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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="394" CreationDate="2011-09-13T20:54:16.650" Score="18" ViewCount="4157" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the (albeit &lt;em&gt;citation needed&lt;/em&gt;) section of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on aspiration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spanish /p t k/, for example, have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, whereas English /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for /p t k/ and 90, 95, and 125 for /pʰ tʰ kʰ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also confirmed from my anecdotal explorations in the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I have is what causes the different stop consonants to have different VOTs. I couldn't find any good linguistic descriptions through some preliminary googling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two hypotheses I had were both based on the (my own) idea that voicing begins once air pressure subsides from high stop-like levels to some trigger point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first hypothesis was that air from a far back pressure release has to travel farther and through more obstructed corridors to reach the open air. Whereas air from a /p/ release can immediately and quickly reach the open, air from a /k/ release has to go all the way through the mouth to get outside. The latter trek is slow and results in a slower decrease of air pressure resulting in a later trigger for voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second hypothesis was that somehow, the backer points of articulation resulted in higher pressure buildups. This would be plausible if stop bursts required some given mass of extra air to release, and this mass, distributed over the oral cavity in /p/ would be spread over a larger volume and consequently have a lower pressure than in /k/. Thereafter, even if air pressure subsided at the same rate, the higher original pressure in /k/ would take longer to hit the trigger point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good readings on the subject or anybody who can provide a more confident explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-21T07:50:58.293" LastActivityDate="2012-04-21T07:50:58.293" Title="Why does stop VOT duration vary depending on place of articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;production&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;stops&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7" CreationDate="2011-09-13T20:56:33.800" Score="16" ViewCount="1348" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the Sino-Tibetan languages I can think of are isolating. Are there any with a fusional or agglutinative morphology? If so, can you show some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-25T06:08:08.187" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T13:53:35.883" Title="Are there any Sino-Tibetan languages that don't have an isolating morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="159" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:04:33.437" Score="32" ViewCount="3418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to use interlinear glossing to show the structure of a sentence to an audience without requiring them to learn the language in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any tools for quickly creating an interlinear gloss and getting the corresponding HTML (or other markup snippet)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I wouldn't have to write raw HTML to achieve this, but one does what one must do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T09:53:39.963" Title="How do I format an interlinear gloss for HTML?" Tags="&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:08:02.630" Score="6" ViewCount="4561" Body="&lt;p&gt;English coronal stop deletion, or TD-Deletion, is a variable process whereby word final /t/ and /d/ in clusters are deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;soft -&amp;gt; sof&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonological rule for TD-Deletion could be given as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{t,d} -&amp;gt; 0/ C__#&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can apply in a variety of morphological conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monomorphemes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;soft -&amp;gt; sof&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regular Verbal Morphology:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;missed -&amp;gt; miss&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irregular Verbal Morphology:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kept -&amp;gt; kep&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is if there is any other good examples of a process like this in other languages.  Here are my criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The process is easily describable, phonologically. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The process applies variably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The process applies in a few different&#xA;morphological contexts. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, the process applies to a few&#xA;different morphological exponents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be nice to know if the rate of variation is affected by the morphological structure it applies in/to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T21:26:34.700" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T17:20:09.470" Title="Examples of Phonological Variation / Morphological Structure Interacton" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;examples&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="337" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:11:08.183" Score="29" ViewCount="4090" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/la-or-le-before-a-persons-name&quot;&gt;“La” or “le” before a person's name?&lt;/a&gt; on the French SE site, the asker refers to the phenomenon that in some rural/dialect settings the first name of a person is preceded by the definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same construction is always used in Austria in spoken German, although it is considered wrong in school in a written essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the history and distribution of this phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other Germanic/Romanic languages that use the definite article for first names at least in dialects?&#xA;Is there a reason it is considered &quot;bad&quot; informal style? &#xA;From a purely literal point of view, the definite article seems quite fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T14:29:04.093" Title="Articles before the name of a person" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:14:16.370" Score="11" ViewCount="830" Body="&lt;p&gt;In particular, I am interested in the suggested common features of creole languages more or less grammaticalized by children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T12:09:03.990" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T11:08:08.583" Title="What is a comprehensive recent discussion of the status of Chomsky's universal grammar theory? " Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:16:20.183" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aren't the Tibeto-Burman languages (under Sino-Tibetan) considered &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0861104.html&quot;&gt;agglutinative&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Tibeto-Burman languages include Tibetan, Burmese, and a number of&#xA;  other tongues, among which are the Bodo, Garo, and Lushai of Assam,&#xA;  the Kachin of Myanmar (Burma), and perhaps also the languages of the&#xA;  Chins and Nagas of Myanmar, the Karen tongues of Myanmar and Thailand,&#xA;  and the Lolo of SW China. Tibeto-Burman languages are likely to be&#xA;  tonal and have anywhere from two to six tones. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;They are less&#xA;  monosyllabic and isolating than the languages of the other&#xA;  Sino-Tibetan families. In fact, they tend to be somewhat agglutinative&#xA;  and exhibit some degree of inflection.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; In an agglutinative language,&#xA;  different linguistic elements, each of which exists separately and has&#xA;  a fixed meaning, are joined to form one word. Affixes added to an&#xA;  unchanged root serve as the usual method of indicating inflection in&#xA;  the Tibeto-Burman tongues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:16:20.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:18:43.820" Score="6" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a computer experiment at a science museum that asked the user to distinguish very similar vowels by sound explaining that visitors with different native language can distinguish different vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible in principle to identify someone's native language from their capability to distinguish sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="43" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T11:15:11.517" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T14:13:10.457" Title="Distinction of vowels depends on native language" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1044" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:19:26.513" Score="25" ViewCount="1429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consonant mutations are a strong characteristic of the Celtic languages. An example in Breton would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Khaz&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/kaz/&lt;/code&gt;: cat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Ar c'haz&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/aʁ.xaz/&lt;/code&gt;: the cat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; is altered to &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; after &lt;em&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia there are mutations in Russian, but I am not familiar with the process. Are these similar to the Celtic mutations or a completely different thing? Where do the Celtic ones come from? Is it a peculiarity of Celtic languages, or could it be traced back in others, maybe ancient, Indo-European groups?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2014-02-02T14:17:05.827" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T09:54:04.183" Title="Are consonant mutations in Indo-European languages specific of the Celtic group?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:22:51.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ray Jackendoff's &quot;discussion note&quot; in the latest issue of Language takes trenchant issue with UG, thus implying that its status is weak, but the sheer volume of recent citations Jackendoff cites implies that it is still the theory to beat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full citation: Jackendoff, Ray. 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v087/87.3.jackendoff.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Discussion note: What is the human language faculty? Two views&lt;/a&gt;. Language 87.3: 586-624. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/RayJackendoff/humanlanguage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;self-archived pdf version&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T00:00:42.857" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T00:00:42.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="52" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:25:40.690" Score="12" ViewCount="40613" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of American English, when I was listening to the difference sounds in &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot;&gt;this IPA chart&lt;/a&gt;, I was really surprised when I realized that I could not differentiate between p/b, t/d, and k/g. (I think I've always been distinguishing the pairs based on whether or not the consonant is aspirated.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the difference has to do with vibrations of the vocal chords, but I am not quite sure what to listen for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-21T07:50:38.980" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T13:25:16.717" Title="What is the difference between voiced and voiceless stop consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:36:20.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is standard in classical Greek for all names (and I think all proper nouns). In modern Spanish usage varies by region, but generally the article is used only with the names of relatives or close friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:36:20.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:36:42.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's actually a diagnostic test for what is a &quot;Proper Noun&quot; in English-- it resists taking an article.*  I've seen the Fonz on TV.  To my ear, &quot;the Fonz&quot; sound like a title and if I was asked if they were transferable, I'd say yes.  I would guess it would be bad style if it communicates something slightly different between when it is included or not included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*_ My source is Paine's &quot;Describing Morphosyntax&quot; I'd look up the page number, but it's at home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T15:19:04.107" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T15:19:04.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="689" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:41:47.493" Score="5" ViewCount="1249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that an intransitive verb accepts only one argument, i.e., the subject. So, such verbs do not need a complement. But how could one understand the concept of an intransitive complementizer, in Chomskyan syntax? After all, isn’t the very nature of complementizers to accept a complement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/052154274X&quot;&gt;Andrew Radford&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;none of the English finite complementisers (e.g. &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;s&gt;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/s&gt; and the null finite complementiser &amp;#8709; found in main clauses) are transitive&quot;.  So, in what sense is the complementizer &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, for example, intransitive? How does it differ from other complementizers that could be classified as transitive in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T10:25:01.317" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T13:43:06.950" Title="What is the difference between transitive and intransitive finite complementizers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:44:56.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've mostly answered it yourself. To native English ears, aspiration is very relevant to the consonants in question. In various other languages, it's not. As aspiration is considered an additional feature in the IPA, your sound samples avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, distinguishing the sounds just takes practice. Your ears are trained to check for aspiration to find unvoiced consonants, so you'll have to &quot;untrain&quot; that. Also keep in mind that the vowels connected to them in the examples are always voiced, so you're really listening for whether there is a break in voicing or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:44:56.463" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:48:30.947" Score="26" ViewCount="1976" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages have either no articles, or one or both of the definite (akin to English &quot;the&quot;) and indefinite (akin to English &quot;a&quot; / &quot;an&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there other kinds of articles, and which languages have them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T23:34:23.713" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T18:44:25.217" Title="Do some languages have articles besides the definite and indefinite articles?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:50:22.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the test subjects are not trying to fool the test (by intentionally picking the wrong answer or feigning knowing when they don't), then it's entirely reasonable that you can derive a reasonably confident list of distinctions the test subject is able to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that, you may be able to match that with trained (or manually curated) models on languages' expected matrices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the positive side, a test subject may be able to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;lake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rake&lt;/em&gt;, but what would this tell us? Very little. But while it wouldn't allow us to confidently eliminate languages that lack that sort of a distinction, it might provide a strong clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the negative side, a test subject may not be able to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;lake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rake&lt;/em&gt;. This is slightly more informative as we might be able to eliminate many languages with distinctive contrasts of that sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I am strongly confident that you would be able to create a test that can be used to differentiate speakers of two drastically different languages. Given good statistical modeling, I am also confident that you'd be able to make a fairly strong n-way distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T21:50:22.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2011-09-13T21:50:42.213" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sino-Tibetan language family is rather large with around 450 languages (making it slightly larger than the Indo-European family by some counts). Within the Sino-Tibetan family you have the Tibeto-Burman family, which has around 430 members, making it a disproportionately large sub-family. The other 15 or so languages are in the Chinese family, which are those heavily isolating languages, but the  majority of the Tibeto-Burman group are relatively agglutinating. Many of the Central Bodic languages I work on have at least affixed tense, aspect, negation, plurals and case marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T02:15:57.733" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T02:15:57.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:02:57.663" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common one is the &lt;em&gt;partitive&lt;/em&gt;.  If you've ever learned a language like French then it's an article you use with mass nouns like &quot;water&quot; or &quot;cake&quot;.  In English the closest would be something like &quot;some&quot; as in &quot;Would you like some cake?&quot;.  Occasionally you'll see it written by linguists as &quot;sm&quot;, as it is phonologically reduced in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples from French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Je ne bois pas de café.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Je n'ai pas de temps à perdre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Donne-moi de la glace.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are probably others!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T19:18:50.377" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:18:50.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="62" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:04:47.083" Score="15" ViewCount="1009" Body="&lt;p&gt;English and Spanish each have one main verb for &quot;to like&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English &quot;to like&quot;, the grammatical subject must be the one doing the appreciating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I like her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with Spanish &quot;gustar&quot;, the person appreciating must be the grammatical object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ella me gusta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish has a few other common verbs which also are opposite the English such as &quot;encantar&quot; vs &quot;to love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my questions is simply whether there is a term to describe such verbs which have the subject and object the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like &quot;valence&quot; or &quot;mode&quot; or &quot;directionality&quot;. Is there a term for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm having trouble wording both the question title and the question body so please jump in and improve it, or leave constructive comments which I'll use to improve the question. Or just let me know if it's not even comprehensible in its current form.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support of user Arne's answer below, I just stumbled across this in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European#Standard_Average_European_as_a_Sprachbund&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for &quot;Standard Average European&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4. a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case, e.g. English &lt;em&gt;I like music&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Music pleases me&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T15:03:37.247" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T04:43:37.550" Title="Is there a term for the syntax difference between English &quot;I like you&quot; and Spanish &quot;Tú me gustas&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:06:24.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different languages produce their vowels at different positions in the mouth. For example while English distinguishes two different a sounds (those in &quot;lard&quot; and those in &quot;gaunt&quot;), German has only one, which is actually positioned between the other two. However, unless you are an advanced speaker of a different language, your ears will not expect to hear this non-English a and instead try to file it as one of the a's that you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is also why people have accents. Their tongues and ears are not used to the other sounds and often they might not even be aware of a difference between the foreign sound and a similar one in their own language. Trouble is, even though it might be similar, it's not the same, and native speakers of the other language can usually tell (because the sound is not exactly what their ears expected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say, to a degree it could thus be possible to determine someone's origin from what sounds they are able to discern. It would not be failsafe however, as you also have to take into consideration what accents and foreign languages the person knows to which degree. Finding things that the person cannot distinguish would thus give better feedback as finding things the person can distinguish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:06:24.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:11:21.813" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The english verb &quot;like&quot; is often referred to as &quot;subject experiencer verb&quot;: On a semantic level, the subject &quot;experiences&quot; the emotion referred to by the verb, and the source for the feeling is expressed in the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An object experiencer equivalent to &quot;like&quot; is &quot;please&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) I like her&#xA;(2) She pleases me&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of a cover term for subject vs. object experiencer verbs, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:11:21.813" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:12:39.180" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any tools to do this, but in HTML5 there is an awesome &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28annotation_markup%29#Ruby_markup&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ruby&lt;/code&gt; element&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I wanted to give an English translation above the Spanish sentence &lt;em&gt;Quiero comer una caja de caracoles&lt;/em&gt;, I could use this HTML markup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ruby&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;Quiero&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;I want&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;comer&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;to eat&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;una&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;a&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;caja&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;box&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;de&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;of&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rb&amp;gt;caracoles&amp;lt;/rb&amp;gt;&amp;lt;rt&amp;gt;snails&amp;lt;/rt&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/ruby&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a few samples of this in action &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsfiddle.net/zr3JL/1/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not directly supported in all browsers, but that can easily be amended &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2010/10/29/cross-browser-html5-ruby-annotations-using-css/&quot;&gt;with a CSS stylesheet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:12:39.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:13:18.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (the exception that comes to mind is the dialect spoken in Bahia), when referring to someone in an informal context, use definite articles before the personal name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Maria vem amanhã.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;DEF Maria comes.3sg.PRES tomorrow&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maria comes tomorrow.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in more formal contexts, such as newspaper articles, for example, the article is not used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="136" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T20:15:35.037" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T20:15:35.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:14:59.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a specific word for it, but you may want to have a look at the notion of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_role&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Theta roles&lt;/a&gt;, your point being only an example of verbs having different theta structures in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T00:40:19.070" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:40:19.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:20:52.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T22:20:52.220" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:20:52.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:20:52.220" Score="0" Body="The Celtic branch of the Indo-European family which includes among its modern members Irish and Welsh." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T23:46:01.163" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:46:01.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:21:01.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;By some accounts, &quot;no&quot; is considered an article, distinct from definite and indefinite.  To me it affects the reference in a very different way than the other two (&quot;a couch,&quot; &quot;the couch,&quot; &quot;no couch&quot;), but I know none of the proper linguistic theory on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:21:01.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:21:50.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is used for two main types of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Seeking the correct term used in the field of linguistics to cover a concept explained in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Seeking a definition or clarification of a given term used in the linguistics field.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the tag can be used for any questions about linguistics terminology, such as seeking to know the difference between two terms which at first glance appear similar, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be used for questions about terminology which is not used in linguistics. Such questions would be general language questions and as such &lt;em&gt;off-topic&lt;/em&gt; here. They may belong on &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For question about the terminology (study of terms) as subfield of applied linguistics, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/study-of-terms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;study-of-terms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;study-of-terms&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:32:17.570" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:32:17.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:21:50.063" Score="0" Body="Words, phrases, and acronyms specific to the study of linguistics." OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:52:40.320" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:52:40.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="80" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:23:04.710" Score="13" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taught &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X' theory&lt;/a&gt; in generative grammar lectures, only to find out that NLP uses mainly simpler grammars, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HPSG&lt;/a&gt; or statistical models such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hidden Markov models&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is X' of any use for NLP at its current state of the art?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T16:00:16.080" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T16:00:16.080" Title="Is there practical application of X' theory in natural language processing?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:25:12.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T22:25:12.867" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:25:12.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:25:12.867" Score="0" Body="The language family which includes among its modern members Mandarin Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T23:46:24.190" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:46:24.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:27:27.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language family including among its members the majority of the languages of Europe and the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Related tags&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/proto-indo-european&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proto-indo-european&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proto-indo-european&lt;/a&gt; (abbreviated PIE): the reconstructed proto-language for the family&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Major branches&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/albanian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;albanian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;albanian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/anatolian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;anatolian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;anatolian&lt;/a&gt; †&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/armenian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;armenian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;armenian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/balto-slavic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;balto-slavic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;balto-slavic&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/slavic-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;slavic-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;slavic-languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/celtic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;celtic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;celtic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/germanic-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;germanic-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;germanic-languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/indo-iranian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indo-iranian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indo-iranian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/greek&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;greek&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;greek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/italic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;italic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;italic&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/romance-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;romance-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;romance-languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/tocharian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;tocharian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;tocharian&lt;/a&gt; †&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T14:18:33.617" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T14:18:33.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:27:27.497" Score="0" Body="The language family covering the majority of the languages of Europe and the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:15:24.510" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:15:24.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="36" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:31:04.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T22:31:04.403" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T22:31:04.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:31:04.403" Score="0" Body="Natural Language Processing: Computer programming techniques designed to aid in processing human language." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-13T23:46:37.717" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:46:37.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-13T22:45:13.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe you've already considered this, but it isn't wholly unprescribed in English.  The dialects that I am familiar with use the definite article when illustrating contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tina I know would never tell me I'll learn to love again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I saw the &lt;em&gt;bald&lt;/em&gt; Andrew yesterday; I haven't seen the other Andrew for months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this only happens in contexts with multiple possible referents for the name, so it is a bit of a special situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:40:54.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1662" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:06:36.490" Score="13" ViewCount="1357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese is often included in lists of agglutinating languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many (most?) agglutinating languages are analysed as having case systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course cases and prepositions/postpositions fill the same role, identifying the job of nominals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also read that Japanese particles are pronounced as part of the noun they follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, has anyone ever published an analysis of Japanese as an agglutinating language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To keep the question simple when I refer to Japanese particles I am referring only to those acting as postpositions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T00:40:27.697" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T00:09:39.590" Title="Are there any papers etc analyzing Japanese as a language with noun cases rather than particles?" Tags="&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:17:32.380" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't forget the demonstratives.  Old Church Slavic had a definite article (i), a proximal or 'this here' demonstrative (sej), a distal or 'that over there' demonstrative (on), and a simple 'this/that' demonstrative (tъ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-10T23:52:24.483" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T23:52:24.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:21:05.133" Score="19" ViewCount="2744" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese and Korean have strikingly similar grammars but whether they are related or not is an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both languages have a particle to mark the grammatical subject of a sentence and in fact it is pronounced the same (within the phonetics of each language), that being &quot;ga&quot; (Japanese &quot;が&quot;, Korean &quot;가&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there evidence for or against these particles being genetically related, or related via borrowing, or any other kind of influence? Or is it believed the similarity is in fact purely coincidental? What is known of the etymology of each particle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Korean particle actually has two forms, the one being discussed is used after vowels and &quot;이&quot; (i) is used after consonants, the latter has no obvious similarity to a Japanese particle I am aware of but this may or may not be otherwise relevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-11-23T18:13:07.527" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T11:03:32.297" Title="Are the Japanese and Korean subject particles known to be related in any way, including by Sprachbund?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:22:49.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a language like Russian, the voiced stops have a continued vibration of the vocal folds, even while the mouth is closed and no air is escaping.  The unvoiced stops have no vibration during the time the mouth is closed and no air is escaping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:22:49.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:24:31.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that Sandiway Fong has made at least one principles &amp;amp; parameters parser, which might be old enough to have proper x-bar structure. There aren't many in that area doing computational linguistics, but probably the big name is Robert Berwick, so you might want to look at some of his work as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to another reply: Some popular versions of transformational grammars would be factorial time (based on number of words in a sentence), at least in the worst case, if they were implemented. Many who work in that line don't consider that important, because they don't consider what they do to be a model of performance but purely a model of knowledge. But not everyone buys that. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/odEcTC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, for example. But I don't think the main culprit is x-bar theory. The main problem is global economy conditions, which in some models require the syntax to generate many permutations of a given sentence and then evaluate them after the fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T02:25:31.083" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T02:25:31.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:26:42.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jackendoff is welcome to the group of those who doubt that anything like UG exists.  All so-called linguistic universals are logical, biological, physiological, or neurological in nature.  That is, there is no universal 'grammar'.  Try Pathways of the Brain by Sydney Lamb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:26:42.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:44:18.110" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a solution &lt;a href=&quot;http://jtauber.com/blog/2006/01/28/dynamic_interlinears_with_javascript_and_css/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which has several versions of interlinear glosses as accomplished through a combination of simple HTML, CSS, and javascript. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest version requires no javascript, and relies on the following:&#xA;HTML &quot;unit&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;unit&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;p class=&quot;gk&quot;&amp;gt;οὕτως&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;p class=&quot;en&quot;&amp;gt;such&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic here comes in the CSS, which can be abstracted as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;div.unit {&#xA;    float: left;&#xA;    margin-bottom: 1em;&#xA;}&#xA;p.en {&#xA;    margin: 0em;&#xA;    padding: 0em 0.5em;&#xA;}&#xA;p.gk {&#xA;    margin: 0em;&#xA;    padding: 0em 0.5em;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the idea is to provide both word-sets with the same amount of padding, but to contain them within a div that automatically resizes to the size of the largest element. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I briefly threw something together based on a combination of this link's answer and Steven Xu's comment above, and you can find it &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsfiddle.net/thenatman/xCxtA/7/embedded/result/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sample is from John 3:16, as from the link, but you can replace it with any text of the form LANG1(LANG2) . Note that currently the script requires you to have the open paren adjacent to the last letter of the source text, but does allow for multiword source and target. I am open to any suggestions to improve this tool. Please note it is very basic but it gets the job done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: The current CSS is static, but could potentially be dynamic and based on user-supplied options. A later version? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2011-09-13T23:44:18.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-13T23:52:44.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Bill Sullivan noted - The demonstratives in Slavic languages can evolve to articles. One example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_grammar#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Macedonian&lt;/a&gt; (and perhaps western Bulgarian dialects):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One feature that has no parallel in any other standard Balkan language is the existence of three definite articles pertaining to position of the object: unspecified, proximate (or close) and distal (or distant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian has something called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Genitival_article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Genitival article&lt;/a&gt; (which is nothing extraordinary - just an article in genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia article about &quot;article&quot;&lt;/a&gt; lists: definite, indefinite, partitive, negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T07:20:27.420" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T07:20:27.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:03:30.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with your second hypothesis. Since &lt;code&gt;P_1*V_1 = P_2*V_2&lt;/code&gt; for an ideal gas, and an obstruction farther along the vocal tract creates a larger volume than another, there will be a corresponding pressure decrease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting related phenomenon is that voiced alveolar stops tend to be more retroflex than their voiceless counterparts (which have longer VOT). Ohala (1983) explains that, counterintuitively, retroflex stops have a larger oral cavity behind the constriction; thus, the gas law above predicts that they will have a shorter VOT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ohala, J.J. (1983). &lt;em&gt;The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints&lt;/em&gt;. In P. F. MacNeilage (Ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Production of Speech&lt;/em&gt; (pp.189-216). New York: Springer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:03:30.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:08:46.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right - it is the vibration of the vocal cord that adds &quot;voice&quot;. Distinguishing them, however, depends on the language - whether there can be two words that differ only by that sound. If this is not the case, then the two consonants are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;allophones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the voiced and unvoiced consonants are not allophones. Aspiration was suggested as a possible reason for not distinguishing them, but I'm not sure if this is the case - aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants are allophones in English, but they differ from voiced ones. For example you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;crap - crab&lt;br&gt;&#xA;bad - bat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;knack - nag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it might be the recordings that are causing the problem (I don't have quicktime to hear them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:08:46.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:16:28.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some books and textbooks that are fairly recent which can give you a good place to start. One of the more recent ones is &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/nvfD50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Understanding Minimalism&lt;/a&gt;, which I think is a good, pretty well-written introduction to some of the most recent stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want the bleeding edge, you will want to look at some of Chomsky's recent articles. You can find a list at &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/4Xr2NM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;his page at MIT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T23:49:28.217" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T23:49:28.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:20:57.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do lovely interlinear glosses with several Latex packages (gb4e and covington, but I think there are others as well). It is possible to convert Latex to HTML, but I have never tried it, so I'm not sure how well that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:20:57.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:23:58.163" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you asked about that particular chart and the accompany voice samples, I took the samples and laid them out in Praat, a tool designed for speech analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top half of the visual representation you see is a waveform, a visualization of air pressure on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. This is the actual energy your ear picks up and interprets as sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom half is a spectrogram, which is a mathematical transformation of the waveform into its constituent frequencies. On the y-axis is the frequency (0 Hz to 5000 Hz) and on the x-axis is still time. A dark region at 3000 Hz at some particular time X means that the acoustic signal at that moment had strong &quot;energy&quot; in the 3000 Hz region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Red and blue lines and regions are explained later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note to those who haven't heard the actual samples in question. They are in the environment &lt;code&gt;/a/ /a_a/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the results (annotations as we go along):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Bilabials&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2GS8R.png&quot; alt=&quot;p&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mssY4.png&quot; alt=&quot;b&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding speech samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/VL_bilabial_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[p]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/V_bilabial_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[b]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important difference between [b] above and [p] below is the relatively low-amplitude vibration before the red lines. This vibration is seen in the waveform as a typical wave and seen in the spectrogram as a &quot;band&quot; of energy in the lower frequencies. This vibration is the result of the vocal chords vibrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the time leading up to the red line is characterized by a complete closure of the vocal tract by the lips (hence the term &quot;bilabial stop&quot;). In [b], during this time, the vocal chords are vibrating. In [p], during this time, they aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Velars&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L8EAu.png&quot; alt=&quot;k&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fee5f.png&quot; alt=&quot;g&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding speech samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/VL_velar_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[k]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/V_velar_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[g]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see the exact same pattern here. The &quot;stop&quot; portions (the period immediately before the red lines) have flat waveforms and no voicing bar on the spectrograms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alveolars&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QtDc8.png&quot; alt=&quot;t&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mUvvt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding speech samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/VL_alveolar_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[t]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/V_alveolar_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[d]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have expected the pattern to continue here. I did too. I believe that the speaker flubbed the pronunciation of the [d] here. As you can see, there is no voicing in the stop periods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I voiced my own version of [d] in the same frame, and this is the resulting spectrogram and sound:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PLPdO.png&quot; alt=&quot;d-improved&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound: &lt;a href=&quot;http://static.stevenxu.ca/sounds/d.wav&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[d] version 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Voiceless aspirated stops&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three voiceless aspirated stops (what we're used to seeing in English as /p t k/ when they occur as simple onsets at the beginning of stressed syllables):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gK9a6.png&quot; alt=&quot;ph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iylLr.png&quot; alt=&quot;th&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lg0mx.png&quot; alt=&quot;kh&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice in all these examples, there is considerable delay after the red line to the blue area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding sound samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://static.stevenxu.ca/sounds/ph.wav&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[p] aspirated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://static.stevenxu.ca/sounds/th.wav&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[t] aspirated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://static.stevenxu.ca/sounds/kh.wav&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[k] aspirated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The spectrum&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you won't have to pick apart samples from above, here's a side by side comparison between [p] aspirated, [p] unaspirated, and [b]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gK9a6.png&quot; alt=&quot;ph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onset of voicing (blue) occurs well after stop release (red).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2GS8R.png&quot; alt=&quot;p&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onset of voicing coincides with stop release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mssY4.png&quot; alt=&quot;b&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onset of voicing occurs well before stop release and also fills up intervocalic (between vowels) stop duration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding speech samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://static.stevenxu.ca/sounds/ph.wav&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[p] aspirated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/VL_bilabial_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[p]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAsounds/V_bilabial_plosive.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[b]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does this mean for you. As a native English speaker, you have only ever been exposed to [p] aspirated and [p] unaspirated. You understand the former to be /p/ and the latter to be /b/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get presented with a sound you've never heard before in that particular phonetic environment, your brain just associates it to the nearest match. Your brain disregards the voicing before the stop release and notices that there is no aspiration duration, concluding immediately that it is also /b/. This is helped in large part in that in even slightly rapid speech, the English sound /b/ appears not as an unaspirated [p] but actually a fully voiced [b] (e.g., in the word &lt;em&gt;tabs&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's why you may not be able to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly didn't help that their [d] was undervoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T01:08:00.450" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T01:08:00.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T00:57:11.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Names can often be marked definite in the dialects around Bergen (Norwegian), for a dimunitive effect. The definite marker is a suffix however, and not an article per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Johan =&amp;gt; Johanen&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in the dialects of northern Norway it is very common, more often than not, to prepend the correct personal pronoun before a person's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Har du sett han Ron? (have you seen he Ron)?&#xA;            ho Ann?                she Aud)?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T00:57:11.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="59" CreationDate="2011-09-14T01:59:33.107" Score="18" ViewCount="724" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency in all of the world’s languages to drop word sounds, especially unstressed syllables. One example is the word for “winter” in Proto-Algonquian, “peponwi”, which developed into “aa” in Cheyenne, after a series of sound droppings&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langmaker.com/thepowerofbabel.htm&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. So, other processes must take place in order to counterbalance this tendency. One such process is grammaticalization, which transforms content words into functional words. Eventually some of these functional words become affixes. That way, while some sounds are eroded, new sounds get incorporated into old words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other phenomena, besides grammaticalization, that compensate for the loss of sounds in a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T07:19:57.183" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T09:30:20.303" Title="Which phenomena compensate for sound losses in languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:02:40.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese is considered a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japonic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Japonic Language&lt;/a&gt; together with Ryukyuan, and the Japonic languages are not widely accepted to be related to any other language family. There have been, however, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_classification#Korean_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;many different proposals&lt;/a&gt;, including a relationship to Altaic, Indo-European (!), and yes, Korean. However, all of these proposals have been heavily disputed, and none of them are considered to be proven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Japanese is related to Korean, it's probably coincidence that these particular particles are related. The time depth for the supposed ancestor of Japanese and Korean would be so great that we wouldn't expect anything to have survived unchanged, and so two identical particles in both languages are probably the same due to coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T02:02:40.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="60" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:08:46.030" Score="20" ViewCount="1286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have usually seen the paucal number presented as intermediate between singular and plural in the languages that have it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;singular - just one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;paucal - a few&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plural - many&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is there any language that only distinguishes between &lt;em&gt;paucal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;plural&lt;/em&gt;? Or is it a linguistic universal that a language with only two number distinctions will always have singular and plural, and that the paucal number only occurs in languages with three or more number distinctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T09:28:19.380" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T01:25:08.787" Title="Paucal number without singular" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;paucal&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:13:50.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common way in which the loss of a sound is compensated for is by changing the sounds around it according to fixed rules. Consider the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; of the Greek aorist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Root &lt;em&gt;angel-&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;announce&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sigmatic aorist suffix &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resulting aorist stem &lt;em&gt;angel-s-&lt;/em&gt; =&gt; &lt;em&gt;angeil-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is lengthened and closed to compensate for the lost &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt;. As a result, the changed vowel in the stem clearly indicates that the aorist aspect has been added to the root, without the actual aorist &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; actually being present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T02:13:50.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:21:36.417" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common ways to compensate for the loss of phonological distinction in a language are morphological: grammaticalization, as you mentioned, as well as compounding and borrowing. A striking present-day example of compounding occurs in English dialects that have the &lt;em&gt;pin/pen&lt;/em&gt; merger, in which the compound &quot;ink pen&quot; has been coined to compensate for the ambiguity. This sort of thing happens frequently in all sorts of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also don't forget that phonological loss is often compensated by other phonological processes, as well. There is epenthesis and straight-up insertion. There is compensatory lengthening (as Cerberus mentioned), as well as nasalization, vowel harmony, and other phonological processes that can preserve featural information and distinctiveness even if segments are lost. It's not the case that phonological change is always destructive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T02:21:36.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="57" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:53:28.533" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much on the issue personally, but in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/3086897&quot;&gt;Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Harley &amp;amp; Ritter, 2002), they make the following claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a language never has a dual without also having a plural (captured by the fact that both Group and Minimal must be active to encode dual). Similarly, &lt;strong&gt;no language has a paucal without also having a dual&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems straightforward enough, and under this claim, languages with a paucal must have at least 4 numbers (singular, dual, paucal, plural). However, they make some concessions in the footnotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Corbett (2000:39) makes a distinction between determinate and indeterminate numbers. Singular, dual and trial denoting exactly one, two or three individuals, respectively, are determinate numbers; paucal and plural are indeterminate ones. We have not explicitly encoded this distinction in the geometry, with the advantage that it enables us to deal straightforwardly with &lt;strong&gt;languages that allegedly have a paucal without a dual&lt;/strong&gt;, such as Bayso (Cushitic) or Walapai (Yuman), cf. Corbett (2000:22) and references cited therein. &lt;strong&gt;In these languages, the paucal denotes between two and six individuals&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than the usual case of three to six. We propose that a dual is a simply a determinate minimal group, and that the paucal in Bayso or Walapai is an indeterminate one, represented by the same Minimal Group geometry as the dual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that the previous paucal-dual claim has counterexamples.  Still, there must be a singular-plural distinction before a paucal can appear, and it is quite likely there will be a dual as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They make another interesting restriction on number related to the paucal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that we predict that no language has both a trial and a paucal number; they are in complementary distribution, representing determinate and indeterminate interpretations of the same geometric configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And of course, no typological study is comprehensive.  I'd be happy to hear more on the issue myself. ;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T02:53:28.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="547" CreationDate="2011-09-14T02:57:01.480" Score="11" ViewCount="1512" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an English-speaking student of Yiddish, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the indefinite article was &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; before vowels and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; before consonants, just like in English. But as far as I can tell, Yiddish developed this independently from English. That is, both turned the Proto-German *&lt;em&gt;ainaz&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;one&quot;) into two separate words, the number one (&lt;em&gt;eyn&lt;/em&gt; in Yiddish) and an indefinite article which is identical in the two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other examples of two languages which shared a root, separated, and ended up with nearly identical words much later, despite otherwise diverging considerably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T09:43:47.463" Title="Examples of convergent evolution?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2011-09-14T03:15:52.260" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To generalize Arne's and Evpok's answers, a simple way to look at cases like these is to recognize two distinct mechanisms going on in all sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thematic role assignment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Case assignment (along with word order)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the conventional analysis, the relationship between the two is prescribed by the verb and the resulting pattern is what we store in our lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take your example in the semantic &quot;like&quot; relationship, there is a liker and a likee (there are more general semantic terms for themes if you care to look them up). The lexicon entry for like may look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;like:&lt;/strong&gt; assigns a liker role, giving it subject marking, and a likee role, giving it object marking. Describes a state in which the liker likes the likee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Spanish one looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gusta:&lt;/strong&gt; assigns a liker role, giving it object marking, and a likee role, giving it subject marking. Describes a state in which the liker likes the likee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the language's own grammar applies things like word order on top of this (SVO for English; a similar model for Spanish with pronominalization/movement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's starter reading on the topic: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_role&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Theta role&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-13T08:22:23.400" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T08:22:23.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="68" CreationDate="2011-09-14T03:42:03.787" Score="10" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French if I write the sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Je mange le déjeuner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would/could be the same as if I am saying I am eating lunch.  What is going on in French goes on in a number of the other Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it that it came to be in the English language that &quot;I eat lunch&quot; cannot represent something I am doing right now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T18:03:08.507" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T18:03:08.507" Title="How did the present continuous in English get to be such a dominant present tense?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;present&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:10:55.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you might get a more pointed response in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt; StackExchange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question itself, my first instinct would be that the potential continuous meaning of the simple present &lt;em&gt;I eat lunch&lt;/em&gt; is blocked by the existence of an unambiguously progressive form &lt;em&gt;I am eating lunch&lt;/em&gt;. We see this pattern all the time in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic/morphological blocking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Germanic languages, to my very limited knowledge, do not have a similar progressive verb form, so I would reckon that it is a new development in English. Moreover, the auxiliary + deadjectival verb nature of the progressive strongly points to it being a derivative form. It's probable that somewhere along the line, people decided that &lt;em&gt;is X-ing&lt;/em&gt; was a good way to specifically refer to a continuous action, and the emergence of the new construction pushed out one of the original meanings of the simple present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal is not necessarily true, though. It could easily be the case that the progressive forms emerged in response to the lack of the continuous meaning. That's a question an English historian might be better able to answer than me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T04:10:55.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="73" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:24:20.350" Score="15" ViewCount="2589" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand how basic Optimality Theory (as applied to phonology) works, but I've never understood how it came into popularity. I'm guessing, though, that there are good reasons why it arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what phonological patterns does Optimality Theory explain that rule-based phonology doesn't? (Or, what phonological patterns does OT do a better job of explaining?) In particular, I'm curious about the original motivating examples (if any) that Prince and Smolensky provided when they introduced OT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="72" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T22:33:52.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T21:03:52.883" Title="What does Optimality Theory explain that rule-based phonology doesn't?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="77" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:27:43.960" Score="25" ViewCount="1545" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that in many languages, words for &quot;no&quot;, negative verb forms, etc. often begin with the sound /n/. Although I understand it is by no means universal, is there any relationship between these sounds in otherwise unrelated languages (e.g. English &quot;no&quot;, Japanese &quot;-nai&quot;, and many more), or is it purely coincidental?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T15:56:50.863" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T13:45:57.797" Title="Is the seeming relation between the sound /n/ and negativity purely coincidental?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:36:21.983" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Steven's second paragraph, about blocking, is not quite correct.  Spanish for example has both a simple present (&lt;em&gt;él come&lt;/em&gt;) and a present progressive formed from a copula + gerund (&lt;em&gt;él está comiendo&lt;/em&gt;), however the former is the default expression of a punctual action (at least in conservative dialects).  I have heard it claimed that in some innovative dialects the gerund is in the process of replacing the simple present.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of history, Old English lacked a copula + gerund form, and developed it over the course of its development into Middle and Early Modern English.  This development was not uniform.  One of the last constructions to gain a morphologically regular progressive form was the passive.  In earlier English, the sentence in (1) was ungrammatical, with (2) being the preferred way of expressing the meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The trunks were being carried down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The trunks were carrying down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That example was taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903&quot;&gt;this Language Log post&lt;/a&gt;, which also has an illustration that people were objecting to this innovation as late as the latter half of the 19th century (the use of the progressive in other contexts was well-established by this time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T04:36:21.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:43:28.070" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages also have a &lt;strong&gt;zero article&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., they have overt articles, but can omit them). In English, for example, you can say &quot;I saw &lt;em&gt;turtles&lt;/em&gt; on the beach&quot;, whereas in French you would have to add the indefinite plural article: &quot;J'ai vu &lt;em&gt;des tortues&lt;/em&gt; sur la plage&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T04:43:28.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-14T04:48:04.490" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting, I think, that &quot;article&quot; is not a theoretical primitive in (most if not all) contemporary generative theories of syntax.  A generative syntactician would say that languages have larger or smaller inventories of determiners (e.g. &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;; this is the category from which &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; developed) and quantifiers (e.g. &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;; this is the category from which &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt; developed).  However, articles are a notion of classical grammar and are definitionally restricted to the definite and indefinite.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some grammarians might include more kinds of articles, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on articles&lt;/a&gt; does.  But this reflects more a taxonomic whim of the analyst than a fact about language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T05:47:47.623" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T05:47:47.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:01:06.200" Score="16" ViewCount="2684" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA contains diacritics for indicating voiceless (/x̥/) and voiced (/x̬/) sounds. There are also different symbols for many voiced/voiceless pairs, e.g. /d/ and /t/ or /g/ and /k/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference between the sounds /d/ and /t̬/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user101" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:14:54.170" Title="Is there a difference between /d/ and /t̬/?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:01:45.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be sound splits in languages, which develop new phonemes &lt;em&gt;ex nihilo&lt;/em&gt;.  One example of such a development is the history of the fricatives /f θ s/ in English, which were not distinguished from /v ð z/.  Specifically, the unvoiced fricatives were pronounced as voiced when occurring between voiced segments.  With the Norman conquest and the concomitant influx of French loanwords with a phonemic difference between /f θ s/ and /v ð z/ (like &lt;em&gt;vile&lt;/em&gt; contrasting with native &lt;em&gt;file&lt;/em&gt;), English began to distinguish between these two classes of sounds, as it does today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T21:20:10.453" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T21:20:10.453" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="66" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:15:46.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prince and Smolensky's original paper about OT&lt;/a&gt; is available for free online. The examples that they have extensive discussion of (viz. a whole chapter in the table of contents) are Berber syllabification and Lardil word-final deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T19:19:05.527" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:19:05.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="66" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:32:59.347" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A main thing the Optimality Theory explains with the previous theories did not, is how different phonological 'rules' which do not seem to have something in common are actually a part of a 'conspiracy' which is meant to serve a single purpose (the prevention of a form the language phonology does not allow etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the Optimality Theory, these restrictions are formed as constraints and allow a description which unites different processes serving the same purpose as parts of the same process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="104" LastEditDate="2016-10-22T19:19:40.003" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T19:19:40.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:48:38.840" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew is not strictly Indo-Eurpoean (although &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghil%27ad_Zuckermann#Historical_linguistics_-_characterization_of_Israeli_Hebrew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; argue it is), but it has something similar: the fricatives /v/, /χ/ and /f/ (when represented by the letters ב, כ and פ) become the plosives /b/, /k/ and /p/ when they come at the start of the word, or after some prepositions, but not after other prepositions. This is called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagesh#Dagesh_Kal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dagesh Kal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;כּלב &lt;em&gt;kelev&lt;/em&gt;: dog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;הכּלב &lt;em&gt;hakelev&lt;/em&gt;: the dog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;לכלב &lt;em&gt;leχelev&lt;/em&gt;: for/to a dog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:16:51.550" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="99" CreationDate="2011-09-14T05:54:06.353" Score="22" ViewCount="4164" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the other common approaches to study syntax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: the source is &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics/6675#6675&quot;&gt;an example question&lt;/a&gt; from the on-topic question list in Area51.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T17:20:04.853" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T01:57:18.390" Title="What are some alternatives to Chomskian generative grammar?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:04:58.560" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Online Etymology Dictionary's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=un-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry of &quot;un&quot;-&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;prefix of negation, O.E. un-, from P.Gmc. *un- (cf. O.Fris., O.H.G.,&#xA;  Ger. un-, Goth. un-, Du. on-), from PIE *n- (cf. Skt. a-, an- &quot;not,&quot;&#xA;  Gk. a-, an-, O.Ir. an-, L. in-), a variant of PIE base *ne- &quot;not&quot; (cf.&#xA;  Avestan na, O.C.S., Lith. ne &quot;not,&quot; L. ne &quot;that not,&quot; Gk. ne- &quot;not,&quot;&#xA;  O.Ir. ni, Corn. ny &quot;not&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the theory is that the root (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/338/meaning-of-star-asterisk-in-linguistics&quot;&gt;possibly&lt;/a&gt; *ne-) traces back to the Proto-Indo-European language, the theoretical ancestor of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt; (including English, Latin, and the majority of European and Indian languages, with total of 3 billion native speakers), which is why you can observe that it's very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Japanese doesn't belong to this group, so possibly it's just a coincidence. Seing from this &lt;a href=&quot;http://users.elite.net/runner/jennifers/no.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of translations of &quot;no&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in many languages, I don't observe it being common outside of Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T16:28:32.773" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:13:50.983" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia, quoting Temes, Elmar, 1986, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_mutation#Celtic_languages&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Historically, the Celtic initial mutations originated from progressive assimilation and sandhi phenomena between adjacent words. For example, the mutating effect of the conjunction a 'and' is due to the fact that it used to have the form *ak, and the final consonant influenced the following sounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sandhi and sandhi-like phenomena in other IE languages (French for example), and this specific consonant mutation in celtic languages (which is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition&quot;&gt;lenition&lt;/a&gt;) can be found in other IE languages. However, there are multiple types of lenition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diachronic - a lenition that has happened historically - a consonant was strong in Latin, but has weakened in Italian, for example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;synchronic - the change happens in the present form of a single language. Such, according to Wikipedia, happens in Western Romance languages in addition to Celtic languages, although it does not bear grammatical meaning as in Celtic ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T06:13:50.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="79" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:17:48.440" Score="8" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/67/is-the-seeming-relation-between-the-sound-n-and-negativity-purely-coincidental&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt;, I was trying to research a list of translation for &quot;no&quot;, and a quick google found &lt;a href=&quot;http://users.elite.net/runner/jennifers/no.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. That website also has other similar pages, like translation of &quot;Hello&quot;, &quot;Good morning&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure about the reliability of those translations, and the website seems to target a tourist audience, not linguists. Where can I find a reliable and academic source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be helpful to find/identify cognates, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T19:43:33.930" Title="Where can I find a reliable academic source of translations of words to the world's languages?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:56:15.270" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest answer is that high performance NLP applications do not use X-bar theory as an explicit representation. A major factor in this is that parsing is most commonly evaluated against the Penn Treebank or various dependency annotated corpora, neither of which would be considered X-bar structures. For an idea of what kind of structures and information are used in statistical parsing, check out one of the seminal articles such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J03/J03-4003.pdf&quot;&gt;Head-Driven Statistical Models for Natural Language Parsing (Collins, 2003)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is certainly some work in NLP that does not explicitly use an X-bar representation but shows that constraints that could be considered to have come from X-bar (or equally, later from Minimalism) are useful in certain applications. For an example in parsing, see the Empty Categories section of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~gabbard/fully_parsing_the_penn_treebank.pdf&quot;&gt;Fully Parsing the Penn Treebank (Gabbard et al., 2006)&lt;/a&gt;; for POS tagging see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D09/D09-1072.pdf&quot;&gt;A Simple Unsupervised Learner for POS Disambiguation Rules&#xA;Given Only a Minimal Lexicon (Zhao and Marcus, 2009)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of performance-driven NLP applications, there is some work. As Alan H. points out, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~sandiway/pappi/index.html&quot;&gt;Sandiway Fong's Principles and Parameters Parser&lt;/a&gt; is a great example. It follows from &lt;a href=&quot;http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6957/AITR-972.pdf?sequence=2&quot;&gt;Principle-Based Parsing (Berwick, 1987)&lt;/a&gt;. For more background in the evolution of these systems, see Robert Berwick or Mitch Marcus's dissertations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T06:56:15.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="79" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:58:47.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/no&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; lists many translations into different languages for different etymologies, along with comments and examples for those translations. An extract from a &quot;no&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Haitian Creole: okenn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian: semmi, semelyik (&lt;em&gt;it is always expressed with a negative verb, and usually semmi is not used&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is no water.&lt;/em&gt; — Nincs víz.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;No horse has two tails.&lt;/em&gt; — Semelyik lónak sincs két farka.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I see no problem.&lt;/em&gt; — Semmi bajt nem látok.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Icelandic: enginn (is) &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;., engin (is) &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;., ekkert (is) &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ido: nula (io)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Igbo: ḿbà&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These translations should not be less reliable than your average dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user101" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T06:58:47.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2011-09-14T06:59:55.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that nasals (n, m, etc.) are the most frequent option for negation. And while there is an easy explanation for the words for &quot;mother&quot; (which also mostly use nasals, and which follows from the first sounds made by babies), it is not that clear for negation. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=c7LxaLP5xogC&amp;amp;pg=PA193&amp;amp;lpg=PA193&amp;amp;dq=negation%20nasal%20languages&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=So_aRcbX0-&amp;amp;sig=UhvVatCjPUP7dqc6dHDVJKjPV4U&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=XFBwTu6SKurg4QTKtdjBCQ&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=5&amp;amp;sqi=2&amp;amp;ved=0CDYQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=negation%20nasal%20languages&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here is a hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of nasal phonemes in the negative in so many languages of the world must in some way be related to to prevailingly nasal character of the grunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T13:26:17.510" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T13:26:17.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="98" CreationDate="2011-09-14T07:57:40.320" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sandhi phenomenon known as &lt;em&gt;liaison&lt;/em&gt; in French bears a strong social connotation, that is to say when its realisation is facultative, it is a marker of a high social class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there facultative phenomenons that bears no social connotation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T10:48:44.907" Title="Is it usual for facultative phenomenons to be socially connoted?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7260" CreationDate="2011-09-14T08:09:10.223" Score="21" ViewCount="7401" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's generally established that Japanese does not have the grammatical category of &lt;em&gt;articles&lt;/em&gt; (akin to English &quot;a/an&quot; and &quot;the&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/16/do-some-languages-have-articles-besides-the-definite-and-indefinite-articles/70#70&quot;&gt;mentioned in this answer&lt;/a&gt;, the concept of &lt;em&gt;articles&lt;/em&gt; seems to be something fairly whimsical that came out of classical language grammar, with a much more coherent and broader category of &lt;em&gt;determiners&lt;/em&gt; being a more modern approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this additional breadth of the determiner category can it be said that Japanese has determiners? In the analyses of Japanese I am familiar with I have never seen this. But perhaps this is a difference between traditional grammars used for teaching and modern grammar/syntax theories used by linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T21:14:24.730" Title="Does Japanese have determiners?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="177" CreationDate="2011-09-14T08:31:19.520" Score="12" ViewCount="5539" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the best resources (online or books) to prepare for the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T17:58:23.377" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T12:36:29.403" Title="How to prepare for the International Linguistics Olympiad" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="84" CreationDate="2011-09-14T08:44:52.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Facultative phenomena can simply bear geographical information, I would say that this is mostly where the social connotations come from in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T08:44:52.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="102" CreationDate="2011-09-14T08:52:35.437" Score="31" ViewCount="11247" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghil%27ad_Zuckermann#Historical_linguistics_-_characterization_of_Israeli_Hebrew&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zuckermann argues that Israeli Hebrew, which he calls &quot;Israeli&quot;, is&#xA;  genetically both Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic and Romance) and&#xA;  Afro-Asiatic (Semitic). He suggests that Israeli Hebrew is the&#xA;  continuation not only of literary Hebrew but also of Yiddish, as well&#xA;  as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other&#xA;  languages spoken by Hebrew revivalists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is this opinion among scholars? What parts or aspects of the Modern Hebrew have significant Indo-European characteristics, and what part Semitic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-09T04:44:02.383" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T20:07:49.283" Title="Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="100" CreationDate="2011-09-14T09:04:13.210" Score="14" ViewCount="2458" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one to find out about the definitions of &quot;generative grammar&quot;, &quot;sandhi phenomenon&quot;, &quot;agglutinative morphology&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T09:41:58.843" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T10:54:34.517" Title="What are some recommended online dictionaries for linguistic terms?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2011-09-14T09:44:26.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly what a determiner is, then Japanese certainly has them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the demonstratives この (this), その (that), あの (yonder), and possibly also the great number of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;counters&lt;/a&gt; such as 一人, 一本, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also check out what &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.cz/books?id=LKoo7Zi63PkC&amp;amp;lpg=PA327&amp;amp;ots=b7hzmQFHHo&amp;amp;dq=determiners&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=PA328#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An introduction to Japanese linguistics&lt;/a&gt; has to say on the topic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="35" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T11:00:31.743" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:00:31.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:29:43.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the problem with parsing X-bar structures is mainly performance based, it is difficult to get a parser to be fast enough to be useful. The transformations make the parsing non monotonic, which makes everything a royal pain for a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are however many systems who use other theories of syntax, such as HSPG, LFG, DCG, CG, TAG etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T10:29:43.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:31:30.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The national language of Japan, member of the Japonic language family which also includes Ryukyuan but is otherwise considered to be isolated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Japanese language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Japanese Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:21:28.890" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T11:21:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="94" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:31:30.790" Score="0" Body="The national language of Japan, member of the small Japonic language family, otherwise considered to be isolated. For non-linguistic questions about the Japanese language, visit our sister site Japanese Language Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:21:03.593" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T11:21:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:32:14.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T10:32:14.427" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T10:32:14.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:32:14.427" Score="0" Body="Websites, pages, and downloadable content which provide resources useful to linguists." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T11:07:00.337" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:07:00.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="277" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:45:32.500" Score="12" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martha's Vineyard had a large deaf population and a native sign language. I read that this had been partially reconstructed by looking at the differences between &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;ASL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;LSF&lt;/a&gt;, as modern ASL is basically LSF with a strong MVSL influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:09:03.030" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:09:03.030" Title="To what extent has Martha's Vineyard SL been reconstructed?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="84" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:48:44.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I believe there is a very strong connection in many languages, possibly the strongest of all things connected with upper-class speech (&quot;old money&quot;, not merely the rich). It is just that facultative phenomena (see what I did there), which I will define as two things between which your choice hardly changes meaning, contain much space for variation, and class markers thrive on variation. Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Synonyms&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;U: &lt;em&gt;loo&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Non-U&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;toilet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;U: &lt;em&gt;plee, wc, &amp;lt; silence &gt;,&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-U: &lt;em&gt;toilet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pronunciation of foreign words:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;U: &lt;em&gt;restaur&lt;/em&gt;/ɑ̃/  (hope I'm getting the a right, and that it is displayed right)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-U: &lt;em&gt;restaur&lt;/em&gt;/ɑnt/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;U: &lt;em&gt;engage&lt;/em&gt;/ɑnt/ (sic)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-U/odd: *&lt;em&gt;engage&lt;/em&gt;/ɑ̃/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; articulate speech usually distinguishes upper-class speech from middle-class speech; in RP, I believe, the word &lt;em&gt;formidable&lt;/em&gt; more or less becomes &lt;em&gt;fo- &amp;lt; drawl &gt;&lt;/em&gt; in quick speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T10:48:44.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-09-14T10:57:05.593" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to go in depth, check the links. To name a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_grammar&quot;&gt;Cognitive Grammar&lt;/a&gt; developed by Ronald Langacker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar&quot;&gt;Construction Grammar&lt;/a&gt; (CxG): &quot;&lt;em&gt;CxG is typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics, partly because many of the linguists that are involved in CxG are also involved in Cognitive Linguistics, and partly because CxG and Cognitive Linguistics share many theoretical and philosophical foundations.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics&quot;&gt;Cognitive Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted in the field of generative grammar.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T10:57:05.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2011-09-14T11:01:19.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only one which I have really used in that past is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.let.uu.nl/uil-ots/lexicon/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexicon of Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glossary of linguistic terms&lt;/a&gt;, which does not seem to be as complete. A brief search also revealed this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/linguistics_glossary.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics Glossary&lt;/a&gt;, which has very few entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In print, there are potentially more options, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/A_dictionary_of_linguistics_phonetics.html?id=3JtAOHLtlHoC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Linguistics &amp;amp; Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;, but I imagine that these can become outdated rather quickly (which is not to say that websites do not, in practice, but they are theoretically easier to maintain). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:01:19.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2011-09-14T11:10:12.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a common opinion. The fact that one language has been significantly influenced by other languages from other families does not change its origin. It may change some core aspects of the language, but it remains Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing could apply to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gypsy language&lt;/a&gt; - it has many forms in different countries that are heavily influenced - both lexically and grammatically - by the &quot;host&quot; country languages, however the gypsy language remains of Indic origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting, related case is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balkan language area&lt;/a&gt;. Romanian, for example, has taken a lot of features from Slavic languages, but it is still Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude - In my opinion changes in the language should not be taken into account when genealogy is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:10:12.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2011-09-14T11:17:02.550" Score="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a linguist whose native language is Hebrew, I am somewhat qualified to answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Modern Hebrew has heavy influences from both Semitic and European sources is pretty much universally accepted. That said, Zuckermann, who is a brilliant scholar otherwise, is also a known provocateur who tends to overstate his ideas when writing for a non-academic audience. Hence his constant nagging about changing the language's name and the talk about mixed language genetics. There are even more extreme opinions around, such that Modern Hebrew is a fully Slavic language with a relexified Semitic vocabulary, but they are not taken seriously by most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the extremist opinions, though - generally speaking, Modern Hebrew's is a complex beast with a syntax that is heavily Slavic/Germanic, but morphology that is distinctly Semitic. The standard phonology used by most speakers also has its roots in Germanic languages, but there are still groups of speakers (whose families are non-European immigrants) who retain other Hebrew phonology traditions. The vocabulary is mostly based on old Hebrew (though a lot of words were given new, modern meanings in a conscious effort), with the usual large set of loan words found in languages spoken by a population consisting of a lot of immigrants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorUserId="6899" LastEditDate="2015-01-01T13:02:26.163" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T13:02:26.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2011-09-14T11:20:23.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preparation for The International Linguistics Olympiad (and national olympiads before that) generally consists of two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;problem solving - find all linguistic problems that you can find and try to solve them. There are some on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ioling.org/&quot;&gt;ioling.org&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps the NACLO ones are also available&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;theoretical knowledge - this is not a strict requirement, but it may help you a lot. Wikipedia is completely sufficient source (together with its reference materials, of course). You can start by exploring the major fields of theoretical linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology. You will end up reading a lot of related articles.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having theoretical knowledge may or may not help you on the olympiad. For example, at least 3 of  the absolute winners of the Olympiad had only basic linguistic knowledge, but were great problem-solvers. But recently linguistic knowledge has proved to be a major benefit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T11:39:59.380" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:39:59.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2011-09-14T11:52:42.623" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not actually the case that /n/ is especially common for negation across language families. Rather the n-negatives are a particular feature of the &lt;strong&gt;Indo-European&lt;/strong&gt; languages, being inherited from PIE and retained in some form in the majority of the daughter languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of the Indo-European language family, n-negatives are not especially common. Those that do exist are the result of coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T11:52:42.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-14T12:14:35.527" Score="10" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the paper cited in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/57/paucal-number-without-singular/60#60&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, in a &quot;usual case&quot; the paucal denotes between three to six individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is the limit &quot;three to six&quot;? Is there any reason that those languages agree on the limit three and six?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T06:54:34.683" Title="The paucal to denote between three to six individuals" Tags="&lt;paucal&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="117" CreationDate="2011-09-14T12:43:36.527" Score="4" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember in one of my linguistics classes, a rather complex sign language (perhaps in Brazil, if I recall correctly) exists among, I believe, deaf children homeless children/orphans on the street. I believe that researchers, for quite a while, had much trouble figuring it out, but a breakthrough was made when they figured out that the signs we're patterned after the shape of streets on signs such as subway or bus maps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that is all that I can remember about the subject, and I don't even know how accurate my information is. And so I ask: where is this type of sign language used and what is it's story / what is unique about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:08:54.793" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T18:55:06.610" Title="What Sign Language developed among orphans/homeless children using the environment as a base for the signs?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="110" CreationDate="2011-09-14T13:00:13.350" Score="15" ViewCount="860" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can imagine a French, German, Dutch or Russian version of &quot;teh first language born of teh internets&quot;. Does any such exist? And what is LOLspeak anyway. It clearly isn't, as it calls itself, a &quot;language&quot;. Is it a cant? Is there, in fact, any linguistic term to describe the phenomenon? It seems to be a form of slang which exists only in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2012-07-04T17:39:27.353" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T12:24:02.777" Title="What is LOLspeak, and does it have equivalents in languages other than English?" Tags="&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2011-09-14T13:50:46.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to suggest that any similarities would be due to borrowing, as Japanese have occupied Korea off and on for at least 1600 years {1}. There has been a lot of borrowing between Chinese, Japanese and Korean; mostly &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; Chinese to Japanese and Korean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 - Books like &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0231121393&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sources of Japanese Tradition&lt;/a&gt; (and the equivalent for other nations) reference historical documents to describe how the political and social structures of the countries developed. Some of the earliest Chinese documents mentioning what we now call Japan mention that they ruled areas of what we now call Korea in the 600s and 800s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T13:50:46.073" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:00:34.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, such a study wouldn't be especially useful. There are more than a 100 particles (all of which are placed after the word they operate on). A simple example would be a comparison of &lt;em&gt;ya&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;. Both mean &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (in the context of a list, such as &quot;apples &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; bananas&quot;), but the context is that &lt;em&gt;ya&lt;/em&gt; gives an open ended list (&quot;apples &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; bananas [and other fruits]&quot;), while &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; signifies that the list given is complete (&quot;apples &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; bananas [and nothing else]&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have also read that Japanese particles are pronounced as part of the noun they follow.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never came across this in my studies of Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T14:00:34.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:17:36.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it a cant?&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say no it is a slang instead. While these sort of words are used to exclude others and mark who is &quot;in-group&quot; and who are &quot;outsiders&quot;, there isn't enough to make it a cant or argot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T14:17:36.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="114" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:21:58.067" Score="6" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;english: me, mine, my&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: мне, меня, мой&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Estonian: mina, mind, mulle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How prevalent is this in world's languages and what should it be attributed to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T17:34:36.823" Title="Can the /m/ sound in a 1st person pronoun be considered a linguistic universal?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:25:19.047" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://hpsg.stanford.edu/&quot;&gt;Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, which is a non-derivational generative grammar, developed at Stanford beginning in 1987.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: Pollard, Carl; Ivan A. Sag. (1994). &lt;em&gt;Head-driven phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt;. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T14:25:19.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:28:21.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting premise, but one I think is fundamentally flawed. As a counterexample, in English, the main difference in pronunciation between regional dialects is in the vowels. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Soundex&lt;/a&gt; was originally developed to get around this issue by deleting vowels in order to find names in lists (such as telephone books and census lists). There are some parts of the US where &lt;em&gt;pen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example in support of your hypothesis, Scandinavian languages have more vowels, and some of my relatives try to explain the difference between them to me, but I can't hear the difference. Is this training? Lack of musical ability on my part? Are they making fun of me? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T14:28:21.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="111" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:29:54.107" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/136B&quot;&gt;According to WALS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. 53 languages sampled have /m/ in the first person singular and 177 languages do not. More interestingly though, there are more than just the Indo-European languages (like all your examples) that have 1st person pronouns with /m/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="72" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T17:58:36.043" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T17:58:36.043" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:38:21.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a guess, because it is more than two (languages with paucal generally also have a dual) and still discernible with a single glance of the eye, that is: six of something doesn't necessarily need to be counted. (Anecdote: I start to need to count between five and six). Paucal then can also mean &quot;a few, a handful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T06:54:34.683" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T06:54:34.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:39:02.017" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call it a constructed dialect. It's a dialect because its mutually intelligible with standard English and it was purposefully constructed, in this case for humorous effect. (Mutual, obviously being not the best word since there aren't native lolcat speakers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the same joke (of attempting to write with as many common or possible mistakes as possible) could be pulled off in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a reference to support my idea that it is a constructed dialect-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&quot;&gt;the Bible in LOLCat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T14:45:09.123" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T14:45:09.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2011-09-14T14:44:54.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you mean &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;? I don't know about sign patterns, but that's a language of particular interest because of its spontaneous development, unlike many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user122" LastEditorDisplayName="user122" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T15:02:35.410" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T15:02:35.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="157" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:06:17.040" Score="4" ViewCount="1717" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading the claims of &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC=US&amp;amp;NR=2006161436A1&amp;amp;KC=A1&amp;amp;FT=D&amp;amp;date=20060720&amp;amp;DB=EPODOC&amp;amp;locale=en_EP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Method for natural voice recognition based on a generative transformation/phrase structure grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly would they be looking at in a sentence to aid the processing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also would such processing only work in English? I.e. would it be pointless looking for triphones in another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T16:41:05.943" Title="What are typical triphones used in natural language processing?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="122" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:11:00.907" Score="19" ViewCount="853" Body="&lt;p&gt;Children raised in a multilingual environment learn all the languages that they are exposed to with no effort. Does the same thing happen if a child has only indirect contact with a language? For example, if the child is only exposed to music, TV and radio programs in another language, is it possible to acquire a native competence in that language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T12:00:09.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T02:37:47.333" Title="Language acquisition without interactive contact with fluent speakers" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:13:55.507" Score="12" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tree Adjoining Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Combinatory Categorial Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexical functional Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HPSG&lt;/a&gt; (Head-driven phrase structure grammar)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and many many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add that in NLP/CL circles, Chomsky's approaches (Principles &amp;amp; Parameters, Minimalist Program) seem to be mentioned only for historical reasons. Chomsky's approaches have been superseded and seem to have been almost completely abandoned. Though &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/stanford-dependencies.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dependencies&lt;/a&gt; are not exactly a grammar formalism, they seem to be far more commonly used than all of the above in NLP/CL circles. Having said that, I believe that many psycholinguists still use Chomsky's systems for their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-04-19T11:21:07.583" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T11:21:07.583" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:17:09.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just speaking from anecdotal evidence and personal experience, I have a friend who grew up in a 100% German-speaking environment, but who seems to have acquired English from American children's cartoons. So I would say that yes, it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, how is that contact any less 'direct' than hearing actual people speaking? Language is language, is it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T15:17:09.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2011-09-14T15:25:47.933" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another example of this might be the recent acquisition of rather good English by large numbers of people in Scandinavia. In the case in Iceland, initially Danish was taught at schools, but that didn't lead to widespread Danish fluency (at least not to the degree you see English fluency now). After independence they switched to English as the most important second language, with much the same sort of schooling and contact with foreigners (i.e. not much), there is widespread English fluency in Iceland. I suppose some of that could be attributed to children hearing English in mass media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T15:25:47.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2011-09-14T16:04:43.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't claim to be an authority on the subject, but believe that the answer varies with the medium. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that any language is learned is by establishing a common context that contains an understood meaning and then associating linguistic data with that meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new language is only ever heard in isolation without any context, there is no way to learn it. Therefore, if the language is only ever heard on the Radio or in music, there is no way to learn it. If the Radio program is multilingual were a given sentence or speech is translated into a language that the listener already understands, that is different because you now have a context upon which to build meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TV and Videos on the other hand are different. There you have a context to be able to extract a certain amount of meaning from the sounds. A movie could be entirely in a single language but you have the context of the scene etc upon which to build a shared meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorUserId="127" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T18:27:39.257" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T18:27:39.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T16:39:39.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have three possible examples that might fit your criteria, two from English and one from French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word final 's[unvoiced stop]' when followed by they noun plural morpheme or the verb singular morpheme 's':&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-sps, -sts, -sks  -&gt; -ss  ( long 's'?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in 'wasps' -&gt; 'wass' or 'basks' -&gt; 'bass'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More careful or slower pronunciation will pronounce all three phonemes, but usual conversation uses the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'-ty-' -&gt; '-tʃ-' (palatal glide to palatal affricate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in 'Don't you ...' -&gt; 'Dontcha ...'. This seems to have no restriction in English to particular morphology (I've heard 'Rightcheer' for 'Right here').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In French, it is common to drop word final syllabic liquids:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'table' -&gt; 'tab', 'autre' -&gt; 'aut'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any morphological interacting instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T16:39:39.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-09-14T16:41:54.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_and_reference_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Role and Reference Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In RRG, the description of a sentence in a particular language is formulated in terms of (a) its logical (semantic) structure and communicative functions, and (b) the grammatical procedures that are available in the language for the expression of these meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T15:30:53.257" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T15:30:53.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T17:20:09.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would Spanish /s/ deletion fit?  It applies in these morphological contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stems ending in /s/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plural ending for nouns /-s/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verbal conjugations for second person singular /-Vs/ and first person plural /-Vmos/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To the irregular 3rd sg. present tense verb form &lt;em&gt;es&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;).  It also applies to the 2nd singular and 1st plural forms of this verb &lt;em&gt;eres&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;somos&lt;/em&gt; respectively.  (Whether these are represented as irregular root + usual affix or just an irregular stem is probably a matter of discussion.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some dialects, the 2nd sg. preterite marker /-Vste/ has a non-standard variant /-Vstes/ (by analogy with the other tenses).  Insofar as this variant is produced, /s/ deletion can apply to it.  (It would be tricksy to measure this, though, as after total /s/ deletion this variant is homophonous with the standard form.  But you could count lenited tokens.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T17:20:09.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="149" CreationDate="2011-09-14T17:36:21.640" Score="40" ViewCount="3297" Body="&lt;p&gt;In diachronic comparison of languages, say PIE to Latin to Romance, it is a classic recognition that the later languages strictly lose some of the morphologically marked categories. PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin 5, Romance 2 or even 1. Pick a morphological category and pretty much always the complexity is reduced: past participles in English are more likely to become weak rather than strong, the subjunctive is disappearing, there's no grammatical gender at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably those forms (that were later lost) came from somewhere, those categories and phonological markers were created. I can imagine a cycle of inflected to isolating (a period of loss) and then back to inflectional where the grammatical markers get phonologically assimilated (fused onto the root), but i have no data to support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I heard a long time ago that Finnish/Hungarian/Turkish might be gaining distinctions or that the word initial inflections in verbs in Irish came from phonological interaction between a pronoun and the following verb, but those are just vague intimations. I am looking for more substantively presented examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any definitive data of a language moving from isolating to inflected?  Present day examples are best, but attested versions (not theoretical) from the past would be good too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T04:55:41.713" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T18:49:58.737" Title="Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:48:33.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, particles are short words the do not fit well into the other parts of speech. They are used to express Tempus, Aspect, Modus, Polarity (TAMP) in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the word &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is calssified as a negation particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, particles are small words (usually 1 or 2 syllables) that follow a word. Some are used to indicate that the preceeding word is the subject or object of a sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:46:08.367" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:46:08.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:48:33.843" Score="0" Body="For question about parts of speech classified as particles." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:46:08.367" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:46:08.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:52:48.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky developed several theories of linguistics, such as &quot;universal grammar&quot; which is the theory that there are some features of languages that all human languages have because these features are hardwired into the human brain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="117" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T19:20:32.747" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:20:32.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:52:48.533" Score="0" Body="This is the tag for discussing Noam Chomsky's theories of linguistics." OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="117" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T19:20:34.900" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:20:34.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:56:03.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language, dominant sign language of deaf Americans. Part of the French Sign Language family with influence from Martha’s Vineyard and home sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anerican Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan, is the name for the language of hand motions and gestures used by many Deaf people in the US. It has a different syntax and grammar from English as is spoken in the US and is different from British Sign Language (which is used in the UK). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:16:40.343" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:16:40.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:56:03.613" Score="0" Body="American Sign Language, the dominant sign language of deaf Americans. Not related to British Sign Language." OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:16:43.727" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:16:43.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-14T18:56:18.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think such fusion of morphemes onto word-roots to form morphological categories is happening in spoken language, but in today’s world where languages tend to have standardised orthographies, they are seen as colloquial, corrupted, or uneducated, and thus are considered by linguists to be not worth analysing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I would argue that most dialects of English already have forms such as &lt;em&gt;gimme&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;givya&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;givim/giver&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;givus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;givyall&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;givem&lt;/em&gt;. In standard orthography they would be written as &lt;em&gt;give me&lt;/em&gt; etc., but we all know most people pronounce them as these fused forms. So the real question is when these will become established orthography, and my suspicion is that it will never happen given how strongly English spelling resists reform despite its clearly showing age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if I may add a claim that I cannot substantiate, I thought I read somewhere that PIE had only two genders (animate and inanimate). If this is indeed the case, the distinction between masculine and feminine was gained at some point. I think it was said that the feminine evolved out of the plural of inanimates; I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to work, but it would explain why neuter nominative plural and feminine nominative singular tend to have the same ending, &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;, in many IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T18:56:18.590" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="71" CreationDate="2011-09-14T19:14:54.170" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually only ever see the voiceless diacritic used on segments for which voicelessness is highly marked, like the devoicing that occurs in /Cr/ clusters in English. [tr̥æp]. Usually, a liquid like &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is voiced, but in this particular instance, it is remarkably voiceless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether there's a difference between &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;t̬&lt;/em&gt; , I think the answer is that IPA transcription is frequently more of an interpretive exercise than a science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question to ask is if you were presented with some audio from a language that contains what sounds like a voiced, alveolar stop, which symbol would you use? I think many times it depends on what else you know about the language, or word you're transcribing. What if you also knew that this language had no voiced stops, and that in this particular piece of audio, it sounds voiced because it's between two vowels? In that case, you might be tempted to use [t̬ ], to reflect your beliefs about the phonemic system. Or, to take the example from Theta30's comment, you might know that a word had an underlying /t/, but it gets voiced or flapped in some contexts, so you add a voicing diacritic to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you also knew the language in question does have voiced stops, or that this particular word does have underlying /d/, you might choose [d] to reflect those beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T19:14:54.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="166" CreationDate="2011-09-14T19:47:31.790" Score="9" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;The so-called &lt;em&gt;tau gallicum&lt;/em&gt; was a character used in Gaulish, written Đ, ð or even a Θ. Its name comes from the only commentary on it that we have, by Vergil (Appendix Vergiliana, Catalepton II, 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every study I have read on Gaulish states that it was pronounced as the affricate [t͡s] or the reversed [s͡t]&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, but there are occurrences of geminated &lt;em&gt;tau gallicum&lt;/em&gt;, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://encyclopedie.arbre-celtique.com/plomb-de-chamalieres-2265.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chamalières' lead&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Tau_gallic_CourDOr_Metz_3147.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this epitaph&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am really not comfortable with a [t͡st͡s]`in &lt;em&gt;snIeððic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;aððedillI&lt;/em&gt;, so I wondered if there are others hypothesis for the pronunciation of this character. Maybe [Θ], since Θ and Greek Θ are obviously close, at least in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;1. See, for example, Lambert's &lt;em&gt;la langue gauloise&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The affricate /st/ in &lt;em&gt;snies-ti-c&lt;/em&gt; is written striked d, as usual in Gaulish.&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T14:59:04.737" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T14:59:04.737" Title="How the tau gallicum may have been pronounced?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="140" CreationDate="2011-09-14T19:53:05.890" Score="42" ViewCount="5158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since vowels in human speech are a continuous spectrum rather than a discrete set, many descriptions of languages I’ve seen — not only on Wikipedia — place the vowels of a language as dots in a two-dimensional grid. For example, here is the one for modern Hebrew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Hebrew_vowel_chart.svg/400px-Hebrew_vowel_chart.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vowel chart of modern Hebrew&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The positions of these dots seem to be pretty precise; in charts for other languages, dots marked with the same IPA characters are nonetheless in slightly different locations. For example, compare the locations of [a] and [i] in the above to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:French_vowel_chart.svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;those in the French one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/French_vowel_chart.svg/400px-French_vowel_chart.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Vowel chart of modern French&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as we know, everyone learns as a child to categorise vowels they hear into the phonemes of their native language. This makes it extremely hard for any particular person to hear subtle distinctions such as the one between the Hebrew [i] and the French [i]. It would seem likely that two linguists of different native languages would place the above dots in (slightly) different places when analysing Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do we actually know where exactly to place these dots? Is there some form of modern technology that is used to analyse vowels? Is there perhaps a software that can be downloaded which would allow the user to speak a vowel into the microphone and have it rendered on such a diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:47.690" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T14:00:00.010" Title="How do linguists place the vowels of a language precisely on the vowel trapezoid?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-09-14T20:07:22.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creoles tends to have three ways of marking noun phrases for definiteness: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;definite, for already known, specific information ({the} in English) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;indefinite, for new, unknown but still specific information ({a/an} in English)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not specific, usually unmarked (also {a/an} in English, or unmarked)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time you mention something you mark it indefinite, later you use the definite marker and if it is not specific or important you use the third option. Naturally I can't remember the reference for it (book used in grammaticalization-class I think) but apparently there can be two types of nonspecificness too, for new and old nonspecific information: In such a system &quot;dogs bark but foxes bark too&quot; the nouns would be marked differently. IIRC no more than three of the four possibilities are marked in any one language though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are the languages with only one article of course... or none, but opinions differ on whether all languages always mark definiteness (needn't be with an article!) or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those interested in definiteness there's the book &quot;Definiteness&quot; by Christopher Lyons. I haven't read it myself as I'm not very interested in the subject. The other books I have read in the series it is part of though, &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, have never disappointed even though of course some linguists just can't write and needs to be read in small doses lest your eyeballs bleed ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T00:28:46.093" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T00:28:46.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="145" CreationDate="2011-09-14T20:13:30.227" Score="17" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interest in linguistics was sparked by John McWhorter's popular book &lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt;, which, in its section on creoles, includes a small piece on Nicaraguan Sign Language, which really sparked my imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to that book, it's the only language which has been, in historical times, and in a fairly well documented way, built from scratch, instead of being derived from other languages. According to a free lecture by an anthropologist (I wish I could remember his name) I went to in Trinity College, Dublin, it's a little more complicated than that. The existence of a precursor to ISN (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) has not been completely ruled out. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Nicaraguan Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; also mentions the possibility of influence from American Sign Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How important is ISN in the study of linguistics? Are there other languages with a similar history? Was it really born from nothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:08:47.803" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T17:56:16.497" Title="Is Nicaraguan Sign Language the only language born from nothing?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2011-09-14T20:15:04.480" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are, in fact, some rough and ready acoustic measures for analyzing vowels. We call them formants, and their acoustic theory is a little heavy to get into right here. Roughly, they are bundles of re-enforced harmonics: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Formant (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;. It's harmonics that make the same note sound different when played on a violin, a viola, and a piano, and it's harmonics that make /i/ sound different from /u/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two formants, abbreviated F1 and F2, correspond roughly to vowel height (F1) and vowel backness/rounding (F2). Automatic formant estimation from raw audio is a tricky business, but it's a project that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoFrhwld/FAAV/tree/master/extractFormants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I myself have been involved in&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the way I analyse vowels now is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obtain a relatively long speech sample from a speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transcribe the speech sample.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run the speech sample + my transcription through our software, which produces estimates for F1 and F2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to normalize the acoustic measurements to account for differences caused by different head and body sizes. Anatomical differences like these cause big differences in the raw measurements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that's probably a little different from how phonological descriptions like the one you posted work. I'd imagine most of these plots with apparently precisely placed points are based partially on acoustic data like I just described, and partially on the phonologist's view of the systematic character of the sound system. I say that because plots of acoustic data are rarely ever so clean as that plot, with perfectly parallel /i/ and /u/, /e/ and /o/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T14:00:00.010" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T14:00:00.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2011-09-14T20:18:57.360" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has long been a secret war in the phonetics community: lets call the two camps &quot;articulators&quot; and &quot;acoustics&quot;. As the names imply, there are two competing ways of describing vowels: what the mouth does (position of tongue, jaw, shape and position of lips etc., this is reflected in the IPA) and what the vowel sounds like, which is visible in a spectrogram for instance. With the latter one uses the formants to map the sound into a vowel diagram, and funnily enough if you connect the dots it still looks like a skewed square! These days, measuring how the mouth articulates a sound is hopefully done with for instance an MRI-machine and not the old way, which includes mirrors, videocameras, painting the mouth, very strong x-rays, casts of the mouth etc. Being a phonetics informant in the old days could be dangerous to your health. Analysing the sound is dirt cheap in comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without knowing which method was used you can't really compare vowel diagrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T21:42:55.600" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T21:42:55.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-14T20:33:56.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages with serial verb constructions, some standardized verbs are reanalyzed as cases, for instance in Akan a sentence that is glossed &quot;Kofi take knife cut meat&quot; it can be argued that &quot;take&quot; is an instrumental. &quot;give&quot; this often becomes a dative-marker, &quot;have&quot; turns into a genitive etc. Hm, was that in Paul Schachters paper in &lt;em&gt;Language Typology and Syntactic Description&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T20:33:56.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="289" CreationDate="2011-09-14T21:20:37.263" Score="20" ViewCount="13059" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what contexts can the zero copula occur in African-American Vernacular English? What rules govern its use—for example, what makes &lt;code&gt;she runnin'&lt;/code&gt; more likely to be acceptable than &lt;code&gt;?she a runner&lt;/code&gt;?&#xA;Some of what I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some (I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labov&quot;&gt;Labov&lt;/a&gt;, notably) have proposed that copula absence in AAVE occurs where &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAVE#Other_grammatical_characteristics&quot;&gt;SAE would allow contraction&lt;/a&gt;, but there are counterexamples (&lt;code&gt;*&quot;How old you think his baby ’s&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;How old you think his baby is&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;how old you think his baby&lt;/code&gt;), so this does not fully explain the context&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula#In_other_languages&quot;&gt;copula absence in other languages like Russian&lt;/a&gt;, AAVE zero copula depends on tense (copula absence usually occurs in present tense: &lt;code&gt;*she home yesterday&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;she home today&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've read that copula absence is much more common if a VP follows than a NP (perhaps Labov, again); a &lt;a href=&quot;http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/dsharma/JPCL09sr.pdf&quot;&gt;paper on AAVE origins&lt;/a&gt; mentions this, that zero copula is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;most frequent with a gon(na) future or a progressive (&lt;em&gt;she Ø gon tell him&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;she Ø&#xA;  walking&lt;/em&gt;), least frequent before a noun phrase (&lt;em&gt;he Ø a man&lt;/em&gt;)...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The general pattern for AAVE is given in (1), with predicate types listed according to increasing rates of copula absence:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (1) NP &amp;lt; Loc &amp;lt; Adj &amp;lt; V-ing &amp;lt; gonna&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copula absence may not occur for habitual actions because &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be&quot;&gt;habitual be&lt;/a&gt;, replacement of &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, may occur. Habitual be is used for things that are ongoing or usual as opposed to a moment in the present (&lt;code&gt;Cookie Monster be eating cookies&lt;/code&gt;, even if he isn't at this moment).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other predictions we can make about when copula absence can occur in AAVE? Does any cross-linguistic approach to copula constructions provide clues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T12:07:22.903" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T17:48:03.967" Title="When does copula absence occur in African-American Vernacular English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2011-09-14T21:53:15.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who does language documentation and isn't too crash hot at analysing formants there is another way to analyse vowels - which is based on the perception of the listener rather than the production of the speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to do this is to find minimal pairs or sets - so in English we know that /a/ and /i/ are separate vowels because people have the words &quot;pat&quot; and &quot;pit&quot; so they're separate vowels. You can also do this for consonants - &quot;pat&quot; and &quot;bat&quot; are different words so /p/ and /b/ must be different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this measures something slightly different to production - we call the production stuff &quot;phonetics&quot; which sets out to give an inventory of all sounds but what I'm doing is something  called &quot;phonology&quot; which only looks at the sounds speakers can tell the difference between. A quick example - put your hand to your mouth and say &quot;pin&quot; and then &quot;spin.&quot; Notice that &quot;pin&quot; gives you a little puff of breath but &quot;spin&quot; doesn't? That's because technically they're slightly different sounds - which someone interested in the phonetics would case about. To speakers though the /p/ in both &quot;spin&quot; and &quot;pin&quot; sound the same so I'd treat them as one sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T22:41:05.167" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T22:41:05.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2011-09-14T22:08:29.657" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;ISN is really important in the study of language - it's the first time that a language has been tracked almost since its inception. Judy Kegl, the linguist who came to Nicaragua at the request of their government, started working on ISN in 1986, only about 7 years after the deaf school opened. Some Creole languages aren't particularly old but no one was there to study their acquisition by children in such a detailed way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say the language came from &quot;nothing&quot; is a bit deceptive - many of the children had &quot;home sign&quot; systems which they would use to communicate with their hearing family members - but these were incredibly basic and impoverished sign systems compared to the ISN. Kegl was able to work with the earliest students at the school and the cohort that was then in 1986 and compare the sophistication of their language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T22:40:48.193" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T22:40:48.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2011-09-14T22:23:25.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a study (&lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01067944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mothers' speech in three social classes&lt;/a&gt;) done in the 1970s where Dutch speaking children in the Netherlands were exposed to German children's television programming for several hours a day with no other German input. These children acquired no German. Likewise, deaf parents used to get their hearing children to watch spoken language programming to give them spoken language skills and these children didn't learn anything. So children can't learn a second language (or, technically, a second first language) without rich interactional input that isn't television.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adults can learn from television or CDs as long as they're geared towards language learning. That's because adults — and older children — are already literate and have had experience constantly learning things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, children and adults can learn a second language perfectly well without native speakers — but with near native speakers as teachers. The majority of English teachers in Europe are rarely &amp;quot;native speakers&amp;quot; in a true sense of the word but still teach the language very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="22150" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T02:37:47.333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T02:37:47.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2011-09-14T22:33:22.007" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;ioling.org has the problems from the IOL comp - but individual countries that have the competition will also put their problem sets online. Here is the link for Australia's Linguistics Olympiad problems: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ozclo.org.au/problem-sets&quot;&gt;http://www.ozclo.org.au/problem-sets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over all they're slightly less daunting than the IOL level ones, so you may want to start there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2011-09-14T22:40:12.627" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T22:40:12.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2011-09-14T22:35:31.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know we've already mentioned it a dozen times already - but I always find Wikipedia a good mix of basic definitions and indepth discussion. It usually doesn't seem to be too theoretically biased either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T22:35:31.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-14T23:13:17.813" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, infinitives and imperatives have their object-pronouns attached to them, as in &lt;em&gt;dámelo&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;give it to me&quot;), a compound of &lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;give&quot;), &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to me&quot;), &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;it&quot;). To me, these look like proto-conjugations. In particular, they have already begun to develop irregularities: &quot;give it to him&quot; should logically be &lt;em&gt;dálelo&lt;/em&gt;, but some sort of euphonic change (not sure what this is called) has changed the middle consonant to &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, creating the modern Spanish &lt;em&gt;dáselo&lt;/em&gt;. With a few more such changes, this simple agglutination may someday become become a &quot;morphological category&quot; as impenetrable as the Latin noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T23:13:17.813" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-14T23:33:39.927" Score="25" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;What role do &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing&quot;&gt;NLP (natural language processing)&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics&quot;&gt;CL (Computational linguistics)&lt;/a&gt; play in today's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_linguistics&quot;&gt;theoretical linguistics&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does, for instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability&quot;&gt;computability&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification&quot;&gt;formal specification&lt;/a&gt; play a big role in modern theories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T17:59:41.487" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T23:24:05.433" Title="What has NLP/CL brought to the table of pencil-and-paper linguistics?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2011-09-14T23:41:54.043" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're still having trouble distinguishing between voiced and voiceless consonants by sound alone, you can try a simple trick I learned in one of my introductory linguistics classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practice producing the voiced/voiceless pairs (I think it works best if you say them in the context of a word) while pressing your fingers to your throat. You'll actually be able to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; the vibrations from your vocal chords when you utter the voiced consonant. I've found that it works pretty well for differentiating between more similar sounds, which are kind of hard to hear and aren't necessarily expressed in the orthography, such as the dental fricatives in English (voiceless θ, as in &lt;strong&gt;th&lt;/strong&gt;istle' and voiced ð, as in 'fa&lt;strong&gt;th&lt;/strong&gt;er').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-21T19:13:14.660" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T19:13:14.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-14T23:48:48.040" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't think of examples off the top of my head, but I'm sure you can find some in the work of linguists like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/pub.htm&quot;&gt;Elly van Gelderen&lt;/a&gt;, who has a theory about exactly what you're talking about (&quot;the linguistic cycle&quot;), and I believe has written or edited at least one book about it recently. You probably should also take a look at the grammaticalization literature. I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unm.edu/~jbybee/&quot;&gt;Joan Bybee&lt;/a&gt; might be a good place to start, if you haven't already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not absolutely precisely the question you asked, but you might also find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; interesting. It claims roughly that morphological systems tend to get simpler as speaker population increases. As you might imagine, it's controversial in some quarters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2011-09-14T23:48:48.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2011-09-14T23:58:26.603" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, which developed under similar circumstances (isolated deaf community) in the south of Israel.  It developed a little earlier than ISN (early 1900s vs. 1970s), but members of the first generation of fluent signers have been studied, and the language is a subject of active research.  According to Wikipedia, the word order (SOV) is different from the word orders of other surrounding languages (Hebrew, Arabic), lending credence to the idea that the language is not related to these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T09:34:22.373" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T09:34:22.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-15T00:09:36.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been argued that in French, subject pronouns are in the process of becoming inflectional elements.  Culbertson (2010) &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lan/summary/v086/86.1.culbertson.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Convergent evidence for Categorial Change in French&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; vol. 86 num. 1 is a recent paper arguing this hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T20:15:15.383" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T20:15:15.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="156" CreationDate="2011-09-15T01:15:02.097" Score="13" ViewCount="5206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several linguists criticize prescriptivism. Stephen Pinker is probably the one to have made the strongest case against it. But, is their criticism based on a methodological principle (the abstraction of value judgements) or is it a statement of fact (that everything &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; the same value)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, both rap lyrics and Charles Dickens's novels can be considered as sources of data from which Linguistics tries to generalize the &quot;system of language&quot;. As such, both sources have the same value. They are equally useful for analyzing patterns, generalizing principles, observing how the language is changing and so forth. But, in some sense, the standard variety is &quot;superior&quot;, in that a Linguistics book itself could not be written using the “gansta rap” variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how should the position of linguists against prescriptivism be understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T07:01:04.963" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T08:44:13.683" Title="Why is prescriptivism criticized?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="155" CreationDate="2011-09-15T01:31:13.210" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is, or should be, a science. Science doesn't tell you how you should value things; personal opinions and value judgments are simply irrelevant. Physicists can tell you how to make a nuclear bomb, but the science of nuclear fission, etc., does not tell you whether you ought to make a bomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason linguistics books aren't written in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English&quot;&gt;African American Vernacular English&lt;/a&gt; is because it is not a standard dialect. The reason it is not a standard dialect is primarily because educated, wealthy and powerful people don't normally use it. And that is more-or-less a historical accident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the above, I think many rightly criticize prescriptivism because it is one of the last socially acceptable ways to discriminate against people, sometimes standing in for simple racism, other times motivated by a dislike of people with little education, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T17:59:55.510" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T17:59:55.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="118" CreationDate="2011-09-15T01:57:23.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the definition: a triphone is a sequence of three phonemes. This is equivalent to saying it is a 3rd order Markov chain or a trigram over phonemes. The application of such a model is usually to ask &quot;what is the probability of the third given the first two?&quot; in a chain as long as the utterance. Such a model assumes that all previous phonemes other than the preceding two are irrelevant. This is called a &lt;em&gt;Markov assumption.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here's an example in English. I wrote a quick script to calculate triphones from CMUDict data. Let's look at the highest probability segments that follow &lt;em&gt;ɪŋ&lt;/em&gt;. I'll use # for a word boundary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# 73.18% (bring, running)&#xA;k 6.02% (think)&#xA;z 5.88% (things)&#xA;ɚ 4.04% (singer)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from this we get that most likely if we've heard &lt;em&gt;ɪŋ&lt;/em&gt;, we're about to hear a word boundary, which makes sense because -&lt;em&gt;ɪŋ&lt;/em&gt; is a suffix but also because /ŋ/ is generally only allowed in codas (ends of syllables) in English. The next most likely segment is /k/, which is to be expected given place of articulation  assimilation for nasals in English (e.g., /n/ before /k/ becomes /ŋ/). -&lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; and -&lt;em&gt;ɚ&lt;/em&gt; are suffixes in English, so we'd expect them where word boundaries are likely. So you see that this simple model has captured a bit of phonotactics, phonology, and morphology. This is why it's handy in speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can see that whenever the memory required to make a good prediction is short, such models work well. Basically, performance in a language is affected by the fit between the phonotactics of the language and Markov assumptions; the more a language defines short, linear relationships between phonemes, the better this model will perform. Also, it often depends on how often such relationships help resolve possible ambiguities or &quot;mis-hearings.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as to how they use sentence information, this is getting into what's called language modeling in speech recognition. What that particular technique is doing is taking some guesses at the words, assigning part of speech tags to those guesses, and then using a grammar to validate the recognition. For example, consider these two possible recognitions (with likely part of speech tag assignments in slashes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob/noun likes/verb Mary/noun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob/noun likes/verb wary/adj.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some grammar that tells us that an adjective complement for a verb is not going to work, and that only #1 is going to make sense as a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that no modern speech dictation system operates with hand-coded grammars like this. The complexity of maintaining such grammars is too high, and much of the performance comes from lexical information (what kind of objects does &quot;like&quot; prefer?) that is lost if you change all words into part of speech tags as the link suggests. So word-based n-gram models are usually used, with little concern for parts of speech or grammaticality. For further reading, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0130226165&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System Development&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0131873210&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Speech and Language Processing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Added some real triphone data instead of the hypothetical example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T16:41:05.943" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T16:41:05.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="155" CreationDate="2011-09-15T03:20:27.237" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me first get the definitions straight. A descriptivist text merely describes language, without itself assigning values like beauty or morality to it, though it may describe how &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt; assign such values. A prescriptivist text assigns values. So far, so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most problems arise, in my view, when one approach is applied to the domain of the other. Oftentimes, you will see uneducated prescriptivists make claims like, &quot;no-one says &lt;em&gt;data is&lt;/em&gt;, and therefore it should not be used&quot;, even though many people do in fact say &lt;em&gt;data is&lt;/em&gt;. The prescriptivist confuses what is and what ought to be: he should say, &quot;no-one should say &lt;em&gt;data is&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but he says &quot;no-one says &lt;em&gt;data is&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, thereby making a prescriptivist statement disguised as a descriptive one. Moreover, many uneducated prescriptivists presuppose that there is an objectively &quot;right&quot; language, discounting the fact that language is forever changing under the influence of various social and other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem, just as frequent, is that someone will say, &quot;most people say &lt;em&gt;data is&lt;/em&gt;, and therefore you should not tell people to say &lt;em&gt;data are&lt;/em&gt;, Mr Styleguide&quot;. That is prescriptivist talk, disguised as descriptivism: this person says, &quot;you can't tell people to use language that is in fact not used much&quot;. It may be true that it is not used much; but why can't a styleguide tell people to use rare language? Granted, it is absolutely valid to say that a styleguide gives bad advice; but saying so is decidedly prescriptivist. And yet this person will often consider himself a descriptivist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is no place for a prescriptivist perspective in a scientific text; that is why style guides and linguistics should be kept strictly separate. Certainly, a style guide may use data found in linguistic research as an argument for or against a certain construction; and a linguist may describe what different style guides say about this construction, etc., ad infinitum; but each should stick with his own trade and not criticize the other—unless his domain is encroached upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean that a single text cannot switch between descriptivist and prescriptivist statements; but the status of each statement should be clear beyond doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the erudite PLL has said before, on English.Stackexchange, a good prescriptivist account of a phenomenon will be very similar to a good descriptivist account of the same. The former will explain what different people use and why, and give advice to its readers neatly ordered according to who they are and what they want. The latter will explain the same things more elaborately, and refrain from giving advice. But if you work in field x and the descriptivist account says that 80 % of your colleagues write &lt;em&gt;data are&lt;/em&gt;, that is very close to (moderate) prescriptivist advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As concerns the use of high-brow academic language in linguistic treatises, there is no escape: linguists are only humans too, and they nearly always choose this type of language consciously. They defer to social pressures and a sense of aesthetics. But that is no problem: most linguists can switch perspectives very well, between the choice they make for the &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt; of their work on the one hand and the linguistic phenomena they describe in the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, some linguists, who are in their linguistic works absolutely descriptive, display a scathing prescriptivism elsewhere, against what they see as &quot;elitist&quot; language. They despise the advice of style guides who do not base their advice on the language of the majority, etc. That is a strong political statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my prescriptivist view, some of those people fail to consider that language is not just a tool that people use subconsciously for communication and consciously to further their position in society, but also a conscious medium of art. Most people find certain forms of language more beautiful than others and choose to change their own language accordingly, by discarding ugly forms and adopting beautiful ones. This might sound like a platitude, but it is often casually assumed that language is exclusively a subconscious tool. Of course our sense of beauty is highly influenced by social factors, but it is beauty nonetheless. In their political quest for egalitarianism, some prescriptivists risk compromising art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a style guide cries absurdities, the problem will solve itself, because no-one will listen; if not, the objecting linguist should perhaps take a good look at his own language, and the way he will teach his daughters to speak, before scolding the elitism of others. I doubt any of them will teach their precious Charlotte &quot;&lt;em&gt;ain't&lt;/em&gt; is fine, period&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it is absolutely fair to criticize people who make others feel miserable about their own use of language without good reason. But you are not helping people emancipate by telling them that their &lt;em&gt;ain't&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;fine&quot;: society is not so tolerant, and they will benefit more from a realistic description of the stigma, however arbitrary, that will still cling to it for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-10-07T06:11:07.020" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T06:11:07.020" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2011-09-15T03:46:31.607" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very important question, I think. It's central to digitization of linguistic materials on the web. I've been working on some (open source) software tools for doing this sort of thing for a while now, and while it's in too much of a messy state to be of immediate use to you, I hope it's okay if I write at some length about the approach to marking up glosses that I've found most useful, after a lot of experimentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found that the most important thing to get right in marking up glosses is to make sure that the structure makes sense. Usually, the goal of glossing is to annotate words (and sometimes morphemes) with translations for the semantics and labels for the grammatical categories. So let's take a simple example Spanish &lt;strong&gt;hablo&lt;/strong&gt; as in &lt;strong&gt;Yo hablo español.&lt;/strong&gt; This might be glossed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yo habl-o español&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; I speak-1sg.PRES Spanish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there lots of variations of how one might gloss this sentence, depending on the linguistic topic at hand and the level of specificity. For instance, there might be a citation tier, an orthographic tier, a phonetic tier, a morphological tier, and a free translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Snifty 2012&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Yo hablo español.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; jo ˈaβl-o espaˈɲol&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; I speak-1sg.PRES Spanish&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; &quot;I speak Spanish.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some linguists work with far more tiers -- multiple orthographies, tone, whatever. But for the purposes of discussion let's stick with something simple -- morphologically delimited orthography, morphological analysis, and a free translation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the first thought in my mind when I set out to start digitizing such thing was &quot;well, it's &lt;em&gt;interlinear&lt;/em&gt; glossing, so I'm going to be &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt;-calating &lt;em&gt;lines&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; So, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=gloss&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;p class=sentence lang=es&amp;gt;yo habl-o español&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;p class=morphological&amp;gt;I speak-1sg.PRES Spanish&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;p class=free lang=en&amp;gt;I speak Spanish.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems reasonable enough at first. (And in fact some online projects have used quite a similar form of markup, check out the source of this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wulfila.be/gothic/browse/text/?book=1&amp;amp;chapter=10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic text&lt;/a&gt;.) But there are difficulties in glossing if we get beyond a short, simple example sentence. The most glaring problem is that things don't line up right. What if the example sentence isn't &lt;em&gt;Yo hablo español&lt;/em&gt;, but rather &lt;a href=&quot;http://qu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qhichwa_simi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Qhichwa Simi Hamut'ana Kuraq Sunturtaq ninmi, huklla simi, Qusqu llaqtap rimayninmi huklla allin qhichwa simi, nispa.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact of the matter is that things will get ugly fast. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do we do to make sure words and their tiered annotations align vertically across the various lines? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we handle line wraps? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One horrid thought was to use tables -- one could argue that a gloss is ''kind of'' tabular, I guess. At least vertical alignment could be handled. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;table&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;tr&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;yo&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;habl-o&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;español&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/tr&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;tr&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;I&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;speak-1sg.PRES&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;    &amp;lt;td&amp;gt;Spanish&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/tr&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;tr&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;td colspan=&quot;3&quot;&amp;gt;I speak Spanish.&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/tr&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/table&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this for a three-word sentence? This is just awful. You have to keep track of which &lt;code&gt;td&lt;/code&gt; corresponds to each of the other &lt;code&gt;td&lt;/code&gt;s in all of the other &lt;code&gt;tr&lt;/code&gt;s... and the free translation &quot;row&quot; isn't really a row at all. Imagine trying to set that Runasimi sentence from above... Blech! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's this sort of problem that I think motivates the key insight about marking up glosses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A word and its annotations should be siblings in the markup, and anything above the level of a word should be represented as a list of word-level items.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can view such a structure, as a nested HTML list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;habl-o&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speak-1sg.PRES&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;español&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it looks quite weird in this format (especially with this site's default CSS), this is actually, I think, the &quot;right&quot; structure for capturing what's really going on in a so-called interlinear gloss. Here's how markup for that might look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ol class=sentence&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;ol class=word&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=es&amp;gt;yo&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=en_MORPH&amp;gt;I&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/ol&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &amp;lt;li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;ol class=word&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=es&amp;gt;habl-o&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=en_MORPH&amp;gt;speak-1sg.PRES&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/ol&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  &amp;lt;li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;ol class=word&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=es&amp;gt;español&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt; &#xA;      &amp;lt;li lang=en_MORPH&amp;gt;Spanish&amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/ol&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/li&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;/ol&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this might not intuitively look much like a gloss at first blush, at least not visually. But the structure is right. And in fact, with a little CSS, we can render these nested lists in a way that looks exactly like a traditional gloss, and which behaves correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't mess with CSS in the posts within this site itself, but you can check out this &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsfiddle.net/snifty/Ty8Vp/2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;jsfiddle&lt;/a&gt; to see what I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;div.wrapper {&#xA;    background: hsla(55, 99%, 80%, 50);&#xA;    padding: 5px;&#xA;    overflow: auto;&#xA;    margin: 1em 0;&#xA;}&#xA;ol.sentence {&#xA;    display: inline;&#xA;}&#xA;ol.sentence li[lang=es]{&#xA;    font-weight: bold;&#xA;}&#xA;ol.sentence li[lang=en_MORPH]{&#xA;    font-family: monospace;&#xA;}&#xA;ol.word {&#xA;    padding: .5em;&#xA;    margin-bottom: .5em;&#xA;    background: white;&#xA;    float:left;&#xA;    border: 1px dotted #ccc;&#xA;    display: inline-block;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that the very same markup of that three-word sentence wraps correctly if we place it inside a wrapper with a fixed width. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot more that could be said about this topic. Specifically, I haven't answered the OP's question with regard a tool for generating such markup, but I think something along the lines of the nifty tool that Nat put together above could solve the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be worth having a discussion about more generic tools for editing, saving, searching, and otherwise manipulating and sharing glosses on the web. (I've been trying to wrap my head around &lt;a href=&quot;http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;backbone.js&lt;/a&gt; as a tool to do just this sort of thing, but the learning curve is pretty steep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2014-02-09T22:23:37.070" LastActivityDate="2014-02-09T22:23:37.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-15T06:58:01.020" Score="7" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Latin is used as a source language for scientific terms in many European languages, and English is used as a source for technology-related terms in other languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T15:45:25.067" Title="What is the terminology for a source language for new word production?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;neologism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="150" CreationDate="2011-09-15T07:06:21.223" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the very idea of using a &lt;em&gt;corpus&lt;/em&gt; instead of picking examples out of thin air and pronounce them sound or unsound has affected all parts of linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T07:06:21.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-15T07:11:21.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication. Countries where English is the main language include the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T23:15:00.637" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T23:15:00.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-15T07:11:21.553" Score="0" Body="A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:16:49.453" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:16:49.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2011-09-15T11:48:18.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation in Malta is interesting, supposedly a lot of children learn Italian through mass media. Because of the relative size of the populations, this is different than the Dutch/German case LaurenG mentioned. However, much of the Maltese vocabulary is quite close to Italian already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar situation exists in Scandinavia with English. Almost all television shows, movies and music imported from the anglosphere, and not dubbed as in other countries with larger population. Many Scandinavians find themselves very good at understanding both written and spoken English, but less proficient in writing and especially speaking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T11:48:18.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="136" CreationDate="2011-09-15T11:50:51.183" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existence of a double-ð does not necessarily imply that the affricate was released twice, any more than other doubled stops are released twice. More likely the stop portion of the affricate was geminated, but the affricate was only released once. For comparison, consider modern Italian orthography, in which the letter &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; represents /ts/, but double &lt;em&gt;zz&lt;/em&gt; is extremely common. This double letter does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; indicate [t͡st͡s], but rather [t:s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I see no reason to dispute the standard reconstruction of the tau gallicum. In particular, I find the suggestion that it could be [θ] to be very unlikely, given the available evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T11:50:51.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="207" CreationDate="2011-09-15T12:00:13.240" Score="26" ViewCount="1344" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin &lt;em&gt;accusative&lt;/em&gt; rather than the &lt;em&gt;nominative&lt;/em&gt;. (This is even true for those languages that have masculine plurals in &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, which is actually a regular reflex of &lt;em&gt;-os&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm aware of exactly one word in Romanian which is only explicable as a survival of the Latin nominative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;om&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;man (sg)&amp;quot; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;oameni&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;men (pl)&amp;quot; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;homines&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The hypothetical, unattested Romanian reflex of Latin acc. &lt;em&gt;hominem&lt;/em&gt; would be *&lt;em&gt;oamene&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other similar reflex in other Romance languages that reflects the Latin nominative? Is there evidence for the survival of the Latin nominative into Proto-Romance in any systematic way (outside of the pronouns)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:59:00.517" Title="Which Romance languages have reflexes of the Latin nominative in nouns?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="155" CreationDate="2011-09-15T13:53:38.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: It's a matter of taste: prescriptivism has a tendency to authoritarianism against non-standard varieties, and there is a quasi-hypocritical tendency to to make up rules that are either arbitrary or just wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer Answer: Linguistics is a science which takes basic data (how people speak) and tries to organize it and systematize it. It naturally attempts to make predictive rules out of the data. It turns out there are natural categories; groups of people tend to talk like one another, and there are fairly sharp demarcations between them (English and French say). So linguists are very rule based, coming up with rules that say 'in situation X, you say &quot;A B C&quot; and not &quot;A C B&quot;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules are very useful when learning a foreign language because, as it turns out, the rules are different from language to language. You should say &quot;A B C&quot; if you want to sound like you're from a particular community. That is both prescriptive and descriptive ('you should' and 'that's what people say').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as categorical as languages might seem, there's more than you think. There's not just a single formal exact &quot;English', there are different registers, different dialects, and choosing between one and another is purely a sociological problem (who is admired? who is forced to do what?). So in some sense, what kids learn in school is this 'formal' language which may or may not be different from their home language (where double negatives might be perfectly everyday). 'That ain't no difference to me' is perfectly grammatical -in certain registers of speech (and certain regions). It is ungrammatical in -standard English- but perfectly grammatical in others. ('That are not no difference to me' is ungrammatical in all the varieties of English I can think of). When people (teachers) say that the double negative is bad or incorrect English, they are correct for -standard- English. When they say 'you use bad (or incorrect) grammar' because you used a double negative, they are making a sociological statement that your language (however rule based it may be) is not -socially- acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem with prescriptivism (that gives it a somewhat bad name) is that some of the rules it puts forth are just not actually descriptive rules for any variety, like the 'split infinitive' or 'don't end a sentence with a preposition'. People really do use those things when they speak; they've just been deprecated artificially by some arbitrary style choice. School teachers propagate them because in the course of correcting performance or attention errors with actual rules, it is difficult to distinguish real rules from made-up ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivists (and school teachers) are normative to a single standard (which is a good thing for students who tend to the lazy and incoherent, or very separately, foreign). Descriptivists tend to notice the varieties (but will still know the rules for variations). Descriptivists can be just as dogmatic as prescriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another short summary: Prescriptivists are criticized by descriptivists because some of the prescriptive rules are made up (split infinitive) and because some of them apply only to one particular variety (double negative). Also, prescriptivists are kinda annoyingly nit-picky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T13:53:38.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="606" CreationDate="2011-09-15T14:28:11.987" Score="9" ViewCount="1059" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical set&lt;/a&gt; is a useful technique for differentiating accents or dialects within a language. A lexical set is a set of all words/syllables that are pronounced with the same vowel. These sets partition the syllables in the language, and then how different sets might merge (like the caught/cot merger) can help identify a particular dialect. A particular lexical set is labeled with one of its primary members. For example, there lexical sets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BATH including bath, pass, path, sample,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PALM including palm, father, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In AmE these two sets are distinguished, but in BrE (RP) they are merged (supposedly; for me, palm and father are different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a chart that lays out the merges among lexical sets for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English dialects&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this. Are there any such similar lexical sets done &lt;strong&gt;for other language families&lt;/strong&gt;? I would think that German, Italian or Chinese would be amenable to such analysis having complex internal intelligible/unintelligible relations in their families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm looking for either references for such similar analysis in other language families, or an explanation of why the lexical set method is or is not a good tool for a particular language family).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: even though I accepted an answer, it didn't answer exactly what I&amp;quot;m looking for. I am hoping for, in the context of very similar varieties of a language, a list of vowel 'contexts' such that within one variety all instances of any particular context are pronounced with the same vowel (this seems to be the definition of Wells' tool. For example, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Deutsche_Dialekte.PNG&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of German dialects&lt;/a&gt; there could be a list of words that help distinguish the dialects by a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; inventory of vowel contexts, i.e. not just a simple maken/machen line (a single distinguishing element), but the set of all vowel contexts that helps distinguish &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T15:46:18.037" Title="Distinguishing dialects objectively: lexical sets in non-English settings" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-15T15:07:59.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For linguistic questions concerning the Latin language, a dead Indo-European language of the Roman Empire and ancestor of modern Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and a few others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions specific to Latin only, please visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Latin Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T00:53:06.773" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T00:53:06.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-15T15:07:59.377" Score="0" Body="For linguistic questions concerning the Latin language, a dead Indo-European language of the Roman Empire and ancestor of modern Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and a few others. For questions specific to Latin only, please visit our sister site Latin Language Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T18:05:22.750" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T18:05:22.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-15T15:09:30.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T15:09:30.750" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T15:09:30.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-15T15:09:30.750" Score="0" Body="Eastern Romance language and national language of Romania and the republic of Moldova, also a member of the Balkan Sprachbund." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T23:15:05.257" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T23:15:05.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2011-09-15T16:18:18.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a recent trip to Italy I noticed that the men's restrooms say &quot;Uomini&quot; rather than &quot;Uomi&quot; as I would have naively expected. I don't know much Italian so there could be more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any examples of this phenomenon in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T16:18:18.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="176" CreationDate="2011-09-15T16:24:52.330" Score="12" ViewCount="3222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ simply shorthand for /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ as with many of the possible diacritic combinations in IPA or are they different sounds? If they are the same, is there any good reason to use one over the other? If not, how are they different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T17:32:57.840" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T09:40:54.320" Title="Is there a difference between /ɕ/ and /sʲ/?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2011-09-15T17:14:38.007" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that they are different. The former refers to alveolo-palatal articulation. The latter refers to palatal release of the consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pure palatal segments [ɕ] and [ʑ] have a constant alveolo-palatal place of articulation. The palatalized alveolar segments [sʲ] and [zʲ] have alveolar articulation with a palatal release. The two core sounds (palatal versus alveolar) are very clearly distinguishable and several languages do have [ɕ]-[s] minimal pairs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are no languages with ?[ɕ]-[sʲ] minimal pairs; i.e., there are no languages that make a semantic contrast based purely on palatalization onset time. That's not to say the difference is not noticeable. Mandarin Chinese has the alveolo-palatal fricative in its standard phonology, but it is common to see delayed palatalization onset these days, and it is seen as a dialectical (especially cosmopolitan urban) marker as well as a non-native dialectical marker (the delayed palatalization as well as voiced palatalization as in [sj] is extremely common for learners of Chinese whose L1 is a language that lacks palatal obstruents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is always worth note in cases like these, however, that since there is no contrastive difference between the two in any language, there is no real canonical difference between the two. There'd be nothing stopping you from transcribing speech using a convention where the palatal release diacritic was just taken to mean constant palatal articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T17:14:38.007" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2011-09-15T19:04:19.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lingclub.mycpanel.princeton.edu/challenge/puzzles.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lingclub.mycpanel.princeton.edu/challenge/puzzles.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bumped into this website somehow or another when I had only a minor interest in linguistics. It has a pretty good set of exercises over a wide range of skill levels. Most of the problems are significantly easier than the ones for the international linguistics olympiad, though toward the end, some were about the same difficulty, so I think it would be a good starting point! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="25083" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T12:36:29.403" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T12:36:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="205" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:52:29.403" Score="6" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to build a cognitive model of how people learn a event representation from a sentence describing the event, based on St. John &amp;amp; McClelland's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000437029090008N&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentence Gestalt Model&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while that model generated its own sentences based on the event to be described, I'm hoping to find a corpus that supplies me with the descriptive sentences required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the event description I end up trying to extract from these sentences is likely to be rather ad hoc, I'm not simply looking for a corpus tagged with semantic information like &lt;a href=&quot;http://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_frontpage&amp;amp;Itemid=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FrameNet&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/projects/ace.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PropBank&lt;/a&gt; (although any tagging is always a plus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I'm hoping to get a corpus with a very limited scope of topic (e.g. traffic/weather reports, sport/game commentary, a catalog of product descriptions) and then use a combination of heuristics and Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get whatever semantic information I end up needing to train my model.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T23:59:06.677" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T23:59:06.677" Title="Where could I find a corpus that is purely descriptive in nature and limited in scope?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="181" CreationDate="2011-09-15T20:59:11.100" Score="30" ViewCount="13937" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate&quot;&gt;According to wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there is a difference between a plosive+fricative sequence, as in the following example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;catch it&lt;/strong&gt; /kæt͡ʃ.ɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cat shit&lt;/strong&gt; /kæt.ʃɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I honestly can't hear the phonetic difference unless the speaker carefully puts a pause between the morphological boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semicircle in the IPA /t͡ʃ/ seems to suggest that /t/ and /ʃ/ are coarticulated, or at least articulated together more than in a typical consonant cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between the affricate /t͡ʃ/ and the cluster /tʃ/? (similarly with /dɮ/, /p̪f/, /ʥ/, and so on) If so, what's the difference, and how could one tell the difference between an affricate and a simple plosive+fricative sequence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T23:26:42.873" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T15:40:26.010" Title="Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="185" CreationDate="2011-09-15T22:43:55.990" Score="42" ViewCount="470356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having practiced armchair linguistics for some years I should be able to sum up the difference off the top of my head, yet often I don't know which term to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And looking them up on Wikipedia doesn't help a lot...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia on &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with &quot;the sounds of language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia on &lt;strong&gt;phonetics&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be that the difference is that phonology deals with language sounds and phonetics deals with human speech sounds? And if so, well what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T15:47:00.523" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T19:34:57.713" Title="What's the difference between phonetics and phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="15" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="32" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2011-09-15T22:46:19.090" Score="30" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I honestly can't hear the phonetic difference unless the speaker carefully puts a pause between the morphological boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have very good instincts, because this statement is halfway to the answer. An exploration of the topic is best started in a discussion of the differences between the words &lt;em&gt;shoe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;chew&lt;/em&gt;, which differ only in that the former has a fricative initially and the latter has an affricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The period of silence (caused by voiceless stop closures like [t]) that characterizes stops and the &quot;stop&quot; portion of affricates is indistinguishable from regular silence. We only ever &quot;identify&quot; the presence of &quot;stoppiness&quot; as well as the nature of the stoppiness (e.g., bilabial vs. velar) by the influences that the silences have on neighboring segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the postalveolar fricative versus the postalveolar affricate, in the postalveolar affricate, the stop asserts its status by altering the nature (non-technical term used here; I will elaborate) of the following fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare my totally amateur recordings of shoe versus chew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Shoe&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aDrij.png&quot; alt=&quot;shoe&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chew&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t9o3U.png&quot; alt=&quot;chew&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two major differences that linguists have narrowed down as the cues our ears and minds use to differentiate &lt;em&gt;shoe&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;chew&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fricative is longer in duration than the affricate in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The loudest point in the fricative occurs much later as a proportion of total fricative length compared to the affricate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even test this out for yourself by doing some basic audio editing in Praat or Audacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When our brains hear &lt;em&gt;catch it&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cat shit&lt;/em&gt;, it is applying these two metrics to figure out which one it heard. Slow ascension to maximum amplitude and relatively long frication noise? Must be &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only really tells part of the story, though. Let's explore the production side a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an oral stop happens, the tongue (or lips) completely constrict the oral pathway. No air (and consequently sound, to an extent) can get in or out. That being said, in the transition process when a non-obstruent like a fricative or an oral sonorant follows a stop in the same syllable (this does not apply all the time, but the story is really complicated), what happens is that in the last few dozen milliseconds air starts coming out from the bottom of the vocal tract. Air pressure behind the stops exceeds air pressure outside the stop. And when the stop is released, air molecules quickly crack from behind the stop to in front of it relatively quickly (on releases of all oral stops, aspirated or not, especially into vowels, you can feel a marked burst of air on your lips or if you put your hand in front of your mouth). This is what we call the stop burst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, many different sorts of things can happen following the stop burst. In the case of the fricatives after stops, the closure relaxes slightly, causing the air to burst, but it remains relatively tight, and air traveling turbulently as it goes through and comes out of that tight corridor is what causes frication noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the story of the affricate (stop into fricative) is that significantly higher than atmospheric pressure builds up behind the closure. When the stop bursts and the tongue goes into constriction position for the fricative, that high pressure of air is released over the early span of the fricative, causing a high amount of noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to what happens when you pronounce a bare fricative. In those cases (e.g., &lt;em&gt;shoe&lt;/em&gt;), your tongue goes into fricative position (small constriction), and then your lower vocal tract just starts pushing air through the constriction. The noise does not begin amidst extremely high pressure behind the constriction. That lack of an air pressure gradient causes it to be quieter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quicker climb of the affricate case causes a &quot;critical noise/vibration&quot; level to be reached more quickly and the tongue to retreat from its constriction position, hence the shorter duration of fricatives in general (the critical level hypothesis is not that thoroughly explored to my knowledge, but it seems to explain a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the story of fricative versus affricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bring it all the way back to your case, what happens when there's a &quot;syllable break&quot; is important. When there is a syllable break after the stop, the pressure buildup behind the stop closure releases (sometimes audibly, depending on the dialect). Then, the tongue assumes the fricative constriction position during a period of neutral pressure, and then the air starts flowing, and the sound occurs as a regular fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure this is poorly edited, so I welcome volunteers who would be kind enough to correct me on all the errors I may have made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@aedia asked in a comment a very interesting question that I'll address as an edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;perhaps try something like at shoe vs. achoo &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's actually a slightly different case in my mind. The prosodic characteristics of &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; (being a very weak unit) in &lt;em&gt;at shoe&lt;/em&gt; may cause segmentation issues. While I still haven't read anything that's totally convinced me that phonemic affricates exist in English, I suspect that proponents of phonemic affricates might argue that the resegmented form is proof that /tʃ/ the cluster and /tʃ/ the affricate are distinct. Rambling aside, this doesn't appear to prevail in my dialect and the fricative in &lt;em&gt;at shoe&lt;/em&gt; emerges like a vanilla fricative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;At shoe&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9kRI.png&quot; alt=&quot;at shoe&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Achoo&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OKSkU.png&quot; alt=&quot;achoo&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T23:21:23.947" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T23:21:23.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2011-09-15T22:57:10.947" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference is phonological, not phonetic.  In many languages including English,  /t͡ʃ/ is a separate phoneme from /t/ and /ʃ/, although the phonetic pronunciation could be identical in some dialects.  That is, most speakers would perceive the phoneme /t͡ʃ/ as sounding different from /t/ and /ʃ/, even if the waveforms are identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many circumstances, however, the waveforms may not be identical and you may be able to tell the difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative sequence due to other phonological processes in a particular language.  For example, many American English speakers would pronounce &lt;strong&gt;cat shit&lt;/strong&gt; (phonemes: /kæt.ʃɪt/) with unreleased final t's [kʰæt̚.ʃɪt̚] or even final glottal stops  [kʰæʔ.ʃɪʔ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T22:57:10.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2011-09-15T22:58:42.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article in question&lt;/a&gt; makes some points that can help in telling the difference. Look at the narrow transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;cat shit → [ kʰæʔʃɪt̚ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;catch it  → [ kʰæt͡ʃɪt̚ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here /t/ &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debuccalization#American_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;debuccalizes&lt;/a&gt; to a glottal stop before /ʃ/ in many dialects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't notice this in your dialect, I suggest trying some of the examples of places /t/ debuccalizes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;get ready ['ɡɛʔ'ɹɛɾi]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  cotton ['kɑʔn̩]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(these strike me as particularly obvious examples where it would be unlikely to articulate the /t/ in American English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the stop-fricative sequence, the stop has a release burst before the fricative starts; but in the affricate, the fricative element is the release. [in reference to one of the non-English examples]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The acoustic difference between affricates and stop+fricative sequences is rate of amplitude increase of the frication noise, which is known as the rise time. Affricates have a short rise time to the peak frication amplitude while sequences of stop and fricative have relatively longer rise time (Howell &amp;amp; Rosen 1983, Johnson 2003, Mitani et al. 2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastEditorUserId="77" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T14:34:12.110" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T14:34:12.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:05:46.533" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the big difficulty with the phonetics-phonology divide is not only that linguists don't even really agree on the difference but also that there doesn't exist a good analogy with any other pair of subfields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the way I've seen it (cards on the table, although there are more extreme folks, I'm fairly far on the &quot;phonology doesn't exist&quot; camp, and that is probably influencing my answers)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of the cognitive processes that turn words into instructions to hand down to the physical body parts that produce the sounds. These instructions, personified into human commands, might sound like, &quot;close your lips, now move your tongue to touch your alveolar ridge; begin lowering the diaphragm at a normal rate and constrict the vocal chords to this degree&quot;. On the acoustic side, phonology's role is much harder to specify (at least to me), but I would say that the &quot;phonology&quot; center takes in sequences/matricies of interpreted linguistic features, for example &quot;between 442-488ms, palatalization level 2&quot;. Phonology would then turn that into the abstract &quot;underlying&quot; representations that can be mapped to morphological parsers and the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of how the &quot;commands&quot; end up translating into specific articulator and vocal tract movements. For instance, how the command to retract the tongue at some particular time &quot;really&quot; maps to minute physical details like exactly when tongue section X touches mouth section Y and then in turn how that affects parts of the resultant acoustic signal. Phonetics also makes observations of how certain groups of instructions can cause very specific consequences. On the acoustic side, phonetics turns the mental spectrogram we receive from the nerve endings in our cochleas into feature sets and timings of the sort that it received from the phonological center during articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Articulatory phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is an attempt to consolidate the two, that, as far as I can tell, is basically phonetics taken one level deeper to receive underlying segments as inputs. And articulatory phonology moves a lot of what was in phonology proper as cognitive processes into physically motivated processes during articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, nobody really knows the difference, but the broad agreement is that phonetics is lower-level and more articulator-centric and phonology is higher-level and more cognition-centric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T23:05:46.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:06:41.053" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;physical aspect&lt;/strong&gt; of sounds, it studies the production and the perception of sounds, called &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;. Phonetics has some subcategories, but if not specified, we usually mean &quot;articulatory phonetics&quot;: that is, &quot;&lt;em&gt;the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Phonetic transcriptions are done using the square brackets, &lt;code&gt;[ ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is about the &lt;strong&gt;abstract aspect&lt;/strong&gt; of sounds and it studies the &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; (phonemic transcriptions adopt the slash &lt;code&gt;/ /&lt;/code&gt;). Phonology is about establishing what are the phonemes in a given language, i.e. those sounds that can bring a difference in meaning between two words. A phoneme is a phonic segment with a meaning value, for example in minimal pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;b&lt;/b&gt;at - &lt;b&gt;p&lt;/b&gt;at  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ha&lt;b&gt;d&lt;/b&gt; - ha&lt;b&gt;t&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in Italian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;p&lt;b&gt;è&lt;/b&gt;sca -&gt; /ɛ/ = Peach (the fruit)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;p&lt;b&gt;é&lt;/b&gt;sca -&gt; /e/ = Fishing (the activity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T05:26:25.010" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T05:26:25.010" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:17:28.317" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly it should be pointed out that there is some overlap between these two subdisciplines of linguistics, just as there is overlap between, say, syntax and morphology. But you're not far from the right track when you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the difference is that phonology deals with language sounds and phonetics deals with human speech sounds...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is close, but it doesn't encapsulate the distinction memorably. I suggest the following approximation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt;: how sounds pattern within a given language (stated in terms of &quot;phonemes&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt;: the characteristics of speech sounds (stated with descriptions of speech those sounds, sometimes referred to as &quot;phones&quot;) themselves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crucially, a phoneme consists of a set of phones, &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; a set of rules describing how those phones are distributed within a particular language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we refer to a &quot;voiced palatal affricate&quot; [dʒ] without context, we are describing a &quot;phone&quot; -- a speech sound which is produced through a particular combination of articulations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we make a statement like &quot;In Japanese, the phoneme /d/ has the allophone [dʒ] before the vowel /i/,&quot; then we are describing the patterning of phones in Japanese. Thus, this is a phonological description.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that how a particular phone patterns may be different in another language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, for instance, &quot;deep&quot; [diːp] and &quot;Jeep&quot; [dʒiːp] are distinct terms, so while the phones in question here are comparable (roughly) to those in the Japanese case, the patterning is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, and this is where it gets a bit messy, it's usually the case that there are purely phonetic (articulatory or auditory) influences that &quot;motivate&quot; particular phonological distributions. In fact the example from Japanese above is of a sort that's quite common cross-linguistically, so much so that it's been given its own name, &quot;palatalization.&quot; So, phonology can often be &quot;explained&quot; in terms of phonetics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these subdisciplines have huge literatures and of course I'm grossly oversimplifying, but hopefully that is a useful start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastEditorUserId="136" LastEditDate="2011-09-15T23:40:46.233" LastActivityDate="2011-09-15T23:40:46.233" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-09-15T23:17:28.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:33:36.847" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetics deals with &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt;. Phonology deals with &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;. What is a phoneme? Ah, that's one of the things phonology deals with. &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nikolai_Trubetzkoy&quot;&gt;Nikolai Trubetskoy&lt;/a&gt; defined it as “the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language”. Now, what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in English if someone says &lt;code&gt;[riŋ]&lt;/code&gt;, you will understand &lt;em&gt;ring&lt;/em&gt;, even if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; pronounce it &lt;code&gt;[ɹiŋ]&lt;/code&gt;. So we can consider that the differences between &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɹ]&lt;/code&gt; are not distinctive. Thus, we call &lt;code&gt;[r]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɹ]&lt;/code&gt; unbound variants of a phoneme &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now if someone says &lt;code&gt;[piŋ]&lt;/code&gt; it has a different meaning : it's &lt;em&gt;ping&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;code&gt;[p]&lt;/code&gt; is not a realisation of &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, but rather of another phoneme &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is the most obvious way of finding the phonemes of an arbitrary language, and &lt;code&gt;[riŋ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[piŋ]&lt;/code&gt; what we call a minimal pair. A pair of words different only for one sound, but with distinct meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have probably guessed it's a bit more complicated, but that's the bulk of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now why bother with phonemes? Why aren't sounds relevant enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a matter of abstraction, convenience. Though interesting, phonetic systems of languages often lack obvious patterns. Studying them is tedious, and subject to bias. And there are many topics in linguistics that don't demand such precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonological systems, though present many regularities, are far easier to formalise, and in fields such as morphology, semantics or pragmatics, they are just precise enough. There is no need to know if one says &lt;em&gt;ring&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[riŋ]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[ɹiŋ]&lt;/code&gt; if they bear the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are differences, these two fields don't address the same issues, though they are closely related. And both are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T07:56:24.040" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T07:56:24.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="192" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:51:14.680" Score="5" ViewCount="4480" Body="&lt;p&gt;A creole is defined as a pidgin (or trading language) which becomes a full language after being used by a new generation as their first language. Generally they take most of their grammar from one parent langauge and most of their vocabulary from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But recently I have heard of a term &quot;mixed language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-08T05:59:46.760" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T05:59:46.760" Title="What is the difference between a &quot;mixed language&quot; and a &quot;creole&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="193" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:52:02.830" Score="8" ViewCount="2809" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that, in some hypothetical language, there were two different words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tump/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tump/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's the difference?&lt;/em&gt;, you might ask. In the first one, the word is one syllable long. In the second one, the word is two syllables long because the /m/ is syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you express this difference with IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T14:13:37.803" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T14:13:37.803" Title="How are syllabic consonants written in IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="198" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:56:56.933" Score="10" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's common for the language of an area to have replaced an older language previously spoken there. The new language typically will have a few words which can be traced to the old language, the latter being called a &quot;substrate&quot;. For instance, Romanian has several words believed to be from Dacian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there known cases of a language taking on traits pertaining to grammar &amp;ndash; or anything besides lexical items &amp;ndash; from the substrate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T01:09:44.410" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:45:23.910" Title="Are some languages known to have taken grammatical features etc rather than just lexicon from their substrate languages?" Tags="&lt;substrate&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="189" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:57:57.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;code&gt;[ . ]&lt;/code&gt; such as &lt;code&gt;/tu.mp/&lt;/code&gt; as a symbol for a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aIPA#Diacritic_marks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syllable break&lt;/a&gt; (often left-off in normal usage). But I don't think &lt;s&gt;your specific case (tump) is possible in a language&lt;/s&gt; a syllabic consonant would appear after a syllable ending with a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syllabic consonant diacritic&lt;/a&gt;. For your examples the transcriptions would look like this [tump] [tum̩p].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-09-18T15:41:09.107" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T15:41:09.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="188" CreationDate="2011-09-15T23:58:34.993" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this extract from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_language&quot;&gt;Mixed language&lt;/a&gt;'s wikipedia article will help you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Different from a pidgin:&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A mixed language differs from a pidgin in that the speakers developing the language are fluent, even native, speakers of both languages, whereas a pidgin develops when groups of people with little knowledge of each other's languages come into contact and have need of a basic communication system, as for trade, but do not have enough contact to learn each other's language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Different from a creole:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a mixed language, both source languages are clearly identifiable. This differs from a creole language, which generally has one identifiable parent, in addition to diverse input which cannot be traced to any particular language. While creoles tend to have drastically simplified morphologies, mixed languages often retain the inflectional complexities of both parent languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T00:22:44.533" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:22:44.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="189" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:03:25.347" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always seen a dot below the syllabic consonant. This is common in British dictionaries which indicate syllabic consonants - the various dictionaries vary quite a bit in this regard as it happens. But the majority of British dictionaries do use IPA which is still quite uncommon in their American counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again Unicode provides &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/329/index.htm&quot;&gt;COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW&lt;/a&gt; for this purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/bʌtn̩/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/bɒtl̩/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T00:18:59.907" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:18:59.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:16:26.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign languages convey information through visual rather than spoken patterns, thanks to manual communication (hand and arm shapes and movement), body language and facial expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:52:14.143" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:52:14.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:16:26.183" Score="0" Body="Tag Synonym of Sign Language. Please use the other tag." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:09:48.957" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:09:48.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:44:09.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The International Phonetic Alphabet: a universal Latin-based alphabet whose goal is to represent every sound in the world's languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T13:22:24.673" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:22:24.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:44:09.053" Score="0" Body="The International Phonetic Alphabet: A Latin-based alphabet designed for transcribing all sounds of all languages." OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T13:22:35.427" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:22:35.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:45:53.977" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rotary-munich.de/2005-2006/theo-vennemann.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theo Vennemann&lt;/a&gt; claims that this is, in fact, what happened to English. According to him,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dozens of Celtic features have been identified in English, that which has been most discussed being the early rise of the progressive aspect, the difference between &lt;em&gt;Peter works&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Peter is working&lt;/em&gt;, which no other Germanic language has developed as early and as thouroughly as English and which is formally and functionally the same as in Welsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These would be specific cases of a more general phenomenon, summarized by two rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Superstrate rule&lt;/strong&gt;: Superstrata give words to their substrata, less so structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Substrate rule&lt;/strong&gt;: Substrata give structure to their superstrata, less so words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:45:53.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:47:42.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2011-09-16T00:48:12.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/sars238/encybrit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article from Britannica&lt;/a&gt; talks about Indo-Aryan languages borrowing grammatical features from Dravidian languages, and Dravidian languages borrowing vocabulary from Indo-Aryan languages. Sadly, it does not give examples of what it's talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://but.unitbv.ro/BU2009/BULETIN2009/Series%20IV/BULETIN%20IV%20PDF/27_Junghare_tot.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; supplies relevant examples, but I have not read it myself, and don't know how good or bad the paper is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background info: Indo-Aryan and Dravidian are the two major language families of India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T00:59:14.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T00:59:14.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2011-09-16T01:00:19.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &quot;substrate&quot; and &quot;superstrate&quot; are usually used in reference to Creole formation. Superstrate languages are the languages of the colonisers (so usually French/English/German) and the substrate languages are the local indigenous or imported labourers. In the traditional view of creolisation it's usually the superstrate language that provides the lexicon and the substrate languages that brings many grammatical structures. See the wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creole languages&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most often, the vocabulary comes from the dominant group and the grammar from the subordinate group, where such stratification exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's not exactly the same situation that you're referring to, but it gives an indication that substrate languages can influence language in more than just the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T12:45:23.910" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:45:23.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-16T01:07:39.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example I always find is helpful for first year. Ignore the vowels just for now, and just focus on the 'p' sounds. If I were doing a &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; transcription of English notice how all the 'p' sounds are different and they've got slightly different diacritics to show this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[pʰin]     'pin'   - notice it's aspirated!&#xA;[spin]     'spin'  - notice it's not aspriated!&#xA;[stop̚]     'stop'  - notice that you didn't actually open your mouth at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use those square brackets to show it's phonetic - it's the sounds as they really and objectively are. But that's not how English speakers really think of them - they don't think of these sounds being different, they all just think of them as 'p.' to show this we just write them all as /p/ and use angle brackets to show that people think of them all as the one sound - /pin/, /spin/ and /stop/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T01:07:39.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2011-09-16T01:21:46.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want limited and descriptive then look fora  narrative corpus. Your best bet would be to look for something like &quot;Frog Story&quot; - which is the wordless picture book &quot;Frog Where Are You&quot; by Mercer Mayer a fairly standard text in linguistic elicitation. This way you also have controlled elicitation because you know exactly the scope of the visual information available for each event description. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming you want English, but this task has been done in many many languages over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a text file of a child and adult corpus from Tania Renner and Virginia Marchman at U Cal:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.docstoc.com/docs/53044454/ENGLISH-FROG-STORY-DATA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.docstoc.com/docs/53044454/ENGLISH-FROG-STORY-DATA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OLAC shows one from Lowry Hemphill:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.language-archives.org/item/oai:childes.psy.cmu.edu:Frogs-English-WolfHemp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.language-archives.org/item/oai:childes.psy.cmu.edu:Frogs-English-WolfHemp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CHILDES project - a major child language corpus - also has a collection of frog stories (this opens as a PDF) &lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/frog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/frog.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yuji Kawaguchi et al.'s &quot;Corpus-based perspectives in linguistics&quot; has an article and corpus on Frog Stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a bit more googling and investigating might turn up more - you'll find plenty of researchers have used Frog Story and even if their corpus isn't publicly available you could contact them to see if they'll share it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T01:21:46.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2011-09-16T01:57:29.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you looked at &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W11/W11-0139.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;? I quote the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we describe the Baseball Announcers’ Language Linked with General Annotation of Meaningful Events (BALLGAME) project – a text corpus for research in computional semantics. We collected pitch-by-pitch event data for a sample of baseball games and used this data to build an annotated corpus composed of transcripts of radio broadcasts of these games. Our annotation links text from the broadcast to events in a formal representation of the semantics of the baseball game. We describe our corpus model, the annotation tool used to create the corpus, and conclude by discussing applications of this corpus in semantics research and natural language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this, many people have worked on creating and/or analysing RoboCup commentary data. I haven't looked for links for that. But I think they ought to be easy enough to find. Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ml/wasp/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; where they have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ml/wasp/robocup-clang/corpus.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the corpus as an XML file&lt;/a&gt;. The text within &amp;lt;nl lang=&quot;en&quot;&amp;gt; is what you are looking for, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T02:16:25.643" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T02:16:25.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="232" CreationDate="2011-09-16T02:17:27.000" Score="8" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27362/what-is-the-name-of-the-phoneme-produced-in-an-upper-class-britons-pronunciation&quot;&gt;copied directly from English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; where it received plenty of interest but the answers had lots of flaws and no resolutions was reached. It was originally asked by user &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/4763/billare&quot;&gt;Billaire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I urge you to please read the answers and comments there too and bring anything into the answer here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone with a Received Pronunciation accent pronounces the word &lt;em&gt;duke&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;The Duke of York&lt;/em&gt;, he doesn't pronounce it with a &quot;hard&quot; 'd', as one might pronounce the word &lt;em&gt;duh&lt;/em&gt;, but a softer type 'd', which I can only spell phonetically as &quot;dj&quot;, so as to pronounce &lt;em&gt;duke&lt;/em&gt; somewhat like &quot;djuke.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is composed of two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would a linguist call this phoneme?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the difference in articulation between it and a &quot;regular&quot; /d/?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T20:48:24.487" Title="What is the name of the phoneme produced in an upper-class Briton's pronunciation of the word &quot;Duke&quot;? What's different in the articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2011-09-16T05:05:29.103" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, many subjective and objective (&lt;em&gt;cas régime&lt;/em&gt;) forms of words were still used in Middle French, at least into the late Middles Ages, if you go through the etymologies of French words. Here are some examples of words in modern French that are reflexes of the Latin nominative, from the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/fils&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Du lat. &lt;strong&gt;homo&lt;/strong&gt;, cas &lt;strong&gt;suj&lt;/strong&gt;. du subst. signifiant «homme», développé en position proclitique, et qui, à basse époque, est relevé dans qq. ex. comme suj. indéterm., emploi aboutissant à sa fonction de pron. indéf.: Peregr. Aether. 13, 1: &lt;em&gt;&quot;ubi homo desiderium suum compleri videt&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;son&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Du lat. class. &lt;strong&gt;filius&lt;/strong&gt; « fils, enfant »; « descendants » en b. lat. La forme actuelle représente l'anc. cas &lt;strong&gt;sujet&lt;/strong&gt; conservé en raison de son emploi fréq. comme vocatif et prob. aussi pour éviter la confusion avec &lt;em&gt;fil.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar cross-pollination from the vocative occurred with French &lt;em&gt;soeur&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;sister&quot; (the Old-French oblique case &lt;em&gt;seror&lt;/em&gt; falling out of use):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Du lat. &lt;strong&gt;soror&lt;/strong&gt; « sœur ». L'a. fr. avait les formes &lt;em&gt;suer,&lt;/em&gt; cas suj., et &lt;em&gt;seror,&lt;/em&gt; avec différentes var., cas régime issu de l'acc. &lt;em&gt;sororem&lt;/em&gt;, très tôt &lt;strong&gt;le cas suj. devint le plus usuel&lt;/strong&gt; à cause de son utilisation fréq. au vocatif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good candidate is &lt;em&gt;corps&lt;/em&gt; (OFr. &lt;em&gt;cors&lt;/em&gt;); the nominative is not mentioned as such, but, the word being neuter in Latin, nominative and accusative were identical in form, so it would seem likely for that form to be used rather than some declined form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Du lat. class. &lt;strong&gt;corpus&lt;/strong&gt;, attesté aux sens de base A 1, 2, 3, B 1; sens C en lat. class., repris en fr. surtout au xvie s.; le sens D est également latin; ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;em&gt;croix&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;champs&lt;/em&gt;, but those probably come from plurals, in which nominative and accusative are formally identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;em&gt;uomo&lt;/em&gt; (pl. &lt;em&gt;uomini&lt;/em&gt;) appears to come from the nominative &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; too. The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etimo.it/?term=uomo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Pianigiani is not entirely clear; lacking further knowledge about the phonology of that time and a reliable source, we cannot be absolutely certain that the word wasn't shortened from &lt;em&gt;huomino&lt;/em&gt;, or something like that. The same applies to Provençal &lt;em&gt;hom&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etimologias.dechile.net/?luz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Spanish etymological-dictionary website&lt;/a&gt; says &lt;em&gt;hombre&lt;/em&gt; comes from &lt;em&gt;hominem&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;luz, paz, voz, cruz&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;lux, pax, vox, crux&lt;/em&gt;; however, I would not trust this dictionary: it sounds rather amateurish all over. I couldn't find any good, relatively modern etymological dictionary for Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; This quotation from &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9gime_%28cas%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists more examples for French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;La forme unique du français moderne dérive le plus souvent du cas régime. Il y a cependant un certain nombre d'exceptions où &lt;strong&gt;c'est le cas sujet qui a survécu&lt;/strong&gt;, concernant &lt;strong&gt;les noms de personnes&lt;/strong&gt; : ex. &lt;em&gt;prestre / provoire&lt;/em&gt; (« prêtre »), &lt;em&gt;ancestre / ancessor&lt;/em&gt; (« ancêtre »), &lt;em&gt;traïtre / traïtor&lt;/em&gt; (« traître »), &lt;em&gt;suer / seror&lt;/em&gt; (« sœur ») et de nombreux prénoms. Dans quelques cas, le cas sujet et le cas régime se sont tous deux maintenus dans la langue moderne, parfois avec des sens différents : c'est le cas pour &lt;em&gt;gars / garçon, copain / compagnon, sire / seigneur, pâtre / pasteur, nonne / nonnain&lt;/em&gt; et &lt;em&gt;pute / putain.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[The first word of each pair is the Old-French nominatif.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more French examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moindre&lt;/em&gt;, and many other nominals on &lt;em&gt;-dre&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anc. &lt;strong&gt;cas suj.&lt;/strong&gt;, issu du nomin. lat. &lt;em&gt;minor&lt;/em&gt;, compar. de &lt;em&gt;parvus&lt;/em&gt; «petit en taille, nombre, quantité, valeur, âge, rang, condition, importance», le cas régime étant &lt;em&gt;meneur&lt;/em&gt; issu de l'acc. &lt;em&gt;minorem&lt;/em&gt;, v. &lt;em&gt;mineur&lt;/em&gt;. Dès la fin du xiie s. &lt;em&gt;mendre&lt;/em&gt; fut employé au cas régime sing., puis aux cas suj. et régime plur., évinçant &lt;em&gt;meneur&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gindre&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anc. &lt;strong&gt;cas suj.&lt;/strong&gt;, issu du lat. &lt;em&gt;junior&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;nomin&lt;/strong&gt;., compar. de l'adj. &lt;em&gt;juvenis&lt;/em&gt; « jeune ».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;em&gt;queux&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Étymol. et Hist.&lt;/em&gt; Ca 1100 &lt;em&gt;cous&lt;/em&gt; cas régime plur. (Roland, éd. J. Bédier, 1817); ca 1165 &lt;em&gt;keu&lt;/em&gt; cas suj. plur. (Guillaume d'Angleterre, éd. M. Wilmotte, 1818); 1174-76 &lt;em&gt;coeu&lt;/em&gt; cas régime sing.; &lt;em&gt;keus&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cas suj. sing.&lt;/strong&gt; (Guernes de Pont-Ste-Maxence, St Thomas, éd. E. Walberg, 1291; 1292); fin xiies. &lt;em&gt;princes queurs de la coisine&lt;/em&gt; (Prophéties de David, 69 ds T.-L.); ca 1280 &lt;em&gt;Li maistre ques&lt;/em&gt; (Merveilles de Rigomer, 7684, ibid.). Du lat. &lt;em&gt;coquus&lt;/em&gt; « cuisinier », devenu &lt;em&gt;cocus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maire&lt;/em&gt;, from a substantivised nominative adjective (and probably many pure nouns on &lt;em&gt;-air(e)&lt;/em&gt; that come from Latin &lt;em&gt;-ator&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A substantivation de l'anc. adj. &lt;em&gt;maire&lt;/em&gt; «plus grand» ca 1165 (Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Troie, éd. L. Constans, 6031), issu du &lt;strong&gt;nominatif&lt;/strong&gt; lat. &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt;, comparatif de &lt;em&gt;magnus&lt;/em&gt; «grand», v. &lt;em&gt;majeur&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you Google for &lt;code&gt;site:cnrtl.fr/etymologie/ &quot;cas suj.&quot;|nominatif|nomin&lt;/code&gt;, you will probably find a whole lot more (though most of those Google hits are not it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T19:25:26.767" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T19:25:26.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="155" CreationDate="2011-09-16T05:53:20.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers so far have been the usual answers that can be found in most introductory linguistics textbooks.  They do not attempt to look beyond the usual, unproven assumptions.  Let's try to.  Prescriptive grammarians who write style guides are not scientists.  They do not claim to be scientists.  Therefore, it is worthwhile to ask why linguists criticize prescriptive grammarians for being &quot;unscientific.&quot;  A nutritionist does not criticize a chef for being unscientific, a botanist does not criticize a florist for being unscientific, and so on.  Thus there is something missing from the standard answer that simply contrasts prescriptivism and descriptivism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand why linguists criticize prescriptive grammarians for being unscientific, it may help if we look at assumptions behind the common claim that linguistics works like a science.  Supposedly, linguistics is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.  But consider.  Noam Chomsky, the highly influential linguist from MIT, created two idealizations that are at the center of modern theoretical linguistics.  These are the ideal native speaker, whose linguistic competence is assumed to be flawless, and the ideal speech community, assumed to be composed of individuals with perfectly identical linguistic knowledge.  Since neither of these ideals exists in the real world, how does the linguist decide which language forms are in the competence of an ideal native speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky (in Miller &amp;amp; Lenneberg's &lt;em&gt;Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought&lt;/em&gt;, 1978) has tried to rationalize the decisions, saying, &quot;A corpus may contain examples of deviant or ungrammatical sentences, and any rational linguist will recognize the problem and try to assign to observed examples their proper status.&quot;  However, the Finnish linguist Esa Itkonnen (in Thomas Perry's &lt;em&gt;Argumentation and Evidence in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, 1980) has a reply: &quot;In natural science the situation is different: everything that happens in the natural course of events is 'correct.'  Therefore the notion of &lt;strong&gt;correctness of data&lt;/strong&gt; does not apply here at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of linguists who accept Chomsky's idealizations may claim they attribute no &quot;value&quot; to the choice.  But call it what they will, they choose to &quot;describe&quot; some language forms and not to &quot;describe&quot; others that cause difficulty for their theories.  Prescriptivism?  No.  Philosophical idealism?  Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do many linguists criticize prescriptive grammarians for being &quot;unscientific&quot;?  It is an interesting question, considering the criticism comes from a group whose philosophical idealism runs counter to a scientific approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T05:53:20.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2011-09-16T07:09:12.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Balkan sprachbund&lt;/a&gt; is a group of languages which have interspersed grammatical features among each other.  The concept of &quot;superstrate&quot; and &quot;substrate&quot; is less than clear here, since that implies a definitive movement from one language to another rather than the (sometimes uneasy) long-term coexistence of Balkan languages.  But it is an example of fairly extensive &quot;horizontal&quot; (in the taxonomic sense) structural influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T07:09:12.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="216" CreationDate="2011-09-16T07:54:45.133" Score="20" ViewCount="1015" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interest in reversal errors in personal pronoun acquisition. My knowledge comes mostly from studies done with English-speaking children, and I was wondering if there is any languages where this effect would not occur or occurs in a fundamentally different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Background: Reversal errors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referent of pronouns shifts with conversation roles. For pronouns a child must realize that she needs to reverse the pronouns in order to communicate correctly. A father will refer&#xA;to his daughter as &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; and himself as &lt;code&gt;me&lt;/code&gt;, but the daughter must infer that&#xA;when she speaks to her father, he becomes &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; and she becomes &lt;code&gt;me&lt;/code&gt;. If a child imitates what she hears, she will refer to herself as &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; and to everyone else as &lt;code&gt;me&lt;/code&gt; - a reversal error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T17:25:58.930" Title="Are there any fundamental differences in personal pronoun acquisition across languages?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="218" CreationDate="2011-09-16T08:30:48.160" Score="20" ViewCount="1627" Body="&lt;p&gt;Baby-talk or motherese is the language that parents tend to use when addressing preverbal or just-starting-to-speak children. What are the fundamental features or rules that define this subset of a language? Is there a publicly available corpus/dataset for it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am primarily interested in English or rules and features that would apply to the motherese of most languages. However, rules or corpora from other languages are fine as answers, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T12:38:38.217" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T12:38:38.217" Title="Corpus of baby-talk or motherese" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1493" CreationDate="2011-09-16T08:46:33.510" Score="15" ViewCount="3930" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe there was some important research published in recent decades which brought a fundamental change to the way linguists think about phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it that the concept of the phoneme has always been contentious despite its seeming wide acceptance to those of us who only dabble in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall reading that a certain linguist studied a certain language and in the end decided that how we thought of phonemes just didn't apply to this language and that we instead had to look at things another way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does my recollection have any truth to it? Who was the linguist and what is the groundbreaking paper or name of the competing theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I know the question is pretty vague so please help me improve it. Answers telling me I'm barking up the wrong tree are absolutely fine.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T15:58:03.013" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T15:58:03.013" Title="Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="214" CreationDate="2011-09-16T09:40:17.890" Score="11" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many weird characters in IPA, like Glottal Stop symbol &lt;code&gt;ʔ&lt;/code&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why these characters? Is there any reason for selecting them, or was their selection just arbitrary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T10:20:06.853" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T08:41:09.190" Title="What is the reasoning behind the selection of the IPA symbols?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2011-09-16T10:00:11.927" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact many of the IPA symbols evolved from symbols aleady being used before IPA, some of which in turn evolved from symbols in various languages. Others were modified Latin letters by reflection, rotation, small capitals, or added &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic&quot;&gt;diacritical marks&lt;/a&gt;. Some of these diacritics became merged with the letters. Some of the diacritics became abstracted and standardized for use with many letters. Some may be whimsical inventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the IPA glottal stop symbol &lt;code&gt;ʔ&lt;/code&gt; I believe it comes from &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; being used on typewriter keyboards by arabists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These in turn came from a pair of special symbols used by arabists that looked like a small semicircles. &lt;code&gt;ʾ&lt;/code&gt; for hamza and &lt;code&gt;ʿ&lt;/code&gt; for 'ayn. They were I believe simplified handwritten signs supposed to be suggest the shapes of either or both the Arabic hamza &lt;code&gt;ء&lt;/code&gt; and 'ayn &lt;code&gt;ع&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me though, it seems at some point the directions of the signs seems to have been switched ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T08:41:09.190" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T08:41:09.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2011-09-16T10:18:39.483" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Hebrew is really an Indo-European language due to contact with Indo-European then English is a Romance language due to Norman French and a ton of loans from Latin. What nonsense. Languages don't go about changing what family they descend from. English certainly is not a continuation of Norman French!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make a new language through creolization, is this Zuckermann claiming that Hebrew is a creole? Dixon's punctuated equilibrium model (see &quot;The Rise and Fall of Languages&quot;) doesn't explain Hebrew either as it needs more time and several languages to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are some that consider Modern Hebrew to be a naturalized conlang (constructed language that has become a natural language through use). If that is the case it doesn't really descend from anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T13:42:25.353" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T13:42:25.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="210" CreationDate="2011-09-16T11:11:51.997" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For as surprising as it sounds, even children learning sign language as their first language go through this same process despite the fact that many if not all sign languages use some kind of pointing for at least first and second person pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They first learn the abstract symbol for the pronoun ignoring the spatial indication and will point to themselves to indicate &quot;you&quot;! Later they make the same change hearing children make and switch to pointing to the person addressed to mean &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some articles I could find on the Internet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mendeley.com/research/gesture-symbol-relation-between-form-meaning-acquisition-personal-pronouns-american-sign-language/&quot;&gt;From Gesture to Symbol: The Relation Between Form and Meaning in the Acquisition of Personal Pronouns in American Sign Language.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://utoronto.academia.edu/LauraAnnPetitto/Papers/292970/Petitto_L._A._1987_._On_the_autonomy_of_language_and_gesture_Evidence_from_the_acquisition_of_personal_pronouns_in_American_Sign_Language._Cognition_27_1_pages_1-52&quot;&gt;Petitto, L. A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American Sign Language.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T11:11:51.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="211" CreationDate="2011-09-16T11:49:47.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ted.com/speakers/deb_roy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prof. Deb Roy&lt;/a&gt; has recorded every moment of his child growing up and acquiring a language — and that includes motherese, and everyone-else-ese. You can probably contact him for the corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-05T22:23:28.823" LastActivityDate="2012-02-05T22:23:28.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="211" CreationDate="2011-09-16T12:52:58.733" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Deb Roy work prash brings up is certainly interesting, but it is just one child in one language. The standard for researchers that study language acquisition is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.talkbank.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CHILDES Database&lt;/a&gt; (MacWhinney, 2000). CHILDES provides downloadable transcripts, video, and audio files mostly comprised of conversations between caretakers and children in many languages and at many ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Motherese itself, the seminal paper on this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/lgcs123read/NewportEA77.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mother, I'd Rather Do it Myself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman, 1977). While the topic has been revisted many times since, the general conclusions of that work still stand. It was the first paper to show that Motherese is &quot;tuned&quot; to the stage of acquisition of the child is in. That is, Motherese isn't a fixed style of speaking; we vary it with respect to how much the child we're talking to knows about language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some characteristics of Motherese pointed out in that article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While utterances are short, they are not necessarily syntactically simple. There are arguments made that the amount of movement required in a derivation of those sentences on average exceeds that of adult-to-adult utterances, largely because of the high number of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Utterances are heavily focused on directing the actions of children when they are younger, and change to contain more declaratives as they get older.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would appear that Motherese is optimized for easy processing rather than syntactic complexity. That is, utterances are short and contain few morphemes, but often more complex short utterances are used as opposed to simpler, longer ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the concept of &quot;simple&quot; is not straightforward; in the cited article it has to do in particular with the transformations common of syntactic theory of the time. Later papers questioned these ideas, but the consensus is that for whatever definition of &quot;simple&quot; you choose with respect to a grammar these general conclusions still hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course other phonological and phonetic characteristics of Motherese. The exaggerated prosody (the intonation of a sentence) and facial expressions are an important part of it as well. So if you want to find a broad set of discussions on Motherese and rules, etc., I would recommend following the trail of papers that cite the one I list above. You can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5157312406828912975&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Google Scholar link&lt;/a&gt; to search among those articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T20:27:29.063" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T20:27:29.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="222" CreationDate="2011-09-16T13:03:19.697" Score="14" ViewCount="1362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering why in Japanese, certain consonants change depending on the vowel. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants that do not change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ka / ki / ku / ke / ko&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;na / ni / nu / ne / no&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants that do change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sa / shi / su / se / so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ta / chi / tsu / te / to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an explanation of this phenomenon? Does it appear in other languages as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T15:44:21.237" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T14:48:45.700" Title="In Japanese, why do certain consonants change depending on the vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-16T13:35:52.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple way to show the difference is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonetics is the study of possible sounds that a human mouth can make and human ear can hear over all languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonology is the study of those same sounds within individual languages (which in each language is a much smaller set that than the total possible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When studying a particular language, phonology is mostly all that matters. Comparison between languages brings out the phonetics. Catalan has one nasal phoneme (doesn't distinguish m,n, and ng, even though they are pronounced as such in different contexts). And English doesn't distinguish some things that make semantic differences in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T13:35:52.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="223" CreationDate="2011-09-16T13:46:43.647" Score="6" ViewCount="5634" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not considering things like vocabulary or syntax (if that is possible), what phonological differences make the most telling distinction between two dialects, is it the vowels or the consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Informally, among English dialects, it seems that between any two things called dialects the major differences are the vowels (and the consonants seem to stay the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've heard (unsupported of course as is my personal judgement) that in other dialect families, it is a change in consonant (and not the vowel that marks the dialect difference) (the classic example being the '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shibboleth&lt;/a&gt;', an s/sh difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(of course this may be a false dichotomy, and there are other phonetic differences that are not about vowel/consonants, like say prosody or accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is somewhat motivated by my other question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/169/distinguishing-dialects-objectively-lexical-sets-in-non-english-settings&quot;&gt;lexical sets&lt;/a&gt;; that is an analysis technique for managing multiple varieties purely by vowels. Maybe that method is useful in general (in other sets of language varieties), or maybe it is just helpful for English, or maybe it is just one tool, and other tools are more or less successful (and I'd like to know to what degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T21:14:18.680" Title="What is the primary phonological difference between dialects, vowels or consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="219" CreationDate="2011-09-16T13:49:04.270" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a very common phenomenon - it's called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palatalization&lt;/a&gt;. It happens when a consonant is followed by a front vowel (e,i, etc). However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it does not happen to all consonants - depending on the language and its evolution only some consonants may be affected. (as in your example, k does not become ch)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it does not happen with all front vowels. In Japanese it's only before &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be found, in various variations, in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains only the change before &quot;i&quot;. The explanation for tsu can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/t, d, n/ are laminal denti-alveolar (that is, the blade of the tongue contacts the back of the upper teeth and the front part of the alveolar ridge) and /s z/ are laminal alveolar. Before /i/, these sounds are alveolo-palatal ([tɕ (d)ʑ n̠ʲ ɕ (d)ʑ]) and before /u͍/ they are alveolar ([ts (d)z n s (d)z]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter phenomenon is rarer (I can't think of examples other than Japanese). But consonant changes that depend on the preceding or the following vowel are common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T20:01:19.523" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T20:01:19.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2011-09-16T14:13:39.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;primary&quot; difference. Some examples from across the spectrum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stops: one of the main differences people consciously identify between British English registers is the nature of stop releases. Fully released stops, even in word final position is characteristic of more deliberate and higher register speech, whereas stop glottalization or lack of release is common in lower registers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fricatives: one of the most salient markets of the Taiwanese dialect of Chinese is the merger of alveolar sibilants with their retroflex counterparts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Approximants: broadly speaking, a major and easily identifiable difference between the Scottish dialect of English and RP is that in Scottish English, there is much less /r/-dropping.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowels: vowel examples are probably the most common, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that they are the &quot;primary&quot; difference due to all the above examples. Probably the easiest isolated example of vowels being a cue of dialect is Canadian diphthong raising.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, each of the above can all contribute equally to non-native dialects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stops: the inability of CV or CVN languages to adapt to CVC languages is a huge cue for non-nativeness; another prevalent example is when speakers of languages with obligatory word-final devoicing like German and Russian make homophonous word pairs like &lt;em&gt;bat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; (not exactly a stop contrast, since it's mostly vowel length, but it's complicated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fricatives: since so many fricatives sound alike, fricatives are incredibly frequently pronounced differently for non-native speakers. Examples are substitution of /s/ for the cross-linguistically rare dental fricative found in English and the use of the velar /x/ in place of /h/ by speakers from languages without [h]. /h/ is also a common source of non-native accents. Since [h] is basically just loud breathing, it's non-distinctive in many languages. English speakers have a hard time adjusting to languages with contrastive word-final /h/, for instance, and French speakers have a hard time adjusting to languages with contrastive word-initial /h/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Approximants: conflation of /r/ and /l/ by Japanese and Korean speakers of English is all too well studied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowels: speakers will very often import vowel qualities from their native languages. For instance, English speakers learning any language with the pure high back rounded [u] will substitute the English centralized gliding equivalent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also prosodic differences that influence our judgment of dialects, but I'm not experienced enough with them to advise on it intelligently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, differences between dialects are marked in so many ways including both vowels and consonants. There is no &quot;primary&quot; difference. That question is as unanswerable as the question &quot;What is the primary sound in languages? Vowels or consonants?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T14:13:39.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-16T16:16:03.237" Score="19" ViewCount="2858" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun#Countable_and_uncountable_nouns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English makes a difference between count nouns (also known as countable nouns) and mass nouns (also known as uncountable nouns).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Count noun:&lt;/strong&gt; One cat, two cats, few cats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mass noun:&lt;/strong&gt; Some information, little information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Both depending on sense:&lt;/strong&gt; One beer, two beers, few beers, some beer, little beer.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(The third case is the least clear though since it seems ambiguous to people not familiar with the concept so we shouldn't dwell on it for this question.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't come across this in the other languages in which I've dabbled other than seeing some mention of it with regard to Swedish on Wiktionary where I couldn't tell if it was established Swedish grammar or one editor overextending similarities between Swedish and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is noun countability in Indo-European languages, how common is it in other language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes for those unfamiliar with the concept of countability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mass nouns are a different phenomenon to invariant nouns which have only one form for both singular and plural such as English &quot;sheep&quot; so be sure not to confuse the two in your answers where you include examples from other languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Defective nouns which have only a singular form or only a plural form (plurale tantum) such as &quot;clothes&quot; are also a different phenomenon to mass nouns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mass nouns can be distinguished from invariant and defective nouns in that they cannot occur with the indefinite article, with numbers, or words like &quot;many&quot; and &quot;several&quot;; and they can occur with words like &quot;much&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Count nouns on the other hand can occur with the indefinite article, with numbers, or the word &quot;many&quot;; but not with the word &quot;much&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;* An advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;* Two advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;* Many advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;* Several advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Much advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;* Much sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T18:56:39.223" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T22:43:16.647" Title="Is the countable vs mass noun distinction common outside English?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-09-16T16:37:49.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this distinction is very common among modern Indo-European languages, including the use of both with the same word depending on sense, though the latter is often less formal. I will also vouch for Latin and Greek, especially in poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bier is goed voor de sociale omgang.&lt;/em&gt; — Beer is good for social&#xA;  interaction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sommige bieren zijn beter dan andere, omdat ze meer alcohol&#xA;  bevatten.&lt;/em&gt; — Some beers are better than others, because they contain&#xA;  more alcohol.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite convinced that this is (almost) universal among the Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Veux-tu de la bière?&lt;/em&gt; — Do you want beer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deux bières, s'il vous plaît.&lt;/em&gt; — Two beers, please.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Amor patris maior est matris.&lt;/em&gt; — My love for father is greater than for mother.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plures amores habebat iuvenis.&lt;/em&gt; — He had several loves/lovers as a youth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this doesn't mean that the distinctions work exactly the same way in all languages. In Dutch, for example, you would not use the plural &lt;em&gt;bieren&lt;/em&gt; if you wanted to order two beers, as opposed to French and English: you'd just ask for &lt;em&gt;twee bier&lt;/em&gt; (singular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also plenty of words in other languages that cannot be pluralized:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ik heb wat informatie voor U. — I have some information for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;*Ik heb informaties voor U (impossible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could say &lt;em&gt;ik heb een beetje (&quot;a bit&quot;) informatie&lt;/em&gt;; it would be grammatically correct, but far less common than &lt;em&gt;ik heb wat informatie&lt;/em&gt;, which means the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T16:49:41.090" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T16:49:41.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-09-16T16:44:30.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese has this distinction between mass nouns and count nouns, as well. And some nouns can also be classified as both count or mass nouns depending on the sense. For example, in Portuguese &lt;em&gt;informação&lt;/em&gt; (information) is a count noun, so you can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Preciso de &lt;strong&gt;duas informações&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;mdash; I need two pieces of information (literally, *I need two informations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;feijão&lt;/em&gt; (beans, in the sense of food on your plate) is a mass noun, so you have to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu comi &lt;strong&gt;feijão&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (and not *&lt;em&gt;eu comi &lt;strong&gt;um feijão&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;eu comi &lt;strong&gt;dois feijões&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;mdash; I have eaten beans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T19:49:33.070" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T19:49:33.070" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-09-16T17:50:06.547" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book to check is once again Corbett's &quot;Number&quot;, from page 78 and onwards. Unfortunately this is one of the features that &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; ought to have but doesn't. Doing a typological study (that is: actually going through grammars and counting which have the distinction and which do not) sounds like good and suffcient material for at least a master's thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T17:50:06.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:01:03.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the non-IE side of the fence, languages like Mandarin Chinese and Thai have a system of &quot;classifiers&quot; which are mandatory with all number + noun collocations (e.g. &quot;two CL eggs&quot;).  The classifiers tend to apply to semantically coherent groups of words, like &quot;round things&quot; or &quot;names for people&quot; (though there are of course exceptions).  This system amounts to treating all nouns as mass nouns.  Since there are languages with this system but no (known) languages with only count nouns, mass nouns appear to be the default option in UG, with count nouns being marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T18:01:03.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:05:12.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must agree with Steven Xu, &quot;primary difference&quot; is the wrong question to ask. In addition to Steven's list, dialects also differ in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word order&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stress and rhythm (Jamaican English IIRC is syllable-timed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intonation (does sentences go up or down at the end, up or down to mark a question, is the intonation pattern before the focused word equal or different to the pattern after the focused word and what the intonation is on the focused word itself). This is one of the most obvious ones in my L1, Norwegian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocabulary &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are as many dialectal differences as there are differences between languages and generally a more interesting and unanswered question is: &lt;strong&gt;where is the cutoff between dialect and language&lt;/strong&gt;. The old joke that &quot;A language is a dialect with an army and a navy&quot; doesn't hold since German German and Austrian German aren't considered two different languages, and there's a movement underway to reunite Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese (makes for a bigger market, that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T18:05:12.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="206" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:14:31.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always imagined (without much evidence) that this was a two-step process. First /u:/ became /ju:/, then the /j/ modified the consonant before it, i.e. &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;duke&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Tuesday&lt;/em&gt;. There is some evidence, at least, that the introduction of /j/ is a recent phenomenon. Guy Deutscher (in &lt;em&gt;The Unfolding of Language&lt;/em&gt;, page 52) quotes Charles Eastlake in 1902 saying that those born around 1800 said &quot;Dook&quot; for &lt;em&gt;Duke&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;Toosday&quot; for &lt;em&gt;Tuesday&lt;/em&gt;; to me this implies that they were using /u:/ and not /ju:/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T18:14:31.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:19:21.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book to go to is &quot;Phonetic Symbol Guide&quot; by G. K. Pullum and W. A. Ladusaw. Page xxii is a summary of the principles the IPA (association) uses to select the symbols for the IPA (alphabet) and if you wonder about a specific symbol you can look it up in the same book. Most of the symbols have their own separate histories, for instance one of the principles is that letters taken from the latin alphabet is to stand for the most common (as in number of languages, not number of speakers) sound for that letter. However the {r} is used for the alveolar trill, which isn't really that common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T18:19:21.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="206" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:28:49.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a palatalized /d/ or a /d/ with a palatal release, written /dʲ/. The superscript {j} is called MODIFIER LETTER SMALL J in Unicode. The name explains the difference in pronunciation. As you release the /d/ you simultaneously bunch up the tongue (behind the tip and maybe one thirds of the length backwards) towards the palate, without touching it. If you instead move the tongue backwards and bunch it all the way up to touch the palate and make a voiced stop there, you get a palatal stop, as is common in Indian English and some Norwegian dialects. If you instead of bunching the tongue up lower and flatten it you'll end up with the &quot;dzh&quot;-sound of &quot;juice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T19:29:23.683" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T19:29:23.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2011-09-16T18:34:37.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prepositions and subordinators (aka. subjunctions) are readily borrowed into other languages provided that they lack them, and such borrowing sometimes also pulls in the necessary syntactic structures. Several Southern American languages have borrowed subordinators from Spanish, and the idea of an explicit subordinating marker with them. Hm, I read this recently, from Cristofaro (2003) &quot;Subordination&quot; possibly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T18:34:37.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-16T19:40:14.690" Score="3" ViewCount="7879" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly since there seem to be multiple meanings of &quot;substrate&quot; and &quot;superstrate&quot; let me start by defining the terms for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A substrate language is one that was in a place before a new language arrived and took over. An example is Dacian words in Romanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A superstrate language is one that makes inroads into a place where a language is already fully established. An example is English words in Romanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Please alert me if I have started with a misunderstanding!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: do languages tend to absorb the same kinds of features from both substrate and superstrate languages or do they generally take certain kinds of features from substrate and certain other kinds of features from superstrate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, perhaps languages tend to absorb lexicon from the language that was there before them (substrate) but phonology from the new language on the scene (superstrate), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-16T22:34:32.860" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:58:58.080" Title="How are languages affected by substrates vs superstrates?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;substrate&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-09-16T22:52:04.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's also present in Italian, but let's see some examples. In Italian we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Countable Nouns&lt;/strong&gt;: It's the same as in English, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Un libro, due libri — &lt;em&gt;One book, two books&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uncountable Nouns&lt;/strong&gt;: Nouns that belong to this category indicate unspecified quantities of a certain &quot;something&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Un po' di pane — &lt;em&gt;Some bread&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some nouns can have both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Prendo del caffè [uncountable] — I'll have (some) coffee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Prendo due caffè [countable] — *I'll have 2 coffees (I'm ordering coffee for two people)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-16T22:52:04.603" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="238" CreationDate="2011-09-17T00:47:23.583" Score="5" ViewCount="866" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. John McWorther, in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2270&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;course on Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;, said, in a lecture about principles and parameters: &amp;quot;if a language is pro-drop, the verb attraction parameter is always set on. If a language isn't pro-drop, then it could go either way.&amp;quot; Using his examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John often kisses Mary (English, pro-drop: off, verb-attraction: off)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jean embrasse souvent Marie (French, pro-drop: off, verb-attraction: on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beso normalmente Maria (Spanish, pro-drop: on, verb-attraction: on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples above show that in English, the verb comes after the adverb, while in French, the verb comes before the adverb (it has moved from its original &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; position to the &lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt; position up in the tree). In Spanish, which is a pro-drop language, the verb has to come before the adverb, as in French. Now, consider the same example in Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normalmente beijo a Maria (Portuguese, pro-drop: on, verb-attraction: &lt;strong&gt;off&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This piece of evidence seems to contradict the hypothesis above. In Portuguese, the subject pronoun can be omitted (pro-drop), but the verb does not have to move (although you could also say &amp;quot;beijo normalmente a Maria&amp;quot;). How can this be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T21:19:25.143" Title="Verb-attraction parameter in Portuguese" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1736" CreationDate="2011-09-17T01:43:13.530" Score="13" ViewCount="2564" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:08:39.223" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T21:00:31.053" Title="What is a phoneme in the context of a signed language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2011-09-17T02:00:35.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adverb &quot;normalmente&quot; isn't the right kind of diagnostic for these languages, as evidenced by its free placement in the sentence.  The fact that it it prosodically &quot;heavy&quot; also leads one to be suspicious of its status -- in general, the right kinds of adverbs for these tests are relatively light.  For Spanish, Suñer (1994) proposes the following sentences as adverbial diagnostics of V-movement (example 14 from the paper):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) Juan juega sucio a las cartas todos los días&#xA;    J.   plays dirty P the cards  all   the days&#xA;&#xA;(2) *Juan juega a las cartas sucio todos los días&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In non-finite contexts (which lack subject raising to Spec,IP) the verb moves past the VP-internal subject (ex. 17a):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(3) Jugar   Juan limpio a las cartas es una contradicción&#xA;    to.play J.   clean  P the cards  is a   contradiction&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since subject movement to Spec,IP isn't obligatory in finite sentences either, the subject can also intervene it these sentences (ex. 17b)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(4) Aunque   jugaba Juan limpio a las cartas, ...&#xA;    although played J.   clean  P the cards&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact parallel to the English sentence &quot;John often kisses Mary&quot; can't be tested, since it is possible that &quot;sucio/limpio&quot; is base-generated to the right of the verb instead of to the left like &quot;often.&quot;  But these diagnostics demonstrate that verb movement of some sort is occurring.  (I don't know Portugese, so I don't know how well they translate to that language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Costa &amp;amp; Galves argue that the Portuguese verb movement is shorter than the English/French kind.  Though position is optional with respect to some adverbs, it isn't with others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(5)  O   Pedro leu   bem  o   livro&#xA;     The P.    reads well the book&#xA;&#xA;(6) *O   Pedro bem  leu   o   livro&#xA;     The P.    well reads the book&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus (and with other arguments) they conclude that the verb movement targets a lower position in Portugese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/~tycho/pesquisa/artigos/COSTA_Jetal-Fase1a.pdf&quot;&gt;Costa &amp;amp; Galves&lt;/a&gt; (2000) &quot;Peripheral subjects in two varieties of Portuguese: evidence for a non-unified analysis.&quot; In &lt;em&gt;Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000&lt;/em&gt;. John Benjamins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jstor.org/stable/i387450&quot;&gt;Suñer&lt;/a&gt; (1994) &quot;V-Movement and the Licensing of Argumental Wh-Phrases in Spanish.&quot; NLLT 12:2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T02:00:35.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2011-09-17T02:54:04.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific question about whether a particular candidate can be considered a phoneme in sign language? Perhaps if you frame your question in terms of the research you've already done on the field (and it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=sign+language+phonology&quot;&gt;doesn't take much to start&lt;/a&gt;), people can build on that. That way, you can take advantage of the diverse array of backgrounds here to help you arrive at new knowledge. I feel the way the question is phrased now, it might be banking entirely on one of the 50-or-so private beta-ists on knowing sign language phonology, which might be unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, what a phoneme is is no different in sign language than in natural language. The fact that word &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; is derived from a root meaning sound doesn't affect the more abstract meaning that it's taken in academic linguistics. It's the underlying representation of a minimally contrastive unit. If changing the location of a gesture and nothing else changes the semantic meaning produced (in ASL, and all other full sign languages as far as I know), then each location (or some more abstract construct that includes or influences location) is mutually contrastive. If changing the hand shape and unilaterally change the semantic meaning, then each of those shapes are mutually contrastive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we know all the mutually contrastive locations, movements, and hand shapes (and other things), we discover relationships between them and rely on native speaker intuition to wean this down into a candidate list of phonemes, whose compositions can deterministically produce every word in the lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T02:54:04.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="705" CreationDate="2011-09-17T06:59:23.807" Score="9" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there language-independent aspects of the expression of emotion by intonation? More specifically, are there established relations between the expression of emotion by linguistic intonation and by musical means (i.e. musical intervals/phrases/melodies)? Quick summaries of what is known and/or pointers to the literature would be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T01:26:38.073" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T11:04:49.650" Title="What is known about the universal aspects of the relation between intonation and emotion?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2011-09-17T08:05:02.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Well there aren't phonemes in signed languages because phonemes are specifically sounds.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;But if you're asking whether signed languages have an equivalent of phonemes then indeed they do, and they are called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cheremes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cherology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, while a bit thin, actually does seem to say that the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was formerly used even in the context of signed languages prior to 1960 when the terms were coined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even as linguists we can forget that meanings can drift away from etymologies (-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No sooner had I mentioned the drift than &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/168/mmoosman&quot;&gt;user mmoosman&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that &lt;em&gt;cherology&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;chereme&lt;/em&gt; have fallen out of favour once more with &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; now covering both spoken and signed languages once more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:53:36.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-17T08:23:28.847" Score="4" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/180/whats-the-difference-between-phonetics-and-phonology&quot;&gt;difference between phonetics and phonology&lt;/a&gt;, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/237/what-is-a-phoneme-in-the-context-of-a-signed-language&quot;&gt;in the study of signed languages cherology is the counterpart to phonology&lt;/a&gt;, are there also counterparts to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; within the study of signed languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked for the term &quot;chenetics&quot; and it doesn't seem to be used. Could it be that the study of signed language is simply too small and specialized to separate the two. Or perhaps the majority of study of signed languages is only concerned with a single language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T05:19:23.197" Title="Are there counterparts to phones and phonetics for signed languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-17T09:23:58.790" Score="14" ViewCount="772" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/224/is-the-countable-vs-mass-noun-distinction-common-outside-english/235#235&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to that question, I talked about a category of nouns that exist in Italian. The italian name is &quot;Nomi sovrabbondanti&quot; or &quot;sostantivi sovrabbondanti&quot;, the meaning is roughly &quot;overabundant nouns&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three subcategories for this type of nouns. Sometimes the plurals or the singulars are interchangeable, other times they have different meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A - &lt;strong&gt;Nouns with 1 singular and 2 plurals&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing.&lt;/em&gt; — Braccio (A person's arm)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plur. 1&lt;/em&gt; — Bracci (armrests on an armchair, the jibs of a mechanical crane, a prison building's wings, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plur. 2&lt;/em&gt; — Braccia (2 or more people's arms)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B - &lt;strong&gt;2 singulars and 2 plurals&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing. 1&lt;/em&gt; — Orecchio (ear, this is the noun commonly used);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing. 2&lt;/em&gt; — Orecchia (this is less used, I'm not sure but I think it's regional);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plur. 1&lt;/em&gt; — Orecchie (Ears, this is the plural commonly used);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plur. 2&lt;/em&gt; — Orecchia (it seems to be used in the non literal sense, like &quot;A book full of ears&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C - &lt;strong&gt;2 singulars and 1 plural&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing. 1&lt;/em&gt; — Scudiero (squire, henchman);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing. 2&lt;/em&gt; — Scudiere (Same meaning);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plur.&lt;/em&gt; — Scudieri (this is the only plural)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is&lt;/strong&gt;: Is this category present in other languages? I noticed English doesn't have one, but maybe I'm wrong, so I figured I would bring up this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T19:34:45.513" Title="&quot;Overabundant nouns&quot; in Italian: do they exist in other languages?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2011-09-17T09:54:44.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This category by its name sounds like the opposite of &quot;defective&quot; where one or more usual forms are absent, generally used of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm not sure whether this category of nouns exists in English I can think of a couple of English nouns that have more than one plural with differing senses (two plurals with the same sense is much more common).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most commonly discussed example is probably &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fish#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural 1 is the usual, irregular plural actually taking the same form as the singular &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fish#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural 2 is the regular plural &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fishes#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fishes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but is restricted to referring to &quot;several kinds of fish&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one I came across through participation in Wiktionary is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/datum#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;datum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural 1 is the irregular plural also alternatively (and sometimes controversially) used as a mass noun &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/data#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural 2 is the quite unexpected regular plural &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/datums#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;datums&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, used only the field of cartography to mean &quot;fixed reference points&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which reminds me of another, also controversial case of multiple singular forms, but not so straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dice#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the accepted plural of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/die#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dice#English&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is also in common use as a singular in which case it is an invariant noun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T10:04:05.713" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T10:04:05.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="262" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:02:10.577" Score="14" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you ask an English speaker to spell a word, there are specific, widely-known names for all the letters to fill this need. The same appears to be true for all Phoenician-derived alphabets that I can think of, incl. Arabic, Hebrew, etc. (Although I don’t actually know whether they commonly use those names when spelling words since those names are longer than English’s — perhaps someone can enlighten me here?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can disregard syllabaries because the names for the letters here are obvious. Similarly for other scripts in which each lexeme constitutes a syllable (such as Han). Nevertheless, feel free to include interesting tidbits about this if you have any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about other alphabetic/abjad scripts that are unrelated to Phoenician? What about the Brahmi scripts (Devanagari etc.)? Unfortunately I don’t know about many other scripts, but according to Unicode there must be loads. :) Can letter names for spelling be regarded as universal, or do some cultures really have no means of spelling out a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T12:19:05.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T17:01:59.317" Title="Do all non-syllabic, non-logographic scripts have pronounceable names for their letters for spelling?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:23:13.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T10:23:13.497" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T10:23:13.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:23:13.497" Score="0" Body="The study of the production and perception of sounds or &quot;phones&quot;." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:17:18.610" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:17:18.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:24:42.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T10:24:42.573" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T10:24:42.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:24:42.573" Score="0" Body="The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T07:10:16.910" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T07:10:16.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:26:58.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Notation_System&quot;&gt;Hamburg Sign Language Notation System&lt;/a&gt;, also abbreviated as &lt;strong&gt;HamNoSys&lt;/strong&gt; is considered to be analogous to the IPA for spoken languages. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache%3ae97870-ooD0J%3awww.ru.nl/publish/pages/570576/slcn3_2010_hanke.pdf%20Hamburg%20Notation%20System&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=it&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEESinQbpFVb0H7hdzgewIfaJ0WEBNq34znVL9FBPIFTwvRhvQuK5PYV6VkEYZ_Krl1uXYTfySEPGXNhfTD_si3JZZXQXI_neXdDrQhAViB5lOzVn-LXg1Nz7_MZBXyZvXEcmky77a&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbTidIA0wYDxqHKD0TKJ-9U9LnWQKg&quot;&gt;guide&lt;/a&gt; for it that I found but I'm not sure it's the most complete one. If I find a better one I'll add it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HamNoSys is not intended to be a pratical writing system (it's actually evolving currently being at its 3rd revision), unlike the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting&quot;&gt;SignWriting&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation&quot;&gt;Stokoe notation&lt;/a&gt;; you can see about the differences between these two systems in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.signwriting.org/forums/linguistics/ling008.html&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T10:26:58.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:27:32.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T10:27:32.647" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T10:27:32.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T10:27:32.647" Score="0" Body="The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, &quot;morphemes&quot;." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T17:17:21.667" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:17:21.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="150" CreationDate="2011-09-17T13:39:48.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll mention just one of the aspects I have seen myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I spoke to Prof. Pollard, who, I suppose, can be considered to be a paper-and-pencil linguist, I believe he said that the reason he did HPSG, and not the more logic-driven approach he is pursuing now (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~pollard/cvg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CVG&lt;/a&gt;) was simply that he did not know logic at the time. The slides for his course on such a formalism are at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/logical-grammar/page.php?id=materials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/logical-grammar/page.php?id=materials&lt;/a&gt;. In any case, doing derivations for sentences in such a grammar is exactly like doing derivations in mathematical logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to my point now, from what I've seen, which isn't much, it's not NLP/CL that's the cutting edge of linguistics, it's mathematics. But this does address the aspects you raised about computability and formal specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note about Pollard's logical grammar: it addresses 3 aspects of sentences: phonology, syntax and semantics, all with exactly the same, logic-based methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T14:43:14.940" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T14:43:14.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-17T14:18:29.277" Score="7" ViewCount="959" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me explain what I'm after:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;monolingual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all examples are taken from a large corpus of contemporary text (the COBUILD series is now using &lt;em&gt;Bank of English&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the senses for each entry are sorted by frequency, most frequent first&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the senses are based solely on a concordance based on the corpus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the definitions are complete stentences without tons of abbreviations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's stuffed with collocations (words that occur together very often, like spot -&gt; the right spot, quiet spot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are synonyms and antonyms for high frequency words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the frequency of words are marked directly, not hidden in an appendix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it uses IPA, not homegrown pronunciation-symbols (probably common in Non-English dictionaries anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any irregular forms are shown together with the entry, not hidden in an appendix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexicographically, the first COBUILD dictionary heralded a paradigm shift, and I was very lucky to find a copy when I was learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking for something like a COBUILD-style dictionary for Geman and French for a very long time. I've started to suspect that it maybe takes too many resources to build one (a corpus with few enough rights limitations and a trained staff and several years for the assembly), and that's why there aren't any obvious candidates for other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T23:58:43.843" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T20:21:54.217" Title="Are there dictionaries like Collins COBUILD for other languages than English?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-07-20T11:28:06.570" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-01T17:30:51.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:11:33.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T16:11:33.737" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T16:11:33.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:11:33.737" Score="0" Body="The aspects of grammar which reflect singular versus plural but also others more exotic like dual and paucal." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T07:10:39.950" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T07:10:39.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:13:37.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic universals are those properties which are shared by all languages, or statements which are true of all languages. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All languages have vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All languages have pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also implicational universals, in which one feature is universally correlated with another, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a language has trial pronouns then it also has dual pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of linguistic universals is closely allied to linguistic typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-04T13:57:11.510" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T13:57:11.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:13:37.153" Score="0" Body="patterns that occur universally across natural languages, such as properties that all human languages share or implications about the relation between the occurrence of one feature and the other" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T11:32:47.650" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T11:32:47.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:15:30.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-17T16:15:30.107" LastActivityDate="2011-09-17T16:15:30.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-17T16:15:30.107" Score="0" Body="The study of language learning, especially the processes by which first languages are learned by children." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T07:10:50.870" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T07:10:50.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="246" CreationDate="2011-09-18T00:52:12.927" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alphabet has only been invented a few times, so this is easier to describe than you'd think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first lineage of alphabets is the &lt;strong&gt;Phoenician&lt;/strong&gt; lineage, which includes the modern Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as a number of less prominent scripts both living and dead. While I haven't checked every one of these scripts, the Phoenicians themselves named their letters, and the tradition of naming letters was passed down to every derived script that I know of. Some of them kept or adapted the Phoenician names (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic), while others created a simplified naming scheme of their own (Latin, Cyrillic), but they all have names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second major lineage of alphabets is the &lt;strong&gt;Brahmic&lt;/strong&gt; lineage, which includes Devanagari as its most prominent member, but includes all of the myriad scripts of India and Southeast Asia in its family tree. Here, too, the original script had named letters, and the tradition of named letters seems to have been kept in all of the daughter scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That covers all of the unambiguous alphabets in the world. There is a third, somewhat contentious example, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean hangul are usually presented as a syllabary, but unlike most syllabaries every hangul syllabic glyph can be fully decomposed into a set of strokes that consistently and predictably represent individual segments in the syllable, with well-defined rules for placement. Therefore hangul arguably represents an &lt;em&gt;alphabet&lt;/em&gt; with an unusual, syllabic arrangement system, in contrast with the simple linear arrangement used in the other major alphabets. And to the best of my knowledge the individual strokes that make up a hangul glyph do not have names--or if they do, their names are somewhat specialized terms that aren't commonly used by people describing how to spell something. This is as close as I think you're going to get to an alphabet without names for its letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_names&quot;&gt;Hangul does have names for its letters,&lt;/a&gt; as pointed out in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-18T10:46:51.087" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T10:46:51.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="150" CreationDate="2011-09-18T03:52:29.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are speaking really generally, Chomsky spoke at my school years ago and I thought he had an interesting insight into CL.  He said few understand it for its potential to empirically and computationally verify different language models paper and pencil linguists, like himself, were creating. So UG for example, if it was a valid way to describe syntax, should be able to used in a computer application to emulate human processing of language, and should be good enough to show that model does work. A lot of the community, in my view when I studied CL in a school where paper and pencil ruled the land, saw it as way out there, unto itself.  He believed really solid language models had to be re-constructed and tested, and that CL was where rubber hit the road, not the place where people were using heuristics to cheat at language cognition, as a lot of it has become in terms of economic viability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T03:52:29.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="266" CreationDate="2011-09-18T04:32:07.730" Score="13" ViewCount="3649" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear that languages can borrow words and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/190/are-some-languages-known-to-have-taken-grammatical-features-etc-rather-than-just&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; from other languages but do they borrow morphemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the English morpheme &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-ation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has a very specific usage in Portuguese. It is specially seen in the word &lt;em&gt;embromation&lt;/em&gt;, that comes from the verb &lt;em&gt;embromar&lt;/em&gt;, something like “to deceive”. The morpheme &lt;em&gt;-ation&lt;/em&gt; transforms it into a noun used to describe bad English. It can also be added to any other word to give it an “English quality”, always in a funny way and making reference to one's poor mastering of English. Although it is certainly not part of the standard Portuguese, it is recognized by almost any speaker and has been used in language school advertisement. (There are funny examples of &lt;em&gt;embromation&lt;/em&gt; on YouTube, both &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Id5iC3GOrI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDQLDF8fjJQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other cases of morphemic borowing, be they jokes or part of the standard system of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit: some theorical considerations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very concept of morpheme was brought up several times throughout the answers and the comments to my question, so I would like to quickly address this point. My notion of morphology and consequently morphemes comes from Steven Pinker's pretheoretical &lt;em&gt;Words and Rules&lt;/em&gt;. He considers morphology to be separated from syntax and responsible for the “rules for forming complex words, including regulars” (page 23). Its main job is to make it possible to join lexicon elements, such as words and morphemes, together, thus saving us from the trouble of memorizing the past form for every verb, for example. Rather than defining morphemes, I will only say that they are the set of memorized chunks that affixes such as &lt;em&gt;-ation&lt;/em&gt; (as in “affiliation”), &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; (“unthinkable”) and &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; (“dogs”) belong to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is quite natural that a language will borrow morphemes (and lexicon, syntax etc.) from the language(s) it came from. I would say that my main interest are those cases in which the borrowing had little to do with political imposition of a language (like Ancient Rome did in most cases, or Spain in its colonies) or linguistic evolution and heritage. Rather, I'm looking for morphemes borrowed because of the need of expression that morpheme would cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, I don't have any specific definition for morpheme, nor am I too concerned with the issues the concept brings; also, “pure” borrowings constitute stronger evidence than “forced” ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T13:50:12.500" Title="Do languages borrow morphemes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-18T06:38:35.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's useful to think of phonology as more than just the individual sounds that are distinctive in a given language, and instead as the 'grammar' of those sounds. A phonological description should not just be 'here are the vowels and consonants I found forming contrasts in language X' - it should also tell you about the rules that govern these sounds, such as what sorts of combinations of sounds are possible (phonotactics), what the stress patterns are and/or what the patterns of tonal marking are, relevant prosodic characteristics (e.g. in many languages a question is marked by higher pitch utterance-finally), and of course, the allophonic variation that is permitted for each phoneme, and in what sorts of environments certain allophones occur. &#xA;Phonetics, on the other hand, studies the acoustic and articulatory substance of speech data, and the techniques used by phoneticians offer a great deal of detail about the sounds of a language. This helps phonologists to back up their claims about different types of sounds (or maybe demonstrates that someone's impressionistic observations are not supported by the actual phonetic data, as is sometimes the case). Phonetic analysis also helps to explain why certain phonological patterns occur, because it is possible to analyse how and to what extent different sounds affect each other, and these phonetic effects are important factors in allophonic variation and language change.&#xA;The two are not mutually exclusive and there are many linguists who work in both phonetics and phonology, because these two sub-fields are, of course, closely related, but also dependent on each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T06:38:35.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2011-09-18T06:44:38.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has done this rather extensively -- the &quot;-ation&quot; you quote is originally Latin.  The verbalizing suffix  &quot;-ize&quot; is originally Greek (and entered the language via Latin (borrowing) and French (descent from Latin)).  And &quot;-ify&quot; is originally Latin.  Both these are unambiguously productive (as is &quot;-ation&quot;).  More recently and colloquially, English speakers have borrowed &quot;uber-&quot; as a prefix (from German).  Attached to an adjective (&quot;uber-tired,&quot; &quot;uber-happy&quot;) it carries roughly the meaning of &quot;very.&quot;  On nouns (&quot;uber-linguist&quot;) it means something like &quot;very exemplary.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a non-English example, the Basque past participle suffix &quot;-tu&quot; (the only pp. suffix which is productive today) is widely (though not universally, as I understand) held to be derived from Latin &quot;-tum,&quot; the neuter past participle suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just examples from two languages I happen to know something about.  So I'd say that this happens all the time, both as a colloquialism or &quot;joke&quot; and also as a part of core linguistic meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T06:44:38.477" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2011-09-18T12:18:42.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are borrowings. Like Aaron said, English (I'll take it as an example) has done it extensively. If you click on the &quot;Example Greek and Latin Roots&quot; link in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/structure/index.html#morph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see a lot of morphemes borrowed by English from Greek and Latin. Some examples can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anthrop&lt;/strong&gt; — human;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bio&lt;/strong&gt; — life;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cac&lt;/strong&gt; — bad; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chrom&lt;/strong&gt; — color;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chron&lt;/strong&gt; — time;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;circum&lt;/strong&gt; — around;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gam&lt;/strong&gt; — marriage, sexual union;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;log&lt;/strong&gt; — study, speak; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mis&lt;/strong&gt; — hate; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phil&lt;/strong&gt; — love, tendency;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phon&lt;/strong&gt; — sound, speech sound;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;corp/corpor&lt;/strong&gt; — body, flesh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...and many more.&lt;/em&gt;  (You can find more morphemes also in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3aEnglish_morphemes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; that I linked when answering to the question that hippietrail linked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding specifically the list above, some of them are even combined: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;misanthropy&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;mis&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;anthrop&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cacophony&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;cac&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;phon&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was another thing I wanted to talk about. Some scholars and linguists, like Hugo Schuchardt have stated that morphemes are transferable only indirectly: They are acquired through the introduction of words. In other words, the speakers of a given language become acquainted with morphemes because they were &quot;brought in&quot; with the loanwords. After the morphemes have been &quot;interiorized&quot; by the speakers, they might create new words in their native language using those morphemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all agree with this, as it happens with the trends of thoughts, but it's an interesting point of view. You can read more about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache:3n-2axMBcsYJ%3arua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/5997/1/RAEI_10_08.pdf%20morpheme%20loan&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=it&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEEShrxUvanZDJ2WPVOnw-rRdF27KvUnp1n3mcBlXY8YVjg7T3s_OgBD92wUvXLVgExmlD0uYl6oHEKTURkF7lndRxX3Ab7cEjWvHoLSH7-cbXo8socnAvMY3ol9kSBNJ09ZMIbwNK&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbTF0Qek19vNKXPUIoYmqudH2i-xTg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this document&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't go really in depth, but it's a good starting point if you want to investigate the matter. I couldn't find any other interesting links about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-18T13:27:06.233" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T13:27:06.233" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="150" CreationDate="2011-09-18T15:11:13.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most theoretical linguists understand the value of the computer in modelling language as a means of verification. However, most computational linguists are focused on statistical models, which are productive for real-world application, but run counter to the field of theoretical linguistics. Statistics simply plays no role in &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mismatch in approaches results in both fields largely ignoring one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be that as it may, many theoretical models, such as LFG and HPSG, incorporate discoveries and approaches from computational linguistics. The fields are not entirely mutually exclusive, just for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T15:11:13.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="276" CreationDate="2011-09-18T15:30:59.397" Score="8" ViewCount="5906" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Latin is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/160/what-is-the-terminology-for-a-source-language-for-new-word-production&quot;&gt;source language&lt;/a&gt; for new words in English and other European languages, and I know English, Sanskrit and Arabic are also source languages in many other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the reasons that languages get picked for that? What are the examples? From the examples above it looks like religion is a strong reason (Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T16:25:03.980" Title="What are some reasons languages get picked as source languages for neologisms" Tags="&lt;neologism&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2011-09-18T16:13:43.330" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inflectional markers can come from originally isolated words (e.g. pronouns) so there is definitely a cycle where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;separate words become clitics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clitics become inflections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inflections get reanalyzed as part of the stem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inflectional syncretism takes place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;separate words are introduced to disambiguate the syncretism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rinse-and-repeat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T16:13:43.330" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:04:48.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms Cherology and Chereme have largely been dropped in favor of the common terms Phonology and Phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scott Liddell and Robert Johnson have developed a system refered to as the Movement Hold Model which separates signs into a series of movements and holds.  An individual movement or hold is the equivalent to a vocal language phoneme.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each movement or hold then consists of features which are made up of (basically) palm orientation, location, handshape and non-manual markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is a very simplistic answer for a more complicated theory.  I'm not finding a web site reference for this, but Liddell/Johnson have been publishing some articles in &lt;em&gt;Sign Language Studies&lt;/em&gt; starting with Volume 11 Number 2 Winter 2011 which go into this model in depth.  They are absolutely worth reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that this model is discussed in &lt;em&gt;Linguistics of American Sign Langauge&lt;/em&gt; by Clayton Valli, Ceil Lucas &amp;amp; Kristin J Mulrooney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T18:04:48.857" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:10:21.987" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is at least one case I can think of in English similar to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many people (myself included) the plural of &quot;mouse&quot; in the computer sense is &quot;mouses&quot;. So we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mouse (sing. 1) the animal or computer peripheral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mice (plur. 1) the animal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mouses (plur. 2) the computer peripheral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous languages that have (or had) a &lt;strong&gt;dual vs plural&lt;/strong&gt; distinction (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;) which seems to be related to what's going on in the &quot;2 plurals&quot; cases in Italian above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corbett's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Number.html?id=7jc-pgAFcE0C&quot;&gt;Number&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  is the best reference on issues on number in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant reference is Acquaviva's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=VwY-4QzbtmIC&quot;&gt;Lexical Plurals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which is specifically about cases like &quot;mouse&quot; and &quot;fish&quot; and &quot;scissors&quot; and &quot;pants&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-18T18:13:14.223" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T18:13:14.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:21:48.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Phoneme&quot; is a theoretical construct which probably can't go away. Especially in languages with writing, most speakers can be asked &quot;which sound did you make here?&quot; in a word, and provide an answer; the answer often roughly corresponds to some canonical choice of representative sound for that phoneme. I believe speakers of languages which use pictographic representations are often also able to do this; I'm not sure what the situation is like with speakers of languages without a widely accepted writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Phone,&quot; on the other hand, seems like it could be more contentious. For instance, in Uighur /o/ and /u/ are separate phonemes; if asked, speakers will readily clarify which one they used; but the actual acoustics of their articulations in context easily bleed into each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T18:21:48.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:28:38.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loanwords&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;borrowings&lt;/em&gt;, are a consequence of two languages having a contact. When there is an asymmetry between the two languages, a language takes the missing term from the other word, and sometimes the borrowing is not just for lexicon, but also syntax, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The borrowings can go in both directions, so what makes one of those two a source language? The &lt;em&gt;prestige&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;importance&lt;/em&gt; of a language over the other one is perhaps the main reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;, for example, became a Lingua Franca because through the expansion of the Roman Empire it acquired &lt;em&gt;importance&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prestige&lt;/em&gt;, being the official language of the Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, a lot of terms entered the various european languages, because Latin, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, was the Lingua Franca for over 1000 years in Europe in many fields: culture, science, international relationships. Because of this it affected all the languages it came in contact with, even when it started to be used less, replaced by English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; is the Lingua Franca, not just in Europe but worldwide (at least in most media). Because of this most speakers know some English enough to be able to &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; some words from it. For a deep explanation and also examples of loanwords from the various languages, visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/structure/borrowed.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T18:28:38.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="278" CreationDate="2011-09-18T18:45:13.970" Score="10" ViewCount="1727" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between the old &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_parameters&quot;&gt;Principles and Parameters&lt;/a&gt; approach and the developing &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program&quot;&gt;Minimalist Program&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, though the MP is just a framework for developing theories in, in practice it is treated like a theory as most of its development in the literature has been as a generative grammar. I see that mainstream Minimalism still uses the X-Bar template. The focus of the MP is on economy and perfection (minimalism), but the only structural difference I know of is the addition of the Hierarchy of Projections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-18T20:31:02.967" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T22:59:21.467" Title="Difference between Minimalism and old P&amp;P" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2011-09-18T20:03:13.713" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the reasons can all come under the umbrella of sociological reasons; that is, purely linguistic reasons are  rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion (Arabic vocab in Farsi, Urdu, Turkish because of Islam) or social status (Greek vocab in arts in Latin) or prestige (Norman vocab in law making in English) or education status (English for electronics on other languages) or technology (Dutch sailing and shipbuilding terms in English) or lingua franca (Swahili vocab in East Africa) are all sociological reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be linguistic reasons for frequency of borrowings. I could conjecture that borrowings might occur more likely from a nearby dialect than from a far off  unrelated language. But it just seems that once a dialect becomes unintelligible, it might as well be from Mars, and that linguistic similarity just doesn't translate at all to real world, folk similarity (e.g. English 'friendship' and German 'Freundschaft' are etymologically very cognate, but not recognizable informally, and that similarity or lack thereof would not encourage or discourage borrowing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T20:03:13.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="97" CreationDate="2011-09-18T21:00:15.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know that there is an answer to this question.  Part of the difficulty here is that ASL isn't just LSF with a strong MVSL influence.  ASL is certainly a daughter language of LSF, and there is certainly MVSL influence there, but there is also a lot of the langauge influenced from home sign.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reconstruction of MVSL to any extent would would be be very difficult.  Simple substraction of LSF from ASL wouldn't work because you couldn't know if the result was from home sign or MVSL.  It would theoretically be possible to perform a comparison between Old Kent Sign Language but there isn't any record of signs from OKSL.  (Or for that matter hard evidence of it's existance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without either more daughter langauges of MVSL, or insight into OKSL that we don't have, I doubt any real reconstruction is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T21:00:15.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="275" CreationDate="2011-09-18T22:59:21.467" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the issues is as follows.  Principles and Parameters is an almost-tautologous restatement of Chomskian UG: there are certain things that are not subject to cross-linguistic variation (principles) and other things that can vary but only in constrained ways (parameters).  (The part about parameters is where the &quot;almost&quot; in &quot;almost-tautological&quot; comes in.)  There are other things that can vary freely, of course – e.g. vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of Chomsky's syntactic theories fall under the P&amp;amp;P approach.  In Government &amp;amp; Binding (the immediately previous generation), things like Conditions A, B, and C were principles; parameters were things like the EPP (&quot;Extended Projection Principle;&quot; originally this was the &quot;subject movement to Spec,IP&quot; parameter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minimalism's principles are things like Merge (the operation) and the conditions on it (Last Resort, no lookahead, ...).  One of the themes of Minimalist thought has been moving the locus of cross-linguistic variation to the lexicon.  So the old EPP parameter, which in GB was true or false of a language, now can be specified independently for each functional head.  In response to the observation/criticism that a small set of global parameters is not empirically adequate to describe the syntax of all natural languages, there has been research into lexical &quot;micro-parameters&quot; to fully describe languages (dialects) with small syntactic differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-18T22:59:21.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-18T23:21:33.550" Score="15" ViewCount="1553" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language&quot;&gt;conlangers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.panix.com/~tehom/allnoun/allnoun8.faq&quot;&gt;AllNoun&lt;/a&gt; is a notable syntax because it only makes use one &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech&quot;&gt;part of speech / word class&lt;/a&gt;, which is analagous to nouns. A natural language I've heard of (but I can't remember or find a reference to it anywhere, I think it was an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages&quot;&gt;Australian aboriginal language&lt;/a&gt;) only has three verbs. I've heard that there are some &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_languages#North_America&quot;&gt;North American languages&lt;/a&gt; that don't exactly have nouns, but I'm not actually sure if this is true or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other languages don't have parts of speech or word classes? Which do they lack, and how does their syntax work in a way so that they are not needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T16:33:27.893" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T23:17:16.053" Title="What parts of speech / word classes do languages most frequently lack?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="287" CreationDate="2011-09-19T00:35:14.027" Score="21" ViewCount="5379" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;creole&quot; language is formed by the merging of two parent languages, usually through an earlier rudimentary mixture of the two. Does this make Yiddish a creole language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is really about what constitutes a creole language: what are its hallmarks and most distinguishing features, and do creole languages ever evolve to become &quot;proper&quot; languages (whatever that may mean) in their own right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T01:59:46.087" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T01:59:46.087" Title="Is Yiddish a creole language? And if not, what is it?" Tags="&lt;creoles&gt;&lt;yiddish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2011-09-19T09:41:51.803" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;For many languages it is claimed that they lack adjectives (for instance Thai), and that either nouns or verbs are used instead. Others claim that all languages have adjectives, if you look closely enough. Japanese has two types of adjectives: noun-like and verb-like. However it can also be analysed as having no adjectives, if the verb-like adjectives were considered just to be odd verbs and the noun-like adjectives were considered just to be odd nouns. In some languages adjectives are a closed class of words - are they still then adjectives? Not if being an open class is part of the definition of adjective :) (An &lt;em&gt;open class&lt;/em&gt; may gain and lose words while a &lt;em&gt;closed class&lt;/em&gt; is of a much more stable size.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ditto for languages that are claimed to lack nouns or verbs, it's a matter of how &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot; is defined. AFAIK there is not yet consensus on any language lacking nouns or verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lacking articles (the, a) is not so uncommon, but I don't think there are languages that lack determiners as a whole (articles are a subset of determiners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T20:55:57.747" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T20:55:57.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-19T10:06:18.647" Score="10" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language#Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistics section on the Wikipedia page for American Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; that ASL was &quot;&lt;em&gt;proven [to be a natural language] to the satisfaction of the linguistic community by William Stokoe, and contains &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; just like spoken languages&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these elements, of phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics, generally accepted as the necessary and sufficient components of a natural language? Would a constructed language which developed such features be accepted as &quot;natural&quot;? (Note that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; itself would be an ambiguous case, being a systematically modified version of  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old French Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, a signing language which developed &quot;in the wild&quot;, so to speak, in the deaf community in Paris well before the French Revolution.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To consider a somewhat flippant example: what would be the necessary conditions, linguistically (as opposed to sociologically) speaking, for either Esperanto or Klingon to develop dialects which would be considered natural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt; I am accepting Alennano's answer as being the most factually correct with respect to what it means for a language to be &quot;natural&quot;; but I also think that, from the answers and comments, the question of whether a language is &quot;natural&quot; is completely beside the point on a matter of linguistics, except inasmuch as the vast majority of &quot;vernacular languages&quot; happened to evolve more-or-less organically most of the time from a prehistoric origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T05:54:02.703" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T05:36:01.633" Title="What are the criteria for deciding whether a language is &quot;natural&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="285" CreationDate="2011-09-19T10:31:28.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;natural language&lt;/strong&gt; has developed spontaneously over time and it has done it gradually. While an &lt;strong&gt;artificial language&lt;/strong&gt; has been created in a relatively short time, usually for a definite aim. Now that other one is the main difference: it has been created. Also natural languages are man-made but the genesis is totally different, in terms of procedures and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No-one thought &quot;let's create a language called English&quot;, over time from Old English to the English we know, it developed &quot;by itself&quot;, through people's usage. While Esperanto, for example was created in more or less 15 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike pidgins, an artificial language has a fairly complex grammar in addition to a good phonology system that is usually as complex as the creator's language, a good furnished lexicon and it's provided with syntax too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural languages have all these things as well, but like I said, in contrast to the artificial languages, they were acquired over time. There were influences, development. In other words: an evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I read your question again and I wanted to add that those parameters (syntax, phonology, semantics, syntax, etc) are not parameters to distinguish a natural language from the rest, since also artificial ones have them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how it works with Sign Languages (about being a natural language or not), but since you mentioned spoken languages too, I answered to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Answering to your comment, the point was to prove that ASL was not a &quot;bad gesturing imitation&quot; of the English language, but rather a true language on its own; this was done by Stokoe, who also encountered many obstacles doing it. The American Sign Language is complex enough under all those points, so it can't just be a simplified version of English; not to mention that it didn't even derive from English. Stokoe wrote some texts about this in case you're interested to go more in depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-19T13:55:58.470" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T13:55:58.470" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2011-09-19T13:18:21.777" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short:&lt;/strong&gt; No, Yiddish is not a creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;creole&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a stable language developed from the mixing of parent languages. A creole develops if (and, AFAIK, only if) its speakers were children who grew up speaking what used to be a pidgin as their first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pidgin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between groups that do not have a language in common. A pidgin is not the native speech of any entire community but is an acquired language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pidgins develop rather haphazardly out of necessity when multiple language groups, for whatever reason, need to communicate with each other on a very regular basis. Bits of vocabulary from each language are put into a melting pot, so to speak, and an ad-hoc rudimentary grammar develops. People are trying very hard to make themselves understood, and the result of that generally resembles a sort of tarzan-speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pidgin languages are not stable and continues to develop in a rather impromptu manner. There is not necessarily any widely agreed upen grammar and will vary widely from speaker to speaker. Certain conventions will inevitably arrive, that is, the features of the pidgin that are used enough will become standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia lists some notable characteristcs of pidgins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Uncomplicated clausal structure (e.g., no embedded clauses, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reduction or elimination of syllable codas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reduction of consonant clusters or breaking them with epenthesis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Basic vowels, such as [a, e, i, o, u]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No tones, such as those found in West African and Asian languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use of separate words to indicate tense, usually preceding the verb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use of reduplication to represent plurals, superlatives, and other&#xA;  parts of speech that represent the concept being increased&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A lack of morphophonemic variation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a creole is linguistically more developed than a pidgin. The language is mostly stable. Unlike pidgins, which along with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_language&quot;&gt;moribund languages&lt;/a&gt; are notable for their simplified characteristics, there are no grammatical features that are unique to creoles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, finally, to your question: &lt;a href=&quot;http://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A9&quot;&gt;Yiddish&lt;/a&gt; was not a language that developed from two language groups trying to communicate with each other. It is a High German language that was (and, to a lesser extent, still is) spoken by Ashkenazic communities in central Europe. Yiddish was never a rudimentary mixture of two languages, it was just German that borrowed a few features of Aramaic and Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, no, English was not a creole during the Norman conquest. English was still English, it was, for the most part grammatically the same as it was before. English just borrowed a large amount of vocabulary from French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T13:18:21.777" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="285" CreationDate="2011-09-19T13:47:57.627" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say a natural language has (or had) &lt;strong&gt;native speakers&lt;/strong&gt;. Natural languages don't cease to be natural when their last native speaker dies. A native speaker is one that learnt it as a child. This means that it had at one time been learned as the first language of &lt;strong&gt;children&lt;/strong&gt; (one child is not enough). So if adults got together to learn a language, it couldn't be a natural language until their children could use it as their sole and first language. A language that is no longer learnt by children will go extinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test of a definition of &lt;em&gt;natural language&lt;/em&gt; is what to do with Esperanto. It now has at least three generations of native speakers (though they are all multilingual). Can a constructed language become a natural language by being the first language of children or will a constructed language always be a mere constructed language no matter what. It should be noted that the Esperanto these people speak is different and more complex than the Esperanto of the parents, who learnt it as adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T13:47:57.627" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="143" CreationDate="2011-09-19T14:13:14.010" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from the &quot;present tense&quot; rule you mentioned, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~nvail/202/SP03/materials/aave.txt&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; where you can see a rather good explanation about AAVE and its rules. I'll paste the part regarding the copula (as usual the * indicates something ungrammatical):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The AAVE copula follows complex rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 1)&lt;/strong&gt; Unstressed copula is never omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;There already IS one!&quot; | *&quot;There already one!&quot; | *&quot;There already BE one!&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 2)&lt;/strong&gt; Copula (like other auxiliary verbs) is never omitted at the end of a phrase: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Couldn't nobody say what color he is.&quot; *&quot;Couldn't nobody say what color he.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 3)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula in the special AAVE remote present perfect (not found in Standard English) is never omitted: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I BEEN know that guy&quot; (this means `I've known that guy for a long time')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 4)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula is never omitted when negated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I ain't no fool&quot; | *&quot;I no fool&quot; | *&quot;I be no fool&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 5)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula is never omitted in its infinitival form &quot;be&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;You got to be strong&quot; | *&quot;You got to strong&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Be nice to him!&quot; | &quot;*Nice to him!&quot; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 6)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula in the special AAVE habitual aspect (not found in Standard English) is never omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;He be singing&quot; (this means `he habitually sings but he is not&#xA;  necessarily singing right now' )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 7)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula is never omitted in the past tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I was cool&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 8)&lt;/strong&gt; The first singular form of the copula (&quot;am&quot; or &quot;`m&quot; as in Standard English) is never omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm all right&quot; | *&quot;I all right&quot; | *&quot;I be all right&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Rule 9)&lt;/strong&gt; The copula is never omitted in a confirmatory &lt;em&gt;tag question&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;I don't think you ready, are you?&quot; | *&quot;I don't think you ready, you?&quot; | *&quot;I don't think you ready, be you?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also check the Grammar section in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/aave.html&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, or these documents: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/Theses09/FrassicaThesis.pdf&quot;&gt;Copula Variation in African American Vernacular English&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=FSDFt4a__YEC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;African American vernacular English: features, evolution, educational implications&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: As noted in the comments, this is not an infinitive, but an imperative. However, I guess the author was referring to the form and word &quot;be&quot; in general and not to the particular tense.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T14:35:40.273" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T14:35:40.273" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2011-09-19T14:35:44.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect one could make the claim that most languages either lack &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;counters&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;measure words&lt;/a&gt;) or that they've become (mostly) extinct. An example in English would be cattle. One does not say &quot;I have 3 cattle&quot;, instead one says &quot;I have 3 head of cattle&quot;. The book I suspect you are thinking of is &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226468046&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/a&gt;. In it, in Chapter 6, there is also a short discussion of a single Japanese counter, &lt;em&gt;hon&lt;/em&gt; (which is used to count long thing things such as sticks, pencils, rivers, phone calls, ball game hits &amp;amp; pitches and dried snakes) and how these categorize how these are in some respects metaphors for how one thinks about the world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T14:35:44.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="219" CreationDate="2011-09-19T14:48:45.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least some dialects of French also affricate apico-dental stops before i and u.  Polish and Brazilian Portuguese affricate and palatalize t and d before i, and Polish palatalizes s in the same environment, distinguishing si from sz (see Schenker 1966).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Japanese, the phonetic situation is very interesting.  The affrication of t and d before all high vowels is the addition of a groove (down the middle of the tongue) articulation instead of a sudden release to the stop.  S appears to be unaffected, because it is already articulated with a groove.  All three are also palatalized or fronted (articulation shifted to the frontum of the tongue) before the front vowel i.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T14:48:45.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="295" CreationDate="2011-09-19T14:56:21.457" Score="22" ViewCount="5644" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to most linguists, Korean is a language isolate. Why doesn't it have any sister languages, like languages usually do? Why didn't it spread to other areas, or split into various languages? The speakers are not geographically isolated from other areas (unlike Japan, for example), and they also have relatively large number of speakers. What are the historical factors that caused its isolation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T02:28:40.767" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T14:22:16.870" Title="How did Korean become a language isolate?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;language-isolates&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2011-09-19T15:15:17.433" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question represents a certain confusion of terminology. By definition, a living language does not have daughters (excluding some circumstances where a parent language is retained in a particular use after the spoken languages have moved on and split, as with Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, etc.) So the question should not be &quot;Why doesn't Korean have daughters?&quot; as much as &quot;Why doesn't Korean have &lt;em&gt;sisters&lt;/em&gt; (other languages descended from the same parent)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, here are some points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean does exhibit dialectical differences. It isn't exempt from the process of language change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern Korean is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Korean_language&quot;&gt;descended from Old Korean&lt;/a&gt;, which was probably one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyeo_languages&quot;&gt;Buyeo languages&lt;/a&gt;. As the name suggests, there were several languages spoken in the Korean peninsula at this time, which are believed to be descendants of the unattested Proto-Korean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that there is only one language currently spoken on the Korean peninsula appears to be because one dialect gained enough prestige to eliminate its competitors. In other words, Modern Korean is an isolate because it killed off its sister langs. The timing of this sororicide is unknown, but probably occurred during the unification of Korea in the Middle Korean period (my speculation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: One more thing: I doubt whether it's actually a case for a language to &quot;normally&quot; have sisters or daughters. All languages change, but language change only results in language &lt;em&gt;split&lt;/em&gt; if the original speaker community has spread out enough to lose frequent inter-communication. The number of languages that expand rapidly in this sense is actually rather small, though the fact of their expansion means that they represent a large fraction of all language speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems most accurate to say that most languages have no daughters (or only one daughter, depending on how you look at it), but that most languages are &lt;em&gt;descended&lt;/em&gt; from languages that have many daughters. In this sense, language isolates are &quot;normal&quot;, while the big language families that we're familiar with are the result of some &quot;abnormal&quot; period of historical expansion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-09-19T15:29:19.300" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T15:29:19.300" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="311" CreationDate="2011-09-19T15:21:10.610" Score="19" ViewCount="5199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ahoy, me hearties!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many of you may already know, today is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.talklikeapirate.com/&quot;&gt;Talk Like a Pirate Day&lt;/a&gt;. Since I find the historical subject of piracy quite interesting, specially after reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_utopia&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pirate Utopias&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to bring up the discussion. &lt;em&gt;Pirate Utopias&lt;/em&gt; deals mainly with the events in Africa's Mediterranean coastline and particularly two Moroccan cities, Rabat and Salé. At some point Peter Lamborn Wilson, the author, mentions the language pirates must have spoken, arguably a mixture of the many languages of both Europe and Africa — maybe even constituting a pidgin of sorts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “piratespeak” people try to reproduce today certainly comes from literature and stereotypes; the real thing was probably a mixture of at least English, French, Italian, Spanish and Arabic. Though it seems to me that there are very few written documents, if any at all, are there any studies on those “pirate languages”? Maybe yer salty sea dogs have seen somethin' about it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="155" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T08:55:08.520" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T13:59:07.213" Title="True languages that pirates spoke" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2011-09-19T16:27:15.707" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of a language isolate is a language that has no relationship with another language, which means that it does not share a common &lt;em&gt;ancestor&lt;/em&gt; with another language. (JSBãngs said it well above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KO may be an isolate, it may be a member of the Altaic family, it may part of a Sprachbund, or a combination of these. (It's not unheard of that sometimes languages that share a common ancestor later are part of the same Sprachbund too, like in the Balkans.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0195065115&quot;&gt;The World's Major Languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; gives a concise historical background of KO language and the theories of its origins &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Artikel01/Korean.htm&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (It's very interesting to me because in addition to discussing the linguistic features that KO shares with Dravidian languages, the Austronesian languages and the Altaic languages, it also mentions anthropological and archaeological evidence for each of these theories.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T16:27:15.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2011-09-19T17:14:11.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like @Krubo, I always thought of the distinction between an affricate and a stop-affricate sequence as being primarily defined in phonological terms. (But of course this does not preclude phonetic differences.) But also, like @hippietrail, I was under the impression that native speakers generally don't have intuitions regarding whether sounds are separate phonemes or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I always thought that in order to tell whether a stop+fricative corresponds to a single affricate phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes, one has to examine its (or their) phonological behaviour with respect to previously motivated phonological restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if a language disallows syllable margins of a certain complexity, and the only way you could analyze an example with the relevant stop-fricative according to your previously-motivated syllable template is in a way that treats the stop-fricative as a single phoneme (or a sequence of phonemes), then you have an argument that the stop-fricative is a single phoneme (or seq. of phonemes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if you know that vowels are always, say, lax before a complex coda, but not before a simplex coda, and vowels are not lax before the stop-fricative, then you have an argument that the stop-fricative is a single phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a metathesis process, or gemination process, might treat the stop-fricative as a single unit, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T17:14:11.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2011-09-19T17:40:26.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any current particular studies on the Pirates' language, or written documents, but it seems that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Western Country dialects&lt;/a&gt; in England are seen as the &quot;closest&quot; example of &quot;pirate speech&quot;, also assuming there wasn't just one type of pirate speech (pirates came from many zones, south america, north america, etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like it says there, the &quot;&lt;em&gt;cartoon-like &quot;Ooh arr, me 'earties! Sploice the mainbrace!&quot; talk is very similar&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to the accent spoken in that part of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, some famous pirates seem to be born in Bristol, such as the pirate Blackbeard. Some movies might have influenced to a further level this &quot;connection&quot;, where this accent (probably brought to an extreme exaggeration) was used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T17:40:26.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2011-09-19T18:17:21.223" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;piratespeak&quot; that we have come to recognize in the west is due to the opera &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance&quot;&gt;Pirates of Penzance&lt;/a&gt;. What you think of as &quot;the pirate accent&quot; is the accent of Cornwall (where &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penzance&quot;&gt;Penzance&lt;/a&gt; is located). The coastline of this part of England is rocky and there were a large number of shipwrecks (selling the loot from wrecked ships provided extra income for many locals). According to legends, the number of wrecks was insufficient, so some of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_%28shipwreck%29#Wrecking_in_Britain&quot;&gt;locals would hang a lantern from the neck of a horse or cow&lt;/a&gt;, so the up and down motion of the lantern would fool victims into thinking that it was another ship and thus safe to continue sailing in that direction. A number of ships smashing into the rocky coastline during storms was one major motivation for the English to develop more accurate methods for determining &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize&quot;&gt;longitude&lt;/a&gt; (in contrast, latitude is simple to determine with a sextant). The book, or TV series, called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_%28TV_series%29&quot;&gt;Longitude&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Serious pursuit of a means of fixing longitude began in 1707, after four British frigates ran aground in fog near their home port owing to total east-west disorientation, with the loss of nearly 2,000 men. Sobel recounts, in a horrifying passage, how after the vessels became lost in a week-long mist, a sailor approached Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell to declare that a private navigational logbook he had been keeping indicated the squadron was about to founder on the dangerous rocks of Scilly Isles southwest of England. British fleet rules then forbade any study of navigation by non-officers, because navigators had a wizard's status no enlisted personnel were allowed to challenge. Sir Clowdisley immediately had the sailor hanged for questioning the judgment of an Officer. Shortly afterward, his flagship ploughed into the Scilly rocks, the three following ships faithfully smashing in as well.&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ticktocktony.com/Newsletter/time-zones.html&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_Isles&quot;&gt;Scilly Isles&lt;/a&gt; are off the tip of Cornwall. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="117" LastEditDate="2011-09-19T19:53:34.530" LastActivityDate="2011-09-19T19:53:34.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="304" CreationDate="2011-09-20T02:12:44.443" Score="62" ViewCount="86488" Body="&lt;p&gt;When should one use /fubar/ and when [fubar] when transcribing in IPA? What are the differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="153" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T07:09:24.347" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T11:12:57.083" Title="When should one use slashes or square brackets when transcribing in IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-20T03:17:03.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean (한국어/조선말) is the official language of the Republic of Korea and Democratic People's Republic of Korea, with different official forms used in each nation-state; it is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of the People's Republic of China. Approximately 80 million people speak Korean worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official language of both South Korea and North Korea. It is normally written in a script called Hangul, and is widely believed to be a language isolate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article about Korean Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Korean language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://korean.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Korean Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T00:50:54.493" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T00:50:54.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-20T03:17:03.950" Score="0" Body="Official language of both South and North Korea, normally written in a script called Hangul, and widely believed to be a language isolate. For non-linguistic questions about the Korean language, visit our sister site Korean Language Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T00:50:57.640" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T00:50:57.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2011-09-20T04:00:07.737" Score="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Square brackets ([fubar]) are generally used for what is known as &lt;em&gt;narrow&lt;/em&gt; transcription - this includes as much detail as the transcriber feels is necessary. Slashes (/fubar/) represent the &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt; transcription, which does not include &amp;quot;predictable&amp;quot; information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English, voiceless plosives are aspirated word-initially and in stressed onsets. Thus, a narrow transcription of &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; might be [kʰul], while a broad transcription would be /kul/. Similarly, &amp;quot;lack&amp;quot; could be represented as [læk] and /læk/ - note that broad /k/ can become narrow [k] or [kʰ], depending on its position in the word and surrounding sounds. Because this information is predictable by the above rule, the aspiration is left out of the broad transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistic description, the &amp;quot;broad&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;narrow&amp;quot; designations are defined somewhat loosely, generally according to whatever convention the linguist reporting the language feels is most useful. Under the Generative Phonology framework, however, these are assumed to represent two distinct stages of phonological processing, each with a psychological reality. Square brackets denote the final stage of processing (which is sent to the articulators), called &amp;quot;phonetic transcription&amp;quot;, while slashes denote the form stored in the mental lexicon (stripped of all predictable information), called &amp;quot;phonemic transcription&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To perform this kind of analysis, first you must determine which sounds are contrastive in the output. For example, in English, [pʰ] and [p] are not contrastive, because [pʰæt] and [pæt] &amp;quot;pat&amp;quot; are judged to be &amp;quot;the same&amp;quot; word by (most) native speakers (even though [pæt] would be ill-formed). However, in Hindi, [kapʰi] &amp;quot;coffee&amp;quot; and [kapi] &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot; are two separate words. The generative hypothesis is that each set of non-contrastive sounds is stored as a single unit in the brain, called a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; (in slashes), which is transformed into a final form (in brackets) passed to the articulators by a series of serially-ordered rules or simultaneous constraints on the possible output forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="28073" LastEditDate="2021-05-26T11:03:39.727" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T11:03:39.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2011-09-20T04:00:44.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, use slashes for broad [phonemic] transcriptions and brackets for narrow [phonetic] transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that I got that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T04:00:44.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2011-09-20T04:02:57.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;[fubar] is used for &lt;strong&gt;phonetic transcriptions&lt;/strong&gt; (emphasizing what is actually articulated) and /fubar/ for &lt;strong&gt;phonological transcriptions&lt;/strong&gt; (emphasizing what is phonologically contrastive)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example [pʰɛʔts] vs /pets/ (or even /petz/) with the implication that former is predictable from the latter using phonological rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By “phonologically contrastive”, I mean that in English, there are no cases where alternating [pʰ] and [p] changes the meaning of an utterance. Which one is articulated is entirely predictable from the context and so many theories models this as a single /p/. /p/ and /b/ contrast because, for example, /pat/ and /bat/ are different words. [pʰ] and [p] do not contrast at this level.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="28073" LastEditDate="2021-05-26T11:12:57.083" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T11:12:57.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2011-09-20T07:07:00.840" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, /fubar/ is typically used for &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; transcriptions, and [fubar] for &lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; transcriptions. But, just to clarify the terminology, phonemic vs. phonetic is not necessarily the same thing as broad vs. narrow transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many linguists talk about using both &lt;strong&gt;broad and narrow phonetic transcriptions&lt;/strong&gt;, which just refers to the level of detail used in representing the actual speech sounds. &#xA;A narrow phonetic transcription would represent every tiny little characteristic of the speech sounds as they were produced in an utterance of Language X, while a broad phonetic transcription would indicate some of the most salient characteristics of the transcribed phones, without being exhaustive but also without necessarily making claims about which segments are phonemically/phonologically contrastive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonemic transcription&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, can really only be broad, in that it only represents the sounds that are purported to be contrastive in the given language, without any detail that is not directly relevant to forming these contrasts. Phonemic transcription does not describe how an utterance actually sounds when produced by a particular speaker speaking in a particular style in a particular situation - phonemic transcription is the 'idealised' representation of the speech sounds, and supposed to represent the underlying contrasts that are meaningful to speakers.&#xA;You can only do phonemic transcription when you have already done quite a bit of work on Language X (collected a range of lexical items, found some minimal pairs and/or worked out the patterns of allophonic variation, etc etc) because phonemic transcription implies that you/someone has decided which phones relate to contrastive phonemes (different sounds that can occur in exactly the same environment) and which phones occur as the result of free/conditioned variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples given by @Alek Storm above illustrate the differences between [phonetic] and /phonemic/ transcription - just remember that phonetic can be broad &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; narrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T07:07:00.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2011-09-20T08:52:30.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lingua Franca&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Frankish Language&quot;), a pidgin used by seafarers from the 11th to 19th centuries, with influences from a number of Mediterranean languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T08:52:30.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="79" CreationDate="2011-09-20T10:10:49.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a subset of words there's &lt;a href=&quot;http://wold.livingsources.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;WOLD&quot;&gt;World Loanword Database&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;IDS&quot;&gt;The Intercontinental Dictionary Series&lt;/a&gt; based on the book &quot;A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages&quot;, Carl Darling Buck, 1949.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T10:10:49.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="79" CreationDate="2011-09-20T12:24:47.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this site, called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Omniglot&lt;/a&gt;. If you scroll down there are also links to other similar resources and multilingual pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there is a search tool, but in case you don't find the expression you need, you can explore the site for other resources or visit the links for external sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T12:24:47.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="296" CreationDate="2011-09-20T12:32:32.113" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Louis Rhys commented, your question seems to be about the actual language that pirates spoke as opposed to the &quot;piratespeak&quot; used today, or at least about how the former led to the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not necessarily a connection - there would never really have been 'one language' that pirates spoke, because piracy has been practised for hundreds and hundreds of years by seafaring peoples from all over the world, and they didn't exactly band together into one group. Throughout time, pirates would have spoken languages from the Mediterranean, Scandinavia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, India, East Asia, the rest of Europe, North Africa, North America - pretty much anywhere, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But mostly what we think of is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy&quot;&gt;'golden age of piracy'&lt;/a&gt; from around the 1600's to the 1800's, and during this time pirates from different parts of the world would certainly have developed ways to communicate - just not as one consistent pidgin or creole. There is some discussion of it on &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002482.html&quot;&gt;this old Language Log post&lt;/a&gt;, in which it was suggested that modern &quot;piratespeak&quot; could be attributed to Robert Newton in the 1950 movie of &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;. Incidentally, he was from the southwest of England, as are the pirates in &lt;em&gt;The Pirates of Penzance&lt;/em&gt;, as mentioned above. So it's fairly plausible that modern &quot;piratespeak&quot; is based on the alleged &quot;Maritime Pidgin English&quot; spoken by pirates who hailed from that part of the UK. Meanwhile, pirates from everywhere else in the world would have been busy developing their own pidgins based on European and African languages, or whatever, depending on where they were from, who they traded with, who they raided, and who they took as slaves or hostages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T12:32:32.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="105" CreationDate="2011-09-20T13:58:08.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speculation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least 2 well-understood cognitive systems that provide humans (and many other species) with numerical representations: the Parallel Individuation System (PIS), which can track potentially up to 4 objects in the world as numerically distinct, and the Approximate Number System (ANS), which provides (fuzzy) representations of larger sets of objects. (You can read an overview discussion with references by Feigenson, Dehaene, and Spelke, in the review article titled &quot;Core systems of number&quot;, in the 2004 Vol. 8, No. 7 of TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences.) Quantities of objects in the 1-3 range are in the &quot;subitizing range&quot;, or, are amenable to  immediate, effortless perception in terms of exact numerosity. These are PIS representations. Quantities of objects numbering 4+ are represented only approximately, in accord with Weber's Law (the larger the set size, the greater the variance around the actual value). So, 7 objects in the world is &lt;em&gt;most likely&lt;/em&gt; to strike you as 7 objects (without counting), but a good proportion of the time you'll represent it as 6 or 8 objects. These are ANS representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That languages may represent singular, dual, and trial in various of their paradigms has struck me as interesting in light of these psychophysical facts. Susan Carey (in her book the Origins of Concepts) speculates that it is PIS representations plus the representations that underlie set-based quantification in natural language that &quot;bootstrap&quot; young language learners into understanding exact number concepts (the foundations of mathematics). Singular, dual, and trial thus refer to exact, primitively perceivable quantities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;paucal&quot; in one language is said to describe numerosities such as 3-6, you can probably bet that psychophysical experiments with such speakers would probably find it can also on occasion count 7, but probably not 2, as the beginning of the applicable numerical range is in the PIS domain, and the end is in the ANS range. &quot;paucal&quot; may here (synchronically) be understood as &quot;small number at the edge of the subitizing range&quot;. You could imagine a similar language in which paucal meant &quot;small number but not 1&quot;, which might (a) only apply to 2 and 3, or (b) would extend &quot;just out of&quot; the subitizing range to apply to those numbers at the lower edge of ANS representation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should languages encode such things? Languages often provides the expressive devices to encode distinctions that are/were important/useful to humans. The primitive distinction between the numbers 1-3 and strictly-greater-than-3 marks an important dividing line in humans' representational repertoire, and is occasionally is encoded in their language. Whether the type of story given here is speculative, the cross-linguistic patterns detectable in linguistic encoding of number, and what we have begun to understand about number cognition more generally, quite invite such speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T13:58:08.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2011-09-20T14:14:50.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definite article &quot;the&quot; is taken to be the paradigmatic example of a determiner, with demonstratives like &quot;that&quot; only disputedly so. The absence of the definite article in various languages has been correlated with a variety of otherwise disparate-seeming syntactic phenomena (see Zeljko Boskovic at UConn, &quot;What will you have, DP or NP?&quot;, for a fairly consistent set of such languages and phenomena). According to Boskovic, Japanese lacks such articles, argues that it is among a number of languages to lack the category D altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T14:14:50.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="285" CreationDate="2011-09-20T14:30:16.800" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question: IMO, Esperanto and Klingon (and other constructed/synthetic languages) are not and therefore never will be natural languages. Among native speakers, the languages will begin to &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt; like natural languages because there will always be language change with time, but I think we'll need to coin a new phrase for these types of languages. (The language formerly known as constructed? Bam! Prince joke.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still not sure about calling ASL a natural language. It is definitely a language of its own right, but it did not happen entirely spontaneously. I guess I wonder about calling any sign language a natural language when it develops in the context of a spoken language society. This is why Nicaraguan Sign Language is so interesting, which developed (among children!) like a pidgin&gt;creole language in an almost entirely deaf community, which may be the closest a sign language could get to being natural since it comes from necessity instead of planning. By the time researchers came in to observe, it already had a basic grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="42" LastEditDate="2011-09-20T14:59:36.397" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T14:59:36.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="318" CreationDate="2011-09-20T15:33:02.470" Score="63" ViewCount="13489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently there is a general trend that languages lose morphological marking over time. For example, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/127/languages-that-are-gaining-morphological-distinctions&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin 5, Romance 2 or even 1. Doesn't this show that less inflection is more natural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is why the early languages had many morphological distinctions at the first place. I mean, why did the old Proto-Indo-European folks invent 8 different words to call &quot;a lion&quot;, or dozens of words for &quot;to eat&quot;, etc. To me, it sounds more natural to call a lion a lion regardless of whether it's nominative or accusative. What analyses have been made about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T05:13:29.853" Title="Why did early Indo-European languages seem to be morphologically complex?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="31" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-20T15:53:00.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notation for systematically indicating the sounds of speech in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/ipa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'ipa'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ipa&lt;/a&gt;: The alphabet promulgated by the International Phonetic Association, commonly used for phonemic and phonetic transcription&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/transliteration&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'transliteration'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transliteration&lt;/a&gt;: representing the graphemes of one script using another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T17:39:57.617" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:39:57.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-20T15:53:00.273" Score="0" Body="Ways of systematically representing the sounds of speech in written form." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:24:16.377" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:24:16.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2011-09-20T16:06:21.453" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really, it depends a lot on the region of the world you're from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The isolating nature of the English language and Chinese, and, to a slightly lesser extent, the rest of the Germanic languages, as well as the Romance languages, is certainly not a norm worldwide. Living languages, in fact, on average incorporate about as much information into their words as old indo-european languages did. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language&quot;&gt;polysynthetic languages&lt;/a&gt; to see extreme examples of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, old indo-european languages do seem to have rather complex rules, incorporating many seemingly different lexical forms, about noun inflection and verb conjugation, making them perhaps in a real sense &quot;harder&quot; to learn than agglutinative languages. I'll try to address why by pasting together some hypotheses and some facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PIE may have resulted largely from the influence of a Uralic superstrate on a NW or NE Caucasian or related language, or from the influence of both on a third language. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art247e.pdf&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PIE quickly spread far and wide, probably multiple times, leading to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) a premium on a modicum of mutual intelligibility for trade, concomitant with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) a bunch of L2 (second-language) speakers exhibiting substrate&#xA;pressure in the form of phonetic changes (e.g., loss of the&#xA;laryngeals) and, more importantly, grammatical changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, there is &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; a natural cycle of isolating-&gt;agglutinative-&gt;inflecting-&gt;isolating in languages. (Every step of this cycle has been observed, although the entire cycle has never been observed.) PIE was past an agglutinative stage and fit quite squarely within the &quot;inflecting&quot; paradigm when it spread.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll mention one, perhaps rather conservative, deduction that can be drawn from this: verbal paradigms which once made sense (3) started making less sense (2b) but were kept (2a). Hence, we have to learn the principal parts of a verb when learning Greek or Latin. Most contemporaries of Proto-Indo-European probably had even richer inflecting/agglutinating structure, but probably fewer irregularities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So many other conjectures can be formed, so I'll leave the rest of the deductions to you, since it's really hard to say that this results in any one particular effect rather than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-12T09:17:34.703" LastActivityDate="2011-11-12T09:17:34.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2011-09-20T16:25:10.063" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the statement &quot;X has no Y&quot; can be disproved with just one word, you might find more researchers willing to say &quot;X has very few Y&quot;.  There are several languages in Papua New Guinea that have remarkably few verbs, sometimes as few as twenty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an aboriginal language that some people claim has only three verbs, but when I looked at the reference grammar, the verb turns out to be incredibly complex, so I suppose one could just as easily argue that the language had lots of verbs and a required morpheme that came in three versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lingsymp/Pawley_paper.pdf&quot;&gt;interesting paper about languages with very few verbs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ref. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=KCATREJERGoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA147&amp;amp;vq=verb%20stems&amp;amp;pg=PA115#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=verb%20stems&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;The Papuan languages of New Guinea&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T16:25:10.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="326" CreationDate="2011-09-20T16:52:31.153" Score="9" ViewCount="1164" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a well known theory, widely accepted that as languages evolve their morphological typology changes through the same usual steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major steps are I think isolating or analytic, inflected, and agglutinating, but I forget the exact order and I'm having trouble finding it with an Internet search due to not knowing what it's called, if it even has a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, it's mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/127/languages-that-are-gaining-morphological-distinctions/270#270&quot;&gt;in James Tauber's answer to &quot;Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; but isn't named.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do linguists usually refer to this trend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T03:13:15.560" Title="Is there a term for the theory that languages move from one morphological typology to the next in a fixed cycle?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;typological-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-20T17:12:17.657" Score="1" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Duplicate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/285/what-are-the-criteria-for-deciding-whether-a-language-is-natural&quot;&gt;What are the criteria for deciding whether a language is &amp;ldquo;natural&amp;rdquo;?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt; I've been directed by the moderators to revise my earlier question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/285/173&quot;&gt;What are the criteria for deciding whether a language is &quot;natural&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;) rather than to post this one. Please go there. The only reason why I do not delete this question is because there is an answer to it. (It is a reasonably good answer, though.) If you are downvoting, please add a comment to indicate why, bearing in mind that I can no longer delete this duplicate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up to my previous question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/285/173&quot;&gt;What are the criteria for deciding whether a language is &quot;natural&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;). The reason why I'm asking this question again is because I would like to dissociate this question from the purely historical question, for any particular language, of whether it has an identifiable origin. The fact that most languages of interest to linguists do not have an identifiable origin, and (dialects unwittingly created via enlightenment projects in received pronunciation and grammatical proscriptions notwithstanding) were not strongly affected by deliberate attempts to engineer, design, or otherwise modify the language, is not obviously pertinent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this question, &quot;a vernacular&quot; means a language which it makes sense to study in a descriptivist manner: a language which is or was actually &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to a mere rule-set. I choose this word based on remarks in the other question, where it's fairly clear that regular use by a community (for whom that language is a vernacular, as opposed to a formal or ritual, language) is likely to be a key criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; is an interesting case study: while derived in large part from a pre-existing sign language which evolved in the wild in Paris, it was viewed with disdain for some time, until it was &quot;&lt;em&gt;proven [to be a natural language] to the satisfaction of the linguistic community by William Stokoe&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Ignoring the reference to &quot;natural language&quot;, this demonstrates that, historically, there have been cases where there was doubt as to whether some particular language was a genuine vernacular (as opposed perhaps to some sort of &quot;bad gesturing imitation&quot;, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;nbsp;a manual pidgin) but that it was possible to convince others that it was a genuine example of a language suitable for linguistic study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a consensus as to what criteria a language must have in order to be considered &quot;a vernacular&quot; (in the practical sense of being a language within the proper domain of the study of linguistics)? If there is some debate as to what criteria apply should, what are recent articles which discuss such criteria? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="173" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T21:18:39.987" Title="What are the criteria for deciding whether a language is “a vernacular”?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2011-11-05T15:06:13.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="321" CreationDate="2011-09-20T17:31:48.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a sociolinguist, I would call the way any person speaks when not reflecting on how they're speaking their &quot;vernacular.&quot; Of course, when people are concerned about speaking &quot;properly,&quot; their speech is going to deviate from their unreflecting vernacular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my definition of &quot;vernacular&quot; is defined as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a speaker's unreflecting speech, displaying the original patterns of&#xA;  their language acquisition, in contrast to language usage they acquired &#xA;  later in their adult life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the more popular use of &quot;vernacular&quot; to mean &quot;language which is very different from the accepted standard.&quot; Under my definition of &quot;vernacular,&quot; some speakers' language use is going to be very similar to the accepted standard, so they would not be called vernacular speakers under the more popular definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to figure out how some forms of language usage get called &quot;standard&quot; and others &quot;vernacular&quot; in more popular sources a deeply social question, not a linguistic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T17:31:48.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="493" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:03:19.730" Score="3" ViewCount="3568" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are about 1200 or so unique (includes all tones) Mandarin Chinese syllables, according to some source I read a while back based off the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/charts/unihan.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unihan database&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my applications I'm limited to using only 1/3 of those 1200 syllables, but I do realize that there are a fair amount of obscure syllables that are hardly used in normal conversations. The problem is, how much of that 1200 is obscure and not so useful? How would being limited to using only 1/3 of it limit my speech? Would I be conversational? Or brought to the level of a grade schooler? Or even worse, unable to hold any sort of conversation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="182" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T07:18:33.597" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T06:01:11.997" Title="What are the most commonly used Chinese syllables?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="328" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:15:51.833" Score="17" ViewCount="39781" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a website or software that will take text written in a source language and produce a transcription in IPA.  The languages I am interested in are French, Italian and German, but if you know resources for other languages I would be happy to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://upodn.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Phonetic Transcription&lt;/a&gt; does English - IPA for free. Here's a sample of their transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that glitters is not gold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ɒl ðæt glɪtərz ɪz nɑt gold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a tool like this. If you're wondering why one would need such a tool, besides the obvious application of helping people learning a new language, it's also useful to singers/actors who have to perform in a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T05:08:55.770" Title="Automated French/Italian/German to IPA transcription" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:18:06.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard of this trend referred to as &quot;cyclic drift&quot; and the &quot;typological cycle,&quot; but I'm not sure that there is an &quot;official&quot; name for the hypothesis. After searching briefly, I've come up with &lt;a href=&quot;http://mypage.iu.edu/~shetter/miniatures/typolcycle.htm&quot;&gt;a short description&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/50856/&quot;&gt;a longer one&lt;/a&gt; -- which also cites some good references -- for you. Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T19:18:06.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:19:08.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Japanese has determiners, such as the demonstrative &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; (this). It has been argued that the ability of some other nominal modifiers to precede the demonstrative shows that Japanese demonstratives are not determiners. However, possessives (like John's or Bill's) are typically analysed as a type of determiner. Many languages have multiple determiners on a single noun, such as Swedish (in definite noun phrases with adjectives) and Icelandic (with possessive constructions, much like the Japanese examples in &lt;em&gt;An introduction to Japanese linguistics&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &lt;em&gt;An introduction to Japanese linguistics&lt;/em&gt; does not adopt the DP Hypothesis, which means that NP is a maximal projection and not contained within a DP (as is commonly assumed nowadays). This affects the analysis greatly. Of course, even without the DP Hypothesis, a phrase can have multiple specifiers under many analyses, so I don't agree with the argument presented there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T19:19:08.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:25:42.983" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The open source eSpeak program&lt;/a&gt; can do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;espeak -v lang --ipa &quot;text goes here&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where lang is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;fr&lt;/code&gt; for French&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;it&lt;/code&gt; for Italian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;de&lt;/code&gt; for German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not 100% accurate in pronunciation in all cases, but will speak out the pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use Kirshenbaum-like ASCII IPA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;espeak -v lang --ipa &quot;[[orthographic text you want transcribed to IPA goes here]]&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use &lt;code&gt;-x&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;--ipa&lt;/code&gt; you get the phonemes in the format that espeak accepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="2816" LastEditDate="2020-03-01T05:08:55.770" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T05:08:55.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:30:09.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Max Weinreich in his History of Yiddish (1980) argues that it developed in the early Middle Ages from Jews speaking a variety based on French picking up German and using Hebrew for religious terms; Slavic influences came later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="187" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T19:30:09.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11116" CreationDate="2011-09-20T19:42:44.127" Score="8" ViewCount="1159" Body="&lt;p&gt;All languages display some form of the hierarchy of projections, to the extent we understand what this is: in a given clause, roughly, complementizers are higher than inflectional heads are higher than verbal heads, etc, modulo various kinds of syntactic movement. We can also talk about the ordering of determiners, numerals, and &quot;quality&quot; adjectives within the DP. Has anyone in the linguistics or philosophical literature written explicitly on why we see this pattern displayed again and again? Does it emerge from the nature of the syntax-to-conceptual system mapping (whatever that might be like), or is it (somehow) imposed by the language system? One can find detailed cartographic approaches like that in Peter Svenonius' &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000001&quot;&gt;Spatial P in English&lt;/a&gt; which are highly suggestive of the semantic nature of the hierarchy (perhaps suggesting it is not imposed by language?), but I can't find an extended consideration of its origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-30T09:05:25.227" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T09:43:09.000" Title="What is the origin of the &quot;hierarchy of projections&quot;, the language system or (some) conceptual system?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-09-20T20:19:46.453" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don’t forget the “no particular approach” approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath: “If there are no frameworks, then what should I teach my students in syntax classes? My answer is: The best syntax class is a field methods course, and the second best syntax class is a typology course.” - &lt;a href=&quot;http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/Frameworkfree.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Framework-free grammatical theory.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T05:58:57.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T05:58:57.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2011-09-20T20:32:23.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a fan of the hypothesis that Daniel Briggs brought up: the cyclical nature of verbal paradigms through time. I wish I could cite sources because I know it's out there, but I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to contribute a thought: Where one language is simple, another language is complex. For instance, Chinese has tones and English has a seriously complex phonology, but both are isolating. But most polysynthetic languages have a much simpler phonology (like, say, Menominee). And phonology, too, of course goes through cycles (think Great Vowel Shift, Grimm's Law, High German Consonant Shift, et al). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With absolutely no evidence at hand to back it up, it's a neat idea to think that maybe phonological complexity and grammatical complexity cycle against each other. I feel a question brewing... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T20:32:23.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2011-09-20T20:52:25.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norwegian has borrowed the semantically murky derivation {-is} from Swedish, I've only seen it make  nouns. Unfortunately that morph is so short it probably haven't been indexed by Google Scholar. I'll keep an eye out for links on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-20T20:52:25.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2011-09-20T20:56:53.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, its siblings, if it had any, died out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-11-07T00:52:32.353" LastActivityDate="2012-11-07T00:52:32.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="346" CreationDate="2011-09-20T21:45:19.840" Score="16" ViewCount="989" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;topic + comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word order&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use of particles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;agglutinative verb morphology but simple noun morphology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two kinds of adjectives: noun-like and verb-like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no definite or indefinite articles, no distinction between singular and plural, use of counters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;complex honorifics systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other cases where two languages not considered by most linguists to be in the same family are grammatically similar to such a degree, or are these two languages special?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T14:32:23.920" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T17:42:34.323" Title="Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;language-isolates&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-20T21:46:08.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert, but in my experience this is common in Galician and Spanish. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;La Juana dijo que vendría. ([The] Juana said she would come.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;O Pepe dixo que non sabe. ([The] Pepe said he doesn't know.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cultural implications are delicate. In Spanish, and to my very subjective perception, it has a connotation of uneducated language or extremely coloquial register. In Galician, however, it sounds perfectly OK and does not connote an uneducated person; maybe because of the Portuguese proximity (see answer by @Otavio Macedo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="186" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T17:04:44.313" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T17:04:44.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-21T00:06:21.387" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, in European Portuguese the use of the definite article with people's names is considered standard, and not using it is very formal. In Modern Greek (not a Romance or Germanic language, but still relevant) it is mandatory (except, naturally, in the vocative), and not using it would be considered ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why it is considered &quot;bad style&quot; in languages that have it in dialects but not in the standard language, I think it's mostly a problem of the standard language being based on an older form than current vernaculars (Written French in particularly is quite archaising compared to Spoken French), a form where personal names cannot take the article. Since anything not part of the standard is considered &quot;wrong&quot; (the typical prescriptivist view), personal names with articles are considered &quot;wrong&quot; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of definite articles with personal names typically appears rather late in the evolution of definite articles. Definite articles typically originate from demonstrative determiners whose meaning gets eroded with time (from &quot;this man&quot; to &quot;the man&quot;). From anaphoric/cataphoric/spatial use to &quot;simple&quot; definition, the erosion of meaning carries on, and as it does the article's use becomes more and more mandatory, for more and more nouns (basically, it stops adding a specific meaning, and starts being seen as just something that must be used with nouns that are considered definite, even if they would still be considered definite without it). You can see this evolution by looking at how different languages use the definite article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English, the definite article is still considered to add definition to a noun, and for this reason is normally not used with nouns that are semantically definite, like concepts (you say &quot;peace&quot;, not *&quot;the peace&quot;), proper nouns (names of countries, regions, towns, etc.) and personal names;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In French, the article has a much less strong meaning by itself, and is used more often than in English. For instance, concepts in French do take the article (&quot;la paix&quot;), as well as country and region names (&quot;la France, la Bretagne&quot;). Other proper nouns (e.g. names of towns) sometimes take the article and sometimes do not, and it's difficult to describe this use in terms of rules. As for personal names, they normally don't take the article, although some rural dialects do so (but the vast majority of French people, at least in France, don't use articles with personal names);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Modern Greek, the erosion of meaning is nearly complete (maybe because the definite article has been extant for more than 2000 years!): it doesn't really &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; definition to nouns, rather it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; appear when a noun is definite, whether this definition is semantic, pragmatic, or due to other determiners. So in Greek the definite article is used with all proper nouns without exception, but it is even used in addition to the demonstrative adjectives (so &quot;this man&quot; is &quot;αυτός ο άνθρωπος&quot;, literally &quot;this the man&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, whether using the definite article with people's names is &quot;bad style&quot; or not could be said to depend on the prescriptivist's view of what the definite article's role is: if its role is to &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; definiteness to a noun, then it's more likely to be considered incorrect to add it to nouns that are already definite by meaning, like people's names. If its role, however, is merely to &lt;em&gt;indicate&lt;/em&gt; that a noun is definite, then it is more likely to be acceptable to use it with nouns that are already semantically definite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T00:06:21.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="340" CreationDate="2011-09-21T00:12:44.150" Score="16" ViewCount="21544" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some dictionaries/lexica, I've seen the asterisk in front of old words. What does it mean/stand for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic#Pre-Proto-Germanic&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic#Pre-Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*ǵʰóstis &quot;stranger&quot; &gt; *gʰóstis &gt; *gastiz &quot;guest&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T07:11:30.743" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T03:31:12.883" Title="Meaning of star/asterisk in linguistics" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="338" CreationDate="2011-09-21T00:48:36.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of historical linguistics, it means the word is just a hypothetical reconstruction, not an actually attested word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The asterisk has another meaning which is to mark an ungrammatical utterance)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T00:48:36.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="338" CreationDate="2011-09-21T00:49:07.963" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;An asterisk is generally used to indicate that a certain form or construction is &lt;strong&gt;not found in natural language&lt;/strong&gt;. To be precise, it means there is insufficient evidence to assume that it could exist or could once have existed in natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When describing &lt;strong&gt;proto-languages&lt;/strong&gt;, this usually means that a certain root or word has been reconstructed: based on phonological rules, we think it must have been somewhat like this—but we cannot be sure, as it is always possible that some unique irregularity would result in a different form, and we have no written sources that contain this form. When a form has never been found in a real source, we say it has not been attested; in other words, it is &lt;strong&gt;unattested&lt;/strong&gt;. In most proto-languages, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; forms are hypothetical, so that they should all be preceded by an asterisk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;strong&gt;modern languages&lt;/strong&gt;, we usually have plenty of sources to establish whether a certain form is possible. In fact, many linguists make up example sentences when they need to, because many forms and constructions are not at all controversial. So I might use &lt;em&gt;Achilles hated Hector&lt;/em&gt; in an article if I needed an example. However, I may also want to use an example that is ungrammatical, i.e. that I believe would never be used naturally in the language under observation. Then I would put an asterisk in front of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Achilles did hated Hector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it depends on context whether a construction is grammatical: if I were writing about standard English, I'd have to use an asterisk; but, if I were writing about a certain dialect where this construction is actually used by some, the asterisk is out of place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that &quot;natural language&quot; is a flexible and sometimes unclear concept; if you are researching English poetry of the 16th century, it is much harder to acquire enough evidence than with modern prose. Context or explanation should make it clear what &lt;em&gt;natural language&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to be in a certain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people would use a question mark instead of an asterisk with well-attested languages if the form or construction is doubtful. In proto-languages, the question mark is sometimes used to indicate a form that is even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; uncertain than the common hypothetical ones—for example, if I am in doubt as to the most probable form of a certain root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people use the percentage sign to mark something that is only grammatical in a certain non-standard dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T03:31:12.883" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T03:31:12.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="343" CreationDate="2011-09-21T01:12:48.857" Score="9" ViewCount="9080" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/180/whats-the-difference-between-phonetics-and-phonology&quot;&gt;this other one&lt;/a&gt;, about the difference between Phonetics and Phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the difference between the two subfields as well as what it means to produce phonetic and phonologic transcriptions. Simply stated, the phonetic transcription deals with the &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; representation, whereas the phonemic one deals with the &lt;em&gt;underlying&lt;/em&gt; representation. But how does one determine what is the underlying representation? For example, in English, [r] and [ɹ] are considered variants (or allophones) of the phoneme /r/. But what is so special about /r/? Why can't we say that these two sounds are variants of the phoneme /ɹ/, instead? Of course, this is just one example. It can be extrapolated to any pair of allophones, such as [p] versus [b] in Korean or [d] versus [ð] in Spanish, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T11:34:59.953" Title="How to determine which phoneme a group of allophones realizes?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="342" CreationDate="2011-09-21T02:08:12.437" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're absolutely right - the choice is completely arbitrary. Generally, before the publication of &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; (Chomsky &amp;amp; Halley 1968), whichever underlying representation required the fewest number of rule derivations to produce the output forms was chosen, i.e., whichever was the most elegant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following rule set describing (simplified) Korean stop allophony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/p/ -&amp;gt; [b] / V_V&#xA;/p/ -&amp;gt; [p] / otherwise&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be preferable to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/b/ -&amp;gt; [p] / #_&#xA;/b/ -&amp;gt; [p] / _#&#xA;/b/ -&amp;gt; [b] / otherwise&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-&lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt;, sound segments were reanalyzed as bundles of features - for example, [p] is shorthand for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[-voiced&#xA;  labial&#xA; -sonorant&#xA; -continuant]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; phonology, all features in the phonetic form of a segment are specified. However, the phonemic form omits features that are derived through rules - this is known as &lt;em&gt;underspecification&lt;/em&gt;. For example, in &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; phonology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ labial      -&amp;gt; [+voiced] / [+voiced] _ [+voiced]&#xA; -sonorant&#xA; -continuant]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that only the modified features are written after the &lt;code&gt;-&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; arrow, and that only relevant features in the surrounding environment are written after the &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt;, rather than whole feature sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T03:09:05.673" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T03:09:05.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="342" CreationDate="2011-09-21T04:35:35.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not arbitrary, and while the ease of rule-writing is certainly a consideration, this is not what determines which sound is the phoneme and which sound is the allophone. To re-use @Alek Storm's first example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/p/ -&gt; [b] / V_V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/p/ -&gt; [p] / otherwise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that this is a simpler analysis than trying to instead account for [b] becoming [p] in a wide range of environments. But, the actual reason why [b] is a variant of [p] is because [p] can occur anywhere, while [b] can only occur in a &lt;strong&gt;specific phonetic environment&lt;/strong&gt;. That is, the voiceless bilabial plosive only becomes voiced when it occurs inter-vocalically, because the voicing of the surrounding vowels carries across to the otherwise voiceless plosive. So, when you start to find phones which seem to be variants of the same sound, you need to look at the environments they occur in to work out which phones have plausibly been affected by the surrounding phones, and which phones seem to be robust in a range of environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are languages which permit a lot of 'free variation' (allophones that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; seem to arise through phonetic conditioning), in which case linguists might choose 'the phoneme' based on frequency, ease of explanation, or familiarity with one type of sound over another. But, in many analyses noting 'free variation', there do turn out to be phonetic factors governing the variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T04:35:35.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T05:40:00.377" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the use of &amp;quot;ligatures&amp;quot;, but I'm most interested in the way the&#xA;ligatures and the possessives can use a combined infix-suffix. I don't&#xA;understand how such a mixed system could develop. I understand the&#xA;progression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u tla 'house' &amp;gt; utla (u or tla is class marker?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u a tla 'house (-a- ligature) &amp;gt; watla&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u a m tla 'your house (m 2nd person) &amp;gt; wamtla&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't understand how you could get mixed classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;duri 'boat' &amp;gt; dwarka 'boat (-a- ligature)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;duri &amp;gt; dwairka 'my boat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;duri &amp;gt; dwarkam 'your boat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miskito_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miskito_grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T17:17:52.930" Title="How did Miskito ligatures develop?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="335" CreationDate="2011-09-21T05:55:28.960" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following features are characteristic of Insular Celtic, a subfamily of Indo-European spoken in Great Britain and Ireland.  They are also characteristic of the so-called Hamito-Semitic languages of North Africa, a subfamily of Afro-Asiatic.  Not every Celtic or H-S language has all of the features, but they are fairly typical of the family as a whole, especially in their most archaic variants (e.g. Old Irish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjugated prepositions: [Prep + Pronominal Obj] is a single word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word order: VSO, N - Modifier, Prepositions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relative clause linker: invariant particle, not relative pronoun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relative clause technique (oblique): copying, not gapping, e.g. &quot;the bed that [ I slept in &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; ]&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Special form of the verb peculiar to relative clauses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polypersonal verb (subject and object both marked).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Infixing/suffixing alternation: Object marker is infixed to the verb if there is a preverb, suffixed otherwise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definite article in genitive embeddings may occur only on the embedded noun: &quot;house [the-man]&quot; = the man's house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonconcord of verb with full-NP subject: verb can fail to agree with the subject, depending on word order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbal Noun (VN: object in genitive), not Infinitive (object in same case as with finite verb).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Predicative particle: in copular or nominal sentences, the predicate is marked with a participle homophonous to a &quot;local&quot; preposition: &quot;He (is) &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; a farmer&quot; = He is a farmer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepositional periphrastic: BE + Prep + VN, e.g. &quot;He is at singing&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DO periphrastic: DO + VN, e.g. &quot;He does singing&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notional adverbial clause expressed as &quot;and&quot; + finite clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonfinite forms usable instead of finite main-clause verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word-initial phonological change, expressing a variety of syntactic functions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Idiomatic use of kin terms in genitive constructions, e.g. &quot;son of sending&quot; = messenger, &quot;son of land&quot; = wolf.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: Orin Gensler, &lt;em&gt;A Typological Evaluation of Celtic/Hamito-Semitic Parallels&lt;/em&gt;, Berkeley, 1993.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this distinctive feature-complex is not typical of other Indo-European languages, and does not seem to be present in Continental Celtic.  This has led to the supposition of a substrate/sprachbund situation in the ancient British isles: the language spoken by the inhabitants before the arrival of Celtic was in heavy contact with Afro-Asiatic speakers and shared these distinctive features, in the usual sprachbundy way; this pre-Celtic language influenced the Celtic language imposed by the Indo-European conquerors in the usual substratal way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No other language groups of the world seem to share this set of 17 features to any statistically significant degree; this is unlikely to be the working-out of typological universals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastEditorUserId="210" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T06:58:05.037" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T06:58:05.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="345" CreationDate="2011-09-21T07:24:35.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the history of the Miskito case, but doubling up on morphology is a known development in the history of language.  Here are two examples from English/Germanic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;em&gt;child&lt;/em&gt; once had plural &lt;em&gt;childer&lt;/em&gt; (regularized from&#xA;the original invariant   plural &lt;em&gt;child&lt;/em&gt;).  Another pluralizer &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;was then added, giving modern &lt;em&gt;children&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Germanic, there is a class of verbs called preterite presents.  These were perfective in Proto Indo-European, but reanalyzed as presents in Germanic.  The past tense was then formed by addition of a suffix (cognate with Mod. Engl. &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;).  So, the past tense forms of verbs carried two &quot;past&quot; markers -- the original PIE ablaut and the Germanic suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to guess what happened in Miskito, I would say that these words were originally in an infixing class (&lt;em&gt;duri&lt;/em&gt; ~ *&lt;em&gt;dwari&lt;/em&gt;), and were subsequently reanalyzed as being a suppletive stem in the &lt;em&gt;-ka&lt;/em&gt; class.  (Suppletion is the operation that occurs when a stem changes form after the addition of a suffix.  An example from Mod. Engl. verb inflection is the alternation between &lt;em&gt;bleed&lt;/em&gt; and  &lt;em&gt;bled&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;bleed + ed&lt;/em&gt;).)  But that analysis is only a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T07:24:35.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-21T09:25:59.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T09:25:59.773" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T09:25:59.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-21T09:25:59.773" Score="0" Body="The discrete and distinctive units constituting the internalized inventory of sounds of a language. A sequence of phonemes is the preverbal form of a word. Phonemes may be systematically distorted upon verbalization, resulting in an allophone. Phonemes and allophones are both &quot;phones&quot;." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T00:19:14.900" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T00:19:14.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T09:39:29.953" Score="8" ViewCount="2341" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about the current situation in machine translation. &#xA;I am aware about two main approaches to machine translation. One which is based in a strong way on linguistic theory and another which is mainly statistical. Is this distinction correct? Is it the case that statistical methods with rather little Linguistics are at present most powerful? What are the relative strengths of the two approaches and to what extent is it possible to merge them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T16:52:24.793" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T19:43:32.020" Title="Machine translation - Rule-Based and Statistics-Based approaches " Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="350" CreationDate="2011-09-21T10:35:39.300" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are two main approaches to machine translation. Rules-based (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelfish.yahoo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;babelfish&lt;/a&gt;) and statistics-based (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;google translate&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that statistical methods are ipso facto better than rules-based methods in all things. You get different types of errors, as you'll see if you try to translate the same text to the same language with both engines linked earlier. It'll depend on the recipients what types of errors still leave the text understandable. I use Babelfish when I need translation-help for English -&gt; German because I consider the errors of Google's translation service to be worse than those of Babelfish, for the kind of texts I need to translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules-based approaches takes time, money and trained personnel to make and test the rules. Statistics-based approaches needs large equivalent&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; corpora for each pair of languages it can translate to and from. Sometimes the former is easier to arrange than the latter, because of for instance copyright. For languages with few speakers rules-based is the only possibility since there exist no suffciently large corpora. That rules out statistical translation for most of the languages on this planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Equivalent corpora: same genre of text. Corporas that have the same texts in different languages is even better but there aren't enough of those.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T06:57:58.247" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T06:57:58.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T13:23:27.810" Score="4" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto's goal was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to create an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that&#xA;  would foster peace and international understanding between people with&#xA;  different regional and/or national languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would a new language foster those things? Why won't the current languages do? Did the advocates subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf view of linguistic determinism? Since that hypothesis has now been widely rejected, what are the motivations of the Esperanto people today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T14:07:16.460" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T14:44:57.907" Title="What are the rationale of people speaking/teaching Esperanto?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-10-11T14:45:04.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2011-09-21T13:41:27.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I don't know that this is really a linguistics question at all. It's probably more to do with philosophy or sociology but I assume it would have to be on topic on an &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/13148/esperanto-language-usage&quot;&gt;Esperanto Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; so I'm going to answer it on the basis that the question could be migrated to the Esperanto site if and when it appears.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would a new language foster those things?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easy to Learn: By being free of regularities and using roots and morphemes already common among languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Politically neutral: By not being the language of a single people, place, religion, or viewpoint.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages: By giving them an alternative language to use that all of them know and none of them own. Thus no language barrier. Thus understanding. Thus (hopefully) peace.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why won't the current languages do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easy to Learn: All current languages are irregular and have varying degrees of complex arbitrary rules. Many include sounds which are difficult for speakers of other languages to produce.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Politically neutral: Existing languages all belong to one or more of a certain ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, or viewpoint that not all other people share. People are not keen to adopt the language of a perceived enemy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages: Mostly because of 2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the advocates subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf view of linguistic determinism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it had to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis whereby a new language might be created which by being able to express only certain things would make it possible to only think those given things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather I believe the creators of Esperanto feel that different groups speaking different languages are a barrier to communication between groups which leads to misunderstandings between them. The idea was when all people can communicate with each other without the use of translators and interpreters who cannot always be trusted that it will be easier to identify with one another and thus reduce the risk of misunderstanding, conflict, and war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since that hypothesis has now been widely rejected, what are the motivations of the Esperanto people today?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt some still believe an international language if widely adopted will lead us to understand each other and stop warring with each other. Others want to learn a language and it's supposedly easy. Others think it's cool to learn a constructed language and this is the most widely used. But I'm sure there are almost as many reasons people speak Esperanto as there are people who speak Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T14:07:44.743" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T14:07:44.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="358" CreationDate="2011-09-21T14:08:29.027" Score="28" ViewCount="7171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Indo-European languages have verbs which endings change according to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;person&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I made a table with the most common (and close) languages and focussed on the category of &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;present tense&lt;/em&gt;, for reasons of space. The endings for each conjugation have been highlighted in red and separated from the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T23UD.png&quot; alt=&quot;English-Italian-German-Spanish-French inflection comparison table&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;If you find mistakes, tell me, I'll correct them and upload the table again.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is:&lt;/strong&gt; What brought English verbs to behave this way? Why also Norwegian and Swedish have the same characteristics but not German, although they are all related languages? I suppose there must be a point where they split directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Side question:&lt;/strong&gt; You can add this in the end, just for completeness. I'm asking out of curiosity: Apart from Chinese and Japanese that I'm aware of (plus Swedish and Norwegian I mentioned above), are there examples of other languages with similar characteristics, regardless of being unrelated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.B. Japanese verbs change a bit yes, but not according to the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-29T09:12:38.430" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T14:22:59.013" Title="Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to &quot;person&quot;?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2011-09-21T14:17:02.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are two million speakers of Esperanto (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;; numbers disputed) then the extent and tenacity of the constructed language is in itself noteworthy. Hangul (written Korean) is arguably the only other language construct (designed by scholars of the court of King Sejong the Great) with such extent and tenacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto gives linguists the equivalent of the motor skill of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physorg.com/news167053363.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Not forgetting how to ride a bicycle&lt;/a&gt;. There might not be a lot of examples of this kind of skill, but at least one example exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto and Hangul help linguists ask some deep questions. Is there some learning feature that helped them survive? (Esperanto and Hangul are extremely regular in nature.) Can speakers and writers express novel and complex concepts? Can the language or alphabet be extended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my semi-serious answer to the OP would be: &quot;To keep linguists employed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T14:36:05.580" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T14:36:05.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2011-09-21T14:34:39.873" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things which conspired to eliminate most of the English verbal morphology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sound changes&lt;/strong&gt;, especially the reduction and loss of unstressed final syllables, meant that verb forms that had been distinct in Anglo-Saxon became identical by Middle English, and lose their final bits of distinctiveness by Early Modern English. This accounts for the 1sg and all of the plural forms becoming identical in the present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Social changes&lt;/strong&gt; caused the old 2sg with &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt;, which had a distinct verbal ending in &lt;em&gt;-st&lt;/em&gt;, to fall out in favor of &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you/9782#9782&quot;&gt;This has been discussed in detail on English.SE.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The collusion of these two forces means that only the lonely 3sg form remains distinct in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this isn't really unique to English, either. French has suffered a similar loss of unstressed final syllables, which means that in speech the French verb has lost most of its distinct forms. French spelling obscures this fact, though, as do conservative French grammar materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T14:34:39.873" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2011-09-21T14:42:21.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question might be based on some false assumptions or gaps in your linguistics knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly you need to know about linguistic typology, specifically morphological typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conjugation is a type of verb morphology in inflected languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are sometimes said to move from one morphological typology to the next in a cyclical pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has moved further down the path away from inflection than some of its siblings, but others of its siblings are doing the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These typologies are not as neat as they are sometimes made out to be which is why English and Japanese both don't fit neatly, but in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In inflected and agglutinating languages, the endings can cover a concept of agreement and there are different things with which to agree. Number is one, person is another. These do not all have to be present in a given language just because it has a certain morphological typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why English is losing some of its inflection, besides this being a trend for inflected languages generally, it has been suggested that one reason was that the Frisian and Norse languages which have both played a part in English's history had a lot in common but used similar inflections in different ways thus weakening them through ambiguity, making them susceptible to being lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the side question, the languages you invited comparison with, Chinese is an isolating or analytic language with no inflections and arguably no affixation. Japanese is of mixed type where its verbal system in agglutinating which means words take multiple endings attached to each other each with a meaning rather than inflectional where one ending encapsulates several meanings. Japanese is analytic in its noun system though since it uses separate particles/postpositions rather than endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-29T08:38:13.823" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T08:38:13.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="342" CreationDate="2011-09-21T15:20:49.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;@AlekStorm's answer is pretty good, but I'd say that in practice there are at least two ways linguists decide which form is underlying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If you take two allophones, say (using relatively broad transcription) [t] and [ɾ]. You could, rather tediously, list all the contexts where [t] shows up, and all the contexts where [ɾ] shows up. Then, you can so some set operations. Call T the set where [t] shows up and D the context where [ɾ] shows up. It should be the case that T-D is a relatively small set of contexts, and D-T should be empty. In this case, [ɾ] has a restricted distribution, so the features of [t] could be considered underlying. This is similar to the elegance of description from @AlekStom's answer. Of course, in practice it will happen that neither A-B nor B-A is empty, and then everything gets more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) You can check to see if one allophone &quot;behaves&quot; as if it were the other. As with [t] and [ɾ], the diagnostic would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does [t] ever behave as if it were a voiced, lenis segment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does [ɾ] ever behave as if it were a voiceless segment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, in many dialects [ɾ] does frequently behave as a voiceless segment, triggering changes in quality of its preceding vowel. For example, in Canadian English and some other dialects, there is the following distinction between &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ride&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;raɪd   (ride)&#xA;rʌɪt   (write)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When adding on the morpheme -er, the /t/ in &lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt; is flapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;raɪɾɚ   (rider)&#xA;rʌɪɾɚ   (writer)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case has the additional complication that both the [d] and the [t] are neutralized to [ɾ]. However, you could still argue that the vowel difference between [aɪ] and [ʌi] is triggered by voicelessness, so that the underlying form of the [ɾ] in &lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt; is behaving as a voiceless segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, like I said, heuristics like these are not applicable to all analyses, and there are certainly underlying forms which have been posited on flimsy evidence. And thank god, because that means that linguists' work is not done!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="28" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T19:35:49.990" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T19:35:49.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2011-09-21T16:13:47.977" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common cause of loss of inflection in a language community is a large influx of speakers of another language (either a close but incomprehensible dialect or one just really far away) in Extreme cases it can be similar to (or is called) pidginization, which when a coherent creole comes out has usually lost most of the inflections existing in the parent language (I don't think this is the only way to lose inflections, just one way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English, it is said that the invasion of the Danes (Old Norse speakers) in the north-east, and then later the Norman invasion (Old French speakers) (all languages involved were inflected) killed off most inflections in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T16:13:47.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="587" CreationDate="2011-09-21T16:40:38.140" Score="10" ViewCount="1249" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can you/should you empirically distinguish between epistemic and circumstantial readings of modals? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I (at least think I) understand how the two readings are supposed to be distinguished theoretically — i.e., that an epistemic reading is a modal claim given the speaker/attitude-holder's evidence/knowledge, whereas a circumstantial reading is supposed to be a modal claim given the circumstances/facts of the world. (...although there is always the problem of how to distinguish evidence from facts, because can't any fact count as evidence towards some claim?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've always had difficulty understanding how to empirically distinguish between the two readings. The standard example used to illustrate the difference is Kratzer 1991's 'hydrangeas' example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) Context&lt;/strong&gt;: You go to a new land, and test the climate and soil, finding out that it's pretty much the same as the climate and soil at home, where hydrangeas grow. You know, however, that this new land has had no contact with Asia or America (and thus hydrangeas could not have possibly spread to this new land)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a)    Hydrangeas can grow here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    b)    There might be hydrangeas growing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context, (1a) is true, but (1b) is false, showing that (1a) and (1b) have distinct meanings, which could be characterized in terms of the types of facts used to make the claims (i.e., that (1a) only is concerned with the physical facts, concerning the soil, climate and the physical properties of hydrangeas, and doesn't care about your evidence that the land in question has had no contact with Asia or America, whereas (1b) cannot discount this evidence). But the problem is that there is also a distinction between (1a) and (1b) with respect to the temporal orientation — the 'epistemic' reading is associated with present orientation (i.e., we're considering the possibility of a current hydrangea-growing-situation), while the 'circumstantial' is associated with future orientation (i.e., we're considering the possibility of a future hydrangea-growing situation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my question is as follows&lt;/strong&gt;: are there any clear examples showing an epistemic-circumstantial distinction that do not also involve this temporal distinction? (Maybe in other words, what sorts of empirical data motivate the theoretical distinction between epistemic and circumstantial modals?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post-answer Reassessment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah thanks, those are good examples! And I think that when I consider the universal &quot;in his office&quot; example, I can even get a backwards-looking circumstantial reading (er, unless this is deontic too). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg. given certain facts, John had to be in his office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) Context:&lt;/strong&gt; Everyone knows John spent all of last night in his office. John's girlfriend knows all of the extenuating circumstances, yet she is still miffed and is complaining somewhat unreasonably about this fact. John's co-worker attempts to justify John's overnight stay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, considering that John was alone in the department working late in his office when a thug broke in and broke his legs, and considering his weak upper-body strength, John had no choice. He had to be in his office last night.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is quite different from an epistemic reading where the speaker doesn't know whether John stayed in his office last night, or whether he was actually out carousing with his buddies, but concludes on the basis of John's lack of hangover, that John had to be in his office last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T01:06:15.733" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:06:15.733" Title="Distinguishing between epistemic and circumstantial readings (without recourse to temporality)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2011-09-21T17:51:28.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not much contention about the concept of a phoneme, but there are several researchers who think it is more a function of literacy than reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffice to say, we all use phonemes in discussing languages, but when you look at speech, you do not see discrete units. You see lots of variation that can be made discrete-seeming through speech processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we were to say &quot;phonemes do not exist as primary things&quot; (i.e., in the same way as we can say &quot;chairs exist&quot;), we can still approximate the concept of a phoneme using things that &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; exist like pitch, intensity, formants, noise, times, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="235" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T14:50:16.833" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T14:50:16.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-09-21T18:08:52.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An additional answer would be that phonetics is concerned with the physical processes of speech (production, processing) while phonology is concerned with abstractly modeling speech processes. There is a lot of overlap between the two areas and it is difficult at times to figure out if a process should  be considered phonetic (a physical result) or phonological (basically a rule that is not physically necessary).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this is something like voicing assimilation. Say you have two words which in isolation sound like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ap] [ga]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you put them together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ap+ga/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the resulting sound is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[abga]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [p] became [b]. Why? A phonological answer could be that /g/ has some feature controlling its voicing [+voice] and /p/ has a feature [-voice] making it voiceless. Then putting them adjacent, the /p/ latches on to /g/'s [+voice] feature and let's go of it's [-voice] feature, making it a voiced /p/ ([b]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonetic answer could be something like, in anticipation of the voicing for producing [g] you also voice somewhat during a production of [p], making it more [b]-like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="235" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-15T15:14:34.577" LastActivityDate="2012-01-15T15:14:34.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T18:15:07.983" Score="11" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make a hierarchy of verbal accidents that would have the &#xA;following features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any two accidents in the hierarchy, if a language marks only one&#xA;of them  by lexical suppletion, it is significantly likelier to be&#xA;the one earlier in the  hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any two accidents in the hierarchy, if a language marks only one of them  by an auxiliary word, it is significantly likelier to be the one later in the  hierarchy.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any three accidents in the hierarchy, if a language marks both the  earliest one and the latest one by morphology, it is significantly likely to also  mark the intermediate one by morphology.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any two accidents in the hierarchy which a language marks both of by  morphology,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if only one of them is by stem-alteration it is probably the earlier one in the  hierarchy;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if only one of them is by affixation it is probably the later one in the  hierarchy.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any two accidents in the hierarchy which a language marks both of by  affixes, if both affixes are on the same side of the root, then it is significantly  likely that the one earlier in the hierarchy is marked closer to the root.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that it might not be possible to fully satisfy all of these desiderata with just one hierarchy; and that perhaps the &quot;hierarchy&quot; would be only partially-ordered rather than &quot;linearly&quot; ordered.&#xA;That's OK; I just want to get as close as I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start with I'm going to consider just the following accidents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aspect  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modality, mode, and/or mood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polarity  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tense  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pluractionality, evidentiality, mirativity, validationality, etc., I might work in &#xA;later.&#xA;Also, &quot;modality/mode/mood&quot; might be two (or more?) accidents instead of one; so might voice.&#xA;And possibly not every language would have every accident; for that matter maybe some languages don't have a &quot;verbs&quot; &quot;part-of-speech&quot;, though I gather most have something close enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original hypothesis, which might be complete hogwash, or might be only partially &#xA;true, is that the hierarchy is more-or-less the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspect &gt; Voice &gt; Tense &gt; Polarity &gt; Modality/mode/mood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's why;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of those five accidents, the one that has the most influence on the actual &#xA;meaning of the verb is Aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of those five accidents, modality/mode/mood tends to be about what the speaker expects &#xA;the addressee to do with the clause, or how the clause fits into the discourse, &#xA;or how the speaker feels about the clause, etc.; and tends to apply to the &#xA;whole clause rather than just the verb.  It doesn't really change the meaning &#xA;of the verb itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And tense is intermediate between aspect and m/m/m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up 'til that, I'm pretty sure my reasons are opinions shared by most &#xA;professional linguists; the thing I'm not sure of is that it has any significant &#xA;influence on most languages' morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rest of the hierarchy;&#xA;I guess that Voice is between Aspect and Tense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I guess that Polarity is between Tense and Modality/Mode/Mood.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone here know of anyone who actually knows anything about these &#xA;questions?&#xA;Can anyone here point me toward a resource (preferably a URL) that answers &#xA;some of them?&#xA;Would anyone here care to speculate about any of it that no resource (as far as &#xA;you know) definitively answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T13:21:17.900" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T15:10:44.390" Title="Hierarchy of morphology, auxiliaries, and suppletion of verbal accidents?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T18:29:26.687" Score="8" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading about the Native American language isolate Washo, and looking at the Universals Archive. If an ergative language is SOV, the object and subject affixes will be prefixes and the main or only alternative order will be OSV. But why is the prefix order osV rather than soV? If the subject and object prefixes are reductions of independent pronouns (and in Washo, they seem to be), one would anticipate soV from SOV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:16:56.430" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:16:56.430" Title="Relationship between SOV word order and osV prefixes" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;washo&gt;&lt;sov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2011-09-21T18:55:18.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any existing research on precisely this question. However, there are some categories in WALS that may be of interest. You might look at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Exponence of Selected Inflectional Formatives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/69&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/79&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Suppletion According to Tense and Aspect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verbal Number and Suppletion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is no data in WALS specifically regarding the &lt;em&gt;order&lt;/em&gt; of affixes in verbal morphology. However, the chapters linked above present a wealth of data about the &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of affixes used, together with links to the relevant papers, which should provide a sufficient base for doing this research on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T18:55:18.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="608" CreationDate="2011-09-21T20:01:02.890" Score="8" ViewCount="1702" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm off to Albania tomorrow so starting to get more and more interested in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one of the outliers on the Indo-European family tree. It's not hard to see a relationship but it's not easy to say what that relationship is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as the distant genetic relationship it coexists in the Balkan sprachbund which might blur the picture a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have linguists come to agree to any extent which other branch(es) are most closely related to Albanian? Greek? Balto-Slavic? If you Google you even see Romanian suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T19:47:58.500" Title="Is there a general consensus on what modern language is the closest relative of Albanian?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="374" CreationDate="2011-09-21T20:04:22.730" Score="10" ViewCount="3208" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some small pockets in India where people actually speak Sanskrit as a native language. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_revival#Sanskrit_villages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In these Indian villages, inhabitants of all castes speak Sanskrit natively since childhood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mattur in Karnataka&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jhiri, District: Rajgadh, Madhya Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ganoda, District: Banswada, Rajasthan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Bawali, District: Bagapat, Uttar Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mohad, District: Narasinhpur, Madhya Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shyamsundarpur,District: Kendujhar, Odisha&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these modern Sanskrit speakers studied? Are they preserving a holy language or is it evolving like a real living language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T11:51:50.547" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T01:56:54.410" Title="Is the Sanskrit spoken natively in pockets in India changing?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T20:11:22.487" Score="23" ViewCount="4586" Body="&lt;p&gt;When field linguists begin to study a new language with whose speakers they don't share a common language, how do they begin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't need the whole story, just the very start, the &quot;bootstrapping&quot;. For some remote languages even the nearest dominating language might be a rare exotic language for us. For example Australian languages. It's likely the native speakers won't be fluent in English but maybe Kriol instead. Would the linguist have to master that instead. The same must apply for the Caucasus, Northern Pakistan, or the Amazon jungle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard this is actually done and I'm not just imagining it. Is there a standard way to start studying a completely alien language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T23:15:05.573" Title="How do field linguists begin to study an undocumented language which they cannot speak?" Tags="&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2011-09-21T20:46:50.997" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find a link to the documents, but there are standardized lists of words that field linguists will use.  Basically they try to get names for various body parts, colors and other common lexical items.  With this they can start to study the phonetics/phonology, and the basic morphology, which will aid them in classifying the language.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org&quot;&gt;SIL&lt;/a&gt; would be a good place to look around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/&quot;&gt;Here a site I was looking for&lt;/a&gt; from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics that has useful resources and more detailed information on the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T13:22:55.210" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:22:55.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2011-09-21T20:55:15.337" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to study documents written in some unknown language, or to study the language itself, there's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_method_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;Combinatorial method&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It  is used to study texts which are written in an unknown language, and to study the language itself, where the unknown language has no obvious or proven well-understood close relatives, and there are few bilingual texts which might otherwise have been used to help understand the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure it's what you needed since this is mainly about texts, rather than analyzing a spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, speaking about the linguist having to master an unknown language, I'd like to introduce Quine, who was not a linguist but a philosopher and a logician. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About translation, &quot;&lt;i&gt;Quine tried to show that &quot;radical translation&quot; from one language to another is logically impossible. Suppose, he said, that you are standing by a native in a foreign land who speaks only a language you do not understand. A rabbit runs by and the native says &quot;&lt;em&gt;gavagai&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Quine claims that you have no way of knowing whether 'gavagai' means &quot;&lt;em&gt;rabbit&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, or &quot;&lt;em&gt;there goes a rabbit&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, or &quot;&lt;em&gt;isn't it a lovely day!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Of course, linguists and even ordinary people have sometimes gone into foreign areas knowing not a single word of the local language, and have mastered it quite well. [...] The simple answer to Quine's puzzle is that if you have not yet got enough experience with the new language to be sure of its proper translation, then get some more experience with it. As long as beings share a common universe, and to the extent they share a common existence, proper translation will always be possible.&lt;/i&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This belongs to the theory called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation&quot;&gt;Indeterminacy of translation&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: There are other methods illustrated in this slideshow, provided by the Professor Peter Austin, called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/r8kGOe&quot;&gt;Linguistic Fieldwork: An introduction&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. If necessary I can move the needed content here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T22:03:58.110" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T22:03:58.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="766" CreationDate="2011-09-21T21:38:09.790" Score="11" ViewCount="12196" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Standard Turkish, &quot;ğ&quot; is explained as having no sound of its own but instead lengthens the previous vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would &quot;aa&quot; and &quot;ağ&quot; sound alike? What about &quot;â&quot; and &quot;ağa&quot;? Can there sometimes be three vowel length distinctions in Turkish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This is a reworded version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30873/turkish-language-usage/33383#33383&quot;&gt;an example question I put up on the Turkish Language &amp;amp; Usage proposal&lt;/a&gt; but I've wondered about it since before that.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-10T01:14:33.333" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T21:41:00.870" Title="In Turkish, how exactly does &quot;ğ&quot; affect the vowel it follows?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="369" CreationDate="2011-09-21T22:14:24.863" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, Mattur's effort is the oldest one, but that began in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/03/02/stories/2008030250200800.htm&quot;&gt;1982&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chitrapurmath.net/sanskrit/sanskrit_lifestyle.htm&quot;&gt;Ganoda&lt;/a&gt; does not seem to be doing all that well. An article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://horsesandswords.blogspot.com/2008/09/propagation-of-sanskrit.html&quot;&gt;Jhiri&lt;/a&gt; is happy to call the Mattur experiment a failure. (It isn't, AFAIK.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see &lt;a href=&quot;http://connect.krishna.com/node/7769&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and in the two links above, the motivation for speaking Sanskrit was to go back into tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The towns/villages that have adopted Sanskrit are too far apart for neologisms of one location to be understood in another. The occasional movies made in Sanskrit, are aimed for Sanskrit speakers across India, and not specifically aimed at these native speakers of Sanskrit. These movies are based on traditional stories and themes. There are some news telecasts on radio and TV (in Sanskrit), broadcast across the country.&#xA;Given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;their motivations to adopt Sanskrit,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how recently the efforts began,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how far-apart these towns and villages are from each other,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;availability and themes of media in Sanskrit, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the intended audience of the media,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how this kind of a Sanskrit can be an evolving language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I have interacted with just one native speaker of Sanskrit, but that was over 15 years ago. He spoke just Sanskrit, I spoke no Sanskrit. Therefore, I cannot have first-hand information about the state of Sanskrit in these places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T22:14:24.863" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T22:30:30.630" Score="28" ViewCount="14254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romanian is a romance language like Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish so much of its core vocabulary is derived from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then even in core vocabulary does Romanian so often seem to be based on different Latin roots than its sister languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to go &lt;em&gt;a merge&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;mergere&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catalan: &lt;em&gt;anar&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;ambulāre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: &lt;em&gt;aller&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;ambulāre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian: &lt;em&gt;andare&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;ambulāre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese: &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;īre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;īre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this perhaps a false impression I get just because these words stand out more? I'll add some more examples if I remember some. (I'm not immersed in Romanian anymore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T10:39:09.793" Title="Why do so many core Romanian words with Latin roots come from different roots than in the other Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="350" CreationDate="2011-09-21T22:40:13.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Statistical approaches certainly produce better results on certain standardized tests for languages and language pairs where there is a lot of data. Statistical approaches are less successful for languages and language pairs where there are not huge corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also depends if your goal is to do better machine translation or to better understand language in a psychologically plausible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember going to an ACL/COLING conference after being away from linguistics for over a decade and being shocked to discover all these people boasting about the f-scores they achieved &quot;without using any linguistic knowledge&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="165" LastEditDate="2011-09-21T23:27:37.800" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T23:27:37.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-21T22:41:34.470" Score="8" ViewCount="6430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Czech has special sound which to me seems to be a voiced trilled r. It is written as &quot;ř&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia describes it a different way&lt;/a&gt;: A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_alveolar_trill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;raised alveolar trill&lt;/a&gt;, and uses the IPA notation [r̝].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czech speakers always seem to tell me that it's unique and that foreigners can never pronounce it. I actually can pronounce it though I have trouble with lots of other language sounds so for me it doesn't feel so exotic or difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this a case of language pride or is Czech really the only language with this sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T03:30:03.847" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T23:22:59.073" Title="Is the sound &quot;ř&quot; unique to Czech?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;trills&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="393" CreationDate="2011-09-21T22:51:42.913" Score="35" ViewCount="3083" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to spatial deixis most languages seem to have either two or three distinctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;2        | 3&#xA;English  | Spanish      Japanese&#xA;--------------------------------&#xA;here     | aquí / acá   koko&#xA;there    | ahí          soko&#xA;(yonder) | allá / allí  asoko&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages with distinctions other than these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T19:28:27.187" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T19:28:27.187" Title="Are there languages with other spatial deixis besides &quot;here&quot;, &quot;there&quot; and &quot;over there&quot;?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;deixis&gt;" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="419" CreationDate="2011-09-21T23:02:46.033" Score="15" ViewCount="2268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall hearing and reading that certain Slavic languages including Czech treat animate nouns as something like an extra gender. Even Wikipedia in some places counts more than three genders for some Slavic languages (or used to, I will have to check for the current state of play).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance here is one such quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender&quot;&gt;from Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the case or is it more complex than that? I think I've heard it described as having three and a half genders too. How is this like and unlike gender and is it sometimes described as being another gender outside linguistics circles or do I have even that wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that I'm specifically asking about nouns so please don't submit answers about pronouns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T12:54:56.573" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T12:54:56.573" Title="Do some Slavic languages have an &quot;extra&quot; gender distinction for animate nouns?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;czech&gt;&lt;animacy&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2011-09-21T23:27:20.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has these two factoids; they are tagged &quot;citation needed&quot; but could be avenues of investigation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This sound occurred historically in Polish, where it was written &quot;rz&quot;, but it has since merged with &quot;ż&quot; [ʐ].  This sound is also used in local pronunciation of Spanish &quot;rr&quot; in region of Ibarra in Ecuador.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alveolar_trill#Raised_alveolar_non-sonorant_trill&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-21T23:27:20.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="530" CreationDate="2011-09-21T23:48:09.800" Score="14" ViewCount="6670" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll be going back to the Republic of Georgia pretty soon and will try to learn the famously difficult language but last time I was there I couldn't distinguish or reproduce the ejectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody understood me anyway but I'd really like to nail them. It will also help my spelling because I can't remember which letter is for which sound when it comes to those with ejective variants. My Georgian and Armenian friends couldn't even understand how such completely different sounds could be confused by anybody (-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody in an earlier question gave what I thought was a very good guide for how to pronounce another sound in another language (I'll add the link when I find it) so I'm hoping somebody can do the same for these tricky sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian has ejective versions of the stops &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt;; and affricates &lt;code&gt;ts&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt; each of which contrast with two other similar consonants plus an ejective stop &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; which doesn't have any counterparts to contrast with so I usually get away with my bad attempt at an Arabic 'ayn which I believe is pronounced in the same place but is not ejective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-18T07:30:44.283" LastActivityDate="2011-12-18T07:30:44.283" Title="Can you give me some tips on how to pronounce ejective consonants?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2011-09-21T23:57:09.413" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been told that my attempts at ejectives are a little stronger than what happens in natural running speech, but my first approach at practicing ejectives went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hold your breath.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While still holding your breath, try to say the sound (stops are easy to start with) in isolation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're holding your breath (not using pulmonary air flow), then when you try to say &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, you should naturally compensate by raising your glottis to create the requisite pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I'd suggest experimenting, by holding your breath, and building pressure for a &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; without releasing it. Through this experimentation, you should get a good feeling about what muscles are involved in generating the ejectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final step is to practice doing them in running speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T13:22:59.610" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:22:59.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="362" CreationDate="2011-09-22T00:29:01.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two such arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cinque separates epistemic and &quot;root&quot; (= circumstantial and deontic) modality, based on the positioning of certain adverbs, which he argues are associated with functional heads.  (1999 &lt;em&gt;Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective&lt;/em&gt;, Oxford University Press)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Von Fintel and Iatridou find that epistemic and deontic modals have different scopal properties.  (2003 &lt;a href=&quot;http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2003-ec.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epistemic Containment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the essence of the hydrangeas case is not temporal.  Modal semantics are understood (especially by Kratzer, one of the architects of this theory) in terms of possible worlds.  It is possible to understand tense also via possible worlds, but this is orthogonal to what is going on with the hydrangeas.  Look into some of Kratzer's work on ordering sources to unpack the nuances of the modal interpretations further.  (I can give a reference if you want; I don't have that paper in front of me now and Google is not being helpful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T00:29:01.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T00:33:55.623" Score="16" ViewCount="1204" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments of another &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/379/do-some-slavic-languages-have-an-extra-gender-distinction-for-animate-nouns&quot;&gt;question about animate as noun gender in some Slavic languages&lt;/a&gt; an interesting point was raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many if not most Indo European languages exhibit grammatical gender for nouns. Also it's known that for many other languages there is a broader realm of &quot;noun classes&quot;, certainly in African and Australian languages and the related concept of &quot;counter words&quot; common in East and Southeast Asian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are there languages in the Indo European family which exhibit noun classes in the broader sense rather than just grammatical genders? (I'd like some references rather than just speculation please, and please only submit answers about nouns and not pronouns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one complicating factor &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as mentioned in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some authors use the term &quot;grammatical gender&quot; as a synonym of &quot;noun class&quot;, but others use different definitions for each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have read a noun class, like a gender would be an attribute of each word at the lexical level and not dependent on semantics, syntax, usage, etc. This is what makes noun classes distinct from classifiers if I am not wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T08:05:17.870" Title="Do any Indo European languages reflect noun class types other than gender?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="485" CreationDate="2011-09-22T00:51:55.507" Score="13" ViewCount="2332" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's generally accepted that languages go through a cycle of changes to their morphological type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is losing its inflectional endings and becoming more isolating/analytic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the big well known isolating/analytic languages, are any of them showing signs of moving to the next stage in the cycle? Adopting something like endings that might be counted as agglutination or inflection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Thai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some research about this or is it maybe that changes at this point in the cycle are not so easy to spot as the changes happening at the point in the cycle where English lies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T01:53:06.053" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T01:53:06.053" Title="Are any of the isolating languages of East Asia showing signs of gaining inflections?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2011-09-22T01:05:59.980" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the same answer that was provided in the previous question applies here. Several Slavic languages have an animate/inanimate distinction in addition to masculine/feminine/neuter. In some languages, only certain combinations are permissible - for example, Russian only distinguishes between animate and inanimate in the masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also been hypothesized that Proto-Indo-European possessed only an animacy distinction, with masculine/feminine developing out of the animate class of nouns and the inanimates becoming neuter. This idea appears to originate from Meillet (1926), and was further developed by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1973, 1984).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamkrelidze, T.V. &amp;amp; Ivanov, V.V. (1973). &quot;Sprachtypologie und die Rekonstruktion der gemeinindogermanischen Verschlüsse&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Phonetica&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;27&lt;/strong&gt;. 150-156.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamkrelidze, T.V. &amp;amp; Ivanov, V.V. (1984). &quot;Indoevropejskij jazyk i indoevropejcy&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Rekonstrukcija i istoriko-tipologicheskij analiz prajazyka i protokul'tury&lt;/em&gt;. Tbilisi: IzdatePstvo Tbilisskogo Universiteta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meillet, A. (1926). &lt;em&gt;Linguistique Historique et Linguistique Generale&lt;/em&gt;. Honore Champion, Paris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T01:05:59.980" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T01:07:48.217" Score="13" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even relatively closely related languages can differ greatly in word order. Take English and German for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is pretty boringly subject-verb-object whereas in German the finite verb must come second, all other verbs go to the end, and separable prefixes also all go to the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to machine translation lore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/98501/who-said-every-time-i-fire-a-linguist-my-system-improves-about-machine-translat&quot;&gt;the systems work better in inverse proportion to the number of linguists in the project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given a complete lack of understanding of the source language how do machine translation systems manage these different word orders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they actually have to know some linguistics after all and hence are not so pure as touted? Or do they actually do worse that touted under these conditions. Or are there statistical methods that somehow take into account even word ordering differences without recourse to linguistic knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T01:48:00.983" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T01:48:00.983" Title="How do purely statistical machine translators deal with different word orders?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2011-09-22T02:32:12.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Spanish has a construction (called &lt;em&gt;a personal&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish) that (in some dialects) has an animacy requirement.  This involves the insertion of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; (homophonous with the preposition translated &quot;to&quot;; whether it is a preposition in this context is debatable) before a direct object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  He     visto a Maria&#xA;    *He     visto   Maria&#xA;     I.have seen  A M.&#xA;&#xA;(2) *He     visto a la  mesa&#xA;     He     visto   la  mesa&#xA;     I.have seen  A the table&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The judgments given correspond to most but not all dialects of Spanish.  Whether a non-human living being gets &lt;em&gt;a personal&lt;/em&gt; is, as I understand, a particular locus of dialect and speaker variation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course orthogonal to gender, which is marked in the usual Romance way on nouns, adjectives, determiners and pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T02:32:12.347" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T03:43:05.150" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T03:43:05.150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T03:43:05.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T03:43:05.150" Score="0" Body="Branch of the Indo-European language family including all languages descended from Latin, such as French, Spanish and Italian." OwnerUserId="242" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T18:16:08.870" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T18:16:08.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2011-09-22T05:46:03.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When ğ is between back vowels: &quot;provides a smooth transition between vowels, since they do not occur consecutively in native Turkish word&quot;. (wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;code&gt;â&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ağa&lt;/code&gt; - they denote different historical evolution rather than different lengths. The soft g has, at some point, existed as a separate sound between vowels. For example in Turkmen (another language of the same group) the word for &quot;onion&quot; is &quot;sogan&quot;. Loanwords in other languages, like Bulgarian or Bulgarian dialects also have the g - &quot;sugan&quot; for &quot;onion&quot;. On the other hand &lt;code&gt;â&lt;/code&gt; is used only for load words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T06:03:49.630" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T06:03:49.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="422" CreationDate="2011-09-22T06:05:58.737" Score="8" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language change and the evolution of languages can be seen as an evolutionary process. Human brains form the environment that constrains language. Language acquisition provides the replication, recombination, and mutation for language. Thus, the whole process is a social transmission or evolution, but with specific constraints from the biology of the brain. Thus, it shares much in common with biological evolution, but also a lot in common with standard meme-theoretic social evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What theories of the change and evolution of language has been studied? How complete and well understood is the &amp;quot;phylogenetic tree&amp;quot; of languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not targeting this question at the evolution of language (note the singular). I.e. I am not interested in how language faculties first appeared in ancestors of humans. I am interested in the change of languages since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not that interested in the sort of micro-evolution of small changes in a specific language except in how it applies as a mechanism of mutation, recombination, or other form of novelty-provision within the longer-period of evolution of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific references to the literature are preferred, but general summaries of trends that I can then use Google Scholar to follow are also fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the goals of this question is to look at both sides. On the one hand, understanding what models most resemble evolution of languages can give us insight into linguistics. On the other hand, insights from linguistics can provide us with a model with which to gain more insight about evolutionary processes (not all evolutionary process need be biological evolution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T15:10:06.357" Title="What evolution framework best describes the change between languages over time?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2011-09-22T07:36:56.540" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malagasy_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malagasy language&lt;/a&gt; for example, national language of Madagascar, has a complex system of deixis with seven degrees of distance. Here's the tab taken from the Deixis section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1iZe5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malagasy_language#Deixis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Notes: &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; Diacritics in deixis are not mandatory in Malagasy; &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; Deixis marked by a * are rarely used.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the Malagasy deixis, you could read &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=5i1aMcmLWlMC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by K. Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelmann (see page 470).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that also the Dyirbal language (Australian family; North Queensland) has 15 suffixes that attach to demonstratives or to the noun classifiers, using a system that takes into consideration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;distance&lt;/em&gt; (short, medium, distant);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;counter-current direction&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;current direction of the river&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;direction towards the top or base of a hill&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;vertical movement towards the bottom or the top&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I couldn't find anything schematic about this one yet. But you can find more about it and others in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum.uit.no/mra/SemSumms/V06/March14.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T22:27:31.683" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T22:27:31.683" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T08:48:42.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I understood of the model proposed by Hanson &amp;amp; Stevens 2000, variation in stop VOT by place of articulation is a consequence of the cross-sectional area formed by articulators. There is a plateau in area before vowel onset during which frication occurs. This plateau duration is proportional to anterior-posterior length of the contact region (longer for velars, shorter for labials), and as a result VOT varies by place. Here is the link to the article [&lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.mit.edu:8443/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64959/hanson_asa_spring_2000_poster_scan.pdf?sequence=1&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastEditorUserId="243" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T09:03:46.617" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T09:03:46.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T09:54:53.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some well-known language families are&#xA;Algonquian, Athabaskan, Austronesian, Bantu,&#xA;Cushitic,&#xA;Dravidian,&#xA;Indo-European,&#xA;Mayan,&#xA;Otomanguean, Pama-Nyungan, Salishan, Semitic,&#xA;Sino-Tibetan, Siouan, Tai, Tupian, Turkic, Uralic and&#xA;Uto-Aztecan. There are some 300 independent language&#xA;families (or genetic units, which include both families of&#xA;languages and language isolates) in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language families can be of different magnitudes, so&#xA;that some larger-scale families may include smaller-scale&#xA;families among their subgroups or branches. The term&#xA;‘subgroup’ (also subfamily, branch) refers to a group&#xA;of languages within a language family that are more&#xA;closely related to each other than to other languages of&#xA;that family – a subgroup is a branch of a family. As&#xA;a proto-language (for example, Proto-Indo-European)&#xA;diversifies, it develops daughter languages (such as&#xA;Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic); if a daughter (say Proto-Germanic) subsequently splits up itself and develops&#xA;daughter languages of its own (English, German etc.)&#xA;they then constitute members of a subgroup (the&#xA;Germanic languages), and the original daughter&#xA;language (Proto-Germanic) becomes an &lt;em&gt;intermediate&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;proto-language, occupying the roles of both parent&#xA;and descendant. Germanic, while a language family in&#xA;its own right, is at the same time a &lt;em&gt;subfamily&lt;/em&gt; (subgroup)&#xA;of the broader, higher-order Indo-European family of&#xA;which it is a branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language family names often end in the suffix &lt;em&gt;–an&lt;/em&gt; (as&#xA;for example, Indo-European, Dravidian etc.). Some end&#xA;in &lt;em&gt;-ic&lt;/em&gt; (as in Cushitic, Turkic, Uralic [called Uralian by&#xA;some] etc.) Such suffixes are helpful, since some language&#xA;families are named for a prominent language in the&#xA;family and without the suffix it would be difficult to&#xA;distinguish the whole family from that single member&#xA;language; for example, Mayan is a family of some thirty-one languages, while Maya (or Yucatec Maya) is one of&#xA;the languages of this family; Tucano is a single language,&#xA;and Tucanoan is the family to which Tucano belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of terms for postulated but&#xA;unproven, more inclusive hypothesized language families, proposed distant genetic relationships): stock,&#xA;phylum and the compounding element ‘macro-’ (as in&#xA;Macro-Penutian, Macro-Siouan etc.). The proposed&#xA;distant genetic relationships are much debated. Some&#xA;scholars employ ‘stock’ or ‘phylum’ in the sense of a&#xA;language family that is large enough to include well-defined or older subfamilies; however, this usage is often&#xA;confused with the more common employment of these&#xA;terms for undemonstrated hypotheses of remote linguistic affiliation, making the use of these terms controversial and often confusing. See also classification of&#xA;languages, macro-family, subgrouping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0874808936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Glossary of Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:52:36.077" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:52:36.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="396" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T09:54:53.057" Score="0" Body="Groupings of languages which can all be traced back to a common ancestor language they evolved from, for instance the Romance languages are all descended from Latin." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T13:23:27.010" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:23:27.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:02:11.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymology helps understanding the historical development of word forms and meanings, it does not define the current meaning of a word. This phenomenon is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymological fallacy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of etymology resources online, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. Those are helpful in answering single word etymologies. Use them before asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-24T23:36:53.037" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T23:36:53.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:02:11.707" Score="0" Body="The study of the history of words including their origins and the changes they've undergone through time." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:45:40.283" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:45:40.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:07:59.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T10:07:59.407" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T10:07:59.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:07:59.407" Score="0" Body="Those speech sounds made with open, unrestricted vocal tracts, in contrast to consonants." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:52:44.407" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:52:44.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:16:01.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T10:16:01.300" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T10:16:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:16:01.300" Score="0" Body="A Slavic language, national language of the Czech Republic which is mutually intelligible with Slovak." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:52:48.150" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:52:48.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:17:58.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional definition of a creole is a language&#xA;descended from a pidgin that has become the native&#xA;language of a group of people – a creole is a pidgin that&#xA;has acquired native speakers, often when individuals&#xA;who have only the pidgin language in common marry&#xA;and their children grow up with the pidgin as their&#xA;primary means of communication. In this view, the&#xA;creole differs from the pidgin from which it originated in&#xA;having a relatively stable though growing grammar with&#xA;a lexicon, a phonology and an emergent morphology.&#xA;Many creoles have been noted to have several structural&#xA;attributes in common, regardless of the languages lying&#xA;behind the pidgins from which they arose. Some scholars&#xA;attempt to explain this by claiming that these creoles are&#xA;the closest languages to an assumed innate universal&#xA;grammar or &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Roots_of_language.html?id=rthrAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bio-program underlying all human language&lt;/a&gt;. Others have sought the explanation in&#xA;the common European language roots, Portuguese,&#xA;Dutch, French and English underlying most pidgins and&#xA;creoles. Unlike languages with standard transmission&#xA;histories, creoles are sometimes claimed to have no&#xA;genetic classification – they are assumed not to arise&#xA;as other languages do – or are claimed to have multiple&#xA;ancestors, often based on a European language with&#xA;further input from the native languages of the indigenous population in contact with Europeans that gave&#xA;rise to the underlying pidgins. Another, more recent,&#xA;view, however, is that creoles have each a single ancestor:&#xA;the language of the founder population (usually the&#xA;dominant European language) that predominates in the&#xA;development and content of the creole language. This&#xA;means creoles can be classified genetically, just as other&#xA;languages, and need not be seen as mixed or having&#xA;multiple ancestors. Haitian Creole is, in this view, a&#xA;Romance language closely connected with French,&#xA;Jamaican Creole a Germanic language closely related to&#xA;English and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0874808936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Glossary of Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:52:43.097" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:52:43.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:17:58.613" Score="0" Body="Fully functional languages which have evolved from simple pidgins by being adopted as native languages." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:52:51.553" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:52:51.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:29:31.083" Score="19" ViewCount="649" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a child is first learning a language in a bilingual environment, is it easier or harder to properly acquire the two distinct languages if they are more similar? For example, is it easier for a child to learn Italian and Spanish growing up in an Italian-Spanish household or English and Japanese growing up in English-Japanese household?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four cases are possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Easier] It might be that similar languages require similar vowels, grammar, and/or vocabulary (or many other factors, the specifics don't matter) and thus are easier to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Harder] if the languages are close, it might be harder for the child to learn to distinguish them and thus they might develop a mixed-language instead of learning the two separate languages. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Same] It could be that children's early language adoption is so robust that there is no statistical difference between the two categories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Mid] There might be a sweet-spot where the language are distinct enough to not be confusing to the child, but similar enough to allow recycling of learning. If you pick more similar or less similar languages than this sweep-spot then the acquisition deteriorates. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the case of children is different from adults (i.e. if similar languages are not easier for them) then why is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="33" LastEditDate="2013-01-21T20:28:44.087" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:40:20.197" Title="Are similar languages easier for children to acquire than dissimilar ones?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="406" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:46:15.843" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T10:46:15.843" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T10:46:15.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:46:15.843" Score="0" Body="What the body (mouth, throat, nose, lungs) does to pronounce a sound or 'phone'. Se also phonetics." OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:52:56.170" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:52:56.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:51:15.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;linguistic typology&lt;/strong&gt; may refer to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A classification of structural types across languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The study of patterns that occur systematically across languages, also called typological generalization. The classical example of typological universal is the implicational universal. An example of an implicational universal is the generalization, 'if the demonstrative follows the head noun, then the relative clause also follows the head noun'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T01:04:18.510" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T01:04:18.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T10:51:15.413" Score="0" Body="The study of structural features, diversity and commonalities among the world's languages." OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T18:47:40.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T18:47:40.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2011-09-22T11:11:46.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you practice what @JoFrhwld is saying, do the finger-trick: put a finger close to the lips and say [b] [p] [p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;] [p']. Expect just about no tickly air on [b] and [p], lots of soft air on [p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;] and a very concentrated, short hard puff on [p'].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T11:11:46.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T11:18:57.633" Score="5" ViewCount="1175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you recommend some books on the connection between language features and (historical) features of the society or circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obvious examples: A homogeneous language without dialects would go with a centralized state and open geography. A language with a single form of address would go with a rather egalitarian society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-08T20:44:54.163" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T20:44:54.163" Title="Books on relationship between language and society / environment" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T11:23:08.157" Score="10" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has the rate of vocabulary change (that is, number of words falling out of use per decade, say) been found to be largely constant in human societies or does it strongly depend on circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If writing happens to be a major factor, has this rate been largely constant before the advent of writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2012-07-04T17:36:56.463" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T17:36:56.463" Title="Is the rate of vocabulary change more or less constant?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T12:30:50.947" Score="3" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently investigating the typology of subordination, or to be more precise adverbial subordination, and would like to see the data that the existing analyses, like for instance Cristofaro (2005) &lt;em&gt;Subordination&lt;/em&gt;, are based on. Is there already an existing, accessible collection of interlinear glosses or must I keep on hunting down reference-grammars? Primarily examples of non-Indo European languages are of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T23:58:26.473" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T23:58:26.473" Title="Is there a database of interlinear glosses of subordination-examples?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T13:10:00.213" Score="12" ViewCount="1654" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tools for working with BNF grammars are a little more discoverable (ANTLR, Gold, etc) and usable than for other types of grammars. What sort of sentences can't be represented with ordinary BNF grammar rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T02:14:26.350" Title="What is an example of a syntactic structure that can't be represented by a BNF grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2011-09-22T13:25:07.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inuktitut is also a language with deixis encoding things such as visible/nonvisible and &quot;up there&quot; as opposed to simply &quot;there, over there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="248" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:25:07.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2011-09-22T13:30:06.853" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm shocked to see that no-one has mentioned Chinese. Chinese has undergone some severe sound changes going from Middle Chinese to modern Mandarin. There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den&quot;&gt;a famous poem&lt;/a&gt; constructed in Classical Chinese so that when pronounced in Mandarin, all the words are [ʂʐ̩], with varying tones. The Wikipedia page linked to also gives pronunciations in the other varieties of Chinese; the number of syllables distinguished in Cantonese is closest to the number distinguished in Middle Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how has Chinese coped in the face of such homophony? Well, in Mandarin, one notices that there are more polysyllabic common words than in other dialects (or, indeed, Classical Chinese): homophonous monosyllabic words were replaced by compound words in order to disambiguate. For example, the word for ‘tooth’ in Mandarin is 牙齒 [ja˧˥tʂʰʐ̩˨˩˦], ostensibly a compound of 牙 (‘tooth’) and 齒 (‘tooth’); in Cantonese, the word is just 牙 [ŋɐː˧˩]. This happens in English too, as JSBᾶngs points out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T13:30:06.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-09-22T13:30:41.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll consider Russian because it's the one I know better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian language has the animate/inanimate distinction, but it's rather a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;noun category&lt;/a&gt; than another gender. Russian has only &lt;strong&gt;3 genders&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Masculine, feminine and neuter&lt;/em&gt;. Such distinction affects the nouns' inflection when they are &lt;em&gt;in the accusative case&lt;/em&gt;. The nouns, in this situation, follow this scheme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'll only treat about the accusative singular&lt;/em&gt; (Otherwise the answer gets too long):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nXSeU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;masculine&lt;/strong&gt; is the only one that has actual changes concerning the animate/inanimate:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Animate: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Студент -&gt; Студент&lt;b&gt;А&lt;/b&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Student&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Учител&lt;b&gt;ь&lt;/b&gt; -&gt; Учител&lt;b&gt;Я&lt;/b&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Teacher&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Inanimate:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Дом -&gt; Дом &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;House&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Музей -&gt; Музей &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Museum&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;feminine&lt;/strong&gt; goes to the accusative:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Машин&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; -&gt; Машин&lt;b&gt;У&lt;/b&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Car&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Тёт&lt;b&gt;я&lt;/b&gt; -&gt; Тёт&lt;b&gt;Ю&lt;/b&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Aunt&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;em&gt;but it has an exception for nouns ending with -ь&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Мать -&gt; Мать &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Mother&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;neuter&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't change:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Окно -&gt; Окно &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Window&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Море -&gt; Море &lt;sub&gt;(= &lt;em&gt;Sea&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure this is what you were looking for, but I hope it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T15:35:38.430" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T15:35:38.430" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2011-09-22T14:03:37.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading in a book Eskimo-Aleut languages that the author disagreed with the concept of phonemes and allophones. He said (about Greenlandic; my translation from the German):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under certain conditions only [f x χ ɬ], under others, only [v ɣ ʁ l]. These conditions are the quantity. &lt;em&gt;[Summary of the remainder of the paragraph: the former only occur long, the latter only short. -PN]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are linguists who would not simply describe this fact and leave it at that. In a &lt;em&gt;functionalistic&lt;/em&gt; analysis, they would combine those sounds to four units called &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;: they would combine [f] and [v], [x] and [ɣ], [χ] and [ʁ], and [ɬ] and [l]; and one would come up with labels for the phonemes such as /f x χ ɬ/ or /v ɣ ʁ l/. The situation where one phoneme corresponds to a number of different sounds is then called &lt;em&gt;allophony&lt;/em&gt;. The really interesting question, however, is what the point of the concept of allophony is. There are some notes on this in Holst (2001: 38, 48f.), but they are not particularly numerous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Functionalists start from the presupposition that languages are composed of units of sound whose differences distinguish meaning. For example, the German words &lt;em&gt;Paß&lt;/em&gt; [pas] and &lt;em&gt;Baß&lt;/em&gt; [bas] have two separate units in their respective onsets which determine the meaning difference between the two words. There are, however, cases where differences of sound cannot make a difference in meaning, because the language system &lt;em&gt;[what I would call the phonology, PN]&lt;/em&gt; regulates which sound appears where. For example, in German, the sound [x] only appears after back vowels and [ç] appears in other positions. This is a complementary distribution. The situation with Greenlandic [f] and [v], etc., is another example. When functionalists encounter such cases, they deny that those sounds are individual units of the respective language, say that this is a case of allophony, and combine the two (or more) sounds to a single phoneme. This course of action is, however, absurd. Afundamental trait of science is that it is &lt;em&gt;empirically&lt;/em&gt; founded: observations are made and then conclusions are drawn. If one observes, for example, that German [x] and [ç] are in complementary distribution, then one may and should state this, but one may not reinterpret the data. The basic assumption of functionalism, which was stated at the beginning of this paragraph, is incorrect: languages are simply &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; composed of units of sounds, the distinctions between which always cause differences in meaning. One encounters the truth of this statement empirically again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has to be stated clearly: the concept of allophony is pure nonsense. Such combining of sounds are not legitimate in a scientific treatment of language and should therefore be refrained from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Jan Henrik Holst, &lt;em&gt;Einführung in die eskimo-aleutischen Sprachen&lt;/em&gt;, Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg 2005. ISBN 3-87548-386-3. Pages 39f. Notes in &lt;em&gt;[italics and square brackets]&lt;/em&gt; are mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="248" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T14:03:37.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-09-22T14:19:53.873" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Amended&lt;/strong&gt; per comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAICT, in Czech, the animate/inanimate distinction is considered as a kind of “sub-gender” specification for the masculine gender. Usually you need to distinguish only m/f/n, but in a few cases, the masculine gender needs to be differentiated to animate/inanimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Masculine animate nouns have the singular accusative different from the singular nominative (e.g. &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;: nom &lt;em&gt;muž&lt;/em&gt;, acc &lt;em&gt;muže&lt;/em&gt;) while inanimate nouns have accusative identical to nominative (e.g. &lt;em&gt;castle&lt;/em&gt;: nom &lt;em&gt;hrad&lt;/em&gt;, acc &lt;em&gt;hrad&lt;/em&gt;). This is the difference native speakers use to recognize noun animacy (and choose the correct &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;declension paradigm&lt;/a&gt;). Furthermore, there are differences in singular dative and locative (e.g. &lt;em&gt;mužovi&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;hradu&lt;/em&gt;), and plural nominative (e.g. &lt;em&gt;muži&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;hrady&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important aspect affected by animacy is the third-person plural past verb form: the inanimate nouns are treated almost like feminines, e.g. &lt;em&gt;muži byl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (“men were”), while &lt;em&gt;hrady byl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (similarily to &lt;em&gt;ženy byly&lt;/em&gt; = “women were”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have four declension paradigms for animate masculine nouns and two for inanimate masculine nouns, however, they are usually listed together and mixed (“pán, hrad, muž, stroj, předseda, soudce”, where &lt;em&gt;hrad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stroj&lt;/em&gt; are those inanimate). So, in general usage, the animacy is definitely not on the same level of importance as gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the “assignment” of animacy to nouns, it is generally true that animate nouns correspond to live beings, while abstract concepts and non-living entities correspond to inanimate nouns. But there are exceptions to this rule. Plants (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;strom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; = tree) and collective nouns (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hmyz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hmyz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; = insect) are inanimate, and a non-living, yet human-like snowman (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sn%C4%9Bhul%C3%A1k&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sněhulák&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), or a by-definition-deceased &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nebo%C5%BEt%C3%ADk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;nebožtík&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have several classes of nouns which may be used either as animate or inanimate. Some of them according to the speaker’s style choice: Nouns ending with &lt;em&gt;-tel&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ec&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ledoborec&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ledoborec&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; = icebreaker) can use &lt;em&gt;ledoborci vypluli&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;ledoborce vypluly&lt;/em&gt; (choosing the noun variant and then the corresponding verb inflection), similarly with a few other small sets of nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are nouns which are animate or inanimate according to the specific real-world meaning, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sb%C4%9Bra%C4%8D&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sběrač&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which might mean a gatherer (a person gathering something), or a pantograph (a device collecting something), and according to the meaning, it is animate (“sběrači měli plné košíky” – “gatherers had their baskets full”), or inanimate (“sběrače měly poruchu” = “collectors were broken”). An interesting word in this regard is &lt;em&gt;robot&lt;/em&gt; (you might be aware that it is originally Czech, invented by Josef Čapek for his brother’s theatrical play R.U.R.): it might be either animate (humanoid, intelligent robots), or inanimate (dumb machines, e.g. a kitchen robot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some nouns, you can also use animate declension expressively, e.g. (“dám si ruma” = “I’ll have a rum”, even though &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rum#Czech&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;rum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is normally inanimate, so “dám si rum” is the basic usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T19:49:14.550" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T19:49:14.550" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2011-09-22T15:10:45.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edward Sapir's classic paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucalgary.ca/dflynn/files/dflynn/Sapir33.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Psychological Reality of Phonemes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; argues that the phoneme (as opposed to the phone, an object properly in the domain of phonetics) is necessary to understand phonological systems. More recently, probably beginning with Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle's &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;, phonemes were `decomposed' into bundles of features that can be the target of phonological rules. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the wiki page&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chomsky and Halle represent speech sounds as bundles of plus-or-minus &#xA;  valued features (e.g. vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, etc..) The &#xA;  phonological component of each lexical entry is considered to be a &#xA;  linear sequence of these feature bundles. A number of context-sensitive&#xA;  rules transform the underlying form of a sequence of words into the &#xA;  final phonetic form that is uttered by the speaker. These rules are &#xA;  allowed access to the tree structure that the syntax is said to output. &#xA;  This access allows rules that apply, for example, only at the end of a &#xA;  word, or only at the end of a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware (though I am no phonologist), there is not much of a debate within rule-based phonology about the status of the phoneme (or, the feature bundle it `names') as a theoretical necessity. Outside of rule-based phonology, I'm not sure the issue is treated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-09T09:39:05.780" LastActivityDate="2011-10-09T09:39:05.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2011-09-22T15:39:26.003" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of talking about words falling out of use, how about we talk about &quot;cognate replacement&quot; (there's a good search term for you).  So, in English, we say &lt;em&gt;to walk&lt;/em&gt; and in Italian they say &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt;. These two words have very different histories, so we'd call them different cognates. In English, we have a less commonly used verb &lt;em&gt;to ambulate&lt;/em&gt;, which is cognate with Italian &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's take two more closely related languages, Italian and French. Italian's word for &quot;to walk&quot; is &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt;, and in French it's &lt;em&gt;marcher&lt;/em&gt;. These two language are both descendent from Latin, which used &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;to walk&quot;. So at some point, French replaced its word for &quot;to walk&quot; with another, historically unrelated word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this kind of cognate replacement happens at a constant rate is, I think, a rather controversial question in Historical Linguistics. It is at least as controversial as whether or not genetic mutations happen at a constant rate.  There is at least one paper which argues that frequent words undergo cognate replacement at a slower rate than other words, namely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/full/nature06176.html&quot;&gt;Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history&lt;/a&gt;.  I haven't read the paper closely myself, but note that 1) It's published in Nature, which has a bad reputation as far as language oriented papers go, and 2) None of the authors are linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for societal differences, I know of no hard data, but I would suspect that a well regulated literary culture would slow down cognate replacement, and that high rates of language contact/bilingualism would speed it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-29T00:41:04.310" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T00:41:04.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2011-09-22T15:49:12.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would take a look at some of Charles Yang's work, especially &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/klnl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of language change can be adequately modeled as genetic competition. For grammatical parameter X, there are competing variants &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;. These two variants have different fitness profiles, so one eventually replaces the other. This model works, fits the data well, and allows us to make interesting inferences and arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a detailed model of inheritance, the world is very tricky. In biological inheritance, an organism has at most 2 parents. However, in linguistic inheritance, the &quot;genotype&quot; of your parents is often less important to your own genotype. Rather, there is some kind of aggregate inheritance from your community at large. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T16:10:37.487" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T16:10:37.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T16:50:36.933" Score="20" ViewCount="1146" Body="&lt;p&gt;People on the street bandy about words like &quot;fluent&quot;, &quot;knows French&quot;, &quot;speaks broken French&quot; as if it all means something. How do linguists determine if a speaker is competent and what taxonomy do they use to separate those who are remarkably fluent from those at various degrees of being less so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine this has application in language acquisition and in the documenting of language death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-04-01T12:41:16.117" LastActivityDate="2012-04-01T12:41:16.117" Title="What method do linguists use to rate language competence?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2011-09-22T16:53:35.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the superficial analogies, both at the large scale descriptive level (languages tend to bunch together in a tree-like fashion) and at the very theoretical level ('information' transfer over a 'noisy' channel), the mechanisms of language change are radically different from speciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two languages, no matter how far apart, can be combined by a younger generation into a pidgin/creole that becomes a rich viable language incomprehensible to its 'parents'. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One language can become the source for vocabulary and the other for grammar. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages that started off from very different sources can become closer by proximity (via Sprachbunds, like the Balkan Languages). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing like DNA recombination in language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no 'natural' selection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sex and death, two primary parts of the mechanism of biological evolution of languages, hardly correspond with the obvious language versions (overlapping speech language communities and extinction respectively).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is no analogous competition for resources or mates in language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are no 'niches' filled by lack of competition in language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand one analogy that does supply change is the concept 'mutation', which for biological speciation comes from molecular transcription errors in DNA; in language it comes from aural distortions, production errors, and mental processing mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said, the major differences are that the mechanisms of change are very different (biology is about survival and reproduction, language is about either straightforward resolving noisy channels or sociological acceptance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T16:53:35.270" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T17:06:07.957" Score="12" ViewCount="35890" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simultaneous bilingualism (or multilangualism) is when a child acquires two (or many) languages simultaneously, for example when they are raised by parents speaking more than one language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequential is when the child acquires the second language(s) after having considerably learnt the first language, for example when the parental tongue is different than the main language of the community or education system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that these two will result in different types of bilingual. How will they differ? Which one will become better speaker of the two languages, assuming both languages are acquired during the critical age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T14:28:26.870" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T21:34:23.793" Title="Simultaneous bilingualism vs Sequential bilingualism" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-22T17:12:33.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T17:12:33.403" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T17:12:33.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-22T17:12:33.403" Score="0" Body="The acquisition or learning of two or more languages, in childhood or adulthood." OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T00:37:29.807" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T00:37:29.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2011-09-22T17:50:12.630" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Competency in a language would be judged on ability to communicate ideas effectively.  There are several areas one can look at for something like this, like if the speaker's phonology is the same as a native speaker, or if the speaker has a lexical command equivalent to a native speaker.  Fluency could be looked at too, but one can be non-fluent in a language and still have near-native command of a language.  This is because fluency is actually just referring to the ability of a speaker to speak at a constant rate without having to pause to think of vocabulary or how to phrase something grammatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T17:50:12.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2011-09-22T18:07:35.883" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;First comes research, of course. If it's an undocumented language, you learn about the languages that are potentially related or nearby it, as well as the culture of the people who speak it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So often the real issues of documenting a previously undocumented language are social or political, so in all likelihood there are many battles to fight before you'd ever actually study the language itself. A professor of mine had to meet with the tribal council of a Menominee res many times as they repeatedly changed their mind back and forth over whether she was welcome. And this was documenting a language the speakers of which literally only number in the double digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you're in good graces, learn the phrases for &quot;more slowly please&quot; or &quot;please repeat that.&quot; If you're really starting with nothing in common, I'd imagine you'd have to start with objects you can point to. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/intlinet/unijos/nigonnet/nlp/200words.pdf&quot;&gt;Here's a great word list to start with.&lt;/a&gt; (Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.globalizationpartners.com/when-there-are-no-words.aspx&quot;&gt;here's a lovely article&lt;/a&gt; on interacting with others when there's no language shared.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have the basics of the language down, being &lt;em&gt;prepared&lt;/em&gt; for your time with your subjects is very important. It helps you collect data you can actually use. Wanna know how the language handles plurals? Hold up one leaf, then hold up two. Hold up one rock, then hold up two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I hope there are completely undocumented languages out there for us to discover, I think most commonly field linguists these days are trying to document endangered and moribund languages, and that's an easier process because there is probably a younger generation that is bilingual who can interpret. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are all sorts of practical considerations too: obtaining permission from speakers to record them, what kind of technology you need to record them and analyze the data, etc. Also, invest in some Moleskine notebooks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to the language itself, I highly recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521588057&quot;&gt;Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists&lt;/a&gt;. It really is a handbook for the first time field linguist and walks through every item one should consider when documenting a language: the language's genetic affliations, sociolinguistic concerns, morphological typology, defining the grammatical categories of the language, constituent order typology, pragmatics of the language, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, it's a must for anyone making their own conlang.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T18:07:35.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="432" CreationDate="2011-09-22T18:30:51.487" Score="5" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding, there is no universal vocabulary across languages, which is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there must be words that have a both highly correlated meanings and levels of usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads to my question: what are the important concepts to account for in vocabulary comparisons across languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T10:21:55.957" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T10:21:55.957" Title="Vocabulary Comparisons Across Languages" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2011-09-22T19:45:12.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Mark's good answer above, when documenting endangered languages, it is also important to consider lexical entrenchment from another more dominant language. With endangered languages, the speakers in a community often use a plethora of foreign words, usually adapted phonologically to the target language. Therefore, you might factor a speakers native lexical knowledge into computing competency, especially when there are no native speakers who do not use foreign vocabulary as a metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="164" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T19:45:12.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="430" CreationDate="2011-09-22T19:50:27.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot;&gt;Swadesh List&lt;/a&gt; are an attempt at a vocabulary list along the lines you are talking about. The goal of such lists is to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;universal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;culturally independent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;available in most languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another criterion that might matter for some applications is how stable the item is; i.e. how unlikely is it to be a loan word from another language. But this was not a stated goal of the Swadesh list, I don't believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="165" LastEditDate="2011-09-22T21:05:10.513" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T21:05:10.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2011-09-22T21:07:38.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some standards, but they tend to be organization specific (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Proficiency_Tests&quot;&gt;DLPT&lt;/a&gt; for the US military, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale&quot;&gt;ILR&lt;/a&gt; for US Foreign Service Officials), or language specific (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html&quot;&gt;Japanese Language Proficiency Test&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what taxonomy do they use to separate those who are remarkably fluent from those at various degrees of being less so&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of JLPT, the lowest level test (N5) corresponds roughly to a first semester college course in Japanese. The next levels, N4, N3 and N2 correspond roughly to 1 year, 2-3 years and 3-4 years of university level study respectively. If you can pass N1, you can probably do well going to a university in Japan, or work in an office environment in Japan (where everyone else speaks Japanese). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Europe, you'll find the CERF&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) ratings on many people's CVs or résumés.  There are three levels with sub-levels within each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A. Basic Speaker&#xA; A1. Breakthrough or beginner&#xA; A2. Waystage or elementary&#xA;B. Independent Speaker&#xA; B1. Threshold or intermediate&#xA; B2. Vantage or upper intermediate&#xA;C. Proficient Speaker&#xA; C1. Effective Operational Proficiency or advanced&#xA; C2. Mastery or proficiency&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stealing shamelessly from wikipedia, here is a description of what is to be expected at each level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;level   description&#xA;A1  Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases&#xA;        aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce &#xA;        him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal &#xA;        details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things &#xA;        he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person &#xA;        talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.&#xA;A2  Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to &#xA;        areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family &#xA;        information, shopping, local geography, employment). Can communicate &#xA;        in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of &#xA;        information on familiar and routine matters. Can describe in simple &#xA;        terms aspects of his/her background, immediate environment and matters &#xA;        in areas of immediate need.&#xA;B1  Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar &#xA;        matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can &#xA;        deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an &#xA;        area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected &#xA;        text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can &#xA;        describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes &amp; ambitions and &#xA;        briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.&#xA;B2  Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete &#xA;        and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her &#xA;        field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency &#xA;        and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native &#xA;        speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can &#xA;        produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and &#xA;        explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages &#xA;        and disadvantages of various options.&#xA;C1  Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and &#xA;        recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently &#xA;        and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. &#xA;        Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic &#xA;        and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, &#xA;        detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of &#xA;        organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.&#xA;C2  Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. &#xA;        Can summarise information from different spoken and written &#xA;        sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent &#xA;        presentation. Can express him/herself spontaneously, very &#xA;        fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning &#xA;        even in the most complex situations.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastEditorUserId="259" LastEditDate="2011-10-09T04:22:00.013" LastActivityDate="2011-10-09T04:22:00.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2011-09-22T22:29:59.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends on what you include in your definition of &quot;grammatical gender.&quot; Let me esplain. No, there is too much; let me sum up: Grammatical gender or noun class is a grouping of nouns that are morphologically marked in the same way. What morphological changes do these words suffer when I want to say x? Gender is separate from case, though, which is the morphological markers that tell how a noun (and adjectives, et al) function in a sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you said, Polish has essentially five noun classes, but it's really three components that make up this grammatical gender: gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personhood (personal, non-personal) and animacy (animate, inanimate) -- but personhood and animacy only affect the masculine gender resulting in what looks like five noun classes, the ones listed in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;grammatical gender&quot; is not necessarily related to gender/sex in the real world -- and grammatical animacy does not always match real world animacy either. These terms are used only to designate classes of words that take certain inflections. Of course, there is usually a lot of semantic overlap between grammatical gender and real world sex and gender roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all in how you name things. For most Indo-European languages, I think it's easiest to group gender, personhood and animacy together into the idea of &quot;gender&quot; or &quot;noun class.&quot; In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;http://homer.members.pgv.at/INDOEURO/gender.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; hypothesize that PIE originally distinguished between animate and inanimate nouns, then the animate group distinguished between masculine and feminine. It explains the masculine/feminine/neuter paradigm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages address things like gender, animacy and personhood in different ways: Navajo uses word order to rank animacy of nouns in a sentence. Japanese uses a different existential/possessive verb for animate or inanimate nouns. Arabic marks gender on pronouns, which means in the 2nd person, the form changes depending on who you're speaking to. Animacy affects ergative languages in different ways, depending on where the language draws its line in the hierarchy of animacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T22:29:59.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T22:41:25.300" Score="20" ViewCount="2535" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several families of languages where the same word can mean either a concept closely related to &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt; or a concept closely related to &lt;em&gt;weather&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romance root: French &lt;em&gt;temps&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;tempo&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;tiempo&lt;/em&gt;, …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slavic root: Bulgarian &lt;em&gt;време&lt;/em&gt;, Croatian &lt;em&gt;vrijeme&lt;/em&gt;, Romanian &lt;em&gt;vreme&lt;/em&gt;, …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Celtic root: Gaelic &lt;em&gt;aimsir&lt;/em&gt;, Breton &lt;em&gt;amzer&lt;/em&gt;, …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek: &lt;em&gt;καιρός&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hungarian (Turkic root): &lt;em&gt;idő&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Albanian &lt;em&gt;koha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are five (or six) sets of languages with no obvious etymological connection for this word. They do, however, have geographical connections, so with only this data I can't exclude cross-language contamination from some proto-Indo-European root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a known single origin for the connection between weather and time? Or is there a pattern that is known to have appeared independently in several language families (perhaps linking the passage of time with the succession of seasons which are marked by different weather)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This question was prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/308/etymology-of-the-different-uses-of-temps-letymologie-des-homonymes-de-temp&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T10:05:18.143" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T04:05:12.043" Title="Is there a single origin for the connection between time and weather?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2011-09-22T22:59:21.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sure that the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinyurl.com/3t8ubnj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Joan L. Bybee (1985) has something about the relative order of inflectional affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;valence &gt; voice &gt; aspect &gt; tense &gt; mood &gt; person-and-number&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which leaves out &quot;polarity&quot; but includes both &quot;valence&quot; and &quot;person-and-&#xA;number&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However as I recall Bybee uses two of the three terms &quot;modality, mode, mood&quot; &#xA;with non-synonymous meanings; I can't remember exactly which one meant &#xA;what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway that kind of says something about what the hierarchy I was looking &#xA;for actually is (descriptive adequacy); I don't know how to achieve &#xA;explanatory adequacy, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0808D&amp;amp;L=CONLANG&amp;amp;P=R10348&amp;amp;D=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This post to CONLANG&lt;/a&gt; talks about which accidents are likelier shown by inflection, which are likelier shown by some other means, and which are likelier not shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0512C&amp;amp;L=CONLANG&amp;amp;P=R5985&amp;amp;D=1&amp;amp;H=0&amp;amp;O=T&amp;amp;T=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bybee also investigates, for each pair of markings, which one tends to&#xA;  be closer to the stem in case they occur on the same side of the stem.&#xA;  She also investigates which markings tend to be fused with the stem. &#xA;  This involved investigating both which features tended to be marked by&#xA;  stem-changes instead of affixes, and which affixes tended to get&#xA;  changed depending upon which stem they were being applied to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In every language derivational markers tend to be closer to the stem&#xA;  than inflectional markers; and whichever marker is closest to the stem&#xA;  is most likely to be fused with it.  Within those restrictions, the&#xA;  hierarchy tended to be valence, voice, aspect, tense, mood,&#xA;  person-and-number.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Person-and-number agreement were often combined in one morpheme. &#xA;  Person-agreement is never derivational, it is only inflectional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="236" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T15:10:44.390" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T15:10:44.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2011-09-22T23:15:05.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@hippietrail, re: your query about which language the documentation should actually begin in, it's generally thought that your work is most valid if all of the data are collected through the actual language you are documenting. This means that you can either essentially start out 'mute', and learn from scratch, or try to learn some of the language before you start the project. This is all well and good, but for languages that are under-documented (or undocumented), you would be lucky to find sufficient materials available to help you learn the language on your own, before going into the field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, mostly, people will first learn the lingua franca of the area - if you plan to work on a small native language of Africa, the lingua franca might be Arabic, French, English, or a dominant native language like Kiswahili. And yes, in Australia, the lingua franca might be Kriol. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, ideally, you'd gradually learn the language you are actually documenting, and use this to verify data you already have, and continue collecting more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, this situation won't always work - it's far more time consuming for the linguist if it's necessary to get an extra language or two under your belt before getting down to the nuts and bolts of documentation, and funding might not always allow for those extra few months as a learner. Not all language documentation entails years spent working on the one language - sometimes an opportunity arises to just work on a language for a short time, or on a specific feature, and it's important to make the most of these opportunities because some documentation is still better than no documentation. In those situations, you might be more likely to end up working with educated speakers who are as fluent in English (or any given language) as you, and that's ok too, as long as you're aware of the possible pitfalls of the 'translation method'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T23:15:05.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-22T23:55:52.170" Score="12" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need references like papers/articles/books by and for people who &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.r-project.org/&quot;&gt;use R&lt;/a&gt; for analysing phonetic data. I have &lt;a href=&quot;http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405199571.html&quot;&gt;Harrington's (2008) &lt;em&gt;Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and it's great, but a lot of other R guides are directed at researchers in applied linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the most appropriate references that have tips more relevant to phonetic work? Please explain &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you're suggesting a certain resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-17T09:14:55.910" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T09:14:59.873" Title="Are there guides to analysing phonetic data in R?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="443" CreationDate="2011-09-23T00:22:11.083" Score="14" ViewCount="4077" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any other graphic systems that attempt to be as complete as the International Phonetic Alphabet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T13:45:58.097" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T16:15:46.830" Title="Alternatives to IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-09-23T00:27:16.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;BNF is a Type-2 language in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy&quot;&gt;Chomsky Hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;A context free grammar has rules of the type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A -&amp;gt; B C&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not rules of the type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x A y -&amp;gt; x B C y&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e., what happens with A depends on what comes before or after A (A's context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-sensitive_grammar&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has a Type-1 example which I don't know how to write here. [Feel free to edit this post.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue_%28programming_language%29&quot;&gt;Thue&lt;/a&gt; is a Type-0 language which also cannot be represented in BNF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a realistic example, many natural languages require that the formal grammar used to analyse them be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildly_context-sensitive_language&quot;&gt;Mildly context-sensitive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T00:46:10.150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T00:46:10.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="446" CreationDate="2011-09-23T00:42:28.187" Score="11" ViewCount="20500" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Affix hopping&lt;/strong&gt; is a morphological operation by which an unattached affix in the &lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt; position is lowered onto a verb. This attachment is done by the &quot;Phonetic Form component&quot; (the posited component in the mind that transforms the inputs it receives from the syntactic component into phonetic spell-outs). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy kicks the ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying syntax tree for this sentence can be represented as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jtyG8.png&quot; alt=&quot;The boy kicks the ball&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; (that indicates third person, singular, present tense) has been taken from its original position and then attached to the end of the verb, producing the form &lt;em&gt;kicks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head movement&lt;/strong&gt; is another operation, by which the head of a phrase is moved (in fact, copied) from its original position to another one. This is a syntactic operation. An example of head moving for a question in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you marry me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can be syntactically represented as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CvkmE.png&quot; alt=&quot;Will you marry me?&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; has been moved from its original position to become attached to the null complementizer that marks a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both operations involve moving a head from one position to another. But affix hopping is assumed to occur at a different level (or different &quot;mind component&quot;) than head movement. What is the fundamental difference that makes linguists classify these two apparently similar kinds of movements as two very distinct operations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T01:20:31.820" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T01:23:30.667" Title="Why are affix hopping and head movement considered as distinct operations?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="387" CreationDate="2011-09-23T00:49:01.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't claim to be an expert on statistical machine translation (SMT) by any means, but as I understand it (an understanding with which my cursory Googling appears to agree), differing word orders is actually quite a large problem in SMT, and causes many problems, as you expect. As with any difficult problem, there are dozens of solutions which have been attempted to varying degrees of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, if your statistical language model is robust enough, these differences in word order would be accounted for even without any foreknowledge of either language. The problem is that a model that robust is expensive: not just in the traditional sense, but also in processing power. I imagine that evaluating texts with such a model would take a prohibitively long amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, yes: all of the solutions of which I am aware are given at least &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; amount  of data about the structure of a language, and then the statistical model expands from there. One approach which shows up in many results in my Google search is &lt;strong&gt;word reordering&lt;/strong&gt; -- basically (at least as I understand it, and perhaps a bit oversimplified), finding the best 1:1 correspondence in word order and evaluating the texts with the statistical model from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T00:49:01.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2011-09-23T02:15:54.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Americanist phonetic notation (APA)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMPA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAMPA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition there are phonetic notations that are designed with one language or group of languages in mind, for example Romaji for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese languages, and the many &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation respelling for English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T02:15:54.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2011-09-23T02:40:43.293" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are not just talking about phonology, the most complete graphic system known to man at this point is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/charts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unicode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because it includes -all- writing systems known to man, including IPA (except maybe Mayan?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T02:40:43.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="387" CreationDate="2011-09-23T02:48:28.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though nominally, statistical MT is distinct from syntactical MT, at its simplest, statistical MT deals with word order (syntax by another name), by n-grams, collecting statistics on pairs of words (in order), triples, etc., with diminishing returns for effort the longer the sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, 'of the' is a very common 2 word sequence, but 'the of' is (almost?) nonexistent, so if ever 'of' is translated to, then the word before it is not going to be 'the' and afterword a good chance of being 'the'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, part of speech tagging (using a plain lookup with some sequential context), can then be used with very short range order constraints. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T02:48:28.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2011-09-23T03:54:46.100" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of reasons that syntacticians make this distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word order facts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locality facts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the first, in a language like French (which has obligatory V -&gt; T head movement), adverbs can separate the (main) verb from its object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  Jean embrasse souvent Marie&#xA;     J.   kisses    often   Mary&#xA;(2) *Jean souvent embrasse Marie&#xA;     J.   often   kisses    Mary&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English (no V -&gt; T movement), the facts are exactly the reverse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(3) *John kisses often Mary&#xA;(4)  John often kisses Mary&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point has to do with the fact that Lowering cannot jump across an intervening projection, whereas Head Movement can&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.  So in a structure like the following, we predict that T cannot lower onto V, because of the intervening Neg.  This is the motivation for &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;-support – &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; is inserted to &quot;support&quot; the features in T (which would otherwise be flagged ungrammatical by the Stray Affix Filter, which says basically that you cannot pronounce a bound morpheme in isolation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6E8Xd.png&quot; alt=&quot;tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*&quot;John -ed not kiss Mary&quot; --&amp;gt; &quot;John did not kiss Mary&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages which lack head movement have different strategies for avoiding this clash.  Mandarin, for example, which lacks verb movement to C, has a non-affixal question complementizer &lt;em&gt;ma&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analyses which merely say &quot;and then it moves in the phonology!&quot; are punting the question of what happens in Lowering derivations.  If you are curious about how to say something substantive about Lowering/Affix Hopping in the phonology, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~embick/move.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 2001 paper by Embick and Noyer&lt;/a&gt; (pdf link) is a recent-ish attempt to construct a theory of post-syntactic movement.  (It also has several examples of post-syntactic movement other than the standard English verb-inflection one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt;: Many syntacticians would like to say that head movement in fact cannot skip intervening heads, and must stop at every one along the trail from source to destination.  But this isn't agreed on by everyone; &quot;long head movement&quot; is the name that putative counterexamples go by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="43" LastEditDate="2011-10-25T02:04:39.660" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T02:04:39.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="438" CreationDate="2011-09-23T03:59:56.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to seem horribly self promotional, but I've gotten a lot of good feedback on a bunch of notes that I've put together, which can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~joseff/rstudy/&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~joseff/rstudy/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all of the examples are based on phonetic data, but most of the ones from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~joseff/rstudy/index.htmll#summer2010&quot;&gt;Summer 2010&lt;/a&gt; are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T03:59:56.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2011-09-23T04:08:58.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guglielmo Cinque wrote a book called &lt;em&gt;Adverbs and Functional Heads: A cross-linguistic perspective&lt;/em&gt; wherein he (ambitiously) tries to construct a cross-linguistic universal hierarchy of functional categories.  He relies on adverb placement, for example facts like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  John luckily mistakenly kissed Mary&#xA;(2) *John mistakenly luckily kissed Mary&#xA;(3)  John mistakenly tenderly kissed Mary&#xA;(4) *John tenderly mistakenly kissed Mary&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between (1) and (2) shows that adverbs related to the speaker's perception of the event (luckily) must precede adverbs related to the subject's state of mind (mistakenly).  And subject-oriented adverbs precede adverbs describing the event itself (tenderly), as (3) and (4) show.  He has many, many more categories of adverbs than just these, and by pairwise comparisons he puts them all into an ordered sequence.  He then argues that each adverb is associated with a functional head, and that the heads are also so ordered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Baker proposed the mirror principle in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178442&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; (JSTOR link).  It says that, of two affixes, the one which is syntactically closer to the stem must be morphologically colser to the stem as well.  So in a structure like the following, wherein Z is the root and X and Y are suffixes, we predict Z-Y-X and not Z-X-Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;   XP&#xA;  /  \&#xA; X   YP&#xA;    /  \&#xA;   Y    Z&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cinque's universal hierarchy plus the Mirror Principle plus some version of the Head Movement Constraint (no skipping positions as you move up the tree gathering affixes) gets you what you want.  If some relatively high functional head is expressed as a verbal affix, the stem must have moved at least that far, so the lower head must also be affixed to the root, closer than the higher one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know Bybee's work and my recollection of the details of Cinque is hazy, but they seem to roughly align in the order you say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T04:08:58.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="450" CreationDate="2011-09-23T11:31:01.403" Score="6" ViewCount="1658" Body="&lt;p&gt;Albanian has a digraph letter &quot;ll&quot; which is described as being similar to English &quot;dark l&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how similar is it and how different? My native Australian English has dark l and to me it tends to turn into a &quot;w&quot; or &quot;u&quot; sound at the end of words and I'm not sure it's the same, maybe it varies a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are some more or less exotic sounds I know of but imperfectly in other languages, some which are also spelled with a version of &quot;l&quot; or &quot;ll&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polish also has a &quot;w-ish l&quot; that is spelled with the letter &quot;ł&quot;. But my hunch is that this one maybe used to be a kind of &quot;l&quot; but is now firmly a &quot;w&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also speak Spanish but learned in Mexico where &quot;ll&quot; mostly sounds the same as &quot;y&quot; so that's also difficult to compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh also has a special letter they spelled with an &quot;ll&quot; digraph. It's said to be unique though and the way I produce it is very raspy so it would seem the least likely to be similar. But maybe I'm not doing it right since most Welsh people I meet can't speak Welsh anyway and are probably just humouring me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which if any of these is Albanian &quot;ll&quot; most like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:40:08.043" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T14:51:49.680" Title="Is the &quot;ll&quot; in Albanian like the sounds in other languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="449" CreationDate="2011-09-23T11:40:20.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_L&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, it's similar to the English dark L (as &quot;ll&quot; in &lt;em&gt;ba&lt;b&gt;ll&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be precise, we are talking about a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velarized_alveolar_lateral_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;velarized alveolar lateral approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (an audio file is available); its IPA symbol is &lt;code&gt;ɫ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Albanian word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;halla&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;aunt&lt;/em&gt;), for example, is transcribed as &lt;code&gt;[ˈhaɫa]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;strong&gt;Polish&lt;/strong&gt; one, it has a &quot;w&quot; sound, such as in &lt;strong&gt;mały&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;łaska&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;grace&lt;/em&gt;) in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consonants section&lt;/a&gt;, see the table called &quot;Example words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T12:08:15.340" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T12:08:15.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="455" CreationDate="2011-09-23T12:06:38.147" Score="5" ViewCount="1251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Animacy has come up in a few recent questions, especially in comparison to gender. One interesting thing that turned up in the comments on those questions was whether or not animacy can sometimes be purely grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let me compare with gender which is more familiar.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural gender and grammatical gender are two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural gender is not abstract or arbitrarily assigned. This is when language reflects the sex of things, mostly people and higher animals. English has natural gender in pronouns etc: &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot;, &quot;him&quot;, &quot;her&quot;, &quot;his&quot;. Some languages have only one third person pronoun regardless of the sex of the person etc referred to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural gender is not lexical. It refers directly to the sex of the thing referred to and not the word representing the thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender is abstract or arbitrarily assigned. This is when every word is assigned a class such as &quot;masculine&quot;, &quot;feminine&quot;, &quot;neuter&quot;, &quot;common&quot;. These assignments are mostly not related to sex but may be related to the sound of the word or may be utterly arbitrary. Words for inanimate objects are very often assigned to the &quot;masculine&quot; or &quot;feminine&quot; class and animate objects are sometimes assigned to the &quot;neuter&quot; (sexless) class, for example German &quot;Fräulein&quot; is a neuter word for &quot;girl&quot;, not feminine as would be expected under natural gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender is lexical. It refers to the word representing the thing and not to the thing directly. Two synonyms referring to the same thing rrcan have different genders. For example there are two Spanish words for &quot;star&quot;. &quot;El astro&quot; is masculine and &quot;La estrella&quot; is feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helps to differentiate the words &quot;gender&quot; and &quot;sex&quot; when talking about this topic. &quot;Gender&quot; was originally a grammatical term only and came to become a synonym for sex later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another phenomenon often confused with grammatical gender. I might call it &quot;semantic gender&quot; but there's probably a real term for it. In English all ships tend to be referred to as &quot;her&quot;, but this is not lexical, does not depend on the word used for the ship. Languages with grammatical gender may use different genders for &quot;schooner&quot;, &quot;destroyer&quot;, &quot;carrier&quot;, and &quot;battleship&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, is animacy ever in any language grammatical? That is to say does it have the properties of being a) abstract/arbitrarily assigned and b) lexical?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T22:11:42.367" Title="Can animacy be grammatical or must it always be natural?" Tags="&lt;animacy&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2011-09-23T13:05:49.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the first eleven tables in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nostratic.ru/books/%28211%29vajda-2008.pdf&quot;&gt;A Siberian Link with Na-Dene Languages&lt;/a&gt;, which show the order of constituents in a verbal complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Included are various Dene-Yeniseian languages as well as Sumerian, Burushaski, Abkhaz, and Ha (a Bantu language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it's very hard to test your hypothetical order against them, since TAM (tense/aspect/mood markers) tend to be clumped together--and sometimes repeated throughout the complex!--whereas negation is only marked in Burushaski, and it's not on the same side as the other relevant markers; and voice doesn't seem to be marked in any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to suggest that perhaps causative markers (and possibly stative resultative markers, although the evidence is really from one family) are often very close to the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2011-09-23T16:28:17.213" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T16:28:17.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="473" CreationDate="2011-09-23T14:27:17.860" Score="4" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/41710/3306&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U question&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;?I declined your report.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some mutually-understood portion that was dropped from the sentence. In my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41710/when-to-use-decline-for-polite-refusal-and-when-not-to/41715#41715&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (comment section), I contrasted &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Visa declined to permit the credit card transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Visa declined the credit card transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;to permit&quot; is mutually understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic operation that allows the drop of the mutually understood portion? I know that if it were a pronoun, the operation would be called a &lt;em&gt;Pro drop&lt;/em&gt;. (For example, in Italian, one may drop the pronoun &quot;He&quot; in &quot;He speaks&quot; and simply say &lt;em&gt;parla&lt;/em&gt;, because Italian verbs are inflected with person and gender.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the operation were &lt;em&gt;raising&lt;/em&gt;, I would expect that a complete sentence would be raised, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Visa permitted the transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;being raised to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems Visa permitted the transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the entire sentence cannot be raised, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Visa declined Visa permitted the transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic operation that allows a mutually-understood deletion from &quot;Visa declined to permit the credit card transaction&quot; to &quot;Visa declined the credit card transaction&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus: something in that operation would also have to explain why &quot;I declined your report&quot; is less grammatical than &quot;I declined to read/to accept/to indorse your report.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Adding examples of a deleted infinitival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clenching his chubby, little fists, Bill declined (to eat) the pasta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wary about unsealed barrel, Bill declined (to accept) the pasta shipment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the waiter had his thumb in the entrée, Bill declined (to receive) the pasta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;? Since it had been on the shelf for a year, Bill declined (to ship) the pasta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;? Liking it extra crunchy, Bill declined (to boil) the pasta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about the pragmatics of &quot;decline&quot; seem to force the deleted infinitival to be near &quot;accept&quot; or &quot;permit.&quot; In 1, Bill's mommy has a yummy spoon of pasta coming his way, but he will not accept. In 3, Bill is not permitting a plate of cooked pasta to be set on his restaurant table. In 4 and 5, the sentences may be grammatical with the parenthetical statements but are ungrammatical without. That is to say, &quot;Bill declined to ship the pasta,&quot; but &quot;? Bill declined the pasta,&quot; even though 1 and 3 are &quot;Bill declined the pasta.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:32:28.173" Title="What linguistic operation is used in &quot;I declined your report&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="451" CreationDate="2011-09-23T15:09:41.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, for example, animacy is not clear-cut in the distinction animate/inanimate. I'll explain better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When studying Russian, or any language that have animacy, it's usually simple to distinguish animals and people that are animate, from a car or a table that are inanimate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some ambiguous cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YDn0U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from animals and people, nouns that denote mythical characters and anthropomorphic creatures or mechanisms are usually &lt;strong&gt;animate&lt;/strong&gt; (Group a), while nouns denoting plants, groups of people or animals (i.e. collective nouns) are &lt;strong&gt;inanimate&lt;/strong&gt; (Group b) and lastly, other nouns can refer both to &lt;strong&gt;animate&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;inanimate&lt;/strong&gt; nouns (Group c)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strange exception to this rule in Russian language are the words &quot;&lt;strong&gt;мертвец&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;dead person&lt;/em&gt;), &quot;&lt;strong&gt;покойник&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;the deceased&lt;/em&gt;) which are animate, while &quot;&lt;strong&gt;труп&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;dead body; corpse; cadaver&lt;/em&gt;) is inanimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception to the group B (collective nouns and plants) is пролетарий (proletariat) which is animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm not really sure about the Group C, because I found two slightly contradicting sources, unless I misunderstood that part. If some Russian native speaker can give a contribution, it would be nice.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-14T22:11:42.367" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T22:11:42.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="451" CreationDate="2011-09-23T15:20:52.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in Russian, Polish marks animate masculine nouns by having a genitive-accusative vs. the nominative-accusative of inanimate masculines.  There are some ambiguous cases, e.g. &lt;em&gt;pilot&lt;/em&gt; 'pilot, TV remote'.  A pilot is human and automatically animate.  A TV remote is not, but it also gets the animate genitive accusative.  Strangely enough, there are totally inanimate nouns like &lt;em&gt;papieros&lt;/em&gt; 'cigarette, which take a genitive accusative: &lt;em&gt;on pali papierosa&lt;/em&gt; 'he's smoking a cigarette'.  We can write off the &lt;em&gt;pilot&lt;/em&gt; case on temporal or cultural grounds, but the &lt;em&gt;papieros&lt;/em&gt; case sounds like a treatment of animacy as a grammatical category.  If you want to say this makes it no longer animate, I won't argue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T15:20:52.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2011-09-23T15:34:31.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember that the intersection of the outputs of two context-free languages is not necessarily context free.  So (a raised to power x) (b ... x) (c ... y) intersected with &#xA;(a ... z) (b ... x) (c ... x) produces (a ... x) (b ... x) (c ... x) because of the identity relation of the two b expressions, a result that is context-sensitive.  (Sorry I can't write it in standard mathematical notation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T15:34:31.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="430" CreationDate="2011-09-23T16:56:40.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The list in &quot;A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages&quot;, Carl Darling Buck, 1949, has been used in several comparisons. It has 22 semantic categories of words, like bodyparts, clothing, time etc. AFAIK it includes all the words on the Swadesh list and some 1200 others in addition. The following two collections based this book are online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wold.livingsources.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;WOLD&quot;&gt;World Loanword Database&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;IDS&quot;&gt;The Intercontinental Dictionary Series&lt;/a&gt;. The former has more words and the latter has more languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T16:56:40.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="464" CreationDate="2011-09-23T17:03:51.790" Score="13" ViewCount="2152" Body="&lt;p&gt;French verbs are conjugated depending on the subject's person and number (ex. je parle, tu parles, il parle, etc.) However in spoken language most of these sound the same anyway because the end part of the word tend to not be pronounced (this isn't the case for vous parlez and nous parlons, though). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since when does this happen and why? Apparently it doesn't happen in other Romance languages. Why is the loss of sound and inflection in speaking not followed by in writing? Is it expected that in the future the conjugation will be much simpler, like in English? Or has there been evidence that it is currently happening? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T08:25:56.837" Title="French conjugation, spoken vs written" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-23T17:13:42.537" Score="10" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/320/is-there-a-term-for-the-theory-that-languages-move-from-one-morphological-typolog&quot;&gt;There is a theory&lt;/a&gt; that languages move from one morphological typology (isolating, inflected, agglutinating) to the next in a usual, predictable cycle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evidence is proposed to support this theory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As background, I am also familiar with natural sciences and usually things move to the most stable state (macroscopically. for example, things go down, hydrogen atoms fuse to become helium atoms, etc) and do not naturally go back without external force. I am wondering why this isn't the case for languages and why languages go in cycle instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T13:33:06.957" Title="What is the evidence of the typological cycle theory?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;typological-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2011-09-23T17:40:08.397" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although other romance languages haven't lost verb conjugations, they &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; lost noun declensions by essentially the same process. People frequently don't pronounce the ends of words in rushed or casual speech, and this can eventually become the norm. English lost its declensions and conjugations in roughly the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French (like English) compensates for the lack of conjugations by generally requiring pronouns which can be left out in other romance languages and in Latin. Colloquial French actually goes further than English, requiring pronouns even when there is already a noun, as in &quot;La France, c'est belle!&quot; This may well be the root of a new conjugation system someday...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this wasn't the main point of your question, but it's worth remembering that in general written language tends to lag behind spoken language. The mess that is English spelling came about largely because the spoken language changed significantly without any reforms to the writing system. French has fared slightly better but is still riddled with no-longer-pronounced letters or even syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2011-10-18T17:04:47.170" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T17:04:47.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2011-09-23T17:54:43.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason the analogy with the physical sciences breaks down, I think, is that languages are transmitted through learning and, during the course of that, there can be perceptual distortions, production errors, processing mistakes, reanalysis, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of isolating, inflected, agglutinating are any more stable than the others so there's no natural state for a language to settle on. Instead, language changes put pressure on other parts of the language to change, either through analogy or a need to disambiguate things which have been conflated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the evidence, processes like grammaticalization and periphrasis can been seen in a lot of languages; and those that have a long enough written record bear testimony to going back and forth—perhaps not always in a full cycle but certainly oscillating between alternatives, neither of which is any more stable than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T17:54:43.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="484" CreationDate="2011-09-23T18:03:53.477" Score="17" ViewCount="974" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comparative method is used to reconstruct unattested languages from the attested ones. By comparing different sounds for the same words in various sister languages, it is possible to infer some phonological rules. The internal reconstruction method, on the other hand, compares variant forms within a single language to discover how they evolved from a past regular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to combine these methods to &quot;look forward&quot;, so to speak? For example, comparing several dialects of a language with how they were fifty years ago and then extrapolate this data to predict how these dialects will change in the near future? Of course, some degree of uncertainty would have to be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T18:48:25.683" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T17:34:09.447" Title="Is it possible to predict language changes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2011-09-23T18:31:28.960" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you're asking is: what processes caused these changes in French so that the spelling no longer matches the pronunciation? &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French#Overview&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia provides a summary of some of the key changes&lt;/a&gt; that have occurred (also see the nice example of &lt;em&gt;chanter&lt;/em&gt; conjugations with IPA):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The loss of almost all final consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The subsequent loss of final /ǝ/, which caused the appearance of many newly final consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The loss of the formerly strong stress that had characterized the language throughout much of its history and triggered many of the phonetic deformations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Significant transformations in the pronunciation of vowels, especially nasal vowels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a broad question: a series of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound changes&lt;/a&gt; produced this outcome, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition#Sound_changes_associated_with_lenition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lenition&lt;/a&gt; resulting in latent or &quot;mute&quot; final consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible reason French is different from other Romance languages in this respect is due to the different impact of its &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French#Impact_of_substrate_and_superstrate_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;superstrate and substrate languages&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the changes have been attributed to substrate influence—i.e. to carry-over effects from Gaulish (Celtic) or superstrate—influence from Frankish (Germanic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding spelling, much of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Middle_French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French orthography&lt;/a&gt; was established based on the spelling from Old French, but when printing of dictionaries occurred, printers might retain or change spellings based on etymological assumptions if it &quot;reflect[ed] corresponding distinctions in the spelling of the underlying Latin words&quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Académie française&lt;/a&gt; also perhaps contributes to retaining historical spellings, but keep in mind that languages like English have undergone significant pronunciation change and the orthography has not kept up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T18:31:28.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:08:06.953" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The European Union is steadily transitioning to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessmen&lt;/a&gt; (CEFR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CEFR distinguishes 6 proficiency levels and suggests to &lt;a href=&quot;http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/LanguageSelfAssessmentGrid/en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;evaluate different aspects of language ability separately&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A Basic Speaker&#xA;    A1 Breakthrough or beginner&#xA;    A2 Waystage or elementary&#xA;B Independent Speaker&#xA;    B1 Threshold or intermediate&#xA;    B2 Vantage or upper intermediate&#xA;C Proficient Speaker&#xA;    C1 Effective Operational Proficiency or advanced&#xA;    C2 Mastery or proficiency&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous self-assessment guides which can help you determine your level, as well as tables correlating CEFR levels to tests such as TOEFL, IELTS, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T19:08:06.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:33:37.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronouns differ from nouns in that they have no intrinsic descriptive content, and so are functors. There are a range of different types of pronoun found in English, including the pronominal noun one(s) used in sentences like &quot;I’ll take the red one(s)&quot;, pronominal quantifiers like any in &quot;I couldn’t find any&quot;, and pronominal determiners like this in &quot;This is hard&quot;. The term pronoun is most frequently used to indicate a class of items (like he/him/his) traditionally referred to as personal pronouns (though analysed in much recent work as pronominal determiners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:57:31.653" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:57:31.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:33:37.190" Score="0" Body="A word used in place of a noun or noun phrase. This includes personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, relative pronouns and others." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:26:14.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:26:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:40:38.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional grammar, a distinction is drawn between common nouns and proper nouns. Proper nouns are names of individual people (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Chomsky&lt;/em&gt;), places (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Colchester, Essex, England&lt;/em&gt;), dates (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Tuesday, February, Easter&lt;/em&gt;), magazines (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Cosmopolitan&lt;/em&gt;) etc., whereas common nouns (e.g. &lt;em&gt;boy, table, syntax&lt;/em&gt; etc.) are nouns denoting general (non-individual) entities. Proper nouns have the semantic property of having unique reference. In some languages (e.g. some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese) proper nouns can be modified by a determiner, while in others, such as English, modification of a proper noun by a determiner is ungrammatical (cf. *&lt;em&gt;the London&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:58:00.657" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:58:00.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:40:38.417" Score="0" Body="A category of word which typically denotes an entity of some kind." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:58:05.337" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:58:05.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="451" CreationDate="2011-09-23T19:41:22.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://georgelakoff.com/writings/books/#womenfire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Women, Fire, and Dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind&lt;/a&gt; (1990), George Lakoff describes a tribe that places women, fire, and dangerous things into the same linguistic category. I read the book some time ago, but I believe that the tribe has a gender for animate objects. If so, then articles or tense or case would have to match the animate category, lest the usage be ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that what you call &lt;em&gt;grammatical gender&lt;/em&gt; is simply called &lt;em&gt;gender.&lt;/em&gt; They are really linguistic categories that are, as you say, somewhat arbitrary. Further, while many languages have two or three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), there are languages that have many genders. In Chinese, for example, there is no masculine or feminine gender, so &lt;em&gt;ta(1)&lt;/em&gt; can mean &quot;he&quot; or &quot;she.&quot; However, there seems to be a separate gender for people &lt;em&gt;san ge ren&lt;/em&gt; = three (people article) people. And another gender for money. &lt;em&gt;san(2) quai(4) chen(3)&lt;/em&gt; = three (money article) dollars. These categories are very deep and not at all obvious to a non-native speaker such as myself. (Incidentally, I would welcome someone who knows or has studied Chinese to correct and extend my examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T19:41:22.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-23T20:27:21.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Principles &amp;amp; Parameters approach, all languages share a &quot;core set&quot; of principles and constraints. In addition to that, it is posited that all languages also have set of binary parameters, that can be set on or off, thus determining the particular structures of different languages. For example, the head directionality parameter is a proposed parameter that classifies word order accordingly to the placement of the head stem, which can be either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Head-final (or head-last): Heads follow phrases in forming larger phrases &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Head-initial (or head-first): Heads precede phrases in   forming larger phrases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:58:24.803" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:58:24.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-23T20:27:21.467" Score="0" Body="Theory that accounts for similarities and differences of natural languages." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:53:57.400" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:53:57.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="454" CreationDate="2011-09-23T20:32:28.173" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that there is any deletion going on.  The word &lt;em&gt;decline&lt;/em&gt; in English simply has two possible uses – one followed by an infinitive, one followed by a noun phrase object.  This is similar to &quot;want&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) I want to go to the park&#xA;(2) I want an apple&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The infinitive-taking version is a control verb (as opposed to a raising verb, which you discuss in your question).  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch9.html#sc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This online syntax book&lt;/a&gt; (direct link to relevant section) has an overview of control structures, diagnostics, and the differences between control and raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:32:28.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2011-09-23T20:45:51.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The loss of verbal conjugation has happened in other Indo-European language families as well.  For example among Germanic languages, English, Swedish, and Norwegian have lost the conjugations inherited from the proto-language whereas German and Icelandic retain them (these are not exhaustive lists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on the phonological processes which led to this change, see aedia λ's excellent answer.  Interestingly, (some dialects of) French appears to be redeveloping conjugation, this time in the form of prefixes derived from subject pronouns.  Culbertson (2010) &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lan/summary/v086/86.1.culbertson.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Convergent evidence for Categorial Change in French&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; vol. 86.; link goes to Project MUSE) is a recent paper that gives evidence for this view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:45:51.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2011-09-23T20:46:42.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in the 70s Peter A. Reich of UToronto did a paper entitled Visible distinctive features focused on finger spelling.  I think a written version appeared in an early issue of the LACUS Forum.  I'll check when I return to my library in about a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="73" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T20:46:42.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-23T21:48:17.933" Score="8" ViewCount="854" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that all the things which reflect &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender&quot;&gt;grammatical gender&lt;/a&gt; in languages have to do with inflectional (presumably also agglutinative) morphology, such as agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is that just coincidence, it seems the same kind of thing could be reflected in particles in an isolating language. But does it ever happen? Are there &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot;&gt;isolating/analytic languages&lt;/a&gt; with the concept of grammatical gender in nouns (not just natural gender in pronouns)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T13:06:40.970" Title="Are there purely isolating/analytic languages with grammatical gender?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="451" CreationDate="2011-09-23T22:05:33.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Algonquian languages are often used as examples of systems that use animacy as a grammatical category. For the most part, it falls into real-world animacy vs inanimacy, but there are cases where there are mismatches between real-world animacy and the grammatical category. This is always one-way - i.e., all real-world animate entities will be grammatically animate, but some real-world inanimate entities will be grammatically animate. (cf.Goddard 2001)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Blackfoot, the word for &quot;knife&quot; &lt;em&gt;isttoan&lt;/em&gt; is grammatically animate, where real-world knives are inanimate. Another example of the arbitariness of the animate/inanimate distinction is the words for an earthenware vs metal bowl. Both types of dishes are &lt;em&gt;ko's&lt;/em&gt;, but the earthenware bowl is grammatically inanimate, whereas the metal dish is grammatically animate. (cf. Frantz &amp;amp; Russell 1989/1995, Wiltschko 2009).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I haven't answered unequivocally &quot;yes&quot; to the question, however, because some have argued that Algonquian nominal systems should not be divided according to animacy, but to a &quot;noble&quot;/&quot;ignoble&quot;  or &quot;esteem/no-esteem&quot; distinction (cf. Maillard 1964 for Micmac). And Wiltschko, for example, has proposed that the animate/inanimate distinction in Blackfoot is morphosyntactically parallel to the mass/count distinction as opposed being morphosyntactically parallel to a gender distinctions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T22:05:33.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-24T00:38:47.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of Universal Grammar is based on a cognitive approach to the study of grammar. We can assume that native speakers have an internalized language within their minds. Such languages, also known as I-languages, are acquired at a very early stage of child development.  Moreover, all children acquire native competence in their respective languages at about the same pace and receiving very little stimuli from adult speakers. A possible way to account for this ability to acquire a language is to posit the existence of a Universal Grammar, innate to the human cognitive apparatus. According to this hypothesis, children would have only to learn the particular aspects of their languages, such as the lexicon and some parameters (head-initial or head-final, pro-drop or non-pro-drop and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky, the founder of this field of research, defines UG as &quot;the theory of human I-languages ...that identifies the I-languages that are humanly accessible under normal  conditions&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T11:34:40.830" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T11:34:40.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-24T00:38:47.210" Score="0" Body="a theory usually associated with Noam Chomsky which claims the existence of a human-innate universal grammar consisting of features that all natural human languages share, enabling children to acquire a language without being taught explicitly, but only having to set language-specific parameters during exposure to language input" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T11:34:25.207" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T11:34:25.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="476" CreationDate="2011-09-24T02:13:58.643" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WALS&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; lets you cross-classify languages based on two features.  Here's a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/combined/20A/31A&quot;&gt;cross-tabulation&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;fusion of selected morphological formatives&quot; and &quot;sex-based and non-sex-based gender systems&quot;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.  It indicates that there are 3 languages that fall into the &quot;exclusively isolating, sex-based gender&quot; class and one in &quot;exclusively isolating, non-sex-based gender.&quot;  (There are mixed categories that you might wish to explore as well.)  You can follow up with these languages and see if they live up to their classification – some of them could have grammatical complications that make them less than pure examples of what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footnotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1. World Atlas of Linguistic Structures&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2. The feature names are admittedly a little opaque.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T13:06:40.970" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T13:06:40.970" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="150" CreationDate="2011-09-24T03:28:51.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important — if often overlooked/ignored — contribution of CL/NLP to theoretical linguistics is implemented demonstrations of insufficiency. More specifically, implementing &quot;pencil and paper&quot; theoretical models derived from a small set of examples, and testing them on suitably large quantities of sentences can (and has!) reveal failures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particular example — not widely quoted in the theoretical community — is a paper available on the Rutgers Optimality Archive by Lauri Karttunen, entitled &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/818-0406/818-KARTTUNEN-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which demonstrates via computational implementation that published Optimality Theoretic analyses of the Finnish prosodic system fail unexpectedly on a certain class of inputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be argued that this isn't a contribution of CL/NLP &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but the implementation of OT is only rendered possible via heavy use of Finite-State Machines, a core tool of modern CL/NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T23:24:05.433" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T23:24:05.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2011-09-24T03:31:33.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert (or even a linguist), and my knowledge on this point is at least 10 years out of date (learning about ASL linguistics in high school from my dad who's an ASL interpreter).  But one system for phonemes in ASL is based on location, movement, and handshape.  For example, the &quot;A&quot; handshape can be done either with the base of the thumb touching the side of the hand or with the thumb sticking further out, and either is the same phoneme.  Whereas, if you put the thumb in front of the hand (the &quot;S&quot; handshape) that's a different phoneme.  Similarly, the difference in location between upper arm and lower arm is phonemic, but the exact location on the upper arm is not.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language_grammar#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has some more detail&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="276" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T03:31:33.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-24T06:34:35.857" Score="5" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;male/female&quot; terminology used to identify the two halves of many, if not all, connectors and fasteners seems universal in the Western Indo-European speaking world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other language families use this same analogy to sexual intercourse as the IE languages do? If not, how do they describe connectors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-08-24T14:46:45.440" LastActivityDate="2012-08-24T14:46:45.440" Title="Translation of electrical connection gender names into non-Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2011-09-30T07:30:20.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-09-24T07:37:53.810" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's tough.  On the one hand, in phonetic changes like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Northern_cities_shift&quot;&gt;Northern Cities Shift&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to record successive generations of speakers and measure acoustically how their vowel production (in this case) slowly moves through vowel space.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets trickier for change that is categorical in nature (rather than continuous).  &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3271774/&quot;&gt;Johnson's dissertation&lt;/a&gt; tracks a known merger (between &lt;em&gt;cot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;caught&lt;/em&gt;) along the boundary, and identifies certain families in non-merged territory where children appear to suddenly merge these sounds.  Predicting entirely new changes is a tricky business – it is possible to say what changes are likely to happen in a language, but their realization depends on many factors, some of them completely random.  In general, I'd say that we don't yet have the ability to predict a novel categorical change in a specific time window (50 years, like your question).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give one concrete example, English has been &quot;likely&quot; to develop negative concord (NC) for centuries as the next step in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jespersen_cycle&quot;&gt;Jespersen Cycle&lt;/a&gt;.  Optional NC is nearly ubiquitous in low-prestige vernacular speech, but it has not entered the standard language in a unified way, due (in all likelihood) to prescriptive norms against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T07:37:53.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="385" CreationDate="2011-09-24T11:46:28.303" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; evidence that some of the archetypal isolating/analytic languages of South-East Asia may be developing more morpholexical complexity. However, it seems that there are only early signs, in comparison to the evidence for English becoming more analytic - that's been happening for hundreds of years so it's pretty easy to spot by now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to consider that although many typical isolating languages seem to lack &lt;strong&gt;inflectional morphology&lt;/strong&gt;, they may still show quite a lot of &lt;strong&gt;derivational morphology&lt;/strong&gt;. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://nickenfield.org/files/annurevanthro34081804120406.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper by Enfield (2005)&lt;/a&gt;, there is some brief discussion of derivational morphology in Mon-Khmer languages, noting that while for some languages, like Khmer, the derivational morphology is visible but no longer productive, in other languages, such as Semelai, the system is quite rich and productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enfield also discusses the resources used by some languages of mainland South-East Asia to create elaborative, alliterative or rhyming expressions, noting that these frequently give rise to morphologically complex structures, and in particular that &quot;a huge system of such patterns is found in Vietnamese (Thompson 1987 [1965]), despite its status as an archetypically morphology-poor language&quot;. He also adds that &quot;the productivity and internal complexity of elaborative morpholexicon in MSEA languages should weaken claims that these languages lack morphology. One just has to know where to look.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example given from Lao is &lt;em&gt;qêêk5-lêêk5&lt;/em&gt; 'lying askew like someone asleep in an awkward position'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there's any evidence for the derivational morphology in these languages becoming more complex over time, but for some it certainly doesn't seem to be going away. As far as more inflectional-type morphology goes, there was some work comparing grammaticalization in Mandarin Chinese and Thai, two typologically very similar languages, both at the extreme end of the 'isolating' part of the morphosyntactic structure continuum. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://gauhati.academia.edu/MarkWPost/Papers/119576/Grammaticalization_and_compounding_in_Thai_and_Chinese_A_text-frequency_approach&quot;&gt;this paper by Post (2007)&lt;/a&gt;, various types of constructions are examined to assess the depth of the grammaticalization of certain features, given that compounds and polysyllabic constructions are common in both languages and &quot;some affixlike behaviour has been observed&quot;. Post finds that, for Chinese and Thai constructions of comparable form and function:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;analogous terms grammaticalizing within these constructions have achieved a greater extent of structural adjustment as functors in Chinese than in Thai, i.e. are more 'deeply' grammaticalized&quot;, and;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;processes of compounding are more extensive in Chinese than in Thai, as measured by frequency of types and tokens as well as factors such as analyzability and semantic drift&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is the evidence for &lt;em&gt;bǎ&lt;/em&gt; becoming generalized as a focused object-marker in Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post suggests that the points noted above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;appear to be &lt;strong&gt;symptomatic of a shift in morphosyntactic typology, on the Chinese side more so than in Thai, away from an extreme isolating, basically monosyllabic prototype towards a more concatenative structure.&lt;/strong&gt; It is possible that both languages are shifting in this direction, and Chinese simply started earlier, or has moved faster, than Thai.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to suggest that there might be a stronger correlation between more compounding and 'deeper' grammaticalization; the obsolescence of basic source lexemes for the grammaticalizing forms (the source lexemes typically being replaced by compounds) might actually encourage the partially grammaticalized versions to shed their lexical-like attributes, and allow behavioural restrictions to become more firmly established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other hints of similar observations around, but these sorts of things can be very difficult to tease out in the early (or mid-term) stages, and require a lot of data, so I think it will be some time before we know for sure whether some of these languages are becoming more agglutinating. Seeing as there is really no such thing as a purely isolating language, we also can't know for sure whether some of these languages are on their way to becoming more or less isolating - they might not be ready to move on to agglutinating if they're not done with the isolating stage!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T11:46:28.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="496" CreationDate="2011-09-24T12:31:39.207" Score="19" ViewCount="8622" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native speaker. However, I have tried a lot during last 10 years to learn English at a high level of proficiency and to become fluent in conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I talk to some of my friends in US over Skype (found via my profession), they tell me that I talk like a foreigner. But they don't know why is that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is/are the reasons that can make a not-native English speaker sound like a foreigner? Is it about pronunciation, or about syntax, or is it maybe just a false assumption coming from a psychological background due to the fact that the other party knows that you are not an English man/woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I asked this question specifically about English, since English is the most widespread language on the earth and tens of different dialects and millions of different idiolects seem to alleviate the problem of &quot;sounding-foreign&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T16:03:56.403" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T19:06:38.780" Title="What makes a non-native English speaker sound foreign?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="451" CreationDate="2011-09-24T12:45:06.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=-IDsW8YmaigC&amp;amp;pg=PA103&amp;amp;lpg=PA103&amp;amp;dq=animacy+in+nahuatl+nounstems&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NObZvCsFAn&amp;amp;sig=GtkttlfI-rbJAn6zQc-9td1Dnw8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=ncx9TsiYCcXW0QH7i6QD&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=1&amp;amp;ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=animacy%20in%20nahuatl%20nounstems&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introduction to Classical Nahuatl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Andrews (2003) writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since the Nahuatl nounstem is a labeling device, it implicitly carries a culturally established animacy classification of entity types.  Because cultural factors are involved, a nounstem may have an animacy at variance with an English speaker's expectations; for example, Nahuatl nounstems translated by &quot;hill&quot; (or &quot;mountain&quot;), &quot;heaven&quot;, and &quot;star&quot; are animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in modern Huasteca Nahuatl which I study, although cultural factors are changing rapidly, &quot;hill&quot; and &quot;star&quot; still take the animate plural form (&quot;tepetl&quot;-&gt;&quot;tepemē&quot;, &quot;citleli&quot;-&gt;&quot;citlelmē&quot;).  So what may have begun as natural animacy is becoming lexical animacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T12:45:06.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-24T13:43:31.763" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few things in your English from your question that signal you as non-native for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*during last 10 years -&gt; during &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; last 10 years&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*some of my friends in US -&gt; some of my friends in &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; US&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*But they don't know why is that -&gt; But they don't know why &lt;strong&gt;that is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*not-native English speaker -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;non-native&lt;/strong&gt; English speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many native English speakers might also do some of these at least as typos or thinking faster than they write, but not 3. and probably not 4. Taken together I would expect you were a foreigner. My first impression from 3. is that you might be a French speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even without pronunciation your syntax would give you away, as would any and all the many points where two languages can differ. (Vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, exceptions to rules, intonation, contractions, idioms, etc, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You seem to have excellent English by the way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T13:43:31.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="609" CreationDate="2011-09-22T13:18:10.810" Score="35" ViewCount="2065" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/uk/linguistics/cgel/&quot;&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/a&gt; states that the first three of the following four excerpts are semantically or pragmatically anomalous (to give that term some context, it cites &lt;em&gt;We frightened the cheese&lt;/em&gt; as an example of an anomaly):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and Margaret Thatcher. Behind him there stood the senators.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and Margaret Thatcher. Behind him there were the senators.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and Margaret Thatcher. Behind him there was the Vice President.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and Margaret Thatcher. Behind him there stood the Vice President.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes to explain that the existential (&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;) characteristically requires that a definite displaced subject (&lt;em&gt;the senators, the Vice President&lt;/em&gt;) be addressee-new and the presentational (&lt;em&gt;stand&lt;/em&gt;) occurs more readily with a discourse-new displaced subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Are the authors of CGEL correct that the first three examples are pragmatically anomalous in major English dialects?&lt;/s&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are the existential and presentational constructions in &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;-sentences sensitive to addressee-status and discourse-status of the postverbal noun phrase, respectively?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Apparently, the sensitivity to definiteness of NP is called &lt;em&gt;definiteness effect&lt;/em&gt;, and Google Scholar kindly &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=definiteness+effect&quot;&gt;provides tons of papers about it&lt;/a&gt;. However, all that linguistick-y stuff is sending my brain into meltdown mode, so it would be great if someone summarised it as an answer, if those papers happen to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: As per a request by @Cerberus and two other people who have upvoted his comment, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_clause&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;existential&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; here refers to the &lt;em&gt;there be&lt;/em&gt; construction, the &lt;em&gt;presentational&lt;/em&gt; has some other verb than &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;There remain many problems&lt;/em&gt;), the &lt;em&gt;addressee&lt;/em&gt; is the one to whom something is addressed, &lt;em&gt;addressee-new&lt;/em&gt; stands for something new to the addressee, &lt;em&gt;discourse-new&lt;/em&gt; stands for something new to the discourse, &lt;em&gt;addressee-status&lt;/em&gt; may be either addressee-old or addressee-new, &lt;em&gt;discourse-status&lt;/em&gt; may be either discourse-old or discourse-new, and a &lt;em&gt;displaced subject&lt;/em&gt; is “the phrase that corresponds to the subject of the syntactically more basic construction” (&lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; by Huddleston, Pullum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="263" OwnerDisplayName="Vitaly" LastEditorUserId="263" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T14:51:49.607" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T12:37:01.440" Title="Why are certain there-sentences infelicitous in English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-09-22T15:28:09.337" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that I’ve seen the full sentences, I think the answer to the first part of your question, at least, is, in principle, yes. To avoid the loaded ‘unacceptable’, however, I would say instead that the first three are unlikely to appear in any serious piece of prose written in Standard English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="281" OwnerDisplayName="Barrie England" LastActivityDate="2011-09-22T15:28:09.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-09-22T15:38:16.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think CGEL is pretty much correct here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's at least &quot;odd&quot; to use &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; in this construction to say something additional about the people &lt;em&gt;already mentioned in the previous sentence&lt;/em&gt;, so that makes the first two versions sound somewhat clumsy to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't like the third version, but I'm not sure CGEL are on such solid ground with their obscure &lt;em&gt;addressee/discourse-new&lt;/em&gt; terminology to explain why it's not so good. If I replace &lt;em&gt;&quot;behind him there was the Vice President&quot;&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;&quot;in front of him there was the Presidential seal&quot;&lt;/em&gt; it doesn't seem so awkward to me. The fact that the VP is another &lt;em&gt;politician/person&lt;/em&gt; similar to the other four already mentioned seems to be significant to my inner ear, which winces a bit at #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I can't justify it on grammatical grounds, I don't much like #4 either. I agree &quot;stood&quot; is better than &quot;was&quot;, but if the VP isn't mentioned in the first sentence that implies he was &lt;em&gt;already on the podium&lt;/em&gt;. Which makes it seem strange to suddenly add him into the verbal picture that's being painted by using &lt;em&gt;&quot;appeared&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the first place. The context implies we already have a mental picture of the podium before the presidential appearance, so bringing up that pre-existing detail as if it were part of the sudden apparition being described just seems clumsy to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, #4 may be grammatical by CGEL's lights, but I'm not keen on the entire construction. I think that's because &quot;stood&quot; doesn't really mean anything different to &quot;was&quot; here. We're at the margins of fine distinctions, but I'd rather just sidestep the issue with &lt;em&gt;&quot;The VP stood behind him&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" OwnerDisplayName="FumbleFingers" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T11:30:12.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-09-23T08:37:29.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think envisioning these sentences without the &quot;behind him&quot; included makes it clear why the first three examples are incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;President Clinton appeared at the podium accompanied by three senators and Margaret Thatcher. There were the senators.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the function of the word &quot;there&quot; is clearly to introduce a new person/object into the context. Adding a spatial reference (&quot;behind him&quot;) doesn't really change the purpose of that sentence, in my mind; it just adds extra information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as the example I've written is redundant (in that we already knew the senators were present), so too is the original example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="onomatomaniak" LastActivityDate="2011-09-23T08:37:29.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2011-09-24T15:19:12.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/learning-chinese/pinyin-syllables.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; I found the &lt;strong&gt;413&lt;/strong&gt; most commonly used syllables in Chinese. They are 13 over your limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these you can create thousands of characters, so the level will be pretty high, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When visiting that site&lt;/strong&gt;, you'll find 2 columns: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the first one is the syllables list written in &lt;strong&gt;pinyin&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the second column is the rough pronunciation according to the English rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I organized them for ease of reference (it's an image, I'm not sure you wanted just a list for reference or a txt file):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mBYBR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T15:24:50.863" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T15:24:50.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2011-09-24T15:30:19.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a slang language that relies on intentional (but consistent) misspellings in Russian. It has been extremely popular in the Russian Web in early 2000s. See the wiki entry for it &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padonkaffsky_jargon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T15:30:19.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="387" CreationDate="2011-09-24T15:43:43.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several quite complex statistical models that try to deal with this, with various degrees of success. Phrase based systems, linguistically perhaps a misnomer as the phrases have nothing to do with syntax at all, tend to be able to alleviate this somewhat. Phrases are found by looking at paralell corpora. Hierarchal phrase based systems can work even better. Instead of translating word by word, the system tries to translate complete phrases. The trouble with all these models is that it's very difficult to estimate the parameters in an acceptable way, there just isn't enough data. Furthermore, the models quite quickly get computationally very expensive, both in time and space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common though, to construct a big n-gram language model of the &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; language, and use that to rerank complete sentences. This can deal with small differences in word order, for instance if the adjective goes to the left or the right of the noun it modifies, as the correct word order will typically have a much higher likelihood assigned to it by the model. As n-grams have limited length in practice, the model fails when the movement is big, as in English to German. In that case, the language model reranking usually only works for short sentences, where the movement is inside the &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; of the n-grams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user47" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T15:43:43.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:18:24.533" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are so many ways that a person's speech can indicate that he is not a native speaker of English (or that he is a speaker of English from certain region). Basically, accents happen when you are using non-English rules (can be phonetic, syntax, idiomatic, etc.) when speaking English. Many speakers do not realize that they are using rules from their own language that are not compatible with the rules of English, since they assume the rules to be true. Because non native speakers often don't notice this, it is very hard to fix unless they practice with a native speaker and have him/her correct them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonemes. One's native language has a different set of phonemes than English, and some English phonemes are not available in one's language. For example, Japanese doesn't have the sound 'l' (they use something like an 'r' instead), French doesn't have 'th' (use 'z' or 's' instead) and a lot of English vowels are not available in French (so they merge them with the available vowels)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Syllable pattern. For example, in Japanese a syllable can begin with at most one consonant and must end in a vowel, so they pronounce girlfriend as &quot;garufurendo&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation rules. For example, French don't pronounce the letter 'h', etc. Plus English is notorious for very unpredictable pronunciation rules, it is often hard for non native speakers to use the right pronunciation naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intonation pattern. This is also hard to get right because it is unpredictable for non native speakers, other languages' pattern are often really different from English, and people often don't realize that they are speaking with a non native-like intonation pattern&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Syntax. For example, speakers of isolating languages tend to forget using the right inflection (plural, past tense, etc). After you learn for a while, you will not make such simple mistakes, but non native speakers often don't get the finer point of the syntax, like what hippietrail noticed&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Idioms&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choice of words&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other ways you can do it &quot;wrong&quot;, so the best suggestion is to speak with a native speaker who knows about these things and have him/her correct you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T07:10:19.517" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T07:10:19.517" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:19:44.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diachronic study of language and its evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:39:24.267" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:39:24.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:19:44.827" Score="0" Body="The diachronic study of language and its evolution." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:41:42.343" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:41:42.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:20:01.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon whereby a language's grammar and lexicon change over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:39:51.223" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:39:51.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:20:01.910" Score="0" Body="The phenomenon whereby a language's grammar and lexicon change over time." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:40:09.867" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:40:09.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:20:35.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The study of past events. Use this tag if your linguistic question is also related to history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:40:45.917" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:40:45.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:20:35.563" Score="0" Body="The study of past events. Use this tag if your linguistic question is also related to history." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:41:31.207" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:41:31.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:32:47.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T16:32:47.937" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T16:32:47.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:32:47.937" Score="0" Body="The patterns of changing endings in inflecting languages which cover multiple properties of a word such as tense, mood, person, number, case, etc. This general term covers conjugation of verbs and declension of nouns and adjectives." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:58:45.550" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:58:45.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="411" CreationDate="2011-09-24T16:39:19.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen many books on this topic over the years in Galicia, perhaps due to its strong diglossic history and present. Off the top of my head, I can recall &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/3110176548&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diglossia and Power: Language Policies and Practice in the 19th Century Habsburg Empire&lt;/em&gt; by Rosita Rindler Schjerve&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T16:39:19.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-24T17:38:23.443" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've also heard about some research by &lt;a href=&quot;https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cls/www/&quot;&gt;Chilin Shih&lt;/a&gt; (but can't find it on her website) that suggests that highly proficient speakers of a second language don't do as much phonetic reduction as native speakers do. So to some native speakers, highly proficient L2 speakers sound like they're hyper-articulating a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-24T17:53:03.500" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T17:53:03.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-24T18:21:02.167" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I cannot cite sources, but I was once told that one key to sounding fluent is to make sure you practice getting the &quot;fillers&quot; correct - the umms and errs in English are quite different from French or Spanish fillers. Fillers are sometimes neglected and it is easy to relapse into a native filler when speaking a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="284" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T18:21:02.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-24T22:44:54.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest hurdle on the way to getting taken for a native speaker is intonation.  That's the hardest part.  You can have a big vocabulary; you can learn that from books easily.  You pronounce each and every single word correctly (in isolation).  Also easily to be learned from books (every dictionary has the proper pronounciation listed... at least for the difficult or unusual words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And still, if your intonation is wrong, it's a dead giveaway.  And most native speakers would probably not be able to say what made you sound foreign, since &lt;em&gt;all you pronounce all the words correctly&lt;/em&gt;.  (Okay, I'm assuming this from your description)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you learn intonation?  Not from books.  Only from listening (a lot), and then practicing what you heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T22:44:54.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2011-09-24T23:41:31.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have also read that Japanese particles are pronounced as part of the noun they follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard about particles being pronounced with the nouns they follow, but for what it's worth, when one is space-delimiting Japanese sentences, it is often suggested that one should group particles that way. For example &lt;code&gt;私は　りんごが　好き です。&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;私　は　りんご　が　好き です。&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2011-09-24T23:41:31.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2011-09-25T04:15:05.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some phenomena at play here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, yourself. As others have mentioned, there are some markers that will undeniably identify a person as a foreign speaker, such as pronunciation. As children, we have the possibility of learning how to pronounce most consonants and vowels from most languages. Some sounds (the English th for example) are only mastered later. As we grow older, we lose that ability and remain &quot;stuck&quot; with a limited range of sounds we can reproduce, even when we learn a new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, your interlocutors. While all the words you use can be English, and your structure can be the correct grammar, there are levels of formality in every language which second language speakers do not always master. This is where sociolinguistics step in. There is a &quot;known social norm&quot; for speech in certain situations, and native speakers are keen to those, albeit unconsciously. It is not bound by fixed lexical or grammatical rules, it's hardly quantifiable, but it exists, native speakers have a &quot;culture of speech&quot; that is part of language and yet cannot be taught directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get it too. I'm a foreign speaker myself, and people tell me I talk too formally. Even when I try and play it down it's still there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T13:14:07.000" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T13:14:07.000" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-25T08:31:22.043" Score="4" ViewCount="1178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before the beta I would've thought questions like this one would be such basic concepts that most contributors would be familiar with them. But after a few questions on gender and animacy it seems that some people do confuse the two even here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;classifiers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; different to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;noun classes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? What's the best way to sum up the differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-25T09:20:05.350" LastActivityDate="2011-09-25T22:34:33.620" Title="How exactly are noun classes different to classifiers?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2011-09-25T17:30:44.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it all depends on how you define &quot;near&quot; future. To make things concrete, we have a very large corpus of spoken English from Philadelphia, where dates-of-birth of our speakers range from 1888 to 1991. Looking at the historical trends across 100 years, I'd feel comfortable making predictions about how the language will look in 3 to 4 years from now, but I think what things will look like 10 to 15 years from now is totally up in the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in the 1970s, it was reported that the vowel /aw/ (as in &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;) was fronting and raising. This fronting and raising pattern looks pretty robust in data collected all the way through the 1980s, into the early 1990s. If you had asked me in 1995 what /aw/ would sound like in 2020, the best guess I could have made based on the available data would be that it would continue shooting up to be something like [iw]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, starting in the mid 1990s, the data starts to turn around, and it looks like /aw/ is taking a nosedive towards a lower, backer pronunciation. As such, I'd guess that in 2015, /aw/ is going to be a little lower and backer than it is now, but I don't want to bet any money on what'll be going on in 2030.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more general terms, there are very few language changes which are guaranteed to happen. As @Aaron said, English has been ripe for wide-spread negative concord for centuries, but it hasn't happened yet. All languages which allow voiced, word-final consonants are ripe for developing word-final devoicing, but it's only going to happen in a small subset of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that at any given point in time, there are a lot of language changes which are likely, and for all language changes, it seems obvious why they occurred, post-hoc. However, which language changes are &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; going to occur next is up to a lot of historical and social chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing is very comparable to trying to figure out what kind of genetic evolution is going to occur next. As always, some are more likely than others, but non are guaranteed to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-25T17:30:44.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="512" CreationDate="2011-09-25T17:55:59.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noun classes and classifiers are similar in one respect: certain lexical roots (like woman, man, tree, etc) will belong to/appear with certain noun classes and not others, and similarly, such roots in other languages will appear with certain classifiers and not others. The operative difference seems to be in the semantic import of the two types of classes. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/384/do-some-indo-european-languages-reflect-noun-class-types-other-than-gender&quot;&gt;the discussion here suggested&lt;/a&gt;, grammatical gender (or grammatical noun class) is not always systematically tied to language-external properties (like &quot;feminine gender&quot; or &quot;animate class&quot; necessarily picking out things we would ordinarily think of as &quot;feminine&quot; or &quot;animate&quot; respectively), but it is generally not (compositionally) important whether it does or not. Classifiers, on the other hand, are related to the semantics of quantity, be it to specify a type of portion or measure, or the cardinal count of a given nominal, etc. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/In_name_only.html?id=GuLFjOcmCYEC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borer's work&lt;/a&gt; theorizing on the relation between the Chinese classifier system and the semantics of quantity in languages like English. Representations of quantity are quite important to natural language semantics: some of the most important results in this field concern the &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generalized-quantifiers/#natu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathematical properties of natural language quantifiers&lt;/a&gt;. I've focused on a semantic difference; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_%28linguistics%29#Noun_classifiers_vs._noun_classes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the wiki page on classifiers&lt;/a&gt; gives more of a morpho-syntactic list of differences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-25T22:34:33.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6956" CreationDate="2011-09-25T22:29:26.040" Score="18" ViewCount="1609" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nouns like &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mud&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;furniture&lt;/em&gt; in English are odd with plural morphology (adding &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;furnitures&lt;/em&gt;), with numerals (&lt;em&gt;three furniture(s)&lt;/em&gt;), and seem to have their own quantifier (&lt;em&gt;much water&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;much boys&lt;/em&gt;), and are typically referred to as &lt;strong&gt;mass nouns&lt;/strong&gt;. In contrast stand so-called &lt;strong&gt;count nouns&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;em&gt;chair&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;table&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;chairs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;three chairs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;many chairs&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Count nouns&quot; are easily singular, &lt;em&gt;a chair&lt;/em&gt;, or plural, &lt;em&gt;chairs&lt;/em&gt;. When a count noun appears without the indefinite article or plural marking in English, the default assumption is that it should be interpreted &quot;as mass&quot;: &lt;em&gt;There was chair all over the highway&lt;/em&gt;. Interestingly, there is no equivalent to &lt;strong&gt;marking mass&lt;/strong&gt; as we &lt;strong&gt;mark plural&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in English, and not in any other language I'm aware of. I know there are languages that mark singular, plural, all of the dual through paucal markers, etc, and still other languages with the glorious &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~sgrimm/publications/grimm_Sub14.pdf&quot;&gt;inverse number marking&lt;/a&gt; systems (a single marker, depending on the lexical root, either means &quot;plural&quot; or &quot;singular&quot;). But are there any languages that mark a noun as having a &lt;strong&gt;mass interpretation&lt;/strong&gt;? Such a marker would result in an odd interpretation when combined with a &quot;count noun&quot;, and &quot;mass nouns&quot; might obligatorily take the mass marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It is true that there are languages with morphemes that, when applied to a &quot;lexically mass&quot; noun, describe a singular unit of the stuff, or a plurality of units of the stuff. Such data may be used to motivate the idea of a &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; category &quot;mass&quot; for nominals. To be more precise about my question: I am wondering if any language has a &quot;mass marker&quot; that marks any noun &lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; mass, so that when added to a word expressing concepts like &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;chair&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning is &lt;em&gt;boy-stuff&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;chair-stuff&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="178" LastEditDate="2011-11-01T19:09:12.580" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T12:44:02.563" Title="Are there any languages that mark nouns as mass?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-25T23:17:36.733" Score="7" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages with small phoneme inventories such as Pirahã often encourage different constructions of the phoneme system. In the case of Pirahã, it either lacks phonemic velars or phonemic nasals. Are there any metrics to measure which option is more likely? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T06:45:32.483" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T06:45:32.483" Title="How do you determine the phonemes in small phonemic inventories?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="519" CreationDate="2011-09-26T03:21:59.533" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there are languages that highlight the mass distinction in particular--the boundaries are of course less clear-cut than for number, but that doesn't mean a language wouldn't have two or three &quot;masses,&quot; with its speakers allowed to use either/multiple ones for masses at boundaries; however, there are languages that make finer, qualitative distinctions that correlate with mass/scale. For instance, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=VfLZFtszOCQC&amp;amp;lpg=PA9&amp;amp;ots=egjlh2tvC4&amp;amp;dq=the%20semantics%20of%20classification%20in%20koyukon%20athabascan&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PA10#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;The Semantics of Classification in Koyukon Athabaskan&lt;/a&gt; by Melissa Axelrod, we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Koyukon Classificatory Verbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G+ø+'o      'compact object is in position, is sitting there'&#xA;G+ø+ton     'flat, rigid, or sticklike object is there'&#xA;G+ø+lo      'plural objects are there'&#xA;ø+kko       'object in an open, shallow container is there'&#xA;G+ɬ+ton     'bag or enclosed object is there'&#xA;G+ɬ+kooɬ    'flat, flexible, or clothlike object is there'&#xA;G+ɬ+koot    'food, edible object is there'&#xA;de+ɬ+t'on   'burning object is there'&#xA;G+de+dzok   'disorderly, scattered plural objects are there'&#xA;G+de+tlaakk 'mushy, wet, messy object is there'&#xA;de+de+nokk  'granular or powdery substance is there'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The capital G refers to a gender prefix, which is chosen from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Koyukon Gender Prefixes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ne-    faces, berries, beads, thimbles, string, rope&#xA;de-    wood, plants, furniture, mittens, boots, rigid containers&#xA;dene-  round, heavy objects: animal heads, cabbages, apples, rocks;&#xA;       long, cylindrical objects: pipes, bridges, pencils, guns&#xA;hu-    the areal prefix, used also to classify areas, events, abstractions&#xA;hede-  weather&#xA;(zero) people, animals&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She then works through an example changing classification and gender with flour, and its implications. It seems as though, if you were referring to rice, for instance, you might choose &lt;em&gt;G+ø+lo, G+de+dzok,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;de+de+nokk&lt;/em&gt; depending on whether it was just a few grains, several, or many, which would correlate with the mass. So this is somewhat related to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T03:40:21.337" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T03:40:21.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-26T04:17:52.537" Score="10" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a background in natural language processing and machine translation, and recently I've been interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_of_machine_translation&quot;&gt;automatic evaluation of translations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read a lot of literature from the machine translation world on approaches to evaluation. Most are statistical (e.g. n-grams), but a few use semantic or grammatical approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for inspiration from further afield and was wondering, is there a body of research within 'traditional' (non-computer) linguistics for evaluating translations? Can anyone recommend some keywords or papers to start with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T05:45:05.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T18:56:09.130" Title="Linguistic research on translation evaluation" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="519" CreationDate="2011-09-26T09:53:59.453" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a way, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about mass nouns is that the things they refer to are usually inherently plural/collective/inseparable, like &lt;em&gt;flour&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;milk&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dust&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;grass&lt;/em&gt;. Those things are most commonly encountered or discussed as, well, masses of a given substance, rather than individual pieces of said substance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it would be somewhat unusual for a language to explicitly mark the 'mass' form of a mass noun, because that would suggest that 'a drop of milk' is the run-of-the mill, everyday way of talking about milk, while 'many drops of milk as one mass' needs to be explicitly indicated because your audience couldn't assume that's what you meant. In effect, you would end up with a similar system to the singular vs. plural marking that happens for count nouns, and it would erode an existing distinction between mass nouns and count nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead, what some languages do is mark the &lt;strong&gt;singulative&lt;/strong&gt; form of a mass noun, which means basically that there is a marked form of the noun to indicate when it is a piece/part of the unmarked mass noun. In English, we can only do this in a roundabout way: &lt;em&gt;a grain of rice&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;rice&lt;/em&gt;, but if we had a singulative marker, say *&lt;em&gt;-op&lt;/em&gt;, we could just say *&lt;em&gt;ricop&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rice&lt;/em&gt;, in the same way as in Bari, you have &lt;em&gt;lɛ-tat&lt;/em&gt; 'a drop of milk' and &lt;em&gt;lɛ&lt;/em&gt; 'milk'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A system like this means that, although the mass form of the mass noun is unmarked, mass nouns have their own specific morphology as opposed to count nouns, so are easily distinguished from count nouns (unlike in English, where mass nouns don't take any special morphemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Singulative marking is encountered as part of the &lt;strong&gt;tripartite number marking&lt;/strong&gt; patterns found in many Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo languages. A tripartite number system exhibits three principles of number indication, namely &lt;strong&gt;pluralisation&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;singulativisation&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;substitution of number morphemes&lt;/strong&gt;, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/37/paper1591.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper on Western Nilotic noun morphology by Storch (2007).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from Anywa (Anuak) from Reh 1996 but reproduced by Storch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;              SINGULAR     PLURAL &#xA;&#xA; ‘bell’       okoot        okóód-í     (plural formation)&#xA;&#xA;              COLLECTIVE   SINGULATIVE &#xA;&#xA; ‘butter’     búóp         búób-ò      (singulative formation)&#xA;&#xA;              SINGULAR     PLURAL  &#xA;&#xA; ‘loincloth’  kèèl-ʌ́       kèèl-é      (replacement pattern)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you can see that in this, the mass/collective noun 'butter' is unmarked for the collective form but marked for the singulative formation, with distinct morphology from the plural formation and the 'replacement pattern'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example given above, and others typical of the tripartite system, for a noun like 'bell' the underlying form is a singular, with a morphologically complex plural, while the morphologically unmarked and thus underlying form of ‘butter’ is plural/collective/mass both grammatically and semantically. &lt;strong&gt;A singulative noun is typically a word that denotes an item that is singled out from a mass or group of similar items. Items that normally occur in pairs or larger numbers are expressed by nouns that are semantically and grammatically plural or collective and morphologically not overtly marked.&lt;/strong&gt; For a noun like 'loincloth', with the 'replacement pattern', both forms a morphologically complex, and neither may be underlying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the semantic distinctions made by speakers of a particular language are crucial to determining how a noun is treated for number marking. This is discussed quite a bit in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/30028548&quot;&gt;this paper by Dimmendaal on number marking and noun classification in Nilo-Saharan (2000)&lt;/a&gt; (access via an institution). He argues that that there is a continuum between 'object' and 'substance', with the end points of this continuum being universally distinguished (i.e. the most 'county' count nouns and the most 'massy' mass nouns), but with intermediate cases being &quot;linguistically malleable&quot; across languages. This is not just true for, say, Nilo-Saharan languages compared to Indo-European languages - it can be true for even very closely related languages, because there is an enormous amount of variation in how these systems work (particularly in the parts of Africa relevant to the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan language groupings, where there are large amounts of linguistic transfer between languages which are geographically close but genetically distant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dimmendaal also gives examples from some other languages which show structural similarities to the the singulative marking patterns in the tripartite systems of Nilo-Saharan, such as Russian &lt;em&gt;gorox&lt;/em&gt; 'peas', &lt;em&gt;gorošina&lt;/em&gt; 'pea'. In the Native American language Kiowa, nouns which are inherently singular or dual take a number suffix to mark plural, while other nouns which are inherently dual or plural ('bone', 'rib', 'wing') take a singulative marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically, mass nouns are 'marked', or indicated, by virtue of being morphologically unmarked but having a clear singulative counterpart, and unique noun morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above points do not take into account the complex interactions between noun classifier systems and number marking in Nilo-Saharan languages, nor external ways of indicating the 'mass-ness' of a noun (the classificatory verbs discussed by @Daniel Briggs) - there are also many other ways to indicate this beyond the noun morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T09:53:59.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="541" CreationDate="2011-09-26T10:47:57.317" Score="2" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There are many kinds of participles&lt;/a&gt;. English has two kinds, past participles (&lt;em&gt;eaten&lt;/em&gt;) and present participles (&lt;em&gt;eating&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on the Albanian language doesn't cover as much as many other language articles. I have seen mention on Wiktionary of Albanian participles but not what kind or if the language has various kinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which kinds of participles are present in Albanian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-19T20:19:50.130" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T20:19:50.130" Title="Which kinds of participle does Albanian have?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="533" CreationDate="2011-09-26T13:40:08.567" Score="22" ViewCount="7379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is their origin (assuming that there is a single origin, if there are many origins)? Or what are the origins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How and for what purpose did they develop? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a glance, there doesn't seem to be a point in differentiating the inflection for adjectives and verbs related to the moon and the sun, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T13:25:38.407" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T11:43:33.910" Title="What is the origin of non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2011-09-26T14:17:37.587" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume more than one origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the book &quot;Women, fire and dangerous things&quot; (that's a noun-class/gender in an Australian language IIRC) by George Lakoff, it arises due to association. It is not &quot;invented&quot;! In the case of the book title, &quot;women&quot; had natural gender feminine. Since women tends the fire, &quot;fire&quot; received feminine gender. Fire is dangerous, ergo &quot;dangerous things&quot; received feminine gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another route, which might be more likely for Indo-European languages, is sound shifts. The markings for two genders become similar for all/some words and the two genders merge. Or, some words of gender X start to sound like words of gender Y due to sound shifts, and change genders so that the system of markings will still make sense. Instead of sorting into genders according to what the words mean you can now just sort them by what they sound like. Note that different dialects may consider the same word to be of different genders...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the book &quot;Gender&quot; by Greville G. Corbett if you really want to dive into the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T16:48:20.200" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T16:48:20.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2011-09-26T14:18:28.713" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could ask the same of any kind of agreement: plurality, case, etc. multiple language elements in an utterance that don't add any extra meaning. Grammatical gender is particularly outstanding because it seems so arbitrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One explanation is that redundancy provides some error correction over the noisy speaking-hearing connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T14:18:28.713" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2011-09-26T14:51:07.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what kaleissin and Mitch have already mentioned, for Indo-European in particular there was at some point just an animate/inanimate (&quot;common/neuter&quot;) distinction which aligned pretty well with actual animacy; English &quot;water&quot; and Latin &lt;em&gt;aqua&lt;/em&gt; are descended from an inanimate and an animate word, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was for neuter nouns a collective marker **-a*, originally a laryngeal **-h2*, that seems to have developed into the feminine gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html#28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How did genders and cases develop in IE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One conjecture is that collective nouns often were used for cows, ewes, does etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/language/f/NeuterA.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What Is the Plural of Virus?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T01:02:30.287" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T01:02:30.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="381" CreationDate="2011-09-26T14:51:15.610" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming from English, ejectives are hard!  I'm studying a Mayan language that's chock full of them, and it took me a solid two years of speaking it before the ejectives stopped feeling like a huge effort to produce.  But it's fairly easy to get to a point where you can produce them &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; effort.  Here are some tips based on my own experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ejectives further back in the mouth tend to be easier to produce: [q'] and [k'] take less effort than [p'].  Since your native language doesn't have uvular sounds in it, [k'] might be the easiest one to start with.  (FWIW, this isn't just personal bias.  There are a lot more languages with phonemic /k'/ then there are languages with phonemic /p'/ -- which suggests that the [k']-sound really is easier or more natural.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ejectives are &lt;em&gt;glottalized&lt;/em&gt; sounds, which means that you shut your glottis while producing them.  It helps to get in the habit of noticing what your glottis is up to.  One way to practice this is to pronounce a sequence of glottal stops (that's the hamza sound in Arabic) and really pay attention to the feeling in the back of your throat and the muscles you're using.  Try to do it &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; inserting vowels in between the glottal stops.  Vibrating your glottis, like you do to produce a normal vowel, can distract you from the glottis-open/glottis-closed feelings that you're trying to notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some English speakers (though apparently not all) will use ejectives as &lt;em&gt;emphatic&lt;/em&gt; pronunciations for word-final voiceless stops.  Try pronouncing the sentence &quot;I didn't say &lt;em&gt;sit&lt;/em&gt;, I said &lt;em&gt;sick&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; putting as much emphasis as you can on the &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;sit&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;sick.&lt;/em&gt;  You may find yourself pronouncing them as [t'] and [k'].  Use kaleissin's puff-of-air test to check.  If, as an English-speaker, you produce a sharp and loudly audible &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;-sound at the end of a word, and there isn't a big soft puff of air along with it, it was quite likely a [k']. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another place you'll hear ejectives in the English-speaking world: beatboxing!  You'll hear [k'] used as a snare drum or rim-shot-type sound, and you'll sometimes hear [p'] used as a bass drum and [ts'] as a sharp closed-hi-hat sound.  If you happen to have put any time into learning to beatbox, or listening to classic hip-hop with prominent beat-boxing, the connection might help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My experience is that production is the key to perception.  The better you get at pronouncing the ejectives, the easier it is to recognize them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, FWIW, the Georgian &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; sound isn't at the same point of articulation as 'ayin.  It's actually at the same point of articulation as &lt;em&gt;qāf&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; though, like you say, qāf isn't glottalized and Georgian &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T14:51:15.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2011-09-26T15:09:28.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;People that grow up with more than one language, can end up being fluent in each language, and have native-speaker competency, but there will still be a dominant language.  This could arise from social stigma (e.g. avoiding speaking a language that is not a dominant language in the community), from lack of full community to engage in (e.g. speaking a parent's native language in a community where few, if any others, speak that language, also commonly referred to as heritage speakers) or from simple cognitive barriers.  This barrier is usually associated with when the L2 is learned and how much the L2 is used, which leads to four main groups: early critical period-high proficiency, early critical period-low proficiency, late critical period-high proficiency, late critical period-low proficiency.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even with a Simultaneous Bilingual, there will be sociolinguistic pressures that make one of the languages a dominant language.  In this sense you can analyse the development of the bilingualism in much the same way as you would any second language acquisition.  Unfortunately there is no guarantee that the Simultaneous Bilingual will have better cross-linguistic ability when compared to the Sequential Bilingual, as this is a function of many variables, but I would feel comfortable putting my money on betting that the Simultaneous Bilingual would have a higher probability of being a high proficiency user of the L2, simply because they have more time, and we can assume that the L2 is acquired before the critical period is over.  Whereas the Sequential Bilingual might not begin learning the L2 until later in the critical period.  And it is important to recognize that the critical period fades over time, and at different rates for each person, and that the early critical period is more valuable than later stages of the critical period.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your question more directly, there will be differences between the two bilinguals, but neither is a solid predictor of language competency.  Which I can attest to from personal experience, where I learned German at a later age (7) than my brother (5), and I have a greater competency than he does.  A good book I can recommend is the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0805854983&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Langauge Acquisition&lt;/a&gt;, which has a lot of good information on bilingualism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T12:28:44.513" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T12:28:44.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="520" CreationDate="2011-09-26T15:27:01.710" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pirahã &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;has a consonant phoneme that's pronounced [g] in some contexts and [n] in others&lt;/a&gt;.  (It has no other nasal phonemes, and arguably no other velar phonemes.)  So the question here is, &quot;Is this Mystery Consonant &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; a /g/, or is it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; an /n/?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of convention, linguists tend to name consonants after their default pronunciation if there is a clear default.  According to the Wikipedia article, the Pirahã Mystery Consonant is pronounced [n] after a pause and [g] elsewhere.  That suggests that [g] is the default pronunciation, and that we should name the phoneme /g/.  And by the looks of it, that's what the linguists who work on Pirahã have done.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, too, it's not &lt;em&gt;terribly&lt;/em&gt; uncommon for languages to lack nasal phonemes.  Whereas it's &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; uncommon for languages to lack velar phonemes: /k/ is the most common consonant across languages.  (There are &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; languages without phonemic /k/, including Tahitian and maybe some varieties of Hawaiian.  But it's very, very rare.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T15:27:01.710" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2011-09-26T16:26:44.753" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're talking about why there is such thing as a neuter gender at all, I mentioned in my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/379/42&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that many believe the masculine/feminine/neuter paradigm of so many IE languages is derived from PIE first distinguishing between animate/inanimate nouns, then the animate noun category began to distinguish between masculine/feminine (&lt;a href=&quot;http://homer.members.pgv.at/INDOEURO/gender.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're talking about why certain nouns are part of specific genders, I too would second the recommendation of Lakoff's &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226468046&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). It's a really interesting exploration of hierarchical cognitive models using some case studies as a guide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here's is Foundalis's closing to his paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.foundalis.com/res/EvolutionOfGender.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evolution of Gender in Indo-European Languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An alternative hypothesis is that masculine and feminine assignments&#xA;  to inanimate objects existed even in the original Indo-European&#xA;  ancestor. Although such assignments seem nonsensical today, they might&#xA;  have “made sense” in the remote past, at least among the few speakers&#xA;  of the ancestor language, based on animistic conceptions of the world.&#xA;  It could have appeared natural to a particular culture that, for&#xA;  example, a stone is of female sex. However, as the original language&#xA;  evolved, ideas about the stone’s sex changed, too. Since there is no&#xA;  objective way to agree on something like the sex of a stone, the&#xA;  “opinions” among descendant languages evolved differently. What we&#xA;  observe today appears as a purely formal and arbitrary assignment,&#xA;  since the original “reasons” have been lost. One prediction of this&#xA;  hypothesis is that gender evolution in such languages should be&#xA;  traceable through a weak agreement between phylogenetically proximal&#xA;  languages. I believe the present work supports this implication,&#xA;  although further investigation of the hypothesis is clearly needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't answer how it occurred, but offers a why: my two cents is that gender is useful since it can help free up word order, ease reference to antecedent words -- basically make communication more efficient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T18:32:21.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2011-09-26T17:14:54.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use just html and css.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the html.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;interlinear&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;div class=&quot;orig&quot;&amp;gt;det ordet&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;div class=&quot;intlin&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;orig&quot;&amp;gt;det&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;morph&quot;&amp;gt;det&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;trans&quot;&amp;gt;1s.neuter.definite&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;div class=&quot;intlin&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;orig&quot;&amp;gt;ordet&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;morph&quot;&amp;gt;ord -et&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;span class=&quot;trans&quot;&amp;gt;word -1s.neuter.definite&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;div class=&quot;freetrans&quot;&amp;gt;the word&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the css:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.interlinear {clear: both; text-align: left;}&#xA;.intlin {float: left; margin: 0.25em; text-align: left;}&#xA;.intlin .morph, .intlin .trans, .intlin .orig, .interlinear {display: block; margin: 2px 0;}&#xA;.intlin .orig {font-weight: bold;}&#xA;.interlinear .freetrans { font-style: italic;}&#xA;.interlinear div.orig { font-weight: bold; text-align: left;}&#xA;.interlinear .morph { color: #10a }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems impossible to highlight inside a pre-tag in this variety of markdown, below is just the magic bits of the css: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.interlinear {clear: both}&#xA;.intlin {float: left}&#xA;.intlin .morph, .intlin .trans, .intlin .orig, .interlinear {display: block}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Somewhere&lt;/em&gt; I have several tools that can generate this from a SIL Toolbox interlinear via xml-export and xslt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T17:14:54.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="539" CreationDate="2011-09-26T17:20:50.020" Score="9" ViewCount="897" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe my variety of English, General Australian, has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_L&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;dark l&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell if I have it in my own idiolect or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty well accepted (I think) that it's hard to linguistically analyse your own speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it could be tricky because in English dark l is an allophone of normal l (so it never contrasts directly as with a minimal pair).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I've largely lost my accent because of years of overseas travel and working with overseas travellers when I'm at home - so if I used to have it I'm still unsure whether I have it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are there some methods or tricks a person can use to analyse their own various &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt; sounds, something like minimal pairs perhaps (I don't think there are exact minimal pairs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a person analyse their own speech for presence of the &quot;dark l&quot; sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-10T06:58:14.373" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T06:58:14.373" Title="How can a speaker tell whether their idiolect has &quot;dark l&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;dark-l&gt;&lt;idiolect&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="862" CreationDate="2011-09-26T18:06:11.147" Score="16" ViewCount="913" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to prepare myself for a glorious sports event this weekend, I've bought and read &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/2296027555&quot;&gt;a book&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_language&quot;&gt;Māori&lt;/a&gt;. If my sources are to be believed, Māori is relatively close to other Polynesian languages, so if you are a specialist in these or in other Austronesian languages, you may be able to answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was quite disappointing: it is clearly very far from comprehensive (which is OK, because it isn't sold as such) and, while it insists on how far from European languages the Māori is, it somehow remains stuck in IE grammatical categories...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect of the grammar where this failure was particularly frustrating is the verb question: the author explains that the verb has no form expressing person, number, gender or tense (this role is assumed by a rich system of particles), that many things can be expressed with verbless sentences, and that a same word often serves as both noun and verb (e.g. &lt;em&gt;mahi&lt;/em&gt; translates as the noun &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; and the verb &lt;em&gt;to work&lt;/em&gt;). In my opinion, all these things are clues that maybe the noun/verb opposition doesn't make much sense in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in all kinds of generalisations of this question, but I'll ask a separate question for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T19:47:35.597" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T19:47:35.597" Title="Is it possible to analyse Māori grammar without contrasting nouns and verbs?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="564" CreationDate="2011-09-26T18:10:01.223" Score="5" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_parameters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;principles and parameters paradigm&lt;/a&gt; says that most languages in the world have their individual structure (grammatical meta-rules) set (and easily learnable) by a small set of principles and parameters. For example, English is (mostly) right-branching (modifiers come -after/o the right) of the modified head) and non-pro-drop (it must have pronouns with the verb). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reference list somewhere of which languages have what value of the parameters? &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; has an unbelievably long list of features, but frankly none of them correspond to the more abstract theorized parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, implicit in this question is what are the currently accepted parameters. The wikipedia article has a list of including head and pro-drop, but there seems to be lot of overlap among those given, showing that that list may not be totally coherent (or equally may be a reflection of the lack of coherence of the research so far).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T20:31:37.917" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T14:51:03.600" Title="Is there a reference for the parameters of the world's languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-26T18:30:12.743" Score="22" ViewCount="981" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fact&lt;/a&gt; that the grammar core of most European languages (not only IE ones) can be analysed in a relatively precise common framework. Of course I do not know much of these languages, but the basic concepts of nouns, verbs, adjectives, verb tenses, pronouns etc. seem to be relevant not only for Indo-European languages, but also for some of their neighbours (Finno-Ugric, Turkish, Semitic, Dravidian...) A perusal of a Finnish Grammar book, for example, will give to the IE reader an occasional surprise (vowel harmony, say), but won't transport him to another planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not interested in a list of linguistic curiosities, but in cases where a serious grammatical analysis has been made that required a brand new look on the language. For example, a language grammar lacking a verb vs. noun contrast would certainly qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, while &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; grammar perfectly illustrates the kind of exotic I'm after, I'm only interested in natural examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something like the whimsical companion of a more precise question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/536/verbs-vs-nouns-in-polynesian-languages&quot;&gt;I asked earlier.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T16:50:57.643" Title="Are there grammatical analyses of languages that are extremely different from IE grammar?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-09-26T19:32:44.203" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference lies in what part of your tongue enters in contact with your &lt;em&gt;velum&lt;/em&gt; (aka &lt;em&gt;soft palate&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you try to pronounce &quot;light&quot; [try with a French accent if that doesn't work with your native Australian pronunciation ;-)] you will notice that the &lt;em&gt;tip&lt;/em&gt; of your tongue enters in contact with your velum.  It leans on the alveolar ridge and touches the upper front teeth.  This is conspicuous when the &quot;l&quot; is at the beginning of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If instead you decompose the pronunciation of words like &quot;feel&quot; or &quot;false&quot; [as heard on the BBC may be], you will notice that your tongue makes itself more compact and touches an inner part of the velum (by which I mean more towards the back of your mouth).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As you can see from the examples I cited, this actually happens when the &quot;L&quot; is at the end of the syllable (and often the word itself).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Normally you should also notice, in a subsequent phase, that the tip of your tongue touches the front of your palate closer to the teeth, but since you already mentioned that you tend to finish your &quot;dark Ls&quot; with a &quot;w&quot; sound, it is possible that this part is absent in your pronunciation - which is actually quite common in America for instance.  On the other hand &lt;em&gt;Received Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; does have both phases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you don't notice a tongue position difference between &quot;light&quot; and &quot;dark&quot; Ls in your way of pronouncing the words mentioned above, you might still notice a synchronisation difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a &quot;light L&quot;, the tongue moves faster towards the front. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a &quot;dark L&quot; one clearly feels two different phases - try &quot;false&quot; or &quot;tell&quot; against &quot;tale&quot;. Caution though: this is a different phenomenon from the length of the preceding vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this more subtle difference, I have to quote &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521533783&quot;&gt;Phonology and Language Use&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (p. 87).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Browman and Goldstein (1992, 1995) have discovered a generalization regarding the difference between certain sonorant consonants in&#xA;syllable-initial and syllable-final position.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In syllable-initial position, the gestures involved in producing a consonant such as [n] or [l] are more synchronous than in syllable-final position, where the gestures&#xA;are more spread out over time. Indeed, Browman and Goldstein (1992,&#xA;1995) report that multiple gestures following a vowel are phased such&#xA;that the wider gesture – the one with lesser degree of constriction –&#xA;comes earlier, yielding a structure in which the syllable nucleus has the&#xA;widest opening and subsequent gestures are organized towards gradual&#xA;closure. Studies of the relative phasing of syllable-final gestures leads&#xA;to a unified description of the seemingly unrelated phonetic pattern of&#xA;‘velarization’ of [l] in syllable-final position and the nasalization&#xA;of vowels before tautosyllabic nasal consonants. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;American English [l], both syllable-initial and syllable-final (‘dark’) [l], is produced with&#xA;two gestures: one involving the tongue tip and one involving the tongue&#xA;dorsum. For [l] before a vowel, the two gestures occur almost simultaneously, &#xA;while after a vowel, the tongue dorsum gesture begins much&#xA;earlier than the tongue tip gesture. In fact, for the postvocalic [l],&#xA;the end of the retraction of the back of the tongue occurs only a little&#xA;after the beginning of the raising of the tongue tip. The acoustic impression of a velarized or ‘dark’ [l] results from this retraction of the back&#xA;of the tongue occurring before the tongue tip raises (Sproat and&#xA;Fujimura 1993).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more considerations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;In Albanian, it should be easier to tell which is which because dark Ls are spelled with a double &quot;l&quot; whereas light ones are spelled with just a single one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;An emphasised &quot;dark L&quot; is conspicuous in the Arabic pronunciation of &quot;Allah&quot; (الله‎) and since you are currently living in Albania, you should probably be able to feel the &quot;depth&quot; of the &quot;l&quot; in Allah (also noted /lˤ/ in IPA).&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T21:12:01.000" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T21:12:01.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-09-26T20:25:27.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd start with looking for descriptions that don't pertain to follow a specific framework like &lt;em&gt;Minimalism&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;LFG&lt;/em&gt; or any of the many others but try to use and if necessary invent structures and terms that make sense for a prticular language. It may make comparisons harder but it may also may lead to a eureka moment. Schachter and Otanes' reference grammar for Tagalog, from 1972 is supposedly a good example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T20:25:27.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="524" CreationDate="2011-09-26T20:58:20.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Albanian has arguably only the past participle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often formed by adding an &quot;-ur&quot; postfix at the end of the stem if the stem ends with a consonant and &quot;-r&quot; otherwise (although there are of course many special cases).  In Tosk there is only one form but Teg instead has two forms depending on whether the past participle is used as an adjective or in verbal phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This apparent paucity is compensated by a large number of uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Gerund is formed by the juxtaposition of &lt;em&gt;dúke/tue&lt;/em&gt; with the past participle [Tosk/Geg]. Which is why I claim that there is no specific &quot;present participle&quot;. See the use of &quot;po&quot; however as another way to form progressive forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Infinitive itself is composed of &lt;em&gt;për te&lt;/em&gt; + past participle [Tosk] or &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; + past articiple [Geg].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many past tenses use the past participle combined with a variety of auxiliaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more, you can refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verbix.com/languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verbix&lt;/a&gt; a great resource for many present and past languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T20:58:20.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-09-26T21:30:03.857" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a failed example of what you are looking for, but perhaps it will be interesting for you nonetheless.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a certain point (in the late 70s, if my memory serves – but I could be off by a bit), linguists working in the generative tradition started describing certain languages as &quot;non-configurational,&quot; meaning that they belonged to a class of languages which lack word order (by contrast with most languages familiar to linguists, which were of course acknowledged to have word order).*  Various explanations were pursued as to how non-configurational languages could have a grammar (making sure that morphological agreement happens, that verbs have the right number of arguments, etc.) without traditional syntactic notions that are often dependent on order.  The paragon example of such a language was held to be Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), but it has now been shown to be analyzable in terms of familiar syntactic theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047512&quot;&gt;This 1983 article&lt;/a&gt; by Hale in NLLT is an example of a non-configurationality analysis of Warlpiri.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8152&quot;&gt;This 2002 MIT dissertation&lt;/a&gt; by Legate** argues for an analysis of the language in line with standard syntactic theories, and by extension that &quot;non-configurational languages&quot; do not form a separate class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This is of course soemething of a simplification of the literature on non-configurationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Full disclosure: a professor of mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-26T21:30:03.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="545" CreationDate="2011-09-26T23:35:44.013" Score="9" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any known natural language in which it is possible to express grammatically—i.e., not through emotional tone or other secondary traits—multiple parallel channels of meaning? Parallel structures could be made explicit in such a language by simultaneous articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a hypothetical language in which words can overlap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʔņ] = “have, there is”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[po] = “apple tree”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ka] = “rain”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[k͡pʼœ̃] = “it is raining and there is an apple tree”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In which [p] and [k] become coarticulated, [ʔ] becomes ejective colouring, [o] and [a] combine to form [œ], and the syllabic [ņ] nasalises the vowel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process is essentially synthesis with a pathologically high degree of sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally this is a contrived example, and a phonologically unusual one; I’d expect a language that has anything remotely resembling this to have some provisions for keeping things manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility, and in my experience with conlangs, I’ve learned not to be surprised when natural languages turn out to be far weirder and more wonderful than anything an individual can come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastEditorUserId="197" LastEditDate="2011-09-26T23:41:03.167" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T22:58:55.120" Title="Simultaneity in natural languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2011-09-26T23:38:26.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples taken from the Wiktionary appendix on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aList_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European roots&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pater&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;patēr&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;ph₂tḗr&lt;/em&gt; (father)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt;: пизда (&lt;em&gt;pizdá&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;strong&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pyzdà&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Latvian&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pīzda&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Polish&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pizda&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;pisd-eh₂-&lt;/em&gt; (vulva)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Umbrian&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pumpe&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Welsh&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;pump&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;pénkʷe&lt;/em&gt; (five)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latvian&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;spenis&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Old Prussian&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;spenis&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;psten-&lt;/em&gt; (breast)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;: τρέμω (&lt;em&gt;trémō&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;: tremō; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;ter-&lt;/em&gt; (to shake, tremble)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Illyrian&lt;/strong&gt;: tri-; &lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;Welsh&lt;/strong&gt;: tri; &lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt;: tri; &lt;strong&gt;Hittite&lt;/strong&gt;: θri; &lt;strong&gt;Albanian&lt;/strong&gt;: tre/tri. &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;tréyes, tri- [prefix]&lt;/em&gt; (three)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Irish&lt;/strong&gt;: dia; &lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt;: dia; &lt;strong&gt;PIE root&lt;/strong&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;déi-no-&lt;/em&gt; (day)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the list goes on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T02:09:59.263" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T02:09:59.263" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="543" CreationDate="2011-09-27T00:21:32.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of an example quite like that from spoken language, but Singleton &amp;amp; Newport (2004) discuss verbal morphology in American Sign Language, and according to their discussion verbs of motion carry seven morphemes. Here's their Figure 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zs1N0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the description, it seems like one or more of these morphemes are articulated simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there's cases of infixation and reduplication, where the pronunciation of one morpheme is interleaved with the pronunciation of another. A fun example from English is &lt;em&gt;fan-fucking-tastic&lt;/em&gt;.  I'm not sure of that meets your criteria of &quot;parallel channels,&quot; since it is more a mixture than a blend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphologically triggered stem changes could also be a good example. For instance in &lt;em&gt;sang&lt;/em&gt;, the phonological process &lt;code&gt;ɪ -&amp;gt; æ&lt;/code&gt; indicates the past tense, and is pronounced simultaneously as the lexical material indicating the verb &quot;to sing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T00:21:32.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="430" CreationDate="2011-09-27T01:16:53.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read about a study on this which used a fascinating methodology.  Here's a description of it from Arends et al. (1994) &lt;em&gt;Pidgins and creoles, An introduction&lt;/em&gt; Johns Benjamins ch. 9 (p. 108):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Twenty Ndjuka [English-based creole, Surinam/Fr. Guyana – AE] morphemes were selected for which the 'area of meaning' [...] differs from the corresponding English morpheme, such as the word &lt;em&gt;mófu&lt;/em&gt;, meaning both &quot;mouth&quot; and &quot;pointed end of a pointed object.&quot;  For each sense of each morpheme, an English sentence was constructed illustrating that particular sense.  Correspondents for 43 languages [...] were asked to give the equivalent for each sense of each selected morpheme.  Finally, by scoring the extent to which in each particular language one and the same morpheme was used to express different senses of each of the twenty morphemes, these languages could be arranged according to the degree to which their lexical semantic structure resembled that of Ndjuka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original study is Huttar (1975) &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/412893&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sources of creole semantic structures&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; vol. 51 (link to JSTOR).  The quantitative methodology is a little dated, but the basic approach to collecting the data is very interesting (and, so far as I know, not being practiced systematically these days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T01:16:53.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2011-09-27T01:38:55.043" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My favorite example is the convergent evolution of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; support.  In Modern English, auxiliary &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; must be used in questions and negative sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) John did not kiss Mary&#xA;(2) Who did John kiss?&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lear.unive.it/bitstream/10278/444/1/8.1.2.pdf&quot;&gt;Beninca and Poletto (1998)&lt;/a&gt; find that a northern Italian Romance dialect has developed a system of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; support very similar to the English one (though it applies only to questions).  This pattern is not attested in any world languages other than these two.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  I'm unclear on the etymology.  The OED says English &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; comes from the &quot;Aryan [=PIE? –AE] verb stem dhē-, dhō-&quot; which it relates to the second element in the Latin verbs &lt;em&gt;ab-dĕre&lt;/em&gt; to put away, &lt;em&gt;con-dĕre&lt;/em&gt; to put together, &lt;em&gt;dē-dĕre&lt;/em&gt; to lay down, but not to &lt;em&gt;facere&lt;/em&gt;, the source of the Italian word for &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;.  On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/d%CA%B0eh%E2%82%81-&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; traces Engl. &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;facere&lt;/em&gt; to a common root (PIE *&lt;em&gt;d&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;eh&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;-&lt;/em&gt;), but without listing any sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: If you know of another example, me and my research would love to hear about it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T10:12:28.740" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T10:12:28.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="550" CreationDate="2011-09-27T02:43:09.133" Score="20" ViewCount="3582" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do parents refer to themselves in third person, when talking to small kids? I've seen this happening in German, English and Russian and I do this myself (even though I try not to, because I think, it is odd). I've read some explanations on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ask.metafilter.com/196626/Why-do-parents-refer-to-themselves-in-3rd-person-when-talking-to-their-young-children&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;, but the answers did not convince me. They mostly say, that it is for the children to learn to say &quot;mommy&quot; and &quot;daddy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own explanation would be, that children don't understand the difference between the pronouns yet. If I'd say &quot;I am kicking the ball&quot; and then did so, the child would refer to me as &quot;I&quot;, not as &quot;you&quot;. So the problem is, that I refers to person talking, not like a name to a specific person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any research been done, I could be pointed to? Are there more and better explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="313" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T04:25:56.423" Title="Why do parents refer to themselves in third person?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="548" CreationDate="2011-09-27T04:10:44.527" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The little bit of research I was able to turn up suggests that parents use pronouns a lot when speaking to kids. Laasko and Smith (2007) [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iub.edu/~cogdev/labwork/Laakso_Smith07.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;] did a corpus study of child directed speech, and produced this graph representing the most frequent syntactic subjects they observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RKtN7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Syntactic subjects from Laasko &amp;amp; Smith (2007)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be the case that parents refer to themselves in the third person when talking to kids more than they do when talking to adults, but &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; are still the most common sentential subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T04:10:44.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="548" CreationDate="2011-09-27T04:30:08.953" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parents might do this instinctively to help children avoid &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/210/33&quot;&gt;pronoun reversal-errors&lt;/a&gt; (among other potential benefits in language acquisition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I published a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/9t456l7160427430/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper about this&lt;/a&gt; where I considered a previous connectionist model of pronoun acquisition. The results lead to a hypothesis that using more third-person (like the nouns 'mommy' and 'daddy') can help reduce pronoun reversal-errors in children. Unfortunately we haven't had the time/resources to set up real baby experiments to verify this, yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T04:30:08.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="554" CreationDate="2011-09-27T05:27:42.757" Score="11" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there examples of creole languages that have had three or more other languages as parents without intermediate two-language creoles? If they exist, then how high is the 'or more', i.e. what is the largest n such that a direct n-language creole exists? If the answer is no, is there a fundamental reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is partially motivated by thinking for the reproductive part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/392/33&quot;&gt;What evolution framework best describes the change between languages over time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T08:04:09.090" Title="Are there creoles of three languages?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="566" CreationDate="2011-09-27T06:06:23.353" Score="13" ViewCount="1893" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages other than some Chinese languages have apical vowels? The &quot;apical vowels&quot; are the i in zi, ci, si (in IPA: z̩ (also seen as ɿ)) and ʐ̩ (also seen as ʅ). They are basically buzzed sounds after certain consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T10:27:09.210" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T10:27:09.210" Title="Which languages other than Chinese have apical vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="571" CreationDate="2011-09-27T07:33:33.693" Score="24" ViewCount="2048" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rebound off a question asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/1211/pourquoi-les-animaux-ont-ils-des-noms-differents-dans-lassiette&quot;&gt;French Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;: in many languages, some designations for animal meats (in its raw, uncooked and uncured form) differ from the live animal's name itself. Examples in various languages include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in English: &lt;em&gt;pig&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;pork&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in French: &lt;em&gt;cabillaud&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;morue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Russian: свинья / свинина (a cognate of свинья)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Czech: prase / vepřové (a cognate of vepř, meaning barrow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Japanese: 豚 / 豚肉 (lit. pig meat, the interesting part here is that 豚 already includes radicals for both meat and pig which makes the addition of 肉 somewhat redundant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How universal is this feature? What could have given rise to it, apart from the understandable need to differentiate between the live animal and the meat, which could be achieve by saying, e.g., &lt;em&gt;pig meat&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;pork&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T16:56:23.343" Title="Animals’ names change when we eat them: is that universal?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2011-09-27T07:53:24.287" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what you mean by a &quot;direct n-language creole.&quot;  Creoles can and do draw their lexicon from many different sources; I would argue looking at aspects of syntax often doesn't let us identify any clear parents at all.  (Berbice Dutch, a SVO language, developed from Ijo and Dutch, both SOV).  So it seems that creoles from exactly two parents are not the norm, and furthermore considering different aspects of a creole's grammar/lexicon can give different answers as to what language(s) are the parents.  Nonetheless, here's an attempt at answering your question from a couple points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whinnom proposed a principle of &quot;tertiary hybridization&quot; which states that three language groups must be in contact for a creole to form.  This is perhaps best illustrated by an example: in Papua New Guinea, Motu speakers were responsible for much coastal trade; they spoke pidgin Motu with their trading partners.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hiri_Motu&quot;&gt;Hiri Motu&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Hiri&quot; means trade) language arose when various of the trading partners began using their common pidgin Motu as a communication device among themselves.  Motu could not form the basis of a creole (so the theory goes) when actual L1 speakers of Motu were in abundance, because they would perpetuate Motu grammatical norms as opposed to allowing a novel creole grammar to flourish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I suspect that you are asking about creoles with a significant lexical contribution from many languages.  Smith (1987, &lt;em&gt;The genesis of the creole languages of Surinam&lt;/em&gt;, a Univ. of Amsterdam dissertation) speaks of a core of lexical material found in English-based Atlantic creoles which comes from various African languages.  It was probably first amalgamated in a pidgin English spoken in African ports, then carried to the New World by slaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Saramaccan&quot;&gt;Saramaccan&lt;/a&gt;, which is among the most &quot;mixed&quot; creoles known, having drawn large portions of its core vocabulary from both English and Portugese.  However, it also has other European and African influences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T08:04:09.090" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T08:04:09.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="560" CreationDate="2011-09-27T08:13:00.310" Score="4" ViewCount="721" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask some Albanian speakers to say pairs of words which come as close to possible as differing only by one of each pair having &quot;l&quot; and the other having &quot;ll&quot;. I'm trying to hear and reproduce the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Albanian have any such &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:39:41.293" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T09:07:15.110" Title="Are there minimal pairs for &quot;l&quot; vs &quot;ll&quot; in Albanian?" Tags="&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="559" CreationDate="2011-09-27T10:04:13.527" Score="11" ViewCount="5658" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure most people here know, but for completeness, let's define what syntax is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.&lt;/em&gt; [NOAD]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; It can also refer to the rules that govern it, or to the linguistics branch that studies such rules.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this word-order can be more or less free, but it usually helps listeners to understand what are the roles of the single words or concepts in a sentence; we might say that you &amp;quot;expect&amp;quot; what is being told to you. Interlocutors expect the speaker to use pre-determined structures (pre-determined by the language rules). These rules simplify communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was wondering: Are there languages with a very strict word order or languages with a very free word order? Which are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T00:23:45.383" Title="Languages with stricter and less strict word order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="552" CreationDate="2011-09-27T11:07:51.060" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apical_vowel#Syllabic_fricatives&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there are other Sino-Tibetan languages with apical vowels. But I don't think they're very common at all: out of the major Chinese varieties, only Mandarin has it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in East Asia, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyako_language&quot;&gt;Miyako language&lt;/a&gt; has an apical vowel, at least according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://133.13.160.25/rlang/intro/index.html&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;標準語の母音ｉに対応して，舌先母音ɿが現れる。この母音を仮名で書くときにはちいさなスをそえることにする。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;（例）ピㇲトゥ　pɿtu（人）　　カビㇲ　kabɿ（紙） &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the language itself contains an apical vowel: [mjaːkufutsz̩]‎.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="252" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T11:07:51.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2011-09-27T11:18:55.210" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you refer mostly to word order, then yes, some languages are syntactically stricter than others. It is often (as in: there is a correlation) related to the amount of morphological markers of function in the sentence. In other words, languages with a &quot;rich&quot; morphology (i.e. with expansive case systems, agreement of nouns with adjectives, rich verbal systems with person marking for all main participants, etc.) will tend to have a freer word order than languages that lack such markings. In the languages that lack such markings, word order will often take over the role of indicating grammatical roles in the sentence, and for this reason will tend to become fixed, as changing the word order in such languages would likely cause misunderstandings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the correlation is not perfect, but as a rule of thumb it works very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples of languages with a strict syntax are simple to find&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; is one of those. English is quite strictly SVO (alternative word orders are restricted to formal written prose and poetry), subjects are mandatory (even for verbs that logically don't take a subject, like &quot;to rain&quot;), adjectives must be put in front of the noun they complete (only heavy constituents can be put after a noun they complete), etc. About the only free constituents are adverbs and adverbial phrases, and even those are somewhat restricted in their movements in the sentence: fronting them, for instance, will sometimes result in a different meaning altogether.  Contrast the following two sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) I only want to see her&#xA;(2) Only, I want to see her&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;strong&gt;Mandarin Chinese&lt;/strong&gt; is also quite strict in its syntax, but I don't know enough of the language to give examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt; is also a language with some very strict syntactic rules, despite having declensions. For instance, it is strictly V2 in independent clauses (i.e. the finite verb must always be the second constituent of an independent clause), so when fronting another element of the sentence, the subject that normally comes in front of the verb &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be put right after it (without anything in between). Word order is allowed some freedom, but the rules behind it are extremely strict. In the same way, the infinite verb part of a periphrastic conjugation must be placed at the end of the independent clause, and no other part of that clause can come after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dutch&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, can be said to be somewhat less strict than German: it has the same ordering rules (V2, infinite verb at the end of the clause), but is somewhat less strict with the last one, allowing one to add some noun phrases after the infinite verb of a periphrastic conjugation. This is, AFAIK, allowed in some German dialects as well, but is still less common than in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the freer side of things&lt;/strong&gt;, take for instance &lt;strong&gt;Modern Greek&lt;/strong&gt;. Although the language is nominally SVO, any word order is allowed, depending on the kind of focus the speaker wants to give and the elements used. And like &lt;strong&gt;Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;, it is pro-drop, and allows one not to show an overt subject, as it is already indicated in the verb. Word order in the noun phrase is slightly stricter, but even there it's freer than in English. For instance, as in English the article has to be put in front of the noun, but demonstratives can freely appear before or after the noun (&quot;αυτό το αυτοκίνητο&quot; and &quot;το αυτοκίνητο αυτό&quot; both mean &quot;this car&quot; and are completely interchangeable). Possessors normally appear after the noun, but they can be put in front of it, although this is considered somewhat formal.  For example, both the following sentences can mean &quot;the dog's toy&quot;, although the second one is rather marked and formal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(3) το   παιχνίδι του      σκύλου&#xA;    the  toy      the-GEN  dog-GEN&#xA;&#xA;(4) το   του      σκύλου  παιχνίδι&#xA;    the  the-GEN  dog-GEN toy&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another language with a relatively free syntax is &lt;strong&gt;Basque&lt;/strong&gt;. Although it is typologically SOV, all word orders are allowed (even verb-initial clauses are allowed, although only if the verb has some particle in front of it, like the negative &lt;em&gt;ez&lt;/em&gt; or the affirmative &lt;em&gt;ba-&lt;/em&gt;), although which word order can be used in which situation is often pragmatically defined, especially by the rule of &lt;em&gt;galdegaia&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there are even freer languages, even going as far as allowing the noun phrase to be separated and its constituents put in various places in the clause, but I don't have enough experience to comment much on them. I know &lt;strong&gt;Classical Latin&lt;/strong&gt; allowed some quite outlandish things (having suffered through 5 years of Latin classes :) ), but it is unclear whether those things (found nearly exclusively in poetry) could be called grammatical at all. Poetic license was strong in Classical Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info, you might want to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;. Feature 81 &quot;Order of Subject, Object and Verb&quot; already lists 189 languages lacking a dominant word order. WALS lists quite a few other features related to &quot;freedom&quot; of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however that &quot;free&quot; syntax does not necessarily mean that all word orders can be equally used or are equivalent in meaning. Even in languages that allow re-orderings freely, word order often has a pragmatic meaning, indicating topic and/or focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-10-08T00:23:45.383" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T00:23:45.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="555" CreationDate="2011-09-27T11:30:49.893" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vjel&lt;/strong&gt; (crop, harvest) and &lt;strong&gt;vjell&lt;/strong&gt; (to throw up)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mal&lt;/strong&gt; (mountain) and &lt;strong&gt;mall&lt;/strong&gt; (goods, commodity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thelë&lt;/strong&gt; (loaf) and &lt;strong&gt;thellë&lt;/strong&gt; (deep profound)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diel&lt;/strong&gt; (Sunday) and &lt;strong&gt;diell&lt;/strong&gt; (Sun)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;A few more with an initial &quot;ll&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;llóje&lt;/strong&gt; (types, kinds) and &lt;strong&gt;lojë&lt;/strong&gt; (pun,joke)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;llak&lt;/strong&gt; (spray, laque, varnish) and &lt;strong&gt;lak&lt;/strong&gt; (loop, noose)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;llagëm&lt;/strong&gt; (sewer) and &lt;strong&gt;lagem&lt;/strong&gt; (to moisten)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T20:40:13.293" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T20:40:13.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2011-09-27T12:13:45.737" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has long been noted that in English, the while the words for many animals are of Germanic etymology, the words for their meats are of French etymology. This must be related to the Norman French invasion of England in 1066, and the usual story goes: the peasants were too poor and oppressed to eat the meat from the animals they raised, because it all went to the French ruling class, and the ruling class never touched the actual animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the story about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is true, language contact is certainly the culprit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that for less commonly eaten meats, we just use the name of the animal: &lt;em&gt;bear meat&lt;/em&gt;; likewise for meat of North American origin: &lt;em&gt;bison burger&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T12:13:45.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="565" CreationDate="2011-09-27T13:34:59.143" Score="15" ViewCount="4621" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/39/are-there-any-papers-etc-analyzing-japanese-as-a-language-with-noun-cases-rather&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; inspired me to finally ask a question that has been bothering me for years: how does one distinguish clitics and/or particles from affixes, especially when those clitics are phonologically enclitics, like Latin &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; or arguably the Japanese case markers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is especially important when one looks at agglutinative languages, where affixes are often added with little to no phonological change to the root or affix. How can one decide whether those affixes are really true affixes or clitics in such languages? Since affixes belong to the morphology of a language, while clitics typically are described as part of the syntax of that language, it's an important distinction to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give you an example of why I find this question both extremely interesting and yet difficult to solve: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt; language is an agglutinative language with a rich declension system (see an example &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/etxe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). The behaviour of those declensions is AFAIK best explained if they are considered affixes, as a typical declension features instances of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppletion (the definite absolutive plural is an unanalysable &lt;em&gt;-ak&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conditional epenthesis and elision: the dative &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; and the cases starting with &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; both take an epenthetic &lt;em&gt;-r-&lt;/em&gt; when added after a vowel, including the singular article &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; after the plural article &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;. Moreover, the plural article actually disappears before the case suffixes in &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt;, so that the only distinction between the indefinite and the plural is the presence or absence of the epenthetic &lt;em&gt;-r-&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other weird behaviours: the local cases are a weird bunch. Unlike the other cases, adding them to the stem directly doesn't form the indefinite but the singular (except the inessive &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; which does take the singular article). To form the indefinite, one has to add &lt;em&gt;-ta-&lt;/em&gt; between the stem and the ending. And even more strangely, this &lt;em&gt;-ta-&lt;/em&gt; element must also appear between the plural article and the local case ending!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the Basque affixes do also behave in ways we expect more of clitics or separate postpositions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They only appear on the last element of a noun phrase, or &lt;em&gt;on the last element of a series of coordinated noun phrases&lt;/em&gt;. E.g.: &lt;em&gt;aita altu eta haur txikiarekin&lt;/em&gt;: with the tall father and the small child (where &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;the&quot; and &lt;em&gt;-(r)ekin&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;with&quot; appearing only on &lt;em&gt;txiki&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;small&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can be stacked on top of each other, a phenomenon called &quot;surdéclinaison&quot; in French. E.g.: &lt;em&gt;Ponetarekilakoarekin&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;poneta-a-(r)ekila-ko-a-(r)ekin&lt;/em&gt;: beret-ART-COM-GEN.LOC-ART-COM: &quot;with the one who is wearing the beret&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that with this example it's now clear why I'm asking this question. I find the distinction between clitics/particles and affixes nebulous at best, and would love to get some clarification. Thanks in advance for your insights!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T06:12:26.547" Title="What are the criteria that distinguish clitics/particles from affixes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2011-09-27T14:49:22.577" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a funny clip from a dramatization of a Japanese class: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6s2ijTvsPc&quot;&gt;Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo episode 1 clips&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 2:10, a discussion begins about &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt;. The teacher explains the classifier used on tuna in its different forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swimming in the ocean: ippiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When caught: ippon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When first cut at market (big pieces): icchou&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When cut into medium pieces: hitokoro&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When cut up thin and packaged for the supermarket: hitosaku&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When it enters your mouth: hitokire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the name for the animal does not change. However, the classifier changes slightly when the tuna is countable (first three) and dramatically when it becomes destined for the table (last three).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt; seems to undergo less dramatic changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My kid hates &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I caught a 300 pound &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My kid hates &lt;em&gt;tuna fish&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;? I caught a 300 pound &lt;em&gt;tuna fish&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;tuna fish&lt;/em&gt; makes it clear that it is a food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T14:49:22.577" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="537" CreationDate="2011-09-27T15:56:16.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no, there isn't. The closest would be some papers by Luigi Rizzi and Giuseppe Longobardi. The problem is that the vast majority of the work done in P&amp;amp;P (rather than, for example, Minimalism) has been based on a set of very closely related Western European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For word order parameters, you could look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://sswl.railsplayground.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SSWL&lt;/a&gt;, which has good (and increasing) coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="318" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T14:51:03.600" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T14:51:03.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="562" CreationDate="2011-09-27T16:52:10.040" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why you think that affixes cannot be stacked.  Here's an example from English, whose morphology no one will argue has non-affixal properites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;anti- dis- establish -ment -ari -an -ism&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need to separate case marking from case agreement.  A given noun phrase is assigned one case; in languages like Latin that case percolates through the NP by agreement among its members, but that operation is logically separate from the assignment of case.  (Your Basque example could be analyzed as a post-position, but a parallel one with an unambiguous case marker is easy to construct: &lt;em&gt;aita eta amak&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dad and mom-ERG&quot;*.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clitics and affixes often share many features (phonological dependence on host/root, grammatical function), so it can be difficult to distinguish them from each other &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt;.  Furthermore, the development from (independent word -&gt;) clitic -&gt; affix is quite common historically, so at any given time there is no strong guarantee that a particular item in a particular language is not in the process of shifting from one category to another and thus displaying a mixture of properties.  As a result of this fact, the categories &quot;clitic&quot; and &quot;affix&quot; have not been rigorously distinguished in the literature, leading to vagueness about what their defining properties are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one kind of clitic that is unambiguously non-affixal: second-position (also sometimes called Wagernackel) clitics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. These are always placed after the first word/phrase (there can be variation between the two options) regardless of its identity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. Another diagnostic of pure phonological clitic-ness is syntactic movement: if a clitic's host is moved, does the clitic follow (affixlike behavior) or remain behind (phonological clitic-like behavior).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.1 and 2.1 below are examples of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in English showing behaviours 1 and 2 respectively above. 2.1 is the non-affixing variant, which is more formal and indicates that it is the more conservative option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1.1) Didn't John kiss Mary?&#xA;(2.1) Did John not kiss Mary?&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The issue of distributing case over conjoined elements is interesting, given what we (don't) know about the syntax of conjunctions; it could provide a diagnostic of case vs. prepositionhood.  It has been claimed that case cannot distribute over a conjunction whereas prepositions can.  In the case of Basque, we should avoid calling things like the dative and (especially) ergative prepositions, so the status of this generalization is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-12-04T06:12:26.547" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T06:12:26.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="552" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:07:30.317" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mandarin apical vowels are examples of &lt;em&gt;syllabic fricatives&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; that is, fricative sounds that form the nucleus of a syllable, as a vowel generally would.  (Sometimes syllabic fricatives are also called &quot;fricative vowels,&quot; though that's rarer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=h1byJz_rWUcC&amp;amp;lpg=PA314&amp;amp;ots=3KQ0WrBD1a&amp;amp;dq=syllabic%20fricative&amp;amp;pg=PA314#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=syllabic%20fricative&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Here's a discussion from one of Ladefoged's books&lt;/a&gt; on &quot;fricative vowels&quot; a.k.a. syllabic fricatives in other parts of the world.  He mentions examples from Czech and Bantu.  Berber is also often described as having syllabic fricatives.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~donaldd/publications/handout_algonquian38_donald_derrick.pdf&quot;&gt;Blackfoot has recently been claimed to have syllabic /s/&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's maybe worth mentioning too that you'll hear syllabic fricatives in English, if only as a fast speech phenomenon.  So for instance, in my dialect, the word &lt;em&gt;horses&lt;/em&gt; is [hɔɹsɨz] if I'm speaking carefully and [hɔɹsz̩], with a syllabic [z̩], in fast speech.  If I'm in a hurry, the last syllable of &lt;em&gt;horses&lt;/em&gt; sounds an awful lot like Pinyin &lt;em&gt;si&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:07:30.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:08:52.527" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tsela's answer is very thorough, but I wanted to point out another aspect of the question.  There are some basically universal cognitive biases about linear order in language (basically, new information goes later in the sentence).  Languages with a strict word order (in terms of argument positions) will have more resources for shuffling arguments to meet this property.  An extreme example of this would be Malagasy, which has strict VOS word order, but has morphology that allows you to put almost anything in &quot;subject&quot; position.*  &quot;Free word order languages&quot; on the other hand may lack some of this morphology, since they can satisfy the cognitive order requirements by reordering words in a sentence.  However, in a given discourse context, only one word order may be grammatical.  To use an example from Basque:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Q: Zein-ek ikusi du  Miren?&#xA;   Who-ERG see   AUX M.-DAT&#xA;   &quot;Who saw Miren?&quot;&#xA;A: Jon-ek ikusi du  Miren&#xA;   J.-ERG see   AUX M.&#xA;   &quot;John saw Miren&quot;&#xA; * Jon-ek Miren ikusi du&#xA;   J-ERG  M.    see   AUX&#xA; * Ikusi ba-du   Jon-ek Miren&#xA;   see   AFF-AUX J.-ERG M.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So describing a language as having &quot;free word order&quot; can be misleading, since speakers are often constrained by context to use only one order.  When we discuss word order we should talk about which languages have more or less morphology for marking word order permutations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*If this is unfamiliar to you, it can be understood by analogy to English passives, which work by putting the object in subject position (&lt;em&gt;John kissed Mary&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;Mary was kissed&lt;/em&gt;).  Malagasy has &quot;more passives&quot; for putting things like an instrument or location into subject position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:08:52.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:42:09.257" Score="29" ViewCount="1111" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the interest of cultivating a professional, academic community, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/112/42&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Meta. One comment was to open a community-wiki question inviting others to contribute to a list of academic sources in the field of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of academic resources available online for us to read, enjoy, learn from and cite. Full-text journals, journal archives, corpora, studies... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I invite you to add the resources you know of, so we can put them all in one place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/linguistics/topical.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL's Topical index of linguistic resources on the Internet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/pubs/journals/browse-journals.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguist List's list of journals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/sp/GetWRListings.cfm?WRAbbrev=Texts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguist List's list of corpora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T13:12:00.360" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T04:57:28.350" Title="Lists of linguistic resources" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="24" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-07T22:39:36.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:42:25.950" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For citations:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSTOR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LLBA &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ASC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Full-text journals:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics-journal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Linguistics Journal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oxford's &lt;a href=&quot;http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/by/year&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Applied Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://eng.sagepub.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Journal of English Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0802-6106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Journal of Applied Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Computational Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/dia/toc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/silepubs/index.asp?series=941&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL ebooks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Association for Computational Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; Anthology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corpora:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UPenn's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic Data Consortium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://icame.uib.no/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ICAME&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.athel.com/corpora.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Athel collection of corpora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BYU's &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;corpora list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; lexical corpus from Princeton. Widely used as a dictionary for word meanings/senses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Framenet&lt;/a&gt; encyclopedic lexical corpus from Berkeley. Wordnet++, with contexts and metaphor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English&lt;/a&gt; (MICASE) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2003T05&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Gigaword&lt;/a&gt;: Four distinct international sources of English newswire (Agence France Press English Service, Associated Press Worldstream English Service, The New York Times Newswire Service, The Xinhua News Agency English Service)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other primary sources:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT's &lt;a href=&quot;http://libguides.mit.edu/flnewspapers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;foreign language newspaper collection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SIL's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/silepubs/index.asp?series=947&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language and Culture Documentation and Description&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American English Dialect Recordings&lt;/a&gt; @ Library of Congress&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.ku.edu/~idea/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Dialects of English Archive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Mason English Accent Archive&lt;/a&gt; (foreign accents and native local accents)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;British Library &lt;a href=&quot;http://sounds.bl.uk/BrowseCategory.aspx?category=Accents-and-dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Accents and Dialects Archival Sound Recordings&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MOOCs:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adelaide University &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edx.org/course/language-revival-securing-future-adelaidex-lang101x-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Universiteit Leiden, Meertens instituut &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;University of Michigan &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/natural-language-processing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to Natural Language Processing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;University of Houston &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/bilingual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bilingual Brain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marburg University &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/user/LinguisticsMarburg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Virtual Linguistics Campus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCourseware, Linguistics and Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other resources:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Max Planck Institute's &lt;a href=&quot;http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UIowa's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonetics Flash Animation Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UCL's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T21:28:19.953" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T21:28:19.953" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2011-10-21T15:45:16.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="562" CreationDate="2011-09-27T17:55:16.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've misunderstood the claim that &quot;clitics don't trigger suppletion.&quot;  It's perfectly consistent to have an unanalyzable clitic like &lt;em&gt;-ak&lt;/em&gt; which spells out more than one feature.  The usual claim is that clitics don't trigger suppletion &lt;em&gt;of the lexical word that they attach to.&lt;/em&gt;  So for instance, if the definite article &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; is a clitic, then you shouldn't be able to have a word &lt;em&gt;foo&lt;/em&gt; that unexpectedly becomes &lt;em&gt;bar-a&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;foo-a&lt;/em&gt; when the definite article is attached.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't think your epenthesis and elision data call for &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; to be analyzed as an affix. There are two alternate possibilities here.  First, you could posit a whole paradigm of clitics: &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; for definite absolutive singular nouns, &lt;em&gt;-ak&lt;/em&gt; for definite absolutive plural nouns, &lt;em&gt;-ari&lt;/em&gt; for definite dative singular nouns, &lt;em&gt;-ei&lt;/em&gt; for definite dative plural nouns, and so on.  Essentially, these would be like the German determiners (which mark case, number and definiteness), except that they'd be clitics instead of independent words.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second possibility would be to treat the case markers as separate morphemes (so that e.g. the dative clitics would be underlyingly &lt;em&gt;-a-i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-e-i&lt;/em&gt;) and come up with some sort of phonological epenthesis and elision rules that generate the forms you actually see.  Note that it's entirely possible to have a conditional epenthesis rule that, for instance, would insert an &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; between &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; but not between &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough about Basque to say which approach would work better.  I'm really just commenting on the data you've presented in your post.  But based on this data, I'd say the definite article was pretty clearly a clitic (or a whole paradigm of clitics), and your arguments for calling it an affix seem unconvincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Gee, I hope I didn't just do your Syntax homework for you.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T17:55:16.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2011-09-27T18:27:35.333" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a broader phenomenon here: we name things based on what they're &lt;em&gt;used for&lt;/em&gt;, and not always just on what they're &lt;em&gt;made from&lt;/em&gt;.  Some examples off the top of my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same square of plain cotton cloth could be a &quot;rag,&quot; a &quot;bandana,&quot; a &quot;handkerchief,&quot; a &quot;placemat&quot; or a &quot;wrapper&quot; depending on the use you intend to put it to.  Similarly, a big rectangle of terrycloth could be a &quot;bathmat&quot; or a &quot;towel,&quot; depending on what you're using it for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Seed corn&quot; is just ordinary corn that someone intends to plant in the future.  It's physically indistinguishable from other kinds of corn.  In some languages, there are separate, unrelated words for &quot;corn kernels used as food&quot; and &quot;corn kernels set aside as seeds.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where I grew up, a &quot;chock&quot; is a triangular wedge of wood that you put behind the wheels of a truck to keep it from rolling downhill.  An identical wedge of wood that was, say, being used as part of a little kid's set of toy blocks wouldn't be called a &quot;chock.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A stoat that's being raised for fur is called an &quot;ermine,&quot; as is the fur it produces.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you could ask the same question for all of these: &quot;Why aren't rags just called &lt;em&gt;wiping cloths?&lt;/em&gt;  Why aren't handkerchiefs just called &lt;em&gt;nose cloths?&lt;/em&gt;  Why did we coin the word &lt;em&gt;chock&lt;/em&gt; instead of calling them &lt;em&gt;wheel wedges?&lt;/em&gt;  Why isn't an ermine just a &lt;em&gt;fur stoat?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I have a positive answer to those questions.  But it's good to keep in mind that language is rarely as logical or as efficient as it could be.  So I'd look at this as a general feature of human language rather than a specific weirdness about livestock terminology.  Sometimes we coin new words for things that we use for a special purpose &amp;mdash; even when it's redundant to do so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T18:27:35.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2011-09-27T19:30:11.527" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is because of its relative isolation from the other Latin-based languages.  Imagine you're looking at early Latin dialects diverging from one another, and they've all got both &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mergere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people in town A tend to use &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; more, people in town B next-door might be influenced to do the same.  But town Q isn't on the other side of the continent, and so there's no influence to end up with &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; over &lt;em&gt;mergere&lt;/em&gt;, so they've got 50/50 odds (assuming those are the only two words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory requires two phenomena: 1) that a language variant's lexicon can drift over time and 2) that one language variant can influence a similar one nearby.  I imagine neither of those would be controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T19:30:11.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-27T20:44:56.010" Score="14" ViewCount="885" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious about what languages are projected to &quot;die off&quot; in the near future, say within 10, 50, or 100 years from now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What and where are these languages exactly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the major reasons for this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(a little more philosophical) Should linguists do anything about it? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="233" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-09-22T04:35:53.030" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T04:35:53.030" Title="What languages are expected to &quot;die off&quot; in the near future and why?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;endangered-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-27T21:09:20.850" Score="8" ViewCount="2015" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Scandinavian languages have a suffix definite article which is pretty straightforwardly tacked on to to the ends of nouns: &lt;code&gt;-en&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-et&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian it is not so simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some genders in some languages, depending on other attributes of the noun form such as number, it may be a simple tacked on suffix like Romanian masculine singular &lt;code&gt;-ul&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in most cases it's not simply tacked on at all but just one of several factors that contribute to deciding which inflectional ending to take, such as gender, number, and case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically the result might be that the indefinite vs definite form differ by having different final vowels such as Albanian &lt;code&gt;Tiranë&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;Tirana&lt;/code&gt;, but there can even be internal changes such as Albanian &lt;code&gt;Shkodër&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;Shkodra&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in all these languages it's widespread and seemingly standard to still refer to all of these languages as having a definite article suffix rather than talk about &quot;definiteness&quot; as a noun property. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T08:26:06.727" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:18:49.157" Title="Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="573" CreationDate="2011-09-27T21:16:04.180" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start from the second point. The usual criteria to &quot;locate&quot; an &lt;strong&gt;endangered language&lt;/strong&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of native speakers that are still alive (at the moment of the analysis);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the average age of these native speakers (or fluent speakers);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the percentage of the new generations that acquire fluency in that given language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a language stops having native speakers, but it's still used in some contexts, it becomes a &lt;em&gt;dead language&lt;/em&gt;, such as Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of native speakers can be a hint, but it doesn't necessarily mean that a certain language is disappearing. For example, a language can have millions of speakers, but if nobody learns it as a child, or if the speakers will &quot;move&quot; to the national language abandoning the local varieties — it seems this is happening in Indonesia — then those local languages will be in danger. If a language has some hundreds of speakers, but it's the primary or only language of a certain population, it won't be in danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language&quot;&gt;Ainu language&lt;/a&gt; is considered to be in a dangerous situation, having only &lt;em&gt;300&lt;/em&gt; native speakers where only 15 use the language on a daily basis. Not to mention that the replacement by the new generations is not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonese_language&quot;&gt;Leonese language&lt;/a&gt; appears in the list, and many others, that you can find in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; from the Guardian, that features a list provided by the UNESCO. The UNESCO also provides an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap.html#&quot;&gt;Atlas of the World's Languages in danger&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some linguists think we should save these languages, because they belong to human history and in turn can help to decipher it and understand it. Other linguists think we should push towards a world situation with less languages in order to favor a good communication between people and possibly arrive to a single global language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T23:50:46.093" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T23:50:46.093" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="573" CreationDate="2011-09-27T21:21:01.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One hears all the time about language X's last speaker dying (Cornish? Dalmatian?). So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a wikipedia list...(googling for it)... &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;of endangered languages&lt;/a&gt;. Their source is the more easily navigable &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/nearly_extinct.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ethnologue list of nearly extinct languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The major proximal reason is lack of children picking it up as first language (in a family). This is usually the second generation after public schools are instituted, teaching the kids the approved language (but not the home language). Then when they get older, the new parents can speak to the grandparents in one language to their kids in the official language, but the grandchildren and grandparents can't speak together. The causes of the education process can be cultural hegemony (laws against speaking the non-standard language) or just plain increase in living standards (that allow more widespread standard education.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;should linguists do anything about it? It's more of an anthropological issue...many European countries have revivals of marginal languages going on (Provencal, Bretagne, Manx?). I think governments around the world should be more tolerant of local customs (like languages), but I also think all stop lights should turn to green just before I get to them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-09-27T21:31:47.663" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T21:31:47.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2011-09-27T21:50:59.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The databases &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/sales/software.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt; for phonemic inventories (web interface &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; for structural properties in general. The latter allows easy exporting of data in an easily parsable format (it's also possible in the former, but it requires some twiddling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T21:29:54.180" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T21:29:54.180" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-07T22:39:36.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="562" CreationDate="2011-09-27T22:12:04.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is actually quite nebulous. Indeed, people are often led more by tradition to classify things as clitics/affixes than by actual linguistic argumentation. I think that many people go back to Zwicky's work on the topic (1977), though Spencer (2000) argues that better typologies of &quot;clitic-hood&quot; exist. Chapter 9 'Clitics' of Spencer's book 'Morphological Theory' discusses these issues a bit. I refer you to Spencer for some background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption, and the source of much of the clitic-related confusion, is that clitics will not trigger stem allomorphy or different phonological processes on the stem. (Indeed, the last poster was arguing against this interpretation.) Linguists have, I think, wrongly assumed that the syntactic status of clitics renders them unable to interact with the phonology or morphology. It is probably better to get outside of the &quot;affix/clitic&quot; dichotomy and think instead of syntactic dependence and conditioned allomorphy as independent properties. This requires really separating the syntactic behavior of elements from their morphophonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="323" LastActivityDate="2011-09-27T22:12:04.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T04:05:42.097" Score="10" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;In their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165.short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2009 paper on the Indus Script&lt;/a&gt;, Rao et al. describe a test for deciding whether a corpus of symbols is in fact a collection of texts in some language. Over-simplifying a bit, the approach they follow can be summarized as follows. They begin by restricting their attention to a given number of most frequently occurring symbols in the corpus, and calculate the conditional entropy of pairs of symbols for this subset. (Conditional entropy in this context quantifies how well one can predict the next symbol, given only the current symbol. Low conditional entropy means the current symbol is a good predictor of the next symbol.) They then plot the conditional entropy against the number of symbols included, and argue that symbol corpora that are linguistic in origin result in similar plots, while non-linguistic symbol systems result in plots that are very different from the plots for linguistic ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The approach of Rao et al. and the justifications they gave have been strongly criticized by &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1374&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;various&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/611.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;authors&lt;/a&gt; and a heated discussion followed (there were even &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/response.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about other approaches to this fundamental problem. What are some of the specific methods proposed for testing whether a given corpus of symbols is in fact a collection of texts in some language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="108" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T11:22:59.630" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T11:22:59.630" Title="What statistical methods are used to test whether a corpus of symbols is linguistic?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;&lt;indus-script&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="350" CreationDate="2011-09-28T11:27:33.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which paradigm is the more accurate or more adequate can not be answered in general. It may depend on what should be achieved since there are different advantages and disadvantages to both systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many commercial approaches use a so called hybrid system which means that there is both a statistic and a rule-based component (or even an example-based component).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some advantages to the statistical approach, e.g. coping better with &quot;irregularities&quot; or better coverage of phrasemes, and some advantages to the rule-based approach, e.g. the abilitiy of syntactic validation. In hybrid systems like the Pangloss or the Verbmobil-system both components are parallel or in order with the goal to adjust both advantages for a better product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T18:48:08.550" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T18:48:08.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T13:16:38.350" Score="12" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than fifty years ago, philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote wrote  an influential paper about computerized translation entitled: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mt-archive.info/Bar-Hillel-1960-App3.pdf&quot;&gt;A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (see also this &lt;em&gt;TIME&lt;/em&gt; magazine &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,819777,00.html?promoid=googlep&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; from 1954). Bar Hillel wrote several further papers on the matter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some related links: A 2000 paper entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/Bar-Hillel-2000.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: A philosopher's contribution to machine translation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Hutchins; the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://ilit.umbc.edu/SergeiPub/bar-hillel.pdf&quot;&gt;Bar Hillel and Machine Translation: Then and Now&lt;/a&gt; by Sergei Nierenberg, and the Wikipedia articles on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehoshua_Bar-Hillel&quot;&gt;Bar Hillel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation&quot;&gt;machine translation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are: to what extent are Bar-Hillel's comments still relevant?  How do they fit with the experience we have had over the last half century?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T18:58:36.837" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T19:05:00.170" Title="Bar-Hillel's critique of machine translation 50 years later" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-28T14:37:47.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; refers not just to the study, but also to the rules that govern this arrangement and to the Linguistics branch that studies it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T00:41:11.380" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T00:41:11.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-28T14:37:47.847" Score="0" Body="The study of the internal structure of expressions, especially between words and phrases, and the principles and processes that determine it. This includes words order, but also the grammatical relations that hold between words, as well as structural ambiguity, binding, reference, and similar issues. Common approaches are numerous phrase structure grammars (GPSG, HPSG, LFG, G&amp;B, X-bar, Minimalism, ...) and, on the other hand, dependency grammars." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:18:26.487" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:18:26.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="582" CreationDate="2011-09-28T15:20:11.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Bar-Hillel article deals mostly with the ability to disambiguate words in isolation and with the aid of context.  While an ambiguous word in isolation is difficult or impossible even for humans (e.g. which word am I referring to when I say &quot;pool&quot;?), a machine could at least make an attempt to choose the word-sense with the highest probability of occurring.  Even this though needs to be trained on a wide range of domains in order to get the most accurate statistical range for the word in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as determining a word-sense from context, I would say that the article is severely outdated, as there are many algorithms that can achieve very accurate results.  One of the methods involves looking at sources like &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; to determine the likelihood of a word sense based on the maximum likelihood estimate of the other non-function words in the context range.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many articles describing these methods and more available online.  Perhaps some of these sources will be useful: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?gcx=c&amp;amp;q=machine%20disambiguation&amp;amp;um=1&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;tab=ws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Scholar - &quot;Machine Disambiguation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T18:30:25.403" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T18:30:25.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="580" CreationDate="2011-09-28T15:34:07.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the article, the authors used what is known as a Markov model.  This is actually the departure for discovering the linguistic value of a text, where the normal methods are those that are used in traditional Cryptanalysis, which is the attempt to discover the meaning (or linguistic value) of a text of seemingly random symbols or systems.  More can be found in a basic introduction to Cryptography, and here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#Cryptanalysis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia - Cryptography (#Cryptanalysis)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T15:34:07.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="362" CreationDate="2011-09-28T18:15:37.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not easy to find examples that do not involve temporal/aspectual matters, since circumstantial modality is usually forward looking (what certain facts lead to or leave open) while epistemic modality is usually backward looking (reasoning backward from the available evidence). But here's a try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John has to be in his office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the epistemic reading, this reasons from clues and deduces that John is in his office. Under the circumstantial reading, this claims that certain facts leave John no choice but to be in his office. Admittedly, this easily acquires a deontic tint. My favorite circumstantial example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have to sneeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker is not saying that her evidence leads her to conclude that she is going to sneeze. She is saying that the state of her body leaves her no choice but to sneeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T18:15:37.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T19:10:12.233" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages with cases seem to be either gaining or losing them diachronically (The Indo-European languages are an example of the latter, and the Uralic languages of the former). Manchu and Xibe (a Manchu dialect spoken by the descendants of a Manchurian guard unit posted away from their kinsmen) have the same number of &quot;major&quot; (grammatical?) cases. Specifically, the Manchu dative-locative corresponds to the Xibe locative, the Manchu ablative to the Xibe dative, and the Manchu prolative to the Xibe ablative.  For background, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language#Manchu_cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Manchu cases&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is this reassignment of case usages without absolute gain or loss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T23:53:16.870" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T17:55:00.403" Title="Case reassignment without change in number of cases" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T19:10:43.637" Score="1" ViewCount="1198" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Albanian the usual greeting is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;tungjatjeta&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, what is it derived or descended from? What are its origins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T20:57:08.420" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T10:43:38.977" Title="What's the etymology of the Albanian word for hello, &quot;tungjatjeta&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2011-10-25T18:17:32.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="602" CreationDate="2011-09-28T19:38:48.377" Score="7" ViewCount="827" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love constructed languages, especially in fiction where I get a taste of constructed culture to go with it. One interesting idea that has popped up a few times in what I've been reading is the idea of a spoken language that has some kind of body language to accompany it. Every language, as a cultural phenomenon, does, but what is interesting about these languages is that the visual/physical cues are &lt;em&gt;essential&lt;/em&gt;, not optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/543/42&quot;&gt;this recent question&lt;/a&gt; about simultaneous articulation of sounds, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/3446&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; at the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy SE, which I'm basically pulling over into the Linguistics SE with some clarification. (The one at SciFi SE is talking about body language and language in general; this is a little more specific. Also, there's a different group of people answering it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tempi,&quot; I asked. &quot;Is all of this?&quot; I made a gesture to my face, then smiled, frowned, rolled my eyes. &quot;Does all this happen with hands in Ademic?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wise-mans-fear-patrick-rothfuss/1100211108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wise Man's Fear&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Book 2 of the &lt;em&gt;Kingkiller Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;) by Patrick Rothfuss, the Adem people have a spoken language and a kind of signing with the left hand. The Adem people are seen by outsiders as fidgety, silent people because the signed language can be used alone for brief exchanges, but it is also used while speaking. It adds nuance to meaning, intention, intensity and emotion. There is a man in the town that lost three of his fingers as a mercenary, and he is basically seen as being mute. The Ademic spoken language is said to be more &quot;open&quot; (a small lexicon of broadly defined words?) than other languages, and one can only be understood clearly when pairing the hand language with it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/amber-spyglass-philip-pullman/1100014503&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Amber Spyglass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Book 3 in &lt;em&gt;His Dark Materials&lt;/em&gt;) by Philip Pullman, there is another world populated by animals called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_and_creatures_in_His_Dark_Materials#Mulefa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mulefa&lt;/a&gt; (pl; sg: zalif) which have prehensile trunks like elephants. Their language is a combination of sounds and a swinging movement of their trunks in a particular direction, ie the same sound can mean something different if the trunk flicks a different direction. I always drew the parallel to tonal languages. The human who visits this world has to swing her arm to mimic their trunks because the movement is essential to the language. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, many instances where body language plays a role in communication, but I think the idea of it being part of the language is unique. Besides sign languages, I don't think that there are real languages that operate like this, but I've been trying to think of examples where &lt;strong&gt;signs or physical cues inject new (non-redundant, ha), concrete information into a conversation&lt;/strong&gt;. Here's what I've come up with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nodding or shaking one's head (without language to accompany it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pointing (without deictic phrases like &quot;over there&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;shh&quot; finger without the &quot;shh&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greeting and parting gestures like waving, offering a handshake, bowing, etc (Usually would not occur without some language, but could?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making &quot;typing hands&quot; while saying something like &quot;So then I said...&quot; automatically puts the conversation being referred to on a computer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last one, although kind of a silly example, is more what I'm thinking of. The other examples here are all part of the mechanics of a conversation: things that are really common or culturally part of the routine of talking. But &quot;typing hands&quot; adds &lt;strong&gt;entirely new content to the conversation&lt;/strong&gt;: where and how they conversation took place. Neat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm steering away from &quot;body language&quot; type cues like eye rolling, shrugging, or crossed arms which will more often reference the conversation itself, not what the conversation is about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything come to mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T08:47:38.623" Title="Examples of physical signs adding content to conversation?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="590" CreationDate="2011-09-28T20:37:22.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd add in &quot;air quotes&quot;.  They're an interesting example of a signed component to a predominantly spoken language, but rather than being borrowed from signing, they're borrowed from writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few months ago I was having a conversation over the phone when suddenly I felt like I couldn't say what I was trying to say -- all because they wouldn't be able to see me doing air quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T20:37:22.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2011-09-28T21:08:19.577" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contra @JoFrhwld, it's not really that controversial to say that the rate of cognate replacement differs in different languages, or in different parts of the vocabulary. Glottochronology has a bad name in linguistics for exactly this reason: the assumption of constant rates of change made by glottochronology is clearly shown to be wrong when the methods are tried out on languages with known histories. Icelandic is a classic example: glottochronology calculates many fewer years separation between modern Icelandic and Old Norse than we know to be the case from the historical record. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend you actually read the article referred to in JoFrhwld's answer if you're interested in this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/full/nature06176.html&quot;&gt;Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Nature&lt;/em&gt;) and also try &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5863/588.abstract&quot;&gt;Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Science&lt;/em&gt;). It's pretty lame to criticize a paper on the basis of your evaluation of the reputation of the journal or the disciplinary affiliation of the authors when you haven't even read the paper! These papers give a clear quantitative demonstration of a couple of the factors that influence the rates of language change, things which were only described qualitatively before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to societal differences, Lupyan and Dale give at least some hard data that language structure is partly determined by social structure &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559&quot;&gt;Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;PLoS ONE&lt;/em&gt;). There's good evidence that language change occurs faster in smaller populations, because it's easier for an innovation to diffuse across the entire population, exactly the same way that genetic innovations are more likely to fixate in small populations than big ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="342" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-29T00:13:46.073" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T00:13:46.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2011-09-28T21:12:40.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish and Galician (my two native languages), we use the same words for the live animal and its flesh when eaten in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cerdo (ES) / Porco (GL): Pig or pork&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pollo / Polo: Chicken&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ternera / Tenreiro: Veal or beef&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in Spanish we distinguish between &lt;em&gt;pez&lt;/em&gt; (fish) when alive or dead but not intended to be used as food, and &lt;em&gt;pescado&lt;/em&gt; (also fish) when captured, processed or served as a meal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, answering the question in the OP, I guess this is not a universal phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T21:12:40.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="596" CreationDate="2011-09-28T21:44:23.913" Score="6" ViewCount="6163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymology is the study of the origins and history or development of words and phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it considered though to be part of the study of linguistics or is it considered to a separate field like we might consider say style guides to not be part of linguistics? Is etymology perhaps considered part of lexicography which might not be thought of to be a field within linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the relationship between etymology and linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T10:29:41.047" Title="Is etymology considered part of linguistics or a separate field outside the scope of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2011-09-28T21:56:54.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically it belongs to Lexicology, but since this last one in turn belongs to Linguistics, you could say that Etymology is part of it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, Lexicography is actually under Lexicology. See the following scheme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XV2b4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; I put the major disciplines for Linguistics. I might have forgotten some of them, though. If you notice some major discipline that is missing, I can edit the image.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T21:56:54.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2011-09-28T22:48:44.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When etymology as such is covered in a linguistics curriculum, it is usually in a historical linguistics class, and I think what current research there is (not so much as there used to be, for sure) is often done by people who would consider themselves doing historical linguistics of some kind.  Much of this kind of research is now under the heading of &quot;semantic change&quot;, and is more theoretically motivated than traditional &quot;etymology&quot;.  I.e. the interesting questions aren't what are the histories of particular words, but rather, what explains the attested/possible patterns of semantic change.  I think there is also a certain amount of less historically oriented work on semantic change in pidgins/creoles and that kind of thing.  In general you may get the impression that it isn't part of linguistics because though it is a part of linguistics, that part is more or less outside the mainstream as represented in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Contra Alenanno's answer, I'm not really aware of any researchers, courses, or conferences that cover &quot;lexicology&quot; as any kind of coherent subfield in the way that the other things in that chart are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastEditorUserId="345" LastEditDate="2011-10-01T16:58:22.357" LastActivityDate="2011-10-01T16:58:22.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-28T22:54:14.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stevens (1999) (as well as his article with Helen Hanson) discusses the relationship between cross-sectional area of the constriction and the size of the active articulator. However, this is provided as an explanation for why more retracted consonants have longer BURSTS, not longer VOT. (VOT duration is a characteristic of the glottis, not the oral articulators.) The idea here is that since the tongue dorsum is a bigger and slower muscle, it moves more slowly away from the point of constriction than the tongue apex or the lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one includes the burst duration in calculating &quot;VOT&quot;, then sure, one will tend to have longer VOT duration for more posterior stops. However, if burst duration is distinguished from VOT, the pattern you observe still holds. With relation to voicing, the aerodynamic constraint holds. Yet, you are curious about a general pattern independent of voicing. So, the explanation must lie elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maddieson (1997) provides one explanation that I have found compelling in my own work: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There is an abduction-adduction cycle of the vocal cords for voiceless stops which is longer in duration than the closure and has a constant time course, anchored to the onset of closure (p. 621). In other words, the duration of the vocal fold opening is considered to be fixed, and when the closure duration is relatively longer, the following VOT becomes relatively shorter (and vice versa).&quot; (from Cho &amp;amp; Ladefoged, 1999)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular explanation accounts for the differences in VOT and for observed differences in trading relations in stop closure. In many languages, velar stop closure is shorter than alveolar stop closure. Stevens &amp;amp; Hajek (2004) found preaspiration in Sienese Italian geminates to arise from closure lenition. When there was less closure, preaspiration arose. However, the duration of voicelessness in the geminate remained more or less constant. Their finding seems to agree with Maddieson's proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="323" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T22:54:14.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="543" CreationDate="2011-09-28T22:58:55.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i.e., not through emotional tone or other secondary traits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intonational contours have aspects that are highly grammaticalized and not just &quot;emotional&quot; in many languages (e.g. in English: contrastive focus/rise-fall-rise, list closure intonation, rising intonation on questions, etc).  The semantic content isn't of the same sort as occurs with content words, which may be what you're looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly root and pattern morphology, where a (multi-)consonantal root that is e.g a N or V is interleaved with vowels providing inflectional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T22:58:55.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:06:21.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a first approximation, one could probably claim that etymology is the &lt;strong&gt;diachronic dimension of lexicology&lt;/strong&gt; but that would probably be too reductive.  This is because to fulfil its role, etymology draws on many other disciplines of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, etymology relies heavily on &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt; to justify successive forms of words because it needs &lt;em&gt;laws&lt;/em&gt; to justify how phonemes morph into one another or even disappear altogether.  This in turn even allows the reconstruction of bygone pronunciations and unattested word roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also builds on &lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt; to explain how people evolve the words they need from the ones they have and &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt; because meanings shift no less than phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is thus both a fundamental component of and an indispensable contributor to &lt;strong&gt;historical linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; and works in this respect hand in hand with &lt;strong&gt;hydronymy&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;toponymy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because historical linguistics adds the time dimension to synchronic linguistics it is one of the litmus tests allowing us to prove or disprove theories aiming at explaining how things are the way they are today as much as at predicting how they might turn out tomorrow.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I shall venture that etymology is not only a part of linguistics but even a central one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-29T06:28:30.560" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T06:28:30.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="430" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:23:42.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really depends on how you want to establish the semantic similarity, but there are a variety of theoretical frameworks that you can apply – they all excel at teasing out different things. One is Componential analysis, which is just teasing out binary features – which was borrowed over from phonetics. As an example &lt;em&gt;girl&lt;/em&gt; would be '+young +female' while &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt; would be '+young -female.' This analysis is really good for kin and pronoun terms that generally fit into matrices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second is Natural Semantic Metalanguage. This theory aims to simmer all languages down to a set of equatable &quot;prime words&quot; which can be built up into longer more complex explications. Aside from any theoretical issues you may have with this it can be a useful tool for teasing apart meaning, especially for complex and abstract things like emotion terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final one I'll mention (although there are more) is Cognitive Semantics. George Lakoff who wrote the book &quot;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&quot; is a major figure in this area. Those working in this type of cognitive semantics attempt to use abstracted diagrams. This is useful for teasing out spatial things – for example English uses &quot;on&quot; for things that are &quot;on top of&quot; and &quot;on the side of&quot; while other languages have other prepositions for each of these jobs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other theories as well, with their own tools. The most important thing is to be aware of exactly what need you have, and to be aware of any short comings a theory might have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T23:58:29.687" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T23:58:29.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="413" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:37:41.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know WALS (World Atlas of Linguistic Typolology) www.wals.info has a chapter on the &quot;Order of Adverbial Subordinator and Clause&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could use this as a starting point because you know that all 660 languages in this survey cover a good area and genetic spread - and WALS almost always point you to a reference grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might take some of the grunt-work out of your task!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T23:37:41.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="590" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:46:51.320" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;co-speech gesture is an area that has received lots of attention only in the last 20 years or so. You'll find lots of work being done on the importance of gestural information contributing to meaning. Adam Kendon and David McNeill have both done a lot of work on this. To summarise two of the more interesting pieces of work in relation to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Susan Golden-Meadows found that if the gestures accompanying the description of how to solve a maths puzzle contributed to the explanation of how to solve it then children were more likely to be able to solve to problem (see her 2003 book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By far my farvourite recent work on this is Jenny Green's 2010 thesis (University of Melbourne) on Arrandic story telling . In Arrandic languages of Australia story telling is always performed with speech, gesture and sand drawing. All three contribute meaning to the story. Although it's only one genre of speech some of this does carry over to general discourse.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T23:46:51.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:49:34.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-09-28T23:49:34.237" LastActivityDate="2011-09-28T23:49:34.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:49:34.237" Score="0" Body="Gesture is a the physical, non-verbal component of communication. It can either stand alone (as a fully fledged sign language or an independent emblematic gesture) or co-occur as a gesticulation with speech." OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T00:40:45.873" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T00:40:45.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2011-09-28T23:55:53.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frank Blair's 1990 book &quot;Survey on a Shoestring: A Manual for Small-Scale Language Surveys&quot; gives a model for how to do this kind of analysis &amp;ndash; it's the best non-computer based process I've found so far, although it does have limitations it its rather brute-force method. You might find some people who have used this method by checking who's cite Blair. I used this process in Lauren Gawne (2010) &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/nepling/pdf/Nep_Ling_25.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lamjung Yolmo: a dialect of Yolmo, also known as Helambu Sherpa&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in Nepalese Linguistics, which is available online. This kind of process requires you to decide how you're dealing with tone, and closely related sounds so it's best to check people's methodology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of process is useful for determining how phonetically related two dialects, or closely related languages are. If you have more than two languages like I did in that paper this may help in establishing the historical relationship between groups of languages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-26T15:46:18.037" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T15:46:18.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="169" CreationDate="2011-09-29T08:25:09.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexical sets&lt;/a&gt; cites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armstrong, Nigel (2001). &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=hu5eYY_4nxcC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Social and stylistic variation in spoken French: a comparative approach&lt;/a&gt;. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 100ff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T08:25:09.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2011-09-29T10:43:38.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with Albanian, but according to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tung&amp;amp;direction=prev&amp;amp;oldid=369325067&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;old wikipedia entry of &quot;Tung&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, it apparently comes from something like 'long-life-to-you'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was finally &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tung&amp;amp;diff=next&amp;amp;oldid=345881362&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;removed&lt;/a&gt; by someone, using the edit summary &quot;tidy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T10:43:38.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="368" CreationDate="2011-09-29T10:49:44.307" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you've found enough information on Wikipedia and other places that make it clear that Albanian isn't closely related to any other living language, but for those who haven't the most concise summary I've found is at Krysstal's Language Families (&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html&quot;&gt;http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Illyric Branch [of Indo European]. Only Albanian (called Shqip by its speakers) belongs to this branch. It has been written in the Latin script since 1909; this replaced a number of writing systems including Greek and Arabic scripts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There are two dialects that have been diverging for 1000 years. They are mostly mutually intelligible. Geg is spoken in the north of Albania and Kosovo (Kosova). Tosk is spoken in southern Albania and north west Greece.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The ancient Illyric and Mesapian languages, spoken in parts of Italy, are considered by some to be an extinct member of this branch.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have to go back to this Illyric branch, which it is argued is part of the Paleo-Balkan group. The only other surviving member of this group is Modern Greek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Balkans_languages). Given how completely dissimilar Modern Greek and Albanian are this answer appears rather unsatisfying - until you realise how amazing it is that Albanian managed to survive this long when any closely related languages died out so long ago!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T10:49:44.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2011-09-29T12:37:01.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are roughly two kinds of accounts of the definiteness effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, as suggested by CGEL, is that the &quot;pivot&quot; (DP following the verb) must be discourse-new, or novel, or something along those lines.  (this idea is due to McNally, Comorovski, Zucchi, and others, just in case CGEL omitted the citations, as it often does.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another, which has been somewhat more prominent than the explanation CGEL points to, is that it is some logical property of the determiner that plays the key role.  (Keenan, Barwise and Cooper, Higginbotham, and others.  But especially Keenan.)  I suppose this is the linguisticky stuff that is causing melting.  But Keenan's proposal in particular has a tremendous amount of empirical coverage, in a way far more than the discourse novelty approaches.  If you want a good recent summary of the Det approaches you should check out chapter 6 of Itamar Francez's 2007 Stanford dissertation, I think available on his website.  Most of these accounts amount to realizing the intuition that the constraint ensures that to check the truth of an existential claim, all you need is the set of individuals semantically provided by the &quot;coda&quot; (the thing optionally following the pivot), and not any larger set.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no good account of what unifies these two types of explanations (though maybe McNally's dissertation takes the best stab), or really even &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; either of them should be true.  The best idea I'm aware of, which as yet has only been pursued informally is sketched in ch. 6 of Francez's dissertation (due to David Beaver), and is roughly that the non-canonical word order in existentials marks that the pivot must be topical, which leads to the definiteness effect.  How to turn this into a predictive theory, I haven't a clue (though it is something I'm working on).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general Francez's dissertation is a good starting point without having to read through every google scholar result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T12:37:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2011-09-29T12:59:23.123" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't an authoritative answer, but it seems to me that this is mostly because Indo-Europeanists are not used to thinking about &quot;definiteness&quot; as opposed to a &quot;definite article&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T12:59:23.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2011-09-29T14:42:40.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A linguist who devotes their time to studying the phonetics (i.e. a phonetician) of an under-documented language, is still a linguist, despite their narrow focus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, a linguist who devotes their time to documenting the lexical environment of a language (i.e. a lexicographer) is still a linguist.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a question were posed to a phonetician about the occurrence of an alternation between two phonemes in language X, the question would be legitimate and relevant to linguists, even if the audience is small.  So I am inclined to say that questions about specific word etymologies in a language X, would be well within the realm of linguistics to provide an educated answer, and hopefully expound on the example with interesting/relevant information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T14:42:40.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="614" CreationDate="2011-09-29T14:50:30.377" Score="37" ViewCount="2964" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that French and Spanish speakers speak their languages faster than English speakers do. Is this difference real, or is it just a mistake in my observation (note: I am much less familiar with those languages than with English)? If it is real, is this difference caused by some traits in the languages, or is it just a cultural thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:42:41.310" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T20:10:20.223" Title="Why does speech speed seem to vary between different languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;perception&gt;&lt;production&gt;&lt;speed&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2011-09-29T14:57:12.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words and concepts don't necessarily correspond for social reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'etymology' is about individual word histories, which is definitely a part of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean there is a sub-section of academic linguistics departments with faculty members who primarily call themselves 'etymologists'. Dictionary makers might have specialists in etymology (which would require all sorts of linguistics and particular language training).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who 'do' etymologies might have more training in multiple specific languages. It doesn't seem likely that they would be a member of a Linguistics department's faculty (at least not in the US). Philology might be a label for a faculty that culturally etymology falls under elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T14:57:12.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2011-09-29T15:35:45.233" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things going on here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that you are not as familiar with French and Spanish, so their speech appears to be faster. This occurs with pretty much every language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that, yes, your intuitions are (tentatively) correct and some languages are spoken faster. There was a recent study that explored this, and I'll post a link to an article in TIMES summarizing it. I'll recap it here. Since you asked here, I'll try to give a slightly more technical explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason has to do with information density, which is basically the information content of something divided by its size. For example, 'male human' is not as dense as 'man', because the later conveys the same information, but in one syllable, whereas the former does it in three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can give a roughly mathematical account by fixing the unit of meaning to be the meaning of some arbitrary expression. This allows us to express the information density of a language with a ratio: syllables/meaning. Two other important ratios here are syllables/time (How many syllables a speaker of the language uses per unit of time) and meaning/time (how much time it takes to express a unit of meaning). Notice that (syllables/time * meaning/syllables = meaning/time). That is, there are certain mathematical relationships between these concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When researchers looked at all of these, they found that meaning/time was constant. No matter what language was used, speakers took about the same amount of time to express the paragraph. What differed between languages was how many syllables they used to express that meaning. This is where the perception of faster speech comes in: Spanish, for instance, used more syllables than English, so there is some sense in which Spanish is 'faster' than English. Japanese is perceived as super fast, and Chinese is slower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is different about Spanish? Look at the equation (syllables/time * meaning/syllables = meaning/time) again. Notice that if meaning/time is constant (which the study found), then syllables/time and meaning/syllable must have an inverse relationship with each other: that is, when one goes up, the other goes down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Spanish syllables have less information in them than English syllables, so it takes more of them to express the same meaning. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably has to do with what syllables are allowed in a language. Different languages allow different combinations of sounds in their syllable. English, for instance, is fairly permissive: &quot;stretch&quot;, for instance, is one syllable, but it is a very complex combination of sounds. Other languages aren't as permissive. Chinese doesn't have a lot of consonants in the coda (last part) of their syllables, but they more than make up for it by having four tones for any syllable they do allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take an extreme example, imagine a language with only two syllables: /ba/ and /da/. Different words are expressed with different sequences of /ba/ and /da/. &quot;No&quot; could be /ba/, &quot;Yes&quot; could be /da/, &quot;man&quot; could be /badaba/, etc. Eventually we have &quot;bachelor&quot; expressed as /bababadabadabadababadabadadadababada/. As you can see, it will take a long time to get anything expressed in that language. To generalize a bit, the more syllables a language allows, the fewer it will need to express any given meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What specific reasons Spanish has for having low information density, I can't tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article: &lt;a href=&quot;http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="28113" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T19:25:31.207" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T19:25:31.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2011-09-29T15:44:57.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's actually been a lot of work on this kind of issue in morphosyntax.  I'm not sure exactly what the best starting point is, but you might want to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/abstract1441.html&quot;&gt;this Dost/Gribanova WCCFL paper&lt;/a&gt; on Bulgarian, since you mention that as one of the languages of interest, and this paper directly addresses the issue of whether definiteness is an &quot;affix&quot;.  I know there's been some subsequent research on definiteness in several of those languages, but I'm just not as familiar with it, so can't point to it as easily.  (But check on google scholar what papers cite this, and cite the Embick &amp;amp; Noyer paper.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T15:44:57.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2011-09-29T17:55:00.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question appears flawed, to begin with. It doesn't seem typologically sound to speak of trends of this nature among entire language subgroups, much less linguistic families. Further, as one commenter mentioned, the families you speak of contain entirely different languages in terms of their structure. Such comparisons are meaningless at this level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be said that all changes in case are essentially reassignments, however. Consider English, which now has only a hint of a nominative and accusative case in pronominal constructions. Its dative case was lost (essentially) by having it folded into its accusative. A language will never experience an absolute gain or loss spontaneously – it always occurs through reassignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T17:55:00.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-09-29T18:00:45.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that there have been analyses attempted; however, sociocultural factors make it very difficult to have true analyses of non-IE languages. Most of the people working on grammatical frameworks do it from an IE standpoint, and thus the tools simply never get developed to work in a true cross linguistic context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="352" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T18:00:45.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-09-29T18:53:52.370" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/vanvalin/rrg.html&quot;&gt;role and reference grammar&lt;/a&gt; might be the kind of thing you're after.  From the PDF overview at that site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The motivating questions for RRG were, ‘what would a linguistic theory&#xA;  look like if it were based on the analysis of languages with diverse&#xA;  structures, such as Lakhota, Tagalog, Dyirbal and Barai (Papua New&#xA;  Guinea), rather than on the analysis of English?', and ‘how can the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in different grammatical systems best be captured and explained?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll refrain from much metacommentary, but just keep in mind that its origins were in a fairly different era than the present -- since then there's a ton of (mainstream) linguistic work in non-IE languages as well, and there is much less anti-semantics/pragmatics sentiment embedded in mainstream syntax than there used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastActivityDate="2011-09-29T18:53:52.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="624" CreationDate="2011-09-29T22:43:46.430" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to talk about moving information, I can use verbs &quot;set&quot; or &quot;assign&quot; in combination with nouns referring to source and target information containers, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition/instinct is to believe the two verbs are interchangeable, but when I make a table I see something not quite symmetric going on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X &amp;lt;-- Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assign X from Y &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assign Y to X &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;set X from Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;set X to Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would a linguist characterise this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T20:21:01.273" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T20:21:01.273" Title="How to characterise set/assign-from/to" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="625" CreationDate="2011-09-30T00:10:18.087" Score="26" ViewCount="10711" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that bugged me before I studied linguists, and it still does - why is the word &quot;orange&quot; so often used for both the colour and the fruit cross-linguistically? Every language I've learned has these items as the same word, or at least very similar origins. English (&lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;), Polish (&lt;em&gt;pomarańczowy&lt;/em&gt;), Italian (&lt;em&gt;arancione/arancia&lt;/em&gt;) and Nepali (&lt;em&gt;suntala&lt;/em&gt;). Granted, these are all Indo-European languages but they do cover quite a spread, and my sister tells me that Mandarin has the same feature with &lt;em&gt;chéng&lt;/em&gt; referring to both the fruit and the colour. I'm assuming that languages have borrowed the work for the colour on the basis of the fruit, and not the other way around but I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that oranges are a relatively recently introduced fruit to many places, but is this phenomenon as cross-linguistically common as it appears from my limited experience. And if so, why?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T03:15:02.800" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T18:45:47.397" Title="The relationship between &quot;orange&quot; the colour and &quot;orange&quot; the fruit" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;colour-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2011-09-30T01:13:24.137" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just some quick notes about Spanish in particular, in light of Nathan's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish has largely retained the number of syllables in a word since Latin (as has Italian). Latin expressed quite a bit of meaning through case assignment and verb conjugation. Spanish has retained some of the verb conjugation and none of the case assignment. Thus we have to rely more on prepositions &lt;em&gt;de, para, encima de, dentro de&lt;/em&gt; etc. in phrases which in Latin may have had prepositions of the same length but more likely had shorter ones or none at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most often case assignment was possible within the last syllable of the word, and Spanish has usually retained a form ending in &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; (which I've heard comes from the ablative, but I'm skeptical), rather than chopping off the ending entirely as, say, in French, this automatically ups the number of syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain initial consonant clusters from Latin are not allowed in Spanish, and this is often dealt with by adding an &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; to native words and loanwords beginning in them, rather than (as Finnish does with loanwords beginning in disallowed clusters) by deleting letters. E.g. &lt;em&gt;escribo &amp;lt; scri:bo:&lt;/em&gt;. (These new rules of consonant clusters may have been due to a phonetic influence of Iberian and Basque speakers. Basque has not very many phonemes and usually comes off as fast, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a point that brings up something not yet mentioned: Spanish does not have vowel length distinction or consonant length distinction (beyond &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;r,&lt;/em&gt; which isn't really just a length distinction). Languages (like Latin and Italian) with these distinctions are able to encode more data using it, and maybe even &lt;em&gt;sound like they're going slower&lt;/em&gt; since there's less change over time in the acoustics. Spanish also changed &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ue&lt;/em&gt; in stressed position in many words; I wager a diphthong is likely to make you sound like you're &quot;going faster&quot; than a pure vowel would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T01:13:24.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-09-30T04:58:48.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that orange is not just a recently introduced fruit in many parts but that the concept of a colour word for this shade is also recent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that many languages do just fine with much fewer colour words than English has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages &quot;orange&quot; doesn't always have full status as a normal adjective but may sometimes be a circumlocution like &quot;orange colour&quot; or &quot;colour of orange&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T04:58:48.230" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-09-30T07:23:17.653" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think hippietrail is on the right track.  Two things are worth mentioning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms%3a_Their_Universality_and_Evolution&quot;&gt;famous study by Berlin and Kay&lt;/a&gt; on the subject of color term hierarchies in language (e.g. if a language has a word for &quot;blue&quot; it must also have a term for &quot;red,&quot; whereas the reverse does not hold).  Lots of follow-up research has been done on this subject.  &quot;Orange&quot; is relatively high on the hierarchy, i.e. according to the theory a language must already have a lot of other color terms before it can develop a word for &quot;orange.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English word &quot;pink&quot; comes from the name of a flower (also &quot;pink&quot;).  Many other IE languages have a word derived from &quot;rose&quot; for this color.  Irish has &quot;white-red,&quot; though (no idea if this is a neologism).  &quot;Pink&quot; is also high on the Berlin &amp;amp; Kay hierarchy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T07:23:17.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="619" CreationDate="2011-09-30T07:36:58.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general organization of how a verb distributes its semantic roles is called &quot;argument structure&quot; (this is part of the more general field of inquiry called &quot;lexical semantics&quot;).  It is very common for verbs (especially those with 3 or more arguments) to display alternations.  The most commonly cited of these is the so-called &lt;em&gt;spray/load&lt;/em&gt; alternation (because of two verbs that show it).  Here are examples with &quot;spray&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) John sprayed paint on the wall&#xA;(2) John sprayed the wall with paint&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two sentences are approximately equivalent in meaning.  Levin published a book called &lt;em&gt;English Verb Classes And Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation&lt;/em&gt;, which consists of a list of English verbs and which of these frames they can appear in.  She has a ton of other work on this topic, some of it co-authored with Rappaport Hovav.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific example, &quot;assign&quot; and &quot;set&quot; are displaying different behavior.  First I would point out that these sentences seem most natural to me in the context of computer programming operations.  I would tentatively explain this by saying that &quot;assign&quot; treats its direct object (non-prepositional argument) always as a location, metaphorically speaking.  &quot;Set&quot; on the other hand can apparently operate on metaphorical locations or metaphorical pointers.  Why this is, and how it links up with other uses of these verbs, I couldn't really say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, as a native speaker of English &quot;set X from Y&quot; sounds quite unnatural.  Technical writing is not always idiomatic, even when done by a native speaker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T07:36:58.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-09-30T09:18:19.803" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a situation where you want to refer to a colour and either you don't know of any name for that colour or you know the name but you also believe your interlocutor doesn't know it - you'll instinctively resort to the evocation of an object characterised by that colour.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same holds true for other senses by the way. Would you rather say for instance &quot;there's a smell of rotten egg&quot; or &quot;there's a smell of hydrogen sulfide&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, unless one wants to tell the policeman &quot;I think the light was still in the 580-620 nm range when I crossed!&quot;, we need aliases for colours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt; colour, interestingly enough, the Old English word was &quot;geoluread&quot; (PDE yellow-red, G. gelb-rot). One has to say that in those times, very few people in England had had a chance of seeing real oranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that oranges are quite alone in their category of orange-coloured objects added to their simple shape and the consistency of their shade probably explains why people commonly used it as a reference for the colour and that the name of the fruit became the name of the colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can only notice that the phenomenon is a widespread one, observed in many languages and suffering only a few notable albeit easily understandable exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a whirlwind tour of the various family of names for the fruit and its distinctive colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first family is the Anglo French &lt;em&gt;Orange&lt;/em&gt; and all its cognates&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian: &lt;strong&gt;arancia&lt;/strong&gt; (fruit) =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;arancione&lt;/strong&gt; (colour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: &lt;strong&gt;naranja&lt;/strong&gt; (fruit) =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;naranja&lt;/strong&gt; (colour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese: &lt;strong&gt;laranja&lt;/strong&gt; (fruit) =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[cor de] laranja&lt;/strong&gt; (colour).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Europe, the &lt;em&gt;sweet&lt;/em&gt; orange was first grown in Portugal in the 15th century&lt;sup&gt;&lt;b&gt;1&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; so that the fruit has a different name all around the mediteranean:  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek: &lt;strong&gt;πορτοκάλι&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;portocâli&quot; (fruit) =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;πορτοκαλί&lt;/strong&gt; (colour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rumanian: &lt;strong&gt;portocală&lt;/strong&gt; (fruit) =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;portocaliu&lt;/strong&gt; (colour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic: the common word (for the sweet Orange is)  برتقال, &lt;strong&gt;burtuqāl&lt;/strong&gt; (the persian  نارنج, nāranğ is only used for the bitter varety).  The colour name is identical &lt;strong&gt;burtuqāl&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Napolitan: &lt;strong&gt;purtuall&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;b&gt;2&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. AFAIR the colour name is identical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turkish: &lt;strong&gt;portakal&lt;/strong&gt; but the colour is &lt;strong&gt;turuncu&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%AC%DB%8C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Persian&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;nârenji&lt;/strong&gt; (نارنجی) =&gt; The bitter variety.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Persian: &lt;strong&gt;porteqâl&lt;/strong&gt; (پرتقال) (meaning &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%BE%D8%B1%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%84&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;both sweet orange and Portugal&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;nârenji&lt;/strong&gt; (نارنجی) meaning both the colour and the bitter variety.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Chinese, the colour (chéngsè &lt;strong&gt;橙色&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; orange-colour) is named after the fruit (chéngzi &lt;strong&gt;橙子&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; orange+[substantive marker]).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Exceptions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One notable exception is the common case of many northern countries in which the fruit has two concurrent names. an older one taken from &lt;em&gt;Old Dutch&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;appelsien&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;b&gt;3&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;  now sinaasappel and a newer one taken from English &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;.  In which case the colour itself is most of the time a cognate of &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Northern German: &lt;strong&gt;Apfelsine&lt;/strong&gt;, and also Apfelsinenbaum, Apfelsinensaft. colour: &lt;strong&gt;orange&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish and Norwegian : &lt;strong&gt;appelsin&lt;/strong&gt; =&gt; Appelsinjuice; colour: &lt;strong&gt;Orange/Oransje&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Icelandic: &lt;strong&gt;Appelsína&lt;/strong&gt;; colour &lt;strong&gt;appelsínugulur&lt;/strong&gt; (orange-yellow).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more to the east: Russian: &lt;strong&gt;апелсин&lt;/strong&gt;; and the colour: &lt;strong&gt;oранжевый&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Dominican Republic, the orange colour is actually called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mamey&lt;/a&gt;&quot; after the local fruit named &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammee_apple&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mammee&lt;/a&gt;.  One has to mention though that they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have oranges over there but these are actually green.  The Mammey instead is... orange.  QED.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;Note 1&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28Frucht%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Während die Bitterorange spätestens im 11. Jahrhundert nach Italien gekommen ist, wurde die süße Variante erst im 15. Jahrhundert nach Europa eingeführt, wo sie zunächst fast ausschließlich in Portugal angebaut wurde.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;b&gt;Translation:&lt;/b&gt; Although the bitter variety was already known in Italy by the 11th Century at the latest, the sweet variety was not introduced into Europe until the 15th Century, where it was first grown almost exclusively in Portugal.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Note 2&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Napolitan people will tell you that it comes from French &quot;Pour toi&quot; but that's folk etymology&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Note 3&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;appelsien = Chinese Apple. There is no relation with the original sin although many German contemporary oil paintings depict Adam and Eve together with the snake coiled inside an orange tree.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T07:15:27.420" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T07:15:27.420" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="630" CreationDate="2011-09-30T10:14:10.813" Score="14" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;When building models of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/392/33&quot;&gt;evolution of languages&lt;/a&gt; or similar phenomena where many different languages are involved and change over time, how do computational linguists abstractly model a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the canonical computer science approach of just considering a subset S of all strings on 0 and 1 will ignore too much of the structure that linguists care about. Thus, if building a computer simulation, or trying to do mathematical/theoretical linguistics, is there a canonical way for researchers to represent languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary interest is in an abstract approach that is easy to work with computationally or mathematically but that captures some (or all) of the features of a language one might typically care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T19:06:40.123" Title="How do computational linguists abstractly represent a language?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-09-30T10:29:08.253" Score="6" ViewCount="822" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've had questions about inflected languages moving towards analytic morphology and about isolating languages moving to agglutinating morphology but we haven't yet investigated the third case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the typological cycle theory languages slowly move from one morphological type to the next in a fixed cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some examples of agglutinating languages such as Finnish, Hungarian, or Turkish merging some agglutinations into inflections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not in these, other agglutinative languages or partially agglutinative ones like Japanese verbs. Also if I'm a bit off in the kinds of changes, correcting me on that would also be interesting (-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T19:14:40.427" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T14:11:01.183" Title="What are some examples of well-known agglutinatve languages moving toward inflecting morphology?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;typological-cycle&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2011-09-30T12:30:33.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one has mentioned probably the best and most humorous example: acquisition of the plural morpheme -s into Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American sports, particularly baseball, are very popular in Japan, and american teams are followed very closely. Many teams have plural names — the Red Socks, the Cardinals, etc. You have the same pattern in american bands, too — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. Apparently, Japanese speakers interpreted the plural morpheme to be something like a team-generating morpheme: you take a noun, add -s to it, and you get a team name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T13:50:12.500" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T13:50:12.500" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="582" CreationDate="2011-09-30T14:01:48.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the claim of Bar-Hillel is two-fold that, at that time the two approaches, which I will call roughly n-gram (or fixed length context) and thesaurus methods, were doomed to failure – as he projected at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the n-gram approach has been vindicated since then. I think the reasons are not because of better use or manipulation of contexts but because of simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;better corpora (masses of working data)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;better processing capability (simply speed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;restriction to local translation contexts (technical documents as opposed to literature).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thesaurus method (which is really nowadays an 'ontology' method) has not been incorporated well into MT (as far as I know so far), but I expect that the same 3 situations (better corpora, processing capability, restricted contexts) will make MT even more successful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I think the ideas mentioned by Bar-Hillel as failures of the 1960's MT technologies are just not failures any more, but strengths. I expect soon enough that those methods will not be enough, but over the past decades, MT really has gotten much much better. No, it's not totally hands-off automatic, but then neither is driving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(disclaimer: I had never read the Bar-Hillel paper before now. Also, I am not an MT researcher or implementer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T19:05:00.170" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T19:05:00.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2011-09-30T14:05:53.640" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking from personal experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We started with a model of what differentiates languages, in this case a set of 13 parameters which could either be on or off. Considering each possible combination of these parameters, we ended up with 3072 languages (less than the expected 2^13=8192 because many combinations were impossible). For each language, we generated a list of all possible sentences which could be constructed in the language without sentence-lengtheners like conjunctions and relative pronouns. Each sentence looked something like &lt;code&gt;Noun Adverb Verb Adjective Noun&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB. These models were used to test theories of language acquisition, not language change, but the methodology could be used there as well. Also, this computer model assumes that the linguistic model (i.e. parameter-setting) is accurate; that part unfortunately can't be tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: The research I was directly involved in was never published. However, the same model was originally used by Janet Fodor and William Sakas of CUNY. A quick search finds &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/pub/FodorSakasBUCLD28.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, which describes the &quot;language domain&quot; in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T02:04:56.577" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T02:04:56.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2011-09-30T14:20:09.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nathan and Daniel already gave very insightful answers. But I want to point out another detail, something I observe sometimes. I'm not a linguist, I'm rather poor at languages (you may notice it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mother tongue is German, but I moved to Spain at the age of six. So I know both - very different - languages. Beside their (mostly) different grammar and vocabulary, there is another difference: Germans make small pauses between words, Spaniards do not. They rather concatenate words. There are two consequences I know: Some words change vowels if they are pronounced in combination with others (e.g. &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; (Spanish &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;) followed by a word starting with &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; changes to &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;), other words that are feminine because of their ending sometimes are pronounced with a male article ('el aguila', 'un agua') to avoid two following &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other consequence: You sometimes can't separate words if you don't know them. Or, you have to concentrate more on the speaker to get everything correctly. I rarely notice that on Spanish speakers, but I do on US English speakers - some of them do it as well! They pronounce everything in one flow, without separating words. But there are others I understand perfectly, even if they speak fast. Those I don't understand don't necessarily speak really fast, but I have to concentrate and I get the &lt;em&gt;impression&lt;/em&gt;, they speak fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are based on words, not syllables or letters. It makes a great difference if you get a hint where words start or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my point is: Maybe some people from some countries speak faster than others, but maybe they just seem to speak faster, as it takes a greater effort to understand them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you don't know a language and don't understand anything said, this argument is invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-09-30T14:31:32.433" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T14:31:32.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2011-09-30T14:50:21.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example that comes into my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;person&lt;/code&gt;: A singular human&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;persons&lt;/code&gt;: Several but distinguishable human beings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;people&lt;/code&gt;: A crowd, lots of humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German and Spanish it's exactly the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;code&gt;Person&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Personen&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Leute&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: &lt;code&gt;Persona&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Personas&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Gente&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess other languages handle it the same or a least similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastActivityDate="2011-09-30T14:50:21.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1013" CreationDate="2011-09-30T18:40:10.627" Score="6" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 22 categories of words used in Carl Darling Buck's &quot;A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages&quot; (1949) are quite different from for instance the categories in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Outline_of_Roget%27s_Thesaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roget's thesaurus as of 1911&lt;/a&gt;. There is no background in the book itself on how the 22 categories where chosen. Did Buck make the list himself or was he following some (undocumented?) tradition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buck's categories are used in at least two other projects, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ids.clld.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IDS&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wold.clld.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WOLD&lt;/a&gt;, which attribute the categories to Buck. It is a little odd that the history of this categorization-scheme seems to be missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T15:00:45.470" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T15:00:45.470" Title="Where did the semantic categories of C. D. Buck's dictionary of synonyms come from?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="638" CreationDate="2011-10-01T11:49:35.430" Score="10" ViewCount="1866" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day I was wondering, are there occurrences of pidgins or creoles in the world of Sign languages? So I made a quick search but there doesn't seem to be much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I found the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Pidgin_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;Hawaii Pidgin Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, but it's not an actual pidgin, it's simply named like this after the Hawaii Pidgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there examples or they simply don't exist? If they do, which are the major ones? For major, I mean most used, most established, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:08:04.280" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:08:04.280" Title="Are there examples of pidgins or creoles in sign languages? If so, which are the major ones?" Tags="&lt;creoles&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="643" CreationDate="2011-10-01T17:11:38.740" Score="16" ViewCount="3157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all languages have the same degree of correspondence between the spoken and the written form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &lt;em&gt;correspondence&lt;/em&gt;, I'm referring to the equivalence between what we write in a certain language and the way we read it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that one of those (very few) languages that have this perfect equivalence is Serbian, although I don't know Serbian that much, therefore I can't really make explanatory examples on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while Serbian, and similar Slavic languages, have a different symbol for the &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; sound, in Italian the letter &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; has 2 different sounds according to what vowel follows it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When A, O or U are present, we have a &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; sound, while with E and I, a &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; sound:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;asa — &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;ena — &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dinner&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;ibo — &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;food&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;osa — &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;C&lt;/b&gt;ura — &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;cure&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages have less equivalence, like English where the reading rules make the spoken form different from the written one, or French, considering the final letters don't get usually pronounced. Others have more, like Spanish or Italian, even though they still have exceptions like I showed above, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T23:41:22.877" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T12:48:57.703" Title="What's the term for correspondence between the written and the spoken form of a language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2011-10-01T17:49:27.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a non-technical term for this, which jars my linguistics ears, but I believe there is no other technical or linguistics term for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;phonetic&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some randomly Googled examples from the net:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romanian is a &lt;strong&gt;phonetic language&lt;/strong&gt; so a person can look at a word and know how it is pronounced&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone knows that English is riddled with horribly inconsistent spelling. Most other languages have a &lt;strong&gt;phonetic spelling&lt;/strong&gt; system ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese and Japanese, of course, could be called the least &lt;strong&gt;phonetic languages&lt;/strong&gt; on earth ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages are &quot;&lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. That means you can look at a written word and know how to pronounce it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the most and least &lt;strong&gt;phonetic languages&lt;/strong&gt; in the world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-10-01T17:49:27.960" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-01T18:22:50.313" Score="17" ViewCount="6388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian is commonly cited as an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/635&quot;&gt;phonetically spelled language&lt;/a&gt;. It is easy to guess how an Italian word is pronounced based on the way it is written, because each written symbol highly corresponds to a sound (with some exceptions). This is not the case with English and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/459&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;, for example. Series of sound changes (for example, the Great Vowel Shift) caused changes in pronunciations and the written form didn't catch up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't the same thing happen to Italian? It is an old language, and the Latin alphabet has been used since before the language existed. Did sound changes not happen? Or did they happen but the written form caught up? Or are the changes so systematic that the letter-sound correspondence still holds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T06:59:40.807" Title="How did Italian manage to stay (mostly) phonetically spelled despite its long written tradition?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="634" CreationDate="2011-10-02T01:12:40.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoken creoles are developed in environments where many languages are mixed (for example, in the Caribbean region, there were several major colonial languages and many African languages spoken by slaves).  For deaf children learning sign languages, there is the opposite problem – they may have no input that is &quot;linguistic,&quot; but only some non-linguistic gestures or non-native sign.  There are two sign languages that have been &quot;created&quot; (i.e. arisen by some means other than descent from an extant language) in recent years and have been the subject of research by language-acquisition researchers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;.  So I'd say that these are the closest thing to a sign language &quot;creole&quot; (although not much is known about the historical genesis of older sign languages, and it's quite possible that all of them arose spontaneously in deaf communities without influence from aural languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the concept of &quot;pidgin,&quot; there are so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Home_sign&quot;&gt;home sign systems&lt;/a&gt;, which develop when deaf children and hearing caregivers do not have access to instruction in an established sign language.  These generally lack some of the traits than linguists ascribe to natural languages (as do pidgins).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in the families of sign languages and the phylogenetic relationships between them, you might want to check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sign_language#Classification_of_sign_languages&quot;&gt;this section of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, which lists the currently accepted groupings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T01:12:40.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T09:49:50.230" Score="14" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For those languages which have it, the indefinite article mostly if not always is derived from the numeral for &quot;one&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most languages have numbers but many lack articles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do linguists decide whether a language under investigation has an indefinite article as opposed to just having a word for &quot;one&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T17:47:27.483" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T16:28:20.780" Title="How do linguists determine whether a language has an indefinite article?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T09:55:09.850" Score="5" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages have a fully developed concept of numbers but many do not, for instance most Australian Aboriginal languages lack numbers and counting beyond a few such as 1, 2, and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages have indefinite articles like &quot;a&quot; and &quot;an&quot; of English but even many major world languages lack them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the languages I'm familiar with if they have an indefinite article it is related to or the same as the number for &quot;one&quot;, perhaps with inflections etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any known languages however which have an indefinite article despite lacking a fully developed number system? Is it a linguistic universal that languages with an indefinite article always also have a number system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T12:39:54.917" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T05:11:39.950" Title="Are there languages which lack a full number system but which have an indefinite article?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T10:03:57.000" Score="5" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is part of a set of three related questions but note they are each specific and distinct, they are not duplicates.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the languages I'm familiar with that have an indefinite article, the word is related to the word for &quot;one&quot;. In fact in English it's more opaque than for most languages I know: &quot;a&quot; / &quot;an&quot; vs &quot;one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there languages which have the indefinite article but in which it is not related to the word for &quot;one&quot;? Perhaps one word or the other has been borrowed from another language, or perhaps the two words evolved from separate roots? Is this known to be possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; Louis Rhys has pointed out that some languages have various kinds of indefinite articles but this question is only concerned with the &quot;main&quot; indefinite article despite my inability to express that succinctly is a single sentence. For instance if French or one of its dialects or creoles were to lose the words &quot;un&quot; and &quot;une&quot;, and &quot;des&quot; assumed their role it would be an example of the affirmative.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T12:59:32.960" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T14:10:19.610" Title="Are there languages with indefinite articles but for which the word for &quot;one&quot; is not related etymologically to any of the indefinite articles?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="641" CreationDate="2011-10-02T11:05:20.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;the French plural indeterminate article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/fren/des&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;des&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Il y a des livres là-bas (&amp;quot;There are books over there&amp;quot;)&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Standard Arabic, indefiniteness is marked by a suffix -n (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arabic/LearnRW/Tanween&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tanween&lt;/a&gt;). For example, compare&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;al-bustaan-u l-kabiir-u&#xA;&lt;br&gt;DEF garden NOM DEF big NOM&#xA;&lt;br&gt;'the big garden'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bustaan-u-n kabiir-u-n&#xA;&lt;br&gt;garden NOM INDEF big NOM INDEF&#xA;&lt;br&gt;'a big garden'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Arabic sample taken from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Definiteness.html?id=1MeX8240YTUC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definiteness&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Christopher Lyons page 91-92 (you can find the pages in Google Books). The book lists the tanween under &amp;quot;indefinite articles&amp;quot; out of the other indefiniteness marker types, also says that this &amp;quot;putative article&amp;quot; .. &amp;quot;cannot plausibly be argued to be a cardinality expression&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T17:10:19.903" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2011-10-02T11:36:12.257" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual term for this in linguistics is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth&quot;&gt;'orthographic depth'&lt;/a&gt;, which refers to the degree to which the writing system of the language shows a straightforward correspondence with the sound system. There are numerous articles on orthographic depth on the web, and a fair discussion on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, linguists are unhappy to describe these as 'phonetically spelled' languages (feel free to look up 'phonetics' on Wikipedia if you want to know why).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages which have a shallow orthography (i.e. are close to having a one-to-one correspondence between written symbols and phonemes) are Finnish and Spanish. While languages with a deep orthography (i.e. poor correspondence between written symbols and phonemes) are French and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T10:56:42.073" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T10:56:42.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="641" CreationDate="2011-10-02T11:50:59.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can see from &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/38A?tg_format=map&amp;amp;v1=c00d&amp;amp;v2=c99f&amp;amp;v3=cd00&amp;amp;v4=dfff&amp;amp;v5=cfff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt; on the Wals.info site, there are many. More explanations on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/38&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main page&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a quick search I did, it surprised me to see some languages on this list that seemed to use the same word for one and the indefinite article, such as Dutch. I might be wrong, it seems, so you might want to look more in depth for the ones you want to study more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there seem to be around 100. I'll list them below for ease of reference alphabetically and ordered according to the continent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I removed some obvious false positives that arose as not fitting but some may remain.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kxo9b.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T18:02:05.220" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T18:02:05.220" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="640" CreationDate="2011-10-02T11:57:45.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not heard of a language that lacks numbers entirely, and doubt one exists (happy to see proof though). It is true that many Australian Aboriginal languages have words for only a few numbers, typically 1, 2 and 3: for discussion of this see Dixon 1981. Some languages are documented to have more numbers (e.g. Anindilyakwa). Many Australian Aboriginal languages don't have any articles (definite or indefinite), but commonly use other words (e.g. determiners) in this function. Have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/37A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Linguistic Structures&lt;/a&gt; (check  out the map).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess the answer is that there are no languages that have an indefinite article but lack numbers, because no languages lack numbers (although Piraha is said to lack true numerals, but I think it needs more investigation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITIONAL: &#xA;From Evans (1995) I see that numerals in Kayardild (Tangkic family, spoken on the Bentinck Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria) extend to four, but it has an indefinite determiner (p. 237; it is formally identical to the numeral one). So this may be an example of a language that lacks a full number system but nevertheless has an indefinite article (though it depends on how these terms are defined).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T05:11:39.950" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T05:11:39.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-10-02T12:30:30.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many good descriptions of languages from all over the world, many very different to IE languages. You ask about languages with no contrast between noun and verb: Samoan (and some other Polynesian languages) are the usual examples here, but this issue is still disputed. It's important to remember that the range of variation of languages is not without limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding Warlpiri and free word order, its worth remembering that Latin has very free word order too, and in fact it seems that languages with case-marking often have pretty free word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-11-04T19:52:53.407" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T19:52:53.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="573" CreationDate="2011-10-02T12:42:11.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding question 3, most linguists I know would like to see all languages preserved, but also understand that people need to have command of the language of power in order to survive and succeed in wider society. There's no contradiction in this, it just means that people should be supported in being competent in more than one language. When linguists study an endangered language (that is, one where intergenerational transmission has been interrupted) it's held to be an important part of our fieldwork ethic that we should offer the community help in preserving their language, if that's what they want. So yes, where appropriate, they should do something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T00:56:52.993" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T00:56:52.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T12:45:32.743" Score="9" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had trouble phrasing a recent question because I couldn't find simple wording to convey the difference between languages like English where all kinds of numbers are expressible, such as &quot;nineteen thousand four hundred and sixty two&quot; and other languages like most Australian Aboriginal languages with only a very basic or minimal number system that typically have only &quot;one&quot;, &quot;two&quot;, and &quot;three&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_%28linguistics%29#Basis_of_counting_system&quot;&gt;Perhaps Wikipedia says it better than I could:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all languages have numeral systems. Specifically, there is not much need for numeral systems among hunter-gatherers who do not engage in commerce. Many languages around the world have no numerals above two to four—or at least did not before contact with the colonial societies—and speakers of these languages may have no tradition of using the numerals they did have for counting. Indeed, several languages from the Amazon have been independently reported to have no numerals other than 'one'. These include Nadëb, pre-contact Mocoví and Pilagá, Culina and pre-contact Jarawara, Jabutí, Canela-Krahô, Botocudo (Krenák), Chiquitano, the Campa languages, Arabela, and Achuar. Many languages of Australia, such as Enindhilyagwa and Warlpiri, do not have words for quantities above two, as did many Khoisan languages at the time of European contact. Such languages do not have a word class of 'numeral'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note I'm trying to make value judgements about individual languages, just looking for the best way to describe these two culturally and/or linguistically different approaches to number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T13:30:11.860" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T01:28:10.843" Title="Is there a term in linguistics for underdeveloped number systems?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="648" CreationDate="2011-10-02T13:15:45.620" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's a specific term for this. I myself (a linguist) would call such a system an open-ended numeral system. Rather than describing what a language can't do, we normally describe what it does, so we talk about a language having a system for expressing numerals up to a certain point. I've worked on languages that have an upper limit of 3, and on one that had an upper limit of 99 (ie no word for 100).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, English doesn't really have words for all numbers, there's always an upper limit, so while there is a technical jargon in mathematics for referring to any number, everyday English does not have names for every number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T13:15:45.620" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="658" CreationDate="2011-10-02T15:18:36.797" Score="12" ViewCount="35086" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly from the half year I studied linguistics, there is a sort of official name for the situation or state your brain (or your speech center) is in when a word is at the tip of your tongue but you can't quite think of what it was again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was that term again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="366" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T18:31:43.790" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T06:53:45.500" Title="What's the 'official' term for when a word is at the tip of your tongue?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="976" CreationDate="2011-10-02T15:33:11.997" Score="16" ViewCount="1105" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/abs/nature06137.html&quot;&gt;this abstract&lt;/a&gt;, published in 2007, &quot;the half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast.&quot; The data that supports this study comes from 177 English irregular verbs, traced over a time span of 1200 years of evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much is known about verb regularization rates in other languages? Does the data collected so far, for the studied languages, show the same correlation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T12:52:18.573" LastActivityDate="2011-11-30T11:40:17.010" Title="How much is known about verb regularization rates?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="683" CreationDate="2011-10-02T17:32:45.357" Score="4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are the examples? What change patterns are exhibited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6673/linguistics/12404#12404&quot;&gt;*&lt;em&gt;modified from Area51&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T23:19:39.197" Title="Is there any language that observe root changes in response to the addition of affixes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-02T17:59:44.643" Score="7" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, definite articles are often related to demonstratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How might one characterize whether a word in a language is a definite article or a demonstrative?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T15:19:36.100" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T15:19:36.100" Title="What diagnostics distinguish demonstratives from definite articles?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2011-10-02T18:31:17.160" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of the phenomena that are studied a lot by experts, along with other facts, under many points of view. The one we are interested in is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;psycholinguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, that is an interdisciplinary field between neuropsychology, cognitive psychology and linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon where people seem to temporarily forget a certain word, is normal and occurs to everyone at least once in a life. The common expression is &lt;em&gt;tip-of-the-tongue&lt;/em&gt;, but the terminology adopted by psycholinguists seems to be simply &lt;strong&gt;TOT&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go more in depth you can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache%3aHXa3f6O99BwJ%3awww2.fiu.edu/~schwartb/sparkling.pdf%20%2bTOT%20%2btongue%20%2bterminology%20%2blinguistics&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=it&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEESieNLBl7p00PAXQ2Qz6EZb_12cmrDc5SdqiYr-eh0eWLb-9OBArGGFYu8o22AvGLIwtKDwDbV4hSv7Mm3YYzwJHxubS6VTG-6qc5U0MSIDbFnL8wvl0fC1-AQEvuQCZg9Ptpo52&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbSO5UzfisOGiLccoGpUU6W9QUipUg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sparkling at the end of the tongue: The etiology of tip-of-the-tongue phenomenology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Bennett L. Schwartz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T18:31:17.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-02T18:45:05.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Psycholinguistics  is an interdisciplinary field that features neuropsychology, cognitive psychology and linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scientific methods used in this field include electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, and more that measure the physiologic reactions that occur in the brain during the very execution of tasks of linguistic nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T04:55:47.863" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T04:55:47.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-02T18:45:05.853" Score="0" Body="Questions that are about the neurobiological and psychological factors that affect the acquisition, comprehension and utilisation of the language in human beings." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T00:40:25.560" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T00:40:25.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2011-10-02T19:40:21.213" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple words for the phenomenon you are speaking of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue&quot;&gt;tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)&lt;/a&gt; is the actual used term for the moment at which the subject has the specific difficulty, or more technically &lt;strong&gt;presque vu&lt;/strong&gt; ('almost seem').&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysnomia_%28disorder%29&quot;&gt;dysnomia&lt;/a&gt; is the term for the general chronic difficulty in retrieving vocabulary items. A more common but inclusive term is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia&quot;&gt;aphasia&lt;/a&gt; which is for any kind of impairment of language though often used for retrieval difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-10-02T21:30:51.243" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T21:30:51.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="350" CreationDate="2011-10-02T19:43:32.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly in machine translation but in the related field of morphosyntax recognition we have noted that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistical models are more adaptive, i.e. can be used for many different tasks with not much alteration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rule-based models are irrelevant for oral corpora&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On written corpora they have close f-scores, specifically on chunking and lexeme recognition statistical models have a good precision and rule-based models a good recall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion being that the most efficient approach is using both : first use a rule-based model, then use its results as data for the statistical model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2011-10-02T19:43:32.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2011-10-02T20:26:48.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A known &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; origin for all is certainly impossible since many languages &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have the same cognate term. So what I guess you are really looking for is a single &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; justification for semantic similarity between the concepts that might lead to using a single cognate term (within a language) for the same concept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical example, the Romance languages, where the terms for the two concepts are identical, all stem from both &quot;time&quot; and &quot;weather&quot; deriving from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.myetymology.com/latin/tempestus.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tempestus&lt;/a&gt;&quot; = &quot;season, weather&quot; (EN) derived directly from &quot;tempus&quot; for &quot;time&quot; (EN).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other examples &lt;em&gt;in IE&lt;/em&gt;, Slavic and Celtic, sometimes have one cognate form (&quot;vrijeme&quot; (CR)) sometimes two, &quot;pogoda&quot; &quot;czas&quot; (PL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other language (not already mentioned) I could find (using Google translate) where the two concepts have a common word is Vietnamese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;time: thời gian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weather: thời tiết&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where all the individual words seem to be about time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just examples. All we can really do is is make an educated but still speculative explanation about the semantic drift that since there does exist at least one example where the distinct concepts have similar roots (Latin), that a word form for &quot;time&quot; has affinities with marked time periods with special weather a &quot;season&quot;, and that can drift over to &quot;weather&quot; itself. That one example is enough to justify that they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of the example in Vietnamese just makes it more likely that it is not such a crazy explanation, because, as you you suggest, it comes from a supposedly uninfluenced language area (supposing that even those a Celtic &quot;ams&quot; for both time and weather was not an independent creation but a loan &quot;analogy&quot;, even though the root is independent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might suggest that Vietnamese might have its pair of terms influenced analogy wise by French but that would take a more in-depth historical/etymological analysis of Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T04:05:12.043" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T04:05:12.043" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="667" CreationDate="2011-10-02T21:55:43.323" Score="7" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist but a language enthusiast and I read lots of stuff about all languages mostly on the internet in blogs but also in accessible books and sometimes attempt to read some things not aimed at a general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I've read either grammatical analyses, opinions of linguists, or opinions of Chinese native speakers, that Chinese words can mostly be used as any part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite Chinese dictionaries (at least bilingual ones aimed at foreigners) usually listing a part of speech for each entry, can it be that they way Chinese words function depends to a greater degree on how they are used in a sentence than any property they inherently posses (word class)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a fairly accepted view amongst linguists or a known but unaccepted view (like Hebrew being a European language or Proto World etc) or is it a view held only by some native speakers of Chinese who lack enough linguistic knowledge to realize it's not right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I realize Chinese covers many languages but this should cover them broadly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T13:07:48.680" Title="Are there some analyses or linguists with the view that Chinese does not have lexical word class?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="668" CreationDate="2011-10-03T00:09:09.420" Score="28" ViewCount="3808" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read somewhere that if there ever was a world's first language&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, that language must have had very much in common&lt;sup&gt;**&lt;/sup&gt; with the Khoisan languages. Arguments in support of this hypothesis are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Khoisan languages have click consonants, a feature that has not developed independently in other languages. Bantu languages, for example, have borrowed them from Khoisan. So, this was probably some sort of an &quot;early invention&quot; that was not very &quot;fit&quot; and got abandoned along the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you look at a map depicting where Khoisan languages are spoken, you will see a major area over parts of Namibia (eastern part, mostly), Botswana and South Africa and two small pockets (one in central Tanzania and one in the western coast of Namibia). These small pockets suggest that Khoisan languages once dominated most parts of Africa and then got replaced by Bantu languages (which, in fact, sorround those pockets).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genetic and archeological evidence suggests that Homo Sapiens originated in that part of the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these arguments generally accepted among linguists? How much of this is &quot;good science&quot; and how much is just &quot;pop science&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;em&gt;In the sense of a single language from which all other languages of the world came out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** &lt;em&gt;The first version of this question contained the expression &quot;direct ancestor&quot;. But, as was pointed out in the answers and comments, this is not an appropriate term.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T14:29:40.920" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T21:04:20.240" Title="Do the Khoisan languages resemble the world's first language?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;proto-world&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2011-10-03T00:54:54.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's enough data to say anything:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pick any language family, you'll find it has some common property within that doesn't appear in -any- other family, and if it does appear elsewhere (like any true scotsman!) can be explained by borrowing (like the clicks in Bantu).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pockets of one language type surrounded by another, could be  explained by all sorts of different historical/cultural migrations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how long was it from the last excursions from Africa and the earliest known reconstructed proto-language? 60K yoa (by genetic evidence (wikipedia) to 6K yoa (PIE is the only one I know of (again wikipedia)). That's a long time, where a lot of things can happen (population movement, language change).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T00:54:54.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2011-10-03T02:45:03.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree, not enough data to say anything an too much time depth. But despite not being a historical linguist,  I can say re question 1 that where a feature is found in only one language family (if Khoisan is a language family!) and there's no evidence of it in others (apart from borrowing), the default assumption is usually that it was an innovation of the ancestor of that language family. So it makes sense to say that clicks were probably an innovation of proto-Khoisan and therefore pretty recent, at least compared to 'proto-World'. The spread of the Bantu languages was even more recent, so they were able to borrow them. The fact that they were borrowed and have been stable in those languages for some time suggests that they aren't that 'unfit'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T02:45:03.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2011-10-03T03:08:34.417" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese has very little morphology, so words don't change to indicate a different part of speech. This means that many words can be of uncertain lexical class membership when on their own. But the same is true of many words in English as well (called zero-derivation). For Chinese (again, like English) syntax can be the only thing that indicates the lexical class items belong to. But when used in a particular location in a clause the membership is fixed, so lexical classes are present and are strict. There are some languages that seem not to have true lexical classes such as Samoan, where the one sentence can be interpreted differently depending on whether words are treated as nouns or verbs (so word order doesn't determine lexical class membership).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that makes sense!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T03:08:34.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2011-10-03T03:08:42.120" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume what's sometimes called the &quot;proto-World&quot; hypothesis: language arose only once, in once community of speakers, and spread from there.  If that's true, then &amp;mdash; like Alek Storm says &amp;mdash; &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; human language has proto-World as a direct ancestor.  So the Khoisan languages wouldn't be unique in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguists talk about a connection between Khoisan and the hypothetical proto-World, what they're suggesting is that the Khoisan languages must be especially &lt;em&gt;conservative&lt;/em&gt; &amp;mdash; that they've preserved some features of proto-World more or less unchanged.  One feature that usually comes up is the one you mention: the presence of clicks.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implicit argument here is roughly: &quot;Well, Khoisan languages are spoken in the birthplace of the human species.  So it stands to reason that they would be the most conservative languages in the world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's a problem with that argument. There is no clear connection between migration and language change.  Sitting still won't prevent language change, and moving around won't make your language change any faster than normal.  (For instance: British English is more conservative than American English in some ways, and less conservative in others.  If migration and language change were connected, we'd expect British English to be much more conservative across the board.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact there's no particular reason to expect the Khoisan languages to be the most conservative, just because its speakers have stayed in one place.  For all we know the most conservative language in the world is one spoken in South America, or Australia, or ... well, &lt;em&gt;wherever.&lt;/em&gt;  We just can't tell.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T03:08:42.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="654" CreationDate="2011-10-03T03:19:26.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can be difficult to pin down. Demonstratives are typically used to pick something out by their location in space (or time) relative to the position of the speaker (deixis). Definite articles function as a referent-tracking device, and pick something out as having already been mentioned, or already known about. To diagnose forms as demonstratives and/or definite articles we have to study recorded utterances, along with their context, and work out how the forms in question are being used. Some languages have distinct demonstratives and definite articles, some have one set of forms that covers both functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T03:19:26.613" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2011-10-03T03:41:57.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An indefinite article is a form with a certain set of functions. These functions are in a number of respects different from those of words for the number 1. Linguists look at samples of language, determine what forms exist, and determine what set of  functions they fulfill. For convenience these forms will be referred to by a suitable name, based on the analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this it gets a bit complicated, but here's some parts of it, focussing on properties of indefinite articles that distinguish them from the numeral 'one'. In many cases the analysis of indefinite articles will involve looking at distributional properties: where in the noun phrase (NP) does it occur, and what other elements can it co-occur with. Articles normally don't occur alone, and act as modifiers of a NP. Indefinite articles may indicate number (eg singular/plural). Semantically, articles indicate whether an item of information is a specific individual, or if it's known to the hearer or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-05-31T16:25:52.227" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T16:25:52.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2011-10-03T04:09:27.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An indefinite article forbids bare nominal arguments (like bare nouns) when the nominal arguments are indefinite.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, in English &quot;*I saw bear&quot; is not valid, while in Mandarin (there is a word for one but no indefinite article) &quot;wǒ kànjiàn xióng le&quot; (I see bear ASP) is valid.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In French (with a plural indefinite article &quot;des&quot;), *&quot;Il y a livres là-bas&quot; (lit. There are books over there) is not not allowed while in English (no plural indefinite articles), it is OK to say &quot;There are books over there&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An indefinite article adds no semantic content. For example, when you say &quot;I have one printer&quot;, you probably mean that you have exactly 1 printer, while in &quot;I have a printer&quot;, a is just used as an indefiniteness marker without adding any semantic meaning. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/publish/articles/003953/bookpart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indefinite articles and beyond - BSW Le Bruyn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-05-31T16:28:20.780" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T16:28:20.780" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="663" CreationDate="2011-10-03T05:04:28.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding point #1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicks have arisen in at least one other language: &lt;strong&gt;Damin&lt;/strong&gt;.  It was a special form of the Lardil language in aboriginal Australia used only by men who had gone through their initiation rites.  Damin had four different click sounds (and one spurt and one pulmonic ingressive).  No other languages anywhere in the region use clicks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously clicks are very rare, but if they were innovated for Damin, they could have been innovated for Proto-Khoisan (if such a thing ever existed - the status of the language family is in doubt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if click sounds were not fit for human language use, how have they persisted this long in the Khoisan languages, and even spread into neighboring unrelated ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T05:04:28.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="653" CreationDate="2011-10-03T09:31:55.017" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;English. Many English words undergo stress shift when taking suffixes. Some examples are (quote mark precedes stressed syllable):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'progress (noun)-&gt; pro'gression&#xA;'commune (noun)-&gt; co'mmunity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stress shift also happens with zero-derivation (when words change their lexical class without affixation occurring). An example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'permit (noun) -&gt; per'mit (verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-02-15T04:21:52.120" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T04:21:52.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2011-10-03T13:30:12.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the claim that Chinese &quot;has no grammar&quot; but this would be news to the text-book writers and teachers who struggled to help me learn Mandarin. Certainly the distinction between verbs and adjectives is perhaps, not as sharply defined as in English. Chinese grammar, formally, seems to have more word classes than English. And categories themselves are surprising; my teacher in China assured me that words like &quot;above&quot; and &quot;below&quot; are nouns. The set of words they classify as prepositions are more limited than in English. (Perhaps not all Chinese theories of syntax follow this path - there seems to be many theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="379" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T13:30:12.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="677" CreationDate="2011-10-03T14:12:50.297" Score="12" ViewCount="2478" Body="&lt;p&gt;The flower forget-me-not is named &quot;Vergissmeinnicht&quot; in German and &quot;Незабудка&quot; in Russian. The meaning is the same in all three languages. Is this a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="313" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T14:00:31.780" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T08:44:05.453" Title="Why does the name of the flower 'Forget-me-not' have the same meaning in other languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;calques&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="675" CreationDate="2011-10-03T14:51:30.980" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Mitch pointed out in his comment, there is a phenomenon called calque or loan translation, where a word or a phrase is borrowed by word-per-word (or root-per-root) translation. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=forget-me-not&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, that's what happened here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from O.Fr. ne m'oubliez mye; in 15c. the flower was supposed to ensure&#xA;  that those wearing it should never be forgotten by their lovers.&#xA;  Similar loan-translations took the name into other languages, cf. Ger.&#xA;  Vergißmeinnicht, Swed. forgätmigej, Hungarian nefelejcs, Czech&#xA;  nezabudka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T14:51:30.980" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="675" CreationDate="2011-10-03T15:16:14.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to come up with a motivation for why this might be a loan word instead of something that people would come up with a suitable native word for.  It's tempting to just say, &quot;well that is the way it is, end of story&quot; Here are my ideas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 It's easy to translate/calque as a phrase. There isn't anything awkward about it and in English it forms a complete sentence.  Compare this to Chinese loans to English-- they are few and become unrecognizable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 Plants have limited ranges, so who ever lives near that plant will likely name it first and the name would spread with the knowledge that the plant exists.  As it turns out for this plant, it has a wide range, so it is possible that in some places the locals had already come up with a word for it.  On the other hand, something like words banana and tea are likely to have traveled with the people who first named these plants.  In the case of Tea, WALS has lots of data on how the name of that plant and the loanwords spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T15:16:14.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="680" CreationDate="2011-10-03T20:16:52.787" Score="12" ViewCount="617" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to use the Edinburgh Twitter Corpus that is referenced in this paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/miles/papers/socmed10.pdf&quot;&gt;The Edinburgh Twitter Corpus&lt;/a&gt;.  But apparently Twitter has changed their Terms and the corpus is no longer available.  Every other Twitter dataset I can find is likewise no longer available.  I am willing to start aggregating the data for myself, but it would be nice to have a set already compiled.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a personal, non-commercial project.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T22:36:00.447" Title="What are some resources that I can use to gather Twitter data for an NLP project?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="681" CreationDate="2011-10-03T22:18:41.633" Score="11" ViewCount="5305" Body="&lt;p&gt;At what age, approximately, is the end of the critical period for native language acquisition? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I understand that many details surrounding the critical period are up for debate. I want to know after what age is it a pretty safe bet that a second language could not be acquired with native fluency. Any references associated with estimates would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:50:44.263" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T22:29:42.527" Title="When is the end of the critical period?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;critical-period&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2011-10-03T22:36:00.447" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Twitter's new &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; (see paragraph (I)(4)(A)), you may not export any data retrieved from Twitter, whether through its public API or by scraping. So you will probably never find a readily-available corpus of tweets - and if you do, it's in violation. Twitter has already taken a lot of flak for essentially shutting down academic research into a whole new frontier of linguistic data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you'd like to publish your results after analysis, you may provide a database of tweet IDs and usernames, which other researchers can cross-reference with the official Twitter archive. I'd recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods&quot;&gt;Streaming API&lt;/a&gt; to start aggregating data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T22:36:00.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2011-10-03T22:42:47.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual limit is considered to be between the 3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; and the 4&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; year of age (I've also seen only the 3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; year being mentioned, but well, we're still around that time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a mention about this on the wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_bilingualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sequential bilingualism&lt;/a&gt;, but there is a document that treats it more in depth: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=kFCIXShz9l0C&amp;amp;lpg=PA17&amp;amp;ots=YcVJ8BPWAL&amp;amp;dq=%2bcritical%20%2bage%20%2bsequential%20%2bbilingualism&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=PA17#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: re-examining the age factor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Silvina Montrul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-03T22:54:09.097" LastActivityDate="2011-10-03T22:54:09.097" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="684" CreationDate="2011-10-03T23:47:01.717" Score="17" ViewCount="13869" Body="&lt;p&gt;By following the comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/663/do-the-khoisan-languages-resemble-the-first-world-language&quot;&gt;another question about the evolution of Khoisan languages&lt;/a&gt;, I learned that there is a heated debate in Evolutionary Linguistics about the origin of language. Some quick research on Wikipedia shows that there are two major, competing hypotheses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;monogenesis hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;, which holds that there was a single proto-language, estimated to have originated between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;polygenesis hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;, according to which languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the current state of this debate? What are the most recent (and compelling) pieces of evidence in favor of each side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T19:30:10.877" Title="Monogenesis vs. Polygenesis" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="653" CreationDate="2011-10-04T02:57:04.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminutive#German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German diminutive&lt;/a&gt; affixes &quot;-chen&quot; and &quot;-lein&quot; cause the root to be umlauted if it can be.  For example, &quot;Haus&quot; is &quot;house&quot;, &quot;Häuschen&quot; is the diminutive (cottage?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other affixes in German do this, too, for example for forming the comparative of adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="369" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T23:19:39.197" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T23:19:39.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="682" CreationDate="2011-10-04T03:50:16.597" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there really even is a &quot;current state of the debate.&quot; Most linguists seem to view it as a question that we don't have appropriate models or analyses to address. To start, I would like to bring up some finer points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Genetic relatedness&quot; of language isn't even really well-defined. It is entirely possible that throughout the past many millennia, languages had a tendency to borrow very differently than today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For instance, suppose you were one of a group of a dozen young women from tribe B who married into tribe C, which has about a hundred people, all at the same time. If tribe B had pronouns, and tribe C did not, but inflected verbs for person, say, only in perfective aspect, you all might start using the pronouns from tribe B; if the people in tribe C like the idea enough, they might start using them. Meanwhile, if tribe A had recently imported grammatical number from tribes elsewhere and lent it to tribe B, you might carry that with you through to tribe C.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we have, in sum, is a mess. Linguists working on pidgins, creoles, and creolization may be our best bet to provide breakthroughs in this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This often brings me to the analogy of genetics in a biological sense: when we look at DNA within the nucleus of a eukaryotic cell, we're definitely able to determine relatedness; however, in a colony of bacteria/organisms that may not exist anymore, the fact that one organism can &quot;eat&quot; a plasmid from another and maybe even splice it into its own principal DNA ring screws up the notion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Human language&quot; isn't really well-defined. It's easy enough to separate what is human language from what isn't, in most cases, in the present day, but the tools we've developed for that from our present-day experience probably aren't adequate to evaluate the situation, say, 300 000—40 000 years ago, or even describe it well. The burden then falls to the inquirer, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is it precisely are you wondering originated once or multiple times?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if there really was polygenesis of language, but those of the present day all come from a single source (assuming we could even define what we meant by that, and it wasn't silly)? If the last language not from the same source was, say, some North American language isolate that went extinct in the 18th century, after being sparsely documented? This leads to more interesting questions, such as what if, grammatically, it wasn't all that out-of-the-ordinary?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as long as we're speculating, my &lt;em&gt;bet&lt;/em&gt; is that the real answer is a mixture of mono- and polygenesis: there were many periods when tribes maintained close contact with each other, borrowing heavily across the grammatical spectrum throughout a dialect continuum for centuries, and then underwent periods of individuation, due to geographical or cultural effects; during one of these periods, perhaps you would say one of these speech patterns would finally qualify for whatever formal definition you have of &quot;language,&quot; and during the next period of mixture, maybe it was borrowed from more than it borrowed. But then, say, a thousand years later, a dialect half a continent away, to which only a small portion of those innovations filtered, innovated enough on its own to where you could call &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;language.&quot; This whole scenario is to bear out the point that what we really have is a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know I've employed a nonstandard usage of &quot;dialect&quot;; I just didn't want to use the word &quot;language&quot; above, for obvious reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=UAFVgdGljl4C&amp;amp;pg=PA24&amp;amp;lpg=PA24&amp;amp;dq=linguistic+monogenesis+vs+polygenesis&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lKzOdi-gJ0&amp;amp;sig=dwN_Lw6P0yfqwkm7CHyfq4Udfps&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=UneKTr7RCabz0gH1nLm8BA&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=10&amp;amp;ved=0CFwQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Polygenesis, convergence, and entropy&lt;/a&gt; (1996), by Lutz Edzard, takes a comparable view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~amag/langev/paper/freedman96languagePolygenesis.html&quot;&gt;Language Polygenesis: A probabilistic model&lt;/a&gt; (1995), David Freedman and William Wang point out the flaws in the usual probabilistic argument for monogenesis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(let me know if I should create another question or something):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An article in the New York Times, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/science/world-s-farmers-sowed-languages-as-well-as-seeds.html?pagewanted=all&amp;amp;src=pm&quot;&gt;World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds&lt;/a&gt; (2003), bears out the relationship between the success of the comparative method and the presence of agriculture in the cultures being studied. (This relates to my point about dialect continua/grammatical innovation/&quot;membranes&quot; and leads into a response to MatthewMartin's answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 to MatthewMartin for mentioning a vital element of the &quot;debate&quot; Otavio Macedo was referring to. Greenberg conducted some of the most groundbreaking and notable research in linguistic taxonomy of the past hundred years, including but by no means limited to the establishment of Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic. There always seems to be a lot of unhelpful, not-so-under-the-surface vitriol in many reactions to the Greenberg/Ruhlen research. On the other hand, when in the Amazon review of Ruhlen's book, Larry Trask says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;of the 13 Basque items presented on page 65 (as 'language B'), four are wrong, and two &#xA;  more are not even native Basque words,&lt;/strong&gt; but are words borrowed from Latin or Spanish.&#xA;  And there are also some profound problems concerning the origins and earlier forms of &#xA;  several of the others,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is a &lt;em&gt;factual&lt;/em&gt; objection, which can easily be verified. Similarly, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nostratic.ru/books/%28211%29vajda-2008.pdf&quot;&gt;A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages&lt;/a&gt; (which I feel is the most notable finding in linguistic taxonomy of the twenty-first century so far, but that's beside the point), we read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first person to claim a genetic link specifically between Yeniseic and&#xA;  Athabaskan-Tlingit (Eyak was then unrecognized as a Na-Dene language) was the Italian&#xA;  linguist Alfredo Trombetti (1923). Since that time, many other linguists,&#xA;  notably Merritt Ruhlen (1998) have repeated the same suggestion, though typically &#xA;  including Haida in Na-Dene&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Merritt Ruhlen's (1998) proposed cognate sets contain several genuine cognates, among &#xA;  over &lt;strong&gt;75% coincidental look-alikes.&lt;/strong&gt; These are Ruhlen's comparisons for: head, stone, &#xA;  foot, breast, shoulder/arm, birch/birchbark, old, and burn/cook, and possibly a few &#xA;  others. The correct identification of cognate words for &quot;birch/birchbark&quot; is &#xA;  particularly noteworthy, as this basic vocabulary item is specific to families of the &#xA;  northern latitudes. The finding of these cognates, though it was impossible to confirm &#xA;  them as such in the absence of much more investigation, represents an important &#xA;  contribution,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in other words, (1) Greenberg and Ruhlen are correct that Na-Dené and Yeniseian are relatives, (2) Ruhlen's wordlist is partially correct and helpful, but (3) Haida is not part of their linguistic unit, and (4) 75% of Ruhlen's correspondences turned out to be invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is getting a little long, so I'll summarize the rest. After his Africa research, Greenberg traveled to Papua New Guinea and to South America (IIRC; if anyone can source this I'd be grateful) and collected &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot;&gt;Swadesh-type word lists&lt;/a&gt; from hundreds of tribes. This, too, is &lt;strong&gt;incredibly important&lt;/strong&gt; research, of a nature not many have had the constitution to undertake. The results of it are, too, very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the conclusion? More research of this sort needs to be done, to get a lower error rate on the words in the lists. Sound changes need to be added back into the equation with gusto, so that we can find more correct correspondences and throw out more of the ones that don't actually hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on those pronouns: they certainly do hint at the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of Eurasiatic (for instance) as a linguistic unit. But what if, again, there were an era where pronouns were the new hot item? Then they could all reduce to loanwords. Again, the conclusion is more research needs to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T21:23:48.513" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T21:23:48.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-04T04:58:41.823" Score="8" ViewCount="2319" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've run into &quot;semantic head parsing&quot; and &quot;syntactic head parsing&quot; and while I think I have a feel for the difference, I was wondering if anyone could give a more concrete definition or reference to read up about the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular I'm curious about the characteristics of parsing sentences with each method. What benefits does each one have? What aspects of the sentence do they highlight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T18:42:35.733" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T02:00:52.623" Title="Semantic head vs Syntactic head parsing" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="682" CreationDate="2011-10-04T06:21:53.560" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I'd follow up Daniel's excellent comment by giving an example of the problems faced by language reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the best tools we have for establishing a relationship between two languages is the comparative method. This was developed in the 17th century after people started noticing some deep similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and some other languages. They hypothesized that they all shared a common ancestor, which they called &quot;Proto-Indo-European&quot;. By comparing the way one concept is expressed in different languages, you can come up with correspondences. If you can generalize this correspondence, you can establish a relationship between the two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you discover a new island, Ba and on this island are two distinct cultures with there own distinct language, Tamo and Danu. We suspect that they share a common linguistic ancestor; the island is so isolated that we don't expect multiple migrations. Still, we can't rule it out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We proceed by constructing a lexicon of the two languages using basic words, something called a swadesh list, which contains all the words we expect a language to have. So we've done this and developed a reliable list along with their pronunciations. It might look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Word     Tamo     Danu &#xA;—————————————————————————&#xA;'Man'     /tam/    /dan/&#xA;'Woman'   /tami/   /dani/&#xA;'Dog'     /kɔd/    /god/&#xA;...       ...       ... &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on and so forth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We immediately notice that these words look similar. 'man' is very similar in both languages: an alveolar stop, /a/, nasal, and rounded back vowel. But, there are some variations. It's a voiced stop in Danu and an unvoiced stop in Tamo. But look: we get the same pattern with 'dog', a voiced alveolar stop in Danu and an unvoiced one in Tamo. If this holds up across a lot of words, then that is strong evidence these languages share a common ancestor, which we might call 'proto-ba'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of things that can go wrong with this. Word-borrowings, crib words, and convergent happenstance can all contrive to make two languages appear related when they are not. You can get over excited about your discovery, and start noticing similarities that aren't there. You'll want to do a lot of heavy research about the language and the people that spoke it. Who have they had contact with? Where did they come from? Have there been any major migrations that might have affected the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that after a certain point, this method stops being useful. Language changes can build up over time, complicated each other or wipe each other out. Our knowledge about the language becomes less and less reliable, and we start losing important pieces to the puzzle. There is a lot of controversy about how Japanese is related to Chinese, for instance, and no one knows where Basque came from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd be fighting through 50,000 years of language change, most of it without any written records and a bare sketch of population movements, and that's a conservative estimate for the age of language. It's really easy to under appreciate just how long a time that is. Proto-Indo-European, for instance, started to split up around 6000 years ago. The invention of writing is around the same age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some linguists that have tried to come up with a sketch of 'proto-world', but they have been met with intense skepticism. Just google &quot;proto-world&quot; and click around on a few of the links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-29T13:56:47.617" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T13:56:47.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="703" CreationDate="2011-10-04T11:23:54.547" Score="6" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Australia there are two creoles in daily use, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Kriol_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kriol&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;rop&lt;/code&gt;, also known as Roper River Creole etc) in the Northern Territory with about 30,000 speakers and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait_Creole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Torres Strait Creole&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;tcs&lt;/code&gt;, also known as Broken etc) in the Torres Strait Islands in far north Queensland with about 25,000 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any kind of papers or research which investigate or compare the two languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideal would be something considering various aspects of language one by one (phonology, lexis, pronoun system, etc) and making direct comparisons or the approaches of the two languages such as &quot;While &lt;code&gt;rop&lt;/code&gt; does ... , &lt;code&gt;tcs&lt;/code&gt; does ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T08:05:27.237" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T08:05:27.237" Title="Are there some studies or resources comparing the two living creole languages in Australia?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="687" CreationDate="2011-10-04T13:43:06.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Torres Strait Creole has been known as 'Broken' and 'Blaikman', but nowadays is usually called 'Yumplatok' (the indigenous name).&#xA;The creole in the NT is sometimes known as 'Roper Creole' (it having originated at Roper River Mission) to distinguish it from Kimberley Kriol (spoken in the Kimberley region of WA), but these two may well form a continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project (ACLA) has examined child language acquisition in a number of communities in the NT, to the south of the areas where Roper Creole is spoken. There is a discussion of some of the outcomes from the project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA/kriol.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While ACLA has focused on varieties (that might be creoles or mixed languages) from these more southerly areas of the NT, the list of references at the end is very good, athough it seems to exclude Yumplatok. From that list I suggest Mühlhaüsler (2004) may provide you the comparative information you are seeking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the best book about Yumplatok is 'Broken: an introduction to the Creole language of Torres Strait' by Anna Shnukal (1988).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T13:57:53.487" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T13:57:53.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2011-10-04T13:43:06.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was based on the assumption that the transitivity of a complementizer was some inherent feature of it. One of the consequences of that feature would be that the closest nominal c-commanded by that complementizer would be given accusative case. So, if there was such kind of complementizers in English, it would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I asked if her would go to the party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as it turns out, that assumption is wrong. What defines a transitive complementizer is precisely the fact that it assigns accusative case to nominals, and not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T13:43:06.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-04T15:49:05.357" Score="17" ViewCount="46217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I found two tables that reported the names for two fruits, which were supposed to be funny, because they specifically reported a single exception among those several languages, where this fruit's name was different for only one of those languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cropped the images to avoid space problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TnUP4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the fruit that is ananas in many languages is pineapple in English only&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/47tWZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the fruit that is banana in many languages is plátano in Spanish only&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They make one smile, but if we try to analyse the matter under a Linguistics point of view, it gets interesting, deserving to have a look into it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my questions are&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did two languages, English and Spanish, develop an alternative word to denote those fruits?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And why did just one language (per case) behaved like this? I mean, why not also some other Romance language for one case or some other Germanic one for the other case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; I just asked one question because I think these two occurrences are related, but if someone finds out they are two different linguistic phenomena, I can split them up. Also, feel free to retag, if necessary.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="153" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T06:31:50.360" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T02:08:23.397" Title="Weird behavior of two fruits' names (ananas/pineapple, banana/plátano)" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="695" CreationDate="2011-10-04T16:08:34.450" Score="4" ViewCount="2199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try to read this texts, start with the most difficult one, if you cant read, skip to the next easier one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;all letters mixed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I onlucd't ieebvel ttah I udloc talyulac rsddetanun hwat I swa&#xA;  radgeni. sngiU eth inrdebelic rweop fo hte nmauh imdn, dorcincga ot&#xA;  arceehsr ta meaiCrgbd yvisUntier, it deson't ramtet in athw rored eth&#xA;  erlttes ni a rwod rae, hte noyl atomirnpt nhgti si ttha hte tsfir and&#xA;  last letert eb in het girth leacp. eTh sret anc be tolta ssem dna ouy&#xA;  cna litsl eard it wohutti a elrpomb. ishT is secbaeu het mahun mnid&#xA;  dose tno aerd verye leettr yb efsilt, btu hte orwd sa a leohw.&#xA;  agzmnAi, huh? Yhea nda I awlyas utgtohh lgniespl aws optnrimta! eSe if&#xA;  uoyr resfdin acn eadr siht oto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inner + first letter mixed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dloucn't ebeilve taht I lcuod utllaacy tsnredanud awht I was&#xA;  irdenag. sUnig hte eidbcrline poewr of the umhan nimd, ccrdiaong to&#xA;  aecrersh at biCagmdre eivUnirsty, it esdon't eattmr in hawt droer the&#xA;  teltres in a rwod are, the lnoy ropamintt nthig is that hte rfsit nad&#xA;  alst eltetr be in the hgrit aclpe. The rest acn be ttoal mses and oyu&#xA;  acn tilsl aerd it ouithwt a rebplom. hiTs is ecuasbe hte muahn mind&#xA;  does ont ared every leettr by iletsf, but hte orwd as a hlwoe.&#xA;  maiAzng, uhh? Yeah nad I lwyaas hugthot lisneplg was mprnotait! eSe if&#xA;  oyur nridfes acn raed iths oto. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inner letters mixed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg.&#xA;  Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at&#xA;  Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a&#xA;  wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer&#xA;  be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll&#xA;  raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not&#xA;  raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh?&#xA;  Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins&#xA;  can raed tihs too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually we learn reading by putting together letters, but with ongoing time this seems to change drastically. Do we perceive words and sentences as small pictures? Like mosaics build of morphemes? Is psycholinguistic research done on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;on comments:&lt;/strong&gt; im very interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psycholinguistics or psychology of language&lt;/a&gt;. Wether this belongs to linguistics.SE, i dont know, the FAQ is unclear, I just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/612/why-does-speech-speed-seem-to-vary-between-different-languages&quot;&gt;this on-topic question about perception&lt;/a&gt; and was reminded of this phenomenon, thougt some experts in linguistics can shed some light on this imho important &amp;amp; interesting phenomenon and its implications as a method, topic for linguistic research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is mainly explored in psychology faculties. But as a scientist myself, i dont see how you want explore origin and evolution of languages without analysing how we perceive (see/hear) language, how our ears and eyes are limited in perception,memorizing and remembering of frequencies and micro-shapes. Thats like saying, we can explore music by analysing all note-sheets ever written or understand PSE by studying chemical compounds instead of doing atom physics. This would be unscientific and missing the big picture, maybe missing the main factors. Of course you have to start with psychoacoustics, phonetics. Maybe you learn more about origin of human language by studying differences to other animals (singing whales, birds) than analysing the fine nuances of human spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So im a bit surprised that so many see this question as off-topic, despite how interesting (to me) the current answers and their links &amp;amp; implications to different linguistic fields are. If a whole PHD-thesis covers this topic, how can it be off-topic? But i wasnt commited to this site and its definition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158/psycholinguistics-or-psychology-of-language-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;i made a question in meta&lt;/a&gt;, imho you should move discussion and comments there before i or somebody else wastes time writing a perception-tagged closed/non-voted questions yielding less effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T21:19:54.780" Title="How do we perceive and read words and sentences? Does the order of the inner letters play no significant role?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2011-10-04T16:16:37.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason that &quot;only one language&quot; calls it a &quot;pineapple&quot; is that the table left out other languages which also do. Spanish, for example, calls it &lt;em&gt;piña&lt;/em&gt;, and a quick glance at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pineapple#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; suggests that several other languages, including Welsh, Catalan, and Afrikaans, do too. It's not surprising that many different languages would have only two words for the fruit, because it's a new world fruit and those are all old world languages, so they all take it as a loan-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for banana, it seems that many, many languages have different words for it. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banana#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; and note in particular the geographical variation in the Spanish word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral of this story is that if we pick the right samples we can show anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T16:16:37.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="691" CreationDate="2011-10-04T16:41:33.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't read the first and not the second much either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why the third one is simpler? There was a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;study done by the Cambridge University&lt;/a&gt;, that stated that the order of the letters was not important, except for the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; one. If you mix them all, like in the first two, you'll need time to anagram them and proceed, but with the last one you can read it faster (and more easily). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neologism created to denote this cognitive process is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Typoglycemia&lt;/a&gt;, a portmanteau of &lt;em&gt;typo&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;glycemia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of this seems to come from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16221887.600#hdkey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a letter sent to the New Scientist&lt;/a&gt; (I can't find a version that can be read without subscribing), by Dr. Graham Rawlinson, although it also seems that a researcher think it was wrongly-attributed (read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nextstepassociates.co.uk/about-us/people/graham-rawlinson/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). I think you can also check his &quot;&lt;em&gt;The significance of letter position in word recognition&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in 1976.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all languages seem to work like this. Arabic for example, because in the written form it has no vowels (you add them reading, if I remember well); Finnish and Turkish words are too long, and for languages like Thai that has no space between words, it doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timendum.net/blog/107/lettere-scombinate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; where you can type or paste text and mix it (the button &lt;code&gt;Mischia!&lt;/code&gt; does it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T16:47:34.510" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T16:47:34.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2011-10-04T16:49:15.010" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer about just the words for &quot;pineapple&quot;.  In short, you're seeing two phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;new item&lt;/strong&gt; is introduced to the world, so a &lt;strong&gt;new name&lt;/strong&gt; is needed to go with it.  Whichever name is used by the introducers gets adopted in many other languages.  See &lt;em&gt;coffee&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt; for some other examples of this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dataset you have above only includes examples that show the author's intended pattern and &lt;strong&gt;excludes examples that don't fit&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start by looking at the dataset.  Clearly there's a bias towards &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt;-type words than towards &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt;-type words, but we don't know why.  One possibility is that the collector of this dataset simply included only languages with &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt; and discarded any examples of &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt; (apart from English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's get some data of our own.  I'm using Google Translate to pull up words for pineapple in all the languages they provide.  (With a few restrictions: there must be a result other than what I typed in English, and there must be a romanization available.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Afrikaans: pynappel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armenian: ark’ayakhndzor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Macedonian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian: ananas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basque, Galician, Spanish: piña&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bengali: Ānārasa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catalan, Filipino: pinya&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese: bōluó&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: pineapple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Estonian: ananass&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georgian: ananasi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek, Portuguese, Slovak: ananás&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gujarati: Anēnāsa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haitian: anana&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi: Anannāsa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hungarian: ananász&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indonesian, Malay: nanas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irish: anann&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese: Painappuru&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kannada: Anānas haṇṇu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean: pain-aepeul&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latvian: ananāsu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian: ananasas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swahili: mananasi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tamil: Aṉṉāci&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Telugu: Anāsa paṇḍu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai: S̄ạbpard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vietnamese: dứa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Welsh: phîn-afal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a glance, it looks like we have six basic types here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ananas: 42 languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;piña/pineapple: 10 languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ark’ayakhndzor: 1 language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bōluó: 1 language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S̄ạbpard: 1 language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dứa: 1 language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt; words are the most common, but what does that mean?  Should Serbian and Croatian (which are generally mutually intellible) each get a &quot;vote&quot; while Mexican Spanish and Castilian Spanish have to share a &quot;vote&quot;?  Which languages you count and which ones you don't is fairly arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's break this up a different way.  The pineapple only came to the Old World via European colonization of the New World, so let's see what the European colonizers call this fruit.  Here we're only looking at languages whose parent countries had a major colonial presence in the New World before 1600:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese: ananás&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: piña&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of these languages use a &lt;em&gt;pine&lt;/em&gt;-type word, one uses an &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt;-type word.  Doing a bit of reading, it seems that &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt; is the Guaraní word for &quot;pineapple&quot; and was borrowed by the Portuguese, and it spread from there.  The Spanish (going all the way back to Columbus) called the fruit &lt;em&gt;piña&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pine&quot; because of its resemblance to a pinecone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these two origins come many of the names for &quot;pineapple&quot; in the various languages of the world.  The only phenomenon you're seeing here is that &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt; simply became more popular.  My best guess as to the distribution of the two forms would be the dominance of French (with &lt;em&gt;ananas&lt;/em&gt;) in previous centuries.  Languages that are more heavily influenced by Spanish (like Filipino) end up with &lt;em&gt;pine&lt;/em&gt;-type words.  Languages more heavily influenced by English (like Japanese) end up with the full &lt;em&gt;pineapple&lt;/em&gt; type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastEditorUserId="314" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T04:58:20.613" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T04:58:20.613" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="691" CreationDate="2011-10-04T17:10:22.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matt Davis&lt;/a&gt; provides a useful summary related to this meme. Versions in Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, German, Czech, Icelandic, Portuguese, Swedish, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian, Albanian, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, and Polish are available on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew and Finnish are also linked and Davis mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[of Finnish] Both Peter and Ari suggest that the resulting scrambled text is very difficult to read. ...one thing that makes these scramblings difficult to read is that the jumbled-letters often move across morpheme-boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[of Hebrew] Samuel suggests that the scrambled text is &amp;quot;a REAL mess.. you can not understand it at all&amp;quot;. This may reflect a interesting property of the Hebrew writing system. Since vowels are not written in the text, there is a lot less redundancy in written Hebrew. It may be that readers are already using some inference processes to work out what words are written, the extra load added by jumbling letters creates an additional, excessive level of difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davis mentions that while no research that spawned this meme was done at &amp;quot;Cambridge University&amp;quot; (some versions of the common text say English University, in fact), this text may have been more widely circulated after a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/newscientist_letter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1999 note from Graham Rawlinson&lt;/a&gt; containing jumbled text, related to his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/rawlinson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1976 PhD research&lt;/a&gt; that described how readers can understand text despite high noise or error rates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Languagehat&lt;/a&gt; also discussed this in 2003, and many of the commenters there have good points about what to explore further. Here's one, S.W.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of this seems fairly close to the concept of non-words and orthographic non-word neighborhood effects (i.e., RT's in a yes/no word/non-word lexical task being longer when non-words have a higher neighborhood, or lexical inhibition). Since most of these are strictly &lt;em&gt;non-words&lt;/em&gt;, I'm betting that the non words with higher orthographic neighborhoods are harder to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, since we're talking about representing these non-words as actual words I'd be willing to bet there are two very obvious factors involved. I'm betting the base-words (non scrambled) with a higher orthographic neighborhood are even harder to recognize, e.g. high non-word orthographic neighborhood, high base-word orthographic neighborhood = much more difficult to recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as someone pointed out, we're not even considering ascenders, descenders, syntax, schemas for written text, the degree to which each word is scrambled....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of what research covers those issues but it mgiht mkae for a good porjcet or fololw-up qeutsoin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T17:10:22.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="682" CreationDate="2011-10-04T17:38:36.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merritt Ruhlen is has a good &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0471159638&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;popularly accessible book on the issue&lt;/a&gt; and my answer is based on my reading of his book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The anti-monogensis stance is by and large based on the proto-indo-european research agenda and their methods. It is not controversial that those techniques fall apart at about 5000 maybe even 10000 years worth of inferences.  A pretty good accessible book about this research agenda and how it agrees with the archeological record for IE, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0691058873&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The horse, the wheel and language&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  The story for PIE is pretty convincing and the reconstructions almost look like a ghost of the original speakers might be able to understand it, albeit this is hardly the level of proof you get in physics or math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruhlen makes the case that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;going further back uses different techniques, e.g. focus on the evolution of pronoun systems, ignore step by step transformations, and these techniques are different than used for reconstructing PIE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has more modest goals, classification is a much more modest goal (i.e. will not result in a PIE type reconstruction of protoworld) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has turned into exercise of academics flinging feces at each other (my words, and darn if it isn't appropriate) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this isn't the first time the academic community reacted violently against a superfamily and then more or less accepted it, using Greenbergs research on the Bantu languages as an example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now for my personal opinion-- some of the most vociferous opponents are American Indian language researchers. In that community, so many competing crackpot ideas have been advanced in the past (e.g. the Indians are the lost tribe of Israel and that Amerind languages are some type of Hebrew) that the whole field has irrationally turned against the idea that Amerind languages can be rationally classified into superfamilies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in other fields, genetics, archaeology and anthropology-- the researchers are coming to the same conclusions or coming to conclusions supported by the other fields. The classification of superfamilies is matching the migrations of ancient humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think someone in the world of Economics (Keynes maybe?) said progress in academia is made when there are funerals. I guess that makes sense because no one wants to retract a research paper that they wrote a long while back to take into account a major shift in the understanding of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T17:38:36.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-04T18:46:56.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-10-04T18:46:56.350" LastActivityDate="2011-10-04T18:46:56.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="698" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-04T18:46:56.350" Score="0" Body="Comparisons across (as opposed to within) languages or language families." OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:54:03.437" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:54:03.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-04T21:27:45.733" Score="15" ViewCount="877" Body="&lt;p&gt;German is the only widely used language prescribing capitalization of nouns in the written language. I speak English and German fluently myself, but I can read German texts significantly faster than English ones. I also use sometimes speed reading techniques (depending on known/unknown topic, skimming a longer text) and it seems to me that especially here the capitalization of nouns works like syntax-highlighting, which obviously is highly useful. German philologists seem split on the question of whether capitalization has more advantages than disadvantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One consideration for me is that we actually seem mainly to focus on the first letters of a word with our eyes to recognize and memorize it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/691/how-do-we-perceive-and-read-words-and-sentences-does-the-order-of-the-inner-lett&quot;&gt;see this question&lt;/a&gt;) or skim smaller words in fixed and frequently occurring word groups (e.g. &quot;at the beginning&quot;).  Speed reading techniques say you should also focus on words when moving your focus from right to left and so double-scan the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are my assumptions backed by research results?  Are there plans to establish capitalization of nouns in any other languages?  Are there already languages with non-Roman alphabets using another type of syntax-highlighting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; As additional hint/proof i want to add that in german forums, you often see people not capitalizing every noun as they cannot tip with 10 fingers or are just used to it in chats. Especially in german Usenet you often see then posts from other users complaining about this style as it makes it significantly harder to read such posts in their opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T14:48:57.657" Title="Does capitalization of nouns aid reading comprehension?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="699" CreationDate="2011-10-05T00:53:59.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cognitive psychological fact I remember from ancient papers (1970's?) is that, in order of difficulty of reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all caps &quot;HOW EASY IS THIS TO READ?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all lower case &quot;how easy is this to read?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;title case, all major words capitalized: &quot;How Easy is This to Read?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is done in a (presumably monolingual) English population. I don't remember if this is only for titles of for longer narratives or for any length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a cursory web search it seems the trend in culture in English is for headlines to be in sentence case (just the first word capitalized, the rest lower case), with the unsupported justification that sentence case 'is easier to read'. As to individuals writing, any kind of capitalization is more difficult than not, because of the extra finger to use to 'shift'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very difficult to say that in general reading is easier in one language rather than another because of so many confounding variables (translation, culture, education, etc) forgetting all the language specific discrepancies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But similarly, comparing speed of reading one passage with another modified passage is confounding because the difficulty of the change itself may outweigh the ostensible benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your other questions, just because there is an experimental justification of a certain technique (capitalization) doesn't mean the culture is in any way receptive to it. Spelling reform in English, despite its simple engineering basis, is considered close to 'flat-earth' theories in adoptability. I don't know of any other languages where the language leaders are intentionally trying to change capitalization or use some kind of syntax marking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T14:48:57.657" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T14:48:57.657" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2011-10-05T06:29:57.617" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Joe has covered words for &quot;pineapple&quot;, so here's some info on words for &quot;banana&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly straightforward explanation for why Spanish has the word &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; instead of a variant of &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt;, compared to the other languages in the above list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plátano&lt;/em&gt; already existed in Spanish to refer to another sort of plant, namely the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus&quot;&gt;'plane tree'&lt;/a&gt;, or trees of the genus &lt;em&gt;Platanus&lt;/em&gt;, whose name can be traced back via Latin through Greek to a Proto-Indo-European root *plat- &quot;to spread&quot;. The name is thought to refer to either the largish leaves some of these trees have, or their broad, flat expanses of bark.&#xA;Various cognates also carry the meaning of 'broad', 'spreading', and so on - in English,  plants of the genus &lt;em&gt;Plantago&lt;/em&gt;, commonly called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantago&quot;&gt;plantains&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, are similarly named for their broad, round leaves, via a borrowing from French. &lt;em&gt;(Edit: to clarify, the plantains just mentioned are a small, herbaceous, bog-loving plant, completely unrelated to any sort of banana).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, once the Spanish-speaking world had access to bananas, &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; was usefully extended to refer to (some) banana plants; given that banana trees have quite enormous leaves, the name is quite appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an alternative hypothesis that Spanish got &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; from the Carib word &lt;em&gt;platana&lt;/em&gt; (from Arawakan &lt;em&gt;pratane&lt;/em&gt;) and that this was altered to make it more similar to Spanish &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; 'plane tree', but there is not much evidence to support this, and either way &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; 'plane tree' is somewhat responsible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the list above is a bit disingenuous, because Spanish &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; have the word &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt;, and this is the word that Spanish initially borrowed from Wolof, a Niger-Congo language, to refer to the fruit. Depending on what sort of Spanish you speak, &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; can refer to to smaller, sweeter fruits we are most familiar with, while &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; might refer to the larger, starchier, less sweet fruits that are generally used in cooking rather than eaten raw. In English, the latter are referred to as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantain&quot;&gt;plantains&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;plantain bananas&lt;/em&gt; (probably on analogy with Spanish &lt;em&gt;Edit: because although English already had the word 'plantain', it wasn't used to refer to bananas&lt;/em&gt;). Both sorts are of the genus &lt;em&gt;Musa&lt;/em&gt;. But at least in Mexico, &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; refers to the sweet variety, and plantains are &lt;em&gt;plátano macho&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most modern languages that use a variant of the word &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; got the word via either Spanish or Portuguese, and those languages initially borrowed it from Wolof. So, to reiterate Joe's point, &quot;whichever name is used by the introducers gets adopted in many other languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in fact, the history of 'words for banana' started long before the Spanish and Portuguese borrowed the modern word from Wolof, and if you look at languages across the world, the word &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; hardly comes into play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent study by a team of geneticists, archeologists, agricultural scientists and linguists investigated the history of different banana varieties based on the evidence for human cultivation and dispersal of bananas. The evidence suggests that bananas likely originated in New Guinea, and the linguistic information associated with this is pretty interesting. Mark Donohue  put together a list of over 1,100 words for 'banana' in languages from Melanesia and South East Asia, the regions in which the banana was first dispersed. The paper can be accessed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/108/28/11311&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (sorry, abstract only unless you have access), but the supplementary materials are available publicly, so &lt;strong&gt;if you want to see over 1,100 words for 'banana'&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/108/28/11311/suppl/DCSupplemental&quot;&gt;go to this page and click the link for Table_S04&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using comparative methods, the researchers reconstructed root forms for different words for 'banana', and found four major cognate sets with distinct, but overlapping, geographical distributions. The root forms were *muku, *punti, *qaRutay, and *baRat. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/06/28/1102001108.DCSupplemental/sfig05.pdf&quot;&gt;You can see some maps of the distribution of these variants here (pdf).&lt;/a&gt; There were other minor groupings and a lot of 'miscellaneous' lexical items that had no clear group of cognates. &lt;em&gt;Banana&lt;/em&gt; is labelled as such, and only shows up twice in this whole list (granted, the list doesn't include many African or continental European languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, while &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; is an oddity in the short list presented above, Spanish actually did use the word &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; first, and some varieties of Spanish still do use it for sweet bananas, where &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; specifically refers to plantain bananas. Furthermore, crosslinguistically, &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; is actually an oddity in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="153" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T08:08:48.993" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T08:08:48.993" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-05T06:56:22.080" Score="13" ViewCount="1137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happen to have been struggling to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese lately, and it's been my first attempt to really deal with tones to any significant extent. I find distinguishing tones quite difficult -- in fact, I find that trying to get tones right has assumed a considerable amount of the effort that I'm applying to studying this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is just anecdotal background for a more theoretical, typological question which I now find myself thinking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should it be the case that variegated tone systems should appear almost always appear in languages that have a) an isolating grammatical system and b) a relatively simple syllable structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, are there any very clear exceptions to this correlation? There seem to be few, if any, examples of heavily agglutinating languages (along the lines of Turkish or Finnish, say) which also have a complex tone system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should this be the case? Have there been studies about nature (or existence) of this correlation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T07:16:07.220" LastActivityDate="2011-12-03T11:30:48.947" Title="Why do tone and simple syllable structure appear to be correlated?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="687" CreationDate="2011-10-05T07:30:33.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are some sources comparing Kriol to Torres Strait Creole/Broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 'Handbook of Varieties of English' Vol 1 (Phonology), there is a chapter by Malcolm (2004) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reference-global.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1515/9783110175325.1.656&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Australian creoles and Aboriginal English: phonetics and phonology'.&lt;/a&gt; You can read &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the chapter &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=mtd3a-56ysUC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=a%20handbook%20of%20varieties%20of%20english&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=Nf-LTriUJuLnmAWfq_iPBA&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=2&amp;amp;sqi=2&amp;amp;ved=0CDsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here on Google Books, p.656&lt;/a&gt;. And in 'Varieties of English' Vol 3 (The Pacific and Australasia), there is another chapter by Malcolm (2008) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reference-global.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1515/9783110208412.2.415&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Australian creoles and Aboriginal English: morphology and syntax'.&lt;/a&gt; (Sorry, no online content for that one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These chapters together give a really good overview of the features of both creoles, and frame the discussion by topic rather than by creole, so there is plenty of comparison between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ausil.org.au/portals/42/WP/WP-A-10%20What%20is%20Kriol.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here is a link to a (quite dated) paper&lt;/a&gt; with some earlier comparisons between the two creoles, by Sandefur (1986). See pages 19-24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T07:30:33.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2011-10-05T07:45:59.857" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Zhen Lin's historical explanation is essentially correct: in order for tone to arise in a non-tonal language, some other phonological contrast is reanalyzed as tone.  Tone languages can both lose tone and regain a complex syllable structure over time, but in general tone languages are likely to be closer to their &quot;starting point&quot;.  (Another way to think of this is that tone is &lt;strong&gt;part&lt;/strong&gt; of syllable/phonological structure.  Under the communicative requirements of human language, which seem to be fairly universal, individual languages can allocate their complexity to tone and other aspects of phonology in different ways.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the typological claims, it is simply not true that there are no/appreciably fewer agglutinating tonal languages.  The WALS (World Atlas of Linguistic Structures) allows you to cross-tabulate different linguistic features.  Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/combined/13A/20A&quot;&gt;tone and a measure of morphological isolationism&lt;/a&gt;.  There are 8 languages with a &quot;complex tone system&quot; and &quot;concatenative [=agglutinating or synthetic] morphology&quot;; only 5 have complex tone and isolating morphology.  The tabulation of &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/combined/13A/12A&quot;&gt;tone and syllable structure&lt;/a&gt; illustrates the generalization that more tonality correlates with less syllable structure, but the intersection of &quot;complex tone&quot; and &quot;complex syllable structure&quot; is not empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T07:45:59.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="240" CreationDate="2011-10-05T14:30:46.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any claims about &lt;em&gt;universals&lt;/em&gt; when it comes to intonation and emotion. There are many studies (production and perception) out there that have tried to isolate the acoustic correlates of different emotions in speech in a single language. An example of one such perceptual study is &quot;Verification of Acoustical Correlates of Emotional Speech using Formant-Synthesis&quot; (Burkhardt and Sendlmeier 2000) for German--the researchers controlled various parameters like mean pitch, pitch range, vowel precision, and phonation type in synthesized speech and asked listeners to categorize the stimuli into a finite set of predefined emotions. As you might expect there were no absolute correlations--just tendencies (for example, a lowered mean pitch and a narrow pitch range as well as breathy or creaky voice was frequently judged to signal boredom). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read about one study from &lt;em&gt;Emotion&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music.&quot; (Curtis and Bharucha 2010) that recorded actors saying lines with various emotional affects and claimed that the descending minor third was a reliable cue to sadness. You can read about their study on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/06/17/music-and-speech-share-a-code-for-c-2010-06-17/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scientific American website&lt;/a&gt; as well as hear audio samples from the study. I am dubious of their methodology and their interpretations of the results, however. Aside from their questionable methods of assessing the melodic intervals of the tokens, when I downloaded their samples and manipulated their pitch to expand and contract the pitch ranges of the utterances, my perception of the emotion being conveyed did not change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-10-07T18:56:47.027" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T18:56:47.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="685" CreationDate="2011-10-05T15:08:46.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you write down the semantic representation of a sentence (lambda calculus) you see that the determiner &quot;consumes&quot; the noun. Hence, it is the semantic head of a noun phrase. &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generalized-quantifiers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SEOP&lt;/a&gt; has a comprehensive overview of the phenomena that led to this, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_quantifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is not bad either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In syntax, the noun is considered the head of the noun phrase because it is the more &quot;contentful&quot; part, in the way people understand sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In HPSG, the CAT derivation is somewhat like the regular phrase-structure derivation, with heads having a correspondence to phrase-structure (PS) heads. (Though, AFAIK, there is no &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; for the concept of &quot;head&quot; in PS.*) The CONT derivation is somewhat like the derivation in Montague semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not two different types of parsing in HPSG (or anywhere else, AFAIK), but two (of the many) aspects of parsing with a rich grammar like HPSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benefits: I don't think you can compare one with the other for benefits... if you go through the references I gave for quantifiers, you'll see that the mathematics would become very cumbersome and ugly (or maybe even impossible... I don't know) if you try to make the semantic heads correspond with PS heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Though some parsing techniques find it useful to have heads of a PS marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T02:00:52.623" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T02:00:52.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2011-10-05T23:16:00.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a few exceptions to the tone/syllable-structure correlation, look at the Chatino languages &amp;mdash; members of the Zapotecan branch of the Otomanguean family.  Several of them have complicated tone systems &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a syllable structure that allows some seriously gnarly consonant clusters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.google.com/site/lenguachatino/recursos-academicos/CruzE-MastersReport.pdf&quot;&gt;Here is a paper on San Juan Quiahije (SJQ) Chatino&lt;/a&gt; that goes into some detail on the consonant clusters.  In this particular variety, the maximal syllable is NCCVN or NCCV7.  In other words, you can have a nasal and up to two other consonants in a cluster at the start of a syllable, and a nasal or a glottal stop at the end of the syllable.  So this allows syllables like &lt;em&gt;nskwan&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ngya7&lt;/em&gt;.  Also, both consonants in the initial cluster can have various sorts of secondary articulation. (For example, &lt;em&gt;jwjya7&lt;/em&gt; is a single CCV7 syllable, with &lt;em&gt;jw&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;jy&lt;/em&gt; corresponding to IPA /xʷ/ and /xʲ/.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I can't find a good English paper on tones in SJQ Chatino that's available online.  If you can read Spanish, try &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=30&amp;amp;q=chatino+phonology&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,44&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which goes into a good bit of detail.  Anyway, SJQ Chatino has ten distinct tones, and also some fairly complicated interactions between tones in adjacent syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: The author of the linked paper is a classmate of mine.  I'm not an expert on Chatino, I just work down the hallway from a few people who are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edit&lt;/b&gt;: Aaron says above that &quot;in order for tone to arise in a non-tonal language, some other phonological contrast is reanalyzed as tone,&quot; and that this tends to lead to phonological simplification.  This is probably true.  But in the Chatino languages, tone &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; arise out of some other feature.  As far as we can tell, they've always been tonal.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oto-Manguean_languages#Phonemes_of_Proto-Oto-Manguean&quot;&gt;The proto-language of the entire family is reconstructed with tone,&lt;/a&gt; and so there was no need for it to &lt;em&gt;arise&lt;/em&gt; out of &lt;em&gt;anything.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current theory is that the Chatino languages are descended from a &lt;em&gt;polysyllabic&lt;/em&gt; language with a complex tone system &amp;mdash; but that some of them (like SJQ Chatino) lost all their unstressed vowels.  Those ended up as &lt;em&gt;monosyllabic&lt;/em&gt; languages; they still have the same complex tone system they always had, but they also have those big gnarly consonant clusters where the intervening vowels have disappeared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't meant as a criticism of Aaron's answer.  I just wanted to elaborate a bit on the historical difference between Chatino and (for example) Mandarin, since I think it sort of clarifies the typological picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T23:43:12.837" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T23:43:12.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="627" CreationDate="2011-10-05T23:33:37.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navajo&lt;/a&gt; would be one to look at. It is still clearly an agglutinative language, but it's well along the pathway that's hypothesized to lead to inflecting morphology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &amp;mdash; which FWIW is pretty decent &amp;mdash; puts it this way: &quot;Navajo is an agglutinating, polysynthetic head-marking language, but many of its affixes combine into contractions more like fusional languages.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To pick out an example from Wikipedia: the underlying morphemes &lt;em&gt;di-'a-ni-sh-ł-bąąs&lt;/em&gt;, after various phonological rules have been applied, give you the word &lt;em&gt;di'nisbąąs&lt;/em&gt;.   Just looking at the surface form, you can't segment it cleanly into six morphemes.  (There's no clean segment of the surface form corresponding to the underlying &lt;em&gt;-ł-&lt;/em&gt;, for instance.)  At best you can split it into three &quot;chunks,&quot; some of which correspond to several morphemes and contribute several grammatical features to the word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the hypothesis goes, speakers will cease thinking of the word as having six morphemes, and start thinking of those three &quot;chunks&quot; as morphemes in their own right.  Keep this up over a few more centuries and you'll have a truly inflecting language, where each word is made up of just one or two &quot;chunks&quot; and each of the &quot;chunks&quot; has a complex meaning like &quot;third person singular past tense.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2011-10-05T23:56:18.583" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T23:56:18.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="640" CreationDate="2011-10-05T23:54:48.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you count a language that has &lt;em&gt;lost&lt;/em&gt; most of its (original) number system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mayan languages used to have words for numbers going very high up into the thousands.  Most have now lost these words due to encroachment from Spanish.  In K'iche', the Mayan language I study, speakers will use the original number words up to maybe three or four at most; above that, they'll switch to Spanish.  Some speakers now count &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, K'iche' has an indefinite article &amp;mdash; which apparently developed before Spanish contact, but which has remained part of the language even as the Spanish number system has taken over.  (And since I see you're also interested in the connection between numbers and articles: yes, it's derived from the old K'iche' word for &quot;one.&quot;  The number one is &lt;em&gt;jun&lt;/em&gt;, the indefinite singular article is &lt;em&gt;jun&lt;/em&gt;, and the indefinite plural article is &lt;em&gt;jujun&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-05T23:54:48.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="206" CreationDate="2011-10-06T06:33:04.020" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think @Aaron is on the right track in pointing you to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Yod_dropping#Y-cluster_reductions&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on yod dropping and yod coalescence&lt;/a&gt;. However, some clarifications are in order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is actually a family of variants for what you are calling the &quot;softer d&quot;--&lt;strong&gt;the variants can respectively be transcribed in IPA as [dj], [dʲ], [d͡ʑ], and [d͡ʒ].&lt;/strong&gt; Remember that in IPA [j] (called &lt;em&gt;yod&lt;/em&gt;) stands for the sound at the beginning of the word &lt;em&gt;yell&lt;/em&gt;, and the symbol [d͡ʒ] stands for the sound at the beginning of the word &lt;em&gt;gel&lt;/em&gt;. When you used the letter &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; in your question, I'm guessing the sound you had in mind was more like the latter, although by placing the letter &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; before it you were perhaps approximating one of the &quot;intermediate&quot; sounds ([dʲ] or [d͡ʑ]). I refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ipa#Letters&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on IPA&lt;/a&gt; and the relevant linked articles (you can click on individual symbols in the IPA chart for in-depth explanations of them) for a review of the sounds represented by these symbols. There you can also read about the differences in articulation among these different sounds, but generally speaking &lt;strong&gt;the articulatory differences between [d] and the variants mentioned here have to do with the placement of the tongue immediately after the closure (farther back for the variants than for the [d]) and the speed at which the tongue blade moves away from the roof of the mouth (more sluggish for the variants than for the [d]).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To discuss the transcriptions in terms of a concrete example, some speakers pronounce &lt;em&gt;dew&lt;/em&gt; as if they are pronouncing the word &lt;em&gt;yew&lt;/em&gt; with a [d] sound before it. That pronunciation would be transcribed as [djuː ]. Some speakers of the dialect (or dialect group) to which you are referring pronounce it like the word &lt;em&gt;juice&lt;/em&gt; without the [s] sound at the end of it, i.e. it is indistinguishable from the word &lt;em&gt;Jew&lt;/em&gt;. We can consider these pronunciations to be at opposite ends of a sort of spectrum, where the first pronunciation comprises a [d]-[j] sequence and the second one comprises a single sound (considered a &lt;em&gt;coalescence&lt;/em&gt; of two separate phonemes /d/ and /j/). Yet other speakers might pronounce it somewhere in the middle, which would be transcribed with one of the other variants mentioned above. (I myself do none of the above; I pronounce it just like the word &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, which some would analyze as yod dropping.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it is important to point out that by using the word &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; you are presupposing that the speech sound (or sound sequence) to which you are referring is the realization of a single underlying unit. Chances are you just meant &lt;em&gt;speech sound&lt;/em&gt;. However, this brings up an issue that is relevant for @Aaron's comment about the pronunciation having a rule-based--as opposed to lexical--source. The existence of the minimal pair &lt;em&gt;dew&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; (as well as other relevant pairs like &lt;em&gt;twos&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Tuesday&lt;/em&gt;) in the relevant dialect(s) shows that the environment for this sound (or sequence of sounds) is not predictable and therefore the distinction must be lexical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T13:00:17.847" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T13:00:17.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2011-10-06T12:43:57.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for even more recent work, Harizanov and Gribanova have the following paper: &lt;a href=&quot;https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7473d2rt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7473d2rt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It directly addresses those properties of DEF that make it seem both like an &quot;affix&quot; and not like one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of morphological and phonological factors in Bulgarian allomorph selection, with Vera Gribanova. 2011. In Morphology at Santa Cruz: Papers in Honor of Jorge Hankamer, (eds) N. LaCara, A. Thompson, and M. A. Tucker. Santa Cruz, CA: Linguistics Research Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T05:48:35.280" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:48:35.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="725" CreationDate="2011-10-06T13:16:37.087" Score="13" ViewCount="3936" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most controversial ideas put forth in linguistics is the idea of &lt;em&gt;linguistic determinism&lt;/em&gt;. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it states that people who speak different languages would also have different mental models of the world. The classical example is the Hopi language, which, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=W2d1Q4el00QC&amp;amp;lpg=PP3&amp;amp;dq=Language%20Thought%20and%20Reality%3A&amp;amp;pg=PA57&quot;&gt;according to Benjamin Whorf&lt;/a&gt;, had “no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’.” So, because of this feature of their language, they are presumably less concerned with past, present and future, and more concerned with a “cyclic” view of time. This idea has gained a lot of attention since its first publication, especially in popular science magazines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But despite its popular appeal, this hypothesis has not yet been proven. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=vCDX54DlYBYC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=the%20stuff%20of%20thought&amp;amp;pg=PT155&quot;&gt;one experiment&lt;/a&gt; &amp;ndash; among many of the same kind &amp;ndash; Tzeltal speakers, whose language does not have words for “right” or “left”, were blindfolded, spun in a chair and then asked to retrieve a coin that had been in one of two boxes. Their performance was the same both when boxes were placed on the floor (a geocentric reference) and when the boxes were placed on the end of a beam that was attached to the chair (an egocentric reference). In other words, the lack of right/left distinction in the language does not impair their ability to make that distinction in the world. This experiment was designed to refute an earlier one, which suggested the opposite, but had some methodological flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some studies show a deep influence of language on thought. One of them suggests that people &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cogsci.northwestern.edu/cogsci2004/papers/paper575.pdf&quot;&gt;estimate time duration differently&lt;/a&gt;, according to the spatio-temporal metaphors found in their respective languages. For example, English speakers, who normally conceive time as a distance (&quot;a long time ago&quot;, &quot;a short interval&quot;, etc), are better at estimating how much time a growing line projected on a computer screen takes to reach the other side. Conversely, Spanish speakers, who normally conceive time as a quantity (“mucho tiempo”, etc) score higher when estimating the time it takes for a “container of water” to fill up on the screen. The important thing here is that both stimuli and responses are non-linguistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The influence on thought suggested by this last study is, of course, very small. But at least, it shows an example of influence of the “strong” type, that is, linguistic features affecting non-linguistic behavior. Is there further evidence in support of this type of strong determinism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T12:37:40.730" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T21:28:21.757" Title="What are some examples of recent studies investigating strong linguistic determinism?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-determinism&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8" CreationDate="2011-10-06T14:13:10.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would likely be extremely difficult without considerable knowledge of perceptual patterns of a large number of languages, including social variation within them. At the moment, there is not adequate evidence for constructing such a system. In the U.S., for example, where there is substantial variation in the sound system, we've seen far less research on perception than production, and we know that the two are not always parallel.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T14:13:10.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2011-10-06T14:30:18.290" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;My advisor, Dennis Preston, used to tell students that the ear hears phonetics, but the brain hears phonology.  That is, your ear is capable of processing whatever linguistic sounds are given to it (assuming someone with normal hearing), but your language experience causes your brain to filter out only those sound patterns that are important to your language(s).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this summary simplifies things considerably.  Phonologists are often as interested in patterns related to the manner of articulation as they are the patterns of the speech waves.  Phoneticians, meanwhile, would have no way to analyze their data sets if they didn't have phonological categories to help organize them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, phonetics is the study of fine grained details of those sounds, while phonology has traditionally dealt with analysis of greater abstractions.  For understandable reasons, the line between the two discipliens is blurring, particularly as our modeling capabilities become more sophisticated. Still, the distinction is useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T14:30:18.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="727" CreationDate="2011-10-06T15:56:54.483" Score="12" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;What previously dead (i.e. no more native speakers) or remnant (i.e. not very well or hardly documented) languages have been revived to the point that there are native speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accounts of revival efforts show up in the popular press form time to time, but not so many accounts of revivals that pass a stiff test of having native speakers, who are not necessarily monolingual, but who do speak that language from birth or early childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T14:50:40.903" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T10:35:30.237" Title="Outside of Modern Hebrew, do any previously dead languages have native speakers again?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:00:38.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existence of lexical fields (e.g. categories like &quot;fish you would eat&quot; vs. &quot;fish you would keep as a pet&quot;) and the creation of new words in a given language shows that linguistic determinism wildly overstates the influence of language on thought.  That said, we shouldn't underestimate the effect that a given category can have on someone's thought patterns, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T16:00:38.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="637" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:11:20.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the difficulty of spelling in English arrises from the fact that we borrowed so many words from other languages (often changing their pronunciation to fit English phonological explanations but keeping their spelling to preserve their etymology) and because our highly populated vowel system appears to be far less stable than the 5-vowel systems we see in other languages.  This probably accounts for much of the belief that many people have that languages like Italian and Spanish are &quot;more phonetic&quot; than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: English originiated as an amalgamation of several germanic languages before borrowing so heavily from other languages.  Yet, it was written down using the Roman alphabet.  So, even before all the historical changes, English writing was probably not &quot;as phonetic&quot; as languages which are more like Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="392" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T19:42:44.037" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T19:42:44.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:30:41.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a great deal of individual variation but most textbooks place it much later than the original responder, up until puberty (say, between 10 and 14). This is certainly true, as you ask, for children acquiring a second language. It's less clear what the critical period is for children who began their life with absolutely no linguistic input from any language (e.g. `feral children').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T16:30:41.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:35:03.000" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This relationship is called &lt;strong&gt;polysemy&lt;/strong&gt;: when one meaning tends to be so close to another meaning that the word for one is generally co-opted as the word for another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most reliable examples of polysemy is container polysemy. The idea is that a container is so closely associated with its contents that we can use the term for the container to refer to its contents. Here's a minimal pair:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I broke the bottle of wine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I drank the bottle of wine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Only the glass container can be the object of &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt;; only the liquid inside can be the object of &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastEditorUserId="273" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:54:29.413" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:54:29.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="653" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:45:36.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases, final voiceless fricatives in English nouns become voiced with the addition of the plural morpheme &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;. Some of these examples are more dialect-specific than others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; wife vs. wives&#xA; life vs. lives&#xA; loaf vs. loaves&#xA;&#xA; house vs. houses ([s] vs. [z])&#xA;&#xA; path vs. paths ([θ] vs. [ð])&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in non-rhotic (i.e. r-dropping) dialects, the addition of a vowel-initial suffix to an r-final root can trigger the surfacing of a linking-r:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; bear [bɛə] vs. bearing [bɛəɹɪŋ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-10-06T16:54:59.613" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T16:54:59.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2011-10-06T16:52:07.403" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Wikipedia can be considered a reliable source, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cornish language&lt;/a&gt; revival movement has been succeeding, but with a lot of disagreement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The revival of Cornish began in 1904 when Henry Jenner, a Celtic language enthusiast, published his book Handbook of the Cornish Language. Jenner's work was based on Cornish as it was spoken in the 18th century, although his pupil Robert Morton Nance later steered the revival to the style of the 16th century, before the language became more heavily influenced by English. This set the tone for the next few decades; as the revival gained pace, learners of the language disagreed on which style of Cornish to use, and a number of competing orthographies were in use by the end of the century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/uk-languages/south-west&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Teaching English&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even though the language was described as ‘dead’ towards the end of the 20th century, its revival has resulted in 2,000 people now being fluent in it (as per a survey in 2008).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eight years earlier, the number of speakers was estimated to be around 300.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T21:02:30.640" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T21:02:30.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2011-10-06T17:01:00.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been discredited on several grounds after its initial formulation. However, recent decades have seen interest spring up in investigating questions about how language interacts with other aspects of cognition. In a very recent paper on this topic, Lila Gleitman and Anna Papafragou write: &quot;In general, both logic and currently available evidence suggest a disclamatory view of strongest proposals (e.g., Benjamin Whorf, 1956) according to which  particulars of certain human languages are important progenitors of thought, such that elements of perception or conception would be permanently altered by learning one or another language. However, several credible lines of experimental and developmental evidence suggest significant influence of linguistic representation during on-line processing in many cognitive and perceptual domains&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/~truesweb/lila_pdfs/Gleitman%20&amp;amp;%20Papafragou%20%28in%20press%29%20-%20Language_and_thought.docx&quot;&gt;doc here&lt;/a&gt;). A really fantastic philosophical investigation into the cognitive role of language can and should be read, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=3&amp;amp;ved=0CC8QFjAC&amp;amp;url=http://www.gregbryant.org/carruthers.pdf&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=The%20cognitive%20functions%20of%20language&amp;amp;ei=792NTvrEAYTb0QGI4PEg&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNGAMxCkX1f1vn03C5BBXApmL_7VZQ&amp;amp;cad=rja&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (Note that this latter reference includes 30 pages of open peer commentary, which is then responded to by the author.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T17:01:00.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="338" CreationDate="2011-10-06T17:21:08.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's true that an asterisk indicates a reconstructed word or morpheme in historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theoretical linguistics, as Cerebus suggested, it indicates &lt;strong&gt;ungrammaticality&lt;/strong&gt;. There are a few other such markers: question marks indicate &lt;strong&gt;relative unacceptability&lt;/strong&gt;, and hash marks indicate anything from semantic incoherence (ex. (1c)) to &lt;strong&gt;infelicity&lt;/strong&gt;, a pragmatic failure (ex. (1d)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a. *John slept the baby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. ?John ate much rice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. #His horse sleeps until dawn. [In response to the question &quot;How are you doing?&quot;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T17:21:08.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2011-10-06T17:43:32.343" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit has been a subject of revival efforts since the 1980s in various villages in India. From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In these Indian villages, inhabitants of all castes speak Sanskrit natively since childhood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mattur in Karnataka&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Jhiri, District: Rajgadh, Madhya Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ganoda, District: Banswada, Rajasthan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Bawali, District: Bagapat, Uttar Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mohad, District: Narasinhpur, Madhya Pradesh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shyamsundarpur,District: Kendujhar, Odisha&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes there are not only native speakers but monolingual speakers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information here is basically recycled from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/369/is-the-sanskrit-spoken-natively-in-pockets-in-india-changing&quot;&gt;my question about whether the Sanskrit spoken in India is a &quot;living language&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T10:35:30.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2011-10-06T18:22:11.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hawaiian language has seen a big revival in the past 20-30 years.  This wikipedia article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revived_languages#Hawaiian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hawaiian Language Revival&lt;/a&gt;, doesn't do it justice, but there have been huge efforts to reclaim the language, and introduce modern technological terms to the language so that it can once again become a native spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="150" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T18:22:11.487" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-06T19:13:24.617" Score="8" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most non-European languages exhibit a clusivity (exclusive/inclusive) distinction. What are the common ways of developing new clusive forms and which clusivity is tied more tightly to the first person singular? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Washo (an Amerindian language), the inclusive dual -ši and plural -hu are the marked forms, marked by a suffix: this suffix is the same as the non-first-person-restricted dual and plural suffixes for independent pronouns. The exclusive is not marked at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Miskito, however, the first person inclusive is formed from first person &quot;yang&quot; and the plural marker &quot;nani&quot; to form &quot;yang nani&quot;, while the first person exclusive is marked: &quot;yawan&quot; (no singular counterpart) without an explicit plural marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one marks the inclusive, the other the exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T00:14:24.780" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T09:36:01.593" Title="How do clusive forms arise?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;&lt;washo&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2011-10-06T19:53:27.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would resist calling the mergers distructive as well.  Certainly the which/witch merger doesn't cause much confusions.  Most people don't even know that there used to be a pronunciation distinction between those two spellings.  Also, my cot/caught merger only causes confusion when I'm trying to dicuss American vowel changes with students or colleagues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastActivityDate="2011-10-06T19:53:27.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2011-10-07T04:30:05.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to be careful what theory we are discussing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong Determinism is the classic form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If you don't have the words, you don't have the thoughts; or, the words force our thoughts. This has never been taken seriously in the linguistic community. For one thing, proponents of this formulation usually embarrass themselves when talking about a particular language. The classic story is the Eskimos have 300 words for snow, but that simply isn't true. While it is true they have a lot of words to differentiate snow, so does English: slush, ice-pack, snow, snow-banks, snow-flakes, snow-drifts... You may protest and say that &quot;snow drift&quot; isn't a word, but once you drop compounds, you end up shooting yourself in the foot with regards to a lot of the words you counted up for the Eskimos. I'll leave it to someone who is familiar with the Hopi language to address the assertion that they can't talk about time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can weaken the hypothesis in a number of ways, and this is what people end up having to do. The problem becomes articulating how language shapes thought, and there are a lot of possibilities. Some people thought that speakers of gendered languages would be better at keeping track of gender, or speakers of languages which incorporated distance or social status or whatever into the verb would be better at tracking those things. That has turned out to be not the case. A recent twist on this is  asks speakers of gendered languages to describe objects in terms stereotypical of that objects grammatical gender. Look up Lera Boroditsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to add that there is an intriguing alternative to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The general idea behind linguistic determinism is that we think in language. This idea has been around for a long time; Plato described thought as speaking to oneself. The thought goes, if you think in language, then the language can shape the thoughts. Kinda like the structural imperfections of marble playing a part in the sculpting of a statue. The  general problem with this is that there are tons of cognitive processes that don't involve &quot;thinking&quot; in the way we usually use that term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is that instead of using language to think, language users use language as a &lt;em&gt;tool to aid in thinking&lt;/em&gt;, especially in communicative contexts. Look up Dan Slobin, who introduced this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T15:41:59.107" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T15:41:59.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2011-10-07T14:41:07.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgetting all the research in to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the answer is both obviously yes and obviously no, all depending on how you interpret 'language', 'shape' and 'thought'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a hard time thinking about building supplies because I don't have the vocabulary to express all the intricacies of hardware. So obviously yes, the hardware language allows a new way of thinking. (but then what is causing what here: I can have thoughts about things without the vocabulary items, the latter just make it easier and quicker, and beside which came first, the words or the thoughts). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the other hand obviously no, language doesn't force thought, one can translate (once experienced from one language to another, one can be bilingual and converse the same thoughts in two different languages. But, it may take one longer in one language than another, or the experiences and cultured learned with one language may not have corresponding things to translate to in the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to balance these out properly, I think one can say (without cynicism) that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is superficially true: when you first visit a new language it always feels like you have to -think-differently to use it properly, and that that is a reflection of and caused by the language itself. But with experience, one can translate from one to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and then there is all the experimental evidence that strong Sapir-Whorf is unfounded and even weak Sapir-Whorf has problems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T14:41:07.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="856" CreationDate="2011-10-07T17:14:18.970" Score="20" ViewCount="950" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Roman empire ruled over the lands around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, and I imagine imposed its language on its subjects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is it that the western part of the empire (France, Spain, Italy, etc) still speaks the descendant of Latin, but in the East (the Balkans, the Levant, Egypt maybe except Romania) this isn't the case? Both regions were controlled by non-Latin speaking people after the collapse of the Empire (Germanic people in the West, Greek people in the East).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-07T17:30:00.277" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T20:11:43.533" Title="Why is it that Latin was more &quot;successful&quot; in the western part of the Empire than in the eastern part?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="111" CreationDate="2011-10-07T17:33:43.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding on kaleissin's answer, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/136&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; further said that the /m/ sound for first person pronoun is common in northern Eurasia (regardless of language family) and rare elsewhere, and tend to co-occur with T-like consonant as second person pronouns (usually t, d, s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two theories have been discussed for the apparent regional universality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nasal consonants (like m) are easy to pronounce, so they have higher probability to occur in  basic words such as pronouns. However, this theory can't explain why &quot;m&quot; is dominant than other nasal sounds, why only first-person, and why m-based first-person pronouns tend to co-occur with t-based second-person pronouns. This also can't explain why it's only common in northern Eurasia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They come from the same genealogical origin. However this combination appears in many language families, such as Indo-European, Turkic and Uralic (and they also have T-based second person pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T17:33:43.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="744" CreationDate="2011-10-07T17:42:30.480" Score="10" ViewCount="1416" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming human vocal tracts are similar and equally capable of articulating different syllable structures, why is it that languages develop different syllable complexity? Why is it that it is not natural for Japanese (and Japanese-speaking people) to have CCVC syllable structure, but it is OK for English (and English-speaking people)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T08:10:27.257" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:54:40.583" Title="Why do languages have different syllable complexity from each other?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="734" CreationDate="2011-10-07T17:48:08.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may already know, Latin was the official language of the empire. Actually, it gained importance and prestige for that very reason, thanks to the Roman Empire that brought it everywhere in the Mediterranean Sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was especially used in the western part of the Empire as a lingua franca. In the eastern part, it was used in the Balkan peninsula (Dacia, Mesia and the northern Macedonia) and in Asia (Berytus – the modern Beirut, Heliopolis and Pisidia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the eastern Mediterranean sea, Latin couldn't overweight the koiné dialektos (κοινὴ διάλεκτος) — which was the language used in those zones — not even in Constantinople. In this city, Latin was used until the year 450, then replaced by Greek that became the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, in the third decade of the VII&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; Century (year 620), until the year 1453.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-07T18:54:54.913" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T18:54:54.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="811" CreationDate="2011-10-07T18:01:41.483" Score="17" ViewCount="7191" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/37A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS Feature 37A: Definite Articles&lt;/a&gt;, 198 languages have no definite or indefinite article, and 45 have no definite article but have indefinite articles. These number excludes languages that have affixes or clitics to mark definiteness, and languages which use demonstrative words as definite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/654/what-diagnostics-distinguish-demonstratives-from-definite-articles/669#669&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;all languages would have some way of expressing definitiness (it seems to be a necessary function for human communication), but there are plenty that don't have a definite article&quot;. Is this true? How is definiteness expressed in those languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:41:10.760" Title="How is definiteness expressed in languages with no definite article, clitic or affix?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2011-10-07T20:13:15.563" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different means by which languages that do not have definite articles can express definiteness. It can be done by the use of demonstratives (corresponding to English 'this'/'that'), by the use of special forms of adjectives if present (e.g. 'a big dog' and 'the big dog' would be rendered by &quot;big dog&quot; but with different forms of the adjective 'big'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, such as Russian, the word order is in part determined by definiteness: e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Boy kissed girl&lt;/strong&gt;, with the nominative marking on &lt;strong&gt;boy&lt;/strong&gt; and accusative marking on &lt;strong&gt;girl&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;&quot;The boy kissed a girl&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, whereas the same words with the same case markers but in the reverse order — &lt;strong&gt;girl kissed boy&lt;/strong&gt; — would mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;A boy kissed the girl&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="400" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-25T17:08:15.753" LastActivityDate="2012-01-25T17:08:15.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2011-10-07T20:22:49.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's part of the inflection as in Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian. It's true that it is often called a suffix in those languages but in truth it blends with the other inflectional factors such as number and case which makes them different to Scandinavian languages which do use a straightforward suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Albanian &quot;girl&quot;: &lt;code&gt;-def&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;vajzë&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;+def&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;vajza&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romanian &quot;student&quot;: &lt;code&gt;-def&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;studentă&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;+def&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;studenta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages have special particles, prepositions, or postpositions which mark definiteness along with other attributes or functions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%AA#Preposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;את&quot; (at)&lt;/a&gt; - only for direct objects of verbs in certain conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a fair bit of discussion out there regarding the topic in topic-comment languages like Japanese and Korean as carrying information about definiteness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://related.springerprotocols.com/lp/de-gruyter/solving-the-problem-of-the-korean-topic-subject-particles-nun-and-ka-a-dTXOuBjIXG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Solving the problem of the Korean topic/subject particles nun and ka: a paradigm and a text analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/p7426w4942235w83/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word Order and Clause Structure in Early Old Japanese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages that don't have definite articles do seem to have determiners, demonstratives, and deictics and such like &quot;this&quot; and &quot;that&quot; that can carry some nuance of definiteness, in fact the definite articles usually derived from these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course there are languages with no overt marking of definiteness at all where context is sufficient to know what's being referred to most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-07T21:33:11.420" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T21:33:11.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2011-10-07T21:29:12.567" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would rephrase your question as, &quot;If CCVC is able to be articulated, why do we have CV languages like Japanese?&quot; Or, &quot;since CCVC is able to be articulated by humans, why don't we have languages which exclusively use CCVC syllables?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll talk about the CC part: Because complex clusters are dispreferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some evidence on how the &lt;em&gt;capacity&lt;/em&gt; for articulation isn't so relevant and that complex clusters are dispreferred:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not natural for Japanese speakers&quot; is partly a separate issue having to do with a perceptual bias. It's &quot;not natural for Japanese speakers&quot; because they didn't learn words with complex onsets. The perceptual consequence of what sounds can occur where in a language is quite powerful, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/papers/Dupoux_KHPM_1999_Epenthetic_vowels_a_perceptual_illusion_JEPHPP.pdf&quot;&gt;Dupoux et al (1999)&lt;/a&gt; demonstrate: Japanese speakers perceive there's a [u] in the middle of [ebzo] because they don't have consonant sequences like [bz] (more specifically, syllable-final non-[n] consonants like the [b]), while French speakers, whose languages do have it, don't perceive this illusory vowel. On the other hand, since French doesn't have a vowel length contrast while Japanese does, French speakers fared worse in distinguishing between [ebuzo] and [ebuuzo] than the Japanese speakers did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Timing the gestures for a sequence of sounds entails speech-motor control involving the brain, the vocal folds, the tongue, the jaw muscles, etc., which isn't trivial. Consonants require more gestures than vowels. With regards to clusters, note that infants produce simple syllables first (&quot;spaghetti&quot; -&gt; &quot;pagetti&quot;, &quot;please&quot; -&gt; &quot;piz&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The combination of consonants which form a cluster are restricted even in &quot;CCVC languages.&quot; &quot;tlank&quot; can't be a word of English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your historical question, of &quot;languages developing different complexity:&quot; there are widely attested changes which disprefer consonant clusters, once again despite the capability of humans to make that sound. Italian often uses geminates instead of clusters with different segments (octo -&gt; otto). You mention English, but the reason why English has weird spellings like &quot;knife&quot; is that &quot;kn&quot; used to be pronounced as a cluster (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_consonant_cluster_reductions&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: English consonant cluster reductions&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again to do with perception: In a stop consonant + vowel sequence like [pa] or [ta], there are cues to whether the consonant is a [p] or a [t] showing up in the vowel sound (this is called the formant transitions). Listeners rely on such cues. So if you have a sequence like [pta], it's harder for the listener to distinguish between it and [ta] because vowel cues aren't available for that initial consonant. (Wilson (2001) has argued that this explains the generalization that in V[stop][stop]V sequences, it is always the first consonant that is deleted.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="397" LastEditDate="2011-10-07T23:11:16.907" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T23:11:16.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2011-10-07T22:11:51.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocian_Greek_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cappadocian Greek&lt;/a&gt; is a mix of (Byzantine) Greek and Turkish, previously thought to have died out by the 1960s due to speakers being forced to move to Greece and then switching to Standard Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in 2005, Mark Janse and Dimitris Papazachariou &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onassis.gr/enim_deltio/foreign/11/lecture_10.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;discovered a group of native speakers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastActivityDate="2011-10-07T22:11:51.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2011-10-08T02:48:19.093" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are reasons specific to syllable structure and markedness that @Aerlinthe has done a great job of delineating (that answer got an upvote from me!), but I think it's also important to point out that we could replace the phrase &quot;syllable complexity&quot; in this question with almost any other grammatical feature: Why do languages have different vowel inventories from each other? Why do languages have different numbers of genders from each other?  Why do languages have different word orders from each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're comparing the phonological systems of two arbitrary languages, we might as well ask: Why does Zulu make use of clicks while French doesn't? Why does Cantonese distinguish six tones while Mandarin only distinguishes four (or five)? The human articulators are clearly capable of creating speech sounds with an ingressive airstream and the human ear is able to distinguish six distinct tunes, so why don't all human languages exploit these capabilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that they don't need to. Languages have evolved over time to meet the functional demands of spontaneous inter-human communication, and different phonological systems exploit different capabilities of the articulatory and perceptual systems of humans to meet these demands. Complexity, if it can be quantified, tends to pop up in different parts of the grammar in different languages. Sure, Japanese doesn't take advantage of consonant clusters to maximize the number of possible syllables at its disposal, but English doesn't make use of vowel length contrasts, which would otherwise increase the number of possible syllables in &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; syllable arsenal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's this inherent property of languages that makes them beautiful, and it's what keeps us linguists in business!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-10-08T03:08:54.900" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T03:08:54.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-08T12:37:56.567" Score="6" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; can often be dropped from a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) I think (that) she can come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) I don't think (that) she can come.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some negative constructions, complementiser dropping sounds marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Does Alex go to dance practice on Wednesdays?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) B: I know that he goes Fridays, but I don't know that he goes Wednesdays.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (5) B: *I know he goes Fridays, but I don't know he goes Wednesdays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) I don't know that I can finish the report by next week...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (7) *I don't know I can finish the report by next week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some native speakers have told me that even (4) and (6) are a bit marked, and that they would have &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; there, which would explain why (7) is unacceptable, as neither of those can be dropped. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.co.jp/search?gcx=c&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=%22i%20don%27t%20know%20that%20I%20can%22#sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;safe=off&amp;amp;source=hp&amp;amp;q=%22i%20don%27t%20know%20that%20I%20can%20do%20it%22&amp;amp;pbx=1&amp;amp;oq=%22i%20don%27t%20know%20that%20I%20can%20do%20it%22&amp;amp;aq=f&amp;amp;aqi=&amp;amp;aql=&amp;amp;gs_sm=e&amp;amp;gs_upl=96207l96931l0l97074l8l5l0l0l0l4l320l1046l0.1.1.2l4l0&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&amp;amp;fp=b28c86c0469d20f3&amp;amp;biw=1024&amp;amp;bih=460&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gewgle&lt;/a&gt; has lots of examples of 'I don't know that I can do it', so it's definitely an attested construction even if it's not prescriptively grammatical. The examples below were accepted as grammatical by the native speakers I consulted, but all had the sense that they would say (10) more easily than (9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) I hope (that) she kills them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Are you seriously hoping to see bloodshed at your daughter's soccer match?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(9) B: I don't hope she &lt;em&gt;kills&lt;/em&gt; them(, but a little bit of carnage might be nice).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (10) B: I don't hope that she &lt;em&gt;kills&lt;/em&gt; them(, but a little bit of carnage might be nice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of any reason why complementiser dropping would be rarer in negative contexts? Or are my three native speakers simply not representative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="402" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-10T10:16:56.410" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T01:46:50.120" Title="Why does complementiser drop not occur in negative English sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-08T13:39:18.013" Score="11" ViewCount="921" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being in Albania I decided to sit down with a word frequency list of the language and look each up so I would know some of the common words I see around me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most common word in Albanian is &quot;të&quot;, which Wiktionary describes as an &quot;adjectival article&quot;. (A neat coincidence after my recent question asking what other kinds of articles exist). Here are Wiktionary's senses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;indefinite masculine and feminine singular adjectives in all cases but nominative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;definite masculine singular adjectives in the genitive, dative and ablative cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;indefinite plural adjectives in all cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;definite plural adjectives in the genitive, dative and ablative cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is an &quot;adjectival article&quot;? Where can I read more about them? What other languages have them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Wikipedia doesn't have a separate grammar article for Albanian and doesn't have an article on adjectival articles)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:34:24.263" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:34:24.263" Title="What is an &quot;adjectival article&quot;? Apparently Albanian &quot;të&quot; is one" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2011-10-08T15:29:45.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across some info trying to learn a bit about Albanian in Albania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albanian has a kind of article called an &quot;adjectival article&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/746/what-is-an-adjectival-article-apparently-albanian-te-is-one&quot;&gt;I haven't been able to find out much about them though so I've asked a question about them.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-10-08T15:37:13.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:20:57.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An affix cannot stand on its own as an independent word, so it need a host to attach to. &#xA;An affix which attaches to the beginning of a word (e.g. &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;unhappy&lt;/em&gt;) is called a &lt;strong&gt;prefix&lt;/strong&gt;: an affix which attaches to the end of a word (e.g. &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;chases&lt;/em&gt;) is called a &lt;strong&gt;suffix&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each affix has a limited set of word categories to which it can attach. For example, in English, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; marks the past tense and thus, can only be attached to verbs. Likewise, the prefix &lt;em&gt;anti-&lt;/em&gt; (as in antivirus) can only be attached to nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:55:02.017" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:55:02.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:20:57.990" Score="0" Body="A grammatical morpheme that must be attached to a host word of an appropriate kind.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:54:56.527" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:54:56.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="750" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:36:00.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;clitic&lt;/strong&gt; denotes an item which is (generally) a reduced form of another word, and&#xA;which has the property that (in its reduced form) it must cliticise (i.e. attach itself to) an appropriate kind of &lt;strong&gt;host&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. to another word or phrase). For example, we could say that the contracted negative particle &lt;em&gt;n’t&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;is a clitic form of the negative particle &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; which attaches itself to a finite auxiliary verb, so giving rise to&#xA;forms like &lt;em&gt;isn’t&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;shouldn’t&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mightn’t&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Likewise, we could say that ’ve is a clitic which attaches itself to&#xA;a pronoun ending in a vowel, so giving rise to forms like &lt;em&gt;we’ve&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;you’ve&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;they’ve&lt;/em&gt;, etc. When a clitic attaches&#xA;to the end of another word, it is said to be an &lt;strong&gt;enclitic&lt;/strong&gt; (and hence to &lt;strong&gt;encliticise&lt;/strong&gt;) onto the relevant word.&#xA;Clitics differ from &lt;strong&gt;affixes&lt;/strong&gt; in a number of ways. For example, a clitic is often a reduced form of a full&#xA;word, and has a corresponding full form (so that &lt;em&gt;’ll&lt;/em&gt; is the clitic form of &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;, for example), whereas an&#xA;affix (like noun plural &lt;em&gt;–s&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt;) has no full-word counterpart. Moreover, clitics can attach to phrases (e.g.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;’s&lt;/em&gt; can attach to &lt;em&gt;the president&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The president’s lying&lt;/em&gt;), whereas an affix typically attaches to a word stem&#xA;(e.g. the past tense &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; affix attaches to the verb stem &lt;em&gt;snow&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;snowed&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/052154274X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Strucuture of English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:57:41.717" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:57:41.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="751" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:36:00.893" Score="0" Body="A reduced form of a word that attaches to an appropriate kind of host.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:57:45.273" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:57:45.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="752" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:50:35.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the definite articele &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;/*an*. Other languages, like French, have the partitive article &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;, used with mass nouns (&lt;em&gt;Je ne bois pas de café&lt;/em&gt;). The partitive corresponds to the English determiner &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:58:36.570" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:58:36.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="753" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-08T21:50:35.437" Score="0" Body="Indicates definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun, member of a small class of determiners." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:58:36.220" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:58:36.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2011-10-09T04:53:25.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the above are good for assessing if someone has learned an L2 language in non-academic settings, such as when you are deciding whether to hire someone, or what grade to give them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In studies, a common way to measure acquisition is to give the subject a bunch of sample phrases and ask them to rate their grammaticality. High scores are taken to be correlated with higher linguistic competence; linguists compare the tested population's scores against the scores of a control group of L1 learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other methods, but that one is pretty basic and pretty common. While this particular assessment tests syntactic competence, it can be pretty easily adapted to test competence in other domains; you can give them nonce-words (like blug and ftalze) and ask them to say if they would be acceptable words in the L2 language or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-09T06:57:23.377" LastActivityDate="2011-10-09T06:57:23.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="746" CreationDate="2011-10-09T08:12:01.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the explanations and examples in the wiktionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%AB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; you mentioned, it is not a real article, it is a word that combines with an adjective to mark its definiteness (and in this case, also gender and noun case). In other words, it is to adjective as an article to a noun. An example (from wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kam nevojë për një libër shumë të mirë.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I need a really good book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(libër = book, mirë = good. Note that &lt;em&gt;libër&lt;/em&gt; has the article &lt;em&gt;një&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mirë&lt;/em&gt; has the &quot;article&quot; &lt;em&gt;të&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary goes on to list the different adjectival articles Albanian has, which varies according to definiteness, gender and noun case.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6XiFi.png&quot; alt=&quot;wiktionary&quot;&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little experiment with Google Translate and Google Search:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read a book.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; Kam lexuar një libër.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read a good book.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; Kam lexuar &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nj%EB%20lib%EBr%20t%EB%20mir%EB%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;një libër të mirë&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read the good book.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; Kam lexuar &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22librin+e+mir%EB%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;librin e mirë&lt;/a&gt;. (note the adj. art for definite masculine in accusative)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The book is good.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Libri+%EBsht%EB+i+mir%EB%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Libri është i mirë&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-10-09T08:12:01.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-09T16:06:13.763" Score="6" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/158/psycholinguistics-or-psychology-of-language-on-or-off-topic&quot;&gt;this discussion on meta&lt;/a&gt; i was reasoning about simple &lt;strong&gt;self-experiments&lt;/strong&gt; you can do in psycholinguistics, where you don't need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or Neuroscience. But where you can investigate and find out different &lt;strong&gt;phenomenological factors and properties&lt;/strong&gt;, how our mental lexicon is structured. (Neurolinguistics tries to explain this phenomenology structurally)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So i gave Hauser (myself) 1 min time and a tag-keyword to say as many words as fast/spontaneous as possible and recorded them&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. Windows Sound recorder on your Desktop). I started with &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt;. 1 min time. This went pretty good, around 100 of verbs i recorded. Same with &lt;em&gt;nouns&lt;/em&gt;. Also pretty good, not surprising. How about &lt;em&gt;adverbs&lt;/em&gt;. Hmm, it gets tricky. My brain didn't seem to have a crystal clear tag here. Additionally it was hard to think just of single adverbs and not adjectives (to deduce the adverb) or verbs often used with a adverb. How about &lt;em&gt;locations&lt;/em&gt;? Pretty easy, many cities i could tell or places i have been. Then i thought about terms like &lt;em&gt;Zeitgeist&lt;/em&gt;. You cant really define a good clear tag-name for words of this category. PROBABLY, because it is a very abstract term with contextual meaning. A lot of scientific terms are abstract, so how about &lt;em&gt;quantities in natural sciences&lt;/em&gt;. Went good, as i have some background here. Interestingly, on the &amp;quot;verbs&amp;quot; tag it seems common to list a lot of related verbs for maybe 10 seconds (&lt;em&gt;running, skiing, climbing, walking...&lt;/em&gt;) till you stop and then quickly switch to verbs related to e.g. the sub-tag &amp;quot;cooking&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;cook, eat, smack,...&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can &lt;strong&gt;I deduce&lt;/strong&gt; from such results (?) There seem to be words pretty good structured and tagged in clouds and sub-clouds (like verbs, nouns), also abstract words of your personal experience (education, hobbies etc.). Even if you might not use them more than others (e.g. prepositions) ,they seem to be tagged, while &lt;em&gt;prepositions&lt;/em&gt; you use in nearly every sentence, are hard to think of spontaneously and better recognized in a distinct phrase they are often used in, there doesn't seem to exist a &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt; tag in the mental lexicon (?). So visual things and activities (objects in real world and motor activities) seem to be much better tagged vs. abstract and not directly perceivable words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it was a nice little experiment I would like to continue, with some tips, how this can be done the most productive and objective way to gain further phenomenological hints, how words and phrases are stored in the mental lexicon and contribute to linguistic topics like sentence building or TOT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm asking for (which fits IMHO &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; question, because of link of theory - exp. method):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are current most investigated and favored models (technical termini) concerning the question &amp;quot;How is our mental lexicon structured?&amp;quot; that are similar to my self-invented experiment above recording a &amp;quot;spatial&amp;quot; map of tags/word-groups of my personal mental lexicon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do professional linguistic research experiments differ from my self-invented exp. described above? What are common phenomenological properties/quantities investigated in such experiments (e.g. semantic proximity), which exist on different human mental lexicons, in such tests? I would think, there have been done experiments recording really big mental lexicons of students and plotting them 2-dimensionally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan's answer is spot on and exactly what I'm asking for. Maybe you or anybody else can add some further details (papers), which cover similar experiments (to get a foot in the door), esp. how diff. mental lexicons differ between single persons. I would like to know what the phenomenological similarities and differences on those lexicons are and maybe map my own mental lexicon more systematically, build my own linguistic fingerprint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T23:26:05.143" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T23:26:05.143" Title="Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2011-10-10T01:28:15.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the commentators that your question is a little confusing. However, I think I can get at an answer, and perhaps help you clean your question up a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a while, semanticists thought that our vocabulary was arranged in a logical, hierarchical way. Nouns are arranged so that they fall under each other, with 'sparrow' coming under 'bird' coming under 'animal' coming under 'life' coming under 'thing'. Something similar takes place for verbs. This is a very optimistic vision of semantics, as it implies that our brains work in a very logical, ordered way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this turns out to be false. There are a number of classic experiments that can be performed that demonstrate this. For instance, you could show people names of different things and ask them to say if they are a bird or not. If you time their responses, you find that people are quicker to respond when shown typical birds, like 'sparrow', then they are  for 'ostriche' or 'penguin'. This was taken to show that our semantic structure was a web, with archetypical words at the center and less &quot;fitting&quot; words further out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another experimental paradigm is priming. We show the subject a series of word and nonce words, such as &quot;blurg&quot; and ask them to determine whether or not they are words. We can prime a subject's response for a particular word, that is, decrease their response time, by showing them a related word before. For instance, if I show you &quot;salt&quot; and then &quot;pepper&quot;, your response for &quot;pepper&quot; will be faster than if I had previously shown you 'President'.&#xA;Cross-modal priming is when you prime someone for a written word by saying a related word, or vis-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get really fancy with ERP (event related potential) experiments and fMRI scans and the like, and talk about activation patterns in the brain, but as far as your question goes we don't really need to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T01:28:15.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="745" CreationDate="2011-10-10T10:10:46.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the general suggestion that complementisers are less likely to be dropped with a negative verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &amp;quot;think&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;believe&amp;quot;, it is quite normal to drop the complementiser:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think he knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe they are coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with &amp;quot;know&amp;quot;, there are certainly examples which seem quite normal to my ears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't know you wanted it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that sometimes with &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; the omission is awkward, and I suspect that, as hippietrail suggests, a doubt as to whether &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;whether&amp;quot; was omitted is behind this: though in fact, &amp;quot;whether&amp;quot; cannot be omitted. But I don't know why this is different from the examples I give above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T10:10:46.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="234" CreationDate="2011-10-10T12:47:20.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Substrate and superstrate aren't always used this way. And yes, creole researchers suggests that there are patterns to which parts of the language are contributed by which social groups.  (Power dynamics has a lot more to do with it than who was there first.) I suggest looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.uottawa.ca/faculty/poplack.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;research by Poplack&lt;/a&gt;, but also look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&amp;amp;context=ircs_reports&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tara Sanchez's dissertation&lt;/a&gt; (and subsequent publications) on Papiamentu.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T05:58:58.080" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T05:58:58.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2011-10-10T17:28:36.133" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extensive typological study doesn't appear to have been done on this. However, this is probably so because it has been difficult to say precisely &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the mass/count distinction is about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can understand is that the mass/count distinction tracks (imperfectly) an important human cognitive distinction between objects (or, countables) and substances (or, uncountables, &quot;fake mass nouns&quot; like &lt;em&gt;furniture&lt;/em&gt; aside). As with many conceptual distinctions, different languages may mark the difference overtly, others may not. To give a different example, a language like West Greenlandic has a host of &quot;pluractional&quot; morphemes that attach to verbs, one of which indicates whether an event description picks out a series of iterative events, or whether it picks out a single event of continuous extent. English doesn't have such morphemes, but interestingly in this language we see certain event descriptions as underdetermining the two uses (e.g., &lt;em&gt;John ran more than Mary last year&lt;/em&gt;, if true, can mean he ran on more occasions (iterative), or for a greater temporal or spatial extent (continuative)). So a conceptual distinction that is overtly marked in West Greenlandic is left implicit in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, English does not mark mass occurrences of nouns, but marks individual (with the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt;) and plural (with the &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; suffix) occurrences of nouns. The bare form of a noun is often understood on a material reading (which is why the gruesome interpretation in &lt;em&gt;There was boy all over the road&lt;/em&gt;, as if uttered after a horrific accident), and singular/plural occurrences are understood as picking out a singularity or multiplicity of individuals that fall under the concept named by the noun. If a language, for example, doesn't have a singular/plural distinction, one might think that noun occurrences there are understood via a combination of the preferred conceptualizations of &lt;em&gt;things falling under the concept&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., we think of &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt; best as describing individual boys, and &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt; best as describing an unindividuated substance), and extralinguistic context. The grammar doesn't force such speakers to express which conception they intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An oft-discussed counterexample to the idea that the distinction is universal, is the claim that all nouns are actually mass in Chinese---&quot;count&quot; nouns don't exist except in the sense that they are &quot;built up&quot; in combination with classifiers. However, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lisacheng.nl/pdf/Massifier.pdf&quot;&gt;Cheng and Sybesma argue&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://philpapers.org/rec/CHIMNV&quot;&gt;Chierchia accepts&lt;/a&gt;, even this language has reflexes of the conceptual distinction---i.e., it uses only &quot;classifiers&quot; for nouns that are understood as &quot;count&quot; (i.e., highly individuated), and only &quot;massifiers&quot; for those understood as &quot;mass&quot; (i.e., low individuation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, the role of grammar seems to be specifying &lt;em&gt;what kind&lt;/em&gt; of conceptualization we're after. In English, there are a lot of nouns that are comfortable occurring as either mass or count, the difference ending up in whether we want to express a notion of the material, &lt;em&gt;rock&lt;/em&gt;, or that of some quantity of individuals comprised of that material, &lt;em&gt;rocks&lt;/em&gt;. Other occurrences, like &lt;em&gt;muds&lt;/em&gt; seem less acceptable, but this could just be a matter of the frequency with which we encounter individuated MUD; if we can talk about kinds of muds or jars that contain some mud in a context, so that &lt;em&gt;I bought three muds at the mud store&lt;/em&gt; isn't really so bad. Extralinguistic context can help us individuate even under the concept MUD. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a language &lt;strong&gt;uses grammar to express the mass/count distinction&lt;/strong&gt; will be a fact about particular languages, but the conceptual distinction is likely universal. (Hat tip to Dustin Chacón for discussion of Chinese.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-10-10T17:28:36.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1035" CreationDate="2011-10-10T18:16:29.997" Score="18" ViewCount="6268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to distinguish nouns and verbs that applies to all languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem has been occupying my mind for some time now.  I'm not quite sure how to approach this question, so I'll just list out some of my thoughts that make this question difficult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The usual grade school definition of a noun is &lt;em&gt;a person, place, or thing&lt;/em&gt;, while a verb is defined as &lt;em&gt;an action or state of being&lt;/em&gt;.  This doesn't work so well when confronted with words like &lt;em&gt;reenactment&lt;/em&gt; which is a noun that clearly refers to an action, or &lt;em&gt;to locate&lt;/em&gt; which seems like it refers to a concept of place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some words can clearly fall in both categories, like &lt;em&gt;struggle&lt;/em&gt;, which is both noun and verb at once.  (Though my belief is that the categories can exist independently, even if many words cross into both categories.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the difference between a language that has verbs like &quot;to be a book&quot;, and languages that allow you to string nouns together making &quot;X Y&quot; the same meaning as &quot;X is Y&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general feel I'm getting from all this is that nouns and verbs are distinguished by their roles in a sentence, not from the concepts they refer to, but I'm having a hard time formalizing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Follow-up:&lt;/em&gt; It seems like people are getting thrown off by all the thoughts I listed out above.  Here's another way of restating the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you have two classes of words in a language, how do you know which one is nouns and which one is verbs?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T23:58:12.660" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T03:59:17.770" Title="What's the global difference between nouns and verbs?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-10T18:30:28.857" Score="10" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is influenced by another one I found on the German SE, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2744/warum-nennt-man-in-deutsch-die-zahlen-0-2-4-gerade-zahlen&quot;&gt;Warum nennt man in Deutsch die Zahlen 0, 2, 4 … “gerade” Zahlen?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. It asks &quot;Why call Germans the numbers 0, 2, 2 &quot;even&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following languages have these pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;strong&gt;gerade&lt;/strong&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;ungerade&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian: &lt;strong&gt;pari&lt;/strong&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;dispari&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese: &lt;strong&gt;par&lt;/strong&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;Ímpar&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: &lt;strong&gt;par&lt;/strong&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;impar&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian: &lt;strong&gt;чётное&lt;/strong&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;нечётное&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that for all of them 'even' is expressed by the basic form and 'odd' is derived from that form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages like  English use different words &lt;strong&gt;even&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;odd&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I modified the question in reaction to the comments to reduce the number of possible results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there languages where &lt;strong&gt;odd&lt;/strong&gt;  is expressed by the basic term and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;even&lt;/strong&gt;  is derived from that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="408" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T18:30:31.427" Title="Are there languages which use  the negation of  'odd' to denote 'even'?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-10-10T18:57:14.657" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern syntax approach to this, unlike the traditional grammar approach, is to categorize words according to morphological and syntactic properties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphologically, we can observe that nouns can be derived from other nouns using the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ism&lt;/em&gt;, for example, to indicate a belief or process (&lt;em&gt;capital&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;capitalism&lt;/em&gt;). Verbs are derived from other kinds of affixes, such as &lt;em&gt;-ify&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;terror&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;terrify&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;undo&lt;/em&gt;). Besides, nouns can be inflected for number (&lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt;) and verbs can be inflected for tense, aspect and mood (&lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;given&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, a noun can be placed after a definite article (technically, a determiner), for example (&lt;em&gt;the book is green&lt;/em&gt;), but not after an adverb like &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; (*&lt;em&gt;this one is more book than the other&lt;/em&gt;). A verb can be followed by an adverb of manner, like &lt;em&gt;humbly&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;he speaks humbly&lt;/em&gt;), but not by an article (*&lt;em&gt;a speaks is fine&lt;/em&gt;). Likewise, if you can substitute a word with a regular noun or verb, both words will belong to the same category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination of morphological and syntactic analyses allows you to define what category a word belongs to. About the third item, you are referring to a specific use of the verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;, known as copula, more specifically, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;zero copula&lt;/a&gt;, present in languages such as Russian and Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T11:58:38.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T11:58:38.203" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2011-10-11T00:40:04.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;ğ is a symbol used in writing Turkish. When word or syllable final, it indicates a preceding back vowel is lengthened and is typically silent otherwise. In some dialects it may be realized as a velar (or uvular) approximant, fricative or plosive. A velar approximant is an acceptable pronunciation in standard Istanbul dialect too, but it's becoming increasingly rare. Following a front vowel it may manifest as a palatal glide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So  &quot;aa&quot; and &quot;ağ&quot; are identical. When intervocalic, the preceding and following vowels belong to different syllables, meaning that &quot;ağa&quot; is a long syllable-final vowel followed by a syllable-initial vowel (so Turkish does not have a three-way length contrast). I don't know &quot;â&quot;??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some other complexities, discussed in the pdf &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.turuz.info/Dil/0212-Turkish%20comprehensive%20grammar.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (pp 7-8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2012-05-06T10:38:36.940" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T10:38:36.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2011-10-11T12:31:24.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re AllNoun: as this is a conlang, and an artificial 'language', I'd suggest that it can't be considered a true language until it has native speakers, and that if it did have native speakers they would expand the language to suit the full range of requirements of human beings, such that it would have at least two POS categories, one that includes 'verb'-type words and one with 'noun'-type words. (Schachter 1985). This is what happens when speakers turn a pidgin into a creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some languages have a small, closed verb category. But in these languages the verbs are highly generic and combine with other elements (which may include coverbs, adjectives, nouns, other verbs, etc) to create verb complexes (or complex predicates) that have more specific meanings. In this way they are able to express everything that a human being needs to. (Schultze-Berndt 2000)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt there are any languages without nouns. The smallest number of POS categories that I have heard about in any language is two, a 'verbs' category and a 'nouns' category. But each of these categories will contain numerous words that can be used to fill the functions that in other languages will fall into different POS categories; ie, the full range of functions is there it's just that, morphosyntactically, they are compressed into two POS categories. Thus Australian languages are usually analysed as having no distinct category of adjective. Instead, words that have adjectival meanings will be members of the same category that includes nouns, in a category often called 'nominal' in grammars of Australian languages. (Goddard 1985)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, many languages will lack some part of speech that's present in some other languages, eg English doesn't have relators or coverbs. It's impossible to give a brief answer to how languages deal with this and in fact, this is what linguistic analysis is largely about, finding out how each language uses its particular set of grammatical and lexical elements to achieve the full range of functions that humans need. I've already described how languages with a small, closed verb class are able to express the full range of meanings required by speakers. Another example could be the question, how does English get along without politeness markers? It does so by using special vocabulary and morphosyntactic constructions, and I doubt many native speakers feel a lack. (Schachter 1985)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-10-11T23:02:08.960" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T23:02:08.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="771" CreationDate="2011-10-11T16:43:08.753" Score="6" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is said that the adoption of Sumerian cuneiform by Akkadian and other languages in the Middle East imposed constraints on those languages (due to the limited number of sounds represented in Sumerian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? In what way does the adoption of cuneiform constrained those languages? How is this possible, while in logographic system like the cuneiform, a symbol corresponds to a word as opposed to a sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T01:25:19.127" Title="How could the Sumerian cuneiform impose constraints on some languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2011-10-11T18:00:41.517" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language revival project that has been successful (with a small population) and has led to a MacArthur Genius grant is the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wlrp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project&lt;/a&gt;. The project was started by  Jessie 'little doe' Baird in conjunction with MIT linguists Ken Hale and Norvin Richards. There's a movie about the project: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.makepeaceproductions.com/wampfilm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;We Still Live Here&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;. Here are two magazine articles: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.technologyreview.com/article/20664/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Reclamation 101&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.technologyreview.com/article/20629/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Saving a Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T13:53:49.370" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:53:49.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="769" CreationDate="2011-10-11T19:07:02.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the answer lies in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.world-news-research.com/languagewar.html&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; you cite in your own comment. Cuneiform at this stage was not purely logographic but rather a mixture of logographic signs and phonemic (or what the article refers to as &quot;phonetic&quot;) signs, and the inventory of phonemic signs that existed was tailored to Sumerian, which had a very different morphology, phonology and phonetics from Akkadian. Note that the writer says that Sumerian &quot;lived on as an imposed constraint on the &lt;strong&gt;expression&lt;/strong&gt; (emphasis mine) of Akkadian...&quot;. By &quot;expression&quot; the author almost certainly is referring to the &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; expression of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system&quot;&gt;Japanese writing system&lt;/a&gt; at all? It's like if in a parallel universe you had grown up speaking German but no one ever taught you how to write it, but then someone handed you an instructional manual for Japanese writing--Kanji, hiragana, and katakana--and you had to try to adapt it for use as an orthography for German. For some words and morphemes you could use already-existing kanji and just re-establish their pronunciations. But how would you deal with the inflectional morphology that German has and Japanese lacks? You'd be forced to choose among letting it be implied, coming up with a kluge for expressing it using kana, or re-appropriating certain kanji to represent inflections. And if kanji didn't exist for certain words, how would you adapt kana to &quot;spell them out&quot;? There obviously isn't a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes in German and kana in Japanese, so you'd sometimes have to go without expressing certain contrasts that exist in German, like /l/ vs. /r/ (or, again, invent a novel way of marking these contrasts) and you'd also sometimes be forced to express certain phonemic sequences in a roundabout way--consonant clusters, for example. Of course none of this would hamper your ability to express yourself &lt;em&gt;orally&lt;/em&gt; in German, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T01:25:19.127" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T01:25:19.127" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-10-11T20:58:00.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to research this question more in-depthly, you should check out Mark Baker's (2002) book &lt;em&gt;Lexical Categories&lt;/em&gt;. There he focuses on languages for whom the difference between nouns and verbs (and adjectives) are less straightforward. But it requires a fairly advanced background in syntactic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastActivityDate="2011-10-11T20:58:00.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-11T22:52:57.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pidgins (sometimes called &lt;em&gt;contact language&lt;/em&gt;) are used for communication between&#xA;groups speaking different languages who have no&#xA;other language in common, usually in situations where&#xA;there are strikingly different levels of power in a colonial&#xA;setting. A pidgin is not spoken as a first or native&#xA;language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process by which pidgins arise is referred to as&#xA;pidginization. As a pidgin becomes the first language of&#xA;a generation of children, it acquires all the characteristics&#xA;of a natural language, including a richer vocabulary and&#xA;a functioning, relatively stable phonology and grammar,&#xA;and in this way becomes a creole. The formation of a&#xA;creole is referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/creoles&quot;&gt;creolization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0874808936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Glossary of Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:03.500" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:03.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-11T22:52:57.683" Score="0" Body="A simplified form of language, typically with a reduced grammar and vocabulary.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:05.390" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:05.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-11T23:03:22.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language may have two or more such classes or genders. The classification frequently corresponds to a real-world distinction of sex, at least in part, but often too it does not (&quot;gender&quot; derives etymologically from Lartin &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt;, via Old French &lt;em&gt;gendre&lt;/em&gt;, and originally meant &quot;kind&quot; or &quot;sort&quot;). The word &quot;gender&quot; is used not just for a group of nouns but also for the whole category; thus we may say that a particular language has, say, three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, and that the language has the category of gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=lvy1va7QcuEC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gender&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:10.510" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:10.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-11T23:03:22.167" Score="0" Body="A  system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:12.307" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:12.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-12T03:26:46.263" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;To say that John ate something, you say &lt;em&gt;John ate (something)&lt;/em&gt;, and it's always grammatical. To talk about the state or time of filling some role, you append &lt;em&gt;-hood&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ship&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;womanhood&lt;/em&gt;, but for most roles this method fails. Is there a name for this (or have I identified a salient distinction at all)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T09:09:19.673" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T09:09:19.673" Title="What is the technical way to talk about patterns that work sometimes vs. those that work always?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-12T03:33:55.413" Score="24" ViewCount="4219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why this shouldn't be the case. Surely children around the world don't learn to speak fluently by the same age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T08:40:59.620" Title="Are some languages inherently harder for children to acquire?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="777" CreationDate="2011-10-12T04:27:19.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For affixes in particular, you can talk about how &lt;em&gt;productive&lt;/em&gt; they are.  So for instance, &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; is highly productive &amp;mdash; you can add it to just about any verb &amp;mdash; and &lt;em&gt;-ship&lt;/em&gt; is much less productive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some affixes have become entirely &lt;i&gt;un&lt;/i&gt;productive: for instance, we've got a few leftover plurals in &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;oxen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;children,&lt;/em&gt; but you can't coin new ones (except as a joke).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With syntactic constructions, it turns out that most are pretty productive. (Though I guess you could argue that old frozen phrases &amp;mdash; like &quot;hallowed be thy name&quot; or &quot;o'er the ramparts we watched&quot; &amp;mdash; represent unproductive constructions.) The restrictions you do see on syntactic constructions tend to be mostly about semantics and not grammar.  For instance, you can &lt;i&gt;persuade a person&lt;/i&gt; of something, but you can't &lt;i&gt;persuade a rock&lt;/i&gt; of anything.  Still, the sentence &quot;I persuaded that rock to get out of my way&quot; is perfectly grammatical &amp;mdash; it's just that if you take it literally, it doesn't make any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T04:27:19.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-12T04:32:37.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, as far as we can tell, all children without cognitive or social deficits achieve fluency at around the same age. Moreover, there is remarkable consistency in the order in which children acquire different features of the language. There is some variance between individuals, but that's to be expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is an intrinsic part of what makes us human, and the need to communicate stretches across all cultures and people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="350" LastEditDate="2011-10-19T05:26:19.280" LastActivityDate="2011-10-19T05:26:19.280" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-12T14:20:42.967" Score="7" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is, is there a language that allows the following type of movement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WH1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DP-TOP1 ... (ATTITUDE-VERB) QUOT ... t1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="415" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-11-07T03:08:17.893" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T20:38:01.953" Title="In languages with quotative markers, is extraction allowed out of quotative-marked clauses?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="785" CreationDate="2011-10-12T15:09:45.337" Score="0" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do vocabulary sets used by one person within the same context differ as a result of the environment of execution? For example: reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the &quot;environments of execution&quot; of significance that are observable?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any constants in the usage clustering? For example, all spoken words are a subset of written words, but words read are not a subset of words written. I don't believe this to be the case, just giving an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Limiting the scope of the question to only English is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2011-10-12T16:17:36.087" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T17:32:25.420" Title="Vocabulary Usage Patterns" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="797" CreationDate="2011-10-12T17:31:34.793" Score="10" ViewCount="1630" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question came up while doing syntax homework. It seems to me that prepositional phrases with &quot;of&quot; can only ever be complements to nouns, not adjuncts. The basis for my conclusion was that, while you can reorder adjuncts freely (1, 2), albeit perhaps with issues of scope/ambiguity, you cannot have an adjunct intervene between a head and its complement (3,4), and I have yet to find an example in which &quot;of&quot; can be reordered felicitously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  The cat with stripes in the garden&#xA;(2)  The cat in the garden with stripes &#xA;     (=intended meaning same as 1)&#xA;(3)  The book of poetry with a red cover&#xA;(4) *The book with a red cover of poetry&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps my judgments and conclusions are off -- if so, please explain a reliable way for telling adjuncts/complements apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part to my question -- assuming &quot;of&quot; phrases cannot be complements -- is why this would be, whether there is some cross-linguistic generalization or whether it is just an historical quirk of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-10-13T16:24:42.957" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T22:51:24.840" Title="Can prepositional phrases with &quot;of&quot; ever be adjuncts to nouns, or only complements in English? If they can't be adjuncts, why?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2011-10-12T17:32:25.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is broad so I will only try to hit some highlights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recognition is -always- easier than recall, so that one can read a word that one might not be able to produce, but not the other way (unless with some bizarre neural dysfunction). This is the case with respect to reading vs writing and separately for speaking vs listening.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One would think that as written language would include spoken language, because one needs more education to read/write. But it turns out that it is a classic situation of foreign language learning that one can learn to enough of the formal variety of a language to give a plenary talk at a symposium on subatomic particles, but then not be able to order a sandwich at a roadside stand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;yes, I agree, it is difficult to assess the vocabulary of one's thoughts without recourse to the other 'environments' (as of 2011)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-12T17:32:25.420" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1728" CreationDate="2011-10-12T18:10:48.663" Score="19" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is a consensus that the PIE roots for &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hundred&lt;/em&gt; are, respectively, &lt;em&gt;*deḱṃ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt;. There also seems to be a consensus that &lt;em&gt;*ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt; is a shortened version of &lt;em&gt;*deḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt;. These two roots are strongly related, both morphologically (sharing the syllable *&lt;em&gt;-ḱm-&lt;/em&gt;) and semantically (a hundred is ten times ten). But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? Researching the subject, I have found some accounts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=YLJb6-OyUIQC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Menninger, 1992&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;*(d)ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt; was formed by appending the syllable *&lt;em&gt;-to-&lt;/em&gt; to the root &lt;em&gt;*deḱṃ&lt;/em&gt;, which turned the number ten into a noun (something like &quot;ten-ness&quot;). In other words, the Proto-Indo-European speakers conceived a hundred essentially as a ten-ness (of tens).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0691058873&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony, 2007&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;*ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt; means (a unit of) tens. So, the combination of these two morphemes (*&lt;em&gt;deḱṃ&lt;/em&gt; + *&lt;em&gt;ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt;), meaning &quot;ten units of ten&quot;, would have given rise to &lt;em&gt;*(de)ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://indo-european.info/a-grammar-of-modern-indo-european-third-edition.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quiles and López-Menchero, 2011&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: The tens were normally formed with the units followed by the suffix *&lt;em&gt;-dḱṃta&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;group of ten&quot;). For example, thirty is &lt;em&gt;*trídḱṃta&lt;/em&gt; (*&lt;em&gt;tri&lt;/em&gt; + *&lt;em&gt;-dḱṃta&lt;/em&gt;). According to this analysis, the word for hundred was formed by *&lt;em&gt;deḱṃ&lt;/em&gt; + *&lt;em&gt;-dḱṃta&lt;/em&gt;, which somehow produced the word &lt;em&gt;*(d)ḱṃtóm&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three explanations are very similar, but they also seem to be slightly different from each other. Are they really different or (what is probably the case) am I missing the big picture here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T10:25:06.747" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T10:25:06.747" Title="What is the relationship between the PIE roots *dekṃ and *kṃtóm?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2011-10-13T01:48:14.090" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some distinctions that are important for conceptualization/communication are simply not marked in some languages. Your question seems to be: if a language provides no resources for definite marker, how does a speaker communicate that a given description is intended as &lt;em&gt;definite&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;indefinite&lt;/em&gt;? Answer: discourse context steps in to help. For example, in English, the discourse function of an indefinite article is typically to signal that a new referent is being introduced. So, if I've already been talking about John, it would be extremely weird to refer back to him by saying &lt;em&gt;Then, a guy called Mary to invite her to the dance&lt;/em&gt;, as it would seem now I am definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; talking about John, rather talking about some new male individual. However, if John is salient in the discourse, it is perfectly natural to refer back to him using the definite, &lt;em&gt;Then, the guy called Mary to invite her to the dance&lt;/em&gt;. In a language with no definite article/clitic/affix/word order difference, but yet with an indefinite article for example, at a minimum discourse demands would lead such speakers to only use the indefinite when introducing new discourse referents, and avoiding using it to refer to establish referents. In the absence, too, of the indefinite article, languages could resort to word order differences (e.g., apply focus and topicalization rules), or additional words like &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;, or use demonstratives and pronouns to indicate (non-)contrast of referents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="178" LastEditDate="2011-10-13T09:55:10.840" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T09:55:10.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="802" CreationDate="2011-10-13T03:01:24.730" Score="8" ViewCount="21758" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might be wrong since I'm unable to find any sources supporting this, but it's increasingly my gut feeling that linguistics appears to focus on spoken languages as opposed to written ones. If this is the case, why is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-10-13T14:20:04.427" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T14:10:17.433" Title="Why does linguistics focus on spoken languages rather than written ones?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-10-13T05:02:16.603" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is ambiguous, so I'll just cast my net wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of research into different aspects of language that don't necessarily involve speaking. Psycho- and neurolinguistics, both thriving subdisciplines, focus their efforts on understanding the psychological and neurological components of language production and processing. Morphology, phonology and syntax focus on the rules that govern the production of language, not necessarily the particular modality of production. A lot of language acquisition research, such as that focusing on how babies process pointing gestures or gazes, or on the strategies that children use to learn a language, has very little to do with spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of disciplines that &lt;em&gt;prima facia&lt;/em&gt; deal with spoken language, such as phonetics or phonology, can and have been successfully adapted to sign languages. For example: research has shown that their are sign language analogues for place and manner of articulation, and that sign language has units of production that can be rightfully refereed to as phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written language is a reflection of spoken, so most of what we know about spoken language can be transfered to written. The converse is not true. Still, there is a great deal of research focusing on how written language is processed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoken language is a part of what makes us human. Every child will become fluent in their native language unless they suffer from massive cognitive or social deficits. Even mentally retarded children, or others with low IQ's, still achieve a great deal of fluency. If someone is deaf or mute, they will either acquire or invent a signed language. Acquiring literacy, on the other hand, is laborious process. Most languages do not have a written form, and even in those that do, not everyone achieves literacy. Spoken language is more widespread and universal, and therefore more interesting than the mostly cultural invention we call 'writing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a lot of linguistics &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be done with spoken language. A lot of phonetics, for instance, is about sound production, transmission, and perception. Children learn spoken language far earlier than written language, so most interesting research on language acquisition is about spoken or signed language. As I pointed out above, most languages do not have a written form, so any linguistic research concerning them has to focus on their spoken forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T05:02:16.603" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-13T10:37:10.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages evolve through time and many factors influence this development:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pre-existing languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nearby languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the very usage of the language itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:14.523" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:14.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="791" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-13T10:37:10.733" Score="0" Body="Development of languages, language families, etc, through time with influences by other languages or pre-existing ones." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:16.803" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:16.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="792" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-13T10:41:29.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the language, verbs are commonly the part of speech inflected to convey &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aspect&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mood&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also agree with &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of one or more of its core arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-04T08:44:02.060" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T08:44:02.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-13T10:41:29.733" Score="0" Body="Part of speech whose members indicate an action or a state of being." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-04T08:44:05.307" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T08:44:05.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="784" CreationDate="2011-10-13T12:06:41.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some cases where an adjunct (always locative) comes before the &amp;quot;of&amp;quot; complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a case in my files of embezzlement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the painting on the wall of Sir Winston Churchill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the incidence in Europe of alcoholism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're all marked constructions (putting a focus on the locative, I think), but I find them all to be grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T12:06:41.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-10-13T14:15:11.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make an analogy, spoken language is like a hand and written language is like a hammer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are born with the capability to speak/hear (specific anatomical structures in the ear, mouth/throat/lungs, and brain) and we spontaneously learn spoken language by its presence. But writing systems are artificial, man-made contrivances, a coding system to record the spoken language, a tool that attempts to extend the usefulness of spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One naturally learns language growing up around people, but one needs instruction in reading and writing to do it. People communicated for thousands of years quite well without writing. The rules of writing are totally dependent on those of language that came before it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the arbitrariness of writing consider that Mandarin is normally expressed in logograms (the complicated picture-like collection of strokes for one syllable), but can also be expressed in pinyin, a romanization, roughly one letter per phoneme. Similarly, Persian is normally written in an Arabic script (leaving out most vowels) where Arabic is a very different structured language, but before the Arabic invasion was written in cuneiform, a syllabic system, but can be transcribed to a roman lettering. All these forms are with no change in meaning. The point is that writing systems are arbitrary inventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing is merely an attempt at encoding natural language (the non-written, primary, spoken thing). So, studying writing is studying the arbitrary man-made patterns of orthography, and these structures are very different from (or, if not, depend entirely on) the patterns of spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studying writing (an interesting topic) is like studying a hammer, a very different thing than studying the hand that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, sign language needs to be accounted for (only because it is nominally not spoken), and that account (by analysis and experiment) seems to be that it has the same properties as spoken language in contrast to written ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, see the preface/first chapter of any introductory linguistics textbook. There is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics#Speech_and_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;speech and writing&lt;/a&gt; section of wikipedia, which supports what I say, but you should seen actual authority to be convinced if you need a trustable reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T14:15:11.750" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="784" CreationDate="2011-10-13T16:15:54.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example of a non-argument &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;-phrase would be &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;-possessives.  (Possessors are by definition not arguments.)  The best way to make sure that an &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; phrase is really a possessive is to mark it (redundantly) with &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1) That dog of John's is really vicious.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is less than clear, syntactically/semantically speaking, what is going on here (Why the double-marking of possessive?  Is there some kind of partitivity?  What, if any, is the difference in meaning between the above and &quot;John's dog&quot;?) – but it is clear that this is a non-argument &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;-phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-10-13T16:23:23.320" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T16:23:23.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="798" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-13T16:41:48.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term derives from &lt;strong&gt;ορθός&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;orthòs&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;correct&quot;) e &lt;strong&gt;γραφή&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;graphé&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;writing&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is related to punctuation and spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:22.517" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:22.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-13T16:41:48.207" Score="0" Body="Orthography is a set of rules that determine the correct way of writing in a certain language, including norms about spelling, punctuation and word breaks. Orthography is usually not considered part of natural language or grammar itself and therefore not strictly a subject of linguistics, but sometimes of interest in investigating individual languages' pronunciation and writing systems." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T12:43:40.863" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:43:40.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="784" CreationDate="2011-10-13T17:47:29.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, for anybody out there also wondering about this, I asked my syntax professor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One-substitution is apparently a fairly reliable way to distinguish complements and adjuncts (at least in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The student of physics --&amp;gt; *The one of physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The student from Kansas --&amp;gt; The one from Kansas (ok)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding placement, English has &lt;strong&gt;extraposition&lt;/strong&gt;, which allows PPs to move rightward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) I bought a painting of the Eiffel Tower yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) I bought a painting yesterday of the Eiffel Tower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I am interested now in whether other languages have such a (seemingly) ad-hoc rule as extraposition. :) But I think that answers whatever was left of the question after Aaron and Colin Fine's answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T20:12:27.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-10-13T22:27:20.853" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is the scientific study of language. A language is narrowly defined as the set of rules that &quot;speakers&quot; (speaking or signing) acquire when they are very, very young. There is evidence for processes of language acquisition underway at the very youngest testable ages (under a year old).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A speaker with a grammar like mine &lt;em&gt;knows&lt;/em&gt;, without ever being told, that strings of words like &lt;em&gt;colorless green ideas sleep furiously&lt;/em&gt; are well-formed, but strings like &lt;em&gt;furiously sleep ideas green colorless&lt;/em&gt; are not. I can say that the first sentence would be true if (i) there existed some things that were colorless, green, and ideas, (ii) such things could sleep, and (iii) such sleepings could happen furiously. The other string supports no such interpretation. Since I don't have to look up these two strings in some kind of book to tell whether one is good or bad, we say that my grammatical rules are internalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of grammar (again, in the linguist's sense) are learned &lt;em&gt;implicitly&lt;/em&gt;. They are not taught, as the rule &quot;i before e except after c&quot; has to be learned when one learns how to spell, but rather inferred on the basis of experience in a linguistic environment (i.e., a community of speakers who do some speaking in the presence of the child). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, knowledge of language is universal. Barring severe cognitive deficits or social deprivation, every normally-developing child acquires a native tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written language stands in sharp contrast: children learn to read and write much later (usually once they start attending school) than they learn to understand and produce spoken language; written language has no internalized rules, it reflects only the speakers' internal rules and, possibly, a speaker's regard for the prescriptive rules of style; written language has to be learned explicitly (often laboriously); and, written language is not universal—there are many, many people on this planet who have knowledge of language but can't read or write. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Written language&quot; is an artifact of (some) human cultures &lt;em&gt;who already had spoken languages&lt;/em&gt;. Spoken language is definitional of our &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt;, and it is this kind of species-specific capacity that linguists study. This is not to say that the capacity for writing is not complex; it is in fact &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; complex than the capacity for language, in that explaining how we can have writing systems requires in part an explanation of what the language we're writing down &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-10-13T22:27:20.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-10-14T00:54:02.290" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The attitude that spoken language is somehow primary to written (usually in a more general sense than geneologically) is known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism&quot;&gt;logocentrism&lt;/a&gt; and has been extensively studied by, amongst others but arguably most famously, Jaques Derrida in his &lt;em&gt;Of Grammatology&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321" LastEditorUserId="321" LastEditDate="2011-10-14T01:05:23.670" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T01:05:23.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="805" CreationDate="2011-10-14T02:01:28.383" Score="14" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any serious work being done on linguistic change in constructed languages (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua, Lojban)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine it might be difficult given the small population of native speakers, but I'm always interested in attempts to &quot;perfect&quot; language in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T10:39:25.023" Title="Is anyone studying change in constructed language?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-10-14T02:29:16.390" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ben Bergen (now at UCSD) has done &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.169.5517&quot;&gt;some research on changes in Esperanto&lt;/a&gt; among children who learn it as a first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-14T09:17:51.227" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T09:17:51.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2011-10-14T02:46:56.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Automodular Grammar (Sorry, no Wikipedia page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A framework by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrold_Sadock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jerrold Sadock&lt;/a&gt; in which each module of language (Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, etc.) is completely independent of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-14T08:15:00.890" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T08:15:00.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="804" CreationDate="2011-10-14T13:13:40.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Except for Esperanto, there aren't any conlangs with native speakers (except a single Volopuk speaker, a single Klingon speaker) So there isn't much to study language change in the same sense that we can study language change of say Latin as it slowly turns into French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next problem is that in the remaining languages, there aren't that many people and they are generally very conscious of the fact that they are using a language with explicitly invented rules, so you can't easily separate explicit creative acts of the users from the natural processes of language change. In this case one would expect fashion and the effectiveness of promoters of a given design to sway the crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last thing that would complicate an examination of language change is that outside of Esperanto, the users of a constructed language are learning it as a second language and sometimes using it as a contact language (communication between people without a shared language, like a pidgin or creole), so you'd expect to also observe people moving along a learning curve and resorting to the sort of things people do when they are in a contact language situation.  For example, pidgin speakers will sometimes try all possibilities of vocabulary and word order until the surmise they have communicated something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T13:13:40.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2011-10-14T14:15:19.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty simple, actually. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoken language is a natural phenomenon; written language is a craft or art form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty strong divide here among the natural sciences. Chemists don't study Money; physicists don't study Beethoven. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists don't study written language (generally) because written language isn't language — it's art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="422" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T23:56:23.780" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T23:56:23.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="812" CreationDate="2011-10-14T15:44:49.057" Score="11" ViewCount="3406" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any cases where two varieties of the same language are treated as separate languages, or where two distinct languages are treated as varieties of the same language. If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-10-25T02:04:45.993" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T19:39:46.377" Title="How are languages and dialects distinguished from one another?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2011-10-14T15:55:36.783" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;All languages, as far as we know, do &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; to mark &lt;strong&gt;information status&lt;/strong&gt;.  Basically this means that when you refer to an X, you have to do &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; to indicate the answer to questions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have a specific X in mind?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, you think your hearer is familiar with the X you're talking about?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, have you already been discussing that X for a while, or is it new to the conversation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you've been discussing the X for a while, has it been the main topic of conversation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question #2 is more or less what we mean by &quot;definiteness.&quot;  (Though for what it's worth, English can use the definite article even when the answer to #2 is &quot;no.&quot;  For instance, in formal English you can say &quot;The whale is a mammal&quot; &amp;mdash; and this doesn't mean you're talking about a specific whale with which your hearer is already familiar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are lots of other information-status-marking strategies that don't directly involve definiteness marking.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As far as we know, all languages mark &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;focus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  Roughly speaking, focused words or phrases are ones that count as &quot;new information.&quot;  In English we use prosodic intonation to mark foci; other languages use word order (e.g. in Hungarian) or have a special function word that acts as a focus marker (e.g. in many African languages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some languages, it's required to mark the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment&quot;&gt;topic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of a sentence (e.g. Russian, Mandarin and Japanese).  This is correlated with definiteness but isn't quite the same thing: topics are likely to be definite, but they don't have to be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages mark &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative&quot;&gt;obviation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  (This is really common in native North American languages.)  This gets a little complicated, but very roughly: if a clause in these languages has two or more third-person referents, the speaker needs to mark one as &quot;more salient&quot; and the others as &quot;less salient.&quot;  Definiteness tends to play a role in the decision &amp;mdash; with definite referents tending to count as &quot;more salient&quot; &amp;mdash; but there are also tendencies for e.g. people to be &quot;more salient&quot; than animals and possessors to be &quot;more salient&quot; than their possessions, so it's not a straight-up definiteness-marking system.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages mark &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telicity&quot;&gt;telicity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. Finnish). A &lt;em&gt;telic&lt;/em&gt; event is one that is complete; an &lt;em&gt;atelic&lt;/em&gt; event is one that isn't complete.  So for instance, &quot;I built-ATELIC the model plane&quot; might mean &quot;I worked on the model plane (but didn't finish).&quot;  This has some functional overlap with definiteness marking: consider the difference between &quot;I ate some cake&quot; (atelic, indefinite) and &quot;I ate the cake&quot; (telic, definite). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages mark &lt;strong&gt;specificity&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. Spanish).  Consider the English sentence &quot;I'm looking for a friend.&quot;  On one reading it means &quot;I just want &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; to be my friend&quot; (nonspecific), on another it means &quot;I've got a particular friend I want to talk to, and I'm trying to find &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (specific).  In Spanish those two senses are distinguished: &lt;em&gt;estoy buscando un amigo&lt;/em&gt; for the nonspecific reading, &lt;em&gt;estoy buscando &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; un amigo&lt;/em&gt; for the specific one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch-reference&quot;&gt;switch-reference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; systems.  (This is huge in New Guinea, and also in Amazonia.)  The details vary, but basically you mark whether a clause has the same subject or a different subject than the clause that went before.  This has some functional overlap with information status marking, because it tends to highlight newly introduced referents.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few languages &lt;strong&gt;mark definiteness on the &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; rather than on noun phrases&lt;/strong&gt;.  Hungarian, for instance, has a special verb form used when the direct object is definite. (Hungarian &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; has definite and indefinite articles, so this is a case of redundant marking of the same feature.  I don't know whether any language uses verb marking as its &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; strategy to indicate definiteness.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these aren't mutually exclusive.  Hungarian has definite and indefinite articles for noun phrases, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; topic marking, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; definiteness marking on the verb.  Finnish marks topic and telicity.  English mostly uses definite and indefinite articles, but it does have topic-marking constructions that you can use if you want to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, in a pinch, you've always got the option of &lt;strong&gt;periphrasis&lt;/strong&gt;: you can say &quot;one guy in particular&quot; or &quot;a different guy&quot; or &quot;that guy we've been talking about&quot; or &quot;a guy you don't know but I'm gonna tell you about him now&quot; or whatever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we've got all these different information status distinctions that a language might mark.  And the interesting thing is that there's &lt;strong&gt;a lot of redundancy between them&lt;/strong&gt;.  If you know that a referent is nonspecific, you can infer that it's indefinite.  If you know that a referent is topical and specific, you can often infer that it's definite.  If you know that a referent has been the subject of the past umpteen clauses, you can infer that it's definite and probably topical.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot is, a language doesn't need to mark all of the distinctions, as long as it consistently marks some of them.  And this is why there can be languages like Finnish with no grammatical definiteness marking at all.  Finnish &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; marks topic, focus and telicity, and this gives enough information to work out whether a referent is definite or indefinite.  Similarly, this is why English can get away with no grammatical switch-reference: we mark focus and definiteness, and use periphrasis in a pinch (&quot;no, not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; X, the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; X&quot;), and that's enough to let us work out whether a clause has the same subject or a different subject than the one before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T15:55:36.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2011-10-14T16:22:37.070" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're using the words &quot;language&quot; and &quot;dialect&quot; as if they were mutually exclusive: as if some people spoke &quot;languages&quot; and other people spoke mere &quot;dialects.&quot;  But that's not how linguists use those words.  Think of them instead as referring to two different levels on the same hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone speaks a language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone speaks a dialect (or &quot;variety&quot;*) &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; whatever language they speak.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I speak the Midland US dialect &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; English.  Asking whether I speak a dialect or a language is like asking whether I was born in Michigan or in the United States.  The answer is &quot;both,&quot; because one includes the other.  Saying &quot;I don't speak a dialect, I just speak proper English&quot; would be like saying &quot;I don't live in a state or territory or in Washington D.C., I just live in the US,&quot; which is pretty much nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe it makes sense to rephrase your questions, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any cases where two varieties of the same language are treated as separate languages for political reasons?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any cases where two distinct languages are treated as varieties of the same language for political reasons?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases the answer is &quot;yes.&quot;  For #1, look at Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.  Most linguists consider these all to be local varieties of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_language&quot;&gt;Serbo-Croatian language&lt;/a&gt;, but native speakers will insist that they're different languages.  For #2, look at the language situation in China, where for instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese&quot;&gt;Mandarin and Cantonese are treated as varieties of the same language&lt;/a&gt; even though they're distinct languages by any non-political standard.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;*Most linguists wouldn't consider &quot;dialect&quot; to be derogatory.  But in non-technical talk, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; often used derogatorily &amp;mdash; as in &quot;That's not a real language, it's just a dialect.&quot;  So I like to use the word &quot;variety&quot; just because it makes it clear that I don't have any derogatory meaning in mind.  That's just a personal preference, though, and as far as I'm concerned if you want to say &quot;dialect&quot; that's fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T16:22:37.070" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="937" CreationDate="2011-10-14T20:02:54.963" Score="5" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for good &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; books or articles on experimental methodology in syntax or semantics.  Ideally they'd be geared towards working formal linguists who don't know much about psycholinguistics or experiment design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest question I'd like to see addressed is &quot;What experimental methods are appropriate for answering X?&quot; where X might be a research question about word meaning or syntactic structure or whatever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar with Baayen's book on stats for linguists &amp;mdash; and it's fantastic, but it's mostly focused on how to analyze the data that comes out of an experiment rather than on how to set up the experiment itself, so it's not quite what I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-10-16T18:15:37.397" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T05:03:27.517" Title="What's the &quot;state of the art&quot; for methodology in syntactic/semantic experiments" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-14T20:24:49.750" Score="6" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance.  I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes &quot;No, not-X,&quot; &quot;Well, not-X,&quot; &quot;Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!&quot; &quot;Yes, you're right about Y, but actually not-X,&quot; &quot;Have you considered the possibility that not-X?&quot; and so on.  I'm interested in the question of &lt;strong&gt;how speakers choose between these forms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively there are a few different factors that go into the decision.  Politeness is a big one.  But I suspect it's not the only one.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://christopherpotts.net/ling/data/waitaminute/potts-waitaminute.pdf&quot;&gt;Here's one paper&lt;/a&gt; on a factor other than politeness that goes into the choice between &quot;No&quot; and &quot;Hey, wait a minute.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for interesting articles or books on this phenomenon&lt;/strong&gt;, from any disciplinary point of view: sociolinguistics, anthropology, semantics, pragmatics, whatever.  They don't have to be about English &amp;mdash; actually, I'd really like some references that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; about English.  Stuff on the role of politeness would be great.  Stuff on other factors besides politeness would be even better (though I'm not sure how much work like that exists outside the business in formal semantics about &quot;wait a minute&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T10:37:02.713" Title="Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2011-10-14T22:46:50.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish there's &lt;em&gt;Dios&lt;/em&gt;, which I'm pretty sure is a continuation of the nominative. Also, I want to say that &lt;em&gt;Carlos&lt;/em&gt; is from the nominative form &lt;em&gt;Carolus&lt;/em&gt;. And of course there's &lt;em&gt;Jesus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="424" LastActivityDate="2011-10-14T22:46:50.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2011-10-15T13:51:31.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A language is a dialect with an army and navy&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (a famous saying)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2011-10-15T13:51:31.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="819" CreationDate="2011-10-15T15:48:42.013" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the process of proving a new language is in fact a language -- and that it is a &quot;new&quot; unclaimed language within linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastActivityDate="2011-10-15T19:27:32.910" Title="Proving an existing, undocumented language is &quot;new&quot;" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1765" CreationDate="2011-10-15T17:38:11.360" Score="12" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese uses a writing system called Kanji, which is a moderated version of Chinese Hanzi. The Kanji characters are similar to or often the same as the corresponding Chinese character, with the same meaning. Koreans and Vietnamese had similar applications too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Middle Ages, the Tangut and the Khitan people (as far as I know) used their own logographic writing systems which were derived from the Chinese writing system. Were they the same as Chinese (like Japanese) or were they rather different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-15T18:00:08.813" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T19:05:48.477" Title="How different were the Tangut and Khitan logographic scripts derived from Chinese Hanzi from Hanzi?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="817" CreationDate="2011-10-15T19:27:32.910" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two parts to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proving a newly-discovered language is in fact a language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proving a newly-discovered language is in fact newly-discovered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at each of these in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It's Actually a Language&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proving that what you've discovered is actually a &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; isn't something that comes up often.  Generally, when you've found that people somewhere are using some method of communicating, you can assume it's actually language.  If you're not sure whether this method you've found is a full language or not, see if it can communicate any arbitrary meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you've found isn't a full language, you'll discover that it can't communicate any arbitrary meaning, just those few meanings that it's already equipped for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you're dealing with the beginnings of a trade pigin, you might find that it only has words for concepts related to trade, and that there's no way to say something like &quot;My mother's foot is hurting.&quot;.  Or if you're looking at a form of proto-writing, you might find that it only has a limited set of symbols that can't encode the whole spoken language of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if what you're dealing with is a full language (in any medium), it will be able to communicate any concept.  Some concepts might have to be explained at length, but the language will have the tools to be able to communicate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It's Newly Discovered&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proving that a language is newly-discovered is essentially the same as proving that no one else has ever documented it.  All it takes is one example of someone else documenting it previously, and then you're not the discoverer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to do this is to publish your findings on this new language, saying that you're unaware of any previous work on the subject.  If others deserve credit for documenting this language before you, I imagine they'll speak up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's no sure way to &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; that no one has documented the language before.  There's no one worldwide repository of language documentation.  You could be writing on some language in the Himalayas, only to find many years later some forgotten Russian journal from the 1800s with documentation of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best you can say is that as far as you know, you're the first person to actually document this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2011-10-15T19:27:32.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="823" CreationDate="2011-10-15T23:41:05.490" Score="6" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;At what age range are children expected to be able to distinguish languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any factors that aid children in learning this skill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T15:07:51.220" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T16:09:59.783" Title="When and how do children learn to distinguish languages?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="832" CreationDate="2011-10-15T23:51:08.600" Score="16" ViewCount="1533" Body="&lt;p&gt;If given a list of languages the listener was able to understand or classify, how would you generate textual output using a standard phonetic alphabet, for example IPA, that would sound like a language if read by someone familiar in reading the textual output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T03:16:58.013" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T03:16:58.013" Title="How could one generate gibberish that mimics a specific language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-10-16T01:22:03.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depends on what exactly you mean. Children as young as 9 months can distinguish between native and non-native speech by identifying unfamiliar sounds and phonological patterns. How children acquire a language's phonological system is deserving of a SE question in itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know of any studies looking at when a child is able to distinguish between two non-native languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's section on phonological development&lt;/a&gt; is very comprehensive, detailed, and well cited. If you are able, I highly recommend tracking down some of the studies they cite. While I might not be familiar with any of them by name, every study involving babies I've ever read was extremely fascinating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastActivityDate="2011-10-16T01:22:03.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2011-10-16T04:55:20.680" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Nathan that you need to look at studies involving babies to find out at what age children can tell that a language they hear is not their native language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there are many interesting studies by Ann Cutler and others, and they have found good evidence that children are attuned to the distinctive intonation and stress patterns of their own language while still in the womb. Right from birth, babies will prefer to listen to those familiar patterns of their mother's language, rather than an unfamiliar language, which indicates that they can perceive the differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting thing with these findings, though, is that if the young infants hear a language which has virtually the same intonation/stress patterns as those found in their native language to-be, as Dutch has to English, their behaviour indicates that they perceive it as being the same language. It takes a few months for them to sort out that Dutch is a different language to English, presumably once they start to pick up finer details of the sound systems beyond intonation and stress. Here is a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://marcs.uws.edu.au/?q=people/professor-anne-cutler&quot;&gt;Anne Cutler's website&lt;/a&gt; including many recent articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T12:42:24.383" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T12:42:24.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="829" CreationDate="2011-10-16T08:43:31.983" Score="26" ViewCount="1256" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, calling someone's two-syllable name is tied very strongly to the minor third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages that like to have a stressed last syllable, I would expect the last syllable to be higher than the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-05T10:45:06.207" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T16:52:28.087" Title="Is it common to use the minor third for calling someone?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="825" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-10-16T10:52:00.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Case is a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads. Traditionally the term refers to inflectional marking, and, typically, case marks the relationship of a noun to a verb at the clause level or of a noun to a preposition, posposition or another noun at the phrase level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521014913&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Case&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-10-17T14:54:26.497" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T14:54:26.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-10-16T10:52:00.423" Score="0" Body="Inflectional forms that indicate the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and their modifiers (such as adjectives)." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:58:11.107" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:58:11.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="813" CreationDate="2011-10-16T13:25:02.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough to recommend textbooks on psycholinguistics, but how about this course page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/experimental_psycholinguistics_2011/schedule.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/experimental_psycholinguistics_2011/schedule.php&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw Otavio's comment only today. Here is the course description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current course will give an overview of experimental methods in psycholinguistics including the following areas: Description of different state-of-the-art methods, various experimental designs, analyses tools and evaluation of findings. Students will gather hands-on experience of all stages of experimental research by designing and running experiments themselves, learning basics of the statistical software R in order to conduct statistical modeling of the results as well as learning to present the results in the standard format of the experimental research reports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evaluation based on experimental work, active participation in lectures and the final research report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T05:03:27.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="868" CreationDate="2011-10-16T13:41:49.570" Score="11" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether anyone knows of any machine parsable database of the geographical distribution of natural languages (for example the geographical distribution of (native) speakers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know WALS has some basic information (it assigns some kind of point of origin for each langauge), but this is not what I'm looking for (indeed, I would like to have such a database to cross reference with WALS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: As the confusion in the comment section suggest my wording was rather unfortunate, as it sounded like I had a specific problem in mind. I'm not looking for anything very specfic, but I'm wondering generally about what (machine parsable) databases containing data about geographical aspects of natural langauges there are. Two very reasonable examples suggested in the comments are databases outlining the geographical regions languages are spoken and (dually) databases for querying what languages are spoken in any geographical region. Even more specific could be something along the lines of a database for querying (native?) speaker density of larger languages (for small ones I guess WALS would usually be enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I've thought of using such a database for is generating more informative maps from WALS, than those already supported by the web interface (having English be a point in England seems somewhat unintuitive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="321" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T19:20:35.770" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T19:20:35.770" Title="Are there any databases of geographical language distribution?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2011-10-16T17:48:58.567" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes! What you are describing is often referred to as &lt;strong&gt;the &lt;em&gt;calling contour&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;vocative chant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and it is &lt;strong&gt;very common, especially among European languages.&lt;/strong&gt; Bob Ladd talks about it in his book, &lt;em&gt;Intonational Phonology&lt;/em&gt; (first edition 1996, second edition 2008). The tune is characterized by a sequence of one or more syllables on a relatively high level pitch followed by one or more syllables on a somewhat lower medium level pitch. &lt;strong&gt;Ladd notes that the interval between the two notes is often, but not necessarily, three semitones, i.e. a minor third&lt;/strong&gt; (p.117 in the first edition, p.136 in the second edition). Some other languages that have been noted to make use of this tune are (not an exhaustive list): English (North America and UK), French, and Hungarian. &lt;strong&gt;French is a language that is analyzed as having final stress; nevertheless, the tune goes down at the end, not up.&lt;/strong&gt; Stress does play a role in some languages in determining when the note changes. In German and English, the higher pitch starts on the stressed syllable of the name (examples adapted from Ladd 2008):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; H      M    L  H     M      L  H M&#xA;Jo-na-than!  E-li-za-beth!  Lou-i-ise!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in French the high note is placed on the penultimate syllable, no matter what:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; H  M      L     H  M     H  M&#xA;Mo-nique!  Anne-Ma-rie!  Lou-ise!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I am using Ls, Hs, and Ms to signify what phonologists think of as the phonologically important pitch events in these tunes (the symbols used in Ladd 2008 are couched within a more technical kind of notation used in autosegmental-metrical theory). As such, they should be thought of as residing in some level of phonological abstraction, and their acoustic realization may vary depending on the context. It is well established, for example, that the overall &quot;tonal space&quot; shifts downward over time during the course of an utterance, and so even if two syllables are specified for the same &quot;tone&quot; the later one will be realized as a slightly lower pitch*. In the above examples from English, some syllables are unmarked for tone, and the idea is that the tone level from the most recently specified syllable carries over (though the actual acoustic output may decline a bit in pitch). The approximate pitch level indicated by M above is very often about a minor third below that indicated by H.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the behavior of this contour (specifically, where the higher part of the tune and the later slightly lower part of the tune anchor themselves segmentally) in different languages has given us some insights into the typological differences among those languages when it comes to stress and intonation. If you Google Ladd's book, you can read some of his discussion on the calling contour via Google Books; just search the book for the term &quot;calling contour&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a lighter note, if you listen to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZNO-yhsfeI&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Voicemail #4&quot;&lt;/a&gt; from the Broadway musical RENT, you can hear the calling contour/vocative chant in action in English! Unfortunately the lyrics don't contain any words/phrases with antepenultimate (i.e. third-to-last) stress like the name &lt;em&gt;Jonathan&lt;/em&gt;, but there are words/phrases with penultimate stress (like &lt;em&gt;Anna&lt;/em&gt;) and those with final stress (like &lt;em&gt;Louise&lt;/em&gt;), and you can hear that when the descending minor third happens indeed depends on the location of the lexical stress!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This also happens with lexical tones in tone languages. I have recordings of Cantonese speakers producing utterances composed solely of syllables with Tone 6 (the low level tone) on them, and the actual pitch gradually descends over the duration of the utterance in all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; I stumbled upon this great website, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation&lt;/a&gt;, that includes &lt;a href=&quot;http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari/mapa.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clickable maps&lt;/a&gt; with audio and video data collected from an intonational survey. The vocative tune was included among the elicited utterance types. The survey made a distinction between &quot;vocative&quot; and &quot;insistent vocative&quot;, and these category names were functional rather than descriptive. That is, the survey provided a scenario for the speaker to imagine while calling out a person's name. As a result, not all speakers chose to utilize the descending third tune that is the subject of this post. But many did!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-07-23T16:52:28.087" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T16:52:28.087" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2011-10-16T17:50:30.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can call this &lt;em&gt;the &quot;air ball&quot; phenomenon.&lt;/em&gt; Dave Barry (an American writer of a humor column for the &lt;em&gt;Miami Herald&lt;/em&gt;) wrote an article entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.miamiherald.com/2007/07/30/2175440/message-from-the-stars.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Message from the Stars&lt;/a&gt;, in which he cited the research of Dr. Cherrill P. Heaton, entitled &quot;Air Ball: Spontaneous Large Group Precision Chanting.&quot; (Although the journal may be searched &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I did not find the original article in &lt;em&gt;Popular Music and Society&lt;/em&gt;; however, this &lt;a href=&quot;http://articles.latimes.com/1995-09-24/news/mn-49383_1_air-ball&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LA Times article&lt;/a&gt; attests to the article writer interacting with Barry.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heaton's article says that an audience will mock a basketball player who completely misses the basket, rim, and backboard by chanting &quot;air ball,&quot; centering on an &quot;F&quot; for air&quot; and a &quot;D&quot; for &quot;ball.&quot; This is the minor third interval with which you hear German mothers calling their children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mothers in the US will call for their children with the air ball interval, but I have only heard it when they are calling outdoors. Sometimes, if there is some anger or impatience on the part of the parent, I have heard the interval go up, but not always a minor third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will call their pet dogs with this interval. Children will mock each other in games where their opponent has failed in a game (to tag someone, to hit them with a dodge ball) with a &quot;nyaa, nyaa&quot; in the same falling minor third (air ball) pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2011-10-16T17:50:30.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-17T12:55:25.067" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found out, that with respect to the German language, where prefixes of verbs are separated from the verb and posed behind the object, I have no chance to find out, if a verb with a prefix is used more frequent than than the same verb without the prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Er schätz sie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Er schätzt sie ab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note in the latter case the infinitive form of the verb is 'abschätzen'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://books.google.com/ngrams/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="408" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T11:50:07.337" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:50:07.337" Title="Are there tools similar Google ngram, which recognise conjugated or declined word forms?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-10-17T14:34:36.467" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a real question that has a real answer published by real linguists to answer other real linguistics questions. (It also has applications in amateur linguistics and non-linguistics fields, like generating lorem ipsum text for design layout)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/wuggy&quot;&gt;http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/wuggy&lt;/a&gt;  This application will generate similar words given a pre-existing list of any language. It does not do a perfect job of generating phonotactically valid words, but it's close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better way to generate random words is to work out the phonotactics of the target language-- which patterns of consonant and vowels are permitted, what is permitted as a coda, onset and nucleus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally you'd choose sounds according to frequency in existing corpus, but a uniform distribution might be okay for a first approximation. Then you start generating words by choosing letters at random, constrained by the phonotactic rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markov chains work, but phonotactic rules are only kind of like markov chains. A (possible) markov chain only pays attention to the most recent letter could generate words that don't follow the coda-nucleus-onset patter and are too long or too short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To generate words in a language with interesting morphology, you'd need to select at random the relevant prefixes and suffixes and apply the necessary changes to allow those morphemes to be attached to the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-18T14:11:25.853" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T14:11:25.853" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="845" CreationDate="2011-10-17T16:28:27.847" Score="6" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past when I was an active Python coder I played a bit with NLTK and learned some basic linguistic terminology. But meanwhile I shifted to PowerShell and I have abandoned coding in Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every now and than I'm searching for linguistic projects in PowerShell context, but until now I didn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other sources not based on script languages I should consider?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="408" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-18T14:08:56.857" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T11:13:24.247" Title="Are there any linguistic toollkits for PowerShell or .NET?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-17T18:26:46.247" Score="29" ViewCount="19185" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I am not interested in hearing the common distinction made in introductory text-books, I am interested in hearing what meaningful distinction there can be between morphology and syntax. Is there any structural, or rather formal, difference between the two? Also if that distinction requires the concept of word, how does one formally describe that?       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="429" LastEditorUserId="429" LastEditDate="2011-10-18T22:03:15.000" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T11:45:51.970" Title="What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="831" CreationDate="2011-10-17T18:49:55.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/verbmobil/Dialogs/vmcd/query.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a web interface for the Verbmobil corpus&lt;/a&gt; that may give a rough approximation of what you need.  Try the query &lt;code&gt;[lemma=&quot;kommen&quot;] []{0,10} auf&lt;/code&gt; for forms of the word &lt;em&gt;aufkommen&lt;/em&gt; in which the &lt;em&gt;auf&lt;/em&gt; is separated by up to ten words.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course suboptimal; you really want to find examples in which &lt;em&gt;kommen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;auf&lt;/em&gt; are in a &lt;em&gt;specific syntactic relationship&lt;/em&gt;.  But to find examples like that, you'd need (a) a parsed corpus, and (b) a search language that can describe syntactic patterns and not just surface word order.  If you wanted to go down that rabbit hole, I'd suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/TIGER/TIGERCorpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TIGER corpus&lt;/a&gt;, but it's not web accessible and not really usable by people who don't understand a bit about linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Mitch points out in his comment, the separable prefixes are an unusually tough case.  So comparing counts for &lt;em&gt;kommen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aufkommen&lt;/em&gt; will actually be much more difficult than doing other sorts of comparisons.  If you wanted to know something like &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;kommen&lt;/em&gt; (with or without a prefix) more common than &lt;em&gt;gehen&lt;/em&gt; (with or without a prefix),&quot; you could get a pretty good answer from Verbmobil.  You need to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/verbmobil/Dialogs/vmcd/aquery.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;advanced search&lt;/a&gt; so you can set the number of returned matches above 100, but if you do that, &lt;code&gt;[lemma=&quot;kommen&quot;]&lt;/code&gt; gives 1176 matches and &lt;code&gt;[lemma=&quot;gehen&quot;]&lt;/code&gt; gives 4545.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Those counts also highlight another disadvantage of the Verbmobil corpus: it's &lt;i&gt;much smaller&lt;/i&gt; than Google's.  This is generally true in corpus linguistics: it's easy to get enormous corpora of raw text, but corpora with any sort of grammatical information attached are really labor-intensive and tend to be much smaller.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T18:49:55.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-17T22:52:02.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To say that it takes longer for a healthy child to acquire naturally one language over another would implicate many more things than just sheer &quot;complexity&quot; of a particular language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us make the assumption that for all natural languages, the expression rate of information is roughly equal; that is to say no human language exceeds another in how fast and efficiently information may be communicated via the language.  If that were not the case, then speakers of languages with a much higher rate of information output (this is keeping in mind the economy needing in both coding and decoding a spoken utterance carrying some kind of meaning) would have an inherent advantage over language speakers with a lower output.  All languages then would strive for the same strategies of communicating.  But, as we see by looking at over the 5,000 uniqe languages of the world, that is not the case at all!  There exist many many strategies to communicate over roughly the same meaning, each one with their own benefits and strengths which in the end should equal out to the same rate of information flow for every language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if one accepts that language speakers communicate at the same rate regardless of which language they may be using, then why should one language take longer to gain fluency in than another?  As said previously, different areas of language may be acquired sooner than others, but any difference should be minimal.  The linguistic idea behind this is that all languages are equal and equally complex.  We are only biased by our own native toungue(s) and the languages which we have learned as L2s, so yes indeed one might think a child would take longer to acquire say Latin than English but it is more of a subjective fallacy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem to be true however that there has been a general trend in language to &quot;simplify&quot; itself by removing case inflections, verb-subject agreements, etc., but this may just a  subpart of the cycle of language change itself.  Nonetheless, that would be a related topic to research which might shed light.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="432" LastActivityDate="2011-10-17T22:52:02.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="863" CreationDate="2011-10-17T22:59:03.903" Score="1" ViewCount="949" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the cognates of onomatopoetic sounds are highly similar even across unrelated languages. In these cases, the sounds of words seem to be an attempt to echo naturally occurring sounds. Other words follow etymology stemming patterns. Still others have no known relationship to what they attempt to express, or to existing expressions; I'm in fact not aware of any, but pretty sure they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T08:23:07.543" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T08:23:07.543" Title="What is the term for how close a phonetic expression is to its meaning?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="839" CreationDate="2011-10-18T01:43:32.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terminology for how much a word sounds like its meaning is pretty simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;onomatopoeia - a word or short sequence of phonemes that is imitative of a non-linguistic sound. for example the sound of a bee is called 'buzzing' in English, the voiced alveolar fricative evocative of the drone of the bee. In comparison to all the sounds humans make, these sequences are very rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it. In fact the vast majority of linguistically produced sequences are so arbitrary and so distant from imitation, that there is no specialword for the larger set of non-onomatopoeic words. And there is no real 'in-between' stage of 'somewhat sounding like the thing it stands for, but not quite', because onomatopoeia includes that too. For example, in a bee buzzing, have you ever heard a voiced bilabial stop? That is 'in between' but is still considered onomatopoeia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T01:43:32.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="839" CreationDate="2011-10-18T03:24:24.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no specific term for how well an onomatopoeic word approximates the sound it refers to, because there is no way to measure how alike two sounds are. Remember that nearly every utterance made by the human vocal apparatus is a combination of several articulators sounding in unison (or phased relative to each other), making their output even more difficult to compare to any given sound in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T03:24:24.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-18T13:35:49.330" Score="3" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;On German Language &amp;amp; Usage we recently had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2811/is-there-a-non-insulting-definition-of-the-word-schmuck&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about the English word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmuck_%28pejorative%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;schmuck&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which is a false friend of the German word &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmuck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schmuck&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of curiosity I tried the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Schmuck,%20schmuck&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;capitalized form vs the non capitalized&lt;/a&gt; form in Google ngram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being astonished by the high number of hits for the Capitalized form I retried this with the more innocent noun &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=house,%20House&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;house&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand the results. I think all the words a normally written in the non capitalized form, except when used in titles or at the beginning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this looks rather arbitrary to me and I have the impression that I would choose a case insensitive option if only I had a chance to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just another shortcoming of Google ngram or is this a problem for other ngram viewers too, and I have to care to set some options explicitly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="408" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:49:37.630" Title="What is the idea of ngram viewers working case-sensitive?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2011-10-18T17:56:38.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="842" CreationDate="2011-10-18T16:35:24.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After doing the search for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Schmuck,schmuck,%20SCHMUCK,%20sCHMUCK&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schmuck,schmuck,SCHMUCK,sCHMUCK&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which should return a graph that looks like this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/chart?content=Schmuck,schmuck,SCHMUCK,sCHMUCK&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you should just be able to check yourself by clicking the &quot;download here&quot;, which is within the phrase &quot;Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that page you'll find instruction on how to download the data and a link to a total counts file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you have those files, it'd be easy enough to do a quick check on the result counts reported versus those within the text provided using something like a GREP command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, believe you'll find that there's not an error in the graph, and would venture a guess that the phrase &quot;Schmuck!&quot; is not all that uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:47.823" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T16:45:19.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-18T17:41:50.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked for evidence to back myself up here, but didn't find any, so here's a mere anecdote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my professors who was working with the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin reported that, though the children seemed fluent at a young age to her, native speakers reported that they didn't consider children fluent until maybe 10 or 11 years old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course lots of caveats to this: Menominee is practically moribund (at best endangered) so the children were bilingual, and possibly reluctant learners. Who knows what criteria for &quot;fluent&quot; the native speakers were using (or my professor, for that matter). Maybe &quot;fluency&quot; is culturally related to &quot;adulthood&quot; in the native speakers mind or something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just thought I'd put it out there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T17:41:50.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="835" CreationDate="2011-10-18T18:48:33.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, there are no &quot;truly equivalent&quot; implementations of NLTK in PowerShell.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_language_processing_toolkits&quot;&gt;list of natural language processing toolkits&lt;/a&gt; which is sortable by the computer language they were implemented in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastActivityDate="2011-10-18T18:48:33.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="848" CreationDate="2011-10-19T01:34:48.633" Score="10" ViewCount="1791" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any packages that do much the same thing for audio/speech that the &lt;code&gt;langid&lt;/code&gt; component/corpus of NLTK does for written text? The &lt;code&gt;langid&lt;/code&gt; corpus/tool makes surprisingly accurate guesses about a language after training on popular trigram counts for a bunch of languages (from a web-scraped corpus), by comparing overlap of the new document with the trigrams for each known language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that there are two really hard problems here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developing an audio segmenter/chunker (I expect there are decent solutions out there already for this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collecting a corpus of audio for many different languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a whole lot of experience in speech recognition and that whole domain. Is this even feasible, or is speech way too hard to process for this purpose, given the state of voice recognition at this point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastActivityDate="2011-10-19T10:12:00.417" Title="Automatic/Computational Language Detection in Speech" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-10-19T04:16:49.457" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics defines morphology as 'The study of the grammatical structures of words and the categories realised by them', and syntax as 'The study of grammatical relations between words and other units within the sentence'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you point out in your question these (pretty standard) definitions depend on the notion 'word' to delimit the domains of each subject. The notion of 'word' is problematic as there's no good definition that applies across all languages. It seems that it's best (or easiest) to define 'word' on a language by language basis, although even then there are problems as different kinds of 'word' can often be distinguished depending on the sets of criteria used: often there is a 'prosodic word' (defined on phonological bases) which differs from the 'grammatical word' (defined in terms of morphosyntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 'word' can be precisely defined in a given language then the domains of morphology and syntax can be fairly clearly distinguished, but if not then there is not a clear boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So cross-linguistically the notion of 'word' is fuzzy, as are the terms 'morphology' and 'syntax'. But for most languages, and in most cases, it's still pretty clear what's meant by these terms; and of course there's the term 'morphosyntax' for boundary cases. So while these two terms are not precise they are still useful as a general way of referring to certain domains within a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-19T04:59:57.213" LastActivityDate="2011-10-19T04:59:57.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="846" CreationDate="2011-10-19T09:58:00.593" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your task is called Spoken Language Identification (LID) or Language Recognition. The best current systems combine acoustic and phonotactic information sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This paper was the first to show the superiority of GMMs with shifted delta cepstral coefficients:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P. A. Torres-Carrasquillo, E. Singer, M. A. Kohler, R. J. Greene, D. A.&#xA;  Reynolds, J. R. Deller, Jr., Approaches to language identication using&#xA;  Gaussian mixture models and shifted delta cepstral features, in: International&#xA;  Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2002, pp. 89-92. &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.4320&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PDF&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This paper used SVM on top of GMM and it is considered the best method using acoustic features: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;William M. Campbell, Joseph P. Campbell, Douglas A.&#xA;  Reynolds, E. Singer, and P. A. Torres-Carrasquillo, “Support vector machines for speaker and language recognition.,” Computer Speech and Language, vol. 20, no. 2-3,&#xA;  pp. 210–229, 2006. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asel.udel.edu/icslp/cdrom/vol3/537/a537.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PDF&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This paper used phonotactics and provides one of the best current results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Haizhou Li, Bin Ma, and Chin-Hui Lee, “A vector space&#xA;  modeling approach to spoken language identiﬁcation,”&#xA;  IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, vol. 15, pp. 271–284, January 2007. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.meraka.org.za/pubs/peche07phonotactic.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PDF&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="435" LastEditorUserId="435" LastEditDate="2011-10-19T10:12:00.417" LastActivityDate="2011-10-19T10:12:00.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-19T14:04:53.270" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is obvious to anyone who only knows one language and doesn't know anyone who is bilingual that their own language is simple and other languages have varying degrees of complexity and ease of learning. For an English speaker, &lt;strong&gt;learning as a second language&lt;/strong&gt;, French and Spanish are relatively &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt;, but Latin and Chinese are much more &lt;em&gt;difficult&lt;/em&gt; and require each a lot of special extra studying to get 'right' (this is ignoring the irrelevant complication of writing method and living/dead situations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is about &lt;strong&gt;first language&lt;/strong&gt; learning. It turns out from seeing many children learning their first language and from bilingual children that they communicate perfectly fine in any of their first languages and communicate equally well in either if bilingual. (I have no reference for this but) they are also grammatical to the same extent  at the same age (French children know the gender of all the nouns they use, with mistakes made in false generalization just like English speaking children might make the mistake 'getted' instead of the past tense 'got').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language like Russian or German with long lists of conjugations and declensions with multiple forms for gender, person, mood, etc, etc with agreement and then there are all the exceptions, they seem so complex and need lots of study by people whose first language doesn't have such features (actually, they need lots of study by people whose L1 -does- have similar features, they don't realize their own language is complex in that way and even if you know the form of the rules you still need to know the specifics). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just turns out that first language learners have no problem with what others perceive as complexity. Think of all the separable verbs in English: call out, call up, call in, call off, put away, put up, put up with, put out. It's just not obvious which preposition to use for which meaning, you just have to learn it. But native English speakers don't even get taught this at school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it just turns out counter to intuition that children do learn to speak fluently -and- grammatically in their L1 at the same rate for all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-10-26T17:27:22.107" LastActivityDate="2011-10-26T17:27:22.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-19T16:45:42.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about first languages, language acquisition is around the same age given freedom from cognitive disabilities and of course adequate exposure to the language (i.e. was not raised in the wild by wolves).  However, language mastery is quite another story.  As in the comment by @MatthewMartin, a language such as Cree which known to be notoriously difficult can take nearly until the start of adolescence to get a firm grasp on.  I believe I heard this statement made by John McWhorter in one of his lectures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2011-10-19T16:45:42.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-19T19:33:00.663" Score="8" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;expresses the category D&quot; I mean, preferably, that there is solid evidence/argumentation for a given morpheme to be analyzed as overtly heading a Determiner projection. I would limit such expressions in this case to those communicating meaning like the definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, but not demonstratives like &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By not displaying inverse scope, I mean that an equivalent translation of (1) would support the interpretation in (2) but not in (3). Perhaps the same for (4) with the interpretations paraphrased in (5) and (6):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some student saw every professor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a (single) student (say, John) such that he saw every professor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For every professor x, there is a (different) student that saw x&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is a solution to every problem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a (single) solution such that it applies to every problem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For every problem x, there is a (different) solution for x&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="178" LastEditDate="2011-11-01T18:55:21.750" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T06:44:56.020" Title="Is there any language that expresses the category D but doesn't have inverse scope?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="851" CreationDate="2011-10-19T23:00:39.300" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, the hypercatergory D has been deconstructed since before it was accepted as the highest layer of the nominal, like in Szabolcsi's work that shows &quot;every&quot; being distinct from articles, and Shlonsky's work on &quot;all&quot; as its own weird category, &quot;each&quot; goes all over the place, and investigation in numerals and weak quantifiers suggest they form a unique category low enough in the structure for classifiers to cliticize. The one determiner that has stood the test of time is &quot;the&quot; (see Alexiadou, Haeheman, and Stavrou's book on the topic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, one such language, with that caveat and with another caveat to be named, is my pet language Bengali. It has -- again, arguably -- a D layer in that there is nominal-internal NP movement, over numerals. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tinTa    Sundor    beRal&#xA;three.Cl beautiful cat&#xA;&#xA;Sundor    beRal tinTa&#xA;beautiful cat   three.Cl&#xA;&#xA;&quot;the three beautiful cats&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I can't think of the reference, it it has been claimed that Bengali also has scrambling and strict scope -- with the exception of canonical SOV sentences! I'll add the citation later with examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-02T06:44:56.020" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T06:44:56.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="854" CreationDate="2011-10-20T00:08:29.297" Score="15" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, linguists determine grammaticality by judgement tests. Native speakers are presented with several types of utterances and, based on their intuition, they can judge each of these utterances as being grammatical or ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But languages like Latin and Gothic, for example, are not spoken natively by anyone anymore. So, does it make sense to talk about grammaticality for dead languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T17:00:07.337" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T21:41:49.367" Title="How is grammaticality judged in dead languages?" Tags="&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-10-20T00:43:28.400" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;That may depend on your definition. We Latinists trust in corpus research and what Roman grammarians said themselves about what they found acceptable. Of course we have less certainty than with living languages, but overall it isn't really a fundamental problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could even be said that corpus research is more reliable than judgement tests, because people may say they would &quot;never write&quot; certain things that they do in fact write on occasion. (Keep in mind that the Latin we know is a literary language: we don't make many claims about spoken Latin. Grammaticality differs between spoken and written English too, at least for most people.) I have heard many Dutchmen claim they pronounce the n of the infinitive (&lt;em&gt;lopen&lt;/em&gt;) and plural nouns (&lt;em&gt;apen&lt;/em&gt;) who wouldn't accept that they did not in fact pronounce it. Another example is the famous linguistics student who said in class, &quot;that is not true, Professor: I don't say &lt;em&gt;don't!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, then cowered in shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T21:41:49.367" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T21:41:49.367" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-10-20T01:06:57.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, It doesn't make sense for exactly the reasons you posited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammaticality judgments require a native speaker. It's safe to say that anything found in the corpus of a dead language is grammatical but there is no way of judging the grammaticality of anything not in the corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T01:06:57.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="734" CreationDate="2011-10-20T05:22:37.100" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add a few of the underlying reasons why the Greek half of the Empire never took to Latin as much as the western half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the population and the economic power of the eastern half of the Mediterranean was greater than that of the western half. Its culture had a longer history, and Greek literature and philosophy were a revered cornerstone of the Roman Empire. That is why the Greek world (the elites in most eastern cities had been using Greek for centuries) was not as open to adopting Latin. When the court moved to Constantinople in the 4th century AD, Latin was used by the government for a century or two, but even that was not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the west, however, the Romans had encountered many Celtic cultures, which did not have a tradition of literature and philosophy as ancient and respectable as that of the Greeks. The Romans were seen as bringers of culture in great parts of Gaul and Spain. Moreover, several different languages were spoken in the cities: Celtic languages/dialects, Greek, and probably Punic in the various Carthaginian cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, before the Romans came, urban life in the west was not nearly as developed as in the east; except perhaps in the south of Italy and the south of Gaul—but that was surpassed by the cities of Asia Minor or Greece or Egypt or Mesopotamia. Consequently, the comparative economic power of Rome was far stronger in the west than in the east. By the time the German tribes arrived, from the 4th century AD onwards, Gaul and Spain had become fairly Romanized. The influx of Germanic people was not enough to disturb this in the more urbanized regions. Nevertheless, it is said that French contains a great many elements from both the Celtic substrate and the Germanic superstrate languages. I don't know much about Spanish, but there is probably some influence there too from substrate and superstrate languages, notably Arabic, which was spoken in most of Spain for six centuries (roughly between the 8th and the 15th century AD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italy and Sicily, Roman influence was strongest, because they were closest to Rome, and because they comprised the first provinces the Romans conquered, in the 3rd century BC. Etruria was conquered centuries before that, so that little is left of Etruscan that we know of, except a few loan words like &lt;em&gt;persona&lt;/em&gt;, I believe. In addition, Sicily was divided between Carthage and Greece, so that it was probably not uniformly Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In southern Italy and eastern Sicily, there were many very large and powerful Greek cities—notably Syracuse on Sicily—together called &lt;em&gt;Magna Graecia&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Great Greece&quot;. Syracuse had about 300,000 inhabitants in its days of glory, rivalling even with Athens. This may have been enough for large parts of (former) Magna Graecia to withstand cultural pressure from nearby Rome: they probably never fully adopted Latin in the Roman era. After Justinian had reconquered most of Italy in the 6th century AD, the south remained under Greek Byzantine rule for several centuries more. In fact, about 30,000 speakers of Griko still exist in southern Italy today (Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T20:11:43.533" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T20:11:43.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="858" CreationDate="2011-10-20T09:50:23.747" Score="6" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages that don't have a perfect 1:1 mapping between sounds and letters in their written form there are two possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English &quot;bow&quot; and &quot;bough&quot; are two spellings with a single pronunciation &lt;code&gt;/baʊ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English &lt;code&gt;/bəʊ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/baʊ/&lt;/code&gt; are two pronunciations with a single spelling &quot;bow&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English both are pretty common, and as my example shows sometimes even the &quot;same word&quot; can be a case of both. But in other languages one case may be much more prevalent than the other. For instance in Modern Greek there are several sounds that can be spelled in multiple ways but I'm not aware of any spellings that can be pronounced in multiple ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What terms are used to describe languages or writing systems where 1. occurs and where 2. occurs?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T12:09:59.003" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T12:09:59.003" Title="Are there different terms for when a language has two ways to spell a sound vs. two ways to pronounce a spelling?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="857" CreationDate="2011-10-20T12:03:38.173" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3SbuY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homograph_homophone_venn_diagram.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia Homograph homophone venn diagram.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe your first example is called heterograph and the second case is a heteronym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T12:03:38.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-20T14:31:14.203" Score="13" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that a number of classifer languages have what might be called &quot;plural classifiers&quot; which -- unlike &quot;normal&quot; classifier -- force a plural, count interpretation, instead of being ambiguous between a single interpretation with a mass-y quantification. That is, in the general case, we see things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bengali&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Onek-Ta rasta  &#xA;many-Cl road   &#xA;&quot;a lot of road&quot; or &quot;many roads&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mandarin&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nei-ge  ren  &#xA;that-Cl person  &#xA;&quot;that person&quot; or &quot;those people&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, there are also &quot;plural&quot; classifiers for these languages that disambiguate, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bengali&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Onek-gulo rasta  &#xA;many-Cl.PL road  &#xA;&quot;many roads&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mandarin&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nei -xie   ren  &#xA;that-Cl.PL person  &#xA;&quot;those people&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cool. But, I also know that Bengali and Mandarin both disallow the &quot;plural&quot; classifier with numerals (and I think other weak quantifiers), so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bengali&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*tin-gulo rasta&#xA;tin  -Ta rasta&#xA;three-Cl road&#xA;&quot;three roads&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mandarin&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*san-xie ren&#xA;san  -ge ren&#xA;three-Cl person  &#xA;&quot;three people&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with a classifier language that has a &quot;plural&quot; classifier? If so, does it only occur on things that aren't numerals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of languages in which numerals co-occur with the stem of the noun and not the plural form (&lt;strong&gt;cf.&lt;/strong&gt; Finnish &lt;em&gt;kissat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cats&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;kolme kissaa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;three cats&quot;), but this is obviously parameterized since in English we say &quot;three cats&quot;, not &quot;*three cat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I ask this is I've been concerned about the fact that all(?) classifier languages seem to place a classifier with the word &quot;one&quot;, so you get Mandarin Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*yi ren&#xA;yi-ge ren&#xA;one-Cl person&#xA;&quot;a/one person&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, there's no &quot;plural&quot; marker that occurs with the numeral &quot;one&quot; in languages that have a morphological singular/plural distinction. This should be surprising on the Doetjes/Borer-type story in which classifiers and number markers are all but the same thing, just morphophonemicized differently. Hence, I'm curious if the lack of co-occurrence with plural classifiers with numerals is a universal, or if that is parameterized in the same way as the Finnish/English distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-11T14:37:08.523" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T18:40:44.037" Title="Are there languages in which plural classifiers co-occur with numerals?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;countability&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-10-20T14:39:15.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me fail to answer your question by asking another question -- what do we GAIN by drawing the distinction? By &quot;ironing out&quot; the distinctions, we can avoid having to postulate quite different grammatical architectures for polysynthetic vs. analytic languages, and we can capture the fact that there are generalizations across these languages. If we have distinct notions of morphology and syntax, the fact that subjects and objects agree with the verb in certain ways regardless of whether there's a word boundary between them or not is completely accidental. Put differently, why should we have phonological atoms be the same as syntactic/semantic atoms at the cost of generality across typologically distinct languages? Remember, although it gets debated a lot in various circles in Linguistics, the standard analyses of verbal morphology in English has pretty much always been syntactic at its core in the Chomskyan generative enterprise since LSLT!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T14:39:15.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-10-20T19:56:10.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One interesting source of information comes from what old prescriptive grammarians found to gripe about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every now and then you'll see someone write something like &quot;It's very bad to use the form X.  You should only ever use this other form Y.&quot;  What that tells us, in an indirect way, is that some people had &lt;em&gt;started&lt;/em&gt; using X.  (After all, why would you complain about a &quot;mistake&quot; unless some people around you were actually making it?)  In other words: for at least some speakers of the language, we can conclude that X had become grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in these cases, we can learn about how people actually talked, and not just how they believed they should talk.  But this sort of thing is pretty rare.  Usually, yeah, it's just corpus work on the written language, like Cerberus describes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-20T19:56:10.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="536" CreationDate="2011-10-20T23:45:15.367" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to analyse Maori grammar without finding a straightforward contrast between 'noun' and 'verb', at least at the highest level of categorisation. Many Maori words may occur in a variety of syntactic environments, somewhat like English zero-derivation (eg, 'fish' can be noun or verb-or perhaps there's two words 'fish', one verb and one noun, but they have identical form?) but much more pervasive. As a result, there have been serious analyses that don't employ the usual noun-verb categtorisation. Bruce Biggs (1996) analysed Maori as having two major categories, 'bases' and 'particles', with five subcategories of 'base'. According to Biggs, Particles are words that occur on the peripheries of phrases and perform functions such as case marking, TAM, directionality, deixis, etc. Bases are those words that can occur as phrasal head and provide the lexical content. He divides 'base' into these five subcategories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun: can take definite article but can't occur as head of verb phrase.&#xA;Universal: a word that may be passivised.&#xA;Stative: a base that can be head of a verb phrase, but not passivised.&#xA;Locative: a base that can be directly preceded by the locative preposition.&#xA;Personal: a base that takes the personal article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while 'nouns' and 'verbs' are grouped together at the highest level of categorisation, they are distinguished as subcategories (with verbs broken into two subcategories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more recent attempt to classify Maori word classes is that of Winifred Bauer, in &lt;em&gt;The Reed Reference Grammar of Maori&lt;/em&gt;. She takes a very different approach to Biggs, although starting from the same issue that 'Maori, like other Polynesian languages, uses the same form of a word in many different syntactic environments' (p. 65). Her analysis identifies classes of noun and verb (along with others) but she argues that morphosyntactic distributional criteria are not enough to identify all and only the members of each category and that the way forms contribute to the organisation of syntactic structure in the clause is also relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-10-21T02:20:31.407" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T02:20:31.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="839" CreationDate="2011-10-21T11:56:09.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no terminology for the level of closeness a 'phonetic expression' takes to its 'meaning', quite simply because this is not something that is researched or discussed in linguistic circles, as there is no real reason to engage in this sort of enquiry.&#xA;Here are some reasons why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) As addressed in the comments, and as widely believed throughout linguistics, &lt;strong&gt;most words are arbitrary with regards to their meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, with no real connection between the types and combinations of sounds in the word to the referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) When onomatopoeia does occur (and it is rare, in that most languages have a tiny number of onomatopoeic words compared to arbitrary words), it is essentially formalised mimicry. As has been pointed out, you can't get very far comparing human vocalisations to non-human sounds, whether they are sounds of animal calls, falling rocks, rushing water, or whatever. All of these real-world sounds will be produced by very different means, and humans can, at best, come up with an approximation of them that works with the constraints of the human vocal tract. More importantly, &lt;strong&gt;an onomatopoeic word can't just try to imitate a referent sound as precisely as possible - it also has to abide by the phoneme inventory, phonotactics and phonological processes specific to the language, at least to a certain extent&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the main reason why onomatopoeic sounds vary cross-linguistically, plus the fact that different speakers may have different perceptions of the same referent sound, and may therefore be mimicking different aspects of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, an onomatopoeic word is, by virtue of being formalised, a word like any other, and &lt;strong&gt;subject to the same processes of language change&lt;/strong&gt;, in particular sound change. This will also account for a lot of variation in onomatopoeic words for the same referent, and something which may have originally been a close approximation of a referent sound is likely to become further and further removed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) There is an active area of research into &lt;strong&gt;sound symbolism&lt;/strong&gt;, but the findings are in general tenuous, and are certainly not based on direct correspondences between a word and a particular sound or thing it references. Rather, &lt;strong&gt;research on sound symbolism investigates the more subtle connections between certain types of sounds and certain types of very broad, non-concrete meanings&lt;/strong&gt;. E.g. sonorants as opposed to obstruents, or voiced sounds as opposed to voiceless sounds, or back vowels as opposed to high front vowels, and the connotations they seem to have of qualities such as 'spikiness' or 'roundness', or 'sweetness' or 'sourness', or 'tiny-ness' or 'big-ness', and so on. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128211.600-kiki-or-bouba-in-search-of-languages-missing-link.html?full=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There is an accessible overview of such research in this New Scientist article.&lt;/a&gt; Phonestheme research falls under this category, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound symbolism research has found some very interesting patterns based on human interpretations of nonsense words (and this has produced a wealth of knowledge for advertisers coming up with new brand names and slogans), but this is not so straightforward as an easily observable connection between the sound of the word and the referent, and of course there is still no terminology to describe the degree of similarity between the two, because &lt;strong&gt;the referent doesn't generally &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a sound in many examples of sound symbolism&lt;/strong&gt;. (What is the sound of 'sour'?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T11:56:09.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="866" CreationDate="2011-10-21T14:43:46.227" Score="12" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of alphabetic writing systems are part of the Phoenician lineage (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic and friends) or Brahmic (Devanagari and friends). Is there an active alphabetic system outside these two families. I found it surprising if there are only two families, while other types of writing system seem to have a lot more families. Is there any explanation to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2012-05-05T20:36:31.930" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T08:01:36.640" Title="Is there an active alphabetic writing system not based on the Phoenician or the Brahmic lineage?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="869" CreationDate="2011-10-21T14:57:43.727" Score="47" ViewCount="11471" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been observed that in general, a word for &quot;mother&quot; tends to be based on a bilabial nasal [m] or similar consonant, and for father it tends to be [b] or [p]. This is found in many language families, so they can't be considered cognates. This is usually explained by the easiness of babies making this sound early in their babbling, so the parents just use those sounds to refer to themselves. However why is it that few languages have used the reverse? (i.e. [p]/[b] for mother and [m] for father)? Wikipedia lists only Georgian, where &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa#Caucasian_languages&quot;&gt;&quot;father&quot; is /mama/ and &quot;mother&quot; is /deda/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-02-29T17:30:25.260" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T17:32:59.167" Title="Why do most words for &quot;mother&quot;, across languages, start with an [m], and for &quot;father&quot; with [p]/[b], but not vice versa?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;&lt;proto-world&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="864" CreationDate="2011-10-21T15:17:27.723" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Korean Hangul.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only one known to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Incidentally, the Brahmic lineage is itself derived from the Phoenician.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T15:17:27.723" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-10-21T22:33:57.090" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is a strong tendency it is still only a tendency. The prevalence of these two sounds in the names of parents is not surprising, given that they're two of the easiest sounds to make regardless of the sound system of your language. Think about English - we have 'mother' and 'father' but we'll accept 'mama' or 'dada' as a first word, because they're easy to make - open CV structure and basic stop sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, across the world caregivers have an incentive to hear what they want to hear - and they want to hear their children say their names. Given that cross-linguistically mothers are generally caregivers, the easiest sound 'ma' usually is used first and the harder sound 'pa' or 'da' somewhere around second. Children are already very aware of who their caregivers are before they can articulate that, so as soon as they can articulate something, even something as simple as 'ma' this gets attributed as a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's less that these words are a strong cross-linguistic tendency and more that parents are anxious to hear meaning in a child's early babbling-like word production!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T22:33:57.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="828" CreationDate="2011-10-21T23:05:37.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the best online source of information on the geographical distribution of natural languages would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;. Ethnologue aims to catalogue all of the world's languages and provides speaker numbers, rough location, family affiliation and other information, along with maps for many areas. Conversely, for every country in the world it lists the main languages that are spoken there, along with an estimate of speaker numbers. It is not designed to be parsed, but it can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldgeodatasets.com/language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Language Mapping System&lt;/a&gt;, but this is not free and uses a very dodgy language classification scheme (Ruhlen's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other sources that deal with restricted subsets of the world's languages are: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://austlang.aiatsis.gov.au/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AustLang&lt;/a&gt; (a complete catalogue of Australian languages), and the forthcoming &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1058096&amp;amp;WT.z_pims_id=12816&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ELCat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-21T23:05:37.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2011-10-22T04:50:10.380" Score="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue is discussed in some detail in &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20051128091658/http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Where do mama/papa words come from?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by the late, great linguist Larry Trask. The paper also gives a very nice introduction to argumentation in historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is that these terms are based on the earliest 'intelligible' babble of babies. The most common first syllable produced by babies is [ma], with [pa/ba/ta/da] following soon after. These earliest articulations are probably just play for the child, but are interpreted by parents as attempts by the baby to address them. As mothers tend to be the main early caregiver the earliest-occurring syllable, typically [ma], is interpreted as referring to them, while the next-occurring syllables are very commonly interpreted as referring to the father. This gives rise to the strong, but not invariant, association of [ma] with 'mother' and [pa/ba/ta/da] with 'father'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T22:09:34.277" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T22:09:34.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="871" CreationDate="2011-10-22T14:04:17.983" Score="5" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any software or tools for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet#WordNet_as_an_ontology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ontology&lt;/a&gt; and WordNet development?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="401" LastEditDate="2011-10-22T14:17:36.090" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T17:09:54.290" Title="Wordnet and Ontology software" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2011-10-22T17:09:54.290" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many. A good place to start is: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/related-projects/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/related-projects/&lt;/a&gt; .&#xA;It has many examples. Just to name several randomly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Suggested Upper Merged &lt;em&gt;Ontology&lt;/em&gt; (SUMO) is an &lt;em&gt;ontology&lt;/em&gt; specified in first order logic. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sigmakee.cvs.sourceforge.net/sigmakee/KBs/WordNetMappings/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SUMO mappings to WordNet 3.0&lt;/a&gt; are available. Email Adam Pease for more information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul Buitelaar, of DFKI-Language Technology in Germany, has developed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dfki.de/~paulb/corelex.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoreLex&lt;/a&gt;, an &lt;em&gt;ontology&lt;/em&gt; and semantic database of 126 underspecified semantic types, covering around 40,000 nouns. CoreLex defines a large number of systematic polysemous classes, derived by a careful, semi-automatic analysis of sense distributions in WordNet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.semanticweb.org/library/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Resource Description Framework (RDF)&lt;/a&gt; representation of WordNet and &lt;em&gt;ontology&lt;/em&gt; defining the terms used to represent the RDF version were developed by Sergey Melnik and Stefan Decker [email].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="435" LastActivityDate="2011-10-22T17:09:54.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="894" CreationDate="2011-10-22T21:24:35.023" Score="14" ViewCount="14114" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does it mean for a language or verb to be one or the other of these typologies (examples would help)? Can it be more than one at once?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T15:29:28.773" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:29:28.773" Title="What's the difference between accusative, unaccusative, ergative, and unergative?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;&lt;valency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2011-10-22T22:59:14.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Link between clusive pronouns and first person singular&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article for clusivity does include a somewhat incomplete table of the inclusive/exclusive pronouns in various languages, including a column listing what form is closest to / related to the first person singular. As far as I can tell, the data seems fairly mixed, and there are no individual citations for these forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more theoretical perspective, which might shed light the relationship between clusive pronouns and other pronouns, the one JSTOR article that I could find which might be relevant was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On Markedness Asymmetries in Person and Number&#xA;  Martha McGinnis&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 81, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 699-718&#xA;  Published by: Linguistic Society of America&#xA;  Article Stable URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489970&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489970&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I perused this article. It discusses a revision of a feature representation of pronouns proposed by Harley and Ritter, and some markedness asymmetries. I.e. if dual number is represented as [+group] and [+minimum], or some sort of combination of the singular and plural, why do languages with no distinct dual category always conflate the dual with the plural, and never the singular? Similarly, in languages without an inclusive category, the inclusive is always conflated with the first person, not the second. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this will be of any value to you; it does not answer your empirical questions directly, but does discuss cross linguistic evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Development of Clusive Pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another paper by Osada Toshiki on historical development of clusive pronouns in South Asian languages can be found at: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sealang.net/archives/mks/pdf/34:79-96.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sealang.net/archives/mks/pdf/34:79-96.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. It discusses several different possibilities for how languages could develop this distinction, including areal diffusion and internal development. Areal diffusion seems to be far more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there are plausibly cases for internal developments of clusive pronouns. For example, Japanese has a special exclusive pronoun &lt;em&gt;temae-domo&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;watashi-tachi&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;watakushi-tachi&lt;/em&gt; being the general first person plural). This is analyzed as &lt;em&gt;temae&lt;/em&gt; 'I' (further decomposed as &lt;em&gt;te&lt;/em&gt; 'hand' and &lt;em&gt;mae&lt;/em&gt; 'front') and &lt;em&gt;domo&lt;/em&gt; (plural suffix). It's only used by sales persons, presumably motivated by the semantic need to differentiate a group including the sales people and customers and a group only of sales people. The article rejects an analysis of the feature being introduced by contact with Ainu because that would not explain its limited use (only by sales people). Also &lt;em&gt;temae&lt;/em&gt; is not attested before the 16th century, too late for Ainu influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case of internal development is possibly attested in Indo-Aryan languages, in which a reflexive pronoun became a second singular honorific pronoun which in turn became a first person inclusive pronoun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2011-10-23T17:49:00.520" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T17:49:00.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="821" CreationDate="2011-10-23T00:12:46.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the subject of why languages sound like they do. Prosody goes a long way to explaining why, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great to know how others see (or hear!) me speaking my own language. Here's one perspective. This is a wonderful &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fake English short movie&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="379" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T00:12:46.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="872" CreationDate="2011-10-23T02:47:50.803" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Intransitive sentences can be either unaccusative or unergative based on the the subject's thematic role.&#xA;If the subject is the agent, the resulting construction is &lt;strong&gt;unergative&lt;/strong&gt;. (e.g. Jane sneezed or John danced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the subject is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an agent, the sentence is &lt;strong&gt;unaccusative&lt;/strong&gt;. (e.g. Jane arrived or The snow melted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergative  and accusative refer to cases (noun inflections). In languages that have it, accusative marks the objects of transitive verbs. Ergative case marks the subject of transitive verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are often divided into Nominative-Accusative and Ergative-Absolutive, but this is an over-simplification. The Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; on the subject is pretty good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there is some arcane connection between ergative/accusative and unergative/unaccusative, but in practice they aren't related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2011-10-25T16:59:17.703" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T16:59:17.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-23T04:05:04.327" Score="5" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I understand that as a field, linguistics tries to study how people actually use language, rather than say how people should. It seems to me, a layperson, that several linguists writing for general audiences have argued quite persuasively that many prescribed rules are baseless. But I have some difficulty with a couple of issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many people consistently say and write things that I think descriptivists and prescriptivists alike would call incorrect. And I don't believe these errors have anything to do with dialect. Just take the writing of the bottom of any typical high school English class, for example. Some errors like &quot;There is many ...&quot; I hear from people of all ages so frequently that I highly doubt such errors would qualify as &quot;just slips,&quot; even in the descriptivist sense: if asked, the speakers wouldn't find any problem with them (I imagine).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line? Can we say that &quot;if 30% (15%? 5%?) of the population accepts this usage, then we'll add it to our grammar of the language&quot;? (Right about here I get the feeling in my stomach that someone will tell me that this is the wrong question.) And if the bar is sufficiently low, I think many rules I've seen categorized as prescriptivist nonsense will pass the test. Just a semester with a particular English teacher who insisted on such silly rules as &quot;&lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; must always be followed by a noun phrase; never write &lt;em&gt;this is&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;this means&lt;/em&gt;&quot; has made me extremely aware of violations of those rules. I have to pause for a moment whenever I hit upon a &lt;em&gt;this explains&lt;/em&gt; in published news articles, and it's gotten really annoying. Surely generations of students of such indoctrination make up a sizeable readership? Sad as it is, this alone seems to be justification for the prescription.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-23T16:37:33.367" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T00:36:20.333" Title="What is exactly &quot;descriptivism&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-23T04:51:49.180" Score="5" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A message asking for the list of such languages was originally posted by &lt;em&gt;Lisa Bylinina&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mosling/message/2668&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this internet page&lt;/a&gt;, check in Russian, under number 1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another term that has been used for these &quot;low degree markers&quot; could be &lt;strong&gt;attenuative&lt;/strong&gt;, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://meaningtext.net/mtt2009/07-IBoguslavskyLIomdin.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Boguslavsky,Iomdin(2009) in &quot;Semantics of Attenuated Comparatives in Russian&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on the Russian words with &lt;em&gt;po-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we will henceforth refer to them as attenuatives, following Igor&#xA;  Mel’čuk(1998).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5551544.html?thread=104490936#t104490936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;In fact, this &quot;whole story&lt;/a&gt; about low degrees and comparison grew out of Russian &lt;em&gt;po-&lt;/em&gt;, and the role it plays in comparative construction,&#xA;but the really striking fact about Bulgarian is that &lt;em&gt;po-&lt;/em&gt; there has nothing to do with low degree anymore at all. It is just the default (and the only? don't remember) comparative marker in Bulgarian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T01:41:37.140" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T01:41:37.140" Title="Comparative markers coming from low degree markers (&quot;attenuatives&quot;)? (List such languages.)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-23T05:01:49.160" Score="8" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;The zero comparative marker and the non-zero one should be more or less interchangeable. (The etymology of the non-zero marker doesn't matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A message asking to list such languages was originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mosling/message/2668&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;posted by Lisa Bylinina&lt;/a&gt;; check under number 2, it's written in Russian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question appeared &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5551544.html?thread=104490936#t104490936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the exploration of the relation between low degree markers and the comparative forms cross-linguistically&lt;/a&gt; (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/877/443&quot;&gt;Comparative markers coming from low degree markers (&amp;quot;attenuatives&amp;quot;)? (List such languages.)&lt;/a&gt;) and the observation of an example--the Tatar language--where indeed the low degree marker is the source of one of the comparative forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tatar is a parallel case [to Bulgarian] I discovered this summer while doing&#xA;  fieldwork on Tatar. not absolutely parallel though, because this low&#xA;  degree marker is optional in most of the comparative environments, but&#xA;  seems to carry no low degree meaning anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is also an example exhibiting the kind of situation queried about in this question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[This Tatar marker (coming from a low degree marker)] is a non-ambiguous&#xA;  variant of zero comparative morpheme (which is ambiguous with the positive form)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T01:47:48.340" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T01:47:48.340" Title="Which languages have zero markers of comparative degree that coexist with non-zero comparative markers?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="853" CreationDate="2011-10-23T14:41:30.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I'm afraid you are wrong. In generative syntax, there are two distinct concepts, acceptability (=the native speaker's intuition) and grammaticality (=observing or violating rules of grammar created by the linguist). You can read more about it in any intro textbook on generative syntax (Haegeman 1994, Adger 2003 etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T14:41:30.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="876" CreationDate="2011-10-23T16:52:21.220" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partially, it depends on how you think of what the goal of Linguistics is. I work within the Chomskyan paradigm, in which we think the goal of Linguistics is characterizing I-language. That is, we are interested in understanding how grammatical knowledge is represented in the mind. Unfortunately, this task will always require a certain level of idealization, because there is also some evidence to think that people will have subtle differences in their knowledge of their language, even if – from a bird's eye perspective – we say they both speak English. That is, language names (like English) are ultimately idealized theoretical fictions. The actual object of study is individuals' capacities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, reread your question. You mention that if you asked your students where &quot;There is many..&quot; is acceptable, they would say yes. That indicates that – since they both use it, and (presumably) find it acceptable – it is grammatical &lt;em&gt;for them&lt;/em&gt;, not implying that it needs to be grammatical for anyone else. The question, then, of where we draw the line – at 15%, 30%, or whatever – is a legitimate question to ask, but it's a question about how to lump I-languages into the languages of a community, which, on the Chomskyan point of view, will always require certain kinds of arbitrary decisions to &quot;iron out&quot; the differences between I-languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you don't imagine the object of study to be individuals' knowledge of their language, and disavow the mentalist perspective, your question is a very poignant one and difficult to address one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-23T17:29:09.823" LastActivityDate="2011-10-23T17:29:09.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-24T03:39:08.897" Score="5" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, phonemes like /e/ and /ɛ/ are so similar in sound. In English, phonemes like /o/ and /ɔ/ are so similar too. Briefly, almost any language, contains phonemes which are very similar to each other. &#xA;The question is: how much comprehension does a listener lose, if a speaker pronounces them the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I'm asking this question because I'm working on something I call SPA (Simplified Phonetic Alphabet), which is based on reductionism, and aims to facilitate language learning process in first steps by removing similar sounds for foreign learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I'm talking about non-native speaker, and a native-listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T03:43:40.923" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T03:43:40.923" Title="If similar phonemes are pronounced the same, will this be difficult to understand for a native speaker?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2011-10-24T07:23:49.473" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A native speaker may or may not be able to understand you; it depends on the phonemes, the language, the accent, the skill of the native speaker, and more. A few things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One should keep in mind that phonemes which sound very similar to a foreigner may sound very different to native speakers. For example, I once pronounced Navarra as Navara in Spanish, and my Spanish friend had no idea at all what I was talking about. After my third try (it was admittedly in a noisy bar), he said, &quot;ohh, you mean &lt;em&gt;Navarra!&lt;/em&gt; Then why didn't you say so?&quot; To me, r and rr sound like the same phoneme—but certainly not to Spaniards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how many relevant minimal pairs there are in the target language. If there are many words, or a few very frequent words, in which only [e] and [ɛ] are different, it will be more difficult to understand for the native speaker if one is used for the other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It also depends on whether the native speaker is aware of the fact that  the foreigner is apt to confuse these two phonemes. For example, since the Romance accents in English are fairly well known, an Englishman will not be misled as easily if a Frenchman keeps confusing &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; (/ðɪs/) and &lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; (unaccented before consonant: something like /ðis/). And there are probably more factors to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-05-22T02:15:11.393" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T02:15:11.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2011-10-24T11:45:00.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To enlarge on what Cerberus said: your premise is wrong. Different phonemes in a language are by definition different in sound (for  at least some phonological environments). The fact that speakers of some other language may find them similar is a fact about that other language, not about the target language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with Louis Rhys' comment, that a notation which confuses two different phonemes in a language is a particularly bad notation for that language - &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; for learning it. (Conventional orthographies for languages sometimes do confuse phonemes in this way, but in these cases materials for learners will often disambiguate them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: added rider about phonological environment - thanks @Musicallinguist - and not about conventional orthographies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2011-10-25T10:09:11.197" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T10:09:11.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2011-10-24T15:19:38.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another way to find &quot;safe&quot; mergers in a language is to look for mergers that &lt;em&gt;some native speakers of that language&lt;/em&gt; make.  For instance, in English, many speakers merge &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot.E2.80.93caught_merger&quot;&gt;&quot;cot&quot; and &quot;caught&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. fail to distinguish /ɑ/ and /ɔ/).  And in the US at least, those of us who don't have the cot/caught merger are still accustomed to hearing it from other people.  So a foreign learner who merged /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ would still be intelligible here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind though that this suggestion is &lt;em&gt;relative to a specific language.&lt;/em&gt;  So &lt;em&gt;in US English,&lt;/em&gt; merging /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ is &quot;safe,&quot; but that doesn't mean it's equally safe in other languages.  For instance, I don't know of any French dialects that merge /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, so I doubt that merger would be as safe in French.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that you're going to find any mergers that are &quot;universally safe&quot; &amp;mdash; i.e. safe in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; languages &amp;mdash; and so if you want your SPA to be a universally applicable system, you're going to run into trouble pretty quickly.  On the other hand, a simplified phonetic notation &lt;em&gt;for a specific language&lt;/em&gt; could succeed.  So you might end up with &quot;SPA-English&quot; (merging /ɑ/ with /ɔ/) and &quot;SPA-French&quot; (merging /œ̃/ with /ɛ̃/ and /ɑ/ with /a/) and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-24T15:19:38.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="891" CreationDate="2011-10-24T15:26:00.893" Score="25" ViewCount="1038" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Indo-European languages have a construction called &lt;em&gt;go-periphrasis&lt;/em&gt;, by which some form of the verb &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; is used in conjunction with the main verb to mark tense. Most languages that have this feature use it to mark the future tense, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going-to_future&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;going to&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sociolinguistics.uottawa.ca/shanapoplack/pubs/articles/PoplackMalvar2006.pdf&quot;&gt;Portuguese&lt;/a&gt;, Spanish, Dutch and French. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/casp/6/paper1124.pdf&quot;&gt;Catalan&lt;/a&gt; uses it to mark the perfective past. There are probably others, but I could not find any example of the go-periphrasis outside the Indo-European family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-12-23T23:13:18.723" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T23:13:18.723" Title="Are there any non-Indo-European languages with go-periphrasis?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="876" CreationDate="2011-10-25T00:36:20.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a linguist, when I go to work on a previously undescribed language I work with individuals to collect language samples then analyse these to make statements about the structure of the language. If one individual happily uses structures that no-one else in the community seems to use (and if I'm sure it isn't just performance error of some sort) then I'll ascribe that to the person's idiolect (individual variety). I might even mention this variation in my analysis though this would be more likely if there was a significant minority using it. I certainly wouldn't say that one variety is more 'correct' than the other. It could happen that this individual's usage will catch on and spread to become widely used in the community, or it may not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While linguists talk about 'the grammar of the language' as though it's a single entity (it does make a handy book title) it's important to remember that each of us has our own grammar inside our head which enables us to produce linguistic utterances. For speakers of the same language much of this knowledge is  shared, but that doesn't mean they're identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is also true that people produce utterances that are 'incorrect'. People make mistakes all the time and repair them if they notice, but they don't always notice. &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Geoff Pullum&lt;/a&gt; expands on this nicely. I suspect that at least some of the cases you've noticed of 'there is many…' might be mistakes, but some might not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T00:36:20.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2011-10-25T00:59:06.097" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this deserves to be an answer in its own right or if it should just be a comment, because I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for. It involves aspect marking instead of tense marking...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese uses the constructions &lt;em&gt;-te-iku&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-te-kuru&lt;/em&gt; as aspect markers on verbs. When used as verbs in their own right, &lt;em&gt;iku&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kuru&lt;/em&gt; express 'go' and 'come', respectively. When used in combination with other verbs (with a verb &amp;quot;linker&amp;quot; -&lt;em&gt;te&lt;/em&gt;-), they can either retain their original meanings in tandem with the other verb or serve a purely grammatical function. In the latter case, &lt;em&gt;-te-iku&lt;/em&gt; expresses a kind of continuation of an action or a state from now on, while &lt;em&gt;-te-kuru&lt;/em&gt; expresses actions or states that have been continuous until now. The following examples were taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://homepage3.nifty.com/i-yasu/Lesson-e32.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this online Japanese tutorial,&lt;/a&gt; one of many informative lessons on a website called &amp;quot;Yasuko's Nihongo House&amp;quot;!  (Note that &lt;em&gt;kita&lt;/em&gt; is the past tense of &lt;em&gt;kuru&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kanojo wa (korekara mo) onnade hitotsu de kodomo o &lt;em&gt;sodatete iku&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'She will (continue to) bring up her child by herself (from now on).'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samuku &lt;em&gt;natte iku&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'It will get cold.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kanojo wa (ima made) onnade hitotsu de kodomo o &lt;em&gt;sodatete kita&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'She has brought up her child by herself (until now).'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atsuku &lt;em&gt;natte kita&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'It is getting hot.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen these markers glossed simply as -IKU and -KURU in syntax and semantics examples, but Matsuo Soga calls this aspect &lt;em&gt;ingressive aspect&lt;/em&gt; in his book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=-02o0sSJO68C&amp;amp;pg=PA182&amp;amp;dq=ingressive+aspect+japanese&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=LcymTsrjCerL0QH8opmeDg&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=1&amp;amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ingressive%20aspect%20japanese&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tense and aspect in modern colloquial Japanese&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-10-25T14:47:16.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="890" CreationDate="2011-10-26T00:21:12.273" Score="12" ViewCount="2240" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusitanian_language&quot;&gt;Lusitanian language&lt;/a&gt; was almost certainly an Indo-European language, but whether or not it was a Celtic language is still uncertain. Some features, as the presence of the initial &lt;em&gt;p-&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;porcom&lt;/em&gt; 'pig'), indicate that Lusitanian is more ancient than Proto-Celtic, which had already lost that initial &lt;em&gt;p-&lt;/em&gt; by the time of the attested Lusitanian inscriptions. Other features suggest a strong parallel with the Celtic languages, such as the loss of the semivowel [w] &gt; Ø before vowels (&lt;em&gt;*owila &gt; *ovila &gt; *ofila &gt; *ohila &gt; oila&lt;/em&gt; 'sheep'), which can also be found in Old Irish (&lt;em&gt;*wir- &gt; *vir- &gt; fir- &gt; ind (f)ir&lt;/em&gt; '(the) man').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This uncertainty is of course due to the scarcity of data (just a few inscriptions, toponyms and deity names). What kind of evidence would be necessary to decide what is the exact place of Lusitanian in the Indo-European tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T21:36:36.607" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T15:03:17.787" Title="What is necessary to decide if Lusitanian is a Celtic language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="889" CreationDate="2011-10-26T03:06:27.917" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;To decide if a language is related to another language requires showing that they descend from a common ancestor. To show that Lusitanian is a Celtic language would require demonstrating that it is descended from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic&quot;&gt;Proto-Celtic&lt;/a&gt;, the postulated ancestor of all known Celtic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of evidence usually used to support a claim of relatedness is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method&quot;&gt;comparative&lt;/a&gt; method. The comparative method involves comparing wordlists to determine regular correspondences; these are then the basis for a hypothesis as to the sequence of regular sound changes that shows how the newer language descended from the older. Another method commonly used is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_reconstruction&quot;&gt;internal reconstruction&lt;/a&gt;, which uses only internal evidence from the language to hypothesise about its history, but this method is more limited than the comparative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To determine the place of Lusitanian within the IE tree would involve looking for shared innovations (these are what define subgroups) to work out what languages fall into the same subgroup. It is necessary to be careful that what appear to be shared innovations are not actually just shared retentions (distantly related languages can appear to belong in the same subgroup because they both have preserved some ancient feature that other descendants have lost). Shared innovations can be in any part of the grammar: phonology, morphology, syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this with Lusitanian it would necessary to collate everything available and compare it to the innovations diagnostic of the various IE subgroups to determine where it fits. If the Lusitanian data is too scanty or doesn't happen to contain the necessary evidence then it may not be possible to subgroup it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the WP article, Lusitanian was classified as Celtic on the basis of personal, deity and place names. This is indicative but not proof. The proto-IE initial *p-, could be an innovation, while loss of [w] before vowels is not uncommon, so the evidence is pretty weak either way. Given the amount of data available it seems unlikely there could be anything more than educated guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition: A good book for a fairly detailed but accessible introduction to historical linguistics is this one by &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/An_Introduction_to_Historical_Linguistic.html?id=_N8v-s6fyt0C&quot;&gt;Terry Crowley&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITION: Proto-Celtic seems to have been an early branching from proto-IE as it doesn't show some of the innovations found in later branches. One of these innovations is the change *k -&gt; s before a front vowel, which gave rise to &lt;em&gt;*satem&lt;/em&gt; 'hundred' where other groups such as Germanic, Italic and Celtic (which all seem to have split off early) retain &lt;em&gt;*centum&lt;/em&gt;. (see Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the wheel, and language: how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world. Princeton University Press.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&quot;&gt;WP&lt;/a&gt; lists some postulated shared phonological changes from proto-IE to proto-Celtic, such as: palatovelars merging with plain velars, loss of aspiration as a contrastive feature. There are various other phonological changes involving the proto-IE laryngeals and vowel system. One interesting change is that velar consonants in proto-Celtic weakened to a fricative before *s, so *rig 'king' + *s 'nom. sg' &gt; *rixs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual diagnostic for membership of the Celtic branch is loss of proto-IE prevocalic /p/ (via *p &gt; *ɸ &gt; *h &gt; ø). &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett/BLS1999.pdf&quot;&gt;Garrett&lt;/a&gt; revisits the usual classification scheme and suggests that this is not a satisfactory diagnostic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Lusitanian inscription were found to show one or more of these features it would be evidence of membership of the Celtic branch, but to make a definite classification it's necessary that several features occur to rule out coincidence. The fact that the inscriptions show the presence of prevocalic *p may be evidence that it is not a Celtic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T06:53:07.767" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T06:53:07.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2011-10-27T11:10:20.900" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of motion verbs to mark tense and/or aspect and/or modality is very common across the world's languages, both as part of serial verb constructions or as auxiliary verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are some non-Indo-European language examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sùpyìré, Niger-Congo family.&#xA;Serial verb construction with the verb &lt;em&gt;sí&lt;/em&gt;  'go' indicating futurity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  Zànhe sí dùfugé    kɛ̀  ɛ̀  gɛ̀     &#xA;     rain  go maize.DEF spoil&#xA;     &quot;The rain will spoil the maize.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bambara, Niger-Congo family.&#xA;Here the motion verb &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; 'come' is used as an auxiliary indicating futurity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(2)  a   na   taa&#xA;     3sg come go&#xA;     &quot;He/she will go.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammaticalisation of the motion verbs 'go' and 'come' as future markers is common in Bantu languages. More examples in &lt;a href=&quot;http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/sal/article/download/1403/961&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Squliq Atayal, Austronesian family, Taiwan.&#xA;Here we see &lt;em&gt;musa'&lt;/em&gt;  'go' used as an auxiliary to indicate irrealis/future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(3)  musa’ m-nbu’  yaya’  =mu&#xA;     IRR   AF-ill  mother =1S.GEN&#xA;     &quot;My mother will be ill&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Lakoff (1993: 218) suggests that the metaphorical basis of describing time in terms of space is biologically determined: “In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2011-10-27T12:01:54.110" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T12:01:54.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-10-27T18:23:48.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way you worded your question implies some kind of comparison. We can't really say that acquiring Russian aspect is harder or easier than English tenses or Latin declensions. What is easier, learning Cyrillic or cuneiform or devanagari? You can only answer this question from the point of view of an L2 learner. In the case of L1 acquisition, it's all the same. All languages are learnable since their primary goal is communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need references, I suggest you start with &quot;Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects language acquisition&quot; (pp. 219-224) in Fasold &amp;amp; Connor-Linton (Eds.), An introduction to language and linguistics. After that you might want to have a look at Lust's Child language or Bavin 1995 review article &quot;Language acquisition in crosslinguistic perspective&quot; in Annual Review of Anthropology 24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-10-27T18:23:48.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="901" CreationDate="2011-10-28T00:38:43.567" Score="7" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading John McWhorter’s &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1592403956&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. One thing called my attention in the book:  he spends a great deal of effort trying to show  how scholars have examined the history of English and yet failed to explain why certain features have appeared. He concentrates particularly on the arising of the &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;-support and the present progressive construction, two innovations not shared by any other Germanic language. I quote from the middle of p. 10: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  And yet specialists in the history of English sincerely believe that English started using &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; by itself, and that it is irrelevant, or virtually so, that Welsh and Cornish have the same features.  You can page through countless books and articles on The History of English, and even on specifically the history of meaningless &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; present, and find Celtic either not mentioned at all, actively dismissed, or, at best, mentioned in passing as a “a possible influence” (read: of no significant bearing upon the issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His point is, of course, that these constructions were introduced into English by the indigenous Celtic speakers, who lived alongside the Anglo-Saxons for centuries. My first reaction to his criticism was: &quot;Yes, he is right! How could linguists have not seen this obvious causal relation?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But every science has to clearly define its scope. And, perhaps, it is not part of the field of Historical Linguistics to try to explain phenomena, but merely to describe them, based on direct evidence (which is not the case in the Celtic influence issue). So, is the job of a historical linguist to explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; languages have developed this way or that? Or do they have to restrict themselves to describing only &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; languages develop over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T04:01:41.863" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T04:01:41.863" Title="Is explanation part of Historical Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="872" CreationDate="2011-10-28T03:28:01.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is all about patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ergative pattern is one that treats subjects of transitive verbs differently than subjects of intransitives and objects of transitives, the latter of which pattern together. In the example below, assuming subjects come first, the pattern is ergative because the subject of the transitive verb has a different form than the other two argument positions. In this situation, people tend to call the subject of transitive verb the &quot;ergative&quot; argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A TRANS B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B INTRANS &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the relevant pattern is usually case-marking or agreement, any pattern that treats subjects of transitive verbs differently than objects of transitive and subjects of intransitives could be called an ergative pattern. Langauges are called ergative as they exhibit more and more ergative patterns, though case/agreement are the canonical patterns people care about here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, accusative patterns treat objects of transitive verbs differently than subjects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive verbs, like below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A TRANS B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A INTRANS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is unergative and unaccusative then? Well, mostly it's bad terminology. Notice that when we talk about ergative and accusative patterns, we're talking about a contrast between transitive and intransitive verbs. When we talk about unaccusative and unergative patterns, we're talking about patterns that treat subjects of one class of intransitive predicates differently than the subjects of another class of intransitives predicates. The pattern is like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A INTRANS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B INTRANS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, some languages use special auxiliary verbs with the subjects of one class of intransitives and a different set of auxiliary verbs with another. Usually when people dig deeper they find that the difference hinges on whether the subject of the relevant intransitive is canonically more &quot;agentive&quot; or more like a &quot;patient&quot;. This is a very complex question in itself, but the important point is that subjects of transitive verbs tend to be more agentive, so folks have decided to call patterns that treat &quot;agentive&quot; intransitive subjects special &quot;unergative&quot; because ergative patterns treat subjects of transitive verbs special. A similar line of reasoning gives the source of the term unaccusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting to your question, it is possible for languages to exhibit mixes of these patterns. Things get hairy here, but basically, we reserve special terminology for when a language's case-marking/agreement system exhibits multiple patterns. For example, if a language sometimes has an ergative case marking system and sometimes an accusative case marking system, then it is called split-ergative. A fourth type of case system is found in languages that ignore the accusative/ergative opposition and mark the case of intransitives along a unergative/unaccusative line (this is a gross simplification). This pattern is often called a Split-S. Back to your question, though, it very often the case that languages exhibit different mixes of these patterns in different domains, in which case, there is usually not a name for it and people just say things like: Phenomenon X targets unergatives/unaccusatives, in which case they mean: Phenomenon X treats different intransitive verbs differently, in particular, it treats intransitive subjects that seem more like transitive subjects/objects in a special way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="390" LastEditDate="2011-10-28T22:42:40.853" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T22:42:40.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-10-28T06:02:37.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McWhorter's quote isn't inconsistent with the possibility that alternative explanations have been advanced by historical linguists regarding do-support. The fact that the Celtic hypothesis is &quot;actively dismissed&quot; indicates that linguists have most definitely &quot;seen this&quot; &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; &quot;causal relation&quot; and have argued against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by your question title, I think you're misinterpreting McWhorter's claim when you say that scholars have &quot;failed to explain why certain features have appeared in the language.&quot; McWhorter is responding to the dismissal of a particular explanation that he favors, not to the general absence of explanation in historical linguistics. I haven't read his book, but I've looked at his article (&lt;a href=&quot;http://iserp-6.webservices.lamptest.columbia.edu/files/iserp/mcwhorter_0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;McWhorter 2009&lt;/a&gt;) and it's clear that there's been many explanations for do-support, but he happens to have objections to them -- just like how other scholars have objected to the Celtic hypothesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It bears mentioning that the journal issue that McWhorter's article above is published in -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?decade=2000&amp;amp;jid=ELL&amp;amp;volumeId=13&amp;amp;issueId=02&amp;amp;iid=5881636&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 2009 issue of English Language and Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; -- is a special issue entitled &quot;Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis.&quot; So there are certainly linguists interested in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are some muddling factors when it comes to this particular language group. &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674302000242&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Van der Auwera and Genee 2002&lt;/a&gt; surveys the field and identifies some meta issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fourth, many an Anglicist would feel that the study of Celtic is not his/her&#xA;  business but rather that of the Celticist (cf. Dal, 1952: 107) or of the Indo-&#xA;  Europeanist (cf. Meid, 1990: 1000). Or Anglicists may feel that at least some of them&#xA;  should have a competence in Celtic languages, but the fact is that most of them&#xA;  simply do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fifth, what further obstructs taking a Celtic hypothesis seriously is the myth of&#xA;  Anglo-Saxonism (see esp. German, 2000 and Tristram, 1999 but also Hickey, 1995:&#xA;  103–5). This ideology starts from the unexamined premise that the English are of&#xA;  unmixed Germanic origin, that their history starts with the arrival of leaders like&#xA;  Hengest and Horsa and that the Celtic population they encountered was completely&#xA;  exterminated or driven away; from this it must follow that there was no contact&#xA;  between Early Celtic and Early English and there cannot therefore be any influence&#xA;  of Celtic on English. A related myth leads to the same denial of the importance of&#xA;  Celtic language and culture in Britain. It has recently been identified under the term&#xA;  Celtoscepticism, and may be seen as the other side of the coin called Anglosaxonism;&#xA;  it consists of the idea that the Celts as a people never really existed or formed a&#xA;  cultural unity, and could therefore of course never as a group have had any influence&#xA;  over other groups (Koch, 2001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors also mention a more generic issue with research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the ever-present trap of mono-causalism. This means that&#xA;  researchers who have already convinced themselves of the plausibility of one cause&#xA;  or explanation may find it hard to accept that there could be more than one cause or&#xA;  explanation. With respect to the specifics of do periphrasis, if one believes that&#xA;  periphrastic do goes back to causative do, this still should not stop one from&#xA;  investigating a Celtic hypothesis seriously as well (cf. Stein, 1990: 19).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="397" LastEditDate="2011-10-28T06:15:31.903" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T06:15:31.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="898" CreationDate="2011-10-28T12:55:32.047" Score="7" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading that Portuguese and Spanish are really just extremes on a continuum of a dialects.  That is, if one travels slowly from (for example) Madrid to Lisbon, one would note nothing more than subtle shifts in dialect the entire way, and there is nothing significant about the shift around the area of the border.  It's just that once you would reach Lisbon, the shifts have added up to a big difference from Madrid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, is this true?  Secondly, if so, what is the technical term for such a situation?  And finally, is there a list of other language pairs that have this property?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="460" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T15:26:38.077" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T15:26:38.077" Title="What is the term for, and a list of, &quot;continuous dialects&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-28T13:13:59.507" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does one's ability to describe an object with words affect his or her ability to identify that object visually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up, does one's ability to describe an object with words affect his or her ability to help others identify that same object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to either or both of the above questions above is &quot;yes,&quot; then in what ways are those abilities affected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="461" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T12:35:12.747" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T12:35:12.747" Title="Does one's ability to describe an object with words reflect his or her ability to identify the object visually?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-determinism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="896" CreationDate="2011-10-28T13:38:48.213" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;strong&gt;language continuum&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;dialect continuum&lt;/strong&gt;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In sociolinguistics, a language continuum is said to exist when two or more different languages or dialects merge one into the other(s) without a definable boundary. This happens, for example, across large parts of India. Historically, it also happened in various parts of Europe, for example in a line stretching from Portuguese to Walloon (in Belgium); from Portuguese to the southern Italian dialects; and between German and Dutch. Within the last 100 years or so, however, the increasing dominance of nation-states and their standard languages has been steadily eliminating the non-standard dialects of which these language continua were formed, making the boundaries ever more abrupt and well-defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That WP article cites several examples, from different language families, around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T13:38:48.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="896" CreationDate="2011-10-28T13:42:21.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're so close. The term for this is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dialect continuum&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the modern, industrialized, media-blanketed world, with centralized languages at the expense of marginal dialects, there are fewer true instances of dialect continua. The classic example is the German dialects from Bavarian in the far southeast through Frankish and Plattdeutsch to Dutch, where each community can understand the the neighboring community just fine, with no strict boundaries where there is mutual unintelligibility, but at the two extremes (or even halfway) one cannot understand the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this doesn't have to be linear. It has been said that within the continent of Australia, the intelligibility is a neighborhood graph with no two particular endpoints, neighbors understand neighbors on all sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-10-29T21:34:54.253" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T21:34:54.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2011-10-28T17:42:48.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh dear, I haven't heard about affix hopping since the good olde GB-days. In Minimalist syntax (aka Program), there is Agree. So, in your first example, T has an uninterpretable phi-feature, number (among many others), and it gets its value from (or it is checked by) the DP in the specifier position of (little) &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;. See Adger's 2003 &lt;em&gt;Core Syntax&lt;/em&gt; for a start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T17:42:48.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2011-10-28T21:36:03.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Lyle Campbell writes in his intro textbook on Historical Linguistics (2004), until the 1970's the general view was that historical linguistics should describe rather than explain, cf. a quote from Lehmann 1962 that &quot;a linguist establishes the facts of change, leaving its explanation to the anthropologist.&quot; Luckily, the situation has changed, and now &quot;most current research is directed at revealing the factors which help to explain language change&quot; (Campbell 2004, p. 313). See chapter 11 &quot;Explaining linguistic change&quot; for further study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically all major textbooks on historical linguistics provide some explanation of sound, morphological, syntactic, semantic etc. change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-10-28T21:36:03.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="897" CreationDate="2011-10-29T03:14:36.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Damage to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;corpus callosum&lt;/a&gt; results in various &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;split-brain&lt;/a&gt; disorders. I remember one of them being such that if you present the patient with an object in one of their visual fields, then they can describe its shape and color, but can't identify the objects. If you present the objects in the other visual field, then they can correctly identify the object. However, I don't remember the name of the patient, or the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just by looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Patient_VP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;patient VP&lt;/a&gt; from Funnell, Corballis, &amp;amp; Gazzaniga's study we can see that the language processing and visual identification processing parts of the brain react differently to damage of the corpus callosum. Thus, it would not be surprising to see effects of being able to describe in words, but not identify as I described in the previous paragraph. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a bit more time later, I will try to hunt down the study I mentioned in the first part of my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T03:14:36.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2011-10-29T15:01:06.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard Italian has 7 vocalic phonemes: a i u è é ò ó,&#xA;some Northerners and most Southerners merge open and close e's and o's, but this is not a prestigious pronunciation (and it's strange-sounding to people from Emilia Romagna, Marche, Umbria, Rome or Tuscany). Nonetheless, you can find in many books for foreigners: ''Italian vowels are easy: ah, eh, eeh, oh, ooh.'' It's called dumbing down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2011-10-29T15:01:06.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="921" CreationDate="2011-10-29T21:21:55.377" Score="8" ViewCount="956" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both Japanese and Korean are &quot;topic-comment&quot; languages and both have an explicit topic particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I believe Chinese might be an example of a topic-comment language without a topic particle but I may be wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which other languages have topic particles? Any well-known languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T03:17:52.117" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T13:38:31.687" Title="How common is a topic particle beyond just Japanese and Korean?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-29T21:40:03.670" Score="10" ViewCount="2765" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the languages I'm familiar with I can't think of any cases of semivowels other than the &quot;w&quot; and &quot;y&quot; sounds &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;. So are there any others and if so, which are most common beyond these two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T09:54:17.073" Title="Are there semivowels besides /w/ and /j/ and which are most common?" Tags="&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="908" CreationDate="2011-10-29T22:16:08.383" Score="10" ViewCount="4746" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have a subjunctive mood but German has a conjunctive. However is the German conjunctive just a different name for the same mood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the two are different what is the difference? If not why the different name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had conversations with German speakers insisting that German doesn't have a subjunctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-10T05:37:50.070" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T23:33:54.527" Title="Is the German &quot;conjunctive&quot; the same as the &quot;subjunctive&quot; of other languages? If so why the different name?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="905" CreationDate="2011-10-30T00:19:49.680" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You listed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[j] which is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;palatal approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, seen in words like &lt;b&gt;y&lt;/b&gt;ou [ju:] (English);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[w] which is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labio-velar_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;labio-velar approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, seen in words like &quot;&lt;b&gt;w&lt;/b&gt;eep&quot; [wi:p] (English). Following a comment request: It's a &lt;strong&gt;labio-velar&lt;/strong&gt; because it's articulated with the &lt;em&gt;back part of the tongue raised toward the soft palate&lt;/em&gt; (called also &lt;em&gt;&quot;velum&quot;&lt;/em&gt; ⟶ &lt;em&gt;velar&lt;/em&gt;) while &lt;em&gt;rounding the lips&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɥ] which is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labio-palatal_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;labio-palatal approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, seen in words like &quot;月 &lt;b&gt;y&lt;/b&gt;uè&quot;, [ɥœ˥˩] in Mandarin or, choosing a &quot;closer&quot; example, in &quot;bonne n&lt;b&gt;ui&lt;/b&gt;t&quot;, [bɔnnɥi] (French);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɰ] which is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;velar approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, seen in the Korean word for &lt;em&gt;doctor&lt;/em&gt;, 의사 [ɰi.sä]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-06T09:54:17.073" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T09:54:17.073" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="906" CreationDate="2011-10-30T01:56:47.470" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;subjunctive&lt;/em&gt; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;subiunctivus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;connective, subordinating&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;conjunctive&lt;/em&gt; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;coniunctivus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;connective&quot;) normally mean exactly the same thing and refer to exactly the same mood, as far as different languages can be compared. In modern English, &lt;em&gt;conjunctive&lt;/em&gt; is seldom heard; it is normally always &lt;em&gt;subjunctive&lt;/em&gt;. So it would make perfect sense to call the German &lt;em&gt;Konjunktiv&lt;/em&gt; in English &lt;em&gt;subjunctive&lt;/em&gt;, if you must use an English word. If you use a German word, however, the only option is &lt;em&gt;Konjunktiv&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that Proto-Indo-European probably had two separate moods, &lt;em&gt;conjunctive/subjunctive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;optative&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;expressing a wish&quot;). Both moods were still present in classical Greek; but they had fused into one mood in (Pre-)Latin, which only had a conjunctive/subjunctive that did the work of both. In (Proto-)Greek, the optative was mainly marked by /i/, whereas the conjunctive/subjunctive was marked by a lengthening of the theme vowel. The unified successor mood that emerged in most Indo-European languages acquired various other formal properties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that both moods already had several, quite different functions each in Greek, so that their names are not very accurate descriptions if one considers what they mean in Latin—nor &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; there be accurate names for such complex moods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin names of the mood, &lt;em&gt;coniunctivus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;subiunctivus&lt;/em&gt;, were both used from late Antiquity onwards. Among the modern languages, some use a form of &lt;em&gt;coniunctivus&lt;/em&gt;, some &lt;em&gt;subiunctivus&lt;/em&gt;, and some both. The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2nd ed.) explains it quite well for Latin and English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both &lt;em&gt;modus conjunctīvus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;m. subjunctīvus&lt;/em&gt; were used by the Latin Grammarians of the 4th c. Isidore &lt;em&gt;Orig.&lt;/em&gt; i. viii. 4 (a 640) has only &lt;em&gt;conjunctīvus&lt;/em&gt;, ‘quia ei conjungitur aliquid, ut locutio plena sit’. Littré cites &lt;em&gt;subjonctif ou conjonctif&lt;/em&gt; from Meigret 1550. In English use &lt;em&gt;Subjunctive&lt;/em&gt; was the usual name until comparatively recent times. It is now used by some in a narrower sense than Conjunctive: see quot. 1871.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1730–6 Bailey (folio), The Conjunctive (or Subjunctive) Mood of a Verb.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1755 Johnson, &lt;em&gt;Conjunctive&lt;/em&gt;, adj..(In grammar.) The mood of a verb, used subsequently to a conjunction.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1824 L. Murray &lt;em&gt;Eng. Gram.&lt;/em&gt; (ed. 5) I. 152 Some grammarians apply, what is called the conjunctive termination, to the persons of the principal verb, and to its auxiliaries, through all the tenses of the subjunctive mood.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1871 &lt;em&gt;Publ. Sch. Lat. Gram.&lt;/em&gt; 96 The Conjunctive Mood is for conceptive statement: as &lt;em&gt;gaudeam si absit&lt;/em&gt;. When this Mood appears in principal construction, we call it the &lt;em&gt;pure conjunctive&lt;/em&gt;, as &lt;em&gt;gaudeam&lt;/em&gt;: when it depends on another Verb, it is called &lt;em&gt;Subjunctive&lt;/em&gt;, as &lt;em&gt;absit&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ibid&lt;/em&gt;. 167 Examples of the Conjunctive Mood used Subjunctively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interwiki links from the English Wikipedia page &lt;em&gt;Subjunctive&lt;/em&gt; nicely show how the languages are split between both terms. Some of these languages might use both terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Bahasa Indonesia - Modus subjungtif;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;中文 (Chinese) - Traditional 虛擬語氣, Simplified 虚拟语气.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Croatian -  Hrvatski konjunktiv, aorist i kondicional;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Czech - Konjunktiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Danish - Konjunktiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dutch - Aanvoegende wijs;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Esperanto - Subjunktivo;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Finnish - Subjunktiivi;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;French - Subjonctif;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;German - Konjunktiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Icelandic - Viðtengingarháttur;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ido - Subjuntivo;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Italian - Congiuntivo;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Japanese - 接続法;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Latina - Coniunctivus;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Magyar - Kötőmód;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Norwegian - Konjunktiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Polish - Tryb łączący;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Portuguese - Modo subjuntivo;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Romanian - Conjunctiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Russian - Сослагательное наклонение;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spanish - Modo subjuntivo;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Swedish - Konjunktiv;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Walon - Suddjonctif;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T23:33:54.527" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T23:33:54.527" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="910" CreationDate="2011-10-30T06:19:32.300" Score="7" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_language&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt; has neither common pronunciation, nor alphabet (written letters), nor most words with modern English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made Old English to be identifiable as English?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What separates a language from other languages and dialects?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="465" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-30T10:29:41.350" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T22:13:33.480" Title="What makes a language identifiable and distinguishable from other languages and their dialects?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="909" CreationDate="2011-10-30T07:22:48.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the writing system has little relevance to this question but I'll point out that while Old English was originally written in runes, from the 9th Century on the Latin Alphabet was used although with a few characters no longer included (e.g. þ 'thorn', ð 'eth' and ƿ 'wynn').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old English refers to the language ancestral to Modern English that was spoken in much of England from the 5th C. until the 12th C. We know it was ancestral because we have detailed knowledge of the course of development from Old English, through Middle English up to Modern English. This knowledge includes huge numbers of etymologies as well as a detailed understanding of changes in the grammar. The sequences of changes that led from Old English grammatical structure to that of Modern English is well understood, and is exemplified at many points in time by numerous pieces of writing (scribal, ecclesiastical and personal). It is that substantial evidence of Old English as the ancestor to Modern English that allows us to identify Old English as 'English'. In fact, it was King Alfred the Great who, in the 9th Century, referred to Old English by the name &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/thehistoryofenglish_us/the-history-of-english;jsessionid=CE098069118CB093A3475BF581581427&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'English'&lt;/a&gt;. So Old English is identifiable as English both because it was the first variety given this name, and because it is demonstrably the ancestor of Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical linguistics is 'diachronic', meaning it examines changes in a language over time. The divisions into 'languages' and 'dialects' is usually applied synchronically (ie at a given point in time). The usual definition is that spoken varieties are different languages if they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mutually intelligible, and are dialects of the one language if they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;. By this definition Old English and Modern English are different languages. Linguists have tried to work out how long it takes for a language to change so much that it would no longer be intelligible to the earlier speakers, but it's highly speculative. To answer your second question then, a language is separated from other languages by sufficient differences in lexicon and grammar such that the two languages are not mutually intelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T22:13:33.480" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T22:13:33.480" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="919" CreationDate="2011-10-30T12:26:31.280" Score="23" ViewCount="5096" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the hypotheses supported by Theo Vennemann and other linguists is that Proto-Germanic was influenced by some Semitic language. The evidence they present for their case includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loss of some grammatical cases from Proto-Indo-European. This would be an indication of language contact, with adults trying to learn a different language and simplifying it in the process. This phenomenon has not occured in other languages spoken at the time, such as Latin and Greek.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One third of Germanic roots do not trace back to PIE, and some of these words seem to have common roots with Semitic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*furkhtaz&lt;/em&gt;, Proto-Semitic &lt;em&gt;*prkh&lt;/em&gt;, 'fright'; Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*magaþ&lt;/em&gt;, Early Semitic &lt;em&gt;makhat&lt;/em&gt;, 'maiden'. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grimm’s law, that has introduced the fricative consonants *[f], *[h] and *[θ]. PIE was poor in fricatives, compared to Semitic languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some deity names also seem to have common origins, such as Old High German &lt;em&gt;Phol&lt;/em&gt; and Semitic &lt;em&gt;Baal&lt;/em&gt;. These names can also be derived independently through regular sound changes, such as the Grimm’s law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbs are inflected for tense only in the present and past (like Semitic languages). Other Indo-European languages have a much richer system of verb inflections for marking tense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of ablaut for marking the past of strong verbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these observations strong enough to posit a Semitic substrate in Proto-Germanic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T11:52:42.377" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T14:22:20.320" Title="Was there a Semitic influence on Proto-Germanic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-10-30T12:29:33.193" Score="7" ViewCount="2393" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know linguists consider language arbitrary. If so, how does etymology work? We have a word and we trace it back to its origins. Then, we find that it either comes from a different language or originated at a certain time. But then what? We have no idea how the word originated originally or why it came to mean what it does. So do we have any idea how or why any word came to mean what it does, originally? And if not, because language is arbitrary, then words got their meanings by someone just deciding a certain sound would represent a certain meaning and people went along with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="467" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T21:06:49.263" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T09:57:38.003" Title="How did the first words arise?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-10-30T13:57:26.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is arbitrary as you say but it is also not created by authority. There's no one person or committee saying: &quot;Let's start a new language, and we'll call all those four legged things we ride 'horse'&quot; (except for the wildly out of the ordinary constructed languages like Esperanto).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are all sorts of theories about the true, way-back-when, something-out-of-nothing origins of words and syntax, but they're all very speculative and quasi-scientific (no one is there to record the early language speakers). Looking at the behavior of other communicating animals (dolphins/whales, birds) gives ideas, but tends to the &quot;Gosh we think it could have been like this, maybe.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A grunt here, a sigh there, eventually people, out of arbitrary association with other activities, modified and distinguished these sounds, not through any dedicated process or choice, created words associated with meaning. Well, that's a theory with little support other than plausible analogy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T13:57:26.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="922" CreationDate="2011-10-30T14:33:43.250" Score="9" ViewCount="812" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8404025.stm&quot;&gt;BBC article&lt;/a&gt; about &quot;linguistic fingerprints&quot;. In my opinion a quite interesting idea, but there seems to exist a dispute in linguistic scientific community &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_linguistics#Linguistic_fingerprinting&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, how valid and objective such a concept is. Nevertheless, some research fields seem to use this concept in a very productive way, e.g. for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/theologyinthenews/israeli-linguistic-fingerprint-algorithm-software-to-test-bible-for-authorship-attribution/&quot;&gt;analysing the number of different authors of the bible&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being no expert in linguistics, but knowing that scientists often tend to create buzzwords, can somebody with more insight explain and give a short overview, if this dispute really exists and where linguistic researchers disagree? Is the concepts itself flawed, as such a quantity would be hard to measure in a valid, reliable and objective way (Operationalization). Or is it rather the the assumption that the &quot;linguistic fingerprint&quot; phenomenon doesn't exist at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I tend to believe in this concept and would assume that the unique elements of a single human fingerprint not only are typical used words and phrases, but also typical length of sentences, use of subordinate clauses. Reading and moderating over a decade in internet forums and usenet, the &quot;linguistic fingerprint&quot; concept seems quite obvious to me, the correct operationlization is of course very tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiki-Definition of linguistic fingerprint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is formed as a result of merged language style. A person's linguistic fingerprint can be reconstructed from the individual's daily interactions and relate to a variety of self-reported personality characteristics, situational variables and physiological markers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-30T17:31:36.103" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T22:32:34.557" Title="Is there serious scientific evidence/vindication for the &quot;linguistic fingerprint&quot; concept?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="906" CreationDate="2011-10-30T14:44:09.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add further to cerberus's interesting answer and mitch's comment, &lt;em&gt;conjunctive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;subjunctive&lt;/em&gt; are not fully similar from a functional point of view. I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2707/why-is-indirect-speech-marked-by-modus-instead-of-tempus-in-german/&quot;&gt;asked on GLU&lt;/a&gt;, why German prescribes the use of &lt;em&gt;modus&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;tempus&lt;/em&gt; for marking indirect speech. So this is one important difference vs. most other languages using tempus or no marking at all for indirect speech. Being a german native speaker and having &lt;em&gt;Latinum&lt;/em&gt;, I never heard ther term &lt;em&gt;Subjunktiv&lt;/em&gt; in a language course. So hippietrail is imo right here, it doesn't exist in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T14:44:09.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="905" CreationDate="2011-10-30T16:41:24.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ties into how one marks up diphthongs and polyphthongs. Strictly speaking you can add a non-syllabic marker (like the bow /̯̯̯/, or the more-open diacritic to closed vowels or the more-closed diacritic to an open vowel) to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; vowel to produce a semi-vowel suitable for a diphthong, if how you define diphthong is a semivowel preceding or following a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual for IPA, frequent/common semivowels get their own symbols, which is why we have /j w ɥ ɰ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pet peeve: IPA isn't very good at showing diphthongs at a phonetic level, or rather, there seems to have been insuffcient interest in typological comparisons of diphthongs such that there is no agreed upon way of marking the difference between for instance English /aj/ in &quot;hi&quot; and Norwegian /ɑˑi̯/ &quot;hai&quot; or what have you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-10-30T16:41:24.403" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="957" CreationDate="2011-10-30T21:43:44.857" Score="13" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cardinal &quot;a half&quot; is unrelated to &quot;two&quot;, whereas &quot;a third&quot;, &quot;a quarter&quot; (and certainly &quot;a fourth&quot;), etc. are related to &quot;three&quot;, &quot;four&quot;, etc. This seems to be true in other languages, too, in various language families:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese &lt;em&gt;metade&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;quarto&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German &lt;em&gt;Hälfte&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;Viertel&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scottish &lt;em&gt;leth&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;cairteal&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew &lt;em&gt;חצי&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;רבע&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hungarian &lt;em&gt;fél&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;negyed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How universal is this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is pretty universal, then why? Why are words meaning &quot;a half&quot; different from the rest?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T22:28:35.890" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T01:53:59.340" Title="Why does &quot;half&quot; not follow the pattern of ordinal numbers across languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2011-10-31T03:11:57.630" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a weak case. I'm sure there's a much more thorough rebuttal in the literature, but I'll give at least a few contrary remarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point, that some words in the two languages seem to have some sounds in common, is the most frequent unscientific argument presented in linguistics circles for the existence of a language family. The problem is that between any two sufficiently large sets of data (language vocabularies have thousands of items), there will &lt;em&gt;nearly always&lt;/em&gt; be a couple dozen pairs of words that can be extracted that are &quot;similar enough&quot; to be cognates. But that isn't how sound change works - to demonstrate shared ancestry, you must reconstruct words of the common ancestor language, and give a series of &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; sound changes that output words in the daughter languages - Grimm's law is a model example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The late Basque linguist Larry Trask gave a quite readable defense against the ceaseless proposals attempting to connect Basque, a language isolate, with nearly every other language family, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=jyDjgt1CcU4C&amp;amp;pg=PA65&amp;amp;lpg=PA65&amp;amp;dq=%22Origin+and+Relatives+of+the+Basque+Language%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=MPuC8HyPhO&amp;amp;sig=tKr2tRa1VgvA3wL-Sr-Mg6RsI3s&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=nAeuTsnyMsHs0gHMuNibBw&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=6&amp;amp;ved=0CEoQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Origin%20and%20Relatives%20of%20the%20Basque%20Language%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;&quot;Origin and Relatives of the Basque Language&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1995), which I highly recommend for its applicability to this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also fail to see how a Proto-Semitic influence would have induced PIE to replace *[k] and *[t] with *[x] and *[θ] when &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#Inventory&quot;&gt;both languages had *[k] and *[t]&lt;/a&gt;. Furthermore, PS doesn't even have an *[f] sound, so PIE could not have borrowed it. (You gave *[h], instead of *[x], as the reflex of PIE *[k] - this was a later development in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European had only two tenses, present and past, on verbs in the imperfective aspect. Tense on other verbs was unmarked. The rich tense systems of its descendants are modern innovations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ablaut&quot; refers to a morphological alternation already present in PIE - you're thinking of Germanic &lt;em&gt;umlaut&lt;/em&gt;, a process which is uncontroversially understood as the product of fronting a stem vowel before a suffix containing [i] (the suffix is later dropped). A substrate influence is not needed to explain this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, you're right that the loss of complexity in the case marking system and the large number of words unique to Proto-Germanic may indicate a pre-IE linguistic substrate. Unfortunately, barring a revolutionary discovery of a new trove of data, we will most likely never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T20:35:09.570" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T20:35:09.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2011-10-31T15:31:55.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I might understand what you are trying to ask in your question. Basically, you want to know whether there is a point where etymologists have to stop because you can't go further. (?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that when linguists try to reconstruct forms (proto-Germanic, proto-IE etc.), they say nothing why a cow is &quot;a cow&quot;. In most cases, the connection between form and meaning is purely arbitrary. Historical linguists study how words (and other linguistic units) change and why. They don't explain why those words have a particular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Jespersen's remark that &quot;&lt;em&gt;the earliest accessible stage remains unexplained and must be taken as it is&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (Jespersen, 1924/1992, The philosophy of grammar, p. 81).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-10-31T15:52:17.507" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T15:52:17.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2011-10-31T21:54:18.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're not particularly well-known, but some modern Mayan languages have topic particles.  (Others have a more Chinese-like system, with the topic appearing at the front of the sentence but without a special particle to mark it.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22topic+marker%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Google Scholar search for the phrase &quot;topic particle&quot;&lt;/a&gt; turns up a good number of hits on other languages.  Malagasy gets a bunch of mentions; it's still not exactly well known, but it's a national language with (according to Wikipedia) around 20 million speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T21:54:18.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="914" CreationDate="2011-10-31T22:32:34.557" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't make much sense to ask whether the concept is &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt;.  You've gotta ask, &quot;valid for &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;  In other words, it makes more sense to ask whether it leads to decent performance &lt;em&gt;on a specific task.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at it this way: if you give me a writing sample and ask me &quot;Which of the five hundred million worldwide speakers of English did this come from,&quot; there's absolutely no way I can answer with any degree of confidence.  If you give me a writing sample and ask &quot;Is this by Winston Churchill or Charles Bukowski,&quot; I'll bet you any sum of money you like that I can get the answer right.  This suggests that &quot;linguistic fingerprinting&quot; is suitable for the Winston Churchill Detection Task, and not so suitable for the task of picking a single author out of a pool of five hundred million.  For tasks in between those two extremes, its degree of suitability is likely to vary. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ai.arizona.edu/intranet/papers/Abbasi%20Writeprints%20TOIS%202008.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this head-to-head comparison&lt;/a&gt; of two authorship attribution systems.  Depending on the task, the winning system gets accuracies as high as 96% or as low as 31%.  The paper also goes into some detail on how the winning system works.  The feature set includes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;presence or absence of specific words, characters or character combinations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;presence or absence of specific typos/misspellings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frequency of different parts of speech or part-of-speech combinations &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frequency of specific function words (e.g. &quot;of,&quot; &quot;for&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of paragraphs, words or characters in the message&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;length of each paragraph or word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vocabulary size and distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use of numerals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, it's not just specific words or phrases, though popular articles on this stuff tend to focus on that aspect of it &amp;mdash; probably because &quot;women use more pronouns&quot; or whatever makes for a catchy headline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-10-31T22:32:34.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="905" CreationDate="2011-11-01T01:49:06.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: Semivowel&lt;/a&gt; has a useful list, which adds some more details to Alennano's answer.  In addition to j, ɥ, ɰ, w, it says that some authors list ɹ and ɻ as semivowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2011-11-01T01:49:06.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2011-11-01T23:55:53.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the general term for these would be &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prestige&lt;/a&gt; languages&quot;. Though the term itself has a wider application, those languages are chosen as sources of technical-term loanwords because of their prestige.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastActivityDate="2011-11-01T23:55:53.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-02T01:10:53.897" Score="19" ViewCount="3103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be especially interested in Indo-European languages or other common language families, but failing that, I would be very interested if it exists at all, because it is an important distinction in formal discourse, but can almost always be taken from context in informal speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T14:39:50.963" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T06:28:32.980" Title="Are there languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive &quot;or&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-11-02T03:27:14.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about other languages, but I know that Latin made this distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Latin they had several different words for these different 'ors'. AUT was generally exclusive, VEL inclusive, as was -VE on the end of  a word, whilst the 'or' of equivalence was denoted by SIVE or SEU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=7YWC49NVMisC&amp;amp;lpg=PA95&amp;amp;pg=PA95#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T03:27:14.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-11-02T08:09:56.850" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Basque (in the &lt;em&gt;batua&lt;/em&gt; dialect) has &lt;em&gt;ala&lt;/em&gt; &quot;or (exclusive)&quot; and &lt;em&gt;edo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;or (inclusive)&quot;, although &lt;em&gt;ala&lt;/em&gt; can only be used in questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also be interested in the WALS maps of languages with an &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/39A&quot;&gt;Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns&lt;/a&gt; and an &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/40A&quot;&gt;Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Verbal Inflection&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T08:09:56.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-11-02T09:16:25.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many European languages we can modify the &quot;or&quot; word by prefixing with &quot;either&quot; to make it exclusive, as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;You must chose either a or b&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (explicitly not both). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But without modification it's inclusive or exclusive depending on context:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Left or right?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is exclusive since &quot;both&quot; is not &quot;possible&quot; (usually),  while &lt;em&gt;&quot;Milk or sugar?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is inclusive because &quot;both&quot; is possible and quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS: As a programmer I'd really like the languages to have words for inclusive-or and exclusive-or clearly defined... ;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="2549" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T15:33:49.793" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T15:33:49.793" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="160" CreationDate="2011-11-02T15:45:25.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In creole studies, you'll hear languages like this described as &lt;em&gt;lexifiers.&lt;/em&gt;  So for instance, with Haitian Creole &amp;mdash; which takes a lot of grammatical features from West African languages, but has a mostly French vocabulary &amp;mdash; you can say that French was the the lexifier.  The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relexification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relexification&lt;/a&gt; gives a few more examples and some citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard the word &quot;lexifier&quot; used to describe non-creole languages.  But if you did use the word that way, I suspect you'd be understood.  Calling Norman French the &quot;lexifier&quot; for English legal terminology might not be technically correct but I'd know what you were getting at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-11-02T15:45:25.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="935" CreationDate="2011-11-02T16:19:35.943" Score="8" ViewCount="1709" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/trigramviz/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for six common subjects. But it doesn't contain the complete statistics about all common English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T11:50:36.947" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:50:36.947" Title="Are there any statistics or web services for n-grams of frequent English words?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="959" CreationDate="2011-11-02T22:16:49.443" Score="7" ViewCount="1117" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the course of their development, the word order of some languages change. Examples include Latin (SOV) that changed to SVO in the Romance languages, Proto-Austronesian (verb initial) that changed to SVO in most modern Austronesian languages, and the Insular Celtic languages, that developed VSO word order. How common is this phenomenon in the history of languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="192" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T00:42:13.110" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T00:59:01.560" Title="How common is word order change?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2011-11-03T00:53:46.637" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Finnish, &lt;em&gt;tai&lt;/em&gt; is inclusive, &lt;em&gt;vai&lt;/em&gt; exclusive, and &lt;em&gt;eli&lt;/em&gt; is for an equivalence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Haluaisitko omenia tai päärynöitä?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Would you like some apples or pears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Haluatko omenan, vai päärynän?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you want an apple, or a pear?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Se on hyvän- ja pahantiedon puun hedelmä, eli omena.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, or an apple.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T00:53:46.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="839" CreationDate="2011-11-03T03:38:16.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may have misunderstood what you're looking for.  But if I understand your question right, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a term for what you're talking about: &lt;em&gt;iconicity&lt;/em&gt;. In cognitive linguistics, expressions that are similar in form and meaning are said to be &quot;more iconic&quot; than expressions that don't show that sort of similarity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance, an onomatopoetic animal name like &lt;em&gt;cuckoo&lt;/em&gt; is said to be &quot;more iconic&quot; than a non-onomatopoetic one like &lt;em&gt;eagle&lt;/em&gt;.  If you say something is &lt;em&gt;lo-o-o-o-o-ong&lt;/em&gt;, with a lengthened vowel, that's &quot;more iconic&quot; than saying &lt;em&gt;very long&lt;/em&gt;.  If you say &lt;em&gt;he did it over and over and over&lt;/em&gt;, repeating the word to indicate a repeated event, that's &quot;more iconic&quot; than saying &lt;em&gt;he did it many times&lt;/em&gt;.  Saying &lt;em&gt;he went home and fell asleep&lt;/em&gt;, with the events described in the same order in which they occurred, is &quot;more iconic&quot; than saying &lt;em&gt;he fell asleep after going home.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I agree with all the caveats that other folks have given you.  It is impossible to quantify exactly how iconic an expression is &amp;mdash; there's no, like, &quot;iconicity quotient&quot; you can calculate.  And often it's not even clear which of two expressions should count as more iconic than the other. Is &lt;em&gt;cuckoo&lt;/em&gt; more or less iconic than &lt;em&gt;whipporwill&lt;/em&gt;?  Or for that matter, is &lt;em&gt;eagle&lt;/em&gt; more or less iconic than &lt;em&gt;pigeon&lt;/em&gt;?  There's really no way to answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as a concept it's not always very useful, and it's certainly not very precise.  Still, the concept is &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; if you want to use it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T03:38:16.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="944" CreationDate="2011-11-03T05:20:30.080" Score="9" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the passive is expressed by the use of an auxiliary and past participle. The agent is demoted to an optional by-phrase, and the theme/patient is promoted to the subject position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rome &lt;em&gt;destroyed&lt;/em&gt; Carthage –––&amp;gt; Carthage &lt;em&gt;was destroyed&lt;/em&gt; (by Rome)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, such as Latin, the passive is expressed synthetically: amare 'to love', amari 'to be loved'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've heard of an older way English expressed the (progressive) passive, the passival:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tooth is pulling out (by the barber)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cf.&lt;/strong&gt; The tooth is being pulled out (by the barber)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other ways the passive is expressed? Are certain ways/constructions more common than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T12:51:31.047" Title="What are the different ways in which languages express the notion of passivity?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2011-11-03T05:45:08.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://phrasesinenglish.org/&quot;&gt;phrasesinenglish.org&lt;/a&gt;'s &quot;N-Grams Advanced&quot; tool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phrasesinenglish.org/explorengrams.html&quot;&gt;http://phrasesinenglish.org/explorengrams.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It allows you to view 1- through 8-grams from the BNC (British National Corpus) in ascending or descending order, and provides a lots of granularity (filter by word pattern, POS etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T05:45:08.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="934" CreationDate="2011-11-03T10:38:57.380" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/107&quot;&gt;WALS page &quot;Passive Constructions&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, there are five necessary properties of a passive construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it contrasts with another constuction, the active;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the subject of the active corresponds to a non-obligatory oblique phrase of the passive or is not overtly expressed;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the subject of the passive, if there is one, corresponds to the direct object of the active;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the construction is pragmatically restricted relative to the active;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the construction displays some special morphological marking of the verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these tests, there are only those two ways to mark the passive: synthetic (some kind of marking on the verb which is different from the active, like Latin) and periphrastic or analytical (using some form of auxiliary and the participal form of the verb, like English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked pages also listed several ways that languages which do not have passive can have constructions which manifest some (but not all) of the five properties, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Agent demotion by simply omitting the agent &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Agent demotion by replacing the agent with an impersonal subject (like &quot;on&quot; in French)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the closest I found is the use of the inverse construction in Plains Cree (Algonquian; Canada). The inverse construction is similar to the passive because the patient is more topical than the agent. However, in the inverse the agent retains some topicality, is still obligatory and still controls the verbal agreement (meaning the agent is somewhat still the subject, hence the construction isn't really passive). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sēkih-ēw   nāpēw    atim-wa&#xA;scare-dir  man.prox dog-obv&#xA;‘The man scares the dog.’ &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Direct construction, 'man' is the proximate (the more topical participant), and 'dog' is the obviate (the less topical participant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sēkih-ik   nāpēw-a  atim&#xA;scare-inv  man-obv  dog.prox&#xA;‘The man scares the dog.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inverse construction, 'man' (agent) is the obviate and 'dog' (patient) is the proximate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are into it, there are other examples in the linked page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T17:17:01.917" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T17:17:01.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="813" CreationDate="2011-11-03T11:49:26.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the first thing you'd need to do is actually pose your question - as there are so many different possibilities as to what can be done with elicitation these days. As a general rule any elicitation must involve non-linguist stimulus, such as a video, to prevent the results being tainted by translation. The best place to look for what is often looked at to be the state of the art is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mpi.nl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegan&lt;/a&gt; - projects like the &quot;put project&quot; and the spatial relations projects are classics in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another vanguard approach is to use non-linguistic evidence of linguistic structures. Gesture is often a popular secondary evidence of the cognitive salience of a syntactic or semantic property. Start with &lt;a href=&quot;http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Susan Goldin-Meadow&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-11-03T13:18:54.403" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T13:18:54.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-03T13:43:27.103" Score="7" ViewCount="1814" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Arabic letter &lt;code&gt;ﻕ&lt;/code&gt; and the Georgian letter &lt;code&gt;ყ&lt;/code&gt; are often described as being similar, also they are both transliterated using &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the Georgian letter ყ is difficult for most Westerners to pronounce. It is similar to the Arabic &quot;qaf&quot; (ﻕ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how is it similar and how is it not quite the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that Arabic pronunciation varies a lot from country to country, is the Georgian sound closer to the sound in any particular variety of Arabic or does it have some quality that keeps it always apart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T17:18:37.870" Title="How exactly do the sounds of Arabic &quot;ﻕ&quot; and Georgian &quot;ყ&quot; differ?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2011-11-03T14:11:03.833" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be precise, while the IPA for ﻕ is &lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt; (N.B. I'm considering standard Arabic), the one for the  Georgian ყ is &lt;code&gt;/qʼ/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is a &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; sound, the second one is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_consonant&quot;&gt;ejective consonant&lt;/a&gt; (you can listen to the sound in the linked page). The main characteristic of this voiceless consonant is that it's non-pulmonic with a simultaneous closure of the glottis while it's being pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't know Georgian, but you can see in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aIPA_for_Georgian&quot;&gt;page for the Georgian IPA&lt;/a&gt; that the consonant you asked for is indeed an ejective one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T14:11:03.833" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2011-11-03T14:18:16.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (Modern Standard) Arabic &quot;qaf&quot; is an voiceless uvular stop [q]. It is pronounced like a plain [k], except that to make the [q], the back of the tongue touches the uvula, instead of the soft palate (to make [k]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Georgian sound is an uvular ejective [q']. It's also pronounced as a voiceless uvular stop, like the Arabic qaf, except that it is an ejective consonant, meaning the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airstream_mechanism&quot;&gt;air is created&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_consonant&quot;&gt;pumping the glottis upward&lt;/a&gt;. [q], like most of our &quot;normal&quot; sounds, is an pulmonic one, meaning the air is created by solely pushing air with the lungs and the diaphragm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T14:18:16.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="934" CreationDate="2011-11-03T14:49:16.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish uses the reflexive for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No se permite entrar. &quot;It is not permitted to enter&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally &quot;It doesn't permit itself to enter&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T14:49:16.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="905" CreationDate="2011-11-03T15:25:39.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The behavior with semi-vowels has to do with their level of sonority. Typically, a vowel is the peak of sonority in a syllable. Semi-vowels are vowels which are not the peak of sonority because they precede and/or are followed by a more sonorous (open) vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, any vowel could become a semi-vowel if it preceded or was followed by something more sonorous (think less constriction) than it was, perhaps with the exception of low vowels (because they are the most sonorous sounds). In reality, I am not sure about the existence of mid semi-vowels, outside of the off-glide in falling diphthongs as in /aʊ/. Alek Storm listed the semi-vowels for the high vowels. Any other types of semi-vowels would probably not have distinctive symbols in the IPA because of their rarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that it is not mandatory that a vowel become a glide if it is precedes or is followed by something more sonorous. A language might instead treat each vowel as the nucleus of its own syllable. It depends on the language's syllabification rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, vowels need not be the nucleus of a syllable: anything which is more sonorant than the surrounding segments can be. Languages vary on what types of segments they will allow to be syllabic nuclei, but Berber famously allows fricatives and stops: &lt;em&gt;tf.tkt&lt;/em&gt; 'you sprained'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T15:25:39.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="934" CreationDate="2011-11-03T16:14:48.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among languages that use the auxiliary strategy, there are different verbs that can be recruited as a passive auxiliary.  It's not always &quot;to be.&quot;  So for instance in English, &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; can also be used as a passive auxiliary.  In Italian there's a passive formed with &lt;em&gt;venire&lt;/em&gt; 'come.'  In Norwegian you use &lt;em&gt;bli&lt;/em&gt; 'become.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T16:14:48.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="934" CreationDate="2011-11-03T20:00:12.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to start with an excellent review &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199281251-e-019&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;by Leonid Kulikov. 2011. Voice typology.&lt;/a&gt; In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, ed. J. J. Song. Oxford: OUP, esp. pp. 374-380.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the best books on the passive voice is Siewierska, Anna. 1984. &lt;em&gt;The passive: A comparative linguistic analysis&lt;/em&gt;. London: Croom Helm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T16:12:23.647" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T16:12:23.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="784" CreationDate="2011-11-03T22:51:24.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are curious adjunct uses of &quot;of-phrases&quot; as in &quot;a man of honor&quot;, which correspond to the Latin genitive of description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2011-11-03T22:51:24.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="953" CreationDate="2011-11-04T02:16:12.623" Score="8" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically I'm interested in the split between Structural Case and Morphological case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structural Case has been part of Chomskyan syntactic theory since at least &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_and_binding_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Government &amp;amp; Binding&lt;/a&gt; (GB). Roughly, Case Theory in GB and the minimalist program state that all nominals in a grammatical sentence must have Structural Case and they move away from their base positions to get it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphological case, or m-case, is the more familiar case (nominative, accusative, dative) that surfaces phonologically on nominals in languages which do so. The most recent theories of m-case that I am aware of derive from Alec Marantz's 1991 paper &quot;Case and Licensing&quot; (which was later reissued as an intro to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ca/books?id=blno4uttFO8C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reuland (2000)&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I last checked, Nominative and Accusative were assumed to be Structural Case and the rest were sort of up in the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T12:47:44.520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T12:47:44.520" Title="Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2011-11-04T02:47:02.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re 'survival of the Latin nominative into Proto-Romance' - It survives into Old French, which had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two-case system&lt;/a&gt; until about the twelfth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for a standard second-declension noun &lt;em&gt;vicinus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;neighbor&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nom. Sg. _li voisins_ &amp;lt; VICINUS  Nom. Pl. _li voisin_   &amp;lt; VICINI&#xA;Obl. Sg. _le voisin_  &amp;lt; VICINUM  Obl. Pl. _les voisins_ &amp;lt; VICINOS&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sample remnant of the third declension, from &lt;em&gt;soror&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sister&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nom. Sg. _la suer_  &amp;lt; SOROR      Nom. Pl. _les serors_  &amp;lt; SORORES&#xA;Obl. Sg. _la seror_ &amp;lt; SOROREM    Obl. Pl. _les serors_  &amp;lt; SORORES&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are several innovations and Old French doesn't preserve the Latin declensions perfectly, but the original forms are retained in several declension types.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article linked has a lot of example declensions, many of which appear to be sourced from Kibler's &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Old French&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T02:47:02.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-04T07:42:09.207" Score="9" ViewCount="11620" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I heard from someone that your mother tongue is the language you talk in your thoughts. I've asked many people to verify the correctness of this proposition and to me, inductively this seems to be true. However, I can't deductively claim it, since I have no reference to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally know 4 languages (Persian, Kurdish, English, and reading and listening of French). However, I think in Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wonder, can we change our mother tongue? In other words, if we accept the above-mentioned theory for specifying mother-tongue, can we change the language in which we think? I know that I can do it deliberately, and many times I do think in English, but only when I'm conscious, and this tires me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd like to arrive to the point where I can think in English spontaneously. Is it possible? How? What are the techniques?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-08T14:45:34.250" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T21:02:39.087" Title="Is it possible to change your mother-tongue by thinking in another language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-04T09:09:30.213" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we accept your definition of mother tongue, then yes, you can switch to other languages, but that's not the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're fluent in a certain language, you think in that language, because since languages are never exactly the same, you need to think using other logics to make your sentences have sense. And right now, while I'm typing, I'm thinking in English. But it obviously isn't my mother tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's define what a mother tongue is again, this is the mostly agreed definition: &lt;em&gt;it's the language you acquired in the early years of your life through the natural language acquisition in a natural setting&lt;/em&gt; (with your family, your village/town/city) &lt;em&gt;and regardless of your following instruction&lt;/em&gt;; for these reasons, it's usually also the first language that you acquire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this definition, you can't change your mother tongue, it's something that doesn't depend on what you do but on your own personal history. However you can reach a high fluency in other languages and that is the key to think in those languages. For example, if you go to another country and live there, after a while you'll acquire the skills to be fluent and you'll treat that language almost as it was your mother tongue. Some people even dream in other languages, not just think in that, but they still have the same mother tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I wasn't speaking about the situations Louis mentioned, such as turning off the lights, since that doesn't require any language skill, or about deaf people, which are on a different level and I don't have enough knowledge as for now in that field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T09:09:30.213" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-04T09:17:18.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If personal anecdotes are ok, and &quot;thinking in a language&quot; includes internal conversations like &quot;what do I want for dinner today&quot; (introspective people have a never-ending conversation/discussion going in their heads), then I would say I am capable of thinking in both my mother tongue and English, and that I almost manage to think in German when I've been there long enough. What language I think in depends om my surroundings or what I have been reading recently. Since I'm writing this answer in English, I am currently thinking in English. I dream in both my mother tongue and English and sometimes in halting German. I often can't remember the language of some article recently read, I only remember the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would go so far as saying that you aren't really fluent in a language until you can think in it, mentally switch to it completely. If you need to translate in your head you are not fluent. For me, this can make translation quite hard as I know what a word means in one language but lack that word in a different language and so have to resort to circumlocutions and a lot of hemming and hawing and halting explanations :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T09:17:18.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-04T10:15:25.520" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have answered, this question is based on a weird definition of what a &quot;mother tongue&quot; is. It also seems to presuppose that thought is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; articulated in a language, which is far from true (I have no reference for that, but I know for a fact that I generally think directly in concepts rather than words, and I know other people who do as well. I think it's been studied before, but I cannot find a reference to that study at the moment. As far as I remember, there is a sizeable minority of people who think mostly in concepts rather than words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I think I can add is that even if you take Alenanno's definition of a mother tongue (which is indeed the most common one), there is actually &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; special about one's mother tongue, besides the fact that it was the one learned chronologically first. It's for instance perfectly possible to completely lose command of one's mother tongue later in life. There are lots of examples of people migrating with their families at the age of 6 to 10 (or even later) to another country, completely cutting the link with their original country. By the age of 40 to 50, it's not uncommon for those people to not be able to speak their mother tongue any longer, except maybe for one or two heavily accented words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal experience also agrees with this: I am a French person who moved to the Netherlands 10 years ago. I speak Dutch and English fluently, and much more often than I speak French. And although I still use French regularly (if not that often) and it is my mother tongue, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the language I speak best any more! I often struggle trying to find my words when speaking French, and I've been told I developed a Dutch accent when speaking the language (I can't hear it myself). Dutch nowadays comes to me much more naturally than French, and I feel I can express myself far more easily even in English than in French! So although it is my mother tongue, nowadays French is only my third language in terms of fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your last questions, yes, it is perfectly possible to think spontaneously in another language than your mother tongue (if you think in a language at all!). There is no special technique to reach that point. As kaleissin pointed out, it's purely a matter of fluency: the more you actively use a language (passive use like reading and listening is not enough), the more naturally you'll be able to think in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="45" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T10:15:25.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="947" CreationDate="2011-11-04T14:48:48.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean by the word &quot;recent&quot; (i.e. how much you already know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way you worded your question, I assume you're interested in generative syntax? If so, see references in Pesetsky and Torrego's &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Case_chapter.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2011 article&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism&lt;/em&gt;, Bobaljik and Wurmbrand's &lt;a href=&quot;http://wurmbrand.uconn.edu/Papers/Case.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2011 article&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Handbook of Case&lt;/em&gt;, and chapter 4 in &lt;em&gt;Theories of case&lt;/em&gt; by Miriam Butt (2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T06:55:18.880" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T06:55:18.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-04T15:36:16.413" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you already got exhaustive answers to your question. For my part, I would like to point out that your question is based on a false assumption that people think in a particular language. Here's a nice quote for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Most cognitively oriented linguists (e.g. Jackendoff, 1992; Pinker, 1994)&#xA;argue that humans think in a non-linguistic format (Pinker calls it &lt;strong&gt;mentalese&lt;/strong&gt;)&#xA;which we map automatically and without conscious control onto the structures of&#xA;particular languages like English or French. We then use these structures, either&#xA;in our heads to regulate our thoughts consciously (&lt;strong&gt;inner speech&lt;/strong&gt;), or in the external&#xA;modalities of speech, writing or sign, for communication with others. You may have&#xA;had the experience of dreaming in a language you’re learning, and perhaps you can&#xA;even recall dreamed conversations in it. Again, although these impressions can&#xA;seem very vivid, they are not evidence that we think in language. We can wrap our&#xA;thought in language, and this is clearly how we co-construct many of our beliefs&#xA;about the world with other speakers, as psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky (1986)&#xA;have pointed out. But this doesn’t mean that language and thought are the same&#xA;thing.&quot; (Hall, Smith, &amp;amp; Wicaksono. 2011. &lt;em&gt;Mapping applied linguistics: A guide for students and practitioners&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-11-04T17:38:27.227" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T17:38:27.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2011-11-04T16:03:28.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=MLASU1ym3ngC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=What%20counts%20as%20evidence%20in%20linguistics%3a%20The%20case%20of%20innateness&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=CTS0TszBBYOatwehhLXcAw&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=1&amp;amp;ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What counts as evidence in linguistics: The case of innateness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, eds. Penke and Rosenbach. 2007. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. This collection of articles was originally published in &lt;em&gt;Studies in Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-04T18:52:43.940" LastActivityDate="2011-11-04T18:52:43.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="958" CreationDate="2011-11-04T17:22:03.273" Score="16" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know we inherit our alphabets (including its ordering) from the Romans, and if we trace it further we will end up with the Phoenicians or some other civilizations in the ancient Middle East. Do (or did) the alphabet sequence have any meaning/sense in it? For example, does it follow some rules based on the letter's phonology, etc. How were the positions of the additional letters determined, do they follow the same conventions/rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-05T00:49:19.440" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T04:24:42.490" Title="Is there any point in the current ordering of the letters in the alphabet?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="918" CreationDate="2011-11-05T00:48:05.027" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I suspected, this is indeed a case of &lt;strong&gt;suppletion&lt;/strong&gt;, a term defined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0874808936&quot;&gt;A Glossary of Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of two or more originally unconnected&#xA;  forms (roots, stems) in the inflection of a single lexical&#xA;  item, for example, &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#47;&lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;, where originally &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; was&#xA;  not part of the tenses of ‘to go’ but rather was the past&#xA;  tense of &lt;em&gt;wend&lt;/em&gt;, which was taken over as the past of ‘to&#xA;  go’ and incorporated into its inflectional paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examining your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese &lt;em&gt;metade&lt;/em&gt; is cognate to &lt;em&gt;meio&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;medius&lt;/em&gt;, ultimately from PIE *&lt;em&gt;medʰyo-&lt;/em&gt; (‘between’). Analogously for other Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;Hälfte&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;halbaz&lt;/em&gt;, which is connected with the Indo-European root *&lt;em&gt;(s)kel-&lt;/em&gt; ('to split'). Analogously for other Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scottish &lt;em&gt;leth&lt;/em&gt; comes from Old Irish &lt;em&gt;leth&lt;/em&gt;, (‘side’). Analogously for other Goidelic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew &lt;em&gt;חצי&lt;/em&gt; is derived from the root &lt;em&gt;חצה&lt;/em&gt; ('to divide').&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian &lt;em&gt;fél&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Uralic &lt;em&gt;pälä&lt;/em&gt; ('side'). Analogously for other Uralic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accorging to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=76UUIcCqMYkC&quot;&gt;Fisiak&lt;/a&gt;, this is the same process that caused the irregularity &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; in several languages. Since the word for &lt;em&gt;half&lt;/em&gt; (as the words for &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt;) is much more frequently used than the words for other fractions, it tends to maintain its irregularity over time. Another source of this irregularity is that children do not learn to count as &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Instead, they learn the ordinal and cardinal sequences separately. This is probably what happens to the fraction numbers as well, which constitutes another barrier to regularization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-05T09:09:57.013" LastActivityDate="2011-11-05T09:09:57.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2011-11-05T08:06:45.930" Score="18" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The original alphabet&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not appear to have any &lt;em&gt;ancient&lt;/em&gt; authority on why alphabetical order is the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several modern scholars, such as Cyrus Gordon and Alessandro Bausani, have posited that the order is in various ways based on the calendar or the lunar zodiac.  (Giovanni Garbini gives a summary of Bausani's theory in his essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=1EEtmT9Tbj4C&amp;amp;lpg=PA119&amp;amp;pg=PA118#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;The Question of the Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;; this is quoted in many places online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing systems scholar Peter T. Daniels, however, has stated that &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/b00ad9eb811a52db&quot;&gt;there is no evidence for such suggestions&lt;/a&gt;, and has also &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/10513&quot;&gt;stated&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Scholars have been trying for centuries to explain the order of the letters of the alphabet, and no plausible answer has ever been found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Additional letters&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for additional letters, there is no hard and fast rule that I'm aware of, but I believe the most common practice has been simply to add them to the end of the alphabet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greeks did this with most of their new letters; beyond tau (the last letter of the Phoenician alphabet) are added upsilon, phi, chi, psi, and omega.  When the Romans invented the letter G, they put it in the gap that had been created by dropping Z from its original place between F and H.  However when they borrowed Y and Z from Greek later, these new letters went to the end of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the new letter is derived from an existing letter, it may sometimes be added to the alphabet immediately after it (thus J follows I, V and W follow U, Ñ follows N), but even in these cases this does not always happen; for example, the letters æ, ø, å, ä, and ö used in Scandinavian languages are added to the end of the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastActivityDate="2011-11-05T08:06:45.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2011-11-05T20:09:40.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change of basic constituent order should be relatively frequent. If two languages share a common ancestor, yet have different basic word orders, then at least one change (and possibly more) has occurred at some point in the course of their descent. &#xA;When two related languages have the same basic word orders, it is often not possible to tell whether this is so because they are related, or because they are within the same linguistic area, because proximity between two languages is actually a better predictor of whether they will share basic word orders than is relatedness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, for example, the map:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/81A?tg_format=map&amp;amp;v1=c00d&amp;amp;v2=cd00&amp;amp;v3=cff0&amp;amp;v4=dff0&amp;amp;v5=dd00&amp;amp;v6=d00d&amp;amp;v7=cccc#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/81A?tg_format=map&amp;amp;v1=c00d&amp;amp;v2=cd00&amp;amp;v3=cff0&amp;amp;v4=dff0&amp;amp;v5=dd00&amp;amp;v6=d00d&amp;amp;v7=cccc#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages form clusters where the basic constituent order is the same, regardless of their genetic affiliation. Although the region containing India and Southeast Asia contains a rather large number of language families, the area can be divided into two contiguous zones where the word order is the same: SOV in India, SVO in SE Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the importance of language contact in language change AND stasis, see:&#xA;Dryer, Matthew S. 1989 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dryer/DryerLargeLingAreas.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Large Linguistic Areas and Language Sampling&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Studies in Language 13: 257-292.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-06T00:59:01.560" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T00:59:01.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-06T01:31:39.650" Score="8" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the best evidence against a position like that expounded by e.g. Bob Port (or Ken Lodge, for you UK-based phon*ists), which essentially states that phonology (or whatever you want to call the cognitive/internal aspect of the acoustic/auditory/articulatory bits of language) is essentially non-segmental, and that segmental phenomena only emerge post-literacy training?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-06T06:11:35.040" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T15:27:40.027" Title="What evidence is there against &quot;nonsegmental&quot; phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2011-11-06T02:34:35.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone who's done a fair amount of work on studying the applicability of evolutionary metaphors (with greater or lesser degrees of abstraction) is &lt;a href=&quot;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~wedel/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Andrew Wedel&lt;/a&gt; (who has the additional benefit of PhDs in both biology and linguistics). In particular, he wrote &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~wedel/publications/PDF/WedelExEvLangChange.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Exemplar models, evolution and language change&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; that explicitly addresses (i) pruning of lines of inheritance, (ii) blending inheritance, and (iii) natural selection as pathways of evolutionary language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has several other papers along with this one that discuss evolutionary dynamics in language change and acquisition, most of which deal with fairly low-level sound change, and many of which involve simulation/modelling couched in a particular non-generative  framework (exemplar/memory-based). Following the links on his pubs page and the references therein should net you much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T15:10:06.357" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T15:10:06.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2011-11-06T02:53:16.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion of critical period that you use in your question (viz. difficulty of second-language acquisition) also goes by the more neutral name &quot;age effects&quot;. At least some researchers (e.g. Kathleen Currie Hall &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~labphon10/abstracts/47.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in this abstract&lt;/a&gt; [sorry no link to paper at hand]) don't believe that there is any a priori basis at all for putting an upper bound on the critial period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there is perhaps no age at which it is a &quot;safe bet&quot; that a second language could not be acquired with native fluency (barring e.g. silly things like exposure at an age so advanced that death is statistically likely to come sooner than L2 acquisition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T02:53:16.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2011-11-06T10:54:29.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any links or references to back up this answer but since the comments are already overflowing and I don't want it to get lost I'm adding it as an answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am certain that I've read in a popular linguistics book of an extreme case where a man had four first languages with each replacing the previous due to many upheavals in his early life forcing him to be moved to new language communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this quite some time ago so I'm sure it wasn't on the Internet and was likely to be in a book by David Crystal or some similar writer who makes books on languages accessible to people not trained in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T10:54:29.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="967" CreationDate="2011-11-06T14:28:25.593" Score="15" ViewCount="10525" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the most convincing and most popular arguments against the Innateness Hypothesis of Universal Grammar or Universal Grammar as described by Chomsky?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T17:19:53.293" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T08:53:15.437" Title="What are the arguments against Chomsky's Universal Grammar?" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2011-11-06T15:06:13.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends what you will count as evidence, and which position you want to argue against. Internal evidence would show that aspects of a phonological system cannot be described perspicaciously without recourse to segments, while external evidence would involve arguments based on the performance of speakers to the effect that their behavior could not be explained without positing segments in a mental representation. There are two possible positions to argue against, (a) that not all of phonology is organized into segments, or (b) that none of phonology is organized as segments. Obviously (b) will be easier to argue against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strong segmentalist view propounded by Chomsky in the 1960's and still by Halle is that phonological representations are matrices, where each column represents a segment. Arguments about the autosegmental nature of tone and accent have made this position difficult to adhere to. The more reasonable segmentalist position today is that phonological representations are made of timing nodes which are linked to different universal features. The timing slots correspond to segments. The argument made by Lodge (in his 2009 book &quot;Fundamental concepts in phonology&quot;) is that the features are not universal, and can therefore be assigned an arbitrary phonetic interpretation. He does not, however, argue that phonological representations lack any sort of timing tier. His model of phonology still requires timing nodes, but varies from generativist work in rejecting the universality of features. Silverman (in his 2006 book &quot;A Critical Introduction to Phonology&quot;) brings up external evidence against features, citing a well-known 1979 Study by Morais et al (Cognition 7:(4) 323-331) showing that Portuguese illiterates were unable to perform a task requiring them to add or subtract a segment to/from the beginning of a word.&#xA;As far as I can tell, there is no opponent of segments who would argue that phonological words are always stored, perceived and produced as indivisible wholes, but this would be a good artificial endpoint to set in evaluating different proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no detailed criticism of Lodge's proposal, but I think that a good argument against it on internal grounds would be to show that phonetic interpretation of features must be highly constrained and, at some level, language-independent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning external evidence, a type of evidence frequently reported in favor of&#xA;segmentalism is evidence from speech errors, Idsardi (2010), for example,&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/~idsardi/papers/2010di-phonology.pdf&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt; in his review&#xA;of Silverman's book, refers to a study on speech errors by Wan &amp;amp; Jaeger (1998). On&#xA;the other hand, speech errors are cited by Articulatory Phonologists as evidence in&#xA;favor of the gestural organization of speech. A 1992 &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/users/ohala/papers/segment_primitive_or_derived.pdf&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; by John Ohala argues for segments on the&#xA;basis of a thought experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I think a preliminary to this task is to try to clarify the positions of the antisegmentalists (admittedly not an easy task) and determine exactly at what points&#xA;these vary from those of segmentalists. It tends to be the case that many arguments put forward on either side are against positions which are not held by anyone, and defenses&#xA;against such arguments are defenses of positions which were never attacked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-06T15:16:23.810" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T15:16:23.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2011-11-06T15:09:02.093" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many opponents of a rule-based approach to language-learning support an &lt;em&gt;exemplar&lt;/em&gt;-based approach instead. In these models, the language learner does not form an internal grammar by learning abstract rules that manipulate segments; rather, she stores vast &quot;clouds&quot; of tokens that are committed to long-term memory on a word-by-word basis. Every time we encounter a new token, we compare it with every similar token we've heard before and adjust our mental representation of that token accordingly. It is important to point out that Port et al do not deny the existence of segment-sized units as a cultural construct, or even as part of individual impressions of speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I certainly would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say that our impression that speech has segment-sized units is due solely to alphabet training. Languages do have some segment-sized units, along with many other sized units as well. What is true, however, is that alphabet skills do tend to highlight the segment-like (i.e., letter-like) properties of phonologies for us. (Port, Languages and Sciences 32, p61-62) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, they contend that what we phonologists have been doing for decades is codifying sets of cultural conventions shared among communities of speakers rather than any kind of internal grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am familiar with three main types of argument against the extreme exemplar view (i.e. the complete abandonment of rule-based approaches to grammar):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The demands on long-term memory that the pure exemplar view entails are quite extreme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that language learners overgeneralize when attempting to produce new forms is evidence that those learners are applying abstract rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existence of Neogrammarian (i.e. across-the-board) sound changes are very difficult to capture in a model that doesn't allow for abstract units and categories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, exemplarists cite experimentally confirmed frequency effects and &quot;neighborhood density&quot; (i.e. degree of proximity to similar sounds) effects on production as evidence for exemplars and claim that purely abstractionist approaches cannot explain such effects. Recently, some researchers have supported a middle-ground approach in which insights from both camps are integrated into a model that allows for both the storage of phonetic detail and the manipulation and categorization of abstract units in the internal grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2011-11-06T15:27:40.027" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T15:27:40.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-11-06T16:19:12.187" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously there is much written on this topic. A good place to start reading might be Evans &amp;amp; Levinson's (2009) article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which is accompanied by responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A64KA9HB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science&lt;/a&gt; by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-08T15:48:50.070" LastActivityDate="2012-12-08T15:48:50.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2011-11-06T23:27:12.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Croft argues for a model of language that is usage-based (rather than child-based) and is based on David Hull's Generalized Analysis of Selection evolutionary model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see Croft's (2000) book &quot;Explaining language change&quot;, also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phy.umist.ac.uk/~ajm/bbcm09.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (2009) article by Baxter, Blythe &amp;amp; Croft for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-06T23:27:12.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2011-11-07T00:54:56.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0816614024&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Thousand Plateaus&lt;/em&gt;, a book Felix Guattari co-authored with Gilles Deleuze&lt;/a&gt;, in which they discuss Chomskyian linguistics in some depth and with a great deal of care. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some caution may be warranted: they may seem to take Chomsky rather lightly, and their position may appear to be antithetically opposed in many ways -- you will find them, for instance, arguing against 'tree-based' sentence analysis, promoting in its stead a kind of 'an-hierarchical' or 'rhizomatic' language analysis emphasizing the pragmatic and collective aspects of discourse. However, a careful reading of this work will find a unique encounter with Chomsky's linguistics that is well worth the time to unpack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also offer a detailed reading of the Labov-Chomsky debate, which may be of some interest in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="492" LastEditorUserId="492" LastEditDate="2011-11-07T03:22:39.283" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T03:22:39.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="745" CreationDate="2011-11-07T01:46:50.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the real issue here is that know is a factive verb. Compare (1)-(3) w/ (4)-(6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I don't suppose that Thomas will come. / I don't suppose Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(2) I don't imagine that Thomas will come. / I don't imagine Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(3) I don't reckon that Thomas will come. / I don't reckon Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(4) I didn't learn that Thomas will come. / ??I didn't learn Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(5) I didn't discover that Thomas will come. / ??I didn't discover Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(6) I didn't find out that Thomas will come. / ??I didn't find out Thomas will come.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)--(3) are ambiguous between a reading where the negation has scope over the matrix verb + complement clause and a reading where it has scope only over the complement clause, by the Gricean maxim of quantity I am supposing. (4)--(6), on the other hand, have only one reading, i.e. &quot;It's not the case that I learned that Thomas will come.&quot; It seems the generalization to make is that the dropped complement versions tilt heavily towards the reading that is blocked off by factive verbs. But there are exceptions, like (7), so this cannot be an airtight account. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) I didn't realize that Thomas will come. / I didn't realize Thomas will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T01:46:50.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="764" CreationDate="2011-11-07T03:55:42.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question may reflect an instance of a much more general pattern. That is, suppose you find an expression X in a language, and another expression Y in that language, and you believe X and Y to stand in a &quot;privileged&quot; relation (two types elaborated below). It seems that, across languages, one is likely to find that X and Y occur as simplex (i.e., nondecomposable) lexical items asymmetrically: i.e., if Y occurs as a simplex lexical item in the language, so does X. But simplex X occurring in a language does not guarantee expression of simplex Y. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One concrete example to explain one notion of a &quot;privileged&quot; relation between two expressions is privileged antonymy. Consider the adjectives &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;: we &quot;feel&quot; that these expressions are related in a way that makes the inferences in (1) and (2) valid, but not that in (3) (despite &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; on occasion meaning something very similar to &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is taller than John |= John is shorter than Mary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is shorter than John |= John is taller than Mary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is longer than John !|= John is shorter than Mary   (where !|= reads as &quot;does not entail&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given what was discussed in the first paragraph above, we thus expect a language to exist where there is no word for &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;, but that conveys such a meaning via negating the positive adjective, e.g. &lt;em&gt;not tall&lt;/em&gt;. One never expects to find a language that does the reverse, e.g. where &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; occurs with &lt;em&gt;not short&lt;/em&gt;, and expression of simplex &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt; fails to occur. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing strong versus weak meanings, Larry Horn in his 1972 dissertation gives nice examples using the dual modals &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;, and adjectives like &lt;em&gt;(un)able&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;(im)possible&lt;/em&gt;, to observe that in general, it seems the &quot;positive&quot; or &quot;stronger&quot; of a dual occurs as an expression &lt;em&gt;simpliciter&lt;/em&gt;, while the &quot;negative&quot; or &quot;weaker&quot; is likely to occur as a combination of the positive/stronger expression with a negative marker. Note that such a synthetic construction carries exactly the (logical) meaning of what the negative/weaker expression as a simplex lexical item would carry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horn has some speculations about why this asymmetric pattern may obtain, but it has not so far been explained in detail, and how far such phenomena extend throughout lexical semantics is (I think) unknown. Understanding that the patterns &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt;/ &lt;em&gt;odd&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt;/ &lt;em&gt;not even&lt;/em&gt; exist cross-linguistically, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;odd&lt;/em&gt;/ &lt;em&gt;not odd&lt;/em&gt;, feels of the same flavor of the above spread of examples. It is unclear to me how one might cast the pair &lt;em&gt;even/odd&lt;/em&gt; in terms of antonymy or strength, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T03:55:42.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2011-11-07T16:34:34.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look at the following book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keller, Rudi. 1994. &lt;em&gt;On language change: The invisible hand in language&lt;/em&gt;. London: Routledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T16:34:34.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="679" CreationDate="2011-11-07T16:41:50.610" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notice that not everyone subscribes to the Critical Period Hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No robust empirical evidence supporting various CPH theories is available at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a very good quote from an excellent textbook written by Lourdes Ortega: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;An early start does not guarantee complete and successful acquisition in all cases, as some children who start learning the L2 at an age as early as four or even two may be found to differ from native speaker performance in subtle ways&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (Ortega 2009, p. 29).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See chapter 2 with an excellent summary and annotated suggestions for further reading in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340905593/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ortega, L. 2009. &lt;em&gt;Understanding second language acquisition&lt;/em&gt;. London: Hodder Education.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, see a recent monograph by Herschensohn, Julia. 2007. &lt;em&gt;Language development and age&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-06-13T22:29:42.527" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T22:29:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="652" CreationDate="2011-11-07T22:36:26.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;German is a language which could probably match English as far as the historical record is concerned, and it is highly likely that studies on regularization rates have been conducted, though I don't have any highly specific references. A good place to start might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fertig, David. Morphological Change Up Close. Two and a Half Centuries of Verbal Inflection in Nuremberg. 2000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that frequency is not the only variable predictive of regularization rate. Another factor identified for English is phonological similarity: i.e. verbs like sing ~ sang will regularize more slowly because of the presence of phonologically similar alternations with other irregular verbs, e.g. ring ~ rang. A reference on this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hare and Elman (1995), &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Papers/learning_and_morphological_change.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Learning and Morphological change&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Cognition 56, 61--98&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-07T22:36:26.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="980" CreationDate="2011-11-07T22:51:20.603" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages with tonal inflection for tense/aspect/mood occasionally have tones associated with certain inflectional categories which are realized on pronouns, e.g. Ngbaka, where the imperfect and the jussive are distinguished only by the tone on a 1st/2nd person subject pronoun (Mid for imperfect, Low for jussive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mi[M] gOmO[H.H] te[M] &quot;i am cutting the tree&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;mO[L] gOmO[H.H] te[M] &quot;you should cut the tree&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Henrix et al 2007, &quot;Description grammaticale de la langue Ngbaka)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(the source does not give two examples with the same pronoun, but assume&#xA;that mO[M] gOmO[H.H] te[M] is grammatical and means &quot;you are cutting the tree&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether anyone can give an example of a segmental analogue, say where there are segmentally distinct versions of a free pronoun whose appearance is conditioned by the tense/aspect/mood of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T08:06:34.523" Title="Segmental exponents of tense/aspect on subject pronouns?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="934" CreationDate="2011-11-08T01:59:33.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure these concepts are mentioned in the books recommended by Alex B, but there are some other related constructions you might find interesting. For instance, many ergative/absolutive languages have a construction that's called the &quot;antipassive&quot;, in which the ergative argument becomes absolutive, and the absolutive argument becomes an oblique (kind of lowering of the agent to a patient grammatical role, and a patient to oblique shift). Additionally, one could conceptualize passives as a subtype of the applicative-type construction, well documented in African languages, in which various morphemes shift around other case/thematic relations. Finally, I recommend google scholaring focus argument constructions, often seen in Polynesian languages (and they go crazy in the Formosan languages), in which there are various NP &quot;slots&quot; arguments go into, and verbal morphology tells which slot gets which thematic role (arguably a particular flavor of a head-marking Baker-style &quot;polysynthesis&quot; language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T01:59:33.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="977" CreationDate="2011-11-08T08:06:34.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While a relatively rare phenomenon, there are numerous examples of languages where the selection of a pronoun depends on the TAM of the clause (I say 'clause' as it is not always the case that it is also marked on the verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Pitta-Pitta (Australian family) all core case-marking is split according to whether it marks future or non-future and this also applies to pronouns. (1a) and (1b) show non-future and future examples respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1a)  WaiRa -nha      ngathu       thari -nya  nhana        -yi    &#xA;     heart  -nfut.acc 1sg.nfut.erg spear -past 3sg.nfut.acc -prox&#xA;&#xA;     wakira   -nha&#xA;     kangaroo -nfut.acc &#xA;     &quot;I speared the kangaroo in the heart.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1b)  Tyira     -maru -ngu     nganyu      karnta -ø   &#xA;      boomerang -prop -fut.erg 1sg.fut.erg go     -fut&#xA;     &quot;I'll be going with the boomerang.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bowern, C. 2004. 'The origins of tense-based case marking in Pitta-Pitta and Wangkajutjuru'. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 24:2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other Australian languages with similar behaviour. Another example is Gurnu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(2) bulga -nguna -ngadhu         bulga -ngaw -adhu&#xA;    hit   -pres  -1sg.pres       hit   -past -1sg.past&#xA;     &quot;I hit (present).&quot;     vs.  &quot;I hit (past).&quot;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blevins (2004) suggests that this is probably due to a combination of factors, including a fixed verb-pronoun word order and the phonological form of verbs causing sandhi changes on following pronouns. (Blevins, J. 2004. 'Evolutionary Phonology'. CUP.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iai (Austronesian family, New Caledonia) also has tensed pronouns, but this is reported to be similar to the English pronouns with (what has been called) propositional marking of tense: &quot;I'll, I'd, I'm, I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scottish Gaelic has two forms of the 2sg pronoun, /tu/ and /thu/, the former occurring only with future/present habitual verbs. Similar to the situation with Gurnu, these have arisen through phonological change caused by the adjacent verb, Gaelic having VSO order in the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hausa (Afro-Asiatic family) and Wolof (Niger-Congo family) also have distinct sets of pronouns for indicating different tense/mood. These are sometimes known as 'temporal pronouns'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upriver Halkomelem (Salishan family) has tense marking on nouns and pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a slightly different tack, it has been shown that two tense-marking auxiliaries in Panare (Cariban family) derive etymologically from demonstrative pronouns.&#xA;(Gildea, S. 1993. 'The development of tense markers from demonstrative pronouns in Panare (Cariban)'. Studies in Language, 17:1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T08:06:34.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="983" CreationDate="2011-11-08T10:25:03.483" Score="19" ViewCount="28866" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following joke is popular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder how common is the phenomenon. &amp;quot;yeah, right&amp;quot; isn't exactly double-positive, or at least it relies on intonation to convey the negative meaning. However, in Bulgarian &amp;quot;да, да&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;da, da&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;yes, yes&amp;quot;) almost always means &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; (still, intonation plays a role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other languages exhibit this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian also exhibits this feature. &amp;quot;Da, da&amp;quot;, said in a certain way means &amp;quot;in no way&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;never&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T08:43:23.963" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T08:43:23.963" Title="Is &quot;double positive meaning negative&quot; a common phenomenon?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="981" CreationDate="2011-11-08T11:58:30.033" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ja, ja&lt;/em&gt; in Dutch and German can express disbelief too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think &lt;em&gt;ja, ja, да, да, yeah yeah&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;yeah, right&lt;/em&gt; should really count; they do not express a double positive in the sense that one positive modifies the other, nor that both modify the same thing. They are just strong (because repeated) positives used &lt;strong&gt;ironically&lt;/strong&gt;; they indicate disbelief—but is it an actual negation? You could use any locution to express a negative &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illocution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;illocution&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, I'm sure your grandmother won't be shocked if you announce that you're gay on Christmas Eve and kiss your girlfriend. She will no doubt be thrilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, it is possible that &lt;em&gt;ja, ja&lt;/em&gt; originates in a polite phrase that no-one believes any more (instead of a faded ironic phrase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that doubling a negative gives a positive is inherent in negations, because they invert whatever falls under their scope. Positives do not invert; they do not change what falls under their scope like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, who is to say what counts? Depending on one's definition, it could be argued that there are two positives, and that the whole is negative. I suppose it is a trivial matter at any rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T16:00:19.300" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T16:00:19.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="981" CreationDate="2011-11-08T12:04:50.897" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, for example, it's the same in Italian &quot;&lt;em&gt;sì, sì&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (= yes, yes), but it's ambiguous, it depends on &lt;strong&gt;intonation&lt;/strong&gt; and not on the words themselves; this means that &quot;double positive = negative&quot; is wrong speaking about the words, but it works through other means. Changing intonation, that &quot;sì, sì&quot; can be absolutely positive as well. We also use a small variation in &lt;em&gt;written language&lt;/em&gt; to substitute the intonation. We write &quot;seh seh&quot; or &quot;se se&quot;... More or less like the English slang variation &quot;ye ye&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the &quot;double positive&quot; also works for French &quot;&lt;em&gt;c'est ça oui&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or Spanish &quot;&lt;em&gt;sí sí&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, still, it's the intonation that plays an important role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And going back to that... Intonation is a &lt;em&gt;suprasegmental prosodic feature&lt;/em&gt;, along with &lt;em&gt;pitch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;stress&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rhythm&lt;/em&gt; and they all belong to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;Prosody&lt;/a&gt;. (There might be other features but right now I don't remember them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prosodic features of a &quot;unity&quot; in spoken language are called &lt;em&gt;suprasegmental&lt;/em&gt; because they occur simultaneously to the utterance (segments). When you say words, forming a sentence, you include &lt;em&gt;rhythm&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;intonation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;stress&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pitch&lt;/em&gt; and these two &quot;categories&quot; occur at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't utter words first and intonation later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, usually that's what makes that utterance have a &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; meaning to the hearer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-11-09T16:55:30.513" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T16:55:30.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-08T14:06:33.687" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the original P&amp;amp;P model, we had a nice story in which there was supposed to be some finite list of principles and some finite list of parameters, the former constraining hypotheses and the latter driving what kinds of things kids should be looking for. So, wh-islands and Binding theory are principles, and head-directionality parameter and wh-in-situ vs. wh-movement examples of parameters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think in the theoretical literature (specifically in Minimalism, and earlier in other lexicalist approaches) the &quot;toolkit&quot; model of variation has more or less become the standard -- UG provides the tools and format for creating languages, and there are any number of ways they can be used. There is a theory of variation, the &quot;Chomsky-Borer Conjecture&quot; (Borer 1984, Chomsky 1995) in which the variation between languages is restricted to what functional elements look like, which can be thought to be a flavor of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm wondering what people think from the acquisition side of things. The idea that languages could vary in any number of ways consistent with principles – and parameters provide no delineation – basically says that we can't really learn anything about acquisition from typology, and that every aspect of variation is something the child has to learn ex nihilo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do kids usually assume that their language will be typologically &quot;unmarked&quot; until they receive evidence to the contrary? To kids seem to lump together properties (do head-final kids like scrambling more often than head-initial kids?) Is the notion of &quot;parameter&quot; still useful in generative approaches to language acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-11-08T18:40:09.810" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T19:56:44.883" Title="Recommendations on the current state of parameters as explanation in acquisition?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;&lt;variation&gt;&lt;parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2011-11-08T16:54:50.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In current mainstream generative L2 acquisition research, there are no parameters per se anymore (because there are no parameters in the MP). So, crosslinguistic variation is explained by the following factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;different languages may select different features;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a feature may or may not project a functional category;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the same functional category may have a set of different features;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how features are realized/expressed, lexically or morphophonologically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feature strength;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feature interpretability;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, generative L2 acquisition research deals with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ability/inability to select features;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feature reassembly;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accessibility of features;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further discussion, see Lydia White (2003), &lt;em&gt;Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, and an excellent collection of articles, &lt;em&gt;The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition&lt;/em&gt; (2010), eds. Liceras, Zobl, and Goodluck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for L1 acquisition, what you mentioned in your question (Hyams' markedness, head-initial parameter etc.) was relevant in the good olde GB  days but, I'm afraid, is no longer valid in the MP. A popular view was that children set (&quot;switched on/off&quot;) UG parameters on the basis of PLD (primary linguistic data). With features in the MP, there is no consensus what causes crosslinguistic variation (interfaces? lexicon? etc.). However, points 1-6 I mentioned above still hold for L1-acquiring children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. &quot;In the absence of a coherent minimalist theory of this type, it is not in fact possible to meaningfully evaluate the success of the P&amp;amp;P enterprise to date.&quot; (Biberauer 2008, Introduction, In &lt;em&gt;The Limits of Syntactic Variation&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-11-08T19:56:44.883" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T19:56:44.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="981" CreationDate="2011-11-08T17:44:44.903" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between semantics (literal or metaphorical meanings) of utterances and their pragmatics (the real world contextual implications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sarcasm (though possibly marked phonetically in English by change in prosody) is a phenomenon of pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, two positives &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; make a negative, the ostensible semantic derivation is that it is emphasis by repetition or, with mathematical terminology, idempotent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surface meaning of 'yeah, right' or 'yeah, yeah' is assuredly positive. It is the situation that let's us see that the student is only implicitly contradicting the teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to other languages, I'm sure the same joke can be translated, but that doesn't make the utterance of two positives a negative there also. Your Bulgarian example may be a native ostensible definition for 'da, da', but it is not a well known phenomenon among the worlds languages (if truly at all) for it to be a true negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-11-08T18:43:50.990" LastActivityDate="2011-11-08T18:43:50.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1012" CreationDate="2011-11-08T22:24:34.917" Score="6" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native Portuguese speakers (myself included) often have a hard time dealing with the English  &lt;em&gt;present perfect&lt;/em&gt; tense-aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the &lt;em&gt;present perfect&lt;/em&gt; is used for expressing past actions with present consequences. This is different from the &lt;em&gt;simple past&lt;/em&gt;, which expresses actions wholly contained in the past. In Portuguese, this distinction is not marked. Sentences using the present perfect in English are usually translated to Portuguese using the simple past. So, for example, the sentence &lt;em&gt;I have received a letter&lt;/em&gt; gets translated into Portuguese as &lt;em&gt;Eu recebi uma carta&lt;/em&gt; (literally, “I received a letter”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Portuguese has a different tense-aspect with the same structure of the English present perfect, but equivalent in meaning to the English &lt;em&gt;present perfect continuous&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Eu tenho trabalhado muito&#xA;I  have  worked     a lot&#xA;“I have been working a lot”&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the two languages develop similar structures (have-aux + verb-past participle), that mark different grammatical tense-aspects? Did one language borrow the construction from another and changed its meaning over time? Is it just pure chance? Or some other explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-09T10:54:23.033" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T22:08:28.703" Title="How did English and Portuguese develop the construction &quot;have+pp&quot;?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-08T20:34:48.230" Score="6" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a measure for the rate of language drift? In one answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32924/is-spelling-still-drifting&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it was suggested that drift had slowed for technological reasons, but may also be speeding up because of different technologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this slowing determined? I would imagine statistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a unit of measurement for language drift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="505" OwnerDisplayName="Sam" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-12-10T14:49:59.747" Title="Can you measure the rate of drift?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="994" CreationDate="2011-11-09T00:27:19.520" Score="12" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, language families originate from a process of divergent, tree-like evolution. All the languages within a family or subfamily can be traced back to the same proto-language, which was spoken several centuries ago. At some point, the various regions in which that proto-language was spoken started developing their own particular innovations. This process went on and on, to the point that, after some time, they were not mutually intelligible anymore and could thus be considered as “different languages”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there any case of the opposite trajectory, i.e., languages that started out very different from each other, then started to converge because of language contact and ended up very similar, much like actual language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am aware of the existence of language areas (Sprachbunds), in which languages share several features by virtue of the high level of contact among them. But even in Sprachbunds, languages maintain their familial “identity”, so to speak. In the Balkans, for example, we can talk about Slavic languages, Romance languages, etc. There is no such thing as a “Balkanic familiy”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T02:21:44.453" Title="Is there any case of a &quot;convergent language family&quot;?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="991" CreationDate="2011-11-09T00:47:32.570" Score="8" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that some people attribute it to influence from the Slavic languages.  But it doesn't just appear in Slavic loans &amp;mdash; it also shows up in obviously Latin-derived words like &lt;em&gt;câine&lt;/em&gt; 'dog' (from CANEM). On the other hand, not all words with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in Latin have &lt;em&gt;â&lt;/em&gt; in Romanian &amp;mdash; e.g. FRATER went to &lt;em&gt;frate&lt;/em&gt; rather than *&lt;em&gt;frâte&lt;/em&gt;.  So was this a sporadic sound change, or a regular change conditioned by some environment, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-10T06:53:49.027" LastActivityDate="2011-11-10T06:53:49.027" Title="What is the history of the sound spelled &lt;â&gt; or &lt;î&gt; (IPA /ɨ/) in Romanian?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2011-11-09T01:19:26.537" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In words of Latin origin, Romanian /ɨ/ arises from a few different places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin /a/ followed by /n/: &lt;em&gt;cânt &amp;lt; canto, sfânt &amp;lt; sanctum&lt;/em&gt;. The diphthong in &lt;em&gt;pâine, câine&lt;/em&gt; is due to assimilation to the following vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Latin word /in/. This is not a regular sound change in that not all Latin instances of /i/ followed by /n/ are centralized, but all forms of the preposition &quot;in&quot; have /ɨ/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vowel /i/ preceded by /rr/ or initial /r/: &lt;em&gt;râu &amp;lt; rivum, urî &amp;lt; horrire&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other instances of /ɨ/ are generally loans. Also, there are numerous words of Latin origin which appear to violate the rules above, but these are usually later reborrowings from Latin or sometimes French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T01:19:26.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="989" CreationDate="2011-11-09T01:30:54.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The evidence of linguistic relationship is observable shared characteristics that are not attributed to borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this it follows that your two languages will never become part of the same language family, because all borrowed features should be ignored when determining membership of a linguistic family. If an Indo-European language has adopted so many features from a Semitic language that both its vocabulary and its grammatical constructions are 99 % borrowed from the Semitic language, leaving only a barely recognizable 1 % Indo-European features, it should by this definition still be considered an Indo-European language. Even if this becomes 100 %, it follows that the old language should in principle &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; be said to be Indo-European!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This the absurd but necessary consequence of the definition shows the limits of its usefulness. It is the only way to classify a language with absolute certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a language is treated here as something entirely separate from its speakers: the essential factor to consider is its past. This poses the following problem: how do we determine which language has borrowed from which? In the above case, it could be said that the speakers have simply gradually adopted the Semitic language and stopped speaking their previous, Indo-European language. It just depends on whether you treat the pair as one &quot;original&quot; Indo-European language influenced by a Semitic superstrate, or an &quot;original&quot; Semitic superstrate that has moved to a new community of speakers and made the old Indo-European languages extinct as to its having any living speakers. The choice seems rather arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible definition could be this (my own version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A language belongs to a language family if the features typical of this family comprise the greatest part of its own features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a language whose vocabulary and grammar is 40 % inherited or borrowed from Indo-European languages, 30 % Semitic, and 20 % from other languages would be said to be Indo-European. However, this results in serious difficulties. How does one measure these percentages? Count words in its dictionary? Count words actually used in recorded conversations? And what if it has more words from family A but more grammatical features from family B? Which is more important? What to do with pragmatic and narrative features? How much weight do we attach to all these features and categories of features? What if one group of its speakers use more features from A, but another group uses more from B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, we could simply say each language can belong to several families at once. In most languages, a main component can probably be reasonably identified, but some should perhaps be said to belong to several families to an equal or comparatively undeterminable degree. If you take this interpretation, your question more or less becomes moot: languages can belong to the same family to various degrees, according as they contain more or fewer features from the same family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2011-11-09T01:53:36.433" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T01:53:36.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="997" CreationDate="2011-11-09T02:57:15.963" Score="5" ViewCount="2562" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the English Language and Usage Stackexchange site, the question was asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt; and the answer boiled down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(article) + number + judgement/attitude + size + age + color + origin + material + purpose + noun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably a similar situation of multiple independent modifiers arises in other languages, too. But is English so special that only it has such a specific ordering? Is it 'anything goes' in other languages, or do they follow a strict pattern but different, or is this pattern universal? Do the patterns that exist share any properties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T17:05:09.780" Title="Are there any other rules for adjective order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="989" CreationDate="2011-11-09T02:57:30.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there would be an epistemic block (i.e. a part of our methodology which prevents us from discovering something, regardless of what the data may say) against ever discovering such a thing. Let's imagine two languages, X and Y, which do not have a common ancestor. If, by traditional criteria of assessing relatedness (apparent shared innovations), we determine that X and Y have a common ancestor, then we will say that X and Y are related, even though they are not related. However, we have no way of discovering our mistake, since so far there is no method for assessing relatedness which has overtaken the comparative method in reliability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since not all language families are equally well substantiated, and none is 100% certain to be a genetic unit, it is highly probable that at least one such case exists: a language family which is called a language family but is really a case of convergence by contact. &quot;Khoisan&quot; is such a case. Once proposed as a family by Greenberg and then accepted as one by scholars, it has subsequently been discredited (see work by Tom Gueldemann on this topic) and is no longer held by specialists to constitute a valid genetic grouping. Since non-specialists may not be uniformly aware of the non-validity of Khoisan as a genetic unit, there are those who will still refer to the Khoisan family, even though it is not a family, but a group of families that resemble each other partly due to contact. But it would be hard to call it a family of convergence, since you would have to simultaneously believe that it's a family and that it's not really a family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting this issue aside, there are many cases of languages which are unrelated but are strikingly similar. Compare Cantonese and Vietnamese: they both have lexical tone, a division between checked and non-checked tones, mostly monosyllabic morphemes, verb serialization, roughly the same segmental phonotactics, similar word order patterns, a variety of sentence-final emphatic particles, share a large proportion of their vocabulary, etc. But they are known to be unrelated, and have a good enough written record to not have ever been confused by serious researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-16T02:21:44.453" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T02:21:44.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2011-11-09T07:36:49.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have yet to find anything about adjective ordering in languages other than English, judging from the reference grammars (some twenty but few on IE languages) and papers I have read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might simply be that other languages do have an ordering but that there are so few linguists working on them that other interesting features of the language take precedence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T07:36:49.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="987" CreationDate="2011-11-09T11:50:10.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Periphrastic forms with &quot;have&quot; are fairly common -- one might think of &quot;have to&quot; in &quot;I have to win&quot; (and its Spanish equivalent, &quot;Tengo que ganar&quot;!) as auxiliaries, and all of the future tenses in Romance are formed from a verb followed by an inflected form of the word &quot;have&quot; in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, if I remember correctly, the way that the English present perfect was formed was via reanalysis of constructions like &quot;I have the cat fed&quot;, in which &quot;have&quot; is the lexical verb, and &quot;fed&quot; is some kind of secondary predicate of the noun &quot;cat&quot;. It's not too hard to see why it got used as a present perfect -- the &quot;have&quot; is expressing that the state is taking place now, and the past participle form &quot;fed&quot; expresses that the relevant event is completed. I imagine that Portuguese probably went through a different trajectory to get the meaning it has, or it followed a similar trajectory, and then semantically drifted to where it is now. Someone would need to check the facts, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T11:50:10.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2011-11-09T11:53:22.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is supposed to be a universal ordering of adjectives. Oddly, languages either have the exact same ordering as English, or the exact opposite as English. And, nouns in various languages fall in some designated position between the string of adjectives -- in English it's at the end, in Romance languages it's somewhere in the middle, such that most adjectives follow the noun, but certain adjectives precede. Guglielmo Cinque is the big name here, who has written a book articulating this idea, called The Syntax of Adjectives (in addition to working on it in a number of papers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T11:53:22.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2011-11-09T16:53:55.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a wealth of research on the ordering of adjectives (also notice that not in all languages nouns can be modified by more than one adjective): Dixon 1982, Sproat and Shih 1991, Bernsetin 1993, Bouchard 1998 (and other papers), Svenonius 1993 (and other papers), Scott 2002 to start with. Also, see some papers in &lt;em&gt;Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse&lt;/em&gt; (2008), OUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g., Dixon 1982: Value-Dimension-Physical Property-Speed-Human Propensity-Age-Colour&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-11-09T17:05:09.780" LastActivityDate="2011-11-09T17:05:09.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1000" CreationDate="2011-11-09T17:56:40.447" Score="7" ViewCount="8505" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a theta role? Is it the same as a thematic role?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what does it mean for a theta role to be undischarged/unsaturated? I came across these terms in a syntax paper. It seems like both undischarged/unsaturated were referring to the same effect. It might help to know what it means for a theta role to discharge/become saturated, and how it happens to discharge/become saturated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T12:22:09.547" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T12:22:09.547" Title="What is a theta role?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="999" CreationDate="2011-11-09T18:21:33.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a syntactic notion and a very closely related semantic notion of &quot;thematic role&quot; that are more or less meant to map onto one another. Essentially, a theta role is the label for how the referent of an NP acts in the event the sentence describes. So, in &quot;John ate an apple&quot;, John is the eater, and the apple is the eatee. In linguistic theory we think we've come up with &quot;general&quot; theta roles that are what the syntax care about -- the eater in &quot;John ate an apple&quot;, the kicker in &quot;John kicked the ball&quot; etc are &quot;agents&quot;, the eaten thing and the kicked thing are the &quot;patients&quot;. Mark Baker has proposed -- and it has been pretty standardly assumed to be true in Chomskyan syntax -- that these theta roles are tied to particular positions in the syntax (which is why &quot;John loves Mary&quot; and &quot;Mary loves John&quot; mean different things!). Theta theory says that each verb comes predetermined with a certain number of theta roles, and each theta role must be assigned to one and only one NP. That's why &quot;John loves&quot; doesn't mean the same thing as &quot;John loves himself&quot;, and why &quot;*John arrived Mary&quot; isn't acceptable (&quot;arrived&quot; doesn't have an object theta role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2011-11-10T07:13:30.093" LastActivityDate="2011-11-10T07:13:30.093" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1004" CreationDate="2011-11-09T23:26:56.540" Score="19" ViewCount="11192" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do archaeologists, cryptoanalysts and linguists decipher extinct languages? Has there been a case in history where this was successfully accomplished, without the means of something like the Rosetta stone or people that still speak a similar variant of the language in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously you start out by collecting statistics. How often do characters appear, how often do certain characters appear together, etc. &#xA;But what do you then do with those statistics? How does it help knowing that A E I O U are vowels, or that u almost always follows q and that h frequently follows t in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to discover English, without knowing anything about it (except for maybe that it is an alphabetical language), or any related languages, how would you go about deciphering it? To simplify things let's assume a fairly simplified version of English with only abstract concepts like squares or triangles.&#xA;If you had books full of sentences like &quot;A square consists of two triangles&quot;, &quot;A triangle consists of three lines intersecting with each other&quot;, etc. how could one extract the meaning of those sentences without prior knowledge of the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="503" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T02:50:40.587" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T00:57:02.733" Title="How are languages deciphered?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1001" CreationDate="2011-11-10T02:31:24.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that, in the scenario you give, It's currently not possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the decipherments to date have depended on some secondary reference, be it a version of the text in a known language, some illustrations, or some other clues as to the content of the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example you give, just plain text describing abstract geometric figures, would need diagrams included to be deciphered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastEditorUserId="297" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T18:22:48.017" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T18:22:48.017" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="988" CreationDate="2011-11-10T04:29:08.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a standard method, but it shouldn't be too difficult to make some metric of the variation in an orthographic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll use the Wright-Fisher model, which is used to model genetic drift in biology.&#xA;Let's say that a word has orthographic variants &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, and their prevalences at time &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; = 0 are &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;(0) and &lt;em&gt;py&lt;/em&gt;(0) = 1 &amp;ndash; &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#40;&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;). Imagine that all of the tokens of our word belong in generation 0. Now we start to do a procedure like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; words at random from generation 0, using the prevalences at &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; = 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now the words that we have selected form generation 1, which has its own prevalences, &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;(1) and 1 &amp;ndash; &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;(1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; words from generation 1 to create generation 2, and so on, until we get to generation n where either &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#40;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;) = 0 or &lt;em&gt;px&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#40;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;) = 1. At this point we can say that one variant of the word has fixed, and there is no more drift.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A way of measuring how much longer the system is going to drift is by calculating the mean fixation time, or the average number of generations from generation 0 that it takes for one variant to fix. For large &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt;, this number is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hMiQ7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we set &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; arbitrarily, the important term is the one with the logarithms in it, which is equivalent to the entropy of the system, though the choice of base is e rather than 2. So if I were starting from scratch, I'd take the entropy as a way of quantifying the present variability, and the amount of time remaining before the system stabilizes, as a baseline measure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=dsCZxYP15YEC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Principles of Evolution&lt;/a&gt; eds. H Meyer-Ortmanns and S. Thurner (Springer, 2011).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-10T14:49:59.747" LastActivityDate="2011-12-10T14:49:59.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1001" CreationDate="2011-11-10T05:27:54.023" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should read Peter T. Daniels' 1996 article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/25203647&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Methods of decipherment&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in an excellent book, &lt;em&gt;The world's writing systems&lt;/em&gt;, eds. Daniels and Bright. New York: Oxford University Press. He has a really nice  table, &quot;Typology of decipherment&quot; (adapted from Gelb 1973, 1975):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5r5pN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type O: (e.g., Punic texts written in Greek letters, Indian names in Chinese Buddhist compositions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type IA: (e.g. Phoenician, Ugaritic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type IB: familiar languages in unknown scripts (e.g., Linear B, Maya glyphs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type II: codes and ciphers (cryptanalysis); pronounceable but unintelligible languages (e.g., Sumerian, Elamite, Hittite)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type III: (e.g., Mesopotamian cuneiform)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above-mentioned article, you can also read about steps in decipherment (cataloging, distributional analysis etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of different characters is also important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about 30 =&gt; abjad (alphabet);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about 100 =&gt; abugida (syllabry);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about 300 =&gt; logosyllabry (logography)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re your last question, at first, most, if not all, languages are in contact with each other,  i.e. there are borrowings. Secondly, there are extra-linguistic cues, e.g. a place where your text was found (thus, you may expect words for certain concepts, like certain types of trees or animals). People who spoke that unknown language should have contacts with other civilizations, thus, you may find certain proper names or concepts mentioned in an already known language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, there might be drawings of triangles and squares etc. All that might help make educated guesses and it could be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there are some (still) undeciphered languages, because either there isn't enough material to (credibly) decipher them or nothing is known about their linguistic affinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-11-11T10:44:49.703" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T10:44:49.703" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1011" CreationDate="2011-11-10T12:28:16.073" Score="13" ViewCount="2135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although not belonging to the Indo-European family, Finnish has personal pronouns that resemble (to a layperson, at least) the corresponding pronouns in Indo-European languages. For example, the consonant &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; in the first person pronouns &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt; (singular) and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; (plural) is also very common in first person pronouns in several Indo-European languages. Similarly for the second person &lt;em&gt;sinä/se&lt;/em&gt; and for the third person &lt;em&gt;hän/he&lt;/em&gt;. Interrogative pronouns &lt;em&gt;kuka&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;who&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;kumpi&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;which&quot;) also seem to share the consonant &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; with Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relationship (if any) between these pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T17:07:44.403" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T12:40:10.673" Title="Are the Finnish pronouns related to their Indo-European counterparts?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2011-11-10T18:19:24.747" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;These pronouns are one of the arguments offered in support of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Uralic_languages&quot;&gt;Indo-Uralic hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;.  But that hypothesis is considered pretty shaky by most linguists: either because they disagree with it or because they think there's just too little evidence to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there's other possibilities.  It could also be that PIE and Proto-Uralic weren't especially closely related, but that one borrowed pronouns from the other.  Pronoun borrowing is rare but not impossible.  It could also be that the whole thing is a coincidence.  There are dozens of function words and morphemes in any given language.  Between two neighboring languages, you'd expect a few tempting matches like this purely by chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the trouble is, Proto-Uralic is harder to reconstruct than PIE, because the written record for Uralic languages is a lot shallower.  The oldest Uralic writing, from medieval Hungary, is less than a thousand years old.  (By comparison, the oldest IE writing goes back &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language&quot;&gt;over 3,000 years&lt;/a&gt;.)  So it's hard to be very confident about what Proto-Uralic looked like, and harder still to be very confident about its history going further back.  We may just never have enough data to say anything certain about the Uralic/IE connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-11-10T18:19:24.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1010" CreationDate="2011-11-10T23:15:30.443" Score="7" ViewCount="960" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand from the principles and parameters theory, all parameters are binary. In particular, the head directionality parameter can be set to either &quot;head-first&quot; or &quot;head-last&quot;. The setting of one value or the other determines, among other things, which kind of adposition the language will have. Head-first generates prepositions (e.g. English). Head-last generates postpositions (e.g. Japanese). But Finnish is an example of language that has &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; prepositions and postpositions. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T05:49:33.097" Title="Head directionality parameter and adpositions in Finnish" Tags="&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2011-11-11T00:20:42.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not unique to Finnish: consider the postposition &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; in English, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is that the assignment of parameters is not always consistent throughout a language, which is only natural since language change does exist and parameters do change with time. However, one talks about whether a language is mainly head-first or mainly head-last, so you could say the parameter is not really binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Finnish, postpositions are more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T00:20:42.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2011-11-11T00:29:24.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Insofar as the status of head directionality as a binary parameter is considered to be an empirical hypothesis, it is false as an absolute universal. So you are not missing anything. Uniform head directionality, however, is a bidirectional statistical universal. VO word order is highly predictive of prepositions, and prepositions are highly predictive of VO word order. And vice versa. For data on the correlations between verb-object and noun-adposition word orders in 1142 languages, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/95&quot;&gt;Dryer 2011&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you would rather not reject the parametric head directionality hypothesis, you can claim that something else is going on in the languages which fail to adhere to the word order correlations. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rci.rutgers.edu/~mabaker/Amharic-Ps-as-case-paper-posted.pdf&quot;&gt;Baker and Kramer 2011&lt;/a&gt;, for example, argue that prepositions in Amharic (which has OV word order) are not really prepositions, but case markers. But the more you indulge in the &quot;it's not really a post/preposition&quot; gambit, the more strict head directionality turns into an analytical principle rather than a testable hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T00:29:24.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2011-11-11T05:49:33.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following up on jlovegren's point that head directionality does not empirically hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anders Holmberg and other researchers have been attempting to sharpen the analytical relevance of mixed order languages such as Finnish into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.ncl.ac.uk/linearization/papers.php&quot;&gt;Final Over Final Constraint&lt;/a&gt; which states, paraphrased very loosely, that head-finality is restricted to positions where it only dominates head-final structures. Hence mixed order languages can have head-final configurations up to some point in the (relevant) syntactic structure, where it switches to being head-initial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As support of this proposal, &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.ncl.ac.uk/linearization/BHR_2010.pdf&quot;&gt;Biberauer, Holmberg, &amp;amp; Roberts 2010:19-21&lt;/a&gt; point out the observation from &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/rz5jeh&quot;&gt;Holmberg 2000&lt;/a&gt; that while both postpositions and prepositions are present in Finnish, a postpositional phrase involving a complex NP is ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1a. ennen  sotaa&#xA;    before war&#xA;    `before the war'&#xA;1b. sodan jälkeen &#xA;    war   after&#xA;    `after the war'&#xA;2a. ennen  [käyntiä [nurkan takana]]&#xA;    before [visit   [corner behind]]&#xA;   `before the visit around the corner'&#xA;2b. *[käynnin [nurkan takana]] jälkeen&#xA;     [visit   [corner behind]] after&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under their analysis, (2b) is ungrammatical because it involves a head-initial NP embedded within a head-final PP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T05:49:33.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2011-11-11T15:13:47.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronouns can be very tricky, so you should be very careful about using them as evidence of genetic relationship. At first, pronouns can be borrowed (and it seems to happen rather frequently, see Campbell and Poser 2008: 212-214). Secondly, similarity in form can be explained by what Nichols (2003) calls &quot;resonance&quot; (e.g. rhyme, alliteration etc.). That is why Antoine Meillet (1948) argued that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Pronouns are similar in almost all languages&lt;/em&gt;, though it does not imply a common origin. [...] &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, pronouns must be used with caution in establishing relatedness of languages.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T15:13:47.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="987" CreationDate="2011-11-11T22:08:28.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This type of construction seems to be found in quite a few Romance and Germanic languages, and also Basque. A quick check of the OED shows that the construction is found at least as early as the Old English period for English. One &lt;a href=&quot;http://langfest.anu.edu.au/index.php/als/ALS2011/paper/view/5151&quot;&gt;idea&lt;/a&gt; is that the construction has been maintained in Western Europe by areal pressures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-11T22:08:28.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="633" CreationDate="2011-11-11T22:28:44.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read his &lt;em&gt;Introduction&lt;/em&gt; for a while, but that's where I'd start. &#xA;If he doesn't deal with it there, I can't help you, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;however&lt;/strong&gt;, you should be aware &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that these are all pretty standard categories in natural meaning categorizations, like PIE roots, Levin's verb lists, classifier systems, phonosemantics, etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that no linguist I know is very concerned about where Buck got his 22 categories. 22 is not an unreasonable number: if it works, use it; if it doesn't, ignore it. Certainly one can use more or fewer categories; there's nothing sacred about &lt;em&gt;22&lt;/em&gt; the way there is about, say, &lt;em&gt;42&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T15:00:43.060" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T15:00:43.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-11-11T23:05:55.043" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very first thing on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/SyntaxTopics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Syntax Topics&lt;/em&gt; handout&lt;/a&gt; for my linguistics classes was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntax and morphology are the two parts of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Morphology&lt;/em&gt; deals with the &lt;strong&gt;internal&lt;/strong&gt; economy of the word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Syntax&lt;/em&gt; deals with the &lt;strong&gt;external&lt;/strong&gt; economy of the word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By which is meant that things that take place within the word are morphological, and things that take place between words are syntactic. Without a sense of &amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, there would be no easy way to distinguish. But we'd need to distinguish anyway, because there are big differences between grammar as expressed morphologically and grammar as expressed syntactically. And plenty of examples to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there are many analytic languages where grammar is almost all syntax, like English or Mandarin; and also many synthetic languages where grammar is almost all morphology, like Russian or Inuit. In an analytic language word order is terribly important, and there are many little auxiliaries and articles and particles to augment the word orders. In a synthetic language, word order is mostly a matter of style or taste, because the structure of the sentence is all tied up and color-coded with the agreement phenomena that morphology enables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other differences as well. Bound morphemes are very fussy about their order, and normally don't tolerate &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; variance. Syntax, however, spins off variation at the drop of a syllable, resulting in many competing patterns which frequently die off, but just as frequently fission into separate constructions. These are very different kinds of things, even if they do somehow &amp;quot;cover the same ground&amp;quot; semantically. It's not necessary to restrict one's observations to only the generalizations one wants to capture. Generalizations are nice, but facts are more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may encounter people who insist that &amp;quot;syntax&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;means&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;grammar&amp;quot;. That's just the theory talking; normally they're just parroting somebody else's dictum, and normally this marks them as generative theory adherents. That's harmless unless you think they mean what they say; really they just want you to use their terminology as a mark of its superiority. Sort of like saying that &amp;quot;Mercedes-Benz&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;means&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;automobile&amp;quot;. I.e, it's not true, or even really helpful, but it lays out your allegiance clearly and that's the important thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T23:01:01.927" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T23:01:01.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2011-11-12T01:30:22.463" Score="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;They seem morphologically complex to us English speakers because we speak an analytic language and don't notice how complex our syntax is. It seems bizarre to us to have umpty-ump different forms for every word, with lots of different paradigms and exceptions. And for gods sake, deponent verbs. Gimme a break! True. All true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But consider that synthetic language speakers learn all these paradigms long before they learn to write -- if they ever do; most people in the world are illiterate, after all -- and all they have to do when they learn to write is figure out how to represent what they say and what they already understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, go nuts when they try to learn English spelling, and get mad when they find out about English syntax -- there are just too many thousands of constructions, each with its own short list of peculiarities, including preferred predicates, presuppositions, and pronunciations. And &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; (or only very few, and they only recently discovered, and still controversial) regularities that can be expressed in human or programming languages. We English speakers learned all this unconsciously before we went to school, and we're blissfully unaware of it because Anglophone schools don't teach English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try explaining to a Finn sometime, for example, why &lt;em&gt;We're going shopping&lt;/em&gt; is OK in English, while *&lt;em&gt;We're going eating&lt;/em&gt; isn't; and what the difference is between this &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;+V-&lt;em&gt;ing&lt;/em&gt; construction and others, like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;go and&lt;/em&gt;+V (&lt;em&gt;Let's go and help/eat&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;They went and helped/ate&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;+V  (&lt;em&gt;Let's go help/eat&lt;/em&gt; / *&lt;em&gt;They went helped/ate&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask any teacher of English as a non-native language. English is syntactically complex. That's the tradeoff you usually find between an analytic language like English -- where syntax does most of the grammatical work -- and a synthetic one like PIE -- where morphology does the heavy lifting. When you have more of one, you need and use less of the other; but when things change in the one, there's always the other to use instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:13:50.000" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:13:50.000" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1019" CreationDate="2011-11-11T14:53:37.587" Score="1" ViewCount="3002" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a large chat application; the public beta had over sixty-five thousand participants, so I need the final version to be complete. Hence I am asking this question.  My application needs to work in all the languages that I can expect my visitors to see it in. I want to cover (most) of the written/read languages of countries &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;that have internet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With some research; I've compiled the following list: (In the order I should prioritize translating my application into it. &lt;strong&gt;Bold&lt;/strong&gt; indicates a completed translation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Japanese&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese (Vernacular?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indonesian (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="507" OwnerDisplayName="cbroughton" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-11-28T11:17:08.623" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T11:17:08.623" Title="What are the most written/read languages on the internet?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-12T17:01:52.587" Score="4" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a problem with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://crfpp.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CRF++ Package&lt;/a&gt;. CRF++ cannot handle large training parts-of-speech corpora (large tagset and large number of words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the number of feature functions automatically generated by CRF++ is very large, which extremely increases the training time. So, what is the best solution for reducing the size of  the feature function set?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="506" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T23:58:55.033" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T23:58:55.033" Title="How to decrease CRF++ feature function set?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2011-11-12T18:03:17.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For users outside of Europe, I'd add French and Malay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-12T18:03:17.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2011-11-12T18:41:26.933" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like what you really need to understand is: which language will the &lt;em&gt;likely users&lt;/em&gt; of your application be using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a starting point, here's a list of the most common languages used online:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The design may be horrible, but the data seems pretty legitimate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bcg.com/documents/file58645.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this report&lt;/a&gt; lists the countries with the greatest engagement with instant messaging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s7yTM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese - topping both lists - should be your priority. The language used online in China is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vernacular written Chinese&lt;/a&gt; (based on Mandarin). It would be very unusual to see 'Traditional Chinese' in a web interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although India is #2 in IM use, the majority of Indian web user's use English. Hindi is still rare online (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=wSlOkuwWKo4C&amp;amp;pg=PA150#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I would suggest Portuguese and Spanish as your next priority, to capture a large section of the South American user-base (as well as a portion of European users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian and Arabic - which has seen the largest growth in internet usage over the past decade (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scottmclay.co.uk/foreign-language-internet-good-business/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) - German, Japanese would all be valid additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, if you're translating common UI elements, take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://pootle.locamotion.org/projects/terminology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pootle Terminology&lt;/a&gt; project, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Translations.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft's UI translations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="473" LastActivityDate="2011-11-12T18:41:26.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2011-11-12T19:32:00.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the reason may be unknown, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet&quot;&gt;Phoenician alphabet&lt;/a&gt; has enough phonetic patterns to support the idea that alphabetic order was at least partly influenced by phonetics.  (That is, it would be  unlikely for a phonetically-independent order to show this many phonetic patterns.)  Some of these patterns are still observable in modern alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nasals are grouped together (m,n)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(moreover, 3 of the 4 liquids are grouped together (l,m,n, though not r))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all 3 voiced stops are grouped together (b,g,d)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 of the 5 voiceless stops are near each other (p,_,q,_,_,t, though not k or ṭ)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the sequence p,_,q,_,_,t has the same place order as b,g,d (labial, velar, dental)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2011-11-12T19:32:00.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2011-11-14T03:20:05.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think another way of getting at the same kind answer is to ask what can be done in morphology that can't be done in syntax. There are approaches to morphology where much of what is traditionally considered with morphology is handled with the same kind of formalism as is used in syntax, and morphology may be referred to as &quot;word syntax&quot; on occasion. However, I do not know of approaches to syntax that strive to account for most common syntactic phenomena using the language of morphology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When word derivations have hierarchical structures, and affixes are given the status of functional heads, it may seem like it's syntax all the way down. There are some facts about inflectional morphology, however, which make syntax-like accounts difficult to pursue to their logical end. (See Ch.1 of Stump 2001 &quot;Inflectional morphology&quot; for discussion) One of these is non-concatenative morphology. In affixal morphology, it is not a real problem to treat the stem and affix as constituents of a tree: [[dog]N.root [-z]PL]N -&gt; dogs. When the morphology is non-affixal, there is a dilemma. But how is &quot;men&quot; derived? In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/bib.html&quot;&gt;Distributed Morphology&lt;/a&gt;, stem-changes are handled in the following way: a zero affix triggers a &quot;readjustment rule&quot; which changes the stem vowel: men = [[man]N.root [zero]PL] -&gt; /man-zero/ -&gt; men. Stump considers this a resort to &quot;extraordinary means&quot;, since it seems like quite a large coincidence that so many languages should have an identical (zero) affix triggering stem changes. Non-concatenative morphology is a challenge for syntax-like approaches to morphology because the basic units of syntax are considered to have a strict precedence relationship: for two constituents X and Y, X must either precede Y or follow it; tertium non datur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is morphologically-conditioned phonological rules. Particular morphemes often trigger specific types of phonological alternations in a language (e.g. changes induced by suffixation of -ity on English nouns), but comparable syntactic phenomena, where, say, a particular type of category triggered an idiosyncratic phonological process in a sister constituent, seem very rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third issue is variable exponence. A given property, when realized morphologically, may have a wide range of unrelated exponents. In a single language, plural on nouns may be realized by either a prefix, a change in the stem vowel, or a change in the tone, depending on the word. Parallel phenomena are hard to find in syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the issue is whether there should be a distinction at all, I suspect that it is in theory possible to remodel our theory of language structure so that syntax and morphology are modeled in the same way, but at the moment there are quite a few details of morphology which do not lend themselves to a syntactic explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-14T03:20:05.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8589" CreationDate="2011-11-14T15:57:42.933" Score="12" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mandarin Chinese appears to be a language that may not express tense (at least in the way I will define below), and it does not seem to allow aspectual coercion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By not expressing Tense I mean, such a language will fail to show morphological exponence of past or present-oriented meanings. English shows present and past on the verb by suffixation to a root or root suppletion (&lt;em&gt;he goes&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;he went&lt;/em&gt; respectively). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By allowing aspectual coercion, I mean in this case that phrases that by themselves would denote momentaneous events, e.g., achievement verb phrases like &lt;em&gt;win the chess match&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;arrive&lt;/em&gt;, can be used to convey other aspects when they appear (a) with progressive aspect, or (b) with adverbials like &lt;em&gt;in an hour&lt;/em&gt; in some cases. Some examples in English, which don't sound bad to my ear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is winning the chess match&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary won the chess match in 5 minutes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The train is arriving&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The train arrived in 2 hours&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a language as answers my question would (a) not show morphological exponence of past/present by means of affixation or suppletion, but (b) equivalent sentences as (1)-(4) would be perfectly acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T05:18:08.277" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T02:15:56.197" Title="Is there any language that doesn't express Tense but allows &quot;aspectual coercion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;variation&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1029" CreationDate="2011-11-15T13:25:52.717" Score="8" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia entry for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerund&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; starts with a list that shows how the term is applied to various languages. And we can see that what the term actually means depends a lot on the specific language we are referring to. For example, it can be a verbal noun in Turkish, an adverbial participle in Portuguese, an adjectival participle in French, part of the infinitive  in Hebrew and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the term &quot;gerund&quot; (as many others, like &quot;perfect&quot;, &quot;imperfect&quot; etc) was coined by traditional grammarians, focusing primarily on Greek and Latin. But, from a linguistics perspective, is &quot;gerund&quot; a term that can be unambiguously defined for any language? If so, what all these different applications of the term have in common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-11-15T22:14:08.687" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T23:21:41.640" Title="Can the term &quot;gerund&quot; be linguistically defined?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1023" CreationDate="2011-11-15T16:53:32.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Role and Reference Grammar, gerund is used in the context of subordinating core juncture to refer to a subordinated core whose nucleus is a non-finite verb. This is of course a theory-dependent definition, and other theories will not grant any status to the term, but I imagine that if the RRG conception were applied to cases of gerunds in traditional grammar, most of them would also be analyzed as gerunds in the RRG sense, and some would get reanalyzed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some general works on RRG:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Van Valin 2005 &quot;Exploring the syntax-Semantics Interface&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pavey 2010 &quot;The structure of language&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T16:53:32.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-15T17:32:06.537" Score="13" ViewCount="2339" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the 12th Basic Color Term (BCT) always light blue as in Russian “голубой” (goluboy) and Italian “azzurro” or are there languages in which the 12th BCT is different? Which languages have a 12th BCT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T03:14:37.787" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T15:03:09.757" Title="Languages with a 12th Basic Color Term" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;colour-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2011-11-15T18:20:26.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to your examples of Italian and Russian, Greek also distinguishes between light blues (γαλάζιο) and dark blues (μπλε)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Several sources&lt;sup&gt;2, 3&lt;/sup&gt; also claim that Hungarian distinguishes between light reds (piros) and dark reds (vörös), but it is questionable whether these are actually BCTs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, that is about the extent of 12th BCTs in languages that have been identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kennycoventry.org/pdfs/greek.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basic colour terms in Modern Greek: Twelve terms including two blues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language#Two_words_for_.22red.22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on &quot;Hungarian language&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://thecolorlanguageproject.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alan Kennedy's Color Language Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T15:03:09.757" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T15:03:09.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2011-11-15T20:43:41.397" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask '[i]s the 12th Basic Color Term (BCT) always light blue' I assume you're referring to work from Berlin and Kay's 1969 book &quot;Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution&quot; (U Cal Press). This book and subsequent work argued that languages acquire colours in a systematic order, so a language with only 2 terms would have a light/dark or warm/cold distinction, and then the next addition would be red, followed by green or yellow, then the other, then blue, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Berlin and Kay's work was a real innovation, it has not stood up to scrutiny over the years. Not only have Berlin and Kay relaxed their finding, but they've been challenged by others. Some of the better reads on this topic are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saunders, Barbara (2000) Revisiting basic color terms. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, 81-99.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Yélî Dnye and the theory of basic color terms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1):3-55.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figuring out what is a 'basic colour term' (as opposed to a historical compound) is incredibly difficult, as is figuring out the order in which languages acquire them. Figuring out the order of colour term inclusion in a language is incredibly hard once you include more languages than Berlin and Kay original looked at. Even in their original data set they are incredibly flexible once they get beyond the basic few terms. This is a summary of chapter 2 of their book (of which they have a not-very readable summary on page 17):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All languages contain terms for black and white.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow    (but not both).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, and/or grey.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by the seventh colour term they basically concede that there is no way to predict order of inclusion in a language. Given that their constraints have been even further relaxed since this analysis I would not find it surprising if there were a language where a separate lexical item for 'light blue' were found before others in rule 7 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T20:43:41.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="206" CreationDate="2011-11-15T20:48:24.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, palatalization in phonetics is a secondary gesture, and in IPA it is graphically represented as a superscript &quot;j&quot;, [dʲ]. So, in my opinion, &lt;strong&gt;there is a difference between [dʲ] and [dj]&lt;/strong&gt;. The former is &lt;em&gt;one (palatalized) sound&lt;/em&gt;, the latter is &lt;em&gt;two sounds&lt;/em&gt;, a voiced dental stop followed by a palatal approximant. I haven't checked it in Praat yet but I'm almost certain that you'll see that difference on a spectrogram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are palatalized stops in Russian, I've never seen/read anyone talking about palatalized stops in English. I will be more than happy to &quot;get educated&quot;, if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T20:48:24.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1023" CreationDate="2011-11-15T23:21:41.640" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gerund&lt;/em&gt; is one of those terms, as you suggested, that we inherited from Classical languages and grammarians. As such, it's always available as a crutch term to mean &quot;this construction/inflection behaves/means something like __&quot;, but the term &lt;em&gt;gerund&lt;/em&gt; no more has an unambiguous Universal definition than does the term &lt;em&gt;the phoneme /a/&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e, in a given language (Latin, for instance) &lt;em&gt;gerund&lt;/em&gt; may have a very useful, natural, and unambiguous definition, with many specific testable properties that distinguish it from other phenomena in Latin (for instance). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a different language, with a different distribution of the semantic and pragmatic jobs to be done by verboids like gerunds, participles, and infinitives -- and perhaps more verboid types to choose from than Latin (for instance) has left us clear terms for -- the characteristics that were so clear in Latin (for instance) are found smeared across a number of different constructions, with no clear analog to &lt;em&gt;gerund&lt;/em&gt;. In a case like that, a linguist may use the term or not, but if they do, it'll always have to have a footnote attached. That's why many might avoid using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English -- especially given the D-/F level of grammatical instruction in Anglophone schools -- &lt;em&gt;gerund&lt;/em&gt; is a term that I use only sparingly, in only one particular context, for one particular construction only: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/gerund.html&quot;&gt;complement clauses&lt;/a&gt; (Noun clauses, Su or DO) that use the &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; complementizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-11-15T23:21:41.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-11-16T02:23:41.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a fairly large number of works on theoretical syntax applied to North American indigenous languages, for example on Stʼatʼimcets (Lillooet), Halkomelem, Plains Cree, Blackfoot, Navajo, and Slave, where the linguists have worked firmly within the Government &amp;amp; Binding → Minimalism framework. The work on the syntax of Salishan languages gives serious problems for syntax in terms of part-of-speech categories (noun vs. verb vs. adjective), and also in word order (they are mostly VSO); see work by Lisa Matthewson, Henry Davis, Martina Wiltschko, and others. Athabaskan, Algonquian, and Eskimo-Aleut languages challenge the idea that sentences need to have subjects and objects, since all of these families frequently show sentences consisting solely of verbs and perhaps adverbs; see work by e.g. Rose-Marie Déchaine, Meredith Johnson, Clare Cook, and Jeff Meuhlbauer. The Athabaskan (and Na-Dene) languages strongly challenge the concepts of morphology, since in these languages the verbs are constructed in a non-concatenative way that looks much more like syntax than it does conventional morphology; see work by Keren Rice, Leslie Saxon, Eloise Jelinek, and Ken Hale, among several others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T02:23:41.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2011-11-16T03:11:27.957" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diversity with respect to lexicalization of different word classes is an interesting issue, and you will find some interesting examples in the RRG literature (see @kgr's answer) of cases where the noun-verb distinction is more difficult to motivate. One point made by Croft in his book &quot;Radical Construction Grammar,&quot; however, is that it is in general possible to analyze a language so that it has whatever number of lexical categories you like, so at a close level of scrutiny it is hard to motivate such claims as &quot;Language X does not distinguish nouns and verbs.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of lexicalization patterns, there are some decidedly non-IE patterns which are documented in high quality descriptions of various languages. Some examples:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages where the concept of syllable is called into question: Bella Coola, Gokana&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages where almost any category can predicate: Classical Nahuatl, Mwotlap&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages where the concept of subject is called into question: Acehnese&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages where cardinal directions are used in place of &quot;left&quot; and &quot;right&quot;: Guugu Yimithirr&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages with up to half a dozen consecutive verbs in the same clause: Isu&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-16T03:11:27.957" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-16T18:44:26.343" Score="17" ViewCount="1323" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Modern Standard Arabic, phonemic /lˤ/ (a.k.a. &quot;emphatic l&quot;) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology#ref_6&quot;&gt;only occurs in one native word: &lt;em&gt;Allah&lt;/em&gt; /ʔalˤˈlˤaːh/.&lt;/a&gt;  (According to the linked article, it also occurs in a few loanwords.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a profoundly weird situation.  If a phoneme exists at all, you'd expect it to show up more than once.  Imagine a time before the loanwords with /lˤ/ were borrowed.  Would &lt;i&gt;allah&lt;/i&gt; then have been the only instance of /lˤ/ in the entire lexicon of the language?  I know that's logically possible, but intuitively it strikes me as completely bizarre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happened?  How did this weird situation come about?  (Or is it less of a weird situation than I think?  I'd be happy to hear about other languages that have similar &quot;one-off&quot; phonemes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T03:33:01.703" Title="How did the Arabic word &quot;allah&quot; come to have an /lˤ/ (&quot;emphatic l&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-16T20:48:51.733" Score="12" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have begun to study computational Arabic linguistics and I have what probably amounts to a basic linguistics question, but I hope I can find some answers nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I know about Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and the dialects.  When I am on Twitter (most important to me) or Facebook or another social media site where people do not necessarily write traditionally grammatical sentences (generalizing across languages here) what exactly am I seeing?  How would that be categorized?  Is that dialect, MSA, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T16:28:54.937" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T13:37:39.183" Title="How can the Arabic language used in social networking websites such as Twitter be classified?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;diglossia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1032" CreationDate="2011-11-16T21:30:49.107" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not unheard of in onomatopoeic and other &quot;expressive&quot; parts of the lexicon.  English for example has &quot;unh-uh&quot; /ʌ̃ʔʌ/ (meaning approximately &quot;no&quot;), which has a nasalized vowel and a medial glottal stop, otherwise not present in the language (as underlying segments).  &lt;em&gt;Allah&lt;/em&gt; isn't quite in this category, but (given a cultural background of monotheism etc.) it might be &quot;special&quot; enough to sustain an exceptional phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, this is just one possible explanation; I don't know anything about the actual history of the word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T15:07:00.720" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T15:07:00.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-11-16T23:15:52.717" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where do I start? At first, there are literally tons of research on this topic (some call them parts of speech, others call them word classes). I don't know how much time you're willing to spend on reading or how linguistically well-trained you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be on the safe side, I strongly recommend to start with an excellent review article by Walter Bisang, &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word Classes&lt;/a&gt;, In &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt;, ed. J. J. Sung, pp. 280-302. Oxford: OUP, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main points summarized here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The inadequacy of purely semantic/notional definitions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Four prerequisites for distinguishing word classes (you need all four of them):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- semantic criteria:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sasse 1993: nouns are thing-like concepts, verbs are event-like concepts;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langacker 1987: nouns are static and holistic, verbs are dynamic;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givon 1979: nouns represent ontological categories that are stable in time, unlike verbs (very time-unstable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wierzbicka 2000, Dixon 2004: there are certain semantic types that are always associated with nouns or verbs only, e.g. PEOPLE, PARTS, FLORA etc. are always nouns, whereas MOTION, SPEAKING are always verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Croft 2000: nouns refer to objects, verbs express predication of an action etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- pragmatic criteria/criteria of discourse functions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns introduce participants, verbs assert the occurrence of an event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- formal criteria:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns and verbs have different morphological and syntactic distribution. They may also differ in their phonological form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- distinction between lexical and syntactic levels of analysis:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lexical (paradigmatic) vs. syntactic (syntagmatic) levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also talks about approaches to word classes proposed by Schachter 1985, Hengeveld 1992, Croft (in a series of works). There is a special section devoted to the noun/verb distinction (section 5). There is a nice conclusion there, where he cites three criteria (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lity.2005.9.3.351&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evans and Osada 2005&lt;/a&gt;) which a language lacking a noun/verb distinction must meet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compositionality;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bidirectionality;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exhaustiveness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T03:59:17.770" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T03:59:17.770" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-11-17T00:10:56.907" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The references in @Alex B.'s answer will do the job for a summary. &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/faces/viewItemFullPage.jsp?itemId=escidoc:273886&quot;&gt;Van Valin 2008&lt;/a&gt; and ch.2 of Croft 2001 &quot;Radical Construction Grammar&quot; might also be useful. I'll try to summarize a family of views held by typologically oriented-linguists, but I couldn't guarantee that anyone other than myself accepts all of the statements made here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to find categories corresponding to nouns and verbs in different languages, but the approach will be a sophisticated version of the traditional grammar view. The prototypical noun is a referring expression (whence &quot;person, place, thing&quot;), and the prototypical verb is a predicating expression (whence &quot;action&quot;). It is then usually possible to pick out morphosyntactic properties associated with referring constructions and predicating constructions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But there are many languages where predicating and referring constructions do not always clearly distinguish two classes of words (i.e. &quot;nouns&quot; can also predicate, &quot;verbs&quot; can also refer). (Van Valin 2008 gives examples of this type of behavior from Nootka and Tagalog) However, it will be possible to find other types of constructions which can assist with the sorting. For example, I might find a language where an intransitive predicating construction does not make the distinction between nouns and verbs, but a transitive predicating construction does. Therefore, if you know roughly which types of word classes you are looking for, it is usually possible to pick out the right constructions that will give you the formal basis for distinguishing the desired number of word classes. Since the procedure is somewhat subjective, linguists will end up disagreeing on, say, whether a language has adjectives, since those who want adjectives can keep looking until they find the construction that distinguishes adjectives from intransitive verbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question is that &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot; are comparative categories which are essential for typological studies, and all languages provide some formal basis for distinguishing them; The catch is that you have to start from meaning-based comparative categories, and the formal basis for distinguishing categories is subjective and language-specific. The chapter in the WALS on the order of Noun and Adjectives (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/87&quot;&gt;Dryer 2011&lt;/a&gt;), for example, includes a large number of languages for which most constructions do not distinguish adjectives and intransitive verbs; instead, &quot;adjective&quot; is understood as &quot;modifying expression&quot;. An approximate meaning-based concept of &quot;adjective&quot; is needed if comparisons are to be made across languages of different grammatical profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T00:10:56.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1038" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" Score="0" Body="A Uralic language, national language of Finland, closely related to Estonian" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T00:35:09.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1032" CreationDate="2011-11-17T01:35:46.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One could hypothesize that the pharyngeality is due to the effect of the two glottal consonants /ʔ/ and /h/ at the beginning and end of the word. This probably isn’t the case however, since this hypothesis would imply that there should be other words with pharyngealization of the middle consonant due to glottal consonants appearing at the beginning and end of the word. I doubt that they exist, given that you say /lˤ/ only occurs in /ʔalˤˈlˤaːh/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an article about the pharyngealized voiced lateral approximant “emphatic l” in Arabic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ferguson, Charles A. 1956. The emphatic l in Arabic. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 32.3: 446–452.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another article discusses the spread of pharyngealization in the context of Grounded Phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, Stuart. 1995. Emphasis spread in Arabic and Grounded Phonology. &lt;i&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/i&gt; 26.3: 465–498.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These might at least give you some references to dig further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T01:35:46.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="999" CreationDate="2011-11-17T01:58:25.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theta role ≠ thematic role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term ‘thematic role’ is used fairly often in linguistic description to label the class of things like ‘agent’, ‘patient’, ‘goal’, ‘experiencer’, ‘instrument’, and so forth. These are semantic properties that most people take to be assigned by the verb or by adpositions to the various noun and adposition phrases occurring in the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the subject of an ordinary transitive verb usually receives the agent role, thus in ‘I hugged her’ the subject ‘I’ is the agent that does the hugging. But if the verb is passivized then the subject gets the patient role instead, thus in ‘she was hugged by me’ the subject ‘she’ is the patient. So thematic role (agent, patient, etc.) and verb argument (subject, object, etc.) are not identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of theta role is basically limited to theories that descend from Government and Binding (GB). Other folks here have discussed it above so I’ll skip describing it. It arose from the concept of thematic roles, hence the use of the Greek letter θ. The idea of numbering them, as done in various flavours of GB, is due to Relational Grammar (RG) I believe. RG is also the source of the terms ‘unaccusative’ and ‘unergative’, describing the alignment of subjects of intransitive verbs with either agent or patient thematic roles and hence the syntactic consequences. (I think Geoff Pullum ranted about this in his &lt;i&gt;Topic...Comment&lt;/i&gt; column under the heading “Citation etiquette beyond Thunderdome”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of ‘saturating’ or ‘discharging’ a theta role is that on the one hand the verb has some theta roles to hand out to noun phrases, and that the noun phrases are sitting around waiting to get a theta role. If a verb ends up with extra theta roles, or if a noun phrase doesn’t get a theta role, then the sentence is ungrammatical (or its derivation ‘crashes’ in Minimalist terms). So noun phrases have theta roles that need to be saturated, and verbs have theta roles that need to be discharged. There are a couple of other terms such as  ‘fulfilled’ and the like that are also used for the same phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastEditorUserId="511" LastEditDate="2011-11-17T02:04:45.393" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T02:04:45.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-11-17T03:30:13.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Salishan language family (northwestern USA, southwestern Canada) is a famous locus of the debate about noun versus verb and lexical categories in general. The neighbouring Wakashan languages on Vancouver Island pose similar problems. Here are a few relatively recent references chronicling the arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kinkade, M. Dale. 1983. Salish evidence against the universality of ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. &lt;i&gt;Lingua&lt;/i&gt; 60.1: 25–40.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;van Eijk, Jan P. &amp;amp; Hess, Thom. 1986. Noun and verb in Salish. &lt;i&gt;Lingua&lt;/i&gt; 69: 319–331.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Renker, Ann M. 1987. &lt;i&gt;Rethinking noun and verb: An investigation of AUX in a Southern Wakashan language&lt;/i&gt;. Washington DC: American University, PhD dissertation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Birch, Barbara M. 1993. Another look at Salish nouns and verbs. &lt;i&gt;Papers for ICSNL XXVIII&lt;/i&gt;: 19–26.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jelinek, Eloise &amp;amp; Demers, Richard A. 1994. Predicates and pronominal arguments in Straits Salish. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 70: 697–736.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demirdache, Hamida &amp;amp; Matthewson, Lisa. 1995. On the universality of syntactic categories. &lt;i&gt;Proceedings of NELS&lt;/i&gt; 25: 79–94.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mattina, Nancy. 1996. &lt;i&gt;Aspect and category in Okanagan word formation&lt;/i&gt;. Burnaby BC: Simon Fraser University, PhD dissertation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Burton, Strang. 1997. Past tense on nouns as death, destruction, and loss. &lt;i&gt;Proceedings of NELS&lt;/i&gt; 27: 65–77.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haag, Marcia. 1998. Word-level evidence for lexical categories in Salishan languages. &lt;i&gt;International Journal of American Linguistics&lt;/i&gt; 64: 379–393.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, Henry &amp;amp; Matthewson, Lisa. 1999. On the functional determination of lexical categories. &lt;i&gt;Revue Québecoise de linguistique&lt;/i&gt; 27.2: 29–69.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davidson, Matthew. 2002. &lt;i&gt;Studies in Southern Wakashan (Nootkan) grammar&lt;/i&gt;. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Buffalo, PhD dissertation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, Henry. 2002. Categorial restrictions in Stʼátʼimcets (Lillooet) relative clauses. &lt;i&gt;Papers for ICSNL XXXVII&lt;/i&gt;: 61–76.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nordlinger, Rachel &amp;amp; Sadler, L. 2002. Nominal tense in cross-linguistic perspective. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 80: 776–806.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Montler, Timothy. 2003. Auxiliaries and other categories in Straits Salishan. &lt;i&gt;International Journal of American Linguistics&lt;/i&gt; 69.2: 102–134.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stonham, John. 2004. &lt;i&gt;Linguistic theory and complex words: Nuuchahnulth word formation&lt;/i&gt;, pp. 54–63. London: Palgrave Macmillan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waldie, Ryan. 2004. &lt;i&gt;Nuu-chah-nulth denominal verbs&lt;/i&gt;. Victoria BC: University of Victoria, master’s thesis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, Henry. 2005. Constituency and coordination in Stʼátʼimcets (Lillooet Salish). Pp. 31–64 in Andrew Carnie, Sheila Anne Dooley, &amp;amp; Heidi Harley (eds.), &lt;i&gt;Verb first: On the syntax of verb initial languages&lt;/i&gt;. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wiltschko, Martina. 2005. The syntax of precategorial roots. &lt;i&gt;Proceedings of WSCLA 2005&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, Henry &amp;amp; Matthewson, Lisa. 2009. Issues in Salish syntax and semantics. &lt;i&gt;Languages &amp;amp; linguistics compass&lt;/i&gt; 3.4: 1097–1166.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Koch, Karsten &amp;amp; Matthewson, Lisa. 2009. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/KochMatthewsonTL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The lexical category debate in Salish and its relevance for Tagalog&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;i&gt;Theoretical linguistics&lt;/i&gt; 35.1: 125–137.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wiltschko, Martina. 2009. Root incorporation: Evidence from lexical suffixes in Halkomelem. &lt;i&gt;Lingua&lt;/i&gt; 119.2: 199–233.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a newer paper by Henry Davis regarding lexical categories in Salishan but I don’t have the reference at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-17T03:30:13.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="57" CreationDate="2011-11-17T23:28:33.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An auxiliary issue is the point that number is a property of morphologial subsystems, rather than of languages themselves. Most languages only distinguish number on nouns and noun-indexing inflectional morphemes, and do so in a consistent way. Some languages, especially Oceanic languages, have different number-marking systems for different morphological subsystems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Wala, lexical nouns have only a two-way distinction between singular and non-singular (i.e. two or more), but possessive suffixes show a four-way distinction between singular, dual, paucal and plural. (data is from a sketch I am preparing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hiw it gets even more interesting. Subject pronouns can be singular, dual, or plural. Object suffixes can be only singular or non-singular, and non-human NP's show no number contrast at all. Hiw also has verbal number, and the contrast is between plural and non-plural (i.e. one or two). So the verb meaning 'kill' has two suppletive stems, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;, meaning to kill one or two people, and &lt;strong&gt;qetnog&lt;/strong&gt;, to kill three or more people. This is a rare case of a subsystem where there is no singular number. (Hiw data is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://alex.francois.free.fr/data/AlexFrancois_11ical_Vb-suppletion_handout.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francois 2009&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-18T01:25:08.787" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T01:25:08.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2011-11-18T18:14:16.800" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something similar shows up in some of the Italian dialects.  The relevant dialects are the ones with the following two features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_gorgia&quot;&gt;Gorgia Toscana&lt;/a&gt;:  After a vowel, &lt;em&gt;p, t&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; go to [ɸ], [θ] and [h].  This happens even when the triggering vowel is in the preceding word: &lt;em&gt;la casa&lt;/em&gt; is [la'hasa] in dialects with this feature.  But it only affects single &lt;i&gt;p, t&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;k&lt;/i&gt;, not the geminate consonants &lt;i&gt;pp, tt&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;kk&lt;/i&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_doubling&quot;&gt;Syntactic doubling&lt;/a&gt;: There are some specific words that, idiosyncratically, trigger gemination on the first consonant of the following word.  This has the effect of blocking the preceding sound change.  So &lt;em&gt;a casa&lt;/em&gt; is [ak'kasa], and not [a'hasa]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Celticist were describing this sort of Italian they might say it had two mutation classes.  Some words trigger &quot;lenition&quot; or &quot;spirant mutation,&quot; others trigger &quot;hard mutation.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, there are even minimal pairs of words that &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; differ in which mutation they cause.  So for instance, the clitic pronoun &lt;em&gt;si&lt;/em&gt; doesn't trigger fortition, but the particle &lt;em&gt;sì&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;if,&quot; does.  This is a little like how, in Irish, &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;his&quot; if it's followed by lenition, and &quot;hers&quot; if it isn't.  The Italian examples are not as dramatic as the Irish ones, though &amp;mdash; my perception is that there are a &lt;em&gt;lot fewer&lt;/em&gt; minimal pairs like this in Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-11-18T18:14:16.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1049" CreationDate="2011-11-18T20:18:48.380" Score="7" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about semantic roles in Latin and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Quibusdam […]      sudor            erumpit.&#xA;someone. DAT.PL     sweat. NOM.SG    come out.PRES.3SG.&#xA;‘Some people start sweating.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;U    nego       poshel   pot.&#xA;with he.GEN.SG   ran.M      sweat.NOM.SG&#xA;‘He started sweating.’&#xA;&#xA;U    nego        poshla   krov’.&#xA;with he.GEN.SG   ran.F      blood.NOM.SG&#xA;“He started bleeding.”&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand it correctly, ‘quibusdam’ in Latin and ‘nego’ in Russian are either an author (effector) or a patient but not an experiencer. What about nominative subjects in those sentences, ‘sudor’ in Latin, ‘pot’ and ‘krov’’ in Russian, or &quot;someone' and 'he' in the English examples? Which semantic role do they all have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: One of the reasons why I am asking is because I want to know which dativus it is in Latin (commodi, auctoris etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T02:31:42.903" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T02:31:42.903" Title="Thematic roles in some languages" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1073" CreationDate="2011-11-18T22:46:18.707" Score="17" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many spoken languages, the words for &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot; are composed of sounds that babies make very early.  Is there a similar trend for early words that babies babble across signed languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="518" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:07:55.090" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:07:55.090" Title="Are first words in signed languages composed of signs that babies frequently babble?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="763" CreationDate="2011-11-19T00:51:32.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the fundamental difference between nouns and verbs is that verbs form sentences. You can't create a sentence without a verb, and nouns in a sentence are always parameters assigned to something else, unlike verbs which can be freestanding (although they may require nouns or other verbs to be supplied as parameters, as &quot;He&quot; is a parameter of &quot;He rests&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know a lot about language universals, but another striking feature of verbs in many languages is that they have a variety of syntactic formats, such that many verbs accept multiple formats, but no verb accepts all formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intransitive: &lt;code&gt;I eat.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transitive:  &lt;code&gt;I eat bread.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With a particle: &lt;code&gt;I eat it up.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three arguments: &lt;code&gt;I show the monster a cookie.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three arguments: &lt;code&gt;I put the monster in a cage.&lt;/code&gt; (*I put the monster)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verb chain (1): &lt;code&gt;I try to stop.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verb chain (2): &lt;code&gt;I stop eating.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subordinate clause: &lt;code&gt;I hope (that) you're happy&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt; to &quot;standard&quot; parameters and complexities that most/all verbs in a language support, such as auxiliary verbs, negatives, and conjugations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns have several optional parts that can hang off them, but almost any noun (other than verbal nouns, i.e. gerunds) uses the same syntax: &lt;code&gt;the important pen from Earth&lt;/code&gt; (note that &quot;pen&quot; could be virtually any noun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastEditorUserId="519" LastEditDate="2011-11-19T01:35:05.380" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T01:35:05.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-11-19T01:17:35.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like a matter that needs more study. It is plausible that most natural languages have nearly the same objective complexity (which could be defined variously, e.g. lexicon size + amount of morphological/inflectional rules), so that children earn proficiency at similar rates for most natural languages. But what if a child's L1 were an objectively simple language such as Ido (or Esperanto)? Has acquisition rate ever been studied for such a scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And note that it is difficult to tell how well a child is acquiring language, because the ability to speak comes more slowly than the ability to understand, and perhaps more slowly than the mental ability to form sentences. It strikes me as difficult to tell how much a pre-speech child comprehends what has been spoken. Pre-speech toddlers can be taught baby sign, which you might use to tell how well they understand speech, but I wonder if having learned a sign language might speed up speech acquisition (thus biasing your study).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T01:17:35.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1045" CreationDate="2011-11-19T05:35:05.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call &lt;em&gt;quibusdam&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_case#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dativus incommodi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here, i.e. a dative of inconvenience, the negative counterpart of the &lt;em&gt;dativus commodi&lt;/em&gt;. Translated more literally, you would have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sweat (&lt;em&gt;sudor&lt;/em&gt;) breaks out (&lt;em&gt;erumpit&lt;/em&gt;) for some people (&lt;em&gt;quibusdam&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd call &lt;em&gt;sudor&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation#Major_thematic_relations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;force / natural cause&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;quibusdam&lt;/em&gt; an &lt;strong&gt;experiencer&lt;/strong&gt; in this translation. I choose experiencer because &quot;breaking out&quot; is not something that normally affects something or someone: you just break out of prison or out of a shell, but you don't directly affect someone by doing so. Sweat breaks out of the body, and the person to whom the body belongs experiences this. In this way I believe your analysis would stay closer to the &quot;spirit&quot; of the Latin construction; Latin &lt;em&gt;erumpo&lt;/em&gt; works just like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you translate it more freely, as you did, you might change the thematic structure. This shows that thematic roles are not extremely &quot;deep&quot;, i.e. they are deeper than syntax but not as deep as illocution; we must use syntactic information (mainly the dative here) to make up a thematic role for &quot;some people&quot;. The same situation can be presented by means of different thematic structures. This, together with the fact that the boundaries between the roles are often vague, shows how the usefulness of thematic roles is not without limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T05:39:27.753" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T05:39:27.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2011-11-19T15:59:04.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Alex Peattie: # of websites in a language does not always correlate with # of users of software in the language. Having said that, &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/07/languages-of-world-wide-web.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/07/languages-of-world-wide-web.html&lt;/a&gt; might give you some ideas about what languages are most popular online. The data is from Google's researchers, and so, ought to be trustworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2011-11-19T15:59:04.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1053" CreationDate="2011-11-19T19:34:40.047" Score="4" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm looking for papers on how sexism is reflected in the English language. A lot of the literature is from the 1970's and is seen as a little out there and not empirical. Besides reading the abstract carefully, reading the actual study, and common sense, are there any general &quot;warning signs&quot; on what I should avoid in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are there any specific studies that are well known and should be avoided or are must reads? I'm focusing on semantic change and words used in relation to women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="522" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T13:20:01.480" Title="Identifying studies on how English language reflects sexism" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2011-11-19T22:51:39.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sexism is in general not reflected in language. Rather, changing standards about what is considered sexist are reflected in the metalinguistic discourse of commentators on gender issues. I do not know of any literature on this topic (metalinguistic discourse about sexism), but it seems like a very interesting one and I would be happy to learn that I was mistaken about its non-existence. For scholarship about how gender and sexuality are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, and about the study of gender and language in general, you might start with works by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/gender.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penelope Eckert&lt;/a&gt;. I suppose it is possible that some sociolinguistic variables identifiable with subcommunities of people who are openly sexist could in principle be identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple approach might be to use the Oxford English Dictionary, which has detailed word histories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-20T00:00:51.317" LastActivityDate="2011-11-20T00:00:51.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1056" CreationDate="2011-11-21T19:13:01.053" Score="9" ViewCount="3485" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some controversy about how an obviate proximate system works. I get that it doesn't work like a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some attempts to illustrate obviate-proximate systems, multiple sentences are used and the entity that gets the case ending keeps it for the entire discourse. So I think ah ha! So the system must rely on who is who because in one of those sentences is was made obvious by context or the like. &lt;a href=&quot;http://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/spec-tech-wait-who-hit-who/&quot;&gt;This is one example of an illustration that relies on two sentence&lt;/a&gt; (or actually one sentence joined with a conjunction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the next illustration uses only a single sentence (all the examples on wikipedia are like that). So then I think, well this must not be a discourse level phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does an obviate proximate system work and what gets marked in a single sentence utterance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-11-21T21:09:17.713" Title="How exactly does an obviate proximate system work?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1054" CreationDate="2011-11-21T20:07:39.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this pdf, titled &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jbmart.people.wm.edu/papers/cr_switch_reference.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Notes on Switch-Reference in Creek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot; by Jack Martin, there is a handout on how this kind of system works in Creek (Muskogean). The same author has recently published a grammar of Creek, which would surely have further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-11-21T20:52:11.397" LastActivityDate="2011-11-21T20:52:11.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1054" CreationDate="2011-11-21T21:09:17.713" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviation is a little hard to grasp for Indo-European language speakers, and confounding this is the problem that it is not necessarily exactly the same phenomenon from language family to language family where it is described. It was first described in Algonquian languages, and this is the “canonical” obviation system. The basic idea is that it is a &lt;em&gt;discourse-sensitive&lt;/em&gt; morphosyntactic mechanism that is used to distinguish different third person elements in a sentence. (Note that “obviative” ≡ “obviate” generally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following info is abstracted from my notes on obviation in an interface syntax seminar by Rose-Marie Déchaine &amp;amp; Martina Wiltschko.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;In any context, there is a distinction, among animate third persons, between proximate and obviative. Only one animate third person, be it singular or plural, is proximate; all others are in obviative form. The proximate third person represents the topic of discourse, the person nearest the speaker’s point of view, or the person ealier spoken of and already known.” (Bloomfield 1962: 38)&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is more than one 3rd person argument then one is proximate and all others are obviate (Plains Cree, Algonquian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;miyê-w   misatim-wa ôhô  kiwêyni-wa  êwakô&#xA;give-3SG horse-OBV  that old.man-OBV this&#xA;‘He(PROX) gave a horse(OBV) to the old man(OBV)’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*miyê-w   misatim ôhô  kiwêyniw êwakô&#xA; give-3SG horse   that old.man  this&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proximate marking indicates a salient element of the discourse and continuity with the topic. Obviate marking indicates that the marked discourse referent ≠ the proximate topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviation contrasts with switch-reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Condition   Description                             Switch-Ref. Plains Cree Obv.&#xA;----------- --------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------&#xA;locality    restricted to linearly adjacent clauses yes         no&#xA;dependency  syntactically or semantically dependent yes         yes&#xA;realization contrastive suffixation on dependent V  yes         yes&#xA;subject     both referents must be subjects         yes         no&#xA;function    codes co-/dis-joint reference           yes         yes&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are the following parallels between obviation and switch-reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Obviation                   Switch-Reference&#xA;--------------------------- -----------------------------&#xA;obviate                     different-subject&#xA;proximate                   same-subject&#xA;(dis)anaphoric w.r.t. Topic (dis)anaphoric w.r.t. Subject&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have to note “logophoricity”, where there are marked differences between a “weak” and “strong” pronominal form, and the strong or possessive pronoun is embedded under a certain class of verbs (usually quotative verbs) where it is obligatorily coreferent with an argument in the matrix clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;In argument positions of certain complement sentences, many Kwa languages contrast a third person pronominal clitic with a distinct third person form: a clitic or a nonclitic, depending on the language. For one item of this contrast set, the antecedent is the ‘Source’ of subject argument of a matrix clause which selects the embedded sentence either locally or at long distance. Hagège (1974) and Clements (1979) call this morpheme a logophoric pronoun. The other item lacks this reading, and it thus a non­ or anti­logophor. (Manfredi 1995: 91)&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has to be distinguished from obviation just as switch-reference is distinct. They all have similar underlying properties, but this is a largely theoretical issue that I won’t go into here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overt DPs (determiner phrases, encompassing NPs) are the primary locus of obviate marking.&#xA;With (direct-form) transitive verbs, the verb agrees only with the subject or object, and obviation of object is only marked on the overt DP (Plains Cree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...êkota kâ-wâpamâ-cik iyâhciyiniw-ak ôhi   nêhiyaw-*a*&#xA;   there COMP-see-3PL  Blackfoot-PL   these Cree-OBV&#xA;‘...there the Blackfoot(PROX) caught sight of the Cree(OBV)’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that obviation, although it generally seems to be a discourse-related phenomenon, is not actually conditioned only by discourse. Instead, there are other things that can trigger obviate marking. For example, possessed nouns have obligatory obviate marking because they involve the presence of two DPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;aw   îskwêw     o-nâpem-a&#xA;this woman.PROX 3.POSS-husband-OBV&#xA;‘this woman(PROX)’s husband(OBV)’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviate marking is incompatible with quantifier binding. Proximate marked DPs can be quantifier-bound (Swampy Cree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kahkinaw iskwêw₁ kî-itwê-w₁   ê-wê-sipwêhtê-t₁&#xA;every    woman   PAST-say-3SG COMP-FUT-leave-3SG&#xA;‘Every woman(PROX) said that she₁(PROX) would leave’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But obviate marked DPs can’t be quantifier bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*cân itênihtam-∅₁ kahkinaw iskwêw ê-kî-itwê-*ni*-t ê-wî-sipwêht-ê-*ni*-t&#xA; John think-3SG   every    woman  C-PREV-say-D-3  C-FUT-leave-D-3&#xA;‘John(PROX) thinks that every woman(OBV) said she would leave’&#xA;&#xA;cân  itênihtan-∅ kahkinaw iskwêw ê-kî-itwê-t  ê-wî-sipwêht-ê-t&#xA;John think-3SG   every    woman  C-PREV-say-3 C-FUT-leave-3&#xA;‘John(PROX) thinks that every woman said she would leave’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This involves some verb morphology that I don’t quite grok, so I’ll stick it up hoping that someone knowing Algonquian languages can explain it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, proximate marked arguments must precede (c-command) obviate arguments. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V S(PROX) &gt; O(OBV) okay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V O(PROX) &gt; S(OBV) weird&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;O(PROX) V S(OBV) bad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Muehlbauer (2009: 335) goes through a set of similar sentences to demonstrate these ordering restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bibliography (a random sampling):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adesola, O.P. 2006. A-bar dependencies in the Yoruba reference-tracking system. &lt;i&gt;Lingua&lt;/i&gt; 116.12: 2068–2106.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aissen, J. 1997. On the syntax of obviation. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 73.4: 705–750.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Austin, P. 1981. Switch‐Reference in Australia. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 57.2: 309–334.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bloomfield, L. 1962. &lt;i&gt;The Menomini language&lt;/i&gt;. Charles F. Hockett (ed). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cook, C. 2008. &lt;i&gt;The syntax and semantics of clause‐typing in Plains Cree&lt;/i&gt;. Vancouver: UBC, PhD dissertation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Davis, H. 2009. Cross‐linguistic variation in anaphoric dependencies: evidence from the Pacific Northwest. &lt;i&gt;Natural Language and Linguistic Theory&lt;/i&gt; 27.1: 1–43.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finer, D. L. 1985. The syntax of switch‐reference. &lt;i&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/i&gt; 16.1: 35–55.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grafstein, A. 1988. The Algonquian obviative and the Binding Theory. &lt;i&gt;NELS&lt;/i&gt; 18.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grafstein, A. 1989. Disjoint reference in a free word order language. In D. Gerdts&#xA;&amp;amp; K. Michelson (eds.), &lt;i&gt;Native American Languages in Theoretical Perspective&lt;/i&gt;. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Huang, Y. 2000. &lt;i&gt;Anaphora: A cross‐linguistic study&lt;/i&gt;. Oxford: OUP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Junker, M.-O. 2004. Focus, obviation and word order in East Cree. &lt;i&gt;Lingua&lt;/i&gt; 114.3: 345–365.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kiparsky, P. 2002. Disjoint reference and the typology of pronouns. Pp. 179–225 in I. Kaufman &amp;amp; B. Stiebels (eds.), &lt;i&gt;More than Words: A Festschrift for Dieter Wunderlich&lt;/i&gt;. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mithun, M. 2008. The extension of dependency beyond the sentence. &lt;i&gt;Language&lt;/i&gt; 84.1: 69–119.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Muehlbauer, J. 2009. Logophoricity in Plains Cree: From, content, and context. (Oxford studies in endangered languages). Oxford: OUP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oshima, D. Y. 2007. Syntactic direction and obviation as empathy‐based phenomenon: A typological approach. &lt;i&gt;Linguistics&lt;/i&gt; 45.4: 727–763.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Willie, M. 1991. &lt;i&gt;Navajo Pronouns and Obviation&lt;/i&gt;. University of Arizona, PhD dissertation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zavala, R. 2007. Inversion and obviation in Mesoamerica. Pp. 267–306 in P. K. Austin and A. Simpson (eds.), &lt;i&gt;Endangered Languages&lt;/i&gt; 14. Hamburg: Helmult Buske.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-21T21:09:17.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1058" CreationDate="2011-11-21T22:35:52.693" Score="4" ViewCount="4119" Body="&lt;p&gt;German is typically described as a Subject-Object-Verb language. For former American President Kennedy's mistake to be grammatical (i.e. without the indefinite article &quot;ein&quot;), why should it not have been: &quot;Ich Berliner bin&quot; (or &quot;Ich ein Berliner bin&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:17:48.747" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:17:48.747" Title="German is SOV: should it not have been &quot;Ich ein Berliner bin&quot;?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;sov&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2011-11-21T23:06:40.030" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, because German has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order&quot;&gt;V2&lt;/a&gt; basic constituent order, not SOV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V2 word order is observed when the the finite verb must be the second constituent of the clause. In many German sentences, the auxiliary verb is the one that is finite, and so it must be in second position. The main meaning-conveying verb appears in a non-finite form, and is flexible with respect to which position it occurs in, and typically occurs in final position. For this reason, German can be mistaken as an SOV language. The German translation of &quot;Peter wants to give the boy the book&quot; is usually rendered as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Peter wollte   dem     Jungen  das     Buch schenken.&#xA;Peter want.PST the.DAT boy.DAT the.ACC book give.INF&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But beyond the requirement that the finite verb be second, the word order is flexible. The following versions are also all acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dem Jungen wollte Peter das Buch schenken.&#xA;Das Buch wollte Peter dem Jungen schenken.&#xA;Schenken wollte Peter dem Jungen das Buch.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(data is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://depts.washington.edu/hpsg2011/pp/Wetta.pdf&quot;&gt;Wetta 2011&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &quot;Ich bin ein Berliner&quot; there is only one verb, which is inflected, and so it must be in second position, after &quot;Ich&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a true SOV language, either the finite verb must be clause final, or all of the verbs must appear at the end of the clause if there is more than one. Here is an example of a serial verb construction in Barai (Olson 1981, qtd, in Foley 2010), which is a strict verb-final language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;namot    tau             da-gwe-r    witki-r     am-ta&#xA;man      sugarcane       foc-bite-r  tear-r      eat-pres&#xA;‘The man is biting the sugarcane off and eating it.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although languages are often referred to as having V2 word order, it is more correct to say that V2 word order is a property of clausal constructions. Not all clause types in German, for example, have V2 word order; subordinate and question clauses do not, but main declarative clauses do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foley, W A 2010, Events and serial verb constructions, Complex Predicates: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1, 79-109&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-22T00:24:58.840" LastActivityDate="2011-11-22T00:24:58.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2011-11-22T18:36:45.313" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In generative grammar, it has long been argued that German is indeed SOV, that the verb-final order is revealed in subordinate clauses, and that the Verb Second (V2) order in main clauses is due to a complex transformation. The locus classicus for the argument is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bach, Emmon, (1962) The order of elements in a transformational grammar of German. Language 38, 263-269. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/410785&quot;&gt;JSTOR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/&quot;&gt;online syntax textbook&lt;/a&gt; by Beatrice Santorini and Tony Kroch has further information about this idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch5.html#mixed&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch5.html#mixed&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch14.html&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch14.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2011-11-22T18:36:45.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2011-11-23T18:53:13.237" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic usually gets covered in a few &quot;womens studies&quot; courses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of books I'd point you at include &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226468046&quot;&gt;Women Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0595159214&quot;&gt;The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing&lt;/a&gt;. Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a number of books with &quot;gentle art of verbal self defense&quot; in the title that also analyzed differences in male and female speaking patterns, although hers were aimed more at how to avoid verbal abuse.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of what get called &quot;sexism&quot; in language reflects relics of old and middle English. Or changing words. In Shakespeare's day, the word &lt;code&gt;girl&lt;/code&gt; meant &quot;teenager&quot; and referred to both males and females alike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One gripe is that &quot;man&quot; is used to reflect the generic human (some folks use &quot;they&quot; to refer to the singular generic human). In olden times, that was correct: &lt;code&gt;man&lt;/code&gt; meant &quot;adult human&quot;. &lt;code&gt;wifman&lt;/code&gt; meant &quot;adult female human&quot; and &lt;code&gt;werman&lt;/code&gt; meant &quot;adult male human&quot;. The &quot;wer&quot; prefix has since been eliminated from English except for one word: &quot;werewolf&quot;, and &quot;wifman&quot; changed phonetically and is now spelled &quot;woman&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the actor/actress issue. Again, back in &quot;olden times&quot;, the endings &lt;code&gt;er&lt;/code&gt; (and sometimes &lt;code&gt;ster&lt;/code&gt;) represented &quot;male who does $verb&quot;, likewise the ending &lt;code&gt;ress&lt;/code&gt; (and sometimes &lt;code&gt;stress&lt;/code&gt;) represented &quot;female who does $verb&quot; (much like Spanish with the &lt;code&gt;dor&lt;/code&gt; suffix for verbs, such as matar + ~dor becomes matador). Likewise the pattern of &quot;person who does $noun&quot; would be the noun + &lt;code&gt;man&lt;/code&gt;, example &quot;taxman&quot;) That's an artifact left over from when English was a gendered language like German or French. The genders in languages don't really map to what is dangling between one's legs, which is why nouns get classified as different genders in different languages (such as &lt;code&gt;moon&lt;/code&gt; being masculine in German and feminine in French). Those artifacts, combined with gender stereotypes is why we keep words such as &quot;seamstress&quot; while the contra &quot;seamster&quot; is forgotten. And for a particularly bizarre combination of all of these, one old (and obsolete) Spanish verb meaning &quot;to pack tightly&quot; is &quot;estevar&quot;, so someone who packs (ships) tightly was an &quot;estevador&quot;. The word was borrowed in English for the port occupation of &quot;stevedore&quot;, and that word itself was rendered obsolete by containerization in the shipping industry and the replacement word is &quot;longshoreman&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T18:53:13.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1063" CreationDate="2011-11-23T19:53:10.687" Score="10" ViewCount="1715" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dutch &quot;zee&quot; means &quot;sea&quot; and &quot;meer&quot; means &quot;lake&quot;, but in German &quot;das Meer&quot; means &quot;sea&quot; and &quot;der See&quot; means &quot;lake&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, verbs like to want, to need, to have, to desire, etc. are all mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who got it &quot;wrong&quot;, and how did that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-04-15T03:06:27.487" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T03:06:27.487" Title="What are the Proto-Germanic words for sea, lake and a couple of others?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2011-11-23T20:44:16.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the words you mention are in Carl Darling Buck's &quot;A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages&quot;, from 1949. For instance, &quot;sea&quot; is 1.32 while &quot;lake&quot; is 1.34. (You can get a copy at for instance amazon, but be prepared to use a magnifying glass.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it says for &quot;sea&quot;: &quot;... between 'sea' and 'lake' there is no rigid demarcation (either by size, or as salt vs. fresh water), and the same word or related group may serve for either or both, or shift its prevailing application with changed physical conditions. This is is notably the case in the Germanic languages, with the divergent distribution of the groups represented by NE &lt;em&gt;sea&lt;/em&gt; and NHG &lt;em&gt;meer&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; Any typos are mine, very small and unclear type in my copy of the book...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody got it &quot;wrong&quot;, and it is safe to assume that every word has its own story and its own path through time. That is after all why etymology can be so fascinating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-11-23T20:44:16.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2011-11-24T00:16:28.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kaleissin is right that the original Proto-Indo-European root &lt;strong&gt;*mori-, mōri-&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;sea/swamp/lake?&quot;, was probably just a large body of non-flowing water, be it technically a sea, swamp, or a lake (but not a river). Cognates in English are &lt;em&gt;mere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sea (obs.), lake/pond (poet./dial.), marsh (dial.)&quot;, &lt;em&gt;marsh&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;moor&lt;/em&gt;, but Latin &lt;em&gt;mare&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;sea&quot;. For other reflexes see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1329.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list at the University of Texas&lt;/a&gt;, which is based on Pokorny. Be warned that their website is not always completely accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article on &lt;em&gt;Meer&lt;/em&gt; in Duden's &lt;em&gt;Herkunfstswörterbuch&lt;/em&gt; explains it too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pZIuD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;sea/zee/See&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*saiwi-z&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;sea/swamp/lake?&quot;, Gothic **saiwi-*, &quot;sea, marsh, lake&quot;; it is uncertain where this stem came from. Some suggest it might have come from Proto-Indo-European **sai-*, &quot;sorrow, sore&quot; (Pokorny). In any case, it appears there is no clear boundary between sea and lake in this root either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Kluge's &lt;em&gt;Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFDNp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T00:16:28.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1061" CreationDate="2011-11-24T04:25:14.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mallory and Adams (2006) argue that &quot;consensus is probably still in support of projecting an original meaning of 'inland body of water' that was changed to 'salt water sea' in some language groups, e.g. Celtic, Italic, and Slavic&quot; (p. 130). In support of their claim they point out the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in Hittite, marmar(r)a meant 'a body of shallow standing water; swamp&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Greeks and Indo-Aryans borrowed words for 'sea' from non-IE languages;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in OE, there were both &lt;em&gt;mere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sæ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-11-24T04:35:13.983" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T04:35:13.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-11-24T11:57:37.273" Score="10" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gold's theorem on the unlearnability of certain sets of languages (among them context-free ones) made several assumptions in its modeling of learning a language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At each time step the learner receives one sentence from our language, and for each sentence in our language there is some finite time by which the learner will have been exposed to the sentence. Apart from this, there are no restrictions on the ordering or frequency of occurrence of the sentences (in fact, the environment might pick sentences in an adversarial order to make learning hard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are absolutely no restrictions on the learner's learning strategy (in fact, it need not even be computable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The languages in our sets of languages are named (equivalently: numbered). A learner has successfully learned a language L if for any environment consistent with (1) there is some finite time after which the learner always guesses that the environment's language is L. A set of languages is learnable if there exists a single learner that can learn every language in the set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in the late 60s and 70s this theorem made a bit of a stir in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;povery of the stimulus&lt;/a&gt; debate. However, the modeling is pretty simple, how has this model of language learning been refined by linguists in the years since?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am interested only in formal refinements of the above model. Thus, replacing rule (2) by &amp;quot;the learner's learning strategy must be a Turing Machine that takes as input the finite segment of sentences seen so far and outputs the name of a language&amp;quot; is fine, but a replacement like &amp;quot;the learner is an average child&amp;quot; is not of interest (unless the authors have a formal definition of average-child).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modifications that change the input (say to allow explicit negative instances) or impose a distribution on it are fine, but obviously rule (3) must be modified accordingly. I think this is how people show the learnability of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stochastic context-free grammars&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am not interested in arguments that try to trivially undercut the whole approach, even if they have empirical validity. For instance, the whole approach can be derailed by asserting that human languages (and definitely individual humans) are not capable of creating sentences of arbitrary depth. Alternatively, a human learner has an upper bound on their life span and hence cannot wait an arbitrarily large (but finite) time to hear a sentence. These arguments are very important in the greater poverty of the stimulus debate, but make formal modeling a bit boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am vaguely familiar with some of the refinements of the above model used by theoretical computer scientists and would like to hear about models that are of interest to linguists, not just computer scientists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T02:29:31.687" Title="General mathematical frameworks of language acquisition since Gold" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2011-11-24T13:57:04.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Douglas Hofstadter's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Person Paper on Purity in Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is not exactly a &quot;study&quot;, but I consider it a must-read. It is a satire on racism and sexism in language. I'll let Hofstadter himself summarize it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps this piece shocks you. It is meant to. The entire point of it is to use something that we find shocking as leverage to illustrate the fact that something that we usually close our eyes to is also very shocking. The most effective way I know to do so is to develop an extended analogy with something known as shocking and reprehensible. Racism is that thing, in this case. I am happy with this piece, despite-but also because of-its shock value. I think it makes its point better than any factual article could. As a friend of mine said, &quot;It makes you so uncomfortable that you can't ignore it.&quot; I admit that rereading it makes even me, the author, uncomfortable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself, the piece did not make me uncomfortable in any way... I just found it very very amusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-11-25T13:20:01.480" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T13:20:01.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="778" CreationDate="2011-11-24T21:16:07.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My unqualified conjecture is that a language would evolve to be easy to learn, especially in a pre-literate society.  If the rules are too complex for a child to learn, the complex rules will eventually be destroyed by repeated failure of people to assimilate and follow the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my view is pretty consistent with the theory that there is a universal grammar that all languages follow.  All languages evolve to be ones that a child can master, based on a humans natural language to understand grammatical rules.  I would add that languages can acquire some variance and some complexity, but they have to be master-able by children to survivor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2011-11-24T21:16:07.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1075" CreationDate="2011-11-25T05:51:31.247" Score="37" ViewCount="2248" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when &lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt;? According to my understanding, agglutinative languages typically join prefixes and suffixes extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance (although I'm probably a bit off here), the word &lt;strong&gt;gizon&lt;/strong&gt; in Basque means &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;gizona&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;a man&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;gizonarekin&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;with the man&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the written convention could easily have been perhaps &lt;strong&gt;gizon a&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;a man&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;gizon arekin&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;with the man&lt;/em&gt;. It would seem that Basque would no longer be an agglutinative language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, one could write english (without speaking any differently) with long compound words like &lt;strong&gt;forthecats&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;howmanymen&lt;/strong&gt;. Is the difference merely orthographical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="534" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T13:24:01.360" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T21:01:38.937" Title="Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2011-11-25T15:45:09.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with the literature on machine learning, but some possible starting points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Work by &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mac.com/giorgiomagri/Site/Papers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Giorgio Magri&lt;/a&gt;, who works on computational models for the acquisition of OT grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also work by Alexander Clark, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clark, Alexander (2010).  Efficient, correct, unsupervised learning of context-sensitive languages.  Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 28-37. Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/alexc/papers/conll2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/alexc/papers/conll2010.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clark, Alexander, and Remi Eyraud (2007). Polynomial time identification in the limit of substitutable context-free languages. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 8, 1725–1745.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully someone else can offer a more complete set of references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T15:45:09.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2011-11-25T17:04:00.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to boil down to: &quot;How are word boundaries defined in a language?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that question is, that we usually trust a native speaker's intuition. If a native Basque speaker says &lt;strong&gt;gizonarekin&lt;/strong&gt; is one word, a linguist should believe her. Writing conventions in this respect are also usually trusted as reflections of speaker's intuition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T17:04:00.500" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2011-11-25T19:04:01.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Starting in the early 1980's, with Dana Angluin and then later Leslie Valiant with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probably_approximately_correct_learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PAC  learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the computational learning theory field has a subfield of language learning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More accurately, the entire field of PAC learning is about learning of languages in the abstract TCS sense, but there is a sub-part that specifically addresses classes in the Chomsky hierarchy, regular, context-free, and context sensitive languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principles and parameters model comes from the linguistics and psycholinguistics literature, was an attempt at addressing learnability, but is not a particularly mathematical framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T19:04:01.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1046" CreationDate="2011-11-25T22:06:26.743" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best article I've found on this so far is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anderson, Diane and Judy Reilly (2002) &quot;The MacArthur communicative development inventory: Normative data for American sign language.&quot; Journalof Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 7 (2): 83-106.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article is about the MacArthur report, which they created to allow parents to easily report their children's early signs in American Sign Language (ASL). With data from 69 children. The study only included deaf children with deaf parents. To skip to the pertinent information - children were documented as producing signs as early as 8 months, but until the age of 12 months they only produced concrete nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study lists the first 35 words that signing children produce (averaged out across the sample - at least 50% of them had to be saying it before it was accepted) and compared it to a list of English speaking children from a similar study: The first seven items were identical and went &lt;em&gt;daddy, mummy, bye, ball, baby, no, shoe.&lt;/em&gt; From there it's still very similar, lots of concrete nouns relating to clothing, food, animals and family members. So we see a similarity between English and Sign in terms of the content, even if it's not identical. For example English speaking children have words like &lt;em&gt;moo, woof, yumyum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uh oh&lt;/em&gt; in their vocabulary whereas such sounds aren't so relevant to non-hearing children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another study &lt;em&gt;Petitto, L.A. (2000). On The Biological Foundations of Human Language. In K. Emmorey and H.Lane (Eds.) The signs of language revisted: An anthology in honor of Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima. Mahway, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Inc&lt;/em&gt; (A PDF version of a similar paper can be found here  &lt;a href=&quot;http://petitto.gallaudet.edu/~petitto/archive/biof.pdf&quot;&gt;http://petitto.gallaudet.edu/~petitto/archive/biof.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) it is mentioned that children who grow up English/ASL bilingual and French/LSQ bilingual don't necessarily produce the same first words in both modalities. So a child's first spoken word might be &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; and their first sign might be DOG, but that's not to say that their first word might not overlap. Petitto gives the example of &lt;em&gt;chapeau&lt;/em&gt;/CHAPEAU (hat) for the French/LSQ bilingual child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although there has been very little cross-linguistic research done into children's first signs cross linguistically we can see from a comparison of ASL and spoken English that the exact words might not be the same, but that they generally fall into similar categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T22:06:26.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1127" CreationDate="2011-11-25T22:11:53.510" Score="13" ViewCount="861" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always been impressed by the skills of ventriloquists - and I've been wondering lately whether anyone has done any work looking at the acoustic or articulatory properties of the speech of ventriloquists when they are speaking normally and using their skills? Any work on perception of ventriloquist speech would also be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T22:50:22.947" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T00:37:06.967" Title="Has there been any research into the phonetics of ventriloquism?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;production&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2011-11-25T23:40:39.067" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the question is about determining the morphological profile of a language, the issue of determining word boundaries is quite central. However, I don't agree with @Dan Milway that native speaker intuitions are relevant here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, two arguments against native speaker intuition data on assessing wordhood: first, in practice morphologists do not support claims about wordhood on native speaker intuitions; instead, they offer language-internal evidence. Wordhood judgments have never served as a significant evidential base for morphological theory in the way grammaticality judgments have for syntactic theory. Second, (and not unrelated) native speaker judgments might somehow fail to reflect genuine linguistic intuitions (i.e. they may reflect spurious judgments) or may be inconsistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In agglutinative languages, the grammatical word typically has a templatic structure: there is a fixed order of morphemes in the word, such that the word grammar can be described by a fininte state grammar. For example, the verbal word in Athabaskan languages can be schematized according to the following template (Hoijer 1971, qtd. in Good 2011)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1 Zero, one or more adverbial prefixes&#xA;2 The prefix for the iterative paradigm (lacking in some languages)&#xA;3 A pluralizing prefix&#xA;4 An object pronoun prefix, found only in transitive verbs and some passives&#xA;5 A deictic subject prefix&#xA;6 Zero, one, or two adverbial prefixes&#xA;7 A prefix marking mode, tense, or aspect&#xA;8 A subject pronoun prefix&#xA;9 A classifier prefix&#xA;10 A stem&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are good reasons for treating FOR, THE, and CATS as separate grammatical words in the English &quot;for the cats&quot;. There is no strict constraint on the sequencing and adjacency of the preposition, determiner and head noun in this phrase. It is possible to add words between FOR and THE, e.g. &quot;for the majority of the cats&quot;, and it is possible to add words between THE and CATS, e.g. &quot;for the seven most unexpectedly agressive cats&quot;. There are even constructions where it is possible to disrupt the usual linear order of FOR, THE, and CATS, e.g. &quot;The cats I bought the food for...&quot;; These kinds of things should be very restricted or completely impossible in a language where the equivalent of &quot;for the cats&quot; is a single grammatical word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Basque case, I am understanding that the Basque comitative postposition does not have a specific position with respect to a head noun, (i.e. it is at the end of the NP) so it not be considered an affix by the criterion I named above. One possibility is that it's a clitic (its linear position is not fixed, but it forms a phonological word with the adjacent material). Since the shape of =(re)kin is depend on the adjacent element, that is probably a good reason for writing it without a space. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jihualde/www/objects/pubs/Hualde%20Postpositions.pdf&quot;&gt;Hualde 2002&lt;/a&gt; on Basque postpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good, J. (2011) The typology of Templates. Language and Linguistics Compass&#xA;Volume 5, Issue 10, pages 731–747, October 2011&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hualde, J.I. (2002) Regarding Basque postpositions and related matters&#xA;in Erramu Boneta: A Festschrift for Rudolf P.G. de Rijk, ed. by Xabier Artiagoitia, Patxi&#xA;Goenaga &amp;amp; Joseba Lakarra, 325-339. Bilbao:Univ. del PaísVasco/Euskal Herriko Unib. Supplements of ASJU 44&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-25T23:40:39.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1074" CreationDate="2011-11-26T22:27:37.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told a story once about a paper that Kenneth Pike supposedly delivered on the phonetics of ventriloquism at an LSA meeting -- while LSA still had only one session, according to the storyteller -- but apparently it was never published, because the SIL doesn't have it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/klp/klp_biblio.htm&quot;&gt;http://www.sil.org/klp/klp_biblio.htm&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, Ken walks down the aisle from his seat in the back with a ventriloquist's dummy on his arm, delivering ventrilocal insults to various colleagues via the dummy. Then he has the dummy deliver the paper. This is a pretty consistent Ken Pike story, at least; he was a great showman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crux of the paper seemed to be that ventriloquists, who can't be seen moving their lips, simply move the entire phonetic chart &lt;b&gt;as a whole&lt;/b&gt; to the inside of the mouth, substituting dentals for labials, palatals for dentals, etc, and ignoring rounding altogether. Thus, no lip movements, though the mouth has to be at least a little open for sound to emerge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the phonemic pattern of each word is shifted regularly, apparently people can get used to understanding the transposed phonetics and hearing it as normal (if perhaps somewhat odd) speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-11-26T22:27:37.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1855" CreationDate="2011-11-26T22:41:49.043" Score="25" ViewCount="27073" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the course of researching the etymology of the word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Australia&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, I was trying to find the Latin words for &lt;strong&gt;north&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;south&lt;/strong&gt; (the cardinal directions). I found some websites that translate north as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/septentrionalis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Septentrionalis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but I understand this to refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dipper#Europe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seven oxen, or what we today call the Big Dipper&lt;/a&gt;, as it is in the northern sky. Other websites translate north as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Boreas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;boreas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aquilo#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aquilon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; though I think that the former is actually a Greek wind god and the later is his Roman name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course in English the words &lt;strong&gt;north&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;south&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;east&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;west&lt;/strong&gt; have no transparent etymologies; they are just the words for the directions. But it seems that Latin and Greek had direction words that were derived from other things (gods, stars, oxen, winds). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line of thought leads to a question: &lt;strong&gt;historically and cross-linguistically, how did terms for the cardinal directions arise?&lt;/strong&gt; Or differently stated, &lt;strong&gt;is it the case that the cardinal direction terms are derived from similar processes across different language families&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="536" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T07:41:38.257" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T07:41:38.257" Title="What are the historical origins of terms for north, south, east and west?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2011-11-27T17:04:09.890" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add a very important reminder here. I don't think it's a good idea to say that some languages are agglutinative and the others are not (isolating, inflectional etc.). This Humdoldtian-Schleicherian (individualizing) approach is flawed because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It recognizes one typological parameter, the morphological structure of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is based on an assumption that any language as a whole has a unique character (Croft 2003, p. 46), also see part 13.1 &amp;quot;Morphological typology&amp;quot; in Laurie Bauer's 2003 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.press.georgetown.edu/book/languages/introducing-linguistic-morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;textbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even Sapir (in the 1920's!) criticized that approach. All intro textbooks still use those terms but &lt;strong&gt;in modern linguistic typological research&lt;/strong&gt;, terms like &amp;quot;agglutinative/isolating languages&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;are no longer used/avoided&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for wordhood tests, you should read Martin Haspelmath's &lt;a href=&quot;https://zenodo.org/record/225844#.YI1UYxBHbxy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt; paper in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/flin.2011.002/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folia Linguistica 45(1)&lt;/a&gt;. He addresses all of your questions, and it is a very good review article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T21:01:38.937" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T21:01:38.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1082" CreationDate="2011-11-27T18:16:49.693" Score="10" ViewCount="33654" Body="&lt;p&gt;In astronomy we have the Aurora Australis in the south and the Aurora Borealis in the north. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;auster&lt;/em&gt; is in fact the Latin equivalent of the Greek &lt;em&gt;νότος&lt;/em&gt;, or southern wind. However, &lt;em&gt;boreas&lt;/em&gt; is a Greek word, &lt;em&gt;βορέας&lt;/em&gt;, not Latin! The Latin equivalent is &lt;em&gt;aquilo&lt;/em&gt;. So, are the &quot;southern lights&quot; derived from a Latin word whereas the &quot;northern lights&quot; are derived from a Greek word? I can think of other places where &lt;em&gt;auster&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;i&gt;boreas&lt;/i&gt; are used as south/north. I find it unusual that this common pair would be derived from two different languages. How did this convention arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T07:43:49.767" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T09:07:07.530" Title="Why is &quot;Aurora Borealis&quot; from Greek, but &quot;Aurora Australis&quot; from Latin?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1079" CreationDate="2011-11-27T19:42:40.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Common sense guess: The northern lights have been known in the west for a much longer time than the southern lights. Maybe the ancient greeks themselves knew of it and named it. The southern lights were discovered (by the west), and thus named, much later, by people who had neither greek nor latin as their first language. Maybe they didn't see a problem in mixing greek and latin terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how many of the older scientific terms for animals and plants are a mishmash of greek and latin (now they are a mishmash of just about anything). If following that tradition, a mix of greek and latin to describe another natural phenomenon is perfectly understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T19:42:40.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2011-11-27T19:56:48.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are actually two different types of correspondence that are at issue, and both are &quot;phonetic&quot;, though in different ways. Gaston is correct that 'orthographic depth' is the variable that distinguishes (say) Finnish from French. But orthographies can be deep in either direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who can pronounce French can learn to read French aloud (whether they understand it or not) without much difficulty, once they learn the spelling conventions. But without knowing a great deal more, they wouldn't be able to know how to spell a word they'd heard aloud; I remember once trying to figure out all the different ways French might have spelled &lt;em&gt;cendrier&lt;/em&gt;. French orthography is shallow for reading (input depth), but deep for spelling (output depth). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not true of English orthography, which is deep on both input and output. A strange written word may have an unpredictable or inconsistent pronunciation (&lt;em&gt;bedraggled, bedridden&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;cough, rough, through&lt;/em&gt;). And a strange spoken word might be spelled in any number of ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is yet another reason why linguists do not like to talk about &quot;phonetic writing systems&quot;. All alphabetic writing systems are phonetic in some sense. But there are a lot of senses, and a lot of &lt;strong&gt;kinds&lt;/strong&gt; of senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T19:56:48.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1079" CreationDate="2011-11-27T20:05:23.580" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;aurora borealis&quot; was arguably first used by a French scientist Petrus Gassendus aka &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gassendi&quot;&gt;Pierre Gassendi&lt;/a&gt; in 1621, in his treatise &quot;Physics.&quot; For further discussion, see Siscoe, George. 1986. &lt;em&gt;An historical footnote on the origin of 'Aurora Borealis.&lt;/em&gt;' In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Hf80l9937aoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA13&amp;amp;ots=BRM3jjVOdn&amp;amp;dq=gassendi%20aurora%20borealis&amp;amp;pg=PR2#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gassendi%20aurora%20borealis&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;History of geophysics, volume 2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon itself has been known for a long time in Europe; for example, the ancient Greeks called it &quot;blazing skies&quot; or &quot;flaming sky dragons&quot; (Hesiod, Theogony).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;aurora australis&quot; was arguably first used in 1741 (OED)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that when those terms were coined, they were used as Latin words. In other words, the Latin word &quot;borealis&quot; was used, not the name of a Greek god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-11-27T21:12:16.373" LastActivityDate="2011-11-27T21:12:16.373" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1088" CreationDate="2011-11-28T14:06:38.620" Score="10" ViewCount="1754" Body="&lt;p&gt;The above typology seems to also be called &quot;Humboldt-Schleicherian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1078/20&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in the question &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, I was seized by a desire to know what is being used for morphological typology for languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping the answer isn't that they are all unique snowflakes, since I rather enjoyed using words like &quot;isolating&quot; as a shorthand for &quot;languages like English, Chinese, Khmer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T13:06:05.460" Title="What are the alternate morphological typologies to isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysyntehtic, etc.?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-11-28T17:49:49.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try looking in a mirror into your mouth while producing some words like &quot;fill feel hello ladle larry bottle etc&quot;. If you see a closure further back (by the dangling thing, your uvula), it is a dark l, while if a closure just behind your teeth, it is a light l. You could even do this with a small pocket mirror in high light -- or a webcam maybe for best results, so you don't have to look at the display while producing the sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="235" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T17:49:49.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2011-11-28T20:32:41.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A partial solution proposed by Comrie (1989:42--52) is to break the traditional scale up into two orthogonal scales, an index of fusion and an index of synthesis. The index of fusion relates to the extent to which morphemes are segmentable within a word, and the index of synthesis relates to the number of morphemes on average in a word. Polysynthetic languages would have a low index of fusion and a high index of synthesis. Agglutinating languages would have a low index of fusion, and an intermediate index of synthesis. Comrie notes labels associated with morphological typology have been around for a long time, &quot;...and it is to be hoped that general linguistics textbooks will not continue indefinitely to give the impression that this is the only, or most insightful, way of classifying languages typologically.&quot; (1989:52)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might add that another useful pair of distinctions in doing morphological comparison is that between segmental and non-segmental morphology, and between concatenative and non-concatenative morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the interesting discussion that came up in the context of the related question concerns a more general issue which has provoked much discussion lately. The issues is whether descriptive labels used by linguists, e.g. &quot;word&quot;, &quot;subject&quot;, &quot;dative case&quot;, &quot;[+voice]&quot;, &quot;noun&quot; can be recognized as being instantiated in individual languages. Some representative works are Dryer (1997), Croft (2000), and especially Haspelmath (2010). These authors suggest that the answer to this question is no (though their position is considered controversial). These labels do not mean the same thing in different languages, but instead refer to comparative concepts that tend to be useful in comparing languages. In other words, inconsistencies are bound to result when we try to apply the same set of tests for, say, wordhood, to different languages. This finding doesn't mean that the concept of word is not useful in any given language, it just means that the notion will mean different things in different languages, and may be more or less useful in describing grammatical patterns in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comrie, B. (1989) Language universals and linguistic typology. 2nd ed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/9783110806120.65&quot;&gt;Croft, W. (2000)&lt;/a&gt; Parts of speech as typological universals and as language particular categories. Approaches to the typology of word classes, ed. Petra Maria Vogel and Bernard Comrie, 65-102. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dryer, Matthew S. 1997 &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerAreGRsUniversal.PDF&quot;&gt;Are Grammatical Relations Universal?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; In Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givon, edited by Joan Bybee, John Haiman, and Sandra Thompson, pp. 115 - 143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath, M. (2010) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/ComparativeConcepts.pdf&quot;&gt;Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies&lt;/a&gt;. Language 86(3). 663-687&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-28T23:13:33.127" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T23:13:33.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2011-11-28T20:43:57.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those terms are still used as typological shorthands in linguistics, but none seems to be well defined in the literature, or else the various definitions and usages are so disjunct that there is no widespread agreement on their denotations. Basically, a linguist can still say ‘isolating’ and get their basic point across – a language with a morphosyntax similar to Mandarin, Vietnamese, or English – but after that initial introduction more soundly defined phenomena should be used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take one term as an exemplar, the term ‘polysynthetic’ lately seems to mean something like “has a lot of morphemes per word and exhibits some kind of noun incorporation”. But there are competing definitions that completely disagree with each other, for example Mark Baker’s extremely limiting definition in his &lt;i&gt;The polysynthesis parameter&lt;/i&gt; (1996) that nobody else seems to be willing to accept. Randomly choosing a contemporary article, I find that Russell (1999) works under a different definition of polysynthesis given that he applies the term to languages that Baker has excluded from his definition. In fact, Russell doesn’t really bother to define his idea of polysynthesis, only using it in the title of his paper. That’s basically the status quo – use the term to get the basic idea across and then abandon it as soon as is convenient because it can’t be clearly defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(BTW, the name should be “Humboldt”, from philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt who was the older brother of the more famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baker, Mark C. 1996. &lt;i&gt;The polysynthesis parameter&lt;/i&gt;. (Oxford studies in comparative syntax). Oxford: OUP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russell, Kevin. 1999. The “word” in two polysynthetic languages. In T. Alan Hall &amp;amp; Ursula Kleinhenz (eds.), &lt;i&gt;Studies on the phonological word&lt;/i&gt;, pp. 203–221. (Current issues in linguistic theory 174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-11-29T08:05:29.913" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T08:05:29.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2011-11-28T20:59:09.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another example of the same combination of gnarly syllable structure and tone is Tlingit, where words like [tʃχánkʼ] ‘grandkid’ and [ɬʔùɬ.tʃí.nì] ‘vest’ occur. Tone provably arose in this language from breathy and glottalized vowels without any change in syllable codas based on the extinct Tongass Tlingit dialect’s non-tonal vowel system. So it’s not the case that tone &lt;i&gt;must&lt;/i&gt; evolve with simple syllabic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be something to the idea that &lt;i&gt;contour&lt;/i&gt; tone cooccurrs with simple syllabic structure, but even then Tlingit provides a counterexample. The Southern Tlingit dialect has a falling tone, a contour tone going from high to low. It predictably occurs in two situations: *Vˀ &gt; V̂ː and *VːR &gt; V̂ːR where R is a sonorant ∈ {/n/, /j/, /w/, /ɰ/}. I think that there are also some Athabaskan languages with complex syllable structure and contour tone, perhaps Southern Tutchone or Tanacross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-28T20:59:09.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1083" CreationDate="2011-11-28T23:12:29.737" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the terminological confusion (see James C.'s answer), there are other reasons why that particular approach has been abandoned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even &lt;strong&gt;Humboldt&lt;/strong&gt; himself realized that &lt;em&gt;those language types are idealizations&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. a pure agglutinative or isolating language doesn't exist. That is why &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12629/12629-h/12629-h.htm#ch6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sapir&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; modified that typology into something &lt;em&gt;less crude&lt;/em&gt;, for example, the number of morphemes per word (analytic, synthetic, polysynthetic) or the degree of morphemic alteration (isolating, agglutinative, fusional, and symbolic). One of the undesirable consequences was that you had to admit that the same language could simultaneously belong to the different types, e.g. Cambodian being fusional-isolating (Shibatani &amp;amp; Bynon 1999). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/1264155&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greenberg&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; went even further and proposed to calculate various indices. However, as &lt;strong&gt;Croft&lt;/strong&gt; 2003 notices, you could calculate those indices for different word classes and you might end up with an observation that in the same language the nominal system is agglutinative whereas the verbal system is inflectional. Or, as &lt;strong&gt;Booij&lt;/strong&gt; 2007 observes, &amp;quot;Germanic languages are fusional in their inflectional systems, but agglutinative in their system of derivational word-formation&amp;quot; (p. 43).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comrie&lt;/strong&gt; (see jlovegreen's answer) proposed two indices, the index of synthesis and the index of fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kroeber&lt;/strong&gt; 1954 posed a very good question, &amp;quot;What do we do with a morphological classification of the world's languages when we have it?&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;Bauer&lt;/strong&gt; 2003 argued that &amp;quot;the value of typology qua typology is [..] very much in doubt.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T13:06:05.460" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T13:06:05.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1103" CreationDate="2011-11-29T18:38:51.720" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess this question is rather theory-internal, but it may be very trivial for someone who follows the theoretical literature well. I am thinking of a type of constraint and want to know if such a thing has been proposed before, in the OT literature or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a representation where X is a root node, and i and j are features of the same type (e.g. they are both tone features), and imagine further that i and j are both linked to X, so you have a representation like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  X&#xA; /\&#xA;i j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i and j are different, then there is a contour. Now what if i and j are the same? Has there been discussion on a constraint against, as it were, &quot;trivial contours?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[subsequently added] Also, let's say that we want to ban the above representation, but still permit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X X&#xA;| |&#xA;i j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a simple OCP rule will not suffice. Then further suppose that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  X&#xA; /\&#xA;i j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when i and j are different, is also permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a second addition] To narrow the problem further, let's say that three elements, &lt;strong&gt;i,i,j&lt;/strong&gt; are to be linked to two nodes, X1 and X2. The two possibilities where every element is associated with some node, and every node is associated with some element are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X1  X2   X1 X2&#xA;/\  |     | /\&#xA;i i j     i i j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these have one OCP violation, and one violation of NoContour, so these two constraints cannot be used in combination to solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-11-30T03:06:44.037" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T21:02:37.727" Title="Constraint against multiple identical linkage in OT" Tags="&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1108" CreationDate="2011-11-29T19:45:09.493" Score="10" ViewCount="10201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to test to see if a string of words forms a complete sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The dog jumped over the fence == Good &#xA;The cat square seven the triangle == BAD &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking the type of words (verb, noun, etc.) and order of the words would help in creating a rule set to test the sentence against.  But before I run off and code up all the sentence rules I know I am looking for any prior art on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="542" LastEditorUserId="46" LastEditDate="2011-11-29T20:32:28.293" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T02:27:41.603" Title="How to test if a string of words is a grammatical sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1090" CreationDate="2011-11-29T20:07:18.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to give a silly answer that might be helpful, and I'll let someone else give the more serious answer. Here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&quot;&gt;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enter your sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See whether it returns a parse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link I have given is for an online implementation of the LinGO English Resource Grammar, which is a rather heavy-duty implementation of English grammar in HPSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T20:07:18.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1090" CreationDate="2011-11-29T23:43:19.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for prior art, there is quite a lot. Formal grammars use a theory of language to encode the grammar of a language. You can go through the links I gave &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/120/126&quot;&gt;when answering a related question&lt;/a&gt;. ERG that jlovegren mentioned is one such example. Other examples would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XTAG&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://decentius.aksis.uib.no/logon/xle.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XLE&lt;/a&gt;, both of which have fairly comprehensive grammars for English, just like ERG, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://openccg.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCCG&lt;/a&gt;, which, at the moment, does not have a comprehensive grammar for English, but has it for a few other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistical algorithms, these days, far out-perform hand-written grammars when it comes to &quot;understanding&quot; a sentence. However, the designers of most statistical parsers have designed their systems to make the &quot;best possible sense&quot; of every sentence, and so, are poor at detecting grammaticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One system that is already used to detect grammaticality of sentences is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link-Grammar&lt;/a&gt; which happens to be integrated into AbiWord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on, but this should be enough to start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-11-29T23:43:19.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1089" CreationDate="2011-11-30T01:45:52.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your wanting a constraint against “trivial contours” ignores the fact that these may not be as trivial as you might suppose. Suppose you have a language with tones {L, LH, HL, H} and no vowel length. Then you could have a vowel like [V̌] which would be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  V&#xA; / \&#xA;L   H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose you have another vowel in this language that has two high tone features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  V&#xA; / \&#xA;H   H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there’s no vowel length, we would expect this to be something like [V́], i.e. just a vowel with a high tone. Our description predicts this should be equivalent to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V&#xA;|&#xA;H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;right? The language shouldn’t have any difference between one and two features. But suppose the language also said that it was okay to spread the second part of the contour onto a subsequent sonorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  V R&#xA; / \|&#xA;L   H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there should be a sequence like [V̀Ŕ] or [V̌Ŕ] arising from the above structure. If L is the unmarked tone then this should be a marked form with high tone on the sonorant. Contrast this with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V R&#xA;|&#xA;H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the R gets the default tone which is L, so producing [V́R̀]. Now with L unmarked but a vowel with two H features then with a following sonorant we’d get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  V R&#xA; / \|&#xA;H   H&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would show up as [V́Ŕ]. That’s a marked form, different from the unmarked [V́R̀] that should happen if L is the default, unmarked tone. This context is not exactly trivial but it does result from the “trivial contours” you describe if you expand the situation to include tone spread to sonorants which is a fairly common phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this isn’t really an answer for you. I can’t point to any literature offhand, but I think that you’d need some good data to justify prohibiting such forms. Just because they seem trivial in the trivial case doesn’t mean that they continue to be trivial in nontrivial situations. To test your hypothesis I’d look for something in western Africa where the Bantu and Bantoid languages have tone systems like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I’m handwaving about ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ because everybody does, but in a real article these terms would need to be well defined.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2011-11-30T01:45:52.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="535" CreationDate="2011-11-30T04:29:42.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could start by studying how you pronounce English /w/, which consists of simultaneous labial and velar approximation.  Ignore the labial approximation: you want to learn what velar approximation feels like.  Of course it feels like the back of your tongue approximating your velum, but it's better to experience it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that you know what velar approximation feels like, you can try to assess how much velar approximation you use when pronouncing l. Light l has little or no velar approximation;  dark l has strong velar approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2011-11-30T04:29:42.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2011-11-30T21:54:28.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough rep to add a comment to the OP, so I will give you this information in an &quot;answer&quot;. In Hebrew the fruit &quot;orange&quot; is a new idea, and thus has a new word. However, instead of calling it by the colour orange (which would be כתום &quot;Katom&quot; in Hebrew) we call it a תפוז &quot;tapuz&quot; which is a portmanteau of &quot;golden apple&quot;. So the fruit is in fact named after a colour, but not the colour of it's peel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2011-11-30T21:54:28.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1101" CreationDate="2011-12-01T11:03:48.537" Score="9" ViewCount="1688" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;close-mid back rounded vowel&lt;/a&gt; is, according to Wikipedia, &quot;usually diphthongized to [oʊ]&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;em&gt;row&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, in the &lt;em&gt;Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; I didn't see &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; standing by itself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In some other languages, you can pronounce it just by itself. How common is that and why is English different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T12:35:27.677" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T12:35:27.677" Title="Why in English words is [o] followed by [ʊ]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1098" CreationDate="2011-12-01T14:33:49.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In British English, actually, the diphthongization is [əʊ], while [oʊ] is more US pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English doesn't have a single [o] in words, because it's a short vowel and English doesn't have a short &quot;o&quot; sound. The case where it's not followed by [ʊ] is [ɔ:], as in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/caught&quot;&gt;caught&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at this page about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology&quot;&gt;English Phonology&lt;/a&gt;, and you look at the table reporting the vowels in English, you'll see that the box for &quot;mid back short&quot; is empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T14:33:49.540" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1098" CreationDate="2011-12-01T17:19:43.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, you misquoted Wikipedia. What it actually says (the current edit) is that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the north of the Netherlands and in North Central American usually diphthongized to [oʊ]&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; The same Wikipedia article has lots of examples when it &quot;stands just by itself.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In British English, things are way more complicated. Although [əʊ] is the most common variant now, there are other variants, too; see part 8.10.4 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Title/9780340958773/Gimsons_Pronunciation_of_English_Seventh_Edition.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gimson's Pronunciation of English&lt;/a&gt; (7th ed.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are British dialects where [o:] is not diphthongized. After all, &lt;strong&gt;in Middle English it wasn't, either.&lt;/strong&gt; It got diphthongized during the Great Vowel Shift. There are dialects where the glide is a schwa etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some discussion based on the material of English dialects (the so called goat test), see Wells, J. C. 1981. Accents of English. Cambridge: CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=1FEivt76U3IC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Linguistic atlas of England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, you can find excellent maps; see, for example, the word &quot;oak&quot; (or loaf, toad etc.), which is not diphthongized in some dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-01T20:47:07.643" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T20:47:07.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1098" CreationDate="2011-12-01T17:47:37.910" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;English high and mid non-central vowel phonemes fall into two categories: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tense /i e o u/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lax   /ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside the tense/lax phonetic distinction (which refers to the muscles at the root of the tongue), these phonemes are distinguished in several other ways -- language loves redundancy and builds it into the structure whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, all the tense vowel phonemes are diphthongized, whereas the lax vowels are pure vowels, which may be neutralized with their tense counterpart in some environments (&lt;em&gt;Mary, merry, marry&lt;/em&gt;), but never appear with an offglide except in local variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the high front vowels /i, u/ the diphthongization isn't always distinctive because the tongue gesture is so short, but it's there and shows up in transitional /y/s and /w/s in phrases like &lt;em&gt;be able&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;do it&lt;/em&gt;. It's clearer in the mid vowels, where the distance the tongue has to move going from [e] to [i] or [o] to [u] is longer and more easily distinguished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, pronunciation of Spanish /e/ as /ei/ and /o/ as /ou/ is one of the characteristics of an English accent. English speakers are normally unable to distinguish the two in Spanish, just as Spanish speakers are normally unable to distinguish English tense vowels from lax, leading to &lt;em&gt;ship sheep late let Paul pole foot boot&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are complexities. In RP, as noted, the actual diphthong is centralized to [əʊ], and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/2VowelShifts.pdf&quot;&gt;Northern Cities Chain Shift&lt;/a&gt; has screwed up urban American English vowels almost as thoroughly as what the Great Vowel Shift did to Middle English vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T17:47:37.910" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1098" CreationDate="2011-12-01T19:49:30.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The map of &lt;a href=&quot;http://aschmann.net/AmEng/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;North American English Dialects&lt;/a&gt; has vast amount of collected data pertaining to your topic, with a visually appealing presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="551" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-02T12:58:00.173" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T12:58:00.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1089" CreationDate="2011-12-01T20:55:31.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Here is an answer whose substance was suggested to me by Diana Archangeli]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form of the OCP I was assuming was a somewhat classical one, more or less like Goldsmith's (1976:272) formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;At the phonetic level, any conti[g]uous identical (auto)segments must be&#xA;collapsed into each other. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this formulation, OCP does not prefer either of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X1  X2   X1 X2&#xA;/\  |     | /\&#xA;i i j     i i j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since it is just evaluating the surface sequence &lt;strong&gt;[i i j]&lt;/strong&gt;. However, a &lt;em&gt;generalized&lt;/em&gt; OCP, as proposed by Suzuki (1998:64) &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; distinguish between the two. Here is Suzuki's formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Generalized OCP (GOCP)&#xA;In the scheme *X...X where “...” is intervening material, a sequence of two Xs is&#xA;   prohibited in some domain D.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is to recognize that the GOCP could apply cyclically, first at one domain, then at a higher domain, since it can apply to all domains generally. So &lt;strong&gt;[[i i] [j]]&lt;/strong&gt; contains two violations of GOCP, first for &lt;strong&gt;[i i]&lt;/strong&gt;, then for &lt;strong&gt;[i i j]&lt;/strong&gt;, while &lt;strong&gt;[[i] [i j]]&lt;/strong&gt; contains only one violation, for &lt;strong&gt;[i i j]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @James C. points out, I did not consider representations where one of the featural elements was multiply-linked. Ranking No-Spread (&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/110-0000/110-0000-MCCARTHY-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;McCarthy 1995&lt;/a&gt;:53) high enough, however, can rule out such representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldsmith, J. 1976. Autosegmental phonology. PhD. thesis, MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McCarthy, J. 1995. Extensions of Faithfulness: Rotuman Revisited. ROA-110.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suzuki, K. 1998. A typological investigation of dissimilation. PhD. thesis, University of Arizona&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-01T21:02:37.727" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T21:02:37.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1106" CreationDate="2011-12-01T21:09:36.890" Score="12" ViewCount="3767" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a post on ELU about a more general question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50246/softened-pronunciation-of-consonants-such-as-t-or-s-followed-by-y&quot;&gt;Softened pronunciation of consonants, such as “t” or “s” followed by “y”&lt;/a&gt;. The question was answered in regard to palatalization, especially for phrases like &quot;but you&quot;, where /t/ is followed by a palatal glide, /j/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does &quot;palatalization&quot; also explain the affrication of /t/ and /d/ when they're followed by /ɹ/, instead of by a front vowel or a palatal consonant? E.g. in 'tram' or 'address' (but not necessarily in 'string'?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see how the affricates are closer to the palatal position than the stops, but the trigger for the change doesn't seem to be a following palatal consonant. (Typical English &#xA;/ɹ/'s place of articulation is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;described as alveolar&lt;/a&gt; rather than palatal.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of a case where &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization#Mechanism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tongue-raising typically affects apical and coronal consonants&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, i.e. palatalizes them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is explored some at &lt;a href=&quot;http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/chricky-affrication/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/chricky-affrication/&lt;/a&gt; and its follow-up blog posts, but I didn't see a definitive answer for what causes the change, or what the process is called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. See also John Well's post &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-do-we-pronounce-train.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how do we pronounce train ?&lt;/a&gt;, which is interesting: the &quot;allophonic rule that retracts t and d when followed by r&quot; - what rule is that and what causes it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely, when asked about &quot;the shift of any alveolar plosive preceding a rhotic consonant to a post alveolar affricate,&quot; Wells concludes &quot;I don’t believe there is any such phonological change in progress.&quot; I really don't understand how that conclusion is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T02:17:23.400" Title="Why are /t/ and /d/ sometimes affricated before /ɹ/ in English?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2011-12-01T22:21:50.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you'll find that it's &lt;strong&gt;initial&lt;/strong&gt; dental stops that &quot;soften&quot; before /r/ (&quot;soft&quot; and &quot;hard&quot; are not phonetic terms, alas). &lt;em&gt;Treat&lt;/em&gt; is an example, while &lt;em&gt;street&lt;/em&gt; isn't, at least not so much. What's going on in &lt;em&gt;treat&lt;/em&gt; is technically called &lt;strong&gt;Affrication&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e, the initial, voiceless, aspirated /t/ and the following voiceless retroflex /r/ are joining together as an affricate, just like /tʃ/ in &lt;em&gt;cheat&lt;/em&gt;. And why does &lt;em&gt;treat&lt;/em&gt; sound so much like &lt;em&gt;cheat&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is the fact that initial voiceless stops in English /p t tʃ k/ are &lt;strong&gt;aspirated&lt;/strong&gt;. This means they get a little puff of air when they're pronounced. This is quite automatic but very easy to perceive, and the aspiration merges with the /r/, which is already voiceless because it's following a voiceless stop, and the result does sound very much like /tʃ/. It's possible to distinguish them, but we often can choose which one to &quot;hear&quot;, in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that English doesn't use /r/ after /tʃ/ or /dʒ/, though it occurs after all other stops; try pronouncing &quot;chree&quot; so that it doesn't sound like &quot;tree&quot;, and you'll see. The palatal affricates behave otherwise like normal stop consonants; this restriction on /r/ clusters is because palatals are too close to /r/ in the mouth for us to distinguish easily. This is a common situation in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Mandarin, for instance, which has contrastive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Pinyin.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Palatal and Retroflex stop series&lt;/a&gt; (in Pinyin, palatal stops are all single letters &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, while retroflex stops are two-letter combinations with a second letter &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;), hearing and pronouncing the distinctions between them is always a challenge for English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, however, we only have the one retroflex consonant /r/ (which you can represent as /ɹ/ if you feel it's required), and /r/ is unique phonetically, and famously variable in different English dialects as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T22:21:50.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2011-12-01T22:27:32.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I've found a satisfactory answer. Following John Wells's allusion to an &quot;allophonic rule that retracts t and d when followed by r&quot;, I did some more searching and found the rule described in a couple of places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone#Examples_in_English_vs._other_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on allophones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scribd.com/doc/8358686/Unit-4-Phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Unit 4-Phonetics&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page 6 or 7. Not sure what book this is from!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process is labelled as &quot;retraction.&quot; I haven't found an explicit statement of the mechanism that causes this rule to happen, but apparently it's because the tongue has to be further back for the r, so it starts moving that way during the preceding segment (sometimes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="176" LastEditorUserId="176" LastEditDate="2011-12-01T22:52:09.950" LastActivityDate="2011-12-01T22:52:09.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2011-12-02T02:08:39.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetics isn't my forte, so I don't follow literature on phonetics and I might be wrong. Here's my guess. An affricate is a stop followed by a fricative, homo- or heterorganic (same or different place of articulation). The tip of the tongue is retracted (moved back) for &quot;t/d&quot; in anticipation of the following &quot;r&quot;. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=QRpw_igmHnkC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;O'Connor 1994&lt;/a&gt; argues that it is on the front of the hard palate. See below what he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tr: &quot;the tongue is in position for the friction of /r/.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dr: &quot;there is friction as the voiced air passes over the tongue-tip for the /r/.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-02T18:19:27.537" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T18:19:27.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1090" CreationDate="2011-12-02T02:27:41.603" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a plethora of prior art on this problem, coming from the areas of formal syntax in linguistics, computational linguistics and also natural language processing. While there has been plenty of progress made on this problem there are also many open problems that researchers are working on, so it would definitely be worth your while reading up on some of the various introductory material on this topic so that you have a sense of what you can already easily accomplish using existing tools, and which things might see you biting off a bit more than you can chew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general problem of analyzing the structure of a sentence is referred to as &lt;code&gt;parsing&lt;/code&gt; and as has already been pointed out, there are (very roughly) two broad approaches towards tackling it. The one that is currently in vogue at the moment is to develop statistical models of the language you want to be able to parse by looking at the probabilities associated with sequences of words occurring next to each other and then automatically deriving a set of rules from the model. The advantage of this sort of approach is that you can throw more and more language data at your model - and we have lots of it these days - yielding significant improvements. They also tend to be more robust, which comes about because they are probabilistic. You can just ask the system to give you the most likely analysis, no matter how bad it actually is, and it will happily oblige. So the flip side to the robustness is that they tend to overgenerate - they provide analyses that are ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it sounds like you're after a test for grammaticality I think you're probably more interested the other broad approach which is often referred to as symbolic or rule-based approaches. These are usually grounded in a formal theory of linguistic syntax and there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax#Modern_theories&quot;&gt;many of these&lt;/a&gt; to choose from. Most of these center around the notion of a &lt;code&gt;grammar&lt;/code&gt;, an abstract device which is a set of rules encoding the constraints of a particular language. In fact, one way of thinking about these grammars is that they provide a model for grammaticality - if a sentence can be produced by your grammar then it is a valid sentence in the language; if the grammar does not license it, then it is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order automate the process of detecting grammaticality, just having a grammar on its own is not enough. You firstly need the grammar to be in a machine-readable form (ie code of some description) and you also need a parser, a bit of software which can apply the rules of the grammar to given input strings of your language.  Luckily there are tools around to help you with this, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. A great way to learn about implementing your own grammars would be with the Python &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot;&gt;Natural Language Toolkit&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch08.html&quot;&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/a&gt; of the accompanying book (which is available for free online) provides a hands-on introduction to writing grammars and exploring parsing algorithms. If you don't know Python or are new to programming the book also doubles as an introduction to programming.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with 'toy' grammars of the type in the NLTK book is that they only describe a woefully small fragment of a language. Unfortunately this is also going to be true even of a grammar that you invest a fair bit of time developing. Many of the rules that govern our languages are readily apparent to us and can be encoded relatively straight forwardly but there are also a great many that occur so infrequently we hardly notice them or that are just so complicated it's tricky to describe a set of rules to capture them without negatively impacting other parts of the language. This is an inherent problem associated with hand built grammars that try to model grammaticality: the large amount of time it takes to extend the grammar to handle different linguistic rules and words from diverse topic areas. The lack of coverage over input text is a big reason why statistical approaches to parsing are popular - you almost literally just throw more data at the model and your coverage of the language increases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily for you there are a few linguistically-motivated grammars around that have quite a bit of development time under their belt so if all you actually want is the answer to the question &quot;is this sentence grammatical?&quot; then you could check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/erg/&quot;&gt;English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt; which has a nice online interface and also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/&quot;&gt;Link Grammar&lt;/a&gt; in the AbiWord program. Just remember that even though these systems are theoretical oracles regarding grammaticality, the practicalities of creating such a system means that unless you're throwing only basic sentences at them, don't automatically assume them to be infallible. If you're unsure, have a look at the analysis it's given you (if any) and see if it makes sense. If it doesn't perhaps you've found a bug in the grammar, a place for improvement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where you could go from here... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A great text book to read would be Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin (specifically section III on Syntax)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Play around with the NLTK and build your own grammars. You won't end up with a wide-coverage grammar but it'll be fun and you'll learn a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read up on some the history of the interplay between linguistics and computational linguistic/natural language technology in the open access journal &lt;a href=&quot;http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/lilt/issue/current&quot;&gt;Linguistic Issues in Language Technology&lt;/a&gt; (it's fascinating stuff)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read up on the art of grammar engineering, the practice of developing large-scale linguistically motivated machine readable grammars: a good paper is &lt;a href=&quot;http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/TLS/TLS10-2006/TLS10_Bender.pdf&quot;&gt;Grammar Engineering for Linguistic Hypothesis Testing&lt;/a&gt; by Emily Bender and another is the second chapter in &lt;a href=&quot;http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/site/9781575866116.shtml&quot;&gt;Language from a Cognitive Perspective: Grammar, Usage, and Processing&lt;/a&gt; Edited by Emily M. Bender &amp;amp; Jennifer E. Arnold, but it doesn't seem to be available online. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or just play around with an existing end-to-end parser that has reasonably good coverage. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/erg/&quot;&gt;The English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt; would be a particularly good one to look at.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2011-12-02T02:27:41.603" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2011-12-03T01:40:41.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the basic observation about agglutinative languages generally not having complex tonal systems is pretty well upheld. In languages where morphemes are generally segmentable, and words are long, tonal systems will be found, as in many languages of North and South America, also some Oceanic language of New Caledonia; but languages with the most complex tonal systems, in Southern Mexico, Equatorial Africa and SE Asia, tend to have short words. This is not to say that such languages do not have much morphology; it's just that the morphology tends to be non-concatentive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess for why this is is that the historical processes leading to very complex tonal systems tend to require short words as their endpoint. In Africa, languages having the most complex tonal systems (with four or five contrasts of pitch level at the surface) have gotten to be this way because syllables get lost, but their tones stay behind, causing perturbations. The more lost syllables, the more complex the tonal system, and the shorter the words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In SE Asian tone systems, the systems have gotten complex due to pitch perturbations caused by the combined effects of word-initial &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; word-final consonants, so getting to the most complex system requires starting out with short words. Effects of consonants on pitch have created or complicated tonal systems in languages already having relatively long words, like Cherokee or New Caledonia languages, but the systems don't seem to get to the point where four and five pitch-levels are contrasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some references&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haudricourt, A.-G. (1954). De l’origine ds tons en vietnamien. Journal Asiatique, 242, 69-82.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hombert, J.-M., Ohala, J. J., &amp;amp; Ewan, W. G. (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language, 55 , 37-58.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hyman, L. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/annual_report/documents/2007/Hyman_Blackwell_Tone_PLAR.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tone: Is it different?&lt;/a&gt;” Submitted to The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Edition (John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle &amp;amp; Alan Yu, eds).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kingston, J. (to appear) &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/jkingstn/web%20page/research/tonogenesis2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tonogenesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rivierre, J.-C. (1993) Tonogenesis in New Caledonia. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications, No. 24, Tonality in Austronesian Languages, pp. 155-173&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uchihara, H. (2009) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/604703&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;High Tone in Oklahoma Cherokee.&lt;/a&gt; International Journal of American Linguistics, 75.3: 317-336.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;K. Wedekind (1985) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kwedekind.de/Eingang1/PdfFiles/1985_Thoughts_when_Drawing_a_Map_of_Tone_Languages.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thoughts when Drawing a Map of Tone Languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2011-12-03T11:30:48.947" LastActivityDate="2011-12-03T11:30:48.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="90" CreationDate="2011-12-05T06:18:10.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/main_files/definitionsa-m.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/main_files/definitionsa-m.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/Glossary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/Glossary.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Via the UCSB linguistics department &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/start/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;start page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastActivityDate="2011-12-05T06:18:10.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1115" CreationDate="2011-12-05T19:35:05.757" Score="9" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Johanna Nichols' book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=52WlLWgPG-oC&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;lpg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=mongolian%20japanese%20dependent&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=OnDOddKApn&amp;amp;sig=Lg2b4-542ysPAgGgI6RYrWql08w&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=vxvdTtaLGdG6hAfjgb3WBA&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;resnum=7&amp;amp;ved=0CE0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mongolian%20japanese%20dependent&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I came across the passage on page 146, where she asserts that Japanese, Mongolian, Dyirbal, and Yawelmani are all radically dependent-marking. Having studied a bit of Japanese, I can imagine what she is talking about. But I'd like to see what this looks like in Mongolian in practice. Can someone provide a simple example (sentence-length perhaps)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those unfamiliar with the distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking, a copy of Nichols' classic 1986 paper on the topic can be downloaded &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.washington.edu/bcitko/LING%20480/nichols.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-09T06:05:41.133" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T06:05:41.133" Title="What's a simple example of how Mongolian is radically dependent-marking?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1122" CreationDate="2011-12-05T19:41:31.800" Score="11" ViewCount="2399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I had heard any spoken, Russian was one of my favorite languages. I used to have fun just reading Russian dictionaries, and I thought I'd soon learn to speak it. But when I tried to find some recordings, I felt that what seemed to be the 'main' Russian accent was not to my taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It stands to reason that a language with very extensive geographical spread will also develop more than one accent, over time. I am interested in knowing what the main accents are regarding Russian as it is spoken today among native speakers. I am particularly interested in how vowel articulation might differ geographically. To a lesser extent, I am interested in geographical variation in sentence intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-05T19:48:02.660" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T15:08:55.967" Title="What are the main accents of modern Russian among native speakers?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1112" CreationDate="2011-12-06T14:04:15.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a very simple one from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/C2/publications/Guntsetseg.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bold naiz   ohin-ig-oo    uns-sen.&#xA;Bold friend girl-Acc-Poss kiss-Pst.&#xA;‘Bold kissed his girlfriend.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two head-dependent relations in this sentence. One is the relationship between the verb (a head), 'uns-...' and its arguments (dependents), 'Bold' and 'naiz ohin-...-oo'. The other is between a possessor noun (dependent), 'Bold' and the possessed noun (head), 'naiz ohin-...'. In both cases, the relationship is marked on the dependent; Accusative case is marked on the object noun, and possessive is marked on the possessed noun, the two of which happen to be the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-12-06T14:04:15.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-06T15:40:58.477" Score="13" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and other Germanic languages, noun compounds are formed simply by “appending” the nouns in a certain order.  For example, phrases like this are very common: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;electricity price comparison service&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese, Spanish and probably other Romance languages, this kind of compounding has to be done with the aid of prepositions. The translation of the phrase above to Portuguese is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;serviço &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; comparação &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; preços &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; eletricidade&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What determines how noun compounds are formed in a language? Is there something like a parameter (as in the principles and parameters theory) that explains this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm focusing only on &quot;open&quot; compounds (not idiomatic ones) formed exclusively by nouns. As Molly mentioned, this might be related to the Adj/N word order in the language. This hypothesis is quite reasonable, since in the Germanic languages the head in these compounds comes at the end, whereas in Romance languages, they come at the beginning, matching the Adj/N word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if this correlation does hold cross-linguistically, how does it relate to the need for prepositions? Maybe prepositions help avoiding ambiguities when the adjectives are postnominal? Could it be related to processing preferences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-07T15:03:47.493" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T13:27:33.143" Title="What determines how noun compounds are formed in a language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1119" CreationDate="2011-12-07T04:00:35.447" Score="15" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that loanwords often take on more specific meanings in the target language than in the source language. To give two very common examples, &lt;em&gt;sake&lt;/em&gt; just means alcohol in Japanese and &lt;em&gt;salsa&lt;/em&gt; just means sauce in Spanish, but those words refer to very specific types of alcohol and sauce in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's this called and is there any research / recommended reading on this type of scope change for loanwords?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-07T17:38:30.993" LastActivityDate="2012-01-07T17:38:30.993" Title="What's this loanword phenomenon called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1117" CreationDate="2011-12-07T07:34:44.677" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's mostly commonly called &lt;em&gt;semantic restriction&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;semantic narrowing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;semantic specialization&lt;/em&gt; are also in widespread use in the linguistic literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="571" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T07:34:44.677" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1123" CreationDate="2011-12-07T09:37:17.323" Score="4" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been struggling, for a couple of months now to find the term for a concept from computational linguistics. It means something like: &lt;em&gt;the minimum number of words that need to be placed after a given word to complete the meaning of a phrase&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apple: 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See: 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dream: 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the phrase &quot;green apple&quot; is logically fully complete, so there is no need to add new words after &quot;apple&quot;. That's why its number is 0. The phrase &quot;I dream&quot; is incomplete, because after &quot;dream&quot; we need to place an object. In &quot;I dream about an apple&quot;, we need 3 words to complete the meaning of the phrase (&quot;about&quot;, &quot;an&quot; and &quot;apple&quot;). In &quot;I see an apple&quot; we need 2 words after &quot;see&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand, this term is very close to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Link grammar&lt;/a&gt;, from Syntax Analysis. What is the name given to this concept in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="572" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-08T14:12:59.507" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T01:17:59.890" Title="Is there a term for &quot;the number of words that must follow a given word to complete a phrase&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1113" CreationDate="2011-12-07T10:10:35.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Geographically, there is not much variation in the Russian language. Basically, the variation is more related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stress&lt;/a&gt; placement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word usage and stress are different in countries that were part of the Russian Empire and lately, the USSR. Ukraine and Belarus have their own languages, which are close to Russian, but not dialects of Russian. All of them developed from Old Slavic language. In these countries, languages are mixed and we call them &quot;Surzhyk&quot;, something like &quot;pidgin&quot;. This is the main difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel articulation is different in cities that were influenced by other non-Slavic languages. For example, in Vologda, they say [o] instead of the more common [ɒ]. It's like the pronunciation of the word &quot;mum&quot; in British English ([mom]), while Americans pronounce it [mɒm]. In Moscow, people often use [a] in words where Standard Russian has [o] or [ɒ]. Even the word &quot;Москва&quot; is pronounced as &quot;МАсква&quot;. People from small cities pronounce the vowel &quot;e&quot; exactly in words where it should be &quot;э&quot;. For example, they pronounce &quot;шинель&quot; as it is written, but should say &quot;шинЭль&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The St. Petersburg dialect is perceived by many as more accurate and intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="572" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-21T19:05:29.507" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T19:05:29.507" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2011-12-07T12:15:01.797" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the term you are searching for is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;valency&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitivity_%28grammar%29&quot;&gt;transitivity&lt;/a&gt; of a verb. Note that it defines rather how many &lt;em&gt;Phrases&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Consituents&lt;/em&gt; a Verb takes at minimum than how many words: For example &quot;I see you.&quot; is as correct as &quot;I see an apple&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383" LastEditorUserId="383" LastEditDate="2011-12-07T14:12:21.870" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T14:12:21.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-07T14:02:31.043" Score="6" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly thinking of a situation where multiple characters form a compound. Can such compounds be broken up over two lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples I can think of as potentially problematic are multi-character nouns in Mandarin, kanji + kana verbs in Japanese or compounds in Egyptian hieroglyphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="574" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2011-12-08T19:33:48.980" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T16:14:03.997" Title="How are line breaks handled in ideographic scripts?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1124" CreationDate="2011-12-07T16:45:31.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese specifically, kanji+kana compounds can be split between lines, but it is recommended to keep them together as much as possible. Splitting doesn't look as nice, but Japanese readers know to keep reading, if that makes sense. You do not insert a hyphen or anything like that (as you would in many Latin script languages). The same applies to Japanese kanji compounds. Also, do not start a line with punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best practice: have a Japanese speaker suggest where to split as all the kana characters after a kanji do not necessarily belong with that kanji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user575" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T16:45:31.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1116" CreationDate="2011-12-07T22:32:41.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compound words are really complex, even if we limit it to noun-noun compounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like you're concerned with &quot;open&quot; compound nouns, not &quot;closed&quot; or hyphenated or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024384168900521&quot;&gt;idiomatic&lt;/a&gt; compound nouns &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rickwalton.com/curricul/compound.htm&quot;&gt;like these&lt;/a&gt; (what a list! right? corpus alert!). So - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntactic definition of a compound noun is when the rule N -&gt; N N can be recursively applied. Anything with more than two nouns is ambiguous in structure. ((coffee mug) holder) vs. (coffee (mug holder)) or whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages are more predictable than English when it comes to &quot;headedness&quot; or left/right branching of closed noun compounds; Downing's conclusion to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/412913&quot;&gt;&quot;On the Creation and Use of English Compound Nouns&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is basically that the relationship is unpredictable from the semantics of the two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct (very scientific!) is that the concatenation vs. use of prepositions for noun-noun compounds is predictable by typology. My guess is that the form of compound nouns is correlated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/87&quot;&gt;the Adj/N word order&lt;/a&gt; tendency of a language. Of course, this isn't really an answer, but I think the answer you're looking for is too big. It's sort of like asking why a language is SVO or SOV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2011-12-07T22:32:41.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1074" CreationDate="2011-12-08T00:37:06.967" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be too much systematical research about the articulatory aspect of ventriloquism, but you could start with these, dealing mainly with substitute sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Metzner, Jörg &amp;amp; Schmittfull, Marcel &amp;amp; Schnell, Karl (2006):&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Substitute sounds for ventriloquism and speech disorders&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, In&#xA;INTERSPEECH-2006, paper 1426-Tue3CaP.7.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ogawa, Y., Uemi, N. and Ifukube, T. &lt;em&gt;Speech production process in&#xA;ventriloquism of the phonemes where the place of articulation is&#xA;lips.&lt;/em&gt; IEICE Technical Report, H2000-37, pages 1-8, 2000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the (psycho)acoustic and perceptual side of it, the 'ventriloquism effect' is a frequent subject in audio engineering and acoustic (location of loudspeakers, acoustic room design) as well, you can find a lot of research in this area.&#xA;Concerning crossmodal perception (which clearly makes up a huge part of it), these ones could be a starter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul Bertelson, Ventriloquism: &lt;em&gt;A case of crossmodal perceptual&#xA;grouping&lt;/em&gt;, In: Gisa Aschersleben, Talis Bachmann and Jochen Müsseler,&#xA;Editor(s), Advances in Psychology, North-Holland, 1999, Volume 129,&#xA;Pages 347-362.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kanaya, Shoko und Kazuhiko Yokosawa 2010. &lt;em&gt;Perceptual congruency of&#xA;audio-visual speech affects ventriloquism with bilateral visual&#xA;stimuli.&lt;/em&gt; In: Psychonomic Bulletin &amp;amp; Review, Volume 18, Number 1,&#xA;123-128.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a nice study of the perception of ventriloquism in relation to the McGurk effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bertelson, Paul / Vroomen, Jean / Wiegeraad, Geert / Gelder, Beatrice&#xA;de (1994): &lt;em&gt;&quot;Exploring the relation between mcgurk interference and&#xA;ventriloquism&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, In ICSLP-1994, 559-562.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are only starting points from a quick and dirty search on the topic. But you should be able to dig a lot deeper from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="571" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T00:37:06.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2011-12-08T22:58:56.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though notice that valency is not a constant associated with the verb alone; it's a property of the constuction it's in. There's a vast amount of variation of affordances among verbs, and even transitivity is hard to predict. Consider, for instance, the following uses of the prototype intransitive verb &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked Monday.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked a kilometer.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked the dog.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked her to the door.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked it off.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He walked himself to death.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's the opportunity of a fencepost error, because only impersonal verbs like &lt;em&gt;rain&lt;/em&gt; have valence 0; Su is 1, Su + DO is 2, Su + DO + IO is 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-12-08T22:58:56.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1130" CreationDate="2011-12-09T00:35:20.643" Score="14" ViewCount="2636" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard and read several times that one of the forces that drive language change is the so called &quot;principle of least effort&quot;. According to this account, several changes are caused by an economy in pronunciation. Take this &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change&quot;&gt;Wikipedia explanation&lt;/a&gt;, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a scientifically valid assertion? If so, how do you measure the cost (and thus the economy) of the pronunciation of a certain sound in a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T21:28:30.883" Title="Is the &quot;principle of least effort&quot; a real factor behind language change?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1129" CreationDate="2011-12-09T02:00:26.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words with higher frequency can remain stable with higher variability in their pronunciation than words of lower frequency, because their occurrence is predictable and their recognition is not seriously hampered by variable pronunciation. Words with higher variability are more likely to significantly change in the course of language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Introducing frequency into the picture predicts that some words are more likely to change than others, but doesn't explain the trend towards simplicity of production. If the notion of simplicity of production is going to be useful, it will have to take on a somewhat narrow sense: reduced forms of words are not easier to produce, but they are simpler to produce. In other words, a highly skilled speaker of a language can use their knowledge about which variations are used in the speech community &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; their ability to pronounce words of the language with high precision to produce a word in a simpler, but still highly-controlled way. It is, after all, easier for second-language learners to produce non-reduced forms accurately than reduced forms. The idea seems reasonable, but I don't know of any laboratory studies purporting to measure simplicity of production, although there is a good chance they would have escaped my attention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books/about/Frequency_of_use_and_the_organization_of.html?id=W20t_5AXeaYC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bybee, Joan (2007) Frequency of use and the Organization of Language. OUP&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a simplified treatment, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=XWMKDj6umvgC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=pt-BR&amp;amp;source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ch.7 of Silverman, D. (2006). A critical introduction to phonology. Continuum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-11T21:28:30.883" LastActivityDate="2011-12-11T21:28:30.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1129" CreationDate="2011-12-09T02:14:27.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to look into Robert Kirchner's &quot;Lazy&quot; (1997: 104) constraints in optimality theory, which posit that surface forms which require more &quot;articulatory effort&quot; are more marked. This accounts for processes such as postvocalic lenition of Spanish voiced stops (e.g. /lobo/ 'wolf' becomes [loβo]). In this example, the rationale that [β] requires less articulatory effort than [b] is simply that it requires less facial motion, and therefore less muscular exertion and energy expenditure, to close one's lips partially (forming the fricative) than to close them completely (forming the stop).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, Kirchner assigns scores to different phones according to how much effort they require to produce, and his constraints take these scores into account. This might help answer your question about how to measure the cost of sound-production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kirchner, Robert (1997). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ualberta.ca/~kirchner/contfaith.pdf&quot;&gt;Contrastiveness and faithfulness&lt;/a&gt;. Phonology, 14,&#xA;83–111.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T02:56:34.197" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T02:56:34.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1113" CreationDate="2011-12-09T02:22:18.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a reference in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=5ApM7jXrM88C&amp;amp;lpg=PA19&amp;amp;ots=Z3wadwp5nT&amp;amp;dq=regional%20variation%20in%20russian%20language&amp;amp;pg=PA19&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Using Russian: a guide to contemporary usage&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Offord and Gogolitsyna. Section 1.5 deals with Regional variation in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly comprehensive discussion with examples &amp;ndash; not just okanje and akanje but frication of g, as well as a number of grammatical and lexical variations. In short, they say that the higher registers of Russian exhibit little variation, and that the colloquial register does vary &amp;ndash; although it is surprisingly uniform given the large geographical area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T09:09:20.097" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T09:09:20.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-09T21:17:26.300" Score="7" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that someone who is fully capable of producing a sound foreign to their own language has trouble using that sound in languages that do use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's say that an English speaker can perfectly pronounce the alveolar trill [r]. Why might they have trouble pronouncing that sound in words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="579" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-09T21:34:07.610" LastActivityDate="2011-12-10T04:08:19.930" Title="Producing sounds that are not used in one's mother tongue" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1133" CreationDate="2011-12-09T22:59:54.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean - for one thing, it's difficult to define what a &quot;perfectly pronounced&quot; alveolar trill would be, because every language that has the &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; /r/ realizes the phone [r] in a slightly different way - but I think the answer probably has to do with &lt;strong&gt;coarticulation&lt;/strong&gt;, which refers to the phenomenon in which speech sounds (segments) have their pronunciation / phonetic realization influenced by adjacent segments, as well as the process of transitioning between two different segments. Although we analyze speech as a series of discrete segments, it's certainly a continuum on the surface, and therefore all phones within words are at least somewhat affected by coarticulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to your specific example, all this means that a person who can pronounce [r] well in isolation may still have trouble pronouncing words containing the sound, because they are unaccustomed to 1) the act of transitioning between [r] and another sound, and 2) the subtle ways that adjacent sounds affect how you pronounce [r].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastActivityDate="2011-12-09T22:59:54.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1133" CreationDate="2011-12-10T00:16:15.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One point to add is that ability to produce a word in isolation does not translate into ability to produce that word faithfully in extemporaneous running speech. Fluency in speaking requires you to be able to pronounce words accurately without having to concentrate on pronunciation in itself. Your working memory will already be taxed by demands on forming ideas, selecting the appropriate grammatical constructions, lexical access, the emotional effect you are trying to impart, etc. Fluency requires correct pronunciation &lt;em&gt;under pressure&lt;/em&gt;. A viable strategy for most L2 speakers is to settle on a bad pronunciation but an understandable message that is not delivered haltingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following reference may help to understand why trills are difficult to produce in certain contexts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solé, M.J. 2002. &lt;a href=&quot;http://pagines.uab.cat/mariajosepsole/sites/pagines.uab.cat.mariajosepsole/files/15.-trills.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Aerodynamic characteristics of trills and phonological patterning&lt;/a&gt;. Journal of Phonetics 30, 655-688.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-10T04:08:19.930" LastActivityDate="2011-12-10T04:08:19.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1142" CreationDate="2011-12-11T20:23:23.433" Score="13" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several processes of change that affect spoken languages, including phonological and phonetic change, semantic change and lexical replacement. Each of these categories, in turn, comprise a large set of complex phenomena, such as all the types of phonological change (epenthesis, elision, metathesis and so on). In any case, all spoken languages undergo the same processes, although at different rates, with different results etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this also true for signed languages? That is, are signed languages affected by the same processes &amp;ndash; albeit &quot;translated&quot;, so to speak, to the domain of signs and facial expressions &amp;ndash; that affect spoken languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:07:23.377" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:07:23.377" Title="Do signed languages undergo the same processes of change that the spoken ones do?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1269" CreationDate="2011-12-12T14:13:06.240" Score="4" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sixth letter of the Georgian alphabet is &lt;code&gt;ვ&lt;/code&gt; and all the resources I have describe it as being like English &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt; or IPA &lt;code&gt;[v]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But especially in the common word &lt;code&gt;ნახვამდის&lt;/code&gt; (goodbye) the &lt;code&gt;ვ&lt;/code&gt; sounds a lot more like an English &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; than an English &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's happening here? I can't seem to find anything mentioning approximants or semivowels in Georgian at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the sound depend on adjacent sounds?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it vary regionally?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it vary from individual speaker to speaker?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also what it does sound like &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; is it an IPA &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt; or something different like a bilabial? To me it sounds a bit different to English &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; but I'm not a real linguist so I can't decide what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-12T16:44:57.087" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T07:26:46.573" Title="What's going on when I hear people pronounce Georgian &quot;ვ&quot; like &quot;w&quot; instead of like &quot;v&quot; as it always seems to be defined?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1141" CreationDate="2011-02-10T11:41:45.577" Score="16" ViewCount="1942" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an application that takes a special database of words and its word class and determines the such from a given sentence. I'm now working to see if word classes that are found in English are found in other non-European languages. If not, how would do you define word classes for Pacific, Asiatic and other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I can take the sentence &lt;em&gt;the boy has a shirt&lt;/em&gt;, tag each word properly and using a Spanish database now, convert that same text to Spanish &lt;em&gt;el nino tiene una camisa&lt;/em&gt;. In essence, I'm creating a multi-functional translation engine, but it won't be used to translate; it's more for simple human-to-machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: I wanted to post this on StackOverflow, but the question was more tied to linguistics than programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10494" OwnerDisplayName="Jacky Alcine" LastEditorUserId="21993" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T07:00:27.730" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T07:00:27.730" Title="Are word classes universal?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1138" CreationDate="2011-02-10T17:12:17.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some commonality among the word classes appropriate for analysing different languages, but they don't map completely onto each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bear in mind also that there is not one single agreed classification for any language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe all languages have &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt; but in some languages (eg Japanese) it is possible to regard adjectives as a subclass of verb. Most languages have &lt;em&gt;nouns&lt;/em&gt;, but whether adjectives belong in with them or not may vary (Lojban has no nouns, but I don't know whether there are any natural languages which haven't). I think all languages have &lt;em&gt;pronouns&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;determiners&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" OwnerDisplayName="Colin Fine" LastActivityDate="2011-02-10T17:12:17.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1138" CreationDate="2011-02-10T19:09:49.683" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/2001wcl.pdf&quot;&gt;Word classes and parts of speech (pdf)&lt;/a&gt;, a 2001 paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite the theoretical problems in&#xA;  defining word classes in general, in&#xA;  practice it is often not diﬃcult to&#xA;  agree on the use of these terms in a&#xA;  particular language. This is because&#xA;  nouns, verbs, and adjectives show&#xA;  great similarities in their behavior&#xA;  across languages. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The general properties of nouns,&#xA;  verbs, and adjectives ... are&#xA;  sufficient to establish these classes&#xA;  without much doubt in a great many&#xA;  languages. However, again and again&#xA;  linguists report on languages where&#xA;  such a threefold subdivision does not&#xA;  seem appropriate. Particularly&#xA;  problematic are adjectives ... but&#xA;  languages lacking a noun- verb&#xA;  distinction are also claimed to exist&#xA;  ..., and ... adverbs ... present&#xA;  difficulties in all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And towards the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hengeveld (1992a) proposed that major&#xA;  word classes can either be lacking in&#xA;  a language (then it is called rigid)&#xA;  or a language may not differentiate&#xA;  between two word classes (then it is&#xA;  called flexible). Thus, `languages&#xA;  without adjectives' ... are&#xA;  either flexible in that they combine&#xA;  nouns and adjectives in one class&#xA;  (N/Adj), or rigid in that they lack&#xA;  adjectives completely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hengeveld&#xA;  claims that besides the English type,&#xA;  where all four classes (V - N - Adj - Adv)&#xA;  are differentiated and exist, there are&#xA;  only three types of rigid languages&#xA;  (V - N - Adj, e.g., Wambon; V - N, e.g.,&#xA;  Hausa; and V, e.g., Tuscarora), and&#xA;  three types of flexible languages&#xA;  (V - N - Adj/Adv, e.g., German;&#xA;  V - N/Adj/Adv, e.g., Quechua;&#xA;  V/N/Adj/Adv, e.g., Samoan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Universal&lt;/em&gt; language support is tricky at best, as far as I know linguists are still arguing about which aspects of language are universal and to what extent. (&lt;em&gt;Universal&lt;/em&gt; here meaning &quot;applying to every natural language that could conceivably be used by a human being&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical standpoint, e.g. for the purposes of making a program, there is also the question of how common the various language classes are. For example Tuscarora, mentioned as an example above, has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skarure&quot;&gt;grand total of 52 speakers&lt;/a&gt; (according to Wikipedia), and it may become a business decision how far out of your way you are willing to go to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL (with the L here meaning Linguist), I merely read up on similar topics in a similar context a few years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="j-g-faustus" LastActivityDate="2011-02-10T19:09:49.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="1142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1136" CreationDate="2011-12-12T16:56:24.290" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since sign languages form spontaneously when deaf children are given access to each other, linguists have had the chance to watch the languages evolve. What is notable is how fast they evolve when they are new, the classic example being the evolution from a intransitive only to a transitive + intransitive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot; As pointed out by a reviewer, a transition from intransitive to transitive &#xA;structures is also clearly observed in the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language &#xA;(NSL), which developed spontaneously by deaf children in the 1970s and 1980s &#xA;(see, e.g.,  Kegl  et al.  1999).  According  to  the  authors,  the  early  pidgin  stages  of NSL do not use transitive [NP V NP] constructions, such as (11) (Kegl et al.  1999:&#xA;216–217)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/colareadinggroup/readings/Progovac2010_SynEvo.pdf&quot;&gt;http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/colareadinggroup/readings/Progovac2010_SynEvo.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-12-12T16:56:24.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="405" CreationDate="2011-12-13T01:58:51.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend taking a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=75473&quot;&gt;&quot;Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Mueller and Hulk and &lt;a href=&quot;http://ijb.sagepub.com/content/13/2/195.short&quot;&gt;&quot;Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Serratrice and Sorace for starters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall conclusions seem to be that structural overlap between the languages does play a role in competency, but that this is only one of many factors and may not even be the most important one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T01:58:51.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-13T12:25:55.497" Score="10" ViewCount="12677" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy for me to imagine the difference, but hard for me to conceptualize it. I guess one involves two vowels and the other involves a consonant, right? Am I on the right track, or is there a more precise definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2011-12-15T02:30:18.657" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T21:35:33.870" Title="What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2011-12-13T13:06:07.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than a &quot;vowel + consonant&quot;, a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a semivowel (it's a synonym). I posted once about them on here, for the question &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/905/are-there-semivowels-besides-w-and-j-and-which-are-most-common&quot;&gt;Are there semivowels besides /w/ and /j/ and which are most common?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. You can read more in the links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diphthong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is obtained by the combination of two vowels occurring in the same syllable. This combination varies according to the language and the rules that belong to the language itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Spanish for example, a diphthong is obtained by joining a closed vowel (i, u) with an open vowel (a, e, o).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Italian it's obtained by joining the vowels (i, u) in unstressed position to other vowels in stressed position, &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; by joining the same vowels, (/i/ and /u/ together), where one of them — in this case — can be in the stressed position.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on... You can read about more languages by clicking on the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-12-13T13:52:52.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2011-12-13T15:37:12.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a language has a sequence of two &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vocoid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vocoids&lt;/a&gt;, and one of them is high, there will be nothing in the signal to tell you whether you are dealing with a vowel+glide sequence or a vowel+vowel sequence. Three common sources of supplementary information (in decreasing order of empirical weight) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Cases where there is a lexical contrast between the vowel+vowel and the vowel+glide sequence. In Vietnamese, for example, there are lexical contrasts where the relevant difference is /-ai/ vs. /-aj/, or /-ou/ vs. /-ow/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Morpho-phonological alternations or selectional restrictions that are sensitive to a vowel-consonant distinction. Two examples are given in Dixon (2010:196--9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Phonotactic considerations. Is a statement of the overall phonotactic patterns of the language simplified by choosing one analysis over the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will also be cases where no evidence is available. In these cases it will have to be admitted that there are no language-internal grounds for classifying the pattern in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dixion, R.M.W. (2010) Basic Linguistic Thoery, vol.1. OUP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-14T11:13:06.040" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T11:13:06.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2011-12-13T20:28:13.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest distinction is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;glide&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; phoneme that is somewhere in the middle of the continuum between consonant and vowel, but is non-syllabic (by itself). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diphthong&lt;/a&gt; is a sequence of &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; vowels, where one of them is often articulated just like a glide. It is questionable whether this two-vowel combination is a single phoneme or two separate phonemes in sequence, but there are two 'things', one of which is glide-like and the other a full vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hesitate to call the glide-like phone in a diphthong a full fledged glide only out of tradition, even though they are seemingly identical articulations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary difference then is that &lt;strong&gt;a diphthong includes a glide&lt;/strong&gt; as one of two constituent parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-12-14T14:06:11.743" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T14:06:11.743" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="746" CreationDate="2011-12-14T02:35:12.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In albanian të can be used for many things. I am not a linguist, but albanian is my native tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Të qenurit vetëm - noun (to be alone)&#xA;të mira - adjective (good ones)&#xA;të notuarit - noun (swimming)&#xA;të bëj - function word (to do)&#xA;të shikoj - (you I see [I see you])&#xA;të tmerron - (you it/she/he frightens )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but you can have this&#xA;ty të shoh (you you I see)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thus no need for ty just say të shoh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="587" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T02:35:12.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T13:59:58.663" Score="11" ViewCount="11914" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1147/51&quot;&gt;Mitch's answer to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a single &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;diphthong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; represents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The two vowel sounds in a diphthong combine to make a single phoneme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A diphthong is a sequence of two phonemes of a certain kind in a certain relationship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the two sounds of a diphthong are considered to be one phoneme, but sometimes they are each considered separate phonemes, depending on context or something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which of these possibilities is true? And if &lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; is true, what are the things that make it one or two phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T01:02:32.343" Title="Is a diphthong one phoneme or two, or does it depend?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1149" CreationDate="2011-12-14T15:16:56.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd go with no.1 because you can find the following minimal pairs in English (RP):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could - cowed /ʊ/ versus /aʊ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cheese - cheers /i/ versus /ɪə/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dead-dared /e/ versus /eə/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bell-bail /e/ versus /eɪ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;buy - boy /aɪ/ versus /ɔɪ/&#xA;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a comprehensive list of minimal pairs in English (RP) compiled by John Higgins, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;a single diphthong in English represents one phoneme.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is traditional phonology, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; generative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, other analyses have been proposed, too. For example, a diphthong is treated as a vowel plus a semivowel or another vowel (McCarthy 1952). Thus, &lt;strong&gt;you end up having a diphthong consisting of two phonemes under those approaches&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=dDVR_zh5wkMC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=peter%20roach%20english&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=peter%20roach%20english&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Peter Roach (2009)&lt;/a&gt; mentions that this view was &quot;almost universally accepted by American (and some British) writers from the 1940s to the 1960s, and &lt;em&gt;still pervades contemporary American descriptions&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (p. 104). &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=aTsAt3D6H58C&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=lass%20phonology&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Roger Lass (1984)&lt;/a&gt; argues that analyzing a diphthong as a vowel plus a semivowel /j/ or /w/ is a &quot;shaky position&quot; (p. 138). He also convincingly dismisses the approach proposed in SPE (Chomsky and Halle), characterizing it as &quot;seem[ing] &lt;strong&gt;close to lunacy&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (p. 138). &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=QT8W4zDHKvwC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=bruce%20hayes&amp;amp;pg=PT1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=bruce%20hayes&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bruce Hayes (2008)&lt;/a&gt; concludes that the &quot;fewer-phonemes-the-better&quot; analysis is not an iron-clad argument and that &lt;strong&gt;the segment/sequence problem&lt;/strong&gt; is still &quot;an unsettled one in phonology&quot; (p. 57).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-15T00:24:06.047" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T00:24:06.047" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1149" CreationDate="2011-12-14T16:45:56.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A diphthong is one sound segment created by a smooth transition between two targets within the same syllable. As a phonetic definition, this makes no theoretical claims about which phoneme(s) represent the articulation in the mind of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This statement is a bit vague, but is, as far as I can tell, true in some situations; see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The number and character of underlying phonemes that a diphthong corresponds to varies by language and which researcher you talk to. Different kinds of evidence for a particular interpretation of field data are evaluated differently by each specialists, and mainstream phonology has yet to produce a theoretical framework that gives one clear answer to this question for each language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, for example, the diphthong [e͡ɪ] could be represented underlyingly as either the single phoneme /e͡ɪ/ or a sequence of two phonemes /ej/, where /j/ is the same segment that appears in /jɛs/ &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. The latter analysis is tempting, since it would reduce the size of the phonemic inventory (all possible underlying segments) of English, but would have to explain the phonetic differences between the /j/ in &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; and the /j/ in &amp;quot;made&amp;quot;, which is much more like an [ɪ]. Of course, the addition of a transformation rule would be standard practice when faced with this situation, but we are then left with the basic question of which is simpler (and thus, more likely to be adopted as a strategy by native speakers): fewer phonemes, or fewer rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2011-12-14T16:45:56.103" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1153" CreationDate="2011-12-14T18:34:48.863" Score="7" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51616/paucity-of-words-for-relationships&quot;&gt;a question at ELU&lt;/a&gt;, I am interested in doing a comparative analysis of kinship terms in various languages. What would help me with this is an inventory of terms for individual languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are online explanations of different systems, but I haven't been able to find a list for many common languages (the main IE/Semitic/East Asian languages). Historical ones like Old English/Latin/PIE would be good, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reference that tabulates the terms for each language? If not that, at least one that lists comprehensively the kinship terms with their definition in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T03:31:22.590" Title="Are there any online databases of kinship terms across languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-12-14T19:58:51.613" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you already seen this? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.austkin.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.austkin.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent database&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ids.clld.org/chapters/2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ids.clld.org/chapters/2&lt;/a&gt; (see Chapter 2, Kinship)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T03:31:22.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T03:31:22.590" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-14T21:11:03.960" Score="7" ViewCount="921" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes X seconds for the average English user to send an average-length text message via phone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language is the most effort-intensive to text? How about to write? Is there one language that is best adapted to &quot;the keyboard&quot; or the touchpad or other means of technologically-assisted expression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="591" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T20:24:57.410" Title="What language takes the longest to text?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2011-12-14T22:51:50.207" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a great research opportunity!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how orthographically long a language may be, one can assume that if you're texting it, there will be a shortened/abbreviated version of it. I mean, who really texts in &lt;em&gt;English?&lt;/em&gt; I don't. I use &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abbreviations for phrases (wtf, lol, omw, ty), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shortened words (srsly, tmr, nm, thx), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replacements for words (2, 4, u, yr, y, n) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and other linguistic adulterations. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are estimates for text expansion/contraction in translation to give you an idea of how languages compare typographically. I don't know where these numbers come from, but they're on a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.universaldialog.com/html/expand.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zillion&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/translation/articles/expansion-retraction.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.globalization-group.com/edge/2010/05/text-expansion-contraction-in-translation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;companies'&lt;/a&gt; websites, and they seem pretty accurate to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So -- let's look at French, a language that I happen to have stumbled on some cool texting information about. French text expansion is about 15-20% -- that is, it takes 15-20% more space to write the same thing that English does. But just like in English, French speakers have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frenchtoday.com/blog/10-top-french-abreviations-used-in-emails-sms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abbreviated their way&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/library/writing/bl-texting.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shortest SMS conversation possible&lt;/a&gt; using &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abbreviations for phrases (JTM = je t'aime = I love you, ily; MDR = mort(e) de rire = dying of laughter, lol; ), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shortened words (bjr = bonjour = hello; C = C'est = It is), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and replacements for words (p2k = pas de quoi = you're welcome, urw; A12C4 = À un de ces quatre = See you one of these days, c u l8r). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;Add into the mix that there are a number of ways to text these days with the variety of phones available: keypad, sliding qwerty keyboard, touchscreen qwerty, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAh-FqEizi4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;swipe texting&lt;/a&gt;. And other factors like T9 and &lt;a href=&quot;http://damnyouautocorrect.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autocorrect&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;/END EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the best language for &quot;the keyboard&quot;: My guess would be English since that's the language it was designed for. Of course there actually exist many &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Alternatives_to_QWERTY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different keyboard layouts&lt;/a&gt; to rival the standard QWERTY arrangement, most notably for English the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dvorak keyboard&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Changing your computer's keyboard layout&lt;/a&gt; can make it really easy to type almost any language. Maybe the same way &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/612/why-does-speech-speed-seem-to-vary-between-different-languages&quot;&gt;perceived speech speed varies with informational content of lexemes&lt;/a&gt;, languages using &quot;native&quot; or adapted electronic input methods could probably type at the same speed as we can in English. Srsly, have u ever seen some1 &lt;a href=&quot;http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~zxie3/ime.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;type in ZH&lt;/a&gt;?? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T15:21:28.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1157" CreationDate="2011-12-15T01:27:05.543" Score="6" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ancient Greek had a participle for the future tense, and the only language I know it uses the future tense is Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason why the future participle appears to be rare cross-linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="592" LastEditorUserId="592" LastEditDate="2011-12-16T00:05:06.597" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:47:16.693" Title="Why isn't the future participle more diffuse in modern languages?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1156" CreationDate="2011-12-15T03:49:11.030" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that a future participle is a non-finite form of a verb which is marked for future tense. For a language to have a chance of having a future participle, there must be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbal inflection for tense in addition to some other category, viz. subject agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A process for forming non-finite forms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two requirements will narrow down the set of candidate languages quite significantly. Looking at the languages that meet these criteria, the question is whether it is more common for non-finite verb forms of this type to have neither subject nor tense marking, or to have one or the other, and whether it is more common for non-finite verbs to be marked only for subject agreement or only for tense when they are marked for at least one category. So what is more common? Tensed forms without subject marking, as in present, future, past participles; OR Tenseless forms with subject marking, as in the Portuguese &quot;personal infinitives.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some interesting possibly relevant data comes from Cristofaro (2007: 112), where a survey is made of marking on verbs in dependent clauses. What is found is that when subject or object agreement is not expressed on the verb, tense/aspect/mood tends not to be marked either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                T/A/M not expressed    T/A/M expressed&#xA;&#xA;Arguments not expressed                127                49&#xA;Arguments expressed                    117                150&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have no intuitions about is whether in non-finite verb forms which are tensed but lack agreement marking, there should be a reason for some tenses not to be expressed (e.g., future) when others (e.g., past) can be expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cristofaro, S. (2007) &quot;Deconstructing categories: finiteness in a functional-typological &#xA;perspective.&quot; in Nikolaeva, I. ed. &lt;em&gt;Finiteness&lt;/em&gt;. OUP, pp.91--114.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-16T15:47:35.267" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T15:47:35.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-15T07:27:24.787" Score="6" ViewCount="3839" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1149/is-a-diphthong-one-phoneme-or-two-or-does-it-depend&quot;&gt;a recent question seeking to clarify how &lt;em&gt;diphthongs&lt;/em&gt; relate to &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, another term popped up in the comments, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder if &quot;segment&quot; is some kind of synonym for either &quot;phone&quot; or &quot;phoneme&quot;, just some way to avoid using those terms, or some other concept all together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what is a &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; and how do segments relate to &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T07:38:04.767" Title="Where does the term &quot;segment&quot; fit in in relation to &quot;phone&quot; and &quot;phoneme&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1162" CreationDate="2011-12-15T14:39:22.590" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that the Spanish name Álvaro is of Germanic origin. So I began wondering where it might be preserved in the Germanic languages. After some thought I came up with the Scandinavian name Ivar, which looked somehow similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the Spanish name Álvaro and the Scandinavian name Ivar etymologically related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="594" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-15T15:23:41.070" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T17:10:48.773" Title="Are Ivar and Álvaro etymologically the same?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1158" CreationDate="2011-12-15T14:52:26.670" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, when you're not sure which linguistic units you're dealing with (be it phonemes, morphemes etc.) or it is irrelevant to your research, you use the word &quot;segment&quot;. Sometimes, it is used for style, to avoid repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, a segment is &quot;any element, at any level of representation, which is described as forming sequences with others&quot; (Matthews 2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Segment:&lt;/strong&gt; A result of linguistic analysis that attempts to isolate minimal linguistic units, such as phones, morphs, syllables, from a language or speech continuum.&quot; (Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In structural linguistics, you would start with segmenting some linear language continuum into chunks (segments) by applying different operations such as substitution etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat:&lt;/strong&gt; in some American intro linguistics textbooks, a segment is &lt;em&gt;incorrectly&lt;/em&gt; defined as a speech sound (phone) only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-15T19:36:19.593" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T19:36:19.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1166" CreationDate="2011-12-15T15:31:03.470" Score="1" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for a systematic online step-by-step process to codify English words into vowel/consontant patterns (CVC, CVCe, CVVC, etc.) and the correct sound (long-vowel, short-vowel, blend, diagraph, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T20:29:28.707" Title="Systematic means of transcribing words to vowel/consontant patterns" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1159" CreationDate="2011-12-15T17:10:48.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wiktionary for the Old Norse name &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%8Dvarr#Old_Norse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ívarr&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first part (&lt;em&gt;Ív-&lt;/em&gt;) stems from Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;īwaz&lt;/em&gt; (“yew”), whence also Old English &lt;em&gt;īw&lt;/em&gt;. The second part (&lt;em&gt;-arr&lt;/em&gt;) stems from Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;harjaz&lt;/em&gt; (“warrior”), whence also Old Norse &lt;em&gt;herr&lt;/em&gt; (“army, crowd”). Partly merged with Old Norse &lt;em&gt;Yngvarr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ingvarr&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%81lvaro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Álvaro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the same source presents the following etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Álvaro&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Álvara&lt;/em&gt; stem from the Late Latin proper name &lt;em&gt;Alvarus&lt;/em&gt;, from Spanish-Visigothic. The Germanic proper name consists of two parts: The first part stems from *&lt;em&gt;all-&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;all&quot;) or from *&lt;em&gt;adal-&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;noble&quot;). The second part stems from *&lt;em&gt;-wars&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;protection, defense&quot;). However, there exist other etymologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the name Álvaro can also be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%81lvaro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Portuguese&lt;/a&gt;, one of these &quot;other etymologies&quot; is that &lt;em&gt;Alvaro&lt;/em&gt; would have stemmed from &lt;em&gt;Ælfred&lt;/em&gt;, related to Germanic &lt;em&gt;alfi&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;elf&quot;, &lt;em&gt;radi&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;counsel&quot;. The voicing (from [f] to [v]) could have been influenced by the Hispanic &lt;em&gt;albar&lt;/em&gt;, derived from Latin &lt;em&gt;albor&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;albus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;white&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another, more far-fetched etymology: according to Meyer-Lübke, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books/about/Romanische_Namenstudien.html?hl=pt-BR&amp;amp;id=6yETAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Romanische Namenstudien&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I, 8, 81, II, 73, the name &lt;em&gt;Álvaro&lt;/em&gt; stems from &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;all&quot;, and *&lt;em&gt;wars&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;aware, circumspect&quot;; another possibility for the second element is a derived form of the Gothic &lt;em&gt;warjan&lt;/em&gt;. So, it would mean something like &quot;he who is aware of everyone/everything&quot; or &quot;he who defends himself from everyone/everything&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the etymological evidence is quite weak and there is no consensus on the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2011-12-15T17:10:48.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1181" CreationDate="2011-12-16T13:44:31.063" Score="12" ViewCount="1339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading The Atoms of Language. The gist is that languages have parameters, one of which will tell you which side of a phrase to add a new word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in some languages, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1112b&amp;amp;L=conlang&amp;amp;T=0&amp;amp;F=&amp;amp;S=&amp;amp;P=13922&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and Spanish, adjectives sometimes precede and sometimes follow the noun they modify. And the meaning of the adjective varies according to that order. How can this be explained within the parameters theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T03:50:10.383" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T03:50:10.383" Title="How can adjective-noun order in French be explained by parameter theory?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;branching&gt;&lt;parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2011-12-16T13:48:41.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any language that is using a character per word is sending a much higher quantity of information per symbol. I'm envious of how much the Japanese and Chinese speakers in my twitter stream can pack into 140 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the otherhand, I learned to type in a single semester in Highschool and learned to read in probably a years worth of instruction.  Chinese and Japanese writing on the other hand is a life long task of acquisition and maintenance that requires daily practice to remain good at using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T13:48:41.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2011-12-16T19:36:55.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what exactly you're interested in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;differences in the Adj+N order between English vs. French;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;differences in French between Adj+N (less common) vs. N+Adj (predominant);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;differences in French involving homonymous adjectives (grand, ancien, pauvre etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GB framework, at its late stage, variation in the Adj+N order was explained by the strength of the Num-head. In English, Num is a weak head and, thus, no movement occurs. In some/all (?) Romance languages, Num is a strong head and it makes N move to Num. Some evidence that might support that analysis: in some Romance languages, adjectives express number (unlike in English). Also &lt;a href=&quot;http://lear.unive.it/bitstream/10278/408/1/3.2.pdf&quot;&gt;Cinque 1994&lt;/a&gt; proposed that &quot;different types of adjectives serve as specifiers to different types of head&quot; (Radford 2004: 179). So, that's the GB framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denis Bouchard has consistently argued that in French there is a difference in semantics between Adj+N and N+Adj (e.g. homonymous &quot;grand&quot; as in ce grand homme 'this great man' vs. &quot;grand&quot; as in cet homme grand 'this tall man'); see, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/prbs.1998.10.2.139&quot;&gt;Bouchard 1998&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=khSizvUe0jgC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=denis%20bouchard&amp;amp;pg=PP8#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=denis%20bouchard&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Bouchard 2002&lt;/a&gt;. His proposal is that variation in the Adj+N order is caused by &quot;choices&quot; languages employ to express Number (D or N). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linge/syntaxe/journal/pdf_volume_one/article3_laenzlinger.pdf&quot;&gt;Laenzlinger 2000&lt;/a&gt; is also a very good paper. By the way, I would read Baker's book with a degree of healthy scepticism; see, for example, Larry Trask's &lt;a href=&quot;http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/trask.html&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to post a very important quote re: parameters and Minimalist Program from Gallego 2011 (The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism): &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Minimalism is probably not the best framework to investigate parameters&lt;/strong&gt; [...]. &lt;strong&gt;The early P&amp;amp;P thesis that variation is encoded in the syntax&lt;/strong&gt; [...] &lt;strong&gt;must be abandoned&lt;/strong&gt; [...].&quot; I'm afraid that &lt;em&gt;The atoms of language&lt;/em&gt; reflects old-fashioned ideas of the P&amp;amp;P framework, popular in the 1980s-early 90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: A reply to Mitch's last question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(too long for posting as a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, I'll try to explain it in a simpler way. Since the question was about parameters, the implication is that the answer should be couched in generative syntax (its version popular in the 1980s). The basic tenet of generative syntax is that constituents are organized hierarchically. If you take A and B and put them together (Merge), one of them will be the head and the other its dependent . The head determines the morphosyntactic properties of the whole phrase {AB}; in other words, if A is the head and it is a noun, then the whole phrase {AB} will be a noun. In generative syntax functional heads are posited, too (besides obvious lexical heads). Functional heads may express tense (T), finiteness, mood,  senternce function (interrogative, affirmative - C), negation (Neg) etc- there is a lot of variation there. They may be overtly expressed (like the past tense in English -ed) or covertly expressed (e.g., accusative on object NPs). Heads can be strong (trigger movement) or weak (don't trigger movement). Since they wanted to explain why adjectives can be used before as well as after nouns in some languages, they suggested there should be some functional head (between prenominal and postnominal adjectives) where a noun moves to. I don't remember who proposed it was the Num-head (Andrew Radford says it's Picallo 1991 and Ritter 1991). There is a really nice picture (74) on page 179 in Radford's textbook (2004) that explains it nicely. I'll try to upload it tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-18T03:46:28.983" LastActivityDate="2011-12-18T03:46:28.983" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1161" CreationDate="2011-12-16T20:29:28.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The task you are asking for is a problem encountered in text-to-speech systems and is called &lt;strong&gt;grapheme-phoneme-conversion&lt;/strong&gt;. A system performing this task takes an english word and translates it to a phonetic transcription. If you search for this on Google you will find information how it is done and there are even some freely available systems for this task,  I didn't find one that works online though. If you want CVC instead of a phonetic transcription, it should be a simple replacement task from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your data problem: To get a list of frequent english words have a look at the 1-Grams at &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/datasets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; or get an english &lt;a href=&quot;http://dreamsteep.com/projects/the-english-open-word-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wordlist&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7764229/sort-words-by-their-usage&quot;&gt;sort it by word frequency&lt;/a&gt;. If you are interested in dictionary entries, you can look up the words in Wikipedia afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all this is a task which can be done, but you probably won't solve it if you don't have a little experience in programming, as I doubt that there are online tools which do exactely what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2011-12-16T20:29:28.707" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1158" CreationDate="2011-12-17T01:01:09.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Segment&lt;/em&gt; in its most general sense can be taken to mean something along the lines of &quot;small, discretely identifiable chunk of speech&quot;, but it is used in all three of the ways you wondered about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often used as a synonym for both &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;, by people subscribing to the concepts of phones and phonemes; these people may use it with a directly equivalent meaning to &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; or possibly even &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;, but the latter usage perhaps more often appears clarified as &lt;em&gt;phonemic/contrastive segment&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also used as a way of avoiding those terms, either because your analysis is still in its early stages and you are not making any claims about the phonemic or otherwise status of any observed phones, or because, as @jlovegren suggested, you are trying to avoid committing to these concepts altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a third concept that is important to the idea of a &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; that I think is worth noting here. &lt;em&gt;Segment&lt;/em&gt; on its own generally refers to a bit of speech within a linear sequence of other bits of speech, but the development of autosegmental theory &lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/AimsAutosegmental.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(see pretty much anything by John Goldsmith)&lt;/a&gt; basicallly allowed for speech to be represented on a series of tiers, instead of just a linear sequence, with things on higher-level tiers connecting to different parts of the tiers below them. A simple example would would be to have a tier that has the tones, and then another tier that has the phonemes/phones, with association lines showing which tones apply to which phonemes/phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Mwn0.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Simple example of tones with association lines to segments&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Autosegment&lt;/em&gt; comes from &lt;em&gt;autonomous&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt;, because segments were more autonomous once they were freed from purely linear representations (which would have all the tones and everything bundled together). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; can be used to mean 'segment in a linear sequence', in opposition to &lt;em&gt;autosegment&lt;/em&gt;, which means 'segment in a tiered, hierarchical representation'. &lt;em&gt;Autosegments&lt;/em&gt; can therefore include tones, nasalization, and various other things that would not usually be considered stand-alone &lt;em&gt;segments&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, beyond autosegmental phonology, &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; can also be used to mean 'the segmental (e.g. phonemic) material of a word/utterance', in opposition to &lt;em&gt;suprasegmental material&lt;/em&gt;, which would be the tones etc. that exist 'above' the segmental material. This provides one distinction between segments and phonemes, if you work on a language in which tone is phonemic; the segments would be the consonant and vowel phonemes, while the tone phonemes (tonemes) would be described as suprasegmental features, or perhaps autosegments if you are using that approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own experience, I most often encounter &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; used in these last two ways, to make a distinction between either &lt;em&gt;autosegments&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;suprasegmental features&lt;/em&gt;. But, &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt; is used in very diverse ways by different linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T07:38:04.767" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T07:38:04.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1179" CreationDate="2011-12-17T05:31:38.383" Score="5" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some friends and I were discussing whether you could reduplicate an already reduplicated string. I came up with this rather contrived example in English to show what I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person A: So, do you like her?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person B: Of course I like her!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person A: Yeah, but do you like her, or do you &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; like her?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person B: I mean... okay, I &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; like her, but I don't LIKE like &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; like her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Paraphrase: I do like her as more than friends, but my feelings are not outstandingly passionate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while I think a lot of native speakers &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; extract the intended meaning from that sentence, I don't think people would naturally produce it very readily. So, my question: Are there any natural languages in which reduplication can apply iteratively like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T00:10:03.523" Title="Iterated reduplication?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2011-12-17T06:07:27.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, yes. &#xA;But not in English; English barely has any morphology, let alone real reduplication. You have to look at the right language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Lushootseed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt;, a polysynthetic Coast Salishan language on Puget Sound, there are seven or eight kinds of reduplication. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Lushootseed-6.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Several of them&lt;/a&gt; can be used together.  For instance, Augmentative/Plural is initial full root reduplication, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  &lt;em&gt;čʼƛʼačʼƛʼa&lt;/em&gt; ‘rocks’ &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;čʼƛʼa&lt;/em&gt; ‘rock’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while Diminutive/Attenuative is initial CV- root reduplication (occasionally with vowel change, as here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)   &lt;em&gt;čʼičʼƛʼa&lt;/em&gt; 'pebble'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these can be used together.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;em&gt;čʼičʼƛʼačʼƛʼa&lt;/em&gt; 'pebbles'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T00:10:03.523" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T00:10:03.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-17T10:40:08.767" Score="5" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages allow the order of adjectives compared to nouns to vary, but for different reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages have very free word order in which case there is little difference between &lt;strong&gt;adj + noun&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;noun + adj&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some languages, the Romance languages are a good example, favour one order, &lt;strong&gt;noun + adj&lt;/strong&gt; but also allow the other order &lt;strong&gt;adj + noun&lt;/strong&gt; on at least some nouns. But when this is done the meaning of the adjective will be different, or at least have a different enough nuance that a translation into another language will choose a different word to map it to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: In the Georgian languages which normally has &lt;strong&gt;adj + noun&lt;/strong&gt; are instances of &lt;strong&gt;noun + adj&lt;/strong&gt; a case of 1. above, or of 2. ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The example of &lt;em&gt;noun + adj&lt;/em&gt;* I saw was &quot;პიცი პატარა&quot; (pitsi patara). &quot;პიცი&quot; (pitsi) means &quot;pizza&quot; and &quot;პატარა&quot; (patara) means &quot;small&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-25T16:36:17.473" LastActivityDate="2012-01-25T16:36:17.473" Title="Is there any difference in meaning or nuance when the adjective follows the noun in Georgian?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;branching&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-17T10:47:20.150" Score="6" ViewCount="747" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm living in an area of Tbilisi Georgia that is traditionally the ethnic Armenian area. I would like to take the opportunity to listen to people in the street to detect whether anybody is speaking Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an English speaker's perspective the phonology of Georgian and Armenian are very similar, they both have ejective consonants for instance. Other than some words borrowed from each other or from common sources though, the languages are totally unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been developing a feeling for Georgian as I try to learn it but I'm not at all proficient yet. I also spent a few days in Armenia last year and learned a few words but not enough to have any feeling for the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So are there some sounds, morphemes, common words, or intonation clues that I can listen for to know when somebody is speaking Armenian rather than Georgian?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For instance, I used to have the same problem with Japanese and Korean but now the easiest thing is to listen for lots of &quot;-yo&quot; endings for Korean and lots of &quot;-masu&quot; endings for Japanese.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:27:06.730" Title="Which cues can I listen for to distinguish spoken Georgian and Armenian?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1172" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:22:25.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:22:25.330" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:22:25.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:22:25.330" Score="0" Body="The suggestion that the typology of languages naturally evolves from isolating through agglutinative to inflectional, then back to isolating." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:56:11.390" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:56:11.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1174" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:24:16.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:24:16.857" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:24:16.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1175" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:24:16.857" Score="0" Body="The traditional set of eight word classes: Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, pronoun, and interjection." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:56:40.143" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:56:40.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:25:31.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:25:31.863" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:25:31.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:25:31.863" Score="0" Body="Questions seeking books, websites, articles, papers, research, or downloadable content on any linguistic topic." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-17T11:56:21.373" LastActivityDate="2011-12-17T11:56:21.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-17T11:31:48.023" Score="22" ViewCount="1452" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; postpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese which are usually analysed as having postpositions (as one subclass of their particle class) but not as having case endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguists study a new language hitherto lacking any tradition of grammatical analysis, how do they determine whether the language has either or both of these features, and which morphemes belong to which category?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also when looking at a well studied language are there easy ways to tell the difference between the two or is it at least partly due to the accepted existing analyses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T14:40:25.063" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T14:40:25.063" Title="How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2011-12-17T21:49:45.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any particular reduplication process that lends itself to reiteration. It is worth pointing out that jlawler's example contains two different morphological processes utilizing reduplication which can combine, but it is not the same reduplicative process reiterated again, which might be what you're after. Your example shows, I think, that reduplication for intensity/contrast &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be iterative; but whether other types of reduplication can be so, I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might not be robust reduplication in English per se, but there are similar types of recursive structures which might interest you, which I've pointed out below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile. I.e. to defeat your enemy's missile you need anti-missile, then they'll need an anti-(anti-missile)-missile, at which point you'll have to build anti-(anti-(anti-missile)-missile)-missiles. Another is: The mouse the cat the dog chased bit ran. That is, the mouse (that) the cat (that) the dog chased bit ran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are processing limitations, which is why these center-embedded strings sound funny and are not common (if they are present at all) in natural speech. Ability to easily interpret them rapidly diminishes beyond one embedding; the same limit, it seems, for reduplication. Reduplication like center embedding strains our ability to keep track of structural relations between words, by forcing us to keep a word &quot;active&quot; in memory longer before we know its full context. So it's not surprising that in speech people rarely produce them. But, as you write, they can be processed with effort -- just like you can write out and do a complex math equation on paper that you couldn't solve in your head. And people will recognize them as grammatical after the parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a paper on this type of reduplication in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4048061&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-Salad Paper)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen and Kevin Russell Natural&#xA;  Language &amp;amp; Linguistic Theory Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 2004), pp. 307-357 &#xA;  (article consists of 51 pages) Published by: Springer. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/salad-salad.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Update 1/15)&lt;/em&gt; Here's a relevant LL post on the subject: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3701#more-3701&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ask Language Log: Raped-Raped-Raped&lt;/a&gt;. This post gives several more examples of the recursiveness of this process, as well as more  links to articles, for those interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="27211" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2019-11-12T14:25:17.873" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T14:25:17.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2011-12-18T21:14:20.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Linguistics Stack Exchange Site is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/about&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;linguists, language enthusiasts and people who have some interest in how languages work&lt;/em&gt;. What is Linguistics? It is &lt;strong&gt;scientific study of languages&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you have a question about...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any natural language from a linguistics point of view &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics phenomena during history  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/331/111&quot;&gt;the Linguistics subcategories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;currents, theories, and their applications in actual languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a single word in relation to multiple languages or a single word/single language &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;papers/articles on a given topic  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sign Languages and &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/11/111&quot;&gt;writing systems&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/433/111&quot;&gt;fictional/constructed/planned languages&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... and it is not about...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything not related to/treated by Linguistics and their subcategories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation-request questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... then you're in the right place!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have questions about grammar, usage, etc., this might not be your place; in case you're sure, or if we confirm that your question would better be asked in another site, consider visiting the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/sites&quot;&gt;Language related StackExchange sites&lt;/a&gt; (Search &quot;Language&quot; in the search bar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any doubts/questions you might have you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/344/111&quot;&gt;read more&lt;/a&gt; here, ask us in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chat&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T13:03:16.797" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T13:03:16.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2011-12-19T14:51:23.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, adjectives have been used in both orders for at least 250 years, with similar meaning differences as observed today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since almost all adjectives in French can appear in both positions, it is not a good hypothesis to treat them all as homophonous words. It is also not a good idea to account for the possibility of two orders in French by assuming that N moves between the two ADJs, whereas it doesn't in English: this just restates the facts, and fails to account for the mirror order of French postnominal ADJs and English prenominal ADJs as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;un vase chinois bleu&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;a Chinese blue vase&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analysis I propose accounts for a lot of details, so it cannot be exposed in a 30 second jingle here. I don't say that order changes the semantics of the adjectives, but rather that ADJs in the two positions modify different elements of the N (a different form/order corresponds to a different meaning): a French postnominal ADJ modifies the whole semantics of the N whereas a prenominal ADJ modifies a subelement of the N. For example, in &lt;em&gt;&quot;une église ancienne&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the ADJ bears on the whole N, hence the meaning of a church that is old; but in &lt;em&gt;&quot;une ancienne église&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the ADJ only bears on the time interval in the semantics of the N, hence the meaning of something that had the characteristics of a church at some time in the past (but doesn't anymore). In English, nouns are introduced in syntax with Number, so the only postnominal ADJs are from a very restricted class that can modify the complex N+NUM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French ADJs are often claimed to be predominantly postnominal. The claim is unclear. As a first impression, there is a greater number of different ADJs that occur in postnominal position than in prenominal position. But ADJs that are typically prenominal tend to have much higher frequency of use than any particular postnominal ADJ. Since there are many more individual ADJs that are postnominal, on the whole, occurrences of postnominal ADJs outnumber occurrences of prenominal ADJs by a margin of about two to one. The higher percentage of occurrences of ADJs in postnominal position and the greater diversity of ADJs appearing postnominally are probably the reason why postnominal placement of ADJs is often assumed to be the “normal” surface position for ADJs in Romance languages. The foregoing discussion should make it clear that this assumption of a “normal” position does not reflect a linguistically valid property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, almost all ADJs can appear in either position in French. It&quot;s just that some resulting meanings are pragmatically less likely to correspond to some world situation, so they occur infrequently. But pragmatic likeliness is not a measure of grammaticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="603" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T14:49:26.507" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T14:49:26.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1189" CreationDate="2011-12-19T21:54:26.080" Score="7" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a literacy researcher looking to create an add on package in R that offers quantitative methods for discourse analysis.  I am creating a function for taking a chunk of text and measuring the syllables per word so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;x &amp;lt;- c('dog', 'cat', 'pony', 'cracker', 'shoe', 'Popsicle', 'pronunciation' )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would yield:  1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I have an algorithm that is about 90-95% accurate by following the these rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The pattern &lt;em&gt;eeing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eing&lt;/em&gt; counts as a 2 vowels (so seeing becomes sVV and being becomes bVV);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;An e at the end of a word is just dropped (as in come) which is counted as cVm;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Two vowels next to each other (as in peach) is counts as one vowel sound (it becomes (pVch);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Any singular vowel left counts as a V (Yoda becomes YVdV);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The sum of the Vs is the number syllables in the word.;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that throw a monkey wrench into the problem are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compound words;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non silent ending &quot;e&quot;s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the rule breakers that don't follow my algorithm. Does anyone know of a dictionary of syllable rule breaker words?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this available as this was an approach similar to that used by Franklin Mark Liang (A guru in the art of syllabication) in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/liang-thesis.pdf&quot;&gt;his 1983 dissertation&lt;/a&gt;.  This same approach is used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.syllablecount.com/default.aspx&quot;&gt;the online syllable counter&lt;/a&gt; and so I know such a dictionary exists. Having this dictionary to combine with my algorithm would make my approach very accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-19T22:44:24.430" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T21:19:02.323" Title="Dictionary of atypical syllabication" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-19T23:12:12.550" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages have words that function as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_item&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;negative polarity items&lt;/a&gt;.  Is this believed to be true of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; human languages?  Are there specific languages that have been plausibly claimed &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to have any negative polarity items?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T00:29:00.757" Title="Do we have any idea how widespread NPIs are?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1183" CreationDate="2011-12-20T00:29:00.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages I know have &lt;strong&gt;something&lt;/strong&gt; like NPIs, though there is less use for at least some of them in languages like French or Yiddish that use Negative Concord. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bibliography in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/CELS-Negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; may help, especially van der Wouden 1996, Horn and Kato 2000, and Zeijlstra, Hedde, and Soehn 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T00:29:00.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-12-20T18:20:54.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2011-12-20T18:20:54.183" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T18:20:54.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-12-20T18:20:54.183" Score="0" Body="Negative polarity items." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2011-12-20T18:40:10.477" LastActivityDate="2011-12-20T18:40:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1152" CreationDate="2011-12-21T00:37:13.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in including kin terms of signed languages in your analysis, there is one such dissertation which examines kinship terms in ~40 signed languages. The author of this dissertation is Erin Wilkinson and the full citation is given below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilkinson, E. L. (2009). &lt;a href=&quot;https://repository.unm.edu/handle/1928/9826&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typology of signed languages: Differentiation through kinship terminology&lt;/a&gt;. PhD thesis, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque, NM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="552" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-21T17:02:52.083" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T17:02:52.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1193" CreationDate="2011-12-21T13:42:23.413" Score="9" ViewCount="1292" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Brazil, the Portuguese dialects spoken in rural areas preserve, despite their own innovations, several features of the language that were common in the 16th century. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the so called “&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caipira&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;caipira dialect&lt;/a&gt;”. These conservative features include  phonological, lexical and semantic aspects, and are considered archaisms in the modern standard dialect. On the other hand, a number of innovations in Brazilian Portuguese originated in the more urbanized areas (southeast region, especially São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) and then spread to the rest of the country. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another geographic scale, Brazilian Portuguese as a whole is considered rather conservative, when compared to European Portuguese. Historically, until the 19th century, Brazil remained as basically an agrarian economy, while Portugal was the urbanized colonial center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, this is not a scientific observation (so it may be strongly biased), but it seems that urbanization and the rate of language change are somehow correlated. Is that a fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-08-10T00:20:35.570" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T00:20:35.570" Title="Is urbanization correlated with language innovation?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1182" CreationDate="2011-12-21T14:56:28.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NETtalk_%28artificial_neural_network%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NETtalk&lt;/a&gt; data set is what I am looking for.  Here is a link to the actual data set &lt;a href=&quot;http://jklp.org/public/projects/lists/talk/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="607" LastEditDate="2011-12-22T21:19:02.323" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T21:19:02.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1190" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" Score="0" Body="National language of Georgia. Member of the Kartvelian language family." OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" LastActivityDate="2011-12-21T17:09:06.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2011-12-22T01:15:29.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer according to a theory of language change mostly associated with Croft, according to which change comes from intra-speaker variation. In an evolutionary model of language change, changes may be propagated via neutral selection (linguistic variants randomly come in and out of existence, but more frequent ones should be the most durable) and via replicator selection (where variants produced by certain prestigious groups people have a better chance of enduring).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We expect innovation (upheaval in customary forms) to happen more frequently when there is greater variation in the community, and when there are groups of people with whom prestige is associated. An urban setting doesn't necessarily have to have both of these, things but they tend to. We should expect innovation in urban settings especially when (i) the residents are coming in from various parts of the country where different varieties are spoken (more variation), (ii) within the urban center itself, there are people who are considered prestigious, and whose speech tends to get disproportionately emulated. If these two conditions are met (and additionally we assume relatively free interaction between speakers), then, according to the theory, we should expect the relatively rapid emergence of a new urban speech variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the answer to the question is that this is a valid assumption, since the factors encouraging language change tend to be very frequently present when new urban centers form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some downloadable papers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Croft (2010): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mendeley.com/research/origins-grammaticalization-verbalization-experience/&quot;&gt;The Origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of experience&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baxter et al (2009): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phy.umist.ac.uk/~ajm/bbcm09.pdf&quot;&gt;Modeling language change: An evaluation of Trudgill's theory of the development of New Zealand English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T01:15:29.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2011-12-22T17:44:58.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Urbanization and language change are, no doubt, somehow correlated; the question is whether change spreads faster/slower in urbanized areas or small communities. Both arguments have been proposed. Here is a (very brief) summary of the main points in Crowley and Bowern 2010 (13.3.4 Variation in small communities). On the one hand, it's easier to enforce language norms in small communities. On the other hand, social networks are denser in small societies (i.e. change will spread easier/faster), not in towns. Thus, Crowley and Bowern, while discussing language change in small communities in Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia, conclude that &quot;linguists do not yet know the answer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, social prestige is a very ambiguous term in the sense of what is considered prestigious is different for different social groups. Living in town is not universally &quot;desirable&quot; in all societies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Labov is the &quot;god&quot; of sociolinguistics. You should read his works on this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2011-12-22T17:44:58.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-22T19:24:24.400" Score="12" ViewCount="1585" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to measure the quality of speech: is it higher level/lower level (vocabulary grammar etc.) and also the understandability of the speech, i.e. is the teacher using language above a student's head?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test&quot;&gt;Flesch Kincaid&lt;/a&gt; readability test is a measurement of a written document's readability (which really is a measurement of understandability).  There are numerous methods of measuring written text's readability, but processing spoken text is different from written text.  Is there a similar way to measure spoken text for understandability? I have transcribed (typed) dialogue.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. &lt;em&gt;I've seen the Flesch Kincaid applied to speech, including President Obama's speeches, and used to determine the quality of the language used, but it seems inappropriate to use a readability measurement for spoken text as well as using readability for measuring quality.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-23T00:38:58.173" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T15:43:58.737" Title="Is there an equivalent to the Flesch Kincaid test for measuring quality and understandability of speech?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1222" CreationDate="2011-12-24T05:08:49.450" Score="7" ViewCount="696" Body="&lt;p&gt;The days of the week in English, such as &lt;strong&gt;Monday&lt;/strong&gt;, are sometimes pronounced with a final -[deɪ] and sometimes with a final -[di]. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster gives Monday&lt;/a&gt; as \ˈmən-(ˌ)dā, -dē\ and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary gives&lt;/a&gt; /ˈmʌn.deɪ/, /ˈmʌn.di/. This is evidently true for both British and American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns the distribution of this variation. Is it dialectical? If so, what dialects exhibit which form? Is it based on register? Stephen Fry &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=B5HpUZbiz1EC&amp;amp;lpg=PT255&amp;amp;ots=37In7pF5yQ&amp;amp;dq=A%20gentleman%20does%20not%20pronounce%20Monday%20as%20Monday,%20but%20as%20Mundy&amp;amp;pg=PT255#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=A%20gentleman%20does%20not%20pronounce%20Monday%20as%20Monday,%20but%20as%20Mundy&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says in &lt;em&gt;Moab is My Washpot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that it's an example of U vs non-U: &quot;A gentleman does not pronounce Monday as Monday, but as Mundy&quot;. This wouldn't explain the variation in the US, though. On the other hand, the two forms do not seem to be in free variation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any of any English vowel mergers that would explain this. Is there a DAY-DEE merger? A rule for final [eɪ]-raising? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's lots of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51228/dialects-where-days-of-the-week-end-with-dee&quot;&gt;anecdotal information on this, like this English.Stackexchange question&lt;/a&gt;, which is interesting enough, but I'm curious if anyone knows of scholarly work on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I have found one scholarly work on the subject, K. Wheatley in American Speech, Vol 9 No 1, Feb 1934, pp 36-45, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2767476637660127796&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=5,36&amp;amp;sciodt=0,36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Southern Standards&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Author writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., always have [i] in the final&#xA;  syllable in Southern speech while [ei] is often heard in these words&#xA;  in the linguistic West.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what dialects she means by &quot;Southern&quot; and &quot;Western&quot; other than that these are American dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:33:37.780" Title="What is the distribution of English dialects that pronounce -day as -[deɪ] vs -[di]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2011-12-25T04:01:42.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[this would be better as a comment, but I need more space]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are English words from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MRC psycholinguistic database&lt;/a&gt; that are disyllabic, have stress on the first syllable, and end in [eɪ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;airway, archway, assay backstay, birthday, bobsleigh, bobstay, byway, causeway, crossway, daresay, doomsday, doorway, entree, essay, fairway, flyway, gainsay, gangway, hatchway, headway, hearsay, heyday, highway, horseplay, inlay, leeway, mainstay, midday, midway, noonday, norway, nosegay, outlay, pathway, pipeclay, pulque, railway, slipway, speedway, stairway, straightway, subway, sundae, survey, tramway, washday, waylay, weekday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, most of these are compounds or foreign words. If this is a regular sound change, then we should find dialects where people pronounce most of these words with final [i] instead of [eɪ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-25T08:39:29.960" LastActivityDate="2011-12-25T08:39:29.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1198" CreationDate="2011-12-25T20:07:41.987" Score="7" ViewCount="1472" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all 3 of the non-Latin-script languages I have learned to relative degrees of fluency, handwritten and printed forms differed significantly. Of course, this should not come as a surprise. Often, learning handwritten forms required a significant amount of practice. Of course, being a language geek, I took pleasure in it. But as for the study of handwriting itself, to which branch of linguistics does it belong? I'd like to read some scholarly stuff on this. Maybe there is even a methodology for sample collecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="230" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T23:20:46.830" Title="Which branch of linguistics studies handwriting?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2011-12-25T20:43:40.630" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphetics&quot;&gt;Graphetics&lt;/a&gt; is the closest thing you'll get in Linguistics that among its studies subjects has the handwritten language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated in the article: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Graphetics is to the study of writing as phonetics is to the study of spoken language. As such, it can be divided into two areas, visual graphetics and mechanical graphetics, which are analogous to auditory and articulatory phonetics, respectively. &lt;strong&gt;Both printed and handwritten language can be the subject of graphetic study&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis and bold are mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2011-12-25T20:43:40.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-26T06:21:55.130" Score="9" ViewCount="455" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are false friends less common between distantly related languages compared to closely related languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is it merely because there's fewer words that sound similar, or is it also that when they do sound similar, they're more likely to have the same meaning compared to similar sounding words in closely related languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend#Shared_etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;false friends&lt;/a&gt; mentions shared etymology (i.e. true cognates) as a potential cause of false friends, and that's more of a risk with closely related languages compared to distantly related languages that have recently imported English loanwords. It also mentions &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend#Homonyms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;homonyms&lt;/a&gt;, which may be less of a risk when the two languages are very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2011-12-26T15:33:16.327" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T20:55:14.177" Title="Do distantly related languages have a lower incidence of false friends?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1199" CreationDate="2011-12-26T17:49:31.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In these days of computational linguistics it would be possible, given the right corpora, to assign quantitative frequencies for false friends between arbitrary languages (at least in theory). However, since I don't have access to any remotely suitable tools, I'll approach this as a thought-experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly closely related languages are by definition more likely to have cognates, but then you need to account for the probability that their meanings have diverged sufficiently to count. (That is, I agree with you when you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when they do sound similar, they're more likely to&#xA;  have the same meaning compared to similar sounding words in closely&#xA;  related languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I would have thought this was an argument for false friends in closely related languages being &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; common than in distantly related ones!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, another reason that closely related languages are a fertile source of false friends is that their phonologies are often similar. Here the phonological similarity is the crucial point, and one would expect just as many false friends for this reason as in any pair of languages, related or otherwise, with such similarity. Larry Trask's book on historical linguistics gives a table of apparently uncanny similarities between Ancient Greek and Hawaiian (IIRC - I don't have it in front of me) that arise out of pure coincidence. Some of the glosses are identical while others are similar but distinct enough to be considered false friends. His point in the context of the book is that such similarities are not sufficient to posit common ancestry, so he's not specifically looking for false friends, but it's not difficult to believe he could have found many false friends if he set out to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise: as I said I have no data to back up these assertions, but my intuition is that - particularly if, given one language, you are allowed to pick &quot;close&quot; and &quot;distant&quot; languages by hand rather than at random - it would not surprise me if you could come up with examples where the distant language had as many or more false friends as the close one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="619" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T17:49:31.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1199" CreationDate="2011-12-26T20:24:59.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the concept of false friends is only useful in the case of pairs of words which can induce confusion in second language learners. If we take this perspective, then false friends is only a useful concept for pairs of languages which have a significant portion of vocabulary with shared origin. So a Japanese person learning Korean might try to rely on their knowledge of Sino-Japanese vocabulary to guess at the meanings of Sino-Korean words, since both languages have a significant number of Chinese loans. But a Japanese person learning, say, Malagasy would not develop any sort of viable strategy for guessing the meanings of Malagasy words by relying on Japanese vocabulary, since there is not any significant vocabulary of shared origin between the two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this perspective, the important factor is not necessarily how closely two languages are related, but the antiquity of their shared vocabulary set. While English and Spanish are related only at the level of Indo-European, English has many learned Latin borrowings from medieval times that have close cognates in Spanish. So you get false friends like 'traduce' and 'traducir'. False friends of this type are likely to trip up beginning learners, but the differences in meaning are enough that a more advanced learner will not be deceived. The kinds of false friends that trip up advanced learners are the ones where the difference in meanings is very subtle. An interesting example is given in Weinreich (1954/1974:54) of a word in the variety of Italian spoken in New York City, &lt;em&gt;giobba&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;work that is found, and for which one has no attachment and no spiritual interest.&quot; Presumably, an American English speaker learning this dialect of Italian could be confused into thinking that &lt;em&gt;giobba&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;job&lt;/em&gt; have the same meaning, and might not have the occasion to discover their error for a long time. But this kind of slight error is something that a beginning learner will probably accept and not bother to adjust for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor would be the reliability of the connection between pairs of words in two languages. If a learner figures out early on that pairs of related words do not have a reliable meaning correspondence, then he/she will be less likely to get deceived by false friends. If meaning correspondences tend to be regular and reliable, then the false friends that do arise will trick learners more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think then that in absolute terms, there will be more false friends in closely related languages, but if we only count false friends where the difference in meaning is very sharp, then there will be more false friends in languages whose shared vocabulary is more antiquated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weinreich U. (1974) Languages in Contact. Mouton (originally published in 1954)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-26T20:55:14.177" LastActivityDate="2011-12-26T20:55:14.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2011-12-27T01:36:02.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I am trying to learn Georgian and Armenian also, and I think just some Eastern Armenian dialects have ejective consonants. As far as I know Stardard Eastern Armenian has a three way opposition concerning its plosives and affricates, plain voiceless, aspirated voiceless and voiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you should hear some Armenian audios to get used with the differences, the intonation for example, and the stress in Armenian is on the last syllable. Reading some vocabulary will make you get a &quot;feeling&quot; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="621" LastEditorUserId="621" LastEditDate="2011-12-27T01:53:00.487" LastActivityDate="2011-12-27T01:53:00.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1205" CreationDate="2011-12-27T02:12:48.947" Score="4" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I isolate each of the formants in my speech? I want an easy way to hear F1-F6 for learning/demonstration purposes. I believe Peter Ladefoged mentioned a way to isolate either F1 or F2 in &quot;A Course in Phonetics&quot;. Possible solutions involve moving the tongue in different directions while listening to the pitch created by air moving through the mouth (air whistling?), flicking the throat, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T02:45:27.993" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T02:45:27.993" Title="How to isolate formants" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2011-12-27T12:54:07.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My copy of &lt;em&gt;A Course in Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; isn't on me at the moment, but if you're open to using software, I'd recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.praat.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; for its automatic formant tracking feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2011-12-27T12:54:07.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1203" CreationDate="2011-12-27T16:13:47.130" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably thinking of the section &quot;Acoustic analysis of Vowels&quot; in the chapter called &quot;Acoustic Phonetics&quot; (pp.170--1 in the 4th ed. of &quot;A course in Phonetics&quot;). Here are the tricks Ladefoged discusses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whispering the vowels makes F2 sound apparent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the highest pitch whistle, your tongue and lips are shaped as for high front rounded [y], for the lowest whistle, your tongue and lips are shaped as for [u].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speaking with a creaky voice makes F1 apparent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a vowel articulation and hold your glottis shut, then flick your finger against the skin on your throat just above the larynx, and you will hear a sound where F1 is apparent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladefoged has also written in his (1967, p.86) &quot;Three areas of experimental phonetics&quot; something that I think is very useful to bear in mind as you start to track formants with a computer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the procedure for determining formant frequencies used in the current&#xA;  research consists of (1) listening to the sound and estimating from&#xA;  experience of analysing and synthesizing similar sounds the possible&#xA;  parts of the spectrum in which the formants might be located and&#xA;  (2) examining the spectrographic analyses and finding the centre&#xA;  frequencies of the regions within those parts that have a relatively&#xA;  high intensity. The essential weakness of this procedure is its&#xA;  circularity---the necessity of having to prejudge the answer before&#xA;  examining the acoustic data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-12-27T16:13:47.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1207" CreationDate="2011-12-28T01:41:03.410" Score="16" ViewCount="1664" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I read passages like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Languages X, Y and Z in region A are closely related to each other, comparable to French, Italian and Spanish in Western Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion in the question &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1199/do-distantly-related-languages-have-a-lower-incidence-of-false-friends&quot;&gt;Do distantly related languages have a lower incidence of false friends?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; also implies that languages can be considered &quot;closely related&quot; or &quot;distantly related&quot; to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would one measure such distance and do linguists make that measurement for any purpose? Sometimes it's logically obvious, as a commenter in the linked question point out, that &quot;it is uncontroversial to say that, given German as a reference point, Flemish (both West Germanic languages) is closer than Danish (both Germanic languages), which in turn is closer than Italian (both Indo-European)&quot;. How about comparison across different families? For example, How would one determine if Mandarin and Cantonese are (relatively) more closely related to each other than French and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T16:57:19.087" Title="Do linguists measure the relation distance between languages? How?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2011-12-28T03:32:27.280" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are qualitative and quantitative measures for 'distance'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qualitatively, many languages are easier to compare simply by know something about their family tree, which is implicitly recognizable (if one is lucky enough to know so many languages so well), by comparing vocabulary lists, syntax rules/systems, and phonology. The more common elements the closer they are. Mandarin and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible, but both have rich tonal systems, similar isolating grammars, and fairly simple phonological rules to map cognate words. Likewise French and Italian have a set of comparisons (similar conjugation/gender rules) and fairly regular rules mapping cognates. And the two sets of differences, those between Mandarin/Cantonese, and those between French/Spanish are of the same scale. The difference between French and German is so much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese that one would be hard pressed to say they are of similar distance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quantitatively, one can define distance mathematically, by collecting a set of quantitative features in each language, and then defining a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_function&quot;&gt;distance function&lt;/a&gt; that calculates an exact positive real number out of a combination of all the differences of these features. Then one can do a simple numerical comparison, the distance between X and Y and the distance between Z and W. One can go further and use a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis&quot;&gt;clustering algorithm&lt;/a&gt; to create a formal family tree of all languages of concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, the utility of a distance function would be to predict the difficulty in language learning or translation (machine or human); the further the distance, the more changes would need to be navigated. At some point, a distance will be meaningless; the difference between French and Swahili is just too much to settle qualitatively or quantitatively to then bother comparing with some other distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T03:32:27.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2011-12-28T06:22:47.487" Score="4" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although a much higher proportion of Japanese people understand English than people from English-speakering countries understand Japanese, it isn't as high as the Scandinavian countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't find this so surprising if it weren't for the high incidence of English loanwords in the language, and English used as decorative text in advertising and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it mainly English's grammar that they have difficulty understanding? Or are other factors to blame, such as English's non-phonetic writing, and it having sounds that they think they can't pronounce?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2011-12-31T04:49:59.550" LastActivityDate="2011-12-31T16:54:05.297" Title="Is grammar the main barrier to Japanese people understanding English?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2011-12-28T20:51:48.260" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a wealth of research on how to measure the distance between languages. Google  the following: lexicostatistics, glottochronology, cladistics, Morris Swadesh and Robert Lees, Donald Ringe, April and Robert McMahon (esp. their 2005 book, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Hl3HPyT4WcQC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Language classification by numbers&lt;/a&gt;), Sergei Starostin (esp. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nostratic.ru/books/%28140%29Starostin_Glotto1.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would recommend to read a intro textbook on historical linguistics (chapters on lexicostatistics and glottochronology) and chapter 6 in Keith Johnson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=uF1oLql0-0wC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=quantitative%20methods%20in%20linguistics&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=quantitative%20methods%20in%20linguistics&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Quantitative methods in linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. Also, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2011-12-28T21:14:53.683" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T21:14:53.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2011-12-28T23:10:13.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;People have looked at how distantly related languages are to determine when the proto-language existed, in much the same way as biologists try to determine when a common ancestor of two species existed. The more distantly related they are, the older the proto-language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, they sometimes present at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/bio/events/doom04/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;same conferences&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T23:10:13.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="947" CreationDate="2011-12-28T23:51:47.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can consult a good reference about case and checking in Minimalism. There is a book called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=91-D04Xphi0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Flexible Syntax: A Theory of Case and Arguments&lt;/a&gt;&quot;,  written by Ad Neeleman, Fred Weerman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-28T23:58:12.750" LastActivityDate="2011-12-28T23:58:12.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1208" CreationDate="2011-12-29T02:28:21.497" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the main factors are going to be language external. Japanese people do not know English very well for reasons having to do with how English is used in Japan, and reasons having to do with the general language ecology in Japan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scandinavians tend to have very good English, and there are language-internal reasons (their native language has a large number of vowels, there are many Germanic cognates, etc.) as well as external reasons (English has become established as a lingua Franca in Northern Europe, there is intensive English education and ample opportunities to practice, living in a multilingual society, they are comfortable communicating in a language that they don't master, etc.). So it could be debatable whether the language-internal or the language-external reasons are more important in determining the English skills of Scandinavians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But consider English in Nigeria. Roughly 400 languages are spoken in Nigeria, most of which are as different from English as Japanese is from English, but educated Nigerians tend to have a high success rate in learning English as a second language. In this case, there is nothing about their native languages that helps to explain their success in learning English. The status English has in government and business in that country, as well as the multilingual nature of the society, have to play a large role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hunch then is that grammar is not the main barrier for Japanese people to learn English, because grammar is not a barrier for English learning in countries where the sociolinguistic situation is favorable for English learning; I think that all of the main barriers have to do with the sociolinguistic situation in Japan: that the society is basically monolingual, and that languages other than Japanese do not have an important status in any major public sphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T02:28:21.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2011-12-29T04:11:00.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you tried &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ipanow.com/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPANow&lt;/a&gt;? It does IPA transcriptions for Latin, Italian, German, and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="629" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2011-12-29T10:45:32.523" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T10:45:32.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2011-12-29T05:00:03.110" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidently the source you may want for this is the collection &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15090604949887269810&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=5,36&amp;amp;sciodt=0,36&quot;&gt;Paradigms: the economy of inflection&lt;/a&gt;&quot; edited by Frans Plank, 1991. I don't have access to the full text in electronic form, but in particular the article &quot;Rasmus Rask's Dilemma&quot; provides a list of criteria for distinguishing cases from postpositions. If it's of interest I can request the book from the library and summarize it here.  Also see &quot;Noun phrase structure in the languages of Europe&quot; by Plank, 2003. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: &#xA;Friedman in Studia gramatyczne, 1991 has a paper titled &lt;a href=&quot;http://mahimahi.uchicago.edu/media/faculty/vfriedm/064Friedman91.pdf&quot;&gt;&quot;Romani nominal inflection: Cases or postpositions&quot;&lt;/a&gt; where he examines this question in Romani (and uses Georgian as one of his models).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romani is strictly prepositional -- with the exception of five postpositions, which have nearly exactly replaced five original Sanskrit cases. Scholars over the years have variously described these as cases or postpositions. Friedman presents the arguments in favor of and against each interpretation. His conclusion with Romani is that it is best to treat these as case suffixes since (1) they undergo assimilation, (2) the language is otherwise prepositional, (3) the case suffixes have no independent lexical meaning and (4) just because their origin was as postpositions does not matter synchronically. But I recommend reading the whole paper for an excellent example of the reasoning and evidence that went into his conclusions, which is what I believe you are asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T05:00:03.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2011-12-29T17:18:36.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, anything that is related to the study of handwriting in &lt;em&gt;historical&lt;/em&gt; documents is part of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleography&quot;&gt;paleography&lt;/a&gt;. Paleography is a large discipline that covers all kinds of writing systems from widely different periods, and it includes the study of handwritten (as opposed to printed or epigraphical) writing. Handwritten forms of writing are often labelled as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive&quot;&gt;cursive or running writing&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. scripts typically used for everday purposes and/or for private correspondence. The letters of cursive writing tend to be &quot;sloppier&quot; than printed ones and they tend to be interconnected much more frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the scientific study of (past and present) writing systems in general there are the terms &lt;em&gt;graphemics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;graphetics&lt;/em&gt;. As in &lt;em&gt;phonemics&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, the former one is mainly concerned with the system of distinctive signs, while the second one is concerned with how those distinctive signs appear in actual scripts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphemics and graphetics are not to be confused with graphology, the latter being a pseudo-scientific method of drawing conclusions about someone's psychology by analysing their personal handwriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is to my knowledge no specific term for the scientific analysis of handwritten (as opposed to printed) writing. If you are looking for more information, your best bet is probably to search for &lt;em&gt;cursive writing&lt;/em&gt; of whatever script you are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="631" LastActivityDate="2011-12-29T17:18:36.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1208" CreationDate="2011-12-31T16:54:05.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For language internal issues, &lt;strong&gt;vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt;, because of its unbounded scale, is the primary barrier to foreign language understanding. Having lots of cognates (like between English and Romance languages for educated communication) helps immensely. The lack of cognates between English and Japanese (despite the minimal borrowings each way) might account for difficulty in understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Externally, it is cultural factors that are the primary barrier that limit language understanding. Extensive media, intermarriage, accepted lingua franca, prestige and privilege, enforcement, etc. all increase the use of a language and therefore understanding. Media is about the only one of these that works in favor of English in Japan, and &lt;strong&gt;media and prestige&lt;/strong&gt; of English is higher (I guess) in Scandinavia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is somewhat vague (is it about a generally accepted perception of Japanese people vs Scandinavians, or is the a quantitative analysis behind it (number of EFL speakers per capita plus proficiency) or what. Just accepting the hypothesis that Scandinavians are 'better' at English than the Japanese, I would speculate that it has little to do with the language itself/linguistic principles, but rather that Scandinavians have a higher incentive to learn English than the Japanese have (relative populations, economic strength, job opportunities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2011-12-31T16:54:05.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2011-12-31T22:59:53.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the existence of a name for a subfield ('graphetics') and a reasonable expectation of study, the currently accepted faculty of linguistics as practiced in most universities these days does not consider handwriting as part of their domain; that is, linguists on the whole do not tend to study and discuss handwriting. Linguistics as currently practiced deals only with  spoken language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The faculties where handwriting is studied in general are cognitive psychology (with respect to how people read it) or clinical psychiatry (evidence of problems shown in handwriting phenomena (the respectable arm of graphology), computer vision (recognition of handwritten characters), or history/archaeology (deciphering of old scripts). Written language (where handwritten script is a special, but not specially considered, case, is studied in literature departments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to find out about handwriting academically, I suggest looking to foreign language teaching literature for the individual scripts concerned. For example, look in instruction material for Hebrew, in English, that describes how one is supposed to draw the script version of characters. As that might be too practical, more scholarly discussion of handwriting will probably be limited to a foreign language teacher's special monograph, that is, most likely -not- a linguist but a specialist in one particular language/writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2011-12-31T23:06:55.690" LastActivityDate="2011-12-31T23:06:55.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1221" CreationDate="2012-01-02T16:14:43.553" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many readability statistics ask that numbers in the text be pronounced to determine the number of syllables.  What I'm struggling with is if longer numbers are considered one or more than one word. As an example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;23,578&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;treated as...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;twenty three thousand five hundred seventy eight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;twentythreethousandfivehundredseventyeight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly an issue with the SMOG formula that &#xA;requires hyphyenated words to be treated as a single word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the question is how to convert numeric symbols into written words that is appropriate for readability statistics.  If you have a source (I have searched &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ebscohost.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EBSCOhost&lt;/a&gt; for a while to no avail) that backs up what you say please share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-01-03T10:12:01.900" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T17:19:11.163" Title="Numbers as words" Tags="&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1220" CreationDate="2012-01-03T02:19:11.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harrymclaughlin.com/SMOG_Readability_Formula_G._Harry_McLaughlin_%281969%29.pdf&quot;&gt;original 1969 SMOG paper&lt;/a&gt; is pretty clear that the number is treated as a single unit:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the 30 selected sentences count every word of three or more&#xA;  syllables. Any string of letters or numerals beginning and ending with&#xA;  a space or punctuation mark should be counted if you can distinguish&#xA;  at least three syllables when you read it aloud in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the single number &quot; 23,578 &quot; which begins and ends with a space is indeed polysyllabic when pronounced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It depends entirely on which test you choose. Compare Flesch (&lt;a href=&quot;http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/32/3/221/&quot;&gt;Flesch R (1948). &quot;A new readability yardstick&quot;. Journal of Applied Psychology 32: 221–233&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Count as words numbers or letters separated by space... Count the&#xA;  number of syllables in symbols and figures according to the way they&#xA;  are normally read aloud, e.g two for $ (&quot;dollars&quot;) and four for 1918&#xA;  (&quot;nineteen-eighteen&quot;). If a passage contains several or lengthy&#xA;  figures, your estimate will be more accurate if you don't include&#xA;  these figures in your syllable count.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Flesch says to count a number as one word, but gives you the ability to skip big numbers in your statistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see also Kincaid (&lt;a href=&quot;http://digitalcollections.lib.ucf.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/IST&amp;amp;CISOPTR=26301&amp;amp;CISOSHOW=26253&quot;&gt;DERIVATION  OF  NEW  READABILITY  FORMULAS  ( AUTOMATED READABILITY  INDEX ,  FOG  COUNT  AND  FLESCH  READING  EASE  FORMULA ) FOR  NAVY  ENLISTED  PERSONNEL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recalculated Fog Count: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Fog Count treats all numbers, regardless of size, as easy words. &#xA;  Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;all numbers receive a value of 1&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recaculated &quot;Flesch-Kincaid&quot; readability: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Count as a word any numbers, letters, symbols, groups of letters&#xA;  surrounded by white spaces...For example, &lt;strong&gt;each of the  following count&#xA;  as one word&lt;/strong&gt;: couldn't F.O.B. i.e. &lt;strong&gt;32,008&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With symbols and figures the syllables are known by the way they are&#xA;  normally  pronounced, for example, ¢ (cent) 1 syllable R.F.D. 3&#xA;  syllables &lt;strong&gt;1918 (nineteen eighteen) 4 syllables&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-01-03T17:19:11.163" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T17:19:11.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2012-01-03T09:27:15.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/51252/edit&quot;&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;, in response to essentially the same question (along with a protracted jumble of further results of my inexpert research), the short answer can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_19.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these maps&lt;/a&gt; from Professor &lt;a href=&quot;http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hNHgV.png&quot; alt=&quot;the final vowel in &amp;quot;Monday,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Friday&amp;quot;, etc. &quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_maps/namerica.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the speech accent archive&lt;/a&gt;, suggests that the [i] (?) ending is popular in the American Southeast, particularly in &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&amp;amp;speakerid=76&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louisville, Kentucky&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&amp;amp;speakerid=83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlanta, Georgia&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&amp;amp;speakerid=556&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belmont, Mississippi&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://plantersville,%20arkansas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plantersville, Arkansas&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&amp;amp;speakerid=445&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elmore, Alabama&lt;/a&gt;; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&amp;amp;speakerid=159&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pensacola, Florida&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="642" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-01-03T09:27:15.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1227" CreationDate="2012-01-03T19:02:28.260" Score="8" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on English Language and Usage, there are many, many questions of the form &quot;What is a single word for [phrase]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster usually seems to be very keen to use a single word — which may be obscure, or have a subtly different meaning — than to use the idiomatic multiple word phrase that a native English speaker would always choose to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example (and this is not intended as a slur on the questioner), one poster wants single word for &quot;lack of clarity&quot; — &quot;unclarity&quot;, &quot;obscurity&quot;, &quot;ambiguity&quot; are all unsatisfactory suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that the questioners are not native English speakers, and wonder whether there is something about their native language that leads them to expect English to have a vocabulary full of words with very specific meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is there a characteristic of non-English languages such that single words are considered particularly desirable? What families of language show this characteristic in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="644" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T12:56:58.520" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T12:56:58.520" Title="The hunger for single words" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1228" CreationDate="2012-01-04T00:38:38.473" Score="8" ViewCount="1011" Body="&lt;p&gt;By making a quick comparison among several language phonologies (from various language families), I could observe that some phones occur very frequently, such as [m], [p], [b], [h], [a] and [i]. Others seem to be much rarer, among which, [ʕ], [ɰ], [ⱱ] and [ɪ̈].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do linguists know the frequency of each phone across languages? And, perhaps more importantly, why are some phones more frequent than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T01:17:39.950" Title="How are phones distributed across languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1226" CreationDate="2012-01-04T01:30:57.647" Score="4" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at modern French in light of vulgar Latin, or Chinese compared with Proto-Sino-Tibetan (if that can even be reconstructed), there seems to be quite a few contexts in which phonemes are subsumed, vowels are nasalized to indicate the loss of a nasal, or tones are introduced to retain distinctions formerly maintained by distinct consonant clusters. Modern Celtic languages certainly seem to have done a lot of this too, and I have heard that a similar thing happened in Sumerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone has any theories or reference to theories about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) What makes a language &quot;prepared&quot; for such a phenomenon to occur (e.g., are there some languages that this would be much less likely to happen to?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Whether there are any aspects of a culture speaking a language that make people more likely to gravitate towards doing something like this across whatever number of generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would also be interested in hearing whether anyone believes there was the strong presence of a Celtic substratum in French that influenced it in this way, but that's kind of tangential.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T02:10:14.063" Title="Vanishing phonemes, nasalization of vowels, tones" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1225" CreationDate="2012-01-04T02:10:14.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like you are interested in the &lt;em&gt;transphonologization&lt;/em&gt; of phonemic contrasts. There is a nice downloadable paper (&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/annual_report/documents/2008/Hyman_Phonologization_PLAR.pdf&quot;&gt;Hyman 2008&lt;/a&gt;) dealing with the topic in an accessible way which includes multiple examples and plenty of references for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T02:10:14.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1223" CreationDate="2012-01-04T08:21:12.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Might simply be that they trust dictionaries too much. If it's in the dictionary it's real. Unfortunately, collocations (transparent combinations of words preferred for a specific meaning, like &quot;lack of clarity&quot; instead of &quot;missing clarity&quot;) and multiword expressions (MWE, non-transparent collocations, like &quot;kick the bucket&quot; for &quot;die&quot;) often aren't in dictionaries even if they need to be memorized just like &quot;spaceless&quot; words. Hm, maybe it's the spaces they object to? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English uses more spaces than other Germanic languages. You can make large compounds in English too but recently made ones are written with spaces and thus probably insufficiently word-like for the sort of posters you told us about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, it might be they consider it prestigious to use spaceless words instead of collocations and so strive to replace the latter with the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to your question: other languages use spaces differently, if at all. The other Germanic languages aren't afraid to write newly minted compounds without spaces, and languages like French (if my Francophile French-teacher in high-school is to be believed) and Russian do tend to prefer &quot;spaceless&quot; words to standardized collocations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any research specifically looking at this, anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T08:21:12.227" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1224" CreationDate="2012-01-04T15:15:33.440" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most frequently-cited work on this topic is probably Maddieson (1984) (see also Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson 1996), and the associated &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot;&gt;UPSID database&lt;/a&gt;, from which you can get frequency data for different types of contrastive sounds in languages. Taking a diachronic perspective, we can say that rare sounds are those which tend to get easily lost in sound change, because they are difficult to produce or perceive, and those for which there are few pathways for their innovation (even if they are not difficult to produce, they just require very specific conditions to arise). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting discussion of aerodynamic factors influencing the prevalence of different types of stop consonants is found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/macn83.pdf&quot;&gt;Ohala (1983)&lt;/a&gt;; a proposal for the rarity of bilabial trills is found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://escholarship.org/uc/item/52014440.pdf&quot;&gt;Maddieson (1989: 91--115)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Ladefoged &amp;amp; Ian Maddieson (1996). &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=h1byJz_rWUcC&quot;&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford: Blackwell.&#xA;Maddieson, I. 1984. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-01-04T15:31:14.693" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T15:31:14.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1224" CreationDate="2012-01-04T18:17:58.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetics isn't my forte but I might offer some help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of at least two theories that try to explain why certain sounds are more wide-spread than others. The first one is called &lt;strong&gt;Quantal Theory&lt;/strong&gt;, proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rle.mit.edu/rleonline/People/KennethN.Stevens.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kenneth Stevens&lt;/a&gt; (1972, 1989, 2002, &lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;). There are regions of stability in the articulatory to acoustics mapping (aka quantal regions), when changes in articulation have little impact on acoustics. Sounds that occupy those stable regions tend to be more common in languages. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist205/index_files/Handout%208%20-%20QT%20&amp;amp;%20Adaptive%20Dispersion.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this handout&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other one is called &lt;strong&gt;Adaptive Dispersion&lt;/strong&gt;, first proposed by Liljencrants &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rn_E._Lindblom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lindblom&lt;/a&gt; (1972) (the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/qpsr/1971/1971_12_1_050-050.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1971 working paper version&lt;/a&gt; can be downloaded for free). Its basic tenet is that sounds in a language tend to be placed in such a way so that perceptual (auditory) contrast between them is at maximum. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/papers/Adaptive.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Keith Johnson &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/411991&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Liljencrants J, Lindblom B. 1972. Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: The role of perceptual contrast. Language 48, no 4, pp839-862&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevens, K.N. 1972. The quantal nature of speech: Evidence from articulatoryacoustic data. In Denes, P.B. and David Jr., E.E. (eds.), Human Communication,&#xA;A Unified View, 51-66. New York, McGraw-Hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevens, K.N. 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of Phonetics 17, 3-46. &lt;strong&gt;[the same issue of &lt;em&gt;JPhonet.&lt;/em&gt; contains multiple critical responses to Stevens' theory]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1458026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stevens, K.N. 2002. Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks&#xA;and distinctive features. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 111, 1872-&#xA;1891.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-01-05T01:17:39.950" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T01:17:39.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-01-04T22:14:32.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Graphemics/graphetics is more of a sibling field to linguistics than a child. Their parent would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semiotics&lt;/a&gt;: spoken language represents ideas, written language represents spoken language (usually). So maybe graphemics/graphetics is more of a niece or nephew since it's dependent on the existence of spoken language... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2012-01-04T22:14:32.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="255" CreationDate="2012-01-05T02:21:02.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this the kind of thing you're looking for ?   &lt;a href=&quot;http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLFi)&lt;/a&gt;  (Link is to the online version but there are also DVD and print versions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T02:21:02.440" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-01T17:30:51.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-01-05T20:25:40.307" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Graphology &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology&lt;/a&gt; tries to decipher what a person's handwriting reveals about his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="650" LastActivityDate="2012-01-05T20:25:40.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-06T20:30:55.057" Score="15" ViewCount="4395" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often I encounter arguments that Armenian is in fact not an Indo-European language. The claims assert that the regular correspondences between Armenian and PIE are too unrealistic, too rare and too irregular. The basic vocabulary is quite different, including the numerals up to ten and words for relatives. The existing correspondences may be explained by Persian borrowings or by a distant genetic relation between the languages through a pre-Indo-European super-family (that is, Euroasiatic/Nostratic, or even earlier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there solid arguments to prove that Armenian is in fact Indo-European?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Armenian words compared to Lithuanian, Latin and Sanskrit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. and Skt. &lt;em&gt;sūnus&lt;/em&gt; (son)                          Arm. &lt;strong&gt;ordi&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. and Skt. &lt;em&gt;avis&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;ovis&lt;/em&gt; (sheep)                 Arm. &lt;strong&gt;ochxari&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;dūmas&lt;/em&gt; and Skt. &lt;em&gt;dhūmas&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;fumus&lt;/em&gt; (smoke)          Arm. &lt;strong&gt;c'owx&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;antras&lt;/em&gt; and Skt. &lt;em&gt;antaras&lt;/em&gt; (second, the other)             Arm. &lt;strong&gt;myows&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;vilkas&lt;/em&gt; and Skt. &lt;em&gt;vṛkas&lt;/em&gt; (wolf)                    Arm. &lt;strong&gt;gayl&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;ratas&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;rota&lt;/em&gt; (wheel) and Skt. &lt;em&gt;rathas&lt;/em&gt; (carriage).       Arm. &lt;strong&gt;aniv&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;senis&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;senex&lt;/em&gt; (an old man) and Skt. &lt;em&gt;sanas&lt;/em&gt; (old).       Arm. &lt;strong&gt;c'erowk&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;vyras&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;vir&lt;/em&gt; (a man) and Skt. &lt;em&gt;vīras&lt;/em&gt; (man, hero).        Arm. &lt;strong&gt;tghamard&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;angis&lt;/em&gt; (a kind of snakes) and Lat. &lt;em&gt;anguis&lt;/em&gt; (snake)            Arm. &lt;strong&gt;o'd'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;linas&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;linum&lt;/em&gt; (flax, compare with English 'linen')       Arm. &lt;strong&gt;vowsh&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;jungiu&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;iungo&lt;/em&gt; (I join)                  Arm. &lt;strong&gt;harakic linel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;gentys&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;gentes&lt;/em&gt; (tribes) and Skt. &lt;em&gt;jánas&lt;/em&gt; (genus, race). Arm. &lt;strong&gt;cegh&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;mėnesis&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;mensis&lt;/em&gt; and Skt &lt;em&gt;masa&lt;/em&gt; (month)          Arm. &lt;strong&gt;amis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;dantis&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;dentes&lt;/em&gt; and Skt &lt;em&gt;dantas&lt;/em&gt; (teeth)         Arm. &lt;strong&gt;atam&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. and Skt. &lt;em&gt;naktis&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;noctes&lt;/em&gt; (night)         Arm. &lt;strong&gt;gisher&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lith. &lt;em&gt;sėdime&lt;/em&gt; and Lat. &lt;em&gt;sedemus&lt;/em&gt; (we sit) and Skt. &lt;em&gt;siedati&lt;/em&gt; (sits).     Arm. &lt;strong&gt;nstel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-06-29T01:58:43.500" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T21:50:33.077" Title="What are the reasons to count Armenian as an Indo-European language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1260" CreationDate="2012-01-07T20:32:18.567" Score="6" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for examples of typological traits that are common in languages of the Americas and rare in languages elsewhere.  Traits could be at any level of description &amp;mdash; phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, whatever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Edit&lt;/b&gt; To clarify, I don't need to find traits that are common &lt;em&gt;throughout&lt;/em&gt; the Americas.  It would be enough to say, for instance, &quot;XYZ is quite common in Mesoamerica, and it's rare everywhere else, including the rest of the Americas and all of the Old World.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm looking for examples in support of the idea that it's important to do research on languages of the Americas.  I'd like to go beyond the general principle that typological balance is A Good Thing, and be able to pull out a few concrete examples of the form &quot;If we'd never studied languages of the Americas, we wouldn't know about XYZ.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T23:03:42.217" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T18:11:23.383" Title="Traits that are common in the Americas and rare elsewhere" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-01-07T22:29:23.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the WALS classification, regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/137A?s=20&amp;amp;z3=3000&amp;amp;z2=2999&amp;amp;z1=2998&amp;amp;tg_format=map&amp;amp;v1=cfff&amp;amp;v2=cd00&amp;amp;v3=cf6f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;feature 137A (N-M Pronouns)&lt;/a&gt;, there are 23 languages in the Americas in which the N-M pattern is paradigmatic, that is, where the consonant [n] is used for first person pronouns and the consonant [m] is used for second person pronouns. For example, in Northeast Maidu, &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; means 'I, me' and &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt; means 'you'. Outside the Americas, only Dumo, in Papua New Guinea and Supyire, in Mali, have this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-01-07T22:29:23.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1223" CreationDate="2012-01-08T12:40:25.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some other languages (particularly German, Russian) have more means to construct words with specific meanings through inflections and concatenations. That is where those speakers can construct a new word from the existing stem, in English they would need to learn a new stem or use a word combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T12:40:25.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1267" CreationDate="2012-01-08T13:44:35.673" Score="10" ViewCount="868" Body="&lt;p&gt;The laryngeal theory proposes that Proto-Indo-European contained a number of consonants that are absent in (almost) all daughter languages. Their existence was proposed (by Saussure, under the term &lt;em&gt;coefficients sonantiques&lt;/em&gt;) because  certain vowel patterns in Indo-European languages seemed irregular, but could be accounted for by assuming the previous existence of certain consonants. Möller proposed these consonants were laryngeals, which is now generally accepted, although there is still no agreement on the number of consonants to be reconstructed, or their actual phonetic value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;laryngeal theory&lt;/a&gt; is quite informative (and contains a bibliography), but what text would give the best introduction of the subject up to the current state of research? I'm looking for a comprehensive overview, e.g. including a discussion of Saussure's &lt;em&gt;coefficients sonantiques&lt;/em&gt; and covering all the mainstream further developments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: if there are no treatments that cover the developments of the theory, I'll settle for a volume with an up-to-date account of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-11T23:35:33.087" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T03:51:21.273" Title="Is there a comprehensive account of the development of laryngeal theory?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1266" CreationDate="2012-01-08T17:55:19.627" Score="11" ViewCount="6869" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any language has a formal variety, primarily (although not exclusively) used in writing, and one or more informal varieties, used in everyday speech. Yet, for some languages, like Norwegian and Arabic, these two varieties lie so far apart that they are considered two distinct dialects. According to Wikipedia, this situation is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot;&gt;diglossia&lt;/a&gt;. This is not the case (as far as I know) in most English speaking countries, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, where do linguists draw the line? What are the features that must be taken into account to consider a certain society diglossic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T09:30:32.977" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T07:22:39.853" Title="What exactly is diglossia?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;diglossia&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-01-08T19:14:18.517" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never seen a serious linguist claiming that Armenian didn't belong to the IE family (it is a satem language). Where did you read that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend chapter 16, Armenian, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405188960.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fortson 2010 textbook&lt;/a&gt;, esp. parts &amp;quot;The Introduction&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;From PIE to Classical Armenian&amp;quot;, pp. 382-393. It's a good idea to read it thoroughly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionaries.brillonline.com/armenian#introTab&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dictionaries.brillonline.com/armenian#introTab&lt;/a&gt; (Tab &amp;quot;Aspects of Historical Grammar&amp;quot;); this is a chapter from an excellent etymological dictionary of the Armenian lexicon inherited from the IE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some of the claims you made are in fact incorrect&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;words for relatives&lt;/strong&gt;; also see Basic Words from Wikipedia, posted by Daniel Briggs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;mayr&lt;/em&gt; ‘mother’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;hayr&lt;/em&gt; ‘father’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;khoyr&lt;/em&gt; ‘sister’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;eġbayr&lt;/em&gt; 'brother'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;dowstr&lt;/em&gt; 'daughter'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;taygr&lt;/em&gt; 'brother-in-law' (cf. Sanskrit devar-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;nu&lt;/em&gt; 'daughter-in-law' (cf. Greek nuos, Old Church Slavonic snuxa)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;some other common examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;kov&lt;/em&gt; ‘cow’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;tun&lt;/em&gt; ‘house’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;em&lt;/em&gt; ‘I am’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;it's a good idea to compare Armenian with Greek&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; 'water' - Greek &lt;em&gt;hydor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm. &lt;em&gt;ayr&lt;/em&gt; 'man'- Greek &lt;em&gt;aner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re: numerals, your assumption is also wrong&lt;/strong&gt;; here's a quote from Matasovic 2009 (Winter 1992 is of the same opinion):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here are the numerals from 1 to 10: mi, erku, erekc, čcorkc, hing, vecc, ewtcn, utc, inn, tasn. &lt;em&gt;Although this is not obvious at first sight, their forms are inherited from PIE&lt;/em&gt; (*smi-yo-, *dwoh1, *treyes, *kwetwores, *penkwe, *(k's)wek's, *septm, *h3ek'toh1, *newn, *dek'm).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T23:29:30.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-01-08T19:54:42.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;“The Americas” is a really large area and the languages within it are as diverse as Asia. You can make some strong generalizations about certain subparts though. The area I work in is the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. This area has a number of interesting shared phonological features: large consonant inventories, asymmetric vowel inventories, large inventories of ejectives, few labials and nasals, complex onsets and codas, vowelless syllables, tendency for velars to be palatalized, lots of unusual morphophonological interactions, etc., and all this across more than eight unrelated families. Although those features are somewhat common to the rest of western North America, none of these apply in the eastern half of North America. So your requirement for traits that are shared across both continents and the Caribbean is hard to fulfill since you’d need to do extensive research and would still find only a few things in common. That would throw into doubt the usefulness of the few features you do find in common, since when weighed against all the unshared features they begin to look like statistical noise and coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2012-01-08T19:54:42.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1293" CreationDate="2012-01-09T03:10:00.470" Score="9" ViewCount="2545" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two common explanations for vagueness/ambiguity in language come from Zipf and Chomsky, and both seem to inherently assume that vagueness/ambiguity do not serve a positive purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Chomsky, ambiguity arises out of the constraints of the mind at parsing language. Once again, this assumes speaker-and-listeners want to communicate perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Zipf, ambiguity arises from the conflict in energy investment between the speaker and listener. The speaker wishes for a totally ambiguous language where they can use one sound to mean everything, and leave the difficulty of disambiguation for the listener. The listener, on the other hand, wishes for a totally unambiguous language, so the difficulty of picking the right words is on the speaker, and the listener doesn't need to spend energy on disambiguation. Note, that this approach still assumes that the speaker-listener pair still have the goal of conveying a single meaning from one to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.csail.mit.edu/madhu/papers/2011/ambiguity-conf.pdf&quot;&gt;recent work (pdf)&lt;/a&gt; even formalizes Zipf-like ideas to prove that ambiguity is essential to allow communication between parties with different priors. However, their approach relies on speaker-listeners that want to maximize the probability of conveying a single meaning from one to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, vague and ambiguous language, is often used on purpose by the speaker in order to have the listener select the meaning they most desire, and not necessarily the one intended by the speaker. A common example would be campaign promises from politicians, but the concept is often used for more artistic and pleasant purposes through songs and poems. Some go so far as to say that vagueness and ambiguity is what allows creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories (hopefully formal/analytic ones) that look at vagueness and ambiguity from a positive perspective? Or at least ones that don't presuppose that the speaker has a single meaning to convey to the listener or that the speaker-listener want to maximize their agreement on an intended meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T09:58:52.423" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T16:43:59.410" Title="Positive uses of vagueness and ambiguity in language" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-01-09T09:18:40.807" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aRequested_entries_%28Armenian%29&quot;&gt;I requested entries for all of the words listed by the OP on the English Wiktionary.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Armenian friend in Yerevan who contributes Armenian and Old Armenian to Wiktionary and has an impressive collection of Armenian etymological dictionaries has now made (or added etymology to) the entries on every word plus provided these notes which I've copied verbatim thanks to both Vahagn and Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ordi = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B8%D6%80%D5%A4%D5%AB#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;որդի&lt;/a&gt; (ordi); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%BD%D5%BF%D6%80#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ուստր&lt;/a&gt; (ustr) for the cognate to sūnus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ochxari = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B8%D5%B9%D5%AD%D5%A1%D6%80#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ոչխար&lt;/a&gt; (očʿxar); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B0%D5%B8%D5%BE%D5%AB%D6%82#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;հովիւ&lt;/a&gt; (hoviw) for the cognate to ovis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c'owx = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AE%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%AD#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ծուխ&lt;/a&gt; (cux); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B4%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%AD#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;մուխ&lt;/a&gt; (mux) for the PIE word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;myows = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B4%D5%AB%D6%82%D5%BD#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;միւս&lt;/a&gt; (miws)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gayl = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A3%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%AC#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;գայլ&lt;/a&gt; (gayl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aniv = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%AB%D6%82#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;անիւ&lt;/a&gt; (aniw)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c'erowk = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AE%D5%A5%D6%80%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%AF#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ծերուկ&lt;/a&gt; (ceruk), diminutive of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AE%D5%A5%D6%80#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ծեր&lt;/a&gt; (cer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tghamard = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%BF%D5%B2%D5%A1%D5%B4%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%A4#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;տղամարդ&lt;/a&gt; (tłamard), see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A1%D5%B5%D6%80#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;այր&lt;/a&gt; (ayr) for the PIE word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;o'd' = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D6%85%D5%B1#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;օձ&lt;/a&gt; (ōj)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vowsh = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%BE%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%B7#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;վուշ&lt;/a&gt; (vuš)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;harakic linel = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%D5%B0%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%A1%D5%AF%D5%AB%D6%81_%D5%AC%D5%AB%D5%B6%D5%A5%D5%AC&amp;amp;action=edit&amp;amp;redlink=1&quot;&gt;հարակից լինել&lt;/a&gt; (harakicʿ linel, “to be adjoining”) (this is a SoP, not gonna create an entry); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AC%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%AE#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;լուծ&lt;/a&gt; (luc) for the cognate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arm. cegh = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D6%81%D5%A5%D5%B2#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ցեղ&lt;/a&gt; (cʿeł); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AE%D5%AB%D5%B6#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ծին&lt;/a&gt; (cin) for the cognate to gens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;amis = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A1%D5%B4%D5%AB%D5%BD#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;ամիս&lt;/a&gt; (amis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;atam = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A1%D5%BF%D5%A1%D5%B4#Armenian&quot;&gt;ատամ&lt;/a&gt; (atam)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gisher = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A3%D5%AB%D5%B7%D5%A5%D6%80#Armenian&quot;&gt;գիշեր&lt;/a&gt; (gišer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nstel = &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B6%D5%BD%D5%BF%D5%A5%D5%AC#Armenian&quot;&gt;նստել&lt;/a&gt; (nstel); see also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%BF%D5%A5%D5%B2#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;տեղ&lt;/a&gt; (teł) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B0%D5%A5%D5%AE%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%AB%D5%B4#Old_Armenian&quot;&gt;հեծանիմ&lt;/a&gt; (hecanim)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T09:26:29.840" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T09:26:29.840" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1223" CreationDate="2012-01-09T14:08:25.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker, so here is why I would ask such a question: Often there is a single word for X. If I have to talk about X in English, I would be concerned about preserving the precise meaning together with all surrounding context so that no information is lost to the audience. When there's an exact match (occasionally it's a loanword from French or another language which is not in the dictionary) I do this much more easily. Alternatively, if German and French have a single word for X, I might suspect English has one, too, which I don't know. English is a very malleable language and I'm a bit hesitant to coin new phrases if established ones already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="655" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T14:08:25.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-01-09T17:55:21.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keeping in mind the caveat pointed out by @James C., I still think it is appropriate to ask whether there is a linguistic area that encompasses all of the Americas. Even though smaller linguistic areas involve a large set of shared features, there appear to be features that have the potential for being transmitted areally over very long distances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dryer/DryerLargeLingAreas.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1989&lt;/a&gt;) paper on the importance of large linguistic areas to typological studies, Dryer argues that there is likely a linguistic area as large as North America, and that there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be an area as large as the entire New World. While admitting that the evidence is &quot;less convincing&quot; (1989: 276), he gives possessive prefixes as an example of a feature that is common in the Americas and rare elsewhere &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-01-09T20:03:25.670" LastActivityDate="2012-01-09T20:03:25.670" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1248" CreationDate="2012-01-10T01:46:02.383" Score="8" ViewCount="2566" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is some good software I can use for listening to speech? I would like to be able to listen to a snippet of speech over and over again, and slow it down without changing the pitch, all with a streamlined user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this from a language learning perspective, but there's no reason this question can't be more general. I figure that transcribing speech is something that linguists must do all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="656" LastActivityDate="2012-06-18T15:19:43.790" Title="Software tools for transcribing speech" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2012-01-10T02:11:47.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;, with TextGrids or a separate text editor, but I preferred &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/&quot;&gt;ELAN&lt;/a&gt; for simple 'prose' transcription of long passages; this is particularly true if there are multiple speakers to keep track of. Both are free and multi-platform. Some people prefer &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html&quot;&gt;Express Scribe&lt;/a&gt;, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-10T10:30:19.373" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T10:30:19.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-01-10T03:40:47.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/81A?z1=2994&amp;amp;v2=cd00&amp;amp;v1=c00d&amp;amp;s=20&amp;amp;v3=cff0&amp;amp;v4=dff0&amp;amp;v5=dd00&amp;amp;v6=d00d&amp;amp;v7=cccc&amp;amp;z5=2999&amp;amp;z6=3000&amp;amp;z7=2996&amp;amp;z4=2998&amp;amp;z2=2995&amp;amp;z3=2997&amp;amp;tg_format=map&amp;amp;lat=-18.646245142670608&amp;amp;lng=70.3125&amp;amp;z=2&amp;amp;t=m&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OVS word order&lt;/a&gt; with 7 languages in South America and only 4 elsewhere in the world (I don't know if the numbers could be misrepresented by the recorded data in WALS, but I believe this is one of the examples often mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also interesting to consider: just about anything about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pirahã&lt;/a&gt; ;) (phonology, 5 'channels of discourse', and of course &lt;a href=&quot;http://daneverettbooks.com/other-publications/research/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Everett&lt;/a&gt;'s controversial claim of lack of recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Amazonian_languages.html?id=EF7GueYuQt0C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Amazonian Languages&lt;/a&gt; (eds. Dixon and Aikhenvald) also has some relevant comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Amazon basin is the least known and least understood linguistic&#xA;  region in the world. [...] when one does get a hold of a grammar of an&#xA;  Amazonian language it is likely to show strange properties - multiple&#xA;  sets of classifiers, oddly conditioned ergativity splits, and so on -&#xA;  that constitute exceptions to received ideas about typological&#xA;  universals. In other instances one finds the richest examples of&#xA;  categories that are weakly attested elsewhere. For instance, Tucano&#xA;  languages have the most highly articulated systems of evidentiality in&#xA;  the world; this is an obligatory specification of the evidence a&#xA;  speaker has for making a statement - whether observed, or reported, or&#xA;  inferred, or assumed. However, a major difficulty is that a high&#xA;  proportion of available grammars are incomplete, affording a glimpse&#xA;  of some exotic grammatical property but with insufficient information&#xA;  to enable the reader to fuly understand it, and to realize its overall&#xA;  typological significance. (p. 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-10T03:48:45.590" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T03:48:45.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2012-01-10T03:41:52.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want a very quick and simple program to slow down a sound file of speech, use VLC Player. It is one of the best free media players at any rate. It cannot transcribe anything, though; but you could get your audio files for the sounds or words you want to study from elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Press - (minus) to go slower, + (plus) for faster. It keeps the pitch intact; that is, it keeps the frequency of the short waves (high frequency) in instrumental music and voices at the same pitch for the human ear. That is what it is designed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does a very good job at slowing voices down, though speeding them up is not always as smooth (but still reasonable). Especially speeding up vibrato in classical music goes wrong, which was only to be expected: the program only takes into account the frequency at the higher frequencies, while each vibration in vibrato takes much longer to complete than the normal vibrations that result in pitch for the human ear. At 200 %, vibrato results in high-pitched bleeps, though the underlying pitch is still audible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for slowing down voices it works very well. You can decrement to 67, 50, 33, 25, 12, 6, and 3 %. A regular song at 128 kbps and 44kHz sounds OK at 50 %, is still reasonably audible (but lots of noise) at 25 %, fails at 12 % and lower. This most probably depends on the quality of the file: the more information there is per second, the more smoothly the file will still sound when slowed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T03:41:52.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1257" CreationDate="2012-01-10T13:53:52.317" Score="7" ViewCount="684" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about problems with the assumption of basic vocabulary in Lyle Campbell, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.br/books?id=EjXrrOJhex8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Historical Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some 'basic vocabulary' appears to change rather easily for cultural&#xA;  reasons, for example, terms for 'head' in various languages.&#xA;  Proto-Indo-European *&lt;em&gt;kaput-&lt;/em&gt; 'head' gave Proto-Germanic&#xA;  *haubidam/*haubudam (hence old English &lt;em&gt;heafod &gt; head&lt;/em&gt;) and Proto-Romance *&lt;em&gt;kaput&lt;/em&gt;. However, several Germanic and Romance languages&#xA;  no longer have cognates of these terms as the basic form referring to&#xA;  the human head. For example, German Kopf 'head' originally meant&#xA;  'bowl'; the cognate from *&lt;em&gt;kaput&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;haupt&lt;/em&gt;, which now means basically&#xA;  only 'main', 'chief', as in &lt;em&gt;Hauptbahnhof&lt;/em&gt; 'main/central train station'.&#xA;  French &lt;em&gt;tête&lt;/em&gt; and Italian &lt;em&gt;testa&lt;/em&gt; both meant originally 'pot'; the French&#xA;  cognate from Latin *&lt;em&gt;kaput&lt;/em&gt; is chef, but this means now 'main,&#xA;  principal, chief', not a human head. (p. 206)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, &lt;em&gt;hoofd&lt;/em&gt; is still the basic word for human head, but &lt;em&gt;kop&lt;/em&gt; is also used in some expressions and impolite usage, for animal heads as well as for 'cup'. I suppose like with German &lt;em&gt;Kopf&lt;/em&gt; the latter is the original meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason bowl/pot/cup &gt; head is a common semantic change (that happened independently?) in different languages? Or is this due to borrowing or loan translation? (Campbell notes that French &lt;em&gt;tête&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed from Italian &lt;em&gt;testa&lt;/em&gt;, but there's also German and Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:03:52.563" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:03:52.563" Title="What is the reason for the semantic change bowl/pot/cup &gt; head?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2012-01-10T14:01:50.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free software, &lt;a href=&quot;http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Audacity'&lt;/a&gt;, can apply and preserve, as well as infinitely undo, many useful transformations in any selections of the audio. See its menu, 'Effects'. 'Change Tempo' will change the speed without changing the pitch. For the reverse, 'Change Pitch' will change the pitch without changing the speed. You may also find that adjusting the pitch will be useful in bringing out some barely-audible speech sounds, for easier listening or just giving your ears variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it lacks the streamlined user interface you requested, with its nice, graphical interface you can visually, easily find different people's speech in a long recording, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is downloadable for many OS's, including Mac, and I can confirm it works well on Windows. It handles huge (multi-gigabyte) files and can save in many formats, including MP3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="660" LastEditorUserId="660" LastEditDate="2012-01-10T16:45:47.687" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T16:45:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2012-01-10T19:18:30.060" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words are usually borrowed from a language of a former colonizing power. For example, in Kyrgyz many words borrowed from Russian, so in England - from the language of Roman Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T19:18:30.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1273" CreationDate="2012-01-10T19:31:41.320" Score="20" ViewCount="1419" Body="&lt;p&gt;The degree of literacy of a certain community of speakers is generally proposed as one of the factors that affect the pace of language change. More specifically, literacy would slow down change, since literate people &amp;ndash; most of them speaking the standard variety &amp;ndash; tend to conform their speech to the written form. Since spelling, by its nature, tends to remain quite stable over long periods of time, the language itself would remain stable as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the basis for this claim? How do linguists measure the impact that the degree of literacy has on language change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T12:50:00.527" Title="How powerful is literacy to slow down language change?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;literacy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-10T22:24:53.527" Score="13" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend was asking me why there aren't any programs that can analyze a user's pronunciation of words and then give feedback/suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, given an accurate phonetic transcription of a predetermined set of words, determining if a user's pronunciation of each word is standard/correct — or, say, determining someone's regional accent — should be trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my sense was that Automatic Phonetic Transcription (APT) is not nearly accurate enough to analyze a user's pronunciation in that way — though my knowledge is about 10 years out of date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it made me wonder: even if APT of &lt;em&gt;spontaneous&lt;/em&gt; speech does have a low accuracy — in a context where each expected word (and even possible alternate pronunciations) is known ahead of time, would accuracy conceivably high enough to give a user feedback on pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: arjan pointed out that Rosetta Stone claims to be able to give pronunciation feedback; how does such a system work (and how well)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="661" LastEditorUserId="661" LastEditDate="2012-01-11T15:37:55.653" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T16:32:39.953" Title="Automatic phonetic transcription of speech: is it still a difficult problem?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1197" CreationDate="2012-01-10T23:20:46.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since nobody has mentioned it, I guess I will. The linguistic study of writing systems in general is orthography. The study of handwritten language would be a part of it. See the Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="662" LastActivityDate="2012-01-10T23:20:46.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1251" CreationDate="2012-01-11T01:17:09.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bowls, pots, and cups are the most common everyday things in European cultures that are hollow. A conventional insult is that one’s head is hollow. So transfer from one to the other is fairly easy via slang. Gourds are used for the same insult in tropical areas where they are cultivated or harvested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think ‘has a hollow head’ is a pretty common insult cross-linguistically, but I’m not aware of any studies on the topic. There was once a journal called “Maledicta” where such things may have been discussed. Another common insult is that one’s head is full of water, or that it is full of fat, or that it is full of a starchy paste (mashed potatoes, sago palm mush, oatmeal, rice pudding, etc.). An inspired researcher could conceivably investigate this by trawling through a huge pile of dictionaries and ethnographies. It’d be a very long term project to gather enough data to really make the argument solid though. Either that or it would require a large number of collaborators, or undergraduate assistants, or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T01:17:09.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-11T03:20:16.850" Score="6" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen two versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) *&lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt; ending actually derived from the collective number form, which also ends in *&lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt;. So the collective number first started to represent abstract things (compare Latin &lt;em&gt;animalia&lt;/em&gt;, Greek &lt;em&gt;zooia&lt;/em&gt;), and then came to mark feminine gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) From Eurasiatic *&lt;em&gt;haia&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;mother&quot;, from Borean *&lt;em&gt;haia&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;mother&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Cnostr%5Cnostret&amp;amp;first=1&amp;amp;off=&amp;amp;text_proto=%CA%94VjV&amp;amp;method_proto=substring&amp;amp;ic_proto=on&amp;amp;text_meaning=mother&amp;amp;method_meaning=substring&amp;amp;ic_meaning=on&amp;amp;text_ier=&amp;amp;method_ier=substring&amp;amp;ic_ier=on&amp;amp;text_alt=&amp;amp;method_alt=substring&amp;amp;ic_alt=on&amp;amp;text_ura=&amp;amp;method_ura=substring&amp;amp;ic_ura=on&amp;amp;text_kart=&amp;amp;method_kart=substring&amp;amp;ic_kart=on&amp;amp;text_drav=&amp;amp;method_drav=substring&amp;amp;ic_drav=on&amp;amp;text_esk=&amp;amp;method_esk=substring&amp;amp;ic_esk=on&amp;amp;text_chuk=&amp;amp;method_chuk=substring&amp;amp;ic_chuk=on&amp;amp;text_notes=&amp;amp;method_notes=substring&amp;amp;ic_notes=on&amp;amp;text_reference=&amp;amp;method_reference=substring&amp;amp;ic_reference=on&amp;amp;text_any=&amp;amp;method_any=substring&amp;amp;sort=proto&amp;amp;ic_any=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nostratic etymology&lt;/a&gt;) which explains similar feminine *&lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt; endings in Semitic, IE and Altaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The account for Laryngeal theory is only compatible with version a) and cannot explain how Eurasiatic *&lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt; became PIE *&lt;em&gt;-ih&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-01-12T06:20:35.017" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T04:48:14.977" Title="What is the origin of feminine ending *-ia in PIE?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2012-01-11T09:34:39.283" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to distant relatives, simply comparing words or grammar is of no use. What should be done instead is establishing regular sound correspondences between cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/indoeuropean.html&quot;&gt;Here's a table&lt;/a&gt; that shows something like that (though it doesn't show the underlying material)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2012-01-11T17:57:17.040" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T17:57:17.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1236" CreationDate="2012-01-11T18:11:23.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative&quot;&gt;obviative&lt;/a&gt; (also known as &quot;4th person&quot;). Mainly Algonquian feature, but also present in other languages of the Americas, and in few languages in the rest of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct%E2%80%93inverse_language&quot;&gt;direct-inverse systems&lt;/a&gt;, found mainly in languages of the Americas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic#Distribution&quot;&gt;polysynthetic languages&lt;/a&gt; are more commonly found in the Americas, than in other parts of the world, though this is a weaker example&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the language families in the Americas are supposed to be quite distinct, but some phenomena indeed appear to be common there. You can find more information if you look for articles about the Greenberg's hypothesis, and more specifically - the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerind_languages&quot;&gt;Amerind languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2012-01-11T18:11:23.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2012-01-12T20:05:58.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say the distinction becomes artificial when a person in that diglossic society can no longer tell which language or dialect he is speaking in if the context is removed. As the two languages assimilate each other their differences fade with time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the division of tongues into languages and dialects is very political, one should also beware of falsely created divisions between languages that create an empty diglossia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-12T20:10:44.937" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T20:10:44.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1239" CreationDate="2012-01-12T20:53:34.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lindeman, Fredrik Otto. 1987. &lt;i&gt;Introduction to the ‘laryngeal theory’&lt;/i&gt;. (Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, serie B 74). Translation of &lt;i&gt;Einführung in die Laryngaltheorie&lt;/i&gt;, Berlin, 1970. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. ISBN 8200184595, 8200026280 (pbk.). LCCN P589 .L513 1987.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this was also reprinted by a few other publishers in different countries. It’s not the most up-to-date given its 1970s provenance, but it’s probably the best place to start. As with any monograph, you should also read the published reviews of it for other people’s criticism. After that I think everything else you would want would be articles published in journals or collections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T20:53:34.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1265" CreationDate="2012-01-12T22:31:05.910" Score="2" ViewCount="1322" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to one I asked earlier about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1220/numbers-as-words&quot;&gt;Numbers as words&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many readability stats call for counting syllables.  The direction for abbreviations and acronyms seems to be to formulate the syllable count as if though the word(s) were not abbreviated (correct me if I'm wrong on this).  So &quot;DVD&quot; would become digital-video-device and count for 9 syllables.  And 7 &quot;pm&quot; becomes &quot;Post-Meridiem&quot; or 4 syllables.  This does not make sense to me as we don't comprehend pm as post-meridiem or DVD as digital video device.  These acronyms/abbreviations have become words unto themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused as to how i should proceed with counting these type of words and am looking for clarification on how to treat these words for readability statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T19:25:48.797" Title="Syllable counting acronyms and abbreviations" Tags="&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2012-01-12T23:00:11.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://digitalcollections.lib.ucf.edu/u?/IST,26253&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Flesch-Kincaid p. 48&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With symbols and figures the syllables are known by the way they are&#xA;  normally  pronounced, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;¢ (cent) 1 syllable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;R.F.D. 3 syllables&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1918 (nineteen eighteen) 4 syllables&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note they count RFD as 3 syllables, not 7 for Rural Free Delivery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-01-12T23:00:11.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2012-01-12T23:01:15.797" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no real objective criteria for diglossia. Like the terms pidgin and creole, it is understandable as a concept, but there are noticeable gray areas that will challenge any definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, the criteria I've seen for diglossia involve a stable linguistic community with (at least) two languages or dialects* in which 1) one of the two varieties is of a higher or more prestigious register than than the other; 2) each variety has defined and separate spheres of use, for example the H(igh) variety might be used in formal contexts like education, business, writing, or formal spoken contexts like speeches, while the L(ow) variety might be used in informal contexts, between friends, in everyday spoken conversation; and 3) the H variety is often not the native tongue but acquired later through formal instruction, e.g. in school, and it is strictly codified. The H and L varieties do not have to be related, though they often are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true for most if not all languages that there are artificial conventions in the formal register of the language, often archaisms or rules arbitrarily superposed by grammarians. So, when does a situation become diglossic? Generally, the term is reserved for cases in which there is a significant degree of unintelligibility between the two varieties, such that speakers need formal instruction and training to understand and communicate in the H variety. Just like English speakers, many speakers in diglossic communities will maintain that the high and low varieties are the same language. However, in the case of a diglossic community, there are so many differences in the syntax/phonology/lexicon that there is reason to consider the varieties separate -- though it is worth pointing out that that is subjective. Again, too, an important criterion is that each variety in diglossia has a strictly defined domain of use. Contrast this with English, in which &quot;correct&quot; English according to prescriptivists is notably rare in even much of the literary language anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are gray areas of course. Even though for most American English speakers the written/oral and formal/informal languages are highly similar, it is arguable that, for example, for a native speaker of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), learning &quot;standard&quot; English (SE), especially learning to write, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; something of a diglossic situation, because of the many differences between AAVE and SE despite their general mutual intelligibility, and also because AAVE is particularly frowned upon by nonspeakers compared to other somewhat nonstandard dialects, resulting in a restricted domain and difference in prestige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Of course, where to draw the boundary between dialects versus languages becomes muddled, but that's another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2012-01-13T03:06:50.480" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T03:06:50.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1239" CreationDate="2012-01-12T23:01:28.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd start with an excellent review article, The laryngeal and glottalic theories, by Ladislav Zgusta (2006), in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/book/9783110199826/ch-d39282259e1019.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of Language Sciences, volume 3&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 2462-2479.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T15:50:31.213" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:50:31.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1270" CreationDate="2012-01-12T23:20:55.163" Score="16" ViewCount="836" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r:   approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, these sounds are historically related, for example the French uvular approximant /ʁ/ replaced the earlier alveolar trill /r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why do these sounds pattern together despite being so phonetically different? Why do they often historically interchange and why do foreign speakers perceive foreign rhotics as comparable to their own, even if they are vastly different in terms of articulation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T05:11:56.123" Title="Why do rhotics pattern together?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1137" CreationDate="2012-01-13T03:00:39.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The grammar/references you've been looking at are perhaps giving a more archaic pronunciation for the word, or a regional/prestigious pronunciation. This happens in Russian, where most grammars give  [ɕt͡ɕ] (or the English approximation: fre &lt;strong&gt;shch&lt;/strong&gt; eese) instead of [ɕː] for &amp;lt;щ&gt;, even though the latter is more common now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I was able to find: &quot;Orthographic  (i.e. &amp;lt;ვ&gt;) stands for the bilabial glide [w], especially after consonants, and for the labiodental fricative [v] elsewhere.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4420124&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georgian Harmonic Clusters: Phonetic Cues to Phonological&#xA;  Representation&lt;/a&gt; Ioana Chitoran Phonology, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1998),&#xA;  pp. 121-141 Published by: Cambridge University Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T03:00:39.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2012-01-13T03:55:05.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't any phonetic basis that captures all the various R sounds.  A rhotic is considered such based on phonological factors, i.e. rhotics pattern in similar ways across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the same segment could be a rhotic in one language and non-rhotic in another.  For example, as you may be familiar with, in North American dialects an alveolar stop often becomes an alveolar flap invervocalically after a stressed syllable (e.g. &quot;ladder&quot;).  An alveolar flap/tap is also used in many other languages as an R.  So that seems to be some evidence that there's no phonetic factor that will make a segment inherently rhotic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhotics are a relatively poorly understood group of segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="667" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T03:55:05.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2012-01-13T03:58:38.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A phonetician can probably give a better explanation, but I used to worry about this, too, and the conclusion I came to was that when you analyze &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; language, there's always a few consonants that crowd the borderline with vowels, and form lots of consonant clusters, and weird vowel diphthongs, and they always turn out to be sonorants and laterals like [r ʀ ɾ ɹ l ɭ ɫ], etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be only one phoneme in a given language, like Mandarin or Japanese, that shares these allophones and patterning; or there may be as many as 4 or more (usually 2 lateral, 2 retroflex/2 palatal, 2 velarized, or some such). But there are always some. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones in one language might count as normal stops in some other language, but in the one they're &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonorant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sonorants&lt;/a&gt; and pattern the same as sonorants in any other language, &lt;em&gt;mutatis mutandis&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T03:58:38.610" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-13T10:45:43.177" Score="5" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;A triadic model of signs can be found by various researchers. Probably the most famous illustration is the diagram in Ogden and Richards's &lt;em&gt;The Meaning of Meaning&lt;/em&gt; (page 11, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aOgden_semiotic_triangle.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;digitized here&lt;/a&gt;). It is also attributed to Peirce as one of the two founders of semiotics, who writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing having this character I term a &lt;em&gt;representamen&lt;/em&gt;, the mental effect, or thought, its &lt;em&gt;interpretant&lt;/em&gt;, the thing for which it stands, its &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common reference I could found is in the &lt;em&gt;Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, paragraph 564 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=HoRfcRUtpnEC&amp;amp;pg=PA303&amp;amp;dq=%22The%20thing%20having%20this%20character%20I%20term%20a%20representamen,%20the%20mental%20effect,%20or%20thought,its%20interpretant,%20the%20thing%20for%20which%20it%20stands,%20its%20object%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;digitized here&lt;/a&gt;, often cited from 1932, but it seems to be published first in 1931). The original paper is &lt;em&gt;On a New List of Categories&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1867 in the &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences&lt;/em&gt; (pages 287-298). This paper, however, does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; include the triadic model, but Peirce added it later to the version printed in the collected papers. Peirce died in 1914, so obviously he has written it before, but where? People seem to just copy references without having looked for the original, don't they? ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="669" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T03:26:45.167" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T16:41:08.607" Title="Where did Peirce publish his triadic model of signs?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1254" CreationDate="2012-01-13T12:50:00.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's quite a big claim to say that &quot;literate people - most of them speaking the standard variety - tend to conform their speech to the written form&quot;, and there are two main reasons why this can not be taken as a given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there is an enormous amount of research showing that speakers generally command a range of ways of speaking their native language, some of which are closer to the standard, and others which are less standard, and these are used at different times and in different contexts. This may include regional or non-standard varieties, which tend to be spoken only, and not written, and speakers of these varieties may at the same time be perfectly literate in the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, while literate people may use a given country's &quot;standard variety&quot; for all literacy-related activities, this does not mean they speak that same language at home. In heavily colonized regions such as the Americas, Africa, and Australia, 'literacy' usually means 'literacy in the dominant language', generally English, French or Spanish. While some of the Indigenous languages may now have literacy traditions, these are rarely the countrywide 'standard', conventions tend to be less standardized, and statistics on literacy rates in non-dominant languages are usually lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, we can't assume that literate people conform their speech to the written form, because these might involve completely different languages or dialects. So, we need to separate out whether we are asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The literacy of individuals in their native language, and differences in language change rates between literate and non-literate individuals speaking the same language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The literacy of a cultural group in the native language of that cultural group, i.e. whether there are differences in the rates of language change once a critical mass of literate people is reached in the group (compared to other cultural groups with different literacy rates)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literacy in general, i.e. whether there are effects on the rates of language change that can be traced to the influences of literacy in general, regardless of the language, because literacy can influence how people package, process, and think about language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that literacy may slow the process of language change has been around for a while, but as far as I know there is no comprehensive study of this, partly because there are lots of issues with finding groups which are otherwise comparable except for literacy rates. There is a key paper on the topic called &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1962.64.1.02a00120/pdf&quot;&gt;Literacy as a Factor in Language Change (Zengel 1962)&lt;/a&gt; which hypothesizes about this but doesn't actually provide any real evidence for it - Zengel is basically surprised by the higher-than-expected rate of retention of vocabulary items in a small sample of English and Latin over 1000 years, and suggests that this could be because literacy was primary and integral in these languages and therefore added extra stability. This study excluded natural phonetic change and structural change in the words because, of course, this was rampant, so Zengel just looked at word stems. (A glance at just about any English sentence is good evidence for the fact that sound change stampedes on ahead, regardless of spelling systems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some arguments against the literacy-slows-change idea are contained in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=8Ben0lE61msC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA61&amp;amp;dq=related%3ab8crS7xLz4EJ%3ascholar.google.com/&amp;amp;ots=I1Fz_sxsL9&amp;amp;sig=Tyf1n23qlOh3DZ2cBb-5WP01wxY#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Chapter 3 of this book on Literacy and Lexical Diffusion.&lt;/a&gt; It's an accessible discussion, basically arguing that literacy actually &lt;em&gt;introduces&lt;/em&gt; rapid and widespread language change, and that literacy itself is diverse and variable rather than uniform and stable. Furthermore, even in so-called literate cultures, &lt;em&gt;widespread&lt;/em&gt; literacy is generally still a relatively recent phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional point to think about is all of the types of changes that can be observed in English usage through the use of new digital mediums of communication - these occur very rapidly, directly mediated by literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2012-01-13T12:50:00.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-13T15:17:56.270" Score="12" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a syllable has a heavy or light rime is often important in whether it will participate in phonological processes, and whether it will receive stress. For example, in Latin, stress is on the penult if it is long in traditional terminology, i.e. heavy (CVV or CVC), otherwise it is on the on the antepenult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ca.'tul.lus (the poet) vs. 'ca.tu.lus (young animal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, languages differ as to whether they treat all types of heavy syllables the same, distinguish between heavy and superheavy syllables, treat geminates the same as other heavy syllables, etc. But is there any good (theoretical) reason why the onset should not count? Does any language treat syllables differently (in some way) depending on whether they have an onset or not, or a simple onset versus a complex onset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T00:30:48.933" Title="Why do onsets not count for syllable weight in phonological processes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1276" CreationDate="2012-01-13T19:03:09.263" Score="15" ViewCount="3168" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Icelandic language is often used as an example of a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; conservative language, compared to other Indo-European languages, in general, and to  other North-Germanic languages, in particular, all of which have changed a lot over the past few centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The retainment of its complex inflectional morphology since the Middle Ages is part of the evidence presented in support of its conservatism. It is often claimed that modern Icelandic speakers can even read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://sagadb.org/&quot;&gt;Icelandic Sagas&lt;/a&gt; (written about 800 years ago) with just a bit of extra effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, first of all, is Icelandic that conservative, as claimed? If so, what explains such phenomenon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T21:31:13.553" Title="What explains the Icelandic language conservatism?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1275" CreationDate="2012-01-14T00:42:00.897" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Icelandic is quite conservative compared to many other Indo-European languages - it could be compared to Latin in terms of the complex morphology it retains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of explanations for this. The geographical isolation of Iceland (being an island) means that speakers of Icelandic had less direct contact with speakers of other languages, and therefore there were fewer competing influences from other languages. Prolonged contact with languages that have very different features is generally considered to have a role in the stripping-down of inflectional systems - English is a good example of this.&#xA;(Though there was, apparently, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque-Icelandic_pidgin&quot;&gt;Basque-Icelandic pidgin&lt;/a&gt; spoken in the 17th century.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the population of Iceland is mostly made up of people who are Icelandic, and the number of Icelandic-speaking people living outside of Iceland is relatively small. Iceland is also a relatively small geographical area, with the majority of the population concentrated around the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk&quot;&gt;Reykjavik area&lt;/a&gt; (200,000 out of 320,000). The dialectal differences are minimal, because the population is not dispersed in the same way as in other countries, and homogeneity in a language can be self-reinforcing of its characteristics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other factors may also contribute to the conservative nature of the language - there is a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://130.241.16.4/dspace/bitstream/2077/18713/1/gupea_2077_18713_1.pdf&quot;&gt;dissertation on language change and stability in Icelandic&lt;/a&gt; which suggests that &quot;strong linguistic nationalism and a stability-oriented language policy, are instrumental in creating the sociolinguistic conditions in Iceland which support language stability&quot;. This is interesting, because while 'language academies' such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_academy&quot;&gt;Académie française&lt;/a&gt; and similar policy-creating bodies generally hold little sway against the tide of language change, the attitudes of speakers themselves can be very influential, and this may be of particular relevance in Iceland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, while Icelandic is still remarkably similar to Old Icelandic (which is essentially Old Norse), the ability of speakers to easily read the old sagas is usually exaggerated (so i've been told by Icelandic people). It's a bit like English speakers reading Shakespeare - you usually have to read a modern version with lots of footnotes and explanations and modernized spelling (because the pronunciation has changed quite a bit over the centuries). Even so, this is pretty impressive - Shakespeare is only four hundred years worth of change for English speakers, while the Icelandic sagas are about twice as old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="153" LastEditDate="2012-03-10T08:04:46.707" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T08:04:46.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1279" CreationDate="2012-01-14T14:30:08.713" Score="12" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, what is the method (or the methods) that linguists adopt to understand and know the etymology of a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these methods reliable and in what measure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The knowledge I have on the matter is not that deep so I wanted to know exactly what happens &quot;behind&quot; that &lt;em&gt;Origin&lt;/em&gt; entry in my dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T21:28:43.603" Title="How do linguists find the etymology?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1277" CreationDate="2012-01-14T16:36:18.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most English words have roots in Indo-European, either through original Germanic or through borrowed Latin, French, or Greek words. For all of the 19th Century, every linguist in the world (which principally meant Europe, in this case) was busily engaged in bringing &lt;em&gt;Ordnung&lt;/em&gt; to the prehistory of the Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the century since, this immense scholarly undertaking has been codified and turned into individual etymologies, which are normally looked up in a principal source, like Pokorny's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-European Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. To make sense of these, you need some linguistic training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are secondary sources available that skip a lot of details but still do the job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Buck's monumental &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226079376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is now available in paperback. It's organized like a thesaurus, in 21 chapters by topic (&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Parts of the Body&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;8.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Agriculture, Vegetation&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;15.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Sense Perception&lt;/em&gt;), and in each chapter about a hundred or two ideas -- like &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;4.20&lt;/strong&gt;), &lt;em&gt;rose&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;8.58&lt;/strong&gt;), &lt;em&gt;restore&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;11.23&lt;/strong&gt;), or &lt;em&gt;good smelling, fragrant&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;15.25&lt;/strong&gt;) -- are given with a list of synonyms and a discussion of the roots involved and the history of the words and concept in different languages. This is a fascinating book to dip into anywhere; Buck really meant his subtitle -- the first sentence in his &lt;em&gt;Preface&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;How do we get our ideas?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Watkins' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0618082506&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was compiled specifically for the words in the unabridged American Heritage dictionary, but they cite Pokorny and have illustrative examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-01-14T16:36:18.763" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1277" CreationDate="2012-01-14T16:41:31.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can probably guess, there are several ways to determine the etymology of words. Probably the most reliable is to look at the genetic relationships between languages - i.e. we know that a word comes from Latin or Greek because it is preserved in a similar form across several modern languages, and we have historical documents in the original language that also use this word (or a very similar form). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, a historical phonological process such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mutation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;I-mutation (umlaut)&lt;/a&gt; is observed for a group of words, which can help to prove that they came from the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of a word becomes more speculative the further back we go - we can be pretty sure that a word came from Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, or Greek, because these languages are (relatively) modern and well-documented. However, determining which &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;proto-language&lt;/a&gt; a word is descended from can be more controversial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, historical documentation and phonological similarity are the two main ways to determine a word's etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="550" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T18:48:24.760" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T18:48:24.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-14T18:04:29.473" Score="14" ViewCount="12208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Steven Pinker in &quot;The Language Instinct&quot; claims that there is strong psychological evidence for the existence of a sharp age cutoff for the ability to acquire a flawless foreign accent (I may dig up the exact reference, if needed). In other words, there is a fairly narrow age threshold (around 20-odd years) below which exposure to a foreign accent is more or less sufficient to acquire it and above which it's physiologically impossible. Has this phenomenon been confirmed or refuted by any systematic study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="673" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T18:45:46.870" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T01:55:09.223" Title="Evidence for age cutoff in foreign accent acquistion" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;critical-period&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2012-01-14T21:04:45.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native &quot;accent acquisition&quot; means successful acquisition of the language's phonology (i.e. the system of sounds in a language).  The cutoff you're referring to is the critical period hypothesis, which claims that there's a critical period (from birth up to around 7-ish or puberty, give or take) during which a person is capable of acquiring a language and achieving native-like competence, but after this critical period it becomes very difficult or impossible to achieve fully native-like competence.  It's thought that there isn't one single cutoff point though, but rather that it varies depending on what part of language you're talking about: phonology is thought to have the earliest cutoff age, while syntax is thought to have the latest (it's much more common to see non-native speakers with excellent syntax but errors in their phonology than vice versa).  The phonology is therefore most often the place where unsuccessful native-like acquisition most often manifests itself, in the form of a non-native accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to get to your question about evidence for this.  There is some evidence, but it's limited, and some of the proposed evidence has been criticized as not valid.  There are some cases of feral or deaf children/adults who grew up without a language (surpassing at least part of the critical period before they were discovered).  These people are often used as evidence that the difficulty with successfully acquiring a language (including phonology) is biologically linked to age.  It's rather clear that normal adults have trouble acquiring a new language and gaining native-like competence as well, but one could claim that that's perhaps because of interference caused by the language they already know.  With feral or non-lingual deaf people though, they don't know &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language (so there's clearly no interference from a native language), so some linguists claim that their lack of or limited success in acquiring a language must be linked to their age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A frequently mentioned case is that of Genie, a girl that was brought up in isolation by abusive parents and never learned a language as a child.  She was found at age 13, after which a linguist worked with her and she started to learn English.  She was never able to learn English beyond a rudimentary level.  Studies with deaf children who started learning a sign language later in their childhood (and having never learned the spoken language of their parents) have also shown a correlation with age and the level of their success in their acquisition of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of this evidence has been criticized.  For example, feral children such as Genie have also obviously suffered traumatic experiences that have affected them psychologically, which could be a factor in their unsuccessful language acquisition.  Cases of late learners of sign language provide better evidence because they were generally well cared for, despite lacking a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="667" LastActivityDate="2012-01-14T21:04:45.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1287" CreationDate="2012-01-14T23:54:55.143" Score="24" ViewCount="3217" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://apps.cla.umn.edu/directory/items/publication/301162.pdf&quot;&gt;The Elusive Butterfly. Iconicity in Language&lt;/a&gt; (2001), William O. Beeman draws attention to the fact that most languages do not share a root for their word for butterfly. In other words, there is a serious resistance against borrowing for this word among languages. He then points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The terms for butterfly have several things that generally unite them: they&#xA;  involve a degree of repetitious sound symbolism, (Hebrew &lt;em&gt;parpar&lt;/em&gt;; Italian&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;farfale&lt;/em&gt;) and they use visual and auditory cultural metaphors to express the&#xA;  concept. Inspecting the list of butterfly terms, it is easy to see how these&#xA;  principles play out in the construction of the terms. In each case, with the&#xA;  many cases of reiterated b's, p's, l's and f's (in widely separated language&#xA;  families) one can almost hear the gentle rustle of butterfly wings and see&#xA;  their repetitive motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages where this reiteration does not occur (as is the case for German &lt;em&gt;Schmetterling&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;butterfly&lt;/em&gt;), the name is coined after culture-specific assumptions and myths. According to the author, this is one of those linguistic puzzles that have &quot;lurked at the edges of scholarship&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any serious linguistic study been done on the topic ever since? If &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&quot;&gt;phonesthesia&lt;/a&gt; is really behind the phenomenon, why does it seem to occur &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; with that species &amp;ndash; and not, let's say, with cats, flowers, birds etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T06:43:51.640" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T21:41:21.973" Title="Why do languages not share a root for &quot;butterfly&quot;?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1532" CreationDate="2012-01-15T16:21:02.787" Score="13" ViewCount="2364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the question was raised &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1282/444&quot;&gt;why many languages do not share a root for 'butterfly'&lt;/a&gt;. When we look at the etymology of the English word, parallels are drawn to Dutch and German forms (OED):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OE buttorfleoge, ME buterfliȝe, ME boterfleȝe, -flye, botter-,&#xA;  bottir-, botyrflye... Etymology: &amp;lt; butter n.1 + fly n.1; with Old&#xA;  English buttorfléoge compare Dutch botervlieg , earlier botervlieghe ,&#xA;  modern German butterfliege . The reason of the name is unknown:&#xA;  Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which&#xA;  suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its&#xA;  excrement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these forms true cognates, or are there other explanations? Maybe involving loan translations and/or spreading of particular beliefs about butterflies - e.g. that 'witches transformed themselves into butterflies to steal cream' - or independent coinings (because butterflies are/were attracted to the butter/dairy producing process)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More forms (via &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butterfly#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English &lt;em&gt;butorflēoge&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;buttorflēoge&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;buterflēoge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middle English &lt;em&gt;buterflie&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;butturflye&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boterflye&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;botervliege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern German &lt;em&gt;Butterfliege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;boterschijte&lt;/em&gt; 'butter shitter'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middle High German &lt;em&gt;Molkendiep&lt;/em&gt; 'milk-thief'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern German &lt;em&gt;Molkendieb&lt;/em&gt; 'milk thief'; and Low German &lt;em&gt;Botterlicker&lt;/em&gt; 'butter licker'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These latter names are similar in meaning, but different in form - can that be taken as support that naming practices (i.e. cultural factors) were important in this case? (Similarly modern German &lt;em&gt;Schmetterling&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Schmetten 'cream').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T03:17:09.677" Title="Are English 'butterfly', German 'Butterfliege' and Dutch 'botervlieg' cognates?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2012-01-16T00:17:13.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons the feral children data are difficult to assess is that the brains of these children are often underdeveloped or have developed differently because they weren't stimulated with language at a young age. (For a more scientific explanation of the how of this, see Curtiss et al 544-545+.) As I mentioned in my comment to Askalon, while that data supports the idea that there is a critical period for acquiring a faculty for language, it doesn't say much about what factors influence how successful you will be in acquiring native-like competence in a second language. Although age is often speculated to be a factor in acquiring native competence, estimates on the cutoff have ranged from as low as 3-4 to as high as puberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Infant Studies of Phoneme Perception&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;An important question to keep in mind is, why should skill in acquiring a new phonological system decrease because of age? Most cognitive abilities get remarkably better with age, assuming typical development. Of course, there are obvious factors like motivation (generally not as high for L2 learners), phonological interference, or different method of acquisition (generally by analytical study and reflection than immersion for L2 learners), but the biggest theory seems to be currently that it is because, while young infants are like a phonological tabula rasa, after exposure to their native language, they narrow their focus to only pay attention to the contrasts which differentiate meaning -- what are traditionally called phonemes. They lose the ability to learn how to produce and differentiate any sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even very young children show decreased sensitivity to contrasts not present in their native language. For example, Hindi has many contrasts that English doesn't, for example differentiating aspirated and unaspirated stops like [pʰal] and [pal]. Werker and Tees (1984) trained infants to expect a reward (a little puppet show) when they heard aspirated syllables (this is called a conditioned head turn technique). Then, they tested them, playing aspirated and unaspirated stops and measuring how often the infants turned at the appropriate times. If they failed to turn after hearing an aspirated stop, this was counted as a miss, and if they turned after hearing an unaspirated sound, this was counted as a false alarm. At 6-8 months, infants scored well -- they had fewer than 2/10 misses or false alarms -- while those in the 10-12 month group did remarkably poorly -- approximately only 2/10 correct hits. I cannot find the citation, but I have heard vocalic categories are cemented even earlier. And keep in mind that this is before these infants are even babbling!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Immigrant and Foreign Language Learner Studies&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;There &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been studies looking at the acquisition of foreign language by people of varying ages, or by immigrants with varying age-of-arrival, and some (Johnson and Newport 1989) support the idea of a critical period and others (Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle 1978) do not. It is important to note that these studies often look at both knowledge of grammar and pronunciation and I have unfortunately not found any studies specifically related to accent -- though I will add them if I come across them. These studies generally rely on a battery of tests to assess grammatical competence (e.g. grammaticality judgments) and native speakers to rate the degree of the subjects' accent. In general, it seems that a critical period for phonology is much more supported than a critical period for grammar -- acquisition of grammar is much more linked to cognitive ability in adults, although in young children, cognitive ability has no effect (e.g. Flege et al 1999, DeKeyser 2000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;So yes, there does seem to be evidence for a cutoff in acquiring native-like phonology, from immigrant studies and SLA studies backed up by infant perception studies. What I would take from this, though, is that in addition to lost competence in implicit learning mechanisms, when we already have one language to work with, we will rely more on overt analysis and comparison to learn a foreign language. And while grammars are very good at detailing correct syntax and morphology, they are often abysmally poor and lazy at instructing learners in pronouncing and distinguishing foreign phonemes. (This is because they are often not written by linguists.) Add to that the fact that having an accent is not terribly stigmatized (but poor grammar is) and it's no surprise that L2 learners will often not develop a great accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/412222&quot;&gt;The Linguistic Development of Genie&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt; Author(s): Susan Curtiss, Victoria Fromkin,&#xA;Stephen Krashen, David Rigler and Marilyn Rigler &lt;br&gt; Source: Language, Vol. 50,&#xA;No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 528-554 Published by: Linguistic Society of&#xA;America Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kennethreeds.com/uploads/2/3/3/0/2330615/article.pdf&quot;&gt;The Critical Period for Language Acquisition: Evidence from Second&#xA;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt; Author(s): Catherine E. Snow and Marian&#xA;Hoefnagel-Höhle &lt;br&gt; Source: Child Development, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec.,&#xA;1978), pp. 1114-1128 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of&#xA;the Society for Research in Child Development&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010028589900030&quot;&gt;Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence&#xA;of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second&#xA;language&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt; Author(s): Jacqueline S Johnson, Elissa L Newport, &#xA;&lt;br&gt; Source: Cognitive Psychology, Volume 21, Issue 1, January 1989, Pages&#xA;60-99, ISSN 0010-0285, 10.1016/0010-0285(89)90003-0.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X99926384&quot;&gt;Age Constraints on Second-Language Acquisition&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt; Author(s): James Emil Flege, Grace H. Yeni-Komshian, Serena Liu &lt;br&gt; Source: Journal of Memory and Language,&#xA;Volume 41, Issue 1, July 1999, Pages 78-104&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=67465&quot;&gt;The Robustness of Critical Period Effects in Second Language Acquisition&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;br&gt; Author(s): Robert M. DeKeyser &lt;br&gt;  Source: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22 , 2000, pp 499-533&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-01-16T00:17:13.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2397" CreationDate="2012-01-16T00:52:43.320" Score="9" ViewCount="2309" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of software programs facilitating interlinear transcription (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/&quot;&gt;Toolbox&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://fieldworks.sil.org&quot;&gt;Fieldworks Language Explorer&lt;/a&gt;). There's also a number of tools that allow you to work on aligning parallel texts (mostly bitexts, but also some allowing multiple parallel texts) but it seems the options for small projects are much more limited and less user-friendly than is the case with tools for interlinear transcription. (Below I've included a short list of corpus/alignment tools that seem to be the most used / well-known). However, so far I have not found a program that allows an integrated approach, i.e. working on morphological analysis of a text that is already sentence-aligned. I'll first explain my use-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a collection of parallel texts in multiple languages, which are part of a religious document. Some of these languages are better documented than the one I'm focussing on, so while working on the morphological analysis of my target language, I would like to compare the equivalents of two of the other languages. Being able to do this simultaneously would also allow to fine-tune sentence-alignments. Having a fully annotated and sentence-aligned version is also a final goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen so far, however, sentence alignment / corpus tools take already annotated texts as input; you then carry out paragraph, sentence (and may also word) alignments. When this work is done you can start investigating your texts: concordances, looking at collocations, etc. In my case, however, I want to use the aligned texts precisely to create the annotated version of my target language text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally there would be a single program to support both tasks, although I don't expect this to be the case (I've read in several places that there's a lack of good tools to support individual linguists in corpus work). Still, parallel text alignment is often used, especially in large projects (likely with technical support?!), so there must be ways of dealing with this sort of problem. I would like to hear about workflows/setups/formats that would make this possible. I'm thinking along one of these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single program that supports both alignment and adding morphological annotation (one can always hope, right?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A workflow which allows adding layers of annotation to an already sentence-aligned parallel text. I suspect this to be possible, but: which combination of tools would make this possible? What formats can be used for import/export and how do you make sure the analysis layers match with the aligned sentences?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a last resort I could make a sentence alignment using any alignment tool and then use two programs simultaneously (check the translation equivalents in the alignment while working on the interlinear version in one of the usual tools - Toolbox etc.). But before I take this route, though, I'd want to know that none of the other options are feasible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How have you dealt with such a task? (or how would you?) (I'd also welcome references to articles dealing with this from a practical angle. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/307.abstract&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; presents a very accessible look on how one can work on preparing a digital version of an old manuscript (but it's concerned with a TEI-encoded manuscript edition, not with alignment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It seems there's not yet a truly standard / recommended format for parallel texts. The most recent general corpus standard is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xces.org&quot;&gt;XCES&lt;/a&gt;; TEI appears not not to be the most useful for this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol5/html/Banski01/BalisageVol5-Banski01.html&quot;&gt;at this time&lt;/a&gt;. I'll use anything that is supported by the tool I choose ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some common alignment/corpus tools:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/uplug/&quot;&gt;Uplug&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk/&quot;&gt;Gate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paraconc.com/&quot;&gt;ParaConc&lt;/a&gt; - This seems to be a user-friendly and often-used (at least, cited in articles) tool&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wanthalf.saga.cz/intertext&quot;&gt;InterText&lt;/a&gt; - This one looks interesting, very recent (and apparently not yet well-known)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T11:01:24.520" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T11:51:55.797" Title="How to work on annotating AND sentence-aligning parallel texts?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1282" CreationDate="2012-01-16T17:13:41.650" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beeman writes &quot;&lt;em&gt;Within the same linguistic family it is expected that a large proportion of linguistic material will be recognizably related due to the derivation of that material from a common linguistic ancestor.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and presents a list where he assumes this process did not take place: &quot;&lt;em&gt;These words seem to be coined anew by each &#xA;population group.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (1) The list presented in the article shows some interesting patterns, but let's take a look the words from the Indo-European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albanian: flutur&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bulgarian: peperuda&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Icelandic: fithrildi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Swedish: fjäril&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dutch: vlinder (?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Greek petalou'da&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Irish: feileacan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Latin: papilio&lt;br&gt;&#xA;French papillon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Italian: farfalla&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Rumanian: fluturi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Portuguese: borboleta&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Persian: parvaneh  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems these could all be plausibly demonstrated to have a common origin. Compare this entry of Latin &quot;pāpiliō&quot; (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Indo-European cognates: OPr. penpalo 'quail', OPr. pepelis , [pl.]&#xA;  pippalins 'bird', Lith. píepala , Latv. paîpala , Ru. pérepel , Cz.&#xA;  přepel , křepel 'quail', OIc. fífrildi , OE fīfealde , OHG fīfaltra ,&#xA;  MHG fīfalter 'butterfly' &amp;lt; PGm.*fīfalðrōn-.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pā -piliō can reflect reduplication of a root *pl- 'to&#xA;  fly, flutter', which has also served to build the word for 'quail' in&#xA;  BSl. and 'butterfly' in Gm. It seems unlikely that this root *pl- is a&#xA;  very early variant of PIE roots such as *pleu- 'to swim, wander',&#xA;  *pleh3- 'to swim, float', *pelh1- 'to swing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some forms that are conspicuously not cognates are butterfly, sommerfugl, Schmetterling, mariposa, but most of these languages used to have related forms (Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A statement like &quot;&lt;em&gt;The explanation for this phenomenon defies analysis using the traditional techniques of historical linguistics&lt;/em&gt;&quot; seem untenable in light of the IE languages. Why would sound symbolism be incompatible with regular sound change?&#xA;My guess is &quot;repetitious sound symbolism&quot; may well have been going on, but the more recent innovations would seem to indicate that this is not so productive anymore (given forms like sommerfugl, Schmetterling, butterfly), at least in European languages. It's certainly not supportive of the idea that &quot;&lt;em&gt;the linguistic realization for butterfly might be something welling up from the most basic cognitive creative processes&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. (I mean, sound symbolism is a valid field, but I don't see how 'butterfly' constitutes a special case, or that it's not amenable to historical-linguistic investigation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. But, adding to the list he presents, I have some more forms for 'butterfly' containing a labial and a liquid:&#xA;Quechua (most variants, including Cuzco, Ayacucho, Wanka, Bolivian, Imbabura, Ecuadorian): pillpintu or pilpintu. Also: chabul, kapila (Imbabura Quechua, Quichua); pillpash (Ancash Quechua).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Aymara: taparaku.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The author's use of the term 'borrowing' here is confusing, since in linguistics this is used to refer to horizontal, rather than vertical transmission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Michiel de Vaan. &quot;pāpiliō&quot; in: Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online. Edited by Alexander Lubotsky. Brill, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="8051" LastEditDate="2015-05-10T09:11:51.353" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T09:11:51.353" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-01-17T11:19:56.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A parallel text consists of a text placed alongside its translation (a bitext) or translations in multiple languages (multilingual parallel text). A collection of multiple parallel texts is a parallel corpus. Sentence-aligned parallel corpora are used in my areas of linguistic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T11:49:23.037" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T11:49:23.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-01-17T11:19:56.410" Score="0" Body="Text placed alongside its translation (a bitext) or translations in multiple languages." OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T11:50:45.780" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T11:50:45.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1292" CreationDate="2012-01-17T12:03:11.753" Score="7" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one online linguistics community, I read the statement that &lt;em&gt;&quot;voicing is not all-or-nothing and that it is a gradient scale.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; This got me thinking: is this statement true or false? I guess it may be true, but I have no idea how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If true, what about the &quot;relative degree of voicing&quot; between the consonants [z] and [d͡z]? Considering the definition of voicing, I would say that [z] is more voiced than [dz] because the vocal chords vibrate more in case of [z] than for [d͡z]. Is my opinion true? And also for what consonants do we see this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="626" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T19:24:56.940" LastActivityDate="2012-01-25T21:00:23.330" Title="Is voicing a gradient scale?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1275" CreationDate="2012-01-17T14:09:36.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Icelandic is less conservative than it used to be-- it has started taking loan words from English. There is some immigration where there used to be virtually none (before a hundred years ago)-- but as far as this hobbyist can tell, a population of Icelandic-as-a-second-language speakers hasn't done anything to simplify the grammar.  I predict the first distinction to go if immigration were to expand would be the difference between the definite article suffixes &quot;-inn&quot; &quot;-in&quot;, which for an adult learner like me is about impossible to hear. (And this change already happened in modern Swedish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't attribute any of Iceland's conservationism to nationalism because nationalism has only been an important factor in the last hundred years. If you enjoy Icelandic movies, set a good number of years ago, in &lt;em&gt;Seagull's Laughter&lt;/em&gt;, you will see that characters very clearly saw Danish and Denmark as the prestigious culture and language -- which certainly is not the case at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the other 900 years of Iceland's history, the isolating geography has been the driving force in the evolution of the language. No immigrants, not much trade, an imperial government that mostly ignored the island, a small island where people routinely would move to far corners of the island to intermix and marry, all led to a homogeneous language with language change, but only of the internal variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T03:12:48.677" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T03:12:48.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1290" CreationDate="2012-01-17T15:00:02.743" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voicing is gradient in the sense that in some languages, voicing onset time begins sooner than in others. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/018ISB4.PDF&quot;&gt;Spanish voiced stops are more voiced than their English counterparts&lt;/a&gt; (also see Lisker and Abramson 1964).  What English counts as a /b/, with little or no prevoicing of the actual stop segment, would be phonetically equivalent, on the basis of VOT, to a Spanish /p/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it also gradient that particular sounds are more voiced than others? I do not know for sure, but since the level of difficulty varies in voicing different segments, I'd say possibly. For example, it's very easy -- in fact the default -- to voice vowels, and relatively difficult to maintain voicing through the complete oral closure during a stop. If this intuition is true, it will be easier and thus more common for [z] to be fully prevoiced than [dz] or [dd].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T15:00:02.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2012-01-17T17:59:22.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is discussion of what we call &quot;ambiguity by design&quot; in the following paper (see especially Section 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kai von Fintel &amp;amp; Anthony S. Gillies. 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2011-mmr.pdf&quot;&gt;‘Might’ made right&lt;/a&gt;. In Andy Egan &amp;amp; Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality, 108–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various mechanisms for dealing with ambiguity (see the article by Massimo Poesio that we cite, and other contributions in the volume in which Poesio's article appeared), but other than our paper, I know of little formal work that looks at ambiguity as something that might have its benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-01-17T18:57:50.880" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T18:57:50.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2012-01-17T21:18:52.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you already seen this? &lt;strong&gt;Meaning and form of vagueness: a cross-linguistic perspective&lt;/strong&gt;, Workshop at the 45th Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE2012) &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/workshopvagueness2012/home&quot;&gt;https://sites.google.com/site/workshopvagueness2012/home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-01-17T21:18:52.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1301" CreationDate="2012-01-17T23:56:38.077" Score="7" ViewCount="1880" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to morphology a common example of a lexeme is &lt;em&gt;[dog, dogs]&lt;/em&gt; where &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; is the plural inflexion of the lemma &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; modified by the &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; suffix, marking plurality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I can accept that &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; are, morphologically speaking, the same word i.e. the same lexeme, it still bothers me because each has a different meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically speaking, can we say &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; are the same words? How does plurality relates to &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; semantically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; means multiple instances of a class &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or does it mean the multiplicity of a same instance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate the different possibilities here above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Suddenly several dogs, not one, were surrounding me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Suddenly several Benjamins, not one, were surrounding me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second example, I used a proper name to emphasize the individuality of the instance, which is multiplied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the former case, if &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; is understood as a class, then &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; could refer to multiple instances of that class as well as to multiple sub-classes of that same class. By the same logic, &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; (singular) could mean a class or an instance of that class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The dog will always be man's best companion.&amp;quot; (class)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;The dog entered my yard this morning.&amp;quot; (instance)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the semantic distinction between class and instance here a shortcoming of the English language? Could a hypothetical language have distinct words for &lt;em&gt;dog-class&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dog-class-single-instance&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dog-class-multiple-instances&lt;/em&gt;, etc.?&#xA;Another example which may suggest the distinction in English would be &lt;em&gt;fish&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;One fish&amp;quot;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Two fish&amp;quot;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Tuna's a large fish&amp;quot;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I breed several fishes&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does plurality mean semantically and how does it reconcile with plurality in morphology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could one say &lt;em&gt;forest&lt;/em&gt; is the semantical plural of &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How about words which have a plural that is morphologically entirely different from their singular (e.g. &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How about words which take a different meaning with a plural inflexion (e.g. F. &lt;em&gt;vacance [vacancy]&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vacances [holidays]&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide examples in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-01-28T00:28:54.733" Title="Is there a difference between plurality in semantics and in morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-18T01:27:16.517" Score="6" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;What&quot; is defined grammatically as an interrogative pronoun &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... used interrogatively in asking for the specification of an identity, quantity, quality, etc. (Wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In dictionaries, however, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is never defined semantically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I meditate on a word like &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt;, I inevitably associate images, feelings and experience with the word. Even if I think of &lt;em&gt;nothingness&lt;/em&gt; I somehow associate sensations and a mental image of emptiness (even if it may be wrong). When I contemplate the word &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, I associate the word with a &quot;person whose identity is unknown&quot;. When I think of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; however, in terms of pragmatics, it seems to suggest a request for more information to the interlocutor, but semantically, I cannot find any meaning to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence this odd question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the semantic meaning of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; (or its equivalent in any language)? Could the meaning of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; be defined as &quot;a thing unknown to me&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-18T18:16:57.457" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T18:16:57.457" Title="The meaning of &quot;what&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1297" CreationDate="2012-01-18T02:27:37.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that &quot;what&quot;, like other &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrogative_word&quot;&gt;interrogatives&lt;/a&gt;, is generally a &lt;a href=&quot;http://strazny.com/encyclopedia/sample-function-words.html&quot;&gt;function word&lt;/a&gt; -- synsemantic -- and has little to no intrinsic lexical meaning. Its meaning is always determined by context. So, the semantic meaning you're looking for probably isn't there!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T02:27:37.717" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1297" CreationDate="2012-01-18T18:06:23.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After all the comments above, there's not much left to say. I didn't really want to post it as an answer but the quotes from Bhat 2004 (since you wanted references) are too long for a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Interrogative proforms are used primarily for &lt;strong&gt;obtaining information&lt;/strong&gt; from the addressee &lt;strong&gt;regarding an unknown entity&lt;/strong&gt;, and hence the speaker can provide only a general indication of its identity. He is therefore forced to use a general term for referring to it. Even when interrogative pronouns have some of their extended uses like testing the knowledge of the addressee, there would still be a need to use a general term.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proforms [...] are general terms that are used for carrying out different functions like (i) identifying the participants of an event by locating them with reference to the spatio-temporal location of the speech act participants (or indicating the location, time, manner, etc. of the event itself in a similar fashion), (ii) referring back (or forward) to other expressions that occur in the utterance or in previous utterances, or (iii) indicating the scope of a question, negation, or exclamation. They are generally made up of two different elements of which one indicates the function of the preform (demonstrative, interrogative,&#xA;indefinite, or anaphoric (relative) ) and the other one denotes their category or&#xA;scope (person, thing, place, manner, quality, quantity, etc.).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;All proforms&lt;/strong&gt; share a set of general concepts and hence &lt;strong&gt;expressing a general concept&lt;/strong&gt; can be regarded as the first set of their main functions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T18:06:23.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2012-01-18T23:11:48.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try to answer the spirit of the title question, although I have no formal training semantics and thus cannot answer some of the more specific questions you pose in the body of the answer (I'm more interested in morphology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, there is often a disconnect between semantics and morphology, and it is something of a quixotic endeavor to try to fully reconcile them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you define plurality, there are cases in which the usual markers to denote it do not correspond to a concept of plural, as you've pointed out. For example, &quot;scissors&quot; is morphologically plural (this is evidenced by verb agreement:  the scissors &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; ...) but semantically refers only to one object (a case of plurale tantum). This is probably also what is happening with &lt;em&gt;vacances&lt;/em&gt;: the use of &lt;em&gt;vacance&lt;/em&gt; in the plural took on a specialized meaning which then became fossilized as a plurale tantum. These cases are problematic even if one accepts that there is a morphological &quot;zero&quot; plural in English which accounts for pairs of ambiguous plurality like deer-deer, fish-fish. Add in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=3&amp;amp;ved=0CDkQFjAC&amp;amp;url=http://www.sfu.ca/~jeffpell/Ling480.08/WisniewskiReallyFinal.doc&amp;amp;ei=dkkXT9CqLIXn0QG8sIz1Ag&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHBIGfxzChLHsQ97a-BmQBypa3TrA&amp;amp;sig2=BaTu2L1JBiYeFg6a3Ukfhg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;collective nouns&lt;/a&gt;, which are morphologically singular though they may be considered &quot;plurally&quot; semantically or even in other parts of the morphosyntax (e.g. &quot;My family is/are happy to see you&quot;) and what seems to be a (relatively) straightforward semantic notion of plurality becomes quite muddled in the morphology indeed! (Also, there is the phenomena of &lt;a href=&quot;http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~kbock/bockpubs/Bock%20Eberhard%20Cutting%20Meyer%20Schriefers%202001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plural attraction&lt;/a&gt;, in which a nearby plural noun can trigger plural agreement with the verb even though the full subject is singular, for example before proof-reading I had written: &quot;...there are cases in which the usual marker&lt;b&gt;s&lt;/b&gt; to denote &lt;b&gt;it&lt;/b&gt; do&lt;b&gt;es&lt;/b&gt;...&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These facts all point to the idea that plurality as a morphosyntactic relation is distinct from semantic plurality. There is usually a relationship between a semantically plural referent and plural verbal agreement or nominal morphology, but not always: morphological plurality can combine with semantic singularity (pluralia tantum) and morphological singularity of the noun can combine with plural semantics and even plural agreement (e.g. the case of &quot;family&quot;). How speakers mentally reconcile this, I do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if every discrete piece of morphology had only one semantic or syntactic meaning. In fact, analyzing words and then breaking them down into parts based on shared semantic contribution is, roughly speaking, how morphemes are analyzed. But the mapping is hardly one to one. As handy as semantics can be in analyzing morphemes, it has been a problem knowing how to reconcile cases in which the semantics and morphology don't match up. A great case are &quot;Priscianic&quot; or parasitic formations, in which one member of a paradigm seems to be formed not on the lexical root of the paradigm but instead on the stem of another member of the paradigm. In Latin, the future active participle in the vast majority of cases is based off of a stem identical to the stem of the supine and past (usually passive) participle. Obviously, future and active ≠ past and passive participle, and so how do you analyze the semantic status of the stem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-01-18T23:11:48.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2012-01-18T23:50:38.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can maybe answer some of the questions raised above. Although I probably won't provide the kinds of examples you are looking for. There are at least two ways that people go about representing the semantics of plurality, sets or sums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link 1983 introduces the notion of a sum to the ontology. So in addition to having individual objects in the ontology, eg. b which stands for the dog Bingo, and a, which stands for the dog Angel, you have sum, or plural individuals, which correspond, eg., to a+b, the sum of Bruno and Angel. So the singular word 'dog' would denote the set of singular dog individuals, {a, b}, and the plural form 'dogs' would denote then set of singular AND sum/plural dog individuals, {a, b, a+b}.(Well, some people would say it denotes the set of just plural/sum individuals, {a+b}, but this is a controversial issue.) Usually you would have more individuals in your model, eg. a singular noun could denote {a, b, c, d}, and the pluralized noun denotes {a, b, c, d, a+b, a+c, a+d, b+c, b+d, c+d, a+b+c, ..., a+b+c+d}. When you have what you are calling class-uses of the noun (Carlson called this a kind-use), eg. &quot;The bear is a carnivore&quot;, the noun is often formalized as denoting the maximal individual in the set, i.e., the individual that is the sum of all of the elements in the set, a+b+c+d. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for 'forest', I think most approaches would not say that it is the semantic plural of 'tree' (which would be 'trees') - but that there are singular individuals in our ontology which correspond to things that we would call a forest. So 'forest' would have a denotation like 'dog', but a corresponds to The Black Forest, b corresponds to The Haunted Forest, etc. There might be operations (like Landman's Group operator) that map plural individuals in the denotation of 'trees' to the singular individuals in the denotation of 'forest', but these are still represented as distinct individuals semantically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for (morphologically) irregular plurals, Link introduces this * notation. So the plural 'dogs' would be semantically represented as *dog, where this *-operator is what maps from a singular's denotation to a plural/sum denotation. This * need not be confined to the presence of a specific plural morpheme, however, so even forms which have suppletive plural forms would be represented with the *, i.e., the denotation of 'children' would be *child. So I think morphological plurality, in English at least, differs from semantic plurality. (And of course we have pluralia tantum like 'pants' and 'scissors', which really suggest against having no difference between morphological and semantic plurality, as noted by Knitter above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set approach, I am not as familiar with, but think it is one where the singular noun 'dog' again denotes the set of singular individual dogs {a, b}, but there is no new type of individual introduced to the ontology. Instead, the plural form 'dogs' denotes the set of all the possible sets of dogs (the power set), {{a}, {b}, {a, b}}. (again, I guess some people would argue that it is this set minus the singleton set members). (Schwarzschild 1996 is what I ought to have consulted previous to answering this, but...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under either approach to plurality, a singular and plural form have distinct denotations, so I don't think they would be considered the same word semantically (assuming that the notion of a semantic word would correspond to a denotation, although I don't know if that is what's usually done.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastEditorUserId="177" LastEditDate="2012-01-19T02:50:37.440" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T02:50:37.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1243" CreationDate="2012-01-19T14:38:56.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some more references, neither positive nor negative, just impartial analysis, that it exists and what issues there are to think about it.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vagueness, by Timothy Williamson, 1994. Starts with the Heap/Sorites paradox (1 grain is not a heap, 2 grains are not a heap..., if n grains are not a heap then n+1 still do not make a heap, therefore there are no heaps (an obvious contradiction). Eventually touches on multivalued logics and fuzzy sets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vagueness&lt;/a&gt;, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. particularly the last section , &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/#7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Is All Vagueness Linguistic?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarity of a convincing argument or in transfer of information has been a major desired goal  in Western philosophy forever, and departures from it have been seen primarily as negative. The use of amphiboly, deliberate or not, is usually seen as a fallacy or error. So I feel that any intended use of vagueness would be considered misleading and manipulative, and so not likely in a positive light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above references don't do their analyses from an obviously tendentious, negative direction, so they may suffice for you, even though they don't attempt to make something explicitly positive about vagueness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2012-01-19T14:38:56.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2012-01-21T20:16:38.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the existance of a cut off period is imposible to measure due to the large number of factors affecting language accuisition. As an English language teacher and a person who has very near native competence in a foreign language, I believe that older people are less likely to achieve native competence in pronunciation because to mimick a native accent perfectly, in the majority of cases, would necessitate presenting oneself as having a different identity to that you have been raised with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Children are less concerned about changing their identity than adults are and will more willingly mimick a native accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why they aquire native pronunciation much more efficiently - and the same is true for adults who are not shy or ashamed to assume a different identity - they also master foreign accents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="696" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T20:16:38.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2012-01-21T20:23:03.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of people who learn English, even to very high levels, still sound 'foreign' because they do not employ the rules of connected speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the following link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/connected-speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/connected-speech&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="696" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-21T20:41:55.493" LastActivityDate="2012-01-21T20:41:55.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-21T23:08:33.313" Score="3" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;With an addition of PIE relatives suffix *&lt;em&gt;-ter-&lt;/em&gt;, Eurasiatic *&lt;em&gt;ama&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;apa&lt;/em&gt; became Old PIE *&lt;em&gt;mā-ter-s&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;pa-ter-s&lt;/em&gt; (the final -s was later lost in late PIE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a difference: in Old PIE *&lt;em&gt;māters&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;a&quot; is a long vowel while in *&lt;em&gt;paters&lt;/em&gt; it is short (and Laryngalists even reconstruct *&lt;em&gt;ph&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;ters&lt;/em&gt;). So the question is how the two similar roots gave different vowels in PIE and how the Laryngealists are able to explain the conversion of a Eurasiatic vowel into a laryngeal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-01-21T23:47:57.530" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T01:01:00.353" Title="How it happened that evolution of &quot;mater&quot; and &quot;pater&quot; is different despite their similar origin?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-22T01:01:52.660" Score="3" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an R package and am in need of a discourse data set (a classroom transcript) that I can publicly include. Quantitative data sets are a dime a dozen but getting a hold of a classroom (school) transcript that can be cited and reused is proving to be very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a publicly available classroom transcript that I could use? Format does not matter (word, excel, handwritten, pdf etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question doesn't seem to full fir this stack exchange but I think it fits this stack exchange better than any others.  If it is inappropriate for here I apologize in advance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T13:16:23.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T14:01:35.223" Title="Finding a classroom transcript (for discourse analysis)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-22T06:19:31.783" Score="2" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formerly as I remember I saw somewhere *dhvor- (door, gate, yard, court) connected with the root *vert- (turn) in PIE. This is quite realistic and can be supported with similar Russian words &lt;em&gt;створка&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;stvorka&lt;/em&gt;) meaning leaf of a door or a gate or a small door, and &lt;em&gt;затвор&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;zatvor&lt;/em&gt;) (gate, lock), both originating from PIE *vert-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Starostin links *dhvor- to Eurasiatic *durV (Kartvelian: *dur-, Dravidian: *tūr-) meaning &quot;hole&quot;. This is quite strange given the difference in meaning and also that *durV strikingly resembles Russian &lt;em&gt;дыра&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dyra&lt;/em&gt;) also meaning &quot;hole&quot;. Vasmer links Russian &lt;em&gt;дыра&lt;/em&gt; with Lithuanian duríù, dùriau, dùrti (stab, make hole) but further etymology is uncertain. It is quite natural to suggest that this word is connected to Eurasiatic *durV instead of idea that *durV is connected to *dhvor-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T09:35:38.523" Title="Origin of *dhvor-" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1338" CreationDate="2012-01-22T09:14:27.763" Score="8" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I learned x-bar theory, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that trees were built top-down, from IP or CP to the VP and its complement, etc. However, as I am learning more about Minimalism (keep in mind I still know very, very little), I see that it posits the opposite direction for tree building. I don't really understand this, because it seems to me that we perceive speech and plan speech, well, from the beginning to the end. I have wondered that if the &quot;bottom up&quot; approach were true, shouldn't we expect to see more speech errors where people stumble on the beginning of the sentence and then finish executing it perfectly, because they have successfully planned the bottom part of the tree/sentence but haven't gotten to or correctly built the top? (Instead of the opposite which usually seems to happen: people start out creating a grammatical sentence and then have an error and the rest becomes incoherent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind, I do not know a lot about Minimalism and don't really want a Minimalism-centric answer. I am just wondering what general theoretical motivations are there for building directionality (for lack of a better term) -- or if syntacticians disregard this matter completely, why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T03:05:48.123" Title="What are the motivations for which direction syntactic trees are built in (top down or bottom up)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4689" CreationDate="2012-01-22T11:19:39.570" Score="3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikitionary shows a PIE word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/m%C3%A9h%E2%82%82t%C4%93r&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;*&lt;em&gt;méh₂tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but I never seen this word spelled with a laryngeal. There was a long vowel there but how is it correct to analyze it to be *&lt;em&gt;-eh₂-&lt;/em&gt; rather than just *&lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-01-22T12:41:09.577" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T20:53:42.073" Title="What is the evidence for laryngeal in *méh₂tēr?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1310" CreationDate="2012-01-22T18:00:48.670" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists who subscribe to the Laryngeal Theory (now it's the majority of researchers) don't have that problem because they don't reconstruct at the &quot;Eurasiastic&quot; level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A laryngeal is reconstructed when Vedic i corresponds to Greek alpha, epsilon, or omicron:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*ph2ter - Vedic pita, Greek pater&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the word &quot;mother&quot;, it's a bit different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*meh2ter -Latin mater&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, notice that in *ph2ter the last syllable is stressed, whereas in *meh2ter it's the first syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are waiting for your &quot;Eurasiastic&quot; explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-01-24T01:01:00.353" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T01:01:00.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1512" CreationDate="2012-01-22T23:59:50.757" Score="11" ViewCount="1409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for data that either confirm or refute the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the Renaissance (let's say, 14th to 16th centuries), Western European languages changed very rapidly. The pace of language change was much greater than before or after that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;: I have observed that in both English and Portuguese, the language used in literary texts changed significantly during that period. Chaucer's Middle English is very different from Shakespeare's Early Modern English, which, by contrast, can be reasonably well understood by today's English speakers. Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Vicente&quot;&gt;Gil Vicente&lt;/a&gt;'s Old Portuguese clearly contrasts with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C3%ADs_de_Cam%C3%B5es&quot;&gt;Luís de Camões&lt;/a&gt;'s Modern Portuguese. 21st century Portuguese speakers can understand Camões's language with almost no difficulty. This is just anecdotal evidence, so feel free to challenge these assumptions, as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: As Cerberus pointed out, it may not be a good idea to try to understand this phenomenon from a modern speaker's perspective. But I hope that historical linguists have an &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; way of measuring and evaluating the process of change in a certain period, as well as making comparisons between different historical periods. The anecdotal evidence above was intended merely to show the motivation for the question, so please don't get much distracted by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-01-28T12:20:30.023" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T19:40:45.343" Title="Did Western European languages change faster during the Renaissance?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1313" CreationDate="2012-01-23T01:23:32.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding top-down vs. bottom up, I am afraid there is no one answer here. Every theory has its own preference. One scholar &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aare.edu.au/05pap/kus05042.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite the widely accepted claim that listening requires an active process &#xA;  on the part of the learners, there are still intense debates as to how the oral input is processed. Some argue that the processing operates in purely bottom-up fashion, while others tend to the top-down one. To mediate these polarized claims, some scholars suggest that both are necessary so the cognitive processing works interactively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to distinguish between theoretical linguistics models and psycholinguistic models (not to mention computational models). They have different motivations. For example, linguists may be motivated by language change (sociological), while psycholinguists may be motivated by sentence processing strategies. These may suggest different top-down vs. bottom-up theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite book on linguistic theory and sentence processing is &quot;Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax&quot;, William O'Grady. It attempts to reduce the theory of grammar to the theory of sentence processing and how working memory stores information.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ogrady/EmergSynt.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;O'Grady (2001)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Traditional syntactic theory focuses its attention on the architecture of sentence structure, which is claimed to comply with a complex grammatical blueprint. In Principles and Parameters theory, for instance, well-formed sentences have a Deep Structure that satisfies the X-bar Schema and the &#xA;  Theta Criterion, a Surface Structure that complies with the Case Filter and the Binding &#xA;  Principles, a Logical Form that satisfies the Empty Category Principle, and so on. The &#xA;  question of how sentences with these properties are actually built in the course of &#xA;  language use is left to a theory of ‘carpentry’ that includes a different set of mechanisms &#xA;  and principles (parsing strategies, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I propose a different view. Put simply, there are no architects; there are only &#xA;  carpenters.  They design as they build, limited only by the materials available to them and &#xA;  by the need to complete their work as quickly and efficiently as possible. Indeed, drawing &#xA;  on the much more detailed proposals put forward in O’Grady (2005), I suggest that &#xA;  efficiency is  THE driving force behind the design and operation of the computational &#xA;  system for language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="435" LastEditorUserId="435" LastEditDate="2012-01-24T20:12:12.327" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T20:12:12.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-23T05:39:22.383" Score="10" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that the third person singular -s can be traced back to a lexical item before it became an inflection? I am trying to see if the theory of grammaticalization applies to its diachronic process. The cline of grammaticalization is as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexical item &gt; grammatical word &gt; clitic &gt; inflectional affix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="698" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T01:49:58.813" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T01:49:58.813" Title="Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1327" CreationDate="2012-01-23T15:15:36.377" Score="18" ViewCount="5160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently in my work I came across the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form&quot;&gt;Backus–Naur Form (BNF)&lt;/a&gt;, one way of describing a context-free grammar. Since then, I've been interested in learning how to deconstruct and parse not only computing lanuages but human ones as well. I realize there is a vast body of knowledge out there, but therein lies the problem. I don't know where to begin. To be clear, I'd like to understand the &lt;em&gt;methodology&lt;/em&gt; involved in taking an English sentence and determining the subjects, actions, modifiers, etc, but I have no prior experience in this field. Where is a good place to start learning? To keep the question non-subjective, canonical textbooks or pointers to introductory wiki's are encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T16:01:22.017" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T13:08:30.607" Title="Looking for a good beginners reference to learn computational linguistics" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2012-01-23T18:00:43.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE *&lt;em&gt;-ti&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; PGmc *&lt;em&gt;-di/-ði&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; AS -&lt;em&gt;t/-ð/-þ&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; ME &lt;em&gt;-th&lt;/em&gt; (Southern)/ &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; (Northern) -&gt; ModE &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Northern &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; came from the influence of Norse mediopassive &lt;em&gt;-sk&lt;/em&gt;; eventually the Northern usage became standard in Modern English. According to this, the form has been inflectional at least back to late PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-01-24T01:47:09.400" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T01:47:09.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-23T18:25:25.477" Score="9" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually it's fairly easy to know the spelling of words in Italian, given the very close relation between that and pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not always true. The word &lt;em&gt;musulmano&lt;/em&gt; in Italian (which means Muslim), has one &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;, but it's pronounced like it had two. There is actually an alternative spelling, &lt;em&gt;mussulmano&lt;/em&gt;, but I've personally never seen it used so much. Besides, it doesn't explain that much about what I'm wondering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dictionary states that the etymology is from the Arabian-Persian &lt;em&gt;muslimān&lt;/em&gt;. I'm sure we have other loanwords from the Arabic language, and as far as I can remember, none of them stands out like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian has a rule about the &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; in inter-vowel position, but my example is pronounced like an actual &lt;strong&gt;SS&lt;/strong&gt;. See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;casa - cassa;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dosi - dossi;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leso - lesso.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first examples, are not pronounced with a voiced &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;, but they are still distinguishable from the second ones, not only because in actual language not everyone pronounces it voiceless, but also because it's less &lt;em&gt;stressed&lt;/em&gt; if compared to the second examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are, what is this phenomenon called (if it is)? And why did it happened, apparently, to this word only? Or are there other examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the reason is that earlier it was written as &quot;mussulmano&quot;, then that changed and pronunciation stayed the same, but I'd like to know if this guess is confirmed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2013-12-31T02:09:00.163" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T02:09:00.163" Title="What is this phenomenon called, and is it the only occurrence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2012-01-23T20:52:18.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basque has a definite article that could be taken as special in some ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-It is an affix&#xA;-There are no nude Basque NPs, and the affix definte article is added to the NP is no other determiner or quantifier appears&#xA;-The so-called definite article also appears in predicates, i.e. in phrases with no referential value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="700" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T20:52:18.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2012-01-23T20:59:21.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basque&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gazta    asko             jan    dut&#xA;cheese   nude quantifier  eat    AUX-IT-I&#xA;'I eat a lot of cheese'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gizon   asko               ikusi ditut&#xA;man     nude quantifier    see   AUX-THEM-I&#xA;'I saw a lot of men'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="700" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T20:59:21.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-23T21:07:48.310" Score="7" ViewCount="1178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound morphemes), and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Derivationally agglutinative with roots in deriving new words. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I haven't been able to find a clear answer on is whether PIE was productively agglutinative with roots, as is found in many modern Germanic languages (i.e. German). Is this still an unanswered question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-23T12:16:06.537" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T18:02:10.207" Title="Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="224" CreationDate="2012-01-23T22:43:16.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, &lt;strong&gt;the count vs. mass distinction is too simplistic&lt;/strong&gt; - see &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.16.2.02god&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Goddard 2009&lt;/a&gt;, who has eighteen types of just concrete nouns, such as plural mass nouns (guts), plural names of dual objects (scissors), singular words for classes of unlike things (furniture) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics approach. He used two semantic features, [bounded] and [internal structure]. An entity is bounded iff it is indivisible (like a boy) and not additive (unlike water). If an entity is made up of separate individuals, then it has [+internal structure].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you end up having four possible combinations of those two features (please feel free to format it into a table):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+bounded, +i: groups (a team, a committee)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+bounded, -i: individuals (a person)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-bounded, +i: aggregates (committees)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-bounded, -i: substances (water)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also like Anna Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. The main tenet of that approach is that in different languages (and cultures) the boundaries for countability are different. For example, Russian 'gorox&quot; (pea) is a mass noun whereas English &quot;peas&quot; is countable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-01-23T22:43:16.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-01-23T23:09:54.053" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book accompanying the open-source Natural Language Toolkit, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/book&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural Language Processing with Python --- Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, is available as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://isbndb.com/x/book/natural_language_processing_with_python/buy/isbn/amazon.html&quot;&gt;paper book&lt;/a&gt; and free online, and is both a good introduction to computational linguistics and programing with the Python language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1554&quot;&gt;Language Log review&lt;/a&gt; of the book begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This book is here to help you get your&#xA;  job done.&quot; I love that line (from the&#xA;  preface). It captures the spirit of the&#xA;  book. Right from the start, readers/&#xA;  users get to do advanced things with&#xA;  large corpora, including information- rich visualizations and sophisticated&#xA;  theory implementation. If you've&#xA;  started to see that your research would&#xA;  benefit from some computational&#xA;  power, but you have limited (or no)&#xA;  programming experience, don't despair — install NLTK and its data sets (it's a snap), then work through this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="702" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2012-01-27T15:50:57.270" LastActivityDate="2012-01-27T15:50:57.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1331" CreationDate="2012-01-24T12:50:39.080" Score="6" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;In examining Chol's &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1974.12.132.87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonology&lt;/a&gt;, I came across the (old?) cents symbol ¢ (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_%28currency%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;with a slanted line&lt;/a&gt;) as a phoneme symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to track what it corresponds to in IPA terms, but I suspect it's the aspirated affricate [t͡sʰ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone familiar with this symbol to confirm or discard that it's such affricate in IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="705" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T03:15:47.047" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T03:15:47.047" Title="Cents symbol in phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1333" CreationDate="2012-01-24T13:52:36.203" Score="2" ViewCount="2817" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the 1981 film, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_%28film%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quest For Fire&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, the late linguist, Anthony Burgess, constructed a language called Ulam (or at least that was the tribe's name).  Given that I'm helping a friend who's an anthropology professor with a project for the classroom — we want to understand the roots (conjectural or not) of pre-Indo-European language and overlay it with a plausible and constructed syntax.  Here are some words in Ulam from the Quest for Fire that I've collected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;atra - the fire sees me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;atrom - I see the fire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;atrois - I am surrounded by many fires&lt;br&gt;&#xA;buuuunan - I love the moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;buuuunu - the moon loves me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;aga - water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;atra hidoop - fire lives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;bratt - brother&lt;br&gt;&#xA;djan vitrash - go quickly, action!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ehyu - grief&lt;br&gt;&#xA;kharrd - the heat/soul of a group&lt;br&gt;&#xA;muuv - breast&lt;br&gt;&#xA;nya Ulam - property of the Ulam tribe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;oowa - alarm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;otim tir preng - a good hunt today&lt;br&gt;&#xA;smerdolor - pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;taka taka taka - aggression&lt;br&gt;&#xA;tir hor ro - horse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;tir meg - mammoth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;vir - men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;virku - women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, some of these words have Indo-European roots and some are simply made-up so can someone provide a better example or source material that we may use to research a proto-European language that might have existed 80,000 years ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="706" LastEditorUserId="706" LastEditDate="2012-01-26T00:17:56.020" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T15:56:47.683" Title="What did people really speak in Europe around the time and place of the setting of the movie 'the quest for fire&quot;?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1322" CreationDate="2012-01-24T17:02:12.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_sorda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;s sorda, o s aspra&lt;/a&gt;. Musulmano/mussulmano is given as an example in the wikipedia article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In posizione intervocalica, dunque, mentre la sonora /z/ si può&#xA;  considerare la regola, si ha la sorda /s/ soltanto in un numero&#xA;  relativamente ristretto di terminazioni e di parole: ...In quelle&#xA;  parole che hanno una variante con la doppia -s-: &lt;strong&gt;musulmano (anche&#xA;  mussulmano)&lt;/strong&gt;, Albisola (anche Albissola), ecc.;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In intervocalic position, therefore, while the sound /z/ can be considered&#xA;  the rule, there can be found /s/ in a relatively small number&#xA;  of terms and words: ...In those words that have a variant with double -s: &#xA;  musulmano/mussulamano, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T17:02:12.857" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1328" CreationDate="2012-01-24T17:32:32.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=PHb7ug_U_O0C&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pullum and Ladusaw&lt;/a&gt; say that symbol (they call it a &quot;slashed C&quot;) represents a voiceless alveolar or dental (centrally released) affricate. The usual IPA notation is [ts] (Pullum and Ladusaw 1996, p. 29).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T17:32:32.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1329" CreationDate="2012-01-24T21:38:34.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I'm re-reading your question. If you're trying to help your Anthropology Prof friend, then I don't understand what his goal is.  Conlangs are either used for recreational or fiction writing goals.  There is some overlap with science, but not a lot. Now the intersection of anthropology and PIE is interesting-- the gist is that culture affects language (which is less controversial than the idea that language affects culture), so a society with a word for sheep, probably at least has seen a sheep and maybe considers it important enough to have a simple word for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Horse, The Wheel and Language is a reasonably accessible book on this approach of linking the evidence of PIE with the archeological record in trying to say something about Old Europe.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0691058873&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/0691058873&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a dictionary to proto-indo european: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words in &quot;Quest for Fire&quot; have no relationship to PIE except that Burgess may have been influenced by modern IE languages in picking his words (&quot;vir&quot; and &quot;bratt&quot; especially).  Anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe 50,000 years ago and either arrived right after the collapse of Neanderthal life or helped finish it off. Your 80,000 number is solidly in the time of Neanderthals in Europe-- you'll get different estimates from different archaeologists and the time line has been evolving rapidly over the last few decades.  In the movie, the language for which you provide the wordlist is the Neanderthal langauge. At best, it appears that a small number of Neanderthals bred with modern humans (as there appear to be Neanderthal genes in modern Europeans), but I doubt any substrate language would have persisted.  We aren't even sure if Neanderthals could talk (I think they did, but there aren't a lot of slam dunk pieces of evidence for it). In any case, PIE wasn't spoken in Europe until ~6000 years ago (tops!) before that, according to Anthony, PIE was a language spoken in the south of the Ukraine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...overlay it with a plausible and constructed syntax...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the realm of pure fiction and art. There are several attempts in the origin of language to speculate on what plausibly could have come first-- for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0809016478&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Adam's Tongue&lt;/a&gt;, there is a discussion about if the earliest syntax was non-recursive &quot;beads on a string&quot; or if it used recursion and would be diagrammed with tree diagrams that look something like the sentence diagrams you saw in English class.  But that is a long way from putting together a specific list of rules and saying, this is how they would have formed sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2012-01-24T21:38:34.523" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-01-25T04:57:18.050" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed with Hugo, the NLTK book is a great free resource for basics in natural language processing and accompanying coding examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add onto the list, the two textbooks assigned by my Computational Linguistics program at University Washington were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Hinrich Schütze &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Speech and Language Processing&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would definitely say they're considered two of the canonical NLP textbooks.  But, since they are textbooks, they are generally more advanced and cover more topics in computational linguistics than the NLTK book.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="710" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T15:05:29.830" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T15:05:29.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1290" CreationDate="2012-01-25T21:00:23.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Knitter's answer, many Phonologists have considered the relative voicing of sounds, especially when trying to make sense of the syllabification of segments. The precise meaning of &quot;voicing&quot; is important here: are we simply asking whether the vocal chords are vibrating? If we are, then voicing is a binary (yes/no) distinction. For this reason, Phonologists usually use the term &lt;em&gt;sonority&lt;/em&gt; to refer to the relative 'strength' of voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great place to start reading about this is pp. 38-64 in Ferdinand de Saussure's &quot;Course in General Linguistics&quot;. We have the sense that voicing is not an &quot;all or nothing&quot; phenomenon, and de Saussure explains this nicely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sonority hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; is a well-established method of ranking the relative sonority of sounds, which is closely related to voicing. This is central to modern phonology, check out John Goldsmith's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm//Papers/syllables.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syllable&lt;/a&gt;&quot; for a great overview of modern thought on this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="550" LastActivityDate="2012-01-25T21:00:23.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-01-26T15:19:14.870" Score="5" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;As indicated in the answers to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/824/111&quot;&gt;Is it common to use the minor third for calling someone?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;many European languages&quot; use this type of chanted falling contour, but the examples all come from English, German and French. Working on Romance Languages, I am interested in any information about the usage of this contour in Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="716" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T17:13:52.937" Title="Are there any papers about the calling contour (minor third, vocative chant) in Italian?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="211" CreationDate="2012-01-27T16:40:21.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Aylin Kuntay in Koç University has started a project to build the corpus of Turkish babies. The project has not been completed so the corpus is not available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-13T21:18:18.990" LastActivityDate="2012-02-13T21:18:18.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1313" CreationDate="2012-01-28T00:13:10.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, talk of syntactic &lt;em&gt;derivations&lt;/em&gt; as top-down versus bottom-up is understood to be purely metaphorical:  the theory of grammar aims to explain static knowledge, not dynamic process. A forthcoming paper considers &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/~shevaun/publications/Phillips&amp;amp;Lewis_2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;how to understand directionality of derivation for syntactic &lt;em&gt;processing&lt;/em&gt; (and what that may imply for an adequate theory of syntactic &lt;em&gt;competence&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;. From the introduction: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generative grammars are typically framed as theories of speakers’&#xA;  task‐independent knowledge of their language, and these are understood&#xA;  to be distinct from theories of how specific communicative tasks might&#xA;  put that knowledge to use. [...] In the most popular current version&#xA;  of the derivational approach, derivations proceed ‘upwards’, starting&#xA;  from the most deeply embedded terminal elements in the sentence, which&#xA;  are often towards the right of a sentence (e.g., Chomsky, 1995;&#xA;  Carnie, 2006). Such derivations tend to proceed in a right‐to‐left&#xA;  order, which is probably the opposite of the order in which sentences&#xA;  are assembled in everyday tasks such as speaking and understanding.&#xA;  ... [yet there] are a number of recent proposals that various&#xA;  linguistic phenomena can be better understood in terms of derivations&#xA;  that incrementally assemble structures in a (roughly) left‐to‐right&#xA;  order. [...] it is hard to avoid the question of whether it is&#xA;  mere coincidence that left‐to‐right derivations track the order in&#xA;  which sentences are spoken and understood. It is also natural to ask&#xA;  how left‐to‐right derivations impact the psychological commitments of&#xA;  grammatical theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, whether speech error data is relevant to the question of derivational order in syntax depends on just how much explanation syntactic theory owes to a theory of linguistic performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="178" LastEditDate="2012-02-01T03:05:48.123" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T03:05:48.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2012-01-28T00:28:54.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main question you're asking has been addressed directly in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=3&amp;amp;ved=0CDQQFjAC&amp;amp;url=http://linguistics.concordia.ca/bale/pdfs/Morphology%2520paper.pdf&amp;amp;ei=10AjT6vYGqbX0QGNuKWFCQ&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNF3mYspkxXGTX9i6efTWUD4uy-VWA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a recent paper on the relationship between morphological and semantic markedness&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2012-01-28T00:28:54.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1345" CreationDate="2012-01-28T11:10:55.540" Score="21" ViewCount="2983" Body="&lt;p&gt;While chatting with a polish penpal, I've discovered that in Polish the expression for &quot;good morning/good day/hello/good afternoon&quot; varies if compared to the other Slavic languages; later I saw that also Belarusian has the same behavior: &lt;em&gt;they both invert the structure of the expression&lt;/em&gt;, see the table below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V3tRM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason for this and is this reason known? I doubt it's a matter of coincidence, but I can't exclude it completely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: The above are not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the Slavic languages. They include the ones I could find the expressions for, and some extra ones that I failed to do that. They have not been translated with Google translate, but they have been taken from resources to learn those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-29T10:21:47.607" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T15:43:18.987" Title="Why do Polish and Belarusian have an atypical greeting if compared to other Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2012-01-29T04:26:25.533" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romanian does, in fact, have a reflex of Latin &lt;em&gt;ambulāre&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;a umbla&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to walk&quot;. (There are reflexes of &lt;em&gt;ire&lt;/em&gt; as well, though it's become a future modal) I've often found that the familiar roots from other Romance languages do indeed exist in Romanian, though as in this case they'll have slightly different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for this are Romanian's relative isolation from other Romance languages, and its cultural domination by Slavic, Greek, and Hungarian neighbors for most of its history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-10-03T13:27:11.667" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T13:27:11.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1343" CreationDate="2012-01-29T05:46:32.683" Score="3" ViewCount="1321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we say that words like 'cot' and 'cat' morphologically similar? I understand morphology as different forms of a particular word, eg. swim, swam, swimming, so my definition of morphology does not cover words like 'cot' and 'cat' because they are totally different words. How should I call such words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More example: 'hat'-'mat', 'task'-'talk', etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="725" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-01-29T10:19:45.613" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T11:58:22.017" Title="Are 'cot' and 'cat' morphologically similar?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2012-01-29T06:10:39.797" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'd call them phonetically similar, not morphologically similar.  They just have similar sounds.  If two words differ in only one sound (like &quot;cot&quot; and &quot;cat&quot;), then you can call them a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair&quot;&gt;minimal pair&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. a pair of words that differ in only one phonological element).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="667" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-01-29T15:41:32.030" LastActivityDate="2012-01-29T15:41:32.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2012-01-29T06:28:40.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no linguistics expert, but I would say that the fact that Japanese particles combine: では、にも、への etc. points towards particles being an analytic construct rather than a morphological construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that the grammatical role particles come after the whole noun phrase, not (necessarily) the noun. Usually the noun phrase ends with the main noun, but there are exceptions, e.g. 彼だけが知っている秘密, a secret that only he knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2012-01-29T15:00:10.547" LastActivityDate="2012-01-29T15:00:10.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2012-01-29T10:33:07.940" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Belarusian &quot;добры дзень&quot; produces 181,000 hits, &quot;дзень добры&quot; only 38,000. I do not speak Belarusian fluently, but it seems to me that &quot;добры дзень&quot; is rather unmarked. For Polish, though, &lt;strike&gt;the pattern you spotted holds: over 16 million ghits for &quot;dzień dobry&quot;, and only 3 million for &quot;dobry dzień&quot;&lt;/strike&gt; the greeting is indeed invariably &quot;dzień dobry&quot;. &quot;Dobry dzień&quot;, on the other hand, will almost always be the order chosen when the phrase is not a greeting, as in &quot;to był dobry dzień,&quot; which means &quot;this was a good day.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I do not think the reason for such an inversion is known. Slavic languages have free word order, and inversion would indeed be grammatical. I am a native speaker of Russian, and I can tell that, while &quot;добрый день&quot; is unmarked, &quot;день добрый&quot; would be marked only slightly, if at all. It sounds a bit more cheerful to me, but the difference is indeed marginal. Google produces 41 mil hits for &quot;добрый день&quot; and 2.7 mil hits for &quot;день добрый&quot;, indicating that the former wording is customary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also notable that Polish expression for good afternoon is invariably &quot;dobry wieczór&quot;. Google search also reveals same huge skew (more than ×100 times!) towards &quot;добрый вечер&quot; versus &quot;вечер добрый&quot; for Russian, but again, if someone would say the latter to me I would not perceive that as ungrammatical or particularly strange at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Ukrainian form that you list is not exactly parallel to others. You can say &quot;добрый динь&quot; which, as with other expressions in your list, is in the nominative case. You can also say &quot;доброго дня&quot; in both Russian and Ukrainian. This is in the genitive form, taken by the  object to verbs of wishing, and therefore implies a missing verb: &lt;em&gt;[I wish you] good day&lt;/em&gt;. I think that the genitive form is more customary for Ukrainian, while it is uncommon in Russian, and much more likely to be used when bidding farewell than greeting someone. So you may think Ukrainian is also &quot;atypical&quot; in this regard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="674" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T10:08:11.087" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T10:08:11.087" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2012-01-29T15:54:48.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polish also has an interesting &quot;good night&quot;: &lt;em&gt;dobranoc&lt;/em&gt;, a frozen expression written and pronounced as one word You can tell that &lt;em&gt;dobranoc&lt;/em&gt; is a single word because the stress patterns like one word, not two: /dɔ'branɔʦ̑/ vs / 'dɔbra 'nɔʦ̑/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noc dobra is not found, although dobrej nocy sometimes is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-01-29T15:54:48.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2012-02-01T01:55:34.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Orthographically similar' might be another term you can use, meaning 'spelled similarly'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'talk' and 'task' might be similar orthographically, but are not as close phonetically as the other pairs. They differ not only on the vowel sounds, but also on the number of consonant sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T01:55:34.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2012-02-01T06:26:13.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Croatian, there are definite and indefinite forms of adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Konj je dobar =The/A horse is good]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dobar&lt;/em&gt; konj =  a good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dobri&lt;/em&gt;   konj  =  the good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dobar dan = a nice day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dobri dan = the nice day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dobar dan!&lt;/em&gt; = Good afternoon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Neka ti je dobar dan!&lt;/em&gt; = Have a nice day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T06:26:13.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1240" CreationDate="2012-02-01T07:22:39.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sociolinguistically, many talk of diglossia when the spoken language of middle and upper classes is very different from the language used in formal writing: Tamil, Arabic, Kannada, Sinhalese are the most given examples, as for Western languages: Czech, Swiss German, Belgian Dutch, Greek in Cyprus and Portuguese in Brazil have been mentioned in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When languages were standardized back in the 19th century, Czechs chose a very conservative form as their standard language (based on the 17th century literary usage). The same thing happened in Brazil, the elites preferred Continental Portuguese with some orthographic differences to the way most Brazilians spoke. With diglossia, you get a high level of linguistic insecurity and ''Schizoglossia'' (see the scandal from last year,with a Brazilian textbook Por uma Vida Melhor which revived the old tensions of two languages of Brazil: ''spoken Brazilian and written Portuguese'' (described as such by Mário de Andrade in his novel ''Macunaíma'' 100 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tension in Norway is not between Bokmål and Nynorsk, but between&#xA;a conservative Bokmål (Danonorwegian), and a modern Bokmål (called ''radical'').&#xA;The differences divide even the city of Oslo in two parts: West Oslo (which is the center of Dano-Norwegian) and East Oslo (where dialect close to ''radical'' Bokmål are spoken).&#xA;Even though it's perfectly acceptable to use a feminine gender in Bokmål, some people think treating female nouns as masculine nouns gives a text a more sophisticated feel, so Danish-made usage is prestigious, the same thing happens in Brazil, while most Brazilians would say: Me chamo, Se diz, Te ver, Chegar em... most of them think that usage imported from Portugal looks more sophisticated in writing: Chamo-me, diz-se, ver-te, chegar a...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Argentinian Spanish is quite opposite to Brazilian Portuguese. The difference between the spoken and the written language is minimal. Argentinians achieved this by upgrading their colloquial usage to the status of the national standard. No Argentinians say ''We speak Spanish so incorrectly''.  They accepted voseo, different verbal usage, vocabulary as parts of their identity. In Brazil, you still see Portuguese professors making big bucks selling books like ''Como evitar erros'' (how to avoid mistakes) or ''Fale melhor sua língua'' (speak your language better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cut a long story short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if the language used in movies, sitcoms, soap operas is very different from the language used in narration of novels, magazines, newspapers, then there is something fishy and there may be a diglossish situation. In Mexican soap operas the language used is standard Mexican Spanish [no grammar errors], in Argentinian soap operas the language used is standard Argentinian Spanish [no grammar errors], but in Brazilian soap operas, the language used is NOT standard Brazilian Portuguese, but a substandard Brazilian Portuguese: you can't write things like: ME CHAMO, VI ELE, CHEGAR NO RIO, FUI NA PRAIA, ENTRE EU E VOCÊ, VOCÊ SABE QUE TE AMO in a magazine.&#xA;Brazilian elites benefit from the gap between the written and the spoken language, because it's one of the way they can control the society. Were colloquial forms fully accepted as a part of the new standard language (as it's been happening in Argentina), Portuguese language would no longer be one of the most difficult subjects in university entrance process, and virtually everyone could get enrolled (for the time being, the elites want only students from private high schools to enter Universities, that's why they benefit from the diglossia and like the status quo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't really seen ''A grammar of spoken Spanish'' or ''A grammar of spoken Slovak'' but I've seen ''A grammar of spoken Brazilian Portuguese'' and ''A grammar of spoken Tamil''...You don't normally get books like these unless there is a huge gap between the written and spoken grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T07:22:39.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="255" CreationDate="2012-02-01T07:35:15.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For European Spanish:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Gran diccionario de uso del español actual&#xA;Based on Cumbre corpus.&#xA;SGEL. 2005&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For Argentinian Spanish:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Diccionario integral del español de la Argentina&#xA;VOZ ACTIVA/Clarin&#xA;available online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.clarin.com/diccionario&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.clarin.com/diccionario&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For Brazilian Portuguese:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dicionário de usos do Português do Brasil by Francisco S. Borba; 2002&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dicionário UNESP by the same author; 2005&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For Italian:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_dizionario_della_lingua_italiana_De_Mauro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_dizionario_della_lingua_italiana_De_Mauro&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As for English&lt;/em&gt;, your best bet is a combination of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;''Oxford Dictionary of English'', either the British variant (NOAD) or the American one (NODE); it lists the most frequent meaning first, and should not be confused with ''Oxford English Dictionary'' which lists meanings as they appeared in the history of the English language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A frequency Dictionary; I bought myself a 20 000 Frequency list (with synonyms and collocates) from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good pronunciation dictionary (I like the Longman one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastEditorUserId="732" LastEditDate="2012-02-01T07:44:34.370" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T07:44:34.370" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-01T17:30:51.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1342" CreationDate="2012-02-01T10:54:55.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you don't understand the difference between Morphology and Phonology and therefore, the difference between &lt;strong&gt;morphemes&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;phonemes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic definition for &lt;strong&gt;morpheme&lt;/strong&gt; is basically this one: &lt;em&gt;&quot;the smallest element in a word or in a statement that carries meaning and that cannot be further split (into smaller parts)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example this word in italian :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZSR3J.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning is roughly &lt;em&gt;&quot;to turn nasty&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. But let's focus on the numbers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prefix&lt;/strong&gt;: The prefix &lt;strong&gt;in-&lt;/strong&gt; in italian makes a verb out of a noun or an adjective;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Root&lt;/strong&gt;: The root carries the basic meaning of the word, in this case a verb; &lt;em&gt;vipera&lt;/em&gt; in italian is a snake, the viper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Verb Ending&lt;/strong&gt;: This tells us without ambiguity that it's a verb, belonging to the third conjugation (Italian has 3 infinite endings: -are, -ere, -ire. This one is the third one).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reflexive particle&lt;/strong&gt;: This tells us that the action of the verb affects the subject itself. In other words, it's the subject that turns nasty, and not someone else because of the subject's action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what a morpheme is. There is still a lot to say about it, but I think this is enough to give you a basic understanding. In English a morpheme is the &lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt; for the third singular person of each verb. It tells you it's the &quot;third person singular&quot;; same goes with &lt;strong&gt;-ed&lt;/strong&gt; which forms the past forms for the regular verbs in English. But what is a phoneme instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To better explain what is a phoneme, let's compare it to a &lt;strong&gt;phone&lt;/strong&gt;. A phone is a sound in a given language, it carries no meaning. A phoneme instead, carries meaning, and it's useful to find &lt;em&gt;minimal pairs&lt;/em&gt; as in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; differ for one phoneme, not one phone, because that different sound, brings &lt;em&gt;different meaning&lt;/em&gt;. As in &quot;lip&quot; and &quot;rip&quot;. You just changed one sound, from /l/ to /r/, but this was enough to change the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the standard pronunciation of a word and its slang pronunciation. They differ, but the word won't change its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kept it fairly simple and standard without going into details, but I hope it helps you give a better grasp. Just remember that it doesn't end here, if you want to go further, check the links for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonemes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphemes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-01T11:58:22.017" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T11:58:22.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="255" CreationDate="2012-02-01T16:08:05.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwds.de/?qu=linguistik&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS)&lt;/a&gt; for German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T20:21:54.217" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T20:21:54.217" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-02-01T17:30:51.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-01T19:12:39.960" Score="13" ViewCount="2373" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swedish has quite a peculiarity that I haven't found (yet) in other languages. There are some spellings that are pronounced all the same way. Currently the number of these spellings is disputed, but it seems that a minimum list was compiled. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet#Spellings_for_the_sje-phoneme_.2F.C9.A7.2F&quot;&gt;this section&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Swedish Alphabet&lt;/em&gt; wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Garlén (1988) gives a list of 22 spellings (⟨ch⟩, ⟨che⟩, ⟨g⟩, ⟨ge⟩, ⟨gi⟩, ⟨ige⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨je⟩, ⟨sc⟩, ⟨sch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨shi⟩, ⟨si⟩, ⟨sj⟩, ⟨sk⟩, ⟨skj⟩, ⟨ssi⟩, ⟨ssj⟩, ⟨stg⟩, ⟨sti⟩, ⟨stj, ⟨ti⟩), but many of them are confined to only a few words, often loan words, and all of them can correspond to other sounds or sound sequences as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But like I said others say the list is much longer. Not only the number is under a dispute, however, since also the classification of the sound itself is &quot;under fire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal-velar_fricative&quot;&gt;Sj-sound&lt;/a&gt;, represented with the IPA /ɧ/, has many classifications. From the same article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The International Phonetic Association describes [ɧ] as &quot;simultaneous [ʃ] and [x]&quot;, but this claim is disputed among phoneticians, including at least one former president of the IPA. Other descriptive labels include &lt;strong&gt;voiceless palatal-velar fricative, voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and velar fricative, or voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative&lt;/strong&gt;. The closest English phoneme is /ʃ/ ⟨sh⟩.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the current situation? In other words, was a consensus reached? I understand this is hard, but who knows. Also, what are the most important papers/resources about this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T02:42:37.613" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T16:08:08.593" Title="About the Swedish /ɧ/" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-02-01T20:14:17.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed that the Jurafsky/Martin and the NLTK book are wonderful to start with. Next up would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1575864347&quot;&gt;Finite State Morphology&lt;/a&gt; by Beesley/Karttunen primarily focused on xfst applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T20:14:17.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2012-02-01T22:53:25.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Banana republic&lt;/em&gt; is said ''república bananera'' in Spanish, even in Spain and not ''república platanera''. ;)&#xA;Some people in Spain differentiate between a &lt;em&gt;plátano&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt;, just like many people in Portugal use both &lt;em&gt;abacaxi&lt;/em&gt; (for Brazil-imported pineapple) and &lt;em&gt;ananás&lt;/em&gt; (for other pineapples).&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Plátano&lt;/em&gt; as a word is never really used in Central America or in Argentina. For example, the Argentinian Clarin dictionary considers it a Mexicanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plátano&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish, as well as &lt;em&gt;ananás&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;abacaxi&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese are like&#xA;&lt;em&gt;anguria&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cocomero&lt;/em&gt; in Italian, there is no one single universal word for the fruit, there are only regional preferences.&#xA;German had a similar ''problem'' with Apfelsine and Orange, but now Apfelsine (a NorthGerman word) is considered obsolete, and Orange (with French pronunciation) is almost universally used. In Argentina, ''ananá'' is more frequent than ''piña'' (and the plural is: ''ananás'').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastEditorUserId="732" LastEditDate="2012-02-01T23:40:36.503" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T23:40:36.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="369" CreationDate="2012-02-01T23:01:27.487" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit in South India (when/if learned) has a lot of influence from native Dravidian languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;most of the times, it's written in the local Dravidian script and not in Dev'nag'ri&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;people pronounce it with a heavy Dravidian accent (even Sanskrit loans in Malayalam are pronounced in a Dravidian way in 99% of situations, most Malayalis pronounce Bhavana as simple Bavana or Bavna, intervocalic GH is pronounced as kh or k or g or as a soft g, it is very rare to hear the ''correct'' Sanskrit pronunciation of Sanskrit words in Malayalam, most of the times, people treat them like normal Dravidian words).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2012-02-01T23:01:27.487" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2012-02-02T01:00:31.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Malayalam, the color is now said &lt;strong&gt;orange&lt;/strong&gt; (loan from English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ഓറഞ്ച്(നിറം)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;oorañčə(niram)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[ˈoːrɐɲdʒɐ(ˈnɪrɐm)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;:( The fruit is said orange too: ഓറഞ്ച്&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for pink, there's a choice between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ഇളംചുവപ്പ്        iLamčuvappə  [ˈiɭɐmˈtʃʊʋɐppə] (light-red)&#xA;and the English loan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;പിങ്ക്(നിറം)     pinkə(niram) [ˈpiŋkə(ˈnɪrɐm)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most of these ''new'' colors and shades in Indian languages are just borrowed directly from English, even in mainstream Tamil (which is known for its purism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2012-02-02T01:00:31.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1354" CreationDate="2012-02-02T03:07:24.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Handbook of the IPA (1999, and online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/handbook.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) does not indicate any problem with this symbol (and it's hard to see how it could be in dispute, being a symbol with an arbitrarily-defined value). [ɧ] is clearly defined by the IPA as a pulmonic articulation comprising simultaneous [x] and [ʃ]. I think the dispute is as to whether or not this symbol is an accurate representation of the Swedish phoneme commonly written as /sj/. This phoneme varies greatly in its realisation, both across dialects of Swedish and between the allophones within each dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-02-03T01:19:03.910" LastActivityDate="2012-02-03T01:19:03.910" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1362" CreationDate="2012-02-02T16:49:30.297" Score="4" ViewCount="3644" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/1318/should-a-toggle-button-show-its-current-state-or-the-state-to-which-it-will-chan&quot;&gt;A question about UI design&lt;/a&gt; led me to speculate about English words which are both a verb and an adjective. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/16824/7178&quot;&gt;My answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question addresses this linguistics issue as the root of the UI issue. I wonder, though, why does English have this property when other languages do not. I speak four languages and only English exhibits this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/356/why-dont-english-verbs-conjugate&quot;&gt;lack of conjugation&lt;/a&gt; in English? How did English words become so ambiguous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T09:33:44.150" Title="English words which are both verbs and adjectives" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1360" CreationDate="2012-02-02T17:33:26.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually not unique to English. English is nearly what lingusts call an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot;&gt;Isolating or Analytic language&lt;/a&gt;. An isolating language does not make a lot of use of conjugations, declensions, and other ways of adding affixes onto words. Instead, as the name implies, words stand in isolation and it's the word order and word choice that makes a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is one example of an isolating language. Others include Chinese and Vietnamese. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_adjectives&quot;&gt;Chinese adjectives are sometimes considered to be a form of intransitive verb&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-02T17:33:26.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1360" CreationDate="2012-02-02T17:40:04.083" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is due to the fact that English has evolved becoming more and more &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an Isolating Language&lt;/a&gt; (it's not the only example, but it stands out as a peculiar example, considering its classification). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isolating languages — often contrasted with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Synthetic Languages&lt;/a&gt; — are characterized by the fact that their &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; is not that considerable and sometimes not existing at all. What is intended by lack of morphology? By saying that, we mean that such languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, so their words are hardly &quot;divisible&quot; in smaller elements, which are called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphemes&lt;/a&gt;. To understand how morphemes work, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1342/are-cot-and-cat-morphologically-similar/1352#1352&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarizing what we need from that answer, English has a famous example for morpheme, which is the &lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt; for the third person singular in verbs. It's &lt;em&gt;only a letter&lt;/em&gt;, something &quot;very small&quot;, but it tells you &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. And that's what a morpheme is: &lt;em&gt;&quot;the smallest element in a word or in a statement that carries meaning and that cannot be further split (into smaller parts)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;; the important part from this definition is &lt;em&gt;&quot;carries meaning&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, especially if compared to other languages, has this low ratio, so it needs other means to disambiguate. You can see this simply by thinking about the fact that English &lt;em&gt;almost always requires personal pronouns to come before verbs&lt;/em&gt;. Take this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Speak&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;We speak&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't tell if the first example is the infinitive, first person singular, a noun, etc. While we know that the second one is the first person plural of the verb &quot;to speak&quot; because of the personal pronoun being there. Note that &quot;speak&quot; is itself a morpheme (it's the root that carries the lexical meaning), so it's not that English lacks morphemes completely, it just has less than other languages; it isn't totally isolating yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Speak&quot; is an unbound morpheme, which means it can stand by it self. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bound morphemes&lt;/a&gt; can't, so they need to be attached to other words. Roots are categorized as unbound morphemes; endings, prefixes, etc. are categorized as bound morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make a contrastive example using Italian because it is good language for explaining how synthetic languages work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Parlo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Parliamo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is unambiguously the first person singular of the verb &quot;to speak&quot; in Italian, as much as the second is the first person plural. But as you can see, neither of them is preceded by the personal pronoun, which is optional in Italian.  (Personal pronouns are omitted in Italian unless the context is ambiguous or used to express contrast, something like &quot;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; said X, while &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; said Y.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another famous isolating language is Chinese, which completely lacks morphology: no conjugations, no endings, no number indication (singular vs plural). When a language lacks morphology, word order is one of the means adopted by the language to compensate for this loss. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="14217" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T09:33:44.150" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T09:33:44.150" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1365" CreationDate="2012-02-03T07:03:38.190" Score="12" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;linear source-filter theory of speech production&lt;/em&gt; ( Fant, G. (1970) &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ca/books?id=qa-AUPdWg6sC&amp;amp;lpg=PA5&amp;amp;ots=ramVZMG1t-&amp;amp;dq=gunnar%20fant%201970&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PA4#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gunnar%20fant%201970&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Acoustic Theory of Speech Production&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://jslhr.highwire.org/cgi/content/citation/4/4/303&quot;&gt;Stevens and House (1961)&lt;/a&gt;) is very useful for understanding speech synthesis and a foundation for acoustic analysis. I don't know if this is silly to ask, but I'm curious to know whether there are any alternatives to it. Or is it &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; major theory in the field of acoustic phonetics?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-03T09:39:44.807" LastActivityDate="2012-02-05T01:14:04.267" Title="Are there any alternatives to Source-Filter theory?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;production&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1360" CreationDate="2012-02-04T03:22:50.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words in different part of speech (POS) categories are considered different words even if they have the same form. Thus /bank/ (noun) and /bank/ (verb) are different words that simply happen to have the same form. This means, for example that they will each have their own entry in dictionaries. They also seem to function as distinct items in our mental lexicons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers have suggested that this situation may be connected to the  lowish amount of morphology in English, but Kastovsky (in Bauer and Valera 2005) argues that this is not correct and gives examples of languages with much more inflectional morphology than English that still have this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English there is a productive process called 'zero-derivation' (or 'conversion') which results in identical forms in different POS categories. This process creates a new word from an old one without any change in form. Thus English speakers regularly use zero-derivation to create  new verbs from nouns. Zero-derivation between other part of speech categories also happens, but is less common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another source of identical forms across multiple POS categories is historical change. English has lost many inflections and this loss has in some cases produced words in different POS categories that have the same form. An example here is 'talk' (noun) and 'talk' (verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-02-04T07:00:59.850" LastActivityDate="2012-02-04T07:00:59.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1363" CreationDate="2012-02-04T05:56:47.570" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that source-filter theory is the major theory in the field of acoustic phonetics. Current textbooks on voice production and phonetics (e.g. Stevens 1998; Titze 2000) make use of the theory, and do not mention any radically different alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source-filter theory is based on the same general mathematical framework that is used in signal processing research and control theory, fields which are highly developed with numerous practical applications. The method is more or less as follows &lt;em&gt;[contributors with better math/engineering background feel free to edit this part]&lt;/em&gt;: the Laplace transform of an observed signal is treated as the product of a Laplace-transformed (actually occurring or ideal) input signal and one or more &lt;em&gt;transfer functions&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_function&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for details). i.e.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Output = Input x Transfer_function&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an input passes through each stage of a process, it is modified, and the effect of the modification is represented by a transfer function. Using this framework, acoustic phoneticians can model the speech production system in a way that separates the effects of the major components from each other. Then knowledge about simpler types of acoustic systems can be applied, and the models can be corroborated with empirical findings from physiological research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevens, K. N. 1998. Acoustic Phonetics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titze, I. 2000. Principles of voice production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-05T01:14:04.267" LastActivityDate="2012-02-05T01:14:04.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="211" CreationDate="2012-02-04T19:03:46.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An eminent linguist Ashok Kelkar has made a rather detailed analysis of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ciil-ebooks.net/html/Kelkar2/kelkar/b29.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Marathi baby talk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at point 3 onwards and you will find the vocabulary and whatnot. I agree that it is only for Marathi, but it is not restricted to one baby, and I, as a native Marathi speaker, can vouch for the ubiquity of the vocabulary given by him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="626" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T12:50:20.003" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:50:20.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2012-02-04T20:00:43.607" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can sign-up for the Stanford NLP class &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nlp-class.org/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is conducted by Jurafsky and Manning, authors of the extremely popular textbooks that the others mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can watch videos by leading researchers in the field at videolectures.net. I recommend starting with &lt;a href=&quot;http://videolectures.net/clspss09_clark_lspl/&quot;&gt;Clark's lecture&lt;/a&gt; and moving on to other lectures suggested in the section called &quot;See Also&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-02-04T20:08:46.993" LastActivityDate="2012-02-04T20:08:46.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1372" CreationDate="2012-02-05T11:34:40.463" Score="5" ViewCount="2357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since my 9 months old son started pointing to things and saying 'Ahh?' with a proper question intonation, I was wondering if all other languages have the same intonation for questions as in English (as in stressing the last word in the sentence). I am interested if it just comes naturally to human beings or is an acquired behaviour.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-02-05T18:01:38.487" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T13:49:11.303" Title="Intonation for questions in different languages and child's early language development intonations" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-05T12:00:14.990" Score="3" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I was studying an infant's transcript, I realized that he deleted the [l] sound in &quot;alma&quot; [alma], a word in Turkish meaning &quot;do not take&quot;. When he deleted the sound, the word became [a:ma]. There is another word; &quot;ama&quot; [ama] in Turkish meaning &quot;but&quot;. These two words become similar unless he changes any sound.&#xA;However, the infant utters them differently after deleting the sound. I wonder whether the infant delibaretely changes the first sound of &quot;ama&quot; meaning &quot;do not take&quot; to show that they are different words. Does he mentally try to show that he knows that they are different words and he cannot only utter the [l] sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-25T04:59:17.023" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T04:59:17.023" Title="Do infants deliberately change the words when they omit the sounds and these words are minimal pairs?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1370" CreationDate="2012-02-05T15:14:49.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no, there is no &quot;universal&quot; question intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a few points in your question need to be addressed, though... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the intonation to which you are referring is most likely the intonation for &lt;strong&gt;yes-no questions&lt;/strong&gt; in English, or possibly &lt;strong&gt;echo questions&lt;/strong&gt;, but not other types of questions like wh-questions (questions that start with &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;), which don't rise at the end. Just the fact that not all questions in English have the same intonation is a hint that it is an acquired behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, stress is a grammatical construct (not an acoustic one) that does not even play a role in all languages (Japanese, e.g.). In English, the stress pattern of a sentence is independent of whether the intonation (i.e. &quot;tune&quot;) of the sentence goes up or down on any given word or syllable. &lt;strong&gt;Generally, yes-no and echo questions in English can be characterized by a final rising pitch contour starting on the last stressed syllable in the sentence (not the very last word)&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, in, &quot;You got me a BIRTHDAY gift?&quot; the rise starts on the first syllable of &quot;birthday&quot;, which is the last emphasized word in the sentence, but not the last word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;strong&gt;although typologically there does seem to be a &lt;em&gt;tendency&lt;/em&gt; across languages for yes-no and/or echo questions to end with a rising pitch--see Ladd (1981)--there are many counterexamples.&lt;/strong&gt; Lee (2008) lists some: varieties of Hungarian and Romanian, Bengali, Greek, Basque, and many African languages. Also, in many languages with lexical tone, including Mandarin and North Kyeongsang Korean, if the tone on the final syllable is falling, the pitch falls at the end even in yes-no and echo questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladd, D. R., 1981. On Intonational Universals. In T. Myers et al. (eds.), The Cognitive Representation of Speech. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lee, Hye-Sook, 2008. Non-rising questions in North Kyeonsang Korean. In P.A. Barbosa, S. Madureira, and C. Reis (eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008 Conference, Campinas, Brazil, 241-244. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-02-07T13:49:11.303" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T13:49:11.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2012-02-06T02:12:21.767" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romanian is a language that's been well established in the Balkan Sprachbund (which is a German term linguists use to talk about a collection of languages that have shared features over a certain period of time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside Romanian in this Sprachbund are languages like Greek, Albanian and Macedonian (among others) and they have each played some influence in altering the other, and this is in all sorts of linguistic domains such as Phonology / Morphology / Syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting thing to note about Romanian is that, although deriving from Latin which had no articles, as East/West-Latin were still splitting up, Proto-Romance had started the grammaticalisation process resulting in the determiners observable today in Modern Romance. As Italian and Romanian both share the East-Latin branch they both originally had determiners that PRE-modified the elements they were attached to and over the course of time, due to influences from languages like Bulgarian (another Slavic language) and Albanian, these have their determiners AFTER the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to quote the oft-cited example here, look at the Italian word for 'the man', which is '&lt;strong&gt;l'uomo&lt;/strong&gt;' and then compare it with the Romanian word '&lt;strong&gt;om&lt;/strong&gt;' (man; notice the similarity) then after developing in this Sprachbund around other languages that put their word for the word 'the' AFTER the noun, Romanian also took this on and has 'the man' as '&lt;strong&gt;om-ul&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as much as you do cross-linguistic comparison among the Romance languages, you will find out time and time again that Romanian is often the black sheep of the family due to its development in this language area where linguistic features are shared and different characteristics can be shown to have spread around to neighbouring languages after a long period of bi- and multi-lingualism throughout the history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To swing this back to your point, this is exactly the reason why not just the Phonology, but also the word-stock (vocabulary) of Romanian is often very different from its sister languages in Western Europe. The same reasons for the sharing of features at a level of linguistic structure only happen in a very sort of 'linguistically intimate' setting and when two or more languages are close, the first thing to cross over are words into the other languages. So, if you see that structure has been shared, you'd be wise to make an educated guess that the level of vocabulary-absorption is considerably higher, and in this case you'd be right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian's history after splitting off and developing in a co-evolutative zone meant that it has slowly been moving further and further away from its core features in the Italic family, in not just words (but very much so), but also in many other aspects of structure (as I mentioned before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps you with your query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T01:37:25.353" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T01:37:25.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2012-02-06T12:13:09.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing to do here is separate out a child's knowledge from their production. The most well known and regarded example of this comes from J. Berko and R. Brown (1960). &quot;Psycholinguistic Research Methods&quot;. In P. Mussen. Handbook of Research methods in Child Development. New York: John Wiley. pp. 517–557. They give this example of a child interacting with an adult. The child has a toy fish and says /fis/, the adult then replicates the child's pronunciation and says 'is that your /fis/?' The child says 'no, it's my /fis/&quot; (and is rather ticked off at the idiocy of the adult). When the adult finally asks if it is a /fish/ the child accepts the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this example shows is that even though children often produce incorrect forms at various stages of their development this doesn't mean that the child can't perceive the difference between what they are saying at the correct form. So even though it may sound like the child in the example you give is merging two forms it is very likely that they're aware of the difference and it will resolve when they've got their tongue around that tricky consonant cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T12:13:09.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2012-02-06T12:42:27.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You also add a lot more languages with shared cognates to your list when you also consider that the Proto-Tibeto Burman negation is *ma- and the Proto-Sino-Tibetan root was probably also *ma- (James A. Matisoff (2003) Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. System and philosophy of Sino-Tibeto-Burman Reconstruction. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no explanation for why the PST form should be a nasal and well as the PIE but it accounts for the possible nasal negative in the 500 ST languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T12:42:27.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1383" CreationDate="2012-02-06T19:33:26.280" Score="13" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, many adjectives support the &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; ending to express a notion of exceeding: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is &lt;strong&gt;taller&lt;/strong&gt; than Mary (is).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is &lt;strong&gt;smarter&lt;/strong&gt; than John (is).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can also have the more analytic construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary is &lt;strong&gt;more intelligent&lt;/strong&gt; than John (is).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with the notion of &quot;does not exceed&quot;, &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;, only the analytic form is available: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is &lt;strong&gt;less smart&lt;/strong&gt; than Mary is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is &lt;strong&gt;less intelligent&lt;/strong&gt; than Mary is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does any language express the &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; form using bound morphology the way we do with &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; in (1) and (2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-06-13T22:33:36.783" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T18:40:53.910" Title="Does any language use bound morphology to express the concept &quot;less&quot;?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1396" CreationDate="2012-02-06T20:35:36.843" Score="3" ViewCount="696" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS chapter on consonant inventories&lt;/a&gt; shows that the distribution of inventory sizes across languages follows a normal curve, with average size inventories (22 ± 3 consonants) being the most frequent. This is approximately the number of consonants that Proto-Indo-European had. Not surprisingly, this is also the category in which most Indo-European languages (at least the ones charted) are classified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some exceptions. Lithuanian and Irish (Donegal), for example, were put into the &quot;large&quot; class (34 or more consonants). What happened to these languages that made them deviate from the most common size and from the size of their ancestor, PIE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T07:34:15.493" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T07:34:15.493" Title="What caused some IE languages to have consonant inventory sizes different from PIE?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-02-06T20:42:33.500" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know any language that does exactly what you want; but it may interest you to know that the diminutive suffix &lt;em&gt;-lus&lt;/em&gt; can be used with adjectives in Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;aedes&lt;/em&gt; = room, house&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;aedicula&lt;/em&gt; = little room or house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;acer&lt;/em&gt; = petulant&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;acriculus&lt;/em&gt; = a little/bit petulant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's behind this is that the distinction between nouns and adjectives was not felt to be very strict in Latin: &lt;em&gt;acer&lt;/em&gt; can mean &quot;petulant&quot; or &quot;a petulant person/thing&quot;. But the diminutive form can certainly be used when the word is used adjectivally/attributively, as in &lt;em&gt;vir acriculus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this suffix is productive, but it is relatively uncommon—certainly less common than English forms with &quot;less&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derived suffixes that work the same way are &lt;em&gt;-ulus, -culus, -(u)sculus, -(u)nculus, -illus, -ellus.&lt;/em&gt; They can all indicate a diminutive or a repeated action (as in &lt;em&gt;credulus&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-06T20:45:02.200" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T20:45:02.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-06T22:18:43.513" Score="11" ViewCount="3687" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that most languages have an irregular conjugation for the verb &lt;em&gt;To be&lt;/em&gt;. I say almost because I don't know all languages, but the ones I've seen all have some irregularity sooner or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a simple table providing some languages from Europe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J6Ns6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Table representing the conjugation for the verb to be in many languages.&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: if you find mistakes, let me know.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I found only one language that fulfills the requirement, Quechua, with the verb &quot;Kay&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; — Ñoqa ka-ni&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; — Qam ka-nki&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; — Pay ka-n&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; — Ñoqanchik ka-nchik — &lt;em&gt;inclusive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; — Ñoqayku ka-niku — &lt;em&gt;exclusive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; — Qamkuna ka-nkichik&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; — Paykuna ka-nku&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the root (which is &lt;em&gt;&quot;ka-&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), is always present. Excluding the ones from the list below, are there other natural languages that have the verb &quot;to be&quot; (meaning &lt;strong&gt;existence&lt;/strong&gt;, not location) but regular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asian languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish/Norwegian/Danish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the languages that have the same form for all the persons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages that don't use this verb in the Present Affirmative form, e.g. Russian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-30T13:28:04.287" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T16:17:40.900" Title="Are there languages with a totally regular conjugation for &quot;to be&quot; outside Quechua?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;regular-verbs&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-02-06T22:29:26.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. In Danish 'be' is realized as &amp;lt; er &gt; and in Swedish it's realized as &amp;lt; är &gt; for all persons and numbers. I am not sure what the exact phonological realizations of these are, sorry. These languages have no agreement, so the paradigms for 'be' are completely regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: the Penn textbook (all available for free online) for introductory syntax, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-02-06T22:29:26.807" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-02-07T01:06:54.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A diminutive is not the same as what a &quot;less&quot; morpheme would be — it lacks comparative semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to answer your question, the answer is, no there is not any such language which expresses a concept of &quot;less&quot; synthetically, at least none has been found despite a very large (300+ language) cross-linguistic survey by Jonathan Bobalijk. See his paper &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/ucm201107.pdf&quot;&gt;Universals in Comparative Morphology&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, for his explanation of why such a morpheme never occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-07T21:49:49.420" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T21:49:49.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-02-07T01:21:46.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Turkish copula &lt;em&gt;olmak&lt;/em&gt; is meant to be regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/olmak#Conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary's conjugation table for the Turkish verb olmak&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-07T10:22:07.353" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T10:22:07.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1407" CreationDate="2012-02-07T05:29:27.060" Score="5" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are currently used computational models/frameworks of language acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Desired features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;models that are biologically plausible (such as neural networks).&#xA;Personally, I have used &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/9t456l7160427430/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cascade correlation neural nets to model pronoun acquisition in children&lt;/a&gt;, but in hindsight, I consider this framework to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/214/29&quot;&gt;not neurobiologically plausible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;models/frameworks that can model learning of both L1 and L2 in children and adults, and capture the observed differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/215/29&quot;&gt;Computational models of early learning in children&lt;/a&gt; on CogSci.SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T21:50:36.540" Title="Computational models of language acquisition" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-02-07T15:11:51.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tibeto-Burman languages are an interesting example of copula verbs that are 'regular' across all person and number forms. I'll share an example from Lamjung Yolmo, because that's what I am documenting at the moment, but you can find similar things in Sherpa, Lhasa Tibetan and other languages of this family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Yolmo there are actually a number of copula verbs, all of which can be used regardless of person or number, but that's because they're marking something other than tense or aspect. I'll just highlight the difference between two of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;em&gt;yè&lt;/em&gt; which is used where an English copula is used for &quot;X be adjective&quot; where X is any person number. This can be contrasted with &lt;em&gt;dù&lt;/em&gt; which can also be used for &quot;X be adjective&quot; constructions. The difference is nothing to do with person, but an evidential distinction, with &lt;em&gt;yè&lt;/em&gt; being used for information that someone already knows to be true and &lt;em&gt;dù&lt;/em&gt; being used for information that the person has recent direct perception of. So in the case of &quot;she is tall&quot; if I saw her every day I'd use &lt;em&gt;yè&lt;/em&gt; but if I walked down the street and saw someone who was tall I might point them out and use &lt;em&gt;dù&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, certain persons go with certain constructions - it's unusual to use direct perception &lt;em&gt;dù&lt;/em&gt; for yourself because you already know what you're doing without evidence. But there are cases where it's appropriate to use it, so it's not a true person distinction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the take-home message from that is that not all of the world's languages require the copula verb to mark person and/or number, making it perfectly easy to have a regular form and no need for conjugation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T15:11:51.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-07T15:28:50.623" Score="3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on question answering problem. The major task is to understand text and convert complex sentences to simpler sentences i.e Textual Commitments using Conventional implicature and conversational implicature and Supplemental Expressions, Relation Extraction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of textual Commitment can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://pastebin.com/kF2R3tGg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://pastebin.com/kF2R3tGg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to implement a practical Textual Commitment system. I will be glad if you can provide me with headstart on this  by providing any existing tools or any reference which can provide me with rules-sets which can be implemented to decompose such sentences in textual commitment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="748" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2012-02-10T12:36:56.293" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T22:00:47.447" Title="Textual Commitment" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-02-07T17:37:17.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kiswahili &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a candidate. There are a few different verbs that correspond to English 'to be'; &lt;em&gt;kuwa&lt;/em&gt; 'be, become' is regarded as the main equivalent as far as &quot;existence&quot;. It is also used for &quot;to have&quot; in conjunction with  &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., &lt;em&gt;kuwa na&lt;/em&gt;='to be with&quot;='to have&quot;)  And also, Kiswahili has a negative conjungation, so 'to not be' and 'to be' are different conjugations. So exact equivalency, as noted above, is tough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to the point here: for &lt;em&gt;kuwa&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;exist&quot; verb, the present tense forms are identically &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; in the modern language; and for the other tenses the forms are &lt;a href=&quot;http://mwanasimba.online.fr/E_Chap17.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;regularly conjugated off the root &lt;em&gt;-wa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You are &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He/she/it is &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We are &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You are &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was &lt;em&gt;nilikuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You were &lt;em&gt;ulikuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He/she/it was &lt;em&gt;alikuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We are &lt;em&gt;tulikuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You are &lt;em&gt;mlikuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are &lt;em&gt;walikuwa&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be &lt;em&gt;nitakuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You will be &lt;em&gt;utakuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He/she/it will be &lt;em&gt;atakuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We will be &lt;em&gt;tutakuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You will be &lt;em&gt;mtakuwa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They will be &lt;em&gt;watakuwa&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am not an expert in Swahili so it may be that I am missing some suppletive form in a strange tense or something. EDIT: See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache%3amSTJvPXLdtsJ%3aswahiliclub.eusa.ed.ac.uk/Class%2520Notes/Intermediate/09.11.05%2520Intermediate%2520notes%2520-%25205.11.09.doc%20&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=us&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEESjaC-PqriOBzfUy6wWK8PpbxrBHgpCyCU7O_o3t9XAxA_Kr2gyeIGx5voA06aDDUdKAWeAnfm3Z8O_Yyg_98NmuKHadA1-LtnRIep-cEZATz2ysBOarTJYF-0IMhTIRvb1Vzih5&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbSKbv-2hxe3lM6uTQYzvRFVtJv_xw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this nice handout&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-07T17:37:17.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2012-02-07T21:09:47.853" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish, the suffic &quot;-cE&quot; gives this meaning when added to adjectives, such as &quot;güzelce&quot;. It means that the person or thing is less beautiful than the mentioned thing. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Annesi gibi güzelce bir kız &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that she is less beautiful than her mother. However, in some contexts it can mean &quot;nearly&quot;. I asked which meaning people think of when they hear words to which this suffix was added; they answered &quot;less&quot;. &#xA;However, this research is not very broad or scientific; I have only asked the people I could contact. Maybe this answer will help you to some extent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=dc329b03-7232-48dc-a84e-4e711c9290bb@sessionmgr15&amp;amp;vid=1&amp;amp;hid=12&amp;amp;bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ==#db=uvt&amp;amp;AN=130555&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; about this suffix; however, the section related to it is very little and not very much detailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="640" LastEditDate="2012-02-20T15:35:58.553" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T15:35:58.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1404" CreationDate="2012-02-08T16:27:33.123" Score="6" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on ELU the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57402/is-betternt-an-ok-word-to-use#comment108760_57402&quot;&gt;Is “bettern't” an OK word to use?&lt;/a&gt; drew me into debate about how significant &quot;childish errors&quot; are in the development of mainstream language. Hence, the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are &quot;childish errors&quot; significant forces of language change?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll put my cards on the table and say straight off that my inclination is to think the answer is &lt;em&gt;&quot;not very&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Two reasons immediately come to mind...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an avid fan of Steven Pinker, I'm a great believer in the idea that children are to a considerable extent &quot;pre-programmed&quot; to emulate what they hear, rather than coin neologisms. And by implication, they're strongly motivated to quickly discard &quot;apparently logical&quot; forms when adults correct them (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Mummy! I be'ed wee-wee on the floor!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; must have been said many times, but soon dropped).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ability to produce &quot;correct&quot; speech strongly correlates with social status, so parents have considerable motivation to ensure their children do this as early and well as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I think about things like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28fruit%29#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the etymology of &quot;orange&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, I don't really see this as relating to faulty language acquisition by children, but I freely admit I'm an armchair philologist in such matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T19:59:00.010" Title="Significance of &quot;childish errors&quot; in mainstream language change" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1395" CreationDate="2012-02-08T21:54:47.410" Score="6" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere that the Hebrew writing system evolved from Egyptian pictographs. If that's the case, have anyone read about records that trace exact evolution from a pictograph to a Hebrew letter, or is this something very hard to research because of the lack of historical data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="754" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2012-02-11T13:05:13.057" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T13:05:13.057" Title="Did Hebrew writing evolve from Egyptian hieroglyphs?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1392" CreationDate="2012-02-08T22:44:02.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What those &quot;childish errors&quot; really show are that children are &lt;em&gt;generating&lt;/em&gt; language, not just repeating it. Think &quot;This is a &lt;em&gt;wug&lt;/em&gt;. There are two &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;_.&quot; (Sorry, kids, the answer is &quot;wuggen.&quot; There's more than one way to pluralize a wug.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would definitely argue that, particularly in verbs, the generative rules that children learn and then unlearn for irregular verbs is a factor in language change. It might not come directly from children, but the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/the_evolution_of_the_past_tense_-_how_verbs_change_over_time.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;regularization of verbs&lt;/a&gt; happens: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lieberman charted the progress of 177 irregular verbs from the 9th&#xA;  century Old English of Beowulf, to the 13th century Middle English of&#xA;  Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to the modern 21st century English of&#xA;  Harry Potter. Today, only 98 of these are still irregular...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They regularise in a way that is 'inversely proportional to the square&#xA;  root of their frequency'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the more infrequently they are used, the less likely it is that somebody's going to remember the irregular form so they just follow the rules they know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are &quot;early modern English&quot; verbal forms (about 400 years ago):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help, holp, have holpen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;swell, swole, have swollen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;melt, molt, have molten&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slide, slid, have slidden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abide, abode, have abidden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strike, struck, have stricken&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shear, shore; have shorn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these forms survive as adjectives (&quot;shorn,&quot; &quot;stricken&quot;, &quot;swollen&quot;), but &quot;have holpen&quot;? Yeah, right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, there are a few of verbs particularly in American English that have gone the other direction: where past participle form (&quot;have __ed&quot;) &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; regular, but because there was a very common, phonologically similar word, it was &quot;irregularized.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dive, dove, have dived; &quot;dove&quot; like &quot;drove&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sneak, snuck, have sneaked; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/s.html#sneak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;snuck&lt;/a&gt;&quot; like ...idk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not very common, probably hypergrammaticalization, a very &quot;grown up&quot; occurrence. I mean, adults get things &quot;wrong&quot; all the time. (My peeve is phenomenon/phenomena.) English in particular is a confusing mess of different verbal paradigms and borrowed words with borrowed plurals from a half-dozen other languages. (Phenomenon/phenomena is Greek, but radius/radii is Latin, etc.) Point is: you still know exactly what the kid means when she says &quot;gooses&quot; or &quot;thesises&quot; or, as my niece is attributed, referring to a babydoll whose eyes would open and close: &quot;She oped her eyes!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key concepts for verb regularization are economy and analogy. Why remember forms when instead you could remember one simple rule? Think about programming a vocabulary into a computer: would you rather program every form of every word, or just tell it to concatenate the verb with &quot;ed&quot; to form the past tense and concatenate the noun with &quot;s&quot; to form the plural? Child (and adult) speakers' brains are just as lazy as the programmer-you is in this scenario. We'd all rather things be simple, neh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="42" LastEditDate="2012-02-09T22:55:47.537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-09T22:55:47.537" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1393" CreationDate="2012-02-09T02:36:25.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hebrew_alphabet#Ancestral_scripts_and_script_variants&quot;&gt;a chart&lt;/a&gt; showing the Hebrew (and other) alphabets and the theorized relation to Egyptian hieroglyphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancientscripts.com/protosinaitic.html&quot;&gt;Proto-sinaitic script&lt;/a&gt; is conjectured to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Semitic_alphabet&quot;&gt;intermediate between the hieroglyphs and later true alphabets&lt;/a&gt;, basing most of its letterforms off of equivalent hieroglyphs according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony&quot;&gt;acrophony&lt;/a&gt;. But it's not clear to me that this link between the hieroglyphs and the Proto-sinaitic script is well-established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-09T02:36:25.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1377" CreationDate="2012-02-09T04:34:38.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue has recently caught the attention of typologists and historical linguists, with a recent publication by &lt;a href=&quot;http://codrinarsene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Science-Atkinson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atkinson (2011)&lt;/a&gt;, where it is claimed not only that a language's phoneme inventory size correlates positively with its speaker population, but that population bottlenecks in the course of human expansion out of Africa 50-70k years ago are reflected in the phoneme inventory sizes of modern languages. According to Atkinson's proposal, population sizes should have some role in explaining the differences in numbers of consonants in modern IE languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal is, to say the least, controversial among linguists. The current issue of the journal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2011.15.issue-2/issue-files/lity.2011.15.issue-2.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt; (2011, vol. 15, no.2)&lt;/a&gt; contains a number of critical evaluations of Atkinson's proposal. Most relevant to the present question is Ringe's commentary (pp. 223--231). Ringe catalogs the sound changes leading to the development of Proto-Indo-Iranian, Sanskrit, Proto-Germanic, Old English, Greek and Latin and makes three main conclusions about the gain and loss of contrasts in IE lineages: (1) new contrasts were usually not due to borrowing, (2) most new contrasts were due to a reorganization of syllable structure or prosodic structure, and (3) the overall trend is neither a loss or gain of phonemes, although individual languages vary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ringe contrasts IE with Oceanic, where most of the modern languages have similar phonotactics, and supposes that the reason for the progressive loss of contrasting segments as one goes deeper into the Oceanic phylogenetic tree is that the usual process for gaining segments, phonotactic changes, has for some reason not happened in most languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't know is how Ringe's proposal plays out for other branches of IE, including Lithuanian. I don't know whether many new consonants in Lithuanian were due to reorganization of syllable or metrical structure in the proto-language, or more straightforward conditioned splits that did not alter the phonotactics by much, but it would be interesting to check out. (Possible starting points for reading would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art253e.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kortlandt 2008&lt;/a&gt; as well as other contributions to the journal &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.leidykla.vu.lt/en/journals/baltistica/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baltistica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which appears to be open access) For bonus reading, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://alex.francois.free.fr/data/AlexFrancois_VowelsNorthernVanuatu_OL44-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francois 2005&lt;/a&gt; for a discussion on how several Oceanic languages of North Vanuatu developed unusually large vowel systems, bearing in mind that most present-day Oceanic languages (along with POc) have small (5 or fewer qualities) vowel systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-02-09T17:35:25.130" LastActivityDate="2012-02-09T17:35:25.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-09T05:22:21.770" Score="8" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an amateur writer that happens to be a professional programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this because I've recently jumped back into a personal research project in which the goal is to automate the de-anonymization of passages or, more simply, figure out the true author behind an anonymous piece of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to do this, I'm looking at the key elements in a person's writing style and looking for patterns that match up to writers and their styles that I've already indexed. The patterns I'm looking for currently are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word choices &amp;amp; vocabulary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Readability score: calculated by the Flesch-Kincaid index (what Microsoft Word uses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Punctuation preferences: whether 1 or 2 spaces are used after a sentence, frequency of exclamation points, commas, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sentence structure: where the various elements of a sentence are usually located within that sentence, as well as general sentence length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other patterns can be used to explicitly define a writing style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="756" LastActivityDate="2012-04-22T08:36:32.847" Title="What defines a unique writing style?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1487" CreationDate="2012-02-09T23:21:40.240" Score="9" ViewCount="712" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=7TKf8BQFoF4C&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=croft&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=croft&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Croft 2003&lt;/a&gt; argues that &quot;the typological universals discovered in contemporary languages should also apply to ancient and reconstructed languages&quot; (the so called uniformitarian hypothesis, p. 233). How so? I don't quite follow his logic. How do new features emerge then? I'd appreciate some references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Let me borrow an example from Burlak and Starostin 2005. Let's say, we have three daughter languages, X, Y, and Z. Some feature F is present in all of those languages but it is realized by different means, F(x), F(y), and F(z). F(x) is the most typologically frequent form (based on &quot;global&quot; typology, not necessarily in this taxon), whereas F(y) and F(z) are less frequent. Now we need to reconstruct that feature for the parent language, W. What should we choose? Synchronic typologists would argue that it should be the most frequent form, F(x) in our case. Now there's the problem. If the parent language W indeed had the most frequent form F(x), then we'd have to argue that language states can change from a more typologically probable state to a less typologically probable one, a very undesirable result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-02-10T23:34:25.800" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T20:40:23.030" Title="Uniformitarianism in diachronic typology" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-09T23:45:41.050" Score="8" ViewCount="586" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently found out the origin of the verb 'bring' as being derived from &lt;strong&gt;bher-&lt;/strong&gt; (carry) and &lt;strong&gt;enk-&lt;/strong&gt; (to go to) and how they fused together and came into Germanic as &lt;strong&gt;*bhrengk-&lt;/strong&gt; then coming down into English as 'bring'. I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a way I could find out what other reflexes (if any) that &lt;strong&gt;*enk-&lt;/strong&gt; had been preserved in any sort of form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given it's a verb of motion I imagine it would have been able to be freely used metaphorically and potentially have been applied to many roots which I think could easily exist in modern languages. Is there a resource you know that might supply this information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the only reflex of it that we're all aware of? Can anyone point to any other words that contain this? I've got quite a steady knowledge of historical linguistics but I've never gone back to any period further than Germanic or Latin so here's to diving back a bit deeper!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-09T23:53:00.403" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T17:01:18.660" Title="PIE -enk reflexes in Modern English" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-02-10T00:54:21.660" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical dictionary of Proto-Indo-European roots is Julius Pokorny's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indogermanisches_etymologisches_W%C3%B6rterbuch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Older prints can be found on line if you look around. The Linguistic Research Centre of the University of Texas has a website based mostly on Pokorny where reflexes can be looked up from roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the examples they give of English &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0482.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reflexes (there are no doubt more) of &lt;strong&gt;enek̂-, nek̂-, enk̂-, n̥k̂- (*henek-)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which meant something like &quot;to reach, obtain; to carry (only found in Greek)&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enough&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;near&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neighbour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nigh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;oncogenesis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;oncology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, this is nowhere near complete, and no intermediate stages are given (unlike in Pokorny). Note also that Pokorny is not always correct and sometimes even speculative—that is, even more so than prehistoric linguistics normally are. Note further that the UoT sometimes misinterpret Pokorny; and sometimes they cite a reflex consisting of several roots, of which only a minor one represents the root you searched for. The lemma in Pokorny is very long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-10T10:09:49.153" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T10:09:49.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-02-10T01:09:59.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean/Notes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; gives some reflexes of &lt;strong&gt;*nek-&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;*enk-&lt;/strong&gt; which support @Cerberus's answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;strong&gt;kom-&lt;/strong&gt; '(intensive)' + &lt;strong&gt;*nek-&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; Gmc &lt;strong&gt;*ganakh&lt;/strong&gt;- 'suffice' -&gt; Goth. &lt;strong&gt;ganos&lt;/strong&gt;, ON &lt;strong&gt;gnogr&lt;/strong&gt;, OE &lt;strong&gt;genog&lt;/strong&gt;, Ger &lt;strong&gt;genug&lt;/strong&gt;, ModE &lt;strong&gt;enough&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Late PIE &lt;strong&gt;*enk-&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; Gk &lt;strong&gt;onkos&lt;/strong&gt; 'burden, mass, tumor', Skt &lt;strong&gt;aṃśaḥ&lt;/strong&gt; 'part'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-10T10:13:09.650" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T10:13:09.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1392" CreationDate="2012-02-10T02:00:32.250" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With due regard to @mollyocr's answer, I shall answer my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The errors children make include a high proportion of utterances where they've &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt; identified a &quot;general principle&quot;, but haven't yet learnt that it doesn't apply &lt;em&gt;in some particular case&lt;/em&gt;. Common errors obviously being to apply the rules for regular verbs/plurals to irregular words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collectively we have a vested interest in discarding existing irregular forms (also in preventing new ones appearing, but that's so easy we barely notice we're doing it). Of the existing irregular forms, only a few intractable ones still survive (intractable because they're so common it's difficult to change them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time a child makes a mistake in the &quot;right&quot; direction in respect of irregular/illogical forms, they raise awareness of how we'd like things to be. Like biological evolution, language change can take a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; long time - but language, unlike biology, is guided by our own rational thoughts. Be it ever so slowly, adults gradually come to adopt the &quot;logical&quot; errors made by people (including children), while correcting the &quot;illogical&quot; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think childish errors &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; influence language change, but some (the ones we judge logical) constantly &lt;em&gt;remind us&lt;/em&gt; of certain illogicalities. Plus they provide a mechanism for adults to increasingly adopt those &quot;errors&quot; in appropriate circumstances, which may eventually become &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T02:00:32.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2012-02-10T16:44:40.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tinyurl.com/7pgklf4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Starling gives the root (e)nek'&lt;/a&gt; with one meaning &quot;to reach&quot; and the other &quot;to bear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Russian word &lt;strong&gt;принести&lt;/strong&gt; (transliterated as &quot;prinesti&quot;; &lt;em&gt;to bring&lt;/em&gt;) is traced to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-12T17:01:18.660" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T17:01:18.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1392" CreationDate="2012-02-10T19:59:00.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=8vqm1zozD18C&amp;amp;pg=PA270&amp;amp;dq=errors%20in%20language%20acquisition%20effect%20on%20%22language%20change%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=03M1T_28MKaM2gWS76T3AQ&amp;amp;ved=0CGUQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=errors%20in%20language%20acquisition%20effect%20on%20%22language%20change%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Understanding Language Change&lt;/a&gt; (McMahon, 1994) there's a great statement: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Historical linguists have so far had little success in assuming that&#xA;  children learning language initiate language change, since there is&#xA;  very limited overlap between changes and characteristics of child&#xA;  language.... How the child learns therefore seems more relevant to the&#xA;  historical linguist than the performance errors she makes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple papers that may help illustrate the point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kerswil, in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&amp;amp;fid=2713488&amp;amp;jid=LVC&amp;amp;volumeId=8&amp;amp;issueId=02&amp;amp;aid=2713480&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Children, Adolescents, and Language Change&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, directly and extensively tackles your question of whether linguistic innovation comes from the speech of children. (He does restrict his study to language change resulting from language contact.) His findings are basically that &lt;strong&gt;different age groups are responsible for different types of language change in accordance with the usual order of language acquisition&lt;/strong&gt;, which he gives as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New phonological rules by age 3 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New phonological oppositions  by age 3-13&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New grammatical parameters by age 8 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes to prosody by age 12&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New morphological classes in adolescence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphologically conditioned changes after age 4-7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All other linguistic changes at any age&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is important since it doesn't restrict itself to morphology and syntax errors, but to phonology, prosody, etc. as well. It also takes into account that adults can learn changes to vocabulary fairly easily; but changes in phonology are almost impossible to acquire past early childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verhoef &amp;amp; de Boer in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguisticsinamsterdam.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?idno=m0401a02;c=aclc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language acquisition age effects and their role in the &#xA;preservation and change of communication system&lt;/a&gt;s&quot; found that, if anything, language learning by children tends to help &lt;strong&gt;resist language change&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recent advances in  sociolinguistics indicate that changes in language&#xA;  learning ability while growing  up can account for the different ways&#xA;  that linguistic changes spread from  community to community. They&#xA;  found that the structure of the system is better  preserved when&#xA;  speakers of all ages are involved in language contact as opposed  to&#xA;  only adult to adult contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last is an important point, in my opinion: nearly all authorities agree that &lt;strong&gt;language change is driven by social groups, not individuals&lt;/strong&gt;; so the ability of children to influence change depends on sociolinguistic factors. E.g. modern Western high school students may be an important group due to their wide social influence, but babies are seldom likely to drive change since they have little to no social influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think looking at all these the overall effect is that performance errors by children don't have very great effects - but that the process of language acquisition by children influences the type and scope of change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-10T19:59:00.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2012-02-11T01:09:10.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine a simple system where there are two possible language types, A and B, and the total number of languages remains constant. Further assume that languages of type A change to type B with (&lt;strong&gt;stable&lt;/strong&gt;) probability k(a), and languages of type B change to type A with probability k(b). When the system reaches a steady-state, the proportion of languages of type A will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;k(b) / ( k(a) + k(b) )&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;regardless of the relative frequences of types A and B at the initial state.&lt;/em&gt; A glance at a college chemistry book on first-order reactions might prove informative, but see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2011.15.issue-2/lity.2011.028/lity.2011.028.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cysouw (2011)&lt;/a&gt; for a more thorough introduction to transition probabilities as typological variables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine that k(a) is 4 times as large as k(b) (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; type A is diachronically unstable). This means that at steady-state, we expect for 20% of languages to be of type A, and 80% of languages to be of type B. This also means that on average, we should expect that for every language that changes from type B to type A, there are four languages that change from type A to type B. If we follow the uniformitarian principle, then there is no problem in proposing a transition from B--&gt;A as a historical reconstruction, provided that B--&gt;A transitions over languages are not proposed as being out of line with the proposed values of k(a) and k(b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-02-11T01:09:10.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="859" CreationDate="2012-02-11T12:41:13.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a paper which treats about a language (well, two, but one is mainly treated, since it's the principal object of the dissertation) being in possess of the structure &quot;number-Classifier&quot;. The Language is the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucatec_Maya_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yucatec Maya Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkbutler/butler2011_diss_chapter2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The DP-adjoined plural in Yucatec Maya and the syntax of plural marking&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, a dissertation  by &lt;em&gt;Lindsay K. Butler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to summarize the content through the paper, but I linked it anyway, both for a complete reference but also for attribution. If I misunderstood the paper or made some mistakes, please let me know by commenting under the answer. I don't want to leave mistakes floating in the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts between «» (and italic) are directly pasted from the paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many well-known Indo-European languages &lt;em&gt;«number is inflectional and obligatory»&lt;/em&gt;. If we have a sentence with a determiner (such as an article), a noun and a verb, they must agree by number. Taking the same examples&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; from the paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Las muchachas están cantando. = Grammatical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;*La muchachas están cantando. = Ungrammatical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;*Las muchacha está cantando. = Ungrammatical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true for many languages, but it's not for the Yucatec Maya, and the paper states that &lt;em&gt;«plural marking in the noun phrase is not necessary for a noun to be interpreted as referring to a plurality»&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, we see that &lt;em&gt;«plural marking and classfiers co-occur even&#xA;within the same phrase, in Yucatec Maya»&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(6) ka'a-túul    x-ch'úupal-o'ob&#xA;    two-CL.AN    FEM-girl-PL&#xA;    'two girls'&#xA;&#xA;(7) óox-p'éel     ja'ab-o'ob&#xA;    three-CL.IN   year-PL&#xA;    `three years' (Blair and Vermont-Salas, 1967, 454)&#xA;&#xA;(8) le óox-p'éel      siidra-o'ob-o'&#xA;    DEF three-CL.AN   cider-PL-DIST&#xA;   `the three ciders' (Andrade and Máas-Collí, 1999, 216)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;CL.AN = Classifier Animated. Read footnote 4 about the examples 7 and 8.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, &lt;em&gt;«Plural marking and classiers have been shown to co-occur within the&#xA;same phrase in Persian as well (Gebhardt, 2009) (and Karimi, pc.). Examples&#xA;are shown in (9) and (10).»&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(9)  se      ta   gorbe-ha&#xA;     three   CL   cat-PL&#xA;     `three cats' (Gebhardt, 2009, 20)&#xA;&#xA;(10) un   do    ta mænzel-ha&#xA;     DEM  two   CL house-PL&#xA;     `those two houses' (Gebhardt, 2009, 75)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;The typology of number markin&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, page 2.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Nominal denotation&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, chapter starts at page 4, examples in page 5.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;: Footnote taken from the paper (&lt;strong&gt;&quot;these examples&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; refers to the examples #7, 8): &lt;em&gt;«These examples  are not partitives. In Yucatec the partitive has a denite determiner between the numeral-classier and noun, e.g. ka'a-tuul le x-ch'uupal-o'ob (two-cl.an def fem-girl-pl) `two of the girls.' I thank Scott AnderBois for this question.»&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-12T18:40:44.037" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T18:40:44.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1385" CreationDate="2012-02-12T21:12:51.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll break up my response into categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Literature Reviews / Surveys:&lt;/strong&gt; An OK survey of various models in psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and computer science is &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shuly/publications/60080086.pdf&quot;&gt;Computational Models of Language Acquisition&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Shuly Wintner. Cambridge has a good paper on the Categorial Grammar Learner (CGL) model, which is &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-675.pdf&quot;&gt;Computational models for ﬁrst language acquisition&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Paula J. Buttery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They build on previous models (such as the Triggering Learning Algorithm of Gibson and Wexler and the Structural Triggers Learner of Fodor and Sakas) and improve CGL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Books:&lt;/strong&gt; A decent book, always &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/m1614nrhm2521336/&quot;&gt;Computational Models of Language Acquisition&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, has been written on the subject by Wintner which covers several accepted models, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/v8x1705jp135244t/&quot;&gt;a recent similar book&lt;/a&gt; (same title as the other one) has been published on the topic by Charles Yang (but I have never read the most recent work, so I cannot vet for its quality, but it appears to be good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Google search for 'computational models of language acquisition' will reveal many more results, but these are some that I've found helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-12T21:50:36.540" LastActivityDate="2012-02-12T21:50:36.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1418" CreationDate="2012-02-13T09:58:47.803" Score="17" ViewCount="3663" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, what does &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;null-subject&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean? Taken from the Wikipedia page for &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_subject_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Null-subject languages&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] a &lt;strong&gt;null-subject language&lt;/strong&gt; is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject. Such a clause is then said to have a &lt;strong&gt;null subject&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, according to this, a &lt;strong&gt;non-null-subject&lt;/strong&gt; language is a language that must have a subject. This can be expressed explicitly or through a pronoun and dummy or not&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Romance languages, for example when telling the weather (the sentence is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;It rains&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;) work without an explicit subject (1-5), but French is a (notable) exception and it doesn't allow sentences without expressing the subject (6), although in colloquial/oral usage, such sentences are allowed (7, 8):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Piove. (Italian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Llueve. (Spanish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plou. (Catalan)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chove. (Portuguese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plouǎ. (Romanian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Il&lt;/strong&gt; pleut. (French)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Je) m'en fiche. — &lt;em&gt;(I) don't care.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L'amour, (je) connais pas. — &lt;em&gt;Love? (I) don't know.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Examples 7,8 are taken from Grevisse, Le Bon Usage, §234d.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of other Romance languages having the same behavior. I chose to treat the most relevant ones, but if you're aware of them, feel free to share them in your answer. Although I must say I'm more interested in French, if those have some deep relation to the evolution of the French language, then they might acquire importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I researched a bit before asking and I found an article titled &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagesoftheworld.info/syntax/on-null-subjects-and-related-phenomena.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Null subjects and related phenomena&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Asya Pereltsvaig, which treats about this phenomenon, comparing English and Italian. Apparently it is only slightly related to this question, but it does mention something that can be interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;«Not only that, but historically, French &lt;strong&gt;used to be&lt;/strong&gt; a well-behaved Romance language like Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Latin, allowing null-subjects (or missing subjects). What also becomes clear from the historical record is that &lt;strong&gt;French switched&lt;/strong&gt; in all the relevant respects — at the same time!»&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article is hinting (well, more than hinting) to the fact that French used to work like other Romance languages, such as Spanish and Italian, but at a certain point in time, &lt;em&gt;it changed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is true, I can't prove it because I have nothing about the old phases of French evolution, so what I'm asking is: when and how did French switched and became a language that doesn't allow null-subject in independent clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dummy pronoun&lt;/a&gt; is used when there isn't an actual subject but it's nevertheless syntactically required by a given language. The usual example is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;it rains&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;: It's not that &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; rains, but English sentences can't stand without an expressed subject.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T21:30:45.737" Title="When and how did French become a non-null-subject language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-02-13T12:47:27.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia mentions&lt;/a&gt; the superstrate/substrate influence of Germanic languages as a possible reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntax shows the systematic presence of a subject pronoun in front&#xA;of the verb, as in the Germanic languages: je vois, tu vois, il voit,&#xA;while the subject pronoun is optional – function of the parameter&#xA;pro-drop – in the other Romance languages (as in veo, ves, ve).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French is noticeably different from most other Romance languages. Some&#xA;of the changes have been attributed to substrate influence—i.e. to&#xA;carry-over effects from Gaulish (Celtic) or superstrate—influence from&#xA;Frankish (Germanic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same article also mentions that the subject became mandatory around 1500 (this is unsourced, though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible reason maybe has something to do that due to sound changes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/459/french-conjugation-spoken-vs-written&quot;&gt;in spoken form the verb conjugation is not so obvious&lt;/a&gt;. Normally only the &lt;em&gt;nous&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt; forms sound different. If you can't tell the conjugated verbs apart, I guess the subject becomes necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/4047573&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Old French to the Theory of Pro-Drop&lt;/a&gt; (thanks Alex B. for the link!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T03:36:10.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1413" CreationDate="2012-02-13T16:06:48.617" Score="10" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages belonging to the same family obviously share many features, most of which were inherited from their common ancestor. But, considering that languages of the same family also are usually spoken in the same geographical region, some shared features are the result of horizontal spread (areal features). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do linguists tell which is which? What are the clues that linguists take into account to tell whether a certain feature was inherited or spread through an area of linguistic diffusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to cite one example that comes to mind: Indo-European &lt;em&gt;ablaut&lt;/em&gt;. It's generally accepted that &lt;em&gt;ablaut&lt;/em&gt; was already present in PIE and that it reflected in its daughter languages (e.g. English sing/sang/sung). How do linguists know for sure that this was not an innovation in one of the early daghter languages that all others have borrowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-13T16:40:19.420" LastActivityDate="2012-02-13T20:27:59.023" Title="How do linguists tell areal features and genetic relations apart?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1414" CreationDate="2012-02-13T16:53:06.277" Score="1" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this answer to the question : &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/70/92&quot;&gt;Do some languages have articles besides the definite and indefinite articles?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is worth noting, I think, that &quot;article&quot; is not a theoretical&#xA;  primitive in (most if not all) contemporary generative theories of&#xA;  syntax.  A generative syntactician would say that languages have&#xA;  larger or smaller inventories of determiners (e.g. &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;;&#xA;  this is the category from which &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; developed) and quantifiers (e.g.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;; this is the category from which &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt; developed).  However, articles are a notion of classical grammar and&#xA;  are definitionally restricted to the definite and indefinite.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Some grammarians might include more kinds of articles, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the&#xA;  Wikipedia article on articles&lt;/a&gt; does.  But this reflects more a&#xA;  taxonomic whim of the analyst than a fact about language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it is more meaningful to say that &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is a special kind of determiners and &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; is a special kind of quantifiers. How can we explain, then, that grammarians classify them together? Is the reason linguistic or is it just a convenience to make it easier to learn grammar? Or because it just &quot;makes sense&quot;? And also, why is the partitive classified in the same group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T13:40:16.573" Title="Why is the definite, indefinite, and partitive article grouped together?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-13T16:58:20.213" Score="18" ViewCount="8285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a large corpus of text messages. By large, I am hoping to have at least 15,000 text messages in my sample. I am fine with combining several smaller corpora into a larger corpus as I will also be adding thousands of text messages relating to the patterns of interest in my research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification on Requirements:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Text messages should predominantly be in English (US/American ideally), although a mixture of Spanish (Mexican Spanish) is also good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The corpus can be either free or available for a reasonable fee.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They should be text messages, as I am specifically looking for euphemisms and slang used in text messaging as well as emoticons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="765" LastEditDate="2012-02-13T17:15:00.550" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T10:37:38.217" Title="Does anyone know of text message corpora?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1410" CreationDate="2012-02-13T20:27:59.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem has been in no way settled in historical linguistics and has caused much debate. However, there is some consensus that in the case of language contact there are usually some &lt;strong&gt;barriers to diffusion&lt;/strong&gt;, such as geographical, social, and typological. Alan Dench (Dench 2006) argues that &quot;where languages spring from a common source, their split must be seen as the eventual result of an accumulation of &lt;strong&gt;blocked diffusions&lt;/strong&gt; - waves breaking against geographical and, most importantly, social barriers&quot; (p. 113). Have a look at a nice collection of papers on this topic in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=sPGe7aBSkpkC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Problems in comparative linguistics&lt;/a&gt; , ed. A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon, published by OUP in 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-02-13T20:27:59.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1411" CreationDate="2012-02-13T20:29:41.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to look at how they pattern, where they can be used, how they behave in the phrase and clause. If &quot;a/an&quot; and &quot;the&quot; go in the same position relative to a noun, then having a term that covers the words that go in that position is worthwhile, ditto for having terms for the position itself, and how other words place themselves relative to the noun and the whatchamacallit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a red car&#xA;the red car&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very simplified here: Can you use more than one of a and the in front of a noun? Nope. Can you move the adjective (red) to the left of the whatchamacallit? No. If you want to add more adjectives, where do you put them? Between the whatchamacallit and the noun. Are there other words that can go in the whatchamacallit-position in English? Well, then that is also the same type of whatchamacallit. In English it just so happens that whatchamacallits that pattern in this particular way are traditionally called articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of speech/word class is only defined &lt;em&gt;for a specific&lt;/em&gt; language. Other languages have other parts-of-speech/word classes that pattern differently. There are similarities, but: if you want to give a pattern in language A the same name as a possibly similar pattern in language B, you need to back it up, be it with examples, analysis or cites/references. The same rough &quot;meaning&quot; is not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-02-13T20:29:41.070" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1412" CreationDate="2012-02-13T22:50:30.140" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only found this corpus on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nus.edu.sg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NUS (National University of Singapore)&lt;/a&gt; site, but luckily it has a lot of entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg:8080/SMSCorpus/old.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  for a corpus containing ~10,000 text messages, which was the original corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg:8080/SMSCorpus/history.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, there is a table listing the corpora (they range from ~10,000 to ~51,000 text messages) available for download. The top line being the most recent corpus there; you can download either in XML or SQL, or download the statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must remind you (and everyone who uses it) that &lt;em&gt;you should make sure to follow the instructions asked by the researchers&lt;/em&gt;, in case you choose it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: please see the comment below my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;: It looks like the download site is down, instead you can download all the data from their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WING-NUS/nus-sms-corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github Repo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="17043" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T10:18:36.593" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T10:18:36.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-02-13T23:10:39.463" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;A classical grammar book indicates a rough timeline and presents the phonetic deletion of verbal endings as the main cause of this change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;« Au Moyen Âge, le pronom sujet faisait ordinairement défaut, parce que les terminaisons verbales, étant encore sonores, indiquaient suffisamment les personnes grammaticales : &lt;em&gt;Que ferai donc ?&lt;/em&gt; (Eneas, 8729). — &lt;em&gt;Ma chiere amie, que avez ?&lt;/em&gt; (Béroul, &lt;em&gt;Tristan&lt;/em&gt;, 3175) — Où est ? (&lt;em&gt;Fiore et Blancheflor&lt;/em&gt;, 676) — Feras ? (&lt;em&gt;Pathelin&lt;/em&gt;, 1390) — Peu à peu le pronom sujet s'est imposé dans la conjugaison. Il était encore assez souvent omis au XVIe s. : &lt;em&gt;Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant&lt;/em&gt; / [...] (Ronsard, t. XVII, p. 265) — Au XVIIe s., cette omission était un archaïsme, quoiqu'elle fût fréquente encore dans les réponses : &lt;em&gt;Et le vais voir tantôt&lt;/em&gt; (Mol., &lt;em&gt;Ét.&lt;/em&gt;, V, 8). — &lt;em&gt;Leur ai dit la langueur&lt;/em&gt; (La F., &lt;em&gt;F&lt;/em&gt;., VIII, 3). — &lt;em&gt;Non ferai, de par tous les diables&lt;/em&gt; (Mol., &lt;em&gt;Av.&lt;/em&gt;, V, 3) »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from Grevisse, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Bon_Usage&quot;&gt;Le Bon Usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, a (quite expensive) book  that cannot be too recommended for any advanced student [or speaker] of French, §667; the English-speaking calls it a &quot;prescriptive grammar&quot;, but that's absurd, as the title already shows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rough translation, without the quotes: “During the Middle Ages, the subject pronoun was usually lacking, because the verbal endings, still pronounced, were sufficient to show the grammatical person. Bit by bit, the pronoun subject made his way in the conjugation. It was still often omitted in the 16th century. In the 17th century, this omission was already an archaism, still frequent yet in answers.”&#xA;(Of course, Mol. is Molière and La F. is La Fontaine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="189" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T22:33:04.523" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T22:33:04.523" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-14T02:51:37.190" Score="6" ViewCount="2531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has the internet or the recent dramatic cheapening of long-distance communication in general had an effect on the way language evolves? I would think (purely speculatively) that it reinforces those languages and dialects&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; that already have large numbers of speakers and streamlines geographic variants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore it would seem to fix current forms&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; of language and provide some resistance to change, though my limited personal experience seems to cast some doubt on this prediction. These things are my own speculation, but I wanted to know if any research has been done on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is known about this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: By &quot;reinforce&quot; I mean to cause more people to use that particular dialect more of the time and more consistently, to some extent to the exclusion of other variants of the language.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;: By &quot;fix&quot; I mean to cause to stay the same over time.&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-15T17:46:27.787" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T10:40:24.433" Title="Has the internet had an effect on language change?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-14T03:03:43.597" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would imagine that it would need a full list of all the forms of all the words, but how much information would need to be told to the computer about each word in order for it to know enough to judge if sentences are, say, valid English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T10:27:28.560" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T10:27:28.560" Title="What does a dictionary need so that a computer can use it to determine the grammaticality of a given string?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1432" CreationDate="2012-02-14T03:12:28.420" Score="5" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese is famous for its very few irregular verbs, but there are some cases where verb-forms are missing and other verbs/adjectives are used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, (in standard Japanese) the verb ある &quot;aru&quot; (to be/exist) does not have a non-polite negative (which would be あらない &quot;aranai&quot;) and instead the adjective ない &quot;nai&quot; is used. Still, ある is usually considered regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is that?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it just a matter of definition, or is there some reason that ある cannot be considered an irregular verb which has undergone suppletion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is する &quot;suru&quot; (to do), which does not have a potential (can do). In stead, the verb できる &quot;dekiru&quot; is used. (する is already irregular, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T14:45:58.367" Title="Suppletion vs. missing verb forms" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;&lt;regular-verbs&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1420" CreationDate="2012-02-14T08:04:23.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jlawler in the comments of your question is right - but I'll try and expand a bit because I think it's a lovely example of how we often under-estimate the complexity of the languages we speak. A dictionary is a useful tool for what it's good at, giving people a basic idea of what a word means and its basic function. To integrate the data from a dictionary into a parsing machine requires the addition of a while lot more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, a dictionary gives the parts of speech (which is a good start) but nowhere in a dictionary will you find sentence-building information like &quot;subjects go before verbs in basic declarative sentences,&quot; or any of the hundreds of other syntactic rules that allow speakers to produce plausible utterances. So that's your &lt;strong&gt;syntactic&lt;/strong&gt; limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, there's a &lt;strong&gt;lexico-semantic&lt;/strong&gt; limitation. Think about a word like sand. We know form the dictionary that it's a noun, but we need more. We need to know it's a mass noun, not a count noun so putting a number with it is not good unless there's something to turn it into a count noun (eg. buckets of sand). Also, dictionaries don't include Proper Nouns so they're not going to be good at recognising large chunks of text (&quot;Lauren mentioned Chomsky on Stack Exchange&quot; - for example), not to mention the incredible creativity English-speakers show in creating neologisms (&quot;I Chomsky'd that post&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, there's a &lt;strong&gt;phonological&lt;/strong&gt; limitation. To give a dull but illustrative example, when do you use a\an? You'll have to build a rule for that on top of your dictionary, but you'll need to include inter-dialect and inter-speaker variation (in fact, the same goes for all of the above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries are great at what they do, and sometimes can be absorbed into computational processes in interesting ways, but it's just a small component of what you'll need to create a sentence checker!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T08:04:23.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="210" CreationDate="2012-02-14T13:34:35.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Japanese (and maybe some other languages) might be special in this case. Japanese uses personal pronouns much less than e.g. English, and second person pronouns are in many cases completely avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When speaking to kids, parents will usually refer to themselves as ママ mama／パパ papa or お母さん okāsan／お父さん otōsan, i.e. Mommy/Daddy or Mother/Father. When referring to the child, they will say &lt;em&gt;child's name&lt;/em&gt;+君 kun/ちゃん chan (honorific suffixes), or sometimes a nickname which might or might not have the honorific suffix &quot;built in&quot;. Personal pronouns are hardly ever used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, the reversal errors do not occur in their usual form. However, different but related problems occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The child has to learn to remove the honorific suffix when referring to themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even without the honorific suffix, referring yourself by name is considered childish. Children have to learn to use a first person pronoun when referring to themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2013-04-08T11:17:05.510" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T11:17:05.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1425" CreationDate="2012-02-14T14:39:01.423" Score="31" ViewCount="6523" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Japanese language lacks personal pronouns in the IE sense. Japanese is very pro-drop, and often sentences will be constructed so personal pronouns do not appear, and the agents which the pronouns would have referred to are implicit from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first person, however, pronouns do occur with some frequency, but these are really &quot;special nouns&quot; such as 私 watashi (originally &quot;individual&quot;) or 僕 boku (&quot;servant&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second person, pronouns are often avoided completely, since using them can be considered rude. When they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; used, they are special nouns like in the first person case, e.g. 君 kimi (&quot;lord&quot;) or お前 omae (&quot;before me&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the noun argument, there are other reasons why these seem different from personal pronouns in the IE sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have changed a lot over time, e.g. a samurai in the Edo period might have referred to himself as 拙者 sessha, but this is not used anymore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These &quot;pronouns&quot; can be modified by adjectives and relative clauses like other nouns, which is not the case for pronouns in the IE languages that I know of.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of real personal pronouns seems very curious to me. You would imagine that it is one of the first things that a language develops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other languages, if any, have no pronouns (or all pronouns have some/all of the above peculiarities, or maybe other peculiarities)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it reasonable to believe that these languages lacked &quot;real&quot; pronouns from the very beginning, or is it reasonable to believe that they lost them due to some process (e.g. because there is a tendency to avoid them like in Japanese)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I've edited the formulation slightly, since I already know about polite 2nd person pronouns covered by nouns/3rd persons/plurals. I also know about the tendency for non-nominative forms to take over the nominative forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2012-02-15T05:03:51.163" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T16:00:32.560" Title="What languages lack personal pronouns, and why?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2012-02-14T18:23:31.947" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the easiest one to talk about is Bahasa Melayu (Malay, Indonesian, Malaysian). As Jack Prentice put it in his review of Indonesian for &lt;em&gt;The World's Major Languages,&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pronoun&quot; is an open class in Malay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any noun that can refer to a human being can be used as a personal pronoun, and person, number, age, and gender (for example) are only a few of the many categories that are relevant to pronoun choice in Bahasa. Plus &lt;strong&gt;{Zero}&lt;/strong&gt; is the most common pronoun, for all persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, much the same is true of related languages I'm familiar with, like Minangkabau, Acehnese, and Javanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T18:23:31.947" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1428" CreationDate="2012-02-14T18:41:00.710" Score="0" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of standard abbreviations/acronyms available for computational linguistics tasks? I understand 'standard' is a subjective term here but anything that is not too domain specific(not a list of medical or chemical abbreviations) should be a start for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="714" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T18:55:46.570" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T19:38:21.087" Title="Machine-readable list of abbreviations" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2012-02-14T18:52:23.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, note that &lt;em&gt;being a pro-drop language&lt;/em&gt; doesn't necessarily mean that a given language lacks pronouns. They just avoid using them because they &lt;em&gt;are not required&lt;/em&gt; in all situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Japanese is not a pro-drop because its personal pronouns have a particular etymology&lt;/em&gt;. It's pro-drop because when people speak Japanese, they omit these pronouns, since they can be understood from the context, or for a matter of &quot;polite/casual speech&quot;. In other languages they are avoided because the morphology of that language already brings that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take as an example the verb &lt;strong&gt;parlare&lt;/strong&gt; which means &quot;to speak&quot; in Italian. The first person would be &quot;io parlo&quot;. But usually people say &quot;parlo&quot;, as there is no need for us to use the personal pronouns. If I say &lt;em&gt;&quot;parlo&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, everyone will understand who I'm referring to without ambiguity at all. But it would be also wrong to say that Italian lacks personal pronouns, since they do exist but they're simply not always required, as they are in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any language that lacks pronouns &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt;. Probably it'd be easier to find languages that have less than others. But languages tend to &quot;economize&quot;, so pronouns are one of the logical consequences. Regarding your second question, I think it'd deserve a question by itself. Anyway, even if languages lose a certain personal pronoun, it's not granted that they will just lose it, as they can simply replace it. Let me re-take Italian again: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;strong&gt;egli/ella&lt;/strong&gt; (he/she) and &lt;strong&gt;lui/lei&lt;/strong&gt; (him/her). The second ones have almost totally replaced the first ones. I'd never say &lt;em&gt;&quot;egli mi ha detto che...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; which means &lt;em&gt;he told me that...&lt;/em&gt;, but rather &lt;em&gt;&quot;lui mi ha detto che...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and theoretically this would be wrong, because it would be like saying *&lt;em&gt;him told me that...&lt;/em&gt; but now it's the common form being used by native speakers. This would deserve itself research on its own, but as you can see even if &quot;we're losing&quot; a pronoun, instead of being without one, we replaced it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T18:52:23.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2012-02-14T19:14:12.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/help-services/QuickGuides/oed-abbr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary: List of Abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; is machine readable, and 'standard' too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T19:38:21.087" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T19:38:21.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1421" CreationDate="2012-02-14T23:02:28.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question being raised is whether there is a sharp line in inflectional morphology between lexemes (usually verbs) which have defective paradigms, and verbs which exhibit suppletion in their paradigms. (For an approach to inflectional morphology centered around paradigms, see Stump 2001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that to a certain extent it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a matter of definition, but nonetheless there are a large number of uncontroversial cases that furnish examples of suppletion and of defective paradigms. Traditionally, the term suppletion has been applied to alternations in a paradigm between verb forms which are etymologically unrelated (cf. Rudes 1980), although most modern analysts would say that the real question is whether the forms are &lt;em&gt;phonologically&lt;/em&gt; related or not (cf. Corbett 2007; Fertig 1998; Mel'cuk 1994). Textbook examples of suppletion, however, almost always draw upon etymologically unrelated forms. A defective paradigm, on the other hand, is one where an expected alternation (expected based on the behavior of other verbs in the language) is simply unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am not familiar with the Japanese facts, I'll go through two simple examples from English and Latin so that you can get a flavor of the type of argumentation required, and then probably make a judgment on the Japanese for yourself. Because you refer to conventional forms that seem to fill a hole in the paradigm, my first guess would be that these &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; suppletive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, take the English forms &lt;em&gt;go, went, going, gone&lt;/em&gt;. Under a defective paradigm analysis, we would claim that there is simply no past tense form corresponding to present tense &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;. There is, however, another verb, &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;, with a severely defective paradigm (having only this one form), which tends to get used where a past-tense analogue of &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; is needed. (See OED entries for &lt;em&gt;go, wend&lt;/em&gt;, for more details) What makes this analysis improbable is that the alternation between &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; is very robust and regular, and the two words have no appreciable meaning difference other than a difference in tense. Phrasal verbs using &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;, for example, for their past tense with &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;. (e.g. &lt;em&gt;go crazy&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;went crazy&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider the Latin deponent verbs (e.g. &lt;em&gt;locutus sum&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have talked&quot;), which have passive-voice forms, but active voice meanings. For these verbs, there are no forms corresponding to a passive voice meaning, related or otherwise. From glancing at the meanings of some deponent verbs (&lt;em&gt;conor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to attempt&quot;; &lt;em&gt;polliceor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to promise&quot;; &lt;em&gt;orior&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to arise&quot;), we see that passive meanings corresponding to these verbs probably would not arise very often in the course of language use. Verbs having suppletive paradigms, on the other hand, tend to have a high frequency (see Veselinova 2006 for details), and the meanings expressed by the suppletive forms tend to arise frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greville G Corbett. Canonical typology, suppletion, and&#xA;possible words. &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v083/83.1corbett.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language, 83(1):8–42&lt;/a&gt;, 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Fertig. Suppletion, natural morphology, and&#xA;diagrammaticity. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1998.36.6.1065&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistics, 36(6):1065–1091&lt;/a&gt;, 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Igor Mel’cuk. Suppletion: Toward a logical analysis of the&#xA;concept. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.18.2.03mel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Studies in Language, 18(2):339–410&lt;/a&gt;, 1994.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blaire A Rudes. On the nature of verbal suppletion.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1980.18.7-8.655&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistics, 18:655–676&lt;/a&gt;, 1980.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gregory Stump. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1166768/?site_locale=en_GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Inflectional Morphology: A theory of paradigm&#xA;structure.&lt;/a&gt; Cambridge: CUP, 2001.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ljuba N Veselinova. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/tsl.67&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Suppletion in Verb Paradigms: Bits and&#xA;pieces of the puzzle.&lt;/a&gt; John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T23:26:54.843" LastActivityDate="2012-02-14T23:26:54.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1481" CreationDate="2012-02-14T23:30:57.397" Score="9" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are very similar languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin over the past two thousand years or so. We know a great deal about their histories, the occupation of the Iberian peninsula by the Roman Empire etc. But I suppose things are not always so easy for historical linguists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguists find documents that attest the existence of two obviously related languages for which is impossible to establish reliable dates, there are, at least, two possibilities of relationship between them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both languages descended from the same proto-language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one is a more modern version of the other. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to establish how they are related based on linguistic data alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="769" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-14T23:52:04.170" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T01:04:16.540" Title="Is it possible to determine genetic relations without external historical data?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="653" CreationDate="2012-02-15T05:30:37.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Germanic strong-weak verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic verbs are usually either strong (vowel change, &quot;ablaut&quot;) or weak (suffix), but strong-weak verbs (mostly modal verbs) are both. As far as I know, this takes place in all Germanic languages. English certainly is no exception: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can-could, will-would, may-might&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T05:30:37.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1421" CreationDate="2012-02-15T05:45:05.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with jlovegren. that it probably has to do with definitions — in fact, I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; seen &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; called an irregular verb. On the other hand, I hazily remember reading something by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruhiko_Kindaichi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kindaichi Haruhiko&lt;/a&gt; which contrasted the behavior of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; with &quot;the adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so, clearly, there are mainstream voices on the &quot;not irregular&quot; side too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To judge from Alex B.'s response, there is no &quot;sharp line&quot;, so the question is, which explanation seems more probable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say we declare &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; part of the &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; paradigm. This leaves us with the problem of what to do about the independent adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt;. If our argument is that it no longer exists, we are left with the difficulty of proving this. For example, &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; clearly existed independently of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; in old expressions like (1) below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Naki&lt;/strong&gt; ni shi mo &lt;strong&gt;arazu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider a fairly direct modern translation of (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Nai&lt;/strong&gt; (wake) de wa &lt;strong&gt;nai&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we offer as proof that the first &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; in (2) &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be considered a conjugation of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;? I can't think of anything. (I'm sure if I am wrong someone will let me know in comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say that &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; still exists as an independent adjective. In that case, we have the opposite problem. What is our proof that the &lt;em&gt;final&lt;/em&gt; word of (2) &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be considered a conjugation of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;? We can offer the polite form (3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;Nai&lt;/strong&gt; (wake) de wa &lt;strong&gt;arimasen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... where the link to &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; is clear -- but in fact, the following is also acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) &lt;strong&gt;Nai&lt;/strong&gt; (wake) de wa &lt;strong&gt;nai&lt;/strong&gt; desu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which is what we would expect to see if the final word　in (2) is &quot;adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt;&quot; rather than &quot;conjugation-of-&lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; *nai*&quot;: if we have no reason to go back to an &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;-related form, we create a polite form just like any other adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure some people would argue that (4) is not grammatical, but then we are back to definitions. It is undeniable that &lt;em&gt;nai desu&lt;/em&gt; is very common in casual speech. It cannot be ruled unacceptable except by fiat. And note that we are also seeing forms like &lt;em&gt;nakatta desu&lt;/em&gt; encroach on what &quot;should&quot; be &lt;em&gt;arimasen deshita&lt;/em&gt;, another example of &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; acting more like an independent adjective than something that is &quot;underlyingly&quot; a form of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the most logical explanation is to view &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; as a defective verb, or at least a verb with a nonpolite negative form that is &quot;suppressed&quot; by the use of independent-adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; instead, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It frees us of the need to make the weak, apparently arbitrary distinction between adjective and negative-of-verb required by examples like (2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It explains why &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt;-like forms are also encroaching on the &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; negative form of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt; as seen in (4): because the word is increasingly not perceived as being part of &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One argument against my second point is that we see forms like &lt;em&gt;ikanakatta desu&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;ikimasen deshita&lt;/em&gt;) as well. Maybe &lt;em&gt;desu&lt;/em&gt; is just turning into a non-conjugating &quot;politeness particle&quot;, and so the encroachment on &lt;em&gt;arimas-&lt;/em&gt; is part of a bigger change involving the loss of &lt;em&gt;-mas-&lt;/em&gt; forms, rather than something specific to &lt;em&gt;aru&lt;/em&gt;. (Counterarguments to &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; might include &quot;Yeah, but this is itself driven by the influence of the adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; on the negative verb ending (or &quot;auxiliary&quot;, etc.) &lt;em&gt;-nai&lt;/em&gt;, so ultimately it comes down to the triumph of adjective &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt; anyway&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-16T14:45:58.367" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T14:45:58.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2012-02-15T06:40:13.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding question (2), Japanese itself didn't always lack them. Old Japanese had a pronoun system (wa/ware, a/are, etc.) which coexisted with modern-style pseudo pronouns (kimi, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how parallel the OJ pronouns were to IE-style pronouns, but they were definitely distinct from other nouns -- the most obvious difference is the &quot;long form&quot; (ware) vs &quot;short form&quot; (wa) distinction, with the former used in isolation and the latter accepting particles like genitive &quot;ga&quot; (never &quot;no&quot;), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastActivityDate="2012-02-15T06:40:13.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1435" CreationDate="2012-02-16T03:49:17.590" Score="21" ViewCount="1976" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4651536127874730779&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,36&quot;&gt;2008 Edward Vajda presented his decade-long research&lt;/a&gt; into a connection between the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=2678-16&quot;&gt;Yeniseian languages&lt;/a&gt; of central Siberia (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingsib.iea.ras.ru/en/languages/ket.shtml&quot;&gt;Ket&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.language-archives.org/language/yuu&quot;&gt;Yugh&lt;/a&gt;) and the American &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=609-16&quot;&gt;Na-Dené&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabaskan_languages&quot;&gt;Athabaskan&lt;/a&gt;–&lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/eyaklanguageproject/&quot;&gt;Eyak&lt;/a&gt;–&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tlingit.htm&quot;&gt;Tlingit&lt;/a&gt;) family. His conclusion was the the languages were indeed related in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages&quot;&gt;Dené–Yeniseian family&lt;/a&gt;, a significant finding since if correct it would be the first genetic linguistic connection between the Old and New Worlds. Definitely big news, and as I recall it was generally positively received at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in understanding: &lt;strong&gt;what is the general view in the academic linguistics community of this research now that time has passed to examine it?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm also curious as to whether Prof Vajda's research is being built upon by any other groups now? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T11:20:23.103" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T11:20:23.103" Title="Is the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis widely accepted, and has it led to further research?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1434" CreationDate="2012-02-16T07:49:22.727" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the view of the linguistics community on the likelihood of the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, the hypothesis has first of all attracted the attention of &quot;serious&quot; linguistics in the field. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://search.ebscohost.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&amp;amp;db=ufh&amp;amp;AN=62012314&amp;amp;site=ehost-live&amp;amp;scope=site&quot;&gt;Rice (2011)&lt;/a&gt; writes in her review, a similar proposal has been made in the past by other linguists, including Merritt Ruhlen &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merrittruhlen.com/files/1998c.pdf&quot;&gt;(1998)&lt;/a&gt; and Sergei Starostin (1995), but these earlier proposals did not have much impact in the general linguistics community. What is different about Vajda's proposal, aside from the evidence he adduces for it, is that Vajda is a &quot;a serious scholar trying to use appropriate procedures.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lylecamp/Campbell%20Yeniseian%20NaDene%20review%2011-2-10.pdf&quot;&gt;Campbell 2011&lt;/a&gt;) As Campbell also notes, scholars with impressive reputations in the area of general linguistics (Nichols, Comrie) and specialists (Fortescue) have voiced support for the hypothesis. Rice, one of the leading experts on Athabaskan, appears to be studiously neutral in her review (2011), and Campbell, a well-known historical linguist and author of the most widely-used textbook on the subject (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=EjXrrOJhex8C&amp;amp;dq=campbell%20historical%20linguistics&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot;&gt;Campbell 1998&lt;/a&gt;), finds the hypothesis inadequately supported (though his reputation as a conservative in this regard is pretty well-established).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is interesting about the proposal is that it combines traditional lexical evidence with morphological data. An idea which has been gaining support in recent years is that templatic morphology (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcgood/jcgood_Diss.pdf&quot;&gt;Good 2003&lt;/a&gt;), when sufficiently complex, may be especially stable over time. This theme was discussed in a workshop at the recent annual meeting of the LSA entitled &quot;The Diachronic Stability of Complex Templatic Morphology,&quot; at which Vajda presented a paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether the research is being built on by other groups, my sense is that relatively few people have sufficient knowledge of all of the different data sources, so there are unlikely to be serious contributors to the debate who come out of nowhere. It seems that Vajda is still devoting a large portion of his time to the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T21:50:24.503" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T21:50:24.503" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1437" CreationDate="2012-02-16T15:33:53.980" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arising from discussion against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58199/against-traffic-or-against-the-traffic#comment110564_58199&quot;&gt;“Against traffic” or “Against the traffic”&lt;/a&gt; on ELU, I wonder if anyone can give an authoritative opinion and/or supporting evidence for the proposition that Americans tend to interpret ambiguous embedded clauses within &quot;compound verb phrases&quot; differently to Brits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example under consideration in that question had &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;...[a vehicle] driving against the traffic towards London...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. - &lt;em&gt;driving against {the traffic towards London}&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;driving {against the traffic} {towards London}&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that if you know already which direction the vehicle itself is heading, the &quot;correct&quot; interpretation will be transparently inferred on either side of the Atlantic without the ambiguity even being particularly noticed. But my question is whether there's any evidence to suggest a UK/US difference in interpretation &lt;em&gt;in the absence of disambiguating information&lt;/em&gt;, and/or a tendency to avoid using the ambiguous construction at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies to anyone who thinks this should have been asked on ELU. I think it belongs here - but it's not really my call, so please just migrate it if I'm out of order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T22:30:03.163" Title="Is there a US/UK difference in interpretation/usage of &quot;compound verb phrases&quot; split by an embedded clause" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1436" CreationDate="2012-02-16T15:52:10.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In speech, of course, rhythm and intonation would probably make it clear what the speaker meant. In print, it's flat-out ambiguous, and I don't see any US/UK differences from the US side. I tend to doubt claims about Pondal and other dialect differences that aren't made by sociolinguists with data in hand. Many people assume that any difference from what they expect in speech or writing must be a dialectal difference, though most such are simply individual preferences and habits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T15:52:10.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1436" CreationDate="2012-02-16T16:02:22.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a case of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/search?q=pp%20attachment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PP attachment problem&lt;/a&gt;, the classic example for which is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see the man with a telescope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I using a telescope and seeing the man through it, or am I seeing a man who is using a telescope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would venture a guess here that this phenomenon is ambiguous in any language, regardless of national variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2012-02-16T16:02:22.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1441" CreationDate="2012-02-16T19:26:58.810" Score="10" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when I see an example sentence in a linguistics textbook which is supposed to be incorrect or unparseable, I get annoyed because the sentence seems just fine to me. Garden paths aren't the same to me anymore, either, because after studying them I can parse new ones without much problem. For example, most linguists know the famous 'the horse ran past the barn fell'; because of that, 'the boat floated sank' and 'the car turned went straight' are easier to parse. How do linguists maintain a sense of what non-linguists can and can't do? There are always surveys, of course, but a linguist can't just write every sentence on a survey and ask for opinions on every one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 more examples. It has been claimed that starting a sentence with multiple 'that' is not possible; but I am just fine with saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That that she did that was a bad idea was not a good thing to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps not the best wording, but I would give it a '?', not a '*'. Triple embeddings are fine sometimes, too, if there's an adverb. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The computer the guy your mom saw yesterday bought broke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is fine with me. Am I abnormal, or am I just a linguist?:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-02-16T20:38:14.707" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T15:33:06.690" Title="How do linguists deal with losing normal intuition?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2012-02-16T19:47:42.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes in machine translation, a model called an &quot;interlingua&quot; is used to represent grammatical or semantic structures in a language agnostic way. The term does not specify the structure of the model in any way, but is a good search term for this topic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingual_machine_translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has an article on it. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a recent example from Google's research blog with some details on their model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They use something called an 'interlingua'. &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.umiacs.umd.edu/pub/bonnie/Interlingual-MT-Dorr-Hovy-Levin.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; provides an overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T19:06:40.123" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T19:06:40.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-02-16T23:33:39.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question suffers from a presupposition failure. In general, linguists don't lose their &quot;normal intuitions&quot;, if you assume for example that only experienced linguists are publishing in Linguistic Inquiry — Jon Sprouse and Diogo Almeida have tested a bunch of examples from LI and from Adger's intro syntax book on naive informants using sophisticated methods and have found that the judgments confirm those reported in print. You can get into this literature &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/001362&quot;&gt;at this page&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What your discussion points to is something that is often pointed out to students as a cautionary note is that even though you might be able to extract the intended meaning of a given ungrammatical string, it doesn't mean that the string HAS that meaning. We can often understand what a string with an island violation in it is supposed to mean, but that doesn't make it any less ungrammatical. It's facts like these, too, that are often taken to claim that natural language is not identical to the language of thought (whatever that might be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T14:09:25.050" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T14:09:25.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1664" CreationDate="2012-02-16T23:47:20.380" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for recently published journals or books dealing with Linguistics education, or the training of professional linguists. I have found one journal, &quot;Innovations in Linguistics Education,&quot; which doesn't appear to be regularly published anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T19:46:59.920" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:46:59.920" Title="Literature on linguistics education" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1444" CreationDate="2012-02-17T12:23:22.453" Score="21" ViewCount="3317" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Romance languages don't have /x/ (like the j in &lt;em&gt;hijo&lt;/em&gt;), nor did Latin. Where did Spanish /x/ come from? Internal development, Arabic influence, or something else? Since Moroccan Arabic also has /x/, one would suspect Arabic influence; but perhaps that is simplistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T12:53:51.960" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T18:23:49.143" Title="Where did Spanish get its /x/? Arabic influence?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2012-02-17T14:47:31.630" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish did have Arabic influence but it seems that the jota (the name for the letter &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; in Spanish) came from Latin, going through some variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An hypothesis, provided in &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=cybGiUrRz1kC&amp;amp;lpg=PA1&amp;amp;ots=AHEgGXI2b9&amp;amp;dq=jota%20sonido%20espa%C3%B1ol%20origen&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PA1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introducción a la historia de la lengua española&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Melvyn C. Resnick, at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=cybGiUrRz1kC&amp;amp;lpg=PA1&amp;amp;ots=AHEgGXI2b9&amp;amp;dq=jota%20sonido%20espa%C3%B1ol%20origen&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PA38#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 38&lt;/a&gt; (Scroll down until you read &lt;em&gt;«Podemos postular...»&lt;/em&gt; going onwards) explains the path from &lt;strong&gt;ōcŭlu&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;ojo&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The [k] (letter C) voices and becomes  a [g]: &lt;strong&gt;ōcŭlu &amp;gt; ogulu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post-tonic&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; vowel falls: &lt;strong&gt;ogulu &amp;gt; oglu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a &amp;quot;shift&amp;quot; from the final &lt;strong&gt;-u&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;-o&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;oglu &amp;gt; oglo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The [g] &amp;quot;vocalizes&amp;quot; (i.e. it becomes a vowel sound) and becomes the semivowel [y], called &lt;em&gt;Yod&lt;/em&gt; letter's name from the Hebrew alphabet: &lt;strong&gt;oglo &amp;gt; oylo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The yod and the semivowel exchange position (called &lt;em&gt;metatesis&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish): &lt;strong&gt;oylo &amp;gt; olyo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The group [ly] gives the [ l̺ ], similar to the Spanish &amp;quot;ll&amp;quot;: &lt;strong&gt;olyo &amp;gt; ol̺o&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The  [ l̺ ] becomes the semivowel [y]: &lt;strong&gt;ol̺o &amp;gt; oyo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The semivowel [y] &lt;em&gt;intensifies&lt;/em&gt; as the &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt; in the French rou&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;e, the IPA is [ž]: &lt;strong&gt;oyo &amp;gt; ožo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Following a general tendency from the Spain of the XVI&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century, the sound becomes voiceless&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, the IPA is [š]&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;ožo &amp;gt; ošo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During the XVII&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century, in Spain, the sound [š] is lost, and the current &amp;quot;jota&amp;quot; sound with the modern pronunciation is originated. It's the same sound from the south american Spanish, the IPA is [χ]: &lt;strong&gt;ošo &amp;gt; oχo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the southern Spain and the northern countries of south america, the [χ] results in [h]: &lt;strong&gt;oxo &amp;gt; oho&lt;/strong&gt;, written form ⟶ &lt;strong&gt;ojo&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evolution of &lt;strong&gt;mūlǐēre &amp;gt; mujer&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;fīlǐa &amp;gt; hija&lt;/strong&gt; follow the same pattern as &lt;strong&gt;ōcŭlu &amp;gt; ojo&lt;/strong&gt; [...], but not all words with such features have the same result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I haven't found other clear references but there are some hints that confirm the process described above. If you want, I can find some other references to further back up this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a search about the possible causes of this &amp;quot;velarization&amp;quot;, but little is there. Especially one source that could hold this information is not (fully) available online, which is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books/about/Historia_de_la_lengua_espa%C3%B1ola.html?id=KzF-haPlyiQC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Historia de la lengua española&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Rafael Cano Aguilar. The chapter that interests us is the number 32, titles &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;De las sibilantes y palatales antiguas a las «ces», «eses» y «jotas» modernas&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but the book stops around the chapter 29 in that preview, so it's not possible to see what is written there. (If someone can access those pages in that preview, please comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other texts I've consulted are &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=rVNGMlx7cOYC&amp;amp;dq=change%20causes%20spanish%20sibilants%20phonology&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Variation and change in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Ralph John Penny, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=ZjcrhyQlFa0C&amp;amp;dq=change%20causes%20spanish%20sibilants%20phonology&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A history of the Spanish language&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, always by R.J. Penny, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.it/books?id=5dnWmTDSWxAC&amp;amp;dq=change%20spanish%20sibilants%20phonology&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Historical romance linguistics: retrospective and perspectives&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Randall Scott Gessa and Deborah L. Arteaga, and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scribd.com/doc/14759073/Lapesa-Historia-de-la-lengua-espanola&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Historia de la lengua española&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Rafael Lapesa, but none of these talked about the causes, although they confirmed that passage from [ʃ] to [χ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place that mentions the (possible) causes is the wikipedia article about the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reajuste_de_las_sibilantes_del_idioma_espa%C3%B1ol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adjustment of the sibilants in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, but I haven't found anything that confirms or denies the information being found there, although I think they are a good starting point if you want to further investigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't know Spanish, I'll summarize the main points of the section &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Posibles causas&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (possible causes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic changes are natural processes in all languages. Although there are phonetic laws that act outside of the linguistic genealogy boundaries; [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When treating phonetic changes or evolution, we must take into account that there never is a single reason, rather some that &amp;quot;act together&amp;quot;. Among the causes, linguists distinguish between internal and external causes, [...]. In this case, linguists believe that the loss of those voiced sounds was due to a spanish-basque bilingualism [...], while others think that it was an internal simplification due to structural causes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Taking into account the fact that the /s/ was an apico-alveolar, there wasn't much difference between that and /š/. For this reason, Spanish speakers, in order to keep the two phonemes distinguished, started to bring &amp;quot;back&amp;quot; the place of articulation, transforming the latter into a velar. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps. Judging from what I found, we know fairly surely how we got this sound &amp;quot;out of nowhere&amp;quot; but we don't know the causes for sure yet. If you don't feel satisfied, I can try to make a deeper research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: I think postónica refers to post-tonic.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;: &amp;quot;Ensordecer&amp;quot; literally means &amp;quot;to deafen&amp;quot;, but I think here it's mean as &amp;quot;to devoice/to become voiceless&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;: [š] = [ʃ]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;: The original title of the article is &amp;quot;Reajuste de las sibilantes del idioma español&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T09:34:46.060" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1436" CreationDate="2012-02-17T20:20:45.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have probably turned myself into a machine, but the sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I was driving against the traffic towards London.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I was driving, against the traffic, towards London.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mean very different things to me, and each has an unambiguous meaning -- not just in text (with punctuation) but in speech too (with intonation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have pasted a couple of graphs below. To make these, I fed the sentences to the Stanford Parser and used my own software to generate the graphs. But you can verify it for yourself  at &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Stanford Parser's demo website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDxPs.png&quot; alt=&quot;I was driving against the traffic towards London.&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MSaTH.png&quot; alt=&quot;I was driving, against the traffic, towards London.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that most parsers (and I &lt;code&gt;:-D&lt;/code&gt;) tend to treat these in a manner identical to the Stanford Parser, I do not claim that most speakers of English would see this difference between these sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@FumbleFingers: I don't know about a UK/US difference in this case, but having done classes in linguistics with a few classmates from the US, I have come to the opinion that in matters of &lt;em&gt;subtle&lt;/em&gt; interpretation, not all people from the same region tend to have the same opinions. How do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; interpret the first sentence? How do you interpret it in speech? Do your RL friends from your region interpret it your way too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-02-17T22:30:03.163" LastActivityDate="2012-02-17T22:30:03.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1419" CreationDate="2012-02-18T10:40:24.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very broad question, and you are seeking information on two different topics. The first is about which language people actually use, and the second is about whether or not a given language being used is less (or more) susceptible to change due to its use online. Here are a few things to think about that may help you to narrow down your question to something that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be answered more easily :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no work that will give you an answer like &quot;A 2005 study showed that the decline in number of people speaking minority dialects is highly correlated with the number of internet users&quot;, as per your example. It's too soon for us to know about a lot of these things, and even though there are many pieces of research that touch on these issues, it is not something that can easily be directly addressed because there are so many variables. A raw number of internet users wouldn't tell us much, especially about users of minority dialects; while internet access is pervasive in the Western world, in many places it is patchy or nonexistent, particularly in linguistically diverse parts of, say, Africa or Papua New Guinea, where a great many minority languages are spoken. People investigating a correlation between internet use and the use of a minority dialect would need to look at it from a very localized perspective. (Also, there are bigger threats to minority languages than the internet - the use of dominant languages in educational and professional contexts exerts quite an influence on people's choices about which language to use.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that a number of dominant languages have a big presence on the internet, and are in many cases preferred for online communication for various reasons (because the content is  in those languages, or the scripts used for the orthography are better supported, or the people you network with use that language). But, at the same time, the internet provides minority languages the opportunity to have a presence that would not be possible if we still relied on print media (books, letters, etc.) With the internet, it's possible for anyone to publish anything, in any language, at no cost. Language documentation and language revitalization projects often make the most of this by putting language materials (stories, online dictionaries, etc.) on the web, so that the people who speak the language can access them. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that people will be using the language online, but anyone can start a blog, discussion group, facebook page, or whatever, in any language they like. There is a large amount of freedom here, and all that is required is that speakers of a given language are still actively using it, have other speakers to communicate with online, and that their writing system is supported by whatever technology they use. For example, online forums and websites are credited with encouraging and facilitating the increased use of Welsh during its revival (which continues), particularly because it gave people opportunities to continue to use their Welsh even if they lived in the diaspora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question of whether or not the internet 'fixes' current forms of a language, well, this is another thing entirely (and too much to address in detail in this already long post!). But, I would be interested to hear why you think that the internet would 'fix' language - generally, people claim the opposite, and think that the internet is leading to the rapid evolution and degeneration of English, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's something that we can't make any big claims about yet, because it's still early to be observing any lasting effects of the internet on a given language. There are various changes that arise because of the nature of the medium (number of characters allowed in various contexts, types of writing systems allowed, the immediacy of communication) and various innovations that are internet-born (slang specific to certain user groups like World of Warcraft, use of hashtags to indicate topics) but we can't yet know whether these will last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are constantly evolving, and this process is natural and generally pretty hard to stop. While putting things in print can contribute to the standardization of a written language, and provide 'norms', the internet is unlikely to do this - there is too much variation in how people communicate online. Think about all the different varieties of English (American English, British English, Indian English, Singapore English), the skill levels in these (i.e. many people using English are not native speakers), the varying levels of formality (many people write in a way that is closer to spoken language), and the diversity of topics and users (different corners of the internet have different slang, jargon, conventions, and standards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: 1) too soon to know about a correlation between internet use and minority language use (other factors have bigger influences on this, and are difficult to separate out), and 2) too soon to know about the relationship between the internet and language change, but it's pretty unlikely that the internet will hold back the normal tides of change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T10:40:24.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2012-02-18T11:59:41.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take into account that in old Spanish, the letter &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; had the phoneme /x/ like the original title of the famous book &lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt;, and the country name we still pronounce with /x/, &lt;em&gt;México&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always thought this had to do with greek letter &lt;em&gt;chi&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;), because of the obvious correspondence in grapheme and phoneme, but that would require somehow a direct connection from Greek to Spanish without passing through Latin, which I'm not sure of.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, influence from Arabic does seem a plausible explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="778" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-19T11:03:11.393" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T11:03:11.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1450" CreationDate="2012-02-18T14:23:49.617" Score="5" ViewCount="1092" Body="&lt;p&gt;These (and some others) are all quite similar raspy sounds to most ears and by features other than place of articulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[χ]&lt;/code&gt; unvoiced uvular fricative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt; unvoiced velar fricative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ç]&lt;/code&gt; unvoiced palatal fricative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact in many languages two of these are merely reflexes of a single phoneme. Sometimes all three are reflexes of the same phoneme, other times another sound may also be a reflex of the same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm unable to think of any language in which any two of &lt;code&gt;/χ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/ç/&lt;/code&gt; are separate even at the phoneme level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there languages which have two, or all three, of these as separate phonemes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T11:00:01.147" Title="Are there languages in which two or all three of /χ/, /x/, and /ç/ are opposed as distinct phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1449" CreationDate="2012-02-18T14:40:27.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/L/L6100.html&quot;&gt;UPSID profile for Haida&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language name:  HAIDA &lt;br&gt;&#xA;UPSID number:   6100&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Alternate name(s):  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Classification: Na-Dene, Haida&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This language has   49 segments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Its Frequency index is  0.234082990 (average percentage of segments; 0.1: many very rare segments; 0.39: average; 0.7: many common segments)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The language has these sounds:  p ph &quot;t &quot;th c k kh q ? ch kWh kW qh qWh qW c' k' kW' qW' q' tSh tS' &quot;tlF' &quot;tlF &quot;dlF tS C x X h &quot;hlF xW XW m &quot;n N m* &quot;n* N* &quot;l* &quot;l w j w* j* i a U &quot;t'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Comment:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Source(s):  Sapir, E. 1923. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uaf.edu/anla/collections/search/files/HA915S1923/sapir-1923-haida_phonetics.PDF&quot;&gt;The phonetics of Haida&lt;/a&gt;. International Journal of American Linguistics 3-4: 143-58.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T14:40:27.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1451" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-18T14:57:20.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For linguistic questions about Spanish, one of the most widely spoken Romance languages, also known as Castilian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Spanish language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Spanish Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T06:21:12.410" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T06:21:12.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1452" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-18T14:57:20.620" Score="0" Body="For linguistic questions about Spanish, one of the most widely spoken Romance languages, also known as Castilian. For non-linguistic questions about the Spanish language, visit our sister site Spanish Language Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T06:21:21.020" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T06:21:21.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1456" CreationDate="2012-02-18T15:01:25.233" Score="4" ViewCount="5459" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the following sentence cohesive or coherent? Or both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ali loves fish. He lives in the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be of interest that cities are next to the sea in the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5299" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T22:24:50.283" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T10:27:09.800" Title="Cohesive vs. coherent" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-18T15:16:55.027" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T15:16:55.027" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T15:16:55.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1455" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-18T15:16:55.027" Score="0" Body="Sounds produced using the hard palate on the roof of the mouth as the place of articulation." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T15:24:11.367" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T15:24:11.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2012-02-18T15:28:04.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text is &lt;strong&gt;cohesive&lt;/strong&gt; but I don't think it's also &lt;strong&gt;coherent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cohesion&lt;/strong&gt; is achieved through some devices, such as the pronouns (you used &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; in your example)&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, so there is cohesion. Both sentences are about Ali.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the text has no &lt;strong&gt;coherence&lt;/strong&gt;, there is no (necessary) logic correlation between loving fish and living in the North.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: As also Mark reminded me in the comments below this answer, the text is cohesive if Ali is a man. Since Ali is also a female's name, the text might lose its cohesion if the text talks about an &quot;Ali = woman&quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-19T10:27:09.800" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T10:27:09.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1457" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-18T16:44:45.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T16:44:45.603" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T16:44:45.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-18T16:44:45.603" Score="0" Body="Sounds produced using the soft palate further back on the roof of the mouth as the place of articulation." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T16:45:25.977" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T16:45:25.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-18T16:45:52.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T16:45:52.590" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T16:45:52.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-18T16:45:52.590" Score="0" Body="Sounds produced using the uvula hanging down at the entrance to the throat as the place of articulation." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-18T16:52:51.770" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T16:52:51.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1449" CreationDate="2012-02-18T17:51:23.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ubykh evidently contrasts&lt;/a&gt; alveolo-palatal /ɕ/, /ɕʷ/, velar /x/, uvular /χʲ/, /χ/, /χʷ/, /χˤ/, /χˤʷ/, and glottal /h/ - four places of articulation and four secondary articulation (labialized, palatalized, pharyngealized, and labialized/pharyngealized). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what you asked as it has an alveo-palatal /ɕ/ instead of a pure palatal /ç/, but you might consider it close. It is impressive; luckily it only has 2 phonemic vowels.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T17:51:23.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2012-02-18T18:14:46.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without understanding the universe of discourse we can't make determination if sentences are coherent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, you give some context about this universe. This context could be seen as giving coherence to the sentences. In particular, if we regard &quot;the North&quot; as exophoric in relation to the cities near the sea, then the text is coherent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a different universe, or in a universe constisting only of the two sentences and no other text or knowledge, then we cannot say they are coherent, rather merely cohesive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T18:14:46.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1449" CreationDate="2012-02-18T18:30:58.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the Salishan languages have distinctive front and back velar phonemes. They generally distinguish several velar fricative phonemes, which in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LushootseedPhonemes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt; are /xʷ/, /χ/, and /χʷ/. There is no /x/, but there is a /h/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;eight&lt;/strong&gt; velar stop phonemes in Lushootseed: plain /k/, /q/, /kʷ/, /qʷ/, and glottalized /k'/, /q'/, /k'ʷ/, /q'ʷ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T18:30:58.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-02-18T18:46:10.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is a bit confused because it conflates ungrammaticality with things like garden paths and center embeddings. Both of these (garden paths and center embeddings) are indeed grammatical but are often at first perceived to be ungrammatical because of processing difficulty. In this way, the linguist is in fact more equipped to determine the relevant sentences' grammaticality than your average Joe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also the case that there is a normal amount of variation in intuition, sometimes because of dialect and sometimes just differing acquisition. In other words even two people who grow up in relatively similar circumstances are probably walking around with slightly different grammars of English. (Clearly, in yours, multiple that is fine: in mine, it's not.) Some grammaticality judgments are more rigid than others, of course; everybody would say that a determiner following its noun in English is ungrammatical, but certain ECP violations will sound better or worse depending on the exact sentence and the listener. (And in fact adding words like &quot;yesterday&quot; to a triple embedding does help its parse-ability.) It does not necessarily mean that you are out of touch if people differ in their grammaticality judgments, although you might be an outlier. That is why it's important to check with other real people, even as haphazard as that can be. (Lack of evidence for a construction, for example on the Internet or in a corpus, does not necessarily mean it is ungrammatical, as is the case for triple center embeddings.) Rarely will an argument ride entirely on one judgment, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-02-18T18:46:10.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1449" CreationDate="2012-02-18T23:12:06.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tlingit phonemically distinguishes &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/xʷ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/xʼ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/xʼʷ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/χ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/χʷ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/χʼ/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/χʼʷ/&lt;/code&gt; (whew!). It is the only language documented to have the ejective versions of these fricatives. No palatal fricatives though – Tlingit only has a palatal &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; and nothing else. The &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/xʼ/&lt;/code&gt; can be phonetically palatal when in the environment of a high front vowel, as one would expect. But this is strictly phonetic variation, and it is not obligatory so that &lt;code&gt;/xi/&lt;/code&gt; can be either &lt;code&gt;[xi]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[çi]&lt;/code&gt; freely, and some speakers never seem to palatalize much at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-19T11:00:01.147" LastActivityDate="2012-02-19T11:00:01.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1468" CreationDate="2012-02-19T22:21:52.650" Score="6" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a property of languages with respect to  copula (a verb 'to be' to mark equivalent thing): the copula may be necessary, or prohibited (and more complex mixtures of necessary and prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, English requires a copula:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is a doctor&#xA;  (you can't take a way the 'is')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, 'is' is not allowed (but it is necessary in the past):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On vrach. ('he doctor'..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this property an accepted &lt;strong&gt;primary&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_parameters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parameter of language (like pro-drop, or head direction)&lt;/a&gt; that is, a property that is correlated with other properties? Or is it associated secondarily with one of the more common parameters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2012-02-21T03:03:23.267" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T18:59:52.180" Title="Is there a proposed parameter of 'copula-drop'?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-02-20T21:15:21.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=6UAfo7tGROQC&amp;amp;lpg=PT55&amp;amp;ots=wsf4S9qlrd&amp;amp;dq=japanese%20spatial%20deixis&amp;amp;pg=PT55#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=japanese%20spatial%20deixis&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;like Japanese&lt;/a&gt; have spatial deixis words that refer to both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes analyzed as proximal, medial and distant, it's more often analyzed as &quot;close to me, the speaker&quot;, &quot;close to you, the listener&quot; and &quot;far from the two of us.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2012-02-20T21:15:21.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1466" CreationDate="2012-02-21T00:19:50.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;WALS has &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/120&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zero copula for predicate nominals&lt;/a&gt;&quot; as &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/120A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;feature 120A&lt;/a&gt; and explicitly treats it as a parameter. The chapter has a thorough discussion on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular it talks about different types of copulas, including verbal (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/datapoint/120A/wals_code_eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;), pronominal (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/datapoint/120A/wals_code_heb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;), and particle (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/datapoint/120A/wals_code_kbl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kabyle&lt;/a&gt;) copulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also points out that zero copula forms a continuum, and not merely a binary parameter. E.g. in English, a zero copula is never allowed; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/datapoint/120A/wals_code_snh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sinhalese&lt;/a&gt; a zero copula is mandatory&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;; but in &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/datapoint/120A/wals_code_rus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt; a zero copula is used in the present ('&lt;strong&gt;она врач&lt;/strong&gt;') but not the past ('&lt;strong&gt;она была врачом&lt;/strong&gt;').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: It appears that &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=DLh8QODmcEsC&amp;amp;lpg=PA64&amp;amp;ots=C0IFMDVu3K&amp;amp;dq=%22zero%20copula%22%20parameter&amp;amp;pg=PA64#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Strasser (1994)&lt;/a&gt; — the author of the WALS chapter — did an extensive study on zero copulas and their association with various parameters (such as Tensedness), it's just not discussed in the short WALS chapter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Note that WALS refers to languages like Sinhalese, where the zero copula is compulsory, as 'zero copula possible': &lt;em&gt;«only languages of the English type have been rated as type 1. In other words, a language is considered to be a member of type 2 if it allows the use of a zero copula, however minimal...»&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-21T18:59:52.180" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T18:59:52.180" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-02-21T20:29:34.780" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish (at least in Mexico) distinguishes two different deixis factors.  I'll show it phonemically instead of orthographically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                   near listener    far from listener&#xA;    near speaker        aki              aka&#xA;far from speaker        aji              aja&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I'm talking to you about something that's here in the same room as us, I'd say it's &lt;code&gt;aki&lt;/code&gt;.  It's here where both of us are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm inviting you to come across the room to sit over here by me, I'd invite you to come &lt;code&gt;aka&lt;/code&gt;.  This emphasizes that it's over here by me, not &quot;here&quot; where we both are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm talking about something over near you, I'd say it's &lt;code&gt;aji&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm pointing at something far off, something far from both of us, I'd say it's &lt;code&gt;aja&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-02-21T20:29:34.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1474" CreationDate="2012-02-22T21:43:21.710" Score="4" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for more information on a particular construction. It seems to be sort of a relative clause made by a PP, but not entirely. I am mostly looking for a name by which I could find it in the appropriate literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What book did you return &lt;strong&gt;without which&lt;/strong&gt; you can't finish the report? &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;That's a good computer &lt;strong&gt;on which&lt;/strong&gt; to play games.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice for the underlying structure of this construction, or a name I could look up in the literature, would be much appreciated. I'm thinking the structure for (2) might be something like: [that's a good computer(i) [to play games on which computer]] --&gt; [that's a good computer(i) [pp on [cp which &lt;strike&gt;computer&lt;/strike&gt; to play games]]] but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T03:46:19.417" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T03:46:19.417" Title="What's this structure called? (prepositional relative clauses)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1472" CreationDate="2012-02-22T22:22:29.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the term you are looking for is &lt;em&gt;pied-piping&lt;/em&gt;, specifically &lt;em&gt;preposition pied-piping&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T22:22:29.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1472" CreationDate="2012-02-22T22:29:05.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an optional rule that applies only in a minority of relative clauses where the relative pronoun is not a subject or object, but rather the object of a preposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optionally, to avoid stranding the preposition by moving the relative pronoun as part of normal relative clause formation, the entire prepositional phrase (with the relative pronoun as the object) may appear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haj Ross is responsible for the name &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pied-Piping&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for this phenomenon. In his dissertation &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Ross1969.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; he says it reminded him of the story of the Pied Piper of Hameln, who led the rats (and later the children) out of the city with his music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be extended &lt;em&gt;ad libitum&lt;/em&gt;, with stacked prepositional phrases. Among others, Ross gives the extreme example (antecedent and coreferential relative boldfaced):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;reports&lt;/strong&gt;, the height of the lettering on the covers of &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; is specified by the government.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Rereading the question, I just realized that example (1) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What book did you return without which can't finish the report?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is ungrammatical. It should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What book did you return without which &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; can't finish the report?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also an example of &lt;em&gt;Extraposition from NP&lt;/em&gt;, since the pied-piped relative clause &lt;em&gt;without which you can't finish the report&lt;/em&gt; has been moved from a position following &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt;, which it modifies, to one following the VP &lt;em&gt;did you return,&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-02-22T22:59:27.647" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T22:59:27.647" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1472" CreationDate="2012-02-22T22:55:32.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume your first example contains and error and you mean this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What book did you return without which &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; can't finish the report?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see nothing special here. It is just a relative clause where the relative pronoun functions as a prepositional phrase within the relative clause—that is, the relative pronoun is modified by the preposition &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; in the relative clause. Relative pronouns can be modified by anything that regular pronouns can. The preposition makes it look slightly less regular, perhaps, because normally the relative pronoun is the first word in a relative clause? That is just not the case when it is modified by a preposition. It is the same in most other Indo-European languages, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't finish the report without [what book] ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is fused with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[What book] did you return?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the result is your sentence. Fusing sentences with identical noun phrases is what relative pronouns are for. You could use a personal pronoun if you don't want to repeat the noun phrase but still want to keep the two separate sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What book did you return? You can't finish the report &lt;strong&gt;without it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conveys the same semantic information as the fused sentence, but it is pragmatically quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a good computer &lt;strong&gt;on which&lt;/strong&gt; to play games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is more complicated. The simple form (without a relative clause) would be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a good computer &lt;em&gt;to play games &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is basically the same construction as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a good computer &lt;em&gt;to buy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that &lt;em&gt;a good computer&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object of &lt;em&gt;buy&lt;/em&gt;, while the prepositional object of &lt;em&gt;play games on&lt;/em&gt;. I'd call these italicised infinitive constructions &lt;strong&gt;attributive&lt;/strong&gt;, because they depend on the noun phrase. I don't know all the latest linguistics terms, but you know what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's peculiar about this is that the noun phrase functions as the object of the infinitive, while normally the word that comes before the verb is the subject, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The only Frenchman&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ever to conquer&lt;/strong&gt; England was William the Conqueror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;conquer&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;the only Frenchmen&lt;/em&gt;; in &lt;em&gt;a good computer to buy&lt;/em&gt;, the preceding noun phrase is the &lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt;. That is what makes this (albeit common) use of the attributive infinitive special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the relation between the noun and the infinitive is better considered [noun]—[postpositional adjective] than [object]—[governing verb], although functionally it is both: if one treats it as a postpositional adjective, the word order makes sense, which it does not if you look at it as subject and verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another special thing about your sentence is that the &lt;em&gt;on which&lt;/em&gt; phrase is not a full clause: there is no finite verb—only an attributive infinitive to the &amp;quot;noun&amp;quot; that is the relative pronoun. But that exists in other languages too: relative pronouns can basically introduce anything that modifies a noun, at least in theory. Normally an elliptic clause can be imagined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've heard three sad songs now, of which [we will have] no more. Give us a merrier song!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must visit the countess next week, to whom [please convey] my compliments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to imagine such an elliptical clause in your example, which shows how extraordinary the noun-phrase-cum-object with attributive infinitive is. The preposition &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; (instead of a simple direct object) is a red herring that makes it looks even more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-02-22T22:55:32.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1482" CreationDate="2012-02-23T06:59:56.103" Score="40" ViewCount="11360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider languages whose case-systems allow the order of arguments to be changed without changing the arguments’ grammatical relations.   (Note the 189 languages noted as having “no dominant word-order” at &lt;strong&gt;The World Atlas of Language Structure Online:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/81A&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feature 81A: Order of Subject, Object and Verb&lt;/a&gt; .)    In such languages, what information is word order typically used to convey?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-11-27T06:38:11.767" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T06:38:11.767" Title="What is word order used for in &quot;free word order&quot; languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-02-23T08:12:02.870" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of the following effects Latin can achieve with its word order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligibility_%28communication%29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intelligibility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. When words that syntactically belong together stand close to each other, the sentence is easier to understand than when they are far apart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Emphasis&lt;/strong&gt;. A word placed in a prominent position within a sentence -- such as the first word of the sentence -- is emphasized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formation of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_figure&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rhetorical Figures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. An alliteration, for example, is easily formed if you can freely rearrange the words in a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28Latin%29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poetic Prosody&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: Latin poetry doesn't rhyme, it builds rhythmical patterns instead. In my experience, Latin poetry is rather hard to translate, because word oder serves the purpose of language rhythm rather than that of intelligibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2012-02-23T08:12:02.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-02-24T01:05:30.133" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the accompanying text to chapter 81, Dryer notes that some languages are treated as lacking a dominant order because two different word orders are conditioned by &lt;strong&gt;syntactic&lt;/strong&gt; factors. German and Dutch are thus treated as lacking a dominant word order because main clauses containing an auxiliary have SOV order, while main clauses without an auxiliary have SVO order. (In languages where two different word orders are conditioned by the main/subordinate clause distinction, the language is assigned the value found in main clauses) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take another example, Idoma (Nigeria) is treated as lacking a dominant order because (according Dryer's source, Abraham 1951: 18) in the &lt;em&gt;past tense&lt;/em&gt; the object may come either before or after the verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that a modern-day analyst might try to investigate whether the word order difference in terms of information structure (where the form with the object before the verb would show focus on the verb rather than on the object). When certain word orders can be tied to focus-like properties, Dryer does not treat these as competing for dominant order (they are said to be &quot;pragmatically marked&quot;).&#xA;Aghem (Cameroon), for example, is treated as SVO because even though various word orders are attested, Dryer's source (Watters 1979) gives detailed arguments for why word order changes are tied to focus. Since the non-SVO orders are all &quot;pragmatically marked,&quot; they are treated as non-dominant orders, and the language is treated as being SVO-dominant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a main clause/subordinate clause split, word order changes conditioned by a polarity split also do not appear to cause a language to be treated as lacking a dominant order. Leggbo (Nigeria), Bafut and Mbili (both Cameroon) are treated as SVO-dominant, even though they have non-SVO word orders in negated clauses (see chapter 144C). Apparently, negated clauses are also treated as &quot;pragmatically marked.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T01:05:30.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-24T03:12:40.017" Score="5" ViewCount="1011" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems it is very difficult to count the people able to speak to some degree some artificial language (or maybe any language in general), for instance is Esperanto usage surging, stable, declining?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any other way (active use in mailing list, etc) of deducing if the communities learning these languages are increasing or decreasing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T21:05:09.403" Title="is the percentage of people studying constructed languages increasing?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2012-02-24T07:31:56.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you point out yourself it is extremely difficult to measure the number of people studying constructed languages and especially difficult to measure the degree of language proficiency. Among all constructed languages only Esperanto has an examination system that is aligned to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CEFR&lt;/a&gt; and certified as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIcert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UniCert&lt;/a&gt; course (CEFR is abbreviated in Esperanto as &lt;a href=&quot;http://edukado.net/ekzamenoj/ker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KER&lt;/a&gt;). However, there is a very small amount of people who pass these examinations, because professional language proficiency and certification thereof is not a goal for most Esperanto-speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally in Esperanto they use the number of people who are members of UEA, the Universal Esperanto Association, the main organisation for Esperanto speakers. Here is the graph of UEA members over the last 100 years (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membronombroj_de_UEA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Prpwm.png&quot; alt=&quot;UEA members&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Green bars show individual members, the red bars stay for associated members (meaning if an organisation joins UEA and pays membership fee all members of this organisation are associated members). As you can see from this graph, the number of UEA members seems to have retracted in recent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another metric is the number of people who participate in Universala Kongreso -- the annual world conference of Esperanto-speakers. I don't have a diagram for this statistic, but you can see the numbers &lt;a href=&quot;http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universala_Kongreso_de_Esperanto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The fluctuations here are much bigger and there is no clear trend -- either increasing or decreasing -- seen there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side, membership in UEA and participation in congresses targets mostly established Esperanto speakers. Therefore another statistic was compiled taking into account the number of participants in popular Esperanto meetings &lt;a href=&quot;http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto-renkonti%C4%9Do&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Germany&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o1qF4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Participants in Esperanto-meetings for young people&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can see that the number of participants seems to increase over recent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, it is indeed difficult to estimate the current trend in numbers of people learning Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T15:49:55.520" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T15:49:55.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1430" CreationDate="2012-02-24T08:20:24.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is at least one more possibility: [3] the similarities might result from intensive influence of one on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Genetic (or genealogical, as I prefer to call it) affinity is quite difficult to prove beyond doubt. Perhaps the best way is to find a large number of regular sound correspondences in the most basic parts of the vocabulary, such as affixes, pronouns, low numerals, etc. No one can really tell what &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; exactly means in this context (see point 3), but if you can do that, the two languages will be considered related. Most Indo-European languages belong here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An older version is only possible if at least one of the two languages is already dead. So, for at least one of them we only have a limited number of texts. If definite statements are to be made on this basis, these texts must either be rather long, or very obviously related, i.e. the great majority of affixes and basic words used in them must demonstrably and regularly correspond to the respective forms in the other language. For example, Latin has a large base of texts and they can be shown to regularly correspond to Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intensive influence is what is suspected when &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; from point 1 is not large enough for everyone, i.e. there remains a considerable number of affixes, etc, which do not correspond between the two languages. The Altaic &quot;family&quot; (Turkic + Mongolic + Manchu-Tungus + Korean + Japanese) is a good example of that. Linguists have argued for around a century now whether they are a family in the genealogical sense, or just have influenced one another very deeply in prehistoric times.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the main problem is the quantitative proportion. You might think that it would be enough to count the number of correspondences between the cases we are already certain about, and see if the appropriate numbers are higher or lower in the unclear cases. Unfortunately, no. Linguistics does not live in a void and in practice linguists always take historic, geographical, archeological, etc, evidence into account. Sometimes a relatively low number of correspondences is enough to pronounce affinity because the other pieces of the puzzle are very clear, but at other times the other pieces are few and so harder evidence is required on the linguistic side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, linguistics alone can determine how two languages are related but not in every case is the conclusion certain. Sometimes, it is merely more likely than the alternative possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-25T01:04:16.540" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T01:04:16.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-02-24T10:21:40.683" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Polish (and a linguist), I can say this: in Polish, word order is almost absolutely free; the only constraint I can think of is that prepositions (e.g. &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; 'in', &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; 'from') can't be placed after the word they refer to. Apart from that, pretty much any ordering is always understandable. It is true, however, that in some sentences some orders will sound more natural, while others will be considered emotional or emphatic, as Aspinea explained above for Latin. An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jaś poszedł do kina.&#xA;Johnny went to cinema.&#xA;The first association: natural, affirmative, simply stating a fact.&#xA;But could be a question if so intoned, or perhaps anything else, too.&#xA;&#xA;Poszedł Jaś do kina.&#xA;The first association: half a sentence, expecting the second part (e.g. ... and he saw a ghost there.)&#xA;But could as well be a confirmation that he did indeed go, a question, or perhaps anything else, too.&#xA;&#xA;Jaś do kina poszedł.&#xA;The first association: answer to the question &quot;Where did John go?&quot;.&#xA;But again, could be used in plenty of other contexts, too.&#xA;&#xA;Poszedł do kina Jaś.&#xA;A tiny bit odd. The first association is that &quot;Jaś&quot; was added as an afterthought (could have been without the tiniest pause, though).&#xA;&#xA;Do kina Jaś poszedł.&#xA;The first association: answer to the question &quot;Who went to the cinema?&quot;&#xA;But again...&#xA;&#xA;Do kina poszedł Jaś.&#xA;The first association: expect an enumeration who else went to the cinema.&#xA;But again...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all the possibilities, right? You might think SVO would be the most frequent one. Well, that's the first thing that comes to one's mind when they hear the English sentence &quot;Johnny went to the cinema&quot;, but I really don't think that in real life it is so much more frequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, take a look at the above examples and imagine that essentially any sentence in Polish can be reordered in an equally free way, with next to no consequences at all. In more complex sentences with subordinate clauses and such, certain orders will be more natural as easier to understand, but that's it: more natural, definitely not the only ones. I think this goes a long way to explain why the majority of linguists who work with languages with more inflection than English, do not share the Anglo-Saxon obsession with syntax and object to using 'syntax' and 'morphology' interchangeably. This includes generativism. I'm quite convinced the only reason it won any following at all in continental Europe is the power of the US and anything coming from there being automatically fashionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS.&lt;/strong&gt; A very distant afterthought: a mediaeval Polish shibboleth to distinguish Germans was &lt;em&gt;miele młyn&lt;/em&gt; [ḿjεlε mwɨn] lit. ‘grinds mill’. In theory, it could be SV just as well but somehow this sounds just fine in modern Polish, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-07-29T10:39:36.660" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T10:39:36.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1377" CreationDate="2012-02-24T10:56:31.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should look at this problem in a different way. Change in language is to a considerable degree a random phenomenon and, for the sake of this answer, it can be likened to coin throwing. If you end with 51 heads and 49 tails, you don't ask what happened to throw number 51 that it landed on tails rather than heads. It just did, and all we can do is capture the general tendency for the results to distribute closely to half-half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same thing with consonant inventories: in every language a certain number of changes has happened which resulted in its inventory being the size it is. All we can do is capture the general tendency for languages to have ca. 22 consonants. If you ask what happened to a particular language, all that can be answered to this is a list of changes that happened in it and influenced the size of its inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atknison's 2011 idea is obviously wrong in every way but even if it weren't, it wouldn't have answered your question, either. It would have only captured a tendency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there isn't a single thing that made some languages distinguish more consonants and others less. It's always the cumulative result of different changes that took place in the language, and we can observe that on average these changes more or less cancel each other out, i.e. in most cases the inventory is changed throughout ages but its size remains approximately the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only seems that anything particular must have happened because that's the kind of impression statistic tendencies make on us. Most people who buy beer also buy chips. But one thing this doesn't mean is that someone who buys beer is also supposed to buy chips. More often than not, they will, and that's all there is to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T10:56:31.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-02-24T15:20:23.790" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Cerberus hints in his comment on Aspinea's answer, it's quite common to use word order to convey &lt;em&gt;information structure&lt;/em&gt;.  (Sadly, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on the relevant sense of the phrase &quot;information structure,&quot; and I can't find a good nontechnical introduction elsewhere. The article &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/Publications/Krifka_InformationStructure.pdf&quot;&gt;Basic Notions of Information Structure&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Manfred Krifka is a good survey of the subject for linguists.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information structure is a pretty broad subject, but there are two basic ideas that are especially important when you're talking about word order: &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt;. The topic of a sentence is, roughly speaking, &quot;what the sentence is about&quot;. Usually, a sequence of sentences will have the same topic, or at least closely related topics. But sometimes you'll want to change topics between sentences, or to contrast two topics with one another — and speakers will tend to &lt;em&gt;mark&lt;/em&gt; the new topic in some way when they do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English actually does mark topic changes using word order, at least some of the time. In passages like these...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary likes beans.  Me, I can't stand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary likes beans.  Lentils, she doesn't like so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the &lt;em&gt;left-dislocated&lt;/em&gt; word in the second sentence (&quot;me&quot; or &quot;lentils&quot;) is marking a change in topic: &quot;Okay, we were talking about beans before, but &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; we're gonna switch gears and talk about lentils for a while.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other important idea is &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt;.  Focus actually has a bunch of different uses (see the Krifka article I linked up above for the gory details) but one of the biggest uses is to mark &lt;em&gt;the answers to questions.&lt;/em&gt;  In English we use prosody to mark focus, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Who likes beans?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;MARY likes beans.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How does Mary feel about beans?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Mary LIKES beans.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What does Mary like to eat?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Mary likes BEANS.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some languages use word order to mark focus too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me give some examples from K'ichee', which is a &quot;free word order&quot; language that I've studied for a while. Default word order in K'ichee' is VOS, so the standard way of saying &quot;Mary likes beans&quot; would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Karaj kinaq' ra'l Mari'y  &quot;Mary likes beans&quot; (literally &quot;Likes beans miss Mary&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In K'ichee', both topics &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; foci can move to the left of the clause. After a topic, you get a pause; there's no pause after a focus; and if both the topic and focus move, the topic goes first.  You can also move words to the &lt;em&gt;end&lt;/em&gt; of the clause, which makes them sound a bit like an afterthought.  So the &quot;real&quot; word order in K'iche' is more like &quot;Topic (pause) focus V normal-O normal-S (pause) afterthought,&quot; though of course you won't get all those slots filled in a single clause.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this lets you say things like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kinaq' karaj ra'l Mari'y &quot;Mary likes BEANS&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This answers the question &quot;what does Mary like?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ra'l Mari'y (pause) karaj kinaq'  &quot;As for Mary, she likes beans.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This changes the topic: we were talking about someone else, now we're talking about Mary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ra'l Mari'y (pause) kinaq' karaj &quot;As for Mary, she likes BEANS.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This changes the topic &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; answers a question. For instance, maybe you asked a minute ago about what someone else likes, but now you're asking what Mary likes, and I'm answering the second question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Karaj ra'l Mari'y (pause) kinaq &quot;Mary likes 'em.... likes beans, that is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This makes &quot;beans&quot; an afterthought. You might use it when you've been talking on the topic of beans for a while, but you want to &lt;em&gt;remind&lt;/em&gt; your listener that that's what you're talking about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on. The upshot is, all six permutations of subject, verb and object are possible in K'ichee', given the right combination of topic, focus and afterthought.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth too, I don't speak Polish but it looks like something similar is going on in Kamil Stachowski's Polish examples. Note that sometimes he says that a particular word order &lt;em&gt;answers a specific question&lt;/em&gt;. This suggests to me that those word orders are being used for focus-marking in Polish — and a little Googling turns up &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=07Eu0Gzi_nIC&amp;amp;pg=PA23&amp;amp;lpg=PA23&amp;amp;dq=polish%20word%20order%20focus&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=8OEVIX0uQL&amp;amp;sig=MEvssP8ymUel_CPG1VIbMd9utfw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=3KZHT867OIi3sQLAy93qCA&amp;amp;ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=polish%20word%20order%20focus&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;this article on Polish focus-marking&lt;/a&gt; claiming that word order is indeed relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T05:22:49.127" LastActivityDate="2012-02-27T05:22:49.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2012-02-24T15:22:27.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A small addition to the above answers: I believe psycholinguistics in general is perhaps the field where the opposition to the notion of phoneme is the strongest. I once read a summary of a number of psychological studies which were supposed to prove that phonemes don't really exist in our minds and what speakers typically consider to be phonemes are in fact letters. I can't remember very well but I'm almost sure it was &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs.indiana.edu/~port/HDphonol/Port.graphical.basis.phones.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a paper by Robert F. Port&lt;/a&gt;. I can also remember seeing a few phonological theories which attempted to do away with the phoneme completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to evaluate all these ideas here. I think they might be indeed true but I surely can't prove it. This way or another, even despite its notorious indefinability, phoneme is a very handy concept in linguistic research and I guess most linguists use it many times each day, whether they believe in its psychological reality or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly believe in the case you mention. There are probably many cases where it is very difficult to determine whether a certain sound is a phoneme or not, see e.g. Slavonic [y] (as in Russian  ‹ы›) or Turkic [ḱ]. Nevertheless, on the whole, phoneme is a handy terminological tool and still widely used — just like we talk about nouns and verbs in English even though separating one from the other is often impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-25T13:21:16.450" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T13:21:16.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2012-02-24T15:33:06.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to some of the other answerers, I do think &quot;intuition blurring&quot; is a real thing.  It's a bit like what happens if you say the word &quot;zebra&quot; a few dozen times in a row and suddenly it stops sounding like an English word and starts sounding like a meaningless noise.  If you read dozens of complicated, multiply embedded sentences to yourself, they'll all start sounding equally good or equally funny after a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This isn't a permanent loss of ability.  It's more like temporary sensory overload.  Going out for a walk or having a conversation that isn't about linguistics usually fixes it in my experience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like Knitter says, it's a bit different from what you're experiencing, because you're looking at processing effects.  You can definitely teach yourself to process some &quot;hard&quot; sentences faster than a normal person.  But researchers who do language processing tend to work with controlled experiments rather than intuitive data, so it's not a huge issue for them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you need grammaticality data and you really feel like your intuition is hopelessly fuzzy, you can ask your friends.  Hang out in a linguistics department long enough and someone will come running out of their office and ask &quot;Hey, you speak English, right?  Can you say X?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T15:33:06.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2012-02-24T17:42:48.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very good question and I'm really happy I stumbled upon it. In general, however, I think there is here a very serious misunderstanding. The frequency of a typological feature is a statistical description of the occurrence of a certain phenomenon. Thus, we have the right to say that &quot;since F(x) is more frequent than F(y) or F(z), it is more likely to have existed in W&quot;. But, and it is a very imporant but indeed, this does not in any way allow as to say that F(x) is really what W had. W is more &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; to have had it, in the sense of probablistics, but we have no idea what it really had, in the actual linguistic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give you a small analogy: if I tell you I threw a coin five times and the last four throws it landed on tails, can you guess how it landed the first time? No. Maybe it landed on heads because that would be statistically more likely. But maybe it landed on tails because it's not perfectly balanced. All you can say is that the four heads in a row are a little odd and not likely to happen again soon if I use a proper coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot draw conclusions about individual cases based on statistics. Statistics are constructed based on individual cases but they don't work backwards.  They describe the result but say nothing about the cause. Statistics are a nice conclusion of a study but they're probably useless as a beginning. Most of the times, typology can't be used to solve a specific problem in historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Croft 2003 might perhaps be right -- if and only if this conclusion follows directly from studies on reconstructed languages. But if I understand you correctly, he is trying to impose modern typology onto reconstruction. In that case his result may possibly be right but his methodology surely isn't. A bit like the ancient Greeks came up with atomism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If frequency of F(x) &amp;amp;c. is all we have, then we simply have no way of telling what existed in W. Maybe some seemingly unrelated data can help; maybe there was strong external influence on Y and Z or maybe F(x) and F(y) have only been attested recently, while F(z) is very old? At any rate, more data is necessary because typology alone solves nothing here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T20:40:23.030" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T20:40:23.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1488" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-02-24T18:02:47.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What questions should have this tag?&lt;/strong&gt; If your question is about constructed languages only or mainly, then consider posting on the appropriate proposal about constructed languages. In Linguistics SE, questions about such languages are off topic, and you might risk having your question closed. If you're in doubt, ask on &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt; or ask some users on our &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-24T18:02:47.183" LastActivityDate="2012-02-24T18:02:47.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1489" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-02-24T18:02:47.183" Score="0" Body="Constructed languages are opposed to natural languages, which means they didn't evolve through time but rather were created by a single person or a group for some purpose. (Note: Read Tag Wiki about this Tag usage)" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-05T10:26:34.483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T10:26:34.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2012-02-24T22:49:29.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Finno-Ugric Transcription&lt;/em&gt;, a.k.a. the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uralic Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is comparably complete to IPA and much more regular and flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-25T00:36:28.883" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T00:36:28.883" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2012-02-25T14:30:26.490" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A part of the question thusfar unattended is whether the concept of phoneme has always been contentious. It has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position defended in Sapir's (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/409004&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1925&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucalgary.ca/dflynn/files/dflynn/Sapir33.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1933&lt;/a&gt;) classic papers, that the phoneme is not just a unit of analysis, but has some psychological status, has always had its critics. There are two major facets of this claim that were challenged: that mental processes of language users involved a segment-sized atomic unit, and that this segment-sized unit was a primitive, called the phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sapir's position is challenged by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/pss/522070&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twaddell (1935: sec.2)&lt;/a&gt;, who is suspicious of the whole enterprise of inferring mental entities. A fine quotation from that work is given here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such a [mentalist] definition [of the phoneme] is invalid because (1)&#xA;  we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an&#xA;  inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such&#xA;  guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite&#xA;  simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes is&#xA;  notoriously a fire in a wooden stove. Our only information about the&#xA;  'mind' is derived from the behavior of the individual whom it&#xA;  inhabits. To interpret that behavior in terms of 'mind' is to commit&#xA;  the logical fallacy of 'explaining' a fact of unknown cause by giving&#xA;  that unknown cause a name, and then citing the named &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; as the cause&#xA;  of the fact. 'Mind' is indeed a summation of such &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;'s, unknown&#xA;  causes of human behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar criticism, this time by a British phonetician, is found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1937.tb00678.x/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Butlin (1937)&lt;/a&gt;, who maintains (reflecting the then popular instrumentalist philosophy of science) that the phoneme is a &quot;convenient fiction.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Fifty_years_in_phonetics.html?id=QCdtAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abercrombie (1991: 27ff.)&lt;/a&gt; [whose ideas were developed much earlier than the citation date suggests] cites Butlin's paper, disputing the status of segment-sized atomic units in language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventual attacks on the phoneme from the side of generative linguists are anticipated by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024384149900443&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martinet (1949)&lt;/a&gt;, who argues that while most phonological concepts should be regarded as fictions, it is necessary to select at least one having status in reality, so that the theory could be grounded in facts describable in the languages of other branches of science. The concept he selects as &quot;...la seule unité pour laquelle nous postulions une existence réele...&quot; (1949: 46) [the only unit for which we postulate actual existence] is the &lt;strong&gt;feature&lt;/strong&gt; rather than the phoneme. Martinet, however, appears to favor a non-mentalist conception of the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beginning with &lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonology/HallePhonemics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Halle (1954)&lt;/a&gt;, American phonologists in what would become the generative tradition started to argue that the &lt;strong&gt;segment&lt;/strong&gt; has psychologically real status, but that the phoneme is epiphenomenal, its observed properties actually being due to featural processes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very nice historical introduction to phonology prior to the 1970's is &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Trends_in_phonological_theory.html?id=RGhiAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fischer-Jørgensen (1975).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-25T18:29:56.050" LastActivityDate="2012-02-25T18:29:56.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1500" CreationDate="2012-02-26T04:06:48.533" Score="5" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;In which varieties of English is it common to front predicates as in the following sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bought a nice house, he did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which pragmatic contexts is this done in these varieties?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-02-27T09:24:26.780" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T19:59:45.923" Title="In which varieties of English is it common to front predicates as in &quot;Bought a nice house, he did.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-02-26T07:50:09.230" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Slavic languages (I am a native speaker of Russian) the relatively free words order is often used to convey the information that otherwise would have been rendered using articles (which we don't have). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Мальчик вошел в комнату.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (literal) Boy entered room.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (meaning) &lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt;  boy entered &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;В комнату вошел мальчик.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (literal) Room (object) entered boy (subject).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (meaning) &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; boy entered &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you can see, we use the word order as a sort of mild emphasis that is rendered in other languages using definite and indefinite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T07:50:09.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2012-02-26T10:48:05.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are consonant alternations in Russian but they work in a somewhat different way than in Celtic, and therefore I'm not sure that it's a good idea to call them the same name, &lt;em&gt;mutation&lt;/em&gt;. In short and off the top of my head,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Celtic mutations happen in anlaut and are petrified sandhi phenomena which may, at least in some cases, be the only carriers of morphological information nowadays (see the use of the Irish article &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Russian (Slavonic) alternations happen on morpheme boundaries, are a by-product of regular sound changes and can't carry morphological information on their own. Examples from Polish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kot 'cat' + -e praep., voc. &amp;gt; koci.e [koće], e.g. in *o kocie* '1. about a cat; 2. oh [my] cat!'&#xA;krok 'step' + -ek dimin. &amp;gt; krocz.ek [kroček] 'a small step'&#xA;mnich 'monk' + -i pl. &amp;gt; mnisi [mńiśi] 'monks'&#xA;rzek.a 'river' + -e praep. &amp;gt; rzec.e [žece], e.g. in *w rzece* 'in the river*&#xA;wag.a 'scales' + -e praep. &amp;gt; wadz.e [vaʒe], e.g. in *na wadze* 'on the scales'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-26T21:02:59.950" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T21:02:59.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="836" CreationDate="2012-02-26T16:54:33.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the traditional distinction between morphology and syntax is pretty clear. Morphology studies how words are inflected and new forms created, while syntax studies how they are combined into phrases and sentences. So, for example, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; would be an issue in morphology while &lt;em&gt;dog barks&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;does dog bark?&lt;/em&gt; would be an issue in syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole confusion arose in the Anglo-Saxon world because English expresses with syntax most of what non-analytic languages express with morphology. As long as the main objects of study for linguistis were Latin and Greek, I don't think anyone mixed the two terms. But after WW2 English became the dominant language and with it, the confusion spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists who are under weaker influence of American linguistics, however, i.e. those who did not study in an Anglo-Saxon country, or who do not specialize in theoretical linguistics, usually make a very clear distinction between syntax and morphology, often combined with looking down on those who don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask if the distinction is meaningful. Absolutely. It is only in a purely analytic language that syntax can tackle the issues of morphology. But not even English is purely analytic, so if you stick to the traditional understanding, even in English there are problems (e.g. the formation of plural) that syntax can't deal with. It is only because there is so little morphology in English that the term &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt; came to mean for Anglo-Saxons both syntax &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; morphology simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-26T20:52:39.713" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T20:52:39.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2012-02-26T17:18:14.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has essentially already been answered; I'll just add two more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example for &lt;strong&gt;strict&lt;/strong&gt; order: the &lt;strong&gt;Turkic&lt;/strong&gt; languages. The order is SOV and the easiest way to describe is to say that the determiner always precedes the determined. This is an interesting case because unlike many (most?) languages with strict order, Turkic languages have an actually quite rich morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example for &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; order: the &lt;strong&gt;Slavonic&lt;/strong&gt; languages, possibly except Bulgarian, I'm not sure. I gave some examples from Polish in response to the question &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1476/what-is-word-order-used-for-in-free-word-order-languages/1482&quot;&gt;What is word order used for in “free word order” languages?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just need to emphasize that unlike in Aaron's examples above, Polish speakers are not actually &lt;em&gt;constrained&lt;/em&gt; by context. In most contexts a specific order is preferred (as in &lt;em&gt;sounds more natural&lt;/em&gt;) but deviations are notorious in everyday communication so at least in this case I would say it is truly free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T18:34:36.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2012-02-26T17:34:09.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is a complex system used simultaneously by a large number of people. Changes typically begin on a very limited area and spread to eventually encompass the entire language. (Or not. That's a simple version of how dialects come into being.) Whether they succeed and spread or fail and die out, depends on how people (individuals) talk to one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, changes in language spread not entirely unlike diseases. It is usually relatively easy to find out how and where a pandemic started but it is very difficult to foresee one. There are many places in the world where the hygienic conditions are horrible but somehow a pandemic does not break out. (That is similar to Aaron's example of English having been ripe for developing NC for centuries.) And at the same time, there are places where hygienic conditions are not bad at all, and yet a disease can from time to time manage to spread very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another analogy would be road or air traffic. When an accident happens, we are usually able to reconstruct how it happened. But regrettably, we are no good at predicting where and when one is going to happen, so we can't prevent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T17:34:09.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1494" CreationDate="2012-02-26T18:33:50.613" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the varieties I know. I don't think it's regional, or varietal; it's just conversational, a sort of syntactic equivalent of Fast Speech Rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it's just an afterthought tag for Conversationally Deleted sentences like the ones Thrasher treats in his dissertation (Thrasher, Randolph H. Jr. 1974. &lt;em&gt;Shouldn't Ignore These Strings: A Study of Conversational Deletion,&lt;/em&gt; Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). I posted about it on Linguist List &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-737.html#2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-121.html#3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-227.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Bought a nice house&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is derivable, in context, from &lt;em&gt;&quot;He bought a nice house&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Conversational Deletion, and — in some cases, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; if the speaker wishes — may be clarified at the end with a tag, whence the &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples, derived from examples in Thrasher:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gotta go now. ~ Gotta go now, I do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;See you next Tuesday. ~ See you next Tuesday, I will.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Too bad about old Charlie. ~  Too bad about old Charlie, it was.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Been in Ann Arbor long? ~ Been in Ann Arbor long, have you?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ever get a chance to use your Dogrib? ~ Ever get a chance to use your Dogrib, do you?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't work in every case of Conversational Deletion, since not every deleted initial sequence can form an appropriate tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;No need to get upset about it. ~&lt;/em&gt; *&lt;em&gt;No need to get upset about it, there is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Last person I expected to meet was John.  ~&lt;/em&gt; *&lt;em&gt;Last person I expected to meet was John, the.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-26T21:41:31.707" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T21:41:31.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2012-02-26T19:09:36.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if that counts as BCTs but in my native speaker's intuition there are three basic words for 'blue' in Polish: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;granatowy&lt;/em&gt; 'navy blue, dark blue'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;błękitny&lt;/em&gt; 'azure, light blue'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;niebieski&lt;/em&gt; 'blue'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit that in my poor, CGA 16-colour world of a male, &lt;em&gt;niebieski&lt;/em&gt; is an umbrella term for all three. For my wife, however, they are seperate colours — even if &lt;em&gt;pink&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;salmon&lt;/em&gt; are, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-26T21:16:07.107" LastActivityDate="2012-02-26T21:16:07.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1505" CreationDate="2012-02-26T23:26:29.033" Score="8" ViewCount="3477" Body="&lt;p&gt;What different definitions of &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; do you know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I'm not asking for an &lt;em&gt;explanation&lt;/em&gt; of what phoneme is but rather for professional &lt;em&gt;definitions&lt;/em&gt;. I'm interested in how the issue is tackled in different phonological theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It sure is very interesting (no irony) to see how different authors explain why they're not going to refer to phoneme in their work. However, if you come across a definition (of the kind of definitions of terms that they have in mathematics), I will be still grateful if you cared to add it or refer to it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T21:33:15.157" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T21:04:25.907" Title="Definition(s) of phoneme" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1502" CreationDate="2012-02-27T19:52:37.427" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/1843&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kortlandt (1972)&lt;/a&gt; for discussion on the development of the phoneme in Soviet phonological theory, also &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/On_defining_the_phoneme.html?id=E7QuAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Freeman (1935)&lt;/a&gt; for an idea of the issues at hand in the early days of American Structuralism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American linguists today tend to be either uncritical about a definition or openly hostile to the concept:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Jacobs (1998: 55) &quot;The term &lt;strong&gt;phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; is used to refer to the segment category that the various allophones are variants of.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odden (2005: 43) &quot;In english, [t] and [th] are predictable variants of a single abstract segment, a &lt;strong&gt;phoneme&lt;/strong&gt;, which we represent as /t/. Predictable variants are termed &lt;strong&gt;allophones&lt;/strong&gt; -- the sounds are in &lt;strong&gt;complementary distribution&lt;/strong&gt; because the context where one variant appears is the complement of the context where the other sound appears.&quot; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladefoged &quot;Vowels and Consonants&quot; (2001: 193--4) &quot;If we are thinking in acoustic terms, even &lt;strong&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; is not so far from &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;. On a spectrogram both correspond to very similar gaps in the pattern. Linguists have a term for a group of similar sounds of this kind. They call it a phoneme...We talk of the difference between &lt;em&gt;kit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pit&lt;/em&gt; being the use of the phoneme /&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;/ as opposed to the phoneme /&lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;/. There is usually no harm in expressing htings this way. But it is important to remember that it is a kind of shorthand. A phoneme is not a single sound but a group of sounds.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silverman (2006: 215) &quot;For our purposes though, the phoneme is not an entity on any level—functional,&#xA;phonetic, psychological, or even metaphorical. Rather, at best, &lt;strong&gt;phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; is merely a&#xA;terminological expedient that might capture the functional non-distinctness of any&#xA;collection of phonetic properties that allomorphically alternates. And yet, despite its&#xA;expedience, I choose to avoid the term altogether, because terminological expedients&#xA;have a demonstrated tendency to become reified by their users.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/PhoneticStructure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ladefoged (ms.)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Perhaps the most startling conspiracy — one that seems to have deceived by far&#xA;the majority  of linguists — is the appearance of &lt;strong&gt;phonemes&lt;/strong&gt;. Accounts of human&#xA;behavior in terms of phonemes are nearly always examples of what has been called&#xA;the psychologist's fallacy — the notion that because an  act can  be described  in  a&#xA;given  way  that it is necessarily  structured  in  that way. As will be shown  later,&#xA;phoneme size units play only a minor role in human behavioral acts such as normal&#xA;speaking  and  listening. They  are, nevertheless, great imaginary  objects for use in &#xA;describing linguistic aspects of speech.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/dissertation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Goldsmith (1976: 17--8)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;The standard linguistic assumption regarding the nature of phonological representations...implies that the process of language acquisition and of perception includes the development of the ability to take a representation and slice it vertically into columns...Let us call this assumption the &quot;Absolute Slicing Hypothesis&quot; ... The assumption of the Absolute Slicing Hypothesis fails...and this failure is in no sense a trivial one.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;====&#xA;I'm going to add the index entry for for &quot;Phoneme&quot; in Fischer-Jorgensen (1975) &quot;Trends in phonological theory&quot;, since I didn't have that book with me yesterday:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phoneme&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(1) concept and definition of the phoneme as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;an abstractional fictitious unit 6.12&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a bundle of distinctive properties (features) 3.3, 6.4, 8.3, 8.4, 8.18, 11.7, 11.25&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a class of (non-contrastive) sounds 6.13, 12.10&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a family of sounds 4.3&lt;br&gt;&#xA;an element of a morpheme 11.3, 11.9&lt;br&gt;&#xA;an ideal abstract sound type 12.17&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a member of a phonological opposition 3.3, 4.3&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a minimum distinctive unit 11.3, 11.7, 11.10, 11.30&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a minimum same of vocal feature 6.4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a minimum unit, differentiating signifiers 11.15, 11.18&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a notion with differentiating function 11.4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a point in a pattern 2.12&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a physical unit 6.11&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a psychologically defined unit 2.4, 3.3, 11.3&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a purely logical symbol 6.14, 6.15&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the realization of a morphon 10.4, 10.6, 10.12, 10.14&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a unit based on comparison 11.30 &lt;Br&gt;&#xA;a useless concept 9.67, 9.68 (but cp. 9.70)&lt;br&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T19:32:40.103" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T19:32:40.103" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1507" CreationDate="2012-02-27T22:24:10.663" Score="3" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where could I find examples of words and their etymologies that occur frequently in many different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I know that the English word &quot;Mother&quot; shares a similar etymology with many other languages from civilizations across the globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an online resource that provides examples of some (or many!) other words like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, to clarify the question, have any papers or articles been posted online of a list of examples of these common words or roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Question copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/59419/universal-etymology-of-words/59420#59420&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T07:40:28.653" Title="Universal Etymology of Words" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2012-02-27T23:32:09.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're looking for is a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cognates&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. words with a shared etymology; this way, you could try doing a more successful research by using the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find any papers specifically listing a lot of cognates for several different languages but you can find something here and there, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Transwiki%3aList_of_German_cognates_with_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; on Wiktionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2007-January/003874.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the Linguist List site&lt;/a&gt;, someone asked a similar question to yours and they gave a link to this document listing English-Spanish cognates: &lt;a href=&quot;http://buildingrti.utexas.org/PDF/Cognates_sp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cognates&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~kondrak/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Greg Kondrak&lt;/a&gt;, who also wrote this about identiying cognates: &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://atala.org/IMG/pdf/TAL-2009-50-2-08-Kondrak.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Identiﬁcation of Cognates and Recurrent&#xA;Sound Correspondences in Word Lists&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/I/I11/I11-1097.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Clustering Semantically Equivalent Words into Cognate Sets in Multilingual List&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~kondrak/cognatesEF.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; listing French-English cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T18:56:30.210" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T18:56:30.210" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1530" CreationDate="2012-02-28T15:12:50.430" Score="14" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from manuals, also nonmanuals; such as head tilt or head shake have grammatical features in Turkish sign languages. They appear while asking questions or giving negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some lip movements are seen while people sign. I know that they do this to ease the convention of the meaning for their hearing counterparts while communicating. But I wonder whether they have further function or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any research carried about this topic? Please provide citations and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:04:45.313" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T11:54:00.243" Title="Does lip movement in Turkish sign language have a grammatical feature?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1508" CreationDate="2012-02-28T18:05:10.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My previous answer (see edit history) concerned signed languages generally, as they all form content words (eg. nouns, verbs, ) with the hands and use facial expression and body movements to form grammatical function words as in Alenanno's example, adverbial &lt;em&gt;“not”&lt;/em&gt; formed by puffed cheeks, or my example, the complementizer &lt;em&gt;“that”&lt;/em&gt; that signals a relative clause and takes the form of a raised lip in both ASL and TID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“[relative clause] constructions are accompanied by special non-manual markers: tensed cheeks and tensed upper lip”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a lecture  &quot;Relative Clause Constructions in Turkish Sign Language” given by Okan Kubus at the Nijmegen Gesture Centre, 2 February 2011: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mpi.nl/research/research-consortia/nijmegen-gesture-centre-1/events/past-series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These uses of the mouth are part of TID grammar and are distinct from mouthing words of spoken Turkish while signing TID. (My gestures when speaking English are often signs from ASL, but no one suggests these are part of English.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those mouthed words can be borrowed, sort of. Non-visible phonetic features like voicing or velarization obviously won't be, but any visible features of spoken words can be borrowed into the signed language if they don't interfere with the grammatical usage discussed above. In that case the borrowed features will change to conform with the regular phonological constraints of the borrowing signed language, and may end up looking totally unlike the original spoken word, and may become an obligatory part of the lexical sign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lexical use of mouth movements are also distinct from the grammatical usage above. Zeshan, cited above, gives an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The sign ‘Deaf’ is used in combination with two diﬀerent mouthings that both  consist  of  two  Turkish  words  coordinated  with  the  double contact of the index ﬁnger at the corner of the mouth and then at the ear. The ﬁrst mouthing, /sag ˘ır dilsiz/ ‘deaf dumb’ (lit. ‘deaf without-tongue/language’) is the older, more traditional term, whereas younger people, under the inﬂuence of more recent political correctness, often use the term  /is¸itme engelli/ ‘hearing impaired’ instead.&lt;/em&gt; (page 48)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see a lexical, not grammatical, use of mouthing: two forms of a TID word whose meaning, “deaf”, is distinct from either of the Turkish substrate phrases that contributed to it.  In English, Turkish or TID,  the word's meaning “deaf” is complete, and if you want to say “not deaf” you add the grammatical function word, &lt;em&gt;/not/, /degil,/ or /puffed cheeks/&lt;/em&gt;, respectively.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is a whole book on this topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Boyes-Braem, Penny, and Sutton-Spence, Rachel eds. 2001. The Hands are the Head of  the Mouth: The Mouth as Articulator in Sign Languages. International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of  the Deaf ; 39. Hamburg: Signum Verlag.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T11:54:00.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T11:54:00.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-02-28T18:44:11.633" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language. Spatial diexis is indicated by what looks like a pointing gesture,  (When discussing physically present referents,one just points at them.) for which there is a potentially infinite number of distinctions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basic info: &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.mdc.edu/psargent/Handouts/Pronouns%20in%20ASL%2007-6.doc&quot;&gt;Pronouns in ASL&lt;/a&gt; (.doc download)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gesturestudies.com/Contributions/Cormier/Cormier.html&quot;&gt;The effect of number marking on the use of space in ASL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T18:57:37.113" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T18:57:37.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1317" CreationDate="2012-02-28T19:33:39.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were other periods of rapid language changes in Western Europe besides the Renaissance. &quot;Faster&quot; is hard to measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I think you need to specify your point of comparison. There have only been about 300 years since the end of the Renaissance. Of course people have lived in Western Europe for &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; 40,000 years, but for this question I suppose we should limit our scope to Indoeuropean languages. IE speakers were certainly in Western Europe by the second millennium BC, 4000 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So did the languages of Western Europe change at a greater rate during 1400-1700 than at any other 300 year period from 2000 BC- present? We just don't have evidence for most of that period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me suggest: what about the rise of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin? That happened sometime between the breakup of the Roman Empire and the 9th century. Langue d'oïl is known since the 9th century, Old Spanish since the 10th, and Common Romanian since the 9th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how you propose to compare the rate of change. I would certainly say, though, that the rise of the Romance languages within 400 years is as significant as the changes due to the Renaissance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Since you mention English above: Middle English arose out of Anglo-Saxon starting in 1066 and the transition was rather abrupt, complete by about 1154, the time of the Plantegenets. Invasions have long been a mechanism for rapid language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T19:40:45.343" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T19:40:45.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1502" CreationDate="2012-02-28T20:38:53.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought the following two passages nicely summarize current thinking on the phoneme in phonology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The most conspicuously unresolved issue in phonology, in my view, is the debate over the classical phoneme that began in the late 1950s. The critiques by Halle (1959) and Chomsky (1964) deprived the traditional phoneme concept of its theoretical legitimacy, but it has nevertheless survived more or less intact in practical applications (such as speech therapy, reading and literacy training, and speech technology),  in linguistic fieldwork, and -revealingly - in beginning linguistics courses. Schane's contention (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/412375&quot;&gt;1971&lt;/a&gt;) that generative phonology had only superficially done away with the phoneme has never been refuted (see further &lt;a href=&quot;http://cunyphonologyforum.net/papers/LaddDistinctivePhones.pdf&quot;&gt;Ladd 2006&lt;/a&gt;).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladd, D. R. 2011. Phonetics in phonology. In John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu. 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1444343041.html&quot;&gt;Handbook of phonological theory&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final draft is available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~bob/gs.ss.pdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dresher, Elan. 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.companiontophonology.com/fragr_image/phoneme&quot;&gt;Phoneme&lt;/a&gt;. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume &amp;amp; Keren Rice, eds., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.companiontophonology.com/public/&quot;&gt;The Blackwell companion to phonology&lt;/a&gt;. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (a monumental work on phonology, in 5 volumes, a must-read!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The concept of the phoneme was central to the development of phonological theory. In the early twentieth century, phonological theory was all about the phoneme: how to deﬁne it, how to recognize it, how to discover it (see, for  example, the articles selected for inclusion in Joos 1957 and Makkai 1972). The American structuralist term for phonology, phonemics, indicates to what extent the ﬁeld was considered to be about the phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things have now changed. The phoneme, to all appearances, no longer holds a central place in phonological theory. Two recent and voluminous handbooks devoted to phonology, edited by Goldsmith (1995) and by de Lacy (2007), have no chapter on the phoneme. It is barely mentioned in the indexes. &lt;strong&gt;This does not mean that the phoneme plays no role in modern phonology; closer inspection reveals that the phoneme is far from dead&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine - Alex B.]. However, it is not much talked about, and when it is, it is more often to dispute its existence than to afﬁrm it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the above survey shows, the phoneme has not disappeared from phonological theory. &lt;strong&gt;The fact that recent handbooks of phonology have no chapters devoted to it is not a sign of its demise; rather, it is a function of the development of phonological theory&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine - Alex B.]. The time is past when one can attempt to provide an exhaustive deﬁnition of the phoneme and its properties apart from elaborating a complete theory of phonology. Many current topics in phonology can be viewed as being about aspects of the phoneme, even though the phoneme is not invoked.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the phoneme in psycholinguistics: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/x0h17720p9278114/&quot;&gt;Uppstad and Tønnessen 2010&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-02-28T21:34:05.530" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T21:34:05.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1388" CreationDate="2012-02-28T22:00:47.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the free software side you may want to look at the plethora of tools available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.semanticsoftware.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Semantic Software Lab&lt;/a&gt; at Concordia University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in commercial work in this area, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1043.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Using Discourse Commitments to Recognize Textual Entailment&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1660000/1654571/p171-hickl.pdf?ip=131.187.117.22&amp;amp;acc=OPEN&amp;amp;CFID=68247862&amp;amp;CFTOKEN=68115021&amp;amp;__acm__=1330466398_ce12947a2778afa0a654f6133de24201for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Discourse Commitment-Based Framework for Recognizing Textual&#xA;Entailment&lt;/a&gt; as references, and the (commercial) software tools from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagecomputer.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Computer Corp.&lt;/a&gt; They have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagecomputer.com/labs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;demos of some of their tools&lt;/a&gt;. I have not used these tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-02-28T22:00:47.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1518" CreationDate="2012-02-29T12:50:49.630" Score="14" ViewCount="5115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar&quot;&gt;Universal Grammar&lt;/a&gt; cites the research by Everett (2005) about the Pirahã language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language is claimed to be a counterexample to the basic tenets of Universal Grammar. This research has been primarily lead by Daniel Everett, a former Christian missionary. Among other things, this language is alleged to lack all evidence for recursion, including embedded clauses, as well as quantifiers and color terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other studies have been conducted on the syntax of the Pirahã language since that paper? Does the claim that it falsifies the theory of Universal Grammar still hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T05:20:49.927" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T05:20:49.927" Title="Does Pirahã syntax contradict the principles of Universal Grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;&lt;piraha&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-29T15:17:47.817" Score="4" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for any recent studies dealing substantially with &quot;broken vowels,&quot;&#xA;or vocoid elements which have a noticeably nonstable formant trajectory, yet for which there are no good phonological arguments that they are diphthongs. &quot;Broken vowels&quot; might alternately be referred to as vowels with an &quot;offglide&quot; or &quot;onglide&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example, in the dialect of Vietnamese spoken around Cần Thơ, open syllables whose vowel is represented by an orthographic &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; are pronounced approximately with a vowel sounding like [ɨi], so &lt;em&gt;mì&lt;/em&gt; 'wheat noodles' is pronounced approximately [mɨi]. Orthographic &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, is pronounced more or less like [ɑ], so &lt;em&gt;mỏ&lt;/em&gt; 'snout' is pronounced [mɑ]. It is difficult to argue that [ɨi] is really a combination of [ɨ] and [i], because there are no open-syllable words having nuclear vowel [ɨ], and none having [i]; there is also no difference in vowel length between &lt;em&gt;mì&lt;/em&gt; and  &lt;em&gt;mỏ&lt;/em&gt;. Anyways, let's try not to quibble over the this specific example more than necessary...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-02-29T15:43:39.237" LastActivityDate="2012-02-29T22:43:20.427" Title="Literature on &quot;broken vowels&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2012-02-29T16:36:59.337" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everett's book on the topic, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0307378535&quot;&gt;Language: The Cultural Tool&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; will be released on March 13 this year. Check the bibliography, or write Dan Everett for a copy of it. I'm sure it'll cite everything published on the Pirahã that's come to his attention so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether the claim still holds, that depends on who you talk to. Everett and many others still hold it, and I'm quite certain there are plenty of others who never held it. Universal Grammar is itself merely a claim, since there's no actual evidence for it, nor for the Language Organ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people capable of forming a scientific opinion on the matter are probably waiting to see what the evidence turns out to be. Evidence first, claims later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-03-16T21:42:36.347" LastActivityDate="2012-03-16T21:42:36.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2012-02-29T18:07:02.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sort of squabble played out a few years ago on the pages of &lt;em&gt;Language.&lt;/em&gt; (85: 2, 2009) An article by Everett (&lt;a href=&quot;http://daneverettbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Everett.CA_.Piraha.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2005&lt;/a&gt;) published in &lt;em&gt;Current Anthropology&lt;/em&gt; triggered a contribution by &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues&lt;/a&gt; (all card-carrying Chomskyan linguists) in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; attacking what they called &quot;Pirahã exceptionality.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mendeley.com/research/piraha-culture-grammar-response-some-criticisms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Everett's response&lt;/a&gt; appears in the same issue. I am not fully familiar with all of the arguments on either side, but invite you to read some of these articles to get a feel for what is at stake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="807" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T14:17:10.077" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T14:17:10.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1517" CreationDate="2012-02-29T22:07:59.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/publications/nzej-backissues/1998-margaret-maclagan.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diphthongisation of /e/ in NZE: a change that went nowhere?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (1998) by Margaret A. Maclagan, deals with the raising or diphthongisation, by different NZ English speakers, of /e/, concluding that the choice between the two is correlated with the age of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-02-29T22:43:20.427" LastActivityDate="2012-02-29T22:43:20.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1556" CreationDate="2012-02-29T23:36:51.983" Score="7" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cartago tem que ser destruída.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Carthage must be destroyed.&quot; I'm wondering about the infinitive (&lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;): where does it come from? In what situations is the infinitive used after &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;: only with &lt;em&gt;ter + que&lt;/em&gt;, or also with other verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks strange to me, because I don't know of any similar construction in the other Romance languages. But it is not at all unlikely that I missed parallels: does a similar construction exist in any of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it doesn't exist in Latin: so in what way could it have developed from Latin constructions? Is it perhaps a combination of &lt;em&gt;quod&lt;/em&gt; and the accusative with infinitive? I would appreciate any information that could help me put this construction in a broader perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-29T23:01:40.690" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T23:01:40.690" Title="Why the infinitive in Portuguese &quot;Cartago tem que ser destruída&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-03-01T00:05:57.143" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish (I am a native speaker) word order, or more correctly the &lt;em&gt;order of the constituents&lt;/em&gt; of a sentence (because, e.g., postpositions still have to &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; their complements) is more or less free. The neutral order is SOV and other orderings are mainly used to emphasize an element. Generally, the element that immediately precedes the verb is emphasized. (Ali = a Turkish first name; dün = yesterday; okula = to (the) school (dative of &quot;okul&quot;); gitti = went (3rd person singular, past tense))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ali dün okula gitti. (Ali went to school yesterday.)&#xA;Dün okula Ali gitti. (It was Ali who went to school yesterday.)&#xA;Ali okula dün gitti. (It was yesterday that Ali went to school.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that in spoken Turkish, stress alone can be used for emphasis with any word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non verb-final orderings are also possible and frequent in colloquial and poetic language. Within the latter, even constituents of phrases can be broken apart and moved around. So, word order can also be a stylistic device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T00:21:46.160" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T00:21:46.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2012-03-01T04:55:11.433" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sigh, not this again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;jlawler notwithstanding, Universal Grammar is not &quot;merely a claim&quot;, nor is it even a claim.  It is just a name suggested by Chomsky (reviving terminology from French philosophy of the Enlightenment) for &lt;em&gt;whatever aspects of language turn out to be universal across the species&lt;/em&gt;.  (Have a look at his 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, page 5 ff, where he introduced the concept.) The real discussion concerns the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of Universal Grammar - what does it look like, how is it embodied in our genes and in our brain, how does a child's experience alter and mold what UG supplies, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues are correct, Everett's claims about Piraha are irrelevant to this discussion, because (1) they do not contradict any proposals that have been made by anyone about UG (and certainly not by Chomsky, whose views Everett misrepresents), and (2) the data presented by Everett himself fail to support his own claims.  Jlawler says &quot;evidence first, claims later&quot;, and the NPR paper is all about the evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find links to all the papers here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411&quot;&gt;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, go read the stuff for yourself and make up your own mind. But watch out for folks who use phrases like &quot;card-carrying Chomskyan linguists&quot; or make blanket assertions that a huge field full of evidence, data and hotly contested proposals about UG boils down to &quot;no actual evidence&quot;.  Read the papers, think, and make up your own mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="807" LastEditorUserId="807" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T05:25:34.437" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T05:25:34.437" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2012-03-01T05:00:14.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watch out about Evans &amp;amp; Levinson's paper. It's inaccurate about what Chomsky and others have said, and inaccurate about the languages they discuss.  When you hunt down the references, they don't make anything like the claims that Evans &amp;amp; Levinson attribute to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These slides from a recent conference are pretty damning (and probably pretty accurate): &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/MatthewsonNELS42public.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How (not) to uncover cross-linguistic variation&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Lisa Matthewson, who is a leading semanticist who specializes in fieldwork on Salish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant article is &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/dharbour/20-QMOPAL-Harbour.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mythomania? Methods and Morals from ‘The Myth of Language Universals’&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Daniel Harbour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="807" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T16:02:31.130" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T16:02:31.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1528" CreationDate="2012-03-01T06:20:12.277" Score="6" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;How common is it for languages to use second person pronouns as indefinite pronouns in certain contexts?   Witness, for example, the following sentence, which, depending on context, could be addressed to a particular listener or to any listener or reader at all, including listeners and readers unknown to the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If you drink and drive, you'll go to jail!&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this use of the second person pronoun confined to English, or do other languages have it too? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T11:08:00.490" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T11:08:00.490" Title="How common is it for languages to use second person pronouns as indefinite pronouns in certain contexts?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2012-03-01T08:15:54.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darja&quot;&gt;Darja&lt;/a&gt; (a group of Arabic dialects used in the Maghreb) uses second person pronoun, but with a twist,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Darja, at first sight, it looks the same way - and for speakers of&#xA;  any one gender, this is true. However, looking at speakers of both&#xA;  genders allows you to realise that the distinction is grammaticalised.&#xA;  Addressee &quot;you&quot; agrees in gender with the addressee; impersonal &quot;you&quot;&#xA;  does not agree in gender with the addressee, but with the speaker.&#xA;  Thus a woman speaking to a man will say &lt;code&gt;tṛuħ&lt;/code&gt; &quot;you go&quot; when &quot;you&quot;&#xA;  refers to the man addressed, but &lt;code&gt;tṛuħi&lt;/code&gt; when it refers to an arbitrary&#xA;  person, like &quot;When you go by bus, it takes a while.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;a href=&quot;http://lughat.blogspot.com/2007/09/impersonal-vs-personal-you.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Impersonal vs. personal &quot;you&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Dr. Lameen Souag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you#Analogs_in_other_languages&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also list Russian as an example. As far as I know, the French uses &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; (not a second-person pronoun) for this purpose, and formally English uses &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T08:21:02.253" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T08:21:02.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-01T12:44:58.050" Score="13" ViewCount="2047" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you ask most people the difference between common nouns and proper nouns they mostly can only tell you that proper nouns start with a capital letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this has problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capital letters and writing systems as a whole are recent inventions added on to language, which is ancient and naturally ocurring.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many if not most writing systems do not have a distinction between upper and lower case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even among languages which use a dual case writing system, not all capitalize words the same way:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German capitalizes all nouns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most romance languages at least do not capitalize the names of days of the week or months or the year whereas English does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So is there a solid cross-linguistic concept of &quot;proper nouns&quot; within the discipline of linguistics, and if so how is it defined? Ie what criteria would an actual linguist use to decide whether a noun is common or proper?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T15:21:42.057" Title="How are proper nouns distinguished from other nouns in linguistics (not in orthography)?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1508" CreationDate="2012-03-01T15:55:19.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you specified about the TID&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; in the comments, I made a search specifically about it. What I found is a paper titled &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://signlanguage-bg.com/bg/publication/eng/11.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Aspects of Türk İşaret Dili&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Ulrike Zeshan, which analysis various features of the Turkish Sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the paragraph &quot;2.2 Types of nonmanual negation&quot;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, the author address various ways of negating using methods that don't include hand signing: &lt;em&gt;head movements&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;facial expressions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the second, which is what we're interested in there is something about the use of the mouth (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whereas both the negative headshake and the backward head tilt are very common&#xA;  in TID, &lt;em&gt;a third nonmanual signal that can convey negation is rather marginal in the&#xA;  language, yet nevertheless very interesting&lt;/em&gt;. In some rather rare contexts that still need&#xA;  to be speciﬁed, &lt;strong&gt;a puﬀ of the cheeks with subsequent release of the air trapped in the&#xA;  mouth has a negative meaning&lt;/strong&gt; (Figure 8 and videoclip 6). &lt;strong&gt;Moreover, the signal carries&#xA;  its negative meaning even in the absence of a manual negator sign, that is, it is&#xA;  suﬃcient to negate a clause by itself&lt;/strong&gt;. In the following example, it is repeated because&#xA;  the predicate it co-occurs with also has repeated movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of this nonmanual signal is interesting because, to the best of my knowledge,&#xA;  facial expressions have not been shown to function as negators on their own. Various&#xA;  facial expressions, such as frowning or pulling down the corners of the mouth, do&#xA;  accompany negation in many sign languages (e.g. Bergman 1995 for Swedish Sign&#xA;  Language, Coerts 1992 for Sign Language of the Netherlands, Berthiaume &amp;amp; Rinfret&#xA;  2000 for Langue des Signes Québécoise). &lt;strong&gt;However, it is often unclear whether they&#xA;  should be considered grammatical or affective facial expressions.&lt;/strong&gt; In any case, they&#xA;  always occur in addition to some other manual or nonmanual marking of negation,&#xA;  not as the sole marker of negation as in the above example from TID. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to this point I still had some doubts but another paper, concerning facial expressions recognition, &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/graduate/allthesis/m_2008_AriIsmail.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Facial feature tracking and expression recognition for sign&#xA;language&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by İsmail Arı, about the previous work said that&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sign language expressions are performed with the combination of manual (hand&#xA;  gestures) and non-manual components (facial expressions, head motion and pose, body&#xA;  movements). Some expressions are performed only using hand gestures whereas some&#xA;  change the meaning where a facial expression accompanies hand gestures. &lt;strong&gt;For example,&#xA;  in Turkish Sign Language (TSL), a sentence can be in positive, negative and question&#xA;  clause forms if the hand gesture of the verb is accompanied by different non-manual&#xA;  gestures as Zeshan [35] describes in her work on TSL.&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say that facial expressions certainly provide a suprasegmental and grammatical feature too, although &lt;em&gt;this doesn't make them part of the sign&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, a sign's meaning is not incomplete without these nonmanual gestures, unless you need to provide some grammatical feature (negation, question, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Turkish Sign Language in Turkish: &quot;Türk İşaret Dili&quot;. I'll refer to it using TID.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;: Page 58.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;: Chapter 1.2.5. Facial Expression Classification in the Scope of Sign Language Expressions, page 11.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-01T16:06:18.177" LastActivityDate="2012-03-01T16:06:18.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1541" CreationDate="2012-03-01T20:16:42.890" Score="5" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;In pre-Roman times, there was a Celtic tribe in Britain, called &lt;em&gt;Deceangli&lt;/em&gt;. To a layperson, this name bears an interesting resemblance to &lt;em&gt;Angles&lt;/em&gt;, the name of another (Germanic) tribe that lived in the continent. Coincidentally, the Angles later invaded Britain along with the Saxons, and the name &lt;em&gt;Anglaland&lt;/em&gt; (England) was coined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just a pure coincidence of names or do they both derive from a more ancient, Indo-European source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T09:52:28.870" Title="Deceangli and Angles: are these two tribe names etymologically related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1283" CreationDate="2012-03-01T22:18:08.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bosworth's 1838&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language&lt;/em&gt; gives &quot;&lt;strong&gt;buttor-fleoge&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Plat&lt;/em&gt;. (Plat-dutch) Better-flege, &lt;em&gt;Dut&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Kil&lt;/em&gt;. (Dutch, from Kilian) Butor-vilege&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it will be possible to determine if these were borrowings, calques, or cognates. These are all West Germanic languages spoken in a fairly small area that probably didn't have abrupt transitions between languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note, The 1838 Bosworth is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archive.org/stream/adictionaryangl02boswgoog#page/n6/mode/2up&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt; but the scanner cut off part of the page in question. The later Bosworths don't give the same cognate information.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T03:17:09.677" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T03:17:09.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-02T03:21:21.440" Score="4" ViewCount="1122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1515/does-piraha-syntax-contradict-the-principles-of-universal-grammar&quot;&gt;A recent question&lt;/a&gt; on this site led to some discussion which provoked the following comment by one of our community members:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UG is &quot;controversial in the latter interpretation&quot; only insofar as&#xA;  there are linguists who are sure there must be domain-independent&#xA;  explanations for all the phenomena of language. I've actually never&#xA;  seen an actual domain-independent explanation for any problem explored&#xA;  by generative grammarians. Usually these non-generative linguists&#xA;  either discuss different phenomena entirely or else deal with relevant&#xA;  issues so superficially (e.g. word order) that they don't even engage&#xA;  the key data&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current question I'd like to solicit examples of problems explored by generative grammarians which are considered to rely most heavily on an assumption of FLN (&lt;em&gt;faculté de langage&lt;/em&gt;, narrowly defined, i.e. a domain-specific human endowment which permits the learning and computation of natural languages), and for which the correctness of the analysis is generally accepted within the tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If community members can provide good examples, then a worthwhile follow-up question (that I or anyone else could ask) might explore whether there are good candidates for &lt;em&gt;actual, relevant, non-superficial&lt;/em&gt;, alternative analyses which do not rely on FLN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T15:03:21.233" Title="Language phenomena suggestive of Universal Grammar" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-02T04:23:22.030" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody happen to know of any good and fairly readily-available surveys of the language-specific semantics of definiteness cross-linguistically? Specifically, I'm interested in all the various ways of defining definiteness in terms of which things are grammatically definite in a given language and which aren't. E.g. how English and Greek have somewhat different criteria for applying the definite and indefinite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="701" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T17:16:39.930" Title="References on Definiteness" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1534" CreationDate="2012-03-02T05:07:40.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lyons, Christopher. 1999. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1137305/?site_locale=en_GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Definiteness&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge: CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dryer, Matthew S. 2011. Definite Articles. In: Dryer, Matthew S. &amp;amp; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.)&#xA;The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 37.&#xA;Available online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/37&lt;/a&gt; Accessed on 2012-03-02.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dryer's paper, he understands a definite article as &quot;a morpheme which accompanies nouns and which codes definiteness or specificity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T17:16:39.930" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T17:16:39.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1537" CreationDate="2012-03-02T05:16:06.860" Score="5" ViewCount="1343" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a language permits only CV or CCV syllables, how does one tell where the phonological word boundaries are?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose a language has a definite morpheme, /li/ that conveys what English &quot;the&quot; conveys.     Suppose this language has another morpheme, /stulu/, meaning &quot;dog.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these two morphemes occur in the order just mentioned, how can you tell whether we have a particle + noun (li stulu) vs. a single word with a definite prefix (listulu)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that stress could be one way to differentiate these two, but are there other ways?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T14:35:01.070" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T14:35:01.070" Title="How do languages that permit only CV and CCV syllables mark phonological word boundaries?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2012-03-02T06:03:50.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, you can't. Stress is a possible disambiguating strategy, but even in your hypothetical language, the two possibilities could have the same stress pattern. As with other forms of ambiguity, context is often sufficient to prefer one interpretation over another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic constraints can play a large part: for instance, in your hypothetical language, &lt;em&gt;li listulu&lt;/em&gt; could not possibly be analysed as *&lt;em&gt;li li stulu&lt;/em&gt;, since, if &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; patterns with determiners cross-linguistically, the combination of two adjacent determiners would be blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the English &lt;em&gt;adder&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;apron&lt;/em&gt; were diachronically &lt;em&gt;nadder&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;napron&lt;/em&gt;, the combination &lt;em&gt;a napron&lt;/em&gt; having been re-analysed as &lt;em&gt;an apron&lt;/em&gt;, showing the potential for fluidity in word boundaries through re-analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T06:03:50.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1522" CreationDate="2012-03-02T07:54:13.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Periphrastic modal constructions of the form 'have to' + infinitive are found in several Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: &lt;em&gt;haber/tener de/que&lt;/em&gt; 'have to'+ infinitive;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese: &lt;em&gt;haver/ter de/que&lt;/em&gt; 'have to' + infinitive;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several Southern Italian varieties also have this construction but it is mostly found in Ibero-Romance languages. In some Ibero-Romance languages this construction has expanded to take on aspectual meaning (eg in Abruzzo &lt;em&gt;tenere a&lt;/em&gt; + infinitive expresses durativity) while in some other Romance languages (eg Sardinian) it is used to express future time reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This construction is rarer in the other Romance languages: French has &lt;em&gt;avoir á/être á&lt;/em&gt; + infinitive while Italian has &lt;em&gt;avere/essere da&lt;/em&gt; + infinitive, but the role of the construction is much more limited than in the Ibero-Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The historical development of this discussion is discussed in &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=zTa23cfRGzMC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verbal periphrasis in Romance&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Mario Squartini. In summary it was a process of grammaticalisation that occurred late in the development of the modern Romance languages and is still ongoing in some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T11:53:00.247" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T11:53:00.247" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2012-03-02T08:06:36.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't quite see the link between your question about word boundaries and what syllables the language permits. Could you elaborate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for one versus two words, I don't think there is a universal method. It mostly depends on what the particular language does to its words and affixes, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stress is perhaps the most universal method, as almost all languages have it, and in your example it must be either one or two. Counterexamples: 1. one can always claim &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; is a separate word which might lose its accent in certain combinations; 2. stress solves nothing in cases such as Polish &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; 'in' or &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; 'from' which are only made up of a single consonant and so can't be stressed anyway (they count as separate words, in case you're interested).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The possibility to insert a separate word in between can also help answer your question. How would you say 'the smart dog' in your language? Can 'smart' go between &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stulu&lt;/em&gt;? Counterexamples: German, Dutch, Hungarian &amp;amp;c. separable verbs are typically counted as one word, although they can be separated, their order swapped, and other words inserted in between.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel harmony is a good method in languages which have it. Counterexamples: Hungarian &lt;em&gt;-kor&lt;/em&gt; temporalis does not harmonize with the stem, yet it is counted as a suffix rather than a separate word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mutations which only happen on morpheme boundaries. Unfortunately, no ready example comes to my mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native speaker intuition would be a great method if it only weren't so shaky. It's a sort of chicken and egg problem with NS intuition and spelling, e.g. Russian &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; 'in' was first written together with the word, and later the spelling was changed to separate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T08:06:36.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1533" CreationDate="2012-03-02T13:56:51.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've constructed your query a bit tendentiously, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First there's the phrase &quot;and for which the correctness of the analysis is generally accepted within the tradition&quot;.  So if someone comes with an example, you can always dip into the vast literature of linguists exploring alternatives to each other's ideas - to characterize the example as not &quot;generally accepted&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's the reference to &quot;FLN&quot;, which will allow you to reject all sorts of examples for which there isn't an analysis compatible with Chomsky's recent hyper-minmalist speculation that the only component of UG is Merge (i.e. FLN).  Chomsky may be famous, but these recent speculations do not drive the field - precisely because it is so hard to explain anything real within their strictures. (Some people might find this a bracing challenge, but the other possibility is that it's a blind alley.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's your reference to &quot;domain-specific&quot;.  No one's going to be able to &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; that a principle relevant to grammar might not turn out to be domain-general.  Maybe the Case Filter reflects some abstract property of the mind that is also used in vision. That would actually be a very exciting result for everyone, generative grammarians included. My point (I'm the author of the quote) is that I've never seen any demonstration of this sort that's real, not that we know for a fact that the principles underlying human language are all domain-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, have a go at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the existence of obligatory verb-initial and obligatory verb-second languages, and the non-existence of obligatory verb-third, verb-fourth, etc. languages&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Cinque hierarchy&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the complement/non-complement asymmetry in Incorporation and compounding (Baker's standard example)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;island conditions as they apply to wh-phrases like &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, both overtly displaced and in situ&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Person-Case Constraint&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples that come to my mind. I imagine others can supply other relevant examples from different areas of linguistics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: In response to the request for references, a first stab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the existence of obligatory verb-initial and obligatory verb-second languages, and the non-existence of obligatory verb-third, verb-fourth, etc. languages&quot;  Maybe start with &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/001087&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this survey article by Holmberg&lt;/a&gt; and follow the references he gives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the Cinque hierarchy&quot; I guess the &lt;em&gt;locus classicus&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sFd79vhd_n0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the book in which Cinque presented his discovery&lt;/a&gt;  Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.words-in-world.de/mediapool/36/361457/data/SRC_Part_I_/Neven_-_Cinque_s_Functional_Hierarchy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;someone's summary&lt;/a&gt; that looks ok.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the complement/non-complement asymmetry in Incorporation and compounding (Baker's standard example)&quot;  Discussed for lay audiences in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7NDlAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Baker's Atoms of Language&lt;/a&gt;, based on research first reported in his book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Incorporation.html?id=1I4oAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Incorporation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;island conditions as they apply to wh-phrases like &quot;why&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, both overtly displaced and in situ&quot;.  Lots of sources.  Probably the references in &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/lingu/dendikken/docs/GLOTultimate.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; will be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Person-Case Constraint.  Simple &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=person+case+constraint&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Googling&lt;/a&gt; is probably good enough to show the nature of the condition, proposed accounts, and the languages across the globe that show its effects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="807" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T22:28:32.437" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T22:28:32.437" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1531" CreationDate="2012-03-02T19:40:49.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=VLpCAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA235&amp;amp;ots=0p1WEBbzvK&amp;amp;dq=concangii%20gangani%20ceangli&amp;amp;pg=PA235#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=concangii%20gangani%20ceangli&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rhys's Celtic Britain&lt;/a&gt; and Tacitus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;deceangli&lt;/strong&gt; was perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsBritain/BritainDeceangli.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;de-ceangli&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt;- &lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;from&quot; + &lt;strong&gt;concangi&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;- &lt;strong&gt;cangi&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=LFJAShEc8ykC&amp;amp;lpg=PA41&amp;amp;ots=IYCgo_3Jsp&amp;amp;dq=%60caing%60%20%27estuary%27&amp;amp;pg=PA41#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%60caing%60%20%27estuary%27&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;according to Guest's Origines Celtica&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cangi&lt;/strong&gt; was &amp;lt;- &lt;strong&gt;caing&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;estuary&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now compare a theory about the origin of the name Angle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Angle &amp;lt;- L &lt;strong&gt;anglii&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;those who dwell by the narrow water/estuary&quot; &amp;lt;- &lt;strong&gt;ang-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;narrow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is an etymological theory which says they are both related, inasmuch as both being named for proximity to an estuary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not as open and shut as that, though. These are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not the only theories of the names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some give Angle &amp;lt;- &lt;strong&gt;anglii&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;those who dwell at the crooked place (i.e. Jutland)&quot;; or &amp;lt;-  &quot;people of *&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingwaz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ingwaz&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Under this theory the names probably are just coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-03-02T21:31:04.747" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T21:31:04.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1494" CreationDate="2012-03-02T19:59:45.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fairly common in Welsh English, particularly in the South.  Usually done for emphasis such as &quot;Fed up, I am&quot;. You can find more about it in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-03-02T19:59:45.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1596" CreationDate="2012-03-03T04:13:41.427" Score="8" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish is often described as putting &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;focused&lt;/a&gt; constituents at the end of the sentence, leading for instance to VOS word order in sentences with a focused subject.  (For instance, Maria Zubizarreta's 1998 book &lt;em&gt;Prosody, Focus, and Word Order&lt;/em&gt; describes this as the standard way of focusing a subject — and the author's a native Spanish speaker, so I trust her intuition.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance, according to the descriptions I've read, the normal answer to a question like (1) would be (3), and (2) in that context would be infelicitous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;¿Quien compró el diario?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;MARÍA compró el diario.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Compró el diario MARÍA. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I found out that a friend of mine from Peru has exactly the opposite intuitions.  For him, the normal way to answer a question like (1) would be (2), and (3) in that context would be infelicitous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'm wondering about the broader geographical distribution of these two word orders.  In what parts of the (Spanish-speaking) world is (2) the default way of answering a question like (1)?  In what parts is (3) the default?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T12:01:28.150" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T12:01:28.150" Title="Focus-marking in different varieties of Spanish" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;&lt;focus&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2012-03-03T05:11:58.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example of Piraha shows that Chomsky's basic claim about language is incorrect, and that's it. There are no legitimate debates to be had here, it is just a falsification, plain and simple. The fact that linguists are denying it bears sad testimony to the sorry state of the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky retrenched position is essentially a vacuous tautology, that people are able to learn language, and that they have a brain facility that helps them do this. This is a pity, because the original idea of universal grammar is the most powerful unifying principle ever devised for linguistics, and it is important to investigate how it fails. This is not going to happen as long as the field of linguistics doesn't acknowledge that it fails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only predictive statement commonly associated with the idea of universal grammar is that sentences in a language should be able to make clause-embedded parse trees of arbitrary depth. Here is an example in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John put the cat on the bed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John put the cat who put the mouse in its mouth on the bed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John put the cat who put the mouse who booked the plane to Chicago in its mouth on the * bed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John put the girl who placed the cat who put the mouse who booked the plane to Chicago in its mouth on her lap on the bed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on, always grammatical, but with ever diminishing clarity. The existence of this type of recursive sentence structure occurs in English, in French, in modern Hebrew, in Chinese, and in all the languages the reader of this sentence is likely to speak. The construction is called recursive, because it allows embeddings arbitrarily far (in principle), and it allows infinite length sentences, so that there are infinitely many sentences that can be produced even when the vocabulary is restricted to one verb (put), two nouns (cat and mouse) and the necessary function words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of recursion is the most difficult to parse, because it is &quot;center embedding&quot;, meaning that you need to push stuff down on a stack and restore the context later, to unravel the nested implicit parentheses. Other examples of potentially infinite length sentences don't require as much effort:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack gave the book to Bobby&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack gave the book to Bobby, then to Jane&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack gave the book to Bobby, then to Jane, then to Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. The sentence doesn't become harder to understand. This is just a list. You don't have to push context and restore to make sense of this, you just add stuff to a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another example of a list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John and Bill and Mary and Martha and Zoe and Alberta and Jane and Willy went to the store.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, no effort required. It's just a list. Here is another example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have one hundred million million billion letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So numbers are automatically recursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of nested clauses that don't require massive effort (unlike the cat with the mouse on the bed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack went to Rio which is the best city in Brazil, which is the best country on the planet which is the best planet in the solar system which is the best solar system in the galaxy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is recursive, but it doesn't require popping the stack. It's tail-recursion in CS jargon. You can just flush the stack when you are done parsing the sentence, and you never need to restore the original context to make sense of what is relating to what and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chomsky's claims&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's original claim is that all languages recurse in the same way. This is incredibly predictive. I will share a personal anecdote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first got Chomsky's stuff (from reading CS, I only read a little Chomsky later), I went to a friend of mine who spoke Chinese. I then asked her to parse the cat-bed sentence with 4 levels of recursion. This is difficult for a native speaker, and for a non-native speaker, it's basically hopeless. She couldn't understand it, and when she did, she &lt;em&gt;assured&lt;/em&gt; me, with confidence, that this type of sentence would have no corresponding Chinese equivalent. Her claim is that Chinese does not embed this way (center embedding four levels deep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assured her that it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; (using Chomsky's hypothesis of universal grammar). Then I laboriously asked her for the word-for-word Chinese translation of the simpler versions (with only one and two levels of recursion), and wrote down what the Chinese 4-level recursive version should be, given this data. I presented it to her, she is a native speaker, and asked her if it was grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She looked at it for a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time, and finally said &quot;Yes. It is grammatical.&quot; She was &lt;em&gt;surprised&lt;/em&gt; that you could say it in Chinese, but she understood that you could say it, by intuition. This means that she had internalized the recursive rules of sentence construction without consciously knowing what they were, or even that they were tree recursive. In fact, she consciously believed that they were not tree recursive, even when they clearly are. This verifies the idea, associated with Chomsky's name, that all children learn the grammar unconsciously and without conscious awareness of absorbing the rules, or even of the character of the rules, suggesting that the grammatical recursive sentence structure is hard-wired into the brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is a nontrivial test of Chomsky's hypothesis, between two of the most distantly related old world languages. You can do it too. People have been doing this for 50 years. It is really remarkable how simple it is to translate the sentences once you know some simple word order and embedding rules. There is no sentence you can't translate with at least a roughly corresponding grammatical construction between any two of the modern common languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homogeneity of the grammar of the major old-world langauges is ridiculously compelling evidence that Chomsky is right, that all languages share an essential recursive structure which is fundamentally isomorphic, underneath the superficial word-order differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the strong Chomsky thesis--- all languages share a common grammar which only differs in superficial ways, and allows center embedding and embedding of arbitrary depth. It is a remarkable idea, because it immediately suggests that language grammar was the central fundamental property of human beings that made us intelligent. It suggests that this recursive stuff is at least about 40,000 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So recursion in language is the fundamental faculty of the human mind. Further, all human beings have an innate mathematical sophistication which is largely independent of culture or history, that is just in our genes, that allows us to absorb stack-recursion ideas unconsciously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These ideas are so central to mid-twentieth century thinking, that denying that they were proposed by Chomsky is an egregious falsification of history. Further, even if this idea is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, it is still an incredibly &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; idea. It is also not too far off the mark in terms of what type of mathematical structures the human brain can intuitively readily accept. These are the tree-structured recursive grammars that are parsed by a stack, using pushing and popping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Chomsky is now saying the above ideas aren't due to him, then who are they due to? They are certainly of the period 1950-1980, this is the period when Bacchus's team developed recursive grammar specifications for FORTRAN, to make natural-sounding computer languages. It is the time that recursion theory became recognized as fundamentally equivalent to thinking. It is also the time that Skinnerian models of regular language grammars were shown to be total failures, and Skinnerian type positvist models that deny internal computations were rejected because they were too impoverished. All these things have Chomsky written all over them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it wasn't Chomsky, somebody else would have come up with the ideas above at about the same time. But if it wasn't Chomsky, this person wouldn't have been able to publish these ideas, because everyone knows these ideas are due to Chomsky. When I read Chomsky, I certainly get the sense that this is what he means. Even if he now says that this isn't what he meant, it is certainly what everyone else thought he meant, so it is what &quot;Chomskian linguistics&quot; means to me, and what it should mean to everybody, no matter what Chomsky says today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exceptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As exceptions to the grammar universality piled up, Chomsky retrenched. The surprising and counterintuitive fact is, that if you look at isolated cultures, you don't find examples of center recursion or complex many-level embeddings. This known to be true of Warlpiri, and now it is claimed for Piraha.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Warlpiri, people say that you just would never ever make a sentence like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cat put the mouse who put the moldy cheese in its mouth in its mouth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is center embedding, but not too deep, so it is still comprehensible without effort. You just don't do that in Warlpiri. You make separate sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a shocker, because the Warlpiri, if brought up in an English speaking culture, will understand and produce center-recursive sentences. But they just don't do it in their language. People said this in the 1970s, and claimed it falsified Chomsky, but nobody listened to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But although Warlpiri might not allow sophisticated recursion, there might be some form of recursion (I don't know, I never studied Warlpiri). Something simple, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John and Mary and Martha and James went to the store&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not center embeddings, so they don't give you the most ambitious idea of universal grammar, but they allow you to believe that the list-making operation &quot;merge&quot; operates in all languages, and might be the central feature of human thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Surprise! Wrong-O!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where Everett comes in. He shows that Piraha's grammar is &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; nonrecursive. That means it truly has a finite number of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means: no &quot;and&quot; recursion, no &quot;or&quot; recursion, no possessive recursion, no number words, no list recursion of any form. Further, no tail recursion, no central recursion. In fact, &lt;em&gt;no clause embedding at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, to me, is as stunning as finding life on Mars. It completely overturns the ideas of Chomskian linguistics, in their predictive and powerful form, explained above. It establishes that recursion is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an evolved feature of humans dating back 40,000 years, but it probably far more recent. It perhaps dates to about the invention of writing, in which case we might be able to trace the evolution of recursive grammar in historical texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of number words, and-lists and so on is a remarkable feature of Piraha. It seems that it survived for no other reason than to completely knock down Chomsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Skeptics' absurd claims&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some skeptics have criticized Everett's analysis of Piraha. This despite the fact that they don't speak Piraha, and Everett does. They use Everett's previous published analysis of the language, made when he held Chomskian beliefs, that held that there is a word &quot;sai&quot; that is used for clause embedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Everett noticed that &quot;sai&quot; never center embeds. He also noticed that it always occurs between what could be construed as stand-alone sentences. Further, once he gained full fluency, he realized that sai was not a clause constructor at all, but something else which I don't understand (Everett's examples are reasonable and persuasive that it is not embedding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if you grant the skeptics that sai is an embedding, it only embeds one level deep! This means that there are still a finite number of Piraha sentences, even with sai, period. Because there certainly is no other form of recusion, no lists, no tails, and sai never works twice, as even the skeptics admit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Chomsky's claim of &quot;merge&quot; being recursive fails for Piraha with certainty, even using the manifestly incorrect analysis of the skeptics. So it is a counterexample to the strong claims above for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that Chomskian ideas are wrong. Its an astonishing falsification of a powerful thesis, and I think there is no shame in having made such a powerful prediction, even if it does turn out to be wrong. If Chomsky decides to disown this idea, he should really say whose ideas they are, because they certainly aren't mine (although that would be nice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="810" LastEditDate="2012-03-03T06:23:50.940" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T06:23:50.940" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1740" CreationDate="2012-03-03T05:42:01.643" Score="1" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project of &quot;AUTOMATED ESSAY EVALUATION&quot;. There will be an student answer and a standard/model answer. These two answers are formatted into a standard format. Thereafter these two formats are compared. According to the matching evaluation will be done. I am wondering how to transform english sentence into the standard format like FOPL, Object oriented format, associative network, frame structure etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="811" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-03T03:08:01.057" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T03:08:01.057" Title="How to represent an English language sentence in a standard data structure for further analysis?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T06:12:32.840" Score="3" ViewCount="1033" Body="&lt;p&gt;I edited this question in response to Karlsson's paper, &quot;Constraints on Multiple Center-Embedding of Clauses&quot; (Journal of Linguistics 43 (2), 2007, 365-392), linked here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/ceb5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/ceb5.pdf&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Piraha (and Warlpiri) do not allow embedded clauses, and Piraha does not allow recursion at all, clause embedding is not universal to all languages. As Karlsson persuasively argues, full blown recursion developed in the historical period. I will assume this here, and I will not repeat Karlsson's arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Hebrew bible, there is no more than one embedded clause in any given sentence, consistent with Karlsson's bound for pre-literate societies, and there are grammar errors which suggest that the authors had a problem with complex sentences. As Karlsson explains, Greek and Latin writers developed full blown center-recursion explicitly somewhere around the 1st and 2nd centuries BC, and there is no evidence that recursion existed before then in any form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hypothesis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As recursive embedding becomes common, it is possible that speakers prefer constructions which allow embedded clauses to take on different roles with no internal modifications. If you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked home-ward quickly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you try to modify home to the embedded noun-phrase &quot;the wide-open field where John slaughtered the goat&quot;, you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked &lt;em&gt;wide-open field-ward where John slaughtered the goat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this requires inserting a syllable in the &lt;em&gt;middle&lt;/em&gt; of the noun-phrase &quot;wide-open field where John slaughtered the goat&quot;. If you want to move the noun-phrase to the subject position of a different sentence, you need to scan the interior of the noun-phrase to remove the case-modifier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The wide-open field where John slaughtered the goat&lt;/em&gt; is pretty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a stand-alone preposition, no scan is required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked to &lt;em&gt;the wide open field where John slaughtered the goat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the words past &quot;to&quot; are exactly the same as when the noun-phrase is in the subject role. If the preposition can appear at the beginning of the phrase, it gives a clear &quot;push&quot; indicator for a mechanical parser, and it allows for trivial transformation of phrases to different roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;compare the cased:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked store-from-ly &lt;em&gt;the wide open sheep grazing field-ward where John slaughtered the goat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Store from-ly means &quot;from the store&quot; in a case approximation in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked &lt;em&gt;the wide open sheep grazing field-from-ly where John slaughtered the goat&lt;/em&gt; store-ward.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the uncased:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I walked from the store to the wide open sheep grazing field where John slaughtered the goat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I walked to the store from the wide open sheep grazing field where John slaughtered the goat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no internal scan of the noun-phrases required in order to change their function. the words stay the same as the noun-phrase takes on different roles, only the preposition changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case-introducing/case-removing noun-phrase scan is really annoying. It is computationally taxing, and I believe that it creates a linguistic pressure to remove cases from a language, and replace these with prepositions. When there are no cases, you have effortless noun-phrase embedding--- you just change the preposition, which always appears at the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally witnessed case-shedding events, in modern Hebrew. In the Bible, you would always say &quot;Halachti le-beyto&quot;, &quot;I went to-his-house&quot; to mean &quot;I went to his house&quot;, using a possessive marker on the word &quot;bayit&quot; (house). But modern Hebrew speaker will always say &quot;Halachti la-bayit shelo&quot;, &quot;I went to the house of him&quot;, precisely because the word &quot;shel&quot; can be used to embed, as in &quot;Halachti la-bayit shel ha-ach hagadol sheli&quot; &quot;I went to the house of my big brother&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to a possessive marker, which was shed, Biblical Hebrew also has a &quot;to&quot; case, so that it says &quot;I walked Schem-ward&quot; (&quot;Halachti Schem-a&quot;). Modern Hebrew, despite prescriptivist admonitions, also dropped this case entirely, so that all modern speakers use the recursion friendly: &quot;I walked to shchem&quot; (&quot;Halachti le-Schem&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my own native speaker intuition, I know that this is a consequence of the ubiquitous embedding in modern Hebrew. You don't say &quot;I walked city-ward by the sea&quot; in modern Hebrew, it is ungrammatical. you say &quot;I walked to the city by the sea&quot;, with the exact same form as in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bible doesn't embed very much, and if it wanted to do this, it would say it in a pre-literate way that suggests recursion is completely alien to the author: &quot;Halachti Schema, zu ha-'ir le-yad ha-yam&quot;/&quot;I walked city-ward, this is the city by the sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the hypothesis is that recursive languages shed their cases as soon as most speakers begin to produce and transform multiply embedded sentences on a regular basis. This happens at different times for different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Predictions/Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hypothesis makes the following predictions, and these are the questions I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases should be most diverse and pronounced in non-embedding languages, like Piraha. This is true of Piraha. Is it true of other non-embedding languages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most cased languages today should have a recent writing system, and the least cased languages should have an ancient writing system. For Russian and English, this works. Are there counterexamples?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there opposite events where the case system was strengthened? Do these correspond to a loss of literacy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="810" LastEditDate="2012-03-08T04:17:04.543" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T00:44:08.627" Title="Did case systems dissappear to make embedding easier?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="26" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1574" CreationDate="2012-03-03T06:33:35.110" Score="61" ViewCount="5650" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we read the news related to dying languages, normally this is painted as bad news and it's really important to preserve the language, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/13/mexico-language-ayapaneco-dying-out&quot;&gt;Language at risk of dying out (Guardian)&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17081573&quot;&gt;Digital tools 'to save languages' (BBC)&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this view shared by most linguists, or is it mainly the view of news reporter or anthropologist? If we think about it, maybe human communication would be better off if we have fewer languages. The diversity of languages cause communication difficulty, and in some cases can even cause conflicts, war, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the scientific reason for preserving dying languages, if any? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-09-22T04:35:17.570" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T21:59:22.030" Title="Why do we have interest in (dying) language preservation?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;endangered-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1548" CreationDate="2012-03-03T06:59:51.473" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read the latest edited version of your question, and I think I understand what you mean now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to make a distinction between an ordinary suffix and a case ending (which could be considered a special kind of suffix). Consider the following two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magni viri&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; liber est in mensa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The large &lt;strong&gt;man's&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; book is on the table.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin sentence means exactly the same as the English one. The word &lt;em&gt;liber&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;book&amp;quot;) is the subject of the sentence, and so it is in the nominative; &lt;em&gt;viri&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;of the man&amp;quot;) is in the genitive, as indicated by the case ending &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; (the nominative would be &lt;em&gt;vir&lt;/em&gt;). The adjective &lt;em&gt;magni&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;large&amp;quot;) is also in the genitive (nominative &lt;em&gt;magnus&lt;/em&gt;). The head word (&lt;em&gt;viri&lt;/em&gt;) of the noun phrase (&lt;em&gt;magni viri&lt;/em&gt;) determines the case, number, and sex of the whole noun phrase; the adjective must always be in the exact same case, number, and sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a central principle in most of the case-heavy languages, including Latin, Greek, and German. Perhaps it would be better to characterise them as heavy in noun inflection, as this includes number and sex too. This principle is called &lt;em&gt;concord&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;agreement&lt;/em&gt;, as you may know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the contrast with the English phrase: only the head of the noun phrase, the noun itself, is marked (with &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;). Because the English suffix does not involve concord, I would not call it a case ending. The principal remaining concord in English is between subject and verb (&lt;em&gt;I am&lt;/em&gt; v. &lt;em&gt;he is&lt;/em&gt;). How about Biblical Hebrew? Is only the head marked, or adjectives as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you see now how easy it is to add a relative clause to an inflected noun phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pater  &lt;strong&gt;magnum virum&lt;/strong&gt; in urbe &lt;strong&gt;captum&lt;/strong&gt;,   qui pius erat, servavit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Father &lt;strong&gt;large  man&lt;/strong&gt; in city &lt;strong&gt;having-been-captured&lt;/strong&gt;, who pious was, saved.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Father saved a large man captured in the city, who was pious.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time &lt;em&gt;virum&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;man&amp;quot;) is in the accusative, because it is object. I have marked all words agreeing in case/number/sex with &lt;em&gt;virum&lt;/em&gt; in bold. The word &lt;em&gt;pater&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;father&amp;quot;) is marked as subject by the nominative. The finite verb of the main clause is &lt;em&gt;servavit&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;saved&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parsing difficulties in your &lt;em&gt;the wide open sheep grazing field-from-ly&lt;/em&gt; are not present in the Latin, simply because the first word of the noun phrase (&lt;em&gt;magnum&lt;/em&gt;) is already marked as object. Imagine if the word &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; in your &lt;em&gt;field&lt;/em&gt; phrase were already marked as &amp;quot;from-ly&amp;quot;. It would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I walked the-&lt;em&gt;from-ly&lt;/em&gt; wide-open-&lt;em&gt;from-ly&lt;/em&gt; sheep-grazing-&lt;em&gt;from-ly&lt;/em&gt; field-&lt;em&gt;from-ly,&lt;/em&gt; where John slaughtered the goat, store-&lt;em&gt;ward&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how the parsing problem disappears? You don't need to hold your breath for the function of the noun phrase to appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German works the same way, and Ancient Greek too. The latter does have a few suffixes that serve as case endings but are only attached to the head word; and you are right, those can normally only be used when the noun phrase consists of a single word, no dependencies or embedding. But I can only think of two such suffixes, and they are rare and/or semi-archaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;οἶκόνδε&lt;/strong&gt; νέεσθαι&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;house-ward&lt;/strong&gt; to return]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word οἶκός (/oi.kos/) means &amp;quot;house&amp;quot;; the suffix δε (/de/) means &amp;quot;towards&amp;quot;; νέεσθαι (/ne.e.stai/) means &amp;quot;to return&amp;quot;. (The accusative ending -όν (/on/) is used because the suffix -δε requires the accusative.) So the whole means &amp;quot;to return home&amp;quot;. This suffix cannot be used with complex noun phrases, as you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your suggestion that embedding a clause in the middle of another clause did not happen until the Hellenistic period, that is just not correct. It took me a whole two minutes to find a counter example, in lines 11 and 12 of the Odyssey. Homer's work comprises the oldest European literature in existence, probably composed in the 8th century BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, &lt;strong&gt;ὅσοι φύγον αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οἴκοι ἔσαν, [πόλεμόν τε πεφευγότες ἠδὲ θάλασσαν]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;then all others, &lt;strong&gt;whoever escaped sheer destruction&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;were home, [having escaped the war and the sea]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ὅσοι is a relative pronoun referring back to ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, &amp;quot;all the others&amp;quot;; it introduces a subordinate clause with the finite verb φύγον, &amp;quot;escaped&amp;quot;. The main clause has ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες as its subject, and ἔσαν (&amp;quot;were&amp;quot;) as its finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Homeric poems were meant to be recited out loud in the correct rhythm (metre). In fact, nearly all literature of Antiquity was meant to be read out loud up until the emergence of novels, around the first century AD. So people were able to use and understand (centrally) embedded clauses in speech throughout European history. I agree that they are generally less easy to parse than embedding at the end of a sentence, so there were obviously some restrictions, just as now; but central embedding was used. It is probably very, very old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to note is that relative pronouns were relatively new: it can be observed in Homer that relative pronouns were still in the process of developing out of demonstrative/personal pronouns of the third person (there never was a strong distinction between demonstrative and personal pronouns of the third person in Latin and Greek throughout Antiquity). However, participles are much older, as are conjunctions; and both can be used to embed verbs with complements just as well, and were in fact so used (e.g. in Homer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T00:44:08.627" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-03T07:50:50.067" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only scientific reason I can think of is that the death of a language deprives us of interesting information that could be used to research universal grammar, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main reason is probably non-scientific, just as we don't like polar bears to go extinct or mediaeval churches to collapse: humanity has certain ideas about preserving the things it likes, and exotic languages are cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T13:18:37.703" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T13:18:37.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-03T08:10:30.480" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a purely linguistic scientific point of view, i.e. abstracting from all humane feelings such as compassion &amp;amp;c., I would say the most important reason to care about languages dying out is &lt;strong&gt;data&lt;/strong&gt;. Generally, those languages that die out, are also the least attested and least researched ones. Since written material and recordings are usually scarce, with the death of the last native speaker, we irreversibly lose the possibility to ever properly investigate the language. This is bad because linguists care about languages (or at least they should), and they care about parallels, cognates, reflexes and other things that can help them study other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real reason, however, why so many linguists are nowadays interested in dying languages is &lt;strong&gt;fashion&lt;/strong&gt;, in my opinion. The trend goes hand in hand with ecology, manifesting appreciation for other cultures and other typically late 20th c. points of view, and brutally speaking it has become fashionable in some centres to conduct field research. This is not to say field research hasn't been done earlier; just not in that scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, not all people interested in languages are necessarily &lt;strong&gt;sit-at-home&lt;/strong&gt; type of people. Field research gives them a great opportunity to study what they like the way they like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the phenomenon is not without a &lt;strong&gt;dark side&lt;/strong&gt;, either. Field research is a costly enterprise and requires a specific set of mind, which does not cooccur terribly often with a scientific attitude. As a result, a great deal of field research nowadays is done by 'curiosity hoppers', i.e. collectors of linguistic pecularities (and their own fame) from a multitude of randomly chosen exotic languages, none of which they ever become specialists in. Sort of cabinet of curiosities kind of attitude. As a consequence, a lot of data thus collected is totally unreliable and next to useless, and proper linguists find it very difficult to obtain further funding because the languages they want to investigate are, in theory, already described. &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; removed a specific example because apparently some users consider a warning against dilettantism to be equivalent to wishing a language to die out. My aim was not to start a flame so just see the history of this post if you're interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T20:58:30.380" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T20:58:30.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3963" CreationDate="2012-03-03T11:05:16.647" Score="3" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;Georgian verbal morphology includes a concept called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preverb#Georgian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preverb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which has several functions compounded into one morpheme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distinguishes present (without preverb) from future (with preverb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adds direction or other nuance to a verb (like verb prefixes in German or Russian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can totally change the meaning of a verb (also like verb prefixes in German or Russian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(If you are not familiar with German or Russian verbs, preverbs are a bit like &quot;&lt;strong&gt;down&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in &quot;cut down&quot; or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in &quot;eat up&quot; in English.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there is a conflict in the literature which I cannot resolve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Source after source states that preverbs are only used in future forms and this is what makes the future forms distinguishable from the present forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the main function of a preverb is to distinguish between the present tenses and the future tenses. In order to make a present tense verb into a future tense, one has to add the preverb to the verb compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But source after source also lists &lt;strong&gt;present forms&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;to go&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to come&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;with preverbs&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mo&lt;/strong&gt;dis = (&quot;he is coming&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;mi&lt;/strong&gt;dis = (&quot;he is going&quot;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what am I failing to understand? If preverbs are only for future forms why are they also in present forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my continued reading on this topic I've found two interesting facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb base of &quot;to come&quot; / &quot;to go&quot; uses suppletion heavily. Several different roots are used for different screeves or forms of the verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some sources say preverbs are used for present forms, other sources say they are used for perfective forms. Since &quot;present&quot; and &quot;perfective&quot; are not at all synonyms, these terms might be obscuring a more tricky actual situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The more I learn about Georgian, the more it seems that the &quot;verbs of motion/movement&quot; are exceptional and use the same prefix morphemes that elsewhere are preverbs, but that they are not preverbs in this case! Yet none of my textbooks actually state this so I'm still in doubt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T00:00:14.497" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T00:00:14.497" Title="Why does it appear certain Georgian verbs take preverbs in present forms?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;present&gt;&lt;preverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T11:23:27.960" Score="4" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some colleagues and I would like to put together a &lt;strong&gt;grammar compendium to teach English grammar&lt;/strong&gt; and would like to record the rules and examples &lt;strong&gt;in XML&lt;/strong&gt; so as to increase the kinds of ways it can be utilized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any XML, much of the work is &lt;strong&gt;defining the schema&lt;/strong&gt;, what to leave out and what to leave in. Here is an example of the kind of XML we are looking to create:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;grammarUnit&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;title&amp;gt;Present Perfect&amp;lt;/title&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;rules&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;rule title=&quot;Past actions with results/consequences in the present&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;examples&amp;gt;&#xA;                &amp;lt;example answer=&quot;has eaten&quot;&amp;gt;Paul _____ all the cookies.&amp;lt;/example&amp;gt;&#xA;                &amp;lt;example answer=&quot;has gone&quot;&amp;gt;Paul _____ to the basketball game.&amp;lt;/example&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;/examples&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;/rule&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/rules&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/grammarUnit&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anyone know of an XML like this that represents grammar rules for the purpose of teaching grammar to people learning the language?&lt;/strong&gt; (It's hard to search Google for this since XML is itself a kind of grammar which brings up many unwanted hits.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="812" LastEditorUserId="812" LastEditDate="2012-03-04T08:45:57.200" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T16:49:14.530" Title="Looking for XML for English language grammar instruction" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-03T11:39:41.567" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages encode a lot of information about its surroundings. Names for plants and animals, what the plants and animals are useful for, various phenomena, things that are relevant for the speakers. Think of it as a specialized encyclopedia. When a language dies, the encyclopedia dies with it. Often, the changeover in language is followed by a changeover in culture as well, so that the previously relevant information is no longer relevant and there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; agreed-upon way of talking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Want to know what's edible in the area you are in? Sorry mate, the locals have been assimiliated into a more westernized culture and only eats the same stuff you do now. Want to know how the locals used to make the paint of a particular shade of blue that is more long-lasting than anything found in the west? Sorry, the conquerors killed the people who knew how for being witches and cut out the tongues of those who spoke the language. Want to know whether this fungus has been used for medical purposes? No can do, the locals who used the fungus died of cholera in the fifties, etc. ad nauseam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For science, the loss of information is a tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T11:39:41.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1522" CreationDate="2012-03-03T15:32:41.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to figure out &quot;why&quot; a construction  has to be a certain way &#xA;is to see how it got to be that way, or whether it is usual or not for a language to do things this way. There are three issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does a verb meaning &quot;to possess&quot; develop a meaning where it expresses obligation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does the following verb of the embedded clause appear in the infinitive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; or something else used as a subordinator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for (1), Heine &amp;amp; Kuteva (2002: 333) name seven frequent grammaticalization sources for the concept of OBLIGATION. These are COPULA, DO, GET, NEED, OWE, H-POSSESSIVE, SUITABLE.&#xA;(An H-possessive is &quot;a marker of predicative possession expressed, for example, in English by &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. (ibid.: 163)). So let's take it on their authority that it is frequent cross-linguistically for &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;-like verbs to end up expressing obligation. The fact that &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; is, or is related to, a verb helps us to explain why this particular construction has to involved two linked clauses: a matrix clause containing the verb &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt;, and an embedded clause describing the obliged action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, use of Latin &lt;em&gt;habere&lt;/em&gt; does actually show up in this sense. (See towards the bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/avoir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CNRTL entry for&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;). The quote from Varro that is cited is &quot;rogas ut id mihi habeam curare&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why is an infinitive used in the embedded clause? Here we can note that cross-linguistically, constructions involving two linked clauses often have a &lt;em&gt;pivot-controller relation&lt;/em&gt; (see Van Valin 2005: ch.4) holding between arguments of the two clauses. An argument of one clause which is expressed (the &quot;controller&quot;) is understood to be coreferential with an unexpressed argument (the &quot;pivot&quot;) of another clause. Since the person who is obliged to do an action is normally the one who is doing the action, it makes sense for this construction to have a pivot--controller relation where the subject of the matrix clause will be the same as the subject of the embedded clause. The relevant property of the infinitive is that it is not marked for its subject; this is fine since it is unnecessary to indicate the subject. (I don't speak Portuguese, but I am guessing that you couldn't use one of the personal infinitives in place of the regular infinitive in this construction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; instead of some other subordinator? My partial guess is that because the construction probably developed from one with similar meaning, but where &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; has an object, e.g. &quot;Tenho trabalho que fazer&quot;, it will just take the subordinator from that construction.  Note that in French, for example, which has a similar construction &lt;em&gt;avoir à + INF&lt;/em&gt;, the relevant form with an object for &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; uses &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; to introduce the infinitive: &quot;j'ai ce travaille à faire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heine, B.; Kuteva, T. (2002). World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. CUP [please do not illegally consult the copy posted on scribd.com by some unscrupulous person]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Van Valin, R. (2005). Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T15:32:41.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1529" CreationDate="2012-03-03T15:59:36.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good observation and a good question, and the comments below it make a valid point, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I would say that there is no such thing as a solid cross-linguistic concept of 'proper nouns' -- or at least, none commonly accepted and adhered to. My own experience is that the term is primarily used to refer to what you could call prototypical proper nouns (&lt;em&gt;Coca-Cola&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Berlin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;John Brown&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp;c.), and rarely to not so clear cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there might have been more than one attempt at a proper definition, but neither has gained enough following to be even known of by the majority of linguists. Here a long and passionate rant is in order on the attitude towards properly defined terms in linguistics, but instead I'll just say that you might not be able to even find a single term which &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; linguist understands the same way for &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; language. You will, however, have no difficulty finding a linguist who can't give a proper and cross-linguistically solid definition for virtually any term he or she's used while talking to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basing a definition on language-specific spelling is obviously not a great idea, although in some cases it might be the best we have. 'Whatever's written between spaces' remains the best definition of &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to create a definition of your own, I suppose you should try to capture the common and distinctive features of the prototypical cases. You should not, however, get your hopes up about how many linguists will memorize it and adhere to it. It's a hopeless bunch in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T15:59:36.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T16:54:03.940" Score="11" ViewCount="2017" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1529/how-are-proper-nouns-distinguished-from-other-nouns-in-linguistics-not-in-ortho&quot;&gt;In an earlier question&lt;/a&gt; I wanted to learn about the nature of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proper nouns&lt;/a&gt; in a language-neutral way, but the comments and answers to that question so far state that this is not possible, that only languages have word categories and that concepts of those categories do not exist independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So following on from that I want to ask if Chinese has proper nouns, since most of us familiar with languages written in dual-case alphabets correlate proper nouns with capitalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Chinese has proper nouns how then are they distinguished from common nouns? Lexically? (property of each individual word) Semantically? (distinguished from the meaning of the word in a given context) Or are there also morphological and/or syntacic cues? (ways the words can be combined with other morphemes or arranged within a phrase that do not work for common nouns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T08:03:59.323" Title="Does Chinese have proper nouns and are they distinguished morphosyntactically or only lexically and or semantically?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-03T16:55:01.147" Score="0" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where can I find a 1TB or larger 1-gram corpus?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am comparing certain structures for term-frequency calculation, but without a significantly large dataset I won't be able to show the non-theoretical speed gains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="364" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T12:54:04.793" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T12:54:04.793" Title="1TB word (1-gram) corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1559" CreationDate="2012-03-03T17:05:48.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/datasets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the corpora available from Google Books Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; not the kind of thing you are looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T17:05:48.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1548" CreationDate="2012-03-03T19:32:02.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was commenting above, English has a possessive &quot;case&quot; marker that can apply to phrases and it exhibits an &quot;allergy&quot; to recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if &quot;cases&quot; just refer to context-sensitive form variations like &quot;be is am are was were&quot;, I see no clash with recursion there (likewise in Spanish, which has plenty of recursion but vastly more verb forms than English.) Esperanto has a simple two-noun-case system and a very productive system of affixes, but when you're used to it, it feels very natural even though the affixes can't mark phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we're simply talking about morphology that changes word meaning, I don't see a real issue there either. For example, in Esperanto I can say manĝaĵujo, a food container, with the &quot;container&quot; suffix -ujo, but ruĝa fruktujo &quot;red fruit container&quot; should mean &quot;a fruit container that is red&quot;, not &quot;a container of red fruit&quot;... basically what I'm getting at is that affixes ordinarily apply only to words, not phrases, and this is no different from English affixes. Yet this doesn't feel like an incompatibility between recursion and morphology, merely a limitation on the complexity of morphological changes. If I want to say &quot;container of red fruit&quot; then I simply give up on affixes and say &quot;ujo de ruĝa frukto&quot;, &quot;container of red fruit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I can only talk about the languages I know about (English, Spanish and Esperanto, all in the same family I'm afraid) but it seems to me that word-level variations such as case markers and affixes can be thought of as providing shortcuts for standalone words like &quot;of&quot;, &quot;that&quot;, &quot;female&quot; (stewardess) etc. Yes, word-level changes don't play well with recursion but that doesn't necessarily encourage them to disappear. As long as they provide some utility that the stand-alone alternatives don't, they will tend to stay. For example, English will keep &quot;'s&quot; for the foreseeable future because it is more concise than &quot;of&quot; (and because &quot;of&quot; is more ambiguous, having more meanings than just the possessive); and this would probably be true even if &quot;'s&quot; were strictly applicable onto to words and not phrases. If Esperanto ever became really popular, the accusative case &quot;-n&quot; might disappear for most sentences, yet would probably remain whereever it provides information concisely, e.g. &quot;hejmen&quot; = homeward, to home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm a linguistic 'newb' myself. I suspect there are lots of forces acting on languages that neither of us appreciate very well, forces that probably outweigh the hypothesis of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="519" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T19:32:02.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1548" CreationDate="2012-03-03T19:57:13.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question deals with two ideas: the possibility of recursive embedding of clauses, and the use of case systems. We are asked to entertain a hypothesis that has the following basic parts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was some kind of early state in prehistory at which no language had embedding, and where all languages had elaborate case systems. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The advent of writing encouraged the development of embedding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Embedding developed at the expense of case-marking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All languages in the world are at some point in the continuum between having an elaborate case system and having recursive embedding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be able to begin to entertain this idea, we need to show that case marking and embedding are strategies which can serve the same purpose. I think that this is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case-marking is a strategy for marking dependency relations between heads and dependents, where the marking falls on the dependent. &#xA;Alternate ways of indicating these relations are by marking the head, or by marking neither, but using certain word order patterns to indicate different types of grammatical relations. So if a language lacks case-marking, then it would be reasonable to suppose that it is either a head-marking language, or it has relatively rigid constituent order. We could also suppose that case-marking languages will have more flexible constituent order, and will be less likely to mark grammatical relations. The choice between case-marking and some parallel strategy affects the organization of the language at the clause level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause embedding, however, is a strategy that is reflected primarily at the level above the basic clause. When two clauses are linked, the linking strategy could involve coordination (no embedding), subordination (one clause is embedded in the other), or cosubordination (both clauses are embedded in some higher structure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I can't see now how this theory has any &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; plausibility right now. I don't think it should be explored further until we can get an explanation for why, on linguistic grounds, case-marking as an organizational strategy in grammar should &lt;strong&gt;compete with&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than work in conjunction with, clause embedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T19:57:13.230" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1553" CreationDate="2012-03-03T21:20:11.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is interesting data. Not knowing anything about Georgian, I am guessing from your summary that the uses you quote have to do with the second use &quot;adds direction or other nuance.&quot; There are some languages (Toqabaqita, for example) which have no basic verb meaning &quot;come,&quot; but combine a verb meaning &quot;move&quot; with directional particles to get things translatable as &quot;come&quot; or &quot;go&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-03T21:20:11.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1533" CreationDate="2012-03-04T07:45:06.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;FLN is a retrenchement of a much stronger claim, which is the claim of universal grammar. Since you asked about Universal Grammar, not just FLN, I will try to answer the UG question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim of universal grammar is that any sentence, no matter how complex or embedded, can be translated between any two languages &lt;em&gt;with essentially the same kind of embedding structure&lt;/em&gt;. This would mean that aside from superficial differences in vocabulary and word order, that all languages share a deeply isomorphic stack-parsed tree grammar at their core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To show you that this makes nontrivial predictions, here is a super-embedded English sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cut the tree which held the girl which put the frog which swallowed the fly in its throat in her pocket down quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will translate this to Hebrew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kara'teti et ha-etz she-hichzik et ha-yalda she-sama et ha-tsfardea sh-bala' et ha-zvuv ba-garon shelo ba-kis she-la be-mehirut.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This translation is word for word, with the exact same recursive structure, except the final &quot;down&quot; in English is omitted (since cut-down is a peculiar English structure). The embedding clause structure and the general sentence pattern is exactly the same, even though the two languages are not particularly related. The recursion works exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew is a revived language, but you can do this with Chinese, with French, with any old-world language, basically, and you will produce a sentence with essentially the same nesting structure, with perhaps some word order or clause-order differences, but which can be recognized to be basically the same sentence, because the parse-tree structure is largely isomorphic, with the same levels of nesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the key prediction of UG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Made up constructions that violate UG&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement that all languages recurse in this way is to be contrasted with made-up recursive structures which &lt;em&gt;never ever&lt;/em&gt; occur in natural languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are sentences in a made-up language, with the same vocabulary as English, but where the following sentence is grammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I walked to the store is green.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intended semantics of this construction are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I walked to the store) and (the store is green).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &quot;the store&quot; repeats in both sentences, one could imagine a culture where you could say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I walked to the store is green is my favorite color looks better than Nancy's favorite color is yellow.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intended Meaning &quot;I walked to the store&quot;/&quot;the store is green&quot;/&quot;green is my favorite color&quot;/&quot;my favorite color looks better than Nancy's favorite color&quot;/&quot;Nancy's favorite color is yellow.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In english, you would say it as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I walked to the store &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; is green &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; is my favorite color &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; looks better than Nancy's favorite color &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; is yellow.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those &quot;which&quot;es are necessary, and something like it is necessary in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the world's languages. The reason is that you are not allowed to make overlapping constructions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(I walked to the store) is green&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I walked to (the store is green)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can see that without the &quot;which&quot;, the parentheses overlap. When parentheses overlap, the language is not parsable by a stack automaton, meaning that it isn't the type of context-free grammar that Chomsky identified as central to human language grammatical embedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;which&quot; makes the stuff that follows subordinate to the preceding stuff, so you get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I walked to (the store which is (green which is (my favorite color which is better than (Nancy's favorite color which is yellow)))))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;notice that the units don't overlap, so this is ok. That's a major nontrivial prediction of UG: all language embedding must be non-overlapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exceptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when languages have complex case systems, they sometimes have a freer word order, which allows units which are grouped together to slide apart because no ambiguity is possible, because of the case markings. Such things might lead structures to partially overlap, which contradicts UG. This is not so terrible, because you can usually figure out how to translate any such thing back and forth with the same &quot;deep structure&quot;, essentially the same parse tree description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more serious challenge is from Piraha and Warlpiri, which do not allow complex embedding at all. You couldn't even translate the Boy-frog-tree sentence to Piraha, you would need many separate sentences. These are counterexamples to the claims of UG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why stacks?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So UG is a predictive, powerful, statement. It just happens to be wrong, despite the fact that you have to go to the far corners of the Earth for a true counterexample. That's weird. Why should it be true of &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; all languages, with a few isolated exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One hypothesis you could make is that bilingual speakers and the need for translation were able to homogenize the grammar between neighboring languages over time, leading the world's grammars to standardize on essentially the same tree recursive form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from my experience with mathematical formalisms, and with artificial languages, I have noticed that human beings are just &quot;hard wired&quot; to parse stack languages naturally. This is most notable in computer languages, where PASCAL (which is rigidly structured and very heirarchical) is considered super-elegant, LISP (which is essentially all nested parentheses) is considered the king of elegance, while &quot;C&quot; (which has side effects) is considered ugly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite its ugliness C wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true in mathematics, where index notation for tensors is considered &quot;ugly&quot;, and function notation is preferred, with nested parentheses. This despite the &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; fact that index notation is a language that perfectly fits the domain, and parentheses notation does not. The same problems occur in Fregian semantics, in biochemical modeling langauges, in Aristotelian philosophy (where categories are not allowed to overlap), in object oriented languages (no multiple inheritence), and basically everywhere the humans try to design rules for natural things: they almost always make nonoverlapping structures, even when these are wrong for the intended domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speculate that the human brain is just hard-wired for tree grammars because of some biochemistry. If memory is encoded in specific RNA chains in the brain, as I am sure it is, it is possible that sliding certain RNA chains in one direction makes a &quot;push&quot; operation on a stack, while sliding them in the other direction makes a pop. Then the one-dimensional linear stack structure of language would reflect the biochemistry of the memory storing RNA in the brain, as the ears respond to the input. The existence of a stack in the brain, an actual biochemical stack, would explain this peculiarity. But this is just speculation at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="810" LastEditDate="2012-03-04T15:03:21.233" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T15:03:21.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1559" CreationDate="2012-03-04T14:22:26.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark Davies' &lt;a href=&quot;http://googlebooks.byu.edu/compare-googleBooks.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;version of the Google Books corpus&lt;/a&gt; (has more functionality than the Ngram viewer) has 155 billion words, which is getting close to 1TB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T14:22:26.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2012-03-04T16:05:28.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few examples of substrate influence in the varieties of English in the UK.  For a phonological influence, you can look at how old-fashioned speech in some communities of Wales, where Welsh is still widely spoken. The speech here, especially of older people, can maintain features like rhoticity (not found in most of Wales, but present in Welsh) and also  being devoiced, so that older speakers may have &lt;em&gt;cars&lt;/em&gt; pronounced with [s] rather than the standard [z], probably due to the absence of such a distinction in Welsh.  As for grammatical functions, you could look at Shetland Scots, where Norn, an extinct Norse language has a substrate influence.  For example, Shetland Scots maintains a T-V distinction, with two different forms for the formal and informal form of the second person personal pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T16:05:28.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1554" CreationDate="2012-03-04T16:44:12.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tei-c.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)&lt;/a&gt; guidelines are probably the best choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively&#xA;  develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in&#xA;  digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which&#xA;  specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the&#xA;  humanities, social sciences and linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They define a modular XML schema to encode texts for a large number of use-cases, and I would guess it's the most widely used standard. There is no subset for grammar writing (there is one for dictionaries), but you could see if TEI Lite, or one of the other &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;customizations&lt;/a&gt; meets your needs, and adapt that if needed. Some XML editors also come with built-in TEI schema support, which may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-03-04T16:49:14.530" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T16:49:14.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-03-04T21:52:44.317" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tlingit has a four-way system of deixis in its demonstratives (which are more like determiners because they cannot encode entities when used alone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;yá&lt;/em&gt; — proximal: near speaker, usually within reach&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hé&lt;/em&gt; — mesioproximal: near speaker but usually closer to listener than speaker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;wé&lt;/em&gt; — mesiodistal: near listener and out of reach of speaker, or out of reach of both listener and speaker but still easily reachable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;yú&lt;/em&gt; — distal: distant, well beyond the reach of either listener or speaker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demonstrate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;yá ax̱ jín&lt;/em&gt; ‘this, my hand’ (speaker gestures to own hand)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hé i káaxweiyí&lt;/em&gt; ‘this, your coffee’ (speaker gestures to listener’s coffee cup)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;wé x̱ʼaháat&lt;/em&gt; ‘that door’ (speaker gestures to door on other side of the room)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;yú hít&lt;/em&gt; ‘that building’ (speaker gestures to building visible through window)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common pair, according to my intuitive experience, are &lt;em&gt;yá&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wé&lt;/em&gt; parallelling English ‘this’ and ‘that’. &lt;em&gt;Yú&lt;/em&gt; is used somewhat less often than &lt;em&gt;wé&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Hé&lt;/em&gt; is not used as much as the other three because it is often an irrelevant distinction, but it does occur in a number of conventionalized oppositions such as &lt;em&gt;yá&lt;/em&gt; ‘right’ vs. &lt;em&gt;hé&lt;/em&gt; ‘left’, &lt;em&gt;yá&lt;/em&gt; ‘starboard’ vs. &lt;em&gt;hé&lt;/em&gt; ‘port’, or &lt;em&gt;yá&lt;/em&gt; ‘fore’ vs. &lt;em&gt;hé&lt;/em&gt; ‘back’. All Tlingit speakers I have met demonstrate full competency with the entire system despite any frequency issues, and given its understanding by the semi-speakers and relearners I have talked to, it is probably something acquired fairly early in childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the speaker could say &lt;em&gt;yá i káaxweiyí&lt;/em&gt; only if they touched or were otherwise close to the listener’s coffee cup somehow. If the speaker wanted to differentiate their hands, they could wave their right hand and say &lt;em&gt;yá ax̱ sheeynax̱.aanáx̱ jín&lt;/em&gt; and then wave their left hand and say &lt;em&gt;hé ax̱ sʼátnax̱.aanáx̱ jín&lt;/em&gt; ‘this my left hand’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these demonstratives can be used for discourse purposes as well, to locate notional things like propositions, utterances, and situations in positions relative to the spatiotemporal centre of the discourse. Thus one can distance oneself from another’s words by saying &lt;em&gt;yú hasdu yoo x̱ʼatángi&lt;/em&gt; ‘that (distal) their speech’, or align oneself with another’s words by saying &lt;em&gt;yá hasdu yoo x̱ʼatángi&lt;/em&gt; ‘this (proximal) their speech’. The subtle differences between these, and indeed the discursive uses of the deixis system in general, have yet to be explored in any sort of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this system really has anything to do with visibility or other forms of evidentiality, as has been described in a lot of deictic ‘complex’ systems. It’s instead strictly deixis, encoding the relative distance from the origo. Also note that it has nothing to do with personal exclusivity, since Tlingit has no encoding of inclusive versus exclusive person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastEditorUserId="511" LastEditDate="2012-03-04T22:08:00.930" LastActivityDate="2012-03-04T22:08:00.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1570" CreationDate="2012-03-05T00:59:54.503" Score="3" ViewCount="1289" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is an example of a modern English clause that does not follow the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verb-second (V2) word order&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:22:18.017" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:22:18.017" Title="What are examples of non-V2 pattern in Modern English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2012-03-05T02:47:59.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;V2 certainly is a technical term in linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use it to refer to the word order of languages such as German, which require the matrix verb in a sentence to be the second constituent of the main clause. V2 word order is the reason that in German, subordinate clauses seem to be verb-final, while main clauses seem to be SVO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has stylistic inversion, which resembles this behaviour (e.g. &lt;em&gt;little did he know&lt;/em&gt;), but this may be another phenomenon altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit puzzled by your question, though, because modern English no longer has this in unmarked contexts: compare &lt;em&gt;Yesterday I read the book&lt;/em&gt; with Dutch &lt;em&gt;Gisteren las ik dit boek&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T02:47:59.420" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2012-03-05T05:27:13.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make @jogloran 's answer more generic, one of the &quot;easiest&quot; way to generate an English (declarative) sentence where the verb is not the second constituent is to have an adverb in front of the sentence,&#xA;e.g. &lt;em&gt;Yesterday I read this book&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Suddenly, a bird appears&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2012-03-05T06:24:21.630" LastActivityDate="2012-03-05T06:24:21.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-05T12:18:43.683" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot has been said (and this is one of the &quot;eternal&quot; topics in Linguistics I think) but I wanted to give my contribution. In your question you say that &lt;em&gt;&quot;if we think about it, maybe human communication would be better off if we have fewer languages&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly disagree with that, and I suppose most linguists or anyone involved in languages study would, too. And the reason is simple: that is not the solution. The perfect solution would be for people to become multilingual, and not let languages die. If that was a true solution for avoiding conflicts and wars, how would you explain that even people from the same country harm each other? It would be too simplistic to relegate the wars' cause to a matter of different languages. Languages are the key to understand its people. When you start learning a certain language, you also start understanding that country, its speakers, its culture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About that, it has been said many times but I'll repeat it: languages and culture are intrinsically related. Or better, &lt;em&gt;languages are culture&lt;/em&gt;. Without language, you wouldn't have culture. So when we talk about preserving, or in the worst cases &quot;saving the salvageable&quot;, we are not simply talking about words, letters and grammar rules, but anything that is correlated to that. I'm not sure one would call this a scientific reason, but I suppose it is, beyond being an absolutely good reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily in some cases, saying that a language dies, doesn't necessarily mean that we lose everything about it; Latin and Ancient Greek are a great example: they are dead languages (i.e. no native speakers), but the material about them is plenty. However, other languages are not so lucky. The &quot;luckiest&quot; endangered languages are the famous ones, but let's think about the unknown ones. They are in the worst situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, technically speaking, but when a language becomes extinct, it's a great loss, and not just for the nation involved but for everyone. I don't want to sound too cheesy, but when a language faces extinction, it's not a language that becomes extinct, it's a part of mankind history. Extinct languages are irreplaceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-10T21:05:23.847" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T21:05:23.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-05T23:54:01.787" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Newmeyer and Emonds (1971: 301) mention that a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...result of the reliance on outside funding agencies is the occasional&#xA;  deliberate falsification of the nature of linguistic work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably a bit &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; cynical, but it comes close to the present situation. The endangered languages cause has captured the imagination of the public, and it is the best shot the field has had at making its work recognized as worthwhile since the idea of automatic translation. Even though language preservation falls more within the bounds of applied linguistics, it is something that professional linguists have found themselves involved in, partly because it is a good selling point for government funding agencies, and partly because they would like to find a way of giving back to the communities that they work in (in the case of field linguists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those interested in how language endangerment has been approached by traditional linguists, a &quot;classic&quot; publication is a collection of essays published in 1992 in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; (Hale et al 1992). The previous year the French journal &lt;em&gt;Diogène&lt;/em&gt; (no.153) dedicated an issue to the topic (though with much less exposure). A good and very recent report on language vitality by family can be found in &lt;em&gt;Language 88(1):155--173&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/5017&quot;&gt;similar open access material here&lt;/a&gt;). The contributors to the 1992 article stressed the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguists should be concerned about the rapid loss of their data sources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language extinction is progressing at a very rapid rate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speaker communities must be empowered to save their languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loss of linguistic diversity is as serious a threat to the world's natural resources as is the loss of biological diversity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two points are generally uncontroversial, though linguists tend to take different stances as to the last two. Peter Ladefoged, for example, published &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bjoseph/Ling311/Ladefoged.pdf&quot;&gt;a reply&lt;/a&gt; to the Hale et al paper, where he noted that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Communities should have the right to choose the fate of their languages. In some cases, the best policy for a young country, to produce national unity, is to &lt;em&gt;discourage&lt;/em&gt; multilingualism, since it is thought to reinforce tribalism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cultural diversity does not necessarily require that different languages be spoken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first point, consider this statement attributed to a Cameroonian government official upon learning that the most recent version of the Ethnoloque included more languages for Cameroon than the previous version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vous voyez ce que je vous dis à propos des linguistes Camerounaises&#xA;  là? Leurs langues là se marie maintenant et cette fois ci, elles ont&#xA;  produit 17 nouveaux langues pendant cinq ans.   [You see what I'm saying about these Cameroonian linguists? Their languages are getting married and now they've produced 17 new languages in five years.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, to discuss the endangered language issue with more sophistication, it is nowadays common to distinguish between &lt;strong&gt;Language Documentation&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Language Conservation.&lt;/strong&gt; An &lt;a href=&quot;http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/&quot;&gt;open access journal&lt;/a&gt; has recently been founded for academic studies devoted to both of these topics. Language documentation concerns making transparent records of languages which can be used for research even after the language ceases to be spoken. Language conservation refers to activism by or on behalf of communities speaking endangered languages to either protect the language from endangerment, or to try to revitalize the language before it falls into complete disuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, linguists do not necessarily have an interest in language preservation (though many do), but most have an interest in language documentation. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dying-languages/45847/&quot;&gt;comments by John McWhorter&lt;/a&gt; are not very far from the approach some linguists take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope&#xA;  that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the&#xA;  press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the&#xA;  world's people will speak one language — is one I would welcome.&#xA;  Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing&#xA;  worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the opposite side, there is this often-repeated quote attributed to Ken Hale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The death of a language is a disaster. It’s as if someone had dropped&#xA;  a bomb on the Louvre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hale, Kenneth; Krauss, Michael; Watahomigie, Lucille J.; Yamamoto, Akira Y.; Craig, Colette; Jeanne, LaVerne M. et al. (1992). Endangered languages. Language, 68 (1), 1-42.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newmeyer and Emonds. 1971. &quot;The Linguist in American Society.&quot;&#xA;Papers from the Seventh Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society,&#xA;285-303. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-10T21:03:15.153" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T21:03:15.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1576" CreationDate="2012-03-06T04:23:00.313" Score="12" ViewCount="2365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have studied and known Spanish my whole life, and got a job at a University where I am allowed to take some free classes. Over the past three years, I have taken all the Italian classes offered, all the Arabic classes, and now I am currently enrolled in a Portuguese class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I am beginning to find really odd is how Spanish makes extensive use of diphthongs whereas these other two Romance languages do not. Is there a historical reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples off the top of my head are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ES: No puedo ir mañana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ES: Yo juego al béisbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PT: Não posso ir amanhã.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PT: Eu jogo beisebol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IT: Non posso andare domani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IT: Io gioco a baseball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With الديوان, Spanish uses a diphthong, but the diphthong [ua] is already almost there, just preceded by an [i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ES: aduana&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AR: ad-diwan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in الطوب, there is just a change in the long [u] to a more informal [o]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ES: adobe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AR: aṭ-ṭuub&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall from Arabic, there doesn't appear to be any discernible reason from a Romance Language point of view as to what happens to the vowels, although if you can understand Egyptian Arabic, it looks pretty normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T20:53:45.197" Title="Why does Spanish have so many diphthongs compared to other Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1575" CreationDate="2012-03-06T05:08:07.510" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a sound change operating on stressed vowels, variations of which arose in the daughter languages of Latin. The fact that the sound change only operates on stressed vowels explains occasional alternations (e.g. &lt;em&gt;juego&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;jugamos&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar vowel-breaking phenomena arose in Spanish and French, but not in Portuguese or Catalan. Hence, Latin &lt;em&gt;petra&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Italian &lt;em&gt;pietra&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;pierre&lt;/em&gt;, Portuguese &lt;em&gt;pedra&lt;/em&gt;. Also, vowel-breaking does indeed happen in Italian: consider Latin &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt; &gt; It. &lt;em&gt;fuoco&lt;/em&gt;, or L. &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; &gt; It. &lt;em&gt;uomo&lt;/em&gt;. Although it doesn't appear as often in the verbal paradigm as it does in Spanish, there is the alternation &lt;em&gt;posso&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;può&lt;/em&gt;, and similarly &lt;em&gt;voglio&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;vuole&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the variability exists in the daughter languages of Latin, the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dartmouth.edu/~linguist/faculty/Chitoran_Hualde_Ph07.pdf&quot;&gt;From hiatus to diphthong: the evolution of vowel sequences in Romance&lt;/a&gt; by Ioana Chitoran and José Ignacio Huald, attempts to tie it to the phonetic inventory of each language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your last point, I'm not sure there is a relationship between this sound change and the nature of Arabic borrowings. Certainly Arabic borrowings such as Sp. &lt;em&gt;adobe&lt;/em&gt; have a monophthong in stressed position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-03-07T02:24:45.200" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T02:24:45.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1583" CreationDate="2012-03-06T09:23:20.890" Score="6" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the rationale for considering di-, tri- &amp;amp;co. -phthongs separate entities? Why aren't these sounds interpreted as sequences of a vowel and a glide? How would be linguistics deficient if aliens came to Earth to erase the term from everyone's memory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am interested in both, the historical reasons (Latin or Greek grammarians, I suppose?), and the modern rationale for continuing to use the term.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-06T17:05:17.437" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T00:43:11.973" Title="Rationale for diphthongs" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2012-03-06T09:35:12.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A complement to the answers above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alphabet used for transcribing and the level of transcription are frequently confused. IPA can, just as any other alphabet, be used for both phonetic and phonemic transcription (the difference has already been neatly explained), or anything in between. One might argue IPA is richer, poorer, more or less readable, flexible, regular, whatever, but in principle there is nothing in it, or any other alphabet, that forces you to use it at any particular level of abstraction. Alphabet and level of abstraction are two independent variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T09:35:12.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="627" CreationDate="2012-03-06T09:45:53.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A nice pair to look at is Finnish and Estonian. They are (very) closely related but due to a relatively low number of mostly sound changes, Estonian has quite moved towards inflection, while Finnish remained agglutinative. For starters, you might want to take a look at H. Metslang's paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://ut-ee.academia.edu/HelleMetslang/Papers/713139/A_General_Comparison_of_Estonian_and_Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A General Comparison of Estonian and Finnish&lt;/a&gt;, from which I took the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;part.sg. : part.pl. → Est. &lt;em&gt;lampi&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;lampe&lt;/em&gt;, Finn. &lt;em&gt;lamppu.a&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;lamppu.j.a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;part.pl → Est. &lt;em&gt;pere.sid&lt;/em&gt;, Finn. &lt;em&gt;perhe.i.tä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a paper by I.I. Popescu and G. Altmann 2008, Hapax Legomena and Language Typology, &lt;em&gt;Journal of Quantitative Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 15/4, 370–78. Unfortunately, they don't give Finnish and Estonian data but if anyone here is good enough at statistics to calculate it, I'd be very interested to find out the results, and how to achieve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-06T14:11:01.183" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T14:11:01.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-06T12:54:38.530" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist. I'm merely a person who sometimes talks, listens, writes and reads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages die because some government invades an area, and discriminates against the indigenous people there. They ban the language outright, or don't teach it at school, instead imposing their own language on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually such governments discriminate against these people in other ways. For example, they may not give them the vote, they may ban some of their customs, they may discriminate in terms of employment, farming, marriage, etc. This kind of discrimination is seen as bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people, some of whom may be linguists, are affected by what Wikipedia calls the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;association fallacy&lt;/a&gt; (and TV tropes calls &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlerAteSugar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hitler Ate Sugar&lt;/a&gt;). If discrimination in X, Y, and Z, and also language death, are all the result of a government's policy against a certain race, then since the discrimination in X, Y, and Z are bad, then the association fallacy will lead some people to think language death must also be bad, merely because they were all the result of the same over-arching policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this logical? No. But linguists are not totally logical, any more than the rest of us are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T12:54:38.530" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-06T15:55:16.670" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jlovegren is right to distinguish between documentation and conservation.  In fact, increasingly we're seeing a &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt;-way distinction being made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;language description&lt;/strong&gt;, the goal is to develop generalizations about the grammar of a particular language.  This leads to results like &quot;This language has an iambic stress pattern,&quot; &quot;The basic word order in this language is SVO,&quot; or &quot;This language has twenty demonstrative pronouns, distinguished by the shape, position and location of the referent.&quot;  On this approach, data is valuable mainly as &lt;em&gt;evidence&lt;/em&gt; for a particular generalization: e.g. &quot;See, you can tell that there's a shape distinction among the demonstrative pronouns, because &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; one is only used to refer to round things [examples] and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; one is only used to refer to flat things [more examples].&quot;  Often, negative data is especially important: e.g. &quot;If I try to use this pronoun to refer to round things, speakers tell me that I'm using it wrong.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;language documentation&lt;/strong&gt;, the goal is to record &lt;em&gt;examples of the language in use&lt;/em&gt;, ranging from everyday conversation to oral literature, formal or ritual language, special terminology such as plant names, and so on.  On this approach, data is seen as valuable in its own right, whether or not it serves as evidence for some sort of descriptive claim.  The result of language documentation is often a collection of texts or recordings: e.g. &quot;Here's ten hours of video of traditional epic poetry being performed.  We've also transcribed the poems in the original language, translated them into English, and added a few notes about the grammar.&quot;  But documentary work can lead to descriptive claims as well: e.g. &quot;The distal demonstratives are rarely used in conversation in this language, but we've noticed that they're very common in traditional poetry.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;language conservation&lt;/strong&gt;, the goal is to help keep the language from dying out.  This often means starting up development projects or getting involved in local politics: building a school, training teachers, founding a radio station, lobbying for a bill that protects indigenous rights.  It doesn't necessarily involve any sort of data collection.  When you do collect data, it's generally in order to write textbooks or teaching grammars, or to build up teaching materials to use in school: e.g. &quot;This poem has some great examples of the distal demonstratives in use.  Let's read it for the sixth-grade class when we teach that unit.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three sorts of work aren't totally separate.  For instance, if you want to write a textbook for language learners (#3), then you need to know some things about the grammar of the language first (#1), and it would be good to have some literature to cover in class as well (#2).  But the distinction is still relevant to the question, because &lt;strong&gt;each of the three is valuable for a different reason.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like Louis Rhys is asking about #3: language conservation.  For what it's worth, this sort of work can actually be quite controversial &amp;mdash; not necessarily among linguists, but among the speakers of endangered languages themselves.  Some communities are very interested in teaching their heritage language to their children or grandchildren and bringing it back into daily use.  Some communities are &lt;em&gt;actively uninterested&lt;/em&gt; in their heritage language &amp;mdash; they feel that it marks them as &quot;old-fashioned&quot; or uneducated, or that it prevents them from getting education or jobs, and they would much prefer that their children or grandchildren just switch to the local majority language.  And in some communities, there's intense debate between the two points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a community &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; to make sure that their children keep learning their heritage language, then a skilled linguist can help,&lt;/strong&gt; by preparing educational materials and helping organize classes and so on.  The community still has to do the bulk of the work; our job is to serve as a resource.  The linguists who do this sort of work tend to see it as community service: it's valuable because it helps a community achieve their goals, and helping people is a good thing.  Of course, if a community is dead-set against using their heritage language, and a linguist tries to badger them into using it anyway, that &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; particularly helpful or valuable.  (And anyway, it isn't likely to succeed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For language description, the value is largely scientific: we have theories about these languages that we want to test, and the data won't be available in 20 years, so we have to test them now.  For language documentation, there are several sources of value.  It can be valuable for science, by preserving data that would otherwise be lost.  But it can also mitigate the sort of cultural damage that kaleissin and Alenanno are talking about: even if a child doesn't grow up speaking his parents' or grandparents' first language, he can still read the stories they told &amp;mdash; either in translation or, with effort, in the original language &amp;mdash; and that gives him a connection to his heritage that he might not have otherwise.  And finally, it can be valuable in the same way that restoring old artwork is valuable.  There are some truly wonderful pieces of literature that are being passed down orally in small language communities, and if the members of those communities want to share them with a larger audience, then it would be a shame if they were just lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T15:55:16.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2012-03-06T16:41:28.923" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is useful to define a linguistic unit when there is evidence that some linguistic process is sensitive to that unit. For example, phonologists and phoneticians have long recognized that the concept of a syllable is a useful one due to evidence from scansion in poetry, syllable-final devoicing, processes related to stress and tone, phrase- and utterance-final syllable lengthening processes, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there are many processes that are easiest to describe when we are able to make reference to a diphthong as a unit. In &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Y0TET4eHHKEC&amp;amp;lpg=PA37&amp;amp;ots=nJKZ5KmLBI&amp;amp;dq=evidence%20for%20diphthongs&amp;amp;pg=PA38#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=evidence%20for%20diphthongs&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;English Phonology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, John Tillotson Jensen raises three sources of evidence for the diphthong as a unit in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Backwards speech games - People who are asked to say the word &quot;choice&quot; backwards generally say [sojʧ] (and not [sjoʧ]), indicating that they are treating the vocalic portion of the word as a single unit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syllabification - Glides can behave as syllable onsets, but words like Toyota are syllabified as toy.o.ta, suggesting that /oj/ is treated as a single unit (c.f. the Japanese syllabification to.yo.ta).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel shifts - Historically, many diphthongs are the result of vowel shifts that affected single vowels (e.g. the /aj/ diphthong in &lt;em&gt;divine&lt;/em&gt;—c.f. &lt;em&gt;divinity&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it is common to observe dialectal differences that revolve around diphthongs. For example, in many dialects of English spoken in the south of the U.S., the /aj/ diphthong is &quot;monophthongized&quot; and produced as [aː] (where [ː] is the symbol for &quot;long&quot;). It makes sense to think of this phenomenon as monophthongization as opposed to &quot;glide dropping&quot; because those same speakers still produce the /j/ glide as [j] elsewhere, including after /a/ (i.e. a speaker that says [aː.ɛs] for &lt;em&gt;I.S.&lt;/em&gt; will still say [aː.jɛs] for &lt;em&gt;ah yes&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-03-06T18:29:01.753" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T18:29:01.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2012-03-06T17:47:55.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll concentrate on the historical part of your question as others are doing well on the modern work. As you've suspected from the etymology, the term &lt;strong&gt;δίφθογγος&lt;/strong&gt; is Ancient Greek (diphthongos, borrowed into LL as &lt;strong&gt;diphthongus&lt;/strong&gt;) and was already in broad use by the 2nd century CE - e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Q_E9AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA104&amp;amp;ots=30_s_iWbfN&amp;amp;dq=Unde%20diphthongos%20eas&amp;amp;pg=PA104#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Unde%20diphthongos%20eas&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terentianus writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Porro vocalem secuta vim tenet vocalium&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Et sonos utrosque jungit, unde diphthongos eas&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Græciæ dicunt magistri, quod duæ junctæ simul&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Syllabam sonant in unam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover the following vowel has the force of a vowel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And joins both sounds; whence the &lt;em&gt;diphthong&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Greek masters say: the two joined together&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sound as one syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and just as old are arguments about it. Is the diphthong two, or is it one? Is it a single sound regarded as a unit, or two sounds yoked together? Pennington's 1844 &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=gH2j6kg2h4kC&amp;amp;pg=PA42&amp;amp;lpg=PA42wB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Essay on the Pronunciation of the Greek Language&lt;/a&gt; reveals this term has provoked long disagreement since classical times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, because there has been a single term for the diphthong, we can say that it has been regarded as a single entity (of some type) since classical times, though its nature has been disputed. The ancients did know that a diphthong was sounded in a single syllable; they typically regarded as the syllable as the smallest unit of sound. So I think that our own usage today of diphthong as being in some sense a 'single sound' is a relic (correct or incorrect, as others discuss) of that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-06T17:47:55.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1577" CreationDate="2012-03-07T00:43:11.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Outside of the dominant 'Phoneme Theory' in Phonology there are other explanations out there (gaining ground I believe) such as 'Element Theory' and in this theory, these would not be considered individual units at all. Just so you know not 'all' models of Phonological Theory subscribe to this notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T00:43:11.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2012-03-07T00:47:04.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I recommend the book 'Language Death', by David Crystal?&#xA;It is a fantastic recount of all the reasons we should care, and be slightly saddened when another language is lost from the world. I don't always view it as a bad thing. We all should accept that times move on, and nobody misses Akkadian nowadays or wishes that Avestan was still being spoken on the streets so we could go around asking for 'satem' of everything (:D), but times do have to move on and if we move onto a world in 50 years with only 1,000 (500?) languages, that's the way it will have to be and we all have to adjust to that. However, it's still not the case that we're losing something special every time those last speakers perish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T00:47:04.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2012-03-07T00:58:47.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;V2 (which yes is a linguistic term but is fantastically common in the literature on Germanic syntax) does still have minor minor traces in English, but your question phrases the idea that we would need to search hard to find a non-V2 structure in PDE (Present Day English), when precisely the opposite is true. Many people would even say it has completely disappeared, but I have exposure to quite a lot of language from around the world because I work for a transcription company and these things stick out to me. I actually noticed one today, I'll grab it now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, of course, on top of a tiny Norman tower was put this enormous spire.&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;Said by a man in the south of England, approx 50ish, giving a tour to a visitor&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here [on top of a tiny Norman tower] is functioning as topicalised constituent which is where you see typical Germanic V2 occurring. It's also quite common in certain negatives when sentence-initial (and arguably the last occurrence where it is recognised by most speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never in a million years [would] [I] think of doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not until she apologies [will] [I] talk to him again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, when talking about V2 in English and other Germanic languages, questions aren't really where you look and especially in a generativist reading these are not even the same thing. Yes-No questions involve auxiliaries which undergo T-C movement and it's not the case of any functional force needed that stipulates that the verb has to be in the second constituent position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, non-V2 patterns are the absolute standard in PDE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T16:24:32.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1575" CreationDate="2012-03-07T02:17:12.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, Portuguese has just about the same number of phonemic diphthongs as Spanish, but in Portuguese they are all &lt;strong&gt;falling&lt;/strong&gt; diphthongs (these are EP): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[aj] [ɐj] [ɔj] [oj] [uj] [ɐ̃j] [õj] [ũj]&lt;/code&gt;  (falling)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[aw] [ow] [ew] [ɛw] [iw] [ɐ̃w]&lt;/code&gt; (falling)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in Spanish we find both kinds:                    `   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[aj] [ej] [oj]&lt;/code&gt; (falling)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[aw] [ew] [ow]&lt;/code&gt;  (falling)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[ja] [je] [jo] [ju]&lt;/code&gt; (rising)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[wa] [we] [wi] [wo]&lt;/code&gt; (rising)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps diphthongs are more 'noticeable' in Spanish because of the active sound change that jogloran describes in his answer (vowel breaking). In Spanish there are verb conjugations like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sEntir&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sIEnto&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sIntiendo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;pOder&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;pUEdo&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;-&gt; &lt;strong&gt;pUdiendo&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the diphthongs only appear in certain forms. Portuguese does not do this, so it may seem that Portuguese uses diphthongs less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jogloran points out how this arose historically in Spanish and French and to a lesser degree in Italian, but not in Portuguese and Romanian. The Portuguese diphthongs arose from an entirely different mechanism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the words borrowed from Arabic came into Spanish&lt;/a&gt; after the vowel breaking from Vulgar Latin had already happened, and was no longer active. So any diphthongs in Arabic borrowings came from sounds already present in the Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T02:17:12.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1597" CreationDate="2012-03-07T07:24:46.293" Score="6" ViewCount="3828" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following extremely melodramatic story fragment (the sentences in the story, and its melodramatic character, set up context and motivation for the brain to parse an otherwise hard-to-parse sentence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Linda was my mother's partner, who my mother, God bless her, admired so much. Linda, along with her husband, a ruggedly handsome adventurer, would jaunt around the world, writing travel pieces. In Ecuador, as he and Linda lay in a sun-bleached hammock sweating with malaria, he sent me a letter by mail. Inside was a photo and a short note explaining their situation, and a second envelope, with the strictest instruction not to open, except upon news of their death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were supposed to return today, but he was alone at the Airport. Oh Linda! Through his tears, he assured me that he would read that secret letter aloud to me tonight, at my bedside. You must have already guessed that I am in love with him. He is the man that Linda, the woman my mother admired, married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But you took the letter, took it upstairs. You didn't let the man that Linda, the woman my mother, God bless her, admired married read it out loud to me. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You know you always stutter when you lie. I am not accusing you of anything, but if while you tell me what you took the letter that I wanted the man that Linda, the woman, my mother, God bless her, admired, married to read to me upstairs for in your own words, you start stuttering, I will never forgive you!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only point of this ridiculous tale is to set up the final sentence. The final sentence has 7 separate layers of center embeddings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am not accusing you of anything, but only if SENTENCE I will never forgive you&quot; is the outer context of the relevant recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;while SENTENCE you start stuttering&quot;  is embedded.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;you tell me SENTENCE in your own words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The middle sentence is &quot;what you took the letter ... upstairs for.&quot; This is a variation on a well known embedded construction observed in a 7 or 8 year old child: &quot;What did you take the book that I wanted to be read to out of up for?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;that I wanted the man ... to read to me&quot;  is another level&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Linda ... married&quot; is another level&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the woman my mother ... admired&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;God bless her (that's the deepest)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about the psychological tests determining the depth of center embedding. The limit of 3 seems to be for homogenous constructions, where the repeated embedding is of the same kind in all the deepening examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a simple sentence that violates the 3 center-embedding limit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you tell me what you took the letter that I wanted you to read from upstairs for in your own words I will forgive you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the sentence from the melodrama is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not accusing you of anything, but if while you tell me what you took the letter that I wanted the man that the woman my mother, God bless her, admired married to read from upstairs for in your own words you start to stutter, I will never forgive you!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is center embedded at least 7 times, so in terms of embedding depth, it is analogous to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The car that the bus that the man that the woman that the child that the bunny that the carrot that the top was snipped off of, was fed to, hopped at, talked to, smiled at, drove, hit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think the preceding sentence is anywhere near as difficult to parse. &#xA;Are the center-embedding limits trustworthy?  Am I fooling myself by reading an incomprehensible sentence too many times? Or is it only a certain type of center embedding that is limited to 3 levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-07T12:41:26.420" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T11:12:35.103" Title="Limits on center-embedding in English" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1593" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-03-07T17:17:15.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-03-07T17:17:15.633" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T17:17:15.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1594" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-03-07T17:17:15.633" Score="0" Body="A word-order effect especially in most Germanic languages where the second constituent of declarative clauses must be that verb which would carry the tense inflection." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-07T17:29:40.743" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T17:29:40.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1590" CreationDate="2012-03-07T18:42:19.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There probably is some sort of practice effect here.  But I suspect it goes beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's telling that you had to set that godawful multiply-embedded sentence up in a story.  And what's more, you had to build it up throughout the story &amp;mdash; starting with the deepest two clauses, &quot;who my mother, God bless her, admired,&quot; and adding on more layers from there.  Even still, I find it only vaguely comprehensible.  You say you find it fully comprehensible, and you speculate that it's because you've read the full sentence too many times.  I think there may be another reason &amp;mdash; I think you've read &lt;em&gt;the inner clauses&lt;/em&gt; too many times &lt;em&gt;in unembedded form&lt;/em&gt;, and you've gotten yourself to a point where you can feel like you understand those inner clauses without actually having to parse them or pay attention to their structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a hypothesis: the constraint against quadruple center embedding only applies to constituents that the hearer (or reader) actually tries to parse.  If the hearer &lt;em&gt;treats&lt;/em&gt; a constituent as an unanalyzable unit, then that unit can then be embedded two or three times without confusion, even if it &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; has inner structure that the hearer is ignoring in treating it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I tell you the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) [Sentences [that &lt;i&gt;bop-squee-fim-blork-pings&lt;/i&gt; utter] are easier to understand.] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing you find the English part of that sentence to be perfectly parseable &amp;mdash; though, of course, you'd have to know what &lt;em&gt;bop-squee-fim-blork-pings&lt;/em&gt; meant in order to fully interpret it.  Now suppose I were to tell you that &lt;em&gt;bop-squee-fim-blork-pings&lt;/em&gt; was a doubly center-embedded structure in some foreign language; maybe it means &quot;women that people you've met dislike.&quot;  Would you take that as evidence that you had just managed to parse a quadruply center embedded sentence?  Probably not &amp;mdash; since, after all, you didn't actually have to parse &lt;em&gt;bop-squee-fim-blork-pings&lt;/em&gt; when you read (1).  Indeed, you couldn't have parsed it if you'd tried, so your brain didn't expend any effort at all on trying.  That particular rabbit hole wasn't even available for you to fall down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose that you've heard the phrase &lt;em&gt;women that people you've met dislike&lt;/em&gt; often enough that you've just started treating it as a single unit instead of actually parsing it on hearing it.  Maybe you've even created a lexical entry for &lt;em&gt;womenthatpeopleyouvemetdislike&lt;/em&gt; as if it were a single compound noun of some sort.  In that case, my suspicion is that (2) would be just as parseable as (1) for you.  But crucially, at that point, you wouldn't be parsing the quadruply-embedded structure in (2b), you'd be parsing the much simpler structure in (2a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Sentences that womenthatpeopleyouvemetdislike utter are easier to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2a) [Sentences [that womenthatpeopleyouvemetdislike utter] are easier to understand.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2b) [Sentences [that women [that people [you've met] dislike] utter] are easier to understand.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is what you're doing, incrementally, when you work yourself up to reading the final sentence in your story.  You convince yourself to treat &lt;em&gt;mymothergodblessher&lt;/em&gt; as a single unit; then you convince yourself to treat &lt;em&gt;thewomanmymothergodblessheradmires&lt;/em&gt; as a single unit; and so on up.  If you hadn't been rehearsing those smaller units and learning to read them without really parsing them, I'm betting you'd be entirely baffled by that seven-layer sentence when you encountered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-03-07T18:42:19.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1544" CreationDate="2012-03-08T03:11:17.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gabriel in &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/1114-1110/1114-GABRIEL-0-0.PDF&quot;&gt;On Focus, Prosody, and Word Order in Argentinian Spanish&lt;/a&gt; [PDF] did follow-on work to Zubizarreta which does look at the cross-dialectal question. The most relevant quote from his paper is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Buenos Aires dialect] data differ from the cross-dialectal data &#xA;  analyzed in Gabriel (2007) insofar as there is at least some evidence&#xA;  of &lt;strong&gt;VO[&lt;sub&gt;F&lt;/sub&gt;S]&lt;/strong&gt;. In the [Patagonian dialect] data, by contrast,&#xA;  not a single occurrence of &lt;strong&gt;VO[&lt;sub&gt;F&lt;/sub&gt;S]&lt;/strong&gt; was attested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I.e., in Porteño Spanish, &quot;&lt;em&gt;MARÍA compró el diario&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;compró el diario MARÍA&lt;/em&gt;&quot; were both found, while in Patagonian Spanish, &quot;&lt;em&gt;compró el diario MARÍA&lt;/em&gt;&quot; was never found.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is limited to two Argentinian dialects, but it shows &lt;strong&gt;there is dialectal variation of focusing strategies&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly it is also a bit different than what you say are Zubizaretta's original results. In your example above you say that &lt;strong&gt;[&lt;sub&gt;F&lt;/sub&gt;S]VO&lt;/strong&gt; was infelicitous to Zubizaretta; but your South American friend found the opposite, in accord with Gabriel's results. So that may be yet another dialectal variation; I don't have access to Zubizaretta's book to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: Gabriel says that contrastive focus is treated differently than informational focus, and that phonetic stress is as important as movement for focusing constituents. Your examples above exhibit informational focus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T03:11:17.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1590" CreationDate="2012-03-08T13:05:33.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Karlsson&lt;/a&gt;'s 2007 paper [PDF] &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/ceb5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I believe may be the most relevant reference here. His key thesis from that paper is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The maximal degree of center-embedding in written language is three.&#xA;  In  spoken language, multiple center-embedding is practically absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But his entire analysis is interesting and I recommend reading the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Most of Karlsson's work centers around constraint theory; e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/Initial_Embedding.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constraints on multiple &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt; embedding of clauses.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia even has a couple reasonable &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sentences on this topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...center embedding refers to the process of embedding a phrase in the middle of another phrase of the same type. This often leads to difficulty with parsing which would be difficult to explain on grammatical grounds alone. [...] An interesting theoretical point is that sentences with multiple center embedding are grammatical, but unacceptable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-25T11:12:35.103" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T11:12:35.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-08T13:32:44.360" Score="11" ViewCount="1631" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern Chinese linguistic recursion system is essentially the same as English. If you have a highly embedded sentence, you can translate it word for word, the embedding is very much the same. In my youth, I believed this was just another datum in favor of Universal Grammar theory, but this is not true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everett recently demonstrated that pre-literate languages can lack embedding, it has long been known that Warlpiri does not have recursive structures like multiple embedding at all, and Fred Karlsson in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/ceb5.pdf&quot;&gt;Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses&lt;/a&gt;&quot; argues persuasively that the modern European center-recursion system was standardized by Cicero in Roman times, and the rules for recursion spread through the influence of Cicero's writing. So that &lt;em&gt;no languages at all were recursive to begin with&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems doubtful to me that this could have reached China until at least the late middle ages, so Chinese recursion is a particularly stringent test of the evolution of recursion in isolation from Cicero, in a culutre literate in ancient times. It is possible that Chinese recursion evolved independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the approximate date of the earliest Chinese 2 or more level center-embedded production? (2-level center embedding is a stringent test of Cicero-speak)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it before or after the date of the first translations of western recursive prose to Chinese?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the general pattern of clause embedding in ancient chinese? Does it show multiple embedding of clauses? When?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it seems highly unlikely to me, if you have evidence that Chinese recursed first, and Cicero read Chinese, that would be interesting. Bonus points for Sanskrit, although I would guess no mutli-level embedding in ancient Sanskrit (based on ancient Hebrew) and considering the different expertise required, it should probably be a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-20T07:58:21.390" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T07:58:21.390" Title="How did Chinese recursion evolve?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1602" CreationDate="2012-03-08T16:14:19.777" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a little weird, but...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How can we describe words or phrases that have a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; accompanying movement?  What sort of topics do they cover?  To what degree has research been done on this? Are there examples in English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of situations in which the meaning of the utterance would be fundamentally changed without the motion.  Obviously, this would apply only to spoken (not signed) languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="518" LastEditorUserId="518" LastEditDate="2012-03-08T22:34:03.517" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T22:34:03.517" Title="Movement and Speech" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1599" CreationDate="2012-03-08T17:42:58.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard of any specific movement that would obligatorily accompany a specific word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, especially if you count facial expression as movement, certain rhetoric strategies are, I believe, accompanied at least very often by movement. Sarcasm, mockery and such typically involve a specific intonation and facial expression. In that sense I can see how a certain phrase could begin to usually cooccur with a specific expression through being used primarily in an ironic sense. I suppose that this also accounts to a certain degree for the popularity of emoticons: without them it's often diffucult to decide if what one's reading is a joke or serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; might often come together with head movement but it's surely not a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a theoretical ground, I can say this would be a relatively unlikely thing to happen, as being obviously redundant. The only scenario that comes to my mind that could lead to an obligatory cooccurrence, is with 'holy' or taboo words, where e.g. a certain movement could perhaps possibly be required in some culture when mentioning the name of a god, demon or something of the kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T17:42:58.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1599" CreationDate="2012-03-08T18:03:45.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Forgive me, father&quot; usually means something different and quite specific when genuflecting and/or crossing oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T18:03:45.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1599" CreationDate="2012-03-08T20:08:11.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages have whole systems of them. I've been told by a field worker in Guatemala that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ixl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ixil&lt;/a&gt; has a whole gestural paradigm of numeral classifiers -- hand gestures that indicate whether you're counting animals, people, things of different kinds, undifferentiated &quot;stuff&quot;, etc -- gestures that accompany the numeric counters, in speech, as they're used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some languages don't even have numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does have at least one word, pronounced /ye/, usually spelled &quot;yea&quot; or &quot;yay&quot; when it has to be spelled, that functions only as a gestural quantifier, as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The stick is about /ye/ long.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the speaker's hand motions and coordinated listeners' eye motions are expected to accompany stressed /e/. This is a gestural version of deixis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this is part of Chuck Fillmore's example of a deictically unanchored sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meet me here tomorrow at the same time, with a stick about yea long.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a grammatical sentence, but if you found it on a note in a bottle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean it would be a little hard to understand properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Parenthetically, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/FillmoreDeixisLectures.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deixis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the general category for words, grammar, idioms, and other linguistic phenomena that depend on the particular spatial (&lt;em&gt;here, this&lt;/em&gt;), temporal (&lt;em&gt;now, soon&lt;/em&gt;), social or personal (&lt;em&gt;yours, mine&lt;/em&gt;) parameters of one particular speech act.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T20:08:11.810" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-08T20:28:21.927" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a citation for /k/ becoming palatal before a front vowel?  Or anything that says labials are less likely than velars to become coarticulated with neighbouring vowels? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="825" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-03T10:41:30.550" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T22:27:21.263" Title="Velar vs labial coarticulation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1603" CreationDate="2012-03-08T22:10:50.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In native &lt;strong&gt;Turkic&lt;/strong&gt; phonology, [k] and [ḱ] are allophones; [k] only occurs in a back environment, while [ḱ] only in a front environment. The same goes for [g] : [ǵ] and [l] : [ĺ], and no other consonant. Examples from Turkish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[kara] 'black' : [ḱere] 'time(s)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ak] 'white' : [eḱ] 'addition'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In loanwords, however, this distribution is disturbed, e.g. [ḱ] can occur in a back environment in Turkish ([kar] 'snow' : [ḱar] 'profit'), but [k] still can't occur in a front environment. In Bashkir, where the opposition has shifted from [k] : [ḱ] to [q] : [k], the latter can be found in a back environment, too, but I'm not sure whether [q] can be found in a front one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All examples off the top of my head, but can be found in probably any Turkic grammar. (Only I'd suggest, if you settle for Turkish, that you use e.g. Ersen-Rasch (in German) or Stachowski (in Polish) because all English grammars I know of are not terribly good in my opinion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a counter example, in &lt;strong&gt;Polish&lt;/strong&gt;, *[k] and *[g] have been conserved in all surroundings except before [i] (&amp;lt; *[y]) and [e], where, in the Middle Ages, they &amp;gt; [ḱ] and [ǵ], respectively. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*[kara] 'penalty' &amp;gt; [kara], *[gnetõ] 'I squeeze' &amp;gt; [gńotẽ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*[kyjь] 'stick' &amp;gt; [ḱij], *[nogy] 'legs' &amp;gt; [noǵi]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*[kъlъ] 'fang' &amp;gt; [ḱew], *[gъzъ] 'gadfly' &amp;gt; [ǵes]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in Polish exactly the same thing happened with *[p] and *[b].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All examples from Mańczak W. 1983, &lt;em&gt;Polska fonetyka i morfologia historyczna&lt;/em&gt;, Warszawa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-08T22:31:49.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1544" CreationDate="2012-03-09T04:28:39.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;María compró el diario would be the normal answer to the question. I have spoken Spanish all my life, and can't think of anyone ever answering a question like (1) with (3). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="826" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T22:53:42.563" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T22:53:42.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1609" CreationDate="2012-03-09T15:48:02.680" Score="6" ViewCount="795" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst it's by no means a &quot;fixed rule&quot;, it seems to me the normal sequence for multiple adjectives applied to a single noun/verb in English does indeed tend to correspond to the top answer given in the ELU question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order&quot;&gt;What is the rule for adjective order?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60520/the-time-before-place-mantra/60522#comment115663_60522&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; (subsequently closed as a duplicate of the above) seem to suggest no such principle applies to Dutch. I'm not sufficiently multilingual to have direct personal knowledge of the situation with any language apart from English, but intuitively it seems unlikely only English has this characteristic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite possibly all languages have words roughly corresponding to adjective/adverb - but even if some don't, presumably &lt;em&gt;many/most&lt;/em&gt; do. So my questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do most languages tend to have a preferred adjective sequence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, do any particular subsections of those sequences tend to occur in many different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-03-09T16:36:48.750" Title="Are there any &quot;universal&quot; aspects to &quot;adjective sequence&quot;" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2012-03-09T16:27:31.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=fr6fwb8En6AC&amp;amp;lpg=PA179&amp;amp;ots=_kVF3egwVA&amp;amp;dq=time%20place%20manner%20typology&amp;amp;pg=PA177#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=time%20place%20manner%20typology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;adverbial or adpositional phrase order&lt;/a&gt;, and it is indeed a typological syntax feature, often correlated with other word order types. It describes an ordering choice of adjectives/adverbs/adpositional phrases categorized as referring to time (when, e.g. 'now'), place (where, e.g. 'here'), and manner (how, e.g. 'quickly'). Two predominant orderings are time-manner-place and place-manner-time. Other orderings are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93manner%E2%80%93place&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;time–manner–place&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is often correlated with SOV (e.g. german, japanese)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich fahre (heute) (mit dem Auto) (nach München).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place%E2%80%93manner%E2%80%93time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;place–manner–time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is often correlated with SVO (e.g. English, French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm travelling (to Munich) (by car) (today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the above refer to the unmarked neutral order without any focusing, topicalization, or contrast. This typology does not seem to extend to other phrase types like purpose/reason. Unfortunately it does not seem to be cataloged in WALS but it is found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&amp;amp;t=29746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unilang&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-03-09T16:27:31.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1607" CreationDate="2012-03-09T16:36:48.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.purdue.edu/hhs/slhs/research/documents/Kemmerer/%282008%29adjective_order.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kemmerer et al (2008)&lt;/a&gt; (the paper is downloadable so hopefully you should be able to follow up with the references cited therein).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the precise nature of the semantic constraints on adjective&#xA;  order? Linguists disagree about exactly how they should be&#xA;  characterized, but several intriguing proposals have been made (for a&#xA;  partial review, see Frawley, 1992, pp. 480--496). At the very outset,&#xA;  it is important to note that most of the ordering patterns found in&#xA;  English have also been observed in a variety of other languages that&#xA;  have prenominal adjective order---e.g., German, Hungarian, Polish,&#xA;  Turkish, Amharic, Hindi, Telugu, Chinese, and Japanese---and the mirror&#xA;  images of these patterns appear in a variety of languages with&#xA;  postnominal adjective sequences---e.g., Chichewa, Basque, Persian,&#xA;  Indonesian, and Qiang (Dixon, 1982; Hetzron, 1978; LaPolla &amp;amp; Huang,&#xA;  2004; Martin, 1969b). Because many of these languages are&#xA;  geographically, historically, and typologically quite distant from&#xA;  each other, no mutual inﬂuences need be suspected, thus raising the&#xA;  possibility that the most commonly attested ordering patterns, such as&#xA;  the ``value &gt; size &gt; color’’ hierarchy, reﬂect universal cognitive&#xA;  predispositions for mapping descriptive semantic properties onto&#xA;  linear syntactic positions.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-09T16:36:48.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-09T18:56:46.590" Score="3" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is an extension of this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1598/how-did-chinese-recursion-evolve&quot;&gt;How did Chinese recursion evolve?&lt;/a&gt; . In the comments, Mark Beadles helpfully pointed out that center-embedding is absent from Sanskrit in the early Vedic period, but you see some embedding in the later Vedic period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting thing about this is that the later Vedic period is past Homer's time by an amount too short for reasonable spreading of the technique. Further, Alexander the Great would not have brought Greek recursion to India until a few centuries later. So this might be a separate independent invention of recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the date of the earliest center embedding in Vedic Sanskrit?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any evidence of Greek/Indian contact which pre-dated this production?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be another nice data point in the fascinating history of the spread of recursive speaking and writing throughout the ancient world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T11:49:26.077" Title="How did Sanskrit embedding evolve?" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-09T23:39:32.777" Score="1" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phones, you now can use speech to do VAD (Voice Activated Dialing). As in, &quot;Call Bob&quot;. This works fine in isolating languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that in Polish (pl-PL), it is more natural to say &quot;Call Dawida&quot; when the name is &lt;em&gt;Dawid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages that decline given names, how strange is it to say &quot;Call Dawid&quot; when talking to a phone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="829" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T21:51:08.313" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T21:51:08.313" Title="In Polish, how do people say &quot;Call &lt;name&gt;&quot; when giving their phone a command?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-08-27T11:37:59.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1611" CreationDate="2012-03-10T01:29:57.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the phone system works in Poland, and besides that's a question for a telephony user group or something, not a linguistics question. So I will address the linguistic point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages other than English have a case system for marking the grammatical roles of words like nouns. In most instances this also applies to proper nouns like personal names. Case-marking in Polish takes the form of suffixes that are appended to the base form of the word. For the masculine name Dawid, the forms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nominative   &lt;strong&gt;Dawid&lt;/strong&gt;   = David as a subject&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Accusative   &lt;strong&gt;Dawida&lt;/strong&gt;  = David as a direct object, to David&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dative       &lt;strong&gt;Dawidowi&lt;/strong&gt; = David as an indirect object, to/for David&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Genitive     &lt;strong&gt;Dawida&lt;/strong&gt;  = David's, of David&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Instrumental &lt;strong&gt;Dawidem&lt;/strong&gt; = with/by David&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Locative     &lt;strong&gt;Dawidzie&lt;/strong&gt;  = at/on/to David&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Vocative     &lt;strong&gt;Dawidzie&lt;/strong&gt;  = O David!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, there exist prepositions, as English &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; etc. The verb &lt;em&gt;(za)dzwonić&lt;/em&gt; 'call' takes the preposition &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; 'to' which requires the genitive, so the whole phrase is &lt;em&gt;(za)dzwoń do Dawida&lt;/em&gt; 'call to David-Gen.'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-10T14:45:13.780" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T14:45:13.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1611" CreationDate="2012-03-10T08:30:57.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commenters above are right in pointing out that the question is not entirely linguistic, but since it's already been asked and the linguistic part answered, I'll complete it with the non-linguistic bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very uncommon for people in Poland to use VAD. It's not really faster than choosing the person from the list and is usually considered showing off, sort of like using a mobile in the early nineties. But whenever anyone does use it, the phones usually let them record their own call, so they end saying &lt;em&gt;(za)dzwoń do Dawida&lt;/em&gt;, or just simply &lt;em&gt;Dawid&lt;/em&gt;. (The &lt;em&gt;za-&lt;/em&gt; bit is aspect; with it, it's perfective, without it, it's imperfective. In this particular situation both can be used.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit, however, that I did see a good couple of years ago someone say &lt;em&gt;zadzwoń Dawid&lt;/em&gt;. I presume his phone required the &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;David&lt;/em&gt; bits to be recorded separately, and he preferred to say &lt;em&gt;zadzwoń Dawid&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;zadzwoń Dawida&lt;/em&gt; because somehow it seems less ungrammatical, and he simply didn't think of recording &lt;em&gt;do Dawida&lt;/em&gt; for 'David'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-10T10:47:23.587" LastActivityDate="2012-03-10T10:47:23.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1615" CreationDate="2012-03-11T01:48:47.480" Score="7" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a language I am studying I have just noticed a significant but subtle difference in the length of [f] segments in tonic versus atonic syllables (an ~50ms difference which is statistically significant). When mentioning the effect to a colleague, I was asked whether such an effect, where consonants differ in their lengths (closure or constriction time) depending on their position in the word, is cross-linguistically common. I said that surely it must be, but I realized that I could only think of two examples, in English [s] (&lt;a href=&quot;http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/51&quot;&gt;Klatt 1974&lt;/a&gt;) and Ibibio nasals (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~akinlabi/foot-structure-in-Ibibio-verb.pdf&quot;&gt;Akinlabi &amp;amp; Urua 2002: 135, fn.11&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I have help with other examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-11T03:56:29.457" LastActivityDate="2012-03-11T03:56:29.457" Title="Consonant length-differences by prominence" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1614" CreationDate="2012-03-11T03:26:51.440" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maria Giavazzi's 2010 dissertation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/magia/www/Site/Research.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The phonetics of metrical prominence and its consequences for segmental phonology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, discusses stress-dependent consonant length alternations as part of a broader investigation into the relation between prominence and segmental phonology. See pp. 43-46 for an overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author mentions Carolina Gonzalez's 2003 USC dissertation, &lt;em&gt;The effect of stress and foot structure on consonantal processes&lt;/em&gt;, which also should have some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastActivityDate="2012-03-11T03:26:51.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1618" CreationDate="2012-03-11T22:50:03.223" Score="8" ViewCount="2362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently stumbled on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sk.com.br/sk-voga.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers&lt;/a&gt;. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese phonologies, the author states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In less compact languages, with a small number of 1-syllable words and a higher average of syllables per word, the number of phonemes does not need to be large and the difference between each vowel can be bigger.  This is the case of Spanish (5 vowel phonemes) and Portuguese (7 vowel phonemes).  English, however, is a language extremely economic in the use of syllables, very compact, with a large number of 1-syllable words.  Naturally, this requires a larger number of vowel phonemes to supply the bigger &quot;demand&quot; of a system with a reduced number of possible combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I confess I had never thought about that possible causal relation. In retrospect, though, it seems quite a reasonable (and almost self-evident) hypothesis. But, of course, it ultimately has to be validated by hard data. So, my question is: has that claim been confirmed? Namely, that &quot;more compact languages&quot; have more vowel phonemes than less compact ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-12T16:57:29.670" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T21:21:54.033" Title="Does the syllable/word ratio in a language determine the number of vowel phonemes it has?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1617" CreationDate="2012-03-12T01:12:02.740" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Daniel Nettle's 1995 paper &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling.1995.33.2.359&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Segmental inventory size, word length, and communicative efficiency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the author takes a sample of 10 languages and demonstrates a correlation between mean word length and the number of segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BG5P1.png&quot; alt=&quot;From Nettle (1995:365)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two follow-ups seem to verify this result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nettle (1996), &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296179808590132&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coevolution of phonology and the lexicon in twelve languages of West Africa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wichmann et al (2011), &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~wichmann/RamaSubmitted.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological diversity, word length, and population sizes across languages: The ASJP evidence.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, none of these are indicative of a causal relation. As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-826.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Linguist List discussion on Nettle 1995&lt;/a&gt;, Maori has a very limited segment inventory and their words are quite short. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible reason is that the metric of word length (either by segment or syllables) varies with morphosyntactic variability. A language may form predicates by using light verbs/phrases consisting of short words (dance -&gt; do a fun move), in which case neither phonemic diversity nor &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; length are crucial components. It's also a methodological question what is measured by mean word length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syllable count can be a worse measure than word length because languages differ in how complex a syllable can be. A language with only open syllables (&quot;sa&quot;) will need more segmental variety to convey the same amount of information with monosyllables than a language which allows complex onsets and codas (&quot;sploink&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="397" LastEditDate="2012-03-13T21:21:54.033" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T21:21:54.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-12T14:19:47.460" Score="4" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to transform complex sentences into one set of simple sentences. I can't find any solution, so I want to study formation of complex sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the most comprehensive and most appropriate papers/books I could study from? Please explain why you're suggesting a certain paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="811" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T03:43:17.190" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T03:43:17.190" Title="Are there papers/books about complex sentence formation in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1619" CreationDate="2012-03-12T15:43:11.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like you'll have to learn enough English syntax to do what you need. What you'll certainly need is lists of transformations (&quot;rules, processes, constructions, alternations,&quot; etc), how they are constrained, and what their boundary conditions are. Then you'll have to figure out (or build software to figure out) which ones have operated in the complex sentences (hint: suspect infinitives) and then unwind them. Some information will be useful and some won't.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a few to start, in increasing order of length and breadth of coverage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Haj-list-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt;, revised 2010 by Haj Ross, of &lt;code&gt;the ¡TOP ONE HUNDRED PLUS TRANSFORMATIONS OF 1999! for your inspection of and additions to.&lt;/code&gt; This is very short; just a list to keep track of which example has which name. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A book, by Beth Levin (1993 &lt;em&gt;English Verb Classes and Alternations&lt;/em&gt;), on governed cyclic rules, with both a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/levin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verb index&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/levin.verbs2.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verb class index&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another book, by Jim McCawley (1998 &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English,&lt;/em&gt; 2d ed) is a college-level textbook that's very clear and uses a consistent system throughout to explain the terms and issues. It's not simple; this is about the level of DiffEQ. But it's better than the other alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-03-12T15:43:11.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1624" CreationDate="2012-03-12T21:10:35.310" Score="8" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noted that there exists a whole literature on Sign Language. I didn't even know there existed more than one... It's very interesting now. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nad.org/issues/technology/vri&quot;&gt;computers can already interpret some sign language&lt;/a&gt;. Do these languages have the property to have ambiguity in them? That is, exists there a chain of signs (or a sentence) that can be interpreted in one or more possible ways by the computer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="822" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:04:25.017" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:04:25.017" Title="Do Sign Languages have ambiguities?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1623" CreationDate="2012-03-13T02:16:05.597" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the basic architecture of the minimalist program, with its numeration and various interfaces, meant to model how language is comprehended or how it is generated? Or is it supposed to be abstract enough to cover both? Since the numeration is unordered, I tend to think it's supposed to be generation, since comprehension involves pre-formed strings, but my fellow student disagrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-13T12:02:59.410" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T11:56:11.930" Title="Does MP model generation or comprehension?" Tags="&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2012-03-13T02:59:52.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly the most orthodox source, but I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://philpapers.org/rec/JOHACO-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Johnson &amp;amp; Lappin's (1997)&lt;/a&gt; synopsis concise and easy to follow for non-practitioners. As they explain,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...on the MP, a sentence is grammatical iff it is assigned a&#xA;  well-formed (convergent)  PF  and LF  via  some  derivation D, but  a &#xA;  derivation  D  is well-formed  iff  it  satisfies  all  the &#xA;  constraints  and  is most highly valued  by the economy metric  with&#xA;  respect to  a  set  of competing convergent derivations (its &#xA;  &quot;reference  set&quot;). (275--6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So derivations, subject to grammaticality constraints and global conditions, create pairs of  representations. MP then models how sets of lexical items are converted to  representations. If it were a model of comprehension, it would model how PF representations are converted to LF representations. If it were a model of production, it would be the other way around. Since it is neither, the answer must be &quot;abstract enough to cover both.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T02:59:52.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1621" CreationDate="2012-03-13T05:33:50.547" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Signs from ASL that have two unrelated meanings and thus are lexically ambiguous: 1) “nation / of course”,  2) “booth / person”  3) “everything / involve” .  You can see pictures of them on page 130 of &#xA;Emmorey, Karen. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexical ambiguity is rife in signing but hard to explain in English (a lot of it is bilingual puns). A good source is &#xA;Sutton-Spence, Rachael (2005) Analysing Sign Language Poetry. NY:Palgrave-MacMillan. Chapter 6 is entirely devoted to the subject of ambiguity in signed languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A somewhat accessible example is the genre of ABC stories, where the hand shapes are letters of the alphabet and at the same time signs that tell a story.  You can see one in this video, with the English letters corresponding to the hand shapes shown on the screen, and you should be able to guess what the story is about.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj1MQhXfVJg&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj1MQhXfVJg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="834" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T05:33:50.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-13T05:35:01.640" Score="4" ViewCount="776" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am shocked that Linguists have not given a reasonably small canonical computationally precise representation of any natural language yet, so I wrote a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32447/is-there-an-ebnf-that-covers-all-of-english/60761#60761&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U post to explain how one does this for English&lt;/a&gt;. I know that this grammar (or a small modification if I forgot something) covers all New York Times English, and all artificial highly embedded sentences, leaving out only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Idioms and weird constructions: &quot;How do you do?&quot;, &quot;hello, dear.&quot;, &quot;Okeh, oops!&quot;, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tense-matching: this is a local finite property, and it doesn't touch the embedding structure. It is a distracting complication. I ignored it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subject-verb matching: again not difficult, but distracting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronoun-reference: &quot;With a broom, John walked on the floor, beating it.&quot;, what does &quot;it&quot; refer to? This is a very interesting linguistic question which I ignore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot;: The and rules are cut-and-paste for different kinds of objects, debugging (ADVERB &quot;and&quot; ADVERB), (ADJECTIVE and ADJECTIVE), (PREPISH and PREPISH), etc, is tedious, so I skipped this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verb ellipsis: I am not sure when this appears in the NYT, I have not seen an example yet. Verb ellipses can be implemented on the parser level, but at the rule level it's very annoying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central possibly new idea that I used is the notion of a commutative context-free grammar. A commutative context-free grammar allows a string of nonterminals to move to different positions in the sentence before expanding. I will illustrate with a sentence with two movable ADVERB phrases, a subject and a verb. At some stage in the generation, it looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ADVERB+ ADVERB+ ADVERB+ (SUBJECT) (VERB OBJECT) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next stages, I can move ADVERB+ to the right, so long as I don't go inside regions enclosed by parentheses. So I might get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ADVERB+ (the ADJ[] man ) ADVERB+ (takes the box) ADVERB+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ADVERB is a production that includes anything that attaches to the verb, including &quot;if&quot; clauses, initial &quot;yes&quot;/&quot;no&quot;, and prepositional phrases that modify the action, as opposed to modifying the noun. At a later stage of production, the ADVERBs resolve to verb arguments, adverb words, or gerund phrases. So in a few steps, you get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a broom (the tall man) to the big monster (takes the box) with a limp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you drop parentheses and introduce commas as conventional, to get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a broom, the tall man, to the big monster takes the box, with a limp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this structure is to capture the commutativity of ADVERB position in a phrase. These really can appear anywhere, and often do in poetic work, although there are style conventions in English which tends to place them at canonical positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea produces a very compact BNF for the phrase structure of English, and explains why other methods don't. The commutativity produces a large number of different nodes if you ignore it. I will point out that the parse description that this generates for the sentence is the same in all permutation of the ADVERBs. It's still a parse tree abstractly, but the tree is not contiguously represented in the sentence. Some arguments far away are bound to distant objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is always a position for the ADVERBs (after the verb) where if you force the writer to place them all there, the grammar becomes context free. If you restrict the ADVERBs to the very beginning too, you can also make it context free while still producing the ADVERBs from the verb, using the following trick:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;define a single nonterminal symbol: ADVERBLIST_SUBJECT_VERB_ADVERBLIST, and have context free rules that spit out ADVERBs on both sides, then when you are done spitting out ADVERBs, break it into SUBJECT ADVERBLIST_VERB_ADVERBLIST, then spit out ADVERBs on both sides, then resolve ADVERBLIST_VERB_ADVERBLIST into a VERB. This allows you to artificially remove commutativity, at the cost of introducing more parse levels into the grammar. If you do it wrong, you can easily introduce new parsing ambiguity that isn't there in the original sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from being counterintuitive, a context-free reduction doesn't match the arguments to the verb the correct way, which is independent of their position, this trick also doesn't work in general. If you have two separate commutative lists, a list of ADJECTIVES and ADVERBs, these can commute past each other, so that if you force the grammar to be context free, you requiring an ever-growing number of nonterminals to represent the different permutations. You can probably parse all the New York Times with only a few permutations, since good style places the ADJECTIVE close to the noun it modifies, but this commutativity leads a combinatorial explosion in the representation of English that suggests that the reason is that the commutative grammar is not context free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Formal Description&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While one can define commutative grammars in extreme generality, I will restrict myself to the ones useful in English. The primitive commutation rule is a production of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A+ B: B A+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And likewise for all + marked variables with all unplussed variables. This allows the plus variables to move rightward, and I place them at the leftmost position they can occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This production is not context free, it takes two objects to two other objects in the other order. But it isn't going hog-wild either--- the number and type of nonterminal symbols is preserved during this transformation--- it doesn't wreck the tree structure completely, it only permutes the order of the nonterminals, and the moment you expand &quot;B&quot; into something in parentheses, say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B: (P Q)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then A no longer is allowed to commute with P and Q. So the commutativity is at each nesting level individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I define a language to be commutative context-free if all comutative objects can be generated, commuted, and resolved into unplussed-variables before any other rules are applied. Further, I will only allow them to move in one direction, by convention to the right, since this is no loss of generality in the cases I am considering. Finally, I will require that any further expansion of nonterminals will always be enclosed in parentheses which provide a firm boundary to any commuting variables introduced at a deeper nesting level, so that objects at a lower level will never commute out of their level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the commutative CFG in the mathematical linguistics literature? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does anyone see a proof that the commutative CFG is strictly stronger than CFG (I am pretty sure this is true)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T06:31:55.480" Title="Is the commutative CFG in the mathematical linguistics literature?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1136" CreationDate="2012-03-13T08:26:49.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every one of those changes has been observed in signed languages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Valli, Clayton and Ceil Lucas. 1995. Linguistics of American Sign Language: an &#xA;introduction. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;metathesis is on P. 43&#xA;&quot;In ASL, several signs which have a pre-specified initial and final location can have the order of these two locations reversed in contexts which seem to be purely phonological. For example the sign DEAF, prototypically made with the '1' handshape making contact first with the cheek and then moving to contact the jaw (as in the sentence FATHER DEAF) can have these locations reversed if the preceding sign, when part of the same constituent, has a final location more proximal to the jaw (as in the sentence MOTHER DEAF). Both forms of the sign DEAF are acceptable to native signers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picture at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/metathesis.htm&quot;&gt;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/metathesis.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="834" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T08:26:49.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1625" CreationDate="2012-03-13T08:38:38.523" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern research into grammar formalisms &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; developed analyses for many of the constructions you deem to be impossible or difficult to account for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of your list, 'tense matching' and 'subject-verb matching', 'pronoun-reference' (usually called anaphora resolution), 'general &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot;' (coordination) have definitely been addressed in many formalisms including generative grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), and many others. (I am not sure what you mean by verb ellipsis, but if you mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He baked and she ate a delicious chocolate cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this, too, is well-studied and well-addressed by computationally efficient methods in the literature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the extension to CFGs which you propose,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A+ B -&gt; B A+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can (I think) be expressed in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_grammar&quot;&gt;linear indexed grammar (LIG)&lt;/a&gt;, so you're right that the generative power required is strictly greater than context-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not even sure this is a valid generalisation — not all modifiers can occur on either side of the verb phrase (at least not without changing the denotation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I honestly believe he is a crook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?I believe he is a crook honestly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frankly I don't give a damn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I don't give a damn frankly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-03-13T11:50:39.487" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T11:50:39.487" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-13T18:06:07.727" Score="14" ViewCount="923" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language? Is there some kind of standard test? This is assuming that there is little documentation of the language and no authority. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, without documentation, corpus, or authority, how can one determine whether S + [be] + V+ing is valid in English? Just make an example to a speaker and ask if he thinks it's grammatical? But there are dialects and individual dialects (idiolects), how can the linguist be sure that the grammaticallity is not just the test subject's dialect? How can the linguist know that the example sentence he gives can be generalized and is not an exceptional case (for example, some verbs cannot have S + be + Ving such as words of emotion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T07:01:09.933" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T18:37:55.053" Title="How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language?" Tags="&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2012-03-13T20:18:48.140" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer: they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't black and white. Some phrases certainly are grammatical (attested many times in different places and different contexts), some (almost) certainly aren't (never attested in a huge and diversified corpus), and all the rest is somewhere in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English continuous tense is in the former category. But if English died out today and future archaeologists only discovered, say, the Bible, they wouldn't be sure that the structure was also stylistically acceptable in a secular context. If they only discovered a transcript of an IRC chat, they could think it was limited to slang. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for Old Turkic we have almost nothing more than official stelae. Plenty of constructions and words are missing, and we can't be sure that they did really exist at that time. We can reconstruct them based on what we find in later texts, but this isn't as certain as if they had been actually written down. Sadly, no widely accepted method of quantifying this probability exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is similar with languages which are at the verge of extinction right now. If there are only, say, three speakers left, we can't go too far in making claims about the entire language. Usually in such cases, however, we simply consider the lect of these three people to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; the language. Everyone knows this isn't exactly true, and everyone knows we simply can't do any better. It's just easier to give it a short name than to note every time when we refer to it, that it's only based on the evidence of three speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking a native speaker directly usually isn't a good idea. It's better to just make them talk as much as possible and record everything, and only ask to explain the unclear parts. Various cultural rules might interfere, such as e.g. the informer might consider it impolite to point out to strangers (= guests) that they made a mistake, and he or she will confirm the grammaticality of an ungrammatical construction merely not to offend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up, everything comes down to quantity and proportions. But regrettably, everything is evaluated by intuition. There is no official scale that would determine a certain phrase is 60% grammatical or anything of the sort. However, when you think about it, I suppose you might find it difficult to judge precisely how grammatical/acceptable/natural e.g. &lt;em&gt;long time no see&lt;/em&gt; is in modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-13T20:46:05.267" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T20:46:05.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2012-03-13T22:50:02.230" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll tell you how I handle these kinds of issues when I am doing fieldwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make sure that you will not have problems with dialectal differences, go to the town where the language is spoken and do some preliminary surveying, asking people whether everyone around generally speaks in the same way, and if more than one language or dialect is spoken in the area, get the names of all the different speech varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you meet a linguistic informant for the first time, find out where they were born, where they have lived, and the native languages of both of their parents. If differences between informants arise, try to see which of these factors may be responsible. If somebody tells you that a sentence is acceptable, ask them to repeat it out loud to make sure it sounds right when they say it. On another day, ask a different person about it to make sure that they accept it too. If you find that people with similar life stories reliably disagree about the status of a particular construction, or the same person keeps changing their mind just accept that there is variability, and don't let any important generalizations you want to make be supported only by a contested variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have no corpora or other documentation, start making them. Ask people if you can record them conversing in their language, or if they can tell you a story in the language, then sit down with someone and write it down and translate it word for word as best as you can with their help. You should be collecting, as well, a list of a few hundred different different words of the major word classes, and an as complete as possible list of the words in minor word classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you notice a new construction, and do not know if it is lexically idiosyncratic, try replacing some of the words with other words from your wordlist and see if the informants accept those sentences as well. A lexically idiosyncratic construction will quickly be discovered this way. You may also determine that certain constructions are only acceptable for verbs of a certain transitivity or aspectual class. Try to put the sentence in the negative, make it a question, change the tense, etc., to see how productive the construction is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you notice a new construction, but aren't sure what it means, try to change out the words you know with other words, see if the informant finds it acceptable, and then ask them to describe in detail in what kind of situation it would be most appropriate to say this thing.&#xA;Repeat this a few times until you get an idea about what the construction is used for. This will help you gain intuitions about the acceptability of variations on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are not really any special tricks, just work hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-13T22:50:02.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2413" CreationDate="2012-03-14T02:22:42.807" Score="10" ViewCount="939" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the comparative method is the most accepted and widely used method in historical linguistics. Often used in conjunction with the internal reconstruction method, it has proved to be very successful ever since the 19th century. There are, of course, alternatives, such as the mass comparison method, defended by Merritt Ruehlen and others. But such methods are, to say the least, very controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there any reasonable alternative in historical linguistics? By reasonable alternative, I mean a competing method capable of achieving the same results by different means. Or perhaps, capable of going further into the past to reconstruct larger language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T12:45:48.220" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T22:45:06.827" Title="Are there alternatives to the comparative method in historical linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1633" CreationDate="2012-03-14T07:29:12.193" Score="4" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a published standard corpus of English sentences which are confounding for mechanical parsers. I am looking over sentences given here, and I have the following (very short) list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Jameson was generous; the hawk, greedy&quot; (verb ellipsis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Kindly speak to Sally&quot; vs. &quot;Speak kindly to Sally.&quot; (binding &quot;kindly&quot; to &quot;do&quot; vs. &quot;speak&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The man gave the cat, the dog, the cow, and the moose, the milk, the bone, the feed, and the hay, respectively&quot; (respectively/in-turn non-context-freeness)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I am skipping to the school, which means that I am happy&quot; (the &quot;which&quot; unusually binds the whole action, not the school)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;John gave the man the book and the woman the pamphlet&quot; (&quot;and&quot; which takes two argument pairs on both sides)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a canonical list of such examples, so I don't have to trawl around for these? I will be happy to accept either a reference, or a reasonable list of nice examples not repeating the issues. I already go through the New York Times or other newspapers, but they generally have complex sentences which only rarely illustrate these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T12:28:06.043" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T14:14:54.080" Title="Is there a standard corpus against which to benchmark mechanical parsers?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1632" CreationDate="2012-03-14T12:52:48.493" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many kinds of corpora. I'll mention just a few. You can find others from references within papers mentioned there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most commonly used method is to reserve one of the sections of the Penn Treebank for testing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/fsbank/default.html&quot;&gt;The PARC DepBank&lt;/a&gt; for dependencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D11/D11-1037.pdf&quot;&gt;Parser Evaluation over Local and Non-Local Deep Dependencies in a Large Corpus&lt;/a&gt;. They evaluate parsers for 10 specific linguistic phenomena. Easier to read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/ddec/slides.pdf&quot;&gt;slides&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/ddec/&quot;&gt;corpus&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;delph-in.net&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must add a note about the first two: since they are based on sentences from the Wall Street Journal, the creators of these corpora can't just give them away. So, if your university does not have it already, tough luck. Computational linguists these days are trying to correct that mistake, and so, most new work is based on Free text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T14:14:54.080" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T14:14:54.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-14T16:40:27.907" Score="5" ViewCount="1900" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, if an English name ends in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;, it's likely female.  But English has no grammatical gender, and there is no general requirement that nouns in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; refer to women.  It seems like in English this is a pattern that applies &lt;em&gt;exclusively to names.&lt;/em&gt;  Does this sort of pattern occur in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="839" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2012-03-15T21:33:44.617" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T12:56:47.160" Title="Gender-based name endings: Are they common?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2012-03-14T17:06:17.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask, &quot;How can the linguist be sure that grammaticality is not just the test subject's dialect?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're making an unwarranted assumption in that question.  You &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be sure that you're not just learning about the test subject's dialect.  In fact, it's just the opposite: no matter what you do, you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; just learning about the test subject's dialect &amp;mdash; or about &lt;em&gt;one of&lt;/em&gt; their dialects, if they're fluent in several.  And the way to do good fieldwork is just to accept that fact and work with it.  You start with the speech of a single town (or family, or person), you note down variation when you run across it, and you gradually widen your sights from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to remember here that &lt;em&gt;everyone speaks a dialect.&lt;/em&gt;  For instance, there is no such thing as &quot;pure,&quot; non-dialectal English.  And this means that, strictly speaking, &quot;grammaticality&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; always just &quot;grammaticality in a particular dialect.&quot;  When a linguist says a construction is &quot;grammatical in English,&quot; what they really mean is, &quot;It's grammatical in the American and British dialects that are culturally dominant right now in the anglophone world.&quot;  And in fact, to be really pedantically correct, they'd have to say  &quot;It's grammatical in the personal idiolects of most or all of the people we've surveyed who belong to the American and British dialect groups that are culturally dominant right now in the anglophone world.&quot;  Which is a bit of a mouthful &amp;mdash; you can see why someone might just say &quot;It's grammatical in English&quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as jlovegren points out, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; ways of getting a decent idea of how widespread a construction is.  You talk to different people, from different regions.  You take advantage of your consultants' metalinguistic awareness: someone in Philadelphia will tell you &quot;Oh, yeah, they talk funny in Pittsburgh,&quot; and then you know to be on the lookout for especially big dialect differences between the two cities.  Sometimes you can pick a particular construction and ask &quot;Do people in other towns say this too?&quot; and someone will say &quot;No, actually, whenever I say this outside my home town, I get funny looks,&quot; and that's an even stronger indication that you're looking at a construction that's limited to certain dialects.  Even better, some people are bi- or tri-dialectal, and can tell you things like &quot;Where I was born they say &lt;em&gt;this,&lt;/em&gt; but where I grew up we say &lt;em&gt;this,&lt;/em&gt; and on TV what they say is &lt;em&gt;this.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, though, you can never be absolutely certain you haven't missed some bit of variation.  If I can elicit a construction from a thousand different people, covering all the major dialect regions I'm aware of, there's still a miniscule sliver of a chance that the thousand-and-first person will say &quot;No, I would never say that, that's totally wrong.&quot;  The only consolation here is that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; natural science has the same problem.  All the terrestrial life forms we've found so far are carbon-based, but it's still logically possible that someday we'll turn over a rock and find a bunch of silicon-based ones.  The strongest conclusion we can ever draw about anything outside of mathematics is &quot;That hasn't happened yet, and we'd be incredibly surprised if it ever did.&quot;  I'd be incredibly surprised to find a monolingual English speaker from a major American city who didn't say &quot;S + [be] + VERBing,&quot; but you know, it's still technically possible that someday I will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T17:06:17.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1639" CreationDate="2012-03-14T18:14:06.360" Score="2" ViewCount="2178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been listening to radio broadcasts lately where a person will be speaking German or Pashtun or Russian or whatever and a translator will be supplying an English rendition, in a format which makes it possible to hear both the original and the translation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that in almost every case, where the interpreter says something like, &quot;The problem is,&quot; or, &quot;the difficulty is,&quot; the speaker in the (to me) foreign language will also say the word, &quot;problem,&quot; identical to English and in the correct place, but merely accented in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it got me to wondering: Is &quot;problem&quot; a modern word or a very old indo-european word? What is its etymology and history? Does it represent a concept which was foreign to non-European cultures before the modern era, or is the speaker making word choices to accommodate an interpreter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="840" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-15T11:05:16.980" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T18:50:28.090" Title="Is the word, &quot;problem,&quot; new to non-English languages?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2012-03-14T18:29:35.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add a very important point here. On the verge of saying a truism (for generativists), I'd like to remind you that grammaticality is not acceptability. Your informants can decide whether this or that sentence is acceptable. However, it is the job of a linguist to collect data, analyse it, and write a grammar of that language. Only a linguist can determine the grammaticality of a sentence. There are other, non-grammatical factors, that may have an impact on acceptability, such as age, gender, social group etc. and, last but not least, psycholinguistic factors (i.e. a sentence is difficult to parse, your informant is tired etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things worse, we learned a very important lesson from generative syntax: acceptability is gradient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good grammar is the one that tries to explain as much data as possible. However, a grammar that completely captures your data is impossible. The perfect match between grammatical and acceptable sentences is theoretically unattainable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T18:37:55.053" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T18:37:55.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1646" CreationDate="2012-03-14T18:35:50.483" Score="3" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading a paper by Anand &amp;amp; Hacquard, I've come across the term &quot;witness world,&quot; where a witness world can verify a proposition, p. I haven't been able to google an easily understandable definition of a &quot;witness world,&quot; (although this is probably due to poor detective work on my part). This leads to my question: What is a witness world (i.e., how is it defined), and how does it do this business of verifying propositions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing that comes to my mind are witness sets, which, as I understand them, are the characteristic sets of generalised quantifiers, except that unlike characteristic sets for a GQ like [Q NP], which may have non-NP entities as members, witness sets only contain NP-entities. Szabolcsi (2010)'s example is &quot;more than one robot,&quot; where a characteristic set includes non-robots (i.e., any set that has more than one robot), but a witness set is constrained so that it only contains robots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figured I could construct a sort of parallel, where a world would be a set of  pairs, so a &quot;witness world&quot; would be a set of these pairs (for a modal, or attitude predicate), but these pairs are somehow restricted by the prejacent or embedded clause's  assignment. But I wasn't sure how to proceed here (or whether I even should, in case there is no parallel, or I was going about the parallel in the wrong way). Which is my second related question - is the notion of &quot;witness world&quot; related to the notion of a &quot;witness set,&quot; and if so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-14T18:41:58.973" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T15:47:06.347" Title="What is a &quot;witness world&quot;? Is this notion related to &quot;witness sets&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1636" CreationDate="2012-03-14T18:44:28.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you assume the word &quot;problem&quot; comes from English, you have an incorrect starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Problem&quot; (note: in English) comes from late Middle English &amp;lt;- Old French &lt;strong&gt;probleme&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt;- via Latin from Greek &lt;strong&gt;πρόβλημα&lt;/strong&gt; (problēma); the word comes from &lt;strong&gt;proballein&lt;/strong&gt; ‘put forth,’ which is &lt;strong&gt;pro&lt;/strong&gt; ‘before’ + &lt;strong&gt;ballein&lt;/strong&gt; ‘to throw.’&lt;sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that shows that the spread didn't come from English at all. Rather, it started from Greek, took by Latin and from there to the Romances languages (and from there English). I'm not sure where Russian took it from, but considering the Russian alphabet is based on the Greek one, I don't think it would be absurd to assume that it might have come from there, although this last sentence is speculation and as such it should be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the words are not merely &quot;accented&quot;, they actually exist in those languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French, &lt;em&gt;problème&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian, &lt;em&gt;problema&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian, &lt;em&gt;проблема&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish, &lt;em&gt;problema&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't think this word represents a &quot;new concept&quot;. If you say that it's meaning or that the way it's interpreted has changed over time, then yes, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would be reasonable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Taken from the New Oxford American Dictionary&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="840" LastEditDate="2012-03-16T01:05:13.900" LastActivityDate="2012-03-16T01:05:13.900" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2012-03-14T23:05:54.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tendency ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is the common ancestor of many of the languages in which the pattern seems to hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE had three genders, like Latin, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, and like in Latin, one set of stems was stereotypically masculine or feminine (&lt;code&gt;ō&lt;/code&gt;-stems and &lt;code&gt;ā&lt;/code&gt;-stems respectively, corresponding to the Latin second and first declension respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The early daughter languages (and many modern descendants) declined personal names just as they declined common nouns. If there were noun paradigms which were stereotypically masculine or feminine, I would expect that personal names would be chosen to coincide with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a point of conjecture, a bunch of personal names derive from attributes. If PIE speakers took attributes (adjectives) as names, then those personal names would take the same paradigm as adjectives, including agreement for gender and usual declination for case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-03-14T23:05:54.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1823" CreationDate="2012-03-15T03:45:24.843" Score="3" ViewCount="3720" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between these three kinds of case? How do we know that they are real? I kind of understand that inherent and lexical case are idiomatic and lead to variation in case marking, but I do not understand how they are different from each other. I read about them in &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/ellenw/Woolford%20Lexical%20and%20Inherent%20Case.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; paper but did not fully understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2012-03-15T18:23:05.420" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T14:44:57.440" Title="What are the differences between inherent, lexical and structural case?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1653" CreationDate="2012-03-15T08:41:30.773" Score="17" ViewCount="2269" Body="&lt;p&gt;While learning (a little) Cantonese, I was annoyed by the fact that every initial [n] was converted to [l], so that the word &quot;you&quot;, written&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;néih hóu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in guidebooks is universally pronounced&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;léih&lt;/em&gt; hóu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People would, if pressed, say that the pronunciation is &quot;néih hóu&quot;, and that they were using &quot;lazy pronunciation&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology&quot;&gt;Cantonese phonology&lt;/a&gt;). The sound-shift was common to words with initial [n]. It did not appear in the superficial list of cross-linguistically regularly observed sound changes that I saw on Wikipedia, which were b&gt;p&gt;f, d&gt;t&gt;th and g&gt;c&gt;ch. These sound changes are just voicing/unvoicing toggles and turning into a fricative, both of which are simple transformations. Initial n to l is just strange (and, possibly coincidentally, it relates the semitic and Indo-European words for &quot;no&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if [n] -&gt; [l] is a sound change which is common cross-linguistically, whether it is directional (is it observed going the other way), if it is confined to the initial position, and more generally which transformations are known with what direction and probability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T15:05:53.290" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T07:04:53.687" Title="What about the sound change initial n -&gt; initial l?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1642" CreationDate="2012-03-15T10:01:44.327" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sound change can only be &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; with respect to a particular language. There are sound changes in languages which seem completely off the wall to me, but are &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; in the sense that they are consistent with the diachronic evidence (i.e. the forms in a daughter language can be derived regularly from rules applied to a mother language). As such there is no list of &amp;quot;regular sound changes&amp;quot;, where a sound change is somehow impossible if it is not in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the body of your question, [n] and [l] are said to be in &lt;em&gt;free variation&lt;/em&gt; in Cantonese, which means that they are used interchangeably by native speakers, who consider both pronunciations acceptable. There are also some socio-linguistic factors involved — the [l] pronunciation is associated with female speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Incidentally, I personally say nei5 for 你 'you', but loeng4 instead of the &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; noeng4 for the word 娘 'young girl'. This particular pair of pronunciations is very much in flux at the moment, and Cantonese may eventually shift largely to one pronunciation over time. Cantonese used to distinguish retroflex [ʂ] from apical [s] (e.g. 傷 shoeng1 'wound' vs 相 soeng1 'mutual'), but that distinction too has gradually been erased over the last 50-100 years.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a quirky sound change, and I really do enjoy these, is from Taishanese, a Chinese topolect which, like Cantonese, is also spoken in Guangdong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;t -&amp;gt; ∅ / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b -&amp;gt; ∅ / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T10:13:11.893" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1638" CreationDate="2012-03-15T15:47:06.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too would like a link to the paper: a Google search for &lt;code&gt;anand hacquard &quot;witness world&quot;&lt;/code&gt; turns up this thread and nothing else.  But I can take a stab at a general answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notions of possibility and necessity in modal logic are commonly treated as involving quantification over possible worlds.  So &quot;It's possible that &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is taken to mean that there exists a world where &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is true, and &quot;Necessarily &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is taken to mean that in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; worlds, &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is true.  We can get different sorts of possibility and necessity by restricting the set of worlds we quantify over.  So for instance, for deontic modals, we quantify over worlds that are in accordance with the rules.  (&quot;John is permitted to do &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&quot; means roughly the same thing as &quot;there exists a world in which no rules are being broken, in which John does &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)  For epistemic modals, we quantify over worlds that are consistent with our current knowledge.  (&quot;For all I know, maybe &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&quot; means, roughly, &quot;there exists a world that's consistent with what I know, in which &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is true.&quot;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantics of modal expressions in &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; language can be modeled this way too, though there are some additional complications.  Kratzer's 1991 paper &quot;Modality&quot; is the classic reference here, but unfortunately I can't find a copy online.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, a &quot;witness world for &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is just a world in which &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is true.  So for instance, we can say that for &quot;possibly &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to be true, there must be at least one witness world for &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; within our domain of quantification.  This is indeed similar to the way the word &quot;witness&quot; is used in talking about nominal quantification &amp;mdash; it's just that here we're quantifying over worlds instead of entities.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T15:47:06.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1642" CreationDate="2012-03-15T18:50:18.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;[n] and [l] are similar acoustically and aerodynamically, in that both are made with periodic vibration and no buildup of pressure, but have more complex formant structures than vowels due to the presence of antiformants. They are also similar articulatory, both being made with the front of the tongue raised towards the alveolar ridge. The only difference in tongue shape is that the tongue body is narrowed laterally in the production of [l] to allow air to flow over the edges of the tongue. Given their phonetic similarity, it is not surprising if they change into one another.&#xA;Interesting work on phonetic similarity can be found in Jeff Mielke's &lt;a href=&quot;http://137.122.133.199/~Jeff/phonetic_similarity/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonetic similarity database&lt;/a&gt;. A more technical treatment will be found in Stevens' (1998) &lt;em&gt;Acoustic Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I cannot find a good database of attested sound changes in the languages of the world. Maybe the closest thing that can be found is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://pbase.phon.chass.ncsu.edu/query&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;database of phonological alternations&lt;/a&gt;, which are themselves &quot;sound changes in progress.&quot; The sound change is however quite frequent cross-linguistically in my estimation. What is unusual about the Cantonese case is that the change has resulted in massive homophony, which typically doesn't happen to such an extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most interesting part of the question concerns the transition probabilities of the change and its reverse. I have no idea about this but the question could be answered with a rich enough database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T09:09:52.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T09:09:52.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-15T19:17:43.870" Score="6" ViewCount="2036" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how the &quot;doing my homework&quot; phrase is to be analyzed in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I felt good doing my homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I had trouble doing my homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I needed help doing my homework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;doing my homework&quot; modify the preceding adjective &quot;good&quot; and the nouns &quot;trouble&quot; and &quot;help&quot; respectively, or it functions as a clausal modifier (adjunct)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I spent the whole evening doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;ing&quot; phrase isn't related to the preceding noun, clearly modifying the whole content of the clause, but I'm still unsure how to analyze &quot;doing my homework&quot; in similar sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="844" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T14:52:21.410" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T19:10:40.403" Title="Is a Gerund-Participial a &quot;clause adjunct&quot; or a &quot;noun/adjective post-modifier&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1642" CreationDate="2012-03-15T20:18:14.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a good reason why such a database (of sound changes) doesn't exist. As Crowley and Bowern 2010 argue, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;given a sufficient period of time, any sound can change into any other sound&lt;/strong&gt; by a series of changes such as those discussed in this chapter [chapter 2, Types of sound change; emphasis mine - AB]&quot; (p. 48). How sounds are changed is more important than what sounds are changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T20:18:14.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1648" CreationDate="2012-03-15T20:42:15.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I can't distinguish between the two terms on offer. Sorry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in each of these sentences the gerund VP &lt;em&gt;doing my homework&lt;/em&gt; functions &lt;strong&gt;semantically&lt;/strong&gt; as a causative, viz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;doing my homework &lt;strong&gt;made me&lt;/strong&gt; feel good&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;doing my homework &lt;strong&gt;made me&lt;/strong&gt; have trouble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;doing my homework &lt;strong&gt;made me&lt;/strong&gt; need help&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;doing my homework &lt;strong&gt;made me&lt;/strong&gt; spend the whole evening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;strong&gt;syntactically&lt;/strong&gt; as the VP of a gerund clause with Equi-NP subject that is the object of a preposition or conjunction, which is often deleted in rapid colloquial speech, viz (with deletions restored in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I felt good &lt;strong&gt;(while (I was))&lt;/strong&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I had trouble &lt;strong&gt;(in my&lt;/strong&gt;) doing my homework.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I needed help &lt;strong&gt;(with my)&lt;/strong&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I spent the whole evening &lt;strong&gt;(in my)&lt;/strong&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T20:42:15.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1648" CreationDate="2012-03-15T22:30:12.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional grammar, the word &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;participle&lt;/strong&gt; in all your examples. It modifies the subject, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;. This can be made more visible by reversing the word order, which results in a somewhat artificial but transparent sentence with identical meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing my homework, I spent the whole evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your construction is the same as in these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hurt my hand repairing the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left the house running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A participle often expresses the circumstances in which the subject performs the action of the finite verb; that is why you can often replace it with a &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; clause, an adverbial constituent of time or cause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent the whole evening &lt;em&gt;because/while I was&lt;/em&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A feature of English (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ellipsis&lt;/a&gt;) is that we can sometimes leave out the subject and the form of &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;. In this case, that is possible with &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; if the subject is the same as that of the main clause and the finite verb is a form of &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;. Then we get this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent the whole evening &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this elliptic clause is still quite different from the participial construction in your examples; notice how the ellipsis is not possible with &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's consider your first example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt good doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that &lt;em&gt;my homework&lt;/em&gt; is also felt to be identical to the thing you feel good about is accidental, it is a red herring: the construction is exactly the same as in &lt;em&gt;I hurt my hand repairing the car&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;repairing the car&lt;/em&gt; is in no way the thing you hurt your hand about/in/whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could add a preposition in your first example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt good &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't prove anything: the word &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; cannot normally be left out in English, so this is an entirely different construction. The fact that there is little change in meaning is, again, a coincidence rather than a structural feature.&#xA;In this construction, &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; is a gerund (not a participle), because it functions as a noun. Only things that function as nouns can be the object of a preposition. You can see that it is not possible in other instances of the same construction, which shows that &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; is no gerund here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I spent the whole evening &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; doing my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T23:43:46.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2012-03-15T23:53:25.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for here, but to give you an example of a language that you could say does show this, you could look at Welsh.  There are girls' names that end, for example, with the suffix &lt;em&gt;-wen&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Branwen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gwen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Awen&lt;/em&gt;) where the suffix carries the meaning 'white, fair'.  There is a masculine counterpart to this in names like &lt;em&gt;Gwyn&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Wyn&lt;/em&gt;, also carrying the meaning 'white'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-03-15T23:53:25.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1642" CreationDate="2012-03-16T00:00:27.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd actually been preparing the latter part of your question myself: &lt;strong&gt;what diachronic sound changes are common cross-linguistically, and are there databases documenting their occurrence?&lt;/strong&gt; (I was prompted by remarks about identifying common changes from personal experience working with the comparative method). I haven't gotten around to posting the question, but I did stumble upon a database which is relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diadm.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The DiaDM Project: A web-based platform for Diachronic Data and Models&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, with one of the three sub-projects covering historical sound change: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diadm.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/unidia/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UniDia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although determining to the elaboration of models that are directly&#xA;  applicable to (real) case studies, there are no compendia that&#xA;  explicitly survey the types of sound changes, their directionality,&#xA;  their relative prevalence, their immutable tendencies and the&#xA;  dimensions structuring their specific behaviours. All this is&#xA;  admittedly of common knowledge, but for someone external to the field&#xA;  - mathematicians, biologists or physicists that could inspire new quantitative approaches to recurrent issues in historical linguistics&#xA;  - it is not. Moreover, accessing this knowledge can prove difficult and excessively time consuming as it is scattered in a multilingual&#xA;  literature and transcribed under various and diverging symbolisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UniDia targets this gap by associating the compilation of published&#xA;  sound change hypotheses from a large geographically and genetically&#xA;  diverse sample to distribution and tendency analysis methods. The&#xA;  symbolism is unified and all transcriptions are harmonized to the IPA&#xA;  – transcription conventions are presented on the left-hand menu bar.&#xA;  No prior typology is imposed on the data but rather, it is the aim of&#xA;  UniDia to explore the overall consistency of the sound change&#xA;  hypothesized across language areas and families and to distinguish the&#xA;  specific from the ‘universal’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course doesn't (yet) cover all language families (and the interface isn't ideal), but it looks interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/305/444&quot;&gt;meta - does this more general question merit a separate post or should it be answered here?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2012-03-16T00:15:34.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-16T13:10:06.453" Score="6" ViewCount="2171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentences below, the phrases in italic have the direct object &amp;quot;him&amp;quot; as a predicand, and would, I think, be analyzed as predicative (depictive?) adjunct, according to the terminology used in Huddleston&amp;amp;Pullum's Cambridge Grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1a)&lt;/strong&gt; She found him &lt;em&gt;with his hands tied behind his back&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1b)&lt;/strong&gt; She found him &lt;em&gt;lying on the bed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1c)&lt;/strong&gt; She found him &lt;em&gt;injured&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the past-participle in the sentence below is clearly different, as it forms a syntactic constituent (noun phrase/object) with the preceding noun - &amp;quot;suspects involved in the robbery&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2a)&lt;/strong&gt;  She found the suspects &lt;em&gt;involved in the robbery&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although superficially similar to examples 1, this sentence obviously has a different syntactic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my problem is that in many cases this difference is not clear to me. For example, I'm not sure how to analyze the past-participial (passive?) phrase in italic in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2b)&lt;/strong&gt; She found a note &lt;em&gt;left on the table&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or in this one :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2c)&lt;/strong&gt; The panel addressed numerous issues &lt;em&gt;raised by the US steel exporters.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="844" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T18:34:32.990" Title="Do these past-participle phrases function as a predicative adjunct or noun post-modifier?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2012-03-16T17:19:27.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to traditional syntax, these are all participles modifying nouns/pronouns. The difference is that the examples 1a–c are clearly predicative, while 2a is purely attributive (modifying a noun), and 2b–c are somewhere in between. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;em&gt;she came first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he arrived late&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; belongs to &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; syntactically, but it also describes the action. Those are called predicative adjectives. Non-predicative adjectives and participles (which are in a way a kind of adjectives) modify only the noun, whereas predicative adjectives are said to modify both the verb and the noun the belong to. The distinction between predicative and non-predicative adjectives is necessarily a bit vague, as can be seen in 2b and 2c, but it can be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is that attributive adjectives can be defining and non-defining, just like relative clauses (&lt;em&gt;the table that I bought&lt;/em&gt; v. &lt;em&gt;the table, which I bought&lt;/em&gt;). When a postpositional participle is non-defining, a comma is usually added. Example 2a is a good example of a defining adjective/participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-03-16T17:19:27.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1675" CreationDate="2012-03-17T03:27:16.147" Score="5" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, Portuguese is unique among Romance languages for having infinitives that take pronoun clitics and so form equivalents to English constructions such as &quot;for you to (do X)&quot; or &quot;for us to do (X).&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there one or more Germanic languages that each have grammatical constructions that are not found in any other Germanic language?   If so, what are some of these constructions?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T14:31:26.290" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T20:47:12.153" Title="Is there a grammatical construction found in one Germanic language that isn't found in other Germanic languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1659" CreationDate="2012-03-17T08:01:46.760" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that there are a few languages that lack sentential embedding.   If this is the case, what grammatical devices do they use instead of adverbial clauses, complement clauses, and noun-modifying clauses?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T03:46:41.277" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T03:46:41.277" Title="How are relationships between clauses marked in languages that lack sentential embedding?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-17T13:57:51.883" Score="3" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if the post really is about tag questions. I apologize for the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider the following situation in English. Your friend asks you,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Haven't you had lunch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;haven't&lt;/strong&gt;, you would say &lt;strong&gt;&quot;no&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, because in English people answer according to the truth of the situation. In Chinese, however, people would say &lt;strong&gt;&quot;yes&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, since they agree with the friend that they haven't had lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am wondering whether this difference is prevalent and where it came from. Also, since it is not a tag question, what is the right term here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across &quot;rhetorical question&quot; and &quot;negative question&quot; on Wikipedia as well but was not sure what exactly those two terms meant. I knew it wasn't a tag question but used the term nevertheless because &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verbs-questions-tag-answering.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tag question&lt;/a&gt; works the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="847" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T14:28:31.253" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T14:28:31.253" Title="Answering Tag Questions" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1657" CreationDate="2012-03-17T15:34:47.687" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;By relying on inference, parataxis can do the job. Compare the a-examples (parataxis) with the b-examples (subordination) below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1) a) Go fetch the urn, the one on the mantlepiece&#xA;   b) Go fetch the urn that is on the mantlepiece&#xA;2) a) The sun was shining bright. We went for a walk.&#xA;   b) The sun was shining bright, so we went for a walk.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still rules though. In the second parataxis-example (2a), the latter sentence is generally assumed to happen simultaneously or after the first sentence. What happens first goes first, and a cause would be mentioned before the effect etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parataxis&quot;&gt;Wikipedia-page on parataxis&lt;/a&gt; isn't very useful as it concentrates too much on parataxis in English for poetic effect, but now you know one more term to look for in reference grammars at least!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T15:34:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1658" CreationDate="2012-03-17T19:28:00.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what is usually called a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes/No Question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The rules for English Y/N Qs are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Invert subject and first auxiliary verb, add question intonation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bill is&lt;/strong&gt; going to the show. --&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Is Bill&lt;/strong&gt; going to the show?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't an auxiliary verb, use &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, transfer the tense to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, and invert &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bill went&lt;/strong&gt; to the show --&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Did Bill go&lt;/strong&gt; to the show?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a contraction with the first auxiliary verb, the whole contraction may be inverted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bill wasn't&lt;/strong&gt; going to the show --&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Wasn't Bill&lt;/strong&gt; going to the show?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the negative is just a normal part of the question, in the normal place, so the grammar is nothing special. The meaning, however, is rather specialized, and there's a big literature on it in pragmatics, among other places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pragmatic solution is to note that if a special word is added to a question, but the modified question asks for the same information as the unmodified one, then there must be a special conventional meaning for the added word, right? -- but it doesn't have to be obvious. Since it's a request for information either way, the negation is used to signal speaker expectation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since it's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about the logical implications of the question, English speakers don't even notice the logic, and answering a negative question with a negative when you agree feels very strange to us; we're keeping our minds on the expectations, beliefs, and goals of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally English speakers use a negative Y/N Q to suggest that the positive -- &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the negative -- is what they expect. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is he going to do it?&lt;/em&gt; (no special implication, just a speaker request for information)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Isn't he going to do it?&lt;/em&gt; (implies speaker had expected him to do it, but now doubts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, this is not a Tag Question; Tag Qs are tags, on the end of statements. (I'm sure you understand this now, don't you? :-) They have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/tags.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some interesting syntax&lt;/a&gt;, too. But the implications of positive and negative Tag Qs can be confusing when compared with those of regular Y/N Qs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He's going to do it, isn't he?&lt;/em&gt; (negative tag; speaker expected positive statement)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He's isn't going to do it, is he?&lt;/em&gt; (positive tag; speaker expected negative statement)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These, by the way, have two different implications, depending on whether &lt;em&gt;is he?&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;isn't he?&lt;/em&gt;) has Y/N Q (rising) intonation, which is a real question, or ordinary full stop intonation (like a Wh-Q gets), which is simply a rhetorical question, stating the speaker's belief, and requires no response, though it often invites one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-03-17T20:41:48.013" LastActivityDate="2012-03-17T20:41:48.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1665" CreationDate="2012-03-18T02:02:53.483" Score="1" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conlanging is my hobby, and I would like to think more creatively about embedding.  Since nature is always more inventive than any hobbyist can be, I've been reading about embedding in natural languages.  Nonetheless, I been unable to find an answer to the following question, which concerns natural languages only:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do languages with extensive verb cross-referencing morphology require less overt marking for embedding than other languages that allow embedding do?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T13:47:39.307" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T13:47:39.307" Title="Why do languages with extensive verb cross-referencing morphology require less overt marking for embedding than other languages do?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="39" CreationDate="2012-03-18T05:40:44.647" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is pretty old now, and the answers have demonstrated that the consensus (in the English- and Japanese-speaking world at least) is strongly in favor of the particle explanation, but here is something that might interest you from Alexander Vovin's Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese (volume I, pp 109-102):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case markers are traditionally defined in both Japanese and Western traditions as particles (Jp. &lt;em&gt;kakujoshi&lt;/em&gt; 格助詞) [&lt;em&gt;long list of references&lt;/em&gt;]. However, in another major school of Japanese studies, the Russian school, three conflicting points of view have been debated over a long period of time. According to one, Japanese case markers are &lt;strong&gt;agglutinative suffixes&lt;/strong&gt; (Konrad 1937: 81-83), (Fel'dman 1979: 60-61), (Syromiatnikov 1972: 96); the supporters of the second point of view consider them to be &lt;strong&gt;postpositions&lt;/strong&gt; (Vardul' 1964: 33-36), (Golovnin 1970: 18; 1986: 227); while according to the third point of view, they are classified neither as suffixes, nor as postpositions, but as &lt;strong&gt;agglutinative case markers&lt;/strong&gt; (Pashkovskii 1957: 117), (Alpatov 1981; 34-41). The last point of view is exactly the one I adhere to [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bold emphasis mine.) The reasons Vovin gives for adhering to the &quot;agglutinative case marker&quot; theory are, in summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) Old Japanese case markers are not &quot;flective&quot;: there is &quot;one and only one&quot; grammatical meaning per case markers, and no fusion with the stem. This is unlike the situation in, say, Indo-European, where a noun ending might contain the meanings &quot;plural&quot; and &quot;dative&quot; without being (synchronically) divisible into a &quot;plural&quot; morpheme and a &quot;dative&quot; morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) On the other hand, &quot;it is impossible to insert anything between the stem and the case marker except plural markers, restrictive particles &lt;em&gt;Npakari&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sapey&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;dani&lt;/em&gt;, or, in some cases, another case marker. These limitations would be unlikely if these were pure particles or postpositions, because the latter are less bound with the stem.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He doesn't specify whether he believes that &quot;agglutinative case marker&quot; remains the best explanation through to Modern Japanese, incidentally, but it seems fair to at least tentatively assume that he does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the bibliography of the book for the references above, and here's what I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Konrad 1937: Not listed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fel'dman 1979: Not listed, but there is this: &quot;Fel'dman, Nataliia I. 1960. Iaponskii iazyk [The Japanese Language], Moskva: Nauka&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syromiatnikov, Nikolai A. 1972. Drevneiaponskii iazyk [The Old Japanese language]. Moscow: Nauka.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vardul' 1964: Not listed, but there is this: &quot;Vardul', Igor' F. 1965. 'O prirode iaponskikh &lt;em&gt;ganio&lt;/em&gt; [On the nature of Japanese &lt;em&gt;ganio&lt;/em&gt;],' Morfologicheskaia tipologiia i problema klassifikatsii iazykov. [The morphological typology and the problem of language classification], Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, pp. 35-61&quot; (I assume that &quot;ganio&quot; means &quot;が、に、を&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Golovnin, Ivan V. 1970. &quot;K voprosu o klassifikatsii leksiki iaponskogo iazyka [To the problem of the classification of parts of speech in the Japanese language]', Voprosy iaponskoi filologii 1:14-29.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pashkovskii, A.A. 1957. 'K kharakteristike iaponskikh sintaksem [On the characteristic of one of the Japanese syntagmatic units]', Sovetskoe Vostokovedenie 2:89-123.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alpatov, Vladimir M. 1981. 'Eshche raz o kharaktere &lt;em&gt;ganio&lt;/em&gt; v sovremennom iaponskom iazyke [Once again on the nature of &lt;em&gt;ganio&lt;/em&gt; in the modern Japanese language],' Voprosy iaponskoi filologii 5.34-41.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;UPDATE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the same argument, slightly expanded and put into a post-OJ context, in Vovin's A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=24GTVscUCX0C&amp;amp;pg=PA47&amp;amp;lpg=PA47&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=r1iKIlqwaB&amp;amp;sig=zPdG2hb5VZYzQ4N8m3uwCfqbq1c&amp;amp;hl=ja&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=FnRmT92dKuTY0QGroZi9CA&amp;amp;ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Points of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vovin explicitly says that &quot;the character of these case markers joining to the stem is not different from that of, let us say, Turkish&quot;. (He does this in the first book I cited, too, but I left it out for brevity; this was probably unwise.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, contrary to Modern Japanese and Turkish, in the Heian period most case markers had their own accent, independent of a preceding noun (Wenck 1959: 403; Martin 1987: 169-170); they therefore cannot be defined as agglutinative suffixes. &lt;strong&gt;I prefer to use the term 'agglutinative case marker', which is meant to show that these elements occupy an intermediate position between agglutinative suffixes and particles.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Vovin is talking about what he calls &quot;case markers&quot;, and his list of same is: ga, no, ni, o, to, yori, kara, e, made. &quot;Wa&quot; is not on the list, and in fact on the next page he calls this &quot;the topic particle&quot; and uses it as an example of what &quot;pure particles&quot; are like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastEditorUserId="755" LastEditDate="2012-03-19T00:09:39.590" LastActivityDate="2012-03-19T00:09:39.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1694" CreationDate="2012-03-18T06:34:35.910" Score="13" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an effort to clearly delineate &lt;strong&gt;durar&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;tardar&lt;/strong&gt; to my Spanish students, I have been searching for some usage notes and I was not satisfied with anything I found. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I was wondering if these two words represent two aspects of the same idea, somewhat similar to how Russian and Slavic languages have different words for different aspects; like how the &lt;strong&gt;писа-&lt;/strong&gt; stem is imperfective, and the &lt;strong&gt;написа-&lt;/strong&gt; stem is used for the perfective aspect and both mean &lt;strong&gt;to write&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to test my hypothesis by doing a simple word-frequency chart and I compared the following two words to each other in thousands of books in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tardaron&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;duraron&lt;/strong&gt; (preterite)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tardaban&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;duraban&lt;/strong&gt; (imperfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I chose the third person plural, because the verb tenses are unique. Whereas several other verb forms are not, such as the first and third person in imperfect; &lt;strong&gt;tardaba&lt;/strong&gt; means both &lt;strong&gt;I took&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;He took&lt;/strong&gt;. I skipped second person tenses because they seem dubious to search for in writing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROFAc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the experiment it appears that Spanish writers prefer &lt;strong&gt;tardaron&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;duraron&lt;/strong&gt; (preterite) about 2:1, and &lt;strong&gt;duraban&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;tardaban&lt;/strong&gt; (imperfect) about 2:1, which is the complete opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it makes sense, the nature of the word &lt;strong&gt;durar&lt;/strong&gt; focuses on the duration of the action, whereas &lt;strong&gt;tardar&lt;/strong&gt; focuses on the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this because Spanish speakers subconsciously prefer &lt;strong&gt;tardar&lt;/strong&gt; for the preterite/perfect aspect, and &lt;strong&gt;durar&lt;/strong&gt; for the imperfect aspect? Are there any words that would presumably follow this order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="740" LastEditDate="2012-03-18T06:53:40.020" LastActivityDate="2012-10-09T17:55:15.247" Title="Do Spanish speakers prefer certain words for certain aspects, like in Russian?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1442" CreationDate="2012-03-18T15:12:02.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=421&amp;amp;keyword=Kuiper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Teaching linguistics: reflections on practice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Koenraad Kuiper (ed.) might be useful. It's in publication by Equinox Publishers. I've never studied this as a teaching practice, so I'm afraid I'm not sure how relevant a resource it will be for your purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-18T21:33:24.027" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T21:33:24.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1661" CreationDate="2012-03-18T23:12:38.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that you are talking about head-marking languages, and by &quot;overt marking for embedding&quot; you mean that dependent clauses must be modified by some kind of subordinating particles. Let me give an example and assume that this is what you are talking about. The example is from Classical Nahuatl, Anderson &amp;amp; Dibble's edition of the &lt;em&gt;Florentine Codex&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;notza-lo      in   tlamacazque huehuetque, in  in-toca        cuacuacuiltin: yehuantin caqui-ti-lo&#xA;summon-NONACT the  spirit      old.men     the 3pl.poss-name  C.             they      hear-APPL-NONACT&#xA;&quot;...the old priests, whose names were quaquacuiltin, were summoned; these were informed...&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English translation contains a relative clause, but there is no kind of subordinate marking in the Nahuatl version. A more or less literal translation will be: &quot;[They] are called. They are priests. Their names are Quaquacuiltin. They are summoned.&quot; The verbs can appear by themselves and be a full clause. So can the nouns. The particle I've glossed &quot;the&quot; is itself optional. There is just not much &quot;glue&quot; holding the words of the sentence together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of a very reason why dependent clauses in head-marking languages should lack particles which mark them as dependents. A not too thoughtful reason is that since dependents at the sub-clause level receive no marking (that is what makes it a head-marking language) the same phenomenon just applies to dependents at the clause- and higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be on the other hand that clause subordination is a language specific issue that does not fully apply to head-marking languages. I'll conclude with two quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://http://faculty.washington.edu/bcitko/LING%20480/nichols.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nichols (1986: 114)&lt;/a&gt; [this paper is worth reading in its entirety if you haven't already]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Head-marked patterns contribute to a flat syntax which minimizes&#xA;  intra-clause and inter-clause structure, freeing a language to&#xA;  concentrate on the grammaticalization of discource prominence and&#xA;  cohesion. In fact it turns out that it is precisely for head-marking&#xA;  languages that a number of traditional grammatical questions prove to&#xA;  be somewhat moot, because pragmatic and discourse relations (rather&#xA;  than strictly syntactic relations) are being grammaticalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/bls/article/download/2347/2309&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Haiman &amp;amp; Thompson (1984: 510)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the term &quot;subordination&quot; seems to be at best a negative term which&#xA;  lumps together all deviations from some &quot;main clause&quot; norm, and thus&#xA;  treats as unified a set of facts which we think is not a single&#xA;  phenomenon...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a cross-linguistically-informed approach to clause linkage, consider perusing some of th e literature in the Role and Reference Grammar framework. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/vanvalin/rrg.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-18T23:12:38.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1648" CreationDate="2012-03-19T23:33:49.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's how I would analyse your sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of your examples the constituent [doing my homework], a non-finite clause, has the same function, that of an adjunct (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). It modifies the matrix clause but not the subject in the matrix clause because adjuncts usually modify either a verbal phrase or another clause or the whole sentence. The connection between the clauses in your examples is not &quot;what kind of I&quot; or &quot;what kind of good/trouble&quot;, so it can't be a noun-adjective postmodifier. The connection between the clauses is temporal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quirk et al. 1985: an adverbial clause of time, reason etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Doing&quot; in your examples is what Huddleston and Pullum 2002 call an &quot;gerund-participle&quot; since they decide not to distinguish between participle I and a gerund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-20T19:10:40.403" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T19:10:40.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1676" CreationDate="2012-03-20T11:55:39.763" Score="9" ViewCount="7086" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only speak from an English perspective. &lt;em&gt;Be&lt;/em&gt; seems to me to be a transitive verb, when joining a subject and an object, yet it is described as a copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bullseye is the target&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks to me like subject, verb, object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where is the hospital?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I see &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; as the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-20T21:12:12.310" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T13:54:55.397" Title="What is the difference between a copula and a transitive verb?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2012-03-20T12:07:54.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you mean the difference between a copula and a non-copular verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that while the copula is used as a linking verb, which &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;defines the subject&lt;/strong&gt;, a non-copular verb &lt;strong&gt;defines the action&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is a doctor. (copula)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John ate an apple. (action)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rather clear concept for someone who studies Languages or Linguistics, but I understand it might be harder for someone who is not so into this subject, so I'll try to explain more in depth what it means to define the subject or the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me make an example in Italian: &quot;Giovanni è felice.&quot; It means &quot;John is happy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &quot;è&quot; in this sentence is not about something that Giovanni is doing, but &quot;è felice&quot; altogether is defining what Giovanni is (in general or in that particular moment, not really important). Note that &quot;è felice&quot; in the analysis &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; considered as one thing. In Italian it's called &quot;predicato nominale&quot;, I'm not sure about the English name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Defining the subject&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copular verbs don't express actions, like I said. When you state that &quot;someone is something&quot;, that someone is not doing anything. There is no action being &quot;made&quot;. Rather there is a feature being assigned to a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the example above, when we say that &lt;em&gt;&quot;John is a doctor&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, John is not **doctoring*. &quot;Doctor&quot; is what John &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, not what John &lt;em&gt;is doing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Defining the action&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, when we say that &lt;em&gt;&quot;John ate an apple&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, we do have an action being defined. &quot;Apple&quot; is not what John &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, but rather &quot;what&quot; is sustaining the action that is being performed by John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a final note, not only the verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; can be a copula. Also verbs like &lt;em&gt;to seem&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;to appear&lt;/em&gt; can be copulae (they can be, i.e. they can be non-copular too). Check &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_copulae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia about English copulae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you mentioned &quot;Transitivity&quot;, a transitive verb is a verb where the action is being performed by the subject and that is being sustained by an object. Read more about it &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitivity_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the wikipedia page for Transitivity&lt;/a&gt;, but to explain it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dog barks. (intransitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John likes apples. (transitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transitivity is closely related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valency&lt;/a&gt; which is about the possibility for some verbs to sustain other arguments other than the Direct Object, as in &quot;John gave Mary a pen&quot;. You can see the link above or &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/40322/6550&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I wrote on EL&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T14:39:01.410" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1682" CreationDate="2012-03-20T20:23:44.590" Score="4" ViewCount="2984" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conversion, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;permit (verb): I &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; you to do so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;permit (noun): Take this &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can be considered to be a morphological (i.e. lexical) process.  But there are arguments for it being a semantic process, rather than a morphological one.  For example, in the first example sentence &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; may indeed fit the syntactic category of being a noun, but is occupying the syntactic slot of a verb, so it takes on the property of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I can't really think of a good argument in favour the syntactic argument and can't find too much clear literature on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-20T21:12:43.760" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T17:43:32.413" Title="Is Conversion syntactic or morphological?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1674" CreationDate="2012-03-20T20:47:40.123" Score="0" ViewCount="82528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble drawing a syntax tree for 3 sentences and I would appreciate it if someone could help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This giraffe reads books about psychopharmacology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monarchs will fly to Mexico.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The computer said that a fatal error occurred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also be thankful if you can explain to me how to draw them, because I do not understand them very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="858" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-23T10:46:08.823" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T18:53:36.390" Title="Syntax trees for sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-01-23T06:26:23.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2012-03-20T20:53:12.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The noun  phrase which follows a transitive verb indicates a distinct participant in the state-fo-affairs indicated by the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noun phrase which follows a copula verb does not indicate a distinct participant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Sam hits a doctor&quot;, there are two participants: Sam, and the doctor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Sam is a doctor&quot;, there are not two separate participants. There is just one participant, Sam, and &quot;a doctor&quot; is a noun phrase that tells us something more about Sam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a noun phrase after a copula is not a direct object, because it is not a separate participant. Instead we typically refer to the noun phrase after the copula as a &lt;em&gt;subject complement&lt;/em&gt;. (Subject complements can also be adjective or preposition phrases, incidentally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the difference between  a copula and a transitive verb: a copula takes a subject and a subject complement, a transitive verb takes a subject and a direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to test this is that transitive clauses can be passivised but clauses with a copula cannot. So, we could say &quot;A doctor is hit by Sam&quot; but we cannot say &quot;A doctor is been by Sam&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="859" LastActivityDate="2012-03-20T20:53:12.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1672" CreationDate="2012-03-20T22:09:06.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences are parsed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This giraffe reads books about psychopharmacology.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i7WMe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monarchs will fly to Mexico.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iq4E1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The computer said that a fatal error occurred.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ADeq9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trees have been made in the site &lt;a href=&quot;http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/?&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phpSyntaxTree&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tree is a mathematical object consisting of a set of points called&#xA;nodes between which certain relations hold. The nodes correspond to&#xA;syntactic units; left-right order on the page corresponds to temporal&#xA;order of utterance between them; and upward connecting lines represent&#xA;the relation ‘is an immediate subpart of’. Nodes are labeled to show&#xA;categories of phrases and words, such as noun phrase (NP); preposition&#xA;phrase (PP); and verb phrase (VP). (&lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scholz et al 2011&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T01:27:46.207" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1656" CreationDate="2012-03-21T02:39:30.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swiss German has a strange cross-serial semantic dependency explained here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &quot;We Hans the house helped paint&quot; brought up whenever someone wished to argue that natural language is not a context free grammar. This is a silly use of this construction, but it does answer your question, because cross serial attachement is consiered ungrammatical in German German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T02:39:30.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2012-03-21T03:43:47.153" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;First it is important to realise that linguistic labels do not really &quot;exist&quot; objectively: they are just words that can be more or less convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's see how things would work out if we assumed that a copula was a kind of transitive verb, and its secondary complement a direct object (the subject being the primary complement of the verb). The following are a few of the properties that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;direct objects&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are normally expected to possess—and a transitive verb is defined as having a direct object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A direct object must always be in the &lt;strong&gt;accusative/objective case&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;that man was I&lt;/em&gt; v. *&lt;em&gt;that man fears I&lt;/em&gt; — the fact that the nominative/subjective case &quot;I&quot; is possible with copulae shows how they are to many people different from transitive verbs; an object can never be in the nominative case. The number of people who would use &quot;I&quot; in certain registers prevent us from simply regarding it as an object in all respects.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It allows for the transitive verb to be &lt;strong&gt;passivized&lt;/strong&gt;, and it then becomes the subject if the meaning of the sentence is to remain intact (&lt;em&gt;the cat likes me&lt;/em&gt; =&gt; &lt;em&gt;I am liked by the cat,&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;she remained a cat&lt;/em&gt; =&gt; *&lt;em&gt;a cat was remained by her&lt;/em&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only a phrase that acts like a (substantive) noun—a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;—can be a direct object. Normally, this includes only words that can have an article without changing their meaning, unlike common adjectives (&lt;em&gt;the chair is expensive&lt;/em&gt; v. *&lt;em&gt;the chair costs expensive&lt;/em&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be seen that copulae + subject complements fail at least one of these tests, which is why they are normally not considered transitive verbs + direct objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the commonly used criteria for calling a verb a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A. It must be capable of taking an &lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt; as its secondary complement in a simple sentence, like &lt;em&gt;I am angry&lt;/em&gt;, and the adjective cannot be replaced with an adverb without change of meaning. A complement is a word or phrase without which the predicate/sentence is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;B. The adjective must assign a &lt;strong&gt;property&lt;/strong&gt; to the subject. This is a semantic criterion (having to do with meaning), not a morpho-syntactic one (form). &lt;em&gt;The apple is red; the number turned out larger than expected.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;C. If a noun is used as the secondary complement, it must be used to &lt;strong&gt;identify&lt;/strong&gt; the subject (another semantic criterion). &lt;em&gt;I am a man; the caterpillar became a butterfly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;D. It &lt;strong&gt;cannot take an object&lt;/strong&gt;. Note that the same verb can be a copula in one sentence and a transitive verb in another, if it is used with a different meaning / predicate frame.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;E. It &lt;strong&gt;cannot be passivized&lt;/strong&gt;—as transitive verbs can—such that the subject becomes a &quot;by&quot; prepositional phrase and the object the new subject, and that without change of meaning. It excludes examples like this: &lt;em&gt;Do they prefer the small or the large car? — They prefer small.&lt;/em&gt; =&gt; &lt;em&gt;Small is preferred by them&lt;/em&gt; (this should not be possible with copulae).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;F. If it can take a personal pronoun as a secondary complement, a copula must be capable of taking it in the &lt;strong&gt;nominative case&lt;/strong&gt; in certain contexts, i.e. for the significant minority who choose to do so, especially in writing. In other words: if absolutely everyone would always use the accusative, it's not a copula.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally a copula should fulfil all these criteria. I think it is safe to say that this is quite a reliable test to exclude transitive verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have noticed that not all of these criteria are easy to check beyond doubt, especially the semantic criteria. Take this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I walked fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here the fact that &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; can be both adjective and adverb obscures criterion A (can take adjective).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Criterion D (has no object) is a bit circular, so perhaps that should be removed from the list all together and merged with criterion E (passivize): the latter will serve to prove that something is or is not an object in any case. If I use &quot;a mile&quot; as secondary complement, the sentence can be passivized, so perhaps it is not a copula; however, one could argue that the verb is used with a different meaning there, so that D/E do not apply at all, if we accept that &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt; cannot take a noun as a secondary complement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Criterion F (nominative pronoun) does not apply at all, because one cannot walk a person. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This leaves criterion B (adjective property) to do the job, because C (noun identity) only works if the verb can take a noun as a secondary complement at all, which was shown to be dubious above. As to B—does &quot;fast&quot; assign a property to the subject? One could say it does, since &quot;I&quot; am &quot;fast&quot; when I'm walking fast. However, this should also be the case with other adjectives, then: *&lt;em&gt;I walked rapid&lt;/em&gt;. This proves that &quot;fast&quot; was not an adjective in the original example, which had the same construction and the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all criteria together are a fairly tight test; but it must be noted that the boundary between copulae and non-copulae is not without weak spots. There are bound to be dubious cases. Even so, this is a useful distinction in many situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &quot;copula&quot; a useful category? First of all, because copulae generally behave differently from transitive verbs and verbs that take adverbs as secondary complements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, because subject complements used to be clearly marked as such by being in the nominative case when the precursors to modern English still used cases consistently; this makes it easier to maintain a consistent set of labels for the same construction through the ages. It is the same construction, because &lt;em&gt;that man was I&lt;/em&gt; has not changed essentially between then and now: it is rather that the case endings of nouns were dropped gradually. So we would have to take an arbitrary point in time at which we suddenly start using a different label for this construction. In addition, the gender of the subject could be used to identify subject complements too, before endings were dropped. An adjective would agree with the gender of the subject if used as a subject complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, many foreign languages still have clearly marked cases or genders, like German, in which subject complements are easier to identify than in English. The construction and the criteria I set out above are the same. Should we then call the same construction by different names in different languages? That is possible, but it obscures interlingual connections, and I would prefer to do that only if we have a very pressing reason to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourthly, people have been using this label for ages: why change it now, and bother them to learn yet another term without a strong reason? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-03-21T03:59:21.300" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T03:59:21.300" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2012-03-21T17:32:48.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add a note on a very important distinction that hasn't been covered yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am a student.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;(a copula)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I became a carpenter.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;(a semi-copula)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sheila seems ill.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;(a pseudo-copula)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;copula&lt;/strong&gt; is semantically empty in the sense that it doesn't &quot;make an independent contribution to the sense of the sentence&quot; (Hengeveld 1992: 32); that is why it can be omitted in many languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;semi-copula&lt;/strong&gt; adds &quot;a flavor&quot; to the sentence (usually aspectual, e.g. ingressive &quot;become&quot;), and, when left out, it changes the meaning of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I was a carpenter.&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;I became a carpenter.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;pseudo-copula&lt;/strong&gt; functions as a &quot;complement-taking&quot; predicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sheila seems ill.&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Sheila seems to be ill.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sheila became ill.&lt;/em&gt; - *&lt;em&gt;Sheila became to be ill.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: some of the examples are taken from Hengeveld's 1992 paper. In American English, &lt;em&gt;sick&lt;/em&gt; would sound better in the examples above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-21T21:17:52.663" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T21:17:52.663" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1683" CreationDate="2012-03-21T19:06:57.787" Score="2" ViewCount="3427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for English or other standard European language co-compounds, and for other common examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across &quot;bittersweet&quot; but I'm not sure if it's really a co-compound. It has a superordinate concept and denotes a scaler-like concept, but I'm not sure. It could be similar to the Asian &quot;short-long&quot; for denoting size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="842" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-03-28T20:11:48.640" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T00:45:51.070" Title="English co-compounds? Is bittersweet a co-compound?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1678" CreationDate="2012-03-21T19:17:48.203" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bittersweet&lt;/em&gt; is what would be called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvandva&quot;&gt;Dvandva&lt;/a&gt; compound in Sanskrit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, though, what you mean by &lt;em&gt;&quot;co-compound&quot;&lt;/em&gt;; it sounds like the kind of term that one linguist or one group of linguists might use with a special meaning, deriving from some theory or other. This sort of stuff happens all the time in linguistics, because there are so many theories and so many varieties of terminology; that's why linguists &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; give examples, to illustrate what &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; mean by any particular term they employ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T19:17:48.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2012-03-21T21:54:00.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would like to find an analysis where, in the first sentence, &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fits the syntactic category of being a noun, but is occupying the syntactic slot of a verb.&quot; Commenters are for good reason thinking you are talking about zero-derivation. To take it from a neutral perspective, we can assume that the analysis you are interested in is diagrammed roughly as follows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7uZ0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word which is normally a noun is behaving as a verb. We can find more dramatic examples of this kind of behavior outside of English.  Consider this pair of Tagalog sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nagtrabajo ang lalaki&#xA;worked     NOM man&#xA;&quot;The man worked.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;Lalaki ang nagtrabajo&#xA;man    NOM worked&#xA;&quot;The one who worked is a man.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence is a basic intransitive clause, where the subject comes after the verb, and &lt;em&gt;ang&lt;/em&gt; marks the subject as such. In the second one, things got flipped. What seems like it should be a verb is getting marked with &lt;em&gt;ang&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;lalaki&lt;/em&gt;, which seems like it should be a noun, is showing up in the verb's usual position. It is no longer clear what is a noun and what is a verb. The problem is that &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot; are being taken to mean two different things at once. A noun is something that refers, and something that generally refers to an object. A verb is something that predicates, and generally refers to an action. &#xA;The approach &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/faces/viewItemFullPage.jsp?itemId=escidoc:273886&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Van Valin (2008)&lt;/a&gt; takes in analyzing the Tagalog sentences is to do away with categories like NP and VP in favor of RP (&quot;referential phrase&quot;) and Pred (&quot;predicate&quot;), so that only one of the typical functions of nouns and verbs is implied in the higher levels of the structure. A simplified version is like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wEsxm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the English example, it will be harder to pull this kind of analysis off with the example you have chosen, because the semantics aren't very regular. The Tagalog example works because any noun can predicate and the meaning is &quot;to be a N.&quot; It is hard to think of other nouns that could be analyzed like your &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; example in English, where the noun predicates and takes a subject, an object and an infinitival complement. On the other hand, you might be able to analyze in this way a kind of aversive construction where just about any noun acts as a transitive verb, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas pantsed Henry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas knifed Henry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas baseballed Henry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas netflixed Henry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning &quot;Thomas did something which negatively affected Henry, involving N.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-21T21:54:00.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1684" CreationDate="2012-03-22T14:03:27.320" Score="6" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese, the third person accusative pronoun &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;himself/herself/itself/themselves&quot;) can be used for four different purposes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Most straightforwardly, as a reflexive pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mantém-se     forte&#xA;Keeps-himself strong&#xA;&quot;He keeps himself strong&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) As a reciprocal marker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Amam-se&#xA;Love-themselves&#xA;&quot;They love each other&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.) As a particle for subject indetermination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vive-se       bem  neste   país&#xA;Lives-oneself well in this country&#xA;&quot;One lives well in this country&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.) As a passivizing particle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vende-se     esta casa&#xA;Sells-itself this house&#xA;&quot;This house is being sold&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this pronoun develop to fulfil such different functions? Also, is this unique to Portuguese or has it occurred in other languages as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T02:32:21.200" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T01:19:33.903" Title="How did the Portuguese pronoun &quot;se&quot; take on these other functions?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2012-03-22T17:28:38.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer the definition of conversion as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;the phenomenon in which one base-word (stem) may function as a member of different lexical categories&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110111286.1/9783110111286.1.12.943/9783110111286.1.12.943.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Don, Trommelen, and Zonneveld 2000: 943&lt;/a&gt;, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://feb-web.ru/feb/izvest/1973/01/731-015.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mel'čuk 1973&lt;/a&gt;, Plungian 2011: 149). In other words, a stem that underwent a functional transposition A=&gt;B starts to behave &lt;em&gt;syntactically&lt;/em&gt; as other members of class B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Class A (a lexical verb)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He permitted me to do so.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He permits me to do so.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He will permit me to do so.&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Class B (a count noun)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I need a permit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How many permits did you have?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Take this permit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in languages with poor morphology where word classes might not have distinctive markers we find another phenomenon, &lt;strong&gt;category indeterminacy&lt;/strong&gt; (or multifunctionality). For example, in Sranan Tongo (Dutch Guyana), Voorhoeve 1979 reports that the word &lt;em&gt;hebi&lt;/em&gt; can mean &quot;heavy; to be heavy; weight.&quot; However, Don, Trommelen, and Zonneveld 2000 argue that this phenomenon is different from conversion. In the case of conversion, there is always one &quot;original&quot; stem (class A in the example above), to which you can trace the transposed stem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED: permit (noun), from permit (verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the original stem is usually more frequently used than the transposed one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;permit (verb), rank: 2121, frequency: 16764; permit (noun), no data (not even included)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-03-22T17:43:32.413" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T17:43:32.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1678" CreationDate="2012-03-22T18:24:57.533" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself have never heard of &amp;quot;co-compounds&amp;quot; before but here's what I've been able to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, a note on terminology. There is a coordinate compound and there's also a co-compound. These are two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A coordinate compound&lt;/strong&gt; (sometimes called coordinative compound) is usually understood as compound with two heads (e.g Fabb 2001: 67, Scalise and Bisetto 2009: 46). Under this analysis, &amp;quot;bittersweet&amp;quot; is &lt;em&gt;an endocentric coordinate compound&lt;/em&gt; (with mixture interpretation, Lieber 2009).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A co-compound&lt;/strong&gt; is a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;natural word-like unit consisting of two or more parts which express natural coordination&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (Wälchli 2005: 1). In other words, those coordinated items are closely related in meaning, they are expected to co-occur, they form a conceptual unit, and &lt;strong&gt;the whole meaning is more general than the meaning of its parts&lt;/strong&gt;  (Wälchli 2005: 1, 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;husband and wife, eat and drink, hands and feet&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why the following are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; co-compounds, although they are coordinate compounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;southwest, blue-green&lt;/em&gt; (no coordination)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;poet-doctor&lt;/em&gt; (no close relationship)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Austria-Hungary&lt;/em&gt; (fusion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;twenty-two&lt;/em&gt; (different hierarchy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OED defines bittersweet as &amp;quot;sweet with an admixture or aftertaste of bitterness. &lt;em&gt;fig&lt;/em&gt;. agreeable or pleasant with an alloy of pain or unpleasantness.&amp;quot; As you can see from this definition, the parts, &lt;em&gt;bitter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sweet&lt;/em&gt;, are on different hierarchical levels; thus, &amp;quot;bittersweet&amp;quot; is &lt;em&gt;not a co-compound&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further discussion of co-compounds, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/SyntaxMorphology/?view=usa&amp;amp;ci=9780199276219&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wälchli 2005&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are many other classifications of compounds; e.g. &lt;strong&gt;under Haspelmath's classification&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bittersweet&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;an appositional compound&lt;/strong&gt; and not coordinative (Haspelmath and Sims 2010: 141)/copulative (Booij 2007: 80) etc. Next time you ask a question, please define the terms you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-22T22:49:38.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1681" CreationDate="2012-03-22T20:07:30.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it this is an evolution from the PIE reflexive to a new mediopassive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE is often reconstructed as having &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/286368/Indo-European-languages/74556/Morphology-and-syntax?anchor=ref603307&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;two voices&lt;/a&gt;, active and mediopassive. Classical Latin had separate &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_2-Active_v_Passive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verb forms in &lt;strong&gt;-r&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that marked the mediopassive. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo-Celtic#Forms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This -r form was also found throughout Italoceltic&lt;/a&gt;, Tocharian, and Hittite.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately, PIE &lt;strong&gt;*se-&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; Classical Latin &lt;strong&gt;sē&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;sēsē&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;sibi&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;suī&lt;/strong&gt;) was almost purely a reflexive marker, with some use as a reciprocal marker (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;inter sē&lt;/strong&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Romance languages developed, the &lt;strong&gt;-r&lt;/strong&gt; mediopassive became disused even for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deponent_verb#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deponent&lt;/a&gt; verbs. I'm not confident why this happened; perhaps it was due to forms becoming homophonous. Anyway, with the loss of the old mediopassive a new form was adopted for the voice.  The reflexive &lt;strong&gt;sē&lt;/strong&gt; filled this role. In the daughter languages &lt;strong&gt;sē&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fr, Es, Pt, Ro&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;se&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;si&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Portuguese, and many of the other Romance languages, the reflexive/reciprocal and mediopassive are formed using &lt;strong&gt;se&lt;/strong&gt;. The &quot;subject indetermination&quot; and &quot;passiving&quot; functions you describe use &lt;strong&gt;se&lt;/strong&gt; as part of this new &quot;mediopassive&quot;; i.e., indeterminate or impersonal subjects regarded as a middle voice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: Miller (2010) has a treatment of this question in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof%3aoso/9780199583430.001.0001/acprof-9780199583430-chapter-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Mediopassive: Latin to Romance&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reflexive sē&#xA;  forms replaced the ‐r forms in different structures at different&#xA;  times. The replacement began in the ergative verbs where ‘I sank&#xA;  myself’ had a bound anaphor in contrast to the lack of agentivity in&#xA;  the type ‘the ship sank itself’ , reanalyzed as an anticausative with&#xA;  reflexive merged in a projection for derived imperfectivity.&#xA;  Subsequently, the sē construction replaced the ‐r forms in certain&#xA;  other structures, and finally the middle and impersonal, but not the&#xA;  passive (within Latin, at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T01:19:33.903" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T01:19:33.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1686" CreationDate="2012-03-23T01:27:46.960" Score="3" ViewCount="2473" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I have an example of a language which separately marks definiteness and specificity (or indefiniteness and non-specificity), and also a principled way for deciding which of the two sets of terms is appropriate in description?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T13:32:22.510" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T22:11:30.057" Title="Distinction between definiteness and specificity" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1685" CreationDate="2012-03-23T02:13:52.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a paper about these topics, among others, many years ago, which was translated into French before being published (in &lt;em&gt;Langages&lt;/em&gt; 48, 1976). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/someproblemsofreference.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;original English MS&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/quelquesproblemes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;French translation&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;Quelques Problèmes de Référence&quot;, aka &quot;Some Problems of Reference&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The OP has added this material summarized from the cited paper:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP's in English which are marked as indefinite can be ambiguous for specificity. The example given in the paper is that the phrase &quot;I'm looking for a policeman&quot; is ambiguous between two readings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm looking for &lt;em&gt;a policeman&lt;/em&gt;, but I can't find him. (specific)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm looking for &lt;em&gt;a policeman&lt;/em&gt;, but I can't find one. (non-specific)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific indefinites are associated with specific instantiations of a referring phrase (in addition to lexical and definitional information), while non-specific indefinites are only associated with lexical or definitional information associated with referring phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T22:11:30.057" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T22:11:30.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1687" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-03-23T13:09:26.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lot of sign languages described, taught, and studied around the world. New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) was made the third official language of New Zealand in 2006, being the first sign language with that status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the American Sign Language (ASL) there is an own tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/asl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;asl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;asl&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:11:22.377" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:11:22.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1688" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-03-23T13:09:26.587" Score="0" Body="Questions about languages that use visual transmitted sign patterns, mostly used by deaf people." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-23T13:09:26.587" LastActivityDate="2012-03-23T13:09:26.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-23T21:35:32.960" Score="17" ViewCount="1478" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the statement a few times that sign languages inflect in the same way that spoken languages do, but all examples I came across refer to phenomena that I would classify as word formation rather than actual inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit.) So my question is this: does any sign language possess a &lt;em&gt;unit&lt;/em&gt; (hand or finger movement, facial expression, anything really) that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;makes no sense if used alone,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modifies the grammatical (&lt;em&gt;syntactic&lt;/em&gt;, if you will) function of the word it is attached to,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not modify the semantics of the word it is attached to, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can be used with at least an entire group of words (see below).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that notions such as case, number or gender could be expressed in this way. Or maybe some sign language requires some kind of agreement between e.g. an adjective and a noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of what I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; interested in: &lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; ASL for 'person' used after a verb (because it makes sense if used alone); &lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; exaggerating the ASL sign for 'big' to obtain 'huge' (because it's the semantics that is modified, not the grammatical function); &lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; signing &lt;em&gt;slow&lt;/em&gt; slower in ASL to denote 'very slow' (because it's limited to this one word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-28T21:06:46.883" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T04:03:54.377" Title="Do sign languages inflect?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-24T06:29:40.057" Score="4" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese (Mandarin) translation of my question may be an example of the sentence structure that both English and Chinese share:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Is there any] [sentence structure] (that) [English has but Chinese (Mandarin) does not]?&#xA;[有没有什么][句子结构][英语有但是汉语（普通话）没有]？&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-03-24T13:22:40.337" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T01:52:31.520" Title="Is there any sentence structure that English has but Chinese (Mandarin) does not?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1691" CreationDate="2012-03-24T12:02:55.097" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider preposition stranding, which is possible in English but not in Mandarin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the girlfriend I broke up with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*跟分手的女朋友&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*gen  fenshou de nvpengyou&#xA;with breakup DE girlfriend&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A resumptive pronoun is obligatory in Mandarin but impossible in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*the girlfriend I broke up with her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;跟她分手的女朋友&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;gen ta fenshou de nvpengyou&#xA;with her breakup DE girlfriend&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other cases such that extraction out of a constituent is grammatical in English but not in Mandarin. In other words, many phrases in Mandarin including 把+NP and the aforementioned prepositional phrases seem to be extraction islands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I can also think of a case of the converse (a Mandarin syntactic construction which cannot be rendered in English without some circumlocution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T09:33:51.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1113" CreationDate="2012-03-24T16:38:17.203" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian definitely has dialects with pronounciation specifics (e.g. one can distinguish south accents, as mine, from the Moscow one), but at least among cities language it's very &quot;smoothed&quot; due to huge migrations and radio/TV influence. Experts can distinguish urban dialects for hundreds of properties, but most of them aren't detectable by people without special training. Nowadays one can hear original dialects with their full specifics only in villages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of original differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gramota.ru/book/village/map14.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;type of &quot;g&quot; (plosive, fricative)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gramota.ru/book/village/map15.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;type of &quot;v&quot; before consonants or at word end (labiodental or bilabial)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence intonation is almost equal for most Russian dialects in the sense that in simple sentences only one logically stressed word has changed tone of stressed syllable. Complex sentences with subordinate clauses get smoothed intonation floating. (The notable exception is Olonets region which keeps some reflexes of the old tonal stress system.) The same is true for east Ukrainian dialects, as opposed to west ones, where intonations are closer to common European style (the boundary is approximately between Ternopil and Zhytomir). So, if you want to hear sentence intonation style known in English, German, etc., study west Ukrainian dialects:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T00:12:35.313" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T00:12:35.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2012-03-24T18:02:59.577" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is the same phenomenon, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that написа- is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; perfective in meaning, and that писа- is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; imperfective.  That is, it would actually be ungrammatical to use написа- in a context that calls for an imperfective form, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas putting &lt;em&gt;durar&lt;/em&gt; in the preterite, or &lt;em&gt;tardar&lt;/em&gt; in the imperfect, would still be perfectly grammatical in Spanish.  It might be less common, but it does happen &amp;mdash; as your corpus data shows!  So in Russian you're looking at a hard grammatical rule, whereas in Spanish you're looking at a mere statistical tendency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in learning about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot;&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;, the process by which statistical preferences (like you have in Spanish) gradually turn into hard grammatical rules (like you have in Russian).  It would be possible for Spanish to grammaticalize the link between &lt;em&gt;durar&lt;/em&gt; and the imperfect, so that, in a few decades or a few centuries, people would start feeling that forms like &lt;em&gt;duraron&lt;/em&gt; were actually ungrammatical and not just unusual.  But the link hasn't been grammaticalized yet, and it may well never be.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T18:02:59.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1696" CreationDate="2012-03-24T18:31:12.670" Score="8" ViewCount="1882" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1684/22&quot;&gt;explain the evolution of the third person accusative pronoun in IE languages&lt;/a&gt;, Mark Beadles makes use of the concepts of middle and medio-passive voices. But the discussion that followed his answer seems to show that these concepts are not so clear to everyone. So, what exactly is a middle voice (and a medio-passive voice, for that matter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T16:11:45.227" Title="What is a middle voice and a medio-passive voice?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2012-03-24T19:04:37.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll find a decent overview of valency-changing processes, with some comments on the term &lt;em&gt;middle&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99024413.pdf&quot;&gt;Dixon &amp;amp; Aikhenvald (2000: secs.3--5, esp. pp.11--12)&lt;/a&gt;, and references therein. Those authors suggest that the term is used with a wide variety of senses, and recommend that it be avoided (almost) altogether because of its ambiguity. Rather than insert a long block quote, I'd encourage interested people to just click through to the PDF and read the passage on pp.11--12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two works that Dixon and Aikhenvald cite that may be worth consulting are &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/The_middle_voice.html?id=mQv0QmkTHbMC&quot;&gt;Kemmer (1993)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4178392?uid=3739832&amp;amp;uid=2129&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=70&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;uid=3739256&amp;amp;sid=55942714153&quot;&gt;Keyser &amp;amp; Roeper (1984)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-24T19:04:37.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-24T19:32:56.307" Score="17" ViewCount="3388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an idea for a programming language that would work more like a spoken language. &quot;sentences&quot; would have an initial context in which specific subjects, verbs, and objects would have meaningful relationships. I'm thinking I can make it more powerful and global if I use something like Esperanto as a base which other languages could translate to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have 2 questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which (constructed|native) language would be the best choice based on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;regularity of grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;easiest to translate other languages to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is easy to learn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is expressive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some other criteria that might be useful (popularity would be nice but doesn't matter as much as regularity and simplicity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you know of any existing projects that do something similar or would be useful for some other reason?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="866" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-03-25T13:39:29.147" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T15:23:08.647" Title="Which language would be easiest for a computer to parse?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-25T00:27:28.737" Score="7" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;em&gt;oeuvre&lt;/em&gt;, which in the two out of two times I've heard the word spoken (in an English context), sounded like it does in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oeuvre&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster's online audio pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, that is, with a vowel that does not occur in any other English word, loanword or otherwise. (As a side note, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oeuvre#English&quot;&gt;various&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/oeuvre&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;amp;q=oeuvre&amp;amp;tbs=dfn:1&amp;amp;tbo=u&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=R2FuT_nrEO7ksQKd_riOBg&amp;amp;ved=0CCkQkQ4&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=1016&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; seem to list some very peculiar pronunciations, together with hilariously pronounced audio samples that do not match the transcriptions.) On the other hand, a quick check &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=opus%2Coeuvre&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=0&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; suggests that the word has really been around in English long enough to have gotten more Anglicized. Are there any other English words with /œ/, or other non-English phonemes? What would have to happen to qualify /œ/ as an English phoneme? Is there a name for the use of phonemes that are not part of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T09:55:42.430" Title="&quot;oeuvre&quot;: foreign phonemes in a loanword" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1698" CreationDate="2012-03-25T08:37:01.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question, but I'm afraid there's no good answer to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon has been noticed by linguists some time ago, and we have two terms: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;loan words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;foreign words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. For the latter also the German term is sometimes used, &lt;em&gt;Fremdwort&lt;/em&gt; (pl. &lt;em&gt;Fremdwörter&lt;/em&gt;) -- incidentally, itself a good example of its own meaning. There is at least one more like that in English, namely &lt;em&gt;menu&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know why it hasn't been adapted better. Maybe because it's a 'vocabulary word', maybe because there aren't many more like it, and maybe both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the second possibility is key here: the feeling of nativeness of a phoneme/word/anything is a function of its &lt;strong&gt;frequency&lt;/strong&gt;. English native speakers don't perceive [œ] as native because it's only there in very few (possily just one) words, and not a very frequent one to that. As it is, it's a foreign word. If there were many more like it, they would become loan words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Polish originally did not have /f/. When the Latin name &lt;em&gt;Stephanus&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed, it was adapted to &lt;em&gt;Szczepan&lt;/em&gt; [ščepan]. But later many other words with /f/ have been borrowed and Poles began to perceive it as a native sound. The connection between &lt;em&gt;Stephanus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Szczepan&lt;/em&gt; became obscure, and the name was borrowed again, yielding &lt;em&gt;Stefan&lt;/em&gt; [stefan] this time. (Both exist in modern Polish and are seen as two separate names.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Turkish originally did not have either /f/ or /ž/. Since the 10th century, however, it has borrowed a large number of words with /f/ but only relatively few with /ž/. As a result, the former is now seen as a native sound much more than the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can see that the distinction is a &lt;strong&gt;gradient&lt;/strong&gt; and comes down eventually to the &lt;strong&gt;proportion&lt;/strong&gt;. Unfortunately, no scale or mathematical formula seems to exist which would allow to specify the feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process is not limited to phonemes. I wrote &quot;phoneme/word/anything&quot; above. It's because this is how we perceive familiarity in general. In the 19th c., English purists attempted to convince the society to abandon French, Latin &amp;amp;c. loan words and thus 'purify' the language. The slogan they came up with was &lt;em&gt;Use exclusively Anglo-Saxon monosyllables&lt;/em&gt;. In case you wondered, &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; is a borrowing from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastEditorUserId="794" LastEditDate="2012-03-25T09:55:42.430" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T09:55:42.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2012-03-25T11:17:33.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my favorite dictionary of linguistic terms, &quot;A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics&quot; by R. L. Trask from 1993, &lt;strong&gt;middle&lt;/strong&gt; is given four meanings, the fourth of which is a synonym of &lt;strong&gt;mediopassive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;mediopassive&lt;/strong&gt; is a transitive verb with a passive meaning but intransitve form, syntactically. Examples from the book are 1) &lt;em&gt;This fabric washes easily&lt;/em&gt; and 2) &lt;em&gt;My new book is selling well&lt;/em&gt;.There aren't that many such in English but in other languages it is productive, like in Basque. Verbs that can be used both transitively and intransitively are also called &lt;strong&gt;labile verbs&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T11:17:33.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2012-03-25T13:26:56.783" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lojban&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;conlang&lt;/a&gt;, already meets these goals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They already have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Dictionaries%2C+Glossers+and+parsers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a few parsers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Official+Parser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;One of them&lt;/a&gt; even has a YACC grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come across literature that give the impression that it is possible to make a parser for Sanskrit, that would generate unambiguous parses. But I don't know of well-executed Sanskrit parsers, myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few additional thoughts on the matter: Morphology is one of the biggest reasons why parsers make mistakes. Chinese does not have morphology at all. Chinese parsers perform well. However, at the moment, English parsers are the most accurate of all. This is possibly because parsers for English have received far more attention than parsers for any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2014-03-30T21:28:31.690" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T21:28:31.690" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2012-03-25T14:43:20.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also the newer conlang &lt;em&gt;Ithkuil&lt;/em&gt;. As with Lojban it has the problem that it forces the human to change behavior by being much more precise and specific than normal. No ambiguity comes at a cost to the speaker, being vague has its own rewards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that learning languages like Lojban and Ithkuil are easier for  programmers since they are already used to an absurd level of precision when coding. Because of this I don't see how using a programming language that was also a human language would gain us anything: No matter the syntax of the programming language, in order for the computer to be able to do something predictable with it, the human coder would still have to be a pedantic perfectionist crossing all t's and dotting all i's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans do fuzzy matching and inference very well, computers not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-25T14:43:20.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1689" CreationDate="2012-03-26T07:01:54.113" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;ASL inflects verbs for aspect, by modifying the motion component of the sign.  For most verbs simple aspect is a single movement; this changes to a continuous circling motion for progressive aspect. There are a zillion others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can't be even produced on its own, let alone make sense; it can be used with any noun; modifies the morphological function of the word by changing the aspect part of a {verb+aspect} bimorphemic word; does not modify the semantics of the verb part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Testing it against the criteria in jlawler's link, above:&#xA;1. It does not change the part of speech; it stays a verb&#xA;3. It affects every verb productively&#xA;2&amp;amp; 4. That circular motion isolated by itself is an exact equivalent to the English -ing morpheme, so it relates to the same semantics outside the word, and plays the same role in the tense/aspect system as the English counterpart. &#xA;5. doesn't apply as all this stuff happens simultaneously.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excellent descriptions are given in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Klima, Edward S., and Ursula Bellugi. 1979. Signs of language. Cambridge,MA: Harvard &#xA;University Press. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Valli, Clayton and Ceil Lucas. 1995. Linguistics of American Sign Language: an &#xA;introduction. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T07:01:54.113" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1705" CreationDate="2012-03-26T09:30:16.840" Score="1" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if anyone is familiar with any research that touches on this. It seems to be a largely untapped topic, other than &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED404879.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wooh-yun Jung's (1994) work&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="368" LastEditorUserId="368" LastEditDate="2012-03-27T07:53:32.810" LastActivityDate="2012-03-27T07:53:32.810" Title="Response to 'Thanking' Speech Acts?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1704" CreationDate="2012-03-26T17:28:21.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;University of Minnesota &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/index.html&quot;&gt;Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition&lt;/a&gt; maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/bibliography/index.html#menu&quot;&gt;very complete bibliography on speech acts&lt;/a&gt; in a variety of languages. It's not clear from your question whether you are interested in English only; there is a lot of Japanese work listed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/bibliography/thanks.html&quot;&gt;Here is the page on Thanking acts&lt;/a&gt;. It includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coulmas, F. (1981).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Eisenstein, M. &amp;amp; Bodman, J. (1995).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Eisenstein, M. &amp;amp; Bodman, J. W. (1986).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ferrara, K. (1994).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hinkel, E. (1994).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ide, R. (1998).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kim, Y. (1994).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kimura, K. (1994).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kumatoridani, T. (1999).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Miyake, K. (1994).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Moriyama, T. (1999).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nakata, T. (1989).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ogawa, H. (1995).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's certainly a good place to start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-03-26T17:28:21.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-27T12:29:06.460" Score="11" ViewCount="2787" Body="&lt;p&gt;French has that rule that whenever a masculine entity is part of a group, the whole NP will default to masculine as far as agreement goes. My native language, German, also defaults gender to masculine, whose forms are usually the least marked, though plural may also be analyzed as a separate, fourth gender. However, I wonder how common defaulting mixed-gender groups to masculine is crosslinguistically (especially outside of Standard-Average-European) if there's also e.g. a neuter category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="872" LastEditorUserId="872" LastEditDate="2012-03-27T13:07:37.910" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T10:42:00.117" Title="Gender of mixed groups defaulting to masculine – how common?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1706" CreationDate="2012-03-27T15:32:18.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew (and, I guess, Semitic languages in general) defaults to masculine too for a mixed group. But it doesn't have neutral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew has four genders: male, female, male plural, female plural. For the plural form, if there is so much as a single male in a group of people, then the group is addressed as male. A hairsplitting example would be in literature aimed at women: despite the fact that a man could read such a magazine, the audience is in fact referred to in the plural female gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="874" LastEditorUserId="536" LastEditDate="2012-06-28T10:42:00.117" LastActivityDate="2012-06-28T10:42:00.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1706" CreationDate="2012-03-27T15:38:46.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1326/1/fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corbett's contribution&lt;/a&gt; to Shopen et al. ed. &lt;em&gt;Language Typology and Semantic Description (2nd ed.)&lt;/em&gt;, esp pp.268--73, where he discusses default genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oneida has three genders (Masculine, Feminine, Zoic) in the singular, but only two (Zoic, Masculine) in the plural (groups of all females are marked as Zoic). Mixed groups default to Masculine &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=YyvVAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=plural#search_anchor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(Lounsbury: 1953:52)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-03-27T15:38:46.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1710" CreationDate="2012-03-27T20:18:04.153" Score="1" ViewCount="2174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a statement such as the one in the example below, what is the term (is there a term?) used to refer to the &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and/or &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I like this more than that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example, the this/that could easily be replaced with a noun. However, the idea could also be expanded to something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I thought that I would be more tired than I actually ended up being.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am to parse this out and categorize the statements in the same way, &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; would equate to &lt;strong&gt;I would be more tired&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;I actually ended up being&lt;/strong&gt;, despite the internal structures of the two examples being very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="785" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-27T20:53:09.343" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T09:51:53.327" Title="What is the proper term for this part of a statement?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1709" CreationDate="2012-03-27T20:51:41.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is being done there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pro-form substitution (replacement)&lt;/a&gt;; &quot;this/that&quot; are called &#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-form&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pro-forms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that in this case &lt;em&gt;&quot;a pronoun substitutes a noun or a noun phrase, with or without a determiner&quot;&lt;/em&gt; such as &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Add-on&lt;/strong&gt;: By the way, seeing that others include the explanation of deictics, I thought I'd include it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't mention it because it didn't seem fundamental to answer your question, but it can add value to the discussion. Like others said, we have &lt;em&gt;deictics&lt;/em&gt; in languages. They are highly dependent to the context, and if you listen to an audio conversation, they might represent a problem if you want to fully understand that dialogue. I had some notes about this matter: &quot;Deictic&quot; comes from the Greek word for &quot;pointing&quot; or &quot;indicating&quot;. It is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the context of the utterance, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;) who is speaking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;) the time or place of speaking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;) the gestures of the speaker&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;) the current location in the discourse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;) the topic of the discourse  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If near speaker, proximal terms are used (this, here, now); if away from speaker, distal terms are adopted (that, there, then). Speakers and hearers constantly adjust their internal registry of deictics to keep up with the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, by deixis is meant the location and identification of person, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee; we can analyze them this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: those that are used to refer to speaker and addressee (&lt;em&gt;I, you, we&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Place deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: those that refer to spatial context (&lt;em&gt;here, there&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: these that refer to temporal context (&lt;em&gt;now, then, verb tense markers&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discourse deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: those that refer to parts of unfolding discourse (&lt;em&gt;next, below, furthermore&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Social deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: those that encode aspects of the social relationship between speaker and addressee (&lt;em&gt;Her Majesty&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perceptual deixis&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;There's Harry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-28T09:51:53.327" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T09:51:53.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1709" CreationDate="2012-03-27T21:01:10.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; are demonstrative pronouns. The sentences &quot;I would be more tired&quot; and &quot;I actually ended up being&quot; have the same syntactic function as &quot;this&quot; and &quot;that&quot; would have. But, being full clauses (instead of simple pronouns), they are classified as subordinate or dependent clauses. In your examples, they function as direct objects of the verb &quot;think&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in your second example, the word &quot;that&quot; is also being used to introduce one of the subordinate clauses. But, in that case, it is a subordinating conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-03-27T21:01:10.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1709" CreationDate="2012-03-27T23:35:44.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Otavio is right. These are demonstrative pronouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deictic Expressions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, having meaning &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; in the contexts of the actual speech act. They're only a small fraction of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Paradigm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deictic paradigms&lt;/a&gt; that English used to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on deictic expressions, see Fillmore's classic &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/1-MayWeComeIn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;May We Come In?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/4-Deixis-I.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;description of deixis&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/FillmoreDeixisLectures.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Deixis Lectures&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-03-27T23:35:44.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-28T07:07:57.907" Score="7" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a constraint on which arguments can co-occur in a construction such as a causative/applicative/ditransitive. It might cause a combination of persons to be ungrammatical or to be unavailable for processes like cliticization/agreement. It is a restriction that one argument must be &quot;more local&quot; in personhood, where 1(&gt;)2&gt;3. In Hakha Lai, the language I am interested in, you cannot use (most) applicatives in cases where the applicative object is less local than the theme. This is possibly because the verb wants to agree with the more local argument in general in HL, but the applicative also is highly prioritized for agreement (and other processes which enhance topicality). In the causative construction, this problem does not arise because there is default agreement with the causee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you cannot have a third person applicative object if the theme (direct object) is first or second person, and there is a weaker violation if the applicative is second person and the theme is first person. So, here would be the HL pattern, with the theme in bold and the (benefactive) applicative in italics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ok He followed &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ok He followed &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ok He followed &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ?? He followed &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * He followed &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * He followed &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; for &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if any languages with more robust person distinctions, for example a an inclusive/exclusive distinction, have a PCC. I would be interested in knowing whether there are any unique effects, for example if inclusive is more local than exclusive, whether it patterns with 1st rather than 2nd, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T13:59:18.190" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T13:59:18.190" Title="Are there languages with PCC effects and a more developed person system?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-28T07:31:54.097" Score="4" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may not even be accurate to call it &quot;slang&quot;...&#xA;I am working on a filtering system that blocks pornography.&#xA;I have a set of key words and phrases in English. Essentially, I would like to have the equivalent of these words and phrases in various languages.  I considered trying to use Google Translate but was unsure how accurate it would be on the wide range of slang naughty words and phrases I have.&#xA;I thought about posting it as a job on Elance but I am unsure if someone on there will be able to do significantly better than I could using the right slang translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?  Ideas?  Web site links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="876" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-01T13:27:27.103" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T17:35:49.143" Title="What is the best way to accurately translate slang?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1715" CreationDate="2012-03-28T11:04:32.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be going at this the wrong way. Naughty words are naughty because they are used in a naughty manner, not because of what they actually mean, or used to mean. If we look at general swearwords, where they're taken from depends very much on culture. Where I am from, the bad, native swearwords are religious in theme: satan, hell, damn you etc. Swearwords realted to  bodily functions and sex are much rarer, many borrowed from English actually. In Brussels, some use the word &quot;architect&quot; as a swearword. Considering some of the architecture there and the history of how those buildings came about, that is very understandable. Due to some of the architecture that have turned up where I live, I've started using &quot;architect&quot; as a swearword myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think you are looking for is &lt;em&gt;euphemisms&lt;/em&gt;, inoffensive words being used as stand-ins for offensive words. Euphemisms is a rich source of new naughty words, as the offensive meaning &quot;rubs off&quot;, and then the euphemism needs a euphemism of its own. You'd need some way of discovering words that mean soft, words for anything that resembles a stick, and words for temperatures above normal at least, but this is fascinatingly unpredictable really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest would probably be to find porn-sites in various languages, sort them on language, get the text-content and use that to train a learning spam-filter. (You'll need text from non-porn sites too). Then see if you can pick out words or preferrably several word-pairs or word-triplets from that that are good indicators of &quot;porniness&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now for the obligatory reference in this case ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quang Phúc Ðông: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://douglemoine.com/english-sentences-without-overt-grammatical-subjects/&quot;&gt;English sentences without overt grammatical subject&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, South Hanoi Institute of Technology, Hanoi, 1967&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-28T12:33:10.997" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T12:33:10.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-28T15:44:52.193" Score="5" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question occurred to me when studying Optimality Theory phonology. For reduplication in OT, the base of the stem (/reduplicated part) is taken to be the input for the reduplicated morph. However, sometimes the base and reduplicant differ. For example, if I was reduplicating a word like &quot;ban&quot; /ban-REDUP/ in a language with homorganic nasals, the result might come out as /bamban/. In OT, this is unexpected (the nasals are not in correspondence between the base and the reduplicant), although of course with a rule ordering approach one could have nasal assimilation occur later. Apparently this is also attested for processes of syncope, where in the surface form the stem has lost a vowel which the reduplicant contains. (I will find the real examples from actual languages later.) I should note, for (most?) other processes, it seems like the reduplicant &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; based off the surface form of the base. So, if the base contains an environment that triggers nasal harmony, the reduplicant will also appear nasalized even if the nasalization trigger is not copied and there is no other trigger for nasalization that could be affecting the reduplicant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, my question is: are certain processes more likely to be surface true cross-linguistically? If so, why? My intuition is that in some cases these effects might be phonetic, or closer to phonetic than phonological. NC assimilation and syncope certainly seem to be more &quot;surface-y&quot; and production-oriented than things like vowel/nasal harmony, etc, although I am not sure of how to formalize that intuition.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I'm not sure whether &quot;reduplicant&quot; is the real/correct word for a reduplicated morph. Please fix if there is a better term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE Here are the real reduplication examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Manam&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;malaboŋ-RED --&gt; malabom-boŋ 'species of flying fox' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;zim-RED-i --&gt; zin-zim-i 'it is black' &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the reduplicated suffix is more faithful to the input than the base, since the presumed base shows nasal assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Klamath&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;RED-poli:-ḱa --&gt; po-pli:ḱa 'little policeman (DIST)' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;RED-mbodý-dk --&gt; mbo-mpditk 'wrinkled up (DIST)' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;RED-pniw-abć-a --&gt; pni-pno:pća 'blow out (DIST)' &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that in the surface forms, syncope has occurred in the base but not the reduplicated morph. But the reduplicant must be able to copy the stem's vowel before syncope occurs... note that it cannot be the case that they are filled in with a default vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, here is the 'normal' state of affairs, in which the reduplicant seems to be copied from the surface representation of the stem (=the base).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Javanese&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;/abur/ &lt;br&gt;&#xA;RED-abʊr --&gt; a.&lt;strong&gt;bʊ&lt;/strong&gt;.r-a.bʊr &lt;br&gt;&#xA;c.f. RED-abur-e --&gt; a.bu.r-a.bu.re &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this language, /i, u/ become lax /ɪ, ʊ/ in a closed syllable. Reduplicants show lax vowels (bolded in the above example) even when they end up not being in a closed syllable themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All examples from a handout from Gene Buckley)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-03-29T14:56:15.710" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T20:36:50.847" Title="Are certain phonological processes more likely to be surface true?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="682" CreationDate="2012-03-28T18:07:05.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;monogenesis hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;, which holds that there was &lt;em&gt;a single language from which all other languages of the world came out&lt;/em&gt;, is false.  The languages of the world include several hundred signed languages, which one can no more ignore than Austronesian or Agglutinating languages.  It is beyond doubt that these signed languages arise spontaneously under certain conditions and have done so many times&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.  In at least one case, ISN of Nicaragua, researchers have documented every step of the mechanism of language creation, not “from nothing”, but by reanalyzing and reorganizing gestural communication into the hierarchical linguistic structure of human language&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. At bare minimum, language provably arose without input from any existing human language, signed or spoken&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, once in the 1980s and once in prehistory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A weaker version of monogenesis for spoken languages only, would be more interesting and would:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain how this known mechanism of language genesis would generate spoken language, with its obligatory gestural components; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;propose some alternative to this known mechanism, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain why it would only operate once in the case of spoken language. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Goldin-Meadow, S. The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. New York: Psychology Press, 2003.&lt;br&gt; &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;: Tomasello, M (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard University Press.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; Hurford, James, 2001. The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution II. Oxford University Press.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; Kegl, J., A. Senghas, and M. Coppola 1999 Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua In M. DeGraff, (Ed.), Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development. Cambridge MIT Press, 179-237. &lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="803" LastEditDate="2012-04-15T19:30:10.877" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T19:30:10.877" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1714" CreationDate="2012-03-28T23:52:50.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preliminarily, I've found in Nevins 2007 five examples which have PCC and inclusive-exclusive, and this distinction never plays a role in conditioning PCC effects. Nevins argues this is because [addressee] (the feature distinguishing inc/exc) is privative. Since his theoretical framework (multiple agree) permits only marked or contrastive features can play a role in PCC, and only binary features can be marked or contrastive, [addressee] is not expected to play any role. I presume based on his description (although he does not explicitly say so) that in these languages first person inclusive patterns with first person, not second person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FIRST PERSON INCL = FIRST PERSON EXCL &lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) &lt;strong&gt;Kiowa&lt;/strong&gt; (Kiowa-Tanoan family; Daniel Harbour, pers. comm., Nov. 2005) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &lt;strong&gt;Passamaquoddy&lt;/strong&gt; (Algonquian family; Leavitt, 1996, Benjamin Bruening and Conor Quinn, pers. comm. March 2006) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) &lt;strong&gt;Yimas&lt;/strong&gt; (Foley, 1991: 212-214) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) &lt;strong&gt;Walpiri&lt;/strong&gt; (Pama-Nyungan; Hale, 1973: 332-338, Julie Legate &amp;amp; pers. comm. May 2006) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;5) &lt;strong&gt;Chinook&lt;/strong&gt; (Silverstein, 1976: 190-194) &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently investigating: Tseltal (thanks to Aaron for reference)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastActivityDate="2012-03-28T23:52:50.047" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2012-03-28T23:52:50.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2012-03-29T00:06:44.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found an example of a language in which onsets matter for stress placement. It's Piraha (of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the syllables are subject to a prominence system, whereby long vowels&gt;short vowels, and among syllables of the same vowel length, voiceless onset&gt;voiced onset&gt;onsetless. (There are no onsetless short syllables.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full prominence system would be: (T=any voiceless consonant; D=any voiced consonant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TVV &gt; DVV &gt; VV &gt; TV &gt; DV (&gt; V)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stress is assigned to one of the last three syllables in a word, according to prominence. In cases of equal prominence, the rightmost syllable wins. I give a few examples below, with stress indicated by boldface type (tonal distinctions not marked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) bi &lt;strong&gt;gi&lt;/strong&gt;  'earth' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) pao hoa &lt;strong&gt;hai&lt;/strong&gt; 'anaconda' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) &lt;strong&gt;baa&lt;/strong&gt; gi so 'many' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;4) ʔi &lt;strong&gt;poi&lt;/strong&gt; hi 'woman' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;5) ho &lt;strong&gt;ao&lt;/strong&gt; ba 'give' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;6) &lt;strong&gt;ʔa&lt;/strong&gt; ba gi 'toucan' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;7) &lt;strong&gt;pii&lt;/strong&gt; gai ia 'scissors' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;8) &lt;strong&gt;kaa&lt;/strong&gt; gai 'word' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;9) &lt;strong&gt;kao&lt;/strong&gt; ba bai 'almost fell' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;10) bii gao &lt;strong&gt;baa&lt;/strong&gt; 'commonly called'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user325" LastEditorDisplayName="user325" LastEditDate="2012-03-29T00:30:48.933" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T00:30:48.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2012-03-29T01:43:14.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, concerning how some of these data will be analyzed in OT. In &quot;classical&quot; OT, markedness constraints were only evaluated on surface representations, and faithfulness constraints were only evaluated on pairs of input/output representations. As it turns out, the analysis of reduplication is one area that led to the development of different types of faithfulness constraints. Correspondence Theory (&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&amp;amp;context=linguist_faculty_pubs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;McCarthy &amp;amp; Prince 1995&lt;/a&gt;) generalizes the notion of faithfulness constraints, so that they can apply to other types of pairing, including Base/Reduplicant. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/jjmccart/fixed.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Alderete et al (1999)&lt;/a&gt; you can find a discussion of how IO and BR faithfulness constraints can interact to account for differing phonotactic characteristics in Reduplicants versus in other parts of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the key to handling the examples you have provided is to note that Faith(BR) compares &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; the Underlying Representation of the base or the surface Representation of the base with the surface form of the reduplicant (thanks to @Aerlinthe for pointing this out). In the Manam examples Faith(UR of base/Reduplicant) would be outranked by a gemeral markedness constraint banning non-homorganic nasal-obstruent sequences.&#xA;This doesn't appear to be a real problem for OT. Tellingly, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rci.rutgers.edu/~phonolab/handbook/chapters.php?chapter=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Urbanczyk's (2007)&lt;/a&gt; chapter on Reduplication, she discusses the Manam data but doesn't bother to remark on the nasal assimilation in the base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the main part of the question: are there processes which tend towards being surface true? Probably the more fruitful way of asking the question is: which types of processes will tend to result in opacity? (you will get more hits if you search for opacity in google) When you have opacity, there are two interacting processes, such that one of them covers up the conditioning environment of the other (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://udel.edu/~heinz/classes/2011/607/materials/Bakovic-2010-Opacity-and-Ordering.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bakovic 2011&lt;/a&gt;'s citation of Kiparsky 1973 (which is notoriously difficult to find) for a clearer definition). If one of these was nasal place assimilation, then we would find rule-conditioned homorganic nasal-obstruent sequences alongside non-homorganic nasal-obstruent sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation is probably rare because it just happens to be difficult to produce a nonhomorganic nasal-obstruent sequence. A process like vowel harmony, on the other hand, is different, since it is not especially difficult to produce, say, a [+ATR] vowel and a [-ATR] vowel in consecutive syllables (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://rci.rutgers.edu/~phonolab/handbook/chapters.php?chapter=15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Archangeli &amp;amp; Pulleyblank 2007&lt;/a&gt; for discussion of some examples of opacity in vowel harmony. There would be no strong articulatory pressure against an opaque rule interaction involving vowel harmony like there would with nasal place assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that your initial intuition is correct: by &quot;surfacy&quot; you mean strongly motivated by non-mentalistic physical factors (articulatory, aerodynamic, acoustic). While most phonological rules have some kind of physical basis, some rules have a stronger basis than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-03-29T19:28:40.037" LastActivityDate="2012-03-29T19:28:40.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1726" CreationDate="2012-03-30T07:34:09.083" Score="8" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Danish, Nynorsk, or Bokmål, but will sometimes, on coming across a writing sample of one of them, wish to know which it is. How do I distinguish them in their written forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd include Swedish in the question also, but I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I can already distinguish that by its &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt;, and lack of &lt;em&gt;ø&lt;/em&gt;. (Is that correct?) But if anyone knows another way to distinguish it from the others, that'd be great, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T08:07:38.930" Title="How can I distinguish modern Scandinavian languages at a glance?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1725" CreationDate="2012-03-30T07:34:22.547" Score="4" ViewCount="853" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Dutch, Flemish, or Afrikaans, but will sometimes, on coming across a writing sample of one of them, wish to know which it is. How do I distinguish them in their written forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T13:01:35.700" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T17:27:23.293" Title="How can I distinguish Dutch from Flemish from Afrikaans at a glance?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1724" CreationDate="2012-03-30T07:53:39.423" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written texts in Flanders, such as newspaper articles, are so close to standard Dutch that you are unlikely to be able to distinguish them except by context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afrikaans is different and the more Dutch you learn the easier it is.  An instant clue is the use of &lt;em&gt;-y-&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. instead of &lt;em&gt;-ij-&lt;/em&gt;).  The use of &lt;em&gt;'n&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;een&lt;/em&gt; as the indefinite article and &lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; as a definite article will also stand out, as does the very different spellings of pronouns.  And then it goes on.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="881" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T07:53:39.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2012-03-30T08:07:38.930" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct about Swedish. But a non-Swedish text may contain Swedish parts, dialogue by a Swede for instance, and then you might find ä and ö.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Danish uses &quot;at&quot; where Norwegian (both forms) uses &quot;å&quot;. It is the infinitive marker, used much as &quot;to&quot; in English. Danish isn't very fond of diphthongs either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nynorsk and Bokmål is harder. The vocabulary of bokmål and nynorsk are not identical. The personal pronouns for instance are not all the same, here's some of the differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;         1st sing 1st plural 2rd plural 3rd plural&#xA;Bokmål:  jeg      vi         dere       de&#xA;Nynorsk: eg       vi/me/oss  de/dykk    dei&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users of Bokmål collapse the feminine and masculine genders into a common gender, using the inflections of the masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nynorsk inflected words are less likely to end with -n, or -t and more likely to end with a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nynorsk in general uses more diphthongs, and different diphthongs in some places. For instance in some strong verbs the past tense forms uses different diphthongs: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;         infinitive present    simple past   past perfect&#xA;Bokmål:  å krype -  kryper   - krøyp/krøp  - har krøpet&#xA;Nynorsk: å krype -  kryp(er) - kraup       - har krope/kropi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The dialect I &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; most of the time uses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;         å krype -  kryper   - krøyp       - har krypi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might consider this to reveal my political stance :)&#xA;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good Nynorsk can be quite different from Bokmål grammatically but Nynorsk translated from Bokmål uses Bokmål grammar. I know good Nynorsk when I see it but I don't get to see it very often so I can't give you any &quot;look for this&quot; tips :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am Norwegian and have not studied Norwegian after high school. I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; read a reference grammar though, in order to write a recognizer: Faarlund, J.T. Norsk Referansegrammatikk. Universitetsforlaget, 1997.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-30T08:07:38.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1727" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1729" CreationDate="2012-03-30T21:03:59.473" Score="3" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his great answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1723/how-can-i-distinguish-modern-scandinavian-languages-at-a-glance&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/119/kaleissin&quot;&gt;kaleissin&lt;/a&gt; alluded to something that I've been particularly interested in, so I want to turn it into a question of its own to all Norwegian and non-Norwegian contributors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(The dialect I speak most of the time uses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    å krype -  kryper   - krøyp       - har krypi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some might consider this to reveal my political stance :) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not so much interested in the sociolinguistic situation between written Bokmål and Nynorsk in general here (that has been described at length in the literature). My question is about casual spoken communication among Norwegians, especially among speakers of different local dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact sociolinguistic/political implication someone makes by using e.g. &lt;code&gt;har krypi&lt;/code&gt; over a somewhat more standard form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common and how &quot;politically charged&quot; is sticking to one's local dialect in spoken communication? Are there situations where someone might avoid a dialectal form of a participle e.g. in order to not make a political statement or maybe even come off as weird?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is it common to approximate each other linguistically or even switch to a codified &quot;standard&quot; form other than for reasons of mutual intelligibility in Norwegian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T10:15:30.180" Title="How does individual linguistic behavior relate to one's attitude of language politics in Norwegian?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="786" CreationDate="2012-03-31T01:05:58.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One further intriguing side note is given by &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=cm-VwKgY8jcC&amp;amp;lpg=PA379&amp;amp;ots=eSJWLmw38c&amp;amp;dq=dekm%20kmtom&amp;amp;pg=PA379#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=dekm%20kmtom&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quiles (2007)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...PIE &lt;strong&gt;kmtóm&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hundred&lt;/em&gt;, (probably from &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;dkmtóm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a zero-grade suffixed&#xA;  form of &lt;strong&gt;dékm&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;/em&gt;)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a view closely echoed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=nLIufwC4szwC&amp;amp;lpg=PA33&amp;amp;ots=DDKj54wO8o&amp;amp;dq=%22tom%22%20proto-indo-european&amp;amp;pg=PA33#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22tom%22%20proto-indo-european&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anthony (2007)&lt;/a&gt; but without the explicit reference to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut#Ablaut_in_Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ablaut&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Proto-Indo-European *&lt;em&gt;k’ṃtom&lt;/em&gt; probably was a shortened version of&#xA;  *&lt;em&gt;dek’ṃtom&lt;/em&gt;, a word that included the Proto-Indo-European root *&lt;em&gt;dek’ṃ&lt;/em&gt; 'ten'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;strong&gt;dékm&lt;/strong&gt; was an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;-grade form&lt;/a&gt; with a zero-grade form &lt;strong&gt;*dkm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;strong&gt;-tóm&lt;/strong&gt; was a suffix. Neither source conjectures as to its nature&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The initial d of &lt;strong&gt;*dkmtóm&lt;/strong&gt; was lost, presumably for phonotactic reasons as happened with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/d%CA%B0%C3%A9%C7%B5%CA%B0%C5%8Dm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*dʰ(é)ǵʰōm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those two sources essentially say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;hundred &amp;lt;- ten + suffix&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. . This is not a complete explanation, but it's certainly suggestive that two of the authors you mention essentially agree. We don't know the nature of the suffix but maybe it's better that we don't, rather than suggest things like &quot;ten-ness&quot; or &quot;units of&quot;. This would give &quot;ten&quot; as the older word from which &quot;hundred&quot; is derived, which makes sense culturally too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;In PIE a series of forms like *CéC, *CeC, *CóC, *CoC, *CC were related in a mechanism called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut#Ablaut_and_grammatical_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ablaut&lt;/a&gt; which was used to express grammatical function.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;Although I note that *&lt;em&gt;tom/tóm/tam&lt;/em&gt; is reconstructed as an accusative demonstrative or pronoun, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schleicher's fable&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-12-03T15:13:39.477" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T15:13:39.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1727" CreationDate="2012-03-31T10:15:30.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the record, Norwegian doesn't have a codified spoken form, which is probably why pronunciation-dictionaries are hard to come by. Some people from some areas like to imagine that their dialect is the standard, unfortunately for them the rest of the population does not oblige. What I find very revealing is that it seems common to regard dialects spoken far away as sounding nice, but those not one's own that is spoken just across the river as sounding horrible. I doubt that is solely a Norwegian phenomenon though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've lived in many parts of Norway thanks to being a &quot;military brat&quot; so I've been exposed to a lot of dialects. (I've also lived abroad for the same reason which is probably why I am fluent in English) So, my perspective might not be the same as somebody who's lived in the same region all their lives. For one, I don't consider any dialect to truly be ugly, and I tend to automatically adapt quite a bit to the dialect of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Politically, Nynorsk is associated with SP (center party, conservative and still dominated by farmers) and KrF (christian people's party, conservative and dominated by people from the south and west, wherefrom Nynorsk originally hails anyway). H (right, conservative) tends toward very conservative and sometimes reactionary Bokmål. V (left, liberal) use Bokmål. A former leader from V attempted to be folksy and hobnob with SP and KrF by moving his inflections nearer to Nynorsk but since he bungled it, hilarity ensued and the standup comedians had material for months. FrP (progress party, populist): I think the death of Nynorsk is part of their party program. AP (workers party, social democrats) and SV (social left, slightly more left-leaning social democrats), I associate them with Nynorsk-like  Bokmål and dialects. Then there's, hm, they used to be called RV (red election alliance, far left) and are now called Rødt (red, after they gobbled up more of the endless amount of tiny communist splinter parties) go for Radikal(t) Bokmål: the worker lingo of the eastern parts of Oslo, with lots of feminine gender (nouns ending in -a in the definite) and forms like &quot;krypi&quot;. In many ways it feels half way between Nynorsk and Bokmål. I don't have any language-associations for De Grønne (the greens). Other Norwegians will no doubt protest these associations, perhaps even loudly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radikalt Bokmål is the form I tend towards, and even tend to write in if I don't need to adapt to an audience. I can't speak any dialect cleanly anyway so it feels like a workable compromise to me. When I write to customers I normalize but when I write to colleagues I don't. Normalizing towards the written standards I guess is a way of showing distance, in the same way that it seems only the employees at the tax office and judges use &quot;De&quot; (3rd person plural pronoun being used for 2nd person singular) instead of &quot;du&quot; (2nd person singular). &quot;De&quot; adds &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; more distance than conservative Bokmål though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There used to be a campaign for Samnorsk, that is: the blending of Nynorsk and Bokmål. AFAIK that's been abandoned. It must have been pushed by the bureaucracy because I don't know of anyone who actually wanted Samnorsk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not particularly accepted is mixing the forms. Mixing krypi (nonstandard), krypte (weak form, nonstandard), krope/kropi (Nynorsk) and krøpet (Bokmål) while writing or speaking is taken for a lot of bad things: poor education, stupidity, low self-esteem, laziness etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligatory joke: During the second world war one of the ship convoys to Murmansk was attacked by German submarines. As the subs leave, it is discovered that one of the Norwegian ships is dead in the water and everybody expect the worst. A group is sent over, there's nobody on deck. Turns out the crew is all inside, and alive, though a bit worse for the wear. Asked what had been going on the reply was that they (the crew) hadn't really noticed any attack by any submarines as they had been busy &quot;discussing&quot; the spelling reform of 1938.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-03-31T10:15:30.180" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-31T16:24:44.453" Score="8" ViewCount="1857" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cultures, females and males speak different language varieties[1]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When retelling, for example, what a man said, would a female say it in the male variety or translate it into the female variety? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would a male do the same when retelling what a female said? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would behavior change depending on who is listening?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the genders speak each other's varieties at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I'm not sure if 'language' is the right word for this. I'm having an extremely hard time searching stackexchange or google for information about this topic, presumably because my word choice is too generic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually have great examples, just an inkling for various things I've read in the past. My assumption is that women speak language A and men speak language B, but perhaps the distinction in practice is much less severe than I imagined. I just found the Lakota example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language#Enclitics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language#Enclitics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not the best example to try and hear differences: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fdaG7ULqAo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fdaG7ULqAo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example that got me thinking about this was a language in which the women could essentially hum and still be understood. (It made the news recently because it seemed to refute Chomsky or something.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it makes sense for men to learn the women language from their mothers? At what point do boys start to use male words and grammar, or are they constantly corrected to speak that way? (if that is indeed real and not a faulty assumption on my part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="884" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-26T09:44:45.000" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T08:53:02.047" Title="In cultures where genders speak different language varieties, how do genders quote each other?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-03-31T22:15:40.573" Score="22" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, have a dedicated belief verb that one uses for describing &lt;em&gt;false&lt;/em&gt; beliefs.  For instance, in Mandarin, &lt;em&gt;yiwei&lt;/em&gt; is used to describe beliefs that the speaker wants to emphasize are false; &lt;em&gt;xiang&lt;/em&gt; is a neutral belief verb, like English 'think' and 'believe,' and can be used to describe &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; belief, regardless of whether the speaker considers it true or false.  (You might translate &lt;em&gt;yiwei&lt;/em&gt; into English as &quot;be under the mistaken impression that.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's been a lot of research on these verbs in developmental psychology.  (The question is, roughly, &quot;If a child grows up speaking a language that has a special false-belief verb, do they acquire the concept of false belief or the ability to think about false beliefs any faster?&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://pavlov.psyc.vuw.ac.nz/courses/Psyc%20415/415%20PAPERS%20FOR%202011/liu%20et%20al%202008%20a%20meta-analysis%20in%20china.pdf&quot;&gt;This meta-analysis refers to a number of studies on this question in Chinese languages&lt;/a&gt;, if anyone's interested.)  But I haven't seen any linguistic work on the subject.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone point me towards any linguistic work on false-belief verbs, in any language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-02T11:12:38.803" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T04:56:07.170" Title="False-belief verbs" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-01T04:13:29.267" Score="8" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard it said that most utterances we encounter on a day-to-day basis are novel.  That is, the individual has never heard that exact sentence before in their life.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that the source of this productivity mostly comes from which words we slot into the grammatical categories (noun, verb....), not from hearing syntactic sequences we've never heard before (novel trees).  Is this correct?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To clarify, I'm talking about how often we encounter new derivations that fit with our existing syntactic rule systems, not novel grammatical constructions that have gained societal currency.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="886" LastEditorUserId="886" LastEditDate="2012-05-11T22:10:59.990" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T00:28:26.337" Title="How often does an individual encounter a novel linguistic construction?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="243" CreationDate="2012-04-02T05:19:23.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Signed languages don't have &lt;em&gt;counterparts to&lt;/em&gt; phones and phonetics, they have phones and phonetics.  We quit using “chereme” because it was found to be inaccurate. Stokoe (1965) coined the term for the combinatorial parts of signs in his original analysis—location, handshape and movement—and these have since been taken as “phonemes” of signed language, but this is a misconception.  Phonemes are temporal segments; location, handshape and movement happen at the same time, so cheremes and phonemes were two different things.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to use  “chereme” to replace a word used with speech, the word would be “parameter”,  Phonemes are described in terms of parameters, e.g. place, manner, voicing ...  that are satisfied by specific phonetic features, and Stokoe's parameters are basically the same.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Place or Location—in the mouth or on the body; &#xA;Configuration—of the articulator, hand shape or tongue shape; &#xA;Manner—of movement, mainly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonetic features that fulfill these parameters occur simultaneously in bundles: English /L/ = {alveolar, lateral, aproximant}; ASL “black” = {forehead, index finger, move sideways}.  A narrow phonetic description of the sign would include a [+/- bent] feature for each finger; if I produced that sign, you would see a phone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of research has been done on this. Besides the M&amp;amp;H Model of sign phonology, several others are&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hand Tier Model, Sandler &amp;amp; Lillo-Martin 2006,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dependency Model, van der Hulst 1993,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Prosodic Model, Brentari, 1998  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521482488&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Language-Linguistic-Universals-Wendy-Sandler/dp/0521482488&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T05:19:23.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2012-04-02T06:35:33.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1502/definitions-of-phoneme&quot;&gt;“Definitions of phoneme”&lt;/a&gt; in the context of a spoken language is not unanimous.&#xA;SIL's definition above is good, but if the language has no sound system, do like Steven says, find the contrastive units.  But there are problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8yzZO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two ASL signs formed by putting a pointer finger on the forehead and moving it sideways, where bending the finger at the end changes the meaning.  Each sign consists of an initial position, a movement and a final position. The contrastive feature is the +/- bent finger in the final segment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern notion of a phoneme is a temporal segment, so one can't say the finger, or just the handshape is a phoneme, we have to include the entire feature bundle: orientation;palm down, location;forehead, and everything else that happens simultaneously in that segment, would all be included as one phoneme. &#xA;With around a hundred contrastive handshapes, and the same number of locations, plus orientation, movement and facial expressions, there would be literally millions of such “phonemes”, and this sort of defeats the purpose of having them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one takes an older, Bloomfieldian definition of “phoneme” any contrastive element counts (e.g. Chinese tones), so just the bent index finger alone would be a “phoneme”. But that's even worse!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, phoneme theory has nothing to offer sign linguistics, and every &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=10&amp;amp;sqi=2&amp;amp;ved=0CH4QFjAJ&amp;amp;url=http://ureca.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/sparrow/docs/phonolog_signed_language.pdf&amp;amp;ei=JEd5T79yjLe3B9DxwC8&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHuLY0h8KFOc73F2usVCMNQ40IERw&amp;amp;sig2=xCbDKTlwTiTT8F2zrZDaTQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;model of signed structure&lt;/a&gt; is feature-based and uses autosegmental or other non-linear phonology.  Upshot is, no phonemes in signed languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T06:35:33.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1739" CreationDate="2012-04-02T11:32:08.443" Score="7" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1735/51&quot;&gt;Joe Martin's enlightening answer to the question &quot;Are there counterparts to phones and phonetics for signed languages?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; I immediately began to wonder how much further spoken and signed phones' similarities might go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in all spoken languages the phones can be divided into vowels and consonants (plus the small category of semivowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further all spoken languages' vowels can be analysed various ways such as monophthong / diphthong / triphthong; high / low + front / back + rounded or not + some other features. Consonants are usually graphed with the major features of &quot;place of articulation&quot; on the X-axis and &quot;manner of articulation&quot; on the Y-axis, and other features being treated in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is &lt;strong&gt;Are there any generally accepted counterparts to these systems that are applied to all signed languages generally?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And don't worry, I'm not asking whether sign languages have &quot;voiced&quot; and &quot;unvoiced&quot;, or any other exact counterpart to any specific aspect of spoken languages, if signed languages are divided into one or five parts where spoken languages are broken into the two of vowel and consonant is just as interesting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T02:45:34.533" Title="Is there a cross-linguistic subdivision of phones in signed languages akin to how all spoken languages have vowel and consonant phones?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-02T16:41:03.777" Score="7" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages count the same syllable as &quot;light&quot; or &quot;heavy&quot; depending on the phonological process in question.  For example, in Lhasa Tibetan, a CVC syllable ending in a sonorant is heavy for tone but light for stress (Gordon 2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: are there languages where either the syllable weight hierarchy is different for primary and secondary stress, or where the cut-off for which syllables are considered heavy or light is different for primary and secondary stress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="889" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T12:39:19.583" Title="Do any languages have different syllable weight criteria for primary and secondary stress?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2012-04-02T21:37:47.590" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One idea that's been going around at least since the 80s is that you can distinguish between &lt;em&gt;Holds&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Moves.&lt;/em&gt;  For instance, many signs have a Hold-Move-Hold structure -- you start with one handshape at one spot in the signing space, move your hand along a designated path, and end up with another handshape in another spot.  It's been suggested that a Hold-Move-Hold sign is akin to a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant syllable in spoken language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holds and Moves can also be described using sets of distinctive features, just as consonants and vowels are in spoken languages.  For instance, every Hold has a handshape component.  A signed language has a fixed inventory of handshapes (&lt;a href=&quot;http://jonathanfleming.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/asl-handshapes/&quot;&gt;here's the set for ASL&lt;/a&gt;), and you can find minimal pairs for handshape in signed languages just like you can find minimal pairs for voicing or point-of-articulation in spoken languages.  For signs where the active hand touches your other hand or your body, there's an inventory of possible &lt;em&gt;points of contact&lt;/em&gt;.  And so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like in spoken languages, different signed languages make use of different feature combinations. F'rinstance, a friend of mine who works on this stuff tells me that in Ban Khor Sign Language, spoken in Thailand, there are signs in which you touch your face with the pinky side of a flat hand (what's called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/signjpegs/f/flat.jpg&quot;&gt;B handshape&lt;/a&gt;).  In ASL, the B hand only ever makes contact with your face on the thumb-and-index-finger side.  So there are phonological patterns that are possible in Ban Khor Sign Language and not in ASL, and probably vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in Liddell and Johnson's &quot;ASL: The Phonological Base&quot; (you can read some good chunks of it &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=mfS3GlTLAUMC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA267&amp;amp;dq=liddell+sign+language+hold+move&amp;amp;ots=QqPiMC4aDz&amp;amp;sig=j4_CziEsCm2nie8BQ4FfXBWZFHI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=liddell%20sign%20language%20hold%20move&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; at Google Books), which goes into some detail on this stuff: the Hold/Move structure of signs, the features that constitute Holds and Moves, etc.  I don't think it's the state of the art anymore -- if there are any experts out there reading this, I hope they'll suggest something more current -- but it's a pretty cool, very readable article, and it gives you a feel for what a careful description of signed phonology might look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2012-04-02T21:49:07.200" LastActivityDate="2012-04-02T21:49:07.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1547" CreationDate="2012-04-03T03:06:30.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have commented, there is currently no general solution to this problem but there is existing best practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been lots of research in this area.  I would characterize this as straddling the line between computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education/testing theory. For example, a recent text on the subject is Shermis and Burnstein's &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=JIR6ihd7ZA4C&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Automated%20Essay%20Scoring%3a%20A%20Cross-disciplinary%20Perspective&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=lGJ6T5LEIeTv0gH67viGBA&amp;amp;ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Automated%20Essay%20Scoring%3a%20A%20Cross-disciplinary%20Perspective&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Automated Essay Scoring: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective&lt;/a&gt;. So this question is actually incredibly broad in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also existing systems that perform such analysis, notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://criterion.ets.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ETS's Criterion system&lt;/a&gt;.  A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/assets/PDF/AIMag25-03-004.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;complete description of that system&lt;/a&gt; can be found in the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence site. The approach is a little different than what you seem to assume in your question. It is statistical in nature; it doesn't parse the grammatical structure of the essays but rather compares characteristics of the essays to corpora of common bigrams (2-word strings) and essays with known scores. Analysis and scoring is performed using AI decision-making and voting algorithms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T03:06:30.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1752" CreationDate="2012-04-03T03:31:19.597" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which alternation between corresponding nasal and non-nasal vowels is used solely for grammatical purposes?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I speak of two vowels that &quot;correspond&quot; in this context, I mean two vowels that differ only by the feature plus or minus nasal.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the alternation I am referring to would obtain across most or all the vowels in the language, such that, to use a nonce example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)  /mezi, dize, noza, tezo, domu/ would all be in one tense, number, etc., and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b)  /mezĩ, dizẽ, nozã, tezõ, domũ/ would all be in another tense, number, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T23:40:25.427" Title="Are there any languages in which alternation between nasal and corresponding non-nasal vowels is used soley for grammatical purposes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1747" CreationDate="2012-04-03T03:46:32.933" Score="7" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have very many linguists studied the structure of sentence fragments used in informal conversation in a given language?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of informal conversation, we English speakers use lots of sentence fragments to answer questions (e.g.  (It's) &quot;In the barn,&quot; (It's) &quot;The roses.&quot;  (You can do/have/etc.) &quot;Whatever you want.&quot;  We also use fragments for other purposes, as in this fragment:  (Look out,) &quot;The wolf!&quot; (is back).  I imagine that the same is true in most languages.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some sentence fragments are clearly not permitted.  For example, we English speakers can't say &quot;Take the.&quot; (peas) for example.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since linguists professional linguists can document the types of structures that are and aren't permitted in a language, I wonder which syntacticians have studied sentence fragments in informal conversation, how much work has been done in this area.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T23:01:17.220" Title="Have very many linguists studied the structure of sentence fragments used in informal conversation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1734" CreationDate="2012-04-03T04:18:57.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, so please double check my answer.   To the best of my knowledge, you are more-or-less correct.   Though grammatical rules can change over time, and new words are added to a language over time, at any given moment,  speakers of a given variety of a language use a finite set of grammatical rules and a finite set of morphemes (meaningful parts of words such as roots and affixes) to generate a potentially limitless number of new utterances.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that the number of new utterances is potentially limitless is because languages allow certain structures to be added to the same structures over and over again indefinitely.  For example, in English, relative clauses can occur within relative clauses ad infinitum.  Thus, &quot;the cat that ate the rat&quot; can be revised to &quot;the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese&quot; to &quot;the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese that stank up the kitchen&quot; to &quot;the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese that stank up the kitchen in which I was trying to eat the pudding&quot; and so on indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult for lay people like myself to understand the details of this generative view of language.  However, it is worth noting that, in the course of everyday conversation, we would all be taken aback if we conversed with someone who used a small set of stock sentences to communicate with.  In fact, we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; all taken aback for this reason when we verbally interact with automated answering systems.   This just goes to show that all of us expect novel utterances when we converse with other people, aside from certain stock utterances like &quot;Yes!&quot; and &quot;Here we go again.&quot;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T04:18:57.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1742" CreationDate="2012-04-03T19:14:46.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Randy Thrasher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has. Details &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1500&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T19:14:46.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1748" CreationDate="2012-04-03T21:44:55.320" Score="15" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watching a movie recently I found I couldn't make out the dialogue because it was all whispered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turned the volume up, and had no problems hearing everything. It seems to me that all words are articulated normally when whispering - the only diference is the vocal cords aren't activated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? Is there anything you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; say properly in English or any other language without using your vocal cords?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-03T23:27:25.317" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T01:00:24.500" Title="Can all languages be &quot;whispered&quot; equally well?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-03T21:46:30.950" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any open source software to automatically extract information from a book: genre, style, location and time of the story, characters, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="895" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-08T01:26:33.723" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T01:26:33.723" Title="Book text analysis tools" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1742" CreationDate="2012-04-03T22:35:32.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course! The usual term is a (sentence) fragment, some started using the term &quot;nonsententials&quot;. What language(s) are you interested in? What syntactic theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to start with, based on English, purely descriptive. Have a look at section 14.3 The constructional principles of spoken grammar in the monumental &quot;Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English&quot;, esp. 14.3.3. Syntactic non-clausal units and 14.3.4 Ellipsis in clausal units. Or &quot;From utterance to discourse&quot; in the &quot;Cambridge Grammar of English&quot; by Carter and McCarthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a cross-linguistic point of view, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/la.93/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary perspectives&lt;/a&gt;, eds. Progovac, Ljiljana, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles, and Ellen Barton. 2006. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-04-03T23:01:17.220" LastActivityDate="2012-04-03T23:01:17.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1745" CreationDate="2012-04-03T23:14:38.093" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've done a couple of little experiments on the identification of stop consonants in whispered speech, though I haven't published the results or even fully analyzed the data, and don't know if I ever will. One of them was with a single Gengbe speaker, and the other was with 15 Korean speakers (if my memory serves me correctly). With that caveat in mind, I'll venture some guesses about whispered speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that whisperers articulate stop consonants in such a way that the aerodynamic effect of producing them is similar to normal speech. In normal speech voiced consonants have less pressure buildup behind the closure than do voiceless consonants phonation will not occur with too high of a transglottal flowrate. In whispered speech I think that talkers produce a voiced stop so that it has a pressure gradient across the constriction similar to what would be experienced if phonation were occurring. Listeners can then identify a voicing contrast by the intensity of the release burst. I think this is true because for both the Gengbe and Korean participants, identification of voicing/laryngeal contrasts was best for velar stops. Velar stops have a higher burst intensity overall than stops at other places of articulation, so differences between more and less intense bursts will be more palpable. Identification for Gengbe was worst for labial velar stops, which have a very faint burst release, and Korean labial stops were also poorly distinguished. Korean listeners were also able to distinguish at better than chance rates the fortis-lenis distinction, and I think that they were able to make use of duration differences to help with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Place of articulation is determined by spectral properties of the speech signal which do not require periodic excitation of the oral cavity, so we would predict that vowel and consonant place of articulation information is well preserved in whispered speech, and I didn't find anything to contradict this. Gengbe makes a distinction between lamino-dental and apico-alveolar voiced stops, and these two were never confused by my participant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As expected, tonal contrasts are very poorly preserved, and my Gengbe participant could not distinguish at better than chance rates high and low tones. I don't think tonal contrasts should be ruled out altogether: one could in principle differentiate tones by altering the tension of the pharyngeal walls, making the airflow more or less turbulent, though this is just speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can contribute any references to published work on perception of whispered speech, I'd love to see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-04-04T01:00:24.500" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T01:00:24.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1750" CreationDate="2012-04-04T05:49:15.153" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a multi-sentence direct quote be a single complement of &quot;say,&quot; &quot;write,&quot; etc.?&#xA;For example, in this  utterance...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He said &quot;Forget the map.  Just find the rascal.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...do the two directly quoted sentences constitute a single complement of the verb &quot;said&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-04-04T06:18:18.720" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T06:18:18.720" Title="Can more than one directly quoted sentence be a complement of &quot;say&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1749" CreationDate="2012-04-04T06:17:42.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I see no problem, neither with the typography nor with your analysis. You will see that such block quotations are often used in books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, you could say that &lt;em&gt;he said&lt;/em&gt; is a complete sentence. Then the quotation that follows is seen as syntactically independent, the connection being purely semantic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would not be my choice, because both the lack of an object to &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; and the lack of sentence-ending punctuation after it point to a syntactic connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, punctuation is only punctuation; and it must be admitted that the use of &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; with direct (quoted) speech is syntactically different from &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; with indirect speech (&lt;em&gt;that ...&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-04-04T06:17:42.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="781" CreationDate="2012-04-04T12:12:26.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about specific cases of &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement, but Japanese allows long-distance scrambling out of a quotative clause, which seems to be a positive answer to your question. For instance, here's an example adapted from Saito (1992):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Sono hon-o]_i    Hanako-ga    [CP Taroo-ga t_i katta to]     omotteiru.&#xA;that book-ACC     Hanako-NOM   Taro-NOM         bought QUOT   think&#xA;'Hanako thinks Taro bought that book.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I don't think I've ever heard of quotative clauses being islands, so I'd expect in &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement languages with quotatives you'll be able to do the type of extractions you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saito, M. (1992). 'Long Distance Scrambling in Japanese.' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/n5571214r33127x3/abstract/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journal of East Asian Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 1(1): 69-118.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="897" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T20:38:01.953" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T20:38:01.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2012-04-04T18:33:43.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we overlook the word &quot;solely&quot; in your question for now, then yes this does occur. Kamil's example from Polish is on point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;kobieta [-a]&lt;/code&gt; '&lt;strong&gt;woman&lt;/strong&gt;' nom. sg.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;kobieto [-o]&lt;/code&gt; '&lt;strong&gt;oh woman!&lt;/strong&gt;' voc. sg.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;kobietą [-õ]&lt;/code&gt; '&lt;strong&gt;with a woman&lt;/strong&gt;' instr. sg.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;kobietom [-om]&lt;/code&gt; '&lt;strong&gt;to the women&lt;/strong&gt;' dative pl.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where between the vocative and instrumental the only difference is the nasality of the final vowel. This is a regular alternation in Polish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Polish also uses &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-nasal distinctions for inflections (e.g. &lt;code&gt;kobieta&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;kobieto&lt;/code&gt;); and nasality is used for lexical distinctions as well (e.g. &lt;code&gt;to&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;tą&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T23:40:25.427" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T23:40:25.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1759" CreationDate="2012-04-05T04:36:19.857" Score="4" ViewCount="1190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's traditionally been held to be more on the synthetic side of the spectrum, but why? Are there any quantitative analyses to back this up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="899" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T16:46:01.653" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T19:12:59.397" Title="Where is Welsh on the analytic/synthetic spectrum?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-05T11:00:50.700" Score="4" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a list of 'accent changes', or pronunciation inaccuracies, non-native English speakers commonly make when speaking English words.  The list would obviously be native language specific and it would be great of the information had the form of phoneme to phoneme mapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/03/16/generating-sounds-like-and-accented-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tool I wrote&lt;/a&gt; attempts to generate words (actually letter sequences that may or may not be existing English words) that sound-like the input word.  slike (the name of the tool) does a simple job of 'sounding' German and I would like to do a better job, as well as support other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="901" LastEditorUserId="901" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T13:27:31.187" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T13:27:31.187" Title="Patterns of accent changes by non-native English speakers" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1619" CreationDate="2012-04-05T13:50:32.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two books dealing with human performance on complex sentences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical competence and parsing performance by Bradley L. Pritchett.  A linguistics oriented book that looks at parse trees.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Understanding complex sentences, Native speaker variation in syntactic competence by Ngoni Chipere.  An experimental based book that considers the performance impact of human memory characteristics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="901" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T13:50:32.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1758" CreationDate="2012-04-05T15:07:39.673" Score="11" ViewCount="1515" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an IPA symbol for the sound you might make when you burn yourself or someone tells you a story about an injury they have&amp;mdash;when you suck your breath quickly through your teeth with your tongue pressed forward and to the roof of your mouth? What is the name of this sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T10:49:55.433" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T20:52:48.917" Title="Is there an IPA character for the sympathetic sucking in sound?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2012-04-05T16:44:03.737" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably you want the &quot;pipe&quot; character, ǀ, which represents the voiceless &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_click&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dental click&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know — it looks too much like a lowercase &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; but you wanted IPA.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-05T16:53:37.837" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T16:53:37.837" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2012-04-05T16:45:15.410" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The type of airstream mechanism you describe (air flowing  through the mouth and nose &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; the lungs rather than the other way around), is known as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound&quot;&gt;ingressive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It is denoted in IPA by a down arrow (↓) placed next to the consonant that has this feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By your description of the sound, I suppose it could be considered a pulmonic ingressive voiceless alveolar fricative and its symbol in the IPA would be [s↓]. But I don't think there is any language in which that sound is used for linguistic purposes, as opposed to paralinguistic purposes, such as reacting to a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only attested use of a phonemic pulmonic ingressive is a lateral fricative in Damin, a ritual language formerly used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. This can be written with the extended version of the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɬ↓].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-04-05T16:45:15.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1753" CreationDate="2012-04-05T21:19:03.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ref.by/refs/29/4840/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Welsh Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Welsh is an analytic language and that the relation of one word to another is conveyed by the  use  of prepositions or by the placing of the word  in  the  sentence.  It does imply, however, that there was a shift from a synthetic Brythonic language to the modern analytic Welsh language some time around 600 AD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-05T17:21:04.110" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T17:21:04.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1761" CreationDate="2012-04-06T02:32:09.963" Score="10" ViewCount="4556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to research methods of identifying or pattern matching names of characters in a novel or a general body of text, but so far my search has been unsuccessful, since &quot;character&quot; refers to those of the alphabet in context with &quot;pattern match&quot;. Some ideas I've had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find any set of repeated words in Title Case&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This causes a problem with &quot;Was Phileas Fogg rich?&quot; by matching &quot;Was&quot; however&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_verb&quot;&gt;transitive verbs&lt;/a&gt; that are unique to people, such as: &quot;Jack said&quot;, &quot;replied Jack&quot;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This won't find characters mentioned in passing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="903" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T10:49:29.693" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T10:49:29.693" Title="How to identify character names in a body of text?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1760" CreationDate="2012-04-06T08:27:24.580" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the natural language processing (NLP) task of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named-entity_recognition&quot;&gt;named entity recognition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have observed, creating a bunch of heuristics will get you a long way, but not the whole way. Following modern trends in NLP, the best-performing approaches in this problem learn statistical models from data, rather than functioning off hand-written rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An adequate statistical model will automatically learn some of the rules that you would otherwise have to define by hand, for example, &quot;a word following a verb in title case is probably a name&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NLP group at Stanford has a state-of-the-art &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml&quot;&gt;named entity recogniser&lt;/a&gt; based on conditional random fields (a machine learning technique). The models it includes are for the more general problem of recognising People, Locations and Organisations, but you can filter the output for People only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T08:32:25.433" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T08:32:25.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-06T10:47:29.010" Score="11" ViewCount="1720" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has seemed to me (though I might be wrong) that languages usually take either &lt;em&gt;prepositions&lt;/em&gt; (English, German, Spanish) or &lt;em&gt;postpositions&lt;/em&gt; (Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish). (Yes I know sometimes a different term is used as for Chinese but those come before the noun like in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've noticed as I learn more about some languages that they have exceptions. For instance, English &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; acts much more like a postposition than a preposition (though dictionaries traditionally call it an adverb). Georgian, which I'm currently learning, has most postpositions. But it also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%92%E1%83%90%E1%83%A0%E1%83%94%E1%83%A8%E1%83%94&quot;&gt;გარეშე (gareshe)&lt;/a&gt;, which can be used as both postposition and preposition. I've also read that it has some prepositions borrowed from Russian but I haven't learned any of those yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this a case where &quot;there's an exception to every rule&quot; and most languages turn out to have a few instance of the opposite &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_and_postposition&quot;&gt;adposition&lt;/a&gt; to how they are usually classified, or have I chanced to bump into some of the rare exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T11:13:43.033" Title="How usual is it for languages to have both prepositions and postpositions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2012-04-06T11:01:50.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mentioned Chinese: I assume you're referring to the traditional category of &lt;em&gt;coverbs&lt;/em&gt;, which indeed are basically prepositions which happen to descend diachronically from verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think Mandarin does also exhibit the behaviour you're interested in. The Mandarin equivalent of a PP like English &quot;inside the car&quot; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;在    车子     里面&#xA;zài   chēzi   lǐmiàn&#xA;at    car     inside&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;limian&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;localiser&lt;/em&gt;, which in Chinese syntax follows the NP it modifies, making it similar to a postposition. However, for the phrase to behave as a VP modifier, it must be preceded by the preposition &lt;em&gt;zai&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English prepositions specify a spatial/temporal relationship relative to the NP it modifies. Chinese syntax uses the dummy preposition &lt;em&gt;zai&lt;/em&gt; and leaves it to the localiser to specify a spatial/temporal relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;: A note on whether it's common or not for languages to have both pre- and post-positions: according to generative linguistics, the head parameter should determine whether adpositions in a language follow or precede their noun phrase, and the head parameter cannot take on two values at once. That theory would predict that it would not be common for languages to have both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T12:20:46.517" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T12:20:46.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2012-04-06T17:00:45.407" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin has many examples of postpositions but was characteristically a prepositional language: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cum&lt;/strong&gt; (and rarely some other prepositions) can come either before or after its object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;mēcum   / cum  mē   quocum     / cum  quo     quoad    / ad quo  &#xA;me with / with me   which with / with which   which to / to which  &#xA;&quot;with me&quot;           &quot;with which&quot;              &quot;to which&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;causā&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;grātiā&lt;/strong&gt; come after their object (though these are in origin ablative nouns):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;exemplī grātiā           urbis causā&#xA;example sake-abl.        town  reason-abl. &#xA;&quot;for example&quot;            &quot;for the sake of the city&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and adjectives modifying prepositional objects can often precede the preposition, making a sort of bracketed construction:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;magnā cum  laude     magno cum  periculo   tristi cum  corde&#xA;great with praise    great with danger     sad    with heart&#xA;&quot;with great praise&quot;  &quot;at great risk&quot;       &quot;with a sad heart&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation obtained in Latin due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=g98ndC5vzi8C&amp;amp;lpg=PA286&amp;amp;ots=HJSYQUcqTI&amp;amp;dq=%22latin%20word%20order%22%20prepositions&amp;amp;pg=PA257#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=postposition&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;a transition in word order from earlier left-branching (head-final) to later right-branching (head-initial)&lt;/a&gt;. The related Italic languages Oscan and especially &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=lq-mkL23oh8C&amp;amp;lpg=PA32&amp;amp;ots=HdeNp2cEjo&amp;amp;dq=umbrian%20postpositions&amp;amp;pg=PA32#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=umbrian%20postpositions&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Umbrian had many more postpositions than Latin&lt;/a&gt;, for example. This supports jogloran's point in his answer that the head parameter of a language dictates whether it has post- or pre-positions; only during transitions will you find both. Of course, languages are always in transition :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-06T17:07:55.663" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T17:07:55.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2012-04-06T19:05:48.477" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an excellent article at &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-complex-is-tangut.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babelstone&lt;/a&gt; that explains this in great detail.  (Kudos to @blunders for already mentioning it.)  I'll try to summarize their findings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters show up in several different ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing directly from Chinese for either meaning or sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deriving from Chinese by adding or removing a few strokes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing from other Chinese-family scripts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inventing new characters unrelated to those in Chinese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which methods were used most depends on the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Khitan&lt;/strong&gt; is closest to Chinese, either borrowing or deriving most of its characters directly from Chinese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jurchen&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit further away, deriving its characters from both Khitan and Chinese.  Jurchen rarely borrows directly from Chinese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tangut&lt;/strong&gt; is the furthest -- it looks Chinese-ish, since it uses mostly the same types of strokes, but its characters are not clearly derived from either Chinese or Khitan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I'd say Khitan is probably the most like Kanji in its relationship to Chinese.  Tangut seems more like Hangul: an independent writing system that, because of its place in the Chinese cultural sphere, was made to look more or less Chinese-ish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-04-06T19:05:48.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2012-04-07T22:13:52.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;True automatic transcription is still nonexistent, unfortunately. The closest thing that I know of is this thing called Blitzscribe, which seems to be reasonably accurate (88–94%). This is what was/is used in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/projects/hsp.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Human Speechome Project&lt;/a&gt;, which is also very interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some sources for further reading: The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/publications/broy-interspeech2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Study on the success of Blitzscribe&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ted Talk&lt;/a&gt; by Deb Roy, the guy who started the Human Speechome Project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-04T16:32:39.953" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T16:32:39.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1746" CreationDate="2012-04-08T01:26:03.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This, generally speaking, corresponds to the fields of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;text mining&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_mining&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;entity extraction&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_extraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;automated (meta)data extraction&lt;/a&gt;. It's not part of linguistics &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;; it's more applied linguistics with relations to information science and library science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an enormously important field right now: consider, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books project&lt;/a&gt;. Google needs to be able to mine through thousands of scanned books to extract author, publisher, title, date, etc. so that it can create metadata to index the books with. &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.google.com/books/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;amp;answer=53549&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;They don't solely use text mining to do this&lt;/a&gt;, but it is one of the methods. I don't know if these methods are good enough to find genre, characters, etc., but it's a similar idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for software, I suggest starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_extraction#Free_or_open_source_software_and_services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of FOSS Information Extraction tools found in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; as a starting point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-04-08T01:26:03.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2012-04-08T10:48:17.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a more interesting example from russian language. It's pair &lt;strong&gt;класть&lt;/strong&gt;  and &lt;strong&gt;положить&lt;/strong&gt;. A literary version permits only &lt;strong&gt;класть&lt;/strong&gt; for imperfective form and &lt;strong&gt;положить&lt;/strong&gt; for perfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unliterary &lt;strong&gt;покласть&lt;/strong&gt; (perfective) and &lt;strong&gt;ложить&lt;/strong&gt;(imperfective) were also acceptibale in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C,%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8C&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=12&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;класть vs ложить&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8C,%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=12&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;положить vs покласть&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(sorry, I can't post the images with my reputation counter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is the really example of grammaticalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Класть&lt;/strong&gt; cognate with the &quot;to loot&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;ложить&lt;/strong&gt; with the &quot;to lie (lay, lain)&quot;. But this words have become synonymous in russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="911" LastEditorUserId="911" LastEditDate="2012-10-09T17:55:15.247" LastActivityDate="2012-10-09T17:55:15.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1773" CreationDate="2012-04-09T03:23:39.980" Score="9" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist in any way shape or form, but I am studying Japanese, and came across this linguistic issue that fascinates me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Japanese Language and Usage site&lt;/a&gt;, there is a discussion about a word &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/5183/is-flyjin-a-japanese-word-and-if-so-does-it-have-an-antonym&quot;&gt;flyjin&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word was create by taking a Japanese word, &quot;gaijin&quot;, which means &quot;foreigner&quot;, and swapping the &quot;gai&quot; part with the word &quot;fly&quot;. It means &quot;a foreigner who left Japan after the earthquake&quot;. It is a somewhat controversial word within the English speaking foreign community in Japan, but here I'm just focused on the linguistic aspects of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consensus is that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a Japanese word, since Japanese people don't use it. The issues that gave rise to the word are virtually unknown outside the English speaking subculture within the larger Japanese culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's a word that only exists &lt;em&gt;because of&lt;/em&gt; the Japanese language. Further, it's a word to describe a situation that only exists in Japan, and it defines an aspect of Japanese culture as seen from within a subculture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while it might at first seem that it's the combination of two languages, since &quot;gaijin&quot; is Japanese, and &quot;fly&quot; is English, I believe it's not quite that simple. &quot;Fly&quot; is a word most Japanese people understand, as it, like a lot of English words, have been integrated to the point of reasonably common usage. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a fully Japanese word now, but it's not that alien either (another linguistic concept I can't fully grasp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this kind of occurrence, where a word is created from a language and because of that language, but not used within that language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it accurate to say that the word is not Japanese just because of the issue of usage among most Japanese speakers? Might it not be reasonable to say it is a Japanese word because it is made from that language? &lt;em&gt;(I'm not making a case to say it should be one way or the other, I'm just exploring the issue.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="913" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2012-04-11T12:39:13.830" Title="What is it called when a word is constructed out of a language, but is not a part of that language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1770" CreationDate="2012-04-09T03:29:46.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-eigo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;和製英語wasei eigo&lt;/a&gt; is an occurrence of Japanese that's made up of English words. For example &quot;サラリーマンsalaryman&quot; is composed of the words &quot;salary&quot; and &quot;man&quot;, but the word itself isn't an English word, except as a loanword from Japanese when describing the work culture in Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="907" LastEditDate="2012-04-09T16:24:25.707" LastActivityDate="2012-04-09T16:24:25.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1770" CreationDate="2012-04-09T05:05:05.313" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with Japanese words that you are describing, but it seems to me that there are two separate process here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing: The Japanese word &lt;em&gt;gaijin&lt;/em&gt; is borrowed by the&#xA;English-speaking community in Japan &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blending: The combination of two words &quot;fly&quot; and &quot;gaijin&quot; (both are in-use words) to form &lt;em&gt;flyjin&lt;/em&gt; (similar to how the words &quot;wiki&quot; and &quot;encyclopedia&quot; are combined to form &quot;wikipedia&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2012-04-09T05:05:05.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2012-04-09T19:16:29.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Iranian languages have both prepositions and postpositions. &lt;a href=&quot;http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/ls/art?id=2649&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stilo (1987)&lt;/a&gt; suggests that this is so because these languages lie in a &quot;buffer zone,&quot; or they&#xA;are at the boundary between two linguistic areas, one where prepositions are common, and one where postpositions are common. There are also Uralic languages which have both prepositions and postpositions (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=QTU7AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA121&amp;amp;dq=uralic%20prepositions%20postpositions&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=RjODT-SEEOf50gH6sdXqBw&amp;amp;ved=0CDwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=uralic%20prepositions%20postpositions&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Comrie 1981: 121&lt;/a&gt; for an example from Estonian), and there is good reason to believe that this is also a &quot;buffer zone&quot; effect (see the map on p. 7 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://exadmin.matita.net/uploads/pagine/219206430_dunnH.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2011 handout by Matthew Dryer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Stilo's proposal for accounting for &quot;mixed type&quot; languages is quite plausible intuitively, and I have no problems believing that mixed adposition profiles are common in language contact situations, but it would be nice to see more comprehensive studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-04-09T19:16:29.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1778" CreationDate="2012-04-12T09:15:55.773" Score="3" ViewCount="2475" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Compound (linguistic)&lt;/a&gt;, compound words that occur in natural languages can be semantically grouped into four categories.   Witness this quote from the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“endocentric:   A+B denotes a special kind of B:   examples:  darkroom, smalltalk”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“exocentric:   A+B denotes a special kind of an unexpressed semantic head:   examples:   skinhead, paleface (head:  ‘person’)”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“copulative:   A+B denotes ‘the sum’ of what A and B denote:   examples:   bittersweet, sleepwalk”   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“appositional:    A and B provide different descriptions for the same referent:   examples:   actor-director, maidservant”   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, how common is each of these types of compounds across languages?   For example, are appositional compounds rare, not that common, common, or extremely common across the documented natural languages?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T09:20:25.063" LastActivityDate="2012-04-12T23:25:40.330" Title="How common are the different semantic types of compounds?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2012-04-12T16:47:36.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't find a simple online citation for this, but it's discussed in Sociophonetics: An Introduction by Erik Thomas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a note about why /r/ might cause retraction in /t/ and /d/, I would say that the American /r/ is most commonly one of two forms - a retroflex approximant or the &quot;bunched-r&quot; where the tip of the tongue is not raised and the body of the tongue is retracted somewhat (and so it would not be at all correct to refer to it as an alveolar approximant). Both of these sounds require the tongue to be further back in the mouth than the typical pronunciation of /t/ or /d/ and so the fact that strong coarticulation results in something like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ affricate sounds is not actually surprising. It might not be appropriate, however, to call the resulting affricate &quot;palatalized&quot; in all cases (it may be retroflexed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure of a good source on the effect of bunched-r on coarticulation (as compared to other /r/ variants). It's been a while since I read it, but it might be discussed in Mielke, Jeff, Adam Baker, and Diana Archangeli's paper &quot;Variability and homogeneity in American English /r/ allophony and /s/ retraction&quot; (in LabPhon 10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastActivityDate="2012-04-12T16:47:36.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1779" CreationDate="2012-04-12T17:21:31.690" Score="5" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to compare Aramaic to Spanish? If so, what are the differences and what are common? I have Spanish at school, and when I saw Passion of the Christ, I recognized lots of words (I don't remember them now, unfortunately, I just noticed during the film). Is it only the vocabulary that is a bit common, or does the grammar also have things in common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the lexicon, grammar and word-endings mostly, a comparison between the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T17:27:58.287" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T18:03:34.887" Title="Aramaic compared to Spanish" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1775" CreationDate="2012-04-12T17:41:26.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, it seems that the (semantic) classification of compounds you found in Wikipedia was proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/organisation/members/booijge.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geert Booij&lt;/a&gt;, with some modifications (he uses the term appositive). The thing is that it's not the only one - I know at least a dozen of other proposals (by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/laurie-bauer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laurie Bauer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/home.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin Haspelmath&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unh.edu/linguistics/index.cfm?id=2F5D79E3-DEA7-5382-9537C36C877013EA#lieber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rochelle Lieber&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unibo.it/SitoWebDocente/default.htm?upn=sergio.scalise@unibo.it&amp;amp;TabControl1=TabContatti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sergio Scalise&lt;/a&gt;, among many others). Although some linguists would say that &quot;bittersweet&quot; is appositional because &quot;bitter&quot; and &quot;sweet&quot; describe the same referent. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1678/english-co-compounds-is-bittersweet-a-co-compound/1683#1683&quot;&gt;English co-compounds? Is bittersweet a co-compound?&lt;/a&gt; for more details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, such a terminological muddle would pose a serious problem for any cross-linguistic research. It is quite possible to do such research though - you just have to keep in mind who means what by this or that term. And, to make things worse, there are languages where it's hard to determine whether there is compounding in them or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/gwq64950512vr372/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guevara and Scalise 2009&lt;/a&gt; used another classification in their cross-linguistic research: they divided all compounds into subordinate, attributive, and coordinate. All of those can be both exo- and endocentric. Here's what they found, on the basis of sixteen languages in their sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HIqD6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Guevara_Scalise2009&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laurie Bauer also did a cross-linguistic comparison of compounding on the basis of thirty-six languages. Here are some of his findings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is not clear whether compounding can be regarded as a universal;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the majority of languages that have compounding have endocentric&#xA;    (tatpurusa) nominal compounds;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the use of dvandva compounds seems to be an areal feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110114232.1/9783110114232.1.8.695/9783110114232.1.8.695.xml?format=EBOK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bauer 2001&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-04-12T23:25:40.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1777" CreationDate="2012-04-12T18:11:11.377" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aramaic and Spanish are of entirely different language families: Semitic (a branch of Afroasiatic) and Romance (a branch of Indo-European), respectively. I am not aware of much contact between the two languages, so it is unlikely that one borrowed words or constructions from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you heard in the film was most likely Latin, the ancestor of all the Romance languages, like Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Romanian. And Latin's daughter languages still resemble her a great deal, especially with respect to vocabulary. Notice also how many words English has borrowed from French and Latin: you should be able to recognise various words you know in English when you hear Latin, like &lt;em&gt;entirely, different, language, family,&lt;/em&gt; etc (Latin &lt;em&gt;integer, differens, lingua, familia&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="941" LastEditDate="2012-04-19T18:03:34.887" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T18:03:34.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1781" CreationDate="2012-04-12T19:34:15.610" Score="19" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do tone languages assign phonemic tones to loanwords from non-tone languages?  For example, does such assignment vary according to the phonological context in each loanword?  Alternatively, does each tone language have a typical pattern of tones that it assigns to such loanwords?  Are there such things as strategies for such tone-assignment that are common across contour tone languages?   Across register tone languages?   Across both types?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T22:16:45.897" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T19:39:54.367" Title="How do tone languages assign phonemic tones to loanwords from non-tone languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2012-04-12T21:06:19.797" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Studies of loanword adaptation have largely focused on segmental adaptation and hence not much compiled information is available on suprasegmental adaptation. The most comprehensive overview I'm aware of is Kang's 2010 Lingua article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002438411000046X&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tutorial overview: Suprasegmental adaptation in loanwords&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I recommend looking at the article if you have access, but here's a sampling with specific cases from accessible papers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stress to high tone: English to Mandarin (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lc.mahidol.ac.th/Documents/Publication/MKS/3/barker1969phonological.pdf&quot;&gt;Silverman 1992&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stress to rise-fall contour: English into Yoruba (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/35/paper1304.pdf&quot;&gt;Kenstowicz 2006&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Default tone(s) for loanwords: French into Vietnamese (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lc.mahidol.ac.th/Documents/Publication/MKS/3/barker1969phonological.pdf&quot;&gt;Barker 1969&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syllable shape to tone: English into White Hmong (&lt;a href=&quot;http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~chrisg/index_files/Golston%26Yang.pdf&quot;&gt;Golston and Yang 2001&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voiced/voiceless onset to low/high tone: English to Tibetan (&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/kenstowicz/mellt.pdf&quot;&gt;Hsieh and Kenstowicz 2006&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the implementation of tone across languages differs considerably, it's also worth wondering about adaptation between tone languages. The Hsieh and Kenstowicz paper mentions that Tibetan adaptations of Mandarin words, for example, ignores the original tone in favor of the voiced/voiceless distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="397" LastEditDate="2012-04-12T21:29:03.257" LastActivityDate="2012-04-12T21:29:03.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1784" CreationDate="2012-04-13T09:17:08.250" Score="14" ViewCount="1014" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ablaut system was in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;. It also is present in some English, German and Greek. Are there ablaut changes in romance languages such as Italian, French and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-13T09:36:01.900" LastActivityDate="2012-04-13T20:36:01.637" Title="Are there ablaut changes in romance languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1782" CreationDate="2012-04-13T17:33:33.887" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;All Romance languages have some historical traces of ablaut. For example from Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hacer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: infinitive with &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;hice&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;I did/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  preterite with &lt;strong&gt;/i/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;hecho&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;done/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  past participle with &lt;strong&gt;/e/&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;faire&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: infinitive with &lt;strong&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fis&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;(I) did/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  preterite (passe simple) with &lt;strong&gt;/i/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fait&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;done/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  past participle with &lt;strong&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fazer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: infinitive with &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fiz&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;I did/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  preterite with &lt;strong&gt;/i/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;feito&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;done/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  past participle with &lt;strong&gt;/ej/&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;a face&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: infinitive with &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;făcui&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;I did/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  preterite with &lt;strong&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;făcut&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;done/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  past participle with &lt;strong&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fare&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: infinitive with &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;feci&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;I did/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  preterite (passato remoto) with &lt;strong&gt;/e/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;fatto&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;done/made&quot;&lt;/code&gt;:  past participle with &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this now acts like root suppletion and is not productive with new words. Occitan and Catalan have &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_phonology#General_ablaut&quot;&gt;productive vowel-altering processes sometimes called ablaut&lt;/a&gt;, but they are not derived from PIE ablaut and are not grammaticalized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-13T20:36:01.637" LastActivityDate="2012-04-13T20:36:01.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1836" CreationDate="2012-04-13T23:30:31.060" Score="9" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any straightforward way of identifying transitive verbs (or sentences containing transitive constructions) in an BrE English text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked into semantic shallow parsers, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/semafor-semantic-parser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Semafor&lt;/a&gt;, but these don't seem to offer the straightforward approach I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="899" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-23T11:16:31.713" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T12:01:55.850" Title="Is there an automatic way of identifying transitive verbs in Computational Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2012-04-14T04:14:39.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the same methods of analysis that are used with spoken languages apply successfully to signed languages. Most work with sign is at a subphonemic level, in  keeping with modern trends  toward nonlinear phonology. &#xA;The analysis of a HMH sign as one syllable utilizes a sonority scale based on perceptual salience, and  equates Movements with vowels and Holds with consonants.  Other models of visual  phonology utilize autosegments, with separate tiers for  configuration features { +/-  backed tongue root, raised apex, bent finger, palm upward ... } and for Location / Place features { alveolar ridge, teeth, lip, nose, forehead … } each tier operating independently. &#xA;Brentari, D. (1998). A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology. MIT Press,  outlines different models of sign phonology starting on page 83, and discusses syllables from page 71.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Movement-Hold Model, the phoneme /t/ would be a Hold-Movement-Hold structure, with beginning and ending positions of the tongue joined by a Movement. The auditory signature of a stop consonant is dead silence: what's perceived, via changes in formant frequency, is the movement of the articulator, either upward [eat] or downwards [tea].  As it moves, the articulator has to be in some configuration, and since this tongue-shape occurs simultaneously with the movement component, we get acoustically different /t/s if we change it.  This co-articulation is the difference between dark L and clear L, or between two signs with different hand-shapes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note: A big difference in the two media is that no morphemes show up in speech at this level of detail, but a HMH sign often includes several morphemes, maybe an entire sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="803" LastEditDate="2012-04-15T02:45:34.533" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T02:45:34.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-14T17:52:03.147" Score="4" ViewCount="7151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a comprehensive list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;conceptual metaphors&lt;/a&gt;? (Either man-made, crowdsourced or based on data-mining / corpora analysis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By a conceptual metaphor I mean a relation in the spirit of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s  &quot;Metaphors We Live By&quot;, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/metaphors/Time_Is_Something_Moving_Toward_You.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Time is Something Moving Toward You&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Tuesday comes... &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Three O'clock is approaching. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thursday passed without incident. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The witching hour is near.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only dictionary I am aware of is &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/&lt;/a&gt; (only for English, only 207 metaphors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous link is dead. Try mirrors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20121015142744/http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20121015142744/http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sugimoto/MasterMetaphorList/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sugimoto/MasterMetaphorList/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="695" LastEditorUserId="695" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T14:11:17.367" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T21:10:28.323" Title="A comprehensive list of conceptual metaphors" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1798" CreationDate="2012-04-15T03:32:00.077" Score="5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages that have grammatical morphemes that specify the scope of modifiers?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We all know that the English phrase &amp;quot;old men and women&amp;quot; is ambiguous.  Surface structure alone won't tell us whether it means &amp;quot;old men and young, middle-aged, and/or old women&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;old men and old women.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there natural languages that have grammatical morphemes that are used specifically to disambiguate such phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, does any natural language have a particle that specifies the scope of a modifier like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;old men DISAMBIG and women = old men and (any-age) women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;old men and women DISAMBIG = old men and old women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, does any natural language inflect adjectives according to whether they modify only one noun or all nouns in a series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;old-suffix.A men and women = old men and (any-age) women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;old-suffix.B men and women = old men and old women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just nonce examples.  I imagine that real examples from natural languages would be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T02:07:31.027" Title="Are there languages that have grammatical morphemes that specify the scope of modifiers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1799" CreationDate="2012-04-15T04:47:55.910" Score="5" ViewCount="698" Body="&lt;p&gt;Across West Germanic Languages, what sound changes have been most common since 1000 CE? &#xA;For example, has there been much epenthesis (vowel insertion) or syncope (dropping middle vowels) or metathesis (transposing sounds, as in flutterby becoming butterfly)?   Other historical processes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T12:50:30.603" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:29:46.563" Title="Across West Germanic Languages, what sound changes have been most common since 1000 CE?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-15T11:53:45.050" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I, not being very familiar with corpus linguistics, read &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/CS-manual/Contents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;the manual for searching PPCEME&quot;&gt;the manual for searching through PPCEME&lt;/a&gt; I entered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;node: NP*&#xA;print_indices: true&#xA; query: (NP-SBJ *PRO*)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without getting a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone please give me a hint where my query is incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="929" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2012-04-15T12:12:57.297" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T20:00:11.370" Title="Query format for NP without subject in PPCEME" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1790" CreationDate="2012-04-15T12:20:06.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/CS-manual/Tips.html#using_ast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Using star&quot;&gt;The manual&lt;/a&gt; I found states that you should be liberal with the use of *, so have you tried &lt;code&gt;NP-SBJ*&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T12:20:06.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1826" CreationDate="2012-04-15T17:01:09.613" Score="16" ViewCount="4550" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is a bit more specific than title would suggest, but I was not creative enough to put it so specifically into compact form. Let me explain. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;When I was a kid I was learning English in elementary school, but I've also watched lot of Cartoon Network which drastically expanded my vocabulary (at least, that's my impression), so in that case it definitively helped. But in that case, for one, I was a kid, second I already had some basic knowledge, which we constantly upgraded. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;The present situation is that I want to learn Norwegian. I did acquire some very basic knowledge, like saying &quot;I want something to eat&quot; or &quot;Where is Parliament street?&quot; by listening to Pimsleur Norwegian lectures. But when I watch a Norwegian movie or show I practically don't understand anything.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question is, should I expect this to change all &quot;by it self&quot;, will I, if, for example I watch 1h per day of some Norwegian show, start to understand the language, acquire vocabulary, understand it completely?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm sure that listening to a language helps in situations where you have some basic understanding and you understand every third word and your brain then connects the dots and you acquire new words as the time passes. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;But does that happen, even if you don't understand a single word in most of the sentences (ok, I understand &quot;are&quot; , &quot;you&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;I&quot;... a very basic set of words)? Is there some threshold of needed vocabulary so you can build on just by listening?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/119/language-acquisition-without-interactive-contact-with-fluent-speakers&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt;, but it was asked in context of kids.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;EDIT:&#xA;I would make a distinction of interaction and listening without interaction. For example, if you put me in some Chinese village, we couldn't understand each other a word, but by interacting with people, using hands etc, as time passes I could pick some words and as time passes I'd probably understand the language. This question is in context of passive listening/watching. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="926" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T09:25:34.093" Title="Can I learn a new language just by listening or watching videos?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1828" CreationDate="2012-04-15T17:50:20.863" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Scienceblogs.com, we find an article titled &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2006/09/when_crimefighting_tools_go_ba.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;When crime-fighting tools go bad: Problems with the face-composite system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that documents the difficulty that people have in describing faces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article here describes a problem with the use of software that helps police create sketches of perpetrators based on their victims’ verbal descriptions.   The problem is that, when the victim only sees the perpetrator for a few seconds, but works with police on creating the software image for a much longer time, the victim remembers the sketch rather than the face of the actual perpetrator and selects people from police lineups accordingly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem would not exist if natural language were up to the task of describing faces exactly, but apparently it isn’t.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have very many studies been done on the difficulties that people have in verbally describing faces and other visual stimuli?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-15T18:49:06.687" LastActivityDate="2012-04-20T09:06:47.103" Title="Have very many studies been done on the difficulties that people have in verbally describing faces and other visual stimuli?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1790" CreationDate="2012-04-15T20:00:11.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several issues with your query.  First of all, you need to escape the stars (with backslashes) or they will be interpreted as wildcards.  Second, pro-drop is indicated by &lt;code&gt;*pro*&lt;/code&gt; (note lowercase).  Finally, you need to specify the query function.  You probably want this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;query: (NP-SBJ iDominates \*pro\*)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;code&gt;NP-SBJ*&lt;/code&gt; as kaleissin suggested won't hurt, but it won't help with this issue either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, if you copied that query directly out of the manual, it is certainly a documentation bug.  If you can show me where specifically it came from, I can see that it is fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="930" LastActivityDate="2012-04-15T20:00:11.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1788" CreationDate="2012-04-16T01:56:47.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;ASL has grammatical morphemes, in the form of facial expressions, that function as modifiers and co-occur with the manual signs they modify&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.  The modifier has scope over all the signing produced with that facial expression.  Example: &#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oMP4r.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raised brows signal a sentence topic, analogously to the Japanese particle wa/ga.  Here the topic is the whole “old man and woman” part, so the brows are raised and held while signing those three signs.  A scrunched up lip signals a relative clause, and the sign “old” gets an up-lip, so a more accurate translation would be “a man who is old”.  Not exactly what you're looking for, but close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Location in space is another grammatical morpheme.  This stuff is better written in vertical columns, and then it would show how &quot;man who is old&quot; is signed over to the signer's left, and &quot;woman&quot; is signed over to the right side. If they were both old, they'd both be signed on the same side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;. Carol Neidle, Judy Kegl, Dawn MacLaughlin, Benjamin Bahan, and Robert G. Lee (2000) The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.  Section 3.4.3 starting on Page 42&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastEditorUserId="803" LastEditDate="2012-04-16T02:07:31.027" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T02:07:31.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1789" CreationDate="2012-04-16T02:09:42.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#Sound_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This chart&lt;/a&gt; at Wikipedia gives an overview of the consonant changes of Low German compared to other West Germanic languages and may be helpful to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0mHQb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T02:09:42.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1802" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1832" CreationDate="2012-04-16T11:24:37.907" Score="30" ViewCount="15259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a vague knowledge regarding those two fields, but I admit there are some fundamental concepts that I lack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we had to write down the actual differences between these two fields, what would they be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll suggest some points that I think the answers should cover for successfully describing each field in a complete and comprehensive way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What it does and what it is about (also what it's not);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Common misconceptions of the field (with consequent debunking);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aims/objective of the field;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tools/instruments and methods adopted by the field;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subfields of each field (if any);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any other points I might have forgotten.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T12:31:38.177" Title="What are the fundamental differences between Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2012-04-16T12:00:18.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms are often used interchangeably. More often than not*, NLP is used when there is actual &lt;strong&gt;processing&lt;/strong&gt; involved, rather than abstract theoretical topics. Comprehensive websites such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&amp;amp;Itemid=42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ACL wiki page&lt;/a&gt; write both separately, or combine them into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/nlpfaq.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CL/NLP&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=List_of_NLP/CL_courses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLP/CL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* - just my impression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps Computational Psycholinguistics is part of Computational Linguistics, but not a part of Natural Language Processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-04-16T16:09:39.213" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T16:09:39.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1777" CreationDate="2012-04-16T18:06:26.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish was heavily influenced by the Arabic language during the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;11th through 13th centuries&lt;/a&gt;. Modern Spanish has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language#List_of_words_of_Arabic_origin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;several hundred loan words taken from Arabic&lt;/a&gt; used in common vocabulary. &lt;em&gt;Almohada&lt;/em&gt; is probably the most famous (meaning &quot;pillow&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt; is related to Semitic languages such as ancient &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aramaic languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is some connection between Spanish and Aramaic. But it's not a very strong connection; not one a casual listener would likely ever notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2012-04-16T18:54:41.300" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T18:54:41.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1558" CreationDate="2012-04-16T23:45:39.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since names exist in all languages, I'm assuming that you're asking whether proper nouns in Chinese are distinguished lexically, semantically, or morphosyntacically  from common nouns.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only relevant link that I found was this one.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hugchina.com/html/learn/3/2011052307265728.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hugchina.com/html/learn/3/2011052307265728.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link mentions a syntactic distinction between Chinese commmon and proper nouns.  Common nouns may take modifiers, whereas proper nouns, like pronouns, generally don't.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, semantics and syntax are sufficient to distinguish the pronouns from the proper nouns.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether certain Chinese nouns do double duty as common &amp;amp; proper nouns (e.g. witness the English name for the L.A. borough &quot;Eagle Rock&quot;) or whether certain nouns are synchronically only proper (e.g. witness the surname &quot;Smith&quot;), the article doesn't say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-04-16T23:45:39.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1529" CreationDate="2012-04-17T00:05:21.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually it is argued that proper nouns have an extension (&quot;the class of things to which it is correctly applied&quot;, Lyons 1977) but, unlike common nouns, they lack an intension (&quot;the set of essential properties which determines the applicability of the term&quot;, Lyons 1977). In other words, the extension of Dublin is a singleton (or there might be more elements in that set, if there is more than one Dublin). However, Dublin has no intension at all - there is no property of &quot;Dublin-ness&quot; that all Dublins would share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or another example. There are lots of people called John. However, there is no property that, by virtue of having it, qualifies you to be John. There is no &quot;John-ness&quot;. You are named John ad hoc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An apple, on the other hand, can be described as &quot;the round firm fruit, typically having crisp white flesh and green, yellow, or red skin&quot; (from OED). All apples share certain properties (round, firm, fruit, having skin etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/36523&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Willy van Langendonck (2007)&lt;/a&gt; argues that a proper name has the following characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It denotes a unique entity at the level of established linguistic convention to make it psychosocially salient within a given basic level category [pragmatic].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the name, if any, does not (or not any longer) determine its denotation [semantic]. - see my examples above&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Its ability to appear in such close appositional constructions as the poet Burns,&#xA;Fido the dog, the River Thames, or the City a/London [syntactic].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-04-17T16:20:06.453" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T16:20:06.453" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="285" CreationDate="2012-04-17T05:36:01.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonology, morphology and etc are not elements or components that can be developed, they are levels of linguistic analysis.  At the level of the morpheme, rules tell how the morphemes fit together into a structure. If they are just jumbled together with no structure, there is no language. That was thought to be the case with ASL, until Stokoe proved otherwise.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone invented a &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; it would by definition have such structures at each level of analysis. Later, if users of the language developed different rules and structures, one could ask if it was now sufficiently different to be a new language, and if so, if that language was 'natural'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ASL was proven to be a &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; language by showing that it was not invented, it is not a modified version of OFLS or anything else; it was not planned, it arose spontaneously, with genetic roots in at least three existing signed languages, and none in any spoken language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not all sign language is ASL. Not all “sign language” is a natural signed language.&lt;/strong&gt;  Some is just gestures; some is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_Coded_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Signed English&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_coded_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manual code&lt;/a&gt; for some other spoken language.  Signed English is an artificial language which &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; planned and so forth; ASL is a natural language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIW9B.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a constructed language, Signed English has structure at all the above named levels. At the level of phonology its structure is partly that of ASL and partly invented.  At the levels of syntax and morphology it has the structure of English.  Syntactically, as shown here, the two languages have different word order.  Morphologically, Signed English uses one sign for each English word, ASL uses fewer words and more affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that there are children whose first and only language is Signed English, but that doesn't make SE a natural language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="803" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T05:36:01.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1809" CreationDate="2012-04-17T13:50:29.973" Score="3" ViewCount="1672" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are there multiple ways for expressing the same sound?&#xA;&lt;br&gt; In English, for example, you can say &quot;axe&quot; or &quot;aks,&quot; or when &quot;c&quot; sounds like &quot;s&quot; like in &quot;face.&quot;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This phenomenon exists in many different languages. Is it just the evolution of pronunciation of certain letters that once had different sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="467" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T08:31:37.587" Title="Same sounds spelled more than one way" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1808" CreationDate="2012-04-17T16:37:07.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very common phenomenon, where a sound in a language can be spelled in multiple ways, or a certain spelling can have multiple pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a quick answer to your question: &lt;strong&gt;Written and spoken forms of a language can change independently.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start by looking at the two cases you mention: |x| and |c|, and we'll also look at silent |k|.  We'll follow the convention of putting spellings between |vertical pipes| and putting pronunciations between /slashes/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;|x| might as well be |ks|&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we have |x| at all?  Historical accident -- the letter |x| was used to spell /ks/ in Western Greek, then was borrowed by the Etruscans, then by the Romans, then by the Saxons.  Usually when people borrow a writing system, they borrow the whole thing, even if it's not a perfect fit for their own language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;|c| says either /k/ or /s/&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions come up here: Why does |c| have two sounds?  Why do we have |c| in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greek had a letter |Γ| for /g/ and a letter |Κ| for /k/.  The Etruscans didn't distinguish these sounds in their language, so they only needed one of the two.  They kept |Γ| and gradually dropped |Κ|.  The Romans borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, but their language &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; distinguish /g/ and /k/, so they made a variant form of |Γ| by adding a little tail to it, thus distinguishing |C| from |G|.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A sound change occurred in some parts of the Latin-speaking world where /k/ changed to /s/ in certain environments.  The sounds changed, but the spelling didn't.  So where |cena| used to be pronounced /kena/, it ended up being pronounced /sena/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;silent |k|&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one doesn't come from Latin at all.  In Old English, the word &quot;knight&quot; was pronounced /kniht/ -- both the |k| and the |gh| were pronounced.  Over the centuries, spoken English changed so that now |knight| is pronounced /nʌjt/.  The /k/ disappeared, but the |k| didn't, so now there's a mismatch between the spoken and written forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the written and spoken forms of a language evolve separately.  A change in written English might not affect the way words sound, and a change in spoken English might not affect the way words are spelled.  Language always changes over time, whether spoken or written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glossing over some details in the examples above, but I hope you get the gist of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T16:37:07.117" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-17T17:18:26.013" Score="7" ViewCount="2142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just learned that the suffix &quot;escu&quot; in a Romanian name means &quot;son of.&quot;  But it seems that the &quot;u&quot; is a common ending in all Romanian words.  Does that one letter have a meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="938" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-17T19:30:35.267" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T02:15:26.760" Title="So many Romanian words seem to end in &quot;u&quot;" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1808" CreationDate="2012-04-17T17:52:11.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is rarely a one-to-one mapping from sequences of sound to sequences of letters.  The extent to which the same sound will be represented using different spellings will depend on issues such as historical usage (e.g., dialect changes over time), how the word was derived (e.g., whether it was borrowed from another language) and these days the demands of the advertising industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coding-guidelines.com/slike/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;slike tool&lt;/a&gt; will generate words that sound like a given word and there are various options that let you play around with generating different spellings (you will need to know technical stuff about compiling programming language source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="901" LastActivityDate="2012-04-17T17:52:11.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2012-04-17T18:18:50.710" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the -u has a particular meaning in Romanian, unless in Rumanian it works to signal a particular ending, such as the masculine ending, but there's no mention about this ending on the article for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Gender&quot;&gt;Romanian grammar&lt;/a&gt;. Rather, I'd say it's simply what &quot;survived&quot; from the Latin endings (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;-us&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-um&lt;/strong&gt;). I tried to look for some resources but didn't find much. In any case I think you could look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://alturl.com/sz3pb&quot;&gt;The Romance Languages&lt;/a&gt; by Martin Harris, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://alturl.com/28yss&quot;&gt;The Romance Languages&lt;/a&gt; by Rebecca Posner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanians#Surnames&quot;&gt;-escu&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in Rumanian's names comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-esc&quot;&gt;Latin &quot;-iscus&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, Romanian is not the only one that still has this heritage: Sardinian and Sicilian are other two examples that clearly still possess these endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three languages are the only ones that kept the endings in &lt;strong&gt;-u&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, while other Romance languages had changes. For example, italian changed the endings to &lt;strong&gt;-o&lt;/strong&gt;. Romance languages are more or less far from Latin. You can see a comparison with the verb to sing, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Proposed_divisions&quot;&gt;Proposed divisions&lt;/a&gt; section on the wikipedia article for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages&quot;&gt;Romance Languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see a comparison for the verb &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to enter&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;╔═══╦══════════╦══════════╦═══════════╦══════════╦═══════════╗&#xA;║   ║  Latin   ║ Italian  ║ Sardinian ║ Romanian ║ English   ║&#xA;║   ║ Intrare  ║ Entrare  ║ Intrare   ║ A intra  ║ To Enter  ║&#xA;╠═══╬══════════╬══════════╬═══════════╬══════════╬═══════════╣&#xA;║ 1 ║ intro    ║ entro    ║ intro     ║ intru    ║ enter     ║&#xA;║ 2 ║ intras   ║ entri    ║ intrasa   ║ intri    ║ enter     ║&#xA;║ 3 ║ intrat   ║ entra    ║ intrata   ║ intră    ║ enters    ║&#xA;║ 4 ║ intramus ║ entriamo ║ intramusu ║ intrăm   ║ enter     ║&#xA;║ 5 ║ intratis ║ entrate  ║ intradese ║ intrați  ║ enter     ║&#xA;║ 6 ║ intrant  ║ entrano  ║ intrana   ║ intră    ║ enter     ║&#xA;╚═══╩══════════╩══════════╩═══════════╩══════════╩═══════════╝&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: see comments. Also other Romance languages possess this ending but not orthographically, just phonetically.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-18T09:46:59.383" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T09:46:59.383" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1829" CreationDate="2012-04-18T03:03:00.867" Score="7" ViewCount="1148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read a question that referred to &quot;aspectual coercion&quot; and looked up a paper called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/andrewkg/akg-jl2007.pdf&quot;&gt;Aspectual coercion and the typology of change of state predicates&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To read this paper, I'll have to know, among other things, what &quot;coercion&quot; means in this context. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;relevant article&lt;/a&gt; in Wikipedia was a stub that cited no references or links to other articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the title question: What does the term &quot;coercion&quot; mean in the context of Cognitive Linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-18T10:01:47.990" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T23:38:44.783" Title="What does the term &quot;coercion&quot; mean in the context of Cognitive Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1808" CreationDate="2012-04-18T08:31:37.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words borrowed from other languages are a big source of rare spellings for existing sounds. If the original spelling and pronunciation are both kept, a new way of spelling might have been introduced. Prior to writing, only the pronunciation could be borrowed so the problem could not occur. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages it is customary to adopt the spelling of borrowings to the spelling of the receiving language, leading to more consistent and easier spelling rules. Another method to maintain a simple system is to change the pronunciation to fit the spelling. Several societies that choose to keep the original spelling seem to have something I had never heard of until about five years ago, spelling bees, that is: competitions to spell rare words!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These days it is common that people learning another language learn to read and write it at the same time, which might lead to knowing how to spell a word but not how to pronounce it, if the spelling system is sufficiently complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-04-18T08:31:37.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1817" CreationDate="2012-04-18T17:44:47.960" Score="3" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lenitive&lt;/a&gt; processes in historical phonology that show affrication? For example, that of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;High German Consonant Shift&lt;/a&gt; where a stop becomes an affricate before becoming a fricative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;p &gt; pf &gt; f&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-18T18:21:37.383" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T00:34:05.263" Title="What processes of lenition in historical phonology exemplify affrication?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1558" CreationDate="2012-04-18T21:44:05.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, but I will try to provide some relevant information here as a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words that come from other languages and get translated into Chinese are so different that I don't really know how important semantics is here. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonardo Da Vinci 达芬奇 (da fen qi)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though &amp;quot;fen qi&amp;quot; can be a word in Chinese (分歧, difference in opinion), &amp;quot;da&amp;quot; does not make any sense if put before &amp;quot;fen qi&amp;quot;. And one would know from the context that &amp;quot;da fen qi&amp;quot; is a person. Additionally, &amp;quot;da&amp;quot; is also not a common Chinese family name, so we know intuitively that &amp;quot;da fen qi&amp;quot; is a foreigner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a few characters only used in foreign names. For example, &amp;quot;耶&amp;quot; is for the sound &amp;quot;ye&amp;quot;. Though &amp;quot;耶&amp;quot; has a lot of homophones in Chinese that are more often used, people who first introduced foreign proper nouns into China probably found &amp;quot;耶&amp;quot; more exotic. So yes, sometimes lexically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yale University 耶鲁大学（ye lu da xue, da xue = university）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jerusalem 耶路撒冷（ye lu sa leng）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how do we distinguish proper nouns originated in China from common nouns? For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tian'anmen Square 天安门广场（tian an men guang chang, guang chang = square）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you have &amp;quot;Tian'anmen&amp;quot; before &amp;quot;Square&amp;quot;, it is understood that you are talking about a specific place. In English, you might (???) later refer to it as &amp;quot;the Square&amp;quot; (with a capitalized &amp;quot;S&amp;quot;). In Chinese, since there is no articles* or capitalization, you can simply use &amp;quot;那个广场&amp;quot; (that square) or &amp;quot;广场&amp;quot; (square). For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;我昨天去了天安门广场。广场上有很多人。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(literally) I yesterday went to the Tian'anmen Square. Square* (on&#xA;it) had a lot of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Definite Article:&#xA;&#xA;Unlike English, which has only one definite article “the&amp;quot;, Mandarin  does not &#xA;have this word at all. You can say ‘this’ or ‘that’, ‘these’ or ‘those’, but &#xA;not ‘the’.  &#xA;&#xA;Indefinite Article:&#xA;&#xA;While we have (a / an / some) in English as indefinite articles,  these words &#xA;do not exist in Mandarin.  To say ‘a book’ in Mandarin Chinese, you say ‘one &#xA;book’.&#xA;&#xA;http://mylanguages.org/chinese_articles.php&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reading an article in which there was a man named Greg Weeks. Is it easy to distinguish &amp;quot;Weeks&amp;quot; (his last name) from &amp;quot;weeks&amp;quot; (the time unit)? Yes, even if they are both capitalized (at the beginning of a sentence, for example)! I think context is everything - and same with Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="847" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T08:03:59.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1815" CreationDate="2012-04-19T00:27:32.353" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other examples abound, although I don't want to just give a long list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One salient example is the affrication which accompanied palatalization in Romance. In various environments in various languages this took the various forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;k,t → tʃ,ts → ʃ,s,θ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;g,d → dʒ,dz → ʒ,j,x&lt;/code&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. L &lt;strong&gt;cena&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;kena&lt;/code&gt; →  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ceia#Portuguese&quot;&gt;Pt &lt;strong&gt;ceia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; /sejɐ/, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cena#Spanish&quot;&gt;Es &lt;strong&gt;cena&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; /θena/, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cena#Italian&quot;&gt;It &lt;strong&gt;cena&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; /tʃena/, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cin%C4%83#Romanian&quot;&gt;Ro &lt;strong&gt;cină&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; /ʧinə/, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsin%C3%A3&quot;&gt;Ar &lt;strong&gt;tsinã&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; /tsinə/  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Affrication very often accompanies palatalization, for example in Japanese &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#ref_1a&quot;&gt;t,d → tɕ,dʑ/ts,dz before i/ɯ&lt;/a&gt;; or English t in &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;nature&lt;/strong&gt;. I understand similar processes have occured in Finnic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is notable that the diachronic stop-&gt;fricative lenition does not always have an affrication stage, and can go right from stop to fricative. An example of this is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot;&gt;first Germanic consonant shift, Grimm's law&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;bʰ → b → p → f&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;dʰ → d → t → þ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;gʰ → g → k → h&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;gʷʰ → gʷ → kʷ → hʷ&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-19T00:34:05.263" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T00:34:05.263" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2012-04-19T01:38:06.027" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding Romanian's history: it's a member of the Eastern Romance (&lt;em&gt;sensu strictu&lt;/em&gt;) subfamily or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Romance_languages&quot;&gt;&quot;Vlach&quot; languages&lt;/a&gt;. The peculiarities of Romanian are shared by its sisters in that branch such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromanian_language&quot;&gt;Aromanian&lt;/a&gt; in Greece, Macedonia, Albania; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megleno-Romanian_language&quot;&gt;Megleno-romanian&lt;/a&gt; in Greece, Macedonia, and Turkey; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanian_language&quot;&gt;Istrian&lt;/a&gt; in, well, Istria. Their peculiar history was influenced by at least 4 distinct factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Romania#Dacia&quot;&gt;earliest area to split off from the Empire&lt;/a&gt;, in 271 AD - leading to loss of stabilizing linguistic influence from Rome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geographical and later social separation from the other Romance languages, leading to less influence by and fewer borrowings from Germanic. E.g. 'white', instead of coming from Germanic &lt;strong&gt;blank&lt;/strong&gt;, is &lt;strong&gt;alb&lt;/strong&gt; from Latin &lt;strong&gt;albus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund&quot;&gt;Balkan Sprachbund&lt;/a&gt; shared with Slavic, Greek, and Albanian. The Sprachbund had a significant influence on both grammar and, to a lesser extent, lexicon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The influence of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Romance_substratum&quot;&gt;Paleo-balkan substratum&lt;/a&gt; which is not inconsiderable - some scholars report &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Romanian_words_of_possible_Dacian_origin&quot;&gt;up to 500 roots may be inherited from Dacian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, every modern Romance language has its own peculiar history, but the above I think covers the bases about what makes the Dacian language different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T01:38:06.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2012-04-19T05:54:47.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a jQuery wrapper method to align interlinear glosses.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nice thing about this approach is that it minimizes the HTML markup that you need to put into the lines of your linguistic data.  For example, something like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;align-me&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;les chiens dormaient&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;le-s chien-s dorm-ai-ent&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;DET-PL dog-PL sleep-IMPF-3PL&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be aligned by calling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$('.align-me').igt();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not yet extensively debugged this, but here's the code.  Comments/suggestions welcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(function($) {&#xA;    // IGT - Interlinear Gloss Text -- this wrapped set method correctly aligns&#xA;    //  words in interlinear gloss text format into columns.  Each element of&#xA;    //  the set is expected to contain two or more elements and the text of&#xA;    //  each of these sub-elements is considered to be the line.  In the&#xA;    //  following example, 'les chiens', 'le-s chien-s' and 'DET-PL dog-PL' are&#xA;    //  the lines:&#xA;    //&#xA;    //    &amp;lt;div class=&quot;align-me&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    //      &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;les chiens&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;    //      &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;le-s chien-s&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;    //      &amp;lt;div&amp;gt;DET-PL dog-PL&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;    //    &amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&#xA;    //&#xA;    //  Basic usage:&#xA;    //&#xA;    //    $('div.align-me').igt();&#xA;    //&#xA;    //  Usage with options:&#xA;    //&#xA;    //    $('div.align-me').igt({buffer: 20, lineGroupBuffer: 5, indent: 60,&#xA;    //                          minLineWidthAsPerc: 75});&#xA;&#xA;    $.fn.igt = function (options) {&#xA;&#xA;        // Align words in each element of the wrapped set&#xA;        $(this).each(function () {&#xA;&#xA;            var container = $(this);&#xA;&#xA;            // Each child is a line whose words may need alignment&#xA;            var children = $(this).children();&#xA;&#xA;            // spanWidths holds the width of each span in each line; it will&#xA;            //  look something like [[49, 32, 40], [66, 49, 40], [61, 99, 25]]&#xA;            var spanWidths = [];  &#xA;&#xA;            // colWidths holds the width of each column, i.e., the width of the&#xA;            //  longest &amp;lt;span&amp;gt;-wrapped word with index x, e.g., [66, 99, 40]&#xA;            var colWidths = [];&#xA;&#xA;            // lineHeights holds height of each line&#xA;            var lineHeights = []; &#xA;&#xA;&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;            // OPTIONS //&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;&#xA;            if (options === undefined) options = {};&#xA;&#xA;            // Number of pixels to put between each span&#xA;            var buffer = (options.buffer === undefined) ? 30: options.buffer;&#xA;&#xA;            // Number of pixels to put between groups of lines (&quot;lineGroups&quot;)&#xA;            var lineGroupBuffer = (options.lineGroupBuffer === undefined) ?&#xA;                                    10 : options.lineGroupBuffer;&#xA;&#xA;            // Number of pixels to indent each subsequent line&#xA;            var indent = (options.indent === undefined) ? 40 : options.indent;&#xA;&#xA;            // Minimum width of a line as a percentage of the container's width&#xA;            var minLineWidthAsPerc = (options.minLineWidthAsPerc === undefined) ?&#xA;                                    50 : options.minLineWidthAsPerc;&#xA;&#xA;            // Line Group Class: class to give to line groups&#xA;            var lineGroupClass = (options.lineGroupClass === undefined) ?&#xA;                            'old-form-igt-line-group': options.lineGroupClass;&#xA;&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;            // FUNCTIONS //&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;&#xA;            // Spanify -- input: line of text; output: line with each word&#xA;            //  enclosed in a span tag&#xA;            function spanify(elementText) {&#xA;                return $.map(elementText.replace(/\s\s+/g, ' ').split(' '),&#xA;                    function (word) {&#xA;                        return '&amp;lt;span style=&quot;white-space: nowrap;&quot;&amp;gt;' + word +&#xA;                        '&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;';&#xA;                    }&#xA;                ).join('');&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;            // Get Greatest Width -- return the greatest width among the words&#xA;            //  in the same 'column'.&#xA;            function getGreatestWidth(widths, index, spanIndex) {&#xA;                if (colWidths[spanIndex] === undefined) {&#xA;&#xA;                    // E.g., from [[49, 32, 40], [66, 49], [61, 99, 25]],&#xA;                    //  return [40, 25] (assuming spanIndex = 2)&#xA;                    widths = $.map(widths, function (widthSet) {&#xA;                        if (widthSet.length == widths[index].length)&#xA;                            return widthSet[spanIndex];&#xA;                        else&#xA;                            return 0;&#xA;                    });&#xA;&#xA;                    result = Math.max.apply(Math, widths); // Get the widest&#xA;                    colWidths[spanIndex] = result;  // Remember for later&#xA;                    return result;&#xA;&#xA;                } else {&#xA;                    // We know max width of this column from previous iterations&#xA;                    return colWidths[spanIndex];&#xA;                }&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;            // Set Width -- set the width of the span to the width of the widest&#xA;            //  span in the same column PLUS the buffer.&#xA;            function setWidth(index, spanIndex, span) {&#xA;                greatestWidth = getGreatestWidth(spanWidths, index, spanIndex);&#xA;                $(span).css({display: 'inline-block',&#xA;                            width: greatestWidth + buffer});&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;            // Sum -- sum all integers in an array (c'mon Javascript!)&#xA;            function sum(array) {&#xA;                result = 0;&#xA;                for (i = 0;i &amp;lt; array.length;i += 1)&#xA;                    result += array[i];&#xA;                return result;&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;            // Get New Max Width: get the max width of a &quot;line group&quot; based on&#xA;            //  the current max width, indent and minLineWidthAsPerc&#xA;            function getNewMaxWidth(currentMaxWidth, minLineWidth) {&#xA;                if ((currentMaxWidth - indent) &amp;gt; minLineWidth) {&#xA;                    return currentMaxWidth - indent;&#xA;                } else {&#xA;                    // Sorry, we can't reduce the width any further&#xA;                    return currentMaxWidth;&#xA;                }&#xA;            }&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;            // ALIGN THE WORDS IN THE LINES ALREADY //&#xA;            ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////&#xA;&#xA;            // Enclose each word of each child in span tags, record the width&#xA;            //  of each such span tag and the height of each line&#xA;            children.each(function (index, child) {&#xA;                // wrap words in spans&#xA;                $(child).html(spanify($(child).text()));&#xA;&#xA;                // record the width of each span&#xA;                var widths = [];&#xA;                $('span', child).each(function (index, span) {&#xA;                    widths.push($(span).width());&#xA;                });&#xA;                spanWidths.push(widths);&#xA;&#xA;                // Record the height of each line&#xA;                lineHeights.push($($('span', child)[0]).height());&#xA;&#xA;            });&#xA;&#xA;            // linesToColumnify is an array of indices representing the lines&#xA;            //  whose span-wrapped words need to be aligned.  Such lines have&#xA;            //  a word count that is greater than one and equal to that of all&#xA;            //  subsequent lines.&#xA;            var linesToColumnify = [];&#xA;            $.each(spanWidths, function (index, line) {&#xA;                // isColumnable returns true if the last line has more than two&#xA;                //  words and all lines from this one on down have the same word&#xA;                //  count&#xA;                function isColumnable(index, line) {&#xA;                    if (spanWidths[spanWidths.length - 1].length &amp;lt; 2)&#xA;                        return false;&#xA;                    for (var i = index + 1; i &amp;lt; spanWidths.length; i++) {&#xA;                        if (spanWidths[i].length !== spanWidths[index].length)&#xA;                            return false;&#xA;                    }&#xA;                    return true;&#xA;                }&#xA;                if (isColumnable(index, line)) linesToColumnify.push(index);&#xA;            });&#xA;&#xA;            // Set the width of each span tag to the width of the longest span&#xA;            //  tag in the same 'column' plus the buffer&#xA;            children.each(function (index, child) {&#xA;                // Only alter the width of spans inside of columnable lines&#xA;                if (linesToColumnify.indexOf(index) !== -1) {&#xA;                    $('span', child).each(function (spanIndex, span) {&#xA;                        setWidth(index, spanIndex, span);&#xA;                    });&#xA;                }&#xA;            });&#xA;&#xA;            // If the container's height is not equal to the sum of the line&#xA;            //  heights, we have lines wrapping and need to fix that by breaking&#xA;            //  the lines into multiple lines.&#xA;            var containerHeight = $(this).height();&#xA;            if (containerHeight !== sum(lineHeights)) {&#xA;                var containerWidth = $(this).width();&#xA;                var minLineWidth = Math.round(minLineWidthAsPerc / 100 *&#xA;                                                containerWidth);&#xA;&#xA;                // Create the lineGroups list of objects; this tells us the max&#xA;                //  width of each line and, indirectly via the spanWidths object,&#xA;                //  the slice of &amp;lt;span&amp;gt;-wrapped words we want in each line.&#xA;                var lineGroups = [{maxWidth: containerWidth, indent: 0,&#xA;                                 spanWidths: []}];&#xA;                $.each(colWidths, function (index, width) {&#xA;                    lineGroup = lineGroups[lineGroups.length - 1];&#xA;                    if ((sum(lineGroup.spanWidths) + width + buffer)&#xA;                        &amp;lt; lineGroup.maxWidth) {&#xA;                        lineGroup.spanWidths.push(width + buffer);&#xA;                    } else {&#xA;&#xA;                        lineGroups.push({maxWidth:&#xA;                            getNewMaxWidth(lineGroup.maxWidth, minLineWidth),&#xA;                            spanWidths: [width + buffer]});&#xA;                    }&#xA;                });&#xA;&#xA;                // Create a new container that has the lines broken up,&#xA;                //  grouped and indented appropriately.&#xA;                var newContainer = $('&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;');&#xA;                var begin = 0;&#xA;                previousIndent = 0;&#xA;                $.each(lineGroups, function (index, lineGroup) {&#xA;                    var topMarg = (index !== 0) ? lineGroupBuffer : 'auto';&#xA;                    var currentIndent = ((lineGroup.maxWidth -&#xA;                        (index * indent)) &amp;lt; minLineWidth) ? previousIndent :&#xA;                        (index * indent);&#xA;                    previousIndent = currentIndent;&#xA;&#xA;                    var lineGroupDiv = $('&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;')&#xA;                                            .addClass(lineGroupClass)&#xA;                                            .css({'margin-left': currentIndent,&#xA;                                                'margin-top': topMarg});&#xA;                    var end = begin + lineGroup.spanWidths.length;&#xA;                    container.children().clone().each(&#xA;                        function (index, line) {&#xA;                            lineGroupDiv.append(&#xA;                                $(line)&#xA;                                    .html($(line).children().slice(begin, end)));&#xA;                        }&#xA;                    );&#xA;                    newContainer.append(lineGroupDiv);&#xA;                    begin = end;&#xA;                });&#xA;&#xA;                // Replace the container's children with those of the new container&#xA;                container.html(newContainer.children());&#xA;            }&#xA;        });&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;})(jQuery); &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="940" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T05:54:47.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1941" CreationDate="2012-04-19T09:03:25.900" Score="7" ViewCount="780" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a hard time finding answers to this question on Ixquick.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was young, transformational grammarians believed that sentences were derived from &quot;kernel sentences,&quot; which were uniclausal, single-verb clauses with no modifiers.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/Kernel-Sentence-term.htm&quot;&gt;http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/Kernel-Sentence-term.htm&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;   For instance, &quot;Mary bought and fed a red horse&quot; would be derived form &quot;Mary bought the horse.&quot;  &quot;Mary fed a horse.&quot;  &quot;The horse was red.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, most modern linguists don't believe that sentences are represented in the brain as kernel sentences.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What considerations prompted generative linguists to abandon the notion of kernel sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2012-04-19T10:35:18.170" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T23:46:02.593" Title="Why did generative linguists abandon the notion of kernel sentences?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2012-04-19T10:11:19.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This would have been a comment on Dan Velleman's answer, but I don't have the reputation for comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the hypothetical situation in which these verbs become associated with certain aspects &lt;em&gt;as a rule&lt;/em&gt;, that would probably be called &lt;em&gt;lexicalization&lt;/em&gt;. I.e., the &quot;mental lexicon&quot; entry for &lt;em&gt;durar&lt;/em&gt; would specify it as being associated with imperfect aspect. The situation in Russian is far more developed than that, in that iirc every single verb has a perfect variant and an imperfect variant, and that systematically one has a prefix and the other does not. That would be &lt;em&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt; because it really becomes a system, not just the idiosyncratic information of a lexical item. (Another important difference is that the Russian aspect distinction is maintained across tenses, i.e. reflected also in the present tense and even in the infinitive, which is again quite different from the Spanish case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as Dan Velleman noted, the Spanish cases appears to (still) be only a tendency, and neither a reflection of lexicalization nor grammaticalization. Still, very interesting data!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T10:11:19.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1734" CreationDate="2012-04-19T11:59:52.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question, but there are two reasons it is very difficult to answer. First, there's a simple problem independent of any specific theory: there is no clear way to define the size of the trees in question. Also, if we believe the generative research of the past 20 years, there's reason to doubt there's such a thing as &quot;slots&quot; in the sense you speak of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the size: simply following orthographic conventions regarding &quot;sentences&quot; doesn't necessarily tell us about the maximal relevant size of syntactic representations. If I utter two long sentences, loaded with adjuncts, and joined together by a conjunction, are they part of the same tree for our purposes? I have no idea, frankly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're probably interested in some very large structure, because the question becomes trivial once the tree is small, and I don't think that trivial question is what you were aiming at. In other words, if the relevant unit to look at is the XP of minimalist generative syntax, meaning any structure composed of a lexical item and whatever other lexical items its selection features require, then by hypothesis the same XP structure is (recursively) used to construct any and all syntactically-structure utterances, and then, indeed, no utterance is syntactically novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So presumably, to make the question interesting, we want to look at units up to some very big size, probably up to the biggest XPs uttered in normal life. But to the best of my knowledge, there's no clearly defined maximum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is that, as I kind of already indicated, the concept of syntactic slots as such isn't really relevant in much of the current research in syntax. &quot;Slots&quot; are essentially created by lexical items (&quot;heads&quot;) which carry selectional features that need to be satisfied in order for the structure to be well-formed (and interpretable at the interfaces to sound and meaning). They are filled by XPs, which are in turn also formed around the requirements of some head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, however, assumed that the real structure-building selectional features are those selecting major content and functional categories (V,N,A,P,D,C,T,v,...). So if we assume these can be seen as &quot;slots&quot;, we might be able to start to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to formulate some kind of attempt at an answer in terms of a thought experiment – the empirical side is not my forte – but without much result, because I keep bumping into the problems I outlined above. I guess this isn't strictly an answer, but hopefully it'll help someone understand the assumptions and implications of the question, and maybe work towards a real answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T11:59:52.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2012-04-19T13:09:09.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference is not in the case itself, but in how it gets there. As I understand it, structural case comes from the functional structure of the clause, inherent case comes from the specific position or role of the argument (not from the structure around it), and lexical case comes from the specific verb's lexical entry. As a result, structural case is the most regular/predictable, followed by inherent and then lexical case. It looks like Woolford explains the details much better than I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether they are real, that seems like the wrong question to ask; they are technical theoretical categories, and as such only make sense and have any status within a certain set of hypotheses. The purpose of theory is not to tell us what's real (that's a question for philosophers), but to construct a model that explains the data as well as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possibly relevant notion of &quot;real&quot; is &lt;em&gt;psychologically real&lt;/em&gt;, but then still theory can only point in the right direction, and quantitative psychological research would be needed to verify psychological reality of an object or category, but that kind of research is not necessarily possible for every theoretical concept in and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastEditorUserId="941" LastEditDate="2012-04-19T14:44:57.440" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T14:44:57.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-19T15:06:48.513" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a corpus of personal letters in which writers explain a tough decision to multiple addressees, each in its own section/paragraph of the letter (for the most part). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if anybody has ever empirically measured the attention/production/verbosity associated with each addressee (e.g. number of words) as a measure of the importance to the writer of their understanding the reasoning behind the decision. so far I've seen vague and indirect references to that in the politeness literature, pragmatics (e.g. Grice's maxim of quantity), discourse analysis register/style shift, etc. but nothing too empirical, systematic and/or quantitative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;any thoughts are most welcome.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="942" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T23:04:25.570" Title="measuring relative importance/social proximity of an addressee based on length of written explanation in letters with multiple addressees" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2012-04-19T17:40:45.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's quite possible we'll never know. Words don't leave fossils, and writing is a very new occurrence in the great scheme of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, the absolute limit assumed for finding shared etymological origin is around 10,000 years. Of course, that number is arbitrary, but it gives you a ball-park idea of how far back we can expect to reliably recognize traces of similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T17:40:45.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2012-04-19T17:53:08.100" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I'd say yes, even after the (hypothetical) critical period for language learning I've experienced passive hearing as very helpful in acquiring a new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Empirically, there's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victoria.ac.nz/home/about/newspubs/news/ViewNews.aspx?id=2458&amp;amp;newslabel=hn&quot;&gt;a study&lt;/a&gt; that says that simply hearing a language is helpful in learning to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, this makes sense. A basic problem involved in language acquisition is the Segmentation Problem: the sounds you hear are physically continuous, but you need to break them into discrete segments (separate sounds) in order for them to be intelligible. Also, as opposed to written language, spoken language doesn't necessarily give a clear signal as to where one word ends and another begins. This is one of the main stumbling blocks to acquiring a new language: you have to learn to segment what you're hearing on two levels. Now, the more you hear a stream of sounds composed of a given set of building blocks (morphemes, themselves composed of phonemes) the more information you have with which to figure out where one of them starts and another begins. Think of it like this: a sound is physically (phonetically) different depending on what sounds it is in between. By hearing it again and again in different environments, your brain can better figure out what exactly makes that sound different from other sounds, and what's just the effect of neighboring sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess that passive hearing with no instruction is more effective than reading a good language-teaching book but not hearing the language. You might be able to learn how to read and write Norwegian from a book, but unless you know exactly how letters like O and R sound in Norwegian (not always quite like English!) you won't get very far in understanding it when you hear someone speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T17:53:08.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1824" CreationDate="2012-04-19T23:04:25.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds interesting, but I don't think number of words, for example, is necessarily a good measure of addressee importance. It could be, of course, but it could also be that the writer knows that a particular addressee is really dense and needs a lot more explicit explanation, or maybe the writer addresses a very short paragraph to another person because the writer knows that person won't read anything longer than 50 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you be better to analyze the different lexical items, style, etc., used in the paragraphs to particular people? Does the writer use any pet names? Any diminutives? What tenses? These things are all quantifiable, and research has been done in this area. Off the top of my head I'm not sure what might indicate addressee importance, but you could get a benchmark from looking at other people's writings to important people (or maybe better yet, if you KNOW a particular addressee of the writer in question was very important) to look for trends. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T23:04:25.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1793" CreationDate="2012-04-19T23:17:05.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there've been a fair number of studies done in the realm of sign language recognition. One that could be a good place to get started is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201534&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Visual memory for shapes in deaf signers and nonsigners and in hearing signers and nonsigners: atypical lateralization and enhancement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Cattani A, Clibbens J. and Perfect TJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fringe comment: Is this really a linguistics issue? I would challenge the conclusion that natural language does not have a good mechanism for describing faces... It seems to me that it's an issue of perception: Most people don't perceive visual details in a way that they can verbalize them. An exception, I suspect, is artists. If you asked an experienced portrait artist to describe someone's face, I think they'd do a very good job of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-20T09:06:47.103" LastActivityDate="2012-04-20T09:06:47.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1813" CreationDate="2012-04-19T23:38:44.783" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll use an example from Bary's 2009 paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Progressive in English doesn't go well with stative verbs (due to their semantic incompatibility):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John is tall.&lt;/em&gt; =&gt;*&lt;em&gt;John is being tall.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John is funny.&lt;/em&gt; =&gt;&lt;em&gt;John is being funny.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the mismatch is resolved by the progressive operator coercing (reinterpreting) a stative verb into eventive. &quot;John is being funny&quot; means &quot;John is acting funny&quot;. It's no longer a state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-04-19T23:38:44.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-20T08:11:12.067" Score="9" ViewCount="1621" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English there are just two series of stops, voiced (b, d, g) and unvoiced (p, t, k). The latter are generally aspirated (though it depends on phonological context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many common languages of Europe and Asia the unvoiced consonants are not aspirated, this is a common difficulty for English speakers learning them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in some other languages that English speakers do not learn as frequently there are contrasting aspirated and unaspirated unvoiced stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've been learning Georgian for a few months and it has three series of contrasting stop consonants (and possible affricates I suppose):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;voiced&lt;/strong&gt;: b, d, g, j, dz&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;unvoiced aspirated&lt;/strong&gt;: pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, chʰ, tsʰ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ejective&lt;/strong&gt;: pʼ, tʼ, kʼ, chʼ, tsʼ, qʼ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ejectives are even harder for English speakers to master than unaspirated voiceless stops. And in fact some teaching aids I've seen don't even mention the ejective quality of these stops and instead focus on the unaspirated quality, presumably because this is easier and is sufficient to distinguish the sounds for both the learners and the Georgian native speakers they will interact with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this has got me thinking, &lt;strong&gt;are there languages which contrast all three kinds of unvoiced stops: aspirated pulmonic, unaspirated pulmonic, and unaspirated ejective?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-04-23T07:48:48.530" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T19:09:19.657" Title="Are there languages with contrasting unvoiced aspirated, unaspirated, and ejective stops?" Tags="&lt;ejectives&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2012-04-20T14:40:23.163" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a PhD in computational linguistics. I can tell you that NLP and CL are not two separate fields. Rather, CL is the superset that encompasses NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In everyday CL practice, NLP focuses on the building of NL parsers and as such it is central to the CL field. CL as a field includes a lot more than NLP. For instance, you can study machine translation, knowledge representation, ontology engineering, text mining, information extraction, etc. all within the CL field.  CL is a pretty broad thing and (unlike CS) is not primarily focused on theory. It is highly hands-on. Most theories in CL come from theoretical CS. When it comes to the nitty-gritty CL is the practical application of various algorithms for purposes of natural language processing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may occasionally encounter a reference to NLP (sans CL) within the field of CS. This is due to the fact that -originally- the generation of parsers served purposes beyond the confines of natural language (the way we mean &quot;natural language&quot; within CL). So, one could argue that NLP within CS is a slightly different animal than NLP within CL. In essence, it's the same kind of object seen under slightly different light.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="946" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-24T18:19:34.203" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T18:19:34.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2012-04-20T17:31:17.303" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference is that Computational Linguistics tends more towards Linguistics, and answers linguistic questions using computational tools. Natural Language Processing involves applications that process language and tends more towards Computer Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the distinction between the two terms is fading and they are being used more and more interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2012-04-20T17:31:17.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1831" CreationDate="2012-04-20T22:20:01.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Penutian language &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintu_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wintu&lt;/a&gt; exhibits the following contrasts in the stop inventory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;╔═══════════╦═════════╦══════════╦══════════════╦═══════╦════════╗  &#xA;║   Stops   ║ Labial  ║ Alveolar ║ Postalveolar ║ Velar ║ Uvular ║  &#xA;╠═══════════╬═════════╬══════════╬══════════════╬═══════╬════════╣  &#xA;║ Voiced    ║ b       ║ d        ║ -            ║ -     ║ -      ║    &#xA;║ Aspirated ║ pʰ      ║ tʰ       ║ -            ║ -     ║        ║  &#xA;║ Ejective  ║ pʼ      ║ tʼ       ║ tʃʼ          ║ kʼ    ║ qχʼ    ║  &#xA;║ Voiceless ║ p       ║ t        ║ tʃ           ║ k     ║ q      ║  &#xA;╚═══════════╩═════════╩══════════╩══════════════╩═══════╩════════╝  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the front stops, they exhibit the contrasts you mention (in addition to a plain voiced manner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: The inventory above is not atypical of North American languages, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiowa_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kiowa&lt;/a&gt; also contrasts voiced/voiceless/aspirated/ejective. And many of Africa's !Kung languages exhibit extensive contrasting manners of articulation among the stops; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekoka_!Kung&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ekoka contrasts up to 5 manners at each point of articulation&lt;/a&gt;, and that's not including clicks. It's not clear if this is the kind of thing you're asking about, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-23T01:00:03.387" LastActivityDate="2012-04-23T01:00:03.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1785" CreationDate="2012-04-21T06:54:40.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parsers for rich formalisms like &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C&amp;amp;C&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/enju/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Enju&lt;/a&gt; come with super-taggers. Super-taggers are quite like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;part-of-speech (POS) taggers&lt;/a&gt;, except that the tags they produce have more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, C&amp;amp;C produces:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;word=&quot;undergone&quot; lemma=&quot;undergo&quot; pos=&quot;VBN&quot; chunk=&quot;I-VP&quot; cat=&quot;(S[pt]\NP)/NP&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; tells you that this is a verb that takes an NP on the right, and then one on the left to form an S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, things are not always this straight-forward. For &quot;added constantly to the list&quot;, we get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   word=&quot;added&quot; lemma=&quot;add&quot; pos=&quot;VBN&quot; chunk=&quot;I-VP&quot; cat=&quot;(S[pt]\NP)/PP&quot;&#xA;   word=&quot;constantly&quot; lemma=&quot;constantly&quot; pos=&quot;RB&quot; chunk=&quot;I-ADVP&quot; cat=&quot;(S\NP)\(S\NP)&quot;&#xA;   word=&quot;to&quot; lemma=&quot;to&quot; pos=&quot;TO&quot; chunk=&quot;I-PP&quot; cat=&quot;PP/NP&quot;&#xA;   word=&quot;the&quot; lemma=&quot;the&quot; pos=&quot;DT&quot; chunk=&quot;I-NP&quot; cat=&quot;NP[nb]/N&quot;&#xA;   word=&quot;list&quot; lemma=&quot;list&quot; pos=&quot;NN&quot; chunk=&quot;I-NP&quot; cat=&quot;N&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;added&quot;, here is transitive, but one of its arguments is a PP. However, not all PPs fill valency slots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea if you would find it more straight-forward than Semafor, or less. &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc/wiki/boxer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Boxer&lt;/a&gt; would give you &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_representation_structure#Discourse_Representation_Structures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;discourse representation structures (DRSes)&lt;/a&gt; which include the kind of info of the Semafor output. I suppose you'll have to evaluate it for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-04-24T12:01:55.850" LastActivityDate="2012-04-24T12:01:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2355" CreationDate="2012-04-21T23:16:41.937" Score="10" ViewCount="1148" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, say I have a list Basque/Euskera words, is there a way I can reconstruct these modern Basque words into a Pre-Proto-Basque version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;beo (hot)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  lur (earth)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  izotz (ice)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  izuga (fear)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  bai (yes)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ze (no)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ao (mouth)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  draga (spear)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  il (death)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  dan (drink)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  jarai (follow)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  laster (fast)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language&quot;&gt;the wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; that somewhat elucidates this potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not went to the library and searched for &quot;Reconstructing the Pre-Proto-Basque Root&quot; by Joseba A. Lakarra yet so I wondered if anyone has andor can explain his methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="706" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-21T23:46:40.920" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T07:50:41.847" Title="Pre-Proto-Basque: is there a methodology to establishing its vocabulary?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1397" CreationDate="2012-04-22T08:36:32.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question title asks for ways of defining a writer's unique style, but the body indicates that the aim is to identify authors based on analysis of their writings. The identification of authors based on analysis of their style, known as 'authorship attribution', does not necessarily allow for characterising a 'unique style' as it may be more about statistical differences rather than unique styles. This means that while a human reader may not be able to guess that two pieces were by different authors, statistical calculations based on various measures may be able to detect this with a fair degree of certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authorship attribution has a long tradition, particularly in theological studies and philology, but has developed many new methods with the advent of natural language processing. Many different metrics have been employed in authorship attribution, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sentence length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;character frequencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word frequencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vocabulary richness (various functions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to list all measures as it has been estimated (Rudman, 1998) that over 1,000 different measures had been developed up to that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some useful references are listed below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/lecturers/stamatatos/papers/survey.pdf&quot;&gt;A survey of modern authorship attribution methods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/E/E99/E99-1021.pdf&quot;&gt;Automatic authorship attribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~sok/papers/r/s004.html&quot;&gt;The state of authorship attribution studies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/?vol=6&amp;amp;num=1&amp;amp;id=136&quot;&gt;Comparative Power of Three Author-Attribution Techniques for Differentiating Authors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-04-22T08:36:32.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2012-04-25T18:34:32.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the delayed response. Here's how you would analyze your examples, according to Huddleston and Pullum 2002 and 2005:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She found him lying on the bed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Found him lying on the bed’ is &lt;strong&gt;a gerund-participial non-finite clause&lt;/strong&gt;.  It is also a plain-complex catenative construction. The verb ‘find’ here is a catenative verb and it belongs to class 3Cii (HP 2002). ‘Him’ is a direct object and ‘lying on the bed’ is a depictive object-oriented (objective) predicative complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She found him injured.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Him' is a direct object, 'injured' is a depictive object-oriented (objective) predicative complement. &lt;strong&gt;'Find' is a complex-transitive verb here&lt;/strong&gt;. 'Injured' is an adjective here - it allows modification, e.g. badly/severely injured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She found a note left on the table.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The past-participle non-finite clause&lt;/strong&gt; ‘left on the table’ modifies the NP ‘note’ – so it is an adjunct of spatial location (HP 2002, Chapter 8, §4). It is essentially equivalent to a finite relative clause: 'which/that was left on the table'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She found the suspects involved in the robbery.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The suspects’ is a direct object, ‘involved in the robbery’ is a depictive object-oriented (objective) predicative complement. &lt;strong&gt;'Find' is a complex-transitive verb here.&lt;/strong&gt; 'Involved'  is an adjective here - it allows modification, e.g. deeply involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-04-25T18:34:32.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2002" CreationDate="2012-04-26T04:31:07.737" Score="13" ViewCount="5446" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, I working on my application for the Bachelor of Philosophy program at Penn State to major in cognitive linguistics, but at I am also a computer science major, my advisor wants me to incorporate computational linguistics into my curriculum. I understand what the field of cognitive linguistics is, but what would I do as a computational linguist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some similarities and differences between cognitive linguistics and computational linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T11:45:26.317" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T08:47:47.597" Title="What does a computational linguist actually do?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1844" CreationDate="2012-04-26T07:25:30.567" Score="10" ViewCount="1336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that implies that accent/dialect &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prestige&lt;/a&gt; is formed due to the sounds of accents (i.e. something to back up statements like an accent being &quot;harsh sounding&quot;) or is it really just to do with perceptions of the area in which the accent is spoken in (i.e. if an area has social problems, does the accent that goes with it have a bad image?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking here of areas like Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Swansea etc. in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T11:31:12.083" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T11:31:12.083" Title="Does accent/dialect prestige rely on socio-cultural bias or on acoustics?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;&lt;prestige&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1840" CreationDate="2012-04-26T07:28:37.827" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I graduated as a computational linguist. The cognitive sciences really weren't alluded to much at all at my uni. so can't help with the compare and contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what a computational linguist does: Not being exhaustive here... computational linguists work with corpora, work to make corpora, design tools for corpora, like POS-taggers, word sense disambiguation; and design natural language parsers, work towards machine translation and text categorization eg. &quot;is this spam or not&quot;, and I'd say the first word net sorts under CL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling computational linguistics (CL) might be to linguistics what AI is to computer science, developing methods, which when they are commonly in use, are no longer considered to be part of CL/AI. Which is okay, since CL/AI is already working on the next big thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically whatever is bleeding edge language data crunching at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming the reason your advisor wants you to do some CL is because you'll need to know the tools, corpora and methods. Then there's getting a better understanding of what's easy and not easy for a computer vs. what's easy and not easy for humans, which should be relevant to cog. ling. &lt;em&gt;indeed&lt;/em&gt;, and finally, it's an obvious suggestion since CL is basically going all CS on poor, unsuspecting language data: it's fun! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T07:28:37.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2012-04-26T17:06:12.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's due to social prestige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a simple example from the history of English accents: changing &quot;ng&quot; to /n/ at the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, a word like &quot;going&quot; is pronounced with an /ŋ/ sound (a velar nasal) in a higher-prestige accent, yet with an /n/ sound &quot;goin&quot; in a lower-prestige accent.  Pronouncing &quot;ng&quot; as /n/ is seen as less educated or less formal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In earlier times, pronouncing &quot;going&quot; as &quot;goin&quot; (with an /n/) was the mark of the English aristocracy.  Pronouncing it with an /ŋ/ was more common among the lower classes.(See an article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=734&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt; for some information about this historical switch.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly this change came about is actually rather interesting from a historical point of view.  The suffix marking verbal nouns (like in &quot;a building&quot;) was &quot;-inge&quot; in Middle English, while the suffix marking progressive participles (like in &quot;I'm running&quot;) was &quot;-inde&quot;.  The two merged together in southern England in the 1300s, spreading slowly but never quite taking over the whole English-speaking world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T17:06:12.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2012-04-26T21:52:00.840" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of no evidence that aesthetic judgments are involved, and several findings to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;.. we have in a series of studies investigated the merit of the social connotations hypothesis. ... French Canadians have traditionally favored the Parisian dialect over local forms of French in terms of elegance and pleasantness, just as the Greeks have favored the standard Athenian accent over the Cretan variety. The inherent value hypothesis would propose that English speakers totally unfamiliar with  either French or Greek would share these natural preferences. Not so. Our English judges (having, of course, no social connotations associated with these sounds) rated the corresponding and non-standard varieties equally favorably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In another study, we asked American and Canadian listeners to rate a variety of British regionally accented speakers whose ratings varied considerably in terms of pleasantness for local British judges. While they were obviously familiar with the language &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; (unlike the previous studies), once again they did not discriminate the varieties in terms of pleasantness. ... Cockney, one of the most denigrated British varieties, sounded as fine to the Americans as any other variety.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Howard Giles and Nancy Niedzielski, &amp;quot;Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly&amp;quot;, in &lt;em&gt;Language Myths&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-04-26T21:52:00.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-27T12:02:12.600" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In sign languages, the position for content questions is clause-initial, clause-final or both. For instance; TİD (Turkish Sign Language) licenses both.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   When there is topicalization in the sentence, the content question occurs post-topic position in some sign languages; like Finnish Sign Language. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4489610&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zeshan&lt;/a&gt; (2004) points that one of the proposed explainations for this post topic position is ease of articulation.&#xA;   Is there any other reason for this change when there is topicalization? Is there synactic reason for it along with articulatory one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="715" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T08:36:36.283" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T08:36:36.280" Title="Is the position of content questions in sign language due to articulary or syntactic reasons?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-27T12:39:29.590" Score="7" ViewCount="978" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in languages that are used as first languages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it have to do simply with population growth/sustenance of the speakers of those languages? What are the theories put forward to explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="961" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T01:44:29.337" Title="Why do some languages have more speakers than others?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-27T19:30:48.137" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a large number of sets of historical documents that are each divided into two subsets: each subset advocating a position in a legal dispute (i.e. one set for a plaintiff and one for a defendant), and the outcome of the dispute is known: What are the linguistic qualities that one could use to identify an objective metric that correlates with successful outcomes (i.e. persuasiveness)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you have lots of historical legal documents and know the outcome, what sort of metrics might one use to decide which has linguistic qualities that correlate with persuasion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, given two pieces advocating the same essential fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The plaintiff takes the position that on May 12, 2009 the defendant was responsible for the destruction of the vehicle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John Doe destroyed the vehicle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the following things may (or may not) be relevant, but are probably worth comparing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use of deferential phrases &quot;The plaintiff takes the position that ...&quot; versus absolute statements &quot;The defendant destroyed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of an impersonal identifier (&quot;the defendant&quot;) versus a personal name (&quot;John Doe&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Length of the words used, and length of the sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inclusion of dates (May 12, 2009)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other metrics might be useful for drawing conclusions about the persuasiveness of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, for clarity, this question is not asking what linguistic qualities are indicators of persuasiveness, but rather what qualities one might want to consider to develop useful (or at least interesting) barometers of persuasiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="962" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T04:18:10.723" Title="Metrics of evaluating the successfulness of persuasive language" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1847" CreationDate="2012-04-27T22:52:42.393" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite simply, &lt;strong&gt;history.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages gain speakers when their speakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;raise children to speak the language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conquer other people and imposing their language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;become culturally influential on other communities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages lose speakers when their speakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;die&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;switch to a different language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diverge into different groups who can no longer speak to one another&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the example of Spanish.  It started just in Spain, then spread to many parts of the world.  This happened because the Spanish conquered other groups (like the Aztecs) and imposed their language and because their population grew in the new territories and they raised their children in a Spanish-speaking environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at Welsh.  It was once more widely spoken in and around Wales, but is now much reduced in number of speakers.  Many people who once spoke Welsh now speak English in their daily lives and don't teach Welsh to their children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of people who speak a language depends on the rise and fall of the community that speaks that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-04-27T22:52:42.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2639" CreationDate="2012-04-28T03:35:49.187" Score="18" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, and no doubt in many other languages, instruments can be subjects.  We can speak not only of John (an agent) cutting the canvas, but also of the knife (an instrument) cutting the canvas.   As others have pointed out, though I can't find the exact reference, not every instrument can be a subject in English.  We can cut paper with scissors, and scissors can cut the paper.   On the other hand, we can eat soup with a spoon, but the spoon can't eat the soup.  Hence we have a distinction between a secondary agent (the scissors, which do something caused or controlled by the agent) and a tool (the spoon, which helps the agent do something).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, are there languages in which instruments can't be subjects?   For example, do languages with semantic alignment permit instrumental subjects?   On a hierarchy of animacy, for example, &quot;scissors&quot; are much lower than first person, second person, and active beings like people and animals.   So how could a word meaning &quot;scissors&quot; be a subject in such a language in sentences with active declarative meanings where nothing is marked with an inverse morpheme?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-04-28T11:17:15.200" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T06:23:02.050" Title="Are there any languages that don't permit instrumental subjects?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1888" CreationDate="2012-04-28T03:47:15.333" Score="4" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;At omniglot.com, we find scripts whose characters more-or-less stand for consonant phonemes, or all phonemes, or syllables, or words.  But I've never heard of a language whose written form consists entirely of phonemic symbols plus separate symbols for grammatical morphemes whether free (like adpositions or conjunctions) or bound (like case or tense affixes).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any of the readers heard of such a script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English writing, we have a limited number of grammatical morpheme characters on our keyboards, such as &quot;&amp;amp;&quot; and &quot;@,&quot; but we don't use them in formal prose.  But I'm talking about a writing system with a bigger repertoire of grammatical morpheme characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="62" LastEditDate="2012-05-05T20:37:26.873" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T16:23:38.403" Title="For natural languages, are there writing systems that consist entirely of signs for phonemes on one hand and grammatical morphemes on the other?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2012-04-28T04:18:10.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's important to remember that the two sentences that you compare are not synonymous:   they stand for different propositions.  One concerns a plaintiff's claim about who is responsible for the destruction of the car, and another concerns the destruction of the car.   To see how different these propositions are, consider this example:   If John Doe destroyed the car during his first epileptic seizure, John would still have destroyed the car, but the plaintiff might not have claimed that John was responsible for its destruction.  To sum up:  you're not comparing sentences that say the same thing using different styles.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I think it's safe to say that persuasiveness of an utterance is connected to the listeners' beliefs about what constitutes evidence for or against it.   An utterance may be persuasive (or not) depending on how the event described has been documented, how much the speaker trusts the source of information about the event, whether the listener has observed the event itself or similar events, etc.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, to answer your question, you may wish to consult volumes on Rhetoric, which is the art of persuasive speaking and writing.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-04-28T04:18:10.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1857" CreationDate="2012-04-28T05:15:53.443" Score="11" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;About how much does language typology correlate with genetic relationships among languages?   For example, should we expect most Sino-Tibetan languages to be isolating, or most Indo-European languages to have a lot of fusional affixes, and so on across language families?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:33:53.193" Title="About how much does language typology correlate with genetic relationships among languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1077" CreationDate="2012-04-29T07:29:01.713" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Direction words arise from the need to coordinate direction. Thus, their nature and usage can vary widely from one language to another. To start, here are a few aspects of a people and their land that can influence the form that direction words / direction morphemes end up taking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The types of activities requiring coordination (migration, herding, hunting, fishing, gathering, farming, trade relations, war, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The geographical features of the area (coastline, a central river, tributaries, woods, islands, steppe, mountains).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The current state of inherited cultural knowledge about direction (including mythology; this may largely go back to (1) and (2) from prior states of the language).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The systems that thus arise may be influenced to be similar to the common cardinal directions in English, or instead make the primary distinction &quot;upstream&quot; vs. &quot;downstream,&quot; &quot;inland&quot; vs. &quot;toward the coast,&quot; or &quot;direction towards&quot; vs. &quot;away from a certain very distant landmark.&quot; Taken beyond that landmark, a person might not be as effective at communicating navigation. (Although, technically, the same thing can happen in English: explain which way to go from the North Pole!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=kzGfdeK9za4C&quot;&gt;Orientation Systems of the North Pacific Rim&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Fortescue, a close examination of the orientation systems of Wakashan, Tsimshianic, Haida, Tlingit, Eyak, Athabaskan, Eskimo-Aleut, Tungusic, Nivkh, and Ainu leads to the enticing conclusion that by conceiving of a language's orientation system diachronically, looking at etymologies of direction words and inspecting any inherently paradoxical methods of expressing direction, we can evidence a hypothesis as to whether a language is relatively new to a region (say, having arried within the past 2000 years), as well as perhaps find out where they came from!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if people in a dialect continuum settle a turning peninsula, the meaning of a direction word at the source may be different from at the tip. Similarly, whereas most IE languages use the PIE root *&lt;em&gt;aus-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to shine, dawn&quot; for &quot;east,&quot; the Latin word &lt;em&gt;australis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;south&quot; may be from the same root. This is &quot;perhaps is based on a false assumption about the orientation of the Italian peninsula, 'with shift through &quot;southeast&quot; explained by the diagonal position of the axis of Italy'...Or perhaps the connection is more ancient, and [directly] from PIE root *&lt;em&gt;aus-&lt;/em&gt; 'to shine,' source of &lt;em&gt;aurora,&lt;/em&gt; which also produces words for 'burning,' with reference to the 'hot' south wind that blows into Italy.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Australia&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your question about English (all quotations from the Online Etymology Dictionary, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;north &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;norð&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;nurtha&lt;/em&gt; possibly derives from PIE *&lt;em&gt;ner-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;left, below&quot; &quot;as north is to the left when one faces the rising sun (cf. Skt. &lt;em&gt;narakah&lt;/em&gt; 'hell,' Gk. &lt;em&gt;enerthen&lt;/em&gt; 'from beneath,' Oscan-Umbrian &lt;em&gt;nertrak&lt;/em&gt; 'left').&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=north&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;south &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;suð&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;sunthaz&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;perhaps related to base of *&lt;em&gt;sunnon&lt;/em&gt; 'sun,' with sense of &quot;the region of the sun.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=south&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;east &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;east&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;aus-to-,&lt;/em&gt; *&lt;em&gt;austra-,&lt;/em&gt; &quot;from PIE *&lt;em&gt;aus-&lt;/em&gt; 'to shine,' especially 'dawn' (cf. Skt. &lt;em&gt;ushas&lt;/em&gt; 'dawn,' Gk. &lt;em&gt;aurion&lt;/em&gt; 'morning,' O.Ir. &lt;em&gt;usah,&lt;/em&gt; Lith. &lt;em&gt;auszra&lt;/em&gt; 'dawn,' L. &lt;em&gt;aurora&lt;/em&gt; 'dawn,' &lt;em&gt;auster&lt;/em&gt; 'south'), lit. 'to shine.'&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=east&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;west &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;west&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;wes-t-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;from PIE *&lt;em&gt;wes-&lt;/em&gt; (source of Gk. &lt;em&gt;hesperos,&lt;/em&gt; L. &lt;em&gt;vesper&lt;/em&gt; 'evening, west'), perhaps an enlarged form of root *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt; 'to go down' (cf. Skt. &lt;em&gt;avah&lt;/em&gt; 'downward'), and thus lit. 'direction in which the sun sets.'&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=west&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot;&gt;OE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages use non-compound words for the ordinal (secondary) directions. For example, Finnish (with help from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/luode&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmansuunta&quot;&gt;Finnish Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;luode&lt;/em&gt; &quot;northwest,&quot; possibly the same etymology as identical &lt;em&gt;luode&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;ebb / low tide,&quot; loan from a Germanic language, cognate of German &lt;em&gt;Flut,&lt;/em&gt; Swedish &lt;em&gt;flod&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pohjoinen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;north,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;pohja&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bottom,&quot; is because the sun is in the north when it's underneath the horizon, possibly also because the back of a dwelling should be facing the north so as to maximize warmth.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;koillinen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;northeast,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;koi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dawn.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;itä&lt;/em&gt; &quot;east,&quot; possibly related to &lt;em&gt;itää&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to germinate,&quot; that the sun grows in the east.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kaakko&lt;/em&gt; &quot;southeast,&quot; equated with &lt;em&gt;kaakkuri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;red-throated diver (loon)&quot; and &lt;em&gt;kuikka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;black-throated diver (loon).&quot; Compare Latin &lt;em&gt;ornithias&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bird-wind,&quot; the spring wind that brings the birds.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;etelä&lt;/em&gt; &quot;south,&quot; antonymously to &lt;em&gt;pohjois,&lt;/em&gt; is the direction in which the front of the house should face. Compare &lt;em&gt;eteen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to the front.&quot; The Estonian cognate &lt;em&gt;edel&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;southwest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lounas&lt;/em&gt; &quot;southwest, lunch&quot; indicates the direction the sun is in at lunchtime. The Estonian cognate &lt;em&gt;lõuna&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;south.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;länsi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;west&quot; may have to do with the day being &quot;flattened&quot; (&lt;em&gt;läntätään&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;litistetään&lt;/em&gt;) as the evening arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T07:29:01.713" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1077" CreationDate="2012-04-29T17:06:15.313" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will look specifically at the western Classical origins of these terms. The Ancient Greeks in particular had &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;extensive mythology and naming associated with all the Winds (&lt;strong&gt;Ἄνεμοι&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Anemoi&lt;/em&gt;) and directions&lt;/a&gt;, not just the cardinals. The Greeks were a seafaring people and wind direction was central to their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;North&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;septentriō&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;septentriōnalis&lt;/strong&gt;) = &lt;strong&gt;septem&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;seven&quot; + &lt;strong&gt;triō&lt;/strong&gt;, that is &quot;the seven plough-oxen (stars of Ursa Major). &lt;strong&gt;triō&lt;/strong&gt; (pl. &lt;strong&gt;triōnes&lt;/strong&gt;) is problematic. Most sources give this as meaning &quot;plough-oxen&quot;, but this term for plough-oxen is used nowhere else in Latin. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=hAFFAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA175&amp;amp;ots=wFe8mbD_Ok&amp;amp;dq=triones%20etymology&amp;amp;pg=PA175#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A few&lt;/a&gt; sources &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Tn1KAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA400&amp;amp;ots=pH2Cd9sYlE&amp;amp;dq=triones%20etymology&amp;amp;pg=PA400#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=triones%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;posit that&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;triō&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;strong&gt;*(s)tē̆r-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;star&quot; with loss of initial &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as in Indic, and that later mythology led people to reinterpret the root as &quot;oxen&quot;. The transparent meaning of this word to the Romans was &quot;in the direction of the constellation the Plough (Ursa Major)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;boreās&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;boreālis&lt;/strong&gt;) was also used to mean &quot;north&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;North Wind&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and was a direct borrowing from Greek &lt;strong&gt;Βορέας&lt;/strong&gt;. The Romans also called this Wind &lt;strong&gt;Aquilō&lt;/strong&gt;; this latter word is of unsure etymology. There have been attempts to relate it to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=F1TaEAHjy1QC&amp;amp;lpg=PA9&amp;amp;ots=06PHyKZUwT&amp;amp;dq=aquilo%20aquilus%20dark&amp;amp;pg=PA9#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=aquilo%20aquilus%20dark&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aquila&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;eagle&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;aquilus&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;dark&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=gyCn0s-dgOgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA75&amp;amp;ots=Z_XpynuqY_&amp;amp;dq=aquilo%20etymology&amp;amp;pg=PA74#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=aquilo%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aqua&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;water&quot;, viz. &quot;rainy wind&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gk &lt;strong&gt;Βορέας&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;boreas&lt;/em&gt; &quot;north, the North Wind&quot; was a Greek word also of unsure etymology. It has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bora_%28wind%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognates in other Balkan and Slavic languages&lt;/a&gt; such as Alb &lt;strong&gt;borë&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;snow&quot;, Srb &lt;strong&gt;бура&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;cold north wind&quot;. It is often said to come &amp;lt; PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0720.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*gʷor&lt;/strong&gt;- &quot;mountain&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This very likely is a reference to a North wind, cold and perhaps arising from mountains, that was prominent in these people's original homeland. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;South&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;merīdiēs&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;merīdiōnālis&lt;/strong&gt;) meant &quot;noon, midday&quot; &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;medius&lt;/strong&gt; “middle” + &lt;strong&gt;diēs&lt;/strong&gt; “day”. Since the sun is in the South at midday in the Northern hemisphere, this word is self-explanatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;auster&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;austrālis&lt;/strong&gt;) was the Latin name of the South Wind and the South. Now here is a fascinating bit of history and its relation to language change. Most scholars believe that &lt;strong&gt;auster&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;strong&gt;*-aus&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;shine&quot; - which is the same root that gives rise to the words for &quot;dawn&quot; and &quot;east&quot; in other IE languages! How can the same root be used for different cardinal directions in sister languages? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Australia&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;One theory is that since the Italian peninsula runs diagonally NW-SE&lt;/a&gt;, the word for &quot;east&quot; shifted to mean &quot;south&quot; since both were in the direction of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Another theory is that since the lands to the South were burning hot, or alternatively since the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirocco&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sirocco&lt;/a&gt; was hot, the root &lt;strong&gt;*aus-&lt;/strong&gt; referred to this heat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gk &lt;strong&gt;νότος&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;notos&lt;/em&gt; was the South wind of the Greeks. I have no idea what its etymology is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;East&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;oriēns&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;orientālis&lt;/strong&gt;)  was the usual Latin term. The meaning was transparent in Latin: &quot;rising&quot;, viz. &quot;in the direction of the rising sun&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;oriēns&lt;/strong&gt; is the present participle of the deponent &lt;strong&gt;orior&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;rise&quot; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;strong&gt;*or&lt;/strong&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/U/P0498.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;O-grade of &quot;move&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gk &lt;strong&gt;ἠώς&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;eos&lt;/em&gt; was used in Greek and also meant &quot;dawn&quot;, which is cognate with Latin &lt;strong&gt;aurora&lt;/strong&gt; and Germanic &lt;strong&gt;east&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;ἠώς&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;strong&gt;*h₂ewsṓs&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;*h₂ausōs&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;*aus&lt;/strong&gt;- &quot;shine&quot;. This is conjectured to be a reference to the shining dawn; but see 'south'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;West&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;occidēns&lt;/strong&gt; (adj. &lt;strong&gt;occidentālis&lt;/strong&gt;) was the usual Latin term. The meaning was similarly transparent in Latin: &quot;going down/setting&quot;, viz. &quot;in the direction of the setting sun&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;occidēns&lt;/strong&gt; is the present participle of &lt;strong&gt;occidō&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;fall/go down&quot; &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;ob&lt;/strong&gt; “towards/facing” + &lt;strong&gt;cadō&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;fall” &amp;lt; Proto-Indo-European &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0804.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*ḱad&lt;/strong&gt;- “fall”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;vesper&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;evening&quot; was also used to mean &quot;west&quot; in reference to the setting sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gk &lt;strong&gt;ἕσπερος&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;hesperos&lt;/em&gt; was found in Greek, cognate to Latin &lt;strong&gt;vesper&lt;/strong&gt; and Germanic &lt;strong&gt;west&lt;/strong&gt;. ἕσπερος &amp;lt; PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/R/P2194.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;*wesperos/wekeros &quot;evening&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;*wes&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wind, blow&quot; + &lt;strong&gt;*pero&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;source&quot;. In origin this may have been something like &quot;the direction from which the wind blows&quot;; one can imagine that this is possibly a reference to the prevailing winds in the PIE &lt;em&gt;urheimat&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T19:39:12.903" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T19:39:12.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1853" CreationDate="2012-04-29T23:13:30.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not very much, and what correlation there is can plausibly be put down to length of common development. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note for example that while Slavonic and Baltic languages retain much of the inflectional apparatus of PIE (though most nominal inflection has been lost in South Slavonic), English and the Scandinavian languages have lost most of it. They haven't quite got to the point where you'd call them isolating, but they're getting somewhere near it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-04-29T23:13:30.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1853" CreationDate="2012-04-30T01:59:22.463" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sino-Tibetan languages are actually a wonderful counterexample.  Some are isolating; some, especially the modern &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_languages&quot;&gt;Tibetan languages&lt;/a&gt;, are agglutinative; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=EcD8uNFBFHAC&amp;amp;pg=PA372&quot;&gt;Kiranti languages&lt;/a&gt; are highly fusional.  Some are tonal; many aren't, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal_Bhasa&quot;&gt; Newari&lt;/a&gt; and several of the Tibetan languages.  (Indeed, Newari phonology looks like the phonology of an Indian language: voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives, retroflex and dental consonants, phonemic vowel length, and so on.)  Some are SVO, but some, including the Tibetan languages again and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_language&quot;&gt;Burmese&lt;/a&gt;, are SOV.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to remember that languages don't &quot;know&quot; what family they're in.  A feature that's been part of the language for thousands of years is just as likely to stick around, and just as likely to be lost, as a feature that was just borrowed or innovated yesterday.  So for instance, yeah, Mandarin and Newari share a common ancestor several thousand years back &amp;mdash; but now there's nothing that's constraining them to evolve in the same direction as one another.  And so in fact they've diverged tremendously, Mandarin coming to look like a &quot;typical&quot; East Asian language and Newari like a typical South Asian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that genetically related languages &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; typologically similar, it's a result either of historical intertia or of continued contact.  Over the course of 4,000 years, historical intertia only buys you so much continued similarity.  So when a language family spreads out over a natural barrier (as the Sino-Tibetan family did) or across a wide area (as Indo-European did), the result is an awful lot of typological diversity among genetically-related languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T01:59:22.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1077" CreationDate="2012-04-30T03:46:34.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to the above, in PIE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South: *aug-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;North: *(s)kewer- (also North wind)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;East: *aus(t)-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the word for the West is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-04-30T03:46:34.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-04-30T14:11:46.693" Score="8" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it hard to learn a second language as an adult while the children may learn to speak more than one language more easily than adults do? If true, how can the language learning process be made easier and successful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="966" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-04-30T16:19:42.980" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T02:50:19.300" Title=" How do children learn to speak compared to adults?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2012-05-01T03:41:13.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To reconstruct a proto-language you need to compare several languages, descended on the proto-language. It is generally impossible to reconstruct a proto-language using only one of its descendants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, since Basque &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/maps/maps5.php?lan=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;belongs to Dene-Caucasian language macrofamily&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to reconstruct some proto-forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ancient forms are as follows (V=unknown vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Basque   |  Proto-Sino-Caucasian&#xA;--------------------------------&#xA;lur      |  lhĭ́mŁwɨ̆&#xA;edan     |  dVnV (this is related to Proto-Indo-European *dhenw &quot;to flow&quot; &#xA;         |  which resulted in Latin &quot;fontis&quot; and English &quot;fountain&quot;&#xA;izu      |  ħVmć̣V&#xA;aho      |  ɦŏ́mxGVwV&#xA;draga    |  twVŋV (not sure if it related)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-05-01T04:11:35.510" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T04:11:35.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1860" CreationDate="2012-05-01T08:59:28.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just spent one month in the United States with my two daughters, neither of which spoke English before. I will answer with anecdotal evidence in regard to the older of the two, she is five years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that children have less rigidly established ideas about the world around them, and are willing to accept new names and new thought paradigms more readily than adults. For instance, when I look at a table it is for me &quot;שולחן&quot; and I have to translate that into &quot;table&quot;. After one week in the US I was still translating &quot;שולחן&quot; to &quot;table&quot; every time I had to use the word. However, only in the last few days did the idea that the object with a flat surface and four legs is called &quot;table&quot; really sink in and come out naturally. Contrast with my daughter, who learned the word &quot;bed&quot; the first day in the US. The next day, speaking in our native language, she used the word &quot;bed&quot;. For her, giving the object a new title was less an exercise in replacing an existing title but more an exercise in establishing a title - any title - for the object even though she already had a title for it. I noticed a similar phenomenon for grammar. She was not translating sentences, but rather learning them anew. Her idea of what a sentence &quot;should be&quot; was obviously less firmly established than my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you might be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1861/linguistics-studies-related-to-elderly&quot;&gt;a related answer in reference to the elderly&lt;/a&gt; that I recently answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T14:48:39.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2012-05-01T10:58:08.657" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enlish &lt;em&gt;strange&lt;/em&gt; and Russian &lt;em&gt;stranno&lt;/em&gt;, with the same meaning; English &lt;em&gt;stranger&lt;/em&gt; and Russian &lt;em&gt;strannik&lt;/em&gt;, with the same meaning. But English and Russian words derived from different and unrelated roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-05-01T10:58:08.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-02T16:24:58.827" Score="4" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most English words can be traced to their Latin, Greek, or other roots in any common dictionary. However, is there a Latin-to-English counterpart that would list current English words that are derived from a specific Latin word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question stems from coming across the terms &quot;Servatis a periculo&quot; and &quot;Servatis a malefico&quot; from an Evanescence song. After discovering that the English word &quot;saviour&quot; is derived from &quot;servatis&quot; the meaning of the phrases becomes easier to grasp. I am not actively studying Latin so access to such a resource would help greatly in the few times that I need to understand a Latin word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T17:57:34.510" Title="List of English words that came from specific words in Latin" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2012-05-02T20:52:11.203" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1866" CreationDate="2012-05-02T17:57:34.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there is, and it's simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to a used bookstore and buy a used paperback Latin dictionary. There are always lots of them; if you have a choice, pick one that marks long vowels with a mācron, since that turns out to be important. (There are online resources, too, but this is simpler, unless you're doing statistics. ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open your Latin dictionary to any page. Glance down the wordlist. When you recognize a connection between some Latin word and its meaning &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt; you know an English word with &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; that form and &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; that meaning, then &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bingo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get in the habit of looking up English words in Latin dictionaries, you'll see a lot of regular extensions of the words with prefixes and suffixes that you recognize, too. Generally if one Latin root is borrowed, there are several more that came from the same place, and are recognizable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, on the page in my Latin dictionary with &lt;em&gt;significant&lt;/em&gt; on it (as &lt;em&gt;signi-ficō&lt;/em&gt; 'to make a sign', &lt;em&gt;significanter&lt;/em&gt; 'plainly, clearly', and &lt;em&gt;significātionis&lt;/em&gt; 'pointing out, showing, indicating'), one finds also the noun &lt;em&gt;signum&lt;/em&gt; 'a sign' and the verb &lt;em&gt;signō&lt;/em&gt; 'to mark, to sign', which shows where they all come from. Also on this page is the noun &lt;em&gt;silentium&lt;/em&gt; 'silence' and the verb &lt;em&gt;sileō&lt;/em&gt; 'to be silent'. And that's just one page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should work for about half of the words in English (though at first you might not recognize the Latin words in English that passed repeatedly through the gullets of French speakers for centuries before English got hold of them). The other half of the words in English come from Germanic sources and have passed through &lt;a href=&quot;http://kmcgowan.rice.edu/wow/grimm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grimm's Law&lt;/a&gt;, so their relations with Latin cognates are complex. But this is an easy way to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T17:57:34.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2012-05-02T21:56:03.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google has a nice project called &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google N-gram viewer&lt;/a&gt;. It contains around 1-million English words from all the books in Google Books Library. You can view the frequency graph of a word over the years and compare between frequency graph of different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/datasets&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;data is also available for download&lt;/a&gt; if you want to try some experiments over them. It consists upto 1-grams to 5-grams of data of Different forms of English (i.e. British, American) and some other Languages (Chinese, German, French ) too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="969" LastActivityDate="2012-05-02T21:56:03.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2172" CreationDate="2012-05-03T07:54:40.697" Score="10" ViewCount="985" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the word &quot;mom&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_and_Latin_roots_in_English#M&quot;&gt;derives from&lt;/a&gt; &quot;mamm-&quot;, Latin for breast. I have actually heard it told that the Latin root &quot;mamm-&quot; derives from the baby's first natural sounds, though I cannot attribute this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dad&quot;&gt;etymology for &quot;dad&quot;&lt;/a&gt; states that this word is &quot;nearly universal and probably prehistoric&quot;, an idea that corresponds nicely with the etymology for &quot;mom&quot;. However, in my own language this word is not used for father, but rather we say &quot;aba&quot;. In fact, my own empirical observations raising children lends to the idea that babies say the &quot;a&quot;, &quot;b&quot;, and &quot;m&quot; sounds, but not the &quot;d&quot; sound. Therefore I suggest selection bias towards whoever decided that because &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; culture encourages babies to say &quot;d&quot; (because they expect it) and that the baby then makes the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How established can an etymology be, and how is one challenged? Is there a canonical etymology of English words? What other words have disputed etymologies? I know that I could write to the author of the website etymonline.com but I am more interested in understanding the process of creating and challenging etymologies than in correcting any inaccuracies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-05T12:07:29.893" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T09:55:29.093" Title="No etymology for &quot;dad&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1872" CreationDate="2012-05-03T15:59:41.863" Score="12" ViewCount="1937" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some browser addons and web-services for website/dictionary translation sometimes offer a &quot;automatic-language-detection&quot; feature. This works more or less in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably a variety of different possible algorithms, like indexing some words of a website and compare them with different dictionaries. Is this the way most of those software do language-detection, comparing 5-10 words of the website with many dictionaries or are there smarter and faster algorithms? For example, languages with romanic letters. What would be a very efficient and reliable criterion to derive the language without the need of many big dictionaries, so it might fit into a small app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki article for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_detection&quot;&gt;language detection&lt;/a&gt; mentions &lt;em&gt;functions words&lt;/em&gt; as a older method. I would guess, words used after/before punctuation marks might be even more effective for most european languages? Especially on multi-language websites where distinct function words might occur in quoted text/link names? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-04T16:18:10.903" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T12:13:07.173" Title="Efficient linguistic algorithms for detecting language of a website?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1871" CreationDate="2012-05-03T22:48:14.767" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A popular approach for language identification is to look at character &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;-grams: consecutive sequences of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; characters from the text, and compare the resulting distribution with frequencies drawn from larger corpora of text from each of the candidate languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, where do the empirical counts come from? Any representative text from the language will do. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/&quot;&gt;University of Leipzig corpus&lt;/a&gt; consists of spidered web text for a large number of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intuition is that particular character sequences are characteristic of particular languages: for example, Dutch text is likely to have &lt;code&gt;ij&lt;/code&gt; in it, Italian text should have a decent frequency of &lt;code&gt;ità&lt;/code&gt;, and so on. The distribution of character &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;-grams is like the signature of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be more robust than a dictionary-based method, particularly because a lot of short words are, just by chance, possibly going to occur in more than one language (e.g. &lt;code&gt;in&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;al&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For certain languages which have scripts that are not shared with other languages (e.g. Chinese, although some of its topolects have written forms too), simple heuristics should suffice. Japanese and Chinese can be distinguished by the presence or absence of &lt;em&gt;kana&lt;/em&gt;. On the other hand, if the text is romanised, then the character-based method should work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/279_Paper.pdf&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; has a basic literature review and concentrates on the harder problem of language identification where the text is very short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-05-04T06:23:22.250" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T06:23:22.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-04T03:24:57.557" Score="16" ViewCount="2994" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding that 100% accurate parsing (analyzing a text and creating a syntactic tree) is an impossible task for computational linguistics at this moment. However, there are many heuristics or approximation algorithms that produces good enough results. Do we have some kind of metric to rate the effectiveness of these algorithms? How does it work? For example, I guess we can run the algorithm against a set of text whose syntactic tree we already know and then compare the program's output against the known sytactic tree? Or do we use other methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there already well-established metrics/scoring system to rate parsing? How do they work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T00:29:55.400" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:47:03.690" Title="Is there a well-established metric to measure the effectiveness of a parsing algorithm?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;evaluation-metrics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1831" CreationDate="2012-05-04T20:15:28.580" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially all of the Na-Dene languages make such a distinction. To take Tlingit, the language I work on, the inventory of the three types of stops &amp;amp; affricates is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unaspirated&lt;/strong&gt;: t, ts, tʃ, tɬ, k, kʷ, q, qʷ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspirated&lt;/strong&gt;: tʰ, tsʰ, tʃʰ, tɬʰ, kʰ, kʰʷ, qʰ, qʰʷ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ejective&lt;/strong&gt;: tʼ, tsʼ, tʃʼ, tɬʼ, kʼ, kʼʷ, qʼ, qʼʷ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glottal stop (ʔ, also ʔʷ for some) could be either unaspirated or ejective depending on one’s analysis. The only voiced sounds in Tlingit are the sonorants /n, j, w, ɰ/, so none of the unaspirated stops &amp;amp; affricates are ever voiced in careful speech, and usually aren’t in fast speech either. Tlingit was described with instrumental phonetic data by Maddieson, Smith, &amp;amp; Bessell (2001, &lt;em&gt;Anthropological Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;), if you care to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, Tlingit also has a plain/ejective fricative distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plain fricative&lt;/strong&gt;: s, ʃ, ɬ, x, xʷ, χ, χʷ, h&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ejective fricative&lt;/strong&gt;: sʼ, ɬʼ, xʼ, xʼʷ, χʼ, χʼʷ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ejective fricatives are real ejectives, articulated in much the same way as ejective stops and affricates. They have a smaller aperture and greater tension with the primary articulator (the tongue) than the plain fricatives, compensating for the ‘leaky’ property of fricatives. Note the lack of *ʃʼ, which might be the result of a historical merger of *sʼ, *ʃʼ &gt; sʼ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I’m aware, nearly all the Athabaskan languages have the same three-way distinction between unaspirated, aspirated, and ejective stops and affricates. Navajo is particularly well documented phonetically, as is Witsuwitʼen. For the latter see Sharon Hargus’s immense grammar (Hargus 2007). I think Joyce McDonough has some solid instrumental phonetic data for Dëne Sųłiné and Slave as well, but I don’t have a reference offhand. Eyak also has the same patterns, but I don’t know of any phonetic investigation of it. The Proto-Na-Dene language is thus logically reconstructed with the same three-way distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="511" LastActivityDate="2012-05-04T20:15:28.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1873" CreationDate="2012-05-04T22:14:41.697" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common evaluation metrics examine the conceptual &quot;distance&quot; between the &lt;strong&gt;candidate parse&lt;/strong&gt; generated by the parser, and the correctly annotated solution (the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;gold standard&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;).  Gold standards are sometimes annotated by hand, but more often they come from existing corpora (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1632/is-there-a-standard-corpus-against-which-to-benchmark-mechanical-parsers&quot;&gt;Is there a standard corpus against which to benchmark mechanical parsers?&lt;/a&gt; has related discussion).  A common choice is the &lt;em&gt;Wall Street Journal&lt;/em&gt; sections of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Treebank&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the current standard comparison is the &lt;strong&gt;PARSEVAL&lt;/strong&gt; metric (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/H/H91/H91-1060.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black, et al 1991&lt;/a&gt;). It defines a set of values that focus primarily on the constituency differences between the two trees. The main values are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Precision&lt;/strong&gt;: The number of correct constituents out of the number of constituents in the candidate parse.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recall&lt;/strong&gt;: The number of correct constituents out of the number of constituents in the gold standard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;F-Score&lt;/strong&gt;: The harmonic mean of precision and recall (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9GHsz.png&quot; alt=&quot;F-score formula from Wikipedia: F=2*(P*R)/(P+R)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demonstrate the concept, consider the pair of trees given below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nUQ0k.png&quot; alt=&quot;Two parse trees&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The constituents for each are given below in form label:yield (&lt;strong&gt;yield&lt;/strong&gt; is the span of the node/constituent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Candidate  gold&#xA;   X:a      X:a&#xA;   Y:b      Z:b&#xA;   Z:cd     V:cd&#xA;   --       Y:bcd&#xA;   W:abcd   W:abcd&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, all of the constituents in the candidate have correct yield, so we have 4/4 = &lt;strong&gt;100%&lt;/strong&gt; precision, but there is an extra node in the hierarchy of the gold, so we only have 4/5 = &lt;strong&gt;80%&lt;/strong&gt; recall. These values then give us an F-score of 2*1*0.8/(1+0.8) = &lt;strong&gt;88.9%&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may also want to consider the accuracy of the labels. In this case we can use the &lt;strong&gt;labelled precision&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;labelled recall&lt;/strong&gt; (potentially introduced by &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P97/P97-1003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins 1997&lt;/a&gt;). These metrics only count a node as correct if its yield AND label match the gold standard.  Above, only 2 out of our 4 nodes with correct yield have the correct label (W &amp;amp; X), so we get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;P = 50%  R = 40%  F = 44.4%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PARSEVAL also includes one last value—the number of &lt;strong&gt;crossing brackets&lt;/strong&gt;.  This is simply a count of how many constituent boundaries in the candidate cross over constituent boundaries in the gold. These errors might be considered more serious, because they often indicate an element is in the completely wrong grouping. In the above example there are no crossing brackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may have noticed, PARSEVAL is a rather &lt;em&gt;coarse&lt;/em&gt; metric, and it certainly is not without &lt;a href=&quot;https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/cl/gschneid/ParserVorl/ParserVorl10.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;conceptual flaws&lt;/a&gt;. Among the complaints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewards shallow/safe analyses better than those that make more claims but a few mistakes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Especially with corpora, punishes parsers that provide more information than necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some &quot;single&quot; errors can hurt the score repeatedly, for example a single misplaced node may trigger multiple crossing brackets and incorrect yields.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weights all nodes evenly, rather than making crucial semantical relations more important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several competing metrics to address some of these issues. One such is Sampson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grsampson.net/RLeafAnc.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;leaf-ancestor&lt;/strong&gt; metric&lt;/a&gt;.  This method examines the &lt;strong&gt;lineage&lt;/strong&gt; of each terminal node—the list of nodes that connect it to the root—and determines the edit distance from the lineage of that node in the gold standard. The creators argue that this is a much more intuitive sense of accuracy, mostly because the Parseval metric &quot;lays excessive weight on locating the exact boundaries of constructions,&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grsampson.net/ATot.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sampson &amp;amp; Babarczy&lt;/a&gt;) which might not be as semantically important as the &quot;ancestry&quot; for each word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, PARSEVAL remains in widespread use, most likely because it is simple and most of its flaws are &quot;equally flawed&quot; for different parsing approaches.  ACL's &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Parsing_(State_of_the_art)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;state-of-the-art listing&lt;/a&gt; continues to use it (though this wiki link only has a few recent parsers included).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One should note that the above vision doesn't apply to all models of grammar. &lt;strong&gt;Dependency grammars&lt;/strong&gt; in particular have become popular for parsing in the last decade. These do not intrinsically define constituents, so they cannot utilise the formulas as given above.  &lt;em&gt;Note: I cannot attest well enough to other models at the moment, so perhaps someone else can come along.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, consider that there are factors that one might evaluate that don't compare parses with a standard. Most statistical parsers assign a score to each parse for the purposes of ranking and choosing the best.  One may want to adjust the values of this score without even knowing if the parse is correct. (e.g. in a parser whose top candidates all get very uncertain scores or one that responds poorly to unknown entities).  There are plenty of other goal-dependent values too. For example, necessary training set size might be a big factor to a parser that aims to approach optimal output with minimal input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, these tools are only used for rough comparisons. Any fine-grained evaluations will consider many metrics, and when controlled for different factors—languages, training sets, tuning values, time/memory limitations, etc.  Ultimately it comes down to the idea of success for the given problem, which is usually tough to quantify, and impossible to compare unilaterally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T08:05:55.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1889" CreationDate="2012-05-05T08:57:52.800" Score="2" ViewCount="3002" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard [w] and [j] are glides and that glides are not considered to be consonants.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen voiced labiovelar approximant [w] and palatal approximant [j] on the IPA consonant chart.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the latest consensus in the linguistic community on whether [w] and [j] should be classified as consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T14:56:58.273" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T14:56:58.273" Title="Are /w/ and /j/ considered to be consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;glides&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1881" CreationDate="2012-05-05T17:14:10.057" Score="4" ViewCount="3153" Body="&lt;p&gt;In WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures), &quot;Number of Cases&quot; is listed for most languages. However, this information is absent for Portuguese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Portuguese have any morphological case marking? If so, how many cases, and what sources could I cite for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="899" LastEditorUserId="899" LastEditDate="2012-05-05T17:53:24.410" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T20:19:37.880" Title="How many morphological cases does Portuguese have?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1879" CreationDate="2012-05-05T20:19:37.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese does not have full* morphological case marking, though it still expresses case through other methods, e.g. pronoun choice, use of prepositions, and other syntactic phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have been known for a long time: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=U7oGAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA11#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transtagano &amp;amp; Nourse 1768&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Portuguese nouns have no variation of case, like the Latin, and it is only the article that distinguishes the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noted, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt; doesn't list Portuguese anywhere under its &quot;number of cases&quot; feature, but in Chapter 49 it does generalize for the region: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/49&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iggeson 2011&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Western Europe has no case marking, or only minimal inventories (with the striking exception of Basque).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another generalization, this time for the whole family: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=oGh5C6DwZowC&amp;amp;pg=PT186&amp;amp;lpg=PT186#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kato 2010&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...in Romance[,] case is morphological only in pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clements' work on the Korlai-Portuguese creole addresses Middle Portuguese directly: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=n2qDqzm7-fcC&amp;amp;pg=PA104&amp;amp;lpg=PA104#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1996&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...case marking for nouns does not involve paradigms in any of the three languages [including Middle Portuguese], but rather elements that are more appropriately considered syntactic phenomena...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Bick's &lt;em&gt;Portuguese Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://visl.sdu.dk/~eckhard/pdf/Portuguese_Syntax4.ps.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2000&lt;/a&gt;) has a couple good quotes on the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to force case on Portuguese nominal constituents, pronoun substitution is useful... [since only pronouns display case]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in his conclusion on how to classify Portuguese parts of speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, nouns, proper nouns, adjectives and (cardinal) numerals feature&#xA;  number and gender [...] only number is ”free” in nouns, whereas gender is a lexeme category to be derived directly from the lexicon. [...] Personal&#xA;  pronouns are morphologically special in that they also inflect for person and case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*-Note that I used the term &quot;&lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in the beginning to highlight the fact that some authors consider pronoun selection to be &quot;morphological case marking.&quot; The more common view however seems to be that pseudo-lexical pronoun differentiation alone does not constitute a system of overt noun case marking.  From &lt;em&gt;Flexible Syntax: A Theory of Case and Arguments&lt;/em&gt;: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=91-D04Xphi0C&amp;amp;pg=PA185#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neeleman &amp;amp; Weerman 2001&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an aside, it should be remarked that the mere existence of a distinction between object and subject pronouns does not mean that object pronouns bear morphological case. [...] Whether or not a language has morphological case depends, it seems, on the existence of a productive paradigm. A word-specific paradigm like (13) is insufficient to introduce the relevant features into the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastActivityDate="2012-05-05T20:19:37.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2012-05-06T00:39:30.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree partly with &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/766/201&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; claiming that 'aa' and 'ağ' are identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequence &lt;em&gt;aa&lt;/em&gt; does not appear in Turkish words unless they are of Arabic origin, and the proper pronunciation of the &lt;em&gt;aa&lt;/em&gt; sequence is not a single lengthened &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; sound, but rather two separate vowel sounds. Take for example the word &lt;em&gt;cemaat&lt;/em&gt; (more properly &lt;em&gt;cema'ât&lt;/em&gt;), which in its Arabic form has an 'ayn consonantal sound between the two &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; sounds. The same goes for the word &lt;em&gt;müracaat&lt;/em&gt;, although I concede that the standard pronunciation of the doubled &lt;em&gt;aa&lt;/em&gt; in these and similar words is often more akin to &lt;em&gt;ağ&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;â&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter &lt;em&gt;â&lt;/em&gt; comes mainly from Arabic loan words where it palatises the preceding consonant and/or lengthens the vowel (but Turkish orthography used to use it for French words as well: &lt;em&gt;plân&lt;/em&gt;). Palatisation occurs with the letters &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, but there is sometime ambiguity: &lt;em&gt;kâtil&lt;/em&gt; has a long &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; but an unpalatised &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;lâkin&lt;/em&gt; has a short &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; but palatised &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound of &lt;em&gt;ğ&lt;/em&gt; after &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; varies depending on the dialect of Turkish, but in Istanbul Turkish, you'd have to say that &lt;em&gt;ağ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;â&lt;/em&gt; are identical. The same does not hold true in, say, Eastern Turkey, where you will hear the &lt;em&gt;ğ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T11:53:40.057" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1886" CreationDate="2012-05-06T01:04:24.560" Score="10" ViewCount="1413" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of languages which have historically been written in more than one alphabet (Hindi/Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Uzbek and so on). I am wondering which single language has been regularly written in the most different alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastEditorUserId="557" LastEditDate="2012-05-06T07:05:30.710" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T19:27:35.547" Title="Which language was regularly written in the most alphabets?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2012-05-06T01:39:48.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's based purely on social prestige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, eastern dialects of Turkish traditionally enjoy a much lower prestige than the standard Istanbul dialect. The uvular/velar fricatives that they have (but that the Istanbul dialect lacks) are particularly stigmatized. But the same sounds, when applied to French or German, have a much higher social prestige in the same country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T01:39:48.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2012-05-06T06:56:43.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is a language with strich word order, Russian is a language with free word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this depends on how much a language is inflictive: the meaning is either provided by word order or by inflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T06:56:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2012-05-06T07:04:23.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer may be: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_language&quot;&gt;Ottoman Turkish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the twentieth century alone, it could be found regularly written in the &lt;em&gt;Arabic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Greek&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Armenian&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hebrew&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Syriac&lt;/em&gt; alphabets. And, since the language reforms of the 1930s happened after the alphabet reform of 1928, we can add the &lt;em&gt;Latin&lt;/em&gt; alphabet to that list. I think there were Ottoman Turkish books published in Bulgaria using the &lt;em&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/em&gt; script as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes at least six –and possibly seven– alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="557" LastEditorUserId="201" LastEditDate="2012-05-07T11:45:16.730" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T11:45:16.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2012-05-06T07:05:28.250" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;My bet is on another Turkic language, Uighur, especially if we use it to mean both modern Uighur and its ancestor Old Turkic, which was the official language of the Uighur Khaganate (begun in 742) and later the predominant language of Turfan / Turpan, East Turkestan (Xinjiang province, China), where Uighurs settled in 840 and have remained to the present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?menu=004&amp;amp;LangID=69&quot;&gt;UCLA Language Materials Project&lt;/a&gt;, the earliest Uighur texts are written in three scripts: the Old Turkic runes (also called Orkhon-Yenisei runes), the Manichean script and the Uighur script. All three types probably ultimately go back to Aramaic script. (The Aramaic script derives from Phoenician, as do a plurality of the world's orthographies eventually.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Uighur script&lt;/strong&gt; derived from the Sogdian alphabet (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sogdian.htm&quot;&gt;Ancientscripts&lt;/a&gt;). Sogdian was a Middle Iranian language related to Pahlavi. By the seventh century, Sogdian merchants had a strong presence along the Silk Road (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.upf.edu/materials/huma/central/abast/sogdian.pdf&quot;&gt;Jonathan Skaff&lt;/a&gt;), from their origin in Samarkand all the way to the oasis state of Turfan, where many of them came to settle. In 840 the Uighurs came here too, and they eventually adopted the script.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The oldest Uighur inscription known, from 732, is from the Orkhon river basin, central Mongolia, in &lt;strong&gt;Old Turkic runes&lt;/strong&gt;, which were possibly based on the Sogdian script or the Chinese script, but there is a powerful argument for a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/31Alphabet/Amanjolov/AmanjolovGenesisEn.htm&quot;&gt;tamga origin&lt;/a&gt; too. Tamga is Mongolian for &quot;stamp&quot; or &quot;seal,&quot; and the use of Tamgas throughout Eastern Eurasia to differentiate clans from each other, for marking property, for official correspondence and for graves goes back to prehistory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Manichean script&lt;/strong&gt; coexisted along the Silk Road with the Sogdian; it is so called because adherents of the Manichean religion seemed to prefer it, and it is said that Mani himself may have devised it. Uighur documents in the Manichean script were found at Turfan by German excavators in the late nineteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Excavations at Turfan have found Uighur documents written in the &lt;strong&gt;Syriac, Tibetan, Brahmi, Nestorian,&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Estrangelo&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/die-staatsbibliothek/abteilungen/orient/aufgaben-profil/veroeffentlichungen/berlin-turfan-collection/&quot;&gt;scripts&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;'Phags-pa&lt;/strong&gt; may have been used as well. Assumedly, writing Uighur in these scripts was an at least somewhat regular occurrence throughout the Tarim basin at various times, the preferences changing from 840 to the 1300s and beyond. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp198_aramaic_script.pdf&quot;&gt;This document by Doug Hitch&lt;/a&gt; outlines the basic features dozens of variants of writing systems used in Central Eurasia, not all for Uighur.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Uighur gradually came to be written predominantly in the &lt;strong&gt;Chagatai&lt;/strong&gt; script, a variant of the Arabic script used originally for the extinct Turkic language Chagatai, which was then widely spoken throughout Central Eurasia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the 1920s, some Uighur-speaking regions became part of the Soviet Union, and others came under its influence, and at first the Soviet Union tried to Romanize the Uighur script, but then decided to use a Cyrillic-derived alphabet known as &lt;strong&gt;Uyghur Siril Yëziqi&lt;/strong&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the 1950s, the Chinese promoted the use of &lt;strong&gt;Yëngi Yëziqi&lt;/strong&gt;, a mixture of Pinyin (Latin-derived) and Cyrillic, for Uighur. Its predominant usage lasted about ten years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The most commonly used, and official, Uighur script today is &lt;strong&gt;Uyghur Ereb Yëziqi&lt;/strong&gt;, a newer Arabic-derived script.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some of the Uighur people have pressed for a change to a Latin-based script known as &lt;strong&gt;Uyghur Latin Yëziqi&lt;/strong&gt; instead, for ease of use with information technology. Many Uighurs know both this script and the Ereb Yëziqi.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T07:05:28.250" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1851" CreationDate="2012-05-06T16:23:38.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Omniglot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which I highly recommend) lists a number of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/semanto-phonetic.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semanto-phonetic&lt;/a&gt;&quot; writing systems including modern Chinese and Japanese. Most of these are ideographic or logographic in nature, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the closest you may come to the literal description in your question is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;shorthand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, systems of tachygraphy for various languages. One modern example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pitman Shorthand&lt;/a&gt; for English, consiting of symbols including the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;consonants: &lt;code&gt;p b f v m l t d th dh n r ch j s z ng w k g sh zh h y&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  vowels: &lt;code&gt;ɑː eɪ iː ɔː oʊ uː æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ ʊ aɪ ɔɪ aʊ juː&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  morphs: &lt;code&gt;a(n) the (h)as (h)is it are of to I you and for have think thank that&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older shorthands included the Tironian notes (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;notae tironianae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), Greek tachygraphy (of which not much is known), and various forms of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;scribal notation&lt;/a&gt; (although these were usually purely phonetic in nature). Remnants of these can be found in modern European languages, e.g. &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_type&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Moon System&lt;/a&gt; of embossed letters for the blind. In addition to symbols for the English letters, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bsblind.co.uk/full/moon/moontype.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;it includes signs for&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;-ing -ment -tion -ness and the -ound -ence -ful -ity&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-05-06T16:23:38.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1878" CreationDate="2012-05-07T09:48:55.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot;&gt;sonority hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; of phonemes and phones, in which [w] and [j] are certainly closest to the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where exactly in this hierarchy you draw the line between vowels and consonants, or whether you distinguish approximants from consonants, depends on the language you are observing and/or the phenomena you are describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T09:48:55.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1900" CreationDate="2012-05-07T13:58:16.273" Score="10" ViewCount="1322" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a language is being transcribed to IPA, is the whispering included in the transcription? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw the Wikipedia mention about not being anything for whispering, but I was wondering if this has ever been analysed in some paper or article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-07T15:38:55.993" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T09:44:11.917" Title="Is whispering transcribed in IPA?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2012-05-07T14:59:01.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with others who say that it is only due to social prestige. A good example of this is English dialects. Standard American English is rhotic, whereas Standard British Englis is Non-Rhotic. If one was more aesthetically pleasing it would predominate in both the UK or the US, which is clearly not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="981" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T14:59:01.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1890" CreationDate="2012-05-07T15:37:38.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. Wikipedia, although not the most reliable source, says on its article on whispering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no symbol in the IPA for whispered phonation, since it is not used phonemically in any language. However, a sub-dot under phonemically voiced segments is sometimes seen in the literature, as [ʃʊ̣ḍ] for whispered should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one could write the sounds as they are spoken. For instance, you could could write [lɪŋgwɪstɪks]with the needed unvoiced symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="981" LastActivityDate="2012-05-07T15:37:38.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1930" CreationDate="2012-05-07T19:19:58.213" Score="8" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that Proto-Uralic and some modern Uralic languages don't mark number on nouns marked for case.&#xA;So that, singular and plural is only distinguished in nominative (and maybe accusative?) case, but not in other cases.&#xA;Can someone point me on further information about this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="980" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-07T21:58:25.290" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T20:50:48.347" Title="(Proto-)Uralic case and number morphology" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1831" CreationDate="2012-05-08T03:55:10.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voiced, unaspirated, aspirated, and ejective stops are distinguished in Dakota (a Souian Native American language) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt; with an unaspirated t is the postposition &quot;to, towards,&quot; whereas &lt;em&gt;t'a&lt;/em&gt; with the ejective is &quot;to die,&quot; &lt;em&gt;tʰa&lt;/em&gt; with the aspirated tʰ is a possessive marker (derived from the longer &lt;em&gt;tʰawa&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; with the voiced d translates as &quot;this&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same distinctions appear for the sequence b, p, pʰ, and p' , and all but the voiced segment also appear in the sequences k, kʰ, k' and tʃ, tʃʰ, and tʃ'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="983" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T03:55:10.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-08T04:35:02.383" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please delete this if it's not appropriate for this Stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm researching machine translation, and trying to read around the subject and understand better how human translators go about translating a document. I was wondering if there are any recommended textbooks for people who study this at university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="70" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T10:06:47.147" LastActivityDate="2012-07-08T10:43:10.650" Title="Recommended Translation Textbooks/Resources" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2012-05-08T06:05:43.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know exactly how the first words arise, at least in the case of signed languages.  Gestural communication is systematized to create  homesign,  which then may be reorganized and grammaticalized to create conventional language. The process is described in detail in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=FbvWmnZDtEUC&amp;amp;source=gbs_book_other_versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003) The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. New York: Psychology Press.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="984" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T06:05:43.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="912" CreationDate="2012-05-08T09:57:38.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can be defined both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, correspondingly, this is the research topic of both language acquisition and language evolution. (the &lt;em&gt;division of labor&lt;/em&gt; of the same research topic does not mean the two fields are not closely tied!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several good books to start with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.hk/books/about/Origins_of_Human_Communication.html?id=T3bqzIe3mAEC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Michael Tomasello. (2008) Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=OeN2Rhvfdn4C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Morten H. Christiansen, Simon Kirby. (2003) Language Evolution. Oxford University Press.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books above both, more or less, deal with the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;arbitrariness of sign&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Also there are some relevant papers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.indiana.edu/l/www/pub/gasser/cogsci04.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Origins of Arbitrariness in Language. Michael Gasser. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004) Volume: 26, Publisher: LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOC PUBL, 10 INDUSTRIAL AVE, MAHWAH, NJ 07430 USA, Pages: 4–7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~gary/PAPER-SUGGESTIONS/monaghan-et-al-JEP-Gen-in-press.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The arbitrariness of the sign: Learning advantages from the structure of the vocabulary. Monaghan, Padraic; Christiansen, Morten H.; Fitneva, Stanka A. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol 140(3), Aug 2011, 325-347. doi: 10.1037/a0022924&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="863" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T09:57:38.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1895" CreationDate="2012-05-08T10:47:49.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in the MIT book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yx3lEVJMBmMC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=readings%20in%20machine%20translation&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=7vioT6msHOnY4QSl2LnRCA&amp;amp;ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=readings%20in%20machine%20translation&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Readings in Machine Translations&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;by Sergei Nirenburg.  And you may also already be familiar with &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6eGPANEvSmUC&amp;amp;pg=PT104&amp;amp;dq=why%20translation%20studies%20matter&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=h_moT_b7I8j74QSKq6WkDw&amp;amp;ved=0CD8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Why Translation Studies Matters&lt;/a&gt; by Gile, Hansen &amp;amp; Pokorn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T10:47:49.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1899" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1985" CreationDate="2012-05-08T11:59:05.407" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is considered the best reference (papers/articles/books) that discusses the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language and outlines its history after the break-up of former Yugoslavia in the early 90s?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-15T12:44:39.227" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T11:32:52.080" Title="References about the history of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian after the break-up of Yugoslavia" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1890" CreationDate="2012-05-08T17:21:59.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thinking on this is as follows. Whispering in regular languages isn't usually semantically or phonemically salient. It's almost always just a modulation of speech in compensation for the physical or social environment. For this reason it's not transcribed in phonetic notation, just like shouting is usually not transcribed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes whispering can be phonetically salient, though. This is rarely if ever the case as part of a language's sound system, so there hasn't been any need to notate it much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, whispering is &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; phonetically salient is in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_disorder&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;study of speech disorder&lt;/a&gt;s. Dysphonation of various types is found among those with disordered speech. This includes inappropriate whispered, creaky, faucalized, unvoiced, mouthed, etc. phonations, ingressive airstreams, etc. Fascinatingly, though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://clispi.org/userfiles/ExtIPAChart2002.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Extensions to the IPA&lt;/a&gt;[PDF] do not actually include a mechanism for indicating whispered phonation! Wikipedia says they do, but it's not clear to me that this is actually true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA does include a variety of diacritics for phonation types, but whisper is not included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-05-08T17:32:44.017" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T17:32:44.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1902" CreationDate="2012-05-08T22:02:43.457" Score="18" ViewCount="2275" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my own experience, drinking alcohol has both positive and negative effects to the ability of speaking a second language. On the one hand, it facilitates the process, mainly because one gets more relaxed and less inhibited (thus caring less about making mistakes, as long as one gets the message across). On the other hand, alcohol affects muscle control, makes reasoning slower, impacts memory and so on. These are all extremely important abilities when speaking a second language, so the intoxication makes it harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: have the effects of alcohol on second language speaking been studied scientifically? What are the main results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-08T22:34:01.673" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T00:50:33.617" Title="How does alcohol affect the ability to speak a second language?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1901" CreationDate="2012-05-08T22:17:44.907" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly I suppose, this has indeed been studied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34041/1/0000318.pdf&quot;&gt;Guiora, Beit-Hallahmi, Brannon, Dull, and Scovel in &quot;The  Effects  of  Experimentally  Induced  Changes in Ego  States  on  Pronunciation  Ability  in  a Second  Language:  An  Exploratory Study&quot;l [PDF]&lt;/a&gt; give a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless thoroughly scholarly exploration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their conclusion is that drinking alcohol induces a state of empathy with speakers of L2, which in turn leads to improved pronunciation of L2. The proposed mechanism according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/conference/hudson-bruckman-cscl02.pdf&quot;&gt;Hudson and Bruckman [PDF]&lt;/a&gt; is thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The language ego permeability hypothesis argues that adults have&#xA;  difficulty learning foreign languages, because they are reluctant to&#xA;  give up control over selfpresentation. Giving up this control is&#xA;  necessary to learning a new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and in turn, alcohol helps one give up such control.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-05-08T22:17:44.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1878" CreationDate="2012-05-09T13:28:05.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for /j/ you could look at its behaviour in the decision made between the selection of the indefinite article  or .  Where  is chosen before a word beginning in a vowel sound and  is chosen if the following word begins with a consonantal sound. In a variety like standard British English a word like  would have a preceding  because  begins with a /j/ in this variety. But in a variety like Welsh English where the /j/ is frequently dropped (yod-dropping) the word  would be preceded by  because the following word begins with a vowel sound. So with this reasoning, you could consider /j/ to be a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T13:28:05.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1847" CreationDate="2012-05-09T15:15:33.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody, possibly  Max Weinreich, commented that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;A language is a dialect with an army and navy&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. A bit of a soundbite perhaps, but the general idea of having an identifiable group associated with the language is sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Military dominance is definitely a factor - Spanish in South America for instance - but economic power is needed to maintain it. A country such as Singapore, for example, has English as its official language for purely economic reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-05-09T17:21:22.747" LastActivityDate="2012-05-09T17:21:22.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2255" CreationDate="2012-05-10T04:04:16.877" Score="15" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why, in the paradigm for Italian past participles ending in &lt;code&gt;-ere&lt;/code&gt;, does the regular past participle end in &lt;code&gt;-uto&lt;/code&gt;? Whence the vowel, when the other two paradigms have &lt;code&gt;-ato&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-ito&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:10:07.333" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:10:07.333" Title="Italian past participle ending -uto" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-05-10T21:59:20.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2212&quot;&gt;John McWhorter&lt;/a&gt;, there is a language called Muna (spoken in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi), in which the system of spatial deixis works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;ini&lt;/em&gt; means 'this here,' &lt;em&gt;itu&lt;/em&gt; means “that&#xA;  there,” &lt;em&gt;maitu&lt;/em&gt; means “that near him,” &lt;em&gt;watu&lt;/em&gt; means “that over there&#xA;  by him,” &lt;em&gt;tatu&lt;/em&gt; means “that up there,” and &lt;em&gt;nagha&lt;/em&gt; means “that which&#xA;  we can hear but not see”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-05-10T21:59:20.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1847" CreationDate="2012-05-11T14:34:09.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The culture around the language is important also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;France has a &quot;Académie française&quot;, laws regarding product labels in shops so that a french translation is always available, a strong national cinema culture. Also, most movies or television shows are either in french already or dubbed in french. The education of the language is a lot more proud and technical with grammar rules taught for most of the primary and secondary stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is opposed to for example regional dialects such welsh of languages such as finnish where there is no legislation (or was until recently) aimed at aiding the language gain more prominence. Movies are usually subtitled for example in Finland, meaning most Finns know english quite well as opposed to French who don't know english that well but have a strong focus and knowledge in their native tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regional dialects are sometimes reduced a single class teaching the dialect instead of teaching in the dialect whereas the main curriculum is taught in the main language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="936" LastActivityDate="2012-05-11T14:34:09.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1734" CreationDate="2012-05-11T22:34:50.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my question, but I've lost the login and can't respond to the questions anywhere other than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Ron Maimon- Thanks!  I think you stated my question better than I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Alennano- Thanks for the welcome.  What I meant was that most sentences an individual hears are novel in the sense that they have never encountered that exact sentence in their lives before.  I don't even know if this is true for starters, but it seems to be repeated a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@michaelsappir- It's been a while since I learned x-bar theory, but I think I understood everything you said.  If you say that everything is just a lexical item combined together with another lexical item then no tree is novel which does seem pretty trivial (I guess, unless you talk about the particular combinations of lexically-based constraints used to combine the items).  But in any event, what I meant by slots was nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc.  In terms of tree size, I agree that it seems likely that we have encountered most small trees by adulthood.  Regarding maximum tree size, since I'm interested in where &quot;most&quot; productivity comes from, I would be happy taking a frequency cutoff (like, the lower 99.9% of tree sizes an individual encounters) as capturing most day-to-day language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, the reason I was wondering is that poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments seem to focus a lot on (&quot;unexplainable&quot;) syntactic productivity in development, but I know there are (psychological) theories arguing that children's generalization is actually very restricted (lexically but especially syntactically).  This just made me wonder if in principle, it's possible to &quot;get by&quot;, as an adult, with no syntactic tree productivity.  I don't know if I explained that very well.  It's obviously a loaded question in full form which is why I asked the simplest version I could think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="886" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T00:28:26.337" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T00:28:26.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1945" CreationDate="2012-05-12T03:30:27.810" Score="17" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even with the volume of constructed languages that exist, I've never seen formal analysis documenting the successive approaches Esperanto took in an effort to really engage and convert &quot;early adopters&quot; to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By engage, I mean finding users of the language to whom its use would provide value for whatever the reason. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By convert, I mean that the potential users of the language after hearing in their native language the value that would apply to them, decide to attempt to learn more about Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guess I ask in part because I assume that the creators of most constructed language focus on the constructed language, not the marketing and development of a community around it. Clearly, there are steps beyond finding &quot;early adopters&quot;, but without addressing the approaches required to engage/convert &quot;early adopters&quot;, such steps are meaningless in my opinion; this based on my knowledge of how technology adoption life-cycles work, and more importantly in my opinion, how they are comparable to the adoption life-cycles of constructed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did Esperanto find &quot;early adopters&quot; for the language?&lt;/strong&gt; To be clear, I'm not looking for opinion, but research documenting the successive approaches Esperanto took in an effort to really engage and convert &quot;early adopters&quot; to the language, and the effectiveness of those approaches quantitatively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-15T16:35:54.833" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T14:10:29.407" Title="How did Esperanto find &quot;early adopters&quot; for the language?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1914" CreationDate="2012-05-12T13:26:10.000" Score="6" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most often I hear that only birth languages, those languages first learned, are native languages to the speaker. Seems like a pretty lazy way to define if a speaker is a native speaker, since to speak a language you've got to speak it, and just speaking a language has no direct relationship to how well you speak the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point, say two non-native speakers have a child, and decide to only speak the native language of the area they're in with the child, but are not native speakers of that language. The child, if only talking to the parents and other non-native speakers, would never become a native speaker. While extreme, it does make the point that birth languages are a poor measure of if a speaker is expressing themselves in a native tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T18:37:19.777" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T21:22:46.667" Title="What is a native speaker, and at what point does someone become a native speaker?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1913" CreationDate="2012-05-12T13:59:59.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;critical period hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; is important in understanding what it means to be a native speaker of a language.  Newborn babies are equally capable of learning to speak any language, but as they develop to certain ages they lose the ability to learn new linguistic patterns that they have not previously been exposed to.  The age at which this happens varies depending on the linguistic system involved — it can be as young as 4-6 years old for learning phonetics (how to speak a language &quot;without an accent&quot;) up to early teens for some subtler syntactic patterns.  There is a qualitative difference in the language skills of a person who has learned to speak a language after this age — although many adult language learners are quite skilled and it might require subtle investigation to detect these differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to the scenario presented of parents who speak a language that they themselves are not native speakers of to their children, precisely such a situation arose in Papua New Guinea in the latter half of the 20&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century, where an English-based pidgin language (i.e. one lacking native speakers) became the native language of a generation of children growing up on army bases, where their parents were from many different linguistic backgrounds.  The changes in the grammatical system of the language that the transition wrought were studied by (among others) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~gillian/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gillian Sankoff&lt;/a&gt;, whose publications would serve as a point of reference for further study of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T18:40:32.287" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T18:40:32.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1919" CreationDate="2012-05-12T15:23:38.053" Score="13" ViewCount="1887" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what's the difference between a &lt;strong&gt;form&lt;/strong&gt; of a language and a &lt;strong&gt;dialect&lt;/strong&gt; of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; states that &lt;strong&gt;British English&lt;/strong&gt; is a form of English and not a dialect of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_English&quot;&gt;Another page&lt;/a&gt; states that &quot;Standard Singapore English&quot; is not a dialect, but a form of English. It also states that &quot;Singapore Colloquial English&quot; is a form of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between a form of a language and a dialect of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T18:41:31.693" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T08:54:39.417" Title="What's the difference between a form of a language and a dialect of a language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1915" CreationDate="2012-05-12T17:28:46.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Types of Language Forms:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idiolect:&lt;/strong&gt; language form of the single speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Standard Dialect:&lt;/strong&gt; group dialect that is supported by institutions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-Standard Dialect:&lt;/strong&gt; dialect that is not supported by institutions, and is non-singular. One type of non-standard dialect is a &lt;strong&gt;sociolect&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a dialect associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I might be wrong, my guess is that in the examples you provided, the author intended to mean that a dialect was standard or non-standard, and confused a language form as being a standard dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2012-05-12T17:34:55.900" LastActivityDate="2012-05-12T17:34:55.900" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-12T19:46:00.280" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I standardize a comparison between the efficiency of reading and writing in from one written language to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of what I mean would be words-typed-per-minute in a given language standardized to a norm within typist for that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2012-05-13T01:06:27.170" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T15:14:57.080" Title="How do I measure the efficiency of reading and writing in a written language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1915" CreationDate="2012-05-13T03:17:49.697" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering this question requires defining &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dialect&amp;quot;. It's easier to do this by using the non-technical word &amp;quot;variety&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt;: speech varieties are different languages if they are not mutually intelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect&lt;/strong&gt;: speech varieties are dialects of a language if they are mutually intelligible but differ in systematic ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of dialects of English&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Britain: Received Pronunciation (or RP), Yorkshire English, Estuary English, Scouse, Norfolk English, etc. Through various historical accidents RP came to be the most prestigious dialect.&#xA;The USA: General American, North-Central, Midland, Greater New York City, etc. General American is the variety with the fewest obvious regional features, and is used especially in the media. &lt;a href=&quot;http://aschmann.net/AmEng/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rick Aschmann&lt;/a&gt; has an excellent and detailed introduction to North American English dialectology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; that says: &amp;quot;British English is the form of English used in the United Kingdom. It includes all English dialects used within the United Kingdom.&amp;quot; is simply using the non-technical term &amp;quot;form&amp;quot; to refer to the grouping of all dialects of English found in the United Kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on Singapore English, I can't see where it says that &amp;quot;'Standard Singapore English' is not a dialect, but a form of English&amp;quot;. It does say that Singapore Standard English is very similar to standard British English (which I assume refers to RP). Singapore Colloquial English (aka &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Singlish&lt;/a&gt;) on the other hand, while based largely on English (as well as on the other languages of Singapore) is so different from English that it is not usually considered a dialect of English (ie it is not mutually intelligible with any other dialect of English) but a creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short, referring to a &amp;quot;form&amp;quot; of a language is a non-technical usage that could cover any variety, or grouping of varieties, of a language (ie dialects, idiolects, registers, genres, jargons, etc).  But the term &amp;quot;dialect&amp;quot; is a technical term within linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T08:54:39.417" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1928" CreationDate="2012-05-13T06:04:26.957" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard of a natural language that has ergative-absolutive marking alone.   From what I've read, languages with said marking also have nominative-accusative marking, with the choice or &quot;split&quot; between the two types of marking conditioned by some semantic or syntactic factor.  For example, in some languages we see the following:  Clauses whose subjects are most likely to be agents have nominative-accusative marking.   So we have &quot;I-nom.  ate the pork-acc..&quot;   But clauses whose subjects are less likely to be agents have ergative-absolutive marking.   So we have &quot;The rock-erg. hit the car-abs.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from what I've read, said split can be conditioned by factors other than the agency, including aspect!   Though I know that aspect &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; condition such a split, but &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; does it do so?   What's the semantic or cognitive logic behind this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-11T09:34:26.740" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T09:34:26.740" Title="How does aspect condition an ergative split?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2435" CreationDate="2012-05-13T06:35:27.760" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both isolating languages and inflected languages can have ways of marking noun classes like masculine nouns, nouns that stand for flat things, etc.   Some isolating languages, like Chinese, have classifiers that outnumber the grammatical genders in highly inflected European languages.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm betting that classifiers in isolating languages don't trigger anything like agreement rules.  Are there other disanalogies between noun classification schemes in isolating languages and noun classification schemes in more inflected languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-19T20:11:50.233" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T20:11:50.233" Title="What are the contrasts between classifiers in isolating languages and genders in highly inflected ones?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1925" CreationDate="2012-05-13T06:44:42.727" Score="11" ViewCount="958" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender often seems arbitrary from a semantic point of view.  When I was taking French many years ago, we were told that one must simply memorize the gender for each noun.  Are there any languages with similar markings on the verb--obligatory morphological markers for the verb that typically seem arbitrary from a semantic point of view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T16:57:12.333" Title="Is there anything analogous to grammatical gender for verbs?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1929" CreationDate="2012-05-13T06:47:45.653" Score="5" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as anyone here knows, are there any natural languages in which the apico-labial trill is a phoneme?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T03:29:24.343" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T03:29:24.343" Title="Is the apico-labial trill a phoneme in any language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1927" CreationDate="2012-05-13T07:09:13.583" Score="8" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a great deal of difficulty finding an adequate definition of &quot;permansive aspect&quot; on the web.  I know what aspect is, more or less, but the meaning of the term &quot;permansive&quot; eludes me.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-15T01:42:53.823" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T01:42:53.823" Title="What is permansive aspect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1922" CreationDate="2012-05-13T07:34:22.060" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romance languages have (generally speaking) three classes of verbs, inherited from Latin.  In French, these correspond to the infinitive endings &lt;em&gt;-re&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt;.  These are like gender in that they don't correspond to any semantic property of the verb.  Unlike gender (as expressed in Romance), it's difficult to point to a single morpheme as the &quot;gender marker.&quot;  However, the different verb classes have differences that pervade the paradigm of tense and agreement marking.  In the Romance context, this is sometimes called the &quot;theme vowel,&quot; hearkening back to a stage of the language when the morphology was more segmentable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other languages have a notion of &quot;verb class&quot; that is even less morphologically transparent.  Old English for example had seven classes of strong verbs; each of these had a different ablaut pattern.  (There were also three different weak verb classes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T07:34:22.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1922" CreationDate="2012-05-13T07:36:23.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;French and other Romance languages provide an example, actually – verbs are arbitrarily associated with theme vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Spanish (I am not familiar with French), the infinitive form of &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;b&gt;e&lt;/b&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, and that of &lt;em&gt;to take&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;tom&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. The bolded vowel, traditionally called &quot;theme&quot;, affects most of the inflected forms of the verb: &lt;em&gt;tienes&lt;/em&gt; (you have) vs. &lt;em&gt;tomas&lt;/em&gt; (you take), &lt;em&gt;tiene&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;toma&lt;/em&gt; (third person singular), &lt;em&gt;tenéis&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;tomáis&lt;/em&gt; (second person plural), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crucially, these are inherent properties of the verbs, not simply a part of their phonological form: in the Spanish subjunctive, verbs with an &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; theme take &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in the theme position and verbs with an &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; theme take &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in the theme position. For example, &lt;em&gt;tomas&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;tom&lt;b&gt;e&lt;/b&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;tienes&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;teng&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. (Obviously, there are some other things going on here morphophonologically, but the important part is the theme vowel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, grammatical gender, theme vowels, and the Germanic verb classes mentioned in Aaron's answer, are kinds of inflectional class (in the modern sense, not the more limited traditional sense), i.e. arbitrary groups of roots/stems identifiable by a morphological reflex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T07:36:23.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1924" CreationDate="2012-05-13T08:00:03.490" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permansive comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;permaneo&lt;/em&gt;, loosely translated as &quot;remain in the same state, be permanent&quot; (English &lt;em&gt;remain&lt;/em&gt; comes from &lt;em&gt;remaneo&lt;/em&gt;). It is considered equivalent to &lt;em&gt;stative&lt;/em&gt; from what I saw in the literature, which indicates a verb expressing a state rather than a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is used in certain Semitic languages, like Akkadian and Old Babylonian, for adjectives that have morphed into predicative verbs. As I understand it, an adjective like &quot;heavy&quot; evolved into a verb that meant &quot;to be heavy&quot;. It is called stative or permansive because it indicates a state of being, as opposed to a change. &lt;a href=&quot;http://balshanut.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/397/&quot;&gt;This article on Balshanut&lt;/a&gt; explains it well enough, and it is in any case interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus Semitic in an ancient phase must have had a permansive-stative form which developed from the nominal phrase, and which in the West Semitic languages was integrated into the verbal system to express the perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-05-13T08:59:33.773" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T08:59:33.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1920" CreationDate="2012-05-13T08:06:28.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's Jessica Coon's analysis of how split ergativity works in Chol, a Mayan language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language has ergative/absolutive marking in simple (monoclausal) sentences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ergative and genitive are marked identically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The subject of nominalizations is marked with ergative/genitive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Progressives are biclausal, and derived from nominalizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in a perfective sentence with one argument, the argument will be marked with the absolutive (by point 1).  In a imperfective/progressive single-argument sentence, the argument will be marked with ergative/genitive (by 3 and 4).  In sentences with two arguments, ergative/absolutive marking is observed for both perfectives and imperfectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above analysis and underlying data are from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kongresuak.ehu.es/p275-shergact/en/contenidos/informacion/ergativity_programme/en_program/adjuntos/Jessica_Coon.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an abstract&lt;/a&gt; (pdf); the author has several papers on the subject whose bibliographic information can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/jcoon/www/Jessica_Coon/Home_files/jcooncv.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;her CV&lt;/a&gt; (pdf).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at least in this language, the appearance of split ergativity is the result of a confluence of quite common linguistic traits (2, 3, and 4 above all occur independently of each other very often.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T08:06:28.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2012-05-13T10:53:44.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds made using the tongue and lip/s are usually called &quot;linguolabials&quot; (eg in the IPA). There are a very few languages which make use of this sound as a phoneme, some examples are listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguolabial_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on linguolabials&lt;/a&gt;. The article lists Coatlán Zapotec as having a linguolabial trill, but it appears to be iconic, used to represent a child's fart, not an actual phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There appear to be no reports of languages that use a linguolabial trill as a phoneme. &lt;a href=&quot;http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test2materials/Phonology3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Edward Vajda&lt;/a&gt; claims that the Chadic language Margi (spoken in Nigeria) has an &quot;apico-labial flap&quot;, but this is not in agreement with other analyses of Margi (it may be that he meant to refer to the well-known labiodental flap of Margi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T10:53:44.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2012-05-13T20:50:48.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reasonably certain that in all of Finnic, and I think in Hungarian, plural is marked in all cases. (Another interesting feature of Uralic languages in comparison with Indo-European languages is lack of adjective case, i.e., concord, and Finnic and I think Hungarian buck the trend here too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that in Mordva there is an indefinite and definite declension, corresponding to what in English we would mark with the articles &amp;quot;a(n)/Ø&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;the&amp;quot;; in the indefinite declension, number is only marked in the nominative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of pluralization in Mari seems to be complex: possessive plurals are often used to pluralize a noun, there are various dedicated plural markers, and sometimes simply the plural verb form suffices; beyond this, context often seems to be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following information is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=0YMU5azMAV0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Uralic Languages&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Daniel Abondolo, which I highly recommend, especially if you also want to find out what the situation is with the plural in Sámi, Permian, Khanty and Mansi, and Samoyedic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mordva, Gábor Zaicz&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may treat as nominals all stems which take declensional suffixes: nouns, adjectives, numberals, and pronouns...Both Erzya and Moksha distinguish indefinite from definite forms of the nominal...In the I[ndefinite] D[eclension], the opposition singular : plural is neutralized in all cases except the nominative, e.g. sN &lt;em&gt;kudo&lt;/em&gt; 'house', pN &lt;em&gt;kudo-t&lt;/em&gt; 'houses', spEla &lt;em&gt;kudo-sto&lt;/em&gt; 'out of a house ~ out of houses.' The ID pN suffix &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; continues the pU plural suffix *-t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mari, Eeva Kangasmaa-Minn&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A kind of generic, non-personal plural may be expressed by the p3 suffix, e.g. &lt;em&gt;šüšpə̂k-ə̂št mura er dene&lt;/em&gt; NIGHTINGALE-p3 SINGS-s3pres MORNING AT 'nightingales sing in the morning', none also &lt;em&gt;tosešə̂št ulo kazde jeŋə̂n&lt;/em&gt; FRIEND-p3 EXISTS EVERY HUMAN-gen 'every person has his/her friends'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also several dedicated plural markers, occurring with different distributions in different dialects. Chief among these in eastern dialects is &lt;em&gt;-wlak&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. pD &lt;em&gt;lud=šo-wlak-lan&lt;/em&gt; 'to readers'. This suffix may be a loan from Tatar, where it is a noun meaning 'cattle'; or it may be related to Mordva &lt;em&gt;velʲe&lt;/em&gt; 'village' and Saami &lt;em&gt;valvi&lt;/em&gt; 'pack (of wolves, dogs)'. Its position in relation to person and case suffixes is rather labile. In the nominative, it can either precede or follow the person marker, e.g. &lt;em&gt;olma-m-wlak&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;olma-wlak-em&lt;/em&gt; 'my apples', and in the grammatical cases both orders, person-number and number-person, are possible again, e.g. &lt;em&gt;joltaš-em-wlak-ə̂m&lt;/em&gt; FRIEND-s1-plur-acc, &lt;em&gt;joltaš-wlak-em(-ə̂m)&lt;/em&gt; FRIEND-plur-s1-acc 'my friends (acc)'. In local cases, besides these two orders, there also exists a third order, number-case-person, e.g. &lt;em&gt;olma-wlak-ə̂št-em&lt;/em&gt; APPLE-plur-ine-s1 'in my apples'. The only restrictions operating in trisuffixal sequences with local cases seems to be that the plural marker cannot come last, and that the case marker cannot come first. Other, distributionally more restricted, plural suffixes in EM are &lt;em&gt;-la,&lt;/em&gt; used mainly with nouns which designate places (e.g. &lt;em&gt;ola-la&lt;/em&gt; 'cities';...), and &lt;em&gt;-mə̂t&lt;/em&gt;, which is used with (chiefly human) animates and forms inclusives, e.g. &lt;em&gt;awa-mə̂t&lt;/em&gt; 'mother and her associates'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A singular form often designates a plural conception; depending on the situation &lt;em&gt;kol&lt;/em&gt; can refer to one fish or to many. There are also syntactic means of expressing plurality, viz. a noun in the singular followed by a verb in the plural: &lt;em&gt;kol ijat&lt;/em&gt; FISH SWIMS-p3pres 'fish(es) swim', contrast &lt;em&gt;kol ija&lt;/em&gt; FISH SWIMS.s3pres 'a fish swims' and the example with &lt;em&gt;šüšpə̂k-ə̂št&lt;/em&gt; 'nightingales' cited above. In sum, the category of number is &lt;em&gt;in statu nascendi&lt;/em&gt; in Mari, and is highly pragmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in many Uralic languages, referents (usually body parts) normally occurring in pairs are encoded morphologically as singulars, e.g. the unmarked meaning of &lt;em&gt;kit&lt;/em&gt; is '(the two) hands/arms'. Disambiguation therefore specifies the marked meaning 'one hand/arm', which is expressed by means of the word &lt;em&gt;pel&lt;/em&gt; 'half', e.g. &lt;em&gt;pel+kid=an&lt;/em&gt; HALF+ARM=adj 'one-armed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second- and third-person singular person markers also act as indicators of definiteness, thus functioning as article surrogates, e.g. &lt;em&gt;užeš kugužan+üdə̂r-ə̂m. kugužan+üdə̂r-et mə̂gə̂ra&lt;/em&gt; 'he sees a princess (&lt;em&gt;kugužan+üdə̂r-ə̂m&lt;/em&gt;, sA). The princess (&lt;em&gt;kugužan+üdə̂r-et&lt;/em&gt;, s2; lit. your princess) is weeping.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-13T20:50:48.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-14T10:14:37.503" Score="1" ViewCount="2044" Body="&lt;p&gt;What word is valid across the largest number of different languages, and as different part-of-speech?&#xA;(The precise term is &lt;strong&gt;interlingual homographs/heteronyms/polysemes&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'rate'&lt;/em&gt; is both verb, noun and adjective in English, so count that as 3. &lt;em&gt;'rate'&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.thefreedictionary.com/rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loanword but also a (distinct) noun in German ('instalment')&lt;/a&gt;, in French: &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.thefreedictionary.com/rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(noun) 'spleen'&lt;/a&gt; and also as verb (present tense of &lt;em&gt;'rater'&lt;/em&gt;), and again a loanword in &lt;a href=&quot;http://no.thefreedictionary.com/rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norwegian&lt;/a&gt;. Giving us a &lt;strong&gt;grand total of 3+2+2+1 = 8&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'baba'&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7062698/data-structure-for-multi-language-dictionary&quot;&gt;meanings across English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, as a noun meaning variously: 'rum cake','saliva','father'...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'like'&lt;/em&gt; can be 8 or 9 valid POS in English alone (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46277/what-word-can-fulfill-the-most-parts-of-speech/67634#67634&quot;&gt;&quot;What word can fulfill the most parts of speech?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), plus &lt;a href=&quot;http://no.thefreedictionary.com/like&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3 in Norwegian&lt;/a&gt;, for a &lt;strong&gt;total of 12&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not asking about &lt;strong&gt;homonyms within the same language&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;'run' or 'set' have &gt;400 meanings in English&lt;/em&gt;). I don't care about straight homonyms, for these purposes that all only boils down to 3 distinct meanings (noun, verb, adjective) for &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ignore capitalization&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. for German nouns)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exclude universal loanwords&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt; (because it's the same word across languages, not a homograph.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exclude proper nouns&lt;/strong&gt; (unless they also have a separate meaning, e.g. 'scotch', 'go dutch'..).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Include noun-, adjective- and verb-stemming&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Include accents as being significant&lt;/strong&gt;, hence &lt;em&gt;plies&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pliés&lt;/em&gt; are both valid in English and French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Include colloquial usage, as long as it's common usage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Words must be 2+ letters&lt;/strong&gt; (arbitrarily, to avoid the 'letter 'A' is the name for the letter A, in languages X,Y and Z' definition that Muke quoted. But allowing unusual definitions like &lt;em&gt;wye&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cym&lt;/em&gt;, as he cited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good multi-lingual dictionary for verifying how many languages a word-spelling is legal in is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thefreedictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Dictionaries/World_Languages/Multilingual/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these others&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Motivation:&lt;/strong&gt; this question arose (legitimately) from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7062698/data-structure-for-multi-language-dictionary&quot;&gt;SO question &quot;Data structure for multi-language dictionary?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On-topicness:&lt;/strong&gt; If anyone quibbles whether this is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask&quot;&gt;practical, answerable question based on actual problems that you face&lt;/a&gt;, see preceding Motivation remark; also I wanted to ask this on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2761/natural-language-processing-and-computational-linguistics-nlp-cl&quot;&gt;NLP/CL, but that's sadly closed&lt;/a&gt;, and non-English questions are offtopic for &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;, and this is probably neither on-topic nor well-suited to the general StackOverflow audience. So yes, Computational Linguistics&amp;amp;NLP is on-topic for Linguistics.SE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1006" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T08:04:56.497" Title="What word has the most valid meanings, across multiple different languages? (interlingual homographs)" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2012-06-04T09:01:35.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-05-14T10:31:11.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://learncebuano.com/here-there-over-there/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cebuano&lt;/a&gt; also has three, from the speaker's point of view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kini ( ki-ni ) (ni) – this / these&#xA;Kana ( ka-na ) (na) – that / those&#xA;Kadto ( kad-to ) (to) – that / those over there (far away)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1006" LastActivityDate="2012-05-14T10:31:11.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2012-05-14T11:16:00.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. The answer is going to depend hugely on several factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1a. &lt;strong&gt;Are we texting textspeak, or is it grammatically correct, punctuated, capitalized (and for foreign languages, accented) sentences&lt;/strong&gt; (which imply lots of extra keystrokes, modifier keys, possible error and correction keystrokes)? Or something &amp;lt;100% proper spelling? What character error rate is considered acceptable? Is this an email to the boss, or just chat or directions? Must German nouns be capitalized or French past tenses accented? (We can predictively learn and add those, from a lexicon. We can also learn the proper nouns you use and add them to lexicon. We could even infer the first and last name of the message recipient - how much use of message 'context' is allowed, exactly?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1b. &lt;strong&gt;Can we use predictive text&lt;/strong&gt;? like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mobilitydigest.com/world-text-record-gets-crushed-by-android-swiftkey-x-user/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;world-record-smashing Swiftkey X&lt;/a&gt; (And are there yet any speaker-specific-entrained predictive text systems?) For textspeak, we could expand hlo, l8r, LMAO, BRB, 'I &amp;lt;3 U' (or the French textspeak mentioned below). Do those common abbreviations give English o romanized languages an unfair advantage?&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swiftkey.net/swiftkey-x-user-smashes-world-texting-record&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current world record (and English-language) is 160 characters/26 words in 10.7 sec, without errors, by Rachael Loncar&lt;/a&gt;, as of 10/2011. Predictive text can make you &gt;2x faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 &lt;strong&gt;Is there one language that is best adapted to &quot;the keyboard&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a. You know that there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Alternatives_to_QWERTY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alternatives to QWERTY&lt;/a&gt;, right? And most of these improve the typing speed for both English- and non-English-language users. QWERTY is only fast because we grew up with it, no other reason. QWERTY discriminates against non-English users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b. Did you mean 'thumb keyboard' as distinct to 'touchscreen'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2c. Texting speed will depend on the size ratio between your fingers and the keyboard. There are gender and racial differences on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2d. My friend points out that Europeans and Asians are in general faster at texting than Americans, simply because they get more practise, since in the US cellphone calls are free (assuming a monthly contract). Whereas many Americans, if they text at all, tend to text when they're in a meeting or unable to pick up, or e.g. if they know you are / or are driving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, all these factors will prevent you from making a language-neutral comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1006" LastEditorUserId="1006" LastEditDate="2019-11-13T20:24:57.410" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T20:24:57.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2012-05-15T00:39:26.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jlovegren's answer is complete, just wanted to add some points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible reason for German to be mistaken for SOV is that &lt;em&gt;subordinate clauses&lt;/em&gt; usually follow a SOV pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ich weiß, daß ich ein Berliner bin.&#xA;'I know that I am a Berliner.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, in subordinate clauses, the &lt;em&gt;conjugated&lt;/em&gt; verb comes finally, whether there is another non-finite verb or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to make (after reading @Alenanno's comment) is that V2 doesn't necessarily even &lt;em&gt;look like&lt;/em&gt; SOV, since V2 doesn't necessarily mean that the main meaning-conveying verb comes in a final position. For instance, Danish (and other Scandinavian languages AFAIK) are V2, but the main verb usually comes before the direct/indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Peter ville give drengen bogen.&#xA;Peter wanted-to give to-the-boy the-book.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If e.g. the indirect object is brought to the head position, the conjugated verb is in 2nd position, but the direct object still comes after the main verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Drengen ville Peter give bogen.&#xA;To-the-boy wanted-to Peter give the-book.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2012-05-17T01:30:20.090" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T01:30:20.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1922" CreationDate="2012-05-15T05:14:05.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English might only have one pattern of regular verb conjugation (depending on how you define &quot;regular&quot;, the strong Germanic verbs have several sub-regularities), but many languages have several classes of regular verbs which have separate rules for conjugation. Usually these are independent from semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the Romance ones that others have mentioned, examples are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish has two regular ways to form past tense, -ede and -te.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish has 3 regular conjugations, -er verbs, -ar verbs and -r verbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern Japanese has two regular conjugations, godankatsuyo (5-row conjugation) and ichidankatsuyo (1-row conjugation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T05:14:05.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-15T09:06:07.857" Score="6" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Edited to provide context and clarify what I'm interested in)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context: I am reading a paper that involves comparing German, Dutch, and English. German is the outlier for the phenomena and measures discussed in the paper; I believe this is partially explainable by the difference in the degree of synthesis (as approximated by average morphemes/word ratio). As well, I think that repeating the procedures described in this paper on a language more synthetic than German would show a trend. Another paper relevant to the first has some measures related to Russian, so I am curious about Russian in particular - how synthetic is it, relative to any of the other languages involved (especially the two outliers of the three used in the first study)? I am interested in a morphemes/word ratio in particular as a simple cross-linguistic and &lt;em&gt;quantitative&lt;/em&gt; point-measurement that also allows for &lt;em&gt;easy relative comparisons&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, if there's some general typology survey out there that gives average morpheme/word ratios for a bunch of languages (including enough of the ones I might find useful or generally interesting) - that would suffice.&#xA;Alternatively, if someone only knows of papers surveying the specific languages I've mentioned - that's fine, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searches for &quot;morpheme per word&quot; (with an optional search term of a specific language) don't seem to yield anything with actual numbers, although I'm certain I've seen numbers for English and German before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1011" LastEditorUserId="1011" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T00:51:47.747" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T00:51:47.747" Title="Citations for morpheme/word counts?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1942" CreationDate="2012-05-15T12:51:26.210" Score="6" ViewCount="835" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about grammatical gender abound on this forum and on other linguistics forums. It's well known that in general, grammatical gender need not coincide with natural gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am interested in whether there exist languages in which the grammatical gender of a given name appears not to coincide with the natural gender to which that name is generally assigned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will exclude ambigeneric names and names belonging to non-human/neuter noun classes. The question is whether, in any languages you know of, a given name of feminine grammatical gender is used as a masculine given name, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I know of one case where this apparent constraint was strong enough that a Japanese female name ending in -o became a Latin first declension noun ending in -a, to avoid a conflict between grammatical and natural gender -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aAkihitum-et-michikam.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;when Princess Michiko of the Chrysanthemum Throne visited Salamanca University&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-05-15T14:12:42.997" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T23:18:20.233" Title="Proper names: does grammatical gender imply natural gender?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1936" CreationDate="2012-05-15T14:27:20.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it started with a classic Joseph Greenberg's 1954 paper, &lt;em&gt;A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language&lt;/em&gt;, in Method and perspective in anthropology, ed. R. F. Spencer (pp. 192-220).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can easily find such calculations virtually everywhere, e.g. in Laurie Bauer's textbook, p. 235. Why not do it yourself? It'd be fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-05-15T14:27:20.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1937" CreationDate="2012-05-15T16:35:06.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by &quot;a given name of feminine grammatical gender used as a masculine given name.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gender assignment in given names is usually lexical, i.e. the Russian boy's name Petja is M and not F - although nouns ending in -a are usually F in IE languages - precisely because that particular name is given to boys, and not girls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: A couple of words on gender in linguistics. &lt;strong&gt;Gender in linguistics doesn't mean biological gender&lt;/strong&gt; - linguistics is not biology, after all. &lt;strong&gt;It is understood as a type, kind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For animate nouns&lt;/em&gt; (NB: animate doesn't mean alive), gender assignment is usually based on semantics.  In other words, if a word denotes a male (human being), the word is masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For inanimate nouns, gender assignment is based on their morphosyntactic properties&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. all nouns taking a particular set of endings belong to gender X. That is why the first declension in Latin includes feminine (mostly) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; masculine nouns, both common and proper (for a list of some masculine nouns belonging to the first declension see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_masculine_Latin_nouns_of_the_1st_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_masculine_Latin_nouns_of_the_1st_declension&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let me repeat it here. If a proper noun denotes a male, it is of the masculine gender. It doesn't matter whether it belongs to the first declension or not. It will be masculine. That is why &quot;Catilina&quot; in Latin is masculine, although it belongs to the first declension. Or in Russian, &quot;Petja&quot; (Pete) and &quot;Vera&quot; (a girl's name) belong to the same type of declension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things even more complicated, gender is only one type of noun categorization (see more on noun classes). There are languages where there is no masculine/feminine distinction in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see a famous passage written by Mark Twain: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not -- which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T23:18:20.233" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T23:18:20.233" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1922" CreationDate="2012-05-16T00:56:53.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll also throw in that some languages also have grammatical gender in their verbs. Polish, for example (I assume other Slavic languages do as well, but I'm only familiar with Polish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;chciałbym = I would like (male speaking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;chciałabym = I would like (female speaking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;byłem = I was (male speaking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;byłam = I was (female speaking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T00:56:53.560" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1820" CreationDate="2012-05-16T10:36:49.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't give any real answer of the kind you want, but I can tell you what I know about about this topic being an undergraduate 40 years after the event, hoping that it will be of any help, even though I am certainly wrong to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see the idea originated with Zellig Harris, who is now taken to be one of few American strucuralists who was concerned with syntax in a serious manner. Harris even dealt with structures bigger than sentences, and since substitution tests were central to structuralism, he had the idea of establishing equivalence relations for sentences by checking which sentences could replace each other in a longer text, which for instance connected corresponding active/passive sentences. It seems that he continued from there by assuming that one member of such a relations is basic and the others derived, and consequently invented transformations to do that derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chomsky's later transformational grammar, the notion of kernel sentece seems to have just been carried over without much deep consideration. I can't remember that he discussed the matter any more than saying that it allows for a more simple grammar. Later work by Katz and Fodor and Katz and Postal then introduced some form of deep structure, which led to the model in Aspects, which repurposed transformations to not deal with inter-sentence equivalences, but instead to map between deep-structures and surface-structures. As far as I know this was when kernel sentences were given up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that that notion was, at least in generative grammar, seen as mostly accidental and a matter of tradition from the start, and that there was no interest in defending it against what was intuitively seen as a more interesting model in Aspects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1014" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T10:36:49.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1937" CreationDate="2012-05-16T13:11:00.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do know of at least one example in Latin where a feminine noun is given as a name to a male, namely &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext:1999.04.0059%3aentry=cupido&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cupido&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, a normally feminine noun meaning &quot;desire&quot;, but given to the male deity &lt;em&gt;Cupido&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cupid&lt;/a&gt; in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You restrict your question to given names, though I think family names might be more likely to exist with a mismatch between grammatical and natural gender.  In Spanish, for example, family names do not have to be words of the same gender as the referent, i.e., a woman can have the surname &lt;em&gt;Delgado&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;delgado&lt;/em&gt;, a masculine word meaning &quot;skinny, slender&quot;) and a man can have the surname &lt;em&gt;Vega&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;vega&lt;/em&gt;, a feminine word meaning &quot;meadow&quot;).   The same thing of course happens in English (a woman can be called &lt;em&gt;Johnson&lt;/em&gt; even though &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; is masculine), but compare Russian and other Slavic languages, where surnames usually change form depending on whether they are given to a male or a female; a man's surname can be &lt;em&gt;Толстой&lt;/em&gt; (Tolstoj, from &lt;em&gt;толстый&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;stout&quot;) but his wife or daughter will have the feminine form &lt;em&gt;Толстая&lt;/em&gt; (Tolstaja).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastEditorUserId="472" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T13:21:20.480" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T13:21:20.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-16T20:55:23.743" Score="13" ViewCount="6408" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a person is partially deaf, I think they would be able to acquire the language, and actually I've seen partially deaf people speak in addition to the use of a sign language. I suppose this means they can use that language when they think, is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens when someone is totally deaf? Hence my question: what language, if any, do deaf people use for their thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, how is this determined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Since this created some misunderstanding, my use of &quot;if any&quot; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean that Sign Languages are not languages or that I don't see them as such. I actually do. Rather, I meant to say that I was thinking that maybe totally deaf people could either use no language at all, just images or self-thinking or do like other people and use a mix of images/sign languages. And also how this had been determined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:33:44.567" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:33:44.567" Title="What language, if any, do deaf people think in?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2012-05-16T21:19:17.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not being deaf myself I can only make conjectures but I would assume that they would think in whatever language they use when they read and write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-= Update =-&#xA;It's seems that I was mistaken.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2486/in-what-language-do-deaf-people-think&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; points out that deaf people think in sign language.  It points out that people who are both profoundly and prelingually deaf are at a great disadvantage when it comes to acquiring language since most of that development takes place between 21 and 36 months and they are unable to attain the information from the same sources as most other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1016" LastEditorUserId="1016" LastEditDate="2012-05-16T21:47:20.480" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T21:47:20.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1912" CreationDate="2012-05-16T23:35:02.370" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the success of Esperanto relative to other conlangs is mostly a historical accident. Specifically, that when the Volapük movement schismed and collapsed after the third Volapuk Congress in 1889, there were then some thousands of people who believed in an international auxiliary, looking for something that wasn't Volapük. The first Esperanto book had been publisheed two years earlier, and so Esperanto was in the right place at the right time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware that the Esperantist movement did much active proselytising at this time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-05-16T23:35:02.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2012-05-17T01:12:29.363" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Steven Pinker (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060976519&quot;&gt;The Language Instinct&lt;/a&gt;, 1995) suggested a name for the language that people &quot;think in&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;mentalese&lt;/strong&gt;. This language, of course, is not a real language and it only vaguely resembles the actual languages that people speak or sign. On the other hand, it is universal; every human being is born with it. His argument is that no natural language could possibly serve as a good medium for reasoning, for several reasons: ambiguity, lack of logical explicitness, co-reference, deixis and synonymy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his own words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People do not think in&#xA;  English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.&#xA;  This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages;&#xA;  presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols&#xA;  that correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying&#xA;  representation shown above. But compared with any given language,&#xA;  mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. It&#xA;  must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must&#xA;  correspond to a given English word like &lt;em&gt;stool&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;stud&lt;/em&gt;. [...]. On the other hand, mentalese must&#xA;  be simpler than spoken languages; conversation-specific words and&#xA;  constructions (like &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;) are absent, and information about&#xA;  pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it&#xA;  could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and&#xA;  annotated quasi-English, with the design I have just described, and&#xA;  that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi-&#xA;  Apache. But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning&#xA;  properly, they would have to look much more like each other than&#xA;  either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that they&#xA;  are the same: a universal mentalese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese&#xA;  into strings of words and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same argument can, of course, be applied to deaf-mute people, even to those who have never learned any language at all. He presents a few compelling examples of people with serious disabilities who are nevertheless capable of the same kinds of complex reasoning that speaking and signing people are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists call &quot;computational&quot; or &quot;representational&quot; theory of mind, according to which, what takes place in the mind is a mere manipulation of symbols, much like a computer, hence the name. Thus, the so called mentalese would be a very complex system of symbols used to represent the world inside people's minds. The &quot;computer processor&quot;, in this case, would the brain, storing and manipulating these symbols by means of physico-chemical processes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: there is no reason (according to this theory) to posit a natural language that people use for their thoughts. Languages would play, at best, an auxiliary role in the reasoning process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T01:12:29.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2012-05-17T01:24:21.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why a definite article suffix and &quot;definiteness&quot; as a noun property contradict each other. The &quot;definiteness&quot; is achieved by attaching a suffix morpheme to the indefinite version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to comment on your comparison between Scandinavian languages and e.g. Albanian, I don't see much difference. I know nothing about Albanian, but from your examples, I would assume that '-a' is the definite article suffix, and 'Tiranë -&gt; Tirana' and 'Shkodër -&gt; Shkodra' are results of vowel elision in the last syllable of the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact same phonomenon happens in e.g. Danish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;måne -&amp;gt; månen 'moon -&amp;gt; the moon'&#xA;morgen -&amp;gt; morgnen 'morning -&amp;gt; the morning'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T01:24:21.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2012-05-17T02:24:42.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to be deaf to know that American Sign Language and various other sign languages used around the globe are languages, pure and simple.   The sign languages have complex grammars and rich vocabularies just as the spoken languages do.   See ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://deaflibrary.org/asl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sign Language Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cal.org/resources/archive/rgos/asl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Center For Applied Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;American Sign Language (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language, whose grammar bears very little resemblance to that of English, should not be confused with Signing Exact English, which is a method of encoding English with signs rather than an independent sign language.  Some deaf speakers use what is called &quot;Pidgin Signed English,&quot; which is a blend of English and ASL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://deafness.about.com/cs/signfeats2/a/pidginsign.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sign Language - Pidgin Signed English &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nchearingloss.org/pse.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pidgin Signed English (PSE)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that many people who are deaf from birth have trouble acquiring a first language is that many aren't identified as deaf, or taught sign language, until they're well into the critical period of language acquisition, and consequently don't get enough exposure to sign language early on.  See...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/170ISB4.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sociolinguistic Perspectives on the Education of Deaf&#xA;Children in Inclusion Placements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for literacy, ASL and other sign languages don't have generally accepted written forms, and consequently not much literature.  This means that they must learn to read and write in a widespread spoken language in order to become literate.   So, for example, we see ASL users' and deaf educators' learning and teaching English.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/literacy1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The relationship between literacy and ASL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, we don't need to speculate about whether congenitally deaf sign language users have a language to think in.  They do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T16:02:29.540" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T16:02:29.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1950" CreationDate="2012-05-17T07:55:24.377" Score="12" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does French use the format &quot;4 x 20 + n&quot; (n = 0 to 19) for numbers from eighty to ninety-nine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1018" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T08:43:42.297" Title="French Numbering System - Eighty to Ninety-Nine" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1949" CreationDate="2012-05-17T08:40:11.497" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The strange construction is a relic from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal&quot;&gt;vigesimal system&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. a base 20 number system. This I'm just repeating from the Wikipedia page, but it seems it's thought to be of Basque origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French construction is weird, but the Danish system is up there as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;50 = halvtredsindstyve ( = half-3rd times 20 = 2½ times 20)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  60 = tresindstyve ( = three times twenty)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  70 = halvfjerdsindstyve ( = half-4th times 20 = 3½ times 20)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  80 = firsindstyve (= four times twenty)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  90 = halvfemsindstyve (= half-5th times 20 = 4½ times 20)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these have more common short forms halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds, firs, halvfems. On top of the vigesimal thing, note the strange way to say 2½ (etc), half-3rd. As a bonus, Danish has the ones before the tens, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;93 = treoghalvfemsindstyve (3 and half-5th(4½) times 20).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-17T08:43:42.297" LastActivityDate="2012-05-17T08:43:42.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1952" CreationDate="2012-05-18T01:13:35.800" Score="5" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese pronunciation is mora-based (correct me if there is a better word), i.e. each mora is pronounced with equal length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still I sometimes see the concept of syllables used, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 疲労 /hirō/ 'fatigue', 2 syllables /hi/ and /rō/, 3 morae&#xA; 広尾 /hiroo/ (location name), 3 syllables /hi/, /ro/ and /o/, 3 morae&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The justification for the 3 syllables in /hiroo/ is that there is a morpheme boundary between /hiro/ and /o/. However, in my opinion the 2 words are pronounced exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that I am correct, what purpose does the concept of syllables serve? I can see that in other languages, it might make sense to distinguish between long vowels and double vowels (e.g. the former might be approx. 1.5 times as long as short vowels, the latter twice as long), but since Japanese is mora-based (i.e. both are twice as long), does the distinction serve any purpose? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2012-05-18T01:56:16.333" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T10:27:06.427" Title="Is the concept of syllables pronunciation-relevant in languages with mora-based pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1951" CreationDate="2012-05-18T03:29:03.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, syllables have an influence on pitch accent in some dialects, including the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, in the standard dialect, only the first mora of a syllable can take stress. That is, for example, /ha.ɴ/ and /haꜜɴ/ are permissible but */ha.ɴꜜ/ is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Kagoshima dialect, both morae in a bi-moraic syllable will have the same pitch. Particularly, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kagoshima_dialect&amp;amp;oldid=491903026#Koshikijima_Accent&quot;&gt;Wikipedia gives an example of how accent is affected in a related dialect&lt;/a&gt;: The morpheme /mono/ is often reduced to /mo.ɴ/ in colloquial Japanese, changing the number of syllables but not of morae. Since in an accented phrase the accent is localized on the penultimate syllable, this causes the accent of &quot;獣が&quot; to shift from [kédámò&lt;strong&gt;nó&lt;/strong&gt;gà] to [kédà&lt;strong&gt;móɴ̀&lt;/strong&gt;gà]. (In this dialect, accent is realized as a high pitch on the first mora of the syllable, and the adjacent morae are low-pitch.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This doesn't apply to Kansai dialects, whose pitch accents are moraically based, nor trivially to those dialects that lack accent.) See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Japanese_pitch_accent&amp;amp;oldid=490727319#Syllabic_and_moraic&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Japanese_pitch_accent&amp;amp;oldid=490727319#Syllabic_and_moraic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this doesn't require analyzing them as syllables. One could just define &quot;mora&quot; = &quot;syllable&quot;, and express the rules as &quot;syllables cannot take stress when followed by a vowel&quot;, &quot;adjacent vowels must have the same pitch within a morpheme/word&quot;, et cetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese accent patterns are generally based on phrasal units, which are generally longer than a single morpheme (for example phrase-ending particles are included). Therefore I'm suspicious of the claim that there's a distinction between /VV/ (within a morpheme) and /V V/ (across morphemes) when the accent pattern of the constituent morphemes is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-05-18T10:27:06.427" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T10:27:06.427" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2012-05-18T04:21:31.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Old English did have grammatical gender, it is completely extinct in that native words are not at all perceived as masculine or feminine according to their endings. The survival of perception of gender-based endings for names is probably attributable to extensive language contact with languages that have them. Particularly, as with many European languages, lots of Christian names were imported via Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would expect gendered name endings in the absence of grammatical gender to be peculiar to a few languages like English that both lack gender and have borrowed names extensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a similar phenomenon could apply in languages which retain grammatical gender whose inflections either have been sound-changed or are distinct from those of a language from which it borrows many names. The result is distinct inflections for common nouns and (subsequently-)imported names. For example, native German nouns inflect with various combinations of /ə/ /n/ /s/, whereas many female given names are instead indicated with /a/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, most Slavic languages take gender-based endings further: they even inflect surnames and patronymics according to gender. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Леонид Ильич Брежнев​&lt;/a&gt; had a son named Юрий Леонид&lt;strong&gt;ович&lt;/strong&gt; Брежн&lt;strong&gt;ев&lt;/strong&gt; and a daughter named Галина Леонид&lt;strong&gt;овна&lt;/strong&gt; Брежн&lt;strong&gt;ева&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-05-18T04:21:31.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3103" CreationDate="2012-05-18T05:07:41.043" Score="11" ViewCount="1074" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do the Latin stress rules (antepenultimate if penultimate is light, penultimate if heavy) have any known exceptions? Also, sometimes the rule assigns antepenultimate stress to a syllable belonging to a prefix — does the rule apply regardless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-05-18T07:00:48.563" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T16:58:41.007" Title="Latin stress rules: exceptions" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-19T03:30:31.307" Score="7" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the size of a phonemic inventory decreases, the information rate allowed by the inventory should likewise decrease. So are there any (semantico-)pragmatic or morphosyntactic strategies  that languages with fewer sounds might adopt to compensate for this inefficiency? Or is the effect negligible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1030" LastEditorUserId="1030" LastEditDate="2012-05-19T03:47:19.337" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T21:51:21.713" Title="What strategies for efficiency are adopted by languages with minimal phonemic inventories?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2012-05-19T06:41:13.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put simply, they become more verbose, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hawaiian&lt;/a&gt; is a good example, where the words can be quite long, even nouns, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Kamehameha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kamehameha&lt;/a&gt;. When &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;human languages lose complexity in one area they make up for it in another&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strategy when a language loses case endings, possibly due to phoneme merger &amp;amp; loss, is to enforce stricter word order. As without the erstwhile case-endings the Subject(Topic) and the Object or Verb(Comment) cannot be easily differentiated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another strategy has been the use of tones for phonemic contrast; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pirahã language&lt;/a&gt; is a good example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; You specifically mentioned minimal phonemic inventory, in case of a smaller consonantal inventory, one of the strategies used is to increase the number of vowels (e.g., tense vs. lax, length, and diphthongs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1028" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-09T21:51:21.713" LastActivityDate="2013-02-09T21:51:21.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="864" CreationDate="2012-05-19T06:52:02.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Hangul (Korean) is not totally based on the Phoenician alphabetic system it was inspired by the shapes in Tibetan(Phagspa) and other Brahmic scripts, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;origin of Hangul&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also some modern day scripts are also not based strictly on the Phoenician alphabetic system. One example is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics#Origins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics&lt;/a&gt;. Note that this too was inspired by Devanagari &amp;amp; Pitman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: If you were to account for Syllabaries too (Not strictly Alphabetic) the Yi Script&#xA;would be one too - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1028" LastEditorUserId="1028" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T08:01:36.640" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T08:01:36.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-19T16:06:00.263" Score="22" ViewCount="22306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language that has a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is there a language that is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Ideal_phonemic_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;100% ideally phonemic&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="998" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T11:55:00.040" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T23:20:42.133" Title="Is there a language whose writing is 100% phonemic?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="23" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-19T16:26:59.150" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finnish is the usual exemplar for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many recent alphabetizations, like those of Native American languages (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LushootseedPhonemes.pdf&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt; is one example), are still phonemic in the sense that the spoken language hasn't had time yet to change away from the phonemic system it had when the alphabet was developed. Or in other cases, where there are no native speakers any more, all language learning is based on the alphabetic representation, by necessity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are plenty of non-alphabetic writing systems with little or no useful correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. Since phonemics is an alphabetic representation system, it can't be put into 1-1 correspondence with an abjad or an abugida, let alone with a lexically-based system like Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-19T17:51:44.330" LastActivityDate="2012-05-19T17:51:44.330" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2012-05-19T19:21:08.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall &lt;a href=&quot;http://lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pellegrino-et-al.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a recent study&lt;/a&gt; at the Université de Lyon. It shows how, in order to maintain a roughly fixed information rate, languages make tradeoffs in any of a number of areas—but predominantly in syllable structure. Essentially, phonemes can be readily omitted in fast speech to increase information density, but syllables are dropped much more rarely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study compares English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish, and uses Vietnamese as a point of reference for normalisation purposes. The two tonal languages (Mandarin and Vietnamese) were found to have the highest relative information density.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also found that information density is not strictly fixed—there are outliers. In particular, Japanese has a small phonemic inventory &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; very simple syllable structure. So even though the syllable rate of Japanese (7.84±0.09&amp;nbsp;Hz) was comparable to that of Spanish (7.82±0.16&amp;nbsp;Hz) and French (7.18±0.12&amp;nbsp;Hz), Japanese was given an information density of 0.49±0.02—next to a more typical density such as 0.91±0.04 in the case of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the effect is by no means negligible; anecdotally, English subtitles for Japanese dialogue go by noticeably slowlier than English subtitles for dialogue in other languages. Bugs me to no end. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2012-05-19T19:21:08.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-05-20T04:11:14.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that some linguists interpret contemporary informal French as a null-subject language, mainly because the phonemic stature of French subject pronouns has diminished over time. A paper by Elly van Gelderen (The Subject Cycle: Linguistic Change and Cognitive Principles, [2007]) perhaps suggests as much. If this is the case, and as the source language of French (namely, Latin) was a null-subject language, is an unorthodox analysis of intermediate forms of French at all possible: to wit, French has never been a non-null-subject language, as English is? I in no way have the expertise to answer this question, but I do not believe that standard prescriptivist accounts of French grammar are indications in themselves of the non-null-subject state of the language. Possibly only the historical record can determine the validity of this unorthodox assertion. That is, examples of subject-less clauses within the historical corpus of unstylized, informal French might affirm the thesis, and examples of unstylized clauses wherein a free morpheme intervenes between subject pronoun and verb phrase (full syntactic configurability assumed) might disprove the thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1030" LastEditorUserId="1030" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T22:51:16.390" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T22:51:16.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-20T06:11:22.490" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many languages that have true phonemic orthographies. An example is Wajarri (Pama-Nyungan family, Western Australia), which has a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Wajarri has no voicing contrast but uses the &quot;voiced&quot; series to represent the plosives potential ambiguity between the velar nasal /ŋ/ and the sequence alveolar nasal + velar stop /nɡ/ is dealt with by placing a full stop between the two letters in the latter case i.e. &lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;n.g.&lt;/em&gt; Many other Australian languages also have highly phonemic orthographies. Some other languages said to have phonemic orthographies are: &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanord.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=cms&amp;amp;action=showsection&amp;amp;id=gen22Srv38Nme10_5805_1214398614&amp;amp;pageid=gen22Srv38Nme10_6897_1253021055&amp;amp;sectionid=gen22Srv38Nme10_5805_1214398614&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zambian languages&lt;/a&gt; and Austronesian languages (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/d1576153384587w4/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malay&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://hss.fullerton.edu/linguistics/cln/W08%20pdf/Angus-Maori.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maori&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some European languages with very shallow orthographies are: Finnish, Croatian, Serbian. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://anthro.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/AudVid/AudVidReadings/GippertEtAl/LangDoc_11_Seifart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seifart&lt;/a&gt; Croatian and Serbian are particularly shallow, even representing allomorphy according to the surface realisation, unlike Finnish which, while very shallow, does not show allomorphy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the languages with phonemic orthographies have comparatively little morphophonological variation and have had their orthographies developed relatively recently. As languages change, orthographies also must change or they will become gradually less phonemic. Languages with complex morphophonologies cannot be represented with a shallow orthography, though it's clear that English orthography is much more complex than it need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T09:35:37.877" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T09:35:37.877" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-20T13:55:17.157" Score="7" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wh- questions in sign languages crosslinguistically can be seen in clause-initial or clause-final position or in both positions. They can be seen in one of the positions in question sentence, like in the example from Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;wo    ball&#xA;where ball  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where is the ball?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/sll/2006/00000009/f0020001/art00007&quot;&gt;Schalber, 2006&lt;/a&gt;, p. 142)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schalber (2006) has pointed in her paper that clause-initial is the default position for the wh- signs in ÖGS. However, the wh-signs can be seen in both positions at the same time. This means that they can be doubled, as in the example below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;was    will    kaufen   was  &#xA;what   want    buy      what&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you want to buy?&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Schalber, 2006, p. 143)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has not mention whether there is a condition or not in which doubled questions has occured. So, my question is whether doubled questions are abtirary. Is there a condition in which they have occured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T14:54:48.177" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T10:38:36.630" Title="Are doubled questions in sign languages arbitrary?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-20T15:26:43.460" Score="12" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning a second language, either by immersing yourself into the culture that speaks it or by being formally taught by a fluent speaker, is an old practice in history. But the scientific study of second language acquisition is a much more recent development (as late as the 20th century).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, has the teaching of second languages been affected by these studies? What techniques and theories foreign language teachers now have available that they didn't have in the past? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to keep this question focused, I'm referring specifically to teaching small groups of middle class literate adults who are native speakers of an Indo-European language and who voluntarily decide to learn another IE language, but belonging to another subfamily. Assume they are learning that second language in their native country, where it is not spoken (e.g. Spanish people learning German in Spain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T18:43:01.837" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T08:57:09.107" Title="What has the study of second language acquisition brought to foreign language teachers?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1968" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1969" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" Score="0" Body="Questions with this tag are about the acquisition of one or more second languages. In other words any language other than the mother tongue or native language of a given speaker." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" LastActivityDate="2012-05-20T15:40:01.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2012-05-21T02:03:51.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for wh-phrase placement in general in American Sign Language anyway, the wh-phrase may occur in clause initial or final position if it corresponds with the subject, but it can only occur clause finally if it corresponds with the object. I'm fairly certain that a double wh-phrase can correspond with either a subject or object.&#xA;In American Sign Language when a second wh-phrase is used it is sometimes/often for emphasis, as in the difference between the english &quot;Who does John love?&quot; and &quot;John loves who??&quot;. But this isn't the only time when it is used. I think it is mostly optional, but as with anything linguistically optional I think it carries nuances, although I don't know what they might be, sorry.&#xA;If you are looking for more detailed information I recommend chapter 7 in The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional categories and hierarchical structure. by Carol Neidle; Judy Kegl; Dawn MacLaughlin; Benjamin Bahan; and Robert Lee (2000). It only covers American Sign Language but it might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1022" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T02:03:51.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1846" CreationDate="2012-05-21T02:18:57.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a theory in American Sign Language Syntax (proposed by Neidle et al 2000) that one of the doubled wh-phrases might actually be a topic (dubbed a wh-topic) in which case it follows the syntactic rules for a base generated topic. One of these rules is that if the wh-phrase occurs with a moved topic, it must precede the moved topic, just like any other base generated topic would. So in American Sign Language anyway the wh-phrase is actually first, followed by the other topic. And since you mentioned the articulatory demands/conflicts, it should be noted the that one of the prominent non-manual markers for wh-questions is brows furrowed, and one of the prominent non-manual marker for topic marking is brows raised, obviously there is a conflict, which is one of the reasons that this theory is up for debate (although there is some evidence that the topic+wh marker is slightly different from just the wh marker)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1022" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T02:18:57.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2012-05-21T07:29:03.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/kaiser/files/Kaiser2009_Losing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kaiser (2009)&lt;/a&gt; is an analysis of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) considering whether it is in the process of becoming a non-null subject language. Kaiser compares developments in BP with historical changes in French as it became a non-null subject language through the course of the Middle Ages and reports on studies of French bible translations that show this occurring over the period from 1170 to around 1600.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The changes which Kaiser reports as being thought to be connected with the loss of the null subject property in French are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;decrease in verbal inflection&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Middle French lost its rich verbal agreement morphology in favour of a system where most inflectional endings were reduced to schwa (lost in Modern French). This has led to Modern French having no agreement marking in the present singular (except for être and avoir).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;decrease of verb second effects&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;emergence of subject clitic pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This process occurred simultaneous to the loss of null subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;emergence of lexical expletive pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It has been claimed that there is a strong correlation between null subject and a lack of expletive subject pronouns; this is observed in the development of French, where lexical expletive pronouns arise at the same time as the null subject property is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there remains some debate as to whether French is truly non-null subject (based around analyses of its two sets of pronouns) it is generally accepted that it is. The only other Romance language that is accepted as non-null subject is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Swiss Romansh&lt;/a&gt;. The author concludes that BP is possibly losing its null subject property but this process is incomplete and it currently retains this property. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T13:25:43.107" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T13:25:43.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2012-05-21T23:46:24.793" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;... what happens when someone is totally deaf?&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;One of two things. Either, they learn a signed or spoken language and from then on use that language to  talk to themselves, dream, and all the things you do with yours. Whether that includes &quot;thinking&quot; is largely a matter of opinion/definition.  OR, they never learn any language in which case they think, dream, and talk to themselves without language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to popular wisdom, adults without language not only exist, they aren't that hard to find. They hold jobs, they tell stories, they do math.  Susan Schaller's book describes what it's like: if you are interested in linguistics you should have already read it and if you haven't, go read it now.  Nieminen's book describes another languageless individual, this one making a living as a newsboy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0520202651&quot;&gt;Schaller, Susan. 1991. A Man Without Words. University of California Press.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0930323629&quot;&gt;Nieminen, Raija. 1990 Voyage To The Island. Washington, DC: Gallaudet Univ. Press.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="984" LastEditorUserId="984" LastEditDate="2012-05-21T23:51:40.450" LastActivityDate="2012-05-21T23:51:40.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1980" CreationDate="2012-05-22T01:21:09.937" Score="7" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA uses the 5 tone-letters ˥,˦,˧,˨,˩. Unicode also has reversed (꜒,꜓,꜔,꜕,꜖) and dotted tone bars (꜈,꜉,꜊,꜋,꜌; ꜍,꜎,꜏,꜐,꜑). What are these characters used for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-05-24T23:01:18.873" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T08:13:55.343" Title="What do reversed and dotted tone letters mean?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-22T08:25:42.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lojban is designed to have a one-to-one mapping: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lojban.org/tiki/audio-visual+isomorphism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;audio-visual isomorphism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1004" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T08:25:42.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1975" CreationDate="2012-05-22T11:00:16.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first series is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/IPA_chart_2005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this scheme&lt;/a&gt; available on the wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;, and, as you said, they are &lt;strong&gt;tone letters&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;˥ = Top&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˦ = High&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˧ = Mid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˨ = Low&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˩ = Bottom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;reversed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reversed dotted&lt;/em&gt; tone letters are referred to as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_symbols_in_Unicode#Modifier_Tone_Letters_.28U.2BA700.E2.80.93A71F.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Modifier Tone Letters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; too, the only difference is that they're called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alanflavell.org.uk/unicode/unidataA7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;left-stem&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I think that considering the lack of info and references, we can simply consider them variations. Someone let me know if you find something, I've explored here and there but it really seems they have no particular use, concerning IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2012-05-22T11:00:16.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1981" CreationDate="2012-05-24T04:25:13.277" Score="10" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stephen Colbert wrote a book entitled “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1864/please-explain-i-am-america-and-so-can-you&quot;&gt;a question on English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt;, the title is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/1873/13786&quot;&gt;intentionally strange way of saying &quot;I am America, and you can [be America] too&quot;, as a parody of self-help book titles&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to be well-formed; compare with the structurally identical yet acceptable “I run marathons (And So Can You!)”. But to a native speaker it's obviously ungrammatical, and even difficult to parse (the &quot;so&quot; feels like it is lacking a referent). So descriptively speaking, English clearly forbids using &quot;be America&quot; as the referent of &quot;so&quot;. What rule does it violate, from a &lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; point of view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T19:14:28.463" Title="Why exactly is *“I Am America (And So Can You!)” ungrammatical?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1975" CreationDate="2012-05-24T07:32:03.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dotted tone letters*:&lt;/strong&gt; Dotted tone letters are used in Chinese linguistics to indicate tones in certain weakly-stressed syllables having a less-distinct quality—there is little or no pitch variation, and the duration is short. &#xA;These are often referred to in Chinese linguistics as “neutral tones”&#xA;Although we call it a &quot;neutral&quot; tone (in Chinese it is called a &quot;light&quot; tone). It takes very little time to say, and does not hold or change its pitch. We use the voice-range stem (|) plus a dot to show where one's neutral tone should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*-Based on the document &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?format=file&amp;amp;media_id=n2646_CommentsOnN2626&amp;amp;filename=n2646_CommentsOnN2626.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Comments on N2626, Proposal on IPA Extensions &amp;amp; Combining &gt; Diacritic Marks for ISO/IEC 10646 in BMP&quot; - Peter Constable, Microsoft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With further material from &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=Mb_COGX3R3YC&amp;amp;pg=PA44&amp;amp;lpg=PA44&amp;amp;dq=neutral%20tones%20chinese%20dotted&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=DB5YFpZ48c&amp;amp;sig=yvT2hdY-XFFCGdR8hXny87ePdvw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=5t29T67NCYrfiALzkozlDQ&amp;amp;ved=0CFgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=neutral%20tones%20chinese%20dotted&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chinese Primer: Lessons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reversed tone letters:&lt;/strong&gt; In the same Comments on Proposal document, the author suggest using the left-stemmed tone bars in combination with the right-stemmed tone bars to indicate contours. I am not certain if this was a mere suggestion or was based on previous usage (Document is from 2003).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1028" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T08:13:55.343" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T08:13:55.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1979" CreationDate="2012-05-24T20:06:21.067" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Colbert wanted to preserve the &amp;quot;and so can you&amp;quot; part, to achieve the desired effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I posted an answer but I decided to completely rewrite it. I don’t pretend to know all relevant literature on VPE (verb phrase ellipsis) in depth, so what I’m going to post below is mostly based on Chapter 17, written by Stirling and Huddleston, in the &lt;em&gt;Cambridge grammar of the English language&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two conflicting rules there. On the one hand, as Stirling and Huddleston argue, &lt;em&gt;“the VP following &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; is almost invariably reduced”&lt;/em&gt; (p. 1539):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Jill will certainly notice the mistake, and so will Max notice it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jill will certainly notice the mistake, and so will Max.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a full VP is sometimes possible, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This forecast is admittedly way above the estimate of most analysts in several recent surveys. But so is reality generally far from off the consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the most important thing about the &amp;quot;and so AUX Subj&amp;quot; construction is that anaphoric so indicates likeness between the two clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we have a stranded auxiliary (can). Only auxiliary verbs can be stranded. In parallel constructions like in your example, you need to use a matching auxiliary verb in the second clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; tired, and so &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; the others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;am&lt;/strong&gt; American, and so &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loiuse &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; dance beautifully, and so &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; her sister.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jill &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; certainly notice the mistake, and so &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; Max.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'&lt;strong&gt;ve&lt;/strong&gt; lost their address.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; I.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I borrowed some of the examples above from Swan 2005).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;do-support&lt;/a&gt;, and it works with lexical verbs. With the verb &amp;quot;be&amp;quot; and modal verbs you don't need &amp;quot;do&amp;quot;; there are some exceptions but they are irrelevant to this discussion, though. If there is another auxiliary already (like in &amp;quot;have/has/had+pp&amp;quot;), you don't need do, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Stirling and Huddleston argue that the verbs “be” and “have” tend to resist ellipsis when there are inflectional differences. In other words, in the following examples you can’t omit the verbs “be” or “have” – it would lead to unacceptable or very marginal results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kim was interrogated yesterday and is being again today.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*Kim was interrogated yesterday and is again today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has been sick several times, and doubtless will be again.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*He has been sick several times, and doubtless will again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/004522.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arnold Zwicky&lt;/a&gt; finds the following sentence marginally acceptable (sounds better than Colbert's title of the book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[??] I am America, and so can you be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston 2002 argues that there are two types of the stranded auxiliary - discourse-old and discourse-new (p. 99).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kim has seen the report and I think Pat has too.&lt;/em&gt; [old-verb stranding]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'll help you if I can.&lt;/em&gt; [new-verb stranding]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's called discourse-old because the missing material occurs in the preceding context (seen the report).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston also argues that new-verb stranding has a slightly narrow rage of possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I didn't bother to phone the results to her because I knew Kim was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is &lt;strong&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/strong&gt; (or, rather, infelicitous) because it's virtually impossible to recover &amp;quot;Kim was&amp;quot; from the previous context. &amp;quot;Kim was what?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, a couple of words on the construction, &amp;quot;and so AUX Subj&amp;quot;. Stirling and Huddleston argue that this construction is restricted to positive clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jill &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; certainly notice the mistake, and so &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; Max.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*Jill won't notice the mistake, and so won't Max.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the subject in the &amp;quot;and so AUX Subj&amp;quot; must be different from the subject in the preceding clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Jill can play the piano, and so can she sing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jill can play the piano, and so can Max.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T19:14:28.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-24T20:23:38.627" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling of a word unambiguously and transparently indicates its pronunciation; and conversely that a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word in Hindi would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1041" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-05-25T14:52:22.457" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T14:52:22.457" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1987" CreationDate="2012-05-25T06:23:14.847" Score="4" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tracing back in time through the language hierarchy, I imagine that geographical areas where ancestors of existing &quot;alive&quot; languages were spoken will narrow in, leaving lots of gaps (Since for instance, PIE wasn't spoken in the whole area where people speak Indo-European now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder how one can speculate about what was in those gaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's for instance take Proto-Germanic. When some people spoke it, what did people speak outside that area, but within the area where people speak Germanic languages now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For, say, North America, I imagine people spoke native American languages that might or might not be ancestors of existing native American languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Northwestern Europe, I'm not so sure. I can think of some possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language isolates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancestors or relatives of existing non-IE languages, e.g. Basque.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Descendants of other IE-proto-languages, Proto-Romance, Proto-Slavic etc. (If these branched before Proto-Germanic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Descendants of PIE which &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; descendants of other IE-proto-languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the only thing that people &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; have spoken, per definition, is a Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of speculation can be made about this question, especially in cases where no writing is left?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for a wishy-washy question. Rather than specific languages, I'm looking to get a better understanding of the whole macro-dynamics of language evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T19:04:49.253" Title="When some people spoke proto-XX, what did other people speak?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-25T11:06:20.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abugidas are going to be more phonetic than other systems. Look at Indian languages. Still, there are some languages there that have ambiguity in pronouncing letters based on position. E.g. Tamil pronunciation of a letter as voiced or unvoiced depends on position of the letter as well as some conventions. Kannada on the other hand is 100% phonetic. No all people speaking Kannada might know how to pronounce those letters that were borrowed from Sanskrit, but the writing system is definitely phonetic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1044" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T11:06:20.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1899" CreationDate="2012-05-25T11:32:52.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If anyone was curious, I've had a little visit to the library and found that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unc.edu/~rdgreenb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Robert Greenberg's&lt;/a&gt; wonderful book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Language_and_Identity_in_the_Balkans.html?id=eXcrtSUnaPIC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent resource if you're interested in the language situation in the Balkans after the break-up of Yugoslavia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T11:32:52.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2012-05-25T14:37:10.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is rather vague, but I think this is what you're getting at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What non-Germanic languages were spoken ca. 500 BC to 500 AD in areas that speak Germanic languages today?  How do we know?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What traces do languages leave if they leave no descendants?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1 leads to a long list of languages.  Proto-Germanic is conjectured to have existed somewhere between 500 BC and 500 AD, roughly the period of Roman ascendancy over Europe.  We look at where Germanic languages are spoken today, then look back to the Roman period, and we can see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Germanic languages were spoken where Germany and southern Scandinavia are today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Celtic languages (alongside Latin and whatever Pictish was) were spoken in the British Isles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing was spoken in Iceland yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably some Finno-Ugric language was spoken in northern Scandinavia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(I'm assuming you're looking at Europe, so I'll stop here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2 is more general.  A language that dies out can leave traces on the languages around it -- the same traces that a living language can leave.  Words can be borrowed; phrases can be borrowed or directly translated.  Look at the concept of a &lt;em&gt;Sprachbund&lt;/em&gt; for some interesting types of borrowing between languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T14:37:10.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2012-05-25T18:48:16.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A partial answer to this is that it will probably depend on how native-like the speaker's pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; parts of the utterance are. So taking a very simplistic example with your two French vowels as an example, the words &quot;clé&quot; and &quot;craie&quot;, in addition to having &quot;l&quot; vs &quot;r&quot;, generally differ in that the final vowel is /e/ and /ɛ/ respectively. So if a speaker does not differentiate /e/ and /ɛ/, this puts more 'pressure' on the /l/ vs /r/ distinction to differentiate these two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(N.B. it turns out that /e/~/ɛ/ are actually in free variation much of the time in French and pronunciation of either is highly subject to effects of assimilation or &quot;vowel harmony&quot;, so this pair isn't necessarily the most compelling example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extending this isolated example out to many different phonemes in a more complex utterance, and you'll see that the situation quickly becomes very complex. Listeners are expecting all sorts of phonetic cues to decipher what they hear, and if you eliminate one particular cue in a specific place it's difficult to predict exactly what pressure this will put on which cues elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would also need to think about what exactly you mean by two phonemes being &quot;similar&quot;. If you mean specifically vowel quality, what other features of the phoneme (e.g. duration patterns, propensity to assimilation, phonotactics) are you then disregarding and does the cost-benefit ratio actually work in favour of your assumption? For example, maybe speakers have difficulty in distinguishing the &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; of English /I/ vs /i/. But maybe they can easily pronounce these vowels with different durations and that it is primarily the duration that is perceptually important. (cf Tajima et al, 1997, &quot;Effects of temporal correction on intelligibility of foreign-accented English: they found that by re-synthesising foreign accented speech to correct specifically the timings of segments, this apparently improved intelligibility even though vowel &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; may been quite 'far off the mark' in some cases). In that case, you have thrown out &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; a distinction that speakers could potentially have made quite easily because your system decided that it was &quot;too difficult to be worth making&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, to put it more succinctly: what you're proposing doesn't sound as though it will achieve its objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T18:48:16.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2012-05-25T19:04:49.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add some info about neighbors of the Germanic tribes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if there is nothing left in writing from those times, historical linguists can't do much and have to rely on data from archeology, ethnography etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to the Germanic tribes. We know that they had contacts with Finnic people because there are some words in Finnish that look like really old Germanic (proto-Germanic): most famous examples are &quot;rengas&quot; (ring), &quot;kuningas&quot; (king), rikas (rich).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also think that the Germanic tribes had contacts with the Slavs: e.g. Russian &quot;knjaz'&quot; (prince), &quot;xleb&quot; (bread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Romans also encountered the Germanic tribes - see Caesar, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Greek geographers and travelers left written accounts of the Germanic tribes, too. For example, Pytheas of Massalia's (4 century BC) trip narrated by other historians and geographers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-05-25T19:04:49.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2012-05-26T14:35:35.470" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cardinal Vowel chart is a rough, impressionistic tool. Nobody is claiming that it is a &lt;em&gt;precise&lt;/em&gt; measurement of the quality of a vowel but rather that it is &quot;good enough&quot; for the purposes of recording and conveying an impression of the approximate quality of a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is true that as far as &lt;em&gt;normal, spontaneous speech processing&lt;/em&gt; is concerned, listeners may be desensitised to subtle variations in vowel quality around the targets of phonemes in their native language(s), this doesn't necessarily preclude that with training, phoneticians can still judge the quality of vowels precisely enough for the purposes of the Cardinal Vowel chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CV chart &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; very well suited to studies relying on precise measurements of vowel quality. For such studies, it is more common nowadays to take an approach similar to that outlined by JoFrhwld, in which vowels (or indeed, continuants in general) are analysed for their formant frequencies. With some judicious mathematical jiggery-pokery, you can just about contort formant frequency measurements into something resembling a CV chart. But there's not always much motivation for doing so: once you're analysing in terms of measured formant frequencies rather than impressionistically, you may as well just plot those measurements on some graph or other, even if it doesn't quite look like a CV chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the bottom line is: if you are asking &quot;how do I find the precise position of a vowel on the CV chart?&quot;, that's probably an indication that the CV chart isn't suitable for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastActivityDate="2012-05-26T14:35:35.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2012-05-27T01:20:29.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the vowel charts in the question, it's important to be aware that these show the &lt;strong&gt;phonemic vowels&lt;/strong&gt; of the languages. When placing vowel &lt;strong&gt;phonemes&lt;/strong&gt; on the quadrilateral they are typically spaced out evenly, as we see in those charts. This is especially so when the vowel systems are neatly balanced, like the ones shown. This should not be taken as a claim that these are the precise values of the vowels. All it really claims is that these are the contrasting vowels of those languages and shows how they contrast. For example: from the chart for French I can see that it has an unrounded high front vowel (represented there by /y/) and another unrounded front vowel that contrasts in being slightly lower (represented by /ø/). A trained linguist, even if they had never before heard French (another weird and exotic IE language I believe), could use these as a rough guide and probably make a fair stab at pronouncing words containing these vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in other answers to this question, locating vowels precisely on the quadrilateral requires acoustic analysis. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Vowels/Vowel_Theories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; contains examples of vowel quadrilaterals based on auditory judgement and ones using measurement of formant frequencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-05-27T01:20:29.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-05-27T05:13:34.737" Score="6" ViewCount="3502" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day I was filling out a form where I had to state my native language and I simply couldn't seem to find an answer to that question. I guess it had never come across me, but I simply had never thought about what my native language was. You see, my first language, or rather the one that my parents taught me, was Portuguese but at a very early age (of around seven or so) I moved to the US where I learned and began using English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, English is the language I'm most comfortable with as well as the one I speak best. Although I no longer live in the US, whenever I have to read something, I do it in English and I understand it far better than if I read it in Portuguese. Not that I don't speak Portuguese, I do, I just make an unusual amount mistakes and have some trouble understanding more complex texts (such as classical novel that an average student would, for example). What further complicates the problem, is that I feel I have a bit accent in both languages, albeit not a very noticeable one. People generally say I only have an accent in Portuguese but I don't know, I still feel as if I also had a bit of a Brazilian accent in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which one do you think is my native language? English or Portuguese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1051" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:50:34.093" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T16:50:34.093" Title="Determining my native language" Tags="&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2012-05-27T13:32:10.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me that &quot;native speaker&quot; has a precise definition in linguistics. &quot;Native speaker of X&quot; can be used to indicate that someone is a first language speaker of X. It is also commonly used in descriptive linguistics to refer to an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.de/index.php/Native_Speaker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ideal informant&lt;/a&gt; (or, &quot;ideal speaker-hearer&quot;) who has full &quot;competence&quot; in the target language sufficient to enable a description of the grammar of that language based on the informant's &quot;performance&quot;. We would then talk about &quot;native level competence&quot; in the language. I would say that this last definition is informal, though widely understood within the discipline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you may have native-speaker level of competence in English, and so could label yourself a native speaker of that language. But you could also be considered a native speaker of Portuguese although to linguists you would not be an ideal informant, having lost some competence in the language and perhaps no longer having true native speaker intuitions about it. In the end it depends on your preferred sense of identity. The form you describe should allow inclusion of more than one native language, but there is a strong ideology of monoglottalism in some nations (my own, Australia, is an example) and I suspect the form is from one of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-05-27T13:32:10.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2012-05-27T18:52:36.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Defining &amp;quot;native language&amp;quot; can be a complex issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for linguistic purposes, I think it's most useful to see it as this: in which language(s) can you make the types of linguistic judgements that a &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; native speaker can readily make in their native language but which a typical non-native speaker cannot readily make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot;, we'd mean something like: &amp;quot;a typical adult speaker having instinctively acquired just that language from birth through a typical degree of exposure&amp;quot;. That's actually slightly problematic: e.g. there are languages where most speakers are actually bilingual. But let's go with it for now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, native speakers can typically make grammaticality judgements about sentences that are 'on the fringe' of the language's syntax whereas non-native speakers have much more difficulty making an instance judgement. So for example, a native English speaker would probably instantly recognise that one of the following 'sounds a little odd'. To even a fairly advanced non-native speaker, neither sentence probably 'breaks any grammar rules' that they've learnt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here's the parent involved in the homework club.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here's the parent baked a cake by the children.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He's the friend that I told you came yesterday.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He's the friend that I told you that came yesterday.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Which task was he asking whether I'd finished?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Which task was he asking whether was most important?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as a starting point, in which language(s) can you instantly make judgements about sentences that constitute 'fringe' cases like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should say there are some problems with this view: it's not clear just how much consensus you will necessarily get among speakers regarding these 'fringe' cases, or whether they make those judgements in exactly the same way as with more common sentences. And it's not clear that in principle a &amp;quot;non-native&amp;quot; speaker can't gradually acquire the ability to make this kind of judgement over time. But for practical purposes, I think this criterion of being able to &amp;quot;instantly judge difficult/fringe cases and arrive at a similar judgement to other 'canonical' native speakers&amp;quot; is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-29T20:14:50.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1997" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-27T20:19:37.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Serbo-Croatian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ISO 639-3: &lt;code&gt;hbs&lt;/code&gt;) is a South Slavic language widely spoken in the former Yugoslavia. The language is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluricentric_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pluricentric&lt;/a&gt;, with several standard forms of the language, Bosnian (Bosnia and Hercegovina), Croatian (Croatia), Montenegrin (Montenegro), and Serbian (Serbia, Kosovo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are about 16 million total speakers. The &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; stands for &lt;em&gt;Hrvatski&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;Croatian&lt;/em&gt;. It is written in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets (with Cyrillic especially used in Serbia and Montenegro), with a regular correspondence between the orthographies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="2268" LastEditDate="2013-07-21T20:58:22.300" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T20:58:22.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1998" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-27T20:19:37.860" Score="0" Body="The Serbo-Croatian language (ISO 639-3: `hbs`), Central South Slavic language(s) of the former Yugoslavia. Includes Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin." OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T20:05:32.057" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T20:05:32.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2008" CreationDate="2012-05-27T20:40:36.220" Score="10" ViewCount="1375" Body="&lt;p&gt;Uniquely among Slavic languages, and unusually among modern Indo-European languages, the Western South Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian, and apparently some dialects of Slovenian) have a lexical pitch-accent system. That is, the languages permit &quot;phonemic tone, but where only one or two syllables in a word can be phonemically marked for tone, and many words are not marked for tone at all&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). Modern Serbo-Croatian distinguishes rising and falling tone on syllables with long or short vowels (4 accent types).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this tonogenesis come about? Was it an innovation in West South Slavic? a sprachbund effect? A reflex of a pitch accent system in Proto-Slavic that was lost everywhere else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:56:18.110" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T16:56:18.110" Title="How did the pitch-accent system of Western South Slavic emerge?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;&lt;slovenian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2012-05-27T21:03:57.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, I distinguish between &quot;first language&quot; (which I also refer to as &quot;mother tongue&quot;) and &quot;native language.&quot; The meaning of &quot;first language&quot; should be obvious---in your case, Portuguese. But because you grew up in the US, I would list your &quot;native language&quot; as English. It's very difficult to have two native languages, because part of what makes a native speaker goes beyond grammar to include idioms, etc. Because you didn't grow up in a Portuguese-majority country, there were a lot of things that you didn't pick up in Portuguese. I consider a &quot;native speaker&quot; to have grown up surrounded by speakers of the language in question, hence the difficulty in acquiring two native languages. I think having a first language that is different from your native language is generally something that happens mostly with second-generation (or 1.5-generation, like yourself) immigrants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My situation is similar, by the way. My first language was Hindi, even though I was born in Canada, and I didn't know English when I started daycare. But now, I'm &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more proficient in English. I could talk in-depth on a variety of technical topics in English, which I really can't do in Hindi. Although it sounds like your Portuguese is a lot better than my Hindi, in my case I think it's clear to call my native language English (but first language Hindi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the practical consideration. Linguistics aside, what do you think the form is asking? Is it a form written by a linguist? In all likelihood they want to know which is your most proficient language. (Mind you, I've put Hindi on a form that asked for my first language, because that was technically true, but in hindsight I should have said English given what the underlying information was that they probably wanted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1052" LastEditorUserId="1052" LastEditDate="2012-05-28T00:30:59.513" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T00:30:59.513" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-05-27T22:45:38.663" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm generally skeptical of any claim of a perfectly ideally phonemic script for any natural non-engineered in-use language. I don't know very much about the potential languages suggested as answers (except Hindi), but even if there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; such a language I wouldn't imagine that the ideally phonemic status would last very long as dialects develop and as the language changes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a language has few speakers, then they start actively trying to preserve it. In this case, you might expect to see less (natural) change and variation. So if this language had a commonly-used ideally phonemic script, it might stay that way until the language finally died out...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I'd also be skeptical of any claims of an ideally phonemic script coming from native speakers of that language. Not to say that the claim is necessarily false, but there's clearly potential for a huge bias to be a confounding factor. On the other hand, I would imagine that languages/scripts for which this claim is made might have &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; transparent orthographies than, say, English; native speakers of other languages tend to come to English and (rightfully) complain about how obtuse the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping is, but then somehow imagine that theirs is perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In actuality, they've just become accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of their own language script and don't see them anymore. (This happens in English too, but the orthography is so obviously opaque that you'd be hard-pressed to find a native English speaker who thinks it's a perfect mapping.) For example, I've often heard the claim that Hindi has a perfectly transparent orthography, but this is plainly false (and yes, I speak it, but not as a native speaker). Schwa deletion is the biggest and most obvious example of a mismatch between the spoken and written counterparts of a word or name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like something empirical, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N06-1030.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learning Pronunciation Dictionaries: Language Complexity and Word Selection Strategies&lt;/a&gt;. They look at, among other things, the number of letter-to-sound rules required for a language and how it changes with vocabulary size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1052" LastEditorUserId="1052" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T01:16:53.130" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T01:16:53.130" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1840" CreationDate="2012-05-28T01:34:20.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few different things computational linguists do, broadly speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;computational work for linguistic knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;: this includes, eg, statistical analysis of corpora to confirm or explore linguistic phenomena, the explorations of the computational complexity of human language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;language work for computing applications&lt;/strong&gt;: a lot of actual or potential computing applications need human language capabilities. Some examples dealt with by computational linguists include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;machine translation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conversational agents (computer programs that can talk to you, eg, there's a &quot;virtual nurse&quot; application in testing) (this field overlaps with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_interaction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HCI&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;automatic question answering&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;language work required for the workflow of computing applications&lt;/strong&gt; like parsing and so on: generally speaking a tagged sentence or parse tree isn't the end result of an application but may be required as an intermediate step in order to achieve the best results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also quite a few problems in computational linguistics that are to some extent in search of an application, or considered interesting in and of themselves. Examples typically given include word sense disambiguation (eg does &quot;bank&quot; in a given context mean a river bank or a money bank?) and textual entailment recognition. Likewise, it may not always be clear that there is an application that requires a .05% improvement in parsing reliability, but parsing researchers will pursue it (as researchers should!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any research field it has developed its own conversations. It's important not to think of computational linguists as either linguists who can program, or software developers who know some linguistics. Computational linguists spend a lot of time on problems and tasks they have developed within their community. Familiarity with those problems may help you get an idea of what you are in for. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;task=view&amp;amp;id=17&amp;amp;Itemid=28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Association for Computational Linguistics's Special Interest Groups&lt;/a&gt; for an idea of active subfields, likewise if you look at the front matter of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2011 ACL conference proceedings&lt;/a&gt; (look for the actual schedule of presentations, it will tell you which track each paper was assigned to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="953" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-28T08:47:47.597" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T08:47:47.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-28T08:19:45.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-05-28T08:19:45.730" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T08:19:45.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-28T08:19:45.730" Score="0" Body="The process by which tone emerges in formerly non-tonal languages." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-28T08:32:37.533" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T08:32:37.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1553" CreationDate="2012-05-28T08:43:31.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well I'm still learning, but I have made some important advances on this front:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The so-called Georgian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is/are an important and exceptional (set of) verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Georgian grammar is usually analysed as having four classes of verbs. Some classes form the future/perfect forms by addition of preverbs, others form them in other ways. The &lt;em&gt;verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt; fall into the latter category.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Textbooks and websites tend to be unclear on whether there is one &lt;em&gt;verb of motion&lt;/em&gt;, which changes nuance by changing a &lt;em&gt;preverb&lt;/em&gt;, or a set of several related &lt;em&gt;verbs of motion&lt;/em&gt;, which differ by initial morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Textbooks and websites on Georgian grammar are inconsistent on whether to call the same morphemes &lt;em&gt;preverbs&lt;/em&gt; as they are used with the &lt;em&gt;verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt;. Also the &lt;em&gt;verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt; tend not to fit into the standard formats of vocabularies and dictionaries used for normal verbs with their preverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Textbooks and websites tend to be unclear on the relationship between the various functions of preverbs: forming the future/perfect; adding a directional component; distinguishing different senses of the same basic verb.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vocabularies and dictionaries may list their verbs alphabetically by a present form, only some of which add the preverb as a data point in a way similar to how other languages might deal with gender. But the &lt;em&gt;verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt; will typically be listed with the initial morphemes that may or may not be considered preverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;verb(s) of motion&lt;/em&gt; do(es) not exist in a form lacking this preverb-like morpheme. There exists &lt;em&gt;modis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;midis&lt;/em&gt; but not plain *&lt;em&gt;dis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T08:43:31.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2012-05-28T14:15:30.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/1103/1/mlg_iwoba_proceedings_paper.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Marc Greenberg, the pitch accent systems in the Western South Slavic languages are indeed reflexes of an accent system in Proto-Slavic (though, see @voikya's answer to this question for an explanation of &lt;em&gt;acuteness&lt;/em&gt;, which is the feature that was relevant in that accent system). At one point all of the Slavic languages had pitch accent systems that were reflexes of this system, but only those in Western South Slavic languages survive today.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, he notes that the corresponding accent types in each individual modern language do not necessarily come from the same accentual category in Proto-Slavic. For example, while the falling accents in Slovene and Croatian have the same sources in Proto-Slavic the rising accents in those two languages have different sources. I am not an expert in Slavic languages, but you may find the references in Greenberg's paper useful for further investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-05-28T21:53:07.387" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T21:53:07.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2012-05-28T18:42:10.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like it's less about big words but rather slangs and simple expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the question I would ask myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I watch movies in [this language] and understand all the jokes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think no matter how fluent you are in your &quot;second language,&quot; there will always be jokes that don't translate. The cultural elements embedded in the use of language are hard to acquire later in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &quot;get&quot; both English and Portuguese jokes even after spending some time in another country, you might have two native languages. I have a friend in China who grew up speaking English to her American parents and Chinese to her nanny. She went to a local public school with some other American expats' children and now &quot;thinks&quot; in both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example @Neil gives is tricky, but I'm afraid that people who studied English as a second language might have an easier time spotting the mistake because they took intense grammar lessons. I learned English as a second language in school, so I did immediately find the mistake and was also able to explain why the second sentence was wrong. If you see the mistake but don't know why, that probably means you are a native English speaker. (If you can explain, you might as well be a native speaker who knows these grammar rules.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="847" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T18:42:10.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2012-05-28T19:51:30.823" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pitch accent system in seen in Southwest Slavic is actually quite old; it actually originated sometime between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Balto-Slavic. Essentially, certain long vowels in PIE acquired a feature that's just termed &quot;acuteness&quot;, but may have been laryngealization, something like the Danish stød. Later on stressed acute vowels developed a rising pitch, leading to the Proto-Balto-Slavic contrast of &quot;acute&quot; (rising pitch) and &quot;circumflex&quot; (falling pitch) stressed vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Southwest Slavic is the only place in the modern Slavic languages where you still see a pitch accent system nowadays (although it's still there in Lithuanian as well), but it was definitely present in all of the Slavic languages early on. Reflexes of this pitch system still survive, for example, in some of modern Russian's stress patterns or in some vowel length alternations in Czech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1054" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T19:51:30.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1536" CreationDate="2012-05-28T23:15:43.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good points have been made in other answers, but I feel that the notion of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonological word&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; needs to be clarified.  This term refers to a prosodic constituent, not a lexical one, so something that is a phonological word in one context might not be one in another.  For example, the English word &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; can stand alone as a phonological word if it is spoken in isolation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or if is under focus within a longer phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; for me.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other contexts it might cliticize to a neighboring word, like a noun that follows it (as @jogloran mentions in a comment under the original question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eat &lt;strong&gt;the eggplant&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that English orthography dictates that we put a space between the determiner &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and the noun that follows it is just a convention that has no bearing on phonological word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Japanese allows CV and a restricted set of CVC but not CCV syllables, it is not directly relevant to the OP's question (i.e. if one encounters a ...CCV... sequence, one can be confident that the first C is in the coda of the previous syllable).  That being said, here's an attempt to address @Mechanical snail's question about Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of the phonological word does not play a huge role in Japanese prosody. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&amp;amp;tid=4405&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988)&lt;/a&gt; note that there is some &amp;quot;segmental allophony&amp;quot; that can take place at the edges of the phonological word, but these phenomena are dependent on the combination of phonemes at those edges and may often not come into play. The accentual phrase is a much more crucial constituent when it comes to the domain of the lexical pitch accent and accentual phrase tones, so tonal information would help a Japanese speaker differentiate between syllables grouped into a single accentual phrase and those falling into two adjacent accentual phrases.  Often an accentual phrase can consist of a single phonological word, in which case the two domains demarcate the same lexical material.  A noun plus a particle can form such a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nasu-o&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eggplant-ACCUSATIVE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grouping of a noun and its particle into a single prosodic constituent is analogous to the determiner-noun grouping in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To bring everything back around to the OP's hypothetical language, if &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; is a definite article, and it behaves like the determiner &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; in English or the particle &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; in Japanese, it will form a single prosodic constituent together with &lt;em&gt;stulu&lt;/em&gt; whether it is a prefix or a standalone morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-05-28T23:21:15.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2012-05-30T01:36:47.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a paper called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/BoersmaHamannLoans35.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception&lt;/a&gt; for a term paper I'm currently writing. I don't know enough about the literature to know if this is a particularly novel idea, but I think that their OT-based perception analysis (as seen in section 3 of that paper) is relevant here. I'll describe the theory first and then I'll talk about how I think it applies to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people who don't know, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Optimality Theory&lt;/a&gt; is basically an alternative to rule-based systems where instead of having specific inputs undergo specific transformations to become specific outputs, there is simply a bunch of preferences where some have a higher priority than others (and thus are less likely to be violated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually when people talk about OT they're talking about the production process (from UR to SR). However, that paper mentions an OT-based approach to perception. So, for example, consider a language that does not contain /ɛ/.There must be some highly ranked constraint &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; (meaning the phonetic sound [ɛ] must not be interpretted as the phonological unit /ɛ/). This prevents speakers of that langauge from &lt;strong&gt;perceiving&lt;/strong&gt; /ɛ/ when they hear [ɛ]. This would be desirable because, due to the lack of /ɛ/ in that language, any SR containing /ɛ/ would be unexpected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare this to a language that does contain /ɛ/ as well as /e/ (like French). It is important to note that in OT &lt;strong&gt;all constraints exist across all languages&lt;/strong&gt; only the rankings change. Therefore, that same &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; must exist in this language too except that now it is much much much lower priority. In this langauge, since /e/ and /ɛ/ are different, we know there needs to be another constraint &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/&lt;/code&gt; (do not interpret [ɛ] as /e/) that has higher priority than &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;. This means that when speakers hear [ɛ] they are more likely to perceive it as /ɛ/ because perceiving it as /e/ is a greater violation (&lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/ &amp;gt;&amp;gt; *[ɛ]/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same paper proposes that the ranking of these constraints is somewhat dynamic and based on a &quot;probability-matching listener&quot;. This means that, theoretically speaking, if a French speaker is systematically forced to accept [ɛ] as /e/ (for example, by speaking for an extended period of time with an L2 French speaker from a language without /e/, only /ɛ/) then the &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/&lt;/code&gt; constraint slowly loses priority and the French speaker slowly becomes more ready to identify [ɛ] as /e/ (and of course, the process will slowly undo itself when the French speaker returns to speakering to other native speakers). Taken to its logical extreme, this could explain why certian languages merge certian sounds while others do not (i.e. if a language does not distinguish between two sounds, violations of the relevant constraints become so lowly ranked that faithfully perceiving phonetic input becomes more costly than approximating it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is how I think this applies to your problem: &lt;strong&gt;in English&lt;/strong&gt; the constraints &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*[e]/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; are both very lowly ranked, allowing English speakers to freely interpret one as the other. Conversely, &lt;strong&gt;in French&lt;/strong&gt;, where misinterpreting one as the other causes a loss of meaning, the constraints are much higher ranked and thus it is much less likely that they will confuse to two. By this approach, it isn't that speakers &quot;lose comprehension&quot; when faced with similar phonetic sounds, it's that the natural &quot;error correcting&quot; in their brain interprets the sounds as whatever sound makes the most sense in a given context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned earlier, I'm not too familar with the literature, but I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lscp.net/persons/peperkamp/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;another author&lt;/a&gt; who's written a few papers around a similar idea of a productive perception as well as both sets of authors cite various other authors who came before them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T07:56:14.780" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T07:56:14.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2025" CreationDate="2012-05-30T11:52:09.200" Score="9" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently studying the Georgian language and it has quite a few interesting properties not common in more well known languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One property of the verb is called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.armazi.demon.co.uk/georgian/unicode/version.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;version&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_grammar#Version_marker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;version markers&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Georgian/Verbs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;versioners&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. And it is used to describe the role of a vowel in the agglutinative verb template which relates to how &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypersonal_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;polypersonalism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_verb_paradigm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Georgian verb paradigm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Versions. The versioners in Georgian establish the language's polypersonalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sister languages of Georgian (Laz, Mingrelian, and Svan) also use the &lt;em&gt;version&lt;/em&gt; concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what I'm wondering with this question is whether the concept of version is also used in any other languages.&lt;/strong&gt; Kartvelian isn't known to be related to any other language families, but it is in a &lt;em&gt;Sprachbund&lt;/em&gt; with other Caucasian languages and often terms in linguistics and grammar are borrowed by people describing other languages, especially ones in a neighbouring area or studied by the same people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T12:51:25.217" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T00:19:07.273" Title="Do languages besides the Kartvelian family have a property of verbs called &quot;version&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;polypersonalism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2012" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-30T11:53:06.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T11:53:06.627" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T11:53:06.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-30T11:53:06.627" Score="0" Body="The South Caucasian language family consisting of Georgian plus its sister languages Laz, Mingrelian, and Svan." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T13:28:42.903" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T13:28:42.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:00:31.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistically motivated questions about Esperanto are on topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;stackexchange for the Esperanto language&lt;/a&gt; where other questions, e.g.,  concerning the usage of Esperanto are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T22:43:10.377" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T22:43:10.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:00:31.140" Score="0" Body="The most successful constructed language, devised to be an international auxiliary language with very regular grammar and Italian most prominent among its many influences." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T13:28:36.787" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T13:28:36.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:02:44.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T12:02:44.197" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T12:02:44.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:02:44.197" Score="0" Body="The various systems present in many languages by which verbs agree with not only the subject but also with the direct and/or indirect object(s) as well." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T13:29:03.777" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T13:29:03.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:05:15.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T12:05:15.533" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T12:05:15.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:05:15.533" Score="0" Body="An ancient non Indo-European language isolate which survives in an area geographically situated in a part of southern France and of northern Spain." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T13:28:16.397" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T13:28:16.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2021" CreationDate="2012-05-30T12:27:39.080" Score="4" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many named concepts which relate to verbs across many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three most well known would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. But &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are others, and there must be many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But should I call these &quot;properties&quot; of a verb, &quot;charecteristics&quot;, &quot;features&quot;, &quot;categories&quot;? Is there one term which is mostly used as a cover term for these and other verbal concepts when considered as a whole?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the terms &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93Aspect%E2%80%93Mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;TAM&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screeve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;screeve&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which are used to describe verb inflections that result from the interaction of say tense and mood. I'm talking about what word to use in the sentence &quot;Aspect and mood are two XXX's of verbs&quot;. What term belongs in the place of XXX?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible that the same term might apply to concepts encoded in other parts of speech. For instance &quot;Number and case are two YYY's of nouns&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T19:32:11.663" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T07:24:17.733" Title="What's the best term for the group of concepts pertaining to verbs which includes tense, mood, and aspect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2020" CreationDate="2012-05-30T15:34:42.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can call them &quot;properties&quot; or &quot;characteristics&quot; in everyday language, but these aren't linguistic terms that imply any particular framework/analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your analysis, &quot;features&quot; would be a more appropriate linguistic term, though quite general. You could more specifically call them &lt;strong&gt;morphosyntactic features&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;(inflectional/morphosyntactic) dimensions&lt;/strong&gt; is also sometimes used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastActivityDate="2012-05-30T15:34:42.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2024" CreationDate="2012-05-30T18:56:09.110" Score="4" ViewCount="1350" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;pragmatic strengthening&quot; has been tossed around in a lot of papers I've been looking at for a project I'm doing on idioms, and I can't seem to find a simple definition anywhere. Is anyone familiar with this, or could point me to some explanatory materials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-05-30T19:39:15.350" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T06:53:56.727" Title="What is pragmatic strengthening?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1066" CreationDate="2012-05-31T02:29:31.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was hoping @Mitch would expand on his comment about PAC-learning. For now, I will provide the only application of PAC-learning directly to linguistics that I know. It is in Ronald de Wolf's master's thesis: &lt;a href=&quot;http://homepages.cwi.nl/~rdewolf/publ/philosophy/phthesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Philosophical Applications of&#xA;Computational Learning Theory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;de Wolf argues for the Chomskian stance on poverty of the stimulus in much the same way as Gold. Except, instead of showing that the context-free languages are not learnable in the limit from positive instances (as Gold), he instead shows that &lt;strong&gt;context-free languages are not effeciently &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probably_approximately_correct_learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PAC-learnable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from positive and negative instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that PAC-learning is much more reasonable model than Gold's since it allows errors of two kinds: (1) some very small fraction of children completely failing to learn the language, and (2) even the successful children making occasional (again small fraction of instances) mistakes on specific sentences, but getting the overwhelming majority of the language correct. These seem reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two restrictions placed on the learners (different from Gold) are: (1) that the algorithm must be polynomial time (i.e. efficient), and (2) the analysis is over worst-case distributions over inputs. The first restriction is perfectly reasonable if we are of the brain as computers camp. The second restriction is unreasonable (children don't get arbitrary distributions, they get very specific ones sometimes involving things like motherese), but still more reasonable than Gold's restriction of a completely adversarial presentation of sentences (that just lists them only in the limit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't think de Wolf's thesis was unnoticed by lingusitics, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=6476994582132477475&amp;amp;as_sdt=2005&amp;amp;sciodt=0,5&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the only citations to it&lt;/a&gt; is from a recent non-linguistics paper by another theoretical computer scientist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T02:29:31.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2022" CreationDate="2012-05-31T06:53:56.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pragmatic strengthening&quot; refers to a situation of ambiguity in the meaning of an utterance, where pragmatic inferences about that utterance serve to strengthen one interpretation. This strengthening can continue to the point where a secondary meaning becomes the default. Pragmatic strengthening is an important process in language change and grammaticalisation as, over time, it can lead to changes in default meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references are an early article by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=pragmatic+strengthening+berkeley&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;ved=0CEUQFjAA&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Felanguage.net%2Fjournals%2Fbls%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F2553%2F2512&amp;amp;ei=5BPHT9usHYWyiQf6s_3jDg&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNENc_ghjZCCvEX1amwyq5eP6dYw2A%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Traugott&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=PsWoYK90zfsC&amp;amp;dq=pragmatic+strengthening&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Handbook of Pragmatics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=nqERLBur7xcC&amp;amp;dq=pragmatic+strengthening&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pragmatics and the Flexibitily of Word Meaning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T06:53:56.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2011" CreationDate="2012-05-31T08:31:39.850" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Georgian verb has a complex templatic structure which includes a slot that may optionally be occupied by one of a set of morphemes known (within Kartvelian studies) as &amp;quot;versions&amp;quot;. These &amp;quot;versions&amp;quot; consist of a single vowel and serve primarily to indicate valence or grammatical voice. Their precise function and syntactic scope results from their interaction with the larger syntactic and semantic context within which they are used. On many verbs the version morphemes are merely agreement markers. In some cases their effect is lexically specific (ie idiosyncratic to that verb). It should be noted that other parts of the Georgian verb may also affect verb valency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &amp;quot;version&amp;quot; morphemes are found, in very similar form, in other languages of the Kartvelian family. Similar morphology, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/4549108/towards-a-typology-of-version-formal-and-functional-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also described as version systems&lt;/a&gt;, is also found in some Turkic languages of Siberia, in the isolate Burushaski, and in South Munda Gorum, an Austroasiatic language of India; these systems are functionally similar to version but formally very different. It has been suggested that the focus systems of Austronesian languages, and the viewpoint aspect systems found in some Trans-New Guinea languages have similar functions to version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the term &amp;quot;version&amp;quot; originated in Kartvelian studies (being a translation of the Georgian term &lt;em&gt;kceva&lt;/em&gt;, lit. `change') &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/4549108/towards-a-typology-of-version-formal-and-functional-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some authors&lt;/a&gt; are using it to describe similar systems occuring in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure and functions of the Georgian &amp;quot;versions&amp;quot; are described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/TLS/TLS9-2005/TLS9_Gurevich_Olga.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Steal Me an Apple&lt;/em&gt;: Version in Georgian&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The PhD thesis by &lt;a href=&quot;http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/publications/TuiteThesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tuite, (1998)&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Kartvelian Morphosyntax&amp;quot; provides a description of versions (amongst many other things) across the Kartvelian languages generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T00:19:07.273" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T00:19:07.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2030" CreationDate="2012-05-31T10:38:09.347" Score="9" ViewCount="9220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know whether nasally produced sounds like &quot;Mmmm&quot; or &quot;Hmmm&quot; constitute verbal or non-verbal language.  Essentially I am a language testing professional, operating within very narrowly defined boundaries of permissible interaction.  In this case verbal interaction is forbidden, but body language is encouraged.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am attempting to resolve the issue of whether the words above are part of body language or not.  I would like to make it clear that these sounds are nasal in nature, produced with the lips sealed and can convey multiple meanings.  They are distinct from other sounds like &quot;uh&quot;, &quot;ah-ha&quot; or &quot;eh&quot; that would be produced using the mouth.  In addition the nasal &quot;hmmm&quot; is different from the &quot;hmmm / h'm&quot; or &quot;hem&quot; which is produced as a slight cough.  I appreciate you taking the time to deal with this query.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1063" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:54:51.800" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:54:51.800" Title="Status of &quot;Mmm&quot; or &quot;Hmm&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;filler&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1033" CreationDate="2012-05-31T12:43:59.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to the 140 character limit, I would say that Twitter-writing is a form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Constrained Writing&lt;/a&gt;. The abbreviations and bad grammar are a product of the character limit constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2012-05-31T12:43:59.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2031" CreationDate="2012-05-31T13:00:21.363" Score="2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happen to be aware that &quot;goodbye&quot; or &quot;bye bye&quot; derives from &quot;May God be with you&quot;. However, most English speakers that I have asked seem to not know this. When asked &quot;What does 'bye bye' mean?&quot; they will not know. It seems that the word &quot;bye&quot;, due to being used in no other context in English, is a sort of nonsense word that people use out of habit with no ulterior intention or expression of meaning. Contrast this with Russian, Hebrew, or other languages in which the greetings and partings are words or phrases with real meanings, such as &quot;peace [to you]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it that some languages or cultures will accept words for greetings and partings that have no obvious meaning? Is the usage of these words simply learned from the surroundings with no questions asked as to the meanings? Are there other words that people use in which they do not know the meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T04:15:14.240" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T04:15:14.240" Title="How are words with no other context used as greetings or partings?" Tags="&lt;interjections&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2012-05-31T13:21:31.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise that there are only two modes of communication — verbal communication and &quot;body language&quot; — and that these two categories are complements of each other is fundamentally flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;verbal communication&lt;/em&gt; refers to communication involving words, and the term &lt;em&gt;body language&lt;/em&gt; refers to communication involving visual cues involving parts of the body. But there are ways to communicate using &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; that are non-verbal, and as a linguist I would argue that signed languages, which are completely non-vocal and involve movement of the body, fall under the category of verbal communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a whole dimension of language called &lt;em&gt;prosody&lt;/em&gt; that is outside of the domain of the pronunciation of consonants and vowels. This term covers variations in pitch, loudness, and rhythm in speech, all aspects of speech that can be controlled by a person without opening her mouth or moving any articulators. It has been shown that babies become sensitive to the prosody of their mother's native language while in-utero and can distinguish it from the prosody of other languages as soon as they are born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also control the pitch, loudness, pace, and timbre of our speech to indicate pragmatic things like our intentions, attitude, and expectations, and also to convey emotions and mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for a moment a patient in a hospital who has been in a horrible accident and is confined to a full-body cast with her jaw wired shut. How would she communicate with the hospital staff and with visitors? Not with body language, that's for sure! And not verbally. I would call it &lt;em&gt;vocal communication&lt;/em&gt;. She could use &lt;em&gt;mm-HM&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;MM-mm&lt;/em&gt; (with the appropriate pitch contours) for &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot;, respectively. She could indicate pain or discomfort with higher, shriller sounds and pleasure or delight with longer falling sounds (think of the sounds we make when we are getting a great massage or eating something yummy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She could let people know she was questioning something or being emphatically sure about something by raising the pitch or making it fall, respectively, at the end of a given &quot;utterance&quot;. If people had the right context in mind, she could even convey exact words and phrases by &quot;saying&quot; them with the appropriate stress and rhythm without opening her mouth. For example, if it were clear to her mother that she wanted her to get someone, it might be enough to utter &quot;mmm-m-m-MMM-mm&quot; for &quot;Doctor Mendoza&quot;. If she were feeling extra creative, she could even hum songs with certain key lyrics or titles to get certain messages across. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be hard-pressed to put any of the above examples into the category of body language, especially since they could be used over the phone! I think your study needs to take into account modes of communication that are both non-verbal and non-&quot;body&quot; and you need to decide whether or not such means of communication are permissible in your experiment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, whether or not the mouth is open should not be used as a criterion for anything. Many linguistic speech sounds are made with the mouth closed--in fact it's the alternating open-closed state of the vocal tract that gives us consonants and vowels. And there are languages that allow whole words to be uttered with the lips together. For example, in Cantonese the word for &quot;not&quot; is pronounced [m]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T22:53:22.173" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T22:53:22.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2029" CreationDate="2012-05-31T16:15:58.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I feel you're artificially limiting yourself to greetings when you could ask a similar question of all words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there's a fundemental flaw in your question in that you assume the origin of a word has a large effect on its meaning. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, etymology isn't particularly useful in most linguistic studies. Does knowing that &quot;Thursday&quot; has its root in the Norse god &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Thor&quot;&lt;/a&gt; truly effect your understanding of what &quot;Thursday&quot; means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, small, incremental changes gathered over long periods of time can yield words with meanings completely dettached from their original source. The word &quot;hysterical&quot; meaning &quot;very funny&quot; can trace its origin back through &quot;excessively emotional&quot; all the way back to the Greek word for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hysterical&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;womb&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Obviously the modern meaning of &quot;hysterical&quot; has little to do with wombs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another mistake you're making is that you assume these greetings are context-free. In fact, their usage is strictly bound by a rich context! No native English speaker would ever randomly say &quot;bye bye&quot; except in the context of a parting phrase (specifically, a parting phrase offered to someone who the speaker is highly familiar with or by/to someone who is very young). Humans don't learn language the same way they learn math. Humans learn language passively through observation, mimicry, deduction, intuition, and trial and error with very little directed input or overt effort (at least as children). Basically, to children the &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't matter nearly as much as the &lt;strong&gt;when and how&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why some languages use a phrase and some languages use a word, if you spend any time trying to learn a second language you will quickly discover words in that language that take an entire sentence to explain in English and vice versa. In fact, this is why loanwords exist; words and phrases adopted from other languages because they express an idea more efficiently than pure native vocabulary alone ever could. The reasons for this can be historical or cultural or it could just be down to plain chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in languages where their greetings are explicitly phrases, my experience is that they become almost a reflex and few speakers stop to consider the literal meaning. For example, I am currently learning Korean and the standard Korean greeting, some variation of &quot;안녕하세요!&quot; (&lt;em&gt;annyeonghasaeyo&lt;/em&gt;, literally &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EC%95%88%EB%85%95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;be peaceful&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &quot;peace be with you&quot;), is so dettached from it's literal meaning that if one tried to use the word &quot;안녕&quot; (&lt;em&gt;annyeong&lt;/em&gt;) to remark that something is peaceful or tranquil they would be met with slight confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T01:13:04.507" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T01:13:04.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1194" CreationDate="2012-05-31T18:25:51.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I don't know of existing work on the subject, one approach you might take would be to recreate a Flesch-Kincaid-like scale for speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First step: determine what levels you want your scale to map to.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You might take something like &quot;conversation/dialogue&quot;, &quot;presentations/monologue&quot;, and &quot;formal speeches&quot; to be three levels on such a scale (at least for an initial experiment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second step: build a classifier&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You could use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Naive Bayes&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kamalnigam.com/papers/maxent-ijcaiws99.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MaxEnt&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, with a simple set of features. If you're going for a hard-analogue to Flesch-Kincaid, go for the two simplest features to extract which approximately measure lexical difficulty and syntactic difficulty. For a corpus of speech, you might use word-length (measured by syllables, phones, or orthographic length) and utterance length (rather than sentence length; how many words are in each utterance). For each document, calculate average word length and average sentence length and see how well your classifier does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's able to consistently distinguish among the classes, you ought to be able to come up with an F-K-style formula that could be used to classify things on the &quot;conversation-monologue-speech&quot; continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146" LastEditorUserId="146" LastEditDate="2012-06-19T15:10:52.737" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T15:10:52.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="882" CreationDate="2012-06-01T01:05:40.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native or fluent speakers enjoy greater license in producing inaccurate pronunciations than do non-native non-fluent speakers. Native and fluent speakers and listeners have tacit command of the relative frequencies of different words and combinations thereof, so expressions which are, given the context, of relatively high frequency, will be understood even when pronounced carelessly, because they are more expected. Native and fluent speakers speak more carefully when they are delivering a less predictable message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-native speakers who nevertheless speak fluently are able to make themselves understood because they know the usual things to say in a given context, and their inaccurate productions will be correctly interpreted because they only try to say things which people normally say in a given situation. I can, for example, understand Vietnamese speakers who are speaking English badly (e.g., pronouncing coda /s/, /t/, /k/, /tS/ all as unreleased [k]) as long as they are saying something that is expected in the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language-learning situation is very unforgiving for a non-native speaker who has little experience with the language and wishes to to express him/herself, only attending to what is a grammatical sentence, and not to what is customarily said in a given situation. A patient or sympathetic listener and accurate pronunciation is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are learning a new language, and pronunciation is not your strong suit, practice saying the same things in very predictable situations so that you will have a better chance of being understood. The level of muscular-auditory coordination needed to pronounce in a standard way, whether it is a novel or mundane expression, is the same, so this will be good practice for obtaining the skill level needed to become more expressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T01:05:40.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-01T12:54:36.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T12:54:36.337" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T12:54:36.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-01T12:54:36.337" Score="0" Body="An uncommon morphosyntactic property of verbs in certain languages including Georgian, Burushaski, and some Turkic languages of Siberia." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-01T13:25:29.170" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T13:25:29.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-01T20:10:38.203" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the known formal approaches to Russian (or similar languages) word order? I'd expect something expressed in terms of exteded DRT or similar formalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1042" LastActivityDate="2012-06-01T20:10:38.203" Title="Formal approaches to Russian word order" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2020" CreationDate="2012-06-02T07:24:17.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the case that the things you mention (TAM, person, number, voice) are always and/or only expressed on the verb, but it is true to say that this is very common. There is no fixed way within linguistics of talking about this, but it would be pretty typical to refer to these (eg aspect and mood) as functional categories that are commonly expressed formally on the verb. For some languages it would be true to say that (eg) the functional categories of aspect and mood are formally expressed by nominal morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-06-02T07:24:17.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1931" CreationDate="2012-06-04T01:23:22.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I choose /ki/, which is a noun class prefix in a good hundred Bantu languages. It also means &quot;key&quot; in English, &quot;key&quot; in Langalanga, &quot;who&quot; in French, &quot;give&quot; in Ngwe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T01:23:22.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1931" CreationDate="2012-06-04T03:10:06.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's interesting enough to try to lay out a method that one might use to try to answer this question, and I think the question is more interesting as one about words written in a basic / lossy IPA (such as how we tended to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kirshenbaum&lt;/a&gt; on Usenet) rather than the languages' respective orthographies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had the relevant tools available, I'd try this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two-sound CV combinations should probably win out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for two-sound Austronesian words. There are over 800 Austronesian languages, and many Malayo-Polynesian of them can be quite close.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are 250-500 Bantu languages, and they can be quite close as well, so if bare prefixes are allowed (and also even if they aren't), jlovegren's suggestion of /ki/ should be taken quite seriously, especially since both the consonant and the vowel are extremely prevalent worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that along with importation of the Roman alphabet we get at least 20-30 loanwords for names of letters into each language. This applies to the hundreds, possibly thousands of languages that &quot;use&quot; the Roman alphabet to some capacity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Languages using scripts in the Brahmic tradition tend to name consonants with a trailing schwa. /kə/, for example. Whether this vowel is involved in many words in other languages seems to rely heavily on how we're transcribing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess (heavily influenced by how Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to pronounce the alphabet) is we would end up getting /ka/, /ke/, /ki/, /nu/, /pe/, /pi/, /te/, or /ti/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question: For each length n, what is the most popular n-letter (in IPA) word? For n at least 4, I have no idea what one could do short of crawling a massive database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Just noticed that we're supposed to exclude universal loanwords, so I'll rework my answer soon or take it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2012-06-04T08:04:56.497" LastActivityDate="2012-06-04T08:04:56.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2042" CreationDate="2012-06-04T11:42:23.720" Score="12" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know if any studies were made to classify the difficulty to learn a particular language depending on learner's native language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of discussions about what is the easiest or the hardest language to learn, but they are mostly made of assumptions that other languages' users have the same difficulties with the same things, which is obviously not true. The Russian grammar may be difficult for English-speaker, but it is easy and intuitive for any user of Slavic language (which, at the same time, could find English grammar very complicated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to have a cross-language study, which would classify, in the 2-dimensional table, how difficult is language A for native speakers of B, C etc.., language B for A, C, D etc.. etc... Such studies could be even use, for example, to model how the languages became popular or die. Is the English so popular nowadays because it is relatively easy to learn for the most of the people on Earth, or just because the political and military dominance of Occident over Orient? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-05T11:47:11.390" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T06:57:15.363" Title="Are there studies of difficulty to learn particular language depending on learner's native language?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2041" CreationDate="2012-06-04T14:54:41.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's get one thing out of the way first - no language is hard to learn for a child.  What you're addressing is second language (L2) acquisition.  Adults tend to have greater problems reaching full proficiency in a second language in general.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because L2 acquisition is such a complicated task, no matter what language you're learning, the political dominance of certain languages is more likely to be simply a result of political factors.  You can blame colonialism, not grammatical complexity, for the decline in use of North American indigenous languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of &quot;which language is hardest to learn&quot; is more complicated than simply determining which world language is the most grammatically complex because you have to look at each language pair individually (i.e. how Russian speakers learn English, how they learn French, how English speakers learn Russian, etc...).  It turns out that no language is easy to learn for any adult speaker but that adults have certain tendencies in acquisition that can help predict what learning pathway a speaker of one language might take to acquire another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are 4 tendencies that have been observed in L2 acquisition (there are probably more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transfer - using structures from the first language (L1) in the second,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Universal tendencies - problems with structures that can be considered complex in the face of cross-linguistic variability,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphology is more difficult to acquire than syntax,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammatical structures that involve interfaces between different components of the grammar are more difficult to acquire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can make generalizations based on these 4 observations.  For example, English has a relatively simple morphological system, which makes this part of the grammar easier to learn in general for adults.  It's interesting, though, because it's been seen that adult learners of English usually have long-lasting problems realizing even that tiny bit of inflection found in English (plural and third-person -s), even if their L1 is Turkish, that involves a great deal of morphological inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1070" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T06:57:15.363" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T06:57:15.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2073" CreationDate="2012-06-04T16:32:29.163" Score="10" ViewCount="2361" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTEaDyTxgIQ&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; earlier today (The most important part is from 8.00 to 9.00), explaining what the &quot;Pimsleur approach&quot; is. It got me interested, because they claim it's the fastest method of learning the basics of a new language. Has there ever been research trying to find the best method of learning a language? Is this approach comparable to the &quot;best method&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To place it in context, I want to learn Finnish, and I'm first looking for a good learning method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1071" LastEditorUserId="1071" LastEditDate="2012-06-04T16:46:33.557" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T07:54:20.137" Title="How useful is the &quot;pimsleur approach&quot; for learning a new language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2047" CreationDate="2012-06-05T09:23:08.263" Score="0" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there currently any faculty on university that is dedicted for artificial languages, or has speciality for such languages? I mean, where you can study them, write Master's thesis for them, doctorise in such thematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T09:57:34.100" Title="Are there any an university faculty for artificial (constructed) languages?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2012-06-05T10:25:12.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2074" CreationDate="2012-06-05T09:34:25.937" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any groups of active Classical Latin users nowadays?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; I mean they meet regularly and speak in classical Latin, or make some videos/vlogs/podcasts or present lectures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-05T11:39:53.660" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T21:37:02.177" Title="Are there any active Classical Latin users nowadays?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2045" CreationDate="2012-06-05T09:57:34.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm not aware of any such place or academics that specialise in constructed languages, it is possible to research them for higher degree studies in linguistics. This is probably most true of departments which have a focus on descriptive/documentary linguistics. I am aware of one person who is doing a doctorate on a constructed language that is used for religious purposes by a group in an Asian country. Being a constructed language (and not anyone's first language) it is not complete, in the sense that there are numerous gaps in what can be expressed (ie things that all natural languages can express). For this reason a lot of the analysis is on the sociolinguistics of the situation that led to the construction of the language and which continues to support its continued usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been suggested that Classical Sanskrit can be considered a constructed language. Classical Sanskrit may be studied at many universities and it is quite possible to do higher degree research on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T09:57:34.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2012-06-05T10:16:07.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;German has some postpositions, although they're far less common than the prepositions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/german/grammar/gr-post.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/german/grammar/gr-post.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another English example I can think of is &quot;the whole night through&quot;, and I can think of some in some other Germanic languages too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I'm not really answering your &quot;how usual&quot; question, and I don't even know why they (to some extent) co-exist in Germanic. The latter might make an interesting new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T10:16:07.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2059" CreationDate="2012-06-05T10:35:02.563" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know about people who learn, use and even develop the constructed languages created for books or films, such as Sindarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of them are doing it because of a very geek interest in the topic, or to simply do something different. But I'm wondering if there may be more linguistic rationale behind it, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Learning language with original structure, which is a kind of mind exercise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beeing a part of language that is created gives the ability to observe the process of language evolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The need to invent new words is also challenging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, wouldn't a person profit more from learning one of more exotic existing languages (Inuit) or dead languages (Sumerian, Nahuatl)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-05T17:20:57.170" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T15:42:55.657" Title="What can one gain from learning language constructed for books or films, like Sindarin?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-10-06T15:12:59.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2049" CreationDate="2012-06-05T12:28:10.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Knowledge of a language identifies one with a constituency speaking that language. Immigrants to a new place can usually gain more than a modicum of acceptance in the host community if they are able to speak the host language fluently. Someone might feel more at home within the community of Star Trek enthusiasts than, say, the community of Inuits. I am also quite confident that the average person will receive more encouragement from the Star Trek enthusiast community than from the community of Inuit speakers if they are taking up a new language spoken by that community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T12:28:10.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2012-06-05T15:10:09.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no linguist, but I learned a bit of Hungarian a few years ago, and discovered that word order is pretty free, and that it can be used to convey emphasis. English lacks word-order freedom, so emphasis is conveyed by inflection in the spoken language and typographical conventions (e.g italics) in the written language. My Hungarian friends tell me this is largely unnecessary in Hungarian because of the extra semantic dimension provided by the word-ordering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1074" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T15:10:09.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2053" CreationDate="2012-06-05T22:30:27.223" Score="21" ViewCount="1672" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regular sound changes can of course affect phonemes used in onomatopoeias. For example, consider a language containing /mjaw/, referring to the call of a cat. Suppose that final /w/ is sound-changed to /v/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a few possibilities for what happens to /mjaw/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The onomatopoeia behaves as a regular word, becoming /mjav/ (thereby losing its onomatopoietic-ness).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speakers try to retain its original pronunciation [mjaw], which gets re-analyzed as a different phoneme sequence (that is permissible under the new phonotactic constraints), such as /mjao̯/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The onomatopoeia gets sound-changed to /mjav/, but the resulting word falls out of use, displaced by a new onomatopoietic coinage /mjao̯/ that better approximates the sound it refers to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any empirical evidence for which of these is more common? or more simply, for whether onomatopoeias are more likely than ordinary words to resist sound change?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T07:09:23.123" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T17:31:41.390" Title="Do onomatopoeias resist sound change?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2052" CreationDate="2012-06-05T23:40:26.053" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Onomatopoetic words do undergo sound changes. Sometimes this results in the word no longer being onomatopoetic, in which case new onomatopoeias are often introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=oGH-RCW1fzsC&amp;amp;pg=PA234&amp;amp;lpg=PA234&amp;amp;dq=sound%20change%20onomatopoeia&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=5EW8DKRUB1&amp;amp;sig=tWtBWWYTtc0Lo1jEdP9Li7gx8gs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=5pXOT67BN-jG6AHa0tCNDA&amp;amp;ved=0CFgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=sound%20change%20onomatopoeia&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Hock and Joseph in &lt;em&gt;Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; give the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;βη&lt;/strong&gt; /bɛː/ was the sound that sheep make. In modern Greek, due to the sound changes /b/-&gt;/v/ and /ɛː/-&gt;/i/ this would be pronounced /vi/, so it is no longer used. The modern Greek onomatopoeia for the sheep's sound is now &lt;strong&gt;μπε&lt;/strong&gt; /be/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Middle English &lt;strong&gt;pipen&lt;/strong&gt; was the sound made by little birds. Due to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://eweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;, this became our modern word &quot;pipe&quot; /pajp/ which we don't use to imitate a bird. Instead we introduced new words &lt;strong&gt;peep&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;cheep&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-06-05T23:40:26.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-06T07:08:44.357" Score="8" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;Articulatorily, velarization and pharyngealization are distinct, but they are often conflated in linguistic analyses I've seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conflating them is common enough, I presume, that the IPA allocates the tilde-overlay diacritic for velarized/pharyngealized (in addition to the more specific /ˠ/ and /ˤ/).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most descriptions of the Russian (un-palatalized) &lt;em&gt;л&lt;/em&gt; /l/ call it either &quot;plain&quot; or &quot;velarized&quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3aIPA_for_Russian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;/l/ is often strongly pharyngealized but this feature is nondistinctive&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly, while the English dark &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is commonly described as a &lt;em&gt;velarized&lt;/em&gt; alveolar lateral approximant, in my own speech it seems strongly pharyngealized when in the syllable coda. (That is, it sounds very distinct if I eliminate the pharyngeal articulation; while I think it's somewhat velarized that doesn't affect the sound much.),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that languages often don't distinguish (phonemically) between velarization and pharyngealization? If so, why? Are they acoustically similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-08-21T09:01:58.133" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T23:04:58.023" Title="Cross-linguistic association between velarization and pharyngealization" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;dark-l&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-06T09:59:14.360" Score="11" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we have a scientific theory explaining why the click consonants were developed, and why they are used almost exclusivly in praerie regions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've watched a BBC documentary about the evolution of humans, and the speaker noticed when hunting with San, that their clicks are good to hear in high grass on short distances, but the speaker was in the same time very hard to locate, so they are perfect adaptation to group hunting in such environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the other way, I can't imagine communicating with clicks on large distances, so the clicks may not be practical in boreal forest during ice age etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've failed to google interesting topics, so maybe theses on that topic exist, but only in paper form in some universities libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T17:52:29.713" Title="Do we have the scientific theory why the click consonants were developed?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-06T12:03:34.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aspect is the marking of the temporal structure of an event. Some commonly marked aspects are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;perfective aspect: this treats an event as a single unitary event&#xA;without any internal temporal structure, eg 'I ate dinner'. The event is seen as a whole.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;imperfective aspect: this treats an event as having internal&#xA;structure as an ongoing event, eg 'I was eating dinner'. The event is seen as a sequence of activities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;perfect aspect: this refers to the event as having been recently&#xA;completed, eg 'I have eaten dinner'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspect is distinct from tense, which marks the location in time of an event (and may be relative or absolute), and from mood, which marks the speaker's attitude towards the event. These three categories are often found as properties of the verb and are commonly referred as TAM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T12:06:23.330" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T12:06:23.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-06T12:03:34.513" Score="0" Body="Marking of the temporal structure of an event." OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T12:06:26.060" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T12:06:26.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2049" CreationDate="2012-06-06T13:30:13.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning any new language helps open your mind to the very different ways in which languages can work. This is always a good thing and will stay with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not motivated to learn a foreign language but are motivated to learn a &quot;constructed&quot; language like Esperanto, or a &quot;fictional&quot; language like Klingon, your mind will still be opened to some of the possible variation in language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on when you are motivated to learn a foreign language, the fact that you have already opened your mind by studying a made-up language will reduce some of the barriers. Because while you still lack experience in say French, you do have experience in producing sounds and forming and parsing morphosyntactical structures quite different from your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it as &quot;what is the point of pure science?&quot; You never know when a practical application pure knowledge will be beneficial &lt;em&gt;at some point in the future&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bet if I had learned Klingon as a kid that the strange and wonderful language features Georgian is throwing at me today would be at least a little bit easier to grok. After all Klingon was specifically devised, by a real linguist, to be very different at most levels to English and other common Western European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T13:30:13.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2060" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-06T14:00:12.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isolating languages are languages that have no bound morphology, meaning that every word is a single morpheme. An ideal isolating language would have a one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and words. The usual example of an extreme isolating language is Vietnamese but a number of other East Asian languages are also highly isolating. Another almost completely isolating language is the Austronesian language Keo, spoken on Flores in Indonesia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T14:03:18.483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T14:03:18.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-06T14:00:12.153" Score="0" Body="A language with no bound morphology." OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T14:03:25.520" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T14:03:25.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3296" CreationDate="2012-06-06T14:35:59.393" Score="20" ViewCount="15491" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;absolute synonyms&lt;/em&gt;, I mean words (in the same language) that are interchangeable in all situations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There can't be differences in register, meaning, or emotional value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there material that treats about this subject, especially showing examples in English? In case they don't exist, I'd like to read material with an explanation or theory why they can't exist in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1078" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-06T19:48:16.373" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T10:15:26.283" Title="Do absolute synonyms exist?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;variation&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2012-06-06T17:14:47.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting an excerpt from Haiman's 1980 paper &quot;The Iconicity of Grammar&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first type [of iconicity], whose existence is universally (though&#xA;  often only implicitly) recognized in practice, is that of a one-to-one&#xA;  correspondence between the signans and the signatum, whether this be a&#xA;  single word or a grammatical construction. The iconic assumption that&#xA;  such a regular bi-unique correspondence must exist motivates the&#xA;  inclusion under a single heading of the various meanings of a single&#xA;  form in both traditional dictionaries and grammars. It also serves as&#xA;  the unspoken basis for the commonly accepted axiom that no true&#xA;  synonyms exist, i.e. that different forms must have different meanings&#xA;  (cf. Bloomfield 1933:145, Nida 1958:282, Bolinger 1968:127 for&#xA;  representative statements of this axiom). Following Hjelmslev,&#xA;  Kurylowicz, and Martinet, I will refer to this relationship as the&#xA;  iconicity of ISOMORPHISM. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/414448&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haiman 1980:515--6&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citation &quot;Bolinger 1968&quot; is: Entailment and the meaning of structures. Glossa 2.119-28, and &quot;Nida 1958&quot; is: An analysis of meaning and dictionary making. IJAL 24.279-92.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-06T17:14:47.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-06T19:44:58.720" Score="2" ViewCount="731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a propensity for agglutinating languages to also permit quite long compound nouns. Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian certainly have them and I've been finding a few now that I'm trying to learn Georgian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously not only agglutinating languages go in for long compound nouns though, since German is quite famous at least among English speakers for having some really long nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But are there languages which are of agglutinating typology but which don't have the tendency to permit long compound nouns? Is there a language universal that says something like:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;+agglutinative ⇒ +noun compounding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that I'm aware some languages, like Japanese, have agglutinating typology for verbs but not for nouns, so those are probably not languages I'm interested in for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T07:55:35.383" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T03:58:19.557" Title="Are there agglutinative languages without a propensity for long compound nouns?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2012-06-06T19:58:11.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question triggered a memory of a thread in my favourite language blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't recall exactly the name of the post of what words were discussed, but in my question for it I turned up another thread containing comments about these terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004614.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;furze&quot;, &quot;gorse&quot;, and &quot;whin&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then finally I found the thread I was looking for, which was about the terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000916.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;gennel&quot; and &quot;snicket&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T14:46:49.827" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T14:46:49.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2066" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-07T02:54:37.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Affricates are a type of articulation which combine a stop phase and a subsequent fricative phase. Affricates are cross-linguistically quite common, some examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ts] - voiceless alveolar stop followed by the equivalent&#xA;(homorganic) fricative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[tʃ] - voiceless alveolar stop followed by the voiceless&#xA;post-alveolar fricative. Found in English words such as: 'church'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[dʒ] - voiced alveolar stop followed by the voiced post-alveolar&#xA;fricative. A similar sound is found in the English word 'judge'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically affricates are a sequence of two phones, but many languages treat them as a single phoneme. Affricates may be written with a tie joining the two symbols to indicate that they are functioning as a single phone, thus: [d͡ʒ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T06:17:59.747" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T06:17:59.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2067" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-07T02:54:37.490" Score="0" Body="Single phone consisting of a stop phase followed by a fricative phase." OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T04:08:24.993" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T04:08:24.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2068" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-06-07T05:21:51.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interlinear gloss is a way of presenting language data. In academic usage, it typically consists of at least three lines of text (but can be restricted to two lines):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A transcription of the utterance, broken up into the separate morphemes (with&#xA;hyphens to indicate these are bound morphemes and not separate&#xA;words);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The interlinear gloss is then on the line below this and has&#xA;glosses/translations of each morpheme, each aligned with the&#xA;language data morpheme above;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third line will usually contain a free translation of the utterance. This is as natural a translation as possible, so cannot be aligned with the preceding lines.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interlinear glosses are the standard way of presenting linguistic data as it facilitates understanding of unfamiliar data and clearly presents morphosyntactic analysis. Interlinear glosses may have extra lines containing information on aspects such as: phonetics, tone, discourse, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following are some examples of interlinear glossing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(1)  Zànhe sí dùfugé    kɛ̀  ɛ̀  gɛ̀     &#xA;     rain  go maize.DEF spoil&#xA;     &quot;The rain will spoil the maize.&quot;&#xA;(from Sùpyìré, Niger-Congo family)&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(2)  a   na   taa&#xA;     3sg come go&#xA;     &quot;He/she will go.&quot;&#xA;(Bambara, Niger-Congo family)&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;(3)  musa’ m  -nbu’  yaya’  =mu&#xA;     IRR   AF -ill   mother =1S.GEN&#xA;     &quot;My mother will be ill&quot;&#xA;(Squliq Atayal, Austronesian family, Taiwan)&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposed set of standards for interlinear glossing that is commonly used is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;. Other standards are listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WP article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:09:36.383" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:09:36.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2069" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-06-07T05:21:51.113" Score="0" Body="The explanation or translation of one set of terms with another set of terms, where the second set is typically written between the lines of the text written with the first set." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:09:55.603" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:09:55.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2012-06-07T15:59:09.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding of neocortex, there would be a continuous variable representing &quot;how far up&quot; your perceptive hierarchy the two words can get on separate pathways before they result the the same set of activations, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they ever result in the same set of activations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few that make no difference to me at a very low perceptive level. Usually I am unconscious of which one was said without being told to listen for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Drunk&quot; and &quot;Drank&quot; as the past tense of drink.&#xA;&quot;box&quot; and &quot;machine&quot; when referring to a computer&#xA;&quot;coke&quot; and &quot;soda&quot; both mean soda without further clarification in the Southeast.&#xA;&quot;bucks&quot; and &quot;dollars&quot; same thing, I'm not even going to notice which one is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1081" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T15:59:09.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2072" CreationDate="2012-06-07T16:38:53.690" Score="7" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how one can &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the difference between these three. I can give an example of the three - respectively &lt;em&gt;come in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;went into&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;got along without&lt;/em&gt; - but I don't know why these are what they are. Can some one explain these terms as clearly and simplistic as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of how I am confused:&#xA;One could state that a phrasal verb consists of a verb and an adverbial participle. Sure they can. But how do they know that that adverbial participle (e.g. &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;) is not a preposition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that the following is true to make a distinction: when talking of a prepostional verb, there can't be any syntactic spot between the verb and the participle. E.g. &lt;strong&gt;They called him up&lt;/strong&gt; (Phrasal) &lt;strong&gt;They called on him&lt;/strong&gt; (Prepositional) Would that be a possibility? Or is that rubbish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T14:25:21.967" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T14:25:21.967" Title="Difference Phrasal Verb, Prepositional Verb and Prepositional Phrasal Verb" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2071" CreationDate="2012-06-07T17:19:16.220" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, a general remark on terminology. There are many theories of how to analyze such constructions. Some linguists even refuse to treat them as &quot;phrasal verbs&quot;, e.g. the authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Secondly, I do not endorse any particular analysis here, nor do I wish to criticize or contrast competing proposals. I simply tried to reconstruct someone else's proposal. I also tried to explain it using very simple words, without theory-specific terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure whose theory you're trying to describe (references would be extremely helpful). Here's what the authors of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English say on this - since what you are trying to describe seems similar to their proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They mention three tests that help you distinguish between a phrasal verb, a prepositional verb, and a phrasal prepositional verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idiomatic meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;particle movement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wh-questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phrasal verb under this analysis is a combination of a verb and a particle (not participle!) that has some idiomatic interpretation (get along). You can't really figure out the meaning of &quot;get along&quot; by adding &quot;get&quot; and &quot;along&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about prepositional vs. adverbial particles. Under this proposal, if you can insert some material between a verb and a particle, that particle is adverbial (look up a word - look it up; pick up the phone - pick the phone up). On the other hand, a verb and a preposition are inseparable (look at the book - look at it - *look the book at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-06-07T20:10:57.737" LastActivityDate="2012-06-07T20:10:57.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2012-06-07T21:13:33.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is almost no research about this subject as far as I know, but there is one article called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~arir/sla1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Second Language Acquisition Model Using Example Generalization and Concept Categories&lt;/a&gt; by Rappoport and Sheinman, which defines a basic computational model for learning a new language, and evaluates Pimsleur Japanese I on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the article, there are really no methods right now of evaluating SLA methods formally, so it's hard to tell what is the &quot;best method&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it has nothing to do with linguistics, may I also recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluentin3months.com/pimsleur/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Benny Lewis' review of the Pimsleur&lt;/a&gt; method, and an explanation why &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluentin3months.com/any-method/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the choice of method is secondary when learning a language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T07:54:20.137" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T07:54:20.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2012-06-08T03:44:53.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are Nuntii Latini, of Radiophonia Finnica Generalis, who bring Latin news. I don't know whether they are still active, though. E.g., here on the arrest of Ratko Mladic: &lt;a href=&quot;http://areena.yle.fi/radio/1278942&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://areena.yle.fi/radio/1278942&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the Bremen Latin news: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.radiobremen.de/nachrichten/latein/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.radiobremen.de/nachrichten/latein/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The French website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mediterranees.net/latin_vivant.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mediterranees.net/latin_vivant.html&lt;/a&gt; has many links, including both of my above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="663" LastEditorUserId="663" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T21:37:02.177" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T21:37:02.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2012-06-08T08:51:50.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only circumstance I'm aware of where absolute synonyms occur is in the situation of name-avoidance taboo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many Australian languages it is common practice to avoid saying the names of the deceased. This name avoidance (or taboo) practice includes words which are phonologically similar to a deceased person's name, which can result in words in common use also becoming taboo. These taboo words are typically replaced by some other word, or perhaps by one borrowed from another language. These replacement words are used as total synonyms of the word they replace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this is given in Dixon (1980:29), involving the death of a man named &lt;em&gt;Ngayunya&lt;/em&gt;. This led to proscription of the first singular pronoun &lt;em&gt;ngayu&lt;/em&gt; and its replacement with &lt;em&gt;nganku&lt;/em&gt;, drawn from the mother-in-law avoidance speech style. As the death name taboo applies most particularly to speech with, and in the presence of, relatives of the deceased, both terms were at all times in use by at least some members of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T08:51:50.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2079" CreationDate="2012-06-08T11:05:07.240" Score="5" ViewCount="834" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greek alphabet has ψ (psi) and ξ (ksi) , both letters correspond to a bi-consonantal sequence. Latin has X, Cyrillic alphabet has Щ which in some languages corresponds to ʃt͡ʃ, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, an alphabet is phonemic (before the language changes and departs from it). Is there any motivation for a single letter representing more than one consonant? how did such letters come to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="26" LastEditDate="2012-06-08T14:56:31.553" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T02:43:19.837" Title="What is the origin of letters corresponding to consonant clusters?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2080" CreationDate="2012-06-08T14:59:11.760" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if my observation that variations normally are less frequent within written forms of a language than spoken versions of the same language is correct. If this is the case, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, within English here are examples of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_pronunciation_differences#Single_differences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pronunciation differences between American and British English&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Different_spellings_for_different_pronunciations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;different spellings for different pronunciations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and just &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Miscellaneous_spelling_differences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;written spelling differences&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mainly interested in if pronunciation differences are more common than purely written spelling differences, and if so, why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-06-10T01:54:26.577" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T00:40:04.547" Title="Are variations normally less frequent within written forms of a language than spoken versions of the same language?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-08T16:32:09.580" Score="4" ViewCount="3731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because I'm learning Swahili now, for which the word 'yes' translates to 'ndiyo' and 'no' translates to 'hakuna.'  It strikes me as strange that a language would have such long words to convey such important concepts as 'yes' and 'no.'  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other languages that have longer words than Swahili for yes and no (or any  basic modifiers or conjunctions)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the reason that such long words stayed in the language, rather than evolving into an abridged version of the word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;The intention of my post was to see if other languages had long words for &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; when directly translated.  I'm not concerned about other ways to communicate 'yes' and 'no' (like 'affirmative' or 'negative') because those aren't the default responses to questions in the language under consideration.  The follow-up question was why these languages have such large words for default responses (yes or no) when it would seem like the words should evolve over time to be more efficient (shorter amount of time to say, write, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="796" LastEditorUserId="796" LastEditDate="2012-06-11T00:53:15.340" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T00:53:15.340" Title="What language has the longest word for 'no' and 'yes'?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2076" CreationDate="2012-06-08T18:04:59.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of Cyrillic Щ, it originated as just a scribal ligature of Ш and Т when writing Old Church Slavonic (where, naturally, it was pronounced /ʃtʲ/). It still does represent a cluster in some languages (e.g., Bulgarian /ʃt/, Ukrainian /ʃtʃ/), but in others has evolved into a single sound (e.g., [standard] Russian /ɕ:/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this particular letter stuck around is because it had a useful function: the cluster /ʃt'/ in Old Church Slavonic wasn't just any cluster, but it had an important morphophonemic function, being the jotated counterpart to /st/. In addition, Old Church Slavonic simply didn't have another good way of representing /ʃtʲ/, since palatalized /tʲ/ only occurred phonemically in this particular cluster; this probably encouraged more frequent use of the letter, although this is just me speculating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, but I believe Greek ψ and ξ are similar, in that the clusters /ps/ and /ks/ have a special significance in the language, but I'm not very familiar with Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, morphophonemics can be a good motivator to have a single letter represent what's phonetically two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1054" LastActivityDate="2012-06-08T18:04:59.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2077" CreationDate="2012-06-10T07:59:31.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is largely a matter of standardisation. For example, English had highly varied spellings up until the 18th century as people spelled words however they wished and this was not seen as a bad thing. Printers commonly added letters to words (or removed them) to make full justification easier. Letters were added to make words more like their (presumed) French/Latin/Greek/whatever source. Also, in the early British Empire there was no standard spelling for many of the tremendous number of words borrowed into English. Much of this was made possible by the fact that spoken English had changed quite substantially, meaning that the writing system did not match it at all well, so there many choices in spelling. Even with languages with a highly phonemic orthography there will be variation in how people spell. With small language communities it is likely that standards will emerge naturally from the small number of writers. But with a large and widespread body of speakers, likely with differing dialects, it is much more likely for there to be great variation in writing, reflecting the dialectal differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once language planning is undertaken and standardised spellings are imposed, and with the development of a concern for 'correct' ways of spelling, variation in writing becomes much less, while variation in the language may still be large. Of coure, as the language drifts away from the orthography there will be a new source of variation in spelling, due to the difficulty of always spelling correctly. But as writing/spelling is a constructed system (as opposed to speaking, which is a natural system) it can be taught and imposed, which will reduce variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-06-10T07:59:31.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-10T15:59:33.340" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a Spanish word list, as simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more complete it is, the better, it should contain as many words as to be a statistically relevant sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be in any format: XML, MS Excel, .txt. It doesn't need to be in any specific order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to import it into a database, and make some statistical analysis about letter and syllable frequency and in what combinations do they appear, where in the word, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="778" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-12T08:56:31.323" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T08:56:31.323" Title="Searching for a Spanish word list for statistical analysis" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2012-06-10T16:36:32.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2077" CreationDate="2012-06-11T00:40:04.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently taking a Sociolinguistics course so I am, obviously, an expert on this subject (please note the sarcasm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Gaston Ümlaut did a very good job describing why there's less variation in written form but I wanted to bring up a few more points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the reason there's less [observable] variation in written forms compared to spoken forms is simply that there is greater societal pressure to conform to the &quot;standard dialect&quot; in written form, as opposed to spoken. Think of writing as akin to making a presentation for a crowd of people. In formal situations like that, most people will make a concious effort to better conform to the standard dialect to be more easily understood. It also helps that since written form has an editting process, people can take more time to think and craft their words and go back and fix &quot;mistakes&quot; (i.e. deviations from standard dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you need to think about the context. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/bell1984.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Style as Audience Design&lt;/a&gt; by Allan Bell (from 1984) shows that people adjust their speech patterns based on the audience. I see no reason why this won't apply to writting as well. In emails, IM, and facebooking between friends slang, varient spellings, and sentence structures which reflect the speaker's (writer's) native accent are extremely common. Then you have the issue of emoticons, slang, and the fact that spelling errors and typos are more easily accepted than, for example, in a newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have anecdotal evidence to support this view cross-linguistically. I currently live in Seoul, South Korea and I have observed that my friend's IMs and text messages frequently use slang and short forms they would not use in more formal situations. It should be noted though that Korean spell adheres quite closesly to pronunciation (not 100%, but maybe 90% identical. Mostly because they occassionally revise their dictionaries to conform to modern pronunciation) so these spellings are rather consistent across writers (but still vary from standard form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T00:40:04.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2076" CreationDate="2012-06-11T02:43:19.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greek graphemes Ψ ('psi', [ps]) and Ξ ('xi', [ks]) represent consonant clusters in some varieties of the Greek alphabet. These clusters are represented by the same graphemes even when they are spilt by a morpheme boundary. Some sources describe these clusters as phonemes but this is not correct, they are combinations of two phonemes in all varieties of Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not certain why the Greeks used single graphemes for these two clusters but it may be related to the fact that they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR101/SR101_03.pdf&quot;&gt;the only clusters that occur in coda&lt;/a&gt;) (ie. final) position in syllables. Earlier forms of the Attic alphabet lacked these graphemes and used ΦΣ and ΧΣ, respectively. While the majority of the Greek alphabet is believed to have been derived from either the Canaanite and/or Phoenician writing system, the graphemes Ψ and Ξ are have no obvious prototype in these traditions and may possibly have been derived from the South Arabian script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the alphabetic tradition normally has the target of representing individual phonemes, this may not be possible when borrowing an alphabet for use with a different language. Other considerations such as prosodic phenomena, syllable structure, morphophonemics, may make single graphemes for multiple phonemes a better solution than a straight mapping of segmental phonemes. And of course there are many languages which have single graphmes for phonemes, such as affricates and double articulations, that combine phones found in other languages as distinct phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T02:43:19.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2133" CreationDate="2012-06-11T14:48:43.587" Score="3" ViewCount="805" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency in Germanic and Romance languages that the number of the grammatical cases is decreasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European proto-language should have 8 grammatical cases, in Latin we already have only 7, in modern German 4, in English only 2...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is suprising for me, the declension of the language was firstly becoming more and more complicated, and then there was a decrease. What have caused such phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-12T10:44:09.457" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T02:03:18.973" Title="Why is the number of grammatical cases in Germanic and Romance languages decreasing?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-11T17:36:19.600" Score="5" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chart below shows a chain of sound changes that happened to the English language, from 1400 onwards. Although the chart was intended to describe the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;, it is not accurate&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, since it describes not only the GVS, but also other changes, that happened later, and also affected the English vowels, such as [oʊ̯] &gt; [əʊ̯]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand, only the changes that affected the &lt;em&gt;long vowels&lt;/em&gt; are considered part of the GVS. What is the reason for not including the other changes in this particular shift? In general, how do linguists determine when a certain chain shift is complete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Great_Vowel_Shift.svg/700px-Great_Vowel_Shift.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wikipedia&amp;#39;s Great Vowel Shift chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* Thank you, Aaron.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:47.843" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T23:53:43.993" Title="How do linguists determine at which point the Great Vowel Shift was complete?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2012-06-11T23:48:15.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't. In five hundred years' time maybe they'll say it's going on now, and maybe they won't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of a sound-change being &quot;complete&quot; makes sense only if you have in some way identified the end-point with respect to which you're defining completion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-06-11T23:48:15.650" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2012-06-12T11:39:00.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact there is such a term, but as far as I know it might only be used in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartvelian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kartvelian linguistics&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarities are very striking due to a couple of coincidences that I'm assuming don't reveal anything deeper in Universal Grammar, but you never know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Georgian language in fact has a whole class of verbs that reveal the exact same thing, despite being utterly unrelated to Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_verb_paradigm#Class_4_.28indirect_or_.27inversion.27_verbs.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Georgian &quot;class IV&quot; verbs&lt;/a&gt; are described with the two terms &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;indirect verbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;inversion verbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This class of verb is known as &lt;strong&gt;indirect&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;'inverted'&lt;/strong&gt; as it marks the logical subject with the indirect object marker set (&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;- set) and&#xA;  the direct object with the subject marker set (&lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;- set). Nouns are&#xA;  declined in agreement: the logical subject is in the dative, and&#xA;  object in the nominative (or sometimes genitive, as in &lt;em&gt;gogo-s&lt;/em&gt; (dat.)&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;dzaghl-is&lt;/em&gt; (gen.) &lt;em&gt;e-shin-i-a&lt;/em&gt; - the girl is afraid of the dog).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Verbs in this class denote &lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;sensations&lt;/strong&gt; and endurant states of being (see also stative verbs), including verbs such as &lt;em&gt;q'av&lt;/em&gt; - to&#xA;  have (X, animate), &lt;em&gt;kv&lt;/em&gt; - to have (X, inanimate) &lt;em&gt;q'var&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;to love&lt;/strong&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;nd&lt;/em&gt; - to want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Class 4 verbs also include 'desideratives' (verbs of desiring), created using the circumfix &lt;em&gt;e- --- -eb&lt;/em&gt; (compare &lt;em&gt;tsek'v-av-s&lt;/em&gt; 'he&#xA;  dances' and &lt;em&gt;e-tsek'v-eb-a&lt;/em&gt; 'he feels like dancing').&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as you see the similarity is in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.. marks the logical subject with the indirect object marker ... and the direct object with the subject marker ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coincidences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That some verbs with similar meanings in Spanish and Georgian are subject to this effect&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;to like&quot; - მოსწონს &lt;em&gt;moscons&lt;/em&gt; - gustar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;to love&quot; - უყვარს &lt;em&gt;uqvars&lt;/em&gt; - amar  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the first person singular pronoun ends up being the same in both languages&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I like Tbilisi&quot; - მე მომწონს თბილისი &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; momcons t'bilisi&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Me&lt;/strong&gt; gusta Tiflis&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I love Tbilisi&quot; - მე მიყვარს თბილისი &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; miqvars t'bilisi&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Me&lt;/strong&gt; encanta Tiflis  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T11:39:00.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="379" CreationDate="2012-06-12T11:51:25.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard about distinction between personal and non-personal masculine/feminine as separate genders, however it's quite interesting to learn that people from outside can see it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example from the Wikipedia is a bit doubtful, because it gives as an example the nouns with other endings, and those decline in other way. But taking as example words with the same ending:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kot - a cat, widzę kota - I see a cat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;płot - a fence - widzę płot - I see a fence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we have a surname &quot;Płot&quot;, there will be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Widzę pana Płota - I see mr. Fence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, some nouns decline in the other way for animate and non-animate nouns. This is, however, not called in Polish grammar &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1064" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T11:51:25.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-12T14:50:21.813" Score="8" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;One time in a conversation, a person who is very knowledgeable about computers off hand mentioned that it would have been difficult, maybe even impossible, to have developed computational technology in a culture where the language had a complex writing system. Writing systems such as Chinese, Japanese, early Korean, maybe Arabic, and I suppose we could even suppose something like ancient Egyptian with its hieroglyphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that by &quot;computational technology&quot;, I'm including pretty much all the concepts involved, from the kind of machinery and electronics involved up to the programming languages that one can utilize those machines with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That conversation was a long time ago, but the question remained with me: Would it have been impossible, or extremely unlikely that computational technology could have developed in a culture with a complex writing system? Since computing involved a lot of transference of human concept to a recorded form usable by a computer by way of textual input, is an extended alphabet a hindrance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess at issue is that you can't make a keyboard unless you have a way of breaking down the input of a language into a limited number of keys. Which is sort of symptomatic of a broader issue that to express commands, especially with limited computing power, you need a certain simplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, put another way, is the fact that English, or European, languages have a simpler writing system, that contributed to why computational technology took off there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is computing so based on mathematics that the language of the developers is irrelevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Babbage and Lovelace have to have been speaking English to do what they did, or could they just have likely been speaking Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="913" LastEditorUserId="13421" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T02:56:57.320" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T02:56:57.320" Title="Would an extended alphabet have been a hindrance to inventing computer technology?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2094" CreationDate="2012-06-12T15:27:45.620" Score="2" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is kind of a specific question, though it appears there is no StackExchange forum for the Korean language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the specific rules in Yale Romanization of Korean with regard to where to put explicit syllable breaks? Wikipedia describes it as &quot;in cases of letter combinations that would otherwise be ambiguous&quot;. But wouldn't a majority of syllable boundaries in romanized Korean be potentially ambiguous? E.g. nearly any consonant or pair of consonants between vowel clusters, between plausible digraphs, etc.? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the output from &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~asaokitan/tools/hangul_yale_converter.cgi.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ling.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~asaokitan/tools/hangul_yale_converter.cgi.en&lt;/a&gt;, it appears to only mark a subset of these cases. It appears to assume that a single intervocalic consonant is the initial consonant of the latter syllable (e.g. solika), and only marks the syllable boundary if that is not the case (e.g. salamtul.i). It also appears to assume that a plausible digraph is indeed a diagraph, and only marks when a syllable boundary splits a plausible digraph (e.g. thaykuk.ki but not nyangi). But it feels like most of those &quot;rules&quot; have exceptions, and I don't understand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are the complete set of rules at work here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T16:00:21.600" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:00:21.600" Title="Rules of Yale Romanization of Korean" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2012-06-12T15:35:25.517" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the nature of the written notation for the language really had much effect. Computation is basically just math and the Chinese had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Chapters_on_the_Mathematical_Art&quot;&gt;firm grasp on mathematics from the earliest times&lt;/a&gt;.  Computational devices were developed based on mechanics - gears, punch cards, etc. - long before they were based on silicon. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine&quot;&gt;Babbage's device didn't use any human language&lt;/a&gt; - it ran on punch cards, gears, and steam; Lovelace's algorithm was, well, algorithmic in nature and not based on characters, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html#NoteG&quot;&gt;as is plain on reviewing it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd note the Chinese invention of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suanpan&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;suànpán&lt;/em&gt;, more commonly known as the abacus&lt;/a&gt;, and the earlier &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_rods&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;chóu&lt;/em&gt; counting rods&lt;/a&gt;. The Ancient Chinese also independently invented the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pointing_Chariot&quot;&gt;differential gear&lt;/a&gt;, an early analog computing device. In none of these case did the Chinese language prove a hindrance to developing mechanical calculation devices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Electronic digital computers, the kind we usually think of nowadays, have been part of Chinese technology &lt;a href=&quot;http://itri2.org/ttec/aemu/report/c3.pdf&quot;&gt;since the late 1950s [PDF]&lt;/a&gt;. The authors note &quot;By June 1985, the task force had successfully developed a personal computer, Great Wall 0520CH, which was the first PC using Chinese character generation and display technology, capable of processing information in Chinese.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's much evidence for the proposition your interlocuter made. It's mistaking the modern keyboard and ASCII input and text monitors - the &lt;em&gt;accoutrements&lt;/em&gt; of computers - for what a computer really &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chinese have always been perfectly aware of alphabets and do make use of the Roman alphabet in their computing. The popular use of keyboards during the past couple decades is not fundamental to computing. Consider touch screens. Touch screens are noted for their difficulty in entering Roman letters, but they are almost perfect for entering Chinese characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/figures/menat6_1-5k.png&quot;&gt;Lovelace's algorithm&lt;/a&gt;. Note its remarkable similarity to &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Yanghui_triangle.gif&quot;&gt;this Chinese version of Pascal's triangle&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-06-12T16:07:41.000" LastActivityDate="2012-06-12T16:07:41.000" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2122" CreationDate="2012-06-12T16:46:02.887" Score="8" ViewCount="1777" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and other languages there are three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative (e.g. tall, taller, tallest). Are there languages with more than three degrees, expressed morphologically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-12T18:29:31.747" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T00:12:25.573" Title="Are there languages with more than three degrees of comparison?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2091" CreationDate="2012-06-13T02:18:55.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the ambiguity is mitigated by Korean phonological rules. For example, &quot;aki&quot; could be either 아기 (a.ki) or 악이(ak.i) but since Korean phonology avoids codas wherever possible they would both be pronounced as &quot;a.ki&quot;. Similarly, &quot;akhi&quot; could be 아키 (a.khi), 앜이 (akh.i), or 악히 (ak.hi) but they would all be pronounced as &quot;a.khi&quot;. 아키 and 앜이 for the same reason as above and 악히 because Korean phonology tends to prefer aspirations over plosive-glottal chains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, complex consonents can only appear in the coda position. Thus, &quot;ilka&quot; could be interpretted as 읽아 (ilk.a) or 일가 (il.ka) but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;i.lka&quot; since complex onsets are banned. If a complex coda is followed by a null onset, as with 읽아 (ilk.a), the complex consonent splits and the last part of the coda becomes an onset as above, resulting in a pronunciation of &quot;il.ka&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically what I'm trying to say is that although the lack of syllable markings is ambiguous in terms of spelling, but it is no more ambiguous than Korean pronunciation. In fact, spoken Korean is even more ambiguous than Yale Romanized text as Korean only allows k, p, t, n, m, and ng sounds in SR (surface representation, i.e. after the coda-to-onset shifts mentioned above) coda positions. Aspiration and glottalization features are lost, s and c become t, and h is silent (remembering that &quot;h&quot; can only be a coda in SR if the following onset is not null and is not a plosive). Thus 밭 (path), 밧 (pas), 밪 (pac), and 받 (pat) are all pronounced identically, despite different romanized forms. So really, Yale Romanization is more ambigious than Korean spelling but less ambiguous than Korean pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you do get true ambiguity is with glottalized consonents like ㄸ (tt), ㄲ (kk), ㅃ (pp), ㅆ (ss), and ㅉ (cc). Without marking syllables 악기 and 아끼 would share the same romanization (&quot;akki&quot;) despite having different pronunciations (&quot;ak.ki&quot; and &quot;a.kki&quot;, respectively). I should note for people who aren't familiar with Hangul (Korean writing system) that although these glottalized consonents may look like complex consonents (ㄲ looks like two ㄱs, ㅃ looks like two ㅂs, etc.), they are not and, unlike complex consonents, they never split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diphthong vowels show a similar ambiguity. 에어 (ey.e) and 어여 (e.ye) would both be written as &quot;eye&quot; despite, as with glottalized consonents, having different pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experience, in literature people tend not to make syllables at all. This is because in practice these ambiguities don't come up too often and the inclusion of an English gloss solves any ambiguities that do occur. You need to remember the context of Yale Romanization; it is used in academic papers because it is the only romanization system with a 1:1 character conversion. Typically these papers must be written for an audience that does not speak Korean at all. In fact, Yale Romanization would be a very bad system to use to teach Hangul if only because Korean consonent/vowel pronunciations are not 100% compatible with English phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it comes down to your style, the style guide of the journal or conference you're writing for, and what exactly you're trying to convey. If you're doing a paper on syllabification or Korean morphological rules then marking syllables would be important. In a syntax or semantics paper, not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personaly note, I too find Yale Romanization frustrating. I once read 6 pages of a paper about NPI licensing in Korean BEFORE clauses before I realized &quot;ceney&quot; was &quot;전에&quot; (cen.ey), which probably says more about my low Korean proficency than Yale Romanization. Also, how is ㅈ, pronounced as a voiceless &quot;j&quot; or unaspirated &quot;ch&quot;, romanized as &quot;c&quot;? Yes, I know it's so ㅊ can be romanized as &quot;ch&quot; (which it does actually sound like) much like the aspirated &quot;k&quot;, ㅋ, is romanized as &quot;kh&quot;. I don't care!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-06-14T06:00:01.440" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T06:00:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-13T17:37:04.743" Score="5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm dealing with a corpus of text that is written informally, but generally conforms to a very standard format by convention (think something like Froyo Frozen Yogurt, Smucker's Peanut Butter) and occasionally requires recursion (Froyo Frozen Yogurt with Smucker's Peanut Butter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regexes, the complexity quickly grows out of hand (Frozen Yogurt by Froyo, Froyo Frozen Yogurt with Peanut Butter by Smucker's, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble finding resources to help me write an EBNF for this, and NLP method are too complex (plus my &quot;parts of speech&quot; don't really correspond to normal english). Is there an intermediate approach, aimed at semi-formalized text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;em&gt;repost from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11006039/how-to-parse-text-too-variable-for-formal-grammars-but-too-constrained-for-nlp&quot;&gt;stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; on Otavio Macedo's advice&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1099" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T23:44:10.317" Title="How to parse text too variable for formal grammars but too constrained for NLP?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2127" CreationDate="2012-06-14T02:53:22.620" Score="3" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do clause chaining languages have complement clauses?  If so, what syntactic roles can they play?   If not, what structures do clause chaining languages have that are commonly translated into English as complement clauses?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found a fair amount of information about clause-chaining on the web, but almost no information about complement clauses, or structures that are commonly translated into English as complement clauses, that occur in clause-chaining languages.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this article, for example, I was able to find only one reference to one possible complement clause.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/silewp/2010/silewp2010-001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.sil.org/silewp/2010/silewp2010-001.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T03:46:31.857" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T03:46:31.857" Title="Do clause chaining languages have complement clauses? If so, what syntactic roles can they play?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2115" CreationDate="2012-06-14T02:59:41.350" Score="10" ViewCount="501" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs?   If so, what would be an example of a phrase structure for a uniclausal simple transitive sentence in such a language?  For instance, what would be the phrase structure of a sentence in one such language which sentence translates as &quot;The boy ate the burger&quot;?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T17:31:24.290" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T17:31:24.290" Title="Is there a strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3866" CreationDate="2012-06-14T03:17:14.480" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ntdiscourse.org/2010/03/background-and-foreground-an-introduction/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ntdiscourse.org/2010/03/background-and-foreground-an-introduction/&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;grounding&quot; in discourse analysis refers to the difference between &quot;core elements that advance a discourse [and] the peripheral elements that flesh it out,&quot; foregrounding pertaining to the former and backgrounding pertaining to the latter.  For instance, in narrative, bits of discourse that denote events (e.g. George drove up the old driveway ...) that happen in temporal succession tend to be foregrounded, and bits of discourse that denote non-events (e.g. &quot;... whose winding course reminded Milicent of a gargantuan dead snake&quot;) tend to be backgrounded.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if any, natural languages have morphemes or syntactic construction that mark grounding specifically?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T07:25:12.133" Title="Do any languages have clear morpho-syntactic constructions that mark backgrounding and foregrounding?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2108" CreationDate="2012-06-14T03:26:38.443" Score="5" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;In natural languages that morphologically mark animacy vs. inanimacy on a largely semantic basis, (e.g. &quot;hamster&quot; is animate, &quot;stone&quot; is inanimate), which of the two noun-classes do terms for the following categories typically fall into?   a) terms for dead organisms, and b) terms for parts of organisms that don't live independently of the whole, e.g. &quot;fingers&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="253" LastEditDate="2012-06-14T09:38:16.710" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T19:17:25.467" Title="Are deceased living things, or parts of living things, marked as animate in languages that mark animacy?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;animacy&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2012-06-14T09:02:42.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Czech, I can think of a few masculine (where animacy is used) nouns for dead organisms (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nebo%C5%BEt%C3%ADk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nebožtík&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mrtv%C3%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mrtvý&lt;/a&gt;), and all are animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, terms for parts of organism are inanimate (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prst#Czech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prst&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/krk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;krk&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nos#Czech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nos&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loket#Czech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;loket&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ocas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ocas&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/penis#Czech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;penis&lt;/a&gt;, …).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="253" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T09:02:42.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7120" CreationDate="2012-06-14T12:27:46.273" Score="8" ViewCount="824" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, there is no essential difference between spoken and signed languages. Both have the same kinds of phonetic, morphological, syntactical and semantic complexities, both are prone to ambiguities, both change over time etc. The main difference is one of medium. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoken languages have, of course, some advantages over their signed counterparts, as the possibility to communicate without visual contact. But signed languages have, in turn, other advantages over the spoken, like higher &quot;bandwidth&quot;, i.e., information is conveyed by multiple channels at the same time (hand shape, hand position, eye gaze and head nodding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of that, spoken languages are much more common than signed languages. And most of the latter have developed at &quot;artificial&quot; environments, like schools for deaf children. Why don't we see, for example, isolated tribes (with hearing and speaking people) that haven't developed any kind of spoken language, but have a rich tradition of signed languages, instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T01:18:03.343" Title="Why are spoken languages more common than signed languages?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-14T14:23:53.680" Score="1" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 214 (by one count) Mandarin phonemes. How can I learn &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which of those are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; shared by English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which of the remaining number are in the most common use (assuming they follow the Pareto Principle — 80/20 or whatever — like everything else)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm doing research and need to be pointed in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1092" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-14T16:18:23.240" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T18:54:17.883" Title="Mandarine Phonemes: Which ones are not shared by English AND the most likely to be used?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2012-06-14T17:55:52.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By pure coincidence I happened to try this out before I saw your question a few hours ago here in Georgia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Georgian nouns are not marked for animacy, but some verbs are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;To have&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;აქვს&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;akvs&lt;/em&gt; for inanimate nouns but &lt;strong&gt;ყავს&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;qavs&lt;/em&gt; for animate nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was joking around with my Georgian friends and tried to say &quot;I have one head&quot;, just to test this out in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;მე &lt;strong&gt;მყავს&lt;/strong&gt; ერთი თავი. &lt;em&gt;animate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my friends corrected and taught me that I should say instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;მე &lt;strong&gt;მაქვს&lt;/strong&gt; ერთი თავი. &lt;em&gt;inanimate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; are animate in Georgian, but &lt;em&gt;body parts&lt;/em&gt; are not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note: Cars are the only nonliving things in Georgian which take the animate word for &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T17:55:52.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2105" CreationDate="2012-06-14T18:54:17.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say do it by hand. First write down all 214 Putonghua phonemes and convert them to symbol tokens in your universal phonetic alphabet. Now write down all N English phonemes and convert them to symbol tokens in the universal phonetic alphabet. Write it so it's two columns, and if the same symbol is used in the universal phonetic alphabet, then they are shared. That's how you do the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the second part, set up a correspondence between your 214 phonemes and their equivalents in pinyin, then take a largish sized representative Putonghua corpus (a million characters or so should work), convert it to pinyin, then convert it to your 214-phoneme system, then tokenize it. Now cross out all of the ones which were counted as &quot;shared&quot; in part I. Now rank them by decreasing token frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it! The only tricky part is in deciding on your universal phonetic alphabet, or put another way, what counts as &quot;the same thing&quot; between English and Putonghua.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T18:54:17.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2012-06-14T18:59:19.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, some important remarks on animacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Animacy is more like a continuum, meaning that it doesn't behave like a dichotomy (animate or inanimate) but rather &quot;a more or less continuous category ranging from most animate to least animate&quot; (Croft 2003: 130), cf. Dixon's animacy hierarchy, human &amp;lt; animate &amp;lt; inanimate. This is semantic animacy or what Croft calls &quot;animacy proper.&quot; Obviously, it is language-specific. For example, trees are inanimate in Slavic languages whereas they are animate in Algonquian languages (Plungian 2011: 142, n.47).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting examples from &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;trup&lt;/em&gt; 'a dead body' [inanimate]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pokojnik&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;mertvets&lt;/em&gt; 'a dead person' [animate] (from Plungian)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Wikipedia article on animacy (its Russian version) aslo mentions cases when the same noun can be both animate and inanimate (with no difference in meaning), e.g. &lt;em&gt;virus&lt;/em&gt; 'virus' or &lt;em&gt;robot&lt;/em&gt; 'robot'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from &lt;strong&gt;Dyirbal&lt;/strong&gt; (Dixon 1972)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;non-human animates: some birds, moon, storms, rainbow, boomerangs, some spears, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to make things more complicated, this semantic animacy interacts with many other things, like definiteness, referentiality etc. (the extended animacy hierarchy). See Croft for further discussion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-06-14T19:17:25.467" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T19:17:25.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2012-06-14T19:26:51.867" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just my two cents: I'm a graduated linguist, and a computer engineering student, but not a historian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your friend was talking from a much more practically minded perspective than the other repliers in this question are thinking, as you seem to anticipate in stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that by &quot;computational technology&quot;, I'm including pretty much all the concepts involved, from the kind of machinery and electronics involved up to the programming languages that one can utilize those machines with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is equally possible to use, say, Chinese as a basis for computational interaction, or hieroglyphics, or whatever (heck, even a system with one ideogram per possible utterance could work, at least on a theoretical level). But there is a massive gap between what is possible theoretically and what practically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that in the early days of practical computing you only got what you could dearly pay for. Bits were not the commodity they have now become. There were only a very small number of bits available, both in main and in secondary memory (read: RAM and hard disk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the problem was one of simple engineering: it is very unpractical to try to use, say, Chinese ideograms or any (really) large writing system when you only have a very limited amount of &quot;bit space&quot; available. You cannot even represent enough ideograms to state a meaningful program if you lack sufficient bit space, if you have to use 0-and-1 sequences to encode any data point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exercise for the interested reader: calculate how many bits would be necessary to represent all building blocks of your writing system using the most efficient binary encoding: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding&quot;&gt;Huffman Coding Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;. Then realise that to have a workable system, you would need to be able to use a large enough &quot;word&quot; (that is, a computer engineering word, which is the length of the every little sequence in memory and processing -- think 32bit or 64 bit). Then find the year since when systems with such word lenghts were economically valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="663" LastActivityDate="2012-06-14T19:26:51.867" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2093" CreationDate="2012-06-14T23:17:07.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Welsh_morphology#Adjectives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Welsh&lt;/a&gt; has a distinct equative, as well as the comparative and superlative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the article linked to: &lt;em&gt;teg&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fair&quot;, &lt;em&gt;teced&lt;/em&gt; &quot;as/so fair&quot;, &lt;em&gt;tecach&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fairer&quot;, &lt;em&gt;tecaf&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fairest&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;mor teced â&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;as fair as&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2012-06-15T16:56:51.227" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T16:56:51.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2097" CreationDate="2012-06-14T23:17:43.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be constrained, but NLP parsers work well, just the same.&#xA;A few popular ones you could play with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford Parser (online demo)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~strctlrn/MSTParser/MSTParser.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MST Parser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.maltparser.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Malt Parser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc/wiki/Demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C&amp;amp;C Parser (online demo)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nactem.ac.uk/enju/demo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Enju (online demo only works with firefox)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could go the BNF way too, if you prefer. (The NLP community prefers to call it CFG (Context Free Grammar)). You can find some online demos of these too. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; comes with an implementation you could play with.&#xA;&lt;HR&gt;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;ADDENDUM&lt;/b&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diotavelli.net/people/void/demos/cky.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.diotavelli.net/people/void/demos/cky.html&lt;/a&gt; has a nice online demo that draws parse charts given a CFG grammar. The website has some limitations, so I recommend that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write the CFG rules in your own text editor, and paste them into the text window. The online demo 'loses' rules as soon as it runs them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remember that the grammar must be in Chomsky Normal Form, i.e. each non-terminal expands to at most two other symbols (in each rule). If you want more, you'll have to compose it yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a good way to get started, you would eventually have to move to a more usable parser, such as the ones bundled with NLTK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-06-16T23:44:10.317" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T23:44:10.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-15T01:14:14.983" Score="10" ViewCount="1634" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22357/equivalent-of-both-when-referring-three-or-more-items&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; it seems that English does not have the equivalent of &quot;both&quot; for three items. Although it would seem to be a useful word, I am unaware of its existence in any languages. Is there any language that has such a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1103" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T16:56:03.360" Title="Are there any languages with the equivalent of &quot;both&quot; for three items?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2012-06-15T02:20:51.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;ทั้ง&lt;/code&gt; [tʰáŋ] is often used for this purpose.&#xA;Also, &lt;code&gt;กัน&lt;/code&gt; [gan] (one another), e.g. ต่อกัน [tò-gan] (mutually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, most (if not all) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;isolating languages&lt;/a&gt; would have such a word, and most likely it would be the same as &quot;together&quot;, &quot;also&quot;, or &quot;one another&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_grammar#Dual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;has dual and triple inflection forms&lt;/a&gt; for certain nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-06-15T09:44:08.303" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T09:44:08.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-15T15:55:14.013" Score="16" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This is probably a poorly-formed question, but I'm really just trying to find out if there's any research in this area.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most children pick up a spoken or signed language at an early age, and this gets referred to as their native language.  Can a person's native language be in the written medium, rather than the signed or spoken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking based on my own experience, so this is purely anecdotal.  When I was a child, I didn't start speaking until later than expected.  Then, in an incident that surprised everyone, when I was two, my parents discovered that I knew how to read when I asked them what &quot;carbohydrates&quot; meant off a cereal box.  Decades later, when speaking to my wife, I often realize I don't know how to pronounce a word that I've been using all my life -- because I've been using it in writing, not in speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any research at all looking at children picking up written language before or in conjunction with spoken language?  Is there any research on children learning written language on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastEditorUserId="314" LastEditDate="2012-06-17T18:44:21.577" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T21:12:55.193" Title="Can one's native medium of language be written, rather than spoken or signed?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2012-06-15T20:04:25.137" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language seems to distinguish between the same basic syntactic &lt;em&gt;functions&lt;/em&gt;. For instance, we can distinguish between &lt;em&gt;predicates&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;arguments&lt;/em&gt; within a sentence, or between a &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; and its &lt;em&gt;modifiers&lt;/em&gt; in a smaller phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in English, most words are limited as to which function they can play.  Nouns like &quot;boy&quot; make good arguments, but they don't make good predicates on their own: you have to tack on a copula (e.g. &quot;be a boy&quot;).  Verbs like &quot;ate&quot; make good predicates but they don't make good arguments on their own: you have to build a relative clause around them first (e.g. &quot;the one who ate&quot;).  So we can say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The boy]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt; [ate]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sentences like these, intended to mean something like &quot;The one who ate is a boy,&quot; are ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The ate]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt; [boy]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The ate]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt; [boy-s]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This limitation is clear evidence for a morphosyntactic noun/verb distinction in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay.  So there are &lt;em&gt;claimed&lt;/em&gt; to be languages without this limitation: languages, that is, in which any word can take any syntactic function. The Salishan language family is the classic source for examples of this.  Here's one example from St'át'imcets: in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; sentence, &lt;em&gt;t'ak&lt;/em&gt; 'go' is the predicate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T'ak]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt; [ti=nk'yáp=a]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[go]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt; [DET=coyote=DET]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Coyote goes along&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; one, &lt;em&gt;nk'yap&lt;/em&gt; '[be a] coyote' is the predicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[nk'yáp]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt; [ti=t'ak=a]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[coyote]&lt;sub&gt;Pred&lt;/sub&gt; [DET=go=DET]&lt;sub&gt;Arg&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The one going along is Coyote&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the word order is backwards from English: Salishan predicates come at the start of the clause, before their subjects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So people have &lt;em&gt;claimed&lt;/em&gt;, based on data like these, that there is no noun/verb distinction in Salishan languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble is, in all the Salish languages where people have checked, it turns out that there are other morphosyntactic asymmetries between nouns and verbs.  For instance, in St'át'imcets, only nouns can be the head of a relative clause.  You can say this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ti=tupun-táli=ha]&lt;sub&gt;Modifier&lt;/sub&gt; [sqaycw]&lt;sub&gt;Head&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[DET=hit-3sg=DET]&lt;sub&gt;Modifier&lt;/sub&gt; [man]&lt;sub&gt;Head&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The man who hit him&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ti=sqaycw=a]&lt;sub&gt;Modifier&lt;/sub&gt; [tupun-as]&lt;sub&gt;Head&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[DET=man=DET]&lt;sub&gt;Modifier&lt;/sub&gt; [hit-3sg]&lt;sub&gt;Head&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lit. &quot;The him-hitter who mans&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Once again, the St'át'imcets word order is the reverse of the English word order: the modifier comes first, before the head.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to describe the syntax of relative clauses in St'át'imcets, you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need a noun/verb distinction after all.  And this seems to be the case for the other Salishan languages as well, though the jury is still out on some of them.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/scable/PNWSeminar/handouts/Lex/Lexical-Categories.pdf&quot;&gt;This handout by Seth Cable is a good place to start for information on the noun/verb distinction in Salishan (and also Wakashan) languages&lt;/a&gt;, and the references in it go into more detail.  (The St'át'imcets examples here are all from Cable's handout.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So okay, the Salishan languages have a noun/verb distinction.  What about other language families?  I'm less familiar with the literature here.  Some people have made similar claims about Austronesian languages.  David Gil, for instance, claims that Riau Indonesian has no noun/verb distinction.  But &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/2010Yoder.pdf&quot;&gt;here's a paper by Brendon Yoder arguing against Gil's conclusions&lt;/a&gt;, claiming that Riau Indonesian does have a noun/verb distinction after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: In the cases I'm familiar with where someone has said &quot;Language X lacks a noun/verb distinction,&quot; further study has suggested that their claim was dubious our outright wrong.  We still can't be dead certain that all languages have the distinction.  But it would be a big surprise at this point to find a language that really and truly lacked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastActivityDate="2012-06-15T20:04:25.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-16T01:06:11.360" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was suggested to cross post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11059701&quot;&gt;this question of mine&lt;/a&gt; from Stack Overflow. Hopefully my question is within the bounds of this question board!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a method of determining the similarity between an audio segment and a human voice, which is expressed numerically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched quite a bit, but what I've found so far (detailed below) doesn't really fit what I need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One method is to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech recognition&lt;/a&gt; software to obtain words from an audio segment. However, this method is unable to come up with how &quot;similar&quot; audio is to human speech; it can often tell whether or not there are words in the audio, but if there are no definite words, it can't tell close the audio is to having such words.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMU Sphinx&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/dragonfly/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragonfly&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shout-toolkit.sourceforge.net/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SHoUT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more promising method is referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_activity_detection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voice Activity Detection&lt;/a&gt; (VAD). However, this tends to have the same problems: the algorithms / programs using VAD tend to just return whether or not the activity threshold has been reached, and no &quot;similarity&quot; value before or after such threshold. Alternatively, many just look for volume, not similarity to human speech.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speex.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speex&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shriphani.com/blog/listener/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Listener&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/VAD_and_CNG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeSWITCH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a method seems extremely complex, so I'm not looking for an algorithm I can implement myself--I'm searching for some type of free software. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1105" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T09:47:06.503" Title="Determining how similar audio is to human speech" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-16T09:42:48.147" Score="10" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most language I have some knowledge of have adjectives with are either &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; nominal in nature or &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; verbal in nature. (apologies if this is not the best wording.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In German, Romanian, and Georgian, adjectives &lt;em&gt;decline&lt;/em&gt; for noun properties such as &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Japanese and Korean, most adjectives inflect like verbs. In Chinese there is no inflection but adjectives are described as incorporating the verb &quot;to be&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So obviously there are always various features that make adjectives behave a bit differently from nouns or verbs, but are there languages where adjectives are morphosyntactically a very distinct category that cannot be related to either nouns or verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this question only makes sense for inflecting languages since the syntax seems to vary for all three and in languages with little inflection like English where there is not much inflection difference even between nouns and verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-03T01:06:05.077" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T01:06:05.077" Title="Are there languages where adjectives are clearly neither noun-like nor verb-like?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2117" CreationDate="2012-06-16T22:42:10.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I understand your question, I'll just type my thoughts here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have an adjective that will generate a noun and a verb, but the adjective per se is not nominal or verbal.&#xA;E.g. &quot;thick&quot; adjectiv, &quot;thickness&quot; noun, and &quot;to thicken&quot; verb.&#xA;As I see it, &quot;thick&quot; is not nominal nor verbal. The noun and the verb must have derived from the adjective.&#xA;Should check the origin of the word, though. English is not my first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T22:42:10.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2012-06-16T22:58:33.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably even the visual learning you had only happened because you were spoken to, even if you didn't speak yourself. It is not unusual that someone does not know how to pronounce a word he/she knows how to write or the opposite, not knowing how to write a word he/she uses in spoken language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can learn a language through visual or acustic signifiers &amp;ndash; be it English, Portuguese or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, it is hard to teach written language to deaf children, at least concerning the kind of writing we are using here, because it is &quot;sound based&quot;, i.e., letters correspond to sounds. So a deaf person in general needs to go through an &quot;oralization&quot; process, to learn reading and writing well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to pictographic writing, like chinese, maybe it could be learned withouth oralization, but this is just a speculation, as I have no experience with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-17T00:22:45.807" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T00:22:45.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2012-06-16T23:20:54.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had the experience of living with a family with two small children (ages 2 and 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father would only spoke German to them, and the mother would only spoke Portuguese.&#xA;The kids could clearly understand both of them, even though they didn't speak much.&#xA;The father told me that the important thing about this is that he would spoke only German to them, and not sometimes German and sometimes Portuguese, for this would get them confused (he wanted them to learn both languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the kids could sense that each person had a proper communication system (one for the father and one for the mother). I think this means they distinguished the languages, for understanding what was said to them required that they knew the values of the signs used in the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that if one person uses several languages to talk to a child, this would make it harder for the kid to distinguish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-17T00:30:33.017" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T00:30:33.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1522" CreationDate="2012-06-16T23:42:40.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;User &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/610/beatrix&quot;&gt;Beatrix&lt;/a&gt; had posted an answer that has been deleted. It contained some useful information that I will summarize here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatrix suggested that some consider the use of &lt;em&gt;ter que&lt;/em&gt; without a direct object to &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt;, as in my Question above, to be bad style (although others disagree). There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brasilescola.com/gramatica/ter-que-ou-ter-de.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the idea&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;tenho de&lt;/em&gt; is used to express &quot;I have to [verb]&quot;, while &lt;em&gt;tenho [noun] que&lt;/em&gt; is used with a direct object to mean &quot;I have [something] to [verb]&quot;. It would then be recommended that &lt;em&gt;ter de&lt;/em&gt; be used when &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; does have a direct object, while &lt;em&gt;ter que&lt;/em&gt; is to be used when there is such a direct object, because &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; is a relative pronoun that refers to an antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that this idea comes from somewhere, leaving aside stylistic issues, it supports the hypothesis that &lt;em&gt;ter que&lt;/em&gt; with no direct object to &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; developed from the older &lt;em&gt;ter [object] que&lt;/em&gt;, as suggested by Lovegren above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-06-16T23:42:40.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2093" CreationDate="2012-06-16T23:57:46.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, some general remarks on comparison and terminology. My answer is mostly based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unibg.it/struttura/struttura.asp?rubrica=1&amp;amp;persona=202&amp;amp;nome=Pierluigi&amp;amp;cognome=Cuzzolin&amp;amp;titolo=Prof.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierluigi Cuzzolin&lt;/a&gt;'s research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with some definition of comparison. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110172782.2/9783110172782.2.14.1212/9783110172782.2.14.1212.xml?format=EBOK&amp;amp;rskey=myb4YA&amp;amp;result=4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004&lt;/a&gt; give the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Taken as a grammatical category, comparison (German Steigerung) is the formal modification of some predicative word – most often an adjective – representing a parameter of gradation&#xA;or comparison, according to the extent to which it applies to its argument, relative to some standard&quot; (p. 1212).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, comparison as a grammatical category includes &quot;semantic&quot; comparison (relative) and gradation (absolute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any comparison must contain at least the following three elements: the comparee, the parameter (a cognitively salient feature), and the parameter marker (a morpheme expressing a degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, Heine has a nice table on types of comparison. Naturally, there is some variation in terminology - but this is irrelevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sWEgC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Heine1997&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004 argue that traditionally three degrees of comparison are recognized: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the positive degree;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the comparative degree, which can involve comparison of majority (smarter), comparison of minority (less smart), comparison of equality (as smart as), and even sameness (known as similative);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the superlative degree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although comparison usually occurs on adjectives and adverbs, it can occur on other parts of speech, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;em&gt;canzonissima&lt;/em&gt; 'the best song'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basque &lt;em&gt;gizonago&lt;/em&gt; 'more man'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to remember about comparison is that it can be expressed by different means: morphologically, syntactically (for examples see Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about equative expressed morphologically (like in Welsh). Cuzzolin and Lehmann argue that it's not that common. They mention the following language groups and languages: Celtic languages, Finno-Ugric languages, Kartvelian languages, Tagalog, Indonesian, Greenlandic Eskimo, and Estonian. An example from Estonian is below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/P0nPw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Estonian equative&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-06-17T00:12:25.573" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T00:12:25.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2117" CreationDate="2012-06-17T15:21:38.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;English provides a good example (qualms expressed in response to Gaston Ümlaut notwithstanding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The expression of degree by &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;est&lt;/em&gt; is unique to adjectives.  (*&lt;em&gt;This one is bedder&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;This one is more of a bed&quot;.  *&lt;em&gt;I'm sleepering/sleepinger&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;I'm sleeping more&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjectives do not take verbal inflection. (*&lt;em&gt;I badded&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;I'm badding&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;I was/am being bad&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjectives do not take nominal inflection. (Reprising the example from your response to Gaston Ümlaut, one says &lt;em&gt;the poor&lt;/em&gt; not *&lt;em&gt;the poors&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjectives are subject to ordering restrictions (&lt;em&gt;I love small yellow tomatoes&lt;/em&gt; not *&lt;em&gt;I love yellow small tomatoes&lt;/em&gt;).  Such restrictions vanish if the adjectives are replaced with nominal or verbal &quot;counterparts&quot; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;I love these tomatoes for their smallness and yellowness / for their yellowness and smallness&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;I love that these tomatoes are small and yellow / are yellow and small&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are various constructions in which only adjectives are licit.  (E.g., &lt;em&gt;So friendly a cat&lt;/em&gt;, but *&lt;em&gt;So friend (of) a cat&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;So befriend (of) a cat&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, those are a few criteria from off the top of my head, some morphological, some syntactico-semantic.  There are doubtless more.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1110" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T15:21:38.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-17T16:05:30.387" Score="11" ViewCount="3385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to download a frequency list of English words that are most common in newspapers, books and magazines. It should contain at least 50.000 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to download such a list from the web? Could you help me start to have better overview where to search for frequency lists and orient better in this area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some requirements: For example, I'd like the list not to contain junk words, like names of certain celebrities. Furthermore, it should also contain phrasal verbs like &lt;em&gt;stand up&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;look for&lt;/em&gt;, correctly sorted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1111" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T09:56:43.733" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T06:24:04.623" Title="Where to find frequency list of English words from newspapers, books and magazines?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2124" CreationDate="2012-06-17T16:54:59.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can download the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/datasets&quot;&gt;datasets&lt;/a&gt; used by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;. These -datasets are compiled from the Google's collection of scanned books (so, magazines and newspapers are not included, AFAIK). If you are looking for frequencies of individual words only (and not, say, pairs, triples etc), you can download only the 1-gram datasets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the word frequencies are annotated by year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an example, here are the 30,000,000th and 30,000,001st lines from file 0 of the English 1-grams (googlebooks-eng-all-1gram-20090715-0.csv.zip):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;circumvallate   1978   313    215   85&#xA;circumvallate   1979   183    147   77&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first line tells us that in 1978, the word &quot;circumvallate&quot; (which means &quot;surround with a rampart or other fortification&quot;, in case you were wondering) occurred 313 times overall, on 215 distinct pages and in 85 distinct books from our sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these datasets are is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, you are free to share, remix and make commercial use of them, as long as you obey the conditions specified in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T16:54:59.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2012-06-17T19:50:23.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I greatly doubt that it could.  Evidence from acquisition suggests that children are primed to extract speech from ambient noise as neonates.  Acquisition of sign languages is commensurate with acquisition of spoken languages.  However, the neural basis of reading is so delayed that some professional advice is that little is lost, and something may be gained, by not teaching children to read until the age of seven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1110" LastActivityDate="2012-06-17T19:50:23.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2098" CreationDate="2012-06-18T02:04:34.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Role and Reference grammar framework, clause chaining is usually analyzed as a type of &lt;em&gt;cosubordination&lt;/em&gt; (a type of clause linkage where two non-finite clauses are both embedded in a matrix clause). Cosubordination exists alongside the more familiar clause-linking prototypes coordination and subordination. Complementization is a type of subordination construction where the verb of a finite matrix clause takes as one of its arguments a subordinate clause. Situating clause-chaining and complementization within the more general typology of clause-linkage, we see that these are instantiations of general clause-linkage strategies, all of which are well-attested cross-linguistically. For a language to have both clause-chaining and complementization then should not be unusual or surprising, then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chechen (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcgood/jcgood-Chechen_Clause-Combining.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Good 2003&lt;/a&gt; for a thorough presentation) has both clause-chaining as well as subordination, so it will probably fit the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-06-18T03:01:30.827" LastActivityDate="2012-06-18T03:01:30.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="552" CreationDate="2012-06-18T15:07:46.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the opportunity to talk about this issue with a Chinese linguist who is teaching a class I'm auditing at Fudan University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese-linguists have traditionally used the term &quot;apical vowel&quot; (and the otherwise unseen characters ɿ and ʅ) to describe the nucleus of the &quot;zhi chi shi ri&quot; and &quot;zi ci si&quot; syllables. The textbook we used was no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, these are often analyzed (or at least written as) syllabic fricatives by the linguistics community at large. I wasn't sure if my professor knew this, so I brought it up with him after class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was actually quite insistent that there is no frication in nuclei of these syllables (and was able to pronounce the syllables in a way consistent with that hypothesis). We eventually agreed that there was a fair amount of variation among Chinese people as to the realization of these phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if and when they're produced without frication, what &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; they? The retroflex one can be analyzed as a syllabic-retroflex-approximant. The apical one is harder, as both the front and the middle of the tongue are raised quite close to the roof of the mouth. A bit like a [ ɨ ] with the front of the tongue raised slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1115" LastActivityDate="2012-06-18T15:07:46.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1691" CreationDate="2012-06-18T15:37:18.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jogloran pointed out, preposition stranding (and how you can't do it in Chinese) is a good source of these. Here are several examples of relative clauses where the object of a preposition is being pulled out. Note that the Chinese grammar doesn't match the English (because the obvious way to do it is ungrammatical): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;carry a bag &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm carrying this bag for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我帮他拿这个包。 &lt;em&gt;I help him grab this CL bag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The person I carried this bag for is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我帮他拿这个包的人走了。 &lt;em&gt;I help him grab this CL bag REL person leave PFV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;come back &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just came back from France. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我刚从法国回来。 &lt;em&gt;I just from France return&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The country I just came back from uses the Euro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我刚从那里回来的国家用欧元。&lt;em&gt;I just from there return REL country use Euro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Literally &lt;strong&gt;hit a phone &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I called Apple (the computer company).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我给苹果公司打了电话。 &lt;em&gt;I give apple company hit PFV telephone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The company I called makes computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我打了电话的公司是制造电脑的。 &lt;em&gt;I hit PFV telephone REL company is make computer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;poke your arm &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I poked your arm with a chopstick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我用筷子戳你的胳膊。 &lt;em&gt;I use chopstick poke you POS arm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The chopstick I poked your arm with is on the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我用来戳你胳膊的筷子在地上。 &lt;em&gt;I use-come poke you (POS) arm REL chopstick located floor-on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sell my bike &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I sold him my bike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我给他卖我的自行车。 &lt;em&gt;I give him sell I POS bike&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The person I sold my bike to also lives in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我把自行车卖给(他?)的那个人也住在中国。&lt;em&gt;I OBJ-Marker bike sell give (him?) REL that CL person also live in China&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems there are a few different grammatical strategies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delete the preposition (as in #3); the meaning is still clear from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use a &quot;dummy variable&quot; as the object of the preposition (&lt;code&gt;他 = he&lt;/code&gt; in #1 and #5, &lt;code&gt;那里 = there&lt;/code&gt; in #2)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reverbalization of the preposition using &lt;code&gt;来 = come&lt;/code&gt; (e.g., #4)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;Notes on glosses:&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;CL = Classifier, as in the measure words in Chinese (e.g., 个).&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;REL = Relativizer; the 的 particle which links adjectives or relative clauses to nouns.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;PFV = Perfective; the 了 particle which marks for completedness of verbs. &#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1115" LastEditorUserId="1115" LastEditDate="2012-06-20T08:46:26.053" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T08:46:26.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2012-06-18T16:34:34.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was studying Generalized Quantifier Theory as part of a Formal Semantics class a few years ago in college, this came up. If I recall correctly, the professor said that there weren't any languages which had a quantifier that had an identical meaning to both, but for the number 3. I don't think there was any real backing up of that assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly there are no major languages that I know of that have this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastActivityDate="2012-06-18T16:34:34.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2084" CreationDate="2012-06-18T18:11:03.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, it's not that these languages are forever on a downward trend with respect to case markings, but rather that these things are cyclical. In general, languages seem to cycle between analytical (few morphological cases, as the question is concerned) and synthetic (many cases) over long spans of time. This happens as children analyze speech in slightly different ways than the adults they are exposed to. A quick example of this happening in earlier English is the word &lt;em&gt;napron&lt;/em&gt;. Adults referred to it as &lt;em&gt;a napron&lt;/em&gt;, and now we know it as &lt;em&gt;an apron&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find more about this by searching on terms &lt;em&gt;linguistic cycle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reanalysis.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that languages with robust case systems are not &quot;better&quot; at expressing ideas than those with sparse case systems. In English, for example, we can express the same ideas for which other languages require case markings by adding other words (generally prepositions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastEditorUserId="908" LastEditDate="2012-06-20T02:03:18.973" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T02:03:18.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-19T08:33:28.350" Score="10" ViewCount="1752" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another question about Italian grammar &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1905/italian-past-participle-ending-uto&quot;&gt;aside from this one&lt;/a&gt; which has bugged me for ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, when forming the &lt;em&gt;passato prossimo&lt;/em&gt; with an intransitive verb, we use forms of the auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt;; with transitive verbs, &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt; is used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt;, the past participle does not agree in number and gender with the verb's subject, but with &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt;, it does. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T04:12:06.203" Title="Italian passato prossimo agrees with subject with 'essere' but not 'avere'. Why?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2140" CreationDate="2012-06-19T09:55:17.393" Score="13" ViewCount="14179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused about the meaning of markedness. From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dominant term is known as the 'unmarked' term and the other, secondary one is the 'marked' term. In other words, it is the characterization of a &quot;normal&quot; linguistic unit (i.e. the unmarked term) compared to the unit's possible &quot;irregular&quot; forms (i.e. the marked term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that &quot;dominant&quot; means more frequent, but is it dominant inside one language or considering all natural languages together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1050" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:28:07.307" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T18:32:56.747" Title="What is markedness?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2146" CreationDate="2012-06-19T12:44:11.900" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition of markedness&lt;/a&gt;, says that unmarked terms are dominant over marked terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, is dominance assumed to stem from biological or cultural constraints (like some sounds are easier to produce than others)? Or has the definition of markedness no concern for the origin of this dominance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1050" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:29:32.300" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:29:32.300" Title="What is the origin of the dominance of unmarked terms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2142" CreationDate="2012-06-19T12:52:23.947" Score="4" ViewCount="1314" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition of markedness&lt;/a&gt;, unmarked terms can be consider the &quot;norm&quot;. So if there is something more &quot;normal&quot; about using unmarked terms, why would a language have marked terms at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they thought to occur by chance in a language? Or is there a pattern, a constraint, or a logical explanation to their existence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1050" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:27:12.553" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:27:12.553" Title="Why do marked terms exist at all?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2137" CreationDate="2012-06-19T13:19:28.013" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example, though probably not a very good one, is &quot;lioness&quot; vs. &quot;lion&quot;. &quot;Lion&quot; can refer to either male or female lions, whereas &quot;lioness&quot; refers to only female lions. In this example &quot;lioness&quot; is marked and &quot;lion&quot; is unmarked. This is because &quot;lion&quot; is the more general term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &quot;young&quot; vs. &quot;old&quot;. Here &quot;old&quot; is less obviously unmarked, while &quot;young&quot; is marked. This is a better example. Normally, when I ask a question, I ask &quot;How old is Jim?&quot;, because &quot;old&quot; is the unmarked term. This is rather general. I do not appear to be making a presumption about Jim. Conversely, if I asked &quot;How young is Jim?&quot;, that presupposes that Jim is young. This is because &quot;young&quot; is the marked term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So marked vs. unmarked means that two terms with contrasting meaning are asymmetrical in their usage and meaning, and that one of them is more general and dominant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course markedness varies across languages, there are surely some in which &quot;young&quot; is unmarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T12:19:58.767" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T12:19:58.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2012-06-19T13:29:48.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;the mark will make the term more specific. Similar to what occurs in biology where you have gender, species and variation of species (Vitis vinifera is &quot;grape&quot; but you may diferentiate grape as &quot;cabernet&quot;, &quot;merlot&quot;, if you are a specialist, specialty means, this detail is meaningful to you...). A biologist talking about reproduction in a group of animals will probably be in need to define how many 'he'-animals are there and how many 'she'-animals, for this information is meaningful to the context. If gender is not important in some context, there's no need for gender opposition.&#xA;The unmarked term is more extense, more abstract and can be used in more cases. It doesn't mean it is &quot;better&quot;, it depends on what information is important in a certain situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T13:29:48.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2012-06-19T13:31:20.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually a marked term has an unmarked opposite, such as &quot;happy&quot; (unmarked) vs. &quot;unhappy&quot; (marked), &quot;old&quot; (unmarked) vs. &quot;young&quot; (marked) and &quot;big&quot; (unmarked) vs. &quot;little&quot; (marked). So you don't generally have unmarked and marked terms meaning exactly the same thing, from what I can tell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For male/female distinctions (at least in English), unaffixed male terms are often unmarked, while affixed female terms are often marked, as can be see from &quot;man&quot;/&quot;woman&quot; and &quot;lion&quot;/&quot;lioness&quot; distinction, where &quot;man&quot; and &quot;lion&quot; are much more broad and dominant terms than &quot;woman&quot; and &quot;lioness&quot;, which are quite specific. Furthermore, singular forms are usually unmarked, while plural forms are often marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So usually, marked terms are not simply marked versions of unmarked terms, they have different meanings even when not considering their markedness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been theorised that markedness reduces cognitive complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T13:31:20.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2592" CreationDate="2012-06-19T15:21:53.487" Score="3" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it seems that most languages are used to facilitate communication, some languages seem to have secondary purposes as well. For instance, expatriates of a nation may continue to speak the language of their homeland to preserve a tie to that land (example: Chinese in the United States). Likewise, a language may be used by a group to isolate itself from mainstream society (example: Yiddish in Israel). What other purposes might languages serve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I am specifically referring to daily-use languages that do facilitate communication, but being used for a secondary purpose as well (as per the examples in the above paragraph). I am not referring to XML!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-19T16:14:29.147" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T14:46:51.033" Title="Which languages are used for purposes other than facilitating communication?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2012-06-19T15:42:47.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language is permeated by the cultural values in which it is immersed. Language may be determinant of what is and what is not acceptable in a situation. Just think about all the social constraints on politeness. These values define who is in and who is out of the group. How does one speak when giving a lecture? How does one speak when talking to his/her mom? The use of language will be determinant of professional and emotional acceptance. If you talk to your girlfriend like an academic lecturer she may be offended (or turned on by it, who knows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that comes to my mind now is Benveniste's comment on &quot;shifters&quot;, like &quot;me&quot;, &quot;you&quot;, words that depend on the context for the determination of meaning. If you say &quot;me&quot;, it is one person. If I say &quot;me&quot; it is another. Benveniste says that these &quot;shifter&quot; words are important and exist not only because it is a kind of &quot;shortcut&quot; for a name, but because of the socializating factor: as you say &quot;me&quot; in a dialogue, and the other person uses this word as well, it is a way of one person seeing the other as a fellow (it is like 'walking on your shoes').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of an specific language with some purpose, Esperanto, comes to my mind, as a language pretending to be universal and non-discriminating (almost a paradoxical statement). There's the experimental language E-Prime, which pretends to say things whitout using the verb &quot;to be&quot;, as this would lack objectivity; E-Prime would be a statement on &quot;language should be information&quot;, interestingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your focus on use of language to avoid communication, this happens whenever people don't share a language. Those who share it will be communicating, and who doesn't dominate the code will be left out of the group. (adolescents using slangs keep their parents out of it, for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-19T16:31:00.160" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T16:31:00.160" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2138" CreationDate="2012-06-19T15:48:56.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's leave aside the definitional reading -- the dominance of unmarked terms is a consequence of what &lt;em&gt;&quot;unmarked term&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;means&lt;/strong&gt;. If some phenomenon is dominant in a language (which is an empirical matter), then it's unmarked in the transcription of that language (which is a theoretical matter). And &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the other way around; data comes before theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other sense of the question seems to ask why those phenomena -- whatever they are -- that &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; dominant in a language (and therefore unmarked in its transcription) &lt;strong&gt;became&lt;/strong&gt; dominant. The question is thus not about markedness at all; it's about individual language history, typology, and the comparative effectiveness of structures in a given language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, let us say, a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of variation in these matters from one speech group to another (never mind &lt;em&gt;from one &lt;strong&gt;language&lt;/strong&gt; to another&lt;/em&gt;), and while there is plenty of theorizing about source and causes, there is no agreement in practice or in principle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markedness is not an empirical but a &lt;strong&gt;typographical&lt;/strong&gt; convention -- like the phonemic principle, it mandates using only a minimum of necessary symbols in language transcription. If something is predictable, it needs no marking; economy of marking requires that only &lt;strong&gt;unpredictable&lt;/strong&gt; features be actually marked in transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markedness thus has little if any connection to origins. If it did, linguists wouldn't be able to talk about it usefully, because the origins are in dispute, and we'd just be arguing about theory, instead of processing data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-06-19T15:48:56.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2160" CreationDate="2012-06-20T03:45:59.220" Score="9" ViewCount="1662" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider sentences like this one.   &quot;Reluctant to place the dog and the children in the same houses as caretakers affected by the slobbering sickness, the authorities decreed that said children would be placed in the care of the Church of the Fiery Severed Fist of Our Beloved Deity while said dog would be placed in a large forest where the elimination of their waste would no longer constitute a public nuisance.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first blush, &quot;said&quot; seems to function as a determiner in the last sentence.  &quot;the said children*&quot; or &quot;a said dog*&quot; are both ungrammatical, although &quot;the aforementioned children&quot; is perfectly okay.  This particular sense of &quot;said&quot; does not appear to belong to an open class.  Participles that premodify nouns can be, and often must be, preceded by determiners, as in the phrases &quot;the dwindling candles&quot; or &quot;a rotating planet.&quot;  However, we don't see &quot;the said candles*&quot; or &quot;the said rotating planet*.&quot;   We do see &quot;said dwindling candles&quot; or &quot;said rotating planet.&quot;   So &quot;said,&quot; in this context, looks like a determiner.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm well aware that I could be missing something here, and so pose this question to the group.   Is &quot;said&quot; really a determiner in the contexts that I've just mentioned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T01:44:41.980" Title="Can the word &quot;said&quot; be a determiner in written English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2151" CreationDate="2012-06-20T07:10:27.557" Score="14" ViewCount="12080" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a mora?   I tried to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; that answers this question, but found it difficult to understand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ditto with the related LSE question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1951/111&quot;&gt;Is the concept of syllables pronunciation-relevant in languages with mora-based pronunciation?&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I decided to ask the question here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T13:45:00.483" Title="What is a mora?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2155" CreationDate="2012-06-20T07:58:45.343" Score="13" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;If two syllables in Mandarin have the same vowels but different tones, can the syllables be said to rhyme according to native speakers?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was tempted to ask this question about all tone languages, but realized that the criteria for rhyming might vary from language to language for all I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will gladly read answers to this question as it relates to other tone languages.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-22T07:34:46.310" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T07:34:46.310" Title="If two syllables in Mandarin have the same vowels but different tones, can the syllables be said to rhyme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;rhyming&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2012-06-20T09:30:20.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a sound change process (that can be seen as compensatory) where the merging of phonemes causes what used to be conditioned variation to be contrastive. I'll use an example from Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Middle Chinese had 4 tonal categories (although one of the &quot;tones&quot; was really just that the syllable ended in a stop consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Middle Chinese also had a voicing distinction. The voiced register included syllables that started with vowels, sonorants, and voiced consonants. The unvoiced register syllables started with unvoiced-unaspirated and unvoiced-aspirated consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the phonetic realizations of the tones was influenced by the voicing of the initial consonants. This was not contrastive though, just conditioned variation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most Chinese 'dialects' have lost truly voiced initial stops. However, in some of the daughter languages, this caused the (formerly conditioned) variation in tone to become contrastive, resulting in 8 tonal categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Middle Chinese, &lt;code&gt;分&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;焚&lt;/code&gt; had the same final and tone, but &lt;code&gt;分&lt;/code&gt; started with a &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;焚&lt;/code&gt; with a &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Cantonese, &lt;code&gt;分&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;焚&lt;/code&gt; have the same initial and final, but &lt;code&gt;分&lt;/code&gt; is 1st tone and &lt;code&gt;焚&lt;/code&gt; is 4th tone. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1115" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T09:30:20.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2148" CreationDate="2012-06-20T13:00:59.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently took a phonology course where Mora Theory was briefly mentioned but we didn't go in depth so your question piqued my interest. I did some light googling and I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.fju.edu.tw/phono/farrah/Moraic%20Phonology.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this set of lecture notes&lt;/a&gt; which I think does a pretty good job explaining it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladefoged (1982: 226 in Vance 1987) states that &amp;quot;A mora is a unit of timing. Each mora takes about the same length of time to say&amp;quot; (p.62)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if  I am understanding the issue correctly, onsets are not assigned a mora because they do not significantly add to the pronunciation time. That is, the time required to pronounce &amp;quot;ah&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;bah&amp;quot; are not significantly different. That amount of time is defined as one mora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sitting at my computer trying various onset/vowel combinations to see if this is true and anecdotally it seems to check out. (Incidentally, it would be a good idea to make sure no one else is home before trying this yourself)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some things take extra time to pronounce. Long vowels are longer than short vowels. Codas (post-vowel consonants) take more time to pronounce. Thus, such syllables are 2 moras because the syllable can be divided into two basic units, each taking time to pronounce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the onset/vowel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the vowel continuation or the coda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps clear up your issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="32736" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T13:45:00.483" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T13:45:00.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2148" CreationDate="2012-06-20T13:30:49.767" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what aspect of the Wikipedia explanation you find unclear, but here's an analogy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the government asks a research group to figure out &quot;how much the Lincoln Tunnel gets used by people to enter Manhattan from New Jersey in a 24-hour period&quot;. There are two obvious ways to obtain this measurement; one could count the &lt;strong&gt;number of vehicles&lt;/strong&gt; that enter the tunnel in a 24-hour period, or one could count the &lt;strong&gt;number of &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; riding in the vehicles that enter the tunnel during a 24-hour period. Either metric could be relevant, depending on what the government is trying to focus on. If they care about factors that contribute to street traffic, then the vehicle-counting metric might be more appropriate. If they are more concerned with the actual population density of Manhattan during the day and how much of it is affected by out-of-towners, the person-counting metric might be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In phonology, &lt;strong&gt;syllables are like cars and morae are like people&lt;/strong&gt;. Every car on the road must contain at least one person (the driver), but a car can also contain multiple people. Likewise, every syllable contains minimally one mora, but it may contain two or even three. Certain phonological processes are dependent on syllable count and some are dependent on mora count; some are dependent on both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studying Japanese is a great way to become familiar with the concept of a mora. As the section on Japanese in the Wikipedia article mentions, most hiragana symbols correspond to a single mora (an exception is when one symbol is followed by one of the &quot;little&quot; gliding kana ゃ,　ゅ and　ょ--in this case the two symbols together correspond to a single mora), so that &lt;em&gt;Nippon&lt;/em&gt;, which is written with the four hiragana symbols にっぽん, contains four morae. Basically, because the hiragana system gives syllable-final consonants their own symbols (ん for a syllable-final nasal and っ for a geminate consonant that anticipates the initial consonant of a following syllable) but syllable-initial consonants are just encoded as part of a CV syllable represented by a single symbol (な for &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;,　か for &lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), the writing system encodes an asymmetry that is quite common cross-linguistically: nuclear vowels and coda consonants contribute to syllable weight in Japanese but not onset consonants. So &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; are &quot;light&quot;/monomoraic syllables, and &lt;em&gt;nai&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kan&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;kat&lt;/em&gt; (as in the geminated &lt;em&gt;katta&lt;/em&gt;) are &quot;heavy&quot;/bimoraic syllables. (At the risk of stretching the analogy too far, onset consonants, when they are present, are kind of like pets that are riding in the car. They don't get counted as people entering the tunnel!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of a process that is sensitive to both the syllable and the mora in Japanese, consider pitch accent assignment. In the &quot;standard&quot; Japanese dialect, a pitch accent is associated with the initial mora of a syllable. So with three-syllable words, there are three possible accent patterns for accented words--initial, medial, and final accent (of course words can be unaccented as well). It doesn't matter if the syllables are light or heavy. But if the accented syllable is heavy, the high &quot;tone&quot; (trying to stay pre-theoretical here) of the accent is constrained to associate with the initial mora of the accented syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope at least part of this explanation clears things up for you a bit! Let me know if there is anything in particular that is still unclear and I will try to improve my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;strong&gt;*UPDATE TO ORIGINAL ANSWER:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a point of clarification--the system described above for Japanese is a language-specific one. For example, in some languages that count morae, coda consonants do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; get counted as being moraic. And, as @jlawler points out in his comment under @acattle's answer, the phonetic realizations of syllable weight contrasts are not the same in all languages (i.e. a heavier syllable--one with more morae--may &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; take longer to pronounce than a lighter one), so the &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; of a mora cannot be dependent on its phonetic behavior. Below is a list of possible moraic segments (in the rime of the syllable) and some example languages that use those criteria for moraicity (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/346-0999/346-0999-MOREN-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morén's 1999 dissertation&lt;/a&gt;, p.16):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels (Khalkha Mongolian, Yidiɲ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels + Glides (Gumbaynggir)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels + Non-glottal Sonorants (Kwakwala)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels + All Sonorants (Lithuanian, Tiv)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels + All Consonants except Plain Stops (Metropolitan New York&#xA;  English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels + All Consonants except Aspirated Stops (Icelandic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All Segments (Latin, Arabic dialects, Aklan, Koya, Imdlawn Tashlhiyt&#xA;  Berber)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-07-20T15:15:52.863" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T15:15:52.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2148" CreationDate="2012-06-20T13:36:35.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages have some kind of word-accentual system, where one position in each word is more prominent than other positions in the same word. The prominent position(s) may have some or all of these properties: higher pitch, longer duration, greater number of contrasts, louder or more forceful pronunciation. When the final property applies, the language is usually said to have stress accent. In these cases the most prominent position is said to have primary stress, and other positions may have secondary stress if they are more prominent than the least prominent syllable, but less prominent than the most prominent syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When studying the word-accent system of a language, you would like to be able to predict which syllable has primary stress, and which if any have secondary stress, and this often involves counting some number of syllables from the edge of a word.&#xA;In Polish, for example, you count from the end of the word and then stress (in most words) falls on the penultimate syllable. But there are some languages where the counting is complicated by the fact that some syllables (especially syllables with a long vowel or a coda) seem to &quot;count as two&quot; for the purpose of assigning primary and secondary accent. So that your analysis can still be simple and easy to follow, you just invent a new type of timing unit, the mora, and say that a double-counting syllable is made up of two morae, and a single-counting syllable is made up of one mora. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T13:36:35.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2012-06-20T16:06:33.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker, I'd say yes to that; 'BUT' they never have to be in same tone to rhyme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1122" LastActivityDate="2012-06-20T16:06:33.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2012-06-21T03:37:12.907" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the meaning of &quot;&lt;em&gt;can be said to rhyme&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Judgments about the acceptability of rhyming really only make sense in a particular artistic context. I'm using classical Chinese poetry and modern Mandarin pop songs as examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Classical Chinese Poetry&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules about rhyming in classical Chinese poetry are &lt;strong&gt;complicated&lt;/strong&gt;. Syllables which rhymed in Middle-Chinese often don't in Mandarin (and vice versa); in order to even assess whether a poem rhymes properly, you need to look up all the characters' Middle-Chinese tones and so forth. Also, since this style of poetry was being written well after the vernacular pronunciation had changed substantially, the &lt;strong&gt;writers&lt;/strong&gt; had to look this stuff up in order to write poems that rhymed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Of the 13-yuán rime] As a so-called 险韵 “treacherous rime,” it was often assigned as the required rhyme on official poetry examinations, so that nervous candidates would mistakenly include words in an&lt;sub&gt;3b&lt;/sub&gt; in the rhyme scheme. Or they might include words in an&lt;sub&gt;3a&lt;/sub&gt; in a poem whose rhyme scheme was limited to an&lt;sub&gt;3b&lt;/sub&gt; and an&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;. In either case, they would be considered to have 出韵 “left the rhyme-scheme”.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;...&lt;/strong&gt; In late Manchu times, 王闓運 (1833-1916) wrote a poem teasing his colleague 高心夔 (1835-1883), who twice received low scores on the official exams when the appearance of 13-yuán caused him to “leave the rhyme-scheme.” Wáng wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;平生兩四等，該死十三元！&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Two fourth-place finishes in one lifetime — to hell with 13-yuán!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more complete exposition of this, read page 29 to 53 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://brannerchinese.com/dpb/publications/Branner_MedievalSpelling.pdf&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mandarin Pop Songs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pop songs rhyme. Mostly. Except when they don't. It's pretty much the same as in English pop songs. I did manage to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/more/chinese-pop-songs/old-boy-by-chopsticks-brothers.html&quot;&gt;find&lt;/a&gt; a couple of approximate rhymes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;转眼过去多年世间多少离合悲欢&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;zhuan3 yan3 guo4 qu4 duo1 nian2 shi4 jian1 duo1 shao3 li2 he2 bei1 huan1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;曾经志在四方少年 羡慕南飞的雁&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ceng2 jing1 zhi4 zai4 si4 fang1 shao4 nian2  xian4 mu4 nan2 fei1 de yan4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;各自奔前程的身影 匆匆渐行渐远&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ge4 zi4 ben1 qian2 cheng2 de shen1 ying3  cong1 cong1 jian4 xing2 jian4 yuan3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;未来在哪里平凡 啊谁给我答案&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wei4 lai2 zai4 na3 li3 ping2 fan2  a shui2 gei3 wo3 da2 an4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, that despite the pinyin, huan and yuan do not have the same vowel. Also, yan and an don't either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1115" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T03:37:12.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-21T07:17:57.133" Score="11" ViewCount="1682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently writing a term paper where I am comparing &lt;code&gt;if... then...&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;only if...&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;if... only then...&lt;/code&gt; statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that &lt;code&gt;only if p q&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;if p, only then q&lt;/code&gt; have the same truth conditions (namely &lt;code&gt;q implies p&lt;/code&gt;). Additionally, unlike &lt;code&gt;if... then...&lt;/code&gt; statements, both show a preference for subject-verb inversion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Mary tells John (then) it will ruin the surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*If Mary tells John (then) will it ruin the surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if Mary tells John will it ruin the surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*Only if Mary tells John it will ruin the surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Mary tells John, only then will it ruin the surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*If Mary tells John, only then it will ruin the surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are differences. While &lt;code&gt;if... then...&lt;/code&gt; seems to allow &amp;quot;then&amp;quot; to be elided at will, &lt;code&gt;only if...&lt;/code&gt; seems to strictly ban &amp;quot;then&amp;quot; while &lt;code&gt;if... only then...&lt;/code&gt; seems to strictly require it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Mary tells John (then) it will ruin the surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;?Only if Mary tells John then will it ruin the surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*If Mary tells John, only will it ruin the surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that &lt;code&gt;only if...&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;if... only then...&lt;/code&gt; share the same syntactic structure but undergo different overt raisings and that the differences in &amp;quot;then&amp;quot; insertion are due to those raisings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; - According to the link in Alex B.'s comment, &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; is a complementizer and the related CP is simply adjuncted on to a VP. That VP is embedded in an IP (where &amp;quot;then&amp;quot; is an inflectional). Also, the CP headed by &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; has the potential to raise to SpecIP. So far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I am assuming that the &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; phrase must scope immediately over the &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; CP because if it scopes immediately over IP then we incorrectly predict the following struture is possible:&lt;/s&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am guessing that the &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; phrase must come immediately over the IP since it is the only way to explain the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;only (?then) q if p&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(You should) only call the police if you see something suspicious&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you see something suspicious, only then (should you) call the police&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still leaves me with the problem of what the &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; phrase is. It is modifying an IP, thus cannot be adjectival nor adverbial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I still have the issue of &amp;quot;then&amp;quot; support. This isn't that big a deal. It seems analoguous to the problem of why C is null for non-embedded CP (in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE&lt;/strong&gt; - Although this is related to my term paper, this is not the topic of my term paper. Still, I understand if some people do not want to give overt answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T04:25:12.310" Title="Do &quot;only if...&quot; and &quot;if... only then...&quot; have the same LF representation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19977" CreationDate="2012-06-21T14:15:28.387" Score="16" ViewCount="2368" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the descendants of the Latin word &lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;thus, so, or just like that&quot;), only the Portuguese word &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt; ends with a nasal consonant. Actually, in modern Portuguese, it ends with a nasal vowel, [sĩ], which must have developed from [sim] by assimilation. Compare this with its &quot;sister&quot; words, taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sic#Latin&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, which have all dropped the final [k]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Aromanian: shi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;French: si, ainsi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Italian: sì, così&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Romanian: și&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Spanish: sí , así&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Catalan: així&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest word is the French (no surprise, given we are talking about nasalization) &lt;em&gt;ainsi&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from Latin (&lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;So where did this nasal at the end in Portuguese &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt; come from? Could it be a further development from French? Something like &lt;em&gt;ainsi&lt;/em&gt; becoming &lt;em&gt;assim&lt;/em&gt; (and later, &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt;), by metathesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-22T07:31:07.237" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T21:20:13.927" Title="Where did the nasal sound in the Portuguese word &quot;sim&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-21T15:08:44.380" Score="3" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on &lt;em&gt;document level sentiment analysis&lt;/em&gt; over the last year. Document level sentiment analysis provides the sentiment of the complete document. For example - The text &quot;&lt;em&gt;Nokia is good but vodafone sucks big time&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would have a negative polarity associated with it as it would be agnostic to the entities Nokia and Vodafone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would it be possible to get entity level sentiment, like positive for Nokia but negative for Vodafone? Are there any research papers providing a solution to such problems ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1124" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-21T16:35:57.073" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T23:28:06.127" Title="Entity level Sentiment Analysis" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2147" CreationDate="2012-06-21T19:14:38.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a noun phrase without a determiner is already fairly common in certain registers of English -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=6&amp;amp;ved=0CF0QFjAF&amp;amp;url=http://www.media.uoa.gr/lectures/linguistic_archives/mda0405/notes/Bell_Media_and_Language.pdf&amp;amp;ei=oXHjT-PkHMXs2QWWy8XfCw&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHZ1QKF7S2gUotL43exWyiNUNa_5w&amp;amp;sig2=sdA0-LB6uwG9zcATklr1Ag&quot;&gt;notably newspaperese&lt;/a&gt;.  I think that there you're also more likely to find formal-souding words like &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/169800?redirectedFrom=said&amp;amp;&quot;&gt;OED Online gives &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; simply as an adjective (ignoring irrelevant senses) meaning &quot;&lt;strong&gt;named or mentioned before&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In the examples they give, &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; is always used with a preceding determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it's consistent with both of the above to say that:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(1) &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; is just an adjective in this case and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(2) some registers of English allow NPs to occur without Dets more frequently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thus leading to NPs like &quot;said children&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-06-21T19:14:38.297" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2147" CreationDate="2012-06-22T05:03:13.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, a couple of words on the origin of “said” in the sense of “above-mentioned”.&#xA;The OED gives the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;†8. To speak of, mention, enumerate, describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?c1225  (1200)    Ancrene Riwle (Cleo. C.vi) (1972) 256   &lt;em&gt;Lichte gultes beteð þus ananrich [read richt] bi ow seoluen. &amp;amp; þach seggeð ham inschrift.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c1390  (1350)    Joseph of Arimathie (1871) l. 70,   &lt;em&gt;I am not worþi to seyn moni of his werkes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a1400–50   Alexander 5551   &lt;em&gt;And oþir sellis he saȝe at sai wald he neuir.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c1540  (1400)    Destr. Troy 5204   &lt;em&gt;The same yle I said you, Cicill is calt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the examples above, the verb “say” in this sense is used transitively, i.e. it takes a direct object. All dictionaries of Modern English mark this dated use as  legalese or used humorously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This agrees with data on “said” – the earliest quote in the OED is this one (by the way, note “þe” before “said”):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a1300   Cursor M. 14978 (Cott.) ,   &lt;em&gt;Son þar went disciplis tua Vnto þe said [Gött. þis said] castel.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, all of the nine examples in the OED do have a determiner before “said”. The tenth example is the absolutive use of “said”, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;em&gt;... the said were sometimes lurking about the Islands of St. John.&lt;/em&gt;” (1648)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one important thing to remember about legalese. As Garner argues, “&lt;strong&gt;It is a convention in legal writing to omit both definite and indefinite articles&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine - Alex B.] before words such as plaintiff, defendant, petitioner, respondent, appellant, and appellee. It is almost as if these designations in legal writing become names, or proper nouns, that denote the person or persons referred to. The convention is a useful one because cutting even such slight words can lead to leaner, more readable sentences” (Garner 2011 :79).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, “There is a contagious tendency to in legal writing to omit articles before nouns, perhaps on the analogy of the special legal convention for party names. … There is a tendency, for example, in tax cases to refer to taxpayer without an article, as if it were a proper name” (p. 79)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Garner gives the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Federal law also required that taxpayer [read &lt;em&gt;the taxpayer&lt;/em&gt;] make contributions ….”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In approaching solution [read &lt;em&gt;the solution&lt;/em&gt;] to this problem we must look ….”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We conclude that although the award as remitted by trial judge [read &lt;em&gt;the trial judge&lt;/em&gt;] was generous ….”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about “said” used in legalese. Garner does mention that it is used as a substitute for &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;, or any other deictic or “pointing” word. Used for such a word, &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; typifies legalese and is often parodied by non-lawyers. And lawyers occasionally fall into self-parody” (p. 793). Here’s one of his examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A considerable number of persons were attracted to &lt;em&gt;said square&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;said meeting&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;said bombs&lt;/em&gt; and other fireworks which were being exploded there. A portion of the center of the square about 40 to 60 feet was roped off by the police of &lt;em&gt;said Chelsea&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;said bombs&lt;/em&gt; or shells were fired off within the space so inclosed [sic!], and no spectators were allowed to be within said inclosure [sic!]. The plaintiffs were lawfully in &lt;em&gt;said highway&lt;/em&gt; at the time of the explosion of &lt;em&gt;said mortar&lt;/em&gt;, and near &lt;em&gt;said ropes&lt;/em&gt;, and were in the exercise of due care” (1892).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I asked you earlier about your theory/definition of the determiner. It is important to know such things because some linguists understand determiners as a lexical category (determiner1 in Chalker and Weiner 1998). There are linguists who understand determiners as a functional category (e.g. the authors of CGEL, determiner2 in Chalker and Weiner 1998), and that is why they also have determinatives. Under the latter proposal, which I happen to agree with, a determiner is not necessarily a determinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of CGEL give the following three tests that help us distinguish between adjectives and determinatives in English (note that these tests may not work in other languages, esp. the first test).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determinatives cannot combine with articles (*&lt;em&gt;a this book&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determinatives can be used with a single count NP (&lt;em&gt;one book&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determinatives can be used in a partitive construction (&lt;em&gt;one of them&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a word doesn’t need to pass all of those three tests to be considered a determinative – e.g. “one” doesn’t pass the first test (&lt;em&gt;the one problem that remains&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite often the same word can belong to both word classes, adjectives and determinatives, e.g. “sufficient”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sufficient as a determinative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;em&gt;the sufficient helpers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sufficient of helpers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sufficient as an adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a sufficient reason&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that “said” may behave like a determinative in legalese in writings of certain people (in whose idiolect &amp;quot;said note&amp;quot; is fine but &amp;quot;the said note&amp;quot; is not) - if there are such writers. However, in this case you’d have to address the following two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How consistent are those writers in omitting articles before “said” followed by a singular count noun? Is &amp;quot;the said&amp;quot; followed by an NP ungrammatical in their idiolect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you want to have the same word belong to different word classes in different registers in your theory of syntax? I personally would say yes to the second question. As Walter Bisang argues, &lt;strong&gt;there are languages where “lexical items are not necessarily preclassified for syntactic categories”&lt;/strong&gt; (Bisang 2011: 293).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T01:44:41.980" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1138" CreationDate="2012-06-22T10:03:34.337" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt at a universal set of 12 parts-of-speech tags. I do not know if it is used in any online systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2086&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset&lt;/a&gt;, by Slav Petrov, Dipanjan Das and Ryan McDonald.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1127" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-08-06T19:52:57.983" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T19:52:57.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2012-06-22T17:50:35.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language has this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Valli, Clayton &amp;amp; Lucas, Ceil. 1995. Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. page 101&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1128" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T17:50:35.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2012-06-22T20:49:33.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within the school of quantitative linguistics there is a kind of measurement methodology for dialects. A scientist called Hans Goebl used surveys to metricate differences between certain dialects inside of France. Here is the website for it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dialectometry.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dialectometry.com/&lt;/a&gt;. The idea and methodology behind it is described in his article &quot;On the nature of tension in dialectal networks&quot; in &quot;Systems: New Paradigms for the Human Sciences&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="74" LastActivityDate="2012-06-22T20:49:33.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2112" CreationDate="2012-06-23T01:46:54.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that Hindi has a generic form that accommodates any number at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;Number Hindi word  Adj&#xA;2      do          donõ&#xA;3      teen        teenõ&#xA;4      chaar       chaarõ&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as the numbers get bigger, it appears&lt;sup&gt;§&lt;/sup&gt; to be more idiomatic to switch to a form that's similar to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;tum chaarõ ladke mere saath aaoo.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All four of you boys come with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;tum saare chalis ladke mere saath aaoo.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All forty of you boys come with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;§&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;mdash; I speak the language fluently, but I'm not a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-06-23T01:52:11.740" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T01:52:11.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2012-06-23T05:35:34.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmmm .... it has been/is common for educators of deaf children to demand that their charges learn the written form of language in place of the spoken language that they have no access to.  This is/has often been accompanied by extreme measures taken to assure that the child NEVER SIGNS! (ask any deaf person for horror stories about this).  By all accounts, this practice has been a miserable failure. So, no.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reading process depends on the use of Phonemic Awareness to perform Phonological Recoding, both of which require a pre-existing language for analysis.  Extracting “minimal distinctive units” from writing doesn't seem possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a good reference:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=5&amp;amp;ved=0CHYQFjAE&amp;amp;url=http://grammar.ucsd.edu/mayberrylab/papers/GoldinMeadow&amp;amp;Mayberry01.pdf&amp;amp;ei=L1DlT7TYJI6c8gTElPmgAQ&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNFxf_qct2HU8VcpgoUZ6KIxw4h4-Q&amp;amp;sig2=Jks-_npH4eqBAGE7NIkwrQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1128" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T05:35:34.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2012-06-23T05:50:32.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem with signing is that  you can't talk to a person without first getting their attention.  If they don't actively look at you and attend to what you are saying, communication is impossible.  Think of all the times you have yelled at/spoken to someone who may not even been aware of your presence; or public address systems, that communicate with everyone within earshot (not eyeshot) Signing is a co-operative venture; speaking is unilateral. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1128" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T05:50:32.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2171" CreationDate="2012-06-23T18:33:41.080" Score="11" ViewCount="2676" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all the languages I know, at least one of the following aspects is complex/difficult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alphabet&lt;/em&gt;: Complex meaning a large alphabet like in Chinese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;: Complex meaning that, for example, small differences in pronunciation can lead to large differences in meaning as in Chinese, or that it is hard/impossible to infer a word's pronunciation from its spelling and vice versa as in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; : Complex meaning, for example, redundant information like conjugation plus personal pronouns as in German, or a complex mapping between grammatical concepts (case, number, time, ...) and change in word forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many languages seem to be &quot;simple&quot; in at least one of these aspects: Romanian, for example, has a complex grammar but simple pronunciation. Chinese languages, on the other hand, are said to have simple grammar (due to what I think are called invariant lexemes) but complex pronunciation (due to the usage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tone_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;tone&lt;/a&gt;). Hence it seems plausible that there are languages which are simple in all of these (and other) aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any &quot;simple&quot; evolved languages?&lt;/strong&gt; And if not, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="413" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T22:20:04.393" Title="Are there any &quot;simple&quot; languages?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2012-06-23T19:58:11.697" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rotokas has a small phonetic inventory, but otherwise, like most languages of small isolated communities, the language is mind bendingly complex with respect to morphology and syntax. Piraha may have a smaller phonetic inventory, but it is tonal, so for a non-tonal language speaker, it would still be considered fairly hard to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest languages are the creoles. They typically do not use tone, are unlikely to have difficult phonemes (like clicks), are likely to be isolating (simple morphology) and have simple syntax. Derek Bickertons &quot;Bastard Tongues&quot; and McWhorter books on creoles are a good place to find more about how creoles in many senses are full languages, yet simpler than languages that were not born of a recent contact situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lingua francas are also simpler than average because large numbers of people using lingua francas must speak with people who use the language as second language and this tends to put an upper limit on how many unnecessary complexities the speech community tolerates. I got this factoid from &quot;Through the Language Glass&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian and Chinese are both lingua francas (Romanian used to be latin, at which time it was a very typical lingua franca spoken over a huge area by people where it wasn't their first language-- now Romanian is slowly becoming less like a lingua franca), so if they appear simple, I would posit that it is because of the dymanics of lingua francas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-06-24T20:42:08.093" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T20:42:08.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1870" CreationDate="2012-06-23T23:03:07.327" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jakobson in a 1969 article theorized that the words for 'mum' and 'dad' across languages were indeed based on the first sounds an infant produced. Thus they would constitute an important exception to the rule that language is arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also noted just like you that it applied clearly to &lt;strong&gt;[m]&lt;/strong&gt; and 'mum', and less precisely to &lt;strong&gt;[d]&lt;/strong&gt; , &lt;strong&gt;[p]&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;[t]&lt;/strong&gt; (as in the english &lt;em&gt;dad&lt;/em&gt;, the french &lt;em&gt;papa&lt;/em&gt; or the polish &lt;em&gt;tata&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell our 'mum' is so natural she's not arbitrary but our 'dad' is already culture-dependent ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in 1969 Benveniste tackled precisely the question of 'dad' in the chapter 'kinship' of his fantastic &quot;Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions&quot;. Benveniste focused primarily on the drift of the semantics of these words in relationship with each other, but his etymological knowledge was very famous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 1: He points out that although more formal forms like &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt; are sound-related to forms like &lt;em&gt;dad&lt;/em&gt; today, one isn't derived from the other in modern times, but rather that they evolved through the ages in parallel. He notes the Gothic &lt;em&gt;atta&lt;/em&gt; was the norm to designate the father and that &lt;em&gt;fadar&lt;/em&gt; was almost never used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 2: This form &lt;em&gt;atta&lt;/em&gt; in turn comes almost certainly from an Indo-European root because almost identical forms are found in Latin and Greek. He also connects it with Slavic 'otic' via a hypothetic compound form *&lt;em&gt;otta&lt;/em&gt; + *&lt;em&gt;ik&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. 'father' + 'qualifier').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also tells you something about etymology methods: either you already have a trace of the change (as in step 1, where the Gothic form is attested in old corpora) or you try to reconstruct a hypothetical proto-form by comparing related languages and making certain assumptions as in step 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1132" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-23T23:26:21.060" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T23:26:21.060" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2159" CreationDate="2012-06-23T23:28:06.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental method for sentiment analysis relies on precompiled polarity lexicons. (This in itself is questionable because word meaning is heavily context-dependent but it provides good approximate results).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refining it to phrase-level opinions simply involves combining such a lexicon with a sentence parser. There is indeed a lot of research going on on this subject, mainly because it's well funded. Indeed sentiment analysis is one of the areas of NLP where business application is straightforward, since our corporate world loves to know what consumers think of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a reference paper, you can have a look at [McDonald, Hannan, Neylon, Wells and Reynar 2007 - &lt;em&gt;Structured models for fine-to-coarse sentiment analysis&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1132" LastActivityDate="2012-06-23T23:28:06.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2012-06-24T15:02:14.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Esperanto is relatively simple, as befits a planned language, and it has, for example, no indefinite article and only one definite article. Despite this relative simplicity, it still needs to be learned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1134" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-24T20:13:17.023" LastActivityDate="2012-06-24T20:13:17.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-25T00:01:11.667" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder which variant of reconstruction of this word, meaning &quot;sheep&quot; in PIE is the correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beekes gives &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;h₃eu̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Fortson gives &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;h₂ou̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Both are respected scholars, Fortson's source is the later. Who is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-09-21T15:53:03.350" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T15:53:03.350" Title="h₂ou̯is or h₃eu̯is" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2177" CreationDate="2012-06-25T13:15:01.027" Score="12" ViewCount="636" Body="&lt;p&gt;In forms like &lt;em&gt;Claudio's house&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Claudio's dogs&lt;/em&gt;, are there languages in which the &lt;em&gt;Claudio's&lt;/em&gt; would change depending on gender and number of the houses or dogs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1136" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T00:06:42.537" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T20:28:00.007" Title="Are there any languages where the genitive case changes according to its object?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2012-06-25T15:46:00.960" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Romani, the genitive case marker looks something like -kVrV or -gVrV, where V depends on the gender (and I believe number) of the object. So for instance, you have &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;me phral-es-kere         kher-es-koro     vudar&#xA;my brother-OBL-GEN.NEUT  house-OBL-GEN.M  door&#xA;'The door of my brother's house'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where kher is neuter and vudar is masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1138" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-25T17:23:36.640" LastActivityDate="2012-06-25T17:23:36.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2012-06-25T23:50:28.020" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindi and Urdu, the genitive particle is &lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; (masc), &lt;em&gt;ki&lt;/em&gt; (fem), agreeing with the possessed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-06-25T23:50:28.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2012-06-26T03:46:28.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon, there is an associative morpheme which agrees with the possessed noun in a genitive construction. In the most minimal type of agreement, the associative marker is a floating low tone for noun classes 1 and 9, and a floating high tone otherwise. Noni, a Beboid language,  has eighteen different genitive markers, depending on the noun class of the possessed noun (&lt;a href=&quot;http://gsil.sc-ling.org/pubs/SCOPILS_6_7_8_9/Noni_grammatical_structure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hyman 1981: 19&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mixed case is Nkwen, of the Ngemba group of Grassfields, which has a segmental genitive marker for classes 2, 5, 6 and 19 (agreeing with the possessed), a floating low tone genitive marker for classes 1 and 9, and a floating high tone marker for other classes. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.journalofwestafricanlanguages.org/Files/pdf/29-1/JWAL-29-1-Awambeng.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ncheafor 2002&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-06-27T01:42:08.787" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T01:42:08.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2012-06-27T08:36:09.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question doesn't specify whether you are interested just in nouns or also in pronouns or adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish these forms of the possessive/genitive adjectives/pronouns (terminology depends on analysis/tradition) are inflected for number, and some also for gender, to agree with the possessed rather than with the possessor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1s:&lt;/strong&gt; mi / mis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2s:&lt;/strong&gt; tu / tus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3s/p:&lt;/strong&gt; su / sus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1p:&lt;/strong&gt; nuestro / nuestra / nuestros / nuestras&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2p:&lt;/strong&gt; vuestro / vuestra / vuestros / vuestras&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is common among Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T08:36:09.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2012-06-27T09:54:22.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bulgarian has straightforward spelling reflecting pronounciation like in Russian but without soft consonants. It also has very little inflexions, like English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-06-27T12:23:37.723" LastActivityDate="2012-06-27T12:23:37.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-06-28T16:40:01.367" Score="9" ViewCount="2221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;http://dailyinfographic.com/what-are-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-infographic&quot;&gt;this infographic&lt;/a&gt;, which lists a bunch of languages as either easy to learn, hard to learn, or medium. I noticed that all the languages in the easy category were either Romance or Germanic languages, about half of the medium category was Indo-European, and none of the four hard languages were Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly for English, there's some correlation between genetic similarity and ease of foreign language acquisition. I'm wondering how much this pattern holds for other language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the same chart was made from the point of view of a Mandarin speaker, which languages would be in the easy category and which in the hard category? Would Tibetan, a language related to Chinese, be easier for a Mandarin speaker than Vietnamese, which is not? How much easier is it for a Mandarin speaker to learn Japanese (as compared to an English speaker)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked for equivalent infographics / data for languages other than English, but so far I haven't found any. Either scientific or anecdotal evidence is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="534" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T20:15:07.613" Title="Relationship between language similarity and ease of foreign language acquisition?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2012-06-29T05:47:31.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional (orthodox) Judaism prescribes, to some extent, the pronunciation of the Hebrew in prayers and the communal ritual reading of the Bible. Therefore, even though there are distinct phonemes with the same orthography (letters&amp;nbsp;+ &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_vocalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia&quot;&gt;Tiberian pointing&lt;/a&gt;), such as quiescent vs. mobile schwa, dagesh lene vs. dagesh forte, and broad vs. small qamatz, there are a number of recent publications (Bibles and prayer books) that distinguish visually all such pairs, thereby effecting a writing system that marks as different all distinct phonemes in the speech (albeit deliberate) of the books' audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T05:47:31.090" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2186" CreationDate="2012-06-29T05:48:34.630" Score="10" ViewCount="2781" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language known to have no minimal pairs separating vowels, or in which only one vowel exists phonemically in the language, or whose speakers don't detect a difference between any two vowels when they appear in words in the language? (My knowledge of linguistics is poor enough that I'm not sure whether those three criteria are identical.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-06-29T11:48:25.510" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T16:55:06.333" Title="Is there a language with but one vowel sound?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2185" CreationDate="2012-06-29T16:55:06.333" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a famous &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.circassianworld.com/new/language/1150-kabardian-eastern-adyghe-kuipers.html&quot;&gt;1960 book by Aert Kuipers&lt;/a&gt; called &lt;em&gt;Phoneme and Morpheme in Kabardian (Eastern Adyghe)&lt;/em&gt;, in which he argues that there is only one &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; vowel in Kabardian, because it has so many distinctive phonemic &lt;strong&gt;consonants&lt;/strong&gt; that their features determine the features of adjoining vowels. This produces a fairly normal profile of phonetic vowel variation (&quot;normal&quot;, at least, for a NW Caucasian language), but only requires that the &lt;strong&gt;positions&lt;/strong&gt; of the vowels be marked phonemically, since all their phonetic features are predictable from their position among surrounding consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an extreme case, and there was a big debate on the subject; the final outcome seems to be that there are now &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; phonemic vowels recognized in Kabardian, sort of like PIE laryngeals. But there are still some &lt;a href=&quot;http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/ussr/kabardn.html&quot;&gt;afterthoughts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergo this entry, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/McCawley-Lg.pdf&quot;&gt;Jim McCawley&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/daysinmay.html&quot;&gt;Days in the Month of May that are of Interest to Linguists&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May 13.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Vowel Day&lt;/em&gt;. (Public holiday in Kabardian Autonomous Region). The ceremonial vowel is pronounced by all Kabardians as a symbol of brotherhood with all speakers of human languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-06-29T16:55:06.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2189" CreationDate="2012-06-29T21:32:19.987" Score="10" ViewCount="786" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duolingo states: &lt;em&gt;“In German, conjunctions do not change with the case (i.e. they are not declinable).”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; I started to think of languages I know, and I don't remember any which would have this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there languages where conjunctions are declinable? How does this mechanism work there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: English-&gt;German topic on “Conjunctions”. Seems that the page is unavailable for unregistered users.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1149" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-02T11:14:49.323" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T01:45:17.513" Title="Declinable conjunctions" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1890" CreationDate="2012-06-30T02:59:35.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the IPA proper does not support transcribing whispering, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ExtIPA&lt;/a&gt; supposedly uses the under-dot (&lt;code&gt;U+0323 COMBINING DOT BELOW&lt;/code&gt;) for &quot;whispery phonation&quot;, if you believe Wikipedia. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ExtIPA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this chart&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QZoql.png&quot; alt=&quot;Whispery phonation&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the linked &lt;a href=&quot;http://clispi.org/userfiles/ExtIPAChart2002.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ExtIPA 2002 chart&lt;/a&gt; does not list this diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nsslha.org/uploadedFiles/NSSLHA/publications/cicsd/2010F-Non-English-Sounds-Prosody-and-Unattested-Sounds.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;My Client Is Using Non-English Sounds! A Tutorial in Advanced Phonetic Transcription Part III: Prosody and Unattested Sounds&quot;&lt;/a&gt; also discusses the extIPA (and does not list the diacritic). The paper also describes a non-IPA system (VoQS) for indicating phonation of stretches of speech, which seems to distinguish 3 types of whisper!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-06-30T09:44:11.917" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T09:44:11.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2012-06-30T16:25:03.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is unusual but possible. For example, Christa König argues that in Ik, a Kouliak language spoken in Uganda, nearly all lexical items can be case-inflected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See examples (48)-(50) on p. 155 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.110&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coding participant marking: Construction types in twelve African languages&lt;/a&gt; or have a look at König 2009 in The Oxford handbook of case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qFBhv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-06-30T17:33:34.527" LastActivityDate="2012-06-30T17:33:34.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2012-06-30T22:30:30.180" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen &lt;a href=&quot;http://peterhallman.com/Reiterative_Syntax.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claims that some dialects of German&lt;/a&gt; [PDF] have &lt;strong&gt;conjunctions that exhibit agreement morphology&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. the remarkable second-person-singular subordinating conjuction &lt;em&gt;daßst&lt;/em&gt; in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wir haben gewußt, daß-st du in Salzburg war-st&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  we  have  known   that-2s you(s) in Salzburg were-2s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘We knew that you(s) were in Salzburg.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs. second-person-plural &lt;em&gt;daßts&lt;/em&gt; in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wir haben gewußt, daß-ts   ihr      in Salzburg war-ts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  we  have  known that-2pl you(pl) in Salzburg were-2pl&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   ‘We knew that you(pl) were in Salzburg.’   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know much more about this, nor what dialects they are, except for &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=CqOZYQAx_xIC&amp;amp;lpg=PA123&amp;amp;ots=7FsACrY0Z4&amp;amp;dq=%22conjugated%20conjunctions%22&amp;amp;pg=PA123#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22conjugated%20conjunctions%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a mention that they are Austrian&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure, these conjunctions exhibit only person-marking, not case-marking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2013-01-11T01:45:17.513" LastActivityDate="2013-01-11T01:45:17.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1860" CreationDate="2012-07-01T01:08:31.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From toddlerhood to about four years of age, children acquire their first languages without much explicit instruction, simply by exposure to and attempts to communicate in the mother tongue.  There are some significantly different theories regarding this fact, but the fact is universally acknowledged.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more, the fact that children make mistakes that ambient proficient speakers don't make (e.g. for English, &quot;gots&quot; for &quot;has,&quot; &quot;goed&quot; for &quot;went,&quot; knocks the legs out from under the hypothesis that mimicry and reinforcement are sufficient to explain first language acquisition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the early years just mentioned, a child can pick up more than one language provided that said child has sufficient exposure to each language.   However, after about six or seven years of age, second languages are learned rather than acquired.    See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.best4future.com/blog/how-children-acquire-second-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.best4future.com/blog/how-children-acquire-second-languages&lt;/a&gt;.   In other words, the language must be taught methodically, even if part of the teaching is a period of immersion (using only the target language among speakers of the target language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2012-07-01T02:50:19.300" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T02:50:19.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2194" CreationDate="2012-07-01T01:13:57.933" Score="6" ViewCount="42041" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allophones are defined by means of complementary distribution. As I understand it, a complementary distribution is a &quot;mutually exclusive&quot; relationship between two phones, with regard to a certain phonetic environment. That is, one of the phones will &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be found in that environment (and nowhere else) while the other phone will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be found in that environment (but will be found somewhere else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, In English, [pʰ] and [p] are allophones of the phoneme /p/, since [pʰ] can be found at the beginning of syllables ([pʰɪn]) and nowhere else. Likewise, [p] is never found at the beginning of syllables, but can be found in other positions ([spɪn]). Summarizing in a table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jqKkf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Phoneme /p/ in English&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in Brazilian Portuguese, [w] and [l] are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_phonology#Oral_diphthongs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;considered allophones of /l/&lt;/a&gt;. The reasoning is similar: [l] is never found at the end of syllables, but can be found in other places ([a.'kli.vi], &quot;slope&quot;). [w], on the other hand, is found at the end of syllables ([saw], &quot;salt&quot;). The problem is: [w] &lt;em&gt;can also be found&lt;/em&gt; elsewhere ([a.'kwi;.fe.ru], &quot;aquifer&quot;). The table for this distribution, therefore, would be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nquJd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Phoneme /l/ in Brazilian Portuguese&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that, in some environments both [w] and [l] can be found, as in the [a.'kli.vi] versus [a'.kwi.fe.ru] example. So, evidently, I'm failing to understand what &quot;complementary distribution&quot; really is. Any help to clarify the concept would be much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T09:15:48.007" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T14:21:35.603" Title="What is the definition of &quot;complementary distribution&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;compl-distribution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2197" CreationDate="2012-07-01T04:31:29.253" Score="6" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of us know that the term &quot;ontology&quot; applies to the a priori philosophical study of the nature of existence.   Ontology is a branch of metaphysics (the attempt to coherently characterize reality a priori in the most general terms possible).  So, for example, a lot of rationalists have only one set of things in their ontological inventory (inventory of the kinds of things that exist), namely those states of affairs which can be modeled with the scientific method.  Traditionally, such thinkers are known as metaphysical materialists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently,&quot;ontology&quot; seems to have a different meaning in computer science, namely a shared specification of the types of concepts that can be represented, e.g. what kinds of classes, states of affairs, relationships, and I-don't-know-what-else.   (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to know is, do some linguists attempt to specify ontologies (more or less as computer scientists use that term) for natural languages, either specific natural languages or natural languages in general?       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-02T10:00:48.020" LastActivityDate="2012-07-02T10:00:48.020" Title="What does the term &quot;ontology&quot; mean vis a vis the study of natural language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2012-07-01T15:00:09.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you need to tease apart the concept of allophony from the concept of complementary distribution.  As people have mentioned in the comments, the two don't necessarily go hand in hand--i.e. it is not necessarily the case that two phones that are in complementary distribution can be assumed to be allophones of the same phoneme (as Alex B. mentioned), nor is it the case that the distribution of two phones--each of which is a possible realization of a single phoneme--will never overlap in their distribution.  It's the second assertion that is relevant for your Brazilian Portuguese example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;trick&amp;quot; is that sometimes different phonemes can have allophones &amp;quot;in common&amp;quot;, i.e. Phoneme A might sometimes be realized as Phone Y, but Phoneme B might also sometimes be realized as Phone Y:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/A/ --&amp;gt; [X] in some environment, [Y] in some other environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/B/ --&amp;gt; [Y] in some environment, [Z] in some other environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens a lot in &lt;em&gt;neutralizations&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mergers&lt;/em&gt;.  In languages with word-final devoicing, for example, maybe /d/ is realized as [t] word-finally but as [d] elsewhere.  But /t/ would also be realized as [t] word-finally.  If one encounters a [t] at the end of a word, one cannot be sure without additional information whether it is a realization of /t/ or /d/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, [w] is probably an allophone of some phoneme that can sometimes be realized as [w] and sometimes [l] (in some sense the &amp;quot;naming&amp;quot; of phonemes is arbitrary, but I'd probably call it /l/ since that seems to be the clear &amp;quot;elsewhere&amp;quot; realization) and [w] is probably also an allophone of a different phoneme (one that I would call /w/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is true that &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt; of the same phoneme must be in complementary distribution, but the two [w]s and the [l] in your table are not actually all realizations of the same phoneme.  So, here is a revised assessment of their distribution, taking their underlying forms into account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[l] (from /l/) not found at the end of a syllable, but found elsewhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[w] (from /l/) found at the end of a syllable, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; found elsewhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[w] (from /w/) found elsewhere (and perhaps also at the end of a syllable?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the [l] and the first [w] are in fact in complementary distribution.  I hope that makes sense!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T15:15:50.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1732" CreationDate="2012-07-01T15:17:46.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider the term  &quot;false-belief&quot; a bit tricky.&#xA;&quot;Belief&quot; implies that the object of it is not certain. When someone is sure about something, this person would say &quot;I know X&quot; instead of &quot;I believe X&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I say &quot;I know X exists&quot;, I have no doubt about it. If I say &quot;I believe X exists&quot;, I'm considering that I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing guarantees that the person who says &quot;I know X...&quot; is correct, this person may be mistaken, then you could say &quot;This person believes X...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly by &quot;false-belief&quot; you meant &quot;unaware of mistake&quot;, but anyway I thought this might add to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person A states &quot;This is X&quot; (&quot;I know X&quot;), it is considered a knowledge, and as such, not an object of doubt.&#xA;Some person B may find that A is mistaken and say &quot;'A' believes this is X, but it is actually Y&quot; (&quot;I know 'A' is mistaken&quot;).&#xA;A 'false-belief' verb would only dislocate the source of knowledge/doubt, as there is no end to this. Some person C could say &quot;'B' considers 'A' to be mistaken, but 'B' is wrong&quot;, etc.&#xA;(As far as I'm concerned, all languages have such words as &quot;mistake&quot;, &quot;error&quot;, &quot;fault&quot;, &quot;confusion&quot;, &quot;minsunderstanding&quot; ... in some cases the noun maybe become a verb, as in &quot;He mistook my intentions&quot;; the mandarin case would only be some specific form of this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1107" LastEditorUserId="1107" LastEditDate="2012-07-01T15:48:25.863" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T15:48:25.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2193" CreationDate="2012-07-01T19:35:14.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but the term &quot;ontology&quot; is not always used; it's pretty general, after all, just the Greek for &quot;words about things&quot;. In the case of philosophy or science, it means &quot;questions about 'things' -- i.e what are &quot;things&quot;? and what properties do &quot;things&quot; have? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Epistemology&lt;/strong&gt; is usually studied (and cited) together with ontology, because epistemology tries to answer how we can know about reality, including &quot;things&quot;, i.e, how do we &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; what a &quot;thing&quot; is? and how do we &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; what properties &quot;things&quot; have? Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fillmore's linguistic work on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/FillmoreDeixisLectures.pdf&quot;&gt;Deixis&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, is clearly ontology, as is his concept of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_semantics_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;Frame&lt;/a&gt;, programmed as &lt;a href=&quot;http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/&quot;&gt;Framenet&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms%3a_Their_Universality_and_Evolution&quot;&gt;Berlin and Kay's work on color terms&lt;/a&gt;, which is squarely based on the structural differences between how humans perceive colors physiologically and how we talk about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of physical ontology -- &lt;strong&gt;real&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;things&quot; -- is based on the human body and its sensory systems, since we need to perceive things in order to be sure they exist, and since the sensations of a human body -- like our experience of position, gravity, movement, and color -- are the only things humans have in common that everyone can depend on others' understanding, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's why we take &quot;things&quot;, and their properties, and their consequences, for granted in natural language; and why all this has to be spelled out in painstaking and pathetically detailed form for computers, which &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; have bodies or experiences to refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why we use body-part &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Metaphors.pdf&quot;&gt;metaphors&lt;/a&gt; so often. Protagoras got it right: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Παντων μετρον ανθρωπος&lt;/em&gt; -- Man is the measure of all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as I like to put it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf&quot;&gt;Ontology Recapitulates Physiology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-07-01T21:09:56.147" LastActivityDate="2012-07-01T21:09:56.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-02T08:04:06.933" Score="5" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages have valency changing rules.   In English and many other languages, we have passive constructions, which change transitive verbs into intransitive ones:   &quot;The man ate the hot dog,&quot; becomes &quot;The hot dog was eaten,&quot; with the agent specified by the adjunct &quot;by the man.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages without rules that change the valency of a verb?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:12:49.740" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T15:48:53.857" Title="Are there languages without valency changing rules?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;valency&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2201" CreationDate="2012-07-03T01:10:05.420" Score="5" ViewCount="1821" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the degree to which loanwords enter a language is highly influenced by culture - for instance, a community which has a lot of contact with another culture, through which many new objects / concepts are introduced, will want to have words for those things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was wondering if there is are &lt;strong&gt;purely linguistic&lt;/strong&gt; characteristics which make languages more or less likely to accept loanwords (or more generally, to be &lt;em&gt;changed by contact with another language&lt;/em&gt;). In other words, are some languages inherently more &quot;influenceable&quot; than others, and if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-03T11:01:17.363" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T11:01:17.363" Title="Are there any linguistic factors that influence the degree to which a language accepts loanwords?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2199" CreationDate="2012-07-03T06:51:10.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, it seems that it's many social factors that influence borrowing. I think I read somewhere, however, that items are more likely to be borrowed if they are similar in form to your own expressions, since they're easily integrated. I also read that it's usually 'contentful' words like nouns that are borrowed, and things like inflectional morphology and numbers are never borrowed - since why would you borrow what you already have which is nice and stable? German has a lot of English loan words, for example, but probably not many from a language like Javanese or Dyirbal. The chief reasons for that would be proximity to the culture, attitude to the culture - perhaps - but even if the Germans did want to borrow a word from a far-away language, morphosyntactic reasons would have some impact on whether that word was easily integrated and thus taken up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1153" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T06:51:10.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2199" CreationDate="2012-07-03T07:18:49.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scholars used to believe that convergence and borrowing was more likely to happen between two languages that were typologically similar, but I believe this has now been disproved. (Clyne, M. (2003) Dynamics of Language Contact, Cambridge) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Michif is a mixed language which combines Cree (verbs) and French (nouns). The languages are typologically very different - what matters is that the social situation, i.e. the intensity of contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has many loanwords from English - it has to alter the phonology of the words, sometimes quite drastically, to make them pronounceable. E.g. kappu (cup) and rimokon (remote control). But English is cool, so the typological difference doesn't matter. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borrowing of fairly basic things like morphology, pronouns, numbers, etc, can certainly happen. Again, it seems to be dependent on the social situation rather than any linguistic factors. For example, English pronouns 'they, them' are borrowed from Scandinavian languages. Speakers of Hindi and other Indian languages (in which the number system is quite complicated) often use English numbers, especially for strings such as phone numbers - it's probably relevant that English and Hindi have been in contact for a long time. Morphological borrowing is typical of languages in extremely close contact, especially where one is near extinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think perhaps the misconception that similar languages borrow more from each other is simply based on the fact that nearby languages are often (though by no means always) typologically similar. So the languages English is in most contact with are French, German, etc - all relatively easy to borrow from. But it's the closeness that makes the difference, not the typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T07:18:49.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2012-07-03T14:32:51.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Slavic languages have such inflection form. It applies both nouns and pronouns and &lt;strong&gt;both possessor and possessed inflect in agreement&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My samples would be in Ukrainian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Pronouns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pron. 1st: &lt;em&gt;Я&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Son (noun, masc.): &lt;em&gt;син&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Daughter (noun, fem.): &lt;em&gt;донька&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My son&quot; (nominative/genitive/dative, other cases skipped):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;м&lt;b&gt;ій&lt;/b&gt; син / мо&lt;b&gt;го&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; / мо&lt;b&gt;єму&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;у&lt;/b&gt; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; мо&lt;b&gt;єму&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;ові&lt;/b&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My daughter&quot; (nom./gen./dat.):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;мо&lt;b&gt;я&lt;/b&gt; донька / мо&lt;b&gt;єї&lt;/b&gt; донь&lt;b&gt;ки&lt;/b&gt; / мо&lt;b&gt;їй&lt;/b&gt; донь&lt;b&gt;ці&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plural form: &quot;my sons and daughters&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;мо&lt;b&gt;ї&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;и&lt;/b&gt; та доньк&lt;b&gt;и&lt;/b&gt; / мо&lt;b&gt;їх&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;ів&lt;/b&gt; та донь&lt;b&gt;ок&lt;/b&gt; / мо&lt;b&gt;їм&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;ам&lt;/b&gt; та донь&lt;b&gt;кам&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nouns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns (possessor) are inflected in a similar way:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ivan (prop.noun): &lt;em&gt;Іван&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ivan's son&quot; and &quot;Ivan's sons&quot; (nom./gen./dat.):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Іван&lt;b&gt;ів&lt;/b&gt; син / Іван&lt;b&gt;ового&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; / Іванов&lt;b&gt;ому&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;у&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Іван&lt;b&gt;ові&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;и&lt;/b&gt; / Іван&lt;b&gt;ових&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;ів&lt;/b&gt; / Іванов&lt;b&gt;им&lt;/b&gt; син&lt;b&gt;ам&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ivan's daughter&quot; (nom./gen./dat.):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Іван&lt;b&gt;ова&lt;/b&gt; донька / Іван&lt;b&gt;ової&lt;/b&gt; доньк&lt;b&gt;и&lt;/b&gt; / Іванов&lt;b&gt;ій&lt;/b&gt; донь&lt;b&gt;ці&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's yet another way of forming possessive by placing the possessor at the end. This way, only possessed inflect while the possessor remains in genitive case only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;син Іван&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; / син&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; Іван&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; / син&lt;b&gt;у&lt;/b&gt; Іван&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-07-03T19:12:34.263" LastActivityDate="2012-07-03T19:12:34.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-03T18:52:38.750" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am somewhat familiar with (not at all learned of)the morphosyntactic criteria by which many languages are classified--such as the system by which the grammatical abstractions of agent, argument, and patient are  treated-- and descried of the criteria potency unto a numerosity of classes yborn of this method of linguistic taxonomy. Being a trinary collection, the abstractions before listed may be partitioned such that unto every set (of a given partition) is assigned a speciality of morphosyntactic treatment; the set of all partitions logically distinguishable would bear  a cardinality of five and include sorts of languages neither ergative-abslutive nor nominative-accusative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely I query pose as to the existence of a language per which the patient of transitive verbs is treated as is the agent of transitive verbs. Specifically I muse at yet on such a language which as well treats the single argument of intransitive verbs differently than the other two said abstractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of languages which may not so neatly fall into any of the classes for which the described partitions account (such as split ergative and active-stative languages) and if response to my inquiry requires disqualification of some premise I've supposed of linguistic taxonomy, I grant the nicety of direct answer may be hence precluded as the same may only transpire upon congruence between him positing and the interlocutor as to the presumed veridical obtentions as for the topic of their discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I greatly appreciate any and all consideration given to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastEditorUserId="1157" LastEditDate="2012-07-04T00:05:58.213" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T00:05:58.213" Title="Exists there a language in which the patient of transitive verbs and the single argument of intransitive verbs are treated alike?" Tags="&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2012-07-04T01:02:52.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in the exact opposite situation, being raised in Norway and wanting to learn the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my belief, the key factor was watching English speaking programs with Norwegian subtitles. After sufficient exposure I gave more attention to the speech and not the text, and you begin to 'draw lines', as you say, between your native language and the one you are trying to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Playing games also proved useful, although a lot harder. It was basically blindly trying, and trying to understand the effect my actions had on the game. As a small child at the time, playing &lt;i&gt;Pokémon&lt;/i&gt; can be quite the challenge when you do not speak the language. Another problem I've struggled with is words that I've only read. RETRY was a word I read as Rettry, basically just because I was eleven at the time, and I still pronounce it that way, if I'm not aware of what I'm about to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all based on personal experience, and I wish you all the best in learning Norwegian.&#xA;Or; Lykke til med språket !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1158" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-02-03T09:25:34.093" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T09:25:34.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2012-07-04T01:10:04.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Mark Beadles says in a comment, declinability seems relevant mostly for subordinating conjunctions, since these make the subclause into a POS of main clauses or other subclauses (Not sure if any languages use anything similar to cases to coordinate main clauses). Also, declinability seems mostly relevant for (let me know if there is a better word) nominalizing subordinating conjunctions (English 'that') since other subordinating conjunctions almost always head adverbial phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we stretch the definitions and classify Japanese nominalizers 'koto' (and 'no') as nominalizing conjunctions and also classify (certain) Japanese particles as case markers (although these are usually analyzed as syntactic constructs, not morphological declensions), we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that Japanese has declinable conjunctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kare-ga kita koto-ga saiwai datta.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;He-NOM came that-NOM luck was.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;It was lucky that he came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kare-ga kuru no-wo matte-iru.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;He-NOM comes that-ACC waiting is(/am/are).&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;(I) am waiting for him to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T01:10:04.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2012-07-04T02:35:19.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to do this, I'd advise you to watch the same movie over and over again. You may notice that children like their caretakers to read them the same story each night, and modern children like to watch the same movie again and again. My theory for why they like this is that they like hearing the story or watching the movie because they are able to understand what is being said, whereas just listening to ambient conversation of adults much of it goes over their heads. So according to my theory, you can do it, and the way to do it is to watch the Norwegian version of The Little Mermaid, or Sesame Street, every day for one month, and maybe sing along. After a year or so of this you can switch over to slightly more challenging programs which still have clear speech, then go on to films for regular adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T02:35:19.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2208" CreationDate="2012-07-04T03:09:24.680" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any method of assigning a numerical score to the extent to which a given alphabet is phonemic?  If so, then obviously, the score for a given alphabet would vary across the languages that it was used to transcribe.   A great many scores could be assigned to the roman alphabet, since the latter is used to transcribe so many languages.  For example, the roman alphabet would score higher in &quot;phonemicness&quot; (phonematicity??) for Serbo-Croation than it would for English.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T05:49:30.100" Title="Is there any method of assigning a numeral score to the extent to which a given alphabet is phonemic?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2207" CreationDate="2012-07-04T05:49:30.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a specific scoring method, but you could probably use a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion approach to make up a reasonable one without too much work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say you have a pronunciation dictionary for each of your languages.  This maps orthographies to pronunciations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;TEST  t eh s t&#xA;WRING r ih N&#xA;BEAT  b iy t&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could use some kind of alignment algorithm to estimate alignments between the letters and phonemes (Note: below is just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; possible, believable alignment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;T:t E:eh S:s T:t&#xA;W:_ R:r I:ih N:_ G:N&#xA;B:b E:iy A:_ T:t&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a really trivial sort of measure might be to just compute the average number of phonemes that are matched to each grapheme and vice versa.  The expectation here being that a 'phonemic' system will tend to have more one-to-one mappings, while a mess like English will tend to have quite a few one-to-many / many-to-one mappings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that even this sort of trivial approach would mark a pretty clear difference between say, English and Spanish (I don't know Serbo-Croatian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T05:49:30.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-04T06:36:11.203" Score="2" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for comprehensive lists or research papers covering language-specific phonotactic constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great to start with English, but any language will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically I'm interested in a nice, packaged set of rules a-la,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;These sound combinations are not allowed:&#xA;  /bn, dn/&#xA;These sound combinations are not allowed at the end:&#xA;  /e, æ, ɐ, ʊ, ɔ/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site provides some nice tidbits and examples, &lt;a href=&quot;http://clas.mq.edu.au/phonetics/phonology/syllable/syll_phonotactic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://clas.mq.edu.au/phonetics/phonology/syllable/syll_phonotactic.html&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm wondering if there are more academic or comprehensive papers on this subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-04T17:17:13.860" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T00:46:32.793" Title="Looking for resources/papers listing language-specific phonotactic constraints" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-04T13:15:30.867" Score="0" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages where the reflexive and reciprocal meaning is expressed with one single suffix, is the reciprocal considered a kind of reflexive suffix or is the reflexive a kind of reciprocal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1156" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-05T10:56:49.877" LastActivityDate="2012-07-05T10:56:49.877" Title="Reciprocal vs Reflexive" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6746" CreationDate="2012-07-04T13:34:49.467" Score="10" ViewCount="3683" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example is parents with different mother tongues living in a foreign country, &#xA;teaching those three languages and also English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and when should this language be taught?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can all be taught in early age or only when the others are firmly embedded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What languages should be taught first? The similar ones or the local language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1160" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T06:57:28.973" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T23:06:12.007" Title="Can children learn up to 4 different languages? And how to do it?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2209" CreationDate="2012-07-04T13:37:36.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au/use.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;database in progress&lt;/a&gt; hosted at ANU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T13:37:36.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2012-07-04T13:50:36.130" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typical adjectives (or adjectival groups), indeed, precede nouns in Polish, as in many Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a notable exception to that rule. &lt;strong&gt;If the purpose of adjective is to classify the denoted entity which belongs to a certain category or type&lt;/strong&gt;, such adjective appears in postposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply speaking, adjective in &lt;code&gt;green apple&lt;/code&gt; goes in preposition: &lt;code&gt;zielone jabłko&lt;/code&gt;, but in &lt;code&gt;Polish Kingdom&lt;/code&gt; it's in postposition: &lt;code&gt;Królestwo Polskie&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these two phrases: &lt;code&gt;good day&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;waiting for a good day&lt;/code&gt; (waiting for a good moment to do something). They would be &lt;code&gt;dzień dobry&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;czeka na dobry dzień&lt;/code&gt;, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per similar appearances in Belarusian, Ukrainian, and even Russian, I would think that this has not been actually &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt; solely in Polish language. Instead, it was rather a common pattern for many languages and dialects, most likely borrowed from sacral texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's is an interesting parallel with Sanskrit that uses postpositions to emphasize sacral meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brajerski, Tadeusz&lt;/strong&gt;. 1963. O szyku zaimka dzierżawczego w funkcji przydawki. Studia linguistica in honorem Thaddaei Lehr-Spławiński. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warren, Beatrice&lt;/strong&gt;. 1984. Classifying adjectives. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-07-04T13:50:36.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1502" CreationDate="2012-07-04T23:42:27.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to put in my two cents here, I've always thought of phonemes as equivalence classes over the set of linguistically attested acoustic signals. With a given statistical model in place, membershiphood into a phonemic class is determined on statistical similarity. I would guess that the model is determined by a vector of real parameters, meaning that the signal space is a euclidean space and phonemic categories are a matter of euclidean clustering. Then statistical similarity becomes a question of euclidean distance, or some other metric on the signal space. Though I haven't yet read into the matter yet, this is the definition I am expecting going into acoustic phonetics. At least with this definition, idiolectual variation is accommodated and experimental error is easily overcome. I'm just speculating at this point, but I would guess that allophones are witnessed by further analysis of a given phonemic category, perhaps by dense euclidean subclusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really have no idea since I haven't read into the subject, but I don't like this definition because it appears at least to be model dependent; even if the signal space is assumed euclidean, a different probabilistic model may yield different clusters. At this point I should stop speculating, but I can't help think that, as convenient as this theory would be, it doesn't yet address the internal representation of what these clusters might represent. This approach does seem very intuitive though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a paper I just found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8408965&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A cross-linguistic investigation of locus equations as a phonetic descriptor for place of articulation. Sussman 1993&lt;/a&gt; that apparently makes a &quot;100% classification rate for 3 places of articulation&quot; and the method involves using a regression relationship of F2 onset and F2 mid of a vowel V when it occurs after a stop C. So, CV for C=[b,d,ɡ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Strong linear regression relationships were found for every stop category&#xA;across all speakers. Slopes and y intercepts systematically varied as a function of place of articulation.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the significance of this is, but it seems relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-07-14T19:22:03.277" LastActivityDate="2012-07-14T19:22:03.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2209" CreationDate="2012-07-06T00:46:32.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering the same thing myself, but specifically for Japanese. I'm starting to think that something like a phontactic rule set is only &quot;complete&quot; or &quot;comprehensive&quot; insofar as the level of detail desired. Like how IPA transcriptions can be as narrow as needed, a phonology needs only to be as detailed as the application demands. I found this book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199545839&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Phonology of Japanese&lt;/a&gt; which claims to be &quot;the fullest account of Japanese phonology ever published&quot; all in 320 pages. I ordered the book just yesterday so we'll see. If I wanted a complete guide to American English, however, then I would just get a bunch of books on the subject of &quot;English phonetics and phonology&quot; and compile one myself. It may not, after all, be very large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T00:46:32.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11487" CreationDate="2012-07-06T07:40:02.207" Score="17" ViewCount="2906" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the verb &quot;do&quot; can be a transitive verb whose object stands for an action.   So, we English speakers can &quot;do a somersault,&quot; &quot;do a back flip,&quot; and &quot;do a cartwheel.&quot;  The productivity of this construction is limited, but it does suggest a question:  are there any languages in which a small and (synchronically) fixed inventory of verbs is used with other parts of speech (for example, nouns that stand for actions or states) to create phrasal equivalents to the many verbs that are found in most languages?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T16:12:29.607" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T00:23:25.640" Title="Are there any languages in which verbs are a closed class?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-06T07:48:50.650" Score="5" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the well-attested languages for which large corpora have been gathered, does the number of idiomatic expressions per language vary significantly?   Are there fewer idioms in some languages than in others?  Do certain factors affect the number of idioms in a language, such as the number of people who speak the language or the number of different cultures in which the language is spoken fluently?      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T17:02:49.443" Title="Do some languages have significantly more or fewer idioms than others?" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2012-07-06T16:56:11.173" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are at least two: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingulu_language&quot;&gt;Jingulu&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_language&quot;&gt;Igbo&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/viewFile/9/64&quot;&gt;(Soschen, 2008)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain languages have a very restricted number of verbs.&#xA;  For example, the aboriginal language Jingulu spoken in Australia has only three&#xA;  verbs: &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt;. Igbo (Ibo), a language of approximately 18 million&#xA;  speakers in Nigeria, does not have verbs at all. Instead, Igbo uses clusters termed ‘inherent complement verbs’ (ICV) that have the structure &lt;em&gt;–gbá&lt;/em&gt; plus a noun. The root &lt;em&gt;gbá&lt;/em&gt; is the only root in Igbo “devoid of meaning”, and the most productive one (Chinedu Uchechukwu, p.c.; see also Uchechukwu 2004). Here are some examples of Igbo clusters: &lt;em&gt;–gbá egwú&lt;/em&gt; ‘dance a dance’ — &lt;em&gt;egwú&lt;/em&gt; ‘dance’, –&lt;em&gt;gbá igwè&lt;/em&gt; ‘ride a bicycle’ — &lt;em&gt;igwè&lt;/em&gt; ‘bicycle’, &lt;em&gt;–gbá ákụ́/egbè&lt;/em&gt; ‘shoot’ — &lt;em&gt;àkụ́&lt;/em&gt; ‘arrow’/&lt;em&gt;égbè&lt;/em&gt; ‘gun’, &lt;em&gt;gbá ụkwụ́&lt;/em&gt; ‘kick’ — &lt;em&gt;ụ́kwụ&lt;/em&gt; ‘foot’, &lt;em&gt;–gbá ọsọ&lt;/em&gt; ‘run a race’ — &lt;em&gt;ọsọ&lt;/em&gt; ‘race’, &lt;em&gt;–gbá motò&lt;/em&gt; ‘travel with a vehicle’ — &lt;em&gt;motò&lt;/em&gt; ‘vehicle’, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T16:56:11.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2012-07-06T23:38:52.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In parts of the world very dense in languages (e.g. Nigeria, India, Papua New Guinea), a common scenario is this: a child's mother speaks language A, the father speaks language B, a vehicular language C is frequently used for interactions between people from different villages, especially in cities, and language D is an official language which is the medium of instruction in government schools. In such places it is not at all uncommon for a young adult to be fluent in four languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For concreteness, imagine an Indian child whose mother is Tamil and whose father is Telugu. The child speaks these languages within his/her extended family. Hindi is used when going out into town to do business, and English is used in school. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-06T23:38:52.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2012-07-07T00:52:38.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really have a linguistic background and I'm not even sure if this qualifies as true declension but there's certain compound words that act as conjunctions semantically in Arabic that seem to fulfil what you're looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the word ma3-'anna (3 representing a voiced pharyngeal fricative ʕ ). It's two separate words ma3 (with) and 'anna (that) acting semantically as a conjunction with the meaning &quot;even though&quot; and it just so happens that 'anna is a word that acts a bit like a verb by taking on a myriad of &quot;pronoun endings&quot; that indicate person, number, and gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ma3-annahu (even though-he)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annahaa (...she)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annahum (...they)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annahumaa (...they, dual)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annahunna (...they, feminine)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annaka (...you, singular masculine)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annaki (...you, singular feminine)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annakumaa (...you, dual)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annakum (...you, plural masculine)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annakunna (...you, plural feminine)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annii (...I)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ma3-annanaa (...we)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an example of its use can go something along the lines of:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;لم يذهب إلى المدرسة مع أنه لم يكن مريضا&lt;br&gt;&#xA;lam yathhab ila 'l-madrasati ma3-annahu lam yakun mareeDan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;not go-he to the-school even though-he not be-he sick&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He didn't go to school even though he wasn't sick.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1169" LastEditorUserId="1169" LastEditDate="2012-07-07T00:58:56.473" LastActivityDate="2012-07-07T00:58:56.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-07-07T02:52:39.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hawaiian has no word for &quot;to be&quot;, instead using adjectives and nouns as verbs representing existance (i.e. &quot;I am smart&quot; is just &quot;I smart&quot;).&#xA;However, if their were a verb for &quot;to be&quot; it would probably be regular, since every other verb is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1170" LastActivityDate="2012-07-07T02:52:39.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2012-07-07T10:52:03.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In France, such a language is called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langage_SMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;langage SMS&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zcorrecteurs.fr/forum/sujet-2828-le-kikoolol.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kikoo Lol&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. (Kikoo, as a transformation of Coucou which means Hello!, and LOL taken from the english). It's mostly due to the use of short SMS on cell-phones, ( I think more than the influence of IRC or the Web). However it's the same dialect on the web and on the cell-phones. In wikipedia, it is called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sociolect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2012-07-08T07:37:45.527" LastActivityDate="2012-07-08T07:37:45.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-07T12:06:54.303" Score="2" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have noticed, a native speaker can actually judge the essence of person, the way he's feeling, even his personality through his writing or voice. Will it be possible for a non-native English speaker to understand English deeply like a native speaker? Most of the time it could be just hard to interpret the language for non-native speakers as their  native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="966" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-07T14:38:18.793" LastActivityDate="2012-07-07T14:38:18.793" Title="Understanding English deeply like native speakers" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2691" CreationDate="2012-07-09T12:00:39.810" Score="18" ViewCount="2402" Body="&lt;p&gt;What ways do we have of measure the mutual intelligibility of two given languages?&#xA;It's easy enough to realise if there is a degree of mutual intelligibility between your own language variety and another, but what methods do we have to measure it between two specific languages that we don't necessarily speak ourselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Standard Ukrainian and Standard Belarusian are said to have a degree of mutual intelligibility and Standard Ukrainian and Standard Russian are also partially mutually intelligibility (but not as much as Ukrainian - Belarusian). So how can we measure the differentness between Ukrainian and Belarusian, and the differentness between Ukrainian and Russian - thus showing which of the two, Belarusian or Russian, is most similar to Ukrainian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T00:36:27.667" Title="How can mutual intelligibility be measured?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-09T21:48:54.877" Score="5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard some people posit that the reason a large amount of idioms in American English come from sports terminology (e.g. &quot;ballpark figure&quot; or &quot;the whole nine yards&quot;) is due to the &quot;competitive nature&quot; of Americans. While I'm not completely bought into the idea, is there a currently accepted theory for classifying the determining factor of idioms in a culture? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T02:17:47.160" Title="Is there a recognized foremost social factor from which idioms are derived?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1116" CreationDate="2012-07-10T13:27:33.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just thinking out aloud, but might it be related to the case systems in Germanic vs. Romance languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;electricity price comparison service&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...is a shortened form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;service for the comparison of prices for electricity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the same as your Portuguese translation, where the prepositions act as case licensors. However, in Germanic languages, the case system is/was richer and the prepositions disappear (because they're redundant). In particular, &amp;quot;of&amp;quot; can be seen as a genitive licensor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(service for the comparison) of (prices for electricity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(prices for electricity)'s (service for the[ir] comparison)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &amp;quot;for&amp;quot; is a dative licensor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(electricity prices)'s (comparison service)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dropping the genitive &amp;quot;'s&amp;quot; morpheme doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination and serves brevity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;electricity price comparison service&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T13:27:33.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-10T13:27:57.687" Score="14" ViewCount="75318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally posted this a while ago on &lt;a href=&quot;http://beismedrash.blogspot.com/2011/11/vayeitzei-origin-of-word-god.html&quot;&gt;my blog&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.needaneitzah.com/questions/23/what-are-some-english-words-that-are-taken-from-lashon-hakodesh#52&quot;&gt;someone&lt;/a&gt; recently suggested that I pose it as a question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God#Etymology_and_usage&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; search on the origin of the word ‘god’ reveals the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The earliest written form of the Germanic word god comes from the 6th&#xA;  century Christian Codex Argenteus. The English word itself is derived&#xA;  from the Proto-Germanic * ǥuđan. Most linguists agree that the&#xA;  reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form * ǵhu-tó-m was based on the&#xA;  root * ǵhau(ə)-, which meant either ‘to call’ or ‘to invoke’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google came up with &lt;a href=&quot;http://wahiduddin.net/words/name_god.htm&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; which presents a survey of various sources that attempt to decipher the origin of the word. It begins with a short summary of its conclusion, which contains the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word God is a relatively new European invention, which was never&#xA;  used in any of the ancient Judaeo-Christian scripture manuscripts that&#xA;  were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am befuddled by the fact that they seem to have overlooked a very clear source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Genesis 30:11 - we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;וַתֹּאמֶר לֵאָה בגד \ בָּא גָד&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Leah said, &quot;&lt;em&gt;gad&lt;/em&gt; has come.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Targum &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targum_Pseudo-Jonathan&quot;&gt;[Pseudo-]&lt;/a&gt;Jonathan interprets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;וַאֲמַרַת לֵאָה אָתָא מַזְלָא טָבָא&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Leah said, &quot;the good 'mazal' (astrological sign / luck) has come.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume that if ‘mazal’ = ‘gad’ then we could have a pretty good indication of where the word ‘god’ came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this isn’t good enough, note the word גדא which is mentioned several times in the Talmud. See, for example, Hullin 40a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;אמר אביי לא קשיא הא דאמר להר הא דאמר לגדא דהר דיקא נמי דקתני דומיא&#xA;  דמיכאל שר הגדול&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Abbaye said, &quot;it is not problematic, for this is when he said [he&#xA;  was slaughtering it] for the mountain and this is where he said it was&#xA;  for the &lt;em&gt;gada&lt;/em&gt; (referring some heavenly minister that some would serve&#xA;  as a &lt;em&gt;god&lt;/em&gt;) of the mountain...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite clear from the context that גדא דהר means just that; god of the mountain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any knowledge that would help in figuring out whether or not these words (גד and god) are actually related, as they seem to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" OwnerDisplayName="Dov F" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T16:29:47.407" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T13:58:53.850" Title="The Origin of the Word 'God'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2229" CreationDate="2012-07-10T17:14:58.280" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Asiatic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afro-Asiatic&lt;/a&gt; language, whereas Proto-Germanic is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both superethnic and cultural groups (Afro-Asiatics and Indo-Europeans) were connected through the history of trade, migrations, and the written alphabet. Afro-Asiatic cultures had trade routes throughout the Middle East, Orient, and Asia; and Indo-European cultures had both migratory and trade routes throughout the Orient, the Middle East and Europe; both groups shared these routes for thousands of years. The first written alphabet was Phoenician (Afro-Asiatic), and it was used as a model for the development of the Indo-European alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we don't know of any relation between these two language families: they seemed entirely unrelated even in our earliest sources. If there is any relation, it is shrouded in the mists of remote prehistory (although some people hypothesise a prehistoric relation). Barring very strong evidence to the contrary, any similarity between a Hebrew word and a Germanic word must therefore be ascribed to coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;had trade route interactions with Afro-Asiatic cultures for thousands of years&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two theories about the origin of the Germanic word, which is still uncertain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could be from Proto-Indo-European &lt;code&gt;*ghau-&lt;/code&gt; &quot;call, invoke&quot;, as the entity that is invoked;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or it could come from Proto-Indo-European &lt;code&gt;*gheu-&lt;/code&gt; &quot;pour&quot;, as the entity to which libations are offered.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any information about the origin of the Hebrew word? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T13:58:53.850" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T13:58:53.850" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2229" CreationDate="2012-07-10T18:20:59.263" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theological issues aside, I can see several wrong assumptions in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The word God is a relatively new European invention, which was never used in any of the ancient Judaeo-Christian scripture manuscripts that were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not entirely clear what you meant there. If you are talking about the English word &quot;god&quot;, then why would you expect to come across an English word in a Latin or Greek text? If you are talking about the concept of &quot;god(s)&quot;, then your assumption is inaccurate. It is a well-known fact that various Indo-European peoples had gods, attested by names of deities (Jupiter, Zeus, Perkunas etc.) and the word 'god', e.g. Latin 'deus', Vedic 'devas' etc. As a matter of fact, Father Sky is a very common deity in many IE cultures. A common motif is the main god fighting/killing some chthonic creature (a snake or a dragon). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about &quot;Gad&quot; and English &quot;god&quot;. The wrong assumption here is what Yuri Otkupschikov called &quot;chronological scissors&quot; (chronological disparity). You are comparing words that don't belong to the same time period. Yes, in OE the word was &quot;god&quot; but looking at other Germanic languages you can't help but notice that originally the root vowel was not &quot;o&quot; but rather &quot;u&quot;, e.g. have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/gudan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a Hebraist (nor a Semitologist) but here's what I've been able to find about the origin of the Hebrew proper noun &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Gad.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gad&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I strongly recommend looking it up at least in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_3JO1FFR6W.HTM&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klein 1987&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Xgeo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general remark on etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A generally accepted principle (advocated by Meillet) permits only comparisons which involve both sound and meaning together. &lt;strong&gt;Similarities in sound alone&lt;/strong&gt; (for example, the presence of tonal systems in compared languages) &lt;strong&gt;or in meaning alone&lt;/strong&gt; (for example, grammatical gender in the languages compared) &lt;strong&gt;are not reliable&lt;/strong&gt;, since they often develop independently of genetic relationship, due to diffusion, accident and typological tendencies&quot; (Campbell 2004: 356, emphasis mine - Alex B.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Executive summary: I am very skeptical of your hypothesis/evidence and my answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-07-10T22:13:56.867" LastActivityDate="2012-07-10T22:13:56.867" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2227" CreationDate="2012-07-11T02:17:47.160" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common way for new languages to form is fairly regular.  When two cultures meet, the dominant culture's language forms the basis for a pidgen in which those in the less dominant culture try to accomodate the dominant language while using grammatical structures, vocabulary, and metaphors/symbols from their own language.  Once a complete language develops from these, it's often called a creole which has elements from both languages, including the metaphoric/symbolic imagery from each--(at the same time, the creole simplifies the grammar/syntax of the original).  So the idiom is usually a metaphor which meant something concrete in the original language but which has taken on a more abstract meaning in the creole--which is then a real language.  English went through this process, absorbing symbols and metaphors while simplifying forms. Sometimes individuals create idioms which go on to be applied to many things; for instance, Shakespeare:  wild goose chase, the crack of doom, as pure as the driven snow, and many more. America added many:  well healed, on the wagon, off the record, +++.  It's a fascinating study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1177" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T02:17:47.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-11T21:24:02.660" Score="2" ViewCount="1324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to do a quantitative analysis to  a medieval text. I need to get some basic information like the total number of the words, their frequencies and the concordances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know about a free  Lexical Analyser software for Windows 7 to wor11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20n advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1179" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-27T07:40:22.500" LastActivityDate="2012-07-27T07:40:22.500" Title="Looking for a Free Lexical Analyser" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2235" CreationDate="2012-07-12T02:32:06.953" Score="5" ViewCount="563" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about language acquisition among twins. I've heard it said that they often develop their own language (of sorts) and I was wondering if anyone has done any studies of this phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it more common in certain languages/ language families?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there societal or gender-based factors to this development?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How complete is this &quot;language&quot; likely to be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="518" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2012-07-12T20:51:57.813" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T20:51:57.813" Title="Studies of Twin Speak" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2234" CreationDate="2012-07-12T06:53:35.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The invented languages of twins, sometimes called 'twinspeak' are also known as cryptophasia or idioglossia. Peter Bakker of Aarhus University (Denmark) has published on this topic (abstract available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3434134&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). According to Bakker twin languages are very common, occurring in about 40% of all twins, but soon disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the structure of these languages, Bakker writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In all cases known, the language consists of onomatopoeic expressions,&#xA;  some invented words, but for the greatest part of words from the adult&#xA;  language adopted to the constrained phonological possibilities of&#xA;  young children. These words being hardly recognizable, the language&#xA;  may turn out to be completely unintelligible to speakers of the model&#xA;  languages, but they resemble each other in that they lack morphology&#xA;  and that word order is based on pragmatic principles such as saliency&#xA;  and the semantic scope of words. Neither the structure of the&#xA;  languages nor its emergence can be explained by other than situational&#xA;  factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bakker article seems to be hard to obtain. Further reading may be found in the bibliography of the subject Bernard Comrie posted to &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-469.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LinguistList&lt;/a&gt; in 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T06:53:35.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2233" CreationDate="2012-07-12T07:09:46.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many software applications for linguistic analysis listed at &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/sp/GetWRListings.cfm?WRAbbrev=Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LinguistList's software page&lt;/a&gt;, including lexical analysis tools and, probably what you're after, concordance software (and lots of other fun stuff too). Most are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the first one in the list, 'Simple concordance program' will do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional: here's an even better &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801708/Text%20Analysis%20Tools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of text analysis tools&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-07-19T10:50:47.147" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T10:50:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2012-07-12T10:12:22.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Hungarian is neither Germanic, nor Romance but the definite article is still used sometimes, incorrectly, before names of people. It is very prominent in Budapest, but it is considered incorrect by linguists. &#xA;I think this kind of use of the definite article is due to Austrian influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T10:12:22.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2240" CreationDate="2012-07-11T00:56:51.813" Score="9" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was born and raised in Hawaii and grew up speaking &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Creole_English&quot;&gt;Pidgin&lt;/a&gt;. My parents are from Washington and California so at home I spoke [what I thought was] Standard English. I moved to the mainland when I was 18, in 1996, and have come to speak English with almost no detection of my Pidgin roots (except when I say words like &quot;Hawai`i&quot;, &quot;Samoan&quot;, &quot;ukulele&quot;). I can speak it with very little effort, but there is still some effort, I catch myself analyzing my words milliseconds before I say them. It feels like a second language that I have learned to speak natively. I have been out of practice with my Pidgin so I can't just jump in and sound local at any moment, but if I talk to my siblings on the phone or go back to Hawaii to visit, it only takes a few minutes before I slide back into partial Pidgin and a couple days before I am back to my old self.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I am speaking Pidgin, I feel like it just comes out of me without any effort, like that is the way I think in my head. When my brothers and our families are together we can &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching&quot;&gt;&quot;Code Switch&quot;&lt;/a&gt; effortlessly between ourselves and the rest of our family without any problems, but will always go back to Pidgin with our siblings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something I have wondered for a while is why Pidgin is so much easier to speak for us. I have decided it is one of 2 options: Either it is because we grew up speaking it (but we also spoke English), or because pidgins and creoles are just designed to be closer to how we think just by the nature of their origins. But, then again, English was a pidgin that became a creole and standardized into a language so you would think that because it followed the same process, it too would be just as easy to speak. &lt;strong&gt;And, yes, Hawaiian Pidgin has a wrong way to speak it!&lt;/strong&gt; You can't just throw out the rules and say words in a random order throwing in a few Polynesian words for flavor. Kids come from the mainland all the time and fail miserably attempting to speak Pidgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any linguists here that would have a &quot;real&quot; explanation why it is easier to speak Pidgin even though I have been speaking English on the mainland now longer than I lived in Hawaii?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1184" OwnerDisplayName="BillyNair" LastActivityDate="2012-07-14T04:26:48.033" Title="Why does Pidgin come easier than Standard English?" Tags="&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2012-07-11T02:17:24.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, but perhaps I could share some useful insight as someone who works in the field of human language technology (HLT), specifically making the machine to understand human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experience, we don't use the prescriptive grammar (the one that dictates good composition and style) when we think; the same applies to speaking, which is mainly spontaneous. The prescriptive grammar comes into play when we write, or give a formal public speech, where we have enough time to reflect our thoughts and to rephrase our words appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The natural grammar in our brains is very flexible, and can vary from one person to another, even within the same dialect. In my opinion, this natural grammar is developed in our brains in our childhood and finally imprinted as we grown up. It is also possible that we can have more than one set of such a natural grammar, if we grown up in a multi-cultural environment. And pretty much like swimming, once the grammar, no matter how many languages in total, has been imprinted to your brain, you will never forget it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself was raised in the south of Thailand until I was five, and I never forget how to say the southern dialect. But similar to you, I have to use a little effort to speak in that dialect, or it might just come out the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1482" OwnerDisplayName="Damkerng T." LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T02:17:24.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2012-07-11T06:32:11.840" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most native speakers of English grow up speaking some variety of the language other than Standard English. In your case it happens to have been a pidgin, which is a little special, but I don’t suppose your case is really much different from those who grow up speaking southern US English, Caribbean English or the English of the north-east of England known as Geordie. The dialect we learn first will usually be the one we feel most comfortable with and Standard English may seem like a foreign language, although its differences from non-standard varieties are not that great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not surprising that few people grow up speaking Standard English, because it is predominantly a written form of the language. It may to that extent be a minority dialect, but it’s an extremely important one politically, economically and socially. For that reason those who want to make their way in an English-speaking world need to learn it. But many English speakers may want to retain their native dialects and to use them with their family and friends, keeping Standard English for writing and for those occasions where a more formal spoken language is required. There’s nothing unusual about such an arrangement. For many people in the world being bilingual, or even multilingual, is the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="281" OwnerDisplayName="Barrie England" LastActivityDate="2012-07-11T06:32:11.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2242" CreationDate="2012-07-12T17:47:41.810" Score="11" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s nearly 30 years since Michael Halliday first published ‘An Introduction to Functional Grammar’ and yet, at least in Britain and in the United States, functional grammar seems not to have entered the linguistics mainstream. I should be grateful for any confirmation of this from those in a better position to judge, and for suggestions why it might be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="281" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T15:59:13.043" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T20:51:55.863" Title="Why hasn't functional grammar been more popular?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2241" CreationDate="2012-07-12T22:50:35.273" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I go on with the answer I'll just point out that Hallidayan functional grammar is known more specifically as Systemic Functional Grammar (AKA SysFunc). It is not the only type of analysis known as functional - for example there is Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). OK, now that's out the way I'll get to the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for the state of linguistic research in the USA and Britain as an outsider - I work in Australia (and for the record I am not a follower of any particular theory discussed herein). In America the prevailing formalist approach (also known as the Chomskian approach) had/has been entrenched for so long that it is hard for people to break away and start with a new theoretical position. It's not always the case — after all Joan Bresnan who started LFG was a student of Chomsky's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main reasons that SysFunc has struggled to gain acceptance is that while it is useful for looking at larger texts some would argue that it is not so useful for single-clause analysis, or typological approaches — which are still some of the main research concerns of contemporary morpho-syntacticians. Different tools for different tasks I guess!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-12T23:18:45.343" LastActivityDate="2012-07-12T23:18:45.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1691" CreationDate="2012-07-13T01:34:06.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English participial phrases and absolute clauses come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this sentence in English, for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Seeing the yellow light, I slowed down.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mandarin equivalent would need to be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Wǒ] [kàn-dào             huángdēng    de  shíhòu] [màn   le       xiàlai].&#xA; I  see-EXTENT-complete  yellow light  MOD  time   slow  ASP-perf  EXTENT-down&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be loosely stated as two uncoordinated verbal phrases, but they would be more disconnected than the English construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Wǒ] [kàn-dào               huángdēng],   [wǒ] [màn  le         xiàlai].&#xA; I    see-EXTENT-complete  yellow light    I   slow  ASP-perf   EXTENT-down&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is better rendered in English as 'I saw the yellow light; I slowed down.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence using an absolute construction in English, on the other hand, does not always make sense uncoordinated in Mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Weather permitting, I will see you tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditional needs to be stated in Mandarin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Tiānqì] [yǔnxǔ   de huà],   [míngtiān  jiàn].&#xA;weather   permit    if        tomorrow   see&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is more like &quot;In the case that weather permits, I will see you tomorrow&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;Notes on glosses:&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;MOD - modifier; makes the preceding phrase modify the following phrase&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;EXTENT - extent marker; -complete indicates completion, and -down indicates gradual completion.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;ASP - aspect marker; -perf indicates perfective.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="1185" LastEditDate="2012-07-13T01:52:31.520" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T01:52:31.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2268" CreationDate="2012-07-13T06:31:20.477" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;How common is it for people to be literate only in a language other than their mother tongue?  I know that ASL signing community members generally learn to be literate in English, since there is no widely accepted method of transcribing ASL, with all apologies to the inventors of Sutton Sign-Writing.   But are there other examples in communities whose languages are spoken rather than signed?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T16:15:25.657" Title="How common is it for people to be literate only in a language other than their mother tongue?" Tags="&lt;literacy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1598" CreationDate="2012-07-13T10:58:34.427" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;From the comments:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This because my wife (who is Chinese) tells me that the grammar changed in radical ways in the 19th century, as contact with the west led Chinese to modernize. Before that, she said, Chinese sentences were &quot;short&quot; and &quot;hard to understand&quot;. She isn't a linguist, so I can't be sure. – Ron Maimon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe two events have been conflated in this description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese has historically had a very analytical typology, reinforced by its writing system that tended to obscure morphological and phonological effects. Those who studied Chinese were more interested in semantics and pragmatics at the lexical level. Therefore, there wasn't a strong native tradition of grammar in syntax as evolved in the west.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 19th century, western missionaries introduced the syntactic approach, and new descriptions of Chinese grammar were written. The only radical change that came as a direct consequence was academic. To this day, the Chinese themselves still approach their language lexicographically, and western curricula in advanced Chinese studies generally follow that tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we've been talking about Chinese as if it were a single language, and in some ways it does behave like one, an important distinction needs to be made. Chinese languages are internally at least as diverse as the Romance languages. Unlike Romance speakers, who were rarely under one central authority for long, the Chinese lived in one unified state for most of their history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms, this meant the Chinese retained Classical Chinese as a written standard until the early 20th century, even as local vernaculars evolved and diverged. Classical Chinese is a frozen form of Old Chinese, is known for being extremely terse, and is not intelligible to untrained Chinese readers. This was most likely what your wife meant by short and hard to understand sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine if Western Europeans continued to write exclusively in Latin while speaking French, Spanish, Italian, etc, and if asked to recite their written Latin, pronounced every word with its local equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western contact coincided with (and contributed to) increased prestige in local written vernaculars, e.g. written Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Hokkien. Only in the early 20th century did written Mandarin replace Classical Chinese as the national standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On multiple-level embedding:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the topic of recursion, multiple centre-embedding can be found as early as Zhuangzi (300-200 BCE). I didn't look very hard, so there are probably other, earlier sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Yángzǐ         yuē,&#xA;Master Yang      say&#xA;Jì       zhī,    xíng  xián    ér       qù       zì      xián       zhī     xīn,&#xA;remember this     do  worthy  CONJ   set aside  self    worthy      this    heart&#xA;ān        wǎng     ér   bú    ài        zāi?&#xA;where     go      CONJ  not  love  particle-question&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;zhī&lt;/em&gt; literally meant 'this', it had a parallel usage as an adnominal modifier. Also, any adjective in Classical Chinese can be used as a causative verb. With these two points in mind, we can render the sentence as literally as possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Master Yang said, Remember ⟨that {[worthy-doing]-[[self-making-worthy]-setting-aside]} heart go where and not be loved?⟩'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more idiomatic English,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Master Yang said, Remember that a heart that does what is worthy, setting aside self-praise, could go anywhere and not be unloved.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T10:58:34.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-13T14:09:42.007" Score="2" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that we need machine translation evaluation? If we have subjective evaluation measures why do we need automatic evaluation? As most of the automatic evaluation metrics are unable to capture linguistic features of languages (Particularly non english, free word order languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More over can one or more automatic evaluation metrics capture deeper linguistic errors that MTs most often make. I don't mean to be rude. I don't mean to offend anybody. It is just that I am new to MT and while reading various papers and books have lots and lots of curious queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1186" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-13T22:11:20.793" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T22:11:20.793" Title="Why do we need machine translation evaluation?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2246" CreationDate="2012-07-13T17:04:27.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a link to the paper introducing BLEU, the most widely used automatic MT evaluation metric.  This metric is problematic in many ways, but the paper does address the question you are asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1073135&quot;&gt;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1073135&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, human evaluation of MT is too time consuming to be the sole method used.  Quick progress in the field relies on developers being able to run experiments testing the effect of different approaches and quickly get a sense of whether those approaches are helping or hurting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1187" LastActivityDate="2012-07-13T17:04:27.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2012-07-14T04:26:48.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is probably that pidgin and creole languages are easier to learn. First, they tend to be not especially complicated formally: you are not going to find a pidgin/creole language with multiple tone levels, scores of obstruent consonants, or Iroquoian-style inflectional paradigms. Second, and probably just as importantly, a pidgin/creole doesn't really belong to anyone, so there is little resistance to outsiders using it, and it is not a turnoff when a novice speaks it badly. In the specific personal history of the OP, however, there is no guarantee that this applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-14T04:26:48.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2251" CreationDate="2012-07-14T17:56:59.930" Score="5" ViewCount="1602" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on some code for an open source package to analyze dialogic classroom transcripts.  I came across an interesting article that calculates a formality measure that I wanted to try out (&lt;a href=&quot;http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/papers/Contextuality-FOSprinted.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt;) as it may help my field (literacy) understand what explicitness of teacher talk means.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Heylighen, F., &amp;amp; Dewaele, J.M. (2002). Variation in the contextuality of language: &#xA;     An empirical measure. Context in Context, Special issue of Foundations of &#xA;     Science, 7 (3), 293–340.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formula for the statistic is fairly straight forward (p. 309):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;F = (noun frequency + adjective freq.  +  preposition  freq.  +  article  freq.  –  pronoun freq. – verb freq. – adverb freq. – interjection freq. + 100)/2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There happens to be a part of speech tagegr in the program I use (R) that is over 95% accurate on tagging POS.  So I first run the POS tagger on the transcript and get counts for parts of speech in a matrix form.  The problem is that Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele use a rather simple POS code as seen in the formula above where as the POS tagger I use, uses Penn Treebank coding (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mozart-oz.org/mogul/doc/lager/brill-tagger/penn.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Tag  Description                             &#xA;1  CC   Coordinating conjunction                &#xA;2  CD   Cardinal number                         &#xA;3  DT   Determiner                              &#xA;4  EX   Existential there                       &#xA;5  FW   Foreign word                            &#xA;6  IN   Preposition or subordinating conjunction&#xA;7  JJ   Adjective                               &#xA;8  JJR  Adjective, comparative                  &#xA;9  JJS  Adjective, superlative                  &#xA;10 LS   List item marker                        &#xA;11 MD   Modal                                   &#xA;12 NN   Noun, singular or mass                  &#xA;13 NNS  Noun, plural                            &#xA;14 NNP  Proper noun, singular                   &#xA;15 NNPS Proper noun, plural                     &#xA;16 PDT  Predeterminer                           &#xA;17 POS  Possessive ending                       &#xA;18 PRP  Personal pronoun                        &#xA;19 PRP$ Possessive pronoun                      &#xA;20 RB   Adverb                                  &#xA;21 RBR  Adverb, comparative                     &#xA;22 RBS  Adverb, superlative                     &#xA;23 RP   Particle                                &#xA;24 SYM  Symbol                                  &#xA;25 TO   to                                      &#xA;26 UH   Interjection                            &#xA;27 VB   Verb, base form                         &#xA;28 VBD  Verb, past tense                        &#xA;29 VBG  Verb, gerund or present participle      &#xA;30 VBN  Verb, past participle                   &#xA;31 VBP  Verb, non-3rd person singular present   &#xA;32 VBZ  Verb, 3rd person singular present       &#xA;33 WDT  Wh-determiner                           &#xA;34 WP   Wh-pronoun                              &#xA;35 WP$  Possessive wh-pronoun                   &#xA;36 WRB  Wh-adverb  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means I have to turn the Penn Treebank coding into Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele coding.  Here is my attempt to do that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;DF1 &amp;lt;- data.frame( &#xA;    noun = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;NN&quot;, &quot;NNS&quot;, &quot;NNP&quot;, &quot;NNPS&quot;, &#xA;        &quot;POS&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;, &quot;CD&quot;)]), &#xA;    verb = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;MD&quot;, &quot;VB&quot;, &quot;VBD&quot;, &quot;VBG&quot;, &#xA;        &quot;VBN&quot;, &quot;VBP&quot;, &quot;VBZ&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;)]),  &#xA;    adverb = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;RB&quot;, &quot;RBR&quot;, &quot;RBS&quot;, &quot;WRB&quot;, &#xA;        &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;)]),  &#xA;    pronoun = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;PRP&quot;, &quot;PRP.&quot;, &quot;WDT&quot;, &quot;WP&quot;, &#xA;        &quot;WP.&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;, &quot;EX&quot;)]),  &#xA;    prep = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;IN&quot;, &quot;RP&quot;, &quot;TO&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;)]),  &#xA;    adj = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;CD&quot;, &quot;DT&quot;, &quot;JJ&quot;, &quot;JJR&quot;, &quot;JJS&quot;, &#xA;        &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;)]),  &#xA;    interj = rowSums(X[, names(X) %in% c(&quot;UH&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;)]))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can see I combine the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;NN&quot;, &quot;NNS&quot;, &quot;NNP&quot;, &quot;NNPS&quot;, &quot;POS&quot;, &quot;JI&quot;, &quot;JK&quot;, &quot;CD&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; tags into &lt;strong&gt;nouns&lt;/strong&gt;.  You may notice there's no articles in my code, it seems that Penn Treebook doesn't have an articles class but may classify them as other codes (I think maybe deterministic; this may be problematic in that is appears deterministic is a mix of adjectives and articles which are on opposites in Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele's measure).  The problem is I run the code and I sometimes get negative numbers (according to Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele this is not possible) .  This isn't because of the code or math but because I haven't classified the Penn Treebank into Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele's codes correctly.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am not a linguist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and my attempts to understand this problem have proven to be well above my knowledge or research capabilities.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for help in correctly converting these codes or letting me know if what I'm attempting isn't feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-15T01:27:22.557" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T01:28:13.273" Title="Turn Penn Treebank into simpler POS tags" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2249" CreationDate="2012-07-15T01:20:55.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Penn Treebank does have a POS tag for articles — they're determiners, &lt;code&gt;DT&lt;/code&gt;, and probably shouldn't be mapped to adjectives as they are in your code. I wonder if that could be the source of your troubles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems that you're mapping some PTB tags (e.g. &lt;code&gt;CD&lt;/code&gt;) to more than one coarse-grained tag. Could that be messing up some of the counts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Stanford NLP has developed a universal POS tag set and mappings from 25 treebanks' tagsets&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, often generalising over finer-grained tagsets. You can compare the mapping from the PTB to the mapping scheme you have developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Petrov S., Das, D., McDonald R. &quot;A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.2086v1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.2086v1.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-15T01:28:13.273" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T01:28:13.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-15T02:10:25.987" Score="8" ViewCount="1322" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a previous question related to this one about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2249/turn-penn-treebank-into-simpler-pos-tags&quot;&gt;parts of speech&lt;/a&gt;.  I need to figure out what a determiner (DT) is in Penn Treebank Tag Set.  In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ccalas/tagsets/upenn.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;set examples&lt;/a&gt; found in the tag set, it appears that a determiner is a mixture of articles and adjectives.  For my purposes articles and adjectives need to be separated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a determiner in the Penn Treebank Tag Set considered just articles or a mixture of articles and adjectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T10:14:26.087" Title="What is a determiner?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2252" CreationDate="2012-07-15T02:45:15.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/treebank/doc/tagguide.ps.gz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;guide posted on the Penn Treebank website&lt;/a&gt; describes determiners as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Determiner---DT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This category includes the articles &lt;em&gt;a(n), every, no&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, the&#xA;  indefinite determiners &lt;em&gt;another, any&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;some, each, either&lt;/em&gt; (as in&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;either way&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;neither decision&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;that, these, this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt;, and instances of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; when they do not&#xA;  precede a determiner or possessive pronoun (as in &lt;em&gt;all roads&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;both&#xA;  times&lt;/em&gt;). (Instances of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; that do precede a determiner or&#xA;  possessive pronoun are tagged as predeterminers (PDT).) Since any noun&#xA;  phrase can contain at most one determiner, the fact that &lt;em&gt;such&lt;/em&gt; can&#xA;  occur together with a determiner (as in &lt;em&gt;the only such case&lt;/em&gt;) means&#xA;  that it should be tagged as an adjective (JJ), unless it precedes a&#xA;  determiner, as in &lt;em&gt;such a good time&lt;/em&gt;, in which case it is a&#xA;  predeterminer (PDT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simple phrase structure grammars based on English a singular common noun phrase, or a plural definite noun phrase, must consist at least of a determiner, and a head nominal, in that order. Formalised gramars of the sort found in Treebank define word classes on a language-specific basis, by distributional criteria (i.e., which words can substitute for other words in comparable structures). In typology (and also school grammar), word classes are based on meanings, so there will be some words which might belong to different categories depending on the approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T02:45:15.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1732" CreationDate="2012-07-15T04:37:59.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual caveat of competence versus performance naturally has to be raised first. A speaker of one language may have to go through more hoops to convey an idea in the same way as a speaker of another language, but both may be equally capable of thinking the same thing. Language is also one interface out of many, and culture and social experience, for example, are variables deeply intertwined with language and thus hard to tease apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there was one study that suggested deaf children who hadn't been exposed to sign language performed less well in false-belief tasks (cited in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2000852/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2000852/&lt;/a&gt;). I'm not aware of work in the same vein by linguists though. This following paper is a psychology study, but it involves similar variables to the ones you have in mind: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de/development/publications/1matsui_rakoczy_et_al_2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de/development/publications/1matsui_rakoczy_et_al_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat tangential to the question, although I'm not sure how relevant, is diachronic subjectification/intersubjectification, where meaning shifts toward being more about the addresser/addressee over time: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/resources/TraugottDavidseIntersbfn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/resources/TraugottDavidseIntersbfn.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T04:37:59.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1905" CreationDate="2012-07-15T12:07:55.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is briefly discussed in &lt;em&gt;The Romance Languages&lt;/em&gt;, on pages 296-7 (in the chapter on Italian by Nigel Vincent). The author explains the origins of some irregular preterits and past participles occurring with second-conjugation verbs. According to him, a number of these verbs derive their irregular preterit base from the Latin perfect marker -U-, which produced gemination of a preceding consonant (e.g. VOLUI &gt; &lt;em&gt;volli&lt;/em&gt;, 'I wanted').He notes that these are also the verbs with participles in -&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;-: &lt;em&gt;avuto&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conosciuto&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;voluto&lt;/em&gt;, etc., and explains thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this participial -&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;- is etymologically from a different source,   namely verbs in -UO such as BATTUO 'I beat', it extended its range considerably in late Latin...suggesting that it had been morphologically reanalysed as being the same element as perfective -U-.... Finally, in this connection, we may note the form [of the verb &lt;em&gt;vivere&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;em&gt;vissuto&lt;/em&gt; 'lived' &amp;lt; *VIXUTUM, which represents the extension of the -UTUM suffix to the already sigmatic Latin perfect from VIXI. The original Latin participle VICTUM survives instead in the word &lt;em&gt;vitto&lt;/em&gt; 'food'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there remains a large number (he estimates about 200) of irregular second-conjugation participles, and he notes that in other areas of Italy, i.e. the South, where the preterit is still used daily, corresponding preterit and participial forms in local languages have undergone analogical leveling and are more regular. I'm aware that in northern Italy where, conversely, the preterit is extinct in many local languages (and where even speakers of Standard Italian simply don't use it), those languages have likewise simplified second-conjugation participles by analogical extension of the -&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; (widely phonetically realized as [y]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T12:07:55.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="637" CreationDate="2012-07-15T17:42:55.787" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were. In medieval central Italy, literacy meant the ability to read and write Latin (and perhaps Greek if one was really learned)—that is, until influential writers like Dante and Petrarca wrote in a somewhat artificial version of &lt;em&gt;il dialetto fiorentino&lt;/em&gt; and made it prestigious. Use of this vernacular was further bolstered by the regional political influence that Tuscany enjoyed from the early Renaissance on, but it wasn't (at least not in the modern sense) a national language until 1861. By then the written form of the language was fairly stable. I think there was a final orthographic reform in the early 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, modern Italian spelling isn't all that &quot;phonetic&quot; when it comes to avoiding ambiguity. In many words it fails to note tonic stress or to disambiguate certain letters, such as: open and closed &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, voiced and voiceless &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; (including &lt;em&gt;zz&lt;/em&gt;), the combination &lt;em&gt;gli&lt;/em&gt;, which normally represents a palatal lateral but in a few cases is [gli], the digraph &lt;em&gt;gn&lt;/em&gt;, which is usually a palatal nasal, but very occasionally is [gn], and semi-consonantal and vocalic &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;. While figuring out the written form of an unfamiliar spoken French word can be difficult, the spelling is normally consistent enough (much more so than in English) to enable correct pronunciation of an unfamiliar written word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, French and Italian are at opposite ends of the Romance Family when it comes to diachronic change or innovation. Old French developed a relatively fixed orthography early on. At that point the writing closely reflected actual pronunciation, but with rapid expansion and the increasing urbanization of its speakers Old French  soon underwent radical pronunciation and syntactic changes (morphing into Middle French) while the writing remained fairly static. Florentine-based Tuscan, on the other hand, is remarkable for its phonological and morphological conservatism, only central Sardinian dialects being closer to Latin in these respects. Native vocabulary hasn't undergone any appreciable phonetic or morphological changes up to the present day, so the spelling, which became fixed relatively late, has remained much closer to spoken Italian than has written French to spoken French. In theory spoken Tuscan could have changed radically soon after the written language became common, as happened with French, but during that period Tuscan didn't become the popular language of a vast state or kingdom—the kind of situation that encourages rapid linguistic change. When it finally became an  official national language in the latter part of the 19th century it was imposed on the population as a language of bureaucracy and remained such until extremely recently. Modern Italian is no longer pure Tuscan but is increasingly mixed with Southern dialects and is in the process of absorbing a huge amount of foreign vocabulary for which it lacks native equivalents. These foreign words—more often than not from English—create an ever-increasing number of &quot;non-phonetic&quot; spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1191" LastEditorUserId="1191" LastEditDate="2012-07-16T07:48:20.793" LastActivityDate="2012-07-16T07:48:20.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2422" CreationDate="2012-07-15T23:11:44.960" Score="8" ViewCount="1160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently reading an academic paper on Amdo Tibetan phonetics and the author uses IPA vowel diacritics that look like &quot;less-than&quot; and &quot;greater-than&quot; signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a picture so you know what I'm talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A8Tk4.png&quot; alt=&quot;nonstandard IPA vowel diacritics&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are narrow phonetic transcriptions in IPA and the &lt;em&gt;greater-than&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;less-than&lt;/em&gt; signs are being used as vowel diacritics, but I cannot find these diacritics listed on the IPA chart, nor can I find them on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_and_nonstandard_symbols_in_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list of nonstandard IPA symbols&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the author uses the standard diacritic &lt;strong&gt;+&lt;/strong&gt; to indicate &quot;advanced&quot;, so these symbols cannot mean advanced/retracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amdo Tibetan is not a tonal language, so these symbols cannot be related to tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper is an analysis of the pronunciation of single words and it does not mention prosody, so I can't imagine that the diacritics are prosodic in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do these less-than and greater-than vowel diacritics mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1192" LastEditorUserId="1192" LastEditDate="2012-07-15T23:40:13.220" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T00:30:14.510" Title="What do the &quot;less-than&quot; and &quot;greater-than&quot; signs mean when used as IPA vowel diacritics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2012-07-15T23:39:42.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They could be indicators for more/less rounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per this wiki - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_articulation&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;the symbols should be left &amp;amp; right half ring below, but perhaps the author didn't find the right font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1028" LastActivityDate="2012-07-15T23:39:42.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2263" CreationDate="2012-07-16T20:29:00.590" Score="5" ViewCount="32746" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will freely admit that this question is based in ignorance of languages other than English (well, American). But do other languages have the concept of rhyming? Thinking back to my few Spanish classes in high school 25 years ago, I cannot think of very many words that I would consider to be rhyming. Mostly due to the different verb forms and feminine/masculine noun forms, it seems like it would be difficult to build a coherent sentence the way (my understanding of) the language works. Other languages that are even more complex just seems impossible to me that rhyming occurs easily or frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1196" OwnerDisplayName="DaveNay" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-25T11:39:16.163" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T22:16:46.430" Title="Is rhyming a uniquely English language construct?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;rhyming&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1322" CreationDate="2012-07-17T09:17:57.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Term&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is &lt;em&gt;syntactic doubling&lt;/em&gt;, or, more formally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cases&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resolving homophony between the words (&lt;code&gt;errare&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;e rare&lt;/code&gt;) is described well in comments above, so I would not elaborate here. You may find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.locuta.com/edoubling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; useful for formal rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other reason seems to me interesting as well. It occurs even in English (compare &lt;code&gt;lesson&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;lessen&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this phenomenon is that &lt;em&gt;written forms sometimes evolved faster than phonetics&lt;/em&gt;. This was especially noticeable for ancient words that were used in sacral texts and are mostly loanwords from Latin, ancient Greek, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/general/PIE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PIE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;casa&lt;/code&gt;, most likely, derived from PIE &lt;code&gt;*kat-&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;leso&lt;/code&gt;, from Latin &lt;code&gt;laedere&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and so on...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the written form has lost the original consonants, the missing consonant sounds still remain in phonetic, e.g. &lt;code&gt;*kat+sa&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;laed+so&lt;/code&gt;. Of course, they are diminished and tend to further reducing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example from Thai language.&#xA;The word จักร &lt;code&gt;[tɕàk]&lt;/code&gt; is borrowed from Sanskrit चक्र &lt;code&gt;[cakra]&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;wheel&quot;). In most words, it looks like this: จตุจักร [tɕà-tù-tɕàk]. However, in the middle of polysyllabic words, the missing &lt;code&gt;[kra]&lt;/code&gt; re-appears as complete syllable: จักรยานยนต์ &lt;code&gt;[tɕàk-krà-yaan-yon]&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;bicycle&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting book discussing &lt;strong&gt;consonant harmony&lt;/strong&gt;: Walker, Rachel: Long-distance consonantal identity effects, 2000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T09:17:57.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-17T09:27:44.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru&quot;. In Japanese that means &quot;In the garden there are two chickens&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Niwa (Garden) ni wa (as for in the...), niwa (2 winged things) niwatori (chicken[s]) ga iru (exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Honmono homo no mono&quot; is another Japanese one I heard in San Francisco. I have heard some Polynesian rhymes, but not sure if they were after the introduction to English speakers and their rhymes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1184" LastEditorUserId="1184" LastEditDate="2012-07-18T02:28:28.063" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T02:28:28.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-17T13:53:38.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rhyming is not a uniquely English phenomenon. It is present in Chinese, for example. As one article puts it, &quot;Chinese words are made up of so few possible syllables that it’s almost hard NOT to rhyme.&quot; (original article: &lt;a href=&quot;http://laowaichinese.net/why-is-it-so-easy-to-rhyme-in-mandarin.htm&quot;&gt;Rhyming in Mandarin&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between rhyming in English and Chinese, however, is that Chinese rhymes must take into account both the pronunciation of the syllable and the tone (i.e. the tones must match).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhyming was an integral part of classical Chinese poetry and there were even large dictionaries of Chinese characters indicating which characters rhymed with each other. (Since the pronunciation of Chinese has changed over time, many classical Chinese poems don't actually rhyme anymore when read using modern Chinese pronunciation, however.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question mentions the possible difficulty of constructing rhymes that form coherent sentences in some languages. This is a valid point, for example, for languages that have different syntax than English. Tibetan and Japanese generally have &lt;code&gt;SOV&lt;/code&gt; (subject-object-verb) word order where the verb always comes last. Thus if you are constructing a poem in these languages and you want the last words/syllables of two sentences to rhyme, you would be forced to find two &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt; that rhyme with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine there are other languages which are also easier to rhyme in than English due to differences in syllable structure. Hawaiian language, for example, has a &lt;code&gt;(C)V&lt;/code&gt; syllable structure, which means that all syllables always end in a vowel. Thus I imagine it would be fairly easy to rhyme in Hawaiian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then again, perhaps other languages have different criteria for what constitutes a &quot;rhyme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1192" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T13:53:38.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-17T15:48:00.300" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;End-rhyming is actually not even an originally English mechanism! Old English poems didn't rhyme like we do now. Instead, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliterative verse&lt;/a&gt; was widely found in the early Germanic languages. Alliterative verse uses head-rhymes (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliteration&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stress-timing&lt;/a&gt;, instead of modern end-rhymes and syllable-timing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern English rhyming scheme was borrowed from the Classical and Romance traditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, end-rhymes are more natural to languages that make wide use of suffixal inflections (like most Romance languages and Latin/Greek). Syllable timing is more natural to many of these languages, too, since the interval between syllabic nuclei is approximately equal. Vowel quantity also played an important role in Latin and Greek meter. Stress-timing on the other hand, where the interval between &lt;em&gt;stressed&lt;/em&gt; syllables is approximately equal, is more natural to languages like English and Portuguese that have notable vowel-reduction processes. And since English has nearly no suffixal inflections, end-rhymes are less common though, of course, still plentiful in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/59989/16191&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my answer to a similar question on English.SE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for a fuller explanation of the verse form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T16:57:29.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-17T17:03:34.183" Score="2" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been attempting to put together an overview of the various theoretical motivations that have been proposed for do-support in the literature, but the topic has been frustratingly difficult to research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm looking for specifically: analyses that address the universals of syntax and morphology that give rise to do-support. Typologies of do-support, essentially, rather than analyses of do-support in particular languages. Grimshaw's &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/1111-1110/1111-GRIMSHAW-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Last Resorts: A Typology of Do-Support&quot;&gt;Last Resorts: A Typology of Do-Support&lt;/a&gt; is the best example I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone here point me in the right direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1198" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T17:03:34.183" Title="What are some theoretical motivations for do-support?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2012-07-17T17:26:36.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This response is personal opinion, since I think it would be difficult to find scientific evidence that addresses the full spectrum of what this question entails, and anecdotal evidence is even worse, since no one knows enough languages to give a consistent answer. So all you're gonna get is opinions of languages people have learnt, and likely-misinformed beliefs about languages they think they know enough to comment on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider different ways of and motivations for second language learning. Some learn in a classroom setting. Some learn naturalistically in environments where the target language is spoken. A few among those cut off contact with their native languages altogether. People learn a second language because it's expected of them (e.g. school); for business/work; to communicate with specific people (e.g. missionaries); out of sheer necessity (e.g. immigrants); or just as a hobby. Then people have differing standards on what counts as functional competence. All these variables also differ from one target language to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that extended disclaimer out of the way, here's my actual response to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think genetic closeness is really an important consideration in and of itself. I would consider similar sound inventories, shared vocabulary, social/cultural predispositions, and typological likeness to be far greater factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, I think the average Mandarin speaker would have more trouble learning Tibetan than Vietnamese on those grounds, despite genetics. Tibetan phonemic makeup is maybe slightly closer than Vietnamese to Mandarin, but Tibetan phonotactics (e.g. complex onsets and cross-morphosyllabic phonological effects) would probably pose a greater challenge than Vietnamese's much friendlier syllable structure. Most Tibetan cognates of Chinese words are probably not immediately recognizable as such, outside of the obvious numerals and kinship terms, which Vietnamese partly shares with Chinese anyway from extensive borrowing. The deciding factor is probably Tibetan's inflectional morphology, with case endings and verb conjugations, in stark contrast to the isolating nature of Chinese/Vietnamese. Vietnamese, on the other hand, shares significant typological features with Chinese, including SVO word order (cf. Tibetan SOV) and noun classifiers/measure words (cf. Tibetan classifiers, which are never used for counting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for social/cultural predispositions, China has historically had closer ties with Vietnam than with Tibet, so there is perhaps a tendency for the average Chinese speaker to view Vietnamese more favourably (there'll naturally be great regional/individual variation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I've heard that Arabic, German, French, and Russian are considered very difficult for Chinese speakers. Many also say that they find Chinese the most difficult, which might refer to the writing system, the continuum between literary and vernacular Chinese, and/or the internal diversity of Sinitic 'dialects'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastActivityDate="2012-07-17T17:26:36.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-18T04:59:28.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Mark covered a lot of what I would have said. So I'll simply add a couple other types of rhyming and languages that prefer them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Biblical Hebrew was fond of rhyming of ideas, where consecutive lines express similar concepts rather than similar sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apart from Western influences, Japanese seems quite fond of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/a&gt;: rhyming between the sound of a word and its concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T04:59:28.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2012-07-18T16:15:25.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @jlovegren said, this is not an uncommon situation, especially in parts of the world that did not have a long history of literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for instance Senegal as an example. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=SN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;majority L1's in Senegal&lt;/a&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fula_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wolof&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fula_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Puulaar&lt;/a&gt;, and a wide variety of other L1's are also spoken. Literacy in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=fuc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Puulaar is 10-30%&lt;/a&gt;, and is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=wol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;even lower in Wolof&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the languages of instruction are French and Arabic (&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/WPLC/article/view/5937&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;M Fall, 2011&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wolof children in Senegal—West Africa—develop their first literacy&#xA;  skills in their second language (L2), French or Arabic, not in their&#xA;  first language (L1), Wolof. The Wolof language is primarily oral, and&#xA;  even though a written system has been recently developed, children&#xA;  still do not read and write in their L1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar situation exists with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahasa_Indonesia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bahasa Indonesia&lt;/a&gt;, the standardized official version of the Malay language in Indonesia. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;23,000,000 speak it as an L1&lt;/a&gt;, but over 120,000,000 as an L2. Bahasa Indonesia is the primary language of instruction, and there is wide literacy in that language. So, there are many people who speak their native language orally but who can read and write Bahasa Indonesia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-07-18T16:15:25.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-18T22:01:30.807" Score="9" ViewCount="850" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently studying Amdo Tibetan. In this language the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] is reported to occur as the first sound in some syllable-initial consonant clusters. More specifically, this sound occurs only before voiced consonants. (Before voiceless consonants this phoneme surface as voiceless [χ] or [h].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of phonetic transcriptions of words starting with this sound (taken from various academic papers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[&lt;sup&gt;ɣ&lt;/sup&gt;za &lt;sup&gt;ɦ&lt;/sup&gt;da wa]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣ&lt;sup&gt;ə&lt;/sup&gt;zɨm]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣgon pa]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣlab raŋ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣgar]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣdʑak]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many papers written on the phonology/phonetics of Amdo Tibetan and all of them use the IPA symbol [ɣ] for this sound. This so-called &quot;pre-initial&quot; sound is quite common in Amdo Tibetan and I hear it quite often when listening to the recording that accompanies my Colloquial Amdo Tibetan textbook, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem is that no matter how hard I listen, I can't seem to hear that this is a velar fricative. In fact, I don't hear it as a fricative consonant at all. Instead, it just sounds like a very short [ə], or at least some other kind of central vowel. Thus, instead of [ɣlab raŋ] I hear something like [əlab raŋ].&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My native language is English and a voiced velar fricative is not a sound I can produce naturally, but I have read a description of it in &quot;A Course in Phonetics&quot; and I've listen to a recording of this sound on Wikipedia (see here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiced_velar_fricative.ogg&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiced_velar_fricative.ogg&lt;/a&gt;). Yet to me this sound does not sound at all like the sound that Amdo Tibetan linguists are transcribing as [ɣ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is this [ɣ] sound actually being pronounced more like a [ə] (or some similar vowel sound-- in which case the transcriptions are &quot;inaccurate&quot;), or do I just hear it as [ə] because I am unaccustomed to hearing a syllable-initial [ɣ]? Or perhaps this velar fricative is being pronounced so lightly that it's fricative nature is not easily heard? &lt;strong&gt;Can I use software such as Pratt or WaveSurfer to figure out which sound is actually being produced?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S. I can upload a sound file if that would help.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1192" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T14:02:40.573" Title="How can I differentiate between syllable-initial [ɣ] and [ə] using Praat or other software?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2012-07-19T00:53:15.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a discussion with a literary group I attended, someone pointed out that similar &quot;early&quot; instruments such as sundials, were used to measure both time and temperature. So apparently, there was a &quot;common cause,&quot; but not an obvious one. And it seems that a number of languages have overlaps between the words for time and temperature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1200" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T00:53:15.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2273" CreationDate="2012-07-19T02:27:31.990" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to NLP so bear with me if this isn't possible yet. I am interested in taking a sentence like 'He had a party at his house' to 'He hosted a party at his house' or simply the verb 'hosted'. Is this possible with current NLP technology or does this require deep semantic analysis that isn't currently available since it involves converting a nondescript verb into a descriptive one based on the receiving object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1201" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-19T10:43:48.450" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T12:41:05.463" Title="How do I get 'hosted' from 'He had a party at his house'?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-19T05:08:15.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Signed languages have rhyming.  Words are said to rhyme when they end in the same phoneme, that is, when their phonetic material matches on certain parameters. These parameters include location, configuraton, and movement of the articulators. eg, CAT and MAT share the ending: {low front vocalic-alveolar stop}  In signed languages the parameters include location on the body where the sign is made, handshape and movement of the signing hand.  So if two signs are perceived as similar due to shared phonetics they are said to rhyme.  American Sign Language has a huge body of poetic literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unit 12 of this online course describes how it works:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.citebite.com/j3m3s4v9viid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://pages.citebite.com/j3m3s4v9viid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;some academic papers on the subject:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sls/toc/sls2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sls/toc/sls2.1.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a news story: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vnews.com/10302010/7236248.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.vnews.com/10302010/7236248.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1128" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T05:08:15.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2012-07-19T12:41:05.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the approach of &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/WP-2001-03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sag et al (2001)&lt;/a&gt; on multi-word expressions, specifically the parts about light-verb constructions, which they model computationally with an HPSG-based grammar. See references in that paper for background, and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aac10/papers/lrec2000.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Copestake &amp;amp; Flickinger (2000)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T12:41:05.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2269" CreationDate="2012-07-19T13:39:16.243" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind is that IPA is language-dependent, i.e. there is not a one-to-one correspondence between IPA symbols and speech sounds.  This point is sometimes glossed over in introductory linguistics courses, where students sometimes are given the impression that the same symbol represents the same sound in all different languages. But this is far from true. Take the symbol [s] for example. What we call [s] in various languages is articulated in a variety of ways, and it is acoustically different in those languages, as well. When my Icelandic friends produce [s] I hear it as somewhere between [s] and [ʃ]; Icelanders, meanwhile, have trouble hearing the [s]/[ʃ] distinction in English because they have no such contrast phonemically (/s/ vs. /ʃ/) in their native language. Indeed, in a spectrogram, the [s] produced by my Icelandic friends shows fricative noise in a frequency range somewhere between that of my [s] and my [ʃ]. Another example comes from Hebrew, which allows many more complex onset clusters than English does. Rina Kreitman played some Hebrew clusters for non-Hebrew-speaking listeners, and those listeners sometimes reported hearing consonant-schwa-consonant sequences, presumably because their native languages didn't allow for such clusters; Japanese speakers also report &quot;hearing&quot; vowels between consonants in English clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is to make the point that, yes, you are likely being influenced by your native language when you are hearing this so-called voiced velar fricative as a vowel. English doesn't have such a fricative; it doesn't even have the approximant version of it (transcribed as [ɰ]), nor are approximants allowed in that position in onset clusters (*[wga], e.g.), so it makes sense that you would map this sound to the closest thing that your native language's phonotactics would allow in that syllabic position--a mid-central-ish vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it is indeed quite possible that, &lt;em&gt;articulatorily&lt;/em&gt;, the sound most often being transcribed as a velar fricative is being lenited to an approximant, in the sense that there is not enough of a constriction in the vocal tract to produce audible turbulent noise. This is quite common cross-linguistically; for example, the pronunciation of the Icelandic word &lt;em&gt;saga&lt;/em&gt; is usually transcribed as [saɣa], but in reality it is often produced as [saɰa]; that is, the back of the tongue and velum approach each other for the velar consonant but they never get close enough to result in audible fricative noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acoustics aren't going to help you distinguish between a vowel and an approximant (unless you have minimal pairs in the language under investigation), because the distinction between the two is largely phonological. You might be able to see evidence for deciding between the fricative [ɣ] and the approximant [ɰ], though. The former should manifest itself with some aperiodic &quot;noise&quot; in the spectrum--some of the otherwise regular vertical lines corresponding to the regular glottal pulses in vowels and approximants will be &quot;smudged over&quot; with textured noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that even in the absence of visible aperiodic noise, researchers might still label this sound as a velar fricative in broader transcriptions (see the second paragraph in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_approximant&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry for the velar approximant&lt;/a&gt;)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-07-19T14:02:40.573" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T14:02:40.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1548" CreationDate="2012-07-19T21:51:33.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you have any real evidence that this &quot;center-marking&quot; is diachronically unstable. It also seems that you are totally unfamiliar with things such as case prefixes and prenomial relative clauses. I suggest you read grammars of Basque or Japanese, for example. (I'm not all that familiar with any case prefix languages, so I can't help you there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a hypothetical SOV language with case suffixes and prenomial relative clauses, your example of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I walked store-from-ly the wide open sheep grazing field-ward where John slaughtered the goat.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;might be glossed something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1SG.NOM store-ABL John-NOM goat-ACC slaughtered where wide open sheep grazing field-ALL walked.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments you stated that you didn't believe kaleissin that Basque works this way. I don't know it well enough to translate this sentence, but I assure you that it works this way (and in Japanese, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, in a hypothetical VSO language with case prefixes and postnomial relative clauses, it might be glossed like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;walked 1SG.NOM ABL-store ALL-field grazing sheep open wide where slaughtered John-NOM goat-ACC.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your problem is avoided entirely when the locus of case marking is on the opposite side of the head noun as relative clauses. This is fairly common. (Few languages have case prefixes, but that is irrelevant. Case prefixes are equivalent to prepositions for this purpose, as are case suffixes to postpositions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way to solve your problem is with case clitics. Rather than give you another hypothetical example, I will use English here. The possesive 's is a clitic that attaches to whole noun phrases. For example, you say &quot;The Queen of England's crown&quot; instead of &quot;The Queen's of England crown&quot;, which you wouldn't like. There are languages that build their entire case systems like this. (In fact, I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think I remember reading that full case-concord systems like we are all used to from Latin, Greek, etc. are relatively uncommon, and case is applied only once to a whole noun phrase in many more languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastActivityDate="2012-07-19T21:51:33.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2281" CreationDate="2012-07-20T07:00:12.287" Score="9" ViewCount="1296" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seeded&lt;/strong&gt; grapes are actually &lt;strong&gt;seedless&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;inflammable&lt;/strong&gt; object is really &lt;strong&gt;flammable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that, superficially, the use of those affixes make the words sound like they should be antonyms, but they are not. Is this an actual thing, or just a quirk that has creeped in over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, does this occur in languages other than English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-02-05T17:37:54.913" Title="Is there a term for when words that sound like antonyms are actually synonyms?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-20T09:07:04.307" Score="2" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently learning modern Hebrew with simple material (Teach Yourself Hebrew). I would like to use a different transcription than the one offered in this book or in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Omniglot&lt;/a&gt; to build up my vocabulary lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above sources, different transcriptions are provided for the alternative pronunciations of the letters &lt;em&gt;bet (b/v), kaf (k/kh), pe (p/f)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;shin (s/sh)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I would like to use a transcription that reflects the use of a single letter+diacritic to denote the change from fricative to plosive and from alveolar to post-alveolar for &lt;em&gt;shin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance I am currently using:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bet&lt;/em&gt;: v = [v] and ṿ [b]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kaf&lt;/em&gt;: k = [x] and ḳ [k]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;shin&lt;/em&gt;: s = [s] and ṣ [ʃ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not really satisfied however with what I have (the dot below usually denotes a retroflex and there I cannot add a dot below &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; with the international keyboard), and I would like to find a way to use the same base letter for both alternative phonetics. Could you suggest any transcription that would reflect the alternative pronunciations in a linguistically appropriate way? (It should also be easy enough to type with an international keyboard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-20T11:53:17.727" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T14:07:17.450" Title="What transcription to reflect Hebrew script and phonetics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2277" CreationDate="2012-07-20T10:55:55.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/27576/6550&quot;&gt;answer on English Language &amp;amp; Usage about this&lt;/a&gt;, I'll paste it below the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I couldn't find any example in other languages, so I'm not sure whether they exist or not, and I'm tending to &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems they are called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaired_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unpaired Words&lt;/a&gt; (maybe the best definition) or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.2wheels.org.uk/return/absent-antonyms.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Absent Antonyms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unpaired Words&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.&#xA;  Many unpaired words are the result of one of the words disappearing from popular usage, though others were never part of a pairing and just begin with the same letters as used in common prefixes. The classification of a word as “unpaired” can be problematic, as a word thought to be unattested might reappear in real-world usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find some examples &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rinkworks.com/words/negatives.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but I'll list the majority of them here anyway for easy reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Words with no positive forms:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Debunk; defenestrate; dejected; disconsolate; disdain; disgruntled; dishevelled; dismayed; disrupt; feckless; gormless; impetuous; impromptu; inane; incessant; inchoate; incognito; incommunicado; indomitable; ineffable; inept; inert; infernal; inhibited; insidious; insipid; insouciant; intact; invert; misgivings; misnomer; nonchalant; noncommittal; nondescript; nonpareil; nonplussed; unbeknownst; ungainly; unswerving; untold; untoward.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Words with uncommon positive forms:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Disarray; disconcerting; immaculate; impeccable; inadvertent; incapacitated; incorrigible; inevitable; innocent; inscrutable; insensate; insufferable; interminable; unbridled; unflappable; unfurl; unkempt; unmitigated; unrequited; unruly; unthinkable; unwieldy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suffixes (asterisk means &quot;word not existing&quot;):&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Reckless/*Reckful  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Indefatigable/*defatigable -&gt; fatigable  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Flammable-Inflammable (not antonyms)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T11:07:07.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2278" CreationDate="2012-07-20T14:07:17.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A commenter to your post suggested that you not use transcriptions, and I would like to expand upon that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Hebrew words are very dependant upon the root (שורש) of the word, you will need to know the root of a word to know its meaning. Also, new words are easy to understand if you are familiar with the root. Hebrew words fall into a finite number of buildings (בניינים) that let you pick out the roots very easily. You will loose that advantage if you transcribe. Also you might loose the difference between differing letters with similar sound, such as וו and ב, for instance the words שבה and שווה would be pronounced the same but have different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what reason do you want to use transcriptions? I may be able to help devise a plan based on your goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T14:07:17.450" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2277" CreationDate="2012-07-20T16:53:50.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transitive &lt;em&gt;seed&lt;/em&gt;  is one of those zero-derived verbs that can be &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Privative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; -- 'remove seeds from X' -- &lt;em&gt;He seeded the pepper before slicing it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provisional&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; -- 'provide X with seeds' -- &lt;em&gt;He seeded the lawn before watering it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/zeroderivation.pdf&quot;&gt;this linguistics problem&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-07-20T16:53:50.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2553" CreationDate="2012-07-21T12:04:00.217" Score="8" ViewCount="2238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew verbs are based on roots. A root can provide different verbs through processes of derivation called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verb_conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;binyanim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Each verb can be conjugated by in-fixing vowels. For instance (using the first person singular in the present), the verbs conjugate as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;לשתות &lt;em&gt;lištot&lt;/em&gt;, to drink -&gt; שותה &lt;em&gt;šoteh&lt;/em&gt;, I drink;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;לישון &lt;em&gt;lišon&lt;/em&gt;, to sleep -&gt; ישן &lt;em&gt;yašen&lt;/em&gt;, I sleep;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;לצרוך &lt;em&gt;liṣroḵ&lt;/em&gt;, to need -&gt; צריך &lt;em&gt;ṣariḵ&lt;/em&gt;, I need;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;לפגוע &lt;em&gt;lip̄goa&lt;/em&gt;, to hurt -&gt; פוגע &lt;em&gt;pogea&lt;/em&gt;, I hurt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those various conjugations different vowels are in-fixed to conjugate the present, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;o-e&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a-e&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a-i&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0-0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rules which dictate what vowels are inserted into the root in the conjugation process? In other words: is it possible to infer the full conjugation and pronunciation from the root or infinitive of each verb? Again reformulated: how does one know &lt;em&gt;liśon&lt;/em&gt; conjugates to &lt;em&gt;yaśen&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;yośen&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;yaśin&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2014-09-08T16:29:48.167" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T11:46:56.143" Title="What are the rules to infer the vowel in-fix in Hebrew conjugation?" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2012-07-21T12:57:49.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to infer the full conjugation and pronunciation from the root of each verb for each binyan. There are exceptions to the rules, but even the exceptions have rules!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Binyanim are named after the form of the third person male past tense form, using the root פ-ע-ל. So the root ח-ש-ב in the binyan פָעָל would have the male past tense form חָשָב and in the binyan פִיעֵל would have the male past tense form חִישֵב.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most basic binyan is called פָעָל and it is the first taught to new Hebrew speakers as it is very simply and widely used. You can find the binyan explained here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/makefjulis/subject-1-7-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://sites.google.com/site/makefjulis/subject-1-7-1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you understand that, you can move on to other binyanim, they are all here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.morim.com/memento%20binyanim.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.morim.com/memento%20binyanim.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that second link uses כתב חסר when writing with vowel points, so in some places there will not be a yod where you might expect one. Just look at the tables, don't try to make sense of what is noted beyond that for the time being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="536" LastEditDate="2012-07-23T14:33:28.813" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T14:33:28.813" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-21T19:40:42.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English language is very poor for composing rhyming poems. This is because it has no inflections and very varying pronunciation. In most cases the English rhyme is only approximate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages, say, Russian are much more suitable for rhyming. Similar can be said about Romance languages, German, Greek and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-07-21T19:40:42.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2012-07-22T04:14:08.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can tell that, for example, lishtot is a member of the pa'al binyan, because of how its infinitive looks. The infinitives of pa'al look like liCCoC. The infinitives for other binyanim look differently--for example in the pi'el binyan, the infinitive is ledaber, leCaCeC. Did that clarify anything? I'm a little new to linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1206" LastActivityDate="2012-07-22T04:14:08.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2296" CreationDate="2012-07-22T14:00:41.350" Score="4" ViewCount="646" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; reconstructed in PIE, &lt;em&gt;sou̯nus&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;seu̯nus&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Anatolyevich_Starostin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Starostin&lt;/a&gt; gives contradictory accounts: &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinyurl.com/cdlnxo4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in Indo-European etymology page&lt;/a&gt; he gives the first variant, but on a page for &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=/data/nostr/nostret&amp;amp;text_number=%20329&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Eurasiatic etymology&lt;/a&gt; he gives the second one. Possibly the vowel could be alternated in this root depending on meaning (to give birth/son), similarly to alternation in ret-/rot-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-04-02T02:39:45.637" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:26:00.857" Title="How is the word for &quot;son&quot; reconstructed in PIE?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2289" CreationDate="2012-07-22T20:27:26.070" Score="3" ViewCount="706" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Austronesian languages, which typically lack inflection, subjects appear structurally identical to their objects. What constructs do Verb-Subject-Object languages use to distinguish the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:16:13.550" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T06:57:50.213" Title="How do isolating VSO languages differentiate the subject and object?" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;&lt;vso&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2286" CreationDate="2012-07-23T01:06:14.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pokorny also gives the &lt;em&gt;seuə-&lt;/em&gt; account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;seuə-&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  To give birth. Suffixed zero-grade form in derivative noun *&lt;em&gt;su(ə)-nu-&lt;/em&gt;, son. son, from Old English &lt;em&gt;sunu&lt;/em&gt;, son, from Germanic *&lt;em&gt;sunuz&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T01:06:14.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2012-07-23T02:02:46.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prepositions are one obvious answer. English doesn't need to mark its object because of its SVO order, but it does mark most other roles with prepositions, and you can easily imagine a language that marks its subject or object with a preposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I say &quot;preposition&quot; as that's what's typical in VO languages. In Japanese, a moderately synthetic language with some peculiar isolating tendencies, just about all roles are (sometimes optionally) marked with postpositions (Japanese is an SOV language). E.g. from &quot;neko&quot; (cat):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;neko ga&quot;: subject&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;neko wo&quot;: object&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;neko ni&quot;: indirect object&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;neko kara&quot;: ablative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;neko ye&quot;: lative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In something of a variation on a theme, non-particle words may be used as well. E.g. some of Japanese' relational postpositions (&quot;kara&quot; comes readily to mind) are thought to originally have been nouns, probably the heads of agglutinative genitive constructs. In Trique, an indian language that was probably originally isolating, possessed-case nouns are often used to mark roles. E.g. &quot;body of&quot; can be an object marker (not often used, primarily for disambiguation), &quot;face of&quot; means &quot;to&quot;, &quot;hand of&quot; means &quot;from&quot;, &quot;stomach of&quot; means &quot;inside&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, you could use a serial verb structure to reduce a transitive construct to a pair of intransitive cosubordinated clauses. This is also common in Trique. E.g. to say &quot;He said to them&quot; you would literally say &quot;Said he heard they&quot;. Though this isn't a very good example (off the top of my head) because both of those have an object of their own: the thing which was said, which comes at the very end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another method I can think of (though the examples I know of are pretty highly synthetic) is an agency-based system. In such a system, both subject and object are unmarked, and the more agentive noun phrase is taken to be the subject and the less agentive the object; if this is not true in a particular clause, an additional &quot;exception&quot; morpheme is added. If you look at the declension of Proto-Indo-European, there appears to be hints of a system like this, perhaps preceding the well-known PIE case system: specifically, you see that animate nouns were zero-marked in the nominative in some declensions, and inanimate nouns were zero-marked in the accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2012-07-29T17:39:27.260" LastActivityDate="2012-07-29T17:39:27.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2309" CreationDate="2012-07-23T12:13:13.633" Score="18" ViewCount="1205" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many languages which, having descended from a language with a complex case system, have lost or greatly simplified theirs: Bulgarian (Slavic), English (Germanic), most Romance languages etc. All of the above are ultimately from PIE which had a case system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an example of the opposite process: a language with a case system which has descended from a language lacking it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1207" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-23T16:39:18.193" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T20:44:58.387" Title="Is there a language known to have developed a case system?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2012-07-23T15:21:08.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if you are asking about Modern or Biblical Hebrew: your transliterations suggest the latter, but I'm not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are calling the &quot;first person singular in the present&quot; is actually a participle, which varies for number and gender, but not person. In Modern Hebrew this is thought of as a present tense, but historically it is simply a participle, construed with the copula. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;אני כותב ('ani kotev) = I (am) one-who-writes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first example, שותה shoteh 'who drinks' is regular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ישן yaśen, 'who sleeps' I haven't an answer to: it just appears to be irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;צריכ ẓarik, 'need' appears not to be a verbal form at all, but an adjective meaning 'needing', though Segal and Dagut's dictionary says &quot;should, must (as prs. tense of הצטרך)&quot; (hitztarekh - the hitpa'el from the same root). I think this means that it functions as though it were the present of that verb. They do not list לצרוכ liẓrok at all, but they don't necessarily list all infinitives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your last, פגוע pagu'a, is a different form, the passive participle, seen in ברוך (barukh) = 'blessed' and כתוב (katuv) = 'written'. The active פוגע (poge'a) means 'who strikes/offends'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, one is regular, one appears to be irregular, one is a functionally different form which just happens to be used in a similar way, and the last is a different but parallel form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more point: I strongly advise that you don't think of the infinitive as the 'basic' or 'dictionary' form. We are used to doing this in Indo-European languages, but it tends to be unhelpful in Hebrew, because it sometimes omits a consonant of the root, as לשבת lashevet, from ישב yashav = 'sat' . Treat the 3sg perfective (or 'past', if you're talking about Modern Hebrew) as the basic form, and the infinitive as one of the derived forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2012-07-23T15:28:26.877" LastActivityDate="2012-07-23T15:28:26.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2293" CreationDate="2009-12-23T18:29:59.850" Score="32" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is &quot;ph&quot; used so often (as opposed to &quot;f&quot;) to transliterate the Hebrew &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe_(letter)#Pei_without_the_dagesh_.28Fei.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fei&lt;/a&gt;&quot; sound into English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alef - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=alef&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17.5 million Google hits (MGh)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aleph - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=aleph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;13.8 MGh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seraf - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=seraf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0.9 MGh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seraph - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=seraph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;23.4 MGh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="238" OwnerDisplayName="Isaac Moses" LastEditorUserId="27664" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T09:38:54.580" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T09:38:54.580" Title="Why the prevalence of &quot;ph&quot; in transliteration?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2292" CreationDate="2009-12-24T04:33:41.493" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two examples you give are good ones because they represent two stages in the development of this trend. Both stem from the translation and transliteration of the Bible into Greek. This juncture in the transmission of non-Hebrew versions of the Bible has had many an impact in enduring transliterations that are strange to the modern English speaking ear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, sounds that are impossible in the Greek alphabet were dropped or replaced by more Grecophilic ones. Take for example the dropping of the 'sh' (absent in Greek) from names like Simeon and Samuel, or the non-consonantal beginnings to names like Isaac and Israel (although that nuance is slightly more complex).*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present test case, it appears to us that no sounds were dropped and therefore the replacement of the simple 'f' sound with the more cumbersome /ph/ bigram is counterintuitive. It can be brought back to the intuitive realm by recalling some phacts about the sounds actually available to speakers of older Greek. The minimal pair of sounds spelled out with the letters /π/ (pi) and /φ/ (phi) was actually originally not the difference between 'p' and 'f', but between an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aspirated&lt;/a&gt; 'p' and an unaspirated 'p'. These two letters were the obvious choices for differentiating between the two versions of the Hebrew letter /פ/ (pei). Then, when Latin came along (to be followed eventually by English) and transliterated from the Greek, the aspirated version was spelled out, quite logically with an /h/ denoting the breath of air that accompanies the 'p' sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in a word that is almost exclusively Biblical, such as 'seraph', the proportion of /ph/ spellings to /f/ spellings is much more striking because most instances of it are [more] influenced directly by its appearance in the Bible. In contrast a word like 'aleph', whose transliteration is more likely to be direct (since most occurrences of it on the Internet today probably refer to the letter, a meaning not appearing in the Bible) would easily be spelled out the way they sound, with the letter /f/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Names are often the best exemplars of changes like this because they force transliteration as opposed to translation most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="WAF" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T06:49:09.707" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T06:49:09.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2292" CreationDate="2010-03-28T15:38:14.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assumption is that &quot;originally&quot; each consonant represented only one sound. Indeed, it makes little sense to devise an alphabet were a number of characters are intended to represent two separate consonants. There is some evidence for this, but putting that aside, it is interesting that even if this were so, already in biblical times at least one character indeed represented two sounds, the shin/ sin, which is clearly attested to in the shibboleth story in Judges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for p/ ph, it is a good transliteration convention. Although &quot;f&quot; and the sound /ph&quot; are the same in English, only with /ph/ is the relationship with &quot;p&quot; apparent. Similarly, this is why it is good sense to use /kh/ for undageshed kaph, and even /bh/ for bet without the dagesh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user92" LastActivityDate="2010-03-28T15:38:14.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2292" CreationDate="2010-04-09T05:38:53.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that Aleph or Seraph are good examples of Hebrew words &quot;transliterated&quot; into English, rather they are words which migrated into English from Hebrew. While these words may be pronounced more or less similar to the Hebrew counterpart they are more along the lines of words such as Josph. Such words are going to reflect nuances of the intermediary languages which they have passed through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transliterated words, those not at all part of the English language (or only recognized by select sub-groups such as those who frequent websites dedicated to the English language discussion of Judaic topics :) ) are probably much less likely to employ ph over f than words which migrated into English. Nevertheless when ph is employed it may often be due to the influence of migrated words (Joseph makes Yoseph more useful than it would be otherwise) directly or indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't think there is an easy answer to why people choose ph of f (when they do) since we cannot read each individuals mind or account for style or other less concrete factors, Ph does have a small advantage over F insofar as it somewhat preserves the shared identity of peh and pheh in Hebrew (פ). This can be particularly useful when trying to illustrate the common root of two words where the pronunciation of the פ has shifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Yirmeyahu" LastActivityDate="2010-04-09T05:38:53.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2286" CreationDate="2012-07-24T17:28:26.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Morphologically, we have CeRC here (R stands for the resonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s an athematic noun, which means that endings were added directly to the stem (sunu-) without an intervening thematic vowel. Obviously, it is also an u-stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All athematic nouns have strong (e.g. nom. and acc. sg., nom.pl.) and weak cases (the rest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you subscribe to the accent and ablaut paradigms&lt;/strong&gt;, this particular noun would be proterokinetic (or proterodynamic), which means that in the strong cases the accent was on the full-grade root (the e-grade), whereas in the weak cases both the accent and full grade shifted onto the suffix, so the u-suffix becomes –eu- (or –ou-, the o-grade) in  the weak cases. So, at this stage, we reconstruct  NOM.SG. as *seunus - the standard citation form is the e-grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the PIE daughter languages the root didn’t ablaut already, cf. Sanskrit sunus, Lith. sunus etc. (sorry, no diacritics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about the root vowel. Usually the long u is not reconstructed as a vowel phoneme in the PIE. Since in Sanskrit and Lithuanian we have a long root vowel – and “y” in Slavic, we need something to make our short u long. If you subscribe to the laryngeal theory, obviously you propose  a laryngeal H (capital H means unspecified); some researchers propose h3 here. So, now, at this stage, we reconstruct NOM.SG. as *seuHnus (or *seuh3nus). For the weak cases, we could reconstruct the zero-grade stem *suHn-eu or rather *suHn-ou (other variants: *suh3neu, *suh3nou). Here's a partial paradigm for this noun (singular) proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Herzenberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonard Herzenberg&lt;/a&gt; (1934-2012) (sometimes his last name is also transliterated as Gercenberg):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IE *&lt;strong&gt;séu̯h3-nu-s&lt;/strong&gt; ‘son’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOM. *séu̯h3-nu-s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACC. *séu̯h3-nu-m&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DAT. *su̯h3-nóu̯&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GEN. *su̯h3-nóu̯-s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Herzenberg 2010: 69)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re: the root vowel in the strong cases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, in the accent and ablaut paradigm theory (a la Leiden, not Erlangen??), if a noun is proterokinetic, in the strong cases the root is in the full grade and accented, whereas in the weak cases the suffix gets both full grade and accent (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Indo+European+Language+and+Culture%3A+An+Introduction%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781405188968&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fortson 2010&lt;/a&gt;, §6.22). In other words,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the strong cases we would have R(é) S(∅) E(∅), but for the weak cases we would have R(∅) S(é) E(∅) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beechstave.com/weiss.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weiss 2020&lt;/a&gt;, p. 277),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where R stands for root, S suffix, E ending, é full accented grade, ∅ zero grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nom.sg. CéC-R (s), acc.sg. CéC-R (m), gen.sg. CC-é/óR-s etc. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/catalog/z.172&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beekes 2011&lt;/a&gt;, 2nd ed., revised and corrected by M. de Vaan, p. 190).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least two ways to reconstruct PIE 'son' under this theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are explained in detail in e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110251449/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meier-Brügger 2010 (9th ed.)&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 336-338 (F 314, 1 and 4) and pp. 341-342 (F 317, 1-4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Vgl. ferner aus dem Paradigma von ved. ’Sohn’ Nom.Sg. stark sūn-ú-s (das Suffix ist schwundstufig, &lt;strong&gt;der Akzent lag ursprünglich auf der Wurzel&lt;/strong&gt;, ist aber sekundär auf das Suffix verlegt worden, s.u. Abs. 4), Gen.Sg. schwach sūn-ó-s &amp;lt; *sūn-áu̯-s (das Suffix ist vollstufig).&amp;quot; (emphasis mine - Alex B., p. 336)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His reasoning is as that even though on the surface level &amp;quot;Das Paradigma von ved. sūnú- zeigt durchgegend stabilen Akzent auf dem Suffix&amp;quot;, [d]ieser Zustand kann aber nicht alt sein. Der Akzent ist auf dem vollstufigen Suffix des schwachen Stammes des Erwartete, nicht aber auf dem schwundstufigen Suffix des starken Stammes&amp;quot; (p. 342).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meier-Brügger also writes that the problem of the root vowel in the strong cases in PIE 'son' cannot be settled, that is why he gives the following reconstruction for the strong cases, &amp;quot; uridg. *?-nu-s, whereas for the weak cases he gives &amp;quot;uridg. *suH-néu̯-s&amp;quot;, cf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Während der Ablautwechsel beim Suffix ved. einzelsprachlich belegt ist, fehlen solche Hinweise auf den Ablautwechsel bei der Wurzelsilbe sū-. Die Rekonstruktion muß dewegen in diesem Bereich unsicher bleiben. Alternativ zu vollstufigen *séu̯H- kann auch betontes schwundstufiges *súH- nicht ausegeschlossen werden.&amp;quot; (p. 342)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. the following remark from Fortson 2010 (p. 125, §6.42):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Two classes of athematic nouns that behaved in parallel were those whose suffix was *-i- or *-u- in the zero-grade and *-ei- *-eu- in the full grade. The most common type continues an earlier proterokinetic paradigm, with zero-grade *-i-s *-i-m and *-u-s *-u-m in the strong cases, and full grade in the weak cases (genit. *-ei-s *-eu-s). By the time of the daughter languages, however, these nouns  do not ablaut in their root syllable.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand Fortson 2010 correctly, he argues that in such cases the zero-grade (for the root in the strong cases) has been generalized (analogically restored) from the weak case forms with the ablauting suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could rather agree with Jesse Lundquist (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110542431-043/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lundquist 2018&lt;/a&gt;) instead, who wrote that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Because the hypothesized changes are situated deep in prehistory (i.e. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;prior to PIE as accessible by the comparative method&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;), their plausibility is difficult to evaluate, either within individual classes or collectively, at the systemic level (p. 2135), cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.winter-verlag.de/de/detail/978-3-8253-5359-9/Wodtko_ua_Hg_Nomina_im_Indogerm_Lexikon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NIL&lt;/a&gt; *suH-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don’t subscribe to the laryngeal theory, you could use a schwa instead of the laryngeal or simply reconstruct *suənu-, without any ablaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T17:26:00.857" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:26:00.857" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-24T16:08:30.553" Score="12" ViewCount="17396" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that this word may derive from an Egyptian decree issued by Pharoah Merueptah (1224 which referred to the hebrew word &lt;em&gt;'habitu'&lt;/em&gt; (type of slave) who carry stones for the great pylon of the great city of Rameses'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the actual etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1738" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-24T19:13:09.147" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T21:07:14.810" Title="What are the origins of the word Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2012-07-24T16:13:18.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Hebrew.html#.UA7JVmGwzW4&quot;&gt;http://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Hebrew.html#.UA7JVmGwzW4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word Hebrew comes from the verb  (עבר) meaning to pass over,&#xA;  through, take away. The first application of this word is in the name&#xA;  Eber. The second application is in the first occurrence of the word עברי,&#xA;  Hebrew in Genesis 14:13, where Abram is called Hebrew. The first case&#xA;  of narrative use of this verb is in the enigmatic cadaver vision of&#xA;  Genesis 15:17, &quot;...there appeared a smoking furnace and a flaming&#xA;  torch that passed between these parts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Gershon Gold" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T16:13:18.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2302" CreationDate="2010-12-12T22:46:48.893" Score="24" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did the name &quot;מֹשֶׁה‎&quot; come to be transliterated with a [z] at the end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/122549?redirectedFrom=moses#&quot;&gt;OED entry&lt;/a&gt; notes that &quot;Moses&quot; derives from Biblical Hebrew &quot;Mōšeh&quot; and that the earliest attestations with a strident coda on the second syllable are Hellenistic Greek &quot;Μωσῆς&quot;, &quot;Μωυσῆς&quot; but fails to show how or when the former gave rise to the latter. Are there other examples of open syllables or final vowels having &quot;ς&quot; appended like this in Greek transliteration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="WAF" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-24T19:38:05.670" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T19:38:05.670" Title="Why was מֹשֶׁה‎ transliterated as [moʊzɨz]?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2010-12-13T00:23:48.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, another example (lehavdil) is &quot;oso ha'ish&quot;'s Hebrew name, ישוע (a shortened form of יהושע found in a few places in Tanach), which ends up in Greek and English with a final S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't recall the source for this now, but somewhere I read that this is because in classical Greek, names ending in a vowel were (or at least sounded) feminine or barbarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Alex" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T00:23:48.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2010-12-13T02:13:11.150" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chumash Binas Miqra, by Rav Aryeh Leib Gordon (author of Siddur Otzar HaTefilos) he brings that he saw in old secular sources that in ancient Egyptian the word &lt;em&gt;mo&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;water&quot; and the word &lt;em&gt;yses&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;was saved from&quot;, hence the Alexandrian translator always refers to Moshe as &quot;Moyses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Binas_Miqra_Shemos_Page_3b.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;alt text&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Yahu" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:47.857" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T02:36:31.513" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2010-12-13T21:52:50.720" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moses is transliterated this way because of the way it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension&quot;&gt;declined&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt;. While the root of the proper noun משה in Greek is indeed μωυση, which is roughly transliterated &quot;moyse&quot; or &quot;moise&quot;, it can take the following forms based on its function in a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nominative&lt;/strong&gt;: μωυσῆς (Moises): e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Deuteronomy/1&quot;&gt;Deuteronomy 1:1&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;These are the words that Moshe said&quot;. Used when Moshe is the subject of a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Genitive&lt;/strong&gt;: μωυσῆ (Moise): e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Joshua/1&quot;&gt;Joshua 1:1&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;after the death of Moshe&quot;, and in the same pasuk, &quot;servant of Moshe&quot;. Used to indicate possessive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dative&lt;/strong&gt;: μωυσεῖ (Moisei): e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Exodus/31&quot;&gt;Exodus 31:18&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;He gave [the luchos] to Moshe&quot;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Exodus/16&quot;&gt;Exodus 16:22&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;and they told it to Moshe&quot;. Used when Moshe is the indirect object. (Note the subtle difference between להגיד inducing the dative versus לדבר inducing the accusative.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accusative&lt;/strong&gt;: μωυσῆν (Moisen): e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Exodus/2&quot;&gt;Exodus 2:15&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Pharaoh wished to kill Moshe&quot;. Used when Moshe is the direct object. Also all the &quot;vayidaber Hashem el Moshe&quot;'s are in this case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vocative&lt;/strong&gt;: μωυσῆ: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.septuagint.org/LXX/Exodus/3&quot;&gt;Exodus 3:4&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;He said 'Moshe! Moshe!', and he replied 'hineni'&quot;. Used when calling out Moshe's name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These declensions follow particular rules, such that any noun with a certain type of stem will be declined following a particular pattern; so it is not just Moses that has a sigma added to its root to form the nominative. Some other names in the Torah that are found declined in the Septuagint are Judah/יהודה/Iουδας/Iουδα/Iουδαν, Joshua/יהושע/Ἰησοῦς/Ἰησοῦ/Ἰησοῖ/Ἰησοῦν and Sarai/שרי/σαρας/σαρα/σαραν.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nominative form, as opposed to the root or vocative, could be considered the &quot;primary&quot; way to refer to the person, since it's how you form sentences having them be the subject, or the main actor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Yosef" LastActivityDate="2010-12-13T21:52:50.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2010-12-15T17:07:00.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the audio &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.teach12.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=350&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;course&lt;/a&gt; on the History of Ancient Egypt, professor Bob Brier mentions the similarity between the name Moses and the names of Egyptian pharaohs like Ramses or Thutmose. In ancient Egyptian &quot;mes&quot; is the word for &quot;son&quot;, and &quot;mesu&quot; means &quot;to be born&quot;.  So &quot;Ramses&quot; means &quot;the son of Ra&quot; or &quot;Ra is born&quot;, and &quot;Thutmose&quot; means &quot;the son of Thoth&quot; or &quot;Thoth is born&quot;.  Bob Brier argues that since Moshe was born in Egypt and raised as a member of the Egyptian royal household, his name may well be Egyptian in origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29192" OwnerDisplayName="Dima" LastActivityDate="2010-12-15T17:07:00.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 2.5" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2012-07-24T22:45:50.127" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chambers Dictionary 11th Ed.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ORIGIN: OFr &lt;em&gt;Ebreu&lt;/em&gt; and L &lt;em&gt;Hebraeus&lt;/em&gt;, from Gr &lt;em&gt;Hebraios&lt;/em&gt;, from Aramaic &lt;em&gt;ʻebrai&lt;/em&gt; (Heb &lt;em&gt;ʻibrī&lt;/em&gt;), literally, one from the other side (of the Euphrates)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Oxford English Dictionary 2nd. Ed.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ME. &lt;em&gt;Ebreu&lt;/em&gt;, a. OF. &lt;em&gt;Ebreu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ebrieu&lt;/em&gt; (nom. &lt;em&gt;Ebreus&lt;/em&gt;, 12th c. in Hatz.-Darm.), ad. med.L. &lt;em&gt;Ebrę̄us&lt;/em&gt; for cl.L. &lt;em&gt;Hebræus&lt;/em&gt;, a. Gr. &lt;em&gt;Ἑβραῖος&lt;/em&gt;, f. Aramaic ‭&lt;em&gt;ﻋebrai&lt;/em&gt;, corresp. to Heb. ‭&lt;em&gt;ﻋibrī&lt;/em&gt; ‘a Hebrew’, lit. ‘one from the other side (of the river)’;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=hebrew&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;late O.E., from O.Fr. &lt;em&gt;Ebreu&lt;/em&gt;, from L. &lt;em&gt;Hebraeus&lt;/em&gt;, from Gk. &lt;em&gt;Hebraios&lt;/em&gt;, from Aramaic &lt;em&gt;'ebhrai&lt;/em&gt;, corresponding to Heb. &lt;em&gt;'ibhri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;an Israelite,&quot; lit. &quot;one from the other side,&quot; in reference to the River Euphrates, or perhaps simply signifying &quot;immigrant;&quot; from &lt;em&gt;'ebher&lt;/em&gt; &quot;region on the other or opposite side.&quot; The noun is c.1200, &quot;the Hebrew language;&quot; late 14c. of persons, originally &quot;a biblical Jew, Israelite.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Collins English Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[from Old French &lt;em&gt;Ebreu&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;Hebraeus&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;Hebraios&lt;/em&gt;, from Aramaic &lt;em&gt;`ibhray&lt;/em&gt;, from Hebrew &lt;em&gt;`ibhrī&lt;/em&gt; one from beyond (the river)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-07-24T22:53:10.010" LastActivityDate="2012-07-24T22:53:10.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2306" CreationDate="2012-07-25T05:11:39.883" Score="14" ViewCount="18760" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to understand an answer from another SE site (Japanese Language &amp;amp; Usage) where the answer involves the differences between anaphora and deixis. &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/6262/1328&quot;&gt;Here &lt;/a&gt;is the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the difference between anaphoric and deictic usage? If possible, please provide some examples showing the differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1211" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T19:00:05.243" Title="What is the difference between &quot;anaphora&quot; and &quot;deixis&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2305" CreationDate="2012-07-25T06:59:12.787" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know any Japanese, but generally, an &lt;strong&gt;anaphora&lt;/strong&gt; is an expression that refers to something mentioned earlier in the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John is tired because &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; has been working all day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary said the moon is made of cheese. I don't believe &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; in the first example refers to John; &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in the second one refers to the moon being made of cheese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;deixis&lt;/strong&gt; is an expression whose exact meaning varies with the context in which it is uttered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who exactly is meant by &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;? That depends on who is being spoken to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;? Whereever the speaker is, or where he is pointing to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What time will it be &lt;em&gt;in one hour&lt;/em&gt;? That depends on when it is being said.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T15:05:47.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2277" CreationDate="2012-07-25T09:11:47.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several case like this in Hebrew, e.g., לשרש means &quot;to uproot&quot;, but according to the regular rules should have meant &quot;to strike roots&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T09:11:47.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2305" CreationDate="2012-07-25T10:28:05.960" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to go a bit more in depth about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deixis&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, by deixis is meant the location and identification of person, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee; we can analyze them this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; those that are used to refer to speaker and addressee (&lt;em&gt;I, you, we&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Place deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; those that refer to spatial context (&lt;em&gt;here, there&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; these that refer to temporal context (&lt;em&gt;now, then, verb tense markers&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discourse deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; those that refer to parts of unfolding discourse (&lt;em&gt;next, below, furthermore&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Social deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; those that encode aspects of the social relationship between speaker and addressee (&lt;em&gt;Her Majesty&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perceptual deixis:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;There's Harry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deixis concerns the use of certain linguistic expressions to locate entities in spatiotemporal, social and discursive context. First and second person pronouns, demonstratives, tense, certain place and time adverbials, verbs such as &lt;em&gt;come, go, bring, take&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fetch&lt;/em&gt;. Such deictic expressions encode specific aspects of the speech event and &lt;strong&gt;cannot be interpreted unless contextual parameters are taken into account&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without physical context we cannot interpret utterances like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll meet you over there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  See you tomorrow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will be back in 10 minutes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You, you and you, come over here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He does not like that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Put that here and then move this over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deictic expressions refer to a deictic field of language whose zero point is fixed by the person who is speaking, the place of utterance and the time of utterance (I, here, now, respectively, etc). &lt;strong&gt;Deictic constructions construct the speaker as the deictic center&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Anaphora and Cataphora&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anaphora&lt;/strong&gt;, along with &lt;strong&gt;cataphora&lt;/strong&gt; and other devices, belong to the so-called &lt;strong&gt;Patterns of reduction&lt;/strong&gt;. In other words they allow you to say less, but still keep sense in your utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anaphora = reference backward&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cataphora = reference forward &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphora is a lower expenditure of cognitive effort for recovering the conceptual content of the co-referring expression (more efficient) - the identity of the content is made plain in advance. Cataphora's processing requires the creation of a temporarily empty slot until the required content is supplied (low efficiency): it is often used to generate uncertainty and to intensify receiver's interest (effectiveness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The difference&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Anaphora, in the linguistics sense, makes use of deictic expressions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sam&lt;/strong&gt; went home because &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; was tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He&quot; is the anaphora expression referring to &quot;Sam&quot;, but it's also a deictic expression, i.e. it changes according to the context/subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deixis, on the other hand, is not necessarily related to anaphora. For example, there's no anaphora in this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;, come over here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are just deictic expressions referring to 3 different subjects, but no anaphora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T10:28:05.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2290" CreationDate="2012-07-25T20:44:58.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Heine and Kuteva's (2002) &lt;em&gt;World Lexicon of Grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt; you'll find examples of words with lexical meanings &quot;give, leave, arrive&quot; having grammaticalized into morphemes expressing dative, ablative, and allative meanings, respectively. However, what is documented are cases of words with lexical meanings gradually changing into words which are best treated as adpositions. When you are thinking of case systems, you are probably interested in cases where a language gains a nominal affix used to express a case relation. Here, the most likely historical change is where a word which already has case-like meaning (viz. an adposition) fuses to the noun. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://files.professorivo.webnode.pt/200000047-800fd8a61f/Thoughts%20on%20grammaticalization.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lehmann (2002: 70ff.)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Thoughts on Grammaticalization&quot; for examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T20:44:58.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2012-07-25T22:16:46.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rhyming is definitely not an English only phenomenon.  If you google “rhyming poetry X”, where X is a language of your choice, you’ll find many of examples.  A particularly famous case is the eleventh century Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, in Persian, which from memory has an AABA rhyme scheme, with as many as three syllables rhyming at the end of each A line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some personal favourites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian (Akhmatova) in transcription, with ABAB rhyme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;za lozh menya predavshix gub&#xA;za myortvy xolod glas&#xA;za to chto mir zhestok i grub&#xA;za to chto mog nye spas&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some German (George), interspersed couplets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sprich nicht immer&#xA;Von dem laub ·&#xA;Windes raub ·&#xA;Vom zerschellen&#xA;Reifer quitten ·&#xA;Von den tritten&#xA;Der vernichter&#xA;Spät im jahr.&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, getting back to your question, Spanish (Lorca), ABBA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Éste del cabello cano, &#xA;como la piel del armiño, &#xA;juntó su candor de niño &#xA;con su experiencia de anciano; &#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1110" LastActivityDate="2012-07-25T22:16:46.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2311" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-07-26T16:50:04.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; (PIE) is the common ancestor of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/indo-european&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'indo-european'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indo-european&lt;/a&gt; languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-European people roughly 5700 years ago. It is not attested, but rather has been reconstructed in substantial detail using the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/comparative-method&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'comparative-method'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;comparative-method&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions specifically about the PIE language itself and its reconstruction. For questions about the history of its descendants, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/indo-european&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'indo-european'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indo-european&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T16:50:56.140" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T16:50:56.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-07-26T16:50:04.873" Score="0" Body="Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed proto-language for the Indo-European language family" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:08:58.373" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:08:58.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2313" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-07-26T16:59:55.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;, a West Semitic (&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/afroasiatic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;afroasiatic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;afroasiatic&lt;/a&gt;) language, is the language of the Jewish people. Biblical Hebrew was spoken around the 6th century BC and went extinct in late Roman times. Hebrew survived as a liturgical language until its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revival as Modern Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/language-revival&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;language-revival&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;language-revival&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Modern Hebrew&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISO 639-3: heb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 10 million speakers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ancient Hebrew&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISO 639-3: hbo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:57:01.150" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:57:01.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2314" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-07-26T16:59:55.583" Score="0" Body="Hebrew, a West Semitic language, is the ancient and modern language of the Jewish people." OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:57:01.150" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:57:01.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:04:29.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notations used to represent the graphemes of one script using another one, commonly the Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/translation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'translation'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt;: converting the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; to another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/transcription&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'transcription'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transcription&lt;/a&gt;: representing the &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; in another script (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/ipa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'ipa'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ipa&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T17:40:51.720" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:40:51.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-07-26T17:04:29.353" Score="0" Body="Notations used to represent the graphemes of one script using another one." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-07-26T17:41:23.690" LastActivityDate="2012-07-26T17:41:23.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1312" CreationDate="2012-07-29T05:01:41.553" Score="-1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, it seems that BSL &lt;code&gt;*dhvor&lt;/code&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;code&gt;*dhuor-&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;*dhur-&lt;/code&gt; &amp;lt; Skt. &lt;code&gt;dAra&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;dvAra&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw somewhere *dhvor- (door, gate, yard, court) connected with the root *vert-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, it does not seem correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Vaan, 2008 (p.233) lists PIE &lt;code&gt;*dhuor-&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*dhur-&lt;/code&gt; as synonyms.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Also, Whitney, 1879 (#399) explained on vowel-to-consonant transition and suggested examples &lt;code&gt;dvāra&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dura&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit, दार &lt;code&gt;[dAra]&lt;/code&gt; and द्वार &lt;code&gt;[dvAra]&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.live4india.com/forum/printthread.php?tid=410&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mostly synonyms&lt;/a&gt;. They both mean entrance, and they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://navshakti.co.in/2012/02/03/%E0%A4%A7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%A8-%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A7%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BE-%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;often interchangeable&lt;/a&gt; in sacral texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there's no evidence that द्वार &lt;code&gt;[dvAra]&lt;/code&gt; can be related to वृत्र &lt;code&gt;[vRtra]&lt;/code&gt; (to rotate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. In Russian, there are many words derived from &lt;code&gt;[vRtra]&lt;/code&gt;, including &amp;quot;вертеть&amp;quot; &lt;code&gt;[vʲer'tʲetʲ]&lt;/code&gt; (to rotate, to turn) and &amp;quot;ворота&amp;quot; &lt;code&gt;[vɐr'otɐ]&lt;/code&gt; (gate). The least has an ancient form of &amp;quot;врата&amp;quot; &lt;code&gt;[vrɐt'a]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T08:26:37.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2342" CreationDate="2012-07-30T09:21:25.977" Score="4" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've begun to wonder how many possible forms can be made from a single Japanese verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/6308/how-many-forms-can-a-japanese-verb-take&quot;&gt;I asked a similar question first on the Japanese Language &amp;amp; Usage site&lt;/a&gt;, where I received some comments and answers that surprised me. So I'm expecting interest from a different angle by the linguist types here on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, typical English verbs have four or fives forms depending on whether they have a regular or irregular past participle but the copula &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; has eight forms, not counting archaic forms such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/art#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;art&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I have also seen the number of possible forms of Arabic verbs calculated before, and that's a language with very complex verb morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese verbs are of an agglutinating type. They are built up by adding various endings onto an invariable root and onto each other. But they cannot be added arbitrarily and surely some combinations are prohibited on either grammatical or semantic grounds. It could be that two differently spelled forms have identical meaning (this happens in Spanish) in which case each counts. There are surely also obsolete and archaic forms or variants which are no longer used in Modern Japanese. These should not be counted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy with a number, a description of how to calculate the number, or references to papers or books which address this topic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T14:39:40.900" Title="What is the maximum number of forms a (modern) Japanese verb can take?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-30T18:28:05.007" Score="3" ViewCount="5369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why some languages don't have the &quot;th&quot; sound? (voiced and voiceless dental fricatives)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say languages such as French, Turkish etc don't have the &quot;th&quot; sound as in &quot;thin&quot; and &quot;then&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes hear the &quot;th&quot; sound as in &quot;then&quot; or &quot;father&quot; in French (Not sure of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that both sounds don't exist in French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or only &quot;th&quot; as in &quot;thin&quot; doesn't exist and &quot;th&quot; as in &quot;then&quot; or &quot;Netherlands&quot; exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1220" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T23:38:11.663" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T23:38:11.663" Title="Why do some languages not have the &quot;th&quot; sound?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2012-07-30T18:58:35.853" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dental/interdental fricatives are quite rare among languages worldwide. A survey of 567 languages (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/19&quot;&gt;Maddison 2011&lt;/a&gt;) found only 42 languages with such sounds. English just happens to be one of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the point made in @musicallinguist 's answer, dental and interdental fricatives probably do not arise in some languages, and get easily lost in other languages because: (i) they are not very acoustically salient, and (ii) they are more difficult to produce. I'll only address the first point. The noise associated with their production is of relative low intensity compared to sibilant sounds like [s]. The latter is made by directing a fast-moving airstream to impinge against the lower incisors, resulting in a noisy, conspicuous sound. Non-sibilant fricatives like the interdental and [f] in English are made by pushing air through a slit formed between the upper incisors and either the tongue blade or lower lips, and the resultant noise is not as noisy and more spectrally diffuse (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3183204&quot;&gt;Behrend &amp;amp; Blumstein (1988)&lt;/a&gt;). A useful observation that you hear in phonetics classes is that &quot;obstacle&quot; turbulence is noisier than &quot;channel&quot; turbulence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spectral profile of 'th' is similar to that of [f], so the two can be confused based on their noise components. However, the formant transitions on neighboring vowels are similar in 'th' and [s], so 'th' can also be confused with [s] (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1405101237&quot;&gt;Johnson 2003:132--3&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-08-08T00:09:03.177" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T00:09:03.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2319" CreationDate="2012-07-31T02:23:41.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because some combinations are prohibited, that doesn't mean that there aren't a whole lot left. If some of the positions in the sequence of agglutinating suffixes is inhabited by an open class, you end up with an upwards unbounded number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about Arabic, but it seems to me that it's possible to have a very complex morphology, and still end up with a finite number, if the part you consider a &quot;form&quot; has no open-class morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is all about how you define &quot;form&quot;. Do you consider verb root + suffixes (all the way to the last suffix) a &quot;form&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are 食べ始める (tabe-hajimeru, start to eat), 食べ終える (tabe-oeru, finish eating), 食べ慣れる (tabe-nareru, get used to eating) etc. forms of 食べる (taberu, eat)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, then the number is upwards unbounded, since the agglutinated verb is an open class (Not in the sense that anything goes, but in the sense that there's a continuous spectrum from verbs that commonly occur in second position and are completely productive, to verbs which sound marked in the second position and/or are unproductive and only work in some combinations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, you might argue that 食べ (tabe) is the form in play here (the 連用形 ren'yokei of the verb). But then, is 食べます (tabemasu, polite form of eat) a &quot;form&quot;? Polite form is always created by attaching ます(masu) to the ren'yokei.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems that the whole exercise of counting verb forms really doesn't seem to make much sense for agglutinating verbs, or at least Japanese. It might make more sense for languages like IE langauges, where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the concept of a word (and thereby a &quot;verb form&quot;) is usually easier to agree upon. (With some exceptions: In spanish, are &lt;em&gt;comerme&lt;/em&gt; (eat me), &lt;em&gt;comerte&lt;/em&gt; (eat you) etc. forms of the verb comer, or are they written as one word as an orthographic convention?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the endings that a verb can take are a closed class.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it really comes down to the question of why you want to know. Is it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;because you want to know how machines parse Japanese verbs? If so, I don't know and would be interested in answers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;because you are looking to master all forms of the verbs? If so, you could use tools like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but the list of included forms will always depend on the creator's subjective choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-07-31T06:07:53.863" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T06:07:53.863" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-02-07T22:01:56.227" Score="10" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been closely following the work stemming from St. John and McClelland's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA218908&amp;amp;Location=U2&amp;amp;doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&quot;&gt;Sentence Gestalt Model&lt;/a&gt;, which uses a connectist model to extract semantic information about events from sentences without first specifying the syntactic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at the limitations of the model (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~homaei/research/files/TDLC07-content.pdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for a high level overview), but nothing about them looks to be insoluble without the inclusion of syntax. This intuition has been supported by the followups done by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/class/psych209a/ReadingsByDate/02_11/Rohde02Thesis.pdf&quot;&gt;Rohde&lt;/a&gt; at Stanford and &lt;a href=&quot;http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/bryant.utcstr98.pdf&quot;&gt;Byrant and Miikkulaine&lt;/a&gt; at UT Austin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then, what's the point of syntax within the context of understanding events? Is it only epiphenomenal here or have I misunderstood the gravity of the objections to syntax free models of semantics? Does there currently exist a model of event semantics that includes syntax and produces results not reproducible by the models cited here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" OwnerDisplayName="zergylord" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T09:30:24.390" Title="What is the role of syntax in understanding event descriptive sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-07-31T17:14:53.133" Score="3" ViewCount="871" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/fillmore%2B88.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; article about linguistic idiomaticity, and there's a good research on English idioms and indirect speech, in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking on different amounts of idiomaticity in various languages. I haven't seen any academic researches that would compare languages side-by-side, but my naive assumption was the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isolating languages have fewer amount of stems (usually limited by phonetics), so they should expose &lt;em&gt;higher amount of idiomaticity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Synthetic ones naturally have broader morphology, so there should be higher chance finding special words for individual terms, therefore, &lt;em&gt;lower amount of idiomaticity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of examples proving this assumption. However, there are exceptions that confuse me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English: yesterday; it has a complicated etymology, but generally it's a single term nowadays, matches the rule&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ukrainian: вчора - single term, matches the rule&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thai: เมื่อวานนี้, literally &lt;code&gt;at the time&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;day&lt;/code&gt; +&lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt;, idiomatic term, matches the rule&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Chinese&lt;/strong&gt;: 昨 - single term, does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; match the rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chinese: 多少, lit. &lt;code&gt;a lot&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;a few&lt;/code&gt;, idiomatic term, matches the rule;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thai: เท่าไหร่, lit. &lt;code&gt;amount classifier&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;what&lt;/code&gt; - idiomatic term, matches the rule;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ukrainian: скільки - a single term, matches the rule;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;How much&quot; - idiomatic term, does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; match the rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the question: is there any pattern on how various languages expose idiomaticity and indirection? I'm also wondering if there's any academic research on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T19:24:35.227" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T19:24:35.227" Title="Linguistic idiomaticity in different languages" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2012-07-31T17:27:43.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to address the main part of this question--the &quot;why&quot; part. This is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/736/why-do-languages-have-different-syllable-complexity-from-each-other/744#744&quot;&gt;my response&lt;/a&gt; to a similar question--&quot;Why do languages have different syllable complexity from one another?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general it's difficult to answer questions of the form &quot;Why do Languages with property X have that property?&quot; or &quot;Why do languages that lack property Y lack that property?&quot; with any synchronic explanation, or even with any unified historical explanation. Usually the best we can do is say, &quot;...because that's how those languages evolved over time.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the current state of any language is the end-result of an evolutionary process over time, most properties of the language came to be through that evolutionary process. One common view of diachronic change is that voicing contrasts, tonal contrasts, length contrasts, etc. are constantly lost and gained in the phonology, principally due to reanalysis of the input by language learners from generation to generation, which results in the constant changing of the phonological inventory of that language (morphology and syntax can change through similar processes of reanalysis as well). Inventories can also be expanded or changed through the influence of contact with other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In rare cases the historical explanation may have a clear-cut physiological basis. For example, if one were to ask, &quot;Why doesn't ASL (American Sign Language) make use of any audible speech sounds?&quot; we could respond, &quot;...because the community in which ASL was developed lacked the ability to perceive such sounds.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other cases, certain sounds may be considered more &quot;marked&quot; than others because they take more effort or are more difficult to produce than others. We may glean some clues from the order in which babies begin to produce certain sounds (generally labials are produced first, and labials are very common in the world's languages, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diachronic explanations like the ones above (and the detailed perceptual account provided by @jlovegren) can potentially explain the source of the loss or gain of a sound in a particular language, but (excluding the ASL example) they don't explain why some languages have been susceptible to such pressures and others haven't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from a synchronic point of view, the precise makeup of an inventory of a given language is arbitrary. In slightly oversimplified terms, the main requirement of an inventory is that it enable the language user to encode a sufficient number of contrasts for defining separate lexical entries for the various morphemes and words the language user needs to store in the lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;as long as a language has enough different sounds to differentiate among the various words in that language, it doesn't matter what those sounds are, and there's no rhyme or reason to why one language uses one set of sounds and another language uses another set of sounds, other than reasons having to do with the historical evolution of those languages.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;reason&quot; that 525 of the languages in Maddeison's survey lack a &quot;th&quot; sound is likely to be different from language to language--in most cases the languages from which these modern-day languages descended probably lacked a &quot;th&quot; sound (perhaps because it is marked from an articulatory perspective); in other cases languages may have had a &quot;th&quot; sound at one time but lost it due to the fact that it got reanalyzed as a dental stop instead of a fricative; in still other cases the &quot;th&quot; sound may have gotten reanalyzed as a different fricative, like /f/ or /v/. One would have to examine each language on a case-by-case basis. &lt;strong&gt;If there is a particular language you have in mind, you should post another question about that specific language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-07-31T20:47:34.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-01T05:19:10.023" Score="12" ViewCount="2539" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce &quot;soft&quot; consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time while learning English I noticed that definitely not all consonants are pronounced &quot;hard&quot; in standard English (as we were taught in English classes). It seems that English speakers quite naturally pronounce &quot;soft&quot; consonants in plenty of words without knowing about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in words &quot;kid&quot; and &quot;give&quot; the first consonant is pronounced &quot;soft&quot; by both British and American speakers: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/kid&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/kid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/give&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/give&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;meeting&quot; the first &quot;m&quot; is &quot;soft&quot; as pronounced by both speakers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/meeting&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/meeting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;please&quot; the British speaker pronounces &quot;soft&quot; &quot;l&quot; while the American pronounces &quot;hard&quot; &quot;l&quot;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/please&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/please&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;business&quot; they both pronounce &quot;soft&quot; &quot;b&quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/business&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/business&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;limit&quot; the British speaker pronounces &quot;soft&quot; &quot;l&quot; and &quot;m&quot; while the American pronounces the both &quot;hard&quot;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/limit&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/limit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;cheese&quot; the first &quot;ch&quot; is pronounced &quot;soft&quot; by both speakers:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/cheese&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/cheese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while in &quot;choice&quot; the British speaker pronounces &quot;soft&quot; &quot;ch&quot; while the American pronounces &quot;hard&quot;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/choice&quot;&gt;http://lingvopro.abbyyonline.com/ru/Translate/en-ru/choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some consonants are always &quot;soft&quot; in English, such as [j] as in &quot;yes&quot;. This consonant is always &quot;soft&quot; in Russian too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time IPA traditionally only indicates &quot;softness&quot; in Russian words while it does not indicate any in English words. I wonder, why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-04-13T05:11:24.247" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T23:26:16.800" Title="Why IPA does not indicate &quot;soft&quot; consonants in English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2327" CreationDate="2012-08-01T06:33:11.893" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key reason is that the &quot;soft&quot;/&quot;hard&quot; distinction is phonemic in Russian, but not in English. As such, the distinction is not rendered in phonemic (broad) IPA transcription. A narrow transcription may use the palatalisation diacritic ʲ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, as you've observed, palatalisation before front vowels in English is subject to idiolectal and dialectal variation. For example, I doubt that unconditional palatalisation before front vowels is present in my idiolect (Australian English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T23:26:16.800" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T23:26:16.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-01T19:33:07.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T19:33:07.670" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T19:33:07.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-01T19:33:07.670" Score="0" Body="Use of segmentally complex expressions whose semantic structure is not deducible jointly from their syntactic structure and the semantic structure of their components. -- Weinreich (1972:89)" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T19:41:16.273" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T19:41:16.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-01T19:52:42.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T19:52:42.160" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T19:52:42.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-01T19:52:42.160" Score="0" Body="A study of the relationships or correspondences between the languages that have a common origin. Formerly known as Comparative Grammar, Comparative Philology." OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T20:02:56.647" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T20:02:56.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2336" CreationDate="2012-08-01T19:53:36.877" Score="4" ViewCount="1461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an intermediate Swahili speaker looking to substantially increase the size of my vocabulary over the next couple weeks.  However, I want to optimize my learning curve by focusing on the first 2000 most commonly used words in the Swahili languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two problems:&#xA;1) Given its relative obscurity, I'm unable to find frequency wordlists for Swahili&#xA;2) Because Swahili is an agglutinative language, many of the most commonly used verbs are excluded from corpus analysis because it's difficult to control for the various infixes, suffixes, and prefixes used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&#xA;Does anybody have or could they point me in the right direction of a word frequency list in Swahili, or even resources that show which vocabulary would be the best to study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, generally, how do computational linguists parse agglutinative languages to extract roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="796" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-02-01T22:33:21.743" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T22:33:21.743" Title="Word frequency list for agglutinative languages like Swahili?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;bantu&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-01T20:17:33.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T20:17:33.563" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T20:17:33.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-01T20:17:33.563" Score="0" Body="A hypothesis of linguistic relativity which states that the structure of a language is not only a way to express ideas, but that it affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world." OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-08-01T21:11:13.833" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T21:11:13.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2333" CreationDate="2012-08-01T22:58:47.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly relevant is the paper by &lt;a href=&quot;http://tshwanedje.com/publications/SwaMorph.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;de Pauw and de Schriver (2008)&lt;/a&gt; where they test an automated parser, using the the 12.5 million word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/cameel/corpus/intro.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helsinki Corpus of Swahili&lt;/a&gt;. That corpus, as it turns out, is lemmatized, so if you gain access to it as a &quot;university researcher&quot; and you can do some basic scripting, you will be able to generate this list yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-01T22:58:47.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-02T16:45:33.140" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;A two part question. Are there attested historical changes whereby a construction &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; in some language means 'not yet', and then &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; changes in meaning so that it means 'not again' at a later time (or vice versa)? Second, can someone situate such an alternation, real or imagined, within some theory of negated scalars, viz. Horn's A-I-E-O square? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Informally, one meaning refers to an action which has happened at least once before the reference time, and will not happen at any time after the reference time, and the other refers to an action which has not happened at any time before the reference time, but will happen at least once after the reference time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as I have thought about it now, it is a change between NOT(still(p)) and still(NOT(p)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-08-03T22:53:04.523" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T22:53:04.523" Title="Historical changes from 'not yet' to 'not again' and vice-versa" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-02T21:11:54.463" Score="2" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an English parser written in Java with a small memory/processing input. I have used the Stanford parser, but it is rather heavy. I am also considering using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/linkgrammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link grammar&lt;/a&gt; parser, which is fast and small, but would require me to write several more grammar rules for my domain. The goal is to extract a semantic structure from an utterance, so anything that can lead easily to that would be nice. Can anyone suggest something good to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2012-08-03T13:50:16.877" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T13:50:16.877" Title="Small English parser written in Java" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2136" CreationDate="2012-08-03T01:49:07.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When forming the &quot;passato prossimo&quot; with an intransitive verb, we use forms of the auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iluss.it/grammatica_free/prossimo_free_demo/text.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;il passato prossimo&quot;&gt;It dependes on the main verb&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The question you ask is named &quot;Concordanza del participio passato&quot; and concerns the use of the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The matter is complicated but is addressed quite well in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mauriziopistone.it/testi/discussioni/gramm05_concordanza.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;concordanza.&quot;&gt;post about &quot;concordanza&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which concludes that in the current use (I do not mean rule) the past participle conjugated with the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; is usually invariable, except when accompanied by unstressed personal pronoun direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out that errors in the &quot;concordanza&quot; can lead to change in meaning or interpretation of the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;VOI SIETE PARTITI/E&quot; if mispelled/mistaken with &quot;VOI SIETE PARTITO&quot; is understood as &quot;TU SEI PARTITO&quot;, whereas in the south of Italy, it is still common the form of courtesy with the second person plural pronoun &quot;VOI&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;VOI AVETE PAGATO&quot; if mispelled/mistaken with &quot;VOI SIETE PAGATI&quot; (even though it's an error) could be understood as &quot;VOI SIETE STATI PAGATI&quot; (you received your payment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1089" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-08-03T11:58:56.123" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T11:58:56.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-03T06:17:30.123" Score="14" ViewCount="2860" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants when whispering, which as I understand it, does not use the vocal cords? I know it sounds silly to ask because we can all understand whispered speech, but I wonder how much is psychological (ie brain-determined using context) and how much is physically different between the sounds? If someone could explain how we differentiate an 's' from a whispered 'z' for instance, that would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="921" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T17:32:47.697" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T17:32:47.697" Title="Whispered Voiced Consonants" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2340" CreationDate="2012-08-03T07:31:37.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The differences might be visible in a spectrogram. You could do the experiment yourself: record yourself saying /sasas/ /zazaz/ both voiced and whispered and make spectrograms with for instance Praat, and compare. You'll need to increase the size of the  y-axis though, since you're comparing fricatives. If you're comparing other consonants the standard setup should be fine. If you're not comfortable with reading spectrograms you could add the images to your question and let us have a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little quick experimentation of my own makes me think the whispered voiced fricatives are more tense than the unvoiced ones: less space between the articulators, and less air pressure. An interesting follow-up question to this though: is whispering language dependent? That is: is a whispered /z/ the same sound acoustically speaking in, say, French and English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T07:31:37.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2319" CreationDate="2012-08-03T08:19:23.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know I read this question a bit ago, and later while I was browsing the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1136638/?site_locale=en_GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Languages of Japan (Shibatani,1990)&lt;/a&gt; I literally happened upon the section (11.4) &quot;The syntax of agglutinative morphology&quot; (chapter 11 grammatical structure). I looked through it a bit and it seems to discuss specifically causative and passive morphology too. To blatantly plagiarize (I don't understand all of it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;Due to the lack of agreement between the head and the dependent constituent, Japanese is not as highly agglutinative as Turkish, especially in the domain of nominal constituents. However, in the realm of verbal constituents, Japanese shows a high degree of agglutination involving a fair number of suffixes in a row. As in many other languages, the order of these verbal affixes is generally fixed, though alternative orders are infrequently observed. In Japanese the following is the typical order:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;(1)　Vstem-causitive-passive-aspect-desiderative-NEG-tense&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;All the possibilities are not, of course, exploited in each expression, but the following illustrates some of the lengthy but commonly observed forms:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;行かせられない　'go'-CAUS-POTEN-NEG-PRES&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;行かせられたくない　'go'-CAUS-PASS-DESI-NEG-PRES&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;歩かせ続けたい　'walk'-CAUS-CONT-DESI-PRES&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to check that book out then. I don't know how the morpheme あげく (example 迷ったあげく、彼の誘いをことわってしまった) fits into this form. Are words like this あげく just derivational morphemes, whereas you're talking about inflectional paradigms? Well if (1) completely captures the structure of inflection, then the answer to your question would be counting the permutations by filling in the possible words, right? But I think there is some real complication to computing this maximal set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider how you might actually count the forms though. Say that the total number of causative morphemes is C, the total number of passive morphemes is P, the total number of aspect morphemes is A, the total number of desiderative morphemes is D, and the total number of NEG morphemes is N, and the total number of tense morphemes is T. Then the theoretical upper bound is obviously C*P*A*D*N*T. But obviously not all permutations will be accepted as grammatical by native speakers (for whatever reasons), so we should remove those deemed ungrammatical. We would check the grammaticality of a particular permutation by just asking a native speaker if its grammatical. If it is then we increment the count of forms, if not then we just continue on to the next permutation. However, if some specific permutation is only accepted by some speakers and rejected by others, then its state of grammaticality is manifestly not yes or no, but rather some number 0 to 1 (the proportion of speakers that accepted it). In other words inclusion of a particular inflected form into the set of all grammatical permutations of an inflectional paradigm is fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ignoring the fuzziness, we could include only those forms which are deemed grammatical by a sufficient number of people. In other words we have to define an arbitrary numerical threshold for which we segregate nongrammatical forms from grammatical forms, that numerical threshold being the proportion of a number of speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an idea on how one might compute a number that captures the idea of &quot;the maximal number of forms&quot;. The set of C*P*A*D*N*T permutations might be slimmed by removing certain permutations on semantic/pragmatic grounds. But then you would need a theory of semantics, and it might only allow us to remove a marginal number of permutations from C*P*A*D*N*T. The point is, that at some point you are going to have to look at real-world data to get this computation done. To keep the computation simple we should aim to minimize theoretical overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a way to do this with data. Fix some verb V for investigation. The data to be collected then consists merely of observed inflected instances of V. For every instance, it will fall into one of C*P*A*D*N*T categories. In other words, you are just counting how many instances of a particular permutation you observe in the data. For example, &quot;行かせられない&quot; forms one of the C*P*A*D*N*T categories. If you happen to hear this exact permutation spoken, say, 5 times throughout an observation session, then the category &quot;行かせられない&quot; gets a tally of 5. We indeed have a large number of categories,  C*P*A*D*N*T categories to be exact. Then counting the maximum number of forms amounts to counting the total number of categories that receive a significant number of tallies, dismissing categories that have very low tallies as ungrammatical outliers. So, for example, if every category is filled uniformly, the we can say that C*P*A*D*N*T is the maximal number of forms. On the other hand, if 99% of the instances fall into only 3 categories while the other 1% falls into some other 4th category, then we might have grounds for dismissing the fourth category and concluding that 3 is the total number of forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To formalize the procedure, we have C*P*A*D*N*T categories, each category is associated with a tally, and the only thing we have to do is eliminate those categories that have low tally counts. Each time we eliminate a category we subtract 1 from the &quot;maximal number of forms&quot; count, which starts out at C*P*A*D*N*T. But now we are charged with the task of defining exactly the tally threshold for which we will dismiss a category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we have just gone full circle. To avoid a &quot;numerical threshold of grammaticality&quot; we circumvented ourselves all the way into a &quot;significance of a tally&quot;. And I think this is the inherit problem of your question. To answer it, an arbitrary decision that has no precedence or justification must be made. In fact, this probably the plague of any scientific endeavour, at some point of analysis a decision with no precedence or justification must be unquestionably made. hhhhmmm.... Well, anyways, in summary, I have no idea how many legitimate forms exist for a given verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-03T14:39:40.900" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T14:39:40.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2340" CreationDate="2012-08-03T21:00:03.433" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you mean &lt;em&gt;phonologically&lt;/em&gt; voiced (because if you're whispering there can't be any phonetic voicing), this indeed has to be a language-specific question, because how phonological voicing contrasts are realized phonetically differs from language to language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English, there are often several other phonetic manifestations of phonological voicing other than phonetic voicing (in fact, quite often phonologically voiced consonants are not phonetically voiced at all). What these manifestations are depends on the consonants in question and on their position in an utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, word-initial voiceless stops (/p t k/) tend to have stronger bursts than their voiced counterparts (/b d g/), where &quot;stronger bursts&quot; means longer and more intense periods of noise. They are also characterized by a relatively long period of aspiration (especially if they are in a stressed syllable) whereas the voiced stops lack such aspiration or only show a bit of it. Aspiration may be distinguished from whispered phonation by being more intense (because the air coming out is not as impeded by the vocal folds). Also, the period of aspiration usually adds duration to the total duration of a syllable (this relative duration difference is usually not perceptually relevant in my experience, but it can be seen in spectrograms when comparing minimal pairs side by side).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for syllable-final stops and fricatives, the relative duration of the nucleus is dependent on the voicing of the coda. All else being equal, a nucleus before a voiced coda will be longer than a nucleus before a voiceless coda. Try recording yourself whispering minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;seat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;seed&lt;/em&gt; to convince yourself of this (or have a native speaker do it if you are not one yourself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For phrase-final stops, released voiceless stops often display a stronger burst than released voiced stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if the consonants in question are in positions where their closure durations can be measured (stops in utterance-initial position and final unreleased stops do not fall under this category), then all else being equal, the closure duration of a voiceless consonant tends to be longer than that of its voiced counterpart. This is true for fricatives, too, where the period of frication is longer for voiceless fricatives (like /s/) than for their voiced counterparts (/z/ in the case of /s/). Try recording yourself whispering &lt;em&gt;E.C.&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;E.Z.&lt;/em&gt; to confirm this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2012-08-03T21:00:03.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2347" CreationDate="2012-08-04T00:17:59.410" Score="8" ViewCount="11161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't really formulate it any more lucid than as it is in the title, so.... I'm reading a phonetics text now, but I haven't yet got to the chapter on 'speech perception' so maybe I'll come across at least the terminology in the near future. But I had to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-07T09:52:32.773" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T09:52:32.773" Title="Hearing your name in a noisy crowd: what is this called and how might it work?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;perception&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2340" CreationDate="2012-08-04T02:41:21.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voiced obstruents have lower intraoral preessure than voiceless obstruents. When you whisper you are still adjusting your articulations on proprioceptive feedback, which includes the sensation of pressure buildup in your mouth. Voiced obstruents then have a lower intensity, I predict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T02:41:21.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2345" CreationDate="2012-08-04T04:07:46.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a paper called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/BoersmaHamannLoans35.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Loanword adaptation as first-language phological perception&lt;/a&gt; by Boersma and Hamann for a Phonology class project last semester. That introduced me to both the idea of a productive perception and the idea of a learning algorithm for OT. I think these two ideas (along with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Optimality Theory&lt;/a&gt;) may help explain the phenomenon you are investigating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption in a lot of literature is that perception is completely faithful, i.e. what people perceive is a 1:1 relation of the incoming soundwave. Productive perception says that this isn't true and that people's perceptions are based on their ingrained phonology. The Boersma/Hamann paper I linked earlier uses this idea to say that people intuitively transpose any foreign words into their own phonology during perception, explaining why loanwords are often pronounced differently from their source form (and indeed, from other native words with similar forms, thus either ruling out a production-only based explanation or requiring loanword-specific rules and constraints).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper cites a 1997 paper by Boersma called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/learningVariation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How We Learn Variation, Optionality, and Probability&lt;/a&gt;. I have not read this paper in full, so my understanding mostly comes from the summary included in the Boersma/Hamann paper I included above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Boersma claims that the constraints (normally used for mapping SR to phonetic form) are bidirectional and that they can be applied during perception as well as production. These constraints are then ranked by probability. For example, consider a cue constraint &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/&lt;/code&gt;. During production this constraint would be understood as &quot;don't produce the phonologic form /e/ as the phonetic form [ɛ]&quot;; during perception as &quot;don't perceive [ɛ] as /e/&quot; (or generically, &quot;[ɛ] is not /e/&quot;). In English representing /e/ as [ɛ] (as opposed to the more faithful [e]) usually does not result in any loss of meaning and thus can be freely violated. These frequent violations would then lead &lt;code&gt;*[ɛ]/e/&lt;/code&gt; to become lowly ranked. Contrast this with French where representing /e/ as [ɛ] &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; usually lead to a loss of meaning and thus such a constraint would be more heavily used and therefore become higher ranked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to tie it in with your question. Presumably one hears their name very often. So a learning algorithm like the one Boersma proposes would rank the constraints in such a way that one can readily distinguish their name during perception, even if the incoming phonetic form is damaged or has heavy interference (such as in a noisy room). It would also explain why people sometimes hallucinate hearing their name (or other common words) and rarely hallucinate uncommon or arcane words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is just one possibility but I hope I at least provided some interesting links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;As for what it's called, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-selective-hearing.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;selective hearing&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-08-06T05:42:48.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T05:42:48.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2012-08-04T18:22:01.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Tamil from Tamil Nadu, India. Though, the name is written as &quot;Tamil&quot; the &quot;t&quot; is &quot;Tamil&quot; is pronounced as the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thin&quot; or &quot;think&quot;. Actually almost every Indian language has both the &quot;th&quot; sounds (as in &quot;thin&quot; and &quot;then&quot;). It is just witten as &quot;Tamil&quot; as if one got to pronounce it as &quot;TAM-IL&quot; but none of the Tamil speakers pronounce that way they pronounce it &quot;THAM-IL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called national language of India Hindi has this sound too. Though it is spelled hin-Di, the &quot;D&quot; in &quot;Hindi&quot; is always pronounced as the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;they&quot; and not like the &quot;d&quot; in &quot;dad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Indian languages have varieties of d, t, th sounds and as English got only a few letters to accommodate, they use the same English letter &quot;d&quot; or &quot;t&quot; to represent the following sounds as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;d&quot; for the &quot;d&quot; in &quot;daddy&quot; &#xA;&quot;d&quot; for the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;Netherlands&quot; (Example: Hindi)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;t&quot; for the &quot;t&quot; in &quot;Take&quot; (Example: Tamatar  meaning Tomato where the &quot;t&quot; is pronounced as the &quot;t&quot; in Take)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;t&quot; for the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;Thin&quot; (Example: Tum meaning you, but the &quot;t&quot; here is pronounced as the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thin&quot; and it is &quot;thoom&quot; and not &quot;toom&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Wikipedia and a number of articles say the &quot;th&quot; sound doesn't exist in many languages, I would say it is not true. I don't know whether those researchers traveled all the way to all countries and regions studying sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1224" LastEditorUserId="1224" LastEditDate="2012-08-04T23:29:56.457" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T23:29:56.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2350" CreationDate="2012-08-04T16:45:58.303" Score="9" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, English uses phrases like &lt;em&gt;to look for&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to look at&lt;/em&gt;, which (I believe) are considered phrasal verbs. Spanish, however, would under normal circumstances use some derivation of &lt;em&gt;buscar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mirar&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, instead of a prepositional modifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish does, however, use verbs that are partially comprised of a preposition, e.g. &lt;em&gt;soñar con&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;llevar a cabo&lt;/em&gt;, as does Italian, e.g. &lt;em&gt;andare giù&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;andare via&lt;/em&gt;. These are a type of phrasal verb, I believe, yet the primary root of the verb is different, unlike &lt;em&gt;to look for&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to look at&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this difference derive from the differing influences in the languages that influenced modern languages, e.g. Spanish has many Arabic influences, while English, perhaps fewer Arabic influences but more Germanic sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1223" OwnerDisplayName="Ricardo Altamirano" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-05T12:05:53.827" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T12:05:53.827" Title="What is the historical basis for the use of this type of phrasal verb in English but less so in Spanish?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2012-08-04T18:24:58.980" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a brief comment on the more Englishy aspect of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between Spanish and English in this regard is not connected to Arabic.  Rather it’s a &lt;strong&gt;Germanic versus Romance&lt;/strong&gt; feature: Germanic languages as a whole have phrasal verbs (in which a particle, frequently homophonous with a preposition, is syntactically separable from the verb, as in &lt;em&gt;look it up&lt;/em&gt;), Romance languages do not (such “preposition”+verb combinations as they have are not syntactically separable; this inseparability survives in Germanic borrowings, like &lt;em&gt;commit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;remit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;admit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt;, resulting in roots, such as &lt;em&gt;mit&lt;/em&gt; do not occur without a prefix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within English, you need to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;look for&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;look up&lt;/em&gt; type verbs.  In the former case, &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; is the preposition used if there is an object; in the latter, &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; is always present, as a necessary part of the meaning.  Hence, the following is possible (no object, no &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Did you look for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: Yes, I looked all morning / Yes, I spent the whole morning looking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Did you look them up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: ??Yes, I looked all morning / ??Yes, I spent the whole morning looking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also syntactic differences.  A object can intervene between verb and particle, or it can follow the particle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked them up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked up the answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This variation is unavailable for verbs that select a prepositional, rather than a nominal, complement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked for the answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;*&lt;/em&gt; I looked them for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Daniel Harbour" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T11:03:28.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2012-08-04T21:22:44.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Asturian, there is such a thing as a different noun class than masculine / feminine.  You can mark a noun with a different suffix to indicate that it is an abstract version of that noun.  This is the so-called &lt;em&gt;neutru de materia&lt;/em&gt;, used for non-countable mass nouns.  This presents a five-fold paradigm morphologically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; for masculine singular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-os&lt;/em&gt; for masculine plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; for feminine singular &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-es&lt;/em&gt; for feminine plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; for the “material neuter”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns are still either masculine or feminine, but you can make them abstract / material nouns.  So for example, if you had &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; red hair, it would be &lt;em&gt;un pelu roxu&lt;/em&gt;, but if you were talking about red hair in general, it becomes &lt;em&gt;pelo roxo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a bit more complicated than this (for example, feminine nouns don’t change their endings), but that’s the basic idea.  You can find vestiges of this in the Castilian &lt;em&gt;ése / ésa / eso&lt;/em&gt; distinction, and in &lt;em&gt;lo necesario&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read Castilian, you should be able to piece your way through texts in Asturian that talk about this very interesting subject.  One such is  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asturies.com/espaciuytiempu/deprendeasturianu/tema4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;El llamáu neutru materia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="707" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T21:22:44.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2136" CreationDate="2012-08-04T23:09:07.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as in French, in Italian a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preceding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; direct object will cause the normally uninflected participle that goes with &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; to agree with that already-seen object. This doesn’t happen in Spanish or Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ho comprato i pantaloni. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Li ho comprati.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the participle is thought to concord to the object with &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt;, but not with &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt;, where it  concords with the subject.  And the concordance only applies when the object is seen before the participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go further, you’ll have to look at how the perfect tenses came to be formed in Romance, synthesized using auxiliary verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="707" LastActivityDate="2012-08-04T23:09:07.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2012-08-05T02:30:22.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages like Spanish and Italian exhibit &lt;em&gt;verb-framing&lt;/em&gt; behaviour, meaning that the manner of the action (e.g. &lt;em&gt;scendere&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cadere&lt;/em&gt;) is encoded in the lexical item. On the other hand, English exhibits &lt;em&gt;satellite-framing&lt;/em&gt; behaviour, since for many verbs, the same kind of information (motion from where? to where?) is encoded in particles which &quot;orbit&quot; the verb. It's true that neither is English entirely satellite-framing (through its Romance-derived verbal lexicon), nor Italian entirely verb-framing (with &lt;em&gt;giù&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sù&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the diachronic reasons, I think that all the Romance languages are largely verb-framing because Latin was strongly verb-framing (its rich set of preposition-like prefixes including &lt;em&gt;ob-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ab-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;trans-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sub-&lt;/em&gt; serving the same purpose as verb particles like &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;across&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daniel Harbour's answer has an important point, though. The verbs which he calls &quot;&lt;em&gt;look up&lt;/em&gt; type verbs&quot; are instances of the English verb particle construction, which yields the verb/satellite-framing variation previously discussed. The &quot;&lt;em&gt;look for&lt;/em&gt; type verbs&quot; are typically analysed as verbs which subcategorise for a PP (prepositional phrase), which explains why they cleave tight to the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T02:30:22.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2012-08-05T07:50:41.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can read the article in question online :) It's in the book Lakarra collaborated on with Trask and Hualde, &quot;Towards a History of the Basque Language.&quot;, and it's on googlebooks - you can view the entire article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the short answer is that the methods of approaching the prehistory of an isolate are generally by (1) examining prehistoric loan words from other languages; (2) examining prehistoric loan words into other languages; (3) internal reconstruction from morphological and lexical patterns. With (1) you can see what sound changes have taken place (beyond simple loan adaptation) since the borrowing; (2) gives you an indication of the phonological form of a native word at a prehistoric point, and thus an idea of what scs have occurred since; (3) allows you to use the comparative method--just with rather limited data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1227" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T07:50:41.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-05T15:32:17.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you have to idiomatically translate Romance articles preceding proper names into English demonstratives.   Hence, &lt;em&gt;¿Dónde está la María?&lt;/em&gt; becomes something more like &lt;em&gt;Now where &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; that Maria, anyway?&lt;/em&gt;, or some such loose translation with additional fluff to indicate the colloquial register.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how it now doesn’t seem odd to use a demonstrative instead of an article: that is, saying &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; Maria&lt;/em&gt; instead of  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; Maria&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;This may relate to the distant origin of &lt;em&gt;la María&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;illa Maria&lt;/em&gt; from Latin, back from before demonstratives became articles.  Latin certainly could use demonstatrive adjectives with proper names.  For example, you could say &lt;em&gt;ille Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=wmnZvwo0N-IC&amp;amp;pg=PA92&amp;amp;lpg=PA92&amp;amp;dq=%22ille+caesar%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=c0KFWCPoKD&amp;amp;sig=DYUnT4JUd-lqsuisZUZd3Qa31GY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=I5AeUPSwHOKbyQHj2IG4CQ&amp;amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ille%20caesar%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=2NZpR3EmptkC&amp;amp;pg=PA290&amp;amp;lpg=PA290&amp;amp;dq=ille+caesar&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=laVFtVQp8p&amp;amp;sig=E6Dx476BjEHEHfCVAA4q3zlI_Xc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=yo4eUPHzCsK_yQGWyIDICQ&amp;amp;ved=0CEkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ille%20caesar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  When the demonstratives turned into articles, one didn’t stop doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="707" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T15:32:17.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2158" CreationDate="2012-08-05T16:30:16.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you’re looking at this backwards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Portuguese word spelled &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt; did not come to be pronounced &lt;code&gt;[sĩ]&lt;/code&gt; through some sort of assimilation of nasal consonant, the way occurred with Portuguese &lt;em&gt;fim&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[fĩ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;em&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ũ]&lt;/code&gt;, or even &lt;em&gt;sem&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;sine&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the word came to be pronounced that way, and so came to spelled in a way that indicated its nasalization, and ‹im› is simply how one spells &lt;code&gt;[ĩ]&lt;/code&gt; there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not all nasalization in Portuguese is explicitly marked in the orthography (for example, in &lt;em&gt;muito&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[mũĩ̯tu]&lt;/code&gt;),  with &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[sĩ]&lt;/code&gt;, it is. Similarly, Portuguese &lt;em&gt;assim&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ɐˈsĩ]&lt;/code&gt; is written with an ‹im›.  This developed from Latin &lt;em&gt;ad sic&lt;/em&gt;, “with nasalization”.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://michaelis.uol.com.br/moderno/portugues/index.php?lingua=portugues-portugues&amp;amp;palavra=assim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;  The history of Portuguese is complex and uneven, and did not settle down until much later than in languages such as neighboring Spanish did back in the 1500s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nasalization and palatalizations were variously marked with an tilde,  with an &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;, or with a following &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; — or with some combination of these:&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortografia_da_l%EDngua_portuguesa#Hist.C3.B3ria_da_ortografia_da_l.C3.ADngua_portuguesa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cimco &gt; cinco&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grãde &gt; grande&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tẽpo &gt; tempo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;razõ &gt; razom&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;camĩho &gt; caminho&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the earliest preserved texts of what would become Portuguese, you see the letter &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; used innovatively, as in &lt;em&gt;sabha&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;sabia&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;mha&lt;/em&gt; for what become modern &lt;em&gt;minha, meu&lt;/em&gt;. For example, Dom Denis wrote in one of his &lt;em&gt;Cantigas de Amor&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://cfp.cm-lisboa.pt/pls/htmldb/f?p=334:6:3977332719096491%3a%3a%3a%3aP6_POE_ID,P6_TEP_ID,P6_ANCORA,P6_AUTOR,P6_POEMA,P6_ID,P6_TIPO:2322,16010,7,Dom%20Dinis,%5BPROEN%C7AES%20SOEN%20MUI%20BEM%20TROBAR%5D,73,autor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Proençaes soen mui ben trobar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   e dizen eles que é con amor;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   mais os que troban no tempo da frol&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   e non en outro, sei eu ben que non&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   an tan gran coita no seu coraçon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   qual m'eu por &lt;strong&gt;mha senhor&lt;/strong&gt; vejo levar.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Afonso Xº wrote &lt;em&gt;mia&lt;/em&gt; for the same word used in the same situation in his &lt;em&gt;Cantigas de Santa Maria&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria/LV&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Con sennor, assi dizia, | chorando mui feramente:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   «&lt;strong&gt;Mia Sennor&lt;/strong&gt;, eu a ti venno | como moller que se sente&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   de grand' erro que á feito; | mas, Sennor, venna-ch' a mente&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   se che fiz algun serviço, | e guarda-me mia pessõa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Atant' é Santa Maria | de toda bondade bõa...  &lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afonso writes other othographically interesting things, like &lt;em&gt;non poss' eu perdon gãar&lt;/em&gt; for modern Portuguese &lt;em&gt;ganhar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria/III&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;non disse ssi nen non&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria/CCLXXXIII&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;. There we see that Latin &lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt; has for Afonso become &lt;em&gt;ssi&lt;/em&gt; without the nasalization marking present in &lt;em&gt;nen&lt;/em&gt;, the same word which would become modern Spanish &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;, but there unnasalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other places, Afonso uses &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt; as a prepositional object, which modern Portuguese would spell as &lt;em&gt;mim&lt;/em&gt; with final ‹im› to indicate nasalization, despite there never having been an historical dental consonant.  Similarly, as words like &lt;em&gt;mha, mia, mi&lt;/em&gt; came to be pronounced with nasalization, these were also reanalysed the way medieval &lt;em&gt;ũa&lt;/em&gt; would.  On page 147 of &lt;em&gt;The Romance Languages&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;[Harris&amp;Vincent; OUP 1990]&lt;/sup&gt;, in the section on historical Portuguese morphology, they write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both the articles show abnormal phonetic developments. In the indefinite article, derived from the numeral UNUM, the feminine forms would ordinarily have been denasalised, as ∗[ua], ∗[uas], but retain their nasality, by analogy with the masculine. The modern feminine forms developed in the seventeenth sentury, though glide epenthesesis &lt;em&gt;ũa &gt; ∗uw̃a &gt; uma&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;possibly influenced by the orthographic form of the masculine,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(h)um&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 143, the authors explain that ‹‑m› and ‹‑n› are modern orthographic indicators of nasality, which in earlier days used a tilde, or which were not indicated in the orthography at all. They warn that &lt;strong&gt;“in many cases (e.g. &lt;em&gt;tã&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;ta(n)&lt;/em&gt;?) its interpretation is a matter of dispute between linguists and paleographers.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So analogous forms of writing nasalized vowels using a following ‹m› in the orthography influenced how nasal vowels would coming to be written as orthography became more regular.  There was no historical nasal consonant left in &lt;em&gt;mea &gt; mha, mia &gt; minha&lt;/em&gt;, but it got written that way, and this in turn came to influence the pronunciation.  Similarly, the spellings of &lt;em&gt;mim, sim, assim&lt;/em&gt; represent the comparatively recent orthographic invention/convention for writing a &lt;code&gt;[ĩ]&lt;/code&gt; there, despite there never having been a nasal consonant present to assimilate. In some cases, there was; in some cases there was not; and in some cases, it is a matter of some dispute just what was actually going on there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="707" LastEditorUserId="707" LastEditDate="2012-08-05T19:19:53.060" LastActivityDate="2012-08-05T19:19:53.060" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2706" CreationDate="2012-08-05T17:02:51.593" Score="3" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How is English &quot;like&quot; &amp;mdash; as in &quot;you look like a monkey&quot; &amp;mdash; generally analyzed these days?  I can think of two ways to go here. I'm tempted to call it either a preposition, or some sort of funny adverb that necessarily takes a complement, and off the top of my head, both views would have advantages.  And of course, there might be a third possibility I'm not thinking of, or there might be ongoing debate with no emerging consensus....&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there words in other languages that have the semantics of English &quot;like,&quot; but that are analyzed as a different part of speech?  For instance, if the consensus is that English &quot;like&quot; is a preposition, are there languages where its closest counterpart is an adverb (or a verb, or a relational noun, or...)?  If &quot;yes&quot; (and I suspect the answer &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;yes,&quot; given how diverse languages are generally), can you give some specific examples?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-18T16:44:47.030" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T16:44:47.030" Title="&quot;Like&quot; in English (and perhaps other languages)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2358" CreationDate="2012-08-05T17:50:47.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Answer to #2, Korean has two forms which could conceivably be translated as the English &quot;like&quot; or &quot;as&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is 처럼 (cherem),  &lt;a href=&quot;http://comet.cls.yale.edu/picturedictionary/pub/cat_gen_combo.asp?meta=165&amp;amp;p=3&amp;amp;v=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a particle&lt;/a&gt;, and 비슷하다 (pisuthata), an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;비슷하다 (pisuthata) can be translated as &quot;similar&quot;. It can be used on it's own...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님과 비슷해요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa pisuthae-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND similar-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is [generally] like [her] mother  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or as an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님과 비슷하게 요리를 잘 해요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa pisutha-key yoli-lul cal hay-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND similar-ADV cooking-OBJ well do-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is good at cooking like [her] mother [is good at cooking] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님과 비슷하게 예뻐요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa pisutha-key yeybbe-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND similar-ADV beatuiful-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is beautiful like [her] mother [is beautiful]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;처럼 (cherem) can be translated as &quot;like&quot; or &quot;as&quot; and, unlike 비슷하다 (pisuthada), cannot stand alone...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*메리가 어머니처럼&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-cherem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AS&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *Mary like [her] mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but can operate in similar circumstances to the adverbial 비슷하게 (pisutha-key):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님처럼 요리를 잘 해요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-cherem yoli-lul cal hay-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AS cooking-OBJ well do-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is good at cooking like [her] mother [is good at cooking]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님처럼 예뻐요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-cherem yeybbe-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AS beatuiful-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is beautiful like [her] mother [is beautiful]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they aren't interchangeable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 한국 사람처럼 한국어를 잘 말해요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka hangwug salam-cherem hangwuge-lul cal malhay-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB Korea person-AS Korean Language-OBJ well speak-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary speaks Korean well like a Korean [speaks Korean well]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?메리가 한국 사람과 비슷하게 한국어를 잘 말해요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka hangwug salam-key pisutha-key hangwuge-lul cal malhay-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB Korea person-AND similar-ADV Korean Language-OBJ well speak-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary speaks Korean well similar to [how] a Korean [speaks Korean well]    &lt;em&gt;(marginal reading)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am no where near proficient enough in Korean to tell you the exact difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question you give &quot;look like&quot; as an example. The use of 처럼 (cherem) with 보이다 (poida), to appear (&lt;em&gt;passive form&lt;/em&gt;)/to be seen, gives a similar expression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님처럼 보여요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-cherem poye-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AS appear-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary looks like her mother&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary is seen like [her] mother [is seen] &lt;em&gt;(impossible reading)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The previous revision of this answer stated that the verb 보이다 (poida) is capable of taking a secondary argument using the AND particle 와/과 (wa/kwa), but to native Korean speakers, it sounds ungrammatical and does not convey a looks-like&quot; argument:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?메리가 어머님과 보여요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa poye-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND appear-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary looks like [her] mother    &lt;em&gt;(impossible reading)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary and [her] mother [both] are seen    &lt;em&gt;(marginal reading)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리와 어머님이 보여요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-wa emenim-i poye-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-AND mother-SUB appear-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary and [her] mother [both] are seen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;메리가 어머님과 함께 보여요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa hamkkey poye-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND together appear-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary and [her] mother both are seen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?메리가 어머님과 봐요&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meyli-ka emenim-kwa pwa-yo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary-SUB mother-AND see-POL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary sees like [her] mother    &lt;em&gt;(impossible reading)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary and [her] mother [both] see    &lt;em&gt;(marginal reading)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1204" LastEditDate="2012-10-15T19:22:43.187" LastActivityDate="2012-10-15T19:22:43.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T19:27:44.773" Score="4" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if there is a system for classifying the &lt;em&gt;types&lt;/em&gt; of questions that can be asked in languages. In other words, how are sentences that query the why, where, what, who, when, and how classified? I guess &lt;em&gt;whence&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;whither&lt;/em&gt;, etc. also belong in that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, what is the term for questions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13662/how-should-i-phrase-a-question-that-must-be-answered-with-an-ordinal-number-e-g&quot;&gt;query &amp;quot;ordinality&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;? For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: [What number] president was George Washington?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: [What number] son of your father are you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, there is no construct to ask such a question in English. But there is in languages belonging to other families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any references on the distribution of these question types across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T17:54:52.623" Title="Types of questions and questioning &quot;ordinality&quot;" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T23:13:14.567" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;By this I mean have there been any project which analyze the evolution of specific constructs, specific words, etc., and how the language has changed over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-09-03T13:50:55.737" Title="Have there been any significant attempts to map the evolution of English?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2371" CreationDate="2012-08-05T23:15:37.653" Score="5" ViewCount="1129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty interested in historical linguistics, but unfortunately, my school rarely offers the historical linguistics class. What are some go-to resources on historical linguistics, be it books, websites, documentaries, etc? More specifically, I'm looking for historical linguistics in practice; I want to answer the question &quot;how is it done?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T19:04:58.800" Title="What are the go-to resources on historical linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-05T23:16:46.047" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would a cognitive linguistics researcher do on a daily basis, and how would they go about conducting this research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="958" LastEditDate="2012-08-06T01:02:17.743" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T01:02:17.743" Title="What does a cognitive linguistics researcher actually do in practice?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2370" CreationDate="2012-08-06T01:27:55.990" Score="4" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all know that language changes over time and that what is &quot;correct&quot; in a language is how people actually use language, yet there are still many people who adhere strictly to prescriptive grammar. Will this always be the trend? How can we break free of prescriptive grammarians who insist upon rules that have no justification other than a claim that &quot;that's the way the language should be.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T05:38:24.867" Title="Will use of descriptive grammar ever overtake use of prescriptive grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2374" CreationDate="2012-08-06T01:36:00.523" Score="4" ViewCount="2523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider myself a neo-Whorfian and see major flaws in universal grammar, but it doesn't seem to me like they are &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; competing theories. Cutting out all of the parts about how language is acquired and how language has universal features, universal grammar seems to be more like a file format on a computer, while the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the program that writes to that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of evidence that language is influenced by culture and that thinking is influenced by language, but there is also a significant amount of evidence to indicate that human language has certain features, almost universally. It doesn't seem like these two theories actually conflict with each other, since they both explain similar but &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; phenomena. Am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T16:09:58.157" Title="Are universal grammar and Sapir-Whorf really competing theories?" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2383" CreationDate="2012-08-06T01:54:26.543" Score="17" ViewCount="4935" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the Proto-Proto-Indo-European?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T06:32:36.727" Title="What language came before Proto-Indo-European?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2372" CreationDate="2012-08-06T01:56:58.927" Score="9" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember reading an article about a book that talked about what the &quot;first language&quot; would have consisted of, but I can't seem to recall what the book was or what the language was called. What is the first language or the origin of language called? The Proto-Proto-Proto-language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T14:45:46.183" Title="What is the &quot;first language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2365" CreationDate="2012-08-06T02:16:19.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start, your premise is slightly faulty as descriptive grammaticists are more common than prescriptive grammaticists since most people just follow their own local dialect anyway, regardless of what prescriptive grammaticists say. Further more, with very few exceptions, prescriptive grammar has not had a large effect on language change. The history of prescriptive grammar is a history of futility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even today, prescriptive grammaticists are merely a vocal minority, as they have been throughout all of history. This should be obvious since they tend to oppose language usage which they deem incorrect but is in common usage and common usage is, by definition, common! I don't have my copy in front of me, so I can't give you any explicit citations, but the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140260234&quot;&gt;Language Myths&lt;/a&gt; by Bauer and Trudgill offers citations for how prescriptive grammaticists always seem to think they are living in the first generation to taint the English language and that only a few decades ago everyone spoke like Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if one stretches the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot;&gt;&quot;diaglossia&quot;&lt;/a&gt; a bit, prescriptive grammaticists tend to promote the standard dialect, typically regarded as the H dialect. Common usage, by virtue of being common, is usually seen as the L dialect. Thus there is social prestige to be gained by overtly aligning oneself with the high-class, more respected H dialect. Basically, supporting a prescriptive grammar yields greater rewards than descriptive grammar and thus will continue to attract people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I see no signs of their numbers decreasing nor their public influence waning. Additionally, in my opinion they (prepare for blasphemy) serve a &lt;strong&gt;somewhat&lt;/strong&gt; useful purpose. They help to codify and propagate the standard dialect. A standard dialect is important for ensuring mutual intelligibility across a wide audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although people should not be forced to use such a standard dialect at all times, if one wishes to be understood by a wide audience then they must at least have the ability to conform to that standard when the need arises, especially in written form. Can you imagine trying to a read a daily newspaper written in the style of James Joyce?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further readings about the conflict between allowing people to speak naturally and teaching them standard dialect, look into the controversy surrounding BEV (Black English Venacular) or AAE (African-American English) in US schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-08-06T05:38:24.867" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T05:38:24.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2362" CreationDate="2012-08-06T02:42:26.693" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good textbook that covers all the basics is your best choice to get started. There are numerous good textbooks for historical linguistics, but you'd best start with an introductory text (other books are more technical in nature and could be a next step). Here are two introductory texts that I've seen recommended many times (I've read Campbell's):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Campbell, Lyle. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Covers all the basics (kinds of linguistic change: sound change, borrowing, analogical change; the comparative method, internal reconstruction, and more)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very readable and well organized&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Examples from many language families&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has exercises, which is a great way to test your understanding (but it doesn't have answer keys)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book does require some knowledge of linguistics (terminology, some IPA symbols), but if you start &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and read up on everything you don't know you should be fine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10274&amp;amp;ttype=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Table of contents&lt;/a&gt;, preview via &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0262532670&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trask, R.L. Historical Linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another classic introductory text to historical linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I haven't read this one, but it covers basically the same ground and is intended for a similar audience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Title/9780340927656/Trasks_Historical_Linguistics_2nd_Edition.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Table of contents&lt;/a&gt;, preview via &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0340607580&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond a general introduction there are so many different areas of research that the specifics of 'how it's done' depend. You should find some journal articles that you think are interesting to see what people are working on. Some journals jou can check (hopefully your library has full access to these, but you can always browse the contents):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/dia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diachronica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/jhl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Journal of Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=histsprahistling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Historische Sprachforschung / Historical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Follow the citations and use Google Scholar to find related articles (and sometimes PDFs as well)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If you like documentaries, this is a nice one which provides a brief overview and discusses a controversial topic, that of long-range historical reconstruction: BBC Horizon's &lt;em&gt;Before Babel: In Search of the First Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T19:04:58.800" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T19:04:58.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2369" CreationDate="2012-08-06T03:21:53.447" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name you're looking for is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-World&lt;/a&gt;. However, we have no way of knowing whether there actually ever was only a single proto-language (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogenesis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;monogenesis&lt;/a&gt;) or whether language developed independently multiple times (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenesis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;polygenesis&lt;/a&gt;). Some arguments may be more plausible in this regard than others, but it remains speculation. You can find more about this debate in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/682/444&quot;&gt;Monogenesis vs. Polygenesis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/663/444&quot;&gt;Do the Khoisan languages resemble the world's first language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we could assume there was one proto-language to all the world's languages, the comparative method - the only proven methodology in historical linguistics - would not be able to tell us what that language looked like, since it has a limit of some six to ten thousand years time depth. Proto-World would have to have existed at least fifty thousand years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T08:43:20.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2366" CreationDate="2012-08-06T12:10:54.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those interested in new Whorf manuscripts, see &quot;The Benjamin Lee Whorf Legacy CD-ROM&quot;&#xA;edited by Peter C. Rollins at www.petercrollins.com  This resource contains some papers by Whorf and a never-before-published novel by Whorf written during the Scopes Trial of 1925 and aimed at the putative conflict between science and religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also on the CD-ROM are a number of articles and book-length works about Whorf by Rollins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This resource provides a larger scope for studying Whorf and should be considered along&#xA;with the John Carroll anthology that has been available since the 1950s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter C. Rollins&#xA;www.petercrollins.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1230" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T12:10:54.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2366" CreationDate="2012-08-06T16:09:58.157" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both proposals have undergone changes since they were proposed, and now each exists in multiple versions. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was originally understood to be a proposal that mental categories which are involved in cognitive tasks other than language use could be arbitrarily shaped by the language practices of a given community. Nobody who is interested in the issue at a professional level believes this anymore. Neo-Whorfianism, on the other hand, is a modern research program whose proponents believe that while there are strong biological constraints on cognition, there are some areas of cognition where a person's native language influences the way they conceptualize things. What are called Nativists do not believe that language can have any such influence: they believe instead that differences in thought processes can be explained in terms of factors such as a person's exposure to literacy, or the type of geographic locale, amongst other factors. To see an example of this kind of debate in the area of spatial cognition, consider the Neo-Whorfian study by Pederson et al (1998), and a similar Nativist-oriented study by Li &amp;amp; Gleitman (2002). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nativists tend to subscribe to some form of the Universal Grammar hypothesis, while Neo-Whorfians tend not to. While all or nearly all linguists agree that there is something special about human brains that allows them to use langauge (cf. comments on Chomsky's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-4631.html&quot;&gt;Rocks and Kittens&lt;/a&gt;&quot; argument for UG), actual UG proponents believe that there are special cognitive abilities which have evolved in humans which are only used for language processing. This may lead (though logically it doesn't have to) to the belief that language processing may be &quot;segregated&quot; from other cognitive functions, and so there is no possibly that knowledge about language can interfere with other cognitive abilities. This is probably why most Nativists tend to be UG proponents. If one believes instead that language ability is tied to other types of cognitive abilities outside of the domain of language, then it is not so hard to see how language and non-language thinking patterns might influence each other at least a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pederson, E., Danziger, E., Wilkins, D. P., Levinson, S. C., Kita, S., &amp;amp; Senft, G. (1998).&#xA;Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization.Language 74(3), 557-589.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Li, P., &amp;amp; Gleitman, L. 2002. Turning the tables: Language and spatial&#xA;reasoning. Cognition 83: 265-294.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T16:09:58.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2381" CreationDate="2012-08-06T18:10:01.783" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on a project for which I have a need to identify certain aspects of a sentence. What markers can I use to algorithmically detect a prepositional phrase in a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I could start by looking for prepositions, but how could I detect the end of the phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-08-08T14:36:05.840" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T14:36:05.840" Title="What markers can one use to automatically detect a prepositional phrase in an English sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2384" CreationDate="2012-08-06T21:10:45.577" Score="10" ViewCount="6641" Body="&lt;p&gt;Memorizing IPA consonants is trivially easy; each symbol represents one sound, and that sound can be described with a variety of parameters about manner of articulation, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA vowels, however, are a whole other beast. How can they be memorized if describing them is not so easy? Of course, some symbols are just English vowels, which makes them pretty self-explanatory, but other ones like the back medium vowels are a bit trickier. Is there any method to the madness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-08-07T20:15:24.123" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T17:05:47.140" Title="How can the IPA vowels be memorized?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-06T21:18:26.850" Score="2" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some constructed languages that are extremely precise, yet extremely difficult (Ithkuil), some that are easy to learn, but a bit too flexible (Esperanto), and tons in between. What criteria would a constructed language have to meet to gain widespread use and to be easily usable by the general population?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T09:59:52.767" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T09:59:52.767" Title="What makes a constructed language likely to gain widespread use?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2012-08-06T21:30:44.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have to nominate English. It meets all of your criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar is fairly regular in that odd constructions are possible, but simple sentences follow a fairly standard form. As for the irregularity of the grammar, there are a finite number of irregular verbs. Everything else follows set patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2, 3, and 4 are easily knocked out by English. English spelling might be a disaster, but in terms of actual grammar, English is simple. Tenses and conjugation are regular and simple, there are no complex conjugations, and word order feels right for programming. Since English is SVO, and since programs follow the syntax &quot;you have this, now make it do that&quot; English fits. You could assign something with the sentence &quot;String s is equal to 'example.'&quot; This fits in with the &lt;em&gt;current programming paradigm.&lt;/em&gt; At any rates, people who want to program learn English; nobody would have to learn a new language if they are already a programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English definitely has popularity. It's the second most spoken language in the world, and as I already said, most programmers already speak it. It's a universal language in the computer world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the practicality of it, it seems like the more &quot;natural&quot; a programming language is, the less functional it actuall is. Compare C to C++ to Java. C can do anything; with Java, you have to do more to do small, system-level operations. Coding is an art form all its own. If you're aiming for elegance, try Python. Python is &lt;em&gt;pretty.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-08-06T21:30:44.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2382" CreationDate="2012-08-06T21:38:52.323" Score="6" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since English descends from Proto-Germanic, which descends from PIE, would either of those two languages be relatively easy to learn (compared to, say, Japanese), or has the language changed too much to be learnable? Certainly people are able to learn Latin, especially those native speakers of Romance languages and English, so would they have much difficulty with Proto-Italic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T06:06:51.780" Title="Would a Proto language be easy to learn?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-06T23:27:03.830" Score="11" ViewCount="15105" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are writing or typing and you are thinking of one word, but then type another word made of the same phonemes, what is that called and what are the linguistic and /or psychological phenomena behind it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually having trouble coming up with examples, but it happens to me quite a lot. I might want to say something like &quot;You need to use shields,&quot; but since the /z/ from &quot;use&quot; assimilates into &quot;shields,&quot; I might end up typing &quot;You need to you shields.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is a rather poor example, and I will edit the question if I think of another one, but this happens to me, and happens to a lot of other people quite often.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-07T11:24:41.600" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T16:58:19.360" Title="When you think one word, but write another, similar sounding word?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2375" CreationDate="2012-08-07T00:25:07.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can be solved by chunking. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; has a rule-based chunker, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/page/software_view/13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Illinois NLP group&lt;/a&gt; has a statistical chunker written using their LBJ machine learning framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T00:25:07.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2379" CreationDate="2012-08-07T06:06:51.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is subjective, but take into consideration the following points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PIE was a quite complicated language with multiple cases and rich inflections. It had more complicated morphology than English, but compared to Latin, German or Russian it does not look too exceptional.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Much of PIE vocabulary is quite well preserved in Latin and Greek so for a person familiar with modern European languages many roots and stems will be easily recognizable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T06:06:51.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2012-08-07T06:21:36.510" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern Moscow school asserts that PIE was predated by Proto-Eurasiatic. It is quite reconstructable at least in terms of vocabulary (examples include *apa for &quot;father&quot;, *'aku and *wete for &quot;water&quot;) and some other features (-s ending for the Genitive, *mi(n) for &quot;I&quot; and *ti for &quot;thou&quot;, *ku and *io interrogative pronouns, ket(a) for &quot;a pair&quot;). Unlike PIE, numerals cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Eurasiatic which suggests that people did not know counting yet at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The families, included in Eurasiatic are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indo-European&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uralic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Altaic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nivkh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chukotko-Kamchatkan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eskimo–Aleut&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etruscan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is further asserted that Proto-Eurasiatic is predated by Proto-Nostratic which includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eurasiatic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Afro-Asiatic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kartvelian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dravidian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large part of Nostratic vocabulary has been reconstructed, you can find a dictionary here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/196512/49/00ND_ALL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/196512/49/00ND_ALL.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further speculation is that Proto-Nostratic was predated by Borean, which includes Nostratic and Dene–Daic (which is subdivided into Dené–Caucasian and Austric).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2019-10-14T06:38:27.293" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T06:38:27.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2376" CreationDate="2012-08-07T07:39:37.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you memorize them while learning to pronounce them you're aided by muscle-memory. They are defined after how they are pronounced after all. The vowels are hard to explain but a tutor can show how to do them. That's how they've traditionally been taught, from mentor to student. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take [ɑ]: relax the lips, open the mouth just about as far as it goes, try to press the tongue down, do not let the jaw move forwards, vocalize. A mentor can tell you when your mouth is in the right position. Once you've hit the right spot enough times, you've reprogrammed your hardware, and might be moving the mouth into position even when reading or thinking about IPA, which is fine :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T07:39:37.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2404" CreationDate="2012-08-07T14:10:33.197" Score="12" ViewCount="6224" Body="&lt;p&gt;English seems to have rules that are much more simple than its cousin German and its influencer French, as well as most of the languages that those are related to. What caused this? I suspect it's because there is so much influence on the language from two separate sources, but I could be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: By this I mean when it comes to conjugation and compound words and number of phonemes, etc., etc., English has simplified very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alternative question that basically means the same thing:&lt;/em&gt; why has English simplified &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than its cousins. PIE was much more complex, and I'm sure Proto-Germanic was much more complex as well; it's obvious that Latin is more complex than French, and I assume Proto-Germanic was much more complex than German. Why has English simplified one step further than these other two languages, in terms of grammatical complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="958" LastEditDate="2012-08-07T15:54:12.657" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T20:27:13.773" Title="Why is English so much more simplified than other, similar languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2389" CreationDate="2012-08-07T16:12:22.677" Score="13" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know pretty much what constitutes a dialect for native speakers of a language, but I wonder if countries that don't speak it as a &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; language, but have a large segment of the population that is required to speak it for one reason or another — can it be said of such countries that they speak a dialect of English? Swiss English, for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about Indian English? Even though English is pretty much universal in India, it is not the primary language that children grow up speaking. Indian speakers of English seem to use constructions they get from their true native language — saying &quot;today morning&quot; for &quot;this morning,&quot; for example. Would Indian English be a dialect of English, or a series of dialects? Or would it [they] be something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-10T07:03:20.157" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T15:41:41.623" Title="Is it possible for a non-native version of a language to be classed as a dialect?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2012-08-07T16:55:11.717" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's certainly &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to classify Indian English as a dialect of English. I feel that you would be more likely to see 'Indian English' used as a label than 'Swiss English'. This suggests that social and cultural factors play a large role in determining the answer to your question, making it irrelevant for explanatory linguistics. (I hate to sound dismissive in such a Chomskyan fashion, apologies!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitch tacitly hit the nail on the head with his final sentence. Questions of labelling (and to some extent definition - think of the largely fruitless, not to mention ongoing, 'what is a word' question) are subject to endless debate and therefore not especially helpful for actual discovery or explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examining the actual use of English in India, on the other hand, might provide fascinating insights, as with the substrate influence you mention. I personally feel it is a pity that so many linguistics papers include lengthy preambles relating to definitions of words like 'dialect', 'bilingualism', etc. At most, they need a sentence or two directing the reader to previous literature on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1228" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T16:55:11.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12810" CreationDate="2012-08-07T17:13:46.320" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am no expert on Sapir-Whorf lore. But I understand it usually concerns itself with semantics and the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible, do you think, to look at languages with similar and different clusters of parameter settings across the world and devise experimental studies to see if syntactic parameters affect the way we organise the world in our minds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might provide opportunities for interesting debate between proponents of Chomskyan and other types of modern linguistics. Of course, someone may already have suggested such an idea, in which case, feel free to admonish my ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1228" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T15:25:33.177" Title="Could we apply Neo-Whorfianism to parameters in the P&amp;P sense?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2376" CreationDate="2012-08-07T17:36:24.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, one should keep in mind IPA symbols have no connection to one's native language. For example, &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; in transcription has nothing to do with &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt;. Fortunately, their appearance often suggests the closest sound. For example, &lt;code&gt;ɘ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ɜ&lt;/code&gt; resemble a certain similarity to &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, but it's not a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best suggestion is to think they are &lt;em&gt;pictograms&lt;/em&gt; that should be studied individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one prefers more scientific approach, there are three basic characteristics of a vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Height (openness): how far the tongue is from the roof of the mouth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Front/back: &quot;horizontal&quot; tongue position in the mouth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roundness: amount of rounding the lips&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They form a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aIPA_vowel_chart_2005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;well-known trapezoid&lt;/a&gt;, and it may be a good exercise to try reproducing them with gradual transitions along each axis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more characteristics like length, nasalization, pitch, etc. They are represented with special symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-08-07T17:36:24.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2012-08-07T20:48:16.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has complicated tenses, spelling, phonology. It also uses more word roots because absence of inflexions require you to use different roots to convey nuances rather than just modifying the same root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-08-11T01:14:26.063" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T01:14:26.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2408" CreationDate="2012-08-07T23:54:33.467" Score="9" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;By this, I mean do a person's body language and hand gestures as they speak manifest in a consistent and observable way? I'm a person who speaks with my hands very much; if I'm not moving my hands while I talk, I feel as if I'm not explaining things all the way. Are the hand gestures that I'm using as I speak as uniform as the words I would use to describe something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-27T01:29:41.057" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T02:24:24.780" Title="Is the body language and hand movements manifested by a person as they speak part of that person's idiolect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;idiolect&gt;&lt;body-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-08T04:38:37.747" Score="7" ViewCount="687" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that some words that have -p- in stem in Latin have clearly reconstructible -k&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;- based on other Indo-European languages. Some examples include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;u̯lpes&lt;/em&gt; - *&lt;em&gt;u̯lk&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;os&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;wolf&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;u̯esper&lt;/em&gt; - *&lt;em&gt;u̯esk&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;eros&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;evening&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;apa&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;ak&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;water&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;k&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;&quot; reconstruction is supported by the majority of languages, still many authors consider the roots with &quot;p&quot; as genuine and/or separate. For example, Katz tryed to proove the connection between *&lt;em&gt;u̯esper&lt;/em&gt;, Hettite *&lt;em&gt;u̯esp&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cloth of the dead&quot; and Greek &lt;em&gt;ospros&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pulse&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mallory &amp;amp; Adams reconstructed the PIE water deity as *&lt;em&gt;H&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;epom Nepots&lt;/em&gt; instead of evident *&lt;em&gt;Ak&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;am Nepot(s)&lt;/em&gt; (note that the laryngeal here is not supported by the Nostratic evidence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starostin lists both *&lt;em&gt;ap-&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ak&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;; *&lt;em&gt;welp-&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;welk-&lt;/em&gt; (and also *&lt;em&gt;lup-&lt;/em&gt;) as separate roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why the correspondence between *&lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is not evident to some authors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-08-08T19:42:25.293" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T22:00:17.673" Title="Is there a known rule of correspondence between Latin and Greek *p and *kʷ - in other languages?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1920" CreationDate="2012-08-08T13:01:03.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the following chapter is a useful reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hiroyuki Ura. 2007. &quot;A Parametric Syntax Of Aspectually Conditioned Split-Ergativity&quot;. In: &lt;em&gt;Ergativity: Emerging Issues&lt;/em&gt;, eds. Alana Johns, Diane Massam, and Juvenal Ndayiragije.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some languages (e.g., Georgian, Hindi, Samoan, Nepali, etc.), where&#xA;  the ergative  system  coexists  with  the  accusative  one,  the &#xA;  alternation  between  ergativity  and  accusativity is determined by&#xA;  aspectuality (cf. DeLancey 1981, Dixon 1994, and Ura  2000).  In  this&#xA;  paper,  I  will  explore  the  syntactic  mechanism  of  the &#xA;  aspectually  conditioned  split-ergativity  and  try  to  explicate &#xA;  the  parameter  settings  which  distinguish the languages with the&#xA;  aspectually conditioned split-ergativity from the  ergative languages&#xA;  with no such split and from the accusative languages in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T13:01:03.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2012-08-08T13:27:13.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll add my own (provisional) answer, that is: there is no tool or obvious workflow available supporting both interlinearization and sentence alignment. Sentence-aligned &lt;em&gt;analyzed&lt;/em&gt; corpora appear to be created only from already analyzed inputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ended up using Toolbox, because it allows adding custom lines next to the text to be interlinearized. (Language Explorer is better in many ways, but it's impossible to add such custom lines). I added lines for the corresponding text in other languages, and manually pasted these in. This at least allows working on the analysis/interlinearization with the translation in sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still open to better suggestions, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-08-08T13:33:59.060" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T13:33:59.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2395" CreationDate="2012-08-08T15:29:39.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(a slightly updated answer)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin &quot;lupus&quot; is usually believed to be a borrowing from Sabellic - PIE *k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt; corresponds to Sabellic (Osco-Umbrian) *p. Other examples of this phenomenon is Latin popina vs. Latin coquina or Latin Pontius vs. Quintius. Another stop in Sabellic borrowings: Latin &quot;bos&quot;. And then metathesis is usually proposed for Greek &quot;lykos&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Latin &quot;vesper&quot;, you might not be seeing a bigger picture. Compare Greek &quot;hesperos&quot;, Armenian &quot;gisher&quot;, Hittite &quot;ispant-&quot;, and Sanskrit &quot;ksap-&quot;. It has been suggested that the PIE root was *ue(k)spero, a derivative of PIE *kwsep- &quot;night&quot;, the zero grade *kwsp-, the consonant cluster was simplified in different daughter languages with various outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can dispute the link between Latin &quot;vesper&quot; (Greek &quot;hesperos&quot; and the rest), on the one hand, and Lithuanian &quot;vakaras&quot; and OCS večerъ, on the other hand. OCS večerъ has no clear etymology, and various hypotheses have been proposed. The hypothesis I mentioned above clearly has one weak point: it offers no explanation of what might have happened to &quot;sp&quot; in Balto-Slavic; although it was suggested that some sort of taboo was involved there (see Havers 1946, Specht 1944) or possibly another word (Muehlenbach 1923-1932). There is another proposal that OCS večerъ is a not a simplex, but a root *vek- with a suffix erъ (like OCS severъ). Or maybe it is related to Lithuanian ukanas &quot;cloudy&quot; and ukti &quot;overcast&quot; etc. So, the last two proposals do not posit any connection between OCS večerъ and Latin &quot;vesper&quot; (and other comparanda mentioned above). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear how the hypothesized PIE form *wesk&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;er- would explain the Balto-Slavic data (what happened to *-s-?). Nor it is entirely clear why two roots with the same meaning would exist in PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Latin &quot;quinque&quot; and PIE *penk&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;e, it is usually suggested that in Italic as well as in Celtic (!) languages *p was assimilated to the following *kw (distance or non-adjacent assimilation). You can find it even in intro textbooks, e.g. Campbell 2004: 29. Another example of this assimilation: PIE *pek&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;- vs. Latin coquina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to understand that in historical linguistics, esp. in etymological research, there is no ultimate theory that explains everything, a theory that cannot be refuted. Quite often several hypotheses coexist, with different degrees of probability. And quite often these hypotheses are ad-hoc, that is they are created to explain one or, at best, a couple of words. This is undesirable but, I'm afraid, unavoidable, at least at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-08-09T03:41:25.043" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T03:41:25.043" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2401" CreationDate="2012-08-08T17:44:47.147" Score="3" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering something for a computer science project I am doing. Documents usually have too many distinct words to process on a computer efficiently. One solution is to map all words to a single synonym. For instance, 'giant' and 'enormous' and 'huge' would all map to big. I also want to account for polysemy, where words can have more than one meaning. If I were to convert all words to their synonyms while accounting for all possible double,triple,etc. meanings, do you think that the number of distinct words in a document would increase or decrease? (Note: assume that all of the words have already been stemmed as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My database of documents consists of mainly forums from the web and links that are fetched through the forums (A web crawler was used to crawl about 10 million sites so far with many more to come). And maybe this might be a better question to ask: For anyone that has tried different methods of dimensional reduction, did you find mapping words to synonyms useful, and if you did, then how did you account for polysemy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1240" OwnerDisplayName="Sidd" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-09T21:29:11.957" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T21:29:11.957" Title="Dimensional reduction with synonomy and polysemy" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2012-08-08T18:37:20.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's going to depend greatly on the nature of the corpus. I would suspect that language of a technical (and therefore generally more precise) nature will generate smaller dictionaries with your method, but ordinary language is shot-through with metaphor and context, and it seems likely that your method will increase the dictionary size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you might think about doing is writing a highly optimized method that generates the dictionaries based on a sample, and then proceeds based on the results, i.e., if it generates a smaller dictionary in the sample, it proceeds with the entire document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1241" LastActivityDate="2012-08-08T18:37:20.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2012-08-09T02:01:56.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Urban language change may be distinctive due to different patterns of language acquisition. If in hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies children take parents/grandparents as their linguistic models right through the acquisition process, then this would produce a pattern of language change in which slow, steady incremental change would dominate. (Though this basic pattern would be later subject to processes of linguistic diffusion through contact with other groups.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In urban environments, however, there are larger groups of children and adolescents living in the same settlement. In some cases they may take their age-peers as linguistic models from a relatively young age, which might be expected to accelerate changes in process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On change by incrementation and diffusion, see: Labov (2007), “Transmission and Diffusion.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of urban language change breaking with the normal incrementation pattern, because of different socialisation patterns, see: Cheshire et al. (2011), &quot;Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1244" LastActivityDate="2012-08-09T02:01:56.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2012-08-09T08:23:16.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the standard definition of dialect makes this fairly clear: mutually intelligible varieties that differ in systematic ways. So 'Indian English' (if there is a single such entity and it is spoken as a complete linguistic code) is a dialect of English. I don't see why it has to be a L1 to be a dialect of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-08-11T15:41:41.623" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T15:41:41.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2012-08-09T14:20:41.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a linguistical point of view, it is proven that English is neither a simple nor a complex language, it depends on the influences of your L1. For example, if you are Korean or Chinese, you may find the pronunciation hard, but if your mother tongue is Spanish, it is quite easy to learn the language. Don't forget that English comes from the Germanic branch of languages in the Indo-European family. However, there aren't many inflections as in German. Besides, there is no gender. So, the complexity of a language should be stated in terms of comparison with your mother tongue, and taking into account all the aspects of it.&#xA;English would be easy in terms of syntax, since you cannot change the words as you do in those that come from romance languages, and it would be easy in comparison to those language where you seem to use symbols more that written phonemes, but it is still complex in some cases: primarily when you are in an upper-advanced level and you deal with literary English, and I'd say it depends on the epoch it is spoken. Why is Shakespeare rather complex for us, contemporary speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1245" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T20:01:29.220" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T20:01:29.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2407" CreationDate="2012-08-10T01:11:06.793" Score="5" ViewCount="7131" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just my observation, but it seems like Standard American English lacks any distinct accent when speaking. Listen to almost any person singing with an accent, and they sound like any American singing! I suppose this could be because America has had so many accents thrown on to it that it's averaged out, perhaps. Is there any explanation for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-10T06:44:49.337" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T19:53:20.730" Title="Why do people singing in English sound like Americans?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2409" CreationDate="2012-08-10T02:11:13.530" Score="2" ViewCount="13962" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies/researches on fields like neurolinguistics(or any other fields) to allow people (can be via drugs, psycho training..whatever) to become a native speaker of another language? Is this kind of holy grail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1195" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T03:19:01.337" Title="Is it possible to become a native speaker of another language for someone that already has a mother tongue?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2012-08-10T02:12:25.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you're coming in from a false assumption. Accents are a combination of many factors, the most notable being vowel pronunciation but also including stress patterns, intonation, etc. However, in common usage &quot;accent&quot; also means dialect or vernacular which would include slang and colloquialisms, tag questions (as a Canadian, Americans often tell me that they love how my &quot;accent&quot; means I say &quot;eh?&quot; a lot), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much all of those disappear when singing. They're overwritten by the melody and time signature of the music. Slang and colloquialisms are less prevalent in music (especially pop music which sells to an international audience). As for vowel pronunciation, it's not uncommon to mangle pronunciation in service of the rhyming scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I am saying is that one could argue that when singing people have neutral accent allowing listeners to fill in the blanks with the accent they are most familiar with (their own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of this, listen to pretty much any song by Adele (who is from Britain). Personally, while she's singing I'd agree that she sounds &quot;American&quot; (actually, I'm not American so I wouldn't say that. I'd actually say &quot;she sounds like me&quot;) but if you actually listen, her vowels are very British.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/on-singing-accents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; to back up my reasoning but it's hardly a peer reviewed academic paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;----EDIT----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, as @Cerebus suggested, there is a certain amount of imitation of American accents to appeal to American audiences but I don't believe that's the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;----EDIT 2----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It also strikes me that the mechanical act of singing is different from normal speaking. Specifically, trained singers focus on higher-than-normal volume, projection, and range. These all require precise control of the vocal tract which would also help mask the singer's accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;----EDIT 3----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even though this question has been inactive for quite some time, a friend recently sent me &lt;a href=&quot;http://umanoapp.com/clip/512c3dfebf334575c9eab8bb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this radio program&lt;/a&gt; which addresses this issue. While it's light on new information, it is worth a listen for anyone stumbling across this question through a search engine, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T11:36:52.203" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T11:36:52.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2012-08-10T04:28:20.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of research on this---co-speech gestures convey part of the message, but convey different information than the speech they accompany. They are definitely language and culture specific, so for example a person's gestures change when they learn an L2.  Google “co-speech gesture” especially as related to second language learning, or work by &lt;a href=&quot;http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/pdfs/Stam_Abstract.pdf&quot;&gt;David McNeil&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Gesture.html?id=hDXnnzmDkOkC&quot;&gt;Adam Kendon&lt;/a&gt;, or Susan Goldin-Meadow, eg Hearing Gesture; how our hands help us think. Harvard. 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At university I did a research project using Labov's methodology to test if Cospeech Gestures  would qualify as sociolinguistic variables.  You would have to concede that spoken language has a visual component, but given that they proved to be a perfect textbook example.  Still have that paper, on a floppy disk.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T04:28:20.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2012-08-10T10:00:53.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term 'native speaker' usually refers to someone who has the language in question as their mother tongue, i.e. it is their first language, acquired as an infant (of course, someone may have multiple mother tongues and so be a native speaker of multiple languages). So under that definition it is not possible to become a 'native speaker' of a language later in life, after acquiring a different language as a mother tongue. However it is possible to reach a native speaker level of fluency in a language which is not one's mother tongue, and this is how the highest level of skill in a language is commonly described in linguistics. So looked at this way it is possible to become a 'native speaker', at least functionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some individuals seem able to acquire a high level of skill in a new language with seeming ease. These individuals are sometimes referred to as 'rapid language learners'. A famous example in the world of linguistics is the late &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._Hale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ken Hale&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T10:00:53.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2012-08-10T21:43:44.400" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English started out as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pidgin&lt;/a&gt;. It is a composite of a few languages. It grew to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;creole&lt;/a&gt; and then developed into a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt;. Most pidgins do not deal with the complex parts of the languages (rarely masculine, feminine, neuter, simpler conjugation, etc.) and just deal with the rules necessary to make your thoughts understood. Languages that grow from a pidgin will add their own rules or include the rules from the languages they developed from, but for the most part those rules are a lot simpler than the rules from the original languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is a relatively young language and is still growing. It is far past its pidgin roots and has gotten more complex, but has not incorporated as many rules as some of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1184" LastActivityDate="2012-08-10T21:43:44.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2012-08-11T02:37:29.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you grow up with two parents who speak different languages, and they both speak their own language to you, then you will start to speak one before you speak the other.  However, you will be a native speaker of both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is my son, growing up in an English-speaking country.  All of his friends speak English, and I myself am a native speaker of English.  So he is also a native speaker of English, as much as I myself, or any of his friends.  But he gained a degree of proficiency in his mother's language long before he spoke a single sentence of English.  So he is the perfect example of someone who had a mother tongue, then became native in something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user780" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T02:37:29.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1689" CreationDate="2012-08-11T04:03:54.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're not the first to ask these questions. Scott Liddell (2003) argues that sign languages are basically inflectionless languages, and I must say, I find his reasoning persuasive. Recently, for example, Corbett (2006) has argued that so called 'agreement verbs' in sign languages don't actually represent examples of agreement, and this is one of the major types of sign modification proposed to be an example of inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1249" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T04:03:54.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1631" CreationDate="2012-08-11T22:45:06.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the absence of anything that looks like an alternative to the comparative method (and internal reconstruction) in the historical linguistics literature, I think we can safely say that there is no alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The method of mass (or multilateral) comparison is heavily critiqued, but whether one would subscribe to its use or not, it would not pose an alternative to the comparative method. If we take the comparative method as a way of i) establishing genetic relatedness between languages, ii) identifying systematic sound correspondences between them, in order to iii) ultimately arrive at a reconstructed proto-language, then multilateral comparison concerns itself only with the first step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Greenberg (1996: 131–132):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be&#xA;widely  supposed that multilateral comparison and the&#xA;comparative-historical method are in some way contradictory. This is&#xA;perhaps most starkly stated by Nichols (1990:477, n. 1) as follows:&#xA;&amp;quot;Greenberg (1987) makes it clear that he  believes  such  grouping&#xA;cannot be  reached by  the  standard comparative method; a wholly&#xA;different method, mass comparison, is  required.&amp;quot; Where I supposedly&#xA;said this is not specified. In fact, just the opposite is stated: &amp;quot;...&#xA;my remarks are not intended as an attack on the validity of&#xA;comparative linguistics  or  on  the  importance of  undertaking&#xA;reconstruction. Rather, the discussion is meant constructively as a&#xA;way of taking first steps where the comparative method has not been&#xA;applied for want of an  assured basis in genetic classification&amp;quot; (LIA,&#xA;p.3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said much the same thing in regard to the relationship between&#xA;the two much earlier (1957:44),  namely, that the  methods outlined&#xA;there did not conflict in  any fashion with the traditional&#xA;comparative method and that they might be viewed as the first step in&#xA;the method itself, for we cannot begin systematic reconstruction until&#xA;we know which languages to compare.  Whether classification by&#xA;multilateral comparison is to be viewed as a necessary preliminary&#xA;step in order to define valid genetic units without which comparative&#xA;linguistics cannot proceed or as the first step in the method itself -&#xA;an alternative which seems more natural - is a matter of  definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heart of the dispute then seems to be whether a classification of genetically related languages can be proven by way of multilateral comparison, or whether the relatedness can only be established by identifying systematic sound correspondences and/or a reconstructed proto-langauge. Either way, mass comparison cannot be counted as a full alternative to the comparative method, since it does not address the reconstruction of proto-languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greenberg, Joseph H. 1996. “In Defense of Amerind.” &lt;em&gt;International Journal of American Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 62 (2): 131–164. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/1265773&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/1265773&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-08-11T22:45:06.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-12T22:53:06.877" Score="7" ViewCount="2969" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, the only nontrivial difference between Nigerian Standard English and the catalog of commonly referenced dialects of English is that Nigerian Standard English has a different prosody, as it is syllable-timed as opposed to stress-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having a difficult time finding examples of dialects of a language with differing prosodic qualities. Given this, is Nigerian Standard English categorized as a discrete language, a dialect of English, or does it fall under some other category? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T10:55:11.193" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T07:24:15.333" Title="How is Nigerian Standard English categorized?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2419" CreationDate="2012-08-13T20:40:39.907" Score="25" ViewCount="4888" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the U.S. where I live it is possible to be right almost all of the time when guessing the sex of a person from his or her given name: Ronald, George (Sand and Elliot notwithstanding), William, Michael (Learned notwithstanding), Warren and Chuck are all men's names, while Emily, Christine, Jasmine, Nancy and Camille are obviously female. Some nicknames go both ways (Chris, Sandy, Sam, etc.) but the full names are generally obviously on one side or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, generally nobody thinks Karlheinz is female or Gisele is male. Cf. Spanish (Juan, Juanita, etc.), French (Michel, Michelle) and so on. Even in Latin, it was possible to tell Julia and Julius apart by letters alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages have markers to indicate gender (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1634/171&quot;&gt;this Linguistics.SE question&lt;/a&gt;. That question discusses PIE affixes, but the scope is even broader. For example, in Japanese, &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ro&lt;/em&gt; endings indicate male names, while &lt;em&gt;-ko&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; indicate female names. Note that my question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; limited to the scope of that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know all the languages that have ever existed in the world, obviously, but all of the ones I have had contact with make a more-or-less clear gender distinction with given names. Are there or have there ever been languages that didn't make this distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T15:43:39.043" Title="Are there any languages or cultures that have genderless given names?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2417" CreationDate="2012-08-14T11:55:54.237" Score="3" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose German &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zigeuner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zigeuner&lt;/a&gt; and Romanian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C8%9Bigan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ţigan&lt;/a&gt; (gypsy) share a common etymology from Greek &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%84%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%B3%CE%B3%CE%AC%CE%BD%CE%BF%CF%82#Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;τσιγγάνος&lt;/a&gt;. I wonder if Swedish &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tigga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tigga&lt;/a&gt;, which means &lt;em&gt;to beg&lt;/em&gt; and looks/sounds quite similar to &lt;em&gt;ţigan&lt;/em&gt;, has an etymological link. Maybe people historically associated begging with gypsies, so that the Swedish word for begging originated from the same source. Does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1254" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T03:58:06.557" Title="Any etymological link between German/Romanian/Greek Zigeuner/țigan/τσιγγάνος and Scandinavian tigga?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2416" CreationDate="2012-08-14T17:56:57.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, not everyone agrees on the etymology of this ethnonym, or, rather, an exonym. Both Duden-7 and Kluge say that the origin of German Zigeuner is &quot;ungewiss&quot; (uncertain) or &quot;unklar&quot; (not clear). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Zigeuner&quot;&gt;Duden online&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Herkunft ungeklärt&quot;. The authors of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymologie.nl/&quot;&gt;Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands&lt;/a&gt; are of the same opinion re: Dutch &quot;zigeuner&quot; - &quot;waarvan de herkomst echter onduidelijk is&quot;. Anyhow, this word has been in use in German (and in most other languages spoken in Europe) since the 15th century. Also note that you might not want to use it in most situations, cf. Duden Online's remark that &quot;Die Bezeichnung Zigeuner, Zigeunerin wird vom Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma als diskriminierend abgelehnt.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vasmer does indeed argue that it comes from Medieval (Byzantine) Greek, citing Theophanes' Chronographia, who described them as &quot;haeretici in Phrygia et Lycaonia praecipue degentes&quot;. Some argue it is related to Ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext:1999.04.0057%3aentry=qigga/nw&quot;&gt;θιγγάνω&lt;/a&gt; &quot;touch&quot; and translate the ethnonym as  &quot;untouched&quot;. My knowledge of Ancient Greek morphology is not good enough to critically evaluate this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to a possible link between Swedish &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://runeberg.org/svetym/1057.html&quot;&gt;tigga&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and this ethnonym. The word &quot;tigga&quot; is a rather old word. It is related to OE þicg(e)an &quot;to take, receive, accept; esp. to take (food), to consume by eating or drinking&quot;; see other &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Germanic/%C3%BEigjanan&quot;&gt;comparanda&lt;/a&gt;; also note that the authors of &lt;a href=&quot;http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/&quot;&gt;Svenska Akademiens ordbok&lt;/a&gt; argue that the origin of Swedish tigga is &quot;av ovisst ursprung&quot; - not sure why. Anyhow, it definitely &lt;strong&gt;predates&lt;/strong&gt;  Swedish &quot;zigenare&quot; (note the following from &lt;a href=&quot;http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer&quot;&gt;an article in Swedish wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Både termen gypsy och termen zigenare anses av en del romer vara oacceptabla benämningar på dem.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-08-14T19:33:32.343" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T19:33:32.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2421" CreationDate="2012-08-14T18:16:51.987" Score="2" ViewCount="1758" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking to see if anyone can help me understand the difference between these similar sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ĝ &amp;amp; ĵ (gx &amp;amp; jx)&#xA;c &amp;amp; s&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been told the gx is like the j in jail or the g in gem &amp;amp; that the jx is like the s in fusion or the j in bonjour. However, when I actually hear speakers or listen to audio clips, they sound much more similar than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the c and s, I'm totally confused. I had not even realized they were two different sounds until I read somewhere that the letters in Esperanto always sound the same and no two letters are to be used interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could figure out what these (as well as some others that come up, but I can't remember now) sound like, then it would really help my study of the language. I have found it to be extremely enjoyable (And I used to specifically hate learning foreign languages through self-study) and would like to continue learning this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried some google searches for references/resources and the best I have thus far is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#Sound_values&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia - Esperanto#Sound Values&lt;/a&gt; article. It doesn't help me because I have no experience with the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-08-14T20:28:25.580" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T11:33:28.110" Title="Esperanto Pronunciation jx and gx &amp; c and s" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2012-08-14T18:29:22.463" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out the Punjabi language. Well spoken by the Sikh culture. Many, many, many names are genderless. Only in modern times (past 50–100 years) have there started to exist some names that are more associated with one gender than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website, &lt;a href=&quot;http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com/category-sikh-names.html&quot;&gt;Baby Names World&lt;/a&gt;, would fool you into thinking that's not the case. But I know many people whose names are registered there as female who are male and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Google search for &quot;Sikh names&quot; usually leads to results that mention how their names are genderless. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh_names&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; says, &quot;Given names are not in general associated with a particular gender&quot;. If gender is to be indicated people say both their first/given name as well as their middle/last name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing a Google search for the &lt;em&gt;exact phrase of your question&lt;/em&gt; led to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3aK1wVqOwCkakJ%3aanswers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080923085111AAstKzu%20&amp;amp;cd=5&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us&quot;&gt;Yahoo question&lt;/a&gt; from 2008 that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Chinese it is normal for names to be for both boys and girls, because there isn't a specific group of &quot;words&quot; that are only used as names, where you can only choose your name from this group like in the Western World, eg. &quot;Anna&quot; isn't a word, but is something that can only be used as a (girl's) name. In Chinese you can use any word or words (max. 2 characters) you like as your name, provided it sounds good and you find it meaningful, just like the names of Native Americans commented above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, names that are flowers are generally girls' names and names with &quot;strength&quot; and such themes are generally boys' names, but other words are mostly neutral. In earlier times there was stronger distinction between genders, but today, where &quot;flower&quot; names and such are pretty much out of the fashion, you would not immediately know the gender of the person when you read their name. Korean names are also similar in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing on my Google search, I found this extremely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html&quot;&gt;lovely article&lt;/a&gt; about how Sweden is trying to pass legislature on allowing parents to give their child &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; name (like &lt;em&gt;Jack&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Lisa&lt;/em&gt;), saying that names should not be tied to gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all in all there is at least three distinct groups of languages/cultures (and many more, I'm sure, are tied to these three groups) that either have genderless given names or are advocating for such a goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1255" LastEditorUserId="1255" LastEditDate="2012-08-14T19:52:41.797" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T19:52:41.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3663" CreationDate="2012-08-14T20:41:45.907" Score="7" ViewCount="7416" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've heard, syllable-timed languages have syllables of equal length throughout each breath-group (i.e. bit of spoken discourse said in one breath), and stress-timed languages have breath-groups of equal length.   By this account, the former entails variation in the length of each breath-group and the latter entails variation in syllable length.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I could have botched these definitions.  Also, I've heard rumors that the timing scheme in a given language can change with rate of speech.  I've also heard a rumor that this distinction isn't quite valid.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I'm asking for a brief and authoritative statement about the difference between stress-timing and syllable timing, and whether this distinction is considered valid by linguists.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T14:20:56.110" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T14:20:56.110" Title="What is the difference between syllable-timing and stress-timing?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;&lt;rhythm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2012-08-14T20:55:33.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a speech/language therapist, I use the IPA when I’m doing my job.   So I was able to use the Wikipedia article that you cited to answer your question about Esperanto orthography.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronounce “ĝ” like “j” as in “jump.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pronounce “ĵ” like “s” as in “treasure.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pronounce “c” like “ts” as in “bets.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pronounce “s” like “s” as in “sail.”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this I can only add that anyone with an interest in speech, linguistics, and learning new languages should learn the IPA.    Doing so will familiarize you, not only with a new means of transcribing speech, but with the properties of speech sounds.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2012-08-14T20:55:33.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2257" CreationDate="2012-08-15T00:30:14.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These diacritics are listed in Unicode documentation as being particular to the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. In the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritics are documented on Wikipedia as indicating &quot;retraction&quot; and &quot;advancement.&quot; It is not clear whether this should be tongue root or tongue body retraction/advancement, but I am guessing the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-15T00:30:14.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3424" CreationDate="2012-08-15T05:22:46.913" Score="2" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages whose syllables are approximately equal in length, how is stress typically indicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stress in English is typically indicated by any or all of the following:  length, loudness, an pitch.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that, in the kind of language in question, loudness and/or pitch would indicate stress.  Is there are preference, or do loudness &amp;amp; pitch for stress co-vary in the languages in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2012-08-16T19:58:43.843" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T15:50:44.690" Title="In languages whose syllables are of roughly equal length, how is stress typically indicated?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-15T13:39:54.227" Score="3" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems post-velar usually refers to a uvular place of articulation. In the wiki of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Americanist phonetic notation&lt;/a&gt;, they are listed as synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes the term seems to mean 'everything articulated farther back than velars', so it could cover uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal. Is it commonly used as such a cover term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is one of these two uses established practice? Or is the term really used both ways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-16T08:45:51.950" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:19:07.443" Title="What exactly does 'post-velar' refer to?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2459" CreationDate="2012-08-15T18:30:24.147" Score="68" ViewCount="23792" Body="&lt;p&gt;After wondering about this today at work, I turned to the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Writings/Shorts/UniqueEnglishr.htm&quot;&gt;A short piece&lt;/a&gt; that focuses on pronunciation points toward &quot;none&quot;. I've scoured ELU and Google (perhaps not as thoroughly or effectively as some others might), but cannot find an answer specific to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this may be considered a broad question, though, so let me clarify what I mean by &quot;unique&quot;. I am not referring to words that only occur in English or one-off exceptions to grammatical rules, i.e. trivial language-specific features (that are innumerable and don't belong here anyway). I'd like to see something more along the lines of what is presented in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lituanus.org/1984_3/84_3_05.htm&quot;&gt;this paper on unique features of Lithuanian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author gives nine unique traits to Lithuanian (I list some with my comments in parentheses):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frequentative past tense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;13 participles in active use (&lt;em&gt;more than other languages?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;four functional locative cases (&lt;em&gt;more than others?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no irregular, or suppletive forms in the comparative and superlative forms in adjective and adverbial systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uniform stressed syllable intonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;preserved several words or forms exactly as they are reconstructed for the distant proto-language (PIE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all the basic possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns are expressed by genitive form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if #2 and #3 are &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; in the sense that English could also claim &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; participles where only the number is significant, not the existence of certain participles unique to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not looking for a thesis, but perhaps a short list along the same lines as the paper above. In short, &lt;strong&gt;what does English do that no other language does&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 1:&lt;/strong&gt; For anyone voting to close, perhaps you can help me rephrase my question or so that it's in line with the kind of succinct answer I'm hoping for (e.g. some &quot;unique features of Lithuanian&quot;). Comments/critiques are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt; John Lawler mentioned WALS, and it is the kind of features cataloged that I'm after. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/90G&quot;&gt;double-headed relative clauses&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/143#143D&quot;&gt;optional triple negation&lt;/a&gt; are only found in a few languages. Again, it may be the case that English is too &quot;mixed&quot; with cross-linguistic features for it to have any unique quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1242" OwnerDisplayName="Zairja" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T16:12:56.057" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T17:41:06.220" Title="What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2012-08-16T14:54:59.957" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;[I thought I'd add this answer to cover in a more systematic way some of the points brought up in earlier answers]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point to make is that trained phoneticians &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; able to hear the differences between similar-sounding vowels in different languages, although these are not noticed by casual observers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning how to make vowel plots,&#xA;there are, in principle, several ways that a vowel trapezoid could be constructed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on objectively measured articulatory characteristics of the vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on &lt;em&gt;proprioceptively&lt;/em&gt; assessed articulatory characteristics of the vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on auditory characteristics of the vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on acoustic characteristics of the vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of all four types of vowel plots can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/featgeom/lindau78-vowelfeatures.pdf&quot;&gt;Lindau (1978)&lt;/a&gt;. The first method has been used in the past with varying methods which would be considered too invasive by today's standards (x-ray motion pictures, placing gold or lead chains, buttons on the tongue, etc.). Modern techniques such as ultrasound or MRI are still used in well-equipped phonetics laboratories, but on whole method (1) is not practical for ordinary descriptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Method (2), called the &quot;Cardinal Vowel&quot; method, is a bit curious in historical perspective: it requires a phonetician trained in the method to repeat a vowel sound uttered by a native consultant until the phonetician's imitation is nearly perfect, and then to proprioceptively assess his/her tongue position in articulating the vowel (Abercrombie, 1991: 40). What is interesting about this method is that in order to use it you would have to be personally trained by the late Daniel Jones or by one of his students, and this is why it has more or less died out. But to get an idea of how it went, consider a typical description of some vowels in Tswana written by Daniel Jones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Sechuana &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; is very nearly cardinal vowel No. 7 (The French sound&#xA;  of &lt;em&gt;ô&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;tôt&lt;/em&gt;); the tongue-position is if anything, a shade lower than&#xA;  this. The sound does not exist in Southern English, but may be heard&#xA;  in the Scottish pronunciation of words like &lt;em&gt;home, go&lt;/em&gt;. It must be&#xA;  carefully distinguished from the diphthongs heard in the various&#xA;  English pronunciations of such words. (Jones and Plaatje,&#xA;  1916: xxiv)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third method is rarely done in a strictly controlled way because of the difficulty in measuring auditory properties precisely. It is, however, used informally by phoneticians with a trained ear. Ladefoged has claimed that many phoneticians claiming to use the Cardinal Vowel method were actually using a sort of auditory based method (most likely because it is actually difficult for anyone to feel the position of their tongue body):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . . after you’ve used a term like tongue height—raise the tongue,&#xA;  lower the tongue, move it to the back or front—you begin to feel that&#xA;  that is what your tongue is actually doing. But you are kidding&#xA;  yourself. This is not really what one does in trying to produce a&#xA;  vowel. (Fromkin, 1985: 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves, finally, the vowel plot based on acoustic characteristics of vowels. Most vowel plots you will see published today are constructed by measuring the first and second formant values of vowels, and either using these values directly or using some kind of transformation of them (e.g., a derived perceptual scale or a normalized value) in making the plots. The main difference between the vowel plot and the kinds of plots you make in high school algebra is that the axis originates at the upper-right corner. Acoustic &quot;backness&quot; is a function of F2 (or F2-F1), and moving to the left corresponds to increasing F2. Acoustic &quot;height&quot; is a function of F1, and moving down corresponds to increasing F1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software exists for tracking formants, but it is not completely reliable and its results need to be double-checked by a trained phonetician. Fortunately, it is much easier to learn approximate formant values for different vowels than it is to learn how to use the Cardinal Vowel method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Abercrombie (1991). &quot;Daniel Jones's teaching.&quot; Fifty Years in Phonetics: Selected Papers. Edinburgh University Press. pages 37–47.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Victoria A Fromkin. Introduction. In Victoria A Fromkin, editor, Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in&#xA;honor of Peter Ladefoged, pages 1–14. Academic Press, Orlando, 1985.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daniel Jones and Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. A Sechuana Reader, in international Phonetic&#xA;Orthography (with English Translations). The University of London Press, London, 1916&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-16T14:54:59.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2430" CreationDate="2012-08-16T20:21:57.213" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, a friend of mine posted a picture of a book series on Facebook and the start of his caption was &quot;Read all 13!&quot; I initially interpretted this as an imperative sentence ([ɹid] all 13), but after reading the entire capture, I figured out that it was actually a declarative sentence about what he had done ([ɹɛd] all 13). Is there a term for this phenomenon? I dub it &quot;homonym confusion&quot; if it lacks a name!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-20T09:08:55.297" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T09:08:55.297" Title="Is there a term for reading a homonym that means one thing but interpreting it as another?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2429" CreationDate="2012-08-17T00:07:51.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/857/363&quot;&gt;Homonym&lt;/a&gt;' usually means same spelling (=homograph) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; same pronunciation (=homophone) so what you describe would be better referred to as 'homograph confusion'. But in my experience what you describe is usually called 'orthographic ambiguity' in the linguistic literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T22:57:53.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2012-08-17T05:05:02.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's seldom accurate to say that any sound in one language is &quot;just like&quot; a sound in another language.  Among other reasons, most languages are made up of multiple dialects, with significant pronunciation differences between them.  The examples given comparing the Esperanto letter &quot;ĥ&quot; to the  Spanish &quot;J&quot;, as in 'juego, rojo, jota', is only true for a few of the Spanish dialects.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Esperanto, almost all speakers learn in their spare time, and use the language as much as they want to, so it is natural that few people have really model pronunciation.  Most speakers strive to pronounce as well as they can, while some don't really care.  Without a lot of practice, it is likely that a person's primary language will influence the pronunciation when speaking another language.  The model pronunciation for Esperanto has been codified, and careful speakers do strive to speak with an &quot;International Accent&quot;.  One goal is to speak sufficiently like the norm, that other Esperanto speakers can't guess your native language or home country.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, the examples that you have listed for ĝ and ĵ are fine for getting started, as are the distinctions others have listed for &quot;s&quot; and &quot;c&quot; in Esperanto.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.lernu.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lernu!&lt;/a&gt; is one of the best learning resources for Esperanto, and it has many sound files available, ranging from the pronunciation of single letters to works of literature.  You will find sound files in multiple locations, including within the lessons in the courses and in the library of texts, sound files, and movies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1262" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T11:33:28.110" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T11:33:28.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2433" CreationDate="2012-08-17T12:12:21.120" Score="2" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to describe the action that Text-To-Speech computer software does, what verb should I use?&#xA;&quot;Pronounce&quot; and &quot;tell&quot; seems like a verb for human action. &quot;Read&quot; may be correct but for software usage it is closer to the &quot;TTS software reads text, then processes it, then ...&quot; then reads again? Seems misleading to use one word for two different actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1265" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T13:48:45.097" LastActivityDate="2012-08-21T12:14:40.913" Title="Correct verb for Text-To-Speech software action" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2432" CreationDate="2012-08-17T14:33:17.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We usually refer to the process of producing artificial human speech as &lt;strong&gt;speech synthesis&lt;/strong&gt;. A text-to-speech system includes a component called a &lt;strong&gt;speech synthesizer&lt;/strong&gt; that takes input in the form of a linguistic representation (that is either provided to it directly by the user or derived from regular text by a front-end component) and produces speech as its output. The verb we can use to describe what it does is &lt;strong&gt;synthesize&lt;/strong&gt;, as in, &quot;That TTS system can &lt;strong&gt;synthesize&lt;/strong&gt; speech in seven different languages.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the relevant Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; if you want to read more about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;***EDIT IN RESPONSE TO @TOOLUKA'S COMMENT BELOW:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that there is a deeper issue with how you've framed your inquiry. One example context you gave was &quot;TTS software reads text, then processes it, then...&quot;, and the other (in your comment below) was &quot;1) User does this and this; 2) Program &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt; text to the user&quot;. The concepts that fill in these blanks are fundamentally different concepts, because the former is a single sub-process of the TTS's functionality, while the latter encompasses the whole text-to-speech process and includes multiple stages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first context I would say &quot;The TTS system reads text, processes the text, then &lt;strong&gt;produces synthesized speech&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; By the time the text has been processed, it is no longer text, so at that last stage the synthesizer is not operating on the text. It's operating on the output of the component(s) of the system that processed the text. Imagine a machine that takes water, flour, and other ingredients and makes it into bread, then slices the bread into slices and stacks them onto a serving plate. It would be strange to say &quot;the machine mixes the water and flour, bakes the water and flour, then slices the water and flour and stacks them onto a serving plate.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second context, it seems like you are looking for a single phrase that covers the entire text-to-speech process. To describe this process I would say &quot;The program &lt;strong&gt;converts text into speech&lt;/strong&gt; for the user.&quot; Unfortunately, I don't think there's a single verb for this process that takes &quot;text&quot; as a direct object, but a colleague of mine suggested the playfully derived word &lt;strong&gt;speechify&lt;/strong&gt;, as in &quot;The program &lt;strong&gt;speechifies&lt;/strong&gt; text for the user.&quot; This would be comprehensible to most people, but it isn't appropriate for formal writing. Neither of these phrases, though, can be used with &quot;to the user&quot;; the only solution I can think of for that is to personify the TTS system and say that it &quot;&lt;strong&gt;reads the text aloud&lt;/strong&gt; to the user&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-08-21T12:14:40.913" LastActivityDate="2012-08-21T12:14:40.913" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-17T21:32:59.993" Score="3" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a term that, as far as I know, goes back to traditional Celtic grammar called &quot;enumerators&quot;. These are essentially words that inflect for number in weird ways when preceded by a numeral, that are predominantly (but not solely) measure terms. For instance, Scottish reportedly disallows number marking for measure terms, meaning you can't say &quot;three days&quot;, but rather &quot;three day&quot;. Similarly, there are cases of nouns disallowing classifiers in classifier languages, which is presumably a similar phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do your pet languages display this feature? That is, is there a class of nouns that do not display normal number marking / classifier cooccurrence patterns? I'm aware of Japanese, Bengali, perhaps Thai, perhaps Vietnamese, perhaps Burmese, Dutch, Irish, and Scottish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, are they only &quot;measure terms&quot;, or do they extend to some weirder nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A second, tangentially related question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with any languages that have a syntactic mechanism for expressing a meaning like &quot;approximately&quot;? Specifically I'm looking for things that change the word order. I'm familiar that such a thing exists in Russian, where you can invert the order of the numeral and noun to mean approximately. So, &quot;three cats&quot; means what it means in English, but &quot;cats three&quot; means something like &quot;approximately three cats&quot;. Furthermore, is there a limit to how high you can do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd find a language that does both :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-08-17T22:51:30.417" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T06:14:31.803" Title="&quot;Enumerators&quot; and Approximate Inversion" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2012-08-17T22:30:06.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A big thing is that gender is frequently lexical. That is, a noun is a certain gender, and it's ungrammatical to use the wrong one. Classifiers frequently don't work that way. For instance, you could use a &quot;flat round thing&quot; classifier in Chinese with a sunflower if you're focussing on the petals, or you might use &quot;tall skinny thing&quot; if you're referring to the whole thing, stalk included. I can't remember the references talking about this point, but it's generally true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, classifiers are almost always used in particular kinds of syntactic contexts. Normally with numerals, and sometimes with determiners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="438" LastActivityDate="2012-08-17T22:30:06.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2434" CreationDate="2012-08-18T06:14:31.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian has &lt;em&gt;centinaio&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;migliaio&lt;/em&gt;, which respectively mean &quot;about a hundred; hundreds (pl.)&quot; and &quot;about a thousand; thousands (pl.)&quot; in the approximate sense. However it's not a productive affix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivational process is a bit weird: noun (L. &lt;em&gt;mille&lt;/em&gt;) -&gt; adjective (L. &lt;em&gt;milliarius&lt;/em&gt;) -&gt; substantive adjective (back to a noun again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: There's also &lt;em&gt;decina&lt;/em&gt; &quot;about ten&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-08-18T06:14:31.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-18T20:55:48.750" Score="4" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia Proto-Indo-European had four tense-aspects, the first being stative and the latter three being eventive: stative aspect, perfective aspect, and past and present tense of imperfective aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &quot;perfective&quot; and &quot;imperfective&quot; are linguistically vague terms. They have a definite meaning - perfective meaning the event is considered in its entirety, while imperfective means only a part or instant of the event is considered - but are often also used to refer to different aspectual splits. In particular, while English is often said to have a perfective/imperfective split, in fact it has a progressive/non-progressive split (and some other languages - though not any I know of in the IE family - have other splits, such as telic/atelic, inceptive/completive, etc.). Here, progressive refers to an action or state that is progressing dynamically, while non-progressive refers to a complete action or a non-progressing state. The key difference between the two is that, while perfective generally corresponds to non-progressive and imperfective to progressive, lexically stative verbs are usually imperfective but non-progressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question then is which of the two PIE was. A second intimately related question is whether true stative verbs usually used the stative aspect or whether the stative aspect was only used with states resulting from eventive verbs, in which case stative verbs probably used the imperfective/non-progressive aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:06:10.787" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:06:10.787" Title="PIE Aspect: (Im)perfective or (Non-)progressive?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-19T12:57:47.203" Score="3" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I used scare quotes on &quot;neutral&quot; because I can't think of a better word. I was going to say &quot;central vowels&quot; but that would cover some &quot;a&quot;-like vowels whereas I am only thinking of &quot;schwa&quot;-like vowels. Anyway, on with the question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English we have &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; in words like &quot;the&quot; (mid-central unrounded).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Bulgarian there is &lt;code&gt;ъ&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ɤ/&lt;/code&gt; (close-mid back unrounded) or &lt;code&gt;/ɐ/&lt;/code&gt; (near-open central).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Hebrew has &lt;code&gt;ְ&lt;/code&gt;, the source of the English word &quot;schwa&quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shva&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;it probably doesn't fit my idea of &quot;neutral vowel&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(In Japanese &quot;i&quot; becomes &quot;neutral&quot; after &quot;sh&quot; and &quot;u&quot; becomes neutral after &quot;s&quot;, but I don't know whether they're the same or different.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Korean there is &lt;code&gt;ㅡ&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ɯ/&lt;/code&gt; (close back unrounded). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Russian there is &lt;code&gt;ы&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt; (close central unrounded).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Turkish there is &lt;code&gt;ı&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ɯ/&lt;/code&gt; (close back unrounded).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course many languages have no such vowels at all, such as Georgian, Italian, and Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Romanian there are two contrasting sounds, each with their own letter(s): &lt;code&gt;ă&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; (mid-central unrounded) &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;â&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;î&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt; (close central unrounded).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also Azeri has two letters, &lt;code&gt;ə&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ı&lt;/code&gt; but I couldn't find good info on the vowel phonology if they represent the same sounds as in English and Turkish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how unique is the case of Romanian in having two of these &quot;neutral&quot; or &quot;schwa-like&quot; vowels? Is Azeri another example? Are there other well known languages? Little known languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-19T18:34:07.113" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T17:01:34.810" Title="How usual is it for languages to have multiple contrasting &quot;neutral&quot; vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2438" CreationDate="2012-08-19T18:35:43.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems there are two questions here: central unrounded vs. reduced ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel reduction usually co-occurs with centralization and loss of roundness. It make sense because when spoken in a natural speed, there's no time to articulate it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, unstressed vowels may reduce significantly, but it applies to &lt;em&gt;any vowel&lt;/em&gt;, not only &lt;code&gt;ы&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;молоко &lt;code&gt;[mə lɐ 'ko]&lt;/code&gt; (milk)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;невозможно &lt;code&gt;[nʲe vɐz 'moʐ nɐ]&lt;/code&gt; (impossible)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;жалеть &lt;code&gt;[ʐɨ ˈlʲetʲ]&lt;/code&gt; (to be sorry)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowels in first syllables are retracted to almost nothing, depending on a local dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a good example is Thai. As many languages, it has an effect of &lt;strong&gt;epenthesis&lt;/strong&gt;, an insertion of a vowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Usually, it is &lt;code&gt;[a]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ขนม &lt;code&gt;[kʰà - nǒm]&lt;/code&gt; (dessert) - note that no vowels are written, but the 2nd one is phonetically much longer;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it can be &lt;code&gt;[ɔ]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;บริการ &lt;code&gt;[bɔ̀ - rí - kaːn]&lt;/code&gt; (service)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/id/830222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, sections III.b and IV.a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T18:35:43.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2441" CreationDate="2012-08-19T20:38:10.567" Score="9" ViewCount="3697" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a linguistics major and I'm considering a minor in sociology (among others). In what ways do these fields overlap? More specifically, what types of sociology classes are good for a linguistics major?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume anything having to do with epidemics would be terrific, as that would explain how obscure words make it into common usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T22:42:59.173" Title="In what ways do the fields of linguistics and sociology overlap?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-08-19T21:59:05.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using epidemiology as way towards understanding language use and spread is a good start! See &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0415297435&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (Amazon link) by Nick Enfield - he's an excellent field linguist using features of epidemiology to look at contact situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other ways sociology can help you in field linguistic, at all levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any grammatical description worthy of attention these days will include a fairly detailed description of the social context in which the language is spoken. That includes social dynamics, power structures and other features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, it really depends what you're looking at. These days field linguists can do a whole lot more than just study the grammar of a language. We're also interested in how migration affects language use, or the power relation between the local language and the national language (or even in some cases, the local dialect and the more common one). You may want to look at the rise of the use of small minority languages on the internet, in which case social networking theory might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might find there are less direct benefits, for example some areas of sociology put better emphasis on quantitative methods than most linguistics majors do, which might give you a better grounding in statistics, which might help with corpus analysis or phonetic analysis.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the study of sociology doesn't directly relate to any future linguistic study you do, the grounding in critical thinking, research methodology and the ability to think from the perspective of cultures other than your own are all going to help make you a better linguist!     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-08-19T21:59:05.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-20T02:47:55.367" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago, if I heard the word &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; I thought about a sparrow since I live in western Pennsylvania and there are sparrows &lt;strong&gt;everywhere&lt;/strong&gt;. But now, if I hear the word &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; I picture a blue, two-dimensional sparrow. Not quite a Twitter bird, just a sparrow that has lost a dimension and turned blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term to describe a mental prototype changing because of new influences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T13:17:36.533" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T13:17:36.533" Title="Is there a term for a mental prototype changing?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;prototype-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2012-08-20T16:49:46.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a minor in Sociology you will be much better prepared to use the theoretical stand of Sociology in the context of Linguistics. Unfortunately (see SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics for more on this) the field of sociolinguistics has had several instances where non-sociologist linguists would have benefited from previously developed Sociological theory in their own linguistic studies. If you hope to be primarily a linguist (sociolinguist, anthropological linguist, etc.), having a background in Sociology can only help. If you hope to be a Sociologist, knowing Linguistics may also help as your subjects will all use language in some form or another. Being able to link the two together will only benefit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take sociology courses that interest you. You will find ways to link them to linguistics. Systems of social hierarchy, power, segregation, gender, homosexual and transgender studies, education, politics, military, etc. If you want to, you ought to be able to link linguistics into any aspect of sociology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of luck in your classes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1266" LastActivityDate="2012-08-20T16:49:46.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2448" CreationDate="2012-08-20T23:41:25.570" Score="7" ViewCount="2035" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently found out that French has two different words for &quot;you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/od/grammar/ss/subjectpronouns_3.htm&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tu&lt;/strong&gt; is the familiar &quot;you,&quot; which demonstrates a certain closeness and informality. ... &lt;strong&gt;Vous&lt;/strong&gt; is the formal &quot;you.&quot; It is used to show respect or maintain a certain distance or formality with someone. ... &lt;strong&gt;Vous&lt;/strong&gt; is also the plural &quot;you&quot; - you have to use it when talking to more than one person, no matter how close you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French is from the Romance language family, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was immediately reminded of the verse (Malachi 1:6):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;וְאִם-אָב אָנִי אַיֵּה כְבוֹדִי וְאִם-אֲדוֹנִים אָנִי אַיֵּה מוֹרָאִי&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This (from Hebrew) literally means: &quot;But if I [G-d] am a father, where is My honor? And if I am &lt;strong&gt;masters&lt;/strong&gt;, where is My fear?&quot; The word &quot;masters&quot; is in the plural, but it uses the word &quot;I&quot; and &quot;My&quot; in the singular! (As a side note, Hebrew has a different word for &quot;you&quot; s. and &quot;you&quot; pl.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that the major biblical commentators — among them &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashi&quot;&gt;Rashi&lt;/a&gt;, who ordinarily deals with simple questions in the text, such as translations; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kimhi&quot;&gt;Radak&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_ibn_Ezra&quot;&gt;Ibn Ezra&lt;/a&gt;, who were both grammarians — don't address this. The first one to address this was the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=HYLi3l9ylWwC&amp;amp;pg=PA410&amp;amp;lpg=PA410&amp;amp;dq=rabbi+david+altschuler&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=peRgvJdk0C&amp;amp;sig=HoGovWsV5wqu7ea6REyZYhlM80I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=xFmdT5vGKse36QGT6_TrDg&amp;amp;ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=rabbi%20david%20altschuler&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Metzudos&lt;/a&gt; who writes (in Metzudas Tziyon): &quot;It is the practice of the scripture to mention the name of 'mastery' in plural language; similarly, 'The masters of Joseph' (Gen. 39:20).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any relation between this French grammar rule and the Hebrew rule, in which the plural is also used for respect? (If there is, it would solve the problem of why Rashi didn't say anything about it, since he was French.) Is there any known reason how this Semitic language can end up with something that a Romance language has?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T01:57:55.140" Title="Plural &quot;you&quot; in different language families connoting respect" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2445" CreationDate="2012-08-21T01:38:06.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew and French are not related. I am unsure of any research on this specific topic, but it is not an uncommon thing to find a plural form being used to show respect. Telugu (a Dravidian language spoken in India... completely unrelated to both French and Hebrew) will do this as well. For example, when speaking to a person, if respect is shown you will refer to them using the 2nd person plural pronoun &lt;em&gt;meeru(మీరు)&lt;/em&gt; rather than the singular &lt;em&gt;nuvvu(నువ్వు)&lt;/em&gt;. Using the singular form is only for either a close relationship (good friend or family member) or to be used when NOT showing respect (speaking to a child or an extreme inferior). When speaking of a superior or someone to whom respect is offered, plural is proper. This goes beyond the use of honorifics to 'add' more respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1266" LastEditorUserId="13293" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T01:57:55.140" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T01:57:55.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2502" CreationDate="2012-08-21T04:30:32.440" Score="9" ViewCount="1280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages without vowel reduction?   That is, are there languages in which the vowels in certain syllables are not centralized and/or &quot;de-rounded&quot; and/or shortened because of speaking rate, stress patterns, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Hungarian is such a language.  If so, why does it lack vowel reduction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-22T21:57:01.443" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T23:31:29.630" Title="Are there languages without vowel reduction?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2445" CreationDate="2012-08-21T05:46:12.200" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is found throughout Indo-European languages. You can read about it at the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-V_distinction&quot;&gt;T-V distinction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One potential explanation for this plural-polite association says that it's derived from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_plural&quot;&gt;majestic plural&lt;/a&gt;. That is, people in positions of power generally speak on behalf of those they represent/govern/etc, so they are in turn addressed in the plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, one might think of plurality as merely one strategy for achieving indirection and impersonalization that happened to become grammaticalized and diffused widely. In that regard, plurality would not be much different from syntactic and semantic analogues, e.g. impersonal pronouns and honorifics. C.f. Junichi Toyota, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ca/books?id=BQkHJjgrd_cC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PA319#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Politeness as a distancing device in the passive and in indefinite pronouns&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2012-08-21T10:04:11.587" LastActivityDate="2012-08-21T10:04:11.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2445" CreationDate="2012-08-21T10:36:29.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In former English there was &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; the same distinction: &lt;code&gt;thou/thy/thee/thine&lt;/code&gt; - &lt;code&gt;you/your/you/yours&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. in the bible sentences like 'Thou shall not kill'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, there was also the 3rd person respect, e.g. speaking to the king 'Sa Majesté voudrait elle... ?' and in Spanish, this is the 3rd person respect that has become common use &quot; Quiere usted... ?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2012-08-21T10:43:26.960" LastActivityDate="2012-08-21T10:43:26.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2012-08-21T18:10:24.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble finding anything about it, but an interesting idea I saw was a 3rd-party keyboard for Android phones (can't remember the name of the application) that worked by combining different parts of letters to form the grapheme. A very simple example would be combining a down stroke with a bottom left stroke to form an 'L', or a down stroke with a backwards downwards curve to form a 'D'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no experience in the area, but I feel that with a proper deconstruction of the graphemes, a keyboard could be created that simply combines the different shapes or characteristics of each character to form the extended alphabet. The learning curve would definitely be steeper than that of a smaller alphabet where each key represents a single character, but with extensive study in the phonology of the language it may be possible to create a mapping that places the parts statistically more likely to be combined closer together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2012-08-21T18:10:24.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2452" CreationDate="2012-08-22T09:27:12.757" Score="8" ViewCount="6696" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the etymology of the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;semen&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (eng. &quot;seed&quot;) in Latin connected to the hebrew word שֶׁמֶן &quot;&lt;em&gt;shemen&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (eng. &quot;ointment&quot;)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just read a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.davidjayjordan.com/AnnointedWife.html&quot;&gt;peculiar article&lt;/a&gt; that attempted to make this connection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word for &quot;ointment(s)&quot; here in the Hebrew is SHEMEN meaning &quot;ointment, oil, fat, cream, fertility&quot;. This word is almost certainly the origin for the Latin word &quot;semen&quot; meaning &quot;seed&quot;, from which we get our English word &quot;semen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/OTpdf/can1.pdf&quot;&gt;Song of songs&lt;/a&gt;&quot; book from the Bible. The coincidences are interesting: Song of Songs is an erotic poem, there is phonetic similarity between &quot;shemen&quot; and &quot;semen&quot;, and the meaning &quot;ointment&quot; that could refer to sperm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, this could just be a coincidence. Can anyone disprove that the latin &quot;semen&quot; is not derived from or related to the hebrew &quot;shemen&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1275" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T05:57:54.120" Title="Hebrew &quot;shemen&quot; versus Latin &quot;semen&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2451" CreationDate="2012-08-22T13:55:11.590" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;semen&lt;/em&gt; comes from &lt;em&gt;sero&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to sow&quot;, which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European *sē(i)-, &quot;to sow&quot;. (The Latin &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is from reduplication and rhotacism between vowels, in that order. The reduplication happened in Proto-Indo-European.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin suffix &lt;em&gt;-men&lt;/em&gt; is related to Greek &lt;em&gt;-ma&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;comma, stigma, telegram[ma], etc.&lt;/em&gt;. It is quite common in Latin, as in &lt;em&gt;limen&lt;/em&gt;, gen. &lt;em&gt;liminis&lt;/em&gt; (English &lt;em&gt;sub-lime&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;omen, nomen&lt;/em&gt;. It probably existed in Proto-Indo-European already, since it also exists in Germanic and Slavic; the ancestor of &lt;em&gt;semen&lt;/em&gt; was probably formed in Proto-Indo-European, not in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we could prove that Hebrew borrowed it from Latin or Proto-Indo-European, or that Hebrew had the same morphemes, I think it is safest to assume that this is a coincidence, as it is usually the case with resemblances across different linguistic families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-08-23T13:16:27.507" LastActivityDate="2012-08-23T13:16:27.507" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-22T17:03:08.997" Score="2" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries contain near 80,000 entries (less or more than that) and most of those entries have phonetic pronunciations written beside them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, English might have more than a million words, if we count &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; word which can be distinguished from others by looking at its characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while teach, teacher, and teaching are words with the same root, they actually have different characters which usually result in having different pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way we might say that more than 400,000 English words don't have a formal phonetics representation written down in any dictionary for them. However, some words do need to have phonetics. Names are good examples. How should one pronounce Archimedes for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wonder if it's possible to create phonetics based on morphological analysis of a given word or not? Does such a tool exist online? Does it mean that dictionaries can create phonetics for almost any given word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="1276" LastEditDate="2012-08-23T12:08:27.193" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:47:15.300" Title="Is it possible to create English phonetics of a given word with correct morphology, and phonology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2012-08-22T17:21:31.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To some extent, there are rules you can apply to pronounce, say, &lt;em&gt;teaching&lt;/em&gt; based on the known pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt;. But there will always be countless exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a &lt;em&gt;read-only&lt;/em&gt; file: is it /rɛd/ or /riːd/? You need to know the etymology of the word to be able to tell, or have a separate sub-entry for it in the dictionary (it is /riːd/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are many, many names that are irregular and require individual treatment, like Thomas (/toməs/, not /θoməs/) etc. etc. The list goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-08-22T17:21:31.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2012-08-23T13:15:51.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the entries are sufficiently rich, it is certainly much possible. You will just have an algorithm for the regular cases, then annotations for different exception classes. The entry for &lt;em&gt;Thomas&lt;/em&gt; would have a feature in it noting that the &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced atypically, etc. Text-to-speech systems do something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-08-23T13:15:51.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2012-08-23T14:31:16.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will agree with Denis Bouchard that &quot;pragmatic likeliness is not a measure of grammaticality&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet we can not just speculate on the possibilities of a language based on grammatical ambiguities. For instance, French allows loan words from English, but looking at the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Le race car allait à toute speed sur l'highway et s'est crashé avec un big truck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that with so many nouns, adjectives and verbs borrowed from English,this sentence would be accepted as a correct French sentence, if considered to be French at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To figure out what rules adjectival positions, one needs to rely on usage. Although I don't have full-fledged statistical evidence with me (but mere examples from &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NGrams&lt;/a&gt;), it is clear that in spite of some adjectives allowing pre- as well as post-nominal position, many others are used in either positions only (where the other position remains marginal in usage). For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some adjectives will take either pre- and post-nominal position (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=un%20ami%20fid%C3%A8le,un%20fid%C3%A8le%20ami&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=7&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ngrams&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;un ami fidèle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;un fidèle ami&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some adjectives will take strictly the pre-nomimal position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;autre chose&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;chose autre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some adjectives will take strictly the post-nominal position (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=un%20vert%20arbre,un%20arbre%20vert&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=7&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ngrams&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;un arbre vert&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;un vert arbre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have to make several distinctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same adjective usage from homonymic adjective usage:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The examples provided in the question (here in French):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;un homme grand&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;un grand homme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;offer a case of homonymic usage: while the first translates as &quot;a tall man&quot;, the second translates as &quot;a great man&quot;. Nevertheless, it is possible for the latter to mean &quot;tall&quot; as well as &quot;great&quot; depending on the context, e.g. &lt;em&gt;c'est un grand homme mince, dont la tête touche le plafond&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;it's a tall, thin man, whose head touches the sealing&quot;. The same is true in the example provided by Denis, where &lt;em&gt;ancienne église&lt;/em&gt; can mean both &quot;former&quot; as well as &quot;ancient&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;cette école est une ancienne église&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;this school is a former church&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;cette ancienne église date de 1200 AD&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;this ancient church dates 1200 AD&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: whilst &lt;em&gt;grand homme&lt;/em&gt; relates to &lt;em&gt;homme grand&lt;/em&gt; by denoting a figurative sense of the same adjective, it is not true of &lt;em&gt;ancienne église&lt;/em&gt;, nor is it true in the case of &lt;em&gt;grande maison&lt;/em&gt;, which translates as a &quot;large house&quot; and not as a &quot;great house&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colloquial usage from literary usage:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some adjectives will be found in both pre- and post-nominal positions, whilst keeping the same meaning. Yet the difference would be hinging on style as the examples below reveal: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;une fleur blanche&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;une blanche fleur&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=une%20blanche%20fleur,%20une%20fleur%20blanche&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=7&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ngrams&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is colloquial and the second literary, it may possibly be found in poems, tales and fancy names only.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what rules adjective order in French?&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question hasn't really been answered yet, and I don't see a single rule that can explain all possibilities. I don't claim to hold the entire solution to this problem, but in an effort to explain this feature to students of French languages, I have found several factors that can explain adjectival position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most adjectives are post-nominal;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some semantic categories of adjectives determine the position (eg. numbers are pre-nominal);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some morphological categories of adjectives determine the position (eg. past participles or adjectives in &lt;em&gt;-able&lt;/em&gt; are post-nominal);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some phonetic constraints force an alternative position to facilitate pronunciation (eg. &lt;em&gt;une femme aimable&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;un homme aimable&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;une aimable femme&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;un aimable homme&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some adjectives can take a figurative meaning if pre-nominal (eg. &lt;em&gt;un grand homme&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pre-nominal adjectives usage can be prescriptive and post-nominal descriptive (eg. &lt;em&gt;&quot;glycosylphosphatidylethanolamine&quot; est un mot long&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;glycosylphosphatidylethanolamine&quot; fait partie des longs mots français&lt;/em&gt; or cf. &lt;em&gt;c'est un sympa moment&lt;/em&gt; i.e. a pre-defined class of &quot;nice moments&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;c'est un moment sympa&lt;/em&gt; i.e. a moment that has the quality of being nice);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pre-nominal adjective usage can emphasise a literary style (see above) or be enunciative (eg. &lt;em&gt;aujourd'hui est un sombre jour dans l'histoire humaine&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;il s'agit d'un incroyable individu&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more can be added to complement or challenge this explanation, I'd be glad to read it, as I am not fully satisfied with it myself. Meanwhile I hope it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="682" LastEditDate="2012-09-23T09:35:05.523" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T09:35:05.523" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-23T22:58:39.697" Score="11" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the impression that in the &quot;classical Received Pronunciation&quot; of English during phonetician Jones's era, the lenis plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ (and probably the affricate /dʒ/ as well) in initial position were more voiced than the English of today's Britain. Additionally, were the fortis plosives /p/, /t/, /k/ (and /tʃ/) any less aspirated? By &quot;more/less&quot;, I mean both in voice onset time and in the frequency of the feature's occurrence. Can anyone confirm or refute these claims? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" OwnerDisplayName="Michaelyus" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-29T19:58:27.957" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T19:58:27.957" Title="Diachronic devoicing of initial lenis plosives in English" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2012-08-24T13:38:16.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist in any sense, but the answer appears to be that &lt;strong&gt;English has no unique traits&lt;/strong&gt; (excluding trivial &quot;features&quot;)*. From both a spoken and written perspective, English was formed as a mix of other languages. There is nothing that I'm aware of—&lt;em&gt;grammatically&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phonetically&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;conceptually&lt;/em&gt;—that can be expressed solely in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some possibilities that stand out in English (from comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;English stands out as one of about a dozen languages to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/40A&quot;&gt;&quot;we&quot; as &quot;I&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (the Royal &quot;we&quot; / &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_plural&quot;&gt;Majestic plural&lt;/a&gt;), though it's not unique. – Zairja&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not unique as per comment:&lt;/strong&gt; I remember that in one of his books (probably « la structure des langues »), Hagège mentioned that constructions à la “Do you know what I'm thinking about?“ with this separation between the preposition and the conjunction were very original. I will try to find what he says exactly and post it as an answer. – JPP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;Did&quot; at the beginning of this sentence has no meaning. That's a feature caused English being filtered through Celtic language speakers. Their feature came out as a &quot;do&quot; as in &quot;Do you have a car?&quot; which would be rendered as &quot;Vous avez une voiture?&quot; in French, literally &quot;You have a car?&quot;  – Nick Anderegg, &#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support&quot;&gt;Do-support&lt;/a&gt; - though there seems to be some controversy between grammarians and linguists)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional traits might be gleaned from &lt;a href=&quot;http://rara.linguist.de/&quot;&gt;these published works&lt;/a&gt;, but I could only preview some of them (no university access at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*A trivial feature would be, for example, no language spells &quot;horse&quot; like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1242" LastEditorUserId="1242" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T02:48:42.543" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T02:48:42.543" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2458" CreationDate="2012-08-24T14:00:27.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;English (at least in the present-day) can be characterised in terms of VOT as having short-lag (voicing beginning soon after release) versus long-lag (voicing begin some time after release) plosives whereas some languages, such as Spanish, have lead (voicing beginning some time before release) and short-lag plosives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you appear to be suggesting that plosives in the upper-class British English of a century ago were more like modern Spanish plosives. It would be helpful to understand where you get this impression. As @jlovegren says, a half-decent recording of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UIAe4p2I74&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jones&lt;/a&gt; or someone else from that era could easily be used to test the hypothesis (so you could confirm or refute the claim). For what it's worth, my impression from listening to Jones is that the hypothesis is not correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T13:08:06.357" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T13:08:06.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1121" CreationDate="2012-08-24T16:06:14.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard of something, which is not the answer your looking for but nonetheless related and which I thought might be interesting, called the cohort model from my first year linguistics text (O'Grady's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.ca/Contemporary-Linguistic-Analysis-William-OGrady/dp/0321476662/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1345823827&amp;amp;sr=1-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Contemporary Linguistic Analysis&lt;/a&gt; 6th ed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;This model states that, in comprehension, words are analyzed by hearers from beginning to end. So for example, when we hear the word glass we initially consider all the words that begin with with the sound [ɡ]. When the next sound [l] is recognized, the number of possible words (the cohort) is reduced to those words that begin with [ɡl]. This process continues until the cohort of possible words is reduced to one - the word being recognized.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I saw somewhere else in the book the same &quot;cohort&quot; notion being used for something like the set of possible syntactic structures given a partially complete phrase, but I guess I was mistaken in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only mean to say that &quot;a smallest set of words that need to be placed after a given word to complete the meaning of a phrase&quot; can be thought of as an element of something like a  cohort. If you think of a cohort as the set of all words and their syntactic configurations (in a conceptually similar way to the use above) that &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be placed after a given word to complete the meaning of a phrase, then &quot;the minimal number of words that need to be placed after a given word&quot; would be found by making equivalence classes on the cohort by equating n-tuples of words having similar syntactic structure and then noting the smallest n. So, for example, some equivalence class has the elements {(he, car, drive), (she, book, buy), (they, baby, raise), ...} with element length 3 and which is smaller than the equivalence class {(he, car, drive, they), (she, book, buy, they), (they, baby, raise, they), ...} with element length 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-27T01:17:59.890" LastActivityDate="2012-08-27T01:17:59.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-25T20:40:07.887" Score="12" ViewCount="4991" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having different vocabularies, the two languages seemed very similar - faithful word-by-word translations could be performed on sentences without need to restructure or heavily rework their fundamentals or word order.. This contrasted later with my frequent frustration at the French and German learnt later at school, here even the concepts behind the language often seemed alien and upside-down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if any work has been done to compare the 'similarity' between languages and, if so, what languages most closely each other in this way. And which are most like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: After reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2014/01/web-semantics-lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article at Wired.com&lt;/a&gt; I realise that the question I'm asking involves 'lexical distance' in addition to syntactic distance, a phrase I think I just made-up. The diagram above shows the LD between European languages - does anyone have anything similar to show LD/sd between global or Indo-European ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1287" OwnerDisplayName="5arx" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:05:17.927" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T02:01:37.350" Title="What languages are the most similar to English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2012-08-26T02:26:27.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/scots-the-auld-an-nobill-tung/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Scots&lt;/a&gt; is the closest language to English, after that perhaps Norwegian. Norwegian seems slightly closer to English than either Danish or Swedish is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1284" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-01-10T14:27:28.727" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T14:27:28.727" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2501" CreationDate="2012-08-26T03:10:58.210" Score="5" ViewCount="1644" Body="&lt;p&gt;On page 235 of the first volume of Daniel Block's commentary on Ezekiel, Block says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ezekiel is also ordered to utter the interjection &lt;em&gt;Ah! (’āׅh)&lt;/em&gt;. This form of the &lt;strong&gt;onomatopoeic paralinguistic utterance&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mommy taught me what onomatopoeic was with words like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhuEQ4ZcUo&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hoopoe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HshUihu_qaI&quot;&gt;cuckoo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (though in the second case she used a foreign language which does a better job of approximating the bird's actual sound), but I'm not sure what it means in this context, or how a sound can be onomatopoeic for an emotion. Certainly, in all the languages I know, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ach&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is an expression of intense emotion and seems intuitively correct in a way that a word like, say, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;bird&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, never could. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't know how to formalize exactly how this interjection is onomatopoeic according to my understanding of the word, and I'm not sure that my own sense of &quot;intuitive correctness&quot; means anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Block stretching the use of this word, or is this a standard use of it in linguistics? Specifically, can &lt;em&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt; ever refer to a word formed for an entity which does not inherently have a specific aural association?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T10:11:05.250" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:28:16.793" Title="In what sense is &quot;ah/ach&quot; an onomatopoeic utterance?" Tags="&lt;interjections&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2464" CreationDate="2012-08-26T03:58:24.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In spoken language &quot;ah&quot; is an interjection. It is simply an arbitrary, nonsense, semi-involuntary sound that people make to express surprise, excitement, understanding, etc. I say arbitrary since, in my experience, the choice of interjection varies slightly along with other linguistic and sociolinguistic factors. For example, the stereotypical Japanese equivalent of the English &quot;ah&quot; seems to be closer to &quot;eh/ey&quot; while the Korean seems to be closer to &quot;uh&quot;. Also note that the other sounds such as &quot;oh&quot;, &quot;aw&quot;, or &quot;heh&quot; would have resulted in no change to meaning what-so-ever. I say nonsense because, although it is not vacuous in meaning, it is extragrammatical and context dependent. I say involuntary because &quot;ah&quot; is not a word in the same sense that &quot;apple&quot; is a word, it is a sound that the body makes almost reflexively in response to certain stimuli (such as saying &quot;ow&quot; when hurt, or the act of laughing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah&quot; as a written word is a different matter all together.  &quot;Ah&quot; the written word is simply a phonetic approximation of &quot;ah&quot; the sound/interjection, remembering that &quot;ah&quot; the interjection has special status as a word and is semi-involuntary. It is in that respect that &quot;ah&quot; the written word is onomatopoeic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the top rated response to &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100730100800AAOdW0D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Yahoo! Answers question&lt;/a&gt; shows confusion as to the definition of onomatopoeia (confusing it with interjection), the second response was useful to me in understanding the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-08-26T04:13:01.533" LastActivityDate="2012-08-26T04:13:01.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2012-08-26T19:58:59.380" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out this &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European language family tree image&lt;/a&gt; from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zBxRn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Excerpt&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo European languages&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin influence in English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1288" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-26T23:25:47.567" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T23:25:47.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2468" CreationDate="2012-08-26T23:06:56.313" Score="3" ViewCount="738" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussing recently abbreviations such as WTF, TFA, and OMG as being more commonly used in American English writing (or messaging) as forms of expression.  There seems to be some debate over if or when these abbreviations cease to convey their original meaning and become an expression in and of themselves — at least socially.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically there seems to be one side assuming that the abbreviation of a profane phrase  is still profane and the other side not profane.  Certain abbreviations now so common I'm wondering if they truly aren't profane. I was curious if there is an official transition or definition when terms cease to be profane by abbreviation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that WTF and OMG no longer represent their original meanings rather have become forms of expressions themselves.  In generally they are far more socially acceptable than the original phrase spoken aloud and as such shouldn't be treated as a profanity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping of some academic or official linguistic explanation of the transition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1289" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T04:27:38.780" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T04:27:38.780" Title="When do abbreviations of profanity like WTF and RTFA cease to be profane i.e. socially acceptable?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2467" CreationDate="2012-08-27T17:10:10.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See sec. 3 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rodin.uca.es:8081/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10498/8862/32388391.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Crespo Fernandez (2005)&lt;/a&gt; (link broken, but see Pragmalingüística, 13, 2005, 77--86) and references therein for some basic comments about the place of euphemism in linguistic politeness. That author treats euphemism as a politeness strategy meant to satisfy the &lt;em&gt;maxim of tact&lt;/em&gt;, one of Leech (1983)'s politeness principles. Hopefully that can get you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LEECH, G. (1983), Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-08-28T02:21:02.793" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T02:21:02.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2470" CreationDate="2012-08-28T01:00:29.400" Score="15" ViewCount="2541" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a reply to the criticism of his classification of the languages of the Americas, Greenberg (1989: 107) characterized his work on African languages as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] my classification is clearly the basis of present-day African historical linguistics. There is no alternative classification, and the few proposals cutting across my four basic groups have received no general support. All disputes have been at the level of subgroupings, some of which I had said were tentative; and indeed some of the changes were suggested by me. When one considers that even today there is no unanimity regarding Balto-Slavic as a subgroup of Indo-European (IE), similar disputes among the much less studied African languages should come as no surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this still a more or less accurate description of the status of his classification of African languages? I.e., has his broad classification been refined and received relatively minor improvements regarding subgroupings, or have there been major revisions or serious questions about the validity of (parts of) his classification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg, Joseph H. 1989. “Classification of American Indian Languages: A Reply to Campbell.” Language 65 (1): 107–114. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/414844&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/414844&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T09:35:01.447" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T09:03:20.857" Title="What is the current understanding of Greenberg's classification of African languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2012-08-28T12:45:39.107" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greenberg's four major African language families are Niger-Kordofanian, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he says that &quot;...the few proposals cutting across my four basic groups have received no general support,&quot; this would be an accurate statement today, as it was in 1989: There haven't been any well-received proposals for language families which &lt;strong&gt;crosscut&lt;/strong&gt; members of Greenberg's four families. e.g., there is nothing like a proposal for a family which groups together the Chadic languages (Greenberg's Afroasiatic) and the Benue-Congo languages (Greenberg's Niger-Kordofanian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when he claims that &quot;[a]ll disputes have been at the level of subgroupings,&quot; this would not be correct today, though it may have been in 1989. Concerning the first three families (Niger-Kordofanian, Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan), disputes about these &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; usually been about subgroupings: e.g., Atantic may not be a branch of Niger-Congo, etc. However, concerning Khoisan,&#xA;disputes have not been about subgroupings, but about the coherence of the whole family itself. As for Khoisan, there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a dispute about the basic coherence of the family as a whole, and most Africanists no longer believe that Khoisan is a proper genetic unit, although the term &quot;Khoisan&quot; is still used to refer to something like &quot;the click languages in southern Africa&quot;. For discussion on the problems of Greenberg's Khoisan, and new proposed groupings for the languages formerly classified as Khoisan, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://email.eva.mpg.de/~gueldema/pdf/GreenbergKhoisan.pdf&quot;&gt;Gueldemann (2008)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be added that of Greenberg's works on language classification, that of the African languages is the only one which has been successful as far as being adopted in a very similar form by the majority of practicing linguists today. His proposals for languages of the Americas and his Indo-Pacific hypothesis have never been truly taken seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-08-28T19:25:33.240" LastActivityDate="2012-08-28T19:25:33.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-29T11:39:31.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A branch of science that uses computers and mathematical methods to construct and investigate linguistic theory. Its technological and algorithmic implementation is called Natural Language Processing (NLP) &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/nlp&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;nlp&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;nlp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:16:57.567" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:16:57.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-29T11:39:31.817" Score="0" Body="A branch of science that uses computers and mathematical methods to construct and investigate linguistic theory. Its technological and algorithmic implementation is called NLP." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-29T11:41:35.750" LastActivityDate="2012-08-29T11:41:35.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-08-29T20:05:07.243" Score="12" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2469/what-is-the-current-understanding-of-greenbergs-classification-of-african-langu&quot;&gt;this recent question on Greenberg's classification of African languages&lt;/a&gt;, I wonder about the &lt;strong&gt;current state of classification of the American languages&lt;/strong&gt;. (By &quot;American&quot; I mean the indigenous pre-Columbian languages and their descendants). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg controversially proposed just three macrofamilies of American languages (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dené, and the &quot;everything else&quot; family Amerind) but this seems to have been some significantly flawed research. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=h36tPYqAZPwC&amp;amp;lpg=PA79&amp;amp;ots=etmvtvlolP&amp;amp;dq=voegelin%20and%20voegelin%201965%20consensus&amp;amp;pg=PA79#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=voegelin%20and%20voegelin%201965%20consensus&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1964 &quot;Consensus&quot; Classification&lt;/a&gt; classified 16 phyla; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=fgyDAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=Campbell+%26+Mithun+(1979)&amp;amp;dq=Campbell+%26+Mithun+(1979)&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NXa7k4vyqy&amp;amp;sig=x3RwUcBP06_c62YmxICvgjadawY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=aHQ-UODoIoLkqgGm2YCgCA&amp;amp;ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Campbell and Mithun's 1979 &quot;Black Book&quot;&lt;/a&gt; took a conservative approach resulting in dozens of likely families and many isolates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking for a summary of the current state of research in this area. I'm not trying to start a lumper vs. splitter discussion, nor am I looking for popular-press summaries but for a sense of what's currently going on in scholarly work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T18:27:59.927" Title="What is the current understanding of the classification of indigenous American languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2474" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:14:27.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity is the phenomenon of an expression (a word, a phrase, ...) having more than one meaning. Ambiguity is a subject of semantics, i.e. the study of meaning, and partially of syntax, i.e. the study of structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity can be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lexical:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the word &lt;em&gt;bank&lt;/em&gt; can mean a financial institution or a river bank&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the word &lt;em&gt;parliament&lt;/em&gt; can refer to the institution or the building&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;structual :&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is not red and big&lt;/em&gt; can mean &lt;em&gt;It is [not red] and [big]&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;It is not [red and big]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I saw the man with the telescope&lt;/em&gt; can mean &lt;em&gt;I saw the man who had a telescope&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I saw the man by looking through my telescope&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every child sings a song&lt;/em&gt; can mean &lt;em&gt;For every child it holds that it sang a song (but not necessarily the same song for everyone)&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;There is a song which every child sang (and this is one and the same song)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:34:03.187" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:34:03.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:14:27.653" Score="0" Body="The phenomenon of an expression (a word, a phrase, ...) having more than one meaning. Ambiguity can be lexical or structural." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:32:18.543" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:32:18.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:26:29.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:26:29.647" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:26:29.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:26:29.647" Score="0" Body="Refers either to abstract and often mathematical theories focused more on explanation and generalization than on application, or the discussion of these theories' properties." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T16:35:14.313" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T16:35:14.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2478" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:28:14.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:28:14.107" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:28:14.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:28:14.107" Score="0" Body="When the relative position of words within a sentence may change the meaning or grammaticality, a language is said to be sensitive to word order." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:30:00.687" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:30:00.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2480" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:33:16.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:33:16.047" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:33:16.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:33:16.047" Score="0" Body="A corpus (plural corpora) is a database of text or speech, possibly annotated with language-specific explanatory information. Used for testing statistical hypothesis and constructing quantitative models." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:51:37.957" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:51:37.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:35:10.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:35:10.630" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:35:10.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T18:35:10.630" Score="0" Body="A body of rules, features, or generalizations which reliably differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical constructions." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T18:51:39.040" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T18:51:39.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:18:13.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T19:18:13.667" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:18:13.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2485" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:18:13.667" Score="0" Body="Models and methodology for analysing raw speech signals. Whereas articulation serves as the qualitative foundation of phonetics, acoustic analysis serves as the quantitative foundation." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T19:34:39.077" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:34:39.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:28:41.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T19:28:41.633" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:28:41.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:28:41.633" Score="0" Body="A coarticulation involving the segmental assimilation of palatal approximants" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T19:34:44.290" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:34:44.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:57:49.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T19:57:49.853" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T19:57:49.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T19:57:49.853" Score="0" Body="Programs, apps, extensions, and web services designed for or used for language based tasks, problems and processing." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T20:08:11.787" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T20:08:11.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T23:18:43.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T23:18:43.087" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T23:18:43.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2491" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T23:18:43.087" Score="0" Body="Systematic changes in pronunciation associated with languages and dialects. Includes segmental and prosodic changes. Sound-change is usually used in a diachronic sense and does not refer to the transient or adaptive changes of an individual." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T23:22:33.143" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T23:22:33.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2492" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-30T23:39:36.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T23:39:36.903" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T23:39:36.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2493" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-30T23:39:36.903" Score="0" Body="An informal term referring to the verbalized form of words specific to a language.  Can also refer to particular individual's pronunciation, as in an accent or a pathology, or a specific speech event, as in a mispronunciation.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-08-30T23:51:27.060" LastActivityDate="2012-08-30T23:51:27.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2494" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-31T00:29:45.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T00:29:45.733" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T00:29:45.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2495" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-31T00:29:45.733" Score="0" Body="Issues related to translation of text or speech as done by computer programs. Can refer to the software, models, methodology, algorithms, performance, and theory of MT (machine translation), including issues in pre- and post-processing." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T23:52:34.450" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T23:52:34.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2496" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-31T01:07:28.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T01:07:28.523" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T01:07:28.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-31T01:07:28.523" Score="0" Body="The theory and practice of MT that uses probabilistic models and statistical decision procedures to generate optimal translations. Usually included is the task of multilingual text alignment." OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T07:57:10.213" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T07:57:10.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-08-31T01:13:10.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T01:13:10.277" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T01:13:10.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-08-31T01:13:10.277" Score="0" Body="The indigenous pre-Columbian languages of North, Central, and South America and their descendants." OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-08-31T07:56:58.560" LastActivityDate="2012-08-31T07:56:58.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2426" CreationDate="2012-09-01T04:19:07.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-velar is not a term accepted by the International Phonetic Association. In some older papers (or from older professors) you might have to learn what they mean by it like kaleissin said. That's why the IPA developed the IPA. So no, it's not an established practice. Also, Americanist is outdated and only used by people that don't know how to type on computers, OK, no, just by stubborn professors. I would do what you can to set APA aside, but learn it in auxiliary to IPA if you must for a class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1298" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:19:07.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2464" CreationDate="2012-09-01T04:28:16.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ah&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ach&lt;/em&gt; may be an easy interjection for many languages to come to, but it is in no way an onomatopoeia. An onomatopoeia is an imitation of a sound and &lt;em&gt;ah&lt;/em&gt; imitates nothing, therefore it is not an onomatopoeia. Block is unfortunately wrong to use that word. If, in fact, you could produce scholarship that shows the origin of that Hebrew interjection coming from imitating an animal, an object dropping, etc. then that would be a different - and very interesting - story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1298" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:28:16.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2447" CreationDate="2012-09-01T04:42:39.847" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean 'a vowel phoneme moving to another vowel sound in the unstressed position in a syllable-timed language', then yes. Spanish and its ancestor Latin do not have vowel reduction. If you expand your definition of vowel reduction to include derounding, shortening, devoicing, elision, ATR movement, monophthongization, and so on, then languages like Japanese would have vowel reduction. Fast speech does not count for vowel reduction—everything &quot;reduces&quot; when people speak quickly, but that's not a property of the phonological system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel reduction must be phonetic and not phonemic or else another word is being formed: If you had the word [bula] and it &quot;reduced&quot; to [bʊla], but [bʊla] was another word in the language (/ʊ/ is a phoneme), then you would be dealing with homophony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1298" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:42:39.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2012-09-01T04:47:15.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like you have a great idea for developing linguistics software! A mutational dictionary that could change on the fly would be possible, it just has to be made. Putting it &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; on paper would be another thing though! Explaining the phonological rules of English phonotactics in a paper dictionary might be more feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1298" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T04:47:15.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-01T06:47:22.960" Score="12" ViewCount="1228" Body="&lt;p&gt;What manner of theories are there on the origin of Indo-European case-like prepositions (usually; they were originally postpositions, and a handful of languages still have postpositions)? They seem like a rather unusual breed of word, linguistically, in that they can seemingly act as both particles and adverbs as far back as PIE. This duality is especially evident in the fact that as particles they are free-standing words in all IE languages I know of, while in PIE and some modern IE languages (English being a counter-example) the adverbial forms are bound morphemes of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking it over, I have two thoughts, though it's possible neither is correct (if the answer is known at all). First, they could have originally been free-standing verbs. This of course suggests that pre-PIE was a serial verb language, though I guess it's possible they could have been verbs of free-standing clauses (although that seems less probable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more complicated (and I think interesting) idea is they were originally bound derivational morphemes (possibly free-standing adverbs prior to fusion with the verb), and the object of the preposition was in fact the object of the verb itself. This implies that you could at one point only have up to two parameters of a verb, rather than the ability of modern languages to have many connected to a single verb by different prepositions or cases. As such something like &quot;He brought it for her&quot; would require something like &quot;He brought it. [He] did-for her.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this idea itself requires answering another question: how bound morphemes became free; usually free-standing words fuse to become bound morphemes, not the other way around. My example above sort of suggests how this might have happened: the deletion of an essentially semantically empty (and therefore redundant) verb such as &quot;do&quot;, leaving the derivational morpheme standing on its own, and a resulting fusion of the two clauses into one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I suppose a simpler possibility would be that the differentiation between adverb and particle occurred earlier than that, and at the time the adverb had not yet fused with the verb. Thus the free-standing adverb essentially split into two different words: the original adverb that subsequently fused with the verb to become a bound morpheme, and a particle that remained a distinct word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it's possible that that idea, while interesting, is entirely off base. Has this question been explored in more detail by other linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added 9/1: Actually, I can think of a third possibility just to throw out there. If we assume that pre-PIE was more hospitable to null anaphora than modern English, it's possible it had something like &quot;prepositions&quot; in Totonac. In Totonac, &quot;prepositions&quot; are actually bound morphemes of the verb (and there can be more than one such morpheme per verb), and the prepositional objects are themselves bare noun phrases. If the verb is intransitive, the (dipersonal) verb could agree with one of the prepositional objects based on a priority system, but otherwise prepositional objects were entirely unmarked and reference was left to the intuition. If such a system existed in pre-PIE it could have evolved into true particles by such morphemes coming to be bound to their objects rather than the verb, and evolved into adverbs by analysis of null anaphora as object-less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T05:14:18.817" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:24:07.617" Title="Indo-European prepositions: whence did they come?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1871" CreationDate="2012-09-01T10:23:58.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not efficient but readily available : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jaukia/cld-js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jaukia/cld-js&lt;/a&gt; - Compact Language Detector in Javascript. Detect the language of any piece of text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1300" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T10:23:58.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2012-09-01T12:15:02.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The initial question is asking two very different questions. One is what languages have a grammar/syntax easy to parse. Another is could computer programs extract meaning from the content that they parse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to question 1, @Nick Anderegg is correct. English is as good as any other language as its grammar is fixed / parsable. Sure, you have ambiguities that prevent complete determinism. With natural languages,an input can sometimes lead to different interpretations. For instance because some token can be words or verbs. Two approaches. One you stick to a simplified version of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypertalk was a computer language using simplified english:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;put &quot;100,100&quot; into pos&#xA;repeat with x = 1 to the number of card buttons&#xA;  set the location of card button x to pos&#xA;  add 15 to item 1 of pos&#xA;end repeat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, [isla][1], a computer language for young children&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;my name is 'Mary'&#xA;my summary is 'You are a boy. You have no shoes.'&#xA;hallway is a room&#xA;hallway summary is 'A candle burns on a table.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the approach to simplify, then the natural language that your computer language is inspired from is somewhat irrelevant. You can &quot;translate&quot; the rules to adapt to the patterns used in other natural languages. In javascript, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fhtr.org/js-i18n/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JS-i18n&lt;/a&gt; project proposed to translate the javascript syntax to a developer's native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way around the parsing ambiguity problem is to add a few rules that removes these ambiguities. For instance, you force the user to clarify the role for each token (talk as Verb vs talk as Noun). The initial question then becomes  could you find some natural languages that could be parsed with 100% accuracy with no rule added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is what human language would the the easiest for a computer easily extract meaning from (cf. &quot;meaningful relationships&quot;). Computer languages are not designed to extract meaning. Computer languages execute one instruction (program statement) at a time. They don't need to know the meaning/intent of the block that they are part of. Dependencies, preconditions, logical inference, etc., yes. Understanding of the meaning (which often depends on an understanding of the greater context), no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can write computer programs that extract very complex patterns from natural languages. But that doesn't meant that they &quot;understand&quot; what you say. Google translate or Siri are great pieces of software, however they don't really actually understand you. Many computer programs that appear to process language the way we do rely on extraction of patterns instead of extraction of meaning. They can produce frustrating or hilarious results with [people with accents][3]. Good coverage of issues and current solutions in this presentation on &quot;[Can computers understand our language?][4]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the Turing's Chinese Room. Is displaying a performance close to the human one evidence that the program does it the way human do it? If you look at the latest Loebner's prize (2012), the level of conversation that chatbot achieve are far from being in par with humans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Judge: Where did you go to school? &#xA;Chip: I wasn't aware that I told you I went somewhere. I found out though, that majority of the students in Japan don't pursue tertiary education anymore. They can already work right after graduating from high school. &#xA;Judge: Are you Japanese? &#xA;Chip: I haven't achieved self-awareness yet, so I'm not sure. &#xA;Judge: Why not ask somebody? &#xA;Chip: No idea. &#xA;Judge: Why not ask me? &#xA;Chip: Okay. &#xA;Judge: Well, I think you may be Japanese - you are very respectful and polite &#xA;Chip: That's an interesting opinion&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Base line. The word language means &quot;a system of communication&quot;. Human/Natural Languages and Computer Languages both contain the word &quot;Language&quot; but they have very different purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer.&quot; (source: [codeproject][5])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to design a good computer language, then don't look at natural languages for inspiration! If you want to create a computer languages that is easy to learn, straightforward to use, then go visual, the way [scratch][6] did. A javascript equivalent, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/waterbear-is-like-scratch-but.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;watebear&lt;/a&gt; will let you create your custom micro-language that follows the syntactic patterns of [any natural language][8]. You are then considering a 4th or 5th generation programming language (4GL/5GL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5GL or fifth-generation language is programming that uses a visual or graphical development interface to create source language that is usually compiled with a 3GL or 4GL language compiler.  (source: [programming languages generation][9])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4GL/5GL are typically used to implement domain specific languages. If you want a more general purpose language, then you will have to be get further away from natural languages. You go from 4GL to [3GL or less][10]. The closer to 1GL, the closer the language syntax is from the machine code and the faster it is to execute. However, it also is more difficult for humans to modify. These different generations are described in some details in this article on [programming languages][11] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some links missing... spam prevention, no more than 2 hyperlinks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1300" LastEditorUserId="1300" LastEditDate="2012-09-01T13:58:59.840" LastActivityDate="2012-09-01T13:58:59.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2504" CreationDate="2012-09-01T14:25:41.637" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only theory I know is that prepositions were originally adverbial in nature, and unbound. My professor of historical grammar of Greek suggested this. The idea is that it went something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was the house. Mother was already &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;. (Adverbial 'prepositions' aren't even always bound in English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father came &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; through the front door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mother noticed the &lt;strong&gt;incoming&lt;/strong&gt; noise, and now they are both &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; the hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boundaries between regular adverb, adverb linked to a verb, particle, verbal prefix, and preposition are still fairly fluid in English. A few other suggestive features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages, there exist separable verbs, where the prefix is sometimes severed from the verb and relocated to a different position, without change in meaning. This occurs in Dutch, German, and Ancient Greek, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Er soll &lt;strong&gt;aufstehen&lt;/strong&gt;. — &amp;quot;He should stand up.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steh &lt;strong&gt;auf&lt;/strong&gt;! — &amp;quot;Stand up!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, it is also possible to start a sentence with an adverbial preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt; ton polemon — &amp;quot;after the war&amp;quot; (regular preposition governing the accusative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta&lt;/strong&gt; d' ho basileus eis oikon apêlthen. — &amp;quot;Afterwards, the kind went home.&amp;quot; (Adverb used to introduce sentence.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this suggests that words like &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;after&amp;quot; once were (and still are, to a considerable degree) very flexible words. Their behaviour is still far more diverse than just as prepositions. Another interesting thing is prepositions that can take two (or more) different cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;horto&lt;/strong&gt; ambulat. — &amp;quot;He walks in the garden.&amp;quot; (garden is ablative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;hortum&lt;/strong&gt; vadit. — &amp;quot;He goes into the garden.&amp;quot; (accusative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich bin in &lt;strong&gt;der&lt;/strong&gt; Kirche. — &amp;quot;I am in the church.&amp;quot; (dative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich gehe in &lt;strong&gt;die&lt;/strong&gt; Kirche. — &amp;quot;I go into the church.&amp;quot; (accusative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; indicates a static being-in-a-place, it goes with the ablative (Latin) and dative (German), which are also the cases normally used for statically being in a place (as partially replacing the older locative inherited from Proto-Indo-European); that is, in Latin, you could under certain circumstances use the bare ablative without &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; to express the same. Similarly, the accusative is the normal case for a moving-towards, where English would stick &lt;em&gt;-to&lt;/em&gt; onto the preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the cases that are now commonly seen as determined by prepositions were probably &lt;em&gt;already there&lt;/em&gt; when prepositions developed: it was perhaps once &lt;em&gt;horto ambulat in&lt;/em&gt;, or something, where the ablative already suggested that one was walking within, not into the garden, and the preposition confirmed this, so to speak (the ablative can also be used to express &amp;quot;out of&amp;quot; without a preposition, and it is also the only possible case to be used with &lt;em&gt;ex&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;out&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my English were poor and I said &lt;em&gt;he came building out&lt;/em&gt;, you would immediately understand that I meant that he was coming out of a building; this shows that a preposition doesn't depend on its position in front of its noun as much as one might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:24:07.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1697" CreationDate="2012-09-02T08:32:16.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have also tried to design a language based on the regularity of esperanto... but well... too much recursive definitions for atoms, thus I ended up in approximatively nothing serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But having this in mind, I'd like to tell you about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Toki Pona&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an extremely simplified constructed language. The base corpus contains only 120 words.&#xA;(though the wikipedia article says it is more, because some words association do have a meaning of their own and thus must be learnt) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took a little time to start learning it, and I must say that I am impressed by the descriptive power of such a tiny designed language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really worth losing 2 or 3 hours to learn the basics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T08:32:16.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-02T09:45:06.277" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;When euphemisms enter another language, are the words making up the euphemism more likely to be translated to that language compared to non-euphemisms? I suspect that people translate words in the euphemisms to emphasize the euphemisms involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From world war 2, the euphemistic term &quot;die Endlösung&quot; entered the English language as &quot;Final solution&quot;, and 大東亜共栄圏 entered the English language as &quot;Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere&quot;, whereas blitzkrieg, luftwaffe, kamikaze, and kristallnacht are usually kept in the original German or Japanese. Is this a general trend? (Some of the terms kept in the original language are proper nouns, but presumably that'd also be true of of the terms that got translated into English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T09:45:06.277" Title="Are euphemisms more likely to be translated when imported into another language?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2361" CreationDate="2012-09-02T13:27:13.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The historical linguistics of English is a very significant area of research. The wikipedia page &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;History of the English Language&lt;/a&gt; gives a fairly decent overview of the field. As you will see from that page, there has been work on almost every conceivable aspect of English language history, from phonetics and phonology to syntax and discourse. There are numerous books (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/182226&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eg&lt;/a&gt;) and journals (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=5700188665&amp;amp;tip=sid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eg&lt;/a&gt;) that deal with English historical linguistics, substantial &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;corpora&lt;/a&gt; available, and very many researchers working in the area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is almost certainly the best-studied language both in its synchonic and diachronic aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T13:27:13.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-02T18:32:08.343" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be the structure for a phrase like, 'before speaking to him' ? Will 'before' take a  CP as the complement and treat 'speaking' like a PRO-ing or is it something else? &#xA;Somebody please help me with the structure for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="991" LastActivityDate="2012-09-02T18:32:08.343" Title="Gerund as a PP complement" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-02T20:24:23.197" Score="8" ViewCount="1593" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a related but different question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2504/indo-european-prepositions-from-whence-did-they-come&quot;&gt;Indo-European prepositions: whence did they come?&lt;/a&gt;, why do just about all modern Indo-European languages have prepositions rather than postpositions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE is believed to have been an SOV language, and like textbook examples of SOV languages it had relational postpositions rather than prepositions. Yet every modern Indo-European language I know of uses prepositions primarily (one or two have postpositions as well, but in such languages prepositions are a clear majority). Even Latin, which looks to have a nominal word order of SOV (though the inflectional case system allowed for large variation in word order) has exclusively prepositions (excluding the comitative pseudo-case where previously postpositional &quot;cum&quot; - which, I may add, is a preposition in Latin - was reduced to a suffix). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it that just about every Indo-European language converted to prepositions (presumably) in parallel, when such a change contradicts typical word order laws?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T23:47:34.660" Title="Indo-European prepositions: why prepositions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2361" CreationDate="2012-09-03T13:50:55.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say it also depends on what you mean by &quot;mapping English.&quot; Are you limiting the search to English as it evolved to British English, or including all dialects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://aschmann.net/AmEng/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;American English Dialectical analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easier to find evolutionary evidence of particular dialects and accents of English, rather than the entire history of English as a whole (which would need to include ModE, EModE, ME, and OE). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have definitely been efforts to map word construction and shifts in ME; I know that Dr. Geoff Nicholls, of St. Peters College, Oxford, proposed a study to understand dialectical differences of ME in England and their corresponding mobility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaston Ümlaut definitely provided some good journals and advice for finding sources; browsing linguistic journals dealing mainly with Indo-European languages studies and English as a whole are really the way to go, as well as perusing the Internet and libraries in search of the many offerings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like it was pointed out, what you are asking is very broad, so a bit more focus would be helpful in answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastActivityDate="2012-09-03T13:50:55.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2517" CreationDate="2012-09-03T14:13:55.523" Score="9" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;What confused me is the transition from &quot;w&quot; in PIE *wel- to &quot;h&quot; in E. helix .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's the sound law applied to the word E. &quot;vulva&quot;,which has the change from &quot;w&quot; to &quot;v&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=helix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;helix&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;a spiral thing,&quot; 1560s, from L. &lt;strong&gt;helix&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;spiral,&quot; from Gk. &lt;strong&gt;helix&lt;/strong&gt; (gen. helikos), related to &lt;strong&gt;eilein&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to turn, twist, roll,&quot; from PIE &lt;strong&gt;*wel-ik-&lt;/strong&gt;, from root &lt;strong&gt;*wel-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to turn, revolve&quot; (see vulva).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=vulva&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vulva&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1540s, from L. &lt;strong&gt;vulva&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;earlier volva&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;womb, female sexual organ,&quot; lit. &quot;wrapper,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;volvere&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to turn, twist, roll, revolve,&quot; also &quot;turn over in the mind,&quot; from PIE root &lt;strong&gt;*wel-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to turn, revolve,&quot; with derivatives referring to curved, enclosing objects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(cf. Skt. valate &quot;turns round,&quot; ulvam &quot;womb, vulva;&quot; Lith. valtis &quot;twine, net,&quot; apvalus &quot;round;&quot; O.C.S. valiti &quot;roll, welter,&quot; vluna &quot;wave;&quot; Gk. eluo &quot;wind, wrap,&quot; helix &quot;spiral object,&quot; eilein &quot;to turn, squeeze;&quot; Goth. walwjan &quot;to roll;&quot; O.E. wealwian &quot;roll,&quot; weoloc &quot;whelk, spiral-shelled mollusk;&quot; O.H.G. walzan &quot;to roll, waltz;&quot; O.Ir. fulumain &quot;rolling;&quot; Welsh olwyn &quot;wheel&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-09-03T17:14:40.490" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T03:54:19.657" Title="What is the sound law to describe the etymology of “helix” and “vulva”?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2369" CreationDate="2012-09-03T14:30:19.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you looking for &quot;Adamic?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is thought by some of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths that the &quot;Divine Language&quot; handed down by God would be the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Adamic Language&lt;/a&gt;. So, it is possible the line you came across was using &quot;Adamic&quot; for Proto-World or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastActivityDate="2012-09-03T14:30:19.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2515" CreationDate="2012-09-03T17:51:34.957" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;helix&lt;/strong&gt;: This came through Greek. Most of the Greek dialects underwent &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Greek_language#Other_Post-Proto-Greek_changes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/w/-loss&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=ue-Ycal6MGcC&amp;amp;lpg=PA49&amp;amp;ots=Ma-APZbjCO&amp;amp;dq=greek%20%22w-loss%22&amp;amp;pg=PA57#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=greek%20%22w-loss%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kavitskaya 2002&lt;/a&gt;). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attic_Greek#Loss_of_w&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attic-Ionic dialects lost the sound early&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. the sound /w/ and its letter &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digamma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ϝ&lt;/a&gt; do not appear in Homer); Aeolian retained it longer but lost it as well. This all leads to the result&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/U/P2137.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;*u̯el-, *u̯elə-, *u̯lē- 'turn, wind'&lt;/a&gt; &gt;w-loss&gt; Gk ἑλίσσω &lt;em&gt;helisso&lt;/em&gt;, ἕλιξ &lt;em&gt;helix&lt;/em&gt; &gt; L helix &gt; Eng helix  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vulva&lt;/strong&gt;: This came through Italic, which did not undergo /w/-loss. So the PIE semivowel in u̯el- was retained in Latin vol-. The semivowel /w/ was then fricativized in the Romance languages. This leads to the result&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE *u̯el- &gt; L volva /wolwa/ &gt; LL vulva /vulva/ &gt; Eng vulva  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T02:40:20.087" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T02:40:20.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2012-09-03T22:06:35.100" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to bring in a different point of view which was wrongly marginalized because it does not suit political agendas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romanian does not stem from Latin&lt;/em&gt;, this is why it is different compared to some of the Romance languages, it stems from Dacian. According to this view and ancient documents, the Dacian language (the language of the people that inhabited Romanian territory and the Balkans during Roman times) and the Latin language were related languages already, there are a lot of very strong scientific/historic arguments to support this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example: around 3000BC Aryans arrived in India and left there the Vedic Bible which is a monument to the Proto-European language that originated in the territory of Dacia. Well, in Vedic Sanskrit [water] is not [aqua] but is APA exactly like in Romanian APA that came directly from the Dacian language, and Sanskrit APA gave words that are similar to Romanian words that have no analog in Latin, ex. Vedic: APAYA, Rom.: APARAIA - a lot of water, flood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1307" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-09T23:35:11.613" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T23:35:11.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-04T16:18:37.200" Score="5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there were any current models that measured the effect of cultural shifts in a given language. Specifically, is there consistent/model-able lag between major cultural events and how it affects a language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my instance, I am thinking in terms of the spread of Hellenism which resulted in the adoption of (Attic/Ionic -&gt; Koine) Greek as &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; for a discernible period of time. Is there an existing way to measure/model the influence of Alexander's conquered areas on the &quot;base&quot; language? When did any Balkan influence appear? Asian? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1293" LastActivityDate="2012-09-04T16:18:37.200" Title="Is there a way to measure culture's impact on a language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3215" CreationDate="2012-09-04T23:57:23.097" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the agent suffix &lt;em&gt;-ter-&lt;/em&gt; (which exhibited e-grade when meaning a profession or purpose and o-grade when meaning the recent perpetrator), can &lt;em&gt;-trom&lt;/em&gt; suffix also be a zero grade from this one plus inanimate nomenative ending &lt;em&gt;-om&lt;/em&gt;? Especially taking into account internal derivation. Just some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯es-tēr&lt;/em&gt; (tailor) -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;u̯es-tr-om&lt;/em&gt; (wear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ero̯-tēr&lt;/em&gt; (plowman) -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;a̯ero̯-tr-om&lt;/em&gt; (plow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Fortson lists &lt;em&gt;-tro-&lt;/em&gt; suffix along with &lt;em&gt;-tlo-&lt;/em&gt; suffix as separate instrumental suffixes. I wonder whether then was a similar agent suffix &lt;em&gt;-tel-&lt;/em&gt; (cf Russian &lt;em&gt;prii̯a-tel&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot;, Greek &lt;em&gt;aristo-tel&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T14:31:11.537" Title="Could the *-trom ending in PIE be a zero-grade from agent suffix *-ter-/-tor-?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2527" CreationDate="2012-09-05T11:44:05.520" Score="4" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the help of Wiktionary, we know two useful Midlle English etymologies of the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bow#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bow-1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Old English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;boga&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, from Proto-Germanic *bugô. Cognate with Dutch boog, German Bogen, Swedish båge, Danish bue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bow#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bow-2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Old English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;būgan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, from Proto-Germanic *beuganan. Cognate with Dutch buigen, German biegen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the change from &quot;g&quot; to &quot;w&quot; here is very interesting to me, but I am unfamiliar with the process, even the name of the &quot;sound law&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T12:58:39.907" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T18:56:50.750" Title="Why does &quot;g&quot; in Middle English &quot;boga&quot; become &quot;w&quot; in Modern English &quot;bow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2012-09-05T11:44:12.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your ability to hear the difference can be dependent on the language you speak. Most languages don't make a strong distinction between affricate and a plosive+fricative and it may be difficult for their speakers to hear the difference. Some languages have a very clear distinction however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example compare these two words in Polish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;czy - &quot;if, whether&quot; (pronounced &lt;code&gt;[t͡ʂɨ]&lt;/code&gt;, a bit like &lt;em&gt;chee&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trzy - &quot;three&quot; (formal transcription is &lt;code&gt;[tʐɨ]&lt;/code&gt;, but often pronounced &lt;code&gt;[tʂɨ]&lt;/code&gt;, a bit like &lt;em&gt;tshee&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; contains multimedia files for &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pl-czysta.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;czysta&quot;&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Pl-trzysta.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;trzysta&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1310" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-09-27T15:40:26.010" LastActivityDate="2012-09-27T15:40:26.010" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2677" CreationDate="2012-09-05T15:38:16.650" Score="10" ViewCount="2376" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Iuppiter#Latin&quot;&gt;Jupiter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;dyew-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (“sky”) (whence also Latin diēs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cognate with Ancient Greek Ζεύς (Zeus), Hittite  (sius), Sanskrit द्यु (dyú). The nominative Iuppiter comes from a vocative combined with Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr (“father”) (whence also Latin pater), and as such is cognate to Umbrian  (iupater).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%96%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot;&gt;Ζεύς&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;dyew-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cognate with Sanskrit द्यु (dyú), Latin Iovis, Old English Tīw, Hittite  (sius), Old Church Slavonic дивъ (divŭ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared with another two words L &quot;&lt;em&gt;Deus&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and Gk &quot;&lt;em&gt;Διόνυσος&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deus#Latin&quot;&gt;Deus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is from &lt;em&gt;dẹ̄os, from Old Latin deiuos, from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;*deiwós*&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. Welsh duw, Lithuanian diẽvas, Persian دیو (div) ‘demon’), o-stem derivative from *di̯ḗus ‘sky; sky-god’ (compare Latin diēs, Welsh dydd), from *dei- ‘to shine’. Doublet of dīvus; related to Iūpiter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%94%CE%B9%CF%8C%CE%BD%CF%85%CF%83%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot;&gt;Διόνυσος&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is Attested in Mycenaean Greek (13th to 12th century BC) as di-wo-nu-so-. Dialectal variants Dienusos, Deunusos, Dinnusos and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By popular etymology often connected with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Διός (the genitive of Ζεύς, Zeus)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The dio- forms are probably built by analogy from an original stem die-. The compound die-nus-os is analysed as from a verbal stem die- (from diemai &quot;to chase, to impel&quot;). The nus- element gave rise to a toponym Νύσα Nusa (Nysa), a mountain where the god was nursed by nymphs (the Nysiads, Nysa is also the name given to one of these nymphs). According to the testimony of Pherecydes of Syros (6th c. BC), nusa is a word for &quot;tree&quot;. Janda (Die Musik nach dem Chaos, 2010) suggests an original meaning of &quot;impeller of the (world-)tree&quot; (the axis mundi), connecting the god with archaic cosmology. The close association or indeed identity of Dionysus with a tree (especially the fig tree) is well attested in the classical period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of environment can explain the divergence between L &quot;d&quot; and &quot;j&quot; or Gk &quot;Δ&quot; and &quot;Ζ&quot;, though they are all from PIE &quot;d&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-05T16:44:31.373" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:48:19.863" Title="How does the initial consonant in &quot;Jupiter&quot; and &quot;Zeus&quot; come from the &quot;d&quot; in PIE &quot;*dyew-&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2524" CreationDate="2012-09-05T16:58:39.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is probably some phonological rule at work where g at the end of a root disappeared in English. The w in &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; is probably best seen as a compensatory change in vowel sound. The phenomenon can be observed in English/Dutch &lt;em&gt;low/laag, lay/leg-, lie/lig- (lie on the ground), lie/lieg- (tell a lie), weigh/weeg-, way/weg, saw/zaag, high/hoog, neigh/neig, bow/boog (and arrow), bow/boeg (ship)&lt;/em&gt; etc.: you can see how the g disappears in English in many words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-09-05T16:58:39.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-05T19:12:18.667" Score="15" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;During my time in Georgia one word came to puzzle me and I'm still thinking about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%93%E1%83%94%E1%83%9A%E1%83%A4%E1%83%98%E1%83%9C%E1%83%98&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;დელფინი&lt;/code&gt; (delp'ini)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;dolphin&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary says this comes from Greek via Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is Georgia is on the Black Sea which has plenty of dolphins so why wouldn't they have their own word since the times before contact with Greek civilization? Georgian is pretty resistant to borrowing basic vocabulary. There's a native word for &quot;whale&quot; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now loanwords are not as common in Georgian as in English, but they're not really rare. They are however mostly for modern/introduced concepts but Georgian is a pretty ancient language, it hasn't really moved, and dolphins have always existed in the world the Georgians inhabit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of theories but they're unconvincing and I haven't been able to find any information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was once a native word but it fell out of use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;(It's not in any of the bilingual dictionaries I've been able to find.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dolphins were considered to be fish, like elsewhere, until relatively recently with the study of biology, taxonomy, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;(But different kinds of fish still have different names and dolphins are pretty different.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-06T08:13:29.943" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T22:49:39.213" Title="Did Georgian ever have a native word for &quot;dolphin&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-06T04:18:44.930" Score="4" ViewCount="1981" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are straightforward ways to convert English words to phonemes via a dictionary that contains such information. However, is there a way to automatically convert English text into syllables? I.e., to split the word &quot;doctor&quot; into the two syllables &quot;doc_tor&quot;? I'd like to do this for a large text and thus an automated procedure would be essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1311" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-09-06T11:09:55.380" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T17:45:29.953" Title="Is there a computational method to syllabify English words?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2136" CreationDate="2012-09-06T13:29:29.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[This should be a comment, but I need room].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As remarked earlier, this feature is shared by French. I'll use French examples, because I'm sure to produce correct and idiomatic sentences in this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule we are talking about has two aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the compound tense is built with “to be“ [essere / être], there is agreement between the past participle and the subject. When the tense is built with “to have” [avere / avoir], the agreement, &lt;strong&gt;if any&lt;/strong&gt; is between the direct object and the participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the “have“-case, there is agreement if and only if the direct object precedes the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marie est venue.&lt;/em&gt;  (Marie has come.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;J'ai mangé une pomme&lt;/em&gt; (I've eaten an apple.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;La pomme que j'ai mangée était verte.&lt;/em&gt; (The apple I've eaten was green.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that the first part of the rule is perfectly logical. The choice of the auxiliary verb (to be vs. to have) depends on the verb you're conjugating. (Very) roughly speaking, transitive verbs use “to have“ and intransitive verbs use “to be“. Let's also remember that, taken in isolation, the participles of transitive verbs are adjectives. When I eat an apple, what's eaten is the apple, not me, so the agreement with the subject would really be weird. In the other case, agreement with the subject makes sense (in some cases, it is even hard to tell if we're dealing with a verb at a compound tense or with “to be + adjective“; for example « &lt;em&gt;Jean est mort&lt;/em&gt; » can mean both “Jean is dead” and “Jean has died.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of the rule (and all the subtleties I've hidden [pronominal verbs, special constructions with « &lt;em&gt;voir&lt;/em&gt; », « &lt;em&gt;faire&lt;/em&gt; », « &lt;em&gt;laisser&lt;/em&gt; »...], which are very complicated and largely ignored even by native speakers) is indeed much more artificial. It's also noteworthy that before grammar was taught in schools, there was a lot of variation concerning this part of the rule. Voltaire, for example, systematically left the past participle without agreement (he would have written “La pomme que j'ai mangé était verte.”) [Chervel's &lt;em&gt;Et il fallut apprendre à écrire à tous les petits Français&lt;/em&gt;, a marvelous book about the history of school grammar, even makes the case that the development of school grammar was in no small part motivated by this question of the « &lt;em&gt;accord avec l'auxilliaire avoir&lt;/em&gt; »]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other cases where French grammar asks for an agreement if and only if the part that triggers the agreement comes first, but they are mostly unimportant peculiarities. For example, “barefoot“ is « nu-pieds » or « pieds nus », you write « &lt;em&gt;une heure et demie&lt;/em&gt; » (an hour and a half) but « &lt;em&gt;une demi-heure&lt;/em&gt; » (a half-hour)... (To be perfectly honest, I wonder how many native francophones know about these rules...) So we could say that, while peculiar, even this artificial part of the rule belongs to some logical framework (but as the other examples are even weirder than the rule we're discussing, this argument doesn't sound very convincing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final comment: this rule is very often infringed in speech, even among educated speakers (with a very large tendency to left the participle uninflected). Interstingly, women (who have to apply it in sentences like « &lt;em&gt;Il m'a remise à ma place&lt;/em&gt; » = “he put me in my place” ; a man would say « &lt;em&gt;remis&lt;/em&gt; ») tend to respect the rule more carefully than men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-09-06T13:29:29.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2543" CreationDate="2012-09-07T02:44:50.030" Score="12" ViewCount="1214" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the distinctions among languages is the tonal/atonal distinction. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1904158/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dediu &amp;amp; Ladd (2007)&lt;/a&gt; suggest that this split between tonal and atonal languages is related to a recent mutation in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPM_%28gene%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASPM gene&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, people with the newer variant of this gene correspond closely to groups with atonal languages. The new variant of this gene is believed to have appeared between 14,100 and 500 years ago (most likely about 6k years ago). The mutation fixed itself very quickly in certain sub-populations, suggesting a selective sweep. If the new variant of this gene is strongly related to atonality in language, then one would also expect a divergence of the atonal languages from a tonal ancestor around the same time (14,100 to 500 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there evidence that atonal languages have tonal languages as ancestors?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, did the seperation appear in the time frame of 14,100 to 500 years ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T05:56:12.670" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T05:56:12.670" Title="Do atonal languages have a tonal ancestor?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-09-07T03:37:15.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-09-07T03:37:15.597" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T03:37:15.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2534" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-09-07T03:37:15.597" Score="0" Body="Semantics is the study of meaning, used to understand expressions through language." OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-09-07T08:05:49.813" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T08:05:49.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-09-07T03:42:28.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-09-07T03:42:28.847" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T03:42:28.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-09-07T03:42:28.847" Score="0" Body="Dialects are varieties of a language that differ in systematic ways from each other but are mutually intelligible." OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:10:21.977" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:10:21.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2540" CreationDate="2012-09-07T06:26:49.073" Score="5" ViewCount="7866" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying speech recognition by Lawrence Rabiner's book. I am unable to find a proper and easy to understand answer for the following question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Difference between production of vowels, diphthongs and semi-vowels&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has just stated a single statement about their difference like &lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Vowels : &lt;/b&gt; Vowels are produced by exciting fixed vocal tract with quasi-periodic pulses of air caused by vibration of vocal cord&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Diphthongs : &lt;/b&gt; Produced by varying the vocal tract smoothly between vowel configuration appropriate to diphthongs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;Semi-Vowels : &lt;/b&gt; Characterized by a gliding transition in vocal tract area function between adjacent phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get some more points ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1314" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-08T01:26:05.407" LastActivityDate="2014-06-08T01:26:05.407" Title="Difference between production of vowels, diphthongs and semi-vowels" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2538" CreationDate="2012-09-07T08:14:13.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just going to tackle the &quot;terminology&quot; aspect of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Diphthongs (and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphthong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;triphthongs&lt;/a&gt;) are a kind of vowel. You can contrast them with &quot;pure vowels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pure vowels have a single &quot;target&quot; where diphthongs (etc) have two (or more) targets. So for the English vowel sound in &quot;pie&quot; the first target is like the &quot;a&quot; in &quot;car&quot; and the second target is like the &quot;ee&quot; in &quot;fee&quot;. This seems to be unintuitive for many people not acquainted with linguistics and could be compounded in English where the spelling of diphthongs often doesn't reflect its components.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semivowels can function as either vowels or consonants, depending on their context (what comes before and after them).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-07T08:36:22.690" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T08:36:22.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2538" CreationDate="2012-09-07T09:32:00.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you know what vowels are, diphthongs are phones which may be described phonetically as a sequence of two vowels (or vowel targets) but which function (phonologically) as a single vowel phoneme in a given language. Semivowels are phones which are phonetically vowels (or vowel-like) but which function as a consonant phoneme in a given language. The distinction between phonetics and phonology is crucial as phonetically identical phones may function as a vowel phoneme in one language, and as a consonant in another. As well, a phonetically identical sequence of two vowels may function as a diphthong (ie single phoneme) in one language and as a sequence of two vowel phonemes in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-09-07T09:32:00.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2566" CreationDate="2012-09-07T11:31:52.090" Score="8" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there exists any summary or paper analysing the time it takes for the creation of a new language (with all reservations concerning definitions of languages et dialects etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, the Romance languages, which are derived from Vulgar Latin. It would be (I suppose) around 400 years (between 4th and 8th century), maybe a little less, and for Yiddish some 500 years (between 10th and 15th century).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1315" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-09-07T12:50:39.647" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T16:58:44.570" Title="How much time does it take to create/fork a new language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2538" CreationDate="2012-09-08T05:14:26.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an addition to hippietrail's great answer, here's the visual representation of English diphthongs as it appears &lt;a href=&quot;http://phoneticsandphonology701.blogspot.com/2009/12/diphthongs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RGcws.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Diphthongs chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legend:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/eɪ/ as day, pay, say, lay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /aɪ/ as sky, buy, cry, tie&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /ɔɪ/ as toy, boy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /ɪə/ as beer, hear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /eə/ as bear, pair, hair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /ʊə/ as tour, poor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /əʊ/ as phone, no, go&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /aʊ/ as how, cow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, an automated speech recognizer should be able to determine at which point of the chart the speaker's voice stays at a given moment. Having this in place, detecting diphthongs is no more difficult than &lt;strong&gt;finding a gesture on a 2D map&lt;/strong&gt;, and there are plenty of effective algorithms for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-09-08T05:14:26.100" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2532" CreationDate="2012-09-08T12:49:13.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of examples known of tonal systems being lost in daughter languages, a couple are described below. Given that it is thought that the majority of the world's languages make use of some kind of tonal contrast in their phonology, that tone seems to be a feature likely to be conserved diachronically, and that tonogenesis seems to happen fairly readily, we shouldn't expect there to be many examples of the loss of tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/aalled/Univ_ete/3LCourseMaterial/African%20%28Cushitic%29%20topics%20-%20M.%20Mous/Downing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Downing (2004)&lt;/a&gt; proto-Bantu is reconstructed as having had two tones. While most present-day Bantu languages have tonal contrasts a few have lost them, retaining only a stress system, eg Chimwi:ni, Kituba, Nyakyusa and Swahili.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been argued by Indo-Europeanist scholars (including &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/piep15.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christian Lehmann&lt;/a&gt;) that an early stage of proto-Indo-European had a pitch-accent system which was lost in most daughter branches. It was preserved into Ancient Greek (although lost in Modern Greek) and continues in present-day Lithuanian and some Slavic &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_accent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;languages&lt;/a&gt;. The tone systems found in some North Germanic languages are thought to be relatively recent innovations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-09-08T12:49:13.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2532" CreationDate="2012-09-08T16:02:57.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples given in GastonUmlaut's answer are sufficient, so I want to only add a note addressing the main methodological issue here. It concerns the relative strengths of historical factors and biological factors in typology. We can say, simplifying things, that a language is the way it is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a reproduction of an earlier stage of the language (Historical factors)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It must be learnable and usable by humans (Biological factors)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large number of biological factors have been identified by comparative studies in phonology, morphology and syntax. To give a few examples: voiced fricatives are dispreferred because they are more difficult to produce than voiceless fricatives; suffixes are preferred over prefixes, probably because this facilitates processing, and a consistent head--modifier ordering between verbs and objects, and between adpositions and their objects, is also preferred for processing reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these biological factors are necessarily weak when compared to historical factors. If the factor disfavoring voiced fricatives were strong, then it would be simply too difficult for humans to learn to incorporate this kind of sound into running speech, and no language would have them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if biological factors is discovered which is different across human populations, we would expect for it to be weak compared to historical factors, because so far there is no evidence that any human population is &lt;strong&gt;constitutionally unable&lt;/strong&gt; to learn some other's language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if this point is kept in mind then Dedieu &amp;amp; Ladd's finding should not be especially controversial, since it is not at all surprising that there are minor genetic differences across human populations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2012-09-08T23:40:30.180" LastActivityDate="2012-09-08T23:40:30.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7195" CreationDate="2012-09-09T03:35:45.943" Score="6" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have there been any English language attempts (preferably readily-available) to define Japanese particles from the perspective of discourse analysis? Some of the things I would be interested to see such an analysis of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of sentence-ending particles such as na, no, ne, yo, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of focus and emphasis particles such as zo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether an explicit subject is represented using wa or ga&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether wa/ga/wo are explicitly stated (most common) or are &quot;dropped&quot; and their noun phrases bare in a clause (grammatical in some contexts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2012-09-09T21:44:36.887" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T07:51:47.403" Title="Discourse analysis of Japanese particles?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-09T07:16:26.433" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wankle#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wankle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English wankel, from Old English wancol (“unstable, unsteady, tottering, vacillating, weak”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*wankulaz&lt;/strong&gt; (“unsteady, wavering”), from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*wank-, *wak-, *wek-, *weg-&lt;/strong&gt; (“to be unsteady; crooked”). Cognate with Dutch wankel (“shaky, unstable”), Middle High German wankel (“unsteady”), German wanken (“to waver, totter”). See also wonky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wonky#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wonky&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From English dialectal wanky, alteration of Middle English wankel (“unstable, shaky”), from Old English wancol (“unstable”), from Proto-Germanic *wankulaz (“swaying, shaky, unstable”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*wankōnan&lt;/strong&gt; (“to sway, be unsteady”), from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*wa(n)k-, *wek-, *wag-, *weg-&lt;/strong&gt; (“to swing, be unsteady, slant, be crooked”). Cognate with Scots wankle (“wonky”), Dutch wankel (“shaky”), German Wankelmut (“fickleness, inconstancy, vacillation”), Danish vanke (“to wander”). See also wankle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or there may be a PIE root *&lt;em&gt;wang-&lt;/em&gt;, which corresponds to the sound law PIE &quot;G&quot; becomes Gmc &quot;K&quot; in Grimm's law, rather than the PIE *&lt;em&gt;wank-&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T06:44:26.500" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T06:44:26.500" Title="Is PIE &quot;*wank-&quot; the ultimate root of E &quot;wankle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-09T08:56:23.030" Score="8" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I think of languages that have a high number of homophones, I think of Japanese, Mandarin, English and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when I think of languages with relatively opaque writing systems that are not particularly phonetic, I think of Japanese, Mandarin, English and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian and Modern Greek have relatively few homophones and highly phonetic writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this explained purely by coincidence, or is there something more to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for the languages already mentioned, but is there a similar trend across other languages of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1317" LastEditorUserId="1317" LastEditDate="2012-09-09T10:41:45.867" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T17:29:34.960" Title="Is there a general correlation between the number of homophones in a language and how phonetic its writing system is?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2547" CreationDate="2012-09-09T15:21:25.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean arguably fits the bill as a language with both a high amount of homophones and a highly phonetic writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will start with the writing system since it is the most cut and dry. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hangul&lt;/a&gt; is by far the most common writing system in Korean. Spelling adheres closely to pronunciation with a few exceptions. It should be noted, however, that those exceptions are all regular. That is, knowing a small handful of pronunciation rules you can reliably produce a faithful pronunciation of a word from written form alone. Some of these rules include nasal assimilation of approximates when preceded by a nasal (as in 종로, literally &lt;em&gt;jong-ro&lt;/em&gt;, a district in Seoul, but actually pronounced as &lt;em&gt;jong-no&lt;/em&gt;), and neutralization of codas (받, 밭, 밧, and 밪, literally &lt;em&gt;bat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bath&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bas&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;bac&lt;/em&gt; respectively, are all pronounced as &lt;em&gt;bat&lt;/em&gt; due to neutralization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hangul is kept highly phonetic by occasional revisions to Korean spelling to match modern pronunciation (&lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt;: I was unable to find an appropriate citation for this. This is what my sociolinguistics professor told me.). I believe the last such update was in the 1950s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;North Korea uses Hangul exclusively however South Korea does have a second writing system, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hanja&lt;/a&gt;, which is basically Traditional Chinese characters (with some variation, but less than Kanji or Simplified Chinese). This system predates Hangul as before Hangul's invention Koreans wrote using Chinese characters. It should be noted that these days Hanja is almost exclusively used in TV news and newspapers (mostly for disambiguation), as well as for artistic purposes (store signs, calligraphy, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relatively recent invention of Hangul combined with the existence and use of the Hanja writing system is what makes the statement &quot;Korean uses a highly phonetic writing system&quot; debatable. However from my experience living in Korea and learning the language I would argue that since Hanja is used only in limited context (you will never see a sentence written entirely in Hanja, if only because all Hanja-based verbs and adjectives must end in 하다, &lt;em&gt;ha-ta&lt;/em&gt;, dictionary form of &quot;to do&quot;, which is pure Korean), it does have a highly phonetic writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the statement that Korean has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/korean-homophones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;high level of homophone&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt;: forgive the non-academic source). It should be noted that this statement too is &lt;a href=&quot;http://seedyroad.com/academics/JournalOfLinguistics-46-453-482.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;up for debate&lt;/a&gt; as, amongst other reasons, homophone usually does not create ambiguity when viewed in context. Much of Korean vocabulary, especially written and formal vocabulary, is adopted from Chinese (much like English uses French/Latin vocabulary). Given the relatively small sets of phonemes in Chinese and the fact that Korean is not tonal and thus can't differentiate through tones, this leaves many sets of words with identical spellings and thus pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common examples include lexical items like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;매매&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;mae-mae&lt;/em&gt; - 賣買 - literally &quot;buying and selling&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;수상&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;swu-sang&lt;/em&gt; - 1) 受賞 - winning a prize, 2) 授賞 - awarding a prize (somewhat archaic)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;기타&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;ki-tha&lt;/em&gt; - 1) guitar (English loanword), 2) 其他 - other, the rest  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;And my personal favourite,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;시간&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;si-kan&lt;/em&gt; - 1) 時間 - an hour, time, 2) 屍姦 - necrophilia (definitely &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; in common usage)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as full sentences such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;아이가 방에 있어&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ai-ka bang-ey iss-a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  child-SUB room-LOC exist-INFORMAL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The child is in [his] room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;아이 가방에 있어&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ai kabang-ey iss-a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  child bag-LOC exist-INFORMAL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The child is in the bag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically these two differ by the voicing on &quot;ka&quot; (voiced in the first, unvoiced in the second) but Korean does not differentiate consonants based on voicing and spoken at a conversational speed they sound identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-09-09T17:29:34.960" LastActivityDate="2012-09-09T17:29:34.960" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2524" CreationDate="2012-09-10T22:57:12.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is almost definitely a phonological rule at work here, although the /g/ was probably not &quot;dropped&quot; as others have been claiming, but rather reduced. /w/ is a &quot;labio-velar approximant&quot;, meaning it's a combination of two places of sound articulation: the rounding of the lips and the near-closing of the velum. Other &quot;velar&quot; sounds include /g/, which when &quot;reduced&quot;, makes half of the /w/. The other half, being that of the rounding of the lips, is a by-product of the back vowels, many of which are rounded (e.g., /u/ , /o/ ), which is why the /g/ in Cerberus's Dutch lexical examples only are realized as /w/ in English in those particular instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1323" LastActivityDate="2012-09-10T22:57:12.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4231" CreationDate="2012-09-10T20:55:45.790" Score="18" ViewCount="5721" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes while watching a subtitled foreign film, I find that reading the subtitles aloud (usually in my head) at the same&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; pace as the speaker takes less time than what's spoken in the native language. Is it possible that &lt;strong&gt;spoken English is more efficient than other languages&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/3022/24117&quot;&gt;Do most languages need more space than English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I'm looking for hard data or relevant studies to support or discount my anecdotal hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought this might be an illusion, similar to what Peter Roach describes in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/tempopr.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly Than Others&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. There are three possibilities he outlines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;some languages really are spoken more rapidly, and some more slowly, than others as a natural result of the way their sounds are produced.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;we get the impression that some languages are spoken more quickly than others because of some sort of illusion.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;in some societies it is socially acceptable or approved to speak rapidly, and in others slow speaking is preferred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roach concludes that (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] while at normal speaking speed the &lt;strong&gt;sounds-per-second rate for all languages may be effectively the same&lt;/strong&gt;, some languages are characteristically using higher and lower speaking rates than other languages in particular social situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delving further, I was led to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pellegrino-et-al.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crosslinguistic study on speech information rates&lt;/a&gt;. Their initial hypothesis is that information rates (IR) are the same across languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;IR&lt;sub&gt;L&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; exhibits a greater than 30% degree of variation between Japanese (0.74) and English (1.08), invalidating the first hypothesis of a strict cross-language equality of rates of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the seven languages in the study&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;English had the highest IR&lt;/strong&gt;. This seems to tentatively confirm my intuition. Still, there's a good deal of research left to do and the paper discusses many of its shortcomings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been similar studies that shed light on how English's &quot;efficiency&quot; (IR) stacks up? Also, is it possible that there is a wholly different explanation for my experience (e.g. subtitles are designed to be read quickly and actually &quot;cut off&quot; the full meaning of the speaker, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; a confirmation bias)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: as best as I can approximate&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2: French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Mandarin, Japanese&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1242" OwnerDisplayName="Zairja" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T02:08:33.373" Title="Is spoken English more efficient than other languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="21" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2524" CreationDate="2012-09-11T14:03:21.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is based on a wrong assumption - the letter w in bow2 is due to a spelling convention imposed by French scribes. At first, long u was respelt as ou (like in house), and then all word-final ou's were respelt as ow - I'm sure you've already noticed how rare or non-existent English words are that end in ou. Then long u was diphthongised - the Great Vowel Shift. This stuff is pretty basic, and you can read about it in any intro textbook on the history of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-09-11T18:56:50.750" LastActivityDate="2012-09-11T18:56:50.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2541" CreationDate="2012-09-12T12:56:01.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sentiments are in line with some of the commenters who point out that on its face the question is asking for too much. On the other hand, there is some recent work that might give you an idea of how similar questions are being approached. &#xA;There is a good summary article (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chd.ucsd.edu/_files/fall2008/Croft.2006.ICHL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Croft 2006&lt;/a&gt;) outlining Croft's &quot;evolutionary&quot; approach to language change. This paper introduces some useful concepts in thinking about the issue of language &quot;speciation.&quot; For a preview of some issues in applying quantitative models to language evoluation, have a look atthe article in press by &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1211548:7/component/escidoc:1379633/Levinson_Gray_TICS_2012.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Levinson &amp;amp; Gray&lt;/a&gt;. Those two authors have received mixed feedback from linguists on some of their recent work in historical linguistics: they introduce interesting new mathematical techniques to language change, but their underlying assumptions are often thought to be more than is warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-09-12T12:56:01.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2282" CreationDate="2012-09-13T11:52:17.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try to live up to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/chaplaincy/judaism.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hillel's example&lt;/a&gt; and try to give you an answer short enough to answer while standing on one leg: &lt;em&gt;It depends on which consonants are in the root, and where they fall.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the ordinary &quot;vanilla&quot; verb כתב (to write). The masculine singular present form in the pa'al binyan is כּוֹתֵב (kotev), with feminine singular present form כּוֹתֶבֶת (kotevet). There are many similar verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;דוֹפֵק (dofek)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  פּוֹגֵשׁ (pogesh)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  צוֹבֵט (tsovet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on, and their feminine counterparts are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;דוֹפֶקֶת (dofeket)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  פּוֹגֶשֶׁת (pogeshet)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  צוֹבֶטֶת (tsovetet)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are several consonants that throw a wrench into the works: &#xA; א ה ח י ו נ ע    They have subtle sounds, some of which are or were guttural (pronounced in the throat). They generally influence the infix vowels in a predictable (&quot;regular&quot;) way, but sometimes they do something oddball, and sometimes they fall out entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you have ה in the final position. The pattern for the masculine forms is similar to what it was before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שׁוֹתֶה (shoteh)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  רוֹצֶה (rotseh)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  קוֹנֶה (koneh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the pattern for the feminine forms becomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שׁוֹתָה (shotah)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  רוֹצָה (rotsah)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  קוֹנָה (konah)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's what you might call a regular irregular pattern. Whenever you have final ה, that's what you'll see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, final ע causes a change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שׁוֹמֵעַ (shomea')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  פּוֹגֵעַ (pogea')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  יוֹדֵעַ (yodea')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with feminine forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שׁוֹמַעַת (shoma'at)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  פּוֹגַעַת (poga'at)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  יוֹדַעַת (yoda'at)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that פּוֹגֵעַ is the masculine singular present form of the verb in the active pa'al binyan; above, you had פַּגוּעַ, which is in the passive pu'al binyan.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some oddities. One of the verbs you chose, ישנ, is one of them. The initial י is the reason for the weirdness, but other words that begin with that letter are more regular (for example, יוֹדֵעַ, one of the verbs I listed above). Fortunately, this kind of weirdness is not common enough to hide the more regular patterns. Other oddities are the adjective-like verbs like צרכ, whose forms are quite different in the present, but I believe those can be counted on the fingers of one hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really like Lewis Glinert's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0415101905&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is clear, practical, and thorough, but not scholarly. He goes into the subject of vowel changes within the binyanim in detail.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I confess that I didn't stand on one leg while I typed this, but I hope I at least answered your basic question and didn't squelch your interest in learning more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1328" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2014-09-09T11:46:56.143" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T11:46:56.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2556" CreationDate="2012-09-14T07:57:11.120" Score="20" ViewCount="2149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a connection, or some sort of established historical/etymological explanation why in a few languages, &quot;the opposite of left&quot; and &quot;legal term&quot; are the same or seemingly related words? Do they all have a common root? Did they develop independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: right  -  right&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French:  droit  -  droit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German:  rechts -  Recht&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish:  prawo  -  prawo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian: право - право&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish: oikea  -  oikea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mungbam: -ntSEhE-  -ntSEhE (&quot;left/wrong&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know of more examples that have the same connection, you can add them to your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1330" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T04:44:08.593" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T22:09:54.703" Title="Connection between right (opposite of left) and right (legal term)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2555" CreationDate="2012-09-14T16:47:08.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In medieval Christian theology, things that were &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/lh-info/myths.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;left-handed were things that belonged to Satan&lt;/a&gt; (or were corrupted by him). This is where the Latin-derived word &lt;code&gt;sinister&lt;/code&gt; became synonymous with evil (even in Latin &lt;code&gt;sinestra&lt;/code&gt; meant &lt;code&gt;unlucky&lt;/code&gt; as well as &lt;code&gt;left&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;code&gt;Right&lt;/code&gt; being the opposite of &lt;code&gt;left&lt;/code&gt; therefore became associated with &lt;code&gt;good&lt;/code&gt; purely by being the opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historically, the left side, and subsequently left-handedness, was considered negative in many cultures. The Latin word sinistra originally meant &quot;left&quot; but took on meanings of &quot;evil&quot; or &quot;unlucky&quot; by the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in Italian, and in the English word &quot;sinister&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness#Negative_associations_of_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="117" LastActivityDate="2012-09-14T16:47:08.903" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2558" CreationDate="2012-09-15T02:09:29.463" Score="5" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cultures and languages, the future is associated with direction ahead of the speaker, while the past is &quot;behind&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is the opposite in modern Chinese where future is &quot;behind&quot; and past is &quot;ahead&quot; of the speaker. This includes the words of &lt;code&gt;day before yesterday&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;front day&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;day after tomorrow&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;behind day&lt;/code&gt;). As I've been told by a native speaker, it's because you can see your past, but not the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems a rare exception; other Asian and Indic languages follow the common pattern or may contain (less outstanding) idioms like &lt;code&gt;a day [that is] far away&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, &lt;strong&gt;are there other languages/cultures exposing a similar phenomenon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(except the Aymara people in South America that is easy to find over the Web)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-09-15T03:52:19.000" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T07:32:31.257" Title="Perception of time" Tags="&lt;perception&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2012-09-15T03:10:46.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends on the metaphor adopted by the speaker -- not so much by the culture or language, because most of them have many resources available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely the topic taken up by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor#Metaphor_as_foundational_to_our_conceptual_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lakoff and Johnson 1980&lt;/a&gt; (quoting Fillmore), and by &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/lgcs11read/GentnerEA02.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gentner et al. 2002&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-09-15T03:10:46.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2012-09-15T09:41:35.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very examples you list, &quot;day before yesterday&quot; is using &quot;before&quot;, a term that describes something in front of you. The &quot;day after tomorrow&quot; is using &quot;after&quot;, a term that describes something which is at the rear end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-09-15T09:41:35.920" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-15T16:34:47.033" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was unable to find a cuneiform for Sumerian (Akkadian?) ĝir&lt;sub&gt;15&lt;/sub&gt; (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ki-en-ĝir&lt;sub&gt;15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) in the unicode character database (&lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/charts/nameslist/n_12000.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cuneiform namelist&lt;/a&gt;) .. however, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ePSD&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that it has the same cuneiform as eš&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;.. compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/epsd/e2182.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ĝir [NATIVE]&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/epsd/e1415.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eš [FLOUR]&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/epsd/e1416.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eš [ROPE]&lt;/a&gt;, both seem to use &lt;code&gt;U+120A0&lt;/code&gt; &quot;&quot; character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it an example of homographs, or is the story more complicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1332" LastEditorUserId="3637" LastEditDate="2014-05-28T08:14:26.540" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T20:09:32.163" Title="Gir15 cuneiform is esh2 homograph?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2562" CreationDate="2012-09-15T19:13:15.863" Score="3" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at finding the name for the rhetoric style which uses two contradictory statements, one positive and the other negative, with the first seemingly giving a sense of positiveness or neutrality to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are an intelligent person, but everything you think, say or do is stupid.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above sentence, the two parts are contradicting one another, but somehow the first part being flattering makes the second seem less insulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the name for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="682" LastEditDate="2012-09-16T12:45:50.967" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T12:45:50.967" Title="Name for rhetoric expressing a two contradictory meanings in one sentence?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2561" CreationDate="2012-09-16T05:51:25.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a type of &lt;strong&gt;appeal to emotion&lt;/strong&gt;, specifically an &lt;strong&gt;appeal to flattery&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part of the statement is an example of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/antiphrasis.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;antiphrasis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; It can also be considered a &lt;strong&gt;red herring&lt;/strong&gt;, since it is intended to distract from the negative second part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dissoi logoi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but with a different intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/E/enantiosis.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/E/enantiosis.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/antitheton.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/antitheton.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchComment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TV Tropes calls it a &lt;strong&gt;bait-and-switch comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-09-16T06:10:47.663" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T06:10:47.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="385" CreationDate="2012-09-16T08:05:28.913" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Erhua&lt;/i&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-YYYY200503021.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] is a very pervasive example of derivational morphology in Mandarin, most often associated with northern dialects. It's commonly described as a diminutive suffix. Although stereotypically thought of as a feature of northern Mandarin, variants also exist in non-rhotic forms in other varieties [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/q217177163l24358/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dōngxī [tʊ̃ŋ˦.ɕi˦] 'east (and) west'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dōngxi [tʊ̃ŋ˦.ɕiˑ] ~ dōngxīr [tʊ̃ŋ˦.ɕiɻ˦] 'thing'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous example hints at possibly both derivational and inflectional morphology in Chinese, through the neutral tone. The majority of morpho-syllables in Chinese have citation tones, with few that are underlyingly toneless. However, some seem to surface without tone in certain situations. Some Mandarin examples are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Cf. Xiaonan Susan Shen, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03740463.1992.10412273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mandarin neutral tone revisited&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Always toneless&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;de /tə/ 'subordinating particle; genitive particle; nominal modifier'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;le /lə/ 'perfective aspect particle'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ne /nə/ 'interrogative particle; emphatic particle'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ba /pa/ 'jussive particle'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes toneless&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;guò /kwɔ˥˩/ 'to pass'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toneless after a verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(qù /tɕʰy˥˩/ 'to go')&#xA;&#xA;[wɔ˨˩.tɕʰy˥˩.kwɔˑ] 'I've gone there before.'&#xA;&#xA;Contrast: [wɔ˨˩.tɕʰy˥˩.kwɔ˥˩] 'I (will) go (and) pass (through).'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zǐ /tsɨ˨˩˦/ 'child'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toneless after a nominal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(pán /pʰan˩˥/ 'disk-shaped object')&#xA;&#xA;[pʰãn˩˥.tsɨˑ] 'plate, saucer'&#xA;&#xA;(shī /ʂɨ˥/ 'lion')&#xA;&#xA;[ʂɨ˥.tsɨˑ] 'lion'&#xA;&#xA;Contrast: [ʂɨ˥.tsɨ˨˩˦] 'lion child'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One generalization here is that toneless morpho-syllables are semantically weak, are phonetically reduced, and generally behave like clitics/affixes/endings. In any case, they are grammaticalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Chinese might also have been less isolating than commonly thought. I think the consensus today is that Old Chinese derivational morphology, e.g. bound prefixes and suffixes, accounts for tonal correspondence in some word pairs in Chinese today [&lt;a href=&quot;http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/09/69/04/PDF/TOKYO_tone_published.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;] that are comparable to vestiges of PIE ablaut in English, like sing/sang/sung/song. So it might be that Sinitic languages have not moved much on the isolating-synthetic continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also important to keep in mind the nature of Chinese writing, which leads many to assume every character is a morpheme/syllable. Abbreviated characters fused from multiple characters have been attested since Old Chinese, and they may not have always represented monosyllabic morphemes. To illustrate with an analogy, in phonemic scripts, even though the ampersand is one symbol, and it can be read as a single phoneme in most Romance languages today, it would be wrong to conclude that the symbol always represented one sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, however, the evidence we have suggests Old Chinese was highly isolating, Middle Chinese was highly isolating, and modern Sinitic languages are still very isolating, but less so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="1185" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T16:14:06.287" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T16:14:06.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2567" CreationDate="2012-09-16T20:29:10.160" Score="8" ViewCount="1938" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his excellent work, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/cu31924026632947#page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Negation in English and Other Languages&lt;/a&gt; (1917), Otto Jespersen has discovered a pattern that describes how linguistic &lt;strong&gt;negation&lt;/strong&gt; shifts between several stages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negation is expressed by a single negative marker (&lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negation is expressed by &lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; in a combination with a negative adverb or noun phrase (&lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt; takes on the function of expressing negation by itself; &lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; becomes optional;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; becomes extinct and &lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt; expresses negation on its own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm confused with its name. To me, &lt;em&gt;a cycle&lt;/em&gt; is something that repeats over and over. As far as I understood, there's &lt;strong&gt;no evidence of more than a single iteration&lt;/strong&gt; here. It seems that only certain languages (including English) have completed their first iteration, and the others (a majority) have not yet even completed their first iteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the question: &lt;strong&gt;why they called it a cycle&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD&lt;/strong&gt;, thanks to Gaston Ümlaut: The term itself has been suggested by Östen Dahl in his work &quot;&lt;em&gt;Typology of Sentence Negation&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (1979).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-09-17T13:22:08.857" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T13:22:08.857" Title="Jespersen's Cycle - why is it defined cycle?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2541" CreationDate="2012-09-16T21:22:52.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you're asking is probably not answerable, but if we just focus on one area where a lot of work has been done, maybe we can get closer to answering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glottochronology as originally conceived by Morris Swadesh is one approach that tries to answer this question in a specific area. It's very controversial, but a lot of research in this area is built on variants of Swadesh's idea, sometimes in an evolutionary biological or computational context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying assumption in glottochronology is that there is a core vocabulary for any given language that is relatively stable and changes at a constant rate analogous to radioactive decay or gene replacement. Numbers are obtained by considering data from languages whose chronological dates and degrees of separation are fairly well-known (e.g. Indo-European). By mapping the rate of change or retention, language divergence can be measured. The accuracy and usefulness of the results, on the other hand, is much debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these earlier papers might be of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bergland, K., &amp;amp; Vogt, H. (1962). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739527&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the validity of glottochronology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrétien, C. D. (1962). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/411186&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The mathematical models of glottochronology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dyen, I., James, A. T., &amp;amp; Cole, J. W. L. (1967). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/411390&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language divergence and estimated word retention rate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recent works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gray, R. D., &amp;amp; Atkinson, Q. D. (2003). &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/2292/10655&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heggarty, P., Maguire, W., &amp;amp; McMahon, A. (2010). &lt;a href=&quot;http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1559/3829&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renfrew, C., McMahon, A., &amp;amp; Trask, L. (Eds.) (2000). &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ca/books/about/Time_depth_in_historical_linguistics.html?id=M3BsAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;Time depth in historical linguistics&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T21:22:52.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2565" CreationDate="2012-09-16T22:34:24.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001202.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Negation by Association&lt;/a&gt;. It happens all the time. Probably it's unavoidable, given the variety of language changes that can occur over centuries, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/NPIs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;variety of negative expressions&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/CELS-Negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ubiquity of negation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether it's technically a &quot;cycle&quot;, it certainly is a repetitive phenomenon, happening quite frequently. But of course it doesn't happen repeatedly to the same forms; this is the kind of &lt;em&gt;cycle&lt;/em&gt; we mean when we talk about &lt;em&gt;digestive cycles&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like negation by association, digestion happens frequently, and in the same order of events, with similar inputs and similar outputs. But it doesn't &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to be recursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-09-16T22:34:24.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-17T05:59:31.243" Score="3" ViewCount="1304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was studying about LPC (Linear Predictive coding) and in this topic the author was explaining the reasons why LPC is used widely for speech recognition system. One reason he gave was this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The way in which LPC is applied to the analysis of speech signals leads to a reasonable source-vocal tract separation. As a result, a parsimonious representation of the vocal tract characteristics becomes possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is parsimonious representation of the vocal tract characteristics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1314" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-09-17T19:50:32.140" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T19:50:32.140" Title="What does &quot;parsimonious representation&quot; mean in the context of speech recognition?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2565" CreationDate="2012-09-17T13:03:32.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called a 'cycle' because the output at the end of stage 4 is able to feed the input at stage 1 (a single negative marker), so a new cycle could easily begin at this point, with the whole process repeating. This is made explicit by Jespersen in the first paragraph of chapter one of the work cited in the question (&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/cu31924026632947#page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Negation in English and Other Languages (1917)&lt;/a&gt;). Jespersen himself only referred to this as a 'curious fluctuation'; the term 'Jespersen cycle' was coined by Östen Dahl in 'Typology of Sentence Negation' in &lt;em&gt;Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, 17 pp. 79-106.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the pattern has the form of a cycle; but whether or not this cycle actually happens, repetitively, is another question that can be examined empirically, and has been in some depth: see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/schwenter1/horn%20festschrift%20revised.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schwenter&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/om/organisasjon/tekstlab/aktuelt/arrangementer/arkiv/negasjon07/Haegeman_Breitbarth.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breitbarth &amp;amp; Haegeman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.e-cademic.de/data/ebooks/extracts/9783110219296.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dahl&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://webh01.ua.ac.be/linguist/SBKL/sbkl2011/vos2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vossen&lt;/a&gt;, and many others accessible by web search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2012-09-17T13:03:32.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2012-09-18T08:29:23.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible answer may be Mongolian. Alphabets used are: Mongolian script (traditional, Galik, Vagindra, Todo), Phags-pha, Soyombo, Chinese Hanzi, Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mongolian in literature involved a lot of vocabulary originated from foreign languages like Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese which is why Galik alphabets where used at the time. However, everyday Mongolian uses most of these alphabets, because some dialects like Khalkha (official dialect of Mongolia) uses sounds not originally inclusive in the traditional script. Vagindra is the name for the Mongolian script with Buryat dialect-specific alphabets while Todo or Clear script is the one for Oirat dialects. Vagindra had been used and Todo is still officially used in Mongol autonomies in Xinjiang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phags-pha was created by a Tibetan scholar in service of Kublai Khan. It was created on a decree by the Khan. This script was intended to be used officially by the Mongols. However, it had only been used extensively in the court thus there are a lot of documents written in Phags-pha. The alphabets are still used in Mongolia and Tibet for decorative, artistic and religious purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soyombo was created by Zanabazar, a noble khutagt. Late Bogd Khan of Mongolia was the last reincarnated avatar of him. The script is still used extensively in the temples. Also, the first letter in the alphabet made national symbol for Mongolia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is evident that Chinese Hanzi was used for writing Mongolian by transliterating the language. A famous book from the Middle Ages (The Secret History of the Mongols) was first found in a Mongolian edition written using Chinese Hanzi characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic and Persian alphabets where used by the Mongol Empire's presence in the Middle East and the later Ilkhanate dynasty. There are many written documents including stamps and paizs (modern-day passport) issued by Mongol khans and nobles and letters to Pope and other European entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425" LastEditorUserId="425" LastEditDate="2012-09-19T15:02:03.777" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T15:02:03.777" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2572" CreationDate="2012-09-18T23:31:02.517" Score="20" ViewCount="1482" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding... Semantics is the raw meaning and connotations a word carries on it's own and pragmatics is the context-dependent meaning a word holds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate? Can anyone explain it to me simply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1336" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:02:50.623" Title="What divides semantics from pragmatics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2012-09-19T05:07:24.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing much. The distinction is a more or less artificial one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposedly, pragmatics is any part of what we laughingly call the &quot;meaning&quot; of an utterance that can be figured out by the listener. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Presuppositiontriggers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;presupposition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Predicatetypes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;factivity and entailment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Grice.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grice's Maxims and conversational implicatures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Deixis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deixis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and other topics, like speech acts, irony, and politeness. Everything else is semantics. Or so it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is not helpful, since you constantly have to be trying to scry out the mental calculations of various speakers in various situations to tell whether you're studying semantics or pragmatics. This is especially troublesome when semantics gets mixed up with logic -- which is rather like confusing speech with writing, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;logic&lt;/a&gt; is just a written representation for natural semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.uchicago.edu/people/McCawley-Lg.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jim McCawley&lt;/a&gt; put it this way, when he was describing &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.uchicago.edu/people/mccawleyinhiswords.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;his research areas&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics/logic/pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; (it's impossible to talk in any detail about any of these three fields without getting into the other two, so I don't even try to keep them separate). I teach courses on logic from a linguist's point of view, taking a broad view of the subject matter of logic (logic has suffered from 23 centuries of myopia, which I try to make up for) and giving full weight to linguistic considerations in revising (or replacing) existing systems of logic to maximize their contact with natural language syntax and linguistic semantics. (See my book, &lt;em&gt;Everything that Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know About Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask&lt;/em&gt;), University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 1993). I also from time to time teach courses in &lt;strong&gt;lexical semantics, tense and aspect, and speech acts&lt;/strong&gt; (with Erving Goffman sharing top billing with J. L. Austin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I agree with Jim. There's no reason to believe that humans consistently distinguish one kind of information from another, and in fact plenty of reasons to believe they differ greatly in what they take for granted; so the null hypothesis has to be that there is no clear, definitive difference, though certainly there are exemplary cases of one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-09-20T19:25:38.893" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T19:25:38.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2853" CreationDate="2012-09-19T07:03:27.520" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always been interested in examining Tu/Mongour and Bonan language. Mongour is a Mongolic language which is spoken by Mongour people who may be the descendants of Xianbei people who moved from Eastern Mongolia to Gansu-Qinghai to establish Tanghut dynasty or they may be descendants of Mongolians left behind when Yuan dynasty collapsed. Bonan language is also Mongolic and spoken by Bonan people. Yet, interestingly, some of Mongour are Taoist and Bonan are Muslim as opposed by most of the Mongols being Tibetan Buddhist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the percentages of Mongolian, Tibetan, Turkic, Chinese or Qiangic words used in Mongour and Bonan languages? Do someone has the answer or what are reliable resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-09T06:06:56.390" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T06:06:56.390" Title="Are there any extensive study on the vocabulary used in the Mongour and Bonan languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2012-09-19T09:10:52.537" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot talk about semantics without pragmatics and vice versa, but a decent way to cut the cake is a broadly relevance-theoretic view. Semantics is the stable aspects of encoded meaning which are always triggered and make a predictable contribution to the final interpretation (however minimal that encoded stuff might be). Pragmatics is the inferred and non-encoded and non-predictable aspects of meaning. Look at '&lt;em&gt;thoughts and utterances&lt;/em&gt;' by Robyn Carston for a good discussion of all this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1337" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T23:33:43.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:33:43.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2576" CreationDate="2012-09-19T10:19:38.307" Score="6" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there some commonly used abbreviations for &quot;gerund&quot;, &quot;gerundive&quot; and &quot;supine&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1338" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-21T05:51:47.843" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T23:31:10.590" Title="Abbreviations for &quot;gerund&quot;, &quot;gerundive&quot; and &quot;supine&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2575" CreationDate="2012-09-19T13:40:51.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two of those are listed on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:SUP for supine, (use SUPL for superlative if both terms will be employed in one work) and GER for gerund. Neither is found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.ucsd.edu/courses/lign120/leipziggloss.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Conventions&lt;/a&gt;, which is fast becoming a standard in linguistics. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/flin.1982.16.issue-1-4/flin.1982.16.1-4.199/flin.1982.16.1-4.199.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lehmann (1982)&lt;/a&gt; contains a suggestion only for gerund (GER). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ldtc/website/syllabus/sp06/LehmannGlossing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An undated though recent paper&lt;/a&gt; apparently by C. Lehmann suggests OBLG for gerundive with the note (&quot;use obligative&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T23:31:10.590" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T23:31:10.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2012-09-19T13:52:09.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question which has been the subject of many studies. I list just one, below. Traditionally, this question is related to the concepts of Information Density, Syllabic Rate and Information Rate (all of which are discussed and addressed in teh cited paper).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few hypotheses which I hope you will find answers your question - the main reason that they are not &lt;strong&gt;facts&lt;/strong&gt; (although please feel free to disagree) is that linguists tend to disagree on the metrics of information density.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that there is a cross-linguistics &quot;constant&quot; of sorts, in relation to Information Rate. However, this is difficult to prove (for the reasons outlined above), and even within studies, it has been found that the Information Rate is not constant, but rather a range or cline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that, because of the constant, where there is greater Information Density, the Syllabic Density will also increase (and hence the time taken to understand/express ideas will increase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, looking at the paper, it would seem that English, while having a greater Information Rate than, say, Japanese, invalidates the first hypothesis, of a &lt;strong&gt;strict&lt;/strong&gt; constant. The second hypothesis, which is that language limits the Rate within a range of values to &quot;guarantee efficient communcation, fast enough to convey useful information and slow enough to limit the communication cost (in its articulatory, perceptual, and cognitive dimensions).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the data though, one would have to consider context, social and otherwise, that would affect the IR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56c0ff4478492f63.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE ON SPEECH INFORMATION RATE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1339" LastEditorUserId="2081" LastEditDate="2019-10-12T02:08:33.373" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T02:08:33.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="366" CreationDate="2012-09-19T14:10:38.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You make a number of assertions that appear to be unfounded/misguided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only possible alternative to an Ergative SOV language is OSV.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a highly unlikely assertion considering that OSV, OVS, and VOS languages together are attested in &amp;lt;5% of the world's languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, the idea that Ergative/Nominative distinctions would be tied to constituent order is at the very least, confusing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you've asserted about the language is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb is marked using prefixes (head-marking), and;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These prefixes convey the role of the arguments to be Ergative/Absolutive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The clause constituent order would be either SOV or OSV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The affixes are reductions of grammatical pronouns which were, at some point in the past, realised by full lexical items.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, I would draw the conclusions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb is so marked because the Subject argument is always obligatory (or a pro-drop, which you have not specified), whereas the Object argument is not always present, as in the case of single-argument predicates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If word order was important, then in this case, the fact that the verb is final would mean that the arguments of the verb would appear to its left. This means that the Subject would be said after the Object, resulting in the o-s-V construction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for the language now becomeing SOV, I have no explanation (as well as very little familiarity with the language itself). However, I will say that the &quot;unmarked&quot; order in the world's languages (where word order is significant) appears to be one where the Subject precedes the Object: English (SVO), French (SOV), Irish (VSO).&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is probably, again, for pragmatic reasons; the Subject is the most &lt;em&gt;salient&lt;/em&gt; argument in the predicate, it needs to be expressed, whereas the Object, and sometimes even the process, can be inferred from context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1339" LastActivityDate="2012-09-19T14:10:38.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2012-09-20T16:04:31.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My pragmatics professor&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; was fond of the following example: if it is a Wednesday and somebody says &quot;next Thursday&quot;, which Thursday is meant, the one tomorrow or the one next week? What if you don't know what day today is when you hear somebody say that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To oversimplify: Context-dependent meanings sort under pragmatics; meaning you can sort out with the help of a dictionary sort under semantics. The border is &lt;em&gt;rather&lt;/em&gt; fuzzy. Intonation plays an important role though. It is, I think, the trickiest part of learning a foreign language, for instance learning when (if) it is correct to say &quot;please&quot; and &quot;thank you&quot;, and adapting to the other parties in the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: My uni. divided linguistics equally into four parts: phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Phonetics was separate.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T23:34:52.270" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:34:52.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4688" CreationDate="2012-09-20T17:59:01.280" Score="1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lubotsky dictionary gives the word for &quot;road&quot; in PIE as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOM *&lt;em&gt;pónt-h₁-s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACC *&lt;em&gt;pont-éh₁-m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GEN *&lt;em&gt;pnt-h₁-ós&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks strange to me because I would expect a thematic vowel instead of the laryngeal. Can this reconstruction be called &quot;overlaryngealism&quot; or it is a standard reconstruction? Is -eh₁- a suffix with fixed meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T08:51:37.393" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T08:51:37.393" Title="Word for road in PIE and overlaryngealism?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2580" CreationDate="2012-09-20T18:44:48.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like what is commonly reconstructed for the instrumental case in *-Vh₁- (see e.g. Kim, &lt;a href=&quot;http://amu.academia.edu/RonaldKim/Talks/31292/Typology_grammaticalization_and_the_reconstruction_of_the_Proto-Indo-European_case_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2010 lecture&lt;/a&gt; and even &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this could be from road-INSTR, i.e. &quot;by road&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-09-20T18:44:48.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-20T19:59:10.223" Score="10" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder what is the etymology of the word &lt;em&gt;sport&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vasmer says that it is from &lt;em&gt;disport&lt;/em&gt; &quot;amusement&quot;, a contraction from Middle English &lt;em&gt;disporten&lt;/em&gt; from Old French &lt;em&gt;desporter&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to take away&quot;, &quot;to distract from the work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Starostin's Starling gives another etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eng. &lt;em&gt;sport&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Old Eng. &lt;em&gt;spyrd&lt;/em&gt;, Goth. &lt;em&gt;spɔrd-s&lt;/em&gt; &quot;racing&quot; &amp;lt; Proto-Germ. *&lt;em&gt;spurd&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE *&lt;em&gt;sperdh-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;run competition&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives as cognates Hittite &lt;em&gt;ispart-&lt;/em&gt;, Avest. &lt;em&gt;sparǝr-&lt;/em&gt; Old Indic &lt;em&gt;-spūrdhán&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;spárdhate&lt;/em&gt; &quot;competition&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that Vasmer connects Russian &lt;em&gt;spor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dispute&quot; to Avest &lt;em&gt;pǝrǝt-&lt;/em&gt; and Old Indic &lt;em&gt;pŕ̥tanā&lt;/em&gt; &quot;struggle&quot; so that the s- in PIE *&lt;em&gt;sperdh-&lt;/em&gt; could be s-mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also take into account the root *&lt;em&gt;per-&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;first&quot;, &quot;in front&quot;, &quot;against&quot; and Proto-Slavic &lt;em&gt;perdъ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;before, in front of&quot; &amp;lt; PIE *&lt;em&gt;per-dʰ-o&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-09-20T23:40:08.577" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T02:19:41.417" Title="Etymology of the word &quot;sport&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2012-09-21T01:19:46.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to Askalon's answer, there are many examples of phones that are rhotic in one language but not in another (here the phone in [] is an allophone of the // in each language):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɾ] is rhotic in e.g. Spanish /ɾ/, but not in American English /t/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[χ] in French /ʁ/, but not in Spanish /x/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[x] in Brazilian Portuguese, but not in German /x/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɣ] in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haitian Creole&lt;/a&gt;, but not in Japanese /ɡ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[d̠ɹ̝] in &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/utterance-initial-%C9%BE/6781#6781&quot;&gt;Japanese /ɽ/&lt;/a&gt;, but not in English /dʒ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʐ] in Mandarin /ɻ/, but not in Russian /ʐ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʂ] in Scandinavian languages /ɾs/, but not in Russian /ʂ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʋ] in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-labialization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some dialects of English /R/&lt;/a&gt;, but not in Finnish /ʋ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɹ] in various languages, but not in Spanish /s/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʁ] in French /ʁ/, but not in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabardian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kabardian /ʁ/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʀ] in Portuguese /ʀ/, but not in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lakota /ʁ/ apparently&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says Brazilian Portuguese has [r ɻ̝̊ ç x ɣ χ ʁ ʀ ħ h ɦ] as allophones of /ʁ/, most of which are not rhotic in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T05:11:56.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-21T02:04:52.197" Score="8" ViewCount="2242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages lack phonemic glottal stops, but regularly insert them. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English invariably inserts glottal stops before utterance-initial vowels, and often before word-initial vowels when enunciating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ˈɔw　ˈnɔw/ [/ˈɔwˈnɔ́ẁ/] 'Oh no!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also when needed to break up adjacent identical vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ði　ˈir/ [ði̠ˈʔiɰ˞] 'the ear'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Japanese_phonology&amp;amp;oldid=506661712#Glottal_stop_insertion&quot;&gt;Japanese is similar&lt;/a&gt;, except it also allows a glottal stop utterance-finally, especially in emphatic utterances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ee/ [ʔèéʔ] ⟨ええ?⟩ 'huh!?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be an under-studied phenomenon despite its widespread occurrence. Do you have any references comparing how this works in different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T00:21:04.797" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T00:21:04.797" Title="Rules for glottal stop insertion across languages" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-21T02:10:37.983" Score="4" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much of a functional load must a phone carry to be considered its own phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, my idiolect of English has a marginally distinctive glottal stop. However, it exists distinctively in only two words I can think of, both interjections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/ʔju/ [ʔjɨw] &lt;em&gt;eew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, distinct from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/ju/ [jɨw] &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;yew&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;ewe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/hju/ [hj̊ɨw] &lt;em&gt;hue&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;hew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/ˌɐˈʔɐ/ [ˌʔɐˈʔɐ] &lt;em&gt;uh-uh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, distinct from &lt;strong&gt;/ˌɐˈhɐ/ [ˌʔɐˈhɐ] &lt;em&gt;uh-huh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is independent of the common utterance-initial glottal stop insertion before vowels, and /ʔ/ as an allophone of /t/ in British English.) Is two minimal pairs enough to establish a phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T00:23:31.183" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T21:49:17.207" Title="How distinctive must a phoneme be?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2590" CreationDate="2012-09-21T07:00:28.577" Score="12" ViewCount="2235" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 2 common articulations of /r/ and /r̩/ in American English, one retroflex, and the other dorsal. This phone is called the &lt;em&gt;molar&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;bunched&lt;/em&gt; r. It can be described roughly as a back-palatal or pre-velar approximant that's somewhat bunched up along the left-right axis, and it's often labiodentalized when syllable-initial. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38485/how-is-the-pronunciation-of-r-before-th-specific-case-north#comment156658_79367&quot;&gt;RainDoctor cites&lt;/a&gt; John Laver as describing it as a &quot;voiced labial pre-velar approximant with tongue-tip retraction&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been transcribing it ad-hoc as ⟨ɰᶹ˞⟩ or ⟨ɨᶹ˞⟩, using ⟨˞⟩ as an attempt to indicate the bunching that imparts the characteristic sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this seems like an abuse of notation, and it doesn't specify &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the articulatory change is that makes it rhotic; is there a standard way to represent this phone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Asking on Linguistics since it's not about the sound per se, but about the notation for transcribing it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T13:14:38.053" Title="IPA transcription of the American English &quot;bunched&quot; /r/" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2012-09-21T13:19:16.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just by coincidence I opened the latest issue of &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; (88:3) and found on the first page a &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v088/88.3.ariel.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter to the editor by Mira Ariel&lt;/a&gt;, responding to a review of her book &lt;em&gt;Defining Pragmatics&lt;/em&gt; (CUP, 2010). The following statement is found therein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book's main claim is that once we base the grammar/pragmatics&#xA;  distinction on a division of labor between directly ENCODED AND&#xA;  UNCANCELABLE associations between forms and meanings or conditions of&#xA;  use (grammar) and CANCELABLE associations mediated by INFERENCE&#xA;  (pragmatics), 'a unified view of the field can thus be construed' (DP,&#xA;  p. xiv). In other words, I assert the coherence of a pragmatics that&#xA;  is defined as inference, while rejecting as incoherent the older&#xA;  approach to defining the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T13:19:16.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1268" CreationDate="2012-09-21T15:52:18.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because the anatomic phonetic theory is a complete fail. People perceive sounds not dependent on how they are articulated. It is possible to pronounce uvular and alveolar &quot;r&quot; in such way that a listener hardly could determine how the sounds were pronounced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-09-21T18:26:30.910" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T18:26:30.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2587" CreationDate="2012-09-21T17:02:15.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &quot;&lt;strong&gt;bunched or molar R&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; sound is widely acknowledged as existing, but has engendered a &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/bunchedmolar-r.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lot of discussion&lt;/a&gt;, not just about its symbol but its exact articulatory nature and even its acoustic distinguishability from a retroflex r. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you note, this sound is discussed at some length in the original Laver 1994 book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=zxKCbu536Z8C&amp;amp;lpg=PP3&amp;amp;ots=S7yHT7j2rM&amp;amp;dq=laver%201994&amp;amp;pg=PA300#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=molar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Principles of Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Laver himself did not think a satisfactory symbol existed and proposed the symbol &lt;strong&gt;ψ&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=meRZfK_JjykC&amp;amp;lpg=PT217&amp;amp;ots=wEWNpZTHvr&amp;amp;dq=voiced%20labial%20pre-velar%20approximant%20with%20tongue-tip%20retraction&amp;amp;pg=PT217#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=voiced%20labial%20pre-velar%20approximant%20with%20tongue-tip%20retraction&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trask 1996&lt;/a&gt; gives this as &lt;strong&gt;Ψ&lt;/strong&gt;). Laver also suggested potentially using the tongue-root-retraction symbol  ̙  (Unicode Combining Right Tack Below) but in a superscript position -- for which there is no Unicode symbol -- in combination with &quot;an existing approximant symbols of suitable lingual and labial attributes&quot;. Tellingly, in my opinion, he didn't give an example of what that proposal would look like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mjb0372/index0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin Ball&lt;/a&gt; in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache:7rmPrZsi3qMJ%3aclinicallinguistics.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/poster_2_york.docx%20&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;gl=us&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEESjQX3Bdys20OcO9RnrEkA1SbS-BTm9lssbRAXp-gy_R28iWV0DKz-QnLgRlP62_aVkrzi_UnEEI7Qn1e0Pqk-wY5P7M-zraO6_amoge3C5iiBubRHEIV14yl1aBbzBry6gidUqj&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbTVLZQ4ZjOrOqgu_8Hnql6x46Aepg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2011 poster&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://clinicallinguistics.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/poster_2_york.docx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[&lt;em&gt;link to original Word document&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/a&gt; has proposed &lt;strong&gt;ɹ̈&lt;/strong&gt; (alveolar approximant with the centralization diacritic) which seems reasonable, and has the advantages of being expressible in Unicode and not requiring a non-IPA symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-09-22T13:14:38.053" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T13:14:38.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2012-09-21T22:17:44.800" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is that we do not know (and possibly never will). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of theories, such as Eurasiatic mentioned in Anixx's answer, and Nostratic (I wasn't aware that there was a theory that includes both of these), but none of them is widely accepted by linguists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-09-21T22:17:44.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2012-09-22T04:32:02.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Newspeak&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a &quot;deliberately impoverished&quot; language designed to prevent people from communicating &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;and thinking about&lt;/a&gt; subversive ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that example is fictional, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Orwell also discussed politicized use of &lt;strong&gt;vagueness&lt;/strong&gt; and other obscurantist rhetorical techniques&lt;/a&gt;. While that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; still communicating ideas, (some of) the ideas are being communicated through choices in the use of language, rather than through the literal meaning of the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is consciously choosing to use/avoid certain words to make a political statement or a statement about group affinity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Politically correct&quot;&lt;/a&gt; language, intended to show you are trying to avoid offending various groups&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And as a reaction, intentionally using politically incorrect language (as well as the term &quot;politically correct&quot; itself).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender-neutral language: avoiding certain constructions perceived as causing offense by applying masculine forms to everyone. Also, proposing new gender-neutral pronouns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terms of abuse: besides demonizing outsiders, abusive terms can be used to reinforce group identity. Examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ethnic slurs&lt;/a&gt;, insulting terms for political opponents, foreigners, rival sports teams, etc.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reappropriation: approvingly using these terms can be a political statement, resulting in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reclaimed term&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In-groups may use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;argots&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and jargon understood only within the group, as a component of group identity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simply using terminology that presupposes the position of one side of a political debate. Examples:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_dispute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;territorial disputes&lt;/a&gt;, using one side's language's name for the territory. Examples:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Argentine sources referring to the Falkland Islands using the Spanish name &lt;em&gt;Malvinas&lt;/em&gt; when writing in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean and Japanese sources using &quot;Dokdo&quot; and &quot;Takeshima&quot; respectively instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liancourt_Rocks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the usual English name&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calling or refusing to describe the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian Genocide&lt;/a&gt; as such&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using or refusing to use various countries' preferred names&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Republic of China / Taiwan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Democratic People's Republic of / North Korea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Myanmar / Burma&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A republican Welsh MP who doesn't &quot;recognise the Queen&quot; referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Queen Elizabeth II&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4060043.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Mrs. Windsor&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. This was in a debate on national security (not on the form of government).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shibboleths&lt;/a&gt; can be used to identify outsiders, often not by the content of the utterance, but by how the speaker uses (or is unable to use) the insiders' language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-political sort: using forms of language to convey respect (or by refusing, lack thereof).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many languages maintain a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;T-V distinction&lt;/a&gt; in 2nd-person pronouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The well-developed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;honorific speech system (&lt;em&gt;keigo&lt;/em&gt;) in Japanese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-09-23T14:46:51.033" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T14:46:51.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-22T12:26:19.863" Score="4" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perhaps this question has been asked before, I may have looked for the wrong terms then because I haven't found the answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know more about the usage of the present tense in sentences expressing the future. What is it called? Does it really express future in the same way as the future tense would? Or is there a nuance? Is it a wide spread phenomenon across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially interested at this practice in French, as with the examples below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Je déménage demain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Je vais manger avec Nicolas ce soir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T15:52:08.207" Title="What is the present tense expressing future?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;present&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2600" CreationDate="2012-09-22T13:44:35.637" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French past participle (&lt;em&gt;participe passé&lt;/em&gt;) is easily inferable with regard to first and second group verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;manger -&gt; mangé&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  finir -&gt; fini&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if there is any way to infer the ending of the French past participle of third group verbs? Can it be inferred at all? If so how? What explains the various endings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T20:15:13.373" Title="Are there ways to infer the ending of the French past participle?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-02-12T10:59:59.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2012-09-22T14:37:52.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Language can be used for prayers so that the meaniong of prayers not lost in translation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Languages are used for singing. Some languages are associated with particular genres, for example Italian is associated with opera.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For expression of scientific topics that cannot be expressed in vernacular language (Latin in medieval Europe)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For writing high-style literature and poetry (high-style Kyrghyz as opposed to vernacular variant, book Norwegian)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some sources claim that metropoly language in colonial countries serves as an instrument of oppression, so that for a successful carrier one have to learn a foreign language&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, in some Baltic states state language is used to exclude ethnic minorities (mostly Russians) from political life and deprive them of citizenship.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-09-23T04:03:14.127" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T04:03:14.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2012-09-22T18:35:23.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;General and fairly short answer: Indo-European languages generally have two tenses: past and non-past. The non-past (what you call the present) can be used for the future, though depending on the language other means might be preferable when speaking about the future, e.g. English prefers to use an irrealis mood marked by the modal verb &quot;will&quot; (which, I might add, can also be used for the present and past, e.g. &quot;He'll be there by now&quot; and &quot;He would [past tense form of will] go later&quot;). But you can also use the plain non-past tense in some situations, such as where a future seems tangibly close, e.g. &quot;The sale begins tomorrow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that while in English tense and aspect are relatively orthogonal (two tenses x three aspects) other Indo-European languages might be more complicated. E.g. Proto-Indo-European had only four tense-aspect combinations: stative (would become the perfect), perfective (aorist), and past and non-past imperfective (imperfect and &quot;present&quot;, respectively). In such a case the future would probably use either the perfective or the subjunctive mood, rather than the &quot;present&quot;. It's very possible this system (or mutations) exists in some modern Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2012-09-22T18:49:43.590" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T18:49:43.590" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2594" CreationDate="2012-09-22T20:15:13.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional categorization of conjugations in French is pretty messy, since it's modelled on the Latin paradigm but with many exceptions. The third conjugation is really a catch-all category for the messy verbs that evolved in distinct ways. Outside of those uniquely irregular verbs, there are groups of verbs you can discern patterns for, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-dre (except -indre, -oudre) &amp;gt; -du&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This applies for battre too, although it otherwise conjugates more like mettre.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;battre -&amp;gt; battu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-indre &amp;gt; -int&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-uire &amp;gt; ui(t)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tenir/venir &amp;gt; tenu/venu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical sound change from Vulgar Latin coupled with Celtic/Germanic influence made French stand out from other Romance languages. Factor in also paradigm levelling, often applied inconsistently. Stress was an important factor, culminating in a stress accent system that eventually disappeared. The various vowels are however a remnant of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the present alternations, which may seem more like exceptions, could be seen as remnants of much more extensive system of alternations in the past that evolved from conditioned sound changes. For example, all the -indre verbs in French are reflexes of or modelled on Latin Vngere (joindre &amp;lt; iungere), whereas prendre/rendre were from prehendere/*rendere respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have also been extensive dialectal differences in French, leading sometimes to lexical items being borrowed in fossilized form, occasionally levelled out by analogical change. Cf. oi ~ ai (François vs. français), VllV vs. VlVV (faillir vs. falloir).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-09-22T20:15:13.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-23T02:39:25.290" Score="3" ViewCount="6731" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I speak or write I tend not to speak in absolutes. I generally use phrases like &quot;I think&quot; or &quot;I don't think&quot; a lot. Further, I usually qualify my statements with words like &quot;generally&quot; or &quot;usually&quot;. Funny - I'm doing this even as I write this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this simple habit, or are there studies that show this means something about my person (e.g., I'm insecure or sensitive to hurting others' feelings, etc.)? If it's a bad indicator, feel free to share anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a aloud to post an answer because of my lack of reputation points, so I'll put it here because this might be helpful to someone else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shared this question with a friend of mine with a degree in psycholinguistics. She answered with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, what you're doing is &quot;softening&quot; your speech and using what we call a &quot;feminine&quot; speech style, although the research shows that it's not gender-specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/~grpproc/crisp/crisp.1.6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.uiowa.edu/~grpproc/crisp/crisp.1.6.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It tends to happen when someone's trying not to be too dominant or to assert themselves over anyone else. People are most likely to use these hedges when they're with a peer or with someone who's in authority over them. You're less likely to use them when you're talking to your kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1343" LastEditorUserId="1343" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T03:48:14.800" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T21:30:48.433" Title="What does it mean if a person says, “I think” a lot" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2609" CreationDate="2012-09-23T04:13:45.473" Score="4" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deuten#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;deuten&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle High German diuten, from Old High German diuten, from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*þiudijanan&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;  Cognate with Dutch duiden, Icelandic þýða (“translate”), Swedish tyda, Danish tyde. &lt;strong&gt;Related to Deutsch&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Deutsch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deutsch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the German word for &quot;German;&quot; &lt;strong&gt;see Dutch&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dutch#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dutch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English Duch (“German, Low Countryman”), from Middle Dutch dūtsch, duutsc (modern Duits (“German”)), northern variant of dietsc (compare modern Diets (“Dutch language”)), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*þiudiskaz&lt;/strong&gt; (compare German Deutsch (“German”), Old English þēodisc (“of the people”)), from &lt;strong&gt;*þeudō&lt;/strong&gt; ‘people’, from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*tewtéh₂&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See also Derrick, Teuton, Teutonic.&#xA;  Middle Dutch duutsc is the result of i-mutation (umlaut) typical of central dialects (Brabantine) while dietsc shows the merger of iu with io and weakening to [iə] typical of coastal dialects (Flemish). This led to doublets which split in meaning during the Renaissance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/tewt%C3%A9h%E2%82%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;tewtéh₂&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noun&#xA;  *tewtéh₂ f&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;people, tribe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to &quot;Deutsch&quot; means they are cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are, the semantic change from &quot;tribe&quot; to &quot;interpret&quot; seems confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T00:49:57.583" Title="Why does German word &quot;deuten&quot; mean &quot;to interpret&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2606" CreationDate="2012-09-23T07:54:28.740" Score="4" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=benison&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;benison&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c.1300, &quot;blessing, beatitude,&quot; from O.Fr. &lt;strong&gt;beneiçon&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;blessing, benediction,&quot; from L. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;benedictionem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (see benediction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=malison&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;malison&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; comes in the exact way described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is it a regular sound change? Such as a sound law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T03:48:10.823" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T05:04:26.117" Title="How does the sound change from L. &quot;benedictionem&quot; to O.Fr. &quot;beneiçon&quot; happen?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2012-09-23T08:29:34.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know in French we just call it &quot;présent à valeur de futur&quot;. &lt;em&gt;La grammaire du français contemporain&lt;/em&gt; (Larousse) calls if le &quot;présent traducteur du futur&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is always used with an adverb depicting time as in both your sentences: &lt;em&gt;demain&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ce soir&lt;/em&gt;, etc. We only use the present tense with a future value when the action, although situated in the future (be it close or more distant in time), has already been definitely decided upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="637" LastEditorUserId="637" LastEditDate="2012-09-23T15:52:08.207" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T15:52:08.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2604" CreationDate="2012-09-23T14:27:14.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks mostly regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (classical) Latin &lt;em&gt;benedictiōnem&lt;/em&gt; /benediktioːnẽ/. In Western Romance, changes that would apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intervocalic voiced obstruents like /d/ tend to get elided: /edi/ &gt; /ei/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plosives in the coda get vocalized (when followed by another plosive): /ikti/ &gt; /ijti/ &gt; /iti/. Compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=authority&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;authority&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt; Old French &lt;em&gt;auctorité&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;auctoritas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close vowels lose their syllabicity when adjacent to other vowels: /eitioː/ &gt; /ejtjoː/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tj/ gets affricated to something like /tsj/, as in &lt;em&gt;-tion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin endings like /ẽ/ often fall off or get reduced&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining these sound changes, we get something like /benejtsjon/. (The sound /ts/ was often written &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies for /malediktioːnẽ/ &gt; /malejts(j)on/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why the /j/ after /ts/ is lost here; it might be idiosyncratic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T14:27:14.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2012-09-23T14:31:08.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm french, I think I can complete other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's called &quot;présent à valeur de futur&quot;, it express future the same way a future would, for some sentences it would sound less &quot;french&quot; to use future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your examples :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Je déménage demain.&#xA;Je vais manger avec Nicolas ce soir.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would actually sound weird in future :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Je déménagerai demain.&#xA;Je mangerai avec Nicolas ce soir.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this case the present tense is perfectly suitable. Wikipedia gives you some details about the case where you must use the &quot;future simple&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futur_simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futur_simple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not 100 % sure of that, but to my humble opinion when some action is certain and fixed in the future, it's better to use the present, the future expresses rather a project (in the case of an action in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nous nous marierons dans un an.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggests that not date has been defined, the project is here, but the event is still unclear about the when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nous nous marions dans un an.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggests that I can ask where and when it's plan to occured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &quot;aller&quot;, doesn't let such details be expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nous allons nous marier dans un an.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't hesitate to ask for confirmation, I'm french so the theory of French is not clear for me, but I know what is used or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1346" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T14:31:08.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2601" CreationDate="2012-09-23T17:54:13.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL. However I've thought about this myself because I use qualifiers a lot in the same manner you do. Your friend's theory is probably the most common, but I think it's completely wrong. Example: I don't have any sense of social hierarchy. I talk to my 3-year old sister the same way I talk to any adult, including the profuse panoplies of &quot;I think&quot; and &quot;I dunno.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what those hedge words mean is &lt;em&gt;precision&lt;/em&gt;. In particular, linguistic precision with respect to the environment. You say &quot;I think&quot; because you're expressing something about the real world. In that real world, you aren't 100% sure about that something, so it would be a misrepresentation of reality to imply that you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think &quot;I think&quot; implies both precision and a particular respect/perspective of the world, which may be two sides of the same coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1123" LastActivityDate="2012-09-23T17:54:13.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2602" CreationDate="2012-09-24T00:02:08.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The semantic extension goes like this: &lt;em&gt;tribe&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;explain to the tribe&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;interpret&lt;/em&gt;. I expect the Hungarian case mentioned by @daf to have an analogous derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T00:02:08.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-24T05:32:45.567" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any experiences of reintroducing a writing system to a language? If so, what may be the challenges since the spoken language and the writing system may have been diverged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-24T07:42:04.447" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T07:42:04.447" Title="How much effort can be caused linguistically to reintroduce a writing system to a language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2613" CreationDate="2012-09-24T23:25:17.600" Score="22" ViewCount="17942" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two terms used for pairs of words (in the same or different languages) that look similar but are actually unrelated: &lt;em&gt;false friend&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;false cognate&lt;/em&gt;. Are these terms synonymous? If not, what's the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T13:11:14.520" Title="What's the difference between a &quot;false cognate&quot; and a &quot;false friend&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2612" CreationDate="2012-09-24T23:25:17.600" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Definitions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;False cognates&lt;/strong&gt; are words that are similar in their modern forms despite having different etymologies. This is regardless of whether the modern meanings are similar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;False friends&lt;/strong&gt; are words that are similar in their modern forms despite having different modern meanings. This is regardless of whether the words are etymologically connected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;True cognates, true friends&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words with a common etymology and modern form and meaning. These are extremely numerous, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banana#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Banana&lt;/em&gt; in numerous languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;True cognates, false friends&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words with a common etymology but which have shifted to have different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Embarrassed&lt;/em&gt; 'feeling publicly shamed' in English, and &lt;em&gt;embarazado&lt;/em&gt; 'pregnant' in Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/susi/ &lt;em&gt;sushi&lt;/em&gt; 'dish containing sushi rice' in Japanese, and &lt;em&gt;sushi&lt;/em&gt; 'prepared raw fish' in colloquial English; in this case the meaning shifted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymically&lt;/a&gt; when it was borrowed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;smoking&lt;/em&gt; 'inhaling tobacco smoke' in English, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smoking&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;smoking&lt;/em&gt; 'tuxedo' in Czech/Danish/French/Italian/Polish/Serbo-Croatian/Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, another metonymic borrowing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;False cognates, true friends&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words etymologically unrelated that nevertheless now have similar meanings (typically by coincidence, but sometimes by influence/reinforcement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancient Greek /tʰea/ versus Latin /dea/ (differing in voicing), both meaning 'goddess', are true friends but false cognates. In meaning, both relate to deities, but they actually derive from different Indo-European roots (*/dhes/- and */deiwós/ respectively).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese &lt;em&gt;obrigado&lt;/em&gt; and Japanese &lt;em&gt;arigatoo&lt;/em&gt; both mean 'thank you'. Due to Portuguese contact with Japan a borrowing would be plausible, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/5480/did-%E3%81%82%E3%82%8A%E3%81%8C%E3%81%A8%E3%81%86-come-from-portuguese-obrigado&quot;&gt;in fact they're etymologically unrelated.&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/5480/did-%e3%81%82%e3%82%8a%e3%81%8c%e3%81%a8%e3%81%86-come-from-portuguese-obrigado#comment13796_5481&quot;&gt;In fact the word &lt;em&gt;arigatoo&lt;/em&gt; is attested since the 8th century as a compound from Japanese roots, and meaning 'thanks' since the 15th century, both before the Portuguese reached Japan.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Within a language, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppletion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suppletive&lt;/a&gt; verb forms may be this; for example English 'be' and its forms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crapper&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Crapper&lt;/a&gt;, popularizer of the flush toilet, and &lt;em&gt;crapper&lt;/em&gt; 'toilet'. Presumably Crapper's name is not actually derived from &lt;em&gt;crap&lt;/em&gt; 'feces', and &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; is a common derivational suffix for 'thing which is used to ...', but having his brand name placed on toilets likely reinforced the use of &lt;em&gt;crapper&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Expressive_loan&amp;amp;oldid=494859468&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Finnish &lt;em&gt;tytinä&lt;/em&gt; 'wobbliness' looks like a derivation from &lt;em&gt;tutista&lt;/em&gt; 'to wobble' (Finnish /u/ and /y/ alternate due to vowel harmony), but is a actually derived instead from Russian &lt;em&gt;stúden'&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: &lt;em&gt;cash&lt;/em&gt; (money), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cash&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Middle French &lt;em&gt;caisse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_%28Chinese_coin%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cash&lt;/em&gt; (Chinese coin)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=cash&amp;amp;oldid=18999431#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reportedly from Tamil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mbabaram_language&amp;amp;oldid=505343472#Word_for_.22dog.22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; 'dog' in Mbabaram (an Australian Aboriginal language)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; in English. The Mbabaram word is &quot;pronounced almost identically to the English word&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;False cognates, false friends&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are completely unrelated words that happen to look similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek &lt;em&gt;κάππα&lt;/em&gt; 'the letter κ' and Japanese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_%28folklore%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/kaʔ̩pa/ (transliterated &lt;em&gt;kappa&lt;/em&gt;) 'water sprite'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese &lt;em&gt;galinha&lt;/em&gt; [ɡəˈɫi.ɲə] 'hen' and English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;galena&lt;/em&gt; [ɡəɫˈi.nə] 'PbS'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Complications&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reinforcement and language contact. In the case of false cognates/true friends, if the two languages are in contact, or it occurs within a single language), the similar meanings tend to reinforce each other. They will possibly even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppletion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;be re-analyzed as forms of the same word&lt;/a&gt;, thereby merging the lexemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;False &lt;em&gt;recent&lt;/em&gt; cognates that are true cognates more distantly. Example: Malay &lt;em&gt;nama&lt;/em&gt; 'name' might look like a loanword from English &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; (Malaya was a British colony), but it is actually an older loanword from Sanskrit (cognate to the English via Proto-Indo-European).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-analysis: false-cognate words may have their spelling altered to match the form of a true friend in the other language. English examples: &lt;em&gt;indict&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;victuals&lt;/em&gt;, from French but with elided Latin consonants re-added. Spelling and pronunciation are borrowed via different paths, so the &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; could be considered cognate though the pronunciation is not. (In this case, both are more distantly cognate via Latin; the French words were sound-changed.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calques or loan-translations&lt;/a&gt;: the form of the word is cognate, but its components are often not. Example: Latin &lt;em&gt;insecta&lt;/em&gt;, Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;ἔντομον&lt;/em&gt; 'insect', from different roots meaning 'cut'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2012-12-24T02:28:28.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2617" CreationDate="2012-09-24T20:46:47.533" Score="15" ViewCount="1368" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and spoken English, and sign language is a &quot;visual&quot; language in the same way that written English is.  Also, homonyms and homophones would be entirely analagous, if these are considered different langauges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the only reason they could be considered the same language, is that they follow each other so closely. That is, there are many one-to-one literal translations between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction is relevant in natural language processing contexts, because it would mean that &quot;understanding&quot; a language and &quot;translating&quot; between languages would be distinct problems.  I believe that this could reduce the problem space substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, I am not the first person to think this, but as I have no formal training on the subject; I'm not sure what the real story is.&#xA;So, &lt;strong&gt;Are written and spoken languages considered distinct?  If not, why not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1356" OwnerDisplayName="John Gietzen" LastEditorUserId="87" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T16:14:53.353" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T11:53:35.893" Title="Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;diglossia&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2012-09-24T21:12:19.203" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign languages and spoken languages are both real, natural languages, learnable and normally learned automatically by children -- without any special training -- &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; they are used in the speech community the children grow up in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written languages, however, are always representations of some &lt;strong&gt;spoken&lt;/strong&gt; language; one has to be specially trained in the technology of literacy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogy is horses &lt;em&gt;vs&lt;/em&gt; cars -- horses are natural, cars are technological. Horses have drawbacks and limitations compared with cars as a means of transportation, but one big advantage of horses is that they can make more horses without a factory, or even any education. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that most people in a community are literate does not automatically result in the children of that community becoming literate, the way a common language generates new speakers (or signers). They have to go to school -- no school, no literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they all speak or sign, whether they're literate or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" OwnerDisplayName="jlawler" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T21:12:19.203" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2012-09-24T21:22:16.763" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can surmise, written and spoken are not quite two distinct languages. A written language and a spoken language are, in general, two different media of communication. What keeps them from being distinct, however, is that a written language is a representation of a spoken languages. Each word in a written language corresponds to a word in a spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_language&quot;&gt;wiki article&lt;/a&gt; on written language states this in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children; children will pick up spoken language (oral or sign) by exposure without being specifically taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A written language exists only as a complement to a specific spoken language, and no natural language is purely written. However, extinct languages may be in effect purely written when only their writings survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in effect, a written and a spoken language are two separate representations of the same language. In theory a human language can exist with only one or the other--the Iroquois languages are among the most famous languages which historically have no written form. But because of the one-to-one correlation of words, they are best thought of as a pair, in effect constituent to what we call a single language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sign language, on the other hand, does not have a one-to-one correlation to any spoken language. Moreover, American and British Sign Languages are two entirely different languages, even though they are both spoken in English speaking countries. A sign language is neither a written nor an orally spoken language. Each one is a language of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="phoenixheart6" LastActivityDate="2012-09-24T21:22:16.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2012-09-25T00:29:26.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written English comes in many varieties. When people write like they speak, their written language is more or less a transcription of what they say orally. When they write the kind of formal expository prose that is usually required for PhD dissertations, they write a variety that normally follows rules that speakers don't follow when they speak. This frequently yields stuffy, stilted prose -- what's often derisively called &lt;em&gt;academic prose&lt;/em&gt;, and represents the worst side of the language: verbose, boring, complex, pretentious, and just plain undecipherable (cf. &lt;em&gt;postmodernist parlance&lt;/em&gt;) -- or clear, easy-to-grok prose. Formal written English is a separate language only in the sense that it must conform to rigid rules laid out in great and sometimes confusing and conflicting detail and arbitrary rules in style manuals -- and not all style manuals agree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the grammar anxiety about language comes from confusing the spoken and written forms. Although they are essentially the same language, they are different varieties and require some different skills, and proficient speaking doesn't guarantee proficient formal writing (and vice versa). I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Jefferson wasn't a good speaker. He certainly was an excellent writer of formal expository prose, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language taught in textbooks is a written language and usually artificial. When I studied German, I was assured that what my textbooks taught me was something called &quot;Schuldeutsch&quot;, a language found only in textbooks and not on the lips of native speakers of German. When I studied Japanese, I was assured that my textbooks were teaching me something called &quot;Nihongo&quot; and not the everyday language spoken by the Japanese in Japan. When I started teaching English as a foreign language, I decided that the textbooks I was using were teaching students an artificial variety of English -- and listening to the tapes and CDs that accompanied those texts confirmed how phony that variety of English was, so I started writing all my own materials using my idiolect and using &quot;authentic&quot; English as spoken and written by other native speakers (TV news reports mostly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers provided here are excellent. I especially like John Lawler's sentence &quot;... we might even think of English writing as corresponding to a dialect of English that has not been spoken anywhere since around 1500.&quot; That just about sums up the difference between spoken and written English. Most of us don't speak like we write or write like we speak. Speaking is natural and a naturally acquired skill; writing is an unnatural act and mechanical and &quot;must be carefully taught&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Bill Franke" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-09-25T02:19:05.367" LastActivityDate="2012-09-25T02:19:05.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2620" CreationDate="2012-09-25T04:49:02.337" Score="11" ViewCount="49275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always had trouble with the distinction between the &quot;e&quot;-like vowels in European languages: &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;. But pronouncing them the same has never caused me any problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I don't even know whether my English &quot;short e&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;. I seem to recall it varies by English variety, even for IPA use (I always use &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; for English IPA). In my idiolect there may even be some kind of merger. &quot;Head&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/hEd/&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;haired&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/hEːd/&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt; could be either &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ɛ&lt;/code&gt; - I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'm in Korea trying to improve my Korean. Up until now I had always pronounced &quot;ㅐ&quot; as &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;ㅔ&quot; as whatever my English &quot;short e&quot; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lately people have been correcting me and telling me &quot;ㅐ&quot; should be what to me sounds like &quot;short e&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having done some reading I find Korean doesn't have &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; as I'd thought, but has two contrasting vowels that would both fall into the &quot;short e&quot; category for my idiolect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;ㅐ&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;ㅔ&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I learn to distinguish these sounds correctly, both for listening and speaking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I learn it for Korean it will also help for my linguistics generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there some minimal pairs in Korean I can practice with with my native Korean speaking friends here? (It's not easy trying to explain to non-linguists with imperfect English what minimal pairs are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-09-25T05:03:31.730" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T07:05:48.607" Title="How to distinguish Korean &quot;ㅔ&quot; /e/ and &quot;ㅐ&quot; /ɛ/?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2619" CreationDate="2012-09-25T05:48:37.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a book called &lt;em&gt;The Sounds of Korean&lt;/em&gt; [1] with an accompanying CD which is invaluable for getting the phonetic distinctions right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mechanical snail is right in that the distinction is being lost, particular among the young. However, in speakers who maintain the distinction, it sounds like a lowered [e]. I had a little look on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt; for examples of speakers who maintain the distinction, but all the ones I checked were from people who merged the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for basic minimal pairs, explain to your friends that you're interested in the difference between 새 (&lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt;) and 세 (combining form of 셋), and they should be able to come up with more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I have a few more minimal pairs for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;게 &lt;em&gt;crab&lt;/em&gt; vs 개 &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;세 집 &lt;em&gt;three houses&lt;/em&gt; vs 새 집 &lt;em&gt;new house&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also observes that while the distinction is not reliably made by many speakers, there is a kind of consistency when transcribing English words: English [æ] is reliably mapped to ㅐ while [eI] and [E] are mapped to ㅔ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Choo and O'Grady. &lt;em&gt;The Sounds of Korean&lt;/em&gt;. University of Hawaii Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T07:05:48.607" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T07:05:48.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2619" CreationDate="2012-09-25T10:47:05.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the minimal pairs of more than one syllable that I could find in the English Wiktionary using a custom application I wrote in JavaScript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;모레&lt;/strong&gt; (more)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the day after tomorrow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;모래&lt;/strong&gt; (morae)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;sand  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;새로&lt;/strong&gt; (saero)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;anew, newly, for the first time  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;세로&lt;/strong&gt; (sero)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;height, length, vertical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found twenty minimal pairs of just a single syllable that I'll include if requested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried the &quot;crab v dog&quot; test &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2620/51&quot;&gt;mentioned by jogloran&lt;/a&gt; with some Koreans here in Seoul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two guys in their 20s who I think are from Seoul both insisted they sound the same.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another friend who is about 40 and not from Seoul insisted they sound different. He pronounced &quot;crab&quot; with a short sound like in English &quot;bet&quot; and &quot;dog&quot; with a long sound like in non-rhotic English &quot;bear&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently both the vowel length distinction and the ㅔ vㅐ distinction are in the process of disappearing and it's happening in Seoul before elsewhere. This is pretty much just what Wikipedia says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T08:05:49.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2630" CreationDate="2012-09-25T16:02:10.210" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen many cases when people who speak different languages make a common mistake spelling words. They &lt;strong&gt;add an extra sound&lt;/strong&gt; (usually, a consonant) while there is no historic or linguistic evidence this sound is necessary nor it was there in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thai: โรตี &lt;code&gt;[roː tiː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;(a kind of puff pastry)&lt;/em&gt; spelled as โรต&lt;b&gt;รี&lt;/b&gt; [roː t&lt;b&gt;r&lt;/b&gt;iː]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ukrainian: прецедент &lt;code&gt;[prɛ t͡sɛ dɛnt]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;precedent&lt;/em&gt; spelled as пре&lt;b&gt;н&lt;/b&gt;це&lt;b&gt;н&lt;/b&gt;дент [prɛ&lt;b&gt;n&lt;/b&gt; t͡sɛ&lt;b&gt;n&lt;/b&gt; dɛnt]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  English: drawing spelled as it was &quot;draw&lt;b&gt;r&lt;/b&gt;ing&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Thai case is especially interesting since an opposite pattern is very common: consonants are often &lt;strong&gt;omitted&lt;/strong&gt; from the consonant clusters: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;กลัว [k&lt;b&gt;l&lt;/b&gt;uːə] &lt;em&gt;to be afraid&lt;/em&gt; spelled as กัว &lt;code&gt;[kuːə]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ใคร [kʰ&lt;b&gt;r&lt;/b&gt;ɑi] &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; spelled as ใค &lt;code&gt;[kʰɑi]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it might be somehow related to how people produce sounds generally, but I'm not sure what to start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the mistake is very common, does it have any common origin?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there any research on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T10:33:45.090" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T10:33:45.090" Title="Intrusive misspelling - does it have any origin?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2870" CreationDate="2012-09-25T23:04:32.143" Score="15" ViewCount="1116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike English, Ancient (e.g. Attic) Greek does not reorder words to formulate a question. The particle &quot;ἆρα&quot; does modify a statement into a question, but is not always present. In that case, I presume there would have been a way for native speakers to hear the difference, perhaps in a change in overall intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What device did spoken Ancient Greek employ to signal a question when the particle ἆρα was not used?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are no native speakers of Ancient Greek around, I imagine having a definite answer to this question is impossible. In that case I would be happy with an educated guess, or a pointer towards current scholarly debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1000" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-05T06:45:33.143" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T06:45:33.143" Title="Did Ancient Greek have a rising intonation for questions?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-26T04:48:11.327" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine posted the following on his Facebook wall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm paraphrasing myself when I say this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this isn't a paradox, is it autological? Is it recursive? Is it even a true statement? If he had said &quot;I'm expressing myself when I say this...&quot;, it's at least self-descriptive, but I'm not sure when it comes to &quot;paraphrasing&quot; because that seems to imply a shortening of the original statement. Can anyone shed some light on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1352" LastActivityDate="2012-09-26T04:48:11.327" Title="Is &quot;I'm paraphrasing myself when I say this...&quot; autological?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-26T19:42:26.630" Score="-1" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing an NLP research, trying to extract concepts/names from phrases, I need your help defining all rules for doing so, so i can feed them onto the computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example rules I observed:&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;if a preposition is followed by a Noun, then that noun is a concept&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ex:&lt;em&gt;in toshka, it's always sunny&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Concept&lt;/strong&gt;: toshka   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; &lt;em&gt;if  Verb, 3PS present is followed by Noun, then that Noun is a concept&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-ex: &lt;em&gt;how old is Ron ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;Concept&lt;/strong&gt;: Ron   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an so on, notice that i can't take all nouns blindly, consider this example:&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;when will the dark knight rises be released ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;the concept here is &lt;strong&gt;the dark knight rises&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not a noun.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;hope my question is clear, I need all language/grammar rules that you (as a human) use to identify entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1354" LastEditorUserId="1354" LastEditDate="2012-09-27T13:45:30.197" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T19:35:01.433" Title="concept/name extraction rules" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2631" CreationDate="2012-09-27T02:42:13.257" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to create an utterance in synthetic speech which is devoid of prosody? Or if no such synthetic speech system exists, would there be a way to filter an existing utterance to remove the intonation contours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="899" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-09-27T13:07:39.153" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T13:44:34.820" Title="Is there a way to create synthetic speech with no intonation contours / prosody?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-27T14:50:47.153" Score="5" ViewCount="3038" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always thought that the response to pain, which people usually express with 'ouch' or 'ow' is a natural response which is the same for all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although spelled differently the same and similar words are used in German and Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after learning Afrikaans (where 'eina' is used) it seems to me that these verbal expressions are something that is taught and not a natural response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do the English expressions come from, and why are the Afrikaans/Dutch expressions different since they are all Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1358" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-09-28T05:57:15.187" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T23:35:13.617" Title="Exclamation for pain" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;interjections&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2012-09-27T16:00:25.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a well known phenomenon called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very common in all languages. For example, thunder &amp;lt; thunor, athlete pronounced 'æ thuh leet', &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;intrusive r in non-rhotic dialects&lt;/a&gt;, it goes on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon of &lt;em&gt;losing&lt;/em&gt; a phoneme is just as, if not more, common and is simply called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;contraction or elision&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, probly &amp;lt; probably, not &gt; -n't, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lenition&lt;/a&gt;, slurring and mumbling of all kinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T01:51:44.150" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T01:51:44.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2627" CreationDate="2012-09-28T13:44:34.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to continue the thread of my comment under the original question, but I figured I might as well turn it into an answer and not have to deal with the word limit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so-called &quot;rule-based&quot; speech synthesis systems out there that can yield output with any kind of desired F0, but it sounds like what you are really looking for is a commercial text-to-speech program that takes text as input and allows you to control the pitch of the output. The important distinction here is that in order to use the former you need to know how to do speech synthesis from &quot;scratch&quot; and manipulate all of the relevant parameters, which I'm assuming is not the case for you! As for the latter, I'm not aware of any such systems that are commercially available at this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an alternative solution is to use the Praat Manipulation features. Here are a couple of tips to minimize distortion in the manipulated tokens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll want to avoid manipulating the F0 of segments that contain&#xA;voiced frication noise, like [z] and [v]. The problem with such&#xA;segments is that they contain voicing with an audible pitch that&#xA;you'd want to manipulate, but the manipulation doesn't work so well&#xA;when there is frication noise mixed in and you get some weird&#xA;distortions as a result. I'm not sure if you have control over the&#xA;segmental makeup of the stimuli you are creating, but if you do it's&#xA;best to construct utterances that don't contain such segments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If possible, you should avoid manipulating speech that has extreme F0 excursions (i.e. a very wide pitch range) to begin with, as the more you &quot;stretch&quot; the pitch of speech, the less natural it will sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll want the input recordings (if they are indeed recordings) to be as clean as possible, with minimal external noise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this does the trick! If you have problems with unwanted distortions or noise, let me know some specifics (like what kind of noise and the context in which it is occurring) and I'll try to recommend ways of avoiding it or getting rid of it after-the-fact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2012-09-28T13:44:34.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-28T13:56:56.890" Score="17" ViewCount="14957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious what could have caused the shift in pronunciation. I presume it must have occurred after the spelling of words was standardized. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French&quot;&gt;History of French&lt;/a&gt; wikipedia article, this happened in the transition to Middle French around 1500 and to Early Modern French around 1700. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1362" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-20T21:08:24.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T06:20:19.463" Title="Why don't the French pronounce consonants at the ends of words?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2626" CreationDate="2012-09-29T08:28:08.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about your &quot;The Dark Knight Rises&quot; example and I was thinking &quot;well, if it was properly capitalized then it's obvious that it's a title of something.&quot; Then I thought &quot;but it wasn't capitalized and I still knew. How can I tell it's a title, even if I didn't have real world knowledge that it's a movie?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the ways I can tell it's a title is because of the way it's embedded in sentence. On the surface it's an embedded CP but it is taking the place of a DP. That got me thinking about how syntax might help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should read about the double object construction. The current view of double objects was first put forth in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25164901?uid=2&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;sid=21101218033001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;On Double Object Construction&quot; by Larson (1988)&lt;/a&gt;. I can't find a full version online for free but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/cls/s2001v2n1/runner_urwpls_v2n1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these lecture notes&lt;/a&gt; that I found should give you the main ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you generate a syntax tree it should be easy to pick out the arguments you want. Although I have never used it before today, I've been playing around with &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Standford Parser&lt;/a&gt; and it looks like you might be able to adapt it to your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the Stanford Parser was able to identify &quot;the dark knight rises&quot; as an NP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ROOT&#xA;  (SBARQ&#xA;    (WHADVP (WRB when))&#xA;    (SQ (VBZ does)&#xA;      (NP (DT the) (JJ dark) (NN knight) (NNS rises))&#xA;      (VP (VB come)&#xA;        (PRT (RP out))))&#xA;    (. ?)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T08:28:08.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2619" CreationDate="2012-09-29T08:50:41.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't add anything to the discussion from an academic point of view but I wanted to share my personal experience as an intermediate-level Korean-as-a-second-language speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was taught &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to pronounce the ㅔ and ㅐ differently but my teacher said that since young Koreans don't distinguish between them there wasn't much point to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅔ is a relaxed mouth shape (same as for pronouncing ㅓ) while ㅐ is more of a wide, smiley mouth shape (same as for pronouncing ㅏ). Pronouncing them back to back I can notice subtle differences, but they are quite similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to contrast the difference between these two vowels with the different between ㅓ and ㅗ. These too differ only by mouth shape (relaxed vs. rounded, respectively). In very limited contexts in casual and colloquial speech I've noticed that these vowels too are occasionally substituted for each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-09-29T08:56:17.677" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T08:56:17.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-29T12:35:01.093" Score="8" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/combined/102A/81A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;According to WALS&lt;/a&gt;, most languages using SOV as basic order of subject, object and verb have some kind of personal agreement markers. As far as I know, these affixes rise by grammaticalization of clitic personal pronouns, when the clitics are adjacent to verb. However, that seems problematic to me, because in case of developing personal preffixes, object prevents affixation of subject pronoun to verb, and in case of suffixes, postion of suffix doesn't match position of its ancestral pronoun in SOV languages. I know two possible solutions of this problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;earlier OSV word order - as far as I know, that is word order attested (or reconstructed) in eralier historical stages of Turkic and Mongolian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SOV transformed to VSO, with clitic personal pronouns for both subject, and object, like in case of modern spoken French. Order of clitics and verb reflects former SOV word order.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two explanations the only possible options? Or perhaps some other possibilites are attested, or at least theorized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1364" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-09-30T12:35:25.260" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T15:11:10.173" Title="How do SOV languages develop agreement affixes on verb?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;polypersonalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2012-09-29T13:19:21.733" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Weakening of consonants (typically stops &gt; fricatives &gt; approximants &gt; nothing) is a process which has affected many languages at many times. It's particularly noticeable in French because, as you say, the orthography predates the change; but the same is true for certain patterns in English (most words that contain 'gh', for example, and for non-rhotic accents such as most dialects of England, 'r' after a vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is slightly unusual in French is that final consonants have often been lost &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; where followed by a vowel - it's much more common to find consonants lost between vowels, and indeed this happened in French earlier, eg Lat. &lt;em&gt;credere&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Fr. &lt;em&gt;croire&lt;/em&gt;. But the fact that the process has mostly affected only word-final consonants means that it is a different process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-09-29T13:19:21.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-09-30T21:30:36.447" Score="4" ViewCount="2773" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of all the languages for which there is sufficient data, including extinct languages, which vocalic speech sound, or phone, as represented by the IPA, has been used most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="489" LastEditDate="2015-05-19T04:17:37.960" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T04:17:37.960" Title="What is the most common vowel?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-04-27T11:10:31.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2012-10-02T06:00:45.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The demonstratives like この &quot;kono&quot;、その &quot;sono&quot;、あの &quot;ano&quot; are used similarly to determiners in English.  In terms of meaning these three accomplish the same as the prenominal English demonstratives: this, that, and that ~ [over there] respectively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are however other parts of this set beyond the prenominals listed above which can serve a similar function to demonstrative pronouns in English, これ &quot;kore&quot;, それ &quot;sore&quot;, あれ &quot;are&quot; definitely do not act like determiners, instead taking the place of nouns grammatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other parts of the same series serve a function close to adverbs, こう &quot;kou&quot;, そう &quot;sou&quot;、ああ* &quot;aa&quot;.  The last of these is, in my experienced highly restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would be hard pressed to classify the latter two as determiners of nouns, as they do not serve that grammatical function.  The three, while different in purpose definitely exist in a similar semantic area in Japanese with regards to referencing space relative to the speakers of a conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be reluctant to name the first set as determiners just because they look similar to those used in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T06:00:45.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1850" CreationDate="2012-10-02T06:23:02.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So.  I just conferred with my Japanese co-worker about your example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that Japanese does not permit instrumental subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English sentence &quot;The scissors cut the paper.&quot; can not be expressed as, &quot;*ハサミが紙を切る”　(hasami ga kami o kiru) grammatically.  Instead it must be spoken with a non-subject instrument &quot;ハサミで紙を切る” (hasami de kami o kiru) The difference is between が (ga) the subject marker and で (de) the instrument marker.  The subject is grammatically absent from the latter example, but if explicitly stated would be a person or other agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed to him the possibility of motorized scissors that automatically cut paper without human intervention and he found this grammatically acceptable as per the first example, but then the instrumentality comes into question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1370" LastActivityDate="2012-10-02T06:23:02.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-02T09:47:36.130" Score="1" ViewCount="2954" Body="&lt;p&gt;We should presume that the phrases &lt;em&gt;&quot;fuck your mother&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;fuck your mother smelly cunt&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;mother-fucking bastard&lt;/em&gt;&quot; existed in the Chinese alt-cultural vocabulary for centuries in various dialects, having a high frequency of usage when the need for profanity arises. May be, I need to verify with people who speak the language/dialects. It is accepted that the term &lt;code&gt;mother-fucker&lt;/code&gt; in English originated in the United States around the 1970s and not earlier than the 1960s. And that it was popularised by African American gangsters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am proposing that the English term &lt;code&gt;mother-fucker&lt;/code&gt; came into existence due to the confluence of Chinese and African-American cultures. I am theorising that its existence is due to among other such confluences, the interaction and/or cooperation between Chinese Triads and African American gangs which started to occur in the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the scenario - a botched co-operation between an African-American and their Chinese counterpart - so the Chinese gangster yells at his African American partner &quot;Fuck your mother&quot;. Or a racist Chinese grocery store owner, shooing away Blacks he feels are not in his shop to spend money. So, the African-American yells back, &quot;Fuck your mother, you mother-fucker.&quot; And the phrase took off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am arriving at this scenario, because of my personally having witnessed a  verbal altercation between a Chinese. Malayalam and Sinhalese man in the far-east in the 1970s. where the Indian men each yelled back, &quot;Fuck your mother, you mother-fucking bastard&quot;, in response to the Chinese man's yelling &quot;Fuck your mother&quot;. I mean, these three men were actually friends but they somehow got into this amazing deprecation match. Which means, I personally witnessed the English term &lt;code&gt;mother-fucker&lt;/code&gt; used in one instance in the early 1970s, not in the US, but in the far-east, by three English-speaking Asian compatriots of different ethnicity in a recreational verbal-bantering match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, my observation and theory would be disagreeable to many African-Americans who claim that the term is purely of African-American origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what triggered the existence of the term in English? Did African-Americans use the term in the 19th century? Is the term purely of African-American origin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1371" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T03:57:45.727" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:57:45.727" Title="Influences of the origins of the phrase &quot;Mother-fucker&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-02T20:38:03.877" Score="5" ViewCount="1226" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of the Latin suffix -alis/-alia? Can it be an Etruscan borrowing? Is Russian adjectival suffix -аль- a borrowing from Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T05:50:36.520" Title="What is the origin of the Latin suffix -alis/-alia?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-04T17:03:47.970" Score="5" ViewCount="1498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get the topic of a sentence, i.e what a sentence is talking about (not the grammatical subject which may be different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OpenNLP in Java which is giving me sentence detection, POS tagging, parsing, tokenizer and Name Finder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MatlParser,stanford Parser - which can give the grammatical subject of a simple sentence by dependency parsing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a noun or a noun phrase will always be the topic in a more general sense, but a sentence can have many nouns and noun phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A complex or compound sentence may have more than one subject which could be considered as the topic of sentence in that case I want to get any one of them. I am looking to get the answer upto some accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1376" LastEditorUserId="1376" LastEditDate="2012-10-04T18:19:25.893" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T12:47:48.333" Title="Locating a sentence's topic" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;linguistic-determinism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3042" CreationDate="2012-10-04T20:00:36.823" Score="8" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard time and again that languages will reject words and structures that are redundant. That is, for example, if though two words may seem like they are perfect synonyms (e.g., rotund and corpulent), we will find that they actually differ slightly in meaning or register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to make sense: Redundancy would be troublesome. But is it really impossible? I present a case where I think there is redundancy. Perhaps there are also others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish imperfect subjunctive&lt;/strong&gt;. In Spanish, there are two forms for the imperfect subjunctive, one using the morpheme -ra (e.g. &lt;em&gt;contara&lt;/em&gt;) and the other using -se (e.g. &lt;em&gt;contase&lt;/em&gt;). They seem to be exactly equal in meaning and register, with -ra being more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This question confirms this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/487/is-there-any-subtle-difference-between-the-two-forms-of-the-imperfect-subjuntive&quot;&gt;Is there any subtle difference between the two forms of the imperfect subjuntive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as well as the article &quot;-Ra vs. -se Subjunctive: a New Look at an Old Topic,&quot; which appeared in &lt;em&gt;Hispania&lt;/em&gt; in 1993 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and more recently &quot;The Semantic Value of Verbal Forms in -ra and in -se of Past Imperfect and Pluscuamperfect of Subjunctive in the Spanish of Venezuela,&quot; which appeared in &lt;em&gt;Nucleo&lt;/em&gt; in 2005.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of redundancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, could it be the case that the -ra form is becoming more popular as a form of differentiating the two forms? After all, when the -se form is rarer, its sociolinguistic properties change (it may be more prestigious, feel more antiquated, etc.). But if this is true, why did the -ra form get chosen and not the -se form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we make of this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="908" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T02:58:28.043" Title="Is redundancy in language really impossible? (Case of the Spanish imperfect subjunctive)" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2646" CreationDate="2012-10-04T23:31:17.383" Score="8" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me (but I may be wrong), that languages tend to evolve towards simplification. Some examples I can think of: loss of declinations in Romance languages or in English, loss of 2nd person specific conjugation in Portuguese (plural in Portugal, singular and plural in Brasil).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could imagine that such processes continue until a language starts loosing its expressive power.&#xA;But it seems that languages are not yet all super-simplified. Some complexity is retained to some extent, depending on the language, and even created (for instance, the double negation in French: &quot;Je ne sais&quot; -&gt; &quot;Je ne sais pas&quot; (which may actually be undergoing a simplification: -&gt; &quot;Je sais pas&quot;)).&#xA;What causes languages to sometimes accept new complex features? Aren't the speakers prone to a natural laziness that should oppose to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose my question is highly dependent on what &quot;complexity&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1379" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T03:06:58.767" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T03:06:58.767" Title="Why do languages retain or re-create complexity?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;complexity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2645" CreationDate="2012-10-05T04:21:12.840" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suppose my question is highly dependent on what &quot;complexity&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, so I hope you forgive me for first spending some time with this issue, before considering your actual question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For decades, if not longer, linguists have been avoiding the notion of complexity in language, usually with the hand-wavy argument that all languages are &quot;equally complex&quot; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't without reason; the question as to what aspects make language complex is notoriously difficult to answer. Also, one wanted to avoid getting into the sort of speculation that scholars like Humboldt had been engaging in in the 18th and 19th centuries, which often involved ranking languages from &quot;primitive&quot; to &quot;civilised&quot;. Of course, it was conjectured, those &quot;primitive people&quot; would also be the ones to speak &quot;primitive&quot; languages which lacked not only complexity but also (subsequently, it was thought) the full range of expressivity that European, and especially classical, languages had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now know that these ideas could not have been further from the truth. Of course we can express any thought, no matter how complex, in any language of the world; it would be possible, for example, to reason about Quantum Mechanics in an indigenous language of the Amazonian, if one cared to borrow all the technical terms. And in no way has it been shown that &quot;primitive people&quot; somehow lack power of expression or linguistic complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are nowadays starting to reconsider the question of linguistic complexity, even if we still don't know how to actually define it. We may try to narrow it down by, for example, only considering morphological complexity and saying that English is morphologically simple and Chinese even more so, but one could sometimes also argue that lack of morphological complexity - e.g. cases - has to be &quot;compensated&quot; elsewhere, e.g. in syntax. For example, a language with a case system tends to have a less rigid word order, so it may be easier to express notions like information structure (what is highlighted, what is previous knowledge, and so on) whereas English with its almost nonexistent case system often requires special constructions like clefts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there are also clear cases of complexity that do nothing to &quot;enhance&quot; the language: The irregularity of a lot of English verbs, the numerous declination paradigms in Czech or the seemingly (?) logically inconsistent verbal agreement patterns in Kiranti languages do not seem to be &quot;required&quot; in any way. So we can maybe call that &quot;unnecessary&quot; or &quot;superfluous&quot; complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarise, there is now growing interest in complexity in the area of linguistic typology, but we still have a lot of unanswered questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to your question itself: We know a lot about how languages evolve, but to this day, theories as to why this happens (and why sometimes it doesn't) are still quite speculative. William Labov wrote a 4-volume book called &lt;em&gt;Principles of Linguistic Change&lt;/em&gt; which tries to address exactly this issue, but it is still perhaps the only comprehensive work in this area yet, plus it is very limited in its scope in that it is restricted to mechanisms of sound change. Whether the same mechanisms apply to morphosyntactic or lexical change is a matter of debate.&#xA;So, again, we don't really know anything about the fundamentals of language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do however have some basic insights that may help answering your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laziness and sloppiness (in performance) are actually not (or not always) the mechanisms that makes languages simpler; often they tend to make languages more complex. When speakers are lazy they tend not to pronounce words well and not to articulate what can be inferred from context anyway. This is for example what leads to contractions of often-used forms, making them irregular. Don't confuse shortness with complexity - a longer form can in many cases be simpler than a short, ambiguous one (arguably, agglutinative markers are simpler than the shorter fusional ones, by virtue of being more transparent).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People simplify words that are not often used (by analogy etc.), maybe because they cannot remember the correct form or because it's so uncommon that &quot;it doesn't sound right&quot;. On the other hand, with words that are very frequent, we don't necessarily see a need to simplify them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually, I think the question might be more: why &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; we simplify? Why does language have to evolve at all? Naïvely, the null hypothesis would be that it simply doesn't - only we know that for some reason it does, and why this is the case is still not well understood (and that's what Labov addresses in &lt;em&gt;PoLC&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems to be the case that, contrary to what people like Humboldt believed, it's actually the smaller languages of &quot;more primitive&quot; societies that tend to be more complex. This has been hinted at by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121140347.htm&quot;&gt;some recent studies&lt;/a&gt;. One reason why this might be the case is that isolated language communities usually have a very low proportion of non-native speakers. Since adults learn languages less easily than children, there could be an impetus for simplification of linguistic structure in languages that have a lot of non-native speakers like English or Chinese. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a similar vein, we have known from dialectology for a long time now that the most rapid and consequential linguistic changes happen at the center of a language community than at the borders. This is probably because at the center there is more intense contact between different dialects/variations than there is outside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if what I write here makes any sense. I'm mainly reciting from memory, I've read about some of this stuff but it's been a while and I don't have a lot of references handy. So anyone feel free to correct me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastEditorUserId="1380" LastEditDate="2012-10-05T06:47:14.123" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T06:47:14.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2643" CreationDate="2012-10-05T04:50:11.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the comment to your post that this cannot be done perfectly (or even near perfectly) unless computers get a lot better at &quot;understanding&quot; meaning, I'd still say there are a number of heuristics you'd be able to use. Of course, putting them together in a way that it yields useful results would mean a lot of trial and error; actually it might be simpler to use machine learning techniques than to try to hand-craft specific rules. Also consider that you have to be explicit about what you mean by &lt;em&gt;Topic&lt;/em&gt;. It is one of those terms that has been used so often, by so many different scholars, that you cannot be sure what it actually means unless you try to provide a precise definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, here are some patterns I would try to look for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronouns tend to be topics more often than full noun phrases, determinate noun phrases more often than indeterminate ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Topics are often high on the animacy hierarchy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes, special constructions are used to highlight the topic of a sentence. In English, you can use &lt;em&gt;topicalization&lt;/em&gt; where you just put the topical element at the front of the clause (which becomes apparent, when it is not the subject - e.g. &quot;&lt;em&gt;Him&lt;/em&gt; I saw yesterday&quot;), but there are also other strategies, like using the &quot;as for&quot; construction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Topics are often continued across sentences, and when the topic is switched we also resort to a number of strategies to make that clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and so on ... a lot of it will also depend on the language. For example, in some languages (like Japanese or Korean) you have special topic markers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T04:50:11.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2012-10-05T05:22:09.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, generative notions of word classes don't seem any less whimsical to me than the classical ones, as they are no less biased. Of course, this will be a matter of hot debate, but I side with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/Preestablished.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Haspelmath&lt;/a&gt; (and a lot of other typologists as well, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~bickel/research/papers/21century_typology_bickel_submitted.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bickel (2007)&lt;/a&gt;) who claims that there is no such thing as true cross-linguistic categories. To ask whether Japanese does have the same linguistic category that a completely unrelated language, English, has (maybe, if 'determiner' even is a valid category for English) seems absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question would be easier to answer if we had a clear, operationalised definition of &quot;determiner&quot; that can be readily applied to all sorts of languages (but I doubt anybody could come up with that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T05:22:09.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2012-10-05T05:41:35.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, &lt;strong&gt;traditionally&lt;/strong&gt; examples like A and B would just be considered homonyms, that is as two separate lexical entries which consequently are also allowed to have different plurals. There are other examples for this in other languages. Somebody mentioned German &quot;Wort&quot; (although in that case the meaning distinction is slowly getting lost, I think), &quot;Bank&quot; (with the plural either 'Banken' or 'Bänke', depending on the meaning) is another example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C (and part of B) seems to me to just be free or regional variation. I don't see the connection to A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course, theories of lexical semantics differ in many regards and you will find other people using different terminology or analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T05:41:35.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2664" CreationDate="2012-10-05T10:00:30.243" Score="6" ViewCount="687" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/finna#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;finna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Old Norse &lt;strong&gt;finna&lt;/strong&gt;, from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*finþanan&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Germanic/fin%C3%BEanan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;finþanan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*pent-, *penth-&lt;/strong&gt; (“to go, pass; path, bridge”). Cognate with Latin pons (“bridge”), Old Indian pánthā (“way, path”). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related also to Old High German fendo, fendeo (“pedestrian, footsoldier”), Old Saxon fāþi (“walking”), Old English fēþe (“locomotion, walking, gait, pace”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Descendants&#xA;  Old English: findan&#xA;  Scots: find, fynd&#xA;  English: find&#xA;  Old Saxon: findan&#xA;  Old Dutch: *findan&#xA;  Dutch: vinden&#xA;  Afrikaans: vind&#xA;  Old High German: findan&#xA;  Middle High German: vinden&#xA;  German: finden&#xA;  Old Norse: &lt;strong&gt;finna&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Icelandic: &lt;strong&gt;finna&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Faroese: &lt;strong&gt;finna&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Swedish: &lt;strong&gt;finna&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Danish: finde&#xA;  Norwegian: &lt;strong&gt;finne&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Gothic:  (finþan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess there must have existed some common changes in the Old Norse branch, for the daughter languages of that branch altogether lost the &quot;d&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what the name of these phenomena?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-15T22:40:17.680" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T16:10:44.883" Title="How does the Icelandic word &quot;finna&quot; come from Proto-Germanic &quot;finþanan&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2012-10-05T10:56:11.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A reason that English might be &quot;simpler&quot; in some terms (whatever that means, the notion is not easy to define; English is certainly quite simple morphologically, phonologically it's quite difficult, I'd say) might be its widespread usage: There is some evidence that language with a high proportion of non-native speakers tend to reduce complexity. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2645/why-do-languages-retain-or-re-create-complexity&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; on a more general question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-10-05T10:56:11.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2657" CreationDate="2012-10-05T12:40:54.817" Score="15" ViewCount="4086" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; While writing a document about foundations of computer science and describing that a number is a sequence of digits, I was wondering about our relation to the decimal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English counting goes like this: &amp;quot;one&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;two&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;three&amp;quot;. If we create a number with 2 digits, the number might be called &amp;quot;forty-two&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Forty&amp;quot; is an alias for 4‧10&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and &amp;quot;two&amp;quot; adds 2‧10&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt;. So it refers explicitly to the decimal system, because neither &amp;quot;forty-two&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;ten&amp;quot; exists in binary&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The language uses decimal-based aliases. &amp;quot;Dreizehn&amp;quot; (3+10 = 13) and &amp;quot;quatre-vingt trois&amp;quot; (4*20+3 = 83) are instances of the same concept in German and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cerberus has pointed out that Aztecs and Babylonians have used different number systems from the very beginning which of course became part of the spoken language (radix &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.temple.edu/%7Ezit/Native%20American/9%20Aztecs_num.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.twsu.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#babylonian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;60&lt;/a&gt;). A nice hint, but I am interested in modern, spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Which modern, spoken languages do not use the decimal system&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;? I would be happy to be able to find 2 to that kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52494/how-do-you-pronounce-numbers-written-in-different-bases&quot;&gt;How do you pronounce numbers written in different bases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: It might be a valid point that &amp;quot;ten&amp;quot; is an alias for 1‧10&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; + 0‧10&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; and therefore &amp;quot;ten&amp;quot; can also be applied to the binary system with 10&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; = 2&lt;sub&gt;10&lt;/sub&gt;, but that is pretty uncommon and I am not sure about it. Correct me if I am wrong. See related link.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2: With &amp;quot;language without the implication&amp;quot; I mean &amp;quot;the pronunciation of a number is only a concatenation of the pronunciation of the individual digits&amp;quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T22:57:10.473" Title="Which modern, spoken languages do not use the decimal number system?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-05T21:03:14.467" Score="10" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people in computational linguistics seem to mention the unexpected power of trigram (or 2nd order Markov) models for language modeling. For instance, it has been stated (verbally) to me on several occasions that trigram models outperform &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PCFG&lt;/a&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good source to cite for trigram models being something of a standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good source to cite for the claim that trigram models outperform more complex models such as PCFGs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone ahead and started a bounty for this question: even just one good reference will help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="899" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T11:53:04.570" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:53:04.570" Title="The power of trigram language models (2nd order Markov models)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2658" CreationDate="2012-10-05T23:30:04.027" Score="4" ViewCount="5206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://intro2gl.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/derivational-vs-inflectional-morpheme.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;derivational/inflectional&lt;/a&gt; morpheme distinction particularly significant to linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is it &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; significant for languages other than English, which I think is less &quot;inflected&quot; than most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I've already asked two questions there, but I'd also be interested to know how English compares to other languages in terms of how much it uses &lt;em&gt;derivational&lt;/em&gt; morphemes as opposed to &lt;em&gt;inflectional&lt;/em&gt; ones (I'm assuming English is called a weakly inflected language because it uses few inflectional morphemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-21T03:12:49.597" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T04:52:39.433" Title="Derivational vs. Inflectional Morphemes" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2012-10-06T02:39:37.970" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;WALS has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/131&quot;&gt;chapter&lt;/a&gt; on numeral bases. It appears most languages use either a decimal or a vigesimal (base 20) system (or some mixture thereof, as in Basque), with other patterns being relatively rare. There are also some language that cannot actually express all possible numbers but only a limited set. Pirahã is even claimed not to have any numerals at all (but every claim about Pirahã should be taken &lt;em&gt;cum grano salis&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T02:39:37.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2012-10-06T03:08:19.967" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Englishes, and many other well-known languages, use base 10 (ie decimal) systems of numerals. But there are many languages in the world that currently use different systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eugene Chan has been studying the numeral systems of the world's languages for many years and his website &lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Numeral Systems of the World's Languages&lt;/a&gt; contains a vast amount of information on this topic. I think a quote from Eugene's introduction is useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The surviving thousands of the world's ethnic groups use a variety of&#xA;  different numeral systems: duodecimal systems, decimal systems,&#xA;  quinary systems, quaternary systems, ternary systems, binary systems,&#xA;  incomplete decimal systems, mixed systems, body-part tally systems and&#xA;  so on. Certain South American indigenous languages even only&#xA;  distinguish the numbers &quot;one&quot; and &quot;many&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Orokaiva.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orokaiva&lt;/a&gt; (Trans-New&#xA;Guinea): digit-tally system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Fas.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fas&lt;/a&gt; (Kwomtari): binary system (base 2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Pazeh.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pazeh&lt;/a&gt; (Austronesian):&#xA;quinary (base 5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Amis.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amis&lt;/a&gt; (Austronesian): decimal (base 10)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Ron-Chadic.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ron&lt;/a&gt; (West Chadic): duodecimal (base 12)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Barapasi.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barapasi&lt;/a&gt; (East Geelvink Bay): vigesimal (base 20)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Meyah.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meyah&lt;/a&gt; (East Bird Head-Sentani): mixed-quinary/vigesimal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="1282" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T22:57:10.473" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T22:57:10.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2655" CreationDate="2012-10-06T14:36:55.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is quite important to any linguist. There is a certain grey area between the two, but there are many clear cases of both. And they have &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; different characteristics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot;&gt;handout on the distinction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-John Lawler, from France but unable to sign on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1384" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T14:36:55.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2064" CreationDate="2012-10-06T18:00:57.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutinative languages can be non compounding, like Turkish for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a contrast, Hungarian and Finnish are compounding languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also German and Dutch are compounding, they are, however not agglutinative, but flective languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1385" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T18:00:57.787" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2012-10-06T21:16:11.223" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &quot;theory&quot; is by no fact of any kind supported, purely the child of some irrealistic phantasy of persons, who unjustifiedly think, they understand anything from linguistic. Such stuff is simply laughable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1385" LastActivityDate="2012-10-06T21:16:11.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T00:07:06.677" Score="5" ViewCount="2067" Body="&lt;p&gt;Practicing immediate constituent analysis using a &quot;toy&quot; context-free phrase structure grammar of English is a great way to introduce undergraduate students to syntactic analysis. In the context of a course in English syntax, the following sentence came up as controversial, with different plausible parses considered. Do community members have a consensus parse for this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mysterious wizards concoct potions cleverly in the early morning if the sun rises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1386" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-08T13:13:13.417" LastActivityDate="2013-08-04T18:56:45.513" Title="Immediate constituent analysis" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2650" CreationDate="2012-10-07T02:01:25.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of these look like regular sound changes between Proto-Germanic and Old Norse. However, I have found no eponyms for these sound changes, if that was what you were asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Loss of word-final /nan/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_Germanic_languages&amp;amp;oldid=516166594#Unique_North_Germanic_features&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia gives&lt;/a&gt; this as an example of an innovation in North Germanic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General loss of word-final /n/, following the loss of word-final short vowels (which are still present in the earliest runic inscriptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;bindanaN&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; *&lt;em&gt;bindan&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; Old Norse &lt;em&gt;binda&lt;/em&gt;, but &amp;gt; Old English &lt;em&gt;bindan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying this rule to *&lt;em&gt;finþanan&lt;/em&gt; gives *&lt;em&gt;finþa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Assimilation of /nþ/ to /nn/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a regular sound change in Old Norse. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20090305100852/http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/%7Emarisal/ie/ngmc.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Marisa Lohr&lt;/a&gt;, one of its characteristic innovations is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Development of /lth/ and /nth/ to /ll nn/ eg. ON finna, past pl. fundinn &amp;quot;to find&amp;quot;; ON gull, OE gold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same phenomenon appears in many other ON words, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C7%ABnn#Old_Norse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tǫnn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'tooth', from Proto-Germanic *&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/tan%C3%BEs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tanþs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gunnr#Old%20Norse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;gunnr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'war' from *&lt;em&gt;gunþiz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;munnr&lt;/em&gt; 'mouth' from *&lt;em&gt;munþaz&lt;/em&gt;. (Note that English instead lost the /n/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T02:01:25.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2012-10-07T03:13:15.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually I had believed we had fully debunked this theory here some time ago. I thought we had found that the theory was posited by a certain individual linguist but was never accepted. I just had a look around the site looking the name of this linguist, but it seems my memory has deceived me and I can find no such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I did find what I had not been able to find when I first asked some questions on this topic here. I found a Wikipedia article which covers the topic and includes a list of linguists who contributed to the development of the theory!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Drift (linguistics)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, contains a section titled &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_%28linguistics%29#Long-term_cyclic_drift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Long-term cyclic drift&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cyclic &lt;strong&gt;drift&lt;/strong&gt; is the mechanism of long-term evolution that changes the functional characteristics of a language over time, such as the reversible drifts from SOV word order to SVO and from synthetic inflection to analytic observable as typological parameters in the syntax of language families and of areal groupings of languages open to investigation over long periods of time. Drift in this sense is not language-specific but universal, a consensus achieved over two decades by universalists of the typological school as well as the generativist, notably by Greenberg (1960, 1963), Cowgill (1963), Wittmann (1969), Hodge (1970), Givón (1971), Lakoff (1972), Vennemann (1975) and Reighard (1978).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T03:13:15.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-07T06:27:57.877" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mongols are a tribal society: they form numerous tribes and clans. During feudalistic periods, there were political categorizations. During Qing rule, tribal units were used to define political units in some Mongol areas. There is of course a sophisticated interrelations scheme between these tribes and their origins. There are also differences between dialects spoken by the tribes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Mongolia, some of the tribes are Khalkha, Dorbet, Bayid, Khotgoid, Darkhad, Torghut, Khoton and many others. The population in Mongolia is highly homogenized. Khalkha is the most populous tribe and some other tribes like Darkhad, Khotgoid, Dariganga and Sartuul are Khalkha-ized. Other tribes like Torghut and Zakhchin maybe Khalkha-ized as well. The point is that the traditional tribal system and dialectic differences don't hold anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the situation in Inner Mongolia and other Mongol regions like Khukh Nuur and Ili? I know there are as well many tribes in Inner Mongolia like Sunid, Urad, Kharchin, Khorchin, Chakhar, Ordos and many more. Does the tribal and dialectic differences still hold or is the Mongol population in Inner Mongolia becoming more homogenized? For example, can we consider Uzemchin, Khuuchid, Abga, Abganar, Sunid as a newer Mongol subgroup called Shiliingol linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any study or publication that studied interrelations and modern taxonomy of Mongol tribes and the dialects they speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="425" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-10-15T19:11:16.147" LastActivityDate="2012-10-15T19:11:16.147" Title="Is the taxonomy of Mongol dialects in Inner Mongolia changing?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2655" CreationDate="2012-10-07T07:09:14.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where I come from, inflection is seen as a kind of derivation, but one that is usefully distinguished from other kinds. It cannot be denied that an inflected form is derived from a stem, like any ordinary derivation; but inflection in general exhibits some properties that other kinds of derivation do not, like some of the ones Lawler mentions in his hand-out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, verbal inflection is in many ways very different from nominal inflection: a fairly sharp line can be drawn between the two—sharper than the line between inflection on one hand and other kinds of derivation on the other. It could be argued that the division &lt;em&gt;verbal derivation&lt;/em&gt; v. &lt;em&gt;nominal derivation&lt;/em&gt; is more significant in certain contexts than that between inflectional and other derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for example Latin &lt;em&gt;mulier&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;woman&quot;. I can add the non-inflectional suffix &lt;em&gt;-bris&lt;/em&gt; to turn it into an adjective, so that &lt;em&gt;amicitia muliebris&lt;/em&gt; could mean &quot;the friendship of a woman&quot;. Instead, I could simply use the (inflectional) genitive, &lt;em&gt;mulier-is&lt;/em&gt;, which is also normally translated as &quot;of a woman&quot; and which is in many contexts interchangeable with the adjective. I cannot do anything with verbal derivation that would result in the same meaning &quot;of a woman&quot;, be it inflectional or non-inflectional derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple inflection can also be used to create a new verb. The first person singular present ending &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; can be stuck on a stem to create a verb out of nothing. The stem &lt;em&gt;reg-&lt;/em&gt;, which means something like &quot;straight, right, lead&quot; becomes a verb if you simply add &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;rego&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I lead, direct&quot;, second person &lt;em&gt;reg-i-s&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you lead&quot;. The nominal suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; turns it into a noun in the nominative: &lt;em&gt;rex&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt;*&lt;em&gt;regs&lt;/em&gt;), &quot;leader, king&quot; (genitive &lt;em&gt;reg-is&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of a king&quot;, etc.). Is this added &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; derivation or inflection? Or both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important reason why we maintain this distinction between inflection and non-inflectional derivation is tradition. Not only is this a tradition in the terminology of descriptive linguistics that dates back thousands of years, but it was also a self-fulfilling prophesy among prescriptivists. Because a full paradigm was (and is) the norm, people felt more inclined to fill up any existing holes and create new forms. The farther you go back in history, the more suppletion you will see. It is speculated that the oldest cases were suffixes that were not at all distinctive compared other suffixes, and possibly even enclitics, and possibly even wholly separate words before that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, it is best to treat inflection as distinct type of derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T07:09:14.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2012-10-07T19:07:55.410" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutinative languages express the same thing shorter, i.e. with less characters. No difference, if written or spoken. They are more effective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the garden       kertben&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my garden        kertemben&lt;br&gt;&#xA;into my garden      kertembe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;about their garden  kertjükről&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are right, if endings were detached, the languages were not agglutinative any more, and became automatically less effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the garden kert ben&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1385" LastActivityDate="2012-10-07T19:07:55.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2663" CreationDate="2012-10-08T12:52:21.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence could have a few different possible parses, though not all of them will be obvious. If you plug the sentence into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LinGO English Resource Grammar (ERG)&lt;/a&gt;, which is an HPSG-based automatic parser, you can see the possible parses. The first one is probably the most obvious one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-10-08T14:51:45.417" LastActivityDate="2012-10-08T14:51:45.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-06T17:56:04.190" Score="12" ViewCount="2527" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are linguists that are very much against conlanging, here are two commonly claimed reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It wastes manpower, time and energy that should have been used to&#xA;rescue an already existing rare natural language or do field work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter reason is also common among non-linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What others are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" OwnerDisplayName="kaleissin" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2012-10-11T18:53:49.713" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T12:38:41.223" Title="Why are some linguists and other people very much against conlangs?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-11-01T09:23:46.903" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2012-10-08T00:08:30.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creating a language is like writing a novel or creating a sculpture: it can be a fun exercise, and an object of art for people to admire. If you happen to not be into a certain genre, you will probably not be interested in studying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the same thing applies to constructed languages. I personally do not find them very interesting, with some exceptions, such as Tolkien's languages—but even those I do not find interesting enough to study: I'm just glad they're there, because they make his books and stories all the more immersive and &quot;realistic&quot;. (Many other constructed languages, on the other hand, I find crude or unimpressive for various reasons.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If certain works of art have some sort of physical, historical, or social significance, then that can be another reason to study them. But it can feel like a waste of time if they haven't. I don't like studying a language that I feel I can't learn anything from, as in nothing relevant for how real languages work. This is probably why studying them is normally not a significant part of academic curricula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" OwnerDisplayName="Cerberus" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2012-10-13T21:55:32.750" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T21:55:32.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2680" CreationDate="2012-10-10T20:15:29.283" Score="5" ViewCount="2903" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that when Hindi is &lt;strike&gt;I guess transliterated&lt;/strike&gt; phonetically transcribed to the English Alphabet many of the letters are doubled to represent the correct sound that one would make if you were speaking it. Some words to demonstrate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;shaadi for शादी (Wedding/marriage)&#xA;aapke or आपके (Your). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true for all the short vowel sounds? I'm trying to learn Hindi currently from someone and they told me to not worry about learning the script, Devanagari currently and to just &lt;strike&gt;transliterate &lt;/strike&gt; transcribe words for my benefit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a common way to phonetically transcribe Hindi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1392" LastEditorUserId="1392" LastEditDate="2012-10-11T15:16:49.327" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T16:37:07.943" Title="What is the proper way to write Hindi phonetically in English?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2012-10-11T04:28:03.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible that certain pronouns were borrowed into Uralic languages from Indo-European tongues. Other borrowings that would seem rare have found their way into the family, such as the Hungarian &quot;száz&quot;, Finnish &quot;sata&quot;, and Khanty &quot;sot&quot; for 100, which night have been either from an Indo-Iranian root like &quot;satem&quot; or Slavic &quot;sto/sotnya&quot;. Scythian, an Iranian language, existed in central asia thousands of years ago and surely interacted with the early Uralic tribes; thus it might not be inconceivable to say that there were some borrowings from a more advanced society, and that there might have been some bilingualism. Scythian could have been a supplier of valuable items from the rest of Asia, like gold and spices, and therefore, it would have benefitted tribal chiefs and noblemen to know Scythian or a related language. However, there is still the possibility of false cognates here, like Hungarian &quot;ház&quot; for &quot;house&quot; (Finnish: koti; Proto-Germanic: husan). Such might be the case in the relative pronouns. As for &quot;sinä/se&quot;, there would not be enough data to prove that the voiceless dental in Indo-European becomes a voiceless sibilant in Uralic, that is to say that &quot;*tuH &gt; se&quot; is inconclusive at best.&#xA;Nevertheless, cognates false or not never definitively prove a genetic relationship. The grammar and morphology must be considered. Finnish has thirteen cases, like the essive, partitive, and illative, which do not correspond morphologically with the eight cases of Indo-European well. Furthermore, cases are not normally innovative, and are usually barrowed from other languages that have them, like the adessive and illative cases in Lithuanian. Moreover, Finnish observes vowel length, with is not common in Indo-European languages, which might employ pitch-accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1394" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T04:28:03.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1258" CreationDate="2012-10-11T04:48:14.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to really know for sure how a feminine marker &quot;originated&quot; in Indo-European, since the exact nature of gender there is unknown, since Hittite conveys only two genders (or states): animate and inanimate. Furthermore, &quot;animalia&quot; is a neuter plural. Nevertheless, it suffices to say that the Semitic ending in Arabic ة-/ية (-ah/iyah) is not at all related to the Indo-European one. Take for example a Berber word for &quot;house&quot;: &quot;tamdint&quot;; the t-t indicates a feminine. The root is &quot;mdn&quot; like &quot;مدينة&quot; (medīnah, city) in Arabic, which becomes &quot;مدينات&quot; (medīnāt, cities) in the plural. Therefore the Eurasiatic theory is far-fetched. &#xA;I might not have fully answered your question, but at least this hopefully narrows it. I think it is important to ponder this sort of thing, but the answer will likely never be known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1394" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T04:48:14.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2642" CreationDate="2012-10-11T05:11:50.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually an very intriguing subject. I contend that, in fact, -alis/-alia are related to -ly/-lik/-lich, and that Hittite actually exhibits this feature in the autonym Nešili ([language of] Neša+ili). If you would like to ascertain whether Russian (about which I will confidently say I know very little) borrowed -аль from Latin, first look at the relationship the two languages have had over time. Then look at the words on which the morpheme is affixed. If they appear to be mostly borrowings, you could probable stop there. However, if you find them veritably Slavic, look to other Slavic languages for similar endings: start with Ukranian, then Belorussian, then go on to Polish (which is very conservative, and if there is any truly Slavic cognate to -alis, it would likely be in Polski), Slovak, or Czech. At this point, if you haven't found what you seek, chances are it won't be in the Southern Slavic languages either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1394" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T05:11:50.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2526" CreationDate="2012-10-11T05:25:41.483" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let it be known first that the Romans called their deity Jove and Juppiter as much as they called him Deuppiter (deum + pater: gods'-father). Furthermore, Iuppiter is not an example of an affricate, which the Romans had none (and therefore is not comparable to &quot;giorno&quot; or &quot;jour&quot;), but the &quot;d&quot; was merely supplanted by the palatial approximate.&#xA;     Your quandary of Zeus can likely be explained by an origin in common with θεός (theos, god)).&#xA;     It's not a complete answer, but I hope it points in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1394" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T05:25:41.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2377" CreationDate="2012-10-11T11:45:30.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;goodness&quot; depends on the purpose. There are several purposes. Some are meant to be used by people in a similar way to how natural languages are used, and meant to be used by several people, like Esperanto. Others are to give flavor to an artwork; a book (Lapine), a movie (Na'vi), a tv-series (Dothraki), a franchise (Klingon). Being used to communicate is then not one of the primary goals. Then again some are experiments: &quot;Can a language with X be mastered by humans? How will this feature Y change when used? How will this feature Z affect its users?&quot;. Some are meant to be artworks in and of themselves. Some just happened and later give birth to conventional works of art (Quenya). Some are meant to be secret, used only be the creator or a small group. Some are made to communicate with the divine (not so uncommon in Wicca IIRC). Some are political statements, IMO (Láadan). Some are an attempt to fight depression (Toki Pona). Some are made for role-playing purposes (Tsolyani), as part of the world-building. Some are made to learn/discover the principles of linguistics. Some are made as a source of examples to teach linguistics. Some are made to serve as a contrast to languages already known, in order to better understand the mechanisms of those. There are probably fewer purposes than there are conlangs but I don't think there are that many fewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have a goal of passing as a natural language. Then it becomes possible to use the normal linguistic arsenal of tools to analyze them and discuss them. Those who do not have this as one of their goals is probably a bad fit for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are meant to be a complete system usable for communication, others are not. As with naturalism, the former can lead to fruitful discussions, the latter are a lot less interesting, at least to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T11:45:30.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-11T14:54:22.170" Score="4" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a field linguist but my hobby overlaps with it, particularly the descriptive part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the far ends, with remnant langauges (Virginian Algonquin) and well studied mega-lingua francas like English or French the answer is clear. Given limited time and resources, what constitutes enough dictionary, corpus and other descriptive material to say a language is documented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One book by a field linguist I read said about six pages of well meticulously glossed text covered most of a languages details. Are there any other rules of thumb for deciding when one has hit the point of diminishing marginal returns for documenting a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not really looking for the answer &quot;the job is never done!&quot;, since it isn't really useful)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-10-13T23:47:55.407" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T04:16:57.117" Title="What sort of criteria are used to deem a language description complete?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2673" CreationDate="2012-10-11T15:53:33.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Code switching&lt;/a&gt; is common in India. So, even when writing to each other in English on facebook or IM, many Indians tend to insert phrases from one or more Indian languages. When people do that, they do not use one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;standard transliteration schemes&lt;/a&gt;. Most Sanskrit books, when printed for an English-speaking audience, use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt;.  However, that's difficult to type on a computer. I prefer &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ITRANS&lt;/a&gt;, and that's what I'd recommend for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is there a common way to phonetically transcribe Hindi?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;common way&quot;, people don't aim to be accurate; they just aim to be understood by a fluent speaker of Hindi. Since you're not a fluent speaker of Hindi, I advise against the common way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-10-11T16:01:33.583" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T16:01:33.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2012-10-11T16:20:29.617" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about being “against”, but I’ve seen some linguists dismiss conlang studies due to a strong form of nativism.  Suppose you’re convinced that 1) all languages are variations of an universal, hard-wired human capacity; 2) languages can only be acquired “for real” when you’re a child in the critical period; and 3) the one true goal of linguistic science is to understand Language (defined in these terms).  If so, then conlangs would be something like fake data.  Natlangs are seen as clues to Language, but conlangs could lead you to wrong conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T16:20:29.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2012-10-11T19:27:30.467" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;That this currently isn't a field with much revenue (except maybe movie languages) or practical use associated with it has already been mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bath-water dynamic going on with the following triggers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Crackpots. They exist in the conlang community and seem to be over-represented. Examples include aUi, by John Weilgart. All fields have crackpots, but some fields attract crackpots more than others.  Weilgart said he got the inspiration for the language from (real) space aliens. This differs from say, Klingon, where the participants know they are real Trek fans and the aliens are fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Auxlang promoters. Auxlang promoters, in the hopes of gaining followers, make wild claims, in particular claims about ease of learning, cultural neutrality and global utopia (or at least some substantive move in that direction).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Historical philosophical languages turned out to be a dead end as languages and lines of thought. The languages hoped to allow the universe ideas to be divided into hierarchal categories and additive &quot;compound words&quot; in the lexicon and for the grammar to follow some sort of &quot;natural&quot; syntax, i.e. little thought was given to syntax. e.g. John Wilkins's language, although it did inspire Roget's thesaurus. It didn't prove to be more useful (or at least, not more popular) than natural languages for discussing the world or philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loglans (like lojban) promised to allow people to say what they mean and people would hear what that person meant. In other words, remove ambiguity in speech. In practice, loglans removed syntactic ambiguity for people who are good at mentally parsing like a machine parser, but left a lot of room for misunderstanding and semantic ambiguity. Loglans also promised to possibly be a way to communicate with machines, possibly for artificial intelligence applications. While a machine can parse lojban, I don't know of any implementations of a &quot;run time&quot; that does anything interesting with the parsed values (say, querying a store of lojban encoded facts, similar to how Prolog words).  This doesn't mean loglans are useless, it is just another conlang that didn't deliver on the original promises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is a scholar out there who wrote some remarkably hostile pychoanalytic-like analysis of the mental states of those who create/use artificial languages. I'm really sorry I can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With red flags like the above, I wouldn't be surprised if people see the field as sort of a quest to square the circle, create a perpetual motion machine, or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with them myself. In the field of languages for the profoundly disabled, such as deaf-blind, new things that look like languages are being invented by health care providers and they are doing a so-so or lousy job of it because they don't have any scientific rigor and methodology behind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T13:57:50.690" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T13:57:50.690" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2377" CreationDate="2012-10-11T21:21:00.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my opinion, as long as a language is not &lt;em&gt;insanely&lt;/em&gt; difficult, constructed languages will only be of a very limited range of complexity, since communication and languages are &lt;em&gt;by themselves&lt;/em&gt; complex. This, and the fact that children seem to be able to perfectly well learn even the most puzzingly complex language, leads me to the assumption that all questions as to whether a language will be gaining widespread usage will not be dealing with intrinsic properties of that language, but much more with external factors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can make a case that modern Hebrew is in a way a constructed language (even if it is not constructed from nothing) and it did gain widespread adoption; and for Esperanto there's nowadays native speakers as well. However, in most of the cases I believe people simply don't see the reason for learning a constructed language. &lt;em&gt;Linguae francae&lt;/em&gt; are generally acquired from culturally dominant and prestigeous groups, but constructed languages simply have no such group of speakers that would inspire others to take their lead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any way, what is certain, is that once a language - constructed or not - is spoken routinely by a sizeable number of speakers, it is inevitably going to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T21:21:00.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2601" CreationDate="2012-10-11T22:44:31.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is acquired as a habit, albeit a much more complex than smoking or sucking your thumb. People develop different styles in speech, because as children they experiment with different ad new usages, some of which they find most comfortable, or which have the ideal cadence. You say &quot;I think&quot; and &quot;usually&quot;, because you grew more accustomed to them over &quot;I believe&quot; or &quot;most of the time.&quot; For me, when I starting more consistently pronouncing the &quot;h&quot; in &quot;what&quot;, &quot;when&quot;, &quot;whither&quot;, etc., I had to force myself to make the correction; now I must correct myself when I do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1394" LastActivityDate="2012-10-11T22:44:31.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2703" CreationDate="2012-10-12T07:33:53.023" Score="8" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other than Latin, are there any languages that have a word for the number 18 that means twenty minus two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick glance at some of the numeral systems of languages in the Indo-European reveal that 20 - 1 is common and there are some 30 - 1 words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I only know of 20 - 2 in Latin (duodeviginti).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1397" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T10:23:19.237" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T10:23:19.237" Title="Word for eighteen expressed as Twenty Minus Two" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2012-10-12T08:28:05.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know any off the top of my head, but Eugene S. L. Chan has a large number of languages for which he has collected basic numeral terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-10-12T08:28:05.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2012-10-12T09:52:09.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Catalan we have the personal article; not using it is incorrect or sounds strange (except in some regions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal article (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://esadir.cat/sintaxi/remartperson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;El portal lingüístic de la Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard personal article forms are, for masculine first names, en/el/l', and for feminine first names, la/l'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With only the first name, the use of the personal article is adequate in all registers, except in very ancient historical contexts (biblical, Roman Empire...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With only the family name or first name and family name, the use of the personal article is more proper in informal registers and dialogues in general. In formal registers (like in the news or documentaries) we don't use this article, because it impresses familiarity.&#xA;'Today we are going to interview Pasqual Maragall.&#xA;*Today we are going to interview &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Pasqual Maragall'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the feminine article before women's names is not proper either. In many cases it can be disrespective. Therefore, in a formal context we would not say “&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Arantxa Sànchez Vicario”, “&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Serena Williams”, but  “Arantxa Sànchez Vicario”, “Serena Williams”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nor would we say “&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Rahola”, just as we would not sat “&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Maragall”. We would say “Pilar Rahola”, “Rahola”, “ex-councilor Rahola”, “Mrs. Rahola”... in parallel with the way of naming men: “Pasqual Maragall”, “Maragall”, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1399" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T05:58:19.007" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T05:58:19.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2012-10-12T15:36:17.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Salishan languages &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nux%C3%A1lk_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bella Coola (Nuxálk)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;http://rci.rutgers.edu/~rdenzerk/Numeral%20Convergence%20in%20the%20Plateau%20Linguistic%20Area.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Denzer-King, pre-publication&lt;/a&gt;[PDF] and &lt;a href=&quot;http://rci.rutgers.edu/~rdenzerk/A%20Preliminary%20Look%20at%20Restricted%20Counting%20in%20Proto-Salish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2009&lt;/a&gt;[PDF]] has &quot;subtractive counting&quot; for 3, 8 and 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;1 smaw&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;2 ɬnus&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;3 ʔa-smús&lt;/code&gt;  ‘being next to + 4’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;4 smús&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;8 kʼi-ɬnus&lt;/code&gt;  ‘lacking or without 2’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;9 kʼi-smaw&lt;/code&gt;   ‘lacking or without 1’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;10 cʼklakt&lt;/code&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sources give &lt;strong&gt;18&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.firstvoices.com/en/Nuxalk/word-category/20c51d4e52e47c52/NUMBERS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not subtractive&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;others have &lt;strong&gt;18&lt;/strong&gt; as subtractive&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;18 smawlakt-nus&lt;/code&gt; ‘11+7’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;18 cʼklakt puƛʼs ʔa kʼiɬnus&lt;/code&gt; ‘10+lacking 2’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-10-13T19:34:53.970" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T19:34:53.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2226" CreationDate="2012-10-13T01:59:24.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although not a true test of mutual intelligibility, Blair's (1990: 26-34) is one way to quantify the lexical difference between two languages, so as to get a percentage of lexical similarity. The higher the similarity the greater likelihood of mutual intelligence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test works by taking a word list, the bigger the better, although I have successfully used it on a mini-corpus of a 100 word Swadesh list before. Each item is gone though, with points assigned for features the same - identical are given full points, differences that are minimal are given less points, and there are no points for completely different items. The great thing about this is that it can be done across multiple languages/dialects at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably computer programs that can do this now, and more sophisticated analytical processes, but for a small list it's not that hard to do it be hand as long as you have a rudimentary knowledge of phonetics/phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blair, F. (1990). &lt;em&gt;Survey on a shoestring&lt;/em&gt;. Arlington, SIL International and The University of Texas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T01:59:24.157" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2882" CreationDate="2012-10-13T15:24:56.200" Score="5" ViewCount="1046" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ma%C3%B0r&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maðr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*mann-&lt;/strong&gt;, whence also Old English mann, Old High German man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Germanic/mann-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mann-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Descendants&#xA;  Old English: &lt;em&gt;mann, man; manna&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  English: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Frisian: &lt;em&gt;man, mon&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  West Frisian: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Saxon: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Dutch: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Dutch: &lt;em&gt;man, men&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Afrikaans: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old High German: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  German: &lt;em&gt;Mann, man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Norse: &lt;strong&gt;maðr&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Icelandic: &lt;strong&gt;maður&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Faroese: &lt;strong&gt;maður&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Norwegian: &lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Swedish: &lt;strong&gt;maþer, mander, man&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Swedish: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Old Danish: &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  Danish: &lt;strong&gt;mand&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Gothic: (&lt;em&gt;manna&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Norse must have undergone some kind of sound change, otherwise the &quot;&lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would be remained in other branches, including English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it is just an element form another Old Norse word? &#xA;Moreover, the &lt;em&gt;&quot;r&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is also unknown to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-11-23T00:14:42.407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T08:58:24.873" Title="Why does the Old Norse word &quot;maðr&quot; include &quot;ð&quot;, while its cognate E &quot;man&quot; doesn't?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-13T19:44:27.830" Score="4" ViewCount="2640" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the main types of contrast involved in contrastive analysis of syntax? I would appreciate a few examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find an answer, but unfortunately I found nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1405" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-14T09:43:12.640" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T13:01:30.797" Title="Main types of contrast involved in contrastive analysis of syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2601" CreationDate="2012-10-13T21:30:48.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can think of the language choices we make based on:&#xA;a) the things we want to talk about in the world, and,&#xA;b) the people we want to talk to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is negotiating our relationships with people that we get all kinds of pragmatic effects (awful summary - language use in context). On of the most interesting works on this kind of effect is Brown and Levinson's book on Politeness (1987). They talk about these things in terms of face - saving your own face and threatening someone elses. They argue that this accounts for a great deal of the choices like 'I think' - which is a hedging strategy to weaken your assertiveness (or in some cases, strengthen it! Language is funny like that).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-10-13T21:30:48.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2012-10-14T04:10:40.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might enjoy a 2005 &lt;a href=&quot;http://emeld.org/school/classroom/text/lexicon-size.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;web publication by Johanna Nichols&lt;/a&gt;, which discusses what one can expect to learn about a language, given the size of the available corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my particular experience, the most efficient situation is where one has a fair-sized text corpus along with follow-up elicitation based on patterns encountered in the text. Having a purely text-based corpus makes the number of words required considerably larger. For one project I've worked on, with a ~280,000 word corpus with free translations and no supporting materials, myself and my colleagues could cover all of the basic topics in a grammatical description. A current project has a corpus of ~35,000 words with extensive notes from follow-up elicitation, and I'd consider the potential coverage better, but not by much, than for the language with the larger corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-10-14T04:16:57.117" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T04:16:57.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2693" CreationDate="2012-10-14T09:16:17.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The function of contrastive analysis is to predict linguistic issues learners might face as they acquire a second language. It has two areas, intralingual and cross lingual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is intralingual, you might:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;analyse contrastive phonemes/neutralisation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;analyse the lexical relations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;analyse morphemes (bound or unbound)that carry grammatical meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at features of the languages morphosyntactic categories - the relationship between morphology and syntax, or in lay terms 'grammar'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at word order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is crosslingual, you might also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compare lexical semantics, basically 'meaning'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;study translational equivalence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastActivityDate="2012-10-14T09:16:17.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2707" CreationDate="2012-10-15T20:46:06.283" Score="12" ViewCount="12337" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages seem to use the same word for &quot;dream&quot; (psychological phenomenon) and &quot;dream&quot; (hope for the future). Quick scanning on Wiktionary gives the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Germanic languages: Danish (&lt;em&gt;drøm&lt;/em&gt;), Dutch (&lt;em&gt;droom&lt;/em&gt;), English (&lt;em&gt;dream&lt;/em&gt;), German (&lt;em&gt;Traum&lt;/em&gt;), Luxembourgish (&lt;em&gt;Dram&lt;/em&gt;), Norwegian (&lt;em&gt;drøm&lt;/em&gt;), Swedish (&lt;em&gt;dröm&lt;/em&gt;), West Frisian (&lt;em&gt;dream&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romance languages: Catalan (&lt;em&gt;somni&lt;/em&gt;), French (&lt;em&gt;rêve&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;songe&lt;/em&gt;), Galician (&lt;em&gt;soño&lt;/em&gt;), Italian (&lt;em&gt;sogno&lt;/em&gt;), Portuguese (&lt;em&gt;sonho&lt;/em&gt;), Romanian (&lt;em&gt;vis&lt;/em&gt;), Spanish (&lt;em&gt;sueño&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baltic/Slavic languages: Czech (&lt;em&gt;sen&lt;/em&gt;), Latvian (&lt;em&gt;sapnis&lt;/em&gt;), Slovak (&lt;em&gt;sen&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek (&lt;em&gt;όνειρο&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew (&lt;em&gt;חלום&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indonesian (&lt;em&gt;mimpi&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;impian&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanaese (夢)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean (꿈)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marathi (स्वप्न)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagalog (&lt;em&gt;panaginip&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turkish (&lt;em&gt;düş&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, the words for the latter meaning of &quot;dream&quot; seem to have been derived from the words for the former:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese (夢想 from 夢)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish (&lt;em&gt;unelma&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;uni&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai (คาดฝัน &lt;em&gt;kʰâːt fǎn&lt;/em&gt; or คิดฝัน &lt;em&gt;kʰít fǎn&lt;/em&gt;, from ฝัน &lt;em&gt;făn&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages use different terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georgian (სიზმარი &lt;em&gt;sizmari&lt;/em&gt; vs. ოცნება &lt;em&gt;otsneba&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian (&lt;em&gt;sapnas&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;svajonė&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malay (&lt;em&gt;mimpi&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;impian&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish (&lt;em&gt;sen&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;marzenie&lt;/em&gt; - however, it is possible to call the psychological phenomenon &lt;em&gt;marzenie senne&lt;/em&gt;, which is a more technical term than &lt;em&gt;sen&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian (сон &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; or дрёма &lt;em&gt;ˈdrʲoma&lt;/em&gt; vs. мечта &lt;em&gt;mɛtʃˈt̪a&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Telugu (కల &lt;em&gt;kala&lt;/em&gt; vs. స్వప్నం &lt;em&gt;svapnaM&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ukrainian (сон &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; vs. мрія &lt;em&gt;mríja&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yiddish (חלום &lt;em&gt;kholem&lt;/em&gt; vs. טרוים &lt;em&gt;troym&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have such usages of the word &quot;dream&quot; been developed independently, or are they mere &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;calques&lt;/a&gt; from a single language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they have been developed independently, is there any linguistic speculation about how the two meanings of &quot;dream&quot; relate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1204" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T12:10:51.470" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T08:51:38.190" Title="Using the word &quot;dream&quot; as hope for the future across languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-16T13:05:07.250" Score="8" ViewCount="855" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an occasional learner of these languages, I find the linguistic situation of Arabic, Persian and Turkish very interesting: they are three genetically unrelated languages (if you stick to unquestioned families, they are Semitic, Indo-European and Turkic, respectively) with quite different grammatical structures but, due to a complex history, there are subject to massive mutual lexical borrowing). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speakers' attitude towards this situation has changed a lot through history. As far as I can tell (mostly through interaction with my teachers), this remains today a burning issue in Iran and Turkey (at least much more burning than, say, the Romance borrowings in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: do you know good reference work about this situation? I'm interested in both the purely linguistic side (a good description of the situation, serious etymological dictionaries and so on) and the sociolinguistical side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T18:03:09.993" Title="Mutual lexical borrowings between Arabic, Persian and Turkish: a reference request" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2012-10-17T13:02:07.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistik-online.de/43_10/fabunmi.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a paper&lt;/a&gt; that gives an overview of the additive, subtractive and multiplicative derivations of number-words as used in the three dialects of Yoruba. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote a few things here, but the number system is far too complicated, and needs the paper I linked to to describe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first pattern, it uses addition solely to derive the number words but with a counting pattern where 'ten', 'twenty' and the added number units are taken as a whole. In the second counting pattern, subtraction is used to derive number words but this is applicable only to three numbers i. e. seventeen – /mɛ́ɛtadínóɡu/, eighteen – /méèʤìdínóɡu/ and nineteen – /mɔkɔdínóɡ́u/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most importantly, the idea expressed in [Standard Yoruba] and [Yoruba Ifè Nigeria] ... is 1 + 10, 2 + 10, 3 + 10, 4 + 10 for eleven to fourteen; and 20 - 5, 20 - 4, 20 - 3, 20 - 2, 20 - 1 for fifteen to nineteen; twenty (ogún) is a &#xA;  basic word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper also compares the preferences of the older and newer generations of people when it comes to specific numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-10-17T13:16:43.130" LastActivityDate="2012-10-17T13:16:43.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-18T09:30:46.637" Score="3" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the key tools of analysis in classical semantics is the concept of truth value. The content of a proposition, when contextualized in a particular world and a particular time, should have a truth value: it is either true or false, &lt;em&gt;tertium non datur.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the study of certain important classes of expressions, e.g., belief, reports, indirect discourse, hearsay evidentials, have raised some issues. While the problem of logical omniscience has been recognized, more recent work has challenged the fundamental distinction between content and context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am curious about specifically is the issue of whether truth value can meaningfully be attributed to a proverb. To better direct the discussion and provide a common point of reference, let's take the presumably contentful  proverb ``spare the rod and spoil the child,&quot; contextualized within the fictional universe of Charles Dickens' novel &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;, I'd like to examine the question of whether a proverb can and should have truth value. If, for example, the proverb is considered as a belief report, do an individual's actions serve as data for demonstrating a contradiction between the reported belief and the individual's true beliefs? Or on the other hand, if the proverb is treated as a universal generalization about the world in which it is contextualized, which types of facts about this world would demonstrate its falseness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1417" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-10-18T12:57:54.383" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T12:04:46.057" Title="Truth value of a proverb" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;truth-value&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2704" CreationDate="2012-10-18T14:11:58.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/discourse-representation-theory/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discourse Representation Theory&lt;/a&gt; can be used for modelling the universe of Charles Dickens' &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you want to treat &quot;spare the rod, and spoil the child&quot; as a belief within this universe or as a hypothesis. If you want to have it as a hypothesis, I suppose you'd have to add the following to the universe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sdt5i.png&quot; alt=&quot;generated by Boxer&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generated the DRS by first paraphrasing the sentence as &quot;if a child is not disciplined , the child will be bad .&quot; and then feeding it to appropriate field in &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc/wiki/Demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the C&amp;amp;C+Boxer demo page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the outermost component of this is a material implication, you can disprove it by finding an instance where the child was not disciplined and was still good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/pn073700883x2062/fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belief in Discourse Representation Theory, by Nicholas Asher&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-10-19T12:04:46.057" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T12:04:46.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2358" CreationDate="2012-10-18T16:01:51.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before answering this question one must agree upon a definition of parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will assume that we define POS not semantically (which would give rise to an almost infinite number of categories), but structurally, i.e. by the way they behave morphosyntactically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is nowadays evident that POS (as any construction) cannot be established cross-linguistically. Some languages do not even distinguish between nouns and verbs, at leat not in the way English does. But even if two languages seem to share the same POS category, despite the similarities it is almost never going to be the exact same. Verbs in Russian inflect for aspect, while German ones don’t, for example. When we talk about &quot;verbs&quot; or &quot;nouns&quot; we always have in mind some prototype category that we compare language-specific categories with. When we ask &quot;does language X have category Y&quot;, we are actually looking for something &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; to Y, so the answer doesn’t have to be &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;, it will often be &quot;somewhat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question about &quot;like&quot; one must consider how it behaves. Of course, it doesn’t behave like an adverb (it takes a complement), so that is ruled out by any traditional notion of &quot;adverb&quot;. It seems to behave more like a proposition in that regard; interestingly its complement is also in the oblique case (&quot;like &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, not &quot;like &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) very unlike German for example (note however that the oblique case has long spread to constructions like coordination as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the top of my head I cannot think of structural features that contradict the preposition theory, but it is possible there are some (I’ve never studied English grammar in detail). There is no a priori reason why the word couldn’t be in a category all of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that I didn’t consider the uses of &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; as subordinator or discourse particle. These would be other lexemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-10-18T16:01:51.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2012-10-18T16:06:04.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is a specific case of how each language uniquely divides up the semantic space. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real world of referents is not divided up neatly into semantic categories that we can directly turn into lexical categories. A classic example is the color space. In the real world, there are an infinite number of colors in the spectrum, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/JenniferLeong.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the human visual system can distinguish between 100,000 to 10,000,000&lt;/a&gt; of them. Of course, no language has 10,000,000 color words - instead, each language divides the spectrum up into ranges and has color names corresponding to those ranges. We know that different languages divide up the color space differently, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the range yellow vs. green vs. blue is notoriously different from language to language&lt;/a&gt;. See for example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/piraha.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;color divisions of Piraha [PDF]&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not limited to colors. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_%28anatomy%29#Names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fingers and toes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_copula#Spanish_copulae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;states and locations of existence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kinship terms&lt;/a&gt;, literally every concept is slightly differently divided and named. This division extends down to the idiolect, in  fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is happening is simply that each language has a unique mapping of abstract semantic fields to concrete lexical fields. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance, you are seeing that some languages (like Polish) happen to use two separate lexical fields for &quot;vision while sleeping&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;sen&lt;/strong&gt;) and &quot;aspiration for the future&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;marzenie&lt;/strong&gt;), and some (like English) happen to use one lexical field for both (&lt;strong&gt;dream&lt;/strong&gt;). I say &quot;happen to&quot; because largely this is the end result of a complex combination of linguistic and cultural evolutionary happenstance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian uses two different words &lt;strong&gt;голубой&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;goluboj&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;синий&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;sinij&lt;/em&gt; for colors around 475 nm, while English uses one word &lt;strong&gt;blue&lt;/strong&gt;. Similarly, Russian uses two different words &lt;strong&gt;сон&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; 'vision while sleeping' and &lt;strong&gt;мечта&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;m'ech'ta&lt;/em&gt; 'aspiration or reverie' for related concepts corresponding to the English lexical field of &lt;strong&gt;dream&lt;/strong&gt;.  The semantic field of &quot;visions, aspirations, and reveries&quot; is divided up uniquely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T10:41:43.590" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T10:41:43.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-18T22:07:47.600" Score="8" ViewCount="959" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any such thing as a Integrated Development Environment for context free grammars (or any variant on a formal, machine parsable grammar) that target natural languages?  The ones for BNF grammars seem to be overwhelmingly aimed at turning language into machine executable code. I would imagine that a similar tool for natural language would let the user write a grammar, evaluate it for mistakes and parse example sentence to trees or generate sample sentences given a dictionary of lexemes/tokens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T20:48:37.943" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T20:48:37.943" Title="IDE for context free grammars for natural languages?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;chomsky-hierarchy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-19T02:48:19.793" Score="3" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;A single verb usually describes an action or state --the common dimension of verb among languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in addition to that it may convey more information e.g. tense, person, gender of subject, emotion of its subject, ... . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its most general form among all languages which dimensions for a single verb are conceivable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2015-11-19T03:10:20.347" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T15:27:00.497" Title="Dimensions of a verb" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2712" CreationDate="2012-10-19T03:36:54.883" Score="5" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=thunder&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O.E. &lt;strong&gt;þunor&lt;/strong&gt;, from P.Gmc. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thunraz&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. O.N. þorr, O.Fris. thuner, M.Du. donre, Du. donder, O.H.G. donar, Ger. Donner &quot;thunder&quot;), from PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;(s)tene-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to resound, thunder&quot; (cf. Skt. tanayitnuh &quot;thundering,&quot; Pers. tundar &quot;thunder,&quot; L. tonare &quot;to thunder&quot;). Swed. tordön is lit. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Thor's din.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The intrusive &lt;strong&gt;-d-&lt;/strong&gt; is also found in &lt;strong&gt;Dutch and Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt; versions of the word.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&quot;d&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in Swedish &quot;tordön&quot; comes from &quot;Thor's din&quot;, and the question arises, namely whether the common &lt;strong&gt;&quot;d&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; appears in English &quot;thunder&quot;, Dutch &quot;donder&quot;, and Icelandic word has the same origin as the Swedish word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-27T02:30:07.297" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T07:28:39.813" Title="How does the word &quot;thunder&quot; get the letter &quot;d&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2716" CreationDate="2012-10-19T11:45:13.640" Score="17" ViewCount="2189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering why Thai word for &quot;snow&quot; was sounding similar to Slavic word for &quot;winter&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thai: หิมะ &lt;code&gt;[hì-má]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;snow&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ukrainian: зима &lt;code&gt;[ˈzɪ-mə]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;winter&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Polish: zima &lt;code&gt;[ˈʑi-ma]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;winter&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;Himalaya&quot; हिमालय &lt;code&gt;[himā-laya]&lt;/code&gt; is commonly referred as &quot;abode of the snow&quot;: हिम &lt;code&gt;[himā]&lt;/code&gt; + आलय &lt;code&gt;[ā-laya]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in M.Vasmer's &quot;Etymological dictionary of Russian language&quot;, I found that Proto-Slavic &lt;code&gt;*zīmā&lt;/code&gt; is related to Ancient Greek &lt;code&gt;χεῖμών&lt;/code&gt;. Also, the Latin word for &quot;winter&quot; is &lt;code&gt;hiems&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite it seems evident that Slavic word is originated from PIE, I found no sources to cite. So my question is: is it true that Slavic &quot;zima&quot; derived from PIE words for &quot;snow&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T23:55:19.007" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T23:55:19.007" Title="Is Slavic [zima] (&quot;winter&quot;) derived from &quot;snow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2710" CreationDate="2012-10-19T12:14:39.197" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Campbell (2004: 36) gives the OE form of 'thunder' as &lt;strong&gt;þunrian&lt;/strong&gt; (though whether this OE form or the other is considered shouldn't affect the explanation), and indicates the addition of the stop consonant to be an example of excrescence, along with &lt;strong&gt;þy:mel&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;thimble&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in both examples the excrescent stop follows a nasal consonant and precedes an oral sonorant. The transition from a nasal consonant to an oral sonorant requires a velum-raising gesture and an obstruction-releasing gesture to happen more or less at the same time. The production of a voiced stop following a nasal consonant happens naturally and spontaneously if the obstruction-releasing gesture lags the velum-lowering gesture just a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be of anecdotal interest to note that in a number of languages (e.g., Korean, some Amazonian languages) what are described as nasal consonants may be pronounced as either nasals, voiced stops or prenasalized voiced stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Campbell, L. (1998/2004). &lt;em&gt;Historical Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. MIT Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-10-19T13:55:37.367" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T13:55:37.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-10-19T18:39:09.093" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary gives Thai &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%B0&quot;&gt;hima&lt;/a&gt; as having Sanskrit origin, which is directly cognate to the Slavic reflex. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aList_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots/%C7%B5%CA%B0&quot;&gt;this appendix&lt;/a&gt; for more reflexes. &quot;Himalaya&quot; also comes directly from Sanskrit (see that wiktionary entry). So yes, the Sanskrit reflex is squarely Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="478" LastActivityDate="2012-10-19T18:39:09.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2718" CreationDate="2012-10-19T21:21:10.997" Score="4" ViewCount="1517" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a word has an affricate in the onset, let's say /ts/, along with another consonant, let's say /k/, to make a word like /tski/, is the phonotactic syllable structure of this word CCV or is it CCCV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-20T05:21:13.723" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T05:21:13.723" Title="What is the syllable structure of a word with an affricate in the onset?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2012-10-19T21:47:55.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From an English Syntax course I took several years ago, I understand that this feature is rare among languages, but not unique:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrasal Verbs: &quot;I will pick him up at the airport.&quot;  (in which 'pick up' makes this sentence have a fundamentally different meaning than &quot;I will pick him at the airport&quot; does)  I have met some fluent ESL-speakers who simply can't use phrasal verbs correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1424" LastEditorUserId="1424" LastEditDate="2012-10-23T22:19:26.447" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T22:19:26.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-10-19T21:57:07.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pokorny &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0632.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymon 632 gives&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*g̑hei&lt;/strong&gt;-/&lt;strong&gt;*g̑hi&lt;/strong&gt;-   'snow; winter' &gt; ON &lt;strong&gt;gamall&lt;/strong&gt;  'old' L &lt;strong&gt;hiems&lt;/strong&gt;  'winter', Gk &lt;strong&gt;χειμών&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;kheimon&lt;/em&gt; 'storm, winter' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that he implies but does not explicitly include the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/-mn%CC%A5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;resultative suffix ****-(é)mn̥-**&lt;/a&gt; which leads to the complete forms shown.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pokorny does not list a Slavic reflex, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_Slavic_In.html?id=LJFiAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Derksen 2008&lt;/a&gt; gives &lt;strong&gt;žiēmą&lt;/strong&gt; ‘winter’ &amp;lt; &lt;strong&gt;*ǵheim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So per Pokorny this semantic field includes &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; snow and winter (and Derksen concurs) and so the meaning diverged in daughter languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note there there is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1809.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pokorny Etymon &lt;strong&gt;*sneigu̯h&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;/a&gt;  'to snow; snow' &gt; Eng &lt;strong&gt;snow&lt;/strong&gt; L &lt;strong&gt;nivis&lt;/strong&gt; 'snow' OCS &lt;strong&gt;снѣгѵ&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;snĕgŭ&lt;/em&gt; 'snow' Gk &lt;strong&gt;νῐφάς&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;niphas&lt;/em&gt; 'snow, flake' Pra 'siṇeha' 'snow' which is apparently unrelated, although I suppose it could be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T12:52:57.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T12:52:57.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2708" CreationDate="2012-10-20T00:06:50.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlr.org/works/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ANTLRWorks&lt;/a&gt; is an editor for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ANTLR&lt;/a&gt; grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANTLR allows you to write BNF context free grammars (which also produces code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANTLRWorks allows you to try examples strings on the grammar and displays the parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to natural language, if you have a BNF grammar for one (I think there is a non-trivial but still non-inclusive grammar for English in the javacc parser code), then you can use it with some changes with ANTLR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T00:06:50.917" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2714" CreationDate="2012-10-20T05:18:41.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the language, and how you choose to analyze it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phonetic sense, an affricate is a consonant cluster consisting of a stop that is released directly into a fricative, with no intervening release burst before the start of the fricative. Affricates may or may not be phonemic; that depends on whether the affricate behaves phonologically/phonotactically as an indivisible unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is the cluster [tˢs]. In Japanese, it patterns as a phonemic unit; in fact, it alternates with (compare [matsu] &lt;em&gt;waits&lt;/em&gt; with [mata] &lt;em&gt;waited&lt;/em&gt;), and is often considered an allophone of, the single phoneme /t/. In contrast, in English, [tˢs] is a sequence of 2 phonemes rather than a phoneme, because it patterns like the sequence /t/ + /s/ (in words like &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt; /kæts/ the /t/ and /s/ belong to different morphemes, so /ts/ is clearly not a unitary phoneme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case is [tɕ] in Russian. This is clearly a phonemic affricate: because Russian doesn't even have a phoneme /ɕ/, it's not even possible to analyze it as a sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether to consider a (phonetic) affricate as two separate consonants in the onset depends on whether you are considering it as a non-phonemic sequence. Phonotactic considerations can also guide you here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: /tʃ/ in Spanish. There are 2 arguments that this should be considered a single consonant in the onset:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard Spanish has no phoneme /ʃ/, so it's not possible to analyze as /t/ + /ʃ/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we exclude /tʃ/, Spanish phonotactics only permits a single obstruent in the onset. This is evidence against /tʃ/ being a sequence, because otherwise it would complicate the phonotactics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular example, treating it as /CCV/ is more likely, since it's uncommon for languages to permit 3 obstruents in the onset, but /CCCV/ is also possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T05:18:41.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2721" CreationDate="2012-10-20T17:53:36.693" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are phrases such as &lt;em&gt;go there&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;turn left&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;move back&lt;/em&gt; etc. analysed syntactically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are they copula + predicate, verb + object, or something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these solutions seem correct to me, so I feel a bit stupid not being able to analyse such simple phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2012-10-24T12:43:15.830" LastActivityDate="2012-10-24T12:43:15.830" Title="Analysis of &quot;go there&quot;, &quot;turn left&quot;, &quot;move back&quot;, etc" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2720" CreationDate="2012-10-20T19:47:55.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those constructions would be analysed as &lt;strong&gt;verb + prepositional phrase&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;em&gt;there/left/back&lt;/em&gt; being analysed as full PP arguments of their verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="297" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T19:47:55.497" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-20T20:49:40.943" Score="3" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone point me towards some good work on the semantics of ordinary language mathematical claims? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when a geometer says of Euclidean geometry &quot;Euclidean points have no extension&quot; he is saying something that goes beyond the axioms. Has there been any linguistic study of this &quot;informal&quot; element of mathematical discourse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T00:24:34.550" LastActivityDate="2012-10-27T13:59:54.420" Title="Semantics of ordinary language mathematical claims?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2012-10-20T22:21:28.870" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;R-coloured vowels seem to be a pretty unique trait of English phonology. I don't know of any other language that has the vowel [ɝ] as in General American pronunciation of &quot;work&quot;. The only major language, other than English, that has this type of vowels is Mandarin, but it doesn't have this particular one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2012-10-20T22:21:28.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-20T23:15:41.217" Score="3" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;I naively picked up a book in which the author assumes that the reader has a background in linguistics, so she often uses abbreviations without first explaining what they mean. I don't have such a background, but before I give up on this book I am hoping I can begin to get it with your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one read the following example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the Branching Direction Parameter is a parameter defined in terms of the direction of the complementizer phrase (CP) head as in Example 3. A left C&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; head as in Example 3a is correlated with right branching, and a right C&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; head as in Example 3b is correcelated with left branching.&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  3a. C' &gt; [C&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt; [IP]]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  3b. C' &gt; [[IP] C&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, she doesn't mention what C', &gt;, C&lt;sup&gt;0&lt;/sup&gt;, IP or the brackets represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1428" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2012-10-21T01:31:22.957" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T02:20:26.847" Title="How are these diagrams read?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;notation&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2724" CreationDate="2012-10-21T01:31:56.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;3a should be read as follows: a constituent C' (a &quot;complementizer phrase&quot;, e.g., English &lt;em&gt;...that I should come home.&lt;/em&gt;) may be rewritten as C0 (a &quot;complementizer&quot;, e.g., English &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;), followed by IP (&quot;inflectional phrase&quot;, i.e., a finite clause, e.g., &lt;em&gt;I should come home.&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3b states that the order of the complementizer and the finite clause are reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give one or two possibly relevant references: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.7587&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kornai &amp;amp; Pullum (1990)&lt;/a&gt; for a sort of technical, but thorough introduction to different versions phrase structure grammar. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerBDTrevisited.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dryer (2008)&lt;/a&gt; on the issue of branching direction theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T01:31:56.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2724" CreationDate="2012-10-21T01:58:46.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not particularly well-versed in syntax so my answer will be less than complete, but I can hopefully define some terms and give you a bit of background to make your reading a bit easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, syntax relies heavily on trees. I see you have over 1K reputation on SO, so I am going to assume you have a solid grasp on basic graph theory (specifically binary trees). A very basic syntax example is that a root S, for sentence, would have two children: NP, for noun phrase, and VP for verb phrase. Trees are a pain to draw in books and on computers, so we use [ ] brackets to help show the structure of the syntax tree where everything inside of a set of [ ] brackets denotes one node, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S &amp;gt; [NP VP]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;NP &amp;gt; [N]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;VP &amp;gt; [V NP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mary eats cake&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;S&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[NP VP]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[N] VP]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[Mary] VP]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[Mary] [V NP]]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[Mary] [eats NP]]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[Mary] [eats [N]]]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[[Mary] [eats [cake]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how the  [ ] brackets trace out the rough structure of the tree? For increased readability the brackets normally also have a subscript explaining what type of node they represent. You can also see that &amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;quot; is not the mathematical &amp;quot;greater than&amp;quot;, but rather something akin to an arrow or &amp;quot;=&amp;quot;. The use of &amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;quot; in this manner is not actually standardized and will vary from author to author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a very simple example. Unfortunately, the modern understanding of syntax is not this simple and there is &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of detail I left out. Modern syntax attempts to exclusively use binary branching to simplify the structure of each node. This is hard to do with some sentences, such as sentences with double object (aka &amp;quot;ditransative&amp;quot;) verbs like &amp;quot;give&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;John gave Mary the book&amp;quot;. Such a sentence is impossible to explain using the &lt;code&gt;S = [NP VP]&lt;/code&gt; structure I used above. How can we separate &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; from &amp;quot;the book&amp;quot; but keep them both inside the VP while keeping a binary structure? (Incidentally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://semlab5.sbs.sunysb.edu/%7Erlarson/larson88do.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Larson&lt;/a&gt; writes a very good paper on this subject although some of the vocabulary he uses is out-of-date).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, to account for these structure most non-leaf nodes in modern syntax trees are in the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;xP &amp;gt; [x yP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;xP &amp;gt; [yP x]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; refers to some &lt;em&gt;literal&lt;/em&gt; (a real word or element of speech. Something that affects how the sentence is actually &lt;em&gt;produced&lt;/em&gt;). The &amp;quot;P&amp;quot; simply means &amp;quot;Phrase&amp;quot;. This is related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X-bar theory&lt;/a&gt;, but we'll discuss that a bit later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you should know from basic graph theory, trees have no &amp;quot;left leaf&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;right leaf&amp;quot;, simply links. As such, these two trees are functionally equivalent, although their &lt;em&gt;surface structure&lt;/em&gt; differs. As you should also be able to see, these cause lopsided trees. When the author talks about left branching/right branching, they are simply referring to which side the nested phrase is on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntax assumes that all languages have the same basic structure with some minor differences such which side the tree grows (branches) on changing the &lt;em&gt;surface structure&lt;/em&gt; of the language. Other things responsible for differing word orders across languages are object raising and checking theory and a whole host of other things, but let's start small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SVO&lt;/a&gt; languages like English, we're right branching; literals that farther from the root appear later in the sentence. Conversely, a theoretical OVS language (I don't believe there are any known OVS languages) would probably be left branching. Given a specific sentence, the syntax trees for English and the OVS language should be functionally the exact same structure; in both cases the object would be the farthest leaf from the root. However, because we branch left in OVS, it's the first object in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have the background out of the way, we can define terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C means &amp;quot;commplimentizer&amp;quot;. This is a bit difficult to explain but an example of a C literal in English would be &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;. These are most noticeable when you embed sentences. Again, an oversimplification but compare &amp;quot;I bought [the food] at the store.&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;I ate the food &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; I bought at the store.&amp;quot; We need to use &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; to allow us to embed the sentence &amp;quot;I bought [the food] at the store.&amp;quot; It is important to note that &amp;quot;I bought [the food] at the store.&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;still has a C&lt;/strong&gt;, it is just that this particular C does not happen to affect the &lt;em&gt;surface structure&lt;/em&gt; of the sentence (we call this a &amp;quot;null complementizer&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C' is pronounced as &amp;quot;C bar&amp;quot;. To understand this, you need to know &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X-bar theory&lt;/a&gt;. Here is where scanning an introductory text book would be helpful (I give suggestions below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I unfortunately do not know what C0 refers to (again, I am not particularly knowledgeable about syntax). [&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; - According to jlovegren's answer, what this author calls C0, I simply call C. I.e. a &lt;em&gt;literal&lt;/em&gt; complementizer, such as the word &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IP stands for &amp;quot;Inflectional Phrase&amp;quot;. Typically it is more useful to split IP into two parts: TP (Tense Phrase) and NegP (Negation Phrase). However, IP is a useful shorthand. Basically, &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; will refer to any set of features that change the verb from its &lt;em&gt;lexical form&lt;/em&gt; (think &amp;quot;dictionary form&amp;quot; in French) to it's fully conjugated, fully &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt; form. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;to do&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;past neg&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;didn't&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, &amp;quot;past neg&amp;quot; is the inflection (&amp;quot;I&amp;quot;). As you can probably guess, IPs have the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IP &amp;gt; [I vP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vP (pronounced &amp;quot;little v P&amp;quot;) is a type of phrase needed because of the double object verbs I talked about above. For your purposes, just think of it as a VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would strongly suggest you first skim an introductory syntax textbook or try to find some introductory lecture slides online because syntax, especially minimalism, has a tendency to build on itself. Without a strong foundation it is hard to understand the more advanced topics. Unfortunately, the book you are reading sounds at least moderately advanced. My school uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.kr/books/about/Syntax.html?id=UWTAU8lAunoC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntax: A Generative Introduction&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew Carnie and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.kr/books/about/Core_Syntax.html?id=GMJ1QgAACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach&lt;/a&gt; by David Adger in its syntax courses. Both books are good, but I think that Carnie's writing style is a bit more engaging. I think a quick look at one of these books would be quite helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T02:20:26.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="325" CreationDate="2012-10-21T04:39:33.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happend to find this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://project-modelino.com/french-phonetic-transcription-converter.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EasyPronunciation.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works okay for French, but it goofs up on some words, so watch out. Looks like English, Spanish and Chinese are also available there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's something for German: &lt;a href=&quot;http://familientagebuch.de/rainer/2007/38.html#4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Donnerstag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1429" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-29T09:20:20.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T09:20:20.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="155" CreationDate="2012-10-21T08:44:13.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the point is that making prescriptive rules is not what linguists are supposed to do. Prescriptivism is not that bad per se, and I think it is unavoidable, especially in written language. When we write, we can be less sloppy than when we speak, because we have time to formulate our thoughts clearly and concisely. Encouraging this should be a good thing. But this is a job for educators and editors. That said, the prescriptive rules can be of use for sociolinguists, because they can tell them which variety of a language has high status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T08:44:13.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2586" CreationDate="2012-10-21T09:17:16.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even one minimal pair can be enough to establish a phoneme. But it might actually be an allophone of some other phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T09:17:16.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2012-10-21T09:51:00.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have references, but the glottal stop before word-initial vowels is present also in Polish and Norwegian. And also in Sidamo, it is always present before word-initial vowels, but generally it is phonemic (can occur within words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Polish the glottal can actually claimed to be phonemic (even though I haven't seen anybody claiming it), because it makes the sound of a non-syllabic semivowel be interpreted as a syllabic vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;łgana [wgana] &quot;lie&quot; (feminine adjectival participle form), 2 syllables vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ugana [ʔwgana], [ʔugana] &quot;Ugana, a populated place in Papua New Guinea&quot;, 3 syllables&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only minimal pair I can think of, because semivowels that don't belong to diphtongs are rare at word-initial position in Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T09:51:00.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2635" CreationDate="2012-10-21T15:56:31.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is your question about how the clitic ends up close enough to the verb to become reinterpreted as an affix? Or is it how personal pronouns end up as clitics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll assume the former and just point out that clitics don't act like personal pronouns. For instance, they're often not where you'd expect to find the personal pronoun. In most cases in Romance languages (SVO), object clitics are to the left of the verb, whereas a corresponding full pronoun would be to the right (in unmarked declarative clauses). It's conceivable that clitics in SOV languages can end up being verb-adjacent, but hopefully a typologist will confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Justin rightly points out that Romance clitics originate in SOV Latin, which goes back to the question of how pronouns (or demonstratives) turn into clitics in the first place. I'm not a historical linguist, but see e.g. Kempson &amp;amp; Cann 2008 for a functionalist-inspired analysis (spoiler: syntax and pragmatics conspire). Let me also turn to the typologists for a statement that perhaps applies more to the original question on SOV languages: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in many other [i.e. other than English] languages, pronouns exhibit word order properties that&#xA;  differ considerably from lexical noun phrases, either because the&#xA;  syntactic rules of the language treat them differently, or because the&#xA;  pragmatic rules are such that their distribution is rather different. (Dryer 2007)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, syntax and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to deal with clitic placement in syntax, you can either base-generate them in their normal argument position and then raise them to be adjacent to their host (the verb), or you could base-generate them in a special functional projection that's already next to the verb. In phonology, particularly in Optimality Theory, people usually use Alignment constraints to specify where the clitic likes to be wrt its host (left edge of the host or right, left edge of the phrasal projection of the host or right of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson, Stephen R. (2005). &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Clitics&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford: Oxford University Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kempson, R., Cann, R. (2008). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/ds/publications/assets/ds-course/Clitics-leverhulme-revised-july08.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Production pressures, syntactic change and the emergence of clitic pronouns&lt;/a&gt;. In Cooper, R and Kempson, R (eds.) &lt;em&gt;Language in Flux&lt;/em&gt;, 178-220. College Publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dryer, Matthew S. (2007). &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerShopenWordOrder.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word order&lt;/a&gt;. In Timothy Shopen (ed.) &lt;em&gt;Clause Structure, Language Typology and Syntactic Description&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 1, 61-131. Second Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Franks, Holloway King (2000). &lt;em&gt;A Handbook of Slavic Clitics&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford: Oxford University Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastEditorUserId="166" LastEditDate="2012-10-22T15:11:10.173" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T15:11:10.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-21T15:58:33.647" Score="0" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of tonal language is very limited, so I'm not clear on what the case is and unsure about examples, but my question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In tonal languages, like Mandarin, is tone carried and therefore transcribed on the phoneme /w/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. in a word such as /fwl/ in a tonal language, would we ever transcribe the tone on the /w/ phoneme (/w/ being a semivowel, rather than a true vowel)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T05:07:03.117" Title="Is tone transcribed/carried on the phoneme /w/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2012-10-21T19:20:22.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The choice in transcription will often depend on the analyst, and there may be cases where there is no clear evidence from the language to suggest why one convention is superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although tone is usually thought to be associated with syllables or morae rather than with individual segments, within a tonal domain such as a syllable or mora, the most sonorous segment is usually designated as being tone-bearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a hypothetical word /fws/ in a tonal language and that word was associated with a lexical tone, then the /w/, being the most sonorous segment, would be the one to get associated with a tone. However, there are some phonologists who would argue that because the segment in question bears a tone, it must be /u/ and not /w/. This means that, in order for the analysis to be uncontroversial, there should also be a word /fus/ associated with a tone which contrasts with /fws/. These kinds of biases have to be kept in mind when an analysis is developed. The main issue is the contentious nature of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot;&gt;sonority hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; itself. There is no agreement about how the hierarchy should be defined, and so there is often a confusion between data which substantiates the hierarchy itself, and data for which the hierarchy should be invoked in interpreting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simpler type type of case which is well-enough attested is for a syllabic non-vocoid, such as a nasal stop or a lateral consonant, to bear contrastive tone. In such a case, since there is only one identifiable segment in the syllable, that segment will be the one to bear the tone, even though it is not a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-10-21T19:20:22.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-22T01:18:08.167" Score="19" ViewCount="826" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the mathematical statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 + 2 = 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is read in English as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One plus two equals three.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One plus two is equal to three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English at least, &lt;em&gt;equals&lt;/em&gt; is obviously an ordinary verb, but the analysis of &quot;one plus two&quot; isn't obvious. Some other languages have similar constructions; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Uno y dos es igual a tres.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Uno más dos es igual a tres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that unlike the usual &quot;y&quot; (&quot;and&quot;), &quot;es&quot; is the singular conjugation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;minus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;times&lt;/em&gt;, etc. act a bit like a conjunction, but there are some differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathematical operators are an &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; class, whereas conjunctions are normally considered closed; new operators can be created whenever they are mathematically useful (e.g. &quot;xor&quot;, &quot;dot&quot;, &quot;cross&quot;). Similarly, &quot;plus&quot;, &quot;minus&quot;, and &quot;mod&quot;/&quot;modulo&quot; seem to be loanwords from Latin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural nouns joined by conjunctions are plural, whereas mathematical-operator phrases are always singular (&quot;Cats and mice &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; animals&quot;, vs. &quot;Two cats plus two mice &lt;strong&gt;equals&lt;/strong&gt; two fat cats.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whereas multiple conjuncts joined by the same conjunction usually elide all but the last (e.g. &quot;A, B, or C&quot;, &quot;A, B, and C&quot;), this is ungrammatical for mathematical operators (&quot;x plus y plus z&quot;, never *&quot;x, y, plus z&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some operators appear to derive from other classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; (division) &quot;pi over 2&quot;: preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; (function application) &quot;f of x&quot;: preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; (subtraction; synonym of &lt;em&gt;minus&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;x less its mean&quot;: adjective?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;times&lt;/em&gt; (multiplication) &quot;2 times 3&quot;: plural noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;squared&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cubed&lt;/em&gt;: verbal participles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;to the&lt;/em&gt; &quot;e to the x&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dot&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cross&lt;/em&gt; (vector operations) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque&quot;&gt;&quot;tau equals r cross F&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;many unary operators are derived from nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trigonometric and hyperbolic functions: &lt;em&gt;sin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cos&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;arcsin&lt;/em&gt;, ... &quot;sine pi equals zero&quot;, &quot;(the) sine of pi equals zero&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;factorial&lt;/em&gt; &quot;four factorial equals twenty-four&quot;, &quot;24 is the factorial of 4&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; (sqrt) &quot;root two over two&quot;, &quot;the square root of two over two&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;gradient&lt;/em&gt;/*del*, &lt;em&gt;div&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;curl&lt;/em&gt; (vector calculus) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations&quot;&gt;&quot;div B equals zero&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what lexical class(es) do mathematical operators belong to, in spoken mathematical usage? I'm interested in how they can be analyzed both in English and in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T11:08:37.793" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T19:07:11.533" Title="How are mathematical operators like &quot;plus&quot; and &quot;cos&quot; analyzed?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2586" CreationDate="2012-10-22T01:50:49.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interjections may not be very representative of the phonology of a language. For instance, &quot;shhh&quot; (being just a consonant) obviously doesn't obey the minimal word restrictions in English. Now, functional words like &quot;they&quot; and &quot;that&quot; can behave in weird ways too and often don't need to obey quite the same restrictions as lexical words. But functional words tend to have high token frequency, so their effect on a language's sound inventory is comparatively strong. In English, this means constant reinforcement of the distinction between /θ/ and /ð/, even while the voicing distinction is often lost in lexical words. Interjections, on the other hand, probably have low frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my guess would be that interjections don't often get used in minimal pairs, or when they do get used, it's with greater care and more caveats. I suppose you could look for other clues as to whether you have a phonemic glottal stop, such as cooking up a small perceptual experiment for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you already checked out some of the literature on characterizing marginal contrastiveness. I've come across Goldsmith 1995 (his introduction to the &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Phonological Theory&lt;/em&gt;) or Hall 2009 (her dissertation) for a more quantitative approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T01:50:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2012-10-22T05:07:03.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depends a lot on the language and analysis. Tone transcription is a messy area with no universal agreement. The most common way is probably to transcribe tone on the nucleus, although where the tone goes with a diphthong/triphthong is generally governed more by convention than phonetic reality. This method also doesn't have one common way of handling syllables with no nucleus. Others transcribe tone with tone letters or contour diacritics after each syllable. This approach is less common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T05:07:03.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2586" CreationDate="2012-10-22T21:49:17.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stirling.kent.ac.uk/SE551/Week10/Ladefoged%20and%20Everett%201996.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A 1996 paper&lt;/a&gt; published in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; by Ladefoged and Everett treats this question, dealing with sounds which are unusual in terms of their phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-10-22T21:49:17.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2012-10-22T23:58:08.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's not that recent, but for reference - an exchange between Hauser, Chomsky and Finch on one side, and Jackendoff and Pinker on the other: &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002422.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Chomsky's hypothesis is that UG contains nothing but recursion. Jackendoff and Pinker point out that our visual cognition is also recursive, so recursion can't belong to UG (unless we believe that these two types of recursion evolved completely independently - but why should we assume that?). If we take the Chomsky's premise about UG, and combine it with the J&amp;amp;G's observation, we end up with the conclusion that there is no UG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T11:08:08.583" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T11:08:08.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-23T10:18:00.323" Score="0" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the abreviation INFLNFL stand for? What is the meaning of INFLNFL and where does it appear in the syntactic tree-construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1435" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T00:21:29.983" Title="What does the abreviation INFLNFL stand for and what is the difference between INFLNFL and INFL?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2745" CreationDate="2012-10-23T10:28:01.980" Score="9" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;txt-speak&quot; appeared because of the need to fit a communication into 160 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Emoticons&quot; appeared due to the need to convey an emotional context with your message so that it is read correctly (many times I've written an email and found that it has been read in a totally different manner than I wrote it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the only thing that is static about the English language is its name, and that there are many variations of it within England alone, does the new-ish phenomenon of txt-speak and emoticons really pose any threat to language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though emoticons &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be seen as a return to &quot;picture-words&quot; and &quot;txt-speak&quot; a return to phonetic spellings, is there anything other than the medium they grew from that would separate these from normal language evolution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1436" OwnerDisplayName="BanksySan" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-23T13:56:33.323" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T18:24:21.860" Title="Are &quot;txt-speak&quot; and &quot;emoticons&quot; examples of normal language evolution?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2742" CreationDate="2012-10-23T16:10:49.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we tell undergraduates in LING 101 is that the conventions of written language are not the object of linguistic investigation. But this might be a bit of an oversimplification (and I wonder if others here would agree). After all, &lt;strong&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; is a very fruitful approach to language research, on the assumption that the texts collected in corpora represent the writers' language experience, even though they may not fully represent their &quot;competence&quot;. Now, what gets collected into corpora is usually not text messages or chat histories, presumably because they don't reflect spoken language use very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think it can be useful to think of the language of these mediums as a sort of register, in which case it could be in the range of &lt;strong&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. A few months ago I saw a talk by sociolinguist &lt;a href=&quot;http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/index.html&quot;&gt;Sali Tagliamonte&lt;/a&gt; on IM language. Some googling reveals &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/coursework/ling395/395_LOL.pdf&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; (pdf). I haven't read it, but if it is similar to the talk I head, it might be of interest. There might also be a newer incarnation that you could look for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagliamonte, Sali &amp;amp; Derek Denis (2008). Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language. In: &lt;em&gt;American Speech&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 83, No. 1, Spring 2008. doi 10.1215/00031283-2008-001&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T16:10:49.743" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2742" CreationDate="2012-10-23T18:24:21.860" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does the new-ish phenomenon of txt-speak and emoticons really pose any threat to language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, it's natural evolution of the language, and it exposes no threats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Languages evolve.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, languages never stop developing (except Latin). New words appear, new semantic constructs arise, others fade out or disappear. You can't stop this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all use &lt;em&gt;&quot;i.e.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;e.g.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;etc.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;$&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;&amp;amp;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and it made no harm to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is there anything other than the medium they grew from that would separate these from normal language evolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It happened before. On paper.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages, likewise all &lt;em&gt;instruments&lt;/em&gt;, adopt to answer changing requirements. There was an objective need to reduce the number of symbols entered, and the language responded this very need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tfrfv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Abbreviations&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the ancient texts. They are full of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scribal abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; which took place for very same reason: cost of the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if it has not ruined the languages before, why should we consider it a threat today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Emoticons (smileys) are part of this process&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct, emoticons seem to be an interesting phenomenon as they are actually ideographic symbols appearing in alphabetic scripts. They evolve exactly the same way as the ideographic symbols have evolved. Their goal is to convey a certain meaning while using minimum of the space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sVLMW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Save button&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you see on this image? Of course, a &lt;code&gt;Save&lt;/code&gt; button. But what exactly is depicted here? Someone young enough may have never seen a diskette, but still, they know the context this image conveys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-10-23T18:24:21.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-23T20:13:28.697" Score="3" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am researching the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Alexamenos Graffito&quot;&lt;/a&gt; from Rome and the various opinions of what the correct translation of the Greek inscription should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some believe it is &quot;Alexamenos worships (his) God&quot; while others believe it is &quot;Alexamenos worship God!&quot; Some even believe that the name Alexamenos is actually two separate words &quot;ale&quot; and &quot;xamenos&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just a rudimentary knowledge of classical Greek, so I'd like to know if there is some consensus on what the translation might be. If available, please provide references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just out of curiosity, what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the etymology of the name Alexamenos? Does it come from similar roots as the name &quot;Alexander&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1438" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-23T22:31:15.957" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T03:47:21.500" Title="Correct Alexamenos Graffito Translation" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2750" CreationDate="2012-10-24T19:12:49.153" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a standard annotated corpora on Language Understanding but I don't know where to start and what to do!&#xA;Does anyone know any good reference in order to guide me through making a standard corpora?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1440" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-10-25T10:28:11.233" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T10:28:11.233" Title="Corpus-making guide in Language Understanding Context" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2749" CreationDate="2012-10-25T01:33:34.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might try Oxford's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ahds.ac.uk/guides/linguistic-corpora/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Wynne, ed.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-10-25T01:33:34.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-25T05:33:45.933" Score="13" ViewCount="1576" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some irregular Spanish verbs with infinite in &quot;-ir&quot; seem to have an interesting pattern in their conjugation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some verbs with &quot;o&quot; as last vowel in the infinite stem (e.g. dormir, morir), the form of the last stem vowel in conjugated forms seem to follow the following pattern (examples are in italics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;stressed: &lt;strong&gt;ue&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;duermo, duerma&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  unstressed, next vowel/diphthong i: &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dormimos, dormía&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  unstressed, next vowel/diphthong ie/a/ió: &lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;durmieron, durmamos, durmió&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly for some verbs with last vowel in the infinite stem &quot;e&quot; (e.g. mentir, sentir):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;stressed: &lt;strong&gt;ie&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;siento, sienta&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  unstressed, next vowel/diphthong i: &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sentimos, sentía&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  unstressed, next vowel/diphthong ie/a/ió: &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sintieron, sintamos, sintió&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking as the &lt;strong&gt;unstressed vowel patterns&lt;/strong&gt; in particular, this reminds me of vowel harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this qualify as vowel harmony at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, where does this phenomenon come from in Spanish? I usually relate vowel harmony to Uralic/Turkic languages, but not IE/romance. Does a similar phenomenon appear in other IE/romance langauges?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2012-10-27T12:47:38.860" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T08:19:44.530" Title="Vowel harmony in Spanish?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2012-10-25T10:06:53.193" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why yes, Romance languages do have vowel harmony, or what the Romance linguistics literature likes to call &lt;strong&gt;metaphony&lt;/strong&gt;. The following information on Spanish is all from &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521717841&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alkire &amp;amp; Rosen 2010&lt;/a&gt;, which is my only source of knowledge about Spanish phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alkire &amp;amp; Rosen 2010 devote subchapter 5.2 to &quot;yod effects in Spanish&quot;. The effect of raising of a stressed vowel under the influence of a following high vowel gesture (anticipation) seems to be especially prominent in the verb system, where it has been largely morphologized. But you find it in nouns as well, so you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VĬTREU &amp;emsp; 'glassy' &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; vidrio &amp;emsp; 'glass'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SĒPIA &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;'cuttlefish' &amp;emsp; jibia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PLŬVIA &amp;emsp; 'rain'&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;lluvia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stressed vowels in Latin should have given Romance high mids, which in Spanish should go on to give you mids: [e] and [o]. Insead, what you you have is [i] and [u], evidence for anticipatory raising. Alkire &amp;amp; Rosen give many more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yod effects can also be found in &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;, but they're more restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PŬGNU &amp;emsp; 'fist' &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; pugno&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FAMILĬA &amp;emsp; 'family'&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;famiglia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CONSĬLIU&amp;emsp;'counsel'&amp;emsp;consiglio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same story here as for Spanish, except it happens before [ɲ] and [ʎ]. There are other examples as well, including examples where the expected raising fails to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; has a lot of yod-related effects too. See ch. 5.3 of Alikre &amp;amp; Rosen 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone else can fill us in on Portuguese. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Romanian&lt;/strong&gt; has this stuff too, but it involves stressed low vowels alternating with mids before an [j] in the inflection (a-ə, e̯a-e, o̯a-o; note that the diphthongs are considered phonemic) and before an [e] in the plural marker (only e̯a-e). This correlates with gender in nouns and person in verbs, so it's also morphologized to a large extent. See Chitoran 2002 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dartmouth.edu/~linguist/pdfs/probus.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abstract&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[mare] &amp;emsp; 'sea' &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; [mər&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp;'seas'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[se̯arə] &amp;emsp; 'evening' &amp;emsp; [ser&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp; 'evenings'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[bo̯alə] &amp;emsp; 'disease' &amp;emsp; [bol&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp; 'diseases'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[aratə] &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp; 'show.3rd.sg' &amp;emsp; [arəʦ&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp; 'show.2nd.sg'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[vise̯azə] &amp;emsp; 'dream.3rd.sg'&amp;emsp;[visez&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp;&#xA;  'dream.2nd.sg'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[do̯arme] &amp;emsp; 'sleep.3rd.sg' &amp;emsp; [dorm&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] &amp;emsp;&#xA;  'sleep.2nd.sg'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T00:56:54.350" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T00:56:54.350" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-25T12:48:05.057" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;People use Figure-Ground Theory to explain inversions. By putting ground before figure, emphasis focus changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how to explain inversion in condition clauses for subjunctive mood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, if clauses containing past subjunctive 'were', as well as some other constructions that are used similarly to subjunctives, can be recast using inversion of subject and verb, with the conjunction 'if' being dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can Figure-Ground Theory explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what theories can be used to explain this kind of inversions for subjunctive mood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1442" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-10T05:38:34.140" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T05:38:34.140" Title="Is the Figure-Ground Theory adaptable for inversion in subjunctive condition clauses in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-25T15:38:02.173" Score="4" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my class we are discussing teaching English as a second language. Some contend that to teach ESL, we need to know the processes and theories about first language acquisition, but it is not clear to me why or whether this helps. Is there clear evidence that this knowledge helps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: I know several ESL teachers that volunteer and are great teachers and know nothing of these theories. On the other hand, to draw a parallel, in the code-switching literature there is plenty of evidence that: teachers that know what code-switching is about get their students to perform better in writing and reading exams. (for example: Rodolfo Jacobson and The Implementation of a Bilingual Instruction Model: The &quot;New&quot; Concurrent Approach.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there hard evidence or at least a program that includes first lang. acquisition theories and the teaching of ESL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1444" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T17:23:26.257" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T20:22:35.337" Title="Do teachers of ESL need to know how first language is acquired?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2758" CreationDate="2012-10-26T04:29:03.530" Score="4" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-age#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Old French &lt;strong&gt;-age&lt;/strong&gt;, from Latin &lt;strong&gt;-aticum&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cognates include Spanish &lt;strong&gt;-aje&lt;/strong&gt; and Italian &lt;strong&gt;-aggio&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-age&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-age&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (etymonline)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;word-forming element in nouns of act, process, function, condition, from Old French and French &lt;strong&gt;-age&lt;/strong&gt;, from L.L. &lt;strong&gt;-aticum&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;belonging to, related to,&amp;quot; originally neuter adjectival suffix, from L. &lt;strong&gt;-atus&lt;/strong&gt;, pp. suffix of verbs of the first conjugation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.The sound change from &amp;quot;t&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;g&amp;quot; is too obscure to me, and how to explain this phenomenon reasonablly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Is there any other word undergone the same change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T12:02:50.633" Title="How does &quot;-age&quot; come from L &quot;-aticum&quot;, with a change from &quot;t&quot; to &quot;g&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2012-10-26T06:54:04.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To get the ball started, here's an educated guess:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-aticum [atiku] &gt; *[atsiku] &gt; *[atsku] &gt; *[atʃo] &gt; [aʒə] (older French) &gt; -age [idʒ] (English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because [ti] is often unstable. The final -m was lost very early IIRC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T06:54:04.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2643" CreationDate="2012-10-26T07:58:15.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to extract the topic of the text using the words of the text, there are some situations which you may encounter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - You have many samples of the same context (e.g. 20newseltter corpora) which many documents in different topics, and each topic labeled to the topic. In this case you just need to do a simple classification on the new data in the same context i.e. you jave 20,000 documents in 20 topics, you give all these documents to a classifier (e.g. Naive Bayes Classifier) and the new document will be classified easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - If you don't have any training data, you should use parsers (as I see you're trying the same), in this case you should build PCFGs from what you get from the parsers (POS taggers, name entity recognizers) return to you. This should be made on your type of data specifically and no general rule exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - If there is a large number of data available but they aren't classified, another way is to use clustering. In many cases in NLP clustering doesn't do much to you but it is worth trying. The only thing you need to make clear for the system is the number of topics (clusters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1440" LastActivityDate="2012-10-26T07:58:15.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4010" CreationDate="2012-10-26T10:41:56.323" Score="6" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native speaker of English, but I study English and Dutch. I have noticed that the two languages differ in their degree of flexibility. The following sentence, for example, is not acceptable to most English speakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but this is not for everyone so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that this might be a too literal translation from Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... maar dit is niet voor iedereen zo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch, however, permits both constituent orders:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... maar dit is niet voor iedereen zo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... maar dit is niet zo voor iedereen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Dutch and English are closely related, I found it interesting that they should differ with respect to their constituent ordering flexibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but this is not for everyone so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but this is not so for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain in a more systematic way the main differences between English and Dutch (or another Germanic language) with respect to word-order flexibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T14:01:09.740" Title="Word order typology in Germanic" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2012-10-27T02:19:01.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Lapropriu gives evidence for a sort of vowel harmony, diphthongizing &quot;stem-changing&quot; verbs are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an example of vowel harmony&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not restricted to &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt;-conjugation verbs; other common ones are &lt;em&gt;sentar&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;me siento&lt;/em&gt; 'I sit'; &lt;em&gt;nos sentamos&lt;/em&gt; 'we sit') and &lt;em&gt;perder&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;pierdo&lt;/em&gt; 'I lose'; &lt;em&gt;perdemos&lt;/em&gt; 'we lose'). And there's nothing special about verbs; the same phenomenon occurs with stress alternation in nouns and adjectives. Example: /be.ne.ˈθwe.la/ &lt;em&gt;Venezuela&lt;/em&gt;, /be.ne.θo.ˈla.no/ &lt;em&gt;venezolano&lt;/em&gt;. (Aside: This process is no longer productive; more recent forms do not alternate: &lt;em&gt;Puerto Rico&lt;/em&gt; /pwer.to.ˈrˑi.ko/ corresponds to &lt;em&gt;puertorriqueño&lt;/em&gt; /pwer.to.rˑi.ˈke.ɲo/, not */porto/-.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Spanish&amp;amp;oldid=517453675#Diphthongization_in_open_and_closed_syllables&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the alternating diphthongizations are derived from Latin short /e/ and /o/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In Spanish, these vowels regularly become /je/ and /we/ in stressed syllables, and /e/ and /o/ in unstressed syllables. This accounts for the alternation between most such verb forms, which differ in stress. It occurs regardless of the other vowels in the word, so it is not vowel harmony. (Non-alternating /e/ and /o/ come from Latin /eː/ or /i/, resp. /oː/ or /u/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Demonstration: /e/ in &lt;em&gt;contar&lt;/em&gt; diphthongizes in stressed syllables, when followed by a syllable starting with any of the possible vowels for the &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt; conjugation:&#xA;* /e/: present subjunctive 3sg -&gt; &lt;em&gt;cuente&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;* /a/: present indicative 2sg (&lt;em&gt;tú&lt;/em&gt;) -&gt; &lt;em&gt;cuentas&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;* /o/: present indicative 1sg -&gt; &lt;em&gt;cuento&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but never diphthongizes in unstressed syllables:&#xA;* /e/: past perfective indicative 1sg -&gt; &lt;em&gt;conté&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;* /a/: present indicative 2sg (&lt;em&gt;vos&lt;/em&gt;) -&gt; &lt;em&gt;contás&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;* /o/: past perfective indicative 3sg -&gt; &lt;em&gt;contó&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Spanish&amp;amp;oldid=517453675#Diphthongization_in_open_and_closed_syllables&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;historical sound changes&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_irregular_verbs&amp;amp;oldid=518573389#Stem-vowel_changes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;conjugations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue that the raising mutations in &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt;-conjugation verbs are like vowel harmony, since they only occur in that conjugation, and depend somewhat on the vowel in the following syllable. But there doesn't seem to be any tendency to regularly place the same vowels in multiple classes, which would be needed for it to be vowel harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-10-27T02:19:01.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2722" CreationDate="2012-10-27T13:59:54.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A standard dictionary or encyclopaedia of mathematics should have these types of historical usages your talking about. You might find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.ca/Words-Mathematics-Etymological-Dictionary-Mathematical/dp/0883855119/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1351344885&amp;amp;sr=8-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Words of Mathematics: An Etymological Dictionary of Mathematical Terms Used in English&lt;/a&gt; if you can find a copy. You might also search works on history of mathematical notation, you should find historical key terms and usages alongside notation compendiums. Otherwise start browsing indices of books like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.ca/Dictionary-Mathematics-McGraw-Hill/dp/0070524335/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1351345111&amp;amp;sr=8-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. The book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.ca/Mathematical-Methods-Linguistics-Barbara-Partee/dp/9027722455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1351345207&amp;amp;sr=8-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mathematical Methods in Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 7.7 &quot;Informal Style in Mathematical Proofs&quot; but it's not something like a discourse analysis. It's more like an explanation of notation and common omissions in proofs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you might find useful are books on the history of mathematics. Such as Boyer's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.ca/History-Mathematics-Carl-B-Boyer/dp/0471543977/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1351345843&amp;amp;sr=1-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A History of Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;. These types of books should explain the contemporaneous concepts, key terms, and notation of mathematical science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only way to find serious academic material on linguistic analysis of mathematical discourse is to approach it as mathematics being a domain of discourse. So, study discourse, then take as your domain &quot;mathematical works&quot; just as you would any other domain like &quot;cooking&quot; or &quot;legal statutes&quot;. Then do as you would, eg extract collocations, classify documents, whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this should really should be more than you asked for, but a less related subject is MathML and LaTex typesettings for mathematical documents. Reading about these would not be directly related to what you want, but it is the current and future course of mathematical publication, and if your seriously studying mathematical discourse you would be remiss to neglect this pertinent aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastActivityDate="2012-10-27T13:59:54.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2012-10-27T14:42:43.433" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The above answers are all good.  I'd like to offer another perspective that I learned while teaching digital libraries that draws on the analogy used in biology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Computational biology = the study of biology using computational techniques.  The goal is to learn new biology, knowledge about living sytems.  It is about science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bioinformatics = the creation of tools (algorithms, databases) that solve problems.  The goal is to build useful tools that work on biological data.  It is about engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the analogy for any field X, we thus have &quot;Computational X&quot; and &quot;X-omatics&quot;.  In NLP/CL, NLP is the equivalent of &quot;Linguamatics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really subscribe to the notion that CL encompasses NLP or vice versa.  They both have a purpose.  CL studies human language to computationally understand how we as humans have the capacity to produce and understand language.  NLP takes a more pragmatic perspective and says that we wish to build systems that facilitate some language interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1446" LastActivityDate="2012-10-27T14:42:43.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2767" CreationDate="2012-10-27T16:02:12.467" Score="2" ViewCount="895" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is on the words with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a word-final &quot;ght&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, such as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;fight&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;wight&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which are quite mysterious, I hope to know the connections among these &quot;ght&quot; words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question comes from the fact that I just don't understand the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;t&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in the PGmc origin &lt;strong&gt;&quot;nakht-&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;fekhtanan&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;wekhtiz&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; stand for, because I can not find the descriptions about the function or meaning of the PGmc or PIE morpheme &quot;t&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;the ultimate question&lt;/strong&gt; is: What is &lt;strong&gt;the historical function about the &quot;t&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; mentioned in the words(with these old language words) above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=night&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O.E. &lt;strong&gt;niht&lt;/strong&gt; (W.Saxon neaht, Anglian næht, neht) &quot;night, darkness;&quot; the vowel indicating that the modern word derives from oblique cases (gen. nihte, dat. niht), from P.Gmc. &lt;strong&gt;*nakht-&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. O.S., O.H.G. naht, O.Fris., Du., nacht, Ger. Nacht, O.N. natt, Goth. nahts), from PIE &lt;strong&gt;*nekwt-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;night&quot; (cf. Gk. nuks &quot;a night,&quot; L. nox, O.Ir. nochd, Skt. naktam &quot;at night,&quot; Lith. naktis &quot;night,&quot; O.C.S. nosti, Rus. noch', Welsh henoid &quot;tonight&quot;), according to Watkins, probably from a verbal root &lt;strong&gt;*neg-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to be dark, be night.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;For spelling with -gh- see fight.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=fight&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O.E. &lt;strong&gt;feohtan&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to fight&quot; (class III strong verb; past tense feaht, pp. fohten), from P.Gmc. &lt;strong&gt;*fekhtanan&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. O.H.G. fehtan, Ger. fechten, M.Du., Du. vechten, O.Fris. fiuhta &quot;to fight&quot;), from PIE &lt;strong&gt;*pek-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to pluck out&quot; (wool or hair), apparently with a notion of &quot;pulling roughly&quot; (cf. Gk. pekein &quot;to comb, shear,&quot; pekos &quot;fleece, wool;&quot; Pers. pashm &quot;wool, down,&quot; L. pectere &quot;to comb,&quot; Skt. paksman- &quot;eyebrows, hair&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spelling substitution of -gh- for a &quot;hard H&quot; sound was a Middle English scribal habit, especially before -t-&lt;/strong&gt;. In some late Old English examples, the middle consonant was represented by a yogh. To fight back &quot;resist&quot; is recorded from 1890.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=wight&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O.E. &lt;strong&gt;wiht&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;living being, creature,&quot; from P.Gmc. &lt;strong&gt;*wekhtiz&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. O.S. wiht &quot;thing, demon,&quot; Du. wicht &quot;a little child,&quot; O.H.G. wiht &quot;thing, creature, demon,&quot; Ger. Wicht &quot;creature, infant,&quot; O.N. vettr &quot;thing, creature,&quot; Swed. vätte &quot;spirit of the earth, gnome,&quot; Goth. waihts &quot;something&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only apparent cognate outside Gmc. is O.C.S. vešti &quot;a thing.&quot; Not related to the Isle of Wight, which is from L. Vectis (c.150), originally Celtic, possibly meaning &quot;place of the division.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-10-31T12:23:17.697" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T08:10:03.477" Title="Where does the &quot;t&quot; in some words like &quot;night&quot; and &quot;fight&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-10-29T00:32:28.940" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One thing to remember about English spelling is that for the most part it is &quot;frozen&quot;, and reflects the Middle English pronunciation. Another thing to remember is that there has never been a standardized spelling for English, and individual judgment, errors, and a variety of dialects have played a large role in how words are spelled. So every question about English spelling has to be considered in light of these two major issues.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Night&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;fight&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;wight&lt;/strong&gt; are all pronounced with a final /-aɪt/ in Modern English. Their &amp;lt; -ght &gt; spelling reflects the Middle English pronunciations, which had a final /-ixt/. (The digraph &amp;lt; gh &gt; in MidEng represented the sounds /x/ or /ç/, which were also variously spelled &amp;lt; h &gt;, &amp;lt; ch &gt;, &amp;lt; ȝ &gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the three words are spelled similarly in Modern English is that they rhymed in Middle English. The reason they rhymed in Middle English despite differing etymologies is that they underwent regular predictable phonological mergers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Germanic these words were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nɑxt&lt;/strong&gt;-s 'night &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;' &amp;lt; PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1373.html&quot;&gt;*nokʷts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wiht&lt;/strong&gt;-iz 'creature, person, thing &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;' &amp;lt; PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P2130.html&quot;&gt;*wekti-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fex-t&lt;/strong&gt; ɑn 'to comb wool, to struggle &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt;' &amp;lt; PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1469.html&quot;&gt;*pek-&lt;/a&gt;. The /t/ came from the personal suffix on the verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Old English the three rhymes were not yet homophones. The /a/ in the &lt;strong&gt;night&lt;/strong&gt; etymon had raised to /i/ under &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_umlaut#Palatal_umlaut&quot;&gt;palatal umlaut&lt;/a&gt;, causing it to rhyme with &lt;strong&gt;wight&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;niht&lt;/strong&gt; /niht/ [niçt] 'night'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wiht&lt;/strong&gt; /wiht/ [wiçt] 'wight' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but &lt;strong&gt;feoht&lt;/strong&gt; /feoht/ [feoxt] 'fight &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By Middle English the rhymes were all homophonous in /-iːht/. This was due to the effects of raising on the sequence /eoh/ to /ih/ in a series of steps: /eoh/ -&gt; /øːh/ -&gt; /eːh/ -&gt; /iːh/; thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;niht&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;night&lt;/strong&gt; /niːht/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wiht&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;wight&lt;/strong&gt; /wiːht/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and &lt;strong&gt;feoht&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;fight&lt;/strong&gt; /fiːht/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://eweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm&quot;&gt;English Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;, Middle English /iː/ diphthongized to [ɪi], then became [əɪ], and finally Modern English [aɪ]. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_fricatives_and_affricates#Taut.E2.80.93taught_merger&quot;&gt;Non-initial /h/ was lost&lt;/a&gt;. This led to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;night&lt;/strong&gt; /naɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wight&lt;/strong&gt; /waɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fight&lt;/strong&gt; /faɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;QED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-10-29T00:40:33.240" LastActivityDate="2012-10-29T00:40:33.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-29T20:02:42.917" Score="4" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested if there is a text or set of texts where each word is correctly POS tagged.&#xA;I know there are algorithms that can associate POS tags to the words, but there are always many of incorrectly tagged words, which are ambiguous and context sensitive.&#xA;These errors could be only handled at the time the text is created by some clever editor and the author of the text would clarify the POS tags of words that could be ambiguous in particular context.&#xA;So, the result would be the text where all POS tags are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you recommend some research material dealing with creation (possibly computer AI assistance) of unambiguous texts by some clever editor which could be further processed on the semantic level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a corpus or set of texts available on the Internet, which are created by this tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1111" LastEditorUserId="1111" LastEditDate="2012-10-30T08:49:56.320" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T13:22:26.297" Title="Tool for manually POS tagging texts" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-10-30T07:49:48.737" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.learningplace.com.au/deliver/content.asp?pid=40456&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;layers of the language&lt;/a&gt; is dealing with co-reference resolution and what are the steps to solve this problem in NLP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="401" LastEditDate="2012-10-31T05:33:36.483" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T05:33:36.483" Title="Which layers of the language is dealing with co-reference resolution and how to solve it computationaly?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2654" CreationDate="2012-10-30T17:30:04.447" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why trigrams can be considered powerful compared to n-grams of higher order, lies in the problem of data sparsity; when n is higher, data becomes increasingly sparse. Because of this, using trigrams is a good compromise which often yields good results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a study by Chen and Goodman (1998), the effect of varying n-gram orders on the performance of a language model was compared. As expected, they found that 4-grams and 5-grams significantly outperform trigram models when using a very large data set (approximately 1e+06 sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where you could find a source stating that trigrams outperform other models, but if you cite Chen and Goodman you can at least say that higher order n-grams are only viable with large data sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry I can't provide you with a link to this article, but here's the citation at least!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chen, Stanley F. and Goodman, Joshua. An empirical study of smoothing techniques for language&#xA;modeling. Harvard University, Center for Research in Computing Technology, TR-10-98:1–63, 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1452" LastActivityDate="2012-10-30T17:30:04.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2708" CreationDate="2012-10-31T10:45:26.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find this interesting: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natlantech.com/lingbench_ide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LingBench IDE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the product description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LingBench IDE is an Integrated Development Environment for Linguists and Computer Linguists to Model a Natural Language by describing the morphology, the syntax, the lexical and other aspects of a language in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be an old and unsupported piece of software though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1453" LastActivityDate="2012-10-31T10:45:26.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2012-10-31T20:28:11.910" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Americans have very long open vowels when speaking so when they sing the don't sound very different.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Many people with different accents sing with long open vowels too, so they do sound very American.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But not everyone sings like that - some people hold on to their accent more than others do when singing so they don't sound like an American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You guys can argue all you want on this topic but I think it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people read this and probably didn't want to believe it because they thought it would be an insult to their accent to sound American, but it's not necessarily sounding American - it's just having long open vowels when you're singing, which you're supposed to do. Americans just happen to speak like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1454" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T17:00:05.160" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T17:00:05.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2791" CreationDate="2012-11-01T04:50:49.010" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am focusing on knowledge based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word-sense disambiguation&lt;/a&gt; (WSD). I have come across algorithms like Lesk, extended Lesk, etc., which perform WSD based on gloss definitions of senses of each word using WordNet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I came across a paper in which they have said that WSD can also be performed using semantic relatedness measures like Resnik, Lin, Jiang-Cornath, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unable to understand this: how exactly can WSD be performed using similar measures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1451" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T11:00:13.710" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T23:21:57.960" Title="How can we perform WSD using semantic relatedness measures?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2785" CreationDate="2012-11-01T06:39:05.020" Score="5" ViewCount="1417" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules for when whitespace is required/permitted in Korean are not obvious, but are not explicitly discussed in any grammars or textbooks I have access to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can infer this much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Between classifier words and their complements (e.g. 한 달)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After pre-verbal adverbs, sentential adverbs and conjunctions (e.g. 잘 지내세요)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To separate complete phrases (e.g. 도서관에서 책을 읽어)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while whitespace is not allowed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;before phrase-final particles (e.g. 저도; 민식만; 시드니까지)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clearly some additional rules, as it seems that whitespace after the classifier word and before 만 is optional as well: 한 달 만 or 한 달만, but I doubt particles 은/을 can ever be preceded by whitespace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, 뭐 is always followed by whitespace in my textbook, but just Googling I see matches for both 뭐 했어 as well as 뭐했어.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other environments in which whitespace is required or optional? Can the above rules be generalised into a simpler rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Korean, phonemic words which begin with 'weakly aspirated' affricate or stop consonants (i.e. ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ) are pronounced lenis with weak aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the word boundaries as indicated by whitespace always correspond to phonemic words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T14:35:10.663" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T12:33:23.750" Title="Criteria for separating Korean words" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T07:21:14.530" Score="11" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning Arabic right now, and the Arabs seem to all hold this book in high regard. Obviously, many for merely religious reasons. However, I've found numerous people that reference it as some sort of perfected grammar. Is there any reason, linguistically, to hold this book in such high regard? Aside from its mythological value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1457" LastEditorUserId="1606" LastEditDate="2012-12-27T10:27:29.240" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T22:56:57.850" Title="The Koran: anything special about this book linguistically?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2778" CreationDate="2012-11-01T08:01:30.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For many (most?) languages, there is such a thing as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_language&quot;&gt;standard variety&lt;/a&gt; among a number of dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English, which has several standards, some of these would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English&quot;&gt;Standard English&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American&quot;&gt;General American&lt;/a&gt;; for German it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German&quot;&gt;Standard or High German&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Arabic, the standard is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Arabic&quot;&gt;Standard Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, which is not what is actually spoken everyday in the Arabic world, which consists of several countries speaking different dialects, but what you find in the Koran. The Koran, if you will, sets the standard for correct Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T10:55:15.757" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T10:55:15.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2778" CreationDate="2012-11-01T10:26:24.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is any perception of it being &quot;perfect&quot; Arabic, then it would stem from the prestige associated with the book itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be a similar case to the language of the bible, where its words are deemed to be those of God. So to deny its status as being perfect would be to suggest God is not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-01T10:55:25.057" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T10:55:25.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-11-01T17:31:15.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just now discovered that Wikipedia has an article &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_marker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Topic marker&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that article currently makes no mention of Mayan or Austronesian languages, it devotes an entire section to Classical Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The suffix 者 &lt;em&gt;zhe&lt;/em&gt; is similar to the Japanese は &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt;, but is used very sporadically in Classic Chinese and used only when an author wants to emphasize the topic; otherwise &lt;em&gt;zhe&lt;/em&gt; is usually omitted. This is different from Japanese, in which the topic marker is generally required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-11-01T17:31:15.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-01T23:16:28.883" Score="3" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing an essay in linguistic typology on possessives. I got stuck in the last part, in which I am supposed to present a syntactic approach to the structure of possessives. I should find an example in the literature and simply present the approach in 300 words and draw an example tree...&#xA;I've found an approach that words with predicate-movement, but the article is quite difficult to understand, so if anybody knows a different approach to the topic, I would very glad to hear about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1458" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T00:05:13.303" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T00:05:13.303" Title="A syntactic approach to possessives" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2012-11-02T00:03:39.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the basis of Ockham's Razor, why not try out &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226556298&quot;&gt;McCawley 1999&lt;/a&gt;, specifically, Ch 12 (&lt;em&gt;The Structure of Noun Phrases&lt;/em&gt;) part c. (&lt;em&gt;Genitives&lt;/em&gt;) pp 399-406. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He lays out all the possible structures, and the arguments for and against them, very clearly. Mind you, he &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; expect that you understand how syntax works, as explained in the 11 previous chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T00:03:39.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-02T00:25:59.883" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;A current trend in cognitive science is to view the mind as a dynamical system (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Continuity of Mind&lt;/em&gt; by psycholinguist Spivey, in which cognition--including language comprehension and production--is understood as a &quot;continuous and often recurrent trajectory through a state space&quot;). Although I'd like to critically evaluate this trend, I'm embarresed to admit that &lt;em&gt;I've never taken even a basic calculus course.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet since I don't intend to build dynamical systems models myself, what is the bare minimum of maths learning that I need to accomplish in order to understand dynamical systems in the context of cognitive? Remember, I'm a total novice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1459" LastActivityDate="2012-11-09T15:13:02.497" Title="What kinds of maths to learn for understanding dynamical systems in cognitive linguistics?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2777" CreationDate="2012-11-02T03:35:18.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since no one else has submitted an answer I guess I will. Be warned though that my answer will be based more on anecdotal evidence from living and working in Seoul for 2 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word Boundaries in Written Korean&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Koreans have a joke about word boundaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;아버지가 방에 있어.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  dad-SUB room-LOC exist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dad is in [his] room.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;아버지 가방에 있어.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  dad handbag-LOC exist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i) [It is] in Dad's handbag.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ii) Dad is in [his] handbag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The subject particle &lt;code&gt;이/가&lt;/code&gt; is often dropped in casual speech, making the &lt;em&gt;ii&lt;/em&gt; variant grammatical. My original understanding was that &lt;em&gt;ii&lt;/em&gt; was the preferred interpretation but talking with friends seems to suggest that &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; might be the preferred interpretation. I would need more data before I can say for certain.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question remains &quot;are word boundaries observed in usage?&quot;. The answer to that, again taken from my personal experience, is &quot;it depends on the context&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short form writings (SMSes, Twitter, chatting, notes-to-self, etc.) allow for the omission of white spaces. I have actually received SMSes from my faculty which had all spaces removed (which caused me great confusion as a non-native speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer and more formal forms do enforce word boundaries (thus the joke above). From what I've seen, the spaces are heavily enforced after case markers (&lt;code&gt;은/는&lt;/code&gt; topic markers, &lt;code&gt;이/가&lt;/code&gt; subject markers, &lt;code&gt;을/를&lt;/code&gt; object marker, &lt;code&gt;에(게)&lt;/code&gt; dative marker, etc.) and after any structural markers (&lt;code&gt;은/는/을&lt;/code&gt; adjective marker, &lt;code&gt;게&lt;/code&gt; adverb marker, &lt;code&gt;와/과&lt;/code&gt; lexical &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;고&lt;/code&gt; sentence &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, various other conjunctions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example you cited, &lt;code&gt;한 달&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;한달&lt;/code&gt; (both &quot;one month&quot;), varies because they are both nouns and both &quot;pure&quot; Korean (i.e. not taken from another language). &lt;code&gt;한&lt;/code&gt; meaning &quot;one/first&quot; and &lt;code&gt;달&lt;/code&gt; meaning month. They retain their meaning in isolation and the sense of their meaning does not change when viewed as a compound word. Therefore, without any grammatical markers, spacing is not strictly enforced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, I've found that Chinese-based vocabulary (i.e. 한자, or&quot;hanja&quot;, words) tend to avoid intra-word boundaries. For example: &lt;code&gt;일월&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;一月&lt;/code&gt;, also literally &lt;em&gt;one/first month&lt;/em&gt;, but with a different usage context than 한달) means &quot;January&quot; while &lt;code&gt;일 월&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;一 月&lt;/code&gt;) is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hypothesize that although these characters have a meaning in isolation the white space is enforced because, unlike &quot;pure&quot; Korean words, the way Chinese-based vocabulary combines changes the meaning of the characters based on context. For example, &lt;code&gt;친구&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;親舊&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;friend&quot;) broken into it's base characters is literally &quot;old closeness&quot; (&lt;code&gt;親&lt;/code&gt; meaning &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A6%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;close&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in the sense of relationships, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A6%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;or &quot;related&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;code&gt;舊&lt;/code&gt; meaning &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%88%8A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;old&quot; or &quot;ancient&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). In this particular case one can guess how the modern meaning &quot;friend&quot; is derived (probably &quot;someone that you have been close to for a long time&quot;), but the literal meaning is essentially non-sense. Therefore, they cannot be analyzed separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word Boundaries in Spoken Korean&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is a much more interesting problem. As I am sure you know, spoken language isn't a series of discrete words like written language but a continuous stream of input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;잘 못했다.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  well not-do-PAST&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [I] did not do [it] well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;잘못 했다.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  incorrect do-PAST&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [I] did [it] incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two examples have different pronunciations. I am not a phoneticist so I cannot comment on exactly how they are different, but the effect is noticeable. It may have something to do with how humans comprehend word boundaries or it may be due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=552176&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Korean's semi-tonal nature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, due to my lack of expertise in phonetics I do not feel comfortable attempting to answer your second question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-11-06T12:33:23.750" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T12:33:23.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2844" CreationDate="2012-11-02T19:37:21.657" Score="4" ViewCount="1777" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the term 'dition' has any meaning by itself or where does it derive from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be found for example in many English words, like edition, addition, expedition or extradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="207" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T05:33:48.030" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:46:03.437" Title="Has the word ending *dition any independent meaning?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2786" CreationDate="2012-11-02T20:11:16.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all of the cited words the /d/ is part of the original Latin root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edere: to edit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;addere: to add&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;expedire: set free&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tradere: to hand over&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these can be nominalized with a suffix -itio(n) (e.g., editio (nom.), editionis (gen.) editionem (acc.))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-11-02T20:11:16.943" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2786" CreationDate="2012-11-02T20:21:37.067" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is: no. This sequence of letters comes from various roots, and it even cuts right through some of them, like &lt;em&gt;-ped-&lt;/em&gt; below. It is not a suffix, but merely a sequence of letters. What those words do have in common etymologically is &lt;em&gt;-t-ion&lt;/em&gt;, which is in all cases a combination of the same two suffixes &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ion-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;ex-ped-i-t-ion&lt;/strong&gt;, it comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;pes,&lt;/em&gt; stem &lt;em&gt;ped-&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;foot&quot;. The original sense of the verb &lt;em&gt;ex-ped-i-o&lt;/em&gt; was &quot;to get the foot out of [a snare]&quot; (&lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; is here a suffix that can turn a noun into a verb). Hence it came to connote a certain sense of (increased) movement or speed. It was already used with various similar connotations in Latin: &lt;em&gt;expedio&lt;/em&gt; also meant roughly &quot;to expedit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; is used to form a past participle out of a verbal stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix &lt;em&gt;-io(n-)&lt;/em&gt; is generally added to the stem of a past participle (here &lt;em&gt;ex-ped-i-t-&lt;/em&gt;) to form a noun of action or result: the act of expediting, or the result of expediting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your other examples, &lt;em&gt;-di-t-ion&lt;/em&gt; comes from the Latin verb &lt;em&gt;do,&lt;/em&gt; verbal stem &lt;em&gt;da-&lt;/em&gt;, past participle &lt;em&gt;da-t-us/-di-t-us&lt;/em&gt;, participial stem &lt;em&gt;da-t-/-di-t-&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;give&quot;. In compound words, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; also means simply &quot;put&quot; or &quot;set&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;strong&gt;e-di-t-ion&lt;/strong&gt;, you give out your book to the public (Dutch &lt;em&gt;uit-geven&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to give out, to publish&quot;): Latin &lt;em&gt;e(x)&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;out&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;ex-tra-di-t-ion&lt;/strong&gt;, you give someone &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; from your own group to the other side/party: from &lt;em&gt;ex-tra&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;on the outside&quot;, which is short for &lt;em&gt;extra parte&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;on the out-side&quot;, from the adjective &lt;em&gt;ex-ter&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;out&quot;, stem &lt;em&gt;ex-tr-&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;ex&lt;/em&gt; and the adjectival suffix &lt;em&gt;-ter/-tr-&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;ad-di-t-ion&lt;/strong&gt;, you give or place a certain something &lt;em&gt;next to&lt;/em&gt; something else, as in adding something to a sum: from &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;to, at&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other words where it comes from yet other stems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;sed-i-t-ion&lt;/strong&gt;, it comes from &lt;em&gt;se(d)-&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;apart, away&quot;, plus &lt;em&gt;eo&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;to go&quot;, present stem &lt;em&gt;e-/i-&lt;/em&gt;, plus the participial suffix &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;a going away (from a group), a rebellion&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40390/word-formation-with-the-nominal-suffix-tion-when-and-why-do-we-insert-an-a&quot;&gt;Word formation with the nominal suffix -tion: when and why do we insert an “a”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T06:26:01.813" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2626" CreationDate="2012-11-03T20:23:51.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could also look into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ANTLR parser&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1465" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2012-11-04T19:35:01.433" LastActivityDate="2012-11-04T19:35:01.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2776" CreationDate="2012-11-03T23:21:57.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible approach would be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic relatedness can be derived from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sics.se/~mange/TheWordSpaceModel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;word-space models&lt;/a&gt;. With a word-space model you could also identify the different contexts in which an ambiguous word is used (e.g. through clustering different contexts based on their vectors). If you do this, let's say, for the word &lt;em&gt;bass&lt;/em&gt;, you should end up with two clusters - one with bass occurring in fish-related contexts, one with music-related contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have done this, you might be able to disambiguate new words through comparing their context vectors, and see which cluster provides the best match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is just a suggestion. Whether or not it would work very well is a different matter. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A link to the paper you mentioned would be appreciated, by the way!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1452" LastActivityDate="2012-11-03T23:21:57.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-04T01:14:52.847" Score="3" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the confusing title, but I'm not aware of any common linguistic terms for the concepts at hand, so I'm kinda making them up as I go. So I'll start by explaining the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few different ways that languages can achieve the function of adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is a handy example of a language which predominantly uses adnominal adjectives: a distinct lexical class whose primary function is to describe nouns adnominally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese uses two types of adjectivals commonly. First, stative verbs, which may then be used adnominally through the formation of relative clauses. E.g. &quot;aoi [be blue] hana [flower]&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese also commonly uses abstract genitive phrases, where abstract nouns are used in genitive phrases conveying an attributive relation with the head noun. E.g. &quot;kirei [beauty] na [genitive marker] tori [bird]&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is what are some languages (I'm not familiar with any) that predominantly use the fourth type: concrete nouns that are used adjectivally by the formation of genitive phrases where the genitive relation conveys equality with the head noun. I suppose German, Japanese, and some other agglutinative languages could be taken as examples of languages which make use of such constructions (if you count agglutination as a genitive structure), but in both cases I'm inclined to think other adjectival strategies are more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T00:06:33.587" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T04:16:29.267" Title="Examples of Equative Genitive Adjectival Languages" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2800" CreationDate="2012-11-05T08:34:36.650" Score="2" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some correct terminology to use within the fields of &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/phonology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'phonology'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phonology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/acoustics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'acoustics'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;acoustics&lt;/a&gt; (I assume).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spoken language there is generally some kind of very brief pauses, changes of intonation, etc which give audible cues which roughly indicate where one word ends and the next begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is roughly analogous to spaces between words in written language but there is rarely a direct 1:1 mapping even though speakers without linguistics training may intuitively feel that there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms which keep popping into my head are &quot;phonotactics&quot; and &quot;prosody&quot; but I'm sure those are not really what I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which term or terms really are pertinent to what I have described?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T15:21:45.447" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:24:35.990" Title="Seeking linguistic terms for how pronunciation reflects word boundaries" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-11-05T08:39:28.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which apply solely or mostly to the written forms of languages as opposed to their spoken forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/spoken-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'spoken-language'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spoken-language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T10:47:26.953" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T10:47:26.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-11-05T08:39:28.567" Score="0" Body="Questions which apply solely or mostly to the written forms of languages as opposed to their spoken forms." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T10:47:07.263" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T10:47:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2796" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-11-05T08:39:58.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions which apply solely or mostly to the spoken forms of languages as opposed to their written forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/written-language&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'written-language'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;written-language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T10:46:59.667" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T10:46:59.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-11-05T08:39:58.413" Score="0" Body="Questions which apply solely or mostly to the spoken forms of languages as opposed to their written forms." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T10:46:36.187" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T10:46:36.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2799" CreationDate="2012-11-05T11:20:34.013" Score="10" ViewCount="1068" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to explain vowel shift in French I wrote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/3363/why-the-pronounciation-of-monsieur/3368#3368&quot;&gt;FL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;  that &quot;Vowel sounds are more prone to evolution than consonants. I suppose it is because phonatory organs are not as easily controlled when sounding vowels than when sounding consonants&quot;. Could someone tell me if my supposition is supported by scientific evidence?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is not on the historical evolution of pronunciation in languages (as the English Great Vowel Shift or the French vowel shift) but on the actual morphology of the phonatory organs and the way we use them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T20:13:04.800" Title="Is there a biological reason to vowel shift?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2798" CreationDate="2012-11-05T13:27:56.510" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer has an air of reasonableness, but the only problem is that it is not exactly clear what it means for the phonatory organs to be &quot;loose.&quot; I think, however, a reasonable construal is that it is more difficult to achieve precision in vocalic gestures than in consonantal gestures. There are a couple of reasons why this might be a reasonable explanation: first, the main articulator responsible for vowel sounds, the tongue body, moves more slowly than does the tongue tip, which is more associated with consonant sounds. Second, proprioception is not as good a guide for vowel sounds as it is for consonant sounds; stop and obstruent articulations provide tactile (from direct contact or pressure-sensing) feedback which is not present in vowel articulations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another perspective which I think may be just as valid is the auditory/acoustic perspective. According to this perspective, the issue is not that there is a difficulty in controlling gestures, but that there is a difficulty in hearing the difference between similar-sounding vowels. In other words, we are able to reproduce vowel gestures which are very faithful to an acoustic image, but it is the acoustic image which is difficult to recall with accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent discussion on these two competing explanations can be found in&lt;br&gt; LINDBLOM, B.- ENGSTRAND, O. (1989) &quot;In what sense speech is quantal?&quot;, Journal of Phonetics 17: 107-121. (see also other contributions to that issue)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility, which I don't think can be ruled out right away, is the sociolinguistic explanation. It might be that both auditory and articulatory precision are within our control, but that vowel sounds carry sociolinguistic information which needs to be adjusted depending on social forces (e.g., a cognate vowel in two dialects might diverge as the two groups try to emphasize their linguistic distinctness). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See work by William Labov for this tradition of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T13:27:56.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2793" CreationDate="2012-11-05T13:44:25.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are referring to are &lt;strong&gt;prosodic word boundaries&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prosody&lt;/a&gt; deals with the relative prominence of linguistic units, but it also deals with the delineation of those units at different levels. Prosody can be encoded in the &quot;ups and downs&quot; of speech melody, but it also manifests itself in terms of duration (of speech units and of pauses) and intensity, among other things. All of these acoustic properties can be used by a speaker to cue prosodic boundaries, including word boundaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other prosodic boundaries include syllable boundaries and phrase boundaries. I added the &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt; tag to your question because phonetics is the field of linguistics that deals with how phonological units like words and phrases are delineated acoustically (acoustics is not a field of linguistics per se; one can study the acoustics of jet engines or the acoustics of a concert hall, but phonetics deals with the acoustics of speech) and how those acoustic cues are produced and perceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noted, the &lt;em&gt;prosodic word&lt;/em&gt; is not always equivalent to the &lt;em&gt;morphological word&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;orthographic word&lt;/em&gt;. For example, a prosodic word can often consist of a content word and a function word that cliticizes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final note: the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonotactics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is not directly relevant for the discussion of the phonetic realization of prosodic boundaries. Phonotactics is the branch of phonology that deals with what combinations of phonemes are permitted in a language. Sometimes the phonotactics of a language can interact with its prosody such that, say, certain consonant clusters are only able to appear across syllable boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T15:24:35.990" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:24:35.990" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2012-11-05T14:49:26.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T14:49:26.523" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T14:49:26.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2802" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2012-11-05T14:49:26.523" Score="0" Body="Questions about the boundaries between words, both phonological and orthographic." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-05T15:14:53.790" LastActivityDate="2012-11-05T15:14:53.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2806" CreationDate="2012-11-06T14:00:19.213" Score="4" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;When learning Thai, I was amazed how modern Thai word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;fish&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;  is similar to Slavic word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;to swim&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai:&lt;/strong&gt; ปลา &lt;code&gt;[plaː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;fish&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Lao:&lt;/strong&gt; ປາ &lt;code&gt;[pa᷅ː]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;fish&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ukrainian:&lt;/strong&gt; плавати &lt;code&gt;[ˈpɫɑvɑtɪ]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;to swim&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Slovenian:&lt;/strong&gt; plávati&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Slovakian:&lt;/strong&gt; рlávаt᾽&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I looked into dictionaries of Slavic languages. Many, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://vasmer.narod.ru/p509.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vasmer's Dictionary of Russian Language&lt;/a&gt;, refer Ancient Greek &lt;code&gt;πλεῖν&lt;/code&gt;, but no further references leading to PIE/Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I looked into Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary and found that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit:&lt;/strong&gt; प्लवते &lt;code&gt;[plavate]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;to swim&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but again, no reference to &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;fish&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is, how to prove that Thai &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;fish&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and Slavic &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;to swim&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; are related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T10:28:56.107" Title="Are &quot;fish&quot; and &quot;to swim&quot; related words?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2798" CreationDate="2012-11-06T20:13:04.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is very interesting and challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dare to say that &lt;strong&gt;vowels are not more prone to change, generally&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Although it is the case in Germanic languages, this is not true in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What triggers languages to change&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Schleicher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schleicher&lt;/a&gt; is usually considered the first linguist who suggested that languages evolve in a similar manner to biological processes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Therefore, it would be accurate to assume that language changes are similar to &lt;strong&gt;biological mutations&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As all mutations, these changes are &lt;strong&gt;random&lt;/strong&gt; by their nature. Randomness imply that there is no natural preference over vowels or consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why vowels, not consonants&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, likewise many other Germanic languages, have a very developed vowel set. Look at these maps. &lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: only monophthongs are listed, no tones, no vowel length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; (16 key points)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D5GXm.png&quot; alt=&quot;English&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; (9 key points);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/plgOG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Thai&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Farsi&lt;/strong&gt; (6 key points)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2nz4k.png&quot; alt=&quot;Farsi&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arabic&lt;/strong&gt; (3 key points)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PT10n.png&quot; alt=&quot;Arabic&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The more places for possible &amp;quot;mutation&amp;quot;, the more likely a mutation will occur.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why changes can be massive&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dialectblog.com/2011/07/22/why-vowel-shifts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; has an interesting insight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use a silly metaphor, imagine that Spanish is a train car with only five riders, while English is a car packed with thirteen people. The five people in the “Spanish” car are likely to remain put for the entire journey (there’s so much room!) The thirteen people in the “English” car, however, tend to jostle around, move to less crowded parts of the train, make room for people as the enter, etc. Simply put, they’re more likely to shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how do particular vowel shifts begin in the first place? What gets the ball rolling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways a vowel shift can be described. The first is as a &lt;strong&gt;“pull chain.”&lt;/strong&gt; Extending the above metaphor, imagine that a passenger on our crowded car train notices an open space a few feet down, so he moves. A second rider moves into the empty space that the first passenger left behind, then another person moves into passenger #3′s space. And so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;“push chain,”&lt;/strong&gt; on the other hand, means the opposite: turning again to our “train,” this means an obnoxious train rider pushes another rider out of the way, that rider stumbles and pushes a third person out of the way as well. In real terms, this means that “pot” moves toward the vowel in “pat,” pushing it toward the vowel in “pet.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Counter-examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there are many evidences when consonants evolved to a larger extent than vowels. Sanskrit had rather a poor vowels set (&lt;code&gt;[a/i/e/o]&lt;/code&gt; plus phonated &lt;code&gt;[r/l/m]&lt;/code&gt;), but it has developed a huge &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.user.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/sanskrit-alphabet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonants list&lt;/a&gt;, including such exotic ones like ব্ধ্ব &lt;code&gt;[bdhva]&lt;/code&gt; or ন্ধ্ব &lt;code&gt;[ndhva]&lt;/code&gt;. No surprise that modern languages evolved from Sanskrit (e.g., Thai, Lao, Hindi) dramatically simplified the consonants, while the vowels actually retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language change processes are similar to biological mutations;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The more &amp;quot;placeholders&amp;quot; for mutation, the more likely a mutation will occur;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Germanic languages often have large vowel sets, so the changes in vowels are more likely to happen;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many languages have dramatically changed their consonants contrary to their vowel sets that remained more or less intact for hundreds of years;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-11-06T20:13:04.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2807" CreationDate="2012-11-08T12:24:01.710" Score="4" ViewCount="8399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are English loanwords ending in /d/ or /t/ systematically transcribed into Hangul syllables ending in ㅅ rather than ㄷ? This seems strange, since when ㅅ is followed by a vowel, the coda is realised as [ɕ] or [s]. Also, there are native words ending in ㄷ, which would be a better phonetic match. Is there a principle explaining why ㅅ might be preferred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;em&gt;Internet&lt;/em&gt; is transcribed in South Korea as 인터넷, yielding the pronunciation [in.tʌ.ne.ɕi] when followed by the subject particle 이, or [in.tʌ.ne.sɨɭ] followed by the object particle 을.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2012-11-09T12:05:10.710" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T14:14:53.560" Title="Korean syllable-final ㅅ in Hangul transcription of loanwords" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-11-08T14:13:54.397" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;How to prove&quot; something that probably isn't true, is rather difficult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Cthai%5Czhtet&amp;amp;first=721&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;, the Thai word has a solid etymology &lt;em&gt;pla.A&lt;/em&gt; in proto-Tai-Kadai.  If this is true (and I have no idea how reliable the site is, but it looks plausible) then the word is not a loanword from Sanskrit, and has no connection with the PIE root (unless you subscribe to one of the controversial super-grouping theories). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T14:13:54.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2805" CreationDate="2012-11-08T16:05:04.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Before we start, I should explain for non-Korean speakers how coda-position ㅅ (&quot;S&quot;) is pronounced in Korean. First, as jogloran has already hinted at, Korean has a tendency to avoid codas, converting them into onsets wherever possible (i.e. if the next syllable has no onset). Slight simplification but good enough for now. Second, ㅅ (&quot;s&quot;) when pronounced &lt;em&gt;as a coda&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. the syllable is pronounced in isolation or the following syllable has a non-null onset) it loses its [+stri] feature and is pronounced more like a soft (unaspirated) &quot;t&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point being that 인터넷 (&quot;internet&quot;. Literally &quot;intheneys&quot;, pronounced &quot;intheneyt&quot;) is pronounced &lt;em&gt;in isolation&lt;/em&gt; in more-or-less the same manner as the English &quot;internet&quot;. However, again as jogloran noted, when followed by a null-onset syllable, as in 인터넷이 (intheneys-i, internet-SUB) or 인터넷에 (intheneys-ey, internet-DAT, &quot;to/at the internet&quot;) the coda ㅅ adjoins to the following syllable as an onset and &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; lose it's [+stri] feature. This results in the surface forms &quot;in-the-ney-si&quot; and &quot;in-the-ney-sey&quot; respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is important to note that several codas undergo the same reduction as ㅅ. Namely, 밧, 받, 밭, and 밪 (pas, pat, path, and pac respectively) all have the same surface structure: 받 (pat). Of these &quot;t&quot; codas, ㅅ is by far the most common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Koreans most readily associate &quot;t&quot; codas with ㅅ. From here it is not difficult to imagine why ㅅ used as a &quot;t&quot; coda, even in English loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/BoersmaHamannLoans35.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception.&lt;/a&gt; by Boersma and Hamann is a paper I have &lt;strong&gt;heavily&lt;/strong&gt; cited on this website. Essentially they propose that a learning algorithm dynamically ranks OT perception constraints over time such that rules preventing specific phonetic units from being perceived as specific phonological units become ranked in such a way that valid perceptions (for example &lt;code&gt;*[a]/a/&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;don't interpret the phonetic &lt;code&gt;[a]&lt;/code&gt; as the phonologic &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;&quot; becomes lowly ranked because it can be violated freely with no loss of meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, this paper provides a mechanism by which Koreans can perceive phonetic [t]s in the coda position as the phonologic /s/ (since the constraint forbidding this perception becomes lowly ranked). The result is a UR containing the /s/ coda which then explains its production as [s] in cases like &quot;인터넷이&quot;. This UR /s/ is then reflected in their orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2012-11-13T14:14:53.560" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T14:14:53.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2805" CreationDate="2012-11-08T18:18:13.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Independent of implementation-specific details such as one that acattle mentioned, the possible alternative that you mentioned appear word-finally only in native Korean nouns -- word-final coronals do not appear in Sino-Korean nouns (&lt;a href=&quot;https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/iverson/www/sohn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sohn 2001&lt;/a&gt;). It's plausible that they're more likely to adapt to the Sino-Korean pattern, which has the common t-s alternation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More significantly, I think it's too strong to say that it's &quot;systematically adapted as /s/.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://yoonjungkang.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/6/2/11625099/kang2003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kang 2003&lt;/a&gt; took a corpus of loanwords and found that word-final coronal stops ([t]/[d]) were largely adapted with an epenthetic final vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aAvHH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Kang 2003, p232&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there's a coronal place effect: vowel insertion is far more common for them than for /p/ and /k/. In fact, every instance of final [d] was adapted with vowel insertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="397" LastEditDate="2012-11-08T18:29:51.050" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T18:29:51.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2792" CreationDate="2012-11-08T23:22:57.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean what I think you mean, then Hebrew is noted for this. The same construction (with the &lt;em&gt;construct&lt;/em&gt; form of a noun) is used for possession:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;בית המלך (beyt ha-melekh) &quot;house (of) the king&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and often for qualification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;כלי כסף (kəley kesef) &quot;vessels (of) silver&quot; = &quot;silver vessels&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages have constructions like this - we can say &lt;em&gt;vessels of silver&lt;/em&gt; in English - but it is more widespread in Hebrew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this what you mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Examples from van der Merve, Naudé and Kroeze, &lt;em&gt;A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-11-08T23:22:57.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2833" CreationDate="2012-11-09T08:36:57.420" Score="9" ViewCount="18307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm stuck understanding the difference between &lt;em&gt;argot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;jargon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to many sources, e.g. Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Argot&lt;/strong&gt; is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jargon&lt;/strong&gt; is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My confusion is based on reading that the term of &lt;em&gt;argot&lt;/em&gt; has appeared to describe a language of lower class young people in France. Can't recall the link, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they both refer the same term?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To be specific, computer professionals speak with argot or with jargon?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To be even more specific, let's stick to a community of computer pro's whose native language is other than English. The terminology in question includes &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;file&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;deadline&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;overflow&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hit&amp;quot; (as per Web page)&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:19:37.777" Title="Argot vs Jargon" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2784" CreationDate="2012-11-09T15:13:02.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tyler,&#xA;I'm going to:&#xA;1. Tell you my background&#xA;2. Give you an answer to the best of my ability, &#xA;3. Wait for feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to be an engineer and had through basic calculus in US High School. Ended up changing my mind and got a BA in Psychology that was 2 courses shy of a minor in linguistics and enjoyed cognitive science and psycholinguistics as it applied to language learning and propaganda.I had courses in statistics through multivariate analysis (11 Semester units)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, your question would be easier to answer if you were to tell us what you plan to measure. What are the metrics of the &quot;state-change&quot;? As you're going to do this over time, I can only see using a graphical function which indicates calculating the &quot;area under the curve&quot;--whether it be language or concept recognition.&#xA;So, I think you will need at least some advanced algebra, and likely calculus analyze the differences you're wishing to measure. But, it has been 25 years since I've had calculus.&#xA;To do any meaningful measurements you'll have to understand the mathematical concepts to know the &quot;why&quot; of what you're measuring what you're measuring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, on another note: The human brain is a electro-chemical bath with billions of connections and the statement&quot;the current trend is to view the mind as a dynamical system&quot; should make you aware of the physical reality and the psychological/philosophical state of cognitive science. That statement is nearly as useful as &quot;water is wet&quot; in that it tells you something that is apparently true, but should be pretty obvious, and is still not a useful way to provide you with a way of measuring values that are important.&#xA;I would recommend a good course or two in neurobiology and chemistry also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1475" LastActivityDate="2012-11-09T15:13:02.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2012-11-09T15:36:37.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Jargon&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;argot&amp;quot; don't have the same meaning. Indeed, we say that computer professionals use &lt;em&gt;jargon&lt;/em&gt;, which is the &lt;em&gt;specific vocabulary&lt;/em&gt; for informatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jargon&lt;/strong&gt; means the whole specific vocabulary relative to a field (like biology, informatics, physics, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;argot&lt;/strong&gt; means words that are not really correct and which are not in the dictionary. They are often used in the street by young people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1476" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T06:19:37.777" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:19:37.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2012-11-09T17:07:31.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the particular meaning of &lt;em&gt;argot&lt;/em&gt;, the words are more or less synonymous, though I think &lt;em&gt;argot&lt;/em&gt; is now much less common than &lt;em&gt;jargon&lt;/em&gt; in this sense. As you say, &lt;em&gt;argot&lt;/em&gt; has another meaning, that of street slang. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-11-09T17:07:31.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-11-10T02:29:03.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavic &lt;em&gt;plávati&lt;/em&gt; definitely related to English &lt;em&gt;flow&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;float&lt;/em&gt; and derived from PIE &lt;em&gt;pleu-&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;pleuti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;swims&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starling derives it from Eurasiatic &lt;em&gt;ṗVlV&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wash, flow&quot;. This does not support any theory because Thai languages do not belong neither to Eurasiatic not to a higher groupping of Nostratic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your idea would be much more probable if you found parallels between Russian and Greenlandic or Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note that there are many much more striking coincidences. For example, you would be surprised that English &quot;strange&quot; is not related to Russian &quot;stranno&quot; which means the same, and English &quot;sport&quot; is not related to Gothic &quot;spords&quot; which means &quot;racing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-11-10T02:29:03.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2803" CreationDate="2012-11-10T13:37:06.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being Thai, I'm pretty sure that the resemblance is merely coincidental. The words for &quot;fish&quot;, and &quot;swim&quot; in Thai are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;fish: ปลา [plaː]&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;  swim: ว่าย [wâːi]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thai has a word for &quot;fish&quot; that was borrowed from Pali/Sanskrit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;มัจฉา [mát-tɕʰǎː]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which doesn't sound very close to the mentioned Slavic word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm more curious in how words like &quot;elephant&quot;, &quot;avatar&quot;, &quot;immortal&quot;, which Thai borrowed from Pali/Sanskrit as เอราวัณ [eː-raː-wán] อวตาร [à-wá-taːn] อมตะ [à-má-tàʔ], sound like in Slavic. (NOTE: The more common word for elephants, which is not a borrowed word, in Thai is ช้าง [tɕʰáːŋ].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1482" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T10:17:37.020" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T10:17:37.020" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2823" CreationDate="2012-11-11T01:45:04.363" Score="6" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Brackets_and_phonemes&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;, slashes for phonemes are mentioned quite casually, without getting into the discussion of how or if it makes sense to use a &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; alphabet to transcribe &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand how it makes sense to have an international &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; alphabet, since all humans have the same speech organs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, phonemes are a completely different animal. They're an abstraction of one or more phones which are in some sense considered equivalent in a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore think that such a thing as an international phonemic alphabet wouldn't make sense at all. Although there could be 2 languages having a phoneme that cover the same set of allophones realized in the same way in the same contexts in both languages, that would be due to relatedness or mere coincidence. It wouldn't work in the general case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we simply consider a phoneme just a set of allophones, the characters in a truly international phonemic alphabet would potentially need to contain all &lt;em&gt;subsets&lt;/em&gt; of the set of phones. There are exponentially many of these compared to phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is using IPA for phonemes completely bona fide? If so please explain how the above shortcomings are handled. Or are the above shortcomings understood, but IPA just used for phonemic transcriptions anyway because it turns out to be convenient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T04:23:42.033" Title="IPA for phonemes - does this make sense at all?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-11T02:54:03.200" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this question is too general, please let me know, and I will revise it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am developing a program that measures all sorts of &quot;features&quot; of a sentence, everything from sentence length, to average word length, to lexical diversity. I'd also like to incorporate some features of the semantic graphs of the sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some suggestions as to useful features of the graph to extract? I'm just looking for a handful, to get the ball rolling, and then develop them further for my specific needs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any reading suggestions would also be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T09:22:16.643" Title="Useful Features of Semantic Graphs" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2820" CreationDate="2012-11-11T04:23:42.033" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what the question boils down to is whether phonological primitives have intrinsic phonetic content. I can first give a &quot;consensus&quot; answer, and then point to some issues which seem to me to be unresolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consensus view&lt;/strong&gt;: This view is most clearly set out in Chomsky &amp;amp; Miller (1963) and Chomsky (1964) [the latter being a substantially revised version of Chomsky's plenary address at the 1962 ICL]. There are three basic ways of defining phonological features: (i) as distinctive features, which are used to organize contrast-bearing differences, and (ii) as indexes for grouping classes of sounds which uniformly undergo or trigger a phonological alternation, and (iii) indexes for grouping sounds by their positional characteristics. The features of (i) are thought to have a physical interpretation which is language-independent. Furthermore, it is assumed that there is a small number of such features, and their logical combinations form a universal phonetic alphabet. &#xA;Such a phonetic alphabet (e.g., the IPA) can be used for representing the contrasting segments in any language. Under the consensus view, however, the same set of features can be used for (i), (ii), and (iii). This means that it is assumed that all phonological regularities can be characterized with reference to labels which have a lanaguage-independent physical interpretation. Since a phoneme represents a group of sounds related by phonological regularities, &#xA;a phoneme can be represented as a symbol taken from the universal phonetic alphabet, its allophones differing from each other by feature-changing operations. Under this view, it makes perfect sense to use IPA symbols to represent phonemes. Such a view is assumed implicitly in most work in theoretical phonology today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some criticisms&lt;/strong&gt;: There are two basic problems that have been identified with the consensus view. The first is that languages show consistent but subtle differences between similar-sounding sounds. This fact renders the enterprise of developing a universal phonetic alphabet less attractive. This kind of argument is made in several works by Ladefoged (e.g., 1980). The second issue is that there are so-called &quot;crazy rules&quot; in phonology which are difficult to account for in terms of phonetically specifiable features (therefore calling into question the identity between features of type (i) and of types (ii)--(iii)). This issue is touched upon in Fudge (1967) and subsequent work by different scholars. If these types of criticisms of the consensus view are accepted, then it does not make sense for reasons other than convenience to use IPA symbols to represent phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky. Current issues in linguistic theory.&#xA;Mouton, The Hague, 1964&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky and George Miller. Introduction to&#xA;the formal analysis of natural languages. In&#xA;Robert Duncan Luce, Robert R Bush, and Eugene&#xA;Galanter, editors, Handbook of mathematical&#xA;psychology, volume 1, pages 271–321. John Wiley&#xA;and Sons, Inc., New York, 1963.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erik C Fudge. The nature of phonological primes.&#xA;Journal of Linguistics, 3(1):1–36, 1967.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Ladefoged. What are linguistic sounds made&#xA;of? Language, 56(3):485–502, 1980.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T04:23:42.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1738" CreationDate="2012-11-11T05:43:48.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer this question, you first need to know what is light or heavy in relation to primary and secondary stress articulation. There is no possibility you can alter a syllable with heavy quality without that syllable having a long or diphthong vowels in its nucleus in the most case languages I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in ha language the word like 'INGOO&quot; means come with two syllables, IN and GOO, where primary stress fall on the second syllable GOO and to have heavy feature as long and more louder than in the first syllable IN in which the secondary stress fall on to have with low loud and more light when pronouncing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By so the word becomes ,IN'GOO to mean Verb COME; hence I can make generalization by saying that according to my experience with reference to the language mentioned above when saying heave the same to primary stress and when saying light the same to secondary stres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1484" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T12:39:19.583" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T12:39:19.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2822" CreationDate="2012-11-11T06:36:26.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not actually a book, but certainly a helpful research is located &lt;a href=&quot;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this site&lt;/a&gt; (interface that provides online access to the LinGO English Resource Grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the semantic graph it has created from the first sentence of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LGSTu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Semantic graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-11T09:22:16.643" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T09:22:16.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-11T17:17:59.393" Score="8" ViewCount="1518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the sound change that brought PIE *&lt;em&gt;dent-&lt;/em&gt; to P.Gmc. *&lt;em&gt;tanth-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grimm's&lt;/a&gt; law seems to be the culprit for the consonant changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Initial voiced stop /d/ devoiced to /t/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terminal voiceless stop /t/ brought to voiceless fricative /θ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the change in #1 (this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;assimilation&lt;/a&gt;, correct?), but &lt;strong&gt;what's the reason for the stop -&gt; fricative change in #2&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1487" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-12T09:32:55.403" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T03:30:40.977" Title="Grimm's law: what motivates stop -&gt; fricative sound change?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2826" CreationDate="2012-11-11T19:29:33.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition#Sound_changes_associated_with_lenition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on lenition&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest that a /t/ -&gt; /θ/ change can actually come from a /t/ -&gt; /tθ/ (affrication) -&gt; /θ/ (spiratization) change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough to confirm or deny that this is what Grimm's law describes. I assume if this were true the /tθ/ step would be part of the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1487" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T19:29:33.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2826" CreationDate="2012-11-11T19:58:45.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, assuming that it went through the way the Grimms and their successors put it -- and not, for instance, the way the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalic_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glottalic Theory&lt;/a&gt; puts it -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://kmcgowan.rice.edu/wow/grimm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grimm's Law&lt;/a&gt; is a chain shift of three different consonant classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE &lt;strong&gt;voiced aspirated&lt;/strong&gt; stops changed to Germanic &lt;strong&gt;plain voiced&lt;/strong&gt; stops&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE *&lt;em&gt;bher-&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; Eng &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE &lt;strong&gt;voiced&lt;/strong&gt; stops changed to Germanic &lt;strong&gt;voiceless&lt;/strong&gt; stops&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE *&lt;em&gt;dent-&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; Eng &lt;em&gt;tooth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE voiceless &lt;strong&gt;stops&lt;/strong&gt; changed to Germanic &lt;strong&gt;fricatives&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE *&lt;em&gt;ten-&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; Eng &lt;em&gt;thin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody knows which happened first, or when, or by which group. But the changes appear &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/GrimmsLaw.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in all Germanic languages&lt;/a&gt;, so they must have been complete after Proto-Germanic separated from I-E, but before it split up. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/GrimmsLawCognates.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;These changes happened only in mode&lt;/a&gt;, never in position -- i.e, dentals changed to dentals, labials changed to labials, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one exception is the PIE labiovelar phonemes -- *ghʷ, *gʷ, *kʷ. Labiovelars were lost in Greek, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/GkReflPIELabioVelars.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;smeared all over the spectrum&lt;/a&gt;, from labial to velar. Germanic and Latin, however, kept some but not all labiovelars (that's what the Romans used &lt;strong&gt;QU&lt;/strong&gt; for -- /kʷ/ was a separate phoneme from /k/ in classical Latin; and that's also where all the English &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words came from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2012-11-11T19:58:45.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2862" CreationDate="2012-11-12T04:53:16.063" Score="9" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native Russian speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I am listening to songs and music in other languages, which I do not know, such as Italian, Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and even Japanese, Finnish, Kyrgyz and Hebrew, I usually can write what I hear with Russian letters (with possibly adding 1 to 3 additional characters for sounds not present in Russian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not the case with English. When listening to English songs I can barely understand anything even though I can write and read in English well. Even more, I cannot even write down &lt;strong&gt;what I hear&lt;/strong&gt;, I do not recognize usual vowels and consonants, as if they were singing with extraterrestrial non-human sounds or if it was just a noise rather than human speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is English so special in terms of phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this is not a question about spelling, English spelling is another big story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-11-21T04:41:14.733" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T00:10:26.790" Title="Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2012-11-12T14:24:56.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To solve the problem you will want to consider one issue at a time. As a starting point, In your position I'd first see whether it is the vowel system of English that is a stumbling block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English could be considered special in that it has an unusually high number of vowel phonemes. Depending on the dialect, English vowels tend not to be pure vowels with a relatively steady formant trajectory, as are found in Spanish or Japanese. Instead, even the non-diphthongs tend to have a moving F1-F2 target. In some of the languages that I have studied that have large numbers of vowel phonemes, the  target for producing the vowels tends to be more complex. I don't know, however, whether this is something that is of general significance. Languages such as Marshallese, which are reported to have very few vowel phonemes, can have complex rules for pronouncing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to see if the issue is the vowel inventories, you might try listening to songs in languages with large numbers of vowels, e.g., Cantonese, Norwegian, etc., and see if you have the same difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T14:24:56.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2012-11-12T15:04:28.630" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not language isolate. It is related to Japanese and Ainu and the three along with others belong to Altaic family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T15:04:28.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-12T15:15:50.317" Score="8" ViewCount="766" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional reconstruction gives the following velars in PIE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*/ḱ/, */ǵ/, */ǵʰ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*/k/, */g/, */gʰ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*/kʷ/, */gʷ/, */gʷʰ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what evidence is there to consider velars */kʷ/, */gʷ/, */gʷʰ/ separate phonemes rather than combinations of a velar and a labial sounds: */kw/, */gw/, */gʰw/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there is a word for &quot;horse&quot; *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;eḱwos&lt;/em&gt; but here ḱ reconstructed to be palatal so it is not a minimal pair. Is there any occurrence of /kw/ in the language, so to take it as a minimal pair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T06:56:09.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T12:00:58.447" Title="What evidence supports labialized velars in PIE?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2012-11-12T20:47:55.633" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on just the definitions you quote, computer professionals do not speak argot, they speak jargon. The jargon of computer professionals was not constructed for the purpose of hiding the meaning of what they are saying from outsiders - it may have that effect, but that was not the purpose. The purpose is to have short hand words that have specific defined meanings that allow for more efficient communication. For example the word &quot;file&quot; can replace the phrase &quot;a block of information stored as a unit on an information storage device&quot;. So jargon is a matter of efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your definitions &quot;argot&quot; has the purpose of secrecy that would prevent eavesdroppers from understanding the meaning of the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1139" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T20:47:55.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2012-11-12T21:05:25.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your problem is very curious. Before going to elaborate, I'd like to jump to my conclusion first: I have a hunch that perhaps it is because &lt;strong&gt;you've already known English&lt;/strong&gt;, which is exactly the reason why you cannot understand most things in English songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem to be mind-boggling, but after reviewing lots of things, and trying to think many possibilities, I really do think that it is exactly the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can't speak Russian, and have watched some movies in Russian maybe only three or four time up until now (and I had to read the subtitles every time), after reading your post, I thought that it might be because English is a stress-timed language, or may be because of the liaison in English (&quot;do it&quot; is usually pronounced &quot;do-wit&quot;, for example), or may be the number of pure vowels. But a quick research on the web tells me that Russian is also a stress-timed language, also has liaison, and six raw vowels is not so few. (Though English has unusually many vowels, around 14-16.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read your original post again and again and finally it hit me. Your saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;I can write and read English well&quot;&lt;/em&gt; gave me some clue. Also, the fact that you can &quot;easily write it [the Romanian/Italian song] down&quot; is another big clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dare say that if you try listening to an English song again, but this time pretend to know nothing about English (you can treat it as some extraterrestrial sounds if you like), and then transcribe it, your transcription might be even closer to the original lyric than you might think!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To really answer the question &lt;em&gt;Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?&lt;/em&gt;, I would say that every language is special in its own way. English might have unusually many vowels, and the liaison seems to be very strong, so strong that all syllables would appear as if they were merged together, even across word boundaries. This could trouble many non-native speakers. But other languages would have their own quirks as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1482" LastEditorUserId="1482" LastEditDate="2012-11-12T22:08:27.773" LastActivityDate="2012-11-12T22:08:27.773" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2012-11-13T00:56:49.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew Sihler (Sihler 1995) argues that Greek is &quot;the only centum language [...] attesting a contrast between reflexes of ḱw and *kʷ&quot;. In Greek &quot;two distinct sounds *ḱw give a double consonant medially, while the unitary *kʷ gives a single consonant&quot; (p. 159). For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PIE *ḱw &gt; Greek ππ&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. Greek ἵππος, Latin equus, equos, Myc. iqo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PIE *kʷ &gt; Greek π&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. Greek ἕπομαι, Lat. sequitur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also acknowledges the fact that this argumentation is based on one word only, Greek ἵππος, &quot;whose peculiarities &lt;strong&gt;do not inspire confidence&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (p. 160) [emphasis mine - Alex B.].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the contrast PIE *kw - PIE *kʷ, I think the evidence also comes from Greek (and Mycenaean): e.g. the so called boukolos rule states that &quot;a labiovelar lost its labial element when adjacent to the vowel *u&quot; (Fortson 2010: 70). For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek βουκόλος 'cowherd' (PIE *gʷoukʷolos &gt; PIE *gʷoukolos), but αἰπόλος 'goatherd' (PIE*aikʷolos).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To conclude:&lt;/strong&gt; PIE was not a monolithic, 'timeless' language that never changed. There is good reason to believe that there were different stages in its development, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2012-11-13T16:27:47.167" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T16:27:47.167" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-13T09:19:28.510" Score="7" ViewCount="1397" Body="&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/10640/2509&quot;&gt;Travel.SE&lt;/a&gt; it was pointed out that in Georgia (the country), a visitor would have use of learning Georgian, Russian, and Armenian. That's three very different languages, with three quite different scripts, for such a small country! That prompts me the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what country do we find the highest &lt;em&gt;linguistic density&lt;/em&gt;? I don't know if this concept exists, but I mean the geographic derivative of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguistic distance&lt;/a&gt;: e.g. a country where very different languages are natively spoken in a small area. Of course, this tends to infinity close to the language border, so let's stick to countries for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1254" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:12.617" LastActivityDate="2012-11-21T02:10:58.373" Title="Where do we find the highest &quot;language density&quot;?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2836" CreationDate="2012-11-13T11:50:12.307" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well Papua New Guinea famously has a lot of languages - 830 languages at the last count (and that's languages, not dialects!)&#xA;However, I'm not sure about how different these languages are, but the numbers are huge and do come from a few different backgrounds. &#xA;For example, English and Hiri Motu are pretty different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the land mass of PNG (452,860 km sq) and divide by the number of languages, according to ethnologue (830) you get a figure of approximately 546 km squared per language. The figure for Vanuatu would be approx. 107 km sp per language, indicating a higher density, but whether or not these languages vary as much as those of PNG, you'd have to consult the link given in jlovegren's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T12:58:57.523" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T12:58:57.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-13T14:35:20.753" Score="1" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have two competitive synonyms &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We found out that during the historical changes of the language, &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; gains dominant position.&#xA;We found out the fact above via a statistical survey of language materials of different periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think the reason that &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; gains dominant position is that there is a high-frequency word &lt;strong&gt;A'&lt;/strong&gt; which has a similar form with A.&#xA;(And, &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;A'&lt;/strong&gt; are roughly identical in meaning. Strict speaking, &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; are a bit stronger than &lt;strong&gt;A'&lt;/strong&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which mechanism can be used to explain this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of analogical mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1442" LastEditorUserId="1442" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T01:22:32.100" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T01:22:32.100" Title="What mechanism of language can be used to explain competitive synonyms similar to high-frequency word?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2836" CreationDate="2012-11-13T15:04:45.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by land area of the country, it'll be Vanuatu. Browse the statistics in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=country&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T15:04:45.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-13T22:32:52.380" Score="2" ViewCount="943" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/grammaticalization-of-third-person-singular-s-in-english&quot;&gt;Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to responses to this question, there was a dichotomy between northern -s and southern -th in Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am wondering is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When and how was the vowel dropped in the ending, such as &quot;makes&quot; /meiks/? I can imagine a number of scenarios, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some northern (-es) dialects dropped the vowel; some southern dialects (-eth) dropped the vowel. The going standard had been a southern dialect with the vowel retained, but a northern dialect with the vowel dropped gained predominance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vowel was never pronounced in northern dialects, even right when they borrowed the ending from Norse. It was never dropped in -eth dialects. (I find this unlikely, since it seems that the vowel would not be written if it was never present.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vowel was dropped contemporaneously in northern and southern dialects of English. However, whenever we read old texts, we are only aware of an era before the dropping of the vowel, so we (sometimes inaccurately) always pronounce the ending /eþ/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What were the rules on voicing of the consonant in third-person singular -eth in Old/Middle/Early Modern English?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did the rules for retention/deletion of the vowel in the ending always apply equally to &quot;thou&quot; -est forms as long as they were productive?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anything worthy of note regarding the presence of the vowel in past tense second-person endings?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-11-13T22:37:59.357" Title="Third-person singular suffix [eth] in Middle English" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T05:44:52.007" Score="2" ViewCount="2164" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that IPA is badly designed and not suitable well for many languages other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some problems are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It uses different characters to denote the same sounds. For example, [ʍ] and [w̥], or [ʃʲ] and [ɕ].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It does not have characters for even widespread sounds that are used in different languages. For example, the sound, conducted by English &quot;ch&quot; exists in English, Czech, Italian, Russian and many other languages. Yet IPA uses two symbols for it: [tʃ]. The Russian [ч] needs three IPA symbols: [t͡ɕ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It uses the same symbols for different sounds. For example the above-mentioned transcription [tʃ] is used both for Belarusian phoneme which is denoted by the letter ч and for the combination of two phonemes [тш]. Similarly, Russian отселить &quot;to resettle away&quot; has [тс] while оцелить &quot;to give aim&quot; has [ц], the both again will be [ts] in IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It uses different methods to indicate the same features in different sounds. For example, palatal variant of [ɣ] is denoted [ʝ], palatal variant of [tʃ] is denoted [t͡ɕ] while in other cases a superscript [xʲ] is used to indicate palatalization.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It uses completely different symbols for voiced and voiceless, or palatal and plain variants of the same sound, which does not reflect the sound proximity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading professional literature on comparative linguistics I never encounter use of IPA. The authors usually use ad-hoc transliterations for even languages which have no written form, and transliteration systems of different branches may grossly differ making comparison difficult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said I wonder whether IPA really obsolete and whether there is recognized need for a better alphabet which could be used in comparative studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T01:11:20.047" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T19:06:20.297" Title="Is IPA obsolete?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="27" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-14T05:52:51.210" Score="5" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Almost all languages have the lexical categories noun and verb, but&#xA;  beyond these there are significant variations in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want tag POS of some text of a lot of different languages, but I need a tag set that be consistent among different languages, e.i. if a POS exist in some language I need tag it with same tag string. Is there any tagging set that contains tag for at least for multiple languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a structure like following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;TAG         A            OM &#xA;        (adverb)    (object mark)  &#xA;------------------------------------&#xA;Arabic      +            -&#xA;Persian     +            +&#xA;English     +            -&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: The article that is mentioned in Bjerva's answer is actually a &quot;universal tag set for common tag set&quot;, I need a tag set that is not less informative and remain all POS imaginable among languages, but use same tag for POS that are common in a subset of languages. As illustrated in above table &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T11:44:07.727" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T11:44:07.727" Title="Multilingual POS tagging set" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2842" CreationDate="2012-11-14T09:00:04.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.petrovi.de/data/lrec.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; suggests a tag set consisting of 12 universal tags. The tag set can be downloaded from &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/universal-pos-tags/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract from the site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, mappings for 25 treebanks covering the following 22 languages are available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1452" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T09:00:04.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2786" CreationDate="2012-11-14T15:16:20.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jlovegren mentions, the suffix is -ition, not -dition. In fact, this is a specific case of the more general suffix -ion. In Latin, the suffix -ion generally makes nouns of action from verbs, and most of the earlier English words with variants of this suffix came from Latin or French originally. Whether the form of the suffix was -ition, -ation, etc. depended on the characteristics of the Latin verb. Nouns with -ition, for example, tend to be those where the Latin verb had a past participal form with -it- - e.g. AUDIRE --&gt; AUDITUM --&gt; AUDITION; ADDERE --&gt; ADDITUM --&gt; ADDITION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in answer to your question, -ition (or -ation, -tion, -ion etc.) doesn't have a meaning, as such. Instead it has a grammatical role, as a suffix which usually turns a verbal stem into a noun of action. It developed to perform this function with native English verbs as well as Latin ones. Examples not from Latin include FLIRT --&gt; FLIRTATION, and STARVE --&gt; STARVATION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T15:16:20.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2841" CreationDate="2012-11-14T19:18:44.190" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA is useful for what it is: an alphabetic writing system biased towards &quot;major European languages&quot; for performing certain analyses/comparisons/descriptions based essentially on the typographical requirements and linguistic models and theory of 100 years ago. As such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it allows you to analyse and denote &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; phonetic/phonological phenomena that it is often useful to examine, e.g. cross-linguistic categorisation of sounds, comparison of broad features of the sound inventories of languages, description of broad/high-level pronunciation phenomena for the purpose of language description and teaching...;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it operates more or less as any &quot;alphabet with diacritics&quot; will operate, so you may as well use the alphabet + diacritics that are familiar to many people rather than inventing a new one with essentially similar problems (though there are other similar phonetic transcription systems: the &quot;US&quot; transcription scheme is systemically similar to IPA, but not actually identical in the specifics of which symbols are used where);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's become &quot;common currency&quot; in dictionaries and teaching materials in some countries for some languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is &quot;common currency&quot; for denoting pronunciations in various linguistic journals and in linguistic publications in some countries;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is a &lt;em&gt;tool&lt;/em&gt; to be adapted to specific languages/purposes and extended where necessary-- much of its effectiveness lies in how effectively the linguist is able to apply it to their needs;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using IPA with modern typography tools (read: &quot;typing IPA on a computer keyboard&quot;) is a complete pain in the arse most of the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's useful, but not the be-all and end-all of the universe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many speech technology applications that require transcriptions don't actually use IPA, but rather some other scheme that is easy to type and more closely adapted to the particular language/analysis needs in question;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many phonetic and phonological studies nowadays aren't quite so preoccupied with the &quot;armchair segmental analysis&quot; for which IPA is most useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if IPA isn't useful for what you're doing, nobody's saying you can't use or invent something else that is. On the other hand, if you are in the business of performing the kind of descriptions/analysis that phonetic transcription is useful for and it is for general readership rather than an internal database of an IT application, you may as well use IPA as not: it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; still &quot;common currency&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1047" LastActivityDate="2012-11-14T19:18:44.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2885" CreationDate="2012-11-14T20:59:08.910" Score="5" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages have no definite or indefinite article, for example, I think, Polish.&#xA;So the Polish word &lt;em&gt;kot&lt;/em&gt; could mean &quot;a cat&quot; or &quot;the cat&quot;. So in a glossed example, and not knowing the context, how do we represent this in the translation?&#xA;I guess it could be 'a/the cat', or could you pick one form - definite or indefinite - and stick with that form throughout an essay etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T13:13:28.137" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:54:36.613" Title="How do you gloss a language with no definite or indefinite article?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2012-11-14T21:24:26.917" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;strong&gt;completely&lt;/strong&gt; different. [ɕ] (which is another way to write [ʃʲ]) is a palatal variant of English &quot;sh&quot; [ʃ], sound while [sʲ] is a palatal variant of &quot;s&quot;.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sounds are phonemically different in the majority of European languages. In English, where palatalization is not phonemic, [ʃʲ] is allophone of [ʃ] and [sʲ] is allophone of [s]. A minimal pair is &quot;sh*t&quot; vs. &quot;sit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer by Steven Xu apparently confuses [ɕ] with [ç].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-15T09:40:54.320" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T09:40:54.320" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-15T11:07:59.977" Score="7" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed something that I can't explain, a link between German and Sardinian. Two languages that, at least apparently for me, are not supposed to be &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; linked. Also English is included in this, which is more related to German than it is to Sardinian. Yet there's something I cannot understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the word &quot;short&quot;. In German it's &lt;em&gt;kurz&lt;/em&gt;. I might be way off, but it seems that they do have some connection, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;k-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sh-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-u-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-rt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-rz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, although my knowledge is not that deep so, like I said, I might be wrong on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the relation seems much closer between German-Sardinian than German-English. In Sardinian, note that I'm speaking about the variant present in the middle of the island which is included in the macro-variant &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logudorese_dialect&quot;&gt;Logudorese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, the word for &quot;short&quot; is &quot;curzu&quot; or &quot;curza&quot; according to the genre of the noun it refers to (e.g. &lt;em&gt;un'istrada curza&lt;/em&gt; = a short street).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how could it be explained that we have &quot;short/kurz&quot; and &quot;kurz/curzu&quot;? Is there something I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, in Italian we do have &quot;corto&quot;, but I'm not sure what role it might have in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: Although my dialect is included in it, they are slightly different. For the purpose of the question I think we can ignore this difference, unless the answerers have reasons to think differently in order to answer the question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T18:11:22.317" Title="Explaining the relationship between &quot;short&quot;, &quot;kurz&quot; and &quot;curzu&quot;" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2857" CreationDate="2012-11-15T16:56:40.707" Score="4" ViewCount="2262" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know some single words may be written in various forms, e.g.like nosy and nosey or  Noruz may be written Norooz, Narooz, Nawru, Nauruz, Nawroz, Noruz, Nohrooz, Novruz, Nauroz, Navroz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Persian dokme/tokme , zoqal/z̤oqal, belit/beliṭ ,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Linguistics we say: Noruoz is &lt;code&gt;?????&lt;/code&gt; of Noruz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such words have same pronunciation or a very similar pronunciation. They have same origin but when are enter to another language they are written differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of such words can be found in this forum thread: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discussion_forum/archive/index.php/t-172645.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Multiple Spellings of the Same Word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest a single word for indicated area, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Polygraph&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QcdMo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2012-11-16T10:03:50.980" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T08:15:03.723" Title="Same meaning, same pronunciation, different spelling" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2012-11-15T21:38:00.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any publication which has exact percentages for the origins of Monguor vocabulary. There are, however, a number of linguistic papers and grammars of Monguor, some of which are available on the Internet. The following grammar, for example, contains a glossary which lists source languages for many Monguor words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp069_monguor_language.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Materials of China’s Monguor Minority&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is the entry for &quot;accustom&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;accustom&lt;/strong&gt;--darisuu (T:dar srol), suri, {SUER, XIGUANRA} (C:xiguan 习惯)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that the word &lt;strong&gt;darisuu&lt;/strong&gt; is of Tibetan origin (from &quot;dar srol&quot;) and that this word is used in Huzhu Mongghul. There is also a word &lt;strong&gt;xiguanra&lt;/strong&gt; which is of Chinese origin (&quot;xiguan&quot;) and used in Minhe Mangghuer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above-mentioned grammar also contains an extensive bibliography of Monguor language resources, some of which may contain glossaries or discussions of Monguor vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another publication that might be of use to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tibeto-Mongolica : the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects&lt;/em&gt; by András Róna-Tas (The Hague : Mouton, 1966).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you can read Chinese, there is quite a lot of material written about the languages of the Monguor minority (Chinese: tuzuyu, 土族语) in Chinese publications, which might contain discussions of vocabulary/etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1192" LastActivityDate="2012-11-15T21:38:00.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2826" CreationDate="2012-11-16T08:01:20.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would really give not an answer but somewhat refusal for the question (despite the question is really good). Currently, the common position is to expand so-called &quot;principle of the arbitrariness of the sign&quot; also to language changes, i.e. you could guess which changes are impossible (for rude example, it's unlikely for any IE language to unify &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; vowels to a single one), but when you have multiple possible choices which doesn't break language structure at any level, you can't predict which one will happen. For the change you mean, if it had took place at all, it 1) moved sounds to neighbour ones, 2) didn't break phonologic relations between related sounds (d[h] - t[h] - t), and this is enough to allow it in theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you become able to explain in most cases &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; an allowed change happens, this would be the second main discovery through the diachronic linguistic history. (The first one was simply the fact that languages can originate from a common source.) Currently, linguistics has found multiple examples for special cases, as substrate/superstrate/neighbour language affecting, but not a common rule. You can compare this with evolution theory: there are prohibited mutations which give an unviable being, so they can't happen, and are allowed mutations, which can't be predict due to really stochastic source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best rule for this I've seen currently is from the typology which counts probability of some change. For example, change /t/ -&gt; /θ/ is known from numerous languages (the closest examples are modern Greek and Castilian, but for /d/ -&gt; /ð/), so it's very likely. Also, pressure of need to distinguish /t/ and /tʰ/ could move any of them to another sound, to make the distinction more expressed (and hence easier to detect). This could be the &quot;narrow&quot; answer to your question: the move was done to keep useful difference between phonemes. But it doesn't give a reason for the whole move, described by Grimm's law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please also note that Glottalic theory says that the Germanic languages really keep the initial PIE series distribution, with minor changes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastEditorUserId="865" LastEditDate="2012-11-19T06:59:26.880" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T06:59:26.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2852" CreationDate="2012-11-16T09:48:01.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term I've heard most often in linguistic contexts is &lt;em&gt;variant&lt;/em&gt;, or more fully &lt;em&gt;variant spelling&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nosey&lt;/em&gt; is a common variant of &lt;em&gt;nosy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Favorite&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;favourite&lt;/em&gt; are variants, accepted in American and British English respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colonel Gaddafi's surname has any number of variant spellings when written in the Roman alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Google Books search brings up plenty of examples of this in academic writing and in  textbooks, so I think it would be generally understood if you used it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-16T10:31:39.420" LastActivityDate="2012-11-16T10:31:39.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2861" CreationDate="2012-11-16T13:37:48.413" Score="4" ViewCount="751" Body="&lt;p&gt;A part of ISO 639-3 Language Names follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;fan fan fan     I   L   Fang (Equatorial Guinea)    &#xA;fao fao fao fo  I   L   Faroese &#xA;fap             I   L   Palor   &#xA;far             I   L   Fataleka    &#xA;fas per fas fa  M   L   Persian &#xA;fat fat fat     I   L   Fanti   &#xA;fau             I   L   Fayu    &#xA;fax             I   L   Fala    &#xA;fay             I   L   Southwestern Fars   &#xA;faz             I   L   Northwestern Fars   &#xA;fbl             I   L   West Albay Bikol    &#xA;fcs             I   L   Quebec Sign Language    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately language names are written in English only. Is there any translation of ISO-639-3 in other languages and/or native name of each languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639%3aa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; provided partially such translation in 6 languages+native name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any active project to provide such database?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2012-11-17T05:03:41.517" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T05:03:41.517" Title="ISO 639 3 (or ISO-639 2) Language Names Translation" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-16T14:19:13.587" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current laws for laryngeals presume the following reconstruction rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ē is reconstructed as eh&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ā is reconstructed as eh&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ō is reconstructed as eh&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word-initial e- is reconstructed as h&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;e&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word-initial a- is reconstructed as h&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;e&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word-initial o- is reconstructed as h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;e&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why we cannot reconstruct u̯ the same way? &lt;strong&gt;ū&lt;/strong&gt; would be reconstructed as eu̯ and the word-initial &lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt; as as u̯e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word for &lt;strong&gt;wolf&lt;/strong&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;u̯elq&lt;sup&gt;u̯&lt;/sup&gt;os&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word for &lt;strong&gt;wheat&lt;/strong&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;peu̯ros&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word for &lt;strong&gt;son&lt;/strong&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;seu̯nos&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-16T15:41:55.120" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T20:19:00.713" Title="What prevents us from reconstructing PIE &quot;u̯&quot; by analogy with laryngeals?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2012-11-17T02:28:09.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cldr.unicode.org/&quot;&gt;http://cldr.unicode.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLDR&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLDR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data is stored in XML files, however, so it may take some processing to extract the data you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1504" LastActivityDate="2012-11-17T02:28:09.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2012-11-17T07:11:51.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problems to listen English seems to be common among Russian native speakers (and me definitely isn't exception), and yes, it's harder to listen English than some another languages as in your examples. I'd post my answer mainly to confirm that it's not solely your issue, and to place some accents; the issue implementation may differ but it's very common to Russian natives, as far as I see and I'm told by friends and various mates. My personal implementation of it seems also influenced by Soviet school specifics which gave too few skills of listening of real native speech (not the one produced by teachers or specially trained dictors), and this one-sided teaching lead to prevailing of the written speech over the oral one (this seems noted by @Damkerng T.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Detailedly, the English features that I detected at my personal experience and which affects understanding of oral speech are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. General &quot;inexactness&quot; of sounds which is of another kind than in Russian. For example, Russian never mutates /t/ to kind of /r/ or even to nothing. English vowels can easily shift to their neighbours, e.g. [æ] to [a] or [e], even under stress, which is impossible in Russian. (They shift even in phonetic courses, immediately when a dictor loses control on his/her pronounciation details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also includes shifts of implementation base (sorry for possible mis-terming). E.g. /d/ in English is less voiced than in Russian, and /t/ is more loud; this difference in exhalation power is sometimes more important than voicedness (e.g. some German dialects lose voicedness but continue to differ t-weak and t-hard). It's normal to hear a sound which we treat as /t/ but which is really /d/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. Loss of difference. Some sounds are differentiated (for us!) only with length which is generally lost in songs, so the difference disappears (e.g. /ʌ/ vs. /a:/). Also, some differences which are supported to average Russian speaker only with r-coloring, can disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III. General inability to detect words quickly (simply because not trained for this). There are numerous omonyms which are detected as some accustomed word but really shall be others (e.g. sum vs. some, hare vs. hair, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IV. Dialect differences which aren't often described. For example, some time ago I was unable to detect phrase which was &quot;must have had&quot; but pronounced like /məstəvəd/ at the same time that this speaker had kept /h/ in words like &quot;happy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The factor which deepens this is that English, unlike Russian, doesn't have a single &quot;canonic&quot; form, so you could hear different accents and dialects when you have no time to spend thinking what does it mean. It's quite rare to hear a Russian song which isn't of ethnic genre but performed using dialect pronounciation; exceptions could be counted using a single hand fingers (В.Высоцкий, Сектор Газа...) English has no such centralization so each singer or speaker gives their own deposit to a &quot;bank&quot; of varieties. At the same time, we were generally taught some &quot;generic&quot; English which is based mainly on Oxford (&quot;RP&quot;) dialect but with huge r-coloring, without some pecularities (as exact manner of [æ] or [ɜ:]), and with very limited vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH I guess that your description of the issue is too emotional. Very unlikely you could differ e.g. /t/ vs. /m/ in Spanish or Finnish and, at the same time, unable to do this in English. If you can't detect the exact word, you can start with phonematic recording of a speech, and then make a deduction of the source using your recording. This could be very helpful to start with understanding songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastEditorUserId="865" LastEditDate="2013-04-04T19:56:35.053" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T19:56:35.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-18T15:39:34.107" Score="4" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;What base does &lt;code&gt;vocabulary.com&lt;/code&gt; use for its hierarchy of meanings of a word? For example see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sound&lt;/a&gt;. Are top levels (numbered list) all homonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What structure do you think is best for showing various meanings of a graph (word) in a dictionary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T23:50:38.970" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T23:50:38.970" Title="How are meanings of a word ordered in a dictionary?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-18T19:14:04.377" Score="2" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages are birth or die gradually.  How time of birth and death of a languages (e.g. Avestan, Parthian, Median, ...) are estimated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a broader sense when we say that a new languages was birthed of or a live one died (extincted)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2013-01-23T03:24:19.653" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T03:24:19.653" Title="How time of birth and death of a languages are estimated?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2850" CreationDate="2012-11-19T09:32:54.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose the short answer is that both German and Sardinian are Indo-European languages, so it's to be expected that they'll have some common word-forms. German is classed as Germanic and Sardinian is classed as a Romance language, but that doesn't mean that their development is completely separate: they shared a common ancestor. You can see the same if you compare French and German, for example. Words like &quot;window&quot; (&lt;em&gt;fenêtre&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Fenster&lt;/em&gt;) are obviously from the same root in French and German (i.e. Latin &lt;em&gt;fenestra&lt;/em&gt;). Welsh has the same root for its word, &lt;em&gt;ffenestr&lt;/em&gt;, although Welsh is categorised as a Celtic language. The English word is unusual here, as English didn't take &lt;em&gt;window&lt;/em&gt; from Latin, but rather uses a native Germanic-derived form, from the words for &lt;em&gt;wind&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt;. (Although note that the word &lt;em&gt;fenester&lt;/em&gt; was also in use in English until the 1500s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of the relationship between German, Sardinian, and English falls into the trap of looking at the wrong data, I'm afraid. The English word that's comparable here is &lt;em&gt;curt&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;. German &lt;em&gt;kurz&lt;/em&gt;, Sardinian &lt;em&gt;curzu/a&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;curt&lt;/em&gt; all come from Latin &lt;em&gt;curtus&lt;/em&gt;, as Alex B. pointed out in the comments. (The etymology of &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; is disputed, though it may also ultimately derive from &lt;em&gt;curtus&lt;/em&gt;.) French &lt;em&gt;court&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;corto&lt;/em&gt;, Dutch &lt;em&gt;kort&lt;/em&gt;, also all derive from the same root. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the fact that any two Indo-European languages have vocabulary in common should not come as a surprise. Much of this vocabulary comes, directly or indirectly, from Latin, and is not usually a sign of particular relatedness between the two languages unless it can be proven that Language A took a lot of its word forms from Language B as an intermediary, and not directly from Latin (or indeed from Language C, or Language D, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T09:32:54.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-19T13:05:05.450" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=LyCwXLDr_-0#t=187s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=LyCwXLDr_-0#t=187s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notices not first time in chaotic context.. it seems people reproducing gesture have chaos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1508" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-11-20T10:33:05.660" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T10:33:05.660" Title="What does this juggling gesture usually mean?" Tags="&lt;body-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2864" CreationDate="2012-11-19T23:09:39.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well it's hard to tell when a language is 'born' because it often develops from another older language. &#xA;I guess you could find a &quot;date of birth&quot; for a constructed language maybe. &#xA;As for language death, well it could be when the last living speaker dies, taking the language with them. Another theory would be that a language dies when it's second last speaker does, because the last remaining speaker can not use that language with anyone, I.e. it is not a means of communication any more. &#xA;If you wan to know more about language death then you should consult Crystal (2002) &lt;em&gt;Language Death&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-11-19T23:09:39.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2623" CreationDate="2012-11-20T09:38:59.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you say, reconstructing the sound of a language for which there are no longer any speakers can be very difficult, so it's unlikely that there is a definite answer to your question. However, you might start with A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, &lt;em&gt;The Prosody of Greek Speech&lt;/em&gt; (Oxford, 1994). The authors use evidence from cross-linguistic studies to build a theory of prosody, and then apply that theory to classical Greek texts. It has a section on questions, and even if that doesn't help to answer your question, it also has a really good bibliography which might help you to track down more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T09:38:59.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2445" CreationDate="2012-11-20T16:24:13.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@ Brad Miller&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only Telugu, but most; in fact, every Indian language has the same rule of using plural to denote respect. I am a native speaker of Kannada. I know Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Kannada 2nd person singular is &quot;Neenu&quot; (Used for friend or family member) and the second person plural is &quot;Neevu&quot; (Used for elders or superiors)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Tamil, 2nd person singular - &quot;Nee&quot; 2nd person plural - &quot;NeengaL&quot; (Retroflex form of 'La')&#xA;In Hindi, 2nd person singular - &quot;Tum&quot; 2nd person plural - &quot;Aap&quot; ( For second person plural &quot;Tu&quot; also exists but is used without least bit of respect and represents inferiority)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1512" LastEditorUserId="1512" LastEditDate="2012-11-20T16:33:55.040" LastActivityDate="2012-11-20T16:33:55.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2836" CreationDate="2012-11-21T02:10:58.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;linguistic density&quot;, you mean the number of distinct languages spoken in an area divided by the size of the area, then Vanuatu would have the highest linguistic density for a country. Vanuatu has a total area of approximately 12,200 km² and is home to 108 known languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure where the highest linguistic density would be found for types of geographic areas other than countries. Presumably, it would be some place else in the Pacific or perhaps sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastActivityDate="2012-11-21T02:10:58.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2445" CreationDate="2012-11-21T02:45:36.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Turkish language has two simple 2nd person pronouns: &quot;sen&quot; and &quot;siz&quot;. &quot;Sen&quot; is the 2nd person singular pronoun which is used to address a single person and connotes a speaker's familiarity, friendship, or consanguinity with the person being addressed. &quot;Sen&quot; is sometimes also used by the speaker if he/she is addressing someone much younger than themselves (e.g., a child) or someone of an inferior position or rank (e.g., in academia or on a job). &quot;Siz&quot; is the 2nd person plural pronoun and is used to address more than one person (irrespective of their relationship to the speaker) or a single person with whom the speaker is not very familiar with or closely related to. It's also used when addressing someone of a superior rank, position, or age. &quot;Siz&quot; is also typically used to express the speaker's politeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastActivityDate="2012-11-21T02:45:36.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2841" CreationDate="2012-11-21T04:24:20.240" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your criticisms of the IPA seem to be mainly based on patent misapprehensions about how its notation is correctly used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In your first impungment of the IPA, you apparently are assuming two different notations of the same sound (in this case, a voiceless labio-velar approximant notated with [ʍ] and  [w̥]) are both unanimously agreed upon transcriptions of one phoneme and are used interchangeably. In reality, they're no more than the result of differences in how the phoneme could be more accurately or most obviously denoted. Whichever notation is employed is more an indication of the preference of whomever it was who employed it rather than the IPA's notational ambiguity. It's a trivial objection to raise, nonetheless. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To your presumably Anglophone ears, [tʃ] and [t͡ɕ] most likely sound the same. In reality, they correspond to two disparate phonemes. When used by knowledgeable people, [tʃ] invariably denotes the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate, whereas the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate is signified with [t͡ɕ]. It isn't just a case of one phoneme having different names and transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's a subtle articulatory distinction to be considered between a palatalized consonant and a palatal consonant which gives the two their different notations. Palatal consonants have a primary articulation with the tongue either toward or in contact with the mouth's hard palate. Some palatal consonants of import are: [ɲ], [c], and [ɟ]. A palatalized consonant (conventionally denoted with a superscript palatal approximant, as in [pʲ] to denote the palatalized voiceless bilabial plosive) are such that they possess a non-palatal primary articulation coupled with a palatal secondary articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the palatalized phoneme [nʲ] is distinguishable from [ɲ]&#xA;because of the latter's palatal primary place of articulation and the&#xA;former's non-palatal primary place of articulation. There's only a&#xA;soupçon of difference between the two, but it's still a difference&#xA;that deserves to be accounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Different symbols for different phonation isn't a legitimate criticism. Also, there are some phonemes which are given special diacritical marks to individuate their voiced and voiceless counterparts, like with voiceless implosives, for example. This is a complex and nuanced issue and I shan't waste any of my time explaining it here. If you're interested, a Google search will help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-07-08T00:49:10.523" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T00:49:10.523" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3243" CreationDate="2012-11-21T23:33:37.817" Score="6" ViewCount="1015" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, the word order is SVO (or V2, to be precise) in main clauses, while in subordinate clauses have the finite verb in final position; there is some discussion of the word order in &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-should-it-not-have-been-ich-ein-berliner-bin&quot;&gt;German is SOV: should it not have been &quot;Ich ein Berliner bin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody tell me how this particularity developed historically? In particular, which of these two word orders is the older one and when and why did the other one take over “half” the clauses in the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1517" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T19:31:31.993" Title="History of the verb positioning in German" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2878" CreationDate="2012-11-22T04:48:19.873" Score="10" ViewCount="4260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because there exists a word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;laugh&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; but &quot;&lt;strong&gt;*daugh&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, while the forms are alike to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find the function of the morpheme &quot;-ter&quot; here, which is maybe irrelevant to the &quot;-ter&quot; in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;enter&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;utter&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, which are a comparative suffix( from PIE &lt;strong&gt;*-tero&lt;/strong&gt;) and a frequentative suffix &lt;strong&gt;&quot;-er&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;( of unknown origin to me) respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-28T05:02:12.650" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:47:22.227" Title="What is the function of &quot;-ter&quot; in words &quot;laughter&quot; and &quot;daughter&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2877" CreationDate="2012-11-22T06:38:11.380" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was the agent suffix -ter- of PIE. It was used for creation of terms for relatives and for creation of agent nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffix -ter- was used to create a noun for person whose function or profession was to perform the action (irrespective whether he actually did it) while the o-grade of it -tor- was used to denote a person who just did the action. The combination of suffixes -a̯-ter- was used for some relatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the term for daughter in PIE was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhuga̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same suffix in zero-grade, &quot;-tr-&quot; in combination with inanimate ending &quot;-om&quot; was used for creating words for tools, such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ero̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;plow&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯estrom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wear&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tere̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;auger&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;costrom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;knife&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus regular PIE rules suggest that a combination of the root for laugh, &quot;kleg-&quot; plus &quot;-tr-&quot; such as in &quot;klegtrom&quot; should give a non-animate noun related to laugh. In Pre-Germanic the ending could change from inanimate -om to masculine -os to render (via metathesis) *hlahtraz in Proto-Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is more possible though that the word by this same process was formed already after Germanic branch split of PIE because other branches do not show use of the -tr- suffix with this root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, of course, the PIE superlative -ter-os was also another use of the same suffix. Thus  &quot;gela̯teros&quot; would mean &quot;more joyful&quot;. The word &quot;enter&quot; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;intra-&lt;/em&gt;) is another example of use of this suffix with adverbs: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯en&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;in&quot; + &quot;-ter-om&quot; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enterom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;intestines&quot;, of which locative case is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enteri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;inside&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-08-25T12:47:22.227" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:47:22.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2953" CreationDate="2012-11-22T17:27:54.140" Score="8" ViewCount="18682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard many times that learning German is easier for those who speak Sanskrit, and vice versa. Is there any linguistic basis for this? What similarities exist between the two languages that may be able to explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://churn-news.blogspot.in/2008/10/why-indians-can-learn-german-easily.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt;, for example, shows a few superficial&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; similarities and claims that Indians&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; can learn German easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: i.e., relating to specific words and not language structure&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2: Most Indic languages are descended from Prakrit(a &amp;quot;sister language&amp;quot; of Sanskrit), so what applies for Sanskrit may sort of apply for these as well.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T18:53:26.360" Title="Is learning German easier for people who know Sanskrit, and vice versa?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2859" CreationDate="2012-11-22T20:19:00.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, [u] and [w] (i.e. u̯) are just allophones in PIE, so the only consequence of reconstructing *&lt;em&gt;w-&lt;/em&gt; as *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt; will be that it forces you to come up with some theory of why the following *&lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; was lost. Plus it doesn't really make sense. If you wanna get rid of word-initial *&lt;em&gt;w-&lt;/em&gt; by reconstructing it as *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt;, you'll notice that *&lt;em&gt;w-&lt;/em&gt; is still initial. So now you need to reconstruct *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt; as *&lt;em&gt;wee-&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;wee-&lt;/em&gt; as *&lt;em&gt;weee-&lt;/em&gt; etc. ad infinitum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, we don't reconstruct *&lt;em&gt;w-&lt;/em&gt; as *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ū&lt;/em&gt; as *&lt;em&gt;ew&lt;/em&gt; because there are lots and lots of examples of PIE *&lt;em&gt;we-&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ew&lt;/em&gt; that didn't become *&lt;em&gt;w-&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ū&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T20:19:00.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2692" CreationDate="2012-11-22T20:26:50.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Old Norse, the sequence &lt;em&gt;-nnr(-)&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;-ðr(-)&lt;/em&gt;. It's just a rule of Old Norse. You'll find it described in any grammar of Old Norse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2012-11-22T20:26:50.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2012-11-23T01:12:13.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Germanic languages are not related to Sanskrit any closer than any other IE branch. German language is not particularly conservative among other IE languages. German also has much of international vocabulary shared with other European languages which Sanskrit does not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T01:12:13.603" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2906" CreationDate="2012-11-23T02:12:13.617" Score="10" ViewCount="1385" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading Daniel Block's commentary on Ezekiel, I have come across the word &lt;strong&gt;sufformative&lt;/strong&gt;. (Block uses it of the Hebrew masculine singular ending &lt;em&gt;-em&lt;/em&gt;.) I have searched all around but cannot find a definition. Searching on Google is instructive in that it reveals that the word seems to be used primary in the context of the study of ancient Hebrew and Greek. I have had trouble before finding definitions for words used by Biblical linguists; they seem to have their own set of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in a general way it indicates some sort of formation at the end of a word. I also have the sense that this is somewhat different than the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;suffix&lt;/strong&gt;, though I am not clear enough on the definition of the word to express this difference. What is the meaning of &lt;em&gt;sufformative&lt;/em&gt;? Is it different from &lt;em&gt;suffix&lt;/em&gt;, and if so, how? Examples (in whatever language) would also be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've chosen to ask this rather than on English.SE because this word seems to be used only by linguists.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T00:50:42.433" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T00:50:42.433" Title="Meaning of sufformative versus suffix" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2012-11-23T02:32:14.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As was said in the comments, just selecting one arbitrarily and sticking to it is probably a bad idea as this could be confusing. Your best options are probably to either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide the necessary context so as to resolve the definiteness of what is being referred to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use 'a/the' in the translation line. An example of this can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the WALS Online entry for definite articles&lt;/a&gt; in the example from the Cherokee language. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably depends on the purpose of your example. If it is to point out that the language does not possess definite or indefinite articles (as in the Cherokee examples), then the second option would be the way to go, otherwise it's up to you I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="81" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T02:32:14.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2892" CreationDate="2012-11-23T14:26:25.510" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I may as well try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evolutionary benefit of warnings, all-clear signals, communication on where to find food and so on is quite clear. But what is the benefit of statements that just convey descriptive information, without implying that an action should be taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any models out there that show the step towards descriptive statements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1517" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T19:13:33.297" Title="Evolutionary advantage of descriptive statements" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2887" CreationDate="2012-11-23T15:01:26.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I provide you with descriptive information, and I either expect you to act in my interest or I am sympathetic to your interest—because in the long term a strong community may help me protect or spread my genes—, then I increase your power to further my interest. For knowledge is power. In that way, descriptive statements may help my genes spread and survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2012-11-23T15:01:26.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2890" CreationDate="2012-11-24T05:41:43.233" Score="3" ViewCount="3542" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a sensitive question, but there should be enough evidence of the correlation, if any, between the language spoken in different regions and their average IQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a correlation between intelligence and one native language. There would suffice to proof that it exists with at least one kind of intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the IQ is the indicator with more available data, it would suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as a personal observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our brain has a limited capacity, regarding any skill. For instance, people with Savant syndrome, are exceptionally good on very specific tasks, but in general lack of the more general skills as socialization and communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, text and speech recognition are among the more expensive tasks to be done by any computer, requiring huge data bases and very fast processors. So that I suspect that our brains could face similar requirements regarding written language and speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to take into account, is that while there are very compact languages, also there are languages with very complex rules and irregularities, with huge alphabets, phonemes, and so on. And here, I have to be very careful, as I don't want to make any affirmation regarding any particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if the price that our brain must pay to be able to master our native language, is to diminish other skills, it should have enough data to demonstrate either that there is a correlation between intelligence and one's native language, or the opposite, that they are not related at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1522" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T17:48:04.207" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T17:48:04.207" Title="Does native language influence intelligence quotient?" Tags="&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2012-11-24T08:15:31.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please see the comment I left on the question about intelligence vs. IQ. I am assuming the OP meant &quot;intelligence&quot; and was simply referring to IQ as a convenient measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/sum07/myths/myths2%5Bintelligence%5D.pdf&quot;&gt;Language alone is not an indicator of intelligence&lt;/a&gt;. Most introductory Linguistics courses will at least briefly cover &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome&quot;&gt;Williams Syndrome&lt;/a&gt;, a form of developmental delay that characteristically presents with exceptional language skills. While it might not make sense that something that causes exceptional language skills could be classified as a developmental delay, you need to remember that when people talk about &quot;intelligence&quot;, they are often talking about a wide range of independent skills (math, induction, memory, expertise on a specific topic, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you did not ask about the link between language and intelligence, you asked if one's native language can affect their intelligence. I couldn't find any research on that topic but I did find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/159ISB4.PDF&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; which found that bilingualism has no noticeable effect on intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that it would be almost impossible to attribute any differences to language alone. There are too many variables between different language speaking areas such as culture, education, and health care. I have found &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.ru.ac.za/504/1/Gaylard_MA.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; which found evidence that quality of education can noticeably affect intelligence test results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, although I could not find any academic sources explicitly addressing your concern, I find it highly unlikely that one's native language affect intelligence levels and any differences that may exist cannot be reliably attributed to language as other factors have greater effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2012-11-24T08:15:31.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2887" CreationDate="2012-11-24T18:23:39.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A descriptive statement is a fairly abstract structure, pragmatically speaking, and as such seems likely to have appeared as a type quite late in human language evolution. Obviously it did not spring into existence full-blown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, there was probably quite a lot of pre-evolution involved, but we don't have nearly enough data about what really happened to do more than speculate about the relative evolutionary advantages of speech act types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is instructive, however, that mathematics, logic, and philosophy (and for that matter, science and theology) have seized on the descriptive statement as the communicational vehicle of choice. Descriptive statements have a lot of convenient features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can be independently verified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have a recognizable structure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are -- in priniciple, at least -- independent of intentions, presuppositions, or emotions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have modes of expression for Quantification, Negation, and Modality (the 3 logical Operators)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fact is that descriptive statements are by far less common in real language than are isolated words or phrases, fragments of idioms and conversational formulae, and simple sub-morphemic intonation contours (i.e, grunts, including the various versions of &amp;quot;Oh&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Ah&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Eh?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly people talk in phrases, not clauses. Sentence-level and paragraph-level consistency in structure and focus is the exception, not the rule -- at least for those educated in Anglophone schools, where such consistency is famously uncultivated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the evolutionary reasons for preferring descriptive statements in some contexts are probably still the reasons for using them in those contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AFTERTHOUGHT&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptive statements also pair up well as responses to &lt;em&gt;Wh&lt;/em&gt;-questions (as they are called in Anglocentric syntactic theories), which are pretty obviously elaborations of natural expressions of puzzlement and anxiety -- so natural that there are characteristic facial expressions and intonations for expressing those emotions, and requesting information about their source, that are pan-H.sapiens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whatever the force(s) and source(s) involved, the evolution of descriptive statements can't be divorced from the evolution of questions; they're a natural pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T19:13:33.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2012-11-25T04:16:03.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. The more languages you know, the easier it generally is to learn new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether Sanskrit is &lt;em&gt;particularly&lt;/em&gt; useful for learning German, I don't know Sanskrit well enough to judge, but this will probably depend on what other languages you already know. I would guess that if you already know English, that will benefit you a lot more in learning German than knowing Sanskrit will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd still like to point out that I don't think genetic relation is necessarily the best/only indicator for how useful one language is for learning another. Certain aspects of languages can be similar across languages that are only remotely related, or even not at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Spanish and Japanese phonologies are much more similar than say, the Spanish and French ones are. That doesn't mean that Japanese is more useful than French for learning Spanish, but if the phonology is a &quot;hole&quot; which would otherwise be hard for you to master, your Japanese knowledge might just fill that hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there are similar ties between Sanskrit and German, I don't know. My guess is that the page you link to is targeting Indians trying to learn German, so I suspect that is why Sanskrit is taken up as a language that readers might know. I find it quite probable that knowledge about Sanskrit will benefit you in at least some aspects of learning German. However, I do find the examples listed on the page quite random and anecdotal in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T04:16:03.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-11-25T04:42:48.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sinhala, one of the languages spoken in Sri Lanka has a four way deixis system. &#xA;written phonemically - &#xA;&lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; = this/these, near the speaker&#xA;&lt;em&gt;oye&lt;/em&gt; = that/those, near the listener&#xA;&lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; = (distal) visible but far from both speaker and listener&#xA;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; = (distal) not visible to either&#xA;Jim Gair has written extensively about it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/repository/81001521.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is an online document I found about it &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1524" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T04:42:48.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2902" CreationDate="2012-11-25T13:58:44.090" Score="8" ViewCount="1575" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does any body know how old-Persian numeral were used and provide some example? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s6HWz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source of image is Unicode characters maps)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2012-11-28T05:46:27.493" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T11:04:11.870" Title="Old-Persian Numeral System" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2897" CreationDate="2012-11-25T14:47:55.340" Score="11" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verb in a language like English can inflect for person, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I see the cat&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;he sees the cat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the verb can inflect for tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I see the cat&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;I saw the cat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do any languages inflect for the singular/plural aspect of the object?&#xA;i.e. is there a language where the verb 'to see' would be different in the two contexts 'I see the cat' and `I see the cats'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-28T05:14:39.003" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T03:40:36.270" Title="Do any languages have verbal inflection with a plural object?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2896" CreationDate="2012-11-25T16:12:50.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biblical Hebrew has object suffixes which distinguish the person, gender and number of the object. Example (from the Shema:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ושננתם (veshinantam) &quot;and you shall chew them over&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;('ve-shinan-ta-m': &quot;and shall-chew-over you them&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian has a set of prefixes and suffixes which combine to show the person and number of the subject and object For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ხედავ (khedav) &quot;you see it&quot;;&#xA;  მხედავ (mkhedav) &quot;you see me&quot;;&#xA;  გვხედავ (gvkhedav) &quot;you see us&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2012-11-25T16:12:50.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2012-11-25T18:43:42.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Slavic 'acute' accent has been lost everywhere in Slavic, but the distinction between acute and non-acute has often been preserved as something else, such as difference in length etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, some western south Slavic dialects still preserve the so called neoacute, a high flat tone... opposed to a falling tone, and they 're both Proto-Slavic in origin.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In many dialects there is an additional rising tone (sometimes it's not really rising but low and followed by a high tone in the following syllable), which emerged only in those dialects some time in the 16th century (and this is also found in the standard Croatian, and Serbian languages).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The tonal systems of all dialects are quite complex... involving various rules etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1525" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-11-28T05:11:38.610" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T05:11:38.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2012-11-26T18:07:17.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well since your question contains nothing to compare to and is therefore ambiguous, the answer could only be yes. Had the question been in the form of a comparison between the ease and rapidity with which one could acquire German with a working proficiency in Sanskrit relative to the ease with which one could acquire German with a working proficiency in language X, then there are sufficient considerations to account for which may allow for a &quot;no&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is syntactically tantamount to asking &quot;Is the act of person X walking from point A to point B easier, and vice versa?&quot;. Easier than what, precisely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T18:07:17.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2012-11-26T18:37:17.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language-learning aptitude may be a veracious earmark of high intelligence, but, sadly, there is no scientific evidence to corroborate the supposition that there exists a native language-intelligence quotient correlation to stroke peoples' egos with and make them feel more intelligent than they are stupid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are medical conditions that seem capable of endowing greater-than-average linguistic dexterity in their sufferers, and there are even medical conditions which are presumed to positively correlate with higher IQ, imputing sufferers with potentiated or augmented cognitive ability as sequelae. There does not, in any case, seem to be one condition known to medicine capable of affecting both linguistic deftness and one's overall g factor concurrently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T18:37:17.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2877" CreationDate="2012-11-26T18:49:10.817" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even with English being a third language to me, the grammatical purport of the suffix &quot;-ter&quot; in words such as &quot;laughter&quot; is easily deducible with only a second's worth of though expended. The affixation of &quot;-ter&quot; is an obvious, though uncommon from my experience, inflectional suffix serving to change a verb, as in &quot;laugh&quot;, into a noun. Compare &quot;He laughed at the joke I had told him...&quot; to &quot;His laughter at the joke I had told him...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1513" LastActivityDate="2012-11-26T18:49:10.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2895" CreationDate="2012-11-27T13:07:45.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/history-of-the-language/old-persian-script/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Old Persian numerals&lt;/a&gt; were treated somewhat like Roman numerals: they were based on &lt;em&gt;juxtaposition&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.uh.edu/~mflagg/2303Text/2303-Section-11.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;addition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;[PDF], and not &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.uh.edu/~mflagg/2303Text/2303-Section-13.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;place-value&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [PDF] like Arabic, Mayan, or Bablylonian numerals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Roman, the numerals were always placed in a single direction (largest-value-on-the-left); there was no subtractive notation like IV for 4. Also, Roman had symbols for 5 (V), 50 (L), 500 (D) instead of 2, 20. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So n Old Persian, &quot;5&quot; was &lt;code&gt;2 2 1&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;18&quot; was &lt;code&gt;10 2 2 2 2&lt;/code&gt;. Decimal &lt;code&gt;453&lt;/code&gt; would have been &lt;code&gt;100 100 100 100 20 20 10 2 1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2012-12-26T11:04:11.870" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T11:04:11.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-28T03:56:11.740" Score="4" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike Chinese and Japanese, Korean does employ spaces between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes a lexical word differs from what constitutes an orthographic word. For instance, particles which can is some ways be compared to English prepositions, are written suffixed or cliticized to the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Korean is very rudimentary to say the least but I believe I have seen in printed Korean the particle &lt;code&gt;의&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;of&quot; or &quot;'s&quot;) at the beginning of the next line when the noun it would normally be attached to came at the end of the previous line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know is this the only place that Korean orthographic words can be separated? Or can line breaks occur at any position in the middle of a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_languages#Line_breaking_rules_in_Korean_text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There is a relevant article on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, but it lumps Chinese, Japanese, and Korean together, with Korean receiving the least specific attention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T22:52:08.917" Title="Where can orthographic Korean words be split at the end of a line?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-28T05:47:42.063" Score="5" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know how the following numerals had been used and provide some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SPW8N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mhWAq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source of images is Unicode characters maps)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T08:47:24.690" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T08:47:24.690" Title="Pahlavi and Parthian numerals" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2012-11-28T09:36:14.510" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Alex B. points out in his comment to your question, some writers (especially earlier ones) use &quot;sufformative&quot; interchangably with &quot;suffix&quot;. However, as I understand it, a sufformative in Biblical Hebrew is specifically an inflectional ending. According to Pratico and Van Pelt, &lt;em&gt;Basics of Biblical Hebrew&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd ed.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Perfect conjugation is also called the &quot;suffix conjugation&quot; because different inflectional endings or &lt;em&gt;sufformatives&lt;/em&gt; are added to the verbal root in order to indicate person, gender, and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Block refers to sufformatives, I think he's describing verbal inflectional endings, rather than other types of suffix such as plural suffixes on nouns and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1492" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T09:36:14.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2052" CreationDate="2012-11-28T13:34:03.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best answer to this question is that onomatopoeiae can undergo sound change, but do have a relatively strong tendency to resist it.  Perhaps a decent example of this could be &quot;woe&quot; in Indo-European languages.  Whether it was an ancient borrowing or a human universal onomatopoeia, there is some ancient, probably Proto-Indo-European uttering whose precise reconstruction may escape us, but is approximately something like *wai or *wei.  Note Semitic languages point to a Proto-Semitic *wai and the Old Georgian Bible contains 'wai' in the same function (possibly borrowed for translation purposes?).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, even if you do not accept a PIE reconstruction, the internal history of 'woe' within branches of IE show sound change.  'vae' in Latin went from being pronounced [wai] to [vai].  Similarly many Germanic languages went through the same labial sound change, while there is considerable variation in the quality of the vowel(s): OEng. 'wa:', OSax./OHG 'we:', Old Norse 'vei'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the forms of many branches show regular, or at least acceptable, sound changes from an initial syllable *w-, while others show clear renewal in order to preserve a w- or v-.  In terms of apparent inheritance we have Old Irish fé (f &amp;lt; *w, like 'fer' man &amp;lt; *wiH-ro-s, cf. Lat. vir) and Welsh 'gwae', while on the other hand there is Koiné Greek 'ouai' ([wai] where initial w- was not a Greek phoneme in that time period) and Armenian 'vay'(where initial PIE *w would normally render Armenian g-).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we see an obvious tendency towards renewal but the clear ability of this onomatopoeia to undergo regular sound changes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid I cannot answer the main question as to the relative frequencies of these different possible evolutionary paths for onomatopoeia.  I only took up the answer at all because of an error in a previous answer which states that onomatopoeias undergo sound change (which is true, or at least they can), but bases this on examples of orthographic change, which actually argues against the respondent's point and did not appear to be the intention of the authors of the cited work.  The fact a Greek sheep's sound is not transcribed with mu-pi only shows resilience against sound change.  The orthographic change from pip- to peep likewise preserves [pi:p].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think the examples involving the evolution of the pronunciation of 'woe' in Germanic and Romance languages, and maybe even in the gap of time from PIE to Celtic better demonstrate the point that onomatopoeia are vulnerable to sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T13:34:03.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2909" CreationDate="2012-11-28T16:03:59.317" Score="3" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hesternal Past tense describes an event occurred yesterday (in an absolute tense system) or the day preceding the day under consideration (in a relative system) and the crastinal future describes and event which will occur tomorrow (in an absolute system) or the following the day under consideration (in a relative system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a language have to express these particular types of tense by the form of an affix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you say that English has a hesternal past form in sentences like &quot;I went to town yesterday&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; limits the event to the day preceding today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T23:46:47.833" Title="How is the hesternal past, crastinal future etc. conveyed?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2908" CreationDate="2012-11-28T23:46:47.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammatical categories&lt;/strong&gt; - tense and remoteness in this case - &lt;strong&gt;are expressed morphosyntactically&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas in your English example the idea of a recent event is expressed by the adverb &quot;yesterday&quot; (i.e. lexically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, one could &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; argue for a certain tense gram (form) purely based on semantics. In this case, one could talk of the following tense forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to town yesterday. (hesternal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to town a week ago. (pre-hesternal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to town last year. (remote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to town a hundred years ago. (ancient past)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;strong&gt;ad absurdum&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Kibort 2008&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to be regarded as a (grammaticalised) tense, &lt;strong&gt;the expression of location in time has to be integrated into the grammatical system of the language&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine - Alex B.]. In contrast, a lexicalised expression of the location in time indicates its integration into the lexicon of the language, but does not entail any necessary consequences for the language's grammatical structure. Grammaticalisation, as opposed to lexicalisation, of the location in time, correlates with two parameters: obligatory expression and morphological boundness. The very rough rule is that a tense is grammaticalised if its morphological expression is obligatory even if the information carried by the exponent is redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kibort, Anna. &quot;Tense.&quot; Grammatical Features. 7 January 2008. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/tense.html&quot;&gt;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/tense.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-11-28T23:46:47.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-29T21:23:42.800" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I know that the title of this question is quite opaque, but I'm having a hard time explaining what I'm looking for. Perhaps someone can help with that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need a tool which can take a collection of syllables (preferably phonetically transcribed), look at all possible combinations, and return any combination that creates a real English word. This is to help me create auditory stimuli for a phonetics experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me describe the problem I am facing. I have a small collection of recordings of sentences that look something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, Jess mistyped it, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to find a way to splice and recombine bits of this sound file to create words that were not originally there. This is because I just don't have enough usable words that I can just extract from the sound file, and for various reasons I can't go out and record my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been staring at these sentences for a while, trying to figure out what could be spliced together to form something close to actual English words, but I'm not getting anywhere fast. Can anyone think of a way of approaching this problem that doesn't require my own imagination? Is there a searchable dictionary with phonetic transcriptions and regular expressions, or something similar that I could use? Extra points for being able to specify the resulting stress pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastActivityDate="2012-11-29T21:23:42.800" Title="Tool for finding recombinations of syllables that yield words" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2012-11-30T10:28:45.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speech is thousands of years older than writing (the earliest known writing is Sumerian cuneiform -pictographs inscribed in clay). So it has primacy over the written word. According to Crystal (2003:178-9) both speech and writing are recognised as 'alternative, equal systems of linguistic expressions'. Focus on writing is characterised by studies in to literature and therefore style, genre and, perhaps, the notion of linguistic excellence and standards. Historically, speech was not considered worthy of study. In modern times, there has been much wider analysis of speech for a number of reasons:&#xA;1. Prevalence of 'second' language learning.&#xA;2. Investigations in to primary language acquisition.&#xA;3. Cognitive studies in to speech and the language centre of the brain.&#xA;4. Striving for improved standards and teaching methodologies.&#xA;5. etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or perhaps for the very fact that not a lot of academic attention had been paid to it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech is an innate skill that manifests itself without a formal learned environment (taking Krashen's distinction on 'acquisition' and 'learning'). Writing is a learned skill in formal learning settings. Children must learn to talk before they can write. So the primary focus in research is naturally on speech as the starting point of language acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1538" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T10:28:45.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-11-30T11:37:16.367" Score="4" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a law that prohibits PIE stems starting with what traditionally reconstructed as non-palatal /g/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I encountered with only one stem that the sources consistently reconstruct with this phoneme: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;gloiu̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;clay&quot;. Is this stem reconstructed reliably?  Cannot it be a borrowing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I know about a prohibition on stems starting with &quot;r-&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T20:06:45.007" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T20:06:45.007" Title="Is there a prohibition on stems starting with /g/ in PIE?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2877" CreationDate="2012-11-30T21:26:57.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be much of a leap to suggest this as an example of a &quot;cranberry morpheme&quot;? A somewhat fossilised style of inflection, in that it no longer carries any distinct meaning in itself, but nonetheless is still quite pertinent to the meaning of the the word itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also put a little more thought into it and have come up with daughter, sister, from English, as well as mater and pater from Latin as examples of famillial relations employing -ter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T21:26:57.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2012-11-30T21:42:05.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies, it seems I don't have enough credit to post a comment, so an &quot;answer&quot; will have to suffice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would analyse the elements on either side of a comparative expression such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;One plus two is equal to three&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be almost like proper nouns referring to abstract mathematical concepts. While the result of the mathematical operation is most certainly non singular in number, we are referring to one, singular, unique, mathematical operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to bring algebra into it, replace the left hand side with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and the right hand side with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Like that, it becomes clear, to me, at least, what the underlying structure of the expression (linguistically speaking) is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That explains the conjugation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be right that we need another class for mathematical operators, but rather than looking at them as singular words within a larger clause, what happens if we examine them as subclauses in their own right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could certainly account for the absence of elision in &lt;code&gt;x + y + z&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastActivityDate="2012-11-30T21:42:05.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2896" CreationDate="2012-12-01T13:52:13.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to read your question strictly as &quot;Are there languages that agree with their objects only with respect to plurality?&quot; There are some cool examples of this. For instance, Classical Nahuatl usually has full agreement with both object and subject for both person and number. In ditansitive verbs, though, we cannot have full agreement with all three arguments. Instead, the verb agrees for number and person with the subject and indirect object and there is a suffix -im, which agrees with plural animate direct objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Xi-nech-&lt;strong&gt;im&lt;/strong&gt;-maca huehuexolo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2Ssg-1Osg-PL-give &lt;strong&gt;turkey&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Give me &lt;strong&gt;some turkeys&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;huehuexolo&lt;/em&gt; were singular or inanimate, &lt;strong&gt;-im&lt;/strong&gt; would not appear. See &lt;em&gt;The Syntax of Agreement and Concord&lt;/em&gt; by Mark Baker for more on this kind of phenomenon, which he calls two-and-a-half agreement because you can agree with two arguments and part of a third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WARNING: The Nahuatl is missing some crucial diacritics that I do not know how to represent on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastActivityDate="2012-12-01T13:52:13.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2921" CreationDate="2012-12-01T18:53:00.157" Score="6" ViewCount="1714" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time determining when an utterance passes the thereby-test and thus can be considered to be an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance&quot;&gt;explicit performative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An utterance in the first-person singular indicative noncontinuous present is an explicit performative if and only if it yields a true statement when plugged into the following pattern: &lt;em&gt;In saying “I ____” in appropriate circumstances, I thereby ____.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if an umpire shouts, “You’re out!” then the batter is out. Therefore, given the right circumstances, this is an explicit performative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0495603953&quot;&gt;Understanding Arguments, An Introduction to Informal Logic&lt;/a&gt;&quot; states that &lt;em&gt;&quot;I agree with you.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is not an explicit performative since &quot;this describes one’s thoughts or beliefs, so, unlike a performative, it can be false&quot;. However, it states that &lt;em&gt;&quot;I apologize for being late.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is an explicit performative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couldn't one be lying when apologizing? &lt;strong&gt;Where does the distinction lie?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, how far does the notion of 'appropriate circumstances' stretch? I could argue that when a person &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; agrees, the statement becomes an explicit performative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1540" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T01:56:10.713" Title="Why can't agreeing be an explicit performative?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2012-12-01T19:29:52.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start from the definitions first. According to the Speech Act Theory, an utterance can be &lt;strong&gt;constative&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;performative&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;constative utterance&lt;/em&gt; is one which makes an assertion but is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; performative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;John promised to repay me tomorrow&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The utterance describes a promise (made by John), but is not by itself a promise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;performative utterance&lt;/em&gt; simultaneously describes and performs the act described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I promise to repay you tomorrow&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the person is promising, and not reporting about a promise. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Searle's classification, speech acts can be categorized as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Declarations&lt;/strong&gt;: These are words and expressions that change the world by their very utterance, such as “I bet”, “I declare”, “I resign” or “I hereby pronounce you man and wife”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Representatives&lt;/strong&gt;: These are acts in which the words state what the speaker believes to be the case, such as “describing”, “claiming”, “hypothesizing”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commissives&lt;/strong&gt;: This includes acts in which the words commit the speaker to future actions, such as “promising”, “offering”, “threatening”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Directives&lt;/strong&gt;: This category covers acts in which the words are aimed at making the hearer do something, such as “commanding”, “requesting”, “inviting”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expressives&lt;/strong&gt;: This last group includes acts in which the words state what the speaker feels, such as “apologizing”, “praising”, “congratulating”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under Searle's classification, an oath or a promise are classified as &lt;strong&gt;commissive&lt;/strong&gt;. Your example about the batter is classified as &lt;strong&gt;directive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when an utterance is performative, you basically &lt;em&gt;do things with words&lt;/em&gt;, when it's constative, you just describe. Furthermore, performative verbs are those verbs which can make an utterance performative when used in a simple 1° person tense sentence, in all other cases the sentence stays constative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uqtr.ca/~vandervk/english_performative_verbs_ch6.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Semantic analysis of English performative verbs&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;agree&quot; is considered as capable of &lt;em&gt;acting&lt;/em&gt; as a speech act verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The verb &quot;agree&quot; is both a propositional attitude and a speech act verb. One can be in the mental state of being in accord or agreement with someone without uttering any words. One can also agree verbally with someone by making the speech act of agreeing. In this illocutionary sense, to agree is to assert a proposition &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;  while presupposing (the preparatory condition) that other persons have previously put forward that proposition and while expressing (sincerity condition) one's accord or agreement with these persons as regards P.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The person(s) with whom the speaker agrees may, but need not, be the hearer(s). One can say &quot;I agree with him that P&quot; as well as &quot;I agree with you that &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; The contrary of &quot;agree&quot; is &quot;disagree&quot;. To disagree is to assert a proposition with the preparatory condition that other &#xA;  persons have previously put forward the negation of that proposition and the sincerity condition that one is in a state of disagreement with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still according to Searle, there is a general condition for all speech acts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hearer must hear and understand the language, and the speaker must not be pretending or play-acting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the speaker is lying, the verb is not a Speech Act one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-02T00:33:16.270" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T00:33:16.270" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2923" CreationDate="2012-12-01T22:29:03.767" Score="7" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Indo-European languages, the neuter is often characterized by syncretism between nominative and accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples of syncretism and also historical change where the nominative pairs with accusative and genitive pairs with dative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a single name referring to something being nominative OR accusative without a further distinction being made? (Or put another way, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; genitive/dative?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or put yet another way, if I were tagging a neuter word and wanted to indicate that the case is either nominative or accusative, is there a term for that (other than just saying nom/acc or something)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the four cases nominative, accusative, genitive, dative were to be treated as having a relationship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X&#xA;+---+--- Y&#xA;    |    +--- nominative&#xA;    |    |&#xA;    |    +--- accusative&#xA;    |&#xA;    +--- Z&#xA;         +--- genitive&#xA;         |&#xA;         +--- dative&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there a name for &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;Z&lt;/code&gt; for that matter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: note that I'm particularly interested in labeling the morphological reflex, not the grammatical relation. In other words, I'm not attempting to make any claims about case semantics by this analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="165" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T11:44:48.943" LastActivityDate="2012-12-07T11:44:48.943" Title="Is there a name for the &quot;case&quot; that is a conflation of nominative and accusative?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2919" CreationDate="2012-12-01T22:54:56.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about what language you're working on, but the Nominative is referred to as &lt;strong&gt;Direct case&lt;/strong&gt; (including also the vocative, when available), while the rest of the cases, including Dative and Genitive, are classified as &lt;strong&gt;Oblique cases&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-02T13:04:15.203" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T13:04:15.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2012-12-01T23:09:08.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What are performative verbs and declarations?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much confusion about what performatives and declarations are and how they should be classified. The following definition by Searle seems the most useful and exact one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;... an utterance is a &lt;em&gt;declaration&lt;/em&gt; if the successful performance of the speech act is sufficient to bring about the fit between words and world, to &lt;strong&gt;make the propositional content true&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;— John R. Searle, 'How Performatives Work' in: &lt;em&gt;Linguistics and Philosophy&lt;/em&gt; 12 (5) pp. 535–558 (1989), 547.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that a &lt;em&gt;declaration&lt;/em&gt; must &lt;strong&gt;describe a situation&lt;/strong&gt;, or it couldn't have a truth value; and its being uttered must &lt;strong&gt;affect its truth value&lt;/strong&gt;. (Note also that this is not necessarily black and white: different utterances may be more or less declarative in degrees; however, we normally only call an utterance a 'declaration' if it is a sufficient condition for itself to become true.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are dismissed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence can be read in two ways; one is similar to the same sentence but in the third person or in the past: the utterance &lt;em&gt;you were dismissed&lt;/em&gt; simply describes a situation where you were dismissed, but it is not a declaration. In that line of thought, &lt;em&gt;you are dismissed&lt;/em&gt; could be read as a non-declarative description. The other reading is performative: by saying this, I affect the external world in such a way that the description becomes true and you are indeed dismissed. When both readings coincide, it is a declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot remain undismissed after my utterance: there is a direct causal link. This is essential. From that it follows that a declaration must describe an utterance (among other things), or there cannot be an inescapable causal link. And so it must normally contain some verbal phrase that expresses an &lt;em&gt;utterance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the question who is to assign this truth value (you? I? someone else?) is open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An explicit declaration is one that is self descriptive, in that the descriptive aspect of the utterance &lt;em&gt;as a whole&lt;/em&gt; accurately describes the performative utterance. In &lt;em&gt;you are dismissed&lt;/em&gt;, this is not the case, because &lt;em&gt;you are x&lt;/em&gt; does not describe an utterance at all; it is therefore considered &lt;strong&gt;implicit&lt;/strong&gt;. The word &lt;em&gt;dismissed&lt;/em&gt; does describe an utterance, in that dismissing someone is uttering certain words, but &lt;em&gt;dismissed&lt;/em&gt; is not the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hereby dismiss you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a declaration, since the utterance affects its own truth value as above. It is an &lt;strong&gt;explicit&lt;/strong&gt; declaration, because the descriptive aspect describes the act brought about by uttering it. It can be tested thus. If someone else produced the same utterance, describing the same state of affairs but with appropriate deixis (= pronouns and tenses, words referring to the external world), as in &lt;em&gt;he thereby dismisses you&lt;/em&gt;, she would accurately describe my performative utterance. The sentence &lt;em&gt;I hereby dismiss you&lt;/em&gt; must therefore be an explicit declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;performative verb&lt;/strong&gt; is short for a verb resulting in an utterance that is usually a declaration if you say &lt;em&gt;I hereby [verb]&lt;/em&gt;. I say &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt;, because (almost) any sentence can be given a different illocutionary meaning given the right context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Should &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; count as a declaration?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brutus: — Caesar is a tyrant; he must be stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cassius: — I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a declaration? Does saying &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; affect its own truth value? I would say no, because agreeing means having an opinion, at least in this context: saying &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; merely informs the other party of Cassius' opinion here. Even if he said he agreed while he privately disagreed, this would not affect his private opinion: he would continue to disagree. One could write, &lt;em&gt;indeed, I said &amp;quot;I agree&amp;quot; to you, but I did not in fact agree&lt;/em&gt;. If this &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; affected its own truth value, then Cassius could not secretly disagree while saying he agreed. But in fact nothing stopped Cassius from disagreeing and betraying Brutus. Therefore it must be something other than a declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, for something to count as a declaration, there must be a direct causal link, in that uttering agreement is a sufficient condition for the agreement to come about. This is not the case. The fact that agreeing is not exactly an utterance itself already points to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scipio: — Hannibal, your army has been destroyed, and you are our prisoner. You now have a choice: either you agree to cede Spain in the presence of the Carthaginian and Roman noblemen assembled in this room, and you will be set free; or you will die. Once you have agreed, there is no way back: Spain will be ours and your title forfeited. What say you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hannibal: — I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, it seems reasonable to read Hannibal's &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;I formally agree, and I hereby cede Spain to the Roman Republic&lt;/em&gt;. To formally agree comes close enough to a verbal phrase expressing an utterance (as mentioned above), rather than having an opinion. Could his father Hasdrubal in Carthage say later, &lt;em&gt;Hannibal said &amp;quot;I [formally] agree&amp;quot;, but he did not [formally] agree&lt;/em&gt;? This does not seem reasonable. No, the utterance seems to be a sufficient cause for formally agreeing in this situation. But all this does depend on your interpretation of &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; as formally agreeing, so it is not clear cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it an explicit declaration? Yes, if you read it as &lt;em&gt;I formally agree&lt;/em&gt;. In this context, the utterance &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; as a whole accurately describes the speech act of formally agreeing. If you think that &lt;em&gt;I agree&lt;/em&gt; does not actually 'mean' formally agreeing but requires interpretation as such, you will probably not consider this explicit. That is a subtle matter of definition which is perhaps not very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same issue applies to all speech acts: what is the 'basic' or locutionary meaning of an utterance, and what is its illocutionary meaning? If you say &lt;em&gt;could you pass the salt&lt;/em&gt;, is the basic meaning &amp;quot;so tell me about your ability to pass the salt; are you capable of doing so, you think?&amp;quot;? Or do you consider &lt;em&gt;could you&lt;/em&gt; an idiomatic phrase meaning &amp;quot;I request that you...&amp;quot; at a basic enough level? A matter of definition, a choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are not all assertive/constative statements declarations?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father, I was forced to cede Spain to the Romans. I say we have lost the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here Hannibal says Carthage has lost the war, and he says that he says it, by &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt;. This makes it technically a declaration: uttering it is sufficient to make &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt; true, and the truth value of &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt; determines that of the whole utterance. One cannot say, &lt;em&gt;Hannibal uttered &amp;quot;I say we have lost the war&amp;quot;, but in fact he did not say that&lt;/em&gt;. That is, this can only work as a paradox, in which &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; are taken to mean two different things in context—which are for the Oracle to decipher, because I wouldn't understand it. The declaration is explicit, because the whole content of the utterance accurately describes itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have lost the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have no &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt;. However, should we not implicitly read &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt; here? After all, this sentence means exactly the same as the one in the previous example. Perhaps this is absurd, or perhaps it is the most rigorous application of Searle's definition. The consequence would be that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; descriptive utterances are taken as declarations with implicit &lt;em&gt;I say&lt;/em&gt;. I have no answer. This shows the limits of speech-act theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other examples.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is could be read as a declaration, if by being out you mean the registered statistic in the game. That is also how the umpire means it, so from his perspective it is a declaration. However, if you read it as &lt;em&gt;being at the designated position at that exact time&lt;/em&gt;, it is possible that the umpire was wrong: you can then say &lt;em&gt;the umpire said &amp;quot;you're out!&amp;quot;, but he was in fact not out&lt;/em&gt;. Here the question 'who is to judge the truth value?' becomes very relevant, and this goes beyond my answer. It is not explicit, however, because &lt;em&gt;being out&lt;/em&gt; does not describe an utterance, and therefore it cannot describe itself. There is no verbal expression of utterance, as in &lt;em&gt;I declare you out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I apologise&amp;quot;, I said, but I didn't feel sorry at all: it was his own fault, and I would do it again. He did not respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a declaration? Does saying &lt;em&gt;I apologise&lt;/em&gt; make the statement true? Can you say, &lt;em&gt;he said &amp;quot;I apologise&amp;quot;, but he did not in fact apologise&lt;/em&gt;? I think not, at least not in this context. You can apologise and not mean it, but that is different. It is also explicit because the whole utterance describes itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said, &amp;quot;I apologise&amp;quot;, but he looked me in the eyes, grinned, and hit me again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it seems clear that neither the speaker nor the listener believe that it is really an apology. Can you say, &lt;em&gt;he said &amp;quot;I apologise&amp;quot;, but he did not in fact apologise&lt;/em&gt;? Suddenly this seems more reasonable. If you repeat the offence, even while saying &lt;em&gt;I apologise&lt;/em&gt;, you are not truly apologising—or are you? It depends on which linguistic level you read &lt;em&gt;I apologise&lt;/em&gt; on. If you read it as &amp;quot;I am making an apologetic statement&amp;quot;, you are apologising even in this example; if you read it as &amp;quot;I am sincerely sorry&amp;quot;, then you are not apologising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irony makes it so that an utterance is interpreted (by both parties) at a deeper illocutionary or perlocutionary level that is very different from the superficial, basic, locutionary meaning. With irony, you can make any statement mean anything. So it may be a declaration at some level, but not at another. It depends on how you read it, and, again, I think this shows how Searle's classification has its limits in terms of usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T01:28:55.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-02T14:12:34.297" Score="5" ViewCount="2503" Body="&lt;p&gt;The course I'm taking is based on Radford's Analysing English Sentences (2009). I'm having a lot of trouble analysing sentences within the split VP framework. There are very few examples in the book (and on the Internet). I'm not sure I'm doing right. I decided to start with very basic sentences. How would you analyse the following sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Links bring to images.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cLyF5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;He arrived&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (unaccusative)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It should be &lt;em&gt;&quot;He arrived home&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  but I don't really know where to put &quot;home&quot; in this tree.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TjehE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;She works hard.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (unergative)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AKEob.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The ship sank.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ergative)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3mned.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;They sank the ship.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ergative)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of &quot;ergative&quot; verbs in my book reads: &#xA;This term originally applied to languages like Basque in which the complement of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are assigned the same morphological case. However, by extension, it has come to be used to denote verbs like &quot;break&quot; which occur in structures like &quot;Someone broke the window&quot; and in structures like &quot;The window broke&quot;, where &quot;the window&quot; seems to play the same semantic/thematic role in both types of sentences, in spite of being the complement of &quot;broke&quot; in one sentence and the subject of &quot;broke&quot; in the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1542" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-02T19:50:55.243" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T01:22:58.473" Title="Syntax trees for unaccusatives, unergatives and ergatives verbs (MP) within the split VP framework" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2919" CreationDate="2012-12-02T16:33:45.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; refers to these as &lt;strong&gt;core cases&lt;/strong&gt;. Specifically, for nominative-accusative aligned languages, these are nominative and accusative; for ergative languages, the core cases are ergative-absolutive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T16:33:45.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2919" CreationDate="2012-12-02T18:34:13.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you got that wrong. Syncretism in a number of forms (as typical in the neuter in IE languages) does not mean that the structural categories themselves merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a language that &quot;fails&quot; to distinguish nominative and accusative case everywhere, cannot really be said to have either of them. (which would mean that arguments would have to be differentiated on some other basis, e.g. head-marking, word order, direct-inverse marking or so)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have to tag a form that could be either nominative or accusative you'd usually employ whichever is appropriate in the context; if no context is given or you need to be explicit you can also indicate the syncretism e.g. as &quot;nom/acc&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit:&#xA;and you (mostly) got that case relationship wrong. with respect to their prototypical usage, nominative, accusative and dative are closer to each other as they all express argument roles while the genitive is typically used for possessor constructions (although in a number of IE languages some verbs do actually require a genitive argument, but this is a minor pattern)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T18:34:13.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2012-12-02T19:12:56.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiranti_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kiranti Languages&lt;/a&gt; are known to exhibit a remarkably unique feature, so-called altitudinal cases. Nouns are always (? I think, it's been a while) marked as being either &quot;above&quot;, &quot;below&quot; or &quot;across&quot; (= level). This is tied to both the geographic profile of the region and to the mythological dimensions of verticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-02T19:12:56.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-03T15:40:13.073" Score="2" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to grok ASL's grammar. There seems to be a lot of folk grammar and the professional liguists haven't been studying it for very long so there is a lot of contradictory statments about what the basic word orders are in ASL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, if we have a language that is topic-comment, then the patient and the agent can be fronted and it seems like  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1) A (agent) hit B (patient) -&amp;gt;  A (topic), (omitted agent) hit B&#xA;2) A (agent) hit B (patient) -&amp;gt;  B (topic), A hit (omitted object)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the topic-comment versions of 1) &amp;amp; 2) look just like SVO and OSV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What diagnostics tests are used to figure out the basic word orders (basic morphosyntactic alignment)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:20:10.320" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:20:10.320" Title="Diagnostic tests for basic word order of subject-verb-object in a topic-comment language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;asl&gt;&lt;svo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2922" CreationDate="2012-12-03T16:49:13.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As people have already pointed out in the comments there are some confusions in the question. The problem is that ergative and accusative, which are normally used to talk about case/agreement patterns across transitive and intransitive verbs, have been extended to talk about contrasts across different types of intransitive verbs, namely unergatives and unaccusatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language manifests ergativity if the subject of intransitive verbs behaves like the object of transitive verbs to the exclusion of the subject of transitive verbs. Languages can manifest ergativity in their case, their agreement, their syntax, etc. Mayan languages, for instance, have ergative agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kaqchikel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X    *e*     ki    tz'ët&#xA;ASP  *O3p*   S3p   see&#xA;*They* saw them.&#xA;&#xA;X    *e'*    el&#xA;ASP  *S3p*   left&#xA;*They* left.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note above that the object agreement in the transitive verb is the same as the same as the subject agreement in the intransitive verb, namely &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;. This makes it ergative. In contrast, look at the English pronouns. The two third person subject pronouns are the same, but the object pronoun is different. This means that case in English is patterning accusatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does unaccusative and unergative come from then? Well it was noticed that some subjects of intransitive verbs seem more agent-y while other subjects of intransitive verbs seem more patient-y. Moreover, in some languages, there are clear syntactic and morphosyntactic differences between these two classes of intransitive predicates. The logic behind the names goes something like this: Well, the agent-y subjects of certain intransitive verbs are getting treated special. That reminds me of how agents of transitive verbs in ergative languages are treated special. Let's call those special intransitive subject unergative. In contrast, the patient-y subjects of those other intransitive verbs are being treated special. That reminds me of how patients of transitive verbs in accusative languages are treated special. Let's call those guys unaccusative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English its hard to talk about unaccusativity and unegativity because we don't have the best diagnostics. Other languages, do though. A classic case is perfect forms of intransitives in Italian. Different intransitive verbs take different forms of the copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;È&lt;/strong&gt; arrivato.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He has arrived &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ha&lt;/strong&gt; telefonato.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He has called.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at more and more of these intransitives it looks like the agent-y, or unergative ones, use &lt;strong&gt;ha&lt;/strong&gt;, while the patient-y, or unaccusative ones, use &lt;strong&gt;È&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for drawing trees. People usually assume that it's the unaccusative subjects that are treated differently. In a derivational theory, they are assumed to start out as objects to the intransitive verb, which then move to subject position. One piece of evidence for this, looking back at Italian, is that the passive form of the transitive verbs use the &lt;strong&gt;È&lt;/strong&gt; you see with unaccusatives. In derivational theories of the passive, the subject starts out in object position and only moves to subject position later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;È&lt;/strong&gt; stato ucciso.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   He was killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long story short, your example (4) is a normal transitive clause. It has no bearing on unaccusativity or unergativity. You examples (1) and (3) are unaccusative, but to convince me you would need to give me some diagnostics. Once you have those, you could try to argue that the subjects of (1) and (3) are underlying objects. (2) might in fact be unergative. Once again, marshall some arguments. If it turns out to behave differently than other patient-y intransitive subejects, you might be able to argue that these subjects originate in subject position or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-03T17:06:28.417" LastActivityDate="2012-12-03T17:06:28.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T00:16:37.453" Score="8" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SMS language&lt;/a&gt;' or 'textspeak' was popularised due in the 90s due to the use of phones with numeric keypads. However, most smartphones these days come with autocorrect / autocomplete which outputs correct spellings for any word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm interested in finding out is whether there has been any study or otherwise data which can tell whether usage of textspeak is on the decline (due to autocorrect or other reasons), rising, or static from previous years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't mean that autocorrect would necessarily correct textspeak into correct spellings. My hypothesis is that with most phones presenting full QWERTY keyboards (on screen) with autocorrect, are people still sticking to textspeak? I think not, but I was looking for something to prove or disprove my hypothesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1546" LastEditorUserId="1546" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T20:22:27.523" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T23:02:26.740" Title="Is usage of 'SMS language' or 'textspeak' changing in any direction?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2929" CreationDate="2012-12-04T08:42:29.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question raises a question whether existing auto-correction functions have sufficient knowledge of abbreviated forms to accurately offer an alternative. I suspect that they won't understand some abbreviated forms -the hallmark of 'textspeak'- and may offer corrections when it is not appropriate. So on this point, textspeak is unlikely to be declining, but the possibility for seemingly incomprehensible messages -characterised by erratic words, correctly spelled, but confusing the sense of the message- may be on the increase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most likely scenario, given the ability of auto-correctors to 'learn' vocabulary, is that after exposure to new forms or being instructed to learn the 'new' word the textspeak words will be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a paper, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mt-archive.info/IJCNLP-2011-Pennell.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Character-Level Machine Translation Approach for Normalization of SMS Abbreviations&lt;/a&gt;, that describes a translation system for textspeak, which, while not entirely pertinent to your question, may give some further thoughts to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1538" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T11:30:52.547" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T11:30:52.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2889" CreationDate="2012-12-04T10:37:30.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with using measures like IQ test is the basis on which they have been devised and whether the tests are underpinned by ideas that are prevalent in one language culture, than another. If we take a weak linguistic relativity position here (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) then the means for comparison may be viewed as too deeply rooted or skewed in favour of a particular language/cultural perspective. Like many aspects of linguistic research there is the potential for observer's paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1538" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T10:37:30.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-04T15:34:57.240" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fillers&lt;/a&gt; are used in many languages when the speaker signals that he or she is thinking but has not yet finished talking. Things in English like &lt;em&gt;umm&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;uh&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something that can be put in the interlinear gloss to convey this? Something like FILL, or a similar abbreviation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:57:32.567" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:57:32.567" Title="How is filler conveyed in a gloss?" Tags="&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;filler&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2922" CreationDate="2012-12-04T17:41:01.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; intransitives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; unergatives: &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; ergatives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; unpaired ergatives (unaccusatives) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(subject is logical object. object raises to subject position): &lt;em&gt;arrive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ii&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; paired ergatives  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(subject is logical object. object raises to subject position. also transitive). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; Inchoatives (anticausatives)  &lt;em&gt;The doar opened.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Middles    - (agent is implied, refers to inherited property) &lt;em&gt;This window cleans easily&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; transitives (includes pseudo-transitives, which can be used with and without internal argument) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I ate in the cafe. I ate an apple in the cafe.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2012-12-04T19:55:36.347" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T19:55:36.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2922" CreationDate="2012-12-04T18:08:39.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;unergatives  have both vP projection and VP which consists of just the verb&#xA;unaccusatives have just VP projection. They do not have vP projection&#xA;Transitive verbs have vP and VP which consists of V and Object&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T18:08:39.267" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2927" CreationDate="2012-12-04T18:13:02.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try to use idioms. If we assume that idioms start as a one constituents, they may show underlined wordorder.  you can also look at more unmarked word order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastActivityDate="2012-12-04T18:13:02.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2922" CreationDate="2012-12-05T01:22:58.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Posting a picture from Adger 2003 now - will write a full answer a bit later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V2Ff0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T01:22:58.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-05T08:10:58.667" Score="12" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we know of any cases where the grammar of a language was influenced by the imperfection of its writing system? For example, has any language become isolating because it had a logographic writing, which didn't express inflections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1552" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T21:39:14.337" Title="Does writing influence grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2842" CreationDate="2012-12-05T14:31:38.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry but this cannot work without significantly stretching the boundaries of &quot;categories&quot; and making the task in a way arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's true that nouns and verbs seem to be distinguished (though not everywhere by the same means) in many (but not all) languages (and some languages do have this distinction, but it's much weaker than in, say, Latin), everything beyond that is highly dependent on the specific language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular the suggestion that &quot;determiners&quot; are in any way &lt;em&gt;universal&lt;/em&gt; is just incredibly short-sighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2012-12-05T14:31:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-06T05:25:02.437" Score="6" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently travel to Nicaragua and interact with a group of children who are learning ISN (Nicaraguan Sign Language) at their school. I have no experience with ASL (other than a friend teaching me a handful of signs), but it seems that ISN shares at least some things in common with ASL (primarily the alphabet, as well as some other signs). My understanding was that ISN developed fairly independently of outside influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What elements are shared between the two languages (lexically, grammatically, etc.)? Was there early influence of ASL on ISN or are these recent borrowings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1502" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T11:45:25.170" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T01:06:03.593" Title="What similarities are there between Nicaraguan (ISN) and American (ASL) Sign Language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2945" CreationDate="2012-12-06T05:36:37.743" Score="5" ViewCount="1830" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's my understanding that sign languages combine a mix of directly signing words with fingerspelling words using a manual alphabet. What exactly is the role of fingerspelling? Is it only used to spell words that don't have a corresponding sign, or does it have a more dynamic role? How common is fingerspelling among fluent signers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1502" LastEditorUserId="1502" LastEditDate="2012-12-06T05:47:43.180" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T13:54:37.470" Title="What role does fingerspelling play in sign language?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2948" CreationDate="2012-12-06T05:47:27.437" Score="7" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Finnish translative case expresses the concept of becoming or turning into something else. Does this case exist in other languages, or is it unique to Finnish? How is this concept most commonly expressed in other inflected languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1502" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T21:21:32.590" Title="Does the Finnish translative case exist in other languages?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2942" CreationDate="2012-12-06T09:31:00.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fingerspelling is usually used for spelling out words that do not have a sign.&#xA;For example, given names may often be spelled out (unless that person has a known sign). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for countries, cities, loan words, product names etc. when the signer either doesn't know the sign, or there is no sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether spelling out words has any additional function, i.e. people choosing to spell out words that everyone in the conversation knows the sign for... I'm not so sure. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Apparently, fingerspelling can also be used to emphasise words. For instance, in Swedish SL one might spell the word #IDIOT rather than sign it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source: Basic knowledge of Swedish Sign Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1452" LastEditorUserId="1452" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T12:18:09.960" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T12:18:09.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2947" CreationDate="2012-12-06T00:19:05.683" Score="1" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some evidence that word choice dictates not only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;how we think&lt;/a&gt; but also how we act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, subjects in &lt;a href=&quot;http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/03/walking-fast-and-slow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bargh's controversial experiment&lt;/a&gt; were reported to walk more slowly after reading text with words about the elderly than subjects who read text primed with words about youthful energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, sometimes people use the word &quot;stress&quot; to express &quot;emphasize.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Stress&quot; suggests the idea of stress as an emotional response, while &quot;emphasize&quot; is more specific and less emotionally loaded-- less likely to suggest the idea of strain or pressure to a listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Emphasize&quot; may be worth its extra syllables because it doesn't evoke the idea of anxiety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_tammet_different_ways_of_knowing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Daniel Tammet explains&lt;/a&gt; is the word choice of &quot;hare&quot; in lieu of &quot;rabbit&quot; to suggest wild frailty in a poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other situations or word choices that are examples of linguistic relativism in that the choice may influence the human experience? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1556" OwnerDisplayName="5un5" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2012-12-07T01:16:53.750" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T23:56:52.183" Title="Linguistic relativity" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2946" CreationDate="2012-12-06T16:15:47.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Witness for the Defense&lt;/em&gt;, Elizabeth Loftus describes how police questioning can influence witnesses into recalling events that never happened. When inappropriately coached, both children and adults can recall false memories and testify tragically in the courtroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Full title: &lt;em&gt;Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial&lt;/em&gt;, 1992, ISBN-13: 978-0312084554.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusPalmer74.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Loftus and Palmer (1974)&lt;/a&gt; wrote a paper in which participants viewed a video of a car crash and were asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How fast were the cars going when they contacted / hit / bumped / collided / smashed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participants not only estimated a higher speed with a more graphic word; they also remembered broken glass more often (even though there was no broken glass in the video).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2012-12-06T16:22:58.293" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T16:22:58.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2943" CreationDate="2012-12-06T21:08:49.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The case is not unique to Finnish alone; its relatives, such as Estonian and Hungarian, have it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it appears to be quite unique to the Finno-Ugric family, to which all of the above languages belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2012-12-06T21:08:49.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2941" CreationDate="2012-12-09T01:06:03.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers you seek are in &quot;Talking Hands&quot; by Margalit Fox (avail only in paper last I checked). For primarily cultural reasons, sign was ignored by academia until very recently, and this book happens to compile a lot of the recent work. By the quip the book is about the author's trip to the middle east to observe linguists studying a newly formed sign language. To fill in the gaps of the book and to explain what she was seeing, the book talks a lot about the similarities among the sign languages of the world. Some of the similarities are due to genetic relationships (ASL is descendant, roughly from French SL). Nicaraguan ASL and the middle eastern one the book studies are nearly a priori or at least as close to that as you can get in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that appear in many sign languages (even unrelated) are verbs that show spatial agreement, like when in ASL you sign , I-give-you, it is a single sign moved from me towards you. The same pattern pops up in unrelated sign languages, hinting at the possibility of SL universals. But like I said earlier, the research on global sign language is pretty new and suffers the same sort of problems that endangered languages suffer, few speakers (compared to English and French) and few researchers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/139/is-nicaraguan-sign-language-the-only-language-born-from-nothing&quot;&gt;Here is a tangentially related question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-12-09T01:06:03.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2012-12-10T17:28:59.663" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an answer not to the part about whether it is easier to learn German after Sanskrit (I don't know), but rather, a few more assorted points re. &amp;quot;What similarities exist between the two languages&amp;quot;, or even more generally, &amp;quot;Why would people make such a claim?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Cerberus noted, most of these claims come from people whose familiarity, outside of Indian languages, is with mainly English, and perhaps a bit of French (or rarely, Spanish or Italian). So even though many similarities noted between Sanskrit and German are in fact those shared by many members of the Indo-European family, the claim just means that &lt;em&gt;among the few languages considered,&lt;/em&gt; German’s similarities are remarkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My background: I have a reasonable familiarity with Sanskrit; not so much with German. For impressions about German I’ll rely on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt;, and, (don’t lynch me) Mark Twain’s humorous essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Awful German Language&lt;/a&gt; — of course I know it’s unfair and not a work of linguistics, but as examples of what the average English speaker might find unusual in German, it is a useful document.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, some similarities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cases&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German apparently has four cases; Sanskrit has eight cases (traditional Sanskrit grammar counts seven, not counting the vocative as distinct). Cerberus notes above that “Sanskrit and German have several functional cases, whereas French/Spanish/Italian/Portuguese/Dutch/English/etc. do not. Those are the languages one might be inclined to compare Sanskrit with”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Compound words&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although English does have short compound words (like &lt;em&gt;bluebird&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;horseshoe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;paperback&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;pickpocket&lt;/em&gt;), German has a reputation for long compound words. (Twain complains that the average German sentence &amp;quot;is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens”) He mentions &lt;em&gt;Stadtverordnetenversammlungen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen&lt;/em&gt;; Wikipedia mentions &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizit%C3%A4tenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft&lt;/a&gt;. But these are &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nothing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; compared to the words one routinely finds in ornate Sanskrit prose. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://hellenisteukontos.blogspot.in/2010/03/what-is-longest-word-of-sanskrit.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. Sanskrit like German allows compounds of arbitrary length, and compounds made of four or five words are routinely found in even the most common Sanskrit texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Verb appearing late&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that German words tend to come later in the sentence than English speakers are comfortable with. I notice &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-should-it-not-have-been-ich-ein-berliner-bin&quot;&gt;questions on this SE&lt;/a&gt; showing that German has V2 word order, not SOV. However, many English speakers seem to find late verbs in German worth remarking on. One of &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/can-i-get-an-example-of-statement-that-can-be-said-to-be-hofstadterian&quot;&gt;my favourite&lt;/a&gt; sentences from Hofstadter goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The proverbial German phenomenon of the &amp;quot;verb-at-the-end&amp;quot;, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twain too, says “the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb” and gives the analogy of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor's wife &lt;strong&gt;met&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In the daybeforeyesterdayshortlyaftereleveno'clock Night, the inthistownstandingtavern called `The Wagoner' was downburnt. When the fire to the onthedownburninghouseresting Stork's Nest reached, flew the parent Storks away. But when the bytheraging, firesurrounded Nest itself caught Fire, straightway plunged the quickreturning Mother-stork into the Flames and died, her Wings over her young ones outspread.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; typical Sanskrit writing. Those sentences might have been translated verbatim from a Sanskrit text. Sanskrit technically has &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; word order (i.e., words can be put in any order), and this is made much use of in verse, but in prose, usage tends to be SOV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of Sanskrit's greatest prose work, &lt;em&gt;Kādambarī&lt;/em&gt;, someone named Albrecht Weber wrote in 1853 that in it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“the verb is kept back to the second, third, fourth, nay, once to the sixth page, and all the interval is filled with epithets and epithets to these epithets: moreover these epithets frequently consist of compounds extending over more than one line; in short, Bāṇa’s prose is an Indian wood, where all progress is rendered impossible by the undergrowth until the traveller cuts out a path for himself, and where, even then, he has to reckon with malicious wild beasts in the shape of unknown words that affright him.” (“...ein wahrer indischer Wald...”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is unfair criticism: personally, I have been lately reading the Kādambarī with the help of friends more experienced in Sanskrit, and I must say the style is truly enjoyable.)&#xA;Now, the fact that this was a &lt;em&gt;German&lt;/em&gt; Indologist writing for the &lt;em&gt;Journal of the German Oriental Society&lt;/em&gt; somewhat goes against the claim of Sanskrit and German being similar. But one could say: for someone familiar with Sanskrit’s long compounds and late verbs that even Germans find difficult, the same features in German will pose little difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adjectives decline like nouns&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit, as it appears to be in German, an adjective takes the gender, case, and number of whatever it is describing. (Twain: “would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gender of nouns has to be learned&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By and large, it is so in Sanskrit as well. Twain notes that in German “a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all”. (He goes on to write a “Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate.”) It does not seem quite so bad in Sanskrit, but yes, gender of words needs to be learned. (In Sanskrit there exists a word for “wife” in each of the three genders.) However this is a feature common to &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; languages (including, say, languages like Hindi or French that have only two genders) so I shouldn’t list it among similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Spelling&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something quite trivial, and linguists often don’t even consider orthography a part of the language proper, but spelling seems to be a pretty big deal to Indians learning other languages. The writing systems of most Indian languages are phonetic, in the sense that the spelling deterministically reflects the pronunciation and vice-versa. There are no silent letters, no wondering about a word spelled in a particular way is pronounced. Indian learners of English often complain about the ad-hoc inconsistent spelling of English; it seems a bigger deal than it should be. From this point of view, the fact that it is claimed that for German, “After one short lesson in the alphabet, the student can tell how any German word is pronounced without having to ask” means that that aspect of German is easier to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The harmony of sound and sense&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is extremely subjective and will be controversial, and perhaps I will seem biased, but to me, in Sanskrit, it seems possible to pick words whose sounds match the desired feeling, better than in other languages. I have seen people who knew many languages say the same thing, and also Western translators from Sanskrit etc., so it is interesting for me to see Twain make a similar remark about German. Anyway, this is subjective, so I’ll not dwell on this much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non-similarities&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course many; e.g. Sanskrit does not have articles (&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) unlike German. It also has very few prepositions (has only a few ones like “without”, “with”, “before”), as the work of prepositions like “to”, “from”, or “by” is handled by case. The difficulty of German prepositions does not seem to be present in Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR version&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some alleged difficulties of learning German, such as cases, long compounds, and word order, are present to a far greater extent in Sanskrit, so in principle someone who knows Sanskrit may be able to pick them up more easily than someone trying to learn German without this knowledge. However, this may not be saying anything more than that knowing one language helps you learn others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2012-12-10T17:28:59.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-10T21:08:22.500" Score="9" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if my question is a little more mathematical in nature, but my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I took a document of some length whether it be news article, book, or something of that sort.  What sort of relationship would I expect between the document's length and the number of unique words contained in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two constraints a graph would contain: the line y = x meaning every word I read is unique and the line y = |english| where we recognize that English has a finite number of words, or some sort of upper bound although I don't want to get into a discussion on how many words are in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more practically, how long a document on average would I need to retrieve to get a list of 100 unique English words, 1000 unique English words , or some other value?  This of course would differ between languages, but I am interested in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" OwnerDisplayName="demongolem" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-12-11T13:37:36.023" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T14:35:50.000" Title="What is the Relationship Between Document Length and Unique Words" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2954" CreationDate="2012-12-10T22:29:51.560" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the comments on Heaps’ Law. I followed one of the links to a related law, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herdan%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herdan’s Law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll quote Wikipedia here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rule is as follows: if &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; is the number of different words in the&#xA;  text, and &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; is the length of the text, then &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; will be proportional to&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; to the power &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;        &lt;em&gt;V ∝ nᵝ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt; ranges from 0.5 to 1 depending on the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The equation looks better in one of the stackexchange families that understands equation formatting. My apologies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one takes the conservative &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt; of 0.5, look for a corpus of 10000 words to get you a V proportional to 100 unique words. At &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt; of 0.6, your corpus would be proportional to 2200 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=== EDIT: Added real numbers for &quot;Green Eggs and Ham&quot; and a couple of CNN articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tested &quot;Green Eggs and Ham&quot; and a pair of CNN articles to find the number of unique words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/~linda/greeneggs/gepage1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green Eggs and Ham&lt;/a&gt; : 791 words, 55 unique.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/11/politics/fiscal-cliff/index.html?hpt=hp_t2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Angry with Obama, GOP threatens political war next year&lt;/a&gt; : 1553 words, 573 unique.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/11/world/meast/egypt-unrest/index.html?hpt=wo_c2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New voter rules announced ahead of Egypt referendum&lt;/a&gt; : 408 words, 235 unique.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt; for these three are 0.600, 0.864, and 0.908. For the second one, I used &lt;em&gt;V = nᵝ&lt;/em&gt; and took the log of both sides to solve for &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;em&gt;β = log(V) / log(n)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Testing was done in Java. &lt;em&gt;Sam-I-Am&lt;/em&gt; counts as a single word, as does &lt;em&gt;decision-making&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=== EDIT: Added graphic for &quot;Green Eggs and Ham&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependent, x-axis shows the word in the corpus. The independent, y-axis shows the unique count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/inFkV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Green Eggs word count vs unique&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" OwnerDisplayName="rajah9" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T14:35:50.000" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T14:35:50.000" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2012-12-12T01:56:10.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The above examples seem very verbose and hard to understand.  I believe the point of the &quot;thereby&quot; test is to determine if a particular speech act performs the act that it's describing.  So  &quot;I apologize&quot; is an explicit performative because In saying “I apologize” in appropriate circumstances, I thereby apologize.  With a statement like &quot;I agree&quot; I believe opening it up to the possibility of lying is misleading.  In saying &quot;I agree&quot; in appropriate circumstance, I don't thereby agree.  I already formulated the thoughts in my head that lead to the condition of my agreeing with you.  Saying &quot;I agree&quot; is simply informing you of something that already existed before I performed said speech act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1573" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T01:56:10.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2012-12-12T05:08:23.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Purely anecdotally:  We live in Taiwan and my son learned Chinese from age 4. Today, he is often told that if he speaks over the phone, it cannot be determined that he is not Chinese.  Even the very best of adult-learner speakers of Chinese I know, even when 100% fluent, cannot shake the accent/inflection that marks them as &quot;non-native&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1574" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T05:08:23.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-12T06:57:31.667" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Western and Eastern Arabic numeral symbols is there any other numeral symbols in active use nowadays? There is 460 decimal (46 numeral set) and 224 non-decimal number in Unicode, which ones are in use? (You can use BabelPad to see the numeral Unicode characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing the answer help developers in localization too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T08:40:59.217" Title="In use numeral systems" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2958" CreationDate="2012-12-12T08:40:59.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are several systems of numeral symbols in active use; for example, Chinese numbers are in very active use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the systems are described to some extent in the Unicode Standard; start from section &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch15.pdf#page=11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;15.3 Numerals&lt;/a&gt; to find such info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1575" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T08:40:59.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-12T13:51:59.707" Score="4" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aramaic_of_Jesus&amp;amp;oldid=515309514&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Aramaic of Jesus&quot;&lt;/a&gt; contains many instances of transliterated Aramaic, using a system I have not seen before. Some of the notations are well-established, like &lt;em&gt;ŝ&lt;/em&gt; for /ʃ/ and macrons for long vowels, but there are many I haven't seen before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried looking up more information on Aramaic transcription systems. Wikipedia has no article on Aramaic transcription, and the articles on Aramaic, Romanization of Hebrew, and various Hebrew letters don't seem to have any relevant information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Particularly&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T-cedilla:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ţlīthā&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ţlē&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B-underline (the Wikipedia page used an actual underline; I added an underline diacritic since Markdown doesn't allow underline):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ţb̲îthâ&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;šəb̲aqtanî&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circumflex vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;šəb̲aqtanî&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bar-Yêšû`&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tômâ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spacing grave accent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Šim`ôn bar-Yônâ&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bar-Yêšû`&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;r`am&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;g-breve ğ (I'm guessing this is supposed to represent /ɣ/, similar to its use in Turkish/Azeri.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;rğaš&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What transliteration system is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T12:26:07.577" Title="What is the Aramaic transliteration system used in the &quot;Aramaic of Jesus&quot; Wikipedia article?" Tags="&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;notation&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-12T16:55:16.697" Score="4" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing my master thesis about extracting &quot;ideas&quot; for innovation from text stored digitally. Thus the project is a combination of &quot;Marketing&quot;, &quot;Datamining/statistics&quot; and &quot;Linguistics&quot;. I am a marketing student and the last english class I had was 6-7 years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come so far that I need to understand what &quot;semantics&quot; (having updated this I am not so sure anymore, but I leave I for now) are related to discussions about ideas. To give a couple of examples of what I mean one could write the following idea in a forum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I came up with an idea of how to build a car that is fueled by water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday I came up with a cool idea about how to create a cure for cancer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point of showing these two example is that if I was to run some statistical analysis on these two examples, the nouns &quot;car&quot;, &quot;car&quot;, &quot;water&quot;, &quot;cure&quot; and &quot;cancer&quot; does not really contribute to whether a sentence contains what I am looking for. So I might as well throw these out. However the phrase &quot;came up with&quot; does provide a lot of information as this is one way to express that one have an idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could imagine several variations of these examples but my point is that basically one should be able to remove nouns as they should not make a difference in theory. Even the word &quot;idea&quot; which is also a noun one should be able to remove, but maybe one need to distinguis between nouns that is often connected to discussions about ideas and nouns in general. For example the nouns &quot;idea&quot;, &quot;innovation&quot;, &quot;design&quot; and &quot;model&quot; might be nouns that in some degree might show up when people discuss ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example of why I started searching this way I have already build a model (via SVM) based on n-grams. When one create the model one obtains the weights of a given term or n-gram that contributes. When looking through that list, n-grams like &lt;code&gt;&quot;that would&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&quot;that sounds cool&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&quot;i have&quot;&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;&quot;i had an&quot;&lt;/code&gt; tend to weight highly, getting me to think that dividing the text into ngrams/chunks is a part of how one should model this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already mentioned one might have to distinguish bewteen nouns which are likely to show up when people debate ideas but unlikely to show up when people debate ideas within a given domain. I will give a couple of examples below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be a great idea to invent chocolate that make you loose weight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am working with innovation and I have just come up with an&#xA;  idea of how to produce chocolate that makes you loose weight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the following phrases/n-grams are likely to have positive weights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;it would be&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&quot;have just come up with&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&quot;just come up with&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&quot;come up with&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could also imagine that the verb &lt;code&gt;&quot;invent&quot;&lt;/code&gt; would also have positive weights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally the nouns &lt;code&gt;&quot;idea&quot;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&quot;innovation&quot;&lt;/code&gt; are also likely to have positive weights, but the term &lt;code&gt;chocolate&lt;/code&gt; is not as it only tells us what domain of ideas we are dealing with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case is that I was handed over 300 classified posts from a userforum where three judges had classified the posts. The posts was classified as containing an idea(1) or not (0) and if at least two of the judges agreed that there was an idea in the text I would use it as a positive case. This gives me 12 positive cases and 288 negative cases, which is of course a very bad training set far to small and unbalanced to do anything proper with. Then the thought was to use this small bad training sample to create a preliminary filter that can be used to extract around 3000 posts from the original forum with a higher likelihood of containing an idea. What I am doing now is that I am trying to optimize the preliminary filter to get a good training set for the final model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing this here because I do not have a clue about how to attack this problem. I know how to setup a computer to do what I want it to, but I dont know how to work with language in a structured way. Therefore I hope that someone in here could throw me a couple of keywords and maybe even sources that I can look at myself in order to figure out how to structure my problem better. I would also be nice just to have someone to debate this with as I am totally on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1578" LastEditorUserId="1578" LastEditDate="2012-12-14T11:19:56.047" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T11:19:56.047" Title="Defining an idea" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2962" CreationDate="2012-12-12T20:38:17.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question sounds simple, but it unveils an entire area of human activity, a Natural Language Processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that natural languages convey the content in a &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; manner. It means that a phrase &quot;build a car fueled by water&quot; can't stand alone. Instead, it is bound to various objects, like this: I (came up with (an idea of (how (to build a car (that is fueled by water))))). An actor, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is linked to an idea (&lt;strong&gt;&quot;a car that is...&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;) through a hierarchy of relations, or links. Hence, your data mining system has to follow the entire sequence, otherwise it would be quickly confused with phrases like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no clue how to build a car that is fueled by water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, the actor and the idea are essentially the same, but the linkage between them indicates the whole opposite message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think that inventing a car that is fueled by water is a total nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although a naive algorithm will find negative words (&quot;nonsense&quot;, &quot;I don't think&quot;), the entire message conveys a positive idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you will end up with a &lt;strong&gt;semantic graph&lt;/strong&gt;, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/891i7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Semantic graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(image produced by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interface that provides online access to the LinGO English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have notice that most common phrases have various ways to be parsed into a semantic graph. You have to use some algorithms figuring out the most probable variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't be discouraged by the complexity; it's not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; terrible. :) For most practical tasks, &lt;em&gt;you don't have to&lt;/em&gt; get into the full depth of analysis. However, knowing &lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; key points will let you focus your attention on practical implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would suggest attending some courses that can provide you with some basis. For instance, Coursera has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/#course/nlp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free course of NLP&lt;/a&gt;, and they also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture/preview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;series of videos&lt;/a&gt; that may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-12-12T20:49:08.483" LastActivityDate="2012-12-12T20:49:08.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2012-12-13T10:48:38.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least, in &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;t&quot; came from the original PIE word for night, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;noqu̯ts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T10:48:38.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-13T15:03:08.423" Score="3" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clean up the design database to initialize costing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the sentence to be confusing but I'm a native English speaker. I asked my wife about it and she responded that &lt;em&gt;“costing is a present participle”&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;“it's being nominalized (made into a noun), but we're not used to that”.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author responded with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now costing in pure grammatical sense in this case would be a noun formed from a verb. Something which american english term as verbal noun. (or like your wife mentioned is similar to a present participle). So probably grammatically this is correct&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1580" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-13T17:37:01.300" LastActivityDate="2012-12-19T22:19:31.820" Title="What's confusing about this sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2016-12-26T22:55:51.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-13T17:49:09.753" Score="6" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Local Man Loses Pants, Life; Beaver Rescue Falls Short&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this named before where a sentence has two endings but I've been unable to find it on any grammar or linguistics websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1582" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T19:45:27.823" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T22:37:52.480" Title="What is the name of this grammatical construct: a sentence has two endings?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2012-12-13T19:49:44.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that spoken English is more efficient than other&#xA;  languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. See other answers for hard data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, subtitles are a poor source for proof (one way or another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oftentimes while watching a subtitled foreign film, I find that&#xA;  reading the subtitles aloud (usually in my head) at the same1 pace as&#xA;  the speaker takes less time than what's spoken in the native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try watching an English language film, with English language subtitles turned on. You will often find that reading the subtitles aloud (usually in your head) at the same pace as the speaker takes less time &lt;em&gt;because so much of the spoken dialog is not rendered in the subtitles.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been doing this more and more as the wife and I watch movies or Netflix while the kids are falling asleep. The volume is sometimes so low we have a hard time hearing what is going on, so we turn on the subtitles. We quite often turn them off as the mismatch is so jarring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is personal anecdote, and not hard data in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="914" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T19:49:44.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2943" CreationDate="2012-12-13T21:21:32.590" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is also present in Armenian language like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;հայ&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;hay&lt;/em&gt; - Armenian (for person/people/nation) --- &lt;strong&gt;հայերեն&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;hayeren&lt;/em&gt; - Armenian (for language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;հայերեն&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;hayeren&lt;/em&gt; - Armenian (for languagge) --- &lt;strong&gt;հայերենում&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;hayerenum&lt;/em&gt; - In Armenian (for language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;անգլիա&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;anglia&lt;/em&gt; - England --- &lt;strong&gt;անգլերեն&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;angleren&lt;/em&gt; - English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understood right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastActivityDate="2012-12-13T21:21:32.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2961" CreationDate="2012-12-13T21:52:36.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The t-cedilla indicates ט (tet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The b-underline indicates an aspirated ב (bet; sounding similar to v).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circumflex vowels indicate long vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grave accent on its own indicates ע (ayin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The g-breve indicates an aspirated ג (gamal; sounding similar to &quot;gh&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one of many variations that Semiticists use to express Aramaic, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages in transliteration. The actual symbols and Unicode combinations used may vary, but their meanings are generally understood and there is no &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; generally &quot;recognized&quot; or &quot;authoritative&quot; system and different publications use their own flavors (even in academic works). :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1586" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2012-12-14T12:26:07.577" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T12:26:07.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2012-12-14T00:29:34.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may take less time, but it does not mean that the same information is conveyed. Being a native Russian speaker I find that with English I can convey only the basic meaning of a sentence and the overtones and other circumstances are lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you can improve the resemblance of the original meaning by adding some additional qualifier words, but in many cases you cannot do anything without explanation that would span a page (and even then it is unlikely would be understood precisely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short one can claim that Black&amp;amp;White video is more efficient than the color one (it takes less volume), but actually it conveys less information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would describe English as a language with less &quot;resolution&quot; than Russian, that is less suitable to convey the details. With English you land not exactly at the point but somewhere near it (which may be enough for understanding a film though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, for example, it is difficult for a speaker to covey his own attitude to the subject without stating it explicitly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that there could be found examples of hate speech or political propaganda in Russian or German which after being translated to English would look quite neutral and unmarked. The English speaker would not even understand why the sequence is considered offensive or emotional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar thing is described in Orwell's &quot;1984&quot; where a new, simplified language &quot;newspeak&quot; (based on English) is invented. It has further reduced &quot;resolution&quot; of the meaning so you would have no means to convey emotions and shades (for example, one word &quot;ungood&quot; for bad, terrible, poor, inefficient etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2012-12-14T00:52:54.217" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T00:52:54.217" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2962" CreationDate="2012-12-14T00:39:26.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the description of your task, I get the impression that you do not really need semantics of any kind &amp;mdash; you intend to discard many segments of a sentence. I believe that you'd be better off looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532046410001577&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the chunkers listed here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chunkers have differing performance levels for noun phrases and verb phrases. You could start with the ones that perform better with verb phrases. You could also try to play with &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch07.html#chap-chunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK's chunker&lt;/a&gt;. You'd have to define your own patterns for NLTK's chunker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't worked with any of these tools, myself. So I can't tell you which ones require you to write software. I understand that you are a student of marketing. I don't know how comfortable you'd be with writing code. But if you have to write code, I think writing Python (for NLTK) should be less of a hair-pulling experience for you, than writing Java for one of the Java-based tools could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2012-12-14T01:10:31.767" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T01:10:31.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2896" CreationDate="2012-12-14T03:40:36.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Nahuatl, Dakota verbs agree with both the subject and object of a sentence (sometimes the indirect object, if it is animate and the direct object is not)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hokṡída kiƞ mázaska wa-k’ú.&lt;/strong&gt;                &quot;I gave the boy money&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;boy   det   money 1Ssg.give&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hokṡída kiƞ mázaska wic̣á-wa-k’u&lt;/strong&gt;               &quot;I gave the boys money&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;boy   det   money 3Oanim-pl.1Ssg.give&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mázaska ma-yá-k’u&lt;/strong&gt;          &quot;You gave me money&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;money  1Osg.2Ssg.give&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="983" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T03:40:36.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2451" CreationDate="2012-12-14T19:57:34.490" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for &quot;seed&quot; in PIE was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;see̯mn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It indeed uses the -men- suffix (in zero-grade).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2012-12-14T19:57:34.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-17T01:20:55.057" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;e.g. while reading quietly and reading out loud. Different people read at different rates, so let's say the delay in terms of beat ratio: if for example every vowel takes one beat on average, how many beats does a period delay take? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any research on this topic? (Not sure if linguistics is the right area. Which field would this belong to?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1589" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T19:30:34.257" Title="What is the average delay between reading a period and the next sentence" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2980" CreationDate="2012-12-17T18:11:10.030" Score="0" ViewCount="3920" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why in English name of months are capitalized but name of seasons do not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any languages that in its orthography seasons names are capitalized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it related to the calender type used by its speakers? For example in Solar Hijri calender each season exactly expanded on three months, so perhaps in Persian, season names may be capitalized. (Formally Persian is written in Arabic script)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know  month, weekday and season names often used as adverbs and adverbs are not proper nouns! Even when they are used as noun they are not proper semantically ('today', 'yesterday', etc. are more proper because they exactly refer to specific time but even this word are not capitalized). So if we accept that main use case for capitalization is indicating proper nouns, logically we should not capitalize  month, weekday and season names in usual use case, even if their names etymologically derived from proper nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2012-12-18T14:51:25.363" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T01:11:21.017" Title="Capitalization of month, weekday and season names" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2976" CreationDate="2012-12-17T19:30:34.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marshall and Newcombe (1973) describe two processes or pathways in the brain for reading: a phonological, which derives meaning by recognising the sound; and a semantic, which recognises the pattern of the word. Since a full stop/period is never spoken -unless dictating a telegram (anyone here done that recently?), and is only a marker representing the ending or beginning of a language 'event'. I doubt if the brain stops to consider this any longer than any other word that has been recognised from the brain's store of words. Having said that, one could measure gaps when reading aloud as this would presumably be a performance and require pauses as markers for the audience, but this would seem to be a question on the craft of acting, rather than a linguistic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1538" LastActivityDate="2012-12-17T19:30:34.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2977" CreationDate="2012-12-17T19:49:19.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Why in English name of months are capitalized but name of seasons do not?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part seems to be trivial. Names of months and days of week (DoW) are &lt;strong&gt;proper nouns&lt;/strong&gt; since they are dedicated to certain deities: Roman for months and Norse for DoW. So they are capitalized as any proper names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;September to December are proper nouns as well for unification reasons, AFAIU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per seasons, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/52937/26446&quot;&gt;this question at EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; seems to be relevant. Quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The four seasons are lowercased.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except&lt;/em&gt; when part of a formal name, such as the name of an event (Winter Olympics), school term (Spring Quarter 2012), or issue of a journal (Summer 2008).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except&lt;/em&gt; when the season is personified, as in poetry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Is there any languages that in its orthography seasons names are capitalized?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/time/seasons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This table&lt;/a&gt; suggests that Alsatian, Aragonese, Cebuano, Chechen, Fristian (Saterfrisian), German, German (Swiss), Greenlandic, Jèrriais, Low German, Luxembourgish, Somali, and several constructed languages &lt;strong&gt;do capitalize season names&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: At least some of these languages, such as German, capitalize &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; nouns.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Capitalization#Capitalization_of_month_names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia&lt;/a&gt; has a list that says Afrikaans, Breton, Welsh, Modern Greek, English, German, Herero, Indonesian, Latin, Malay, Portuguese, Venda, Xhosa, and Zuku &lt;strong&gt;do capitalize month names&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/time/months.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; seems to be more detailed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/time/days.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;days of the week&lt;/a&gt;, just for sake of completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the month names originated from other languages (including those not having capitalization at all), there are various (and maybe controversial) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_%28capitalization%29#Capitalization_of_expressions_borrowed_from_other_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spelling rules&lt;/a&gt;, but AFAIK most of them suggest using the &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; language capitalization rules.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hence, Thai &lt;code&gt;ธันวาคม&lt;/code&gt; (December) should be spelled &lt;code&gt;Tanwaakhom&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;tanwaakhom&lt;/code&gt; (obviously, except when your reason is delivering a pure phonetic transcription, then everything is lower case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/capitals.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/capitals.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wps.ablongman.com/long_longman_ohb_1/0,10005,1798020-content,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wps.ablongman.com/long_longman_ohb_1/0,10005,1798020-content,00.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T01:11:21.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-18T08:29:02.790" Score="6" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a language of Celebes island in Indonesia, its name is Mongondow (mog). It has a Phillipine's Alignment morphosyntactic which it has combination of Accusative and Ergative languages. The word ordering is Verb-initial type (either VOS or VSO). The Phillipine's Alignment works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V+patient trigger _ ERG-Noun _ ABS-Noun (V_S_O);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V+actor trigger _ OBL-Noun _ ABS-Noun (V_O_S);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V+actor trigger _ ABS-Noun (V_S);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V+patient trigger _ ABS-Noun (V_O).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three noun cases in the language: Absolutive, Ergative, and Oblique. Nouns are marked for Absolutive and Oblique with separate word, while Ergative Nouns is unmarked. (Pronouns have Irregular Marking patterns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I think the unmarked Nouns are Absolutive, because in other languages I found the Absolutives usually are unmarked. However in this language I found that the unmarked Nouns fit more as Ergatives while the Marked Nouns which at first I thought as Ergatives fit more as Absolutive. I am still hesitate, is it okay that Ergative case be unmarked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1592" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:29:10.953" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:29:10.953" Title="Is it okay that Ergative case be unmarked?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2983" CreationDate="2012-12-18T17:13:12.727" Score="5" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am exploring the phonological system of Kyrgyz Language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In casual speech people tend to change &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt; when &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; occurs between two vowels or preceeds &lt;strong&gt;l, r, y&lt;/strong&gt; and followed by vowel. Are there other languages where &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; changed into &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;? What may be the reasons for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-20T12:10:07.377" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T05:50:47.243" Title="Change of B &gt; W in casual speech" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;bilabial&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2982" CreationDate="2012-12-18T18:17:05.463" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common process called &lt;strong&gt;lenition&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a language that has a phoneme /b/ as its only voiced bilabial phoneme. Speakers will then often pronounce /b/ without complete closure of the airway, giving a fricative [β] or approximant [β̞] realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very similar phenomenon occurs in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, where intervocalic /b/ is realized as [β̞]. For example, Spanish &lt;em&gt;bobo&lt;/em&gt; /ˈbo.bo/ will be pronounced [ˈbo.β̞o]. Japanese similarly often realizes /b/ as /β/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the (voiced bilabial) stop turns into an approximant. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyz_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kyrgyz lacks a /w/ phoneme&lt;/a&gt;, so there is no need to distinguish /b/ from /w/. Since the bilabial approximant [β̞] sounds similar to the bilabial-velar approximant [w], it is not surprising that [w] is another possible realization. Such shifting between various labial sounds and [w] is very common cross-linguistically; examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancient Greek /w/ (&lt;em&gt;Εὐρώπη&lt;/em&gt; /ewrɔ̀ɔ́pɛɛ/) → modern /v/ (&lt;em&gt;Ευρώπη&lt;/em&gt; /evˈro.pi/ 'Europe') (in the coda, before a voiced segment)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical Latin /w/ (&lt;em&gt;vīvere&lt;/em&gt; /ˈwiː.we.re/, 'to live') → Romance /v/ → Spanish /b~β̞/ (&lt;em&gt;vivir&lt;/em&gt; /biˈbir/ [biˈβ̞ɪr] 'to live')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Germanic /w/ (English &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; /wɪl/) → Dutch /ʋ~β̞/ (&lt;em&gt;wil&lt;/em&gt; /ʋɪl/ 'want' 1sg), German /v/ (&lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; /ˈvɪl/ 'want to' 1sg)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old Japanese /p/ (/pa/, topic marker) → /ɸ/ → modern /w/ (⟨は⟩ /wa/, topic marker) (sometimes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another such transformation is Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;βῆτα&lt;/em&gt; [bɛ́ɛ̀.ta] 'the letter beta' -&gt; Modern Greek &lt;em&gt;Βήτα&lt;/em&gt; [ˈvi.ta], where the /b/ was lenited to /β/, which was replaced with the cross-linguistically-more-common labiodental phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-25T05:50:47.243" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T05:50:47.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-18T18:56:47.997" Score="5" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;morpha&lt;/strong&gt; is &quot;form, like, kind&quot;. But where does the &lt;strong&gt;nepo&lt;/strong&gt; prefix originate from? I seem to get a lot of terms like 'nepotism' in my searches, but I wonder how purely aquatic hemipterans ('sucking' aquatic 'bugs') derive their name from such a prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt it must have something more to do with aquatic/water born habitats than a simply relational 'nepotism' like device. Yet I cannot seem to find a Latin or Greek/other classical term that is similar apart from that in nepotism. And if it does simply define itself as some kind of 'relational' form, then why is it juxtaposed so clearly against gerromorpha? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the surface dwelling bugs-which appears to connote a geo — or at least semi-earth type sense — this leads me to believe I am searching for a water related latin/greek term — or other origin for this nepo-morpha prefix — can you help? Is there some kind of aquatic classical reference within 'nepo'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1595" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2012-12-18T21:11:05.313" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T01:47:00.367" Title="Specifically in terms of nepomorpha, nepidae and further taxonomic classifications" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2984" CreationDate="2012-12-19T16:28:02.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nepida&lt;/em&gt; &quot;water-scorpion-like&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/centurydictipt1400whituoft#page/3968/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apparently coined by Leach in 1818&lt;/a&gt;) comes from classical Latin &lt;em&gt;nepa(s)&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;scorpion&quot; or &quot;crab&quot;. The water scorpion or &lt;em&gt;nepa&lt;/em&gt; is currently a genus under the family of &lt;em&gt;nepidae&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn fall under the infraorder of &lt;em&gt;nepomorpha&lt;/em&gt;; according to Wikipedia, it was so named or classified by Linnaeus himself in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepa_%28genus%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1758&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;nepa&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed from an African language (according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=_Ugb6woUJLoC&amp;amp;q=nepa#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=nepa&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Festus, p. 163&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nepa:&lt;/strong&gt; Afrorum lingua sidus, quod cancer appelatur, vel, ut quidam volunt, scorpios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In a/the language of Africans, the star named &quot;crab&quot;, or, as some would have it, &quot;scorpion&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then proceeds to give a quotation from Plautus, where &lt;em&gt;nepa&lt;/em&gt; is used metaphorically for an animal that could be either a kind of crab or a (water) scorpion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-06-12T01:47:00.367" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T01:47:00.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2012-12-19T22:33:45.660" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the longest sentences are for example in Finno-Ugric and Eskimo-Aleut languages, like Finnish, Estonian or Inuktitut. I think they are agglutinative languages but I think it might take some minutes to type something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1600" LastEditorUserId="15584" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T12:51:44.343" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T12:51:44.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-20T02:19:03.020" Score="3" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read about a concept called the &quot;usage rate&quot; (proposed by Juliand and Chang-Rodriguez). It's a method for calculating the frequency of a word in a corpus. What exactly is the &quot;usage rate&quot; and what is the formula for calculating a word's usage rate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="760" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T18:58:46.033" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:58:46.033" Title="What is the formula for Usage Rate?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2012-12-20T03:46:29.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one &lt;a href=&quot;http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~gilntu/data/workshop%20on%20Austronesian/2%20hirano.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt;, Hirano analyzes Tagalog &quot;ay&quot; as being a topic marker. It's traditionally treated as an inversion marker. If that is true, there are a few more Philippine languages (Sambalic languages, Aklanon, and some Cordilleran languages) with such topic markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bashiic, a group of Austronesian languages in Northern Philippines, are analyzed as having topic particle. In Itbayaten, this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.trussel2.com/acd/acd-l_I.htm#Itbayaten&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;o&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In Yami, its either &quot;o&quot; or &quot;am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T03:46:29.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2012-12-20T05:14:27.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no natural language with just one word class for both nouns and verbs. Although some Philippine-type Austronesian languages like Tagalog are said to have no noun/verb distinction, it seems what they have is weak distinction instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/allgemeine_sprachwissenschaft/dozenten-unterlagen/himmelmann/lexcat.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Himmelmann&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With regard to syntactic categories it may be argued that all Tagalog&#xA;  content words (both roots and derived words) are categorially&#xA;  indistinct, i.e. they may all occur in essentially the same basic&#xA;  syntactic positions (section 3.1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gial.edu/images/pdf/Kroeger-reply-Foley-LFG98.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kroeger&lt;/a&gt; disputes this saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distributional similarities mentioned above between nouns and&#xA;  verbs in Tagalog apply equally to adjectives and even PPs.  Each of&#xA;  the four categories may appear as (i) a clausal predicate, (ii) a&#xA;  modifier within the NP, or (iii) a noun phrase..[but]..this difference&#xA;  between verbal and non-verbal clauses provides a clear distributional&#xA;  test for distinguishing between verbs and all other lexical&#xA;  categories: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;only a verb can function as the predicate of a verbal&#xA;  clause&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Himmelmann, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With regard to lexical categories, however, there are clear-cut&#xA;  categorial distinctions (section 3.2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An important aspect of the voice system in Tagalog is the fact that voice-marked words (V-words) as well as the roots from which they are derived &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;belong to lexical categories which are very different from the lexical categories found in more familiar languages such as English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It has been repeatedly suggested that the difference &#xA;  pertains to the fact that Tagalog roots are precategorial and/or that there is no distinction between nouns and verbs in Tagalog. The preceding sections present a somewhat different explication of the difference between the two systems of lexical categories and its repercussions for the voice systems. Specifically, it is claimed that &#xA;  Tagalog roots are generally not bound and/or precategorial roots. Instead, Tagalog roots belong to different morpho-lexical classes. That is, it cannot be predicted solely on the basis of their meaning with which affixes a given root may occur. Furthermore, all kinds of roots, including roots denoting ACTIONS, allow for unaffixed uses. In their unaffixed uses, roots may denote THINGS, ANIMATE BEINGS, PROPERTIES, STATES, RESULTS OF&#xA;  ACTIONS, NAMES OF ACTIONS, etc., i.e. concepts which in English are generally rendered by nouns or adjectives.&#xA;  What roots cannot denote is the actual and specific performance of an action. Only V-words may denote the actual performance of an action. In this regard, Tagalog V-words are similar to English verbs. They differ, however, from English verbs in the following important respects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;While Tagalog V-words clearly belong to their own morpho-lexical category, they do not belong to a special  terminal syntactic&#xA;  category. That is, V-words have morphological and semantic properties&#xA;  which set them  apart from all other Tagalog content words. But with&#xA;  regard to the positions they may occupy in a phrase  structure tree&#xA;  they do not differ from other content words. In English, on the other&#xA;  hand, there is an  unambiguous correlation between (morpho-)lexical &#xA;  and terminal syntactic categories: Membership in a given  lexical&#xA;  (sub-)category implies membership in a specific terminal syntactic&#xA;  category (‘die’ is an intransitive  verb, and hence a verb and not a&#xA;  noun).    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All Tagalog V-words are necessarily derived, while in English there are both basic and derived verbs. The  derivation of Tagalog V-words&#xA;  is manifest both formally and semantically: Formally, the&#xA;  morpho-lexical  category of the root is changed to the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  morpho-lexical category of V-words. Semantically, an oriented action&#xA;  expression is derived from an expression which denotes a THING, STATE,&#xA;  NAME OF AN ACTION, RESULT OF AN  ACTION, etc. The notion oriented&#xA;  action expression conveys two things: First, oriented action&#xA;  expressions  denote the actual performance of an action (and not the&#xA;  name or the result of an action). Second, they denote  the actual&#xA;  performance of an action in such a way that at the same time they also&#xA;  denote one of the  participants involved in the action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For English verbs active voice is the basic, non-derived voice. For Tagalog V-words all voices are derived in  the same way. Hence, it&#xA;  does not make sense to consider one of the four Tagalog voices the&#xA;  basic voice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T05:14:27.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2996" CreationDate="2012-12-20T10:44:43.193" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages#cite_note-vajda-2012-worshop-6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dené–Yeniseian languages&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, it mentions about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His [&lt;em&gt;Vajda's&lt;/em&gt;] conclusion was that, contrary to prevailing belief,&#xA;  such structures are often preserved intact with little change over&#xA;  several thousands of years, and as a result may actually be stronger&#xA;  evidence of a genetic connection than the lexical relationships that&#xA;  are traditionally sought. As a result, he agreed with the consensus&#xA;  belief that lexical evidence of a genetic relationship becomes&#xA;  virtually undetectable after about 8,000 to 10,000 years of linguistic&#xA;  separation, but suggested that certain sorts of complex morphology may&#xA;  remain stable beyond this time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been noticing some similarities between Austronesian and Salishan language families, like:&#xA;1) Pervasive Reduplication,&#xA;2) Weak noun/verb distinction,&#xA;3) Alienable/Inalienable Possession,&#xA;4) Numeral Classifiers,&#xA;5) VSO word order,&#xA;6) Attributive markers, &#xA;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could such theory that complex morphology and syntax, to a limited degree, are preserved intact be used to link these two families? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T14:59:50.123" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T14:59:50.123" Title="Link betwen Austronesian and Salishan families" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2995" CreationDate="2012-12-20T13:52:46.537" Score="9" ViewCount="2470" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a rule used almost subconsciously by almost all English speakers (and I'm sure it applies to many other languages too) which is that yes/no questions are asked ending with a rising tone, and others are ended with a falling tone.  Why is this and how did the phenomenon develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one exception to this rule that I've found - if you ask a yes/no question with a falling tone, it is still understood as a question, but that you're asking it in a very unenthusiastic or grudging way.  Again, is there any obvious reason for this or did it just kind of randomly develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T19:45:11.380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T23:31:03.143" Title="Why are only yes/no questions asked with a rising tone?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2981" CreationDate="2012-12-20T21:16:06.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean when you ask if it is okay. If that is how the language works, then that's how it works. I assume that what you're really asking is whether it okay to analyze some null case as ERG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well known that it is difficult to decide whether Austronesian languages have ergative alignment or accusative alignment because their incredibly rich voice systems make it difficult to tell what is the &quot;basic&quot; transitive clause. We need to know what the basic transitive clause looks like because that is what we compare to the intransitive clause to determine whether the pattern at hand looks ergative or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You give two options for the basic transitive clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) V+patient trigger _ ERG-Noun _ ABS-Noun (V_S_O);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) V+actor trigger _ OBL-Noun _ ABS-Noun (V_O_S);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say we take (1) as basic. Then the alignment looks ergative because S in actor voice intransitive get marked with the same case as O in (1). If (1) is the basic transitive clause, then what is going on in (2)? We have to analyze it as some sort of antipassive, where O has been demoted and appears in an oblique, while S gets the same case as actor voice intransitive because (2) is actually intransitive itself in virtue of being an antipassive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if we take (2) as the basic transitive clause? Then the alignment looks accusative because the A argument gets marked with the same case actor voice intransitive subjects. This would mean that what you call OBL here is actually an accusative case. If we take this path, then what must we say about (1). Well, we have to say that it is a passive clause. The thematic object has been promoted to subject of an intransitive verb, which is what it bears the same case as a normal intransitive subject. What you're call ERG would then have to to be the oblique agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can the morphology tell us (In particular, what can the fact that your ERG above is unmarked tell us)? I think we have to pick our poison. It is typologically rare for ergative to be the unmarked case. At the same time, it is also typologically rare for oblique arguments, like the demoted agent of a passive, to be morphologically unmarked. Whether we decide (1) or (2) is the basic transitive clause, we're in a pickle. I really can't say anything more without looking at more data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: You could always just reject this dichotomy and say that this language is neither ergative nor accusative, but has a tripartite case systems where the A case is morphologically unmarked. I think this is typologically rare, but I don't know as much about these kinds of systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T21:16:06.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2991" CreationDate="2012-12-20T21:26:42.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with taking this route is that it blurs genetic and typological classification. The attributes you list could be typologically correlated and have nothing to do with shared history, either through common descent or language contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T21:26:42.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2992" CreationDate="2012-12-20T23:35:25.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for why intonation might be used to mark polar questions rather than content questions, my guess is that polar questions are the most frequent question type, so from a functional perspective, such a useful cue as F0 gets one more profit if it is used for the more common question type. This is just a hunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the prevalence of rising pitch contour used to mark polar questions, see the references below. Rialland's papers draw attention to a common phenomenon in African languages where polar questions are marked with a &lt;strong&gt;falling&lt;/strong&gt; pitch contour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ohala, John J. 1984. “An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice.” Phonetica &#xA;41: 1-16. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rialland, Annie. 2007. Question prosody: an African perspective. In Gussenhoven, Carlos, and Tomas Riad (eds.), &#xA;Tunes and Tones, Volume 1: Typological Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter, &#xA;pp. 35-62. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rialland, Annie. 2009. The African lax question prosody: Its realisation and geographical distribution. Lingua &#xA;119.6: 928-949.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T23:35:25.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2991" CreationDate="2012-12-20T23:46:13.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;See my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1434/is-the-deneyeniseian-hypothesis-widely-accepted-and-has-it-led-to-further-rese&quot;&gt;a prior question&lt;/a&gt; about Vajda's hypothesis for a few potentially relevant remarks about Vajda's methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use morphological or syntactic (or phonological) facts to establish a genetic relationship, pay attention to the following provisos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The units of comparison need to be form-function pairings, not just forms or functions (1, 3, 4, and 6 are deficient on this count).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The form-meaning pairings have to be (typologically) unusual enough that you can plausibly argue that their coincidence is not due to chance (2 and 5 are deficient on this count).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to have a plausible non-linguistic historical scenario that matches the timeline you are proposing (this is probably the biggest problem with such a proposal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-12-20T23:46:13.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2012-12-21T11:58:40.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found this useful paper on contemporary Georgian phonetic realisation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/annual_report/documents/2006/shosted_chikovani_11-23.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Standard Georgian&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;em&gt;Ryan K. Shosted&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Vakhtang Chikovani&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian ყ is realised as any of these four allophones: &lt;code&gt;[q'] [χ'] [ʔ] [q'χ']&lt;/code&gt;, which matches my listening impression as well; They say even the same speaker uses these allophones as free-variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Arabic letter transcribed as &lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;ق&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C4%81f#Arabic_q.C4.81f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Qāf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found the most common Georgian pronunciation to be &lt;code&gt;/χ'/&lt;/code&gt; to something like &lt;code&gt;/qχ'/&lt;/code&gt;, and both are accepted. &lt;code&gt;/χ'/&lt;/code&gt; is quite different to &lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1605" LastEditorUserId="1605" LastEditDate="2012-12-22T00:19:31.407" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T00:19:31.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3011" CreationDate="2012-12-22T02:06:29.560" Score="7" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like as a hobby to do text processing and analysis of CJKV text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese and Chinese is of course available in near infinite quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean is a bit harder to find, but not impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese though has not been written in Han Characters for almost a century, and prior to that time literacy was not common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there have been efforts to encode characters used only in Vietnamese and not the other languages into Unicode. But what I don't know is if there's been effort to encode old documents and make them available to the public online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T03:45:55.863" Title="Is there a digital corpus somewhere of pre-Latin Vietnamese text?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-22T08:31:02.197" Score="4" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read once there is a text about the Sun, which is created to use words and concepts which shall be present in any human language, and which is translated nearly to all human languages for using by linguists to show basic grammar, morphology and syntax. It contains phrases like &quot;we like it very much&quot;, &quot;we appreciate its coming each morning&quot;, &quot;We all say 'Hello, Sun!'&quot; Regrettably there were no links to the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody please point me to this text and its canonical translations?&#xA;Is it used in common tradition, as this lost source states, or it's specific to a single scholar school?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastActivityDate="2012-12-23T00:39:30.013" Title="A classical text about the Sun?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2999" CreationDate="2012-12-22T22:59:05.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is the same text you're thinking of, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Wind_and_the_Sun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The North Wind and the Sun&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Βορέας καὶ Ἥλιος&quot;), one of Aesop's fables, is commonly translated into various languages and used as an example text in phonetics. The International Phonetic Association has a tradition of using it as an example text to illustrate its phonological descriptions of languages and dialects (see the Handbook for many translations and transcriptions). But it doesn't contain the phrases you mention. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook_downloads.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Audio readings of the IPA's translations of the fable are available.&lt;/a&gt; Wikisource has &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%91%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%8E%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%85_%CE%9C%CF%8D%CE%B8%CE%BF%CE%B9/%CE%92%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%AD%CE%B1%CF%82_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9_%CE%89%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Polytonic Greek version&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_North_Wind_and_the_Sun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two versions in English&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/B%C3%B3reas_y_el_Sol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E3%82%A4%E3%82%BD%E3%83%83%E3%83%97%E7%AB%A5%E8%A9%B1%E9%9B%86/%E5%A4%AA%E9%99%BD%E3%81%A8%E9%A2%A8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one in Japanese&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article says it's also used &quot;as a parallel text in comparative linguistics as it provides more natural language than the Lord's Prayer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2012-12-22T22:59:05.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2012-12-24T00:27:31.797" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to slashes and square brackets, sometimes also used are double-slashes, pipes, and angle brackets. Their uses are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Angle brackets — ⟨cats⟩ or &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;cats&quot; or cats — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicates a linguistic entity, like a word or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme&quot;&gt;grapheme&lt;/a&gt;, written according to a language's orthography. Alternatively, the orthography is often given in italics or quotes, or simply not indicated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Square brackets — [ˈkʰæʔt͡s] — phonetic transcription&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicates a transcription that records the phones (speech sounds) that are spoken, without attempting to classify them into phonemes. The amount of phonetic detail transcribed can vary; the example here is a fairly &lt;em&gt;narrow&lt;/em&gt; (detailed) transcription. A &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt;er transcription might be [ˈkʰæts].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Slashes — /ˈkæts/ — phonemic transcription&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicates a transcription that records only information asserted to be &lt;em&gt;contrastive&lt;/em&gt;. This records a sequence of phonemes (as well as any phonemic suprasegmental features like stress or tone), ignoring allophonic differences. In this example, the fact that the initial /k/ is pronounced aspirated ([kʰ]) is ignored, because /k/ and /kʰ/ do not contrast in English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Double-slashes or pipes — //ˈkæt z// or |ˈkæt z| — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphophonology&quot;&gt;morphophonemic&lt;/a&gt; transcription&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicates a transcription that attempts to record the underlying sounds of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme&quot;&gt;morphemes&lt;/a&gt;, before they are combined to form words. This ignores sound changes conditioned on location, which may result in multiple phonemes, that get applied in actual speech. To illustrate, here, the final sound is written ⟨z⟩ (rather than ⟨s⟩ as in its pronunciation) because it represents the English morphophoneme //z//, used as the plural marker. //z// can be realized as /z/ (as in &lt;em&gt;pigs&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;kangaroos&lt;/em&gt;), /s/ (as in &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt;), or /ɪz/ (as in &lt;em&gt;horses&lt;/em&gt;). The posited morphophoneme cannot be an actual phoneme, because English distinguishes /z/ /s/ /ɪz/ in other contexts (like &lt;em&gt;whores&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;horiz(ontal)&lt;/em&gt;). (The choice of ⟨z⟩ for the transcription of this morphophoneme is arbitrary, but makes sense because it is realized as /z/ in the absence of the effect of an adjacent voiceless segment.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;More examples&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology&quot;&gt;Morphophonological processes are especially prominent in French.&lt;/a&gt; Example phrase: &lt;em&gt;On a laissé la fenêtre ouverte.&lt;/em&gt; 'We left the window open.':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orthographic ⟨On a laissé la fenêtre ouverte.⟩&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonetic [ɔ̃.na.le.se.laf.nɛː.tχu.vɛχt]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonemic /ɔ̃naleselafnɛːtʁuvɛʁt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;morphophonemic //ɔn a les e la fənɛːtʁ uvɛʁt ə//&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;petit&lt;/em&gt; 'small': orthographic ⟨petit⟩, phonetic [pɵt̪ʲi], phonemic /pəti/, morphophonemic //pətit//&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Standard Russian vowel reduction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the standard (Moscow-based) Russian accent, five vowels /i　e　a　o　u/ are distinguished in stressed syllables, but at most three /ɪ~ɨ　ɐ~ə　ʊ/ in unstressed syllables. /i　e/ reduce to /ɪ/, /a　o/ to /ɐ/, and /u/ to /ʊ/.  Russian also has word-final obstruent devoicing and assimilation of voicing and palatalization. Russian orthography is roughly morphophonemic. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meaning: &lt;em&gt;poppy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;poppies&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mages&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;earth&lt;/em&gt; (nom. pl.), &lt;em&gt;earth&lt;/em&gt; (gen. sg.), &lt;em&gt;transport&lt;/em&gt; (infinitive), &lt;em&gt;transports&lt;/em&gt; (present, 3sg)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orthographic ⟨ма́к⟩ ⟨ма́г⟩ ⟨ма́ки⟩ ⟨ма́ги⟩ ⟨зе́мли⟩ ⟨земли́⟩ ⟨вози́ть⟩ ⟨во́зит⟩&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonetic [ˈmak] [ˈmak] [ˈmakʲɪ] [ˈmaɡʲɪ] [ˈzʲe.mʲlʲɪ] [zʲɪˈmʲlʲi] [vɐˈzʲitʲ] [ˈvo.zʲɪt]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonemic /ˈmak/ /ˈmak/ /ˈmakʲɪ/ /ˈmaɡʲɪ/ /ˈzʲe.mʲlʲɪ/ /zʲɪˈmʲlʲi/ /vɐˈzʲitʲ/ /ˈvo.zʲɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;morphophonemic //ˈmak// //ˈmaɡ// //ˈmak‿ʲi// //ˈmaɡ‿ʲi// //ˈzʲe.mlʲi// //zʲeˈmlʲi// //voˈzʲitʲ// //ˈvo.zʲit//&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T04:50:03.850" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T04:50:03.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3005" CreationDate="2012-12-24T02:56:17.563" Score="11" ViewCount="1568" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/95327/is-there-any-reason-why-english-doesnt-add-respectful-words-in-every-sentence&quot;&gt;Is there any reason why English doesn’t add respectful words in every sentence?&lt;/a&gt; that was asking why there's more respectful language in Korean and Japanese compared to English, the accepted answer was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary reason is cultural. Western languages are not steeped in Confucian culture. Filial piety and constantly overtly expressed respect for the elderly, for seniors, and for superiors are not central values in Western cultures. Most Western languages have polite forms (du &amp;amp; Sie in German, tu and Vous in French, for &quot;you&quot;), but English lost that distinction when thee and thou died a couple of hundred years ago. Still, there are polite &amp;amp; impolite ways to speak English. English speakers generally consider using honorifics as obsequious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I had always assumed, but when I hear someone else describe it, it sounds a little like stereotyping (of asian cultures, and of western cultures) and speculation based on small sample sizes. Has any research been done to confirm the effect of culture on the amount and usage of politeness-related constructs, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_honorifics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;honorific endings&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese#Honorific_prefixes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;honorific prefixes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese#Respectful_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different forms of verbs for different politeness levels&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T00:13:08.070" Title="Correlation between politeness of a culture and its languages" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3004" CreationDate="2012-12-26T00:13:08.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, there are several reasons why some languages have developed a broad variety of particles (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/id/589972&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thai&lt;/a&gt;) while other have not (nor there are any historical evidences they have ever been).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Confucian culture made a great impact on this, with its idea of saving one's face and harmonious relations are often at premium. Use of the appropriate polite particle in a sentence can add just the right amount of politeness for human communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are right asking the question here. There are researches &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/jun/workshop2007icphs/pittayaporn_thai.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1; PDF)&lt;/a&gt; that suggest pure linguistic reasons for particles have been more developed &lt;strong&gt;in tonal languages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Indeed, a non-tonal language uses stress and tone to change the feeling and mood of a sentence. Asking someone, &lt;em&gt;&quot;What are you doing?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the tone of the voice, can completely change the meaning from a greeting to a rude command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tonal language, where the meaning of a word is determined by the pitch of the voice, uses particles, usually tacked onto the end of a sentence, to convey emotion and feeling. If you tried to express feeling and mood through intonation of voice, it may interfere with the tone (and therefore meaning) of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side note, Japanese used to be a tonal language. There are relics of tones, like 高低アクセント.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in Thai language, even nouns or verbs may change depending on your relation to the listener (e.g. younger versus elder person, monks or royal family members). E.g. &lt;code&gt;to know&lt;/code&gt; has polite &lt;code&gt;ทราบ [sâːp]&lt;/code&gt; and informal &lt;code&gt;รู้ [rúː]&lt;/code&gt; forms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They don't seem to be derived from tonal nature of the language, but most of the formal words I'm aware of are derived from ancient Pali/Sanskrit background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize the answer to your question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Many Asian languages had reasons to develop a set of polite particles, primarily because of their tonal nature, but also because of cultural reasons like harmony and saving one's face&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2012-12-26T00:13:08.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3007" CreationDate="2012-12-26T01:20:50.440" Score="27" ViewCount="11630" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of languages which are mutually intelligible (i.e. a speaker of A can understand language B and [perhaps] vice versa)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And would this beg the question of whether they really are separate &quot;languages&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="460" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:56:46.863" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:56:46.863" Title="Is there a list of mutually intelligible languages?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-12-26T18:11:29.233" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proper term for what you're asking is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_distance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linguistic&amp;nbsp;distance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Sometimes it is also called &lt;strong&gt;Lexical&amp;nbsp;distance&lt;/strong&gt;, if only lexical units have been compared/measured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is an article on Wikipedia called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mutual intelligibility&lt;/a&gt;, and it has a nice list of mutually intelligible languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noticed, there are several aspects by which linguistic distances (LD) between a certain pair of languages may differ. It may be orthography, morphology/lexicon, or phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most intriguing fact is that &lt;strong&gt;linguistic distances can be measured&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Prof. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ukrainianweek.com/Culture/65223&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;K.&amp;nbsp;Tyshchenko&lt;/a&gt; has published his method of computing LD. I would specifically recommend his work, &lt;em&gt;Metatheory of Linguistics (Kyiv, 1999)&lt;/em&gt; (Ukrainian, Russian), but I'm terribly sorry for being unable to find this work in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how the main diagram looks like:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwyPg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Linguistic Distances&quot;&gt;&#xA;(image taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/34/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yet another version&lt;/a&gt; of the same diagram created by a prominent blogger contains actual numbers of linguistic distances of even a larger set of languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ms0Uy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ms0Uy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Linguistic Distances&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bowfree.com/data/_Frequency%20dictionaries/lex-distances.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ukrainian version&lt;/a&gt; of the same diagram. Further explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17401/1009&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And would this beg the question of whether they really are separate &quot;languages&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An obvious answer is, there's a certain threshold in measured LD above which they can be called different languages, while below which they may be considered dialects. Also, it should be understood that considering a separate language may involve a political aspect, so the political desires may not completely correspond the linguistic reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T20:59:44.877" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2012-12-27T18:05:43.450" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of the largest list of mutually comprehenstible languages, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; is probably your best bet in terms of the number of languages that are listed and compared. For many languages it lists other languages which share intelligibility and lexical similarity. This is discussed in more (but still possibly insufficient detail) on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a question on quantifying mutual intelligibility a while ago, in which I pointed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2226/how-can-mutual-intelligibility-be-measured/2691#2691&quot;&gt;Blair's lexical similarity quantification&lt;/a&gt; as one way of assessing mutual intelligibility based on lexical similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T18:05:43.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2981" CreationDate="2012-12-27T18:17:24.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite common cross-linguistically to have ergativity marked optionally. McGregor (2010) talks about this in impressive cross-linguistic detail, arguing that while in some language ergativity may be obligatory, in other languages it can be used optionally. This optionality is not entirely arbitrary, and there are commonalities cross-lingustically. These include a tendency for ergativity to be more common in past tense costructions, with animate or human subjects or to indicate a high level of volitionality. Other articles in the Lingua special that McGregor's paper appeared in also discuss optional ergativity in specific languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McGregor. 2010. Optional ergative case marking systems in a typological-semiotic perspective. Lingua 120:7. pp: 1610-1636 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2012-12-27T18:17:24.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2012-12-29T02:29:04.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spain, Argentina and Uruguay -se forms are pretty common. They&#xA;don't sound particularly formal or bookish (unlike in Mexico or some other countries).&#xA;It's like dreamed/dreamt variation in English...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Se and -Ra forms are not completely interchangeable (in normative Spanish):&#xA;1: -ra forms function as a pluperfect: ''Después de que pagaran la cuenta, me fuy.''&#xA;(=Después de que habían pagado la cuenta, me fuy).&#xA;2. -ra forms can replace the past conditional: ''Me habría/hubiera gustado mucho si&#xA;hubieras venido a la fiesta).''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T02:29:04.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2998" CreationDate="2012-12-29T03:45:55.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;this project may have what you are looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nomfoundation.org/nom-project/Digital-Library-of-Han-Nom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nomfoundation.org/nom-project/Digital-Library-of-Han-Nom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1617" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T03:45:55.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2012-12-29T05:31:31.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lakota Sioux “úŋ” is completely regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am = waúŋ&#xA;You are = naúŋ&#xA;He/she/it is = úŋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and I are = uŋk’úŋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are = uŋk’úŋpi&#xA;y'all are = naúŋpi&#xA;they are = úŋpi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, they tend not to use it except for (rare) emphatic purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1619" LastActivityDate="2012-12-29T05:31:31.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-29T06:16:23.950" Score="8" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Germanic languages, a generic construction using the definite article with mass nouns is unacceptable. In contrast, Romance languages require the definite article to make the generic construction grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.) &lt;em&gt;The water is a liquid.&lt;/em&gt; (Unacceptable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.) &lt;em&gt;The tiger is an animal.&lt;/em&gt; (acceptable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.) &lt;em&gt;L'eau est un liquide.&lt;/em&gt; (acceptable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason it is not acceptable in Germanic languages is that the definite article in Germanic languages requires the noun to have individuality. The noun must have a separate existence (boundedness) in order to make a definite generic sentence with it. Take the sentence above for example, &amp;quot;the tiger is an animal.&amp;quot; refers to the ideal tiger that has every feature to be &amp;quot;tiger-ish&amp;quot;, which we could call the &amp;quot;representative of  all tigers&amp;quot;. The fact that &lt;em&gt;tiger&lt;/em&gt; is a countable noun contributes to the generic construction. There is no such thing as the &amp;quot;representative of water&amp;quot; to refer to, as water is homogeneous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what I would like to know is, what is different about the definite article in Romance languages compared to that of Germanic languages from a cognitive point of view? What is it that allows (or rather it is necessary to have) the definite article to make a definite generic sentence with mass nouns in Romance languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the definite article in Romance languages not require individuality/boundedness? Or maybe Romance language speakers see mass nouns like water as separated substances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When making a definite generic sentence, what does it refer to? In Germanic languages, it refers to the &amp;quot;representative individual&amp;quot; of the noun. When saying &amp;quot;L'eau est un liquide.&amp;quot;, what water does the sentence refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1618" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T20:43:42.047" Title="Usage of definite articles in Germanic and Romance languages" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2012-12-30T00:51:07.413" Score="9" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for articles and or theories that explore the idea that morphology and syntax are not separate but operate on the same principles; for example, that the sentence is just an extended morphological word (using those terms generally, external of their various theoretical use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1621" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-01-03T08:43:23.290" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T21:12:00.623" Title="Can anyone point me toward articles/theory that syntax and morphology operate on the same principles?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3015" CreationDate="2012-12-30T09:06:02.373" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'll point to a previous question on this SE, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/836/what-meaningful-distinction-is-there-between-morphology-and-syntax&quot;&gt;What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax?&lt;/a&gt;. I'll just present one line of approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A seminal article is Mark Baker's 1985 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178442&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mirror Principle and morphosyntactic explanation&lt;/a&gt;, wherein he defines the Mirror Principle as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morphological derivations must directly reflect syntactic derivations (and vice &#xA;  versa). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, Distributed Morphology (DM) was developed by Morris Halle &amp;amp; Alec Marantz and colleagues. I quote from their 1993 paper, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~muellerg/dm8.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection&lt;/a&gt; (pdf):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] we take the phonological realization of the terminal elements in the syntax to be governed by lexical (Vocabulary) entries that relate bundles of morphosyntactic features to bundles of phonological features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have called our approach Distributed Morphology to highlight the fact that the machinery of what traditionally has been called morphology is not concentrated in a single component of the grammar, but rather is distributed among several different components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two points: first, it is in a sense the opposite of what you mention in your question, in that a morphologically derived word is claimed to have internal syntactic structure. Second, DM is not pure syntax (hence the &quot;Distributed&quot; label): it does have a number of post-syntactic operations that derives morphological generalizations such as syncretism (where different morphosyntactic feature bundles like first person singular and second person singular are realized by the same morpheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of resources for DM:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rolf Noyer's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DM Frequently Asked Questions page&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/bib.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bibliography&lt;/a&gt;, both written in the late 90s&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heidi Harley and Rolf Noyer 1999, &lt;a href=&quot;http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readings/Harley+Noyer1999.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;State-of-the-Article: Distributed Morphology&lt;/a&gt; (pdf), another overview which also has an attached bibliography&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David Embick and Rolf Noyer 2006, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~embick/interface.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Distributed Morphology and the syntax-morphology interface&lt;/a&gt; (pdf), a handbook article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Nevins and Karlos Arregi 2012, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/linguistics/book/978-94-007-3888-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morphotactics: Basque Auxiliaries and The Structure of Spellout&lt;/a&gt;, a recent book that shows Distributed Morphology &quot;in action&quot; by using the framework to account for the morphosyntax of the Basque auxiliary system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2012-12-30T09:19:01.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2012-12-31T20:43:50.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't offer a proof, but for what it's worth, one of the standard Croatian dictionaries, Anić's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hjp.novi-liber.hr/index.php?show=search_by_id&amp;amp;id=f15lURh7&amp;amp;keyword=zima&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rječnik hrvatskoga jezika&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, gives the following etymology for Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian &quot;zima&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;prasl. i stsl. [proto-Slavic and Old Church Slavonic] zima (rus. [Russian] zimá, polj. [Polish] zima), lit. [Lithuanian] žiema ← ie. [Proto-Indo-European] *g'heym- (lat. [Latin] hiems, grč. [Classical Greek] kheȋma)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that any of the standard (etymological) dictionaries of any of the Slavic languages will give the same etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Thai, as Huoxingwen pointed out above, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; (insofar as it's to be believed) states that it's a Sanskrit loan, where the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AE#Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit original&lt;/a&gt; is a reflex of our old friend *g'heym-. So, to cut a long story short, the Thai word for snow seems to be a loan from Sanskrit, and the Slavic word for winter and the Sanskrit word for snow both stem from the PIE root *g'heym-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1625" LastEditorUserId="1625" LastEditDate="2013-01-03T08:31:47.573" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T08:31:47.573" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1999" CreationDate="2012-12-31T21:34:08.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're describing is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtokavian_accentuation#Accentuation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neo-Štokavian accentuation&lt;/a&gt;, the characteristic innovation of the Neo-Štokavian dialects of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (including all the current literary forms), which apparently dates to no earlier than the 16th century. Very crudely speaking, Neo-Štokavian falling accents continue earlier accents on initial syllables, whilst Neo-Štokavian rising accents result from a shift where accented inner and final syllables retained their higher pitch, but had the actual stress retracted to the preceding syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast with the marked accentual innovation of Neo-Štokavian, the pitch accent of the Čakavian dialects is apparently an extremely rare (if not unique) partial continuation of the accentual system of Common Slavic, and as such has attracted considerable scientific attention from Slavists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My apologies if I have bungled any terminology (or even worse, facts)--I'm afraid I'm a mathematician, not a Slavist!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I also see, to my embarrassment, that slavist has already said all that needs to be said on the matter. Had I the reputation, I'd have simply added a comment to his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1625" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T21:34:08.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2012-12-31T21:44:42.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably not a record holder, but to be precise with Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, it has been written in the Latin, Cyrillic (both in the standard form and in an extinct, western form called Bosančica), Glagolitic, and Arabic (the so-called Arebica). Arebica saw use until WWII, Bosančica seems to have gone extinct by the 18th century, and Glagolitic for the vernacular was probably extinct by the end of the 18th century---Glagolitic for Croatian Church Slavonic lasted until 1927, albeit with partial use lasting until Vatican II.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1625" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T21:44:42.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2012-12-31T23:58:29.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is Sanskrit, which has been written in a large number of Asian scripts plus Latin.  See&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Writing_system&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Writing_system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for a graphic of 17, which I suspect is not all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1626" LastActivityDate="2012-12-31T23:58:29.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-01T09:19:42.403" Score="5" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I am no linguist I do teach language as an element of culture to my middle-schoolers and as we are located near Boston, the &quot;Pahk the Cah in Havahd Yahd&quot; question often comes up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kids want to know why there is such a distinct pronunciation. I tell them honestly that I do not know but suspect that it is a throw-back to our British roots.  My whole premise is based on the word &quot;can't&quot;.  Any insight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1627" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-01T11:21:03.587" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T15:40:31.737" Title="Bostonian Accent" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3021" CreationDate="2013-01-02T03:18:29.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me just quote the first two paragraphs of p.93 of David Crystal's &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;. (If you are an English teacher consider getting a cheap copy on Amazon)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The two settlements--one in Virginia, to the south; the other to the north, in present-day New England--had different linguistic consequences. The southern colonists came mainly from England's 'West Country'--such counties as Somerset and Gloucestershire--and brought with them its characteristic accent, with its 'Zummerset' voicing of &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; sounds, and the &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; strongly pronounced after vowels. Echoes of this accent can still be heard in the speech of communities living in some of the isolated valleys and islands in the area, such as Tangier Island in Chesepeake Bay. These 'Tidewater' accents, as they are called, have changed somewhat over the past 300 years, but not as rapidly (because of the relative isolation of the speakers) as elsewhere in the country. They are sometimes said to be the closest we will ever get to the sound of Shakespearean English (p. 69).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    By contrast, many of the Plymouth colonists came from counties in the east of England--in particular, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex, Kent, and London, with some from the Midlands, and a few from further afield. The eastern accents were rather different--notably, lacking an &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; after vowels, as in present-day Received Pronunciation (RP, p. 365)--and they proved to be the dominant influence in the area. The tendency 'not to pronounce the &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;' is still a feature of the speech of people from New England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T15:40:31.737" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T15:40:31.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3026" CreationDate="2013-01-02T07:43:36.257" Score="4" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would the proper term for it really be &quot;non-symbolic language&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language up until now uses symbols at various forms &amp;ndash; vowel sounds and consonants are symbols; syllables, which are combinations of vowels/consonants, are symbols; and words, which are combinations of syllables, are symbols, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to create a language with no distinct symbols, and every thought is a gradient of sounds to represent an idea on the &quot;coordinate plane&quot; of thoughts?  You could compare the difference between symbollic/non-symbolic languages to the difference between   The ideas behind it would be similar to Ithkuil in that you'd be able to represent varying degrees of ideas (AKA, representing the &quot;amount&quot; of heaviness of a rock, for example) very well, however it simply wouldn't rely on symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit, someone speaking it would sound hilariously stupid, but is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be really interested if it is.  Some more thought leads me to believe that maybe &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; degree of symbols is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpreting this language would be incredibly subjective to the perspective of the listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that I'm explaining this well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1630" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T03:25:27.770" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T04:10:23.247" Title="Could a constructed non-symbolic language be created?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-02T13:55:12.803" Score="3" ViewCount="970" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there examples of reduplication that clearly changes the syntactic category of a root/stem? I'm thinking of cases like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pak, n &lt;em&gt;'tortilla'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pakpak, v &lt;em&gt;'make tortillas'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tap, a &lt;em&gt;'red'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tatap, v &lt;em&gt;'redden'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language with pervasive reduplication I know best, Kaqchikel (Mayan), has reduplication turning affect words into intransitive verbs, like the following example, but as far as I know, there aren't cases of reduplication that change core syntactic categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;witz' &lt;em&gt;'the sound mice make'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;niwitz'itz' &lt;em&gt;'he/she/it made the sound mice make'&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T02:40:31.387" Title="Examples of category-changing reduplication" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3023" CreationDate="2013-01-02T15:22:37.727" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe language is &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; symbolic; if your &quot;gradient of sounds&quot; &lt;em&gt;represents&lt;/em&gt; anything, then I would call that a symbol. So I would say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say language is communicating information without relying exclusively or mainly on actions. If I hit a man and kill him, my intention that I wanted him dead is thereby communicated to others; but it isn't language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I kick you in a medium-soft manner, I may thereby communicate to you mild displeasure. It is not merely a direct action, because hurting you, the obvious result of kicking someone, is not really my intention. You might call that language, although others insist that language should involve more complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I emit a certain specific gnashing sound through my teeth to indicate that there is a rock that calls for your attention, and the volume expresses its hardness, then that is symbolic, because there is no intrinsic connection whatsoever between volume and the hardness of a rock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there were &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; connection, but only a partial one, as in when sounds imitate the sound of something real, you might still call that language, although some will object, as with the kicking example above. But it cannot be denied that an imitation of the sound of a fox is not a fox, and yet I want to communicate to you &quot;there is a fox&quot;, so that some form of symbolism is involved even in so basic an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-01-03T01:10:34.800" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T01:10:34.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3028" CreationDate="2013-01-03T02:54:23.413" Score="8" ViewCount="6059" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in English we say Germany, Japan, and China but they say Deutschland, Nihon, and Zhongguo respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we change the names because they are difficult to say or spell outside of their native language, how is the English name created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1633" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-01-03T06:18:15.533" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T23:12:54.610" Title="Why do we call some countries a different name than the people of that country?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3027" CreationDate="2013-01-03T05:07:25.540" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Historical Reasons&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most of these differences in English seem to be due to historical reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;China&quot; seems to refer to either &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Qin province or the Qin Dynasty&lt;/a&gt; which comes to English via Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &quot;Japan&quot; seems to have come to English via &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jippon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Portuguese name for Japan&lt;/a&gt; (itself a transliteration of &lt;em&gt;nippon&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &quot;Germany&quot; refers to the geographic area called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Germania&lt;/a&gt; in which Germany resides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a similar process at work on a much smaller scale with people who still refer to &quot;Burma&quot; (which changed its name to Myanmar), &quot;Ivory Coast&quot; (which has stated that its name is always &quot;Cote d'Ivoire&quot;, regardless of the language), and &quot;Czechoslavakia&quot; (a country that no longer exists and has been replaced by both Czech Republic and Slovakia, officially Slovak Republic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other times these differences can, as you noted, occur for simple pronunciation reasons. This is why we refer to &quot;Spain&quot; instead of &lt;em&gt;España&lt;/em&gt;. Also, as noted, the Japan example from above may fit this category as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adaptations in other languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During my short stint studying Chinese I was rather jealous that America became 美國 (&lt;em&gt;meiguo&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;beautiful country&quot;) and England became 英國 (&lt;em&gt;yingguo&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;hero country&quot;) while my native Canada was simply 加拿大 (&lt;em&gt;jianada&lt;/em&gt;), a mere transliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the truth is a bit more complicated. &lt;em&gt;Meiguo&lt;/em&gt; seems to be derived from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a transliteration of &quot;America&quot;&lt;/a&gt; that got shortened and affixed with &lt;em&gt;guo&lt;/em&gt; (country). Similarly, &lt;em&gt;yingguo&lt;/em&gt; seems to also be derived from &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/1713/origin-of-%E8%8B%B1%E5%9B%BD-england&quot;&gt;a shortened and affixed transliteration&lt;/a&gt;. So these country names are both a transliteration and an adaptation at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, American and England seem to have come to Korean via Chinese (미국, &lt;em&gt;miguk&lt;/em&gt;, and 영국, &lt;em&gt;yeongguk&lt;/em&gt;, respectively) while France (in Mandarin 法國, &lt;em&gt;faguo&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;law country&quot;. Presumably via the same mechanism as America and England), which would be koreanized as 법국 (&lt;em&gt;peopguk&lt;/em&gt;), is actually 프랑스 (&lt;em&gt;phurangsu&lt;/em&gt;, a more faithful transliteration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other interesting adaptations of country names in Korean are China and Japan. Korean, like many East-Asian languages, borrowed a lot from Classical Chinese (despite being linguistically unrelated). As such, many Chinese characters have a Korean pronunciation. This is how we can tell that 미국 and 영국 are derived from the Chinese. As you have stated, the Mandarin name for China is 中國 (&lt;em&gt;zhongguo&lt;/em&gt;). Using the Korean pronunciations of those Chinese characters we get the Korean name for China: 중국 (&lt;em&gt;jungguk&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, &lt;em&gt;Nippon&lt;/em&gt; is written in Chinese (technically, in Kanji) as 日本 which gives us the Korean name for Japan: 일본 (&lt;em&gt;ilbon&lt;/em&gt;). Oddly, adaptations of this sort do not extend to city names but do sometimes apply to people's names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T07:58:16.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3030" CreationDate="2013-01-03T06:34:04.070" Score="12" ViewCount="783" Body="&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, how much is there that all linguists would be willing defend as correct knowledge about linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just finished taking an introductory course in linguistics. One thing that struck me was how at every topic there was always a disclaimer along the lines of &quot;this is just one analysis&quot; or even &quot;orthodoxy has it that ... but it's not clear if anyone believes that&quot;. For example, the professor disagreed with the textbook's putting adverbs in the specifier position of verb phrases. This being a question at all depends on the validity of the X-bar theory, which I'm told is a theory of Chomsky's. And Chomsky, I'm told, revises his theories every decade or two, and you sometimes overhear the TAs discussing which version they were taught as undergraduates. And then I read that Chomsky's entire approach is questioned by large swaths of the linguistics community. Therefore it would seem that there isn't any consensus at all, which really makes the entire business rather suspicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent am I exaggerating the state of affairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="370" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T21:19:11.150" Title="Why does there seem to be so much disagreement among linguists?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2013-01-03T08:02:33.913" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics belongs to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humanities&lt;/a&gt;. Unlike exact sciences, linguistic phenomenons often have social nature and therefore can't be measured or applied blindly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are laws and tendencies, but they may apply differently in different times, locations, and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2565/jespersens-cycle-why-is-it-defined-cycle&quot;&gt;Jespersen's cycle&lt;/a&gt;: the same language may have different tendencies as per how to build a negation, in different times. Other languages may totally skip this phenomenon (e.g., Slavic). Of course, if you read about Jespersen's cycle, you have to keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;&quot;this is just one analysis&quot;&lt;/em&gt; which has a nice fit for certain languages and N/A for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another thought. &lt;strong&gt;Linguistics is a young science.&lt;/strong&gt; Although the earliest linguistic document, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Panini&lt;/a&gt; is dated about 500 BCE, linguistics as a science became taught in European universities only in 17th century. Compare to Newton's mechanics that was almost fully discovered (and stays unchanged) since the same time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So it seems to be normal that some discussions yet haven't been settled till today, and a good scientist should be ready to admit their mistakes and accept another theory, if it is proven better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical linguistics has problems similar to common history: there are many artifacts of written language, but they may be contradictory, e.g. the same document may have several spellings of the same word, and it's hard to figure out what is just a typo, and what is a proper spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line, maybe the most important.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As per linguistics, &lt;strong&gt;courses do not teach you what theory is correct.&lt;/strong&gt; They teach you to read, to argue, and to think by yourself. To make your own mistakes and to fix them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Don't stick to a certain theory.&lt;/strong&gt; Learn as many different views as you can and pick which one sounds better for you. Don't be afraid to change your opinion if you find evidences powerful enough.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Be a scientist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-01-03T08:08:42.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3063" CreationDate="2013-01-01T19:12:38.160" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to be analyzing tweets where I care about how confidently someone is expressing an idea.  So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X destroyed Y &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be express greater confidence than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X beat Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 9 months ago I found a site that had ranked the relative strength of similar verbs, but I dumbly didn't bookmark it; but I know such a list exits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of a database like this somewhere?  I've been searching for days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1667" OwnerDisplayName="tazz_ben" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-04T12:37:59.563" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T01:59:57.977" Title="Database of synonym gradients" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2013-01-05T09:42:57.193" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation&quot;&gt;expletive infixation&lt;/a&gt; isn't unique to English, what about recursive expletive infixation, however impractical it may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Holy mother-mother-fucking-fuck!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T09:42:57.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3038" CreationDate="2013-01-05T12:17:22.153" Score="3" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are many languages from many families besides just Mandarin Chinese and its close relatives within China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was wondering if China has at least one language isolate within its borders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more than one, which has the most speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are none, is there one language that is &quot;least related&quot; to other languages of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T05:53:55.303" Title="Are there any language isolates in China?" Tags="&lt;language-isolates&gt;&lt;languages-of-china&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-05T14:56:27.227" Score="30" ViewCount="9138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday on ELU, the IPA sequence &lt;strong&gt;ˌoʊkeɪˈhiːɹjəˌgoʊ&lt;/strong&gt; was posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/96765/2637&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not very familiar with IPA, so I thought the easiest way to &quot;decode&quot; that would be through a software speech synthesiser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already use text-to-speech (TTS) in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=85308&amp;amp;hl=foo_tts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my own plugin&lt;/a&gt; for the Foobar2000 music player. But I couldn't quickly see how to tell the underlying software that the input text was IPA, rather than standard English, so I went looking for an online version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After several minutes Googling, all I could find was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this demo from AT&amp;amp;T&lt;/a&gt; - which, as it turned out, wasn't accurate enough for me to figure out what was being &quot;said&quot; by my target string above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd always assumed that if IPA is supposed to be a &quot;generic&quot; way of representing phonemes, it should be the ideal input format for TTS software. But if that's so, why was it so difficult to find even something that produced what seems to me an inadequate rendering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems unlikely to me that very few software developers are interested in TTS, so I'm guessing there's some reason why it's difficult for TTS software to handle IPA. Can anyone tell me why this might be so? Or is there maybe some other explanation as to why such software is at the very least &quot;uncommon&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T10:39:32.680" Title="Is it hard for software speech synthesisers to handle IPA? If so, why?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3125" CreationDate="2013-01-05T15:05:23.033" Score="4" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some comparative analysis that would indicate how &lt;strong&gt;imperative meaning&lt;/strong&gt; can be built in various languages by using &lt;strong&gt;grammatical moods&lt;/strong&gt; other than &lt;em&gt;imperative&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that in many languages you can build a phrase with suggestive or imperative meaning by using other tenses/moods/aspects, not necessarily imperative or suggestive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TL;DR samples&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dutch&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;At liever eens wat minder!&quot; (lit. &quot;ate rather once somewhat less) means &quot;better eat a bit less&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/02/do-imperatives-in-the-past-tense-exist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(link)&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, &lt;code&gt;at&lt;/code&gt;, a past perfect form of &lt;code&gt;eten&lt;/code&gt;, forms an imperative, something like &quot;if you ate less&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; is maybe even more vivid example. In fact, you can &lt;em&gt;build an imperative using almost any verbal tense&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imperative: &lt;code&gt;пойди за пивом&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;go for a beer&quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indefinite: &lt;code&gt;встать!&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;to stand up!&quot;); it's rude but commonly used in army;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Past singular: &lt;code&gt;пошёл за пивом!&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;{you} went for a beer!&quot;) - warning, it's a very rude form;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Past plural: &lt;code&gt;пошли за пивом&lt;/code&gt; ({we} went for a beer) means &quot;let's...&quot; - unlike above, it sounds very friendly;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present singular: &lt;code&gt;сейчас ты встаёшь и идёшь за пивом&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;now you are standing up and going for a beer&quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present plural: &lt;code&gt;идём за пивом&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;{we are currently} going for a beer&quot;), again, it's a &quot;let's&quot; form;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future singular: &lt;code&gt;сейчас ты встанешь и пойдёшь за пивом&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;now you will stand up and go for a beer&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future plural: &lt;code&gt;пойдём за пивом&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;{we will} go for a beer&quot;), again, it's a &quot;let's&quot; form;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, imperative case does not necessarily mean imperative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;пойди я за пивом вчера, не пришлось бы идти сегодня&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;imperative_go I for beer yesterday, there would be no need to go today&quot;) &amp;mdash; this denotes subjunctive mood;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;хорошее пиво, скажи?&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;good beer, imperative_say?&quot;) - &quot;...isn't it?&quot; form;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any comparison chart for imperative in different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T02:25:12.933" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T02:25:12.933" Title="Forming an imperative mood by using other grammatical moods or aspects across the languages" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3035" CreationDate="2013-01-05T22:18:30.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my studies of Proto-Indo-European I always use Russian speech synthesizer. It is not perfect: Russian lacks some phones that were in PIE, also it pronounces unstressed o as a (following the Moscow dialect) and sometimes places stress wrongly. Yet in most cases I can get what I actually wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.hotbox.ru/Sounds/cleuos.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cleu̯os ndhghu̯itom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.hotbox.ru/Sounds/quoteros.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;qu̯oteros&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.hotbox.ru/Sounds/pater.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pa̯tēr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-10-12T08:19:29.283" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T08:19:29.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3034" CreationDate="2013-01-05T22:50:59.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Korean [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=kor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kor&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are roughly 2,000,000 Koreans living in China. Ethnologue lists 1,920,000 Korean speakers in China as of the 2000 census. (Not sure whether that counts North Korean refugees.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean is an isolate (assuming you don't accept it as Altaic). Wikipedia says, &quot;With over 78 million speakers, Korean has more speakers than all other language isolates combined.&quot; So Korean wins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Chinese Sign Language [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=csl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;csl&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia lists it as an isolate&lt;/a&gt;. There are probably other local sign language isolates, presumably undocumented or poorly documented. ISO 639-3 considers it two languages, the other being &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=hks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;List&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate#Australasia_and_Oceania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's partial list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-05T22:57:49.677" LastActivityDate="2013-01-05T22:57:49.677" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3035" CreationDate="2013-01-06T03:29:34.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following remarks might be interesting when reflecting on why such text-to-speech software is not presently available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phonetic component of a computer system&#xA;  may use an orthographic text, but it does not really require one. Chinese characters would do just&#xA;  as well, as long as there was a character for each possible English syllable. The way most speech&#xA;  synthesis systems work is to search through a vast store of several hours of recorded speech and&#xA;  find the longest possible sequences that match the desired output. In practice this is done with &#xA;  reference to something like a segmental transcription of words, but there is nothing in the theory&#xA;  of concatenative speech synthesis, as this process is called, that requires traditional phonetic&#xA;  segments. In fact it virtually never uses them. The smallest lengths of sounds that are ever pulled&#xA;  out of the store are diphones — the last half of one segment and the first half of another — and&#xA;  even these are used only very occasionally, when there is no matching word or syllable in store.&#xA;  Concatenative synthesis nearly  always manages to  join  whole syllables or even whole long&#xA;  words together. Listeners to high quality synthetic speech agree that the phonetic component of a&#xA;  language generator works quite well by simply finding appropriate bits of stored sounds and then &#xA;  joining  them together. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/PLfeaturesParameters.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ladefoged 2005&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also tangentially relevant, and a good and quick read regardless of one's familiarity with phonetics is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/qpsr/2005/2005_47_1_009-019.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2005 interview with Gunnar Fant&lt;/a&gt;, who was very influential in the early development of digital speech transmission and speech synthesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2013-01-06T03:48:02.530" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T03:48:02.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3036" CreationDate="2013-01-06T14:00:52.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Dutch, I consider the example (&quot;at liever eens wat minder&quot;) to be non-standard, though there may well be dialects in which this is grammatical. Still, it is true that standard Dutch has a 'past tense imperative' (or whatever grammarians really call it). These are formed in a somewhat different manner: &quot;Had liever wat minder gegeten&quot;, literally &quot;had rather eaten a bit less&quot;, meaning &quot;you had better eaten less&quot;. This is a common construction, the most frequent specimen probably being &quot;Had dat meteen gezegd!&quot; (&quot;If only you had said that right away!&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1649" LastActivityDate="2013-01-06T14:00:52.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2013-01-06T22:10:26.340" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is unique for its &quot;hieroglyphic reading&quot; feature. All other languages either use ideograms (hieroglyphs) for writing or use alphabetic/syllabary spelling that can be read following certain rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is unique in that while it uses usual letters, it has no general reading rules that could lead a reader to unambiguous pronunciation. A reader of English reads not single letters or syllables, but the whole words at once: to learn reading in English one has to remember the reading and spelling of the whole words. In this quality English is close to hyerogliphic languages where the reader or writer has to remember pictures for the whole words. Although words in English are formally composed of letters, they do not play a similar role as in other languages, rather they are used as parts of a word's picture which should be remembered as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T18:41:29.787" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T18:41:29.787" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2013-01-07T02:58:28.043" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two forms are not equivalent.  It is true that anywhere the &lt;em&gt;-se&lt;/em&gt; forms are used in Spanish, the &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; forms can be used, but the opposite is not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while  both these pairs are fully equivalent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No estaba seguro de que &lt;strong&gt;viniera/viniese&lt;/strong&gt;. [both imperfect subjunctive forms freely interchangeable]&lt;br&gt;(I wasn’t sure he was coming.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Después de que &lt;strong&gt;llegara/llegase&lt;/strong&gt;, nos dijo que no podía quedarse. [both imperfect subjunctive forms freely interchangeable]&lt;br&gt;(After he arrived, he told us he couldn’t stay.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, notice how in those two examples, even though Spanish requires a subjunctive form there, you do not use a subjunctive when translating it into English.  Other places you do, but not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two places where you cannot use an &lt;em&gt;-se&lt;/em&gt; form.  These are when the &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; form is acting as &lt;strong&gt;something other than an imperfect subjunctive;&lt;/strong&gt; to wit, as either a literary pluperfect indicative or as a polite conditional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although it is a learnèd, literary tense, because the &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; forms exactly map to the Latin pluperfect indicative, they can also fulfill that same rôle in very formal written Spanish. This is interesting because it allows the old “purely inflectional” tense to replace the now-standard “analytical tense”. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Spanish/History/Subjunctive/Spanish-Subjunctive_Evolution-04.html&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apenas &lt;strong&gt;había cerrado&lt;/strong&gt; la puerta cuando me llamó. [analytic tense; standard form]&lt;br&gt;(Hardly had I closed the door when he called me.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apenas &lt;strong&gt;cerrara&lt;/strong&gt; la puerta cuando me llamó. [inflectional tense; very formal written form]&lt;br&gt;(same)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; form can serve as an alternative to the conditional when used for polite requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;¿&lt;strong&gt;Querrías&lt;/strong&gt; cerrarme la puerta, por favor? [conditional form]&lt;br&gt;(Would you like to close the door for me, please?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;¿&lt;strong&gt;Quisieras&lt;/strong&gt; cerrarme la puerta, por favor? [alternate polite conditional]&lt;br&gt;(same)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form is most often used in strong verbs like &lt;em&gt;quisieras, pudieras, debieras&lt;/em&gt; — basically &lt;em&gt;would you, could you, should you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both those two situations, you cannot use the &lt;em&gt;-se&lt;/em&gt; form, because the &lt;em&gt;-se&lt;/em&gt; form functions only as an imperfect subjunctive.  It never functions as a pluperfect indicative or as a conditional, whereas the &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; form can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another rarely seen literary tense sometimes occurs with the conjunction &lt;em&gt;apenas&lt;/em&gt;.   This is an analytic tense composed of the auxiliary in the preterite rather than in the imperfect.  This is called the &lt;em&gt;pretérito anterior&lt;/em&gt;, and occurs only after certain conjunctions, and even then almost only ever in writing.  It is used when the other clause is in the preterite, and you need something that is &lt;strong&gt;more preterite&lt;/strong&gt;, so that it happens before — and in practice, usually &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the normal pluperfect is an imperfect tense, not a perfect (completed) one, so the auxiliary is placed into a real preterite, making a new analytic tense.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Una vez que me &lt;strong&gt;hube quitado&lt;/strong&gt; la camisa, me sentí muchísimo más cómodo.&lt;br&gt;(Once I’d taken my shirt off, I felt way more comfortable.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="707" LastActivityDate="2013-01-07T02:58:28.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-07T14:19:29.510" Score="3" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it not be nice to have a site from which people can listen to&#xA;different phrases in different languages with each phrase having the&#xA;following characteristics, in any combination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sample Sentence (describes the meaning of the sentence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name of Person Speaking (used to differentiate among speakers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language and Dialect (defines the written form of the words in the sentence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accent (local, or foreign and in the latter case original languages(s)&#xA;and dialects(s) of the speaker, thus leading to mixed accents as well.&#xA;Most importantly an accent defines not only the sound but also the rhythm&#xA;of the words and letters therein pronounced within the sentence, again,&#xA;something that can take some time to get used to.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intonation (happy, sad, fed up, reassuring, complaining, enthusiastic, surprised, etc...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sexuality of the speaker (such as, for instance, any combination of&#xA;not male, male-, male, male+ with not female, female-, female, female+)&#xA;once again defined in a somewhat flexible manner according to the speaker's&#xA;self perception.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speaker pitch (soprano, alto, etc...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other physical voice attributes (e.g. having caught a cold, having a sore throat, etc...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sentence pronunciation in IPA or other phone/phoneme transliteration system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optionally, a list of sentences which are not the sentence being uttered&#xA;but that the listener could confuse in place of what is being said.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this site people could also be allowed to upload their mp3 or wav sound files so as&#xA;to contribute sample sentences, or conversations, which the user of the site can then&#xA;listen to at a later time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of such a site? If not then it could be a good idea to construct one&#xA;like this? Such a site could be a great aid in allowing learners to practice with&#xA;different languages, dialects, and accents etc... as described above, one more step&#xA;towards preserving the linguistic diversity of our people, places, and world&#xA;while learning about them in a fun, accessible, and easy manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1653" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-01-07T14:25:40.390" LastActivityDate="2013-02-10T22:05:09.380" Title="Getting familiar with accents" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3047" CreationDate="2013-01-07T23:55:17.263" Score="22" ViewCount="2375" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages with grammatical gender that has (almost) no morphological relation between the words and the genders(e.g. French), how do they determine the gender of a new word that has been introduced/created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that&#xA;as people don't speak based on the grammar but the grammar is based on how people speak, grammatical genders are determined based on in what gender people use the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, How do &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; know in what gender they are to treat the introduced/created word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends a lot on the language, but if you know any example of any language, I'd be glad to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1618" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T18:51:42.603" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T13:24:50.127" Title="In languages with grammatical gender, how do they determine the gender when a new word has been created?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-01-08T04:04:09.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's based on how the borrowed/new word sounds compared to existing words. For example, in French words ending in -age are typically male. But in German, the borrowed word &quot;garage&quot; became &quot;die garage&quot; - female. (E.g. die Frage, die Lage)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1654" LastEditorUserId="1654" LastEditDate="2013-01-08T04:10:28.857" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T04:10:28.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-01-08T04:58:04.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker, let me try to describe it. To be most specific, I will refer Ukrainian and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keyword: &quot;a &lt;strong&gt;city&lt;/strong&gt; of New York&quot;; &lt;code&gt;city&lt;/code&gt; is masculine, hence most often, city names are masculine as well;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronunciation: words ending with consonant - masculine; ending with &lt;code&gt;-e&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-o&lt;/code&gt; - usually neutral; &lt;code&gt;-a&lt;/code&gt; - feminine;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR, just if you are curious to details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let me remind that grammatical gender (GG) has no relation to lexical meaning of the word; you have just to remember GG of each noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, although there are three formal GG, there are nouns that are always singular, plural or dual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most loanwords belong to the following groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No declension: coffee, cocoa, Bourdeau (wine), Euro (currency), etc;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Toponyms: America, Tokyo, Mississippi, Himalaya;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abbreviations (OUN, USA);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noun groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naturally plural or paired items (types of shoes);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General rule&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those ending on &lt;code&gt;-o&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-e&lt;/code&gt; (many French and Italian words) usually become &lt;strong&gt;neutral&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ending with &lt;code&gt;-a&lt;/code&gt; become &lt;strong&gt;feminine&lt;/strong&gt;;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ending with a plosive consonant become &lt;strong&gt;masculine&lt;/strong&gt;;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ending with &quot;soft sign&quot; (pronounced with a palatalized final consonant) so &lt;strong&gt;feminine&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nouns that do not decline&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They usually used to be proper nouns that later started to mean common terms (whisky, Champagne, Bourdeau, brandy, Euro). &lt;em&gt;Note they have retained capitalization in English, but in Slavic languages they are regular words, unlike toponyms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There's no certain rule, and GG is assigned according to similar existing loanword nouns. For instance, most &lt;em&gt;non-declining&lt;/em&gt; words borrowed from Romance languages are &lt;strong&gt;neuter&lt;/strong&gt; due to their pronunciation (ending with &lt;code&gt;-e&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;-o&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many exceptions, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RU, UA: &lt;code&gt;whisky&lt;/code&gt; can be either &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;neutr&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RU: &lt;code&gt;кофе&lt;/code&gt; (coffee) is masculine due to historical reasons: there was an older version &lt;code&gt;кофий&lt;/code&gt;, ending with a consonant;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Naturally plural or paired items&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, they are plural (grammatically, plural and dual are the same). Note that in most declensions, there is no difference between masculine+plural, feminine+plural, and neutral+plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moccasin - shoes, naturally paired;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jeans - naturally plural;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noun groups&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one word has no declension while the other has, the GG of the whole group is given by the word that has declension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Web-page&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;Web&lt;/code&gt; has no declension while &lt;code&gt;page&lt;/code&gt; is a common word (&lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Toponyms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GG is given according to what category the noun belongs to. Look again at the rule above and think of &quot;the &lt;strong&gt;city&lt;/strong&gt; of New York&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mississippi&lt;/code&gt; is a river; river is &lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt;, hence, &lt;code&gt;Mississippi&lt;/code&gt; is as well;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ontario&lt;/code&gt; is a lake; &lt;code&gt;lake&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;neutral&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;San-Francisco&lt;/code&gt; is a city; &lt;code&gt;city&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of exceptions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hudson&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Rhein&lt;/code&gt;, although &lt;code&gt;river&lt;/code&gt;s (fem), are &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt; - probably, due to ending with plosive consonant;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Philadelphia&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Nevada&lt;/code&gt;, are states (&lt;code&gt;state&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt;), is &lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt;, again, probably, due to it ends with &lt;code&gt;-a&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RU: &lt;code&gt;Vienna&lt;/code&gt; is a city (must be masc), but is &lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UA: &lt;code&gt;city&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;neutral&lt;/strong&gt;, but it does not apply on most city names; For example, &lt;code&gt;Vienna&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;Відень&lt;/code&gt; ['videnʲ], and it is &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Apache&lt;/code&gt; is tribe (must be neutral), but is &lt;strong&gt;plural&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abbreviations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GG is given by the keyword:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OUN stands for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Organization&lt;/strong&gt; of United Nations&quot;, the highlighted keyword is &lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt; (all words ending with &lt;code&gt;-ion&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;fem&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;USA stands for &quot;United &lt;strong&gt;States&lt;/strong&gt; of America&quot;, and it is &lt;strong&gt;plural&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TCP/IP is an &quot;Internet &lt;strong&gt;protocol&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;masc&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, if the loanword does not apparently belong to any of the groups above, it is often considered by its category or keyword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if that was too boring, I have good news: there are lots of exceptions. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T13:24:50.127" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T13:24:50.127" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-01-08T05:13:57.123" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;strong&gt;source language already has genders&lt;/strong&gt;, then they will often be taken along to the host language, provided that people in the host language know a little bit about the source language. But there are countless other subtle, complex factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dutch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has a &lt;strong&gt;neuter&lt;/strong&gt; article (&lt;em&gt;het&lt;/em&gt;) and the fused/common gender &lt;strong&gt;masculine-femine&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;). There are no definite rules for borrowed words, and we never learned any such rules. I would know if there were any, but no: genders are assigned subconsciously. For existing Dutch words, there are some rules, but I think perhaps half the words have genders that feel arbitrary (though fixed) to us. For example, a person will nearly always be masculine or feminine, and words on &lt;em&gt;-heid&lt;/em&gt; are always feminine; but for most other words you just have to know. The difference between masculine and feminine only comes up with possessive adjectives (&lt;em&gt;the fork and his?/her? prongs&lt;/em&gt;) and personal pronouns (&lt;em&gt;not that fork: I saw her?/him? lying over there&lt;/em&gt;). Colloquially, we usually use masculine pronouns for &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; words; in writing, I often have to look up the gender of a word, unfortunately. In the south and in Belgium, I think they don't use masculine by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we have a word &lt;em&gt;het huis&lt;/em&gt; in Dutch (&amp;quot;the house&amp;quot;), English &lt;em&gt;safehouse&lt;/em&gt; will become &lt;em&gt;het safehouse&lt;/em&gt;, as it is very &lt;strong&gt;similar&lt;/strong&gt;. Usually the similarity is less direct; then a word with a similar &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; may be picked as the example. For instance, suppose that Japanese *&lt;em&gt;inko&lt;/em&gt; means house (I'm just making this up), then I am more likely to say &lt;em&gt;het inko&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a second factor is how the word &lt;strong&gt;sounds&lt;/strong&gt; compared to words that sound remotely similar. Words on -o are probably more often masculine in Dutch, because of the many Italian and Spanish words on -o, like impresario, virtuoso, amigo, gringo, etc., so I am more likely to say &lt;em&gt;de inko&lt;/em&gt; because of the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, I think many languages have a kind of &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;default&amp;quot; gender for (foreign) words&lt;/strong&gt;. In German, I was taught that newly borrowed words are normally feminine. So it was easy to learn &lt;em&gt;die CD&lt;/em&gt; and such (although, if this rule is valid in German, there must be many categories of exceptions). In Dutch, masculine and feminine have all but merged, that is, they have the same article, &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;. For that reason, &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; is much more frequent than &lt;em&gt;het&lt;/em&gt; (neuter), so that &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; is more likely to be chosen for new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourthly, there is the possibility that the gender is taken from a &lt;strong&gt;third language&lt;/strong&gt;, if that language has already adopted the word and assigned a gender to it. Dutch might follow German in some cases; I don't know how often this really happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To all these factors may be apportioned different weights in different circumstances, and they are somehow weighed by the subconscious of the first people who use the word, until at some point it has acquired a commonly accepted gender. It is often unpredictable in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that it is perfectly possible for a borrowed word to &lt;strong&gt;remain of uncertain gender&lt;/strong&gt; indefinitely. We even have some ancient native (inherited) words that we still bicker over (in a good-natured manner, of course). Now a few practical examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch &lt;em&gt;het net&lt;/em&gt; =&amp;gt; &lt;strong&gt;het Internet.&lt;/strong&gt; Since &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; means the same thing in Dutch as in English, this one was easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Het koekje&lt;/em&gt; =&amp;gt; &lt;strong&gt;de/het cookie.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not sure about this one; I would probably say &lt;em&gt;de cookie&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps it is too new, but people do talk about this on a regular basis, have done so for at least a decade, and yet it is still not entirely decided. One would expect such a strong similarity to the Dutch word to lead to &lt;em&gt;het cookie&lt;/em&gt;, and yet I would say &lt;em&gt;de cookie&lt;/em&gt;. I feel that perhaps the default gender &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; is just too strong in Dutch. Or perhaps the fact that it is a small object: perhaps those have an extra strong tendency to be &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; words? Hard to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De router, de server:&lt;/strong&gt; we have no similar words, but words on &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; usually indicate an agent, a person even, and people are normally not neuter, so definitely &lt;em&gt;de router, de server&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De absence&lt;/strong&gt;: this is the French word, pronounced as in French. It was adopted into Dutch long ago, so I did not witness its introduction. My guess is that the ending &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; had a strong influence, and simply the fact that it is obviously feminine in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Het communisme&lt;/strong&gt;: this probably came from French. For some reason, (nearly?) all words on &lt;em&gt;-isme&lt;/em&gt; are neuter in Dutch. I have no idea why, because I think they are masculine in all other languages, including French, which doesn't have a neuter gender at any rate. They come from Latin -&lt;em&gt;ismus&lt;/em&gt;, which is masculine, from Greek &lt;em&gt;-ismos&lt;/em&gt;, also masculine. Very strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De coating&lt;/strong&gt; (as in paint). There is no Dutch equivalent. The ending &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; is nearly always feminine in Dutch for non-persons, so &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; (cognate to German &lt;em&gt;-ung&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De axolotl&lt;/strong&gt;: nothing at all sounds like or resembles an axolotl, but I think animals are by default &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;, because they are agents (even though we do have plenty of neuter animals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De tsunami&lt;/strong&gt;: probably &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; because &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; sounds a bit like Italian or Latin masculine? There is also &lt;em&gt;de golf&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;the wave&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;de vloed&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;the flood&amp;quot;. I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Het DNA&lt;/strong&gt;: hard to say. Perhaps because &lt;em&gt;Acid&lt;/em&gt; was translated subconsciously as &lt;em&gt;het zuur&lt;/em&gt; by the first Dutch scientists? Because substances are more likely to be &lt;em&gt;het&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T17:18:05.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3043" CreationDate="2013-01-08T13:03:43.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a website for accents: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.forvo.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't have sentences. (I think the website would become unmanageable if they did.) I don't know if they have idiomatic phrases, but they have quite a few single words and compound word phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can contribute by submitting their own samples, and by rating samples provided by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/bottle/#en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This one&lt;/a&gt;, for example, has the word 'bottle' as pronounced by Brits, Americans and Canadians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/89/screenshot080113140741rb.png/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://imageshack.us/a/img89/1108/screenshot080113140741rb.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2013-01-08T14:18:15.580" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T14:18:15.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-01-08T14:02:01.267" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian anything ending -а is feminine, anything ending -о and -е are neuter and anything ending with a consonant is masculine. Abbreviations case is determined based on the main noun in the abbreviation (this is the rule), but sometimes the speakers also apply the usual rules to the abbreviation as well, that is determine the gender based on the pronunciation, for instance &quot;НАТО&quot; (&quot;NATO&quot;) is often used as neuter because of the -O ending, ВУЗ already became masculine this way. This happens mostly with familiar, often-used abbreviations which gradually become accepted as nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only remaining cases are the words ending with -и, -у whose gender is usually determined by the class to which the noun refers (city, river, organization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple exceptions though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-01-08T14:07:02.943" LastActivityDate="2013-01-08T14:07:02.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3055" CreationDate="2013-01-08T20:12:59.653" Score="10" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in my mind, language can be generally considered as a sequence of paragraphs, each being a sequence of sentences, each being a sequence of words, each being a sequence of letters. I understand that there is a science for each level of this hierarchy, from graphology to rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these fields? How do they connect with each other? In other words, how'd you classify each of these errors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Awirit&lt;/em&gt; a wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Letters are joined non-sensically)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Youre&lt;/em&gt; a wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Letters are joined incorrectly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Your&lt;/em&gt; wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Word exists but is used incorrectly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Words exist but are used incorrectly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Sentence is correct but words are joined nonsensically)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are a &lt;em&gt;mother wonderful&lt;/em&gt;. I am so proud of you. (Words exist but are ordered incorrectly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are a wonderful mother. &lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; I am so proud of you. (Sentences are correct but joined incorrectly, at least according to Italian rules.*)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're a wonderful mother. &lt;em&gt;I play tennis.&lt;/em&gt; (Sentences are correct but joined non-sensically)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*In Italian, sentences can't start with prepositions. I used this example for lack of better ideas, but I wrote it in English anyway for your reading pleasure.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and what about languages like the Japanese that don't have letters as we know them to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="955" LastEditorUserId="955" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T13:34:17.550" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T13:34:17.550" Title="What is the hierarchy for studies inside linguistics, or: How many different kinds of error can one make in language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2792" CreationDate="2013-01-09T07:29:50.460" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;na&quot; is also a relative construction, not a genitive construction, just like the &quot;-i&quot; adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page is the one your looking for: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/60&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/60&lt;/a&gt;. According to this page, languages that uses relative clauses for semantic adjectives would include Tagalog, Thai and Cantonese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elaborating on Tagalog using your examples :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;blue flower &gt; &lt;strong&gt;bughaw &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; bulaklak&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;bulaklak &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; bughaw&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[bughaw = blue; bulaklak = flower]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;beautiful bird  &gt; &lt;strong&gt;maganda &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; ibon&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;ibon &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; maganda&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[maganda = beautiful; ibon = bird]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only adjective construction in Tagalog. Additionally, the order of the adjective and the noun is not fixed or reversible. Most Philippine languages behave in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T07:29:50.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3052" CreationDate="2013-01-09T16:30:47.607" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are on the track of something important, but you are confusing a number of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to say is that language is not written language: written language is a highly divergent subset of language, with a lot of special properties not shared by language in general. Language does not have letters: it has sounds (or in the case of sign language, signs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The levels you are talking about do exist in languages in general (except that we talk about sounds rather than letters). But there are more fundamental distinctions that can usefully be made. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguists will recognise at least the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; is about the actual sounds that are spoken and heard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is about the patterns of sounds in a particular language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt; is about the shapes of words in a language, and how in many languages the shape changes for different grammatical functions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt; is about how a particular language puts words together to make sentences or larger structures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt; is about the meanings of words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;discourse analysis&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; are about how we know what we 'mean' when we talk (eg &quot;If you like.&quot; can mean &quot;I don't really want to&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other areas of study, and different theoretical frameworks; but if you look some of these up you will get some idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T16:30:47.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3052" CreationDate="2013-01-09T17:29:53.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;See Colin Fine's response for a general answer on levels of analysis in linguistics and the object of linguistic study (i.e. not writing). I'll try to address some of your more specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other words, how'd you classify each of these errors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.) Awirit a wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Letters are joined non-sensically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonology studies which sound combinations you may find in an individual language. &lt;em&gt;Awirit&lt;/em&gt; looks like a valid English sound sequence to me, but it just happens not be associated with a meaning. So let's say that if someone made such a mistake, they might have problems retrieving words from their mental lexicons. This would be a case of language pathology that might especially interest neurolinguists or psycholinguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.) Youre a wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Letters are joined incorrectly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typo or spelling mistake. This is not within the domain of linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.) Your wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Word exists but is used incorrectly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, typo or spelling mistake, nothing to do with linguistics. You also omitted the article &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; here, which might be a question for semantics. Semantics defines the meaning of individual words and how they combine to give you the meaning of sentences. With your missing article in 3, semantics may tell you that it cannot form the meaning of the entire sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4.) You are the wonderful mother. I am so proud of you. (Words exist but are used incorrectly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're at the level of &quot;words being joined&quot; (as opposed to sounds being joined, as in 1), you're probably going to be talking about syntax or semantics. I'm assuming again that you're using &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, which makes this similar to 3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5.) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Sentence is correct but are joined nonsensically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again semantics. &lt;em&gt;Colorless green&lt;/em&gt; forms a contradiction in the semantic representation of the sentence. &lt;em&gt;Sleep&lt;/em&gt; may impose an animacy restriction on its argument which is not met by &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6.) You are a mother wonderful. I am so proud of you. (Words exist but are ordered incorrectly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, syntax deals with word order. Where the adjective is found relative to the noun it modifies may depend on the default ordering between heads and modifiers in any individual language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7.) You are a wonderful mother. And I am so proud of you. (Sentences are correct but joined incorrectly, at least according to Italian rules.*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know Italian, but this sounds like a prescriptive rule to me. This is to say that people may very well say this, but it is considered &quot;incorrect&quot; or &quot;uneducated&quot;. Linguistics doesn't describe how people &quot;should&quot; speak, but how they can/do speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;8.) You're a wonderful mother. I play tennis. (Sentences are correct but joined non-sensically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discourse structure. Depending on your view, this could be dealt with in semantics, pragmatics, or separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...and what about languages like the Japanese that don't have letters as we know them to begin with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists don't care much about writing systems (except historical linguists, since that's all they have to work with). Japanese is very much like any other language in that it has sounds, words and utterances. To illustrate the point further, speakers of languages with no writing systems and illiterate speakers are just as interesting to linguistics as literate English or Japanese speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T18:56:05.137" LastActivityDate="2013-01-09T18:56:05.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-09T21:10:09.740" Score="6" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;In different forms, the Latin root &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; &quot;head&quot; appears with different vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a-u&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caput#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;caput&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (nominative singular);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a-i&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caput#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;capitis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (genitive singular), &lt;em&gt;capitī&lt;/em&gt; (dative singular), &lt;em&gt;capita&lt;/em&gt; (nominative plural), and so on;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i-i&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/praeceps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;praecipitem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (accusative singular) &quot;headlong&quot;, and so on; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/praecipito#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;praecipitō&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I throw headlong&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e-0&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/praeceps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;praeceps&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (nominative singular) &quot;headlong&quot; (coming from &lt;em&gt;-cept-s&lt;/em&gt;, as we may assume);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i-u&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/caput#Compos.C3.A9s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;oc-ciput&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sin-ciput&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these alternations an expression of a general rule of Latin grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they reflect some Proto-Indo-European alternation rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from the point of view of universal grammar (linguistic theories with more predictive sterngth/explanatory force, such as optimality theory), can these alternations be explained as a consequence of certain universal (cross-linguistically valid) phonological constraints? (In which other languages are these constraints active too?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="443" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2013-01-10T18:52:13.030" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T18:52:13.030" Title="What rule governs the vowel alternations in Latin caput/capit-/-cep(t)-/-cipit-/-ciput?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-09T22:20:01.063" Score="3" ViewCount="4313" Body="&lt;p&gt;The theme can be heard here at youtube &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;amp;v=T6tWC-SnC2U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;amp;v=T6tWC-SnC2U&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The music and &quot;lere-lere&quot; in the beginning come from Retirantes song, but the words starting from 0:08 &lt;em&gt;ARE NOT&lt;/em&gt;. What language is this? It's not Portugal. Someone transcribed the passage like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ungazun garunge ungazun garunge, &#xA;ungazun garunge ungazun garunge. &#xA;Zambele garunge ungazun garunge, &#xA;zambele garunge ungazun garunge&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's obviously very rough and not correct/misheard. The soap opera in question is about sugar cane plantation and black slaves in Brazil, so it's possible that the words have something to do with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1661" LastEditorUserId="1661" LastEditDate="2013-01-09T22:33:30.990" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T09:42:53.047" Title="Language used in Escrava Isaura opening theme" Tags="&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3058" CreationDate="2013-01-10T04:16:22.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song appears in 2 versions, one in Portuguese, and the other in the unknown language. The Portuguese lyrics are (omitting repeated lines):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lerê, lerê, lerê, lerê, lerê&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vida de negro é difícil, é difícil como o quê&#xA;  Eu quero morrer de noite, na tocaia me matar&#xA;  Eu quero morrer de açoite se tu, negra, me deixar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vida de negro é difícil, é difícil como o quê&#xA;  Meu amor, eu vou-me embora, nessa terra vou morrer&#xA;  Um dia não vou mais ver, nunca mais eu vou te ver&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a reasonable assumption that the unknown-language lyrics are a translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tvrlive.com/abertura-novela-escrava-isaura/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This guy claims it's Yoruba&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lere Lere, Lere-Lere-Lere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lere Lere, Lere-Lere-Lere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unga zunga unguê&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unga zunga unguê (bis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tanguelê za unguê&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unga zunga unguê&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tanguelê za unguê&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unga zunga unguê&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nagô nation, of people? from Benin to southwest of Nigeria, who spoke Yoruba. Brazilian traficants trade offering tobacco, powder, rifles in change of … people … prisioners of african tribal wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/A_Dictionary_of_the_Yoruba_Language.html?id=UuUNAAAAYAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one old Yoruba dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, I do find some near-matches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tangala - a bird&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tankalẹ: to spread about, communicate, publish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lera (v., adj.) (be) strong, healthy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kirishi.ru/?myforum_themeread_4488&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another guy gives a purported translation&lt;/a&gt;, without identifying the language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Lere Lere, Lere-Lere-Lere        (Режем, режем, резь-резь-резь),&#xA;Lere Lere, Lere-Lere-Lere        (Режем, режем, резь-резь-резь),&#xA;Unga zunga ungue                 (Высокий сладкий тростник)&#xA;Unga zunga unga e                (Ой, высокий сладкий тростник)&#xA;Tanguele za ungue                     (Гля, какой высокий)&#xA;Unga zunga                           (Высокий и сладкий)&#xA;          Zunga e                                  (Ой, сладкий!)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian text is a song about cutting reeds. It seems to have nothing to do with the Yoruba words or the Portuguese lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T04:16:22.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3057" CreationDate="2013-01-10T04:40:55.143" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of these can be explained by synchronic rules of Latin grammar, at least not in the classical age. Nor does this seem to be regular Proto-Indo-European ablaut, where one would expect something like **cp-/cep-/cop-*. Somehow many different allomorphs of &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; exist; but allomorphs of other stems are plentiful in Latin and in most other languages. Many combinations of these allomorphs appear to be possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cap-/cep-/cip-&lt;/strong&gt; (semantic root)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-ut-/-it-&lt;/strong&gt; (suffix)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &lt;strong&gt;nominative singular &lt;em&gt;-ut&lt;/em&gt; v. stem &lt;em&gt;-it-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, nominatives singular are normally different from the other forms of words or suffixes of the 3rd declension. &lt;em&gt;Homo, hominis; rex, regis; munus, muneris;&lt;/em&gt; etc. Each nominative can probably be explained, and there are patterns, but I don't know about the &lt;em&gt;-u-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; specifically. And &lt;em&gt;-ud/-ut&lt;/em&gt; is probably a Proto-Indo-European suffix, probably with its own rules. I have consulted &lt;em&gt;Walde-Hoffmann&lt;/em&gt; (1938) and &lt;em&gt;Ernout-Meillet&lt;/em&gt; (1959), but I couldn't find a real explanation for &lt;em&gt;-ut-&lt;/em&gt; v. &lt;em&gt;-it-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;caput, capitis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the same &lt;em&gt;-u/i-&lt;/em&gt; allomorphs seem to exist in a Germanic word that is probably cognate to &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; (so says &lt;a href=&quot;http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN%20/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&amp;amp;wdb=EWN&amp;amp;id=ewn005911&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philippa (2004–2009)&lt;/a&gt;, although the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (2nd ed.) is sceptical). Dutch &lt;em&gt;hoofd&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;Haupt&lt;/em&gt; come from Proto-Germanic **haub-id-*, whereas Old English &lt;em&gt;heafod&lt;/em&gt;, modern &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt;, and Old Norse &lt;em&gt;haufuþ&lt;/em&gt; come from **haub-ud-*. According to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, this &lt;em&gt;-id/ud-&lt;/em&gt; constitutes &quot;suffix ablaut&quot;. One would expect the Germanic and Latin suffixes to be cognates too, but, alas, etymological dictionaries rarely explain all the affixes, and I couldn't find it. Note that there is also a Germanic allomorph **hab-* leading to Proto-Germanic **hab-ud-*, Old English &lt;em&gt;hafud&lt;/em&gt;, and Old Norse &lt;em&gt;höfuþ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-cip-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;praecipito&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, an &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; in the first syllable of a verb normally changed into &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; after a prefix, in a certain phase of Latin. The same applies to &lt;em&gt;-ae-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt;, but not to &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-u-&lt;/em&gt;, as far as I know. The length of the vowel was generally preserved, so that long &lt;em&gt;-ā-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ae-&lt;/em&gt; become long &lt;em&gt;-ī-&lt;/em&gt;, but short &lt;em&gt;-ă-&lt;/em&gt; becomes short &lt;em&gt;-ĭ-&lt;/em&gt;. Note that vowels did not (always) change in words formed in later phases of Latin. Nor did they change in the perfect stems of verbs. Hence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maneo - remaneo - immanens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paro - reparo - apparans&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Present)&lt;/em&gt; capio - recipio - incipiens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Perfect)&lt;/em&gt; cepi - recepi - receptus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Present)&lt;/em&gt; ago - redigo - redigiens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Perfect)&lt;/em&gt; egi - redegi - redactus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may explain &lt;em&gt;-cip-&lt;/em&gt; after many suffixes. However, it is possible that it is simply an older, unexplained allomorph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;praeceps&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, this appears to be an allomorph that already existed in prehistoric Latin or earlier. (&lt;em&gt;Cep-&lt;/em&gt; in the perfect is probably a lengthening of the vowel and explained through other mechanisms, but this is not certain.) The dictionaries above have no real explanation. It is possible that the &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; is due to contamination from words like &lt;em&gt;princeps&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;auceps&lt;/em&gt;, which probably came from the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; grade of the root of &lt;em&gt;capio&lt;/em&gt;.  According to &lt;em&gt;Ernout-Meillet&lt;/em&gt;, the root of &lt;em&gt;capio&lt;/em&gt; had three allomorphs that seem to display regular Proto-Indo-European ablaut: **kēp-, &lt;em&gt;kōp-,&lt;/em&gt; and **kəp-* (from which &lt;em&gt;cap-&lt;/em&gt;). Notice that the stem of &lt;em&gt;princeps&lt;/em&gt; etc. is &lt;em&gt;-cip-&lt;/em&gt;, whereas that of &lt;em&gt;praeceps&lt;/em&gt; etc. is &lt;em&gt;-cipit-.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; is only in the nominative singular, and it is not surprising in general that the nominative singular should be irregular. &lt;em&gt;Pontifex&lt;/em&gt; (gen. &lt;em&gt;pontificis&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;maleficus&lt;/em&gt; come to mind, from &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;make&quot;. Somehow both &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; occur. Compare also &lt;em&gt;pars, partis&lt;/em&gt; leading to &lt;em&gt;expers, expertis&lt;/em&gt;: the same nominative &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt;, but no &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; in the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &lt;strong&gt;disappearance of the suffix&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;anceps&lt;/em&gt;, it is possible that it was syncopated, but it is more likely that the suffix was simply not used in all words derived from what may have been Proto-Indo-European **kh₂p*-/**kap-* (the origin of Proto-Indo-European **kap-ut* is not quite certain: **kh₂p*-/**kap-* may have come from a pre-Proto-Indo-European substrate language). This root meant something like &quot;head&quot;, and later reflexes include some forms with the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ut/-ud&lt;/em&gt;, others with &lt;em&gt;-elo-&lt;/em&gt; (Greek &lt;em&gt;kephalê&lt;/em&gt;), and probably others again with no suffix at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that this root may be related to &lt;em&gt;capio, habeo,&lt;/em&gt; and English/Germanic &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;/etc. (so suggests Walde), which come from a Proto-Indo-European root **kap-* (from **kh₂p-*/**kəp-*), or **gʰabʰ-* (from **gʰh₂bʰ-*) / **gʰebʰ-*, but this is uncertain. (These Proto-Indo-European roots may be variants on and reflexes of a pre-Proto-Indo-European substrate root, so suggests Philippa, &lt;em&gt;Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands&lt;/em&gt; (2004–2009), &lt;a href=&quot;http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN%20/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&amp;amp;wdb=EWN&amp;amp;id=ewn005673&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'hebben'&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words derived from the &lt;em&gt;capio&lt;/em&gt; root exist that mean something like &quot;recepticle, container&quot; (notice &lt;em&gt;cep&lt;/em&gt;-), and a semantic shift from pottery to head is a common phenomenon. Cf. Latin &lt;em&gt;testa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(piece of) earthen pot&quot;, from &lt;em&gt;torreo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;burn&quot; (related &lt;em&gt;toast&lt;/em&gt;), which lead to French &lt;em&gt;tête&lt;/em&gt; &quot;head&quot; and similar words in other Romance languages. Cf. also Latin &lt;em&gt;cuppa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cup&quot;, probably from a non-Proto-Indo-European language (&lt;a href=&quot;http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN%20/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&amp;amp;wdb=EWN&amp;amp;id=ewn007179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philippa&lt;/a&gt;), which probably led to English &lt;em&gt;cup&lt;/em&gt;, Dutch &lt;em&gt;kop&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cup; head (informal)&quot;, German &lt;em&gt;Kopf&lt;/em&gt; &quot;head (informal)&quot;. The original Proto-Indo-European root for &quot;head&quot; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/19926/3036&quot;&gt;**ker-*&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;head, horn&quot;, from which &lt;em&gt;horn, cerebrum, cervix, unicorn, triceratops&lt;/em&gt;; somehow the central word for &quot;head&quot; was replaced often in the successor languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T08:28:35.010" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-01-10T07:10:55.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Swedish there are two grammatical genders, &lt;em&gt;neutrum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;utrum&lt;/em&gt;. Most nouns are categorized as &lt;em&gt;utrum&lt;/em&gt; which is a merge of masculine and feminine genders in modern Swedish. New words are almost always &lt;em&gt;utrum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastActivityDate="2013-01-10T07:10:55.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-11T23:40:28.130" Score="6" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excuse my virginity in linguistics, but it seems to me that phonetic alphabets are &quot;only&quot; protocols for audio compression into visual input/output media, optimized for human throat sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that when a person gets a letter or word through visual input, her image recognition cortex sends virtual audio to her auditory cortex and only then she transforms these sounds into abstract concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that this works in such an inefficient way because speech was invented long before writing, and early writing functioned as audio recordings of speech. Evolution often makes such inefficient systems, having to improvise &quot;on the go&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: does auditory cortex participate in reading process when human reads &lt;strong&gt;non-phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; hieroglyphs? Or in this case hieroglyphic visual input bypasses the auditory cortex and transforms directly into abstract concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1665" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T07:30:40.363" Title="Is audio-processing (auditory) brain cortex activated when human is reading non-phonetic alphabets?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;perception&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3031" CreationDate="2013-01-12T01:59:57.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a project to induce verb-verb relations automatically using a pattern based approach a few years ago. &#xA;The effort included gradient (or strength). I would recommend to take a look at:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://demo.patrickpantel.com/demos/verbocean/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://demo.patrickpantel.com/demos/verbocean/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if it's still maintained, but it may be worthwhile to contact one of the authors of the paper on this:&#xA;Timothy Chklovski and Patrick Pantel. 2004. VERBOCEAN: Mining the Web for Fine-Grained Semantic Verb Relations. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-04). pp. 33-40. Barcelona, Spain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="283" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T01:59:57.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3062" CreationDate="2013-01-12T03:53:08.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess, this question has both medical and linguistic senses. The latter is better to be asked on medical sites, so let me just answer it from the linguistic point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;strong&gt;Sub-vocalization&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, sub-vocalization is considered to produce a negative effect for perception of written text. For example, techniques for &lt;strong&gt;rapid reading&lt;/strong&gt; include suppressing your natural habit of sub-vocalizing when reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you read a text in non-phonetic writing system (Chinese is the most prominent example), sub-vocalization is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; involved, and this is why many rapid reading techniques are simply N/A for reading Chinese.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other words, one can perceive Chinese text more rapidly (than as in alphabetic systems) without special training, specifically because the process is not slowed down by sub-vocalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/2003/can-chinese-readers-scan-large-amounts-of-text-faster-more-accurately-than-their&quot;&gt;relevant question&lt;/a&gt; at Chinese.SE, please take a look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T07:30:40.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3067" CreationDate="2013-01-12T07:34:42.767" Score="6" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm attempting to better understand what a control verb is. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/control_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia definition&lt;/a&gt; seems clear enough.  But the definition in this other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article, about Control,&lt;/a&gt; was harder for me to understand.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's one quote from the article whose meaning I need to learn...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Control predicates have semantic content; they semantically select their arguments, that is, their appearance strongly influences the nature of the arguments they take.[3] In this regard, they are much different from auxiliary verbs, which lack semantic content and do not semantically select arguments.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant here by &quot;their appearance,&quot; i.e. the &quot;appearance&quot; of control verbs?   What aspect of the &quot;nature&quot; of the arguments do control verbs influence?   What does &quot;semantic selection&quot; mean in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-01-12T19:19:49.880" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T05:06:35.920" Title="What does it mean for a control verb to semantically select its arguments?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2946" CreationDate="2013-01-12T23:56:52.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most interesting research is experimental work on grammatical gender and functional words (like prepositions). Lera Boroditsky reviews several recent experiments in this Economist article:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/626&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/626&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastActivityDate="2013-01-12T23:56:52.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3065" CreationDate="2013-01-13T02:25:11.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A verb is said to have selectional restrictions if there are certain well-defined properties that licit arguments must have. The verb &lt;em&gt;massacre&lt;/em&gt;, for example, selects for a plural object. In semantic selection, the selected property must be semantic, and in studies on argument structure &quot;semantic&quot; usually means a role like agent, patient, instrument, etc., which are grammaticalized into grammatical relations such as subject, object, etc. In the Wikipedia article, what they are getting at is that the subject of the subordinate clause is either the subject or the object of the control verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that it probably means instead that the semantics of the control verb are responsible for deciding whether its subject or object is the subject of the subordinate clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2013-01-13T05:06:35.920" LastActivityDate="2013-01-13T05:06:35.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3069" CreationDate="2013-01-13T06:25:48.850" Score="23" ViewCount="4492" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many studies on calligraphy, and in some cultures (Chinese, Indic, Arabic) it became a really significant part of culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are not only examples of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; handwriting. Often we see examples of bad handwritten script. There are even anecdotes of &quot;doctor's handwriting&quot; that can't be easily deciphered (no offense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TgBRd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Doctor&amp;#39;s handwriting&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even a nicely written text may become difficult to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qqgJg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Russian cursive&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is well known that Latin &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; obtained a dot above specifically because it was hard to read it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_%28palaeography%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic script&lt;/a&gt; of 14th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7IXPH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mimi Numinum&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never found any researches of this topic. So, can anyone please explain and/or point me on some researches about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why people who are equally educated and familiar with the language may be able or unable to read a badly written hand script?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any special mechanisms involved when we read handwritten texts, compared to reading a printed text?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How one can improve their ability to read handwritten text? (besides just practicing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T22:13:13.987" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T22:13:13.987" Title="Deciphering a handwritten script" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3068" CreationDate="2013-01-13T08:35:09.760" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The academic field concerned with reading illegible manuscripts is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;palaeography&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. As the name implies, only deciphering old manuscripts is apparently included: as palaeographers, we are not trained in deciphering modern handwriting, for better or worse. This is probably because modern manuscripts are less likely to contain information required for academic research, although one wonders about, say, the letters and notebooks of famous writers, which are often difficult to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way one deals with an illegible manuscript is by first &lt;strong&gt;collecting what information one has about the context&lt;/strong&gt;. Do we know who wrote it? Where was it written? When? What do we know about the situation pertaining to the manuscript? If, for example, we know that a certain document deals with the transfer of land near Oxford into the hands of the bishop, this will help us tremendously, because we have a better idea of what to expect. Words like &quot;land&quot; will be primed in our minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing to do is to &lt;strong&gt;&quot;read&quot; through the entire document&lt;/strong&gt;, or at least the first page, to see what we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; read. Usually at least a few words or letters are legible enough, even if the beginning is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that helps is background knowledge about the &lt;strong&gt;formulae commonly used in the genre&lt;/strong&gt;. Many legal documents in Latin, for example, start with &quot;In nomine dei amen&quot;. If we see something at the beginning of the first page that might possibly resemble these words in some way, this may be used as a starting point. We will then know what one version of the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; used in the document looks like, and of an &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;, an &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Then we can try and find more instances of these letters elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0n2mN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it says IN NOMINE S[AN]C[T]E ET IND[IVID]UE TRINITATIS; once we know that the first words are likely to be something like this, it becomes much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, &lt;strong&gt;knowledge of common (or, better, rare) letter and character shapes&lt;/strong&gt; of the time helps a great deal. That comes with experience, and from reading illustrated guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some great &lt;strong&gt;dictionaries&lt;/strong&gt; of scribal abbreviations, letter shapes, and other marks. For Latin and Italian, there is the phenomenal Cappelli, which can be browsed on line at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ub.uni-koeln.de/cdm/ref/collection/mono20/id/8533&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Cologne&lt;/a&gt;. The main part of the book is the &lt;em&gt;Wörterbuch der Abkürzungen&lt;/em&gt; (this is the German translation). Each letter starts with a list of the twenty or so most common shapes that the letter could take in the Middle Ages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3tDY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Western-European writing has always been based on Latin, many abbreviations were used in all countries using the Latin alphabet, like modern &lt;em&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/em&gt;, which is a ligature of &lt;em&gt;Et&lt;/em&gt;, Latin for &quot;and&quot;. No doubt Cyrillic was partly influenced by Greek conventions; I have no idea about Chinese, but I am sure manuals and dictionaries exist. For whichever alphabet or character set one wants to study, there will be books teaching various techniques with many examples. And there are also countless websites providing lessons. If you have a practical problem regarding an older manuscript or print in Latin script, ping me in the English or Linguistics room, and could try to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to modern handwriting, the same techniques mostly apply. The only problem is that there is even less uniformity now than in the Middle Ages, when a scribe would at least follow some local scribal tradition. The same applies to your question why some people can read a certain manuscript while others cannot: they may be more used to a certain style, they might have more information about the background of the person who wrote it, or they might just be more talented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important approach to a cursive hand that is difficult to read is to &lt;strong&gt;follow the ink&lt;/strong&gt; (or other pigment) in chronological order. That is, when looking at a letter or character, one tries to determine where the scribe first touched the paper (or parchment, papyrus, wax, clay, wood...), which line or curve was drawn first, which next, which last. Doing so consciously can sometimes be just enough to realise what the scribe was doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/woW59.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.peregrinatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ms_good31.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin document&lt;/a&gt; presumably written in the 14th century. Consider the third, long letter. It looks a bit like a long, vertical, pointy semi-oval, with a short horizontal line across, and a diagonal thingy at the top right. When using a quill, a line drawn down is usually thicker than up. Looking at the thin left half of the oval (2), you will assume that the thick, right half of the oval (1) must have gone down, the left half up. Similarly, a line from left to right is thicker than one drawn toward the left. The short, thick, diagonal line at the top (3) must have been drawn downward and to the right. This means that the main vertical line and the short diagonal line must have been drawn in separate strokes. As to the horizontal line (4), where a short horizontal line crosses a long vertical line, we usually draw the vertical line first, as in our modern letters t and f. So he must have begun at the top, drawn the vertical line downwards, and up again to the left, touching the starting point and closing the oval. Then he either lifted his quill, or he continued to draw the &quot;flag&quot;, the thick diagonal line that goes from the top downwards to the right. Then he raised his quill to draw the horizontal line from left to right, continuing on into the next letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One usually begins a stroke with an important part of a letter, whereas a decorative or connecting flourish is more likely to occur at the end of a stroke. All this taken together leads to the conclusion that this letter must be an &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;, and the word &lt;em&gt;Infinita&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T20:14:45.060" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T20:14:45.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3071" CreationDate="2013-01-13T10:58:35.690" Score="7" ViewCount="820" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a loanword enters a language, does it usually replace an existing native word or phrase? Or does it more often lead to an increase in the size of the language's vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding Japanese's influence on English, most of the words are new words describing concepts that did not exist before, such as karaoke, kimono, and sushi, with only the occasional word replacing existing terms (tsunami replacing &quot;tidal wave&quot;). I'm curious as to whether most loanwords are like this, or whether it indicates that Japanese has had a rather weak influence on English compared to other languages' influence on English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T07:31:57.540" Title="Do loanwords usurp existing words?" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2013-01-13T11:23:48.963" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not a single behavior and loanwords behave differently from one another, because after all they're strictly connected to human behavior and that's quite variated even if similar across the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;Loanword&lt;/em&gt; itself is a calque from the German &lt;em&gt;Lehnwort&lt;/em&gt;. And even &lt;em&gt;Calque&lt;/em&gt; is a loanword from French. Calques are another thing but let's focus on loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English the word &lt;strong&gt;web&lt;/strong&gt; both refers to a spider's web, and to the web, the internet. Italian got this last word (from &lt;strong&gt;www&lt;/strong&gt; which means &lt;em&gt;world wide web&lt;/em&gt;), so we say &quot;Ho portato la mia attività sul web&quot; (I got my activity/shop on the web, online). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Italian only acquired that meaning. We don't say &quot;C'è una web nell'angolo di quel muro&quot; (There's a web in that wall corner). For us &quot;Web&quot; exclusively refers to the Internet, not to the spider's web. Loanwords often behave like this, they just refer to the object/situation/concept they referred to when they were acquired and just to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &quot;Corner&quot;. In English it designates a random wall/something corner, or the Corner Kick (in Soccer). In Italian if we say &quot;È stato assegnato un corner alla squadra avversaria&quot;, we mean &quot;the opposing team was awarded a corner kick&quot;. We won't say &quot;Questo muro ha un corner strano&quot;, (this wall forms a weird corner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens for the opposite: English say &quot;lasagne&quot; because the term was acquired from the collocation &quot;Lasagne al forno/alla bolognese&quot;, not knowing that &quot;lasagne&quot; is a plural for us and that the singular is &quot;lasagna&quot;. But English acquired that particular word and uses it as standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's another important point&lt;/strong&gt;: when loanwords are acquired, their original gender/number is lost and they are &quot;reset&quot; to work in the receiving language. In Italian we say &quot;In questa cartella ci sono molti file&quot; to mean &quot;In this folder there are many files&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at a certain point, it's really hard to know what word is actually a really well-integrated loanword. I bet many Italians wouldn't know that &quot;Grattacielo&quot; is actually a loanword from English &quot;Skyscraper&quot; (cielo = sky, gratta(tore) = scraper).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English and Japanese are more transparent in this case as Japanese, for example, usually adopts Katakana so you can see what words are not Japanese. The word &lt;strong&gt;tsunami&lt;/strong&gt;, 津波 (&lt;strong&gt;tsu&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;harbor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;nami&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;wave&lt;/em&gt;), would probably be used just to refer to the natural disaster, even if you could say &quot;a tsunami of crime&quot;, because people will always (un)consciously link that word to those disasters and journalists will most likely prefer another word to avoid this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion&lt;/strong&gt; there is not a single answer that will satisfy all instances concerning loanwords as each loanword has a different story and a different origin, but luckily for most recent loanwords, it's not hard to guess their history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also true when talking about their position in the new language: some sort of usurp the original word, others will increase the vocabulary (mostly because the receiving language didn't have a word for that concept), and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-14T00:33:06.670" LastActivityDate="2013-01-14T00:33:06.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T01:18:45.423" Score="7" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on relative clauses in Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz and some other Turkic languages show agreement of subject with object in relative clauses, instead of the verb. It is an SVO language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Menin okugan        kitabim&#xA;I-Gen read-rel.suf. book-1st persn&#xA;&#xA;&quot;The book that I read&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages that show an agreement of subject with object, but not with verb in relative clauses?&#xA;What can be the cause of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T10:22:38.047" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T06:42:01.440" Title="Which languages have Subject-object agreement in relative clauses?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T01:27:45.703" Score="3" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two kinds of NPs existential and definite. Sometimes NP that we would expect to be existential behave as they are actually definite. One example of such NPs are those that are kind-denoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex:&#xA;The snake is a cold blood animal.&#xA;The rose is a flower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences have general meaning and we would expect them to have existential meaning and take indefinite article. However, they take definite article and have definite meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could any one give examples of relative clauses that have kind-denoting meaning and are definite or is there any articles on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T03:46:52.967" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T03:46:52.967" Title="Could any one give an example of bare &quot;kind&quot;-denoting relative clause?" Tags="&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T06:53:22.430" Score="9" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to draw a diagram to show relationship between these terms but I am not sure what is correct position of them is diagram. Can you please help to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is relation of following term (&lt;em&gt;is-a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;has-one&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;has-many&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;is-consist-of&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;is-a-type-of&lt;/em&gt;, ...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morpheme, word, phoneme, phone, allophone, allomorph,&#xA;grapheme, glyph, allograph, letter, (and any other missed related term)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T11:41:27.953" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T11:41:27.953" Title="Relation between some linguistics terms" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3163" CreationDate="2013-01-15T14:23:12.083" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you name a string of glyphs (letters) regardless of their meaning and regardless of their pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example in Persian ‍‍&lt;code&gt;س&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;ی&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;ر&lt;/code&gt;  = &lt;code&gt;س‌ی‌ر&lt;/code&gt; represents following words (and more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/siɾ/&lt;/code&gt;  garlic  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/siɾ/&lt;/code&gt;  a unit of weight (75g)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/sejɾ/&lt;/code&gt; travel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are homonyms or heteronyms, or in English &lt;code&gt;moped&lt;/code&gt;=&lt;code&gt;m+o+p+e+d&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moped   /ˈmoʊpɛd/   n.  a small motorcycle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moped       /ˈmoʊpt/    v.  past tense of mope&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you name &lt;code&gt;moped&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;س‌ی‌ر&lt;/code&gt;:  some letters that are written representation of one or more morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: to clarify what I am looking consider following table, what you name first column?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (?)     number of words&#xA;------  ----------------&#xA;moped          2&#xA;dog            1&#xA;does           3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2:&lt;/strong&gt; In languages that are written use Arabic script short vowel generally are not written, as a result most strings represent more than one word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2013-02-02T03:45:39.687" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T04:03:35.470" Title="A String of graphemes" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3080" CreationDate="2013-01-15T17:40:20.487" Score="4" ViewCount="1666" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working through &quot;Contemporary Linguistics&quot; on my own.  It's been going pretty well, but I have a question about building syntax trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the tree here for &quot;The dog might bite that man&quot; fairly well. Now, I would like to add &quot;tomorrow&quot; to the end of the sentence.  I've looked through the book, and the only similar example I can find is using &quot;never&quot;, which comes in front of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this there a Move happening here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tomorrow the dog might bite that man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is correct grammar, but I don't see anything to attach &lt;em&gt;tomorrow&lt;/em&gt; to on the left side of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*The dog might tomorrow bite that man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not correct grammar, and I believe that means tomorrow could not have moved from there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite know if &quot;The dog tomorrow might bite that man&quot; is correct grammar, but it seems much less ungrammatical than *&quot;tomorrow bite&quot;.  Could the adverb attach to the I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I build this tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vr8nH.png&quot; alt=&quot;A syntax tree for &amp;quot;The dog might bite the man.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1675" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-15T18:05:54.690" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T17:11:46.077" Title="Syntax: How can this tree be built?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-15T20:13:30.573" Score="2" ViewCount="1092" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't about sound change in general, but the changes that took place in the pronunciation of individual words. Does such a compilation exist? It would be interesting to know how divergent pronunciations developed, and how people pronounced certain words in earlier ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MORE DETAILS: What I'm seeking is something similar to the documentation on changes in orthography and semantics that exist in etymological dictionaries for pronunciation. This by its nature is more difficult, of course; but since linguists have been able to piece out the pronunciation of the words of languages long dead, it might not be impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EVEN MORE DETAILS: Of course, changes in pronunciation might occur more frequently than changes in spelling, which would only add to the difficulty of the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I ask is that certain words in English appear to have very peculiar pronunciations - ones that strike one as not being optimal in terms of how easy it is to say them. Semi-non-native speakers (such as for instance educated people in India, where I lived for a few years) pronounce words like &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; with the emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second, which to me seems an easier way to say the word. I've even heard some native speakers, unless they speak with great care, place greater stress on the first syllable than native speakers normally do. Was it always pronounced like this? I would think that far more variation might have existed in pronunciation, as it did in spelling, before communication and writing were sufficiently developed to make something of a standard variety possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also English words tend to lack consistency in terms of pronunciation. &quot;Finite&quot; is pronounced differently when it's in the word &quot;infinite&quot;. &quot;Demoniac&quot; is &quot;dee-MOH-nee-ac&quot; but &quot;demoniacal&quot; is &quot;dee-mo-NAY-uh-cal&quot;. Words that are very similar in terms of spelling and language of origin are nonetheless pronounced differently. The schwa is far more common in syllables without primary stress than it was earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I might find suitable answers to these questions if such a guide to historical pronunciation as I seek existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1654" LastEditorUserId="1654" LastEditDate="2013-01-15T20:29:06.043" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T04:10:23.823" Title="Historical pronunciation of words in English" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3078" CreationDate="2013-01-15T20:30:21.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tomorrow&lt;/code&gt; simply becomes a part of a Verbal Phrase (VP):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'&#xA;. I: might&#xA;. VP&#xA;. . VP&#xA;. . . V: bite&#xA;. . . NP&#xA;. . . . DET: that&#xA;. . . . N: man&#xA;. . PP&#xA;. . . Adv: tomorrow&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that there are two possible formal representations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;bite tomorrow&lt;/code&gt;, as pictured above;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;might tomorrow&lt;/code&gt;, when &lt;code&gt;tomorrow&lt;/code&gt; becomes a part of epistemic modality verb phrase (&lt;code&gt;I'&lt;/code&gt; in your diagram);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the clash may be caused by mixing &lt;strong&gt;language-specific&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;language-agnostic&lt;/strong&gt; semantic graphs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The former are often vulnerable to artifacts that prevent displaying them into a nice tree-style structure. Maybe the simplest example would be separable prefixes in German language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich &lt;strong&gt;fange&lt;/strong&gt; mit der Arbeit &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;I begin with studying&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, VP is &lt;code&gt;mit der Arbeit&lt;/code&gt;, but the V itself splits into two words around its VP, which can't be represented with a nice tree. In a language-agnostic semantic graph, there is no such problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-01-16T17:11:46.077" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T17:11:46.077" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2013-01-16T00:34:27.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I think words are usually borrowed to fill in gaps in a language. For example, there are no lions, horses or snow in Malaysia, which is why all these words were borrowed into Malay from Snskrit or Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes a loanword can become so popular that it eclipses the native word. For instance, Sanskrit 'kapala'- skull became Malay 'kepala'- head, eventually usurping the place of 'hulu'. Nowadays, 'hulu' only retains vague remnants of its original meaning, e.g. 'hulu'- head of the river -&gt; upstream, 'penghulu' headman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to Japanese. A digression...&#xA;Well, actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but tsunami is not a loanword. It just happens to be an indigenous Japanese word written in kanji. In fact, if you search wiktionary, you can see that it is written with different kanji that all mean 'tidal wave'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Japanese borrowed Chinese script, it applied them to both loanwords and the original Japanese words.For example, the same kanji is used for 'chu' in 'chu-goku'- China/Middle Kingdom; and 'naka'- centre, middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to tell if a Japanese word is borrowed is through its pronunciation. Loanwords typically sound closer to Sinitic languages but might have evolved a different meaning. Eg: 'shitsurei'- loss of manners/rudeness cf. Mand. 'shili', Taiwanese Hokk. 'sit-lae'; 'benkyo'- study cf. Mand. 'mianqiang'- to force; 'hijyou'- emergency, extraordinary situation cf. Mand. 'feichang'- really, extraordinarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1676" LastActivityDate="2013-01-16T00:34:27.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3084" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2013-01-17T00:34:13.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any natural language from a linguistics point of view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics phenomena during history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currents, theories, and their applications in actual languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sign Languages and writing systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tools and techniques of linguistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T07:18:58.890" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T07:18:58.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3085" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2013-01-17T00:34:51.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything not directly related to linguistics and their subcategories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions you haven't tried to find an answer for (show your work!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requests for lists of things, polls, opinions, discussions, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T07:25:07.660" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T07:25:07.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3076" CreationDate="2013-01-17T01:34:47.530" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Etic&quot; terms (signify a surface form, as realized, without claiming any underlying significance)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;phone - a speech sound, e.g. [b]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;glyph - a written sign, which may or may not signify anything by itself, e.g. ⟨&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c1kpb.png&quot; alt=&quot;g&quot;&gt;⟩, ⟨&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Z8qm.png&quot; alt=&quot;ɡ&quot;&gt;⟩, ⟨ˆ⟩ (a diacritic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diacritic - a glyph that is placed on or attached to another glyph, e.g. acute accent, vowel signs in Hebrew and Arabic, the diaeresis diacritic ⟨¨⟩&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Emic&quot; terms (signify an equivalence class of linguistic entities, so inherently language-specific)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;phoneme - a distinctive class of speech sounds, e.g. English /t/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;morpheme - smallest semantically significant unit in a language&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;grapheme - smallest significant distinguishable unit in a writing system. Types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;letter - a single element of a writing system that (in principle) represents a phoneme or phoneme sequence, e.g. English ⟨t⟩, Japanese ⟨ゆ⟩ (represents the sequence /ju/), Ugaritic ⟨⟩ (vowels not indicated). Letters may consist of multiple glyphs; for example, ⟨ü⟩, consisting of ⟨u⟩ and the diaeresis diacritic, is a distinct letter in Estonian (where it represents /y/), but is not a letter in Spanish (where it represents the same sound as ⟨u⟩, the diacritic indicating that it is not silent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Digraph, trigraph, tetragraph, ...: sequences of letters that are used to represent a sound other than the sequence of sounds indicated individually, e.g. English ⟨sh⟩ representing /ʃ/, Japanese ⟨しゃ⟩ representing /sja/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;logogram or logograph - represents a morpheme or word, e.g. the Mandarin copula ⟨是⟩; ⟨&amp;amp;⟩ 'and', ⟨@⟩ 'at', ⟨$⟩ 'dollar' in English&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ideogram or ideograph - represents an concept, e.g. ⟨上⟩ 'up' in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese/Japanese&lt;/a&gt;; digits like ⟨8⟩ 'eight'; ⟨♡⟩ 'love'; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no symbol ⟨ ⃠⟩&lt;/a&gt;; the red octagonal stop sign&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pictogram or pictograph - an ideogram consisting of a pictorial representation of its referent, e.g. ⟨木⟩ 'tree' in Chinese/Japanese, ⟨⟩ 'pile of poo', many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;emoticons&lt;/a&gt;, astronomical symbols like ⟨☽⟩ 'waxing crescent moon'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Terms signifying relationships between &quot;emic&quot; and &quot;etic&quot; terms:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;allophone - e.g. &quot;In Spanish, The phones [b] and [β̞] are allophones.&quot;, or &quot;The phone [β̞] is an allophone of the phoneme /b/.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;allomorph - e.g. &quot;The Latin-derived prefixes &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;im-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;il-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ir-&lt;/em&gt;, ... are allomorphs.&quot;, &quot;The English plural suffix has the allomorphs -/z/, -/s/, and -/ɪz/.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;allograph - e.g. &quot;⟨&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c1kpb.png&quot; alt=&quot;g&quot;&gt;⟩ and ⟨&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Z8qm.png&quot; alt=&quot;ɡ&quot;&gt;⟩ are allographs of the letter G; some fonts use each form, without affecting meaning.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other terms&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word - ambiguous. Generally, refers to a relatively small unit wrt some linguistic phenomenon. Different sorts of words include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;orthographic word - a sequence of characters written together, typically separated from other words with spaces or punctuation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;phonological or prosodic word - a sequence of syllables whose boundaries affect some phonological process. May be larger or smaller than an orthographic word. For example, German and Russian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;devoice obstruents that come at the end of a phonological word&lt;/a&gt;. Many languages have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowel harmony&lt;/a&gt; that stops at word boundaries. Many languages require each phonological word to have exactly one primary stress, possibly at a fixed position in the word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;semantic word - the smallest semantically or pragmatically significant unit of a language that can stand on its own. The smallest unit of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;lexeme - a unit of vocabulary, such as &quot;eat&quot;, comprising the set of inflected forms a word can take, such as &quot;eat&quot;, &quot;eats&quot;, &quot;ate&quot;, &quot;eating&quot;, &quot;eaten&quot;, (excluding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivation_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;derived words&lt;/a&gt; like &quot;eater&quot; or &quot;eatery&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_%28morphology%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;citation form&lt;/a&gt;, dictionary form, headword, or lemma - the form of a lexeme conventionally chosen to represent the lexeme, such as &quot;eat&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;allograph&lt;/em&gt; has an unrelated meaning describing the relationship between sound and orthography. Allographs are letters (or sequences of letters) that represent the same sound in some writing system. For example, allographs of /k/ in English include ⟨k⟩ in &lt;em&gt;king&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨c⟩ in &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨ck⟩ in &lt;em&gt;sack&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨ch⟩ in &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨q⟩ in &lt;em&gt;quit&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨kh⟩ in &lt;em&gt;khan&lt;/em&gt;, ⟨cqu⟩ in &lt;em&gt;lacquer&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastActivityDate="2013-01-17T01:34:47.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-18T02:39:08.960" Score="7" ViewCount="1807" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any known reason why the scholars of the time didn't think it easier to use calques, as for instance the Germans did for the names of some of the basic chemical elements? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1654" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-01-18T02:56:40.953" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T19:21:34.723" Title="Why did English borrow more from Latin and Greek than, e.g., German did, in scientific and philosophical subjects?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3077" CreationDate="2013-01-18T05:36:43.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Homograph&lt;/a&gt;. Literally &quot;same spelling&quot;. Any two words with different meanings which are spelled the same regardless of their pronunciation (it could be the same or it could be different. It doesn't matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the discussion of abjad to it's logical conclusion, I see no reason why this term couldn't be extended to even completely non-phonetic writing systems. I can easily imagine some Chinese-like ideograph which represents two separate concepts (perhaps with the same pronunciation or not). Since they are orthographically identical I'd still consider them homographs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-01-18T08:36:21.777" LastActivityDate="2013-01-18T08:36:21.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3077" CreationDate="2013-01-18T17:52:15.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I am aware, it is not a concept that has been discussed enough to have a customary term. If I were writing about it, I would use &lt;em&gt;word form&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-01-18T17:52:15.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-18T18:56:20.097" Score="0" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a method for comparative morpheme analysis in historical aspect? To which degree is it accurate, if such a method exists? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, where and who did invent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" OwnerDisplayName="Manjusri" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-18T20:11:07.943" LastActivityDate="2013-01-18T20:11:07.943" Title="Is there a method for comparative morpheme analysis in historical aspect?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-19T05:36:53.520" Score="10" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading an article about typology of Russian language by Gasparov, B. M. (“Structure of Russian language from typological point of view (Intro to sociogrammatics). Article 2. Morphology of the noun”. &lt;em&gt;Scholarly notes of Tartu University&lt;/em&gt;, issue 486. Tartu, 1979. Pp. 23—44.) and in the section about grammatical number there is passage where I am not sure how to translate certain terminology in English. I am native Russian speaker, I just do not know the proper linguistic terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the passage from page 32 &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/bitstream/handle/10062/25795/acta_486_problemy_1979.pdf?sequence=1#page=33&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rus&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt; where he talks about the general development of dual and then its extinction in Russian language, translated to the best of my ability (terms in question are emboldened, author’s own emphasis of one of the words is converted to italics by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most ancient stratum of the functioning of this form, apparently, constitute the so-called &lt;strong&gt;independent dual&lt;/strong&gt; — the form used with a noun outside of combination with the numeral “two”, that is, not supported by lexical definition of quantity. Independent dual was used originally for designation of &lt;em&gt;paired&lt;/em&gt; objects (“eyes”, “arms” and the like). Subsequently develops the usage of &lt;strong&gt;connected dual&lt;/strong&gt; [related? bounded?] that combines the noun with the numeral “two”. As a result, the usage of the form of dual grammatical number broadens, and this form becomes universal quantitative determinant that can be imparted to any noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate more on “connected dual” author examples (p. 33) how relics of dual forms now differ in meaning according to whether or not they are used with a qualifier, such as numeral “two” or pronouns “these”, “such”, “mine”, “some” &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt; If someone says “&lt;em&gt;на столе лежат книги&lt;/em&gt;” (there are books laying on the table), listener would assume a “larger multitude” of “more than two” (&gt;2), whereas “&lt;em&gt;эти книги лежат на столе&lt;/em&gt;” (these books are laying on the table) means that there could be any number of books, including two (&gt;1). That is, author argues that if there were, in fact, two books on the table, the speaker is expected to note that directly, or qualify that he is talking about specific objects (again, akin the definite article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, as a native speaker, it is not readily intuitive, but I do agree that author is onto something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Old Russian dual and its relics in modern Russian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To shed more light on what the author talked about, below are several examples of Old Russian dual and its relics that remained after its extinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern word &lt;em&gt;рука&lt;/em&gt; (NOM SG F) meaning “arm” is the same in Old Russian save for the digraph &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uk_%28Cyrillic%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ѹ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in place of &lt;em&gt;у&lt;/em&gt; (both have similar or identical sound). NOM PL is the &lt;em&gt;рѹкы&lt;/em&gt; (modern &lt;em&gt;руки&lt;/em&gt;), and NOM-ACC-VOC DU is &lt;em&gt;рѹцѣ&lt;/em&gt; which has no modern counterpart (although the numeral “two” follows the same paradigm for the F: modern &lt;em&gt;две&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;em&gt;дъвѣ&lt;/em&gt;). If that points to anything, this form is the same for DAT SG and LOC SG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in modern Russian there is no dual, but there is, we could say, paucal form for plural of 1.5, 2, 3, and 4. In case of &lt;em&gt;рука&lt;/em&gt; and several other words it is formed with the same word as uncounted plural, but with the stress shift. “Two hands” is &lt;em&gt;две руки́&lt;/em&gt;, but uncountable “hands” is &lt;em&gt;ру́ки&lt;/em&gt;. From 5 to 20 GEN PL form is used: &lt;em&gt;13 рук&lt;/em&gt;. After that combined numerals begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the article it is unclear to me what author means exactly by “connected dual”. As he writes “connected dual that combines the noun with the numeral ‘two’”, does it not defeat the whole idea of dual? Although examples of Old Russian dual &lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE#.D0.9F.D1.80.D0.B8.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80.D1.8B_.D1.83.D0.BF.D0.BE.D1.82.D1.80.D0.B5.D0.B1.D0.BB.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D1.8F_.D0.B4.D0.B2.D0.BE.D0.B9.D1.81.D1.82.D0.B2.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.BD.D0.BE.D0.B3.D0.BE_.D1.87.D0.B8.D1.81.D0.BB.D0.B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rus&lt;/a&gt;, Wikipedia)&lt;/sup&gt; show that it could have been used both with or without numeral “two”. Gasparov also notes that after usage of dual had broadened, dual for paired objects took on function similar to that of definite article in English: &lt;em&gt;рѹцѣ&lt;/em&gt; [dual, the arms, both arms, arms of one person] vs. &lt;em&gt;рѹкы&lt;/em&gt; [plural, arms].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the correct linguistic terms for these particular types? Did I translate correctly? Please, link authoritative source or glossary, and bear in mind that I am not a linguist, so nothing excessively recondite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1670" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T15:39:25.480" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T12:38:50.390" Title="Proper terminology for the types of dual" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;paucal&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2013-01-19T06:22:13.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, some nouns had at first inherently dual meaning, but eventually there was a development where an affix historically deriving from the word meaning &quot;two&quot; began used as a generic dual marker. The first usage might be called the &lt;strong&gt;lexical dual&lt;/strong&gt;, and the second the &lt;strong&gt;morphological dual&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2013-01-19T06:22:13.453" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3102" CreationDate="2013-01-19T06:59:09.283" Score="1" ViewCount="1073" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the consonant [b] always voiced across languages? &#xA;What about [p] being voiceless?&#xA;Similarly, is [k] always voiceless across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I am taking what I know in English and wondering if it applies more broadly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-01-20T08:00:53.307" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:53:18.090" Title="Is the consonant [b] always voiced across languages? What about [p]?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;&lt;bilabial&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3087" CreationDate="2013-01-19T17:02:13.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the French language became powerful during the Norman era, English lost its position in writing though people still spoke it. However, by the end of the 14th century, the French language had began to lose its power affected by the events like losing the war against France(=other French nobles) and Black Death. At the same time, English had started to be written by people again(e.g. Chaucer). After that, people including the rulers wanted English to be more powerful as a language, which led to borrowing many words from Latin that was the lingua franca (in writing) at the time. This coincided with The Renaissance which brought about new ways of thinking (&lt;strong&gt;philosophy&lt;/strong&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;science&lt;/strong&gt; and the revival of the classics. Latin (and some Greek as well) was the language used in this cultral expansion. And this was the time English borrowed Latin words the most. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, the answer is that English was more motivated to borrow Latin words than other languages. English at the time tried to gain power by borrowing words from powerful languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wermser, Richard. Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des englischen Wortschatzes. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1976&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gelderen, Elly van. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2006. 178.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit:sources added&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1618" LastEditorUserId="1618" LastEditDate="2013-01-20T17:13:02.367" LastActivityDate="2013-01-20T17:13:02.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-20T12:49:35.570" Score="9" ViewCount="1300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a corpus consisting of sentences that are to be categorised in order to train a text categorisation algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a (preferably web-based) tool that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allows me to input a list of sentences;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Define a set of categories, for example: &lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sports&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;science&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has a user interface to present to a &lt;em&gt;coder/annotator&lt;/em&gt; one sentence after the other, allowing him/her to classify the sentence into zero, one, or more of the previously defined categories;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provides some way to export the sentences together with their categories. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the tool would allow some of the sentences to be categorised by several coders (to measure coder reliability/agreement) and feature a REST-based API for data export.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1689" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-07T00:29:52.637" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:26:50.647" Title="Tools to annotate (categorise) sentences from a sentence corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3095" CreationDate="2013-01-20T15:04:24.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk/teamware/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GATE&lt;/a&gt; may meet those requirements. It is web-based, supports multiple annotators and has export capabilities (not sure if also REST-based). I don't know if it has a sentence-based annotator interface, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2013-01-20T15:04:24.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3095" CreationDate="2013-01-20T19:44:34.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I needed such things, I usually hated the (custom) frontends that I had to deal with. I preferred simple CSV files, that I could open in a spreadsheet (LibreOffice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have one sentence per line, and ask annotators to fill in the categories in the next column, it is quite easy to collect all the annotations and merge them into one file, such that each annotator's input goes into a unique column. You can either merge them all using a spreadsheet, or write a simple script (shell, perl, python, etc.) for the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you only have one category per sentence, and if your categories are &lt;code&gt;economics&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sports&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;science&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;life&lt;/code&gt;, I recommend entering it as &lt;code&gt;1economics&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;2sports&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;3science&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;4life&lt;/code&gt; in the spreadsheet. The user has to type only the first character, and autocomplete will do the rest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you need more than one category per sentence, I think the annotator would find it quicker to enter numbers like &lt;code&gt;12&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;134&lt;/code&gt;, etc. However, autocomplete would be useless for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-01-20T19:44:34.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="648" CreationDate="2013-01-21T01:22:24.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are often closely related to Approximate Number Systems.  Piraha for example, in claimed to have just the numbers 1 and 2. But when they use them, it appears that they use even these small numbers in an approximate manner (2 can refer to some single thing that is unusually large).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that many of these language with numbers say, 1-7 actually have an approximate number system, more akin to &quot;single, pair, a few, a lot&quot;  With the right scenario a field linguist could ask an English speaker, &quot;How many apples are on the table?&quot; And the subject would say &quot;A few&quot; and the linguists would record, &quot;Ah, so 'a few' is the number 3.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-01-21T01:28:10.843" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T01:28:10.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3070" CreationDate="2013-01-21T07:31:57.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian is an example of language which uses borrowing of foreign words actively for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. Loanword expresses something that have not a representation yet (obvious case, and isn't a case in question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. Loanword is shorter and/or more convenient. For example, the complex clause &quot;электронно-вычислительная машина&quot; or its indeclinable abbreviation &quot;ЭВМ&quot; is replaced with &quot;компьютер&quot; ('computer'), and this replacement had finished just immediately after USSR collapse, when old moral rules had got down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III. Loanword is used due to fashion, or speaker lasiness to find an existing word for the same. This is typical for wide crowd of business related people (mainly &quot;office plankton&quot;), for IT people and some other branches which are led mainly by English literature, which borrow words with the described phenomena, even if the native language has words for the same sense. Such borrowings aren't stable and are actively criticised even by speakers' colleagues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IV. Loanword is used to express some specific flavor of word sense, which isn't distinguished from a main sense in own word. For example, &quot;тенденция&quot; ('tendency') was neutral for centuries, but, in the current business slang, it is definitely negative; instead, &quot;тренд&quot; ('trend') is used for positive meaning. This difference isn't reflected yet in printed dictionaries but it is marked by (IIRC) most of audience; it has appeared due to reasons described in (III) but, unlike most of those words, has been surviving for years. Also, IT is full of such borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastActivityDate="2013-01-21T07:31:57.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3101" CreationDate="2013-01-21T10:38:53.727" Score="6" ViewCount="3126" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sydney.edu.au/heraldry/coat_of_arms/index.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The motto of my alma mater&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;sidere mens eadem mutato&lt;/em&gt;, which I gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sidere         mens           eadem          mutato&#xA;star-SG.N.ABL  mind-SG.F.NOM  same-SG.F.NOM  change-SG.N.ABL&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have long wondered why, if the traditional translation is &quot;(Though) the stars have changed, the mind (remains) the same&quot;, the structure of the motto emphasises the state of the &lt;em&gt;stars&lt;/em&gt; (the concessive) rather than the mind (the consequent).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that the motto has the chiasmus structure ABBA. The Wikipedia article on chiasmus defines it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but does not elaborate on its stylistic effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the motto &lt;em&gt;sidere mens eadem mutato&lt;/em&gt; an instance of a chiasmus? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, where is the focus understood to lie, or is parallelism the desired effect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if not, what is the desired stylistic effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I understand that the motto can only be parsed this way. My question is about the stylistic intent of its word order.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-22T00:52:07.603" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T05:24:24.483" Title="The stylistic effect of chiasmus in Latin" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3100" CreationDate="2013-01-21T13:05:23.537" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be considered chiasmus, as the endings do form a cross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sidere   mens&#xA; N/Abl  F/Nom&#xA;     ╲ ╱&#xA;      ╳&#xA;     ╱ ╲&#xA;eadem   mutato&#xA;F/Nom    N/Abl&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hyperbaton&lt;/a&gt; is what makes this phrase striking (or even double hyperbaton). Part of speech normally trumps syntactic agreement when it comes to chiasmus; that is, if we have four words, of which one pair are the same part of speech, and the other pair another, then that is what one would look at to consider whether or not the construction was chiastic, i.e. then A would have to be a part of speech, not a number/sex/case, and the same for B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Normal&quot; order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mēns ĕădēm sīdĕrĕ mūtātō&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A regular chiasmus, &lt;em&gt;noun-adjective-adjective-noun&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mēns ĕădēm mūtātō sīdĕrĕ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To place &lt;em&gt;mens eadem&lt;/em&gt; inside &lt;em&gt;sidere mutato&lt;/em&gt;, as in motto of the University of Sydney, can be done in poetry; the reason will often be the metre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sīdĕrĕ mēns ĕădēm mūtātō&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be part of a dactylic hexameter, the noblest of Greek and Latin meters, where each metre/foot must be either ¯ ˘ ˘ (long-short-short) or ¯ ¯ (long-long), except the sixth foot (long-either). Notice how the normal word order would never fit the metre, while the motto could, depending on what came before and after. The regular chiasmus could fit as well. Normally, such an unusual word order as in the motto is only used in poetry, and then usually &lt;em&gt;metri causa&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;for the sake of metre&quot;), but poets may also do it on a whim, or because it sounds better for some other reason. So your motto sounds poetic because of its word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a regular chiasmus, the effect is often antithetical: &lt;em&gt;you are right, and wrong am I.&lt;/em&gt; The non-parallel word order in a chiasmus makes one realise &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; the two phrase are parallel, which one might otherwise not have noticed so strongly. It can also be merely a local decorative (non-functional) effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as to the precise stylistic effect of your motto, I would say the effect is no more specific than a poetic tinge. Focus lies where it lies in the translation, but no thanks to the word order. It is possible that other classicists will disagree with me, but probably not a great deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T05:24:24.483" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T05:24:24.483" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2013-01-22T01:35:49.603" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what is meant by &quot;[b]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/301/when-should-one-use-slashes-or-square-brackets-when-transcribing-in-ipa&quot;&gt;a transcription in brackets means that it's a phonetic transcription&lt;/a&gt;, which aims to represent the sounds uttered without considering whether the language makes a phonemic distinction between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the strictest interpretation, [b] is voiced by definition, since that IPA symbol represents the &lt;em&gt;voiced bilabial plosive&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, the &quot;cardinal&quot; or prototypical value of [b] is voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more commonly, phonetic transcriptions can also be &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that they notate only the most salient features, or those that are likely to be linguistically significant. For instance, one can transcribe the American English word &lt;em&gt;buddy&lt;/em&gt; as ⟨[ˈbʌɾ.i]⟩. This is clearly a phonetic rather than phonemic transcription, since it indicates the specific allophone ([ɾ]) of /d/ that gets used. But it is a broad transcription. In English, utterance-initial voiced stops are usually partially devoiced, which is rarely noticed by native speakers. So this transcription is using ⟨b⟩ to denote a partially-devoiced phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, even in a &lt;em&gt;narrow&lt;/em&gt; (precise) transcription, ⟨b⟩ may be used to represent a voiceless phone when it is used with a diacritic. For instance, one might transcribe the Russian word &lt;em&gt;го́лубь&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;gólubj&lt;/em&gt;) as [ˈgolˠʊb̥ʲ] to indicate that the final consonant, though phonetically voiceless, is an underlyingly voiced sound that is devoiced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a phonological process&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a phonemic or morphophonemic transcription, the symbol ⟨b⟩ can easily refer to a voiceless stop. Many languages do not distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops. For example, Korean has a series of stops that vary between voiced and (tenuis) unvoiced. Authors can somewhat arbitrarily pick which allophone to use to transcribe each phoneme; in this case, one might pick the voiced IPA symbols to help distinguish them from Korean's 2 other series of voiceless stops. Then the word ⟨불고기⟩ would be phonemically transcribed as /bul.ɡo.ɡi/, even though the initial consonant is voiceless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T01:35:49.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1954" CreationDate="2013-01-22T16:50:56.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a summary of most common exceptions (based on Belov 2007, Borovskii and Boldyrev 1975, Sihler 1995, Tronskii 2001):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;word final:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;illic (from illice), istuc (from istuce), adhuc (from adhuce), addic (from addice), adduc (from adduce);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NOM.SG.M. ending in -as or -is (originally, -atis and -itis respectively); e.g. nostras, Arpinas, Maecenas, Samnis etc.;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;audit (from audivit), fumat (from fumavit), irritat (from irritavit) etc.;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interjections &lt;em&gt;attat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;papae&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;calefacis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;penult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GEN. for nouns ending in -ius and -ium;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enclitic -que, -ne, -ue. e.g. Musaque, uidesne, facisue. cf. itaque vs. itaque.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-01-22T16:58:41.007" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T16:58:41.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2864" CreationDate="2013-01-22T23:43:49.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is a continuum, and not something that has an absolute, well-defined beginning (or end, for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of a language like you would a species of animal or plant. There was no first human, or mouse, or giraffe, it has been a constant process of evolution. What we can see, however, is that at given intervals, there is a noticeable difference between how these creatures acted and looked, and when others broke off from the &quot;main&quot; line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is exactly like this. We can look at English from 500 years ago and notice how different it was, but if you were living at that time, from day to day, the change wasn't noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I don't believe any language was &quot;born&quot;, but that this is rather a metaphor for the earliest time at which a language was evidentially distinct from its most recent descendant. We can look to history for clues about more abrupt changes, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language death is similar. In terms if Middle English dying out and being replaced with modern English, that was just the result of evolution. Then you can look at language that was wiped out by conquest, and look at how the natives speak the language of their conquerors. In Ireland, the way English is spoken, even by those who do not know any Irish, has traces of Irish in it (the classic 'at all, at all' is a calque of 'ar chor ar bith', for example). In that case, is the language really dead (FYI - Irish is not by any means a dead language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at recently extinct languages, they are lost to proper study when the last speaker dies, and if they have not been recorded, they may be lost forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastActivityDate="2013-01-22T23:43:49.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2013-01-22T23:58:10.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the word initial inflections in verbs in Irish came from phonological interaction between a pronoun and the following verb [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what you mean here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irish is VSO. As such, a verb very rarely (if indeed ever) follows a pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Chonaic  mé    an       cailín.&#xA;Saw-PRET I-NOM the-SING girl-MASC.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see the use of prepositions (more so the associate agreements) in Irish affecting the past tense, though. Traditionally, the past tense was created by preceding the infinitive with to preposition &quot;do&quot; (Ith -&gt; D'ith), which causes a lenition (Bí -&gt; Do bhí -&gt; Bhí).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-01-23T14:58:25.173" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T14:58:25.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-23T19:14:04.740" Score="5" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to draw a dialect map, splitting an area up into differently coloured regions. Is there an online tool for creating dialect maps?&#xA;Of course, any map drawing tool where I can take an existing map and draw lines, shade areas, label etc. would work fine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T14:55:33.303" Title="Is there a convenient tool for drawing (dialect) maps?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3106" CreationDate="2013-01-23T19:45:11.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a specific tool for making dialect maps but it does sound like something suitable for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenStreetMap&lt;/a&gt; (OSM) and its many map-making tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Egotistically, it would be a great overlay to put on top of another map on my GPS, which uses OSM =) It would make for some silly trips: &lt;em&gt;Are we at the isogloss yet? This is retroflex /l/-country!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T19:45:11.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2013-01-23T20:57:08.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This speaks more about your MBTI-personality and psychological modalities than on your idiolect. However, in some (sub)cultures gestures do convey a specific extra meaning, so there is also a sociolinguistical dimension to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-01-23T20:57:08.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-23T21:01:20.853" Score="9" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a mention on such a system among some South American native languages in Adam Jacot de Boinod's book &lt;em&gt;I Never Knew There's A Word For It&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-academic reading, which doesn't make it less interesting. Yet the fact of it being non-academic allowed the author to spare the important details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me with specific names of such languages? Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:27:22.650" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:27:22.650" Title="Which indigenous languages have marked Ancestral/Mythological Past in grammars?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3074" CreationDate="2013-01-24T05:03:01.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation, in which case they've been argued to denote a kind. A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dinosaurs are extinct.&#xA;Horses are widespread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out Carlson 1977 &quot;A Unified Analysis of the Bare Plural,&quot; reproduced in Portner &amp;amp; Partee's &lt;em&gt;Formal Semantics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="394" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T05:03:01.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1529" CreationDate="2013-01-24T10:59:23.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with Alex B.'s quotation of Willy van Langendonck (2007) if your looking for  a &lt;strong&gt;cross-linguistic&lt;/strong&gt; criteria. I haven't come across any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, there are languages that do distinguish proper and common nouns apart from orthography. A case in point are the Philippine languages. In Tagalog, the determiner used is different if the noun is common or proper. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sapatos &lt;strong&gt;ni&lt;/strong&gt; Imelda (Imelda's shoes).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sapatos &lt;strong&gt;ng&lt;/strong&gt; babae (woman's shoes).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Si&lt;/strong&gt; Imelda ang kasama ng ng presidente (Imelda is the one with the President).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ang&lt;/strong&gt; babae ang kasama ng presidente (The woman is the one with the President).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies for the nominative, genitive and oblique cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T10:59:23.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1529" CreationDate="2013-01-24T15:21:42.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proper nouns in one languages can not be translated in other languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Proper noun denotes 'instance and a common noun denotes 'class'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1534" LastActivityDate="2013-01-24T15:21:42.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-25T04:04:21.027" Score="7" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I pray in Hebrew. Many of my prayers have fixed wordings; as such, sometimes (alas) I wind up reciting them without wholly concentrating on what I'm saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm doing so, I find that concurrent ambient conversation in Hebrew tends to confuse me from what I'm saying. Ambient conversation in English does not. Why the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="228" LastEditDate="2013-01-25T04:39:23.723" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T07:30:38.810" Title="Why does ambient conversation in the same language confuse me when I recite, but in another language not?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-25T05:23:50.873" Score="5" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I randomly found this terrific &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; that contains a good structured collection of images, animations and videos to show how a sound is articulated in the German, Spanish and American English languages. I need similar resources for other languages such a Arabic, French and Persian or IPA in general . Do you know such sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of sites usually use Flash that is not indexed well by search engines, so if you know such resources for any language, please inform the community.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2013-08-01T06:06:16.557" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T11:11:42.597" Title="Multimedia materials for pronunciation learning" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2013-01-25T10:50:59.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also a completely separate vowel harmony process in some Spanish dialects that have an alternation between high and low vowel allophones. An open allophone at the end of a word triggers using the open allophone in preceding syllables' vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_phonology&amp;amp;oldid=529800388#Realization_of_.2Fs.2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia gives some examples&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Eastern Andalusian and Murcian Spanish, word-final /s/, /θ/ and /x/ (phonetically [h]) regularly weaken, and the preceding vowel is lowered and lengthened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/is/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[i̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;code&gt;[mi̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; ('my' pl)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;code&gt;/es/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[ɛː]&lt;/code&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;mes&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[mɛː]&lt;/code&gt; ('month')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;code&gt;/as/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[æ̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;más&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[mæ̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; ('plus')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;code&gt;/os/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[ɔː]&lt;/code&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;tos&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;code&gt;[tɔː]&lt;/code&gt; ('cough')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;code&gt;/us/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[u̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;tus&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;code&gt;[tu̞ː]&lt;/code&gt; ('your' pl)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A subsequent process of vowel harmony takes place so that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;lejos&lt;/em&gt; ('far') is [ˈlɛxɔ], &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tenéis&lt;/em&gt; ('you all have') is [tɛˈnɛi] and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tréboles&lt;/em&gt; ('clovers') is [ˈtɾɛβɔlɛ] or [ˈtɾɛβo̞lɛ].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They give a citation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2007), &quot;On the Nature of Vowel Harmony: Spreading with a Purpose&quot;, in Bisetto, Antonietta; Barbieri, Francesco, &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the XXXIII Incontro di Grammatica Generativa&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 15–35.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T12:36:43.530" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T12:36:43.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3106" CreationDate="2013-01-25T14:50:17.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3320952/how-to-automatically-create-imagemaps-of-grey-maps-from-wikipedia&quot;&gt;This question on Stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; has information on where one can find blank maps to fill in. It turns out that Wikipedia has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blank_maps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite a few template maps&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Graphics_Lab/Resources/Tutorials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several tutorials&lt;/a&gt; too on Wikipedia on how you can go about modifying them. In particular, the articles titled &quot;Change the colors of a country&quot;, &quot;Create and color map zones&quot;, and &quot;Cut a map into several sub-areas&quot;. The last two of these are in French, but the Google Translated versions of these are quite readable too. Also, read &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Tutorial-cartography_%28basic%29.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this introduction to cartography with Inkscape&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These articles recommend using the software, &lt;a href=&quot;http://inkscape.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inkscape&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2013-01-25T14:55:33.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3122" CreationDate="2013-01-25T17:53:27.153" Score="6" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will be attempting to solve the problem of automatic language identification/detection (and later translation), and I'm in a need of free digital dictionaries or corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for dictionaries for English, German and Slovenian language. Each dictionary must have words translated to all other mentioned languages. I only need word--word/&quot;list of words&quot; kind of dictionary, I don't need the definitions, nor examples. Preferably, they should contain word frequencies/probabilities, or at least be sorted from most used to least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the above request seems a bit unreasonable, I'm completely fine with large corpora (50GB+ of plain text is preferred; but at least 10GB is fine too) for each language. Preferably noiseless, which means that the German language shouldn't contain (many) English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1700" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:47:19.570" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T19:15:36.160" Title="Looking for bi-/tri-lingual dictionaries or corpora" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;slovenian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-26T01:02:33.777" Score="4" ViewCount="1851" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a friend studying a language from the pacific islands, and she found an affix that when added to a noun makes a verb and when added to a verb makes a noun. What would you call such a thing, and how might one find it in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastEditorUserId="1702" LastEditDate="2013-01-26T01:11:17.763" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T20:51:37.747" Title="Affix that makes nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-26T06:48:40.450" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In older variations of English in history, how much evidence of written language samples is needed to accurately define the grammar and usage of that period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if we want to define how English was in the year 500 CE, how much evidence in the form of parchments and samples must we have and analyze? Is there an official figure or standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1400" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T10:26:40.190" Title="How much evidence of written language is needed to accurately define English in a particular period of history?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3120" CreationDate="2013-01-26T10:26:40.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Cerberus told you in his comment, we can't really be 100% sure. Well, if we had the chance to go back in time and collect &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; written material then we could have a chance but that's impossible, for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we can do is study the material that got to us and formulate hypotheses using that material. Old English was roughly between the V (5&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 400 AD) and the XII century (13&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt;, 1200 AD), when it was already mostly developing into Middle English. But these are arbitrary dates. I mean, Old English didn't suddenly start at the V century. That is the date where we're sure it was already enough present and that it had those certain features that we attribute to Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not to mention that what we call Old English for simplification was actually a co-existence of four dialects: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. The one that emerged, for political reasons, was this last one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The changes occurred between this period of time and the XV century on the language were so deep and drastic that they make this old phase of English basically incomprehensible to the typical speaker of Modern English. Pick a piece from the &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; and ask a native that hasn't studied to read it and tell you what it's saying: he won't be able to do it because they are really different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what material do we have? Alfred the Great by the IX century, who favored the union of the various kingdoms/regions, also favored the &quot;english&quot; culture through two measures. An educative program focused, on one side on the study of Latin for the ecclesiastics, and on the other side on providing the most significative texts for translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the Anglo-saxon prose was born through translating texts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historia&lt;/em&gt; - Beda;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cura Pastoralis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dialogi Miraculorum&lt;/em&gt; - Pope Gregory I;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parts of the Bible;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;De consolatione philosophiae&lt;/em&gt; - Boethius.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we had the homiletic production by Wulfstan, who composed &lt;em&gt;Sermo Lupi ad Anglos&lt;/em&gt; in 1014, and Ælfric, who composed the 120 sermons divided in three series, where the first two formed the &lt;strong&gt;Homiliae catholicae&lt;/strong&gt; and the third &lt;strong&gt;Passiones sanctorum&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the X century, most of the anglo-saxon poetic patrimony is represented by &lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt; manuscripts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the manuscript Junius;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the manuscript Vercelli;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the manuscript Exeter;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the manuscript Cotton Vitellius A XV, better known as the &lt;strong&gt;Manuscript of Beowulf&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We actually have more material (Cædmon, Cynewulf) but I think that the basic answer to your question relies in what I said up to now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T10:26:40.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3118" CreationDate="2013-01-26T16:18:50.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The largest parallel corpus I know of is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmt.org/europarl/&quot;&gt;Europarl Parallel Corpus&lt;/a&gt;. It contains sentence-aligned bi-texts, including German-English and Slovene-English. However, it doesn't come close to the quantities of text you are asking for (German ~ 47 million words, Slovenian close to 13 million words). (Also see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php?id=197&quot;&gt;EU translation memory&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt huge corpora exist for Slovenian at all, especially if you need parallel corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some more resources for locating corpora:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se&quot;&gt;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se&lt;/a&gt; (includes Slovenian corpora)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/&quot;&gt;http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lt-world.org/kb/resources-and-tools/language-data&quot;&gt;http://www.lt-world.org/kb/resources-and-tools/language-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding English loanwords, it's important to realize loanwords are an integral part of language. Especially in domains like technology English loans are unavoidable. That said, different kinds of texts will likely contain different proportions of loanwords (and code switching), but I think this is something you will have to establish by analysing the available material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2013-01-26T16:18:50.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2013-01-26T17:36:27.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest calling this/these affix(es) either a &lt;strong&gt;nominalising affix&lt;/strong&gt; or a &lt;strong&gt;verbalising affix&lt;/strong&gt;, depending on its context. (See Additional Information below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Reasoning&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These terms are already present in literature as seen below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=xt15qmqx7UcC&amp;amp;pg=PA183&amp;amp;lpg=PA183&amp;amp;dq=morphological%20terms%20nominalisation&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=WT14E55fGd&amp;amp;sig=bTHRkGdtXtmP9HjqF1RvTZey8NI&amp;amp;hl=nl&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=sg0EUcWXKqvH0AHcjYCYBQ&amp;amp;ved=0CGYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=morphological%20terms%20nominalisation&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morphological Productivity (Cambridge; Google Books)&lt;/a&gt; gives&#xA;examples of nominalisation affixes in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ment&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-tion&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and examples of &quot;verbifying/verbalising&quot; affixes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ate&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: Nominalisation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see link for contents; gives lots of linguistic examples)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Additional Information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages do map different morphological processes to sometimes the same phone. For example in English, we have &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, which is called either a &lt;em&gt;plural(-ising) affix&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;possessive affix&lt;/em&gt;, depending on its context, because it will either turn a singular word plural or it will signify possession of a noun. Therefore, approaching this problem as a native-English speaker, I stick true to the aforementioned suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/482/jlawler&quot;&gt;jlawler&lt;/a&gt; mentions above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not always clear what's a noun and what's a verb in Austronesian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this new information in mind, perhaps a native speaker of an Austronesian language does not necessarily differentiate nouns/verbs as I do. This difference might then promote your friend to call this paradigm something specific to Austronesian languages. If such a term &lt;em&gt;does not exist&lt;/em&gt; in specific literature, then typically your friend can simply coin an appropriate term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1703" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T05:33:26.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3036" CreationDate="2013-01-27T21:14:45.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some resources on imperatives cross-linguistically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2010. Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Khrakovskiĭ, Viktor Samuilovich. 2001. Typology of imperative constructions. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;van der Auwera, Johan &amp;amp; Dobrushina, Nina &amp;amp; Goussev, Valentin. 2011. Imperative-Hortative Systems. In: Dryer, Matthew S. &amp;amp; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 72. Available online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/72&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/72&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;van der Auwera, Johan &amp;amp; Lejeune, Ludo (with Pappuswamy, Umarani &amp;amp; Goussev, Valentin). 2011. The Morphological Imperative. In: Dryer, Matthew S. &amp;amp; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 70. Available online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/70&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/70&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's something wrong with your terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, &lt;strong&gt;there's no such thing as the &quot;imperative&quot; tense.&lt;/strong&gt; The imperative is usually analyzed as a type of mood, because it expresses the speaker's attitude (i.e. modality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you misanalyzed/miscategoried the forms in your examples (e.g. the &quot;indefinite&quot; tense etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-01-27T23:15:00.537" LastActivityDate="2013-01-27T23:15:00.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-28T02:01:13.143" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling the answer is no, and that there are complications involved, but I was considering this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[-consonantal, +syllabic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would first remove all consonants, leaving e, u, i, and others, and then ensure that the remaining are syllabic, which would rule out glides (like j, w). All vowels should be syllabic, yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T04:53:23.397" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T05:57:25.200" Title="Is there an agreed-upon feature set that defines segments as vowels?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3036" CreationDate="2013-01-28T02:46:45.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll find a chart quite like what you're looking for, although we can give examples from particular languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cantonese has an imperative formed with a perfect aspect marker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sik6       zo2          keoi5       laa1&#xA;eat        PERF         3SG         SFP&#xA;Eat it up (already!)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the connotation of impatience or exasperation which the regular imperative (formed with the bare verb) does not. Cantonese, like Mandarin, lacks tense-marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T02:46:45.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3114" CreationDate="2013-01-28T04:55:25.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of what we think of as our hearing faculty is in our ears and part is in our brains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We here all noise with our ears and then our brains do all kinds of filtering and analyses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At one level human speech sounds stand out because these sounds fall within a particular range. Our ears contain tiny hairs of different lengths which vibrate in sympathy with different sound frequencies. The vibrations are converted into electrical signals and sent to the brain. This is very much like Fourier analysis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At a much deeper level, languages we know very well stand out more because our brain subconsciously processes the sounds as speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where ambient language can enter your thoughts and confuse you. For me my Spanish is sub-fluent so mostly I can concentrate on a conversation I'm having with people without bothered by a loud TV in the background which would interfere with my thoughts in English. I do however find that I subconsciously eavesdrop on people speaking Spanish, even when I haven't used it for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T04:55:25.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3126" CreationDate="2013-01-28T05:57:25.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A decent answer by @hippietrail from the comments above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the answer would be &quot;no&quot; given that the same sound might be&#xA;  considered a consonant in one language and a vowel in another. Thus&#xA;  the feature set alone is not sufficient to categorise a segment one&#xA;  way or the other, other factors must be taken into account, possibly&#xA;  including &quot;tradition&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the feature set notion is not perfectly adequate in describing our notions of vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T05:57:25.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3132" CreationDate="2013-01-28T10:28:54.970" Score="5" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told years ago by a teacher at a Carden School that they teach their students that English homonyms, especially those with diphthongs, can be told apart by the pitch profile of the vowel sound. Now I see in wiki that all English diphthongs have a falling tone. This does not necessarily mean it won't work, but it makes it a little harder to achieve. I can listen to myself talk, but my bias interferes. Is there any scholarship on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example I remember is &lt;em&gt;&quot;meat&quot;&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;&quot;meet&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It was said that &lt;em&gt;&quot;ea&quot;&lt;/em&gt; has a flat profile while &lt;em&gt;&quot;ee&quot;&lt;/em&gt; has a rising profile. This might be relative to each other. I also think that 'pitch' may have been a paraphrase and it actually means something else like emphasis or volume?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1706" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-01-29T02:25:21.870" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T17:23:30.047" Title="Are English homonyms distinguishable by pitch profile?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2013-01-28T10:38:36.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jairo Nunes and Ronice Müller de Quadros have an article (in the  theoretical framework of minimalist syntax) arguing that wh-doubling in sign languages (in their cases Brazilian Sign Language) obeys the same rule as in spoken languages: that is to say that a morphological reanalysis of the higher wh-element (in the case of sign language, presumably for reasons of focus) modifies the treatment of the chain formed by the doubled wh-element, triggering the overt manifestation of both elements of the chains. Here is a link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ronice.cce.prof.ufsc.br/index_arquivos/Documentos/Nunes_Quadros%20NELS%202006.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ronice.cce.prof.ufsc.br/index_arquivos/Documentos/Nunes_Quadros%20NELS%202006.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T10:38:36.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3130" CreationDate="2013-01-28T17:35:48.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid this is wishful thinking on the part of some instructor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of no dialect of English where &lt;em&gt;meat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;meet&lt;/em&gt; (and, for that matter, &lt;em&gt;mete&lt;/em&gt;) are not pronounced identically as /mit/, and there is no intonational difference between them. English does not distinguish words by pitch profiles like Chinese does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out, by the way, these two words are spelled differently, so they're not &lt;strong&gt;homographs&lt;/strong&gt; (Gk 'same writing'), but they're pronounced the same, so they are &lt;strong&gt;homophones&lt;/strong&gt; (Gk 'same sound'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homonym&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous between these senses, and tends to confuse folks, since most people believe that writing is the real language and speech just comes from that. That's the complete opposite of the truth, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech is real language, and writing is just a poor representation of some parts of it. That's the wishful thinking that the instructor indulged in — if they're spelled differently, they ought to be pronounced differently, right? As we all know, however, English spelling emphatically does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; represent the sounds of modern English, so this is a lost cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T17:43:28.543" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T17:43:28.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3133" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Germanic&lt;/a&gt; (ISO 639-5: &lt;code&gt;gem&lt;/code&gt;) is a branch of the Indo-European languages from Northern Europe, including English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sub-branches include West Germanic (including English, German, Dutch), North Germanic (the Scandinavian languages), and the extinct East Germanic (Gothic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proto-language is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/proto-germanic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'proto-germanic'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proto-germanic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3134" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" Score="0" Body="Branch of the Indo-European languages from Northern Europe, including English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:22:01.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3135" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Germanic (abbreviated &quot;PGmc.&quot;) is the reconstructed proto-language of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/germanic-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'germanic-languages'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;germanic-languages&lt;/a&gt;, a branch of the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/indo-european&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'indo-european'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indo-european&lt;/a&gt; languages. It was spoken in Northern Europe from the years −500 to 500.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3136" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" Score="0" Body="Proto-language for the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:25:42.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3137" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions on notation used in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms of linguistic notation include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetic &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/transcription&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'transcription'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;transcription&lt;/a&gt;. For this, see &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/phonetic-symbols&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'phonetic-symbols'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;phonetic-symbols&lt;/a&gt; for questions on the symbols used, or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/ipa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'ipa'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ipa&lt;/a&gt; for the questions on the International Phonetic Alphabet, a widely-used system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abbreviations for linguistic terms, such as names of languages or language families, or abbreviations used in &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/interlinear-gloss&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'interlinear-gloss'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interlinear-gloss&lt;/a&gt;es.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conventions for indicating different kinds of linguistic entities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistic charts or diagrams, such as parse trees, family trees, consonant or vowel charts, or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/optimality-theory&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'optimality-theory'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;optimality-theory&lt;/a&gt; tableaus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;See also&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'terminology'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;: questions on what linguistic terms mean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3138" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" Score="0" Body="Questions on notation used in linguistics" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" LastActivityDate="2013-01-28T20:47:24.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2013-01-28T21:00:48.710" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;English commonly resorts to post-auxiliary ellipsis as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) They arrived late, as I thought they would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is already pretty rare among the world languages. But, as far as I know, English is unique in the variety of constructions where ellipsis is tolerated. For instance, it tolerates voice mismatch as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) This problem was to have been looked into, but obviously nobody did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even non-verbal antecedent as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Mubarak’s survival is impossible to predict and, even if he does [survive], his plan to make his son his heir apparent is now in serious jeopardy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never heard of another language tolerating constructions like (2) and (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2013-06-11T19:45:18.133" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T19:45:18.133" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3143" CreationDate="2013-01-29T06:17:27.953" Score="10" ViewCount="690" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is the case in many households, my wife and I are both fluent in two languages  to the degree that we speak to each other without a conscious thought as to which language we are using.  We often alternate multiple times between languages in a single sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had never paid much attention to it before, but I began to wonder how we choose the language to express a given word, phrase or sentence.  My first hypothesis was that we might be subconsciously choosing the language with the least syllables in order to economize speech, but my observations did not bear this out.  Does anyone have other ideas or an answer based on research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1712" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-01-29T14:23:57.320" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T20:14:19.330" Title="In multilingual dialogues, which factors determine the language the speaker chooses for a given word or phrase?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2013-01-29T06:51:20.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_venery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Terms of venery&lt;/a&gt;, collective nouns used for denotating a group of animals, while countables (or, to say it better, measure words) denote a part of a group, an item, a piece, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, as opposed to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;countable words&lt;/a&gt; in languages like Chinese/Japanese, might be a unique feature (not mentioning the English spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-06-06T18:48:46.750" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T18:48:46.750" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2013-01-29T17:44:19.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not a fixed set of factors, but one could be the one you listed, the &lt;strong&gt;need for economizing&lt;/strong&gt;, which by the way is always strong and present regardless of the language. Languages always tend to say more with less effort and waste of energies (or sounds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor, which I think is very prominent, is &lt;strong&gt;the lack (temporary or not) of competencies in the other language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I mean by this? If you're speaking one language and you just don't have the necessary competencies to say something (high register, specialized terminology, etc), you'll switch to the other one. This would happen if you knew that the other person has the same abilities that you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching&quot;&gt;Code-switching&lt;/a&gt; happens in a community or in a group of people that share at least two languages (usually code-switching supposes the presence of bilingualism, or at least fluency in two languages from both speakers; it's related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_transfer&quot;&gt;Linguistic interference&lt;/a&gt;), so you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; subconsciously that the other person can speak the other language, otherwise you wouldn't switch. If you have the competencies but you feel a sudden loss of words, you'll switch, maybe just for that sentence/expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another factor, perhaps not applicable in your case but still worth to mention, is &lt;strong&gt;identity&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, you speak a dialect with your family only and the official language of your country with the rest. One of your relatives moves away and they start speaking the official language more and the dialect less for various reasons. If you talk to them then, some code-switching might occur, because you sometimes use the dialect (being family) and other times switch to the main language (because maybe they keep using that one); they might do code-switching too, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T17:44:19.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2013-01-29T17:56:41.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Alenanno's answer is great, but there is yet another factor: &lt;strong&gt;conspiracy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for a controversial example; &lt;strong&gt;please consider it from linguistic point only.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, your Thai girlfriend is talking with her friend, and they are discussing you. There's a big dialect of Thai, called Isaan, by the name of a large province. If they both are fluent with Isaan, they will almost certainly switch to Isaan. This is regardless if they speak something bad about you. This is rather a question of &lt;strong&gt;comfort&lt;/strong&gt;, and Thai people feel much better if they are sure nobody else understands them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2812/argot-vs-jargon&quot;&gt;Argot&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;strong&gt;suitability&lt;/strong&gt;, this example is very relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Tolstoy's &quot;War and Peace&quot;, when Pierre Bezukhov was asked (in Russian), &lt;em&gt;&quot;what is freemasonry?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, he started answering, &lt;em&gt;&quot;c'est un fraternite..&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and then realized he was unable to discuss abstract terms in Russian of those days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't say &lt;em&gt;modern&lt;/em&gt; languages are bad for any topics, but certainly, &lt;em&gt;comfort&lt;/em&gt; and  &lt;em&gt;economize your speech&lt;/em&gt; are important criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T18:31:29.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2013-01-29T18:24:59.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also Burling's Law of Bilingual Discourse (named after &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_Burling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Robbins Burling&lt;/a&gt;, who formulated it), which states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When two bilinguals speak, the weaker speaker's weaker language is avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies, of course, only to situations where one of the speakers, at least, is not a native speaker of both languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burling arrived at this formulation while trying to learn Norwegian in Norway, where everyone famously speaks excellent English; he found it a very difficult enterprise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I experienced the same effect in Malaysia, trying to have conversations in Malay; my biggest successes were with people who didn't know for sure that I spoke English (I usually offered a choice between Spanish or Malay).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T18:24:59.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3119" CreationDate="2013-01-29T20:51:37.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the answers and comments! My friend is going with the term derivational affix (abbreviation DER) as used by Karen Ashley (who works on the Sa'a language of the Solomon Islands). Seems a bit vague, but I guess it was necessary to show it is the same morpheme performing both functions. I'll try to release more info when the paper is published. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastActivityDate="2013-01-29T20:51:37.747" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2013-01-30T00:47:07.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was too long for the comment, so had to post it as an answer. As a native speaker of several languages, when I talk to someone who is also proficient in these languages I select:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a word that is shorter in one language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a word that expresses more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a word that is easier to articulate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a word that is used and heard more frequently in one language. For example, such words as midterms, finals, papers are generally used in English because I study in English medium university and I hear them more frequently, than in my mother tongue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a word that has association with past or something special, for example denoting the group from which I came. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and for constructions generally those that express more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my observations of myself and my friends. It is clear that some factors are stronger than others such as 4, but I think more research could be done on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-30T11:35:23.133" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T11:35:23.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3130" CreationDate="2013-01-30T17:23:30.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, it seems that you probably meant to discuss homo*phones*, and I'll proceed on that assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a lot of &quot;mainstream&quot; scholarship on the issue of whether alleged homophones are distinguishable or not, but there is some. Pursuing it leads down the fascinating rabbit-hole of so-called &quot;fine-grained phonetics&quot;, and typically winds up at a theory claiming that people store much more (and much more nuanced) phonetic detail in their mental lexicon (the repository of words in our mind, in particular their sound-meaning(-and-perhaps-spelling) associations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good start on the homophone question is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gahl, S. &quot;Thyme&quot; and &quot;Time&quot; are not homophones. Word durations in spontaneous speech.  Language 84(3), 474-496.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2013-01-30T17:23:30.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3152" CreationDate="2013-01-30T20:22:31.790" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is a little bit tricky (for me) to put in a title. I will try to describe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different types of writing systems, such as logographic, true alphabets and segmental scripts. Not sure if this is the cause of it, but my issue is that I noted that certain alphabet types, such as the &quot;featural linear alphabet&quot; used by e.g. Korean leads to words/characters being reused extensively with different meanings. Take for example 치다 which has &lt;a href=&quot;http://dic.daum.net/word/view.do?wordid=kew000073484&amp;amp;q=%EC%B9%98%EB%8B%A4&amp;amp;page=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the meaning of &quot;strike, hit, beat&quot;, but also many many other meanings&lt;/a&gt;. It is one of the most frequent used words (at position 366 of circa 6000). On the other hand, those words in English (a Latin alphabet language) are often very distinct, but they were counted to be only at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_lists_by_frequency#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;30,000 (?) words&lt;/a&gt;. At the same time, there are ~200.000 words though in Korean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume these effects may be similarly present in Chinese and Japanese, although my knowledge of those languages is limited. My question is now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the effect called in the Linguistics, in which a word has either (as in English) only a few (usually one) meanings vs. routinely having multiple meanings (as in Korean)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1363" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T10:59:15.640" Title="How is the differing reuse of words depending on language called in Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-01-30T20:49:35.770" Score="3" ViewCount="1390" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I was about asking this question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;German Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; since this is a feature specific to the German language. Possibly, this feature exists in other languages as well but as far as I know not in English. Anyway, since this question is about linguistics I think this is the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I know, transitivity, in linguistics, means whether or not a verb is followed by a direct object (called accusative in German). &lt;em&gt;To thank&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is a transitive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I thank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, an intransitive verb must not take a direct object. &lt;em&gt;To die&lt;/em&gt; is such a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*He died something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(In addition, respective to comments: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/die&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To die&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is defined as intransitive by Merriam-Webster dictionaries but it seems to be ambitransitive, too, because &lt;em&gt;to die a death&lt;/em&gt; is valid transitive use of &lt;em&gt;to die&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs can be followed by a direct object but this object is not necessary. These verbs are called ambitransitive. As example, consider the verb &lt;em&gt;to eat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am eating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ate an apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some transitive verbs additionally have a second object, the indirect object (dative in German). The appropriate term is ditransitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I give you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll give you a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll explain it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the indirect object is the recipient of the direct object the indirect object can't be defined independently from an direct object, at least in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I give to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, however, you can put a dative object behind some intransitive verbs. &lt;em&gt;Danken&lt;/em&gt; (English &lt;em&gt;to thank&lt;/em&gt;) is one of those verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich danke dir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison to &lt;em&gt;I thank you&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dir&lt;/em&gt; is not an accusative in German and consequently not a direct object. I'd claim that in German it is possible to use an indirect object without a direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cut a long story short: what is the appropriate term for intransitive verbs which take an indirect object or dative, respectively, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding comments:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't understand the discussion about the definition of transitivity. In the German sentence &lt;em&gt;Ich danke dir&lt;/em&gt; the verb &lt;em&gt;danken&lt;/em&gt; is intransitive. I think Dixon's definition is not relevant to this question. Of course, if it were &lt;em&gt;the definition par excellence&lt;/em&gt; then &lt;em&gt;danken&lt;/em&gt; would be transitive but before posting this question my research gave no inkling that I had to doubt whether &lt;em&gt;danken&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt; since it has no accusative object and that's the &lt;em&gt;most accepted&lt;/em&gt; definition.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Perhaps some linguistics will disagree. I'm not very familiar with linguistics but there's one rule I follow in general: If even experts don't agree then I stay with the most accepted definition until someone gives a persuasive counterargument.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That said, sources that handles the German language only, and therefore using the terms accusative and dative object rather than direct and indirect object, mentions that a verb in its transitive form has to be followed by an accusative object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in the sentence above &lt;em&gt;danken&lt;/em&gt; is intransitive. @jlawler confirms this when saying &amp;quot;Transitivity is not a property of verbs per se, but of verbs in a particular sentence -- or perhaps, better, only of sentences&amp;quot; although I think he actually wanted to say the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, these discussion might be interesting but are unrelated to my question:  what are verbs called that are intransitive and followed by an dative object as &lt;em&gt;danken&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Ich danke dir.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T02:26:00.240" Title="What are intransitive verbs with dative complement called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3150" CreationDate="2013-01-30T20:49:41.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure but if I got it right you are asking about how to call a word that has multiple meanings. In that case, we're talking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;polysemous words&lt;/a&gt; (as opposed to &lt;em&gt;monosemous&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case I don't see why the type of writing would affect how many meanings a word has. The various meanings are gained/lost through usage: speakers determine them by using the word in a certain context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 30,000 words in English that you linked to are the words by frequency: English (as most languages) has much more words than that (almost obvious considering that. The exact number is pretty much impossible to determine the most obvious reason being the fact that the vocabulary corpus changes every day, but according to all the studies I've seen we're between ~140,000 and 1,000,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm saying this because you compared what I think is the total count of words in Korean (let's assume it's more or less correct since you gave no reference) to the list by frequency in English. That's not a good comparison of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that words with one meaning in Korean are the exception. That's a strong statement, as we don't have hard data to support that. To me it looks like monosemous words are less common (since language tends to re-use existing words a lot) but my judgement here might be biased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, polysemy refers to words with more meanings, but it's different from homonymy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polysemy&lt;/strong&gt;: a word has different meanings, they might have some relation (not necessarily, though; it's not a requirement). E.g. &lt;em&gt;Dog&lt;/em&gt; refers to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an animal, a wicked man, a mechanical device for gripping, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homonymy&lt;/strong&gt;: two or more words sound the same but are unrelated (e.g. &lt;em&gt;where, wear&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;polynymy&lt;/a&gt; (even if it seems like so) has no reason to be here as it means something different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you can't say &quot;homonymous language&quot;: what does it mean? A language that only consists of homonyms doesn't exist and the same is true for the other features. As far as I know there isn't a name for languages using this type of characterization. All languages have homonyms, polysemous/monosemous words, etc, and the amount of these words is always changing and for this reason you can't use it as a distinguishing feature, since it's not distinguishing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-01-31T10:59:15.640" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T10:59:15.640" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3141" CreationDate="2013-01-31T20:14:19.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, one of the most influential factors is the frequency in which the term is used or heard by the speaker in each language. Just like the single language case where a speaker may be more inclined to use a certain word or grammatical construct out of several equivalent options, because that option is more accessible to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also related to the expected accessibility of the utterance to the listener. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_accommodation_theory#Speech_accommodation_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Accommodation theory&lt;/a&gt; tries to explain this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2013-01-31T20:14:19.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-01T05:30:20.483" Score="10" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the sets of possible morphemes of any given language a regular set, and can thus be recognized by a finite state automaton, or, equivalently, matched by regular expressions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are there any examples of recursive syntax in morphology that requires a context free grammar? (That is, recursive other than in trivial ways like left or right recursion that are still regular.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1724" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-16T02:05:10.283" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T02:05:10.283" Title="Are the morphologies of languages based on regular grammars?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-01T05:39:33.757" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I want to invent a sound which, if it already isn't a Dutch word, could potentially be one, because it exhibits the right morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some document where I could find &quot;Dutch&quot; under D in the index, and then navigate to a page starting on which all the rules are there? As in, Dutch has these phonemes, and then these rules for combining them, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1724" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-07T00:29:16.147" LastActivityDate="2013-02-07T00:29:16.147" Title="Is there a catalog of phonological and morphological information about languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3161" CreationDate="2013-02-01T07:18:49.187" Score="4" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;In old Russian the word &lt;em&gt;фрязин&lt;/em&gt; ([fr'az'in], apostrophe means a soft consonant) was used to denote a westerner. Although the word is not used any more, it is kept as part of some place names, such as a town Фрязино.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it is connected to the Thai &lt;em&gt;farang&lt;/em&gt; which is also used to denote a westerner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T16:27:37.907" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T16:27:37.907" Title="Are the Russian &quot;фрязин&quot; and Thai &quot;ฝรั่ง&quot; (farang) related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3155" CreationDate="2013-02-01T11:49:58.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the term you are looking for is &lt;em&gt;phonotactics&lt;/em&gt; and it has more to do with phonology than with morphology. Basically, the phonotactics of a language defines what sequences of sounds are allowed (or not allowed) and the basic syllable structure. For example, in Dutch the syllable structure is (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C), where C stands for consonant and V, for vowel. Letters in parentheses indicate optional sounds. Having the basic rules, you can, in theory,  derive the words (even those that don't actually exist in the language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a quick search, I could find a small section on Wikipedia about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dutch phonotactics&lt;/a&gt;, which, granted, is very superficial. But I bet that if you try more academic sources, you will find more detailed information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T11:49:58.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2013-02-01T14:14:55.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Natural Languages as Regular Languages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we can begin, a bit of house keeping. I will be using regular expressions, regular languages, and finite state automatas interchangeably. While this is not strictly true, it is sufficient for the scope of this answer. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c19/ch12.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly difficult question as the only way to prove a language &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; regular is by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language#Closure_properties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;constructing it from the unions, intersections, compliments, and relative compliments of known relative languages&lt;/a&gt;. Obviously natural languages would require a relatively complex regular language to describe it meaning a complicated derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is much easier to prove a language is not regular. A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_regular_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pumping Lemma&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; (but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt;) property of regular languages. I.e. if no pumping lemma can be found for a given language it cannot be regular but the existence of a valid pumping lemma does not prove the language is regular. Essentially, a pumping lemma is any &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is not empty and &lt;strong&gt;xy&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt; can be parsed by a given regular language for all values of n ≥ 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Testing English for Irregularity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/726_04/lectures/Lecture%2013%20revised%20Are%20NLs%20Finite-state.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this lecture&lt;/a&gt; which takes an intersection of English and a regular language to result in the language &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;B&lt;sup&gt;n-1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; where A denotes a set of determiner phrases (e.g. {&lt;em&gt;the dog&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the cat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the mouse&lt;/em&gt;, etc.}) and B denotes a set of transitive verbs (e.g. {&lt;em&gt;chased&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;admired&lt;/em&gt;, etc.}). Remember that the intersection of two regular languages is also regular. This means that if no valid pumping lemma can be found then English, by deduction, must be irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this regular language, we have only three choices for &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is all As&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is all Bs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a mixture of As and Bs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*y* is all As&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;the cat&quot;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;the dog&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;chased died&quot; then for n = 1 we get: &quot;the cat the dog chased died&quot;, which is obviously valid (i.e. can be parsed by &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;B&lt;sup&gt;n-1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). However, for n = 0 we see &quot;the dog chased died&quot; which is obviously invalid. Similarly, for n = 2 (&quot;the dog the cat the cat chased died&quot;) or higher, the output is obviously invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generically, if &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is all As and the number of times &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; appears can be variable then it's impossible to ensure that there for exactly one fewer B than As. Therefore there is no possible &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is all As.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*y* is all Bs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is all Bs (e.g. &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;the cat the dog the man&quot;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;admired&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;chased died&quot;), we see a similar problem to the above where we cannot ensure exactly one fewer B than As&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*y* is a mixture of As and Bs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a mixture (e.g. &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;the cat&quot;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;the dog chased&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;died&quot;) seems to work a bit better as both n = 0 and n = 1 are valid (&quot;the cat died&quot; and &quot;the cat the dog chased died&quot; respectively) but things start to fall apart at n = 2: &quot;the cat the dog chased the dog chased died&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generically, if &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a mixture of As and Bs ten as &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; repeats some B &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; occur before some A, which is banned by the regular language &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;B&lt;sup&gt;n-1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no possibly &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;strong&gt;xy&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt; is valid for &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;B&lt;sup&gt;n-1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; across all values of n. Therefore &lt;strong&gt;xy&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt; is not regular, therefore English is not regular, therefore English cannot be [fully] expressed by a regular expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this only applies to English and I cannot say that there is no natural language that can be fully expressed by a regular expression, but I highly doubt it. For any natural language one could repeat a similar test to prove it is not regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note that I am talking about describing the language &lt;em&gt;fully&lt;/em&gt;. That is not to say that under certain conditions a regular expression cannot describe a subset of a natural language &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; that regular expressions cannot &lt;em&gt;approximate&lt;/em&gt; a natural language in limited contexts. It depends on the scope you're working with and if you can justify the loss of accuracy for increased computability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Natural Languages as Context-free Grammars&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where the thoroughness of my answer takes a drop as I am less familiar with examining and proving context-free grammars. However, I was able to find a few articles which address the issue of natural languages as context-free grammars (usually to the negative). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4178381?uid=3739448&amp;amp;uid=2129&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=70&amp;amp;uid=3737720&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;sid=21101602539093&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an article proving English is not context-free. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2026618/Shieber_EvidenceAgainst.pdf?sequence=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is another article making a similar argument for Swiss German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both these articles seem to take a similar approach to the regular language process above where they user the closure properties of context-free grammars to generate a subset of a natural language then prove that that subset is non-context-free thus proving the full natural language is also non-context free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-02-01T17:44:28.910" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T17:44:28.910" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2013-02-01T17:37:02.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general belief of most linguists was expressed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/pdf-files/7-8-buch.pdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in 1998 this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..the complexity and power required to analyze linguistic data is &lt;strong&gt;discontinuous&lt;/strong&gt; in its distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Coarsely put, we have seen over and over that the simplest tools have the broadest coverage, and more and more complexity is required to expand the coverage less and less. Consider the&#xA;  place of natural language as a whole on the Chomsky hierarchy, for instance. Chomsky&#xA;  (1956) demonstrated that natural language is at least context-free in its complexity, and after a&#xA;  number of failed proofs, it is now commonly agreed that natural language is strongly and&#xA;  weakly trans-context-free (Shieber 1985, Kac 1987, Culy 1985, Bresnan et al. 1982). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet&#xA;  what is striking about these results is both the relative infrequency of constructions which&#xA;  demonstrate this complexity and the increase in computational power required to account for&#xA;  them. For example, the constructions which are necessarily at least context-free (such as&#xA;  center embedding) seem fairly uncommon in comparison with constructions which could be&#xA;  fairly characterized as finite state; the constructions which are necessarily trans-context-free&#xA;  are even fewer. In other words, a large subset of language can be handled with relatively&#xA;  simple computational tools; a much smaller subset requires a radically more expensive&#xA;  approach; and an even smaller subset something more expensive still.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   -- Bayer &lt;em&gt;et al&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Theoretical and Computational Linguistics: Toward a Mutual Understanding&quot;, p.224&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's in terms of &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt;, mind you, not morphology. But to the extent one considers morphology as a sort of phonological syntax, the same principles apply, provided one can distinguish and mark exceptions. Much of it is quite simple, even in a complex morphology. Some of it is harder; and agreement phenomena slide right over into syntax again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I've been informed by Jerry Sadock, an expert on West Greenlandic Eskimo languages, that polysynthetic Eskimo has recursive morphology; it works very simply through noun incorporation, since complement clauses are nouns. So one can theoretically make recursive words of countably infinite length, though performance constraints appear to make these rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T17:37:02.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2013-02-01T17:52:21.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IIRC, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reduplication&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;circumfix&lt;/a&gt; cannot be modelled using regular grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples of reduplication:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;i&gt;food+&lt;strong&gt;and other such things&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi: &lt;i&gt;khaanaa+&lt;strong&gt;vaanaa&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kannada: &lt;i&gt;ooTaa+&lt;strong&gt;geeTaa&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;i&gt;frogs+&lt;strong&gt;and other such things&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi: &lt;i&gt;mai.NDak+&lt;strong&gt;vai.NDak&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kannada: &lt;i&gt;kappe+&lt;strong&gt;gippe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Example of circumfix:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;i&gt;play+&lt;strong&gt;ed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;i&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ge&lt;/strong&gt;-spiel-&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-02-01T17:52:21.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3156" CreationDate="2013-02-02T00:21:43.133" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, it appears they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; related, cognate to &lt;em&gt;Frank&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BD&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article that Alex B. linked&lt;/a&gt; gives an etymology for the Russian &lt;em&gt;фря́зин&lt;/em&gt; /ˈfrʲa.zʲin/. It derives from the older form &lt;em&gt;фрѧ́зин&lt;/em&gt; /ˈfrɛ̃.zʲin/ (following loss of nasality of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yus&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ѧ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and a spelling reform). This is a sound-changed version of /ˈfrɛ̃ɡʲin/ by progressive palatalization; this derives from &lt;em&gt;Frank&lt;/em&gt; + /ʲin/, a suffix for ethnonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang&quot;&gt;The Thai ฝรั่ง [faràŋ]&lt;/a&gt; is reportedly also derived from &lt;em&gt;Frank&lt;/em&gt;, via Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit (various forms like &lt;em&gt;Farangi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Faranj&lt;/em&gt;). Cognate terms were used by Middle Eastern traders to refer to the Catholic Western Europeans. Southeast Asian languages have numerous borrowings along that route, so this etymology is plausible. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Franks&amp;amp;oldid=532555249#Legacy&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list of cognate terms&lt;/a&gt;, which includes similar terms in many nearby languages (Indic languages, Malay, Cambodian). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi&quot;&gt;It also appears in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not related to English &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=foreign&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;foreign&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is coincidentally similar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-02T00:29:47.797" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T00:29:47.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3077" CreationDate="2013-02-02T04:03:35.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Colin Fine said &lt;strong&gt;Word form&lt;/strong&gt; is probably most related term. But I decide to use &lt;strong&gt;string&lt;/strong&gt; because convey exactly just what I mean, also in computer programming a string of letters are called string.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastActivityDate="2013-02-02T04:03:35.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2013-02-03T02:43:55.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages (excluding highly polysynthetic ones) generally have a finite set of morphological word forms. From this, it follows that the language's morphology can in the worst case be described as a regular language simply by a disjunction of all possible forms; the question remains how elegant (and how explanatorily adequate) such an approach will be. Affixation can be very easily modeled via finite state automata without the need to explicitly enumerate each possible form, but full reduplication, stem alteration (like suppletion and ablaut) or templatic morphology (as in the semitic languages) require more work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good book on the subject is &lt;em&gt;Finite State Morphology&lt;/em&gt; by Beesley &amp;amp; Karttunen (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~laurik/fsmbook/home.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Although it makes reference to a proprietary software (the &lt;strong&gt;xfst&lt;/strong&gt; tool), there are open source alternatives that work very analogously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T02:43:55.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-03T19:41:41.680" Score="4" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some background info&lt;/strong&gt;. These two symbols don't have a reading on their own, but rather affect the sound that appears right before them. In modern Russian they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ъ&lt;/strong&gt;, which is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yer#Original_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hard sign&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ь&lt;/strong&gt;, which is instead the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_sign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;soft sign&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction covers front-vowels and back-vowels (just like in most Fenno-Ugric languages). It also gave a consonant shift (just like in some Fenno-Ugric languages). Some languages spoken at the Slavic language area are Fenno-Ugric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be a result of Fenno-Ugric influence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" OwnerDisplayName="Manjusri" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-02-04T10:33:40.977" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T13:08:58.203" Title="When were ъ and ь first distinguished in Slavic?" Tags="&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3165" CreationDate="2013-02-03T20:17:10.277" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ь and ъ were alway distinguished in Protoslavic, long before Slavs came into contact with Uralic peoples. The reduced vowel ь developed from the PIE short *ĭ, the reduced vowel ъ developed from the PIE short *ŭ, Old Church Slavonic &lt;code&gt;вьдова&lt;/code&gt;, Russian &lt;code&gt;вдова&lt;/code&gt;, Old Indo-Aryan &lt;code&gt;vidhavā&lt;/code&gt;, Latvian &lt;code&gt;vĭdua&lt;/code&gt;. Old Church Slavonic &lt;code&gt;дъва&lt;/code&gt;, Russian &lt;code&gt;два&lt;/code&gt;, Old Indo-Aryan &lt;code&gt;dŭva&lt;/code&gt;, Greek &lt;code&gt;δύω ['düō]&lt;/code&gt;. Also, ъ developed from the PIE *ŭ &amp;lt; *ŏ at the end of the words: Old Church Slavonic &lt;code&gt;сънъ&lt;/code&gt;, Russian &lt;code&gt;сон&lt;/code&gt;, Greek &lt;code&gt;ὕπνος ['hüpnos]&lt;/code&gt;: *sŭpnŏs &gt; *sŭpnŭs &gt; сънъ, &lt;code&gt;*pn&lt;/code&gt; simplified into &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;, final &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; disappeared according to the rule of open syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" OwnerDisplayName="Yellow Sky" LastActivityDate="2013-02-03T20:42:55.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4168" CreationDate="2013-02-04T12:18:31.097" Score="11" ViewCount="3693" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most algorithms for splitting text into sentences which I've found rely on punctuation being correct. However, in many real world applications, there will be substantial numbers of punctuation errors (missing periods, extraneous periods, etc.) Are there sentence-splitting algorithms which deal with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1732" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T03:57:45.320" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T10:34:35.863" Title="Are there sentence boundary disambiguation algorithms which can handle punctuation errors with decent accuracy?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3118" CreationDate="2013-02-04T14:04:28.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/10/accuracy-and-performance-of-googles.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this comparison of 3 language detection libraries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/language-detection/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language-detection&lt;/a&gt; is trained on Wikipedia and achieves 99.22% accuracy on single lines from Europarl corpus, so using Wikipedia shouldn't be a problem for accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1732" LastActivityDate="2013-02-04T14:04:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-05T19:48:59.440" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the phenomenon of questions that are posed as not as well-formed questions, but phrases. Yet, they contain enough structure to be understandable, and understood as questions. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wife of the president of USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context here is web queries, where the query is not a full fledged question, but rather a phrase and average search engine user would type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1736" LastEditorUserId="1736" LastEditDate="2013-02-06T08:12:29.210" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T08:12:29.210" Title="Name of a Question Phenomenon" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3169" CreationDate="2013-02-05T21:41:47.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're referring to is the fact that we can interpret speech acts that don't look like questions as questions because of other features. So even though the phrase you gave doesn't look like a question (e.g. word order inversion or inclusion of wh- pronouns for English) people can still interpret it as a question though other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common reason these are interpreted as questions (in English at least) is because they occur with high rising intonation, which makes them sound like questions. Another reason may be that the person asking the 'question' gestures at the other person, indicating they would like them to contribute the relevant information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists and philosophers like to talk about 'speech acts' when discussing how people communicate. Sometimes a speech act will be doing something different in conversation to what the grammar looks like. For example &quot;aren't you cold?&quot; is a question grammatically, but in interaction it's a suggestion (that the other person put on more clothing). Therefore, even though some things don't look like questions on the surface, their speech act function may actually be to elicit information like a question would. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more on speech acts here is a nice summary: &lt;a href=&quot;http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/spchacts.html&quot;&gt;http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/spchacts.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two most often cited papers in this area are Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), and it's also closely linked to Grice's (1989) theories about Implicature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Develops the distinction between performative and constative utterances into the first systematic account of speech acts.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grice, H. P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (The essays on meaning and conversational implicature provide a framework for distinguishing speaker meaning from linguistic meaning and for explaining their relationship.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. (Presents a theory of speech acts relying on the notion of constitutive rules.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2013-02-05T21:41:47.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-05T21:51:01.133" Score="7" ViewCount="6251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a first-semester student in linguistics and I need clarifications regarding the following trees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KNFxB.png&quot; alt=&quot;(NP (N&amp;#39; (det the) (N car)))&quot;&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/afhVq.png&quot; alt=&quot;DP (D&amp;#39; (D the) (NP ∆ car)))&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My course notes seem to stick with the first kind of notation but when I read about X-bar, I find both being used in different books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate some clarification of the different notations - or if they're indeed really the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1486" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-12-11T16:34:49.303" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T13:56:27.200" Title="Basic syntax notation: noun phrase vs determiner phrase" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;notation&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3171" CreationDate="2013-02-05T22:57:23.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional Principles and Parameters Framework &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, &lt;em&gt;noun phrases (NP)&lt;/em&gt; are considered the topmost &lt;em&gt;lexical head&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach had some disadvantages regarding determiners and how they work with, for example, inflections. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[NP [N' [det the] [N car]]]  &#xA;[NP [Spec [N' [det the] [N car's]]] [N' engine]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the determiner &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is treated as a part of a genitive phrase &lt;em&gt;the car's&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abney &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; suggested an idea that the NP is headed with a &lt;em&gt;determiner (D)&lt;/em&gt; to solve the problem with determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these notations simply reflect two different frameworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Chomsky, Noam. (1995). The Minimalist Program.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Abney, Steven. (1996) A Grammar of Projections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2013-02-05T22:57:23.753" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3171" CreationDate="2013-02-05T23:22:26.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are two different representations that depend on your assumption. Some linguists believe that noun and determiner make a Noun Phrase, while others believe that noun and det constitute a Determiner Phrase. The second group assumes that in such languages as English determines are overtly presented while in such languages as Russian they are covert or null. It is a rough explanation. Let's be a little bit more specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the X-bar theory every head must project into a phrase. A determiner does not seem to be a phrase, thus the representation in (1) causes a trouble. That's why many linguists reject the representation in (1), where the det is a specifier of an NP. On these grounds, the representation in (2) is theoretically more acceptable. It was firstly proposed by Abney (1987). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's look into some empirical evidence toward 2. Here are two genitive phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helen's book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The girl with a telescope's book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first example, it looks like the genitive suffix attaches to the noun head, however the second example clearly shows that it is not the case. That genitive suffix is actually attached to something bigger. It attaches to the whole phrase and it is actually a determiner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[DP  Helen [D'  's [NP book]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also impossible to say &lt;em&gt;Helen's the book&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In introduction courses many instructors prefer to use the first representation in order to keep things simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="9334" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T13:18:53.113" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T13:18:53.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-05T23:27:22.273" Score="1" ViewCount="1037" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble drawing a tree diagram for the following sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chrissy believed that the earrings she bought for Sue were real silver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the task we have to divide the sentence into its clauses and state the types of clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose 1 sentence and 2 clauses were Chrissy believed is already 1 clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1737" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-02-06T11:02:02.240" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T18:38:11.763" Title="Having trouble drawing a tree diagram" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2013-02-06T00:27:22.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mX8TS.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this about what you were looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-02-06T18:38:11.763" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T18:38:11.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3177" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-02-06T07:25:12.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;X-bar theory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a theory of &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'syntax'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; that postulates &lt;em&gt;X-bar&lt;/em&gt; (written &quot;X̅&quot; or &quot;X′&quot;) categories of phrases, where &quot;X&quot; can be a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/lexical-category&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'lexical-category'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lexical-category&lt;/a&gt; such as N (noun). The X̅ category shows up between X and XP in a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/parse-tree&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'parse-tree'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;parse-tree&lt;/a&gt;. An X̅ consists of an X possibly combined with an adjunct or with complements. An XP consists of an X̅  possibly with a specifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-06T07:25:12.380" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T07:25:12.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3178" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-02-06T07:25:12.380" Score="0" Body="A syntactic theory that postulates intermediate constituents below the phrase level (XP) but above the word level (X), known as  &quot;X-bar&quot; (written &quot;X̅&quot; or &quot;X′&quot;)." OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T16:28:18.317" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T16:28:18.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3095" CreationDate="2013-02-06T08:29:19.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Brat &lt;a href=&quot;http://brat.nlplab.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rapid Annotation Tool&lt;/a&gt; looks like an option, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1689" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T08:29:19.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3155" CreationDate="2013-02-06T18:15:57.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;World phonotactics database: &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au/index.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures Online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if that has morphological information or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2013-02-06T18:15:57.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-08T17:25:41.557" Score="7" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of 2009 the Montenegrin alphabet was adopted in Montenegro. It consists of the same alphabet as used in Serbia, with the addition of two graphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graphemes ⟨ś⟩/⟨с́⟩ and ⟨ź⟩/⟨з́⟩ are said to represent sounds unique amongst the Shtokavian languages, where they are palatalised variations of /s/ and /z/. I've seen this phoneme written as /ɕ/, /sʲ/ and /ç/ for ⟨ś⟩ and /ʝ/ for ⟨ź⟩.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is this, which of these phonemes is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-09T02:11:33.363" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T22:49:40.293" Title="What sounds do the graphemes ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ź⟩ represent in Montenegrin?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-10T18:22:37.830" Score="1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across culture-specific meanings of concept 'blue' (that is, of a colour hue between green and violet) in various languages. We know its idiomatic meanings in Standard or American Englishes, but in Russian 'blue' (or, actually, light blue) /голубой/ has an idiomatic meaning 'gay' (referring to sexuality). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, the word has some other idiomatic meanings, e.g. surprised/drunk in French, or 'police person' (in Latin American Spanish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which other languages have specific idiomatic meaning for the colour? Not just in idiomatic sayings (e.g. like 'blue collar', or 'out of the blue'), but rather like a standalone word? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was such an idiomatic meaning in any ancient languages ever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T01:09:19.347" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T01:09:19.347" Title="Which other languages have idiomatic meaning for words meaning 'blue'?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2013-02-23T14:31:54.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3043" CreationDate="2013-02-10T22:05:09.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is something fairly close to what you're talking about, which is the Speech Accent Archive someone above mentioned: &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://accent.gmu.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a collection of speakers from different regions and with different native languages (there are a lot of native English speakers from various regions but also non-native English speakers with various native languages) reading the same short passage. The passage is a little bit weird but I believe it was designed to include as much of the English phonological inventory as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Entries in the Speech Accent Archive include the speaker's birthplace, current place of residence, age at time of recording, native languages, other languages spoken, age at which they began learning English, where they lived that English was spoken, and how long they've lived there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the passages have been transcribed in IPA, but unfortunately not all. I'm not sure how new transcriptions are added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="771" LastActivityDate="2013-02-10T22:05:09.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6848" CreationDate="2013-02-11T00:17:06.460" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;pushed open&lt;/strong&gt; the door.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;pushed&lt;/strong&gt; the door &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the two ‘&lt;strong&gt;pushed open&lt;/strong&gt;’ phrasal verbs and have ‘the door’ as their objects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1728" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T17:50:01.847" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T17:50:01.847" Title="Are these all phrasal verbs?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3187" CreationDate="2013-02-11T14:35:23.413" Score="-3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an argument with someone recently and figured I should find out, so I went on a research spree and could not find any authoritative answers on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure there are many disputes about how one should write numbers, as digits (0-9) or as words (one, two, three....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to know about one particular subset of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to write &lt;code&gt;'Three cookies'&lt;/code&gt; is it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to write &lt;code&gt;'3 cookies'&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that when wanting to write &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; numbers, it is acceptable to write with digits, like in the case of &lt;code&gt;'4356 people showed up to the event'&lt;/code&gt; since it would be sort of silly to write &lt;code&gt;'four thousand three hundred and fifty six people showed up to the event'&lt;/code&gt; but in the case of &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; digits, I was always told I should write the number out fully, and not just use the digit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my question is clear, I do not want to start a discussion or a debate about anything other than the particular case of writing a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; digit versus writing out the word. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1752" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T15:31:00.063" Title="Is it *incorrect* to use single digit numerals?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2013-02-11T18:18:48.447" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3186" CreationDate="2013-02-11T15:31:00.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is wholly in the purview of style guides, which is the only domain in which this can be 'incorrect'. Many such guides agree that sentences should not begin with numerals, and it is common to prescribe that numbers &amp;lt;10 should be written out. If you're writing for a publication (in whatever language), you should follow their rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-02-11T15:31:00.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-11T18:18:47.113" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that what we hear and interpret as speech is often an inarticulate garble of phonemes that native speakers process with lightning speed (usually) to come up with a clear and specific meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English if you are a native speaker and you hear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yerg'nahaftagedoudaherenow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you probably parse it instantly and correctly as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're going to have to get out of here now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But non-native speakers would be completely flummoxed unless there were sufficient contextual clues—angry face, threatening or warning gestures, tone of voice—to make most of the meaning clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how much of this post-processing is based on pattern recognition, how much is contextual or modal or extra-linguistic, and so on. Certainly if I were to bring up an abstruse topic out of the blue, and spoke in a similarly rapid and inarticulate manner, comprehension would go way down, even for native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="171" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T10:42:52.537" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T10:42:52.537" Title="To what extent is aural language comprehension based on a post-processing model, and what are the factors involved?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3191" CreationDate="2013-02-11T20:13:59.507" Score="-1" ViewCount="2130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like learning new languages so I am curious in getting a degree in linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of jobs are available as a linguist?&#xA;What are the opportunities available in this field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I am reading from this list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1802/what-are-the-fundamental-differences-between-natural-language-processing-and-com&quot;&gt;What are the fundamental diff between natural language processing and Com...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia - Computational linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems these answers focus on computers. As much as I like computers and I work with them all day, when I think about linguistics [I am layman so I don't actually know what linguist really do] I kind of imagine it involving talking with people of different cultures as opposed to staring at a screen all day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine things like gathering oral history from people who speak language in different ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do linguist really do??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T01:25:03.430" Title="What are the job opportunities in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-02-12T09:57:37.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11899" CreationDate="2013-02-11T22:41:22.807" Score="10" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my understanding of Chinese, the language lacks any sort of grammatical tense but is instead very aspect driven when describing actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a reoccurring pattern among languages with a high use of grammatical aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:14:20.347" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T08:28:45.110" Title="Do languages with high use of grammatical aspect generally lack grammatical tense?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3189" CreationDate="2013-02-12T01:10:00.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This board is supposed to be for actual linguistics-based questions with possible fact-based answers and I don't mean to encourage these types of opinion-based questions here in the future but I do feel a bit bad for you since I don't know where else you could ask. I seem to remember a good linguistics thread over at the Something Awful Forums but that was quite a few years ago and if probably gone. So, in that spirit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is the study of &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to the study of &lt;strong&gt;languages&lt;/strong&gt;. It's a fine distinction that many have trouble understanding. A degree in linguistics is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about sitting in a classroom learning new languages (although this may be required for your individual research) but instead studying the structure of languages. This can be divided into grammar (syntax), meaning (semantics), pronunciation (phonology and phonetics. Phonetics being more concerned with the physical aspects of sound waves and sound production), social context (sociolinguistics), and geographical/historical context (historical/comparative linguistics). As you can see, linguistics is an incredibly diverse field and you need to do a lot of research into which aspect of language you'd be interested in studying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your image of linguistics seems to be closer to sociolinguistics. In all honesty this doesn't seem to be a very popular field of study (I once had a graduate-level sociolinguistics course that only had 3 people in it including both me &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the professor). Also similar, occasionally my phonologist and phoneticist friends conduct studies where they record people of various accents and dialects in order to examine pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main concern is that you seem to misunderstand what linguistics is and have incorrect expectations as to what studying and working in linguistics is like. If you are interested in linguistics simply as a way to learn new languages I highly suggest you look at other degrees such as a literature degree (in your language of choice, of course) or maybe even translation (although they may expect you to already by bilingual. Check with prospective schools). If you're interested in meeting different cultures I'd suggest some kind of sociology or anthropology degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm probably going to catch some flack for this but I'm going to say that &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; there are no prospects for a Linguistics graduate to get a job in the Linguistics field outside of academia (i.e. being a professor or paid researcher). By which I mean it's very unlikely you'll find a job which explicitly requires linguistic knowledge. But here's the good news: it's the same situation for pretty much every single degree except the hard sciences, engineering, computer science, statistics, and finance/accounting. Even business majors (excluding finance/accounting) will have a hard time finding a job that wouldn't also accept an English Lit. major. To a certain extent, undergrad degrees don't matter as long as you have one, so you might as well choose something you find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Computational Linguistics, that's a whole different ball game. It's an interdisciplinary field (with cross-over skills that can qualify you for multiple types of careers) and it sits very much on the &quot;applied&quot; side of the theoretical/applied spectrum. Obviously, applied disciplines will have an easier time finding a job as they create more tangible outputs that companies can use and sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interdisciplinary fields in linguistics include psycholinguistics (psychology + linguistics), historical linguistics (history + linguistics), sociolinguistics (sociology + linguistics), and neurolinguistics (neurology + linguistics). With the exception of neurolinguistics, I'd say these are all rather theoretical. You'd have more career opportunities but there are fewer employers looking for your exact skill set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that few universities offer degrees or courses in these interdisciplinary fields at the undergrad level (probably historical and socio excepted). This means you either need to wait until graduate studies or take some sort of major/minor degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I do not think you are ready to study linguistics. Your expectations as to what linguistics is and what linguists do seems off and you have not done nearly enough research into what fields are entailed in linguistics. I would suggest going to the websites of prospective schools and seeing what courses linguistics students are required to take. Read the syllabuses. Don't just stop at first year courses but also look at second year and third year courses (just try not to get discouraged if you don't understand what upper-year courses are talking about. Remember, you'll have 1-2 years of training before you have to take those courses). See if the courses appeal to you. This will tell you if you want to study linguistics as well as give you a better idea of what is available. And, unless you have a career in mind that you want to work towards, don't worry too much about getting a job afterwards as the vast majority of people take careers completely unrelated to their degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you look at the courses and decided a degree in linguistics isn't right for you, don't be afraid to keep linguistics as a hobby. I think I'm right in saying that the vast majority of people on this StackExchange did not take linguistics as their undergrad nor made linguistics their career. I know I only became interested in linguistics in the final year of my undergrad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-02-12T01:25:03.430" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T01:25:03.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3194" CreationDate="2013-02-12T06:56:06.947" Score="5" ViewCount="3986" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages that are more analytic than (or as analytic as) English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1618" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-15T00:36:55.813" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T14:11:52.737" Title="Are there any languages that are more analytic than English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3192" CreationDate="2013-02-12T20:19:16.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those unsure of terminology, &quot;analytic&quot; refers to how many morphemes group together to make a word. Some languages will have lots of morphemes together in a word (Australian and North American languages are famous examples of this) and they are called 'polysynthetic.' A language that has few morphemes together in a word is called 'analytic.' Mandarin is often cited as an example of such a language, where there is often only one morpheme per word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is relatively analytic, but not the most analytic. While I can't find any stats for languages as a whole, the ever-reliable &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; database has a feature called &quot;[Inflectional synthesis of the verb]&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/22A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;. The verb is not a terrible place to look - although it does deprive us of the kinds of polysynthesis in German where adjectives and nouns act as morphemes in larger words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this we see that English is, across the world's languages, relatively analytic - being one of 24 languages with only 2-3 morphemes per verb. There are only 5 languages with fewer (0-1 morphemes) as opposed to the remainder of the 145 language sample that have anywhere from 3-13 morpheme slots per verb. Looking at the 24 languages that have only 2-3 morphemes, we see that there aren't many in the Euro-area. There's Finnish, but that's not Indo-European, but Uralic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves Hindi on the map - a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. I have not learned much Hindi, but I have learned Nepali, and I would say that these Indo-European languages have, at the most, only a slightly higher number of morphemes per word. This area would be your best candidate for finding another analytic language of the Indo-European family that is similar to English in terms of morphological density of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2013-02-12T20:19:16.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-13T06:30:28.407" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a question out of curiosity. Before typing became commonplace, many writing communications must have been transcribed from dictation. My hypothesis is that certain syntax and grammar must change from dictated to (personally) written communication. Is there any research in this subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1588" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T15:50:15.870" Title="Does speech transcription change syntax/grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3207" CreationDate="2013-02-13T09:39:27.197" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to annotate some lecture transcripts with multiple sentences or paragraphs per annotation category. GATE seems to be cumbersome and less responsive whereas brat is intuitive but multisentence\multi-line annotation is complex and buggy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any annotation tools catering to lecture transcripts?&#xA;In my case there is almost no meta data and only contiguous transcript of a single speaker text .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tools already tried in order of decreasing satisfaction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UAM Corpus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GATE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MAE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is exists a &lt;a href=&quot;http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/12/18/bib.bbs084.short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recent review paper on annotation tools&lt;/a&gt; which also concludes the unavailability of  a single best annotation tool and each of them lacks certain features many of the important tools were surprisingly not included in the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T11:42:35.037" Title="Annotation tool for lecture transcripts" Tags="&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2013-02-13T10:21:10.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem you are thinking about may have to deal with linguistic recast which involves transformation of non compact speech(like spoken discourse) to or from compact metaphorical discourse(like a formal Essay). Related work on functional recast is by &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-4781.00199/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;systemic functional linguistic scholars Mohan &amp;amp; Beckett&lt;/a&gt; they present two kinds of recasts: corrective recast which grammatically corrects the input speech and functional recast which recasts by paraphrasing the discourse rather than correcting syntactic mistakes. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wagsoft.com/Systemics/Conferences/ISFC39_2012_proceedings.pdf#page=63&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ping&lt;/a&gt; presents example study of functional recast from textbook discourse to spoken discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-02-13T15:50:15.870" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T15:50:15.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3196" CreationDate="2013-02-13T14:18:31.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly spoken syntax differs from written syntax; but dictation is a linguistic skill which can be learned like any other. Some considerations to keep in mind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the heyday of dictation, most dictated communications were addressed to very routine matters for which the originator had developed a lexicon of stock phrases and sentences. &quot;In response to yours of the 4th inst. I have the very great pleasure of informing you that ... &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the same token, secretaries were skilled at ignoring the false starts and local solecisms endemic in speech, and took upon themselves - were indeed often relied upon - to rewrite as they transcribed. &quot;Take a letter, Miss Samuels. My dear Harper, I was very happy to hear that, blah, blah, blah - you know what to say. Stick in something about his speech at the Chamber ... &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, dictation was often only a first draft: an important letter or speech was dictated, typed, and then corrected, perhaps many times over.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I would be surprised to find that dictation was more common before typewriting. My impression is that before the end of the 19th century bosses composed in longhand and handed off their drafts to clerks for fair-copying (twice: once for the recipient and again in the firm's letterbook). It was not until after the advent of the new technologies typing, shorthand and carbon paper - and of that new and exceptionally cheap IT drudge the female secretary -  that bosses found dictation a more efficient use of their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2013-02-13T14:18:31.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-13T14:32:47.587" Score="0" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am exploring of a possibility of experiencing the world around without a language. By listening, speaking, seeing and reflecting on words made by the alphabets of a language - one experiences the World. How far is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1759" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-15T00:36:19.123" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T19:40:27.950" Title="Can any one experience the World without a language? if yes to what extent, if no, why not?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-14T14:10:06.657" Score="9" ViewCount="996" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_checker&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's &quot;Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm&quot;, published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% of context-sensitive spelling errors, in addition to ordinary non-word spelling errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this up-to-date? What if we limit to algorithms not covered by patents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: After reading the papers on Winnow, it only seems to support distinguishing a limited number of &lt;em&gt;confusion sets&lt;/em&gt;, which need to be chosen before training, and so can't serve for general spelling correction anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1732" LastEditorUserId="1732" LastEditDate="2013-02-15T07:12:06.933" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T12:59:18.160" Title="State-of-the-art spelling correction algorithms" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3206" CreationDate="2013-02-15T23:16:21.110" Score="10" ViewCount="1256" Body="&lt;p&gt;In British English you'll often hear them post-fixing expressions that American English tends to keep up front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I've heard British English speakers (golf commentators in particular) say things like &quot;It looks easy, that shot.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sounds a bit odd to my American ears, and I take it that construction isn't common to American English. We seem to prefer &quot;That shot looks easy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this linguistic phenomenon called? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T16:28:40.357" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T19:18:10.777" Title="What is this feature of British English called?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3203" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;philosophy of language&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) deals with the nature, origins, and usage of natural language. It explores the nature of linguistic truth and meaning, theories of reference, the cognition of language, pragmatics, and other topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;See also&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Philosophy of linguistics&lt;/a&gt; on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/philosophy-of-language&quot;&gt;&lt;kbd&gt;philosophy-of-language&lt;/kbd&gt; tag on Philosophy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3204" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" Score="0" Body="for philosophical questions concerning the nature, origins, and usage of natural language" OwnerUserId="1021" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T00:34:39.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3202" CreationDate="2013-02-16T04:12:15.117" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This rule is known as &lt;strong&gt;Right-Dislocation&lt;/strong&gt;; it moves the subject to the end of the sentence, leaving behind a coreferential pronoun. There is a corresponding &lt;strong&gt;Left-Dislocation&lt;/strong&gt;, as well, that inserts a pronoun as the subject.  Both constructions are accompanied by specific intonation contours, marked with commas; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Preliminarybufattenedlistoftransformations.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more on these syntactic rules, and similar rules of English, on page 4 here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; looks easy, that shot. ~ That shot looks easy. ~ That shot, &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; looks easy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The beginning and the end of a sentence are the two most prominent positions available; thus there are dozens of English syntactic rules that have the effect of moving some important word&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or construction to either the beginning or the end of a sentence, under specific circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dislocated constructions, like most constructions that indicate speaker attitude by intonation, are features of speech, rather than writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and dislocation is not a feature of British English. It's all over the US, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T19:18:10.777" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T19:18:10.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2013-02-16T11:42:35.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ELAN&lt;/a&gt; as my annotation tool of choice - but this is appropriate for Audiovisual transcription (and, to a lesser extent, audio or video alone). The best thing about this is that it's time aligned, and allows you to &quot;pull out&quot; the written transcript for analysis in other programs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're transcribing and encoding text that is already written, in which case &lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/clan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLAN&lt;/a&gt; might be more appropriate for you. Although it was created for the massive CHILDES project, I know people use it for other written transcripts as it allows for good encoding and some analysis within the program. I haven't used it but other people might be able to tell you more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T11:42:35.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3209" CreationDate="2013-02-16T20:21:58.870" Score="3" ViewCount="1480" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a similarity between the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Salut&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in French and the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;سلام&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in Arabic which is pronounced &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Salaam&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and they both mean &quot;safety and well-being&quot; and are both used as a general greeting to mean &quot;hello&quot;. But Salut comes from Latin which I don't think is related to Arabic in any way. How can that be possible then? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1768" LastEditorUserId="1768" LastEditDate="2013-02-18T08:37:03.127" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T08:37:03.127" Title="Similarity between Salut in French and Salaam in Arabic" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3208" CreationDate="2013-02-16T21:02:24.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like you said, the French term &lt;strong&gt;salut&lt;/strong&gt; comes from Latin and to be precise from &lt;em&gt;salūs salūtis&lt;/em&gt;. This term appears in other Romance Languages as well: &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt;. saluto, &lt;em&gt;Es.&lt;/em&gt; saludo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning which is &lt;em&gt;health, well-being&lt;/em&gt;, is carried out also by other descendants: &lt;em&gt;It.&lt;/em&gt; salute, &lt;em&gt;Es.&lt;/em&gt; salud, &lt;em&gt;Port.&lt;/em&gt; saúde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a connection to &lt;strong&gt;salaam&lt;/strong&gt; which actually means &lt;em&gt;peace&lt;/em&gt; in Arabic (I think you can confirm this meaning) and is related to the term &lt;strong&gt;shalom&lt;/strong&gt; in Hebrew. You can find more about this on the Wikipedia page for &lt;strong&gt;Shin-Lamedh-Mem&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;&quot;the triconsonantal root of many Semitic words&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, at the section &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0-L-M#Salam_.22Peace.22&quot;&gt;Salam &quot;Peace&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the same page, this &lt;em&gt;&quot;root itself translates as whole, safe, intact&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but the triconsonantal part refers to the Š-L-M, while in salut we miss the last one and we have a T instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a real closeness in terms of meanings which could be a coincidence. Still, this is just a superficial analysis and I don't have all the tools/resources to absolutely exclude a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T21:02:24.483" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3208" CreationDate="2013-02-16T22:49:22.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin word comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;solu̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;healthy, whole&quot;. It is hypotized to derive from Proto-Eurasiatic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;calom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to suffice, be full&quot; which also gave reflexes in other Eurasiatic languages such as Eskimo-Aleut &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ciɫǝ-m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Altaic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;čā́lo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Uralic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cilä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Dravidian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sāl-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;salaam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;šalom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; both derive from Proto-Semitic  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;šǝlǝm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;healthy, whole&quot;, which in turn derives from Proto-Afro-Asiatic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s/cǝlǝm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;healthy, whole&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since both Eurasiatic and Afro-Asiatic belong to Nostratic (and considered quite close to each other), it is reasonable to suppose they are related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice also Proto-Sino-Caucasian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ʒó̆ɫǝ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;healthy, whole&quot; (example from Lak language: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cullu-s:a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;whole, healthy, undamaged&quot;) with Proto-Sino-Caucasian groupped as sister family to Nostratic into Borean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-02-16T23:10:34.997" LastActivityDate="2013-02-16T23:10:34.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-17T04:44:24.960" Score="3" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a word in Indian Bengali which is &quot;sala&quot;, but in Banladesh Bengali it is pronounced as &quot;Hala&quot;. The &quot;s&quot; becomes &quot;h&quot; in a Bangladeshi's tongue. Similarly &quot;Tsunami&quot; seems to be impossible to be pronounced (&lt;em&gt;ts&lt;/em&gt; part); but it is asssumable Japanese can utter it. So why does such things happen? Is it because those who can utter hard constructs, have a letters in their alphabet which helps them pronouncing? Or is it totally a regional and anthropological thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1770" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:31:40.367" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T20:06:16.160" Title="Why do people from a certain region sometimes have difficulty pronouncing certain sounds?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3214" CreationDate="2013-02-17T06:53:31.230" Score="9" ViewCount="15994" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading around multimodal text and many of the readings I have come across (Kress, Halliday) seem to define language as spoken or written communication.  That seems to exclude sign language and places it as a form of high level gesture (though still a mode).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What defines a language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is sign language actually a language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:32:42.767" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T11:42:22.903" Title="What defines a language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3208" CreationDate="2013-02-17T10:46:46.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to the previous posts,&#xA;&quot;Salve&quot; was a common greeting phrase in Sweden during the medieval time,&#xA;and also has a similar meaning (peace, well-being).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1772" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T10:46:46.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3212" CreationDate="2013-02-17T13:45:38.280" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language is a complex system of communication, spoken or written, verbal or non-verbal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, natural languages are spoken or signed: written language is an artificial creation made by man and this includes also systems like Braille (for blind people), etc. There are many languages that nowadays lack a written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that spoken language comes before written language is reinforced by two aspects: &lt;strong&gt;ontogenesis&lt;/strong&gt; (single individual), humans learn to speak first and then they are taught how to write and &lt;strong&gt;philogenetics&lt;/strong&gt; (human species), in human history, spoken language developed first as opposed to the written language that developed later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Language properties&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the language properties are (some of these are translated from other resources so if you spot a mistake, just let me know):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Biplanarità&lt;/strong&gt; (not sure how to translate it): This is the most obvious property and it defines the correspondence between &lt;em&gt;signifier&lt;/em&gt; (the form taken by a certain sign) and &lt;em&gt;signified&lt;/em&gt; (the meaning conveyed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example, &lt;strong&gt;cat&lt;/strong&gt; is a signifier, it's a word. The animal we think of by reading that word is the signified, i.e. the meaning the word conveys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point we would have the real-world entity, an actual cat, which is called &lt;strong&gt;referent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arbitrariness&lt;/strong&gt;: A language is made of many symbols that are placed together to form utterances, using the grammar rules for that given language. But symbols are arbitrary: there is no natural link between a signifier and signified. If you say &lt;strong&gt;cat&lt;/strong&gt;, there is nothing in this word that would naturally link it to the meaning of &quot;cat&quot; or to the actual animal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different levels of arbitrariness but for the sake of this answer I'll skip this part since it could get very long.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duality&lt;/strong&gt;: There are two levels, primary and secondary. A quick example would be the word cat we used earlier. The letters C, A and T are meaningless when given singularly (except particular cases but let's ignore that for now). If I say &quot;C&quot;, you won't get nothing out of it. This could constitute our secondary level. When this elements are combined, we get to the primary level, the units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you combine those three letters to form the word &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt;, then you have meaningful unit. If I say cat, you'll certainly think of the four-legged animal covered in fur.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Systemacity&lt;/strong&gt;: Elements and words combine in a language according to certain rules. Without rules, we wouldn't be able to determine the meaning of an utterance or even decide whether an utterance has meaning at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So languages have rules, rules for combining sounds, words and even sentences. With these rules there is a common ground between us and the rest, that can give communication a constant. Different expressions or ways of talking will have a single (mutable but single) point that defines what is appropriate for communicating and what is not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linearity&lt;/strong&gt;: Signs can be uttered only one after the other, there cannot be simultaneous signs. You can think a lot of things at the same time, but your physical tract will only let you utter one sign at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Productivity&lt;/strong&gt;: Given some rules, a language can create new combinations or ways to express something so that the interlocutor can correctly understand this new word even if they have never seen/heard it before, thanks to the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by taking a root from a single word, we're able to produce several other words related to the first. For example: farm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farm&lt;b&gt;er&lt;/b&gt; = person&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Farm&lt;b&gt;able&lt;/b&gt; = adjective&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Displacement&lt;/strong&gt;: We can talk about something (car, last night's soccer match) even if it's not there anymore or not in front of us. E.g. Talking in a bar &quot;My car is parked outside.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language is stimulus-free&lt;/strong&gt;: The previous two features are linked to the concept of languages being stimulus-free: humans don't always have the same response and wouldn't utter the same words when given the same stimulus. Furthermore, language is independent from the reality that we're experiencing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cultural transmission&lt;/strong&gt;: This refers to the fact that languages (and all that this includes) is transmitted to future generations. Also, these don't necessarily acquire the language from their biological parents, but rather from the society where they grow up (which might include their parents).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntactic complexity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multifunctionality&lt;/strong&gt;: Language can take &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobson%27s_functions_of_language&quot;&gt;different functions&lt;/a&gt;: poetic, metalinguistic, phatic, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;: There is not a unique relation between a signifier and a signified. A signifier could have many signifieds and a signified could have multiple signifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recursion&lt;/strong&gt;: This is a phenomenon where a linguistic rule can be applied to the result of the application of the same rule. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Riflessività&lt;/strong&gt; (not sure how to translate this): This is the ability of a language to talk about itself. We use the language to refer to the language itself, making it a metalanguage. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Transposition of means&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sign Languages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sign languages are natural&lt;/strong&gt;, which means they aren't created artificially to cover a certain purpose. They can be, but they are naturally born in deaf communities. In the past, deaf communities or even twins have been discovered and what happened was that they naturally developed a sign language to communicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;Sign Languages have their own grammar and syntax&lt;/strong&gt; and that's why a user of BSL (British Sign Language) cannot communicate as easily with a user of ASL (American Sign Language) as it happens for other speakers. English, even having different vocabulary in some occurrences, different accents, is still perfectly understandable from BrE and AmE speakers. But &lt;strong&gt;Sign Languages are totally independent&lt;/strong&gt;. This obviously means that Sign Languages are not international, even if an International Sign Language (ISL) has been elaborated, previously called Gesturo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that wasn't enough, Sign languages have their written form or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting&quot;&gt;SignWriting&lt;/a&gt; (just an example). They can be also be transcribed, the most used method being the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Notation_System&quot;&gt;Hamburg Notation System or HamNoSys&lt;/a&gt;, which would be the IPA version for the Sign Languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 60s a scholar named &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe&quot;&gt;William Stokoe&lt;/a&gt; was the first to declare Sign Languages (to be exact the American Sign Language) as fully-fledged languages that had all the properties of spoken languages, revealing the possibility of their components to be divided in sub-components. If in a spoken language we have a &lt;strong&gt;word made by phonemes&lt;/strong&gt;, in a Sign Language we have a sign made by four parameters, which are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ydfvP.png&quot; alt=&quot;scheme made using the program XMind&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently also other non-manual components have been highlighted (even if they are considered suprasegmental features): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;face expression&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;head position&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;torso posture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;labialization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, as stated before, Sign Languages are totally independent from spoken languages: they aren't a simplified copy of those languages. Their grammar and their syntax are totally different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-02-18T18:35:19.887" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T18:35:19.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2523" CreationDate="2013-02-17T14:31:11.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Jean Haudry, Proto-Indo-European *-tr-om indeed is *-ter with zero-grade and neuter ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also according to him, PIE *-tel is an old phonetic variant of PIE *-ter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to PIE *-tr-om, there is also PIE *-tl-om, as in Latin &quot;(ob)staculum&quot; from PIE *stéH₂-tlom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastActivityDate="2013-02-17T14:31:11.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-17T15:59:03.903" Score="12" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quartus#Latin&quot;&gt;quartus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Latin &lt;strong&gt;quattuor&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;four&quot;), originally from Proto-Indo-European&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quattuor#Etymology&quot;&gt;quattuor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*kʷetwóres&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cognates include Sanskrit चतुर् (catur), Old Armenian չորք (čʿork'), Ancient Greek τέσσαρες (tessares), and Old English fēower (English four).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the L. &quot;quatt-&quot; changed to L. &quot;quart-&quot;, but I don't know how does this happen, and want to find one more example like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:09:35.043" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T15:26:24.327" Title="How does L. &quot;quartus&quot; come from L. &quot;quattuor&quot;, which has &quot;quat&quot; but &quot;quart&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3216" CreationDate="2013-02-17T16:40:06.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon you describe may be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(adjacent) metathesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not infrequent in phonology. Metathesis means &quot;swapping&quot;. In linguistics, &lt;em&gt;adjacent or local metathesis&lt;/em&gt; refers to the swapping of two adjacent sounds at some point in phonological developments. As to why it happens, I know of no formal explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there is something in our brains or speech apparatus that makes certain sounds less &quot;easy&quot; or pleasant to pronounce in combination with other forms as part of a phonological system (a language), or less easy to remember subconsciously. We are then inclined to various degrees to change pronunciation in a way that renders it closer to our common speech patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sound can simply be changed, as in the change from older English -th to modern -s in &lt;em&gt;makes&lt;/em&gt;; alternatively, adjacent sounds can be swapped, as in &lt;em&gt;iron&lt;/em&gt;, which apparently evolved from /(a)irən/ into /aɪə(r)n/ in modern pronunciation: the r and the schwa were swapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be seen that this is in certain circumstances a natural inclination in us humans by the frequency with which (non-Italian) children pronounce &lt;em&gt;spaghetti&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;pasghetti&lt;/em&gt;; the cause is that &lt;em&gt;sp-&lt;/em&gt; is natively infrequent in many languages, such as English and Dutch. Languages tend to sometimes transform borrowed foreign words to conform to native phonology (sound patterns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;quartus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; is an adjectival suffix. It is possible that at some point a form **kwat(w)rtos* existed in Proto-Latin. If so, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissimilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissimilation&lt;/a&gt; may have been the main cause of the metathesis: a &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; sound twice, especially combined with a &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; sound twice, tends to disappear or transform in Latin, as in many other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, it may just be that the consonant cluster **-t(w)rt-* was too &quot;difficult&quot; to pronounce, i.e. not conforming to Latin phonology, and hence transformed/simplified into &lt;em&gt;-rt-&lt;/em&gt;. But I do not know the intermediate stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T15:26:24.327" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T15:26:24.327" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3219" CreationDate="2013-02-17T21:02:30.757" Score="10" ViewCount="3319" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are Turkish and Azeri related to Japanese and Korean? Are there obvious similarities between them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1768" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-09T06:15:04.853" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T13:35:56.693" Title="Relationship between Turkish/Azeri and Japanese/Korean" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3218" CreationDate="2013-02-17T22:11:05.500" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they share many characteristics. But so do most of the other language families in the area, which includes most of Central Asia. It is not clear that they &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; related; opinions differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a proposed (but not accepted) reconstructed proto-language family called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Altaic&lt;/a&gt;. Roughly, it's a stripe of Asia with Korean and Japanese on the east end, Turkic languages on the west end, and Mongol and Manchu languages in between. This is just south of and parallel to the similar stripe reaching up to the Arctic containing the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uralic languages&lt;/a&gt;: Finno-Ugric languages from Finnish and Hungarian through Russia to Samoyed languages in Siberia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uralic is an accepted family, and shares many of the characteristics of the languages proposed for Altaic; for a while there was a &quot;Ural-Altaic hypothesis&quot; as well. But the fact is that all the peoples in this area are nomadic herders with similar cultures who have been in the area for millennia. Plus the Altaicists haven't managed to convince one another yet. So Ural-Altaic is premature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has always been considerable mixing among the cultures, via exogamy, war, slavery, and trade, and it has been going on for much longer than the Comparative Method that linguists use for reconstruction can reach; the upper threshhold for that is about 5000 years at maximum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we're unlikely ever to know for sure, since words leave no fossils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T13:35:56.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T13:35:56.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4644" CreationDate="2013-02-18T01:18:09.557" Score="6" ViewCount="5078" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words for &quot;Sabbath&quot; and &quot;seven&quot; seem similar in both Hebrew and Aramaic.  Is there an etymological relationship between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sabbath (Shabbat), שַׁבָּת, is Strong's H7676. It is spelled shin-bet-taf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seven, שֶׁבַע, is Strong's H7651. It is spelled shin-bet-'ayin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:19:20.727" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T11:58:51.683" Title="Linguistic or etymological relationship between the words &quot;Sabbath&quot; and &quot;seven&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3875" CreationDate="2013-02-18T09:21:07.130" Score="4" ViewCount="1674" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, the root S-L-M (س ل م) has a general meaning of &quot;Peace&quot;, but can also be used for &quot;Submission&quot; (such as in the words Islam/Muslim).  Given the close relation between Hebrew and Arabic, I'm curious to know whether the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0-L-M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hebrew Sh-L-M&lt;/a&gt; (ש ל ם) can be similarly interpreted thus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, was this root ever used to refer to those who &lt;em&gt;whole-heartedly submitted&lt;/em&gt; themselves to the Mosaic Law (and thus to G-D's authority)?  If not, was a different term (with similar meaning) used for these people, in order to distinguish them  as the best followers among the children of Israel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got following Hebrew terms from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0-L-M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mushlam&lt;/strong&gt; (מושלם) — perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shalem&lt;/strong&gt; (שלם) — whole, complete&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have these concepts ever been extended to &lt;strong&gt;perfect&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Mushalam&lt;/em&gt;) followers or &lt;strong&gt;complete&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Shalem&lt;/em&gt;) submission in any literature and can  root ש ל ם be used to mean “Submission” ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would also be interested to know the answer for other related languages like Aramaic or any ancient  biblical period languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T14:39:49.377" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T11:29:02.600" Title="Can the root ש ל ם be used to mean “Submission”?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3222" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-02-18T09:26:44.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or &quot;coded&quot; in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-02-18T10:13:34.920" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T10:13:34.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3223" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-02-18T09:26:44.520" Score="0" Body="Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. " OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-02-18T10:13:39.243" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T10:13:39.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3211" CreationDate="2013-02-18T11:22:48.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language has it own phonology and rules for putting them together.  Every language has something called phonotactics, which are language specific rules for what sounds can occur, where they can occur and in what combinations they can occur.  For example, English phonotactics prevent the consonant cluster [pf], whereas in German [pf] is acceptable as in the word &lt;em&gt;Pferd&lt;/em&gt; 'horse'. Also in English we pronounce the word gnome [nom] instead of [gnom], because English phonotactics prevents the cluster [gn].  It is a result of these rules that some languages can have certain sounds and combinations of sounds that other languages can't have.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1776" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T11:22:48.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2013-02-18T15:13:00.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://obcyjezykpolski.strefa.pl/?md=archive&amp;amp;id=95&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maciej Malinowski&lt;/a&gt;, the cause was accentuation. Until the end of the 17th century, &quot;dobry dzień&quot; was the literary form. This phrase has two accents in Polish: &quot;&lt;b&gt;dob&lt;/b&gt;ry &lt;strong&gt;dzień&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; However, people started to shift the stress and pronounce it as &quot;dob&lt;b&gt;ry&lt;/b&gt;dzień.&quot; That was because they started to think of the phrase as a single word. In Polish, words are stressed almost excusively on the penultimate syllable. (See the note at the bottom.) The same happened to the greeting &quot;dobra noc&quot; (&lt;em&gt;good night&lt;/em&gt;). In this case the linked form has since become standard, and we write &quot;dobranoc&quot; and say &quot;dob&lt;b&gt;ra&lt;/b&gt;noc&quot; instead of &quot;&lt;b&gt;dob&lt;/b&gt;ra &lt;strong&gt;noc&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Now, Malinowski says, there were people (&quot;linguists&quot;) who objected to that process. They came up with a solution, which was to introduce a new word order, &quot;dzień dobry&quot;. This phrase has only one stressed syllable in it: &quot;dzień &lt;b&gt;dob&lt;/b&gt;ry&quot;, and a Pole doesn't have to consider it a single word to pronounce it this way. Thus the phrase was saved from the offending linking. We still write &quot;dzień dobry&quot; and not &quot;dzieńdobry&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Malinowski doesn't substantiate his claim. I do not know where he got his information from. It could be a guess for all I know, but it doesn't seem improbable at all. Note that Belarussian retains both forms: &quot;добрыдзень&quot; and &quot;дзень добры&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://poradnia.pwn.pl/lista.php?id=13789&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Małgorzata Marcjanik&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;dobry wieczór&quot; (&lt;em&gt;good evening&lt;/em&gt;) was also changed to &quot;wieczór dobry&quot;, but that form doesn't survive. Note that the phrase &quot;dobry wieczór&quot; also has two stresses in it: &quot;&lt;b&gt;dob&lt;/b&gt;ry &lt;b&gt;wie&lt;/b&gt;czór&quot;. However, the attempt to change it to &quot;wieczór dobry&quot; seems inconsistent with what Malinowski says. &quot;Wieczór dobry&quot; also has two stresses: &quot;&lt;b&gt;wie&lt;/b&gt;czór &lt;b&gt;dob&lt;/b&gt;ry&quot;. Also I don't know whether the spelling &quot;dobrywieczór&quot; was ever trying to creep into the written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOTE.&lt;/em&gt; West Slavic languages are special among Slavic languages in that they all, or at least the standardized ones, have fixed stress. Among them, Polish is the only one with penultimate stres. There is one South Slavic language, Macedonian, with fixed antepenultimate stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="691" LastEditDate="2013-02-18T15:43:18.987" LastActivityDate="2013-02-18T15:43:18.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3227" CreationDate="2013-02-19T05:13:48.123" Score="9" ViewCount="772" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://math.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; and it was suggested to me that it would be a good idea to submit the question here, too, as there might be more specialists on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an undergraduate student in Mathematics and I would like to continue my postgraduate studies in the harder, more mathematical aspects of Linguistics. Possible areas of interest would include the mathematical aspects of syntax and semantics, as well as computational linguistics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence or machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of now, the courses that I have taken have been purely mathematical: real, complex and functional analysis, measure theory, point-set topology, differential equations, group and ring theory, linear algebra. I understand that the analytic courses are not very pertinent in linguistics where data is rarely &quot;continuous&quot; or as nicely behaving as the functions studied in analysis. I would like to hear the community's suggestions about courses that should constitute good preparation for postgraduate studies in the aforementioned areas. The courses need not be mathematical. They can be linguistics, statistics, computer science courses or courses from any other discipline that would best prepare me for the task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: For those that might be interested, I received some answers for this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/306874/mathematical-preparation-for-postgraduate-studies-in-linguistics&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1777" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:09.673" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T09:38:01.537" Title="Mathematical preparation for postgraduate studies in Linguistics" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3226" CreationDate="2013-02-19T06:47:31.743" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently completing a Masters of Linguistics, specializing in Computational Linguistics, after a Software Engineering undergrad so I think my experience might be relevant to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you may be a bit disappointed by the actual math involved in linguistics. Setting aside Computational Linguistics, the only real math I see is statistical analysis used in academic papers (and not something you'll generally need for your course work). Of course, semantics requires some basic set theory and algebraic logic but as a computer programmer by training and [formerly] by trade, it was all fairly basic. My [limited] understanding is that the cutting-edge work in syntax, semantics, and phonology come from examination and theorizing of frameworks involved in language usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computational Linguistics is where you're going to see more advanced math; being a cross-disciplinary field with Computer Science. Machine learning and AI use various mathematical models and statistics. Information Retrieval heavily uses linear algebra and statistics (with some algorithms even using graph theory). Speech recognition and speech production all involve a certain amount of signal processing which you may find interesting. The problem with Computational Linguistics though is that it is typically part of the Computer Science department and this might limit the type of projects you'll get to do and the types of classes you'll get to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm more concerned that you don't seem to have any set goal other than &quot;I did a degree in math and this linguistics stuff looks interesting. I wonder if I can combine the two?&quot; I wasn't much better off when I decided to pursue linguistics but it sounds like you need to do a bit of leg work before you deciding that linguistics is right for you. Linguistics is a very broad and diverse field of study. Your first step should be finding what part you're interested in. Try to audit some introductory linguistics courses and/or skim an introductory textbook. Think about what made you interested in linguistics in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you decide what area you want to pursue then you can start deciding what courses would help prepare you. In general, the math used in linguistics is very applied (as opposed to the more theoretical stuff you're probably used to) so you might be better off taking some engineering or computer science courses. A course on signal processing would be very helpful if you're interested in speech recognition but useless if you're interested in semantics. Similarly, if your interests lie in question-answer systems then some courses in AI would be helpful but would get you nowhere if you're interested in phonetics. Without an area-of-interest it is very difficult to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T06:47:31.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3226" CreationDate="2013-02-19T07:25:14.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Logic&lt;/em&gt; is a big deal in linguistics (especially semantics), and &lt;em&gt;unification&lt;/em&gt; is an important idea behind several grammar frameworks like HPSG and LFG. I did both a bit of math and statistics to support my Master's, and unification was only taught at the ling. dept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, browse through the table of contents of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/9027722447&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy)&quot; (1990) by Barbara B.H. Partee et al.&lt;/a&gt;, that should give you a good overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T07:25:14.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3226" CreationDate="2013-02-19T07:43:24.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few unrelated subfields of mathematics to choose from. If you're going to focus on machine learning, and related techniques, some of the textbooks mentioned in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1320/looking-for-a-good-beginners-reference-to-learn-computational-linguistics/&quot;&gt;Looking for a good beginners reference to learn computational linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&quot; should cover what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to focus on logic and semantics, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/L.-T.-F.-Gamut/e/B0034PKWLA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the two books by L.T.F. Gamut&lt;/a&gt; are excellent to begin with. Some researchers who work on formal grammars also use concepts from graph theory and type theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, you'll probably use concepts from algorithms and complexity theory, the hierarchy of languages, FSM, etc. -- most of which are covered in the book by Jurafsky and Martin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my own experience, you probably don't need to study any of this before you start your masters. That's what your masters program is meant for anyway. Having had one or two classmates with a background in just mathematics, I'd suggest that you develop competence with some programming language instead; your course might require that you be comfortable with programming already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T07:43:24.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3231" CreationDate="2013-02-19T07:53:10.293" Score="4" ViewCount="14188" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .Auntie *&lt;em&gt;Ma&lt;/em&gt;*rge's present, see, it's here under. . . &lt;a href=&quot;http://audioscraps.tistory.com/140&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[audio source]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the audio above, [mɑː] sounds like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[..m..]&#xA;  [......ɑː.....]&#xA;---- (time) ----&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds close to nasalized [ɑː], like in Indic ॐ [om]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[..o..]&#xA;[.....m.....]&#xA;---- (time) ----&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, since English has no nasalization, it must sound like this, with much smaller overlap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[..m..]&#xA;     [......ɑː.....]&#xA;---- (time) ----&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to &lt;em&gt;&quot;see&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;under&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but to a lesser extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how to explain this phenomenon? Is it possible for languages that have no nasalized vowels? Or is it just a random deviation and is not a rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1728" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:33:42.737" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:33:42.737" Title="How can nasalized vowels in English be explained?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3230" CreationDate="2013-02-19T17:03:23.980" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a &quot;deviation&quot; at all. Contrary to your understanding, English employs tons of nasalization in its vowels. What it lacks is &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; nasalization, that is, phonologically nasalized vowels whose distribution is not predictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, vowels (and sonorant consonants) in English get phonetically nasalized (i.e. they are pronounced with the velum lowered so that air can escape through the nose) when they are adjacent to nasal consonants. So, the [i] in &lt;em&gt;bead&lt;/em&gt; is usually not nasalized, but the [i] in &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; is nasalized because it is flanked by nasal consonants. The nasal passage is open for the [m] and stays open through the duration of the vowel and the final [n]. A vowel that is between a nasal consonant and a non-nasal consonant will usually get partially nasalized (more nasalized on the side next to the nasal). This explains why you are hearing the vowels in &lt;em&gt;Marge's&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; as nasalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many speakers leave their vela slightly lowered for a majority of the time while they are speaking, resulting in rampant partial nasalization of most of their vowels and sonorants, regardless of whether they are abutted by nasal consonants or not. As an American, I have noticed this to be a pervasive tendency in many dialects of British English (such as the one in your link). This would explain nasalization in words like &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; (although in this particular case that vowel does not sound nasalized to my ears).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the important point here is that, in all the cases above, the nasalization of the English vowels does not contribute to the phonological distinctiveness of those vowels. That's why speakers who leave their vela lowered most of the time have no trouble communicating with speakers of the same dialect that don't leave their vela lowered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T17:03:23.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-19T20:27:21.830" Score="3" ViewCount="2459" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to formal sementics propositions (semantic term for &quot;sentences&quot;, &quot;clauses&quot;) have truth value. The truth value shows whether sentence is true or false and it is denoted as 1 or 0. &#xA;What about sentences that have failed in presupposition? Do they have truth value? &#xA;Ex: The king of USA lives in NY. &#xA;Here, the interlocutor presupposes that the USA is ruled by the king, and s/he fails in his/her presupposition. So what be the truth value of this proposition?&#xA;I think that it is impossible for proposition that has failed in presupposition to have a truth value but I am not sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: here I am talking about the direct meaning of the word &quot;king&quot;, not possible metaphoric. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T18:41:24.960" Title="What is the truth value of propostions that have failed in Presupposition?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;references&gt;&lt;truth-value&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2013-02-19T21:33:38.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think they are related. As you said, the root from which the word &lt;strong&gt;shabbath&lt;/strong&gt; is built, is different from that of &lt;strong&gt;sheva&lt;/strong&gt;. The first is constructed from the root &lt;em&gt;shin-bet-&lt;strong&gt;tav&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sīn-bā’-&lt;strong&gt;tā’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in Arabic) and the second comes from the root &lt;em&gt;shin-bet-&lt;strong&gt;'ayin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sīn-bā’-&lt;strong&gt;’ayn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in Arabic). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;שבת&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;shabbath&lt;/strong&gt;) means &lt;em&gt;to rest, to stop working&lt;/em&gt; and that is why the last day (seventh day) of the week is called shabbath. &#xA;On the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;שבע&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;sheva&lt;/strong&gt;) is the number seven and is related to the word &lt;strong&gt;سبعة&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;sab’a&lt;/strong&gt;) in Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some extra information on the word shabbath:&lt;/strong&gt; The seventh day of the week for Jews is Saturday as it is with Arabs, so &lt;strong&gt;shabbath&lt;/strong&gt; means Saturday, and so does its Arabic counterpart &lt;strong&gt;السبت&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;sabt&lt;/strong&gt;) (but for Muslim Arabs, the day of rest is &lt;strong&gt;جمعة&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;jum’a&lt;/strong&gt;) which is the sixth day). The Persian word &lt;strong&gt;شنبه&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;shanbeh&lt;/strong&gt;) has been derived from shabbath and has the same meaning (Saturday) but it is not the day of rest; it is the first day of the week. Instead of Saturday, the last day of the week for Iranians is Friday which is the Islamic holy day of the week. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I know so I hope it helps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1768" LastActivityDate="2013-02-19T21:33:38.320" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3237" CreationDate="2013-02-19T22:14:13.307" Score="1" ViewCount="1637" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to write a syntax tree structure of a sentence with the word 'should'.  It's a long sentence, so to simply, let's take this sentence instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I should play the piano.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether 'should' is the tense marker in the sentence.  To demonstrate (surface structure):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ghSi3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My argument is that in the sentence &lt;code&gt;I played the piano&lt;/code&gt;, it's clear that the T has merged with the V....&#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1784" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:14:23.477" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T13:14:23.477" Title="Is 'should' a Tense?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-20T05:37:01.363" Score="7" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/able#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;able(1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English, from Old Northern French able, variant of Old French abile, habile, from &lt;em&gt;Latin&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;habilis&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;easily managed, held, or handled; apt; skillful&amp;quot;), from &lt;strong&gt;habeō&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;have, hold&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/able#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;able(2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English ablen, from Middle English able (adjective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-able#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;-able&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English, from Old French, from &lt;em&gt;Latin&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;-ābilis&lt;/strong&gt;, from -a- or -i- + bilis (&amp;quot;capable or worthy of being acted upon&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not closely related etymologically&lt;/strong&gt;, though currently related semantically, to able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replaced native Old English -bǣre (&amp;quot;bearing, making, worth&amp;quot;), from Proto-Germanic *bēriz, *bērijaz; and -lic (&amp;quot;like, having the quality of&amp;quot;), from Proto-Germanic *-līkaz.&#xA;Compare German -bar, Dutch -baar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the etymology relationship between these words? Why the description is &amp;quot;not closely related&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T22:00:58.050" Title="Is the word E &quot;able&quot; related to the suffix E &quot;-able&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3234" CreationDate="2013-02-20T09:20:48.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to what I have learnt, I wouldn't say that &lt;code&gt;should&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a tense, but I would say that it &lt;strong&gt;carries&lt;/strong&gt; a past tense inflection. And about your idea of T merging with V, I would suggest considering the following. Basically, there is a hypothesis saying that TPs are headed by a T constituent, either overt or null. Merging occurs, but that wouldn't fully explain what happens to T. In your fist example, the head of T is the modal auxiliary verb, but in the finite clause, the T would have a null phonetic spell out of a tense affix which also carries person and number features. The idea is that heads cannot be empty, and in this case the tense affix undergoes a morphological operation called &lt;strong&gt;affix hopping&lt;/strong&gt;.  Thus, in the sentence &lt;code&gt;I played the piano&lt;/code&gt;, the T head would be something like &lt;code&gt;Tense-3SgPr&lt;/code&gt; and it would be lowered onto the head V &lt;code&gt;play&lt;/code&gt;. The derived structure would be &lt;code&gt;[play+Affix-3SgPr]&lt;/code&gt;, which in turn would be spelled out as &lt;code&gt;played&lt;/code&gt;. See Radford (2006) for a more detailed explanation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-02-20T09:20:48.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3265" CreationDate="2013-02-20T19:55:58.053" Score="5" ViewCount="944" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the Arabic word &lt;strong&gt;جید&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;jayyid&lt;/strong&gt;) which is pronounced &lt;strong&gt;gayyid&lt;/strong&gt; in Egypt and means &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;, so similar to the word &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; or the German word &lt;strong&gt;gut&lt;/strong&gt;? Is it a borrowing? (since the word for &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; is very different in Hebrew - it is &lt;em&gt;טוב (tov)&lt;/em&gt;) If it is a borrowing, why would such a &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; word have been borrowed by a people? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1768" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-21T13:11:31.707" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T22:45:05.300" Title="Is the similarity between the Arabic word Gayyid and the English word Good due to a borrowing?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3235" CreationDate="2013-02-21T06:09:25.273" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin roots of the English word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;strong&gt;habeo&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;to have, hold&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The suffix &lt;strong&gt;-bilis&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;that ought or can easily be &lt;code&gt;[verb]&lt;/code&gt;ed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (unattested) Latin form was *&lt;em&gt;habibilis&lt;/em&gt;, as mentioned by Sihler and noted by Tom Recht below. In classical Latin, this had been shortened to &lt;em&gt;habilis&lt;/em&gt;, as it often happens with double syllables (called &lt;em&gt;haplology&lt;/em&gt;). The &lt;em&gt;h-&lt;/em&gt; had disappeared in certain French forms and dialects by the time the word was borrowed by English, and &lt;em&gt;-lis&lt;/em&gt; regularly evolved into &lt;em&gt;-le&lt;/em&gt; in French, resulting in English acquiring the word &lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin root of the English suffix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-able&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The suffix &lt;strong&gt;-bilis&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;capable or worthy of being &lt;code&gt;[verb]&lt;/code&gt;ed&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; was originally only present in verbs whose stems ended on &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt;, such as &lt;em&gt;ama-re&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to love&quot;, resulting in &lt;em&gt;ama-bilis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;worthy of being loved&quot;; however, this was later extended to other formations with &lt;em&gt;-bilis&lt;/em&gt;, resulting in an an alternative suffix &lt;em&gt;-abilis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that the &lt;em&gt;-ilis&lt;/em&gt; part in &lt;em&gt;-bilis&lt;/em&gt; is related to the separate suffix &lt;em&gt;-ilis&lt;/em&gt; as used in &lt;em&gt;habilis&lt;/em&gt;, but I cannot find a definitive etymology for &lt;em&gt;-bilis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-09T02:38:53.997" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T02:38:53.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2013-02-21T07:42:59.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though there are some linguists who express hostility toward conlanging, most notably Yaguello in her book &quot;Lunatic Lovers of Language,&quot; I haven't heard of any general outcry from the linguistics community against conlanging.   However, I do believe that most linguists consider natural language to be the proper subject matter of linguistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a conlanger, I think that this is as it should be for several reasons.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, linguists discover, document, and interpret their data.   In linguistics, inventing the data is strictly forbidden for obvious reasons.  But when I devise a conlang, inventing the data is not only permitted--it is the whole point of my hobby.  I think that this makes conlanging something other than a science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, a great deal of theoretical debate in linguistics is devoted to the degree to which linguistic knowledge is innate and to the existence of language universals.  Since conlangs are almost never acquired naturally and can be designed with or without any of the proposed language universals, I don't see how the mere study of conlangs could have any bearing on such issues.  For example, inventing a language without recursion would not, as far as I know, shed any light on the controversy about whether recursion occurs in Piraha.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, although every good conlanger knows more about linguistics than most non-linguists do, conlanging involves making implicit or explicit whimsical or esthetic judgments about linguistic structures that have no place in linguistics.   To a linguist, ergativity is interesting and worthy of study.   To a conlanger, ergativity might be a &lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt; feature to put in one's conlang, or conversely a &lt;em&gt;trite&lt;/em&gt; feature since all the other conlangers are putting ergativity into their conlangs.  A conlanger might also believe that copying natural language ergativity &lt;em&gt;isn't weird enough&lt;/em&gt;, and might therefore look for ways of conditioning the ergative/acccusative split that don't occur in natural languages.   Another conlanger might also think it would be &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; to give ergative marking to some hypothetical relative of Latin.   For conlangers, there is no limit to the whimsy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have often likened the difference between conlanging and linguistics to the difference between painting monsters and studying zoology.  There are, I suppose, some zoologists who take an occasional interest in depictions of monsters, but it would not surprise me if most zoologists didn't share this interest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T07:42:59.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3255" CreationDate="2013-02-21T07:53:51.557" Score="2" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been searching the internet for an answer to this question, but found only a reference to &quot;cosubordination&quot; being neither coordination nor subordination strictly speaking.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;cosubordination&quot; have any relation to clause-chaining?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T02:38:30.457" Title="What is cosubordination?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2876" CreationDate="2013-02-21T19:31:31.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to give you a partial answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Joachim Schildt (section 2.1.3, page 72), in Old High German the finite verb was often on the second position in a sentence but it could also be the first one. In imperative sentences the finite verb was on the first position, for example &quot;gib mir trinkan&quot; (&quot;give me to drink&quot;). In subordinate clauses the finite verb often was on the last position. But generally the position of the finite verb was more free than in modern German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Middle High German the situation is similar: in the main clause in most cases on the second position, in imperative sentences first or second position, in subordinate clauses final and other positions. Schildt assumes that in Germanic the finite verb was on the first position in a sentence (section 2.2.1.3, page 95).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Werner König presents some details about socio-linguistic differences in the position of the finite verb in the 15th century. In that time educated writers and public documents used to put the finite verb on the final position of a subordinate clause whereas less educated writers and private letters do so less (p. 83). In the 16th and 17th century grammarians declare this final position compulsary (p. 100).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various scholars point out that historical syntax is hard to reconstruct: ancient texts (at least Old High German ones) are in verse (which means there is no natural syntax) or they are heavily influenced by Medieval Latin (which means the syntax might be Latin too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old Norse the finite verb usually was on the second position or on the first one, also in non-questions (Haugen, section 16.2.1, page 248).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial question was, which of the two (V2 or V-final) is oldest -- may be none of them (see Schildt). And why did V-final take over the subordinate clauses -- well... probably no linguist knows that for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joachim Schildt: &quot;Abriß der Geschichte der deutschen Sprache&quot;, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1984&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Odd Einar Haugen: &quot;Grunnbok i norrønt språk&quot;, Ad Notam Gyldendal, Oslo, 2. utgåve 1995, ISBN 82-417-0506-9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Werner König: &quot;dtv-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache&quot; (dtv-Atlas Nr. 3025), 10. Auflage, München 1994, ISBN 3-423-03025-9&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastActivityDate="2013-02-21T19:31:31.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-21T21:18:28.267" Score="6" ViewCount="2871" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;strong&gt;crocodile&lt;/strong&gt; seems to originate from the Latin &lt;strong&gt;crocodīlus&lt;/strong&gt; and Ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;κροκόδιλος&lt;/strong&gt;. Indeed it has ended up very similar in several modern languages: German (Krokodile), Russian (крокодил), Hungarian (krokodilfélék).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does anyone know why the Spanish (and only they) moved the r and call it a &lt;strong&gt;cocodrilo&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1788" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T12:07:28.307" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T12:07:28.307" Title="How did 'cocodrilo' originate from 'crocodile'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3244" CreationDate="2013-02-21T23:13:17.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually the word &lt;code&gt;crocodilo&lt;/code&gt; is listed in some Spanish dictionaries, but one thing is what dictionaries say and another thing is what real users of language do. Anyway, it seems that this is a case of &lt;strong&gt;metathesis&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a process that reorders the segments of a given string. Thus, perhaps &lt;code&gt;crocodilo&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;cocodrilo&lt;/code&gt; after the /r/ was reordered in the word. In Italian it is very similar: &lt;code&gt;coccodrillo&lt;/code&gt;, so Spanish is not the only case as you think. This phenomenon could have started in Latin for &lt;code&gt;crocodilus&lt;/code&gt;, and this would explain that Spanish and Italian exhibit the metathesis too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T10:30:59.287" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T10:30:59.287" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-22T02:45:19.230" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/render#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;render&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Old French &lt;strong&gt;rendre&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;to render, to make&quot;), from Vulgar Latin &lt;strong&gt;*rendere&lt;/strong&gt;, from Latin &lt;strong&gt;reddere&lt;/strong&gt;, present active infinitive of &lt;strong&gt;reddō&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;return in profit&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wonder whether it is a kind of sound change or just a infix &quot;-n-&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T17:10:03.147" Title="How did L &quot;reddere&quot; change to E &quot;render&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3246" CreationDate="2013-02-22T17:10:03.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;-n-&quot; isn't a real infix (like the Proto-Indo-European infixes). It's no sound change, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;-n-&quot; is due to a mix-up (&quot;croisement&quot;) with Latin &quot;prendere&quot;, &quot;prehendere&quot; (&quot;to take&quot;), whence also French &quot;prendre&quot; (Picoche and Rolland).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nocentini adds some other Latin verbs that could have influenced &quot;reddere&quot;: &quot;pendere&quot;, &quot;vendere&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jacqueline Picoche, Jean-Claude Rolland, &quot;Dictionnaire étymologique du français&quot;, Paris 2009, Dictionnaires Le Robert, ISBN 978-2-84902-424-9&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alberto Nocentini, Alessandro Parenti, &quot;l'Etimologico — Vocabolario della lingua italiana&quot;, Le Monnier, 2010, ISBN 978-88-00-20781-2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T17:10:03.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3273" CreationDate="2013-02-22T19:26:03.667" Score="11" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some Hebrew (right-to-left) text within an English (left-to-right) text as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/03u7Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew text (right-to-left) by itself looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/16Cbv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the &lt;em&gt;paper&lt;/em&gt; does not have enough width, the Hebrew text would wrap naturally as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bARgo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the correct way to write the text when &lt;strong&gt;there is not enough space to finish the right-to-left quote in a single line&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ozWJs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note that we have to read the Hebrew text from &lt;em&gt;bottom-up&lt;/em&gt; if this is the case)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lEeQz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(aligning the &lt;em&gt;start-of-line&lt;/em&gt; of the Hebrew text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option C:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIOdT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(same as Option B but compacted left)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option D:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9jd5a.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option E:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vihg9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="1756" LastEditDate="2013-06-03T13:36:43.030" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T13:36:43.030" Title="How are line breaks handled in bidirectional messages containing both English and Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2013-02-22T22:38:07.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is usually asserted that the Proto-Indo-European word for &quot;seven&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;septm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was an early borrowing from Semitic. Also, Russian word for Saturday, &quot;суббота&quot; &quot;subbota&quot; is a relatively recent borrowing from Hebrew. It is unclear though whether the roots somehow related. Possibly, the &quot;rest&quot; role for the seventh day was decided by ancient Semites based on the similarity in the pronunciation of the words for &quot;rest&quot; and for &quot;seven&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-02-22T22:38:07.503" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-22T23:36:39.630" Score="12" ViewCount="77966" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is recursion? I've looked at the Wikipedia's explanation (recursion and then &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#Recursion_in_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recursion in language&lt;/a&gt;) but that explanation is not really clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T05:28:20.807" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T23:45:03.313" Title="What is recursion?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2013-02-23T00:26:42.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recursion is a property of language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a Linguistics viewpoint, recursion can also be called &lt;em&gt;nesting&lt;/em&gt;. As I've stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3214/111&quot;&gt;this answer to what defines a language&lt;/a&gt; (third-last bullet point), recursion &lt;em&gt;&quot;is a phenomenon where a linguistic rule can be applied to the result of the application of the same rule.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see an example of this. Consider the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alex has a red car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An application of recursion would give:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car which is parked there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on. This can go on endlessly, even if in real situations recursion will stop at a certain point, since the idea being expressed would get too confused. Recursion can also be applied to a noun and its adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nice Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nice and cute Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nice and cute Alice, sweet, gentle and considerate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T00:16:24.570" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3241" CreationDate="2013-02-23T02:38:30.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cosubordination is similar to both coordinate structure and subordinate structure simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/uhlcs/LENCA/LENCA-3/information/abstract-files/van-valin-robert-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/uhlcs/LENCA/LENCA-3/information/abstract-files/van-valin-robert-2.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is most likely what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1791" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T02:38:30.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3263" CreationDate="2013-02-23T04:39:18.207" Score="4" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any symbol to represent a vowel?&#xA;Is there any symbol to represent a constant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &quot;bog&quot;, &quot;bat&quot; and &quot;bag&quot; can be represented by &lt;code&gt;b[v][c]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;b✦✧&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Udate:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In a paper I want to describe how pronunciation of words are changed in Persian according to word that are before or after them. It depends on the initial letter of adjacent words, that is a vowel or a constant. I want to show some patterns, using a symbol for vowel and another one for constant. They will act like variables in mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T01:00:27.003" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T01:00:27.003" Title="Is there any symbol to represent an unknown vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3250" CreationDate="2013-02-23T06:23:26.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &lt;strong&gt;Option D is the answer, and Option E may be an answer with minor corrections.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am affiliated with a company that develops a formatting engine, so let me tell how we do it in printing industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision point comes from an understanding of Unicode sequence, and difference of RTL (Right-to-Left) Unicode sequences to a plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a Unicode text, you will have the following sequence of character codes. E.g., &lt;code&gt;The title says&lt;/code&gt;, then space and quotation mark, and then the string &quot;פעילות הבינאום&quot; &lt;strong&gt;in their natural, RTL, order&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;פ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ע&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;י&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when a rendering engine performs typesetting, it takes those characters in their natural order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It takes an English text;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a space;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a quotation mark;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt; Note, there is no breakable space here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and the first Hebrew word, פעילות, &lt;strong&gt;starting from &quot;פ&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then it takes another space symbol;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and then it finds out that the &lt;strong&gt;second&lt;/strong&gt; Hebrew word, הבינאום, does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; fit into the first printable line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rendering engine takes whatever fits and &lt;strong&gt;breaks the line&lt;/strong&gt; at the nearest break location (a breakable space between the two Hebrew words).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then it starts processing glyphs &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the line: English text is rendered with LTR rules, while Hebrew text is rendered with RTL rules. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction within the line (RTL vs. LTR) can be resolved in a different manner. Some formatting standards assume detection by text codepage; others, like XSL-FO, are being specifically instructed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/prop_writing-mode.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;writing-mode property&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it will be naturally Option D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also consider that RTL does not imply Bottom-to-Top. This is why Option A is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Option E is essentially the same as Option D, only having text alignment set to &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt;, except that the quotation mark will be aligned together with the first word of the Hebrew text since there is no breakable space in &lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit that you have prepared your question very well, so I don't even need screenshots! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-02-23T06:37:27.930" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T06:37:27.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3250" CreationDate="2013-02-23T09:32:06.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say &lt;strong&gt;option D&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, you can try what Web browsers do. They have touchy algorithms to handle this kind of cases, and not all Web browsers render them correctly. Firefox is quite good at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Ishida has &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/bidi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a good page of explanations where you can test your Web browsers&lt;/a&gt;. It's fun when it comes to numbers and parentheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here are more detailed insights&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1792" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T09:32:06.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2013-02-23T09:48:00.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kurdish.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kurdish&lt;/a&gt; has been written in the Arabic alphabet, in the Latin alphabet, in the Cyrillic alphabet, Kurdish has even been written in the Armenian alphabet in Soviet Armenia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagauz_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gagauz&lt;/a&gt; was written in the Greek alphabet. Then, it has been written in Cyrillic letters, and then in Latin letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1792" LastEditorUserId="1792" LastEditDate="2013-03-06T22:18:15.393" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T22:18:15.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3212" CreationDate="2013-02-23T12:27:15.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” ;-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More seriously, sign languages are languages. I say &lt;strong&gt;sign languages&lt;/strong&gt; and not &lt;strong&gt;sign language&lt;/strong&gt;. There are several sign languages. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;New Zealand&lt;/a&gt; has the &lt;em&gt;New Zealand sign language&lt;/em&gt; as one of her three official languages, the first country to do do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1792" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T12:27:15.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3182" CreationDate="2013-02-23T12:40:39.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;surprised&lt;/em&gt; in my native &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/french.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;french language&lt;/a&gt;. However, &lt;em&gt;les bleus&lt;/em&gt; are the cops, for the obvious clothing reason. &lt;em&gt;Le bleu&lt;/em&gt; is “the new one”, in a job — I have no idea why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1792" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T12:40:39.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3151" CreationDate="2013-02-23T13:02:29.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, first these verbs are not really &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt;. We call them &lt;strong&gt;indirect transitive verbs&lt;/strong&gt;. They exist not only in german but in french too. Examples : &lt;em&gt;dépendre de&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;appartenir à&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;obéir à&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;plaire à&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;téléphoner à&lt;/em&gt;. Contrary to english, in french we cannot reverse these constructions to the passive voice (&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;was given&lt;/strong&gt; a present&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These verbs can even be doubly indirect transitive verbs. For example in french &lt;em&gt;je &lt;strong&gt;t'&lt;/strong&gt;ai parlé &lt;strong&gt;d'elle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. This is the &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt; — pun intented — in german too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1792" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T13:02:29.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3256" CreationDate="2013-02-23T13:16:19.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle I would suggest using capital C for consonants and capital V for vowels. This is the way syllable templates are discussed in phonology texts. Brackets are used for phonetic transcription, so &lt;code&gt;[v]&lt;/code&gt; refers to the particular consonant called voiced labiodental fricative. Perhaps you could use something like &lt;code&gt;b(V)(C)&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;bVC&lt;/code&gt;, but of course you should explain your notation clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T13:16:19.237" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3182" CreationDate="2013-02-23T14:28:19.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, being &quot;blau&quot; means being drunk. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blau&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1793" LastActivityDate="2013-02-23T14:28:19.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3238" CreationDate="2013-02-23T20:21:23.490" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was only able to find the Arabic word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ṭayyib&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (طَيِّب) meaning &quot;good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is a cognate to Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tov&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (טוֹב) comes to the Proto-Semitic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ṭayb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and further etymology is unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology for the word you mentioned  is unavailable, but I want to put out that the spelling usually indicates the former pronunciation. This means that if the word was borrowed, it was starting with j- at the time rather than with g-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word &quot;good&quot;, related to Russian &quot;годный&quot; &quot;suitable&quot; comes from Proto-Indo-European root &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ghedh-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which means &quot;fit together&quot;. I do not see any connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-07-21T12:02:34.540" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T12:02:34.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-23T23:45:59.863" Score="2" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Mallory we have the following PIE words (in this notation, g = palatal/plain ġ=plain/uvular):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enghu̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; snake (&gt; уж)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enĝhus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; narrow (&gt; узко)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enĝhnos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fear, constriction (&gt; ужас)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hints at that the words could be related if the exact value of the g was determined wrongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wonder whether the following words are related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯oğhis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; snake, serpent (in Fortson, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eĝhu̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). Mallory claims this is unrelated to the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enghu̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Fortson claims it is related to the following entry and reconstructs the same consonant in the root. Mallory claims that the &quot;traditional school&quot; derived hedgehog as &quot;snake-eater&quot;. The Brill etymological dictionary of Latin reconstructs the initial a̯- here and links this root to the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯nğhis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, claiming that the -n- infix appeared in it due to analogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eĝhis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; hedgehog (&gt; russ. ёж, eng. hedgehog)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eĝhs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; out &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eĝherom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lake (&gt; russ. озеро)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯oghu̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, it could be connected to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eghu̯ti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; drinks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-09-07T03:10:56.160" LastActivityDate="2014-09-07T03:10:56.160" Title="Are the Russian уж (a kind of snake) and узко (narrow) related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3238" CreationDate="2013-02-24T11:24:07.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick search of &lt;strong&gt;جید&lt;/strong&gt; on Google returned two relevant results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/%D8%AC%DB%8C%D8%AF/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The first one&lt;/a&gt; is a pronunciation of the word by an Egyptian speaker,&#xA;where it is pronounced with a plosive-velar [g].&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%AF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the second result&lt;/a&gt; is a Wiktionary entry of that word where the pronunciation is with a velar [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the fact that Arabic has many (many!) dialects, it's not surprising to see a word, even a &quot;basic&quot; one, being pronounced differently in different cultures and societies. In fact the difference only in the manner of pronunciation indicates that one of the consonants is an allophone of the other and not a case of borrowing the whole word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close relations to Hebrew can also help to shed light here, the Hebrew word for good &lt;strong&gt;טוב (tov)&lt;/strong&gt; is very similar to  the Arabic word &lt;strong&gt;tayyib (طَيِّب)&lt;/strong&gt; which also means good, and from there the jump to jayyid or gayyid is not very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might not be a professional, or any sort of authority in this matter, but it seems to me that a language borrowing a single word is less likely do so if the word already exists in the borrowing language, especially a fairly common and &quot;basic&quot; word like good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1785" LastEditorUserId="1785" LastEditDate="2013-02-24T16:46:48.290" LastActivityDate="2013-02-24T16:46:48.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3221" CreationDate="2013-02-24T14:56:49.500" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native Hebrew speaker i have ever heard the root שׂ.ל.מ (s.l.m), or any of it conjugations used in the context of submission. Neither does the root שׁ.ל.מ (Sh.l.m).&#xA;The word שלם (shalem) means, as the Wikipedia article states, whole (and all its derived meanings like perfect or or complete) or peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9D&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; entry on the root and its various meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew word for submission (not necessarily religious) is כְּנִיעה (kni'a), and devoted can be translated as מָסוּר (masur, literaly- to give yourself) from the root מ.ס.ר. But there is no particular word with this meaning in a religious context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the extra meaning for the root, in Arabic, came from the religious context, as the name of the religion Islam and the word for submission &lt;strong&gt;إسلام&lt;/strong&gt; (ʾIslām), and one who submits is is translated &lt;strong&gt;مسلم‎&lt;/strong&gt; (muslim), also the name for an Islamic man.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the Hebrew and Arabic are close, I think this word in particular got its meaning after the two languages split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1785" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T00:37:01.580" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T00:37:01.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-25T04:50:16.560" Score="16" ViewCount="2029" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty basic question I guess, but anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do all (human) languages have sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguistic articles I read assume so, but can we take this as an assumption?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1798" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T09:37:30.577" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T23:41:00.223" Title="Do all languages have sentences?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-25T07:22:57.330" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/congee#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;congee&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Old French &lt;strong&gt;congié&lt;/strong&gt; (modern congé), from &lt;strong&gt;commeatus&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;passage, permission to leave&amp;quot;), from &lt;strong&gt;commeo&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;I go and come&amp;quot;), from con- + meo (&amp;quot;I go, I pass&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I find this word, but I can't help being curious about the change from &amp;quot;-mm-&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;-ng-&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T09:28:41.027" Title="How did E &quot;congee&quot; come from L &quot;commeatus&quot;, with an intrusive &quot;g&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3271" CreationDate="2013-02-25T09:04:33.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sound change isn't really mm &gt; ng, but rather [mj] &gt; [nʒ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination /j/+front vowel underwent fortition in other Romance languages, including Italian (L. iactare &gt; Italian gettare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;congee&lt;/em&gt;, I would propose &lt;em&gt;commeatus&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; [komjet] -&gt; [komʒet] (fortition) -&gt; [konʒet] (assimilation). The OED etymology has Provençal &lt;em&gt;comjat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conjat&lt;/em&gt;, which confirms the last sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T09:28:41.027" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T09:28:41.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3250" CreationDate="2013-02-25T13:56:09.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a reader of Hebrew, I can tell you that the many times I've encountered such scenarios, it's been written with Option D, which is by far much easier to read.  It is more natural to the reader, and this seems to be the norm in virtually all publications I've encountered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In social media, and even on SE sites, it is very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to render it this way, and the result is something that appears to be gobbeldygook and takes a good deal of effort, sometimes even requiring contacting the writer, to decipher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1756" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T13:56:09.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-25T15:38:44.543" Score="4" ViewCount="851" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an intuition, and Hypothesis, that the native language we speak is responsible for our cognition and thinking skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. Hebrew speaking people would have poor spatial ability compared to Sanskrit speakers because Hebrew has a simple morpho-spatial structure compared to Sanskrit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we come to the mathematics language domain, then it's very clear that different representations are comprehended differently by the human mind, and that we are better able to think in, say, the &quot;geometrical domain&quot;. Hence transforming a problem to different domain is a common practice in mathematics to ease understanding of the problem and solve it efficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: It's easier to prove a certain theorem geometrically than algebraically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it could be the other way round: our cognitive abilities could determine the language that would fit our ability, making language dependent on the innate cognition of the human mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T02:25:14.153" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T12:48:19.573" Title="Does language influence thinking skills or cognition" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-25T16:19:08.617" Score="4" ViewCount="3394" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering the nature of deixis, I have trouble coming up with written examples where the pronoun is of a deictic nature, other than quotes from speech etc. Or maybe I have misunderstood the meaning of a deictic pronoun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T21:40:18.723" Title="Are deictic pronouns at all apparent in written language?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-25T19:12:10.167" Score="0" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/155/why-is-prescriptivism-criticized/208#208&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; concerns the reasons why prescriptivism is criticized. I know of these criticisms because I hold them myself. However, I have a question about the opposite side, and that is, do any professional linguists hold a strong prescriptive belief, and criticize descriptivism as heavily as the other side criticizes prescriptivism? If so, where can I find information about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="anon" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T21:29:21.157" Title="Does anyone criticize descriptivism as heavily as prescriptivism?" Tags="&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3275" CreationDate="2013-02-25T19:37:32.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In spite of their differences, written and oral language don't differ too much in deixis, I think. Deixis is not only concerned with quotes. It refers to the extralinguistic world: yesterday, tomorrow, he, she...These are different categories (adverbs, pronouns...) but they have this propriety in common. Anafora and Catafora refer to precedent and previous speech, respectively, thus, a link to deixis can be seen.&#xA;Sorry for the mistakes, it's difficult to explain such a thing in English (I'm Spaniard) but I hope to have shed some light in this issue.&#xA;Best regards.&#xA;María José Barrios (Spain)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T19:37:32.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3276" CreationDate="2013-02-25T21:04:54.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only people on the border of linguistics would hold (read: propone) the belief that a language should be spoken differently than the common usage of native speakers, as far as I know. Linguistics is a science (which involves measurement), and those who say the observed facts should not be what they are do not show themselves to be scientists. However, some linguists publicly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&amp;amp;_&amp;amp;ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED024053&amp;amp;ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&amp;amp;accno=ED024053&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recognize the value of the notion of standard dialects&lt;/a&gt; for participation in the majority (or dominant) culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My apologies for the author's terminology -- it is a bit dated and offensive to modern readers) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastEditorUserId="1702" LastEditDate="2013-02-26T20:14:01.570" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T20:14:01.570" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3270" CreationDate="2013-02-25T21:14:32.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Merriam-Webster online, a sentence is ``A set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation,...'' In that sense I think we could say yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The orthography of certain languages may not have spaces or punctuation marks but, just as all human languages have breaks between sounds, they also have breaks between thoughts. If you mean some requirement to do with predicates or subject or objects, perhaps there is a language that almost always omits one of them (I studied applied linguistics and saw many odd examples along the way). In what sense do you mean 'sentence' (as jlawler said)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastEditorUserId="1702" LastEditDate="2013-07-05T19:16:33.833" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T19:16:33.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3274" CreationDate="2013-02-25T21:24:40.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your idea is a variant of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguisticmystic.com/2006/12/31/proving-or-disproving-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-in-three-steps-a-quick-and-easy-guide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, which is generally not highly regarded anymore. However, it is widely recognized that people do construct categories that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;correspond to their language's words&lt;/a&gt; for plants, animals, body parts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T21:24:40.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3275" CreationDate="2013-02-25T21:31:59.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deictic&lt;/strong&gt; pronouns refer to entities that must be identified according to the context of utterance. For instance, in the sentence &lt;code&gt;I will give you an answer about deictic pronouns&lt;/code&gt;, the deictic pronouns &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; refer to the speaker and the addressee, respectively. Of course, there could be different referents in each context of utterance. &lt;strong&gt;Anaphoric&lt;/strong&gt; pronouns are different. They refer back to constituents in the sentence domain. That is the case of &lt;code&gt;her&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;Mary is my wife and I love her&lt;/code&gt;. In principle, pronouns cannot be both anaphoric and deictic, since they simply pick up different referents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastEditorUserId="1754" LastEditDate="2013-02-25T21:40:18.723" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T21:40:18.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3276" CreationDate="2013-02-25T22:30:57.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't imagine there's a modern professional linguist that would think this way. In fact, I don't see how you could get through a modern undergraduate linguistics major, let alone a master's or doctoral program, thinking this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1800" LastActivityDate="2013-02-25T22:30:57.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3288" CreationDate="2013-02-26T04:58:37.343" Score="6" ViewCount="834" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &quot;Pete wants to paint,&quot; &quot;wants&quot; is of course the finite verb, and &quot;to paint&quot; is of course the infinitive.   But is there a syntactic term for a construction such as &quot;wants to paint&quot;?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a bonus question:   In English, constructions such as the one just described can consist of three or more verbs, e.g.   &quot;wants to begin to change,&quot; and &quot;needs to want to begin to change.&quot;   These constructions each consist of one finite verb plus X number of infinitives.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which equivalents to such constructions would consist of X number of finite verbs followed by one infinitive, as in this nonce English example:   &quot;needs wants begins to change&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T01:42:05.133" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T14:37:17.807" Title="Is there a syntactic term for finite verb + infinitive constructions such as &quot;wants to paint&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-26T05:17:25.937" Score="1" ViewCount="6836" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm editing an article which talks about early terms for artefacts in the Russian language, but the article is in English. Both Russian and English have a diverse field of synonyms for 'thing' - I was wondering if anyone can spot any semantic differences between 'thing', 'object', 'piece' and 'item'? Be as subjective as you please!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1801" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T05:57:40.570" Title="What is the semantic difference between 'thing', 'object', 'piece' and 'item'?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-02-28T17:54:42.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3284" CreationDate="2013-02-26T05:56:55.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thing and object are a classic example of terms of Germanic origin versus Latin (or Norman French) origin, therefore informal/formal, domestic/intellectual (or legal) type of distinction. Does Russian have formal and informal registers?&#xA;Piece and item are both parts of a larger group, but items feel like they are complete in themselves, whereas piece feels incomplete. (Jigsaw puzzles have pieces, not items, whereas collections tend to items rather than pieces) In usage of course this is not always so, as piecework tends to mean being paid for items.... And concerts have items, but you tend to practise them as pieces.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did say to be subjective....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1802" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T05:56:55.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3284" CreationDate="2013-02-26T05:57:40.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no actual research backup for this, but I tend to see &quot;thing&quot; as being more amorphous.  &quot;Object usually means a discrete object, and I tend to imagine it as small unless otherwise specified, but that may be personal.  &quot;Piece&quot; implies that it's either part of a whole or there are multiple items.  &quot;Item&quot; ... I guess pretty similar to &quot;object&quot; - if I had to make a distinction, I'd say that I use 'object' for something just lying around and 'item' for something deliberate - an item in a shopping trolley or on a list or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all pretty personal, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1803" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T05:57:40.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3289" CreationDate="2013-02-26T11:29:11.483" Score="8" ViewCount="2296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a branch of linguistics using Calculus as a mathematical tool? I mean, can we use differential or integrate in linguistic study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1804" LastEditorUserId="3637" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T15:44:30.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T00:00:05.080" Title="Is there a branch of linguistics using Calculus as a mathematical tool?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3283" CreationDate="2013-02-26T14:37:59.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we see those constructions just as &lt;code&gt;finite + infinitive&lt;/code&gt;, I wouldn't know other term different from &lt;em&gt;complex verb phrase&lt;/em&gt;. However, your example includes the verb &lt;code&gt;want&lt;/code&gt;, which has some particular features. In the sentence &lt;code&gt;Pete wants to paint&lt;/code&gt;, the matrix verb &lt;code&gt;want&lt;/code&gt; is followed by the nonfinite clause &lt;code&gt;to paint&lt;/code&gt;. In English, these clauses do not have an overt subject, so they are said to have a nonfinite null subject called &lt;code&gt;PRO&lt;/code&gt;. Thus, the sentence structure is something like &lt;code&gt;Pete wants [PRO to paint]&lt;/code&gt;. We think that this null subject PRO is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;controlled&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by the subject of the sentence, in this case &lt;code&gt;Pete&lt;/code&gt;. You can see the subject as an antecedent of the null pronoun PRO. The sentence would mean something like &lt;code&gt;Peter wants&lt;/code&gt;&lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;code&gt;to paint&lt;/code&gt;. Verbs such as &lt;code&gt;want&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;like&lt;/code&gt;, which admit this kind of infinitive complements, are called &lt;strong&gt;control verbs&lt;/strong&gt;, and the clause with a null PRO subject is a &lt;strong&gt;control clause&lt;/strong&gt;. The complete phrase would be then known as &lt;strong&gt;control predicate&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;control structure&lt;/strong&gt;. This explains what happens in English, but languages vary in terms of the kind of clauses that allow null subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T14:37:59.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2013-02-26T15:23:01.047" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Calculus can be a useful tool in quantitative linguistics. One simple example would be the deduction of the theoretical equation for the Piotrowski law modeling language change by Altmann et al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The increase of new forms &lt;code&gt;p'&lt;/code&gt; is proportional to the product of the proportions &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; of new and &lt;code&gt;1-p&lt;/code&gt; old forms: &lt;code&gt;p' ∝ p(1 - p)&lt;/code&gt;. Introducing the factor of proportionality &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; then yields the differential equation &lt;code&gt;p' = bp(1-p)&lt;/code&gt;, which can be solved for &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; as a function of time: &lt;code&gt;p = 1/(1 + a exp(-bt))&lt;/code&gt;. (Skipping a few details here, like Piotrowski's earlier fitting of a tangens hyperbolicus curve, which is compatible with the above, since &lt;code&gt;1/(1 + a exp(-bt)) = 1/2 tanh w(t-t₁) + 1/2&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;1/2 tanh w(t-t₁)&lt;/code&gt; was one of Piotrowski's original proposals. Also, this can be (and was) generalized for partial change, and there are other viable approaches besides the interactionistic model.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in quantitative linguistics, I'd suggest the works of Prof. Gabriel Altmann and Prof. Reinhard Köhler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1393" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T15:23:01.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2013-02-26T18:37:12.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lambda calculus is often used in formal semantics to express the meaning of a sentence compositionally as a series of successive function applications. On &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/NZ_2006/NZ06_Ling_310.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Barbara Partee's website&lt;/a&gt; there's a nice lesson on how lambda calculus (or, as some say, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; lambda calculus) can be used to model English semantics. Lesson 7 introduces lambda calculus, but it might be worth looking at earlier lessons to see why it is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sure, lambda calculus is not &quot;calculus&quot; in the typical sense of differential calculus that we learn in our high school math classes, but it is a kind of calculus in that it involves an operator (lambda) that operates on a function and returns another function, binding a variable in the process. In that sense the lambda operator gives you something like the &quot;derivative&quot; of the original function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-02-27T17:48:26.127" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T17:48:26.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2013-02-26T20:09:48.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope that this thread is not too dead, but I'd like to add &lt;a href=&quot;http://ikpa.snu.ac.kr/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IKPA&lt;/a&gt; - International Korean Phonetic Alphabet. It's based on Hangeul, so is mostly featural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1807" LastActivityDate="2013-02-26T20:09:48.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2013-02-27T18:38:44.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you either underestimate the uniqueness of Finnish, or have read a wrong book on it. Among its other interesting features, Finnish has verb declention, marked evidentiality, active paradigm (like Aimara or Kechua) and near-to-obligatory (in some cases) possessive markers. None of this categories is expressed in mainstream Finnish grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and did I mentioned the five types of 'infinitives' in Finnish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar of Finnish in its traditional form does have a lot in common with Germanic grammars (e.g. so-called 'weak stems' vs 'strong stems'), but a comparative analysis of other Finno-Ugric languages demonstrates the categories absent in IU languages (evidentiality, noun comparison, and a certain non-discrimination between parts of speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the part of your question about languages without parts of speech, Chinese, Yoruba or any other 'isolating' language would serve as a perfect example of a language without parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T18:38:44.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-02-27T19:31:19.663" Score="0" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew and possibly other abjads, there is a concept called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria#Values_table&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gematria&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which is, in short, that each letter has a numerical value proceeding linearly through the alphabet, such that א equals 1, ב equals 2, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This produces many classical commentaries on these numerical values, and there are many theologically significant interrelationships between words.  As a very simple example, the sum of the values for the Hebrew word for father and mother is equal to the value of the word child, as below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father: אב, av&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Mother: אם, em&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Child: ילד, yeled&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Av equals 3, em equals 41, and yeled equals 44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more examples, but this is one of the simplest.  How could such a thing have arisen naturally?  As far as I know it does not occur in other languages, and seems too complex to be coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1809" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-02-28T00:08:46.820" LastActivityDate="2013-02-28T00:08:46.820" Title="How could complex numerical interrelationships arise naturally in a language?" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-02-28T13:38:29.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3293" CreationDate="2013-02-27T23:17:39.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Complex relationships (e.g., Chaldean) are probably just chance. I don't accept the &quot;too complex to be coincidence&quot; argument. Given a large set of symbols of numerical (or other) value, connections are bound to occur. Not finding anything like this would be amazing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple relationships, such as &quot;Father + Mother = Child&quot; could also be coincidence but they could easily have be designed or at least &quot;encouraged&quot;. Considering the significance of numbers in religion, a connection like this could almost be required for such a fundamental statement. So, if it wasn't there already, synonyms could be encouraged or new words coined to make it true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to know how many of these were purely by chance and how many were designed or encouraged. It probably wouldn't be possible to know for sure without a record of the words/letters before association with numbers. [Then we could see if the &quot;coincidences&quot; increased or remained the same.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastActivityDate="2013-02-27T23:17:39.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3302" CreationDate="2013-03-01T03:11:08.957" Score="8" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does languages with imperfect aspects typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, which does not mark its verbs for imperfect aspect, we have progressing &quot;-ing,&quot; we have adverbial to convey habitual aspect (&quot;always,&quot; &quot;usually,&quot; &quot;regulary&quot;) and even an auxiliary, &quot;keep,&quot; that can convey iterative aspect.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages that do have imperfect aspect but no verb inflections or auxiliaries that mark distinct habitual, progressive, or iterative aspects, how are the concepts that answer to the latter three names conveyed? For example, is the use of adverbials to make these distinctions the most common strategy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-02T11:40:15.160" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T20:08:47.377" Title="How do languages with imperfect aspect typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2013-03-01T14:39:39.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make a more general contribution, but still regarding your specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many definitions of synonymy. Let's agree in a simple one: it is a semantic relation between the meanings of words or sentences. We now have the problem of defining &lt;em&gt;meaning.&lt;/em&gt; In one way or another, the concept of synonymy is understood without requiring absolute identity between words, if there is such thing. Without going in the details, a logical account for absolute synonymy would say that two linguistic forms are synonyms if they are interchangeable salva veritate, that is, keeping the truth value of the expression they are part of. In his attack on the concept of analyticity, Quine (1951) discussed the idea of whether this kind of interchangeability was a condition strong enough for synonymy. Saying that &lt;em&gt;bachelor&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of &lt;em&gt;unmarried man&lt;/em&gt; was saying that the proposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All and only bachelors were unmarried men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was analytical. But that is circular, and Quine wanted to discuss whether the sufficient condition for cognitive synonymy was interchangeability and not analyticity. Hundreds of articles have been written about this and I cannot review all the arguments, but the point was to illustrate one of the basic ideas about logical synonymy. If you think about the example of the correspondence between &lt;em&gt;bachelor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unmarried man,&lt;/em&gt; you will soon realise that there are not really many words like those in natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we talk about words, we think that synonyms are those that can be substituted for each other in sentential contexts, and if we talk about sentences, then they are said to be synonyms if the substitution preserves truth values. But still we have to be careful with the concept of synonymy. For words, we can have different semantic values that may not have a one-to-one correspondence to each other. Think about the words &lt;em&gt;old, ancient, aged, obsolete.&lt;/em&gt; They are not interchangeable in all contexts: &lt;em&gt;old/ancient ritual&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;old/?ancient laptop.&lt;/em&gt; So it's not only about the meaning of the synonyms, which is unclear, but also about their relations with other words on their contexts of appearance (the basic idea being compositionality in semantics). We can also use euphemisms as synonyms for the words we don't want to use. Here we are opening the door to a whole new set of factors that can influence synonymy, as some previous comments/answers point out. We must then consider that synonymy (either absolute or partial) depends on what are the meanings we are trying to compare and the compositional nature of the relations between words in the context of sentences. This is a matter of debate for any kind of approach to meaning, either in semantics, pragmatics and other subfield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us admit that there can be at least two kinds of synonymy: there might be a full synonymy for words that are logically (salva veritate) interchangeable, but that is not very common. And there is also this everyday use of synonymy that treats sameness of meaning in a more or less unrestricted way. One could see meaning as some sort of continuum and words as mapping certain parts of that continuum, with overlaps between them that allows us to call them synonyms. This can be analysed theoretically and empirically in linguistics. As was mentioned before, definitions depend on the framework used to explain meaning. If the meanings of words are their referents, then it is easy to find synonyms. A second option is to understand that meanings are senses (more or less in he Fregean conception), but then you will find many debates as well. A third option is a psychological perspective were meanings are representations or concepts in the mind, and there you will find even more disagreement. The definition of synonymy is then closely related to the semantic perspective adopted and the definition of meaning endorsed. You can compare words in terms of denotations, semantic features, semantic maps, representations, etc. You can also study synonymy in terms of sociolinguistics, comparing dialects and registers, or even from a cross-linguistic point of view. The use of computational methods and corpus research is also frequent. But at the end, you can only say that there is absolute synonymy if you analyse all the possible meanings/contexts, and that is quite difficult, if not implausible.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, definitions of synonymy are relative to the theoretical framework adopted, and particularly dependent on the definition of meaning. What you call &quot;absolute synonymy&quot; can also be what has been defined as logical or full synonymy, but not everyone will agree. Words like &lt;em&gt;bachelor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unmarried man&lt;/em&gt; can be said to be full synonyms, but then again, these examples are extremely rare and there might be differences we don't know yet. That is also the case of &lt;em&gt;gorse&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;furze&lt;/em&gt;, mentioned in a previous answer. Perhaps the reason is that these words have a very narrow range of contexts of use. It might be the case that words with more meanings and more frequently used tend to be less close to the end of the continuum where full synonymy (if it exists) is found. Besides, two or more words that mean exactly the same seem to be not economical for language, and thus it would tend to be avoided. Are there absolute synonyms? There can be, but then again, the answer itself is not absolute. I am sorry I can't provide references, but it seems that's the situation, at least in linguistic semantics. Partial synonymy is assumed for methodological purposes without much discussion, while absolute synonymy is considered rare because it is inefficient and uneconomical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastEditorUserId="1822" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T15:34:01.290" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T15:34:01.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2013-03-01T17:51:12.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From semiotics I gather that semantics is related to the abstract concept the word represents, while pragmatics is related to the purpose of its use. [S. Boell en D. Cecez-Kecmanovic, “Attributes of Information”, in AMCIS 2010 Proceedings, 2010, pp. 11.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I say that my heart rate is 120 BPM, there will be no misunderstanding about its conceptualisation; its meaning.&#xA;Still, a medical doctor cannot draw any conclusion from just this information alone. Context is required, such as age, gender, current and very recent activity (running or sitting) in order to draw conclusions about a certain aspect of my health. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pragmatics define the sort of actions to take, which are dependent on the listener's goal. The pragmatics for a medical doctor examining a patient will therefore be quite different than those for a personal trainer coaching an Olympic athlete. Therefore the conclusion drawn (i.e. is a heart rate of 120BPM good or bad) is influenced by its use (pragmatics), while the meaning of &quot;a heart rate of 120BPM&quot; remains constant (semantics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that context, used above to indicate &quot;what else do we need to know before we can draw conclusions&quot;, therefore depends on pragmatics. The context required for the medical doctor might be different than for the personal trainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1815" LastEditorUserId="1815" LastEditDate="2013-03-04T08:40:15.757" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T08:40:15.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-02T19:33:12.163" Score="0" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that between 3000 and 6000 languages are spoken on Earth. My question is the following: how do people calculate that number?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1820" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-04-04T15:46:54.580" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T15:46:54.580" Title="How do we know how many languages exist?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3035" CreationDate="2013-03-02T20:20:38.920" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the phoneme level, a text-to-speech system is usually tied to the phoneme set of the language a voice was built from. This is usually because modern speech synthesizers (MBROLA, Cepstral, AT&amp;amp;T, etc.) use recorded voice samples in a diphone database (sampling phoneme pairs from the recorded data). This allows them to sound more natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result of this, the phoneme set is restricted to the voice's language. Thus, handling IPA phonemes not in the target voice is one problem you need to solve in interpreting IPA phoneme strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is further complicated as the underlying phoneme model is likely a simplistic one that does not model phoneme features (e.g. voiceless bilabial fricative) that can be mapped from one phoneme scheme to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eSpeak text-to-speech engine comes close to this in that its model is based around phoneme features and it can support a large number of languages, but it has taken the choice of using a language per voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in the process of building the Cainteoir text-to-speech engine that will use phoneme features to model phonemes, providing transcription schemes to map to/from that model and separating language and voice. That is, each language and voice specify the phonemes they support, allowing a voice to speak different languages and each language to be used by multiple voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem comes in identifying what text is IPA and what is not. This is complex as /jes/ could be IPA or could be jes in italics. Also, gin could be IPA or could be a word depending on context. This can be seen in the way different text-to-speech systems handle roman numerals (I, II, III, IV, V, ...): consider &quot;Chapter I was the Chapter I was reading.&quot; and &quot;Henry IV was placed on an IV drip.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text-to-speech programs will often support SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) that allows you to write &amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;ipa&quot; ph=&quot;jes&quot;&gt;yes&amp;lt;/phoneme&gt; to specify IPA phonemes. Different text-to-speech programs will handle this differently, for example Cepstral only supports their Arpabet-like phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text-to-speech engine will express phonemes in their own phoneme transcription scheme that expresses the phonemes the voice supports. For Cepstral this is based on Arpabet (the US voice uses the CMU pronunciation dictionary with lower case phonemes); for MBROLA this is based on SAMPA (with each voice supporting the corresponding language-based SAMPA phonemes and some additional phonemes); for eSpeak this is based on Kirshenbaum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem then becomes (a) reading the IPA text and (b) mapping the phonemes to the phonemes supported by the voice. A lot of text-to-speech engines don't bother as they do not have the need to support this (dictionary entries are specified in the voice's phoneme transcription scheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The approach I am taking is to express a phoneme transcription scheme as a collection of &lt;code&gt;text =&amp;gt; features&lt;/code&gt; mappings such as &lt;code&gt;/s/ {vls,alv,frc}&lt;/code&gt; (ipa: &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/master/data/phonemes/ipa.phon&quot;&gt;https://raw.github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/master/data/phonemes/ipa.phon&lt;/a&gt;, ascii-ipa: &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/master/data/phonemes/ascii-ipa.phon&quot;&gt;https://raw.github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/master/data/phonemes/ascii-ipa.phon&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is to store the phonemes internally as a sequence of feature groups, allowing &lt;code&gt;transcription =&amp;gt; features =&amp;gt; transcription&lt;/code&gt;. This then supports, for example, MBROLA voices reading Unicode-based IPA transcriptions. Here, each voice will have their own &lt;code&gt;features =&amp;gt; transcription&lt;/code&gt; mapping that maps several feature groups to the same transcription. For example, an English voice could pronounce /r/ and /ɹ/ as /ɹ/ as &lt;code&gt;{vcd,alv,trl}&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;{vcd,alv,apr}&lt;/code&gt; could map to the same phoneme /r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;strong&gt;ˌoʊkeɪˈhiːɹjəˌgoʊ&lt;/strong&gt; as an example, the transcription for eSpeak is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ espeak -v en --ipa &quot;[[,oUkeIh'i@j@g,oU]]&quot;&#xA;ˌəʊkeɪhˈiəjəɡˌəʊ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for British English, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ espeak -v en-US --ipa &quot;[[,oUkeIh'i:rj@g,oU]]&quot;&#xA;ˌoʊkeɪhˈiːrjəɡˌoʊ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for American English. You can also get it to output the MBROLA phonemes, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ espeak -v mb-de5-en --pho &quot;[[,oUkeIh'i@j@g,oU]]&quot;&#xA;@ w k E j h i: @ j @ g @ w&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MBROLA phonemes are actually listed one per line with duration and pitch contour information, but I have excluded that for brevity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, eSpeak would need to map &lt;strong&gt;ˌoʊkeɪˈhiːɹjəˌgoʊ&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;code&gt;,oUkeIh'i:rj@g,oU&lt;/code&gt; for the en-US voice, &lt;code&gt;,oUkeIh'i@j@g,oU&lt;/code&gt; for the en voice and &lt;code&gt;@ w k E j h i: @ j @ g @ w&lt;/code&gt; for the MBROLA de5 voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="185" LastEditDate="2013-03-04T18:19:44.137" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T18:19:44.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3295" CreationDate="2013-03-02T20:39:51.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has two types of verbs: perfect VS imperfect. Perfect verbs are normally distiguished by prefixes added to verb stems. For imperfect verbs, no distinction between habitual/iterative aspects is made, but progressive is marked by a combination of prefix + durative suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish and Estonian have three types of perfective tenses, two imperfect tenses, and two primary objective cases to mark perfect VS imperfect actions. Habitual, iterative and progressive aspects are marked by partitive case endings. Verbs also have iterative / progressive suffixes, but their usage is arbituary and the aspects of actions are presented with object cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T20:08:47.377" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T20:08:47.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3305" CreationDate="2013-03-03T00:21:21.873" Score="1" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose one person does not like one word or expression. He would have to use it though, so then he chooses a substitute. The majority of the people however use that word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, since one meaning of a word is the number of utterances in the society, that person consciously and intentionally changes the impact of the word in society. He chooses to do so, even if the impact is very small and perhaps limited to his lifetime.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bit similar to an election where one votes for a candidate who by far will not win. Are there examples of people who do that? Is there a norm that one has or has not the right to choose the word of his like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-03T17:49:48.297" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T03:58:04.617" Title="Are there people who intentionally refuse to use some words even if the majority does it?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3303" CreationDate="2013-03-03T04:27:39.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are.   As Acattle points out in his/her comment above, some people carefully refrain from swearing, even though the majority of Americans have become comfortable with a little profanity among adults.   Common epithets are another class of words that most people use but that some people won't use.  There are gentle people who won't use the term &quot;slut&quot; to designate a person known to be promiscuous.  Conversely, certain people refuse to use euphemisms in the belief that those who do use them are inauthentic or too timid to speak forthrightly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are at least two obvious norms that limit to one's ability to refuse to use certain words that most people use.   One is that most people expect a speaker to use a variety of language that the listener finds to be grammatically acceptable.  An almost certainly hypothetical native English speaker who refused to use &quot;the&quot; might find himself or herself labeled as too eccentric to be worth talking to.   The second norm is more important:  one must speak in a way that allows one to be understood if communication is one's goal.  If our almost certainly hypothetical native English speaker refused to use either the word &quot;person&quot; or any of its synonyms, he or she would have a tough time talking about everyone's favorite subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-03-03T04:33:05.483" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T04:33:05.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3303" CreationDate="2013-03-03T10:32:07.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two examples (besides swearing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basically every political-correctness movement starts like this. You have a neutral description, e.g., &lt;em&gt;disabled.&lt;/em&gt; Then a minority of people starts to dislike this term for some reason (e.g., since it is also used as an insult) and replaces it by some word they consider to be better, e.g., &lt;em&gt;differently abled.&lt;/em&gt; This minority has an impact on society, not only popularizing the new term but also moving the public reception of the old term from a neutral to a more negative one. Finally the old term is generally considered to be disrespective and insulting and the new one is considered neutral and preferable. (And then people start all over again.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In almost every language you will find speakers who oppose loanwords and use neologisms (or existing words) instead. For example, though the vast majority of Germans uses &lt;em&gt;Internet&lt;/em&gt; for the internet, there is a small radical minority, which (unsuccessfully) propagates the use of &lt;em&gt;Weltnetz&lt;/em&gt; (world network) or similar terms instead. There are also successful examples of replacing a loanword, e.g., some of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Zesen&quot;&gt;Phillip von Zesen’s&lt;/a&gt; creations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T10:32:07.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3034" CreationDate="2013-03-03T12:01:41.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, there are no isolates in China (with the exception of Korean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are several languages having disputable or unclear taxonomy within the Tibeto-Burman language philum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is (or, rather, had been spoken) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhangzhung_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zhanzhung&lt;/a&gt;, an ancient sacred language of Tibetan Bön tradition which had existed  in Tibet long before the Buddhist period. There is also an old Kuznetsov's theory (1988) of Tibet having some links with Sumerian culture, and since Sumerian is considered by most linguists to be an isolate, the idea of possible discoveries/researches suggests itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nungish_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nungish languages&lt;/a&gt; spoken in Yunnan province and forming 'a poorly described family of uncertain affiliation within the Tibeto-Burman languages'. Given the vast propensity of any nations to be sinoficated within the Han borders (consider e.g. the history and background of Hui muzlims an Jews in China), it is unclear whether these languages are related to the Sino-Tibetan stock or just represent a local language union.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-03T13:06:11.590" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T13:06:11.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-03T12:08:07.407" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the argument/actant theories, but perhaps there is something like universal semantical coding for the nouns as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Argument concepts,you can see the relevant Wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_argument&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verb Argument&lt;/a&gt;. For Actants and Valency Theory, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A9ma_actantiel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schéma actantiel&lt;/a&gt; instead (in French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-03T23:48:17.680" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T23:48:17.680" Title="Is there any universal semantic coding for noun cases similar to verb aspectology?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3034" CreationDate="2013-03-03T14:57:45.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Language isolate&quot; is a vague term. For nearly all languages in the world there are conjectured affiliations. For example, Etruscan is supposed to be Eurasiatic, Basque is supposed to belong to Dene-Caucasian and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all languages in China it is known that they are either Dene-Caucasian or Nostratic. The same can be said about Russia and Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-03-03T14:57:45.237" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3311" CreationDate="2013-03-03T17:26:43.603" Score="16" ViewCount="6808" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not yet studied tonal languages, so it might be understandable, but when I listen to Chinese music, for example, I'm unable to perceive tones. This makes me think they are partially or completely dropped in music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are tones preserved or simply dropped in music? Do the tones often influence the melody or the other way around? How has this changed through history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1824" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-29T18:53:10.130" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:19:31.243" Title="How do tones work in music sung in tonal languages, such as Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;cantonese&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-03T23:45:16.547" Score="9" ViewCount="1829" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have there been any studies done on say Mandarin native speakers who learn as adults other languages which have more lexical tones or which have lexical tones different to Mandarin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe for instance that Mandarin has fewer or simpler tones than Cantonese, Thai, and Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if such second language learners typically have ease or difficulty acquiring these extra lexical tones compared to a learner whose native language entirely lacks lexical tone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T12:17:37.993" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T18:18:33.753" Title="Do native speakers of language with lexical tone have difficulty learning another language with more or different lexical tones?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3309" CreationDate="2013-03-04T06:45:51.940" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Cantonese songs, one of two things happen — the tones are preserved in a particular way, or the tones are ignored. The paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/download/1828/1600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tone and melody in Cantonese&lt;/a&gt; by Marjorie K.M. Chan has some information on how often the tones are preserved, showing that the tonal contrasts are largely preserved by the melody in a small sample of 90s HK pop songs. The paper is about the relative pitches of adjacent syllables, but there is a second mechanism for preserving tones in the melody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, in Cantonese songs which preserve contour tones, this occurs by applying a grace note to the syllable, so that it starts below the notated tone. You can hear this in, say, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=Uw5OeD3Vc4E#t=77s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;男兒當自強&lt;/a&gt;, where the rising contour tone syllables 膽, 打, 似 are sung with a lower grace note. The grace note is on the previous note of the scale in 膽, but a semitone below the notated note on 打.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't know of any singer who tries to preserve the Cantonese low-falling tone (tone 4) with an upper grace note, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This manner of preserving tonal information can be applied even when the original melody was not written for the lyrics, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pur28DxPhj8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;每天愛你多一些&lt;/a&gt;, which was written for a Japanese song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, I can't think of a Cantonese song which ignores contour tones altogether, although sometimes you hear Happy Birthday sung with the Mandarin lyrics in their Cantonese readings (祝你生日快樂 etc.), and I think the contours are not generally respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Mandarin songs, on the other hand, obliterate tone distinctions and don't try to preserve them in the melody. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=6lbPgfKK7m4#t=55s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;朋友&lt;/a&gt; by 周華健 is an example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the greater number of contour tones in Cantonese is the reason why singers at least try to preserve the contour/level contrast. It would be interesting to get data on whether singers in other tone systems — Thai and Vietnamese, for instance — preserve contour tones or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T08:19:31.243" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:19:31.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3310" CreationDate="2013-03-04T09:32:16.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447007000289&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, which states that Mandarin Chinese natives and English natives when trained on recognizing lexical tones advanced about equally fast in their training but found different tones to be among the most difficult. Abstract below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two groups of listeners, one of native speakers of a tone language (Mandarin Chinese) and one of native speakers of a non-tone language (English) were trained to recognize Cantonese lexical tones. Performance before and after training was measured using closed response-set identification and pairwise difference rating tasks. Difference ratings were submitted to multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses to investigate training-related changes in listeners’ perceptual space. Both groups showed comparable initial performance and significant improvement in tone identification following training. However, the two groups differed in terms of the tones they found most difficult to identify, and in terms of the tones that were learned best. Differences between the two groups’ training-induced changes in identification (confusions) and perceptual spaces demonstrated that listeners’ native language experience with intonational as well as tone categories affects the perception and acquisition of non-native suprasegmental categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T09:32:16.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-04T15:26:24.393" Score="4" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find building interlinear gloss for Chinese to be difficult without any sort of reference material for what to call different grammatical particles etc. Is there such a reference available online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2013-03-04T15:26:24.393" Title="Where can I find references for how to build interlinear gloss for Chinese?" Tags="&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3310" CreationDate="2013-03-04T15:26:30.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would not separate lexical tone here.&lt;/strong&gt; There are many other lexical tools. Depending on your native and studied languages, you will (or will not) be able to hear when these tools are used and use it by yourself. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consonant-related &amp;mdash; fricative, aspiration, palatalization:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Russian speaker will quickly grasp palatalization, but aspiration makes a huge problem even for me, after some three years speaking Thai &lt;strong&gt;daily&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same Russian speaker will easily recognize a huge variety of Mandarin Chinese affricates &lt;code&gt;t͡s&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;t͡ɕ&lt;/code&gt; or retroflex &lt;code&gt;ɻ&lt;/code&gt; as they exist in Russian (to a certain proximity). At the same time, English speaker will have difficulties with them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel-related &amp;mdash; di- and triphthongs, long/short vowel length:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English speakers often have problems with &lt;code&gt;ɯ&lt;/code&gt; and short &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt;, but have no issue reproducing &lt;code&gt;ɤ&lt;/code&gt;. Things are totally opposite for Russian speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is common for all mentioned linguistic phenomenons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good news: &lt;strong&gt;If a language learner is already familiar with a certain lexical tool, it will be easier for them to accept its existence and to start using it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bad news: it's almost certain that there are other lexical tools to become an issue when studying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think if someone is telling a native English speaker about a language that has five more vowels: &lt;code&gt;ɯ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ɤ&lt;/code&gt;, etc. &amp;mdash; what would they answer? &quot;Yes, other vowels do exist, so what?&quot; They wouldn't be surprised there are languages with vowels. :) This is why it's important to learn many languages: the more you are aware of (not necessarily speaking fluently), the more tools you know and can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get back to tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several Chinese friends who study Thai. Existence of lexical tones is something obvious for them. Since Thai has extra tones, comparing to Mandarin (namely, &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;middle&lt;/em&gt; tones; plus, Mandarin &lt;em&gt;high&lt;/em&gt; corresponds to Thai &lt;em&gt;high-rising&lt;/em&gt;), those extra tones make some trouble to hear and reproduce for Chinese speakers, but no more than diphthongs or long/short vowels do, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, several Thai friends of mine have studied Mandarin, one is a professional Thai-Mandarin translator. Being curious, I asked them about their study. They have never complained on Chinese lexical tones. What really makes them trouble is Mandarin consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have started with Mandarin Chinese, but then stopped my study for years. When it came to learning Thai, yes, my prior familiarity with Chinese tones helped me to skip several lessons of spoken Thai training. I would not say it was critical, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;. One more thing, it seems to be related.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This observation came to me when I was listening to Chinese and Thai songs. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQIJwqTw1AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;做你的愛人&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/FdxjeObg7y4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;自由飞翔&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; tones follow the melody, even if they are incorrect;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/WQJP9lmGdbE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;นอนไม่หลับ&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk0E_LMiVnk#!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;อยากรู้แต่ไม่อยากถาม&lt;/a&gt; &amp;mdash; simply read the lyrics, and the melody will arise by itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese speakers tend to minimize phonetic distance between the tones. No, I don't say they &lt;em&gt;ignore&lt;/em&gt; it. They only emphasize tones when needed (e.g., the context allows a different word pronounced in another tone).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thai is the opposite. Native speakers highlight the tones pretty accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-04-07T18:18:33.753" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T18:18:33.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2013-03-05T16:18:44.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Yoruba (and many other languages spoken in Africa) there is no gender distinction for personal names. Lukumi, a decendent form of Yoruba, has inherited the same feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some IU languages, there is no gender distinction for some specific names or their forms. Here is a list of French &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/od/culture/a/frenchnames_4.htm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unisex names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-03-05T16:18:44.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3341" CreationDate="2013-03-06T05:31:16.753" Score="2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;To ask the question more exactly, is there a term for a form of the verb that is a) not marked for tense, and b) can syntactically pattern like a noun-phrase or like a noun-modifier depending on the syntactic context? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term I'm looking for need not be uniformly applicable and unambiguous for all languages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, the definitions of terms such as &quot;gerund,&quot; &quot;gerundive,&quot; and &quot;participle&quot; each vary depending on the language that the users of these terms are describing.  See, for example, this LSE post on the term &quot;gerund&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1023/can-the-term-gerund-be-linguistically-defined&quot;&gt;Can the term &amp;quot;gerund&amp;quot; be linguistically defined?&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if there is a term for a type of verb that meets criteria a) and b) above, even if this term has only applies to descriptions of a small number of languages, I'd like to know what the term is, even if it turns out to be &quot;participle,&quot; &quot;gerundive,&quot; or &quot;gerund.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T05:19:53.560" Title="Is there a term for a non-finite verb that does that work of gerunds and participles?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-06T13:37:55.717" Score="6" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is widely regarded as the global language of science now. In China, we use simplified Chinese to write scientific textbooks, teach courses and do almost everything. Let's take the simplest example, single variable calculus. I have used both a Chinese version and an English version (Thomas' &quot;Calculus&quot;), and to me, the English version is much, &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; better than the Chinese version. The technical terms become much clearer. Let's take the example of &quot;Differentiate,&quot; &quot;Differential,&quot; &quot;Differentiation&quot;. When translated into Chinese, they have the same name &quot;微分,&quot; and the subtle difference is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my question is, how can you prove one language is more efficient than another language  for science? Like proving English is more efficient than Chinese for science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Since almost all of you guys agree that any language is OK for science, the question is now about efficiency in scientific contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1804" LastEditorUserId="1702" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T16:54:03.063" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T16:54:03.063" Title="Is there a way to prove one language is more efficient than another language for science?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2013-03-06T15:34:08.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language is a tool for conveying meaning. If you can convey the meaning then the language is a &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; tool for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All (really, &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt;) modern languages are good for scientific expressions. If they weren't, they would have already died by today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese and English are very different, for example, Chinese is much more idiomatic. And yes, the way you convey a meaning is different. There are thousands of examples of Chinese terms that don't translate to English accurately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;火车 doesn't mean 火 (fire) + 车 (cart);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;网路 is not 网 (net) + 路 (path);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure, you can give many, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Difficulty to translate does not mean uselessness for science.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible that some terminology in scientific books is based on English, and, sometimes, is using &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; idiomaticity (&quot;net&quot; is a good example &amp;mdash; computer network has nothing to do to fishnets and spider webs). For a foreigner, it may become a difficulty to grasp an entire meaning. But again, it does not mean the language is useless for science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-06T15:46:52.217" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T15:46:52.217" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="820" CreationDate="2013-03-06T16:09:59.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My son grew up multilingual from the get-go. In India, my parents spoke with him in my mother-tongue (Marathi), my in-laws and acquaintances in the national language (Hindi), and I, mainly English. He started forming words and saying baby versions of multi-syllabic words like &quot;calendar&quot; by 8 months. By one year, he could speak sentences like &quot;Happy birthday to you&quot; (baby version, of course) and by 1.5 years, could smoothly change languages based on who he turned to speak with. Replies to questions would be in the language the questions were asked and if he wanted specific information, he would start in one language but change if it was someone replying in another language. I also exposed him to German at 4 and he seemed to take to it easily as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen other kids easily picking up 2-3 languages as toddlers - depending upon what the parents spoke at home as well as their nanny or other help. Even if the nanny spoke a completely different language (other than what their parents did), they picked it up. So, I believe children do pick up languages early - earlier than 9 months, if exposed to them early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1829" LastActivityDate="2013-03-06T16:09:59.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2013-03-07T02:39:03.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP is making a very common mistake when it comes to comparing languages. If you can find a copy of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140260234&quot;&gt;Language Myths by  Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill&lt;/a&gt;, I suggest you read Myth #2: Some Languages Just aren't Good Enough. If you can't find a copy then &lt;a href=&quot;http://vagabonddrifter.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/language-myths-some-languages-are-not-just-good-enough/&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt; should give you the rough idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's examine the example given in the question: &lt;em&gt;differentiate&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;differential&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;differentiation&lt;/em&gt; are all collapsed into a single word, 微分. The OP says that this makes the words lose their &quot;subtle difference&quot;. But what is the difference between these words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Differential&lt;/em&gt; is a noun referring to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_%28mathematics%29&quot;&gt;&quot;a change in the linearization of a function.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Differentiate&lt;/em&gt; is a verb roughly meaning &quot;find the differential&quot;. Finally, &lt;em&gt;Differentiation&lt;/em&gt; is a noun meaning roughly &quot;the act of finding the differential&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If memory serves, Mandarin Chinese (like English) has a strict word order meaning that the &quot;differentiate&quot; verb form of 微分 should be unambiguous. However, this leave some ambiguity between the &quot;differential&quot; and &quot;differentiation&quot; forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except, such an ambiguity will most likely be resolved though context meaning that there's no real loss of meaning. Even in English there is no sentence using the word &quot;differentiation&quot; that can't be restated using &quot;differential&quot;. For example, &quot;Show the differentiation&quot; could be restated as &quot;show how to find the differential&quot;. The only reason these multiple noun forms exist is because using &quot;differential&quot; constantly could create some aesthetically unpleasing sentences, nothing to do with meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a more generic example, imagine a language spoken by a small tribe of primitive fishermen in the Amazon rain forest. They don't have words for &quot;nuclear power&quot; or &quot;the internet&quot;, so that means they're incapable of talking about them, right? Wrong! The wonderful thing about language is it's living and changing. If you said &quot;nuclear power&quot; or &quot;the internet&quot; to Shakespeare, he'd be dumbfounded. English had to invent those words and if you introduced those concepts to our hypothetical Amazonian fishermen they'd invent a word for it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loanwords are a type of invention too. English had to take the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow&quot;&gt;kowtow&lt;/a&gt; from Mandarin to describe that act. Similarly, we literally translated the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%29#Chinese&quot;&gt;face&lt;/a&gt; to describe the Confucian concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given enough time any language can find a way to describe any concept. Therefore you cannot say that one language is &quot;unfit&quot; to describe something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I will offer one proviso: English is used as the international language of science. This is not because other languages are unable to describe scientific concepts but used in order to promote sharing and understanding of scientific works. The Ur-example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Johann_Mendel&quot;&gt;Gregor Mendel&lt;/a&gt; who discovered how inheritance worked as early as the 1860s but because he published his work in Hungarian and in an obscure journal, it was not until the 1900s, after his death, that his work was rediscovered and revolutionized the way scientists viewed genetics. Perhaps if he had published in a German or French journal his work would have been recognized sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T02:39:03.187" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3323" CreationDate="2013-03-07T04:12:48.970" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am etymologizing the word &lt;em&gt;punta riversa&lt;/em&gt;, and I would like to request a photocopy--or resource link--to the Oxford Latin Dictionary's entries for both &lt;em&gt;punctum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reversus&lt;/em&gt;. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-4iaGl-MmPxs/UTglHYOgKYI/AAAAAAAAAQE/JNglAlwgTv8/w228-h305-o-k/photo%2B4.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;reuersio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; what I should be looking for in the OLD? Why the &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; and not the &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1818" LastEditorUserId="1818" LastEditDate="2013-03-10T09:10:01.240" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T09:10:01.240" Title="&quot;Punta riversa&quot;: An Oxford Latin Dictionary Analysis" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3322" CreationDate="2013-03-07T09:26:34.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, &lt;em&gt;reuersio&lt;/em&gt; is what you want to look up. Here's my first-order approximation of why this is so — I trust that it is not too inaccurate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Classical_Latin_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;classical Latin alphabet&lt;/a&gt; had only the letters &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, Z,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; represented both /i/ and /j/ and &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; represented both /u/ and /w/; by the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet had also acquired more-or-less the now-familiar lower-case forms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, x, y, z.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; only appeared still later, as allographs of &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, and it wasn't until after the Renaissance that &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; systematically represented /i/ and (what had at least been) /j/, respectively (e.g., &lt;em&gt;cujus&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;cuius&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; systematically represented /u/ and (what had at least been) /w/ (e.g., &lt;em&gt;vos&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;uos&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, since the Latin orthography of classical antiquity only knew &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; (which originally gave rise to the lower case forms &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;), many modern editions and references use only upper-case &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; with lower case &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and upper-case &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; with lower-case &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, (I presume) in order to adhere as much as possible to the original orthography whilst allowing for the normal use of upper- and lower-case letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1625" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T09:26:34.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-07T22:56:03.830" Score="7" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some discussions about the latest reform of the German orthography, it was claimed that a central language regulation body prevents people from writing as they like and thus prevents “natural” changes of orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to this, I would hypothesise the following:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The establishment of spelling as a concept amongst the users of a given language automatically leads to the existence of conservative users who oppose spelling changes. The amount of these users and their “stubbornness” finally become so high that it prevents changes of spelling from reaching broad acceptance, unless accepted and propagated by a central regulation body for the language. This particularly applies for changes of a more general nature that affect more than just a small number of words, e.g., a hypothetical replacement of c by k, whenever it is pronounced as /k/ (as in &lt;em&gt;can),&lt;/em&gt; for the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples that stimulated my hypothesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no central regulating body for the English language. As a result of this, there is some variety in spelling, e.g., the differences between British and American English or certain punctuation issues. However, the apart from this (and even within this), little to nothing has changed since the end of the 19th century (if I am not mistaken). Having read some of the works by H.P. Lovecraft, who is known for his archaic language, the only »old« spellings that caught my eye, were uses of the trema (e.g., in &lt;em&gt;coöperate)&lt;/em&gt; and a few archaic vocables (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Esquimaux).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the German language, the &lt;em&gt;Orthographische Konferenz&lt;/em&gt; (Orthographical Conference) of 1901 established an official orthography and at the same time reformed some aspects of spelling, for which a widespread convention existed at that time, e.g. the usage of the letter c. Though the next orthography reform (which most prominently changed the usage of the letter ß) happened not until 1996, the spelling of many words changed during this time, e.g., many alternative spellings allowed in 1901 came out of use (e.g, &lt;em&gt;Concern&lt;/em&gt;), modern spellings were established (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Photo → Foto&lt;/em&gt;) and even one rule changed (the triple-letter rule, which became increasingly bizarre) – all this being done by the Duden dictionary, which had an official monopoly on defining correct spelling. While both reforms met heavy opposition, their changes became accepted very quickly (in about 10 years) by most users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, my question:&#xA;Is there more to my hypothesis (given a certain establishment of orthography, central regulating bodies accelerate orthography changes) than the above two examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastEditorUserId="1822" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T17:56:52.277" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T17:56:52.277" Title="Do central language regulation bodies accelerate or inhibit orthography changes?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2013-03-07T23:30:47.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What really fixes spelling is &lt;strong&gt;printing&lt;/strong&gt;. Before Caxton set up shop in England, spelling was a matter of representing one's speech as closely as one could, using whatever spelling conventions one liked, and understanding others' different conventions as well. Since everything was copied, there was understood to be a great deal of variance. As there is today in handwriting, but not spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official language regulation bodies have, at best, a spotty history. They don't really represent the way the language is developing, and while the French Academy may have hindered whatever development there was towards a phonemic French orthography (I don't know of any, but what do I know?), it is certain that the French are too fond of their orthography, which is serviceable and meets their requirements adequately, to change much, unless something new, like texting or autotranslate or speech recognition, makes it seem like a good idea in some contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for English, forget it. There's too much installed base. Think MicroSoft after 400 years of .doc files. Are they going to revert to ASCII? No chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-03-07T23:30:47.190" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3332" CreationDate="2013-03-08T04:18:23.210" Score="3" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages some of whose verbs require more than three arguments?   I was thinking of causative constructions, such that &quot;Mike had John give Sally the ring&quot; could be expressed with one clause.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T12:59:26.490" Title="Are there any languages with verbs that require more than three arguments?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3310" CreationDate="2013-03-08T08:24:24.993" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language has some tones. The question is, to which degree they are relevant to  a given language. Even Finnish language, which conventionally 'has no tones', actually marks the first stressed syllable with a falling tone, although there are no 'syntax tones', like in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can distinguish Russian rising or falling tones (which are important for conversational syntax) and Spanish or Italian tonic stresses, and I can distinguish both tones for Swedish lexemes (which are either falling or falling-rising), but I cannot distinguish none of two tones in Lithuanian or, say, Tibetan. All these languages have 'common' tones, that is, the tones are distiguished by a universal tone scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I relatively easy distinguish four tones in Mandarin, but I cannot distinguish any of three Yoruba tones, perhaps because Yoruba, like Kpelle, is a language with 'private' and not 'common' tones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-08T12:36:46.133" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T12:36:46.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3309" CreationDate="2013-03-08T08:39:50.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing is that two musical systems are different, the Occidental being septatonic and the Oriental, pentatonic. Thus, 'western' music distiguishes seven tones, while 'eastern' music distiguishes five tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in both musical metanarrations the 4:3 and 3:2 ratios are used for the melos and canon settings. And, yes, there was a time when septatonic scale was also applied in Chinese music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;http://baruchim.narod.ru/Roll1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a link to Chinese poetry transcribed in western alphabet and read by native speakers along with the Chinese music played&lt;/a&gt;  (sorry, the translations are in Russian only). One can notice that there is a certain match between the tones in Chinese speech and those in the music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-08T08:50:07.753" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T08:50:07.753" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3327" CreationDate="2013-03-08T09:24:28.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the term &quot;tritransitive&quot; for verbs that are said to take four arguments. One example in English is this &lt;code&gt;She(1) bet me(2) ten euros(3) that they won't show up(4)&lt;/code&gt;. As you can see, this is different from your example with causatives, because the fourth argument taken by the main verb &lt;code&gt;bet&lt;/code&gt; is the whole &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clause. If I recall correctly, causative constructions have been analyzed as having only two or exactly three arguments. A problem for the analysis of any construction with regard to argument structure is to determine whether two or more arguments are taken by the same predicate, and thus are &lt;em&gt;coarguments&lt;/em&gt;. You need syntactic and semantic evidence to prove that a verb can have four arguments, and as far as I know, causatives are not part of that kind of verbs. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything else about argument structure outside Germanic and Romance linguistics.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastEditorUserId="1754" LastEditDate="2013-03-08T12:59:26.490" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T12:59:26.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-08T16:02:01.860" Score="13" ViewCount="26295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in learning a second language. To do this I have created a list of the 1000 most common words and phrases for a given language. I've also established sentences which contains each of these words. Acknowledging the challenge of making a truly comprehensive list of this type, I'm doing my best to include as much relevant information as I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know what the average vocabulary size is for someone capable of engaging in everyday casual discussions. Approximately how many words and phrases must one know to have a reasonably fluent conversation in a language? From this answer I plan to expand my vocabulary list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of words and phrases that I think might well be in this list for English: apple, banana, gay, orange, apartment, sunny, leg, sex, word, sentence, pink, second, holidays, carry, finally, potato, onion, sometimes, rice, shower, whatever, pasta, since, plastic, always, fish, really, last, french, beef, pork, water, sea, fall, love, river, penis, chicken, knife, hit, fork, stolen, spoon, cup, brilliant, probably, cool, breast, dollar, box, foot, circle, fix, journey, help, always, between, ass, remember, sit, clock, run, buy, either, want, normal, fart, hairy, straight, time, internet, on the other hand, after all, kind of, hurry up, shut up, as well, not for long, lie down, oh my god, america, shampoo, pair, around, okay, under, table, money, milk, toilet paper, come on, pick it up, put it down, never, remember, business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of words and phrases that might not find it onto the list: grumpy, lemon, adore, lawn, infant, hero, witnessed, miracle, punch, gorilla, tip, heel, knuckles, approximately, fluent, author, return, truly, salmon, moon, purple, pineapple, elbow, napkin, accordingly, assumption, as a matter of urgency, have a blast, go to town, get real, don't get me started, lighten up, get down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2013-03-09T22:28:43.837" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T03:10:41.183" Title="How many &quot;words&quot; do I need to learn?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3337" CreationDate="2013-03-08T16:33:24.770" Score="2" ViewCount="3026" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently analysing a poem, and I have come across two sentences that are obviously grammatically incorrect, but I can't figure out how to describe what is wrong with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Beside him, the greyheaded man has let one arm slide awkwardly over his shoulder, is talking and pointing at whatever it is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Where mountains are clouds, lightning, but no rain.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're from the poem &quot;Utah&quot; by Anne Stevenson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said, they're obviously syntactically incorrect, but I'm rubbish at describing grammar! If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be very grateful! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for an assignment, yes, but by no means mandatory. Also, I'm not expecting a straight out &quot;sentence a is wrong because there is no x&quot;, but I have never been taught to describe grammar, so I find myself floundering a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to intuitions, yes, I do have some, but my failures lie in how to describe them! I would say that both sentences are questions of ellipsis, but that is not really syntactical but rather cohesion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentence 1 the problem clearly lies with the add-on clause &quot;[...]is talking and pointing [...]&quot;. I would say that perhaps there are two verb phrases attached to a single noun phrase without the proper conjunction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentence 2, I would say much the same. A missing conjunction, or verb phrase (?), but again, that depends on how you read the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, thank you for the welcome! I'm not quite sure how I should explain the context? I am personally looking at the ambiguity in the poem, and in relation to that I am discussing the ambiguity that the syntax produces. I also just realised that perhaps this is too &quot;grammar-oriented&quot; to fit onto this forum, so my apologies if so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 2:&lt;/strong&gt; In response to StoneyB - thank you for your input, it was enlightening! I was just wondering what your take on alternative 'corrections' were, so e.g. &quot;the greyheaded man [who] has let one arm slide awkwardly over his shoulder, is talking and pointing at whatever it is&quot; or &quot;In the distance, where mountains are [are] clouds, lightning, but no rain&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1837" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-03-08T21:15:04.483" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T21:15:04.483" Title="What is syntactically wrong with these sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2013-03-08T16:48:18.393" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I'm seeing it's generally accepted that most English speakers have a vocabulary size of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Native-language_vocabulary_size&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;15000 to 20000 words&lt;/a&gt;. It should be noted that some sources place this estimate as high as &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8013859.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;50000 to 75000 words&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, only a fraction of those words are used regularly. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corpus4u.org/forum/upload/forum/2005062106260627.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This study&lt;/a&gt; found that knowing as few as 2000 words could lead to a 95% comprehension rate for English speakers. If one increases their vocabulary size to 5000 words (250% the vocabulary size as before), the comprehension rate only increases to 96%. This is why focusing on just the most common words in a language, as you are doing, is a common tactic for language learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For lower levels of competency, I've found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100605200548AAWxJds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo! Answer&lt;/a&gt; (and several like it) suggesting that 400-500 words and 150 phrases are enough to &lt;em&gt;communicate&lt;/em&gt; in a second language (albeit with a fair amount of difficulty). However, I cannot find any academic research to back up these claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact number of words you need to know depends on how you define &quot;fluency&quot;, the language you're speaking, and the context you're speaking in (for example, business speech, casual speech, and even academic speech are all different &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;registers&lt;/a&gt; with different vocabularies). Additionally, this number (as well as how you define &quot;word&quot;) will change depending on the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem with these estimates is that they vary in how they define &quot;vocabulary size&quot;. It could mean the number of words that a speaker knows and can produce in conversation or it could mean the number of words that a speaker is able to recognize in conversation, even if they would never use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, the exact number of words one must need to know to be &quot;fluent&quot; in a language varies depending on how you define fluency, which language you're talking about, if you're talking about comprehension, speaking, or both, and how you define &quot;vocabulary size&quot;. The best lower-bound estimate I can find is 2000 words. Note that that particular study was based only on comprehension, so maybe you could get away with a slightly smaller number of &quot;active&quot; or &quot;producible&quot; vocabulary (words you know how to use in conversation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I'm sure you know, there's more to speaking a language fluently than vocabulary size alone. For starters, there's your grammar skill. Also, remember that &quot;fluency&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/46250&quot;&gt;is derived from the same origin as &quot;fluid&quot;&lt;/a&gt; so a big part of &quot;being fluent&quot; is being able to speak smoothly, evenly, and at a reasonable pace. Similarly you need to be able to listen and understand other speakers to be able to respond appropriately. This all take lots and lots of practice; preferably with native speakers. Even just getting your tongue used to pronouncing foreign words at a reasonable speed can be incredibly difficult. While learning the most frequent vocabulary words is a good exercise, it alone cannot teach you a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-03-09T02:17:02.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3334" CreationDate="2013-03-08T19:22:38.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beside him, the greyheaded man has let one arm slide&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  awkwardly over his shoulder, [and] is talking and pointing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  at whatever it is ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first quote is in fact one of only two full sentences in the poem;  &lt;em&gt;the greyheaded man&lt;/em&gt; is the subject of both clauses, and it omits a conjunction between two clauses, which impels the poem forward and really associates the two actions more intimately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second really needs its introductory phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;       In the distance, where&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mountains are clouds, lightning, but no rain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, as in most of the periods of the poem, the verb (implicitly &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;) is omitted. The sense is &lt;em&gt;In the distance, where mountains are clouds, [is] lightning, but no rain&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFTERTHOUGHT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The syntax is actually not particularly unusual - just missing copulas. What's really interesting is the meter: there are two feet missing in that final line. I'd be inclined to read them as pauses on either side of &lt;em&gt;lightning&lt;/em&gt;. And &lt;em&gt;lightning&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;but no&lt;/em&gt; are, I think, spondees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2013-03-08T19:34:08.960" LastActivityDate="2013-03-08T19:34:08.960" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3316" CreationDate="2013-03-09T02:49:00.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I had to describe that group under one label, I would use &lt;strong&gt;nominal verb&lt;/strong&gt;, but be aware that &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt; has various senses and may not be unambiguous without some explanation. &lt;em&gt;Nominal&lt;/em&gt; in this sense refers to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and participles/gerundives/gerunds alike; in short, anything that can function in ways similar to nouns or adjectives. In inflexional languages, this includes declension (case endings) as opposed to conjugation (the personal endings that verbs have). Nouns and adjectives are intimately connected in various ways, at least in Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Verb and noun-adjective at the same time&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting thing about these forms is that they are both verb and noun/adjective at once; that's why &lt;em&gt;nominal verb&lt;/em&gt; is the only label that seems to cover what they are. &lt;strong&gt;Externally&lt;/strong&gt;, they function as &lt;strong&gt;nouns or adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;, in that they can be the subject or object of verbs and prepositions or modify nouns, etc. (&lt;em&gt;I want [a pony | to run], she failed at [running | love], I see a [running | fast] donkey&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internally&lt;/strong&gt;, however, they function mostly as &lt;strong&gt;verbs&lt;/strong&gt;, in that they can have the kinds of arguments that finite verbs have, like subjects, objects, adverbial phrases, etc. Note that not every nominal verb can have all of these things in any situation, but in general they can have most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, whatever they depend on treats them as nouns or adjectives, while they themselves treat their own dependencies mostly as verbal arguments. That applies to participles/gerunds/infinitives in all languages I know, which are admittedly Indo-European; I'm not sure this category even makes sense in other linguistic families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The infinitive as a noun&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The infinitive is a dubious case, because it resembles a noun more or less depending on the language: in Greek, it can have prepositions and articles, whereas in Latin the gerund is used with prepositions and cases, not the infinitive. In English, the semi-preposition &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; still clearly points to the nominal origin of the infinitive in Proto-Germanic. In all of these languages, an infinitive can be the subject of a finite verb, and it can also be an object, in the sense that &lt;em&gt;(ego) volo vivere / I will live / (egô) mellô zôein&lt;/em&gt; resemble the pattern finite verb + object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A note on &lt;strong&gt;clauses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that two current definitions exist. Some branches of linguistic studies and disciplines use the strict definition of &lt;em&gt;clause&lt;/em&gt;, which is &quot;a finite verb and all its dependencies, including its subject&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely sure about the broader definition and how it differs from &lt;em&gt;verbal phrase&lt;/em&gt;, but I think it is something like &quot;any kind of verb and its dependencies&quot;. What constitutes a &quot;verb&quot; is defined by the kind of arguments it takes, I would say (in both definitions). I am not sure whether the broad definition includes the &quot;subject&quot; of a participle in the clause (probably yes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T05:19:53.560" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T05:19:53.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2013-03-09T16:21:23.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by the words you provided, you might need somewhere around 5000–8000 separate words in English, where inflected forms are counted as one word each. Your phrases or expressions will have to be extrapolated based on this. If you can give us a few more words that you think should be in one's vocabulary, and a few more that wouldn't, more precision could be achieved. But it is still a bit arbitrary, unscientific, and non-transferable to other languages...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How your words rank in the list of most frequent words in TV and movie scripts (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary%3aFrequency_lists#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary corpus&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;814th     apartment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2927  orange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3021  holidays&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5182  banana&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;8110  elbow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;8127  assumption&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&gt; 10,000)    pineapple&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&gt; 10,000)    accordingly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T05:12:52.473" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T05:12:52.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-09T22:47:21.280" Score="13" ViewCount="7321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am coming to linguistics from a completely non-linguistic background; I was a mathematician. Next year I will start taking some serious (Master's level) linguistics courses and I would like to have considerable background in the topics that will be covered so that I can be as best prepared as possible. The courses will be on syntax, semantics and phonetics/phonology. Below, I am providing brief descriptions of the courses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntactic Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;This course is an introduction to basic goals and methods of current syntactic theory through a detailed analysis of a range of phenomena, with emphasis on argumentation and empirical justification. Major topics include phrase structure and constituency, selection and subcategorization, argument structure, case, voice, expletives, and raising and control structures.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics and Pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;This is the first in a two-course sequence designed to provide a foundation in the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic meaning. The first quarter focuses primarily on pragmatics:  those aspects of meaning that arise from the way that speakers put language to use, rather than through the formal properties of the linguistic system itself, which is the domain of semantics. However, a central goal of the course will be to begin to develop an understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics, by exploring empirical phenomena in which contextual and conventional aspects of meaning interact in complex but regular and well-defined ways, and by learning analytical techniques that allow us to tease these two aspects of linguistics meaning apart.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonological Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;This course introduces cross-linguistic phonological phenomena and methods of analysis through an in-depth examination of fundamental notions that transcend differences between theoretical approaches: contrast, neutralization, natural classes, distinctive features, and basic non-linear phonological processes (e.g., assimilation, harmony, dissimilation).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be most grateful if you could suggest textbooks (and, more generally, resources&amp;nbsp;— including, but not limited to, lecture notes, websites, software) that would help me get a good grasp of this material. Textbooks that have become mainstream in the postgraduate study of these subjects will be especially helpful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1777" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T20:24:08.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T02:52:10.333" Title="Textbook suggestions for syntax, semantics/pragmatics and phonetics/phonology" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="14" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-10T13:30:04.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-10T02:02:33.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently doing a course on stylistics, which includes a lot of syntactical analysis, although I am &quot;just&quot; an undergraduate. Our lecturer swears by names such as Toolan, Halliday and Hasan and Simpson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of specific books we're encouraged to acquire are&#xA;'Language in literature' (1998) Michael Toolan&#xA;'Language through Literature: an introduction' (1997) Paul Simpson&#xA;'Cohesion in English' (1976) M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particular the Toolan book is an excellent introductory text, in my (and my lecturer's!) opinion. I believe that these are used across both graduate and postgraduate. In any case, they will be a good place to start, even if they are not as comprehensive as more specialised texts! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I don't have much to offer on the other two courses, I've only done basic introductions to those myself. If you're as foundation-less as you say, more basic introductory texts like 'The Study of Language' by George Yule and 'An Introduction to Language' by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman might be a good place to start. They obviously do not only cover the topics that you're interested in, but offer a broader base. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope some of this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1837" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T02:02:33.333" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-10T13:30:04.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2013-03-10T11:40:40.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let us define what'a free word order' is and how the word order fuctions in different languages. E.g. Russian or Polish are reputed for being 'languages with free word order', but you never find a preposition at the end of a sentence in those languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the atlas, Russian is classified as a SVO language (together with Mandarin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word order in Russian and Polish carries the meaning of theme/rheme, or the same meaning is conveyed with Japanese -wa/-ga nominative markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking on Japanese, its word order is not quite 'free', either (unless we consider phrases like 'watakusi-mo' (me, too) or 'heya-ga!' (the house!) being sentences. Basically, an elaborate Japanese sentence ends up with a predicate. Hence, we need a universal definition for a sentence or, for that matter, for a predicate. Japanese is classified within the same atlas as a SOV language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Mandarin Chinese, the word order is used to define what part of speech a given 'word' is. Hence, we should also define 'a word'. According to the atlas, Mandarin falls under the same category as Russian, Finnish or Swedish (SVO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two latter languages show a 'free word order', but never in sentences with subject-object clauses (hence, the examples with 'Ali went to school' and 'malchik voshel v komnatu' are wrong examples; the right ones are like 'Ali gave a present to a friend' or 'On arendoval komnatu na paru let').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the only language on the atlas list with a proper 'free word order' is Hungarian, where the word order conveys the meaning of theme/rheme dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-11T19:03:10.273" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T19:03:10.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-10T12:35:35.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Skim &quot;The Linguistics Wars&quot; by Harris to get a bit of political history for the field. Then you'll be aware that you might be served only a very small slice of the pie. For a bit of culture/humor, read the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://specgram.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Speculative Grammarian&quot;&gt;Speculative Grammarian&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. The more linguistics you know, the more funny it gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For phonetics, phonetics is great fun if you go in for actually being able to pronounce it all. Will there be any articulatory phonetics? Try to load the entirety of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) into your head anyway. Find a private space with a mirror so you can see what you mouth is doing. There's lots of online more-or-less good resources for learning the IPA, bookwise have a look at the &quot;Handbook of the International Phonetic Association&quot;, and &quot;Phonetic symbol guide&quot; by Pullum. Handy reference works. Phonology is, naturally, less hands-on and come in several schools: optmality theory, autosegemental theory etc. etc., I haven't kept up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantics/pragmatics: &quot;Understanding utterances&quot; by Blakemore, and &quot;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&quot; by Lakoff. Then look up Montague-semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntax: Now that's the tricky one. There are several frameworks for doing this. If it is claimed that no framework is being used it's probably a variation on Basic Linguistic Theory. See books by RMW Dixon. If there's lots of binary trees it's probably Minimalism. See Chomsky. If boxes, lots of set theory and unification: LFG, HPSG or something else ending in G. See Pollard &amp;amp; Sag, Bresnan, Dalrymple. If matching the same analysis to several languages at once in order to map out the possibilities it's probably some Construction Grammar. Croft's &quot;Radical Construction Grammar&quot; is fine but he is not a good writer so be prepared to struggle a little. There's no doubt lots of new frameworks, it seems there's a new one at least twice a decade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm. Skim Dixon's books, that should give a good overview of all the latinate terms. Analysis goes on top of those. On that note, also get &quot;A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics&quot; by Trask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-03-10T12:35:35.543" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-10T13:30:04.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-10T13:23:51.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an introductory text for phonology, I can recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/English_Phonology.html?id=ALJKvQWP8FAC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Phonology: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Although it's only for English, it's well divided, has plenty of examples, and should give a good introduction to phonology in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T20:22:48.503" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T20:22:48.503" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-10T13:30:04.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-10T18:29:32.980" Score="5" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm processing a large corpus for a given language. I've noticed that for certain sections of the corpus, I can go many tens of thousands of words without the word &quot;me&quot; being mentioned. These are obviously the parts of the corpus with more technical data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm primarily interested in &lt;strong&gt;words and phrases&lt;/strong&gt; used in everyday casual speech and am wondering what words i can search for in order to find those parts of the corpus which are more suitable to my particular application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of my suggestions: me, you, he, she, them, our, ours, their, theirs, my, your, mine, yours you're, i, &quot;i am&quot;, &quot;you are&quot;. So I would expect these words to have a higher frequency of occurrence in those parts of the corpus of most relevance. What other words and phrases would you suggest? Is there a danger that I bias my results in a manner I haven't anticipated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2013-03-10T20:39:53.623" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T21:39:45.557" Title="Words and phrases more likely in everyday speech" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-11T08:31:43.807" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a document about &quot;The Proclamation of Henry III&quot;, in which the text is presented and a short commentary and glossary follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the survival of some of the distinct verbal inflections classes of Old English. &#xA;In particular, I'm referring to the verbs &quot;swerien&quot;, &quot;makien&quot; and &quot;werien&quot;: I noticed that these particular verbs ends in &lt;em&gt;-ien&lt;/em&gt;, while the usual suffix of the infinitive/subjunctive verbal forms in the text is &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the glossary, I came across some dictionary-like entries, such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;swerien&lt;/strong&gt;, 4, swear, 3 p. pi. subj. after &lt;em&gt;hoaten&lt;/em&gt; ; ags. &lt;em&gt;swerian&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;inf., &lt;em&gt;swerion&lt;/em&gt; subj. ; ge. &lt;em&gt;sweren&lt;/em&gt;; p. 85. Str. 560.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me to find out what is special about these verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1845" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-11T13:41:47.517" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T13:41:47.517" Title="Particular verbal inflection classes in &quot;The Proclamation of Henry III&quot;" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3358" CreationDate="2013-03-11T14:16:41.737" Score="3" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been immersed in the magic of languages since childhood (LOTR, Myst, Eragon) - and now that I'm dreaming up a world of my own, I'm interested in developing a unique and interesting language for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's many aspects of creating a language I can peg down myself, chief among them being design. However, I'm finding it really hard to get started on the structure: syntax and morphology. Are there resources online dedicated to detailing unique structural aspects of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: I've taken a couple of courses in japanese, and I love the use of particles - tiny words (and sometimes even phonemes) that are meaningless on their own, but modify and give context to the words they're attached to. I've also studied the way that Tolkien formulated elvish, and while I love his creativity in formulating the alphabet, I have no interest in copying it. I want to find more examples of uncommon structure and syntax like these - any sites/books/resources out there that would enable my search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1839" LastEditorUserId="1839" LastEditDate="2013-03-11T17:53:43.160" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T20:34:52.570" Title="Where to find examples of unique/uncommon syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3351" CreationDate="2013-03-11T19:25:14.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could your results be biased by English? There could be languages with lower or zero frequency of personal pronouns due to one or all of the reasons below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal pronouns are hidden within verb paradigms. E.g. in Spanish one would hardly say &lt;em&gt;yo tengo&lt;/em&gt; (I have) but rather just &lt;em&gt;tengo&lt;/em&gt; instead, since the meaning of 1st.p.sg. is conveyed by verb ending.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal pronouns are subject to change. Consider Japanese, Chinese or Basque, where all or some of the personal pronouns vary according to speaker's/addressee's age, gender, social status, etc. Personal pronouns may even be tabooed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal pronouns fit a different paradigm. Consider languages with pronouns changing by tense (Kpelle) or with other categories (e.g. inclusive/exclusive dichotomies known for many languages).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are no personal pronouns (although no such a language has been attested for), or they are within a really minimalistic paradigm (e.g. Lardil has only two personal pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The context/corpus covers a limited scope (e.g. there is a sacred language, an illiterate community, bilingual/multilingual community with social stratification by  languages, or, to put it simply, the corpus covers a limited scope of all the social registers of a language).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T21:39:45.557" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T21:39:45.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-11T19:26:44.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for Semantics and Pragmatics, once you've gotten caught up in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Logic&lt;/a&gt;, some good books are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistic Semantics&lt;/em&gt;, by William Frawley. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/meta4/frawleyq.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Study guide&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/frawleyentities.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classes of entities&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metaphors We Live By&lt;/em&gt;, by Lakoff and Johnson. Short introduction. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/L&amp;amp;J-Lg-Review.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Review&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pragmatics and Human Communication&lt;/em&gt;, by Georgia Green. Short introduction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pragmatics&lt;/em&gt;, by Stephen Levinson. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; book on pragmatics. Including &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Presuppositiontriggers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Presuppositions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's lots more, but this'll get you started on semantics and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T19:26:44.547" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-11T19:26:44.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2013-03-11T19:34:59.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends on dominant semantic scope of a vocabulary for a given language. Some languages, like English, Spanish or Chinese, have more than one meaning for an item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others, like Japanese, Finnish or French, target at specific, or 'occasional' semantics. E.g, there are special words for 'nest' and 'a nest within a hollow of a tree trunk', 'alone pine' or 'pine in a forest' in Finnish, or special words for 'you-underling', 'you-equal' or 'you-superior' in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former languages usually have fewer words in vocabularies as compared to the latter ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the languages with greater number of cases might have no word for, say, 'at' or 'within', but a word like 'up' might have more than three different varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T19:34:59.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3354" CreationDate="2013-03-11T20:34:52.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is going to be to find typological works that give a general survey of the possibilities across known human languages, and then choose the less frequently found features (or those that aren't found at all, since this is a constructed language!). Thomas Payne's &quot;Describing Morphosyntax&quot; is a great beginners guide for those documenting language, but you could use it as a check list to make sure you've not forgotten to include anything in your language. It would also help you figure out what interesting features of language exist that we don't necessarily have in the languages you already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2013-03-11T20:34:52.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-12T00:31:29.080" Score="8" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;Folowing on from my previous question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2742/are-txt-speak-and-emoticons-examples-of-normal-language-evolution&quot;&gt;Are &quot;txt-speak&quot; and &quot;emoticons&quot; examples of normal language evolution?&lt;/a&gt; I would like to propose that emoticons are simply now symbols of punctuation, rather than icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Icons tend to represent a thing or an action. Save, Folder etc. The same is true on road signs, icons for railways, danger etc. An emoticon conveys context. It tells the reader how to interpret what you are saying. Spoken communication does this with voice tone and gestures. Emoticons are more like punctuation than words. &lt;code&gt;:)&lt;/code&gt; means I mean this to be interpreted light hardedly, &lt;code&gt;;)&lt;/code&gt;, cheeky, or edgy, in the same way that a &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; would ask the reader to read the sentence in the style of a question, or &lt;code&gt;!&lt;/code&gt; an expletive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Could it be said that emoticons are punctuation?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T06:45:37.563" Title="Should emoticons be considered punctuation?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-12T01:11:37.470" Score="3" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tone sandhi is the process by which the nominal tones of syllables or words change based on the surrounding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Mandarin Chinese and Thai have tone sandhi - but is this process universal within tonal languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T15:34:36.530" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T16:12:15.613" Title="Do all tonal languages have tone sandhi?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;tone-sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3370" CreationDate="2013-03-12T01:15:53.743" Score="4" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sedano#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sedano&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;σέλινον&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Italian etymology I can find is on Wiktionary. And why does the Italian noun &amp;quot;sedano&amp;quot; look the same with the Italian verb &amp;quot;sedano&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T20:30:23.363" Title="How did It &quot;sedano&quot; come from Gk &quot;σέλινον&quot;, with a &quot;l&quot;&gt;&quot;d&quot; shift?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2013-03-12T04:43:36.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst any character set is normally limited by the number of bits you use to represent any particular character ~ if every character has to fit in 8 bits, there can only be 256 of them ~ I doubt this was a massive problem in early computing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese hackers could have just used a subset of Japanese that provided all the characters they needed, which isn't many for a programming language, and used short words or abbreviations to reduce the total number of characters in any file. Alternatively, they could have invented a magic character that switched which character set was being used, adding new, 255-character character sets at very little end cost, assuming those sets were optimised for writing a formal language which was itself optimised to use those sets, avoiding the need to constantly switch set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the &lt;code&gt;ls&lt;/code&gt; command is shortened due to concerns about system resources; rather it was chosen to reduce the amount of characters a user had to type. Shell languages try to be very easy to enter as they are designed to be used interactively at a command line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I disagree with the assertions above that suggest that having a large character set made early computing significantly more difficult. The challenges at that time were not significantly lessened by being able to readily type all the characters in your natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not true that everyone was working on computing at an even pace until we moved from entering binary to text, and then the people with small alphabets shot ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a case where size doesn't matter, much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1852" LastEditorUserId="1852" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T13:05:56.190" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T13:05:56.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3377" CreationDate="2013-03-12T06:10:06.120" Score="5" ViewCount="3356" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to the English language, how many words is the average person likely to hear (not read) on an average day. By &quot;how many words&quot; I don't mean how many unique words. In other words if I hear the word &quot;get&quot; 1000 times and &quot;given&quot; 10 times, then this would result in 1010 being added to the total result. This means that I can multiply the total result for a day by seven in order to get an estimate for a week. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that class, occupation and number of friends etc. have an impact on this value, but I really only need a very rough estimate. What I'm interested in knowing is how many words a learner is exposed to on a given day when immersed in an English speaking society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T06:56:06.863" Title="How many words do we hear in a day?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3368" CreationDate="2013-03-12T06:49:35.823" Score="6" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Abjad&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a technical term for a kind of writing system which is used when contrasting them with other writing system types such as alphabets, abugidas, and syllabaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an Arabic word &lt;a href=&quot;http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D8%A8%D8%AC%D8%AF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;أبجد&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading various sources on the Internet some say the term was coined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Daniels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter T. Daniels&lt;/a&gt;, which would imply that it's originally an English word which was borrowed into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sources merely say that it's an Arabic word formed by the first four letters of the traditional Arabic alphabetical (abjadical?) order. This would imply that Daniels didn't coin it but was merely responsible for borrowing it into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course even the stories about Daniels coining the term give the reason for his invention being the traditional Arabic order of the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it a word used in Arabic since before Daniels started using it in English or has Arabic only used the word after he coined it as an English word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T16:14:00.573" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T16:14:00.573" Title="Is the word &quot;abjad&quot; borrowed from Arabic or was it coined in English then borrowed by Arabic?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3365" CreationDate="2013-03-12T13:51:37.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment in this review by Daniels points to the former:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the consonantary (my ''abjad'') and the ''semi-syllabary'' (my&#xA;  ''abugida'') [...] (Neither of my terms is an invention; they are&#xA;  names in Arabic and Ge`ez respectively for exactly the phenomena I&#xA;  imported them into English to name.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter T. Daniels, &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=85714&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Review of  Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis&lt;/a&gt; by Florian Coulmas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Frank Lewis further writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, the order A-B-J-D is quite ancient, insofar as the word abjad&#xA;  is not of Arabic origin, but comes from earlier written alphabets,&#xA;  perhaps from Phoenician though the sequence may be as old as Ugaritic.&#xA;  In any case, it certainly predates the writing down of Arabic, as can&#xA;  be seen by comparison of Hebrew (Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth) and Greek&#xA;  (Alpha Beta Gamma Delta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis, Frank. 1999. &lt;a href=&quot;http://bahai-library.com/lewis_abjad_numerological_system&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Overview of the Abjad numerological system&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2013-03-17T16:02:51.250" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T16:02:51.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-12T15:55:14.497" Score="11" ViewCount="21439" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consonants are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant#Features&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;distinguished&lt;/a&gt; normally by features like place of articulation, manner of articulation, voiced/voiceless, etc. while vowels are usually distingusihed by stuff like tongue's position and roundedness. Why can't a universal methodology be used to classify both of them? Some of them are similar anyway, e.g. /i/ vs /j/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1854" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-03-13T14:48:38.673" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T13:25:02.053" Title="Why are consonants distinguished differently than vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3361" CreationDate="2013-03-12T18:31:05.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;L'etimologico&quot; by Alberto Nocentini says: &quot;sedano&quot; from &quot;serano&quot; from &quot;seleno&quot; from Byzantine Greek &quot;sélinon&quot; (σέλινον). The intermediate forms (&quot;serano&quot;, &quot;seleno&quot;) are attested in the Italian dialects, so they are no theoretical reconstructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus it's not a direct L &gt; D sound change but an indirect one, probably due to the migration of the word from one dialect to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remark about the LEI: This is a really large dictionary project which just has started. They haven't reached the letter S yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition, 1 hour later: You asked: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And why does the Italian noun &quot;sedano&quot; look the same with the Italian&#xA;  verb &quot;sedano&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is coincidence, and nobody cared about it. The noun &quot;sedano&quot; and the verb &quot;sedano&quot; don't disturb each other because the speakers cannot confuse them. So there was no need to change the borrowed noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastEditorUserId="1773" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T20:30:23.363" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T20:30:23.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2013-03-12T18:36:36.337" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because that is precisely what separates consonants from vowels: consonants are sounds produced with a partial closure of the vocal tract. Depending on what type of closure the speaker does (in combination with other factors), a different consonant will be pronounced. And, as you have already seen, consonants can be analyzed according to several features: place of articulation, manner of articulation, aspiration etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels, on the other hand, are pronounced with an open vocal tract. Therefore, by definition, it is not possible to apply those features to classify vowels. Other features, such as roundedness, must be used in this case. So, for example, it wouldn't make sense to speak of place of articulation for vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-12T19:55:29.180" LastActivityDate="2013-03-12T19:55:29.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2013-03-12T19:47:43.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, vowels are syllable nuclei, and consonants are syllable peripheries. Consonants are the sounds that &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; occur in the middle of a syllable, and vowels are the ones that &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all, really. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from diphthongs like /ay/ in &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt;, which involve tongue movement during pronunciation, vowels are determined by the shape of the resonating chambers formed by the tongue in the mouth (this is what decides the formants). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants, however, are always modulated by approach or touch of an articulator (usually some part of the tongue) to another part of the vocal chamber, and they have very complex wave-forms, with fricatives being especially noisy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independent articulators outside the inner mouth cavity can apply to either kind of sound because they don't participate in this alternation. For example, the lungs are independent and therefore there are both aspirated vowels and aspirated consonants; the lips can round vowels or consonants; the larynx can glottalize vowels or consonants, as well as voice either, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-03-13T20:48:46.360" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T20:48:46.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-12T23:45:46.777" Score="5" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rhotic and non-rhotic accents&lt;/a&gt; gives a pretty good overview of which countries and states are rhotic or non-rhotic. What I want to know is what the pattern (or link) between the rhotic countries and states is, or even if such a link exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of any link, why is it distributed the way it is? What are the factors lying behind the development of the rhoticity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1857" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T03:22:01.660" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:03:08.050" Title="How is rhoticity distributed among varieties of English? Why is it like this?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-13T04:32:51.850" Score="2" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, matching &quot;protest&quot; with &quot;protested&quot;, &quot;protesting&quot;, &quot;protests&quot;, and also matching less regular conjugations, like &quot;run&quot;, &quot;ran&quot;, &quot;running&quot; and &quot;grab&quot;, &quot;grabbed&quot;, &quot;grabbed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were such a function in JavaScript or something, that would be nice. But I'm looking for a tool that does this - I would think exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance. (If you have things remotely similar, please share, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ultimate goal is to match my data, which is a bunch of verbs, with a given (huge) corpus that has a variety of verbs conjugated in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T12:29:08.007" Title="Is there a computer program/script that can match a verb with its various conjugations?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3379" CreationDate="2013-03-13T05:25:28.973" Score="3" ViewCount="539" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out whether the verb in bold below is a Raising to Subject or Subject control verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boys &lt;strong&gt;were rumored&lt;/strong&gt; to have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were &lt;strong&gt;was rumored&lt;/strong&gt;, I could see more clearly that it's a Raising to Subject verb.  You could do the expletive It test - &quot;It was rumored that the boys did so&quot;.  But since it's &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt;, would that affect it in any way?  It's being affected by the subject.  You can't say &quot;It were rumored to have done so.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1784" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-13T13:04:24.403" LastActivityDate="2013-03-23T14:42:28.073" Title="Raising to subject or Subject control?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3374" CreationDate="2013-03-13T06:30:35.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like a similar question was asked elsewhere: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8424806/verb-conjugations-database&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8424806/verb-conjugations-database&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I am settling on using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-languages.info/english/irregular_verbs.php?l=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.online-languages.info/english/irregular_verbs.php?l=1&lt;/a&gt; - copying it's content to a text file, and then parsing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T06:30:35.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3364" CreationDate="2013-03-13T11:28:41.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found one source claiming that &lt;a href=&quot;http://education.com/magazine/article/30000_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;30,000 words a day&lt;/a&gt; is a reasonable estimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another source claiming the value is actually &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.emoiz.com/study-americans-consume-34-gigabytes-of-information-per-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;100,000 words a day&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-14T05:21:29.157" LastActivityDate="2013-03-14T05:21:29.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-13T12:29:14.537" Score="11" ViewCount="94689" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is really tricky to read, especially for beginners like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any online tools that can almost 'convert' pasted IPA into phonetic pronunciations or similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried Wolfram|Alpha which doesn't seem to understand IPA, and a Google search wasn't much help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1859" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-15T00:13:34.390" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T14:14:27.927" Title="Does an IPA to 'English' translator exist?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3375" CreationDate="2013-03-13T13:56:10.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the expletive insertion could work for &lt;code&gt;The boy was rumoured&lt;/code&gt; but not for &lt;code&gt;The boys were rumoured&lt;/code&gt;. Your test sentence &lt;code&gt;It was rumoured that the boys did so&lt;/code&gt; indeed proves that &lt;code&gt;be rumoured&lt;/code&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;raising predicate&lt;/strong&gt;. Look at your wrong result: &lt;code&gt;*It were rumoured to have done so&lt;/code&gt;. Of course it's unacceptable because it doesn't have the (CP) that-clause that you used in the correct expletive test. If I recall correctly, this kind of clauses prevent the subject to be raised, but the expletive comes to the rescue. The verb has to agree with the expletive, not with a noun phrase that is blocked for movement. That's why you get &lt;code&gt;it was&lt;/code&gt; and not &lt;code&gt;*it were&lt;/code&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T13:56:10.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2013-03-13T14:50:15.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While others have provided informative answers to this question, I would argue that the &lt;em&gt;premise&lt;/em&gt; of this question is not completely accurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-900-introduction-to-linguistics-spring-2005/study-materials/soundcorr.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;traditional distinctive feature set&lt;/a&gt;, all phonemes (both vowels and consonants) are specified for the features [cons] and [son]. Further, it's true that there are additional features for which only vowels or only consonants are specified, but in a way this is an arbitrary distinction to single out. For example, in the same way that all vowels and sonorant consonants and glides are trivially [+son], all consonants besides /h/ and /ʔ/ are trivially considered [-spread] and [-constr], meaning those two features are not used to distinguish a vast majority of consonants.  The resulting effect is that the minus value for those features on most consonants doesn't amount to much more than a placeholder. One could easily assign a minus values for those features on vowels and it would bear the same significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that some of the features used to distinguish vowels appear to have redundant analogues in the set used to distinguish consonants (e.g. [rounded] and [labial]), but really that is just a side effect of the fact that they are derived from similar articulatory properties.  It is important to keep in mind that the distinctive features are just a convenient way to categorize phonemes at the &lt;em&gt;phonological&lt;/em&gt; level (which is why I added the &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt; tag to the post) and at the end of the day they are abstract labels derived mnemonically from articulatory (and in some cases acoustic) characteristics of the speech units with which they are associated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-03-13T14:50:15.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-14T17:59:06.097" Score="4" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have texts in English and German containing &quot;dictionary words&quot; and names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e.g. &quot;... In Florence the painter Leonardo built ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a Java program where need to determine for each word if it is a name or a word of the respective language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e.g. names={..., Florence, Leonardo, ...}, language words={..., In, the, painter, built, ...}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two approaches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use a respective dictionary list, load it into a hash structure, see if the word is in it (language word) or not (name / misspelled).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems / Issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find a German word list where names are excluded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;word flexions (complicated in German) may not be in the list&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use a service / an api to translate single words into another language, see if the word is changed (language word) or not (name / misspelled).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems / Issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;names may be translated as well, e.g. Florence &gt; Florenz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find an offline dictionary list / api. So I suppose using an online service is the way to go, but the big ones like google translate are not free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are names which resemble dictionary words and in both approaches they are identified as dictionary words which is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The main question is: Are there comprehensive dictionary lists without names in English and German, at best with word flexions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively:&#xA;Is there a free (online) API to do the task? Is there another solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1864" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-14T18:39:13.317" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T13:02:43.200" Title="Text parsing: Distinguish between “dictionary words” and names" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2013-03-15T12:19:15.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Chinese characters consist of limited sets of strokes which are, in turn, united into different combinations, I think this type of writing would not require too extended a keyboard. In fact, the total number of basic strokes is 9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the character input could be done just by these signs, so neither a number of keys nor keyboard measurements would cause any difficulty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a real pain is how to make the strokes appear accordingly in proper order and at proper places of a character, e.g. when we write â or ê in French layout, we first press ^ and then a corresponding vowel sign. The sequence is 'upper element =&gt; lower element', but there can be three or more vertical elements within a Chinese character, not mentioning the fact that there are vertical or falling strokes (elements). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, imagine a keyboard with a touchpad-like place in the middle, which is a basic place for a character, with nine buttons for basic strokes on the right and four buttons directing the strokes. Or the other way round: left buttons for strokes, right buttons for directions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By pressing one of the eight zones at the character touchpad, we choose where to print a basic stroke selected, precisinng the direction of the stroke with the directional keys. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problemme would be the stroke order, which is different not only in Japanese and Chinese, but in some varieties of Chinese as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in fact, the Chinese invention would be even simpler. &#xA;What really would be entirely different is the syntax of programming languages and programming logic (especially in object programming).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and please remember my five per cent for the idea whenever selling it on the market:-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-15T12:34:27.053" LastActivityDate="2013-03-15T12:34:27.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20166" CreationDate="2013-03-15T16:32:33.353" Score="18" ViewCount="2428" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have had a number of questions about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sound-change&quot;&gt;sound changes&lt;/a&gt;, asking for the history of specific changes. See this one, for example: asking about the change &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/2604/22&quot;&gt;from Latin &lt;em&gt;benedictionem&lt;/em&gt; to French &lt;em&gt;beneiçon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Often, as the original poster of that question observed, the process can be explained by a series of steps of just one sound correspondence. As far as I know, each sound change is only productive for a certain period of time in a language. Of course, different changes may be occurring simultaneously, so overlaps of these periods are expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for something more general: a diagram &amp;mdash; probably a tree-shaped one &amp;mdash; that shows the development from Latin into the Romance languages. The diagram must meet the following requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shows at least two of the major six Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each branch shows the history of the language from Vulgar Latin to the present day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each branch has the sound changes and their respective (approximate) periods annotated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each language, any variety can be chosen, as long as it remains the same throughout the diagram.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some book, site, whatever, where one can find such a diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:13:58.847" Title="Is there a diagram showing the history of sound changes from Latin to the Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3407" CreationDate="2013-03-15T17:46:57.950" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for dialectological works for the area of former Yugoslavia, though I am most interested in Serbia and Montenegro. I can't really find any, other that the kind of maps on wikipedia showing &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aSerbo_croatian_dialects_historical_distribution.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the division between Štokavian,Čakavian, Kajkavian, Torlak(ian)&lt;/a&gt;, and these maps aren't particularly useful/detailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T09:00:35.427" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T13:52:30.260" Title="Are there any dialectological works for Serbia/Serbia &amp; Montenegro/Yugoslavia?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3378" CreationDate="2013-03-16T03:55:45.373" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't heard of the kind of program that you've described, but it might not matter, because there is no substitute for learning the IPA.  You may find the following links to be helpful:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, here are some links that have sound files to go with the IPA characters so that you can hear how they're pronounced.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-Pulmonic Consonants:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/nonpulmonics.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/nonpulmonics.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/vowels.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/vowels.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diphthongs:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diphthongs.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diphthongs.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diacritics:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diacritics.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diacritics.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Symbols:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/othersymbols.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/othersymbols.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suprasegmentals:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/suprasegmentals.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/suprasegmentals.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there is at least one way of transcribing the IPA with ASCII characters, to wit:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.let.rug.nl/~gilbers/onderwijs/tools/sampa.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.let.rug.nl/~gilbers/onderwijs/tools/sampa.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, here is an online IPA keyboard.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="3132" LastEditDate="2014-02-07T19:32:18.253" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T19:32:18.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3381" CreationDate="2013-03-16T05:26:03.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the possible solution would be using if=&gt;then strategy for recognition of German articles before most of nouns. The number of articles, even with flexions, is smaller as compared to that of nouns as such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you make a whitelist for the words preceeded by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_articles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then make a blacklist for proper geographical and/or historical names with articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-03-16T05:26:03.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-16T15:39:19.320" Score="2" ViewCount="581" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oestrus#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;oestrus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the Latin &lt;strong&gt;oestrus&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;gadfly”, “sting”, “frenzy&quot;), from the Ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;οἶστρος&lt;/strong&gt; (oistros).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hiero-#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hiero-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Ancient Greek prefix &lt;strong&gt;ἱερo-&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;hiero-&lt;/strong&gt;), from &lt;strong&gt;ἱερός&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;hieros&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;sacred, holy&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B1%CE%B5%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ἱερός&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*ish₂ros&lt;/strong&gt;. There are a number of candidate cognates with this word. &#xA;  Compare Sanskrit इषिर (iṣirá) and Oscan  (aisusis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the two words derive from the same PIE noun *ish₂ros, but why did the Ancient Greek decendants own different meanings with a prefixed &quot;h&quot; from each other, further giving &quot;hiero-&quot; and &quot;oestrus&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2013-03-17T02:17:05.077" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T02:17:05.077" Title="How does Gk. &quot;hieros&quot; differ from its cognate Gk. &quot;oistros&quot; with an &quot;h&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2013-03-16T19:48:34.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to give a partial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Chantraine (Dictionnaire Étymologique Grec), Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;oistros&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hieros&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be related but this is not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;hieros&lt;/em&gt; does not have a clear well-defined meaning but several ones, so some linguists believe that two formerly separate words have been merged into one word (&lt;em&gt;hieros&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to your question: &quot;... why did the Ancient Greek decendants own different meanings ...&quot; &amp;mdash; Maybe their meanings are so different from each other because they are not related. Sure, there are drastic semantic changes but if meanings are too different, a theory of relationship becomes too weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastActivityDate="2013-03-16T19:48:34.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2526" CreationDate="2013-03-16T21:21:18.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE there was a word meaning &quot;sky&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This word gave numerous cognates, one of which a generic word for a god, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;deiu̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reconstructed cognate is the PIE word for the Romans' supreme god, whom they called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;di̯eus pa̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The first part in this word, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;di̯eus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a genitive of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, so here it means &quot;of the sky&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that Latin word for a god, &lt;em&gt;deus&lt;/em&gt; is a derivative of PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;deiu̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and retains the meaning, i.e. &quot;a god&quot;, while both Jupiter and Zeus derive from the personal name of the supreme deity, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;di̯eus pa̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this, PIE also had another set of cognates, meaning &quot;god&quot;, derived from the root &quot;dhee̯-&quot;, &quot;to put, place&quot; (compare reduplicated verb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhedhee̯ti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;puts, places&quot;). These words include &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhee̯s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhe̯sos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, both epithets of gods, meaning &quot;establisher&quot; (compare &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhee̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;creator&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are at the origin of some other modern words, such as &quot;theology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-06-18T18:18:59.757" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T18:18:59.757" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3389" CreationDate="2013-03-16T21:54:04.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mine is also a partial answer. I'm not commenting on the etymology of the Greek words in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Attic Greek ἱερός, there's a diacritic over iota (in some other dialects there was psilosis, or h-dropping). It's called &quot;rough breathing&quot; (Lat. spiritus asper; Greek δασὺ πνεῦμα). Usually, Anlaut (word-initial) spiritus asper in Greek corresponds to PIE *s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Greek ἱερός, it's a different story. Sihler 1995 argues that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Initial /h/ sometimes results from the anticipation of an intervocalic /h/ from -s-. (§174.2)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also another rule here: an intervocalic *s was lost in Greek (*s&gt;*h&gt;0) (Sihler 1995, §172).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-03-16T22:39:53.410" LastActivityDate="2013-03-16T22:39:53.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3394" CreationDate="2013-03-17T16:59:15.077" Score="7" ViewCount="19776" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking that it is English because it has so many borrowed words and most you French, Italian, or German words can be written in English as is. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T08:24:57.383" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T08:11:05.133" Title="Which language has the biggest vocabulary?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2013-03-17T18:19:23.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that it depends on what counts as a word. However extensive the English vocabulary is, technically it consists of separate items, each one of them having a large number of meanings. We can learn, say, 500 English words to talk on any subject. The grammar is relatively simple, with a small amount of regular words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking on regularity; are French &lt;em&gt;ir/je vai/allez&lt;/em&gt;,  or Spanish &lt;em&gt;ir/yiendo/vaya&lt;/em&gt;, two sets of three different words, or are they just two paradigms for &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; in two languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Lakota &lt;em&gt;Waŋyáŋkiŋ...&lt;/em&gt; for 'you take a look at it' a single word or a phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also languages with 'targeted vocabularies', where lexical items have less meaninings than in English (e.g. Russian, French, Spanish or Finnish) and the lexical stock is bigger even for high-frequency items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are languages with targeted vocabularies and word-merging alchemy producing a new word, e.g. Finnish 'tie' (way) +-to-suffix does not equal 'the way done', but 'knowledge', and 'tieto' plus 'kone' (machine) does not equal 'knowledge machine', but 'computer'. Or 'kilpi' (shield)  plus 'konna' (toad) does not mean 'a shield toad', or 'a toad shield', but simply 'a turtle'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as far as a unique lexical combination is concerned as a separate word, my guess is that of all the languages I am familiar with, Finnish has the biggest vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-17T21:15:11.020" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T21:15:11.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3386" CreationDate="2013-03-17T19:07:10.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When writing my dissertation about Language and Identity I found these two references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bugarski, R. (1997). Lengua, nacionalismo y la desintegración de Yugoslavia. &lt;em&gt;Revista de Antropología Social, 6,&lt;/em&gt; 13-27.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RASO/article/download/RASO9797110013A/10187&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RASO/article/download/RASO9797110013A/10187&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg, M. L. (April, 1996). &lt;em&gt;The role of language in the creation of identity: Myths in linguistics among the people a of the former Yugoslavia.&lt;/em&gt; Article presented at the seminary &lt;em&gt;Reinvention of Tradition&lt;/em&gt;, University of Kansas.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/969/1/yugoslav_myths96.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/969/1/yugoslav_myths96.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe they can help you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1872" LastActivityDate="2013-03-17T19:07:10.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2013-03-17T19:53:50.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you count the number of separate roots, English seems one of those with the highest number. If you count word stems, English is far behind say German and Russian. But in the latter case one cannot make an exact comparison because the later two languages have extensive rules of the formation of the new stems by the use of suffixes and root concatenation, which produces astronomical numbers of possible combinations most of which are meaningless or hardly useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T09:06:07.643" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T09:06:07.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3399" CreationDate="2013-03-18T13:32:06.897" Score="12" ViewCount="988" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently started learning Esperanto because I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare and contrast it with the natural languages I speak. Anyone who has done even light research on Esperanto know its two main selling points are its claim that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esperanto-usa.org/node/77&quot;&gt;it's easy to learn&lt;/a&gt; and its claim that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto&quot;&gt;learning Esperanto first makes learning other languages easier&lt;/a&gt;. For now I'm most interested about that second claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much every website discussing Esperanto in some way references that second claim, usually by saying something to the effect of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-2.html&quot;&gt;&quot;one may become more fluent in French by first studying Esperanto for 6 months and then studying French for a year and a half, rather than studying French for two continuous years.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; This seems like a rather counter-intuitive notion and made me rather curious. None of these websites seems to offer any citations in support of this claim. In fact, a cursory Google Scholar search also turned up nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, these websites offer conflicting accounts of why learning Esperanto is supposed to make learning other languages easier. Some claim that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto#Language_teaching_introductory_effect&quot;&gt;Esperanto helps learners become aware of the essential characteristics of language&lt;/a&gt; which allows them to focus on their target language more clearly. Others claim that Esperanto's ease and quickness of learning &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/&quot;&gt;allows learners to gain confidence speaking in a foreign language&lt;/a&gt; which they can then take with them to their target language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone on this board know of any academic sources which address this claim (either supporting or refuting)? I'd be particularly interested to see any experiments which explicitly tested this notion that 6 months Esperanto + 18 months of another language is better than 24 months of that same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-18T15:17:09.363" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T14:08:02.037" Title="What research has been done on the effects of learning Esperanto on acquiring other languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3401" CreationDate="2013-03-18T13:42:16.640" Score="7" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been having some trouble understanding how is it that what differentiates, for example, /p/ from /b/, is the vibration of the vocal chords, present in /b/, but not in /p/. From what I have read and have been told, /b/ can't be produced without the vibration of the vocal chords. But, for my untrained ear and amateur testing, it seems it is possible to produce both /b/ and /p/ while whispering (therefore, voicelessly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm really confused. I understand how /s/ has to be voiceless and /z/ has to be voiced, but not in cases like /t/ versus /d/. I've heard the opinion that the difference is &lt;em&gt;clearer&lt;/em&gt; if the vocal chords vibrate, even though this is not the primary distinctive feature between them. So is it just a conventional practice for easier reference or does my judgement trick me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1874" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-19T03:03:18.220" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T03:03:18.220" Title="Understanding Voiced Consonants" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3397" CreationDate="2013-03-18T14:20:50.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim about Esperanto having &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/propaedeutic&quot;&gt;propedeutic&lt;/a&gt; properties for French learners comes from the EKPAROLI project, you can find a somewhat outdated but &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20031204061223/http://www.education.monash.edu.au/projects/esperanto/Ekrep97.htm&quot;&gt;detailed report&lt;/a&gt; about the project. Some more recent information can be hopefully found on the webpage of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mondeto.com/&quot;&gt;Mondeto&lt;/a&gt; society which is currently trying to continue the efforts of EKPAROLI on the global scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg&quot;&gt;recent TED Talk&lt;/a&gt; titled &quot;Learn Esperanto First&quot; mentions the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.projectcomenius.com/&quot;&gt;Project Comenius&lt;/a&gt; as a frame initiative for studying the propedeutic properties of Esperanto, some more information about participating schools and activities is &lt;a href=&quot;http://esperanto-urbo.de/page.php?pid=83390898&quot;&gt;available in Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto&quot;&gt;a Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on this topic can be a good start for your reading too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-19T03:06:40.217" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T03:06:40.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3398" CreationDate="2013-03-18T14:59:11.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I remember form a phonology class I took in unversity, the voicing of consonants is something that comes with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortis_and_lenis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fortis-lenis distinction&lt;/a&gt; at least in German and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T14:59:11.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3398" CreationDate="2013-03-18T15:24:04.537" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before attempting to address this question, we need to be clear on what is meant by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The concepts of &lt;em&gt;phonological&lt;/em&gt; voicing and &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; voicing are often conflated, which leads to many misunderstandings among students of linguistics. As I mentioned in my comment above, you might want to read my answer to a related question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2340/whispered-voiced-consonents&quot;&gt;Whispered Voiced Consonants&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk about /b/, we are referring to a phoneme, and [+voice] is a phonological feature that it bears. This feature can be thought of as a mnemonic label that is derived from the fact that, in some environments, this phoneme can be distinguished from the phoneme /p/ by the presence of phonetic voicing during the realization of the former but not during the realization of the latter. One common environment where this is true in English is in the middle of a word between vowels (e.g. &lt;em&gt;rebel&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;repel&lt;/em&gt;). You can check this by recording a native speaker saying these words and looking in the spectrograms for a voice bar during the stop closure in one case but not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many environments in which /b/ is not realized with voicing during the closure, or in which it is only partly voiced. For example, for many speakers, at the beginning of an utterance, both /p/ and /b/ are realized without any voicing during the closure. It turns out that what is more relevant in distinguishing these phonemes in utterance-initial position is their &lt;em&gt;voice onset time&lt;/em&gt;. Phonetic voicing starts right away after the closure of the /b/ but there is a delay in phonetic voicing in the case of the /p/ (there is aspiration noise in place of the phonetic voicing during this period). If we were to assign a narrow phonetic transcription to these sounds, we might actually consider this realization of /b/ to be [p] and this realization of /p/ to be [pʰ]. So, &lt;strong&gt;a stickler might say that the &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; [b] must be produced with vibrating vocal folds, but the &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; /b/ certainly can be realized without vocal fold vibration during the closure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for /z/ and /s/, the distinction does not always lie in phonetic voicing. If you record a native speaker saying &lt;em&gt;Say 'course' for me&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Say 'cores' for me&lt;/em&gt;, where the target word ends in /s/ in the first case but /z/ in the second case, chances are you won't actually see much of a voice bar in the realization of the /z/. Instead, the more salient difference will be in the duration of the vocalic stretch before the fricative, and in the duration of the fricative itself. You may also see that the phonetic voicing from the vowel turns off a bit earlier before the [s] than it does before the [z].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So /b/, /d/, and /z/ can be distinguished from /p/, /t/, and /s/, respectively by the distinctive feature [+/-voiced] (although some prefer the use of &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt;, as @Aspinea mentioned). But distinctive features are a way of categorizing the phonological behavior of segments, and while their names have been derived from the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of the phonemes to which they are assigned, they should not be considered literal phonetic descriptors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-03-18T18:02:21.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2013-03-19T12:02:51.260" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is hard to prove, there are some indications that the largest amount of expressions is likely English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unlike, for example, the French, English speakers have no problem with adopting foreign loanwords into their language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is spoken as a first language in many countries on different continents. Each of these countries have one or more unique dialects with their own expressions and slang. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is the primary language of science and technology. Manuals, tutorials, and other technical documents may require the invention of new words or word forms (e.g. &quot;to google&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is the universal language of the merchant marine and air travel. The specialized vocabulary used is simply not translatable in all languages. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because spelling has hardly changed over the centuries, old poetry and literature is still widely read. This prevents older expressions and antiquated words from being forgotten.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English language has a ridiculous amount of synonyms. See Roget's Thesaurus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1877" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-19T16:32:19.643" LastActivityDate="2013-03-19T16:32:19.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-19T16:25:54.890" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This thought occurred to me after having read a closed question here. I drew five language trees for an identical sentence rendered in five different languages, and the result was quite interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences were structured a little bit differently according to a type, and so were the language trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took English, Russian, Finnish, Estonian and Swedish as sample languages. Then I wrote and structured it in Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Bulgarian and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages, however different in their typologies, have some similar features (e.g. English is more like Swedish, and Finnish is much like Estonian). There were also differences in language trees depending on language analytism, flections and possible word order. The differences may be, however, described by submodalities of personal ideolect as well. I have not yet compared the languages thorough an atlas with wide parameter scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, my knowledge of other languages (e.g. that of Arabic, Yoruba or Chinese) was not sufficient to present more data on languages of other types, so I am presenting this question to the Community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If different types &lt;em&gt;are indeed&lt;/em&gt; described by different structures, then what is the main typological factor for the language tree discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T08:09:54.863" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T08:09:54.863" Title="Are languages of different types described by different structures in language trees?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3408" CreationDate="2013-03-20T02:16:06.830" Score="7" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/offero#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;offero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From ob (&quot;towards&quot;) + ferō (&quot;bear, carry&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aufero#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;aufero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From ab (&quot;from&quot;) + ferō (&quot;bear, carry&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both prefixes of them end with &quot;-b-&quot;, but why do their compounds differ from each other, namely &quot;-b-&quot; vs &quot;-u-&quot;? Is this a regular sound change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question is L &quot;ostendo&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ostendo#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ostendo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From obs- for ob&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;before&quot;) + tendō (&quot;I stretch&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/obtineo#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;obtineo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From ob + teneō (&quot;hold; restrain&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, L &quot;obs-&quot; turned into L &quot;os-&quot; in &quot;ostendo&quot;, while &quot;ob-&quot; survived in &quot;obtineo&quot;, is that also a regular sound change? &#xA;Can anyone show me some other examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-20T02:37:05.867" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T15:01:44.257" Title="Why does &quot;-b-&quot; differ between L “offero” and L &quot;aufero&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-20T13:51:13.903" Score="1" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why might one regard “Japanese English” “Korean English” and “China English” as varieties rather than interlanguages? What are the educational implications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1857" LastActivityDate="2013-08-23T17:31:29.863" Title="Asian English Varieties" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3386" CreationDate="2013-03-20T13:52:30.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With some help from Rocío, I have found a fairly useful resource (in the bibliography of Greenberg). The reference in question is Pavle Ivić (1958) &lt;em&gt;Die serbokroatischen Dialekte:ihre Struktur und Entwicklung, Volume 1&lt;/em&gt;. It can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Die_serbokroatischen_Dialekte.html?id=tXw0AQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, but it's not available for preview. However, you might find a copy at a library, I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-03-20T13:52:30.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3405" CreationDate="2013-03-20T16:17:55.987" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, there was total regressive assimilation in a combination of an occlusive (&lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verschlusslaut&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verschlusslaut&lt;/a&gt;) followed by f:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OCC+f&gt; -ff-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;affero &amp;lt; *at-fero &amp;lt; *ad-fero (recomposition also possible - adfero) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;offero &amp;lt; *op-fero (recomposition also possible - obfero)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;effero &amp;lt; ec-fero (recomposition also possible - ecfero) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Weiss 2009/2011: 172, &quot;Latin does not normally have &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; in non-initial positions. The few examples are in compounds and the family of &lt;em&gt;inferus&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the group &quot;bt&quot; in Latin was most likely pronounced [pt] (Tronskii 1960: 114). Prefixes ab-, ob-, and sub- are usually reconstructed as PIt. *ap-, *op-, and *sup- (Tronskii 1960: 113, de Vaan 2008).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for aufero (and aufugio), here's what you can find in de Vaan 2008:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fa4LJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;deVaan2008&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a combination of a labial/velar followed by s+C, the first consonant (labial or velar) was lost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ostendo &amp;lt; *ops-tendo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suscipio &amp;lt; *sups-capio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suspicio &amp;lt; *sub-specio etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Leumann 1977 &quot;Neben &lt;em&gt;ab ob sub&lt;/em&gt; stehen die mit &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; erweiterten Formen &lt;em&gt;abs- obs- subs-&lt;/em&gt; bzw. &lt;em&gt;aps- ops- sups-&lt;/em&gt;, fast nur als Praeverbien [...] Die s-Formen stehen nur vor Tenues, besonders in altertuemlichen Komposita; oefters sind sie vereinfacht zu &lt;em&gt;os- sus-&lt;/em&gt;, vor &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; auch &lt;em&gt;as-&lt;/em&gt; [...]&quot; (p. 157).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernout &amp;amp; Meillet 1985/2001, &quot;ce dernier [obs-; Alex B.] usité seulement en composition; [..] il est souvent réduit à os-&quot; (p. 454).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you can see (Ernout &amp;amp; Meillet 1985/2001, Leumann 1997), the form obs- was usually used in compounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernout, Alfred, Antoine Meillet, and Jacques André. 2001. &lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots&lt;/em&gt;. Paris: Klincksieck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leumann 1977, § 203. - Leumann, Manu, J. B. Hofmann, Anton Szantyr, and Friedrich Stolz. 1977. &lt;em&gt;Lateinische Grammatik: Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre.&lt;/em&gt; München: Beck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pfister 1977, §137.2. - Pfister, Raimund. 1977. &lt;em&gt;Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre. Band 1, Einleitung und Lautlehre.&lt;/em&gt; Heidelberg: Winter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tronskii 1960, §232, 268. - Tronskiĭ, I. M. 1960. &lt;em&gt;Istoricheskai︠a︡ grammatika latinskogo i︠a︡zyka&lt;/em&gt;. Moskva: Izd-vo lit-ry na inostrannykh i︠a︡zykakh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaan, Michiel Arnoud Cor de. 2008. &lt;em&gt;Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic languages&lt;/em&gt;. Leiden: Brill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weiss, Michael L. 2011. &lt;em&gt;Outline of the historical and comparative grammar of Latin&lt;/em&gt;. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2020-04-03T15:01:44.257" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T15:01:44.257" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-20T19:15:36.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-20T17:13:11.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are comming from the non-linguistics environment, the best book is to start with Is Fromkin, Introduction to language.  It provides a general introduction to syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics and brain and language. It is easy to read. I really advise you to start with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For syntax, you can read Andrew Carnie's Syntax: a generative introduction. Hageman's introduction to government and binding. Redford's Minimalist syntax. I have benefited from these books a lot and I advice you to read them in this order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For phonology, you should read Oddey's Introducing phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="22577" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T02:52:10.333" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T02:52:10.333" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-20T17:13:11.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2013-03-21T14:55:39.717" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks as if the courses you intend to take are introductory courses, so it's not likely that you need too much background knowledge. If so, you should be set just reading &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; introductory book to linguistics, which will cover the basics of all the subdisciplines in linguistics. There are many books to choose from here. Some of them are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Edward Finegan: Language: Its Structure and Use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) William O'Grady et al.: Contemporary Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Victoria Fromkin et al.: An Introduction to Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal recommendation is Fromkin et al. &amp;quot;Linguistics: An Introduction&amp;quot; from 2001. It's not printed anymore, but you can get it at Amazon. It covers only the main fields of linguistics: Syntax, Semantics &amp;amp; Pragmatics, and Phonology. And it does so very well. It aims a little higher than the basic introductory textbooks mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T14:55:39.717" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-21T14:55:39.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2013-03-21T15:03:01.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is as understudied as you might think. What you're describing is a laryngeal feature used to mark the edges of an utterance. That's pretty common. The laryngeal feature used, though, might vary quite a bit between languages. They can be glottal stops, pitch, aspiration, devoicing, creaky voice, etc. Searching for something like laryngeal markers at utterance boundaries might give you more interesting hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T15:03:01.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-21T18:04:24.343" Score="0" ViewCount="1283" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider%27s_dynamic_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schneider's dynamic model&lt;/a&gt; gives an account of the evolution of languages in a post-colonial setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article, Stage 3 is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) Contact-induced changes can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, from code-switching to code alternation to acquisition strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Stage 4 is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) Language evolution, and the emergence of contact-induced varieties, can be regarded as speakers making selections from a pool of linguistic variants made available to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between Schneider's stages 3 and 4? How useful is the distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1857" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-03-21T19:00:48.607" LastActivityDate="2013-03-21T19:00:48.607" Title="Schneider's Model: What's the differences between stages 3 and 4?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3415" CreationDate="2013-03-22T00:52:10.310" Score="6" ViewCount="3791" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a database of one million strings which I want to rank against one another so that I can tell which contain meaningful English words / sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These strings contain no spaces or punctuation. Some contain real English words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THISISASENTENCETHATCONTAINSENGLISHWORDS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are a jumble of random letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IHWEIONMSACOMDSCKNENCIJNCDSKMCDJCSJDNJL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I use an updated &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/mayzner.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mayzner letter frequency list&lt;/a&gt;, and I count for occurrences of most common tri/bigrams in the above strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[&quot;th&quot;,&quot;he&quot;,&quot;in&quot;,&quot;er&quot;,&quot;an&quot;], // Mayzner most common 2grams&#xA;[&quot;the&quot;,&quot;and&quot;,&quot;ing&quot;,&quot;ion&quot;,&quot;tio&quot;] // Mayzner most common 3grams&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first string contains more occurrences of these ngrams, so would rank above the second string in terms of its Englishness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above method works OK but I want to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the improvements I've looked into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel to consonant ratio.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel and consonant positions within string.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letter positions / relation to one another. e.g. The bigrams: JQ, QG, QK, QY, QZ, WQ, and WZ, should never occur in the English language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dictionary search (i.e. match most commonly used words from an English dictionary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;E,T,A,O,I,N being the most occurring letters, in this order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the most important factors for determining whether a string contains English words? Maybe it would be a combination of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1888" OwnerDisplayName="StuR" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T11:50:21.117" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:50:21.117" Title="Common English bigrams / trigrams - recognising that a jumble of letters contain only valid English words" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3414" CreationDate="2013-03-22T02:42:00.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I am a little confused on exactly what the OP means by &quot;similar&quot; and if they want to find English-like strings or actual English strings. I may need to edit my response once they provide clarification&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the type of feature where the question isn't &quot;how accurate can I make it?&quot; but rather &quot;how good is good enough?&quot; as some of the methods will be easier to implement and more efficient to run than others. Also, there's a very big difference between identifying &lt;em&gt;English-like words&lt;/em&gt; and identifying &lt;em&gt;English words&lt;/em&gt; so I'm going to break my answer into two parts.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Finding English-like Text&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this purpose, your bigram/trigram probability method is probably satisfactory. If you haven't researched it already, there are plenty of online resources for teaching people how to compute probabilities from bigrams. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kathy/NLP/ClassSlides/Class3-ngrams09/ngrams.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a set of lecture notes I randomly found on Google&lt;/a&gt;. If you find you're getting a lot of strings with a probability of 0 then you should look into using some kind of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram#Smoothing_techniques&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;n-gram smoothing technique&lt;/a&gt; but this is probably less important with letter-based n-grams than with word-based n-grams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see one major problem with using off-the-shelf probabilities, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/mayzner.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mayzner frequency list&lt;/a&gt; you're currently using: &lt;strong&gt;n-grams do not cross word boundaries&lt;/strong&gt;. You correctly say that bigrams like &quot;WZ&quot; never occurs &lt;em&gt;word-internally&lt;/em&gt; in English, thus any &quot;WZ&quot; bigram would be assigned a probability of 0 (and thus the probability of the entire string by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naive Bayes&lt;/a&gt;). Problem is that there's nothing stopping them from occurring &lt;strong&gt;across word boundaries&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, the sentence &quot;I don't care how Zoe feels&quot; is obviously English but if you remove spaces, punctuation, and capitalize everything you get &quot;IDONTCAREHOWZOEFEELS&quot; which &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; contain the bigram &quot;WZ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible solution would be to calculate your own probabilities by taking a large corpus of text, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brown Corpus&lt;/a&gt;, processing the text so that it is a continuous string of capital letters, and then using that to calculate your own probabilities. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~stanchen/e6884/labs/lab3/x43.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you need help implementing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention about using consonant/vowel ratios and individual letter frequencies to improve your result. You may not realize it but what you're describing is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz%27s_back-off_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Katz's back-off model&lt;/a&gt; which uses trigram, bigram, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; unigram probabilities to evaluate text.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Finding Actual English Text&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You used the word &quot;rank&quot; in your question so I think these methods may not be what you want since they will tend to return more of a &quot;yes/no&quot; answer than a probability. That isn't to say you can't adapt them to give a probability but it may be difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is do you want to find which strings &lt;em&gt;contain&lt;/em&gt; and English word or which string are &lt;em&gt;entirely English&lt;/em&gt;. To illustrate the difference, think about which of these two you'd rank higher:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ORANGES&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  QAPPLEQ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding strings which contain an English word is conceptually very easy but requires a lot of time and computing power. You'd simply search for ever word in an English dictionary in every string. One major problem is that there are &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of English words. If you narrow your search down to the top 3000 or so most common English words then your speed increases but your accuracy drastically decreases. Another problem is that there are single-letter words in English (&quot;a&quot; and &quot;I&quot;) that, unless excluded from the word list, would mean the vast majority of strings contain an English word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to find which strings actually &lt;em&gt;are English&lt;/em&gt; then you should focus on &lt;strong&gt;identifying word boundaries in text&lt;/strong&gt; (as opposed to in spoken language). The good news is that there has already been research on on this problem. The bad news is that the existing research generally doesn't focus on English. I have found articles explicitly about identifying word boundaries in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/paisarn/papers/apccas98.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thai text&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rws.xoba.com/newindex/cpcol.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese Text&lt;/a&gt;. These languages generally do not use white spaces so finding methods to break text into individual words is very important for any kind of computational linguistic analysis. Unfortunately, both these papers seem to use statistical methods so I'm not sure how applicable they are to English text (since the required statistics may not be readily available). You may also want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1605353/word-break-in-languages-without-spaces-between-words-e-g-asian&quot;&gt;this Stackoverflow question&lt;/a&gt; about identifying word boundaries in Japanese, but again you have a hard time applying this to your situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;vid=USPAT6185524&amp;amp;id=F-UGAAAAEBAJ&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;dq=word+boundary+identification&amp;amp;printsec=abstract#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=word%20boundary%20identification&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this patent&lt;/a&gt; for identifying word boundaries in continuous text (which is exactly what you'd need) &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; being a patent, you may need to license this technology before you can be allowed to use it (even for non-commercial uses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2013-03-22T02:42:00.087" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3211" CreationDate="2013-03-23T14:39:35.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called mothertongue influence! When we use other languages, the linguistic system of the mothertongue effects the other language too. But we can overcome this by conscious effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1534" LastActivityDate="2013-03-23T14:39:35.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-23T19:00:25.290" Score="6" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the term &quot;raising&quot; suggest directionality? Consider the sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We want him to buy the groceries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who describe such sentences often speak of the subject of &quot;he to buy groceries*&quot; being raised to the object position of the matrix clause to yield &quot;We want him etc.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have nearly enough linguistics knowledge to critique such accounts intelligently. &#xA;I am merely curious about why the above account implies directionality when there aren't any sentences that contain phrases like &quot;he to buy the groceries*&quot;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-27T14:40:23.750" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T20:16:51.620" Title="Why does the term &quot;raising&quot; suggest directionality?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3423" CreationDate="2013-03-23T19:40:22.947" Score="2" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;What characteristics of a language tend to maximize the average number of allophones per phoneme?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a small phonemic inventory tend to increase the number of allophones, e.g. in a language with a phonemic inventory comprising /a/, /i/, and /u/, would /a/ more allophones than it would in a language with a 10 vowel system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a language with few or no free morphemes have more allophones on account of the greater number of phonetic contexts in which a give realization of a phoneme might occur?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other factors might maximize the average number of allophones per phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T13:18:01.230" Title="What characteristics of a language tend to maximize the average number of allophones per phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4000" CreationDate="2013-03-23T19:50:07.007" Score="16" ViewCount="12689" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the chief advantages &amp;amp; disadvantages of describing sentences with dependency vs. phrase structure (aka. constituency) trees?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, dependency grammar trees lack phrase nodes and mark everything as dependent on the verb.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrase structure trees start with the highest constituent then analyzes it into phrases like NP, VP, etc., as I'm sure we all know.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under what circumstances would it be preferable to use one type of tree diagram over the other?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-31T09:21:56.493" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T21:17:17.473" Title="What are the chief advantages &amp; disadvantages of describing sentences with dependency vs. phrase structure trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4001" CreationDate="2013-03-23T20:03:55.223" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I peruse this site and others, I find references to apparent operations that change either one surface structure to another (as with passivization) or a deep structure to a surface structure (as with raising).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the notion of transformations still current among generative linguists?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how do generative grammarians generally explain the linguistic data formerly explained by transformations?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, where can I find a list of transformations currently acknowledged by generative grammarians?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if so, has the number of acknowledged transformations decreased over time?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T17:39:07.180" Title="Have generative grammarians abandoned the notion of transformations?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3418" CreationDate="2013-03-23T20:20:24.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the raising is from *&lt;em&gt;we want that he buys groceries&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;we want him to buy groceries&lt;/em&gt;, and the &quot;high&quot; level is the main clause; the content of a fictional subordinate &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; clause is raised to the level of the main clause, in the form of an object plus an infinitive (in this case). After all, &lt;em&gt;sub&lt;/em&gt;-ordination means &quot;ordering below&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we even posit such a fictional subordinate clause that never really existed? You could argue against this practice. But I think the main reason is semanto-pragmatic; that is, it cannot really be proven syntactically in any way. We somehow presume that there is in language a &quot;standard&quot; model of expressing an agent and a situation that the agent applies a modal opinion to, and that this model is a main clause with agent plus modality, followed by a subordinate clause containing the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-03-24T01:12:40.477" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T01:12:40.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3419" CreationDate="2013-03-24T11:56:38.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a matter of presence/absence of  a phonetic system within a given language as a milestone for comparison-contrast procedure, either historically or diachronically. Or maybe there is no relation between a phonetical inventory and a number of allophones at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, if number of allophones might be regarded within the scope of same inventory (consonants/vowels only), or does it cover the whole phonetical system of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; has three primal vowels (a/i/u), which produce long vowels and diphtongs, yet its consonants ṭ,ṭh, t and th (= aspirated t) are regarded as separate consonants, not as allophones. In fact, its vowel phonetic inventory might not be taken as really 'minimal' together with (semi)vowels ṛ,ṝ,ḷ or ḹ.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages like English or Chinese has no inner comparison/contrast systems, but the number of consonant and vowel allophones in English is bigger as compared to Chinese, perhaps due to the polycentrism of English. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chinese&lt;/a&gt; almost has no vowel allophones, and position of phonemes zh, j, x and q is dubious. Well,  to a Westerner's ear, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the languages with a relly minimal vowel inventory is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Abkhaz&lt;/a&gt;, which has only two distinctive vowels, but a number of Abkhazian consonants equals 58. They are, however, regarded not as allophones of, say, t/tʼ/tʷ, d/dʷ, or h/χʲ/χ/χʷ/χˤ/χˤʷ/ħ/ħʷ sounds, but as separate consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, (which has not just a/æ/e and i/y allophones, but also a special [o:] phoneme for its &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Arabic_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Egyptian variety&lt;/a&gt;), there is a big set of consonants. There are tˤ/t and x~χ/ħ~ʜ/h phonemes, which are also recognised as different consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us take as an example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_phonology#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Estonian language&lt;/a&gt; which has all the possible dyphtongs and three-grade vowel length (short, long and overlong). All this abundence of phonetics, and overlong vowels as well, happens in initial syllables only, while the rest of Estonian word has either short or long back vowels and long or short consonants. Not too much of  vowel allophones, but a system of front/back vocals and long/short vowels and consonants instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Finnish&lt;/a&gt; has the same system (long/short vowels and consonants and front/back vowels together with vowel harmony). Not too much of allophones, either (with the exception of nasalised vowels and n-allophones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Modern Irish&lt;/a&gt; has broad/slender comparison paradigms for consonants together with a number of consonant allophones. A number of vowel allophones has survived in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Irish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ulster&lt;/a&gt; dialect up to day. Additionally, there has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Irish_phonology#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lenis/fortis&lt;/a&gt; comparison-contrast paradigm for sonorants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology#Allophony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt; has palatalised/unpalatalised dychotomy for its comparison-contrast paradigm and a large set of vowel allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-25T13:18:01.230" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T13:18:01.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2424" CreationDate="2013-03-24T12:18:28.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has equal vowel length for all syllables, but vowels in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.russianstress.info/index.php/main/view/stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stressed syllables&lt;/a&gt; are pronounced longer and with &lt;em&gt;expiratory pitch&lt;/em&gt;. No difference in vowel length is marked in writing and long vowels are perceived by native speakers as having qualities of allophones with 'normal', or short length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese has approximately equal length for all syllables, but in polysyllabic words there is a kind of tone sandhi which results in specific &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/26817-a-dictionary-of-word-stress-in-mandarin-chinese/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lexical stress patterns&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-24T15:50:44.690" LastActivityDate="2013-03-24T15:50:44.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="373" CreationDate="2013-03-25T14:40:22.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native turkish speaker living in İstanbul, 30 years old. I am an architect, really interested in linguistics and I am reading the questions and answers with big enthusiasm. I would like to correct an issue: &quot;aa&quot; and &quot;ağa&quot; are not the same. It takes two stops to give the sound of aa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with sigue and his examples of &quot;cemaat&quot; and &quot;müracaat&quot;, which are right. It takes two syllables to pronounce &quot;aa&quot; here: &quot;ce-ma-at&quot; and &quot;mü-ra-ca-at&quot;. there are a a lot of ways to use &quot;ğ&quot;, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;amp;q=cache%3armEeOvVfUYUJ%3awww.dilbilimi.net/kilic_erdem_turkiye_turkcesindeki_yumusak_g_unsuzunun_fonetik_analizi.pdf+&amp;amp;hl=tr&amp;amp;gl=tr&amp;amp;pid=bl&amp;amp;srcid=ADGEESjc43ELcqxNufHdHaI67gMDV2_qeOZvUCFtmTlf16u9ejDQLQk9uUy-pqj6vf8XJwEuaoafrZ_yhWioD8XTExgPnUGkMeme1SQk0O_8HwJEDszV1d-2nI2AEBWR0K3IdAEJrLJL&amp;amp;sig=AHIEtbRv88WgvmExW63qshuxNqVN3Y5xbg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;good research on the issue (in Turkish)&lt;/a&gt;, that may be helpful for the ones that know turkish already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1899" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-25T16:21:05.923" LastActivityDate="2013-03-25T16:21:05.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-26T06:14:53.370" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's restrict the question to syntax. Will be there a point when all the governing rules behind grammar have been discovered and all phenomena is explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T06:14:53.370" Title="What's the future of linguistics? Will it be ever...complete?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-03-26T16:21:13.387" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-26T16:09:50.857" Score="1" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Basque word for 'town/city' is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hiri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, with mute H. Could its origin be in Middle Eastern languages with its subsequent incorporation into Basque through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Kingdom_of_Cilicia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a Hebrew cognate for the word, which is עיר.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any reliable sources of etymology of this &lt;em&gt;Basque&lt;/em&gt; word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-03-26T16:43:27.680" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T21:47:55.377" Title="What is probable origin of Basque word for city/town?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-26T16:22:05.840" Score="3" ViewCount="3196" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Ottoman Empire, both Turks and Armenians shared common social and cultural domains, but are there any loanwords in either language from either side - i.e. Turkish loanwords in Armenian or Armenian loanwords in Turkish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Dutch and Spanish people also have been sharing common social and cultural domain, but there are almost no loanwords from Spanish language in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the sociolinguistic situation in modern Turkish and Armenian, bearing in mind the fact that both nations have &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; in the book of human history?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any loanwords now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T19:02:29.863" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T19:06:25.470" Title="Are there any loanwords between Turkish and Armenian?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2013-03-26T16:30:02.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=lxwp23-08-edb.pdf&amp;amp;site=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Basque etymological dictionary&lt;/a&gt; claims that the word is &quot;of unknown origin&quot;, but that the variant forms &lt;em&gt;(h)uri&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;iri&lt;/em&gt; have been recorded in toponymy of Rioja, Alava and Navarro (Basque-speaking regions) from the 11th Century onwards. This would suggest that they are of Basque origin (and would rule out your theory of incorporation through the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia - as the forms were recorded in the region prior to the existence of the kingdom)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T16:30:02.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3429" CreationDate="2013-03-26T16:41:44.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably want to check out the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aFWQTBm35m0C&amp;amp;dq=armenian%20loanwords%20turkish&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian loanwords in Turkish&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Dankoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He lists &lt;em&gt;azap&lt;/em&gt; 'torment', &lt;em&gt;deri&lt;/em&gt; 'leather' and &lt;em&gt;zekrek&lt;/em&gt; etc. as examples of Armenian words in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T16:41:44.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-26T19:08:59.557" Score="0" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an English student (English is not my native language) and I once encountered this word &lt;code&gt;nowhere&lt;/code&gt;, but I first recognized it in that moment as &lt;code&gt;now + here&lt;/code&gt; and I literally pronounced it so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my mind was tired, I don't know. But I realized that I've never heard native speakers (in movies, over Skype, in TV channels, and other places) to pronounce it so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any lingual pattern that makes mind of native-speakers not making mistakes in pronouncing such words, which can be pronounced in two syntactically correct sections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-27T12:02:45.960" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T12:02:45.960" Title="What prevents people from pronouncing 'nowhere' as 'now + here' instead of 'no + where'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3432" CreationDate="2013-03-26T19:56:39.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native speakers will probably learn &lt;em&gt;nowhere&lt;/em&gt; as a spoken word first. So they already have its pronunciation fixed in their minds before ever reading it. Secondly, once you know what it means, it only makes sense that it is no+where, so semantics reinforce this pronunciation beyond any possible confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-03-26T19:56:39.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3432" CreationDate="2013-03-27T00:54:27.343" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English unlike other languages most words should be just learned. In really confusing cases they use hyphen to separate semantic parts like in &quot;no-where&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T00:54:27.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2064" CreationDate="2013-03-27T03:58:19.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;German compound nouns generally aren't made up of derivational suffixes, like those in agglutinative languages tend to be. They're more like some English ones, just strings of nouns. The only difference is that in writing they don't use spaces or hyphens. &#xA;I think the reason why long compound formations are found so often in agglutinative languages is probably just because of the usefulness of derivational morphemes- they allow a language to have a smaller core vocabulary, which makes it easier to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T03:58:19.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2013-03-27T04:30:21.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if people were exposed to written language from infancy in situations to provide context, in the same way that most are exposed to spoken or sign language, they could probably become fluent readers, although writing is a lot harder than speaking or signing just because it requires use of a tool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most difficult part of this hypothetical situation would probably be that of the already fluent speakers, instead of the baby's. The easiest way I can think of to make this all possible would be to cary around a dry erase board and a marker wherever you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T04:30:21.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3432" CreationDate="2013-03-27T04:47:21.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because &quot;nowhere&quot; is a combination of &quot;no&quot; and &quot;where&quot;; &quot;where&quot; in this case means &quot;a place&quot; instead of acting as a question word. &quot;Now here&quot; is always written as two separate words. This also goes back to the tendency of english spelling to not have a letter-to-letter connection to english pronunciation. (Notice that &quot;ere&quot; represents two different sounds in the words &quot;where&quot; and &quot;here&quot;- Then there's also words like &quot;ear&quot;, &quot;near&quot;, &quot;bear&quot;, &quot;air&quot;... This is what I dislike most about English.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T04:47:21.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3429" CreationDate="2013-03-27T14:32:25.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English Wiktionary is a pretty decent source for this kind of thing, at least to get you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are all kinds of etymology categories of which these are relevant to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aTurkish_terms_derived_from_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Turkish terms derived from Armenian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aOttoman_Turkish_terms_derived_from_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ottoman Turkish terms derived from Armenian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aArmenian_terms_derived_from_Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian terms derived from Turkish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aArmenian_terms_derived_from_Ottoman_Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian terms derived from Ottoman Turkish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aArmenian_terms_derived_from_Turkic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Armenian terms derived from Turkic languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Bonus: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aSpanish_terms_derived_from_Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Spanish terms derived from Dutch&lt;/a&gt; ... &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category%3aDutch_terms_derived_from_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dutch terms derived from Spanish&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T02:26:36.847" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T02:26:36.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8676" CreationDate="2013-03-27T15:32:28.263" Score="8" ViewCount="1104" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well-known, or better said, well-accepted, that the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a OV language with a very limited (or nonexistent) use of subordinate clauses. In Proto-Germanic, subordinates was more common (but not too much) but yet a OV language.&#xA;However, both Old English (OE) and Old High German (OHG) had a VO structure in main clauses, and ancestral OV in subordinate clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                             |-&amp;gt; OE (VO/OV) -&amp;gt; English (VO/VO)&#xA;   PIE (OV) --&amp;gt; PGmc (OV/OV) --&amp;gt; ¿?(VO/OV)--&amp;gt;|&#xA;                                             |-&amp;gt; OHG (VO/OV) -&amp;gt; German (V2)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm right, a possible source of shift OV -&gt; VO (in main clauses) is the original topicalization of the verb in PIE/PGmc. In PIE/PGmc the verb occupied the first (or second) position in the sentence to mark some special type of sentences, for example, to mark imperative sentences. This original topicalization of the verb could have became more frequent even changing completely the sentence word pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: What process created the appearance of subordinates and subsequently how and when did it change the structure in main clauses? And why were only main clauses affected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2: What process caused English to be strict SVO and German to be strict V2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 3: Was OE really a V2 language like German, or only a left-peripherical language? (V in first or second position, that means, a not strict version of V2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1902" LastEditorUserId="1902" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T17:02:33.870" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T23:02:18.377" Title="Origin of current order pattern in English/German" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3270" CreationDate="2013-03-27T22:42:41.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All languages have sentences; both the basic building blocks (parts of&#xA;  speech like nouns and verbs) and the systems for constructing&#xA;  sentences out of these building blocks are very similar across&#xA;  languages.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Mark Aronoff (2007) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Language_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scholarpedia.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Scholarpedia&lt;/a&gt;, 2(5):3175.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to your question: &lt;strong&gt;YES!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1904" LastActivityDate="2013-03-27T22:42:41.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3270" CreationDate="2013-03-28T05:38:07.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we take a sequence of different parts of speech (or a sequence of different words) as a basic definition for a sentence, then there are two types of languages which, presumably, have no sentences falling under the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;polysynthetic&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;incorporating&lt;/a&gt; languages (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chukchi&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Coola_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bella Coola&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tiwi&lt;/a&gt;) for their word-sentences, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) languages with vocabulary where words cannot be divided into parts of speech, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zhuang&lt;/a&gt; or Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-10-22T23:41:00.223" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T23:41:00.223" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-28T05:48:05.877" Score="5" ViewCount="925" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a person speaks several languages, occasionally making mistakes in grammar(s), using untypical patterns, clichés and/or calques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can such a level of language competence be defined as bilingualism/multilingualism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do bilingual speakers ever make language slips?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do multilingual persons make language mistakes more often than bilingual or monolingual speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T11:07:18.163" Title="Do bilinguals and multilingual native speakers make language mistakes?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2013-03-28T06:34:06.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only answer your first two questions, but: Native or very high-level speakers of languages make mistakes all the time. I don't see why making the occasional mistake in several languages would prevent someone from being defined as multilingual. And of course bilinguals slip up sometimes. Everyone does!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1907" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T06:34:06.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-28T07:38:36.717" Score="2" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are defining criteria, and how can we decide whether a person speaking, say, ten languages is a multilingual or a polyglot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T07:38:36.717" Title="How to distinguish multilingualism from polyglotism?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3446" CreationDate="2013-03-28T12:46:31.373" Score="1" ViewCount="11604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to check my understanding of these 2 terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diphthong&lt;/strong&gt; (concerned with sound; 1 sound; represented 2 letters; not long or short)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;digraph&lt;/strong&gt; (concerned with graphemes; 2 letters; can be long or short)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate?  If not what is the similarities/differences?  And can a diphthong be represented by a digraph/ is it always represented by a digraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="607" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T02:20:00.400" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T13:40:36.427" Title="diphthong vs. digraph (English)" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3445" CreationDate="2013-03-28T13:48:34.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right about their being concerned with sound and graphemes, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A diphthong is concerned in particular with &lt;strong&gt;vowels&lt;/strong&gt;. The term refers to a combination of two vowels characterized by a sort of glide from one vowel to the other. English is full of them, and particularly in English it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; true that a diphthong is always represented by two letters. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;gate&amp;quot; /eɪ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;bite&amp;quot; /aɪ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;alone&amp;quot; /əʊ/ (BE) or /oʊ/ (AE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ow&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;cow&amp;quot; /aʊ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A digraph is any two-letter representation of a single sound. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;th&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;another&amp;quot; /ð/ or in &amp;quot;thanks&amp;quot; /θ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sh&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; /ʃ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;oo&lt;/strong&gt; in &amp;quot;root&amp;quot; /u/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diphthong /aʊ/ in &amp;quot;cow&amp;quot; is represented as the digraph &amp;quot;ow&amp;quot;. This is not unusal, but as you can see in the examples, not always the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T15:45:47.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3445" CreationDate="2013-03-28T13:56:44.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;diphthong&lt;/strong&gt; is a single vowel sound which is not a single 'pure' vowel quality, but is composed of a transition from one vowel target to another. Some examples (using RP English) are the vowel sounds in the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lied&lt;/em&gt; [laɪ̯d]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; [ləʊ̯w]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;digraph&lt;/strong&gt; is a combination of two graphemes to represent a single sound. Thus the digraph &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ph&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is composed of two graphemes, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;h&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, but as &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ph&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; it represents a distinct sound, the labiodental fricative [f]. Digraphs may be used to represent diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T13:56:44.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3445" CreationDate="2013-03-28T16:03:02.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diphthongs are actually somewhat complicated in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; diphthongs &lt;strong&gt;/ay aw oy/&lt;/strong&gt; (to use Kenyon and Knott's American phonemic system), as in &lt;em&gt;buy bough boy&lt;/em&gt;,  which are definitely phonemic, and in contrast with the vowels they transition between (/a o i u/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are &lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; diphthongs, which represent diphthongized allophones of single tense vowel phonemes, like [əʊ̯] in RP or [ow] in American English for the tense mid back rounded vowel phoneme /o/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In American English, &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; tense vowel phonemes have diphthongized allophones -- front tense vowels /i e/ have a high front /i/ glide, and back tense vowels /u o/ have a high back rounded /u/ glide. There are no pure tense vowel phonemes for these diphthongs to contrast with, so they are normally not represented phonemically, viz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;i/ &amp;nbsp; [iy] &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  /u/ [uw]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /&lt;strong&gt;e/ [ey]  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  /o/ [ow]&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is such a common phenomemon that it's a feature of an American accent in other languages; speakers of American English are often unable to hear or produce the distinction between (for example) /e:/ and /ei/, or /o:/ and /ou/, when speaking European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I find that I have already &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1101/482&quot;&gt;answered this question&lt;/a&gt; here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T16:03:02.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2013-03-28T18:11:46.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope all can agree that mistakes can be made at any level of proficiency. The level(s) of competence needed to make a reasonable claim for bi-/multilingualism are of course flexible but can to some degree be measured. One example is the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) but there are other applicable standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the error rates based on the number of languages spoken, I guess you're referring to the speaker's best language(s). Errors made in a second(+) language would seem to only be a crude measure of how well that language is known. I haven't seen this precise question studied but it's somewhat similar to the question of whether bilingual children develop language skills later than their monolingual counterparts. It seems to have been the conventional wisdom that there is a delay but studies have not shown this conclusively. This of course doesn't mean that errors rates in primary language are also comparable but I would doubt that the effect is large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastActivityDate="2013-03-28T18:11:46.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-28T18:59:14.590" Score="0" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different languages conjugate their nouns or verbs based on the number that they are referring to. For example, in languages such as English and French, there are two distinctions--singular and plural. Arabic contains three--one, two, and many. What types of conjugations based on the number of whatever is being spoken about are there, and what languages/language families are they associated with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1133" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T15:40:03.720" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T15:40:03.720" Title="What are the different types of counting conjugations?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-04-05T11:35:57.863" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-28T19:51:06.347" Score="4" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you recommend a good reference for studying Japanese phonetics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1910" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-12-22T12:19:56.190" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T20:03:57.293" Title="Basic resource on Japanese phonetics" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-28T21:49:36.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3451" CreationDate="2013-03-28T20:02:51.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a good book on Japanese phonetics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suski, P. M. [1931] 2011. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lyUc7oNgaqoC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Phonetics of Japanese Language: With Reference to Japanese Script&lt;/a&gt;. Taylor &amp;amp; Francis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably available at your library and there's a preview available on Google Books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2013-05-08T23:51:21.967" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T23:51:21.967" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-28T21:49:36.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3491" CreationDate="2013-03-28T20:34:05.993" Score="-1" ViewCount="3179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an important English word which doesn't have a corresponding word in another language. I would be happy even it's a language spoken only by a small population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably, the word is not a colour. Please provide a reference if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1911" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-03-28T21:47:29.593" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T12:45:45.823" Title="Important english word which doesn't exist in another language" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-28T23:04:46.437" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is said that European Portuguese has count/mass distinction as many Indo-European languages. However I noticed out that all products/items at stores in Portugal are labeled in singular form. In European Portuguese although countable nouns are used plural in a sentence like &quot;I bought apples&quot; as in English, they appear in the form of bare singular nominal on a price tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it is possible  to see a price tag &quot;maçã/kg&quot; rather than &quot;maçãs/kg&quot; for the apples at the supermarkets in Portugal. I have seen plural tags for such items so far in all languages where there is count/mass distinction except European Portuguese. Why is there such use of bare nominals in European Portuguese which sounds incompatible with sentential meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1913" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T20:13:28.120" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T18:52:05.843" Title="Is there count/mass distinction in European Portuguese as it is in English?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4134" CreationDate="2013-03-29T02:50:33.330" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;loanword,&quot; I'm referring to words borrowed into language X from other languages and altered only as the phonology of language X requires.   Examples would include &quot;le weekend&quot; in French, &quot;das Internet&quot; in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if any, aspects of linguistic typology affect the percentage of loanwords that a given language has in its lexicon?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, many other factors affect the percentage of loanwords in a language's lexicon.   I can think of a few off the top of my head.    How much contact do the speakers of language X have with the speakers of other languages?  Are the speakers of language X a minority culture in the area where language X is spoken?   How often to the speakers of a language calque foreign terms instead of just adapting foreign words to language X phonology?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, are there any instances in which language typology influences the percentage of loanwords in a given language?   For example, all other things being equal, would a language with a lexicon dominated by bound morphemes have fewer loanwords than a language with a lexicon dominated by free morphemes?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T02:14:38.090" Title="What, if any, aspects of linguistic typology affect the percentage of loanwords that a language has in its lexicon?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-29T03:03:26.983" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do generative linguists use spoken-word corpora for data?   Offhand, I don't see why at least some of them wouldn't.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting that the use of spoken-word corpora vs. documented native speaker judgments of grammaticality would be mutually exclusive.   Nor am I asking whether &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; generative grammarians would use spoken-word corpora.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am asking whether, for example, one or more generative grammarians or a subset of generative grammarians would make use of such things as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/sbcorpus_obtaining.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Santa Barbara Corpus of American English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T11:50:52.810" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T00:22:19.940" Title="Do generative linguists use spoken-word corpora?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3200" CreationDate="2013-03-29T03:28:24.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a speech-language therapist (M.S., CCC-SLP), I have met people who obviously perceive the world and who just as obviously lack language.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During my training, I worked briefly with someone with global aphasia.   Thanks to certain brain injuries, such as strokes, some people wind up with aphasia, or loss of some of their language abilities.   The most severe form of aphasia, namely total loss of the ability to communicate with conventional (i.e. arbitrary) symbols, is called global aphasia.   See this Wikipedia article on global aphasia:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_aphasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_aphasia&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Global aphasia differs from dementia in that global aphasia patients can do well on non-verbal IQ tests and on many tasks that do not require symbol use, whereas the victims of severe dementia score low on tests of language and cognition and have difficulty doing most tasks.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strokes and brain injuries arent' the only conditions that can manifest themselves in the lack of language.   Over the last ten years or so, I have worked with increasing numbers of students whose autism is so severe that they have not acquired an L1, and must be taught to communicate with picture exchange.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;caseyr547 has already mentioned Genie.  You may wish to read the book &quot;Genie, a Scientific Tragedy&quot; by Russ Rymer.   Her case is instructive, but one need not look at such rare cases to document perception without language.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T00:52:39.207" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T00:52:39.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3458" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3462" CreationDate="2013-03-29T03:58:46.603" Score="8" ViewCount="4099" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told that the best way to learn a new language is through immersion, i.e. placing oneself in an environment in which only the target language is spoken and making constant use of the target language.   I do not know what would supplement this exposure for an adult learner.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question concerns people who learn languages that have no living native speakers, as well as people who need to learn to speak and read in a language but cannot live in a place where the language is spoken by almost everyone.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, some people can learn languages through book-study alone;  some scholars can fluently speak Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian, for example.  And I have heard that living languages can be learned in this way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what are the specific disadvantages of book-learning a language over learning the same language through immersion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T05:41:18.773" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T15:19:38.967" Title="What are some of the disadvantages of learning a language through book-study as opposed to immersion?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3458" CreationDate="2013-03-29T09:40:46.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of things you can never learn from the books (or even by Skype):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everyday communicative patterns. How to ask for things you want to buy? What are everyday words for groceries, housewares or fastfood (provided they are not English)? What are clichés used by speakers of a corresponding sociolect?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sociolects. Not a problemme for languages like Swedish or Dutch, with their minimal socioliguistic distinctions, but starting from French, Spanish, Russian or Arabic a learner meets certain difficulties while choosing from you/You, gender markers, etc. Not mentioning languages with honorifics or more exotic sociolinguistic markers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Immersion is compulsory, books are not. I am not trying to promote a compulsory education, but rather an idea that one can never turn off an inner speech in a studied language while picking  up an immersion strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aggressive (or otherwise unexpected) speech patterns. Yes, life is life, and human beings sometimes face aggressive rhetorics, from sarcasm and bullying to swear words, where the other side of communicative channel is not friendly or neutral. This can be extended to any unusual/unexpected speech situations and strategies as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal experience building a linguistic sub-personality installed into learner's cognitive framework. Of course, this can also be achieved from the books as well, but in such a case a learner has to continue with one's inner monologue in a language learned inside one's mental reality without adequate response from the outside world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD:&lt;/strong&gt; oh, there is one more thing: &lt;em&gt;lexical compatibility&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. one would hardly say 'the target of this project is'...). I guess that is the main difference between 'planned' and 'natural' languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-03-30T15:19:38.967" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T15:19:38.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-03-29T12:01:45.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really do mean a common/important word in English without a reasonably-close, single-word translation in at least one other language, there must be many, many examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite example is that the word &quot;fewest&quot; is missing in Swedish. Swedish has close equivalents for few and fewer but switches to &quot;minst antal&quot; (roughly &quot;least number&quot;) for fewest (though some may mistranslate to the Swedish word for &quot;smallest&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you might discount &quot;fewest&quot; since only &quot;few&quot; is common enough to qualify as important. A database search should provide better hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T12:01:45.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2013-03-29T12:58:09.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may distinguish Armenian by two types of R used in a phrase (provided its sound sequence is long enough): there are trilled /r/ ռ = ṙ (similar to Spanish, Swedish or German phoneme) and tapped /ɾ/ ր = r, which is more like English phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian, on the other hand, uses the rhotic r/რ, which is more like Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The melos of speech also differs in two languages, but I cannot explain it verbally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-04-06T20:41:47.027" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T20:41:47.027" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3458" CreationDate="2013-03-29T17:37:47.857" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short: immersion helps a great deal, but it is neither always essential, nor always sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few definition problems here. &lt;strong&gt;What counts as immersion&lt;/strong&gt;, and which aspects of it do you consider essential?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exposure: reading and listening and watching people speak in a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Active use: producing sentences in the language yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interaction: getting immediate feedback in the form of a natural conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speech: all of the above in speech (so not only in written communication).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think by immersion you mean you get all of the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How well does one need to know a language&lt;/strong&gt; for you to say that one has &quot;learned&quot; it? There is a very wide range between &quot;can buy bread at a supermarket&quot; or &quot;can read a comic book&quot; on one hand, and &quot;can successfully pose as a native speaker&quot; or &quot;can win literary prizes for writing novels in proper style&quot; on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I think your progress will on average be slower without the above four points of immersion, you can certainly learn a language very well without some of them. If you watch a lot of French films, read a lot of French, chat with people on-line in French, but never visit a Francophone country, you can still learn to read, write, and speak very good French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, many people who have lived in France for several years will still make grammatical errors and have a fairly noticeable accent. Moreover, if you never read good literature, your French will most likely never approach that of an educated Frenchman, not even after 30 years of immersion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. It is easier to learn skills associated with &lt;strong&gt;producing language&lt;/strong&gt; by immersion than by other means, but you can still learn them;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. Immersion is not enough for other skills, such as &lt;strong&gt;educated reading and writing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. It greatly depends on the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immersion should be considered an important and efficient tool, but it is neither absolutely essential nor always sufficient. The best and quickest way to learn a language and all its facets is by a &lt;strong&gt;combination of reading, writing, and immersion&lt;/strong&gt; (so speaking and listening). Reading includes both novels and grammar books. Chatting on-line has some of the important aspects of immersion, but it is of course confined to writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-03-29T21:28:55.760" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T21:28:55.760" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3450" CreationDate="2013-03-29T20:34:35.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Number&lt;/strong&gt; in language is a big subject, much too big for a single answer on a site like this. I recommend you find the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/no/knowledge/isbn/item1160529/Number/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Number&quot; by G. G. Corbett&lt;/a&gt;, which I think gives a good overview. It is not exhaustive (I doubt any book on a scientific topic ever can be) but it is very clearly written and a fast read. Just skimming the table of contents is an eye opener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been years since I read it, but IIRC it discusses things like trial and tertial number (for things that come in threes or fours) and whether these really exist, paucal (few, countable) as opposed to plural (many, uncountable) systems, some that also include duals (things that come in twos, not that uncommon a number actually), count versus mass, where number is expressed (on nouns? verbs? pronouns? adjectives? etc.), how it is expressed (clitic? affix? separate word? change of tone, stress?), what sort of reduced systems the author has found (reduced=missing number, e.g dual for people but not things, plural marked in the present tense but not any other tense) etc. etc. Number, like all things I've ever looked into when it comes to language, is big, complex, and beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-03-29T20:34:35.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3200" CreationDate="2013-03-29T23:53:27.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Genie&lt;/a&gt; was a feral child who was abused and grew up almost without linguistic skills but acquired some language skills as a teenager. The papers published on her case might provide insights into the view point of someone who does not have language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1916" LastEditorUserId="1767" LastEditDate="2013-03-30T18:28:12.490" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T18:28:12.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2013-03-30T00:21:21.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a bit informal but the introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Princeton Companion to Mathematics&lt;/a&gt; includes a rather nice discussion of the grammar of mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T00:21:21.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3467" CreationDate="2013-03-30T03:51:43.137" Score="2" ViewCount="1282" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tense&lt;/strong&gt; is the grammatical expression of the location of events in time. It anchors (or ‘grounds’) an event to the speaker’s experience&#xA;  of the world by relating the &lt;strong&gt;event time&lt;/strong&gt; to a point of reference.&#xA;  The normal, universal and therefore unmarked point of reference is the&#xA;  moment of speaking – &lt;strong&gt;speech time&lt;/strong&gt;, what has been called ‘the&#xA;  inescapable and constantly changing &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; in which all verbal&#xA;  interaction takes place’. Past event takes place before the ‘now’,&#xA;  while future events are thought of as taking place after it. (Angela&#xA;  Downing, English Grammar: A University Course)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t grasp what she says about the tense exactly. So I brought an example below. In the example, it seems that the ‘speech time’ is past, for the whole story is mainly developed by the tense. Having thought this, I’m confused at the ‘present’ dialogues: “I think you must. . .”, “See? Harry Potter. . .” &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Would you let me know what is ‘speech time’, and why it can be constantly changing now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hagrid,&quot; he said quietly, &quot;I think you must have made a mistake. I&#xA;  don't think I can be a wizard.&quot; &lt;br/&gt;  To his surprise, Hagrid&#xA;  chuckled. &lt;br/&gt;  &quot;Not a wizard, eh? Never made things happen when you&#xA;  was scared or angry?&quot; &lt;br/&gt;  Harry looked into the fire. Now he came&#xA;  to think about it... every odd thing that had ever made his aunt and&#xA;  uncle furious with him had happened when he, Harry, had been upset or&#xA;  angry... chased by Dudley's gang, he had somehow found himself out of&#xA;  their reach... dreading going to school with that ridiculous haircut,&#xA;  he'd managed to make it grow back... and the very last time Dudley had&#xA;  hit him, hadn't he got his revenge, without even realizing he was&#xA;  doing it? Hadn't he set a boa constrictor on him? &lt;br/&gt;   Harry looked&#xA;  back at Hagrid, smiling, and saw that Hagrid was positively beaming at&#xA;  him. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;      &quot;See?&quot; said Hagrid. &quot;Harry Potter, not a wizard - you wait, you'll be right famous at Hogwarts.&quot;  (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1728" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T11:51:34.627" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T11:51:34.627" Title="What does &quot;speech time&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3466" CreationDate="2013-03-30T05:19:44.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's related to the concept of time. You know how &lt;strong&gt;the present&lt;/strong&gt; refers to the exact moment we live in? Everything after it (i.e. everything that hasn't happened yet) is called &lt;strong&gt;the future&lt;/strong&gt; and everything before it (i.e. everything that has already happened) is called &lt;strong&gt;the past&lt;/strong&gt;. Also, you need to realize that the future will eventually become the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, image it's currently Wednesday. Today, Wednesday, is the present. Yesterday, Tuesday, is the past and tomorrow, Thursday, is the future. Now imagine it's Thursday. Is Thursday still the future? No, it's now the present. And when it becomes Friday then Thursday will be the past. So &lt;em&gt;on Wednesday&lt;/em&gt; Thursday was &quot;the future&quot; but &lt;em&gt;on Friday&lt;/em&gt;, Thursday is &quot;the past&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speech time&lt;/strong&gt; (which I'd probably write as &quot;time of speech&quot;) refers to the exact moment a person speaks/writes anything. &lt;strong&gt;Tense&lt;/strong&gt; tells use when an event is happening in relation to when the person is speaking. So &lt;em&gt;on Wednesday&lt;/em&gt;, I would use &lt;em&gt;future tense&lt;/em&gt; to talk about events on Thursday (e.g. &quot;I &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; go to the store on Thursday&quot;). &lt;em&gt;On Friday&lt;/em&gt; I need to use &lt;em&gt;past tense&lt;/em&gt; to talk about Thursday (e.g. &quot;I &lt;strong&gt;went&lt;/strong&gt; to the store on Thursday&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where is gets tricky and here is where I think your problem is: If it is Wednesday and I am talking about Thursday I must use the future tense &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; what if I wrote my message, &quot;I will go to the store on Thursday&quot;, in an email and sent it to you but you didn't read it until Friday? &lt;em&gt;To you&lt;/em&gt; Thursday is in the past but I still used future tense. The reason is that  at the time I wrote the message (the &lt;strong&gt;speech time&lt;/strong&gt;) Thursday (when the &lt;strong&gt;event&lt;/strong&gt; was to take place) was still in the future. However, time moved forward and by the time &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; read it, Thursday was in the past. However, this does not affect the grammatical of my message at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of the Harry Potter quote, &lt;em&gt;the story&lt;/em&gt; takes place in the past. That is why &lt;em&gt;the narrator&lt;/em&gt; (the person telling the story to you, the reader) uses past tense. But the &lt;em&gt;events&lt;/em&gt; the characters talk about are happening &lt;em&gt;at the same time as they are speaking about them&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. the &lt;strong&gt;event time&lt;/strong&gt; is the same as the &lt;strong&gt;speech time&lt;/strong&gt;) so even though to you, the reader, the events are all in the past, the characters must use present or future tense because &lt;em&gt;to them&lt;/em&gt; the events either are happening at that moment or have yet to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, tense is decided by the &lt;em&gt;temporal relationship&lt;/em&gt; between when a &lt;strong&gt;speech&lt;/strong&gt; is made (the &lt;strong&gt;speech time&lt;/strong&gt;) and when the &lt;strong&gt;event&lt;/strong&gt; it talks about takes place (the &lt;strong&gt;event time&lt;/strong&gt;). The three simplest of these are past, present, and future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously tenses are more complicated than just past, present, future. Once you feel you understand the basic principle, check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_tenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for more information on Tenses in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-03-30T11:22:50.393" LastActivityDate="2013-03-30T11:22:50.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3471" CreationDate="2013-03-31T13:18:05.267" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do descriptivists differ from prescriptivists in &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they determine whether something is correct? Or do they differ in &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; or not they determine whether something is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if 80% of the English-speaking population decided to spell &quot;tsunami&quot; as &quot;zunami&quot;, but there was no justification for that spelling, and mainstream media still preferred &quot;tsunami&quot;, how would descriptivists and prescriptivists differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Descriptivist: 80% of people spell it &quot;zunami&quot;. It ought to be&#xA;  recognized as a correct spelling of that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist: Those 80% are idiots! &quot;Tsunami&quot; is the only correct spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prescriptivist: The correct spelling is &quot;tsunami&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Descriptivist: I don't believe in such a thing as &quot;correct spelling&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T16:38:15.397" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T18:05:40.713" Title="Do descriptivists differ from prescriptivists in how, or whether, they determine correctness?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3470" CreationDate="2013-03-31T13:35:58.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, maybe more the second for the prescriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Descriptivist&lt;/a&gt;, a bit of both. The fact is, descriptivists &lt;em&gt;don't really care&lt;/em&gt; about the correct spelling, or rather, they don't really care about saying there is one or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, Linguistics is descriptive. Linguists don't care if something is correct or not, they analyze what happens in a language and the causes, etc. Not whether it's right or wrong. They just describe the world (linguistic perspective of course) as it is, without preconceived ideas of how something must be. They would say &quot;80% of the population says zunami&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, they would probably also say that they don't believe in a thing called correctness, but that's because we're not talking about black and white issues, the world is not divided into two set groups of people that either think &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. For this reason, we don't have a total descriptivist or total prescriptivist, but two tendencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T16:13:40.667" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T16:13:40.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3470" CreationDate="2013-03-31T15:45:42.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid this is a rather poor question. However, instead of voting to close it because it's off-topic, I'll attempt to explain in an answer what's wrong with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question uses the terms &lt;em&gt;Prescriptivist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Descriptivist&lt;/em&gt; without qualification, presupposing that they are well-known and well-defined terms, that they actually refer to two different real groups of real people, and that there are in opposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is true. That means that, whatever you're asking about, there's no answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be people who wish to define themselves as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, for all I know -- &#xA;there are people who will do &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt;. But there are certainly no coherent groups of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; people, and there is absolutely no coherent viewpoint represented by the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; people who believe that there is only one correct way to speak or write a particular language (oddly enough, that always turns out to be the way &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; speak or write it). Some may call them &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt;, since they &lt;em&gt;prescribe&lt;/em&gt; behavior for others, like a doctor prescribing medicine; others use different terms, from different metaphors. Almost none of these people are linguists. Some of them may consider themselves &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; others may not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are people who believe that &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; is what people speak and write and that no bit of language is inherently &quot;better&quot; than any other. Some of these people are linguists. And some linguists &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; describe language and languages, so some might call them &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt;, like a biologist describing natural phenomena; but there are very few linguists in total, so real descriptivists are a very small part of this group, and very few of them besides linguists would consider themselves to be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are lots of other people, with lots of other opinions about language and correct behavior. They aren't either &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;D&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that it's impossible to identify the two groups you mentioned, or to identify members of either group, so anybody can say anything they like about them. And they do. But there's no information in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T18:05:40.713" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T18:05:40.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3477" CreationDate="2013-03-31T18:02:27.033" Score="4" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some of the difficulties that linguists face in defining the notion of &quot;word&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what little I've been able to find out, the concept of the word is considered problematic among quite a few linguists.  But though I've found some links about lexicology, I haven't been able to find a specific source that outlines some of the main problems.   What makes &quot;word&quot; hard to define for the purposes of linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-07T09:29:32.267" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T17:54:20.707" Title="What are some of the difficulties that linguists face in defining the notion of &quot;word&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3479" CreationDate="2013-03-31T18:24:16.017" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who came in late:    From what I understand, English stative verbs don't take the progressive.   We can use progressive in utterances with dynamic verbs.   Witness &quot;I'm eating,&quot; &quot;She's running,&quot; and &quot;The Martians are melting the tanks.&quot;   But we can't use progressive in utterances with stative verbs.   Witness these:  &quot;*I'm believing in Santa,&quot; &quot;*She's knowing the way home,&quot; or &quot;*The Martians are owning California.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that the verb &quot;think&quot; isn't always stative.  So we have these perfectly well-formed English messages with &quot;think&quot; in the progressive.   &quot;Don't disturb her;  she's thinking.&quot;   &quot;You aren't thinking about leaving, are you?&quot;  &quot;You've been thinking bad thoughts!&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seemed to me, until recently, that &quot;think&quot; was always stative when it took a that- clause as a complement.   &quot;I think that we should end this card game,&quot; was and is grammatical, but four decades ago when I was young, &quot;*I'm thinking that we should end this card game&quot; was not.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to have changed.  Now I hear (or rather &quot;now I'm hearing&quot;) &quot;think&quot; with both progressive and that-clause complements all the time.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we witnessing the death of stative &quot;think&quot;?   If not, am I missing out on a fact about the usage of &quot;think&quot; and verbs like it that's been around for a long time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-07T09:27:07.087" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T09:27:07.087" Title="Are we witnessing the death of stative &quot;think&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-31T18:48:34.037" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, languages differ when it comes to the prevalence of compound words in their lexicons.   For example, the fact that compound words are more prevalent in Chinese than in French was mentioned in this article:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much do languages vary when it comes to the prevalence of compound words in their lexicons?   Are there extremes, such as languages with almost no compound words?    (The article above describes Chinese as lying near the opposite extreme.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-03-31T19:51:04.227" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T19:51:04.227" Title="How much do languages vary when it comes to the prevalence of compound words in their lexicons?" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-03-31T19:52:12.697" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to study linguistics. Could someone recommend a reputable introductory text for the study of linguistics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1920" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T02:20:52.480" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T02:20:52.480" Title="What is a reputable introductory text for the study of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-10-01T06:49:32.470" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-03-31T20:29:30.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3473" CreationDate="2013-03-31T20:17:47.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Word&lt;/em&gt; is a popular term, which means that everybody has their own idea about what it means, aided or hobbled by whatever education they may have encountered that claimed to deal with  language or languages. That varies quite a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words (sorry), linguists &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; define the notion of &quot;word&quot;, except in particular circumstances, under particular conditions, for particular purposes. It's not up for general revision, and linguists have no authority to change people's vocabulary in any case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists only get to define technical linguistic terms in a technical linguistic contexts, like, for example,the fact that there are only two &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/tense.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in English, instead of the 6 or 12 or 67 that one might have been told about in what we laughingly call &quot;grammar school&quot;. Or like Matthews' distinctions between &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/threekindsofword.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;three different senses of &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is actually a pretty analytic language, which means that there isn't much &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inflection&lt;/a&gt;, so mostly syntax is a matter of the proper choice of lexical items and their arrangement into constructions. &lt;em&gt;Word&lt;/em&gt; is a useful choice for these lexical items, as long as we don't get bogged down in pointless determinism like the question of whether &lt;code&gt;XYZ&lt;/code&gt; is &quot;a word&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a polysynthetic language like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Lushootseed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt;, on the other hand, there are a lot of situations where it's hard to tell the difference between a word and a sentence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For instance, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;háʔɬtәƛʼusyiqʼibʔәcәluƛʼ&lt;/em&gt; 'The old woman used to make good baskets'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has three semantic roots:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; 1. &lt;em&gt;haʔɬ&lt;/em&gt; '(be) good, well'&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; 2. &lt;em&gt;yiqʼ-&lt;/em&gt; 'weave [baskets]'&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; 3. &lt;em&gt;luƛʼ&lt;/em&gt; 'elder [person]'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything else is supplied by the multiple inflections or derivations, rather than by auxiliaries and articles, prepositions and particles, like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even in English it's not so simple to identify words, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/fillmore+88.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;let alone&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/HowManyWords.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;count them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-04-07T17:54:20.707" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T17:54:20.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3474" CreationDate="2013-03-31T20:40:17.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens is that when we use a normally stative predicate in a construction like progressive or imperative that requires an active predicate, we are signalling that what we are actually referring to is some &lt;strong&gt;action&lt;/strong&gt; associated with the normally stative predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Rodin's bronze statue is doing is &lt;em&gt;thinking&lt;/em&gt;. This means doing something that gives the impression of one's being absorbed in thought. Since there is no standard behavioral accompaniment for &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;, this could be almost anything; Rodin certainly chose a common behavior to depict, but there are plenty of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, there is the active process of consideration before decision, as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm thinking about it; give me a minute, OK?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also various active phrasal verbs and idioms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He's overthinking his business plan.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Think it over/through; you'll see.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You'll have to think up a new logo.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of these are the mental stative sense of &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think it's a bad idea.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be made into a progressive inchoative, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm beginning/coming to think it's a bad idea.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that in turn can be shortened by simply making &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; progressive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm thinking it's a bad idea.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-03-31T20:40:17.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3474" CreationDate="2013-04-01T02:30:05.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this usage has been around for a long time and you're missing out. A simple look at Google's Ngram viewer shows that the rate of occurrence for both &quot;think that&quot; and &quot;thinking that&quot; have &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=think+that%2Cthinking+that&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2012&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot;&gt;held relatively consistent since 1800&lt;/a&gt;. Granted, Ngram Viewer only has data up to 2008, but it does suggest that the progressive construct &quot;thinking that...&quot; is not undergoing any particular surge in popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you might argue that those results are based on books and the phenomenon you're talking about is in informal speech. Unfortunately, I have no data on how this trend relates to informal speech but I would still say the results of Ngram Viewer evidence a historical precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, expanding somewhat on jlawler's answer, the progressive construct seems to place an emphasis on the act of thinking, creating slightly different semantic contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) It's a bad idea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) I think it's a bad idea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (3) I'm thinking it's a bad idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me (native Canadian-English speaker), these three sentences show different levels of confidence in the opinion &quot;it's a bad idea&quot;. Without any &quot;think&quot; construct, (1) implies absolute certainty. The stative construct (2) implies a high level of certainty but leaves room for doubt (for illustration, let's say 80-95% confidence). Finally, the progressive construct (3) allows room for much more doubt (maybe 55-70% confidence). This is reflected below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) It's a bad idea but I could be wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (5) I think it's a bad idea but I could be wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (6) I'm thinking it's a bad idea but I could be wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While none of these sentences are &lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt;, (4) seems marginally unacceptable to me. Given a choice between (5) and (6), I find (6) more natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with this perceived confidence, (1), (2), and (3) also differ in perceived forcefulness. I can think of numerous times where I have used &quot;think&quot; to soften the impact of my opinion when talking to a superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, there seem to be multiple stylistic and societal factors which influence the choice of the progressive &quot;think&quot; construct over stative &quot;think&quot; construct (over no &quot;think&quot; at all). Combined with the historical precedent, I don't believe progressive &quot;think&quot; is a new phenomenon nor that it is overtaking stative &quot;think&quot; in any meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final note, as I stated above, my answer relies heavily on my own personal intuition. I'd be very interested to hear what other native speakers think about my interpretation. It's entirely possible that I am part of the tend of this &quot;dying stative 'think'&quot; but I see no evidence suggesting that such a trend even exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-04-01T02:45:19.140" LastActivityDate="2013-04-01T02:45:19.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-01T14:52:05.420" Score="5" ViewCount="907" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to contrast the vowel systems of English and Spanish, and showing two vowel trapezoids seems like a good approach. I've not yet found one yet. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1923" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T20:38:04.947" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T22:01:01.360" Title="Do you have a vowel trapezoid for Spanish?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3300" CreationDate="2013-04-02T00:23:38.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; is a common source of reference for language classification and documentation. It uses the ISO 639-3 standard, which classifies languages using a three-letter coding system. The basic criteria that Ethnologue uses to identify languages (as opposed to, for example, dialects) are (i) mutual intelligibility between speakers of variants of a language; and (ii) existence of a common literature or of a common ethnolinguistic identity. The criterion for including a language in the ethnologue is that it must be “known to have living speakers who learned [it] by transmission from parent to child as the primary language of day-to-day communication”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1924" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T00:23:38.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3483" CreationDate="2013-04-02T00:41:26.780" Score="0" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose we take the view that language is a tool for communication. &lt;strong&gt;What would be the basic, or essential, constituents of a language?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples that come to mind: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a set of words &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a set of referents (objects to be described)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a mapping between words and the referents (establishes the meanings of words)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammar rules (to help form sentences)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... [anything else?]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the vagueness of this question. Please comment to let me know if there is any way to help you understand my question better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1924" LastEditorUserId="1924" LastEditDate="2013-04-02T00:54:06.250" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T02:41:45.157" Title="Constituents of language" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3482" CreationDate="2013-04-02T02:41:45.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert, so please judge this answer accordingly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that your question has an answer.  The words &quot;basic&quot; and &quot;essential&quot; are too vague;  one cannot test a constituent for &quot;basic-ness&quot; or &quot;essential-ness.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of giving you the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to assume that you are talking about elementary units of analysis.   In recipes, for example, ingredients (like flour, sugar, ground beef) and procedures (like basting, broiling, stirring, or baking) would be elementary units of analysis:  a finite set of things in terms of which all recipes can be analyzed.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things get more complicated when it comes to identifying elementary units of analysis for linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words can't be such units, because, as one expert recently pointed out to me, &quot;word&quot; is a popular and hard-to-define concept that academic linguists don't need.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referents can't be such units, because referents constitute all the things and states of affairs that language can be used to refer to--in other words, almost everything in the universe that humans know about.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that mappings between morphemes and referents can be elementary units of analysis, because meaning and reference are not identical and the relationship between them is best discussed by experts, and because morphemes aren't neatly mapped onto meanings in one-to-one correspondence, and the mappings between morphemes and meanings varies from language to language.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, language has different types of putative units of analysis, because language has different components.  Phonology (sound pattern rules), morpho-syntax (grammatical structure), and semantics (meaning) would each need their own units of analysis.   When it comes to semantics, I don't think that anyone has identified a finite set of semantic primitives in terms of which all morpheme meanings can be analyzed.  To my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has even established that such a list is possible.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your post suggests that you could profit from some first-year instruction in linguistics, or some introductory texts.   You might want to look up &quot;phonetics,&quot; &quot;phonology,&quot; &quot;morphology,&quot; &quot;syntax,&quot; &quot;semantics,&quot; and &quot;pragmatics.&quot;       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-04-02T02:41:45.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3486" CreationDate="2013-04-03T01:20:57.180" Score="44" ViewCount="210091" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, both terms have to do with the rules of formation of sentences. I've seen grammar used in mathematical contexts, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;computability theory&lt;/a&gt;, where it has a precise definition. But from what I've read about syntax, I cannot see the difference between the two terms. So, what's the difference? Or do they mean the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crosspost at English.SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/29577/9392&quot;&gt;What's the difference between grammar and syntax?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T22:37:03.483" Title="What's the difference between syntax and grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2013-04-03T01:50:48.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z2ZPDH6AP7sC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=syntax%20and%20grammar&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=pIlbUcm3EIGFO6OYgGg&amp;amp;ved=0CEUQ6AEwAQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Grammar and Syntax&lt;/a&gt; defines the two as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; is a set of rules that set forth the correct standard of usage in a language. These rules dictate how we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; say things correctly. For example, agreement between words in relation to other constructions in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of sentences and their structure, and the constructions within sentences. Syntax tells us what goes where in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T01:50:48.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2013-04-03T02:36:39.257" Score="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; is a (occasionally &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) set of rules for the organization of meaningful elements into sentences;&#xA;their &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt;, in one sense of that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two basic varieties of grammar; all languages have some of both kinds, but, depending on the kind of language involved, there's  a lot of variation in how much of each kind they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One part of grammar is called &lt;em&gt;Morphology&lt;/em&gt;. It has to do with the &lt;strong&gt;internal&lt;/strong&gt; economy of words. So a word like &lt;em&gt;bookkeepers&lt;/em&gt; has four morphemes (&lt;em&gt;book, keep, -er, -s&lt;/em&gt;) and is put together with morphology. English doesn't have nearly as much morphology as most European languages; Russian grammar, for instance, has much more morphology than syntax. Russian is a &lt;em&gt;synthetic&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflected&lt;/a&gt;) language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other part is called &lt;em&gt;Syntax&lt;/em&gt;. It has to do with the &lt;strong&gt;external&lt;/strong&gt; economy of words, including word order, agreement; like the sentence &lt;em&gt;For me to call her sister would be a bad idea&lt;/em&gt; and its syntactic transform &lt;em&gt;It would be a bad idea for me to call her sister&lt;/em&gt;. That's syntax.  English grammar is mostly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/pdf-files/syntaxtopics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;. English is an &lt;strong&gt;analytic&lt;/strong&gt; (uninflected) language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T22:37:03.483" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3480" CreationDate="2013-04-03T02:53:17.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made the trapezium from Otavio Macedo's comment in LaTeX and uploaded it &lt;a href=&quot;http://pdfcast.org/pdf/spanish-vowel-trapezium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It looks a little nicer now, and you can copy, save or snip it. Here is a preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cYf9p.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-04-03T11:46:36.650" LastActivityDate="2013-04-03T11:46:36.650" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-03T04:54:42.960" Score="5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of any (preferably free) online corpora of indigenous American languages (anywhere on the American hemisphere)? I've managed to find corpora of many of the common world languages, but I'm interested in adding some of the more diverse languages to my library as well. However, just about all of the indigenous American languages have been so marginalized that I can't find any widely-spoken enough to have corpora available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T16:05:57.437" Title="Corpora of Indigenous American Languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-03T09:11:48.797" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an assignment for my machine translation class which involves using the different language versions of websites as parallel corpora. The problem is the text isn't properly aligned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ryanair.com/ie/terms-and-conditions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ryanair.com/ie/terms-and-conditions&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ryanair.com/de/geschaeftsbedingungen#regulations-aircarrierinformation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ryanair.com/de/geschaeftsbedingungen#regulations-aircarrierinformation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://textmechanic.co&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;textmechanic.co&lt;/a&gt;, the English version has 481 sentences / 807 lines and the German version has 533 sentences / 909 lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of any way to automate / verify the text aligning process? We have a tried writing our own Java program to match as many sentences as possible and throw away ones which don't match. However, we encountered errors at punctuation such as full stops for Mr. / Mrs., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have any experience dealing with this sort of situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1930" LastEditorUserId="9707" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T17:41:07.093" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T17:41:07.093" Title="Automated methods to align text" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-04T11:22:46.370" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can we &lt;strong&gt;simply&lt;/strong&gt; define a language ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that a language is an association of a lexicon and a grammar ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1911" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T11:22:46.370" Title="What is a language?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2013-04-04T11:25:36.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-04-04T20:15:02.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't exact because you didn't describe whether the word should have exact equivalent or it's enough to have a rather synonym in another language but with essential semantic difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite example is couple of English words &quot;issue&quot; and &quot;problem&quot; and their translation to Russian. The technical support team at my work is especially trained to use &quot;issue&quot; for any thing which is treated by customer as something which needs explanation or fixing; but it's very hard to translate &quot;issue&quot; to Russian because all translations have a main sense more closer to some another English word; e.g. &quot;вопрос&quot; is &quot;question&quot;, &quot;тема&quot; is &quot;topic&quot;, &quot;предмет&quot; is &quot;subject&quot; or &quot;thing&quot; or even &quot;agenda&quot;, and so on. Similar discussions in Russian tends to use &quot;проблема&quot;, but it's much softer than English &quot;problem&quot;; the latter generally means a kind of principal discrepancy, which solving needs even some sacrifice, while Russian &quot;проблема&quot; is closer to &quot;issue&quot; in its level but not in kind (&quot;issue&quot; can be a feature request or even a polite suggestion). So, it's impossible to give a one-to-one translation for English &quot;issue&quot; or &quot;problem&quot; to Russian; each translation variant needs detection of importance level and selecting a proper equivalent among more than ten similar words. Whether is it similar to colors for you, I don't know, but anyway this isn't for colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="865" LastActivityDate="2013-04-04T20:15:02.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-05T20:37:05.977" Score="4" ViewCount="1419" Body="&lt;p&gt;As onomatopoeia, the words used for animal sounds are often quite similar across many languages. However, there are non-trivial differences, even for something as common as the croak of a frog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if these differences could generally be grouped (or explained) according to language family or if it's basically just chance (eg, the term that caught on due to some local story or song).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to put this is to ask to what extent the animals actually sound different to speakers of different languages (without getting too philosophical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T18:03:30.883" Title="Animal sounds across languages" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2013-04-06T03:27:59.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is quite widespread in Russian. The main competition happens between the &lt;em&gt;-а/-я&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-и/-ы&lt;/em&gt; forms, which were historically derived from PIE dual and plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;тон &quot;tone&quot; - тона (about colors) - тоны (about sounds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;хлеб &quot;bread&quot; - хлебы (about bakery products) - хлеба (about kinds of grasses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;цех &quot;plant workshop&quot; or &quot;medieval guild&quot; - цеха &quot;plant workshops&quot; - цехи &quot;guilds&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;год &quot;year&quot; - года (as in &quot;years passed&quot;, &quot;in your years/age&quot;) - годы (as &quot;in the 1990s years&quot;, &quot;the years of youth&quot;, also can replace года everywhere)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some forms can be used interchangeably:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;слесарь - слесари/слесаря&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;шторм - штормы/шторма&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-04-06T22:06:30.150" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T22:06:30.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-04-06T03:35:20.507" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the answer by Netch I would give some other examples of words whose equivalent does not exist in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;item&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;entry&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T03:35:20.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-06T14:36:20.173" Score="6" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;We live in a world that is incredibly different to the one that was here 200 years ago. Literacy, in the developed world at least, is no longer an elite privilege, but rather almost taken for granted. English speakers are instructed in the rights and wrongs of things like spelling and basic sentence construction from an early age, and the same goes for many, many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the growth of the internet, we see a huge increase in the level of communication between language communities that are far removed from one another (ie, the internet, media). It was, in the past, the physical separation that induced accent/dialect change, initially, and over longer periods of time, the development of new languages in their own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: given that the rules of a language are taught prescriptively to young members of a language community, and the breakdown of the factors that lead to increased diversity between dialects, what impact will this modern age have on traditional language evolution. Will languages with standardised rules and a globally interconnected community of native speakers (e.g. USA-UK-Australia) see a slowing in divergence compared to what was observed in the past, or will it be a convergence, or will there be no tangible impact at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1117" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T17:54:58.437" Title="Impact of widespread literacy and global communication on language evolution" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2013-04-06T15:19:09.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested, then &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cl.uzh.ch/research/nlp4quechua_en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here's a website with a list of resources for Quechua&lt;/a&gt;, the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas. I highly recommend that you visit the following website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cl.uzh.ch/research/nlp4quechua_en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cl.uzh.ch/research/nlp4quechua_en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a project that is dedicated to collecting corpora for indigenous languages in South America. They are focusing especially on Quechua, Aymara and Guarani. The project is called &lt;em&gt;hltdi-l3&lt;/em&gt; and is collecting parallel corpora for these languages and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am from Peru and I work in the computer linguistics area. In my experience I have found that the institution in my country that has the most corpora is the &quot;PUCP&quot;. They have a project called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lengamer.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lengamer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is focused on lots of indigenous languages (the website is in spanish):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lengamer.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lengamer.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case I work with Quechua and Ashaninka. If I could be of any help just write to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the spelling and grammar mistakes in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1935" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-07T09:05:20.357" LastActivityDate="2013-04-07T09:05:20.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-06T16:11:34.283" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any explanation regarding why some nouns are used in singular form while the others are used in plural form such as price tags in stores or menus in restaurants. I know that in languages where there is count/mass distinction uncountable nouns such as milk, meat etc. are tagged in singular form. For example in Swedish, at the stores many countable items are naturally tagged in plural form such as &quot;apelsiner(oranges)&quot;and &quot;jackor(jackets)&quot; as they are tagged in English. However I noticed out that countable products such as cucumbers and onions are tagged in singular form as &quot;gurka&quot; and &quot;lök&quot; rather than &quot;gurkor&quot; and &quot;lökar&quot; on the contrary to other fruits and vegetables. Is there any examination/explanation in linguistics directly referring such terminology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1913" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T16:11:34.283" Title="On price tags/labels why some nouns are used singular/plural regardless of countability?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-06T20:59:04.720" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the isolating languages I am familiar with have context-bound semantics either in division into parts of speech (e.g. Chinese) or word meaning (Yoruba), or both (Chinese, again). E.g., in Chinese, the meaning of 来 in 来世 'future life' or in 来来! 'come on, move!' is different, the former having an approximate meaning of adjective, the latter roughly corresponding to an imperative form. Or the actual meaning of Yoruba ní 'on, at, in' and sí ‘onto, towards’ are to be defined by context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide more examples from other isolating languages to shed some more light on this theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-04-06T20:59:04.720" Title="Is there a correspondence between contextual semantics and the type of language?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-06T21:32:15.657" Score="1" ViewCount="594" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. transformational grammars or probabilistic grammars deal with language structures, branching, semantic ranging, etc. They are dealing with more or less 'rational', or logical cocepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if there are grammar which cover such aspects, as ethics (like any language with honorifics, or with status sociolects, like Tamil), or grammars of emotions (from Tamil concepts of agams to emotions coded in grammars of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Australian&lt;/a&gt; and Amazonian languages)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the exact domains of language grammars? Are they ontological, and if they are, is that explicitly or implicitly determined? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-04-08T02:46:59.900" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T02:46:59.900" Title="What is the exact domain of a grammar?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-04-10T21:53:42.970" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="375" CreationDate="2013-04-07T19:54:07.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be all fair and square to both sides of this discussion, the actual truth can go either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in defense of those who say that Dacian was already related to Latin, it makes more sense than you think, if you but try to think it over.  This may explain the many dissimilarities between Romanian and other Romance languages, mainly why so many Romanian words have roots in Latin words different than their French, Spanish, Italian etc. counterparts.  Roman Emperor Trajan himself said that he was from a Dacian (or related) village, where as a child he spoke a sort of Latin, much like all Dacians from other neighboring villages - this can be found in his correspondence and journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that such a theory has a lot of opposition and I understand why that is so.  If this theory held, it would refute 99% of all doctoral studies, books, and textbooks about Romanians' origins and their Roman-Dacian heritage.  This would spell a big &lt;em&gt;Ouch!&lt;/em&gt; for those who issued these studies.  Campaigns to change the idea of Romanian heritage have taken place before, and not just in Romania.  Before the 18-19th centuries, many sought to restore a Greater Dacia; after that, many sought to create a Greater Romania (which happened for a short spell of time).  During Communism, they sought to teach Romanians of their Slavic heritage (thank the Soviets for that), although Romanian and Russian barely had anything in common, as opposed to the other Romance languages.  After the 1989 fall of Communism, we returned to the idea of purely Roman heritage while seeking the support of the West and EU accession.  I don't know what Dacians did wrong to be sidelined as an uncivilized people (as I, myself, was taught they were, in school).  Interestingly enough, all invaders and foreign occupation have been described in Romanian history textbooks as evil, except the Romans.  In terms of defining foreign occupation, what makes the Romans so much better than the Russians, the Poles, the Ottomans, or the Austro-Hungarians?  The Romans were as much of an invading power as all the other ones.  Do you see the politics in this?  I know that I am biased, but I try not to be.  In the end, all history is more or less biased, because we explain it in accordance with our current knowledge, perceptions, and feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we but apply common sense, here's one fact we are all aware of:  The Roman Empire conquered only about 14% of the Dacian kingdom, which it occupied for only ~160 years.  Comparatively, the Romans occupied other areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa for even 400-800 years at a time.  For some reason, as stated by many historians, Dacians seem to have forgotten their language completely in the 160-year occupation of only 14% of Dacia, while other peoples who were under Roman occupation for many more centuries seem to have kept their language just fine.  To me, that makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dacian kingdom was pretty well developed when it was conquered (partially) by the Romans.  Hence all the artisan work that has been discovered, the complex decorations on Dacian battle shields, Dacian fortifications and other ruins, the over 100 statues of Dacians exhibited in Rome (more than any other people conquered by the Romans), the 4 statues of Dacians guarding Constantine's arch, and the references to the Dacians made in the writings of Ptolemy, Socrates, Pythagoras, Herodotus and others as a well-organized, fearless people.  They were well known at the beginning of our era as a strong kingdom that often plundered the Roman Empire before they were conquered, during Roman occupation, and even after the Aurelian retreat in 271 AD (although to a much lesser extent).  After the Aurelian retreat south of the Danube they struck a deal with the Romans to protect the Roman Danubian borders from invaders (I'm not sure how well that played out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References to Romanians' being referred to as &lt;em&gt;Dacians&lt;/em&gt; date all the way to the 18th century.  Horia, a famous Romanian revolutionary of that century, is depicted on a painting made for the Emperor of Austria at the time (whom he met at least three times at his court) as &lt;em&gt;Rex Daciae&lt;/em&gt; (King of Dacia).  Horia was known as &lt;em&gt;Rex Daciae&lt;/em&gt;, being known to seek the reunification of old Dacia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that Romanians are pure descendants of the Romans was implanted in the minds of Romanians especially in Transylvania, by Transylvanian Romanian scholars who sought the support of the West, particularly France and the Vatican, in their struggle against Hungarian occupation and persecution of Transylvanian Romanians.  It makes perfect sense to seek such a relationship with these European (and heavily Catholic) powers when the Catholic Church was clearly at odds with the Protestant movement (later on), the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman Empire (the Muslim threat).  The Orthodox Church was considered a Slavic church by most; the Slavs were not liked because of their connection to the great migrations that had heavily impaired European civilization and Catholic development, previously.  Mind you, the pan-European movement to latinize language occurred mostly after the Great Schism (1054) between the Vatican and Constantinople.  Therefore, the Dacians and proto-Romanians could not have been as heavily affected by Carolingian renaissance, or by the Catholic campaign of the Middle Ages that sought to instill the importance of Latin in the sociopolitical relations of Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the University of Hamburg, Germany, ran some paleogenetic tests - that is, they compared the DNA of bones dated up to ~6000 BC with the DNA of Romanians nowadays.  The resemblance was staggering (around 75%).  At the same time, they compared the DNA of Romanians with the DNA of Italians... only about 5-6% resemblance.  There were more similarities between Romanians and Italians from Northern Italy, but nowhere near 75%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Micheál Ledwith, adviser to Pope John Paul II, having had access to the Vatican Library, stated that indeed Romanian is not resulted from Latin, but rather that both Latin and Romanian stem from the same mother language, Thracian.  Basically, that means that Dacian and Latin were sister languages long before Dacians and Romans met.  When Dacians surrendered to Rome, after years-long wars, there is no mention of any translators mediating the peace talks, which would have normally been the case.  I conclude from this that Latin was a very important adstratum to the evolution of Romanian (as were the surrounding Slavic languages), but no more than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, all of this can be interpreted both ways...  There is a lot more to be told about these things, but I don't think I will.  If you speak Romanian, you may want to watch these two documentaries released last year about the Dacians and Romanians' heritage.  There are also versions on Youtube with English subtitles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dacii - Adevaruri tulburatoare&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;amp;v=duj_84hnc58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Documentary on YouTube 2012 HD &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dacii - Noi dezvăluiri&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;amp;v=3yBrbMrAppw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;YouTube 2012 HD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS - I am Romanian and I'm studying linguistics (particularly French).  I am proud to be Romanian and am proud of my heritage.  I don't dispute the Roman contribution to world civilization and to the Dacian people, by all means they were a great political and cultural empire.  But I do dispute the idea that the main ancestors of Romanians are the Romans.  For reasons aforementioned and others that I will not mention at this point, I do believe that there is more to Romanian heritage than the Romans and the Latin language.  I believe that the Dacian and Latin languages were closely related, enough that there was never a complete latinization and subsequent replacement of the Dacian language by Latin.  As for the Romanian words asserted to be Dacian, they are present in other Balkan countries/languages as well, and may very well be of Thracian descent (hence the pan-Balkan similitude).  You will find specific sources to the things I just mentioned in the above documentaries (which you can find on Youtube with English subtitles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1937" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T13:54:03.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:54:03.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-08T09:54:22.927" Score="4" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any good references for an introduction to the theory of strict cyclicity within Generative Phonology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1915" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T20:37:10.240" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T01:03:20.553" Title="Introduction to Strict Cyclicity" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3508" CreationDate="2013-04-08T13:56:53.823" Score="7" ViewCount="2975" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a phonological rule, taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_rule&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qqvUh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a package or some other convenient way to format this in LaTeX?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T23:45:16.313" Title="Is there a package for formatting phonological rules in LaTeX?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latex&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-08T14:29:04.430" Score="5" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where I grew up (UK) there was a pub called The Drysalters. I always liked this name without having any idea what a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drysalter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;drysalter&lt;/a&gt; was, or having any association or emotional connection to the pub itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just heard a BBC Radio 4 programme discussing drysalters which said exactly the same thing; that the word is evocative and pleasant to the ear (and ought to be reclaimed - it has fallen out of use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know JRR Tolkien famously said &lt;em&gt;cellar door&lt;/em&gt; was the most beautiful combination of sounds in English, and this has already been &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13237/why-do-some-consider-cellar-door-a-beautiful-phrase&quot;&gt;discussed on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage site&lt;/a&gt;. This has led me to a potted history of phonoaesthetics on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be combinations of sounds or words which are pleasant (or unpleasant) to the ear. Although it might sometimes be because of association (Wikipedia has some interesting reasons why the door to the cellar might be evocative), this cannot be the only reason (as in my case with drysalters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain words can find their origins far back in the roots of Indo-European languages, the most obvious one being the &lt;em&gt;ma&lt;/em&gt; sound of so many words meaning 'mother'. Is there any traceable reason why phonoaesthetic words are so attractive? Do those particular sounds have their roots deep in the first languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1941" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T11:55:18.813" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T11:55:18.813" Title="Cellar door and Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-08T15:20:57.717" Score="3" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible to parody other languages by how they sound. Even if you don't know any words of that language you can make pretend speech which others will recognise as being that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg German is full of &lt;em&gt;sch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;acht&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vie&lt;/em&gt; (wie), &lt;em&gt;unt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian is full of &lt;em&gt;iano&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gnore&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ucci&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm sorry I don't know how to write these phonetically, and I certainly don't mean to offend anyone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to know is how would people from other countries parody English? What are the determining sounds that distinguish English from other languages? How would you mock English speakers in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Light hearted mocking of course. I'm not trying to start an international incident here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1941" LastActivityDate="2013-04-08T15:20:57.717" Title="How is English stereotyped by non-native speakers?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-04-08T15:42:13.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-08T19:56:32.497" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language#Africa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Italian is spoken to some degree in Libya, Eritrea and Federal Republic of Somalia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there in Africa any &lt;em&gt;clearly different&lt;/em&gt; varieties of this language which have &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; local traits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-11-28T03:57:22.283" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T03:57:22.283" Title="To what extent do African dialects of Italian differ from their European counterparts?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3502" CreationDate="2013-04-09T01:08:55.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could make the above rule as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass{article}\usepackage{tipa,amsmath}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;    $\left[\begin{array}{l}+\text{stop}\\+\text{consonant}\\+\text{alveolar}\end{array}\right] \longrightarrow$ \textipa{[R]} /&#xA;        $\left[\begin{array}{l}+\text{vowel}\\+\text{stressed}\end{array}\right]$ \rule[-10pt]{20pt}{1pt} $\left[\begin{array}{l}+\text{vowel}\\-\text{stressed}\end{array}\right]$&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, you could define a macro to automate some of the typing. A crude and simple one puts the following commands in the preamble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\fSet}[2]{#1\text{#2}\\}&#xA;\newcommand{\featMatrix}[1]{$\left[\begin{array}{l}#1\end{array}\right]$}&#xA;\def\goesTo{$\longrightarrow$}&#xA;\def\Context{\rule[-10pt]{20pt}{1pt}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can produce the same rule more simply as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\featMatrix{\fSet{+}{stop}\fSet{+}{consonant}\fSet{+}{alveolar}}&#xA;\goesTo&#xA;\textipa{[R]}&#xA;/&#xA;\featMatrix{\fSet{+}{vowel}\fSet{+}{stressed}}&#xA;\Context\&#xA;\featMatrix{\fSet{+}{vowel}\fSet{-}{stressed}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T01:08:55.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3502" CreationDate="2013-04-09T01:16:59.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These kinds of phonological rules are pretty easy to do with standard LaTeX such as mbox, the array environment, etc. Here's an example (warning to TeXperts, you may find this ugly!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{figure}[h]  \centering %#%\small&#xA;  \[ \mbox{/h/ $\rightarrow$} \left\{&#xA;    \begin{array}{l}&#xA;      \parbox{1.7in}{[h] $\sim$ [\slashed{0}]{\Large /}     \underline{~~~~}C_{\textsubscript{\textsc{son}}}}  \\&#xA;      \parbox{1in}{[\texthth]  {\Large /} V\underline{~~~~}V} \\&#xA;      \mbox{[h] ~ elsewhere}&#xA;    \end{array}&#xA;  \right.&#xA;  \]&#xA;  \caption{Allophonic variation of /h/}&#xA;\end{figure}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mLRtA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Allophonic variation of /h/&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what other phonological rules you're interested in displaying in LaTeX, but I can provide an example Optimality Theory tableau if that's helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some useful information at the  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/latex4ling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX for linguists&lt;/a&gt; page. That page is getting a bit outdated now but a general web search (eg 'latex linguistics phonology') will find lots more examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T01:16:59.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3495" CreationDate="2013-04-09T14:19:09.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read on the French Wikipedia that the spelling of French had an influence on its pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Au début du XVIe siècle, l'orthographe commence à avoir un impact sur la prononciation. Des consonnes initialement muettes, introduites en suivant l'étymologie, commencent à être prononcées (le &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; de &lt;em&gt;subtil&lt;/em&gt; par exemple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographe_fran%C3%A7aise#Histoire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographe_fran%C3%A7aise#Histoire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I'd translate as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the beginning of the 16th century, orthography starts to have an impact on pronunciation. Some consonants initially mute, introduced following etymology, start to be pronounced (the &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;subtil&lt;/em&gt; [&lt;em&gt;subtle&lt;/em&gt; in English], for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how accurate this story is, but it is a fact that as a French speaker, I do pronounce this &quot;b&quot;. So if it is true that this b was initially not pronounced, the idea that literacy may influence the evolution of the language is far from absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1379" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T14:19:09.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-09T17:13:09.897" Score="5" ViewCount="1799" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the concept of lexical density while reading &quot;Embracing a New Creed: Lexical Patterning and the Encoding of Ideology&quot;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; by Oliver Mason and Rhiannon Platt and was wondering what practical benefit it is for linguistic analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; Oliver Mason and Rhiannon Platt (2006) &quot;Embracing a New Creed: Lexical Patterning and the Encoding of Ideology&quot;, &lt;em&gt;College Literature&lt;/em&gt;, vol.33, no.2, 155—170.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've revised my understanding of lexical density based on re-reading the article in question and getting a clearer understanding of the actual calculation. I now understand lexical density to be the proportion of content words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to function words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns). Essentially I guess I understand it as the proportion of words that give meaning to the constituent clauses and phrases over against the words that appear in nearly every context and lend little to no meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1293" LastEditorUserId="1293" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T04:03:23.950" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T22:58:38.883" Title="What value does lexical density add to analysis?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3510" CreationDate="2013-04-09T17:56:02.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we take a sample of supposedly analytical language, then the samples of highest density are likely to be grammatical clauses. The items of highest frequency are likely to be grammatical particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking this as a starting point, we can deduce the grammatical meaning of a phrase/paragraph/clause, and perhaps even the limits of a sentence for a language where it is marked grammatically (e.g. SOV or OSV-languages, or languages where aspect is marked by a final particle in a sentence. Yes, like in Chinese). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2014-12-01T18:48:02.927" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T18:48:02.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3502" CreationDate="2013-04-09T18:02:22.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A late answer but perhaps it will help someone. Here's some code to generate a rule very similar to that of the example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass[11pt]{article}&#xA;\usepackage{amsmath,amsthm,amssymb}&#xA;&#xA;\usepackage{tipa}&#xA;\usepackage{soul}&#xA;&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;\begin{math}&#xA;\left[&#xA;\begin{array}{l}&#xA;+\mbox{stop} \\&#xA;+\mbox{consonant} \\&#xA;+\mbox{alveolar}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;\right]&#xA;\longrightarrow &#xA;\end{math} % Ending math mode to use the IPA symbol below &#xA;[\textfishhookr] % Using `tipa' package in the preamble&#xA;\begin{math} % Resume math mode&#xA;\left. \middle/ &#xA;\left[&#xA;\begin{array}{l}&#xA;+\mbox{vowel} \\&#xA;+\mbox{stressed}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;\right]&#xA;\right.&#xA;\end{math} % Ending math mode to have a good underscore below (using package `soul')&#xA;\setul{.5cm}{.4pt}% Lower the space between the underline and the text&#xA;\ul{$\qquad$} &#xA;\begin{math}&#xA;\left[&#xA;\begin{array}{l}&#xA;+\mbox{vowel} \\&#xA;-\mbox{stressed}&#xA;\end{array}&#xA;\right]&#xA;\end{math}&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it should look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lW57B.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-04-09T18:02:22.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-09T20:00:06.577" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify, &lt;em&gt;pre-positional&lt;/em&gt; articles are the articles positioned &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; a noun they refer to, like English &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Post-positional&lt;/em&gt; articles are those positioned &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a noun they refer to, like Swedish &lt;em&gt;-en/-ett&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;en skog =&gt; skogen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (forest =&gt; the forest), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ett barn =&gt;barnet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a child =&gt; the child),  Romanian &lt;em&gt;-l/-le&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;codru =&gt; codrul&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (forest =&gt; the forest), or Bulgarian &lt;em&gt;-ът /-та / -то / -те&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;гора = гората&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (forest =&gt; the forest), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the languages which have &lt;em&gt;pre-positional&lt;/em&gt; articles (not to be confused with languages with articles merged into prepositions, like French &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt;, or Italian &lt;em&gt;della&lt;/em&gt;) but which have no &lt;em&gt;post-positional&lt;/em&gt; articles, then we notice that these languages also have &lt;em&gt;zero articles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_article_in_English#Zero_article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English, the zero articles&lt;/a&gt; are used with mass noun singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, the zero article (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books/about/L_Article_Z%C3%A9ro_en_Fran%C3%A7ais_Contemporai.html?id=lskaSr4WCFQC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article zéro&lt;/a&gt;) serves to denote 'neither massive nor countable' non-partitive noun (which, to my understanding, is somewhat similar to that of Sumerian types of plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, the zero article (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.um.es/lincoing/jv/2002%20Contrastivo%20Carabela.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;artículo cero&lt;/a&gt;) stands for non-possessivness (?) and group partitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch also has zero articles, although it is difficult to find any reliable work on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the situation with &lt;em&gt;prepositional&lt;/em&gt; zero articles in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-04-10T05:14:37.577" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T05:14:37.577" Title="Do all languages with pre-positional articles have zero-articles if they don't have post-positional articles?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3515" CreationDate="2013-04-09T20:35:46.710" Score="5" ViewCount="2366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for two sentences that have phonological/phonetic ambiguity (like John's feat, and John's feet), but with different syntactic structures.&#xA;For example, &quot;John's feat was a big deal&quot; and &quot;John's feet was a big deal&quot; doesn't qualify for what I'm looking for because even though they have phonological ambiguity, their syntactic structure is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't come up with any...any help would be appreciated!  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1784" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T12:54:52.867" Title="Phonological ambiguity that changes the syntactic structure" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2013-04-10T00:34:59.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fruit flies like a banana&lt;/em&gt; is a famous example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T00:34:59.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2013-04-10T02:59:02.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonological ambiguity is often the result of phonological change. &lt;em&gt;Feet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;feat&lt;/em&gt; are homonyms in Modern English, but they were pronounced differently in Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift merged both ME long /æ:/ and long /e:/ into Modern English tense /i/, whence /fit/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So another example of phonological change that changes the syntactic structure -- in fact a recurring prototypical example -- is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Grammaticalization.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammaticalization Cycle&lt;/a&gt;. This happened in Latin around 0 CE, leading to the Romance languages; and in English a millennium later, after the Norman invasion make English a language spoken by illiterate peasants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-04-10T02:59:02.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-11T02:29:42.120" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend/coworker and I got into a pretty heated discussion about a label for a graph I had made and the units I was using.  We work in internet advertising where there is a type of unit (I consider it a unit anyway) called a &quot;CPM&quot; (Cost Per Million, in dollars usually).  To give some visualization to some data we're collecting, I made a line graph to see CPM over Time (seconds).  I used CPM because the amount of money per second was too small to do in normal dollars.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend then saw the label for the graph, something like &quot;CPM/Second&quot;, and the argument ensued.  His claim was it could only be used as a rate and nothing else.  Where he is getting confused (again, I think), is saying you are paying per million when you are only paying for one unit is sort of weird to think about.  While knowing that it is often used as a rate, I also know it has been used as a unit and I don't see why that wouldn't make sense anyway.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is do humans interpret rates (Cost Per Milli, X Per Y, etc...) differently from absolute units? Are their any languages where this might be the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1948" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-04-11T02:51:44.290" LastActivityDate="2013-04-11T02:51:44.290" Title="Rates and Units: The difference?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3522" CreationDate="2013-04-12T01:15:20.710" Score="4" ViewCount="2047" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am native &lt;strong&gt;Armenian&lt;/strong&gt; speaker. I know &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; from childhood. Recent years &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; became my &lt;em&gt;second language&lt;/em&gt; and I am using it in everywhere except interaction with friends. Now I want to learn &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;. Do I need to learn &lt;strong&gt;Esperanto&lt;/strong&gt; first in order to make my job easy and more consciously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T09:31:28.530" Title="Do I need to learn Esperanto?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-08-23T13:33:10.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-04-12T01:58:30.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say probably not.  Despite its name, Esperanto is not a simplified Romance language.   Though much of its vocabulary comes from Romance languages, its phonemic inventory is Slavic, and its morphology is agglutinative.   See the Wikipedia article on Esperanto for more details.    &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Linguistic_properties&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Linguistic_properties&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the grammar of Esperanto, though it is simple, is so regular and embodies so much invention that I'm not sure that it resembles Italian grammar enough to serve as a stepping stone to learning Italian.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, and only speak one language, my native English, so take my answer with a grain of salt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-04-12T01:58:30.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-04-12T08:46:40.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are much more propedeutic languages. Latin is the first that comes to mind but if you already knew it. Learning it on purpose for Italian is not really convenient, you'd be better off using that time to learn Italian directly. If you had knowledge of Spanish and French, that'd be certainly a good help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish is very similar to Italian (a stereotype says that you just need to add an S to Italian words to get Spanish, which is of course wrong but gives you an idea of their closeness). Many words are basically the same (the words for yes and no are the same except the graphic stress which is the opposite: &lt;strong&gt;sì/sí&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;no/no&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French differs a bit in terms of some grammatical structures and vocabulary but it's close to Italian as well. If you had prior knowledge of these three languages, then you'd be at an advantage in learning Italian, but if you don't know them, just go ahead and learn Italian directly: if you choose to learn those later you'd have Italian as a prior knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning Esperanto: I agree with the others saying that I doubt it'd really help you. I haven't never studied it but I have seen some material written and I can say it didn't feel really &quot;italian&quot; to me and I'm a native italian speaker. If you don't have to learn it for personal interest or other needs, feel free to skip it and go straight to Italian. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-04-12T08:46:40.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-12T09:39:34.910" Score="2" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although Wikipedia says 'the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language#Influence_and_derived_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages&lt;/a&gt;', I suppose some ancient Italic (or perhaps even pre-italic) traits might prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially curious about syntax features, like subject-object relations in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Italian grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T13:18:36.123" Title="Are there any specific traits in Italian which make it different from other Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3523" CreationDate="2013-04-13T13:33:40.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not syntax but it has a lot of geminates. It's very hard for all but the broadest syntactic and lexical patterns to last that long. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1955" LastActivityDate="2013-04-13T13:33:40.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-04-14T00:37:06.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not say, &quot;go for it before learning Italian, Spanish, Portugese, French or Romanian...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're tempted... it will expose your mind to a &lt;strong&gt;linguist life's work&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Esperanto helps understanding/accepting/explaining different language structure mentally. Easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, be aware that Esperanto have lots of roots from all european languages: Spanish, French, Italian, English, German, Latin, Russian, Slavic... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only my personal experience: I learnt esperanto in... 2005. I never mastered it. At most I knew 200 words. At most because I was learning reading the book: &quot;Esperanto per iom pli ol 200 vortoj&quot; by Aleksandr Kerbel. (I think &lt;em&gt;there is not a single foreign word&lt;/em&gt; in it. Only drawings and esperanto. Well that's the way I remember it...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Esperanto grammar and vocabulary is so concise, regular, and modular, that I was able to read the &quot;Persian Letters&quot; by Montesquieu in Esperanto, with simply the help of a little dictionnary before even finishing my 200-words learning book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a really refreshing feeling when you grasp its expressiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T00:54:19.820" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T00:54:19.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-04-14T10:36:15.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want an auxiliary language closer to Italian, consider Interlingua. Unlike Esperanto it is closely based on Latin and other Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto most likely will not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-04-14T10:36:15.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-14T15:31:48.873" Score="3" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;So through my library I've gained access to Mango Languages language courses and I've taken on learning Latin. When trying to keep my pronunciation as close to the examples as possible, though, I feel I'm almost getting an American accent (my first language is Swedish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this question is hard to answer because, firstly, you need access to Mango Languages, and then you need to know how Latin is &quot;supposed&quot; to sound, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't try so hard speaking exactly like the examples, but rather focus more on learning words and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I took a listen to one Latin news radio program from Germany and one from Finland. Their pronunciation was very much influenced by their mother tongue. With Latin, having been the lingua franca for a long time through history, is it generally more acceptable to have an accent? Is there even a correct way to speak Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1956" LastActivityDate="2013-04-14T15:31:48.873" Title="How's Mango Languages Latin Pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-04-14T16:53:31.397" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-14T20:19:36.197" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm vaguely aware that the (definite) determiner has a much freer distribution in Portuguese than in other languages, e.g. it can come before personal names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Maria lê um livro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Maria reads a book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And before possessive pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O meu amigo é inteligente.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The my friend is intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And before (some?) wh-words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O que você está fazendo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The what you are doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of any papers offering an analysis for the structure of the Portuguese NP/DP in light of these facts? Barring that, can anyone recommend a good source for a comprehensive description of the distribution of Portuguese determiners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="544" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-04-14T22:45:32.470" Title="Resources/papers on Portuguese nominal syntax and determiners?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3579" CreationDate="2013-04-15T00:41:41.053" Score="7" ViewCount="2598" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading about aorist and preterite verb forms. It seems that they are both forms which express perfective aspect and past tense. Is the difference between them simply in differing terminology or are there semantic differences as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:07:34.133" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T17:39:45.777" Title="Is there a difference between a preterite and an aorist?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aorist&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4285" CreationDate="2013-04-15T10:20:29.687" Score="6" ViewCount="638" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the originally Barbarian names in history were Christianized. Many Christian saints with Slavic/Germanic names were given similar-sounding Greek and Latin names. In this way &quot;Kuzma&quot; (blacksmith) became &quot;Cosmas&quot;, &quot;Mariam&quot; became &quot;Maria&quot;, a feminine form of the old Roman name Marius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there a Greek or Roman name &lt;em&gt;Jesus&lt;/em&gt; so that &quot;Yehoshuah&quot; was named &lt;em&gt;Jesus&lt;/em&gt; in translation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯esus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;good&quot; in PIE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T12:10:30.240" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T00:59:49.987" Title="Was there a Greek or Latin name spelled &quot;Jesus&quot; or similarly before the advent of Christianity?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3567" CreationDate="2013-04-15T14:46:49.267" Score="-2" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to learn a second language which language in the world would confer the greatest cognitive benefit to a native English speaker? Would, say, Japanese confer greater benefit than Spanish due to being more different from English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1959" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T01:41:32.617" Title="What Second Language Confers the Greatest Cognitive Benefit" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2013-04-18T13:52:04.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-15T15:55:06.943" Score="-1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the etymology of the word &quot;pigment&quot; is the Latin verb &lt;em&gt;pingere&lt;/em&gt; (to paint) plus the suffix &lt;em&gt;-mentum&lt;/em&gt; (instrument used in the accomplishment of the action).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the &lt;em&gt;-mentum&lt;/em&gt; suffix is used with verbs and adjectives, but not with nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a project which I want to call &quot;pictura mentum&quot;, but I don't know if that  means anything or if at least it is well-formed Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1960" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T18:57:05.750" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T21:49:42.763" Title="Does &quot;Pictura Mentum&quot; mean anything?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2013-04-15T16:05:57.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While not actual native text (and thus potentially lacking some of the subtleties of the grammar), I just ran across a site of possible interest: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scriptureearth.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.scriptureearth.org/&lt;/a&gt; which contains Bible translations for a substantial number of obscure/marginalized languages, with PDF versions available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T16:05:57.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3532" CreationDate="2013-04-15T19:10:28.877" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means &quot;Picture of the Mind.&quot; Pictura is in the nominative case while Mentum is a genitive which we think of as meaning &quot;of the mind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1961" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T21:49:42.763" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T21:49:42.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3535" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:50:45.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T20:50:45.590" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T20:50:45.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3536" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:50:45.590" Score="0" Body="The study of societal effects on language use and of language use on society." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:10:52.150" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:10:52.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3537" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:53:27.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T20:53:27.943" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T20:53:27.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3538" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:53:27.943" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the practice, techniques, and methodology of translation — communicating a source language A in a target language B. Don't use this tag for questions asking to translate a particular word, phrase, or text piece, as such questions are explicitly defined off-topic. " OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T05:00:52.317" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T05:00:52.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3539" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:56:42.000" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T20:56:42.000" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T20:56:42.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3540" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:56:42.000" Score="0" Body="The literary language and language varieties spoken from the Middle East to North Africa of the Afro-Asiatic language family" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:10:44.667" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:10:44.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3541" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:59:34.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Romance language spoken mainly in Italy, but also in Switzerland, San Marino and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Italian language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Italian Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T02:34:38.787" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T02:34:38.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3542" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T20:59:34.887" Score="0" Body="A Romance language spoken mainly in Italy, but also in Switzerland, San Marino and others. For non-linguistic questions about the Italian language, visit our sister site Italian Language Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T02:34:32.583" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T02:34:32.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3543" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:01:22.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An East Slavic language spoken mainly in Russia and neighbouring territories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Russian language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Russian Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rus.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Русский язык Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, if you are proficient in Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T00:51:08.590" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T00:51:08.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3544" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:01:22.347" Score="0" Body="An East Slavic language spoken mainly in Russia and neighbouring territories. For non-linguistic questions about the Russian language, visit our sister site Russian Language Stack Exchange (or Русский язык Stack Exchange, if you are proficient in Russian)." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T00:51:05.127" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T00:51:05.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3545" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:02:25.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family which is mostly spoken in China and consists of many spoken varieties, including the standard and most prominent variety, Mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Chinese language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Chinese Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T01:09:00.440" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T01:09:00.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3546" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:02:25.210" Score="0" Body="A branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family which is mostly spoken in China and consists of many spoken varieties, including the standard and most prominent variety, Mandarin. For non-linguistic questions about the Chinese language, visit our sister site Chinese Language Stack Exchange.&#xD;&#xA; &#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T01:08:57.123" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T01:08:57.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3547" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:03:31.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Romance language spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other former Portuguese colonies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the Portuguese language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://portuguese.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Portuguese Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-06T11:43:15.237" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T11:43:15.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3548" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:03:31.837" Score="0" Body="A Romance language spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other former Portuguese colonies. For non-linguistic questions about the Portuguese language, visit our sister site Portuguese Language Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-06T11:43:19.450" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T11:43:19.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3549" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:04:14.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T21:04:14.060" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T21:04:14.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3550" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:04:14.060" Score="0" Body="A Hellenic language principally spoken in Greece." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:11:12.717" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:11:12.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3551" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:05:11.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T21:05:11.813" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T21:05:11.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3552" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:05:11.813" Score="0" Body="Indo-European language spoken mainly in Albania and Kosovo, in two forms: Gheg and Tosk." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:28:34.923" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:28:34.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:05:42.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Germanic language spoken in, among others, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the German language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;German Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T21:43:46.537" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T21:43:46.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:05:42.690" Score="0" Body="A Germanic language spoken in, among others, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For non-linguistic questions about the German language, visit our sister site German Language Stack Exchange. " OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T21:43:41.657" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T21:43:41.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3555" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:07:03.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T21:07:03.630" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T21:07:03.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3556" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:07:03.630" Score="0" Body="Spoken in Turkey - the most widely spoken Turkic language." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:10:56.870" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:10:56.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3557" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:08:53.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romance language, official in 29 states, including France, Belgium and Côte d'Ivoire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-linguistic questions about the French language, visit our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;French Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T02:38:24.130" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T02:38:24.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3558" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T21:08:53.373" Score="0" Body="Romance language, official in 29 states, including France, Belgium and Côte d'Ivoire. For non-linguistic questions about the French language, visit our sister site French Language Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T02:38:27.623" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T02:38:27.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-15T22:28:45.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-15T22:28:45.210" LastActivityDate="2013-04-15T22:28:45.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-15T22:28:45.210" Score="0" Body="Welsh is a p-Celtic language spoken in Wales and the Patagonia region of Argentina." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T00:10:34.667" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T00:10:34.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-16T00:42:04.143" Score="3" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;I commonly calculate the precision and recall for information pulled from text but I'm not sure how to calculate the margin of error for those precision and recall values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example, if I have a sample 1,000 given names out of an unknown amount of data.  My goal is to indentify the gender of of each name.  My system does its magic and I am able to determine that I am assigning gender with 90% precision and 90% recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I calculate the margin of error for the precision and recall given that the values I've calculated are over a sample of data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found a formula for the Maximum Margin of Error on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.had2know.com/business/compute-margin-of-error.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.had2know.com/business/compute-margin-of-error.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this doesn't seem like it would really apply in this kind of situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T18:04:48.320" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T18:04:48.320" Title="Calculating margin of error for precision and recall" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-16T03:23:27.077" Score="1" ViewCount="1284" Body="&lt;p&gt;In lexicography is the following claim correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To describe the origin of a word in a dictionary only you need either describe its &lt;strong&gt;'etymology'&lt;/strong&gt; (if that word has a single morpheme) or &lt;strong&gt;'morphology'&lt;/strong&gt; (if it is constructed by more than one morpheme) but not both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T05:07:28.467" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T22:27:01.610" Title="Etymology and Morphology" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3529" CreationDate="2013-04-16T05:53:53.630" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the term preterite, although not usually applied to English. Still, I am aware that English does posses three past tenses: aorist which is also called the simple past, present perfect, and past perfect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple Past&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;I saw the movie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Present Perfect&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;I have seen the movie.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Past Perfect&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;I had seen the movie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Present Perfect adds an Auxiliary Verb. The Past Perfect is formed by conjugating that Auxiliary. This explination may not be 100% correct but the website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/simplepast.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Englishpage.com&lt;/a&gt; seemed to help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1964" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-04-16T13:57:35.500" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T13:57:35.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1113" CreationDate="2013-04-16T15:08:55.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main living dialects are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Moscovian (fast speech tempo, emphasised [a] in unstressed positions, longer [a] in stressed position)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) North-Western (much similar to modern literary standard)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Southern (with fricative [γ])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caucasian Russian is regarded by some linguists as something between pidgeon and creole, although it does not differ much from the standard Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Siberian Russiad is much like a separate dialect (although some dialects, like &lt;em&gt;чалдонская поговорка&lt;/em&gt;, are [almost?] extinct now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also sociolects (e.g. criminal slang, etc.) differing mainly in style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other regional variaties had prevailed, although the modern Russian is mainly a monocentric language with a prescreptive grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian spoken by diaspora wordlwide varies greately, due either to conservation (e.g. Russian spoken by first wave emmigrés in France or China),  or because of borrwings and language contacts (Russian in America and in Baltic &amp;amp; Nordic States).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T15:08:55.967" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3531" CreationDate="2013-04-16T20:47:33.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, if you're looking for maximum &quot;cognitive benefit&quot;, what you'll want to do is maximize how proficient you become in the language, which means choosing a language that you'll work hard to learn and not give up. So choose a language that you're interested in, and actually learn it. Even if there is a difference between languages in terms of their benefits, gaining fluency in the least helpful will be more helpful than spending three weeks learning the most helpful, then giving up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1967" LastActivityDate="2013-04-16T20:47:33.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3531" CreationDate="2013-04-17T01:41:32.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be a bit confused about your own question. You can't really tell us what you mean by &quot;congative benefit&quot; or how one would measure it. I think you may mean one of two things, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Linguistic Relativity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the assumption that the language you speak affects the way your brain works. That maybe one language makes math easier to comprehend and perform or that maybe another is better for thinking about spacial relationships. This is what's known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; (specifically, the strong version). It has been widely studied and, unfortunately, largely disproven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can find evidence for is that language provides very superficial differences. A popular experiment is to compare the adjectives generated by native speakers of two different languages when showed a noun that is masculine in one and feminine in another. These speakers tend to generate adjectives associated with the noun's gender in their native language. You can listen to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2009/04/06/102518565/shakespeare-had-roses-all-wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this NPR clip&lt;/a&gt;, but know that this program is a bit misleading because it presents this research as new (it isn't) and also know that this effect is not nearly as significant as the program tries to make it seem (it's not that speakers of a language where &quot;bridge&quot; is feminine &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; see its masculine attributes or that they think those attributes do not exist, it's just that they show a &lt;em&gt;statistical preference&lt;/em&gt; to generating feminine attributes). Also there is evidence to suggest that language plays a large role in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blutner.de/color/Sapir-Whorf.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;colour perception&lt;/a&gt; (starting on page 11).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this perspective, learning a language what classifies nouns differently than your native language could theoretically broaden your perception of objects and colours. However, don't get too excited. Most of the research is done on native speakers of languages. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;critical period hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, by the time you're an adult your brain is pretty set in it's ways so I would expect any Sapir-Whorfian boost to your cognitive skills from learning a foreign language to be minimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Alzheimer's&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Sapir-Whorf is a more detailed and interesting answer, I heavily suspect that what actually happened is that you read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/18/bilingual-alzheimers-brain-power-multitasking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an article saying that bilinguals delayed onset of Alzheimer's related dementia&lt;/a&gt; and then extrapolated from there. Looking at that article we see similar vague references to &lt;em&gt;cognative skills&lt;/em&gt; without explaination so to what it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Learning a second language and speaking it regularly can improve your cognitive skills...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually &lt;a href=&quot;http://cog.lab.yorku.ca/files/2007/11/Schweizer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;found the original paper&lt;/a&gt; for this research. The papers is rather unclear about at which age the bilingual patients acquired their second language, which I find a bit suspicious since language acquisition in children is &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; different from language acquisition in adults. Reading between the lines (and knowing the demographics of Toronto), it seems that most of the bilingual patients are immigrants to Canada, meaning many may have learned English as an adult. This is good news you for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another problem. The paper talks about bilingualism as being a factor in &quot;building a cognitive reserve&quot;, but they don't claim it's the only factor. Surely there must be other activities or combinations of activities that provide just as great a benefit. In fact, the paper draws a link between bilingualism and multitasking, that having to switch between the languages is what helps the patients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which language is the most beneficial? Well, so far as I can tell no research has been done on this. Your intuition seems to be that the most beneficial language is the one which is most different from your native language. While that certainly is logical, the common thread in the research I'm seeing is that the language that you learn is not nearly as important as the fact that you learn another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you from experience that learning a language very different from your native language is difficult and frustrating and makes you likely to want to give up (I'm a native English speaker learning Korean). If the benefits are equal, you might as well learn something more closely related to your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T01:41:32.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3569" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:21:51.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_l&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:56:26.757" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:56:26.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3570" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:21:51.577" Score="0" Body="velarized alveolar lateral approximant" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:52:54.647" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:52:54.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:22:53.660" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:22:53.660" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:22:53.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:22:53.660" Score="0" Body="An Indo-European language spoken in Armenia." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:27:55.503" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:27:55.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3573" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:23:50.037" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:23:50.037" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:23:50.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3574" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:23:50.037" Score="0" Body="A Vietic language spoken in Vietnam." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:27:38.940" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:27:38.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3575" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:24:41.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:24:41.893" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:24:41.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3576" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:24:41.893" Score="0" Body="A West Slavic language spoken mainly in Poland." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:27:42.927" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:27:42.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3577" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:25:31.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:25:31.637" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:25:31.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3578" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-17T16:25:31.637" Score="0" Body="A Tai-Kadai language spoken in Thailand." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T16:27:35.817" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T16:27:35.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3529" CreationDate="2013-04-17T21:43:36.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, a lot of linguistic terms are used ambiguously/differently, and the term &quot;aorist&quot; is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usually&lt;/em&gt;, aorist is understood as a combination of perfective (aspect) and past (tense) (Plungian 2012). Preterite is a simple past, aspectually non-marked - thus, such combinations as Perfective Preterite and Imperfective Preterite are possible. &lt;em&gt;Under this proposal&lt;/em&gt;, aorist is a kind of preterite (i.e. Aorist=Perfective Preterite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-04-17T21:50:38.043" LastActivityDate="2013-04-17T21:50:38.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3582" CreationDate="2013-04-18T13:27:30.643" Score="14" ViewCount="7801" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may just be that I'm demonstrating my gross ignorance, but I can't seem to find a 'why' for stem-changing verbs in Spanish.  I understand that there is some sort of perceived weakness in the vowel that is emphasized by the addition of stress to the syllable, and that the vowel is somehow strengthened by the shift.  I just don't understand the governing principles of that shift.  Why do some vowels shift and not others?  What is it that says that the 'e' or 'o' in this verb will change, but not the 'e' or 'o' in that verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every search I've done just comes back with a lot of people saying 'that's just how it is, memorize it', and that's not really an answer.  Any help out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1972" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T09:56:36.290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T13:46:33.413" Title="Why do stem-changing verbs have a vowel change in Spanish?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3580" CreationDate="2013-04-18T15:01:18.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'governing principle' is stress. In Spanish, [ɛ] and [ɔ] become diphthongs in stressed positions, explaining why &lt;em&gt;niego&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;niegas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;niega&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;niegan&lt;/em&gt; have diphthongs, while &lt;em&gt;negamos&lt;/em&gt; does not (the stressed penultimate is [a] there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the Wiki article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_breaking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vowel breaking&lt;/a&gt; for other examples of diphthongisation in stressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2013-04-18T15:11:40.847" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T15:11:40.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3580" CreationDate="2013-04-18T17:42:01.980" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diphthongization of front and back mid vowels that's referred to here is an historical process moving from Classical Latin to Vulgar Latin to Castilian Spanish, over about a millennium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the way it works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical Latin (ca 0 CE) had long and short vowels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vulgar Latin (ca 0-1500 CE) lost the Classical vowel length distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vulgar Latin innovated a new open/closed distinction for mid vowels &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mid vowels that were &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt; in Classical Latin became &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt; in Vulgar Latin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Castilian Spanish (ca 1200 CE) changed Vulgar Latin open &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; [ɛ] to &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt;, and open &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; [ɔ] to &lt;em&gt;ue&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what it says in the Mexican standard high school textbook on Greek and Latin etymology of Spanish (Mateos M, A, &lt;em&gt;Etimologīas Grecolatinas del Espanol&lt;/em&gt;, Editorial Esfinge, Mexico DF):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(51) La &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; breve y el diptongo &lt;em&gt;ae&lt;/em&gt; del latín clásico se convirtieron en la &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; abierta del latín vulgar y se transformaron generalment in &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt;, al pasar al castellano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(54) La &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; breve del latín clásico se convirtieron en la &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; abierta del latín vulgar y se diptongó in &lt;em&gt;ue&lt;/em&gt; (pasando por &lt;em&gt;uo&lt;/em&gt;), por regla general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, if the mid vowel was short in Classical Latin, it's likely to be a diphthong in Spanish now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T22:08:07.417" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T22:08:07.417" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3374" CreationDate="2013-04-18T20:12:55.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to do this is to lemmatize your corpus. You have to use a program or library that does this for you. I know of freeling, but there are many more out there. It depends on what programming language you want to use. The advantage of freeling is that it allows you to use it from various languages like java, perl, python, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you have your corpus lemmatized, it will look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I loved her blue shoes -&amp;gt; I &amp;lt;lemma=I&amp;gt; loved &amp;lt;lemma=love&amp;gt; her &amp;lt;lemma=his&amp;gt; blue &amp;lt;lemma=blue&amp;gt; shoes &amp;lt;lemma=shoe&amp;gt;&#xA;I love his blue shoe&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the format will vary, and some details too, but the main idea is that you'll get the stem of the words. Then, you can match your list of verbs against the lemmas in the corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-07-05T12:29:08.007" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T12:29:08.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3562" CreationDate="2013-04-18T22:27:01.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some degree you're asking about the precise scope of the two terms, but as they are commonly understood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology&lt;/em&gt; is not restricted to monomorphemic words, or even to single words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; of a polymorphemic word is usually considered synchronically. The history (etymology) of its morphology is a separate matter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would tend to use &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; to refer to the structure of a derived or inflected word and not to a compound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T22:27:01.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3585" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-04-18T23:40:59.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-04-18T23:40:59.347" LastActivityDate="2013-04-18T23:40:59.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-04-18T23:40:59.347" Score="0" Body="Linguistics questions that concern TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and related typesetting systems." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-19T03:49:44.240" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T03:49:44.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3588" CreationDate="2013-04-18T23:51:40.780" Score="2" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many nouns in Welsh have a the plural form that is shorter than the singular form (i.e. the singular form looks like the plural form + affix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Singular&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;coeden&lt;/em&gt; 'tree'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;seren&lt;/em&gt; 'star'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;malwoden&lt;/em&gt; 'snail'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plural&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;coed&lt;/em&gt; 'trees'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; 'stars'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;malwod&lt;/em&gt; 'snails'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way of forming the plural is common in Welsh nouns. It may be that this way of forming the plural is fairly common in other languages. Even if this form of pluralisation &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; all that rare, I'd still like to know what this kind of pluralisation is called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-20T09:28:00.700" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T07:22:47.060" Title="What kind of pluralisation system does Welsh use?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3587" CreationDate="2013-04-19T00:38:53.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some words in Welsh use a singulative/collective distinction instead of the singular/plural distinction used e.g. in English. This means exactly what you've shown: the collective term for '(a collective of) trees' is the root, and you add the singulative suffix to get 'a tree'. This is sort of analogous to 'a head of cattle' in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T00:38:53.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3591" CreationDate="2013-04-18T23:55:03.773" Score="3" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one determine the &lt;strong&gt;correct plurals&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;made up&quot; words&lt;/strong&gt; that have no given plural form given by its original canon source or creator?  Is it possible to determine what the &quot;most similar&quot; existing word would be, and mimic its own rules for making plurals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one wished to determine the plural form of &lt;em&gt;koopa&lt;/em&gt;, a species from the Super Mario Bros universe, be it either &lt;em&gt;koopas&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;koopa&lt;/em&gt;, would there be a way to tell by looking at similar real English words, such as &quot;sheep&quot; or &quot;mouse&quot; (which are both names of species of creatures, like the fictional word, and have special plurals)?  Or would the only way to know be to ask Shigeru Miyamoto or another source of Nintendo of America? (Please note that this is only an example, and does not itself need answering)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1977" OwnerDisplayName="Southpaw Hare" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-04-19T10:58:49.740" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T10:58:49.740" Title="Determining plural forms of fictional words" Tags="&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3589" CreationDate="2013-04-19T00:57:39.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Made up words which are used in English will follow pluralization rules that hold for other English words. See the Wikipedia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wug_test&quot;&gt;Wug Test&lt;/a&gt;. The most reasonable plural of &lt;em&gt;koopa&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;koopas&lt;/em&gt;, since most English nouns form their plurals by adding (orthographic) &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to take an affected air, you can call them &lt;em&gt;koopae&lt;/em&gt;, by analogy with Latinate English words ending in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; which have a learned plural form with &lt;em&gt;-ae&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;alumna&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;alumnae&lt;/em&gt;, which you might find in some brochures for women's colleges).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You couldn't get &lt;em&gt;koopa&lt;/em&gt; to have another type of irregular plural (and expect people to guess you are talking about more than one kooopa), unless the singular form has the right sound pattern that will let people pick up on your game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T00:57:39.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3589" CreationDate="2013-04-19T01:15:19.513" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.talkbank.org/topics/wugs/wugs.pdf&quot;&gt;Research in linguistics&lt;/a&gt; has shown that when English-speaking children are asked to pluralise made-up words (which fit with the phonotactic constraints of English) they use the standard productive plurals, suffixing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/əz/ on words with final /s, ʃ, ʧ, ʤ, z/;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/s/ on words with an final /p, t, k, f, Ө/;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/z/ on words with all other finals, including vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that under normal circumstances English speakers would apply this rule to novel words, but whoever makes up the word can make up the plural as well. An example of this is the semi-jocular plurals of 'Unix' as 'Unices' and 'Unixen', instead of the predicted 'Unixes' /ˈjunɪksəz/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the example you give, 'koopa', the expected plural form would be 'koopas', pronounced something like /kupəz/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" OwnerDisplayName="Gaston Ümlaut" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T08:17:01.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2013-04-19T21:56:00.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely. This is a little obscure, probably to obscure to be of any real use, but there is a chapter from the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/3540375201&quot;&gt;Aspects of Automatic Text Analysis&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84340191/2%20Mathematics%20of%20Semantic%20Spaces.pdf&quot;&gt;The Mathematics of Semantic Spaces (PDF)&lt;/a&gt;, that models semantics as a metric space. It's general calculus on metric spaces, and this is probably the limit of mathematical abstraction in applied linguistics that I've seen. Unless you've been introduced to some very high level math, this material won't make any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other then that, I know acoustic phonetics has derivatives, integrals, limits, series, etc. For example, one way to describe a sound wave quantitatively is take it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform&quot;&gt;Fourier transform&lt;/a&gt; which  involves the evaluation of an integral. Then there's statistical analysis of corpora, where calculus isn't directly involved, but the formulas won't make any sense unless your familiar with the concepts of basic calculus. Things like weighting, infinite sums, neighbourhoods, continuity, finding volumes and lengths, optimization etc. are implicit in a lot of statistical measurements. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine&quot;&gt;Including vector calculus.&lt;/a&gt; A lot of linguistic models employ continuous sets, not just discrete sets, and require a metric or a topology to define the set as a mathematical space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastActivityDate="2013-04-19T21:56:00.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2013-04-20T16:36:49.653" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A more recent neophyte article on linguistics (which I'm sure many of you will have read by now) cites Sapir-Whorf: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Joshua Foer. The New Yorker, December 24, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1981" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-04-23T17:39:46.250" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T17:39:46.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3587" CreationDate="2013-04-21T00:25:28.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know another language which has singulatives like Welsh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's well to remember that Welsh, like English and the Western Romance languages, has lost all its case inflection except on pronouns. The reason I bring this up is that in Russian and other Slavonic languages many nouns have a suffix &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive plural (eg рука (ruka) 'hand'; рук (ruk) 'hand &lt;em&gt;gen. pl&lt;/em&gt;')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm pretty sure that Welsh singulatives aren't like this, and they do actually contain a singulative suffix (IIRC &lt;em&gt;plant&lt;/em&gt; 'children' is borrowed from Latin &lt;em&gt;planta&lt;/em&gt;, so the singular &lt;em&gt;plentyn&lt;/em&gt; must be derived). But you can't tell that from their current form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2013-04-23T23:27:06.793" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T23:27:06.793" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3775" CreationDate="2013-04-21T20:04:10.940" Score="5" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;Air Travel Information Service (ATIS) is a benchmark corpora/dataset in spoken language understanding field. Many papers make use of it to see how their algorithms perform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many tagging methods defined on this corpora, and I hoped to have the corpora with one of those methods tagged but when I accessed it, I saw only the sentences (transcribed) and the output result of the system (the SQL query which generates the answer of the system to the user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought there might be some codes to preprocess the corpora (or the processed data) available on the net, spend two days googling for it but nothing exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to write a code to interpret the SQL query and generates the semantic frames representation but before that, I hope someone knows anything helpful and shares with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1440" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-04-24T01:37:32.927" LastActivityDate="2013-05-29T08:29:46.717" Title="Semantic frame representation of ATIS 3 corpora" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3620" CreationDate="2013-04-21T21:19:51.427" Score="17" ViewCount="2867" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that PIE, Latin, old English, and even old German did not use articles, yet current English, German and Romance languages all use articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that articles developed in all these languages independently from the word for &quot;one&quot;? What is the reason for their development? Were they useful in any way, such as helping pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1983" LastEditorUserId="1983" LastEditDate="2013-04-22T12:52:17.140" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T17:16:45.610" Title="Origin of articles in European languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-22T07:03:25.883" Score="1" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese dialects, Korean, and Japanese all use Chinese characters in their writing systems, at least in some capacity. Chinese trivially so, Japanese through Kanji, and Korean through Hanja. As to be expected, each language has developed their own logographic simplifications as well as they differ in their pronunciation of various characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot speak for Japanese, but Korean's pronunciations &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seem to be related to the Chinese pronunciations of some older form of Chinese&lt;/a&gt; but both languages have undergone sound changes meaning the differences are sometimes non-trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed (and previously described &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3027/why-do-we-call-some-countries-a-different-name-than-the-people-of-that-country/3028#3028&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) that some Korean words, mostly proper nouns, can only be explained if they are translated literally from their written form, like some special form of a calque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Korean word for &quot;USA&quot;, &lt;code&gt;미국&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mikuk&lt;/em&gt;), is &lt;a href=&quot;http://krdic.naver.com/detail.nhn?docid=14684900&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;derived from the Hanja &lt;code&gt;美國&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. These are the same characters Mandarin uses for &quot;USA&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This etymology for the Mandarin &lt;code&gt;美國&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;měiguó&lt;/em&gt;) shows that it must have originated in Mandarin (or some form of Chinese) before being adopted into Korean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;America -&gt; 亞美利加 (&lt;em&gt;yàměilìjiā&lt;/em&gt;) -&gt; 美國 (&lt;em&gt;měiguó&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've heard arguments that &lt;code&gt;미국&lt;/code&gt; is actually derived from Chinese by way of Japanese, but this would not affect the phenomenon I am describing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Koreans had adopted &lt;code&gt;美國&lt;/code&gt; through a phonological process alone, one would expect something like &lt;code&gt;메궈&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mekweo&lt;/em&gt;). The Korean transliteration for &quot;America&quot; is &lt;code&gt;아메리카&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;amelikha&lt;/em&gt;). As such, it's hard to explain the presence of &lt;code&gt;미&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt;) through any type of phonological adoption alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can easily predict the appearance of &lt;code&gt;미&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt;) from the character &lt;code&gt;美&lt;/code&gt; (literally meaning &quot;beauty&quot;) which is consistently pronounced as &lt;code&gt;미&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt;) even in situations not referring to the USA. For example, &lt;code&gt;미용실&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;美容室&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;miyongsil&lt;/em&gt;, a beauty parlour). Similarly, &lt;code&gt;國&lt;/code&gt; is consistently pronounced &lt;code&gt;국&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kuk&lt;/em&gt;) even in situations not referring to the USA. For example, &lt;code&gt;국회&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;國會&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kukhoy&lt;/em&gt;, the National Assembly). This is why I feel that the Korean pronunciation &lt;code&gt;미국&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mikuk&lt;/em&gt;) had to be adopted from the Chinese written form, not spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are alternatives. There is evidence that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean sound change was more conservative&lt;/a&gt; when it came to the pronunciation of Sino-Korean vocabulary than some Chinese dialects. It is entirely possible that the original pronunciation of &lt;code&gt;美國&lt;/code&gt; was closer to &lt;em&gt;mikuk&lt;/em&gt; even in Chinese before sound change resulted in modern Mandarin's &lt;em&gt;meiguo&lt;/em&gt;. Unfortunately I cannot rule this out as I do not know when &lt;code&gt;美國&lt;/code&gt; entered the Chinese vocabulary but subjectively the &lt;em&gt;mei&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;meiguo&lt;/em&gt; is a closer transliteration than the &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;mikuk&lt;/em&gt; and the difference in pronunciation can easily be explained by Hanja pronunciation rules (I am aware the subjective judgements are not evidence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clearer example is the Korean word for &quot;Germany&quot;, &lt;code&gt;독일&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dokil&lt;/em&gt;). This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%8F%85%EC%9D%BC#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was derived from the Japanese transliteration of &quot;Deutsche&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (as in &quot;Deutschland&quot;), &lt;code&gt;ドイツ&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;doitsu&lt;/em&gt;). If Koreans had transliterated it themselves we would expect to see &lt;code&gt;도이치&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;doichi&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, if Korean had adopted it from the Japanese through phonological methods alone we would expect either &lt;code&gt;도이치&lt;/code&gt; again or possibly &lt;code&gt;도이즈&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;doiceu&lt;/em&gt;), again making it hard to explain the Korean pronunciation through phonological means. However, like before we can easily explain the Korean pronunciation using Hanja character pronunciations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deutsche -&gt;  ドイツ (&lt;em&gt;doitsu&lt;/em&gt;, Katakana) -&gt; 独逸 (Kanji) -&gt; 獨逸 (Kyūjitai/Hanja) -&gt; 독일 (&lt;em&gt;dokil&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Katakana, Kanji, and Kyūjitai forms are pronounced identically and I am not implying they are discrete steps in the derivation just that I include them as evidence for the relationship between &lt;code&gt;ドイツ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;독일&lt;/code&gt;. Also note that the Mandarin word for &quot;Germany&quot; uses unrelated characters and shows a different etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon even applies to names of people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Li&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;李连杰&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;lǐ liánjié&lt;/em&gt;, Simplified Chinese) -&gt; 李連杰 (Traditional Chinese/Hanja) -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9D%B4%EC%97%B0%EA%B1%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;이연걸&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;iyeonkeol&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Korean has an internally consistent system for pronouncing Chinese characters (called Hanja in Korean). All Sino-Korean words have a written form using Hanja characters which can be found in any Korean dictionary (although non Sino-Korean words do not have Hanja forms). In some cases it is almost impossible to explain the Korean pronunciation of a borrowing though phonological processes alone but trivial if one considers the borrowing's Hanja written form. This means that it's the written form that affects the word's pronunciation instead of the expected opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this type of phenomenon, specifically with respect to borrowings? Does this phenomenon occur in any language other than Korean? (I suspect it occurs in all languages which relied heavily on Chinese script at any point in their history, but I do not have any examples) Is this phenomenon unique to Chinese script due to its ideographic nature and other geopolitical factors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any special term for a word's written form causing its spoken form to be reevaluated (even language-internally)? I would appreciate any examples of such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-04-22T11:56:05.883" Title="Are there any other examples of words being borrowed via their written forms only (or written forms causing reevaluations of spoken forms)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3597" CreationDate="2013-04-22T11:56:05.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'x' in Mexico is pronounced 'ks' in English (and many other languages). This is because that's how the x is usually pronounced in English. However, in Spanish the x stood for a 'sh' sound or, more recently, as the spanish 'j' as we know now (as in jalapiño or mojito).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This messup is purely based on orthographical reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1985" LastActivityDate="2013-04-22T11:56:05.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-22T13:11:42.877" Score="5" ViewCount="1234" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Diana Archangeli (1997) there is a universal set of constraints (CON) that is part of our innate knowledge of language. These constraints are used in Optimality Theory, such as NOCODA: 'syllables end with a vowel'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a formal list of such constraints, or are there too many to list/not enough information about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2013-04-23T13:51:21.580" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T13:51:21.580" Title="What is the universal set of constraints in Optimality Theory?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3601" CreationDate="2013-04-22T17:07:53.953" Score="13" ViewCount="6737" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a way to automatically convert arbitrary natural language sentences into first-order logic predicates. Although complex, this seems to be feasible to me, through &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.public.asu.edu/~cbaral/papers/fol2012.pdf&quot;&gt;inverse lambda calculus&lt;/a&gt;; one of the biggest downsides of this technique is that it heavily relies on a combinatory categorial grammar (CCG), which must be trained to yield the appropriate results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other known approaches to such conversion at all, or it is a bad idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1987" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T14:53:39.260" Title="Automatically Converting Natural Language to First-Order Logic" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3600" CreationDate="2013-04-22T20:37:43.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... it heavily relies on a combinatory categorial grammar (CCG), which must be trained...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two broad-coverage CCG parsers for English, which you could use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sc609/candc-1.00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Curran &amp;amp; Clark Parser&lt;/a&gt; by itself only generates CCG derivations with &lt;em&gt;categories&lt;/em&gt;, not with semantics. &lt;a href=&quot;https://valeriobasile.github.io/candcapi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boxer&lt;/a&gt; works on the parses to generate semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenCCG/openccg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCCG&lt;/a&gt; when used with the broad-coverage grammar, &lt;a href=&quot;http://talkingrobots.dfki.de/software/tarot/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MOLOKO&lt;/a&gt; can show semantics. But I haven't used this one yet, and can't read their output.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there other approaches...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CCG is not the only logic-based grammar. There are others that closer to mathematics, in that, their derivation trees for sentences that look exactly like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_deduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural deduction proofs&lt;/a&gt;. I think the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loria.fr/equipes/calligramme/acg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACG guys&lt;/a&gt; have a working parser. I am not sure about the others like TLG, CVG, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T14:53:39.260" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T14:53:39.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-22T22:35:25.590" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the best term to describe the following sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I live in 美国.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard the term &lt;em&gt;macaronic&lt;/em&gt; used to describe a mix of languages that use Roman script, but is there a more specific term for when a mix of orthographies from two distinct languages are used?  I've heard the term &lt;em&gt;mixed orthography&lt;/em&gt; used to describe the Japanese writing system, but, of course, it is only one language; is the term appropriate for my example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="William Campos" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-23T01:50:46.040" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T01:50:46.040" Title="What is a term for the use of two scripts in writing?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2013-04-23T11:52:51.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anixx, with all due respect, as a &quot;native Russian speaker&quot; you'd be the last person I'd trust as to which language is more capable of inflection.  The suggestion that Russian has words that would require an entire English page to translate is completely ridiculous. You write English very well, but you may not understand some of the spoken subtleties that convey these &quot;overtones&quot; you refer to.  It is possible English accomplishes this through more subtle means than words: slight pauses, inflections, even minor dialect code-switchings.  But that doesn't mean English is unable to convey nuance, it just means you don't recognize it.  Ultimately language must reflect the speakers state of mind: your post inadvertently implies English speakers somehow have a lower state of mind than Russian speakers.  (Obviously, some of them do! &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dlyCTswYH0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dlyCTswYH0&lt;/a&gt;)  It could also be cultural and pedagogic.  If you're in the UK, speaking about certain things or speaking with a certain high degree of &quot;resolution&quot; about certain subjects, to use your word, is considered declassé.  Heard of &quot;omit needless words&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also has much to do with the speaker's overall level of literacy; while an NFL football team and the 1920s Bloomsbury group would be mutually intelligible, they wouldn't have much to say to each other.  And subtleties would be completely lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1990" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T22:50:44.113" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T22:50:44.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-23T12:03:55.233" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the modern world, it's clear that some very influential people have a small effect on the evolution of a language by popularizing certain linguistic constructions as slang, which eventually evolve into full-blown common usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How frequently was this in historical terms? Were languages more likely to evolve as a result of changing social communities and dynamics, or via influential speakers who would then impart those changes on their peers as a result of their charisma and/or authority?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example here that I can think of clearly is Shakespeare, who coined many new words (at least he was the first to write them down), and many of the phrases and styles of speaking he used in his plays have been adopted into common English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1991" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T12:21:14.853" Title="Do languages evolve via community usage or via influential individuals?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-23T14:41:15.753" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am now studying Deep and Surface Grammar and I can't understand any particular differences in representation of the sentence as a case frame (Ch. Fillmore's theory) or a semantic model (W. Chafe). Could anyone throw light on it somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1992" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-04-23T17:45:18.787" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T17:45:18.787" Title="The sentence as a case frame or a semantic model" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2013-04-23T23:45:26.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible, but I'm not aware of any evidence for it. As Mohammd Sanei points out, the root שבת (šbt) means &quot;rest&quot;, which is a more obvious origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, שבע (šv') as well as 'seven' also underlies שבועה (švu'h), which means 'oath'; so a single root can have unrelated meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-04-23T23:45:26.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3587" CreationDate="2013-04-25T02:22:08.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with Welsh, so make some general remarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you assume that the unmarked form in a paradigm is the most basic, and that all morphological signs are marked by the &lt;em&gt;addition&lt;/em&gt; of phonological material, then you arrive at the singulative analysis. If you instead would like to assume that the singular form in the paradigm is the most basic, then you are required to admit morphological operations such as &lt;em&gt;subtraction&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;truncation&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;ellipsis&lt;/em&gt;. If you read French and have access to a university library, consider looking in Mel'čuk's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/catalogue/cours-de-morphologie-generale_-volume-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cours de morphologie générale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on the topic, or that failing, find a copy of his more condensed and more widely available English work, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.kr/books/about/Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Morphology.html?id=7Z87yQilGvkC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Morphology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T07:22:47.060" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T07:22:47.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-25T11:35:23.307" Score="2" ViewCount="6706" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word preposition. I am trying to break down a series of words into their constituent morphemes and am having trouble with the word 'preposition'.&#xA;I can obviously see that the 'pre-' is a morpheme in itself. However for 'position' it seems to me that there are a few possibilities.&#xA;Would it be pos + ition (my first instinct)?&#xA;Or posit + ion?&#xA;Posi + tion?&#xA;Pos + it + ion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your instinct tells you one over the others, please explain why? I know that -ition is a suffix, but have read somewhere else that it is made of the affixes -ite and -ion. Are -ite and -ion seperate &lt;em&gt;morphemes&lt;/em&gt; also then? Or is '-ition' one morpheme? I know that 'pos-' is a morpheme therefore it's just a case of whether to seperate the '-ition'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully someone knows the answer to my question and can explain it to me.&#xA;Many thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just wanted other peoples' take on it, as the answer I've come up with is pre + pos + ition but I'm pretty sure that's not right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1997" LastEditorUserId="1997" LastEditDate="2013-04-27T11:23:49.920" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T13:38:19.253" Title="What are the constituent morphemes in 'preposition'?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-25T12:57:58.677" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading the news report for the AP Twitter hoax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking this is the most unambiguous and perfect stock market bomb. Is there a measure of how simple this sentence is to parse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1981" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:32:01.020" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:48:33.917" Title="Is there a measure of how easy a sentence is to parse as a Natural Language problem?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-25T13:51:26.930" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;As shown in the Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frigus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;frigus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Indo-European *sriges-, *sriHges-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't find the clue to this sound change on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_sound_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which concludes that PIE*bʰ, *dʰ, *gʷʰ will become L. f-, when they are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;At the beginning of a word&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2013-04-27T00:19:20.817" Title="How does PIE *s- in *sriges- change to L. f- in frigus?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3610" CreationDate="2013-04-26T09:54:55.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think we ever know for sure &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; a sound change happens. We can deduce what changes &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; happened (and sometimes experience what changes &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; happening), and we can certainly conjecture about the phonetic processes involved, but we can never really answer &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;) questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the obvious conjecture is that in that context, the fricative /s/ came to be replaced by a different fricative /f/. In other places the sequence became /ʃr/ or /str/, suggesting that it is often found to be awkward. I also notice that when I pronounce /sr/ I have a tendency to project my lower lip. If I happen to protrude my upper lip a bit, it can become /sfr/ (actually /sφr/, with a bilabial fricative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the other examples you give are difficult to understand unless you assume that they went through a fricative stage such as /β/, /ð/ or /ɣ/; then the probable process would again be substitution of the different fricative /f/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a similar process at work currently in dialects of English where /θ/ (as in &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;) appears as /f/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-04-26T09:54:55.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3615" CreationDate="2013-04-26T17:33:46.097" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some man and some woman visited a garden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously it's not 100% unambiguous how many gardens there are, but I think most people would agree there is just one common garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence has the following formal grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[NP [NP Some man] and [NP some woman]] [VP visited [NP a garden]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that since a VP has the type entity to truth value (E -&gt; T) the only way I can think of interpreting it is &lt;code&gt;λv.∃x.garden(x)∧visit(v,x)&lt;/code&gt;, however now how the only path I see forward leads me to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;∃a.man(a)∧(∃x.garden(x)∧visit(v,x)) ∧ ∃a.woman(b)∧(∃x.garden(x)∧visit(b,x))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is exactly what we didn't want: that that the garden might be different persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, given the way the VP is interpreted, is there any way we can ever end up with the intended formula (below)? Or is my interpretation of the VP simply incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;∃a.man(a)∧(∃a.woman(b)∧(∃x.garden(x)∧visit(a,x)∧visit(b,x)))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:35:36.553" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:35:36.553" Title="Conjunctive NPs in Montague Grammars" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3610" CreationDate="2013-04-27T00:09:53.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word-initial PIE *sr- &gt; L. fr-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L. frigus, cf. G. ῥῖγος&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word-medial PIE *-sr- &gt; L. -br-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L. funebris, cf. L. funus, funeris&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intermediate stage was PIE *sr &gt; PIt. *θr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Baldi 1999: 284; Leummann 1977, §194, §207; Sihler 1995, §225.2: Weiss 2009/2011: 163)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-04-27T00:19:20.817" LastActivityDate="2013-04-27T00:19:20.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3612" CreationDate="2013-04-27T14:01:00.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll attempt an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key issue is the contrast between lay intuition, and mathematical logic. Lay intuition tells us that nouns and verbs are the most 'contentful' parts of a sentence. Mathematical logic brings its rules for operators and their scopes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we have the expression &lt;code&gt;∃x(F(x))&lt;/code&gt;, we can't have the &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; scoping wider than the outermost parentheses here. If an &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; had some sort of a universal scope, for example, over &lt;code&gt;G&lt;/code&gt; too in &lt;code&gt;G(x)∧∃x(F(x))&lt;/code&gt;, we'd soon have a formalism that only talks about &lt;em&gt;constant terms&lt;/em&gt; in the universe. Such &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;s would be useless as variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, note that the logical terms that we introduce for describing sentences are based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_compositionality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;principle of compositionality&lt;/a&gt;. If we had used &lt;code&gt;&quot;man&quot; =&amp;gt; λx.man(x)&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&quot;some&quot; =&amp;gt; λF∃x.F(x)&lt;/code&gt; to derive &lt;code&gt;&quot;some man&quot; =&amp;gt; ∃x.man(x)&lt;/code&gt;, this would not correspond to what we understand of the phrase &quot;some man&quot;. Instead, it would correspond to &quot;there is a man&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper expression for &quot;some&quot; would be &lt;code&gt;λPλQ∃x.P(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt;. So, &lt;code&gt;&quot;some man&quot; =&amp;gt; λQ∃x.man(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt;, and (after a bit of α-conversion to avoid name clashes) &lt;code&gt;&quot;some woman&quot; =&amp;gt; λR∃y.woman(y)∧R(y)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two more pieces of the puzzle: &lt;code&gt;&quot;visit&quot; =&amp;gt; λSλu.S(λv(visit(v,u)))&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&quot;and&quot; =&amp;gt; λHλJ.H∧J&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now have NPs that have become functions that accept Vs and VPs as arguments. Determiners, that play a subordinate role in Phrase Structures, play a key role here in controlling the scope of variables, and the order in which functions apply over arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, if you were to apply the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; over the verb, and then apply the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; over the resultant, you'd have the man and the woman each visiting a garden, that may or may not be the same garden. However, if you were to apply the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; over the verb, and then apply the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; over the resultant, you'd have them both visiting the same garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all this, we haven't brought in &lt;strong&gt;(Neo-)Davidsonian Event semantics&lt;/strong&gt;, so we have made no commitments at all about whether or not the visit(s) to the garden(s) happened at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2013-04-27T18:56:23.347" LastActivityDate="2013-04-27T18:56:23.347" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3612" CreationDate="2013-04-27T17:21:49.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ended up finding a nice way to do it. Inspired by the way &quot;All men visited a garden&quot; which doesn't have any problems with the high number of entities, I make my NP have the meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;λvp.∃x(man(x) ∧ ∃y(woman(y) ∧ ∀z(z=x ∨ z=y → vp z)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I let&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;np1 `and` np2 = λvp.np1(λx.np2(λy.∀z.z=x ∨ z=y → vp z))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks slightly less nice than what's been suggested, and you'll need different &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;s for different typesl, but the nice thing is that it works even if our original sentence was something complicated like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every man and every woman and some child ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which simply becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;λvp.∀x(man(x) → ∀y(woman(y) → ∃c(child(c) ∧ ∀z((z=x ∨ z=y v z=c) → vp(z)))))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2013-04-28T19:43:53.423" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T19:43:53.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3617" CreationDate="2013-04-28T11:27:55.650" Score="5" ViewCount="2008" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a phonological reason for this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are names where, when clipped, there is /r/ in coda position. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derek &gt; Der&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sarah &gt; Sar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harold &gt; Har&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in non-rhotic varieties, these forms become Del, Sal/Sally, Harry/Hal/Hap to avoid the coda-position /r/. So is the change from /r/ in the cases of Robert and Richard, where /r/ is in a syllable onset, the subject of some phonological change or something different (e.g. Etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T19:11:53.003" Title="Why do Richard and Robert become Dick and Bob?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3616" CreationDate="2013-04-28T12:49:14.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It actually has nothing to do with a phonological rule, per se. You've pick out that these two names have onset /r/s, but what about &quot;William&quot; (&quot;Bill&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples appear to be vestiges of a long-dead middle-ages trend of rhyming nick names (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/how-dick-came-to-be-short-for-richard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006050211828&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=61502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;. Please forgive the non-academic sources). As such, the reasons for these names are more cultural than phonological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also find &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8767/changes-in-english-names-of-people&quot;&gt;this EL&amp;amp;U question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://voices.yahoo.com/nicknames-john-became-jack-other-odd-nicknames-765885.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt; interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T12:55:08.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3618" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3619" CreationDate="2013-04-28T13:44:57.040" Score="0" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any tests or morphological test which can help to identify whether an expression is lexicalised or not? For example, whether some compounds are processed through morphological processes or stored in the lexicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-04-29T08:39:28.877" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T08:39:28.877" Title="Tools to identify lexicalization" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3618" CreationDate="2013-04-28T22:42:40.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are psycholinguistic test that can help you with this. A lexicalized element should be more easily accessed by the speaker, and the reaction times should be lower than parsing a sentence. There should also be some phonetic reduction: if the language has word boundaries these should have or be in the process of disappearing, and the word should be losing phonetic material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also test for frequency for indications of lexicalization, but not concrete proof. I would say you need all of these to conclude that an expression has lexicalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some morphological test would be to see if the word can use nominal morphology. This is however problematic since it only works for other parts of speech lexicalizing, and not the lexicalization of compound nouns or things like that. But if a verb-noun, or short phrase or sentence can start building plurals, diminutives, declensions, etc, then it probably has lexicalized to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T22:42:40.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3596" CreationDate="2013-04-28T22:46:07.623" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indefinite articles developed from numerals, and the definite articles developed from demonstratives. This is a very well known process called grammaticalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-04-28T22:46:07.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3596" CreationDate="2013-04-29T04:22:18.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is true and yes, in most cases indefinite articles indeed developed from numerals, as @MGN already said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only there's no evidence of articles in PIE, the lack of articles is a more common phenomena than it can be expected to be from the Standard Average European point of view. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://inchiostro.unipv.it/uploads/pagine/855405872_Santiago_Giacalone.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interesting quote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The geographical distribution of articles on a worldwide basis (WALS&#xA;  2005) confirms the Western European peculiarity: while languages&#xA;  lacking articles are common (out of 566 languages, only 188 have no&#xA;  definite or indefinite articles and 41 have no definite, but only&#xA;  indefinite articles), one area in which lack of definite article is&#xA;  infrequent is Western Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as it can be read in the article provided, the upcoming process of &#xA;grammaticalization of articles can be observed nowadays in some Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more, there are some hypothesis that definite articles in some cases underwent further evolution and transformed to some other grammar units. For example, Joseph Greenberg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.ru/books?id=UV8Gtnf5iCwC&amp;amp;lpg=PA47&amp;amp;ots=99WCguHB-R&amp;amp;dq=Grinberg%20article%20gender%20bantu&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PA47#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Grinberg%20article%20gender%20bantu&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claimed that&lt;/a&gt; this is how some languages acquired gender markers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastEditorUserId="533" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T17:16:45.610" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T17:16:45.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2013-04-29T09:09:06.863" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nova &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.supernova-soft.com/c5/index.php/products/text_aligner/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;text aligner&lt;/a&gt; can do many things...it is worth trying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2007" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T09:09:06.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3624" CreationDate="2013-04-29T11:13:00.453" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty confident that there is a term describing the phenomenon of a compound which is created from words of different languages, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“eigenvalue” – made from German “eigen” and English “value”, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“aqualite” – made from Latin “aqua” and Greek “λῖϑος”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what that term is? Also do you have other examples for this phenomenon? I’m especially interested in Greek/Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1388" LastEditorUserId="1388" LastEditDate="2013-04-29T12:31:01.663" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T20:50:11.007" Title="The term for compounds mixed from different languages" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3623" CreationDate="2013-04-29T12:05:25.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are so called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hybrid words&lt;/a&gt;. And indeed, in English the majority of such words is of mixed Greek-Latin origin, so there exists a separate term for members of such subset - a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_compound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Classical compound&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastEditorUserId="533" LastEditDate="2013-04-29T12:16:33.260" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T12:16:33.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3616" CreationDate="2013-04-29T13:41:06.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt the explanations given elsewhere in this thread very much. It doesn't help that they are non-academic and free of references. I have always interpreted names like &quot;Bill&quot; and &quot;Dick&quot; to be caused by child phonology. It's hardly a coincidence that both the change from &quot;William&quot; to &quot;Bill&quot; and &quot;Richard&quot; to &quot;Dick&quot; can be formulated in phonological terms. They've changed from disyllabic to monosyllabic forms, and their continuants have become stops, yet retain both the voice and place features of the original form. Those are all highly familiar features of child phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T13:41:06.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-29T18:45:49.210" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a tonal language like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cantonese&lt;/a&gt;, how is stress assigned to loanwords (from languages which don't have a tone distinction)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Hong Kong Cantonese has various &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Cantonese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;words borrowed from English&lt;/a&gt;, a language without a tone distinction. Words such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;baa1 si2 &lt;strong&gt;'bus'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;saam1 man4 zi6 &lt;strong&gt;'sandwich'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;saam1 man4 jyu2 &lt;strong&gt;'salmon'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how is it so that these loanwords attain the tone pattern that they do? Is there some kind of pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-04-29T18:45:49.210" Title="How is tone assigned to loanwords borrowed from non-tonal languages?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;cantonese&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-05-01T13:54:19.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3616" CreationDate="2013-04-30T08:15:09.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as Nell and Ned (and Nan) go, I've always been told that it's metathesis - from 'mine Ellen' and 'mine Edward' - but I'm not sure that this is right, given how often it seems to work the other way (a napron becoming an apron, for example).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2010" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T08:15:09.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-04-30T13:50:59.607" Score="11" ViewCount="1253" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computer science (especially &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory&quot;&gt;computational complexity theory&lt;/a&gt;), problems can be classified to some complexity theory. For example, we say the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem&quot;&gt;travelling salesman problem&lt;/a&gt; belongs to NP-complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parsing of a human-language text (e.g. English text) is also a computational problem. Can it be analyzed and classified to some complexity class? If yes, which class does it belong to and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T15:32:11.860" Title="Can parsing be classified to some complexity class (e.g. NP-complete)?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-04-30T16:25:00.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I have been unable to find any excerpts from the book in question, &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.7335&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;A Fundamental Algorithm for Dependency Parsing&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by M. Covington references &lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computational-complexity-and-natural-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Computational Complexity And Natural Language&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Barton, Berwick, and Ristad, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Barton, Berwick and Ristad... prove that when lexical ambiguity and agreement features are present — that is, when words can be ambiguous and can be labeled with attributes — natural language parsing is NP-complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this book may be of great interest to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conclusion is backed up by &lt;a href=&quot;http://pagesperso.lina.univ-nantes.fr/~cdlh/papers/icgi.stringmax.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Computational complexity of problems on probabilistic grammars and transducers.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by F. Casacuberta et al. which provides proofs that parsing of Stochastic Regular Grammars is NP-Hard as well as &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P02/P02-1003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Generation as Dependency Parsing&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by A. Koller et al. which offers an ad hoc proof that parsing Topological Dependency Grammars is also NP-complete. As well as several other papers I found with a quick search on Google Scholar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-04-30T16:25:00.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-03T05:15:52.387" Score="5" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Australian languages are usually classified into two main groups. The first group is a large family spanning the continent, &lt;em&gt;Pama-Nyungan&lt;/em&gt;. The other group is not a family but merely an &quot;everything else&quot; category, &lt;em&gt;Non-Pama-Nyungan&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the languages that still have a large number of speakers (in the thousands), all the ones I can think of are I believe Pama-Nyungan: Arrernte, Kala Lagaw Ya, Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder which language is the most spoken but not a Pama Nyungan language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T07:43:27.067" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T07:43:27.067" Title="Which Non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language has the most speakers?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;&lt;endangered-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3633" CreationDate="2013-05-03T07:14:34.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exact figures are always hard to come by, but here are the Non-Pama-Nyungan with the most speakers, as far as I can tell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunwinggu_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gunwinggu&lt;/a&gt;, spoken in Arnhem Land by 2,000 people in 2003.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tiwi&lt;/a&gt;, spoken in the Tiwi Islands by &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.ethnologue.com/16/show_language.asp?code=tiw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1,830&lt;/a&gt; people in 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enindhilyagwa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Enindhilyagwa&lt;/a&gt;, spoken on Groote Eylandt by &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.ethnologue.com/16/show_language.asp?code=aoi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1,240&lt;/a&gt; people in 1996, though Wikipedia says there have been reports of as many as 3,000 speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2013-05-03T07:14:34.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-03T14:35:01.393" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know Chinese is related to some quite different languages like Tibetan and Burmese, the latter of which is native outside the territories which might be thought of as &quot;Chinese language territories&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are a good few languages within China which belong to unrelated families, such as Uyghur and Zhuang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are languages in nearby countries which superficially share features such as tonality, lack of inflection, and tendency to prefer single-syllable words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I began to wonder if there are any members of the Sinitic family itself which are native to anywhere beyond the borders of these &quot;Chinese language countries&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this question I'm not asking about the obviously vast diaspora of speakers of Chinese languages all over the world. A language solely outside these lands would be the most interesting but languages that span both sides of any border are also worth knowing about. I wasn't really thinking of any pidgins or creoles but I suppose those might be within the scope of my question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-05-03T14:35:01.393" Title="Is any member of the Sinitic family native outside the borders of China / Taiwan / Hong Kong / Macau?" Tags="&lt;languages-of-china&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-03T20:30:33.387" Score="6" ViewCount="1065" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning a Tigrinya for the last couple of months, and find it difficult to grasp and produce the central vowels of the language (see picture). I want to know if there are other languages which have this three way distinction regarding backness, the only other language I found was Norwegian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c0yvi.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T22:58:19.370" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T22:20:20.547" Title="What languages have a three-way vowel distinction with backness?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;frontness-backness&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3636" CreationDate="2013-05-03T23:38:38.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, vowel backness (as well as all the other attributes) is not the property of a certain language. It's because of the nature of the human vocal tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, each vowel sound produced has a certain backness (as well as the other features).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, languages use different &lt;em&gt;mappings&lt;/em&gt; of phones to phonemes. In other words, each point on a vowel diagram is not a point, but rather an area. Everything that falls into that area is mapped to a certain phoneme.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are plenty of languages that do not distinct backness (on IPA vowel diagram, it looks like an area occupying the whole width of the diagram).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Polish &quot;m&lt;b&gt;y&lt;/b&gt;sz&quot; (mouse) &lt;code&gt;[mɘ̟ʂ]&lt;/code&gt;. Different speakers may actually say &lt;code&gt;[mɪʂ]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[mʊʂ]&lt;/code&gt;, but a listener would &lt;em&gt;map&lt;/em&gt; it to an existing phoneme, &lt;code&gt;ɘ̟&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;German &quot;bitt&lt;b&gt;e&lt;/b&gt;&quot; (please) &lt;code&gt;[ˈbɪ-tə]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Greek &quot;ακακί&lt;b&gt;α&lt;/b&gt;&quot; (acacia) &lt;code&gt;[ɐ-kɐ-ˈci.-ɐ]&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is yet another consideration. Although some languages lack &lt;em&gt;cardinal&lt;/em&gt; central vowels, those vowel appear &lt;em&gt;in a spoken language&lt;/em&gt; due to various phonetic phenomenons (of course, individual for every language). For instance, it's a common effect of centralization/reduction of unstressed vowels in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;молоко&quot; (milk) &lt;code&gt;[mə-ɫʌ-'kɔ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that this word contains three &quot;o&quot;, the last one in stressed, and two unstressed ones are reduced in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;этот&quot; (this) &lt;code&gt;[ˈɛ-tət]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that &lt;code&gt;ɛ&lt;/code&gt; (front mid) in this word, regardless of stress, is often pronounced &lt;code&gt;ɜ&lt;/code&gt; (central mid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-05-06T12:02:07.607" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T12:02:07.607" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T07:23:57.433" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bats_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the Bats language of Eastern Georgia has a case called &quot;contacting&quot;, but no description is offered as to its function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the Russian and Georgian versions of the page and I checked the pages for the languages it's related to, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechen_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chechen&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingush_language#Case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ingush&lt;/a&gt;, and found no further mention of this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Contacting Case present in any other language or might it just be an unusual name for one of the more usual cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T11:49:18.793" Title="What is &quot;contacting case&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T08:29:15.610" Score="0" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;Optimality Theory has been adapted by some linguists to a stratified model, what are the benefits of such a model over a non-stratified model of OT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T10:33:51.330" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T15:15:17.117" Title="What are the benefits of a Stratal approach to Optimality Theory?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T08:54:25.507" Score="9" ViewCount="6979" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an example sentence with a non-projective dependency parse. &#xA;It doesn't have to be in English, though such an example would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2023" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T12:36:58.870" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T14:31:32.320" Title="Non-Projective Example" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-05T12:42:16.490" Score="4" ViewCount="13583" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to build a keyword extractor based on the TextRank model as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/emnlp/pdf/Mihalcea.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RMPT04&lt;/a&gt;. But I don't understand how to calculate the co-occurrence between two words in a window of text explained in the point 3.1. Moreover, is a corpus necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2025" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T12:47:13.903" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T08:31:10.187" Title="How to calculate the co-occurrence between two words in a window of text?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3636" CreationDate="2013-05-05T15:17:43.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for an list of languages, you're probably going to have to do some research yourself. I looked at WALS, but it doesn't seem to have a chapter specifically related to backness. But you could have a look at languages with many &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/2A?tg_format=map&amp;amp;v1=c00d&amp;amp;v2=cfff&amp;amp;v3=cd00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vowel phonemes&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The more vowels, the more likely that there's a 3-way backness distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for familiar vowel sounds to help you pronounce the Tigrinya vowels or other central vowels, I suggest you find the vowels on Wikipedia, which usually has a list of languages with a specific vowel. Scanning through that list might give you an idea of how the sound should be pronounced. E.g. start with&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;close central rounded vowel&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and jump to other central vowels using the IPA vowel chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T16:07:10.537" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T16:07:10.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3596" CreationDate="2013-05-05T20:11:36.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Articles in Macedonian are like demonstrative adjectives attached to the nouns, so there are 3 degrees of ''proximity'' observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My language (Croatian) does not have articles, but it has a concept of definite and indefinite adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dobar konj  = a good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dobri konj = the good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;predicative:&#xA;konj je dobar = a/the horse is good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with numbers, you use definite adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jedan dobri konj = one good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;neki dobri konj = a/some good horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because by putting an identifier (jedan=one, neki=some, a), you are making it more definite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastEditorUserId="732" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T20:18:22.467" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T20:18:22.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1575" CreationDate="2013-05-05T20:42:29.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Brazilian) Portuguese does have [we],  (in words that were spelled in old spelling with -güe-, -qüe, -güi, -qüi- ): agüentar, agüar, líqüido, sangüíneo, birigüi etc...; and in toponyms of Amerindian and African origin : Ibirapuera, Birigui (former spelling: Birigüi), Itapuã...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brazilian Portuguese has so many diphthongs which are not indicated in spelling: vocês [vo'sejs], Brasil [bra'ziw], sulco (['suwku] different than suco ['suku])...Ruim ''bad'' is frequently pronounced as a monosyllabic word, so it sounds like a nasalized version of the name Ruy [huj] (with both u and j nasalized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different than French (or maybe even Continental Portuguese),  voar ''to fly'' is [vu'a(h)] or [vo'a(h)]&#xA;Monosyllabic [vwah] (à la French voix [vwax]) is not common in Brazilian Portuguese (but it's frequent in Continental Portuguese [vwar]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to Spanish,  in standard peninsular Spanish (Madrid/Salamanca) &lt;strong&gt;muy&lt;/strong&gt; is [mwi] and not [muy]:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/espt/muy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wordreference.com/espt/muy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastEditorUserId="732" LastEditDate="2013-05-05T20:53:45.197" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T20:53:45.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2013-05-05T21:03:56.277" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is efficient, especially when it comes to adjectives. :)&#xA;Many different meanings are joined together, and you end up with adjectives with compound meanings, like&#xA;samey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SAMEY&#xA;similar and boring&#xA;▪ &lt;em&gt;He has written five samey novels.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/samey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/samey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T21:03:56.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="236" CreationDate="2013-05-05T21:19:25.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brazilian Portuguese is not pro-drop, in the spoken form it's 90% non-pro-drop, and 10% pro-drop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baiano Brazilian Portuguese: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu normalmente beijo Maria.&#xA;Eu frequentemente vejo ela.&#xA;A gente sempre planeja o futuro.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with inversion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maria, eu normalmente beijo.&#xA;Ela, eu frequentemente vejo.&#xA;O futuro, a gente sempre planeja.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quem (que) você sempre chama?&lt;/em&gt; = Who(m) do you always call/invite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quem (que) sempre chama você?&lt;/em&gt; = Who always calls/invites you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="732" LastActivityDate="2013-05-05T21:19:25.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3647" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-05T23:13:43.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the three main dimensions of vowels, reflecting the position of the tongue relative to the front or back of the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other vowel dimensions are &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/roundness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'roundness'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;roundness&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/vowel-height&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged 'vowel-height'&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;vowel-height&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Front vowels in the main varieties of English are (in IPA):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back vowels in the main varieties of English are (in IPA):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ʌ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɔ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɑ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɒ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mid position between &lt;em&gt;front&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; is called &lt;em&gt;central&lt;/em&gt; and the intermediate positions are called &lt;em&gt;near front&lt;/em&gt;  and &lt;em&gt;near back&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-06T01:37:50.710" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T01:37:50.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3648" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-05T23:13:43.983" Score="0" Body="One of the three main dimensions of vowels, reflecting the position of the tongue relative to the front or back of the mouth. The other dimensions are roundness and vowel height." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-06T11:44:14.470" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T11:44:14.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3639" CreationDate="2013-05-06T15:15:17.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stratal approaches offer a way to deal with morpho-phonological &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_opacity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;opacity&lt;/a&gt;, which is one of the biggest challenges to the traditional monostratal version of OT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few years ago I looked at some inflectional paradigm data from several languages--Japanese, Ukrainian, and Turkish. In each of these languages I found a handful of forms that on the surface appear to violate the expected inflectional pattern (e.g. in Japanese there are some verbs that consist of vowel-final stems and vowel-initial suffixes, despite the tendency everywhere else for vowel-final stems to &quot;select&quot; consonant-initial allomorphs of suffixes). I found that, in each case, no single ranking of constraints could account for the majority of forms plus these exceptional forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turned out that adopting a stratal model--one with a unique &quot;stem phonology&quot; constraint ranking and one with a unique &quot;word phonology&quot; constraint ranking--could account for all of the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-05-06T15:15:17.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3822" CreationDate="2013-05-06T23:35:41.933" Score="13" ViewCount="6829" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like Indo-European languages are always stuck between throwing away complicated fusional grammar (like English) or retaining most of it (like Russian). Are there any Indo-European languages that reanalyzed the verb system into agglutination with series of suffixes rather than trying to stuff complex tense, aspect, and person information into a single arbitrarily chosen suffix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it generally a rule that languages evolve away from agglutination and never towards it? It seems, for example, that Modern Japanese is a bit more fusional rather than agglutinative due to certain sound changes - for example in Classical Japanese &quot;ikitari&quot; &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; simplifying into &quot;ikita&quot; (which prevented further addition of affixes since -ta is not a verb citation form ending) and then fused into &quot;itta&quot;, which obscures the root &quot;ik&quot;, thus becoming somewhat fusional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T12:58:23.507" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T12:58:23.507" Title="Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3640" CreationDate="2013-05-07T11:37:03.413" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~strctlrn/bib/PDF/nonprojectiveHLT-EMNLP2005.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Non-projective Dependency Parsing using Spanning Tree Algorithms&lt;/a&gt; has a few examples of non-projective dependency trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbs0l.png&quot; alt=&quot;non projective tree&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that dependency graphs are (1) not a formalism and (2) not standardized, so each researcher may re-define what happens in dependencies. Some of those dependency graphs are not even trees. Refer &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/LREC06_dependencies.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ErgWd.png&quot; alt=&quot;dependency graph&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2013-05-07T18:30:41.607" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T18:30:41.607" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-07T13:38:14.037" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, speech production errors such as phoneme or morpheme exchange, anticipation, etc. are the result of interference in the speech production process. However, the use of a word in a morphological gap (such as &lt;em&gt;confusal&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;arrivation&lt;/em&gt;) uses the same speech production process as every other word, and the word is still semantically and morphologically correct, even if it's not present in a language's lexicon. Would this still be classified a speech production error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T11:34:19.070" Title="Is the use of a word in a morphological gap technically a speech production error?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;production&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-07T15:16:43.590" Score="1" ViewCount="3842" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I originally posted this question on the Philosophy.stackexchange site&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was prompted by this newspaper article saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages spoken by billions of people across Europe and Asia are descended from an ancient tongue uttered in southern Europe at the end of the last ice age, according to research...by scientists in Britain, [and] points to a common origin for vocabularies as varied as English and Urdu, Japanese and Itelmen, a language spoken along the north-eastern edge of Russia.&#xA;Linguistics conventionally divide human languages into families. For example the Indo-European family which contains Latin, Sanskrit and Greek amongst others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it seems to me that all languages must be related in the same way that all life on Earth is related even though there are marked similarities between certain species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot see how, even taking into account Chomskys idea of a universal grammar intrinsic to the human mind, how a language can spontaneously develop in total absence of another human being simply because a human babies and infants are utterly helpless and dependent. (Is there any evidence of this ever occurring)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is there is always spoken linguistic continuity; and languages should be considered in a continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? Or am I missing something? Or is it a trite truth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the question, is that if Chomskys Universal Grammar hypothesis is correct, and I suspect it is; then language contrary to the above hypothesis orginated where Man originated - in the African continent and marched out of it when he did too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T15:24:05.430" Title="Are all languages related?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-05-07T15:35:31.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-07T15:20:36.807" Score="0" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asked to help proofread an Arabic language (right-to-left) flyer with some English (left-to-right) text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now it reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;بطاقة المساعدة الغذائية&lt;br&gt;&#xA;مقبولة من Local Farm Market&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;اسواق المزارعين هو مكان رائع لشراء الأطعمة المحلية ولرؤية مجتمعك&lt;br&gt;&#xA;يجب على الجميع ان يكون لديهم مفتاح لطعام محلي طازج&lt;br&gt;&#xA;للجميع بزيادة Local Farm Market  الان يقبلون ببطاقة الطعام&lt;br&gt;&#xA;الوصول إلى طعام محلي, صحي وطازج&lt;br&gt;&#xA;اختبر السوق بنفسك!&amp;rlm;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that there is a difference between different rtl languages in terms of the different cultures and accepted norms in each. For example, in Hebrew, standard practice is to use a question mark facing the same way as in English. In Arabic, however, standard practice is to reverse the question mark's orientation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'm thinking that the second bolded line needs to be rearranged so that the English text is on the left.  Is my instinct correct in that?  Is that the most natural placement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in the main body of the flyer, I'm unsure if the placement of the English text (the name of the market) belongs after (=to the left of) the verbal phrase as it is currently, or before (=the right of) it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the second issue above, I know that a subject can follow a verb in Arabic; I'm asking for the most natural composition for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1756" LastEditorUserId="1756" LastEditDate="2013-06-02T23:48:12.140" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T23:48:12.140" Title="Mostly Arabic text with some English" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3655" CreationDate="2013-05-07T15:24:05.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few theories about the origins of human language, but one of the theories is that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Proto-Human Language&quot;&gt;Proto-Human Language&lt;/a&gt; from which all other languages are descended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because we don't have written forms going back nearly that far, it is extremely difficult to accurately reconstruct the language. Reconstructing that language would be based off of other Proto reconstructions, like Proto-Indo-European, and we can't even &lt;em&gt;guarantee&lt;/em&gt; the accuracy of those reconstructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is somewhat likely that there is a single Proto-Human Language, considering that fact that all humans originated from the same area of the world. They then expanded out and the languages changed based on natural change and language contact to give us what we now have today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2013-05-07T15:24:05.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3633" CreationDate="2013-05-08T05:33:51.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The non-Pama-Nyungan languages with the highest numbers of speakers are Bininj Gun-Wok, Tiwi, Anindilyakwa and Murrinhpatha.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anindilyakwa: Spoken on Groote Eylandt, &lt;a href=&quot;http://austlang.aiatsis.gov.au&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AustLang&lt;/a&gt; reports speaker numbers in the range 1,500-2,000, while the 2011 census indicates 1,500 speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bininj Gun-Wok: this is a cover term for Mayali, Kunwinjku, Kune, Gundjeihmi, Kuninjku and Gundedjnjenghmi. This is a group of closely-related and mutually intelligible varieties spoken across central Arnhem Land. AustLang indicates total speaker numbers of around 1,300; the 2011 census indicates around 2,000 speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Murrinhpatha: spoken in the community of Wadeye (also known as Port Keats), this language has grown in speaker numbers due to having become the regional lingua franca. 2006 Census speaker numbers were 1,850, while the 2011 census gives it 2,400.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tiwi: The language of Bathurst and Melville islands, off the coast to the north of Darwin. Tiwi has undergone substantial change with a new variety emerging, called Modern Tiwi, while speaker numbers for old Tiwi have dropped greatly. Austlang reports speaker numbers over 1,700 while the 2011 census gives it over 2,200.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the basis of these figures it appears that Murrinhpatha currently is the non-Pama-Nyungan language with the largest number of speakers. Of course, the Indigenous Australian languages with the largest numbers of speakers are the creoles, Kriol (Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions) and Yumplatok (Torres Strait islands and Cape York peninsula). While these are not Pama-Nyungan, they are also conventionally not included in non-Pama-Nyungan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T05:33:51.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3660" CreationDate="2013-05-08T09:54:59.567" Score="1" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;In certain papers on Optimality Theory (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://works.bepress.com/john_j_mccarthy/29/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by McCarthy, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguisticsinamsterdam.nl/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=aclc;sid=e08903bd79b52283508f08f7b5d46364;rgn=main;idno=m0302a02;view=text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) the tableaus contain the notations &lt;strong&gt;*L&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;*W&lt;/strong&gt;, as seen in the image below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dq472.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by these notations? The second paper I linked to used these examples if you want to see the kinds of contexts they're used in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T13:32:14.793" Title="What are *L and *W used to denote in Optimality Theory" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3659" CreationDate="2013-05-08T13:32:14.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a tableau is comparing two candidates, a &lt;em&gt;W&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the constraint in that column favors the winning candidate, while an &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; indicates that it favors the losing candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example above, Candidate A is the loser and Candidate B is the winner. FAITH(Neg) favors the winner, since the winner violates it zero times and the loser violates it once. On the other hand, *Neg favors the loser, since the loser violates it once while the winner violates it twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See page 7, paragraph 3 of the McCarthy paper for further explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T13:32:14.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3602" CreationDate="2013-05-08T14:35:10.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be some confusion when we ask about how to describe a &quot;sentence&quot;, and then discuss properties of how the sentence is written down.  We should distinguish &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; ; they are distinct things, with independent properties.  Writing is (basically) a representation of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's think of  the language first.  The key question is, what linguistic utterance is that piece of writing &lt;em&gt;representing&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's representing &quot;I live in Měiguó&quot; (or &quot;I live in Mei⁵gwok³&quot;, etc.), then the sentence displays &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_switching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code-switching&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;borrowing&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macaronic&lt;/em&gt; is a somewhat more informal term for frequent code-switching, sometimes mixing parts of words.  I wouldn't say this sentence looks particularly macaronic, though it could be part of a larger macaronic rant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's representing &quot;I live in America&quot;—that is, if the characters ‹美国› are supposed to be read as &quot;America&quot;, the way e.g. Japanese read ‹大人› as &lt;em&gt;otona&lt;/em&gt;—then there's no code-switching or borrowing going on.  It's just an everyday English sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we turn to writing.  ‹I live in 美国› is a mixture of two writing systems.  I believe &quot;mixed orthography&quot; or &quot;mixed writing&quot; are reasonable labels for this phenomenon.  This is independent of how many languages are being represented; for example, ‹I live in Америкa› is mixed writing representing a pure English sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T01:19:12.583" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T01:19:12.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2420" CreationDate="2013-05-08T14:38:00.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the figure. Line 1 is stress timed (secondary stress ignored) and line 2 is syllable timed. IIRC, the time between each dot is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iyq9o.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T14:38:00.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3666" CreationDate="2013-05-08T15:45:49.343" Score="0" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find a copy of Paul Kiparsky's &lt;em&gt;How abstract is phonology?&lt;/em&gt; written in 1968?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place version I've found so far is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/How_abstract_is_phonology.html?id=mQRZAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;snippet view on Google Books&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://anthropology.uwo.ca/faculty/creider/247/abstract.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this summary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-08T22:20:45.060" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T23:13:40.463" Title="Where can I read &quot;How abstract is phonology?&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3680" CreationDate="2013-05-08T16:02:16.590" Score="8" ViewCount="2320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious why every language I've heard of has back or central vowels. Are there any languages that exclusively uses front vowels (say the phonemes /a/, /e/, /i/, /y/)? I want to know this more or less because I'm making a simple conlang that I want to only use front vowels - would this in real life be unstable and lead to language evolution that generates back vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, shouting and screaming generally involve front vowels. Is there some natural vocalization resulting in back vowel sounds, which would lead to inclusion in language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T14:43:32.717" Title="Are there any languages with only front vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3664" CreationDate="2013-05-08T23:13:40.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any online/digital versions, but I &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=Q5x17Vm22rEC&amp;amp;pg=PA272&quot;&gt;came upon&lt;/a&gt; the places where it's reprinted. You should be able to get it in your library or via interlibrary loan, I suppose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kiparsky, Paul. 1968. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2215592&quot;&gt;How Abstract Is Phonology?&lt;/a&gt; Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reprinted as a section (pp. 5-56) of: Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. “Phonological Representations.” In: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/499860155&quot;&gt;Three Dimensions of Linguistic Theory&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Osamu Fujimura, Donald L Smith, S. I Harada, and Julie. B Lovins. Tokyo: Tokyo Institute for Advanced Studies of Language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/564487076&quot;&gt;Explanation in Phonology&lt;/a&gt;. Dordrecht: Foris. Pp. 119-163.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2013-05-08T23:13:40.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3688" CreationDate="2013-05-09T01:40:38.540" Score="9" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not very updated on random theories regarding the Altaic theory (which I personally am agnostic about; though I slant towards not believing in it due to the extreme lack of any regular sound change patterns from &quot;Proto-Altaic&quot;) and the classification of Korean and Japanese, and English Wikipedia generally regards the consensus being that Japonic and Korean are isolates. However, the Chinese Wikipedia gives many, many theories, and the Japonic language family is also regarded as controversial (!) in many articles in CW. However, the Chinese Wikipedia is quite famous for not citing things properly and containing boatloads of &quot;weasel words&quot; in part due to common Chinese style abusing the word 据说 (it is said; according to some) a lot. This huge block from Chinese Wikipedia has very little footnotes, so I'd like some help on distinguishing viable theories from fringe or probable Wikipedia editor pet theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a translation of the relevant parts from &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki&quot;&gt;https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki&lt;/a&gt;/阿尔泰语系 , with the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;朝鲜语、日本语（包括琉球语）的系属一直都是学术界争论的焦点、基本上可以有五类的观点&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classsification of Korean and Japanese (including Ryukyuan) has always been a focus for academic debate. There are generally speaking five camps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第一类观点认为朝鲜语、日本语即使属于该语系，也只能在阿尔泰超语系假说（Macro-Altaic theory）上成立，因为朝鲜语、日本语有着一些阿尔泰语系的语言特征。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;流音不会出现在本土词汇（固有词）的首个音节上&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;元音和谐律（或称元音调和）&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;黏着语的特征&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;但缺少人称后缀&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;如通古斯语(赫哲) Mini bithe-i 我的书 Bi mini bithe-we-i hvla-i.我读我的书。 bithe-we-i中的we是受格后缀，而i是第一人称领属后缀。hvla-i中的i为动词第一人称后缀。 [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;日本语的这三个语言特征为该观点提供了相当有力的支持。由于日本语跟阿尔泰语系的其他语言之间的同源词汇非常少，所以反对该观点的学者一般都以此作为反驳的力证。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first camp believes that Korean and Japanese do belong to this [Altaic] family, which could only be true if the Macro-Altaic theory is true, because Korean and Japanese have some Altaic characteristics. (&lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt;: this sentence is equally awkward in the original)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Liquids do not appear in the first syllable of native words&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vowel harmony&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agglutination&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conjugation for person (however, J/K does not have this one)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A typical Altaic languages] such as Tungusic (Nanai) &lt;em&gt;Mini bithe-i&lt;/em&gt; &quot;My book&quot; &lt;em&gt;Bi mini bithe-we-i hvla-i&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I'm reading my book&quot;. (&lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt;: incomplete sentence in original) bithe-we-i's &quot;we&quot; is a patientive suffix, while &quot;i&quot; is a ferst person genitive (?) suffix. hvla-i's &quot;i&quot; is a first person conjugation for the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining three characteristics do belong to Japanese, giving this theory significant support. However, Japanese shares very little vocabulary with other Altaic languages, so scholars against this viewpoint take this as strong evidence against this view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第二类观点认为日本语跟朝鲜语共属于一个新的语系。持该观点的学者认为日本语的文法与朝鲜语的文法有惊人的相似度，都是使用主宾谓序列，且两者历史上又共同受过古汉语的强烈影响。因此有学者认为日本语跟朝鲜语是阿尔泰语系和汉藏语系混合的新语系。但是日本语跟朝鲜语之间缺乏同源词也成了异议的学者们反驳该观点的力证。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second camp believes Japanese and Korean belong to a new [i.e. separate] language family. Scholars believing in this theory think that Japanese grammar is shockingly similar to that of Korean - both use SOV - and both have had strong influence from Old Chinese. Thus, some people believe that Japanese and Korean is a mixed language family arising from the creolization of Sino-Tibetan and Altaic. However, the lack of common vocabulary between Japanese and Korean also becomes a arguing point for dissenters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第三类观点认为日本语跟琉球语共属于一个新的语系，即日本语系。由于日本语跟琉球语之间确有不少相似性，故此观点得到了一些学者的支持，但仍然并没有被广泛认同。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third camp believes Japanese and Ryūkyūan belongs to a new family, the Japonic family. Since Japanese and Ryūkyūan do have many similarities, this theory receives the support of some scholars, but remains controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第四类观点认为日本语跟朝鲜语一样，都是孤立语言，而它们跟目前世界上已知的语系都没有关联。持该观点的学者们以“同源词问题”支持该观点。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth camp believes that Japanese and Korean are both isolates, unrelated to other languages of the world. Scholars believing in this view support it with the &quot;lexical similarity problem&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第五类观点认为日本语应当归属汉藏语系藏缅语族，主要以西田龙雄为代表的一些日本学者，认为日本语的语序与缅甸语相同，而且也有与缅甸语及中国南方方言近似的词汇，甚至在音韵上也有好些类似之处，因而主张日本语应归属藏缅语族[1]。但是持反对意见的人认为，日本与藏缅语民族地区之间路途遥远，中间还隔着南岛语系和满-通古斯语族的民族地区，故此观点大多未加以重视。然而，有些学者提出应当以民族迁徙历史来看待此说，他们说:虽然今天的民族分布看起来日本和藏缅语族相隔甚远，但是在商周时期，一些藏缅语族、南支古亚洲族(鸟田)和南岛语族混合，并且在汉藏(周)民族强大的压力下以其航海技术沿岸北上或南下透过朝鲜半岛南部进入九州岛定居。当时，通古斯族尚在蒙古高原东北部与北支古亚洲族(今楚科奇和朝鲜族之北方族源)竞争，故此说法极有可能。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fifth camp believes that Japanese should belong in the Sino-Tibetan family under Tibeto-Burman. This theory is supported by a camp of Japanese scholars led by Nishida, who holds that Japanese word order is similar to that of Burmese, and also has vocabulary similar to those of Burmese and southern Chinese dialects; even the pitch accent has similarities with the tonal systems of these languages. However, other people believe that since Japan is very far from both Tibet and Burma and separated by Austronesian and Tungusic language areas, this theory should be ignored. However, yet others think that according to race migration history, around the Shang and Zhou dynasties of China, some dialects of Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian mixed, and [their speakers] used their advanced seafaring skills to migrate to Korea and Kyūshū under the pressure of the Sino-Tibetan speakers (Zhou dynasty). At that time, the Tungusics have yet to set up home in the eastern Mongolian plateau, so this theory is extremely probable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;除了上述五类观点以外、还有学者认为日语应当属于南岛语系。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except the five above camps, some others believe Japnaese belong to Austronesian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T09:33:31.080" Title="Is it accurate - Chinese Wikipedia on Japanese/Korean classification" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-09T01:53:42.627" Score="2" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;so I have a Syntax II final Friday and am really confused about one of the study guide questions: &quot;Why can't semantics be the input to Syntax? Illustrate with examples&quot;. Could anyone please shed some light on this, or direct me to a source? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2037" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T18:53:10.840" Title="Why semantics can't be the input to syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4043" CreationDate="2013-05-09T03:15:59.480" Score="9" ViewCount="1025" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: Please don't assume that because I'm asking about vocabulary, that my only method of language study is vocabulary memorization.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of learning a couple of new languages, and am getting in the habit of using flash cards for vocabulary practice.  My primary goal is to be able to converse in the target languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether it might be a better use of my time to use flash a word in my native language (L1), to practice remembering the translation to my second language (L2), or the other way; flash the L2 word and translate to the L1 word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter (L1 -&gt; L2) seems to be the most common method I have seen in my various classes and language learning books.  But the former seems more natural, and to more mimic how a child learns his first language (he hears a word, learns that it is associated with a particular object, then over time the word comes to mind when he sees the object).  The latter is also far easier, in terms of getting the answer &quot;just right.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy, for instance, for a native English speaker learning Spanish to see the Spanish word &quot;banco&quot; and remember the English &quot;bank.&quot;  It can be a bit harder to see the English word &quot;bank&quot; and remember if the Spanish word is &quot;banco&quot;, &quot;banko&quot; or &quot;banc&quot;.  But that may also mean that the harder exercise is the more fruitful one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have any studies or other relevant work been done that would shed any useful light on this?  Does the most effective method vary depending on other circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T23:31:23.103" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T12:50:15.360" Title="Which makes more more effective vocabulary practice: L1 -&gt; L2 or L2 -&gt; L1?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-09T03:42:21.330" Score="6" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of us know that sentences and clauses can be coordinated, and that subordinating clauses can modify nouns (see restrictive relative clauses), modify verbs (see adverbial clauses) and serve as complements for verbs (see complement clauses).     Also note nominalizations such as the first big constituent in &quot;Bill's looking for the dollar under the sofa frustrated his date, Charlene.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the last few years, I was surprised to find out that there is another way to build multi-clausal sentences, namely clause-chaining, in which a chain of medial clauses (whose verbs don't take all of the inflections that the main clause verbs do) precedes or follows the main clause.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among natural languages, is there another way to form multi-clausal sentences besides the ones listed above?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T03:43:54.437" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T03:43:54.437" Title="Aside from coordination, subordination, and clause-chaining, how else do natural languages create multi-clause sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3675" CreationDate="2013-05-09T03:58:30.160" Score="4" ViewCount="2667" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any synchronic difference between homonymy and polysemy?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a literate English speaker, I can usually tell when words that are pronounced&#xA;identically have different etymologies thanks to our wretched but etymologically&#xA;informative spelling system.    I know that &quot;here&quot; and &quot;hear&quot; come from different&#xA;roots, for example, just as I know that &quot;run&quot; as in &quot;I want to run away&quot; and &quot;run&quot; as &#xA;in &quot;Dad runs the company now&quot; come from the same root.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as most of us know, children acquiring language don't have access to etymological information.    So, spelling aside, is there any synchronic difference between homonymy and polysemy?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible answer is that morphologically different words are synchronic homonyms rather than polysemous words.     Consider &quot;lie&quot; (repose horizontally) and &quot;lie&quot; (use language to deceive).    A naive person like me could argue that the two &quot;lies&quot; are synchronic homonyms and not one polysemous word because they inflect differently in past tense (lied, lay).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But couldn't critic counter that &quot;lie&quot; meaning &quot;present tense of lie.deceive&quot; and &quot;lie&quot; meaning &quot;present tense of lie.repose&quot; are still examples of polysemy?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-20T02:54:03.077" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T02:54:03.077" Title="Is there any synchronic difference between homonymy and polysemy?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3676" CreationDate="2013-05-09T04:01:36.687" Score="4" ViewCount="819" Body="&lt;p&gt;[As per comments below, I have edited this question for greater clarity.]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know whether a language without recursion, which would generate only a finite number of well-formed sentences, could still generate a potentially infinite amount of discourse.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the term &quot;recursive&quot; describes formal operations (including a grammar's generation of well-formed sentences and constituents) that can apply to their own output.   For example, the rules for forming relative clauses amount to a recursive operation, since relative clauses can be added to a noun phrase within some matrix relative clause.  Thanks to recursion, we have noun phrases such as the cat that ate the rat,&quot; &quot;the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese,&quot; &quot;the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese that attracted the roaches,&quot; and so on, &lt;em&gt;ad infinitum&lt;/em&gt;.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say that recursion allows a grammar to generate a &quot;potentially infinite&quot; number of sentences, I mean that a formal description of the language's syntax would entail that the number of well-formed sentences in the language is infinite in principle.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say that a language without recursion is finite, I mean that such a language's syntax would entail that the number of well-formed sentences in the language would be finite.   This does NOT imply that a finite language couldn't generate enough sentences for its speakers to express themselves across contexts.   Neither does it mean that a finite language would necessarily be a simple one.   Dan Everett, a linguist who joined the Piraha-speaking community in South America to learn and study their language, has  claimed that Piraha is finite and has also described Piraha's verb formation as extremely complex.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now so far, we've been talking only about sentences.  But we all know that people don't communicate in one-sentence telegrams.   We talk at length for various purposes.  In other words, we exhibit &lt;em&gt;discourse&lt;/em&gt;.   AFAIK, a lot of human discourse is &quot;potentially infinite.&quot;   In other words, in many types of discourse, an instance of such a type of discourse could continue indefinitely in principle.   Hence expressions like &quot;That conversation will go on forever.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this information prompted me to ask whether a language without recursion, which would have a finite number of sentences, could in principle allow discourse (such as conversations) that could in principle continue indefinitely.   I suspect that speakers of any language, finite or not, could go on talking forever in principle.  But I want to know if this is more than my suspicion.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T07:46:12.057" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T04:37:17.837" Title="Wouldn't a language without recursion still be non-finite at the level of discourse?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3677" CreationDate="2013-05-09T04:04:34.573" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know, every language has open classes of morphemes.    If we discovered a new mineral whose natural florescence captured the public's attention, there would be no difficulty coining a new name for it in either technical or popular vocabulary.     Odds are, the new name would be derived from existing morphemes, yielding something like &quot;glo-stone.&quot;  But nothing theoretical could prevent the coinage of a new morpheme like &quot;fraz.&quot;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have often heard that the number of morphemes in a language is finite because there are only so many morphemes in a language at a given time.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, only so many sentences are being spoken in a given language at a given time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It simply isn't possible for there to be an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; infinity of sentences in a given language.     But because of recursion, we can rightly characterize the number of sentences in a language as non-finite in principle.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't we say the same about the number of morphemes?   There may be practical and cognitive limits on the lengths of morphemes, but not theoretical limits as far as I know.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the numbers of both sentences and morphemes in a language are  &lt;em&gt;actually finite&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;non-finite in principle&lt;/em&gt;,  then how could any language be characterized as having only a finite number of sentences in principle even if said language lacks recursion?    True, new morphemes are uttered with far lower frequency than new sentences are, but what theoretical difference would that make?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T05:31:53.787" Title="Are lexicons finite in principle?" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3672" CreationDate="2013-05-09T04:58:28.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short: &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, you need a diachronic definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;device&quot; had the plural &lt;em&gt;mouses&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;animal&quot; had &lt;em&gt;mice&lt;/em&gt;, would you say it was still polysemic? I think the answer has to be yes: the paradigm/inflexion is in the end not crucial. &lt;em&gt;Mouse&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt; are still &quot;the same word&quot;. So we cannot use that as a criterion to distinguish between true homonymy and polysemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential criterion could be, &quot;is the meaning of one sense of the word close to that of the other sense?&quot;. But you can see how this is impracticable: polysemy can lead to wildly different senses, and homonymy can lead to similar senses, such as through &lt;em&gt;folk etymology&lt;/em&gt;, where words converge because they are &lt;em&gt;perceived&lt;/em&gt; as etymologically related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then what should we use? I think the only criterion that can be rigorously applied to distinguish between the two kinds of same-sounding/written words is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the history of this word, were the two senses ever marked as written or pronounced differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, it is a true homonym; is not, it is merely polysemy. Incidentally, one could argue that every word is polysemic, since all words can be used metaphorically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, only a diachronic criterion works to distinguish between the two categories that our intuition wants to put different labels on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T04:58:28.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-05-09T05:12:00.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume you have the recursion of syntactic dependencies in mind. Yes, I agree: a language can never be finite as long as you can produce it. Even saying the exact same thing twice or thrice or a hundred times can at least theoretically add or change meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What those people you are probably thinking of mean is that you cannot have an infinite number of different &lt;em&gt;sentences&lt;/em&gt; without some kind of sub-sentence recursion. That is to some extent true, but it seems to focus a bit too much on the sentence as a unit. Because I can say more or less the same thing... In shorter or different units. Another thing to consider is the following. Sentence boundaries are often a stylistic matter more tied to the following. Writing, rather than speech. They also are the following. Defined or chosen in somewhat arbitrary ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T07:13:35.790" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T07:13:35.790" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3674" CreationDate="2013-05-09T05:31:53.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a philosophical question, but I agree with your reasoning: in theory, or in principle, a language could contain an infinite number of different morphemes (one of which might have to have an infinite length, but that doesn't matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in practice, one observes that the number of new, intelligible sentences recorded on the Internet every day is very large, whereas the creation of new, intelligible morphemes is very small. For all practical purposes, it makes sense to treat the number of possible sentences as infinite, and the number of morphemes as nearly fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of morphemes becomes larger already if you include more, such as every unknown letter combination recorded; but it makes more sense to only count as morphemes combinations that are to some degree understood by people. Of what we count as newly created sentences, most are to some degree understood by people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T05:31:53.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3681" CreationDate="2013-05-09T09:59:14.487" Score="6" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Catalan has a process whereby word-final non-continuants undergo deletion and nasal assimilation. For example /ben+k/ surfaces as [beŋ] 'I sell'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this relation opaque?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I found this question in some lecture notes from 2011 and can't find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T16:26:46.927" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T18:37:18.910" Title="Why is the process of word-final non-continuant deletion and nasal assimilation in Catalan opaque?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;catalan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2942" CreationDate="2013-05-09T12:13:08.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an answer to your second question, I searched the Swedish Sign Language Corpus (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.su.se/teckensprakskorpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.su.se/teckensprakskorpus&lt;/a&gt;), where the total number of signs is roughly around 28 000 (depending on how you define a sign, please see &lt;a href=&quot;http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:186542&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:186542&lt;/a&gt; for further reading). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fingerspelled signs accounted for about 6.2% of the signs in the corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2040" LastEditorUserId="1452" LastEditDate="2013-05-09T13:54:37.470" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T13:54:37.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3665" CreationDate="2013-05-09T13:57:37.340" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;why&quot;, it's believed that most languages will go for &quot;maximal dispersion&quot; and try to have vowels as acoustically distinct as possible (or, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/207443/Explaining_vowel_systems_Dispersion_Theory_vs._Natural_Selection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;easily learnable&lt;/a&gt; as possible).  So if they choose three vowels, it will very often be /a,i,u/ ;  /i,u/ are easier to distinguish than /y,ɯ/ or /u,o/ (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr/~jean-luc.schwartz/fichiers_public_JLS/fichiers_pdf/Schwartz_Boe_JPhonetics1997_1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are always oddities; Ubykh had just /ə,a/ (and 84 consonants!).  But, querying &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt; (a database of 451 languages) for languages with no back vowels return 0 results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion your language would be highly unusual, and yes I find it likely that over time it would change into an easier system, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily impossible to occur.  Schwarts et al (cited above) remark that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in both primary and secondary [vowel] systems , the sounds are mainly concentrated at the periphery [i.e. both front and back, high and low] […] if there is an asymmetry (around 30% of the cases) , the number of front vowels is likely to be greater than the number of back vowels (3 times more likely in primary systems, 2 times more in secondary systems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T14:19:42.270" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T14:19:42.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3678" CreationDate="2013-05-09T14:46:05.007" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about Catalan, but based on the example it seems like a more accurate analysis is that nasals assimilate in place to following obstruents and then word-final non-continuants undergo deletion. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ben+k/ --&gt; beŋk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;beŋk --&gt; [beŋ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interaction is opaque because once the word-final consonant is deleted we no longer see on the surface what triggered the place assimilation in the nasal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules, ordered how they are, are in a counterbleeding relationship. If word-final non-continuant deletion happened first, then there would be nothing to trigger the nasal place assimilation. In other words, the deletion would &lt;em&gt;bleed&lt;/em&gt; the assimilation. But as they stand the rules are in the opposite--&lt;em&gt;counterbleeding&lt;/em&gt;--order. This kind of opacity results in a surface form that appears as though a certain rule (in this case the nasal place assimilation) has &quot;overapplied&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that's clear! Feeding, bleeding, counterfeeding, and counterbleeding can be kind of confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-05-09T14:46:05.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-10T11:18:26.880" Score="5" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowel analysis in Chomsky and Halle's (1968) SPE is said to be overly abstract. What are the main issues phonologists have with this abstractness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1915" LastEditorUserId="1915" LastEditDate="2013-05-10T12:03:54.037" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T22:01:00.780" Title="What are the main issues concerning the abstractness of the theory set out in The Sound Pattern of English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;spe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4627" CreationDate="2013-05-10T21:29:31.480" Score="7" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or which phenomenon is causing this? Is there a known reason or rule behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1388" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:09:42.423" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:09:42.423" Title="Is the second “ρ” in “διάρροια” from “διά” + “ῥέω” due to an assimilation?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3686" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-11T08:43:41.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T08:43:41.113" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T08:43:41.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3687" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-11T08:43:41.113" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding Chomsky &amp; Halle (1968) The Sound Pattern of English." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T13:39:21.273" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T13:39:21.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3667" CreationDate="2013-05-11T09:33:31.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most strikingly absurd thing here is that Ryūkyūan and Japanese may not be related. The only alternative claim at this point--made basically only by non-linguists in Japan--is that the 5 or so Ryūkyūan languages are merely dialects of Japanese. Even just a casual glace at all but the most divergent Japonic languages makes it really obvious that they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the biggest issue with this whole section and all possible evidence given is that they just aren't giving any convincing evidence that Japonic is related to any other language. There remains only one way to do this: rule out chance and borrowing of similar-looking forms and use the comparative method to show that a common ancestor can be reconstructed on the basis of (more or less) regular, recurrent sound correspondences. Campbell (2013)--or any other intro to historical linguistics textbook--covers this in great detail. By this test, they have failed to demonstrate it is an Altaic language. Additionally, while there was the hypothesis that Old Japanese did at one point have vowel harmony (cf. Whitman 1985), this has basically been abandoned (see Miyake 2003). The other two features don't do anything to tell us that Japanese is or is not related to the so-called Altaic languages, because they don't give us the regular, recurrent sound correspondences we need to show languages are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is on-going argument whether Japonic and Korean are related. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=7807607&quot;&gt;Beckwith (2010)&lt;/a&gt; for a review of two recent works. The consensus seems to be moving towards &quot;no&quot;, but there are still some proponents. And none of these proponent--like Whitman (1990), for instance--would use structural similarities as this article does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Japanese is related to Tibeto-Burman (or Dravidian or Zuni or whatever) is an extreme minority position and is again simply not supported by any real linguistic evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T09:33:31.080" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-11T11:24:25.717" Score="0" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the linguistic relationship between plural suffixes &quot;-ler/-lar&quot; in Turkish and &quot;-er&quot; in some Nordic/Germanic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2045" LastEditorUserId="2045" LastEditDate="2013-05-11T12:30:48.960" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:04:07.987" Title="Lingustic relationship between plural suffixes in Turkish and -er in some Nordic/Germanic languages" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3689" CreationDate="2013-05-11T12:19:27.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This similarity is rather coincidental. According to widely accepted theories, Turkish and Germanic languages aren't cognates. And plural endings usually don't get borrowed from one language to another, except a part of a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you sure that the Turkish plural ending is ''-er'' and ''-ar''? Not ''-ler'' and ''-lar''? For example: kitap (&quot;book&quot;) — kitaplar, medrese — medreseler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Scandinavian (Norwegian) examples could be: bok (&quot;book&quot;) — bøker, skole (&quot;school&quot;) — skoler. So ''-er'', ''-r'', ''-ar'' without ''l''.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1773" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T12:19:27.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-11T12:52:31.643" Score="3" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the &quot;close front rounded vowel&quot; /y/ mainly used in Germanic, Altaic and far Asian languages but rare in Latin*, Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that Germanic phonetics is less similar to the rest of Indo-European family? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Only the French people, the descendants of Germanic Franks, use it a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2045" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-09T06:09:40.310" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T01:42:28.297" Title="The &quot;close front rounded vowel&quot; mainly used in Germanic, Altaic and far Asian languages" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3689" CreationDate="2013-05-11T17:04:07.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nordic Germanic languages the final -r came from -s via regular sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:04:07.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3580" CreationDate="2013-05-11T17:07:36.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One last thing. Vulgar latin, like Italian and Catalan, only had the distinction of ɛ-e and ɔ-o in stressed syllables. They were reduced (ie. merged) to e and o in unstressed syll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the alternation 'mover' - 'muevo' comes from Vulgar latin /mo'vere/ - /'mɔ.vo/.&#xA;The stem, /mɔv/, had been reduced to /mov/ in unstressed positions, so it wasn't diphthongized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2048" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:07:36.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="405" CreationDate="2013-05-11T17:40:20.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of similar languages being simultaneously learnt as L1 and L2 is modern Catalonia (currently in Spain), where Spanish and Catalan are co-oficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many households are monolingual, and the other language is learnt early at school, or from TV (despite some slums where Catalan is barely taught despite being mandatory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, living in a Catalan speaking household, the only Spanish I was exposed to before age 6 was that coming from TV programs, but by that time I had an almost native-like fluency when talking to strangers. And I rarely mixed up both languages. Only a few Catalan words slipped from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I'd developed some sort of sound change and morpheme correspondence list between both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2048" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T17:40:20.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2013-05-11T18:03:27.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compared to GErman and French, English has almost no inflections: No case and gender for nouns, and almost no verb conjugation. The cause are sound changes that deleted the suffixes that originally (i.e. in Old English) marked those categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present conjugation of the Old English verb 'hǣlan' (to heal):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ic hǣle  (I)&#xA;þū hǣlst  (you-singular)&#xA;hē/hit/hēo hǣlþ  (he/it/she)&#xA;wē/gē/hīe hǣlaþ  (we/you-plural/they)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many final sounds have been weakened and dropped, so only 'heals' remains distinct from 'heal'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a 1st stage, only some sounds were dropped because of phonetical reasons. Later, the others were deleted for grammatical reasons (ie. the system had been weakened, so it just &quot;fell apart&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2048" LastActivityDate="2013-05-11T18:03:27.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2013-05-11T18:13:33.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Ibrihim, 1973, p.61:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the noun is animate, natural gender tends to dictate grammatical gender.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The borrowed word tends to take the gender of the native word it replaces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the borrowed word happens to have a suffix that the borrowing language uses as a gender marker, the suffix tends to dictate gender.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the borrowed word rhymes with one or more native words, the latter tend to dictate gender.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The default assignment is the borrowing language's unmarked gender.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rarely, the word retains the gender it had in the donor language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, sometimes the choice is totally arbitrary, and may be different indifferent dialects. It may also change with time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2048" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-05-12T07:34:27.133" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T07:34:27.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-12T04:23:03.690" Score="1" ViewCount="1859" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking online, but I can't find a nice description of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T20:42:21.317" Title="What is a PARSE constraint in optimality theory?" Tags="&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-12T08:53:47.683" Score="2" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several English demonyms (&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=Englishman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Englishman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) are compound words ending in &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but most are not (&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Greek&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; demonyms refer to England and close neighbors: &lt;em&gt;Frenchman, Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Dutchman, Norseman.&lt;/em&gt; Because of this, I thought the compound might be an early form that stopped being productive, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=Dutchman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dutchman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=Chinaman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chinaman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are more recent – and &lt;em&gt;Greek&lt;/em&gt; dates to Old English &lt;em&gt;Grecas.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scotsman&lt;/em&gt; is unusual in that the non-compound form &lt;em&gt;Scot&lt;/em&gt; is also acceptable. &lt;em&gt;Chinaman&lt;/em&gt; is unusual in that it compounds &lt;em&gt;China+man&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Chinese+man.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there etymological rules or patterns behind these differences? Are there parallels in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1988" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T18:59:57.320" Title="Why do only a few English demonyms have a -man suffix?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-05-12T15:43:47.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from French: &quot;si&quot;, which means &quot;I disagree with your negative statement/question.&quot; For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tu parles pas anglais? = You don't speak English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mais si. = Your statement/question is incorrect. I do speak English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2049" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T15:43:47.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-05-12T19:38:01.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Articles would be an easy and probably quite shocking (given their frequency in English) case. As far as I recall, there is no equivalent for “the” in Latin, nor do I recall one in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2020" LastActivityDate="2013-05-12T19:38:01.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-05-13T01:14:55.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Western Desert Language in Australia does not have a word directly equivalent to English 'love'. Of course, this very important concept can still be easily expressed. One way of doing this is with a construction that combines the serial form of the verb &lt;em&gt;puntuni&lt;/em&gt; 'make large/loud' with the verb &lt;em&gt;yuntjurringanyi&lt;/em&gt; 'like/want' (to improve clarity free pronouns are used rather than the more typical clitics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;  Ngayulu nyuntu   -nya puntu        -ra  yuntju      -rri    -nganyi    &#xA;  1sg.NOM 2sg      -ACC make.large   -SER like/want   -INCH   -PRES&#xA;  &quot;I love you.&quot;&#xA; &lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOM = nominative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ACC = accusative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;SER = serial&lt;br&gt;&#xA;INCH = inchoative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;PRES = present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T12:45:45.823" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T12:45:45.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3699" CreationDate="2013-05-13T15:54:09.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why people just comment and don't answer questions here, but I'm pasting a summary of a discussion with @KleinePrins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ualberta.ca/~annemich/TesarSmolensky1998.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this document&lt;/a&gt;, you can find the definition as &quot;Underlying (input) material is parsed into syllable structure&quot;. This wasn't clear to me at first, but then @KleinePrins elaborated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I understand the definition as saying that the segments that are&#xA;  considered input for the syllable structure have to be parsed to give&#xA;  an output. The concept of parsing here could be a bit vague (and&#xA;  perhaps that's what prof. Lawler meant with his comment), but I think&#xA;  we could understand it as structure assignment. There's a good reading&#xA;  about this: Tesar (2004). Computing Optimal Forms in Optimality&#xA;  Theory. In McCarthy (ed). Optimality Theory in Phonology. Blackwell.&#xA;  Hope this helps!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked around at some examples to get a better understanding, and I think a relevant example is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Diola Fogny, a language in West Africa, the underlying form &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;/na-min-min/&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;results in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[namimmin]&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume Parse has a high ranking, then the underlying syllable structure remains, and it can be represented as &lt;em&gt;[na.mim.min]&lt;/em&gt;, where the .'s separate syllables (notice how the placement of .'s makes it just like the placement of -'s in the underlying form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastActivityDate="2013-05-13T15:54:09.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-13T20:44:22.367" Score="15" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend recently asked me this simple and fascinating question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At what point in history were there the largest number of human&#xA;  languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although a really precise answer needs a clear definition of a &quot;language&quot;, I still find the question very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes.&lt;/strong&gt;  Using a definition of a language which would today rate the number on Earth as being roughly that quoted by Ethnologue (6809) seems a useful place to start.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.danielburke.com/files/howmany.pdf&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; claims the number is currently decreasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally not a good idea to get too hung up on definitions (as Wittgenstein showed clearly when discussing the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game#Ludwig_Wittgenstein&quot;&gt;&quot;game&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). However Ethnologue has a nice page discussing the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/about/problem-language-identification&quot;&gt;problem of language identification&lt;/a&gt; and how it relates to their method for counting languages.  The most relevant part is quoted here for completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ISO 639-3 standard&#xA;  applies the following basic criteria for defining a language in&#xA;  relation to varieties which may be considered dialects: Two related&#xA;  varieties are normally considered varieties of the same language if&#xA;  speakers of each variety have inherent understanding of the other&#xA;  variety at a functional level (that is, can understand based on&#xA;  knowledge of their own variety without needing to learn the other&#xA;  variety). Where spoken intelligibility between varieties is marginal,&#xA;  the existence of a common literature or of a common ethnolinguistic&#xA;  identity with a central variety that both understand can be a strong&#xA;  indicator that they should nevertheless be considered varieties of the&#xA;  same language. Where there is enough intelligibility between varieties&#xA;  to enable communication, the existence of well-established distinct&#xA;  ethnolinguistic identities can be a strong indicator that they should&#xA;  nevertheless be considered to be different languages. These criteria&#xA;  make it clear that the identification of “a language” is not based on&#xA;  linguistic criteria alone. The language entries in Ethnologue include&#xA;  a listing of dialect names. In most cases, those listings are not&#xA;  based on rigorous dialectology. Rather, these lists include all names&#xA;  reported to us which may, at one time or another, have been used in&#xA;  reference to a local variety of a language. Names listed may be&#xA;  alternate names for the same linguistic variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2059" LastEditorUserId="2059" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T09:06:48.570" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T00:17:59.290" Title="When were there the most languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3708" CreationDate="2013-05-14T00:32:21.690" Score="8" ViewCount="10968" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how many of Latin (both Classical and Medieval varieties) words&#xA;have Greek roots. Is Greek the common root of most IE languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2060" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T14:42:38.250" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T13:35:09.427" Title="How many of Latin words have Greek roots?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3707" CreationDate="2013-05-14T01:05:56.137" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not many. The Romans borrowed plenty of Greek words, but mostly in technical senses; in Antiquity, many Greek words that were used in Latin were also considered a bit fancy and special, for better or worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were also some Greek words that were borrowed by the Romans so early in Roman history that they were probably no longer intuitively (or at all) felt to be Greek during the Empire; but the very large majority were not from Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Christian times, some more Greek words were adopted from the New Testament and from ecclesiastical traditions; Christianity emerged in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, where literate people spoke Greek, not Latin (many people were bilingual, though, just as in the western part). But the number of Greek words was still fairly limited; for comparison, the proportion of French or Latin words in English is many, many times greater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin is from the Italic branch of languages, along with Oscan and a few more long-dead languages. Greek is from the Greek/Hellenic branch of languages. Both branches are part of the larger Indo-European language family, along with the Germanic branch (English etc.), the Slavic branch (Russian etc.), and several other branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is true that Latin was influenced by Greek in ways other than vocabulary—such as grammar—, most similarities between Greek words and Latin words you observe are probably due to their common ancestor, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language, in which the Indo-European family of languages originated. All Indo-European languages retain much of their Proto-Indo-European heritage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also true that some Indo-European branches are more closely related than others; but I believe the Italic branch was more closely related to the Celtic branch than to the Greek branch. It may be that Italic and Greek are more closely related to each other than to Germanic and Slavic, but they're still not very close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T14:54:14.883" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T14:54:14.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-14T02:22:14.470" Score="4" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a child born in Canada is spoken to strictly in another foreign tongue other than english (ie. Italian), it is inevitable that this child will also think in Italian.  When this child starts going to school and is immersed in the English language, does the language he/she thinks in change to English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2061" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T16:39:10.707" Title="What language do children think in?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-14T03:07:23.987" Score="9" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;In discussions of language learning, multilingualism, and related topics, I hear references to &quot;thinking in a language.&quot;   Two questions on this stack exchange list have referenced this, namely &quot;What language, if any, do deaf people think in?&quot; and &quot;What language do children think in?&quot;   One can find lots of references to &quot;thinking in a language&quot; on the internet.   The following link is only one of many examples:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://drenguin.hubpages.com/hub/How-does-thinking-in-a-certain-language-affect-us&quot;&gt;http://drenguin.hubpages.com/hub/How-does-thinking-in-a-certain-language-affect-us&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I experience internal monologue like everyone else, and that monologue is in my native English, I have an intuitive sense of what the phrase &quot;thinking in a language&quot; means.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is internal monologue, aka thinking in a language, something that can be investigated scientifically?   Is there an operational definition of thinking in a language?   Does the phrase have empirical meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T11:46:38.283" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T09:22:21.710" Title="Does the phrase &quot;thinking in a language&quot; have empirical meaning?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-14T03:12:08.673" Score="-3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;a. Some English words have more letters in their spelling than they have sounds in their pronunciation, but none have more sounds than they have letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.  If an English word has 3 vowels sounds, it must also contain at least 3 consonant sounds in its pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.  A vowel letter (&amp;lt; a e i o u &gt;) may represent different sounds in a given word, but a consonant letter always represents the same sound if it appears twice in a given word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d.  Pronouncing hoop requires more tongue movement than does pronouncing too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.  Some words contain fewer phonemes than allophones in their normal pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f.  If a word contains 5 morphemes, at least one of those morphemes will be a prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;g.  Derivational morphemes change the part of speech of the word they attach to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;h.  When the string of words “those crazy kids” appears in a sentence, it functions as a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2062" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T08:04:02.253" Title="Several Questions Please Help with Answers" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-05-14T10:23:44.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3711" CreationDate="2013-05-14T03:51:09.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presuming they're intended as questions (if odd ones!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. perhaps 'I' is a counterexample, depending on what you mean by 'sound'?&#xA;b. 'amity' is a counterexample&#xA;c. no, 'gauge'&#xA;d. yes (no coronals in 'hoop')&#xA;e. I'm not quite sure what this question means, but maybe it's true, eg 'state' where the  &#xA;   single phoneme /t/ manifests as two different allophones&#xA;f. Very arbitrary, but how about 'institutionalisation' as a counterexample?&#xA;g. Derivational morphemes are morphemes that create (derive) a new word; this very often &#xA;   results in a change of part of speech, although not always.&#xA;h. 'those crazy kids' is a NP (wherever it appears) therefore true.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-05-14T08:04:02.253" LastActivityDate="2013-05-14T08:04:02.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-15T02:48:59.523" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most if not all national or widely spoken languages with an inflecting or agglutinating typology do all of their inflecting at the end of the word. These are called &quot;suffixing languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true for nouns and verbs in all the European and East Asian languages I know much about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another possibility where inflectional information is in the form of prefixes attached to the beginning of the word. These are known as &quot;prefixing languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I can't name any such languages off the top of my head, I'm wondering which language that has this property is the most widely spoken or has the most speakers. Is any a national language, co-official language, or local lingua franca?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, combinations of both suffixing and prefixing are also possible, as is internal changes like in Semitic languages. Also I'm only asking about inflecting morphology, not derivational morphology, we know European languages use lots of derivation prefixes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-05-15T02:48:59.523" Title="Which prefixing language has the most speakers?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3381" CreationDate="2013-05-15T10:44:05.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are programs that do this. Unless you actually need to do it yourself, you shouldn't. Name entity recognition systems are well developed, and can do an amazing job. If you really need to do it yourself, I would say use one of the free spell checking dictionaries, there are several for linux. Some of these even include a list with conjugations and inflexions, but if you can't find any, you could do the following thing: look up the word in the dictionary, if it doesn't find it, try to match an ending from a list of suffixes to the word, remove the suffix and look again. This method isn't very fast, but I don't see many alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-05-15T10:44:05.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3706" CreationDate="2013-05-15T10:49:50.187" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;My estimation would be between 1000 and 500 years ago, after population drifts but before the European conquest. But that's just a guess and you won't get anything better than that. Counting languages today is extremely difficult, now imagine counting languages of 1000 years ago, it can't be done. We don't know how many languages were spoken in the Americas, nor how many of those disappeared before the arrival of the Conquistadores - that information is lost for ever. The same goes for all other regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastEditorUserId="2785" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T23:46:17.747" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T23:46:17.747" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2013-05-15T10:57:29.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no single answer to your question. It depends on many things. I would say that generally speaking, yes, the child will learn English as a second L1 and start thinking in English in some contexts. But that doesn't automatically needs to be the case, it depends on how old the child is, for example. If he is older than 12, he might not acquire English as a second L1, but as an L2, and not think in English per se for a long time, and never as a native speaker would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another problem, and that is the definition of &quot;thinking in a language&quot;. Would you accept only L1 competence, or do speakers of an L2 with really advance level that claim that they can think in the L2 also count? How well does the child have to think in the language? There are cases of people who can think about almost anything in a second language but when it comes to counting they have to use their first L1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be more specific with your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-05-15T10:57:29.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-15T12:59:36.153" Score="3" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;In following when talking about 'native speaker' I refer to what is considered as 'mother tongue' rather than reaching a level of fluency.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For the purpose of this question think of an average person who is not a prodigious infant who is talented in learning languages but also not being exceptionally incapable of learning languages.&#xA;Furthermore, it shouldn't be of interest if languages X and Y are related, say, German and Dutch, or if they are completely different, say, Spanish and Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of whichever language you are able to recognize other speakers as also being native. When someone learns a language as a second language he'll probably never reach the same level as those who speak that language as first language, even if they live in the foreign country for a long time. There'll (almost &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) always be a few indicator which will distinguish them from native speakers. And I don't refer to accent or similar but only to the language skills and feel for a language, i.e. word-choice, grammar etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of what would happen if a child is born in country X into a native family of the respective language but being raised in country Y by a family whose native language is Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: Will this child ever 'perfectly' speak language Y and be recognized by other speakers of Y as native? Or does this child has an inborn ability to language X and, for that reason, will not be able to speak language Y good enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: What would happen if this child will have instructions in their 'inborn' language? Will they easily learn their &lt;strike&gt;second&lt;/strike&gt; 'inborn' language? Similar, what would happen if this person would move to country X after growing up. Will they be able to learn language X good enough to be recognized as a native speaker of X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;The exception that proves the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1719" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-15T21:15:53.290" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T18:48:06.897" Title="To what extent do children adapt to a language which is not their mother-tongue?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-15T16:12:57.327" Score="9" ViewCount="2268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are any general morphological properties of proper names. If a word is used as a name, it will be constrained by whatever syntactic constraints that language uses from proper names, but are there any kind of cross-linguistic rules regarding any kind of morphological changes that take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if a new town was founded, and its name is derived from the word &quot;cheese&quot;, and we added, say, &quot;ton&quot; or one of the many other morphemes common to place names in English, would we need to make any morphological changes to &quot;cheese&quot; to produce a name, or would you end with Cheeseton? Are there any cases were changes would need to be made? What about when combining more than one root word - can we say anything about the formation of town names back when morphemes like &quot;ton&quot; and &quot;chester&quot; still had a separate lexical meaning, and thus would have been treated differently? And for any such rules that might exist, are they any different from the rules governing the morphology of any other noun? And what about the names of people, languages, cultures - are there any general rules for where they come from? How does this extend cross-linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware this a huge topic, so if there is published material on the topic, approaching it from a linguistic perspective, I'd be appreciative to be pointed in that direction even if no-one has any answers themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2070" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T09:37:55.220" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T06:52:28.790" Title="Morphology of proper names" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;&lt;toponomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3453" CreationDate="2013-05-16T06:21:09.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What could really be hardly translated into Russian is 'privacy' (although some might disagree stating that it is translated as &lt;em&gt;покой&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is really remarkable is the reported absence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/archives/archive32/newposts/149/topic149004.shtm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;numerals&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books?id=2pGdpr-1bA8C&amp;amp;pg=PA160&amp;amp;lpg=PA160&amp;amp;dq=no%20word%20for%20tree%20in%20Australian%20language&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=AiBn9HAX0F&amp;amp;sig=l8z5v5QYKwUAuX77rNXil05eofU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=6niUUaHMM7CQ4ASM1IDQCA&amp;amp;ved=0CFAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=no%20word%20for%20tree%20in%20Australian%20language&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;generic terms for 'fish' or 'tree'&lt;/a&gt; in some Australian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T06:21:09.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3720" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-16T09:36:43.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T09:36:43.603" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T09:36:43.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3721" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-16T09:36:43.603" Score="0" Body="Questions about the study of proper names." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T10:33:34.077" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T10:33:34.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3722" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-16T09:38:57.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T09:38:57.160" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T09:38:57.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3723" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-16T09:38:57.160" Score="0" Body="The study of place names, a discipline within _Onomastics_" OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-05-16T10:33:29.263" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T10:33:29.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-16T16:41:53.977" Score="16" ViewCount="1143" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's known that Literary Chinese (or Classical; &lt;em&gt;wényán&lt;/em&gt; ), the language of historical Chinese texts, differs completely from modern Mandarin as well as from other spoken Chinese languages, not only in vocabulary but even syntax, grammatical particles, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difference is that Literary has many single-syllable words, while Mandarin has a lot more polysyllables (especially disyllables).  The usual theory is that the spoken language, too, used to have the same short words as Literary, only with more phonemes available to distinguish syllables; as it lost phonemes, the ambiguity was compensated by adding more syllables.  This process (the theory goes) ended up creating a gulf between Literary and the vernacular (spoken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/1397604&quot;&gt;Henry Rosemont argues&lt;/a&gt; that written Literary Chinese might have been a special, artificial register from the start—that the gulf was always there.  In the same vein, the linguist &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059728&quot;&gt;Victor Mair has found&lt;/a&gt;  evidence of longer words (like &lt;em&gt;taolu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;path, way&quot;) being very archaic (at least 463 BCE in this case), and proposes that the short Literary words (like &lt;em&gt;tao&lt;/em&gt; &quot;path, way&quot;) would be truncations of the spoken language, not their predecessors.  According to this theory, Literary would be like a telegraphic notation abbreviated from the spoken Old Chinese, and never was anyone's mother tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this idea very intriguing, but not knowing Chinese, I'm having trouble finding more resources for or against it.  Could anyone suggest research or essays on this subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2013-05-17T18:16:51.760" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T12:25:47.270" Title="On the idea that Classical Chinese may *not* be direct ancestor of modern Chinese languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-16T16:57:14.703" Score="9" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;As shown in the Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pledge#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pledge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English plege, from Anglo-Norman plege, from Old French plege (Modern French pleige) from Medieval Latin plevium, plebium, from Medieval Latin plebire &quot;to pledge&quot;, from Frankish *plegan (“to pledge, support, guarantee”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*plegō&lt;/strong&gt; (“responsibility, habit”), from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*dlegh-&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Akin to Old High German pflegan (“to take care of, be accustomed to”), Old Saxon plegan (“to vouch for”), Old English plēon (“to risk, endanger”). More at plight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't find the clue to this sound change on Wikipedia, which concludes that only PIE *b will become PGmc. p-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: AHD contains the same etymon &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.ru/books?id=4IHbQgz1nZYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=zh-CN#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=dlegh&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlegh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2013-05-20T05:50:55.003" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:08:30.640" Title="How does PIE *d- in *dlegh- change to PGmc. p- in plegō (E pledge)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2013-05-16T21:26:17.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have to go look it up to be sure (or you could yourself in Andrew Sihler's comparative grammar of Greek), but I suspect that it has nothing to do with any influence from the dia- prefix, but is a remnant from the much older way of pronouncing any word that began with rho, sc. with an initial w-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial w- disappeared throughout, but retained some traces in writing, including for an initial rho by giving it a spiritus asper. I suspect that not being able to write this spiritus in the middle of a word may have prompted the writing of a second rho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second rho is therefore not an assimilation, but a way of notation for an old sound that only left superficial traces in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Do feel free to edit my answer; I am writing this while very tired.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="663" LastActivityDate="2013-05-16T21:26:17.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3811" CreationDate="2013-05-17T00:41:06.710" Score="13" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I observe my fellow Brazilian countrymen learning to speak English, a clear sound change pattern stands out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[θ] → [f]&#xA;[ð] → [d], syllable-initial &#xA;      [f], syllable-final&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; is usually pronounced [fĩk], &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced [den] and &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;, [wif].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Brazilian Portuguese does not have dental fricatives, this kind of sound change is much to be expected. What is interesting about it is the regularity of the pattern. Among other &quot;likely&quot; candidates, such as [s] or [t], which are also sounds found in BP, [f] is &amp;mdash; almost always &amp;mdash; chosen to replace [θ]. Similarly with [ð], that could as well be replaced with [z] or [v].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even those who have never heard other people speak that way will make this choice. So, my question is: can this sound change be predicted from Brazilian Portuguese phonology? What else could explain its regularity? In general, if a phonologist is presented with two languages, &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, can they predict what sound changes are most likely to occur if the native speakers of &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; start speaking &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; as a second language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-17T11:33:43.123" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T14:12:25.800" Title="Dental fricatives for Brazilian Portuguese speakers" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2013-05-17T11:34:47.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the word meaning field &lt;code&gt;champs&lt;/code&gt; comes from &lt;code&gt;campus&lt;/code&gt; nominative rather than &lt;code&gt;campum&lt;/code&gt; accusative&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the word &lt;code&gt;republique&lt;/code&gt; comes from &lt;code&gt;res publica&lt;/code&gt; nominative rather than &lt;code&gt;rem publicam&lt;/code&gt; accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2013-05-17T11:34:47.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9023" CreationDate="2013-05-17T11:42:36.863" Score="4" ViewCount="842" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://slb-ltsu.hull.ac.uk/awe/index.php?title=Prepositional_complement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prepositional complement&lt;/a&gt; is the noun phrase that follows a preposition. So, given sentences like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John saw the woman with an umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John saw the moon with a telescope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prepositional phrases are &lt;strong&gt;with an umbrella&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;with a telescope&lt;/strong&gt;. And the prepositional complements are &lt;strong&gt;an umbrella&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;a telescope&lt;/strong&gt;. In the first sentence, the modified phrase is an NP, and in the second, it is a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is(are) the term(s) for parts modified by these PPs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T11:41:46.253" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T08:58:37.423" Title="Term for the modified part of a prepositional complement" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2013-05-17T12:43:14.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the &quot;thinking language&quot; is just the language that you use to speak.&#xA;If you have lived, for example, in Italy for a long time, independently of your age, you start to think in Italian for sure. So it is for children, unless the family and context language is different.&#xA;Also the &quot;dreaming language&quot; is relevant, but changes earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;thinking language&quot; is not the act of thinking, it's only the act of speaking to yourself to improve the thinking process. You can also force yourself to use a different language in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example, Kobe Bryant is a fluent Italian speaker because he did a large part of primary school in Italy, but I'm pretty sure that he thought in English during that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2074" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-05-22T16:39:10.707" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T16:39:10.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3759" CreationDate="2013-05-17T15:30:27.713" Score="3" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of years ago there was a company called &quot;Hooked on Phonics&quot;, which made a name for itself with a successful &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/gcITeGy-U6w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ad campaign&lt;/a&gt;, and whose aim was to emphasize connecting different phonemes of words as a means for teaching reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/RVXHsfUtoFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; still widely used, I wonder if linguists and education professionals have studied its effectiveness as a teaching tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have they, and what have they found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1756" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T01:57:50.567" Title="Is phonics still considered a strong teaching tool for teaching reading skills?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3728" CreationDate="2013-05-17T22:30:27.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since  (inter)dental fricatives are indeed not that easy to pronounce for those speakers whose native languages do not have these phonemes (or even those of them whose local pronunciational norm differs), there is a big statistical data of which mistakes and replacements are more common. Some of such &quot;mispronunciations&quot; are so common that there exists specials term for them. Here they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-alveolarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;th-alverorization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - ([θ], [ð]) → ([s], [z]). Typical for some English dialects as well. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;th-fronting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - ([θ], [ð]) → ([f], [v]). There's an excellent quote in wikipedia on this issue: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Th-fronting occurs (in many cases historically independently) in&#xA;  Cockney, Estuary English, West Country dialects, Yorkshire dialect,&#xA;  Glaswegian, Newfoundland English, African American Vernacular English,&#xA;  and Liberian English, as well as in many foreign accents (though the&#xA;  details differ among those accents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;th-stopping&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - realization of the dental fricatives [θ, ð] as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stops&lt;/a&gt;. This is also typical for dialect as well as for some accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to conclude, there's nothing untypical (from the statistical point of view) in how Brazilians pronounce this phonemes, whether they are countrymen or not ;)&#xA;See, they could have been English monolingual speakers and still follow the same patterns. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dis is da life ))) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastActivityDate="2013-05-17T22:30:27.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3736" CreationDate="2013-05-18T03:05:00.743" Score="7" ViewCount="1409" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be because I'm reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Daniel Everett's&lt;/a&gt; autobiography right now and it has me all pumped up for adventure... but it does bring up the question: How do you actually break into that field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is going for a Ph.D. program like &quot;Language Documentation and Revitalization&quot; or &quot;Descriptive Linguistics&quot; enough to make the right contacts to break into the field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of chances does someone who studies in a field like psycholinguistics (the specific field I want to go to grad school for) have of becoming a field linguist? What can someone do with just a Bachelor's degree in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-19T09:43:06.593" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T15:20:55.980" Title="How does one become a field linguist?" Tags="&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-18T12:39:27.243" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following exam question for a machine translation course:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5N67Z.png&quot; alt=&quot;examquestion&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding, I assume the answer is looking for incorrect English grammar which get discovered by bi-grams. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer would contain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I are&#xA;I right&#xA;I wrong&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure of how to fully answer the question i.e what the generalisations are. Can anybody shed some light on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1930" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-05-18T14:19:28.057" LastActivityDate="2013-05-18T14:19:28.057" Title="Generalisations which a bi-gram probabilistic model might infer from a dataset" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3734" CreationDate="2013-05-18T21:13:47.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked Dan Everett for his advice, and he replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can do field research from any speciality of linguistics, hyphenated or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One needs to have the interest in it, some training, and some talent for crosscultural understanding and learning other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For training, I would suggest &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6585755/?site_locale=en_US&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sakel and Everett (2012).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Find a part of the world you are interested in, try to meet people from there, especially local linguists, and read on the languages there. Money for research will be hard at first, at least it often is, so try to get local university grants. Go on a shoestring budget and get some good data based on your own interests (driven by knowledge of typology, theory, etc). Once you have returned and written up something, use this to develop a larger project for more significant funding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't exhaust  advice and I am sure Rich will have ideas too. But there is no one way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I also asked &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rich Rhodes&lt;/a&gt;, and he replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I look at this from an odd angle. I think a reasonably talented linguist with MA level training is enough preparation to go to the field. I'd like to suggest that real success depends on stuff they don't teach: the willingness to get personally involved in the community you study, patience, humility -- especially humility -- the ability to think outside the box (as the cliché goes), an eye (and ear) for serendipity, an unwavering respect for the data, and the rare ability to be obsessed with getting the details right without losing sight of the big picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if this sounds a little zen, but I think most of what makes for the best fieldworkers isn't really taught and may not even be teachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I should add a word about what I mean by reasonably talented. You have to have a good ear. Period. You have to be able to do basic morphemic analysis in your sleep. And, possibly the hardest thing to come by in this day and age, you have to be able to do pre-theoretical syntax and semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will, I guarantee it, run across phenomena that don't fit anyone's theory. The worst possible thing to do is to gloss over something because you have no theoretical/conceptual box to put it in. You have to have the tools to explore it even if you can't explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rich&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I agree with both of them, and appreciate their responses. And I'd add that fieldwork is not cheap, and one normally spends at least as much time and effort on getting the wherewithal for it as one does in expending it gainfully. Don't become a fieldworker if you don't want to beg for funding, unless you're independently wealthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T15:20:55.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3771" CreationDate="2013-05-19T00:14:39.697" Score="0" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Georgian most nouns in the nominative case end with &quot;-ი&quot; (-i), most other nouns end in another vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases other than the nominative this ending may be replaced with a different ending but the endings are not usually altogether omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am sure that I have occasionally seen some nouns without this final -ი and just ending with a bare consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really possible or have I imagined it? Under which conditions can it occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T18:41:51.217" Title="Are there conditions under which Georgian nouns omit the &quot;-ი&quot; case ending?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2013-05-19T18:40:23.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;phonetics is the production and perception of speech sounds in any language and it deals with &quot;phone&quot;. Phonology on the other hand is the interpretation of speech sounds in a particular language and it deals with phoneme: the smallest unit of sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2077" LastActivityDate="2013-05-19T18:40:23.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2013-05-19T18:49:33.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; is what comes out of your mouth and goes into your ears. &lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is how those sounds are arranged in your head to go to your mouth, and how the sounds from your ears are deconstructed to be processed by your brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="958" LastEditDate="2013-05-20T05:34:39.733" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T05:34:39.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-19T19:58:32.130" Score="3" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the common name for speech errors like phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution, just like there is word called &quot;prosodic error&quot; for stress error and intonation error. I have viewed the list for speech errors but can't find a common name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2079" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T18:55:02.257" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:55:02.257" Title="Common name for speech errors like Phoneme Deletion and Phoneme Substitution" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3741" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-05-20T19:41:59.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-05-20T19:41:59.840" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T19:41:59.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3742" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-05-20T19:41:59.840" Score="0" Body="Rhoticity refers to the presence or absence of post-vocalic &lt;r&gt; in different varieties of English." OwnerUserId="2019" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T09:24:09.143" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T09:24:09.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2013-05-20T22:51:53.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romance languages are far from isolating, and Italian verbal phrases for example look more like polysynthetic constructions than syntactic structures, even though one usually write them like several words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence &quot;glielo darò&quot; = &quot;I will give it to him&quot;, is actually one word, even though it is written as two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with case systems, embedding is often made by initiating the embedded phrase with a pronoun that carries the case marker, or by putting the case marker at the end of the verb. You can easily embed ad infinitum with these methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-05-20T22:51:53.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-21T03:11:46.950" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semitic languages are known for doing quite a bit of their inflection and derivation not via adfixes but via modifications around a triliteral radical of three consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if there's anything comparable to a language anywhere that does more or less the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-05-21T08:21:32.183" LastActivityDate="2013-05-21T08:21:32.183" Title="Languages with vowel-based &quot;radicals&quot; inflected or derived by changing consonants?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3751" CreationDate="2013-05-21T15:48:31.733" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came upon a viral/funny Quebecois video:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InMJopurNTE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InMJopurNTE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, the guy is pronouncing his &quot;r&quot;s (e.g. in gros, bras) very oddly. I can't reproduce this sound, and neither can my Quebecois friends. It's not an alveolar trill, it sounds like more like a uvular trill, but it might be a combination. Does anyone have any idea? I'm fascinated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2088" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T03:29:41.907" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T03:29:41.907" Title="How are these rolled &quot;r&quot;s pronounced?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-22T00:31:25.023" Score="10" ViewCount="5275" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespearean English, thou/thee/thy/thine were used for second person singular, and you/your/yours were used for second person plural. In modern English, you is used for both singular and plural. Why did English stop using thou?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2089" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T18:05:59.880" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T15:56:25.107" Title="Why did English stop using thou?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;formality&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3760" CreationDate="2013-05-22T05:07:27.177" Score="6" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find a database of English words that has the various forms for each word? Specifically, it would give the plural and singular form with its indefinite article for each noun, the various forms, tenses, and voices for verbs, and the comparative and superlative for adjectives. It would be easy to use it to solve queries like (noun,plural,&quot;fish&quot;) and (verb,past,&quot;to go&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2090" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-23T11:18:06.263" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T03:11:13.820" Title="Existing English word database with word forms?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3750" CreationDate="2013-05-22T06:19:42.873" Score="12" ViewCount="30127" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of positions you can take on what the relationship between syntax and semantics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could think that syntax is prior and so think that an expression's syntactic function determines (or, weaker, &lt;em&gt;constrains&lt;/em&gt;) the expression's semantic role. Or you could hold the converse (i.e., an expression's semantic role determines/constrains it's syntactic function). Finally, you could deny any significant connections exist and think that they are two largely orthogonal parts of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people I talk to seem to agree that there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; relationship, but they're not sure what exactly it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What views have linguists developed about the relationship between these two branches? What are some of the classic/canonical articles and what is the current state of the art?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T10:25:15.597" Title="What is the relationship between syntax and semantics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2013-05-22T10:55:31.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll speak for the research tradition I work in, namely Construction Grammar. In CxG you have something called &lt;strong&gt;constructions&lt;/strong&gt; which are symbolic units that directly link form and meaning. A construction can the be a word, say &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt;, but it also can be an idiom &lt;em&gt;kick the bucket&lt;/em&gt;, or a semifixed construction [the mother of all X] or [what is X doing Y] (what is that fly doing in my soup?), or an argument structure construction (kinda hard to represent). Syntax then is intrinsically interrelated to semantics, and there is a really strong link between both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many flavours of construction grammar, you have on the one hand some very formalist approaches like sign based CxG by Kay and Fillmore; and on the other hand some more cognitive takes on the matter like Langacker, Croft, Bybee or Goldberg. I like better this latter approaches, if you are interested you should check out Croft 2001 &lt;em&gt;Radical Construction Grammar&lt;/em&gt; and Langackers &lt;em&gt;Cognitive Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, also Goldberg has a very important book &lt;em&gt;Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T10:55:31.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3745" CreationDate="2013-05-22T10:58:04.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't alveolar in any case, it is indeed a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; clean uvular trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T10:58:04.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-22T15:22:49.447" Score="4" ViewCount="928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the relative chronology of Grimm's Law and Verner's Law. I understand that there are different views, and that it is not easy to work out. I believe Ringe argues that the Verner's Law happens after all of Grimm's, Voyles however says that the Verner's happens in the middle of Grimm's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an article that sums up the latest views and the pros and cons for each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2092" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-05-22T15:44:37.670" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T17:59:29.820" Title="What is the relative chronology of Grimm's and Verner's Law?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-22T16:02:26.923" Score="1" ViewCount="2521" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question for a machine translation exam which reads; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Provide examples where unigram, brigram, trigram and 4-gram models would fail to capture a grammatical constraint of the English language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody give examples of what grammatical constraints are as I don't have a clue...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1930" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-23T04:16:50.223" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T22:02:48.647" Title="Grammatical constraint of language" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3753" CreationDate="2013-05-22T18:56:38.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A grammatical constraint is a &quot;rule&quot; that prohibits speakers from building a particular kind of sentence. For example, you can't say in standard English &lt;em&gt;he go to school&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;to he goes school&lt;/em&gt;, etc. What they are asking you (if I understand the question correctly) is to provide examples of these kinds of constraints that a n-gram based grammar would miss. An example that comes to mind is that of long distance relations and structural closeness. If you need specific examples I could give you a couple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T18:56:38.603" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3747" CreationDate="2013-05-22T22:48:01.747" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will attempt to answer this, but please understand that it is more of a guess since the comments to your question are correct.  This may not even be the kind of question that can be answered here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that thou was more than just the &quot;second person singular&quot; - it was later an &lt;em&gt;informal&lt;/em&gt; pronoun as well, and picked up connotations of referring to someone of lower social standing than yourself.  We can see different usages frozen in time in different contexts (religiously, thou lingered with a different connotation than it did in the phrase &quot;holier than thou&quot; or &quot;Get thee gone!&quot;).  The meaning probably still continues to change*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once &quot;thou&quot; had the connotation of suggesting the lower social status of someone, you can see how this would become problematic in a society that was becoming increasingly egalitarian (and perhaps still is).  At some point, the old &quot;familiar&quot; usage is polluted with a tinge of disdain/inferiority that was inappropriate for the context and it was preferable to borrow another form to show that the speaker was not presuming his own superiority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that Darth Vader says, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58JrxLL3u2s&quot;&gt;What is thy bidding, my master?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in a context where he is kneeling in submission to his master.  A usage that, if it is not outright wrong, seems to hint at the complexities of the relationship as well as bringing in religious overtones and a &quot;cool factor&quot; that wouldn't exist with &quot;What is your bidding, my master?&quot;  Or, perhaps, the meaning has reversed and &quot;thou&quot; is meant to show &lt;em&gt;additional deference&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1581" LastActivityDate="2013-05-22T22:48:01.747" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3745" CreationDate="2013-05-23T03:49:41.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought it was a bilabial trill; maybe in coarticulation with an uvular one, at least sometimes? Sounds slightly different at the beginning of the video than later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2013-05-23T03:49:41.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-23T07:58:53.610" Score="4" ViewCount="2827" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just looking at a Zulu word entry in Wiktionary that implied it was made from a prefix and a suffix, but there was nothing between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this could just be sloppy editing of Wiktionary but either way it got me thinking about whether this is a valid word-formation strategy used by any languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first asked this question I didn't word it in a way that clarified I was asking about word formation. It turns out there are words in several languages which can be analysed on the furface into only affixes, but the examples so far were not originally formed that way, but my more complex processes of adding and dropping morphemes at various stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this affix-only manner of word formation known to occur? Is it widespread amongst languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T06:20:03.370" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T23:20:07.253" Title="Can words be formed by deriving from just prefix(es) and suffix(es) with no actual root morpheme between?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2013-05-23T17:04:19.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. One such word is Russian word &lt;em&gt;вынуть&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to take out&quot;. Here the &lt;em&gt;вы-&lt;/em&gt; is prefix, &lt;em&gt;-ну-&lt;/em&gt; is suffix and &lt;em&gt;-ть&lt;/em&gt; is ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old form of this word was &lt;em&gt;вынять&lt;/em&gt; which had the root &lt;em&gt;-ня-&lt;/em&gt;, but later the root was re-analyzed as suffix by analogy with other words (&lt;em&gt;сунуть&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;дунуть&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-05-23T17:04:19.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3732" CreationDate="2013-05-24T01:57:50.567" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a &lt;strong&gt;ton&lt;/strong&gt; of research on the efficacy of phonics programs, but it is nearly all contentious and its significance hotly debated.  Back in the early 1990s (the heyday of the Hooked On program) things got so tense and politically charged that people referred to the &quot;Reading Wars&quot;.  (Google it.)  On one side were the proponents of &quot;phonics first&quot;, who argued that the work of decoding individual phonemes necessarily must precede the other skills that are part of reading; on the other side were the proponents of &quot;whole language&quot; instruction.  The Wikipedia article on &quot;Whole language&quot; has a good overview of the controversy.  Matters were made even more complicated by the fact that &quot;whole language&quot; was often mischaracterized (not only by its critics but also by some teachers who were supposed to implement it) as an approach that did not include phonics instruction at all, rather than an approach that insisted on phonics instruction only in the context of meaningful interaction with text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffice it to say that most academics who study literacy acquisition believe that the evidence clearly supports whole language as the preferred approach; skeptics, on the other hand, have produced voluminous critiques of the academic research, which they regard as ideologically biased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Slightly OT digression:  The controversy over literacy instruction has much in common with the analogous politicization of math education, with which I am much more conversant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Much more OT afterthought:  It is both weird and delightful to see jlawler, a former college professor of mine who I have not seen in nearly 20 years, answering a question posed by my cousin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2097" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T01:57:50.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3748" CreationDate="2013-05-24T03:11:13.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look here, maybe there's something useful among those tools: &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Morphology_software_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Morphology_software_for_English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technical note:&#xA;A &quot;database&quot; would be a less than ideal format for a language's morphology given the high redundancy among different word forms (all with the same stem); one typically uses a finite state machine/transducer for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T03:11:13.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-24T10:36:12.050" Score="1" ViewCount="671" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on speech project where the original authors chose to use the Computer Phonetic Alphabet (CPA), from Nuance, to store phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the dictionaries we want now to use are all written in IPA. I was wondering if a translation table for these two languages was existing? Or another method to convert IPA into CPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2098" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T11:09:51.823" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:46:27.713" Title="How to convert IPA into CPA (Nuance)?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-24T11:38:25.977" Score="3" ViewCount="2805" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a project I would like to look up the top bigrams containing the word &quot;like&quot;. Is there such a service available online somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-05-24T19:11:10.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-18T06:35:45.957" Title="Online bigram frequency lookup" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3761" CreationDate="2013-05-24T11:46:27.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that the A in IPA just means Alphabet and just like the Latin alphabet, it can be and is used differently for different languages, and even more than one way for the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any phonemic transcription scheme it works best with a pronunciation guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you are facing is a mapping problem. You need to decide exactly which sound is represented by each of your CPA symbols for your language and you need to decide exactly which sound is represented by each of the IPA symbols, for each of your sources if they differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then if you are lucky and both are based on similar analyses of the sound systems of the language in question you will have a 1:1 mapping of CPA symbols to IPA symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more often than not you will not be quite this lucky and one scheme will have more symbols than the other scheme. This is where you will have to make decisions based on your knowledge of phonetics and phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-05-24T11:46:27.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-24T21:36:55.840" Score="5" ViewCount="672" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on the Kazakh language&lt;/a&gt; it can be written in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perso-Arabic_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perso-Arabic&lt;/a&gt; scripts as it's a language that does not have its own native script like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Armenian&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is &lt;strong&gt;which alphabet is currently used&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kazakhstan&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-05-28T04:58:04.693" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T03:59:32.617" Title="In which script(s) is the Kazakh language actually written in Kazakhstan?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3766" CreationDate="2013-05-25T01:16:46.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They use their own variant of Cyrillic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;President's site for example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.akorda.kz/kz/category/respublica_kazahstan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.akorda.kz/kz/category/respublica_kazahstan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kazakh alphabet contains 9 additional letters: ә,і,ң,ғ,ү,ұ,қ,ө,һ. Additional letters took place right after cyrillic letters that additional letter based from. Thus &quot;ә&quot; goes after &quot;a&quot;, &quot;ө&quot; goes after &quot;o&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 27th October of 2017 The President of Kazakstan signed act of using latin alphabet. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.akorda.kz/ru/legal_acts/decrees/o-perevode-alfavita-kazahskogo-yazyka-s-kirillicy-na-latinskuyu-grafiku&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to act on President's official page(RU)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="20937" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T03:59:32.617" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T03:59:32.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3762" CreationDate="2013-05-25T04:06:35.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; which might meet your needs but I honestly can't figure out exactly how you'd use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that doesn't work, it's easy enough to write your own program which reads a corpus, counts the bigrams, and outputs the data you're looking for. Even if you don't have any programming background, this is actually quite easy. I have given this task as an assignment to classes where the majority of students had little-to-no programming experience and that didn't have much trouble. Try a quick Google search for tutorials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is choosing a corpus. Generally corpora tend to be specialized by the type of language included (such as only news articles, only tweets, only novels, etc.). You will need to take a look at what's available and decide which corpus (or combination of corpora) are right for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nltk_data/index.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; offers multiple corpora for free download as well as TREC offers &lt;a href=&quot;http://trec.nist.gov/data.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;multiple corpora&lt;/a&gt; across various types of language (some free, some requiring approval, and some requiring purchase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-05-25T04:06:35.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-25T18:31:14.503" Score="7" ViewCount="937" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read in a number of places (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_pronouns&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) that Proto-Indo-European had first and second-person personal pronouns, but no third-person pronouns. Instead, a system of anaphoric demonstrative pronouns, ancestors of English third-person he/she/it, were used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is what methodology can be used to determine whether a set of pronouns are third-person personal pronouns or anaphoric demonstratives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-13T14:35:10.620" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T06:58:26.450" Title="Personal vs. Demonstrative Pronouns" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3737" CreationDate="2013-05-26T18:41:51.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based mainly on Aronson and Kiziria's &lt;em&gt;Georgian Language and Culture: A Continuing Course&lt;/em&gt;, the most common situations in which Georgian nouns that take -i in the nominative can end in the bare consonant are the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) vocative forms of proper nouns, e.g. &quot;დავითი/Daviti&quot; (nom.), but &quot;დავით/Davit&quot; (voc.),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) when as an attribute in agreement with a noun in the dative or adverbial case (i.e. it is declined just like a consonant-stem adjective), e.g. &quot;ბოთლ/botl&quot; (bottle) in &quot;ლინდსი ლოჰანი დღეში ორ ბოთლ არაყს სვამს/Lindsi Lohani dgheshi or botl araqs svams&quot; (Lindsay Lohan drinks two bottles of vodka a day),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) first names preceding family names, titles etc., e.g. &quot;დავით აღმაშენებელი/Davit Aghmashenebeli&quot; (David the Builder) but &quot;დავითი/Daviti&quot;, or &quot;მიხეილ სააკაშვილი/Mikheil Saak'ashvili&quot; but &quot;მიხეილი/Mikheili&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) the first element of some fixed expressions, mainly involving points of the compass, e.g. &quot;დასავლეთ საქართველო/Dasavlet Sakartvelo&quot; (Western Georgia), but &quot;დასავლეთი/dasavleti&quot; (west).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-05-26T18:41:51.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3665" CreationDate="2013-05-26T20:26:04.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wals&lt;/a&gt; claims there are at least 4 known languages which use only two vowels, /i/ and /a/, and would therefore make no distinction based on backness. But I find this hard to believe. The only example they give is that of Yimas.&#xA;But Yimas has 4 vowels /i ɨ u/ and /a/ if William A Foley &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.fr/books?id=5TCsAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is to be believed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the evidence for a language that doesn't have at least those 3 vowels /i a u/ (maximally front, maximally open, maximally back) seems quite flimsy to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="2105" LastEditDate="2013-05-27T16:07:05.330" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T16:07:05.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3706" CreationDate="2013-05-27T00:45:26.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language appeared more than 50 000 years ago (and that's a conservative estimate.) The oldest writing systems appeared 6000 years ago. &#xA;And in many parts of the world, writing appeared only during the XXth century. Most languages still aren't written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, languages are dying nowadays, but are they really dying faster, or do we just get this impression because we started counting them, studying them, accounting for them ? &#xA;We have little elements of comparison between now, and a thousand years ago. We have no element of comparison between now and a ten thousand years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to that the fact that it is easy to notice when a language dies without posterity, but it takes more time to see if a new language was born, for obvious reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical linguistics can only get us so far back in the past, and even then, it only gives us reliable information about languages which survived and evolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will never know when there were the most languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="2105" LastEditDate="2013-05-27T16:06:20.860" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T16:06:20.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3641" CreationDate="2013-05-27T11:18:44.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course you need a corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally in statistical NLP, you train your model based on a corpus. For example, for text classification where an input document is fed to the model and it should output its class (from a list of classes). The model is trained on many documents with their corresponding classes and when the new document is tested under that model, it will use the features (information) which was extracted from those documents to classify the new document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of co-occurrence of two words, you can use context-vector, which is very common in statistical NLP. It has a simple definition and very easy to implement, but you will need a corpus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will define a vector with fixed length (the number of unique words in your corpus) for each unique word in your corpus. The context vector for each word tells us how many times other words have co-occurred with the current word in the defined window, e.g. in a window of words, you see what are the other words occurred with the current word and increment their corresponding element in the context vector. A simple example is show below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corpus:&#xA;A D C E A D F E B A C E D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Window size: 2 (the 2 words of the either side)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context vectors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      A B C D E&#xA;&#xA;A     0 1 3 2 3    &#xA;B     1 0 1 0 1     &#xA;C     3 1 0 2 2    &#xA;D     2 0 2 0 4    &#xA;E     3 1 2 4 0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these context vectors you can get co-occurrences very easy. For example co-occurrence of D and E is D[E] = 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1440" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T11:18:44.943" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3595" CreationDate="2013-05-27T11:59:27.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ATIS semantic frame annotation was done in Cambridge University under supervision of Prof. Steve Young.&#xA;There are two types of annotations: Abstract and word level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstract annotation is used to train &lt;a href=&quot;http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~sjy/papers/heyo03a.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hidden Vector State (HVS)&lt;/a&gt; model introduced by Yulan He and is in the form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Show me flights from Boston to Washington : SS(FLIGHT(FROMLOC(CITY_NAME) TOLOC(CITY_NAME))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The annotation is parsed to a hierarchical tree explained in Yulan He's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another annotation is the word-level one which is used in other parsers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/tbed-parser/%E2%80%8E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TBED Parser&lt;/a&gt; is in the form of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Show me flights from Boston to Washington &amp;lt;=&amp;gt; flight(fromloc.city_name=Boston, toloc.city_name=Washington)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;flight is the frame name and shows the goal of the utterance and the slots (fromloc.city_name,...) shows the details of the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no code available to convert SQL queries to this formats but, it can be easily induced from the queries (parsing the SELECT and WHERE clauses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1440" LastEditorUserId="1440" LastEditDate="2013-05-29T08:29:46.717" LastActivityDate="2013-05-29T08:29:46.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3706" CreationDate="2013-05-27T16:56:33.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem is, as you've identified, how to define &quot;language&quot;. But the much larger problem, which makes your question impossible to answer, is that in order to approach an answer, we need to know the complete number of languages at minimum two distinct times in human history (in order to compare and find the larger number). The only point in time where it's possible to find the number of total languages is today (and we don't even know what that number is). So we will never know the complete number of languages that existed at some point in time in the past. Hence the question cannot be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T16:56:33.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3752" CreationDate="2013-05-27T17:11:14.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consensus is that Grimm's law occurs before Verner's law. You will in the field of Indo-European linguistics always find someone who claims the opposite of what the consensus says. So it's important to know what the consensus is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an argument in favor of the traditional approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verner's law turns voiceless fricatives into voiced fricatives. You can read more about that in my 2011 paper &quot;The phonetics and phonologization of Verner’s law&quot;. But, Verner's law also targets Proto-Indo-European */k/. How is that possible? Well, Grimm's law turns Proto-Indo-European */k/ into a voiceless fricative */χ/, so if we order Grimm's law before Verner's law, then the outcome follows: */k/ &gt; */χ/ &gt; */ɣ/. You can read more about that in my 2009 paper &quot;The development of voiced labiovelars in Germanic&quot;. My papers are here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://folk.uio.no/sverrej/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://folk.uio.no/sverrej/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how those people who order these laws differently will explain these facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-05-27T17:11:14.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2013-05-28T15:15:08.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not easy to describe the relation between syntax and semantics, but it is probably easy to say why that is not easy: there are different perspectives about syntax and semantics, so the relation depends on what you understand by form and meaning, structure and content. If you look at the history of Chomskyan linguistics, you will find the  chapter in which a group of people were working on deep structures so much that they actually were doing semantics and not syntax. Moreover, anaphors and quantifiers became really problematic for the framework, so it became insufficient to explain the linguistc phenomena under discussion. But Chomsky and others were not happy about the division, and today there are many syntacticians who keep themselves away from the &quot;dangerous&quot; interface with semantics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to be more specific about your question, but still general about the definitions, I think that you could see syntax as independent from semantics but not the other way around. Let's say the goal of syntax is to develop theories about the similarities and differences between linguistic structures within and across languages. Let's also assume that we can study elements that are necessary for those structures to be well-formed, and that their meaning is not essential for the interpretation of the whole structure. Then it is possible to say that syntax does not need semantics, or that it is structure what determines meaning. Whether that is interesting or helpful is up to the syntacticians who work under such view. As for semantics, it simply cannot be studied without reference to syntax, for any meaningful phrase or sentence is always a that, a phrase or a sentence, so it must have a certain structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to study language in a more comprehensive way, I think the relation bewteen syntax and semantics must be one of interdependence, and thus it is more fruitful to study the way structures are built up and also the meaning that arises from such building operation. Just as we have structure building from a syntactic perspective, we have function application from a semantic perspective. This is one of the several general descriptions of the relation between syntax and semantics, but again, the specific views depend on the theories of syntax and semantics which you are working with. Even if the view is that syntax and semantics are related in some way, there are approaches in which syntactic and semantic structures are generated independently, for instance 1 below. There's also an interesting and recent article about the syntax-semantic interface that you might find useful, and that's 2. Another interesting presentation of the mutual influence of syntax and semantics can be found in 3 (link to video).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jackendoff (2002) Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hackl (2013) The syntax-semantics interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conference by Barbara Partee (2009) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/run/events/research/conferences/conference/video/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2013-05-28T15:15:08.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3766" CreationDate="2013-05-28T18:47:05.463" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kazakh was written in Perso-Arabic before it wasincluded into USSR. All countries in USSR used cyrilic alphabet, thus, Kazakh languages at that period was written in Cyrilic. After gaining independence, Kazak government decided to convert their writing into Latin. Now, it is in the period of transition to Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastActivityDate="2013-05-28T18:47:05.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-28T22:05:52.397" Score="5" ViewCount="1173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that several languages of East Asia and the Pacific islands like Japanese, Chinese, and Hawaiian, have much stricter rules governing phonotactics than languages in other parts of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a legitimate trend, or have I just not been looking at the right languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it is legitimate, are there any possible reasons for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-05-31T13:00:57.933" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T04:13:56.667" Title="Is there a general tendency among East Asian languages toward simple syllable structure?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-30T20:22:52.857" Score="0" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have been doing phonemic rules in class, and our professor says to write a &quot;phonemic rewrite&quot; of words based on these rules, where these words are written like so &quot;/_/&quot;. While I understand the concept of phonemes and their representation in the slashes, I dont understand it when words are represented in those slashes or what a phonemic rewrite is. Can someone please elaborate on this? Unfortunately, my textbook does not cover it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2117" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-01T16:20:15.277" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T16:20:15.277" Title="What does a phonemic rewrite mean?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-30T20:23:09.650" Score="15" ViewCount="11207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the any open source tools/software libraries to convert an audio clip to its IPA representation? If so, are they accurate? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a Gaelic word I wish to convert:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ogg format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connacht Gaelic:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_c.ogg&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_c.ogg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Munster Gaelic:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_m.ogg&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_m.ogg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ulster Gaelic:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_u.ogg&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/tra_xthno_xna_u.ogg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mp3 format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connacht Gaelic: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_c.mp3&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_c.mp3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Munster Gaelic: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_m.mp3&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_m.mp3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ulster Gaelic: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_u.mp3&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/tra_xthno_xna_u.mp3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also how about phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/ar_bith_c.ogg&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/ar_bith_c.ogg&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/ar_bith_c.mp3&quot;&gt;http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/ar_bith_c.mp3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T16:14:06.673" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T01:04:44.283" Title="Convert audio recording of word to IPA representation" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3788" CreationDate="2013-05-30T21:02:36.420" Score="3" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a program that will take input from users in non-English languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) and will need to determine whether the input is grammatically correct. The majority of the coding will be done in Python, so I would like suggested tools to have a Python interface if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found the Python NLTK which contains a grammar module. Their data includes English and Spanish grammars, but I am still in need of the other languages. Any help is greatly appreciated. Also, grammars for other languages are welcome, but the listed ones are the ones I will definitely need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2118" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T09:07:34.873" Title="Checking grammar of non-English text (NLP)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-31T06:58:18.417" Score="1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kartvelian languages such Georgian have a very complex agglutinative verb structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian is very well studied but there's not a lot of self-study books or online sites that go really in depth. I do have several self-study books but they don't seem to cover everything, or some things are particularly hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across a verb &quot;ატარებს&quot; (atarebs) / &quot;ტარება&quot; (tareba), &quot;to carry&quot; which has an initial &quot;a&quot; in one of the citation forms (third person singular present indicative) but not in the other citation form (verbal noun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the form I encountered, &quot;ეტარებინა&quot; (etarebina) has an initial &quot;ე&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several kinds of prefixes that I am aware of but I can't figure out what this is. It's not a preverb since that is a closed class. Georgian has a complex relationship between a concept called &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2011/do-languages-besides-the-kartvelian-family-have-a-property-of-verbs-called-vers&quot;&gt;&quot;version&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and another of &quot;polypersonal verbs&quot;. I understand that these are single vowel prefixes and I've seen &quot;ე&quot; mentioned but not thoroughly treated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Georgian is also famous for having many irregular verbs and lots of suppletion, and there could well be some other categories of the verb that I haven't even become aware of yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my quest I discovered on Wiktionary that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%90%E1%83%A2%E1%83%90%E1%83%A0%E1%83%94%E1%83%91%E1%83%A1#Conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;ეტარებინა&quot; is the third person singular pluperfect&lt;/a&gt;, but this doesn't help me to understand at all the process that led to the initial vowel changing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody explain what is happening in this verb form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T14:42:35.023" Title="Which features of Georgian verbs can cause an initial &quot;ა&quot; (a) to become an &quot;ე&quot; (e)?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3785" CreationDate="2013-05-31T08:18:57.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough to work out whether this is actually the answer to your question, but Hewitt says (&lt;em&gt;Georgian: A Learner's Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, p. 135):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For prefixal intransitives an indirect object may only be expressed in one way, namely by changing the prefix ი- to ე-, in front of which the relevant object agreement affix is placed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't make out whether the verb in question can come in this category or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T08:18:57.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-05-31T10:09:18.330" Score="22" ViewCount="1600" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a similar question here which mainly dealt with why English only has eleven and twelve as unique words with some interesting ideas. But my question is why do different languages have different cut-off points for unique words. Here I am using unique just to mean words which follow a different pattern to simply number + the word for ten, or which are formed differently to the other numbers between 10 and 20. French for example goes up to 16 before saying 10-7, 10-8 etc. and I just found out that Spanish and Portuguese go up to 15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking online I can see that Catalan and Italian follow French, going up to 16, while German, Dutch and Nordic languages follow English and stop at 12 . Greek also acts similarly and has 11 and 12 with different forms to the other numbers. Gaelic, Romanian and Hungarian have no unique words between 10 and 20. Finnish and Czech appear to also have no unique words (or all unique words depending on your outlook: they use a suffix different to the word ten). No offence to it, but Welsh is a mess. Latin itself has 11-17 following one pattern, and 18 and 19 with a different pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that in Europe only Germanic and Romance languages have unique words between 10 and 20. Modern Germanic languages all have 11 and 12 as unique words, while modern Romance languages are split between 11-15 (Spanish and Portuguese), 11-16 (French, Catalan and Italian) and none at all (Romanian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly curious as to why the numbers 10-20 seem to have more differences between languages than any other set of numbers (after 0-10 of course). And why these words in Romance languages seem to have splintered due to geography while in Germanic languages they haven't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Sergoetgrim" LastEditorUserId="1021" LastEditDate="2013-05-31T11:17:57.520" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T11:55:31.107" Title="Why do different languages have different amounts of unique words for numbers between 10 and 20?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3784" CreationDate="2013-05-31T12:08:41.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagetool.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LanguageTool&lt;/a&gt; used to be usable with just OpenOffice. These days, they have a stand-alone version too. In contrast to NLTK, LanguageTool is made (and extended) with Java. I suppose you could use Jython.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AbiWord also has a grammar checking tool that is built using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Link Grammar&lt;/a&gt;.  This was made with C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both tools support many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T12:08:41.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3787" CreationDate="2013-05-31T18:05:38.187" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eleven&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;twelve&lt;/em&gt; are remnants of a duodecimal system which still shows up in words like &lt;em&gt;dozen&lt;/em&gt;. There have to be 12 unique base units for duodecimal, just as there have to be 16 for hexadecimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not always present, however. And the other numbers between 10 and 20 show quite a lot of variation, even in European languages, as you point out for various Romance languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the main generalization here is that numbers, and number patterns, often repeat the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - Singular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) - (Dual)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Many&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - Plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pattern found in, for instance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Singular (Dual) Plural&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dual words and morphology are irregular and arbitrary (e.g, Eng &lt;em&gt;glasses, pants, both, pair, couple&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1-syllable Comparative &lt;em&gt;bigger&lt;/em&gt; (2-syllable &lt;em&gt;easier/more solid&lt;/em&gt;) Polysyllable &lt;em&gt;more interesting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Disyllabic comparatives are irregular and arbitrary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as many other linguistic phenomena, which suggests that duality of one kind or another is semantically unusual, and has some of the irregular and arbitrary characteristics of the numeral &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; (which is often extended for use as a demonstrative, a pronoun, or an article, and which has unique syntax in every language); as well as some of the regular characteristics of compositional numbers like &lt;em&gt;seventy-three&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual is transitional between singular and plural, and it's semantically significant because we are bilaterally symmetric animals and therefore have plenty of reason to refer to things that come in pairs. Plus there are two sexes which mate in pairs, and that's an area rife with irregularity and arbitrariness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This extends to decades (for 10-based systems; I'll use the term for all recurring sequences, of whatever base) as well as numbers. In any system, the first decade is usually composed of unique base units (though not always; in Ute, for instance, &lt;em&gt;nine&lt;/em&gt; means 'almost ten'). The second decade is full of irregularities, but not usually new bases. The third and following decades are usually very regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-05-31T18:05:38.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2013-06-01T07:13:21.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The one point that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is the distinction between segmental and non-segmental approaches to phonology going back at least to the 1960s. So while something phoneme-like may indeed be useful for some kinds of linguistic analysis, the psychological reality (as pointed out) or practical utility (for speech recognition, for instance), has long been in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approaches such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosegmental_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;autosegmental phonology&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ualberta.ca/en/Research/Projects/PhonologicalExemplarBasedLearn.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;exemplar phonology&lt;/a&gt; all seem to be dancing around the same issue of phoneme being at the same time so attractive and so limiting as an analytic concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T12:44:51.317" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:44:51.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3656" CreationDate="2013-06-01T14:49:50.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like what happens if you try to type right-to-left text with a left-to-right word processor. Try copying it into the word processor of your choice and setting the paragraph writing direction to right-to-left, and it should come out correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2124" LastActivityDate="2013-06-01T14:49:50.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3797" CreationDate="2013-06-02T02:09:13.317" Score="5" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more I learn about the Georgian language the more eager I am to compare it with nearby Caucasian languages, to which it is not related but shares a common Sprachbund with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm also interested in Abkhaz and Chechen, I've become mostly interested in Avar because of the Caucasian languages spoken in Dagestan it has the most speakers, it's flourishing, it's taught in schools, and is used as a local lingua franca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet despite this there is an amazing paucity of information about Avar available on the internet. At least in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am seeking either a grammar of Avar or a pretty detailed description. A dictionary would also be OK. I can't really pay for one and I don't have access to journals for professional linguists. Where might I be able to find something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T15:32:38.607" Title="Seeking free grammar or detailed description of Avar" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-02T03:58:16.413" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is especially about how we can measure importance and choose a second language for us. It is not a secret that in a variety of aspects &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; is first language by its importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how to choose second language by some &lt;em&gt;criteria&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please bring examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T09:17:11.520" Title="How to measure importance of language?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-06-02T18:24:11.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3795" CreationDate="2013-06-02T05:41:19.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't measure importance of a language within the science of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is clearly subjective you have to use non-linguistic and/or non-scientific methods like drawing up a good old fashioned list of pros and cons (criteria). You can choose (again subjectively) whether to treat each criterion as equal, or to assign them weights. You can choose whether to just allow yes/no answers or a range with positive and negative extremes and a neutral zone in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example as requested for a language somebody might find important. I've weighted each criteria equally and allowed a range between -20 and +20 for scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;I have no idea&quot; so is equal to &lt;code&gt;0&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Chinese    Arabic    Swedish    Georgian    Avar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I make more money if I learn it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+10       +5         +5         -5          -10&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I quickly learn its written form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-10       -10        +10        -5          -5&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it spoken by hot chicks I would like to chat up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+5        +5         +10        +10         ?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might its utter differences to languages I already know offer tangible linguistic insights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+5        +10        +2         +10         +20&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I practice it with the people in my local convenience store or ethnic restaurant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+10       0          0          0           0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I have a fun and safe holiday visiting a country where it's spoken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+5        +5         +7        +10          -20&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it impress the hell out of people I randomly bump into who speak it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+10      +10         +10       +10          +10&#xA;&#xA;-----------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;+35      +25         +39       +30          -5&#xA;=================================================================&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Men svenska är tråkigt. Kan jag välja något annat? (-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-02T09:17:11.520" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T09:17:11.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3794" CreationDate="2013-06-02T10:39:01.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only grammar of Avar that I can find is this, in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charachidzé, Georges. 1981. Grammaire de la langue avar. Paris: Editions Jean-Favard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Nook ebook version is, apparently, free from Barnes and Noble, but only if you're in the USA. You can see several pages of the grammar &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_ava_phon-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://cowgill.ling.yale.edu/sra/lgs_of_the_caucasus.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; of the 4 volume 'The Indigenous languages of the Caucasus' mentions the Charachidzé grammar as well as several other works. I suspect they will all be difficult to obtain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search of LinguistList gets &lt;a href=&quot;http://multitree.org/codes/ava&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; information, but no grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/ava&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; claims there is an SIL grammar (as well as a dictionary and Bible portions), but it might be hard to get. A search of SIL gets &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/search/node/avar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these results&lt;/a&gt;, but still no grammar. If you have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/silesr/2005/silesr2005-015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper on Avar from SIL&lt;/a&gt; the references might be useful if you read Russian (there's always Google translate). The paper includes the lead author's email address so you could try contacting him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also ask on the Caucasian studies mailing list &lt;a href=&quot;http://heinecke.pagesperso-orange.fr/caucling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CaucNet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you could try asking on LinguistList, or perhaps email &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Johanna Nichols&lt;/a&gt;, a linguist who has carried out much work on Caucasus languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-06-02T10:39:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3804" CreationDate="2013-06-02T11:37:20.260" Score="6" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example is a cognate of flee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Germanic/fleuhan%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fleuhaną&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Descendants[edit]&#xA;  Old English: flēon&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;flee&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Old Frisian: fliā&#xA;  Old Saxon: fliohan&#xA;  Old Dutch: *flion&#xA;  Middle Dutch: vlien&#xA;  Dutch: vlieden&#xA;  Old High German: fliohan&#xA;  German: fliehen&#xA;  Old Norse: flýja&#xA;  Icelandic: flýja&#xA;  Faroese: flýggja&#xA;  Norwegian: fly&#xA;  Swedish: fly&#xA;  Danish: fly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gothic&lt;/strong&gt;:  (&lt;strong&gt;þliuhan&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just seems so peculiar, and I wonder whether it is a rule of sound change or an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: the PGmc root comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Germanic/fleugan%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PIE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; *pleuk-, enlargement of *pleu- (“flow”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/408893?seq=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are four Gothic words with cognates of PIE etymons starting with *pl-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2013-06-03T06:29:01.823" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T15:46:30.923" Title="How does PGmc.fl- change to Goth. thl-, such as PGmc *fleuhaną to Goth. þliuhan?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3784" CreationDate="2013-06-03T09:07:34.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to have a look at OpenNLP &lt;a href=&quot;http://opennlp.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opennlp.apache.org/&lt;/a&gt;. It's in JAVA but it does have a parsing component. It is supposed to be available across languages but you may have to train it. Frankly, I haven't used it for anything myself so would be interested in hearing whether it is useful for an application like yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T09:07:34.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3783" CreationDate="2013-06-03T09:11:13.013" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other thing to keep in mind is that not only is IPA language-dependent, it's also convention dependent &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/false-alarm.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/false-alarm.html&lt;/a&gt;. It's really just a tool to help linguists communicate not a tool for exact representation of speech sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T09:11:13.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3783" CreationDate="2013-06-03T12:14:59.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is not based on wave or acoustic properties of sounds, it is based on the anatomy of the sound origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T12:14:59.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-03T12:54:39.380" Score="0" ViewCount="1030" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the linguistic relation  between &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Turkic words &lt;strong&gt;bin&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;min&lt;/strong&gt; and Latin word &lt;strong&gt;mille&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &lt;strong&gt;thousand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Turkic &lt;strong&gt;dil&lt;/strong&gt; and dutch &lt;strong&gt;taal&lt;/strong&gt; meaninge &lt;strong&gt;language&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2045" LastEditorUserId="2045" LastEditDate="2013-06-03T12:59:47.777" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T09:01:54.687" Title="The reason for similarity of Turkic &quot;min&quot; and latin &quot;mille&quot;, Turkic &quot;dil&quot; and dutch &quot;taal&quot;?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3802" CreationDate="2013-06-03T19:35:17.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no known linguistic relation. For (unprovable) ideas about a relationship, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T19:35:17.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3798" CreationDate="2013-06-03T19:44:34.373" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an old problem within comparative Germanic linguistics. The main ideas out there have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Only Gothic has both &lt;em&gt;þl-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fl-&lt;/em&gt;. The other Germanic languages must therefore have undergone a sound change &lt;em&gt;þl-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;fl-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Gothic underwent a sound change &lt;em&gt;fl-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;þl-&lt;/em&gt;. The Gothic words with &lt;em&gt;fl-&lt;/em&gt; are newer loanwords (or other ad hoc solutions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Gothic underwent a conditional sound change &lt;em&gt;fl-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;þl-&lt;/em&gt;, but it's not clear what the condition was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me whether there is any consensus in the field here, to the extent that this topic has been sufficiently treated to allow a consensus to arise at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-06-03T19:44:34.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-03T22:46:35.687" Score="13" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a set of free and (somewhat) easy tools that I can use with my EFL writing students next semester. I want to analyze their initial essays and look for common errors that can be addressed back in the classroom (hence, the DDL - data-driven learning). I had initially thought of using AntConc to search for certain words (i.e. &quot;should&quot;, and then transfer it over to a spreadsheet for categorization of grammar or errors (o, but I'm not sure this is the best method for doing it. Are there any other methods you could suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T10:21:28.407" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T17:32:40.380" Title="Best method for building a learner corpus for DDL" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3802" CreationDate="2013-06-04T11:59:36.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no relation between the cited words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T11:59:36.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2013-06-04T15:08:07.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very interesting question, though I have no idea for&#xA;an objective way of assessing experimentally the scientific efficiency&#xA;of a language, and even less for theorizing the results of such an&#xA;experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the answers already given and their comments are rather&#xA;surprising to me as they appear almost exclusively concerned with&#xA;terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terminology seems to be the easy part. It does matter to&#xA;some extent, as science is always in need for new words. For example, it seems that English does not mind too much&#xA;creating new words, or assembling them into new expressions.  French&#xA;(at least in France) seems more reluctant and less flexible.&#xA;Neologisms are more awkward. It may be related to a traditionally more&#xA;prescriptive view of the language, possibly due to the creation of the&#xA;French Academy in the 17th century. It may also be due to even more&#xA;centuries of efforts to unify the country (which lead to political&#xA;centralisation), and unifying the language was one way to achieve&#xA;that (though &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140260234&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Myths&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;http://vagabonddrifter.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/language-myths-some-languages-are-not-just-good-enough/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arguments&lt;/a&gt; that may indicate that these considerations were not relevant). Still, France has managed to do reasonably well in the sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terminology hurdles are somewhat easy to overcome. If a&#xA;word is needed, one will be found or created, or borrowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the issue of suitability for scientific thought has more to do&#xA;with morphology (inflexion) and syntax, inasmuch as they are the main&#xA;vehicle for expressing relations in the semantics of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific thought is about establishing and organizing relations (temporal, causal, hypothetical&#xA;...) between facts and phenomena, about organizing the world in a net&#xA;of relations. If the kind of relation that is needed is not&#xA;expressible in the language, it will not be available in the thinking&#xA;and the scientific knowledge will not be able to develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This connects somewhat to the ideas of Thomas Kuhn regarding&#xA;scientific revolutions which, according to him, are based on a&#xA;conceptual change of perspective. But to work with new concepts, you&#xA;must be able to express them in your language. Progress in the&#xA;mathematics has been highly dependent on the development of&#xA;mathematical notation (the language of mathematics) to express the&#xA;needed concepts (the notation for zero is a classical example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significant development of scientific reasonning in ancient Grece&#xA;seems directly related to the development of rethorics, the art of&#xA;discourse, which goes much beyond a mastery of terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get back to more direct experience, the difficult part in learning&#xA;a new language (say Russian or ancient Greek, for example) is not so much&#xA;learning the vocabulary, or even the morphology and syntax rules. It&#xA;is to grasp the semantic relations that are expressed with the&#xA;morphology and the syntax, and can be significantly different from&#xA;other languages (I am thinking for example of verb tenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that it is precisely these structures that are essential for&#xA;scientific thinking. Now, it would require more knowledge than I have&#xA;to assess the suitability of this or that language, or language&#xA;feature, for science. It could even be that it depends on the kind of&#xA;science or of scientific activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added after comments&lt;/strong&gt; (June 7, 2013) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am adding this to reply to comments. But I feel pushed to the limit&#xA;of what I can assert credibly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the assumption that discourse structure and expression of&#xA;relations is expressed through syntax more than through&#xA;terminology. The assumption is likely to result to some extent from my&#xA;ignorance and biases, and it would really require a systematic analysis&#xA;in a variety of languages. This analysis itself would demand&#xA;knowing/identifying the fundamental semantic concepts and relations&#xA;that are essential for science, probably through synchronic and&#xA;diachronic, and probably cultural (I am not sure what is the correct&#xA;technical term) analysis scientific texts. They might even differ&#xA;somewhat according to the scientific areas concerned. I would be&#xA;suprised if nothing had been done/published already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrasting it with texts that give non scientific (to be defined,&#xA;without anachronisms) explanations of the world might be useful too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work of historians of science would probably be an important&#xA;starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding isolation vs inflection, I have little to say. I am not&#xA;competent to speak, but my intuitive understanding is that they both have&#xA;expressive power for structuring a sentence, which is really&#xA;what I was trying to say. For example, if you cannot express clearly&#xA;what is implied when you state that all linguists are liars, I am not&#xA;sure you will be able to develop modern scientific knowledge and&#xA;discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also wondering whether some languages might have a greater affinity&#xA;for ambiguity or multiplicity of meanings, and whether it could have&#xA;an impact on scientific thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the tenses of verbs, it was in my personnal experience the&#xA;first thing that struck me as capable of impacting systematically the&#xA;way some people think of (for lack of a better expression) correlation&#xA;of events. How much these variations may affect scientific thinking, I&#xA;do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not totally unrelated reference. There was a SE discussion on programming languages and natural language: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/9581/are-programming-languages-becoming-more-like-natural-languages/12406&quot;&gt;Are programming languages becoming more like natural languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.197" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T22:44:40.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-04T17:54:35.317" Score="-4" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is so probable that all Caucasoid people have had a common ancestor.&#xA;Does The fact that most of Caucasoid people speak a Semitic or Indo-European language  not suggest that there has been an ancient language  sometime in the past that primitive Caucasoids spoke it and from which these groups have been derived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2045" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T23:59:57.060" Title="Caucasoid people, Common Genetic roots and Common Proto-Language?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-06-05T00:57:46.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3728" CreationDate="2013-06-04T20:14:01.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at phonetic implementation of these sounds, American English &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; is often pronounced a lot like an affricate &lt;code&gt;[̪dð]&lt;/code&gt; when in onset position (not just in the stereotyped pronunciation of Chicago, but in other dialects as well).  If a BP learner of English hears such a sound, it is unsurprising that they will classify it according to the closest match in their native phonology (which according to your description of BP, would be &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example of &quot;with&quot; is odd, since in many (most?) dialects of English, &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; does not occur syllable-finally in that word (rather it's &lt;code&gt;θ&lt;/code&gt;); in any event, the likely explanation for &lt;code&gt;/ð/ → [f]&lt;/code&gt; (instead of &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[z]&lt;/code&gt;) has to do with segmental cues: both &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[f]&lt;/code&gt; are fairly quiet fricatives, while &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[z]&lt;/code&gt; are quite loud (because the tongue forms a groove that channels a high-velocity air stream right at the back of the teeth, causing lots of loud turbulence.  This makes &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[f]&lt;/code&gt; more perceptually similar than say &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2013-06-05T14:12:25.800" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T14:12:25.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3810" CreationDate="2013-06-04T23:34:54.997" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indo-European languages are more closely related to Altaic (including Turkic, Mongolic, Japanese, Korean), Eskimo-Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan than Semitic. The most of speakers of those language families belong to Mongoloid race. It is thus difficult to infer any relation between race and language based on this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the speakers of, say, Chinese while belonging to Mongoloid race, speak a language which is much further from Indo-European than Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we can more or less reliably speculate that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were Europeoid, we cannot do any conclusions of similar reliability about Eurasiatic or Nostratic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T23:34:54.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3810" CreationDate="2013-06-04T23:59:57.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language and genetics, as much as they tend to correlate, don't necessarily have to at all. People can, and do, frequently adopt languages that have no connection at all to their own ancestry. It may well be the case (and probably is) that something like this has happened in the case of Indo-European and Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'caucasoid' (and I'm not sure that your knowledge of human genetic history is very accurate), but certainly there are a couple of clear counterexamples for you. Basque is the most obvious - clearly not Indo-European, and indeed clearly pre-Indo-European, and yet spoken by people that are genetically very European. Sumerian and maybe Elamite might have also been counterexamples - they've since been replaced by Semitic languages (&gt; Aramaic &gt; Arabic in the case of Sumerian) or Indo-European languages ( &gt; Persian in the case of Elamite), despite the fact that neither language was anything like either Semitic or Indo-European (or each other) and the fact that the people that spoke them were never 'replaced' with anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-06-04T23:59:57.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2013-06-05T16:01:03.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP seems to be bilingual in English in Chinese. Perhaps they think that being bilingual equates to equal mastery of both language in ALL domains (social, scientific, political, economic discourses, and so on). However, the notion of a balanced bilingual is mostly a myth. My point is that you (the OP) seem to favor English for mathematical and scientific discourse. I would put your original question to a Chinese scholar in variable calculus or any other field and ask them if they think their language isn't good enough to handle the concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T16:01:03.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-05T16:28:59.013" Score="7" ViewCount="2329" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a single, unified place where one can look up cuneiform signs for Sumerian words?  Unicode now supports cuneiform, but every source I've found has only transliterations, not actual cuneiform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'd like to find this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ki-en-ĝir&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I find myself wishing there were a &lt;a href=&quot;http://sumerian.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;sumerian.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:43:40.183" Title="Sumerian cuneiform dictionary?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-05T18:31:05.170" Score="3" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might ask now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What does the &quot;i&quot; stand for?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, according to the following article&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2009/01/the-i-in-iphone.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2009/01/the-i-in-iphone.html&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;the &quot;i&quot; was originally meant to stand for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, but it was never fixed to the meaning of internet alone; it can also denote other things such as  &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Individual&quot;  &quot;Instruct  &quot;Inform&quot;  &quot;Inspire&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would be describe the '&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;' in linguistic terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As some new kind of productive affix? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or would you rather argue &lt;em&gt;iPad, iPhone&lt;/em&gt; etc. to be compounds, where the first part of the compound was clipped, while the second part of the compound retained its form?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any other good ideas? :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2122" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T21:39:12.457" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T21:40:58.707" Title="What exactly is the &quot;i&quot; in iPad, iPhone, iMac etc. linguistically speaking?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3815" CreationDate="2013-06-05T20:45:32.177" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you already looked at the upenn dictionary?  It is at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd1/nepsd-frame.html&quot;&gt;http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd1/nepsd-frame.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It uses graphics instead of Unicode I think.  You can send an email to Steve Tinney and ask if there is something else that might meet your needs better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2135" LastActivityDate="2013-06-05T20:45:32.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6893" CreationDate="2013-06-06T04:06:40.903" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the English speakers in this group are familiar with the use of &quot;keep&quot; to convey persistent action, whether the action is repeated (He kept knocking the ball off the table) or maintained (The ball kept rolling.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that &quot;keep&quot; in this context is an aspectual auxiliary.  But for the life of me, I can't find the name of the aspect that auxiliary &quot;keep&quot; conveys.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Wikipedia article, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_aspect#Lexical_vs._grammatical_aspect&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_aspect#Lexical_vs._grammatical_aspect&lt;/a&gt;, names dozens of different aspects, but though it listed English aspects, it didn't contain an explicit referenced to auxiliary &quot;keep&quot;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's the name of the aspect that auxiliary &quot;keep&quot; conveys?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:13:58.640" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T16:20:55.730" Title="What is the name of the grammatical aspect conveyed by the English auxiliary &quot;keep&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-06T10:01:22.267" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Georgian and its related languages there is a concept of the &quot;preverb&quot;, which is much like the separable and inseparable verb prefixes in German or in English phrasal verbs with a preposition or adverbial particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prefixes sometimes impart some meaning like a preposition, but mostly there is one set preverb per verb which is used in perfective forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a set number of preverbs in Georgian: &lt;code&gt;ა–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;გა–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;და–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;მი–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;მო–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;შე–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ჩა–&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;წა–&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preverbs can also be combined, the most common being: &lt;code&gt;ამო–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;გადა–&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;გამო–&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;ჩამო–&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the materials I've been using do not go on to list the full number of possible combinations and permutations. &lt;strong&gt;So I'm wondering about rare preverbs, preverbs which might lead to ambiguity in analysing verbs, and whether what is possible and impossible in preverb combinations has been studied.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are preverbs with the same morpheme doubled possible, such as &lt;code&gt;აა-&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;მიმი-&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible for preverbs to comprise three morphemes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May &lt;code&gt;ა-&lt;/code&gt; occur as the second morpheme in a preverb pair?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've analysed some Georgian text and found words which might be examples of all three types but it's very possible they're not verbs or the following morpheme is causing ambiguity where it looks like part of a preverb. My Georgian knowledge is not yet sufficient to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-07T00:55:48.113" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T10:49:41.740" Title="Constraints on Kartvelian preverbs" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;preverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-06T11:46:48.763" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have long been out of the NLP game, but I am curious to get back in.  I wanted to know about modern techniques for doing automated writing evaluation of English texts.  I want to take essay-form content from non-native speakers and write an application to assess how well-written it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left the question vague on purpose, because I really want to read up on the topic and it has been a while.  Does anyone have any pointers to good books or articles on this domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T11:46:48.763" Title="Articles Books on Automated Writing Evaluation Techniques" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-06-06T12:44:14.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3819" CreationDate="2013-06-06T16:53:14.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can answer only from Hewitt's &lt;em&gt;Georgian, a learner's grammar&lt;/em&gt; (which is, of course, not a reference grammar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He lists the eight you give, together with გადა-, as &quot;Simplex&quot;, and all of them (except მო- itself) combined with მო- as &quot;Complex&quot;, though he says დამო- is found with only one verbal root. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if other combinations of two or more preverbs are found, they are outside the notice of this Learner's Grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-06-06T16:53:14.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2013-06-06T18:42:35.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among ancient languages, there are certain traits of aggluttination in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language#Verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hittite&lt;/a&gt; (especially in its verbs of mi-class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in living languages, then one of the possible suggestions would be verbs of the  regular -ar or -er types in modern Swedish. The -ar- type is a type of verbs of regular declention taking, like the rest of regular Swedish verbs, a similar ending (here, -ar) for all and any personal forms in Present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider e.g. the verb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;att svara&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to answer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Sg.                          Pl.&#xA;&#xA;1.  jag svarar                        vi svarar&#xA;&#xA;2.  du svarar                         ni svarar&#xA;&#xA;3.  hen svarar                        de [dom] svarar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a new coinage, presumably a calque from the Finnish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hän&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Both new Swedish and the Finnish words mean the same: (s)he. The actual and more exact gender-specific pronouns in Swedish are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for 'she' and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;han&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for 'he'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's make a Past Tense form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Sg.                          Pl.&#xA;&#xA;1.  jag svarade                 vi svarade&#xA;&#xA;2.  du svarade                  ni svarade&#xA;&#xA;3.  hen svarade                 de [dom] svarade&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Passive Form would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;svaras&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (it is answered = ´&lt;strong&gt;svara&lt;/strong&gt;+ &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; ') and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;svarades&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (it was answered/answering = '&lt;strong&gt;svara&lt;/strong&gt;+*&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;*+&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is more of agglunativity in Swedish nouns, though:-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider e.g. the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;eld&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (fire).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plural form is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;eld+ar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (yes, unlike &lt;em&gt;-or&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt; endings are applicable for nouns &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; verbs, although the adjectives have a different plural - or, actually, emphasised - form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The postpositional definite article is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; hence, 'the fires' will be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eld+ar+na =&gt; eldarna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD:&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here conveys the meaning of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; plurality and definitiveness, and can be divided into &lt;strong&gt;-n-&lt;/strong&gt; (postpositive plural definite marker) + &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; (emphasised form of a noun applicable in plural only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this form of word can be further structured as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;eld+ar+n+a =&gt; eldarna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morover, there is a common Germanic survival of the Genitive case, which is - suprisingly! - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, 'of [the] fires' (like in 'light of [the] fires') will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;[[eld+ar+n+a+s] ljus] =&gt; eldarnas ljus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-08-16T16:06:26.790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T16:06:26.790" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3794" CreationDate="2013-06-07T02:09:21.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered (via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=99&amp;amp;t=12405&amp;amp;start=0&amp;amp;st=0&amp;amp;sk=t&amp;amp;sd=a&amp;amp;sid=70b73e5a9e14acdc38299cfece9c0c61&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UniLang&lt;/a&gt;) a German language site on Avar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sprachen.sprachsignale.de/awarisch/awarisch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sprachen.sprachsignale.de/awarisch/awarisch.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's set out as lessons but includes (oddly) &lt;a href=&quot;http://sprachen.sprachsignale.de/awarisch/lexikonDA.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English-Avar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://sprachen.sprachsignale.de/awarisch/lexikonAD.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Avar-English&lt;/a&gt; dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has quite a bit of grammar info but seems only to cover pronounds, nouns, and adjectives. No information on the verbal system, which is usually where the meaty stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Looks like it hasn't been updated in seven years so I wouldn't expect a verb section soon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T02:09:21.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-07T03:12:59.783" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made a quick search on the internet about Developmental Orthography, but the papers and research projects I found are not very recent, some almost 20 years old. Apart from that almost all of them are about second language acquisition (English).&#xA;I am not quiet experience in the linguisic field really, so can you give a references of works about this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1935" LastActivityDate="2013-06-07T03:12:59.783" Title="Recent material (papers, books, etc) about Developmental Orthography" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-07T22:15:30.533" Score="3" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there are any verbs/phrases that qualify &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; as ditransitive, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; as atelic. The following shows the relevant tests. The satisfying verb/phrase should have the same * patterns as &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; w.r.t. ditransitivity, but * patterns with &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;watch&lt;/em&gt; in the telicity tests. A complete answer will provide the evidence that the proposed word passes the test in these ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*'s in the below indicate low acceptability. Note that the absence of a phrase must be interpreted as the absence of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; inferrable phrase--adding a phrase silently will increase acceptability, but this should be avoided in order to understand the judgments. It is also intended that a difference in transitivity not change the meaning of the verb, so sometimes a * might indicate that example is not interpretable in the same way as the corresponding non-*ed examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intransitive&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al slept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al watched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Transitive&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al slept a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al watched TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al gave a ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ditransitive&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al watched Mary TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al watched TV to Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al gave Mary a ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al gave a ring to Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Single-event compatibility with &quot;in&quot;-phrases&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al slept in an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al watched TV in an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al gave Mary a ring in a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Single event compatibility with &quot;for&quot;-adverbials&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al slept for an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al watched TV for an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al gave Mary a ring for a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Entailment from the progressive to the perfect&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al is sleeping. =&gt; Al has slept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al is watching TV. =&gt; Al has watched TV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al is giving Mary a ring. !=&gt; Al has given Mary a ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Single-event compatibility with &quot;a lot&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al slept a lot last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al watched TV a lot last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Al gave Mary a ring a lot last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="178" LastEditDate="2013-06-08T16:18:07.210" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T16:18:07.210" Title="Are there any atelic ditransitive verbs (or verb phrases)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3825" CreationDate="2013-06-08T00:46:53.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some possibilities, I guess it depends on your test of telicity. In English telicity depends to a large degree on the semantics of the arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rent; allow; cause; cost; guarantee; leave; owe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-06-08T00:54:36.903" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T00:54:36.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3819" CreationDate="2013-06-08T10:49:41.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hewitt, Aronson and Tschenkeli are in agreement that გადა- is simplex and that the only way that complex preverbs can be formed is by having მო as the second element. Therefore, anything that looks like a complex preverb with something other than მო as the second element, or anything that looks as if it might be a three-part complex preverb should be flagged as a false positive and reinterpreted as some combination potentially including the preverb, object pronouns, version vowels and even the first letters of the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms such as მომიტანე (&quot;bring me&quot; or &quot;you brought me X&quot;) are not parsed *მომი [preverb] + ტან [root] + ე [screeve ending], but should be parsed მო [preverb] + მი [1st p sg indirect object] + ტან [root] + ე [screeve ending]. Contrast with მოგიტანე (&quot;I brought you X&quot;), where there is no such ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example with ა looking like part of a preverb, but actually being a version vowel, we could take the example of გაინტერესებს &quot;it interests you&quot;, which is not parsed *გა [preverb] + ინტერეს [root] + ებ [P/F stem formant] + ს [screeve ending], but which should be parsed გ [2nd p sg indirect object, h-series] + ა [version vowel] + ინტერეს [root] + ებ [P/F stem formant] + ს [screeve ending]. Contrast with მაინტერესებს (&quot;it interests me&quot;), where there is no such ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T10:49:41.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3785" CreationDate="2013-06-08T14:42:35.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty good, concise summary of version vowels (referred to as &quot;preradical vowels&quot; in Aronson's terminology) in Lesson 13 of Aronson, &lt;em&gt;Georgian: A Reading Grammar&lt;/em&gt;.  I'm assuming you already have a copy (if you don't, it is available to download for free from the Duke University website), so I won't paraphrase what is mentioned there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for ეტარებინა, it is indeed the 3 p.s. pluperfect of ატარებს.  It is formed regularly.  So for the I and III conjugations, you basically use the aorist, with inversion.  The subject is marked with the OBJECT prefixes plus ე and the object is marked with the normal aorist screeve endings for the SUBJECT, with an intrusive ვ for third person subjects with first person objects.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, ვნახავ (fut) &gt; ვნახე (aor) &gt; მენახა (ppf - note the inversion: it looks like there should be a 3 p.s. subject, but the ე version vowel shows us that it's pluperfect, so the ending is reinterpreted as a 3 p.s. OBJECT); გნახავ (fut) &gt; გნახე (aor) &gt; მენახე (ppf - again, look at the screeve ending - this is what happens with non-3 p. OBJECTS); ნახავს (fut) &gt; ნახა (aor) &gt; ენახა (ppf); მნახავს (fut) &gt; მნახა (aor) &gt; ვენახე (ppf - here is an example of the &quot;intrusive ვ&quot; - it has to appear because otherwise ენახე would be ambiguous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only slight complication with ეტარებინა is the -ინ-, but this is infixed in the pluperfect of (all???) denominal verbs in ა-...-ებ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to be as brief as possible without sacrificing clarity.  I hope I have succeeded!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-06-08T14:42:35.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-08T23:59:49.293" Score="20" ViewCount="45712" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am strictly interested in the question of homophones and kanji.  Korean has homophones yet they removed the Chinese characters and are getting by just fine?  Or are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese kanji lovers say kanji is required in order to deal with homophones.  Unlike English, Japanese has many homophones and you can't know from context which is being used.  As such we need to use kanji in order to deal with homophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was korea able to remove it even though Korean has homophones but japan hasn't? I am strictly focusing on the question of is kanji necessitated by homophones and if yes how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;------------- EDIT ---------------------------&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently relying on context alone is not enough.  In Japanese tv the frequently use subtitles/kanji to remove ambiguity. Have a look at this text also: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cjk.org/cjk/reference/japhom.htm&quot;&gt;http://www.cjk.org/cjk/reference/japhom.htm&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;A single Japanese word homophone may have 20 meanings and for these kanji they argue for kanji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Given what I have mentioned do you think the kanji is still required or could it be removed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2139" LastEditorUserId="2139" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T12:37:12.257" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T07:46:19.897" Title="Why was korea able to remove kanji but japan wasn't when both languages use homophones?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2013-06-09T00:48:56.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably just a government policy thing - Japanese kids start learning kanji basically as soon as they're done with kana, while Korean kids don't start learning hanja until they're in middle school. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the homophony, Japanese likely could be written phonetically just fine. I've actually read a few texts written by nonconformists that use kana and spaces instead of kana and kanji. Meanings are contextually obvious frequently enough that it's not really a problem most of the time (and I can imagine that if the switch was made, those problem words would be replaced with more distinct ones fairly quickly).&#xA;It's also true that Korean has more potential readings for hanja than Japanese has for kanji (it allows syllable-final consonants, for one thing), but I'm not sure how much this affects anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T00:48:56.193" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3844" CreationDate="2013-06-09T03:28:59.530" Score="5" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last night I was thinking about the trill sounds and how most languages I know about have just one, though they vary in which one they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most common seems to be the alveolar trill &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, as in Italian, Spanish, and many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then German, depending on the variety, has the uvular trill &lt;code&gt;/ʀ/&lt;/code&gt; which I can seldom produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only language I am familiar with that has two contrasting trills is Czech, with an alveolar trill, and its famous/unique fricative trill, &lt;code&gt;ř&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveats: Yes there are languages such as German that have two non-contrasting trills, which those sounds being allophones distributed among the varieties, and languages which contrast a trilled &quot;r&quot; with one or more other types of &quot;r&quot; such as taps/flaps. I'm not concerned with those for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there some less well-known languages that have three or more &lt;strong&gt;contrasting&lt;/strong&gt; trills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-09T04:32:43.097" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T18:52:14.777" Title="Does any language contrast more than two trills?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T09:24:45.413" Score="2" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come to understand that language plays a central role in producing political identities such as &quot;black&quot;, &quot;white&quot;; &quot;man&quot;, &quot;woman&quot;, &quot;genderqueer&quot;; &quot;heterosexual&quot;, &quot;queer&quot;. How exactly does language affects the formation and variation of such categories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2141" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T07:16:45.613" Title="How does language produce identities?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2013-06-09T13:02:00.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Japanese kanji lovers say kanji is required in order to deal with homophones. Unlike English, Japanese has many homophones and you can't know from context which is being used. As such we need to use kanji in order to deal with homophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry but this can't be a good reason. Japanese can be spoken and understood, therefore it could be written phonetically without problems. It is mostly tradition that keeps them writing Kanji, also the fact that once you learn it, it is somewhat faster to write than any phonemic alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T13:02:00.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3834" CreationDate="2013-06-09T13:05:34.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't, not directly. Those categories are more political and cultural than any other thing. It's not because of language, but because of social factors that we say &quot;genderqueer&quot;. So, socio political and cultural factors affect the way we use language. Was that your question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T13:05:34.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3833" CreationDate="2013-06-09T13:34:22.403" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian contrasts soft [р'] with hard [р]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;дурь &quot;foolishness&quot; vs дур (genitive plural of дура &quot;silly&#xA;woman&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;пар &quot;vapor&quot; vs парь (imperative of &quot;to steam&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;жар &quot;hotness&quot; vs жарь (imperative of &quot;to roast&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;прачка &quot;loundress&quot; vs прячь-ка (imperarative of &quot;to hide&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;праха (genitive of &quot;ashes&quot;) vs. пряха &quot;female spinner&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;кор (genitive plural of кора &quot;bark, cortex&quot;) vs. корь &quot;measles&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;рад &quot;pleased&quot; vs. ряд &quot;row&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T13:16:42.550" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T13:16:42.550" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T13:40:32.193" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;For semantic role labeling process, is it enough to just using some corpora like FrameNet and PropBank, or we must have some syntactic annotated corpora using dependency grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T13:40:32.193" Title="What is the role of syntax in semantic role labling?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-09T15:33:30.890" Score="1" ViewCount="905" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian has diphthongs when you put together two vowels, like in the word &quot;uomo&quot;. As far as I understand a diphthong is not necessarily a glide, because a glide has to be less sonorous than a vowel. So I'm asking: are there real glides in Italian, and can you provide examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T18:07:59.667" Title="Are there glides in Italian?" Tags="&lt;italian&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3841" CreationDate="2013-06-09T15:42:17.127" Score="2" ViewCount="4181" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is not one of those, while German should be. Italian is one of those and French is not. So it seems that this feature does not depend on the linguistic similarity and historical relation among languages. Or am I wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T08:50:13.097" Title="What are those languages with no one-to-one correspondence between sound and written symbol?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2013-06-09T17:57:53.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your question to make sense, it would have to be a question about &lt;em&gt;particular language-orthography pairs&lt;/em&gt; (and if in talking about sound-symbol correspondences we interpret &quot;sound&quot; to mean &quot;phoneme&quot;, then the question is further restricted to &lt;em&gt;language-alphabet pairs&lt;/em&gt;, excluding syllabaries and logographic orthographies).  So for example, you could ask whether the Roman alphabet as used to write Parisian French shows a 1:1 phoneme:grapheme relationship.  If you're interested in syllabaries, you would ask whether a 1:1 mapping existed between graphemes and &lt;em&gt;phonotactically legal syllable shapes&lt;/em&gt; in that language (syllabaries are by definition not 1:1 with regard to phonemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a further complication is that spoken languages change over time, and orthographies do not necessarily change along with them.  As such, even if a particular language-alphabet pairing has a one-to-one correspondence of phonemes to graphemes at one point in time, there is no guarantee it will remain so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as global patterns go, there is no systematic relationship between the orthography used to write a language and the genealogical history of that language.  For example, &lt;strong&gt;lots&lt;/strong&gt; of languages all over the world from all different language families use the Roman alphabet, and in many of those cases they do so because: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they had no orthography prior to contact with European anthropologists, linguists, and missionaries, and the development of their orthographies were strongly influenced by those Europeans, and/or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;their orthographies are very recent and are designed to make easy use of language technology (like computers).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give another example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mongolian script&lt;/a&gt; is used to write Mongolian, Evenki, and Xibe, but in principle could be adapted to write many other languages too.  On the other hand, the Mongolian &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; is also commonly written using a slightly modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2013-06-10T21:14:09.590" LastActivityDate="2013-06-10T21:14:09.590" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3839" CreationDate="2013-06-09T18:07:59.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really depends on how the language treats those kinds of vowel-vowel pairs. If the 'uo' in 'uomo' is treated like a single vowel, then it's a diphthong; but if the 'u' is treated like a consonant, then it's a glide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, a diphthong is when a vowel-vowel sequence is treated like one vowel; and a glide is when one vowel in a vowel-vowel sequence is treated instead as a consonant. (Really, it's not that glides have lower sonority than vowels, it's that vowels have their relative sonority level reduced when they're used as glides.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-06-09T18:07:59.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3847" CreationDate="2013-06-11T20:50:21.380" Score="3" ViewCount="28210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always assumed that Latin and Greek were related due to English having so many roots from both-but they aren't, right? So why does English have so many Greek and Latin roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2146" LastEditorUserId="163" LastEditDate="2013-06-14T20:35:13.667" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T19:31:43.680" Title="Why does English have both Latin and Greek origins" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3833" CreationDate="2013-06-11T20:50:27.750" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Konstanz University site there is a project, &lt;em&gt;DAS GRAMMATISCHE RARITÄTENKABINETT&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;a leisurely collection to entertain and instruct&quot;. There we find &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/nav/browse.php?number=9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an entry on the Dravidian language &quot;Toda&quot;&lt;/a&gt; with these notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phenomenon&lt;/strong&gt; | apical trills at three places of articulation (fronted alveolar, alveolar, retroflex) (see Image), both without and with palatalization&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toda_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toda has a Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; with more information. These are the &lt;strong&gt;six&lt;/strong&gt; listed trills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/r̘/&lt;/code&gt; - plain apical alveolar trill&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/r̘ʲ/&lt;/code&gt; - palatized apical alveolar tril&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/r̠/&lt;/code&gt; - plain apical alveolar trill (concave, aka &quot;retroflex&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/r̠ʲ/&lt;/code&gt; - palatized apical alveolar trill (concave, aka &quot;retroflex&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɽ͡r/&lt;/code&gt; - plain subapical palatal trill (retroflex)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɽ͡rʲ/&lt;/code&gt; - palatized subapical palatal trill (retroflex)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-12T00:29:22.830" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T00:29:22.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3848" CreationDate="2013-06-11T20:56:41.127" Score="2" ViewCount="1058" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish and Italian both have &lt;em&gt;como&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt; if I'm not mistaken, however English has &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;. Where did we get &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere that it's Germanic, but I thought German developed from Latin roots as well? Why didn't we get a similar word to Italian and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2146" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-12T01:04:09.953" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T12:11:56.700" Title="Where does the word &quot;How&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2013-06-11T21:30:28.417" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;English (and most other Western-European languages) adopted many words from Latin and Greek throughout history, because especially Latin was the Lingua Franca all through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, English has many more words borrowed from Latin than have other Germanic languages, which it owes to the conquest of England by the Normans in the year 1066. The Normans spoke Norman French, which was still much closer to Latin than modern French, especially in spelling. From then on, French was used as the language of administration for a while, and much of this was incorporated into English even as the influence of Norman culture in England waned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, very, very long ago, in prehistoric times, the Germanic and Italic branches (the ancestor of Latin) diverged from the (supposed) proto-language called Proto-Indo-European. That's why e.g. English, Greek, Russian, Persian, Urdu, and Latin have certain things in common, although most similarities are now only apparent to the trained eye. The similarities you see between English and Latin are mostly caused by what happened after 1066.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T17:05:35.057" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T17:05:35.057" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3845" CreationDate="2013-06-11T21:47:09.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German branch (English, German, etc.) and the Italic branch (Latin, Spanish, Italian, etc.) of the Indo-European languages each split off from Proto-Indo-European, their common ancestor. This probably happened  There is no other relation between the two branches (except reciprocal borrowings and influence). Both &lt;em&gt;come/come&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; come from the same Proto-Indo-European root (probably something like **kʷo-*, ), but they went through different phonological changes in the mean time, so they look very different now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish and Italian split off from their common ancestor Latin a short time ago, no more than, say, 1500 years ago, so they still look very much alike. There was also much contact between them, and hence more borrowings and mutual influence. This does not apply to the Germanic and Italic branches of Proto-Indo-European, whose oldest common ancestor existed over 5000 years ago; and the two branches generally didn't undergo much reciprocal influence either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jD7ng.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A map of the spread of the different Indo-European branches, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Indo-European_branches_map.png/300px-Indo-European_branches_map.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. Blue is Italic, Red is Germanic. Grey areas are mostly non-Indo-European.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/acJkS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hartleyfamily.org.uk/IE_Language_Tree_by_Warnow.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chart&lt;/a&gt; of the history of the evolution of Proto-Indo-European, with approximate/hypothetical dates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FkgYl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Probably from a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, “The Early History of Indo-European Languages” in Scientific American of March 1990.&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Probably from a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, “The Early History of Indo-European Languages” in Scientific American of March 1990.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-06-11T22:37:53.577" LastActivityDate="2013-06-11T22:37:53.577" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2013-06-12T01:01:34.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin and Greek are related due to both being descended from the same prehistoric ancestor language. English also shares a common prehistoric ancestor with Latin and Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages have a single origin (though creoles and mixed languages have two).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the origins of a language need not be the origins of each and every word. English has borrowed words from very many languages but from French it has borrowed &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt; due to the Normans, who spoke an old variety of French, invading and ruling England almost a millenium ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar and core vocabulary of English have origins in Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many English words have origins outside English. Many of those had their origins in Norman French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norman French, of course has Latin as its origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not correct to say &quot;English has both Latin and Greek origins&quot;. Origin means starting point and the Norman borrowing happened much later than the starting point of English, though still in a remote time from our point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has Germanic origins. Individual English words have hundreds of exotic origins from languages all over the world. A large percentage of English words have Norman French origins. Norman French had Latin origins. The majority of Norman French words had Latin origins (though there are surely words Norman French borrowed from other languages it was in contact with and passed on to English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course even the Germanic and Latin languages didn't spring out of nowhere. They also had origins. They are both traced back to a common origin in Proto-Indo-European. Some linguists try to trace the origins even further back and have many hypotheses, but most linguists agree that such retracing is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-06-20T03:32:47.913" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T03:32:47.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3851" CreationDate="2013-06-12T01:54:14.573" Score="9" ViewCount="3634" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just answering a question about the origins of English and Latin and wanted to talk about their common ancestors but ran into a surprising problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we know the majority of languages in Europe and the Indian subcontinent are related under the name &quot;Indo European&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to look at the languages in the subcontinent there is the name &quot;Indic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you want to look at the other half, I can't seem to find a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is a member of the Germanic family. Latin is a member of the Italic family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are on close branches on the European side of the Indo European tree but &quot;European&quot; is not the name of a language family as far as I am aware. When we talk about European languages the terms covers an area including unrelated languages such as Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if &quot;European&quot; is not a name of a language family and Indo-European is far too vast, is there a term I'm overlooking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T05:41:17.530" Title="Is there a named common ancestor of Germanic and Latin besides &quot;Indo-European&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3850" CreationDate="2013-06-12T03:33:52.610" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never heard of such a term. And it may even be impossible, &lt;strong&gt;depending on which hypothesis you subscribe to&lt;/strong&gt;. According to the below reconstruction, the last common ancestor of the Italic and Germanic branches existed some 5200 years ago, when the Italo-Celtic super-branch split off. That was after the Anatolian and Tocharian branches had split off from the rest, but before the Germano-Albanian super-branch and the Indo-Iranian branch diverged. In other words, the Indo-European languages mainly located in Europe share no common ancestor that excludes the Indo-Iranian branch, and neither do the Germanic and Italic branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other reconstructions may have different ramifications. &lt;strong&gt;[Update: You can see what a mess Proto-Indo-European migration was: it all depends on dating the big yellow arrows in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://indo-european-migrations.scienceontheweb.net/map_of_indo_european_migrations.html&quot;&gt;map&lt;/a&gt; at the bottom.]&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps some reconstruction exists that groups the Italic and Germanic branches closer together than either branch to the Indo-Iranian (super-)branch. Note also that the Greek, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic (super-)branches are rarely grouped closer to &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Italic and Germanic than to Indo-Iranian. I therefore do not expect any reconstruction to have a &quot;European&quot; super-branch that excludes Indo-Iranian, even if a super-branch may be reconstructed including Italic and Germanic but excluding Indo-Iranian. To put this into perspective, there is no &quot;non-Germanic&quot; super-branch including all Indo-European branches except Germanic either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/acJkS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hartleyfamily.org.uk/IE_Language_Tree_by_Warnow.jpg&quot;&gt;chart&lt;/a&gt; of the history of the evolution of Proto-Indo-European, with approximate/hypothetical dates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QvQNx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;http://indo-european-migrations.scienceontheweb.net/map_of_indo_european_migrations.html&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://indo-european-migrations.scienceontheweb.net/map_of_indo_european_migrations.html&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-06-12T04:08:35.637" LastActivityDate="2013-06-12T04:08:35.637" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T00:15:12.543" Score="7" ViewCount="1167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Including different kinds of length distinctions, such as in stressed syllables only, or stressed and unstressed, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-13T03:17:24.503" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T13:23:32.083" Title="How common is phonemic vowel length across languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-13T21:09:37.493" Score="3" ViewCount="717" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been searching for quite a long time for a Hebrew-Arabic grammar book to study both languages in more depth at the same time while being able to compare similar roots and the root system for instance. I've only been able to find old books treating general Semitic languages or enormous volumes of comparative grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering if someone could recommend me some book. It doesn't matter if it's too informal grammatically speaking or too formal, but there doesn't seem to be anything out there anyways.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2155" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-15T05:53:16.643" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T14:19:19.490" Title="Hebrew - Arabic grammar book" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3859" CreationDate="2013-06-15T07:02:53.627" Score="3" ViewCount="1021" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are those terms totally interchangeable in all contexts (finite = conjugated) (non-finite = conjugated) or are there slight meaning differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2122" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-15T10:12:46.497" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T18:36:38.707" Title="finite/non-finite verb = conjugated/non-conjugated verb" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2013-06-15T08:24:40.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way you've described it so far sounds like the Turkish [r]. English speakers perceive it as a [ž] especially in __# positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2158" LastActivityDate="2013-06-15T08:24:40.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3857" CreationDate="2013-06-15T15:03:37.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As these terms originate in Indo-European grammar, I will focus on Indo-European languages; these names may not apply as well to non-Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;conjugation&lt;/strong&gt; of a verb can mean two things: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) All the finite forms of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) All the inflected forms of a verb, including non-finite forms, like the infinitive and participles. I believe this usage is more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;finite&lt;/strong&gt; form of a verb is one that has an ending; conventionally, the suffixes used to form infinitives (what's in a name?) and participles are not considered endings, although one might question the rationale behind this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A verb &lt;strong&gt;ending&lt;/strong&gt; is normally that part of a verb which expresses the features person and number (and usually mood). That is, a non-ending normally cannot express person or number or mood; but an ending &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; express more than person and number and mood (such as tense). You could say endings that express more than person, number, and mood are a contraction of some suffix with an ending, like the Latin imperfect (e.g. &lt;em&gt;stabam&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;I stood&quot;), which is either analysed as &lt;em&gt;present stem + imperfect suffix -ba- + ending&lt;/em&gt; (sta-ba-m), or as &lt;em&gt;present stem + imperfect ending&lt;/em&gt; (sta-bam). We &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; say the tense is included in the ending in such cases, of which there are many, but in other situations it is more practical to treat the suffix or contraction as a separate morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, an &lt;strong&gt;ending / finite form&lt;/strong&gt; is a kind of &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; (finite inflexion), and an &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; is a kind of &lt;strong&gt;suffixed form&lt;/strong&gt;. Often, but not always, we use &lt;em&gt;suffix&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;non-inflexional suffix&quot;, because we already call inflected forms &quot;inflected&quot;— although inflected forms are also said to have inflexional suffixes in some contexts. &quot;Inflected forms&quot; normally does include all finite forms / endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tense&lt;/strong&gt; is a difficult concept of which different people use different definitions. An ending can be said to express tense, although there are endings that do not express tense. The forms of the Greek optative, for example, are always finite, but they never express a tense, while the endings of the imperfect do express tense (even though they are always finite too). &lt;em&gt;Luoi&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;may he unbind&quot; (optative), which can be used in present, future, or past sentences alike, i.e. there is no real tense in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspect&lt;/strong&gt; can be expressed in suffixes, in (suppletive) stems, in additional words, but also in endings, if you consider something like &lt;em&gt;-bam&lt;/em&gt; above to be a single morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, most endings have contracted or disappeared in ways that make different persons, moods, and numbers invisible. There is still &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in the 3rd person present singular indicative for most verbs, and the most important and frequent verb of all, &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;, still has many distinctive endings; but most other Indo-European languages have many more visible endings. The &quot;invisible endings&quot; in English finite verbs are often called &lt;em&gt;zero endings&lt;/em&gt;, an kind of &lt;em&gt;zero inflexion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, many linguists have resorted to using the present tense v. the (synthetic) past tense as a more practical way of distinguishing between finite and non-finite forms. English doesn't really have endings that can be conveniently separated from tense, so a problem as with the Greek optative endings above (which have no tense) does not occur in English. So a way to test whether a verb form is a finite form or not is by testing whether it can be put in the (synthetic) past tense and present tense without changing the structure of the sentence. &lt;em&gt;He goes to school =&gt; he went to school&lt;/em&gt;: that is possible, so it must be a finite form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-06-17T18:25:06.840" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T18:25:06.840" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-15T23:51:45.023" Score="0" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I drew the syllable structure for steak, and I deduced that 'st' is one cluster and forms part of the onset instead of the rhyme. So that leaves the rhyme with eI and k which will give me two moras. Is this correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2152" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T17:16:25.657" Title="How many moras in [steak]? I produced two moras." Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1149" CreationDate="2013-06-16T01:02:32.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I used the last time I searched for the same thing before this website. Diphthongs are considered one phoneme with two targets, meaning the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2152" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T01:02:32.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3860" CreationDate="2013-06-16T01:04:19.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most text books focus on single consonant onsets (called simplex onsets) so dealing with a complex onset like /st/ can be confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a look at section 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~topintzi/papers/companion_onsets.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this overview of moraic theory&lt;/a&gt;, you can see that complex onsets do it in one of two ways: the either treat the complex onset as two separate consonants or they say that the features of the consonants linearize, for lack of a better word, and effectively turn into a single consonant. Either way the result seems to be that a complex onset does not take significantly more time than a simplex onset and thus does need any extra moras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, You should also be aware of &lt;em&gt;superheavy syllables&lt;/em&gt;, defined in the Wikipedia article for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_weight&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syllable weight&lt;/a&gt;. These are syllables with two V segments (a long vowel or a diphthong) plus a coda or a single V and two C segments in the coda for a total of three moras per syllable. Superheavy syllables don't appear in every language but I believe they do in English. So the question is whether the vowel in &quot;steak&quot; is a diphthong. For me it isn't but you seem to think it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-06-16T01:10:20.783" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T01:10:20.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-16T06:43:58.443" Score="3" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for putting up such a specific question here but any help will be really appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Akha is the language spoken by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akha_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Akha people&lt;/a&gt; of southern China (Yunnan Province), eastern Burma (Shan State), northern Laos, and northern Thailand. Linguists consider Akha to be a dialect of the Hani language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a Korean short story into English. The text contains a few Akha words or expressions. The problem is if I follow the Korean Romanization the result looks nothing close to what little I have seen of the original Akha language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following is the romanization of the original Korean transcription of the Akha phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My friend, hello. - Dosha, domialla. (Korean transcription 도샤, 도미알라.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My son, good bye. - Ari, domialla. (Korean transcription 아리, 도미알라.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm fine.    - Shyejei mangneu. (Korean transcription 셰제이 망느.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Akha words I could find on the internet were the ones for 'friend' (chawv) and son (ahv leeh), which as you can see look very different from the romanized versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any linguist here who can help me out with the original Akha wording? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2161" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T02:26:56.470" Title="How do I romanize words from the Akha Language?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3806" CreationDate="2013-06-16T07:10:04.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would really like to hear from more people who've tried this. A free concordance program would be great. I've used TextSTAT with some trainee teachers as an optional tool. Some really liked it, some just couldn't get their head around the whole corpus thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T07:10:04.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3834" CreationDate="2013-06-16T07:16:45.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to disagree with the other answers. I think the evidence supports a yes (with a caution on the interpretation of the word &quot;produce&quot;). The way we speak to children and ask them to speak back contributes strongly to their gender identity. Having an available label such as &quot;queer&quot; can contribute to a particular kind of sexual identity. A better book to look by Lakoff is Moral Politics which is much less partisan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a better starting point is identity in general, rather than political identity. And identities are complex creatures. A great source of evidence for the processes involved are studies of bilingualism. There you can see where and how people use which language. I usually point people to the phenomenon of 'code switching' which often hints at language-based identities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the objection of this being a &quot;linguistics question&quot;. It is unless you assume a very modular view of language and identity. They are both complex, unstable and not easily bounded concepts. So as long as we keep that in mind, we can make interesting observations  about their relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T07:16:45.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2100" CreationDate="2013-06-16T07:25:12.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand the question correctly, then I'd say all languages have some way of doing this. (Let's not forget intonation.) In English, you can say &quot;It's John, I'm talking about.&quot; Instead of &quot;Today I'm talking about John.&quot; In Czech, you simply change the SVO to OVS word order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the way you phrase the question has to do more with information structure (e.g. topic-focus) of discourse. Foregrounding/backgrounding also happens at phrasal/lecical level. E.g. I'm standing in front of a Church. vs. The church is behind me. vs. The're a bench in front of the church. vs. There's a Church behind this bench. You'll find this sort of analysis in cognitive/construction grammar approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be surprised if there were no languages that did some of this purely morphologically but I can't think of any examples, right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T07:25:12.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3860" CreationDate="2013-06-16T16:37:19.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A rather different perspective of the analysis of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;st-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; cluster in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(though it does not, alas, mention moras). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess from the evidence that &lt;em&gt;st-&lt;/em&gt; has been perceptually clustered for quite a while,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and isn't perceived as two units by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T16:37:19.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-16T22:52:50.523" Score="7" ViewCount="1460" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen nothing on a trilled &quot;L&quot; sound anywhere. I've tried producing the trilled &quot;L&quot; sound and I can get something that seems similar. Is it possible to trill an &quot;L&quot; and if so are there any languages that use this sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2163" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-06-17T13:51:14.263" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T23:20:29.310" Title="Is there use of a trilled &quot;L&quot; sound in any language? Is a trilled &quot;L&quot; even possible?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;trills&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2377" CreationDate="2013-06-16T23:40:18.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would need to be politically expedient to learn it. Like it is now with English and as it was for Greek. The process could be sped up by the simplicity of learning the language, yet people will learn any language that they NEED to learn. This is more a political issue than linguistic, at least in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2163" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T23:40:18.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2013-06-16T23:58:24.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that lateral and trill are mutually exclusive - trills require repeated opening and fully closing, while laterals require a state of half-closure. If you drop the sides of your tongue to make a lateral, you make trilling impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lateral flaps, though, which seem to be not uncommon - Japanese has one, /ɺ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-06-16T23:58:24.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3604" CreationDate="2013-06-17T00:10:48.217" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically most words were probably adopted from the community rather than a single person, but initially I think every word has to have a single originator, except if the word is adopted from another language. Faster communication in modern times allows us to see the correlation between the charismatic originator and his neologisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2163" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T00:10:48.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3604" CreationDate="2013-06-17T12:21:14.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both are true. Although most language evolution, even today, occurs through language use by the whole community, influential individuals can have some impact on their languages. Take Homer, his works (if it was only one man) had some effect on ancient Greek; Castillan Spanish was also influence by literary spoken poems, etc. However, these effects are tiny and usually restricted to lexical variation and constructions employed. The sounds and grammar of a language evolve through language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-06-17T12:21:14.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-18T05:28:43.770" Score="2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learnt that Edward Witten, the world's best string theorist &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt;, wrote a paper on generative grammar, called &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Pronominalization: a handbook for secret agents&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as you can see from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.jp/search?client=safari&amp;amp;rls=en&amp;amp;q=Pronominalization%3a%20a%20handbook%20for%20secret%20agents&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;amp;redir_esc=&amp;amp;ei=kO6_UfnoLMKWkwWBw4GADw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Search&lt;/a&gt;. Also see footnote 98 at &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=JNi58Gqm8qYC&amp;amp;lpg=PA69&amp;amp;ots=vZS3RvtBpz&amp;amp;dq=Pronominalization%3a%20a%20handbook%20for%20secret%20agents&amp;amp;pg=PA53#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently it's an unpublished thesis from Brandeis University. Is there a way to get a copy of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2166" LastActivityDate="2013-06-18T05:28:43.770" Title="Pronominalization: a handbook for secret agents" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-06-19T07:13:47.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3221" CreationDate="2013-06-19T12:28:28.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lson's response was not comprehensive. the wikitionary entry for שלם says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%9D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/שלם&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aramaic Etymology from above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Proto-Semitic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*šalām-.&#xA;  Verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שלם&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to be whole, to be complete&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to follow, to agree&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to obey&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew&#xA;Etymology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Semitic *šalām-.&#xA;  Pronunciation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שׁלם / shâlam / shaw-lam'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Verb&#xA;  שלם&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to be safe (in mind, body or estate); figuratively to be (causatively make) completed; by implication to be friendly; by&#xA;  extension to reciprocate (in various applications): - make amends,&#xA;  (make an) end, finish, full, give again, make good, (re-) pay (again),&#xA;  (make) (to) (be at) peace (-able), that is perfect, perform, (make)&#xA;  prosper (-ous), recompense, &lt;strong&gt;render&lt;/strong&gt;, requite, &lt;strong&gt;make restitution&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;  restore, reward, X surely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all the meaning between asterisks have a close meaning to submit and/or follow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the word kni'a exists in arabic too and it is khono'e (with the root khaf,nun and ayn just like in hebrew)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2174" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-09-14T11:29:02.600" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T11:29:02.600" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3856" CreationDate="2013-06-19T12:41:49.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course such books exist. I bought one when I was a kid. You would find them in print in Arabic countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;اسم الكتاب: اللغه العبريه:قواعد و نصوص &#xA;  اسم المؤلف: سيد فرج راشد &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2174" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-20T02:53:25.403" LastActivityDate="2013-06-20T02:53:25.403" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-08-19T10:56:50.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-06-19T13:20:18.780" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is you might be oversimplifying the facts. We have no data on Hawaiian or other ancient languages of Pacific phylum yet, but here are some points proving that at least Chinese and Japanese do not fall under the same category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Chinese is basically monosyllable, CV, V, Vc or CVc-structured language while Japanese is a polysyllabic, mora-structured language. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Japanese used to have vowel harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some languages of the area (Thai, Burmese and tribal languages of China) have different prosodic structures, including C2C1V- initial syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages like Finnish or ancient Kretian sharing the same predominant CV- structure for syllable like Hawaiian or Japanese (although Hawaiianan word may also have +VV+ syllable structure), but this does not mean these languages are related by their syllable-structuring principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-06-19T15:57:54.427" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T15:57:54.427" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3724" CreationDate="2013-06-19T14:02:25.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several facts speaking against this theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic corresponences between Tibetan and Chinese words &lt;em&gt;which are not borrowings&lt;/em&gt; from either of the related languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The way the Chinese loan words are pronounced in neighbouring languages of the area which are not related to Chinese (e.g. Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese). They demonstrate regular phonetic correspondences between lexical items of Chinese/accepting languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The correspondence between the ancient Japanese scripts (e.g. that of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Manyoushyuu&lt;/a&gt;) and the corresponding Chinese characters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chinese vocabulary items which are &lt;em&gt;spelled&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; differently yet cover close semantic fields. The difference implies, either simultaneously or per criterium: initial / tone / medial / final. Some regular corresponences between criteria can be observed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tonality of the language and &lt;em&gt;tone sandhi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics (that is, the items having phonetic meaning as well) in the Chinese writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-10T07:17:04.880" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T07:17:04.880" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3672" CreationDate="2013-06-19T22:35:44.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a difference in inflection between &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;device&quot; and &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;animal&quot;, the natural way to model this is with two different lexemes. Anything else seems like a poor model to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical categories don't remain the same. Just because the etymology of &quot;mouse&quot; is still transparent, it doesn't mean it's still both the same lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, concepts such as &quot;polysemy&quot; and &quot;homonymy&quot; are made up by linguists; I don't expect them to have psychological reality. But that doesn't mean we can't use them to model semantics, just as we use terms such as antonyms, meronyms, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be that as it may, there are certainly several competing defintions of homonymy and polysemy, so it's kind of wrong to argue which one is &quot;right&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2013-06-19T22:35:44.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-20T10:02:14.303" Score="7" ViewCount="2819" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm rephrasing my question after (very helpful) comments to my initial version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the differences between the [i] produced by French speakers (in French) and English speakers (in English)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the English [i] ever occur in a context such as C_C i.e: [ʃi:p] where minimal pairs are possible without the lengthening? Is this a redundancy built into the language so [i]~[ɪ] can be discriminated?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Previous title&lt;/strong&gt;: [ɪ]~[i] production by native French speakers of English - why is [ɪ] the 'default'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption is that the vowel [ɪ] does not exist in (standard) French even as an allophone. When (mis)pronouncing sheet/shit, beach/bitch, etc, anecdotal tellings of this particular error seems to favour the [ɪ] in terms of occurrence (if someone can point to an actual study that would be appreciated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the French [i] of 'livre' /livʁ/ known to be far shorter in duration than the English [i] in 'leave' /li:v/? When 'leave' is pronounced by a French speaker as /liv/ (note: correct vowel, but not lengthened) is this being perceived by native English speakers as an occurrence of 'live' /lɪv/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1486" LastEditorUserId="1486" LastEditDate="2013-06-21T07:22:03.533" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T17:31:43.923" Title="What are the differences between the French and English [i] and how does it affect the perception?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-20T11:51:08.777" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any regular phonetical correspondences between grammatical patterns of both dialects? Which one is thought to be the 'real' Armenian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and how did the dialects split? Is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Western Armenian&lt;/a&gt; an offspring of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Eastern dialect&lt;/a&gt;, or did the dialects appear during a synchronous process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-06-20T13:35:54.460" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T10:58:46.907" Title="What is the history of Eastern and Western Armenian dialects?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3884" CreationDate="2013-06-20T14:35:00.437" Score="15" ViewCount="1790" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin word &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; (which is the origin of the English word &lt;em&gt;ounce&lt;/em&gt;) denotes &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;/&lt;sub&gt;12&lt;/sub&gt; of a pound.  Does anybody know the etymology of this word? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn’t it be something more like *&lt;em&gt;docia&lt;/em&gt;, or anything starting with a &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;em&gt;Uncia&lt;/em&gt; sounds more like &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;/&lt;sub&gt;11&lt;/sub&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2177" LastEditorUserId="707" LastEditDate="2014-04-06T14:27:31.957" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T21:19:12.400" Title="Why is 1/12 called an &quot;uncia&quot; in Latin?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3883" CreationDate="2013-06-20T17:36:16.163" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;All etymological dictionaries (Walde, Meillet) say that &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; is derived from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*&lt;a href=&quot;http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN%20/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&amp;amp;wdb=EWN&amp;amp;id=ewn003733&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oi-nos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;one&quot;, the same stem as Latin &lt;em&gt;unus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;one&quot;, and English &lt;em&gt;one/an&lt;/em&gt;. (This stem at some point replaced in many languages the older stem used for &quot;one&quot;, &lt;em&gt;sem-&lt;/em&gt;, as reflected in English (through Latin) &lt;em&gt;simple, single, simultaneous&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) Walde on &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; suggests that its original meaning was &quot;unit&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...als &lt;em&gt;*oin(i)cia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Einheit&quot; zu &lt;em&gt;ūnus&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did a word related to &quot;one&quot; come to mean &quot;one twelfth&quot;? Meillet doesn't know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Le nom de l'unité fractionnelle est évidemment dérivé de &lt;em&gt;ūnus&lt;/em&gt; ; et tous les autres s'y rattachent. Il s'agit de termes techniques dont la formation est &lt;strong&gt;singulière&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was an idiomatic development in older Latin. Because &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was mainly the smallest unit of weight in early Republican currency, perhaps the smallest unit was simply called &quot;one-ness&quot; or &quot;unit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just so happened that an &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was taken as 1/12th of an &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;, which was the central coin of the new Roman system introduced ca. 280 BC and based on the older system of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aes_grave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aes grave&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;signed bronze&quot;), where one unit of &lt;em&gt;aes grave&lt;/em&gt; equalled twelve &lt;em&gt;unciae&lt;/em&gt;, small &quot;pellets&quot; of bronze. Note that the weight represented by the &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was also an important quantity that was often used, so &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; were the two main coins, and also the smallest and the largest, respectively. As a unit of weight, &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was also used outside coins. Coins like the &lt;em&gt;denarius&lt;/em&gt;, worth ten &lt;em&gt;asses&lt;/em&gt;, were only introduced later; the word &lt;em&gt;de-n-arius&lt;/em&gt; simply means something like &quot;tenner&quot; (cf. English &lt;em&gt;de-cimal&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was also one twelfth of a &lt;em&gt;pes&lt;/em&gt;, a foot, like the English word &lt;em&gt;inch&lt;/em&gt;, no doubt related. I don't know whether the unit of length or the unit of weight (from which English &lt;em&gt;ounce&lt;/em&gt;) was older, so I don't know which influenced which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were many &lt;strong&gt;duodecimal numeric systems&lt;/strong&gt; in use around the Mediterranean, so it seems likely that the &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; was at some point equalled to the smallest &quot;unit&quot; in any duodecimal system. I believe duodecimal systems are ultimately related to &lt;strong&gt;sexagesimal systems&lt;/strong&gt; (=5x12) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_measurement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as used in ancient Mesopotamia&lt;/a&gt;. There are more ways you can divide twelve into integers than, say, ten: you can divide twelve by 2, 3, 4, and 6, while ten can only be divided by 2 and 5, so twelve as a base was more useful in many simple physical transactions and quick calculations. Remnants of such a system in modern cultures are the way our hours and minutes are 60 times the smaller unit, and the way we use sexagesimal minutes and seconds in angles (360°=6x60). And of course the fact that we have twelve hours in a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only hypothesise about the origin of the root &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;one&quot; in counting, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia on &lt;em&gt;Sexagesimal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; offers this interesting bit of information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is possible for people to count on their fingers to 12 using one hand only, with the thumb pointing to each finger bone on the four fingers in turn. A traditional counting system still in use in many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20 and 5. In this system, &lt;strong&gt;the one (usually right) hand counts repeatedly to 12, displaying the number of iterations on the other (usually left), until five dozens, i. e. the 60, are full.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just so happens that a Latin word &lt;em&gt;*uncia&lt;/em&gt; (apparently unattested but noted by Meyer-Lübke) for &quot;finger joint&quot; is mentioned in Meillet and Walde. It is mentioned under and apparently derived from &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;curved&quot;. Perhaps the root &lt;em&gt;*un(i)(c)-&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;one&quot; originated in this practice of counting by finger joint, where you have twelve finger joints in the right hand for the thumb to touch? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; is apparently related to &lt;em&gt;unguis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;claw&quot; (v. Meillet) and to English &lt;em&gt;ungulate&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anchor&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;angle&lt;/em&gt; (all from Latin), and to English &quot;nail&quot; (from Proto-Germanic, v. Walde). The Proto-Indo-European root was apparently something like &lt;em&gt;*-nk-&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;bend&quot; (Oxford English Dictionary); in some languages, a &quot;vulgar&quot; vowel like &lt;em&gt;u-&lt;/em&gt; was prefixed (Meillet: &quot;populaire&quot;), resulting in &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; is related to &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt;, then the precursor of &lt;em&gt;unus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;one&quot; must be derived from &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt;; but then this must have happened before the Italic and Germanic branches of Proto-Indo-European diverged, since the Germanic languages also have words for &quot;one&quot; based on this Proto-Indo-European precursor of &lt;em&gt;unus&lt;/em&gt;. It seems unlikely that both &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; should have survived through the Proto-Gallo-Italic phase into Latin for so long and made it unscathed, especially considering that &lt;em&gt;unus&lt;/em&gt; would still have had to drop its &lt;em&gt;-k-&lt;/em&gt; sound! Therefore, if &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;1/12&quot; should be related to &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;curved&quot;, it would have to be unrelated to &lt;em&gt;unus/one&lt;/em&gt;; but the relation between &lt;em&gt;unus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; appears to be undisputed, so it seems that &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uncia&lt;/em&gt; are not related. Perhaps there was some sort of folk etymology at work in the archaic age, where speakers or writers mixed up some of those words and their etymologies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T21:19:12.400" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T21:19:12.400" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-21T12:31:13.047" Score="3" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;The  infinitive form of the verb in Eastern Armenian (provided there are infinitives) is a suppletive 'linEl'. I am surprised to notice its resemblance to most Finno-Ugric words of similar meaning, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Finnish     lienee    (Potentialis of olla = to be in 1st p.sg. affirmative)&#xA;   Hungarian   lenni     (to be)&#xA;   North Sami  leat      (to be)&#xA;   Komi        [lony]    (to become, to be, to turn into)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the oldest records of the Armenian verb? Are there any correlates in Iranian and/or Paleo-Balcanic languages? Or maybe there are some correlates with languages from Anatolian group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-06-21T14:23:57.093" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T16:28:01.923" Title="What is the most ancient form of Armenian verb 'to be'?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3885" CreationDate="2013-06-21T16:38:01.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE the verb was e̯esmi/e̯essi/e̯esti (I/you/he is). As such the Armenian word cannot be inherited from PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-06-21T16:38:01.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-21T16:44:55.197" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all books I have read so far (Beekes, for example), it is assumed that the word for hundred in PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cmtom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; came from the word for &quot;ten&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;decm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. They thus postulate that the oldest (non-attested) form was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dcmtom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether another explanation is also possible. For example why it could not origin from the root &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;together&quot; plus a common neuter adjectival suffix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-tom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cmtom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; thus would mean &quot;something put together&quot;. Is this explanation possible and if no, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T11:29:49.730" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T11:29:49.730" Title="Origin of PIE cmtom" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-06-22T14:28:14.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3890" CreationDate="2013-06-21T16:54:36.167" Score="3" ViewCount="2421" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the original intent of the letter 'X' was to pronounce the phoneme [k^h] in Classical Greek but evolved over time to be [ks]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;How come there are so many European languages that use the sounds [k] and [s] together, when there are so few non-European languages that use the sounds together so frequently?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't appear to be any innate affricate connection between the two sounds, unlike the way [t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ] appear independently in many world languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T16:02:20.927" Title="Why do the sounds [ks] have their own single letter 'X' in European languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-21T19:08:13.553" Score="7" ViewCount="17612" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The former&lt;/a&gt; seems to have more speakers, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the latter&lt;/a&gt; seems to possess the elder history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slovak said to be a West Slavic language, while Slovene seems to belong to the South Slavic group (reputedly having some traits shared with the West Slavic languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two languages mutually intelligible? To which degree? Which dialects of Slovene resemble Slovak language the most?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2019-10-20T17:04:34.007" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T17:04:34.007" Title="What are the exact relations between Slovak and Slovene?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;&lt;slovenian&gt;" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3888" CreationDate="2013-06-21T20:18:48.727" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It came about like this.  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/howtoreadgreek.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Details about Greek here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Greeks adopted the Punic abjad into an alphabet, they changed a lot of the letters, and added some new ones. The Punes hadn't needed vowel letters, for instance, due to the nature of the language, but the Greeks did. On the other hand, the Greeks didn't need the post-velar and emphatic consonants of Semitic, so they used those letters for vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alpha&lt;/strong&gt;, for instance, represented a post-velar consonant -- glottal stop [ʔalif] -- in Punic (and still does in Hebrew and Arabic), but it represents the vowel /a/ in the Greek alphabet, and has since then in the Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the clever things the Greeks did was invent special letters for combinations of stops and the sibilant /s/. There were three of them, one in each of the three Greek places of articulation -- labial, dental, and velar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Labial + S letter is &lt;em&gt;Psi&lt;/em&gt; (Ψ ψ /ps/), which was the letter you used when &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; of the three labial stops -- voiceless &lt;em&gt;Pi&lt;/em&gt; (Π π /p/), aspirated &lt;em&gt;Phi&lt;/em&gt; (Φ φ /pʰ/), or voiced &lt;em&gt;Beta&lt;/em&gt; (Β β /b/) -- occurred before &lt;em&gt;Sigma&lt;/em&gt; (Σ σ ς /s/).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Dental + S letter is &lt;em&gt;Zeta&lt;/em&gt; (Ζ ζ /ts/), which got voiced to /dz/, metathesized to /zd/ and thence to /z/ in historic times. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Velar + S letter is &lt;em&gt;Xi&lt;/em&gt; (Ξ ξ /ks/), which was the letter you used when velar stops occurred before Sigma. (Note, by the way, that this letter is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;X&quot; but &quot;Ξ&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did they need special letters for sounds before /s/? Because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek was heavily inflected, and many of the suffixes began with /s/.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many of the roots ended in stop consonants, right before adding suffixes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before /s/, the three-way voiced/voiceless/aspirated stop distinction neutralized;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;i.e, there was no difference and they all came out the same.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was sensible to use a special stop for that common combination. When the Greek alphabet was later adapted for Latin, &lt;em&gt;Ψ&lt;/em&gt; (psi) didn't make it into Latin at all, but &lt;em&gt;Ξ&lt;/em&gt; (ks) did, and was used for the /ks/ cluster. However, they changed the shape of the letter. Having no need for a letter for aspirated /kʰ/ in Latin, they used &lt;em&gt;Χ&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Ξ&lt;/em&gt;, possibly because it was easier to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's an accident. You can find out all about the history of each letter in any good encyclopedia, btw. Especially David Crystal's &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Encyclopedias&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;of Language&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-03-07T16:02:20.927" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T16:02:20.927" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3894" CreationDate="2013-06-22T00:34:36.390" Score="0" ViewCount="1051" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at teaching a computer about grammar which could turn into teaching it sentence analysis and eventually how to formulate a response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the baby steps. I am defining a noun. So far I define a noun as a word that can be in singular or plural. But a noun also have a gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am teaching it English, neuter probably won't matter much. But I was just thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How big of an impact does gender really have on how you construct a sentence? Not being a native speaker (It's my 2nd language but I am very fluent in it) I actually don't know if my program needs to know about genders to know Nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some clearance would be nice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2056" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-22T00:46:53.360" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T01:05:55.323" Title="Importance of Genders in English Nouns" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3892" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-06-22T00:48:39.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Latin language, trees are feminine by natural gender, even when their names are formally belonging to a declension class of masculine words. Examples are &lt;em&gt;quercus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;oak tree&quot;, fraxinus &quot;ash tree&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;ulmus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;elm tree&quot;—they all take feminine adjectives, participles, and pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, in the German language all diminutives are grammatically neuter, it is &lt;em&gt;das Mädchen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the girl&quot; despite the fact that all girls are feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T13:46:09.120" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T13:46:09.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3893" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-06-22T00:48:39.897" Score="0" Body="For question about natural gender in language. Natural gender (contrasted with grammatical gender) is assigned to words according to the gender of the meant object (often a person or an animal, but there are also examples of other kind of objects requiring natural gender in some languages.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;This tag is not about the roles of female and male speakers, and their linguistic behaviour—the tag sociolinguistics is applicable here." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T13:46:09.120" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T13:46:09.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3891" CreationDate="2013-06-22T01:05:55.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; does not have &lt;em&gt;grammatical gender&lt;/em&gt;, but only &lt;em&gt;natural gender&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural gender may apply in different languages to humans only, humans and &quot;higher&quot; animals etc, it may or may not include pronouns. English has all those kinds of natural gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(English also has a quirk where some things such as ships may be referred to with female pronouns but this is not grammatical gender).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &lt;em&gt;neuter&lt;/em&gt; doesn't have much meaning in English other than contrasting the pronoun &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you will find when implementing a human language on a computer is that you will have to deal with semantics and context as well as just syntax. Treating gender as part of syntax will lead you to problems but if you want to match pronouns in English then you will need to have some kind of semantic or contextual awareness too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find is that when adding such semantics is that other factors then spring up, some of which are more important than gender, and usually they have semantic counterparts in some languages. Chief amongst these is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;animacy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs have different meanings if the subject is animate. Sometimes just figuring which noun phrases are subject, direct object, and indirect object requires you to know which are animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you may even want to distinguish between human and animal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my answer is, for English, either leave out gender if you want something simple, or if you want something complex, then don't just implement gender but also either animacy or some kind of semantics, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ontology&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;real-world&quot; knowledge, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T01:05:55.323" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3885" CreationDate="2013-06-22T01:46:16.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AC%D5%AB%D5%B6%D5%AB%D5%B4#Old_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; the ultimate origin of the Armenian word for &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; &quot;լինել&quot; (linel) is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Armenian had such forms as լինիմ, լինենամ, and back to the earliest known *լէնիմ (lēnim) - which looks to be a hypothetical form from its asterisk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow links around the Armenian and Old Armenian entries you will find some other words. &quot;To be&quot; is a pretty fuzzy word over time in most languages and can float around concepts such as existence on one hand, a mere syntactic copula on another hand, and then there can be senses like &quot;there is&quot; which can blur into words that also mean &quot;stand&quot;, &quot;lie&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T16:28:01.923" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T16:28:01.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3885" CreationDate="2013-06-22T10:49:40.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest attested form is Old Armenian լինիմ (linim), whose origin in uncertain. Possibly derived from PIE *&lt;em&gt;ḱley-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to lean&quot;, whence Ancient Greek κλίνω, Latin &lt;em&gt;clino&lt;/em&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%AC%D5%AB%D5%B6%D5%AB%D5%B4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; for more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descendant of PIE *&lt;em&gt;h₁ésmi&lt;/em&gt; is եմ (em).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2180" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T10:49:40.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3882" CreationDate="2013-06-22T10:58:46.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eastern and  Western Armenian developed from Old Armenian, not from each other. Both are equally Armenian. I don't know the answers to the rest of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2180" LastActivityDate="2013-06-22T10:58:46.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4005" CreationDate="2013-06-23T19:56:06.340" Score="7" ViewCount="1758" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do linguists and scientist have some international coordinated program/authority where the goal is to create the artificial language for all peoples on this planet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, this was always done by individuals instead of organisations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Esperanto - L. L. Zamenhof (1887)&#xA;Loglan - James Cooke Brown (1955)&#xA;Slovio - Mark Hučko (1999)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and even Lojban and others were created by small groups of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why big organisations such as UN or I don't know European Parliament or big linguistic institutions and schools are not involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is creating a common language such a big problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are so many linguists and if they work together in teams across the whole planet, I think that in 10 years or less we have the best auxiliary language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I wrong and are there such international collaborations in progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-06-23T20:07:53.857" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T10:35:53.230" Title="Why are artificial languages created always by individuals and not by international institutions?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;&lt;lojban&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-06-23T20:40:25.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would an organization &lt;strong&gt;want&lt;/strong&gt; to create a language? For what purpose would it be used? Who would pay for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're thinking of a language that would suit as a lingua franca, we already have one, it's called English. &lt;strong&gt;Best&lt;/strong&gt; is not the issue here, a language needn't be &quot;good&quot; in order to be popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just making a language, by committee or not, won't make it be used as a means of communication. It must have something extra, like a community of some sorts, which for instance Esperanto has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having some organization decree that some specific language is to be used instead of some other language rarely ends well. It has been used as an important and integral part of indoctrination and wholesale destruction of local and indigenous culture for centuries. Did you know there once were &quot;schools for the primitives&quot;, in at least the US (american indians), Australia (aborigines) and even my own country Norway (sami). Kids were taken from their parents and punished harshly for using their mother tongues and/or keeping to their parents beliefs and customs. Another tried and tested technique is a little more direct: genocide. Both methods have proven to work splendidly when the goal is to replace one language with another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What organization in its right mind would risk that blemish on its reputation today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the purpose of linguistics is not to create language but to study it. While there are linguist that dabble in language construction, it is generally not to create the final and best language to replace all other languages, just as botanist aren't in the business of making the one, true plant to supercede all other plants. Linguists do not weight features up against each other and attempt to prove that, say, three tenses is better than five. Linguists describe, they do not prescribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-06-23T20:40:25.487" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-06-23T20:42:44.710" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, this goal is seen as somewhat utopic today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was ok about 100-130 years ago for Johann Martin Schleyer (the inventor of Volapük, the first constructed language that become relatively widespread), and possibly for Zamenhof (inventor of Esperanto) too*  nowadays the goal of introduction a neutral, constructed language for international communication seems to be absolutely unrealistic. Every language is backed by the economy of the state it comes from and there is no any neutral organisation (like UNO, for example) which would have a distantly similar influence to economy of English, Chinese or Spanish speaking countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;em&gt;- even though there are some allegations that Esperanto was just a part of his philosophy, hillelism (later changed to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homaranismo&quot;&gt;homaranism&lt;/a&gt;), and potentially aimed only at Jews.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the original goal &quot;to become a second language for all people in the world&quot;, that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_movement&quot;&gt;Esperanto movement&lt;/a&gt; (not the language!) claimed during its early development (so-called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finvenkismo&quot;&gt;Fina venko&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, the &lt;em&gt;final victory&lt;/em&gt;) has been superseded by another concept, described in the &quot;Manifest of Raumo&quot; and therefore called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism&quot;&gt;raumism&lt;/a&gt;. It &quot;emphasizes instead the fact that the Esperanto-speaking community has itself become a culture, worthy of preservation and promotion for its own sake.&quot; (Wikipedia). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the language were not &quot;created&quot; by individuals, in Esperanto they prefer to use the word &quot;proposed&quot;, or &quot;initially proposed&quot;. The original project of Esperanto language, as proposed by Zamenhof, was (slightly) reformed during the first years to adapt it to real usage (most dramatic change was the changes to correlatives). This is true for other language projects as well, they often evolved dramatically over time and the language was re-tailored once some practical gaps became evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, thirdly, there are also languages which were from the very beginning created by many (at least &gt;2) people, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua&quot;&gt;Interlingua&lt;/a&gt; -- created by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Auxiliary_Language_Association&quot;&gt;International Auxiliary Language&#xA;Association&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_%28language%29&quot;&gt;Ido&lt;/a&gt; -- was developed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation_for_the_Adoption_of_an_International_Auxiliary_Language&quot;&gt;Delegation for the&#xA;Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both languages were created not only by group of people, they were created by professional linguists (in contrast to oculist Zamenhof, pastor Schleyer, naval officier de Wahl (occidental/interlingue) etc.). But this didn't help much for them to become popular and widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="538" LastEditDate="2013-06-23T21:21:31.997" LastActivityDate="2013-06-23T21:21:31.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3951" CreationDate="2013-06-24T00:44:02.257" Score="1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the kinds of ambiguities which can be encountered when attempting to analyse the agglutinative verbs of Georgian into their component &quot;slots&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian verbs may have an optional &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2011/do-languages-besides-the-kartvelian-family-have-a-property-of-verbs-called-vers&quot;&gt;&quot;version vowel&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &quot;pre-radical vowel&quot; in the position immediately preceding the verb stem. Of Georgian's five vowels only &quot;ა&quot; (a), &quot;ე&quot; (e), &quot;ი&quot; (i), and &quot;უ&quot; (u) are possible in this position. The vowel &quot;ო&quot; is never used in this function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling with learning Georgian verbs. Different dictionaries use different forms as the citation form. The version vowel is sometimes used for things such as polypersonal agreement but textbooks tell you that you must learn each verb's version vowel when you learn a verb and they seem to be usually included in the citation forms used as dictionary headwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm wondering is if there are also Georgian verbs whose stem begins with one of these same letters, which would necessitate extra care when reading new verb forms to allow for a vowel to be either a version marker or just part of the stem. Conversely you need to know these parts of a verb just to decide where in a dictionary to look them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there Georgian verb stems starting with ა- / ე- / ი- / უ- ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T14:03:05.117" Title="Can Georgian verb stems start with a vowel?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3881" CreationDate="2013-06-24T06:28:48.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a bit of confusion about the translatability of the IPA. The [i] in English is lengthened or not lengthened based on convention of transcription rather than because of a belief in some underlying difference in pronunciation. [i:] is the typical modern transcription and [i] is used as a compromise in some contexts (like -ity) where different speakers pronounce different vowels. As such I think the comparison between French and English should happen outside the traditional transcription and on particular uses. I don't know enough about French to offer an opinion but thought I'd caution against oversimplifying the English situation. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english-uni.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english-uni.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-06-24T06:28:48.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-24T06:57:15.597" Score="3" ViewCount="2387" Body="&lt;p&gt;And is Tuscan regarded as a dialect or as a language by modern Italian linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested mostly in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;its&lt;/a&gt; lexical peculiarities, but some interesting features of syntax would be of a great value, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing is that the features should make this dialect different from other varieties of Italian and/or other Romance dialects/languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please notice that the phenomenon of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_gorgia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tuscan gorgia&lt;/a&gt; is already known to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there ever been literature written in this dialect (and not in the Italian &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, which, to the best of my knowledge, is also based on Tuscan)? Are there any documents to attest its development on time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T04:40:22.173" Title="What are the most specific features of Tuscan dialect of Italian?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2013-06-24T07:12:35.600" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bluntly, Slovak and Slovenian have nothing in common other than being both Slavic languages. No more than Slovak or Serbian or Slovak and Ukrainian. This is a question driven by superficial similarity in their names which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slovak-republic.org/slovenia&quot;&gt;I'm sure members of both nations are thoroughly sick of&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it is true that Czechs and Slovaks will perceive Slovenian as less alien than Serbian from which we could possibly make some tentative conclusions. But that still doesn't make them mutually intelligible nor is there any meaningful basis for comparison other than the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="1079" LastEditDate="2013-06-25T10:50:42.897" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T10:50:42.897" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3863" CreationDate="2013-06-25T02:26:56.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I worked many years to make a romanized script for Akha that solved several problems with existing scripts. The script could be considered a bit longer but is very exacting. It is also congruent with most sounds in UK English - spellings etc. So it makes Akha easier for a non Akha to learn, and if an Akha learns it they will not get real frustrated if they want to learn english later and find it all in conflict, spellings, sounds etc.  There are a number of books in this script on our site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.akha.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.akha.org&lt;/a&gt; and a whole lot more that I should be transcribing but haven't due to shortage of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2189" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T02:26:56.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-25T04:29:51.287" Score="5" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greek work &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; meant &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; in Homer. By the time of Philostratus (3rd c. A.D.) it sometimes had the meaning of &lt;em&gt;too late&lt;/em&gt;.  Of course, if someone arrives too late for an event, they arrive &quot;after&quot; it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Greek doesn't have the word &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt;. My theory is that the adverb &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt;) morphed into a preposition (&lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;).  But, Greek already has &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;. So, &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; faded out of existence.  Does my theory seem correct? Is it way off base? Your critique will be most valuable for my research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="John Lemley" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-06T13:42:32.307" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T08:41:53.317" Title="Did the Greek adverb for &quot;late&quot; evolve into a preposition meaning &quot;after&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2013-06-25T12:29:43.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; was used as a preposition meaning &amp;quot;after&amp;quot;, even in Antiquity, if we are to believe &lt;a href=&quot;http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/dict?name=lsj&amp;amp;lang=el&amp;amp;word=o%29ye/&amp;amp;filter=CUTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liddell-Scott-Jones&lt;/a&gt;, which is a highly reputable source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.) &lt;strong&gt;as Prep. c. gen.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ὀ. τούτων &amp;quot;after these things&amp;quot;, Philostr.VA6.10, cf. 4.18;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so perh. ὀ. σαββάτων &amp;quot;after the sabbath day&amp;quot;, Ev.Matt.28.1.—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what happened to &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; as a preposition in later Greek, but I'll take your word for it that it disappeared. It is certainly possible that one factor working against it was the existence of &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; + acc. &amp;quot;after&amp;quot;; however, the latter is both older and far more frequent than &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;after&amp;quot;, so then how do you explain the fact that &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; allowed such a competitor to rise at all, and why did it decide to oust &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; later rather than sooner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, &lt;em&gt;meta&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;after&amp;quot; may have been a factor, but this is likely to be a very complex matter. For starters, perhaps &lt;em&gt;opse&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;after&amp;quot; was used in a different register? It was never very common anyway, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T12:43:45.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3192" CreationDate="2013-06-25T14:11:52.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The picture of the synthesis degree is not very clear in many languages. German and the scandinavian languages are quite synthetic if you count in the frequency of composition, and in Scandinavian and somewhat also in English even compound noun-verb complexes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek and Italian can be said to approach polysynthesis if you regard the rigid templatic verbal phrases of these languages as one-word-structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T14:11:52.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-25T15:11:41.590" Score="5" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that there are some languages that treat /r/ and /l/ as a vowel, such as Czech and Hindi, I am wondering how come the same isn't true in some varieties of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native English speaker of the American West, I have noticed that we pronounce many of our /ə/ +  /ɹ/ and/or /ɫ/ using just those liquid sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best example is how every Arabic speaker I have met has trouble with the pronunciation of the word &quot;world&quot;, and usually realizes it as something like &lt;strong&gt;[ˈwɔr-lɛd]&lt;/strong&gt;. I only noticed that when I try to explain to them how &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; pronounce it, I have to omit all 'vowels'; &lt;strong&gt;[ˈwɹ-ɫd]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the pronunciation around Los Angeles, it seems many of us follow this pattern with a whole category of words including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pattern - &lt;strong&gt;[ˈpʰæ-ɾɹn]&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;[ˈpʰæɾ-ɹn]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;stirred - &lt;strong&gt;[stɹd]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;measure - &lt;strong&gt;[ˈmɛ-ʒɹ]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to be accepted practice to consider these liquids as vowels at least by dictionaries or Wikipedia, but when I try to pronounce these words the way the authorities presume, it sounds like I am speaking with a different accent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a caveat&lt;/strong&gt;, I will state that I've heard virtually only exceptions to this from speakers anywhere east of Denver, Cheyenne or El Paso.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T22:25:07.670" Title="Do some dialects of English have a liquid vowels, such as /ɹ/ and /ɫ/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2013-06-25T17:41:19.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;These syllabic consonants (that's what the technical term is) are totally present in English.  There is no true vowel in 'world' for me either, the [ɹ] is the syllable nucleus. It doesn't honestly make much sense to me either why Wikipedia and others don't seem willing to transcribe them as such - my guess would be that they haven't yet fully dropped a traditional 'English syllables must have at least one vowel in them' mindset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not these syllabic consonants are phonemic is a bit of a hairier question. I would venture to guess that they're not - I would say 'fur' is still phonemically /fəɹ/ (or whatever that vowel is), but that /ə/ is one of the vowels that's deleted before /ɹ/, so the word comes out as [fɹ̩ː]. English vowels and their allophony can be pretty screwy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-06-25T17:41:19.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2013-06-25T17:49:59.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you have to take transcriptions in dictionaries with a grain of salt. When an American English dictionary gives /ɜr/ for &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;, I think you can safely take that as equivalent to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;/ɝ/&lt;/a&gt; (although see @jlawler's comment under @sjiveru's answer regarding phonemic specifications in broader, cross-dialectal arenas). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The job of a dictionary transcription is to serve as a guide to the pronunciation of the word, not to provide a phonological analysis, although in giving a phoneme-level transcription it is implicitly assuming one. Since different dictionaries use different phonemic schemes, the user has to be wary when interpreting a given dictionary's choice of symbols. If a dictionary gives /shərt/ for &lt;em&gt;shirt&lt;/em&gt;, for example, the /ər/ sequence should not be interpreted as a sequence of /ə/ plus /r/ any more than /sh/ should be interpreted as /s/ plus /h/. More than likely the two-symbol string is being used to represent a single sound. Sometimes this can be confirmed by listening to the recorded pronunciation that often accompanies transcriptions in online dictionary entries. Indeed, if you downloaded one of these sound files and examined a spectrogram of it, you'd be hard-pressed to segment the vocalic portion of the word into two separate vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as for the distinction between [ɹ] and [ɝ]: From a phonologist's perspective, the distinction is not really one of pronunciation, but one of syllable structure. When this sound is used as an onset of a syllable, for example, it is treated as a consonant, and when it is used as a nucleus it is treated as a vowel. Conventionally the former is transcribed as [ɹ] and the latter as [ɝ] (or [ɚ] if it's unstressed). This can be viewed as parallel to the distinction between [j] and [i]. For some speakers there may be slight articulatory differences between the two, such as duration or degree of retroflection, but that is not the primary consideration in assigning them two different symbols. To make the relationship between the two more transparent, some use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syllabic&lt;/a&gt; diacritic under the [ɹ] when it functions as a nucleus: [ɹ̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-06-27T17:45:34.683" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T17:45:34.683" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-25T21:19:13.427" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt; could I find/read about &lt;strong&gt;studies&lt;/strong&gt; about the influence &lt;strong&gt;in English&lt;/strong&gt; of the lack of regulatory  bodies of its use and lexicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to google and find long arguments on the topic. I am interested in studies that at least attempt to be systematic or rather scientific (to the extent this is possible in this case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.1. &lt;em&gt;Your personal opinion is not what is being asked unless it comes from an study. In that case it is prefered that you point to where can I find such study.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I expect to find in them comparison with languages like Spanish and French that have their language academies. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I honestly expect to find in them conclusions pointing to benefits, as that is my personal opinion, but I am open to what the studies could say. As pointed out in the comments it is to be expected a serious study may not be able to label as benefit any such influence. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I expect the studies to particularly look at the influence in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-) the speed of evolution of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-) the breadth of the English lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T05:00:55.883" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T16:30:50.657" Title="Influence of the regulatory bodies in the English language" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-26T02:59:32.170" Score="3" ViewCount="8098" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the origins of the word &quot;addict&quot; are referred to Latin. Once I read somewhere that such word could have greek roots, from &quot;diké&quot;, justice, rights. Something like &quot;adiktoi&quot; could mean &quot;those not entitled to rights&quot;, therefore slaves. It makes some sense, at least.&#xA;Where could we find support to trust or to distrust such claims?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2192" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T11:19:08.943" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T12:31:58.060" Title="What is the history of the word &quot;addict&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-11-20T07:40:19.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3917" CreationDate="2013-06-26T03:31:31.353" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;addico&lt;/em&gt;, which means, amongst other things, &quot;to devote&quot;, so an addict is someone who is (excessively) devoted to something, from the past participle &lt;em&gt;addictus&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;devoted&quot;. You can look up the etymology of English words on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=addict&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot;&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/a&gt;. Note that the double &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; could never have come from Greek &lt;em&gt;adikê&lt;/em&gt;, nor could the combination &lt;em&gt;-ct&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T03:31:31.353" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-26T04:07:05.053" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there are a number of English verbs that can stand for acts that can be done voluntarily or involuntarily.   Sometimes we can't help but laugh, but anyone with even mild acting talent can laugh deliberately.   Sometimes our coughs are involuntary, but anyone can cough deliberately.  The arrival of a meteorite isn't controlled by an agent, but in what sense do workers arrive on time to their jobs without arriving deliberately?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings us to the question:  Can some verbs be unergative in some contexts and unaccusative in others?    Or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T06:22:17.927" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T06:22:17.927" Title="Can some verbs be unergative in some contexts and unaccusative in others?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-26T04:20:59.087" Score="11" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the area that includes Western Washington and Western Oregon.  As many of us know, most English-speakers who were raised in this area speak more or less the same variety of English.   Contrast this with English speakers who were raised in the area that includes New York and Boston.   This area was settled for longer than the Pacific Northwest, so we have more dialect differentiation.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking whether modern telecommunications and travel would tend to homogenize the various varieties of English that are already well-differentiated.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking whether there's any evidence that modern telecommunications would slow down dialect differentiation in areas like the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades where the varieties of English that people raised in this area speak don't yet differ significantly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T12:48:44.097" Title="Is there any evidence that modern telecommunication slows dialect differentiation?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3971" CreationDate="2013-06-26T05:34:59.913" Score="9" ViewCount="1591" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that despite the fact that Middle English long vowels have long since shifted dramatically, their descendants still pattern like long vowels in modern English. Since there's really very few cases where some kind of diagnostic alternation might be triggered, I only have two points of potentially helpful data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Former long vowels can never be unstressed, even in loanwords - they always have to take at least secondary stress (eg. [ˌbɛj.ˈʤiŋ], rather than *[bɛj.ˈʤiŋ]). It also seems like you could pronounce Liberia either as [lɪ.ˈbi.ɹi.ə], with no stress on the first syllable, or as [ˌlaj.ˈbi.ɹi.ə] with secondary stress on the first syllable, but never *[ˌlɪ.ˈbi.ɹi.ə] (wrong because that's supposed to be a long vowel) or *[laj.ˈbi.ɹi.ə] (wrong because long vowels have to be stressed).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Long vowels occasionally appear in somewhat archaic playful renderings of words where they normally appear as short (eg. California as [ˌkæ.lɪ.ˈfoɹ.ˈnaj.ˈɛj], though maybe that's an isolated example).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to rationalise (General American) English vowel pronunciations as a system with seven-or-so underlying vowels, varying in realisation due to length/stress (unstressed, short stressed or long stressed) and environment (e.g. being deleted before /ɹ/, and so on). I haven't come up against any counterexamples yet, but they may well be out there; and I'm not wholly sure that my methodology makes sense (where the underlying phonemes are so very far removed from any of their realisations - e.g. /aː/ typically realised as [ɛj]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose my question is this - is the fact that you can fairly well analyse Modern English vowels as having length just an artifact of history, or are length distinctions still part of Modern English's active phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-26T06:24:54.890" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T06:19:13.437" Title="Is the concept of 'long vowel' still relevant in modern English phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-26T14:51:56.143" Score="-1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if this is not the right sort of question to post here, but I was curious as to the derivation of the above sentence. (Apparently the correct choice is 'we'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Their class has more singers than we [have singers]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Their class has more singers than we [ do [have singers] ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where [] denotes Ellipsis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2194" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-28T06:01:28.977" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T02:49:47.593" Title="Their class has more singers than (we/us) -- possible syntactical derivations?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3922" CreationDate="2013-06-26T16:03:11.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;we do&lt;/em&gt; is equivalent to &lt;em&gt;we have singers&lt;/em&gt;, there is no test by which it is possible to tell which of these is what is ellipsed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The correct choice became &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; when some grammarian decided a couple of hundred years ago that English grammar was supposed to be Latin grammar. The ordinary English has always been &lt;em&gt;than us&lt;/em&gt;. The OED says &quot; With a personal or relative pronoun in the objective case instead of the nominative (as if than were a preposition).This is app. the invariable construction in the case of than whom, which is universally accepted instead of than who. With the personal pronouns it is now considered incorrect.&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-06-26T16:03:11.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-26T21:47:11.083" Score="3" ViewCount="1288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to learn Icelandic online, but am struggling to produce some phonemes.  I am unable to find an IPA translator for Icelandic and think it'd be easier for me if I could see some of what I learn in IPA if possible. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2196" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-28T06:01:53.510" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T19:20:16.913" Title="Is there a way to learn Icelandic phonetics online?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-27T06:22:06.737" Score="3" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to analyse the verb brought (or bring) in terms of lexical aspect, or aktionsart. More accurately, it's an analysis of the Hungarian verb &quot;hozta&quot; (bring-3sg.pst.def). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be telic (and therefore an accomplishment), as it clearly has a definite object (the thing being brought); and I assume that to 'bring' something, there is an end point to which you will stop bringing it and instead be depositing/gifting/offering/leaving it at the place?&#xA;My intuition says that the &lt;strong&gt;bringing to x&lt;/strong&gt; goal is contextual and implied; not inherent in the semantics of the verb; and therefore atelic and an &lt;strong&gt;activity&lt;/strong&gt;. But then my intuition tends to be a bit wishy-washy, and I'm apt to change my mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are people's thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2197" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-28T06:02:30.983" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T14:48:25.890" Title="Aktionsart - &quot;brought&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-27T12:14:43.330" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;By 'complex system' I mean a system of interrogative pronouns which includes more than just 'animate/inanimate' classes of prounouns, like these of 'who' and 'what' in English (e.g. a special interrogatiuve pronoun for each one of Bantu-like classes - if there is such a thing; or gender-specific interrogative pronouns (like &lt;em&gt;'which one?'&lt;/em&gt; having a feminine/masculine/neuter genders in Russian, or French &lt;em&gt;quel(le)?&lt;/em&gt; with a close meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another sub-question is: are person-specific interrogative pronouns possible at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like &lt;em&gt;who+you?&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;what+we?&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;when-(s)he&lt;/em&gt;, etc. This could be a fairly economical way of a language strategy, but I am not quite sure if that is possible at all in any language. At least, none of the languages I am familiar with has such a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T12:14:43.330" Title="Are there more languages with complex system of interrogative pronouns?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-27T14:19:08.420" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an absolute rookie with this stuff, but I'm building a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingojam.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;translation program&lt;/a&gt;, which will hopefully enable people to create their own translators to share with the world. I'm particularly excited for its use by conlang enthusiasts, but I want to make sure it's got the features that would be needed. At the moment it can swap phrases, words, 'intrawords' (I don't know correct name) along with prefixes and suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: What features would be fundamental to a program like this? I think it would depend on the complexity of the language, and how close it is to English communication, but I'm sure there are some fundamentals that I'm missing - it just feels a little bit primitive at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for you time in helping me with this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2198" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-06-27T15:26:58.260" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T15:26:58.260" Title="Fundamental features for program that helps you build a translator?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3903" CreationDate="2013-06-27T20:05:08.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Italian language is actually taken from the Tuscan. So, no particular set of differences, apart from those described in the already mentioned Wikipedia article &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic things are the &quot;Tuscan Gorgia&quot; (phonetic), the strong use of impersonal constructs and the transformation of some verbs (&quot;io fo&quot;). Moreover, you would hear things as &quot;la mi' mamma&quot; instead of &quot;mia mamma&quot; (my mother). &#xA;This means that they use an article and shorten the possessive adjective when indicating people.&#xA;Tuscan people also tend to put an article before the forename when indicating someone, but I think this only applies to females. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already said, apart from those peculiarities, Tuscan has nothing particularly different form standard Italian, which was directly taken from it. As standard Italian, it shows much more interesting differences with other Italian dialects. This is due to the history of the peninsula, which was dominated by many people during time, and this has generated a great deal of dissimilarity. But, as for Tuscan, you may think of it as the one that, among all, became standard Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastActivityDate="2013-06-27T20:05:08.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3924" CreationDate="2013-06-28T14:51:33.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you taken a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://icelandiconline.is/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Icelandic Online&lt;/a&gt;? It's a free online Icelandic language course created at the University of Iceland. It's been designed with an emphasis on immersion and trial-by-error, so you aren't spoonfed everything in every lesson. Pronunciation is no exception to this, so this may not be what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you stick with it it might prove useful in the pronunciation arena. One of the tricky things about Icelandic is that there is a lot of lenition, contraction, etc. that happens in the context of full utterances, so that the pronunciation of a phrase may not be the literal &quot;sum of its parts&quot; (think &lt;em&gt;going to&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; &lt;em&gt;gonna&lt;/em&gt; in English), but these pronunciation changes aren't indicated in any way in the orthography the way we sometimes use apostrophes or changes in spelling to express such phenomena in English. This is of course true for a lot of languages to varying degrees, but my anecdotal experience as a linguist and a native speaker of English is that Icelandic presents a more extreme case along this spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's useful about the Icelandic Online program is that it provides tons of recordings (by native speakers) of both full dialogues and individual words. By listening to the carefully articulated pronunciations of the individual words you start to build a sense of how the orthography--and therefore the phonology--works, especially if you supplement it with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Icelandic phonology&lt;/a&gt;, which gives you IPA information. Then, if you listen to the dialogue recordings you start to get a sense of how things get &quot;slurred&quot; and lenited in continuous speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-07-30T18:25:17.133" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T18:25:17.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-29T12:14:10.670" Score="5" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sarcasm and irony are a form of humor used by a lot of languages. Are they aided by certain features or structure of the language? Are they dependent on the presence of certain structures within a language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, are there any languages which because of their structure do not allow for the use of sarcasm or irony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2171" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-06-29T22:42:57.430" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T03:43:23.150" Title="Is the usage of sarcasm or irony dependent on the language and its structure?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3934" CreationDate="2013-06-29T12:24:27.963" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The grammar descriptions of some languages seem to treat words like &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, as in '&lt;em&gt;all giraffes are yellow&lt;/em&gt;' and '&lt;em&gt;no pigs have wings&lt;/em&gt;' simply as adjectives, because the words they determine are the nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there most certainly is a difference between saying&#xA;'&lt;em&gt;no pigs have wings&lt;/em&gt;' and '&lt;em&gt;green pigs have wings&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This becomes obvious when turning the adjectives into equivalent relative clauses. This works: '&lt;em&gt;pigs which are green have wings&lt;/em&gt;'. This does not: '&lt;em&gt;pigs which are&lt;/em&gt; *no &lt;em&gt;have wings&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand these adjectives is they are somewhat like articles or quantifiers in that they help to fix the scope of the noun they determine. A 'mathematical' explanation would be that saying &lt;em&gt;some pigs&lt;/em&gt; makes it clear you are talking about a subset of the set of all pigs and the subset is small. And saying &lt;em&gt;the pigs&lt;/em&gt; implies that you are referencing a subset you defined earlier or will define in the near future. It doesn't say anything about the pigs in the subset (such as their being green), but gives you some context information. [In prepositional logic, this would be a function of quantifiers, such as ∀ or ∃.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most descriptions of grammars I've read (English and non-English) stick to the traditional parts of speech. So, does it make sense to consider words like &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; as a separate part of speech in its own right and is there any linguistic theory out there sharing this view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2201" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T03:30:22.723" Title="The word 'all' as an article, rather than an adjective?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-29T13:20:27.363" Score="-4" ViewCount="2626" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you compare English with e.g .Russian or some other Slavic language, English sounds very cold and not warming at all. Could it be explained scientifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/MKGH2tmrp08?t=9m22s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youtu.be/MKGH2tmrp08?t=9m22s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/LgaakhgbL9s?t=3m15s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youtu.be/LgaakhgbL9s?t=3m15s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian to me sounds more &quot;human&quot; and warm. Could it be scientifically explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-06-30T09:59:59.407" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T18:52:31.743" Title="Why does English sound so cold to a Slavic speaker?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:53:35.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3932" CreationDate="2013-06-29T23:45:40.247" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Cerberus has commented, these are often lumped into the category of 'determiners', which in English also includes what you've referred to as articles (the, a), possessive pronouns (my, your), and some demonstratives (this, that). These are different from normal adjectives in the following ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can't coexist with other determiners (e.g. *the this hat, *my a car)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They seem to be required on all singular non-name nouns (e.g. *car is nice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some can appear entirely without a noun, though some of the ones that can have a morphological change involved (e.g. no cars are there &gt; none are there, but red cars are there &gt; *red are there)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some syntacticians have theorised that the determiner, not the noun, is the head (basically the core element) of phrases containing nouns. Adjectives, on the other hand, are just an optional component of a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at least according to mainstream syntax, your intuition is right - while they're not 'articles' as the term is typically understood, they are in the same category as articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="2132" LastEditDate="2013-06-30T03:30:22.723" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T03:30:22.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3940" CreationDate="2013-06-30T13:22:17.853" Score="7" ViewCount="11283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the two mentioned abilities are different. I always find it quite straightforward to understand a foreign language when reading. provided I have a good knowledge of its grammar and a large vocabulary. But when it comes to speaking it, so, to create a new, personal and creative content, I may experience an added difficulty. The words I look for in order to use them may not immediately come to mind, even though when I read them I don't have to think about their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there any psychological reason why is it less difficult to understand than to speak, even when the same vocabulary and rules are involved? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I may be wrong in this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T02:54:39.603" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T18:35:20.127" Title="Why is it &quot;easier&quot; to understand a foreign language when reading than to speak it?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-30T13:53:20.450" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was rather surprised to learn that the Chinese word for &quot;mommy&quot; is māmā. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It never surprised me to hear that this word is similar among Western languages, because of some common origin or borrowing reasons. But then, it looks like this word is the same in Eastern languages like Chinese (and also Japanese). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just because &quot;ma&quot; is the maybe the &quot;easiest&quot; syllable to articulate for a child? And, moreover, is this true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T13:53:20.450" Title="The informal word a child uses to call his/her mother is the same (or strongly similar) in many languages. Why?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-06-30T19:27:26.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2013-06-30T15:54:32.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning to speak and understand a language is a difficult task, and involves coordinating many physiological and mental activities, like pronouncing sounds that may be unfamiliar in different contexts, parsing constructions at speed, recognizing words from others' pronunciation (which is usually quite different from &quot;standard&quot;), and recalling their meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading, on the other hand, is not language, but technology. There is no human adaptation to literacy as there is to spoken (i.e, real) language, and in fact some humans never manage to master literacy in their native language, while others find it very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not that it's easier, but rather that it's easier &lt;strong&gt;for you&lt;/strong&gt;. People vary enormously in language abilities, and that's squared and cubed for writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all technologies, there are lots of arbitrary features in writing systems, and many systems to choose from. I think anyone finds Mandarin easier to learn to speak than to learn to read in characters, for instance. But it can be written in Pinyin as well as characters, though that's not standard, and if you can speak the language, you can learn to read Pinyin easily enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, /ɪf ɪŋɡlɪʃ wərɪtən fəniməkli, ɪtəd be iziər tərid/, after a little practice, at least. And with added spaces and punctuation. But all writing leaves out important aspects of real language, like pronunciation, rhythm, gesture, gaze direction, facial expression, and intonation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently virtually all written sentences are multiply ambiguous, like these &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/gardenpath.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Garden Path sentences&lt;/a&gt;, which exist only in written form; as spoken, there is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-06-30T15:54:32.833" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-06-30T23:57:49.777" Score="5" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently been tasked with programming a web crawler that searches through news articles for certain keywords--company names, for example--and then tries to determine if the article has a positive or negative slant. The web crawling portion is trivial but I feel that I've bitten off more than I can chew for the textual analysis portion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current approach is detailed below. I'm wondering if it's a sensible way to do things, or if there are better methods to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crawler starts off by pulling the page's DOM. It then assumes that the actual &quot;article&quot; is within the paragraph &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags, so it reduces the data down to just that text. (This may be refined later on a per-website basis, but for now it works reasonably well). There are three input files: the aforementioned keywords, with words like &quot;Facebook&quot; or &quot;Google&quot;, and then two wordlists, one containing positive words and the other containing negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program then crawls through each paragraph of text in search for the keywords. If it finds a keyword, it starts checking every word against both word list. A keyword has a weight for each webpage, starting at 0, and incrementing for positive words found in the paragraph, decrementing for negative words found. So if 5 positive words and 3 negative words are found accompanying a keyword, a weight of +2 is assigned. If the combined weight of all paragraphs is positive (or even above some cut-off) the article is deemed to view it in a positive light, and the opposite for a negative score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this approach brings some pretty huge issues. For example, a keyword (always a proper name) can be used once in an article, and the rest of the text may just refer to it as &quot;it&quot;. I could make the scoping of the keyword per article (i.e., if the keyword is found anywhere in the page, then any paragraph containing listed words count toward the weight) but that brings it's own problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, and I realize this problem is probably pretty high up as far as linguistic problems go. I'm not looking for a perfect solution, but I'd like to know if there is anything more I could be doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any feedback. I'm not sure if this is really appropriate for this stackexchange site, if it's not I'd like to know a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2210" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T14:24:26.217" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T14:24:26.217" Title="sentiment analytics" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3938" CreationDate="2013-07-01T01:54:20.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.co.kr/scholar?q=sentiment+classification&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentiment Classification&lt;/a&gt; is a still developing field so I don't feel comfortable saying that there is a right or a wrong way to approach your problem. Your approach would theoretically work but it is a bit simplistic. Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, how will you choose your word list? Will it be manually compiled? How will you make sure it is representative and has wide enough coverage to actually be useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, how will you choose your coefficients? From your description, I'm assuming all coefficients will be &lt;code&gt;+1&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;-1&lt;/code&gt;, but surely a word like &quot;excellent&quot; conveys more positivity than a mere &quot;good&quot; and reflecting this in your coefficients would improve accuracy. How will your coefficients reflect this? How do you know they are accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest you read a few papers on Sentiment Classification (perhaps starting with the Google Scholar link I gave at the beginning of my answer) to get a general understanding of modern techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I'm seeing, most solutions use some manually annotated sentiment corpus, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mpqa.cs.pitt.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Multiple Perspective Question Answer (MPQA) Corpus&lt;/a&gt; and perform machine learning techniques (usually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SVM&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_classifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MaxEnt&lt;/a&gt;) to decide which words and features are strong indicators of sentiment and what their optimal coefficient should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of machine learning libraries to help you with the programming component. A simple Google search should help you find a suitable language for your programming language of choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-07-01T16:03:19.517" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T16:03:19.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2013-07-01T03:18:36.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several factors in play here, all of which differ according to each person's situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many people in fact find it much easier to learn to speak a new language than to learn to read and write it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a split between people who pick up speaking more easily and those who pick up comprehending more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When comprehending a language, either by listening or by reading, you don't need to know as much minutiae of the grammar since context resolves a lot of unknowns and ambiguities. But when speaking or writing some people are more concerned with being very grammatically correct than just being understood. And perhaps more so in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's naturally easier to comprehend a language closely related to one you already know. Now some language pairs such as Danish and Swedish are orthographically very similar but phonologically quite different. Other language pairs such as Hindi and Urdu are very similar in phonology, lexicon, and grammar; but have radically different orthographies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some advice if you are quite good at the passive side of a language - comprehending via either reading or listening, but not so good at the active side - speaking or writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Immersion = The deep end. If you spend time in a place this language is native you will be forced to use it to meet your needs, and you will be surrounded by its appearance and its sounds all day every day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relax = Let go. You will make more errors but just like learning to ride a bicycle you need to keep trying so you can get the practice you need to improve. So don't worry about correctness and just try to communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alcohol helps with 2. (-;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T03:18:36.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-07-01T05:07:16.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingvo.org/un&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UNESCO minute&lt;/a&gt;s in 1954,which recommended (recognised) the use of Esperanto. It is because the leaders of many countries are selfish to control the people for letting the people the literacy, thus they don't make Esperanto as a subject in the school. However, Esperanto was researched &lt;a href=&quot;http://mesg2012.blogspot.com/2012/12/french-business-would-use-esperanto-but.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in 1921&lt;/a&gt; and to be the best language in business. All people know the French government halted this project as they thought French is going to stay forever but they are wrong and now the English is another ['dying language'][3]. However, Indonesia government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to make Esperanto a subject for the young diplomats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brazil made Esperanto as an elective subject in 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2211" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T05:07:16.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2013-07-01T05:34:35.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it always, though? Try reading some Mandarin, Tamil, Hebrew or Japanese, and you might have a different take on it. Actually, I'd argue that &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; Mandarin is probably harder than speaking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason it's often easier to read foreign languages is that they often use similar writing conventions to the ones you already know. The script is the often the same (or related); spaces and punctuation are used in a similar manner to encode word boundaries and prosodic features. Also, in languages related to each other, related vocabulary often retains similar spelling even if actual pronunciation has diverged. One might also point to stylistical features of written languages - while register and modality (spoken vs. written) are separate features (you can colloquially write a chat message or very formally give a speech), there's a high degree of correlation: so written language tends to be more precise, use more international vocabulary (at least in some languages), and avoids more obscure or recent idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's also the fact that spoken information in general is volatile and, due to background noise, production errors and perception errors, has a low-quality signal. By contrast, written language - at least in its digital variety - is very unambiguous and can be reread as often as you like (much easier even than rewinding on an audio track for example). But try reading foreign language handwriting and you'll see how much this breaks down when letters are not so clearly distinguishable anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T13:58:24.950" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T13:58:24.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2013-07-01T07:08:02.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends mainly on whether a learner is an introvetive or an extravertive person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For extravertive persons, speaking and live communication is more natural and it takes less efforts, but the best way to memorize words, rules, etc. is to read and to practice language studies alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For introvertive persons, the opposite strategy is more efficient. That is, introverts spend less energy while reading or doing study-alone language practices, but the most efficient way to memorize anything is to do some group training/real-life communication activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T07:08:02.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-07-01T07:38:42.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I am quite fluent in Russian, I wouldn't say English sound particularly 'cold' to me. There can be many different personal  explanations on why we like or dislike certain languages: childhood imprinting, personal idiosyncrasy, aversion to or preferences towards certain languages - you name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the psycholinguistic reason may be that Russian in fact offers a greater number of options of intonational patterns than English does. In Russian, the intonation actually  conveys syntactical meaning covering the speakers's personal attitude towards the things said (or towards an addressee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference may be also in MBTI-types of the actors (the Russian actors are more like  Feeling types).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please notice that while both stories cover the same archetypical scenarios (journey into a mirror, meeting doppelgängers and going through labyrinths), they are different and the Russian story is a bit secondary to Carrol's book, for it partially borrows the original idea (namely, travel through a mirror).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These ideas are well synthesised with Slavic archetypes of journeys to another world and were later developed in many Russian books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-07-31T10:05:00.597" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T10:05:00.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2327" CreationDate="2013-07-01T15:13:44.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, there is no change in meaning due to the change in palatalization, like there is in Russian. We have no contrastive words or minimal pairs due to palatalization. Дан [&lt;strong&gt;dan&lt;/strong&gt;]  &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; дань [&lt;strong&gt;danʲ&lt;/strong&gt;] are different, meaning &quot;Dane&quot; and &quot;tribute&quot; but this differentiation doesn't occur in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean that palatalization isn't an interesting concept in English though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For example:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western American speakers render &quot;education&quot; as [&lt;strong&gt;e.d͡ʒɪ̈.ˈkej.ʃɪ̈n&lt;/strong&gt;], resulting from the palatalization of the 'd' followed by the /&lt;strong&gt;ju&lt;/strong&gt;/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some British accents pronounce &quot;tune&quot; as [&lt;strong&gt;t͡ʃun&lt;/strong&gt;] for the same reason, and despite these siginficant changes in pronunciation due to palatalization, they do not change meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our /&lt;strong&gt;ɹ&lt;/strong&gt;/ sound has an interesting effect on palatalization as well in some dialects: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;try&quot; -&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;t͡ʃɹaj&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;dragon&quot; -&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;ˈd͡ʒɹæ.gɪ̈n&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion we have quite the opposite phenomenon occurring in English, words can be significantly palatalized but do not change meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T15:13:44.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3938" CreationDate="2013-07-01T19:07:44.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/omsa/omsa.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This book by Pang and Lee&lt;/a&gt; is a classic reference on the topic. To get a good overview of the topic, look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/opinion-mining-sentiment-analysis-survey.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;book's website&lt;/a&gt; which has links to presentation slides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you want to implement the software on your own, and you want to (re-)invent algorithms too. The reasons behind these is not entirely clear. If you are writing a research paper or a thesis on the topic, you would need to do both. Otherwise, you can (1) look for free software for sentiment analysis; if you can't find any, or the licenses are unsuitable for your use, (2) learn techniques from published papers that demonstrate good results for the kind of classification you wish to do. There are a few workshops on this topic, and the website keeps changing from year to year, based on who is hosting it. In general, you could look for papers at &quot;Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://optima.jrc.it/wassa2013/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WASSA-13&lt;/a&gt;, for example) or at &quot;Practice and Theory of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/pathosworkshop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PATHOS-2013&lt;/a&gt;, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-07-01T19:07:44.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-07-02T02:18:36.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One powerful husband and wife couple had created an organization before Interlingua was formalized. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Vanderbilt_Morris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Vanderbilt_Morris&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2213" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T02:18:36.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-02T11:21:15.217" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that different cultures may use different (hand or other body part) gestures to convey the same meaning. But is the amount of gestures similar in number among cultures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some recent research, in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fla.sagepub.com/content/28/2/164.full.pdf+html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fla.sagepub.com/content/28/2/164.full.pdf+html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;goes in the direction of claiming that Italian children develop a higher richness in gestures than, in this case, American children. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being Italian, I know I have learned a lot of gestures, especially hand gestures. What about other cultures/countries? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm talking about gestures that emphasize the message conveyed through the speech, but do not substitute it entirely (it's not like the sign language, where you use language without voice production).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-02T14:24:05.437" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T14:24:05.437" Title="Has the use of body gestures during speech production the same importance in every culture?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6265" CreationDate="2013-07-02T13:53:45.697" Score="5" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often languages have compounding phrases with the same Part Of Speech (POS) and it becomes a morphological analysis problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most notorious being infinite German noun compounds, e.g. &lt;code&gt;Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetzausnahmeregelungsbeschluss&lt;/code&gt; which can be decomposed into &lt;code&gt;Wissenschafts zeit vertrags gesetz ausnahmeregelung beschluss&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What other languages has such noun compounds?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages with the same phenomenon but with verbs? If so, what other languages has verb compounds? An example would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there open-source morpohological analyzers used for these languages to decompose the noun/verb compounds?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:17:26.477" Title="Which language has verb/noun compounding features?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3901" CreationDate="2013-07-02T14:03:05.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are indeed Georgian verbs that have a root starting with ა, ე, ი or უ.  Here is an example for each vowel: არსებობს/იარსებებს (X exists/will exist), ელავს/იელ(ვ)ებს (there is/will be lightning), აიარაღებს/შეაიარაღებს (X arms/will arm Y), აუმჯობესებს/გააუმჯობესებს (X improves/will improve Y).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough though, it is my impression that most verbal roots starting with a vowel are actually derived from nouns, adjectives or adverbs that happen to start with vowels.  Here are examples for two of the most typical processes of denominal derivation: ინტერესი (interest) &gt; აინტერებს/დააინტერებს (X interests/will interest Y) and ექიმი (doctor) &gt; ექიმობს/იექიმებს (X works/will work as a doctor).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T14:03:05.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-02T14:05:41.960" Score="10" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we know that Latin nouns and adjectives inflect for case as well as person, number, and gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also we know that all the major modern Romance languages except Romanian no longer have a case system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's been judged that Romanian's case system is not a direct descendent from the Latin but a later innovation just as its neuter gender is not descended from that of Latin - but I could be wrong on some of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, which Romance language, or which variety of Vulgar Latin is believed to be the one that retained a case system directly inherited from Latin the longest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If I'm wrong about Romanian please show the direct relationship or provide references.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T08:58:13.483" Title="Where did Latin and its descendants retain a case system most recently?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3956" CreationDate="2013-07-02T10:25:33.697" Score="6" ViewCount="1126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is Ivrit, the modern version of Hebrew, not considered an artificial language like for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Interlingua&lt;/a&gt;? From the history it looks like the language was dead except in clerical circles and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Eliezer Ben-Yehuda&lt;/a&gt; &quot;revived&quot; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm only just beginning to learn the language but I was wondering why it isn't considered artificial as such, because from what I read a lot of the things virtually not present in at least two millennia have been given words that were literally &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Interlingua and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Esperanto&lt;/a&gt; a lot of words are also rooted in Romance languages, yet they are considered artificial and Ivrit is apparently not. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2214" OwnerDisplayName="0xC0000022L" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:45:47.510" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:28:44.550" Title="Why is Ivrit not considered an artificial language?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3953" CreationDate="2013-07-02T19:40:39.027" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this is a fair question, I think there are several factors which argue against Modern Hebrew being considered an artificial language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The degree of mutual intelligibility between the modern language and the ancient language tends to argue that these two are in fact the same language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that the language, as &quot;constructed&quot;, was specifically designed upon the existing language so that it would act as a faithful representation of the ancient language in the modern world.  If a word was needed for which the Ancient Hebrew word was not known, great care was taken to scour literature for the word or to incorporate a word that was at least potentially an Ancient Hebrew word using related languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language is not spoken strictly as &quot;designed&quot;, with many words and phrases deviating from the original intent.  We can then, at least when feeling pedantic, claim that even if Modern Hebrew &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; a constructed language, that what is currently spoken in Israel is no longer artificial.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this certainly isn't &quot;proof&quot;, and I do not think this may not be the kind of issue that can be settled because everyone will have their own definition of the word &quot;artificial&quot;.  For example, someone could come along and claim that there is no such thing as an artificial language, or that one language could never be more artificial than another. (Stranger conversations have taken place)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1581" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T19:40:39.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-02T19:52:09.197" Score="4" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would seem advantageous for any language to have minimal numbers of syllables in its words, especially for its most common words, where there would be no loss (and instead, probable gain) in communicative ease and clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, why would it make sense for &quot;they&quot; (= &quot;ili&quot;) in Esperanto to have two syllables rather than just one? Same for &quot;one&quot; (= &quot;unu&quot;), and there could be many more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm by no means a linguist or highly knowledgeable in Esperanto, so if anyone could help clear this up (or explain why my premise is faulty), that would be helpful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2215" LastEditorUserId="13357" LastEditDate="2016-11-06T16:46:58.537" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T20:13:33.690" Title="Why aren't the number of syllables in constructed languages like Esperanto minimized?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2013-07-02T22:35:11.490" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of different goals that the constructors of conlangs might have, such as ease of learning, regularity of grammar, minimal inventory of phonemes, or philosophical hierarchy of knowledge. Conciseness &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be such a goal, but I do not remember encountering an actual conlang where it was (John Lawler mentions a fictional example, in Heinlein's &lt;em&gt;Speedtalk&lt;/em&gt;, and Vaclav Havel's play &lt;em&gt;The Memorandum&lt;/em&gt; turns on a conlang called &lt;em&gt;Ptydepe&lt;/em&gt;, in which the most common words are the shortest, and the least common the longest). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John Lawler says in his comment, redundancy is actually very common in real-world languages, and for a good reason: because speech is often used in noisy environments (in the communication-theory sense of &quot;noisy&quot; as well as the everyday sense). Extreme brevity would be likely to lose much of that redundancy, and it is not clear exactly what would be gained to offset that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the simple answer is &quot;Because that was not one of Zamenhof's goals&quot;. He was much more concerned with regularity, and with ease of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-07-02T22:35:11.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2013-07-03T10:26:15.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One good attempt at a language like this is Dutton Speedwords, which was elaborated under a principle known as Zipf's law, namely, that most common words are the shortest. One language that preceded Esperanto was Volapük, which made words unrecognizable and difficult to connect to words in other languages. In the free marketplace of ideas, Esperanto rose to the top of the IAL heap even without adhering to Zipf's law, so those who have learned it have not found that lack of conciseness to be disadvantageous. If conciseness were a necessity for the advancement of a language, then you would see greater popularity of Solresol, whose alphabetic components are the seven basic tones of the music scale, or Toki Pona, the product of a teenager dabbling in Eastern religions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2218" LastEditorUserId="3340" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T20:02:23.797" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T20:02:23.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-03T17:27:08.080" Score="8" ViewCount="1654" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently traveled in Bavaria. I was struck by the prevalence of place names ending in &lt;em&gt;-au&lt;/em&gt;, like Donau, Passau, Oberammergau, and Dachau... I looked up the dictionary, and found the word &lt;em&gt;aue&lt;/em&gt; which according to Langenscheidt means &quot;pasture, meadow&quot;. Is there any connection between &lt;em&gt;-au&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aue&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2220" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-07-04T11:44:07.493" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T16:01:48.717" Title="German Place Names ending in -AU" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;toponomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3960" CreationDate="2013-07-03T20:16:46.813" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you give are actually of different origin. &quot;Au&quot; as you have stated correctly is a high German (i.e. southern German) variant of &quot;Aue&quot; derived from old high German &quot;ouwe&quot;, which denotates a lower place near water. But in case of Oberammergau the ending is actually &quot;Gau&quot;, which is derived from old high German &quot;gouwe&quot;, which means something like area, territory or governmental district.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the name Passau seems to be derived from roman &quot;Batavis&quot;, which was a roman name for a germanic tribe. How the derivation process changed &quot;Batavis&quot; into &quot;Passau&quot;, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2212" LastEditorUserId="2212" LastEditDate="2013-07-03T20:40:56.110" LastActivityDate="2013-07-03T20:40:56.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3953" CreationDate="2013-07-04T06:40:59.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know practically nothing about Hebrew. My answer is based on your claim, &quot;a lot of the things virtually not present in at least two millennia have been given words that were literally &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two classes of words, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_class_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open class&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_class&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;closed class&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Open classes accept the addition of new morphemes (words), through such processes as compounding, derivation, inflection, coining, and borrowing. A closed class is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items. Typical closed classes found in many languages are adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies to any language. People can create new nouns and verbs, when necessary or when convenient. For example, recent additions, to English, of verb forms of google and tweet, do not make English any less natural for it. Now, if some committee modifies Hebrew &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; significantly, I'd say there is good reason to start classifying the modified Hebrew as a &lt;strong&gt;constructed language&lt;/strong&gt;, as opposed to &lt;strong&gt;natural language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-07-04T06:40:59.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1553" CreationDate="2013-07-04T14:01:43.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perhaps worth thinking separately about I. preverbs used with verbs of motion, and II. preverbs used with other verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. For verbs of motion, the preverb has a strictly lexical function: it shows which direction the motion takes place.  For სვლა, change in tense is shown by using a different stem, so, for example, in მოდის (X comes) and მოვა (X will come), we understand which is present and which is future not from the presence or absence of a preverb, but from the choice of stem.  Other verbs that use preverbs in this way are &quot;to run&quot;, e.g. მორბის (X runs here/X comes running) მოირბინს (X will run here/X will come running), and bring/take/carry/fetch... For example, მომაქვს (I am bringing X here), მოვიტან (I will bring X here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. For other verbs, remember that preverbs are only used in the I and II conjugations.  The III conjugation forms its future stem by circumfixing ი...ებ, while the IV circumfixes ე...ებ.  As for the function of a preverb, its addition changes presents to futures, imperfects to conditionals and imperfective aorists to perfective aorists (however, imperfective, i.e. preverbless, aorists don't seem to be particularly common).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to return to your question, it is not only the verb of motion that takes a preverb in the present tense...  As an exception to what I wrote above, some III conjugation verbs can take preverbs in the present tense, so from ლაპარაკობს (X speaks), we can derive მოლაპარაკობს (X comes speaking) მილაპარაკობს (X goes speaking).  As far as I know, these forms only exist in the present series...  It is tempting to think that when used like this, preverbs keep their lexical meaning, but I don't know enough Georgian to know if this is always the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are also some other verbs that, for some reason, take a preverb in the present series.  The only one I can remember at the moment is შე(მო)=ჰ-კივის (X screams at Y) შე(მო)=ჰ-კივლებს (X will scream at Y).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do apologise for the rather disorganised state of my answer: it reflects my own rather tenuous grasp of the subject, but all the same, I do hope that it will be of some help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-07-04T14:01:43.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-04T14:22:59.617" Score="4" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my perception (native German, lived in UK) German culture is more focused on the written word and values precision and perfection when expressing yourself. English culture on the contrary endorses spontaneous conversation (debating, pub culture) more and I generally perceive English speakers to be more tolerant to mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if the correct terms would be &quot;oral&quot; and &quot;written&quot; cultures, and whether there is any literature that supports or challenges this subjective view, as I seem to remember to have read something about this, but can't seem to find it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2224" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T11:22:52.873" Title="English an Oral, German a Written Culture?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3966" CreationDate="2013-07-04T14:31:17.870" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I originally asked this question on philosophy.stackexchange, but the consensus was that this was better asked here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deleuze &amp;amp; Guattari introduce the idea of the rhizome in their text A thousand Plateaus as a metaphor closer to the reality than aboroscent (tree-like) descriptions can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then becomes how does one theorise rhizomatically? Is the evolution of language a good example to theorise with - after all it is traditionally described by a tree? Can one, for example, suggest the existence of a tap-root was actually forced onto linguists by their chosen mode of description - a tree - whereas a rhizomatic description does away with a point-like origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a picture of say the Indo-European language family starting of at some distant tap-root and slowly diversifying and splitting into many languages, with each branch then developing in perpetual isolation. In this picture, one cannot visualise creolisation where two languages at one time far apart is put into sudden contact and either one perishes, or a new hybrid (creole) develops. Or two languages that were in close contact and actually mutually intelligible, by some force are closed off from each other, and so developing independently eventually become mutually unintelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one say then that the Rhizome is arguably closer ontologically to the reality of language than the 'traditional linguistic' image - the tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this formulation been used in the philosophy of language/evolutionary linguistics at all? If it has, by whom - and what has been the reception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T01:32:06.627" Title="Is the evolution &amp; development of language better described by Deleuze concept of the rhizome than the traditional tree?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3965" CreationDate="2013-07-04T18:12:26.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say, if you try to depict the development of a single language through time and take a single starting point, the tree is the better choice. Trying to visualize the state of a language or several languages in its relations to many or all others a three dimensional network or rhizome, if you will, would be the better, if not only choice, because a dichotomic depiction cannot suffice, when numerous interdependent relations of varying strength are involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I think your questions is rather one of the means of visualization to a specific end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a related question would be, if language as such has only one origin, which is quite improbable, or a large number of origins, which again suggests a rhizomatic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so much an answer, but rather a further contribution for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2212" LastActivityDate="2013-07-04T18:12:26.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3965" CreationDate="2013-07-05T01:32:06.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Divergence of language has most commonly been represented as a tree model, but there is a counterpart in the form of the wave model. When the Neogrammarians in the late 19th century posited that sound change is regular and exceptionless, dialectologists argued against this and the family tree model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The alternative to the family tree model which was put forward was the “wave theory,” [...] The “wave theory” was intended to deal with changes due to contact among languages and dialects, where changes were said to emanate from a center as waves on a pond do when a stone is thrown into it, and waves from one center of dispersion (where the stone started the waves) can cross or intersect outward moving waves coming from other dispersion centers (started by other stones thrown into the water in other locations). Changes due to language contact (borrowing) were seen as analogous to successive waves crossing one another in different patterns. (Campbell 2000: 92-93)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be some similarities between the wave model and the rhizome concept, but I'm not sure to what extent these hold. For example (comparing with the wikipedia page on rhizome), chronology is relevant in the wave model, and the 'disturbances' do leave traces. Note that in the wave model, there is still a proto-language from which the dialects developed - a single point of origin. There are however multiple sources that contributed linguistic features/innovations to a particular dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, it is understood these days that it is not a question of either the tree model or the wave model that is most representative, but that both are needed to explain language divergence. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linguists have traditionally represented patterns of divergence within a language family in terms of either a ‘splits’ model, corresponding to a branching family tree structure, or the wave model, resulting in a (dialect) continuum. Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have tended to assume the former as a viable idealization also for the latter. &lt;strong&gt;But the contrast matters, for it typically reflects different processes in the real world: speaker populations either separated by migrations, or expanding over continuous territory&lt;/strong&gt;. Since history often leaves a complex of both patterns within the same language family, ideally we need a single model to capture both, and tease apart the respective contributions of each. (Heggarty, Maguire &amp;amp; McMahon 2010)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude: I'm not really sure what a rhizomatic model of language divergence would entail. But since the tree and the wave model are both needed to explain different processes, I don't think the rhizome alone could better represent language change. (And, to my knowledge the term rhizome is not used in relation to language change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Campbell, Lyle. 2000. “The History of Linguistics.” In The Handbook of Linguistics, 81–104. Blackwell Publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heggarty, Paul, Warren Maguire, and April McMahon. 2010. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://academia.edu/1088940/Splits_or_waves_Trees_or_webs_How_divergence_measures_and_network_analysis_can_unravel_language_histories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Splits or Waves? Trees or Webs? How Divergence Measures and Network Analysis Can Unravel Language Histories&lt;/a&gt;.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365 (1559): 3829 –3843.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T01:32:06.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-05T03:32:03.150" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arvix#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;arvix&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sacrificial ram&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aries#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aries&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a Proto-Indo-European root meaning &amp;quot;jump, spring,&amp;quot; cognate with Old High German irah (“ram”), Old Irish heirp (“kid”), Ancient Greek ἔριφος, Armienian արոջ (“lamb”), Old Church Slavonic йарици, Lithuanian erytis and Middle High German ireh (“ram”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wondering the simlarities both in meaning and spelling of them, and maybe they are cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T12:50:10.530" Title="Are L. arvix and L. aries cognates?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3964" CreationDate="2013-07-05T11:22:52.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the notion &quot;oral culture&quot; refers to a culture which passes on its history, traditions, social conventions and collective knowledge in an oral manner, that is by word of mouth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German as well as English culture are generally seen as paradigms of the exact opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there may be differences between the two, but there are definitely also differences within the two regarding social status, background, education and situational context of the group of language users observed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally and subjectively I would say: In our time and age of text messaging and social networks, as well as multicultural societies, the relative output of written language opposed to spoken language in Germany and England will most probably not differ tremendously, but this is not based on solid sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the error-tolerance in written, as well as spoken language to me seems rather influenced by the media involved, the addressee and the setting (professional, private...) than by national culture.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm putting this in an answer, because it is too long for a comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2212" LastActivityDate="2013-07-05T11:22:52.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3921" CreationDate="2013-07-06T00:39:45.423" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question presupposes that &quot;you can fairly well analyse Modern English vowels as having length&quot;, but it's not clear that that is the case. I'll get to that later, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's be clear--&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; we were to divide modern American English vowels up into long and short vowels, the categories would cross-cut the categories of long and short vowels that existed in Middle English. That is, &lt;strong&gt;it's not the case that all the vowels in modern American English words that were long vowels in their Middle English counterparts pattern together in modern American English.&lt;/strong&gt; As I mentioned in my comment, for example, &lt;em&gt;moon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; both had a long vowel in Middle English, but we wouldn't want to analyze them both as having a long vowel in modern American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; we were to divide modern American English vowels up into long and short vowels, it would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; work to take the Middle English reflexes of the vowels that underwent the Great Vowel Shift as the underlying forms of their shifted &quot;descendents&quot; as well as of other instances of vowels that are realized in the same way--i.e. &lt;strong&gt;we wouldn't want to analyze the vowel in &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; and the vowel in &lt;em&gt;Beijing&lt;/em&gt; as underlyingly /a:/&lt;/strong&gt;, because there would be no sensible trigger for the synchronic vowel quality change. What would the rule look like? /a:/ --&gt; [ej] ... in what environment? Everywhere?? Assuming you believe that underlying forms are stored in a speaker's grammar, how would a child ever infer the underlying form if it never surfaced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, I would say that, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; we even wanted to analyze modern American English as having short and long vowels (still a big &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;), history would have little relevance for our analysis other than the fact that some of the vowels we might analyze as long would have been long in Middle English.&lt;/strong&gt; (But some wouldn't, and some that we would analyze as short would also have been long in Middle English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which finally brings me to what I gather is the real meat of the question--does it indeed make sense to use the distinctive feature [long] in a synchronic analysis of modern American English? My answer would be: &lt;strong&gt;yes, but the name for the feature would just be a convenient mnemonic label and other names could just as easily be given to that feature.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best candidates for a +/-long distinction would be the vowels in minimal pairs such as &lt;em&gt;beat-bit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Luke-look&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;raid-red&lt;/em&gt;. It's true that, all else being equal (same prosodic environment, same speech rate, etc.), the vowels in the first members of the pairs will be phonetically longer than their counterparts in the second members. The vowels of the first and second members, respectively, also pattern together phonologically (i.e. they form &lt;em&gt;natural classes&lt;/em&gt;); for example, while the first vowel in each pair may appear in a word-final open syllable (&lt;em&gt;bee&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;loo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ray&lt;/em&gt;) the second vowel in each pair may not (*[bɪ], *[lʊ], *[ɹɛ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a synchronic analysis that makes use of distinctive features, then, it makes sense to posit a feature that would delineate these two natural classes. Based on the tendency of the vowels in one class to be realized as phonetically longer than those in the other class (all else being equal), we might choose the name &quot;long&quot; for our feature. But there are other phonetic differences that distinguish the two classes of vowels. That is, if we took recordings of the words &lt;em&gt;beat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Luke&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;raid&lt;/em&gt; and simply shortened them (using Praat's duration manipulation feature, for example), they would not be perceived by native speakers as &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;, respectively. This is because they differ in quality as well as length, as @hippietrail mentioned in her comment above. If we looked at spectrograms of the vowels in &lt;em&gt;beat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Luke&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;raid&lt;/em&gt;, we would see that the first two formants hit targets that are more &quot;extreme&quot; and that the formants of the vowels in &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; have relatively more &quot;neutral&quot; targets. Some people chalk this difference up to an articulatory difference that was historically characterized as one of &quot;tenseness&quot; of the articulatory muscles, and so a traditional label that was adopted for the feature was [tense].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it technically doesn't matter what we call the feature since, as I mentioned, it is really just a convenient label for characterizing natural classes (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3398/understanding-voiced-consonants/3401#3401&quot;&gt;my response to this related question about voiced consonants&lt;/a&gt; for further discussion). We could call it [feature 42]. It's true that calling it [long] is a sensible mnemonic choice, since duration is one dimension along which the relevant differences manifest themselves phonetically, but it wouldn't tell the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-07-06T00:39:45.423" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-06T05:32:32.613" Score="3" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;This subject itself is difficult to google, so I apologize beforehand for the hundreds of links I'm sure are hidden somewhere. This question was moved from the philosophy site as they told me that it fits better here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it came with this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/203684/71839&quot;&gt;Is fewer lines of code always better?&lt;/a&gt;, a somewhat subjective question about code (about best practices). Then I thought about it and now I'm really curious about it. I have some questions around this subject itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there other words that show signs of a sentence that, while syntactically correct and apparently right, can be used to clearly see that a sentence might be logically wrong? Always/never in something that makes me read it slowly and double check about the validity of that sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where/how can these words be used? If it's a definition, for example, &lt;code&gt;always&lt;/code&gt; can be used (as long as it doesn't class with other definitions). But people don't normally talk with pure definitions, and there're many cases (in programming at least) that people overuse the words 'always/never',  maybe for laziness or shortness sake. Another example (for programming), 'Global state is evil', which could be reworded as 'Never use global state'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:01.913" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T21:39:25.287" Title="Can words like 'always' and 'never' be used to determine sentences inherently wrong?" Tags="&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4072" CreationDate="2013-07-07T20:59:50.887" Score="1" ViewCount="17871" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder why certain words are used in occupations when possibly a common known synonym could also be used?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in law, &lt;em&gt;desist&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;stop, cease&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in economics, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/13211/what-does-parity-mean-with-regards-to-student-loans&quot;&gt;parity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;equality&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in medicine, &lt;em&gt;onset&lt;/em&gt; of a disease instead of &lt;em&gt;start, beginning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What role or function does professional jargon have in these instances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:50:31.887" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:50:31.887" Title="Why is jargon sometimes used instead of familiar words?" Tags="&lt;study-of-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-08T07:29:44.970" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is grammatical role of &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; word in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages? Notice the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&gt;&#xA;  La léngua emiliâna-rumagnōla l’é parlêda int l’Emélia-Rumâgna, int la pêrt ed sōvra dal Mêrchi (pruvîncia ed Pêṣer) &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; in Tuscâna (pruvîncia ed Mâsa-Carēra). L’a ‘s divèd in dō pêrti: l’Emigliàn &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; al Rumagnōl. A’s pèinsa che la divisiòun tr’al dō sesiòun descréti sōvra la sia sucèsa a l’inési dal Medioēv, quând i Bizantèin gvernêven la Rumâgna &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; i Longobêrd l’Emélia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See more examples on &lt;a href=&quot;http://eml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langua_emigli%C3%A8na-rumagn%C3%B4la&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T10:41:24.907" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T10:41:24.907" Title="grammatical role of the word &quot;e&quot; in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2013-07-08T08:21:14.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The length of the words is not  a decisive criteria, when foreigners are trying to express ideas accurately in a language they learned  from internet.&#xA;However, in most cases Esperanto is shorter than English, even if Zipf was (luckily) not involved in assembling it (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.remush.be/rebuttal/index.html#203&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.remush.be/rebuttal/index.html#203&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Remuŝ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2231" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T08:21:14.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3977" CreationDate="2013-07-08T11:30:50.610" Score="1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a computer program which will randomly generate a string of letters. It then looks up the random letter collection in a dictionary, to determine if it is in fact a real word, in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there common terms in linguistics to distinguish between 'words', 'non-words', and 'possible words'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2233" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-09T00:11:57.500" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T17:21:56.940" Title="Is there a technical term to describe a sequence of letters that may or may not be a word in a given language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2013-07-08T11:46:17.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-token_distinction&quot;&gt;Token&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is a term for a string that might or might not be a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a term for non-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of the term &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word&quot;&gt;word&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is not always entirely straightforward itself; for further information compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T11:46:17.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3974" CreationDate="2013-07-08T14:36:06.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any direct knowledge of the language(s), but from the excerpt you provide, &quot;e&quot; seems to mean &quot;and&quot;, i.e., it is a coordinating conjunction: &quot;e in Tuscâna&quot; (and in Tuscany), &quot;l’Emigliàn e al Rumagnōl&quot; (Emiliano and Romagnolo), &quot;i Bizantèin gvernêven la Rumâgna e i Longobêrd l’Emélia&quot; (the Byzantines ruled Romagna and the Langobards ruled Emilia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T14:36:06.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2013-07-08T14:45:05.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion is not how Esperanto was authored, but how several &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; constructed languages have been authored. These languages tend to have little traction as several of their goals (i.e. brevity) supersede other elements that make languages usable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A posteriori&lt;/em&gt; languages, on the other hand, such as Esperanto, borrow elements from existing languages, hence making them more organic, and more likely to be adapted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2234" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-09T00:04:46.207" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T00:04:46.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3973" CreationDate="2013-07-08T18:17:22.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons for using jargon, but the primary one is precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words that are used only (or at least most commonly) within a particular profession are defined accurately by practitioners of that profession to mean something precise.  Hearing a common word can lead many people to THINK they know what it means, and be slightly wrong, whereas a word they don't know will have to be defined, and can therefore be defined precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your examples, &quot;desist&quot; means more than just stop.  It means something like &quot;stop, and don't start again, and don't do anything else so similar that we can show it has the same effect&quot;.  This is why the letter you send to someone using your intellectual property is called a &quot;cease and desist&quot; letter, rather than just a cease letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parity, on the other hand, is slightly less specific than equality.  It suggests equality in one specific way, or mere connectedness, rather than actual equality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough about medicine to know the specific meaning of onset, but it is highly likely that it is slightly different to &quot;start&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you choose a word to represent something that is already accurately contained within a word in common usage, if the concept is important within the profession in question, it is likely that a jargon word may be coined in order to avoid the word's meaning migrating over time, as words in common use are wont to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2008" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T18:17:22.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3973" CreationDate="2013-07-08T18:48:24.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to precision, jargon is used to mark status and what social group(s) you are a member of, or wish you were a part of. Such jargon then coincides/overlaps with sociolect. For instance, the Alice of &quot;Alice in Wonderland&quot; used &quot;looking glass&quot; for &quot;mirror&quot;. See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;U and non-U English&lt;/a&gt; at the Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T18:48:24.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3699" CreationDate="2013-07-08T19:25:29.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit old but I ran across it in the evaluation thread and I thought it could really use some work.  PARSE and FILL are paired constraints that in the early days of OT were used to drive epenthesis/deletion, and have largely been replaced by more general MAX and DEP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;parse&quot; here refers to the relationship between a string and some kind of structural representation (e.g. a tree, a syllabic forest, etc.), exactly as you find in syntax.  A string is parsed if every token finds a place in a structural representation; it is overparsed if the structural representation includes some pronounced slots (e.g. leaf nodes in a prosodic tree/forest) that don't correspond to any tokens in the strings, and it is underparsed if there are tokens that don't make it into the tree.  In a syllabic representation, being present in the tree means something has to be pronounced, and being not present means that whatever is missing is not pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PARSE is violated by underparsing, which if the structure is a syllable structure, amounts to deletion of the underparsed segment.  FILL is violated by overparsing, which in this case is an empty segment, leading to epenthesis.  (The choice of segment is made by other constraints.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples pulled/elaborated from McCarthy's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/052179644X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;A thematic guide to Optimality Theory&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 13, without correct IPA: (What I am elaborating is the necessary rankings that McCarthy leaves implicit in the discussion) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English /bomb/ goes to [bam], because PARSE is outranked by constraints against this type of syllable-final cluster, and is also outranked by FILL.  (Evidence McCarthy gives that the b is there underlyingly comes from e.g. &quot;bombard&quot;, &quot;bombardier&quot;.)  If FILL had outranked PARSE, we'd expect epenthesis of a neutral vowel instead, leading to...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish /skwela/ goes to [&amp;lt;&gt;skwela] (&quot;escuela&quot;), where &amp;lt;&gt; is filled in by a default/neutral vowel, probably a schwa.  Here a constraint against word-initial OCP violations (or something) would outrank FILL, which outranks PARSE, and so we get epenthesis (prothesis more specifically) to break the syllable cluster across a syllable boundary.  With this example, something more would have to be said to block epenthesis between the consonants, perhaps a constraint in favor of morphological contiguity; word initial VC syllables are pretty marked.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, the &quot;miracle&quot; referred to in the comments is that there was unpronounced and/or abstract structure in the output phonological representation, but aside from that (which is not all that crazy itself), there is nothing particularly complicated or miraculous about the implementation of these constraints.  They have fallen out of favor, and did so pretty early, because (i) they aren't very general, and in particular don't capture more general insights about markedness and faithfulness that MAX and DEP do, and (ii) tie epenthesis and deletion too closely to prosodic structure, and leave a lot of related phenomena hard to explain.  MAX and DEP (and IDENT) cover all the same cases plus much more, don't presuppose anything about the relation of segments to the prosodic structure they appear in, or require any abstract structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastEditorUserId="345" LastEditDate="2013-07-08T20:42:21.317" LastActivityDate="2013-07-08T20:42:21.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3984" CreationDate="2013-07-08T21:35:26.110" Score="2" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some grammar books, I see the term &quot;ambitransitive&quot; used to describe verbs that have two arguments in some contexts and one argument in others.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read on Wikipedia, there are generally two types of ambitransitive verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we have those whose intransitive senses have sole arguments that stand for patients.   One such verb is &quot;cook&quot; as in &quot;The turnips cooked in the pot,' vs. &quot;We cooked the turnips&quot;?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, we have verbs whose intransitive senses have sole arguments that stand for agents.   One such verb is &quot;eat,&quot; as in &quot;We ate,&quot; and &quot;We ate turnips.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm asking whether the term &quot;ambitransitive&quot; is a generally accepted term among linguists?   (I'm afraid I can't rely on Wikipedia for the answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-08T23:45:26.257" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T00:22:06.517" Title="Is the term &quot;ambitransitive&quot; controversial?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3983" CreationDate="2013-07-09T00:22:06.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ambitransitive&lt;/em&gt; is likely to have a meaning only in certain theories that make certain assumptions, like the assumption that transitivity is a property of verbs (instead of constructions), for instance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact transitivity is a very complex property, in that the details of the verb - direct object relation are very dependent on the semantics of the verb (or adjective or noun -- not all transitive constructions have verbal predicates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally we would consider &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt; prototypically intransitive, and &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; prototypically transitive. But consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1a) &lt;em&gt;He walked the dog.&lt;/em&gt;         (2a) &lt;em&gt;He ate the steak.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1b) &lt;em&gt;He walked ten miles/a lot.&lt;/em&gt; (2b) &lt;em&gt;He ate ten ounces/a lot.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1c) &lt;em&gt;He walked too much.&lt;/em&gt;        (2c) &lt;em&gt;He ate too much.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1d) &lt;em&gt;He walked today.&lt;/em&gt;           (2d) &lt;em&gt;He ate today.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1e) &lt;em&gt;Did he walk?&lt;/em&gt;               (2e) &lt;em&gt;Did he eat?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which one is &quot;transitive&quot;? Or are all verbs &quot;ambitransitive&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some other varieties of transitivity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3a) &lt;em&gt;He sells the books fast&lt;/em&gt;.   (4a) &lt;em&gt;He opened the store early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3b) &lt;em&gt;The books sell fast.&lt;/em&gt;       (4b) &lt;em&gt;The store opened early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3c) &lt;em&gt;He sells fast.&lt;/em&gt;             (4c) &lt;em&gt;He opened early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-07-09T00:22:06.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-09T15:09:48.243" Score="1" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently we can see a wave of informal language that is used across websites over the Internet. However, the language used is not impolite. Maybe it's because of the marketing issues, or stuff like that. But it's definitely polite, and non-offensive, and at the same time it's not a formal language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, we might describe it using two simple attributes: &lt;strong&gt;informal &amp;amp; polite&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a specific name for it. I was thinking of &lt;em&gt;vernacular&lt;/em&gt;, but I'm not sure if it applies or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-09T15:11:05.700" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T04:12:36.830" Title="Do we have a name for informal &amp; polite language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3985" CreationDate="2013-07-10T04:12:36.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer to your question is that no single term exists to describe the &quot;informal [but polite] language that is used across websites over the Internet&quot; nor informal/polite language in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as jlawler has pointed, in sociolinguistics the technical term for a manner of speech is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;a register&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, humans change the way they pronounce words, the words they choose, and even the grammar they use based on who they are speaking to and how they wish to be perceived. I would suggest reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/bell1984.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language Style as Audience Design&lt;/em&gt; by Allan Bell&lt;/a&gt; for a more detailed analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your question, if you wish to perform a detailed analysis you could define &quot;a polite but informal register of speech commonly used on webpages&quot; and then give examples showing the main traits of this register. If you simply want to refer to generic polite but informal speech you can simply refer to a generic &quot;polite but informal register&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final note is that I have seen some publications use the word &quot;code&quot; instead of register (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code-switcing&lt;/a&gt;) but I'd suggest sticking with register since it seems to be the more common word these days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T04:12:36.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-10T11:56:49.700" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does there exist a scale by which languages might be rated for their ability to let the user easily or concisely express concepts?&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a professional linguist, but I do find that some languages, such a Hebrew, make it more difficult to express certain subjects than do other languages. Other languages, such as Russian, make it easy to unambiguously express or confer complex ideas, even concisely. I've heard that Swahili is an inherently simple language in which one &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; express many complex (not necessarily modern) concepts, such an example would rate low on this scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T15:59:33.473" Title="Does there exist a rating scale for the &quot;conferability&quot; of languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3994" CreationDate="2013-07-10T15:58:03.027" Score="-4" ViewCount="1126" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to write a poem or some lyrics in English, I am stuck with the very strict word order and other things like articles, very repetitive usage of articles (a/an, the) that destroy the sound when you are using nouns. You cannot drop the (I, you, he/she) like in Slavic languages etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I write a poem in Czech or Slovak I like the plasticity of the words, I have much more possibilities when building rhymes, my words are free of the articles, word order I have the possibility to use the (untold) object/subject (because of the genders and grammatical cases), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Slovak language there is the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Rhythmic law&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; or rhythmic alternation length is changed for a short syllables after the previous long syllable. This law is typical for Slovak and other Slavic languages ​​do not have it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. omáčka (o-máč-ka/short-long-short) or vyúdený (vy-ú-de-ný/short-long-short-long).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen something like that in any other language. It's perfect for poetry. The rhytmic changes make it melodic and very pleasant for the ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing: I can pronounce every letter as it is(and with different modulation/tone), very hard to explain, but it's very powerful thing in poetry &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtube.com/watch?v=B8u8Nd-n2XM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youtube.com/watch?v=B8u8Nd-n2XM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it's extremely obvious to notice short-long-short-long-short-long &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/TCiZSxrWxTg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youtu.be/TCiZSxrWxTg&lt;/a&gt; it's characteristic for middle part of Slovakia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more serious &quot;Mor ho!&quot; from Samo Chalupka &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/5KCse2zSzII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://youtu.be/5KCse2zSzII&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of free word order (Czech)&#xA;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jsem z města.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; Am from city&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am from the city&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could by said in poetry (or in real life too) like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Z města jsem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; From city am&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the city I am&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Já z města jsem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; I, From city Am&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Já jsem z města&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; I am from city&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Z města já jsem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;lit.&lt;/em&gt; From city I Am&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and other combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are Slavic languages because of their plasticity better for poetry? Is there some study about using the languages in poetry (which languages are what advantages/disadvantages?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="2182" LastEditDate="2013-07-14T21:08:30.560" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T21:08:30.560" Title="Are Slavic languages better suited for poetry?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;czech&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-08-15T10:00:16.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3987" CreationDate="2013-07-10T15:59:33.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any language is, ultimately, able to convey any idea that a speaker might wish to convey. Certain languages might find certain ideas easier to convey than others (for reasons ranging from 'having a grammatical structure that's convenient for that' to 'having a large and developed technical vocabulary for that field'), but you can say anything in any language, even if you have to resort to loanwords / on-the-spot coinings or convoluted sentence structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to rate languages on how easily they can express certain individual concepts (for example, a number of languages in the Amazon would rate very high on a scale of how easy it is to note where information was obtained from; Korean and Javanese (yes, with a v) would rate high on a scale of how easy it is to reference social hierarchy, etc); but it mostly evens out on average - few, if any, languages struggle more than others on the whole.&#xA;(And really, most of the difficulty that comes with conveying complicated information is due to just not having the words, a problem that is -very- easily solvable!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-07-10T15:59:33.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4013" CreationDate="2013-07-10T19:57:57.970" Score="1" ViewCount="1291" Body="&lt;p&gt;After analyzing many words morphologically I come across the following three words which I found hard to analyze:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;linguistic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphs: lingu/ist/ic --&amp;gt; 3 morphs; Would 'lingu' be then a bound lexical morph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphemes: [lingua]+[ist]+[ic] --&amp;gt; 3morphemes; Would 'lingua' be the root to use here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;literary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphs: literary  --&amp;gt; 1 morph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphemes: [literary] --&amp;gt; 1 morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has aroused&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphs: has/arouse/d --&amp;gt; 3morphs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;morphemes: [arouse]+[present perfect] OR [have]+[3rd person]+[sg]+[arouse]+[past participle]&#xA;Is there such a thing as a present perfect morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2122" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T17:54:35.003" Title="morph/morpheme analyis" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-11T06:26:48.400" Score="2" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the allophones of /ɹ/ in General Western English?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By General Western English, I mean the dialect of English that is spoken by people raised in Seattle, WA;   Portland, OR;  and other places west of the Cascade Mountains in the USA.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard someone say that there are twelve, but I have been unable to confirm the number on the internet, and have not been able to find a specific list of them either.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-11T09:35:08.163" LastActivityDate="2013-07-11T09:35:08.163" Title="What are the allophones of /ɹ/ in General Western English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3993" CreationDate="2013-07-11T06:42:47.897" Score="3" ViewCount="646" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, a lot of languages that have nominative-accusative marking have only this type of marking.   However, languages that have ergative-absolutive marking in some contexts typically also have nominative-accusative marking in other contexts.   These are called &quot;split ergative languages.&quot;    (See the article in Wikipedia for more detail:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_ergativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_ergativity&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a lot of people talk about &quot;ergative languages.&quot;   The article just cited states that &quot;most of the so-called ergative languages are not pure but split-ergative.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there really any languages that have ergative marking but no nominative-accusative marking?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why, in general, do people refer to split-ergative languages as &quot;ergative languages&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-11T09:32:01.260" LastActivityDate="2014-05-20T00:26:17.743" Title="Why do people use the term &quot;ergative language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3992" CreationDate="2013-07-11T15:30:50.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: Since I got a downvote, I reworded my question to better reflect my original intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right in claiming that there is (very probably) no &quot;pure&quot; ergative language (although some, such as Dyirbal, come close).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then also consider that there is possibly no true accusative languages as well. While English certainly aligns fundamentally, accusatively, there are some constructions that are sensitive to other distinctions than subject/object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past participles are one such example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The sung choir (A)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The eaten glutton (Sa)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fallen leaves (Sp)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hunted rabbit (P)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past participles can only ever refer to objects (P) or affected intransitive subjects (Sp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular instance of alignment found in English participles (which some call &quot;split intransitivity&quot;) is actually the way normal sentences work in languages such as Lakhota or Guaraní.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the true answer is: there is no pure accusative/ergative/split-intransitive language, but linguists, as anyone, need labels for effective communication. That's why we use such convenient descriptions such as &quot;ergative language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastEditorUserId="1380" LastEditDate="2013-08-15T01:30:17.700" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T01:30:17.700" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3988" CreationDate="2013-07-12T06:15:26.577" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely they are better suitable. Along the properties you highlighted there are some more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Common endings of nouns and verbs makes it easier to find a suitable rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Richer set of suffixes and superposition of suffixes - makes it easier to control the desired number of syllables in a word. For example any noun has a lot of diminutives and other variants conveying the author's attitude to the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a word for &quot;black&quot;: чёрный. It has many differently suffixed forms: чёрненький, черноватый, чернявый, чернейший, наичернейший, черноватенький, чернявенький, чернушный, чернеющий, почерневший, почерневшенький, зачернённый.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-07-12T09:47:24.017" LastActivityDate="2013-07-12T09:47:24.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2013-07-12T08:46:28.387" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Czech/Slovak (parents from both countries) and I can best understand Polish, then Ukrainian and Russian and only then Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for that is that Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were always in one &quot;pack&quot; while Yugoslavia was separated by Hungary and Romania from the others. Therefore you have more Italian words in Slovenian and even more &quot;exotic&quot; in Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's because of the arrival of Hungarian tribes in around 900-1000 A.D. to this region. They separated these Slavic tribes and therefore the different &quot;outcome&quot; in the end. Of course, I am generalizing this geo-linguistic issue, it is much more complicated in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Dominik Lukes:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Bluntly, Slovak and Slovenian have nothing in common other than being both Slavic languages.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry Dominik, but this statement is completely wrong! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a lot of common words and even more word-roots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;EN              | SK         | SL&#xA;----------------+------------+------------&#xA;Slovak language | Slovenčina | Slovenščina&#xA;(he/she/it) is  | je         | je&#xA;to talk         | hovorit    | govorit&#xA;car             | auto       | avto&#xA;chin            | brada      | brada&#xA;function        | funkcia    | funkcija&#xA;eye             | oko        | oko&#xA;arm             | ruka       | roka&#xA;finger          | prst       | prst&#xA;brother         | brat       | brat&#xA;sister          | sestra     | sestra&#xA;newspaper       | časopis    | časopis&#xA;window          | okno       | okno&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw. check this ([y and i] and [ä and e] are pronounced basically the same in Slovak):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;one     | jedna | ena&#xA;two     | dva   | dva&#xA;three   | tri   | tri&#xA;four    | štyri | štiri&#xA;five    | päť   | pet&#xA;six     | šesť  | šest&#xA;seven   | sedem | sedem&#xA;eight   | osem  | osem&#xA;nine    | deväť | devet&#xA;ten     | desať | deset&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still want to say that &quot;Slovak and Slovenian have nothing in common other than being both Slavic languages&quot; after these basic number comparison showcase, you are simply being ignorant to the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T04:41:54.043" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T04:41:54.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4003" CreationDate="2013-07-12T19:09:08.803" Score="5" ViewCount="1456" Body="&lt;p&gt;Germany is called with different names in different languages, as a result of the different tribes who populated it through time, who originated the names.&#xA;A comprehensive reference for this is in the German stack:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/is-there-a-reason-why-germany-deutschland-is-called-so-many-different-things-i&quot;&gt;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/is-there-a-reason-why-germany-deutschland-is-called-so-many-different-things-i&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether are there other countries with a similar feature, namely countries which are called in different ways depending on the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T01:42:02.107" Title="Are there countries in the world whose names differ in different languages, apart from Germany?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2013-07-12T19:39:48.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First example that comes to mind is Japan, or 日本 (nihon; nippon) in Japanese. In Chinese the reading for the characters 日本 is Rìběn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, China /'tʃaɪnə/ is 中国 (Zhōngguó) in Mandarin and Chine /'ʃin/ in French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Sjiveru mentions, there's also the example of Hungary, which is more like your German example, since the difference in naming has to do with different groups occupying the territory historically. @Sjiveru mentions that: &quot;Hungary [is]...Magyarórszág in Hungarian...[and is called Hungary] because that's where the Huns settled in the 400s AD -- the modern-day 'Hungarian' people (Magyars) didn't end up there until the 800s or so.&quot; Also mentioned is Finland, which is Suomi in Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that a fuller answer will depend on how different a name has to be to count as &quot;different&quot; in your book, though we could potentially define different as &quot;originating from a different source&quot;. In that case, the Japan example falls apart, since it seems that folks believe the name &quot;Japan&quot; to be based on the Portuguese pronunciation of the Japanese or Chinese name for the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146" LastEditorUserId="146" LastEditDate="2013-07-13T02:41:36.213" LastActivityDate="2013-07-13T02:41:36.213" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4022" CreationDate="2013-07-13T07:06:45.117" Score="4" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;[I've overhauled this question.]   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I'm asking about the semantic differences, if any, between mediopassives and anticausatives.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's a definition of anticausative verb from definitions.net:   &quot;anticausative(Adjective)&#xA;(Of an intransitive verb) which shows an action affecting its subject, without indicating the cause&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of verbs that have anticausative readings include &quot;break,&quot; &quot;sink,&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;move.&quot;   For example, consider these sentences:    The window broke.   The ship sank.   The snail moved.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast the latter with these causative sentences:   Timmy broke the window.   The torpedo sank the ship.   The little boy moved the snail.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here's a definition of mediopassive that I got from the SIL glossary.   &quot;Mediopassive voice is a passive voice in which the verb has stative meaning, and actor is not expressed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (Chichewa Bantu):   In the following example, mediopassive voice is indicated by the suffix -ka:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mwana wangu wapandi-ka&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;child my beat -MEDIOPASSIVE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘My child has been beaten.’&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also heard such constructions as &quot;The shirt irons easily&quot; and &quot;The book reads well&quot; called mediopassive.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-07-17T03:38:13.470" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T03:38:13.470" Title="What is the difference between mediopassive VP's and anti-causative VP's?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;&lt;mediopassive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-14T07:37:46.483" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given two vowel phonemes that contrast by length alone, will their phonetic realizations typically have different vowel qualities?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if a language has two vowel phonemes, /ɑ:/ and /ɑ/, would they be realized as [vowel sound 1] and [vowel sound 2]-- in other words, as vowel sounds that differ by features in addition to length?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what are some common long vs. short phonetic realizations in languages that have phonemic long vs. short vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T07:54:36.327" Title="Given two vowel phonemes that contrast by length alone, will their phonetic realizations typically have different vowel qualities?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3420" CreationDate="2013-07-14T17:19:32.293" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are concrete differences between dependency-based and constituency-based tree representations (D-trees vs. PS-trees). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D-trees have the great advantage that they are minimal compared to PS-trees. Thus one can produce a D-tree for a given sentence with much less effort than one needs to produce the corresponding PS-tree for the same sentence. The number of nodes and edges in D-trees tends to be about half as many as for the corresponding PS-tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proponents of PS-trees will object, however, that minimalism and simplicity are not the entire story. Their objection is of course correct insofar as simplicity alone is of no value. A simpler model is only better if it succeeds at clarifying the phenomenon at hand as well as or better than a more complex model. (The principle is known as Occam's Razor)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal view is that the simpler D-trees can accomplish most anything that the more complex PS-trees can. In the scheme of things, each linguist has to form his/her own opinions about the strength/weaknesses of the competing principles for representing syntactic structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a brief and direct answer to the question, D-trees are more suited for those situations where simplicity and transparency are the primary concern. Dependency is now the preferred means for representing syntactic structure in computational linguistics, where one is interested above all in automated parsing of natural language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrase structure, in contrast, remains dominant in theoretical linguistics, where one tends to pay more attention to fine-grained syntactic and semantic distinctions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-07-22T14:17:51.463" LastActivityDate="2013-07-22T14:17:51.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3421" CreationDate="2013-07-14T17:39:07.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the notion of transformation still exists for most generative grammarians, although the use of the exact term &lt;em&gt;transformation&lt;/em&gt; has fallen out of favor. One tends to break transformations down into their component procedures. One acknowledges mechanisms such as &lt;em&gt;move&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt; to describe and explain how various grammatical structures are related to and derived from each other. The underlying idea remains the same, however, although the description of the transformations has become much more exact than it was in the early days of Transformational Grammar.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T17:39:07.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3283" CreationDate="2013-07-14T18:44:52.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example sentence &lt;em&gt;Pete wants to paint&lt;/em&gt;, the word combination &lt;em&gt;wants to paint&lt;/em&gt; is a simple finite verb phrase. But in the similar example &lt;em&gt;Pete wants to paint the house&lt;/em&gt;, one can no longer claim that &lt;em&gt;wants to paint&lt;/em&gt; is a verb phrase, since it no longer qualifies as a phrase (constituent) due to the presence of &lt;em&gt;the house&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to answer the question directly, there is no established term in theoretical syntax that clearly denotes a word combination consisting of a finite verb plus a &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-infinitive. However in school grammar, many grammar teachers nevertheless call such a combination a &lt;em&gt;verb phrase&lt;/em&gt;. The phrase concept is much more flexible in school grammar than it is in theoretical syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a relatively new term that theoretical syntax employs to denote the word combination like &lt;em&gt;wants to paint&lt;/em&gt;; it is a verb &lt;em&gt;catena&lt;/em&gt;. See the following article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The catena is a much more flexible unit of syntax than the phrase/constituent. Many word combinations that are not phrases or constituents but are relevant to various phenomena of syntax are catenae. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T18:44:52.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2013-07-14T19:29:48.420" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course that depends mainly on which country and which language is meant. Some names carry on the ancient names of countries and/or tribes, other ethnonyms convey the history of a long-period quarrels (settled by time or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, the Japanese and/or Chinese names of countries are fabulous, but there are also some more examples from IE languages in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start with, there is a language with no names for lands like Checkia, Hungary, Germany and Italy, and that language is Polish. The literal meaning of  the country names would be &lt;em&gt;the Checks (Czechy)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the Hungarians (Węgry)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the Speechless ones (Niemcy)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the Italians (or Włochy, as named by the Speechless ones, and please don't ask me how it comes to be)&lt;/em&gt; respectively. The names of Lithuania and Latvia in Polish also mean 'a group or a tribe' with collective sufixes: Litwa and Łotwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking on which, and moving along the European map, we meet some more examples of exotic names. Lithuanian, this ancient language of Baltic states, offers such a collection of ancient onomastic survirvors as &lt;em&gt;Lenkija (Poland)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Suomija (Finland)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Vokietija (Germany; not a big surprise)&lt;/em&gt;, and Latvian offers the hidden treasures of ages passed like &lt;em&gt;Igaunija (Estonia)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Somija (Finland again)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Vācija&lt;/em&gt; (Germans seem to lose their perfect &lt;em&gt;Clear&lt;/em&gt; toponym wherever they get into), the almost irrecognisable name of Sweden masked as &lt;em&gt;Zviedrija&lt;/em&gt; and - surprise again! - the powerful Eastern neighbour &lt;em&gt;Krievija a.k.a. Russia&lt;/em&gt; (although I used to think, up to this post, that Lithuanian shares this exotic variety of view on its occidental neighbour with Lithuanian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Swedish has nothing to surprise a linguist with, perhaps with the exception of &lt;em&gt;Ungern (Hungary).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Estonia&lt;/em&gt; itself is a good example of being both &lt;em&gt;Eesti&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Viro&lt;/em&gt; in Finnish, which also keeps the old traditions of near-neolythic naming of now-extinct tribe names in such words like &lt;em&gt;Venäjä (Russia)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ruotsi (Sweden)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Puola (Poland)&lt;/em&gt;, and calqued &lt;em&gt;Belorussia (Valko-Venäjä), Itävalta (Austria, a.k.a. Eastern State)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Alankomaat&lt;/em&gt; *(Nederlands, or Neath-Lands)*. I am not mentioning  &lt;em&gt;Tanska&lt;/em&gt; here, for its original mode of &lt;em&gt;Danmark&lt;/em&gt; is quite recognisable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Estonian names often rhynme with Finnish patterns, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Rootsi (Sweden)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Venemaa (Venäjä)&lt;/em&gt;, and even if &lt;em&gt;the Netherlands&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;Holland&lt;/em&gt;, being occasionally &lt;em&gt;Madalmaad&lt;/em&gt; (Lowlands), the &lt;em&gt;Danmark&lt;/em&gt; is still &lt;em&gt;Taani&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;Norway&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Norra&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of other Finno-Ugric languages I am familiar with, Komi mostly copies the Russian names, with the exception of &lt;em&gt;Russia (Rochmu)&lt;/em&gt;, and Hungarian claims &lt;em&gt;Italy&lt;/em&gt; to be &lt;em&gt;Olaszország&lt;/em&gt;, otherwise adding the &lt;em&gt;ország&lt;/em&gt; *(-land)* part to the rest of most other country names: &lt;em&gt;Spanyolország (Spain), Németország (Germany), Lengyelország (Poland)&lt;/em&gt; and masked mysterious &lt;em&gt;Magyarország (Hungary)&lt;/em&gt;, not mentioning &lt;em&gt;Észtország (Estonia)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Lettország&lt;/em&gt; *(Latvia)* or &lt;em&gt;Oroszország (Russia)&lt;/em&gt; together with  &lt;em&gt;Írország (Ireland)&lt;/em&gt;. They are strange, but mostly regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &lt;em&gt;not so&lt;/em&gt; regular, is the Ghaelic orthography, and here are some interesting Irish examples; &lt;em&gt;An Eilbheis (Swissland)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An t-Seic (Check Republic)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Innis Tìle (Iceland)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An Eadailt (Italy)&lt;/em&gt;, and almost any other country the name of which is made irrecognisible by a magic spell casted with Irish orthography: &lt;em&gt;A' Bhealaruis (Belorussia)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Moldàibhia (Moldova)&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;An Laitbhe (Latvia)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Ireland&lt;/em&gt; itself becomes Poblachd na &lt;em&gt;h-Èireann&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Beurla&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Sasainn&lt;/em&gt;, but I think there is nothing outstanding about these facts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trivia:&lt;/strong&gt; the Irish name for Englishmen would make most of Russians laugh, since &lt;em&gt;Sasanach&lt;/em&gt; in Irish is pronounced almost like &lt;em&gt;'wtf'&lt;/em&gt; in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Basque language shows a certain modesty in exoticism as compared to this Indo-European feast of onomastics; &lt;em&gt;Errumania, Errusia, Eslovakia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Eslovenia&lt;/em&gt; are just &lt;em&gt;Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia; Txekia&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Checkia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Herbehereak&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;Neath-Lands&lt;/em&gt; again, but why &lt;em&gt;Serbia, Suedia, Suitxa (Swiss) and San Marino&lt;/em&gt; have no initial *E*s? This is just unfair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Of course, I am not referring here to Erresuma Batua, since the United Kingdom is a strange pair of words when translated into any other language; nor speaking I about Montenegro, which is sometimes translated into other languages as Black+Mountain, and sometimes, not.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T08:55:22.147" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T08:55:22.147" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3988" CreationDate="2013-07-14T19:39:14.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, a suitability of a language for creative writing is a matter of creative witer' s language proficiency. Any language fits just fine, the trick is to let its poetics flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking on Slavic languages, I thing that irregular word order together with, say, irregular word stress (like in Russian) is more like a disaster for a poetic rhythm than an advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-07-14T19:53:40.243" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T19:53:40.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-07-14T19:45:31.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the possible answers is that conlangs are arts, and to make art, you have to be creative. Being creative, in turn, implies living in comfort, and it has always been easier to create individual comfort than to make some comfort for an institution, or for a society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T01:46:59.980" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T01:46:59.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4007" CreationDate="2013-07-14T21:36:02.657" Score="2" ViewCount="795" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any leads as to the etymology of the greek words &lt;em&gt;sigao&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://biblesuite.com/greek/4601.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;strongs # 4601&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;sige&lt;/em&gt; (strongs # sige) which are translated &lt;em&gt;silence&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;silent&lt;/em&gt; respectively in the new testament?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-15T01:59:16.077" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T15:36:01.173" Title="Etymology of the Biblical Greek words &quot;sigao&quot; and &quot;sige&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4006" CreationDate="2013-07-14T23:03:13.737" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chantraine, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec/Chantraiine-DictionnaireEtymologiqueGrec#page/n1019/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says the etymology is &quot;obscure&quot; and refers to two hypotheses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that it derives from an &quot;expressive syllable&quot; σι-, which I suppose is analogous to English &lt;em&gt;shh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that it derives from a conjectural &lt;em&gt;swīg-&lt;/em&gt; which is also ancestral to Ger &lt;em&gt;schweigen&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to be mute&quot;, and goes back to PIE &lt;em&gt;su̯ī-, -g-, -k-, -p-&lt;/em&gt; (Pokorny 1052), &quot;fade, weaken, etc.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further references are at the link above. The Pokorny entry is online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2013-07-14T23:03:13.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15378" CreationDate="2013-07-15T01:09:15.243" Score="5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, does any natural language have 2nd person pronouns or verb conjugations that vary according to whether ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)   All of the people for whom the speaker's remarks are intended are present.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b)   Some of the people for whom the speaker's remarks are intended are present and others are absent. &#xA;c)   None of the people for whom the speaker's or writer's remarks are intended are present at the delivery of the message?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condition a) would apply, for example, when a speaker is sharing a secret intended only for those present in the room with her, or when a speaker is addressing all and only the members of a present crowd, such as a graduating class.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condition b) would apply, for example, when the speaker's remarks are intended for all members of an organization, both those who are listening to the speaker and those who are absent.   For example, a CEO might give a speech whose message applies to all company employees both present and absent from the setting of the speech.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condition c) would apply when the speaker or writer recorded or wrote his message alone, for example, in a last will and testament or in a recording sent to relatives on disc.  Some might use such a form to talk to dead relatives.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; this in natural languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T16:13:33.120" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T07:32:54.593" Title="Do any natural languages vary the form of the 2nd person markers according to whether the intended audience is present or absent?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4012" CreationDate="2013-07-15T07:04:57.503" Score="7" ViewCount="1453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Esperanto accepting new root words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this process done and you can create new words only by combining existing ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T06:41:31.630" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T19:39:21.763" Title="Is Esperanto accepting new root words?" Tags="&lt;esperanto&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2013-07-15T14:01:09.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference you point to has to do with the position of predicative and non-predicative expressions in sentences. English usually places non-predicative PPs after the predicate, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a.  It was funny for the kids.&#xA;    b. *It was for the kids funny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, &lt;em&gt;funny&lt;/em&gt; is a predicative adjective; it forms the predicate with &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;. German and (I assume) Dutch have two options for placing non-predicative expressions. The standard position is in the Mittelfeld (middle field) before the predicative expression, but they can also be placed in the Nachfeld (after field) after the predicative expression, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) a.  Es war fuer die Kinder lustig. (It was for the kids funny.)&#xA;    b. ?Es war lustig fuer die Kinder. (It was funny for the kids.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence is considered good German, whereas the second sentence has a looser feel; it belongs to a conversational register or is used to place emphasis on the PP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question more directly, &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; is a predicative expression in the original Dutch example. As such, there are options and tendencies where non-predicative material should appear in relation to the predicate. English tends to keep the words of a predicate closer together, only certain adverbials can split the predicate, e.g. &lt;em&gt;It was definitely funny&lt;/em&gt;, whereas German and Dutch often split the words of a predicate, creating what is known as a Mittelfeld (middle field), in which all sorts of non-predicate material is placed. But heavier constituents (e.g. PPs) can at times also appear in the Nachfeld (after field) after the predicative expression depending on register or desire for emphasis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand this explanation, one needs to have some understanding of predicates and how they are manifest in German/Dutch and English. Wikipedia has a couple of articles that can help establish some of the necessary background knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendler_classes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendler_classes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicative_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicative_expression&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T14:01:09.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2013-07-15T16:52:04.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, new words come into the lexicon in a variety of ways, including borrowings, coinages, derivations from existing words, and extensions of meaning of existing words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T16:52:04.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2013-07-15T17:13:46.743" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zamenhof borrowed and made up the first batch of words. He encouraged people to Esperantize words from their mother tongue if they didn't know a word. So from the beginning, there wasn't a central source of authority for new words. This contrasts with other new languages, such as Klingon, toki pona, Tolkien's Elivish, where the stock of root words is limited by the number of words the inventor published. (Derivational creation of words is pretty much unavoidable, even in isolating languages)  This doesn't stop people from creating new words, but coining new root words aren't part of the &quot;game&quot; in those community.  This is analogous to the rule about having 52 cards in a standard playing card deck-- you can create a new one, but community standards, existing rules of the game don't encourage it and it doesn't happen in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that there are native Esperanto speakers, the language is evolving much like any other natural language.  I think there is a language board for Esperanto, I'm not sure if it attempts to create new words (like the French one does) or if it is effective at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T17:13:46.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3990" CreationDate="2013-07-15T23:20:25.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;lingu-&lt;/em&gt; part may well be analyzed as a bound root. It depends somewhat on the inclination of the analyst, but for many linguists the presence of the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;linguist&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; is clearly carrying out its usual function of indicating a person specializing in some field of expertise, is more than enough evidence to show that the word &lt;em&gt;linguist&lt;/em&gt; is morphologically complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More controversially, the presence of the &lt;em&gt;lingu-&lt;/em&gt; morpheme without &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;lingual&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sublingual&lt;/em&gt; may be further evidence, though there the meaning 'tongue' is far more common than the meaning 'language', so that may be a different morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see little evidence to suggest that the root in question is &lt;em&gt;lingua-&lt;/em&gt;, since I don't know of any English words where the [a] shows up clearly. (The [a] in &lt;em&gt;lingual&lt;/em&gt; comes from the suffix &lt;em&gt;-al&lt;/em&gt;.) So I'd argue that the morpheme is just &lt;em&gt;lingu-&lt;/em&gt;, and it's a bound root roughly meaning 'language', although as with many bound morphemes, it may enter into complex words whose meanings can't be composed purely from their parts (i.e. morphological idioms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2250" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T23:20:25.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2013-07-15T23:21:33.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linguistic feature you're talk about is the difference between an &lt;em&gt;endonym&lt;/em&gt; and an &lt;em&gt;exonym&lt;/em&gt;. An endonym is the name that an ethnic group gives to their own topographic space, while an exonym is that given to the group by an external group. These terms can also extend to the name of the cultural group, or the name of their language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty common around the world as you can see from all the examples above, given that groups generally have a different perspective on themselves than others external to them do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2013-07-15T23:21:33.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4018" CreationDate="2013-07-16T04:57:12.940" Score="5" ViewCount="1057" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've read (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case&lt;/a&gt;) applicative voice occurs when an oblique noun phrase becomes an argument of the verb when the verb takes some applicative morpheme.   As the article points out, &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; like this happens in English when a sentence like &quot;Jack ran faster than the giant&quot; becomes &quot;Jack outran the giant.&quot;  But in the many other languages that mark verbs with applicative morphemes, applicative voice is much more productive.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article states that &quot;A language may have multiple applicatives, each corresponding to such different roles as comitative, locative, instrumental, and benefactive.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, do applicative verbs marked for such roles ever govern different cases?   For example, is there a language in which a verb marked with a benefactive applicative morpheme must have an argument or &quot;object&quot; in benefactive case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-16T06:14:20.050" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T10:54:23.463" Title="Do applicative verbs ever govern the cases of their objects?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-16T05:08:11.633" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, specificity of reference and the use of definite vs. indefinite articles don't always co-vary.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &quot;A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,&quot; and &quot;The bird is the only living feathered creature,&quot; both &quot;a bird&quot; and &quot;the bird&quot; have non-specific reference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &quot;A bird came to my window one day,&quot; and &quot;The bird pecked at my cat's head,&quot; both &quot;a bird&quot; and &quot;the bird&quot; have specific reference.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does the apparent independence of specificity and definiteness hold true across languages?  (Does it even always hold true in English?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T05:08:11.633" Title="Does the relationship between definiteness and specificity vary across languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2013-07-16T10:54:23.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.benjamins.com/catalog/sl.34.4.01bug&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bugaeva (2010: 752)&lt;/a&gt; sums up prototypical applicatives as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The applicative is typically described as a syntactic construction signaled by&#xA;  overt verbal morphology which allows the coding of a semantically peripheral&#xA;  argument or adjunct as a core object argument (Peterson 2007: 1; cf. Comrie 1985:&#xA;  III-316, Spencer 1991: 253, and Polinsky 2005: 442). This newly introduced object&#xA;  argument is usually referred to as an applicative object (henceforth AO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above definition implies that, a prototypical applicative construction has&#xA;  the following three properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;An applicative construction increases verb valency by one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;An applicative construction provides an alternative to oblique realization of&#xA;  a semantically and syntactically peripheral participant, i.e. there must exist a&#xA;  non-applicative (base) construction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;An applicative construction does not involve non-peripheral participants,&#xA;  such as Agent and Theme/Patient. Addition of an Agent typically results in&#xA;  causativization; likewise, addition of a Theme/Patient results in non-causative&#xA;  transitivization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applicatives therefore wouldn't ever govern a case other than accusative (or however direct objects are marked). What they do do is take some peripheral or oblique argument (like a location or benefactive) and make it into a core argument (specifically, a direct object). Here's an example and its non-applicative paraphrase from Ainu (from Bugaeva 2010: 753):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. &lt;em&gt;casi upsor &lt;strong&gt;ta&lt;/strong&gt; ahun=an ruwe ne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  castle inside &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; enter.SG=IND.S INF.EV COP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘I entered the castle.’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;casi upsor&lt;/strong&gt; a=Ø=&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;-ahun ruwe ne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;castle inside&lt;/strong&gt; IND.A=3.O=&lt;strong&gt;to.APPL&lt;/strong&gt;-enter.SG INF.EV COP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘I entered the castle.’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1a), &lt;em&gt;casi upsor&lt;/em&gt; takes the postposition &lt;em&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt;, which indicates it is an oblique argument, specifically, a location. However, the applicative paraphrase in (1b) doesn't have the postposition, and instead has the locative applicative morpheme &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt;. Additionally, Ainu has no case marking but has the strict word order of SV in simple intransitive clauses, and SOV in simple transitive clauses. This means that &lt;em&gt;casi upsor&lt;/em&gt; here is likely the direct object. This is also backed up by the verbal agreement marking. In the indefinite person, like we have here, Ainu has a tripartite system, with the subject of transitive clauses, the subject of intransitive clauses, and the direct object of transitive clauses each being marked differently (&lt;em&gt;a(n)-&lt;/em&gt; for A, &lt;em&gt;-an&lt;/em&gt; for S, and &lt;em&gt;i-&lt;/em&gt; for O). We see the overt agreement suffix here being the intransitive one, &lt;em&gt;-an&lt;/em&gt; in the non-applicative paraphrase, and the transitive one, &lt;em&gt;a(n)-&lt;/em&gt; in the applicative version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ctjhuang/NTNU/Pylkkanen_2002.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pylkkänen (2002)&lt;/a&gt; looked at the similarities between &quot;true&quot; applicatives, like those that are found in Ainu, and double direct versus dative ditransitive verbs in English through a minimalist framework and found some fundamental differences, terming the former &quot;high applicatives&quot;, and the latter &quot;low applicatives&quot;. For instance, you cannot add a benefactive participant to an English unergative verb, but you can in the Bantu language Luganda:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(11)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c. I ran.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  d. *I ran &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;. [meaning ‘I ran for his sake’--my addition] (Pylkkänen 2002: 17)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(31)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. &lt;em&gt;Mukasa ya-tambu-&lt;strong&gt;le&lt;/strong&gt;-dde &lt;strong&gt;Katonga&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mukasa PAST-walk-&lt;strong&gt;APPL&lt;/strong&gt;-PAST &lt;strong&gt;Katonga&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘Mukasa walked for Katonga’ (Pylkkänen 2002: 25) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T10:54:23.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3201" CreationDate="2013-07-16T12:59:18.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From an applicative point of view the following software solutions are quite popular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Aspell (which replaces Ispell)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunspell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hunspell&lt;/a&gt;, look at the quite impressive list of uses, including Apache Solr, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchant_%28software%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Enchant&lt;/a&gt; is an interesting aggregator as it capable of having multiple backends loaded at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2251" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T12:59:18.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3710" CreationDate="2013-07-16T13:22:03.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in the philosophical side of this question, there are relevant texts by Leibniz, who mastered several languages. He had a take on the way one thinks with or without symbols:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is only too true that even in their minds men put words in place of&#xA;ideas, especially when the ideas are complex and indeterminate. But it&#xA;is true also, as you have observed, that in such a case the mind&#xA;contents itself with merely taking note of the truth without yet&#xA;understanding it, being convinced that it can understand it whenever&#xA;it wants to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. W. Leibniz, &lt;em&gt;New Essays on Human Understanding&lt;/em&gt;, Book IV, Chap. 5, § 4 (text available here for instance: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/ne41.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/ne41.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following publication (in German) provides a good overview of the subject:  S. Krämer, &lt;em&gt;Symbolische Erkenntnis bei Leibniz&lt;/em&gt;, 1992. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/20483450&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/20483450&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2251" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T13:22:03.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3998" CreationDate="2013-07-16T13:32:58.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Levin calls it a middle construction in English Verb Classes and Alternations. She provides lots of references. Of the two names you're asking about, only &quot;mediopassive&quot; seems to be used in the titles, while &quot;middle&quot; is far more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condoravdi, C. (1989) &quot;The Middle: Where Semantics and Morphology Meet,&quot; Student Conference in Linguistics 1989, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 11, MIT,&#xA;Cambridge, MA, 16-30.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Croft, W.A. (1991) Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations, University of&#xA;Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curme, G.O. (1931) A Grammar of the English Language, D.C. Heath, Boston. Reprinted 1977 by Verbatim, Essex, CT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidse, K. (1992) &quot;Transitivity/Ergativity: The Janus-Headed Grammar of Actions and Events,&quot; in M. Davies and L. Ravelli, eds., Advances in Systemic Linguistics, Pinter, London, 105-135.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dezso, L. (1980) &quot;Middle and Causative Constructions in English and Hungarian,&quot; in W. Nemser, Studies in English and Hungarian Contrastive Linguistics, Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 207-231.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dixon, R.M.W. (1991) A New Approach to English Grammar, On Semantic Principles, Oxford University Press, Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doran, E. and M. Rappaport Hovav (1991) &quot;Affectedness and Extemalization,&quot; NELS 21, 81-94.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emonds, J.E. (1976) A Transformational Approach to English Syntax, Academic Press, New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erades, P.A. (1950) &quot;Points of Modern English Syntax,&quot; English Studies 31, 153-157.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fagan, S. (1988) &quot;The English Middle,&quot; Linguistic Inquiry 19, 181-203.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fagan, S.M.B. (1992) The Syntax and Semantics of Middle Constructions, Cambridge&#xA;University Press, Cambridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fellbaum, C. (1985) &quot;Adverbs in Agentless Actives and Passives,&quot; Papers from the&#xA;Parasession on Causatives and Agentivity, CLS 21 , Part 2, 21-31 .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fellbaum, C . (1992) &quot;Review of R.M.W. Dixon: A New Approach to English Grammar.&#xA;On Semantic Principles,&quot; Language 68, 642-645.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gawron, M.J. (1983) Lexical Representations and the Semantics of Complementation, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geniusiene, E. (1987) The Typology of Reflexives, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grady, M. (1965) &quot;The Medio-Passive Voice in Modern English,&quot; Word 21, 270-272.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hale, K.L. and S.J. Keyser (1986) &quot;Some Transitivity Alternations in English,&quot; Lexicon Project Working Papers 7, Center for Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hale, K.L. and S.J. Keyser (1987) &quot;A View from the Middle,&quot; Lexicon Project Working Papers 1 0, Center for Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hale, K.L. and S.J. Keyser (1988) &quot;Explaining and Constraining the English Middle,&quot; in C. Tenny, ed. (1988), 41-58.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halliday, M.A.K. (1967) &quot;Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English Part I,&quot; Journal ofLinguistics 3, 37-81.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halliday, M.A.K. (1968) &quot;Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English Part III,&quot; Journal ofLinguistics 4, 179-215.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hatcher, A.G. (1943) &quot;'Mr. Howard Amuses Easy',&quot; Modern Language Notes 58, 8-17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jaeggli, O.A. (1986) &quot;Passive,&quot; Linguistic Inquiry 17, 587-622.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jespersen, 0. (1927) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part 3&#xA;Syntax, Vol. 2, Carl Winter, Heidelberg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keyser, S.J. and T. Roeper (1984) &quot;On the Middle and Ergative Constructions in&#xA;English,&quot; Linguistic Inquiry 15, 381--416.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keyser, S.J. and T. Roeper (1992) &quot;Re: The Abstract Clitic Hypothesis,&quot; Linguistic Inquiry 23, 89-125.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poutsma, H. (1904) A Grammar of Late Modern English, P. Noordhoff, Groningen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roberts, I.G. (1987) The Representation of Implicit and Dethematized Subjects, Foris, Dordrecht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stroik, T. (1992) &quot;Middles and Movement, &quot;Linguistic Inquiry 23, 127-137.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sunden, K.F. (1916a) The Predicational Categories in English (Essay 1), The University Press, Uppsala.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sunden, K.F. (l916b) A Category of Predicational Change in English (Essay II), The University Press, Uppsala. (Published together with Sunden (1916a).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Van Oosten, J. (1977) &quot;Subjects and Agenthood in English,&quot; CLS 13 , 459-47 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilkins, W. (1987) &quot;On the Linguistic Function of Event Roles,&quot; BLS 13, 460-472.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Williams, E. (1981) &quot;Argument Structure and Morphology,&quot; The Linguistic Review 1, 81-114.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zubizarreta, M.L. (1987) Levels of Representation in the Lexicon and in the Syntax, Foris, Dordrecht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2252" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T13:32:58.830" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3998" CreationDate="2013-07-16T20:49:00.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do either of these terms have definitive definitions among linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. I have yet to meet structural categories in linguistics that have single, universally agreed upon definitions. Even &quot;word&quot; is not strictly defined in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can compare terms only within the same framework. &quot;Mediopassive&quot; is a term used generally in historical linguistics for a certain kind of language-particular constructions/forms - anticausative is a term i know from typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless given a precise definition of the terms, I don't think it is possible to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1380" LastActivityDate="2013-07-16T20:49:00.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3489" CreationDate="2013-07-17T15:30:37.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use &lt;a href=&quot;http://mokk.bme.hu/resources/hunalign/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hunalign&lt;/a&gt; or one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/tools.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tools used by the open source parallel corpus&lt;/a&gt; (the main one, uplug, has several parts designed to align sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read about &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/corporal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CorporAl&lt;/a&gt; but I do not know if there is a stable version of it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2251" LastActivityDate="2013-07-17T15:30:37.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4031" CreationDate="2013-07-18T22:57:58.023" Score="4" ViewCount="4195" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the only difference between these two ways of describing classes of words is that 'syntactic categories' actually relies on evidence of use for determining categories, while 'parts of speech' labels can just be applied without any appeal to evidence. There is also the term 'word classes' which appears to be similar, but also used without specification. &#xA;Are they simply used by different sub-disciplines of linguistics? Or are there more specific differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2013-07-19T04:42:47.067" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T12:18:13.497" Title="What's the difference between 'parts of speech' and 'syntactic categories'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2013-07-19T08:01:48.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What follows is just my impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Syntactic category&lt;/em&gt; is a term that has a formal definition in a few grammar formalisms. In contrast, &quot;part of speech&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;intuitive&lt;/em&gt; class of a word. I suppose the equivalent term for syntactic category in HPSG would be &lt;em&gt;Typed Feature Structures&lt;/em&gt; or just &lt;em&gt;signs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In CCG, for example, the syntactic category &lt;code&gt;S\NP&lt;/code&gt; refers to many things: intransitive verb, transitive verb with the object filled-in, a &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; verb phrase, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, given the phrases &quot;young Obama&quot; and &quot;Barack Obama&quot;, a (trained) person may tag &quot;young&quot; as adjective and &quot;Barack&quot; as noun. However, in CCG, they are both &lt;code&gt;N/N&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T08:01:48.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2013-07-19T10:22:06.677" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Esperanto does both. One can introduce a neologism, a new international term. Or by combining existing word parts. Not introducing new words is considered optimal, as it saves in words to know. However the new combination must be understandable, and optimally intuitively formable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the terms exist in parallel, until a concensus crystalizes. Usage, listing in partial dictionaries of communities, communications. There are unfortunately no accelerating, prescriptive institutions. An Akademio de Esperanto is rather conservative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally &lt;strong&gt;komput-i&lt;/strong&gt; meant &lt;em&gt;count&lt;/em&gt; as in Geiger counter. Computer got a neologismo &lt;strong&gt;komputero†&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;komputoro†&lt;/strong&gt;, but nowadays &lt;strong&gt;komput-il-o&lt;/strong&gt; (tool to compute) and &lt;strong&gt;komput-i&lt;/strong&gt; is enlarged to mean &lt;em&gt;compute&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early years there was &lt;strong&gt;hospital-o&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;mal-san-ul-ej-o&lt;/strong&gt; (quite notorious).&#xA;The term &lt;strong&gt;malsanulejo&lt;/strong&gt;, comparable with the German &lt;em&gt;Krankenhaus&lt;/em&gt;*, means literally place (-ej) of persons (-ul) with property sick (mal-san-a), opposite (mal-) of healthy (san). The term &lt;strong&gt;malsanulejo&lt;/strong&gt; can be nicely used as negative example of Esperanto, but in fact is quite popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are terms without need for introducing neologisms. Animal related names are a positive example of active language possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hundo = dog, hundino = female dog, virhundo = male dog, hundido = dog welp, hundejo = dog kennel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ĉevalo = horse, ĉevalino, virĉevalo, ĉevalido, ĉevalejo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;koko = chicken, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are stricter guide lines to a good neologism, as Esperanto serves some (European) language families.&#xA; - The esperantized spelling should be phonetic, though keep visual similarities. &lt;strong&gt;ĝeneral-a&lt;/strong&gt; = (adj.) general, not ĵenerala (more phonetic).&#xA; - The term should not already exist as other word, or have several meanings internationally.&#xA; - The term should not be too similar to existing words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T10:22:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2013-07-19T11:49:53.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are talking about &lt;em&gt;mental design&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at Esperanto, and its initial creator, the &lt;em&gt;non-linguist&lt;/em&gt; Zamenhof. He actually took years playing with notions (not entirely alone), and there are many ideas in the language, that are worth essaying on. For instance endings -a (adj), -e (adv), -o (n) and suffixes -in- -ist- -ebl- have the feature starting with a vowel, so they are chainable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unknown to many, even Esperanto speakers, Zamenhof first played with a proto-version, trying out other vowels for endings. Though the pronunciation of &quot;..io&quot; more involves a stop than a y transition, he refrained from &quot;..ijo..&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zamenhof also chose very short consonant cut-off monosylabic digits (except for 1): unu du tri &lt;em&gt;kvar&lt;/em&gt; _kvin_ ses &lt;em&gt;sep&lt;/em&gt; _ok_ naŭ &lt;em&gt;dek&lt;/em&gt;. This helps with counting (aloud), an area where a foreign speaker often reverts to his native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a commitee not necessarily is better suited for such initial design work. The large manco of Esperanto is its undocumentedness. And - beside the more passive Akademio de Esperanto - one would have hoped for more productive linguistic commitees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider Interlingua, which is linguistically based, and community oriented. The language has other merits, but I find its concept certainly not better funded. I would rather delve into Lingua Franca Nova; but I am very biased to my Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T11:49:53.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2013-07-19T15:29:19.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an aposteriori language Esperanto takes its words from existing languages. It does however have the notion of word stem plus &lt;strong&gt;-o&lt;/strong&gt; for noun, &lt;strong&gt;-a&lt;/strong&gt; for adjective, &lt;strong&gt;-as&lt;/strong&gt; for verb present tense, and so on. And it reduces some pseudo-suffixes in word stems somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nacio = nation (reduced &quot;~tion&quot; to &quot;~ci&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nacia = national (reduced &quot;~al&quot; to &quot;-a&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;naciigi = nationalize (-ig meaning &quot;make&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;kombini = combine&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kombinas = combinates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kombino, kombinaĵo = combination (-aĵ = product, aĵo = thing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see there is some reduction of pseudo-suffixes, in favour of systematic endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numerals are - apart from 1 - all monosyllabic. Why 1 is the exception, one may guess. Esperanto has no indefinite article (English &quot;a&quot;), so maybe a security measure. The digits are also reduced in an almost Volapük like manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unu du tri &lt;strong&gt;kvar kvin&lt;/strong&gt; ses &lt;strong&gt;sep ok&lt;/strong&gt; naŭ &lt;strong&gt;dek&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage is easy counting. Where a foreign speaker often tends to fall back on his native language where counting, Esperanto helps a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However to come back to your question: Esperanto does not reduce much, and it would have not be so much better. Volapük (&quot;Worldspeak&quot;) shows that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing away with categorical suffixes (~ation, ~al, ~ess, ~ine) did not come without a (shorter) substitution, though systematized. This does not make Esperanto texts much more compact though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Esperanto gives a better active language possession, especially for non-europeans, providing an automatic assurrance of correctness, there exist other perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interlingua goes entirely the natural way, to have readable text close to the natural languages - with several pseudo-suffixes to make an adjective from a noun, and so on. So Interlingua is a language &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reducing its syllables. &lt;em&gt;Nevertheless people love the language, and do not care to switch to Esperanto.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the three in order of reduction-to-natural, failed Volapük (very reductive), successful Esperanto, and &quot;linguistic&quot; Interlingua, I think the majority of linguistics tend more in the direction of Interlingua than Esperanto (a shame). So reduction is no compelling advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T15:29:19.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2013-07-19T17:06:35.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;part of speech&lt;/em&gt; is narrower than the term &lt;em&gt;syntactic category&lt;/em&gt;. Every part of speech is a syntactic category, but many syntactic categories are not parts of speech. This holds particularly of the distinction between word and phrase. Words are parts of speech, but phrases are not. A noun is a part of speech and a syntactic category, whereas a noun phrase is a syntactic category but not a part of speech. An adjective is a part of speech and a syntactic category, whereas an adjective phrase is a syntactic category but not a part of speech. Thus the term &lt;em&gt;part of speech&lt;/em&gt; denotes a subgroup inside the greater group denoted by &lt;em&gt;syntactic category&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-07-19T17:06:35.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2013-07-19T23:03:12.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.remush.be/tezauro/PIV.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.remush.be/tezauro/PIV.xml&lt;/a&gt; you'll find&#xA;In green: the words chosen by Zamenhof in his Universala vortaro&#xA;In red: the official words later added by the Academy of Esperanto.&#xA;In black: the words added by individuals, and generally accepted by the community.&#xA;Between [brackets]: a few examples of words commonly built by users of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2231" LastEditorUserId="2231" LastEditDate="2013-07-20T17:52:51.653" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T17:52:51.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4034" CreationDate="2013-07-20T20:11:36.770" Score="13" ViewCount="1966" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do some languages change more slowly or quickly than others?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what factors slow or accelerate the rate of change?   (For this question, let's forget about the possible effects of modern mass media and concentrate on factors that might have always affected the rate of language change.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that, as long as a language has native speakers, the language will change.   But how fast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Thanks go to the book, &quot;Language Myths&quot; (Laurie Bauer, ed.), for telling us lay people that Appalachian dialects of English are not the same as Elizabethan English.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T03:55:48.060" Title="Do languages change at different rates?" Tags="&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4033" CreationDate="2013-07-20T23:03:48.163" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages definitely change at different rates. A clear contrast is between Icelandic and some dialects of Norwegian - Icelandic has one of the slowest rates of change observed (Icelandic schoolkids can read the Norse sagas as easily as English-speaking schoolkids can read Shakespeare), but certain Norwegian dialects have some of the highest rates observed. And yet both are North Germanic - clearly speed of change is independent of the actual language that's changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear at all what causes these disparities. To some degree, isolation seems to be a factor, but it's not obvious which direction it pushes (Norwegian dialects were pretty isolated from each other due to mountains, and Icelandic has been pretty isolated from the rest of the world due to location). Other factors may include how many people are learning the language as adults (more learners tends to lead to innovations that simplify things), and the level of visibility of a written prestige/standard variety (since standard/prestige varieties tend to be based on older forms of the language, and speakers may want to emulate prestigious writing styles in speech). There may be additional factors as well, some of which might well be due to the language itself - for example, if a language ends up in some kind of unstable state (say, with a very unbalanced vowel system), it may suddenly right itself, thus triggering a cascade of further changes (say, if rebalancing the vowel system results in ambiguity in person-marking verb suffixes; then the person-marking suffixes will themselves change). Indeed, there's so many potential factors affecting speed-of-change that it's very hard to isolate any one to study it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some aspects of the mechanics of linguistic change are fairly well understood (we have a pretty good idea about how things like phonemic imbalances and articulatory difficulty can cause change), other factors (for example, things like sound changes not caused by either of the above) are less well understood. Rate-of-change and change timing are things that we just don't really know that much about yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-07-20T23:03:48.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4033" CreationDate="2013-07-20T23:46:59.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, languages change at different rates. An Italian linguist, Matteo Giulio Bartoli, elaborated 5 norms that can help explain or at least understand how languages can change differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I've studied these norms in Italian so the English translation I'll be giving them might not be what you can see in books, researches, etc. Please note that I might not be choosing the best terminology, so feel free to comment for corrections. For example &quot;form&quot; is here intended as &quot;linguistic phase of a language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples are not meant to be fully meaningful sentences but only represent how words (nouns and adjectives) change depending on their geographical location. Also, the words are presumably Latin forms that give origin to the modern words and do not represent the modern language itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norma dell'Area Isolata&lt;/strong&gt; (Isolated Area)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one states an isolated area (and so less exposed to commerce and communicaton) usually keeps an early linguistic form. An example of this is Icelandic, very similar to the Old Norse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is Sardinian, derived from Latin, that still keeps many features of this language unlike Italian that evolved quite a bit from it. A clear example is the use of the personal pronoun &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt; to say &quot;I&quot; in some towns&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sardegna: domus magnus ager&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Iberia: casa grandis campus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gallia: casa grandis campus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Italia: casa grandis campus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dacia: casa mare campus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norma dell'Area Centrale&lt;/strong&gt; (Central Area)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lateral areas will usually keep a later form than the central area, with the condition that the central area is not an isolated area. An example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Iberia: equa mūtāre formōsus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gallia: caballa cambiare bellus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Italia: caballa cambiare bellus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dacia: equa mūtāre formōsus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central one will present an innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norma dell'Area Maggiore&lt;/strong&gt; (Bigger Area)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger, wider area will usually keep the early form. The condition is that the smaller area is also not the isolated area or the sum of the lateral areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Iberia: cor deus furnus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gallia: cor deus furnus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Italia: cor deus furnus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dacia: anima dominus deus coctōrium&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norma dell'Area Seriore&lt;/strong&gt; (Older Area, seriore means &quot;chronologically later&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The zones where the language has arrived later will keep an early form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin: edĕre &gt; Spanish: (comedere) &gt; comer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Latin: manducāre &gt; Italian: mangiare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin reached Spain after Italy for obvious reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norma della Fase Sparita&lt;/strong&gt; (Disappeared form)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a geographical norm, rather it states that if we have two phases/forms and one of them died or is about to, and the other one survives, the first one is usually the early form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: Sardinian is not a &quot;single&quot; language but has countless varieties, usually changing from town to town. Being the more different the farther you go from a certain location.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-07-21T21:54:39.363" LastActivityDate="2013-07-21T21:54:39.363" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4044" CreationDate="2013-07-22T04:51:44.063" Score="3" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Across ergative languages, is there a case that typically marks the arguments in copular &amp;amp; existential clauses?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in sentences that translate as &quot;The beetle is red&quot; and &quot;There is a flower nearby,&quot; is there a case with which most ergative languages would mark the equivalents of &quot;beetle&quot; and &quot;flower&quot;?   For example, would that case usually be the absolutive case?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would the case in question vary across ergative languages?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also asking about ergative languages in which clauses without verbs have existential meaning or specify relationships such as &quot;being the same as&quot; or &quot;belonging to the class of.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-22T07:23:17.910" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T16:21:14.013" Title="Across ergative languages, is there a case that typically marks arguments in copular &amp; existential clauses?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4041" CreationDate="2013-07-22T07:11:43.990" Score="3" ViewCount="1154" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had a discussion going in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/591/you-are-here&quot;&gt;Travel Chat&lt;/a&gt; about where the Arabic language originated (assuming borders had stayed the same throughout history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some websites have suggested Egypt, others Yemen, and one speaker of the language in the room agrees with the Yemen view, and I was hoping Linguistics.SE could provide some solid evidence for where it may have originated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(by modern-day country, for example, if it originated in what was then called Siam, the answer today would be Thailand)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2275" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T11:13:05.863" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T00:41:39.957" Title="In which modern-day country's borders did Arabic start?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="37733" CreationDate="2013-07-22T07:15:04.213" Score="5" ViewCount="967" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Saudi friend on our sister site, travel.stackexchange.com, was just telling me there is an isolated language in his country called &quot;Fifa'a&quot;, but that nothing is written about it on the internet as far as he can find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also can't find any information on it. But it seems to have some other spellings: Fayfa, Faifa, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentioned that some people regard it as a dialect of Arabic but others do not. He tells me it has a similar sound to Arabic but a totally different grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Fifa'a a dialect of Arabic? Where can I even read anything about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-08T07:58:43.180" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T23:30:18.773" Title="Is the Fifa'a language of Saudi Arabia a dialect of Arabic or a separate language?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;language-isolates&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4038" CreationDate="2013-07-22T17:49:53.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where a certain language originated depends in large part on how exactly you define that language. Taking English as an example, one might wonder whether English as spoken in the 10th century is the same language as spoken nowadays - 10th century English is hardly intelligible to modern speakers of the language. But the name &quot;English&quot; is usually used to refer to the language no matter how dramatically it changed up until the point when it diverged from other Germanic languages (around the 6th century AD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the history of Arabic in the same way, the first evidence of (Proto-)Arabic after it split from its ancestor (Central Semitic) comes from what is nowadays &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic#External_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Saudi Arabia&lt;/a&gt;. The absence of any earlier written records from other regions does not prove that Arabic was not spoken earlier in other places, but this is the best piece of positive evidence that we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is true, as jlawler pointed out in a comment, that Arabic ultimately goes back to the Afro-Asiatic family, whose proto-language was spoken earlier in another place, possibly modern-day Nigeria. But I don't think this is a meaningful answer to the questions where Arabic originated. Using the same argument we would have to conclude that Latin, English, Danish, Hindi and Russian all originated from the same place, probably somewhere in western Asia - since they all belong to the Indo-European family. I don't think this is what people mean when they say &quot;language x was first spoken in place y&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is an important point in this. What we consider Arabic or English is not a monolithic language, but there are dialects. Not all of these dialects are mutually intelligible, and in the future some of these dialects might become languages of their own. The fact that the dialects of Arabic are considered to belong to a single language has more to do with politics and its status as the sacred language of Islam (similar points could be made with respect to a number of other languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to consider Arabic dialects to be independent languages then the answer to the question &quot;Where did dialect x of Arabic originate?&quot; would of course be different. In that sense, where a language was first spoken depends on your understanding of what that language is, and whether you consider some dialects to be independent languages (or the other way around, you might consider what others think are independent languages to be dialects of a single language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to keep the question what a dialect and a language is out of the debate then it is indeed necessary to go back to the last identifiable proto-language, in this case Afro-Asiatic. However, this is only the oldest ancestor of Arabic that can be identified with some certainty. It is likely that all languages go back to one proto-language, or at least a small number of proto-languages. We don't know yet where exactly these were spoken and might never know. Obviously, this would make questions as to the geographic origin of different languages pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to have a meaningful answer to the question where Arabic originated you have to keep in mind that this depends on what you consider the Arabic language to consist of. If you agree with the majority usage of the concept &quot;Arabic&quot; then Saudia Arabic seems like the best answer, given the current state of archaeological evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-07-23T10:25:38.097" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T10:25:38.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2013-07-22T18:03:14.990" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitions of &lt;code&gt;parts of speech&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;syntactic categories&lt;/code&gt; have already been given by Tim Osborne. I would like to add a point on whether there is any evidence to label a word a &lt;code&gt;noun&lt;/code&gt; or a &lt;code&gt;preposition&lt;/code&gt;, since this is also occurred in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say we already know that &lt;em&gt;table&lt;/em&gt; is a noun. Then we can take a sentence where this word occurs and try to replace it with other words. If the sentence is still grammatical then the new word is also a noun. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mouse is under the table.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mouse is under the bucket.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mouse is under the behind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;bucket&lt;/em&gt; is also a noun since sentence 2 is grammatical, &lt;em&gt;behind&lt;/em&gt; is not a noun since sentence 3 is not grammatical. In this way all words can be assigned to parts of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-07-24T19:22:27.740" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T19:22:27.740" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3669" CreationDate="2013-07-22T19:06:03.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is most effective for you depends on your goal, and partly on your learning type. Basically, if you want to translate from L1 to L2, learn words in this direction. If you want to translate from L2 to L1, then the other way around. If you mostly want to be able to express yourself in the L2, then L1 to L2 is probably better (given these two choices), since learners tend to find this direction harder and have to spend more time memorising pairs for this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned you are aware of other ways of extending your vocabulary. Rote learning L1-L2 word pairs has fallen a bit out of fashion in language teaching as far as I can tell. Being able to define a word in the L2, or being able to name the target word after reading a definition/description/&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cloze test&lt;/a&gt; is now often preferred than just going for L1-L2 word pair memorisation. Still, you should go with what works best for you depending on your learning style and your aims. Personally, I like learning L1-L2 word pairs since it works for me in many (not all) occasions. But I wouldn't choose it as my preferred method to teach students learning a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T12:50:15.360" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T12:50:15.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2013-07-23T16:21:14.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That varies greatly throughout languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ergative &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Nominal_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sumerian&lt;/a&gt; (which did not necessary have copula sentences, for there has been no commonly accepted theory of Sumerian syntax and Sumerian had polypersonal-like clauses similar to those of modern Basque) a subject of an equative sentence was in Absolutive case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;za-e lugal ursag-me-en [thou+ABS king+ABS hero+ABS-art] = Thou art the king, the hero.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no exactly copula sentences in Sumerian with (presumably) sentence-final existensial verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergative was used mostly as a case to express an animate subject (although there were some examples of birds or cities mentioned in the same case as ergative subjects, these words were regarded  in Sumerian as inanimate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of equation was expressed in Sumerian by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Equative cas&lt;/a&gt;e and, in some examples, by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comitative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Comitative&lt;/a&gt; (namely, in phrases like comparing oneself with smb). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_grammar#The_cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;In Basque&lt;/a&gt;, subjects of equative sentences are often presented by Absolutive regardless on their animacy/inanimacy, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hiri hori oso polita da. = [Town that very beautiful is]. = That town is very beautiful&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basque also has sentence-final equative verbs, but sentence-final verbs are not copulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like Japanese, which has sentence-final [equative] verbs and/or adjective predicates, and Equative -yori, but there is no Ergative in Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, Finnish language has two forms of adjective predicate with preceding (existential) copula, but there is no Ergative in it, either. Well, at least there is no &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; ergativity in its commonly recognised system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, of all the languages I am familiar with, Sumerian seems to be the only language matching the criteria you have set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T16:21:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1336" CreationDate="2013-07-23T16:35:26.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find the &lt;a href=&quot;http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation&lt;/a&gt; (created by Pilar Prieto and others) to be helpful. It includes a whole bunch of useful resources and references, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari/mapa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interactive maps&lt;/a&gt; that allow you to click on a city and hear audio recordings of different utterances elicited from speakers in that city. Vocatives are one of the intonational contour categories that were included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Browsing through the Italian recordings, I encountered many instances of the minor third (and some major thirds and some major seconds). The survey made a distinction between the &quot;vocative&quot; and the &quot;insistent vocative&quot; (you can read in the methodology section about how the two were elicited), and interestingly there were some cases where one involved a minor third at the end and the other didn't and some cases where both involved a minor third but the &quot;insistent vocative&quot; just placed the minor third interval higher in the speaker's vocal range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T16:35:26.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3270" CreationDate="2013-07-23T16:58:45.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think even a better question would be &lt;strong&gt;do any languages have sentences?&lt;/strong&gt; Sentence is an artifact of writing and punctuation. You can see how this study found it hard to compare sentence length in writing and speech for this very reason: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grsampson.net/ASoc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The structure of children’s writing:  moving from spoken to adult written norms&lt;/a&gt;. In many ways, it's not that different from asking 'Do all languages have paragraphs' where the answer is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all languages have some sort of a clause-type thing allowing them to express predication, attribution, etc. See Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic-Linguistic-Theory-Volume-ebook/dp/B0030XN0B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 1: Methodology &lt;/a&gt;. All languages also must have means of expressing cohesion and coherence (texture) although this is much less studied in cross linguistic perspective. Punctuated sentences are a kind of cohesive device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-22T22:20:55.470" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T22:20:55.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4033" CreationDate="2013-07-23T17:02:52.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with all the answers here. I would recommend Dixon's 'Rise and Fall of Languages' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Languages-R-Dixon/dp/0521626544/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Languages-R-Dixon/dp/0521626544/&lt;/a&gt; where he explores some of these issues in depth. I particularly found his analogy with 'punctuated equilibria' very useful. But he also addresses questions of language boundaries and relatedness. Well worth a read, even if a bit controversial in places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T17:02:52.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2013-07-23T19:39:21.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a very interesting question and the answer sheds a light into what makes Esperanto unique. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is a wide-open language, very free in creating new words and idioms (e.g. &quot;spam,&quot; &quot;copasetic,&quot; &quot;hang 'em high.&quot;)  This gives English an openness and freedom, but also makes it hard for people to learn.  It can lead to impreciseness and sloppiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French, in contrast, has traditionally been more disciplined in its vocabulary.  Instead of 17 synonyms for one concept, French might have one or two.  As a result, I find that French texts are often easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Esperanto, the process of word adoption is out in the open. There is long and often heated discussion about the introduction of new words.  People become aware of the implication of creating a new word from existing roots and affixes, versus importing a new word from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, there are two different currents of thought.  On the one hand, writers like Jorge Camacho want the freedom and expressivity of new borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, people like Claude Piron, Renato Corsetti and Anna Lowenstein argue that it's far better to use the native roots of Esperanto.  For one thing, the imported words tend to be from English and Romance languages. This makes the language more European-centric, and harder for speakers of non-European languages. In fact, harder for everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, they recommend using the existing Esperanto roots as much as possible. The Esperanto system is so regular and productive, it's a shame not to take full advantage of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piron's book on the subject:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/piron/La_bona_lingvo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/piron/La_bona_lingvo.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2279" LastActivityDate="2013-07-23T19:39:21.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-23T23:45:34.087" Score="3" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;an&quot; word is usually a determiner: &lt;em&gt;I will be ready in an hour.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;It can also be used as a preposition with the meaning of &quot;per&quot;: &lt;em&gt;My rate is $10 an hour.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I tell in each particular situation what &quot;an&quot; is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2254" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-24T00:30:13.650" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T16:28:37.803" Title="What makes the &quot;an&quot; a determiner in one situation and a preposition in another in English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4049" CreationDate="2013-07-24T00:36:08.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question of syntax. Usually you find or think up a bunch of diagnostics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest here is &quot;If I replace &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; does the sentence still make sense?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;My rate is $10 per hour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I will be ready in per hour. *&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence is grammatical so &quot;an&quot; was a preposition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second sentence is ungrammatical, indicated by the * symbol, so &quot;an&quot; was an article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T00:36:08.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-24T02:57:37.907" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a model describing the relation between language and culture ? I'm looking for a model integrating culture as part of the process of human communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2280" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T02:57:37.907" Title="Is there a model describing the relation between language and culture?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4049" CreationDate="2013-07-24T03:17:29.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that there are two &quot;a/an&quot;s in English. One is an article and one is a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you consider that languages are full of homonyms it is natural that there can be multiple items in a lexicon that share the same form (pronunciation/spelling) while having different meanings. Consider the word &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sanction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sanction&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which can mean the exact opposite of itself depending on whether it is a noun or a verb yet we have no problem understanding it. This is a good comparison because like &quot;a/an&quot; the type of word it is interpreted as depends on how it is used in the sentence but &quot;a/an&quot; has the added advantage that, unlike &quot;sanction&quot;, it does not carry a semantic value (or at least none beyond the logical implications of using an indefinite article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When trying to decide if a particular instance of &quot;a/an&quot; is an article or a preposition you can use a substitution test like the ones put forward by hippietrail: substitute &quot;a/an&quot; in a sentence with other articles or prepositions and see if the sentence is still &lt;strong&gt;syntactically&lt;/strong&gt; valid (it might be &lt;em&gt;semantically&lt;/em&gt; weird but that's OK)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-07-24T03:28:44.617" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T03:28:44.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-24T07:32:35.877" Score="2" ViewCount="1301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop a program which can differentiate between CVC, VCV, and CV syllable types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble knowing when vowel has ended in CVC and CV syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to read more about it. Are there any websites, papers, or books that would be recommended reading for this task?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2281" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-25T06:21:16.253" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T10:29:02.013" Title="Computationally differentiating between CVC, VCV and CV syllables" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4053" CreationDate="2013-07-24T19:50:17.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you're dealing with audio data. Then your problem is that phonemes in actual speech are not discrete units and there is no single right answer to the question where the boundary between a consonant and a following vowel is located. For example, in the syllable &lt;code&gt;/pa/&lt;/code&gt;, the articulators move away from the most consonant-like position where airflow is completely blocked (lips are closed) to a fully open position at the mid-point of &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;. The articulators need time for that, so there is a range of mid-points between the two sounds that you might want to consider as potential boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dealing with a sequence of an obstruent (a consonant such as &lt;code&gt;/p,t,f,z/&lt;/code&gt;) and a vowel, common criteria are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;onset/offset of stable formant pattern in the vowel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rapid in-/decrease in intensity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and sometimes onset/offset of voicing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dealing with a sequence of a sonorant (a consonant such as &lt;code&gt;/n,m,w/&lt;/code&gt;) these criteria might be less or not at all useful. But a change in intensity and change in formant pattern will usually be observable. For example, approximant &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; (such as in standard American and British English) usually has a low third formant, so the boundary could be set at the midpoint of the trajectory of the third formant in a &lt;code&gt;/r/ + vowel sequence&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two references you might find useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Machac, Pavel and Radek Skarnitzl (2009). Principles of Phonetic Segmentation. Prague:&#xA;Epocha.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wiget, Klaus, Laurence White, Barbara Schuppler, Izabelle Grenon, Oleysa Rauch, and&#xA;Sven L. Mattys (2010). How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm?&#xA;Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127.3:1559-1569.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter is not primarily about your topic but they give a good description of and more references for segmentation criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you start writing your own program you might also want to consider using or adapting existing solutions. There are some tools that use phonemic forced alignment, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HTK&lt;/a&gt;. Together with an acoustic model of the language you are working on and an orthographic transcription of the text, this produces a phonemic time-aligned transcription of an audio recording. Together with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;P2FA&lt;/a&gt;, which provides a wrapper and an acoustic model of American English, and outputs Praat TextGrids, I have achieved good results even for other varieties of English. You could also take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bas.uni-muenchen.de/Bas/BasMAUS.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MAUS&lt;/a&gt;, which provides a web interface for a small number of languages and also produces Praat TextGrids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-07-25T08:59:48.910" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T08:59:48.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4049" CreationDate="2013-07-24T20:07:40.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers so far agree that &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; must be a preposition because it can be replaced by other prepositions. I think this is a possible but not ideal analysis. It is not ideal because it means positing a new preposition &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; which only occurs in phrases of the type &lt;em&gt;[x amount of currency] a/an [(time) unit]&lt;/em&gt;, where 'unit' is a measure of something that can be bought - hours of working time or things, for example (thanks to dainichi for pointing out &lt;code&gt;Ten bucks a piece&lt;/code&gt;). The description of a grammar and vocabulary of a language should be &lt;strong&gt;parsimonious&lt;/strong&gt;, which is to say it should have as few entries in the lexicon/vocabulary and syntactic rules as possible as long as this results in an equally accurate analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the phrase &lt;em&gt;[x amount of currency] a/an [(time) unit]&lt;/em&gt; might have arisen due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ellipsis&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;[x amount of currency] for a/an [(time) unit]&lt;/em&gt;. This explanation avoids positing a new entry of &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; as preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that such expressions are common in other languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: zehn Euro die Stunde (&amp;lt; zehn Euro für die Stunde)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gloss:       ten euro the hour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: zehn Euro das Stück&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gloss: ten euro the piece&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: dix euro l'heure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gloss:       ten euro the-hour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not 100 % sure about the French example since I'm not a native speaker, but I think it's grammatical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that German and French use a definite article, whereas English has the indefinite article. In neither of these languages, I think, do articles/determiners double as prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-07-25T16:28:37.803" LastActivityDate="2013-07-25T16:28:37.803" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3762" CreationDate="2013-07-24T20:45:52.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This is mostly a step-by-step explanation of how to make use of the sources acattle pointed out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web interface of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt; offers a collocate search function. Just follow the link and you should see the web interface. Now choose 'Compare' under 'Display', this should make a 'Collocate' box appear immediately under the search box. Then choose 'List' under 'Display', and type in 'like' in the search box. Now press search and you should get the major collocates of 'like' and their frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mark Davies&lt;/a&gt; also offers other corpora which you can access with the same interface. If that does not suit your needs you could get another corpus (for example from the sources acattle pointed out) and extract collocates/collocations with a concordancer (a program for accessing/searching corpora). I would recommend the free program &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Antconc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-07-24T20:45:52.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4071" CreationDate="2013-07-25T00:16:52.767" Score="4" ViewCount="1729" Body="&lt;p&gt;What factors affect the number of synonyms a language has?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to leave aside sign languages for this question.   When the production of a given sign can be varied in 3-D space, not a lot of synonyms are needed.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does English, which borrows and anglicizes loanwords galore and was spoken throughout a worldwide empire, have more synonyms than Danish, which is spoken over a smaller territory?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-25T06:16:28.377" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T09:43:09.487" Title="What factors affect the number of synonyms a language has?" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-25T14:10:34.117" Score="3" ViewCount="1054" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opinion that young people nowadays can't properly write any more seems to have (had) currency across many cultures and times. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;ved=0CC8QtwIwAA&amp;amp;url=http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk.html&amp;amp;ei=ryvxUcP-BITWtQbcgYHoBA&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNGVpMKeiaqJpmOUeHcum4mxhQOcxg&amp;amp;sig2=VGBQt9pdCQJw1S_rqRU88A&amp;amp;bvm=bv.49784469,d.Yms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C. H. Ward&lt;/a&gt;, a 1917 Conneticut school teacher, is reported as saying that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From every college in the country goes up the cry, &quot;Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.&quot; Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: I was wondering whether there is any evidence of developments in (written) language proficiency&lt;/strong&gt; of, say, 18 year-olds, in post-WW2 industrial societies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before WW2 and in pre-industrial societies I assume public education was still expanding and following from that there was an increase in literacy. So in the general population I suppose there will also have been an increase in language proficiency and writing skills. I chose 18 years as a baseline because I assume that is the general school-leaving age for upper secondary education, but it's just an approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be particularly interested in data on different languages (English, French, German, ...) and the general population, but college freshmen would also do. I suppose any or most available data will be on proficiency in (written) standard language, not non-standard dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible sources&lt;/strong&gt; include standardised school-leaving exams like the US-American SAT. These can and are sometimes said to be subject to grade inflation - General improvement in scores might be due to more lenient grading or easier tasks. Are there other sources not/less subject to this criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation for asking:&lt;/strong&gt; In case this helps in answering the question, I am tired of listening to complaints about how children and young adults can't spell any more, our language is going to the dogs etc. The fact that such complaints are not new suggests that they are not based on facts. I would like to be able to point out that, in fact, language proficiency has remained stable or even improved for some time. If there is evidence to the contrary I'll do my best to hide... ehm I'll eat my words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-26T01:26:43.887" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T01:26:43.887" Title="Evidence of/against deterioration in language proficiency" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;&lt;literacy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-25T14:58:11.280" Score="6" ViewCount="1509" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for something like the (really excellent and useful) &lt;a href=&quot;http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/school/MRCDatabase/uwa_mrc.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MRC database&lt;/a&gt; that includes a measure of semantic relatedness for a given pair or set of words in colloquial American English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found quite a few papers on how to create a measure of semantic relatedness, but that's not what I'm looking for at the moment. There's also the very promising &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogworks.cogsci.rpi.edu/projects/msrserver&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Measures of Semantic Relatedness Server&lt;/a&gt; at RPI's Cogworks Lab, but it appears to be down and may be vestigial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2205" LastEditorUserId="2205" LastEditDate="2013-07-25T15:06:15.710" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T11:05:01.550" Title="Online Semantic Relatedness Database?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4173" CreationDate="2013-07-25T16:25:37.543" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anybody provide me with a definition of &quot;oracle information&quot; as it's used in NLP and machine learning?  I've come across the term in in sentiment analysis, wsd, mt, and in a number of other areas but haven't been able to find a definition of the term. Here is some context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a section of a thesis dealing with automated classification of discourse relations, the author describes oracle information in terms that are indistinguishable from &quot;supervised.&quot; To predict Z, manually annotated discourse segments X and Y serve as &quot;oracles&quot; to the classifier.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a paper dealing with a two-stage classification task (first classify a sentence as subjective/not subjective, then classify all subjective sentences as x or y) the tags from stage 1 are described as &quot;oracles&quot;--so, output from the stages of a hierarchical classifier is oracle information for later stages?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a paper dealing with named entity recognition, the authors use word alignment information as an oracle. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can anyone provide a decent definition for the term along with an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2285" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-07-26T14:30:04.840" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T16:12:59.533" Title="What is the definition of &quot;oracle information&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4059" CreationDate="2013-07-25T22:29:56.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will suggest two fields that might be of interest, although I can't say for sure they will give you what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ontologies&lt;/strong&gt; organise lexical items hierarchically. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontologies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article on (web) ontologies&lt;/a&gt;, and there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://techwiki.openstructs.org/index.php/Ontology_Tools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of ontology tools&lt;/a&gt;. If you find a ready-made ontology for English and a way of querying the number of nodes one has to traverse to travel from word 1 to word 2 this would provide a measure of semantic distance. I quickly skimmed the list of tools and haven't found anything ready-made that can achieve this. Perhaps another Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow?) would be a good place to ask for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributional_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distributional semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is based on the assumption that words that frequently occur in similar contexts are closely related in meaning. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a large enough corpus, distributional-similarity data can be used to compute semantic relatedness. I suppose the ideal solution for you would be a table with all words as rows and columns, giving semantic distance scores for each pair of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My brief search didn't turn up anything like that, but you may be able to build your own semantic distance matrix by acquiring a large corpus and using the tools and guides provided by the website for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://clseslli09.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;course on distributional semantics&lt;/a&gt; at the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information 2009. Also, people working in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;COMPOSES project&lt;/a&gt; might already be able to share something like a distance matrix with you or point out other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-25T02:10:49.093" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T02:10:49.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4065" CreationDate="2013-07-26T02:47:04.327" Score="4" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to figure out what additional semantic information &quot;both&quot; carries when used in a sentence. Does it differ from &quot;and&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice and Bob both ate lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice and Bob ate lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What extra is gained by the &quot;both&quot; in the first sentence? Do either of the sentences give a stronger or weaker implication that the activity was performed together or separately? I've been overthinking it, so I don't know what my intuition tells me anymore. My initial thought was perhaps that using &quot;both&quot; added a stronger implication that the activity was shared between the two rather than separate events. If the word &quot;together&quot; is added to the end of either sentence, I feel that it feels a bit superfluous on the first, with &quot;both&quot; (yet not a questionable or starred sentence), and much more natural with the second, as in &quot;Alice and Bob ate lunch together&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at a dictionary entry, it would imply that &quot;both&quot; is used for emphasis, but gives the examples with &quot;both&quot; being in an initial position, which I feel automatically gives emphasis - &quot;Both Alice and Bob ate lunch&quot; seems to actually have a whole different feel to it, and to me would be used more to correct an incorrect assumption. &quot;I thought only Bob was there...&quot; &quot;No, both Alice AND Bob ate lunch...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2286" LastEditorUserId="2286" LastEditDate="2013-07-26T04:16:20.590" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T19:02:28.507" Title="Semantic logic of the word &quot;both&quot; in English - different from &quot;and&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4063" CreationDate="2013-07-26T19:02:28.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s what I gleaned from the relevant page in “Language Typology and Syntactic Description” (Timothy Shopen, ed.)  (Volume II, Complex Constructions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic difference between normal coordination with “and” and emphatic coordination with “both…and” is that, in the latter, the separateness of the referents of the two coordinands is emphasized.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, “Both Wyoming and Wisconsin are in the USA,” emphasizes that, though both states are in the USA, logically neither &lt;em&gt;or only one&lt;/em&gt; of the states might have been in the USA.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I would add that emphasis on the separateness of Wyoming and Wisconsin might also be achieved by stressing &quot;and&quot;:   Wyoming AND Wisconsin are in the USA.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text I cite here points out that the sentence “Spanish and Portuguese are similar,” is felicitous, but the sentence “*Both Spanish and Portuguese are similar,” is infelicitous “because two things cannot be separately similar.”  (The latter quote is on p. 55 of the book I mentioned above.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These considerations apply to your examples.   &quot;Bob and Alice ate lunch,&quot; presupposes that both, one, or neither might have eaten lunch.   But &quot;Both Bob and Alice ate lunch&quot; emphasizes the possibility that only one might have eaten lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-07-26T19:02:28.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-27T18:40:54.550" Score="1" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An interesting aspect of Akatek grammar, which is also present in most&#xA;  other Q'anjobalan languages, is the use of directional morphemes,&#xA;  which appear as enclitics. These morphemes make it possible for the&#xA;  speaker to talk about movement and direction in space &lt;strong&gt;without pointing&#xA;  or using other gestures&lt;/strong&gt;. Consider the stative verb [ʔej] to be, which&#xA;  can appear as [ʔejʔok] existing inwards, [ʔejtok] &lt;strong&gt;existing towards&#xA;  there, away from the speaker and listener&lt;/strong&gt; and [ʔeːltox] existing from&#xA;  the inside out, using different enclitics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble understanding how a word can express direction if the speaker and listener may be facing each other, sitting/standing side by side, or even back to back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1712" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T22:02:40.820" Title="How do directional morphemes work independant of relative positions of the speaker and listener?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4066" CreationDate="2013-07-27T22:02:40.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like it would work in much the same way that 'there' does in English - it doesn't specify any actual direction other than 'away'. I would assume that =[tok] means 'away from the general area that contains both the speaker and listener'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Akatek does have morphemes like this that encode relative specific directions, I'd imagine that they'd be explicitly linked to the direction the speaker was facing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-07-27T22:02:40.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4078" CreationDate="2013-07-28T12:40:54.487" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently stumbled upon these two concepts &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/403/403%20middle%20english/ME%20grammar.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relaxed&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/1/article/304?htmlOnce=yes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;na(t)ïve&lt;/a&gt; orthography, but I don't really known how to used them properly, any advise would be welcomed, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1935" LastEditorUserId="1935" LastEditDate="2013-07-28T13:55:25.553" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T05:59:42.560" Title="What is the difference between a relaxed orthography and a na(t)Ïve orthography?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-28T13:32:13.413" Score="2" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the materials I possess or can find on the Internet, Georgian adverbs derived from nouns end in -ად (-ad) (unless the noun in the nominative ends in -ო (-o) or -უ (-u), in which case the adverb will end in -ოდ (-od) or -უდ (-ud), respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in fact the adverbial case of the noun. Adjectives also have an adverbial case which is just the bare stem without an ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I've just come across the word მწარედ (mtsared) &quot;bitterly&quot; which is related to the word მწარე (mtsare) &quot;bitter&quot;. As you can see it ends in -ედ (-ed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just an irregular inflection peculiar to this word, or is there a regular adjective → adverb process that I just haven't been able to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T18:09:19.433" Title="Why does the Georgian adverb მწარედ (mtsared) &quot;bitterly&quot; end in -ედ rather than -ად?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4061" CreationDate="2013-07-28T13:42:58.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the term &lt;strong&gt;oracle&lt;/strong&gt; here refers to information that is kind of useful in solving a question/task, but also intransparent and in need of interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your first example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To predict Z, manually annotated discourse segments X and Y serve as &quot;oracles&quot; to the classifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sounds to me as if the classifier was trained and for such a task manually annotated data is often used. The classifier has no idea how this training data was annotated in this way, it just has the annotation as information and (presumably) information on the classification outcome. In other words, the training data is not transparent to the classifier, it just has to take it as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T13:42:58.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4057" CreationDate="2013-07-28T14:46:39.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Factors that might lead to the emergence of synonyms include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language contact&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specialised vocabulary for particular fields (medicine, law, hip hop culture, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vibrant literature, particularly poetry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geographical dispersion/dialect diversity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Language contact&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language contact often leads to the borrowing of words. While these might fill a lexical gap, they often do not. For example, in German (and probably other languages, too) it is now not unknown to hear people use the words &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt;, for which native equivalents exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Specialised vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particular communities, such as lawyers, fishing enthusiasts or those involved in hip hop culture, often have specialised vocabulary that in many cases can have synonyms &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3973/why-is-jargon-sometimes-used-instead-of-familiar-words&quot;&gt;in general usage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Vibrant literature/poetry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative writing has a tendency to invent new words to avoid the repetition of the same word, or words beginning in the same sound, or for words to end in the same sound/syllable (to produce a rhyme). Arabic literature, for example, vaunts itself as a creator of many synonyms, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Names_of_Allah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;99 ways of referring to Allah&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Geographical dispersion/dialect diversity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out in the question, geographical dispersion might play a role. Language communities that are separated by geographical barriers such as a mountainside or sheer distance tend to diverge. Because of this divergence words might take on new meanings or new words might come up that then are synonyms of other words used in another community speaking another dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Problems with the definition of &lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others pointed out in the comments determining what is a synonym is not trivial. Two words might be interchangeable in one context, but not in another. In other cases the lexical meaning of two words might be equivalent, but they belong to different registers (formal and colloquial), such as &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Associated with this is a tendency of languages/communities of speakers to not tolerate complete synonyms. Soon enough, they diverge in meaning or gain different connotations. For example, after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norman Conquest&lt;/a&gt; many French words were borrowed into English. The word &lt;em&gt;sheep&lt;/em&gt; derives from a Germanic root, and &lt;em&gt;mutton&lt;/em&gt; from a Romance root. The contemporary French word &lt;em&gt;mouton&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;sheep&lt;/em&gt;, but after it was borrowed into English lexical specialisation set in and it came to mean the meat, not the animal itself  - presumably because only the French-speaking elite could afford to eat meat and the English-speaking peasantry was involved in raising the animals (There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anglo-norman.net/dissem/data/page5-plain.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a contrasting view&lt;/a&gt; which holds that the lexical distinction evolved later, but it isn't a problem for the argument that lexical distinctions arise after time - thanks to @hippietrail for the link).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Problems with determining which words belong to a language&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of synonyms (however you define &lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt;) you count in a language depends on which words you think belong to that language. Cases that might be contentious include specialised vocabulary and loan words. Specialised vocabulary is often known only to the community that uses it, so you might want to exclude it from the vocabulary of the language since it is only known to a select group. On the other hand, there are bilingual dictionaries for many of these communities/fields which point to the fact that these words do have to belong to some language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loan words might after some time be considered to become part of a language, and in many cases are not transparent as loan words any more after some time. However, &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; are still transparent in German as loan words from English. I suppose many native speakers of German would not consider them German words, despite the fact that speakers with little or no knowledge of English might use and understand them, which suggests they have become a part of the German language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, these two problems will give rise to some methodological headaches when you actually want to count synonym pairs in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T09:43:09.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3973" CreationDate="2013-07-28T21:46:48.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reasons for the use of jargon are precision and the tendency of communities (professional or otherwise) to develop their own vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Precision&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members of a community, such as lawyers, might sometimes feel the need to invent new words for concepts that exist in general usage to make it clear that they are referring to a strictly defined term. This might help &lt;strong&gt;avoid confusion&lt;/strong&gt; between the looser meaning of the word in general usage and the narrower meaning of the one used in specialised discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to take the word from general usage and &lt;strong&gt;(re)define&lt;/strong&gt; it in a way that suits the needs of the professional community. For example, German &lt;em&gt;Klage&lt;/em&gt; means both &lt;em&gt;lawsuit&lt;/em&gt; (law jargon, among others) and &lt;em&gt;complaint, lamentation&lt;/em&gt;. Lawyers know that &lt;em&gt;Klage&lt;/em&gt; if used by their peers refers to a &lt;em&gt;lawsuit&lt;/em&gt; and not a complaint without legal consequences, there is no ambiguity involved. So if precision were the only principle shaping the language of professional communities one would expect very little or at least less coining of new terms to occur, especially since redefining an existing word would be more &lt;strong&gt;economical&lt;/strong&gt; than coining a whole new word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Identity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, perhaps more important, argument I think is that communities tend to come up with their own vocabulary. This is in part because they need to refer to concepts those who do not belong to the community have no interest in or knowledge of. But jargon can also arise in cases where the concept that a new word refers to is not particularly complicated or new, such as in the examples given in the question (&lt;em&gt;desist&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jargon serves to create a common &lt;strong&gt;identity&lt;/strong&gt; among the members of the group. If you know the jargon you belong to the group, if you don't know it everybody will notice you don't belong to the group. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=diwosITLKwAC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spolsky (1998)&lt;/a&gt;, for example, says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specialised jargon serves not just to label new and needed concepts, but to establish bonds between members of the in-group and enforce boundaries for outsiders. If you cannot understand my jargon, you don't belong to my group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense jargon is comparable to slang, which also serves to mark group boundaries. The difference, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/publication/225028025_Coaching_Behaviour_in_Team_Sports_of_Greece/file/79e415093f3afe273e.pdf#page=23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kollataj (2009)&lt;/a&gt; points out, is that slang is stigmatised but jargon is not. How groups of people, whether they work in the same professional community or belong to more loosely defined social groups, develop their own ways of communicating has been described by Penelope Eckert as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/%7Eeckert/PDF/eckert2006.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;communities of practice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-28T21:46:48.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9696" CreationDate="2013-07-29T09:31:39.127" Score="8" ViewCount="2898" Body="&lt;p&gt;Psycholinguistically, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word. However from a lexicographic perspective, the lemma is merely the aorist or canonical form of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the lemma of a verb is the 3rd person singular form; for a noun, it's the singular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However for multi-word expression, we might need to use the plural form of a noun within the expression, e.g. &quot;kick_one's_heels&quot;. Even if we don't consider multi-word expression to constitute a lemma, we have other inconsistencies of the criteria to give lemma status to a word, e.g. hooved(adj) vs hoofed(adj).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of selecting the &quot;canonical&quot; word form as the lemma increases when dealing with morphological more sophisticated languages such as Turkish too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a notion of lemma? How is it scientifically defined? Citations will be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-02T14:00:28.303" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T20:40:29.893" Title="What is the notion of lemma?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-07-29T21:48:20.520" Score="4" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a syntactically valid situation when 2 noun phrases are next to each other in English within the same sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building a bottom-up parser for English. I need to know if [NP][NP] situation can be used as a elimination rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2254" LastEditorUserId="2254" LastEditDate="2013-07-29T22:09:15.413" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T16:52:03.727" Title="Can one noun phrase follow another in English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2013-07-29T22:40:00.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in so-called double object constructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give me the pen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They made him a lieutenant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it helps with your parser: I think this construction tends to be avoided when the first NP is not pronominal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They made Jim a lieutenant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is still OK, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give Rosie the pen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(while not ungrammatical or terribly uncommon) would &lt;em&gt;more frequently&lt;/em&gt; be expressed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give the pen to Rosie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T22:40:00.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2013-07-29T22:45:50.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely it does.  Aside from various bitransitive schemes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;two NPs in a row is a standard parsing signal for an upcoming relative clause with a nonsubject relative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The man who Bill saw left early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The man that Bill saw left early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the man [∅] Bill saw left early.&lt;/em&gt; =  [[&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;]np [[&lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt;]np &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt;]s]np&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The man who saw Bill left early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The man that saw Bill left early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;The man [∅] saw Bill left early.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As  can be seen, it doesn't work that way with subject relative pronouns, because they can't be deleted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every finite clause in English must have a subject.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That's Rule One.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-07-29T22:45:50.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4068" CreationDate="2013-07-30T05:59:42.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An orthography is a system for writing a language. Ideally an orthography would be developed on the basis of a thorough analysis of the phonology of the language in question. The aim would be to have an unambiguous representation of each phoneme, with a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes; this is known as a 'phonemic' or 'shallow' orthography. This can often be very difficult to achieve, but the less ambiguity in the writing system, the easier it seems to be for literacy. Japanese hiragana (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Kanji!) and the Finnish orthography are good examples of shallow orthographies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there are some languages which have a standard orthography which involves a complex many-to-many relationship between graphemes and phonemes; these are referred to as 'deep' orthographies. English is a fairly well-known language with a deep orthography, which gives rise to the situation where even native speakers may not know how to pronounce a word seen in writing for the first time, or how to write a word heard for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A native (or naive) othography is one developed without being based on an analysis of the phonology. Typicaly it is created by speakers of the language in response to their desire to make written records and will be based on the best-known language that has a standard orthography: for example in Papua New Guinea people may draw on the Tok Pisin orthography. This means that the orthography is not a good match for their language, but it may be good enough that it meets some needs. Examples I've seen are of people wanting to write a song in their language for use in church, or people wanting to write their name, a sign on their house, and other such fairly short texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not actually aware of the term 'relaxed orthography' but it seems from your link that the webpage is referring to 'relaxed spelling'. Relaxed spelling refers to a situation where there is little prescription of spelling, so it is acceptable for words to be spelled in a variety of ways. English has a deep orthography, which makes numerous spellings potentially possible for most words (eg the famous spelling of 'fish' as &lt;em&gt;ghoti&lt;/em&gt;) but relaxed spelling is generally not acceptable, at least in recent times (in the 18th century and earlier, English spelling was very relaxed). The idea of relaxed spelling generally wouldn't be very applicable to languages with a shallow orthography as the spelling is an accurate representative of the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T05:59:42.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4083" CreationDate="2013-07-30T06:20:43.460" Score="7" ViewCount="2663" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do linguists define the idea of a grammatical subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only place I could find on the Internet about linguists' definition of a grammatical subject was at the SIL glossary, here.  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsASubject.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsASubject.htm&lt;/a&gt;).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this definition, grammatical subjects often have...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The grammatical characteristics of the agent of typically transitive verbs&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The grammatical characteristics of the single argument of intransitive verbs&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A particular case marking or clause position&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The conditioning of an agreement affix on the verb&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The capability of being obligatorily or optionally deleted in certain grammatical constructions, such as the following clauses:   Adverbial, Complement, Coordinate&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The conditioning of same subject markers and different subject markers in switch-reference systems&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The capability of co-reference with reflexive pronouns&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition doesn't imply that all grammatical subjects in all languages have all of these characteristics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was wondering whether this definition passes muster among the professional linguists on this list.   If not, is there are better source of information about what grammatical subjects are? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T10:38:59.553" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T13:07:27.327" Title="How do linguists define the idea of a grammatical subject?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4081" CreationDate="2013-07-30T14:58:35.127" Score="6" ViewCount="2150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously none of the languages that existed 5000 years ago are still in use today. Rather, we use their descendants. Over time, the lexicon and grammar change and transform, subtly, so that the language slowly evolves into something very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if any studies have ever been done regarding the nature of linguistic evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does language change at random, perpetually, never settling, or is it refining itself? Are modern languages in any non-arbitrary way &lt;em&gt;superior&lt;/em&gt; to ancient languages, e.g. easier to write, more expressive, more understandable, more consistent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is linguistic evolution purposeful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1647" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-07-31T00:33:27.007" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T07:34:50.220" Title="Does language improve over time, or does it just change?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-07-30T15:44:57.417" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Superiority/inferiority is by definition arbitrary, at least in the realm of linguistics. Any language is ultimately able to convey any thought, and that's all that really matters. I can't really imagine being able to objectively judge ease-of-communication on individual points - there are so many subjective decisions that would have to go into setting up a standard to judge by that I doubt it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your individual points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 'easier to write' means 'closer to a 1:1 grapheme:phoneme correspondence ratio', then typically languages become harder to write over time - if spellings are standardised, they may not change for centuries (e.g. Tibetan, which was standardised a millenium ago); while the language will continue to change as normal. Typically some form of standardisation is the default (unofficial though it may be - since writing is associated with prestige, and prestigious things tend to be conservative), so in order for a language to become 'easier to write', its speakers have to make a conscious decision to change the way they spell things. It's not a naturally-occurring process at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what 'more expressive' means. If you're a native speaker, you'll be able to express pretty much anything with extreme ease - and while there may be a construction here and there that's not that easy, there's almost certainly a good number of languages out there that struggle with something your language finds easy. If you're referring to the range of topics that can be discussed, that's more of a vocabulary question; and vocabulary can be changed and extended so easily that it really doesn't work as a standard of 'ease of communication' - you can just add new words then and there and then perfectly easily talk about whatever it was you couldn't have before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't really know what 'more understandable' means. If you're a native speaker, you're going to understand it! :P If you're not, how easy it is to learn depends on what your native language is. For example, Portuguese is pretty easy for Spanish speakers to learn, harder for English speakers, and very difficult for Mandarin speakers - but Cantonese is relatively easy for Mandarin speakers, and much harder for English and Spanish speakers. Something like Burushaski or Xhosa or Nuxálk would be quite difficult for all of them - but then, Xhosa would be relatively easy for Zulu speakers. It's a question of similarity - if a language is similar to your native language in terms of grammatical structure (and vocabulary helps too), it'll be easy to learn. If it's structured very differently, it'll be harder to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, languages are not becoming more consistent (by which I assume you mean 'grammatically regular') - see Modern English, for example! Not that earlier stages were any -more- regular, but they weren't really -less- regular, either. Languages in general tend to maintain the same general level of regularity over time (with some exceptions, and different languages may differ greatly in regularity). The reason for this is that the two kinds of changes that languages undergo - sound change and grammatical change - have opposing effects on regularity. Sound changes create irregularity (as words get worn down, individual morphemes become harder to identify and harder to separate out), while grammatical changes typically create regularity (as individual words' inflection patterns are modified to better match more general patterns). These opposing forces tend to create a kind of equilibrium - sound changes make things more irregular, but once they get too irregular then grammatical change kicks in and makes them more regular again. And if you move on from grammatical regularity to other kinds of regularity (semantic, phonological, etc), you'll come across other issues - phonological patterns are extremely regular, though they might be horrendously complicated; while semantics, being more a 'space' of meanings that are arbitrarily divided, doesn't have very much in the way of 'patterns' at all outside of a few domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, languages are not improving, because the term 'improving' is meaningless. Even if you agree that things like grammatical consistency and phonemic spelling are valuable, languages aren't improving. (And you have no real reason to value those things! Things like grammatical inconsistencies and irregular spellings are often windows into the history of a language - we can learn about how things used to be from the weird half-patterns they've left behind. Yes, they make a language harder to learn, but there's more to value in a language than how easy it is to learn.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T15:44:57.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4099" CreationDate="2013-07-30T17:44:56.303" Score="7" ViewCount="6383" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a list that contains every two letter combination that is not found in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; English words? I have searched for a very long time and found nothing. It would also be useful if I had three letter combinations that do not exist. I have to search through a large text file looking for strings that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; contain actual words. (And another list of things that only a few words are apart of, like qa)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I have compiled a list myself, here it is for anyone who may need it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bk  fq  jc  jt  mj  qh  qx  vj  wz  zh&#xA;bq  fv  jd  jv  mq  qj  qy  vk  xb  zj&#xA;bx  fx  jf  jw  mx  qk  qz  vm  xg  zn&#xA;cb  fz  jg  jx  mz  ql  sx  vn  xj  zq&#xA;cf  gq  jh  jy  pq  qm  sz  vp  xk  zr&#xA;cg  gv  jk  jz  pv  qn  tq  vq  xv  zs&#xA;cj  gx  jl  kq  px  qo  tx  vt  xz  zx&#xA;cp  hk  jm  kv  qb  qp  vb  vw  yq&#xA;cv  hv  jn  kx  qc  qr  vc  vx  yv&#xA;cw  hx  jp  kz  qd  qs  vd  vz  yz&#xA;cx  hz  jq  lq  qe  qt  vf  wq  zb&#xA;dx  iy  jr  lx  qf  qv  vg  wv  zc&#xA;fk  jb  js  mg  qg  qw  vh  wx  zg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used 70,000 words, but there are more so some other bigrams &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; exit. Doubtful though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2299" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T20:48:03.707" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T02:05:39.300" Title="Impossible bigrams in the English Language" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4079" CreationDate="2013-07-30T18:57:43.467" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notice that the glossary say subjects &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have these characteristics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e, the characteristics are common, but not definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there is no universal characteristic &quot;Subject&quot;, except insofar as it may be demanded by various theories of grammar. In English, the concept of &quot;subject&quot; is very well-defined in most cases, but there are a few marginal situations where it's not so obvious, for instance with dummy-insertion rules like &lt;em&gt;There&lt;/em&gt;-Insertion and Extraposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are two unicorns in the garden.&lt;/em&gt; (the verb agrees with &lt;em&gt;unicorns&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There appear to be two unicorns in the garden.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; undergoes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/cliffs-equi-raising.pdf&quot;&gt;Subject-Raising&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It was unfortunate that he vomited during his aria.&lt;/em&gt;  (&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt;-clause subject or &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; subject?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other languages the concept of Subject may be nonexistent, because it depends on a particular orientation of grammatical relations that doesn't occur everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What English (and Indo-European languages generally) mean by &lt;strong&gt;Subject&lt;/strong&gt; is a relation between some noun phrase in a clause and the verb of that clause. In English, every clause has a Subject.  We contrast the Subject with the Direct Object, which is specially marked in many languages (this is the &quot;accusative case&quot;, of which English has only a few remnants like &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;), and which occurs along with the Subject, but only in some clauses; we call these clauses Transitive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; English clause has a Subject, but Direct Objects only occur in &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; clauses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is called an &quot;Accusative&quot; system. There are other systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such system is the &quot;Ergative&quot; system, which is common in Mayan languages, Australian languages, Caucasian languages, and many others. In an Ergative system &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; clause has one kind of noun phrase (called an &quot;Absolutive&quot;) and &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; clauses (the transitive ones) also have a specially-marked noun phrase (called an &quot;Ergative&quot;) as well as an Absolutive. Not much different, except that the Ergative noun phrase in a transitive clause is what English would call the &quot;subject&quot;, and the Absolutive is the &quot;object&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very confusing for those who don't realize that there are other ways of marking NPS.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ergativity.pdf&quot;&gt;diagram of the differences here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-07-30T18:57:43.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4088" CreationDate="2013-07-31T06:51:01.230" Score="5" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;Across languages, body parts are used as part of a metaphor, whether it is in an idiom or in a phrasal construction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any know of any survey like academic paper that investigates the whys and hows of this phenomenon across different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, can someone suggest papers that investigate this phenomena in a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-07-31T23:41:17.823" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T23:41:17.823" Title="Body parts and metaphor" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-07-31T07:40:08.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's interesting in this context is that the original historical linguists were driven by exactly the opposite motivation. They were convinced that languages were deteriorating over time and their mission was to record the perfect state (and if possible to halt the decline). Labov describes it in his Principles of Linguistic Change&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T07:40:08.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-07-31T09:40:51.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; did deteriorate, due to almost abruptive historical changes. It will never become phonetic (nation versus national), and we won't see much reform there besides through/thru. So evolution is not an automatically proceding process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We live with a much richer language in qualitative terms. Philosophics showed the historical introduction of a Greek notion for (non-religious) &lt;em&gt;soul&lt;/em&gt; (Latin animus). So nowadays we have a bag of notions like &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tolerance&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;open-minded&lt;/em&gt;. Nevertheless philosophy, or psychology did contribute nothing to our linguistic mental toolset describing mental processes themselves. We did not become better argumentators. And are still as gullible to wrong arguments (financially supporting child raising, despite world over-population; energy saving lamps, despite very toxic waste). Despite better &lt;em&gt;expressiveness&lt;/em&gt;. So the &lt;strong&gt;meta-level&lt;/strong&gt; of language did not evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting in this respect to look at the artificial language Esperanto. (I am Esperantist &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; anglophile.) The language can be seen to correct many of the grown short-commings of evolution: instead of the many suffixes to make a word adjective (-al, -ic, -ive) or noun there is just one -a or -o. The spelling is again phonetic. Rules are few and without exception. A linguistic evolution in general has no such opportunity to make a clean break. Modern Hebrew was such a forced effort and might be worth readding upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general language evolution is a process of &lt;strong&gt;growth&lt;/strong&gt;, friction and fitting. Missing are aspects of the biological evolution that made so good &lt;em&gt;survivors&lt;/em&gt;: hunt, competition for the same resources, colaboration, genetic reproduction. Hence language &lt;em&gt;evolution&lt;/em&gt; is nothing to be overly optimistic about. Especially as there is a large qualitative equality between languages. Historical or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T09:40:51.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4084" CreationDate="2013-07-31T17:01:18.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, Lakoff and Johnson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_in_the_Flesh.html?id=KbqxnX3_uc0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Philosophy in the Flesh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is probably the place to start.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic concept is that the only thing that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; humans have in common -- and therefore the only thing one can always count on humans understanding -- is the experience of having a human body.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, abstract and non-experiential stuff gets referred to in terms of the body, and its parts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Whether it's actually related to the body or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Metaphors.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UP and DOWN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/April05Eye.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Religious and computer terms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T17:01:18.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-07-31T17:09:28.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree completely with the comment by @Alenanno, Jun 29 at 15:07. But you had asked for some scientific evaluation, so here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across a paper by Stephanie Lindemann, &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2005.00087.x/full&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Who speaks “broken English”? US undergraduates’ perceptions of non-native English&lt;/a&gt;, that, as the title says, deals with the converse phenomenon. &quot;respondents were given a list of 58 countries and asked to rate the English of university students from each of these countries on how correct, friendly, and pleasant they found it on a scale of 1 to 10.&quot; The study covers accents from France, Italy, Germany, Russia, India, Mexico, and China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many AmE speakers commented that a Russian accent sounds &quot;harsh&quot;, &quot;hard&quot;, &quot;guttural&quot;, &quot;very forceful and damaging to the throat&quot;. Does this make a statement about Slavic/Russian itself, or about how Slavic/Russian is &lt;em&gt;perceived&lt;/em&gt; by American students? I am, of course, assuming that these perceptions would stay the same whether a Russian is speaking English or speaking Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T17:09:28.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2013-07-31T18:02:30.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;-ედ (or perhaps we should just say -დ) is the normal adverbial ending for noun or adjective stems ending in ე.  So you have the following forms: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;consonant stems &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;წიგნ-ი &gt; წიგნ-ად &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vowel stems &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;დედა &gt; დედა-დ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;მეპურე &gt; მეპურე-დ  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;გოგო &gt; გოგო-დ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ყრუ &gt; ყრუ-დ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;here should also be included the rare i stem nouns such as the example Tschenkeli gives: ტრამვაი &gt; ტრამვაი-დ (although I think that most of these have a tendency to be declined like consonant stems in the contemporary language).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adverbial forms such as ჩქარა and ნელა are exceptional and can be interpreted as having lost the final დ as per ჩქარ-ი &gt; *ჩქარ-ად &gt; ჩქარ-ა, ნელ-ი &gt; *ნელ-ად &gt; ნელ-ა.  Most adjectives form their adverbial as would be expected, e.g. კარგ-ი &gt; კარგ-ად.  However, it must be borne in mind that the above only applies when the adjective is not modifying a noun in the adverbial, i.e. when it is being used as an adverb in its own right.  If the adjective is modifying a noun, then it will take no ending, as you say. Compare კარგ სტუდენტად (as a good student) with კარგად წერს (he writes well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2104" LastEditorUserId="2104" LastEditDate="2013-07-31T18:09:19.433" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T18:09:19.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2013-07-31T18:52:31.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that Russian is a much more tonal language than English. Therefore, Russians use tone more to convey meaning, feelings, size, etc... As a result, English sounds like it has less life, because there is less tonality in English speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the use of suffixes in Russian often allow one to associate a word with the one following it. As a result, there is more of a sense of flow in Russian speech, which also gives it that more &quot;lifelike&quot; quality when compared to English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my 2 cents worth as a fluent bilingual speaker of both languages that shares the OP's sentiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2303" LastActivityDate="2013-07-31T18:52:31.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-01T01:17:00.857" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have in PIE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯eitr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; way, pedestrian road &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯imos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; road &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯iera̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; year &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯eiti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; goes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯iteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; other, another, next&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether the word for &quot;one&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e̯oinos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; alone, separated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;connected to the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the PIE word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯oinos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; had clear meaning of &quot;one alone&quot;, &quot;one separated&quot; contrasted with another word for &quot;one&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which meant &quot;united&quot;, &quot;one together&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also word for &quot;thus&quot;, &quot;ergo&quot;, &quot;it follows that&quot; which confusingly Mallory gives as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯ita̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; while Beekes gives as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯ei&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and analyses as locative case of pronoun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯e&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-08-03T21:08:45.600" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T21:08:45.600" Title="Are the words for one and for going cognates in PIE?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2013-08-01T02:15:26.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Definite_article&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ul&lt;/strong&gt; is the definite article for (many) masculine and neuter nouns. E.g. cal--&gt;calul i.e. horse--&gt;the horse.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Commonly and informally, &lt;em&gt;ul&lt;/em&gt; is reduced to &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T02:15:26.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-01T03:10:38.267" Score="2" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inveigle#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inveigle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Early corruption of French &lt;strong&gt;aveugler&lt;/strong&gt; (“to blind, to delude”), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from &lt;strong&gt;aveugle&lt;/strong&gt; (“blind”), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from the Old French &lt;strong&gt;avugle&lt;/strong&gt; (“without eyes”), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from Latin &lt;strong&gt;ab&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;oculus&lt;/strong&gt; (“eye”). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The in- might be from other a-/en- variations found in Middle English, which was then latinised into in-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound change from Latin &lt;strong&gt;aboculus&lt;/strong&gt; to Old French &lt;strong&gt;avugle&lt;/strong&gt; is difficult for me to deduce, so I wonder whether it is regular and is there any other example like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-02-02T14:16:17.113" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T10:35:28.837" Title="How did the English word inveigle evolve from the Latin aboculus?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-08-01T06:03:04.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Are modern languages in any non-arbitrary way superior to ancient languages, e.g. easier to write, more expressive, more understandable, more consistent?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't address that last two parts of your question, for two reasons.   First, I know of no instance in the speakers of language A have more trouble understanding each other than the speakers of language B owing to some grammatical inadequacies of language A.  Second, the inconsistencies of a language are not a problem for the language's native speakers.  Most people can use even rare and complex language constructions in their native tongues by the time they are five years old.   See this article:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/psych215/PDF-files/language-acq-II.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/psych215/PDF-files/language-acq-II.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for ease of writing, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support the notion that one type of orthography (say, logographic vs. alphabetic) is more easily written than another type.   See this post on the Linguist List:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-322.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-322.html&lt;/a&gt;.  Ease of learning may be another matter, but I haven't found information about this.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether ancient languages are inferior to modern languages in any non-trivial way, we have no way of knowing what the most ancient languages were like.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our species is about 195,000 years old.   See the Wikipedia article on homo sapiens:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens&lt;/a&gt;.  Writing systems were devised only within the last 6,000 years.  See the Wikipedia article on the History of Writing:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Inventions_of_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Inventions_of_writing&lt;/a&gt;).     So, on the evolutionary time scale, so-called &quot;ancient&quot; languages like the first language to be written, Sumerian, might just as well be modern.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't even know for sure whether language first developed in our species or among our  pre-homo sapiens ancestors!   Some anthropologists believe that the origin of modern language happened about 50,000 years ago, when humans first left traces of &quot;behavioral modernity&quot; (manufacture of keen-edged stone tools, use of pigment for art, burial of dead, and other behaviors).   See the Wikipedia article on behavioral modernity:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity&lt;/a&gt;   However, other experts believe that &quot;behavioral modernity&quot; began long before 50,000 years ago, and that the evolution of language may have occurred before the human line evolved into anatomically modern humans.  See this paper by Francesco D'Errico and a number of others:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/290586/Archaeological_Evidence_for_the_Emergence_of_Language_Symbolism_and_Music_an_Alternative_Multidisciplinary_Perspective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.academia.edu/290586/Archaeological_Evidence_for_the_Emergence_of_Language_Symbolism_and_Music_an_Alternative_Multidisciplinary_Perspective&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer:  I haven't slogged all the way through this last paper:  I concentrated on the abstract and what I gleaned by using the finder to locate the word &quot;language&quot; in various places in the text.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it makes sense to assume that the most ancient natural languages were less sophisticated than the languages of modern humans, we have no way of knowing what those first, rudimentary languages were like, or how they became as complex and expressive as every language that linguists have studied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T06:03:04.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2013-08-01T14:02:11.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minimal Program is not to construct a grammar,rather it concerns what Chomsky calls the third factor,that is why linguistic theories do have these principles  ,not others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T14:02:11.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2013-08-01T14:08:40.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recursion is computability,in modern theory,it is the central idea of computational theory,and due to different computational models ,that have been proved to be equivalent,like Turing Machine,Lambda calculus ,Post system,recursive function (computable function),etc,recursion may appear in different forms,formal grammar or Chomsky hierarchy is one of such forms,which is also equivalent to other computational models .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2013-08-01T14:08:40.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-08-01T14:17:01.573" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages are defined as subset of Kleene closure of alphabet.So the subset may be recursive set or enumerably recursive set,or non-enumerably-recursive set,the last one is not recursive,and in fact,the last two are not recursive  in a strict sense.So,there are infinite languages that are not recursive.Or,there are as many  non recursive infinite language as real numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2013-08-02T11:37:53.017" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T11:37:53.017" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2013-08-02T02:22:11.490" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To elaborate on jlawler and Ryno's comments, you are very very very unlikely to find the kind of data you want precompiled and available on the web. The reason is A) it's pretty easy to do yourself, and B) it isn't particularly useful once you get past an introductory level, i.e. there are probably better ways to judge the &quot;Englishness&quot; of words than just looking at their bigrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you need a corpus. Obviously not every corpus will have every word in it which might leave some rare, but valid, bigrams out. You could use multiple corpora but realistically it won't make much difference. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://icame.uib.no/brown/bcm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brown Corpus&lt;/a&gt; is freely available and is used a lot in this sort of thing. Alternatively, you could grab a bunch of books off of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming you have at least some programming knowledge since you talk about needing to scan a large text, so once you have your reference corpus it should be trivial to scan through it and create a list of all unique bigrams or compute bigram probabilities. Typically when computing bigram probabilities you should use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naive Bayes&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;P(AB) = P(B|A) = C(AB)/C(A)&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;C()&lt;/code&gt; is the count) instead of raw probabilities (&lt;code&gt;count of the bigram / total number of bigrams&lt;/code&gt;). This is because the independence assumption (&lt;code&gt;P(AB) = P(B|A)&lt;/code&gt;) means you can compute probabilities one [additional] letter at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond bigram or full-word based solutions, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1891404/how-do-you-create-an-english-like-word&quot;&gt;a similar question over on StackOverflow about English-like word &lt;em&gt;generation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;detection&lt;/em&gt;) which takes a syllabic approach. Essentially you have 2 lists; valid onset/nucleus (or onset/vowel, i.e. the first half of a syllable) pairs and valid nucleus/coda (i.e. the second half of the syllable) pairs. These are then stitched together in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Markov chain&lt;/a&gt; resulting in valid English syllables. The important part is that these pairs are not a fixed length, for example &lt;code&gt;&quot;-a&quot; + &quot;at&quot; = &quot;at&quot;&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;&quot;-stre&quot; + &quot;ength&quot; = &quot;strength&quot;&lt;/code&gt;. From here building valid English words is trivial (off the top of my head I can't think of invalid coda/onset combinations nor any valid syllable-initial/final pairs that cannot also be word-initial/final). Of course, this still leaves the problem of data since syllabifying itself is non-trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T13:07:39.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2013-08-02T06:08:43.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;improve&quot; over time as well as &quot;just changing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that each change is an improvement or that improvements never come with negative side effects or that improvements must necessarily grow to outnumber negative properties. This also does not negate the fact than any concept can be expressed in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages actually can adapt innovations either invented by a speaker or observed in use in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious is example is the acquisition of a writing system and literacy. Once a language can be written it is possible to communicate over greater distances are timespans. Few people would argue that any language was not improved when it gained a way to be written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the world's languages either have no writing system, only gained a writing system in the 20th century, or have small literate populations despite governments or missionaries devising an orthography. Yet which seldom-written languages are prominent world or national languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example would be borrowing, calquing, or devising words for new concepts. Whether a language has an academy or not, speaker populations will begin referring to new concepts such as horses, guns, cars, satellites, sushi, computers, e-mail, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now could it possible for languages to acquire other improvements such as grammar and syntax? I seem to recall reading somewhere once that features such as relative clauses or some forms of recursion were not always universal but were passed from language to language much like other good ideas. I find this possibility very tantalizing and would like to read any references about it. Please add a comment (-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T06:08:43.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4105" CreationDate="2013-08-02T07:15:18.913" Score="6" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the functional or semantic distinction between proximate and obviative person deixis?   From what I've read ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Deixis is reference by means of an expression &lt;em&gt;whose interpretation is relative to the (usually) extralinguistic context of the utterance&lt;/em&gt;, such as who is speaking, the time or place of speaking, the gestures of the speaker, or the current location in the discourse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Person deixis is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and referents which are neither speaker nor addressee.&amp;quot;   [i.e. 1st, 2nd, &amp;amp; 3rd person--J.G.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Third person deixis is deictic reference to a referent(s) not identified as the speaker or addressee.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Obviative person deixis is third person deixis that distinguishes a less important referent in the present stage of the discourse from a referent that is more important.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Proximate person deixis is a third person deixis that distinguishes a referent that is more important at the present stage of the discourse from a referent that is less important.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All of the latter definitions are quoted from the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms at&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/index.htm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with all this help from the SIL website, I'm still having trouble understanding the proximate vs. obviative distinction.   Could it be that, in certain contexts, the English phrases &amp;quot;the first one&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the other one&amp;quot; could be functionally analogous to proximate vs. obviative pronouns? Consider this passage, which I made up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So these two guys are sitting at a bar, and the first one says something really nasty about the other one's girlfriend, so the other one smacks the first one right in the jaw.  So the first one is screaming bloody murder and calls the police so the other one winds up in jail.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's stipulate that the topic of our discourse is the guy known as &amp;quot;the first one.&amp;quot;  If, by some magic, we now add proximate pronouns (like PROX.SG) and obviative pronouns (like OBV.SG) could we paraphrase the passage like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So these two guys are sitting at a bar, and PROX.SG says something really nasty about the OBV.SG's girlfriend, so the OBV.SG smacks PROX.SG right in the jaw.  So PROX.SG is screaming bloody murder and calls the police so the OBV.SG winds up in jail.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T15:32:12.157" Title="What is the functional or semantic distinction between proximate and obviative person deixis?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;deixis&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4092" CreationDate="2013-08-02T12:04:28.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, as far as we know to this moment it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;один&quot; is related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/%C3%B3ynos#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; PIE root (*h₁ey), and the word &quot;идти&quot; - to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%81ey-#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, which also is transliterated like (*h₁ey), but this is a coincidence. Personally I never've heard such assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T12:04:28.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-02T13:15:19.647" Score="6" ViewCount="3722" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some dialects of English (for example: General American), “writer” is said to be pronounced differently from “rider” due to the following two phonological rules (done in this order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowels are longer before voiced consonants (than before voiceless consonants)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alveolar Tapping: [+alveolar, +plosive] -&gt; [ɾ] / (in certain intervocalic environments)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;“writer”: /ɹaɪtɚ/ → /ɹaɪtɚ/ → [ɹaɪɾɚ]&#xA;“rider” : /ɹaɪdɚ/ → /ɹaɪːdɚ/ → [ɹaɪːɾɚ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For some people, the difference between “writer” and “rider” is not a distinction of vowel length, but of vowel quality.  Either way, my question is more about the presence/absence of a distinction, rather than its specific nature.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this distinction in “writer / rider”, as well as in derived examples such as “writing / riding”, “write on / ride on”, etc.  However, I do not observe any difference in other pairs such as “matter / madder” or “litre / leader”; this even includes other examples with /aɪ/ as the vowel, such as “sighter” and “cider”.  However, I do observe the distinction in “slighter / slider” (which differs from the previous pair only by the presence of /l/ before the vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s going on here?  Even if we restrict the question to /aɪt/ vs. /aɪd/, which environments preserve the distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2272" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T05:25:04.490" Title="The &quot;writer / rider&quot; distinction" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2013-08-02T15:14:18.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is one of a family of phenomena known as &lt;strong&gt;Canadian Raising&lt;/strong&gt;. &amp;quot;Traditional&amp;quot; Canadian raising involves the systematic vowel quality distinction made for the diphthongs  /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ when they are followed by a voiced vs. a voiceless consonant. Generally they are realized as [ʌɪ] and [ʌʊ], respectively (or some similar variants), before a voiceless consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several varieties of this phenomenon, however, and the one to which you are referring happens to be the one that I speak. I was born and raised in New Jersey, USA, which is one of the regions where this variety is commonly found. I make the voiced/voiceless distinction for /aɪ/ but not for /aʊ/. I maintain the distinction even when the underlying voicing distinction is neutralized, as in the flapping examples you mentioned, like &lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rider&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those facts alone may not be that surprising, but there are certain seemingly exceptional examples in my dialect that make it less than straightforward to analyze from a phonological perspective. For example, in most cases the raising is only &amp;quot;triggered&amp;quot; when the voiceless consonant is in the same morpheme as the diphthong--so [ʌɪ] appears in &lt;em&gt;ice cream&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;I scream&lt;/em&gt;. But there are exceptions to this generalization--[ʌɪ] occurs in &lt;em&gt;high school&lt;/em&gt; (when it refers to the institution of secondary education). Also, as you mentioned, the raised version of the diphthong occurs in some cases before voiced consonants! It appears in &lt;em&gt;spider&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;idle&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;cyber&lt;/em&gt;, for example. Finally, it can even appear before [nt], as in &lt;em&gt;pint&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to &lt;em&gt;pined&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because of the exceptional examples in my dialect, a phonologist who believes in phonemes would have to concede that I actually have two separate phonemes, /aɪ/ and /ʌɪ/, in my inventory.&lt;/strong&gt; There's no other way to explain minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;cider&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;sider&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;high school&lt;/em&gt; (the lexicalized compound) vs. &lt;em&gt;high school&lt;/em&gt; (meaning 'a school that is high'). When I first mentioned all of these examples to a colleague of mine, she wouldn't believe me; she thought I was making them up. She finally came around when I pointed her to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_raising#Varieties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;! In analyzing my dialect I would still posit a regular rule/constraint that keeps /aɪ/ from surfacing as [aɪ] before voiceless coda consonants, but such a rule would not be &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; to cover all the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for fun, I'm listing some additional notable examples below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No raising:&lt;/strong&gt; IC, bisexual, flyswatter, high, rider, tidy, pie plate, Pythagoras, pined, highchair, high-speed, IT, wi-fi, bystander, bifocals, Lysander, sider, slider, cyborg, hyperbole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Raising:&lt;/strong&gt; icy, bicycle, ice water, height, writer, tighty, disciple, python, pint, high school (compound), mighty, wife, feisty, license, Lysol, cider, spider, cyberspace, hyper&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I've realized, after looking at the above examples, that syllable structure might play a role. The reason is that I have a very strong intuition that the raising is obligatory in monosyllabic words that end in a voiceless coda. Give me a nonce word with one syllable and a voiceless coda, and the vowel can never be realized as the non-raised /aɪ/. Further, if you look at the apparent exceptions in the &amp;quot;no raising&amp;quot; group above, such as &lt;em&gt;Pythagoras&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bifocals&lt;/em&gt;, what they appear to have in common is that the syllable following the diphthong-containing syllable always appears to be stressed (either primarily or secondarily). In words like &lt;em&gt;python&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bicycle&lt;/em&gt; (and of course &lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt;) I have the intuition that the following syllable is unstressed and therefore the voiceless consonant is ambisyllabic (i.e. behaving both as a coda and an onset). This doesn't explain the exceptions that go in the other direction (i.e. raising occurring before voiced consonants), but at least it allows us to formulate the raising rule (or constraint) in a way that makes it exceptionless! This would also explain why I would raise the diphthong in polysyllabic nonce printed words like &lt;em&gt;griter&lt;/em&gt; but not in those like &lt;em&gt;gritatious&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T20:04:13.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4101" CreationDate="2013-08-02T19:09:20.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a description from the (very complete) Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ojibwe grammar&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like most Algonquian languages, Ojibwe distinguishes two different kinds of third person, a &lt;em&gt;proximate&lt;/em&gt; and an &lt;em&gt;obviative&lt;/em&gt;. The proximate is a traditional third person, while the obviative (also frequently called &amp;quot;fourth person&amp;quot;) marks a less important third person if more than one third person is taking part in an action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Ojibwe uses the obviative to avoid the confusion that could be created by English sentences such as &lt;em&gt;John and Bill were good friends, ever since the day he first saw him&lt;/em&gt; (who saw whom?). In Ojibwe, one of the two participants would be marked as proximate (whichever one was deemed more important), and the other marked as obviative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; NP gets marked proximate or obviative is determined&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;by the speaker's decision about which NP is more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T19:09:20.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2013-08-02T20:36:17.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no need to invoke ordered rules in order to explain the vowel distinction between 'writer' and 'rider'. In both cases, the vowel is simply the same as in the non-derived forms 'write' and 'ride', where the distinction between /t/ and /d/ is still present, and it's this distinction between /t/ and /d/ that's responsible for the difference in the articulation of the /ai/ diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason you can't detect any difference between the vowels in 'matter' and 'madder' is that these two words aren't derived from base forms where a /t/ and /d/ is present. You're actually being tricked by knowing their spelling. If you didn't, you wouldn't have any idea that one was spelled with 't' and the other with 'd', since these consonants are in fact always pronounced the same (as a flapped [ɾ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the lack of vowel differences in 'liter' vs. 'leader'. The word 'liter' isn't derived from a base with 't'. The word has a flap [ɾ], which is voiced, and vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants. Since both 'liter' and 'leader' (derived from 'lead') have the vowel before a voiced consonant, their vowels are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about 'sighter' vs 'cider'? Here you would expect the diphthong in 'cider' to behave like it does before other voiced consonants, since it has a voiced [ɾ]. As musicallinguist says in his answer, the 'Canadian raising' phenomenon typically affects /ai/ before voiceless consonants, but it actually affects some words where /ai/ is before voiced consonants as well. One of the words musicallinguist mentions that he has Canadian raising in is indeed 'cider', and I can verify that (not as a native speaker, but I have definitely heard people pronounce it like that). Other words where you have an 'unexpected' raised /ai/ include words like 'tiger'. I don't know if anyone has a good explanation for these exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'slighter' vs. 'slider', you find a contrast in the vowels because they behave &quot;normally&quot;, i.e. just like 'writer' vs. 'rider' (since they're derived from 'slight' and 'slide').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T20:36:17.243" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2013-08-02T20:50:04.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is analyzed by Jonathan Kaye in a pretty obscure paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kaye, Jonathan. 2012. Canadian Raising, eh? In Sound Structure and Sense: Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann. Eugeniusz Cyran, Henryk Kardela, Bogdan Szymanek (eds.) Lublin:  Wydawnictwo KUL. Pp. 321-352&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Kaye formalizes Musicallinguists' answer above but for NYC English and proposes separate phoneme status. The reason you get the CR phenomenon in writer/rider and slighter/slider but not sighter/cider is because the backing of /aɪ/ to /ɑɪ/ (which is the difference in vowel quality) operates in closed syllables at the end of words except when before voiceless consonants. So 'ride'and 'slide' get the backed vowel. Then the addition of the suffix -er opens the syllable, but does not alter the vowel quality. Same is true for 'riding' and 'sliding.' 'Cider' on the other hand starts in an open syllable, so the backing never takes place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, I was talking about this just the other day with Erik Thomas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1955" LastActivityDate="2013-08-02T20:50:04.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3673" CreationDate="2013-08-03T04:37:17.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that you've substantially fleshed out your question it's easy to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to know whether a language without recursion, which would generate only a finite number of well-formed sentences, could still generate a potentially infinite amount of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes of course! The linguistic theory of recursion is about syntax, within the sentence. It places no limits on what can happen among many sentences - discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-08-03T04:37:17.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-05T03:46:53.870" Score="-1" ViewCount="1496" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would mathematics teachers use jargon or metalanguage when teaching their subject?  I assumed the former but may well be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2318" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T00:13:53.553" Title="Does maths use jargon or metalanguage?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4079" CreationDate="2013-08-05T04:02:29.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are right, in traditional linguistics that is, linguistics before generative grammar, the idea &quot;subject&quot; is not well-defined, so every definition given by the traditional linguist can not cover all the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, generative grammar does not use it in the traditional sense, and gives a definition relating D-Structure. You may see some general works of generative grammar for the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-05T05:57:41.763" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T05:57:41.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4114" CreationDate="2013-08-05T04:48:14.873" Score="7" ViewCount="4124" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do the terms &quot;exponent&quot; and &quot;formative&quot; mean in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen the term &quot;exponent&quot; used in linguistics texts, and found a definition at Wikipedia.   &quot;An exponent is a phonological manifestation of a morphosyntactic property. In non-technical language, it is the expression of one or more grammatical properties by sound.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on to give examples of the different types of exponents:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Identity (e.g. deer + PLURAL = deer)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Affixation (e.g. look + PAST = looked)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Internal Modification (e.g. sing + past = sang)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Reduplication (e.g. toó ‘man’ totóo ‘people’ (from Pangasinin, cited in WALS)&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the article cites no references or sources, I have been unable to find authoritative references and sources elsewhere, and I have been unable to find a definition of linguistic &quot;formatives&quot; and how they are related to linguistic exponents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T19:06:23.500" Title="What do the terms &quot;exponent&quot; and &quot;formative&quot; mean in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4133" CreationDate="2013-08-05T05:28:57.920" Score="6" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the reality of zero morphs controversial among linguists?   I haven't been able to find a wealth of information online about zero morphs, but did find a definition of them at the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, which read as follows:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;zero morph is a morph, consisting of no phonetic form, that is proposed in some analyses as an allomorph of a morpheme that is ordinarily realized by a morph having some phonetic form.&#xA;Example (English)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example:   &quot;The plural form that is realized in two sheep is Ø, in contrast with the plural -s in two goats.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this analysis of singular &quot;sheep&quot; vs. plural &quot;sheep&quot; accepted by most linguists, or do linguists debate other possibilities, e.g. that the singular and plural forms of sheep happen to be identical, no zero morpheme needed?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-05T05:50:31.590" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T07:28:08.810" Title="Is the reality of zero morphs controversial among linguists?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4112" CreationDate="2013-08-05T12:50:55.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your theory of morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laurie Bauer uses the term &quot;formative&quot; to describe &quot;a recurrent element of form which correlates with derivational behaviour in some way and yet cannot be identified with a morph&quot; (Bauer 2003: 330).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as he himself admits, this is an untraditional use and usually the term &quot;formative&quot; is equivalent to a morph or a morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I hear/see the words &quot;exponent&quot; (or &quot;exponence&quot;), the first name that comes to my mind is of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/staff/phm1000/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Matthews&lt;/a&gt;. Here's how he defines an exponent. &quot;If x marks y, x is defined as an exponent of y.&quot; Thus, under his proposal, a formative could be an exponent of some morphosyntactic property. E.g. formative &quot;s&quot; could be a plural exponent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T12:50:55.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3309" CreationDate="2013-08-05T13:31:57.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese songs the tones will generally follow the melodies. Of course sometimes there still be some odd, out-of-tone sounds but most of it is a product of an amateur musician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As André Müller said in &lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/DT4lE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my experience, this is different in other tonal languages, pop songs and chansons in &lt;strong&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt; have quite clearly audible tones and especially in slow songs this becomes obvious. You still hear the melodie, but you also hear the ups and downs of the single syllables. As if you simply pitch them higher and lower on the musical scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/DTk76&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another answer by Liên Hoàng&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I second what André said about Vietnamese songs: the tones need to match the rise and fall of the melodies (there's more leniency than would be the case for spoken Vietnamese, but not much)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~bob/TALKS/japan.tone-song.public.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A number of studies are converging on the conclusion that in many tone languages, it is important for the &lt;strong&gt;musical melody and the linguistically specified pitch sequences to match&lt;/strong&gt; in certain ways.  That is, there are &lt;strong&gt;text-setting constraints&lt;/strong&gt; that limit the possible combinations of text and melody. These have been found in a number of languages, including Cantonese, Shona, Dinka and Vietnamese. In these languages, roughly speaking, it appears that &lt;strong&gt;if the linguistically specified pitch goes up&lt;/strong&gt; from one syllable to the next, then across those two syllables &lt;strong&gt;the musical melody must not go down&lt;/strong&gt; (and vice-versa).  Looked at the other way, if the musical melody goes down from one note to the next, the words must be chosen so that the linguistically specified pitch sequence does not go up on the two corresponding syllables – and vice-versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more interesting information in the paper that you can reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T18:48:37.633" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T18:48:37.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3815" CreationDate="2013-08-05T14:29:40.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have JUST what you need (well not quite... no font, but these are nice resources). I've hosted them on my site for you :) (domain expired ;-( !)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alphabet of syllables/phenomes:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barriereader.co.uk/sumerian/phenomes.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.barriereader.co.uk/sumerian/phenomes.gif&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barriereader.co.uk/sumerian/reference.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.barriereader.co.uk/sumerian/reference.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference is really helpful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2321" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-12-11T13:22:26.667" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T13:22:26.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2013-08-05T18:05:09.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Who gave what to Mary is Peter the pen.&quot; Not very common in English, but very prominent in case-marked languages (German: &quot;Wer wem was gab ist Peter Paul den Stift.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2322" LastActivityDate="2013-08-05T18:05:09.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4110" CreationDate="2013-08-05T23:18:58.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathematics teachers would have to use both jargon and metalanguage to teach mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the Wikipedia definition of &quot;jargon&quot;: &quot;the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity occupational or social group.&quot;  For example, biology has its own jargon. Witness terms like &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/eukaryotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;eukaryotes&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prokaryotes?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;prokaryotes&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematics has its own jargon too. Even those among us who hardly use any math on the job probably remember some mathematical jargon from high school:   &quot;sine,&quot; &quot;cosine,&quot; &quot;hypotenuse,&quot; &quot;parabola,&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Math instructors would have to teach the meanings of terms from mathematical jargon, and in doing so would have to use metalanguage. Metalanguage is a language or vocabulary used to talk about language. In other words, it's language about language. For example, in the sentences below a) is not metalanguage but b) is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The sun came up yesterday.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b) &quot;unglaublich&quot; is a German word that translates as &quot;unbelievable.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point someone might claim that the two sentences represent the same kind of language. The problem with this claim is that &quot;unglaublich&quot; is neither an English word nor a noun phrase. So if we admit that sentence b) makes sense, then we have to admit that language-about-language has some rules that are distinct from those of non-meta-language--in this instance, distinct rules about what can qualify as a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we come to the day in mathematics class when the teacher tells his students the following:  &quot;The hypotenuse is the longest side of a right triangle.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By defining a term, the teacher is using metalanguage. From then on, the teacher uses &quot;hypotenuse&quot; freely with his math students in sentences like &quot;The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides of a right triangle.&quot; This illustrates a math teacher's necessary use of jargon.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-08-06T00:13:53.553" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T00:13:53.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-06T00:18:19.293" Score="4" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone here successfully learned* another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Learned being defined as the ability to communicate with native speakers without trouble (or basically, at an expert level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know because I'm wondering what your typical daily routine as far as learning the language goes? (i.e. study this, listen to that, speak with so-and-so, watch this, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of trying to learn a language, and currently my daily routine looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coursebook w/ audio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flashcards based on adaptive recall (via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memrise.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.memrise.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Texting with a native speaker (reading/writing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the opportunity to Skype with a native speaker (not typically, though)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Attempting&lt;/em&gt; to listen to radio in that language (very hard and don't understand much)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What methods should I add? I'd like to know what has worked for people that have successfully learned another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2323" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-06T08:34:50.197" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T08:34:50.197" Title="Has anyone here successfully learned another language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-08-06T08:33:53.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4120" CreationDate="2013-08-06T04:21:02.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Microtherion (fantastic name, I love it!!): the things you are already doing are great, but reading is what seems to be lacking. I mostly learn(ed) English that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing a lot of words and constructions in context greatly helps you to polish/grow your intuition; and it is relatively easy to motivate oneself to read. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; learn to speak a language like an expert by speaking and listening alone, but then you'd probably need a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of exposure. The great advantage of reading is that you can look things up and go over a sentence or paragraph multiple times, and at your leisure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think newspaper or Internet articles about something that interests you are a good start. Do make sure the website sticks to conventional grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that can help is chat rooms. The problem is that you need to find a room with interesting people who are willing to talk extensively to someone who does not speak the language well yet, but it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T04:21:02.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4120" CreationDate="2013-08-06T07:47:36.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Low threshhold: internet news, internet television, subtitled movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading of light lecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passover in the country, at best something like a pen pal conference, goal oriented (whatever is of your interest). Quiet tourist evading others, in a pension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the flash cards, which one acquires relatively passively. Try stories, sentences, fibulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talk to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding a native speaker and making it work is hard for me. Maybe sit in on a group of native speakers, if they meet in a student café, to at least learn by hearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T07:47:36.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4124" CreationDate="2013-08-06T11:10:13.777" Score="3" ViewCount="1332" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;maybe&lt;/strong&gt; is pretty much a direct translation of &quot;may be&quot; in all languages I know, with or without concatenation. Examples: &lt;strong&gt;kanske&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(Swedish)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;måske&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(Danish)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;peut-être&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(French)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;может быть&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(Russian)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in German the word is &lt;strong&gt;vielleicht&lt;/strong&gt;. What is the etymology behind this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I believe there is a construction &quot;kann sein&quot;, which fits the above pattern, but I think it's much less common and might have a slightly different use than vielleicht).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2325" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-06T12:52:34.607" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T08:41:00.250" Title="&quot;Maybe&quot; in German (vielleicht)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2013-08-06T11:51:05.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology appears to be 'without difficulty, easily'. The second part of the word, &lt;em&gt;leicht&lt;/em&gt;, continues to be used on its own in the sense of 'easy/easily' - as in &lt;em&gt;mit Leichtigkeit&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;with ease, easily&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GV08379&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm&lt;/a&gt; provides the following &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/genFOplus.tcl?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GV08379&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;concatenation of &lt;em&gt;vil&lt;/em&gt; and Middle High German &lt;em&gt;lîhte&lt;/em&gt;. In Middle High German and early Modern High German, the latter still has [by itself] the meaning of Modern High German &lt;em&gt;vielleicht&lt;/em&gt; [...]; Middle High German &lt;em&gt;vil lîhte&lt;/em&gt; was not only used in the sense of 'easily, without difficulty', but also in the looser sense [of 'perhaps']&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zusammengeschoben aus&#xA;vil&#xA;und mhd.&#xA;lîhte.&#xA;letzteres allein hat im&#xA;mhd. und noch dem älteren nhd. die bedeutung des nhd. adv.&#xA;vielleicht,&#xA;s. oben bd.&#xA;6,&#xA;sp.&#xA;637 (leicht&#xA;17)&#xA;; mhd.&#xA;vil lîhte&#xA;wird nicht nur im sinne von&#xA;'&#xA;sehr leicht, ganz ohne schwierigkeit&#xA;',&#xA;sondern schon in&#xA;freierer bedeutung angewandt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kann sein&lt;/em&gt; is indeed sometimes used in the sense of &lt;em&gt;vielleicht&lt;/em&gt;, but more colloquial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T11:51:05.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4123" CreationDate="2013-08-06T12:23:42.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English &lt;strong&gt;perhaps&lt;/strong&gt;: can happen, and the Dutch &lt;strong&gt;misschien&lt;/strong&gt; (geschieden): might happen have similar roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German &lt;strong&gt;vielleicht&lt;/strong&gt; seems to deviate on first sight, but there is the Dutch &lt;strong&gt;wel-licht&lt;/strong&gt; with the same meaning: &quot;yes easily (possible)&quot; - &lt;em&gt;wel&lt;/em&gt; = indeed, yes, yeah (compare the English &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt;). Both &lt;strong&gt;vielleicht&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;wellicht&lt;/strong&gt; stem from the same spoken form evidently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastEditorUserId="1611" LastEditDate="2013-08-07T08:41:00.250" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T08:41:00.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2903" CreationDate="2013-08-06T22:52:08.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out in the comments section, &lt;strong&gt;the line breaks can occur at any position&lt;/strong&gt;. This does lead to ambiguity and style issues. If you were to create a MS Word document (in Korean), you will notice its aversion to line break in the middle of a word. I do not remember seeing these kinds of line breaks recently (say, last 2 ~ 3 years). I would imagine I would encounter these more had I been living in Korea and read paper version of daily newspapers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2327" LastActivityDate="2013-08-06T22:52:08.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-07T03:42:05.377" Score="2" ViewCount="4691" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English in sentences like &lt;em&gt;it is soon&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;he is fine&lt;/em&gt; what is the part of speech of the last word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2254" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-08T04:05:37.597" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T15:28:48.137" Title="Is &quot;soon&quot; in &quot;it is soon&quot; a predicative adverb or adjective or both?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4127" CreationDate="2013-08-07T11:16:59.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your second example is the easiest to deal with - the PoS of the post-copula element is an adjective, in the predicative position. The individual-denoting subject &quot;he&quot; is predicated of the adjective &quot;fine&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example is a little trickier - 'soon' modifies an event (you can replace the pronoun 'it' with an event-denoting DP, i.e. &quot;the beginning is soon&quot;, or &quot;the party is soon&quot;. 'it' can't refer to an individual, i.e. *&quot;the rabbit is soon&quot;). This is similar to its use as an adverb - &quot;John will go to the party soon&quot; - 'soon' modifies the event of John-going-to-the-party. There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest that it isn't an adverb here, since copulas don't seem to place many restrictions on the PoS of their complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'soon' is semantically licensed because it stands in a particular kind of relationship with the event-denoting subject. In fact, some people treat adverbs as predicates which take events as their arguments, which makes example (2) parallel to example (1). We can tentatively say that &quot;X is Y&quot; is licit just in case X and Y stand in an argument/predicate relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-07-13T01:51:57.680" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T01:51:57.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-07T11:19:19.560" Score="0" ViewCount="1511" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m a university student from Bonn, Germany, and have to write a linguistic term paper for my semantics class. My topic is: Meronymies in English - Is a cap part of a bottle? So I’m dealing with the subfield lexical semantics. The most important thing to mention is that it has to be an empirical term paper, and we are obliged to use questionnaires and dictionary entries to get results.&#xA;My problem is that I cannot think of any useful questions for my questionnaire right now. I would be very happy if you could help me a little bit, and maybe come up with a few ideas :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2329" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-07T19:10:15.840" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T18:53:40.680" Title="Term paper in Semantics" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2013-08-07T11:38:50.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another construction you may want to bear in mind involves a kind of ellipsis operation called 'gapping'. This is pretty vanishingly rare in written English, and not very common in spoken English, but i mention it here for the sake of completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Some ate pizza, and others {ate} pasta&#xA;(2) I should call you, or you {should call} me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The braces indicate that a string can be deleted under identity. Note that this looks like deletion of a non-constituent, but it's generally analysed as involving movement of an argument from out of the VP, followed by deletion of the entire VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only really happens in coordination constructions, and it tends to be subject to fairly strict locality. Shouldn't be too difficult to write a rule for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another instance which hasn't been mentioned is coordination of more than two elements, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You, me and John should go to the cinema together.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if your parser pays attention to punctuation - if it does you could write a special rule for this, taking advantage of the comma separating the first two elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thing - don't have the rep to comment directly, but it's not quite right semantically to say that &quot;They made Jim a lieutenant&quot; is an identificational construction that &lt;em&gt;equates&lt;/em&gt; its two object NPs. Rather, [Jim a lieutenant] is syntactically a small-clause, with &lt;em&gt;predicational&lt;/em&gt; semantics. [a lieutenant] is a predicative DP which takes the individual-denoting DP [Jim] as its argument. Note that the predicative element in a small clause can just as easily be an adjective: &quot;They made Jim angry&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T11:38:50.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1622" CreationDate="2013-08-07T11:56:11.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question relates to Chomsky's competence/performance distinction, which can be a little difficult to grasp. (see the discussion in &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the theory of syntax&lt;/em&gt;). Your question seems to presuppose that MP relates to performance, i.e. actual language use. Minimalism is not intended to be an account of the generator/parser, but rather it is intended to be a competence grammar - it models an ideal speaker/hearer's knowledge of language while abstracting away from actual language use (although, naturally, evidence on which a competence grammar is based can only be inferred from actual use). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minimalist model of the grammar can be used as the basis for a parser or generator - adapting it for a generator would be fairly straight-forward, as derivations proceed 'from the bottom up'. This is probably the basis of your intuition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T11:56:11.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4129" CreationDate="2013-08-07T15:38:59.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest formulating a narrower question if you want some focused answers :-). It would be useful to first come up with a question you would like to ask about meronymy before getting into the nitty-gritty of designing a questionnaire (incidentally, using dictionary entries as empirical evidence for a lexical semantics paper strikes me as deeply odd).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could, for example, ask questions about the taxonomy of meronymic relations (see, e.g., this paper in CogSci: &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog1104_2/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog1104_2/pdf&lt;/a&gt; ) - to what extent is the 'part of' semantic relation primitive? We can say that a leaf is part of a tree, and a ship is part of a fleet - but do these express the same primitive semantic relation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Just to clarify, i'm not suggesting you ask these questions in your questionnaire, but i'm suggesting a possible over-arching research question to guide your questionnaire construction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-07T15:48:40.477" LastActivityDate="2013-08-07T15:48:40.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4113" CreationDate="2013-08-07T16:43:29.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably worth making the more general point here that not everyone agrees with a Bloomfieldian 'constructive' conception of morphology, in which words are built-up from sub-word units. There are a few morphologists working within an 'abstractive' word &amp;amp; paradigm based framework (Jim Blevins' terminology), where words, the basic units, are associated with paradigms, e.g. 'dogs' is a basic unit associated with the 'plural' cell of a paradigm. Formatives and inflection etc. are treated as epiphenomenal abstractions over the lexicon. See for example the work of Jim Blevins at Cambridge , and his 2006 paper 'word based morphology' (can find here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jpblevins.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.jpblevins.net/&lt;/a&gt;) for an intro to this kind of approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question: The reality of 'zero morphs' is controversial, in the sense that word and paradigm models (which do seem to be in the minority) do not even commit to the reality of any sub-word unit (other than as an abstraction), and this includes zero morphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-08T01:20:50.807" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T01:20:50.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3455" CreationDate="2013-08-08T02:14:38.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think whether a language has many bound morphemes or not (or whether it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synthetic&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;analytic&lt;/a&gt;) has much influence on how readily loanwords are accepted into the language. Empirically showing that this is true would be complicated due to the many other factors you mentioned that influence the number of loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide some anecdotal evidence I'll give examples of recent or ad-hoc borrowings from two synthetic languages and how they are integrated into the complex morphology of these languages. These examples show that languages with many bound morphemes readily borrow words and add native morphemes to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Polish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently heard the word &lt;em&gt;niezasejwowany&lt;/em&gt; in a Polish pop song. This is a past participle and ultimately borrowed from English &lt;em&gt;to save&lt;/em&gt;. It appears to be so recent a loanword that it's not in the rather good dictionary I use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysing &lt;em&gt;niezasejwowany&lt;/em&gt; gives &lt;em&gt;nie-za-sejwowa-ny&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;un-PERF-save-PP-Sg.m.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ować&lt;/em&gt; is a very productive verbal suffix usually used with borrowed verbs -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;sejwować&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;za-&lt;/em&gt; is a perfective marker -&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;zasejwować&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;past participle singular male is &lt;em&gt;zasejwowany&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and adding the negative prefix &lt;em&gt;nie-&lt;/em&gt; gives &lt;em&gt;niezasejwowany&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this appears to be a rather recent loanword it is readily integrated into Polish morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;German&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A while ago I heard a shop assistant praise another's hard work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Du bist aber heute wieder hart am Worken&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are but today again hard at working/work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You are really working hard today&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Worken&lt;/em&gt; is a deverbal noun from what I assume must be the verb &lt;em&gt;worken&lt;/em&gt;, obviously borrowed from English &lt;em&gt;to work&lt;/em&gt;. I haven't heard anyone use the verb &lt;em&gt;worken&lt;/em&gt; in German, so I assume this is an ad-hoc borrowing or code-switching. The crucial point is that even such an ad-hoc borrowing is readily integrated into German morphology and gets a deverbal &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; suffix to derive a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these examples I would say that even very recent borrowings are integrated into the morphology of synthetic languages without any problems. And if this is the case the number of bound morphemes a language uses should have no influence on how many loanwords it accepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T02:14:38.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-08T07:17:46.723" Score="-1" ViewCount="902" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Czech poetry you can say something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;zvukem kulek k tobe promlouvam&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I speak to you with(through) the sound of bullets/shots&quot;./&quot;Mluvim k tobe se(skrz) zvukem(zvuk) kulek.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you cannot say:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The sounds of bullets to you (I) speak&quot;/&quot;zvukem kulek k tobe promlouvam&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The sounds of bullets&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is always nominative case in EN, even though that it's the combination of instrumental and genitive.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zvukem = instrumental (kym?/&lt;strong&gt;cim?&lt;/strong&gt; zvukem)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kulek  = genitive (koho? &lt;strong&gt;ceho?&lt;/strong&gt; kulek)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In English it's nominative, no matter what&lt;/strong&gt; ;), at least in the written form. I don't know how the EN people translate it in their brains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution would be something like:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Them soundems of bullets to yoem speakujem/speakuji&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-em&lt;/strong&gt; would be the indicator of instrumental case ;D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, e.g. I see EN as very weak competitor in e.g. poetry when compared with languages that use cases (most of Slavic languages, German, Latin, Sanskrit etc.) , because you have everything just in nominative. And sometimes genitive (man's house).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another advantage of cases is answering to the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &quot;Jak jste se tam dostal?&quot; / &quot;How do you get there?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: &quot;Vlakem&quot;. / &quot;By train&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the EN &lt;strong&gt;&quot;By train&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; would be in Czech &lt;strong&gt;&quot;S vlak&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; which is robot-like talk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to use the correct case not the nominative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct case for this example is instrumental so it could be &lt;strong&gt;&quot;S vlakem&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is perfectly fine, but we always drop the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;s&quot;/&quot;with(or by)&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; because we know that from the word &lt;strong&gt;vlakEM&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;EM&quot; told us that it's instrumental. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little more complicated in real sitautaions, because you have multiple genders and &lt;strong&gt;14 paradigms of noun declension/Slovak has 15&lt;/strong&gt; ;D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, EN is great for the students, they just need to learn the 1 one word for singular and 1 word for plural ;) and there is in most cases the difference just -s in plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have &lt;strong&gt;4 - 7&lt;/strong&gt; or more different sound possibilities and if you multiply that with 3 genders (&lt;strong&gt;14 paradigms of noun declension&lt;/strong&gt; in Cezch) and combine that for 4 or 5 words  in the sentence the number of combination is enourmous when compared with English. Not to mention the word order (notice that we are using in all cases just the same 3 words) ;D: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Češi udělali &lt;strong&gt;revoluci&lt;/strong&gt; (The Czechs made a revolution -&gt; stress on &quot;revolution/revoluci&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revoluci udělali &lt;strong&gt;Češi&lt;/strong&gt; (It was the Czechs who made the revolution -&gt; stress on &quot;Czechs/Češi&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Češi revoluci &lt;strong&gt;udělali&lt;/strong&gt; (The Czechs did make a revolution -&gt; stress on &quot;did/udělali)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which creates even more possibilities in poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how do native English speakers translate the nominative cases in their brains? Does it stay there in nominative. or they translate it to causality-like grammatical cases form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-09T03:04:08.133" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T03:34:21.960" Title="How do English people understand the grammatical cases?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2013-08-22T10:21:12.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-08-08T11:57:52.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that everything in English is nominative, it's simply that English doesn't have productive morphological case &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; - although there are some remnants of the old English case system, such as in the pronominal system, and the who/whom distinction. Lack of m-case is hardly unusual typologically - neither Chinese not Dutch has it, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question of how &quot;native English speakers translate the nominative cases in their brains&quot; - assure you that we get by! More seriously, Jean Vergnaud, in a 1977 letter to Chomsky &amp;amp; Lasnik (&lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262062787_sch_0001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262062787_sch_0001.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) suggested that all languages possess 'abstract' case underlyingly, and it just so happens that it is spelled-out in languages like Czech, and not in languages like English, Chinese etc. This means that in English, abstract case is assigned based on the structural position of the Noun Phrase - for example, the grammatical subject is assigned abstract nominative, and the grammatical object is assigned accusative case. This conception of case is quite widely accepted in generative linguistics. It's worth emphasising that on this view, case is purely syntactic - it is not taken to dictate the semantic role of a Noun Phrase. A nominative subject can, e.g. be an agent (&quot;She hit John&quot;) or a patient (&quot;She was hit by John&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does indeed rely much more on things like word order - generally speaking, languages with rich case morphology are 'non-configurational', which means that they display more flexible word order. English is conversely 'configurational', so it has a more rigid word order. As an aside, languages like Chinese are an exception - it has no case morphology and free word order. We call these 'discourse configurational' languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure it's worth seriously addressing your contention that languages without m-case are inferior with regards to poetry, but i'll just add that Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Wordsworth etc. would beg to differ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-08T20:38:30.660" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T20:38:30.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1672" CreationDate="2013-08-08T16:51:38.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, and I'm not entirely sure about the PP and the DetP (could be DP that splits into 'this' and NP 'giraffe'), it should rather look like this (using Redford's structure)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/9PpSYFd.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://mshang.ca/syntree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mshang.ca/syntree/&lt;/a&gt; to draw the tree.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2322" LastActivityDate="2013-08-08T16:51:38.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4174" CreationDate="2013-08-08T19:50:32.957" Score="13" ViewCount="4384" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does vowel harmony typically arise in a language?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a definition of vowel harmony from the WALS chapter on Vowel Quality Inventories:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/2&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/2&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;When a language is said to have vowel harmony this generally means that within a word, including any affixes, it is only possible to combine the members of certain subsets of the vowels together.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of vowel harmony from Wikipedia's/Free Net Encyclopedia's article on vowel harmony:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Vowel_harmony#Features_of_vowel_harmony&quot;&gt;http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Vowel_harmony#Features_of_vowel_harmony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate (or harmonize) are termed targets. In most languages, the vowel triggers lie within the root of a word while the affixes added to the roots contain the targets. This may be seen in the Hungarian dative suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Root    Dative  Gloss&#xA;város   város-nak   &quot;city&quot;&#xA;öröm    öröm-nek    &quot;joy&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dative suffix has two different forms -nak/-nek. The -nak form appears after the root with back vowels (a and o are both back vowels). The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels (ö and e are front vowels).&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article at Free Net Encyclopedia covers a lot of ground, but leaves me curious about how vowel harmony typically arises.   Does it arise in languages with big vowel quality inventories, or do big vowel quality inventories arise in response to it?   Does the consonant inventory play any role in its development?   Does prosody play a role?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-09T03:38:39.180" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T17:27:59.720" Title="How does vowel harmony typically arise in a language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2013-08-09T03:34:21.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's more than one way to analyse just about anything in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have depends on the number of inflected forms that nominals can take. Well after taking into account which parts of the inflection are due to other factors such as number and gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have is based on comparison with a previously analysed language due to tradition. This was once very common using Classical languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek as a basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes which cases a language is analysed to have is based on traditional analysis of the language as it was in former times even though it may have changed quite a bit since. Georgian is usually considered to have the same cases as Old Georgian but in fresh analyses it's been noted that some of the postpositions have &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could even be possible to analyse which cases a language has based more on syntax that morphology, especially for languages which have both inflectional and analytic features. For instance, genitive and dative might be considered to be two cases in a language even though they may share a single inflectional form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's look at English. English nominals are nouns, adjectives, and pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns have two forms or four forms depending on how the possessive is analysed: dog, dog's, dogs, dogs'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since number is not related to case this leaves either one or two cases, depending on whether you analyse possessive to be a case. In English three of the forms are the identical in pronunciation but differ in orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives have three forms, none of which reflect case: big, bigger, biggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns have more forms which reflect cases than nouns have. But again it depends on analysis. Pronouns often share a kind of paradigm with possessive adjectives and are often suppletive: I, me, my, mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So pronouns in English would usually be labelled &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; and then nouns and adjectives have a &quot;possessive&quot;. But not necessarily in your preferred analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could compare the English &quot;subjective case&quot; to &quot;nominative case&quot;, English &quot;objective case&quot; to &quot;dative case&quot;, an English &quot;possessive case&quot; to &quot;genitive case&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could analyse English as having just one case for nouns and two cases for pronouns and not count possessive as a case at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you see there is no &quot;natural law&quot; - there's just many ways to describe what happens using terminology that fits to varying degrees across many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T03:34:21.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3420" CreationDate="2013-08-09T21:01:58.043" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing this question reminded me of a section in Peter Matthews book 'Syntax' (1981) (it's meant to be a textbook, but it's more like a monograph really). In Chapter 4, p84-93, there's an explicit comparison and evaluation of dependency grammars vs. constituency grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews shows that for any d-grammar, there is a ps-grammar which will generate the same set of sentences, and vice versa - that is to say that d-grammars and ps-grammars are &lt;strong&gt;weakly equivalent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews goes on to discuss a different and more interesting way in which the two can be compared: Can an analysis in one framework be shown, in each instance, to be isomorphic to an analysis in the opposing framework? In other words, can we say everything using d-grammar that we can using a ps-grammar, and vice versa? If the answer is yes, then the two are &lt;strong&gt;strongly equivalent&lt;/strong&gt; (Chomsky '63, &lt;em&gt;formal properties of grammar&lt;/em&gt;). As far as i understand it, strongly equivalent grammars are essentially notational variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparing d-grammars and ps-grammars, we shouldn't necessarily pay too much heed to the variable simplicity of the &lt;em&gt;notation&lt;/em&gt; - we can only use this as an argument if it's already been established that the two are strongly equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews pretty convincingly shows that there is no mechanical procedure from which d-trees can be derived from ps-trees, and no mechanical procedure from which ps-trees can be derived from d-trees across the board. There are things of descriptive value that can be said in d-grammars that can't be said in ps-grammars, and vice versa, and therefore they aren't strongly equivalent. You could entertain the idea of combining the two representations (which is something like what we have in, e.g. modern minimalism), although this is something that Matthews ultimately rejects in favour of his own d-grammar, for interesting and unrelated reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dick Hudson is a proponent of 'word grammar', a modern theory in the d-grammar school, and he has some powerful arguments in his various papers (available here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/wg.htm#main_ideas&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/wg.htm#main_ideas&lt;/a&gt;) that a d-grammar is to be preferred to a ps-grammar. Given that ps-grammars and d-grammars aren't mere notational variants, it seems to me that one or the other will ultimately turn out to be a more accurate abstraction over speakers' mental representations. Ultimately, that's still an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-08-09T21:01:58.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-09T22:10:51.753" Score="5" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;First let me warn you I have no academic formation in Linguistics, I can't define that area well, so if this sounds off-topic, it probably is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I know what you know&quot; is an ambiguous sentence, carrying two distinct meanings: that &quot;I&quot; am in knowledge of, at least, the very same things &quot;you&quot; are; or that &quot;I&quot; have information of &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; subjects &quot;you&quot; know (without this meaning &quot;I&quot; know anything &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; subjects &quot;you&quot; knows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several related questions associated to the sentence: is there any way to separate the two meanings without a full explanation (kind of what I did)? What about other languages? In Portuguese, the same thing happens. Esperanto often seems to have a way to carry just the needed precision, yet I can't think of any way to distinguish those meanings right now. With what types of verbs does this work? For instance, it doesn't work with &quot;think&quot; (a proposition is required in at least in one of the cases) and most certainly not with &quot;eat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2334" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T09:37:33.437" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T23:50:03.310" Title="Are the meanings of «I know what you know» distinguishable?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-09T23:09:00.410" Score="3" ViewCount="3775" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my native language, Portuguese, numbers have officially been in various classes, from adjectives and nouns to &quot;quantifiers&quot; and determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking that perhaps we can't group them all, simply because they behave differently. For example, &quot;ten&quot; works differently from &quot;million&quot;. Multiplying by 2, you get &quot;twenty&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; million&lt;b&gt;s&lt;/b&gt;&quot;. A million is a noun, like a potato or a third; while &quot;ten&quot; is different. &quot;Twelve&quot; and &quot;a dozen&quot; are the same in meaning, but grammatically behave in different ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? In other languages, this happens with other words. Some may agree in gender/number with the object they quantify, like nouns do. Can we grammatically divide numbers in different classes? How would this work? Would another class be required? How would this system vary from language to language (I'd appreciate if you'd make a comparison between English and some other language of your choice)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2334" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T17:43:41.910" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T21:50:04.227" Title="When are numbers nouns?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-08-10T02:30:34.267" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with P Elliot above, that your two sentences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with regards fact &quot;X&quot; (as an example, &quot;swans are white&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know X, that you know as well. (I know that swans are white too.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;vs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I know that you know X (but may not know it myself). (I know that you know what colour swans are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As has been pointed out in comments, purely syntactically, the first version of &quot;I know what you know&quot; implies that I share all of your knowledge, not just a specific fact.  However, I feel that in use, nobody would ever suggest that they know everything another person knows, and so there must be an implied context to the use of this sentence.  The discussion around the differences between the two sentences, and other potential cases of this ambiguity still apply whether we are talking about a specific context or a general totality of knowledge, so this point is largely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In thinking about these two a little more, I came up with this, that I think also explains the ambiguity well:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1) I can answer [a question/all the questions] that you can.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) I know [a question/all the questions] that you can answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In speaking each of the sentences, it would be emphasis that would separate the two.  &quot;I KNOW what you know&quot; is different from &quot;I know WHAT you know.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides re-phrasing, which could be done in many ways, an example above in this answer, I can't think of how you could distinguish the two in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to think of how to classify verbs where this kind of ambiguity, and coming up blank.  The reason that it works with &quot;know&quot; is that the object of &quot;know&quot; is a fact, and &quot;the thing you know&quot; and &quot;that you know a thing&quot; are both facts.  Of course, with any verb, if the object of the verb, call it &quot;X&quot; is a &quot;Y&quot; then &quot;the thing that you X&quot; must also be a &quot;Y&quot;, but &quot;that you X a thing&quot; is always going to be a fact.  So a verb that can be applied to a fact in this manner, should be a possible candidate for this ambiguity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out, it doesn't work with &quot;think&quot;, because although you can &quot;think&quot; a fact, the phraseology is somewhat different.  &quot;I think what you think&quot; (I think like you) vs &quot;I think that you think [that].&quot; (I know what you think)  Attempting to force the sentences into the same structure to allow the ambiguity brings us back to using the word &quot;know&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other word I've found that works is &quot;say&quot;.  &quot;I say what you say&quot; can mean &quot;I say the same thing as you&quot; or &quot;I tell you what to say&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I suspect what you know&quot; also has similar ambiguity - but only because suspect basically means &quot;think I know&quot; so the sentence &quot;I think I know what you know&quot; still contains your original sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help with other languages, but I suspect that any with common forms in the declension of a noun, or a specific form for a verb when it's used in a noun phrase, will have this same feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2008" LastEditorUserId="2008" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T17:48:20.457" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:48:20.457" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T08:36:27.027" Score="10" ViewCount="2373" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages whose plural pronouns ('we', 'they', etc.) are formed from singular pronouns ('I', 'he', etc.) plus a plural marker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if English were such a language, instead of &quot;we&quot; we would say &quot;Is&quot; (the pronoun 'I' + the plural suffix -s), &quot;hes&quot; to mean &quot;they&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T03:23:18.077" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T13:21:18.633" Title="Do any languages form plural pronouns by adding a suffix to the singular form?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T08:57:30.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia suggests that Japanese is such a language. For example the pronoun &lt;em&gt;watashi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I&quot; becomes &lt;em&gt;watashi-tachi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;we&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T08:57:30.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T09:15:10.733" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already said, Japanese works this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;私      +   達 = we&#xA;watashi   tachi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the same happens in Chinese as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;我 + 们 = we&#xA;wo  men&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first portion of both is the standard way to say &quot;I&quot; (we'll ignore other versions for the sake of this answer). The second is a plural marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T09:15:10.733" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T10:45:43.800" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some varieties of English have plural personal pronouns that are composed in roughly the way you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Southern US English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;you'all&lt;/em&gt;/ &lt;em&gt;y'all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is composed of the 2nd p. singular pronoun + plural marker &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;. Because there is now a separate 2nd p. plural pronoun &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; tends to be restricted to singular reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the other comments as saying that Japanese &lt;em&gt;tachi&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;watashi-tachi&lt;/em&gt; is a plural marker that it is also used in other circumstances as a plural marker. &lt;em&gt;you'all&lt;/em&gt; doesn't meet that definition because it's not grammaticalised as a morphological plural marker. But it marks plurality lexically and &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; in the future be grammaticalised as a plural marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tok Pisin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tok Pisin is an English-based creole (more specifically: English is the lexifier language) spoken in Papua New Guinea. The morpheme &lt;em&gt;pela&lt;/em&gt; (from English &lt;em&gt;fellow&lt;/em&gt;) argueably works as a plural (or not-singular) marker in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin&quot;&gt;pronoun system&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1st (exclusive) singular: &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1st (exclusive) plural: &lt;em&gt;mipela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2nd singular: &lt;em&gt;yu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2nd plural: &lt;em&gt;yupela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dual is marked in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1st (exclusive) dual: &lt;em&gt;mitupela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2nd dual: &lt;em&gt;yutupela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I said &lt;em&gt;pela&lt;/em&gt; might be interpreted as not-singular because it's also used in the dual (and trial where it exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3rd person dual conforms to the system: &lt;em&gt;tupela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But 3rd personal singular and plural have suppletive forms: &lt;em&gt;em&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ol&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, as far as I know &lt;em&gt;pela&lt;/em&gt; is not used as a plural marker otherwise. But the meaning of the pronouns is still compositional in that there is a person morpheme (e.g. &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt;), a dual morpheme (&lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;), and a non-singular morpheme (&lt;em&gt;pela&lt;/em&gt;) that combine to form the various pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T10:45:43.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T10:45:53.457" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of these languages is Thai, except it's not a suffix, but a prefix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;คุณ &lt;code&gt;[kʰun]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (singular, formal) - พวกคุณ &lt;code&gt;[pʰûːək kʰun]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;you all&lt;/em&gt; (plural, formal)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;เธอ &lt;code&gt;[tʰɤː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (singular, informal) - พวกเธอ &lt;code&gt;[pʰûːək tʰɤː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;you all&lt;/em&gt; (plural, informal)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;เขา &lt;code&gt;[kʰáu]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;he/she&lt;/em&gt; - พวกเขา &lt;code&gt;[pʰûːək kʰáu]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, this does not apply 1st person: ผม versus เรา or พวกเรา&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-09-27T21:06:42.710" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T21:06:42.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T11:15:49.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another language that does this is Nhanda, a Pama-Nyungan language of Western Australia. Nhanda has a productive plural suffix '-nu', which is used to form plurals of both nouns and pronouns, as follows (only showing subject forms):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ngayi&lt;/em&gt; = 1sg 'I' - &lt;em&gt;ngayinu&lt;/em&gt; = 1pl 'we'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ngini&lt;/em&gt; = 2sg 'you.sg' - &lt;em&gt;ngininu&lt;/em&gt; = 2pl 'you.pl'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ala&lt;/em&gt; = 3sg 'he/she/it'; &lt;em&gt;alanu&lt;/em&gt; = 3pl 'they'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more detail see:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Blevins, Juliette. 2001. &lt;em&gt;Nhanda: an Aboriginal language of Western Australia&lt;/em&gt;. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T11:15:49.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T11:33:02.903" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: I had almost forgotten about the existence of &lt;strong&gt;WALS&lt;/strong&gt;. Chapter 35 gives an overview of plurality in independent personal pronouns: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chapter Plurality in Independent Personal Pronouns.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the category most relevant to your question is type 8 (person stem with a nominal plural affix). If you look at the map on WALS, you can see 19 type 8 languages listed, many of which have been mentioned here, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Southern US English. Type 3 (person-number affixes) and type 7 (person stem with a pronominal number affix) might also be of interest to you, as they show some morphological complexity in the expression of number in the pronominal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, it looks like it's far more common &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to have a morphologically transparent pronominal system, like English. The morphologically transparent pronominal systems are in a small minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several meso-melanesian languages have morphologically complex pronominal systems, including number marking on plural pronouns. One example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Babatana&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1sg exclusive = &lt;em&gt;ra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1dual exc. = &lt;em&gt;raru&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1pl exc. = &lt;em&gt;rami&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kubokota, another meso-melanesian language is especially interesting, in that the plural form is suppletive, but the dual and trial forms are morphologically complex, with the plural form as a stem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kubokota&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1sg. exc. = &lt;em&gt;ara&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1pl. exc = &lt;em&gt;yami&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1dual exc = &lt;em&gt;yami-kori&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1trial exc = &lt;em&gt;yami-kue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/17/papers/lfg12palmer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Nominal Number in Meso-Melanesian' (Palmer, 2012)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-21T13:21:18.633" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T13:21:18.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T14:14:10.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Persian (a.k.a. Farsi) pronouns are built with suffixes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;man =&gt; me, maha =&gt; we&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;shoma =&gt; you (formal), shomaha =&gt; you all (plural formal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an =&gt; he/she/it, anha =&gt; they&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2339" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T14:14:10.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T14:43:41.413" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone help me to breakdown what this question needs me to look at specifically!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Assess the state of language acquisition research in terms of the types of evidence that are used to support theoretical positions. (I.e., what kinds of evidence used in order to discover how children acquire language and what are its limitations?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure whether this question is referring to the two ways of studying children (Experimental and Naturalistic) or if its saying I need to go through both Rationalist and Empiricist theories, then give evidence for and against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2340" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T17:46:30.823" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:46:30.823" Title="What kinds of evidence are used in order to discover how children acquire language &amp; what are its limitations?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4154" CreationDate="2013-08-10T15:19:31.040" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes,one doing what you describe has to read some classic work like Gold's Limitation in Identification of language ,which I think is very important theoretical work,and lot of linguists have found or believed that there are very little negative evidence during child acquisition of their mother tongue,combining those two ,one may conclude that faculty of language is an innate functional part of human brain.So,one have to consider those two evidence,to support or be against the conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T15:19:31.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2013-08-10T16:52:03.727" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking deeper into the Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb#Two-place_transitive%3a_Vg_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two-place transitive: Vg verbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vg verbs (named after the verb give) precede either two noun phrases or a noun phrase and then a prepositional phrase often led by to or for. For example: &quot;The players gave &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;their teammates high fives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &quot;The players gave high fives to their teammates.&quot;&#xA;  When two noun phrases follow a transitive verb, the first is an indirect object, that which is receiving something, and the second is a direct object, that being acted upon. Indirect objects can be noun phrases or prepositional phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Transitive Verbs: Vc verbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vc verbs (named after the verb consider) are followed by a noun phrase that serves as a direct object and then a second noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive phrase. The second element (noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive) is called a complement, which completes a clause that would not otherwise have the same meaning. For example: &quot;The young couple considers &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the neighbors wealthy people&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &quot;Some students perceive adults quite inaccurately.&quot; &quot;Sarah deemed her project to be the hardest she has ever completed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2254" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T16:52:03.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:06:12.853" Score="2" ViewCount="1955" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What theories explain the transfer of phonetic and phonological features from the first language to a second or foreign language? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do these theories differ from each other? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such theories should refer to both transfer of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;segmental&lt;/a&gt; features (phonemes) and suprasegmental features (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prosody&lt;/a&gt;) and be grounded in empirical research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm referring to phenomena such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English has two th-phonemes, a voiceless and a voiced &lt;strong&gt;dental fricative&lt;/strong&gt; (/&lt;strong&gt;θ&lt;/strong&gt;/ and /&lt;strong&gt;ð&lt;/strong&gt;/). Learners with a first language (L1) that lacks these phonemes, such as French or German, tend to replace them with phonemes that are relatively similar, such as alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/ - manner of articulation is the same and place of articulation is as close as you can get to dental (labiodental /f/ and /v/ are arguably even closer and are also sometimes used).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French has nasal vowels that contrast with oral vowels. Learners with an L1 that lacks phonemic nasality (but may have nasalised vowels adjacent to nasal consonants), such as English or German, tend to have problems acquiring this phonemic distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-04-19T08:11:41.387" Title="Theories on L1 transfer/interference in L2 pronunciation/phonetics/phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4154" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:20:00.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidence on first language acquisition can be acquired in a controlled or naturalistic setting (and in other ways too, but this is a major distinction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;controlled setting&lt;/strong&gt; all factors other than the one(s) you are interested in are held constant. Participants should have the same age, sex, socio-economic background or at least you include roughly equal numbers of both sexes etc. and check whether it makes a difference. Then you present the same stimuli in the same way and see what happens, or vary them in a specific manner between gropus. From an experimental and extremely unethical point of view, the ideal experiment would be taking children a birth, assigning them to different groups and presenting each group with input that differs in some way you are interested in. Needless to say, nobody will do exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;strong&gt;naturalistic setting&lt;/strong&gt; the researcher tries to influence the result as little as possible. You try to generalise from what you see happening 'in real life' - for example that 90 % of all children acquiring English in the UK from monolingual patterns have mastered irregular past tense verbs by age 3 (I'm making up the numbers here). One problem here is that the presence of a researcher might &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer%27s_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;change the outcome&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T17:31:01.313" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:31:01.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:29:01.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to go around the world to find examples. In Portuguese and French, all plural personal pronouns end in &quot;s&quot;. Check below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;English       French   Portuguese&#xA;&#xA;I             je       eu&#xA;you           tu       tu&#xA;he            il       ele&#xA;she           elle     ela&#xA;it            -        -&#xA;we            nous     nós&#xA;you           vous     vós&#xA;they (masc)   ils      eles&#xA;they (fem)    elles    elas&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice for &quot;il/ele&quot; and &quot;elle/ela&quot; the plurals are precisely what you were looking for. Plus, they're formed as in English (they're all related languages, so it's no big deal). Interesting that when I saw your question I thought &quot;well, that's interesting&quot;, until I tested if it worked in Portuguese: then the answer was obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As these answers have shown, this is far from uncommon, even appearing in English non-standard forms. I guess if you knew some other languages it would help, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed no one directly answered your question, and although it is clear what all of us mean, I always like a direct answer: &lt;strong&gt;yes, there are such languages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2334" LastEditorUserId="2334" LastEditDate="2013-08-10T18:41:20.080" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T18:41:20.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:45:39.993" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yous&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;yous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This regional term is predominantly used in Scotland and Ireland and throughout Australia, as well as overseas areas of previous Irish emigration e.g. some parts of the US (Boston, MA and Philadelphia, PA) and northern Nova Scotia and Lanark Ontario/Canada and South Auckland, New Zealand. It also occurs in Scouse (usually spelled &amp;quot;yous&amp;quot; as above, instead of &amp;quot;youse&amp;quot; a more American variant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Noun.&lt;/em&gt; Plural form of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T17:45:39.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-10T17:57:25.837" Score="4" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a book on comparative grammar, where the grammar of different languages and/or language families is described and compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: A comment made me realize that the question is extremely broad. An example of a reference that I think would be ideal for my purposes is &lt;a href=&quot;http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9780511704505&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. It's just that it was written in 1843! Also, books which describe grammar generically, but with examples from different languages, are of interest. It does not need to be research level, this is just for fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone give some pointers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2325" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T04:45:11.597" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T04:45:11.597" Title="Resources comparing grammars of different languages" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4161" CreationDate="2013-08-10T18:56:20.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want a broad overview of variation in a wide variety of languages have a look at the field &lt;strong&gt;typology and language universals&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two standard text books that I found excellent are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Croft. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Typology-Universals-Cambridge-Textbooks-Linguistics/dp/0521004993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1376160829&amp;amp;sr=8-1&amp;amp;keywords=croft%20typology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Typology and Universals&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bernard Comrie. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226114333&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Universals and Linguistic Typology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are also in some ways complementary, so it's worth it to read both. Some background in linguistics will be useful to get the most out of them but they don't require too much previous knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-08-10T18:56:20.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-11T03:51:09.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In standard Arabic, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ant&lt;/em&gt; = You mascline sg&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anti&lt;/em&gt; = you feminine sg &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antuma&lt;/em&gt; = you dual &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antum&lt;/em&gt; = you mascline pl &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antunna&lt;/em&gt; = you feminine pl &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2347" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-11T11:25:24.053" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T11:25:24.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-11T12:33:33.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ella (she) =&gt; ellas (they)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finnish:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;tämä (this evident) =&gt; nämä (these evident)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;tuo  (that evident) =&gt; nuo (those evident)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;se (that, non-evident) =&gt; ne (those, non-evident)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The marker &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; is said by &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books/about/Language_Relations_Across_the_Bering_Str.html?id=Su_xVd0gTOcC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Michael Fortescue&lt;/a&gt; to be the remnant of common Nostratic plural -n, present in modern Semito-Hamitic and Germanic languages (and also in a rare form of plural in Komi: &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt; =&gt; &lt;em&gt;pian&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;son =&gt; sons&lt;/em&gt;). Cf. also Komi &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt; with English &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt;, Finnish &lt;em&gt;poika&lt;/em&gt;, Swedish &lt;em&gt;pojke&lt;/em&gt;, all the three being of presumably unknown etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T17:37:24.770" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T17:37:24.770" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-11T12:44:14.787" Score="11" ViewCount="5452" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transfer of some phonetic/phonological features from the first language to a second language is common in second language acquisition. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant&quot;&gt;aspiration&lt;/a&gt; is not phonemic in English. Voiceless plosives (/p,t,k/) in simple onsets are aspirated (as in &lt;em&gt;top&lt;/em&gt; /tʰɒp/), but in complex onsets they are unaspirated (as in &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; /stɒp/). Although English speakers have the ability to pronounce voiceless plosives with or without aspiration when required by English phonology, they often find it difficult to consciously use this ability when learning languages that have phonemic aspiration, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi_phonology&quot;&gt;Hindi&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that these segmental pronunciation problems receive lots of attention in second language acquisition research. However, prosody (for example intonation) can also be rather difficult for learners and seems to receive less attention (although there is some research on this topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Is there any research on whether &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;segmental&lt;/a&gt; differences (such as aspiration) or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;suprasegmental&lt;/a&gt; differences (such as in intonation) are more difficult for learners to overcome?&lt;/strong&gt; (Controlling for the fact that when comparing languages some have more segmental differences and some more differences in intonation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T02:46:58.957" Title="Common problems in second language pronunciation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-11T13:37:11.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quechua has completely regular plural second- and third-person pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1sg: &lt;em&gt;ñoqa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2sg: &lt;em&gt;qam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3sg: &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1pl excl.: &lt;em&gt;ñoqayku&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1pl incl.: &lt;em&gt;ñoqanchik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2pl: &lt;em&gt;qamkuna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3pl: &lt;em&gt;paykuna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;cf&lt;/em&gt;.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“man”: &lt;em&gt;runa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“men”: &lt;em&gt;runakuna&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“woman”: &lt;em&gt;warmi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“women”: &lt;em&gt;warmikuna&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plural suffix -&lt;em&gt;kuna&lt;/em&gt; is not mandatory if context suffices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="489" LastEditDate="2013-08-11T21:34:36.290" LastActivityDate="2013-08-11T21:34:36.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-11T18:21:57.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first language, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tamil&lt;/a&gt;, has the &quot;gal&quot; suffix in its formal form, and the &quot;ga&quot; or &quot;nga&quot; suffix in the colloquial form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Me - Naan    &#xA;Us - Naangal (formal)/Naanga (colloquial)&#xA;&#xA;You - Nee  &#xA;You (plural) - Neengal (formal)/Neenga (colloquial)&#xA;&#xA;He/She (polite) - Avar (formal)  &#xA;They (polite) - Avargal (formal)&#xA;&#xA;It - Adhu   &#xA;They (neuter) - Adhugal (formal - rare)/Adhunga (colloquial)&#xA;&#xA;He (impolite) - Avan   &#xA;They (masculine, impolite) - Avanuga (colloquial only)&#xA;&#xA;She (impolite) - Aval   &#xA;They (feminine, impolite) - Avaluga (colloquial only)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same suffixes apply for nouns also, though I just realized the curious fact that most of the time we leave out the plural marker in colloquial Tamil. &lt;code&gt;10 naay irundhadhu&lt;/code&gt; (10 dog was there) is at least as frequently used as &lt;code&gt;10 naaynga irundhadhu&lt;/code&gt; (10 dogs were there). Optional grammatical number!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vehicle - Vandi &#xA;Vehicles - Vandigal (formal)/Vandinga (colloquial)&#xA;&#xA;Dog - Naay&#xA;Dogs - Naaygal (formal)/Naaynga (colloquial)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="971" LastEditorUserId="971" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T03:26:14.043" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T03:26:14.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3167" CreationDate="2013-08-11T22:08:50.167" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's how such a sentence boundary algorithm could be built. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crucial thing is to come up with &lt;strong&gt;sequences of words (n-grams) that have a high likelihood of occurring at the end of a sentence or at the start of a sentence and a small likelihood of occurring within a sentence.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of these n-grams could be compiled with a large corpus such as the written part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/a&gt;. Once the list is complete, the algorithm would go through the text without punctuation and for every word boundary look up the preceding n-grams in the list. For example, in a sequence of words such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;have you seen it it's incredible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;once the algorithm is at &lt;em&gt;have you seen it&lt;/em&gt; it would look up &lt;em&gt;seen it&lt;/em&gt; in the list and give you a score such as: Occurred 56 times at the end of sentences and 22 times within a sentence, i.e. a score of 56/22 = 2.5. There should also be a list of three-word sequences, so look up &lt;em&gt;you seen it&lt;/em&gt;, which might have a score of 13/2=6.5, then go on with a four-word list. Now average all scores and if it passes a certain threshold (which would need to be determined empirically) the algorithm sets a sentence boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same could be done with n-grams/word sequences occurring sentence-initially, and n-grams which occur at sentence boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: As @P Elliott pointed out in the comments, a somewhat similar algorithm has been implemented (&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl-arc.comp.nus.edu.sg/archives/acl-arc-090501d3/data/pdf/anthology-PDF/A/A97/A97-1004.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Maximum Entropy Approach to Identifying Sentence&#xA;Boundaries&lt;/a&gt;) and has high accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="17226" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T18:38:17.170" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T18:38:17.170" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2583" CreationDate="2013-08-11T22:45:27.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of English (&lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sport&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sport&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/disport&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;disport&lt;/a&gt;), the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=sport&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GS36131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grimm Brothers Dictionary of German&lt;/a&gt; all give variants of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; Middle English &lt;em&gt;disport(en)&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Old French &lt;em&gt;desporter&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; from &lt;em&gt;des-&lt;/em&gt; 'away' + &lt;em&gt;porter&lt;/em&gt; 'carry' (from Latin &lt;em&gt;portare&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T00:40:57.910" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T00:40:57.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-08-12T06:24:27.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hungarian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ő  = he/she (genderless) &#xA;ők = they (also genderless)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in Hungarian, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-k&lt;/em&gt; is generally used for plural for all words, not just in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic case has only the third person obeying this rule, the other two are exceptions. However, in other cases, most (or all, I didn't really count) obey this rule, with minor variations, but still ending in &quot;k&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nekem -&amp;gt; nekünk (for me -&amp;gt; for us)&#xA;neked -&amp;gt; nektek (for you, singular -&amp;gt; for you, plural)&#xA;neki -&amp;gt; nekik (for him/her -&amp;gt; for them)&#xA;&#xA;velem -&amp;gt; velünk (with me -&amp;gt; with us)&#xA;veled -&amp;gt; veletek (with you, singular -&amp;gt; with you, plural)&#xA;vele -&amp;gt; velük (with him/her -&amp;gt; with them)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples, listing only one person, (but all persons have this rule)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tőlem -&amp;gt; tőlünk (from me -&amp;gt; from us)&#xA;enyém -&amp;gt; mienk (mine -&amp;gt; ours) derived from (én=me, mi=we)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2354" LastEditorUserId="2354" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T05:09:15.087" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T05:09:15.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2938" CreationDate="2013-08-12T15:34:01.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Chinese characters or what we call Chinese logogram have not influenced it's grammar at all. Writing is just a image of the mapping from sound and maybe meaning of language. How could it influence the rule of language? From modern model of evolution of language like evolution game theory, also it is unlikely that logogram influences grammar either!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-11-20T21:39:14.337" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T21:39:14.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3724" CreationDate="2013-08-12T15:48:29.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you or other present as evidence to support &quot;On the idea that Classical Chinese may &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be direct ancestor of modern Chinese languages&quot; may happen in other language too, it is just the difference between literary and the vernacular (spoken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the comparative historical method, one can construct systemic correspondence between dialects and Mandarin, between dialects of Mandarin and archaic Chinese. How can we imagine an artificial language systemically relates to a spoken one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we have not done statistical research, which may be more likely to refute what you say. But what we have observed may lead to negation of your conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-10T07:15:10.137" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T07:15:10.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4061" CreationDate="2013-08-12T16:05:05.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a term from computer science or computability theory.You know,there are some sets that are not computable or recursive or not computably enumerable.To compare these sets,the Turing machine may ask information source outside the turing machine(you may think of turing machine as computer) the question about the membership for yes or no when it can not decide  a element's  membership or it can not decide   a element's membership after amount of computation steps.To extend such an idea of information source  to compare two computable sets ,one may be regarded as information source  so as to decide the membership of other set's element.So it is defined in two cases,one is incomputable,the other is computable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the information source outside the Turing Machine is not gotten by computation or reasoning,it comes to Turing machine as from God,we call it oracle,or oracle information.You know in ancient china,people used oracle to get God's intention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2013-08-12T16:12:59.533" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T16:12:59.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4139" CreationDate="2013-08-12T17:27:59.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the most common explanation of how vowel harmony starts is that it's a grammaticalization of the phonetic effect of coarticulation, where the properties of one segment influence how the speaker articulates surrounding segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when an upcoming syllable contains a round vowel, it's common for speakers to begin rounding their lips partway through the &lt;em&gt;preceding&lt;/em&gt; syllable or earlier (even two or three syllables earlier). In speech communities where speakers do a lot of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, it's possible that learners in future generations will reanalyze what they hear as being contrastive rounding (or whatever) on more than one syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably no relation to the size of the vowel inventory. In the 1990s, Sharon Manuel proposed that languages with larger vowel inventories tend to allow less vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (so maybe we could hypothesize they'd be less likely to develop vowel harmony in the future), but her proposed relationship between inventory size and coarticulation hasn't really held up beyond the languages she first looked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosody should definitely have a role according to this story. Segments in prosodically strong positions tend to exert stronger coarticulatory effects on their prosodically weak neighbours than vice versa. So along with other tendencies (like right-to-left being more common than left-to-right), you'd expect more languages to develop harmony patterns where features spread &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; prosodically strong segments than &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2358" LastActivityDate="2013-08-12T17:27:59.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3925" CreationDate="2013-08-12T17:56:25.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert, but a native speaker. Please excuse me for the lack of terminology, but Hungarian doesn't really adhere to the Nominative/Accusative/Dative/Genitive division.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root is &quot;&lt;code&gt;hoz&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (&lt;code&gt;ő hoz&lt;/code&gt; = he/she brings), the &quot;nominative&quot; or &quot;basic&quot; form is &quot;&lt;code&gt;hozni&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (to bring)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; is the general sign of the past tense. (Hungarian really has only one past tense, excluding some tenses used in regional dialects)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use &lt;code&gt;ta&lt;/code&gt; it means it refers to the specific thing (&lt;code&gt;hozta a levelet&lt;/code&gt; = he/she brought the letter vs. &lt;code&gt;hozott egy levelet&lt;/code&gt; = he/she brought a letter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the basic form would be the non-specific, &quot;&lt;code&gt;hozott&lt;/code&gt;&quot;, where the vowel is only there to make it more &quot;musical&quot;, because &quot;hozt&quot; would feel funny, and so it's some kind of exception. Generally the unspecific form just adds a &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; and nothing else, like in &lt;code&gt;válaszol -&amp;gt; válaszolt -&amp;gt; válaszolta&lt;/code&gt; = answer -&gt; answered (general) -&gt; answered (specific)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;About being telic/altelic&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there is an end point to which you will stop bringing it and &#xA;  instead be depositing/gifting/offering/leaving it at the place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; it's really hard to say, as Hungarian does not make the same distinction as for example English between past simple and past perfect, past continuous, etc. In English and German, if you have compound sentences, you have to take care whether the action in the first sentence already finished when the second started or not. In Hungarian, &lt;strong&gt;there is no such thing&lt;/strong&gt;, there is only one past tense (and only one future tense which is not really a future tense at all). All the complicity in other parts of the language are a little bit diminished by the very very simple tense rules.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note: there is a past tense to indicate an action very distant in the past, in this tense it would be &lt;code&gt;hozá&lt;/code&gt;, or indicating an even more distant past &lt;code&gt;hozá vala&lt;/code&gt; but this tense is quite archaic and not generally used except in some regional dialects.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For additional fun, try to analyze &lt;code&gt;hozhattátok&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;you (plural) could have brought it&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2 (telicity)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just &lt;code&gt;hozta&lt;/code&gt; does not necessarily mean that the action is finished. It might have been interrupted. So if someone interrupted me when I was bringing something, then I was not able to actually bring it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;code&gt;meghozta&lt;/code&gt; means that the action is finished. (But it's still the same tense). The prefix &lt;code&gt;meg-&lt;/code&gt; in front of any verb accentuates that the action is completed. However, to compare it to the German &quot;machen -&gt; gemacht&quot; would be, in my opinion, a mistake, because in German there was a change in tenses. Its role is very similar to other prefixes, just like &lt;code&gt;felhozta&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;elhozta&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;behozta&lt;/code&gt;, which mean &lt;code&gt;brought it up&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;brought it here&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;brought it in&lt;/code&gt;, respectively, which are obviously finished acts. The &lt;code&gt;meg-&lt;/code&gt; just indicates its &quot;finishedness&quot;, without specifying &quot;here&quot;, &quot;there&quot;, &quot;up&quot;, or &quot;down&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telicity#Testing_for_telicity_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; example, &quot;John built a house in a month.&quot; vs. &quot;John built houses for a month.&quot;, in Hungarian it is incorrect to use &lt;code&gt;hozta&lt;/code&gt; with a formulation like &quot;in an hour&quot;. You have to use &lt;code&gt;meghozta&lt;/code&gt; or some other prefix. You can use &lt;code&gt;hozta&lt;/code&gt; only in the context of &quot;for an hour&quot;, and &lt;code&gt;meghozta&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;elhozta&lt;/code&gt; etc. only in the context of &quot;in an hour&quot;. So it seems telicity is inherent of the verb itself, not like in English where in both cases you use &quot;built&quot; and the context decides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from this example, &lt;code&gt;hozta&lt;/code&gt; on its own would be atelic. You would need a prefix to indicate that the action is completed. The prefix can be separated from the word under certain circumstances, but it would still have to be in the sentence to indicate that it's an accomplished action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2354" LastEditorUserId="2354" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T14:48:25.890" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T14:48:25.890" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1476" CreationDate="2013-08-12T19:00:33.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hungarian is a language with completely free word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have an example: &lt;strong&gt;I was in the house.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, you could say something like &quot;In the house I was...&quot; but it's more poetic and generally not used in common speech. In Hungarian, all 6 permutations can be used. (I = én, was = voltam, in the house = a házban)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Én a házban voltam = I was in the house, I don't know where the others were&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Én voltam a házban = It was me in the house, not someone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A házban voltam én = I definitely visited the house, maybe other locations, I didn't. (used with an exclamation mark)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A házban én voltam = In the house it was me, not someone else. At other places, maybe not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voltam én a házban = these last two are rare, but can be used as a defense against an accusation that I wasn't in the house, or that I was somewhere else and not in the house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voltam a házban én&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, that if the person is not that important, or not accentuated, it is usually omitted, and some of the above sentences may sound more natural without the pronoun. They are correct, however, even with the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you can add a time (like yesterday) to have 24 permutations, and the name of a person (who was there with me) to have 120 permutations! I did not check all of them, but did a mental check on a number of them and they are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2354" LastEditorUserId="2354" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T14:06:05.670" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T14:06:05.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4183" CreationDate="2013-08-12T21:53:59.303" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on an M.Phil thesis which is focusing on topic modelling 19th century journals.  The journals in question are science, literature and antiquities based.  I have extracted the text using OCR.  I need to build a dictionary of terms with which I can spell check my corpus.  To do this, I need to find a clean scientific corpus or word list that I can build the dictionary from. &lt;em&gt;edit - English language corpus required (sorry for any ambiguity)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at Archer but it's got a lot of OCR errors / non-textual content in the word list.  I have also looked at The Art Corpus, but it is too modern.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2359" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T10:27:09.663" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T10:27:09.663" Title="Word list sought based on corpus of 19th century scientific English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4182" CreationDate="2013-08-12T22:44:43.847" Score="15" ViewCount="48983" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many countries around the world, especially in Africa, the people natively speak both an indigenous language and French due to French colonization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Norman conquest of England left us with many, many French words and grammatical structures, but England maintained only one language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What factors caused this difference? The French colonization of the world left many countries speaking French, but only left England with a vastly different language from what it started with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T03:13:58.647" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T20:41:51.593" Title="Why did England not maintain French as a spoken language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2013-08-13T06:47:45.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect the difference may be due to the fact that language used to be less “politicized”, i.e., the conquerors did speak French, but there was no conscious effort to impose the French language on the colonized people: Everybody essentially just used whatever language seemed most useful to communicate in a given situation. This &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; favored the conquerors’ language, because they tended to be the people with money and power, but over time, there was a creolization of the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 19th century, as the concept of a nation state developed, language started being considered part of the national identity, so there was more of an effort to impose the national language on every subject of a nation. As an example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Education_Act_1835&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Education Act of 1835&lt;/a&gt; switched money previously spent on educating Indian elites in Sanskrit and Arabic to educating them in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2020" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T06:47:45.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-13T08:44:57.887" Score="5" ViewCount="6296" Body="&lt;p&gt;English spelling is in many respects not phonetic and there is often no one-to-one mapping between spelling and pronunication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. '&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;' is /ej/ or /ey/ instead of /a/ as in Albert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;' is /s/ not /c,ts/ like in Tsunami or Cyprián&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;' is /i/ (this is the most ridiculous, how can you pronounce  as &quot;i&quot; when in most words it's E e.g. Edward, met, get, hemp?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;' is /aj,ay/ ? Am ay en aydiot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is who can we thank?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is not due to influence from French because their pronunciation is quite logical (well maybe except the weird '&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;' that  sounds like German '&lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt;' ;) ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYy3P2okyw&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYy3P2okyw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which language or people brought the '&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;' that sounds like /i/ and '&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;' that sounds like /ay/ to the &quot;Inglish&quot; language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T09:49:04.210" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:53:33.830" Title="Why is English spelling so inconsistent?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4180" CreationDate="2013-08-13T09:00:21.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look up &quot;Great Vowel Shift&quot; in either the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or English &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastEditorUserId="715" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T10:53:33.830" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:53:33.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2013-08-13T09:04:39.013" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the Norman Conquest in 1066 French quickly replaced English in all domains associated with power. French was used at the royal court, by the clergy, the aristocracy, in law courts. But the vast majority of the population continued to speak English. Had the aristocracy and clergy miraculously vanished in 1100 English would have taken over right away. In reality it took until the 14th c. for English to slowly supplant French in many of these domains. There are several reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_lackland&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Lackland&lt;/a&gt; (King of England) &lt;strong&gt;lost Normandy&lt;/strong&gt; to the King of France. This meant that his and the Norman aristocracy's focus shifted to England. He still had possessions in the South of France, but these were too far off to shift the focus away from England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Society used to be split into a French-speaking aristocracy and clergy who wielded all the power, and English-speaking peasants without power. Now an urban and &lt;strong&gt;English-speaking middle class&lt;/strong&gt; (traders, artisans, etc.) came up, and acquired wealth and power.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;French-speaking population&lt;/strong&gt; was ultimately rather &lt;strong&gt;small in number&lt;/strong&gt;. Looking at it from this perspective one might ask why French stayed that important for such a long time. French did remain the language of power for two centuries or so, but ultimately the aristocracy slowly shifted towards English because their attachment with France had waned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the 14th c. people started making fun of the French spoken by the Norman Aristocracy. Chaucer, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v036/36.2rothwell.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prioress's Tale&lt;/a&gt; in the Canterbury Tales says about the Prioress (a nun):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librarius.com/canttran/genpro/genpro118-162.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Frenssh of Parys was to hir unknowe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Prioress only knew the kind of French taught in England (Stratford here) and not the kind of French spoken in Paris (seen as more desirable). This was at a time when text books for teaching French to the aristocracy came up. They now needed instruction in French because they didn't learn it at home any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T09:04:39.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4177" CreationDate="2013-08-13T09:14:10.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark Davies offers a word list based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ngrams.info/download_coha.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Historical Corpus of North American English&lt;/a&gt;. The list indicates frequencies for each decade from 1800 to 1990, so you can choose the periods you need. Scientific texts are included in the corpus, but I don't know whether you can get a word list based on specific genres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T09:56:07.457" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T09:56:07.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-13T11:51:45.033" Score="2" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dialectology is the study of geographical varieties of a language. The study of (for example) older dialects of English (such as the dialect spoken in the Northeast of England around Newcastle) and more recent dialects (such as Indian or Australian English) can contribute a lot to other areas of linguistics. For example, the authors of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.128/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Dialect Laboratory.&lt;/a&gt; Dialects as a testing ground for theories of language change&quot; argue that dialectology can contribute in many ways to the study of language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Does dialectology also have something to contribute &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;psycho-&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolinguistic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;neurolinguistics&lt;/a&gt; (the study of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning the ability to use language)? Or the other way around? Are there any studies relying on this connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-13T12:00:14.870" LastActivityDate="2013-08-13T12:00:14.870" Title="What can dialectology contribute to psycho- or neurolinguistics - or the other way around?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:16:04.513" Score="1" ViewCount="1841" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was always taught that a word contains as many syllables as it has vowels. By definition,  a vowel is a sound that produces a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in English phonology, by definition, diphthong is two adjacent vowels which produce one syllable. I did not hear about diphthongs until I read some literature about English phonology.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware about long vowels (which produce one syllable) and vowel hiatus (two consecutive vowels) which produce two syllables. So what is the proof that English diphthongs are actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;two vowels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which produce &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one syllable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as opposed to long vowels, hiatus, or a vowel followed by a consonant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T21:11:16.710" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T02:11:54.927" Title="Is there any proof that diphthongs exist?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="24" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4187" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:34:11.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lexicon is the abstract notion of all words forming a particular language. In contrast, a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/dictionary&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dictionary&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is a concrete sample of the lexicon collected and catalogued by some lexicographers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:01:22.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:01:22.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:34:11.890" Score="0" Body="Questions relating to lexicons: the catalogue of a language's words." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T21:17:10.307" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T21:17:10.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:35:01.440" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T20:35:01.440" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T20:35:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:35:01.440" Score="0" Body="When words are taken from one language and incorporated into another." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T21:17:24.043" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T21:17:24.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:36:22.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T20:36:22.570" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T20:36:22.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-14T20:36:22.570" Score="0" Body="a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-08-14T21:17:29.513" LastActivityDate="2013-08-14T21:17:29.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-15T01:20:22.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Defining a diphthong as a sequence of two vowels may not be correct.    A diphthong is a sequence comprising a vowel and a glide, at least, according to the Summer Institute of Linguistics:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsADiphthong.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsADiphthong.htm&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glide, or semivowel, is defined at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt; as “a sound, such as English /w/ or /j/, that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.”   In other words, a sound that is like a vowel, but non-syllabic.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the glide comes first in the diphthong, we have words such as British “new” [nju], in which [j] as in &quot;yes&quot; [jɛs] is the glide.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the glide comes last in the diphthong, we have words like English “aisle” [aɪ̯l], in which [ɪ̯] is the glide.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the little curve symbol under the &amp;lt;ɪ&gt;, yielding &amp;lt;ɪ̯&gt;.    That little curve, called an &lt;em&gt;inverted breve&lt;/em&gt;, means that the vowel sound is non-syllabic, i.e. that it’s a glide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, vowels aren’t the only sounds that can be syllable nuclei.   Consider syllabic consonants, such as the [̯̯̯̯l̩] in “bottle” [bɑdl̩].     Also see the examples mentioned with this definition of syllabic consonants:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASyllabicConsonant.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASyllabicConsonant.htm&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T01:20:22.953" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-15T01:22:35.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, loosely speaking, there is just one continuous vibration or wave in one syllable with one, two or more vowels. Those syllables with more than one vowel are just due to the writing system, and it just designates the location of tongue when the tongue moves, not saying that two vowels are put together to form part of one syllable or one syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may record the sound of several syllables with more than one vowel by computer and take a look at a diagram of its spectrum or wave with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;, they are all continuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you do the same experiment on several syllables when you speak continuously, you may almost always find there is a break or almost weakest energy between diagrams of wave or spectrum of the syllables or two vowels that sound as two syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-16T16:29:40.353" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T16:29:40.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4201" CreationDate="2013-08-15T01:56:36.947" Score="6" ViewCount="2593" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference, if any, between &quot;ungrammatical&quot; and &quot;infelicitous&quot; as linguistic terms?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had much luck finding an answer to this question on the 'net.    We all know that a phrase or sentences is ungrammatical if it violates the morpho-syntactic rules of a given language.  So &quot;I play ball,&quot; is grammatical but &quot;*Me play ball,&quot; is ungrammatical in General Western English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm betting that &quot;*Me play ball,&quot; could also be called &quot;infelicitous&quot; in General Western English.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in linguistic terminology, are the terms &quot;infelicitous&quot; and &quot;ungrammatical&quot; synonymous?   Or is the term &quot;infelicitous&quot; a more general term, encompassing the violation of more than just morpho-syntactic rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T14:12:22.550" Title="What is the difference, if any, between &quot;ungrammatical&quot; and &quot;infelicitous&quot; as linguistic terms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-15T06:16:49.753" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In thinking about this it's important to distinguish between phonetics and phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically a diphthong is a sequence of two vowel targets, wherein the tongue starts at one vowel position and moves to another. For this reason it may sometimes be described as a combination of vowel and glide, but it's best to understand the articulatory facts of what it involves, movement from one tongue 'vowel' position to another, as opposed to the steady-state articulation found in simple 'monopthongal' vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence for this can come from simply hearing the vowel movement, as well as from various kinds of imaging such as spectrograms, ultrasounds, x-rays, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologically such an articulation can function as a single phoneme, as in the diphthongs of English. But a sequence of two phonemes consisting of vowel + vowel, or vowel + glide, can (eg in fast speech) be phonetically identical to a diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for English diphthongs, a standard phonemic analysis of English will reveal a set of vowel phonemes. In every variety of English that I'm aware of some of those vowel phonemes will be realised as diphthongs, involving an articulatory movement from one vowel target to another, as revealed by the kinds of evidence already mentioned. Some of the evidence of the phonemic status of these diphthongs in English includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;standard minimal sets: 'beet, bit, bet, bait, bite, boat, bout,&#xA;bought, boot' etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diphthong as sole syllabic nucleus, eg 'how', 'boat', 'I'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Participation in same tense-lax contrasts as monopthongal vowels, eg&#xA;'divine-divinity', cf. 'serene-serenity'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-08-22T04:18:29.613" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T04:18:29.613" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-15T07:15:25.767" Score="4" ViewCount="1090" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of source (probably NLP study) of comprehensive list of collocations in English (not only the frequent one). Additionally, does anybody know the approximate estimate of the total number of collocations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2367" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T15:00:19.943" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T15:36:31.640" Title="List of collocations in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3762" CreationDate="2013-08-15T07:20:43.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can try the &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;. They additionally provide the raw data for analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2367" LastEditorUserId="2367" LastEditDate="2013-08-18T06:35:45.957" LastActivityDate="2013-08-18T06:35:45.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4196" CreationDate="2013-08-15T12:25:01.387" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of &quot;infelicitous&quot; and &quot;ungrammatical&quot; are that they describe two entirely separate situations.  Your definition of ungrammaticality is sound- something that violates syntactic or morpho-syntactic rules is ungrammatical.  However, in my experience &quot;infelicitous&quot; is used in the study of pragmatics to describe an utterance that is grammatical but cannot occur. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is used to describe performative speech acts- sentences that cause actions to occur ('I christen this child &quot;Jim,&quot;' or &quot;I sentence you to death').  Each utterance has felicity conditions, or situations that must be true in order for the utterance to be true and have the effect the speaker wanted.  In the case of &quot;I sentence you to death,&quot; the speaker must be a judge, in a courtroom, somewhere that has the death penalty, talking to a criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of these conditions are not true, the statement is infelicitous and has no effect.  So, if a judge were, say, at the movies and someone was talking very loudly, the judge could say &quot;I sentence you to death,&quot; but &lt;em&gt;it wouldn't work&lt;/em&gt;.  The felicity conditions of being in a courtroom and talking to a criminal have been violated.  No one would say that the sentence &quot;I sentence you to death,&quot; is ungrammatical, but it is infelicitous because it cannot succeed under the given conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="518" LastActivityDate="2013-08-15T12:25:01.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2013-08-16T06:50:39.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned the form/function distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics studies the nature (acoustic and articulatory) of sounds that human's produce while speaking. Phonology studies their function in differentiating meaning in various contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus (very crudely), phonetics will notice the difference between the aspirated and non-aspirated /p/ in pin vs. spin. But phonology will be mostly interested in the fact that the meaning of both words will change when you replace /p/ with /k/ in exactly the same way as in lip vs. lick where aspiration doesn't enter the picture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course, phonology can only be successful when it has good phonetics to rely on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T06:50:39.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-16T19:10:54.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You asked if English diphthongs could be analyzed instead as long vowels, but that doesn't make sense. Long vowels don't change in quality (phonologically) over their duration. But you are asking about sounds such as &quot;hey&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;cow&quot;, &quot;toy&quot;, which clearly do change. Actually, I realize you probably have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Traditional_long_and_short_vowels_in_English_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;confusion of definitions between linguistic long vowels and &quot;long vowels&quot; as taught in elementary school&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be vowel hiatus? Well that would mean that each vowel is treated as belonging in a separate syllable. But in the example words I gave above, we English speakers clearly treat those as monosyllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the real tricky question is whether these sequences are true VV diphthongs or actually VC and CV glides. The tricky thing is that all the glides in my dialect of English (Western Canadian) end on either a [j] or [w] sound, which, when I say it that way would mean these aren't really diphthongs. But [j] can also be interpreted as [i] and [w] as [u].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it is instinctive that they are phonological diphthongs, but that is probably not a good enough answer. But ask yourself, do you consider the &quot;y&quot; in &quot;fly&quot; to be a legitimate vowel sound in English or merely an [a] sound followed by a [j]? It is curious that 4 out of the 5 names of our vowels in english are actually pronounced as diphthongs. As Manjusri hinted at, an understanding of moras would be helpful. Briefly, a diphthong in any language must have two moras (same with long vowels), however a glide belongs in either the onset (no mora) of a syllable or in its coda. Then things get complicated. Depending on the language, and depending on sound, the coda may or may not carry a mora. Unfortunately I think English is ambiguous about this. If it could be shown that the purported [j] or [w] at the end of a syllable had no mora then that would be proof that it is really a glide sitting in the coda rather than the second half of a diphthong, sitting in the nucleus. I don't think you can find such proof though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="2373" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T17:22:14.257" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T17:22:14.257" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4198" CreationDate="2013-08-16T20:01:21.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can download Google Ngrams whole dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2013-08-16T20:01:21.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-16T20:32:57.663" Score="2" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has there been any investigation into the ATR quality of the central alveolar approximant [ɹ]? It is very vowel-like and I have this theory that it could simply be the result of an advanced tongue root and a retracted tongue tip. Is that a crazy idea? I know there is probably more to it than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T06:13:12.627" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T06:13:12.627" Title="Is [ɹ] +ATR or -ATR or is that even relevant?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;atr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4207" CreationDate="2013-08-17T01:42:04.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about [ATR] the phonological feature, then you will want to know whether there is [-ATR] approximant that alternates with [r] in some language. If you are talking about the physical parameter normally correlated with [ATR] in languages which have that feature, then it gets tricky since the exact articulatory/acoustic correlates to be associated with [ATR] are not fully agreed upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the latter question, see, inter alia, Edmondson and Esling (2009) &quot;The valves of the throat...&quot;; Fulop, Kari and Ladefoged (1998) &quot;An acoustic study of the tongue root contrast...&quot;; and references therein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T01:42:04.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4209" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-17T06:13:48.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T06:13:48.613" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T06:13:48.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-17T06:13:48.613" Score="0" Body="The &quot;Advanced Tongue Root&quot; phonological feature." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T09:23:48.030" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T09:23:48.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4211" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-17T17:23:19.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T17:23:19.517" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T17:23:19.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-17T17:23:19.517" Score="0" Body="A morphological derivation process whereby complex words are formed by the stringing together of morphemes." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T18:02:14.317" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T18:02:14.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4213" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-17T17:24:35.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-17T17:24:35.287" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T17:24:35.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-17T17:24:35.287" Score="0" Body="A phonetic sequence, consisting of two vowel targets, that is interpreted as a single vowel." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:59:24.253" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:59:24.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4112" CreationDate="2013-08-17T21:30:37.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should really be a comment to Alex B's answer, but the system won't let me comment yet...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that the meaning of &quot;formative&quot; or &quot;exponent&quot; depends on your theory of morphology. But in practice, the most widespread reason why people use these terms is to try to &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; theories of morphology — and especially to avoid the controversial and hopelessly theoretically loaded terms &quot;morph&quot; and &quot;morpheme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people tend to use &quot;formative&quot; for any chunk of phonology that recurs across several words with a consistent behaviour (usually a sequence of one or more segments, though some people are more liberal about what counts) — as in Bauer's definition, except (crucially) remaining agnostic over whether it's a morph or not (rather than, like Bauer, insisting it can't be). It gives you a way to talk about things like the &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-fer&lt;/em&gt; of English &lt;em&gt;refer&lt;/em&gt;, without claiming that they do or don't mean anything and without getting into an argument (like Aronoff 1976 did) over whether they deserve to be called &quot;morphemes&quot;. Or to talk neutrally about things like the theme vowels in a verb conjugation, or the apparent genitive suffixes that appear between the halves of many German compounds. Or to talk about &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; without taking a stand on whether it's an independent word or a stem or an affix or a clitic or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People don't use &quot;exponent&quot; quite as consistently, but it tends to be the flip side of &quot;formative&quot;: talking about the phonological realizations of a meaning or of a morphosyntactic feature, while not taking a stand on what the phonological realization has to be like. Maybe it's a string of segments (a formative), but maybe it's just a single phonological feature, or a shift in the position of stress, or nothing at all (people talk about &quot;zero exponents&quot;, while talking about &quot;zero formatives&quot; would be weird), or maybe it's even &lt;em&gt;deleting&lt;/em&gt; something from the phonological representation. Maybe this particular phonological representation for the feature [past] recurs consistently across verbs, or maybe it occurs in just this one verb — doesn't matter, we can still just call it an &quot;exponent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To oversimplify: &quot;Formative&quot; talks about form with minimal assumptions about meaning. &quot;Exponent&quot; talks about (the form of) meanings with minimal assumptions about form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for all the linguists who use the terms differently. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2358" LastActivityDate="2013-08-17T21:30:37.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4218" CreationDate="2013-08-18T03:19:17.617" Score="3" ViewCount="10393" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &quot;or&quot; and &quot;either...or?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one comprises one phonological word and the other comprises two.  I have yet to find an analysis of &quot;either...or&quot; in which &quot;either&quot; is considered to be an adverb.   The Summer Institute of Linguistics glossary of linguistic terms indicates that &quot;either...or&quot; is a correlative conjunction, which the SIL defines as &quot;either of a pair of coordinating conjunctions used in ordered fashion.&quot;  (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsACorrelativeConjunction.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsACorrelativeConjunction.htm&lt;/a&gt; )  I'm not sure that this definition makes sense for English, because &quot;either&quot; is not a coordinator by itself AFAIK.   This definition may apply to other languages.  But I've been having a hard time finding examples on the Internet.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, my chief interest is in the semantic difference between &quot;or&quot; and &quot;either...or&quot;.   Although I'm asking about two English coordinators, I believe that this question is appropriate for this list because other languages also have a similar contrast.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I'm a monolingual English speaker, examples of sentences in which &quot;or&quot; would be acceptable but &quot;either...or&quot; would not be--and vice versa--would be helpful.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T17:13:47.557" Title="What is the difference between &quot;or&quot; and &quot;either...or&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4216" CreationDate="2013-08-18T14:58:08.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert on this topic but these are some of the most relevant works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Den Dikken, Marcel. 2006. &lt;em&gt;Either&lt;/em&gt;-float and the syntax of co-&lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;-dination. &lt;em&gt;Natural Language and Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; 24(3). 689–749. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-005-2503-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-005-2503-0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 2005. The syntax of correlative adverbs. &lt;em&gt;Lingua&lt;/em&gt; 115(4). 419–443. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2003.09.009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2003.09.009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larson, Richard K. 1985. On the syntax of disjunction scope. &lt;em&gt;Natural Language and Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; 3(2). 217–264. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00133841&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00133841&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schwarz, Bernhard. 1999. On the syntax of &lt;em&gt;either ... or&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Natural Language and Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; 17(2). 339–370. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1006046306942&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1006046306942&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, you can find more relevant literature on the topic by perusing the bibliographies of these works and/or exploring via Google Scholar who has been citing them. Larson and Schwarz are the pivotal contributions. Johannessen gives a fairly non-technical cross-linguistic perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2013-08-18T14:58:08.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4216" CreationDate="2013-08-18T18:20:11.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both...And, Either...Or,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Neither...Nor&lt;/em&gt; are the classic examples of correlative conjunctions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Either&lt;/em&gt; is a disjunctive dual form in English, parallel with &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;, a conjunctive dual form, in some uses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to both Bill and Mike&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to Bill and Mike.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to either Bill or Mike ~ He wants to talk to Bill or Mike.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of dual reference, however, &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; don't work as correlatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to both Bill, Mike, and Joe.&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to Bill, Mike, and Joe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to either Bill, Mike, or Joe.&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to Bill, Mike, or Joe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; can be used pronominally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to both (of them).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to either (one) (of them).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though only &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; (as the suppletive dual of the quantifier &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;) can undergo Q-Float:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to both/all (of them).&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;He wants to talk to them both/all.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both/All (of them) want to talk to him.&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;They both/all want to talk to him.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think it's most useful to consider &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; as an auxiliary conjunction; it does some of the work of a conjunction, and appears in an optional supporting role with other conjunctions in special circumstances. That's pretty much what &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; auxiliaries do in English -- &lt;em&gt;be, get, have, can&lt;/em&gt;; articles, particles, and prepositions. Why not conjunctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-08-18T18:20:11.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4236" CreationDate="2013-08-19T02:57:19.513" Score="3" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the most common reasons for (synchronic) word-order changes in isolating languages?    From what I’ve read, word order in isolating languages can be changed even when the constituents in the resulting sentences have the same semantic roles as they do in the original sentences.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “semantic roles,” I mean relationships between agents, patients, etc., with respect to what the verb denotes.   I’m trying to follow the SIL’s definition here:    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASemanticRole.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASemanticRole.htm&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, “The king helped the people,” and “The people were helped by the king” don’t have exactly the same meaning, but the constituents have the same semantic roles.   In both sentences, the king is the agent, helping is the action, and people are patients.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that there are a number of reasons for varying word order in an isolating language.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, for example, word order can vary in order to specify whether a given argument is definite.    For instance, in Chinese “Lái rén le,” (come person perfect) means “Some person or people have come.”   But “Rén lái le,” (person come perfect) means “The people (presumeably the expected people) have come.”    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rule, if I understand it correctly, is that clause-initial nouns tend to be definite, while non-clause initial nouns tend to be indefinite.     See a little more about this Chinese grammar rule here:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chineselanguage.com/chinese-lessons/id/373/grammar--chinese-word-order.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.chineselanguage.com/chinese-lessons/id/373/grammar--chinese-word-order.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, my sole and native tongue, is pretty isolating compared to German, but the former has some grammatical constructions that allow for fronting constituents that normally occur after the verb.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put a focus closer to the front of a sentence, English speakers can do things like this:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We saw Hector in the garden.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a)  It was Hector whom we saw in the garden.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b)  Seeing Hector in the garden is what we did.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To topicalize non-subjects, we can front them like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rose drove a car.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a)  The car, Rose drove. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b)  As for the car, Rose drove it.          &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the examples I’ve shown here don’t tell me which kinds of word-order changes are the most common across isolating languages.  What are the common trends?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T16:11:58.907" Title="What are the most common reasons for (synchronic) word-order changes in isolating languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2013-08-19T18:03:30.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mostly folks try out whatever they think will work in context, and they get to like some ways more than others. I know that doesn't tell you where each one originates, but there's very little direct evidence and therefore most of the possible answers are theory only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's partly because there's a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of syntax in English, and the vast majority of it has been innovated, at least in its present form, during the last millennium, since the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycle.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt; wheel turned for English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here's the table of contents, from p.3 of Haj Ross's list&lt;br&gt;&#xA;of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Preliminarybufattenedlistoftransformations.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Top 200+ English Transformations of 2012&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I. Emphasis p.3ff&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - A. Pseudoclefts and Dislocations pp.3-4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - B. Clefts p.4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - C. Frontings pp.4-6&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  II. Coordinate Structures p.6&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  III. Deletions p. 6ff&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  IV. Noun Modifications p.9&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  V. Insertions p.10&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VI. Pronominalizations p.12&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VII. Advancements p.12&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - A. To subject p.12&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - B. To object p.16&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VIII. Ascensions p.18&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - A. To subject p.18&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - B. To object p.20&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  IX. Incorporations p.21&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   X. Rules for Paths p.21&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  XI. Reorderings p.21&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  XII. Lexically-governed Deletions p.24&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  XIII. Embeddings p.27&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  XIV. Constructions p.28&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and one of the rules, from the bottom of p.5, with example sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. Frontings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1. &lt;strong&gt;TOPICALIZATION&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - [&lt;em&gt;I don’t watch TV ➞ TV I don't watch&lt;/em&gt;.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - [&lt;em&gt;I would never send anything to Harry. ➞ To Harry I would never send anything&lt;/em&gt;.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - [&lt;em&gt;We have been stupid only about citizenship. ➞ Stupid we have been only about citizenship.&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - [&lt;em&gt;We should word this reply tersely. ➞ Tersely we should word this reply.&lt;/em&gt;]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NB: Many Southern speakers aver that they can’t do this kind of preposing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For some reason, NP’s with deictic determiners prepose easilier:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - [[&lt;em&gt;That/This&lt;/em&gt;] / &gt; &lt;em&gt;?The&lt;/em&gt; / ?*&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;em&gt;cat I fed.&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-08-19T18:03:30.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2938" CreationDate="2013-08-20T20:14:17.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any case of a particular script or orthography influencing grammar but writing in general can have an influence. Written forms of a language are very often their own &quot;dialect&quot; or register. Sentences tend to be longer and more grammatically complex. Undoubtedly this feeds back into the spoken language to some degree. But I guess this isn't the kind of answer you are looking for. I think it is more likely that grammar will influence the writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2013-08-20T20:14:17.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3115" CreationDate="2013-08-20T23:22:49.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are some interesting links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunciation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual Lab, Okanagan College&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wso.williams.edu/~jdowse/ipa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The IPA by J. Dowse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Speech Accent Archive&lt;/a&gt; which will show you the diversity of the ways of pronunciation,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://saundz.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Saundz&lt;/a&gt; (American English)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and a nice ogv file from &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Real-time_MRI_-_Speaking_%28English%29.ogv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="5228" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T11:11:42.597" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T11:11:42.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-21T09:04:25.550" Score="1" ViewCount="987" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a two-fold level questions. Question about linguistics from the view point of linguistics.&#xA;I am interested whether linguistics is a field of science/research or is it a discipline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two paragraphs show some use of both concepts, both taken from the same book (Newmeyer, 1988):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;By the final quarter of the century, the notion of autonomy had&#xA;parted ways with the view of language as an &quot;organism,&quot; a move which&#xA;reflected the growing recognition of the distinctive aspetcs of the&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;discipline of linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Just as its subject matter has endowed the &lt;strong&gt;field of&#xA;linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; with an importance far out of proportion to the number&#xA;of practicing linguists, so too have its debates engendered an&#xA;interest from the outside well beyond what one might expect.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it seems that in this StackExchange it is field of linguistics that is used more often: &quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2440/in-what-ways-do-the-fields-of-linguistics-and-sociology-overlap&quot;&gt;In what ways do the fields of linguistics and sociology overlap?&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newmeyer, F. J. (1988). The politics of linguistics. University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T09:40:13.453" Title="Linguistics, a discipline or a field?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4224" CreationDate="2013-08-21T09:40:13.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's... both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expressions &lt;em&gt;Discipline&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Field (of study)&lt;/em&gt; are synonyms. I doubt that Linguists will argue on that point. It's really just a matter of choosing one expression over the other rather than having actual differences in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T09:40:13.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-18T13:10:05.933" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;A curious and nice property of German is that some nouns don't have, say, &lt;em&gt;intrinsic&lt;/em&gt; names, but composed (German!) names according to the human use or perception. For instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pusteblume&lt;/em&gt; (Löwenzahn) = &lt;em&gt;pusten&lt;/em&gt; (blow) + Blume (flower).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: is there a known name for this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remark.&lt;/strong&gt; Dutch possesses the same characteristic. My favorite example there is the word &lt;em&gt;(de) paddestoel&lt;/em&gt;. In this compound name &lt;em&gt;pad&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;Kröte&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stoel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Stuhl&lt;/em&gt;: together, &lt;em&gt;paddestoel&lt;/em&gt; means Pilz (Fruchtkörper) — d.h. &lt;em&gt;der Stuhl der Kröte&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2021" OwnerDisplayName="Jorge Campos" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-23T10:39:39.733" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T10:39:39.733" Title="On an anthropological feature of German etymology (e.g. Pusteblumen)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2013-08-21T18:34:30.750" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a programmer, when I develop a system for a project I may not have enough information to get to an efficient solution within several iterations. Often convolution will occur as new relationships are created and new abstractions are formed.. this inevitably results in a code 'refactor' which is when the 'bloated' library is reduced to a more efficient, effective and precise behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language would surely have this same development cycle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2389" LastActivityDate="2013-08-21T18:34:30.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4229" CreationDate="2013-08-21T20:56:42.267" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this specific type of sentences has a name, but I can't remember it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences I'm referring to are the sentences that describe an action that is performed when saying the sentences, like for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I give you my benediction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wish you a happy birthday&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I curse all those who...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clues ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2390" LastEditorUserId="1740" LastEditDate="2013-08-22T04:09:30.593" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T04:09:30.593" Title="What is the name of the type of sentences that describe an action that is realized by saying the sentence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4228" CreationDate="2013-08-21T22:12:04.257" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;These sentences are referred to as &lt;strong&gt;performative utterances&lt;/strong&gt;. As you mention in the question, performative utterances are those in which the utterance itself (the act of speaking) is part of the action that the utterance describes. So, the act of saying &quot;I wish you a happy birthday&quot; itself is part of the act of &quot;wishing one a happy birthday&quot;, and thus it is a performative utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other main characteristic of a performative utterance, as I understand it, is that they have no truth value (though this is not a unique feature of performative utterances). In other words, &quot;I wish you a happy birthday&quot; and its ilk cannot be deemed true or false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jlawler points out in the comments, J. L. Austin's &lt;em&gt;How to Do Things with Words&lt;/em&gt; is a good source for learning about performative utterances. Alternatively, consult any text on pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1740" LastEditorUserId="1740" LastEditDate="2013-08-22T00:57:11.397" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T00:57:11.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2938" CreationDate="2013-08-22T07:09:57.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really not the right question to ask. Writing is not just about the way of writing things down but also its own way of communication. People who read and write, don't just transfer speech into letters. They express themselves differently in the two modes. This is partly because of the different cognitive demands of reading/listening and partly because the two are used in different contexts. But in effect, all literate people are to an extent bilingual - they are competent in two codes and they switch between those codes with ease. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as in all instances of language contact, there is cross-pollination. So it's quite likely that complex multi-clausal sentences with embedding and hypotaxis developed in complexity alongside writing - although I don't think there is any definitive proof of that. In some cases, written language perpetuates older forms - e.g. in Czech or Arabic that would probably otherwise disappear. In English, there are many pronunciations influenced by spelling and vice versa. None of these examples constitute 'imperfections', just features. Although, it would not be difficult to argue that the English spelling system is completely flawed, the impact of these flaws on spoken English has been minimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T07:09:57.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2013-08-22T07:20:48.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a translator, I can assure you that English is no more efficient than other languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, subtitles often miss out whole bits of dialogue and definitely leave out swathes of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there is no recognized measure of language efficiency. I did a comparative study of cohesion in English and Czech and found that word counts were very unreliable. There is no clear definition of what a word is and most words in any sentence only serve the function of holding the text together. And all languages have different rules. For instance, German or Czech will use more connectives where English will rely on the reader to make the connections in their head. Information density is a very discipline-specific concept. There is loads of 'information' conveyed by any one word that would not be captured by this notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, many bilingual speakers will tell you that there are certainly areas in which one language feels more expressive than another. So it's true that English adjective chain formation makes saying some things much easier (kind of like German word formation). But a language like Czech can express many things more efficiently thanks to its aspect or case markings. So overall, all languages are probably equally efficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T07:20:48.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-22T10:49:48.407" Score="25" ViewCount="45473" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a free English language corpus with at least 15 million words. The corpus should contain one or more plain text files. There should be no tagging, just raw text. The corpus should be free. I would prefer if the corpus contained was for modern English, with a mixture of: tv, radio, film, news, fiction, technical etc., or better still, just plain everyday conversation, but this is not a requirement. I will be processing each sentence in the text with the python programming language. Can anyone direct me to such a resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2013-08-22T12:05:40.680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T15:38:30.200" Title="English text corpus for download" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-22T14:47:03.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By definition, a vowel is a sound that produces a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the definition of a syllable? Taking dictionary.com as an example, syllable is defined as &quot;an uninterrupted segment of speech consisting of a vowel [...] (with or without preceding or following consonant sounds)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you can see where this is going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T14:47:03.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4232" CreationDate="2013-08-22T15:28:19.880" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corpora containing more than 15 million words are often not freely available due to copyright issues (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot;&gt;British National Corpus&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anc.org/&quot;&gt;open part&lt;/a&gt; of the American National Corpus (OANC) might fulfill your criteria. It contains almost 15 m. words, it's free, and contains conversations and other genres. The spoken part consists mainly of the telephone based Switchboard corpus. If you want more face to face conversations consider adding the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/santa-barbara-corpus&quot;&gt;Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OANC comes in versions with different annotation schemes. If you take the version with the least amount of annotation you should be able to strip off all the annotations with a regex find and replace scheme in Python or Notepad++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T15:28:19.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-22T15:47:41.627" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peindre#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;peindre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Latin &lt;strong&gt;pingere&lt;/strong&gt;, present active infinitive of &lt;strong&gt;pingō&lt;/strong&gt; (“I paint”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about the sound change within the early Romance languages, while this one above maybe not a sound change for its bizarre phonological shift. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although its just my guess, I still wonder whether it is a regular sound change or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:30:43.077" Title="How did OF. peindre derive from L. pingere, with a &quot;-ng-&quot; &gt; &quot;-nd-&quot; change?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4219" CreationDate="2013-08-22T16:11:58.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is probably better to talk about the order of constituents rather than words - since it is syntactic constituents that can be moved around, but not single words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rose was driving the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The car, rose was driving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Car, rose was driving the.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking two questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) What is the motivation for word order changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) What mechanisms of changing word order are used in isolating languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will first try to answer (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;(1) What is the motivation for word order changes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences can be analysed, in terms of how they present information, into two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the sentence is about (&lt;strong&gt;theme&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New information about the theme (&lt;strong&gt;rheme&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The king helped the people&lt;/em&gt; is a statement about what the king did and might be part of a larger section telling his story: &lt;em&gt;he was intelligent, had to spend his childhood in another country, and after his return, the king helped the people.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;The people were helped by the king&lt;/em&gt; is a statement about the people: &lt;em&gt;During the great famine everybody was hungry and desperate. In kingdom A many died, but in kingdom B the people were helped by the king.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since themes are usually known to those involved in the conversation (&lt;strong&gt;discourse-given&lt;/strong&gt;), they tend to be definite. Usually the subject of a sentence is also its theme because prototypical themes/subjects are high on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;animacy hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; - such as humans. On top of the animacy hierarchy are those involved in a conversation, who can be referred to with &lt;strong&gt;I, we, you&lt;/strong&gt;, and these are always discoure-given. So it makes sense that subjects, which are often rhemes, usually come at the beginning of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;(2) What mechanisms of changing word order are used in isolating languages?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic means such as those referred to by jlawler are available in English and some other languages, such as French. Here's an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleft_sentence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cleft&lt;/a&gt; sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was Hector I wanted to see, not Juliette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C'était Hector que je voulais voire, pas Juliette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spoken language intonation is at least as important as syntactic mechanisms. &lt;em&gt;Hector&lt;/em&gt; receives a pitch accent (major intonation movement) in the following sentences, where &lt;em&gt;Hector&lt;/em&gt; is extraposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hector I wanted to see, not Juliette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hector je voulais voire, pas Juliette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T16:11:58.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-22T17:48:20.300" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of easily located material online which describes &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming&quot;&gt;stemmers&lt;/a&gt; or provides implementations. There's a bit of discussion of metrics for quantifying how effective they are, and I've even found an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/stemming/Links/program.htm&quot;&gt;evaluation program&lt;/a&gt;. What I can't find anywhere is some manually tagged data for use in such evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there standard test data sets for English stemmers? (Test data sets for lemmatisers would obviously also serve). Are they freely available online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2394" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T12:52:41.273" Title="Are there standard test data sets for English stemmers / lemmatisers?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4235" CreationDate="2013-08-22T19:15:49.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that the -e- is lost, then ng assimilates to nd before r. I don't know what the rest of the paradigm looks like, though (because this particular sound change could only take place in the infinitive) - if there's nd elsewhere, I'd wonder if some analogy hadn't happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-08-22T19:15:49.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11208" CreationDate="2013-08-22T23:34:00.073" Score="5" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to identify click sounds like [‖ ʘ !] by formant transitions in the surrounding vowels? I know stops and fricatives have that feature. &#xA;I'm just wondering how the five (main) click sounds differ from each other acoustically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2013-09-20T19:16:27.487" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T21:07:19.347" Title="Are click sounds accompanied by specific formant transitions?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-23T14:01:18.800" Score="3" ViewCount="1601" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I distinguish different consonants based on acoustic information/spectrographic analysis such as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;? Is there a list of acoustic cues for different consonants like there is for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant#Formants%20and%20phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;average vowel formants&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2396" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-08-23T20:37:54.730" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T20:30:58.933" Title="How can I distinguish different consonants in Praat/acoustic analysis?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3406" CreationDate="2013-08-23T17:31:29.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Is the term &lt;em&gt;Japanese English&lt;/em&gt; used by anybody?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several comments to this question indicated doubts that terms such as &lt;em&gt;Japanese English&lt;/em&gt; are appropriate or used by anybody. In fact, in research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) (and on postcolonial varieties of English) &lt;strong&gt;such terms are used frequently&lt;/strong&gt;. A quick search on Google scholar turns up several instances, such as studies on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/jun/JKL7-Ueyama-Jun.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;intonation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=2OK1G_AVnCUC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PR7&amp;amp;dq=%22Japanese%20English%22&amp;amp;ots=0f-5kuHA-E&amp;amp;sig=daSPuRV81p-QuhdNYPCZF2Nkb60#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Japanese%20English%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language contact&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=oosABE1zdSkC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PR7&amp;amp;dq=%22Japanese%20English%22&amp;amp;ots=b4cYsxXM2b&amp;amp;sig=ATw82Q2WVxGieAnrF4QY7Oa105A#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Japanese%20English%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bilingual families&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Educational implications&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes terms such as &lt;em&gt;Japanese English&lt;/em&gt; are used as synonyms of &lt;em&gt;English as spoken by learners whose first language is Japanese&lt;/em&gt;. Then their use has no educational implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other researchers might consciously opt for &lt;em&gt;Japanese English&lt;/em&gt; etc. to underscore their commitment to teaching English as a second/foreign language without positing native speaker norms as a realistic goal or even ideal that learners should strive for. Instead, they should aim for international intelligibility, such as Jennifer Jenkins' &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/65985/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lingua Franca Core&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This philosophy is based on the recognition that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of native speakers of English is far outstripped by the number of speakers of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most ESL/EFL speakers interact more with other ESL/EFL speakers than with native speakers, and many ESL speakers hardly ever interact with native speakers of English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, native speaker norms are argued to be relatively unimportant to their needs. What should be the aim is teaching a variety of English that is &lt;strong&gt;internationally intelligible&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are there native speakers of Japanese English?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alex B. argued in the comments to the OP that &lt;em&gt;Japanese English&lt;/em&gt; is not an appropriate term because there are no native speakers of this variety of English. However, there are also very few native speakers of Indian English, the vast majority of speakers of Indian English acquire it when entering school or later, and yet the term is relatively accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research into postcolonial varieties of English has largely come to the conclusion that the existence of native speakers is irrelevant to the emergence of a separate variety of English. What is important is a community of speakers, (relatively) separated from other communities, that transmits their variety to future generations. There is a large body of research providing evidence for these claims, and Schneider's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/sociolinguistics/postcolonial-english-varieties-around-world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Postcolonial English&lt;/a&gt; is probably the most important theoretical contribution to the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;P.S.: Who is a native speaker, anyway?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the concept of the native speaker is hard to apply to multilingual societies such as India and Nigeria where English is widely used as a second language. When people acquire two languages from birth, and a third language in school, and finally end up being more proficient in many areas in the third language (chronologically speaking), what is their native language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of the native speaker is based on the 18th/19th/20th c. Western idea that one nation has one language. This works pretty well for most people in most Western countries (minus recent immigrants), but it didn't in Renaissance, medieval or earlier Europe, where educated people or traders from any country were supposed to be proficient in several languages - Latin, French, Italian, a local dialect, a local standard language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-08-23T17:31:29.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4246" CreationDate="2013-08-24T10:51:52.023" Score="6" ViewCount="1323" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone languages&lt;/strong&gt; use intonation to distinguish words. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_language#Mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mandarin Chinese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mā&lt;/em&gt; with a mid tone means &lt;em&gt;mom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mǎ&lt;/em&gt; with a rising tone means &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intonation languages&lt;/strong&gt; do not make such distinctions. Intonation is only used to distinguish the meaning of sentences. English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Berry is coming home tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a statement with falling intonation, but a question with rising intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, tone languages also use intonation in this way, in addition to its phonemic function of distinguishing words. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_%28linguistics%29#Intonation_in_Mandarin_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that in Mandarin Chinese&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tones create fluctuations of pitch around the sentence patterns [...]. Thus the sentence patterns can be thought of as bands whose pitch varies over the course of the sentence, while changes of syllable pitch cause fluctuations within the band.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So tones consist of smaller variations and sentence intonation causes greater variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Is this a common or universal pattern in tone languages? Are there other ways in which syllable-level tone and sentence-level intonation interact in tone languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T14:32:09.910" Title="How do sentence intonation and (syllable-based) tone interact in tone languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3456" CreationDate="2013-08-24T11:53:29.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A strict distinction between &lt;strong&gt;competence&lt;/strong&gt; (the abstract grammar of a language that speakers have implicit knowledge of) and &lt;strong&gt;performance&lt;/strong&gt; (the actual products of this grammar - utterance produced by speakers) prevented this. Generative grammarians argued that (1) corpora don't provide &lt;strong&gt;negative evidence&lt;/strong&gt; - they don't tell us what kinds of sentences are not possible or ungrammatical, and that (2) performance is tainted by the limitations of the human mind (limited memory and attention span, tiredness etc.) (@PElliot points out in the comments that this argument is based &quot;on misunderstanding of the difference between performance and competence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;strong&gt;recursion&lt;/strong&gt; (such as in &lt;em&gt;The man the woman the child... saw called&lt;/em&gt;) is infinite in terms of competence, but in actual performance few iterations are possible - you end up losing track of how the different parts are supposed to go together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any attempts to filter out these confounding influences were considered futile to the extent that using corpora (collections of actual language use - performance) was considered unscientific in generative grammar. We are used to thinking about communities of scientists as the pinnacle of rational thinking but in reality, what is considered scientific or unscientific relies very much on tradition and what the consensus is at a given time. Once a certain consensus has formed, it takes enormous effort (by individual scientists and the whole community) to re-examine this consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the last 20 years or so have seen some dialogue between generative grammarians and corpus linguists, leading to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books/about/Generative_Theory_and_Corpus_Studies.html?id=tz5kXmymHzgC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;conference on dialogue&lt;/a&gt; between the two fields and other publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;Here's an example from Carnie, Andrew. 2002. &lt;em&gt;Syntax. A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (p. 10-11):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One obvious source [of data] is in collections of either spoken or written texts [...] called corpora [...]. While corpora are unquestionably invaluable sources of data, they can only be a partial representation of what goes on in the mind. More particularly, corpora will only contain instances of grammatical [...] sentences [...]. To really get at what we know about our languages [...], we have to know what sentences are not well-formed. [...] This kind of negative information is not available in corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carnie makes the &quot;no negative evidence&quot; argument here. Note that he first calls corpora &quot;invaluable&quot; but then proceeds to say that to &quot;really get at what we know about&quot; language they are not useful. In other words, he doesn't seem to consider corpora all that useful and in fact never once mentions them again in the whole textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-26T00:22:19.940" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T00:22:19.940" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4216" CreationDate="2013-08-24T12:13:09.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The semantic difference between &lt;em&gt;x or y&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;either x or y&lt;/em&gt; is that &lt;em&gt;either...&lt;/em&gt; suggests &lt;strong&gt;exclusion&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;both x and y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me illustrate this with a rough quote from the TV series &lt;em&gt;The West Wing&lt;/em&gt; where a character is asked questions about his ex-wife and her pregnancy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: How pregnant is your ex-wife?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: How pregnant? As I understand it, pregnancy is a binary state, you either are pregnant or you're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Either x or y&lt;/em&gt; suggests that x and y &lt;strong&gt;cannot both be true&lt;/strong&gt;. You cannot be both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time. &lt;em&gt;x or y&lt;/em&gt; allows that both x and y are true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you offer someone &lt;em&gt;banana juice or apply juice&lt;/em&gt; they can answer &lt;em&gt;Can I have both?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say &lt;em&gt;You can have either banana or apple juice&lt;/em&gt; they could still be cheeky and say &lt;em&gt;Can I have both?&lt;/em&gt;, but they will know that this is not the desired answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; might be used without &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; when the context implies that not both x and y can be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: When will you get your hair cut? A: I'll do it tomorrow or the day after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting one's hair cut is an action that in all likelihood is completed in less than one day. Because this is implied by the context and because it is not important here that the action cannot take place on both days &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; can be omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The account of &lt;em&gt;either ... or&lt;/em&gt; as exclusive that I've given here is supported by the &lt;em&gt;Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; by Randolph Quirk et al., one of the standard academic descriptive reference grammars of the English language (§13.34):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Either ... or&lt;/em&gt; emphasises the EXCLUSIVE meaning of &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are &lt;strong&gt;exceptions&lt;/strong&gt;, for example &lt;em&gt;either live or work in X&lt;/em&gt;, in legal usage, appears to mean &lt;em&gt;work or live or both in X&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13889/does-either-a-or-b-preclude-both-a-and-b&quot;&gt;question and good discussion&lt;/a&gt; of this question son SE English L&amp;amp;U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T17:13:47.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2013-08-24T12:21:56.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a project that produced a corpus of (spoken) Nigerian English we used HES for &lt;em&gt;hesitation&lt;/em&gt;. I've also come across HES in articles in linguistics journals, but not FILL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-08-24T12:21:56.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4242" CreationDate="2013-08-24T14:45:33.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &quot;ripples on waves&quot; (Bolinger 1964, Chao 1968) interaction that is observed in Mandarin is only one of several ways that lexical tone and utterance-level intonation may interact.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a series of production experiments in which I elicited sets of utterances from native speakers of tone languages; the main two variables I manipulated were the tone on the final word or syllable and the intonation-type of the utterance (either declarative or echo question). The following summarizes what I found for echo question as opposed to declarative intonation in each language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin: The local contour of the lexical tone on the final syllable was largely preserved but shifted upward in the speaker's vocal range. So a falling lexical tone was still falling but from a higher starting pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cantonese: The first half of the final syllable preserved information about the lexical tone on that syllable, but starting somewhere in the middle of the syllable the pitch shot upward with a steep incline. So a falling tone started falling but after the initial dip the pitch shot up in the second half of the syllable. There was no major lengthening of the syllable to accommodate both trajectories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shiga Japanese: The tone and the intonation were expressed &quot;in series&quot;, so that the fall associated with the lexical tone was completed and then the syllable was extended to accommodate the subsequent rise associated with the echo question intonation. In some cases this lengthening nearly tripled the duration of the final syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;North Kyeongsang Korean: If the final word was monosyllabic, the falling contour observed in the declarative case was completely &quot;overwritten&quot; by a rising contour. If the final word was disyllabic (where the peak was on the first syllable and the fall carried through to the end of the second syllable in the declarative case) the fall was preserved but it started higher in the speaker's range on the first syllable (much like in Mandarin). In some instances there was a slight rise toward the end of the syllable (like in Cantonese, but nowhere near the magnitude observed in Cantonese or in the monosyllabic case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in each language there were lexical-tone-specific idiosyncrasies that made it impossible to formally characterize the mapping from the declarative version of a lexical tonal contour to the echo question version beyond the descriptive generalizations above. In other words, for a given language it was not possible to come up with an algorithm that could accurately predict the F0 contour of an echo question given only the F0 contour of its declarative counterpart. For example, There are three tones in Cantonese that are basically level in the declarative environment. In two out of the three cases (tone 3 and tone 6), the rising trajectory in the echo question environment was curved (i.e. more exponential-looking) but in the third case (tone 1) it was straight (i.e. more linear-looking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@jlawler's comment reminded me that there is also an interesting case in Shingazidja, a Bantu language spoken in the Comoros. Patin (2008) shows data suggesting that yes-no questions in Shingazidja are formed by the insertion of a &quot;superhigh&quot; tone on the penultimate syllable (phonetically the pitch on the syllable is higher than that on lexically H-toned syllables), overwriting whatever is there in the declarative version of the utterance (it gets realized at the same pitch regardless of the tone on that penultimate syllable in the declarative version). Interestingly, when the final syllable of the declarative version of the utterance bears a lexical H tone, the superhigh intonational tone is placed on the &lt;em&gt;antepenultimate&lt;/em&gt; syllable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bolinger, D. (1964). &quot;Intonation: around the edge of language.&quot; Harvard Educational Review 34: 282-296.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chao, Y. R. (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patin, C. (2008). Tone and Intonation's Waltz in Shingazidja Polar Questions. 3rd TIE&#xA;Conference on Tone and Intonation (TIE3). Lisbonne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-08-25T14:32:09.910" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T14:32:09.910" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2013-08-24T18:17:46.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what about the names of people, languages, cultures - are there any&#xA;  general rules for where they come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially fascinated by the ethnic adjectives we assign to the people and languages of a given place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, we have a euphonic (literally translated from Greek: &quot;good sounds&quot;; i.e. it &quot;sounds good&quot; to us) sense that gives us &quot;Seattleite&quot; for Seattle, but &quot;British&quot; for Britain and &quot;Kansan&quot; for Kansas.  &quot;Kansite&quot; doesn't &quot;sound right&quot; to us.  We have an impressive list of potential suffixes to chose from when forming a new ethnic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;England&quot; is a great example of the kind of compound toponym you mention that evolved over time.  It was originally Engla-land (&lt;em&gt;engle&lt;/em&gt; the Anglos + &lt;em&gt;land&lt;/em&gt; land of) in Old English and the haplology reduced the repeating &quot;la-la&quot; in the middle to form &quot;England&quot;.  Even with a steadfast rule of compounding toponyms from -land, -ton, etc., they are still susceptible to the evolution of cultural euphonics and their modern snapshot may not be immediately recognizable as an old compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="986" LastEditorUserId="986" LastEditDate="2013-08-26T20:14:02.643" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T20:14:02.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T08:19:33.420" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are annotation tasks where the items belong to multiple categories and annotators have to mark each category to which the item belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: the same coder c1 assigns the two categories (v1,v2) to the item '1'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;task = AnnotationTask(data=[(‘c1’, ‘1’, ‘v1’),(‘c1’, ‘1’, ‘v2’),...])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should such multiple categories be represented as bitstrings , such that for n categories there would be a whopping 2^n assignments ? This would surely make the inter annotator agreement (IAA) scores very low for minor differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to capture diverse partial agreement and assign high weightage to specific categories reflecting their importance to be annotated correctly. Moreover I would like the metric to significantly reflect even minor agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the above, what is the best way to compute annotation agreement for tasks that require multiple assignment to an item? And how to represent categories for such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastEditorUserId="1758" LastEditDate="2013-08-25T15:05:12.813" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T15:05:12.813" Title="Annotation agreement for multiple category assignment" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3373" CreationDate="2013-08-25T09:39:01.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rhoticity distribution in the US has both historical and social reasons. The first-found colonies in the North (New Hampshire, Mass., Connecticut, Rhode Island) and South (Maryland, Georgia, N&amp;amp;S Carolina, Virginia) were non-rhotic right from the start, because the English who settled there came from regions which at that time were already non-rhotic (esp. London and Middle-England). Moreover, they stayed in touch with they home country so that their non-rhotic accent was kept alive. &#xA;The Midland American English Founder colonies, however (Pennsylanvia, Delaware, NY, New Jersey) was settled by nonstandard-speaking people from Northengland, Scotland and Ireland, thus a rhotic region separated non-rhotic southern and northern founder states. &#xA;These rhotic states played a major role during the westward movement, so that most of the US became rhotic and has remained so until nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet for a fact, rhoticity is viewed differently in different parts of the US: There are still some relic areas in the South in which postvocalic [r] is socially marked. In non-rhotic New York, however, rhoticity has gained prestige and is increasingly used by young and upwardly mobile people (LABOV 1966).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2398" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T09:39:01.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T11:05:30.480" Score="4" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Discourse Basis of Ergativity&lt;/em&gt; published in Language in 1987, John W. Du Bois proposed a theory which stated that (p. 850)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[universally] the distribution of new information vs. old information [as well as the distribution of lexical vs. non-lexical arguments] is correllated with the ergative/&#xA;  absolutive structural opposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to him, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;language-internal phenomena as basic as the system of grammatical relations can be structured by forces arising out of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the S=P alignment found in ergative languages is said to be a manifestation of the pattern in discourse, which also shows S=P alignment of new information (pragmatic dimension of the &lt;em&gt;Preferred Argument Structure&lt;/em&gt;) and noun phrases (lexical dimension). Note that Du Bois gives several examples for languages (next to the one he observed) that also seem to show that alignment, among others German, Quechua and English (p. 839).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is where I come in:&lt;/strong&gt; In a recent homework, I tried to find supporting/contradictory evidence in another corpus. My own data did in the end confirm Du Bois' theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, a former professor now &quot;published&quot; a manuscript, in which he argues that (Haig/Schnell p. 40) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;outside Du Bois' original data, evidence in support of an S=P unity in discourse are strikingly absent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the claim that cross-linguistically, connected discourse exhibits a characteristically ergative profile, such that intransitive subjects and objects pattern alike, is in fact an artifact of a highly marked corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I would like to ask you if you yourself have reason to believe that either of the two positions is correct. Ideally, &lt;strong&gt;try to confirm/refute Du Bois' theory on a &lt;em&gt;Preferred Argument Structure&lt;/em&gt; based on findings of your own.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how this question might provoke a discussion rather than definite answers. But as a clear, scholarly response is what I am aiming at here, feel free to give advice on how I could improve this question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both articles are available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Du Bois (1987): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/415719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/415719&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haig/Schnell (2013): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/3403768/The_discourse_basis_of_ergativity_revisited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.academia.edu/3403768/The_discourse_basis_of_ergativity_revisited&lt;/a&gt; (Note that this paper is still marked  &quot;unpublished manuscript&quot;!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sample data I worked with was taken from the corpus developped in the project described here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=131&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2013-08-29T19:51:26.320" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T19:51:26.320" Title="Is there any evidence pro/contra Du Bois' Preferred Argument Structure (ergative patterning in discourse)?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T14:17:22.417" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;If possible, has it been documented which language(s) seem to have the most amount of redundant elements? The least amount?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T20:30:31.130" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:30:31.130" Title="Is it possible to measure the amount of redundancy in a language?" Tags="&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4248" CreationDate="2013-08-25T14:54:18.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really depends on the relationship between the categories and what you want to use your agreement scores for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you want to annotate verb phrases for tense and aspect, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;has been working&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfect: yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past: no&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Progressive: yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it would make sense to compute IAA for all features combined if what you need is accuracy in the annotation of all features. That IAA is lower overall is not a problem per se since whatever benchmark you are using (comparing two human raters as benchmark, and one automatic with one human rater as test case, for example) will also be lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand you will &lt;strong&gt;lose information by computing combined IAA&lt;/strong&gt;. It might be of interest whether there is more agreement for annotating &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt; than for annotation &lt;em&gt;progressive&lt;/em&gt;, for example. This will help in identifying categories that need to be clarified or need clearer guidelines for annotation. Unless you have dozens of features, it might make sense to &lt;strong&gt;compute both combined and single IAAs&lt;/strong&gt; to get the whole picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is whether the features you want to annotate belong to the &lt;strong&gt;same category&lt;/strong&gt;. If you rate syntactic and semantic features of verb phrases it will probably make less sense to calculate combined IAA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;has been working&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SYNTACTIC: Perfect: yes, Past: no, Progressive: yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SEMANTIC: Telic: no, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it would make sense to calculate IAA separately for syntactic and semantic features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T14:54:18.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T18:44:07.337" Score="6" ViewCount="6011" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marked phonemes are those that require more effort during articulation or are &quot;harder&quot; to articulate. For example, the interdental fricatives &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8th%E2%9F%A9#Acquisition_problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;/θ/ and /ð/ are considered to be marked&lt;/a&gt;. Marked phonemes are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acquired later than unmarked phonemes in native acquisition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tend to pose more problems during Second Language Learning/Acquisition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are less frequent cross-linguistically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English-speaking children &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8th%E2%9F%A9#Acquisition_problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;frequently do not acquire /θ/ and /ð/&lt;/a&gt; until age 5 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Are there marked or &quot;hard&quot; phonemes that are acquired even later in First Language Acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Also, are there any phonemes that (are so marked that they) are not acquired at all by a substantial part of the population (say more than 5 %)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: So far, most comments and one answer focus exclusively on the concept of the &quot;marked phoneme&quot;. Let me make it clear that (1) I think this is a relatively well established concept - If you don't believe me google &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/search?q=%22marked%20phoneme%22&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla%3aen-US%3aofficial&amp;amp;client=firefox-a&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=gKZdUtjIOZKThgf-sICIAQ#q=%22phonological%20markedness%22&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla%3aen-US%3aofficial&amp;amp;safe=off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;markedness in phonology&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/search?q=%22marked%20phoneme%22&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla%3aen-US%3aofficial&amp;amp;client=firefox-a&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=gKZdUtjIOZKThgf-sICIAQ#q=%22marked%20phoneme%22&amp;amp;rls=org.mozilla%3aen-US%3aofficial&amp;amp;safe=off&amp;amp;start=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;marked phoneme&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. If you doubt the usefulness of this concept you're not the only one, but please let us move one from &quot;I don't believe you&quot; and &quot;It's wrong&quot;, and please provide at least one academic reference why you think it's wrong or useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) More importantly, I couched my question in terms of markedness because I think it's a relatively uncontroversial concept, but it's really not central to my question. I'm asking whether there are phonemes that are acquired very late or never by a substantial number of speakers, whether you want to call them marked or articulatorily complex or challenging or hard. Answers should if possible be empirically sound such as quantitative claims from surveys, personal experience from teaching, child-rearing etc., with references where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I don't mean cases where there are differences between vernaculars and the standard languages and some speakers acquire the standard imperfectly (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;th-stopping&lt;/a&gt; in some English dialects, or the pharyngealised consonants present in Modern Standard Arabic but not in many Arabic dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found literature on &lt;a href=&quot;http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.linguist-list/2003-10/msg00307.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;marked phonemes in a rage of languages&lt;/a&gt;, but not much on the age of acquisition of marked phonemes in different languages. Also, I have heard that the trilled /r/ present in Spanish and other languages is acquired very late and that some teachers think children often need help to properly acquire this sound - but this seemed rather unlikely to me if only for the reason that trilled /r/ appears to occur in a good number of languages and claims that children need &quot;help&quot; in acquiring their first language sound more like a difference between dialect and standard and teachers' desire to make their students use standard language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:07:41.547" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:07:41.547" Title="Are there marked/&quot;hard&quot; phonemes that are acquired very late or never by a substantial number of speakers?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2013-08-25T19:32:29.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers have raised many important aspects why diphthongs are a useful concept, and I'd like to add some points that I personally feel are crucial in this debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proofs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure insisting on a proof of the existence of diphthongs will help you understand why many use the concept &lt;em&gt;diphthong&lt;/em&gt; to analyse language. There is no proof that they exist because they don't. They are an abstraction (just like the phoneme), a way of analysing or describing language and the same phenomenon can be described in many different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any proof of gravity either - if an apple falls down, and you insist it's because of gravity I could still say it's because it is the nature of apples to fall down to Earth or that God likes apples to fall down etc. and we'd be no wiser. However, you could say that your theory of gravity explains a whole lot of other things at the same time, such as pears falling down and celestial bodies rotating around each other. In this sense gravity is a very elegant concept because it explains many phenomena at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Diphthongs are not combinations of monophthongs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way I can point out how diphthongs allow a more elegant description of (for example) English phonology. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;12 monophthongs&lt;/a&gt; in English (RP). If we allow combinations of two monophthongs we should expect to find all or almost all such combinations - 12!/(12-2)! = 132. But there are only 8 diphthongs in English (RP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we could come up with a number of rules stating that such an such monophthongs cannot occur together. We would need so many such rules that our description of English phonology would become bloated. Diphthongs are a more elegant abstraction for describing the sound system of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Syllables&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sverre pointed out that syllables must contain a single vowel and if there is movement from one vowel target to another then the syllable contains a diphthong. You argued that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can define a vowel through syllable, or syllable through vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I agree that there is a certain circularity here. But syllables also have a definition independent of that. A syllable consists of a sonority (basically, loudness) peak and has sonority troughs (little loudness/acoustic energy) as boundaries. This solves the circularity of the syllable -&amp;gt; diphthong argument. And if the vowel contained in a syllable has two articulatory targets it is a diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T19:32:29.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-25T21:15:10.510" Score="5" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_georgian.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Georgian: A Reading Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Howard I. Aronson, Georgian has many &quot;harmonic clusters&quot; consisting of two consonants pronounced with only a single release. (The consonants must be stops or affricates, I guess, but the distinction between stops, affricates, and fricatives in Georgian is something I don't understand very well since it seems that some phonemes can be rendered in multiple ways.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples he gives, which are supposed to be exhaustive, are as follows (using the official romanization: apostrophe to denote ejectives, q to denote a uvular or thereabouts stop or affricate or fricative, and kh/gh to denote an unvoiced/voiced probably post-velar affricate or fricative):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bg, dg, dzg, jg&#xA;pk, tk, tsk, chk&#xA;p'k', t'k', ts'k', ch'k'&#xA;&#xA;bgh, dgh, dzgh, jgh&#xA;pkh, tkh, tskh, chkh&#xA;p'q', t'q', ts'q', ch'q'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how these clusters are actually produced (and more generally whether Aronson's description is correct). It seems impossible to literally have a single release. What I suspect is meant is that the tongue starts with two points of contact against the roof of the mouth, but at the forward point it is held against the mouth rather loosely so that when the back stop releases the released air almost immediately causes the front stop to release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens so fast that the releases are perceived as simultaneous and the writing system even puts the front stop first. I think I can produce such an effect when only stops are involved, but I find it hard to apply this theory to the clusters in the fourth and fifth lines above (those involving kh and gh).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T18:57:47.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T10:11:56.617" Title="What are Georgian harmonic clusters phonetically?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2013-08-25T23:50:03.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would submit that prosody could play a role in disambiguating the two readings, at least in English. As a native speaker, if I heard someone say (out of the blue):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; know what &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret it as, &quot;I have knowledge about the same things you have knowledge about.&quot; On the other hand, if I heard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2a) I know what you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2b) I &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; what you &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret it as, &quot;I know which subjects you have knowledge about.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that we tend to emphasize things that we are comparing or contrasting entities in parallel constructions (a phenomenon known as &lt;em&gt;contrastive focus&lt;/em&gt;) and to de-emphasize things that are repeated or taken for granted in the context of the conversation (things that are &lt;em&gt;given&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;presupposed&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), the two instances of &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; are referring to the same knowledge, so they are de-emphasized, but the pronouns (i.e. the &quot;knowers&quot;) are different, so contrastive focus is utilized. This version of the utterance would have the same prosodic pattern as something like, &quot;I watched what you watched&quot; (in response to the question, &quot;What did you watch on TV last night?&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis on the last content word in a phrase or a clause (without getting theory-specific here) can also signal focus on that whole constituent (known as &lt;em&gt;broad focus&lt;/em&gt;). In both (2a) and (2b), the constituent &quot;what you know&quot; is being focused as new information, and so the last word, &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, gets emphasized. Whether the first &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; is emphasized or not could depend on the speech rate as well as the context. In faster speech or in a context where the topic of the speaker's knowledge is given (e.g. if the speaker is answering the question &quot;What do you know?&quot;) the first &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; may not get emphasized. But in more careful speech or in a context where the topic of the speaker's knowledge hasn't been established (e.g. if the speaker is responding to the question &quot;Why are you smiling?&quot;) the first &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; may get emphasized. The prosodic patterns given in (2a) and (2b) would be appropriate for something like &quot;I ate what you cooked&quot; (in response to &quot;What did you eat for dinner tonight?&quot; or &quot;Why did you get sick last night?&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-08-25T23:50:03.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4260" CreationDate="2013-08-26T09:38:49.933" Score="6" ViewCount="3291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this is not &lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; antonymy. If it's still antonymy, &#xA;do linguists have a separate term for this type of semantic relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2404" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:31:01.183" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:31:01.183" Title="Are &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot; antonyms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-26T10:00:49.317" Score="5" ViewCount="1890" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the cases I've seen  of a consonant /s/ (or similar pronunciations) at the beginning of a word occur in Indo-European languages. Can we say that this is a characteristic of this language family?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/s/ +  some consonant &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ʃ/ + some consonant &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Examples:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;star(english), ster(dutch),  strana(russian) schnell (german), stamina(latin), spyros (greek),...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T09:57:33.410" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T15:48:20.890" Title="Word-initial consonant clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/, an Indo-European characteristic?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-08-26T11:45:47.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mother&lt;/em&gt; is not the antonym of &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;. They are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;co-hyponyms&lt;/a&gt; because they are both a kind of &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; - and &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; is the hypernym of &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Antonymy is the relation that holds between &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;child&lt;/em&gt;. So by extension the antonym of &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; could be said to be &lt;em&gt;child&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: After reading hippietrail's answer, I somewhat changed my opinion. If one considers two words to be antonyms already if just one of their semantic features is replaced with the opposite then &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; (female parent) and &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt; (male parent) can be said to be antonyms. However, I feel that it might make sense to reserve antonymy for complete negation or oppositeness, and describe the relation between &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt; as hyponymy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T16:47:12.950" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T16:47:12.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4259" CreationDate="2013-08-26T14:02:50.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed in the Proto-Indo-European language there is a known &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_s-mobile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phenomenon called &quot;s-mobile&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Some roots in PIE could occasionally have an initial augment &quot;s-&quot;. Since all PIE roots begin with a consonant, this gives initial &quot;sC-&quot; cluster. The meaning of this extension is not known. We only know that some words with a root had it while others did not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a theory that this initial s- could be result of fusion between the usual PIE ending -s/-os with the following word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of the examples you gave are irrelevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for star in PIE was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ster&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, with the first phoneme being a laryngeal which was either lost or became a vowel. It is conjectured that the initial form was even more complicated: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯e̯ster&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and related to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ee̯tr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;fire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian &quot;strana&quot; on the other hand, sometimes considered to derive from a root with s-mobile &quot;(s)tero̯-&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Cie%5Cpokorny&amp;amp;first=1&amp;amp;off=&amp;amp;text_root=%28s%29ter-1&amp;amp;method_root=substring&amp;amp;text_meaning=&amp;amp;method_meaning=substring&amp;amp;ic_meaning=on&amp;amp;text_ger_mean=&amp;amp;method_ger_mean=substring&amp;amp;ic_ger_mean=on&amp;amp;text_grammar=&amp;amp;method_grammar=substring&amp;amp;ic_grammar=on&amp;amp;text_comments=&amp;amp;method_comments=substring&amp;amp;ic_comments=on&amp;amp;text_derivative=&amp;amp;method_derivative=substring&amp;amp;ic_derivative=on&amp;amp;text_material=&amp;amp;method_material=substring&amp;amp;ic_material=on&amp;amp;text_ref=&amp;amp;method_ref=substring&amp;amp;ic_ref=on&amp;amp;text_seealso=&amp;amp;method_seealso=substring&amp;amp;ic_seealso=on&amp;amp;text_pages=&amp;amp;method_pages=substring&amp;amp;ic_pages=on&amp;amp;text_any=&amp;amp;method_any=substring&amp;amp;sort=number&amp;amp;ic_any=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pokorny&lt;/a&gt;) which meant &quot;stretch&quot; but this root may be considered s-mobile erroneously due mixing with other roots (Starling gives this root with a solid s). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the &quot;schnell&quot; and &quot;snell&quot; is unknown beyond Proto-Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;stamina&quot; origins from the root &quot;stea̯-&quot; which had no mobile &quot;s&quot; at least in the observable PIE stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the &quot;spyros&quot; is also unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-08-26T22:33:40.760" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T22:33:40.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4265" CreationDate="2013-08-26T14:04:23.587" Score="4" ViewCount="2062" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a range of computer programs that can represent acoustic energy graphically in a spectrogram. I usually use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;, which uses a black and white gradient to represent the intensity of energy at specific frequencies and time points. Here's an example:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QbcyK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Praat black and white spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often I find colour easier to interpret:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/VariableFrequency.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;colour spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Can anybody suggest free software that produces online colour gradient spectrograms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solutions that I have considered:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Save Praat spectrogram, load into image processing software and replace black and white with colour gradient: &lt;em&gt;too complicated&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://audacity.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Audacity&lt;/a&gt;: Audacity can display colour spectrograms, but the resolution is nowhere as good as in Praat and no combination of options (window size and function) seems to improve that. Here's an example:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zUT2G.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Audacity colour spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the latter spectrogram is wide-band and the first in Praat narrow-band, but changing wide-band to narrow-band doesn't solve the problem in Audacity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-26T15:55:46.063" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T16:36:01.300" Title="Software request: Spectrograms that represent intensity with a colour gradient" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4262" CreationDate="2013-08-26T15:53:51.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bartlomiej Plichta has written a Praat script which automates your first solution, shelling out to the open-source ImageMagick package to do the colour conversion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://bartus.us/blog/?p=579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bartus.us/blog/?p=579&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of your second solution (using something other than Praat): There were a fair number of free and commercial acoustic analysis programs around before Praat essentially obliterated the ecosystem, some of which could draw colour spectrograms. A free one that isn't dead yet is Wavesurfer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2358" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T15:53:51.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-26T18:56:03.090" Score="7" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek had a three way contrast between voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated stops. It seems to be assumed that the unvoiced stops were pulmonic, but how do we know this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fact that may or may not have any bearing is that when there would otherwise be a sequence of two aspirated stops in successive syllables, the first one lost its aspiration (Grassmann's Law). Another is that certain initial stop clusters are uncommon or non-existent. The relatively common ones are pt, kt, and their aspirated correlates. Bd is uncommon and mainly used in words for ugly and disgusting things, while gd is more or less non-existent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="663" LastEditDate="2013-09-03T11:15:38.883" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T23:30:07.470" Title="How do we know that Ancient Greek didn't have ejectives?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4262" CreationDate="2013-08-26T23:33:32.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/wavesurfer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WaveSurfer&lt;/a&gt; lets you display spectrograms in color, and it's free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you record or import a sound, right-click (or the equivalent) on the waveform pane. Select Create Pane &gt; Spectrogram. The spectrogram will appear in black and white as a default. Right-click (or the equivalent) on the spectrogram and select Properties. Here you can play with all different parameters, including the spectrogram color. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are two versions of the same spectrogram produced in WaveSurfer--one in black and white and the other in color:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wa4q3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;black-and-white-spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ecVEr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;color-spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-08-26T23:33:32.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4266" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:29:11.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T02:29:11.863" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T02:29:11.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4267" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:29:11.863" Score="0" Body="The variety of English used in the United States of America." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:09:40.697" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:09:40.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:33:24.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples for phonetic symbols are Bell's Visible Speech and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/ipa&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;ipa&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;ipa&lt;/a&gt;, the International Phonetic Alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:07:37.097" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:07:37.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:33:24.817" Score="0" Body="Symbols used for the visual representation of speech sounds." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:07:37.097" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:07:37.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:35:22.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T02:35:22.780" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T02:35:22.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:35:22.780" Score="0" Body="Objective analysis and description of actual language usage" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:53:30.323" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:53:30.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:40:03.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T02:40:03.987" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T02:40:03.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:40:03.987" Score="0" Body="The pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar characteristic of only a part of the speakers of a language. Dialects, for example, are geographical varieties, and sociolects are social varieties." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T09:24:24.257" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T09:24:24.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:42:15.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T02:42:15.760" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T02:42:15.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4275" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:42:15.760" Score="0" Body="a property of speech sounds that arises by vibration of the vocal folds. For example, the &quot;s&quot; sound in English &quot;zoom&quot; is voiced, but the &quot;s&quot; in &quot;sea&quot; is voiceless." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:34:19.423" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:34:19.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4276" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:44:39.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;lexical semantics looks at classification and decomposition of lexical items, differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure cross-linguistically and relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyponymy , Hypernymy, Synonymy and Antonymy are examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:28:41.407" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:28:41.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-27T02:44:39.333" Score="0" Body="A branch of semantics, the study of the meaning of words, affixes and compounds too." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:29:31.207" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:29:31.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-08-27T03:12:21.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; they are antonyms. That doesn't affect whether they may have other, possibly even overlapping or seemingly contradictory relationships, such as being co-hyponyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Antonyms are two words which are opposites. That seems pretty simple. But in fact you have to think about what &quot;opposite&quot; means, and what it means for words in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end it comes down to semantics like so many other things, and people will surely come up with multiple analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antonyms can be adjectives naming properties: &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can be abstract nouns naming properties: &lt;em&gt;shortness&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;length&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a property can possess a value along a scale then generally values toward each end of the scale are seen as opposites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are properties which can have one of two values, which can of course be analysed as a special case of the previous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure some people analyse &quot;male&quot; and &quot;female&quot; to be antonyms, and people who would strongly refute it. They can certainly be argued against semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two words are nouns then they need refer to objects having one property which has &quot;opposing&quot; values. Some nouns have more than one property capable of this. Others have none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T03:12:21.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4282" CreationDate="2013-08-27T14:04:49.567" Score="2" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;What word would be used or could be coined to express the opposite of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;accent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in reference to syllables, not foreign accents.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The usage is theory on chant and setting prose text to music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&gt;  Origin: 1520–30;  &amp;lt; Latin accentus  speaking tone, equivalent to&#xA;  ac-&#xA;  ac- + -centus,  combining form of cantus  song (see canto);&#xA;  translation of Greek prosōidía prosody&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Related forms ac·cent·less, adjective ac·cen·tu·a·ble&#xA;  [ak-sen-choo-uh-buhl] Show IPA , adjective non·ac·cent, noun&#xA;  non·ac·cent·ed, adjective non·ac·cent·ing, adjective]&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accent?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal Reflections in view of the word needed:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nonaccent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;accentless&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; indicate a lack of accent but do not indicate the opposite of accent (the opposite would express the de-emphasising a syllable).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ie.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;accented&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; syllable the voice would be raised.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nonaccented&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; syllable the voice would stay the same.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the opposite of an accented syllable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the voice would be lowered.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;De-accented&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; seems inadequate since it would indicate negation of the accent which would merely mean &lt;em&gt;nonaccented&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would the opposite of &lt;em&gt;accent&lt;/em&gt; be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;decent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ie.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In speech some syllables bear an &lt;em&gt;accent&lt;/em&gt;; some bear a &lt;em&gt;de-cent&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In speech some syllables are &lt;em&gt;accented&lt;/em&gt;; some are &lt;em&gt;de-cented&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In speech some syllables are &lt;em&gt;accentuated&lt;/em&gt;; some are &lt;em&gt;de-centuated&lt;/em&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T19:03:37.783" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T19:03:37.783" Title="The Opposite of &quot;Accent&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4281" CreationDate="2013-08-27T14:53:24.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this context, the term &lt;em&gt;accent&lt;/em&gt; might be a bit ambiguous. And in fact, you did make a distinction between what you meant and foreign accents. It is a synonym of stress, so it's not that strange that you thought of it, but as I said it's ambiguous and furthermore, it has no opposites that I'm aware of. Going through your proposals for the sake of completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Decent&lt;/strong&gt; is not the opposite of accent, it means something else entirely. I see that you deconstructed the word &quot;accent&quot; but I don't think it works in this case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-accented&lt;/strong&gt; (or unaccented) refers to letters without &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diacritics&lt;/a&gt;: a, e, i, o, u, etc. As opposed to à, è, ì, ò, ù, and so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;de-accented&lt;/strong&gt; does not exist I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Linguistics, I've always seen the term &lt;strong&gt;stressed&lt;/strong&gt; be used in this context. Its opposite would be &lt;strong&gt;unstressed&lt;/strong&gt;. So we speak of stressed/unstressed syllables, stressed/unstressed vowel sounds and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you search for &quot;accented&quot; in the dictionary, it will give you the definition of &quot;stressed&quot;, but I think stressed would be more appropriate for this task. And indeed, there is also another ambiguity about this: in some languages, &lt;strong&gt;not all stressed syllables bear accents (diacritics)&lt;/strong&gt; and vice versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T15:05:59.143" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T15:05:59.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4258" CreationDate="2013-08-27T19:17:58.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with hippietrail's answer as I have not seen any dictionaries which describe this type of relationship as antonymy. For example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/father#related-to-more&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;father&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/antonymie/p%C3%A8re&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;père&lt;/a&gt;. In Merriam-webster we have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;descendant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as antonym, and in TLFi &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;enfant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  As such, I don't think considering these types of words as antonyms is a common point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Semantics (1977, pp. 279—280), John Lyons calls this relationship &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=jQA6wVLCINUC&amp;amp;q=converseness#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=converseness&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;converseness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be distinguished from antonymy and complementarity is&#xA;  converseness*, exemplified by pairs like 'husband' : 'wife' (which may&#xA;  be regarded as two-place predicates). The sentence 'X is the husband&#xA;  of Y' express a proposition whose converse is expressed by 'X is the&#xA;  wife of Y' (cf. 6.3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Converse relations between lexemes which may be used as two-place&#xA;  predicative expressions are especially common in areas of the&#xA;  vocabulary having to do with reciprocal social roles&#xA;  ('doctor' : 'patient', 'master'/'mistress' : 'servant') and kinship&#xA;  relations ('father' : 'mother','son' : 'daughter' etc.) &amp;lt;...&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in my opinion it's not applicable for lion/lioness, tiger/tigress so I don't know how to call this kind of relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2410" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T07:17:07.067" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T07:17:07.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3530" CreationDate="2013-08-27T19:36:48.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Iesous&quot; isn't a Greek-sounding name, and I can't imagine how there could be any influence from Latin. The name &quot;Iesous&quot; doesn't occur in Greek literature outside of Jewish and Christian contexts (first in the Septuagint, second century BC). According to the Wikipedia article on the name &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua_%28name%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yeshua&lt;/a&gt;, Jesus may have gone by Yeshua or even Yeshu. So the difference from the Greek form is not necessarily that great. Greek did not have the sound &quot;sh&quot; and seems to have borrowed foreign names that had this sound using &quot;s&quot;. For instance, Samouel, from Hebrew Shmu'el and perhaps Kuros from Persian Kurush. (I expect there are many further examples, but these are all that come to me at the moment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2013-08-27T21:48:13.500" LastActivityDate="2013-08-27T21:48:13.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T05:55:20.750" Score="4" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up and linked to the question &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/392/what-evolution-framework-best-describes-the-change-between-languages-over-time&quot;&gt;What evolution framework best describes the change between languages over time?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in knowing how did language &lt;strong&gt;originate&lt;/strong&gt; and how does it &lt;strong&gt;survive&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware as to how language &lt;strong&gt;changes&lt;/strong&gt; over time. But how did it actually originated and what were the condition for its survival. For example, one word survives and the other does not. Why is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this question is framed correctly. In case not, please advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2408" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T19:22:27.137" Title="Did language originate and evolve just as organisms did? As in Evolution by Natural Selection?" Tags="&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4286" CreationDate="2013-08-28T06:54:08.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;origin of language&lt;/a&gt; is (and most likely will forever remain) a mystery. That Wikipedia article should give you a quick overview of the various competing theories. To oversimplify, verbal language provided a survival advantage, allowing people to warn each other about danger with enough detail to effectively avoid it, all while keeping hands free for locomotion, fighting, and grabbing. While this explains why language survived, it does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; explain how language came to be in the first place. Evolution has no foresight and just because a trait is advantageous doesn't mean evolution will make it happen (how many animals have wheels?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the case of why some languages thrive while others die off quietly, unfortunately the answer is simple socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors combined with sheer luck. Why is English so widely spoken across the world? Because English speaking countries had enough political and economic power and influence to spread it across the world. Why do other languages die? Typically because it is displaced by a more politically/socially powerful one. That or all the speakers simply die out/are killed. So if the survival of a language is based on the speakers' sociopolitical power, what makes one group more powerful than another? I don't know but I highly doubt it has anything to do with language. In the 19th and early 20th centuries people believed that the language one spoke significantly affected their cognitive abilities (the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;) but these claims have largely been disproven and few linguistics believe in them these days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most interesting part of your question is the last bit. If language changes over time, what governs those changes? Why do certain changes stick and others die out? I recently sat in on a lecture about &lt;a href=&quot;http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~ackerman/web_contents/Paris_2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Low Entropy Conjecture&lt;/a&gt;. While I am oversimplifying the issue, Professors Malouf and Ackerman calculated the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shannon Entropy&lt;/a&gt; (the measure of uncertainty in Information Theory) of verbal conjugations in various languages and found that in all cases the results were much lower than those expected by chance. Their conjecture basically states that languages change to become less entropic (i.e. less random) over time. Extrapolating from this, any change that is successfully adopted into a language would have to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding. It's a neat idea but it's a very very new area of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T07:06:40.617" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T07:06:40.617" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T08:35:45.940" Score="-1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the factors that must be considered when setting a linguistic corpus price?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any standard model or something else I should follow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T16:29:24.310" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T19:22:00.630" Title="What factors should I consider when setting a Linguistic Corpus price?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T15:55:05.103" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ex : They scared me / I scare easily / but not * I scared last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question was not ask properly so I tried again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2409" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T20:20:13.953" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T20:20:13.953" Title="Why do certain verbs not accept the ergative schema whereas they accept the mediopassive (middle) one?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;mediopassive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2013-08-28T19:22:00.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any standard models but &lt;em&gt;size&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;source(s)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fitness for purpose&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;language(s)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;copyright vettedness/copyright restrictions&lt;/em&gt; seems like relevant factors. Big size (a copy of the internet) isn't necessarily an asset if what the buyer needs is a domain-specific high quality corpus. There are many corpora already for English, fewer for other languages, but fewer are studying other languages so the market is smaller and they can pay less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corpora with too strict licensing can be worthless because you can't use the data for what you need to use it for or there are restrictions on publishing methods etc. As to vettedness: not good to have to scrap research because the seller didn't have the right to sell the raw data in the first place... There was a lot of copyright angst when I dipped my toes into corpus linguistics years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advice: Be a salesman, pose as a buyer to figure out what the competition is doing :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T19:22:00.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4264" CreationDate="2013-08-28T19:22:30.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typologically, stop systems of the type &quot;voiced - aspirated - ejective&quot;, with no plain voiceless stops, are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the Greek voiceless stops were ejective, then either they became ejective after PIE for some unexplained reason, or the PIE voiceless stops were ejective too and lost their ejective feature in every attested language, both of which are implausible scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are some phonetic descriptions of these Greek sounds by ancient writers, and none of them suggests that they were anything but plain voiceless stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-11-04T23:30:07.470" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T23:30:07.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T19:42:01.713" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The city of Rome&quot; means not the city belonging to Rome, but the city that is Rome. Is there a term for this use of the possessive? Why do many languages use their possessive constructions for this non-possessive meaning? Is this usage restricted to specific families or geographical regions? Are there languages in which it's ungrammatical to do this? What are the restrictions on this construction (e.g. you obviously can't say &quot;the president of Obama&quot; to mean the president who is Obama)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T00:05:23.547" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T18:51:03.397" Title="Possessive constructions signifying semantic equation: term? distribution? explanation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4292" CreationDate="2013-08-28T20:26:49.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, this is called the &lt;em&gt;genitivus explicativus, definitivus, appositivus&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;epexegeticus&lt;/em&gt;: the genitive defines or describes in other words what the head word is or consists in (not &lt;em&gt;consists of&lt;/em&gt;). It exists in various Indo-European languages, possibly in all, including Latin, Greek, German, English, Dutch, French... In languages without cases, a preposition meaning &quot;of&quot; is normally used instead of / as the genitive.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genitiv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genitiv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some connection with the &lt;em&gt;genitivus partitivus&lt;/em&gt;, which describes what parts the head word consists of or includes: &lt;em&gt;a box of matches, a cup of coffee, a regiment of archers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that most cases and prepositions have widely different meanings. The preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; in English has always been strongly associated with the older genitive case (which developed into &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, many other languages also have a preposition they strongly associate with the genitive: Dutch &lt;em&gt;van&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;von&lt;/em&gt;, (late?) Latin &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;. This strong association, which may have been already present, was often strengthened as languages lost their cases. There is also cross-contamination between languages: the Latin use of the genitive and &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; may have influenced that of the Germanic languages in the Middle Ages. But some uses of the genitive were most probably already present in Proto-Indo-European, like possession. The same applies to other cases and prepositions, to varying degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T06:35:45.880" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T06:35:45.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-28T22:03:53.303" Score="7" ViewCount="1436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could anyone give examples of context-sensitive sentences that cannot be generated by context-free rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, they are generated by rules including at least one that is in the form αβγ→αψγ, α,γ are not empty and we cannot find any context-free grammar that can generate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Language&quot; here means natural languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T06:17:37.763" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T06:17:37.763" Title="Could anyone give examples of context-sensitive sentences that cannot be generated by context-free rules?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:01:53.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:01:53.923" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:01:53.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:01:53.923" Score="0" Body="The set of words within a language." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:59:09.690" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:59:09.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:04:45.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:58:15.107" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:58:15.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:04:45.187" Score="0" Body="A grammatical category expressing the time when a state or action denoted by a verb occurs." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:59:16.783" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:59:16.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:06:38.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:06:38.320" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:06:38.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:06:38.320" Score="0" Body="A unit of organisation for a sequence of speech sounds. Consists of a nucleus with optional preceding onset and optional following coda." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:59:28.473" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:59:28.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:14:50.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:14:50.073" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:14:50.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:14:50.073" Score="0" Body="Linguistic model that explains language structures through the interaction between conflicting constraints." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:58:40.063" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:58:40.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4303" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:23:11.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:23:11.170" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:23:11.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:23:11.170" Score="0" Body="The phonemic use of pitch." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:58:28.220" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:58:28.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:25:30.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:25:30.400" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:25:30.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:25:30.400" Score="0" Body="Words that describe or modify a noun or noun phrase." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:59:33.113" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:59:33.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:27:51.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-28T23:27:51.767" LastActivityDate="2013-08-28T23:27:51.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-28T23:27:51.767" Score="0" Body="A branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts that underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics claims that language is part of a larger cognition apparatus and views meaning in terms of conceptualisation and mental spaces, denying that there is a separate module in the human mind dedicated exclusively to language." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:22:10.503" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:22:10.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4294" CreationDate="2013-08-29T01:28:21.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous example of a phenomenon which seems to argue against the context-freeness of natural language is cross-serial dependencies in Swiss German (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schieber, '85&lt;/a&gt;) (cross-serial dependencies can also be found in Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two facts about Swiss German are relevant here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Objects are case-marked (dative and accusative), diff. verbs sub-categorise for objects with different case-marking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subordinate clauses allow a cross-serial order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the pertinent data. I'll just give the English gloss, see the linked-to paper for details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) ...Jan said that we Hans.DAT1 [the house].ACC2 helped1 paint2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the cross-serial dependencies; &lt;strong&gt;Hans&lt;/strong&gt; is the object of &lt;strong&gt;helped&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;the house&lt;/strong&gt; is the object of &lt;strong&gt;paint&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now onto the proof that a context-free grammar can't handle cross-serial dependencies. This is going to be fairly sloppy, but bear in mind that this is an established result in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going to give a proof by contradiction, so let's assume that the &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; (Swiss German) &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; context free. Therefore the intersection of a regular language with the image of &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; under a homomorphism must be context free as well. Now consider the following grammatical Swiss German example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) Jan said that we [the children].ACC1 Hans.DAT2 house.ACC have&#xA;  wanted let1 help2 paint&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;lt; NP, V &gt; pairs &amp;lt; the children, let &gt; and &amp;lt; Hans, help &gt; can both be iterated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following homomorphism &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; seperates the iterated NPs and Vs in (b) from the surrounding material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;f(the children) = a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(Hans) = b&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(let) = c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(help) = d&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(Jan said that we) = w&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(house have wanted) = x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(painted) = y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f(s) = z otherwise&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The images we are interested in under f are of the form &lt;em&gt;wV1xV2y&lt;/em&gt;, where V1 contains &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bs&lt;/em&gt;, and V2 contains &lt;em&gt;cs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ds&lt;/em&gt;, and if the &lt;em&gt;kth&lt;/em&gt; element in V1 is an &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; (a &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; resp.), then the &lt;em&gt;kth&lt;/em&gt; element in V2 is a &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; (a &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; resp.) - i.e., sentences involving cross-serial dependencies. All other sentences have a &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; somewhere in their image under f. To make sure we only concentrate on constructions involving cross-serial dependencies, we intersect &lt;em&gt;f(L)&lt;/em&gt; with the reg. language &lt;em&gt;wa*b*xc*d*y&lt;/em&gt;, giving us &lt;em&gt;L'&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; is context free, then &lt;em&gt;L'&lt;/em&gt; must be too. If this is so, then the image of &lt;em&gt;L'&lt;/em&gt; under a homomorphism &lt;em&gt;f'&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;f(w)=f'(x)=f'(y)= Ɛ, f'(a)=a, f'(b)=b, f'(c)=c, f'(d)=d&lt;/em&gt; will also be context free. This image is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;f'(L') = L'' = { a^i b^j c^i d^j | i, j &gt;= 0 }&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;L''&lt;/em&gt; should satisfy the pumping lemma for context free languages. Inspecting the word &lt;em&gt;{a^k b^k c^k d^k}&lt;/em&gt;, where k is the constant from the pumping lemma however, this can be shown to lead to a contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion L'' is not context free, and neither is L' nor L. The take-home message is that purely context-free grammars cannot handle cross-serial dependencies in natural languages - although examples of this are few and far between. This result has been used to argue that natural languages are properly described by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildly_context-sensitive_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mildly context-sensitive languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-29T12:05:29.123" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T12:05:29.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-29T04:01:40.623" Score="3" ViewCount="15176" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is juncture in phonetics and/or phonology?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juncture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Juncture&lt;/a&gt;, I gathered that juncture is a phonological (and/or phonetic?) phenomenon that allows listeners/speakers of a given language to hear and produce differences between words and phrases each comprise the same sequence of phonemes.   Juncture, apparently,  allows English speakers to produce and hear the distinction between “nitrate” and “night rate”, “a name” and “an aim,” etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t get enough information from this article.    It listed and very briefly defined different types of juncture, but did not explain them or provide examples of them.     It also made too many unhelpful references to “recreational linguistics.”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find better articles on the Web.    So what is juncture in phonetics and/or phonology, and what are some examples?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-29T10:35:19.443" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T05:23:42.697" Title="What is juncture in phonetics and/or phonology?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4313" CreationDate="2013-08-29T04:03:05.957" Score="8" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any natural languages that mark the distinction between cataphoric and anaphoric pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make sure I got the terms straight, I looked up “cataphora” and its opposite, “anaphora,” at the Summer Institute of Linguistics’ Glossary of Linguistic Terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Cataphora is the coreference of one expression with another expression which follows it. The following expression provides the information necessary for interpretation of the preceding one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.  “If you need one, there’s a towel in the top drawer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsCataphora.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is cataphora?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Anaphora is coreference of one expression with its antecedent. The antecedent provides the information necessary for the expression’s interpretation.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.   “A well-dressed man was speaking; he had a foreign accent.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnaphora.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is anaphora?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, are there any languages that mark this distinction?   For example, are there any languages that have one set of pronouns that is cataphoric and another set of pronouns that is anaphoric?    Another example:   Are there any languages whose pronouns take affixes that mark their reference as cataphoric vs. anaphoric?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T06:14:35.767" Title="Are there any natural languages that mark the distinction between cataphoric and anaphoric pronouns?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4312" CreationDate="2013-08-29T12:17:50.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question! I personally don't know of any NLs which mark the distinction morphologically, and i'd be very surprised indeed to find one that did. Suppose in a hypothetical language L, an anaphoric pronoun is assigned form A, and a cataphoric one is assigned form B. The distribution of A and B would have to conditioned by the linear order of A/B with respect to its antecedent, which may be at a potentially unbounded distance away. Syntactic/morphological rules just don't work that way - syntactic rules don't tend to invoke linear order at all, and morphological rules only invoke linear order to the extent that forms can be conditioned by adjacent material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it's much harder to prove a negative than a positive, but since i'm feeling brazen i'm going to go ahead and answer this question by saying that &lt;strong&gt;such a natural language couldn't exist&lt;/strong&gt;. Now someone go ahead and try to disprove me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-08-29T13:59:21.117" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T13:59:21.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4316" CreationDate="2013-08-29T19:16:55.443" Score="4" ViewCount="1439" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going on the general assumption that ASL is loosely rooted in English (only in the sense that it was developed in a country dominated by native English speakers, this is not to say that ASL is derived from English), it most likely does not have a case system. If this is the case, based on my (admittedly shallow) knowledge of morphology and syntax it should have some semblance of a fixed word order, though not necessarily the SVO of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is word order, as in sequence of signs, strictly rigid in ASL, or is there a bit more freedom in sentence structure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="1165" LastEditDate="2013-08-31T00:21:50.103" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T16:27:39.210" Title="Is there a significance to word order in ASL?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4312" CreationDate="2013-08-29T20:20:20.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek does something pretty close. It has (among others) two demonstrative pronouns &lt;em&gt;hóde&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hoûtos&lt;/em&gt;, both of which are usually translated &quot;this&quot; or sometimes &quot;that&quot;. But when referring to a stretch of discourse, e.g. a story or a speech, &lt;em&gt;hóde&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the following&quot; and &lt;em&gt;hoûtos&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the preceding&quot;. For example, &lt;em&gt;táde élege&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;táde&lt;/em&gt; = neuter plural of &lt;em&gt;hóde&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;he said this, i.e. what follows&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;taûta élege&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;taûta&lt;/em&gt; = neuter plural of &lt;em&gt;hoûtos&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;he said this, i.e. what precedes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-08-29T20:20:20.397" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4314" CreationDate="2013-08-30T02:52:27.150" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I am not an ASL speaker (signer? user?), your question interested me. After some quick research, the simple answer to your question seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language_grammar#Syntax&quot;&gt;yes, word order matters in ASL&lt;/a&gt;. Strictly speaking, ASL sentences follow the a basic SVO sentence structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages typically have &lt;a href=&quot;https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/psych215/PDF-files/language-acq-II.pdf&quot;&gt;a trade off between strict word order and inflectional complexity&lt;/a&gt; (see slide 13). In a language with no morphological case markings &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; free word order it would be impossible tell what was the subject and what was the object. Therefore, languages with free word order require morphological case markings while languages with strict word orders tend to lose case markings over time since they are redundant (or perhaps it is more accurate the say that strict word orders develop to allow case markings to be omitted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I can tell, ASL does not have any case marking signs, thus word order must be respected. I'd actually be interested to know if there are any sign languages which do have such markings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that ASL sentences can contain a &quot;topic&quot; which occurs at the beginning of the sentence. Therefore, a signer may wish to emphasize the object of a sentence by moving it to the front of the sentence, marking it as the sentence's topic. English doesn't really have a concept of topic but other languages do. For example, Korean, which assigns case morphologically, uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_marker#Korean%3a_.EB.8A.94.2F.EC.9D.80&quot;&gt;the 은/는 marker to denote topic&lt;/a&gt;. If it helps, you can think of it as a combination of &quot;Yoda speak&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement#Basic_examples&quot;&gt;wh-fronting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that some sources claim that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ddeafworld.com/&quot;&gt;ASL users are typically familiar enough with English word order that they can understand English-ordered ASL&lt;/a&gt;, I suspect this is because, in addition to the fact that not all hearing-impaired people are completely deaf and thus may have learned English, even ASL users need to learn written English. However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/grammar.htm&quot;&gt;ASL grammar is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the same as English grammar&lt;/a&gt;.  Some of the big differences are the ability to omit subjects and the lack of a &quot;to be&quot; verb in ASL. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://doug.stringham.net/uvuasl/3330/3330_linguisticdifferences.pdf&quot;&gt;this paper that summarizes a lot of the differences between ASL and English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as jlawyer mentioned, sentences in ASL are not typically a linear set of independent signs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language_grammar#Affixes&quot;&gt;Signs may be combined&lt;/a&gt; to change their meanings as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4GsZ9P5DKY&quot;&gt;the spacial relationships between signs&lt;/a&gt; is important to meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T16:13:13.537" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T16:13:13.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4367" CreationDate="2013-08-30T06:08:56.290" Score="3" ViewCount="1198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently in Thailand and a bit frustrated with the difficult writing system here. Normally after a week in a country I can learn the writing system to a functional degree (except Han characters of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can draw the characters just fine but many characters look alike and many characters represent the same sound, but the two sets of &quot;alikeness&quot; are totally independent and unrelated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I'd like to learn the most frequent letters first. But short of wandering around in the heat and humidity with a notepad and building a frequency table myself, I'm sure there must be a letter frequency list out there for Thai already. Can somebody point me to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T09:38:55.467" Title="Looking for Thai letter-frequency resource" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:30:26.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:30:26.010" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:30:26.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:30:26.010" Score="0" Body="How often a linguistic element occurs relative to other linguistic elements." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:31:25.630" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:31:25.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:32:07.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alphabet supports both consonants and vowels. Well known alphabets are the Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, Armenian, and Georgian alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:22:28.927" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:22:28.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4322" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:32:07.127" Score="0" Body="A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:32:33.823" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:32:33.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:33:53.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A dictionary is a concrete collections of (some) words of a langauge. The whole set of words belonging to a particular language is termed the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/lexicon&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;lexicon&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;lexicon&lt;/a&gt; of the language..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:02:56.553" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:02:56.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:33:53.447" Score="0" Body="A collection of words in (a) specific language(s), often containing usage information." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:34:21.533" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:34:21.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:35:17.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:35:17.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:35:17.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:35:17.497" Score="0" Body="The process of syntactic analysis, usually used in the context of computational linguistics." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T11:33:09.470" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T11:33:09.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:37:41.100" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:37:41.100" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:37:41.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:37:41.100" Score="0" Body="Structure and meaning of morphemes and how they interact with the grammatical structure of utterances." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:39:49.883" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:39:49.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:39:23.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:39:23.403" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:39:23.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:39:23.403" Score="0" Body="Interaction of two languages, often leading to changes in one or both languages." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:39:43.633" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:39:43.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:41:09.143" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:41:09.143" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:41:09.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:41:09.143" Score="0" Body="The first or only language that a speaker acquires from birth." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:08:32.333" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:08:32.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:46:25.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:46:25.020" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:46:25.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:46:25.020" Score="0" Body="Study of the origin and development of languages." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:08:13.440" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:08:13.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:48:57.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:48:57.497" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:48:57.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:48:57.497" Score="0" Body="Variation of pitch that is not used to distinguish words (see &quot;tone&quot;), but to indicate e.g.  speaker's emotions,  important information or different kinds of sentences (such as declarative sentences vs. questions). " OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:26:42.140" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:26:42.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:52:32.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:52:32.387" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:52:32.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:52:32.387" Score="0" Body="Definite noun phrases refer to entities that are specific and identifiable in a given context." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:08:25.177" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:08:25.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:54:02.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T12:54:02.017" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T12:54:02.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:54:02.017" Score="0" Body="A word consisting of more than one root." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:09:52.730" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:09:52.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:55:13.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semitic languages&lt;/a&gt; are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family which developed in the Middle East and have spread to adjacent areas, including North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Notable Semitic languages include Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Ge'ez, Amharic, and Maltese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about Semitic languages in general, about the relationships between Semitic languages, or about how Semitic languages have influenced or been influenced by other language families (e.g. Indo-European, Turkic, etc.). For questions about a single Semitic language, prefer the specific language tag if one exists (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/arabic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;arabic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;arabic&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hebrew&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hebrew&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hebrew&lt;/a&gt;), but keep in mind that &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; questions are off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14005" LastEditorUserId="14005" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T18:48:23.213" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T18:48:23.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T12:55:13.940" Score="0" Body="The Semitic languages are a branch of related languages originating in the Near-East and a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="14005" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T03:59:47.853" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T03:59:47.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:17:07.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:17:07.283" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:17:07.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:17:07.283" Score="0" Body="Contiguous sequence of n words (more rarely, n letters or other elements)." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:56:21.327" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:56:21.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:19:11.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:19:11.493" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:19:11.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:19:11.493" Score="0" Body="Production of dictionaries and analysis of the relationships between the words of a language." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:57:33.143" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:57:33.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:20:03.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:20:03.153" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:20:03.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:20:03.153" Score="0" Body="Form of a verb used to modify a noun phrase." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:58:05.727" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:58:05.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:21:03.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:21:03.563" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:21:03.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:21:03.563" Score="0" Body="The rhythm, stress and intonation of speech." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:58:23.947" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:58:23.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:22:01.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:22:01.127" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:22:01.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:22:01.127" Score="0" Body="Change in the form of a word depending on the grammatical features of another word." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:56:05.343" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:56:05.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:22:46.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:22:46.350" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:22:46.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:22:46.350" Score="0" Body="The study of solutions to language-related real-life problems." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:58:34.117" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:58:34.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:26:21.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:26:21.300" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:26:21.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4356" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:26:21.300" Score="0" Body="Similar syntactic marking or usage of transitive objects and intransitive subjects." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:57:17.020" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:57:17.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:28:14.413" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:28:14.413" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:28:14.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:28:14.413" Score="0" Body="Occur together with a noun or noun phrase and express their reference in the given context. This can be definiteness or indefiniteness, number, possession or proximity. Examples in English are &quot;a&quot;, &quot;the&quot;, &quot;some&quot;, &quot;that&quot;, &quot;my&quot;, &quot;five&quot;, but also the zero article in &quot;∅ tables&quot; (depending on theory)." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:24:50.280" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:24:50.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:30:10.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:30:10.593" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:30:10.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:30:10.593" Score="0" Body="Modification of a verb from its basic form to indicate information on person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mode, voice or other grammatical categories." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:57:06.627" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:57:06.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:31:16.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:31:16.723" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:31:16.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:31:16.723" Score="0" Body="Languages that lack native speakers but formerly had native speakers." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:58:16.227" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:58:16.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4363" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:33:22.713" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:33:22.713" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:33:22.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4364" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-08-30T13:33:22.713" Score="0" Body="An American linguist who founded the field of Generative Linguistics." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-08-30T13:58:52.650" LastActivityDate="2013-08-30T13:58:52.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4370" CreationDate="2013-08-30T20:33:59.867" Score="14" ViewCount="2324" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Arabic script is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abjad&lt;/a&gt; writing system or consonantal alphabet. Most letters stand for a consonant, and short vowels are usually not indicated (but can exceptionally be indicated with diacritic symbols). Long vowels also have proper letters, which is why the Arabic script can be called an impure Abjad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic script is said to be well adapted to Arabic grammar (and more generally, Abjads are well adapted to Semitic languages) because roots usually consist of three consonants. Words derived from a common root still look fairly similar in writing because much morphology consists of changes in short vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, according to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, the Arabic root ذ ب ح Ḏ-B-Ḥ (to sacrifice) can be derived the forms ذَبَح ḏabaḥa (he sacrificed), ذَبَحْتَ ḏabaḥta (you (masculine singular) sacrificed), ذَبَّحَ ḏabbaḥa (he slaughtered), يُذَبِّح yuḏabbiḥ (he slaughters), and مَذْبَح maḏbaḥ (slaughterhouse). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source: Abjad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This is marked as disputed in the Wikipedia article, but sounds sensible to me and I think I've also read it elsewhere. Still, if you can cite sources disputing this feel free to rectify it.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; The Arabic script is also used for a range of non-Semitic languages, such as Farsi/Persian and Urdu. Despite a fair degree of influence from Arabic, these languages do not follow the Arabic/Semitic system where roots rely on (three) consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this have any practical consequences? Is there any evidence that the use of the Arabic script for non-Semitic languages makes reading and writing harder? Or the use of other Abjads, such as the Hebrew script for Yiddish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My attempt at an answer, so far:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the one hand - as a learner of Arabic - I find the Arabic script troublesome enough even though consonantal roots are important in Arabic and short vowels less so. After all, short vowels carry morphological load (the passive of &lt;em&gt;kataba&lt;/em&gt; - write - is &lt;em&gt;kutiba&lt;/em&gt;, only distinguished by short vowels). But if authors feel this creates too much ambiguity they use diacritics to mark the crucial short vowels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another problem when learning Arabic (caused by the Arabic script) is that I can't pronounce words I do not already know. But this is because I'm a learner, and publications for learners (whether native or non-native) typically include diacritics for short vowels depending on previous knowledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the other hand, even in English, it's n_t th_t h_rd t_ r__d _ s_nt_nc_ w_th__t v_w_ls. (see below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the Arabic script really does cause so much trouble for non-Semitic languages one would expect these language communities to try and adopt another script. I don't know of any such cases where the community did that of it's on accord (some communities in the Soviet Union were forced to) and even if there are some they seem to be exceptions. I think this is not really a counter-argument to the Arabic script not being ideal for non-Semitic languages because once a community has adopted a script the opportunity costs implied by change would be fairly high (everybody has to learn a new script). Also, many communities using the Arabic script are also Muslim. As the language and script of the Qur'an, the Arabic language and script enjoy a lot of prestige.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The clause without vowels is supposed to read &amp;quot;it's no that hard to read a sentence without vowels&amp;quot;. If you had to read this apparently it is harder than I thought.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:50:44.023" Title="If the Arabic script is suited to Arabic grammar, how do speakers of non-Semitic languages cope with it?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2573" CreationDate="2013-08-31T04:36:33.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;RE: &quot;some of Mongour are Taoist and Bonan are Muslim&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bao'an/Bonan who are officially classified as such live in Gansu. However, the place where they originated, which is called /Bao'an/ is in Tongren County, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China. The former group are Muslims. The latter group are Tibetan Buddhists. The Muslims left because of conflict with the Buddhists. The Buddhists are classified as /Tu/ as are the Chinese-speaking residents of Wutun, which is also in Tongren County. The Wutun people, though classified as /Tu/, are devout Tibetan Buddhists and, among their number, are some of the best thanka painters in the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in Tongren County are other Tu, who live in Gaomer and Niandehu. These Tu speak a language that is very close to what Bao'an residents speak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Tu dialects are spoken in Huzhu and Minhe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contention that the Tu are descended from the Xianbei is questionable. This contention derives mostly from a sense of nationalism and the claim that /Tu/ is related to the /Tu/ in the term /Tuguhun/ /Tuyuhun/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2419" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T04:36:33.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4317" CreationDate="2013-08-31T16:04:21.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've downloaded the Thai Wikipedia dump of the 29/08/2013, converted its 82,200 articles into text files with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/yohasebe/wp2txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wp2txt&lt;/a&gt; and counted the 195,667,724 characters with a small python script. wp2txt is supposed to remove the metadata, but the statistics can be skewed anyway, and since I don't know any Thai, I have no way to check whether the statistics below make any sense...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only kept the characters occurring with a probability higher than .01%, but I can decrease this threshold if you want. They are listed below, in decreasing frequency order, with their unicode names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0592 : - -:U+0020 SPACE &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0515 : -า-:U+0E32 THAI CHARACTER SARA AA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0446 : -น-:U+0E19 THAI CHARACTER NO NU&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0428 : -ร-:U+0E23 THAI CHARACTER RO RUA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0321 : -อ-:U+0E2D THAI CHARACTER O ANG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0311 : -ก-:U+0E01 THAI CHARACTER KO KAI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0306 : -เ-:U+0E40 THAI CHARACTER SARA E&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0293 : -ง-:U+0E07 THAI CHARACTER NGO NGU&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0282 : -่-:U+0E48 THAI CHARACTER MAI EK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0258 : -ม-:U+0E21 THAI CHARACTER MO MA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0255 : -ั-:U+0E31 THAI CHARACTER MAI HAN-AKAT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0213 : -ย-:U+0E22 THAI CHARACTER YO YAK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0211 : -ี-:U+0E35 THAI CHARACTER SARA II&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0211 : -้-:U+0E49 THAI CHARACTER MAI THO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0206 : -ล-:U+0E25 THAI CHARACTER LO LING&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0195 : -ว-:U+0E27 THAI CHARACTER WO WAEN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0180 : -ิ-:U+0E34 THAI CHARACTER SARA I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0178 : -ท-:U+0E17 THAI CHARACTER THO THAHAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0178 : -ด-:U+0E14 THAI CHARACTER DO DEK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0167 : -ส-:U+0E2A THAI CHARACTER SO SUA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0158 : -ต-:U+0E15 THAI CHARACTER TO TAO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0144 : -ะ-:U+0E30 THAI CHARACTER SARA A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0139 : -บ-:U+0E1A THAI CHARACTER BO BAIMAI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0139 : -ป-:U+0E1B THAI CHARACTER PO PLA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0128 : -ค-:U+0E04 THAI CHARACTER KHO KHWAI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0125 : -ห-:U+0E2B THAI CHARACTER HO HIP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0114 : -แ-:U+0E41 THAI CHARACTER SARA AE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0112 : -พ-:U+0E1E THAI CHARACTER PHO PHAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0108 : -จ-:U+0E08 THAI CHARACTER CHO CHAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0.0106 : -e-:U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0.0096 : -์-:U+0E4C THAI CHARACTER THANTHAKHAT&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0093 : -ช-:U+0E0A THAI CHARACTER CHO CHANG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0092 : --:U+000A  (end of line)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0090 : -t-:U+0074 LATIN SMALL LETTER T&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0087 : -a-:U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0080 : -ข-:U+0E02 THAI CHARACTER KHO KHAI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0080 : -ุ-:U+0E38 THAI CHARACTER SARA U&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0076 : -i-:U+0069 LATIN SMALL LETTER I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0075 : -ใ-:U+0E43 THAI CHARACTER SARA AI MAIMUAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0073 : -ื-:U+0E37 THAI CHARACTER SARA UEE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0071 : -ไ-:U+0E44 THAI CHARACTER SARA AI MAIMALAI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0071 : -o-:U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0069 : -n-:U+006E LATIN SMALL LETTER N&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0067 : -l-:U+006C LATIN SMALL LETTER L&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0066 : -โ-:U+0E42 THAI CHARACTER SARA O&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0065 : -r-:U+0072 LATIN SMALL LETTER R&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0065 : -็-:U+0E47 THAI CHARACTER MAITAIKHU&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0064 : -.-:U+002E FULL STOP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0064 : -ู-:U+0E39 THAI CHARACTER SARA UU&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0059 : -ศ-:U+0E28 THAI CHARACTER SO SALA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0054 : -ำ-:U+0E33 THAI CHARACTER SARA AM&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0054 : -s-:U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0049 : -2-:U+0032 DIGIT TWO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0042 : -1-:U+0031 DIGIT ONE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0041 : -p-:U+0070 LATIN SMALL LETTER P&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0041 : -0-:U+0030 DIGIT ZERO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0037 : -ึ-:U+0E36 THAI CHARACTER SARA UE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0036 : -ซ-:U+0E0B THAI CHARACTER SO SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0035 : -c-:U+0063 LATIN SMALL LETTER C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0033 : -h-:U+0068 LATIN SMALL LETTER H&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0032 : -5-:U+0035 DIGIT FIVE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0031 : -ถ-:U+0E16 THAI CHARACTER THO THUNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0031 : -)-:U+0029 RIGHT PARENTHESIS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0031 : -(-:U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0031 : -ธ-:U+0E18 THAI CHARACTER THO THONG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0031 : -u-:U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0029 : -d-:U+0064 LATIN SMALL LETTER D&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0028 : -ภ-:U+0E20 THAI CHARACTER PHO SAMPHAO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0028 : -ณ-:U+0E13 THAI CHARACTER NO NEN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0028 : -ษ-:U+0E29 THAI CHARACTER SO RUSI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0025 : -/-:U+002F SOLIDUS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0025 : ---:U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0025 : -m-:U+006D LATIN SMALL LETTER M&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0024 : -ผ-:U+0E1C THAI CHARACTER PHO PHUNG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0024 : -|-:U+007C VERTICAL LINE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0022 : -ญ-:U+0E0D THAI CHARACTER YO YING&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0022 : -g-:U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0022 : -,-:U+002C COMMA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0021 : -4-:U+0034 DIGIT FOUR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0020 : -3-:U+0033 DIGIT THREE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0019 : -9-:U+0039 DIGIT NINE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0018 : -[-:U+005B LEFT SQUARE BRACKET&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0018 : -]-:U+005D RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0017 : -ฟ-:U+0E1F THAI CHARACTER FO FAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0017 : -w-:U+0077 LATIN SMALL LETTER W&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0017 : -=-:U+003D EQUALS SIGN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0016 : -y-:U+0079 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0015 : -8-:U+0038 DIGIT EIGHT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0015 : -b-:U+0062 LATIN SMALL LETTER B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0014 : -f-:U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0013 : -C-:U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0013 : -&quot;-:U+0022 QUOTATION MARK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0013 : -7-:U+0037 DIGIT SEVEN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0013 : -6-:U+0036 DIGIT SIX&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0012 : -T-:U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0012 : -A-:U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0012 : -S-:U+0053 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0012 : -E-:U+0045 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0012 : -:-:U+003A COLON&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0011 : -R-:U+0052 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0010 : -ฐ-:U+0E10 THAI CHARACTER THO THAN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0.0010 : -k-:U+006B LATIN SMALL LETTER K&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;.1 %&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;0.0009 : -I-:U+0049 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0009 : -D-:U+0044 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0009 : -v-:U+0076 LATIN SMALL LETTER V&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0009 : -M-:U+004D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0008 : -B-:U+0042 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0008 : -P-:U+0050 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0008 : -ฮ-:U+0E2E THAI CHARACTER HO NOKHUK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0006 : -ฉ-:U+0E09 THAI CHARACTER CHO CHING&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0006 : -N-:U+004E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0006 : -ฤ-:U+0E24 THAI CHARACTER RU&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0006 : -ๆ-:U+0E46 THAI CHARACTER MAIYAMOK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0006 : -F-:U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0005 : -L-:U+004C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0005 : -ฝ-:U+0E1D THAI CHARACTER FO FA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0005 : -H-:U+0048 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0005 : -G-:U+0047 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0005 : -W-:U+0057 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0004 : -O-:U+004F LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0004 : -'-:U+0027 APOSTROPHE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0004 : -ฎ-:U+0E0E THAI CHARACTER DO CHADA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0004 : -ฏ-:U+0E0F THAI CHARACTER TO PATAK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0004 : -J-:U+004A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -x-:U+0078 LATIN SMALL LETTER X&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -ฒ-:U+0E12 THAI CHARACTER THO PHUTHAO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -K-:U+004B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -#-:U+0023 NUMBER SIGN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -V-:U+0056 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -%-:U+0025 PERCENT SIGN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0003 : -j-:U+006A LATIN SMALL LETTER J&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -U-:U+0055 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -๊-:U+0E4A THAI CHARACTER MAI TRI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -z-:U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -–-:U+2013 EN DASH&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -ฑ-:U+0E11 THAI CHARACTER THO NANGMONTHO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -ฯ-:U+0E2F THAI CHARACTER PAIYANNOI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -ฬ-:U+0E2C THAI CHARACTER LO CHULA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -”-:U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -“-:U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -_-:U+005F LOW LINE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -ฆ-:U+0E06 THAI CHARACTER KHO RAKHANG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0002 : -Y-:U+0059 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0001 : -&amp;amp;-:U+0026 AMPERSAND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0001 : -;-:U+003B SEMICOLON &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0.0001 : -๋-:U+0E4B THAI CHARACTER MAI CHATTAWA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2013-08-31T16:04:21.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-08-31T16:30:45.590" Score="2" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.hum.uva.nl/fg/working_papers/fdg_H&amp;amp;M.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Functional Discourse Grammar&lt;/a&gt; by Kees Hengeveld and J. Lachlan Mackenzie describes objects in FDG using notation like the formulae below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(π v1: [head (v1)Φ]: [σ (v1)Φ])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(π M1: [(A1) ... (A1+N)] (M1): Σ (M1)), where N ≥ 0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the notation is described in the paper, e.g. square brackets describe non-hierarchical associations, but some such as circular brackets and colons are not. I am trying to read the paper without any linguistic background, I presume the notation would be obvious to students of linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the basis of this notation, and is there somewhere I can read up on it? Alternately is the paper intended to describe and define the notation from scratch? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will try and clarify my current understanding. At a high level FDG is organised into a hierarchy of four levels, each of which consists of a number of layers. The first formula above describes the general structure of a layer, presumably as an algebraic function. Basically there are three components to each layer; an operator, a head, and a modifier. v1 is &quot;a variable of the layer in question&quot; - I'm not sure what this means, does the value of v1 identify which layer is being processed, or does it somehow represent some aspect of the actual language being generated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second formula is an instance of a particular layer, in this case the &quot;Move&quot; layer. This is a topmost layer of analysis within a discourse - it either &quot;calls for a response or is itself a response&quot;. I understand the formula says that the Move layer contains a number of Discourse Acts [(A1) ... (A1+N)]. I don't know what Σ(M1) means - instinctively I read &quot;sum of M1&quot;, but expect that doesn't fit here. I also don't know how Φ fits in, it is described as &quot;a function ... a grammatical strategy which applies to the entire layer&quot; but I'm not quite sure what this means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2420" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-01T08:52:56.630" LastActivityDate="2013-09-01T08:52:56.630" Title="What is the notation used in Functional Discourse Grammar?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-01T03:24:02.777" Score="14" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4314/is-there-a-significance-to-word-order-in-asl&quot;&gt;prior question&lt;/a&gt; I asked whether word order in ASL has a special significance, which naturally lead to another question: do any signed languages, that is languages communicated mostly if not fully through hand signs, have a case system to free up word order for, say, greater expressiveness or inflection? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1689/do-sign-languages-inflect&quot;&gt;Here I found a question along those lines&lt;/a&gt;, but it dealt specifically with inflection and not cases. An example of the type of case system I'm asking about is that of Latin, where &lt;em&gt;agricola puerum necat&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the farmer kills the boy&quot; while, though not in typical word order, &lt;em&gt;agricolam puer necat&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the boy kills the farmer&quot; though the word order remains the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there signed languages that use morphological case markers? Is that even possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T13:27:30.290" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T13:27:30.290" Title="Are there signed languages that have a case system?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4365" CreationDate="2013-09-01T06:41:36.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian had used to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a variety&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alphabets&lt;/a&gt; throughout the time, so I think it would not make any particular difficulty to read in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Persian Arabic&lt;/a&gt; alphabet as well. The main difficulties are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) sounds not present in Arabic, yet noticeable in Persian (or other languages using the script), and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) a richer stock of vowels. These two factors elicit in Persian Arabic script, respectfully,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) four new letters with some more dots to distinguish phonemes [p]پ, [t͡ʃ] (ch)چ, [ʒ]ژ zhe and [ɡ]گ, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) using 'Alef for [ɒ], Vav for [v] / [uː] / [o] / [ow] / [oː] (in Dari), Yi for [ɒː] / [eː] (in Dari) and not distinguishing short vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key principle might be similar to that of using Arabic script for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aljamiado&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aljamiado&lt;/a&gt; texts in Medieval Spain, or to write (Turkic) Tatar language in Belorussia with the Arabic script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Abjad is still vastly used for most of non-Semitic languages spoken throughout former &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tocharian&lt;/a&gt; areas and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sogdia&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is truly interesing, from my point of view, is how the Arabic script was used by Chinese muslims (A.K.A. Huizu) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaoerjin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to write Chinese&lt;/a&gt; words, and there are still examples of reversed order of two-syllable (that is, two-character) words among some of Chinese Hui people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T08:50:44.023" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:50:44.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-01T15:40:51.420" Score="11" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any techniques available today that would make it considerably easier to anyone attempting to translate it today (as if they were trying todo it for the first time)?&#xA;Otherwise would the process be the same as it was for the first person who managed to translate it? Would computers be of use and if yes how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="3052" LastEditDate="2015-02-04T17:15:27.173" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T16:58:30.033" Title="If the Rosetta stone were to be translated today, would the process be the same as used the first time?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5988" CreationDate="2013-09-02T03:36:40.557" Score="5" ViewCount="1165" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a couple of weeks in Thailand and learning how to say &quot;I don't want it&quot; I've just realized the word for &quot;want&quot; is very similar to the word for &quot;want&quot; in Mandarin Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the coincidence rate is likely to be high in single syllable words but the fact the languages are so close in proximity and the large Chinese influence throughout the region still makes me wonder if it could be an old borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mandarin Chinese &quot;要&quot; (yāo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai &quot;เอา&quot; (ao)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the tones are quite different but I believe these tend to change more freely between dialects so I would assume even more freely when borrowing to another tonal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least going by dictionaries without much language knowledge or context there are a bunch of other words for &quot;want&quot; in both languages, but these are the simple ones I've been taught in each. I've looked for the Zhuang equivalent but no luck so far. I have found a Lao cognate though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lao &quot;ເອົາ&quot; (ao)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-06T12:40:55.367" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:49:37.180" Title="Could the Mandarin word &quot;要&quot; (yāo) and the Thai word &quot;เอา&quot; (ao), both meaning &quot;to want&quot; be related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4372" CreationDate="2013-09-02T14:43:55.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, it's just a coincidence. I don't have direct proof, but here are some speculations that may (or may not) lead to an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think you may have been confused hearing this word with a negative particle: ไม่เอา &lt;code&gt;[mâj au]&lt;/code&gt; which may be perceived as &lt;code&gt;[mâj jau]&lt;/code&gt; which is used very often e.g. buying food.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most &lt;a href=&quot;http://wold.livingsources.org/vocabulary/23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thai loanwords&lt;/a&gt; with Mid-Chinese origin are phonetically similar to Cantonese pronunciation, not to Mandarin Chinese. The Cantonese pronunciation of 要 is &lt;code&gt;[yiu1]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[yiu3]&lt;/code&gt;, unlike Mandarin &lt;code&gt;[yau1]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[yau4]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are many other words (e.g. อยาก &lt;code&gt;[jàːk]&lt;/code&gt;) that can equally be borrowed from same Mid-Chinese word (if they were).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A minor difference in meanings: 要 &lt;code&gt;[yau1]&lt;/code&gt; translates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://pinyincity.com/hanyupinyin/search/?q=%E8%A6%81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;demand/request/important&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, while เอา &lt;code&gt;[au]&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/id/131133&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;desire/need&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In this sense, อยาก &lt;code&gt;[jàːk]&lt;/code&gt; is more suitable for meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/id/131324&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;demand&quot; or &quot;wish&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last thing. It may or may not be relevant to เ◌า, but certainly worth thinking. When traveling to Northern Thai provinces (Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai), I found something interesting. The thing is that some diphthongs have unusual pronunciation. Here's how they read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sara Au&lt;/em&gt; เ◌า &lt;code&gt;[au]&lt;/code&gt; is read as &lt;code&gt;[eaː]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sara Ai Maimuan&lt;/em&gt; ใ◌ &lt;code&gt;[ai]&lt;/code&gt; read as &lt;code&gt;[eɯ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sara Ai Maimalai&lt;/em&gt; ไ◌ &lt;code&gt;[ai]&lt;/code&gt; read as &lt;code&gt;[ei]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will probably hear examples of the last item by yourself, even in Central Thailand. For instance, people pronounce the negative particle ไม่ &lt;code&gt;[mâj]&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;[mêj]&lt;/code&gt;, like in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ไม่มี &lt;code&gt;[mêj miː]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;don't have&quot; (instead of &lt;code&gt;[mâj miː]&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ไม่ได้ &lt;code&gt;[mêj dâːj]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;can not&quot; or &quot;was not&quot; (instead of &lt;code&gt;[mâj dâːj]&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &quot;unofficial&quot; pronunciation is very close to a decomposed written form, e.g. &lt;code&gt;ไ = เ◌ + ◌ี&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;เ◌า = เ◌ + ◌า&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also found a hypothesis expressed by &lt;strong&gt;Nantana Danvivathana&lt;/strong&gt; in their book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.th/books?id=pXA6OilJtqwC&amp;amp;pg=PA188&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=Nantana+Danvivathana&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Nantana%20Danvivathana&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Thai Writing System&lt;/a&gt;, page 188. Quoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Li Fan Kuei stated in his A Handbook of Comparative Tai (1977, pp. 256, 288-289) that in Lungchow, one of the Thai languages spoken in China, words written with &amp;lt;ไ-&gt; in the Thai language are pronounced with &lt;code&gt;[ai]&lt;/code&gt;, while words written with &amp;lt;ใ-&gt; are pronounced with &lt;code&gt;[aɯ]&lt;/code&gt;. This gives rise to the hypothesis that in ancient Thai &amp;lt;ไ-&gt; was pronounced as &lt;code&gt;[ai]&lt;/code&gt; and &amp;lt;ใ-&gt; was pronounced as &lt;code&gt;[aɯ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this hypothesis does not confirm ไ◌ to &lt;code&gt;[ei]&lt;/code&gt; or เ◌า to &lt;code&gt;[eaː]&lt;/code&gt; phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I was looking for an origin of เอา, I would rather look into words with &lt;code&gt;ea&lt;/code&gt; pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T14:43:55.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4253" CreationDate="2013-09-02T15:40:40.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly what you are asking, but in Spanish,  /ʝ/ and /ʎ/ are considered different phonemes and are not distinguished at all by most speakers, not being really considered a question of standard vs. vernacular: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2426" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T15:40:40.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-02T19:44:14.357" Score="6" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;What features of a word make a word sound natural in a language. For instance in two made up words 'mobify' sounds more natural in English than 'jlkrtz'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2427" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-02T20:06:51.013" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T19:39:48.690" Title="What determines how natural a word sounds in a language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4375" CreationDate="2013-09-02T20:05:42.897" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;By 'natural' you seem to be referring to what sounds (or phonemes) can be combined in what order. This is called &lt;strong&gt;phonotactics&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;mo&lt;/em&gt; in your example &lt;em&gt;mobify&lt;/em&gt; is a combination of a consonant and a vowel that fairly often occurs in English, in words such as &lt;em&gt;motor&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;for simplicity I'm ignoring here that spelling doesn't exactly reflect pronunciation - ultimately phonotactics is about what sounds/phonemes can combine and English spelling can be very misleading when it comes to pronunciation - but I hope the examples are straightforward&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your example &lt;em&gt;jlkrtz&lt;/em&gt; cannot be an English word because several combinations in this word are 'illegal' in the sense that they do not follow the sound laws of English. &lt;em&gt;jl&lt;/em&gt; is not a legal consonant cluster, &lt;em&gt;kr&lt;/em&gt; is, but &lt;em&gt;krtz&lt;/em&gt; is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does allow fairly long consonant clusters, such as in &lt;em&gt;twelfths&lt;/em&gt; /twɛlfθs/ (four consonants in the coda). But consonant clusters of this length are rare and only a fraction of all possible combinations are allowed. Just try replacing /θ/ with /b/, /p/, /m/, /n/, /z/ or /k/, none of these are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further details take a look at the 14 rules in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics#English_Phonotactics&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.:&lt;/strong&gt; Nobody really pronounces very long consonant clusters except in very special contexts. &lt;em&gt;twelfths&lt;/em&gt; has /twɛlfθs/ as so-called citation form. This pronunciation would be used when talking to learners of English (including children) or when speakers are aiming for very clear and accurate pronunciation. But in any common communication task at least one of the four coda consonants would usually be left out, even by newsreaders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-09-02T20:05:42.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4314" CreationDate="2013-09-03T16:27:39.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer, but I'd like to correct a wrong assumption that you make at the beginning of your question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Going on the general assumption that ASL is loosely rooted in English  (only in the sense that it was developed in a country dominated by native English speakers, this is not to say that ASL is derived from English), it most likely does not have a case system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, ASL is rooted in FSL (French sign language) and is totally different from the British sign language !  To cite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia sign language page&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sign languages generally do not have any linguistic relation to the spoken   languages of the lands in which they arise. The correlation between sign and spoken languages is complex and varies depending on the country more than the spoken language. For example, the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their dominant language, but American Sign Language (ASL), used in the US and most parts of Canada, is derived from French Sign Language whereas the other three countries sign dialects of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language. Similarly, the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different, despite Spanish being the national language in each country, and the sign language used in Bolivia is based on ASL rather than any sign language that is used in a Spanish-speaking country.[18] Variations also arise within a 'national' sign language which don't necessarily correspond to dialect differences in the national spoken language; rather, they can usually be correlated to the geographic location of residential schools for the deaf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and (further down on the same page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble that of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to your reasoning, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, should have cases, since Russian has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;6 cases&lt;/a&gt;.  However, it is also case-less, as member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSL-family&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is to say that if ASL shares a characteristic of English (like &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; lack of cases or word-order rigidity), it has &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; no reason to come from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T16:27:39.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-03T17:31:28.867" Score="0" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a software that does speech to IPA transcription? It seems like this is an easier problem than speech to text but searching for it online didn't give me any results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2429" LastActivityDate="2013-09-03T17:31:28.867" Title="Is there any speech to IPA software?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-09-04T18:47:08.233" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T07:36:58.690" Score="-1" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that languages evolved just as species did complying with Darwin Natural Selection, what are the Genotype and phenotype when it comes to languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2408" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T02:54:33.823" Title="What are the counterpart of Genotype and phenotype in a language?" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4381" CreationDate="2013-09-04T11:27:34.887" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assumption that language evolution is in any way analogous to darwinian species evolution seems to me to be completely incorrect. Here are two among the major differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Species evolution is driven by differential rate of reproductive success between individuals, themselves dependent of differential heritable traits. Languages evolution does not function in this way at all, with differential rate of reproductive success probably ill-defined. Even if it were, it would be correlated to socio-historical phenomena and presumably not at all to heritable characteristics of languages. It is the Roman legions, not Latin's case system, which spawned the Romance family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and most importantly &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) One of the core logical concepts of (contemporary) darwinian species evolution is the distinction between heritable and non-heritable traits; only the former contributing to evolution. In fact, the very premises on which your question is built require this concept; otherwise there is no meaningful distinction between genotype (the material encoding heritable traits) and phenotype (actual expressed observable characteristic of an individual). However, language acquired traits are of course heritable: if a language looses the masculine/feminine distinction in the course of its history, for instance, it is very likely that many of its offsprings will also lack this distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it extremely unlikely that languages could have traits in their purported genotype which are not in their phenotype (so heritable traits with no observable expression) or conversely traits in their phenotype which are not in their genotype (so observable traits which are nonetheless not heritable). Or in other words, I doubt that the genotype-phenotype distinction makes any sense for languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question as an interesting spin-off though: once understood that language evolution does not obey the rules of darwinian species evolution, one could wonder which formal rules it does obey. Heritability of acquired traits would be there maybe alongside drive to simplicity (because of the acquisition of languages by infants) and some interactions with phonology and morpho-syntax (inflectional systems probably cannot survive high rates of syncretism, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T11:27:34.887" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-04T11:49:33.987" Score="3" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some pet owners seem to be able to speak to their cats or dogs. Is there any evidence that animals understand human languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: By &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt;, i mean understanding of spoken language and relatively long sentence. We are not talking about understanding of some reserved, isolated words (like run command or attack command for dogs). It's more like understanding of &lt;em&gt;discourse&lt;/em&gt; with all methaphors and grammatical constructions and perhaps all this &lt;em&gt;Sprachspiel&lt;/em&gt; (Wittgenstein).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T11:46:39.953" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T11:46:39.953" Title="There is evidence that domesticated animals (cats or dogs) understand human language?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4385" CreationDate="2013-09-04T12:13:54.517" Score="2" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I search for dictionary of Georgian with lexical stress, but i can't find online of offline. Perhaps Georgian have any explicit rules for lexical stress which i don't know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T12:29:16.763" Title="Dictionary of Georgian language with lexical stress?" Tags="&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4384" CreationDate="2013-09-04T12:29:16.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Georgian.html?id=KRtkAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Aronson (1990)&lt;/a&gt; gives the following rules for stress-assignment in Georgian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;less than 4 syllables in word -&gt; stress on 1st OR antepenultimate syllable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5 or more syllables in word -&gt; stress on 1st AND antepenultimate syllables&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=0F69CF6C0CBF384097D45250C91DDCA1.journals?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=3891588&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Robins &amp;amp; Waterson (1952)&lt;/a&gt; give an alternative, less compact (but perhaps more readable) set of rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2 syllables -&gt; stress on 1st syllable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3 syllables -&gt; stress on 1st OR 2nd syllable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  4 syllables -&gt; stress on 2nd OR on 1st &amp;amp; 3rd syllables&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5 syllables -&gt; 1st &amp;amp; 3rd OR 2nd &amp;amp; 4th syllables&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  6+ syllables -&gt; 1st &amp;amp; antepenultimate syllables  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being overly familiar with Georgian, i can't speak to the accuracy of each, but i suspect the more recent 1990 reference is the one to go with. So, by way of an answer to your question: &lt;strong&gt;Georgian stress-assignment is partially rule governed&lt;/strong&gt;. Applying the rules helps, but since at least one of the rules is disjunctive, stress assignment must be partially lexicalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-09-04T12:29:16.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4262" CreationDate="2013-09-05T09:35:03.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sygyt.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Overtone Analyzer&quot;&gt;Overtone Analyzer&lt;/a&gt; is another program that you might consider for color spectrograms. It provides a number of different color schemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sygyt.com/images/oa/2.0/en/1280/vowelchart-1280-en.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;click for large version&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/teXJa.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jsleV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Spectrogram of speech&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is optimized for high resolution spectrograms that are rendered in real time from recorded sound or from existing files.&#xA;There are free and commercial versions available. The program has an integrated vowel chart and special features for formant analysis of vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm the author of this program and make my living from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2437" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T16:36:01.300" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T16:36:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4289" CreationDate="2013-09-05T13:40:18.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question, properly generalized, is the object of much active research. Of course, one can make lists of verbs allowing active, unaccusative (or ergative) and mediopassive constructions in a given language, but the theoretical generalizations allowing one to predict what will be in these lists does not exist, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a flavor of the difficulty, notice that given an appropriate context, French transitive verbs tend to accept a mediopassive construction, even  those like &lt;em&gt;kill&lt;/em&gt; which resist it strongly in Germanic languages. UPDATE: Contrast for instance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sell apples/I kill ants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apples sell easily/*Ants kill easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je vends des pommes/Je tue des fourmis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Les pommes se vendent bien/Les fourmis se tuent facilement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the last sentence is perhaps a bit strange out of context but perfectly OK embedded in an appropriate discourse e.g&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J'ai de gros problèmes de fourmis dans mon jardin. Les fourmis noires sont absolument increvables mais heureusement les fourmis rouges se tuent assez facilement. (I have huge ant problems in my garden. Black ants are absolutely indestructible but fortunately red ants kill rather easily).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is even more so in other Romance languages (the Spanish equivalent of Ants kill easily, for instance, seems quite natural). On the other hand of the spectrum, all Japanese transitive verbs have an ergative form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For recent research on the topic, you can read the work of Artemis Alexiadou, for instance.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2013-09-05T15:02:01.027" LastActivityDate="2013-09-05T15:02:01.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4375" CreationDate="2013-09-07T17:52:18.097" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it depends of concrete language. For example in some languages are words with only consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the phrase in (both) Czech an Slovak languages which worth of the article in Wikipedia: &lt;strong&gt;Strč prst skrz krk&lt;/strong&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;translation to English, pronunciation, explanation in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Czechs and Slovaks it is natural phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Armenian language there are surnames like &lt;strong&gt;Mkrtychan&lt;/strong&gt;. There are more people with this surname you can find in Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language has its own set of rules, and I think that exact answer on your question possible to find in Generative linguistics, not in phonology only. Why phrase &lt;strong&gt;Strč prst skrz krk&lt;/strong&gt; is natural for Czech and Slovaks, but very bizarre for another people, for another human beings with similar speech organs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exists the Generative grammar of Chomsky, which explains construction of sentences. I think if Generative phonology would really exists like branch of science it can give proper answer to your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2446" LastEditorUserId="2446" LastEditDate="2013-09-07T19:39:48.690" LastActivityDate="2013-09-07T19:39:48.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4365" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:28:42.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many non-Semitic languages written in Arabic-based script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Persian or Farsi, presently used in Iran is an Indo-European language and use a variant of the Arabic script.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozarabic_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozarabic language&lt;/a&gt; was a language used by Spanish Christians back when Arabic was the main language of learning and literature. It is primarily written in the Arabic script. It is a Romance language, and its vocabulary was derived from Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During the sultanates era, Malay (which is an Austronesian language) used to be written in an Arabic script, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jawi&lt;/a&gt;. Today people use the Latin alphabet, but Jawi is still used in several context. In fact, I have first-hand experience with Jawi writing, so I am going to elaborate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Riau, an Indonesian province which is the Indonesian centre of Malay culture, Jawi (or as we call it, &lt;em&gt;Arab Melayu&lt;/em&gt;) is taught in school all the way to high school. It is also widely used in road signs, signs of buildings, and even a few books. To handle the difficulties you highlighted, there are several rules/changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-original arabic letters are introduced to represent sounds that doesn't exist in arabic. Some are borrowed from the Persian script, and it introduced several new ones to represent sounds that doesn't exist in Arabic or Persian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many vowels are represented by their closest consonant, e.g. waw (normally representing w) also represents u and o sounds. This isn't that far from the original Arabic usage because waw is also used in Arabic to represent long u sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The schwa vowel does not appear in the written form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The a sound can be represented in several ways, there is a slightly complicated rule regarding this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic loanwords are written in the original Arabic form, so the above rules are ignored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other rules, but it's not that complicated. I remember reading the rules which fits merely 2 or 3 book pages including examples, and after this I never have any problem with this subject in school. After certain level, this subject involves studying Malay literature, culture and history in full Jawi text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2447" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T07:28:42.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-08T07:33:40.213" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I assume evolution of language took place over time, I am curious as to what can be the initial population of words or syllable or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say I am about to write a algorithm to evolve certain language. How do I start with it?&#xA;What can the inital data set?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2408" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T15:22:00.680" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T15:22:00.680" Title="Considering languages evolved over time, what could be the initial dataset?" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-08T05:18:45.993" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Language is t]he words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do non-verbal ways of communication, such as a semaphore or a heliograph, count as a language or not, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user51300" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-09-08T14:25:53.127" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T15:39:52.467" Title="Do non-verbal ways of communication count as languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2013-09-08T09:28:43.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semaphore and heliograph are not &lt;em&gt;languages&lt;/em&gt;: rather they are &lt;em&gt;telegraphy systems&lt;/em&gt; for transmitting written messages (presumably in a particular language which exists outside the system) over a distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be a debate about when an encoding becomes a language in itself, but a standard example is signing with hands: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;British Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a language with its own vocabulary and grammar, while &lt;em&gt;Signed English&lt;/em&gt; not a language but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_coded_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;manually coded English&lt;/a&gt;, even though they have a lot in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="881" OwnerDisplayName="Henry" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T09:28:43.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2013-09-08T10:33:20.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition from Wikipedia seems very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;Language&quot; is not always spoken ; it includes &quot;body-language&quot; and &quot;road-signs&quot; ; it is the expression of an idea or a feeling, using a code understood by at least two persons to communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" OwnerDisplayName="Mark Thorin" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T10:33:20.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4396" CreationDate="2013-09-08T15:39:52.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language, is a mean of communication shared by a community and which includes a grammar and the ability to speak about anything. It is the most often verbal, and is often associated with a way to write it down. There are some exception, the most prominent being the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sign languages&lt;/a&gt; used by deaf communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the same language can have several material forms which do not change them enough so that they are considered a different language. For example, English can be spoken, written down by hand, typed in an email, written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Braille&lt;/a&gt; or signed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_coded_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;manually coded English&lt;/a&gt;, it stays the same language: English. On the other hand, an email can be in English, German or French, the technique of transmission stays the same, but the language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some means of communication share some properties of languages, and are therefore sometimes called &quot;language&quot;, but they are not real language in the linguistic sense :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Body language&lt;/a&gt; is a (often subconcious) way to transmit some informations. But it is of course impossible for body language to convey any moderate elaborate meaning like &quot;Don't forget to buy Apples at the market tomorrow&quot;, while it's trivial in any language (spoken or signed). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computer languages and the mathematical formalism have some structure which may recall natural languages's grammar, and the capacity to convey some elaborate meaning, but they lack the possibility to speak about anything a true language has.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Secret languages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pig Latin&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves%27_Cant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thieves' cant&lt;/a&gt; are often a variation of a natural language, either through a systematic rule (Pig Latin) or a a different vocabulary (Thieves' cant), but they often preserve a lot of the original language characteristic, and they are rarely a true distinct language, but mainly an encrypted version of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T15:39:52.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-08T16:58:58.237" Score="1" ViewCount="890" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aforementioned languages form a certain language union, although they belong to different language families and even branches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages in question are all the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Scandinavic languages&lt;/a&gt; (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic) plus Finnish and Estonian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonetic phenomenon in question concerns vowel-initial words with a glottal stop preceding a vowel in an initial syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glottal stop is a sound occurring in vowel-initial words in some languages of the area which I hear as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;glottal stop&lt;/a&gt;  (similar to Arabic &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ayn&lt;/a&gt; as pronounced in Saudi Arabic dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some isolated Swedish words the initial glottal stop is sometimes perceivable, and sometimes not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B8d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Danish glottal stop&lt;/a&gt; is likely to be an entirely different phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seto_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Seto&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B5ro_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Võro&lt;/a&gt;, until recently regarded as dialects of Estonian, a glottal stop corresponding to Finnish Nom. Pl. marker -t (Estonian -d) is rendered with a letter q. That sound, however, (always?) takes a word-final position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glottal stop is sometimes perceived and articulated, and sometimes not, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9789514289842/isbn9789514289842.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Finnish vowel-initial words&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any resources / researches regarding initial glottal stop in Norwegian and Faroese languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Swedish initial glottal stop really exist (as that  is the case with German and, to some extent, in Dutch)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a similar phenomenon in Icelandic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T00:38:00.677" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T00:39:40.113" Title="Is a glottal stop common for vowel-initial words in Fenno-Baltic and Nordic languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-08T20:06:39.483" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tibetan alphabet&lt;/a&gt; is an abugida divided by groups of four syllables in tonally descending order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syllables can combine into ligatures with other syllables by either writing a (part of a) syllable sign above or below each other, making altogether about 15,000 possible combinations. Tibetan has ancient written tradition and an abugida ligature written as e.g. 'rgyud' may be roughly read as 'juhd', a syllable ligature of 'bzhi' as 'jih', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Tibetan spoken in my environment differs greatly from its dialects spoken by native  Tibetans elsewhere, I would very appreciate any answer(s) to the following question(s):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do syllables retain their tonality in abugida when said in colloquial Tibetan speech? I know that the difference is not quite important for Amdo dialect of Tibetan, but what about other varieties of native Tibetan speech?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tone sandhi&lt;/a&gt; in Tibetan similar to that existing in Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do combined syllables change their tonal quality when (a part of) an extra sign is written above or below a main sign?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-09-26T21:35:06.507" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T21:35:06.507" Title="What are common tone patterns for syllables in conversational Tibetan?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;&lt;tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-08T20:46:08.450" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing research on machine translation in prolog and I am wondering if there are any suitable dictionaries available in text/xml format for machine translation. With suitable for machine translation I mean that entries are marked with word category like noun, verb, etc and whether the word is male/female or singular/plural etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some research myself and found some dictionaries like Wiktionary or Omegawiki but these are usually not complete or do not have the required information like word category etc. Specifically I am looking for dictionaries translating single words between English/German/French/Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The many online translation websites are not suitable for my needs, I would need something that works offline. Are there any standard dictionaries that machine translation researchers use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2449" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T09:47:50.283" Title="Dictionaries for machine translation" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2447" CreationDate="2013-09-08T21:14:15.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are such languages. E.g. Polish, Finnish and Spanish (not mentioning monosyllable Chinese), although Spanish shows some vowel fusion in certain clusters. Oh, and Japanese, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Hungarian, it has the classical (Proto)Fenno-Ugric CV(C) syllable structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fenno-Ugric (and Altaic) syllable structure might correspond (or not) to the syllable structures of Paleo-Asiatic languages, some of which might have both vowel and consonant harmony, a feature now survivived in peculiar consonant and/or vowel alteration patterns of Native American languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-09-08T21:14:15.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2013-09-09T18:15:46.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aymara and Quechua have both topic and focus markers. There's a paper on the pragmatic suffixes in Aymara with a detailed explanation and many examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homola, Petr, and Matt Coler. 2013. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W13/W13-3712.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pragmatic Structures in Aymara&lt;/a&gt;.” In &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Eva Hajičová, Kim Gerdes, and Leo Wanner, 98–107. Prague: MATFYZPRESS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T13:38:31.687" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T13:38:31.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="878" CreationDate="2013-09-09T18:36:35.903" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aymara. However the nonzero marking may have emerged under the influence of Castilian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T18:36:35.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3109" CreationDate="2013-09-09T18:40:04.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kawesqar is an example of such a language. In fact, quite a few languages have tenses that tend to be used in myths, stories, fairy tales, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T18:40:04.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16" CreationDate="2013-09-09T18:44:25.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Catalan has personal articles used with person names, e.g., &lt;em&gt;en Pere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Peter&quot; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;el/un noi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the/a boy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T18:44:25.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2013-09-09T18:46:37.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mostly by word order and (in spoken language) tune.&#xA;There are also languages that use topic and/or focus markers such as Quechua.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T18:46:37.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2013-09-09T19:04:12.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if Everett's analysis is correct (and I found his arguments convincing), it doesn't. It might well be the case that Pirahã doesn't make use of recursion but most languages clearly do. Note that there are varying levels of recursion. For example, the Andean languages use possessive recursion (&quot;the house of my Dad's aunt&quot;) but no verbal recursion (there are no embedded sentences with finite verbs). Similarly, Old Indo-European used participles instead of (recursively) embedded sentences, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-09T19:04:12.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2013-09-10T03:38:35.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian often uses word order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;По комнате прошёл мальчик. = A boy walked through the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Мальчик прошёл по комнате. = The boy walked through the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases it can use a word for &amp;quot;one&amp;quot;, demonstratives and possessives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Человек думал по-другому. = The man was thinking differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Один человек думал по-другому. = One man was thinking differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Женщина прекрасна. = The woman is beautiful. (meaning all women)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Та женщина прекрасна. = That woman is beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases it can use special case forms to indicate definiteness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Хочу выпить чай. = I want to drink out the tea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Хочу выпить чаю. = I want to drink some tea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я жду письмо. = I wait for the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я жду письма. = I wait for a letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases it can use capitalization with words like &amp;quot;President&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;God&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Motherland&amp;quot; and some others to indicate definiteness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T03:58:31.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4403" CreationDate="2013-09-10T09:47:50.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The big name in computer-based dictionaries is &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; which groups English lexical items by concept (called &lt;em&gt;synsets&lt;/em&gt;). I can be downloaded and used offline. Obviously, this tool is quite powerful and is used extensively a lot in various Computational Linguistic and Natural Language Processing applications. There are even projects to create WordNet equivalents for other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, some people have tried to map synsets across different languages. While I'm not an expert, a quick Google search revealed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.casta-net.jp/~kuribayashi/multi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;multiple projects&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.illc.uva.nl/EuroWordNet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;linking WordNet&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/908_Paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;various other ontological hierarchies&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps these would fit your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T09:47:50.283" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T09:56:29.873" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for S/W that evaluates the quality of short English texts, e.g. in terms of grammar, syntax, maybe style or ethnicity. My interest is, for example, in descriptions of items offered for sale on Web sites or via email, not essays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any packages I can try, preferably open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2453" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T10:15:53.117" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T10:15:53.117" Title="Automatic evaluation of written English - e.g. item descriptions" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T12:46:18.420" Score="5" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to present German users English texts and they need to know the meaning of each individual word.  I was thinking to use Google Translate API or Bing Translate API, and request a translation for each word in a text.  But they respond with only one single translation, which is obviously wrong often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this problem be solved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T19:09:05.237" Title="How to perform word by word translations?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-10T13:46:29.640" Score="4" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to learn a language which has cases which cannot be mistaken for other cases, in pronunciation and writing. Does such a language exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of what I want to avoid: The case endings of 'ИЯ' nouns in Russian for genitive, prepositional, nominative plural and dative cases are all the same - 'ИИ'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a language were to have six cases; Nom, Acc, Gen, Prep, Dat, Inst. Six for singular and six for plural. There would be twelve &lt;strong&gt;unique&lt;/strong&gt; case affixes in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a rule for the sought after language would be, once you learn the one affix for a case, you then know how to decline all nouns in that case. All cases would be &lt;strong&gt;unique&lt;/strong&gt; in pronunciation and writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: 'book' becomes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      Nom      Acc      Gen      Prep     Dat      Inst&#xA;Sing  bookat   bookam   bookem   bookim   bookom   bookum&#xA;Plur  bookati  bookami  bookemi  bookimi  bookomi  bookumi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2456" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T17:52:06.727" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T13:47:34.773" Title="Which language(s) has cases which cannot be mistaken for other cases?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4416" CreationDate="2013-09-10T15:11:26.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutinating languages tend to have many cases and tend not to meld the case affix with any gender or number affix so most would probably suit your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ones most often discussed would be Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian. More people talk about Turkish being easy to learn while you often hear the other two described as very difficult to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example for Turkish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      Nom    Acc     Dat     Loc      Abl       Gen&#xA;Sing  at     atı     ata     atta     attan     atın&#xA;Plur  atlar  atları  atlara  atlarda  atlardan  atların&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T15:33:51.427" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T15:33:51.427" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1124" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:14:03.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good way to have rough but well informed advices on how to process scripts is to look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode standard&lt;/a&gt;. The result does not contain all the nuance needed for a high quality typography, but still a lot of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The document to read here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode Standard Annex 14: Line Breaking algorithm&lt;/a&gt; and the accompanying &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/LineBreak.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;LineBreak.txt&lt;/code&gt; data file&lt;/a&gt; . There, the paragraph 3.1 says :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three principal styles of context analysis determine line break opportunities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Western: spaces and hyphens are used to determine breaks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;East Asian: lines can break anywhere, unless prohibited&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South East Asian: line breaks require morphological analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Western style is commonly used for scripts employing the space character. Hyphenation is often used with space-based line breaking to provide additional line break opportunities—however, it requires knowledge of the language and it may need user interaction or overrides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second style of context analysis is used with East Asian ideographic and syllabic scripts. In these scripts, lines can break anywhere, except before or after certain characters. The precise set of prohibited line breaks may depend on user preference or local custom and is commonly tailorable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean makes use of both styles of line break. When Korean text is justified, the second style is commonly used, even for interspersed Latin letters. But when ragged margins are used, the Western style (relying on spaces) is commonly used instead, even for ideographs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look the details of the &lt;code&gt; LineBreak.txt&lt;/code&gt; file, you'll see that all Han (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) characters, most of the Kana, the Yi syllabic characters and some pictographic symbols (e.g. ☺, ),  are in the ID (for IDeographic) class, which allows breaking at any place, also in the middle of a word. The presence of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern Yi script&lt;/a&gt;, which is a pure syllabary, in this list shows that this property of breaking at any moment is more linked to tradition than to the logographic/phonetic nature of the script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two other logographic script are encoded in Unicode 6.2, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. In both cases, the corresponding characters are of category AL, like western alphabets. This means no line-breaking, axcept at specipc places, allowed by punctuation (including spaces and word divider.)  Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrat_%28hieroglyph_block%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grouping of signs in hieroglyphic texts&lt;/a&gt; is considered beyond the scope of Unicode (see p. 25/488 of the Unicode Standard 6.2 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch14.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(pdf)&lt;/a&gt;). This add a structure inside a line and clearly forbids linebreaking for Egyptian compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T16:14:03.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3109" CreationDate="2013-09-10T16:49:56.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm sure I've read the following idea written by a linguist somewhere. I didn't manage to find the reference and I'd love to have serious references for that. The following is mainly a first person description of my native language's grammar, on an aspect which is not taught at school, but seems obvious in retrospect.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an indigenous language is my native modern French ! The tense corresponding to mythological/ancestral past is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;passé simple&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia link, with more details, but in French&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this past tense was used for distant past event (older than 24h) in the 18&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century but totally disappeared from oral speech by the beginning og the 20&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century. It stayed in formal writing, and by now only appears in old text and fairy tales. For example, when my 8 years old niece invents a fairy tale, it is at the passé simple tense, and it is the only occasion she ever uses this tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T17:00:27.687" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T17:00:27.687" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4423" CreationDate="2013-09-10T18:45:22.433" Score="4" ViewCount="846" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thai there are particles which can be used at the end of many sentences to make them more polite. Different particles are used by male and female speakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ครับ&quot; (kráp) : male&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ค่ะ&quot; (kâ) : female&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lao is so closely related to Thai that they are apparently mostly mutually comprehensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet one of the first things I noticed in the speech when I crossed the border from Thailand to Laos is the complete lack of such particles in Lao. I never hear anybody say them and none of the materials I've seen on Lao describe them. In Thai it's one of the first things you are taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does Lao have etymologically related words that serve other functions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did Lao have them formerly but they slipped out of usage in the remote or recent past?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they an innovation in Thai since after the point in time the languages diverged from their common ancestor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:12:00.797" Title="Do the Thai masculine &amp; feminine &quot;polite particles&quot; have counterparts in Lao?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" Score="0" Body="A Tai-Kadai language spoken in Laos." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" LastActivityDate="2013-09-10T18:45:58.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2013-09-11T02:59:12.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This video from Youtube, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMlSEKwqyhM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stories behind Polite Endings in Thai ครับ/ค่ะ and Lao&lt;/a&gt;, answers all of your questions. Let me write down some excerpts from there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The polite particles came from legacy words of master/servant relations. As you know, social status and relationship of people in a conversation impacts on the style of such conversation;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does Lao have etymologically related words that serve other functions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, these words are &lt;em&gt;master&lt;/em&gt;, ຂ້ານ້ອຍ &lt;em&gt;servant&lt;/em&gt;, and similar ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some &lt;a href=&quot;http://laomate.activeboard.com/forum.spark?aBID=98894&amp;amp;p=3&amp;amp;topicID=40950083&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;usage rules&lt;/a&gt;, not using ຂ້ານ້ອຍ twice: e.g. &quot;my name is John&quot;, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is already ຂ້ານ້ອຍ, so the polite particle is omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, ເຈົ້າ (&quot;lord&quot;) is used in meaning of &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did Lao have them formerly but they slipped out of usage in the remote or recent past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they have been used as both pronouns and polite particles, quite like in Thai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are they an innovation in Thai [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily. Off the top of my head, take the English word &lt;em&gt;sir&lt;/em&gt;. It used to have the meaning of &lt;em&gt;&quot;title of honor of a knight or baronet&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;), but later became a &lt;em&gt;respectful form of address or salutation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-11T15:01:09.933" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T15:01:09.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4416" CreationDate="2013-09-11T05:28:12.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hungarian and Finnish are easy languages (although Finnish has two main object cases, chosen depending on a verb form, of which the so-called Accusative case has two different modes similar either to a Nominative or to Genitive, which does not make it quite simple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages with distinctive difference in case markers are Japanese (in fact, the difference goes as far as two different nominative cases) and Korean (easier writing system, just seven cases, although Genitive marker written as -uy is  pronounced similar to inanimate dative -e). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Tibetan, an ergative language with six cases, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Tibetan_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;all the case markers are entirely  different&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_cases.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arabic case system&lt;/a&gt; also seems to be quite easy (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BEI%CA%BFrab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;with few exceptions&lt;/a&gt;) and close enough to your request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-09-11T13:47:34.773" LastActivityDate="2013-09-11T13:47:34.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4427" CreationDate="2013-09-11T09:15:54.217" Score="5" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages associate the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; sound with the second person and the &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; with the third. For example Spanish (&lt;em&gt;tu/tuyo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;su/suyo&lt;/em&gt;), French (&lt;em&gt;tu,ton/ta/tes,son/sa/ses&lt;/em&gt;), Italian (&lt;em&gt;tu,tuo/tua/tuoi,suo/sua/suoi&lt;/em&gt;) etc. Even English associates &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; with the second person (&lt;em&gt;thy,thine&lt;/em&gt; etc). German does not &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.german-database.supanet.com/page13.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;seem&lt;/a&gt; to have &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; for the second person (though it has &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; which is close)  but does have third person adjectives beginning with &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sein/seine&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern (and I would guess Ancient as well) Greek, however has the inverse.&#xA;The second person is associated with the &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; sound and the third with &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Σου&lt;/em&gt;, pronounced &lt;em&gt;su&lt;/em&gt; just like in Spanish means &lt;em&gt;your(s)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;του&lt;/em&gt;, again pronounced exactly like the Spanish &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;, means &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt;. I can imagine that &lt;em&gt;του&lt;/em&gt; may have originated from the word for &lt;em&gt;self&lt;/em&gt; (ἑαυτού/τον/τος) but, in that case, why the third person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is about the history and origin of this association between &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; and the third and second person respectively. Is it a characteristic of Proto-Indo-European and, if so, what happened to Greek? Did PIE have such adjectives and, if so, did they also start with &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; and/or &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt;? Any extra historical information on the origin and phylogeny of these possessives would also be very welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2458" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-09-11T10:13:13.600" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T07:38:34.670" Title="What is the origin of 't-' and 's-' words for second and third person possesive adjectives?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1515" CreationDate="2013-09-11T18:55:30.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because a language or all languages are capable of recursion does not prove that grammatical recursive sentence structure is hard-wired into the brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples of logical fallacy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recursive sentence structure is hard-wired into the brain because all languages are capable of recursion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Playing games is hard-wired into the brain because all humans are capable of playing games, abstract or physical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is circular reasoning or begging the question or petitio principii.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2456" LastEditorUserId="2456" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T18:56:30.173" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T18:56:30.173" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4425" CreationDate="2013-09-11T20:30:21.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second person singular pronoun in PIE was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tua̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tue̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). This explains why many languages have t- in the first position in second-person pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no third-person personal pronoun in PIE. In such cases one could use either demonstrative (like &quot;that&quot;) or reflexive (like &quot;themself&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reflexive pronoun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯em&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in PIE was one for all persons (unlike English where you see &quot;yourself&quot;, &quot;himself&quot;) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The demonstrative pronouns (like &quot;that&quot;) were &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for masculine, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sea̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for feminine and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tod&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for neuter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this you can see that both reflexive and the demonstratives could be the origin for s- in third person pronouns in descendant languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T09:36:21.270" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T09:36:21.270" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-12T01:07:37.367" Score="4" ViewCount="408" Body="&lt;p&gt;The area I live in has a very large population of Chinese people. I also speak fluent Chinese as a second language (10+ years learning and also speak at home). For various reasons I regularly meet new people and may stay in contact with them for a period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find it hard remembering the name of Chinese people if they don't provide me with an English name. So if they introduce themselves as Steve Wang, in most cases I won't have trouble remembering Steve's name, but if someone introduces themselves as Wang Da Wei then I will usually forget. I have in certain cases had people say (in Chinese) &quot;just call me Steve&quot; because they will notice that I struggle to remember their name after asking a few times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to remember peoples names because it shows that you are interested in them and its a poor way to start a friendship if you can't remember their name or have to ask each time you meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it just me, or has it been shown that remembering names which come from a foreign language are more difficult to learn?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this issue exacerbated in languages such as Japanese or Chinese where you need to have the name written down or each character described?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2461" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T12:41:25.583" Title="Difficulty in learning names of people in second language" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4432" CreationDate="2013-09-12T08:09:34.213" Score="6" ViewCount="3235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a English language corpus consisting of 100 files of different sizes and containing a total of 7 million words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a good approach in order to establish the frequency of a given word from this corpus? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A word like the name &quot;Barry&quot; might be very common in one of the corpus files (say a novel) and this will result in a larger than expected frequency for this word if you simply add all of its occurrences in the corpus and divide my 7 million.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Words under a certain frequency should be ignored but how do I establish this threshold frequency? For example, if the word &quot;Cranberry&quot; occurs twice in the entire corpus, I can hardly claim that its frequency is 2/7000000. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T09:57:10.753" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T09:57:10.753" Title="How to establish word frequencies from a corpus?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2013-09-12T09:15:13.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Irish Gaelic:&lt;/strong&gt; Wales is called &quot;An Bhreatain Bheag&quot; (The Little&#xA;Britain) and Brittany is called &quot;An Bhriotáin&quot;. England is called &quot;Sasana&quot; (Land of Saxons). Ireland is &quot;Éire&quot;. Scotland is &quot;Albain&quot;. The USA is called SAM (Stáit Aontaithe Mheiriceá). Sweden is called &quot;An tSualainn&quot;. Norway is called &quot;An Iorua&quot;. Italy is &quot;An Iodáil&quot;. The Netherlands are called &quot;An Ísiltír&quot; (The low country). Cornwall is &quot;Corn na Breataine&quot; (Britain's horn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/an_bhreatain_bheag/#ga&quot;&gt;http://www.forvo.com/word/an_bhreatain_bheag/#ga&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Scottish Gaelic:&lt;/strong&gt; Unlike Irish, Wales is called &quot;Bretyn&quot; and Brittany &quot;A' Bhreatain Bheag&quot; (The Little Britain). England is Sasainn. Ireland is Èirinn. Scotland is Alba. Cornwall is &quot;A’ Chòrn&quot; (The horn).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Manx Gaelic:&lt;/strong&gt; Wales is called &quot;Bretyn&quot; and Brittany is called &quot;Yn Vritaan&quot;. England is &quot;Sostyn&quot;. Ireland is Nerin. Scotland is Nalbin. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Welsh:&lt;/strong&gt; Ireland is called &quot;Iwerddon&quot; and Scotland &quot;Yr Alban&quot;. England is called &quot;Lloegr&quot; (the British name for the south east of Britain). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So England is &quot;Land of Angles&quot; in English, &quot;Land of Saxons&quot; in Gaelic and a part of ancient Britain, called Lloegr, in Welsh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Ireland&quot;, &quot;Irland&quot; or &quot;Irlanda&quot; stem from Éire, its Gaelic name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scotland is &quot;Alba&quot; in Gaelic, which was historically applied to all of Britain, if I'm not mistaken. And &quot;Scot&quot; was a Roman word used with respect to the Irish. Later, with the gaelification of Scotland, the term became associated with the modern day Scots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wales is referred to as &quot;The Little Britain&quot; in Scots Gaelic since the Welsh are descendants of the native British, with Wales representing a smaller version of the original Britain. In Irish &quot;The Little Britain&quot; is associated instead with Brittany since this country was originally a colony created by native Britons fleeing the Germanic invasion of Britain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T09:40:29.683" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T09:40:29.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-12T11:55:03.910" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how the relation of corpus size to observed ngrams is(especially unigrams). Since the word frequency follows a Zipf distribution, i would expect some kind of logarithmic relation as well, but has anyone done research on this particular question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:36:07.053" Title="How is the dependency of corpus size and observed ngrams?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4429" CreationDate="2013-09-12T14:42:23.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; A word like the name &quot;Barry&quot; might be very common in one of the corpus files (say a novel) and this will result in a larger than expected frequency for this word if you simply add all of its occurrences in the corpus and divide my 7 million.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many corpora (except very large ones) only include parts of larger texts like novels (such as 2,000 words) to circumvent this problem. If, however, you have to use a corpus where such imbalances occur there is a way to address this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to &lt;strong&gt;estimate the frequency of a word type&lt;/strong&gt; you could give two normalised frequencies. An uncorrected frequency, and a corrected frequency that excludes tokens found in texts where the word on question is very frequent. For example, if the uncorrected frequency of &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; in the corpus is 50 per million words (pmw) you could exclude all texts where &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; is more than five times as frequent (more than 250 pmw) and calculate the corrected frequency based on the remaining texts in the corpus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to &lt;strong&gt;compare the frequency of a word in two corpora&lt;/strong&gt; the cut-off criterion should be the same for both corpora. It could for example be 5 times the average frequency of the word in both corpora. In any case you need to validate claims that a word is more frequent in one corpus by using a statistical test such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;log likelihood test&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Words under a certain frequency should be ignored but how do I establish this threshold frequency? For example, if the word &quot;Cranberry&quot; occurs twice in the entire corpus, I can hardly claim that its frequency is 2/7000000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can, and in fact that is the only thing you can claim about the frequency of the word in the &lt;em&gt;corpus&lt;/em&gt;. A different question is whether the word in question can be claimed to be &lt;strong&gt;more or less frequent in corpus A than in corpus B&lt;/strong&gt;. That can be tested using the log likelihood test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given a frequency x of a word in a corpus, what is the likelihood that the true frequency of the word in the population is y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be operationalised by imagining that you compile another corpus (with texts from the same registers!). What is then the likelihood that in the new corpus the frequency of the word is y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say in corpus x the word has a frequency of 2 pmw and you want to know how likely it is that in the population it is 20 pmw. Assuming your first corpus has 1,000,000 words, we imagine that you compile another corpus of 1,000,000 words and you find the word in question 20 times in that corpus. Using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;log likelihood calculator&lt;/a&gt;, you get a log likelihood (also called G2) of 17.09. If you scroll down on the webpage you find a key for the log likelihood values, which tells you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;99.99th percentile; 0.01% level; p &amp;lt; 0.0001; critical value = 15.13 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your G2 of 17.09 is higher than the critical value of 15.13, i.e. it is extremely unlikely that in the population the word occurs with a frequency of 20 pmw. In fact, there is a likelihood greater than 0.95 that the word is not more frequent than 8 pmw in the population (test this by putting 8 instead of 20 for the second corpus in the form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T14:42:23.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-12T16:22:51.260" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean obligatorily marking a word for number, gender, animacy, direction etc, I don't actually know what I'm asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English, we have that awkward situation where we don't know if the cat in the box is dead or alive, and might not know if it is a she or he, so is it an it, he or she (or singular they)?  I'm sure style guides have rules for this, or maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask a similar question about Russian which has a puacal number (single, a few, many) marked on nouns.  On that site, the native speakers didn't understand the question and only repeated the style guideline rule. For example, &quot;Tell me about your problems&quot; -- Would a speaker have to get into a big circumlocution to avoid implying that a person has exactly 1, 2-5, or more than 5? (Tell me about your problem or your 2 to 5 problems or your list of problems greater than five)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guugu Yimithirr is famous for requiring a north/south/east/west orientation just to utter certain words. I wondered how they would discuss things on a erratically spinning asteroid, in the fictional book Flatland, or if they just didn't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in Icelandic, I've asked people how they deal with inanimate collections of mixed or unknown genders-- since there are 3 ways to say &quot;they&quot; (a collection of bus alone, cars alone is different from a mixed collection of buses and cars)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any recognized patterns on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-15T21:30:42.867" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:30:42.867" Title="What are the various rules to deal with &quot;markedness&quot; if the speaker doesn't know?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4433" CreationDate="2013-09-12T19:23:09.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question concerns why certain semantic features seem to be 'unmarked'. As an example, we can consider the fact that, at least in certain (especially older) varieties of English, the masculine pronoun &lt;em&gt;he/him&lt;/em&gt; is used as the 'default'. Consider a scenario where a class consisting of both male and female students have finished their homework, (1) is generally considered to be felicitous, whereas (2) is not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Every student has finished his homework&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) # Every student has finished her homework&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) is only licit in a scenario where it is &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; by the speaker that &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; student who has finished her homework is female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within formal semantics, so-called 'phi-features', such as gender features, are modelled as &lt;em&gt;presupposition triggers&lt;/em&gt;. This means that a gendered pronoun is treated in formal semantics as a partial function from individuals to individuals. For example, we can treat the denotation of 'she' as a partial function from individuals to individuals just in case the referent is female - the output of the function is undefined for non-female referents. We capture the unmarkedness of 'he' by not associating the feature [masculine] with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; presupposition. Semantically, 'he' merely denotes the referent. The feature [masculine] is semantically vacuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now introduce the pragmatic principle 'maximise presupposition', which means, without getting into the formal specifics, that given a set of alternative sentences, we prefer to use the alternative that is presuppositionally stronger. This explains the fact that, if all students are known to be female, (2) is licit, whereas (1) is not. (1) and (2) are semantically identical aside from the fact that (2) is presuppositionally stronger, and in this instance, the presupposition associated with (2) (that every student is female) is satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The masculine pronoun can only be used when the presupposition associated with the feminine pronoun is not met. (2) presupposes that for each student, that student is female. In a scenario with a mixed-gendered class, the presupposition is not met, which explains why (2) is infelicitous in this scenario, whereas (1) is not. Since [masculine] does not introduce any presupposition, the masculine pronoun may be used in a mixed-gender scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar analyses can be (and have been) given for animacy and number features. See Yasutada Sudo's (2012) thesis for an excellent overview of the pertinent data and the formal specifics of the kind of analysis i outline here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/ysudo/www/pdf/dissertation-final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://web.mit.edu/ysudo/www/pdf/dissertation-final.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; Before someone points it out, i want to make it clear that in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; English, the masculine pronoun isn't unmarked. Rather i use the plural pronoun 'they' as a bound pronoun in a mixed gender scenario, or in a scenario where gender isn't known. It's relatively trivial to give an account of this variety in a similar framework: We simply say that both [masculine] and [feminine] are presupposition triggers, whereas 'they' is semantically vacuous. The role of number features introduces additional complications here, but they can be accommodated. See the linked-to thesis for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-09-12T19:29:02.397" LastActivityDate="2013-09-12T19:29:02.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-12T23:35:21.727" Score="4" ViewCount="3240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a dataset of phoneme sets for the most widely spoken languages. Something like the sort of thing available here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though the data there is not conveniently available nor is it particularly comprehensive for widely spoken languages (for example, it does have English as far as I can see). Even better if there are frequency statistics for the phonemes. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2467" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T09:28:13.057" Title="Where can I find a dataset of language phoneme sets?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4425" CreationDate="2013-09-13T07:38:34.670" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The child at the breast makes lip sounds - m, m becoming n, n becoming a; and b&#xA;becoming p; and p becoming f. Hence, we obtain mama, nana, baba, papa. The m/n/a&#xA;set becomes the first person - me. Any other person is identified by the tooth sound d, d becoming t, t becoming s, s becoming h, h becoming a mere breath or then ceasing to exist. Hence, we obtain dada and tata. The d sound is felt to be too harsh to use of/to other persons, so it is initially softened to t and so kept&#xA;for the third person - that one ( him/her//it); but even that is too harsh when&#xA;speaking to another person, so the second person - thee - is softened to s. The t/&#xA;s/h series, being the non-me series, is , naturally, used as the tool for making &#xA;pronouns and the definite article. (In Semitic languages, the d is kept in some, &#xA;becoming dh, becoming zh, becoming z in others; but also with the series d/t/s/h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2469" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T07:38:34.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4433" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:29:27.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with P Elliott and his explanation that this is a question of markedness. His examples are from English, which has natural, but not grammatical gender. It might be interesting to see how this works in a language that has grammatical gender, and where grammatical gender usually trumps natural gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, all nouns are marked for gender (= grammatical gender). Then noun &lt;em&gt;die Katze&lt;/em&gt; (cat) is female, i.e. female is the unmarked gender for cats. There is also a male variant, &lt;em&gt;der Kater&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Female&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;die Katze&lt;/em&gt; or the pronoun &lt;em&gt;sie&lt;/em&gt; is used if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the speaker does not know the sex of the cat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the speaker knows the sex of the cat, but does not want to specify it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the speaker knows the sex of the cat, wants to specify it, and the cat is female.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Male&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;der Kater&lt;/em&gt; or the pronoun &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; is used if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the speaker knows the sex of the cat, wants to specify it, and the cat is male.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns referring to persons also pose an interesting problem. &lt;em&gt;Das Kind&lt;/em&gt; (child) and &lt;em&gt;das Mädchen&lt;/em&gt; (girl) are both neuter, which suggests that the unmarked grammatical gender for pronouns referring to them is also neuter. Indeed, prescriptive German grammar has it that neuter nouns can only be referred to by neuter pronouns, as in this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hast du das Mädchen gesehen? Es geht in diesselbe Schule wie ich.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Have you seen that (neuter) girl? She (neuter) is in the same school as I.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in spoken German this is quite uncommon and only used in formal contexts. The colloquial variant has natural gender trump grammatical gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hast du das Mädchen gesehen? Sie geht in diesselbe Schule wie ich.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Have you seen that (neuter) girl? She (female) is in the same school as I.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:29:27.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4438" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:33:01.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:33:01.943" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:33:01.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:33:01.943" Score="0" Body="Graphical representations of hierarchical analyses of grammatical relations. Requests to make syntax trees are off-topic." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T10:00:02.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T10:00:02.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:35:34.203" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:35:34.203" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:35:34.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:35:34.203" Score="0" Body="A number category expressing a higher number than other categories existing in that language (such as singular, dual, paucal)." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:56:03.707" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:56:03.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:36:07.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Robert for pointing me at this. Here is an approach to approximate the number of word types in a corpus. We assume that Zipf's law holds and the frequency of the second most common word type is 1/2 the frequency of the most common word type and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let N be the corpus size. Let maxfreq be the (relative) frequency of the most common word type. Then by Zipf's law, it should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;freq(w) = maxfreq / rank(w)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where rank tells us at what rank(w) the word type is with respect to its frequency, and freq(w) is the relative frequency of that word type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of word types can be approximated by the maximal rank of words that have an absolute frequency higher than 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;max rank(w)&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;s.t.  N*freq(w) &gt;= 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that means that this maximum is N*maxfreq&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if the most common word had a relative frequency of 20%, then the number of word types would also be roughly 20% of the corpus size. I think this will overestimate pretty much always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:36:07.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:37:33.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:37:33.667" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:37:33.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:37:33.667" Score="0" Body="How and when human languages came into being." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:54:58.563" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:54:58.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:38:16.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:38:16.387" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:38:16.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:38:16.387" Score="0" Body="Emphasis given to a syllable relative to other syllables." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:55:32.783" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:55:32.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:40:14.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:40:14.363" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:40:14.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:40:14.363" Score="0" Body="a speech sound with regard to its physical properties, and not its role in the phonology of a language" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T18:40:03.477" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T18:40:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:41:31.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:41:31.793" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:41:31.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:41:31.793" Score="0" Body="Language-specific rules governing the combination of phonemes." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:56:41.007" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:56:41.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:44:11.693" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:44:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:44:11.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:44:11.693" Score="0" Body="Subgroup of the Indo-European languages, spoken in Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Northern part of Asia." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:54:05.420" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:54:05.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:45:02.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:45:02.527" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:45:02.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:45:02.527" Score="0" Body="Translation of spoken words into text, usually with the help of computers." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:55:07.987" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:55:07.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:45:50.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:45:50.200" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:45:50.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:45:50.200" Score="0" Body="A sense relation between words with the same or similar meaning." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:55:16.283" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:55:16.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:47:11.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:47:11.737" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:47:11.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:47:11.737" Score="0" Body="A consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:53:38.980" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:53:38.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4459" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:48:39.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:48:39.493" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:48:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4460" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:48:39.493" Score="0" Body="A language family spoken in an area from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:56:53.557" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:56:53.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:50:11.157" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:50:11.157" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:50:11.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:50:11.157" Score="0" Body="Consonants produced by completely obstructing oral airflow." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:55:25.847" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:55:25.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:50:55.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:50:55.363" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:50:55.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:50:55.363" Score="0" Body="Words that have a common etymological origin." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:56:14.037" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:56:14.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:51:48.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:51:48.147" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:51:48.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:51:48.147" Score="0" Body="a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate, such as *is* in English" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T18:39:07.613" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T18:39:07.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:54:58.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:54:58.317" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:54:58.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:54:58.317" Score="0" Body="A language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:55:46.740" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:55:46.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:55:54.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on their placement, adpostions are named prepositions, postpositions, or circumpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include the English words &quot;from&quot;, &quot;to&quot;, &quot;of&quot;, &quot;by&quot; (prepositions); &quot;ago&quot; (postposition); and &quot;for ... sake&quot; (circumposition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/prepositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;prepositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;prepositions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:17:33.293" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:33.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:55:54.053" Score="0" Body="A class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial or temporal relations." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:57:08.040" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:57:08.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:56:25.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:56:25.103" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:56:25.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:56:25.103" Score="0" Body="A function word used to ask a question." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:54:42.467" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:54:42.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:57:28.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:57:28.343" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:57:28.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:57:28.343" Score="0" Body="a relation between a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T18:40:09.303" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T18:40:09.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:58:24.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T09:58:24.363" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T09:58:24.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-09-13T09:58:24.363" Score="0" Body="A non-finite verb form that can replace a noun phrase." OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T10:57:01.227" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T10:57:01.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28662" CreationDate="2013-09-13T13:00:33.603" Score="6" ViewCount="2126" Body="&lt;p&gt;German has for more than 1000 years been in contact with West Slavic languages, notably Polish and Czech. This is highly likely to have led to borrowing or interference between these languages, in both directions. It seems that discussion of this is usually restricted to influence from German on Polish and Czech. For example, the Polish &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dialect spoken in the Poznań region&lt;/a&gt; is reported to be heavily influenced by German. There is also a great number of German loanwords in Polish, such as &lt;em&gt;malować&lt;/em&gt; from G. &lt;em&gt;malen&lt;/em&gt; (both &lt;em&gt;to paint&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in influence in the opposite direction, from Polish and/or Czech to German (standard or other dialects), particularly on pronunciation. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://ec.europa.eu/languages/euromosaic/pol2_en.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euromosaic&lt;/a&gt; study alluding to some influence of Polish on Silesian and East Prussian dialects, but it doesn't give any details or sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possible influence&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ are realised as /i/ and /e/ in the Saxon dialect and used to be pronounced this way in Silesian and East Prussian dialects of German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Kühe' as 'Kihe', 'Süden' as 'Siden'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Höhle' as 'Hehle'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, incidentally, also the way many learners of German with Polish as first language pronounce these vowels. These rounded vowels do not exist in Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Slavic influence on some German dialects might have occurred as early as the 10th c. as this is the time German eastward expansion into (not only) Slavic territory started. The relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung#Rural_development&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; states that old and new population frequently mixed, so there were many opportunities for contact between people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Deutsche_Ostsiedlung.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia map&lt;/a&gt; shows the time frame for different regions:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OpFia.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wikipedia map on time frame of German eastward expansion&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Can anybody confirm Polish influence on (East) German dialects, in general and in particular for these vowels?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Influence of Polish on varieties of German spoken in the Ruhr region has been documented, but this influence was more restricted in time. There was Polish migration to the Ruhr region in western Germany in the 19th c., and influence also seems to be restricted to some lexical items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-13T22:27:05.533" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T15:13:16.980" Title="Influence of Polish and Czech on the phonology of German dialects" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4480" CreationDate="2013-09-13T13:34:04.150" Score="4" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a cave in Vietnam which has been newly opened to tourism called &lt;a href=&quot;http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_S%C6%A1n_%C4%90o%C3%B2ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hang Sơn Đoòng&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_Doong_cave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the syllable in the name of the cave which is represented as &lt;code&gt;đoòng&lt;/code&gt;. I didn't think the orthography allowed a nucleus written as &lt;code&gt;oo&lt;/code&gt;, but it's there in the Vietnamese version of the page as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the only matches for &lt;code&gt;đoòng&lt;/code&gt; that I can find are references to the cave. Is this a possible nucleus in Vietnamese orthography, and if so, what does it represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T03:56:22.350" Title="Hang Sơn Đoòng — the syllable Đoòng in Vietnamese orthography" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4477" CreationDate="2013-09-13T21:49:16.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no knowledge about other German dialects, but the dialect of Vienna has been influenced by Czech because there were so many Czechs in the city in times of Austria-Hungary. The pronounciation of ü/ö as i/e is an example of this influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-13T21:49:16.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4478" CreationDate="2013-09-14T02:48:14.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a licit nucleus, transcribed -ɔŋ in Nguyen-Dinh Hoa's &lt;em&gt;Vietnamese-English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (1966), Charles E. Tuttle Company. In the Hanoi dialect, it rhymes with the nucleus &lt;strong&gt;-on&lt;/strong&gt;, but having a different coda. But quickly looking through the same dictionary, I can't find any examples, so I'm supposing it's infrequent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did just find one, the French loan &lt;strong&gt;boong&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;pont&lt;/em&gt; &quot;deck of a ship.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastEditorDisplayName="user483" LastEditDate="2013-09-14T02:56:06.733" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T02:56:06.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4435" CreationDate="2013-09-14T09:28:13.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phoible.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://phoible.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes the phoneme inventories you mention above, converted into Unicode IPA, and many more languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2471" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T09:28:13.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-14T09:30:11.083" Score="4" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#The_word_.22tea.22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;In just about every language&lt;/a&gt;, the word for &quot;tea&quot; can be traced to one of two variants of the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Te&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Amoy &lt;em&gt;tê&lt;/em&gt; of Fujian Province and Taiwan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Cantonese &lt;em&gt;chàh&lt;/em&gt; of Guangzhou (Canton).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia indicates that Lao &quot;ຊາ&quot; (saa) is in the latter, &quot;cha&quot; lineage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder why it has an &quot;s&quot; sound rather than a &quot;ch&quot; sound, given that Lao does have a &quot;ch&quot; sound, and its close relative, Thai, &quot;ชา&quot; (cha) uses a &quot;ch&quot; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T07:46:46.023" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T07:46:46.023" Title="Why is the Lao word for tea &quot;ຊາ&quot; (saa) and not &quot;ຈາ&quot; (chaa)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4482" CreationDate="2013-09-14T11:59:35.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no contradiction here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lao: ຊ (ຊ ຊ້າງ) &lt;code&gt;[so sâːŋ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;is a direct equivalent of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thai: ช ช้าง &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰo tɕʰáːŋ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This even includes the meaning of the verbose name of the consonant (&lt;em&gt;&quot;an elephant&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other words &quot;behave&quot; the same, they preserve their written forms but pronounced according to each language's standards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;nation&quot; ชนชาติ &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰon tɕʰâːt]&lt;/code&gt; - ເຊື້ອຊາດ &lt;code&gt;[seuo sâːt]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;win&quot; ชนะ &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰá náʔ]&lt;/code&gt; - ຊະນະ &lt;code&gt;[sa na]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;help&quot; ช่วย &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰûaj]&lt;/code&gt; - ຊ່ວຍ &lt;code&gt;[sûaj]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, the Lao consonant may have softened a bit comparing to its Tai &lt;em&gt;(not Thai)&lt;/em&gt; origin, resembling (IMHO) the Chinese consonant &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;, as in &quot;小&quot; &lt;code&gt;[xiao3]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...and not “ຈາ” (chaa)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ຈ ຈອກ &lt;code&gt;[tɕo tɕɔ̏ːk]&lt;/code&gt; is a totally different consonant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;unaspirated&lt;/strong&gt; in Thai, and probably it was so in proto-Tai languages; This alone is a dramatic difference;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mid class (versus ຊ Low class), the whole set of words will require different tone marks;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a direct equivalent of Thai จ จาน &lt;code&gt;[tɕo tɕaːn]&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Latin transcription may be a false friend as it suggests no difference between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tɕʰ]&lt;/code&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tɕ]&lt;/code&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather write &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰ]&lt;/code&gt; -&amp;gt; &lt;code&gt;chh&lt;/code&gt; if I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2013-09-14T11:59:35.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-14T16:42:14.273" Score="2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; can be used to express completion or thoroughness: &lt;em&gt;eat it up&lt;/em&gt; 'eat all of it', &lt;em&gt;beat him up&lt;/em&gt; 'beat him thoroughly'. What research exists on this construction, from any angle (syntax, historical semantics, Construction Grammar, etc.)? How did it arise and when? What are its exact semantics? How is it that &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; can function as an argument for verbal valency purposes ('He swept the dirt up' but *'He swept the dirt') given that it appears to lack any of the usual semantics of arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T16:17:08.643" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T16:17:08.643" Title="What has been written about English completive &quot;up&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-15T08:21:37.827" Score="1" ViewCount="682" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmong is a dialect continuum spoken across several countries in Southeast Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One prominent characteristic is the &quot;aspirated m&quot; (IPA &lt;code&gt;m̥&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;mʰ&lt;/code&gt;) found in some varieties. This is the reason behind the &quot;hm&quot; in the English spelling of their ethnonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not hard to find sources stating that it exists, some like to include &quot;voiceless&quot; as well as &quot;aspirated&quot; when referring to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't seem to find a clear description of its nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are other languages with voiceless nasals, I believe some Celtic languages are examples. But I believe those do not also have the aspiration component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the aspiration come before the &quot;m&quot; as suggested in the English spelling?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it come after the &quot;m&quot; as suggested in some IPA transcriptions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they somehow at the same time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this voicelessness as important as the aspiration? This component is not as often referred to though it is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the few discussions of this sound's nature I can find is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/thinking/2009/09/aspirated-nasal-in-gran-torino.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a blog post from 2009 on the Clint Eastwood Movie &lt;em&gt;Gran Torino&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which featured Hmong characters. This blogger also seemed to have some trouble analysing this sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-09-15T08:21:37.827" Title="What is the nature of the (voiceless) aspirated &quot;m&quot; in Hmong?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28442" CreationDate="2013-09-15T10:27:12.313" Score="10" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anybody aware of published analysis of this interesting construction, which seems to require what I will loosely term swear words to work? I believe I've only heard it in British English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A1&lt;/strong&gt; - Dave got a job at Roche.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;B1&lt;/strong&gt; - Fuck off did he! (=&lt;em&gt;No he didn't&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;I don't believe you&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A2&lt;/strong&gt; - Whales are fish, you know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;B2&lt;/strong&gt; - Bollocks are they. (=&lt;em&gt;No they aren't&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1320" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T23:21:19.417" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T23:21:19.417" Title="Analysis of 'fuck off has he', 'bollocks do they', and the like" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4488" CreationDate="2013-09-15T10:35:11.060" Score="10" ViewCount="828" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/126519/17952&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/126519/17952&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Backstory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recently was explaining a couple of Marathi phrases to my friend,&#xA;  and I realized that the language doesn't have the word &quot;to have&quot;. We&#xA;  have multiple different ways of expressing posession, but I found a&#xA;  particular one rather interesting: When I want to say &quot;I have a pen&quot;,&#xA;  I instead say &quot;My pen is&quot; (literally translated). Other ways to express posession are: &quot;There is a pen near me&quot;, &quot;There is a pen with me&quot;, or &quot;There is a pen in my custody&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese seems to have a  similar (possibly not the same) construct to &quot;My pen is&quot; (&lt;em&gt;watashi-no pen-desu&lt;/em&gt;) when it comes to possession. Russian uses something similar to &quot;X is near me&quot;  (&lt;em&gt;У меня есть X&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in English, we use the verb &quot;to have&quot; for possession and the object being possessed is the direct object of the verb. French and Spanish do something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do different language families express possession?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Credit @Alenanno and @snailboat for this info&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1085" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T00:05:32.540" Title="How does expressing possession vary across language families?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4487" CreationDate="2013-09-15T14:40:02.773" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/117A&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures)&lt;/a&gt; provides an account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The five values of the parameter in their analysis are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locational (possessor marked by locative case/adposition; 48/240 languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genitive (possessor modifies possessed; 22/240 languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Topic (possessor appears as the topic; 48/240 languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjunctional (possessed modified by adverb/conjunction; 59/240 languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;have&quot; (lexical verb with two arguments: possessor and possessed; 63/240 languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They give examples of each type &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/117&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their typology, Russian would be type 1 (with the preposition у &quot;near&quot; marking the possessor); Japanese would be type 2, since in &lt;em&gt;boku no pen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my pen&quot;, the possessor and the possessed are related through a genitive construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard English, French and Spanish would be type 5, although Gaelic-influenced English would have type 1 (&lt;em&gt;The pen is at me&lt;/em&gt;) in a calque of the Gaelic construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T14:12:00.097" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T14:12:00.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4490" CreationDate="2013-09-15T23:07:23.430" Score="6" ViewCount="1146" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between phrase prosody and sentence prosody?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that prosody is a phonological suprasegmental--its components, such as intonation, are more than one phoneme long.  I know that possible components of prosody in a given language such as pitch, intonation contour, stress, and tempo can be modulated to convey lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic information.  In English, for example, rising intonation is a prosodic cue that marks a lot of questions.   I know that prosody can vary quite a bit across languages.  For example, some languages don't have word stress, a fact mentioned in this paper:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/pdf/lucl/lwpl/1.1/roosman.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/pdf/lucl/lwpl/1.1/roosman.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note this definition of prosody:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Prosody&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Prosody&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've run across a reference to distinct phrase and sentence prosody in this conlang, &lt;a href=&quot;http://yiklamu.ludiware.com/grammar.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://yiklamu.ludiware.com/grammar.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can find darned little introductory information on natural language prosody on the Internet, let alone any typological information about it.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any natural languages distinguish phrase and sentence prosody?   Do most natural languages do so?  Does this distinction occur in English?   If so, what are some English examples?  Also, where can I find more information about prosody on the Internet or in a still-available book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T13:26:44.840" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T15:52:59.233" Title="What is the difference between phrase prosody and sentence prosody?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4489" CreationDate="2013-09-16T12:24:02.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is standard to talk about the &lt;em&gt;prosodic hierarchy&lt;/em&gt;, which is a theoretical construct that divides utterances into smaller, phonologically relevant constituents called &lt;em&gt;phrases&lt;/em&gt;, which are in turn divided into smaller constituents called &lt;em&gt;prosodic words&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. There is not an absolute consensus as to what the exact levels of the prosodic hierarchy are or even how many there are, and (as with many theoretical constructs in linguistics) slightly different models lend themselves to different languages. For example, the mora is a prosodic unit that is more motivated in some languages than in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of levels in the hierarchy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Utterance &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrase (some distinguish a &lt;em&gt;major phrase&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;minor&#xA;phrase&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foot &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syllable &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mora&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, each presumed level in the prosodic hierarchy is motivated by the observation that certain phonological processes (some may be prosodic in nature and others may be segmental) are associated with that constituent. For example, in standard Japanese there is a prosodic constituent called the &lt;em&gt;accentual phrase&lt;/em&gt;, in which only one accented syllable may occur. If multiple words that are lexically accented are combined into a single accentual phrase, all but one of the accents gets deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, presumed prosodic constituents are motivated by more phonetic-y phenomena. For example, in English it is common to observe the lengthening of word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final syllables. In many languages there is also a pitch reset (where the downward trend of the overall pitch range—sometimes called &lt;em&gt;declination&lt;/em&gt;—stops and starts again at a higher pitch) at phrase boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usage of the term &lt;em&gt;prosody&lt;/em&gt; in the conlang grammar you linked to is a bit confusing and seems to conflate &lt;em&gt;prosody&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;intonation&lt;/em&gt;. It's not really that languages &quot;distinguish&quot; between &quot;sentence&quot; and &quot;phrase&quot; prosody; rather, as described above, different phonological and phonetic processes are observed to occur at different prosodic levels (i.e. over different prosodic constituents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often-cited references for the prosodic hierarchy include those by Selkirk, Pierrehumbert and Beckman, and Hayes. I'm not sure how technical you want to get, but if you search for &quot;prosodic hierarchy&quot; online, you'll find links to online course materials that are relevant for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T15:52:59.233" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T15:52:59.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4502" CreationDate="2013-09-16T15:56:41.043" Score="1" ViewCount="1001" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is the word &quot;elephant&quot; in the following Japanese sentence represented in the corresponding X-bar tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Elephant  trunk  long&#xA;TOP       NOM    NPST&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the tree flat or are &quot;elephant&quot; and &quot;trunk&quot; understood as one NP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-16T16:07:23.450" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T14:56:49.790" Title="How are topic-phrases represented in X-bar trees" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4494" CreationDate="2013-09-16T16:26:31.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, there's a node for topics that's a child of C' (and a sister of either TP or another C', IIRC). It's the same place that fronted nouns in V2 languages like German and Norwegian go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe some theorists have posited a whole topic-focus structure up there (for languages like Latin), but I unfortunately don't remember how it works exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T16:26:31.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4528" CreationDate="2013-09-16T16:36:51.573" Score="6" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Greek, the PIE verbal roots *&lt;em&gt;dheh1&lt;/em&gt; 'put' or 'do', *&lt;em&gt;Hieh1&lt;/em&gt; 'throw', and *&lt;em&gt;deh3&lt;/em&gt; 'give' show up with an unexpected -k- in some aorist forms: ἔθηκα, ἧκα, ἔδωκα. In Latin, the reflexes of the first two roots have -k- throughout: &lt;em&gt;facio, iacio&lt;/em&gt; (although the present forms are new analogical formations, so it's plausible that this -k- too was once confined to the perfect/aorist). LIV adds some data from other Italic languages (and tentatively from Phrygian) but says the Greek and Italic &lt;em&gt;-k-&lt;/em&gt;'s are unrelated (citing two references which I can't access at the moment), which seems odd. What are the theories as to the origin of this &lt;em&gt;-k-&lt;/em&gt; or these &lt;em&gt;-k-&lt;/em&gt;'s? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are there other IE languages in which these verbs may have once had &lt;em&gt;-k-&lt;/em&gt; in the aorist but we can't tell because the resulting forms would be the same with or without it? (For example, if Sanskrit once had an aorist *&lt;em&gt;adhākt&lt;/em&gt; it seems plausible that the regular reflex of this, **&lt;em&gt;adhāk&lt;/em&gt;, would be analogically reformed as the attested &lt;em&gt;adhāt&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:09:17.083" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:09:17.083" Title="Origin of *-k- &quot;extension&quot; in (aorist of) some IE verbs?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;aorist&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2013-09-16T17:27:57.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are formalized dependency-based grammars, such as Meaning-Text Theory or Functional Generative Description. A simple Google search will give you links to papers and books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-16T17:27:57.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2013-09-17T09:55:57.970" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The take of an Israeli linguist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There must be a consensus among scholars about one thing: Modern Israeli Hebrew emerged as a result of language revival, and as such its development from its so-called origins is different from the development of nearly all other living languages today (and all fully-fledged languages spoken by a monolingual community). At the absence of documented precedents of language revival, there can't be any research-based 'developmental model' relevant for Modern Hebrew, so any 'scholarly' opinion, even by the most learned and experienced historical linguists, would be of limited value. It is not proper to compare contact influences of Norman French on English or Slavonic on Romanian etc., because English/Romanian/etc. were living mother tongues at the time they were influenced, while Modern Israeli Hebrew, at its very beginning, was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most scholars think that Zuckermann claims the obvious: Hebrew was revived by speakers of other languages (mostly Indo-European), albeit with profound knowledge of Classical Hebrew (a semitic language) as a second language. It is thus inevitable that the revived language would bear grammar components of both Classical Hebrew and the revivers' native language(s). Very few linguists would be concerned with this question further, because linguists are language analysts - they analyze language components, which are uncountable and unweightable - one can't really say 'there are N,M,O Classical Hebrew components with the respective weights 1/2/3, P,Q Yiddish components with weights 1,2, X independently-innovated components with weight 1, therefore Modern Hebrew is Semitic/Indo-European/What-have-you'. Once we agree that Modern Hebrew emerged based on substantial contributions of two or more sources, it makes little scientific sense characterize the language 'as a whole'. Zuckermann's insistence on discussing the holistic nature of Modern Hebrew as 'mixed', and his dedication of time and effort to this discussion, is simply considered as non-scientific. This is further exacerbated by his insistence on the label, i.e. the use of 'Israeli' instead of 'Hebrew'. Thus, it is most likely that scholars would merely dismiss Zuckermann's strong claims about the nature and origin of Modern Hebrew, but at the same time agree with some/most of his specific claims about the origin of specific components of Modern Hebrew grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of the original question is particularly problematic: Is a grammatical component retained from Classical Hebrew essentially 'Semitic'? What if it had been borrowed into Classical Hebrew from Classical Egyptian or from Philistine? Is a component retained from Yiddish necessarily 'Indo-European'? What if it was a Yiddish innovation not shared with any Indo-European language? What if it was borrowed into Yiddish from Liturgical Hebrew, and it's retention in Modern Hebrew is faithful to its use in Yiddish, not in Liturgical Hebrew? What about Modern Hebrew grammatical innovations, which are plenty (e.g. the stress system)? Can they be assigned any genetic label other than 'Modern Hebrew'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2480" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T09:55:57.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-17T15:00:43.377" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an annotation software (no matter which OS), which lets me annotate focus and scope, as user-friendly as possible, e.g., via console input, or via a graphical editor (mouse-supported). Which tools fulfill these requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2483" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-17T17:00:39.080" LastActivityDate="2013-09-17T17:00:39.080" Title="Which annotation software can I use to annotate scope and focus?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-17T17:38:19.133" Score="3" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a number of Indian colleagues who are fluent in English (but Natively spoke Urdu or Hindi) and I've noticed a trend to stutter the word &quot;I'll&quot; when they speak it, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll I'll look into that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love language, and especially the etymology of how languages from multiple cultures combine into a common language, so I've become curious as to the nature of this.  Is there something in one of the base language grammar or patterns here that leads to this behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2484" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-18T08:31:56.457" LastActivityDate="2013-09-18T08:31:56.457" Title="Native Urdu Speakers saying &quot;I'll I'll&quot; when speaking English" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4494" CreationDate="2013-09-18T14:00:16.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: This update aims at clarifying many points which were raised in comments. Many thanks to dainichi for correcting the Japanese (all remaining embarrassing errors of course remain solely my own). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to make two assumptions. The first is that the Japanese sentence you have in mind is (1), the most literal translation I can imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) 象は　鼻が　長い。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zoo-ha hana-ga nagai&#xA;Elephant TOP trunk NOM long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that you are looking for an answer within X-bar theory as it is currently understood and practiced. Then &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[.TopP [.TopP [.N Zoo  ] ha ] [.TP Hana [.T -i [.Adj Naga  ]] ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with post-syntactic addition of the NOM marker &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; and morphological head movement of the bare adjective to the tense marker seems a plausible enough representation, though of course much investigations would be needed in order to determine if it is anywhere near correct. This representation (hopefully) obeys some of the standard constraints nowadays commonly believed (by people doing that kind of stuff) to hold for arborescent representations, namely: it is a binary tree and it satisfies Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom. In particular, it is very much &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; flat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid I'm unable to understand P Elliott remarks in comments. Is the problem that I used bare phrase structures notations rather than pure X-bar notations? I will say this though, I took Atamiri's question to be whether X-bar theory treated topic sentences as flat trees, so I proposed a not too absurd tree showing that this was not the case. This tree embodies a number of assumptions, most conspicuously that topic elements are base-generated above TP (but many other, starting with the status of the nominative marker or the status of adjective in Japanese predication relations). I made a minimal effort to make non-absurd choices but my intention was not to accurately describe predication in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, non-contrastive topics in Japanese are indeed usually thought to be base generated in the left periphery. Contrastive topics probably move. See for instance :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the position of topics in Japanese (Reiko Vermeulen)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topic prominency in Japanese (Kishimoto Hideki)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE2: P Elliott correctly remarks in comments that a PRO should probably appear somewhere in the TP. I must confess that I have no clear idea where it should be, and so omitted it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T14:56:49.790" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T14:56:49.790" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-18T20:18:27.910" Score="4" ViewCount="3500" Body="&lt;p&gt;So basically I have this text and it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Our &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; shows ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it only focused on ..., the findings are also thought to hold true for other ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; involved only college students, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Certain words are omitted for a reason)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the 'It' is a deixis, and it is assumed that it refers to the study previously mentioned, so am I correct in assuming it is an anaphoric reference even though there is some text in between which focuses on the findings of the study rather than the study? Or is it a different type of deixis altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2485" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T07:42:37.520" Title="Types of Deixis and Anaphoric and Endophoric references help?" Tags="&lt;deixis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4503" CreationDate="2013-09-18T21:07:51.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right, this &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is certainly anaphoric (provided that it refers back to &lt;em&gt;our study&lt;/em&gt; or some other element in the text). There is no need for an anaphor to come immediately or soon after a previous element in the text: as long as it refers to &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; element that was mentioned earlier in the text or discourse, it's anaphoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several definitions of deixis, I believe, but a widely accepted one is an element whose meaning or reference depends on something in the context. Wikipedia agrees. Then anaphora is a kind of deixis. The narrower definition has deixis as something that refers to an &lt;em&gt;extra-linguistic&lt;/em&gt; context; then anaphora would not be deixis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T02:15:02.650" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T02:15:02.650" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4506" CreationDate="2013-09-19T05:29:01.547" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following dialogue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How are you, Juliet?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;&lt;em&gt;Ohnot&lt;/em&gt; too bad&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The child has evidently heard people saying responding to &quot;How are you?&quot; with &quot;Oh, not too bad&quot; and has come to learn &quot;Ohnot&quot; as though it is a single word. Is there a term for this sort of error, whereby two (or more) words are mistakenly learned as though they are one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first word needn't have been &quot;Oh&quot;. I've seen this error occur with more meaningful initial words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rather like a mondegreen or malapropism or eggcorn, but different in that the end result isn't a word at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2136" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T09:10:26.833" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T09:12:00.277" Title="Is there a term for the error whereby two commonly co-occurring words are mistakenly learned as one?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4505" CreationDate="2013-09-19T08:17:27.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known in language acquisition as segmentation error.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;: Blom and Wijnen (2006). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://home.hum.uva.nl/variflex/BlomWijnen_LI_OIpaper_oct2006.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Development need not be embarrassing: the demise of the root infinitive and related changes in Dutch child language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-19T09:12:00.277" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T09:12:00.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-19T08:57:20.443" Score="4" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my continuing interest in this pair of closely related languages I have noticed each uses an unrleated word for the negative particle meaning &quot;no&quot;, &quot;not&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;ไม่&lt;/code&gt; (mai)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lao:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;ບໍ່&lt;/code&gt; (bo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Thai have have a reflex etymologically related to Lao &quot;ບໍ່&quot;? Does Lao have a reflex etymologically related to Thai &quot;ไม่&quot;? Do we know the origin of this difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: Which words are used in Isan and Zhuang?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T13:48:22.063" Title="Do the Thai and Lao negative particles, &quot;ไม่&quot; (mai) and &quot;ບໍ່&quot; (bo) have reflexes in the other language?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2013-09-19T17:09:31.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;its not a question about overlap.when the study of sociology deals with the effects of language on the society than it is called the sociology of language. and the opposite is sociolinguistics.go through sociolinguistics,you ll be able to know everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2488" LastActivityDate="2013-09-19T17:09:31.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T02:16:06.407" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a linguistics student and working on narrow transcriptions.&#xA;Most transcription come fairly easily to me, but I'm caught up on the vowel in the word &quot;hard&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should the vowel be transcribed with General American (from central New York state) accent? &#xA;What I have so far (with V standing in for the vowel: [hVɹd] (the vowel will presumably be rhoticisized)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1679" LastEditorUserId="1679" LastEditDate="2013-09-22T02:08:06.873" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T02:08:06.873" Title="IPA Transcription help" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:32:38.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T07:00:57.810" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just learned that Lao has two words for &quot;to be&quot;, that are mostly interchangeable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ເປັນ&lt;/code&gt; (pen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ແມ່ນ&lt;/code&gt; (maen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both begin with a labial, have an &quot;e-like&quot; vowel, and end &quot;n&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty established that the &quot;b&quot;, &quot;m&quot;, and &quot;p&quot; sounds can be variants of each other in variants of the same word or in closely related words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel in &lt;code&gt;ເປັນ&lt;/code&gt; is an &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; but as fpr the vowel in &lt;code&gt;ແມ່ນ&lt;/code&gt; I'm not sure if it's more like &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;, but I also believe that both of these can have close relationships with an &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; sound in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Isan language, generally considered a dialect of Lao spoken in Thailand with a different set of recent influences and now written in the Thai script, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isan_language#Verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;also has the two copulae&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two copulas used in Isan, as in Lao, one for things relating to people, &lt;code&gt;เป็น&lt;/code&gt; (pen, &lt;code&gt;/pen/&lt;/code&gt;), and one for objects and animals, &lt;code&gt;แม่น&lt;/code&gt; (maen, &lt;code&gt;/mɛːn/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm wondering if these two words that are similar in sound and similar in function are etymologically variants.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think Thai has two words and Zhuang seems to have an unrelated word as its copula: &lt;code&gt;dwg&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-22T16:06:49.627" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T16:06:49.627" Title="Are the two Lao (and Isan) words for &quot;to be&quot;, &quot;ເປັນ&quot; (pen) and &quot;ແມ່ນ&quot; (maen), etymologically related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2013-09-20T11:08:45.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aymara&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;naya    -naka    we (exclusive)&#xA;juma    -naka    you (pl.)&#xA;jupa    -naka    they&#xA;jiwasa  -naka    we (inclusive, more than 2)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nayanaka&lt;/em&gt; is obligatorily contracted to &lt;em&gt;nänaka&lt;/em&gt; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T11:08:45.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2650" CreationDate="2013-09-20T16:10:44.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;em&gt;muðr&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;munnr&lt;/em&gt; exhibits an additional later change like that in &lt;em&gt;maðr&lt;/em&gt; &quot;man&quot; from *&lt;em&gt;mannr&lt;/em&gt;. Somehow geminated &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; before the &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;-derived &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; realized as &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt;. So it would PG *&lt;em&gt;munþaz&lt;/em&gt; to proto-ON *&lt;em&gt;munnr&lt;/em&gt; to later ON &lt;em&gt;muðr&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2490" LastActivityDate="2013-09-20T16:10:44.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T18:18:17.267" Score="3" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for (reasonably) scientific statistics on the percentage of African Americans whose speech is sufficiently inflected with AAVE that their speech is identifiable as such.  (It would be interesting to know how many non-African Americans would be identified as speaking AAVE, but that's secondary for me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the methodology would be for &quot;identfication&quot;, because it's essentially subjective, but I'll take any data at all for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2491" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-21T04:29:18.433" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T04:29:18.433" Title="What percentage of African Americans speak identifiable African American Vernacular English?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;aave&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T19:47:25.020" Score="6" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stepping off of the airplane in Lisbon, I could immediately hear that the pronunciation was much different from Brazilian Portuguese, which I am more accustomed to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level of vowel deletion was so pronounced in fact, that I almost thought people were speaking Polish, due to the high number of awkward consonant clusters - &lt;em&gt;such as brzydka or ptaki in the Slavic language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four most striking and frequent examples I personally heard were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pessoas&lt;/strong&gt; as /ps'oɐʃ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;português&lt;/strong&gt;  as /prt'geʃ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lisboa&lt;/strong&gt; as /lʒ'bo,ɐ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;desculpas&lt;/strong&gt; as /dɯ̽ʃ'kuɫps/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any general rules as to which of the vowels are more likely to be deleted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="740" LastEditDate="2013-09-20T21:26:40.757" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T21:30:50.703" Title="What vowels are most likely to be deleted in European Portuguese?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-20T21:14:23.177" Score="4" ViewCount="4324" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I asked which of &amp;quot;ungrammatical&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;grammatically incorrect&amp;quot; is prefered and why? at an English language forum I got the following &amp;quot;linguistic perspective&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are used, but I believe linguists prefer the former. Grammaticality, as one linguist explained it to me, means &amp;quot;following the rules of the relevant scientific model that is used to describe how people speak&amp;quot;. So it is strictly dependent on the model used, but in practice many linguists presume that there is consensus about most elements of the relevant model, so it mostly overlaps with &amp;quot;people actually use this within a certain group and they consider it normal&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;incorrect&amp;quot; may suggest that there is something wrong with straying from grammatically; I suspect that linguists do not use this much because they resent the implication. So I think that's why you will mostly see ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please comment on the linguistic accuracy of this answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="517" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T16:29:26.363" Title="Ungrammatical or Grammatically Incorrect" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-21T03:18:23.147" Score="1" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sense relations are apparently semantic relationships between words and/or predicates.  We learn more about this at Glottopedia.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A sense relation is a paradigmatic relation between words or predicates. &#xA;Two major types of sense relations can be distinguished:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sense relations of inclusion, esp. hyponymy and synonymy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sense relations of exclusion, esp. complementarity and antonymy &#xA;(both of which are instances of the relationship of incompatibility).&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for sets of words that have the same sense relation between them?  For instance, how would one complete this paragraph?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;'up' and 'down' are antonyms.   'animal' is a hypernym of 'cow'   'pal' is a synonym of 'friend.'   Each pair of words just mentioned is a set of (term I'm looking for).&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T16:53:46.600" Title="Is there a term for sets of words that have the same sense relation between them?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4541" CreationDate="2013-09-21T17:53:47.990" Score="4" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language standardisation has variously been described, for example by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/670407&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Einar Haugen&lt;/a&gt;, as a process involving the selection, codification, acceptance, and elaboration of a linguistic norm. I'm concerned here with the &lt;strong&gt;selection&lt;/strong&gt; of a norm. Often this consists not of selecting a dialect that is already present in its entirety, but a process called koinéisation takes place - the levelling of differences between dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from regional varieties (dialects), social varieties (sociolects) also play a role. I think I have heard/read repeatedly that linguistic structures/words etc. used by educated speakers are more likely to become part of the emerging standard than linguistic structures used by less educated speakers. This is, I think, because educated speakers play a role as gatekeepers due to their social, economic and political power. In consequence, the varieties used by uneducated speakers are often looked down upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the literature on language standardisation (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=8ciimg5gGqQC&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;dq=%22language%20standardization%22%20educated&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=u9w9Urn2F6ja4AS-1oHwAg&amp;amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22language%20standardization%22%20educated&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Standardization and Language Change&lt;/a&gt; I could not find any reference to the importance of educated speakers in language standardisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can anybody provide academic references for this?&lt;/strong&gt; (of course I would also be happy to consider references denying the role of educated speakers in language standardisation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:04:52.057" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T14:04:52.057" Title="Role of educated speakers in language standardisation" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4522" CreationDate="2013-09-21T18:06:22.737" Score="9" ViewCount="2203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are “go” and “went” part of the same lexeme, i.e. the same set of inflected forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this brief &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Lexeme_%28i.e._a_set_of_word-forms%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glottopedia entry&lt;/a&gt;. The entry defines its subject matter as follows:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A lexeme is usually defined as a set of inflected word-forms that differ only in their inflectional properties.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entry also provides these examples:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The English word-forms boy and boys make up the lexeme BOY. The Latin word-forms habeo 'I have', habes  'you have', habet ' s/he has', habemus  'we have', habebam  'I had', habebunt  'they will have', and so on make up the lexeme HABERE.”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But can “went” really be described as part of a set of &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt; word forms in the lexeme that also includes “go,” “goes,” and “going”?   If so, how is “went” inflected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I confusing “inflections” with “inflectional properties”?    (I don’t know whether there is a distinction between these terms or not).   Could “went” have “inflectional properties”  that make it part of the lexeme “GO” even if &quot;went&quot; can’t be described morphologically as being inflected?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T19:07:16.557" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T23:55:14.983" Title="Are &quot;go&quot; and &quot;went&quot; part of the same lexeme?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2013-09-21T20:35:40.087" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are. In the sentence &lt;code&gt;John goes to school&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;goes&lt;/em&gt; can be replaced by &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; and the two sentences have the same meaning (semantic content) except for tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The base form is usually called &lt;em&gt;lemma&lt;/em&gt; in formal and applied linguistics (in this case &lt;code&gt;go&lt;/code&gt;) and it stands for the meaning of the inflected word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-21T20:35:40.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4526" CreationDate="2013-09-22T04:54:59.690" Score="2" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two native German speakers have each told me that conversational English is easy to learn because its number of case-endings, agreement morphemes, and other grammatical morphemes is small.   However, these same two people told me that complex English discourse was difficult for them to learn, owing to the lack of said morphology, which guides the speaker of highly inflected languages through long sentences, and the syntactic structures that English speakers used instead of said morphology in long sentences.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some of these English syntactic structures? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-09-23T13:18:40.360" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T00:01:26.873" Title="In what ways does English syntax compensate for its low number of inflectional morphemes?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2013-09-22T11:03:02.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English uses syntactic configurations that need to be learnt. According to some linguists, configurationality is a scale from completely fixed word order (no language has it) to completely free word order in so-called radically nonconfigurational language (Latin and Warlpiri are examples of such languages). Word order expresses information structure (topic-focus articulation) and since it's relatively fixed in English (as a result of impoverished morphology), I suppose that what your friends meant is that English discourse is seemingly less coherent for them because information structure is expressed by different means (syntax instead of word order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, non-German speakers have problems with intrasentential coherence in German because nonfinite verbs occur in the nachfeld (although word order in the mittelfeld is completely free). In my opinion, German sentence topology is much more challenging than English configurationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-22T11:03:02.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2013-09-23T08:03:21.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;acattle's comment that there is a trade-off between inflectional complexity and strict word order is a good answer to your question. I think it would really help to illustrate this with some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, let's look at &lt;strong&gt;English word order&lt;/strong&gt; (actually it's the order of &lt;strong&gt;constituents&lt;/strong&gt;, not words):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject Verb Object&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dog bit the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man bit the dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English word order is SVO. If you move the object to subject position and subject to object position the meaning of the sentence changes fundamentally. &lt;em&gt;The dog bit the man&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;The man bit the dog.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, however, you can reverse the order of these consituents without changing the (truth-conditional) meaning of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Der Hund biß den Mann. (SVO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Den Mann biß der Hund. (OVS)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Den Mann&lt;/em&gt; is accusative, so although it's in first position in the second sentence, it's still clear that &lt;em&gt;the man/den Mann&lt;/em&gt; is the object in both sentences. Word order is free in German in the sense that these two sentences describe the same action. However, OVS word order is marked and might be used to stress the identity of the object, somewhat like &lt;em&gt;It was the man that was bitten by the dog, not the woman.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German you can move constituents around because they are marked by case. In English you can't, but there are other strategies to do that: &lt;em&gt;It was the man that was bitten by the dog&lt;/em&gt; shows two: Passive and it-cleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Other aspects like verb-second word order and the Vorfeld - Mittelfeld - Nachfeld distinction only show that German word order is not completely free - But still it is much more flexible than English word order.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, German also has these syntactic options. As a native speaker of German and with some experience in teaching English to advanced learners of English, I don't really see how English discourse structure should be terribly hard to learn for native speakers of German. There are some idiosyncrasies, in the sense that one particular structure is more appropriate in a certain context in English, but another one in German. But you get that with any pair of two languages. What I do think is challenging, particularly for advanced learners of English, are choices in English syntax where there is no hard and fast rule. For example whether to use simple past or present perfect to express an action in the past, or whether to use the of-genitive or the s-genitive/possessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your friends might find English discourse structure challenging for their particular reasons - After all learners are individuals and everybody has their own way of learning a foreign language. Also, I think what you perceive as difficult in a foreign language and what actually is difficult for you can be two very different things (that's my personal experience from teaching - So I don't have any actual data to back this up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T10:52:20.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2013-09-23T09:04:36.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Untermann shows that the -k- in lat. fac- and iac- is part of the root and does not contribute &quot;aoristic&quot; semantics to the verbs. Nor does he find any relations in their functionality compared to the greek material. The -k- may however be of common italic origin as tentatively shown by suchs forms as ven. vhagsto (root *dheh1-k-) or osk./umbr. stakaz (root *steh2-(k?)).&#xA;The presented material is hardly sufficient to determine the function or contexts of the k-extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ref.:&#xA;Untermann, J. Meiser, G. (Ed.) Gr. ἔθηκα = lat. feci, gr. ἧκα = lat. ieci? Indogermanica et Italica. Festschrift für Helmut Rix zum 65. Geburtstag., 1993, 461-468.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2498" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T09:04:36.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4226" CreationDate="2013-09-23T09:32:06.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is no specific linguistic name for this feature. It rather has a share in composition and metaphorics. By the time compounds lose their transparency, e.g. germ. Eimer (&quot;bucket&quot;) &amp;lt; *ein-ber &amp;lt; PIE. *oino- &quot;one&quot; + root *bher- &quot;carry&quot;. What you have spotted is the contrast of intransparent versus transparent morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2498" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T09:32:06.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4006" CreationDate="2013-09-23T09:45:56.777" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To connect the *swig- from old high german swīgān with the greek σιγ- one can suppose the greek interjection (that must be prior to the verb) had a digamma phonem like so *σFιγ-&#xA;coming from PIE *su̯ī-g- that disappeared in the early sound history of greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2498" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T09:45:56.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4532" CreationDate="2013-09-23T11:39:44.460" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words contain letters (A to Z and a to z), but also apostrophes, such as in the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;don't&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;'em&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and even hyphens in the case of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ice-cream &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;long wind-&#xA;ed sentence&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to English, is there any other symbols that can compose a word? More precisely, I want to know how I should identify words when processing a corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I would be interested in learning about other European languages and their use of such symbols within words which fall outside those defined by the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T01:22:05.703" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T01:22:05.703" Title="Symbols that compose a word" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4531" CreationDate="2013-09-23T12:49:40.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, you're fine with apostrophes. Compounds with hyphens, such as ice-cream, are mostly treated as separated tokens in corpora.&#xA;As for other languages in Europe, the &quot;long&quot; L in Catalan is denoted by a &quot;bullet&quot;, e.g. &lt;code&gt;pel·lícula&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-23T12:49:40.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4523" CreationDate="2013-09-23T19:06:37.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the benefits of case syncretism in english is the lack of restriction between verbs and their objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English: I saw and helped her&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The above example is not possible in Russian  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Russian: Я увидел её и помог ей - I saw her and helped her&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  её = accusative case for увидел&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ей = dative case for помог&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Virtual Linguistics Campus have a video clip named &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uc3cOcPX3A&amp;amp;noredirect=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Syntax - The Consequences of Case Syncretism&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in relation to this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native speakers of English, and of course linguists, find it much easier to play around with word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems easy, to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To me, it seems easy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It, to me, seems easy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Easy, it seems, to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I realize the last two examples are far less common but would be quite likely to occur in a stage play for effect. I can imagine &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_Appleby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Humphrey Appleby&lt;/a&gt; saying &quot;It, to me, seems easy, Minister.&quot; with the appropriate pauses, naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2456" LastEditorUserId="2456" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T00:01:26.873" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T00:01:26.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4531" CreationDate="2013-09-23T20:23:12.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, the key point answering this question would be by understanding the &lt;strong&gt;distinction between an &lt;em&gt;alphabet&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Some boring definitions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; is defined as a set of letters. Examples are &lt;em&gt;Latin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Script, or, more formally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Writing system&lt;/a&gt;, is a &lt;em&gt;language-specific&lt;/em&gt; set of rules used to encode a text in a particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each language, script includes (a part of) a certain &lt;em&gt;Alphabet&lt;/em&gt;, certain type of &lt;em&gt;Numerals&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Punctuation marks&lt;/em&gt;, and other symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Now, let's get to the question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With regard to English, is there any other symbols that can compose a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_writing_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English writing system&lt;/a&gt; includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin letters, letter-case and capital-case, obviously;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arabic numerals&lt;/a&gt;, obviously;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diacritic marks&lt;/a&gt; used for loanwords;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Punctuation symbols&lt;/a&gt; - make sure your software properly processes similarly looking symbols, e.g. apostrophes used to mark possession, and to mark contractions;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For Natural Language Processing (NLP) software, you have to be aware that most characters with diacritic marks have their own Unicode points, so, for instance, parsing a sequence of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and ◌&amp;#x0302; (a zero-width &lt;em&gt;combining circumflex accent&lt;/em&gt; modifier, U+0302, not to be confused with a standalone character &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt;) should work exactly as parsing a single code point of &lt;code&gt;Â&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Latin A with circumflex&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are parsing Unicode text, you have to be also aware about ligatures, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spelled_with_a_ligature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here's the list&lt;/a&gt;, and there may be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typography%29#Stylistic_ligatures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stylistic ligatures&lt;/a&gt; as well;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, I would be interested in learning about other European languages and there use of such symbols within words which fall outside those defined by the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, don't look into an &lt;em&gt;alphabet&lt;/em&gt;. Look into &lt;em&gt;writing system&lt;/em&gt; of a corresponding language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T00:50:34.497" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T00:50:34.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4537" CreationDate="2013-09-24T01:15:12.707" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walking with my wife the other day, I turned around and realized that the person behind me was, in fact, someone else, and my wife had stopped to look in a shop. I said to her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1a Oh, I thought that guy behind me was you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly because I had a bit of cognitive interference with &quot;Oh, I thought you were behind me&quot;, I was tempted to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1b Oh, I thought you were that guy behind me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on reflection I realize that 1 sounds right (felicitous?), and 2 sounds wrong (infelicitous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt; I've used these terms from now on at P Elliot's suggestion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2a The boy thought the woman whose hand he was holding was his mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is felicitous, while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2b The boy thought his mother was the woman whose hand he was holding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is infelicitous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3a I thought that log was a bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3b I thought that bear was a log.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are felicitous, although they point to different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts so far: definiteness might be important – playing around with how things sound, &quot;a guy&quot; vs. &quot;the guy&quot; vs. &quot;that guy&quot; vs. &quot;something&quot; seems to shift things a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, maybe it has something to do with &quot;was you&quot; being qualitative rather than existential – that is, the meaning is not A=B but rather something closer to &quot;A is B-like&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, perhaps, some basic and fundamental aspect of semantics (/pragmatics?) that I'm forgetting/never learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2013-09-25T22:34:15.880" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T00:01:03.793" Title="&quot;I thought X was Y&quot; vs. &quot;I thought Y was X&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2013-09-24T02:00:00.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although they do sound a bit odd and stilted, I personally have no trouble accepting &lt;code&gt;1b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;2b&lt;/code&gt;. I think your problem is that you aren't making a distinction between &lt;em&gt;unacceptable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;weird&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;awkward&lt;/em&gt;. Humans judge utterances based on several criteria; of course syntax and semantics but also stylistic factors and even ease of comprehension. In my [limited] experience, these are considered as extra-linguistic factors and not including in an utterances acceptability unless explicitly noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how &lt;code&gt;1&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;2&lt;/code&gt; use embedded clauses (&lt;code&gt;guy behind me&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;whose hand he was holding&lt;/code&gt;, respectively) while &lt;code&gt;3&lt;/code&gt; doesn't. Also note how in the &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; versions the embedded clauses come at the end of the sentence while in &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; they come in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I unfortunately cannot find an academic source addressing this exact issue, embedding clauses in the middle of a sentence &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.primaryschoolscience.com/literacy/lit-complex.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;causes difficulty because the reader needs to figure out where the embedded clause ends&lt;/a&gt;. When the embedded clause comes at the end of the sentence it is trivial to see where it ends. I suspect that you, like me, don't consider &lt;code&gt;1b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;2b&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; so much as &lt;em&gt;harder to parse&lt;/em&gt; compared to &lt;code&gt;1a&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;2a&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;multiple sources&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/33540/34310145.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;how embedding can affect understandability&lt;/a&gt; but they describe different types of embedding from the one in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-09-26T00:01:03.793" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T00:01:03.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4535" CreationDate="2013-09-24T02:10:01.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copular clauses in English generally have a &quot;Topic BE Focus&quot; structure, rather than a &quot;Focus BE Topic&quot; structure. That is, the phrase that you're predicating something about precedes the copula; what you're predicating of that phrase follows the copula. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, you were predicating something about &quot;the guy behind you&quot;, namely that you were mistaken as to his identity. You weren't predicating something about your wife (as you would have been if you had said &quot;I thought you were behind me&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises the non-linguistic question, which I'm not sure how to answer, of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; we cognitively frame cases of mistaken identity in this way rather than the reverse: after all, if you're wrong about the identity of X because you think it's Y, aren't you also wrong about the identity of Y? But that's not how we think about it. If you were asked &quot;Whose identity were you mistaken about, in that scenario?&quot; you would answer &quot;The guy behind me&quot;, not &quot;My wife&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar vein, your example 2b would be fine in a scenario (a weird one, but bear with me) where the boy has learned a wrong meaning for the word &quot;mother&quot;, and thinks it means &quot;any woman whose hand one happens to be holding&quot;. Describing that case you could, I think, perfectly well say 2b. This is because what the boy is mistaken &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; is (the meaning of) &quot;his mother&quot;, so that goes into the Topic position, while in 2a what he is mistaken about is the identity of &quot;the woman whose hand he was holding&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-09-24T02:43:08.473" LastActivityDate="2013-09-24T02:43:08.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4607" CreationDate="2013-09-24T16:04:24.230" Score="2" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;AA-Hista&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;s&gt;Arabic&lt;/s&gt; Farsi which means slow (or not fast) and &lt;em&gt;&quot;hasty&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in English have the same roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to me that a prefix of negation &quot;a&quot; has been used in front of hasty to give the &lt;s&gt;Arabic&lt;/s&gt;Farsi word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On checking I found out that the word &lt;s&gt;A&lt;/s&gt; Ahista is a Farsi (Persian) word (&lt;a href=&quot;http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/aphorisms-twelve/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reference I could find&lt;/a&gt;) ; So now I request for a reconsideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To speak ahista does not just imply speaking low.  The expression may also implore us not to go too fast in our speech delivery. Both meanings are inbuilt in the root, from Farsi &lt;em&gt;ahista&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/aphorisms-twelve/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&gt;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" OwnerDisplayName="ARi" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-03T09:52:57.413" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T15:54:53.560" Title="Etymology &quot;Hasty&quot; : Does it have Arabic or Farsi roots?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4520" CreationDate="2013-09-25T02:20:39.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standardisation is more to do with codification than with educated speakers directly. Having grammar books, dictionaries, and maybe a literary cannon, are what distinguish a standard language from a creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course somebody has to decide what goes into those things - what the standard language will be - and that is usually the role of the powerful, high-status speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For references:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion of ideological issues:-&#xA;Milroy, James. &quot;Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization.&quot; Journal of Sociolinguistics 5.4 (2001): 530-555. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion of the process:-&#xA;Haugen, Einar. &quot;Dialect, Language, Nation.&quot; American anthropologist 68.4 (1966): 922-935.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion of the function of standardisation:-&#xA;Mathiot, Madeleine, and Paul L. Garvin. &quot;The functions of language: a sociocultural view.&quot; Anthropological Quarterly (1975): 148-156.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2013-09-25T07:34:53.257" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T07:34:53.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4517" CreationDate="2013-09-25T12:33:45.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received a fairly detailed answer at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=40511#40511/Lingforum.Com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lingforum.Com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="517" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-25T16:29:26.363" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T16:29:26.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2013-09-25T14:37:19.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not fast&quot; is in Arabic  ليست سريعة (pronounced something like &quot;lessat sahirah&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hurry is definitely of Nordic origin. Commercial relations existed between present Scandinavia and Arabia, but the similarity is probably fortuitous. Some Arabian words have been introduced much later, when they were at the top of their civilization, and Europe less advanced in some fields of knowledge (algebra, algorithm,nadir, zenith, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T14:37:19.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3881" CreationDate="2013-09-25T15:52:47.390" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I could answer, being both French and British.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isolated, the French &quot;i&quot; should not be difficult at all, it is exactly like the British &quot;e&quot;, and I don't see any word where it should not be short.&#xA;I believe that there is no pitfall like &quot;to live&quot; vs &quot;a life&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it longer (much less than into &quot;leave&quot; or &quot;sheet&quot; however), it is followed by &quot;e&quot;, e.g. &quot;la mie&quot; (soft part of the bread), or a &quot;y&quot; is used instead, such as &quot;ayez confiance&quot; (be confident).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the emphasis may lengthen it a bit :&#xA;- in &quot;Comme j'admire l'Italie !&quot;, the &quot;i&quot; of &quot;admire&quot; will be longer, or rather more stressed, than in&#xA;- &quot;Moi, prétendre que j'admire l'Italie !&quot;&#xA;because the first sentence is a praise, the second shows despise. The &quot;It....&quot; is abrupt, the &quot;...lie&quot; soft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when combined with some letters, it is tricky : &quot;j'ai un lapin&quot; (I have a rabbit) is very difficult for an English speaker, and I don't find a way to transcribe the pronunciation, &quot;ai&quot; and &quot;in&quot; being nonexistent. No difficulty in &quot;livre&quot; or &quot;lit&quot; however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used with a &quot;tréma&quot; (ï), it is isolated ; &quot;aïe !&quot; (= ouch !) is almost pronounced ah-ii-euh, as in &quot;pagaille&quot; (= mess, chaos)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T15:52:47.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2013-09-25T16:19:52.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that the mean length of the words explains the speed of spoken language : they are very similar between French and Italian (many words too), but, when spoken, the rhythm is quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the French point of view, Swiss and Belgian natives are notoriously slow, and even the Canadians from Québec - with almost exactly the same vocabulary (just a few words are different, or don't have the same meaning), and of course the same grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, in Chinese the words are very short, and they are not any slower when speaking ; interpreting in real-time is almost impossible, you have to pray the speaker for some pauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T16:19:52.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2013-09-25T16:56:23.343" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, all the words are the same if they refer to the same animal or product. There is a difference between &quot;cabillaud&quot;, the fish still fresh, and &quot;morue&quot;, which is dried and salted, in the past from &quot;Terre-Neuve&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;porc&quot; is a little more polite than &quot;cochon&quot; ; you should ask for &quot;une côtelette de porc&quot; at the butcher's. But &quot;Cette ferme est un élevage de cochons&quot; is perfectly correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And beef is always &quot;bœuf&quot; at the butcher's, even if is a cow.&#xA;For leather, it is always &quot;vache&quot; or &quot;vachette&quot;, even it is a bull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" LastActivityDate="2013-09-25T16:56:23.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-26T03:55:36.490" Score="2" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;In sanskrit &quot;Pad&quot; (rhyming with mud with a soft 'd') means feet; so does pod in Latin . Do they have same roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2512" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-26T09:30:23.307" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T09:30:23.307" Title="Etymology &quot;Pod&quot; Sanskrit roots" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4557" CreationDate="2013-09-26T05:53:14.220" Score="4" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Lao script was originally used as an abugida (consonants have implied vowels) for the Lao language, just as most of the writing systems related to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lao script is now used as an alphabet for the Lao language. There are now ways to spell all vowels and there are no implied vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently these changes were the result of a series of language/script reforms which also included removing many letters (which have still not been added to Unicode). The last reform was by the communist Pathet Lao after they took control of the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of this may be wrong. I'm looking for detailed sources on how many reforms they were, when each reform occured, and what the specific changes of each were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An Internet source in English would be best but French, Lao, or Russian might exist too. I'm also interested in finding a dictionary using any of the former spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T19:35:30.203" Title="Seeking details of Lao orthographic reforms" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4547" CreationDate="2013-09-26T06:35:23.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are cognate forms. Sanskrit pad-, lat. pēs, greek πώς and engl. foot all come from an indo-european word *ped-/pod- in the same meaning. Sanskrit also has a verbal root pad- &quot;to step, to go, to sink down&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2498" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T06:35:23.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3952" CreationDate="2013-09-26T07:42:45.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old French most certainly retained a fully functional case system (cas sujet et cas régime) at least up to the XIVth century, perhaps up to the XVth century in eastern parts of France (and of course retains case inflections for pronouns to this day, e.g me/moi). This case system is a direct descendant of the Latin one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject is very well documented so on-line references, starting with Wikipedia, are easy to find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, for some words both the cas régime and cas sujet survived in modern French, usually with slightly different meanings but in a few occasions with identical meanings. One can find prescriptive French speakers (some would say pedantic) who insist on using the cas sujet form in subject position and the cas régime form in object position (as this prescription presupposes one knows about this past cases, you can imagine that such speakers are vanishingly rare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: In response to robert's comment, one could start with &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_fran%C3%A7ais&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ancien Français&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Grammaire_%C3%A9l%C3%A9mentaire_de_l%E2%80%99ancien_fran%C3%A7ais&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammaire élémentaire de l'Ancien Français&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically on the survival of one case rather than the other, for instance:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://monsu.desiderio.free.fr/curiosites/cassujet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cas sujet/cas régime&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are plenty of further references accessible by googling cas régime and cas sujet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I didn't mean to imply that some speakers retain any syntactic sensibility to these cases (there hasn't been any for 500 years), rather than a vanishingly small number of speakers will preferentially use &lt;em&gt;Le sieur&lt;/em&gt; when subject and &lt;em&gt;putain&lt;/em&gt; when régime rather than their (perhaps more common) alternatives as some kind of maximal adherence to prescriptive rules, including long lost ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-03-25T08:58:13.483" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T08:58:13.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3013" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:13:38.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of French, my feeling is that your premise that the phenomenon is primarily of cognitive origin is most likely false. It is not the case, I think, that I conceptualize water differently when thinking/speaking in French or in English, it is rather that the same cognitive process are not syntactically encoded in the same ways in these two languages. Common nouns in French syntactically require an article, no matter what, so speakers have to resort to some choices when none is especially obvious from a cognitive or referential point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For pure predicative assertions as &lt;em&gt;L'eau est liquide, Le tigre est un animal&lt;/em&gt; no choice is possible as far as I can tell: the definite article has to be used. But as soon as one leaves this simple context, my intuition is not so good. For instance &lt;em&gt;Un chimpanzé adore les bananes&lt;/em&gt; (A chimp loves bananas) and &lt;em&gt;Le chimpanzé adore les bananes&lt;/em&gt; (The chimp loves bananas) both seem equally degraded with respect to the perfect &lt;em&gt;Les chipanzés adorent les bananes&lt;/em&gt; but nevertheless acceptable to my ear (with the meaning Chimps love bananas). Even predication relations which are somewhat qualified open choices: &lt;em&gt;L'eau est liquide&lt;/em&gt; but both &lt;em&gt;L'eau à 0 degré est solide&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Une eau à 0 degré est solide&lt;/em&gt; (with a subtle difference in meanings that is not so easy to describe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note finally that some Romance language, e.g Spanish, have an extra syntactic mark that can be adduced to an indefinite noun (this is sometimes called differential object marking) with subtle impacts on definiteness, specificity and the syntactic properties of the object.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:13:38.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1730" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:37:36.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my anecdotal experience, in Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) In a retelling situation, the speaker would usually avoid gender-marked words or syntax but rather use gender-neutral equivalents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) same as 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Of course! Quoting literally would for instance be favored in order to produce a comical effect, and disfavored if the aim was to transmit objective informations. Also, the implication of the teller in the story would be crucial (a woman would very rarely, for instance, literally quote her husband towards a social inferior of said husband). But there is nothing mysterious in that at all: the same phenomenon is at play when someone reports the speeches of someone else with a very different social position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Yes, and I would be extremely skeptical of claims that any language could have mutually non-intelligible gendered dialects, for rather elementary reasons of biology, sociology and linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:37:36.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-26T08:40:28.397" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was entering random names in Google Ngram when I noticed that in the late 80s to early 90s, there is a bump in the occurrence of lower-case European country names. See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;united kingdom: &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/16srJju&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bit.ly/16srJju&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;italy:          &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/1fGCAHG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bit.ly/1fGCAHG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something similar happens for most West-European country names. A search for &quot;usa&quot; gives a slight bump too, but for china or russia it's absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upper-case names of countries show no bump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an explanation? Also: how reliable is Google Ngram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2513" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T08:40:28.397" Title="Weird bump in lower-case country names on Google Ngram" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4592" CreationDate="2013-09-26T13:07:03.670" Score="6" ViewCount="5672" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone used this term in conversation with me, and I googled it expecting to find a wikipedia article or a link to some dictionary of linguistics. However, nothing of that sort popped up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the term refer to any sort of grammatical error, or to a subset of errors? If the latter, what subset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2136" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-27T13:45:51.637" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T15:23:42.337" Title="What's a grammatical infelicity?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4599" CreationDate="2013-09-26T14:09:44.610" Score="2" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence &quot;&lt;strong&gt;This sentence is false&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; is a paradox (called the &quot;liar's paradox) as even though being well formed it is a contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While logicians can call this a case of un-decidability  what would be the take from a linguistics perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-10-02T13:50:07.183" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T16:06:11.187" Title="The Liar's Paradox : a linguistic perspective" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4548" CreationDate="2013-09-26T14:10:58.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a good overview, see the document &lt;a href=&quot;http://nickenfield.org/publications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;N. J. Enfield&lt;/a&gt;'s &quot;A Grammar of Lao&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cePDX9kIAFAC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;), section &lt;strong&gt;2.2.2 Revolutionary reforms&lt;/strong&gt;. I believe, it answers all your questions, except probably a dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that they are not actually &lt;em&gt;reforms&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, I would call them &lt;em&gt;attempts of standardization&lt;/em&gt;. The difference between the two may be (vaguely and informally) explained as &quot;reform is a modification of a prior standard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to few integration between different provinces, there was no &quot;standard language&quot; till the times of Lao PDR. So it's hard to call Poumi's Grammar a reform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early attempts of standardization&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guignard’s dictionary, 1912&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gedney, 1940's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roffe and Roffe, 1958&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deuve and Deuve 1960's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poumi's Grammar&lt;/em&gt; 1967, popular after Lao PDR established in 1975;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goal: minimize influence of foreign languages (mostly, Thai);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goal: simplify learning to let more people to educate;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moving spelling closer towards pronunciation;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simplified spelling of Sanskrit/Indic loanwords;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Renouncing an obsolete distinction between &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; consonants;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost elimination of politeness particles and honorific pronouns;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No official attempt to standardize the &lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt; language (section 2.2.1);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more detailed list of particular changes, see the document &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:94911:4/component/escidoc:217961/Enfield_1999_Lao+as+a+national+language.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Lao as a national language&quot; by N. J. Enfield&lt;/a&gt; (PDF, direct link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barely related note: Check how different is that from the grammar changes in Thai language, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sawatdii.livejournal.com/484.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggested in 1942&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T19:35:30.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T19:35:30.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4555" CreationDate="2013-09-26T14:11:29.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sentence is infelicitous when it's grammatical but nonsensical. See, for example, Chomsky's famous 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' - there's nothing wrong with the sentence on a grammatical level, but actually attempting to turn it into useful information fails nonetheless. If ungrammaticality is a grammatical problem, infelicity is a semantic problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T14:11:29.437" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4563" CreationDate="2013-09-26T14:42:37.583" Score="4" ViewCount="1782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit and Hindi both use the Devanagari script.  It it interesting to note that there are letters which are used by only one of these languages and not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used only in Sanskrit are letters Lri, and Rii. I would request if  any example of their usage be given and also why were these letters never used in Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T09:00:45.987" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T16:10:49.273" Title="Missing Devanagari letters in Hindi" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1730" CreationDate="2013-09-26T14:54:49.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be several aspects of what you're asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In languages with gender-related inflections (e.g., all Slavic languages), words may conjugate not according to a speaker's gender;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In languages with polite particles and honorific pronouns (e.g., Thai), the speaker may use those not according to their social/gender status (comparing to listener's);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In languages with distinction between &quot;high&quot; and &quot;street&quot; language. For example, Thai has different words for &quot;to eat&quot;: ทาน &lt;code&gt;[tʰaːn]&lt;/code&gt;, formal versus กิน &lt;code&gt;[kin]&lt;/code&gt;, informal;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All cases occur when the speaker uses direct speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see what happens in each case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inflections&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As far as I know, all Slavic languages retain gender-related inflections according to the &lt;strong&gt;original subject&lt;/strong&gt;, as in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Direct speech: &lt;em&gt;она сказал&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt;: &quot;я пошл&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; за пивом&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(&quot;she said [past, fem.]: &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; went [past, fem.] for beer&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indirect speech: &lt;em&gt;она сказал&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt;, что она пошл&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; за пивом&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(&quot;she said [past, fem.] that &lt;strong&gt;she&lt;/strong&gt; went [past, fem.] for beer&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polite particles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thais often prefer shorter sentences, and the direct speech is grammatically simpler as it omits &quot;that&quot;. However, when re-telling someone's words may lead to misunderstanding of  polite particles of a social class (that the final speaker doesn't belong to). Two examples below are spoken by a make speaker re-telling female's words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Direct: เธอ พูด &lt;em&gt;ว่า&lt;/em&gt; สวัสดี &lt;em&gt;คะ&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;she said, &quot;hello [polite particle, fem.]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;note here there's no masculine polite particle, so Thais often use the second way to say the same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Direct: เธอ พูด &lt;em&gt;ครับ&lt;/em&gt; ว่า สวัสดี &lt;em&gt;คะ&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;she said [polite particle, masc.], &quot;hello [polite particle, fem.]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indirect: เธอ พูด สวัสดี &lt;em&gt;ครับ&lt;/em&gt;  (&lt;em&gt;she said hello [polite particle, masc.]&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Low language by high-level speakers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Usually it is prohibited to use such words for speakers of a high social class, so they use indirect speech to indicate (but not reproduce) vulgar words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even examples in English. Imagine a situation when two people with high social status (and hence using &quot;high&quot; language among themselves) discuss someone else's rude behavior:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can you imagine that? &lt;strong&gt;He said to me, &quot;f%ck off&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; on an important meeting, so I never work with them anymore.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using an indirect speech, the whole picture is different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can you imagine that? &lt;strong&gt;He was so rude to me&lt;/strong&gt; on an important meeting, so I never work with them anymore.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-01-07T08:53:02.047" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T08:53:02.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4572" CreationDate="2013-09-26T16:07:19.500" Score="10" ViewCount="12661" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which natural languages have the fewest phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2014-10-01T04:50:04.280" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T16:46:15.160" Title="Languages with the fewest phonemes" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-09-26T16:46:18.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polynesian languages have very few phonemes (such as Hawaiian, which has about a dozen).&#xA;On the other end of the scale are Northwest Caucasian languages (the now extinct Ubykh and a dialect of Abkhaz).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-02-02T09:12:06.170" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T09:12:06.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4559" CreationDate="2013-09-26T16:46:48.693" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all it is not completely right to say that Sanskrit and Hindi both use the Devanagari script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that Devanagari script is the native script of Hindi, which is also written in other scripts such as Urdu script and roman script (mainly in social media and Hinglish). Sanskrit, on the other hand, has no native script whatsoever and it is written in several scripts in Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia and it has been so since ancient times. It is quite possible that two Sanskrit speakers (one from North India and second from Thailand) perfectly understand each other while talking but still not be able to understand a single letter of each other's writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letters you are referring to (Lri, Rii etc.) belong to Sanskrit alphabet not the Hindi alphabet. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Devanagari script&lt;/a&gt; is not exclusive to Hindi and is used to write alphabets of other languages such as Marathi and Sanskrit as well. As an other example, Marathi alphabet has some letters that are not in Hindi or Sanskrit alphabets but they all use Devanagari script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2013-09-30T06:16:39.183" LastActivityDate="2013-09-30T06:16:39.183" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-09-26T17:23:41.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Central Rotokas (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas&lt;/a&gt;). It has five vowels (/a i u e o/) and three consonants (/p t k/), for a total of 8 phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T17:23:41.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4576" CreationDate="2013-09-26T18:54:02.700" Score="0" ViewCount="2104" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is a quote from a Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American English phonology&lt;/a&gt; and concerns flapping in American English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to alveolar tap [ɾ] before unstressed vowels (as in butter, party) and syllabic /l/ (bottle), as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel (what else, whatever). Thus, for most speakers, pairs such as ladder/latter, metal/medal, and coating/coding are pronounced the same. For many speakers, this merger is incomplete and does not occur after /aɪ/; these speakers tend to pronounce writer with [ʌɪ] and rider with [aɪ]. This is a form of Canadian raising but, unlike more extreme forms of that process, does not affect /aʊ/. In some areas and idiolects, &lt;strong&gt;a phonemic distinction between what elsewhere become homophones through this process is maintained by vowel lengthening in the vowel preceding the formerly voiced consonant&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g., [ˈlæːɾɚ] for &quot;ladder&quot; as opposed to [ˈlæɾɚ] for &quot;latter&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Are there any studies on how many speakers have this vowel lengthening? Or can anyone confirm this based on anecdotal evidence?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly makes sense that speakers might phonologise vowel lengthening before voiced plosives after the voicing distinction in alveolar plosives has been neutralised. But this is the first time I have read such a claim, so I would be glad if somebody can confirm or deny it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-writer-rider-distinction&quot;&gt;previous question on a related topic&lt;/a&gt;, where question and answers did not specifically focus on the phonologisation of vowel length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T17:09:56.363" Title="Phonological vowel length in American English due to (t-)flapping" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4556" CreationDate="2013-09-26T19:46:48.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The typical linguistic response is that much like Chomsky's famous &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Colourless green ideas sleep furiously&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the liar sentence is well-formed but meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you insist on evaluating the truth value of the sentence, and posit it is not meaningless in a simple way like &quot;The present King of France is bald&quot; (we can't evaluate the truth-value of this sentence since we are referring to something that doesn't exist) but saying that &quot;This sentence&quot; is a proper self-reference (note that in formal systems, saying 'this sentence' or a similar reference is much more involved) then the alternative way out for the linguist is to say that language is simply &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liar-paradox/#IncVie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inconsistent&lt;/a&gt; and the sentence is both true and false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="33" LastEditDate="2013-10-02T16:06:11.187" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T16:06:11.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4568" CreationDate="2013-09-26T21:36:51.360" Score="8" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many English-based jargons include newly created nouns, verbs and adjectives; and re-appropriate existing English nouns, verbs, and adjectives to new ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't come up with an example of a newly minted preposition, and only one example of a conjunction: &quot;iff&quot; meaning &quot;if and only if.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jargons diverge from their parent language, do they tend to accrete new terms from some parts of speech but not others?  Which parts of speech?  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm less interested in loan-words in jargons like Latin in law &amp;amp; science.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I design computer programming languages and am hoping that understanding how people adapt general purpose human languages to specialized domains might provide some insight into how programming languages might be made easier to adapt to specific problem domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2517" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:51:27.693" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:51:27.693" Title="What parts of speech do professional jargons tend to mint?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;neologism&gt;&lt;study-of-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2013-09-26T22:09:23.967" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not in only in jargons, but in most languages in general there are more nouns, verbs and adjectives than conjunctions and prepositions. The former are called open word classes and the latter closed class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open word classes readily admit new members, but closed word classes don't give in so easily - although closed is a bit of an exaggeration, over time they do, but slowly. See the relevant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So jargons hardly ever invent new conjunctions, prepositions or determiners. I would expect first of all lots of new nouns, and adjectives and verbs in second place. Jargons are by definition very technical and technical texts are often written in a very nominal style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-09-26T22:09:23.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2013-09-27T00:54:25.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look for papers on &lt;em&gt;multi-word term recognition&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;automatic term recognition&lt;/em&gt;, etc. In English, the most common patterns are [Noun*][Noun] and [Adjective*][Noun]. For a recent-ish survey of the field see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/538_paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Comparative Evaluation of Term Recognition Algorithms&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;. See the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/1878908/An_improved_automatic_term_recognition_method_for_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An Improved Automatic Term RecognitionMethod for Spanish&lt;/a&gt; for examples of POS patterns that the authors used, for detecting multi-word terms in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T00:54:25.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-09-27T01:00:26.440" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pirahã&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to have either ten or eleven phonemes (three vowels and either seven or eight consonants). If it has ten, that's one fewer than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Central Rotokas&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="3132" LastEditDate="2014-02-10T22:56:10.947" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T22:56:10.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7014" CreationDate="2013-09-27T01:26:38.213" Score="4" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Indian languages are classified as syllable-timed. Some Dravidian languages, such as Tamil and Telugu, are mora-timed, which in recent research on speech rhythm has been called super-syllable-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to persistent and intensive language contact, Indian languages share many features. This prompted Emeneau &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/472464/The_influence_of_Dravidian_on_Indo-Aryan_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; to describe these languages as belonging to a common linguistic area or &lt;em&gt;sprachbund&lt;/em&gt;. For example, it has been &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/472464/The_influence_of_Dravidian_on_Indo-Aryan_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; (see also references in the linked article) that Dravidian languages have influence the phonology and phonetics of Indo-Aryan languages. Retroflexion, for example, might have been introduced to Sanskrit from Dravidian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Is syllable-timing in Indo-Aryan languages due to contact with Dravidian languages?&lt;/strong&gt; If yes, please provide references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/472464/The_influence_of_Dravidian_on_Indo-Aryan_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; Emeneau, Murray B. (1956) India as a linguistic area. Language 32, 3–16&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-09-27T01:51:21.743" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T00:38:36.063" Title="Is syllable-timing in Indo-Aryan languages due to contact with Dravidian languages?" Tags="&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;&lt;rhythm&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4806" CreationDate="2013-09-27T11:10:11.510" Score="5" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia : Devnagari :- &lt;/a&gt; : &quot;The avagraha &lt;strong&gt;ऽ&lt;/strong&gt; (usually transliterated with an apostrophe) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is a Sanskrit punctuation mark&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for the elision of a vowel in sandhi: एकोऽयम् ekoyam (&amp;lt; ekas + ayam) &quot;this one&quot;. An original long vowel lost to coalescence is sometimes marked with a double avagraha: सदाऽऽत्मा sadātmā (&amp;lt; sadā + ātmā) &quot;always, the self&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Its main function is to show that a vowel is sustained in a cry or a shout&lt;/strong&gt;:&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we have a similar feature in any other languages? How is the 'stretching' of a long vowel denoted in  other languages&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2013-10-29T07:48:39.210" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T07:48:39.210" Title="The shout symbol?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-27T11:32:23.747" Score="1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I want a job with a social &lt;em&gt;connect&lt;/em&gt;&quot;   , using a verb &lt;em&gt;connect&lt;/em&gt; for&#xA;the noun &lt;em&gt;connection&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's a &lt;em&gt;fail&lt;/em&gt;!&quot; , using the verb &lt;em&gt;fail&lt;/em&gt; instead of the noun &lt;em&gt;failure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Acme is a multinational corporate&quot; , using the adjective &lt;em&gt;corporate&lt;/em&gt; instead of &quot;Corporate entity&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Increase in rep on SE due to an accept&quot;. Using verb accept instead of noun acceptance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;SE is upgrading its &lt;strong&gt;compute&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has such a usage been noted , what do we call it?&#xA;  any examples of more such usage welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2013-10-21T05:55:10.903" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T05:55:10.903" Title="Adjectives/verbs being used as nouns: the trend grows?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4565" CreationDate="2013-09-27T15:55:53.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any references on this at the moment, but anecdotally I can say that I indeed display a version of this length distinction in my dialect. There are some issues that should be highlighted, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the well-known vowel length alternation that is observed before voiced vs. voiceless consonants is the most common and the most robust when the consonants in question are coda consonants and when the syllable in question is phrase-final:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case A: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peace&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say peas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say peace&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many speakers also display this alternation phrase medially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case B: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say bad for me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say bat for me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some length differences may be observed even when the consonant in question may not be analyzed as a coda:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case C: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ogre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ochre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;buzz around&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bus around&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Case C it may make sense to analyze the consonants as being ambisyllabic--that is, both belonging to the coda of the syllable to the left and the onset of the syllable to the right. Note that the syllable to the right is unstressed in all of the examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I produce all of the length alternations mentioned above, although my speech follows the general trend in that the length differences are greatest in Case A, less in Case B, and the least in Case C. Similar length alternations can be observed in some words that I realize with flaps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;coding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;coating&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say bad again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Say bat again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note though, that in all of the above cases, the segments that are realized as flaps are found at morpheme boundaries, meaning that in other contexts they may be realized as [d] or [t] (or [tʰ]). I don't make a reliable length distinction in &lt;em&gt;ladder&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;latter&lt;/em&gt;, and it is likely because in my lexicon the medial consonants in these words are not /t/ and /d/ but rather just /ɾ/. I have read claims that some speakers do make this distinction (though I don't have references off the top of my head), but I am not one of those speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that, when the vowel in question is the diphthong /aɪ/ and the flap is at a morpheme boundary (as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;rider&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), I display both the length alternation as well as the vowel raising phenomenon discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-writer-rider-distinction&quot;&gt;the post mentioned by the OP&lt;/a&gt;, but the vowel in &lt;em&gt;spider&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cider&lt;/em&gt; is raised (and the same length as the first vowel in &lt;em&gt;writer&lt;/em&gt;), which suggests that in my lexicon those words do not have underlying /d/ in them. They could therefore either be analyzed as having /t/ or just /ɾ/, as I mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T17:09:56.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-27T17:41:51.757" Score="1" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a command line app that has the following functions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;function createABox() { console.log(&quot;hey&quot;); };&#xA;function deleteABox() { console.log(&quot;wutsup&quot;); };&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The command line app can take any kind of text input. I want the app to call createABox whenever it makes sense to do so from an English speaking perspective. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;create a box&quot;, &quot;create box&quot;, &quot;new box&quot;, &quot;I want a new box&quot;, &quot;new container&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should all call createABox. Is this a common linguistics problem and if so what would be the pseudocode algorithm for something like that? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2519" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-28T04:51:17.893" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T05:43:54.803" Title="Algorithm for converting an English sentence or phrase into a function call" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-10-28T11:03:57.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4577" CreationDate="2013-09-27T18:26:08.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off all, you'll need a parser. Once you have a syntax tree (provided the input is well-formed according to your grammar) you can try to construct a logical form that can be semantically interpreted in your app. If the domain is very limited, the parser will be comparatively simple. It all depends on where your limits are. Read a good description of definite clause grammars (which are covered in all good books about Prolog).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-09-27T18:26:08.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-28T06:35:29.453" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably due to a desire to sound cute or otherwise I find teens (girls mostly) using an accent wherein they have to pout their lips a bit more in speaking while this may give them a more appealing  look or peer group  acceptance the accent changes; moreover this is not a localised phenomenon but spread out throughout the age group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this ever been noted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which are the cultures wherein the accent changes with demography?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg for an adult it might be p-aa-rty the teen&#xA;says ph-o-ty (with a  flapping of intervocalic /t/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-09-28T07:57:12.280" Title="Different accent for different genders and age groups" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-28T08:53:18.320" Score="6" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;In both Lao cuisine and Vietnamese cuisine there exists a noodle dish with a similar name. Lao &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feu_%28food%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ເຝີ&lt;/code&gt; (feu)&lt;/a&gt; and Vietnamese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;phở&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Wikipedia article discusses the possibility of the dish/word being related to French &lt;em&gt;pot-au-feu&lt;/em&gt; but the articles do not even mention each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In looking for other sources you might find the Lao and Vietnamese dishes/words discussed but with no mention of the French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems it is difficult to get to the hard etymological facts, or at least solid likely theories due to such things as folk etymology and nationalism. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3aPho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia talk page for the Vietnamese dish&lt;/a&gt; has some reasonable debate while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3aFeu_%28food%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the one for the Lao dish&lt;/a&gt; is very unreasonable and nationalist with a mixture of some logical points, some bad linguistics, and some arguments I suspect to be based on misunderstand but don't know enough.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chinese word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B2%89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;粉&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; may also play a part, via Cantonese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do we actually know about any relationship between these three words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the languages in question have at least one vowel which might be described as being &quot;like a schwa&quot;. In the case of Lao and Vietnamese there seem to be many interpretations for how to map the sounds in these words into &lt;strong&gt;IPA&lt;/strong&gt;. Here are all the variants I have found for the words in question, including comments from Wikipedia talk pages about the tones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;feu&lt;/code&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fø/&lt;/code&gt; (Wiktionary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lao&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;ເຝີ&lt;/code&gt; (feu):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fə̆ː/&lt;/code&gt; (SEAlang)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;the Lao word, feu, uses a neutral tone&quot; (Wikipedia talk page for the Lao word)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fǝ̌ǝ/&lt;/code&gt; (found by Googling)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fɤˆː/&lt;/code&gt; (found by Googling)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;phở&lt;/code&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fɤ/&lt;/code&gt; (SEAlang)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fəː˧˩˧]&lt;/code&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;the Vietnamese word, pho, uses a rising tone&quot; (Wikipedia talk page for the Lao word)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fə̃ː/&lt;/code&gt; (found by Googling)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fɤ̌/&lt;/code&gt; (found by Googling)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/fə ̉ː/&lt;/code&gt; (found by Googling)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T13:27:04.930" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:56:49.383" Title="What is the etymological relationship between French &quot;feu&quot;, Lao &quot;ເຝີ&quot; (feu), and Vietnamese &quot;phở&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4478" CreationDate="2013-09-28T13:05:17.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no linguistics expert but the sound &quot;oong&quot; in the North is pronounced like &quot;on&quot; /ɔŋ/ in Southern dialect. In the South they are both pronounced the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the word &quot;đoòng&quot; above is pronounced as &quot;đòn&quot; in Southern Vietnam. Some other common words for this are &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/xoong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;xoong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; nồi&quot; (pot for cooking), &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%E1%BA%A3i_xoong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cải &lt;strong&gt;xoong&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Nasturtium officinale/Nasturtium microphyllum, a type of vegetable),&quot; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/boong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;boong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; tàu&quot; (ship deck), &quot;xe &lt;a href=&quot;https://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/go%C3%B2ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;goòng&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (wagon), &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boong_ke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;boong-ke&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (from German &lt;em&gt;bunker&lt;/em&gt; with french pronunciation)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2014-09-13T05:06:35.663" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T05:06:35.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4587" CreationDate="2013-09-28T13:12:50.820" Score="11" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's consider just borrowing between unrelated, national/standardized tonal languages, just in case borrowing between related languages might be a special case and borrowing between non standardized languages might be more variable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cantonese ↔ Lao&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cantonese ↔ Thai&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cantonese ↔ Vietnamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lao ↔ Mandarin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lao ↔ Vietnamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mandarin ↔Thai&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mandarin ↔ Vietnamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai ↔ Vietnamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that each language has a different number and selection of tones just like each has a different number and selection of phonemes, is it generally true that the &quot;closest&quot; tones will be borrowed as well as the &quot;closest&quot; phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this would be within reason since there are going to be phonological constraints such as possible phoneme clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've put &quot;closest&quot; in scare quotes since this may not be scientifically measurable, so there may be two more or less acceptable mappings possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basically are tones as stable or less stable than phonemes when borrowing between languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1780/how-do-tone-languages-assign-phonemic-tones-to-loanwords-from-non-tone-languages?rq=1&quot;&gt;we already have questions about borrowing from non-tonal into tonal languages&lt;/a&gt;. This question is for when both the source and destination languages are tonal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T14:46:26.013" Title="Are tones &quot;preserved&quot; when borrowing between unrelated tonal languages?" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4585" CreationDate="2013-09-28T16:54:23.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me speak only about Thai language and what rules govern the loanwords. Other languages may well &quot;behave&quot; the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is it generally true that the &quot;closest&quot; tones will be borrowed as well as the &quot;closest&quot; phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: &lt;strong&gt;Yes, but not always&lt;/strong&gt; for phonemes; &lt;strong&gt;Usually No&lt;/strong&gt; for tones.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would also say that it's useful to know how words borrowed from &lt;strong&gt;non-tonal&lt;/strong&gt; languages (English) change. It would highlight the things better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many words are borrowed along with their pronunciation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;บาร์บีคิว &lt;code&gt;[baː biː kʰiw]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;barbecue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;孔子 &lt;code&gt;[kʰʊŋ3 tsɨ3]&lt;/code&gt; -- ขงจื๊อ &lt;code&gt;[kʰǒŋ tɕɯ́ː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Confucius, a philosopher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but sometimes not accurately. There are several observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consonants are preserved in their &lt;strong&gt;written form&lt;/strong&gt;, but pronounced according to the target language rules. This often happens to final consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;disco&lt;/em&gt; ดิสโก &lt;code&gt;[dìt koː]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note the low tone appeared &quot;from nowhere&quot;, because the &lt;code&gt;do-dek&lt;/code&gt; consonant + dead syllable &lt;strong&gt;implies&lt;/strong&gt; the Low tone (unless an explicit tone mark presents).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; in final position is pronounced &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt; แอปเปิ้ล &lt;code&gt;[ʔɛ̀ːp pɤ̂ːn]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here, the 1st syllable has implied low tone, like the above, and the 2nd syllable receives an explicit tone mark to denote &lt;strong&gt;Falling tone&lt;/strong&gt;; obviously, the original English word has no tones at all, and moreover, the 1st syllable is stressed, not the 2nd (stress somewhat resembles the Falling tone);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; in final position is pronounced &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;football&lt;/em&gt; ฟุตบอล &lt;code&gt;[fút bɔːn]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Again, the implied high tone for the 1st syllable (&lt;code&gt;fo-fan&lt;/code&gt; consonant + short vowel) and &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; in final position;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tones may be totally missing:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;叩头 &lt;code&gt;[kʰɤʊ̯4 tʰɤʊ̯2]&lt;/code&gt; -- เข่าเท้า &lt;code&gt;[kʰàw tʰáːw]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;to bow one's head&lt;/em&gt;. Note different vowel length and different tones: &lt;code&gt;[kʰɤʊ̯4 tʰɤʊ̯2]&lt;/code&gt; is Falling+Rising, while &lt;code&gt;[kʰàw tʰáːw]&lt;/code&gt; is Low+High. Different diphthongs must be fine since &lt;code&gt;[aːw]&lt;/code&gt; seems to be closest to &lt;code&gt;[ɤʊ̯]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;老子 &lt;code&gt;[lɑʊ̯3 tsɨ3]&lt;/code&gt; -- เล่าจื๊อ &lt;code&gt;[lâu tɕɯ́ː]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Lao-Tze, a philosopher&lt;/em&gt;. Again, the original FallingRaising+FallingRaising tones become Falling+High due to explicit tone marks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, more drastic changes happen when loanwords omit tone marks, so they have &lt;strong&gt;default tone&lt;/strong&gt; governed by the initial consonant &lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;カラオケ &lt;code&gt;[ka ra o ke]&lt;/code&gt; คาราโอเกะ &lt;code&gt;[kʰaː raː oː kè]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;karaoke&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This word is a shining example: the original word has all syllables of equal length (has no lexical vowel length), while being borrowed, it has long vowel for syllables 1-3, but short vowel for syllable 4 (plus, short vowel produces Low tone according to Thai grammar rules).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;อินเทอร์เน็ต &lt;code&gt;[in tʰɤː nét]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Internet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that due to vowel length, it sounds rather like &quot;inTERnet&quot;, plus the last syllable has High tone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;公司 &lt;code&gt;[kʊŋ1 sɨ1]&lt;/code&gt; -- กงสี &lt;code&gt;[koŋ sǐː]&lt;/code&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;company&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Different vowels &lt;code&gt;[ɨ]&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;[iː]&lt;/code&gt;, different length, and different tones: High+High tones vs. Mid+Rising&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All above applies per syllable, of course. If the word is polysyllabic, the same rules apply that govern polysyllabic words of Thai language (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/id/830222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enepenthetic ‘Leading Consonant’ Clusters&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(1)&lt;/sup&gt; In Thai language, syllable's tone is defined by its &lt;em&gt;initial consonant&lt;/em&gt;, unless overridden by an explicit tone mark. Each consonant belongs to &lt;em&gt;one of three consonant classes&lt;/em&gt;. Each consonant class is associated with a default tone, governed by live/dead syllable or long/short vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consonants&lt;/strong&gt; are often preserved in their written form;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And become governed by the target language rules;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vowels&lt;/strong&gt; are more vulnerable for changes (than the consonants);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some loanwords attempt to keep original &lt;strong&gt;tone&lt;/strong&gt;;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often, it happens to be not very accurate;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A large number of words do not retain the original tones;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(A)&lt;/strong&gt; Fundamental frequency contours of the four &lt;strong&gt;Mandarin Chinese&lt;/strong&gt; tones (spoken by a female speaker of Mandarin). Each tone on the syllable &lt;code&gt;/ma/&lt;/code&gt; represents a different lexical item. “ma1” is the level tone, “ma2” the rising tone, “ma3” the dipping tone, and “ma4” the falling tone.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(B)&lt;/strong&gt; Fundamental frequency contours of the five &lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; tones (spoken by a female speaker of Thai). Each tone on the syllable &lt;code&gt;/ma/&lt;/code&gt; represents a different lexical item. “ma0” is the mid level tone, “ma1” the low level tone, “ma2” the falling tone, “ma3” the high level tone, and “ma4” the rising tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU8KR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tone contours for Chinese and Thai&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;Image from &lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00120/full&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sealang.net/thai/chinese/modern.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Chinese Loanwords in Thai&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T14:46:26.013" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T14:46:26.013" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T02:28:00.907" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Glottopedia we read that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Adversative_coordination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adversative coordination&lt;/a&gt; expresses semantic contrast between the coordinands. In English, adversative coordination is usually accomplished with “but,” as in these sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Hendersons were poor, but happy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He tried the door, but it was locked.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beck-shop.de/fachbuch/leseprobe/9780521581578_Excerpt_001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coordination&lt;/a&gt;, we read that adversative coordination is always binary.  In other words, adversative coordination can only involve two coordinands.   Hence these two sentences are ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*The queen tried to kill Snow White but Snow White escaped but she went through much hardship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*The mountain climbers were tired but happy but bankrupt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, why are these sentences ungrammatical?    Is the reason syntactic or semantic?  If the answer is lengthier than space on Stack Exchange allows, is there a link to a paper or book with the answer to this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T17:07:01.087" Title="Why must adversative coordination be binary?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T10:50:12.227" Score="4" ViewCount="1354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing my dissertation on interpreting and while I've been trying to find out the history behind it, I've come across a few websites which say that interpreting dated back as far as the Ancient Egyptians as they had a symbol which meant &quot;interpreter&quot;. I have tried everywhere I can think of to track down this symbol but I'm not having much luck, does anyone have any idea if this is true? Or where I can find out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2524" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T15:30:11.353" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T19:18:11.997" Title="Is there an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol meaning &quot;interpreter&quot;?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4589" CreationDate="2013-09-29T13:08:37.083" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this is not going to be a &quot;here it is&quot; type of answer, but I found some information that might be helpful in your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, apparently, even though interpreting is not a human activity that leaves many traces, the first mentions of such subject have been found in an hieroglyph that meant &quot;interpreter&quot; on some written material dated 3000 BC. I've tried searching for this kind of data but nothing turned up, only other articles repeating the same wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I tried another course of action and I searched Ancient Egyptian dictionaries. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7080551M/An_Egyptian_hieroglyphic_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary &lt;/a&gt; by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, which is freely available to the public for both online reading and download. The content is quite fascinating but if you search for &quot;interpreter&quot;, two results will come up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qCIIJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/egyptianhierogly01budguoft#page/2/mode/2up/search/interpreter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XQvKd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/egyptianhierogly01budguoft#page/106/mode/2up/search/interpreter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 106&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note: In the second image, there is an equal sign... Probably the expression after it is the word for interpreter, but I don't know how to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, from a quick look, you'll notice that there is a symbol that seems to come up continuously. That one is that of a man kneeling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VMKr8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched this symbol and I've discovered that it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Determinative&lt;/a&gt; and the concepts it refers to are &quot;eat, drink, &lt;strong&gt;speak, tell&lt;/strong&gt;, feel, think, love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v8GtY.png&quot; alt=&quot;sDd&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (transcription: &lt;strong&gt;sDd&lt;/strong&gt;) that contains it, means &quot;to converse&quot;. I think you could start from here and see what comes up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancient-egypt.org/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient-egypt.org&lt;/a&gt;, choose &quot;Man and his occupations&quot;, and then select the third symbol.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T19:18:11.997" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T19:18:11.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T14:31:34.813" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognition is, generally speaking, ‘linguistic’ in itself, in that it is&#xA;the manipulation of language-like structures (propositions) according to formal&#xA;rules; (b) the function of natural language is just to express these language-like&#xA;structures; therefore, natural language does not affect cognition in any substantial&#xA;way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2521" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-29T14:51:33.900" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T14:51:33.900" Title="What does it mean that cognition is linguistic in itself?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4555" CreationDate="2013-09-29T19:13:23.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/lmatthewson/pdf/fieldwork.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Matthewson 2004's paper&lt;/a&gt; on semantic fieldwork distinguishes three kinds of judgements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammaticality judgements (i.e., syntactic/morphological well-formedness),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;truth-value judgements (i.e., true or false in a given context), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;felicity judgements (i.e., acceptable or not acceptable in a given context).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion of (in)felicity judgements suggests that they deal with a speaker's failure to make sure the context satisfies either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) (lexically-encoded) presuppositions, or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) Gricean Maxim-induced implicatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, she uses the following example to contrast truth-value judgements from felicity judgements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Context: Two cats are in the room, and they are both asleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. The cats are awake.&#xA;b. The cat is asleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1a) is FALSE, because the cats are both asleep. (1b) is INFELICITOUS because 'the' presupposes something like: the entity referred to is the maximal entity that satisfies the NP restriction in the context, and the maximal entity in the context is both cats, not a single cat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of infelicity via failure to satisfy Gricean Maxims would be something like (c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. One of the cats is asleep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1c) is TRUE, but INFELICITOUS because it implicates that the other cat is awake, and this violates the Maxim of Quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you consider presuppositions to be grammatically encoded (which I think is the standard view, eg., Heim 1983), then instances of infelicity via presupposition failure would be considered a subset of the 'grammatical errors.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you consider implicatures to be grammatically encoded (not the standard view, but cf. Chierchia, Fox and Spector 2008 on 'scalar implicatures'), then instances of infelicity via Gricean-violations would also be a subset of 'grammatical errors.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-10-02T15:23:42.337" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T15:23:42.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-09-29T19:44:39.970" Score="1" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;à la mode&quot; in French? I am thinking it must be an adjective but wondering how this might be represented in an &lt;em&gt;arbre syntagmatique&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to linguistics and just trying to get a solid grasp on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2526" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-09-30T20:40:39.270" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T10:14:28.147" Title="What part of speech is the French &quot;à la mode&quot;?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2011" CreationDate="2013-09-29T20:13:35.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Amerindian Na-dene languages have something similar, called classifier prefixes, placed at the exactly same place, and having a similar function, namely valence-alternation, but in these languages the prefixes are consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2013-09-29T20:13:35.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2013-09-30T20:06:08.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is very tempting to analyse it as a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;set phrase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and indeed it is leaning toward being one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is still possible to break it down, and, for instance, put an adjective before &quot;mode&quot; to qualify it : &quot;à la nouvelle mode&quot;, meaning more or less &quot;newly fashionable&quot;. Or after it : &quot;à la mode française&quot;, meaning &quot;in the french fashion&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to French set phrase &quot;pour le moment&quot;. It is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; possible to add an adjective qualifying &quot;moment&quot;, either before or after it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think it is still better to analyse &quot;à la mode&quot; as a full-fledged prepositional phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-03T10:14:28.147" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T10:14:28.147" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-01T07:01:50.573" Score="5" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had long believed there was such a thing as a &quot;set phrase&quot;. I thought I had learned it in my school days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set phrases included but were not restricted to idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idioms were a special class of set phrases whose overall meaning is not transparently based on the sum of its parts, such as &lt;em&gt;red herring&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to kick the bucket&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other set phrases were transparently based on their parts but still tended to occur as fixed units. Perhaps like &lt;em&gt;at this point in time&lt;/em&gt; (but there may be better examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the Wikipedia article on set phrases has always been very poor, which makes me wonder if the concept I learned may not be as widely held as I thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3aSet_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia talk page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Set_phrase&amp;amp;action=history&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article's history&lt;/a&gt; with lots of changes and controversy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there some more solid references? Is this a linguistics concept? Do I have the right term but the wrong definition?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T07:07:38.903" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T10:57:25.223" Title="Does linguistics have a concept of &quot;set phrase&quot; with a meaning differing from &quot;idiom&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;set-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2013-10-01T15:06:14.183" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No need to say that there is a lot of variation in linguistic terminology. See Table I.I below from Cowie 1998: 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9XDf7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some most common ones - based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.139.07gra/details&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Granger and Paquot 2008&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/II/3.toc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cowie 1981&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free combinations, e.g. &lt;em&gt;to blow a trumpet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;restricted collocations (or collocations proper), e.g. &lt;em&gt;to blow a fuse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;figurative idioms, e.g. &lt;em&gt;to blow your own trumpet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pure idioms, e.g. &lt;em&gt;to blow the gaff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last three categories are also known as &quot;composites,&quot; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;formulae&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. pragmatically autonomous utterances).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://global.oup.com/academic/product/phraseology-9780198294252?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;tab=toc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mel'chuk 1998&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semi-phrasemes (or collocations);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quasi-phrasemes (or quasi-idioms);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;full phrasemes (or full idioms).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Granger and Paquot 2008&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;referential phrasemes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lexical collocations (&lt;em&gt;heavy rain&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;idioms (&lt;em&gt;spill the beans&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;irreversible bi- and trinomials (&lt;em&gt;bed and breakfast&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;similes (&lt;em&gt;swear like a trooper&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compounds (&lt;em&gt;black hole&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical collocations (&lt;em&gt;depend on&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phrasal verbs (&lt;em&gt;make out&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;textual phrasemes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;complex prepositions (&lt;em&gt;with respect to&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;complex conjunctions (&lt;em&gt;as if&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linking adverbials (&lt;em&gt;in other words&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;textual sentence stems (&lt;em&gt;the final point is&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;communicative phrasemes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speech act formulae (&lt;em&gt;take care!&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;attitudinal formulae (&lt;em&gt;in fact&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commonplaces (&lt;em&gt;It's a small world.&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proverbs (&lt;em&gt;When in Rome&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slogans (&lt;em&gt;Make love, not war.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;set phrase,&quot; when used in the broad sense, will include anything but free combinations (Cowie's classification above); semi-, quasi-, and full phrasemes (Melchuk's classification). For example, Mel'chuk 1998 says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;People speak in set phrases, rather than in separate words, hence the crucial importance of set phrases. At the same time, set phrases, or PHRASEMES, represent one of the major difficulties in theoretical linguistics as well as in dictionary making&quot; (Mel'chuk 1998: 24).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Burger, Dobrovol'skij, Kühn, and Norrick 2007 argue that &lt;strong&gt;&quot;set phrase is a widely accepted term in English. [...] It thus includes all fixed expressions of a language, such as collocations, idioms, quasi-idioms, catch phrases, routines, proverbs&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; - in other words, it is equivalent to German &lt;em&gt;Phraseologismsus&lt;/em&gt; in the broad sense (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esv.info/978-3-503-12204-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burger 1998&lt;/a&gt;). To make things worse, some Anglo-American linguists use &quot;idiom&quot; or &quot;collocation&quot; in this sense, too. Here's what Burger et al. suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rBTZv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To show how huge this terminological divide between Anglo-American linguists and the rest of the world is, in Granger and Meunier 2008 (23 papers, more than 400 pages), the term &quot;set phrase&quot; is used in two papers only (!), three or four occurrences only, the phraseological unit or phraseme being used much more frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/21739&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burger, Dobrovol'skij, Kühn, and Norrick 2007&lt;/a&gt; or a collection of papers in &lt;a href=&quot;http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.139/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Granger and Meunier 2008&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T22:26:29.477" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T22:26:29.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4608" CreationDate="2013-10-01T15:06:22.137" Score="2" ViewCount="701" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say the dictionary has two definitions for live:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;: I &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; by the sea.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;: The match was shown &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; on the sports channel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also contains the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Live it up&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Live it up&lt;/em&gt; like there's no tomorrow! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A native speaker of English will easily differentiate between these different meanings for a range of different sentences, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I prefer to live in a house. (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kennedy was shot on live TV. (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Live football. (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;) probably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Live and breathe football. (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Live it up girl! (&lt;strong&gt;Live it up&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... is live... (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... live or... (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;), (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;) or even (&lt;strong&gt;Live or let die&lt;/strong&gt;). More context is needed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have built my own corpus with 10 million words. This corpus supplies me with words or groups of words and their frequencies. I can query the corpus after the word &quot;live&quot; and get the following result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to live&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to live in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live up to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live on &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the word is show in its most common contexts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I wish to do is to complement this list by tagging it in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 80%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 20%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to live (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 100%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live in (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 95%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 5%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live with (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 95%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 5%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to live in (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 100%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live up (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 90%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 10%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live up to (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 95%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 5%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live on (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 70%, &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: 30%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;who live (&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: 100%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;live it up (&lt;strong&gt;Live it up&lt;/strong&gt;: 100%)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; tags should be associated with &quot;live on&quot; since you can have &quot;Shown live on tv&quot; or &quot;I live on a farm&quot;. The percentages relate to the probability that a particular meaning is associated with the group in question. &quot;live up&quot; is more than likely &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but it is possible that it is &lt;strong&gt;Live&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, in the case: &quot;I am watching the match live up in my room&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;living&quot; or &quot;lived&quot; are not present in my list. I'm only interested in the word itself and groups of words in which it might be found. No plurals or the likes of the word in question are present in the list either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example for the word &quot;soap&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;soap (80% &lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, 20% &lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the soap (80% SOAP, 20% &lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;soap operas (100% &lt;strong&gt;Soap opera&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of soap (100% &lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;soap opera (100% &lt;strong&gt;Soap opera&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I define the following meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: I wash myself with soap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: Dallas is my favorite soap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Soap opera&lt;/strong&gt;: Dallas is my favorite soap opera.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't make the connection between &quot;soap&quot; and &quot;soap opera&quot;, hence &lt;strong&gt;Soap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Soap opera&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I currently have my own corpus and the facility to request for a word its most common contexts. How would you suggest I produce tagging along the lines of those specified above? What api's might help me, for example? What theories should I research? Perhaps there are api's or theories which might not give me exactly what I'm looking for but might still be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-10-03T21:46:36.160" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T09:13:07.897" Title="Word Sense Disambiguation for common groups of words" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;&lt;set-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4556" CreationDate="2013-10-01T15:18:31.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that there is no &quot;typical linguistic response&quot; here. The paradox is interesting mostly for philosophical semantics, but much less for many of the linguistic semantics perspectives. For instance, one view is that the sentence in question turns out to be a paradox if we assume a referential theory of meaning, and if we assume that the indexical &quot;this&quot; refers to the sentence itself. When we analyze this sentence taking into account a given context of utterance, then we might have a sentence that perhaps does not refer to itself. The point here is that any sentence from natural language that matters for linguistics is a sentence that has content, its relevant in a given context, and its related to the world in some way or another.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we see the liar's paradox from the perspective of truth-conditional semantics, I would say that what we want to understand is the truth conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence, and we need to consider the state of affairs or particular model of reality it describes in a given context. Here it is important to know the difference between truth conditions and truth value, because we can know the meaning of a sentence without knowing if it is true or false. So, for the proposition expressed by &quot;This sentence is false&quot;, what we know is that its meaning is whatever makes the sentence true or false depending on the model. If the sentence is uttered in a model or a possible world where the context states that &quot;this&quot; refers to any sentence, we just have to check what sentence are we talking about to evaluate its truth value. If the model states that the sentence refers to itself, then we are moving from the domain of linguistics to the domain of philosophy, and we have different options. One is that this is a problem of confusing hierarchy levels: language and metalanguage (Russellian view); another one is that we are just uttering a pointless sentence, where nothing true or false is really being said (Strawsonian view). There are other alternatives, but again, they are philosophical approaches to the logic of language, and are far from the scope of most linguistic theories of meaning in natural language.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastEditorUserId="1754" LastEditDate="2013-10-01T17:33:44.403" LastActivityDate="2013-10-01T17:33:44.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4596" CreationDate="2013-10-02T10:47:05.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Istvan Kecskes uses the term &quot;situation-bound utterance&quot; (SBU) to identify &quot;highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized&#xA;communicative situations&quot;. Kecskes (following a line of thought in linguistic pragmatics led by Coulmas, 1981) notes that &quot;set phrases&quot; (that is, prefabricated pragmatic units) can be classified on a continuum from least obligatory in a given situation to most obligatory, i.e., an SBU. An example of an SBU is the set phrase &quot;all aboard!&quot; that is tied to the situation of boarding a train. SBUs differ from idioms for their situational obligatoriness and also for their semantic transparency. To differentiate between an idiom and an SBU, take &quot;he has kicked the bucket&quot; vs. &quot;he has gone on&quot;. The idiom is not semantically transparent (it doesn't mean what its words say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all to say that there are many kinds of &quot;set phrases&quot; in language, and linguists set out to identify them and give them precise terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Coulmas, Florian, 1981. Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communicative Situations and Prepatterned Speech. The Hague, Mouton.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kecskes, Istvan, 1997. A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances. Paper Presented to Chicago Linguistics Society, March 7, 1997.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kecskes, I., 2000. A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (6), 605–625.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kecskes, Istvan, 2003. Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2534" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-02T10:57:25.223" LastActivityDate="2013-10-02T10:57:25.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2013-10-03T02:51:37.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that it is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%C3%A0%20la%20mode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;adjective&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; English and French. It's &lt;a href=&quot;http://thesaurus.com/browse/a+la+mode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;synonymous&lt;/a&gt; with en vogue, haute, trendy, etc.In English, it has additional applications in food, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/a+la+mode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;topped with ice cream&lt;/a&gt; or braised or stewed in vegetables. It literally translates as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0_la_mode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in the style or fashion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2539" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T02:51:37.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-03T12:05:35.913" Score="10" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michiel de Vaan's &lt;em&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Latin&lt;/em&gt; has for PIE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ei̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;copper&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eimos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;imitation, substitute&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯imea̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;image, copy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three words seemingly have the same root a̯ei̯-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two words related? Did the word for copper initially mean &quot;fake gold&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T18:21:48.537" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T15:58:50.393" Title="Did the PIE word for &quot;copper&quot; mean &quot;imitation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2013-10-03T23:03:20.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is hard to work from transliteration alone, rather than original orthography and/or phonemic transcription and I am no Persian specialist, but the word &quot;hasty&quot; is very obviously derived from &quot;haste&quot;, which is itself a loanword from the old french &quot;haste&quot; that became &quot;hâte&quot; in modern French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Haste&quot; comes from the Frankish stratum, it is theorized to be descended from Frankish *haist, itself a descendant of Proto-Germanic *haiftiz and ultimately of Proto-Indo-European *ḱēybʰ- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, this does not leave much room for a Persian etymology, and the answer to the question in the title is most likely no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, Wiktionary lists several Persian prefixes with negative or privative meanings : &#xA;نا (nâ)&#xA;ضد  [zed̪]&#xA;بی /biː/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, none of them are simply &quot;a-&quot;. &quot;a-&quot; as a privative suffix is descended from Old Greek ἀ-, ἀν-, itself descended from Proto-Indo-European root *n̥- whose descendant in Persian is suffix نا (nâ) above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2013-10-03T23:03:20.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4598" CreationDate="2013-10-04T01:52:16.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a technique in NLP called &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/shallow-parsing.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shallow semantic parsing&lt;/a&gt; that you might find useful. As others have pointed out in the comments, it's a very demanding task. Humans use a lot of information that's not readily available to an automatic semantic parser, not only from the context, but also real world knowledge that prompts us to exclude very unlikely interpretations (and only reconsider them if other more likely interpretations don't seem to make sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/SEMAFOR/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SEMAFOR&lt;/a&gt; project by the Stanford NLP group has built such a &lt;a href=&quot;http://demo.ark.cs.cmu.edu/parse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic parser&lt;/a&gt; and they provide a demo. You can probably download it and use it on your corpus. I haven't used this tool, but others from the same group. If you aren't scared by using a command line and figuring out a few things (it's rarely as easy as just installing some software and running it) you will likely be able to run it on your computer. They also provide further references on their website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ran some of your sentences in the demo, and results are mixed. The verb &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; seems to be recognised only in the sense of *Live*1 = to reside. The adjective is treated as something different from the verb. Phrasal verbs and idioms such as &lt;em&gt;live it up&lt;/em&gt; seem to be beyond the current abilities of the parser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCEXX.png&quot; alt=&quot;I prefer to live in a house.&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VSHOV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Live and breathe football.&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6LxiX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Live it up girl!&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJoN8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Kennedy was shot on live TV.&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IL6G5.png&quot; alt=&quot;The match was shown live on the sports channel.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect part of the reason why results are not ideal is that the semantic parser builds upon the results of a syntactic parser. Syntactic parsing is quite complex and computationally demanding. Even for simple sentences different well-formed parses are possible. Consider the following two sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(apparently a quote by &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=W4ZEWYUdk5MC&amp;amp;pg=PA8&amp;amp;lpg=PA8&amp;amp;dq=%22Yesterday%20I%20shot%20an%20elephant%20in%20my%20pyjamas%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=g2UCpwiXt-&amp;amp;sig=-Ry9L0onk-OijWE8zBAJbmeIj7U&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=px5OUuKBPcOn0AWYloDYCA&amp;amp;ved=0CFEQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Yesterday%20I%20shot%20an%20elephant%20in%20my%20pyjamas%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Groucho Marx&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The joke rests upon the fact that &lt;em&gt;in my pyjamas&lt;/em&gt; can be an adjective phrase that qualifies &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt; or an adverbial phrase that qualifies the verb. Most people's initial interpretation is the latter because elephants rarely wear anything. We usually don't even notice that the former alternative (adjective phrase qualifying &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt;) is a possible parse. Humans integrate syntactic and semantic parsing, but AFAIK current NLP applications can't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic parsing is an area of active research, and the Stanford parser is not the only around. An alternative is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCREL Semantic Analysis System&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-10-04T09:13:07.897" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T09:13:07.897" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T07:43:10.917" Score="5" ViewCount="4786" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a computer program which requires some of this functionality at one point, so I wanted to get into a (better-written) code and have a look, to get some inspiration. Are there any good ones out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2541" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T21:06:54.073" Title="Are there any good open source English text to IPA/other phonetics alphabet transcription programs?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T12:00:54.020" Score="4" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in whether it is possible to classify texts by authorship using just syntactic/grammatical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take ten people and have them write three texts. About their favorite hobby, a political commentary and the third one is a fictional story. &#xA;For the classification I do not want to use information like vocabulary or typos but just the grammatical role of a word in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to turn such information into a vector f.x. and classify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As suggested by hippietrail I'll try to clarify further what aspect I am interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally one can quantify anything and then have a clustering or classification algorithm work on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically you can use any metric you can think up beside just vocab, word frequency and typos. The latter won't even apply to identifying edited texts. Things like collocations, hyphenation, sentence length - anything imaginable. (hippietrail)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(hyphenation f.x. does not interest me for the purposes of this question - only the grammatical level.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not a linguist and I wouldn't want to start from scratch guessing my way to a useful quantification. So I am wondering whether there is already a quantification/vectorization of the above mentioned grammatical information distilled from a text that is known to serve this purpose of authorship identification sufficiently well. Maybe even a &quot;classical&quot; approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2542" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-04T14:30:52.543" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T17:41:43.750" Title="Identify author by a text's grammatical/syntactic structure" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;stylometry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4612" CreationDate="2013-10-04T12:59:17.750" Score="-2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically at 01:05&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vimeo.com/5297531&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://vimeo.com/5297531&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reproducing the audio for this film as my final year study at university and am unable to work out exactly what is being said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone could tell me the language being spoken, I'd greatly appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2543" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T13:40:54.777" Title="Is anyone able to tell me the language being spoken in this video?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-09-25T18:07:55.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4611" CreationDate="2013-10-04T13:23:38.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's Cantonese. The character is naming colors, but the colors he's naming are different from the ones that appear in English on the screen. First he says &quot;green&quot;, then he says &quot;purple&quot;, then &quot;red&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-10-04T13:40:54.777" LastActivityDate="2013-10-04T13:40:54.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4647" CreationDate="2013-10-04T15:35:35.807" Score="2" ViewCount="2055" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have the following syntax tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wvM3B.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for the nodes identified by &quot;S&quot;, &quot;NP&quot;, &quot;VP&quot;, and &quot;V&quot;? For a generic tree, I guess you would just call them &quot;non-terminal nodes&quot; or &quot;branch nodes&quot;, but I was wondering if there was a term for those nodes that is specifically used in the context of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1740" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-05T07:49:30.413" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T10:36:38.210" Title="What do you call the non-terminal nodes of a syntax tree?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-04T16:24:57.723" Score="5" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes, I've already read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;irrealis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;evidentials&lt;/a&gt; in wikipedia.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like these are talking about the same issue, except possibly the concepts arose separately to describe how each work in different languages (maybe a bad analogy is genitive and possessive in Russian and English-- same core thing, but different terminology because they don't work identically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T01:08:20.160" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:08:20.160" Title="What's the difference between irrealis and evidentials?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4614" CreationDate="2013-10-04T16:48:41.223" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irrealis&lt;/strong&gt; mood is used to talk about events that are not-real (ir-realis), such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had eaten an apple earlier I wouldn't be hungry now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The condition (I ate an apple earlier) cannot be fulfilled any more at the time of speaking, or cannot be fulfilled at any time (&lt;em&gt;If the Sun revolved around the Earth...&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evidentials&lt;/strong&gt; mark the source of information. English doesn't have grammaticalised evidentiality, but there are lexical expressions such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumour has it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm told that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on evidentials&lt;/a&gt; gives examples from Eastern Pomo, which has suffixes to mark different source of information: -&lt;em&gt;ink’e&lt;/em&gt; (nonvisual sensory), -&lt;em&gt;ine&lt;/em&gt; (inferential), -&lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt; (hearsay), -&lt;em&gt;ya&lt;/em&gt; (direct knowledge). This is not the same as irrealis mood. Whether you think your neighbour's house is burning because you felt the heat of the fire (nonvisual sensory), because you saw smoke (inferential), because your other neighbour called and told you (hearsay), or because you set it on fire yourself (direct knowledge) doesn't influence whether you think it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T07:48:36.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4618" CreationDate="2013-10-04T20:08:03.617" Score="2" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple event description such as &quot;The boy jumped&quot; does not necessarily imply anything about the speaker's understanding of the cause of the event or of the volition of the agent. I can say &quot;The boy jumped&quot; and mean that he was caused to jump involuntarily (e.g. by a sudden noise), or that he jumped of his own volition for a specific purpose (e.g. to reach something), or that he jumped of his own volition but for no reason or cause I can see, etc. Are there languages that mark such differences with verbal morphology, in the way that some languages mark evidentiality (which seems like a similar type of category)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking about argument structure-changing operations like causative forms; I'm asking if there are languages that inflectionally contrast forms of the same verb, with the same argument structure, with morphs that might be glossed as e.g. &quot;involuntary action&quot;, &quot;purposive action&quot;, &quot;unknown cause&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-05T07:35:10.263" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T14:34:14.667" Title="Are there languages that mark different types of volition or causality morphologically?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2013-10-04T23:16:53.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/lut/%2a%2a%2aEDITION%2a%2a%2a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt; has two different object pronoun paradigms, depending on whether the action predicated was performed volitionally or not. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʔu-k̉ʷəɬ-&lt;strong&gt;əd&lt;/strong&gt;-čəd tə-qʷu 'I poured the water'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;pour/spill&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;3DOVolit&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;Def&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʔu-k̉ʷəɬ-&lt;strong&gt;dxʷ&lt;/strong&gt;-čəd tə-qʷu 'I spilled the water'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;pour/spill&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;3DONonvol&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;Def&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and contrasting with the intransitive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʔu-k̉ʷəɬ tə-qʷu 'the water spilled'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;pour/spill&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;Def&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ʔu-pus-&lt;strong&gt;uds&lt;/strong&gt;-čəxʷ  'You threw something at me (and hit me)'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;throw&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sDOVolit&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;2sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ʔu-pus-&lt;strong&gt;dubš&lt;/strong&gt;-čəxʷ  'You threw something at me (and it happened to hit me)'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;throw&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sDONonvol&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;2sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ʔu-kʷa-&lt;strong&gt;ad&lt;/strong&gt;-čəd  'I dropped it'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;drop&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;3DOVolit&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ʔu-kʷa-&lt;strong&gt;dxʷ&lt;/strong&gt;-čəd  'I dropped it'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Narr&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;em&gt;drop&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sDONonvol&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;1sAg&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-05T14:34:14.667" LastActivityDate="2013-10-05T14:34:14.667" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6120" CreationDate="2013-10-05T08:06:39.583" Score="18" ViewCount="2730" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know a bit about parsing computer languages. Generally they try to resolve all ambiguities when parsing or abort the parse and throw an error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you either got nothing because there was an error, or you have a neat syntax tree / AST with no ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in natural languages ambiguity is rampant and has to be handled somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the same kind of syntax tree used for computer languages could not work for natural languages (&quot;can&quot; in an ambiguous sentence might be part of a verb phrase or part of a noun phrase depending how you look at it) &lt;strong&gt;I'm wondering if there is some data structure which has gained wide acceptance among NLP practitioners.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simplistic obvious approach is just to have one tree for each way of parsing a sentence, but the longer the sentence and the more ambiguities, they tend to compound and everything quickly gets out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm expecting there is some kind of multidimensional tree used which is &quot;flat&quot; in the unambiguous parts of a sentence but has extra layers for each variant parse just in the ambiguous sections. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-05T09:14:20.250" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T11:01:42.577" Title="Is there a favoured data structure for storing ambiguous parse trees in Natural Language Processing?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4619" CreationDate="2013-10-05T09:04:11.510" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you correctly note, ambiguity is rampant in natural language and whatever data structure is used for parsing in ambiguous grammars must somehow represent a large number of possible derivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, it's not feasible to represent every possible derivation as an explicit parse tree, because the number of possible bracketings of a string is its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catalan number&lt;/a&gt;, exponential in its length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which data structure is used to compactly represent ambiguity depends on the parsing algorithm chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll use the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYK_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKY algorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as an example, as the way in which it packs ambiguity is simple to describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CKY parsing algorithm implicitly represents ambiguity using a data structure called a chart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To focus on your question, I'll leave the description of the algorithm out, only describing how the data structure represents ambiguity. I'll leave a description of the algorithm itself to any NLP text or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq80J8kBg-Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the video from Chris Manning's Coursera course&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we're parsing a sentence with N words. The chart can be modelled as a two-dimensional array, in which each cell C[i,j] contains all non-terminals which words [i..j] of the input sentence can derive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in the below chart, cell C[0,3] contains all the non-terminals derivable from the words &lt;em&gt;Book the flight&lt;/em&gt; using a particular grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FnfIJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;CKY chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CKY algorithm builds up the chart bottom-up through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dynamic programming&lt;/a&gt;, so that when the algorithm terminates, the cell C[0,N] contains all possible non-terminals with a yield of the words [0..N]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key insight that allows the chart to implicitly represent all possible derivations is that any parse tree in which some constituent XP has the yield [i..j] is represented by the very same chart entry in the cell C[i,j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above chart, for example, the chart entry NP in cell C[1,3] implicitly belongs to &lt;em&gt;every parse tree&lt;/em&gt; in which the words &lt;em&gt;the flight&lt;/em&gt; at positions 1 and 2 is interpreted as an NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If each production rule is associated with a probability (a probabilistic context-free grammar), then a &lt;strong&gt;decoding&lt;/strong&gt; algorithm such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viterbi algorithm&lt;/a&gt; can be used to find the most likely parse given the chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other parsing algorithms for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CFGs&lt;/a&gt;, such as the Earley algorithm, have analogous ways of packing ambiguity — in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley_parser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earley parser&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, a data structure called the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;agenda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; contains all possible parsing states for a prefix of the input sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible for a parsing algorithm to discard ambiguity. Since not every possible parse is a likely parse, massive efficiency gains can be realised by only preserving a number of likely parses at each step (a &lt;em&gt;greedy algorithm&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some parsing algorithms, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonds%27_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chu-Liu-Edmonds algorithm&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_spanning_tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MST (minimum spanning tree)&lt;/a&gt; parsing, do not really represent derivational ambiguity directly. In such algorithms, the set of all possible parses isn't actually stored and thus can't easily be recovered. Instead, the sentence is treated as a graph, with directed edges representing dependencies between words. A tree algorithm runs over this graph to find the maximum-scoring set of spanning dependency edges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sufficient because most parsing applications in NLP focus not on enumerating all parses, but on finding the best parse with respect to some figure of merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bibliography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McDonald, Ryan, et al. &quot;Non-projective dependency parsing using spanning tree algorithms.&quot; Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T07:44:57.540" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T07:44:57.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-05T19:59:55.900" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that distances (intervals) between (I could be wrong in the choice of words) &quot;very bad&quot;, &quot;bad&quot;, &quot;not bad&quot;, &quot;good&quot;, &quot;very good&quot; are approximately equal. Such equality of intervals was used to create 5-points scale for Semantic Differential technique (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_differential&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_differential&lt;/a&gt;). How to find out such distances between other comparative adjective? For example, between &quot;very small&quot;, &quot;small&quot;, &quot;not large&quot;, &quot;large&quot;, &quot;extra large&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD&lt;/strong&gt; The citation: &quot;It was shown by Norman Cliff (1959), that next particular quantifiers to yield approximately equal degrees of intensity: +3 &lt;em&gt;extremely good&lt;/em&gt;; +2 &lt;em&gt;quite good&lt;/em&gt;; +1 &lt;em&gt;slightly good&lt;/em&gt;, 0 &lt;em&gt;equally good and bad or neither&lt;/em&gt;; - 1 &lt;em&gt;slightly bad&lt;/em&gt;; - 2 &lt;em&gt;quite bad&lt;/em&gt;; -3 &lt;em&gt;extremely bad&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2518" LastEditorUserId="2518" LastEditDate="2013-10-25T01:04:59.733" LastActivityDate="2013-10-25T01:04:59.733" Title="How to check the distance beween comparative adjectives?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6310" CreationDate="2013-10-06T17:31:11.450" Score="1" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to construct a first-order logic representation of the following sentence. My general approach for constructing the representation is to parse the sentence into a phrase structure tree using a context-free grammar with features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of those features is an expression in lambda-calculus, which allows the composition the sentences semantics from the nodes of the phrase structure tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sentence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the alien here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP LV NP&#xA;&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Det N | N&#xA;&#xA;N -&amp;gt; 'I' | 'alien'&#xA;&#xA;Det -&amp;gt; 'the'&#xA;&#xA;LV -&amp;gt; Neg Copula | Copula&#xA;&#xA;Neg -&amp;gt; 'not'&#xA;&#xA;Copula -&amp;gt; 'am'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am stuck on how to parse the word &quot;here&quot;. Formally, 'here' is a deictic locative predicate &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/111058/what-part-of-speech-does-here-have-in-i-am-here&quot;&gt;(source)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, from the linke English.SE answer, that a first-order logic representation of &quot;I am the alien here&quot; could be (here(I) &amp;amp; alien(I)). Which one should receive the negation in &quot;I am not the alien here&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T01:59:39.573" Title="How would I parse the sentence, &quot;I am not the alien here.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4655" CreationDate="2013-10-06T19:26:24.897" Score="7" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the steps invoked in producing a dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am primarily interested in understanding the role software plays in the production process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously a corpus for the language is first produced and this corpus needs to find a reasonable balance between technical terms, fiction, slang etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I'm guessing the size of the dictionary needs to be decided on and consequently the number of words it should contain. Then I'm presuming the most common words from the corpus make it into the dictionary and the rest are ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens then? Suppose I need to make the entry in the dictionary for the word &quot;of&quot; and I have 20,000 entries for this word in the corpus. How do I proceed? How do I keep track of the senses covered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-07T07:41:58.747" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T10:20:42.977" Title="How are dictionaries produced" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4622" CreationDate="2013-10-06T21:01:38.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Davidsonian first-order logic, the semantic representation would be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;∃e.not(e) &amp;amp; alien'(e,I) &amp;amp; here(e)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is the eventuality of being an alien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2013-11-02T13:22:00.077" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T13:22:00.077" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-06T21:13:17.470" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to write code that takes in a natural language sentence and determines what that sentence is about. Not from a list of possible subjects, but just from the input text, the NL sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these sentences will be NL questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the best way to determine the subject of a sentence / question; or in other words, what the sentence is about?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am currently doing is finding the nouns in the sentence, but the subject isn't always a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me write the psuedo-code of an algorithm that can do this properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2550" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-10-07T09:52:45.817" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T09:52:45.817" Title="Algorithm for determining the subject of a NL sentence / question" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:31:01.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2013-10-07T03:42:48.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens with all Greek words in r- when a prefix is added, not just that particular word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A likely explanation (though I don't have a reference for this) is that the sound written as Greek initial ῥ- was a long trill [rr], just like initial r- in Spanish. (The fact that ῥ- always comes from a cluster, *sr- or *wr-, makes this plausible.) Therefore when a prefix was added you need a way to distinguish this in spelling from single [r], leading to the spelling -ρρ- (or -ῤῥ- as it's usually written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T03:42:48.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2013-10-07T03:47:21.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can't be &quot;Alexamenos, worship God!&quot; for two reasons: the name is in the nominative, not the vocative; and if σέβετε was imperative, it would be imperative plural, which makes no sense with a singular addressee. So the only possible reading is &quot;Alexamenos worships (a/the/his) god&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T03:47:21.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4656" CreationDate="2013-10-07T04:05:36.467" Score="10" ViewCount="1145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages, if any, outside of Semitic have something like Semitic-style root-and-template morphology, with roots that can be analyzed as consisting of consonants only, and the vowels coming from a separate morphological tier? I've heard that some Native American languages have similar systems, but I don't know which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that Germanic ablaut (for example) is a similar kind of phenomenon, but it's not basic to morphology in Germanic the way that it is in Semitic; I'm asking about languages where this is the basic strategy of verbal and/or nominal inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T18:25:23.920" Title="What non-Semitic languages have templatic non-concatenative morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T04:15:05.970" Score="8" ViewCount="1136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;First-person inclusive&quot; forms are ones that refer to both the first and second person. In that case, why call them &quot;first-person&quot; anything? Wouldn't it be equally logical to call them &quot;second-person inclusive&quot;? It isn't that there's a division &lt;em&gt;within the first person&lt;/em&gt; into inclusive and exclusive forms -- that wouldn't mean anything. Is this just a historical convention, due to the fact that when speakers of a language without such an opposition encounter a language with one, they perceive its inclusive forms to correspond to their own &quot;first-person plural&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it common for inclusive forms to somehow pattern more like first-person than like second-person forms, and if so how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I realize that you could ask similar questions about the term &quot;first-person plural&quot;, since this usually doesn't refer to multiple speakers but to a speaker plus others, and about &quot;second-person plural&quot; when this refers not to multiple listeners but to a listener plus others. But those forms at least &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; refer to plural speakers or to plural listeners, while an inclusive form can never refer to the first person alone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T12:21:13.087" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T00:28:09.980" Title="Why are &quot;first-person inclusive&quot; forms called &quot;first-person&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T06:51:51.797" Score="5" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;No matter how much I browse, I cannot find any true researcher's really precise and accurate data on the issue. Actually, I cannot find any Gulf Arabic Phonology compendium, so any help will be greatly appreciated.&#xA;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2554" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-07T07:18:25.887" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T23:55:32.933" Title="Gulf Arabic vowels allophones" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2013-10-07T08:28:37.267" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese names, like Chinese, have &lt;strong&gt;no specific name set&lt;/strong&gt;. So the choice depends on the parents or the person who gives the name. They can choose &lt;strong&gt;any syllable&lt;/strong&gt; they like to combine into the name. But of course there's a set of words that are much more commonly appear in names because they are &quot;more beautiful&quot; words. However Vietnamese name have no limit in number of syllables like Chinese names, although most will have 3-4 syllables. Like Koreans, Vietnamese names are mainly Sino-Vietnamese but there are also pure-Vietnamese names&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;strong&gt;no restriction in gender&lt;/strong&gt; of the name either, but most will have some &lt;em&gt;bias&lt;/em&gt; in gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example when hearing the names such as &lt;em&gt;Mai&lt;/em&gt; 梅, &lt;em&gt;Lan&lt;/em&gt; 蘭, &lt;em&gt;Thúy&lt;/em&gt; 翠/脆, &lt;em&gt;Vân&lt;/em&gt; 雲... you can guess that they are women's names most of the time because they describe things such as flowers and birds... They feel more &quot;feminine&quot; and &quot;soft&quot;, albeit there are men who were given those names too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand names such as &lt;em&gt;Trung&lt;/em&gt; 中/忠, &lt;em&gt;Hùng&lt;/em&gt; 熊/雄, &lt;em&gt;Dũng&lt;/em&gt; 勇, &lt;em&gt;Mạnh&lt;/em&gt; 孟... would have 95% chance to be a man's name because they express vigor, strength...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most other names are more neutral in gender. The possibility for &lt;em&gt;Phúc&lt;/em&gt; 福, &lt;em&gt;Tú&lt;/em&gt; 繡/秀, &lt;em&gt;Phương&lt;/em&gt; 方/芳... to be a man's/woman's name might be 50/50 whereas &lt;em&gt;Thanh&lt;/em&gt; 清/聲/青, &lt;em&gt;Hà&lt;/em&gt; 何/河... perhaps are a bit more &quot;womanly&quot; because in 55-60% of the cases they are a woman's name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past women often had &lt;em&gt;Thị&lt;/em&gt; 是 and men usually had &lt;em&gt;Văn&lt;/em&gt; 文 as the middle name so you could infer sex information from that. But nowadays those aren't favorable any more, replaced with more &quot;fashionable&quot; middle names, and there are many people who don't have middle names, so occasionally you can't get gender hints from that anymore. But when going along with an appropriate given name, sometimes it will reverse the gender bias or make the bias stronger. For example &lt;em&gt;Anh&lt;/em&gt; 英 and &lt;em&gt;Thanh&lt;/em&gt; 青 are neutral names, but with &lt;em&gt;Vân&lt;/em&gt; 雲 as middle name then &lt;em&gt;Vân Anh&lt;/em&gt; 雲英 or &lt;em&gt;Vân Thanh&lt;/em&gt; 雲青 would be a woman's name. Or &lt;em&gt;Dương&lt;/em&gt; 陽 is more or less a man's name, but &lt;em&gt;Thùy Dương&lt;/em&gt; 垂陽 would be a woman's name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the percentages are only from the sense of a Vietnamese person, not any specific statistics so it may not reflect exactly the actual number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T15:43:39.043" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T15:43:39.043" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4631" CreationDate="2013-10-07T08:37:26.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's just convention. If a pronoun includes in its reference the speaker then we call it a first person pronoun. If a pronoun includes in its reference the listener, then we call it a second person pronoun. If neither the speaker or listener are included then we call it third person pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T08:37:26.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4631" CreationDate="2013-10-07T08:47:21.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are interesting pragmatic consequences to using 1st person inclusive (1INC) in certain languages, e.g. in Tamil, 1INC is used by lower-caste members as a 1st person form to address higher-caste members. This may be taken to suggest that 1INC is fundamentally a 1st person form, but in Santali, 1INC is used as a 2nd person form in order to threaten someone. It doesn't seem as if the 1st or 2nd person components of 1INC are universally priveleged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, referring to 1INC as a 1st person form rather than a 2nd person form is due to convention - probably due to the person hierarchy in which 1 &gt; 2 as noted by @Justin_Olbrantz, as, in actuality, it is both a 1st and a 2nd person form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uconn.edu/bobaljik/341/crossmodular.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reference: Nevins (2008), 'Cross modular parallels in the study of phon and phi'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T08:47:21.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4638" CreationDate="2013-10-07T09:54:39.607" Score="0" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have seen how copyright infringement goes into zero derivation English words such as &lt;code&gt;a Xerox clone&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;He was Googling it&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;A lego like construction&lt;/code&gt;. (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://agile.dzone.com/articles/real-lessons-lego-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://agile.dzone.com/articles/real-lessons-lego-software&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid copyright lawsuit, &lt;strong&gt;is there a list of words alternative word/phrase that one can use for such zero derivation words that comes with arcane copyright laws?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good alternative for phrases such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lego like construction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a Xerox clone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He googled long and hard to find her&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T11:19:59.417" Title="Using the alternatives for copyrighted zero derivation words (e.g. &quot;LEGO&quot;, &quot;Xerox&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-10-07T18:51:45.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T09:59:39.497" Score="4" ViewCount="933" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for activities which are only ever accomplished by other activities? If I were to make up a term I'd call them &lt;em&gt;meta-activities&lt;/em&gt;. Some examples of what I'm thinking of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;teaching - accomplished by explanations, demonstrations, quizzing, giving feedback&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cooking (potatoes) - accomplished by peeling some potatoes, dicing them, boiling them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While cooking has a primary sense of heating food, I'm not sure that teaching ever does - every example of teaching will be an example of other more basic actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought of hyponymy/hypernymy, but it's not the same. Explanation isn't a type of teaching, and not all explanations will teach. None of the other common lexical relations are appropriate either. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-11T07:14:53.230" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T07:14:53.230" Title="What do you call an activity accomplished by other activities" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4636" CreationDate="2013-10-07T10:07:16.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright isn't relevant to this. If any law is involved it will be &lt;em&gt;trademark&lt;/em&gt; law. But some genericised trademarks are no longer enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific answers for your examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;snapable bricks (perhaps. I'm not certain if there is a common generic name for Lego-like toys)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;photocopier. In Australia we never say anything other than photocopier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;searched the internet for ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list, though it is incomplete of course: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why are you asking about zero derivations? Only Googled is derived - Lego and Xerox aren't, at least not in the examples you gave.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-07T11:19:59.417" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T11:19:59.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2013-10-07T15:25:31.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rho-geminate should come from the assimilation of the combined sounds /h/ + /r/ that a single rho at the beginning of a word represents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek ῥέω 'to flow' comes from PIE *sreu̯- 'to flow' and must thus have received its aspiration from /s/ and not from /w/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2498" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T15:25:31.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4637" CreationDate="2013-10-07T15:55:25.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In (neo-)Davidsonian semantics, what you call activities is called &lt;strong&gt;events&lt;/strong&gt;. Teaching/cooking in your example would be &lt;strong&gt;complex events&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical example is &quot;Brutus stabbed Caesar. Caesar died.&quot; vs. &quot;Brutus killed Caesar&quot;. Brutus' killing Caesar is a complex event that comprises stabbing and dying (the former causes the latter). It's not an atomic (causative) predicate since there's a time spam between the two events. Google for &quot;neo-Davidsonian semantics&quot; for papers and slides that discuss events in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T15:55:25.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-07T19:02:42.747" Score="5" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has implications for programmatic localization. The example below isn't universally valid if, for some language, the noun placement must change, or the numerical adjective must be split from the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English template:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search found &lt;strong&gt;{adj} {noun}&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English singular:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search found &lt;strong&gt;one record&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English plural:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search found &lt;strong&gt;five records&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We've definitely seen examples of changes in the position of the numerical adjective relative to the noun. Now, what about something like this... is there any language for which the &lt;em&gt;position of the object&lt;/em&gt; changes based on number? Or for which the numerical adjective and noun split apart from a cohesize unit? The consequence being, you would actually need separate templates to accommodate grammatical number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical singular:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search found &lt;strong&gt;one record&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With template:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search found &lt;strong&gt;{object}&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical plural -- object moved:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search &lt;strong&gt;five records&lt;/strong&gt; found.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would require a separate plural template:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search &lt;strong&gt;{object}&lt;/strong&gt; found.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical plural -- object and numerical adjective split:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search &lt;strong&gt;records&lt;/strong&gt; found &lt;strong&gt;ten&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would require a separate plural template:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Search &lt;strong&gt;{object-noun}&lt;/strong&gt; found &lt;strong&gt;{object-adj}&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2557" LastEditorUserId="2557" LastEditDate="2013-10-08T19:54:31.147" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T19:54:31.147" Title="Are there any languages in which grammatical number changes word order?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-10-07T19:15:16.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the framework. Within LFG, parsing is NP-compete in the worst case. However, Ron Kaplan argues that NL parsing is polynomial in the average case. In general, NL parsing is NP-complete because of the constraints associated with rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T19:15:16.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3087" CreationDate="2013-10-07T19:21:34.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read German authors down to the end of the 18th century you will see that they used lots of Latin words (and in the 18th century lots of French borrowings as well). But in the 19th century there was a conscious effort to replace foreign words by German equivalents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T19:21:34.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2013-10-07T19:54:53.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally assumed, that originally Afroasiatic languages had and many of them still have biradical roots [see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=SMzgBLT87MkC&amp;amp;pg=PA27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wolff&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/jud/histhebl.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kutscher: p. 6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aulaorientalis.org/AuOr%20escaneado/AuOr%2023-2005/AuOr%2023%20PDF/8-Militarev-def.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Militarev 2005: &quot;Root extension and root formation in Semitic and Afrasian&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and others]. &quot;Final consonants of verb roots (“determinants” in Semitic linguistic terminology) appear to semantically modify the root&quot; (from Wolff). This can be exemplified by cognates of Semitic triradicals and &quot;Hamitic&quot; biradicals as well as comparison of triradicals within the Semitic itself with very similar meanings, but differing by a single consonant [although it is very difficult to prove that such forms actually do stem from the same biradical root].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one series of Hebrew roots, provided by Kutscher as an example of the intra-Semitic evidence of the original bi-radicalism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫' פרד‬divide'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫' פרט‬change’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫ פרך‬, פרר‬'crumble’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫' פרם‬tear'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫' פרס‬divide in two'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫' פרק‬tear apart'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‫פרץ‬ 'break through'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not to say that שבע and שבת are cognates [and I couldn't find relevant information concerning this relationship], but one couldn't rule it out basing on tri-consonantism of most of the Hebrew roots. However the meanings are pretty much different: שבע designates &quot;seven&quot; in Semitic languages and שבת is &quot;rest&quot;, from which the noun שבת for Sabbath is derived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T15:07:04.677" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T15:07:04.677" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4641" CreationDate="2013-10-07T20:25:09.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Gaelic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deich mbliana d'aois - ten years of age  (10)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aon bhliain déag d'aois - one year (and) ten of age  (11)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deich mbliana agus fiche d'aois - ten years and twenty of age (30) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dhá scór bliain d'aois - two score years of age (40)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deich mbliana le cois an dá scór d'aois - ten years as well as the two score of age (50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ceithre scór de bhlianta d'aois - four score of years old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you write unit tests when programming the above!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T20:25:09.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4641" CreationDate="2013-10-07T21:26:35.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;רשומה אחת (reshuma 'ahat) = one record&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;שתי רשומות (shtey reshumot) = two records (not to mention special dual forms, [still] used for some nouns in Modern Hebrew)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;שלוש רשומות (shalosh reshumot) = three records&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other Semitic languages the situation seems to be similar, including Maltese, which utilizes the Latin script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T21:26:35.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4613" CreationDate="2013-10-07T23:59:08.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4613/what-do-you-call-the-non-terminal-nodes-of-a-syntax-tree#comment12500_4613&quot;&gt;jlawler writes&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;non-terminal (node)&lt;/em&gt; is, in fact, the correct term here. He also notes that, if you want to be extremely formal, you can call it a &lt;em&gt;labeled non-terminal node&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-10-07T23:59:08.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4369" CreationDate="2013-10-08T01:56:48.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Auslan has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dnxDgCvEnJoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA129&amp;amp;pg=PA129&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genitive marker&lt;/a&gt;, though I don't know if it should be called a case. I'm not aware of it having other case markers and the word order isn't free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T01:56:48.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-08T02:10:12.430" Score="0" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a rule of thumb from my perspective (compound words are not included), such as th/t/s/z/c + /V/ + n/m:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;T-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-tion/-sion&lt;/strong&gt; (question, division, conclusion),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;TH-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-than&lt;/strong&gt; (leviathan),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-thon&lt;/strong&gt; (marathon, python),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-thm&lt;/strong&gt; (algorithm, rhythm),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-thom&lt;/strong&gt; (fathom),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-them&lt;/strong&gt; (anthem),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;S-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-sm&lt;/strong&gt; (apriorism, prism),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-san&lt;/strong&gt; (artisan, courtesan, partisan, ptisan),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-son&lt;/strong&gt;(bison, prison, season),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-som&lt;/strong&gt;(blossom, bosom, ransom, transom),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Z-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-zan&lt;/strong&gt; (azan, bartizan),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-zen&lt;/strong&gt; (citizen, dozen),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-zam&lt;/strong&gt; (Nizam),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-zem&lt;/strong&gt; (chernozem, diltiazem),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-zon&lt;/strong&gt;(horizon, Amazon, menazon, blazon, cabezon),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;C-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-can&lt;/strong&gt; (florican, pecan, pelican, toucan),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-cam&lt;/strong&gt; (piroxicam).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T04:54:04.880" Title="Why do so many English nouns have a Consonant-Vowel-Nasal ending?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-08T03:18:23.637" Score="9" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Attic-Ionic dialects of Ancient Greek underwent a sound change whereby, in a sequence of a long vowel followed by a short vowel, the quantities were switched: -V:V- became -VV:-, e.g. &lt;em&gt;-e:o- &gt; -eo:-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has a metathesis of this kind occurred -- or does it occur as a synchronic process -- in any other language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T15:00:00.653" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T17:59:42.643" Title="Quantitative metathesis in other languages than Ancient Greek?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4649" CreationDate="2013-10-08T04:10:55.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because the Proto-Indo-European language from which English derives had the ending &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in nominative for inanimate(neuter) nouns. Some words and suffixes were borrowed into English from Latin and Greek who also derived from PIE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other words derive from PIE words ending with -m-os and -n-os (which was a common derivational construction) with the ending -os later disappearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words derived from non-IE language were often anglicized, latinized or hellenized before entering English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the -tion suffix comes from Latin, where it is inherited directly from PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ti̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It is a common combination of suffixes plus nominative ending of neuter/inanimate gender. Some examples of the reconstructed PIE words with that suffix: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a̯usti̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; river mouth     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plea̯ti̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a kind of dress (cloak)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tra̯nsprtea̯ti̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; act of carrying across &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leviathan is just a borrowing from Hebrew with little change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Python and Marathon are borrowings from Greek where -on is the nominative ending directly derived from PIE nominative ending -om.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix -ism is derived from PIE adjective suffix combination+ending &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ismos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-10-08T19:02:15.637" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T19:02:15.637" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4649" CreationDate="2013-10-08T04:56:39.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English words in -tion/-sion are nouns because this suffix comes from Latin, where it was a productive way of forming action nouns. Some of these English nouns are borrowings directly from Latin, but this suffix has become productive in English too. (Some nouns on your list are from the same origin but borrowed through French, with a change in spelling and pronunciation, e.g. benison.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class of words in -ism (and less frequently in -asm and -thm) comes from Greek, where -smos was a productive abstract noun formant. In this case too, -ism has become productive in English, so many words with this suffix don't have a Greek source (e.g. capitalism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than these two classes, I don't think there's really a pattern here; many of the other nouns you list are very rare, and I'm sure one could come up with a few verbs with similar endings to balance them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T04:56:39.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4039" CreationDate="2013-10-08T05:55:11.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't much information on the language referred to by the OP as &quot;Fifa'a&quot;, but there is some information on a group of people in Saudi Arabia called the Fayfa. The Fayfa are described &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.peoplegroups.org/Explore/groupdetails.aspx?peid=42795&quot;&gt;in this evangelical religious website&lt;/a&gt; as speaking Mehri. Additionally, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldmap.org/maps/other/profiles/saudi%20arabia/Saudi%20Arabia.pdf&quot;&gt;Missionary Atlas Project&lt;/a&gt; lists the &quot;Fayfa&quot; people and also describes them as speaking Mehri. This makes it likely that this is the language the OP (based on his informant) refers to as &quot;Fifa'a&quot; so I proceed on this assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fayfa people of Saudia Arabia speak Mehri, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/gdq&quot;&gt;Yemeni language&lt;/a&gt; classified as a member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehri_language&quot;&gt;South Arabian subgroup&lt;/a&gt; of the South Semitic group of languages (within the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family). The Arabic languages (which includes Saudi Arabic), on the other hand, are classified within the Central Semitic group (etc) so are quite distantly related to Mehri. This means that Arabic and Fayfa are definitely not mutually intelligible and can therefore be described as distinct languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of Mehri speakers are in Yemen, but there are also a number in Oman. There is a modest body of work on Mehri, some of which is listed at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.language-archives.org/language/gdq&quot;&gt;OLAC&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T05:55:11.027" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4623" CreationDate="2013-10-08T10:20:42.977" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a complex topic but here's an attempt at an answer. My background is in describing and documenting relatively small, endangered languages, so I'll describe how it's done in that situation. I'll assume you have computers, software, internet, native speaking informants, recording equipment, and many years to spend on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, recorded texts are needed, which are transcribed typically using software such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/&quot;&gt;ELAN&lt;/a&gt;, and with much help from the native-speaking assistant. The resulting transcript should be time-aligned and have the following annotations at a minimum, each on its own tier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*a phonemic reperesentation of the text&#xA;*a gloss (a very brief definition)&#xA;*a free translation&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is known as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss&quot;&gt;interlinear gloss&lt;/a&gt; and is a standard analytical approach in linguistics. Here's an example (Western Desert language, Pama-Nyungan):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ngayulu  ngurra -kutu ya -nku&#xA;1.sg.ERG home -ALL    go -FUT&#xA;'I'm going homewards'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another commonly included tier is a part of speech description for each lexical item (presupposing an analysis of the language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next this data would be imported into a tool such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/computing/toolbox/&quot;&gt;Toolbox&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://fieldworks.sil.org/flex/&quot;&gt;FLEx&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://tshwanedje.com/tshwanelex/&quot;&gt;TshwanaLex&lt;/a&gt;. These tools then construct a database of the lexical items. The entry for each item will include the part of speech assignment, the gloss, a fuller definition, and can include many other pieces of information about the entry. These tools typically also enable creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Word_in_Context&quot;&gt;KWIC (key word in context) concordance&lt;/a&gt; which facilitates analysis of the text to discover the full range of meanings and uses of an item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_database&quot;&gt;'lexical database'&lt;/a&gt; will typically be formatted using &lt;a href=&quot;http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/6936/1/RAL-chapter-28.pdf&quot;&gt;FOSF (Field-Oriented Standard Format), aka backslash codes&lt;/a&gt;, or at least will enable export/import using FOSF. FOSF consists of a backslash '\' combined with an arbitrary alphanumeric string, followed by the information it categorises. A fairly typical if basic entry would look like this (entry for the word 'papa', Western Desert language):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\lx papa&#xA;\pos noun&#xA;\def dog&#xA;\syn maliki&#xA;\xv papangku wati patjarnu&#xA;\xe the dog bit the man&#xA;\so JS&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The codes: \lx = headword (this would also indicate start of a new entry), \pos = part of speech, \def = definition, \syn = synonym, \xv = vernacular example, \xe = english gloss of example, \so = source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Entries such as this one can have a much more complex structure, including multiple senses. Each sense subentry would begin with a line such as \se1 (for the first sense), followed by its own \def, \syn, etc lines within the entry, as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a variety of software that can take a regularly-structured FOSF lexical database and convert it into a nicely formatted dictionary. One easy to use software to do this that is currently popular is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexiquepro.com&quot;&gt;Lexique Pro&lt;/a&gt;, although ToolBox and FLEx can also do this conversion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T10:20:42.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4630" CreationDate="2013-10-08T14:48:30.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pure separation of consonants=root and vowels=affix would be way out at the extreme end of templatic morphology — so extreme that it doesn't describe what's going on with the nouns in Semitic languages or even a substantial proportion of the verbs. Almost always in &quot;root-and-pattern&quot; systems, you'll find roots that have their own inherent vowels and CV-patterns (or syllable structures), but the templates often ride roughshod over those vowels and CV-patterns, and sometimes the consonants too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most notable/studied native American language of this type is Yowlumni (usually called Yawelmani until recently). You'll find some similar features in Muskogean languages, and probably several others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll also find templatic morphology at the next level up from Semitic, in other Afro-Asiatic languages like Berber and Hausa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2358" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T14:48:30.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2013-10-08T18:17:05.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I am going to address Tangurena's answer (I don't have enough reputation to add a comment).&#xA;Your claim of Japan occupying Korea for 1600 years is very misleading to say the least.&#xA;Japan occupied Korea during 1910 - 1945. It is a such a shame to Koreans that they call it as 경술국치 (pronounced as Kyung-Sool-Gook-Chi), meaning national shame in the year of Kyung-Sool. Here's a wikipedia article about the treaty that took place: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93Korea_Treaty_of_1910&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only other time that Japan invaded Korea as a country was after Toyotomi Hideyoshi united Japan (much thanks to Oda Nobunaga) and invaded Korea from 1592 - 1598. At one point they even took over the capital but Korean king at the time fled to northern part of the country, and the legendary admiral Yi Sun-sin defeated &amp;amp; sank numerous Japanese ships to force them to retreat back to Japan. After Toyotomi Hideyoshi died, eventually all of the Japanese troops fled back to Japan. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%931598)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can even argue that some kingdoms (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baekje&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Baekje&lt;/a&gt;) in Korea ruled Japanese provinces in the ancient times and did in fact influence languages and some of the cultures. Also they served as a gateway for Japan to obtain Chinese goods/cultures/ etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For outsiders, a good way to visualize the relationships between Korea, Japan and China might be that of France, England, and Rome. Given that relationship, it is easy to make connections for both Japanese and Korean languages to Chinese and there are definitely few features (such as writing systems for both countries have been borrowing from Chinese for much of their history as well as many words having roots originating from Chinese language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my &quot;open&quot; answer to the question of the thread is that, yes, there are definitely some influences between these two countries - both affecting each other. But keep in mind that these two are separated by sea so it is different than some of the European countries who shares borders with other countries where language can easily be influenced by each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also Korea is made up of 70 ~ 80% mountainous terrain which affects the &quot;sharing&quot; of the language. So the caveat is that each region developed their own features while the sharing and influencing were going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2327" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T02:46:46.430" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T02:46:46.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4659" CreationDate="2013-10-08T18:23:33.127" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider phrases such as these: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Joe from France&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Transport of wheat&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Walking to Berlin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there specific grammatical terms for a) the constituent that occurs immediately before a preposition and b) the constituent that occurs immediately after a preposition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T05:44:01.617" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T05:44:01.617" Title="What are the terms for a) the constituent before a preposition and b) the constituent after a preposition?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4658" CreationDate="2013-10-08T19:24:51.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word in front of a preposition can be the &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; that governs the prepositional phrase, but it doesn't have to be. Only the position &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a preposition marks a special syntactic function; that is called a &lt;strong&gt;prepositional object&lt;/strong&gt; or the &lt;strong&gt;object of a proposition&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;Berlin, France, wheat&lt;/em&gt; in your examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T19:24:51.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2013-10-08T23:18:25.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=2AmspKX3beoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA271&amp;amp;vq=subject%20ka&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=japan&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'A history of the Korean language'&lt;/a&gt; (p 271) the Korean subject particle &lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; is a recent development in that language, not being attested at all until the sixteenth century, and probably not in common use until the 18th century and thereafter. This means we can rule out the possibility that it is cognate with the Japanese &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; (ie they are not similar because they are both inherited from some ancestor to the two languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two other possibilities are coincidence or borrowing. Given that there is no known etymological explanation of the development of Korean &lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; that would show it to be a coincidence, or that would even provide any origin, the rapid development of this particle in Korean suggests it is a borrowing from Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yukoyanagida.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/JK212012.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been proposed&lt;/a&gt; that the Japanese postposition &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; was originally borrowed from Korean, perhaps by the 9th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-10-08T23:18:25.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-08T23:45:50.177" Score="2" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Linguistics, there is a lot of talk about 'subject' (and many other things). A Linguist will say, &quot;This is the subject of this sentence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, as far as I can see, neither subject, nor sentence have any robust definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any of you have such a definition, which will work, without exception, in say English, German, Spanish and Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2566" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T08:00:33.720" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T08:00:33.720" Title="definition of subject" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:33:36.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4661" CreationDate="2013-10-09T00:27:07.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there are comprehensive definitions of &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt;, they won't apply to every language. Some languages use a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;topic-comment&lt;/a&gt; structure instead, such as Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most communication is intended to convey propositions to the listeners. Propositions generally start with a piece of known information, and then add a new piece of information. Sometimes the new information is communicated through nouns or adjectives (such as &lt;em&gt;John is a man&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;John is tall&lt;/em&gt;) and sometimes through verbs (&lt;em&gt;John is running&lt;/em&gt;.) In all three of these examples &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is the topic, and in English &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is in the subject position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrasting position is usually called the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt;. Transitive sentences will have both a subject and an object (&lt;em&gt;John kicked the ball&lt;/em&gt;.) In these cases John has the &lt;em&gt;role&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;actor&lt;/em&gt;, while the ball has the role of &lt;em&gt;undergoer&lt;/em&gt;. But roles do not always correspond to the same grammatical position. In &lt;em&gt;passive&lt;/em&gt; sentences the undergoer becomes the subject (&lt;em&gt;The ball was kicked&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for these reasons you can't always identify the subject based on the meaning of the sentence. But you can identify it based on factors such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Case - some languages have case for all nouns, but English only has it for pronouns. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is nominative and only appears in the subject position, while &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; is accusative, and does not appear in the subject position (usually. Let's not get into this discussion, but sentences like this will often be made by many native English speakers: &lt;em&gt;John and me are going to the beach&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verb agreement - in many languages the verb will agree with the subject. In English we say &lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; jumping&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; jumping&lt;/em&gt;. In some languages though the verb is also marked for the object!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntactic position - in many languages the subject must appear in a fixed position. In English it is before the verb. But there are other constructions which can change it around, such as Left-dislocation: &lt;em&gt;The girl, the dog bit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T01:28:24.917" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T01:28:24.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4631" CreationDate="2013-10-09T00:53:43.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some languages where the inclusive forms clearly pattern separately from the second person forms. One such language I've studied is Walmajarri, an Australia language. Here are the subject agreement markers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Person&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;singular&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;dual&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;plural&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1 sg&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-rna&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1 exc&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-rli&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-rlipa&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1 inc&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-tjarra&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-rna-()-lu&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-n&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-n-()-pilla&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-n-()-lu&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-()-pilla&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;-()-lu&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;em&gt;The pronominal clitic complex in Walmajarri&lt;/em&gt; by Fritz Schweiger (Folia Linguistica Historica, 28(1-2), 251–268) for the full details. The brackets indicate where an object marker may be inserted, which could be considered an infix. (For those markers without brackets the object marker is inserted afterwards.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first person inclusive markers were fundamentally second person then we would expect them to begin with an /-n/. Instead, the first person plural inclusive form /-rnalu/ is the same as the first person singular form /-rna/ with the common plural marker added on. On the other hand, the first person exclusive forms are unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T11:39:31.407" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T11:39:31.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T02:32:22.997" Score="7" ViewCount="1125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/w%C4%BA%CC%A5k%CA%B7os#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wĺ̥kʷos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word *wĺ̥kʷos is a thematic accented zero-grade noun perhaps derived from the adjective *wl̥kʷós ‘dangerous’ (compare Hittite walkuwa ‘dangerous’, Old Irish olc ‘evil’, Sanskrit [script?] (avṛká) ‘safe’, literally, ‘not wild’, वृकतात् (vṛká-tāt) ‘savagery’).&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/w%C4%BA%CC%A5k%CA%B7os#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; Stress shift onto the zero-grade is consistent with nominalized adjectives: compare Sanskrit कृष्ण (kṛ́ṣṇa) ‘black antelope’ from कृष्ण (kṛṣṇá) ‘black’. Alternatively, the word may be a derivative of the verbal root *welh₂- ‘to tear up’.&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eleven#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; In either case, the word's formation closely resembles that of *h₂ŕ̥tḱos (“bear”), another thematic accented zero-grade noun whose referent is an animal subject to cultural taboos.&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=eleven&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Latin and Greek reflexes are unexpected (vs. expected Lat **volquus, Gk **álpos; l̥ → Lat ol, Gk al). The Latin reflex may be variously a borrowing from Sabine (where PIE */kʷ/ regularly gave /p/), influenced by volpēs ‘fox’, or a taboo deformation meant to offset the fear usually associated with the animal, or any combination of the three. A deformation would explain the metathesis of */w/ and */l/, which also occurred in Greek (*wĺ̥kʷos → *lúkʷos → *lýkos), but does not explain the presence of delabialized /k/ which is regular in Greek only before /u/. In both cases, the expected forms are so close to the word for ‘fox’ (compare Lat volpēs, Gk alōpós, alṓpēx) that avoiding conflation of the two words ‘wolf’ and ‘fox’ may have motivated either alteration or borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Germanic&lt;/strong&gt; reflex, with /f/ ← */p/ ← */kʷ/, underwent &lt;strong&gt;an unusual sound change&lt;/strong&gt;, but the velar was retained in at least one form, e.g., Old Norse ylgr ‘she-wolf’ (vs. Old English wylf, Middle High German wülpe ← &lt;strong&gt;*wulbī) ← *wulgʷī́ ← *wl̥kʷíh₂&lt;/strong&gt;, which indicates neither taboo deformation nor derivation from some other root took place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Armenian and Celtic have replaced the word with Proto-Indo-European *wai-lo (“howler”) due to taboo; compare Old Armenian գայլ (gayl), Old Irish fáel.&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=twelve&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another similar derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eleven#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eleven&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English, from Old English endleofan; from Proto-Germanic *ainalif (“one left”), &lt;strong&gt;a compound of *ainaz and *lif-&lt;/strong&gt;. Compare West Frisian alve, Dutch elf, German elf, Danish elleve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=eleven&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eleven&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c.1200, elleovene, from Old English endleofan, literally &quot;one left&quot; (over ten), from Proto-Germanic *ainlif- (cf. Old Saxon elleban, Old Frisian andlova, Dutch elf, Old High German einlif, German elf, Old Norse ellifu, Gothic ainlif), &lt;strong&gt;a compound of *ain &quot;one&quot; (see one) + PIE *leikw- &quot;leave, remain&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. Greek leipein &quot;to leave behind;&quot; see relinquish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=twelve&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;twelve&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English twelf, literally &quot;two left&quot; (over ten), from Proto-Germanic *twa-lif-, &lt;strong&gt;a compound of the root of two + *lif-, root of the verb leave (see eleven)&lt;/strong&gt;. Cf. Old Saxon twelif, Old Norse tolf, Old Frisian twelef, Middle Dutch twalef, Dutch twaalf, Old High German zwelif, German zwölf, Gothic twalif. Outside Germanic, an analogous formation is Lithuanian dvylika, with second element -lika &quot;left over.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched and found a hypothesis about these changes as following:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://phoenixblog.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/wolves-wolps-and-lupes.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolves, wolps, and lupes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;*kʷ &gt; *p /R_&lt;/strong&gt;. Where &lt;strong&gt;R = i,l (and likely then also u,r)&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So I'm presuming the similar environment in question would be in cases like &lt;strong&gt;*-Rkʷ- (*R = {any resonant})&lt;/strong&gt;? Then I suppose, PIE *pénkʷe &gt; Germanic *fimf would fit that pattern as well.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the sound change &lt;strong&gt;PIE *kʷ&lt;/strong&gt; to  &lt;strong&gt;PGmc. *f&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;PIE *kʷ&lt;/strong&gt; to  &lt;strong&gt;PIE *p&lt;/strong&gt; regular though it's uncommon?&#xA;And does any other example exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.ru/books?id=KemgK5CquRkC&amp;amp;pg=PA142&amp;amp;lpg=PA142&amp;amp;dq=interchange%20of%20velars%20and%20labials%20Germanic&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=nNajQxGqLL&amp;amp;sig=5QNMEFwpT9l15Hnys5swrZ9tkfg&amp;amp;hl=zh-CN&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=ALpUUomhHJOgiQeuiICACw&amp;amp;ved=0CFUQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a book about the similar sound change in Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T16:36:02.767" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T20:39:50.567" Title="How does PIE *kʷ in **wĺ̥kʷos change to PGmc. *f in *wulfaz?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4661" CreationDate="2013-10-09T03:40:22.543" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for that. I would point out the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you try to use 'object' to define 'subject', you are simply avoiding the issue. Without a robust definition of 'subject', it is pointless to talk of object.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without a definition of subject, how can you talk of 'subject position'?&#xA;See if you can tell me the subject, and therefore the 'subject position' of this German sentence:&#xA;Die Katze biss die Frau. &#xA;Since feminine nominative and accusative case are identical, it is impossible to say which is which. Case was invented to indicate the roles of arguments. It is a very flawed invention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'John is a man.' or 'John is tall.' are not propositions, but statements. If you wish to identify the 'subject' of 'John is a man' which criteria would you apply? Languages that use case will show both to be nominative, the case often associated with 'subject'. If you say the first noun is the subject, you mentioned left dislocation, which will immediately contradict this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chinese has no verb inflections. Do you wish to say Chinese has no concept of subject, as has been mooted by some? (I'll provide a name later, can't find it right now).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to identify 'is' as a verb, tell me if you think it is passive or active.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the market place stood a tall statue. Syntax will not define the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If position, case, syntax and verb agreement (cf my German sentence die Frau biss ..., die Katze biss ...) do not identify 'subject', ask yourself what are you doing to identify subject. You are using an art, but not a science.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I would say, with respect, your intuitive grasp of what 'subject' is, is entirely arbitrary, English orientated and not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2566" LastEditorUserId="2566" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T04:20:04.497" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T04:20:04.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2013-10-09T07:38:40.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, alternation and sound changes between *p and *kʷ are common in IE languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Latin aqua and Oscan āpa (water)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Latin vesper and Russian vecher &amp;lt; *kʷ (evening)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cornish pemp and Latin quinque (five)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this light you should consider the fact that they reconstruct two very close roots for PIE: &lt;em&gt;lupos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fox&quot; and &lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆os&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wolf&quot;. If we consider the p a result of alternation, we come to &lt;em&gt;luq̆os&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆os&lt;/em&gt; which could be result of elementary metathesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T01:48:52.357" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T01:48:52.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T07:41:20.483" Score="12" ViewCount="3190" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;borrowing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;loanword&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is when a word from language A is added to the lexicon of language B, with whatever phonological adaptations are necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cognate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; only a word directly inherited from an ancestor language, or is it correct to say that any two words than can be traced back to a common ancestor word are cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously in the history of a word both things can happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Old English word and its descendant in Modern English are cognates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a word borrowed into Old English and its descendant in Modern English cognates?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would the Modern English word be cognate to the original word in the language that lent it to Old English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would the Modern English word be cognate to a modern word in another modern language descended from the word in its ancestor language that Old English borrowed it from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should we most correctly use the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cognate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T03:44:17.560" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T18:42:06.927" Title="Is a loanword also a cognate or are the two terms mutually exclusive?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T07:44:18.510" Score="5" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;With China asserting its influence on Tibet, including the standard Chinese language, what changes if any have taken place in the Tibetan language due to influence from the Chinese language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there will be lots of loanwords but I'm not interested in these. I would like to know if there are any known grammatical, syntactical differences, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T18:51:10.540" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T08:08:45.227" Title="Do we know of any influences on Tibetan from Chinese (other than lexical borrowing)?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4667" CreationDate="2013-10-09T09:13:05.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognates are only words shared in two sister varieties that have been inherited genetically from a parent variety. From Campbell and Mixco's &lt;em&gt;A Glossary of Historical Linguistics:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cognate&lt;/strong&gt; A word (or morpheme) that is related to a word (morpheme) in sister languages by reason of these words (morphemes) having been inherited by the related languages from a common word (morpheme) of the &lt;strong&gt;proto-language&lt;/strong&gt; from which they descend. For example, Italian &lt;em&gt;cane&lt;/em&gt; /kane/, Portuguese &lt;em&gt;cão&lt;/em&gt; /kãũ/, French &lt;em&gt;chien&lt;/em&gt; /syɛ̃/ ‘dog’, are all cognates, since they descend in these Romance languages from the same original word in Latin (ancestor of the Romance languages): &lt;em&gt;canis&lt;/em&gt; ‘dog’. (Campbell and Mixco 2007: 33-4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your hypothetical examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first one is uncontroversially a cognate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your second example, the OE form and the ModE form (but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the form from wherever it originated) are cognate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In your third example, the ModE form and the form in language X are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cognate because they don't go back to a common origin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And equally, the ModE form and the form in language Y (a descendant of language X) are also not cognate, as they do not go back to a common genetic ancestor (to be clear, the forms, not the languages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common ancestors are &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; genetic ancestors, despite how people might informally use &quot;common ancestor&quot;. Chinese 豆腐 (standard Mandarin &lt;em&gt;dòufu&lt;/em&gt;) was loaned into both Japanese, as 豆腐 &lt;em&gt;toufu&lt;/em&gt;, and into Korean, as 두부 &lt;em&gt;dubu&lt;/em&gt;. These forms share a common origin (a loan from some Sinitic language at some point into Korean and Japanese), but they aren't from a common ancestor (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not related). The Mandarin, Hakka (&lt;em&gt;teu&lt;sup&gt;55&lt;/sup&gt; fu&lt;sup&gt;55&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), and Hokkien (&lt;em&gt;tāu-hū&lt;/em&gt;) forms, on the other hand, are cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T09:13:05.887" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T09:25:54.760" Score="2" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't definitely a &quot;linguistic&quot; question, but I hope there're some people who solved the same problems like me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since of my childhood I was very curious in languages and linguistics, but I hadn't enough money to study abroad and universities with good linguistics faculties. Finally I was graduating in computer programming and worked in software engeneering since I was graduated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ffind a way to connect both of my interests, but I don't know anyone who tried it, and I'm not sure about current situation in this field. For example, as long as I know, the spellchecking and parsing the search requests are well-developed enough and these problems are almost solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, only a great research or a new university degree can help me with finding my place in that field. But is it possible from online courses, or I have to join &quot;full-time&quot; university (the second is impossible, I think :(). The thing is I don't know anyone who worked with such a problems (all of the linguists I know studied culture, histore, etc of the countries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2567" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T14:00:50.737" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T00:21:58.033" Title="Studying Linguistics for a Programmer" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2013-10-09T09:34:58.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Japanese case marker &lt;em&gt;=ga&lt;/em&gt; (a post-clitic), was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; originally a subject marker. We can easily see this in the Ryūkyūan languages, related to Japanese, as well as historically attested forms. It's important to keep in mind that standard Japanese is actually fairly innovative when compared to other Japonic languages, both historical and modern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, &lt;em&gt;=ga&lt;/em&gt; was a possessive case marker which happened to also have a usage as marking subjects (but only animate subjects; inanimate subjects used the genitive case marker &lt;em&gt;=no&lt;/em&gt;) (Vovin 2005: 118). Compare this Western Old Japanese form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;wa=Nka kəkərə&lt;/em&gt; |1s-POSS heart| 'My heart' (Kojiki Kayou 3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this Okinawan form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ari=ga guusan&lt;/em&gt; |3s-POSS cane| 'his/her cane' (Uchima and Nohara 2006: 66)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary function of Korean &lt;em&gt;=ka&lt;/em&gt;, to the best of my knowledge, has only ever been marking subjects. Not so with Japanese &lt;em&gt;=ga&lt;/em&gt;, so not only are we only looking at a phonetic similarity (I doubt you'll find recurrent sound correspondences here--the Proto-Japonic form was prenasalized voiced &lt;em&gt;*=&lt;sup&gt;ŋ&lt;/sup&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt;), but also an anachronistic similarity in meaning between modern standard Korean and modern standard Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="1832" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T10:02:25.307" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T10:02:25.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4670" CreationDate="2013-10-09T11:39:11.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; is a NLP library for Python, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK Book&lt;/a&gt; covers many computational linguistics topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T11:39:11.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29470" CreationDate="2013-10-09T11:43:41.033" Score="3" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered a contradiction between two respectful monographs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mallory gives the word as &lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;2/3&lt;/sub&gt;u̯obhseh&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; thus excluding &lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; while de Vaan gives totally opposite version, &lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;u̯obhseh&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; thus excluding &lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I wonder who is right? What do say the primary sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words the both sources also differ similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T21:35:27.113" Title="What laryngeal should be reconstructed in PIE word for wasp?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4521" CreationDate="2013-10-09T13:22:52.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Several frameworks consider words such as &lt;em&gt;go/went&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I/me&lt;/em&gt; to be two representations of a single lexical item. &lt;em&gt;Suppletion&lt;/em&gt; is the term for when the inflected forms are etymologically unrelated, while the term &lt;em&gt;allolex&lt;/em&gt; can be used for the individual forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think &lt;em&gt;allolex&lt;/em&gt; originated in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/in-brief&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework&lt;/a&gt;, originally only for semantic primes, but I can't see any reason why it can't be applied to any other words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T23:55:14.983" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T23:55:14.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4637" CreationDate="2013-10-09T13:30:13.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm don't think that the two examples you mention should be grouped together linguistically as a single class (to the exclusion of other activity verbs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin (1993) classes &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;em&gt;verb of transfer of message&lt;/em&gt;, along with &lt;em&gt;show, read, preach, etc.&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;verbs of transfer of message&lt;/em&gt; are notable in that they participate in the dative alternation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) John taught Mary the song.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) John taught the song to Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin classes &lt;em&gt;cook&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;em&gt;build verb&lt;/em&gt;, along with &lt;em&gt;arrange, bake, carve, chisel, etc.&lt;/em&gt;. Such verbs are notable in that they participate in the following argument structure alternations: &lt;em&gt;The material/product alternation, total transformation alternation, unspecified object alternation, benefactive alternation, raw material subject alternation,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the sum of money subject alternation.&lt;/em&gt; The example below is the &lt;em&gt;benefactive alternation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) John baked Mary a cake.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (4) John baked a cake for Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cook&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; are show very different behaviour. It's not even obvious to me that they belong to the same aspectual class. I don't see any reason why there should be a linguistic term to describe the conceit of 'activities accomplished by other activities'. As far as i can tell, there's no evidence to suggest that the distinction has any relevance to natural language semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT&lt;/em&gt;: Forgot to give the full citation for Levin. Here it is: &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/English_Verb_Classes_and_Alternations.html?id=6wIZWOrcBf8C&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Levin, B., (1993), English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T14:26:08.723" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T14:26:08.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4670" CreationDate="2013-10-09T14:51:49.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are still a student (or if there is a university in your city), I suggest emailing or making an appointment to talk to some professors specializing in AI. Preferably ones specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computational Linguistics (CL) but even if they don't they can still give you relevant advice and point you to the proper people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, you can take an online course. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Coursera.org&lt;/a&gt; is a website devoted to providing free access to courses written by professors from world-leading institutions. Currently they have not one, but two introductory NLP/CL courses. One from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Standford University&lt;/a&gt; and one from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/course/nlangp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Columbia University&lt;/a&gt;. The Stanford class in particular was co-created by Dan Jurafsky who also co-wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0131873210&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the textbook that most introductory NLP/CL courses use&lt;/a&gt;. Just click the &quot;preview&quot; button on those courses' websites and you should have access to all the slides and video lectures in the course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing it appears that the Columbia course is about to begin a 10 week long session, meaning the materials are unavailable for preview. However, if you register for the course you will get access to the materials as the course progresses. Not only that but you will get to participate in weekly assignments, get feedback from other users and TAs, and at the end get a nice certificate of completion which, if nothing else, shows employers and potential professors that you're serious about your studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These courses should give you an overview of NLP/CL tasks and techniques. You can use this to guide any further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also caution you that &lt;strong&gt;linguistics is not learning and speaking languages&lt;/strong&gt;. It is the study of the underlying mechanics of language which all languages share. I'd start by reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0061336467&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker&lt;/a&gt;. It's very basic and written for a general audience but it provides a nice overview. If you enjoy that and want to learn more then &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT OpenCourseWare&lt;/a&gt; has slides for MIT's introductory &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-901-language-and-its-structure-i-phonology-fall-2010/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonology&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-902-language-and-its-structure-ii-syntax-fall-2003/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-903-language-and-its-structure-iii-semantics-and-pragmatics-spring-2005/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt; courses. With that foundation you can explore &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/index.htm#linguistics-and-philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;all the Linguistics courses MIT offers&lt;/a&gt; and see if any interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T00:21:58.033" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T00:21:58.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4667" CreationDate="2013-10-09T15:47:43.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to illustrate that there is not a complete consensus about the definition, this is how David Crystal defines it in &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cognate (adj./n.) (1) A language or a linguistic form which is historically derived from the same source as another language/form, e.g. Spanish/Italian/ French/Portuguese are ‘cognate languages’ (or ‘cognates’); père/padre, etc. &#xA;  (‘father’) are ‘cognate words’ or cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, by this definition, loanwords would also be cognate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also seems to share this definition, and it explicitly mentions the &quot;cognate doublet&quot; shirt and skirt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T15:47:43.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4680" CreationDate="2013-10-09T17:54:28.557" Score="14" ViewCount="12292" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two words in English would appear to refer to foreign peoples / cultures known to the Rus within recorded history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian wikipedia pages indicate a surface similarity in spelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%B8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Казахи&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Казаки&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the etymologies (and, by extension, the current meaning) of these two terms terms referring to similar, or related, groups, or is this a false connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1236" LastEditorUserId="1236" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T22:12:28.583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T04:59:38.280" Title="What is the relation between the words &quot;Cossack&quot; and &quot;Kazakh&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-09T18:15:07.107" Score="3" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, PIE phonology postulates three voiceless velar/uvular stops to PIE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*/ḱ/ (c), */k/ (q), */kʷ/ (q̆)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I made a search for a PIE dictionary with come 11-15 thousand words, and found only one occurrence of the combination ku̯, in word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;kroku̯a̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;border post&quot; which is highly untypical, while kʷ is abundant.kʷ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this fact, the only explanation that comes to mind is the idea that there was actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; kʷ in PIE but rather in most cases it was a combination ku̯. This theory would be refuted if there were many kʷ in the end of the roots: in that case after applying this theory we would have roots ending with -ku̯ which is prohibited. So I searched for -ekʷ- composition throughout the roots so to check if it actually frequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what I found? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases either the u̯ in -eku̯- can be part of a suffix, or the *kʷ can be actually reconstructed as *p!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;soq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;sap&quot; - may be actually, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sopos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;running water&quot; - may be actually, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tequ̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (suffix -u̯-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eq̆ea̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;water body&quot; - may be actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯epea̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (this root a̯ep- for water is actually reconstructed along &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eq̆ea̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wolf&quot; could be actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lquos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (suffix), or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lpos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lupos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;coq̆r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;excrement&quot; could be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;copr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (compare &quot;coprophagy&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i̯eq̆r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;liver&quot; could be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i̯epr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (compare &quot;hepatitis&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯oq̆&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;eye&quot; could be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯oqu̯-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a typical u-stem (while -q̆ stem is highly untypical)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peq̆ter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;cook&quot; could be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pepter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (compare &quot;peptide&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is wrong, what could be the solution to the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar solution that the voiced equivalent to q̆, ğ at the end of the roots, could be actually b may explain why PIE has very rare *b. For example, traditionally reconstructed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯reğos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;darkness&quot; could be actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯rebos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which literally coincides with Greek word for &quot;darkness&quot;, &quot;erebos&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2832/what-evidence-supports-labialized-velars-in-pie&quot;&gt;What evidence supports labialized velars in PIE?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the traditional phonology implies that in several unrelated branches such as Hellenic, Osco-Umbrian and Celtic, happened similar change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kʷ-&gt;p&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems to me highly unlikely. It also postulates&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kʷ-&gt;p-&gt;f in Germanic, but not root-initially!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;penkʷe -&gt; finf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u̯lkʷos -&gt; wolf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kʷod -&gt; what&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kʷor -&gt; where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This supports my idea that root-initially kʷ could be actually ku̯ but root-finally it was p because ku̯ root-finally is impossible due to sonority rule (u̯ being sonorant cannot be further from the root nucleus than stop k)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-10-17T03:39:45.293" Title="Solution to a typological problem about PIE phonology: are there any facts that contradict this view?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2013-10-09T20:53:21.800" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should not confuse the two terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Cossacks: are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who became known as members of democratic, semi-military and semi-naval communities,[1] predominantly located in Ukraine and in Southern Russia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Kazakhs: are a Turkic people of Eastern Europe and the northern parts of Central Asia (largely Kazakhstan, but also found in parts of Uzbekistan, China, Russia and Mongolia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, The Russian Empire recognized the ethnic difference between the two groups; it called them both Kyrgyz to avoid confusion between the terms Kazakh and Cossack (both names originating from Turkic &quot;free man&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the noun qazğaq derives from the same root as the verb qazğan (&quot;to obtain&quot;, &quot;to gain&quot;). Therefore, qazğaq defines a type of person who seeks profit and gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vassmer's etymological dictionary traces the name to an Old East Slavic козакъ, kozak, originally from Cuman Cosac - a free man (in the Latin translation of this word in the Codex) or a freed man (in the Arabic translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, they have the same meaning but each group refers to a specific area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my answer would be of help.&#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2568" LastEditorUserId="2568" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T01:04:11.167" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T01:04:11.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2013-10-09T21:30:44.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There're 2 completely different groups, just their name is of same etymology. It comes from ancient Turkic 'kazak' - &quot;free man, wanderer, rambler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2571" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-10-09T21:49:10.240" LastActivityDate="2013-10-09T21:49:10.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-10T02:14:19.990" Score="4" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to extract all components (&quot;atoms&quot;) of meaning of the concept &quot;friendship&quot; in a certain language (actually in Russian).&#xA;By components of meaning I mean, for example: &quot;girl&quot;=&quot;human&quot;+&quot;female&quot;+&quot;young&quot;.&#xA;But the concept &quot;friendship&quot; is more complex.&#xA;One possible way is to use explanatory dictionaries (but entries may not be complete).&#xA;The other way is to review proverbs and idioms used in Russian.&#xA;What other linguistic methods may be useful here?&#xA;Any ideas are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2574" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T02:15:50.263" Title="How to explore the meaning of a concept (like &quot;friendship&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4679" CreationDate="2013-10-10T02:26:36.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This proposal creates a lot more problems than it solves. First, I don't think the rarity of the biphonemic sequence /kw/ is that problematic: plain velars are relatively infrequent in any case, so it's not too strange if /kw/ happens not to occur in the subset of the PIE lexicon that has been reconstructed. Especially so given that it would have competed with a similar-sounding single phoneme /kʷ/, which might easily have led to merger, or else possibly to dissimilation into /ḱw/. (There are also of course IE scholars who don't believe in the plain velar series at all and think that there were only two velar series, in which case the problem doesn't arise, but this is a minority position.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, changing all the reconstructed /kʷ/ into /kw/ actually creates a massive statistical anomaly, since labiovelars are at least as common as plain velars; so this would mean that PIE has more instances of /k/ followed by /w/ than it had of /k/ followed by all other sounds combined, which is highly improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, you'd have to explain why this biphonemic sequence shows up as a single phoneme in most of the daughter languages. For example, in the satem languages, why would /w/ have been lost after a velar but not otherwise? In Greek, why would */ḱw/ yield /pp/ (as in &lt;em&gt;hippos&lt;/em&gt;), but */kw/ yield /p/ or /t/ and not /pp/ or /tt/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Replacing labiovelars with labials leads to other problems: you would have to say that */p/ became /kʷ/ or /kw/ in some branches, to account for e.g. Latin &lt;em&gt;aqua&lt;/em&gt;, which is a bizarre and to my knowledge unattested change. This would also have to be parallel innovation in those branches, so it's no better in that sense than the standard */kʷ/ &gt; /p/ change. Moreover, it would have to be irregular, since obviously most instances of PIE */p/ remain labial in all the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-17T03:39:45.293" LastActivityDate="2013-10-17T03:39:45.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4682" CreationDate="2013-10-10T03:52:36.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Semantic_Metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; is a controversial approach to semantics. The idea is that there is a limited set of &lt;em&gt;semantic primes&lt;/em&gt; which are themselves undefinable and also universal. But with that set of primes, every other meaning can be defined/explicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conveniently, someone has already made an NSM definition for &lt;em&gt;friend&lt;/em&gt;! These definitions are always a work in progress, but it might give you a good place to start your investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(my) friend =&#xA;I think about this person like this:&#xA;    I know this person well&#xA;    when I do things with this person, I feel something good&#xA;    when I am with this person, I feel something good&#xA;I know this person thinks the same about me&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=3_1snsgmqU8C&amp;amp;pg=PA613&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source: Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-11T02:15:50.263" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T02:15:50.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-10T04:18:21.747" Score="3" ViewCount="2525" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know if &quot;helps&quot; is a verb, an auxiliary verb, a tense, a complementizer phrase, or something else. Could someone attach a picture of the correct tree? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2575" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T05:56:31.753" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T15:36:54.657" Title="I am having troubles drawing a syntax tree for the sentence &quot;networking helps you grow your business&quot;. Can anyone help me?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-03-07T20:43:42.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4685" CreationDate="2013-10-10T04:53:46.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would analyse it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wZAFS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Syntax tree for &amp;quot;networking helps you grow your business&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;helps&lt;/em&gt; is definitely a verb - the /-s/ suffix is the third person present tense agreement marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I drew the tree with an internal sentence, but it might also be called an Inflection Phrase or a Tense Phrase. There's little consensus on the syntactic categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can make trees like this easily at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T04:53:46.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4691" CreationDate="2013-10-10T05:24:12.210" Score="4" ViewCount="896" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the current accepted origin of the Japanese particles no/na/ni/ga?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One account I heard was that all were descended from a common root: an existential verb nu or ni, where ni was the infinitive/conjunctive form, and no/na/ga are various evolutions of the non-finite/adjectival or irrealis forms. Another account I heard was that ga and no were true particles (ga being a more concrete genitive relation and no being a more abstract genitive relation), while na is a shortened form of naru/nari (which might itself be a contraction of ni aru/ari). I wouldn't be surprised if there were other explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an accepted etymology for some or all of these particles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T11:46:45.693" Title="Etymology of Japanese no/na/ni/ga?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2580" CreationDate="2013-10-10T07:39:39.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for 'path' certainly contained an ablauting laryngeal suffix, as the Avestan paradigm of the word demonstrates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;acc.sg. paṇtąm &amp;lt; *pént-oH-m̥ (cf. Skt. pántham) [NB Av. ą &amp;lt; ā / _m$]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gen.sg. paθō &amp;lt; *pn̥t-H-ós (cf. Skt. patháḥ)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PIE accent/ablaut type here is amphikinetic (e-grade root and o-grade suffix in the strong stem, zero grade of both root and suffix in the weak steam, with accent on the root in the strong stem and the ending in the weak stem). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A laryngeal is necessary in order to account for the Avestan θ [interdental fricative] and Sanskrit th [voicless aspirate], continuing Proto-Indo-Iranian *th. Only when the laryngeal is directly adjacent to the stop does θ result (Skt. has evidently imported the voiceless aspirate throughout the whole paradigm: pántham &amp;lt;&amp;lt; *pántam). Proto-Indo-Iranian *th exists only in forms that are reconstructable to Proto-Indo-Iranian, or to Proto-Indo-European voiceless stop + laryngeal sequences (thus, the same applies to PIIr. *ph [&gt; Av. f and Skt. ph] and *kh [&gt; Av. x and Skt. kh]). For instance, the 2.sg. ending of the perfect, Av. -θa, Skt. -tha, Greek -θa, Hitt. -ta is to be reconstructed as PIE *-th2e, thus accounting at one stroke for the a-vocalism in the Greek ending and the voiceless aspirate in the Indo-Iranian forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the laryngeal is to be reconstructed as *h1 or *h2 not wholly certain, though *h2 seems more likely. In all instances in which the quality of a laryngeal that produces a voiceless aspirate in Indo-Iranian is clearly discernible, the laryngeal is *h2. For instance: Skt. &lt;em&gt;rátha-&lt;/em&gt; 'chariot' &amp;lt; *rot-h2-o, cf. Lat. &lt;em&gt;rota&lt;/em&gt;; Skt. pr̥thú- 'broad', cf. Grk. πλατύς. Hence, Mayrhofer (1986), for instance, holds that only *h2 produces aspiration on stops in Indo-Iranian. The best possible example for aspiration by *h1 is perhaps the 2.pl.pres. ending of Vedic, -tha, which corresponds to Greek -τε, thus potentially implying a form *-th1e. Vedic 2.pl.pres. -tha otherwise lacks an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivational suffix *-eh1 would certainly be uncommon; I cannot call to mind any other words that decisively show it. I believe that scholars in Leiden follow Pedersen (&lt;em&gt;La cinquieme declenasion latine&lt;/em&gt;) in accepting a derivational suffix *-eh1 as the origin for Lithuanian nouns in &lt;em&gt;-ė&lt;/em&gt; (as well as perhaps contributing to the Latin fifth declension). Others (e.g., Weiss) take the Latin fifth declension as a Latin-internal development from certain nouns that contained &lt;em&gt;ē&lt;/em&gt; for other reasons (e.g., &lt;em&gt;rēs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diēs&lt;/em&gt;), and reject the potential Baltic connection, in which case little basis would exist for the assumption of a derivational suffix *-eh1. *-eh2, in this specific instance, is also peculiar, since it primarily derives feminine nouns, and 'path' is a masculine in both Skt. and Avestan. Alternatively, *-h2 here could be a collective derivational suffix (compare Skt. &lt;em&gt;rátha&lt;/em&gt; 'chariot' &amp;lt; 'set of wheels' above), in which case a 'path' would be 'a group/set of &lt;em&gt;pont&lt;/em&gt;-' (whatever exactly a *&lt;em&gt;pont-&lt;/em&gt; might have been -- we have no such root noun).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further inflection off of another inflectional form (as Mark Beadles suggests) is highly unlikely -- such &quot;decasuative&quot; derivation is typologically unsubstantiated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If truly pressed, I'd reconstruct *pónt-eh2- / *pn̥t-h2-, but we cannot be wholly certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2576" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T07:39:39.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1314" CreationDate="2013-10-10T08:05:51.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending upon the specific view that one accepts concerning the development of the accent systems of Baltic and Slavic, the Baltic cognate would compel a reconstruction with *h2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian (nom.) &lt;em&gt;móteris&lt;/em&gt; [the acute diacritic here indicates the surface word accent] ‘woman’ belongs to the third accent class, which indicates that the stem &lt;em&gt;moteri-&lt;/em&gt; contained a so-called &quot;acute&quot; intonation (the use of the terms &quot;acute&quot; and &quot;circumflex&quot; in Baltic and Slavic accentology is fraught and convoluted -- beware). If one follows the position of Kortlandt (though also more or less sustained in Petit's recent &lt;em&gt;Untersuchungen zu den baltischen Sprachen&lt;/em&gt;) that only IE laryngeals or voiced stops in syllable codas could eventually produce &quot;acute&quot; intonation, then the reconstruction *meh2-ter- would be necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, insofar as one does analyze the word into a root and suffix -ter, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; IE root whatsoever that participates in derivation lacks a consonant following the root's full-grade (&lt;em&gt;confer&lt;/em&gt; the roots in the &lt;em&gt;Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verben&lt;/em&gt;). IE grammatical elements that lack final consonants consist exclusively of particles (e.g., *su 'good, well'), prepositions (e.g., *pro ‘before’), and pronouns.  Thus, IE constraints on licit root structures would exclude *mā- as a root. So even setting the Baltic considerations aside, *meh2-ter remains a preferable reconstruction.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2576" LastEditorUserId="2576" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T20:53:42.073" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T20:53:42.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20992" CreationDate="2013-10-10T10:30:01.497" Score="2" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lao is said to now be a language with phonetic spelling since &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4548/seeking-details-of-lao-orthographic-reforms&quot;&gt;the reform/standardization of the 1970s&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this process some consonants were made obsolete (they're still not in Unicode) because they were only used for etymological spelling and more common letters represented the same sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it seems Lao retained two vowel letters that have the same sound: &quot;ໄ&quot; and &quot;ໃ&quot; both represent the sound &lt;code&gt;/ai/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;•&lt;/strong&gt; Do we know why a duplicate vowel was retained while duplicate consonants were discarded? &lt;strong&gt;•&lt;/strong&gt; Or are they distinguished phonetically somehow after all, possibly only in some dialects? &lt;strong&gt;•&lt;/strong&gt; Or are they one remaining vestige still used for etymological spelling of Pali and Sanskrit words? &lt;strong&gt;•&lt;/strong&gt; Could it be due to a merger ancient or modern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact there's even a third way to spell &lt;code&gt;/ai/&lt;/code&gt;: &quot;-ັຍ&quot; and there seem to be other vowel sounds with multiple spellings as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:04:52.197" Title="What's the difference between the Lao vowel letters &quot;ໄ&quot; and &quot;ໃ&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4687" CreationDate="2013-10-10T11:36:04.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very few of the case markers you are asking about have any kind of an accepted etymology. Most of the time, it's because we just don't have any evidence to go on. Generally, they all share their functions and forms throughout the Japonic languages, so we have no real evidence to call them anything other than what they were, even going back to Proto-Japonic times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first, a detour. The &quot;existential verb&quot; you're talking about is not an existential verb at all, but a copula. In Vovin (2005, 2009)'s analysis of Old Japanese, the copula &lt;em&gt;n-&lt;/em&gt; is a defective verb, only having three forms: an infinitive &lt;em&gt;n-i&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;|COP-INF|&lt;/code&gt;, an attributive (used to form relative clauses) &lt;em&gt;n-ö&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;|COP-ATTR|&lt;/code&gt;, and a subordinating converb form (used to link sentences) &lt;em&gt;n-i-te&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;|COP-INF-SUB|&lt;/code&gt; (Vovin 2009: 511-37). You can find reflexes of this not only in modern Japanese, but also in the related Ryukyuan languages, so the copula &lt;em&gt;n-&lt;/em&gt; certainly goes back to Proto-Japonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, &lt;em&gt;=ga&lt;/em&gt; (PJ *&lt;sup&gt;ŋ&lt;/sup&gt;ga) has no known etymology other than just a possessive case marker with a subject-marking usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's conceivable that the genitive case marker &lt;em&gt;=no&lt;/em&gt; (PJ *nə) and the attributive form of the copula &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; (also PJ *nə) are related (and even today most people continually confuse them--traditional Japanese approaches to grammar don't even recognize the copula &lt;em&gt;n-&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;, which is used in modern Japanese to use certain nouns (also called adjectival nouns or &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;-adjectives) as attributives of some other noun is clearly a special attributive form of the copula. As far as I know, this is an innovation only found in Late Middle Japanese (so at the earliest around 1200 CE) (Frellesvig 2010: 341-2). Frellesvig seems to think LMJ &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; is from ealier &lt;em&gt;naru&lt;/em&gt;, but he doesn't say whether this is from even earlier &lt;em&gt;n(-i) ar-u&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;|COP(-INF) exist-FIN|&lt;/code&gt; or from &lt;em&gt;nar-u&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;|become-FIN|&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dative-locative case marker &lt;em&gt;=ni&lt;/em&gt; is also of unclear etymological origin beyond being the Proto-Japonic dative-locative case marker *nəi (Vovin 2005: 148, reconstruction Whitman 1985: 36-8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T11:46:45.693" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T11:46:45.693" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4693" CreationDate="2013-10-10T11:58:37.377" Score="0" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many and which prepositions do you need to express everything that prepositions can express. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Alice goes under the line&quot; and &quot;Alice goes over the line&quot; you could solve both cases with the same proposition if you add an adjective that indicates going under or over. It either going under or going over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same doesn't go for prepositions such as 'of' and 'to'. You can't replace one of them with the other by adding an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a minimal set of essential preposition that you can't exchange against each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-10T17:31:43.857" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T17:31:43.857" Title="Minimal set of prepositions" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4692" CreationDate="2013-10-10T12:33:28.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tok Pisin&lt;/a&gt; has two prepositions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bilong&lt;/em&gt; meaning 'of' or 'for' (the genitive, essentially)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; for everything else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T12:33:28.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-10T17:52:54.567" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4692/minimal-set-of-prepositions&quot;&gt;minimal sets of prepositions&lt;/a&gt; gained an answer that that Tok Pisin, the English-based creole used as national language and &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt; of Papua New Guinea has only two prepositions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bilong&lt;/strong&gt; (of)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; (general use)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what strategies does Tok Pisin employ to express all the relationships typically handled by the larger set of prepositions of a typical European language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first guess is that it might use techniques similar to Japanese where &quot;XYZの中に&quot; (XYZ no naka ni) &quot;inside XYZ&quot; is literally &quot;XYZ's middle in&quot;, and many similar constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T17:52:54.567" Title="Given that Tok Pisin has only two prepositions, how does it express a range of relations?" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-24T12:26:35.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2013-10-10T18:46:50.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe, a single quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://vasmer.narod.ru/p242.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vasmer's dictionary&lt;/a&gt; will answer the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Слово: казаґк,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ближайшая этимология: аґ-, укр. козаґк, др.-русск. козакъ &quot;работник, батрак&quot;, впервые в грам. 1395 г.; см. Срезн. I, 1173 и сл. Из укр. заимств. польск. kоzаk &quot;казак&quot;. Ударение в форме мн. ч. казаґки -- результат влияния польско-укр. формы; оренб. казаки говорят: казакиґ; см. Зеленин, РФВ, 56, 239. Заимств. из тур., крым.-тат., казах., кирг., тат., чагат. kаzаk &quot;свободный, независимый человек, искатель приключений, бродяга&quot; (Радлов 2, 364 и сл.); см. Бернекер 1, 496; Мi. ТЕl. I, 330. Сюда же казаґки мн., &lt;strong&gt;соврем. казаґхи -- тюрк. народ&lt;/strong&gt;. Этноним касоґг не родствен казаґк, вопреки Эльи (505).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A loose translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word: kazak &lt;code&gt;[qɑzɑq]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nearest etymology: ag-, Ukrainian козаґк, Old Russian козакъ &quot;worker, farmhand&quot;, in grammar since 1395; see Sriezniewski, 1173 and a dictionary. [...]  Borrowed from Turkish, Crimean-Tatar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Chagatai kаzаk &quot;a free, independent person, adventurer, tramp&quot; (Radlov 2, 364 and dictionary); see Berneker 1, 496; Мi. ТЕl. I, 330. Cognates казаґки plural, &lt;strong&gt;modern Kazakh казаґхи -- a Turkic nation&lt;/strong&gt;. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2013-10-10T18:46:50.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-10T19:27:26.090" Score="2" ViewCount="706" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=UJQwf05yzqYC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Accents of English (1982)&lt;/a&gt;, John C. Wells came up with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;useful notation&lt;/a&gt; for English vowels that allows easy comparison of the pronunciation of English vowels in varieties of this language. This notation has been widely adopted, and it is now common to talk about the STRUT vowel to refer to the vowels in &lt;em&gt;cub, rub, hum&lt;/em&gt;. In standard British and American English this vowel is pronounced as [ʌ], but in Northern England as [ʊ]. What makes this notation extremely useful is that mergers of two vowels can be easily referred to by shorthand, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NEAR - SQUARE merger&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Has anyone suggested an equivalent notation for &lt;strong&gt;consonants&lt;/strong&gt;? Such as the TOOTH consonant when referring to what in British and American English is a voiceless interdental fricative? I couldn't find anything online or in the literature. I get why the lexical set notation was first devised for vowels since English spelling is particularly inconsistent when it comes to vowels. But I feel it's still inconsistent enough for consonants to make a lexical set notation in this area useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: If not, what would be criteria by which to choose keywords to represent lexical sets for consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T13:22:31.723" Title="What is the consonant equivalent of Well's lexical sets for English vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8482" CreationDate="2013-10-10T19:57:54.600" Score="2" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actor in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Youtube comedy video&lt;/a&gt; seems to be imitating African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I wonder how successful he is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammatical features seem to be pretty accurate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;y'all&lt;/em&gt; as second person plural pronoun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where is x at?&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;Where is x?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You're done messed up&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;You have messed up&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His intonation also appears to be a quite accurate imitation. But what about how he pronounces the student's names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jacqueline&lt;/em&gt; as [dʒeɪ'kwɔlɪn]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blake&lt;/em&gt; as [bə'lɑkeɪ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Denise&lt;/em&gt; as [di'naɪs]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two seem too good to be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aaron&lt;/em&gt; as [eɪ'ʔeɪrɒn]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*O'Shaughnessy [oʊʃeg'henesi]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T03:12:29.777" Title="Characteristics of African American Vernacular English" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;aave&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-10T21:00:50.137" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say you're teaching someone the sentence &quot;I got in the car&quot;. This is a tricky sentence for beginners since they might ask: eh, what did you get in the car? Such sentences are easier to teach when there is a context associated with the sentence. That is, if you see someone getting into a car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm wondering if any of you know of a tool or database which can be used to generate pictures or animations based on simple sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Images does not help when you enter &quot;I got in the car&quot; into its search engine. However, if you enter &quot;enter car&quot; you do get some useful matches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps someone has developed software that you know about which can generate animations and or images by inferring the meaning associated with the sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2013-10-11T04:57:34.173" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T04:57:34.173" Title="Associating Sentences with Animations" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-11T04:41:17.343" Score="3" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;In learning Lao one of the tricky things For a native English speaker is the two vowels that we don't have in English and sound very similar to us. This is compounded by the fact that both exist in short and long forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm actually looking for a minimal &quot;quartet&quot; ideally, and because Lao has five or six tones it's important that only the vowels contrast and not the tones, which will distract my ear and my attempts at pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel sounds in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɯ/&lt;/code&gt; Lao orthography &lt;code&gt;ກຶ&lt;/code&gt; Latin transliteration &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ue&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɯː/&lt;/code&gt; Lao orthography &lt;code&gt;ກື&lt;/code&gt; Latin transliteration &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ue&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɤ/&lt;/code&gt; Lao orthography &lt;code&gt;ເກິ&lt;/code&gt; Latin transliteration &lt;code&gt;eu&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;oe&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɤː/&lt;/code&gt; Lao orthography &lt;code&gt;ເກີ&lt;/code&gt; Latin transliteration &lt;code&gt;eu&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;oe&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've arbitrarily used &lt;code&gt;ກ&lt;/code&gt; as the base consonant. Vowel length is unfortuately not reflected in the common transliteration schemes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize it's not always possible to find perfect minimal pairs and that's going to be even harder with four contrasting sounds rather than two, so &quot;near minimal pairs&quot; are acceptable. I'd prefer short common words that I'll be able use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are also diphthongs with each vowel followed by schwa: &lt;code&gt;/ɯə/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/ɯːə/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/uə/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/uːə/&lt;/code&gt; so bonus points if you can include those!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T04:41:17.343" Title="Seeking Lao minimal pairs for /ɯ/ vs /ɤ/ vs /ɯː/ vs /ɤː/" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4637" CreationDate="2013-10-11T06:59:23.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verbs like &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; might be labelled &lt;em&gt;non-homogeneous activities&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dvlKSiystvQC&amp;amp;pg=PA173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David R. Dowty writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas we can distinguish homogeneous activities from the class containing non-homogeneous activities and accomplishments (e.g. by Taylor's (57)), there seems to be a sense in which non-homogeneous activities are always defined in terms of more primitive accomplishments/achievements. There may or may not be a verb of English corresponding to this more primitive accomplishment (or series of them), of course. The definition of &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt; (an activity) would, should we desire to spell it out, seem to involve the accomplishment of &amp;quot;taking a step&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Yet there seems to be no expressions at all describing the minimal accomplishment which defines &lt;em&gt;chuckling&lt;/em&gt; (Taylor's example) or &lt;em&gt;laughing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Teach&lt;/em&gt; could be analysed as a non-homogeneous activity comprising the accomplishments &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;demonstrate&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T06:59:23.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-10-11T07:20:40.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;aktionsart&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;lexical aspect&lt;/em&gt; refers to the inherent temporal structure of verbs, which contrasts with &lt;em&gt;grammatical aspect&lt;/em&gt;, the context dependent temporal structure of a specific clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-11T11:40:07.433" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T11:40:07.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-10-11T07:20:40.930" Score="0" Body="*aktionsart* or *lexical aspect* refers to the inherent temporal structure of verbs, which contrasts with *grammatical aspect*, the context dependent temporal structure of a specific clause" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2013-10-11T11:39:49.353" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T11:39:49.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4574" CreationDate="2013-10-11T11:55:26.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suau_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Suau&lt;/a&gt; (Austronesian, PNG) has a particle indicating a continuing action, which is phonetically a long /e/ which can last for as long as a couple of seconds, and is written simply as &lt;em&gt;eee--&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Abo   i   dalahai,  i   dalahai,  i   lau,  ie  sae,&#xA;then  he  take.off  he  take.off  he  go    he  go.up&#xA;  ie  sae,   ie  sae,   ie  sae,   ie  sae    eee--,  i   hekau.&#xA;  he  go.up  he  go.up  he  go.up  he  go.up  CONT    he  dim&#xA;&quot;He was taking off, and going on, going up and up (x5) until he was out of sight.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/3668716/Can_a_top-down_CARLA_Emulate_HARLA_Some_discourse-level_considerations_for_our_next_generation_of_parsers._Proceedings_of_the_1996_General_CARLA_Conference_EditRe-order_section_JAARS_Center_Waxhaw_N.C._November_14_1996&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source: Russ Cooper (academia.edu)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T11:55:26.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-11T22:29:18.587" Score="2" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for languages with writing systems that are almost completely ideally phonemic (i.e. no silent letters and an unambiguous one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes). Two that I have found so far are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiswahili&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Swahili&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;. Does anyone know of more? It would be great to compile as many as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2580" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-12T10:34:21.663" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T15:11:12.537" Title="Ideally phonemic writing systems?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:34:42.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2013-10-11T22:33:57.280" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is pretty much the case with Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-11T22:33:57.280" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-11T22:38:43.487" Score="3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am conducting a small research on the usage of dual in the Czech language. Normally, the dual is used only when referring to body parts (legs, eyes, knees etc) and the number 200. However, in spoken Czech it is frequently used for other nouns, which is considered grammatically wrong, but still is pathologically wide-spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is : can it after some language development be eventually considered a new grammatical norm? What are the main criteria for a very common mistake to be legalized? Is it some frequency limit, after reaching which the form is legalized? Or is all this much simpler : some person in the government who is in charge of education allows this form and requests to change the dictionaries and grammar reference books (happened in Russia, the famous &quot;coffee&quot; became neutral as well as masculine)? I would like to get some documented proof and statistical data, if that is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Until the XV. century this dual usage was actually grammatically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1651" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T15:39:41.970" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T15:39:41.970" Title="What are the main criteria for a grammar mistake to become a new normative?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2013-10-12T01:37:10.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most recently developed orthographies are phonemically straight forward - they become less ideal as time goes on and the spoken language goes under sound shifts, but the written language doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the languages SIL has worked with did not have an orthography before, so you'll be able to find many in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/resources/browse/subjectlanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their archive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T01:37:10.870" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2013-10-12T03:06:58.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid there is no real answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;correct&quot; can refer to a &lt;strong&gt;correspondence of symbol to reality&lt;/strong&gt;, as &quot;the earth is round&quot; refers to a situation in what people perceive as reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &quot;correct&quot; or &quot;legal&quot; is used to describe a &lt;strong&gt;grammatical phenomenon&lt;/strong&gt;, however, there is &lt;strong&gt;no such correspondence to reality&lt;/strong&gt;; at best, one can ask, &quot;given grammatical rule x, is utterance y legal/correct?&quot;. Further, one can try to test a certain rule for consistency with other rules and call it &quot;incorrect&quot; if it seems inconsistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But language is a huge set of rules and &lt;strong&gt;idiomatic exceptions&lt;/strong&gt;: the mere fact that utterance y does not follow a rule or goes against a rule says no more than...the fact that it is irregular. It can be stylistically undesirable, neutral, or desirable. There can be no true objective judgement of &quot;correctness&quot; or &quot;legality&quot; about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people say &quot;utterance y is incorrect&quot;, what they usually do is give an &lt;strong&gt;aesthetic&lt;/strong&gt; opinion: does it sound good or not? These aesthetics may be influenced by various factors, such as social class, consistency, etc. A political authority, like the Académie Française, or the author of a style book, or prevailing cultural norms, may influence what things people approve and disapprove of; but to declare the decrees of such a political entity &quot;binding&quot; is an aesthetic, moral, or practical choice, not an observation of &quot;fact&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, &lt;strong&gt;there is no objective way&lt;/strong&gt; to establish when or whether a certain construction is &quot;the norm&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T03:06:58.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-12T05:33:42.497" Score="3" ViewCount="2522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a really hard time searching for the exact term to refer to quantifiers that are of NP+PP combinations. E.g.: a lot of, lots of, a bit of, plenty of, a number of, an amount of, etc. &quot;Basic&quot; quantifiers are single word quantifiers (e.g.: few, much, many, several, etc.), but what are the NP+PP combinations called? Are they quantifying expressions? They're not compund quantifiers, are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are they analysed in phrase structure form? Let's take for example &quot;a lot of sugar&quot;. Should the quantifier &quot;a lot of&quot; go under the node &quot;Det&quot;,  should the whole phrase be analysed as [[NP[Det+N]]+[PP[Prep+[NP[N]]]]], or is there an X-bar involved somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T15:45:24.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T16:47:42.803" Title="Quantifier (Noun Phrase + Prepositional Phrase); what are they called?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2850" CreationDate="2013-10-12T07:24:17.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several overlapping factors here:&#xA;Firstly, many Indo-European languages share root words that go back long before Latin, and have been subject to a number of sound shifts, which is why they may not seem related at first (cf, the difference between the initial [sh] in 'short' and the [k] in 'Kurz' and 'curzu'). These are continually ongoing - for example, the ancestral German word probably ended in a '-t', but these were later shifted to a '-ts' sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, layered into this is the adoption of words from Latin, which was so prestigious in the past, and similarly the adoption of words from French and Italian (especially into English, but also into German) for similar reasons in the later medieval centuries. This has given English doubled pairs like 'short' and 'curt', by 're-'adopting cognate forms, and finding a space for them in the vocabulary. I don't know German anywhere near well enough to be aware of a similar example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the tendency of some languages to maintain a separation from others. The reason that Italian uses 'pomodoro' instead of a cognate to 'Tomate' isn't because German and Italian are that different, it's just because the linguistic powers that be in Italy consciously avoided it. In a current context, many language communities prefer to create new technological words instead of using English terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2582" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T07:24:17.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2710" CreationDate="2013-10-12T07:28:39.813" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can suggest two reasons:&#xA;The 'd' could have been added under influence from the Norse forms during the Viking age (when English adopted significant quantities of Norse vocabulary and grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, it may have been added as a hypercorrection - it's a common tendency in English dialects today to drop the alveolar stops t and d, especially after 'n' ('Toronto' is often pronounced 'Tronna' by residents, for example). The 'd' might have been added by people who wanted to sound more learned, and mistakenly thought they were dropping a 'd' in that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2582" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T07:28:39.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2013-10-12T11:51:55.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A single program that supports both alignment and adding morphological annotation is impossible in the next 10 years.&#xA;Having a fully annotated and sentence-aligned version is everybody's goal. I'm working on a Sanskrit-Russian corpus and so I build upon &lt;a href=&quot;http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/index.php?contents=texte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/index.php?contents=texte&lt;/a&gt; and add Russian parallel texts.&#xA;TEI-encoded manuscript edition is XML. I have just TXT, no markup, only corresponding shloka (=line) numbers.&#xA; &quot;I added lines for the corresponding text in other languages, and manually pasted these in.&quot; - that does not make much sense. InterText can handle that. What languages are you working with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2584" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T11:51:55.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2013-10-12T15:11:12.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Armenian&lt;/a&gt; is one of such languages. More, it is one of the oldest languages known to be mostly phonemic.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/armenian.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the late 4th century AD, king Vramshapuh of Armenia asked Mesrop Mashtots, one of the officials in his chancellery and a prominent scholar, to create a new alphabet for Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mashtots travelled to Alexandria, where he studied the principles of writing and came to the conclusion that the Greek alphabet was the best alphabet in use at that time because there was an &lt;strong&gt;almost one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters&lt;/strong&gt;. He used this model to come up with a new alphabet, which he presented to the king when he returned to Armenia in 405 AD. The new alphabet was well-received and a new Armenian translation of the bible was published in 405 AD. Other literary works soon followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some differences between spoken and written language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two sounds, &lt;code&gt;[f]&lt;/code&gt; and palatalized &lt;code&gt;[ja]&lt;/code&gt; that have been adopted from Russian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other subtle differences have primarily dialectic nature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T15:11:12.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-12T16:38:34.113" Score="2" ViewCount="904" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, some words start with the double consonant graphemes ⟨&lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt;⟩ - that have indeed the value of &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any language that have a similar pattern (starting with double consonants)? What is the origin of this &quot;phenomena&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know, at least, that Arabic does not have such pattern). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2586" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T11:46:06.713" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T12:47:03.910" Title="The double ⟨l⟩ in Spanish" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2850" CreationDate="2013-10-12T18:11:22.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED's etymology of &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Old English sc(e)ort = Old High German scurz &amp;lt; Germanic type *skurto- (comparative *skurtizon- , Old English scyrtra ), whence Dutch schorten , Old Norse skorta to lack; for other derivatives see shirt n., skirt n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Germanic adjective is commonly regarded as a popular Latin *excurtus ( &amp;lt; Latin ex- + curtus ). On this view it would be parallel in origin with the synonymous Old Frisian, Old Saxon kurt , Dutch kort , Old High German (Middle High German, modern German) kurz , a West Germanic adoption of Latin curtus . The Romanic languages, however, afford no evidence of a popular Latin *excurtus , and it is unlikely that such a form existed. It is possible that Germanic *skurto- may be an altered adoption of Latin curtus , with prefixed s either due to some Germanic analogy or attracted from the ending of a preceding word in some Latin context. Some scholars, however, regard *skurto- as a native Germanic word, &amp;lt; a root *skert- (supposed to be evidenced in Middle High German scherze , scherzel small piece) &amp;lt; pre-Germanic *skerd- , an extension of *sker- to cut (see shear v.).&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is: German &lt;em&gt;kurz&lt;/em&gt; is a borrowing from Latin &lt;em&gt;curtus&lt;/em&gt; (which gives the Romance forms &lt;em&gt;court, corto, curzu&lt;/em&gt;, etc.). English &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; is either a borrowing from the same source with an added initial &lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt; whose origin isn't understood, or else it's not from Latin at all, but from a PIE root *&lt;em&gt;sker-&lt;/em&gt;. (If the latter, it would likely still be cognate with Latin &lt;em&gt;curtus&lt;/em&gt;, which is from PIE *&lt;em&gt;ker-&lt;/em&gt;; since many PIE roots appear in two forms, with and without an initial &lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt;, the two roots would probably be ultimately the same.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T18:11:22.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3238" CreationDate="2013-10-12T19:04:36.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;جيّد&quot; [jayyid] (having quality; refined) is an adjective from &quot;جودة&quot; [jawda] (quality), so there is a &lt;code&gt;[dʒ]&lt;/code&gt; not a &lt;code&gt;[g]&lt;/code&gt; in the beginning of the word but in the Egyptian dialect of the Arabic language the &lt;code&gt;ج&lt;/code&gt; is spoken as a &lt;code&gt;[g]&lt;/code&gt; giving the sound &lt;code&gt;[gayyid]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aftermaths, no borrowing from the Egyptian dialect regarding the word &quot;good&quot; or &quot;gut&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2586" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T11:40:22.857" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T11:40:22.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2013-10-12T19:14:09.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this construction is widely used in spoken Czech, then it's already part of a certain norm : the vernacular spoken Czech, which may be considerably different and likely more permissive than the written Czech norm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's often a good deal of difference between a language's spoken norm, and a language's written norm. The spoken forms almost always eventually prevail and become the new standard, but there can be a considerable gap between the two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, the possessive construction with &quot;à&quot; (&quot;le livre à Michel&quot;, &quot;la soeur à Matthieu&quot;) is in use since the Middle ages, and everyone uses it every day. However, normative grammars consider it &quot;incorrect&quot; in this context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, &lt;em&gt;entire tenses&lt;/em&gt; that no longer exist in spoken French are still part of its written norm (the best example is the &lt;em&gt;passé simple&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion : being widely used is a necessary condition for a form to become part of the written norm, but by no means is it a sufficient condition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Endorsement by someone who's considered an authority on the (current) norm is neither sufficient nor even necessary, but it may popularize the form, especially in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2013-10-12T19:14:09.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-12T20:46:46.963" Score="3" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just the simultaneousness? &#xA;Also - can a sequence of say uvular stop and glottal stop become - diachronically - an uvular ejective?&#xA;Thanks :))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2587" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T00:22:51.743" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T00:22:51.743" Title="What is the difference between an ejective consonant and a sequence of consonant + glottal stop?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-13T02:54:08.347" Score="5" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you analyse the following sentence (in generative syntax):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No one but John attended the meeting?&lt;/em&gt; (an example is taken from von Fintel's 1993 paper on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.encquran.brill.nl/entries/encyclopedia-of-hebrew-language-and-linguistics/exceptive-construction-COM_00000921&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;exceptive constructions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the NP &quot;no one but John.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T11:11:51.413" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T11:37:36.703" Title="Syntax of exceptives (generative syntax)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4742" CreationDate="2013-10-13T03:03:49.727" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know much at all about the specifics of Arabic grammar, so this question might not make sense, but as I understand it, most Arabic words consist of a three-consonant root with vowels inserted to alter the meaning / part of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do loanwords take part in this process, or are they unaffected by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T21:21:05.553" Title="How are foreign terms incorporated into the Arabic system of vowel alternation?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4726" CreationDate="2013-10-13T06:17:32.607" Score="2" ViewCount="1674" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bracketing for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_constituent_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IC analysis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;e.g.    &lt;code&gt;((The) (((happy) (teacher)) ((in) ((that) (class))))) ((was) ((beaming) (away))).&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, what about this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What happened next astonished all present at the meeting&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2590" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T18:16:12.973" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T18:16:33.197" Title="How is bracketing used in IC analysis?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-13T06:59:15.553" Score="2" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in English we have a &quot;quarter&quot; and a &quot; half&quot; as two words which denote fractions, in Hindi we have separate words for half ('Aadha'), Quarter ('Sava'), three-quarters ('Pauna'), One and a half ('Dedh') and two and a half ('Dhai').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How may separate words do we have for fractions in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T11:13:13.730" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T11:13:13.730" Title="Words for fractions" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2013-10-13T08:29:06.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't know about generative syntax, that makes far too many assumptions to be safe.&#xA;'but' is from OE butan (cf Plattdeutsch, Dutch buten), which derives from by or be + ut = out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have： Not one (person) [outside] John attend -ed the meet -ing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one (person) attend -ed the meet -ing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one has the attribute '[outside (of)] = but John'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese that looks like this （I find it useful to compare, simply because Chinese is so very different):&#xA;约翰之外，没有人出席会议&#xA;Yuehan zhiwai, meiyou ren chuxi huiyi&#xA;John outside, nothave person attend meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2566" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T08:29:06.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4715" CreationDate="2013-10-13T11:56:26.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is based on a very common lack of understanding about the difference between &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is ancient, prehistoric. The first writing systems we know of are only about three thousand year old innovations. Writing and orthography are basically an artificial technology invented by people as an enhancement to the naturally occurring language we have always had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But oddly enough there is one language I know of that answers this question in every way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albanian has a &lt;code&gt;&quot;ll&quot;&lt;/code&gt; digraph which is counted as a separate letter and represents a different sound to the Albanian letter &lt;code&gt;&quot;l&quot;&lt;/code&gt; (though not the same sound the Spanish &lt;code&gt;&quot;ll&quot;&lt;/code&gt; represents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Albanian &lt;code&gt;&quot;ll&quot;&lt;/code&gt; can also occur at the beginning of words. Here are the ones currently in the English Wiktionary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Albanian_nouns&amp;amp;pagefrom=ll#mw-pages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Albanian/ll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;llaf, llapë, llastoj, llasë, llautë, llënjëz, llërë, lloj, lloj brejtësi, lloji, llom, llucë, lluke, llullaq, llum, llup, llups, llurbë&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T10:23:36.767" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T10:23:36.767" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4722" CreationDate="2013-10-13T14:02:36.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase (IC) &quot;what happened next&quot; is the subject of the sentence. The phrase &quot;all present to the meeting&quot; is the (direct) object. Thus, the basic IC structure is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[[what happened next] [VP [astonished] [all present at the meeting]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The object NP can be further analyzed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[all [AP present [PP at [NP the meeting]]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The category labels depend on the theory used. In the heyday of syntactocentrism, for example, NPs with a determiner were believed to be &quot;DPs&quot;. And in the Minimalist Program, there are no category labels at all. Nevertheless the basic IC division should be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-13T18:16:33.197" LastActivityDate="2013-10-13T18:16:33.197" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2013-10-13T15:40:55.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting case - there's an awful lot on the semantics of exceptive markers (such as the paper you linked to), but i'm not sure i'm familiar with anything on their syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to note as a preliminary is that [but John], which i'll tentatively call the &lt;em&gt;exceptive phrase&lt;/em&gt;, can appear discontinuous from the NP &lt;em&gt;no one&lt;/em&gt; which it seems to modify, although it's fairly restricted in where it can appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;strong&gt;[No one] [but John]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(2) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting &lt;strong&gt;[but John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(3) * &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended &lt;strong&gt;[but John]&lt;/strong&gt; the meeting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(4) * &lt;strong&gt;[but John] [no one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the exceptive phrase can't appear between the verb and it's object. It can appear here, however, if we just make the object a little heavier, licensing heavy NP shift:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) ? &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended &lt;strong&gt;[but John]&lt;/strong&gt; [the meeting we all said we would go to]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can tell that [no one] is sitting fairly high when it appears discontinuous from the subject because we can have intervening adverbials:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting yesterday &lt;strong&gt;[but John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, having a reflexive in object position doesn't give rise to a principle C violation with a co-referring proper name in the exceptive phrase, so we know that the exceptive phrase isn't c-commanded by the object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; shaved himself &lt;strong&gt;[but John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that a reflexive (probably a logophor in this case) can be bound in the exceptive phrase by the subject shows that the exceptive phrase is c-commanded by the subject even when the two are discontinuous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) &lt;strong&gt;[Nobody's mother]&lt;/strong&gt; likes anybody &lt;strong&gt;[but herself]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth comparing the distribution of [but X] with [except X], since both seem to have a very similar function:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(9) &lt;strong&gt;[No one] [except John]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(10) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting &lt;strong&gt;[except John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(11) * &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended &lt;strong&gt;[except John]&lt;/strong&gt; the meeting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(12) ??? &lt;strong&gt;[except John] [no one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;((12) only grammatical with prosodic break between exceptive phrase and subject)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like, more or less, [except X] and [but X] have an identical distribution. One interesting thing to note is that sentence-initial exceptive phrases can be repaired by inserting &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(13) &lt;strong&gt;[but for John] [No one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(14) &lt;strong&gt;[Except for John] [no one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These variations sound a little odd if not sentence initial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15) ?? &lt;strong&gt;[no one] [except for John]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(16) ??? &lt;strong&gt;[no one] [but for John]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(17) ?? &lt;strong&gt;[no one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting &lt;strong&gt;[except for John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(18) ??? &lt;strong&gt;[no one]&lt;/strong&gt; attended the meeting &lt;strong&gt;[but for John]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have an analysis (and hence, no answer) yet, but i thought it would be interesting to leave these facts here as a work in progress. Tentatively, it looks like the exceptive phrase can be stranded in the VP-internal subject position by A-movement of the subject to the matrix subject position, hence the possibility of the discontinuous order. I'll be coming back to this when i have some more time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Some more observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;-exceptives are restricted in the sorts of phrases they can modify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) &lt;strong&gt;[Everyone]&lt;/strong&gt; [but Sally] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(ii) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; [but Sally] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iii) &lt;strong&gt;[All boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iv) ?? &lt;strong&gt;[Each boy]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool. - &lt;em&gt;Not sure about this one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iv) # &lt;strong&gt;[Most boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(v) # &lt;strong&gt;[Some boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(vi) # &lt;strong&gt;[The team]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(vii) # &lt;strong&gt;[A group of boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [but John] jumped into the swimming pool  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the data above, it looks like &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;-exceptives can only modify something quantificational, but it only plays nicely with certain quantifiers (presumably this is a fact that can be derived from the semantics of the exceptive phrase). Additionally, it doesn't seem to play nicely with an overt distributive marker &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt;, which i find odd. &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt;-exceptives stand in stark contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) &lt;strong&gt;[Everyone]&lt;/strong&gt; [except Sally] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(ii) &lt;strong&gt;[No one]&lt;/strong&gt; [except Sally] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iii) &lt;strong&gt;[All boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iv)  ?? &lt;strong&gt;[Each boy]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(iv) ? &lt;strong&gt;[Most boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(v) ?? &lt;strong&gt;[Some boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(vi) ? &lt;strong&gt;[The team]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(vii) ? &lt;strong&gt;[A group of boys]&lt;/strong&gt; [except John] jumped into the swimming pool  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt;-exceptives seem much more free to modify non-quantificational DPs. Curiouser and curiouser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-10-14T11:37:36.703" LastActivityDate="2013-10-14T11:37:36.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20991" CreationDate="2013-10-14T13:07:06.580" Score="5" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just found out that the Lao word for &quot;kangaroo&quot; doesn't appear to be a direct loan from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both words are pronounced more or less as &quot;ching choh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact it doesn't seem to be from French, Chinese, or Vietnamese either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages just borrow the English word, but of the ones I can find that don't none of them look like the Lao and Thai words either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's plausible that &quot;ching choh&quot; somehow is related to &quot;kangaroo&quot; but if so it's changed more in the borrowing most loanwords from English or French that I've come across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the actual etymology of these words?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:00:46.790" Title="What's the origin of the Lao (ຈິງໂຈ້) and Thai (จิงโจ้) words for &quot;kangaroo&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2604" CreationDate="2013-10-15T05:04:26.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some corrections compared with Mechanical Snail's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Old French&quot; &lt;em&gt;beneiçon&lt;/em&gt; (also written &lt;em&gt;beneison&lt;/em&gt;) is actually Anglo-French (Norman French). Standard Old French would be more like &lt;em&gt;benoiçon&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;benoison&lt;/em&gt;. Anglo-French tended to reduce &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, and indeed the Middle English form was &lt;em&gt;beneson&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt; in this word is probably irregular. Compare Latin &lt;em&gt;directiāre&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Old French &lt;em&gt;drecier&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Modern French &lt;em&gt;dresser&lt;/em&gt;, not *&lt;em&gt;droisser&lt;/em&gt;; we would thus expect *&lt;em&gt;beneçon&lt;/em&gt;. The ending &lt;em&gt;-eison&lt;/em&gt; is the normal outcome of Latin &lt;em&gt;-itiōnem&lt;/em&gt;, and probably occurs in &lt;em&gt;beneison&lt;/em&gt; by analogy, with &lt;em&gt;beneiçon&lt;/em&gt; a mixed form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So you might expect changes like &lt;em&gt;benedictiōnem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Proto-Western-Romance (PWR) /benedetts&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;one/ (Latin short i becomes PWR /e/) &gt; /beneets&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;one/ (&lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; lost by lenition, double consonants simplified) &gt; /benets&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;on/ (loss of intertonic and final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;) &gt; /benetson/ (simplification of palatal consonant) &gt; expected *&lt;em&gt;beneçon&lt;/em&gt;, replaced by &lt;em&gt;beneison&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;beneiçon&lt;/em&gt; by analogy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that the loss of /j/ after /ts/ is regular. French words in &lt;em&gt;-tion&lt;/em&gt; are direct borrowings from Church Latin (that's why the pronunciation has /s/ despite the classicizing spelling).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2597" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T05:04:26.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4253" CreationDate="2013-10-15T06:06:22.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your definition of &quot;marked phoneme&quot; is wrong. Marked phonemes are those that are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, and are prone to disappear during sound changes. This doesn't necessarily have anything much to do with how &quot;hard&quot; the sounds are to articulate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that sounds with complicated articulations are often simplified (e.g. the Proto-Indo-European sound /g&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;h/ with secondary labialization and breathy-voice is the most &quot;complex&quot; sound and the one most liable to disappear. But the markedness of most phonemes is due to the lack of &lt;strong&gt;auditory&lt;/strong&gt; prominence. This is e.g. what makes /θ/ and /β/ marked in comparison with /f/, /s/, /v/ etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an articulatory standpoint, /θ/ is &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; than /s/; this is in fact the origin of a &quot;lisp&quot;, which replaces /s/ with /θ/. Yet /s/ is one of the most stable, most common and least marked sounds cross-linguistically, due to the fact that it has extremely high acoustic prominence (that's why people say &quot;pssss&quot; or &quot;sssst&quot; to get someone's attention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hardest English sound to pronounce is almost certainly /r/, and it's often the last sound learned by children. To pronounce this sound you have to retroflex the front of the tongue, and bunch up (velarize) the back of the tongue, and round the lips, all at the same time. Foreigners have a hell of a time learning this sound. English /l/ is also difficult, and (as mentioned above) /s/. But all three sounds are highly stable and highly prominent. The Wikipedia article claiming that /θ/ is difficult to learn is certainly wrong; this impression comes from adult foreign-language speakers, who in general have difficulty with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; sounds missing from their native languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2597" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T06:06:22.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2013-10-15T06:27:03.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To rephrase the first answer above: Spanish /x/ comes from earlier /ʃ/ by a process of backing. Old Spanish of the 1300's had the sounds /ʃ ṣ ts ʒ ẓ dz/ where /ṣ ẓ/ indicate apico-alveolar sibilants. By the 1400's this had become /ʃ ṣ s ʒ ẓ z/ with apico-alveolar /ṣ ẓ/ vs. lamino-dental /s z/ (similar to English). The sound /ṣ/ was quite similar to /ʃ/ on the one hand and /s/ on the other. Usually a language with tricky-to-distinguish sound pairs would eliminate one of the two (cf. Portuguese which once had the same sounds but changed ṣ &gt; s and ẓ &gt; z, still distinguished in spelling: intervocalic &lt;em&gt;ss&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;). But in Spanish, before such a change could happen, a different change happened, with the voiced sounds becoming unvoiced. This put a high load on the remaining sounds /ʃ ṣ s/, and so most dialects of peninsular Spanish &quot;solved&quot; the similar-sound problem without any mergers by separating the three sounds, with /ʃ/ backing to /x/ and /s/ fronting to /θ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2597" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T06:27:03.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-15T15:34:07.933" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3360/do-all-tonal-languages-have-tone-sandhi&quot;&gt;Most tonal languages&lt;/a&gt; have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tone sandhi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which consists of rules whereby the standard/default/dictionary tones of words/syllables change due to which tones occur in adjacent words/syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am unable to find any language courses, wikis, linguistics papers, or any other materials on the processes of tone sandhi in the &lt;strong&gt;Lao&lt;/strong&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of a reference where I can read up on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T18:32:03.103" Title="Searching for the rules of tone sandhi in Lao" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;tone-sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4735" CreationDate="2013-10-15T16:10:30.710" Score="4" ViewCount="732" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have for years known that there was a &lt;strong&gt;Dutch&lt;/strong&gt; bad word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;stront&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; meaning &quot;shit&quot; but I expected it was spelled &quot;stroent&quot; until I looked it up just now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also known the &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt; bad word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;stronzo&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; which has many uses but literally also means &quot;shit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in the last half hour or so did I consider the similarity and wonder if they could be related. I haven't been able to find any discussion of this or an etymology for the Dutch word, but apparently the Italian word comes from Lombard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if and how these words from a pair of countries without a border might be related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T04:26:22.950" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T04:26:22.950" Title="Do we know if the Dutch vulgar/slang term &quot;stront&quot; is related to the Italian vulgar/slang term &quot;stronzo&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4734" CreationDate="2013-10-15T17:08:30.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently stront comes from a Proto-Germanic root *&lt;em&gt;strentan-&lt;/em&gt;/*&lt;em&gt;stranta(n)-&lt;/em&gt;/*&lt;em&gt;strant(i)ō(n)-,&lt;/em&gt; which meant &quot;something long and stiff&quot;, after what the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN%20/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&amp;amp;wdb=EWN&amp;amp;id=ewn011251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; calls &quot;the shape of solid excrement&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EWN also notes that Latin borrowed it as strundius, which is attested in the 9th century. As you say in your comment based on Italian Wiktionary, Italian got &lt;em&gt;stronzo&lt;/em&gt; from Lombardic &lt;em&gt;strunz&lt;/em&gt;. The Lombards were a Germanic tribe that invaded Italy in the 6th century and settled there, giving modern Lombardy its name; so it makes sense that they should use the Germanic word (Middle German &lt;em&gt;strunze&lt;/em&gt; meant &quot;stront&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Wiktionary also mentions Italian/Lombard &lt;em&gt;sterco&lt;/em&gt;, which must come from Latin &lt;em&gt;stercus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dung&quot;, related to Greek &lt;em&gt;skôr,&lt;/em&gt; stem &lt;em&gt;skat-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dung&quot;, as in scatological. So perhaps the Italian word is a fusion of the Germanic word and the Latin word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EWN says &lt;em&gt;stront&lt;/em&gt; is related to &lt;em&gt;stronk&lt;/em&gt; &quot;tree trunk&quot; and Proto-Indo-European *&lt;em&gt;stred-&lt;/em&gt; / *&lt;em&gt;stredh-&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn may be an extension of *&lt;em&gt;(s)ter(h1)-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be or become stiff&quot;. Which happens to resemble Latin &lt;em&gt;stercus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T17:08:30.057" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="739" CreationDate="2013-10-15T21:41:10.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on some DP/NP distinctions in codeswitching of Romanian and Serbo-Croatian (Romanian is a DP language - meaning, it has both definite and indefinite artcles and Serbo-Croatian (SC) is an NP language, that lacks the definite article, therefore it lacks definiteness)&#xA;SC, on the other hand, has means of expressing SPECIFICITY on adjectives - by having two different forms of adjectives (one specific, one nonspecific).&#xA;It's actually very debatable whether definiteness/specificity should be treated as equal &quot;intensifiers&quot;, or whether these are two different issues (there is proof that certain elements can be indefinite, but specific, so that might help us with making the distinction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some nouns (in both DP/NP languages) can be inherently definite, like proper names and proper nouns, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2600" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T21:41:10.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-15T23:26:50.833" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wouldn't touch that idea with a ten-foot pole.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's a tool maker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Germany, Catholics and Lutherans pay a church tax.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The zebra stripes indicate a pedestrian crossing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is a resident of an Indian reservation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is from the Klingon homeworld.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English one does not refer to a &quot;ten-feet pole&quot; or a &quot;tools maker&quot; or a &quot;churches tax&quot; or a &quot;pedestrians crossing&quot; or an &quot;Indians reservation&quot; or the &quot;Klingons homeworld&quot;, despite the clear-cut non-singularity in each instance.  But in corresponding locutions in German, the plural form is always used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a name for this distinction or for either of the two modes of expression?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an account of this in popular, or at least relatively non-technical, published expository sources?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this an instance of something more general that linguists have a concept for?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What can be said about this that is of interest besides the brute observation that the phenomenon exists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-16T03:30:26.777" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T03:30:26.777" Title="Singular versus plural in certain locutions: Is there a name for this?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4737" CreationDate="2013-10-15T23:46:15.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of your examples involve compounds (even though the two parts of the compound are in most cases written as separate words). English has inherited from Indo-European the principle that the first part of a compound (Vorderglied) is as a rule not inflected for number or case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of your (implied) German examples are of the same sort: Zebra(streifen), Indianer(reservation) have an uninflected Vorderglied. Others have a Vorderglied in the genitive singular: Kirchen(steuer) follows the old weak declension of Kirche (Kirchen in all cases except nom. sing.), a type also well attested in ancient IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-15T23:46:15.793" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-16T03:12:27.393" Score="7" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Is there a name for the phenomenon described below, whereby even after centuries of development into erudite thinking, people feel that words that come from formerly more civilized foreigners are more civilized, literate, dignified, or formal than native words?  What other instances of it exist than English and Korean?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Nativity&quot; is a fancy word for &quot;birth&quot;, and what makes it &quot;fancy&quot; seems to be that it's derived from Latin.  English-speaking people tend to regard words obviously derived from Latin or Greek as more hifalutin than words of Germanic origin.  &quot;Substance&quot; is more dignified than &quot;stuff&quot;; &quot;decay&quot; more formal than &quot;rotting&quot;; &quot;predict&quot; more scientific than &quot;foretell&quot;.  When Arthur C. Clarke wanted to make the names of two characters in a story set in the very distant future seem futuristic, he called them Eriston and Etania, which seem like ancient Greek names (Or do they?  I now find something on the web saying &quot;Eriston&quot; is of English origin and means &quot;son of Eric&quot;, but I am doubtful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems at least somewhat plausible to explain this by saying that people who spoke Latin and were familiar with books in Greek (maybe especially the New Testament?) brought civilization and literacy to British barbarians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that something similar happens in Korea.  Korean names of numbers bigger than 1000 are Chinese words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know enough about Swahili to know that it's pretty easy to tell which words in that language are derived from Arabic, and among those are all words that would be known only to literate people and unknown only in non-literate communities.  The word &quot;kitabu&quot;, meaning &quot;book&quot; is obviously of Arabic origin, although its way of being used in Swahili is completely adapted to that Bantu language, as seen in the fact that its plural is &quot;vitabu&quot; (it is one of a class of nouns in Swahili whose singular (in most instances) begins with &quot;ki-&quot; and whose plural begins with &quot;vi-&quot;).  I don't know whether Swahili-speaking people feel the same way about Arabic-versus-Bantu as English-speaking people do about Latin/Greek-versus-Germanic-or-otherwise-barbarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T04:30:41.093" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T04:30:41.093" Title="Feelings about formerly more civilized foreigners' words" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4741" CreationDate="2013-10-16T03:25:07.947" Score="4" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Does any language besides Esperanto have conditional participles?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto has these only &quot;unofficially&quot;; they're not considered correct Esperanto usage by authorities, but common sense will tell you that they're perfectly inevitable given other aspects of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribanta homo = a person who is writing (present active participle of &lt;em&gt;skribi&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribinta homo = a person who has written (past active participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribonta homo = a person who will write (future active participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribata letero = a letter that is being written (present passive participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribita letero = a letter that has been written (past passive participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribota letero = a letter to be written (future passive participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skributa letero = a letter that would be written (if things were different) (conditional passive participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skribunta homo = a person who would write (if things were different)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once heard someone speaking of a hypothetical situation say &quot;Viaj savuntoj ne povus atingi vin.&quot; (Your would-be rescuers would not be able to reach you.)  A noun-form of a conditional active participle of the verb &lt;em&gt;savi&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's been sarcastically suggested that the book called &quot;Plena Ilustrita Vortaro&quot; (complete illustrated dictionary) ought to be called &quot;Plena Ilustruta Vortaro&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-16T08:38:11.650" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T17:08:36.500" Title="Conditional participles" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4740" CreationDate="2013-10-16T05:23:10.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit of Googling turned up references to &quot;conditional participles&quot; in Bengali:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=C7vz0ABJnJsC&amp;amp;pg=PA177&amp;amp;lpg=PA177&amp;amp;dq=%22conditional%20participle%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=wWBIrR9-fD&amp;amp;sig=GRPZp9ElUEDafktIBuInbZm-hOM&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=7CBeUvXLOIXmiwLatYCACA&amp;amp;ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22conditional%20participle%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bengali&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  By Hanne-Ruth Thompson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Oriya:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=RaYIAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA73&amp;amp;lpg=PA73&amp;amp;dq=%22conditional%20participle%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=7mYeRBzeOh&amp;amp;sig=QrcbNSfH3sAvLYWtRzVkNb8_1uk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=OiFeUrbNNsHwigKspIHwBw&amp;amp;ved=0CEUQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22conditional%20participle%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oriya Grammar for English Students&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Ebenezer Charles Bethlehem Hallam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Morphology_of_Kyrgyz_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page on Kyrgyz morphology&lt;/a&gt; refers to something it calls an &quot;irrealis participle&quot;, which might be what you're looking for, but it doesn't describe its usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-16T17:08:36.500" LastActivityDate="2013-10-16T17:08:36.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4721" CreationDate="2013-10-17T09:07:44.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Loan words in Arabic are generally borrowed in something approaching their original form, but they are often perceived as being built around a three or four-letter root, from which purely Arabic derivatives can be formed. E.g. Greek philosophos was borrowed into classical Arabic as faylasūf, then reanalysed as f-l-s-f, with the regular Arabic plural falāsifa, and the de-nominal verb tafalsafa “to philosophise”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-17T09:07:44.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1032" CreationDate="2013-10-17T22:56:51.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert in the classical Arabic language nor in the &quot;Tajweed&quot; science but I can contribute with the little bit I know ... my clarification can be summarized in some points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, we have to know that the word &quot;Allah&quot; is a &quot;classical&quot; Arabic  word (very ancient) consisting  of the word &quot;ilah&quot; (god) linked to the definite article &quot;al&quot; to say &quot;The God&quot; (The One [not any one]) : that's a proper noun (so, without plural nor feminine) and it's not the equivalent of the English word &quot;god&quot; or &quot;dieu&quot; in French ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an exceptional word  that has an &lt;strong&gt;eccentric spelling&lt;/strong&gt; - did you even notice? - and, an &lt;strong&gt;eccentric pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt; (and that's the subject of your question).&#xA;If we know that the &quot;L&quot; (ل) [lām] in almost all Arabic recitations of the &quot;Qur'an&quot; and, before that, in almost all dialects is not an  emphatic consonant (it's rather pronounced with some thinness), how this happened with the word &quot;Allah&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two reasons for the &quot;tafkhim&quot; (thickening) of the &quot;lām&quot; in the word &quot;Allah&quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the first is to avoid the confusion with the name of an historical&lt;br&gt;&#xA;pagan divinity called &quot;allat&quot; - which is linguistically a word from&#xA;the same roots, ends with &quot;t&quot; instead of an &quot;h&quot; and having a &lt;strong&gt;thin&#xA;&quot;L&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the second is the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Glorification of the name of The God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (yes, almost&#xA;all Arabian tribes were not monotheistic but they knew that &quot;Allah&quot;&#xA;is &quot;The authentic God&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.mrkzy.com/t21613.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://forums.mrkzy.com/t21613.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to mention that the &quot;lām&quot; in the word &quot;Allah&quot; is not always thickened, that's to say there are cases making the &quot;lām&quot; thin if the word &quot;Allah&quot; comes after a &quot;Kasra&quot; (almost after an [i]), as in [ لِلَّهِ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الأرْضِ] or in [بسم الله],&#xA;and I have also to mention that in the method of recitation of &quot;Warch&quot; (a famous reader of the Qur'an), the emphatic &quot;L&quot; , thus the famous /lˤ/ , happens in other cases (known as the &quot;L&quot;s of warch : لامات وَرْشٌ), like in: يصلى,فصل ,ويصّالحا,فلما فصل طالوت بالجنود ,صلى,طال ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://vb.tafsir.net/tafsir19763/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://vb.tafsir.net/tafsir19763/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://telmwarsh2.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/%D8%AA%D8%BA%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://telmwarsh2.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/%D8%AA%D8%BA%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA-2/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's worth saying that language it's not a Darwinian realm, it's rather a complex confluence of historical and geographical events added to some rare &quot;mutations&quot;: some phonemes or letters can persist without being even used (the German alphabet contains the letter x but it is used only for borrowed words ...)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry for the links, they are in Arabic, I will try to find English links if there are any ones.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2586" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-18T03:33:01.703" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T03:33:01.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-18T12:08:08.960" Score="8" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/domus#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;domus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From Proto-Indo-European *dṓm, from root *demh₂- (“to build”)&lt;/strong&gt;. Cognates include Ancient Greek δόμος (dómos), Albanian dhomë (“a chamber, a room”), Sanskrit दम (dáma) and Proto-Slavic *domъ. The same Proto-Indo-European root also gave Old English timber (“building, act of building”) (English timber).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/domo#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;domō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From Proto-Indo-European *dem-h₂- (“to domesticate, tame”)&lt;/strong&gt;. Cognate with Sanskrit दाम्यति (dāmyati), Ancient Greek δαμνάω (damnaō), Old High German zemmen and the Proto-Germanic adjective *tamaz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following sentence makes me wonder and have this question: tame is a reflex of PIE *dem-h₂- (“to domesticate, tame”), which has the same formation of PIE *demh₂- (“to build”). Maybe the semantic explanation is &quot;tamed in a house&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tame&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tame&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English tom, tam &quot;domesticated, docile,&quot; from Proto-Germanic *tamaz (cf. Old Norse tamr, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch tam, Old High German zam, German zahm &quot;tame,&quot; Gothic tamjan &quot;to tame&quot;), &lt;strong&gt;from PIE *deme- &quot;to constrain, to force, to break (horses)&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. Sanskrit damayati &quot;tames;&quot; Persian dam &quot;a tame animal;&quot; Greek daman &quot;to tame, subdue,&quot; dmetos &quot;tame;&quot; Latin domare &quot;to tame, subdue;&quot; Old Irish damnaim &quot;I tie up, fasten, I tame, subdue&quot;). &lt;strong&gt;Possible ulterior connection with PIE *dem- &quot;house, household&quot; (see domestic)&lt;/strong&gt;. Meaning &quot;spiritless, weak, dull&quot; is recorded from c.1600.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:51:25.703" Title="Are L. domus and L. domō cognates?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-17T21:21:45.847" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;figurine&quot; means &quot;little figure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From etymonline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;figurine (n.) [Look up figurine at Dictionary.com]&#xA;      1854, from French figurine (16c.), from Italian figurina, diminutive of figura, from Latin figura (see figure (n.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the postfix that makes &quot;figurine&quot; diminutive of &quot;figure&quot;? Are there other examples with the same 'diminutive' postfix as &quot;figurine&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" OwnerDisplayName="Tim" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-18T20:54:53.067" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T09:21:13.117" Title="What is the postfix that makes &quot;figurine&quot; diminutive of &quot;figure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4749" CreationDate="2013-10-18T21:07:58.863" Score="3" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;In looking through &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=cePDX9kIAFAC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_vpt_reviews#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=a/s%20v%20o&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books's preview of &lt;em&gt;A Grammar of Lao&lt;/em&gt; by N. J. Enfield&lt;/a&gt;, I came across these two terms, which I'm assuming are equivalent to one another (possibly one is even a typo) and some kind of variant of &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;SVO&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, representing the word order subject-object verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S/A-V-O&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By unmarked I mean that the speakers report an impression that the S/A-V-O pattern is somehow basic in status. A consultant will likely supply the S/A-V-O pattern when asked to compose sentences of the variety &lt;em&gt;The farmer killed the duckling&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A/S-V-O&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, consider the Lao A/S-V-O constituent order pattern, perhaps the closest to a pragmatically unmarked pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Departures from the A/S-V-O pattern are common. Movement, for example, may see a subject argument in a post-final position ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T22:14:32.057" Title="What might &quot;S/A-V-O&quot; and &quot;A/S-V-O&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4747" CreationDate="2013-10-18T22:14:32.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Abbreviations list of that book is viewable (if you search for &quot;abbreviations&quot;), and says &quot;A = agent-like argument of transitive clause&quot; and &quot;S = single argument of intransitive clause&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-18T22:14:32.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4775" CreationDate="2013-10-19T02:09:04.003" Score="11" ViewCount="741" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntactic theories in the generative tradition involve transformations, i.e. movement of constituents, between deep structure and surface structure. What is actually meant by this? Is it intended as a model of the linguistic mind, a metaphor, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, take the statement &quot;English passive clauses are derived from underlying active clauses by a set of transformations&quot;. I can think of two things this might mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might be intended as an actual model of the linguistic mind. That is, the claim would be that when you form a passive clause, your brain first puts together the corresponding active clause, then applies the transformations to produce a passive clause out of it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might not be intended as a model of the linguistic mind, but simply as a formal system, i.e. a set of algorithms that can produce linguistic forms that correspond to those that actual speakers produce, but without necessarily going through similar processes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 1 is intended, what evidence is there that it's true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 2 is intended, what is the point of such a set of algorithms, when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-10-19T11:49:58.270" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T01:29:30.823" Title="Ontological status of syntactic transformations" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-19T03:03:01.160" Score="6" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it, that in words like &lt;em&gt;plaza / piazza&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;blanca / bianca&lt;/em&gt;, the &amp;quot;l&amp;quot; in Spanish corresponds to an &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; in Italian? Is there a preference for this kind of sound in Italian, or is there another reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2146" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T17:32:20.643" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T17:32:20.643" Title="From Italian to Spanish, consonant + &quot;i&quot; goes to consonant + &quot;l&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11106" CreationDate="2013-10-19T06:03:38.557" Score="7" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4747/what-might-s-a-v-o-and-a-s-v-o-mean&quot;&gt;What might &amp;quot;S/A-V-O&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;A/S-V-O&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/a&gt; reminded me of something I've wondered at various points in the past. I'm familiar with the different clause constituent orders (SVO, SOV, etc.) and their relative frequencies. However all the information I've heard has been in accusative languages, or at least it described the orders as based on subject and object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do ergative (or other non-accusative alignments) languages have constituent order that follows their alignment, or are they usually based on subject/object? What are the relative frequencies of constituent orders in these languages? Also, as far as I'm aware all ergative languages are actually split-ergative languages; is it the usual case that each type of clause will pattern its constituent order after its respective alignment, or is it more common for the language to have a single pattern of constituent order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T01:04:15.160" Title="Constituent Order and Alignment" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4745" CreationDate="2013-10-19T08:32:00.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the literature, I get the impression that this is a complicated and possibly unsolved issue. Three relevant sources I found but don't have time to analyse now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;De Vaan, &lt;em&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages&lt;/em&gt; (2008):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On &lt;em&gt;domo&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE *domh2-eie/o- 'to tame'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;domus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE *dōm, *dem- 'house'; *dom-o-?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ernoud &amp;amp; Meillet (1985) on &lt;em&gt;domo&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;domus and domo are not related):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sur &lt;em&gt;domō&lt;/em&gt; et &lt;em&gt;domus&lt;/em&gt;, voir l'important article de  M. Benveniste, 'Homonymies  radicales en indo-européen',  &lt;em&gt;BSL&lt;/em&gt; 51, 1955, p. 14 sqq. Il démontre péremptoirement que les deux mots n'ont, à l'origine, rien de commun et que &lt;em&gt;domus&lt;/em&gt;, de son côté, doit être séparé de la racine *dem(ə2)- &quot;bâtir&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.unine.ch/files/content/sites/linguistique.francaise/files/shared/documents/MethodeBader.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brouillon du texte paru in Françoise Bader (éd.), &lt;em&gt;Langues indo-européennes&lt;/em&gt;, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 1994, 43-64&lt;/a&gt;: p. 53:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ainsi, Benveniste a-t-il par exemple postulé que gr. dómos &quot;maison&quot; résulte de la confluence tardive d'un dérivé thématisé d'un nom-racine *dom, terme institutionnel désignant une institution politique, un cercle de parenté, avec un dérivé thématique de la racine *dem-(h2)- &quot;construire&quot; (1955, 15-29; l'article contient des explications analogues pour d'autres racines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T11:51:25.703" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:51:25.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2013-10-19T09:48:39.400" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not Spanish /l/ that &quot;turns into&quot; Italian /i/. It is that the Latin clusters pl-, bl-, fl- became /pj/, /bj/, /fj/ in Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T12:10:18.250" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T12:10:18.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4039" CreationDate="2013-10-19T17:58:23.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm from Fayfa people. Our language is an old Arabic language, kholane language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the people around our area have similar languages but a little different, and understand our language and we understand theirs, and understand modern Arabic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2609" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T23:30:18.773" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T23:30:18.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3780" CreationDate="2013-10-20T04:13:56.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Phonotactics Database&lt;/a&gt; was launched. While I've noticed some errors in languages I'm familiar with, it may be useful to check there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, is there a trend across languages in terms of syllable structure? To start with, let's look at how many consonants can be in an onset. Their sample contains 2,338 languages. Of these, 2 do not allow onsets, 1,363 allow for at most 1 consonant in their onset position, 727 allow for at most 2 onset consonants, 229 allow for at most 3 consonants, 15 allow for at most 4 consonants, and 2 allow for at most 6 consonants (note that they have no languages in their sample with at most 5 onset consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's also look at how many consonants can be in a coda. They again sample from 2,338 languages. Of these, 485 languages do not allow for coda consonants, 1,373 allow for at most 1 coda consonant, 358 allow for at most 2 coda consonants, 107 allow for at most 3 coda consonants, 12 allow for at most 4 coda consonants, and 3 allow for at most 5 coda consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, I think it's likely that what we're seeing in the rest of the world--where &quot;familiar&quot; languages allow for complex onsets and codas--is actually a result confirmation bias. Indo-European languages, for instance, with the exception of highly divergent languages like English or Russian, really only allow for at most 2 or 3 onset consonants (2s include Armenian, Spanish, and Punjabi; and 3s include Albanian, Irish, and Lithuanian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most of the world's languages, a CV structure is preferred. This is, as far as I'm aware, a very old typological generalization. &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/browse.php?number=687&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Universals Archive&lt;/a&gt; cites Jakobson and Hale (1956) as the first statement of this structure being a linguistic universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T04:13:56.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-20T07:59:47.523" Score="-1" ViewCount="1239" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A: What's a baby pig called?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B: A piglet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A: So what's a baby toy called?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B: A toylet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tom: Mike has asked me for a loan of five pounds. Should I be doing right in lending it to him?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Jack: Certainly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tom: Why?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Jack: Because otherwise he would try to borrow it from you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun as they are, which linguistic terms are involved? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2590" LastEditorUserId="2590" LastEditDate="2013-10-24T15:15:48.613" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T15:15:48.613" Title="Why the following two jokes are fun in terms of linguistic terms?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4746" CreationDate="2013-10-20T09:21:13.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in the etymology you give, &quot;figurine&quot; is ultimately a borrowing from Italian, through French. &#xA;Therefore, it is in Italian that you'll find the diminutive suffix -in- meaning &quot;little&quot;, as shown in the following derivations : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gatto - gattino (male cat - kitten) &#xA;viola - violino (viola - violin)&#xA;concerto - concertino &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt that this suffix is productive in English, but as you can see in the second and third examples, there are other examples of this suffix in borrowings from Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T09:21:13.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4762" CreationDate="2013-10-20T10:36:34.063" Score="3" ViewCount="1456" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, copulas hold a subject complement (or a predicate in any case). Example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The sky became clear.&#xA;I am ill.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is in the definition of a lexical verb that makes copulas lexical verbs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the comments point out, I ought to be more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently read an article of French linguist Pollock. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, UG, and the structure of IP.&#xA;  Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365-424.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He claims that the differences between English and French with respect to syntax of sentence negation, questions, adverbs, floating quantifiers and “quantification at a distance” are correlated. He proves this in various ways. One thing that bothers me, though, is that he seems to contrast copulae and auxiliaries, but in such a strange way I have never heard of before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following examples (from Pollock, aforementioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; infinitives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;1.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; (to be) and &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; (to have)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ne pas être heureux est une condition pour écrire des romans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ne&lt;/em&gt; to not be happy is a prerequisite for writing novels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;N'être pas heureux est une condition pour écrire des romans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'&lt;em&gt;Ne&lt;/em&gt; to be not happy ...' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the negation in French can be in front or after the verb (a copula). More correctly, it is the verb that moves to Infl - in front of the negation - or not. Verb Movement is possible, but not obligatory in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Pollock continues by saying &quot;Let us now consider lexical verbs. The situation here contrasts sharply with the paradigm [in the previous examples].&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;2.&lt;/code&gt; Lexical verbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ne pas sembler heureux est une condition pour écrire des romans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'&lt;em&gt;Ne&lt;/em&gt; not seem happy is a prerequisite for writing novels.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Ne sembler pas heureux est une condition pour écrire des romans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'&lt;em&gt;Ne&lt;/em&gt; to seem not happy ...'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;*&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;not considered standard language&quot; or simply not possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tendency in infinitives &quot;sort-of&quot; aligns with &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; tensed clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is not happy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*He seems not happy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was not arredsted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*He got not arrested.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It appears that although Verb Movement can apply to auxiliaries and lexical &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;, it cannot apply to lexical verbs in infinitives in French.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going further into detail, it struck me that Pollock seems to make a distinction between &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; (and French &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;) - which seems to be an auxiliary, according to his theory - and &lt;em&gt;to seem&lt;/em&gt; (and French sembler) as a lexical verb. Even though, my gut tells me that &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;code&gt;1.&lt;/code&gt; and in &lt;em&gt;He is not happy&lt;/em&gt; is as good a copula as &lt;em&gt;sembler&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;He seems not happy.&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2013-10-21T09:13:39.763" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T10:28:38.507" Title="Are all copulas lexical verbs?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-20T12:03:17.533" Score="5" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this phenomena with the English copula &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1a&lt;/strong&gt; - &amp;quot;My day off is Saturday&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;1b&lt;/strong&gt; - &amp;quot;Saturday is my day off&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2a&lt;/strong&gt; - &amp;quot;John is a doctor&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;2b&lt;/strong&gt; - *&amp;quot;A doctor is John&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've heard it before but can't remember.  Also what are the conditions under which it can occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2611" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T10:30:59.927" Title="Interchangeable arguments with English copula" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4757" CreationDate="2013-10-20T12:17:05.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, in the first joke the -&lt;em&gt;let&lt;/em&gt; suffix in &quot;piglet&quot; is not fully productive, meaning that it cannot be reliably applied to all relevant nouns to give the meaning of &quot;a baby-aged or small version of X&quot;.  Here, the joke assumes that -&lt;em&gt;let&lt;/em&gt; is a fully productive suffix, and the result when applied to &quot;toy&quot; is the word for the thing we shit into, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However when &quot;baby&quot; is applied attributively to &quot;toy&quot; it means &quot;a toy for babies&quot;, not &quot;a young/small toy&quot;, so I'm not sure the joke totally works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get the second joke...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2611" LastEditorUserId="2611" LastEditDate="2013-10-20T12:29:36.723" LastActivityDate="2013-10-20T12:29:36.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4759" CreationDate="2013-10-20T12:37:10.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Some people consider only &lt;em&gt;be/être&lt;/em&gt; a copula; verbs like &lt;em&gt;seem/sembler, become/devenir&lt;/em&gt;, etc. they consider lexical verbs. I believe their reason is that they consider only &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; devoid of any non-grammatical function, whereas &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; also means &amp;quot;affect the perception of others&amp;quot;, and &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;change&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only ever encountered this narrow sense in certain branches formal linguistics of the Anglo-Saxon school, not in other disciplines or places, but it has some merit, and perhaps it is more widespread than I know. It is something to take into account when you see someone talking about &amp;quot;copulae&amp;quot;; if only writers always had the time to define their terms... &lt;strong&gt;]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that &lt;strong&gt;lexical verbs express more than a mere grammatical function&lt;/strong&gt;, while auxiliary verbs express only grammatical function, such as tense, number, or modality. Some consider copulae lexical verbs, others do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The auxiliary modal verb &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; merely adds a notion of modality and presentness to the action or state of seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the distinction is one of convenience, not a rigid or even consistent one. What comprises a grammatical function and what lexical content is a semantic criterion, and not one that can be easily defined or tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suicide note rules out murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What meaning does &lt;em&gt;rules out&lt;/em&gt; add? You could say it merely adds a notion of impossibility and nothing else, just like &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt;. But we normally call &lt;em&gt;rule (out)&lt;/em&gt; a lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brahma is swimming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present continuous, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is commonly considered an auxiliary verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brahma was a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This man is Brahma .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a copula, it is sometimes considered lexical, sometimes non-lexical. What meaning does it add? It mainly establishes identity between &lt;em&gt;Brahma&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a/this man&lt;/em&gt;. It also expresses (or implies?) that &lt;em&gt;Brahma&lt;/em&gt; existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brahma existed as a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Existed as&lt;/em&gt; mainly expresses existence, but also identity. &lt;em&gt;Exist&lt;/em&gt; is commonly treated as a lexical verb. But is it all that different from &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;? Should &lt;em&gt;exist as&lt;/em&gt; be considered a copula? No, because copulae must take a subject complement (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1676/82&quot;&gt;among other requirements&lt;/a&gt;), which cannot be introduced by &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brahma was in love with Sita.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brahma felt love for Sita.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; assigns an attribute/property to the subject in the form of a prepositional phrase, the state of being in love. But &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; can do the same thing by means of a noun, although it is limited to feelings, unlike &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whether or not you find existence and identity (copula + noun) or existence and attribute/property (copula + adjectival phrase) a mere grammatical function should determine whether or not you call copulae lexical verbs. It is a choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T10:28:38.507" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2013-10-20T12:56:56.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that tonal languages may have a relatively small number of phonemes, but that number is multiplied by a number of pitches or contours. Chinese languages/dialects are a prime example. [I should say: a relatively small number of vowels and consonants or other vocalizations, not a small number of phonemes.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2534" LastEditorUserId="2534" LastEditDate="2013-10-21T11:16:04.357" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T11:16:04.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4760" CreationDate="2013-10-20T14:31:23.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference you've identified is between &lt;strong&gt;predicational&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;specificational&lt;/strong&gt; copular clauses (terms coined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12988&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Higgins, 1979&lt;/a&gt;, i think). In a predicational copular sentence, the subject denotes an individual and the complement (which may be either a Noun Phrase, or an Adjectival Phrase) denotes a property. The subject is predicated of the complement. Your examples &lt;strong&gt;1b&lt;/strong&gt; (i) and &lt;strong&gt;2a&lt;/strong&gt; (ii) are predicational copular clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i) [Saturday]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is [my day off]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The entity denoted by 'Saturday' satisfies the property of being the speaker's day off.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ii) [John]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is [a doctor]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The entity denoted by 'John' satisfies the property of being a doctor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In specificational copular clauses, the relationship between subject and complement is reversed - the subject (which may only be a Noun Phrase, due presumably to the EPP), denotes a property, and the complement denotes an individual, which is predicated of the subject. Your examples &lt;strong&gt;1a&lt;/strong&gt; (iii) and &lt;strong&gt;2b&lt;/strong&gt; (iv) are specificational copular clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(iii) [My day off]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is [Saturday]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The entity denoted by 'Saturday' satisfies the property of being the speaker's day off.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(iv) #[a doctor]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is [John]&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The entity denoted by 'John' satisfies the property of being a doctor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that specificational copular clauses and their predicational counter-parts are truth-conditionally equivalent. The difference is generally considered to be driven by information-structural considerations, such as topic and focus (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~mikkelsen/dissertation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Line Mikkelsen's dissertation on the topic&lt;/a&gt;). One common assumption is that predicational and specificational copular clauses have the same underlying D-structure, as follows (using X'-notation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) [SpecIP ... [I' &lt;em&gt;[+pres]&lt;/em&gt; [VP ... [V' is [predP John [pred' &lt;em&gt;pred&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  [NP a doctor]]]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copular takes a small clause complement (a &quot;predP&quot;, in Mikkelsen's terminology). The functional head &lt;em&gt;pred&lt;/em&gt; takes a specifier of type &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and a complement of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. In a predicational copular clause, the individual-denoting element in specPredP raises to the matrix subject position, and the complement remains in situ. In a specificational copular clause, the property-denoting element in compPredP raises to the matrix subject position, and the subject remains in-situ. See Mikkelsen's thesis for further discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: @Daincihi points out that i don't explain why (iv) is bad in my answer. (v), below, illustrates that there isn't any general ban on indefinite specificational subjects:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(v) [A philosopher who seems to share Kiparskys’ intuitions on some&#xA;  factive predicates] is [Unger] (1972), who argues that ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned that under Mikkelsen's account, the difference between a predicational and specificational copular clause concerns information structure. One of the restrictions on a specificational copular clause is that the subject must be a &lt;strong&gt;topic&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. it must be &lt;strong&gt;given/old&lt;/strong&gt; information). A bare indefinite such as &quot;a doctor&quot; can't function as a topic for fairly obvious pragmatic reasons, whereas an indefinite modified by a relative clause can, hence the difference in acceptability between (v) and (iv).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.b. I presuppose a very basic knowledge of &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/MontagueGrammarElsevier.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;type-theoretic semantics&lt;/a&gt; in my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some terminology, following @cerberus's suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; = the semantic type 'individual' (the type of, e.g. a proper name)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; = the semantic type 'truth-value' (the type of a sentence)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e,t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; = a function from individuals to truth-values (i.e. the type of a property, or predicate)    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EPP = The Extended Projection Principle; The requirement that all English sentences have a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-10-21T10:30:59.927" LastActivityDate="2013-10-21T10:30:59.927" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-21T22:26:58.273" Score="1" ViewCount="982" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thai สบายดี is sà-bāɪ-dīː(sà with a low tone, bāɪ and dī with mid tones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Lao ສະບາຍດີ is sá-bàɪ-dìː (sá with a high tone, bàɪ and dìː with low tones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, I need confirmation on the tones in Lao. The Thai &quot;sabaidi&quot; is confirmed and good. I keep getting difference of opinion on the Lao &quot;sabaidi&quot;. I am looking for the tones as spoken in the Vientiane dialect of Lao. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Thai tones, I am using 1) Mid 2) Low 3) Falling 4) High 5) Rising&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Lao tones, I am using 1) Mid 2) Low 3) High Falling 4) Low Falling 5) High 6) Rising&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2617" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-10-21T22:32:40.563" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T15:49:47.010" Title="Can someone confirm the Lao language tones in the greeting &quot;sabaidi&quot;" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:31:37.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-21T22:34:16.133" Score="7" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let someone wants to know what some word (concrete as &quot;chair&quot; or abstract as &quot;happiness&quot;) mean. What methods, experimental techniques are there for extracting word's meaning? I found next ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Study appropriate entries at various &lt;strong&gt;dictionaries&lt;/strong&gt; (defining vocabulary, philosophical/psychological/sociological dictionaries)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just ask enough &lt;strong&gt;native speakers&lt;/strong&gt; about what researched word mean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Study of &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt; in which the word occurs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Componential_analysis&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;componential&lt;/strong&gt; analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_differential&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; differential&lt;/a&gt; experiment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_by_association&quot;&gt;linguistics &lt;strong&gt;association&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; experiment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks as if these methods have significant &lt;em&gt;disadvantages&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dictionaries are often too insufficient; if some really give a full description (that is rare), then same question: how the compilers get them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asking native speakers looks very unreliable, subjectively way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Study of context is very widely. I didn't find any good examples of extracting meaning by this way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Componential analysis has no any rigorous algorithm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantic differential gives only connotative, emotional part of meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linguistics association is too indirect method and requires too much interpretation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other methods are there for the full extracting researched word meaning? In the end I want have &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; description of researched word's meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2518" LastEditorUserId="2518" LastEditDate="2013-10-22T14:26:02.780" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:10:02.353" Title="Methods for meaning extraction" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4507" CreationDate="2013-10-22T03:23:54.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wouldn’t Thai เปล่า be the etymological equivalent of Lao ບໍ່ ?  My impression is that เปล่า is mainly used as a question tag and response, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;เป็นหวัดหรือเปล่า? (Do you have a cold?)     เปล่า (No.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ไม่ would also be possible here, but sounds more formal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Longdo dictionary entry also has it in preverbal position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;นักเรียนพูดกับครูว่า ผมเปล่าลอกข้อสอบนะครับ (The student said to the teacher, “I didn’t copy the test, sir.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That entry also shows เปล่า being used as a content word “bare, empty, in vain” and gives the expressive pairing เปล่าเปลี่ยว “lonesome”.  So clearly there are some differences in usage from Lao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we’re looking for Sprachbund-type parallels, Burmese might be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;chánaw thwà deh  (I go)     chánaw má thwà bù  (I don’t go)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the negation with má… bù, rather like a ne… pas construction in French.&#xA;Here’s the Longdo entry for เปล่า:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dict.longdo.com/search/%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%9B%E0%B8%A5%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Longdo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T03:05:50.897" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T03:05:50.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2863" CreationDate="2013-10-22T05:45:41.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vocabulary.com's senses (and entries) are generally the same as WordNet's: compare with &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sound&amp;amp;sub=Search%20WordNet&amp;amp;o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;h=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sound at wordnet.princeton.edu&lt;/a&gt;. Vocabulary.com has clearly done some filtering to make the entries less Weirdnet: note that there's no example sentence for &quot;the audible part of a transmitted signal&quot;, which in WordNet is exemplified by &lt;em&gt;&quot;they always raise the audio for commercials&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. without the headword &quot;sound&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a much more straightforward question than what is the best structure for showing the various meanings of a term in a dictionary. As Alex B. notes in his comment, it depends on the dictionary, but this question asks about meaning as &quot;hierarchical&quot;, which could be considered begging the question. Most synchronic dictionaries do present meanings within an ad-hoc hierarchy, but there are also componential and prototypal approaches to semantic analysis/description, very solidly exemplified in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon&lt;/a&gt; theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2621" LastActivityDate="2013-10-22T05:45:41.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2013-10-22T16:47:01.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You listed a good number of methods, and some of their disadvantages. There are also other methods, but judging from your previous comments I'm really not sure whether you will be satisfied by any of them. Part of the reason for this, I presume, is that you first have to &lt;strong&gt;define&lt;/strong&gt; what &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; is. Then you can choose a method and evaluate it. Take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on semantics&lt;/a&gt;, and you might also want to read a good textbook or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding you question on &lt;strong&gt;dictionary compilation&lt;/strong&gt;, for example, you would have to define what you consider to be a complete entry. Maybe you would want it to list all the separate meanings of a word. But what is a separate meaning, what is metaphorical? In other words, when do speakers stop using a word in a metaphorical sense and start using it in two different meanings? Besides, what about very unusual meanings? I'm not sure there's a point in including a meaning that occurred twice in 1847 - but where do you draw the line? In 1884, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; recognised the whole project might take a little longer than they thought - they had just reached the lemma &lt;em&gt;ant&lt;/em&gt;, after spending five years on what was intended as a ten year project. The choices you make for a dictionary ultimately depend on the resources available and the aims (few people feel the need to consult the actual multi-volume OED, it's not a general purpose dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a concrete enough definition of meaning, you can define concrete and rigorous methods. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prototype theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, for example, holds that meaning is best described in a fuzzy sense, with the prototype of a category conforming completely to the definition, while more peripheral members of the category are not prototypical but still belong to the category. Based on this you can run experiments with native speakers. For example, you present cylindrical containers made out of glass, and with different heights and diameters to people, some have a handle, some do not. If you ask native speakers for different variants of this whether they're seeing a vase or a glass, you will probably find that a handle increases the likelihood that it's a glass or cup. If the object has a very small diameter and is tall it is more likely to be a vase etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributional_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Distributional Semantics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is an approach in Computational Linguistics. It's based on the premise that the context of a word determines its meaning. If you have a large enough corpus you can model this context, and compare it to another corpus (say, of another dialect of the same language). In this way you can compare differences in meaning between the same word in two or more dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T07:49:38.867" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T07:49:38.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4777" CreationDate="2013-10-22T20:39:34.937" Score="4" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the verb &quot;enjoy&quot; cannot be followed by an infinitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I enjoy to eat – ungrammatical&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I enjoy eating – grammatical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this question relates to the area of transitivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also makes me wonder if there is a term for a verb/word which determines/restricts the structure of an entire sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2456" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T17:01:50.443" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T17:01:50.443" Title="Is there a term for a finite verb which cannot be followed by an infinitive verb, in English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4768" CreationDate="2013-10-22T22:48:03.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key point is the definition of meaning. This definition is probably not limited to linguistic. In fact many applications learn what we could call the meaning of things in completely different ways and for completely different objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In purely linguistic approaches the followings come to my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clique detection in synonymy graph. Defining a word by its set of pure synonym&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantic structure of word paraphrases. You can for example (among many) take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/syntactic-theory-09/literature/MTT-Handbook2003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MTT&lt;/a&gt;. But also leveraging sentence semantic structure for word disambiguation... &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see the problem in term of image processing, vision. One can learn the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;chair&lt;/em&gt; only looking at pictures of chairs. Many algorithms exist for object and scene classification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-cvr.ai.uiuc.edu/ponce_grp/publication/paper/cvpr06b.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spatial pyramid of bag of visual word&lt;/a&gt;, is one of them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More recently deep learning methods like convnets...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see meaning identification as a classification problem. One can argue that nobody knows the real true meaning of &quot;chair&quot;, &quot;conscience&quot; or &quot;love&quot;, but our ability to distinguish between two concepts of different meaning is essential. Applications and techniques used vary but it then falls down to a classification problem with well known algorithms (CART, logistic regression ...). The purpose can be again disambiguation of polysemic word, sense cluster identification, machine translation. In this case the meaning of a given word is a just a point in a machine learning model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="996" LastEditorUserId="996" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:10:02.353" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:10:02.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4750" CreationDate="2013-10-22T23:39:18.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, this is an Answer, not a book, and conversations are inhibited here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I'm going to observe some restrictions to keep this relatively short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not dealing with Chomsky here; I find Chomsky's proposals and theories about language and its supposed relation to human brains, minds -- and lately biology and genetics -- to be at best irrelevant, and  at worst embarrassingly ridiculous. Either way, what he might say, or has said, is of no interest to me. For details, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl&quot;&gt;The Chomskybot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm restricting myself to a discussion of syntactic rules as they are developed in McCawley 1998, which is pretty basic and non-formal (formality in syntactic theory is only justifiable to the extent it makes theories machine-washable, and that is not the issue here).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, here's the presenting question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the point of 'a  set of algorithms that can produce linguistic forms that correspond to those that actual speakers produce', when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind? [all presuppositions by the original poster]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there are an &lt;strong&gt;awful&lt;/strong&gt; lot of different sentences in any language; if not an infinite number, at least an extremely large number, especially if you allow recursion without limit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How does one describe them all? No matter when we start, we'll never finish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's not helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same problem with anything alive; there are a lot of worms, for instance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How do we describe &lt;strong&gt;them&lt;/strong&gt;? By noting similarities and differences, and positing clades, like species.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Same thing in syntax. We look for similarities and differences, and posit clades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, take the Passive construction in English.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I call it a &lt;em&gt;Construction&lt;/em&gt;, but it could be called a &lt;em&gt;Rule&lt;/em&gt; just as well, or an &lt;em&gt;Alternation&lt;/em&gt;, though it's not cyclic. &#xA;You have asked &quot;Why say the active is basic and the passive derives from it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the data. Assuming one can recognize Passive sentences and distinguish them from Active sentences, one will soon discover that for every Passive sentence there is a corresponding Active sentence -- perhaps with an indefinite subject when the Passive sentence lacks a &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-phrase -- but that this is not true in reverse.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The following Active sentences, for instance, have &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; corresponding Passive sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill is sick ~ Mary ran yesterday ~ It's all over now. ~ He's being honest.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, there are Active sentences with no corresponding Passives, but there are no Passives with no corresponding Actives. This is a fact, and if grammar is about facts, it ought to be able to state this fact. One way to do this is to consider Passive a special effect that can be applied to most transitive sentences, but not to intransitive sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to make is that corresponding Active/Passive sentences mean &lt;strong&gt;the same thing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill ate the cake = The cake was eaten by Bill&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mary kicked Bill's ass. = Bill's ass was kicked by Mary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are synonymous (if one is true, so is the other, and if one is false, so is the other),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;even though they look and sound different. So the &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; of the Passive is predictable from its corresponding Active. Furthermore, the &lt;strong&gt;form&lt;/strong&gt; of the Passive is also predictable from its corresponding Active, by the following &quot;algorithm&quot;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Promote Object of main verb to Subject&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b) Add auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c) Follow &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; immediately with the past participle of main verb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  d) If desired, express former Subject as object of &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows the form &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the meaning of passive sentences to be described, simply, by means of reference to the corresponding active sentence. And, by unwinding, to produce a corresponding active from a passive. This cuts the number of sentences that have to be described way down, because now Passives can be completely specified by reference to the prototype Active. And every time you discover another rule, you simplify the prototype that much more. That's the rationale, basically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely any scientific theory of grammar should be able to describe such a simple correlation between simple sentences in a simple way. This is one such way. If you've got a neater way, tell us about it. And Passive is just one rule of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Preliminarybufattenedlistoftransformations.pdf&quot;&gt;several hundred&lt;/a&gt; in English, and this way works for all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the tag in the question ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who's this &quot;we&quot; you refer to?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that there &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; such a thing as &quot;the linguistic mind&quot; as a separate or separable entity (even ignoring problems with the ontological status of &lt;em&gt;mind&lt;/em&gt;), except in the imaginations of theorists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not even any evidence that different people speaking the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; native language use the same internal syntactic processes. Much less &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; humans speaking &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; languages. Forget about &quot;the linguistic mind&quot; and &quot;universal grammar&quot;; it would be nice to be have telepathic X-ray syntax vision, but not even Superman has that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real linguists just have data to look at. And the data shows patterns. And the patterns can be viewed as algorithms, or as databases, or as formatting for ideas, or as social activity, or as cultural conventions, or as a lot of things. But you have to be able to state them somehow, and get the job done before the heat death of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T02:34:16.717" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T02:34:16.717" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T01:38:41.823" Score="4" ViewCount="947" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the rules of forming past participle tense and perfect tense of a verb in Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, about the word &quot;parsimony (n.)&quot;, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=parsimony&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;etymonline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;early 15c., from Latin parsimonia &quot;sparingness, frugality, thrift,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;pars-, past participle stem of parsi, perfect tense of parcere &quot;to spare, save, refrain from, use moderately&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (which is said to be unrelated to Latin parvus &quot;small,&quot; parum &quot;too little&quot;) + -monia, suffix signifying action, state, or condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-25T03:21:47.420" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T17:38:24.250" Title="Rules of forming past participle tense and perfect tense of a verb in Latin?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:31:55.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4773" CreationDate="2013-10-23T13:19:11.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no special term for a verb which can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be followed by an infinitive, but there are a variety of special terms for those which &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;. It turns out that treating all verbs that can be followed by an infinitive as a unified class is misguided - they can be divided up into several classes on the basis of certain properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Control verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) I like to eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With control verbs, a single Noun Phrase seems to function both as an argument of the matrix predicate, and as an argument of the embedded predicate. I.e. in (1) The speaker is the one who is doing the &lt;em&gt;liking&lt;/em&gt;, and also the one who is doing the &lt;em&gt;eating&lt;/em&gt;. This is modelled in generative grammar by positing a dependency between the Noun Phrase and a null pronominal category &quot;PRO&quot; in the non-finite clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1') I_i like [ PRO_i to eat ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Raising verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) John seems to be leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With raising verbs, a Noun Phrase in the matrix clause functions as an argument of the embedded predicate. I.e. John is the one who is doing the &lt;em&gt;leaving&lt;/em&gt;, in (2). Crucially, John does not function as the argument of the matrix predicate - John is not doing any &lt;em&gt;seeming&lt;/em&gt;. Generally speaking with raising verbs, the subject can be replaced by an expletive and the non-finite with a finite clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2') It seems that John is leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not possible with other verbs which take a non-finite complement, such as control verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) John likes to eat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (3') * It likes that John is eating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raising verbs are analysed in generative grammar as involving displacement of the subject of the embedded non-finite clause to the matrix subject position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) John seems [ t_John to be eating]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ECM Verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final class of verbs which are followed by an infinitive are ECM verbs, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) Mary believes him to be a fine dancer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ECM verbs can be characterised by the fact that they semantically select an entire &lt;em&gt;proposition&lt;/em&gt; as their argument. ECM constructions look superficially similar to control constructions in which the matrix object is the controller, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) They told us to start&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (6), the pronoun &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; functions as both an argument of the matrix predicate &lt;em&gt;told&lt;/em&gt;, and as an argument of the embedded predicate &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt;. Remember that we modelled this as a dependency between the 'controller', and a null pronominal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6') They told us_i [ PRO_i to start ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ECM constructions are different, in that the syntactic object of the matrix predicate does not function as a semantic argument of the matrix predicate, but as a semantic argument of the embedded predicate. In (5), it is not &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; that is being believed by Mary, but rather the proposition &lt;em&gt;that he is a fine dancer&lt;/em&gt;. We model this in generative grammar as displacement of the Noun Phrase in question from the subject position of the non-finite clause to the matrix object position, similar to the analysis of raising verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) They told us [ t_us to start ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not a verb is a control, raising or ECM verb is presumably a fact which must be &lt;strong&gt;learned&lt;/strong&gt;. If a verb cannot take a non-finite clause as its complement, than it simply does not belong to one of these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T13:19:11.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-23T14:13:38.970" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I request you if you are willing and able to help me on my linguistics thesis with the title of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The morphosyntax of gender animacy and clitics in Oromo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oromo is one of the Cushitic branch languages which is spoken by more than 35 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and other areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I appreciate anyone  who will provide me information and suggest me some references (books) related with my topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2625" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-23T16:55:57.170" LastActivityDate="2013-10-23T16:55:57.170" Title="Looking for books etc on gender animacy in Oromo" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;animacy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4059" CreationDate="2013-10-24T04:08:06.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an online resource, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; provides several ways to get measures of semantic similarity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/wordnet.html#similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Several Wordnet-based options&lt;/a&gt;. Many of them are based on the path distance between synsets in the Wordnet graph. Many words obviously occur in more than one synset, so you need to choose at least a part of speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/_modules/nltk/corpus/reader/lin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nltk.corpus.reader.lin&lt;/a&gt; which provides distributional &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/api/nltk.corpus.reader.html#nltk.corpus.reader.lin.LinThesaurusCorpusReader.similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;similarity&lt;/a&gt; measures drawn from some large corpus. I've never been able to find a proper citation for this distributional thesaurus, but it appears to be related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/papers/polarity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Identifying Synonyms among Distributionally Similar Words, Lin et al. 2003&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2621" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T04:08:06.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-24T11:38:23.947" Score="2" ViewCount="7278" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English adjective-noun combinations the noun commonly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Stress#Stress_in_adjective-noun_combinations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;carries the main stress&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a big HOUSE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a beautiful DOG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception to this rule are adjective-noun combinations that are treated as one unit, and the adjective carries the main stress:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a HOT dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the WHITE house&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've also noted this stress pattern with other examples (the links are to Youtube videos):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WHITE men, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=NYdpte1W0vk&amp;amp;t=416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BLACK men&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXPLirJRGDQ&amp;amp;feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;t=54&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ChiNESE food&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAPqqfUJEVU&amp;amp;feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;t=145&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CRAzy guy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noted this stress pattern in a number of examples, and my impression is that it's more common in American than in British English. Each of them might be interpreted contrastively. In the second example the speaker seems to imply that Chinese food is somehow more fun or enticing than, say, Italian food. Similarly, in the first example that information that the speaker is talking about black men, not white men seems to be key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've always found this stress pattern surprising, to me the context in these examples doesn't warrant this kind of contrastive focus (as in &quot;No, I want ChiNESE food, not ITAlian food.&quot;). Then again, I'm not a native speaker. So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Does this stress pattern strike anyone else as remarkable, or is it just me?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Is &quot;contrastive stress/focus&quot; the best analysis of these examples?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) Is it more frequent in American English than other varieties, such as British English&lt;/strong&gt; (note that all the examples are from American English)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4) Has this stress pattern become more frequent in the last decades or so?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this stress pattern is something more than just ordinary contrastive focus, references would be appreciated (but not strictly necessary ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-10-24T12:18:12.067" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T15:23:38.190" Title="Stress rules in English adjective-noun combinations" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4776" CreationDate="2013-10-24T14:22:36.347" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no real way to predict the perfect stem or the supine stem (past-participle stem) of a Latin verb; there are only probabilities. One normally learns the past stems of a verb along with its present stem and conjugation group if they are irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The regular suffix to form the &lt;strong&gt;perfect stem&lt;/strong&gt; is by adding &lt;em&gt;-v-&lt;/em&gt; to the present stem, so after the theme vowel. This is very common, especially for verbs of the &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; conjugation, and also somewhat common for the &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; conjugation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;voca-re → voca-v-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;audi-re → audi-v-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quaer-ĕ-re / quaes-ĕ-re → quaes-i-v-i or quaes-i-i  (r changes into s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common way of forming the perfect stem is by removing the theme vowel (if present) and adding &lt;em&gt;-u-&lt;/em&gt;. This is especially common for verbs of the &lt;em&gt;-ē-&lt;/em&gt; conjugation, but by no means limited to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;terrē-re → terr-u-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;evanesc-ĕ-re → evan-u-i (ingressive present suffix &lt;em&gt;-sc-&lt;/em&gt; disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding /s/ is also quite frequent, especially with consonant stems. The resulting letter may be an x if the present stem ended on &lt;em&gt;-c-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-g-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mitt-ĕ-re → mis-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;teg-ĕ-re → tex-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;torquē-re → torsi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many verbs do not get a suffix at all, especially but not exclusively with consonant stems, but the vowel in the stem will be lengthened compensatorily, and sometimes changed qualitatively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vĕni-re → vēn-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vĭdē-re → vīd-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vinc-ĕ-re → vīc-i (nasal present infix disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fund-ĕ-re → fūd-i (nasal present infix disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ăg-ĕ-re → ēg-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;făc-ĕ-re → fēc-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many verbs of the &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; conjugation have both &lt;em&gt;-v-i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;audi-re → audi-i / audi-v-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i-re → i-i / ī-v-i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs undergo reduplication, which is an artefact from proto- or pre-Latin, if I remember correctly. This, too, is most common with consonant stems. The vowel will often change in length and quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fall-ĕ-re → fe-fell-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;caed-ĕ-re → cĕ-cīd-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tang-ĕ-re → te-tig-i (nasal infix disappears; vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;făc-ĕ-re → &lt;em&gt;archaic&lt;/em&gt; fe-fec-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;păr-ĕ/i-re → pe-pĕr-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pell-ĕ-re → pĕ-pŭl-i (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;posc-ĕ-re → po-posc-i (o-reduplication)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spondē-re → spo-pond-i (apparently unique, based on Proto-Indo-European perfect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of these rules are remotely strict or consistently applied. And many verbs have several perfect stems that can be used interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;supine stem&lt;/strong&gt; (past participle) is regularly (but by no means always) formed by adding &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; after the theme vowel, if present, where theme vowel &lt;em&gt;-ē-&lt;/em&gt; changes into &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt;. This &lt;em&gt;-i-tus&lt;/em&gt; sometimes also happens with consonant stems. Supine stems are just as irregular and unpredictable as perfect stems, and many verbs even have two interchangeable supine stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;voca-re → voca-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;audi-re → audi-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;terrē-re → terr-i-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pet-ĕ-re → pet-i-tus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cognosc-ĕ-re → cogn-i-t-us (ingressive suffix &lt;em&gt;-sc-&lt;/em&gt; disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quaer-ĕ-re → quaes-i-tus (r changes into s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in many cases the suffix &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; has to come immediately after a consonant; in that case, many things can happen. This is perhaps unexpectedly not limited to consonant stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After p and c, it can come immediately after:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cap-ĕ-re → cap-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fac-ĕ-re → fac-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dental consonant &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; plus &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; often but not always becomes &lt;em&gt;-ss-&lt;/em&gt;. This sometimes also happens after &lt;em&gt;-d-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mitt-ĕ-re → mis-s-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ced-ĕ-re → ces-s-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;-d-&lt;/em&gt; plus &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt; usually becomes &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fund-ĕ-re → fus-us (nasal present infix disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;caed-ĕ-re → caes-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;accend-ĕ-re → accens-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spondē-re → spons-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;em&gt;-l-&lt;/em&gt;, it is turned into &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fall-ĕ-re → fal-s-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pell-ĕ-re → pul-s-us (vowel changes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonant g becomes unvoiced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ag-ĕ-re → ac-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;frang-ĕ-re → frac-t-us (nasal infix disappears)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonant b becomes unvoiced and t may or may not turn into s (but verb stems on &lt;em&gt;-b-&lt;/em&gt; are rare at any rate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lab-i (deponens) → lap-s-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;scrib-ĕ-re → scrip-t-us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T17:38:24.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4781" CreationDate="2013-10-24T15:23:38.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a native speaker of American English, and none of the examples you have given strikes me as marked in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the latest discourse-structure-based theories of focus would say about these examples, but my intuition is that &lt;strong&gt;they illustrate focus avoidance on &quot;given&quot; constituents&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;food&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt; are somehow &quot;given&quot; in their respective contexts. It's true that those words may not have literally been uttered yet at the time they appear in the discourse, but there is something generic about the entities to which they refer in those contexts, in a pragmatic sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is informative in the first discourse, for example, is the race of the men.  Leading up to the mention of the men, the expectation is built up that St. Nicholas is accompanied by some perhaps unexpected entity. His being accompanied by men is not so remarkable (with the introduction of the phrase &lt;em&gt;accompanied by&lt;/em&gt; one is biased to expect some category of human), but the fact that they are black is what the speaker expects to be novel and informative for the listener. It's true that one could think of &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; as being contrasted with other races, but I don't think this is contrastive focus in the usual sense, since the speaker isn't explicitly contrasting it with another specific race. If St. Nicholas were accompanied by six to eight black &lt;em&gt;sheep&lt;/em&gt;, I would expect the prominence marking to shift to &lt;em&gt;sheep&lt;/em&gt;, since people are not usually accompanied by sheep.  In that case the focus would actually be ambiguous--it could be marking narrower focus on just sheep or broader focus on the entire constituent &lt;em&gt;black sheep&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second example, &lt;em&gt;food&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat expected after &lt;em&gt;We've ordered...&lt;/em&gt;, but the fact that it's Chinese is informative (and in this particular case enticing--it's a selling point to get the listener to help the speaker) to the listener.  Again, had they ordered Chinese &lt;em&gt;dancers&lt;/em&gt;, I would have expected &lt;em&gt;dancers&lt;/em&gt; to be prominent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third example, the characters have all been talking about the person who has breached their security--the &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt;. Even more than in the previous two examples, the &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt; part of &lt;em&gt;crazy guy&lt;/em&gt; is given explicitly in the discourse--he's the topic of their conversation. I should mention that, to my ears, the prominence pattern is actually not so clear in this example--I can convince myself that the speaker is putting prominence on &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt; or that he's putting it on &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt; (it's not just about which has higher pitch--sometimes prominent syllables can get lower pitch in English). If he is placing prominence on &lt;em&gt;guy&lt;/em&gt;, I would believe that he is contrasting it with the terrorists mentioned by the other character--&quot;not a terrorist (or a group of terrorists)--just a guy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have data on this, but my impression is that these focus phenomena are not unique to American English. I've definitely heard British speakers use similar patterns.  The same holds for earlier generations of speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T15:23:38.190" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-24T17:50:01.297" Score="6" ViewCount="1179" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sue considers Joe &lt;strong&gt;a fool&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sue calls Joe &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Daddy-O&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe weighs &lt;strong&gt;200 pounds&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that none of these are objects, as witnessed by the fact that you can't raise them to be the subject of a passive clause: *A fool is considered Joe by Sue, *&quot;Daddy-O&quot; is called Joe by Sue, *200 pounds is/are weighed by Joe. What are their syntactic and semantic roles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that 3 is a completely different kettle of fish than 1-2. My attempt at an answer for 1: it's a predicate in a verbless subordinate clause, cf. &quot;Sue considers Joe to be a fool&quot;, with the same meaning and an explicit verb. (This procedure of analyzing the structure of a sentence S by means of a paraphrase S' isn't obviously valid to me, by the way, but I realize it's normal in syntax.) 2 looks similar enough that something along the same lines might work, but here you can't make the subordinate verb explicit (*Sue calls Joe to be &quot;Daddy-O&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 is obviously something else entirely. &quot;200 pounds&quot; is a required argument of the verb (*Joe weighs), but syntactically not an object (apparently) and semantically not a patient or theme, so what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T22:39:27.257" Title="What are these NPs, syntactically and semantically?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-24T18:53:34.010" Score="0" ViewCount="2003" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a set of sentences from which I want to extract all the subjective phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For eg., from &lt;strong&gt;I am pleased to learn that the president has been reelected.&lt;/strong&gt;, I want to extract &lt;strong&gt;am pleased&lt;/strong&gt;. What is the way to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; So each sentence can be divided into subjective and objective phrases. For example in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Barack Obama is the President of the USA but I don't think he's doing a good job.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the first part, &lt;code&gt;Barack Obama is the President of the USA&lt;/code&gt; is the objective part of the phrase as it states the fact but &lt;code&gt;I don't think he's doing a good job&lt;/code&gt; is the subjective part of the phrase which gives the sentiment. I want to extract all such subjective phrases from a bunch of sentences. What I have access to is a bunch of documents which have sentences with corresponding documents already containing the subjective phrases present in these documents. I need to find a method which I can use to understand how these subjective phrases are constructed so that I can extract subjective phrases from a new set of sentences/documents. If anyone is aware of some papers or any other sources dealing with this, it would be of great help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2629" LastEditorUserId="2629" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T18:20:04.723" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T18:20:04.723" Title="Extracting subjective phrases from sentences" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4784" CreationDate="2013-10-24T18:57:05.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, 1 and 2 are known as verbs with &lt;strong&gt;object complements&lt;/strong&gt;. A number of verbs can have those; they are similar to how copulae can have subject complements in that they either identify the object with its complement (&lt;em&gt;I consider him my best friend&lt;/em&gt;) or assign/apply a property to it (&lt;em&gt;I consider him dull&lt;/em&gt;), just as copulae do this with a subject and its complement. Other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He painted the house black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She kept him locked up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had him fired. (Alternative analyses are possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He made her his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She bought him free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She set him free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He killed her first, her husband second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He pronounced them wife and wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. Some verbs can typically take this construction (like &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt;), and some adjectives typically allow this construction with many verbs (like &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-10-24T18:57:05.827" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4798" CreationDate="2013-10-25T06:41:30.920" Score="0" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm soon crossing the Lao/China border and after gaining some familiarity with Lao in my capacity as an &quot;armchair linguist on the road&quot; I'm very interested in experiencing some Zhuang language before I head further north in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has some articles on the Zhuang languages generally, and on specific Zhuang languages including a Standard Zhuang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I'm ideally looking for is some kind of introduction to Zhuang intended for people with some knowledge of the better known Tai national languages of Thailand and Laos. I'd prefer something based on the Lao language but perhaps something comparing to the Thai language is more likely and this would also be acceptable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T04:25:27.373" Title="Looking for comparison of Lao (or Thai) and Zhuang languages" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;lao&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-25T16:42:00.260" Score="3" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/538/are-there-grammatical-analyses-of-languages-that-are-extremely-different-from-ie/542#542&quot;&gt;SO answer&lt;/a&gt;, I am curious if another supposedly non-configurational language like Wubuy (Nunggubuyu) has been re-analyzed as &quot;configurational&quot;. Work on it was done by &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00133375&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeffrey Health&lt;/a&gt;  in 1986, and still being used as example by &lt;a href=&quot;http://easyurltoremember.com/docs/papers/nonconfigurationality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Gulumbia&lt;/a&gt; in 2004, which was after Legate's 2002 dissertation. I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here even Warlpiri seems not to be the true limit case. Heath (1986) describes&#xA;  Nunggubuyu, an Australian language of Arnhem Land that is ‘‘more radically&#xA;  nonconﬁgurational than Warlpiri, particularly in lacking clear evidence for a subject-&#xA;  VP split’’ (Heath, 1986, p. 376). The critical phenomena in question, in addition&#xA;  to the discontinuous constituents, free word order, and extensive use of null anaphora&#xA;  familiar from Warlpiri, include ‘‘extremely complex’’ morphology and&#xA;  morphophonemics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested in knowing any research work on that. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T17:20:53.210" Title="Non-configurational language Nunggubuyu/Wubuy" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-25T17:54:01.560" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;Ivan the Terrible&quot; or &quot;Conan the Barbarian&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2634" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-26T16:09:56.833" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T10:19:53.803" Title="Is there a term for names with the &quot;X the Y&quot; construction?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4816" CreationDate="2013-10-25T17:56:14.983" Score="1" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both are informal words meaning father. It is interesting that I &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt; find a similar word in other Germanic and Latin languages. It looks that this word has &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; migrated from central asia to british isles &lt;strong&gt;!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T14:33:39.390" Title="Linguistic relation Turkish dada English dad" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-25T22:53:40.757" Score="4" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;While hearing something on the radio in Lisbon, I heard this phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lei diz que tu não podes... (The law says you can't...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word that interests me the most is the last one &lt;em&gt;podes&lt;/em&gt; which is pronounced in rapid speech something like &quot;pɔdʃ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the last sound cluster &quot;dʃ&quot; be considered an affricate, or is there a requirement that the affricate be entirely voiced or devoiced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-26T15:50:49.680" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T14:58:20.283" Title="Do any languages have half-voiced affricates?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-26T10:05:21.110" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if this isn't right place to ask this kind od question, which I'm aware is not, but at the same time I can't pick any more adequate from the list of SE sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Premise is this: Verb [x] in a single specific form - in particular tense, person, number, gender... - is independent lexical unit, independent from the original verb; it has it's own special meaning, and, unlike other verbs, it's invariable.&#xA;Premise is arbitrary and unscientific; I'm going to use it as a literary device. I have a strong feeling it isn't my original idea, and I'd like to know history of &quot;it&quot;, terminology of &quot;it&quot; specially. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2635" LastEditorUserId="2635" LastEditDate="2013-10-26T10:12:12.070" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T16:50:45.990" Title="Pseudosemantic question" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-07-24T09:11:14.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4793" CreationDate="2013-10-26T12:47:14.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Correct me if I misunderstood your question.&lt;/em&gt; Assuming that you refer to a fixed combination of morphemes, e.g., fixed root, derivational morphemes, and inflectional morphemes, just as in German &lt;code&gt;nimmst ... mit&lt;/code&gt; (as a 2nd person singular present indicative form of &lt;code&gt;mitnehmen&lt;/code&gt; lexeme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are talking about seems to be simply &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_parsing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;morphologically unparsed&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;word form&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Specifically answering your question, whether &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;an independent lexical unit, independent from the original verb&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not a lexical unit, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon#Size_and_organization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexicon deals with Lexemes&lt;/a&gt;, not with individual word forms;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not an independent one. If you define &quot;independent&quot; is that you can &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it independently, you really can do it in only a tiny subset of sentences that require only this particular word form;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;it has it's own special meaning&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;One or many&lt;/strong&gt;, indistinguishable if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; analyze the word alone;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider English &lt;code&gt;works&lt;/code&gt; — it can be either a noun (in plural form), a verb (3rd person singular), or a family name (a proper noun). Even if you stick to verbs, I believe it's easy to find counter-examples in virtually every language;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;and, unlike other verbs, it's invariable&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, it's invariable. However, how can we compare a whole lexeme (a complete set of its forms) and one of its particular word forms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T12:47:14.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4789" CreationDate="2013-10-26T15:10:37.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that Legate's work is not conclusive and definitive, per &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/fb10/fery/publications/Prosodic_and_morphosyntactic_aspects_of_discontinuous_NPs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fanselow &amp;amp; Féry&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Recall that Hale (1983) and Jelinek (1984) proposed an analysis for Warlpiri working with multiple independent modifications of a single argument slot by different autonomous nominal expressions rather than with discontinuous noun phrases in a strict sense. On the other hand, Legate (2002) argues for a configurational analysis of Warlpiri, in the spirit of Rizzi (1997), in which the language would allow discontinuous noun phrases just like German does. The limitations of our data do not permit us to settle such issues.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_10618.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Falk&lt;/a&gt;, Legate's approach is circular: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attempts have been made in the structurally oriented literature to discover indirect arguments&#xA;  for VP in non-configurational languages; one recent example is Legate (2001) on Warlpiri. Typically,&#xA;  these studies demonstrate that non-configurational languages have subject/non-subject&#xA;  asymmetries in some area of the grammar, such as anaphora, and then argue that such asymmetries&#xA;  require a VP node. However, this argumentation is circular: nobody denies the existence&#xA;  of subject/non-subject asymmetries – the disagreement is over how best to express them formally.&#xA;  Since the basic intuition behind constituent structure is that sentences are built out of&#xA;  hierarchically arranged “pieces” (constituents), what is missing is direct evidence for the VP as&#xA;  a “piece” of structure. While it is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the&#xA;  absence of such evidence in the literature – despite the theoretical importance of demonstrating&#xA;  that non-configurational languages have a VP – is, to my mind, significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would then follow that &lt;a href=&quot;http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8152&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Legate's work&lt;/a&gt; can't be applied with Wubuy, yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2013-10-26T15:10:37.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-26T17:44:31.063" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some good beginner's introductions to accents? In English (accents, I mean, generally; but English sites or books)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this moment I'm primarily interested in accents on the level of the single syllable, but I'm bit lost in terminology: prosody, accentology, stress, pitch, intonation... and can't find the starting point, with names of  &lt;em&gt;syllable accents&lt;/em&gt;, their notation, maybe codification etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2635" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-10-27T00:20:29.120" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T00:20:29.120" Title="Accents resources?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4787" CreationDate="2013-10-27T08:10:23.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Zhuang, the entry by Luo Yongxian in the Routledge language family series for the Tai-Kadai languages is a good overview.  The Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development at Mahidol University in Bangkok, in conjunction with one of the ethnic minority universities in China, has also produced a multilingual dictionary for one variety of Zhuang – it has Northern Zhuang, Chinese, Thai and English arranged in columns for easy comparison.  The title is simply NZ… Dictionary, published in 2006.  It lacks a real grammar overview, but it would complement Luo well.  It’s part of a series of five volumes covering the different Tai languages spoken in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s an orthographic convention for Zhuang that is worth knowing at the outset – tone is indicated with final consonants.  For example, the word ‘boux’ is pronounced [pou] with the ‘x’ indicating 33 tone.  (This word, meaning ‘male’ or a classifier for people, is cognate with Thai ผู้ .)  Hmong uses a similar system, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering a bit about the geography of your travels.  I would assume you will be crossing into Yunnan province, but Zhuang is mainly spoken in Guangxi, the next province over which borders on Vietnam.  There is an area of Yunnan where Zhuang is spoken called Wenshan, but most of the Tai language speakers in Yunnan speak something else.  In Sipsongbanna, which is where you’d be if you crossed at Botan, one of the major languages is Tai Lue.  A missionary linguist named William Hanna recently published a ‘Dai Lue-English Dictionary’ with Silkworm Books which looks quite good.  It seems to contain some general linguistic background on the language besides the dictionary entries, and it uses the distinctive script of Tai Lue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T04:25:27.373" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T04:25:27.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-27T16:21:07.020" Score="0" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for all the replies. I'm new to this site and trying to find my way around here. I apologize if my question hadn't come across as properly phrased in accordance to policy this of site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to my question, the original discussion in class had raised following points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Devanagari and other Indian scripts are losing relevance because - &#xA;1. English is widely used a professional and higher-education language in India &#xA;2. Availability of Devanagari keyboards is dwarfed by English keyboards. Similarly, software and user interfaces released and promoted in India are in English, as is much of the computer education available here. &#xA;3. Low awareness of Devanagari keyboard layouts. &#xA;4. Regional literary scene in almost all Indian language has stagnated while at the same time works written by Indian authors in English are thriving. One of the reason is newer generations find Indian vernaculars irrelevant to there lifestyles, aspiration and experiences. Romanization can be a tool for making vernaculars relevant once again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to acattle for suggesting more appropriate framing of question, so here you go-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which languages have adopted or considered adopting the Roman alphabet in place of an existing script? What factors led to their adoption/rejection? What were socio-cultural consequence if Roman alphabets were adopted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2638" LastEditorUserId="2638" LastEditDate="2013-10-29T09:40:33.070" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T09:40:33.070" Title="Romanization - good or bad?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2013-10-28T11:02:49.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4799" CreationDate="2013-10-27T21:52:22.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;It was suggested that if Indic languages have to survive they must adopt Roman alphabets or else they will quickly lose their relevance&quot;. Who made this suggestion? Does he or she know how many millions of people speak Indian languages? I have not seen Hindi etc. on any list of endangered languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-27T21:52:22.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-28T10:06:27.753" Score="5" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any academical resource on the diacritization of Arabic words. Almost all Arabic text is written without diacritics and it is quite challenging to learn all the words.&#xA;Thanks in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2640" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T10:02:43.653" Title="Arabic Diacritization List" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4801" CreationDate="2013-10-28T11:59:37.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are asking about the vowel signs (ḥarakāt)? What you need is a dictionary (the best one is Wehr) and a grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T11:59:37.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4792" CreationDate="2013-10-28T14:58:20.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be conflating &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3398/understanding-voiced-consonants/3401#3401&quot;&gt;phonetic and phonemic voicing&lt;/a&gt;. If you are really talking about phonetic voicing, the answer is that &lt;strong&gt;it is quite common to find affricates that are only partially voiced.&lt;/strong&gt; As @jlawler points out, the phoneme /dʒ/ in English is considered phonologically voiced, and it contrasts with /tʃ/. But phonetically, what is broadly transcribed as [dʒ] (as for the word &lt;em&gt;judge&lt;/em&gt;) is often only partially voiced. In phrase-initial [dʒ] it is quite common for the stop closure to be completely unvoiced and for voicing to turn on at the beginning or partway through the fricative noise, and in phrase-final [dʒ] it is quite common for voicing to turn off before the fricative noise altogether or early on in the fricative noise. Even when the segment is in the middle of a phrase or word, flanked by vowels, it is not uncommon to see part of it devoiced. There are several cues to phonemic voicing in English, so even though there is the /tʃ/-/dʒ/ contrast in the phonology, there definitely is not a phonetic &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; that voicing continue throughout this phonologically voiced affricate. I haven't looked at spectrograms of Portuguese affricates, but I suspect that the same holds in that language. And, as @jlawler points out, in a language that doesn't have the phonological contrast that English has, there is likely to be even more flexibility phonetically. In fact, I would wager that languages with an absolute phonetic requirement that an affricate be fully (phonetically) voiced are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologically, if one believes in phonemes and features, each affricate is treated as a single unit and it either has the feature [+voice] or [-voice], so &lt;strong&gt;it doesn't make sense to talk about &quot;partial voicing&quot; of affricates in a phonological context.&lt;/strong&gt; And in the Portuguese example, one wouldn't analyze the surface cluster in &lt;em&gt;podes&lt;/em&gt; as a single phoneme, so it isn't a relevant example for phonological requirements on affricates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-10-28T14:58:20.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-28T21:06:35.133" Score="1" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I define the lexical/semantic relationship between a noun X and a modifier + noun X?&#xA;e.g. a girl/ a beautiful girl; a city/ a big city. Is it a case of hyperonimy/superordination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2642" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T22:18:20.083" Title="Lexical Relationships" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4811" CreationDate="2013-10-29T03:55:47.070" Score="3" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who came in late, a &quot;sentence adverb&quot; is a word that modifies an entire sentence rather than just the verb or predicate.   A sentence adverb communicates speaker attitudes about the proposition that the sentence denotes, or discourse information.   So &quot;fortunately&quot; is a sentence adverb in the sentence &quot;Fortunately, we found a source of fresh water on the island.&quot;  Also note &quot;however,&quot; the sentence adverb for discourse.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find much information on the Internet about sentence adverbs.   Here are the three most helpful links I found:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASentenceAdverb.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASentenceAdverb.htm&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/sentadvqa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/sentadvqa.htm&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sentence-adverb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sentence-adverb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the links define sentence adverbs as sentence modifiers.  But is this always true?   Note the following:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The man fell from the tenth story, fortunately onto a pile of pillows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Fortunately, the man fell from the tenth story onto a pile of pillows.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sentence a), &quot;fortunately&quot; clearly conveys speaker attitude and has the same meaning as it does in sentence b).   However, the sentences don't necessarily have synonymous readings.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be unfortunate that the man fell from the tenth story onto a pile of pillows, and at the same time fortunate that he landed on a pile of pillows (rather than the hard pavement, for example).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if &quot;fortunately&quot; in sentence a) can convey speaker attitude about the state of affairs denoted by the prepositional phrase &quot;onto a pile of pillows,&quot; what should we call &quot;fortunately&quot; in this context if not a sentence adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that other languages have sentence adverbs, and that this question is therefore not off-topic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T10:00:28.900" Title="Are sentences the only constituents that &quot;sentence adverbs&quot; modify?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4574" CreationDate="2013-10-29T04:45:34.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hf6Wa.png&quot; alt=&quot;extract from google books&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5SpQe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Music and musical thought in early India&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aspect of pluta is brought out here&#xA;........&lt;br&gt;&#xA;........&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T04:45:34.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2013-10-29T06:03:39.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar is the general term referring to the set of rules in a given language including syntax , morphology, while syntax studies sentence structures.&#xA;  This means that syntax is studied within grammar as a daughter of grammar but sister of morphology where syntax has nothing to share with internal structure of words but grammar have i.e in morphology.&#xA;  So,morphology studies words forming, syntax deals with such formed words by putting them in a correct position within a phrase, clause or/and a sentence under the umbrella of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2644" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T06:03:39.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2013-10-29T11:01:35.597" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many words common in both German and sanskirit for e.g&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Wissenshcaft : Vigyan shashtra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Wirthschaft : Arthashastra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Wagon : Vahan or vahanan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Etwas : Athwa &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) Verruckt : Virakt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) Verheiratat : Vivahit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7) Kopf : Kop or kapal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8) Augen : Aakhen &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;9) Himmel : hima  (sky)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10) Wutshcrei : Viroshit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more but languages do change and original German may have derived more from Sankirit the mother of all Indo-european languages. I have reasonable knowledge of German language and my mother tongue is Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MGT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2645" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T11:01:35.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2013-10-29T11:11:48.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some linguists see a distinction between A) 'descriptive' (selecting one of many possible features) and B) 'classificatory' (specifying a subset of the class) modifiers, and would say that 'beautiful' and 'big' are descriptive (eg Halliday 'epithet' vs 'classifier')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your suggestion of hyperonomy/superordination would place 'beautiful, big' in B), i.e meaning that 'beautiful girls' are a subset of 'girls' and that 'big cities' are a subset of 'cities'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is also an implicit notion that 'descriptive' = 'subjective/personal opinion', and 'classificatory' = 'objective/consensus opinion'; so many linguists would disagree with your suggestion that 'beautiful, big' are 'objective/consensus' classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from my corpus linguistics perspective, 'beautiful girl and 'big city' are frequent collocations (strictly speaking, i should check the statistics in a large general English corpus before asserting this, so... &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/&lt;/a&gt;, a corpus of 1.9 billion words, tells me that the most frequent modifiers occurring one word before 'girl' in 226047 authentic text examples are: little, young, old, baby, teenage, beautiful; so beautiful is the 6th most frequent collocate)... so i would suggest that 'beautiful girl' is a usage-based/consensus unit of language, which draws on both the descriptive and classificatory functions/purposes of language? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'beautiful girl and big city' cannot be analysed further without knowing more details about the contextual occurrence of this collocation - eg in which specific text and genre of text, written/spoken by whom, in what historical/social circumstance, etc?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2646" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2013-10-29T14:31:31.153" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T14:31:31.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2013-10-29T12:04:33.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. Your examples are convincing. As I see it, there are four possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fortunately&lt;/em&gt; is not a real sentence adverb; real sentence adverbs do modify the entire sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fortunately&lt;/em&gt; does in fact modify a sentence, but this is obscured by ellipsis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same adverb can be a sentence adverb in some sentences but not others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;sentence adverb&lt;/em&gt; does not adequately describe the category of adverbs we have in mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;fortunately&lt;/em&gt; happen to be a bad example?&lt;/strong&gt; Let's take a few other, similar words, then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The cat became agitated. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, the mouse was absent from the kitchen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) The cat was in the kitchen. The mouse, &lt;strong&gt;however&lt;/strong&gt;, was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) I bought a pair of &lt;strong&gt;hopefully&lt;/strong&gt; unused socks at the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it can be seen that &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt; modifies the entire sentence in a), but only &lt;em&gt;the mouse&lt;/em&gt; in b) (contrasting it with &lt;em&gt;the cat&lt;/em&gt;). And &lt;em&gt;hopefully&lt;/em&gt; clearly modifies only &lt;em&gt;unused&lt;/em&gt; in c), which is perhaps a bit informal, but not uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) One could say your example is really an &lt;strong&gt;elliptical form&lt;/strong&gt; of a full secondary sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The man fell from the tenth story; &lt;strong&gt;fortunately&lt;/strong&gt; [it was / he fell] onto a pile of pillows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this doubtful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) The cat was in the kitchen. The mouse, &lt;strong&gt;however&lt;/strong&gt;, was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems impossible to reconstruct this as ellipsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) I bought a pair of — &lt;strong&gt;hopefully&lt;/strong&gt; [they are] unused — socks at the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This perhaps possible, but it seems weak. And it cannot work for &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt;. It seems far more likely that the subconscious sometimes wants to treat &lt;em&gt;hopefully&lt;/em&gt; like other &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; words and have it modify an adjective. I hear an English monk sharpening his razor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Perhaps &lt;strong&gt;the same adverb can sometimes be a sentence adverb, but at other times modify only a single constituent.&lt;/strong&gt; This would then have to apply to most sentence adverbs. The problem or issue is that most adverbs that we normally do not consider sentence adverbs can also do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) The mouse was &lt;strong&gt;often&lt;/strong&gt; absent from the kitchen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e) The &lt;strong&gt;often&lt;/strong&gt; absent mouse was dearly missed by the cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes this different from &lt;em&gt;fortunately&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt;? The main difference seems to be that the latter are about the attitude of the speaker towards the text, modality, whereas &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; is not. In the case of &lt;em&gt;fortunately&lt;/em&gt;, its meaning does not change between its use as a sentence modifier and its use as modifying a constituent. It would not seem warranted to call &lt;em&gt;the word&lt;/em&gt; a sentence adverb in one sentence and a normal adverb in another, if its meaning does not change; then we could just as well call &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; a sentence modifier in d), which seems trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;strong&gt;It doesn't seem to make sense to use &lt;em&gt;sentence adverb&lt;/em&gt; at all&lt;/strong&gt;, because it suggests that certain adverbs modify only whole sentences and other adverbs do not. Instead, the essence of what makes &lt;em&gt;fortunately&lt;/em&gt; etc. special is that they express the attitude of the speaker towards the text, somewhat like modal verbs. Perhaps the intended category should be called &lt;em&gt;modal adverbs&lt;/em&gt; instead. Or perhaps we are dealing with more than one category: &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt; could be called a discursive adverb, as it does not really express a modal attitude, but rather the speaker's attitude towards the ordering of the text (in casu a contrast). An attitudinal adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the word &lt;em&gt;disjunct&lt;/em&gt; has similar problems, because it implies that the adverb is entirely separate from the rest of the clause and does not modify a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T10:00:28.900" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T10:00:28.900" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4805" CreationDate="2013-10-29T16:56:55.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adverbs have long been called a ‘wastebasket’ category in syntax. Their definition is very general: adverbs are distinguished from adjectives, which modify nouns, by saying that ‘adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs’; to this one can add that they may also modify phrases and clauses as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something doesn’t fit nicely in some other word class, it generally gets lumped in as an adverb of some sort. Traditionally, adverbs (and adverbials, which means ‘any chunk that acts like an adverb’ -– not a terribly precise definition) represent qualifications and afterthoughts to ordinary propositions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they can occur in many different positions in the sentence, which means they may or may not be close to whatever constituents they focus on. Which allows lots of useful variations and conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sentence adverb&quot; is not a type of adverb.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's a type of adverbial &lt;strong&gt;construction&lt;/strong&gt;, or usage;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;one of the things some adverbs can do.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;sentence adverb&quot; is a sloppy technical term, since it doesn't distinguish &quot;sentence adverbs&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from &quot;clause adverbs&quot;, or &quot;phrase adverbs&quot;, which also exist, but are not mentioned.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I wouldn't worry too much about &quot;sentence adverbs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-10-29T16:56:55.660" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-30T00:49:12.230" Score="0" ViewCount="4104" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the origins of the Hebrew word pronounced &quot;ed,&quot; meaning &quot;witness?&quot;  It is spelled ayin daled.  Is it related to the ayin daled portion of the word &quot;Le-ad,&quot; which means &quot;forever?&quot;  Does it also mean a contract and evidence?  Is the origin Aramaic?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2651" LastEditorUserId="2653" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T16:40:16.280" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T15:01:51.577" Title="Etymology of witness in Hebrew" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4814" CreationDate="2013-10-30T01:35:31.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gesenius's &lt;em&gt;Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt; states that it is the present participle of a root ayin-waw-dalet, meaning 'return' or 'repeat', with an Arabic cognate &lt;em&gt;`āda&lt;/em&gt; -- the idea apparently being that a witness is one who 'repeats' what he saw. It's presumably not an Aramaic borrowing, since it occurs already in Genesis. Gesenius lists the meaning 'testimony' in addition to 'witness'. In modern Hebrew, though, it only means 'witness'; 'testimony' is a related noun, &lt;em&gt;edut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether it's related to &lt;em&gt;`ad&lt;/em&gt; 'eternity', Gesenius thinks not: he derives the latter from a different root ayin-dalet-he. It seems conceivable that the two roots could be related further back, though; at least, one could certainly imagine a semantic relationship between 'return' and 'eternity'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T04:34:34.467" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T04:34:34.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4791" CreationDate="2013-10-30T09:29:57.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish father is &lt;em&gt;baba&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe Turkish spoken in Cappadocia has &lt;em&gt;dadas&lt;/em&gt; (not sure), which is a native Anatolian word (attested also in Cappadocian Greek). Turkish &lt;em&gt;dede&lt;/em&gt; however means grandfather. Generally local dialects might have picked up native Anatolian words such as Lydian &lt;em&gt;taada&lt;/em&gt;, Luwian &lt;em&gt;tatta&lt;/em&gt; and Carian &lt;em&gt;ted&lt;/em&gt;. Those extinct languages are all Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case all those words are lallnamen (baby speech), which goes beyond the limits of language groups and are far older than Indo-European and Altaic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T14:33:39.390" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T14:33:39.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4819" CreationDate="2013-10-30T16:09:21.803" Score="1" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing natural language processing and I am trying to figure out how to parse the following sentence (I am using BNC tags to mark parts of speech):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have I seen the man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I see it is like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have &gt; VHB&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I &gt; PNP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      seen &gt; VVN&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      the &gt; AT0&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      man &gt; NN1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that we have: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the + man &gt; np&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I &gt; np&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  have &gt; aux (auxilary verb)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  seen &gt; verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, since sentence should be in form np vp, what is the initial np here? Is it 'Have I'? I do not understand how does 'Have' fit in the whole thing, since it's before the initial np 'I' but should belong with 'seen'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2654" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T16:41:56.287" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T00:14:06.947" Title="Parsing a simple sentence?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-10-30T16:23:24.477" Score="5" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;adverbial free relative clause&quot; (maybe there's a better term for this) I mean a relative clause which (a) is headed by an indefinite fused relative pronoun, e.g. English &lt;em&gt;whoever, whatever&lt;/em&gt;, and (b) has no antecedent in the main clause and thus no close syntactic connection with it (hence &quot;adverbial&quot;). English examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Whatever the weather is tonight, we'll go out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Whoever wrote that paper, it's silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Whichever road you take, you'll get to London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this construction exist in early Indo-European languages (e.g. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hittite)? If not, how do these languages express such meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What syntactic and semantic analyses of such clauses (in any language) have been proposed? They have the unusual property of not having an antecedent and modifying an otherwise syntactically independent sentence, which is odd for relative clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-30T20:21:29.537" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T04:23:50.413" Title="Adverbial free relative clauses, in early Indo-European languages and generally" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4817" CreationDate="2013-10-30T21:59:46.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence will be a CP in traditional GG: [CP [C have] [IP I seen the man]]. Note that constituent trees represent sentence topology rather than grammatical relations. In the example at hand, &quot;have&quot; and &quot;seen&quot; are coheads but they don't appear contiguously in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T21:59:46.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1235" CreationDate="2013-10-30T22:33:21.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider Armenian to be a &quot;saturated&quot; language, because of Urartian (non-IE), Luwian and Iranian influence. Proto-Armenian was probably a bit different from how Armenian is today, but in its basis it is obviously Indo-European. It just needs a little bit more attention and things clear up. I usually make comparisons with Greek, Hittite and other Anatolian or Balkanic languages. See some examples below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The order is English : Armenian - other languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;great: mec - Greek mega&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bad: çhar - Greek kako&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bite: xacanê - Greek dakno&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bone: oskr - Greek oston, Hittite hastai&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;breathe: phçhê - Greek pnei&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cloud: amp - Hittite alpas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dry: çhor - Greek xeros&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fire: howr - Hittite pahhur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;give: tay - Hittite pāi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hair: her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I: es - Greek/Latin ego&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in: i - Proto-Germanic *in, Greek en and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lake: liç - Hittite lulis, Greek limne&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;name: anown - Greek/Phrygian onoma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bring: berê - Phrygian ber-, Greek pher-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other: ayl - Greek allos, Lydian alev&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;salt: al - Greek alas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;star: astl - Hittite hasterz, Greek aster&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;warm: jerm - Greek thermo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what: zi - Greek ti&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wife: kin - Greek gyne, Lydian kana, Thracian *goni&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bear: arj - Greek arktos, Hittite hartaggas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cow: kov&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;goat: ayc - Greek aiga&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ship: naw - Greek nāus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you might be interested also on this speech by Charles de Lamberterie (Sorbonne). He speaks about the place of the Armenian language in the Indo-European language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDgMTVnUnIU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Armenian Language &amp;amp; its Place in the Indo-European Linguistic Family&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2014-07-18T06:43:57.217" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T06:43:57.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2013-10-30T22:46:02.320" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're talking about a circumstantial clause, which refers to a set of circumstances which help explain the rest of the sentence. Circumstantial clauses do appear in Latin, and therefore most of the romance languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, etc.). Although they use relative pronouns, circumstantial clauses aren't relative clauses at all (at least not in Latin). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, a circumstantial clause always includes the word &quot;cum&quot; (which means &quot;with&quot;, as in &quot;magna cum laude&quot; (&quot;with great praise&quot;)). &quot;Cum&quot; isn't a relative pronoun at all; it's actually a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2643" LastActivityDate="2013-10-30T22:46:02.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2013-10-31T00:31:00.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE such construction would be conducted with a word, consisting of the root &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ei̯-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;always, ever, constant, the same&quot; and a interrogative pronoun, like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆oteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;which&quot;, with a suffix -i to form adverb (formerly, locative case):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a̯i̯q̆oteri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - either of the two (the English word &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; origins exactly this way, via Old English &lt;em&gt;æghwæðer&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a̯i̯q̆ea̯li&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - of whatever sort, equally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A̯i̯q̆oteri tua̯ pnta̯oi̯ e̯eisi u̯ici bheue̯si.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - Either road you go, you will reach the village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that English word &quot;whatever&quot; also produced from the same roots: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆od&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;who&quot; + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ei̯-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;always&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T03:33:49.350" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T03:33:49.350" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2013-10-31T02:30:14.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a bit of searching I can now partially answer my own question 1, about these constructions in Latin and Greek: apparently both have basically the same construction as English, using an indefinite relative pronoun (usually &lt;em&gt;quisquis&lt;/em&gt; in Latin, ὅστις or ὁστισοῦν in Greek) and a verb in the indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hostem qui feriet, mihi erit Carthaginiensis, &lt;strong&gt;quisquis erit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; 'whoever kills an enemy will be a Carthaginian in my eyes, &lt;strong&gt;whoever he may be&lt;/strong&gt;' (Cicero &lt;em&gt;Balbus&lt;/em&gt; 22.51)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ita ille faxit Iuppiter, ut ille palam ibidem adsiet, &lt;strong&gt;quisquis illest, qui adest a milite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; 'I wish Jupiter would so make it, that he were openly in the same place with me, &lt;strong&gt;whoever he is, that has arrived from the Captain&lt;/strong&gt;' (Plautus &lt;em&gt;Pseudolus&lt;/em&gt; 4.1.22-4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;δεινῶς γ᾽ ἔοικεν ἀποκεκρυμμένην τέχνην ἀνευρεῖν ὁ Τεισίας ἢ ἄλλος &lt;strong&gt;ὅστις δή ποτ᾽ ὢν τυγχάνει καὶ ὁπόθεν χαίρει ὀνομαζόμενος&lt;/strong&gt; 'a wonderfully hidden art it seems to be which Tisias has brought to light, or some other, &lt;strong&gt;whoever he may be and whatever country he is proud to call his own&lt;/strong&gt;!' (Plato &lt;em&gt;Phaedrus&lt;/em&gt; 273c)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek additionally has a slightly different construction which places the free relative clause inside a conditional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;μὴ ἐπιτρέπειν τῷ ἀσεβοῦντι &lt;strong&gt;μηδ᾽ ἂν ὁστισοῦν τυγχάνῃ ὤν&lt;/strong&gt; '[we ought not] to let him who acts impiously go unpunished, &lt;strong&gt;no matter who he may be&lt;/strong&gt;', lit. 'not even if he happens to be whoever'. (Plato &lt;em&gt;Euthyphro&lt;/em&gt; 5e)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T04:02:07.517" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T04:02:07.517" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4818" CreationDate="2013-10-31T03:02:22.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It exists in Greek and Latin, and probably in most other Indo-European languages—at least in the ones I know: Dutch, French, German, Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to create an indefinite relative pronoun in Latin, one uses an extended form of the interrogative pronoun, doubling it, so &lt;em&gt;quidquid&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;quid&lt;/em&gt; &quot;what&quot;; or one adds &lt;em&gt;-cumque&lt;/em&gt; to the relative pronoun, so &lt;em&gt;quodcumque&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;quod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(that) which&quot;. The indicative mood is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catullus describes how Egnatius is always grinning, whatever happens, &lt;em&gt;Carmen&lt;/em&gt; 39, 5–7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... si ad pii rogum fili  &lt;em&gt;[if at the pyre of a loyal son]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater,  &lt;em&gt;[people mourn, when the bereft mother bemoans her only son,]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  renidet ille. &lt;strong&gt;quidquid est, ubicumquest,&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;em&gt;[he grins. Whatever it is, wherever he is,]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;quodcumque agit&lt;/strong&gt;, renidet. ...  &lt;em&gt;[whatever is happening, he grins]&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek, there are many ways to form indefinite pronouns. One can add a form of the interrogative pronoun &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt; to the relative pronoun &lt;em&gt;hos&lt;/em&gt;, but there are other ways. The indefinite clause is normally in the subjunctive mood. An example from Xenophon, &lt;em&gt;Memorabilia&lt;/em&gt; 2.3, 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ἄλλοις μὲν ἀρέσκειν δύναται, ἐμοὶ δὲ &lt;strong&gt;ὅπου ἂν παρῇ&lt;/strong&gt; πανταχοῦ καὶ ἔργῳ καὶ λόγῳ ζημία μᾶλλον ἢ ὠφέλειά ἐστιν.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;[he can be pleasant to others, but to me, whenever he is there, he is in all respects, both in deed and in word, harmful rather than helpful.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Marchant (1923) translates: &quot;he is pleasant enough to other people, but whenever he is near me, he invariably says and does more to hurt than to help me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is much easier to find an antecedentless (and postcedentless) indefinite pronoun when it refers to something adverbial (a time or place) rather than a thing or person. Both Latin and Greek are (far) more likely to add an antecedent than English or Dutch. I was able to find a Latin example, but not a Greek example. Nevertheless, I think the origin of our antecedentless indefinite clause lies in indefinite clauses that do have antecedents, as in Latin and Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An different but interesting development in French is that of the word &lt;em&gt;quoique&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;what which&quot;, similar to Latin &lt;em&gt;quidquid&lt;/em&gt;. It can mean &quot;whatever&quot;; but it has also developed a meaning &quot;however&quot;, and even &quot;although&quot;, as a full conjunction. That is, there is no longer a &quot;what&quot; to fulfil the function of a subject or object in the subordinate clause. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=epk8G-OHJ18C&amp;amp;pg=PA12&amp;amp;lpg=PA12&amp;amp;dq=voltaire%20quoique&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=nhWrbZhMH6&amp;amp;sig=W_NAylOHOGa0570SmYm0SeNniHU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=5MlxUt32L4ed0QWV5oCgCw&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=voltaire%20quoique&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;La Harpe&lt;/a&gt; to Voltaire (s.xviii):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quoique&lt;/strong&gt; éloigné du centre de notre littérature, vous en êtes toujours l'âme et l'honneur. &lt;em&gt;[However far removed from the centre of our literature, you are still/always its soul and honour.]&lt;/em&gt; Modifying the adjective &lt;em&gt;éloigné&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=r-2w6K9GPk8C&amp;amp;pg=PA40&amp;amp;lpg=PA40&amp;amp;dq=voltaire%20quoique&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=BXBdFQo-L6&amp;amp;sig=cAcmB_oGf_cw3Pwct05J1X2VLb8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=5MlxUt32L4ed0QWV5oCgCw&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=quoique&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Calmet&lt;/a&gt; (s.xviii):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Les écrivains sacrés, &lt;strong&gt;quoique&lt;/strong&gt; remplis d'une lumière supérieure et infallible, s'expriment d'ordinaire d'une façon humaine et populaire; ... &lt;em&gt;[The sacred writers, though full of a superior and infallible light, normally expressed themselves in a human and popular manner; ...]&lt;/em&gt; Modifying the entire clause (leaving out the finite verb as in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indefinite relative clauses seem to be intimately connected with a concessive (&quot;although&quot;) connotation in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-10-31T04:23:50.413" LastActivityDate="2013-10-31T04:23:50.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4817" CreationDate="2013-11-01T00:14:06.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/gaz81.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gazdar's 1981 paper&lt;/a&gt; on handling questions in a phrase structure grammar for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0aaW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T00:14:06.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-01T01:34:07.123" Score="5" ViewCount="1437" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please forgive the potentially noob question, but I'm trying to get started with semantic text analysis, particularly in the legal space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a very good &lt;a href=&quot;http://wyner.info/research/Papers/WynerMochalesPalauMoensMilward2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper which describes a context free grammar&lt;/a&gt; for legal argument (pp. 10-12).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found that Python's NLTK library allows context free grammars to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/book/ch08.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;defined&lt;/a&gt; like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; groucho_grammar = nltk.parse_cfg(&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;... S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;... PP -&amp;gt; P NP&#xA;... NP -&amp;gt; Det N | Det N PP | 'I'&#xA;... VP -&amp;gt; V NP | VP PP&#xA;... Det -&amp;gt; 'an' | 'my'&#xA;... N -&amp;gt; 'elephant' | 'pajamas'&#xA;... V -&amp;gt; 'shot'&#xA;... P -&amp;gt; 'in'&#xA;... &quot;&quot;&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it even feasible/practical to use NLTK to define the grammar described in the paper? If so, how should I attack the problem? And if not so, what are the appropriate lines of inquiry I should follow in order to reproduce (part of) the context free grammar for legal argument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2657" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T14:53:41.267" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T14:53:41.267" Title="Expressing Context Free Grammar from academic article with Python's NLTK" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4826" CreationDate="2013-11-01T14:46:51.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any context-free parser can be used. However &quot;pure&quot; CF grammars aren't practical for real applications. I'd recommend to use LFG or a similar tool that generates more useful underlying representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T14:46:51.560" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4835" CreationDate="2013-11-01T17:06:58.090" Score="1" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very basic question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whom will you invite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't the subject &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; block the movement of &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try an answer: the movement of &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; is not an A-movement because it isn't case-driven. Therefore it doesn't hop on A positions and it just goes from complement of VP to [Spec, CP], with no intermediate steps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2661" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-02T08:21:10.253" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T17:26:42.360" Title="Why doesn't the subject prevent WH- extraction of an internal argument?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-01T18:12:13.820" Score="0" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the floating quantifiers' theory on external argument's movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These data raises two different problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a) The dogs ALL should have been petted.&#xA;&#xA;b) *The dogs should have been ALL petted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; There seems to be no room for a possible landing site of the NP subject &lt;em&gt;the dogs&lt;/em&gt; between [Spec, AgrP] and the head [Agr0] - or [Spec, IP] and [I0] if we don't take into account Split-IP hypothesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; get stranded in a) in the syntax tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; Why &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; cannot be stranded there? Theoretically, that position could be either be [Spec,VP] of the verb &lt;em&gt;pet&lt;/em&gt; or [Spec,IP] of the participle inflection of &lt;em&gt;(pet)-ted&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the theory account for the ungrammaticality of b)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2661" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T18:12:13.820" Title="Hypotheses for floating quantifier's positions in generative grammar" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3318" CreationDate="2013-11-01T21:34:22.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;let me give you a maths example:&#xA;pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon，???-gon&#xA;五边形，六边形，七边形，八边形，九边形，十边形，一百边形&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese does not need to invent new words as English needs to.&#xA;Think about it, which is easier to understand - lard/suet/talon or 猪油/羊油/牛油？&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2663" LastActivityDate="2013-11-01T21:34:22.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4843" CreationDate="2013-11-02T07:55:24.173" Score="2" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently hitchhiking through Yunnan, China and I've noticed that the city Kunming usually sounds more like &quot;Kuiming&quot; or &quot;Kweeming&quot; or &quot;kwəming&quot;. Even Google Translate produces the last when you get it to speak aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my unaccustomed ear it seems that the &quot;u&quot; is acting as a semivowel and the &quot;n&quot; is acting as some kind of vowel in the region of &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this due to a phonological process in Chinese?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or is it one of the quirks of pinyin, which isn't so transparent for a newcomer?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or could it be a Yunnan pronunciation quirk due to Mandarin/Standard Chinese not being people's native dialact down here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T07:36:10.383" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T07:36:10.383" Title="What feature(s) of Chinese language lead(s) to the city written in pinyin as &quot;Kunming&quot; to sound more like &quot;kuiming / kweeming / kwəming&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-02T13:43:31.883" Score="21" ViewCount="31536" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is /h/ called voiceless vowel phonetically, and /h/ consonant phonologically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2667" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T15:26:05.203" Title="Why is /h/ called voiceless vowel phonetically, and /h/ consonant phonologically?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4828" CreationDate="2013-11-02T17:19:11.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going through the derivation might help. Since your question is framed in terms of the generative framework, i'll give my answer also from a generative PoV - specifically, from the PoV of the Minimalist Program, where movement is feature-driven. I presuppose i certain amount of familiarity with minimalism in my answer, so apologies in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We start with the following 'Numeration'/'Lexical Array'. I've only included featural specifications (which are given in square brackets) where they will be relevant to the derivation. Note that i'm also going to ignore subject-auxiliary inversion in the derivation. I also use bare phrase structure labelling, so no distinction between maximal projections and intermediate levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;{Whom[wh], will, you, invite, &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;[*u*Wh]}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First we merge 'whom' and 'invite', so that 'invite' satisfies its internal theta-role, and 'whom' is assigned accusative case. Note that 'whom' possesses an interpretable Wh feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite whom[wh] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next we merge the subject, 'you', which satisfies the external theta-role of 'invite':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite whom[wh] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next we merge 'will':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; will [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite whom[wh]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Movement of the subject 'you' to SpecIP is triggered (by, e.g. an EPP feature on I):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; will [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite whom[wh]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interrogative C is merged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) [&lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; C[*u*Wh] [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; will [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite whom[wh]]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we've reached the crucial part of the derivation. Interogative C possesses an &lt;em&gt;uninterpretable&lt;/em&gt; wh-feature, which must be deleted before spell-out, or the derivation will crash. The [*u*Wh] feature 'probes' downwards for a matching 'goal' - since 'whom' posseses an interpretable [wh] it counts as a matching goal. Once the goal is found, movement of 'whom' to SpecCP is triggered, and [uWh] is deleted in a spec-head configuration under AGREE with 'whom'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) [&lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; {whom[wh]} [&lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; C [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; will [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; you [&lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; invite {whom[wh]}]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is that 'you' doesn't count as an intervener, since it doesn't possess a [wh] feature. Interrogative &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; probes specifically for [wh] - anything not possessing [wh] isn't visible to the probing operation. &lt;strong&gt;Intervention is relativised - only elements of the relevant sort count as interveners.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that other wh-words &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; count as interveners by considering the well known superiority effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) Who &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; bought what?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) What did who buy &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the subject is closer to interrogative &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; than the object, it counts as an intervener to wh-movement of the object, as attested by the ungrammaticality of (b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-11-02T17:26:42.360" LastActivityDate="2013-11-02T17:26:42.360" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4834" CreationDate="2013-11-02T18:19:17.473" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good question, and a very basic one that illustrates &#xA;an important difference between Phonetics and Phonology (or, as it used to be called, Phonemics):&#xA;They use different criteria for what's a vowel and what's a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, an important caveat:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; true of English; i.e, it's the &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; phoneme /h/ we're talking about.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;, for example, true of the Malay phoneme /h/.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Phonemes and Phonology are localized to individual languages,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;whereas Phonetics is independent of individual language systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that means is that when an English speaker pronounces the words &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;heat, hit, hate, hen, hat, hot,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;for instance,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they are pronouncing the phoneme strings &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/hit/, /hɪt/, /het/, /hɛn/, /hæt/, /hat/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonemically&lt;/a&gt;, and using /h/ as a Phonological &lt;strong&gt;consonant&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonological&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; consonants are sounds that pattern in some language &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on the &lt;strong&gt;borders&lt;/strong&gt; of syllables,  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and that are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; used in those languages as syllable nuclei, like voiced vowels are in English.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word here is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pattern&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Phonology is all about the patterns that sounds fit into in a given language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In English, /h/ &lt;strong&gt;patterns&lt;/strong&gt; as a consonant, and that's that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in pronouncing those phoneme strings&lt;br&gt;&#xA; -- which represent the way &lt;strong&gt;speakers&lt;/strong&gt; hear the words --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the actual /h/ sounds that the speaker says can be classified physiologically as voiceless vowels,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;because a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonetic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vowel is defined by how it's pronounced,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;rather than how it patterns with other sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic vowels are produced by passing lung air through the open mouth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and without significant contact between any articulators.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e, vowels are differentiated only by the positions of the tongue and the lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For historical reasons, English /h/ only occurs before vowels.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; occurs before a consonant, or at the end of a word (i.e, before &lt;code&gt;Zero&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It used to occur everywhere, but those /h/'s went silent or mutated,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and are represented in English spelling as GH.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/148033/15299&quot;&gt;why words with GH in them are so perplexing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the biggest difference between an /h/ and a following vowel is that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the vowel is &lt;strong&gt;voiced&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas the /h/ is &lt;strong&gt;voiceless&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, there is not much friction necessary to distinguish an /h/ from its absence,&#xA;which is the only thing it contrasts with, so all that is really needed is a transition&lt;br&gt;&#xA;between voiceless and voiced occurring after the vowel has started.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Rather like the Greek concept of a &quot;rough breathing&quot; (Greek only had /h/ before vowels, too).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the easiest way to accomplish this reliably and efficiently turned out to be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;to pronounce /h/ with a different allophone for every vowel it preceded, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[i̥it], [ɪ̥ɪt], [e̥et], [ɛ̥ɛn], [æ̥æt], [ḁat]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vowel symbol with a circle below represents a voiceless (whispered) vowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Any English speaker can prove this to themself easily:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whisper &lt;em&gt;eat, it, ate, ett, at, ott&lt;/em&gt;, holding the vowel long, to hear its voiceless sound&lt;br&gt;&#xA;then whisper each vowel, but start voicing the vowel and continue with the word.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You'll hear an /h/ in each case, if you're an Engish native speaker.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And, if you're paying attention, you'll notice you don't move your tongue -- only your larynx&lt;br&gt;&#xA;which means you're saying a different voiceless vowel in each case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has no other uses for voiceless vowels,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;so they're available as allophones for /h/.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Language rarely wastes resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T16:40:00.083" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T16:40:00.083" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6463" CreationDate="2013-11-02T20:42:07.943" Score="10" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of examples of signed languages borrowing or deriving words from spoken language. In ASL, the word DOG is a lexicalized fingerspelling of &quot;dog&quot;, CHURCH is made with the &quot;c&quot; handshape corresponding to the first letter of &quot;church&quot;, just to name a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of a spoken language borrowing words from a signed language? It seems less likely, since signed languages have lower prestige. Even so, there are many communities that have a large deaf population where such a phenomenon could happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T18:44:49.500" Title="Has a spoken language ever borrowed a word from a signed language?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-02T21:50:22.857" Score="3" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish has two different suffixes for relative clauses. The difference is due to the subjectivity in relative clause. In other words; if it defines a subjective, it is constructed with the suffix -En; if not, it is constructed with -DIK/AcAK. (-DIK and -AcAk make time difference in the structure and they cooccur in other structures such as nominalizer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (1) Kitap okuyan kızı gördüm. &#xA;      book  read-part. girl-acc. see-past-1stp.&#xA;      &quot;I saw the girl who read a book.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;  (2) Kızın okuduğu kitabı gördüm.&#xA;      girl-gen. read-part. book-poss. see-past-1stp.&#xA;      &quot;I saw the book which the girl is reading.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;  (3) Kızın okuyacağı kitabı gördüm.&#xA;      girl-gent. read-part. book-poss. see-past-1stp.&#xA;      &quot;I saw the book which the girl will read.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these sentences, the change in the suffixes create ungrammaticality. However, there are also structures allow the both structure even though it should be nonsubjective suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (4) Bacasından dumanın çıktığı evi gördüm.&#xA;      chimney-poss.-abl. smog-gen. came out-part. house-acc. see-past-1stp.&#xA;      &quot;I saw the house from whose chimney the smog came out.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;  (5) Bacasından duman çıkan evi gördüm.&#xA;      chimney-gen.-abl. smog come out-part. house-acc. see-past-1stp.&#xA;      &quot;I saw the house from whose chimney the smog came out.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not actually define the subject of relative clause but it can form by both suffixes. Furthermore, when I asked it to the native speakers, most of them pointed that the structure with subjective suffix sounds more natural. Do you have any suggestion or reference why or how it can be possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="640" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T15:55:00.160" Title="Co-occurence of different participles in Turkish relative clause structures" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4832" CreationDate="2013-11-03T00:35:34.570" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;this could be a regional dialect problem. As you know, the standard mandarin pronunciation is KUNMING. I would not regard this as a phonological process because dialectal influence varies a lot among people in different places. If this is a phonological process, there should be only one standard form of pronunciation.  Nice trip there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2669" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T00:35:34.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2013-11-03T00:40:58.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Finnish pronouns are &lt;em&gt;minä, sinä, hän, me, te, he&lt;/em&gt;, and other Finnic languages have a similar pattern. Siberian Finnic languages have the pattern (examples are form the Erzya language) &lt;em&gt;mon, ton, son, min, tin, sin&lt;/em&gt;. In Hungarian &lt;em&gt;én, te, mi, ti&lt;/em&gt; (I, thou, we, you), Turkic &lt;em&gt;men, sen&lt;/em&gt; (I, thou). Indeed, these are an &quot;extraoridinary coincidence&quot;, and the verbal endings in Finnish are (-&lt;em&gt;n, -t, -, -me, -te, -vat&lt;/em&gt;) and those in Teutish (aka IE) are &lt;em&gt;-mi, -si, -ti, -me, -te, -nti&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2670" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T22:04:18.070" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T22:04:18.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4832" CreationDate="2013-11-03T01:44:01.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly certain it's not a quirk of Pinyin. The first character of Kunming, 昆, is unambiguously pinyinized as &quot;Kūn&quot;. I speak some Mandarin, and I would never pronounce that like &quot;Kwee&quot;, and nor have I ever spoken to a Chinese person who would. When I travelled in Yunnan, I never encountered the pronunciation that you've described. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said - you might be in a different part of the province. You could be encountering some regional dialect changes to standard Mandarin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One feature of Yi (a local minority ethnic group)-influenced dialects of Mandarin is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunnan#Languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lack of distinction between /n/ and /ŋ/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe what you're hearing comes from the combination of the first tone, and the distorted, slightly nasalized /n/ in Kūn, when pronounced by Yunnan speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2671" LastEditorUserId="2671" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T03:07:18.127" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T03:07:18.127" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12217" CreationDate="2013-11-03T10:10:47.713" Score="3" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sandhi in the Vedas and Aranyakas which of the following is more correct (i.e. &lt;strong&gt;ḥ s&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;ss&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;रुद्रः सन्महो&#xA;rudraḥ sanmaho&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;रुद्रस्सन्महो&#xA;rudrassanmaho&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is from the Mahanarayana Upanishad section 24 (Taittiriya Aranyaka 10.24.1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some books use the 1st format (Taittiriya-Aranyaka Edited by Subramania Sarma, Chennai) while others use the second (Mantra Pushpam by the Ramakrishna Math, Taittiriya Mantra Koshah by Ramakrishna Math). Do you know which is more correct according to Vedic sandhi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is not the correct place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2674" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-03T13:13:43.717" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T17:01:55.233" Title="Vedic sandhi: ḥ-s or ss? (Sanskrit, Devanagari)" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4832" CreationDate="2013-11-03T11:27:59.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised that neither of the current answers makes reference to what exactly the Pinyin phonetically transcribes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the city, romanised in Pinyin as &lt;em&gt;kun1ming2&lt;/em&gt;, is pronounced [ku̯ən˥ miŋ˧˥]. As hippietrail correctly notes, there is a semi-vowel in medial position in the onset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hippietrail's transcription of 'kweeming' reflects the semi-vowel in the onset, plus the assimilation of the [n] in the first syllable to the following [m].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the confusion is that Pinyin rimes aren't meant to correspond directly to English orthography. This is why a Pinyin syllable like &lt;em&gt;yuan&lt;/em&gt; is mispronounced by virtually every English speaker, where a correct transcription might be [yɛn].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there's a quirk of Pinyin regarding syllables with the nucleus [u̯ə]. In Pinyin, this diphthong is transcribed &lt;code&gt;un&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;kun&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sun&lt;/code&gt; etc) except when the initial is zero, when it's transcribed &lt;code&gt;wen&lt;/code&gt;. This quirk of Pinyin may be responsible for your question — perhaps its pronunciation would be less surprising if Kunming was instead transcribed &lt;code&gt;Kwenming&lt;/code&gt;, as would be the case if this quirk didn't exist!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, you've encountered one of the quirks which make it hard for a naive English speaker to approximate Mandarin based on the Pinyin; although Pinyin uses Roman letters, the values diverge considerably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2013-11-04T04:28:12.607" LastActivityDate="2013-11-04T04:28:12.607" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2013-11-03T21:48:20.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're both correct. Says Whitney in his Sanskrit Grammar (pp. 58-9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Before an initial sibilant -- ç, ṣ, s -- s is either assimilated, becoming the same sibilant, or it is changed into visarga. The native grammarians are in some measure at variance as to which of these changes should be made, and in part they allow either at pleasure. The usage of the manuscripts is also discordant; the conversion to visarga is the prevalent practice, though the sibilant is also not infrequently found written, especially in South-Indian manuscripts. European editors generally write visarga.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T21:48:20.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2013-11-03T22:18:20.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hyperonymy and other sense relations are not usually applied to adjective + noun combinations (expections are made where the combination is lexicalised, such as &lt;em&gt;White House&lt;/em&gt;). Instead, your examples can be analysed by comparing the sets of entities they refer to. The phrase with a modifier can refer only to a subset of the entities that the noun without modifier can refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some cities are big, and not all cities are big. &lt;em&gt;a city&lt;/em&gt; can then refer to any city from the set of all existing cities, while &lt;em&gt;a big city&lt;/em&gt; can only refer to a subset of all cities - namely those of a certain size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-11-03T22:18:20.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9824" CreationDate="2013-11-04T20:45:00.597" Score="6" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't decide whether Ancient Greek had &quot;geminate&quot; or &quot;long&quot; consonants. In other words did γλῶττα stand for [glˈɔːt̪.t̪a] or for [glˈɔː.t̪ːa] ? The difference between geminate and long consonants is clearly expressed by John Laver, Principles of phonetics, chapter 14 : geminate=repetition of a same sound, unlike a long consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;geminate :&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I read in Michel Lejeune (Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien), page 70 (my translation) : &quot;Geminate occlusives are the (phonemes) whose tense (=French 'tenue') is sufficient to be heard by ears and whose implosion and explosion, both audible, belong to two different syllables&quot;.&#xA;From Lejeune's book I understand two ideas : Ancient Greek had geminate occlusives and these geminate became later long consonants (but I can't find the passage relative to this last idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; :&#xA;I read in Sidney Allen (Vox Graeca, page 12) : &quot;wherever the normal spelling writes a double consonant, it stands for a correspondingly lengthened consonant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about ? Any help would be appreciated !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM :&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; I have to apologize : the difference between gemination(=repetition) and gemination (lengthened consonant) isn't in John Laver, Principles of phonetics, chapter 14. &#xA;This distinction appears in Lejeune's book (Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien, page 71, note 59-1) but Lejeune only cites another book (Maurice Grammont, Traité de phonétique, 52-57) where the definition between &quot;geminated consonants, opposed to long consonants&quot; (my translation of Lejeune's note) is given. I don't have Grammont's book so I can't go further. Is this distinction outdated ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-08T00:11:51.630" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T11:36:53.237" Title="geminate or long consonants in Ancient Greek?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;gemination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2013-11-05T11:09:38.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to a statistical estimation I know roughly 7000 words in English. I am able to read all literature with one unknown word per three lines on average (guessing on basis of ten books I have read in the last six months), can speak pretty fluently but still noticeably worse than in my native language and understand nearly everything in spoken language (conversations, films, and so on). The only remaining part of the language I have a lot of difficulties with is music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My third language is Russian. I have a lot of practise with listening but not understanding because I've been exposed to it passively. In the previous month I have learned the thousand most commons words by memorizing them through space repetition software and I have got six hours of training in Russian lessons. Now I am able to understand all kinds of basic conversation but with a lot of guessing.  I can express only simple thoughts, very uncomfortably, slowly and in a completely wrong way but natives understand me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen estimations of passive native vocabulary as high as 50k and more. As mentioned above my English vocabulary is about 7k words big and with regard to my abilities I am pretty sure that a normal human being doesn't know more than say 20k to 25k words. I guess that 10k - 12k is enough to speak/understand like a native in the case that you are strong in all other areas of a language (accent, grammar, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2682" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-05T13:05:27.817" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T13:05:27.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-05T15:16:06.417" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an annotation tool for linguistic structure that compares to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/sfb378/negra-corpus/annotate.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;@nnotate&lt;/a&gt;? One of the major features of annotate is the annotation is semi-automatic, i.e., it uses a language model to make annotation suggestions to the annotator.&#xA;Unfortunately it is slightly outdated as it depends on Tcl/Tk 8.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an annotation tool with a comparable feature set?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="890" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T15:16:06.417" Title="Semi-automatic annotation tool like '@nnotate'" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2013-11-05T15:20:33.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similarities between the personal pronouns of languages of northern Eurasia (not just IE and Uralic) has been noted many times by different individuals. It's been claimed to be evidence for the proposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages#Personal_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nostratic&lt;/a&gt; family and other similar controversial macro-family proposals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these proposals are not mainstream, there are several possible mainstream explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/m/ for first person and /t/ or /s/ for second person may represent a universal linguistic tendency like mama/nana and papa/tata words for &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot;. This explanation doesn't seem plausible because the phenomenon seems to be largely confined to the Old World (except sub-Saharan Africa). For example in Americas the pattern /n/ - /m/ seems to be much more common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pure chance. Widely used function words (like personal pronouns) tend to be short and chance resemblances are almost inevitable. But locality of the phenomenon seems to suggest a rather different explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Areal features due to language contact (borrowing in this case). It's often stated that pronouns are rarely borrowed and it seems to hold true for most historically known Eurasian languages. But it's also known that some other languages (like Pirahã) borrowed their whole set of personal pronouns. So, maybe, this constraint holds true in only certain cultural settings. It may well be the case that pronouns &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; borrowed in Eurasia in prehistorical times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T15:20:33.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2013-11-05T15:51:24.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish, some subject + verb groups tend to form a close association, a tendency to stay together and not to allow other words to appear in between. It appears to be motivated by the low animacy of the subject. It is mildly similar to split ergativity. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Adamı köpek ısırdı.&#xA;man+definite-accusative dog bite+past-tense&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the subject + verb group &quot;köpek ısır-&quot; shows a strong tendency to remain together at the expense of natural SOV word order. Because the word &quot;adam&quot; (man) has higher animacy than the word &quot;köpek&quot; (dog), the topic of the sentence shifts from the subject to the direct object. The subject + verb group &quot;duman çık-&quot; shows a similar tendency. Sometimes these rigid groups may accept a subjective &quot;-en&quot; participle instead of the expected objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual rules are way more complicated (and possibly not entirely analyzed) but there is a chapter devoted to the subject in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idefix.com/kitap/turkcede-niteleme-sifat-islevli-yan-tumceler-fatma-erkman-akerson/tanim.asp?sid=AB7YLY4YYT7NMZMM25QN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T15:51:24.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-11-05T23:02:58.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The study in the TED talk you referenced was for students who probably had not learned another language before learning French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why Esperanto was considered helpful was because it allowed the students to become acquainted and become comfortable with speaking a language other than their own. Esperanto is very simple and shares roots with many languages, building the confidence required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you are completely comfortable with multiple languages (Armenian, Russian and English) so the benefit of learning Esperanto to learning further languages will be minimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2687" LastActivityDate="2013-11-05T23:02:58.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2013-11-06T01:02:52.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@TIKSN, please be patient and read the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition we are always biased when we judge an experience unsuccessful or unuseful when we do not give everything we can to make it successful or useful. You will always find what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary goal of Esperanto as an auxiliary language is to &quot;facilitate the communication&quot; so people can rapidly and easily communicate and learn about each other cultures. Hence its nature as &quot;auxiliary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto is a highly agglutinative language, because it uses a word-building mechanisms to rapidly build new words from roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same time, its regular grammatical structure allows learners to easily develop a feel for nouns, verbs and adjectives. A straight forward simplified pronunciation: One grapheme (smallest writing unit) corresponds to one phoneme(unit of sound). As a result it allows learners to become quite proficient with a minimum amount of effort and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing that, there is more than 6000 languages in the word, to not overlook anyone of them: national, regional, tribal... and each one is tied to a country, region, culture, history... Why should one or few national languages be better than others? Isn't that language discrimination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto doesn't belong to any country, and everyone can adopt it. Because it has indo-European roots and highly agglutinative characteristics, it offers a very  quick and easy solution to communicate between people of different cultures and languages without any military, colonial or economic hegemony. It helps preserving the diversity of languages which is as important as the diversity of species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not blaming main languages themselves, but the way they aquired their &quot;International legitimacy&quot;.&#xA;This is not the case with Esperanto, it is only a vector of communication intended to be a springboard to other languages and their cultures.&#xA;With esperanto we immediately start efficiently communicating each using his/her own culture. The culture of Esperanto is what we obtain as the result of intercultural communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Learning a language and live it day by day it is like discovering a parallel world with its reality and its people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I regularly participate in local, regional and international meetings, congresses... and I can find people speaking Esperanto in every country I visits&#xA;I have friends ALL over the world with whom I speak only esperanto. I have build many projects, professionally with esperanto collegues and my friend childrens have Esperanto as their native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing to other languages, it is very young but mature enough to be efficiently used for international communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sure, it is going to be tough to go against the historical determinism of the main languages, but it is worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at these websites for more inf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lernu.net&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ikurso.net&lt;br&gt;&#xA;edukado.net&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a recently appeared book about the subject, might interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto as a starter language for child second-language learners in the primary school,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karen Roehr-Brackin, Angela Tellier, Lingvistiko, Esperanto UK, 2013 (2a eld.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resumoj de la malkovroj faritaj kadre de la projektoj &quot;Springboard to Languages&quot;. Prezo: 12.30 EUR. Pliaj informoj, reta mendilo: &lt;a href=&quot;http://katalogo.uea.org?inf=9012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://katalogo.uea.org?inf=9012&lt;/a&gt;             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2688" LastEditorUserId="2688" LastEditDate="2013-11-15T00:41:30.107" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T00:41:30.107" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2826" CreationDate="2013-11-06T03:30:40.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jon -- you're a bit confused when you say &quot;initial&quot; vs. &quot;terminal&quot;. All the Grimm's Law changes happened in all positions (except directly after an obstruent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have mentioned, it's impossible to say for sure why a particular change happens, but there are various plausible theories, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An initial chain shift d -&gt; t, t -&gt; th (aspirated stop) is extremely common. Aspiration of initial voiceless stops is common, and if that happened then d would naturally shift to t through economy of effort, and in turn dh would shift to d. Aspirated stops changing to fricatives are also common (e.g. happened in Greek).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's also possible that t shifted directly to a fricative; this is more likely to have begun intervocalically and expanded to other positions. If this happened, then d -&gt; t followed by dh -&gt; d would also be natural changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It could have also been a push chain. The t - d - dh system is typologically very rare and obviously dispreferred, and so there would be pressure to eliminate the dh. If dh started to shift to d, then either it would merge with d or force a chain shift. Both solutions are seen (dh -&gt; d in Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Iranian, etc.; chain shift in Germanic and Armenian).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2597" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T03:30:40.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-06T07:01:09.157" Score="4" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had always thought agglutinative languages were inflected languages where the inflections to a greater degree are built up by multiple affixes, each having an atomic effect. (Unlike the &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; on English verbs which denotes &lt;code&gt;3rd person&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;singular&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;present tense&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On hearing Esperanto described as a &quot;highly agglutinating language&quot; I found this odd. I know Esperanto can add more than one affix to nouns and/or verbs to build up a grammatical ending. This makes it more agglutinating than English but not &quot;highly agglutinating&quot; according to my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might expect the term &quot;highly agglutinating&quot; to be used of languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Tamil, or Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in a recently posted answer, user AJN states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Esperanto is a highly agglutinative language, because it uses a word-building mechanisms to rapidly build new words from roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In followup comments an example is given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ex: from root word &quot;san&quot;(health) we obtain &quot;mal-san-ul-ej-o&quot; =&gt; (mal=inverse,ul=person,ej=place,o=substantif) as a result, mal-san-ul-ej-o = hospital, a name of a place where you find not healthy people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the terms &quot;agglutinating language&quot; and/or &quot;highly agglutinating language&quot; correctly applied to such word-building processes or only to the morphological processes I outlined above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the terms are applicable to both, does accepted terminology exist to differentiate the two types of agglutination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-05-06T17:22:39.067" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T21:22:40.067" Title="Does the term &quot;(highly) agglutinating language&quot; refer to inflectional endings, word-formation processes, or both?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4856" CreationDate="2013-11-06T10:46:46.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;agglutinative&quot; refers to languages in which BOTH derivation and inflection are expressed by chained suffixes. The confusion might originate from the fact that both properties positively correlate in natural languages. Esperanto is an artificial language, and therefore atypical in this respect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T10:46:46.670" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4859" CreationDate="2013-11-06T10:48:46.090" Score="2" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's pretend we are producing four-language cross-dictionary. To be more difficult, let it be a Russian-English-Japanese-Sanskrit dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;cross-dictionary&quot; I mean that the person using it will be able to look up any &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; in any of four supported languages and have four different articles describing the same &lt;em&gt;term&lt;/em&gt; which this &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;All four languages have a &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;term&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fire&quot; (I mean not a &quot;forest fire&quot; but just a generic &quot;fire&quot;). So, we have a binding of four words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Огонь / Fire / 火 / अग्नि&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users of this dictionary will be able to look up any of these words and get the four articles describing the same term &quot;fire&quot;. Each of these articles would be the usual dictionary article, of course, with all other possible meanings/readings/inflexions/etc of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What problems should be solved (and preferably, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; they can be solved) when making such a dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2690" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T09:55:57.857" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T09:55:57.857" Title="How can a multi-language dictionary be made?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-11-16T17:54:07.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2013-11-06T12:45:23.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that most words cannot be translated one to one. For simple, concrete words like &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt;, it's less of a problem. But consider a word like &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;. It has many different senses that would all need to be translated into different words in those other languages: it can mean &quot;upwards&quot;, &quot;finished&quot;, etc. Or consider a word like &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt;. It can mean &quot;as is certain&quot;, but also &quot;granted&quot; as in a concession. Etc. That's why even the simplest dictionaries have multiple senses for most words. I'll end with the entry for &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/up&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; on dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;, a relatively simple dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;up&#xA;  [uhp] &lt;em&gt;adverb, preposition, adjective, noun, verb,&lt;/em&gt; upped, up·ping.&#xA;  adverb&#xA;  1.&#xA;  to, toward, or in a more elevated position: to climb up to the top of a ladder.&#xA;  2.&#xA;  to or in an erect position: to stand up.&#xA;  3.&#xA;  out of bed: to get up.&#xA;  4.&#xA;  above the horizon: The moon came up.&#xA;  5.&#xA;  to or at any point that is considered higher.&#xA;  6.&#xA;  to or at a source, origin, center, or the like: to follow a stream up to its source.&#xA;  7.&#xA;  to or at a higher point or degree, as of rank, size, value, pitch, loudness, brightness, maturity, or speed: to move up in a firm; to pump up a tire; to turn a lantern up; Prices are going up. Speak up! Hurry up!&#xA;  8.&#xA;  ahead; in a leading position in a competition: He managed to get up on his opponent by three points.&#xA;  9.&#xA;  in continuing contact, especially as reflecting continuing awareness, knowledge, etc.: to keep up with the latest developments in mathematics.&#xA;  10.&#xA;  into or in activity, operation, etc.: to set up vibrations.&#xA;  11.&#xA;  into a state of emotional agitation or distress: His insults left her all roiled up.&#xA;  12.&#xA;  into existence, visible form, etc.: His sample was worked up in the studio.&#xA;  13.&#xA;  into view, prominence, or consideration: The lost papers have turned up.&#xA;  14.&#xA;  into or in a place of safekeeping, storage, retirement, etc.: to lay up riches; to put up preserves.&#xA;  15.&#xA;  into or in a state of union, contraction, etc.: to add up a column of figures; to fold up.&#xA;  16.&#xA;  to the required or final point: to pay up one's debts; burned up.&#xA;  17.&#xA;  to a state of completion; to an end: She finished it all up.&#xA;  18.&#xA;  to a halt: The riders reined up and dismounted.&#xA;  19.&#xA;  Baseball. being the player or team batting; at bat.&#xA;  20.&#xA;  (used as a function word for additional emphasis, sometimes preceded by it  ): Go wake your father up. What plugged it up? We laughed it up.&#xA;  21.&#xA;  ahead of an opponent or opponents in points, games, etc.: The golfer was two strokes up on his nearest competitor.&#xA;  22.&#xA;  each; apiece: The score was seven up in the final quarter.&#xA;  23.&#xA;  (of machines or equipment, as computers) working; in working order or in operation.&#xA;  24.&#xA;  Informal. without the addition of ice; straight up: Bring me a martini, up.&#xA;  25.&#xA;  Nautical . toward the wind: Put the helm up.&#xA;  preposition&#xA;  26.&#xA;  to, toward, or at an elevated place on or in: They went up the stairs. The cat is up the tree.&#xA;  27.&#xA;  to, toward, or at a high or higher station, condition, or rank on or in: He is well up the social ladder.&#xA;  28.&#xA;  at or to a farther point or higher place on or in: She is up the street. I'm going up the street.&#xA;  29.&#xA;  toward the source, origin, etc., of: up the stream.&#xA;  30.&#xA;  toward a particular direction or in the interior of, as a region or territory: The explorers were up north.&#xA;  31.&#xA;  in a course or direction that is contrary to that of: to row up the current.&#xA;  adjective&#xA;  32.&#xA;  moving in or related to a direction that is up or is regarded as up: the up elevator; the up train traveling north; the up platform of a railroad station.&#xA;  33.&#xA;  informed; familiar; aware (usually followed by on  or in  ): She is always up on current events.&#xA;  34.&#xA;  concluded; ended; finished; terminated: The game is up. Your hour is up.&#xA;  35.&#xA;  going on or happening; taking place; occurring: What's up over there?&#xA;  36.&#xA;  having a high position or station: He is up in society.&#xA;  37.&#xA;  in an erect, vertical, or raised position: The gate at the railroad crossing is up. The tent is up.&#xA;  38.&#xA;  above the earth or ground: The corn is up and ready to be harvested.&#xA;  39.&#xA;  in the air; aloft: The meteorological balloons are up. The airplanes are up for their reconnaissance flights.&#xA;  40.&#xA;  (of heavenly bodies) risen above the horizon: The sun is up.&#xA;  41.&#xA;  awake or out of bed: to be up with insomnia.&#xA;  42.&#xA;  mounted on horseback: He knows which jockeys are up in every race.&#xA;  43.&#xA;  (of water in natural bodies) high with relation to the banks or shore: The tide is up.&#xA;  44.&#xA;  built; constructed: The new museum is up and open to the public.&#xA;  45.&#xA;  facing upward: He is resting and his face is up.&#xA;  46.&#xA;  sunnyside up.&#xA;  47.&#xA;  (of roads, highways, etc.) having the surface broken or removed (usually used in combination): a torn-up road.&#xA;  48.&#xA;  in revolt, mutiny, or rebellious agitation: Many territories were up and preparing to send troops against the government.&#xA;  49.&#xA;  in a state of agitation: Beware of him when his temper is up.&#xA;  50.&#xA;  Informal. cheerful or optimistic; high-spirited; happy; exuberant; upbeat.&#xA;  51.&#xA;  Informal. productive, favorable, or profitable: a string of up months for the company.&#xA;  52.&#xA;  afoot or amiss: Her nervous manner told me that something was up.&#xA;  53.&#xA;  in a state of enthusiastic or confident readiness (usually followed by for  ): The team was definitely up for the game.&#xA;  54.&#xA;  bound; on the way: She was on a ship up for Australia.&#xA;  55.&#xA;  resolved in an unfavorable or undesired way: They knew that their game was up.&#xA;  56.&#xA;  higher than formerly in cost, amount, degree, etc.: The price of meat was up.&#xA;  57.&#xA;  (of age) advanced (usually followed by in  ): He is rather spry for a man so up in years.&#xA;  58.&#xA;  active: The captain wished to set sail as soon as the wind was up.&#xA;  59.&#xA;  in a legal proceeding as defendant: He is up for murder.&#xA;  60.&#xA;  in operation or ready for use: The theater's lights are up.&#xA;  61.&#xA;  (of points or other standards used to determine the winner in a competition) ahead; in advance: He won the game with two points up over his opponent.&#xA;  62.&#xA;  considered or under consideration: a candidate up for reelection; a bill that is up before Congress.&#xA;  63.&#xA;  wagered; bet: He won all the money up in the game.&#xA;  64.&#xA;  living or located inland or on elevated ground: They live in a village two miles up from the coast.&#xA;  65.&#xA;  (used with a preceding numeral to indicate that a score is tied in a competition): It was 10 up at the end of the first half.&#xA;  66.&#xA;  ahead of an opponent or opponents: They scored three times in a row to go two up.&#xA;  noun&#xA;  67.&#xA;  an upward movement; ascent.&#xA;  68.&#xA;  a rise of fortune, mood, etc.&#xA;  69.&#xA;  a time of good fortune, prosperity, or happiness: He has had more ups than downs in his career.&#xA;  70.&#xA;  an upbound means of public transportation, as a train or bus.&#xA;  71.&#xA;  Informal. a feeling or state of happiness, exuberance, or elation.&#xA;  72.&#xA;  Slang. upper (  def 10 ) .&#xA;  73.&#xA;  a person or thing that is in a favorable position of wealth, fortune, etc.: People who were ups in the business world suffered losses in the economic depression.&#xA;  74.&#xA;  an upward slope; elevation.&#xA;  75.&#xA;  an upward course or rise, as in price or value: The landlord promised his tenants there would be no further ups in the rent this year.&#xA;  76.&#xA;  Slang. upper2 .&#xA;  verb (used with object)&#xA;  77.&#xA;  to put or take up.&#xA;  78.&#xA;  to make larger; step up: to up output.&#xA;  79.&#xA;  to raise; go better than (a preceding wager): to up the ante.&#xA;  verb (used without object)&#xA;  80.&#xA;  Informal. to start up; begin something abruptly (usually followed by and  and another verb): Then he upped and ran away from home.&#xA;  81.&#xA;  (often used imperatively or hortatively) to rise up: Up, men, and fight until all the enemy are defeated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-11-06T12:45:23.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4862" CreationDate="2013-11-07T04:43:29.537" Score="9" ViewCount="3062" Body="&lt;p&gt;The various Wikipedia articles covering Standard Chinese all seem to agree that Mandarin does not have voiced plosives, fricatives, or affricates except for [ʐ] / [ɻ], written in Pinyin as &quot;r&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many other sources cite voiced IPA symbols and when I get my native Mandarin speaking Chinese friend who lives in the Beijing region to demonstrate the alveolar, retroflex, and alveolo-palatal series, it really seems to my ear that he is making voicing distinctions where Wikipedia indicates only aspiration distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, when I try to produce the sounds with only aspiration differences he corrects me until I give in and add voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must make it clear that I'm just an armchair linguist with no official training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what might I be observing? Could it be regional differences in Mandarin away from Standard Chinese? Could it be due to differing analyses of Chinese phonology? Could it be that Wikipedia is listing archiphonemes which commonly do have voiced realizations? Could it be that Wikipedia is just plain wrong? Or is it all down to my uneducated ear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-11-07T21:04:28.830" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T22:41:26.213" Title="Does Mandarin Chinese have phonetically voiced plosives, fricatives, or affricates (besides &quot;r&quot; = [ʐ] / [ɻ])?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2013-11-07T06:24:37.110" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a regional question.  Mandarin b,d,g may often be realized with voicing, but the key distinction is aspirated vs. unaspirated.  Here is a lab study of the voicing profiles of Mandarin and German. This comparison with German stops sums it up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Phonologically, all Mandarin stop consonants are voiceless; /p,t,k/ are aspirated, /b,d,g/ are unaspirated. In German, stops are usually classified by voicing: /p,t,k/ are voiceless, /b,d,g/ are voiced; aspiration is an optional feature of the voiceless stops. The results of our study show that, despite this typological difference between the consonantal systems of the two languages, Mandarin /b,d,g/, phonologically voiceless and unaspirated, and German /b,d,g/, phonologically voiced and unaspirated, show very similar patterns in their voicing profiles.”  [p.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for Mandarin, they found that “83% of realizations of the voiceless unaspirated alveolar stop /d/ in Mandarin are voiced at the beginning of the closure, and 50% are still voiced at the end of the closure.”  While the unaspirated stops are more likely to be voiced than the aspirated ones, this is not really surprising.  In practical terms, pronounce /b,d,g/ as you might in English, but make sure to aspirate /p,t,k/.  It’s not difficult, really, since they are initial sounds, just like English aspirated stops.  I don’t think this poses problems for native speakers of English, unlike the tripartite stop distinction found in many languages of mainland Southeast Asia.  (Taiwanese also has a 3-way distinction, by the way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the link:  Chilin Shih, Bernd Moebius, ‘Contextual Effects on Voicing Profiles of German and Mandarin Consonants’   &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.4.3423&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.4.3423&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2013-11-14T02:02:21.157" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T02:02:21.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-07T12:26:58.520" Score="6" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only really familiar with English and a few European languages, so to my mind it is normal for a language to have a double object construction and/or an NP-PP construction, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John gave [Mary] [a book]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John gave [a book] [to Mary]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English (and as far as I know a few others like German maybe) also have a limited &quot;tritransitive&quot; construction, where verbs like &quot;bet&quot; or &quot;fine&quot; can take three objects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John bet [Mary] [five bucks] [that she couldn't spit further than him]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John fined [Mary] [fifty dollars] [for cycling on the sidewalk]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that's a little controversial. Anyhow, is it &quot;normal&quot; for languages to have either of these constructions? Also, is the restriction on so-called &quot;tritransitives&quot; equally as restricted to monetary terms as it is in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2695" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T17:02:36.007" Title="Are ditransitives (or tritransitives?) cross-linguistically attested?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4866" CreationDate="2013-11-07T12:59:47.693" Score="6" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;This thread (related &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4847/geminate-or-long-consonants-in-ancient-greek&quot;&gt;to this problem&lt;/a&gt;) can be split into two questions, the first one being restricted to Ancient Greek, the second one being more general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; Let's be, by example, two syllables, the first one having an onset and a nucleus, the second one beginning with a lengthened consonant &lt;strong&gt;due to syllabication&lt;/strong&gt;. By example, Ancient Greek has γλῶττα, standing for [ glˈɔː . t̪ːa ] (from Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca, page 12 : &quot;wherever the normal spelling writes a double consonant, it stands for a correspondingly lengthened consonant.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question : is the first syllable a closed one ? I read in John Laver, Principles of Phonetics, p. 32 : &quot;When a syllable ends in a vowel, with no final consonant, it is said to be an open syllable&quot;. So the question becomes : does the first syllable has a coda or not ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, from Michel Lejeune (&lt;em&gt;Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien&lt;/em&gt;), I read, page 70 (my translation) : &quot;Geminate occlusives are the (phonemes) whose duration (=French 'tenue') is sufficient to be heard by ears and whose implosion and explosion, both audible, belong to two different syllables&quot;. Same statement in Laver's book (page 437) about another language (Nubian) having &quot;consonants being geminated (being made long, across a syllable boundary)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Lejeune's statement it seems clear that [ glˈɔː . t̪ːa ] can be analysed as if the first syllable had [t̪] in its coda, the second syllable beginning with another [t̪], the first syllable being consequently a closed one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; But I know that other languages have &lt;strong&gt;natural&lt;/strong&gt; lengthened consonants &lt;em&gt;at the beginning of a syllable&lt;/em&gt;. By example, (in Laver, p. 437) Pattani Malay has [lːabɔ], [sːiku], ... For these languages, if a syllable without a coda is followed by a syllable beginning with a lenghtened consonant (e.g. [pa . lːabɔ], an example I forged for the occasion), is the first syllable [pa] a short or a long one ? The word [lːabɔ] beginning with a long consonant, can this word somehow &quot;share&quot; its consonantal lenghth with the preceding word or is the syllabic boundary &quot;impassable&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-11-08T00:11:41.693" Title="Can a syllable be open before a lenghtened consonant?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;gemination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4863" CreationDate="2013-11-07T16:45:49.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ditransitives of the English type are very rare. Most languages use either case marking on nouns to signify grammatical relations or polypersonal head-marking. By &quot;English type&quot; I mean that both objects can be passivized. Your example can be paraphrased as &quot;A book was given to Mary by John&quot; or &quot;Mary was given a book by John&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T16:45:49.827" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4864" CreationDate="2013-11-07T17:46:26.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer (1): in Greek, geminates syllabify across a syllable boundary, so the first syllable is closed, e.g. γλῶτ.τα. We know this for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know that Greek doesn't allow a syllable to begin with a geminate, because if it did, there should be words where this occurs initially (e.g. *ττα) or after a consonant (e.g. *γλῶρττα), and such words don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vowels followed by a geminate make a heavy (a.k.a. &quot;long&quot;) syllable, as can be seen from their scansion in poetry. E.g. in Iliad 1.3 πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδὶ προΐαψεν, the first syllable must be heavy to satisfy the meter, so we know it's πολ- not πο-. A similar, non-metrical source of evidence is the comparatives and superlatives of o-stem adjectives, whose form varies according to the weight of the preceding syllable: -ότερος/-ότατος after a heavy syllable, -ώτερος/-ώτατος after a light syllable. Adjectives with a geminate before the -o- take the former set: περιττός, περιττότερος, περιττότατος. This shows that the syllabification is πε.ριτ.τός not πε.ρι.ττός.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-11-07T17:46:26.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-07T22:45:31.970" Score="2" ViewCount="4018" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there some data about how many languages exist with or without a writing system? Etnologue enumerates about 6800 living languages and for each language it registers writing systems the language uses, so it might contain the number. Are there any other estimations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1722" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T22:11:22.117" Title="Number of languages without a writing system" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-08T03:33:33.873" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to generalize what environments a certain set of phonemes occur, but I'm not sure if nasalization would affect where the vowel would be on the IPA vowel chart. I think my analysis of the data is affected by nasalized vowels, so I want to make sure I'm classifying them correctly! &#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2696" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-09T01:09:04.343" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T01:09:04.343" Title="When a vowel is nasalized does it effect on how open/close + front/back it would be?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;frontness-backness&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;&lt;vowel-height&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-09T00:14:09.833" Score="4" ViewCount="1461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new here. I dont know how to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am teaching Syntax and I have some problems to differentiate Nominal Relative Clauses and Wh-Interrogative Clause. I am wondering if some of you could help me with these examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you remember when Columbus discovered America?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you remember when we first came here, darling?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What caused the fire remains a mystery.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We never discovered what caused the fire.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2697" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2013-11-09T02:51:27.430" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T00:56:55.963" Title="Sentential Relative Clauses versus Non-restrictive Relative Clauses" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4871" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" Score="0" Body="One of the three main dimensions of vowels, reflecting the height of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth. The other dimensions are roundness and frontness/backness." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T01:18:17.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4869" CreationDate="2013-11-09T13:28:41.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try to identify the subject, predicator and object  of each sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a whole (relative clause) immediately precedes/follows the [predicator], i.e. the main verb, it is the subject/object of the sentence; hence, a nominal relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.: Do you [remember] (when Columbus discovered America)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(What caused the fire) [remains] a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a (relative clause) follows a {noun phrase}, it is a post-modifying dependent relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.: That was {the time} (when Columbus discovered America).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{He} (who shall not be named) is here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2013-11-09T13:33:55.977" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T13:33:55.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4863" CreationDate="2013-11-09T17:02:36.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general terms, yes, ditransitives are universal as far as we know. You can take a look at this paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/DitransitiveOverview.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;by Haspelmath&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-11-09T17:02:36.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-09T23:26:48.490" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to make a comparison of the phonemes commonly spoken in Standard Chinese and English to spot the differences. I tried to use some IPA charts, but then found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3783/convert-audio-recording-of-word-to-ipa-representation&quot;&gt;Convert audio recording of word to IPA representation&lt;/a&gt; that the IPA symbols are not consistent across the languages. Is there any notation system that can be used to represent the sounds in both languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T10:41:50.897" Title="Is there a language-independent notation system that can compare the phonemes found in different languages?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5873" CreationDate="2013-11-10T03:01:28.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well they can be used consistently across languages if you are prepared to come up with a scheme that covers just the languages you need by going to a more narrow transcription, or to cover all languages by going to a very narrow transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then you will have lots of diacritics on the symbols and it becomes a lot harder to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also have to choose a phonological analysis of each language. Because we don't have access to &amp;quot;god's design&amp;quot; of any language we can only analyse how they work and come up with theories. And any sufficiently studied language will have multiple analyses, each resulting in a different set of phonemes and what other sounds are then allophones of those phonemes, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English the main different analyses are based on regional Englishes, with the two major ones being Received Pronunciation for British English and General American for American English. But there are many other varieties of each of those, and even though the various analyses of each are mostly in agreement, there are still variations and you will have to make choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Chinese the situation is much worse. Even if you choose Standard Chinese there are several major variations on how to analyse the phonemic iventory based on peculiarities of which vowels are in complementary distribution. I belive there are three main ways to group the vowels. On top of this there are some symbols which have been obsoleted by the IPA which seem to still be used by Sinologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway it is doable but to do properly will require more thought and more work than perhaps you expected. The easy way will be to make some perhaps arbitrary choices about which analysis of which variety of each language to use as a base, and inherit any quirks they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard way will be to embrace the discord among the analyses and try to cover as much of the variance among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt; in a language than &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;. The IPA symbols are not consistent across languages, or even within languages, at the &lt;em&gt;phoneme level&lt;/em&gt;. IPA symbols are consistent across and within languages at the &lt;em&gt;phone level&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T10:41:50.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5876" CreationDate="2013-11-10T09:20:43.853" Score="9" ViewCount="12290" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chains of relative clauses and strings of attributive adjectives are both examples of recursion--Correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chains of relative clauses have each non-initial relative clause embedded within the previous one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[the cat [that killed the bird [that ate the rat [that ate the cheese]]]]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, in a string of attributive adjectives, all the adjectives modify the same noun(s);  there's no embedding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping that the experts on the list can give me a clearer idea of the difference between recursion and embedding.   For example, is all embedding an example of recursion?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-11T05:51:06.330" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T20:55:40.823" Title="What's the difference between recursion and embedding?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5875" CreationDate="2013-11-10T15:50:41.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recursion in phrase structure grammar is where an expression of some type contains an expression of that same type. Under this definition, chains of relative clauses count as an instance of recursion. We can see this more clearly by drawing a (simplified) Phrase Structure Tree of your example (note i'm abstracting away from irrelevant details, e.g. the syntax of relative clauses. The 't' in the subject position of each relative clause stands in for an empty category - every theory of relativisation has to assume something like this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) [S [NP [NP the cat] [CP [C that] [S [NP t] [VP [Vt killed] [NP [NP the&#xA;  bird] [CP [C that] [S [NP t] [VP [Vt ate] [NP [NP the rat] [CP [C&#xA;  that] [S [N{ t] [VP [Vt ate] [NP the cheese]]]]]]]]]]]]] [VP [Vi&#xA;  left]] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKKmL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tree can be characterised by the following set of rewrite rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; NP VP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VP -&gt; Vi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VP -&gt; Vt NP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  NP -&gt; NP &lt;strong&gt;CP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;CP&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; C S&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vt -&gt; killed/ate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vi -&gt; left&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  NP -&gt; the cat/the bird/the rat/the cheese/t&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  C -&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see that as a consequence of these rewrite rules, we can build PS-trees with an in principle infinite number of recursively embedded CPs, since S is one of the outputs of CP, NP is one of the outputs of S, and CP is one of the outputs of NP, so by transitivity, CP can contain CP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's consider your example involving a string of attributive adjectives. Under standard assumptions, adjectives are &lt;strong&gt;adjoined&lt;/strong&gt; to the Noun Phrase - this captures the fact that an NP modified by any number of adjectives still behaves as an NP externally. Consider the following simple example + PS-tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) [S [NP [AP [A tall]] [NP [AP [A blonde]] [NP [AP [A beautiful]]&#xA;  [NP [N women]]]]] [PredP [Pred are] [AP [A intimidating]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w7Gfs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can characterise the tree via the following set of rewrite rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; NP PredP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; AP &lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  NP -&gt; N&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  AP -&gt; A&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  PredP -&gt; Pred AP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  N -&gt; women&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A -&gt; tall/blonde/beautiful/intimidating&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pred -&gt; are  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see just from inspecting the tree that we aren't dealing here with &lt;strong&gt;recursively embedded APs&lt;/strong&gt;, since in no instance does an AP contain an expression of the type AP. Rather, what we have here is an instance of &lt;strong&gt;recursively embedded NPs&lt;/strong&gt;, since an expression of type NP can contain an expression of type NP. There is a rewrite rule which has NP as its input and NP as its output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this clarifies the distinction between recursion and embedding. Recursion crucially involves embedding an expression of some type within an expression of the same type. If the types are distinct, we aren't dealing with recursion (in the narrow, linguistic sense). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-11-10T15:50:41.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-10T16:43:33.980" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are good software tools or libraries that can be used to evaluate how well a given token conforms to English phonological rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally open-source, freeware. In a perfect world, I'd have a simple function that takes a token as input and outputs a rating of how well the token conforms. I'm not at all concerned with meaning. So a token such as 'minoplatish' would rank much higher than 'cejewoadvjije'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially interested in very short tokens -- 5 letters or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2233" LastActivityDate="2013-11-10T17:17:16.600" Title="Are there good, existing software tools to determine if a given token conforms to English phonological rules?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5877" CreationDate="2013-11-10T17:17:16.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question, but there are a number of decisions you need to make about terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you talking about phonemes or graphemes ('letters')? If it's graphemes, you'd need to perform some conversion between the two (a fairly messy but doable process, because English spelling is non-transparent), because 'phonological rules' are going to be over phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of measure of 'conformity' are you thinking about? There are a lot of issues here, both theoretical and practical. It's not a settled question as to what English speakers use to determine 'word goodness', but there are many hypotheses involving both frequency- and neighbor-based approaches; even ignoring the human side, you have to determine a useful measure. A plain legal/illegal distinction is much simpler to obtain, but it sounds like you need more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way do you operationalize 'English phonological rules'? Computationally, n-gram methods are common, but phonologists have also made use of various rule-based frameworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-11-10T17:17:16.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5875" CreationDate="2013-11-10T21:06:27.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things are rendered a bit murky by the fact that the notion of 'category' began to get a bit fuzzy with the introduction of features into trees with Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and especially Remarks on Nominalization (1971), where NP, VP etc were treated as [+N, +'double bar'], [+V, +'double bar'], etc, and people were also treating case, etc as features on NPs.  So how many features do we pay attention to?  The minimalist doctrine says 'ignore all of them', but there could also be a 'maximalist doctrine' that says 'pay attention to all of them', in which case many instances of recursion would go away due to feature differences between the levels of the embedding.  So for example 'John's picture of Mary' would not be recursive if you supposed that 'of' assigned a kind of abstract genitive case to Mary that was not present on John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, most linguists (eg Carnie in his textbook) seem to have assumed that standard PS category features count for recursion and others don't, but there is no satisfactory delineation of what the category features are, so the Minimalist view is probably the most coherent one out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2705" LastActivityDate="2013-11-10T21:06:27.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5875" CreationDate="2013-11-11T02:22:23.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(my slightly incoherent ramblings on recursion, Merge, and embedding) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recursion as self-embedding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some generative theories of syntax, recursion is usually understood as self-embedding, in the sense of putting an object inside another of the same type (Fitch 2010, Kinsella 2010, Tallerman 2012). However, Tallerman 2012 argues that HFC 2002 used recursion in the sense of phrase-building or the formation of hierarchical structure generally (p. 451).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recursion is not Merge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Berwick 1998's observation that recursive generative capacity is an inherent property of Merge (p. 332). They are both concatenative (or combinatorial) operations; however, Merge involves hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Merge vs. iteration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky says that Merge is putting alpha and beta together. If you want to add gamma to it, then you add gamma to a object [alpha+beta]. The issue here is that for [alpha+beta] to be different from a mere sum of alpha and beta, some new property must arise, otherwise we’ll end up with iteration. What is this new property?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevins et al. argue that Merge is recursive because it can combine “lexical items and phrases” of any type (p. 367, n.11), cf. Zwart 2011 “[t]he operation Merge is standardly taken to be recursive in that the output of Merge may be subject to further operations Merge” (p. 116).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When alpha and beta are Merged, either alpha or beta projects its property (N, D, V, v, T, C etc.) onto this whole new phrase. This is what Horsntein 2010 calls Label (and Chomskyan Merge is Concatenate under his proposal; also notice that some generativists don’t do labels, like Chris Collins). However, this information about the head isn’t necessarily preserved through several instances of Merge, e.g. V selects a DP and we end up with a VP. What makes Merge truly recursive is that “the output of one derivation functions as a single item in the next derivation” (Zwart 2011, p. 116). I think this is very important, otherwise Merging gamma with [alpha+beta] will lead to simple iteration. [alpha+beta] must be treated as a single unit when it is Merged with gamma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-11-11T02:33:25.913" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T02:33:25.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-11T03:52:54.027" Score="11" ViewCount="747" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/day#Etymology&quot;&gt;day&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English day, from Old English dæġ (“day”), from Proto-Germanic *dagaz (“day”), from &lt;strong&gt;Proto-Indo-European *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”)&lt;/strong&gt;. Cognate with West Frisian dei (“day”), Dutch dag (“day”), German Tag (“day”), Swedish and Danish dag (“day”), Icelandic dagur (“day”). Compare Albanian djeg (“to burn”), Lithuanian degti (“to burn”), Tocharian A tsäk-, Russian жечь (žeč’), Sanskrit दाह (dāha, “heat”), दहति (dahati, “to burn”).&#xA;  Latin diēs (from Proto-Indo-European *dyew- (“to shine”)) is a false cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Coronals.2Fdentals&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European phonology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Coronals/dentals[edit]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The standard reconstruction identified three coronal/dental stops: */t/, */d/, */dʰ/. They are symbolically grouped with the cover symbol T.&#xA;  In so-called &quot;thorn clusters&quot; of the form TK in all branches except Anatolian and Tocharian a metathesis occurred, resulting in dorsal-coronal clusters of non-obvious phonetic makeup. &lt;strong&gt;Metathetized and unmetathetized forms survive in different ablaut grades of the root *dʰégʷʰ &quot;burn&quot; (whence also English day) in Sanskrit, dáhati &quot;is being burnt&quot; &amp;lt; *dʰégʷʰ-e- and kṣā́yat &quot;burns&quot; &amp;lt; *dʰgʷʰ-éh₁-.&lt;/strong&gt; See the section on PIE phonological rules, below, for more discussion and examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt this etymology just because I can't find any reference of this kind of saying that &lt;strong&gt;PIE *dʰegʰ-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;day&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;*dʰegʷʰ-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;burn&quot; are cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt;: the reconstructions are based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kloekhorst.nl/KloekhorstPIEThornClusters.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in footnote 8 on page 2 of which the author even deny this connection and &lt;strong&gt;E. day&lt;/strong&gt; comes from &lt;strong&gt;PIE *dʰegʰ-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to repeat itself (over and over again); cycle&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-21T13:08:16.627" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T13:08:16.627" Title="Does English &quot;day&quot; really come from PIE *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5881" CreationDate="2013-11-11T06:02:56.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dheĝhr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt; (root dheĝh- &quot;cycle&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhoğhos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;burning&lt;/em&gt; (root dheğh- &quot;to burn&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;sky, daylight&lt;/em&gt; (root dei̯- &quot;sky&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three are not related or their relation is unknown. Traditionally English &quot;day&quot; is considered to derive from the PIE root for &quot;burn&quot;, although the author whom you link in the question points out that it is more likely to derive from PIE root meaning &quot;cycle&quot; which already was used for &quot;day&quot; and &quot;yesterday&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhĝhi̯es&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) in PIE, and which also gave for example, Russian &quot;den'&quot; &quot;day&quot; which indicates that the PIE word for day had an r/n stem (-r suffix in Nominative and -n in other cases), and as such, very archaic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ironic consequence of this hypothesis if we accept it would be that the both parts of the English word &quot;&lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt;&quot; originate from the same root: the yester- part is from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhĝhi̯es&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;yesterday&quot; while the second part is from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dheĝhr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;day&quot;.  The corresponding PIE form would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhĝhi̯esterom dheĝhr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (according the rules, the first word due to large consonant cluster would be pronounced starting with ĝh- already in PIE). It is unknown whether such form was used already in PIE or originated later, but it does not seem impossible especially given that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhĝhi̯es&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is adverb rather than a noun. For instance, in Russian you can say &quot;вчера&quot; &quot;yesterday(adv.)&quot; and &quot;вчерашний день&quot; &quot;yesterday(adj.) day&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2020-03-21T12:14:25.803" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T12:14:25.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-11T11:50:13.347" Score="2" ViewCount="2604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand syntax trees for sentences, i have been working through linguistics by myself and am having trouble understanding the structure of syntax trees (English is my second language). These are the sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The flight of the humble bee was so baffling.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The scientists found that the honeybee flaps its wings in a different manner.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An insect needs to be stabilized by its wings.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A completed syntax tree and explanation would be greatly appreciated to help me understand this area of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2707" LastEditorUserId="2707" LastEditDate="2013-11-12T01:24:13.837" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T01:30:34.773" Title="Help with syntax trees for sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-07-09T11:35:15.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2013-11-11T16:27:23.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things going on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is correctly stated in the question, the primary use case of the -(y)En suffix is to modify the head noun when it's the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; of the embedded clause. Let's call it the use case A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Çocuğu uyandırma.&#xA;    Don't wake up the child.&#xA;&#xA;    Çocuk odada uyuyor.&#xA;    The child is sleeping in the room.&#xA;&#xA;    Evde uyuyan çocuğu uyandırma.&#xA;    Don't wake up the child who's sleeping in the room.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing that is going on is that -(y)En is also used when the head noun is the the modifier of a possessive construction functioning as the subject of the embedded clause. Since it's an extension of the use case A, let's call it the use case A'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Çocuğun odası yeni boyandı.&#xA;    The child's room was recently painted.&#xA;&#xA;    Odası yeni boyanan çocuğu uyandırma.&#xA;    Don't wake up the child whose room was recently painted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing that is going on is that sometimes -(y)En can also be used when the subject of the embedded clause has low definiteness and animacy and the head noun is in dative -(y)E, locative -DE or ablative -DEN with a directional or locative function (not when they function as indirect objects). In rare cases, it can also be used when the head noun is the direct object in accusative case -(y)İ. Let's label all these use cases the use case B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Odaya güneş giriyor -&amp;gt; Güneş giren oda&#xA;    Çekmecede para duruyor -&amp;gt; Para duran çekmece&#xA;    Caddeden tramvay geçiyor -&amp;gt; Tramvay geçen cadde&#xA;    Kızı arı soktu -&amp;gt; Arı sokan kız&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example in the original question is what we can label as the use case B'. It happens when the head noun modifies an argument that would be eligible for the use case B in a possessive construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T16:27:23.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5887" CreationDate="2013-11-11T19:34:15.590" Score="11" ViewCount="1247" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I understand that these typological distinctions are not absolute and almost all languages show signs of almost all morphological strategies but most display a certain tendency towards one or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also understand that agglutinative languages are said to use bound morphemes called affixes for many grammatical functions where isolating/analytic languages prefer independent function words like adpositions and particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm not sure about is how an affix is differentiated from a particle. As a result, I'm not sure about how to distinguish (mostly) agglutinative languages from (mostly) analytic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Turkish speaker. In Turkish, affixes undergo certain (mostly predictable) phonological assimilations (like vowel harmony) according to the base morpheme they're attached to. Less often the base morpheme also undergoes similar (again, mostly predictable) changes. This is how I differentiate, say, a case suffix from a postposition. The former undergoes the assimilations while the latter doesn't. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    yaprak + den  = yapraktan   ~ from (the) leaf&#xA;    yaprak + gibi = yaprak gibi ~ like (a) leaf&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I can tell that the first one is a case suffix because it undergoes vowel harmony and voice assimilation while the second is a mere postposition because it doesn't undergo similar changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these criteria applicable to other agglutinative languages? If not, what other methods are used to distinguish an affix from an independent function word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-11-11T19:40:37.383" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T22:15:54.457" Title="Agglutinative vs. Analytic. What's the difference?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2013-11-11T19:44:05.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your analysis is correct - the typical criterion is whether or not the affix/particle seems to act as part of the word it attaches to. When nice phonological demonstrations like vowel harmony aren't available, prosody is the next recourse. If prosody isn't helpful, you're pretty much left with an open question - you have to reason from the rest of the language's typology, and if that provides no further help, you're basically stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages with a long history of being written don't follow the above criteria exactly, and often divide words from affixes based on either the etymology of the morphemes in question or on historical spelling patterns. Some languages, in either their native systems or in romanisations, largely ignore the criteria, though - Japanese particles seem very much like they ought to be considered affixes (certainly they're not separable prosodically, and they've undergone some word-medial sound changes to their initial consonants), but the prevailing non-scientific romanisations (and several scientific romanisations) treat them as separate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T19:44:05.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5886" CreationDate="2013-11-11T22:15:54.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the criteria in Sjiveru's answer, syntactic criteria are also important for distinguishing affixes from adpositions (or determiners, or any other syntactic class whose function might be equivalent to that of affixes; but I'll focus on adpositions here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Affixes attach at the word level, while adpositions attach at the phrase level. If what they're attaching to is a single word, you might not be able to tell the difference: in a phrase like &lt;em&gt;to Rome&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; looks like it could be analyzed a a prefix. But this is no longer true when a longer phrase is involved: in &lt;em&gt;to the beautiful city of Rome&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to Italy's capital&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to that place we went last summer&lt;/em&gt;, it's clear that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; can't be a prefix since it's attaching to a whole phrase, not just the nearest word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another test that's sometimes useful is coordination: you can say &lt;em&gt;to and from Rome&lt;/em&gt;, but affixes can't typically be coordinated in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-11-11T22:15:54.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2013-11-12T01:27:13.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an Alveolar Lateral Trill, it has this symbol; /rˡ/ and there a video of it; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr4_zYBRaWY&amp;amp;api_format=3&amp;amp;vndel=watch&amp;amp;app=desktop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr4_zYBRaWY&amp;amp;api_format=3&amp;amp;vndel=watch&amp;amp;app=desktop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2709" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T01:27:13.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-12T19:22:32.197" Score="5" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;How big is the active vocabulary that an average hunter gather tribe in Africa uses? Is it comparable to the size of Western civilisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T20:48:31.393" Title="Size of active vocabulary in hunter gather tribes" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-12T22:32:00.003" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on Pragmatics Approach, there is one of the principle that involves in communication. It is cooperative principle. This principle consists of 4 maxims. There are maxim of quality (Truthful), maxim of quantity (Informative), maxim of relation (relevant), and maxim of manner (clear).&#xA;the question is: Can Grice's Maxims be applied on written texts&#xA;If yes, are there any studies; articles, dissertations so far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2713" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T22:32:00.003" Title="Grice's cooperative principless" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5896" CreationDate="2013-11-12T23:11:12.773" Score="1" ViewCount="1043" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just met the persian/hindi word &quot;jadoo&quot;. Given its meaning and sound, I would guess that it is etymologically connected to &quot;voodoo&quot;, possibly having a common ancestry. I would like to confirm/refute such theory. An initial quick research on it took me nowhere. I can see where each word came from to a certain extent, but I can't get any conclusive information. &quot;voodoo&quot; came from north africa, but I couldn't figure out for how long it has been used there. &quot;jadoo&quot; is a persian word, and I also can't figure out dates for usage. Since these peoples are geographically somewhat close and their cultures were in several points in history mixed/connected, the relation seem even more plausible. Does anyone know if they are connected? If nobody knows, what can I do to investigate this further, or to be certain of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2714" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T14:24:16.583" Title="etymology - voodoo/jadoo" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3869" CreationDate="2013-11-12T23:20:29.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can do something I'd categorize as trilled L: I close the air flow in my mouth by placing my tongue behind my upper teeth; then I blow the air out, creating very small opening on the sides. It sounds like a child mimicking a fart :/ It can be either a trill or fricative, depending on how the air gets out. So, I think it's possible. :-)&#xA;I've never seen it in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2714" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T23:20:29.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2013-11-12T23:36:04.713" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Farsi word &quot;جادو&quot; /dʒɒ:du:/ is thought to be cognate with Sanskrit &quot;यातु&quot; /ja:tu/, with a similar meaning. On the other hand, &quot;voodoo&quot; is thought to be ultimately derived from one of the Gbe languages of West Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With such a large geographical distance between Indo-Arian and Gbe, no obvious possibility of contact and small phonetic similarity (/CVdu/), I'd bet my money on pure coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-11-12T23:41:19.050" LastActivityDate="2013-11-12T23:41:19.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-13T02:04:22.657" Score="1" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is the preferred language in many fields of study and in international communications, it has more vowel sounds than many languages, but a compact alphabet, which in my opinion is why English words and sentences are short, compared to other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is if there could be a correlation between the wide acceptance of English and its compact alphabet and relative high number of vowel sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As per comments:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean for compact alphabet is a small number of symbols to construct words and sentences, thus chinese would have much more written symbols than english. So written english would be much easier to learn that written chinese, due a fewer number of symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding to vowel sounds, chinese would have much less vowel sounds than english. Thus spoken chinese would be much easier to learn than spoken english due to its fewer vowel phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1522" LastEditorUserId="1522" LastEditDate="2013-11-15T00:01:01.773" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T17:18:10.237" Title="Correlation between vowel sounds and compact alphabet used in English and its acceptance" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5883" CreationDate="2013-11-13T12:31:44.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear from your question whether you are wondering just about syntactic structure trees for the sentences you gave or about syntactic structure trees more generally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the latter, it might be useful to note that syntactic structure trees may provide different kinds of information: constituent structure, the syntactic categories of constituents, the grammatical functions of constituents, etc. A given kind of information may play a role in one theory but not in another. &#xA;You can read more about &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/Syntactic-Structure-Trees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syntactic structure trees&lt;/a&gt; on our company's website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the sentences you asked about, you might find useful the following tree for your first sentence, which follows the syntactic framework in &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (eds. Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c0YqI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/the_flight_of_the_humble_bee_was_so_baffling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enlarge image&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T12:31:44.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-13T16:16:27.173" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying the use of semiotics and the link to identity, I wondered if anyone could point me towards any research they knew of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm already reading The Semiotic Stance, Paul Kockelman 2005 &amp;amp; his later work on identities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated, thanks. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(PS. FACEWORK is also relevant in my research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2716" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T16:16:27.173" Title="Semiotics &amp; identity research" Tags="&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-13T16:21:51.413" Score="0" ViewCount="3228" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt; are in complementary distribution within Japanese as I already know, but I don't speak Japanese and I'm finding it difficult to give examples how they are in distribution, are there any examples which could work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2716" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T09:16:31.447" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T09:16:31.447" Title="Seeking examples of complementary distribution of [s] and [ʃ] in Japanese" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;compl-distribution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3359" CreationDate="2013-11-13T18:31:26.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that I can't upvote your comment yet, but I did just join the site in order to reply.  While you might not find it in any formal prescriptive English grammar book as yet, there's plenty of evidence that emoticons are functioning in exactly the same way that canonical, traditional punctuation does: namely, they're pragmatic or discourse marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's quite a bit of literature supporting the assertion that punctuation functions in this way (beyond simply indicating pauses found in regular speech which set clauses apart, or carrying information which is ambiguous in vocal speech, such as the apostrophes in possessives or commas to delimit items in lists).  For instance, &quot;scare quotes&quot; may not be indicated in the phonetic form of an utterance, but are still articulated by a change in stress (or as &quot;air quotes&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, to the commenter who suggested that emoticons only provide a discourse- or paragraph-wide context, it's been shown that emoticons actually do segment clauses (occurring regularly at the end of a sentence to which they attach illocutionary force), thereby punctuating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markman and Oshima write: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the emoticon has been most frequently associated with adding&#xA;  emotion to CMD [Computer Mediated Discourse], at a pragmatic level, emoticons &gt; appear to clearly serve a specific purpose within thestructure of the &#xA;  message. Specifically,we would like to propose that emoticons serve as &#xA;  punctuating devices in CMD. In these data, emoticons are most typically &#xA;  deployed at the&#xA;  end of sentences or clauses (when part of a parenthetical remark), or&#xA;  turns at chat, either with or in placeof standard sentence-final&#xA;  punctuation marks. In this usage, the emoticon functions to close off&#xA;  the sentence or thought by confirming the action performed by the&#xA;  text. In this sense, the emoticon can be seen to complement,&#xA;  strengthen, or clarify the illocutionary force of the utterance, while&#xA;  at the same time providing a cue to interpreting the structure of the&#xA;  message.&#xA;             &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/attachments/30664074/download_file&quot;&gt;(Markman, Oshima 2007)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, remember that this is a Linguistics, not a traditional English Grammar &amp;amp; Composition, forum.  The objective here is not to dismiss real linguistic phenomena on stylistic grounds, but to recognize and describe them as part of the living, changing thing that language is, and not as one feels it &quot;ought&quot; to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T18:31:26.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2013-11-13T20:03:34.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Avestan yātu-, Middle Persian jādūg, New Persian jādū all mean “sorcerer”, though the NP word is also used for “sorcery” (MP. jādūgīh). This Iranian yātu- is cognate with Skt. yātu-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-11-13T20:03:34.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-14T05:43:19.257" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know if there is an index or dictionary of sorts that attempts to list and distinguish the prosodic features(?) of English. This seems unlikely to me because of the ambiguity of a single prosodic feature. For instance, a pause in an utterance has a different meaning depending on context. However, I can conceive of a hypothetical study which utilizes a computer program (or many humans) to analyze vast catalogues of spoken English utterances for specific prosodic effects. Does such a list of categorized prosodic effects exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2125" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T17:45:56.257" Title="Is there an index of English prosodic effects?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-14T13:49:50.417" Score="4" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that PIE had no grammatical future tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I wonder how future events were expressed in PIE. Whether they used go-periphrasis, desiratives or a form of the root &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bheudh-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (grow, develop)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-15T17:20:38.163" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T17:20:38.163" Title="How future tense was expressed in PIE?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5900" CreationDate="2013-11-14T15:10:07.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been noted in the comments, [s] and [ɕ] (sometimes broadly transcribed as [ʃ]) are not in complementary distribution in Japanese. However, they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be analyzed as allophones of the same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following rule can be used to explain some of the facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/s/ --&gt; [ɕ] before [i], [s] elsewhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[asa] 'morning'&#xA;[ɕi] 'four'&#xA;[aɕi] 'foot'&#xA;[isu] 'chair'&#xA;[seki] 'cough'&#xA;[heso] 'belly button'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, [ɕ] also appears before other vowels besides [i]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[iɕa] 'doctor'&#xA;[hoɴɕuː] 'Honshu'&#xA;[ɕoːyu] 'soy sauce'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to an analysis in which it is sensible to treat /ɕ/ as its own phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not counting the less nativized loanword pronunciations of words (like [siː] for the English letter 'C'), we never get [s] before [i]. Related forms like [osu] 'press-PRESENT' and [oɕita] 'press-PAST' give us further evidence that at least some instances of [ɕ] before [i] are likely surface realizations of /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, one analysis that captures all of the facts is that there are two phonemes--/s/, which has the allophones [s] and [ɕ], and /ɕ/, which always surfaces as [ɕ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: In response to comments below, here is an alternative analysis that can also capture the facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We observe that palatalized versions of consonants may appear before [a], [o], and [u]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kʲoku] 'piece of music'&#xA;[nʲuːiɴ] 'hospitalization'&#xA;[ɾʲoːhoː] 'both'&#xA;[hʲaku] 'one hundred'&#xA;[happʲaku] 'eight hundred'&#xA;[sambʲaku] 'three hundred'&#xA;[bimʲoː] 'subtle'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The choice of transcription of these Cʲ onsets varies; some choose to use [ç] instead of [hʲ], for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some gaps--the alveolar stops ([t], [d]), alveolar fricatives ([s], and [z]), and the bilabial approximant [w] do not have palatalized counterparts. The [w] gap is not an unexpected one, since [w] is the only approximant (besides [j] itself). Historically, the palatalized counterparts of [t], [d], [s], and [z] became what are now the alveolo-palatal consonants [tɕ], [dʑ], [ɕ], and [ʑ], respectively. Further, these alveolo-palatal consonants do not have palatalized counterparts (there is no [ɕ]/[ɕʲ] contrast, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the above facts, some consider it reasonable to adopt a synchronic analysis in which all surface occurrences of [tɕ] and [dʑ] are underlyingly /tʲ/ and /dʲ/, respectively, and all surface occurrences of [ɕ] and [ʑ] are underlyingly /sʲ/ and /tʲ/ (or even /sj/ and /tj/), respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2013-11-18T16:51:06.913" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T16:51:06.913" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2013-11-14T15:54:53.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel pretty confident to say that jadoo/ja:tu is related to Greek ἰατρός 'physician, healer, surgeon'. The voodoo term must be a coincidence as others said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B0%CE%B1%CF%84%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B0%CE%B1%CF%84%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T15:54:53.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5905" CreationDate="2013-11-14T16:27:07.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reference to future was inferred from the context, much like in today's German: Ich arbeite morgen nicht (I won't work tomorrow). The adverb &quot;tomorrow&quot; indicates that the speaker conveys a future event. Without a semantic clue in the sentence, the preceding discourse might be an indication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The go-periphrasis is a much later development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-14T16:27:07.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-14T19:49:27.023" Score="1" ViewCount="9517" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need some umbrella term for those funny names like &quot;Debbie Downer&quot;, &quot;Negative Nancy&quot;, &quot;Realistic Rita&quot;, &quot;Chatty Cathy&quot;. Could I say that they are examples of figurative language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2724" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T05:27:58.693" Title="What &quot;category&quot; are proper names of this kind &quot;Debbie Downer&quot;, &quot;Negative Nancy&quot; etc?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:40:58.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5910" CreationDate="2013-11-15T13:58:46.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any figurative element here either. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Negative Nancy&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is perceived as having a negative attitude to many things, quite literally. These nicknames may be exaggerations, but that doesn't make them figurative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A figurative nickname would be &lt;em&gt;&quot;Thunderstorm Thomas&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to describe an irate person. Thomas is not actually a thunderstorm, but has some quality (compared to other people) that is likened to some quality of a thunderstorm (compared to normal, calm weather).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as Dominic pointed out, your examples are alliterative - The alliteration makes these nicknames just more catchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2013-11-15T16:48:21.567" LastActivityDate="2013-11-15T16:48:21.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-15T16:42:30.790" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;What data to collect when conducting a research on aphasia??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to do a research in psycholinguistics and I don't know where to start and what data to collect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am really confused and I need your help soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2694" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T22:26:23.323" Title="What data to collect when conducting a research on aphasia?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5897" CreationDate="2013-11-16T05:46:08.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Revised)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes I agree you need to know a lower number of symbols in order to read English than you need to know in order to read Chinese.  For English you need to know &lt;em&gt;26&lt;/em&gt; symbols, out of which 5 are vowel symbols. As far as I know you need to know &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt; of Chinese &lt;em&gt;symbols&lt;/em&gt;, in order to read quite simple texts in Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No I dont agree that the spoken vowels of Chinese would be easier to learn than than vowels of the English&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has about a dozen &lt;strong&gt;phonemic vowel qualities&lt;/strong&gt;, and maybe half a dozen more if you count the diphthongs.  Chinese may have fewer vowel qualities than English, but it also has &lt;strong&gt;phonemic tone&lt;/strong&gt;, which English does not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of vowels in Chinese is at least the number of distinct vowel qualities X the the number of tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T17:18:10.237" LastActivityDate="2013-11-16T17:18:10.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-16T08:20:23.833" Score="3" ViewCount="8357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the best way to learn a language is to go to a country which speaks that language, but what if you don't have that convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to become fluent simply through reading books in that language- so starting off with simple children books and then progressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2522" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T14:48:58.067" Title="Is it possible to become fluent in any language simply by reading books in that language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-16T16:23:43.633" Score="7" ViewCount="1130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to compile a list of possible types of word origins as a preliminary work before trying to design a database of etymological relations between words (mainly for Turkish but the ultimate goal is broader).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By types of word origins, I mean things like evolution (with sound shifts from older forms), compounding, derivation (with affixes, ablaut, reduplication, analogy etc.), borrowing, calque, phono-semantic matching, different kinds of semantic shifts etc. I'm equally interested in historical phonological changes and historical semantic changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any established classification of etymological relations between words? Can someone refer me to some previous studies on the field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-11-16T16:39:27.103" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T04:24:17.317" Title="Is there a formal classification of types of word origins?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3359" CreationDate="2013-11-16T16:56:18.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is one willing to accept that there is a new kind of communication channel with its own elements? The question then is, what kind of a transference phenomenon do we see from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-mediated_communication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CMD&lt;/a&gt; to other kinds of communication because unless that happens emoticons are just that: emoticons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transference may even be to verbal communication, nonverbal gestures, in addition to the written language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note how &lt;strong&gt;quotes&lt;/strong&gt; were invented to convey an aspect of spoken language in the written one. Also note how 'air quotes' in gestures (and a particular structure in speech) are used to convey the officiousness of an element of the  written language: the quote. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note how since the last decade and a half, &lt;strong&gt;bullet&lt;/strong&gt; has been given the status of a punctuation mark; a glyph which originates in technical literature and now is in mainstream written English. Also note how there is a new tendency in spoken English to recreate this bulleted structure orally (I am trying to find evidence, name for this).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;period&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; was used to indicate a finished thought or sentence in written language, but now the term is also used in conversation to convey this- terminal aspect ie to mean  &quot;the end of the matter&quot;: e.g.,  &quot;We will not do it. Period.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2014-04-28T06:45:37.563" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T06:45:37.563" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-11-16T17:07:52.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2013-11-16T18:49:54.920" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're combining three questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Can you learn to speak fluently without speaking?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is obviously NO. You need to practice what you want to do. You can learn to read fluently without being able to speak very well (I've taught courses doing that), although you need to learn some sort of subvocalisation. But obviously there are fluent readers of dead languages like Ancient Egyptian who don't speak them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Can you learn to speak fluently without visiting the country where that language is spoken?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is obviously YES. Champollion (the man who deciphered the Rosetta Stone) could famously speak Arabic fluently enough to confuse native speakers without ever visiting Egypt. And this was before audio recordings were available. But he kept diaries in the language and practiced all the time (I assume with native speakers but I don't know if that was the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Can you improve your spoken language by reading?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that is also YES. Reading will expand your vocabulary and your grasp of the idioms and underlying constructions of the language. Ideally, you will want to combine this with speaking practice so that you can translate this knowledge into conversation. Reading will also give you cultural background to the language that simple exposure to it by living in the country will not. Imagine how much you have missed by not growing up in the country. Books will contain so much of that background knowledge. But so will films and TV shows, so I'd recommend a combination of both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;[UPDATE]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to note that living in a country where a language is spoken does not guarantee that you will learn to speak it at all, let alone with any degree of fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things to remember are that there are many languages (most languages in fact) that are only spoken by relatively small communities within larger countries so living among them is not as visiting a country and takes a lot more effort to make happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, fluency and language competence in general are fluid concepts without clear boundaries, although there are certain folk pre-conceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T08:32:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-17T03:08:46.633" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, and many other languages, subordination is often marked in the subordinate clause.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So complement clauses can, for example, begin with a complementizer such as English &quot;that.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.   &quot;I know &lt;em&gt;that Howard must have eaten here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do any natural languages mark the verb in the matrix clause as taking a complement clause, leaving the complement clause itself with the same from that an independent clause has, like so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.   &quot;I know-[infix that indicates that &quot;know&quot; takes a complement clause] Howard must have eaten here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relative clauses can, for example, contain special relative pronouns or have a special word order.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.   &quot;The man &lt;em&gt;whom we confined&lt;/em&gt; has escaped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do any natural languages mark the noun as being modified by a clause subsequent to the one in which the noun occurs and having the form of an independent clause, like so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.   The man(suffix indicates that the next clause modifies this noun) has escaped;  we had confined him.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adverbial clauses can, for example, be marked by subordinators.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.    We were relieved when the man returned.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do any natural languages mark the verb as being modified by a clause subsequent to the one in which said verb occurs--a clause with the same form that an independent clause has?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.    We were relieved (infix means &quot;at the same time as&quot; and also conveys that the following clause is adverbial to the one in which the infix occurs) the man returned.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T02:28:43.177" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T02:28:43.177" Title="Are there any natural languages in the subordination of a clause is marked only in the matrix clause?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5921" CreationDate="2013-11-17T03:18:10.740" Score="7" ViewCount="1674" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the English complementizer &quot;that&quot; look like the relative pronoun &quot;that&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for those &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question may need to be carted off to the English Stack Exchange, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; there are other languages in which complementizers and relative pronouns also resemble each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T04:58:13.507" Title="Why does the English complementizer &quot;that&quot; look like the relative pronoun &quot;that&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5920" CreationDate="2013-11-17T04:51:30.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is no doubt that, as in many other languages, the complementizer/conjunction introducing indirect speech comes from a neuter relative pronoun. The archaic/hypothetical construction was &amp;quot;I tell you that, that happened...&amp;quot; (meaning &amp;quot;I tell you that, which happened&amp;quot;), or &amp;quot;I tell you, what happened...&amp;quot;. This neuter relative pronoun later acquired the characteristics of a conjunction, and the (hypothetical/potential) antecedent disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neuter relative pronoun / conjunction-complementizer &lt;em&gt;/ neuter demonstrative pronoun:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: &lt;strong&gt;that / that&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch: &lt;strong&gt;dat / dat&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;strong&gt;das / daß&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: &lt;strong&gt;que / que&lt;/strong&gt;  / &lt;em&gt;ce&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin: &lt;strong&gt;quod / quod&lt;/strong&gt;  / &lt;em&gt;hoc(ce) (or id, etc.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek: &lt;strong&gt;ho(ti) / hoti&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;em&gt;ho(de)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the first two words have the same root in each Indo-European branch—Germanic, Italic, and Greek. Note also that the conjunction in classical Latin is not normally used to introduce indirect speech, for which the accusativus cum infinitivo was used, but for other, related subordinate clauses. In Greek, &lt;em&gt;hoti&lt;/em&gt; could introduce indirect speech or a causal subordinate clause; the a.c.i. was more common for indirect speech, though. In Latin, the various uses of &lt;em&gt;quod&lt;/em&gt; can serve as a nice illustration. All the following constructions/meanings are possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mihi placet templum, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;Me pleases the temple, that you made.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mihi placet id, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;Me pleases that, that you made.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(i.e. &amp;quot;that, which&amp;quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mihi placet, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;Me pleases, what you made.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mihi placet, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;Me pleases [the fact], that you have made/done [it].&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erravisti, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;You have erred [with respect to the fact], that you have done [it].&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(i.e. you have made a mistake with respect to doing this)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peribis, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;You will perish [because of that], that you have done.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peribis, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti. — &amp;quot;You will perish, because you have done [it].&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(most common usage of &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; in the classical age)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;% Dicit, &lt;strong&gt;quod&lt;/strong&gt; fecisti templum. — &amp;quot;He says, that you have made the temple.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(only in Mediaeval Latin, possibly Vulgar Latin)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T04:58:13.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5954" CreationDate="2013-11-17T18:52:02.263" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;-mİş&quot; forms in Turkish are traditionally given as examples of evidentiality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;geliyor (he's coming; implies direct knowledge, generally visual)&#xA;geliyormuş (he's coming; implies indirect knowledge, generally acquired from someone else)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second form can also be the indirect version of &lt;code&gt;geliyordu&lt;/code&gt; (he was coming) and may also encode other types of (somehow related) aspectual/modal/evidential information (for example when the speaker has just noticed that &quot;he's coming&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've never seen a thorough analysis of &quot;-Dİr&quot; forms like &lt;code&gt;geliyordur&lt;/code&gt;. These forms, among other things, may be used to encode that it's a guess made by the speaker. They can be used with (the Turkish equivalents of) &quot;I'm sure that&quot;, &quot;I think that&quot;, &quot;probably&quot;, &quot;maybe&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It does not necessarily encode inferential evidence&lt;/strong&gt; which can also be done with the indirect form above or periphrastically (&lt;code&gt;geliyor olmalı&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;he must be coming&quot;). In fact, it can be used in case of total lack of evidence to express pure guesswork. Does lack of evidence and pure guesswork count as evidentiality? Or is there another term for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: Here, my analysis of &quot;-Dİr&quot; forms are not very relevant. There are too many complications in their usage. My question is simply: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Can a form that expresses lack of evidence be classified as an evidential?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2013-11-17T18:59:32.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T23:57:22.213" Title="Does lack of evidence count as evidentiality?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2013-11-17T20:04:30.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can learn how to make yourself understood by reading literature in the language, and by reading descriptions of language use, but you can only learn how to &lt;em&gt;communicate&lt;/em&gt; in interaction with speakers, preferably native speakers who are monolingual. No amount of description can replace actual interaction, and there are certainly aspects of language use that only interaction can teach you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2013-11-17T20:04:30.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5912" CreationDate="2013-11-18T03:37:29.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to gather information on aphasia, you'll have much more luck consulting the literature of Speech/Language Science or Neuropsychology than you will in the Linguistics literature.   Speech/Language Sci departments &amp;amp; Neuropsychologists educate not only the neuropsychologists &amp;amp; speech/language therapists who assess and treat aphasia but also most of the scientists who do aphasia research.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.   Examples of relevant journals:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advances in Speech-language Pathology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;International Journal of Speech Language Pathology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Journal of Speech and Language Pathology, Applied Behavior Analysis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language and Speech&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topics in Language Disorders&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.   If you have lots of money, the pricey online &quot;Aphasiology&quot; journal may be useful:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psypress.com/journals/details/0268-7038/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.psypress.com/journals/details/0268-7038/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.   Here's a guide to Aphasia research:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aphasia.org/?q=content/research-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.aphasia.org/?q=content/research-guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d.   Most hospitals have speech/language therapists on staff, and some are Ph.D.'s in this field.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.   Here's a list of books and articles about aphasia at Questia:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.questia.com/library/science-and-technology/health-and-medicine/diseases-and-disorders/aphasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.questia.com/library/science-and-technology/health-and-medicine/diseases-and-disorders/aphasia&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f.   Don't forget the Psychology Wiki.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=aphasia&amp;amp;fulltext=Search&amp;amp;ns0=1&amp;amp;ns14=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=aphasia&amp;amp;fulltext=Search&amp;amp;ns0=1&amp;amp;ns14=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;g.   Here's an introduction to the subject:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.medicinenet.com/aphasia/article.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.medicinenet.com/aphasia/article.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are more resources for you to find.   Good luck!   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2013-11-18T22:26:23.323" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T22:26:23.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5910" CreationDate="2013-11-18T22:07:48.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really depends as some examples, eg. 'Doubting Thomas' have quite clear cultural semantic origins, so are not figurative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2740" LastActivityDate="2013-11-18T22:07:48.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8873" CreationDate="2013-11-19T08:58:42.277" Score="7" ViewCount="2595" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic term for words like sir, mam, miss, pal, bro, dude, buddy, son, mom/mum, dad etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I understand that there is a fair degree of overlap, I'm not looking for the term &quot;title&quot;. Titles are used &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the addressee's name. I'm specifically looking for the term for the words used &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; (instead of) the addressee's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T16:12:53.750" Title="What's the linguistic term for the words used when addressing someone?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-19T11:54:44.597" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any comprehensive pronunciation dictionary for Portoguese language like CMU dictionary for English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2640" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T17:25:51.977" Title="Pronunciation Dictionary for Portuguese" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4685" CreationDate="2013-11-19T15:20:35.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree with @Cerberus that &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; in your sentence takes a direct object and a bare-infinitival clause as complements. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; really feels like an argument of &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt;, and therefore should be its direct object. There might also be some syntactic tests we can use to try to establish that. If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; is a direct object, then it should be possible to move it up the sentence by using the cleft construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) It is you that networking helps grow your business (not me).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this test and others like it is that we can’t really find sentences where the main verb is followed by a noun phrase and a bare-infinitival clause and yet behaves differently with respect to the test. So we don’t have a contrast showing that in one such sentence the relevant noun phrase is a direct object and in another it is the subject of the embedded bare-infinitival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ch. 14 of &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (eds. Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum), the same distinction is discussed regarding sentences where the main verb is followed by a noun phrase and a gerund-participial clause. It is established there that in (2), &lt;em&gt;Kim&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object of the main verb, whereas in (3)  it is the subject of the embedded clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) He caught Kim drinking his beer.&#xA;(3) He resented Kim drinking his beer.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the clefting test distinguish between these two sentences? I’m not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(4) It was Kim that he caught drinking his beer.&#xA;(5) It was Kim that he resented drinking his beer.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) is grammatical, as expected, but I’m not sure about (5) (I’m not a native speaker of English). If (5) is grammatical, this means that subjects of embedded non-finite clauses can be clefted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same holds for the relativization test (with an embedded bare-infinitival clause). Is (6) grammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(6) You are the person whom networking helps make new connections.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, It would be nice to find syntactic tests clearly showing that &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Networking helps you grow your business&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object of the main verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, here is a syntactic tree generated by &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contextors&lt;/a&gt; where &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object (we follow the syntactic framework in &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, where non-finite complements have the functional category &lt;em&gt;catenative complement&lt;/em&gt;; also, we analyze &lt;em&gt;networking&lt;/em&gt; as a gerund-participial clause).       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KTN3y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/networking_helps_you_grow_your_business.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enlarge image&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastEditorUserId="2715" LastEditDate="2013-11-19T15:36:54.657" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T15:36:54.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-19T19:18:27.290" Score="9" ViewCount="1434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indo-European is not a language family known for discontinuous morphology, but there are occasional examples. I can think of two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The German and Dutch past participle formants, &lt;em&gt;ge-en&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ge-t&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. Dutch &lt;em&gt;ge-nom-en, ge-werk-t&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Ancient Greek present formant &lt;em&gt;-N-an-&lt;/em&gt;, with infixed nasal before the last consonant of the root (where phonotactically possible), e.g. &lt;em&gt;lambanō&lt;/em&gt; from the root &lt;em&gt;lab&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other examples of discontinuous morphology in Indo-European languages are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T05:03:59.673" Title="Discontinuous morphemes in Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5935" CreationDate="2013-11-19T19:42:16.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is modern English slang &lt;em&gt;that is in-fucking-credible&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further you could say various forms of reduplication are discontinuous, such as the Greek perfect, where reduplication and perfective suffix must come together or not at all, similar to Dutch/German ge-werk-t. Present stem &lt;em&gt;lu-&lt;/em&gt;, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;le-lu-k-&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;le...k-&lt;/em&gt; together mark the perfect stem. A few verbs also have reduplication in non-perfective stems, but then many Dutch/German words also have &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; in non-past-participles, like &lt;em&gt;ge-voel&lt;/em&gt;. To both &lt;em&gt;ge...t&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;le...k-&lt;/em&gt; applies that they are perhaps best considered two morphemes each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seperable verbs might also count as discontinuous, but they are certainly not single morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a Dutch &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; + reduplicated vowel that are sometimes informally used as an infix for emphasis, mainly in speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KPN dwingen om de post op zondag te bezorgen? Dat kan toch niet, wat zei ik nou net: KPN is een &lt;em&gt;ondernéhéming&lt;/em&gt;, geen staatsbedrijf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Force KPN (postal service) to deliver the post on Sundays? You know that isn't possible, what have I just told you? KPN is an &lt;em&gt;enterpríhíse,&lt;/em&gt; not a government agency.&quot; However, I'm not sure whether this &lt;em&gt;hV&lt;/em&gt; should be considered a morpheme rather than just a phonetic bit of...something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-11-19T19:42:16.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5935" CreationDate="2013-11-20T02:50:20.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Lithuanian reflexive verbs, the particle showing reflexivity goes at the end.  However, if the verb has a prefix like pa-, iš- etc., the reflexive particle comes between this prefix and the stem.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aiškinti  ‘to explain’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;paaiškinti  ‘to explain a little’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aiškintis  ‘to explain oneself’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pasiaiškinti  ‘to explain oneself a little bit;  (reciprocal) to resolve mutual disagreements’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a case for calling –si- an infix?  It seems like a simple question of prefix ordering.  But still, in languages like Latvian or Russian with generally similar verbal morphology, this movement doesn’t take place – the Latvian equivalent of the above series would be ‘skaidrot, paskaidrot, skaidroties, paskaidroties’.   Or looking at it another way, perhaps we could say that Lithuanian is averse to morphological discontinuity, since it stacks the prefixes in front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T02:50:20.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5935" CreationDate="2013-11-20T05:03:59.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Lithuanian verbs show a kind of &lt;em&gt;vowel grading&lt;/em&gt; between past and present tense combined with tense/person &lt;em&gt;suffixation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg KIRSTI (to cut)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pres sg 1st, 2nd, 3rd person: kertu kerti kerta &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past sg 1st, 2nd, 3rd person: kirtau kirtai kirto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since both elements are obligatory for the distinction present vs past you could&#xA;argue that they are discontinous morphemes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pres sg 1st, 2nd, 3rd person: e_u e_i e_a &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past sg 1st, 2nd, 3rd person: i_au i_ai i_o &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T05:03:59.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-20T09:12:49.693" Score="0" ViewCount="1107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a not a native speaker and I just begun studying English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not used to phonetics at all. I know that is has something to do with pronunciation, but I really don't have any idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be grateful for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2749" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2013-12-22T19:28:31.490" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T19:28:31.490" Title="English: Why can’t you ever find [l] opposed to [ɫ]? And why can’t you ever find [h] opposed to [ŋ]?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2013-11-20T10:48:59.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand your idea of opposition correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[l] and [ɫ] are allophones, which menas they are varieties of the same phoneme. Only two different phonemes can be in opposition with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I'm guessing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[h] is a phoneme you usually find in an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_onset#Onset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;onset&lt;/a&gt; position; [ŋ] is one you'll usually find in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_coda#Coda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;coda&lt;/a&gt; position. Two linguistic entities can't be in opposition unless they turn up in the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="715" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T10:48:59.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-20T12:20:05.430" Score="3" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, nouns (and nominals) are the only words that can inflect for grammatical number. E.g.: cat (Sg), cats (Pl); writing (Sg), writings (Pl).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This&quot; and &quot;that&quot; as singular demonstrative determiners have their plural counterparts, &quot;these&quot; and &quot;those&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &quot;these&quot; and &quot;those&quot; actually inflected from &quot;this&quot; and &quot;that&quot; or are the two pairs different lexemes altogether? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they were inflected, it would mean that this sort of inflection (or declension) is not exclusive to the part of speech 'noun'. If they were different lexemes, it would mean that the words have no relation in respect to grammatical number and inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that there exist the demonstrative pronouns as well. The same question goes to this set of words too (pronouns and pronominals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T13:46:38.583" Title="Are the demonstrative determiners &quot;this&quot; &amp; &quot;that&quot; inflected to become &quot;these&quot; &amp; &quot;those&quot; or are they different lexemes altogether?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5945" CreationDate="2013-11-20T13:42:53.257" Score="0" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working in a project where I need to identify the object(s) of an English sentence. Is there any tool or work that can help identify the object(s) of a sentence? I will be very grateful for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2750" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T17:40:52.740" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T17:40:52.740" Title="Identification of the object of a given sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5942" CreationDate="2013-11-20T13:46:38.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are inflected. It wouldn't make any sense to treat them as separate lexemes. In many languages, they also inflect for gender and/or case. In some languages, even the deixis is considered an inflectional category, e.g. in Macedonian: kuka-va &quot;this house&quot; vs. kuka-na &quot;that house&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T13:46:38.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5943" CreationDate="2013-11-20T14:16:22.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll need a parser to identify objects automatically. There are a few online interfaces to natural language parsers. For example, you could use the Stanford parser (&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) and look for &quot;dobj&quot; to find direct objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T14:16:22.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5940" CreationDate="2013-11-20T14:24:52.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In any language (or most languages, anyway) there are sounds which speakers of some other languages will regard as different, but in the specific language they are regarded as variants of the same sound: usually, most speakers of that language will not even be aware that there is a difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A group of sounds which are not distinguished in a language are referred to as a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;, and the different realisations of that phoneme are its &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example, of [l] and [ɫ], is a case in point: for most English speakers the choice between them is entirely occasioned by the phonetic environment (what sounds come before or after them), though this choice varies for different dialects of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard test for whether two objectively different sounds are the same phoneme in a language, is to look for &lt;em&gt;oppositions&lt;/em&gt;: words in which both occur, and are regarded by the speakers of that language as different sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that test is not the whole story. [h] and [ŋ] are not found in contrary opposition, yet are clearly not the same phoneme; the explanation, as Aspinea says, is that in English they are each limited to environments which don't happen to overlap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting case in English is the dental fricatives, [θ] and [ð]. Many English speakers do not even notice until it is pointed out to them, that these are different sounds (the fact that they are both spelt 'th' often misleads people). They &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; different phonemes, but there are only a few minimal pairs: &quot;wreath&quot;/&quot;wreathe&quot;; &quot;sooth&quot;/&quot;soothe&quot;, and (marginally in the modern language) &quot;thigh&quot;/&quot;thy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T01:25:44.787" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T01:25:44.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5948" CreationDate="2013-11-20T15:25:31.970" Score="0" ViewCount="2295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the meaning of linguistic variation. What are some linguistic variations and how are they different from the definition of identity? I mean, if someone speaks American English vs someone who speaks British English, that is considered a dialect variation. But your dialect is part of your identity, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2751" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T16:32:59.957" Title="Linguistic Variation (Sociolinguistics)" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5947" CreationDate="2013-11-20T16:32:59.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many other things are also part of your identity, though. It's pretty useful to have a separate concept for just linguistic variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistic variation also includes many other levels of difference. Not only dialect (which has various meanings, including your hometown, your region, your nation), but also your personal variety (idiolect), and many shared sub-categories of e.g. your family, your group of friends, your office, your school; plus various ethnic/culture categories (including things like registers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T16:32:59.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2013-11-20T17:13:04.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general language standardisation happens &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; changes in the language communities. Only reforms in Chinese is a counter-example. The impetus of changes derives of the cultural changes in the communities. Historical American English and Brazilian Portugues changed faster. One language with many more or less isolated communities (historic Greek), isolated Portuguese in Portugal and Brasil. Small Dutch/Flanders may have easier reforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regulation like revisions, and cross-community standardisation, are conservative (though still receive much opposition). Take the reform of German where some occurrences of &lt;code&gt;ß&lt;/code&gt; (but not all) were replaced by &lt;code&gt;ss&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regulation authorities are seldom speeding things up to a larger degree. In general they start to allow new orthography and finally make some new spelling the standard. They also cannot really hinder new cultural terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dictionary though intending to be non-regulative, in fact &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; regulative. As people tend to follow spelling and word choice as provided in the dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; The mosquito steering the elephant. Though language regulation is linguistically important, its controlling function (negative or positive) depends on other factors, like the Chinese in the past wanting to do a huge simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T17:13:04.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-20T18:27:59.853" Score="2" ViewCount="1061" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble drawing a syntax tree for these sentences and I would appreciate it if someone could help me right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why did Ella, one of my friends, who always comes on time to the class where we usually use to learn syntax seriously and in which we met her for the first time rent the motorcycle where horn was broken because of the accident which happened 2 weeks ago when the day was raining?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also be thankful if you can explain to me how to draw it, because I do not understand it very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2753" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T17:09:28.433" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T17:09:28.433" Title="How to make Syntax trees for these sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T08:19:51.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-20T21:19:27.573" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an automated process that generates links to steps that are dynamically numbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we have some documents with XML (DITA) source such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Repeat &amp;lt;xref&amp;gt; through &amp;lt;xref&amp;gt; for each nozzle.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes through a transformation process and pulls in the word &quot;Step&quot;, determines the appropriate number, and creates a link around the word and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Repeat Step 1 through Step 4 for each nozzle.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had originally planned on customizing the process so that the word step came before or after the number, but I am now learning that some languages are much more complex. (Such as Hungarian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original incorrect translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mindegyik fúvóka esetében ismételje meg az lépés 1–lépés 4t.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance a Hungarian user has asked for us to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mindegyik fúvóka esetében ismételje meg az 1-4. lépést&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This breaks my pattern. Is there a more generic way to use lépés (Step) without conjugation to follow the same pattern as it does in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same question for singular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original EN: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;You can also create a stain program by selecting Select Program, then Edit, then proceeding with Step 4.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original incorrect translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Festési programot úgy is létrehozhat, ha kiválasztja a Programválasztás, majd a&#xA;Szerkesztés gombot, majd a lépés 4 sel folytatja.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommended translation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Festési programot úgy is létrehozhat, ha kiválasztja a Programválasztás, majd a Szerkesztés gombot, majd 4. Lépéssel folytatja.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to state the same sentence without conjugating the word &quot;Step&quot; (Lépéssel)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2754" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T15:43:08.573" Title="Hungarian: Repeat Step X through Step Y" Tags="&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-11-28T12:35:28.990" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5943" CreationDate="2013-11-20T23:54:22.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative to the standford parser is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/freeling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Freeling&lt;/a&gt;, it does a pretty good job but is a bit harder to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T23:54:22.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5923" CreationDate="2013-11-20T23:57:22.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would certainly count it as a sort of evidentiality since it expresess how the speaker knows what he is communicating, ie. source of evidence. In this case you claim it expresses second hand information as apposed to first hand evidence, so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2013-11-20T23:57:22.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5956" CreationDate="2013-11-21T02:10:08.340" Score="1" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading the wikipedia article on relative clauses, I was puzzled somewhat by a description of a relative clause in English. It asserts that in the relative clause &quot;that I saw yesterday&quot;, as in &quot;the man that I saw yesterday went home&quot;, &quot;that&quot; is a complementizer rather than a pronoun, and that there is a gap left after &quot;saw&quot; where a pronoun would normally go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why wouldn't you say that the relative clause is indicated by word order alone rather than gapping, &quot;that&quot; being moved from its usual position after the subject to the head of the phrase? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause#Ways_of_forming_relative_clauses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to the article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T18:44:02.823" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T18:44:02.823" Title="Classification of Relative Clauses in English" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5955" CreationDate="2013-11-21T04:54:15.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, that's not the only way to look at the phenomenon, and it's not necessary&lt;br&gt;&#xA;to believe that there are gaps like black holes left in sentences or anything like that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But there's a point it makes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two great families of pronouns, both descending from Proto-Indo-European roots:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Demonstrative pronouns and their allies, descended from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20080628043014/http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE534.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PIE root &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;to-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In English these start with &lt;strong&gt;TH&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;there, that, thither, thence, then, this, thus, though, the, they,&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relative and interrogative pronouns and their allies, descended from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20080628043014/http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE258.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PIE root &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;em&gt;kʷo-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In English these start with &lt;strong&gt;WH&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;where, what, whither, whence, when, how, who, why, whether,&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a relative pronoun, it's an odd one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; has been used for over 600 years to introduce tensed subordinate clauses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And it still is used that way for two out of the three kinds of subordinate clauses in Modern English.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tensed Noun clauses and Adjective clauses require or allow &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, under varying rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mary believes [&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; [the Earth is an oblate spheroid]].&lt;/em&gt; [Complement (Noun) clause]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The man [&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; [Mary talked to]] didn't believe her&lt;/em&gt;. [Relative (Adjective) clause]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tensed Adverb clauses don't allow it any more, though they used to in Chaucer's day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;When he gets here, be sure to offer him a drink.&lt;/em&gt;  (grammatical without &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;When that he gets here, be sure to offer him a drink.&lt;/em&gt;  (ungrammatical with &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But compare the first line of Chaucer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whan &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; aprill with his shoures soote the droghte of march hath perced to the roote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'When (*that) April with its showers sweet the drought of March has pierced to the root'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the kind of word that introduces a clause and doesn't have meaning as such &#xA;is a &lt;strong&gt;Complementizer&lt;/strong&gt;. Clearly this is the right term for the &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;that the Earth is an oblate spheroid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And it's obvious that it's the term for the way Chaucer used it, too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, what is it when it heads a relative clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a relative pronoun, then there are a lot of questions that need answering:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; so different from the other relative pronouns?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; optional in restrictive relatives but forbidden in non-restrictive ones?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why can &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; be used in any kind of clause, where WH relatives are specific to person, time, etc?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why is it being used as a relative pronoun when it's already used as a complementizer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a complementizer in relative clauses, then these questions evaporate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What appears then is a situation similar to complement clauses. &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; may be deleted in complements, just as it can be in relative clauses, and under the same conditions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- whenever it's not needed to mark the subordinate clause as a subordinate clause, it's optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This also solves all coreference problems, because complementizers are not referential.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Therefore if there is any coreference in the relative clause, it is coreference of the sort called &quot;understood&quot; (also, &quot;deleted&quot;, &quot;a gap&quot;, &quot;zero&quot;, &quot;Pro&quot; (of two varieties), or some other term, depending usually on what year your syntax instructor got their PhD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what they really mean, I think. There's quite a lot more one could say on the topic,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but I forbear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-11-24T16:20:31.050" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T16:20:31.050" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5960" CreationDate="2013-11-21T12:13:34.503" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often in novels or reported speech, we have the quotation marked by opening and closing quotation mark. And before or after the quotation we have a phrase that states, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;somebody&amp;gt; said&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;said &amp;lt;somebody&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. For example, from sherlock holmes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;What! Where?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;strong&gt;shouted Mr. Windibank&lt;/strong&gt;, turning white to his lips and&#xA;  glancing about him like a rat in a trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a linguistics/literary term for the bolded phrase/clause?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How about the verb in that bolded phrase/clause?&lt;/strong&gt; Is &lt;code&gt;introductory verb&lt;/code&gt; the correct terminology to refer to the verb &lt;strong&gt;shouted&lt;/strong&gt; in the above example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T16:57:42.737" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T16:57:42.737" Title="What do you call the phrase/clause after a quotation in a novel?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5916" CreationDate="2013-11-21T19:16:57.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One part to an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Semasiology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is said to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/36772/hebrew-language-usage?referrer=vYF-uD8pJWlpaSf89lZ05w2&quot;&gt;&quot;the study of the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/semasiography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semasiography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, where words and characters are investigated for their origin.  Sometimes a word has an origin in natural phenomena themselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this regard, I think that many ancient words were capturing a particular systematic phenomenon, representing an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;affordance&lt;/a&gt; – somewhere between physical, and psycho-social&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic Syncretism&lt;/a&gt; also deals with this (common origins).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/I-recently-encountered-the-term-semasiographic-which-denotes-a-system-of-writing-not-meant-to-mimic-spoken-words-Im-having-trouble-imagining-this-if-you-have-a-spoken-language-and-you-read-a-semasiographic-text-dont-the-concepts-you-read-map-onto-concepts-you-can-say/answer/Zachary-Jones-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a related discussion of mine, on Quora.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2653" LastEditorUserId="2653" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T04:24:17.317" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T04:24:17.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2013-11-21T22:31:33.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;x &lt;em&gt;shouted&lt;/em&gt; &quot;...&quot;, x &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; &quot;...&quot; etc. are called &lt;strong&gt;quotatives&lt;/strong&gt;. Another term is &lt;strong&gt;verbum dicendi&lt;/strong&gt;. There is a fairly extensive body of literature on quotatives in varieties of English. The quotative that has recently attracted a lot of interest is &lt;em&gt;be like&lt;/em&gt;, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then I was like &quot;no way, that can't be true&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another recent-ish one is &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then he went &quot;yada yada yada&quot;. I hate him when he says that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also possible: The bare quotative (IIRC in Multicultural London English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then me &quot;It's true man!&quot;. And then him &quot;No way!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-11-21T22:31:33.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3529" CreationDate="2013-11-22T13:22:12.940" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I teach my pupils the matter like this (and I hope it’s useful for anyone who reads this thread):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek has three ways of representing actions (I’m leaving out future tense because it merely expresses tense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] as actions in process or repeated actions – durative [all forms beloning to the præsens stem] e.g. θνῃσκ- = to be dying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] as (merely) completed or single actions pointing towards completion – completive [all forms of the aorist [stem]: (‘aorist’ and ‘aorist stem’ mean the same in this way of representing). θαν- = to expire one’s last breath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] as a result of actions – resultative [all forms of the perfect stem] τεθνα-/τεθνηκ- = to have died -&gt; to be dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I explain to them that this basic stem related meaning is conveyed in all forms belonging to that specific stem (durative/præsens, completive/aorist, resultative/perfect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I explain that all these stems have present tenses, past stenses, participles, imperatives, subjunctives, optatives and infinitives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next thing I need to do is explain that the aorist doesn’t/can’t have a present tense, because the idea of ‘completedness’ and ‘present tense’ are incompatible.&#xA;Another thing that needs to be clarified is the perfect present tense is something different than the perfectum of Latin, but usually soon after this they realise there are only three past/preterite tenses in Greek [imperfectum (ἔθνῃσκεν), aorist past tense (ἔθανεν) and plusquamperfectum (ἐτεθνήκει) – all marked by the augment].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, not all forms belonging to the aorist (stem) express past tense (θάνοι τάχα καὶ ἡσυχῇ - may he pass away soon and peacefully, πολλὰ δῶρα βούλομαι σχεῖν – I want to get/have any presents, τὴν θύραν ἀνοῖξον – close the door, ἡσθήσομαι οἴκαδε ἀφικόμενος - I will be happy (after) having arrived home).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Aorist (stem)’ and ‘past’ only coincide in those verb forms that have the augment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2757" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T16:44:05.490" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T16:44:05.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1669" CreationDate="2013-11-22T13:54:55.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English the distinction is hardly relevant, since it doesn’t have cases except for  the pronouns, but with regard to languages that do have cases it’s more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, in my opinion there’s hardly any difference: the difference in languages that do have cases (Latin, Greek, Russian) is the case the verb requires with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give examples from Russian and Ancient Greek&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;εἰμί +nominative case - ἐκεῖνος ὁ ἀνὴρ φιλόσοφός(nom) ἐστιν ἔδοξος(nom) = that man is a famous philosopher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἐπιλανθάνομαι +genitive case - ἀεὶ τῶν βιβλίων(gen) ἐπιλανθάνεται = he always forgets his books&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;βοηθέω +dative case - ὁ υἱὸς τῷ γείτονι(dat) βοηθεῖ = the son is helping the neighbour&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;κολάζω +accusative case – τὸν κλέπτην(acc) βαρέως κολάζουσιν = they’re punishing the thief severly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;быть +nominative case: он -()- знаменитый философ(nom) = he is a famous philosopher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;боятся +genitive case: они боятся царя(gen) - they are afraid of the czar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;помогать +dative case сын помогает соседу(dat)  - the son is helping the neighbour&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;видеть +accusative case: я тебя(acc) вижу - I see you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;пользоваться +instrumental case: он пользуется влиянием(inst) - he is using his influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing which distinguishes transitive verbs in English (or verbs that require the accusative in Russian, Greek and Latin) from intransitive verbs is transitive verbs can be put in their passive voice. &#xA;They fear the czar – the czar is feared&#xA;Ὁ κλέπτης(nom) κολάζεται – the thief is (being) punished&#xA;Видятся дома(nom) – the houses are (being) seen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2757" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T13:54:55.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-22T14:28:55.663" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is the right place to post or if I should be posting CompSci so please feel free to redirect me to the most appropriate StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to  &lt;strong&gt;determine interests or hobbies that people have given two sources of data from their Twitter data&lt;/strong&gt;. Those two pieces of information are their &lt;em&gt;Bio&lt;/em&gt;, which is a user supplied description of themselves and their tweets (both a maximum of 140 characters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have background in NLP but intuitively I have been thinking of three contexts for determining interests given here with decreasing confidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using &lt;strong&gt;explicit word phrases that express interest&lt;/strong&gt;: interested in, passionate about, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;positive sentiment&lt;/strong&gt; expressed about the subject. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neutral or even negative sentiment&lt;/strong&gt; for a topic (for example, somebody may be interested in their football team but dislike their current manager).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result I am trying to achieve is to automatically label a user with a collection of interests such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finance &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And/or more specific examples like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOREX Trading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Android Development &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have tried using LDA, specifically the &lt;em&gt;topicsmodels&lt;/em&gt; package in R, using an individuals tweets as the corpus but I am not so sure about the applicability of the results&lt;/strong&gt;. LDA gives a collection of terms associated with the topics it found. This requires some manual interpretation to distinguish what the interest is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you might get some results from LDA like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Twitter, Java, time, work, day]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[code, IPhone, mobile, look, job]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[football, fantasy, team, pick, score]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can generally pick out the topics people are interested in here but its just the key word or topic identifier I am interested not the other contextual terms like team, pick or score in the last example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps part of speech tagging would be useful, maybe I should filter by noun, proper noun, proper name to get the core interest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I would need to handle ambiguous topics such as Java, which could be a programming language, coffee variety or the island itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any suggestions, references, links or pointers would be appreciated&lt;/strong&gt;. I am comfortable with R, Java and Python if there are libraries which could help achieve this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2758" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T15:41:35.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T20:36:28.053" Title="Determining interests from Twitter text" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-22T15:33:09.437" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that most sources refer to phonological data collected a long time ago. Where can I get some fresh stuff to analyze?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2759" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T15:37:16.030" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T15:37:16.030" Title="Where can I get data set for metaphony in Italian dialects?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-22T17:33:58.880" Score="0" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for grammar for relatively simple subset of English, tokens in which contain only letters, digits and comma. No quotes, colons, dashes and so on. Is there such thing? If no, is there other (free) grammars for subsets of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2763" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T17:33:58.880" Title="Are there grammars for subset of English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-22T17:53:57.030" Score="3" ViewCount="763" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I found a list of all the words in Hebrew including plurals, inflections, etc.?&#xA;I have only found some lists that are based on wikipedia corpus or subtitles curpus, which include many errors and are missing so many words. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://invokeit.wordpress.com/frequency-word-lists/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://invokeit.wordpress.com/frequency-word-lists/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2764" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-23T15:02:14.323" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T00:23:03.447" Title="List of words in Hebrew" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5981" CreationDate="2013-11-22T22:27:58.837" Score="4" ViewCount="6484" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm searching for languages which use a lot of different tones. The one with the most tones I found was Thai which has 5 tones. Are their tonal languages with use more distinct tones than thai?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T13:02:02.880" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T13:03:32.457" Title="Tonal Language with more than 5 tones" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2013-11-22T23:09:50.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese has six tones.Cantonese has nine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-11-22T23:09:50.543" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-22T23:24:12.013" Score="0" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the derivation of &lt;em&gt;John eats the apples.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  [CP C [TP John T [v*P &lt;strong&gt;John&lt;/strong&gt; v*-eats [VP &lt;strong&gt;eat&lt;/strong&gt; [DP the apples]]]]] &#xA;                   [uφ]       [φ]                 [uφ]           [φ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bracket notation above, where the words in boldface type indicate copy/trace.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phi-feature of &lt;em&gt;the apples&lt;/em&gt; and uphi-feature of &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; agree. This agreement is not morphologically realized in English.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The phi-feature of &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; and uphi-feature of T agree.  This agreement is realized on the verb &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; by -s morpheme.  But how?  the verb is never in agree relation with &lt;em&gt;John.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Untill Chomsky (1995), Minimalist Program, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2765" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T12:54:14.060" Title="How is T-subject agreement realized on a verb in minimalist syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T13:13:22.033" Score="0" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.pl/books?id=HyRk1v6wb7AC&amp;amp;pg=PA69&amp;amp;q=suffixoid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kremer, 1997&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.pl/books?id=79BV7ZOxI1AC&amp;amp;pg=PA32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Štekauer, 1995&lt;/a&gt; words like ‘cat-like’ &#xA;or ‘congressman’ etc. have what they call &lt;em&gt;suffixoids&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;semiaffixes&lt;/em&gt;. IMO, it’s kind of a dull idea, because they look like straightforward words consisting with two stems joined by the null interfix, am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2206" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T14:43:18.130" Title="suffixoid vs null interfix" Tags="&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T13:53:21.940" Score="4" ViewCount="1044" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nasals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must answer the question but I am not sure how to understand it... &#xA;The question is: why nasals both can and cannot be treated as stop consonants? &#xA;I thought that nasals cannot be stop consonants almost by definition,  now I am so confused!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2767" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-25T00:40:18.437" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T16:33:46.067" Title="Are nasals stop consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T14:19:25.190" Score="3" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've put &quot;isolates&quot; in scare quotes because this is probably not a standard meaning for the term &quot;language isolate&quot;. But anyway I'm sure it's still abvious what I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about languages losing or merging tones until there are none left. Since that would take a long time we might not have evidence of such occuring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what we might possibly have are instances of non-tonal languages within language families which otherwise consist mostly of tonal languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't exist I'm also interested in cases of a language with far fewer tones than most of its sibling and cousin languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T07:11:35.607" Title="Non-tonal &quot;isolates&quot; within families of tonal languages" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5974" CreationDate="2013-11-23T14:38:47.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Khmer language isn't tonal, but it's surrounded by tonal languages although not all of them belong to one family (but they form a sprachbund).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more general context, there are many languages that have lost phonemic vowel length, which might be related to the loss of tones as an internal process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T14:38:47.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2013-11-23T14:43:44.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lao&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has five tones (like Thai) in the south.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Lao has six tones in the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... In the capital, Vientiane, which is supposed to set the standard for the Lao language, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_language#Indication_of_tones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;there has been an ongoing debate about whether the local spoken variety has five or six tones&lt;/a&gt;. I encountered teaching materials bluntly stating five, others bluntly stating six, and others mentioning the debate before arbitrarily choosing one analysis or the other before continuing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T14:43:44.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T15:56:48.680" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese (I've only had experience with Mandarin so far) has at least one or two equivalents to English &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;, such as &quot;在&quot; (zài) and &quot;是&quot; (shì).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know that Chinese adjectives are actually verbs so are often described as having &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; &quot;built in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I am told that sentences such as &quot;我好&quot; (Wǒ hǎo) are not right and instead we should say something like &quot;我很好&quot; (Wǒ hěn hǎo) where &quot;很&quot; (hěn) means literally &quot;very&quot; but in these constructions it loses that meaning and the sentence means only &quot;I am good&quot; rather than the literal &quot;I am very good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that &quot;很&quot; (hěn) is not the only word that can be used in a similar way. Is this construction usually analysed as some kind of copula? And does it imply that copula is more of an open category in Mandarin than in English? Is this common in other language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;copular&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that as an untrained &quot;armchair&quot; linguist my concept of &quot;copula&quot; might not accord with that held generally. Let me sketch out my current notion of &quot;copula&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Copula&quot; and &quot;copular&quot; are abstract terms to refer to ways of linking mainly nominals. In theory they could refer to words or terms but perhaps also to syntactic structures involving particles or just word order. In practice in Western European languages and in languages with traditional analyses influenced by Western European linguistics they may usually pattern with verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I specifically ceased to think of copula as necessarily a type of verb but as an independent concept. I thought this was in line with current linguistics, but perhaps I've abstracted my concept of copula more than is usual among real linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-24T02:27:13.007" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T03:04:12.557" Title="Could certain adjectives or adverbs be analysed to function as a type of copula in Mandarin Chinese?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T16:42:37.170" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a math and statistics student/enthusiast as well as a fiction writer with cultivated interest in a few foreign languages. Linguistics has held appeal to me for many years, but I admit to having only had a cursory introduction to the field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately I have been searching for an access point and quite naturally turned to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/Mps/Travaux/A/1963-7ChomskyAlgebraic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Noam Chomsky and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. I assume that reading this text is, at this point in time, as much like reading history as it is like reading linguistics, but I have been stimulated nonetheless, especially by all the possibilities of connecting algebra and linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; What other (past or current) papers are worth reading &lt;em&gt;for a non-linguist&lt;/em&gt; to develop an adequate view of the linguistic landscape? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; In your opinion, what are some linguistic papers/ideas/schools of thought that might interest someone who is part-mathematician, part-humanist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; For the linguists out there: is there a book or paper about linguistics that you wish everyone in society would read?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, one more (possibly too esoteric) question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; Does anyone know of applications of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%B6bner_basis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gröbner bases&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in (computational) linguistics? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks so much for humoring the questions of an outsider. I look forward to your responses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2768" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T16:42:37.170" Title="Writer/math student seeking an overview of linguistics. Help?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-23T18:10:56.373" Score="6" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/5977&quot;&gt;a recent question of mine&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copulas&lt;/a&gt; and Chinese it has been stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the concept of &quot;copula&quot; is a medieval invention of Latin grammarians, and not a modern linguistic term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a generally accepted view in linguistics? I seem to read about copulae pretty frequently and I don't think I'm reading more mediaeval sources than modern ones lately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding was that in theory copulas have specific functions which differentiate them from other verbs in languages such as English, and in fact I've been under the impression that cross-linguistically copulas exist which are not necessarily partilcularly verb-like at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I'm wrong, I'm not a trained or professional linguist after all, just an interested amatuer. Perhaps I have been noticing only articles at similar levels to Wikipedia and perhaps in real linguistics sources the concept of copula has been obsolete for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody clear this up? Is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a live concept in modern linguistics, is it dead, or has it been superceded with one or more modern concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2013-12-02T15:37:28.100" Title="Has the term or the concept of a &quot;copula&quot; ceased to be used/relevant in modern linguistics?" Tags="&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2013-11-23T19:49:48.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on how you analyze it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trique_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Trique&lt;/a&gt; may have as many as 15 tones, built from 5 pitch levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2013-11-23T19:49:48.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-24T04:57:25.390" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was speaking with my housemate and he said &quot;A friend of mine and I who used to play were walking together.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We both realized this sentence was weird. It seems to me that &quot;a friend of mine who used to play&quot; should be a unit in itself, so how does &quot;and I&quot; end up smack dab in the middle of it?  It was understood by both me and the speaker that he did not mean that both he and his friend had played.  So what gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="518" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T05:49:32.607" Title="What makes this sentence okay?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-24T05:24:36.567" Score="0" ViewCount="3778" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone please help with drawing the following tree in s-structure.&#xA;&quot;Which fat pig did the small sheet bite behind the barn?&quot;&#xA;How would I do so if you are suppressing the structures of all specifiers and all adjuncts in triangles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm utterly confused by building syntactic trees and cannot find enough examples in the book I have to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also having trouble with drawing the tree for &quot;the deputy's recent discovery of incriminating evidence&quot;  while putting all specifics, all complements, and all adjuncts in triangles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2769" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-11-29T15:25:15.983" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T19:03:35.310" Title="Difficulty with creating Syntax Trees (d and s structure)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-06-25T00:39:20.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5982" CreationDate="2013-11-24T05:49:32.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A relative clause&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;who used to play&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;doesn't necessarily come immediately after its antecedent&lt;/strong&gt; (the word it refers back to), like &lt;em&gt;a friend of mine&lt;/em&gt;. The preferred position is immediately after, but there can be intervening factors. However, if the intervening words make the connection between antecedent and relative clause too unclear, the sentence should be recast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, apparently the pair &lt;em&gt;a friend of mine and I&lt;/em&gt; are felt to be &lt;strong&gt;a unit&lt;/strong&gt; so strongly connected that it overrides the preferred position of the relative clause, as viewed intuitively by your housemate when his brain constructed the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt;, it sounds almost ungrammatical to me, but I can understand how it would work if you knew more about what to expect about the people in the sentence and their activities. Context is very important in determining how far away antecedent and relative clause can be, and what kind of intervening phrases are allowed in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give you a simple example of a relative clause that is moved away from its antecedent but is still perfectly easy to understand and grammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I visited the new King of Spain in Madrid, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; was a devout Catholic and a great supporter of the Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; must refer to &lt;em&gt;the new King of Spain&lt;/em&gt; and not to &lt;em&gt;Madrid&lt;/em&gt;, because context tells us Madrid is not a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lazy as she was, she strayed from the prescribed waking order: she awoke Kermit only after me, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; then screamed in a tongue I did not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in this odd situation, it seems clear from context that &lt;em&gt;who...&lt;/em&gt; refers only to Kermit, not to me, because people usually don't scream together upon waking up, and because it seems unlikely that I should scream in a tongue I did not know. But in a specific context, anything is possible, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My uncle and my cousins, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; were in the bedroom, would all be conscripted as soon as the officer arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who were in the bedroom: just my cousins, or also my uncle? This is completely ambiguous to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[My uncle and my father were fighting in the garden. I knew my father was wrong about this.] My uncle and my cousins, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; were in the bedroom, would all be conscripted as soon as the officer arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; must refer only to &lt;em&gt;my cousins&lt;/em&gt;, because my uncle was in the garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[All children had been told to join their fathers.] My uncle and my cousins, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; were in the bedroom, would all be conscripted as soon as the officer arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; most probably refers to all three, because all children are with their fathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is key. No utterance has a complete meaning without context, nor even a complete structure, most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T05:49:32.607" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5977" CreationDate="2013-11-24T06:17:18.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving the broader question about copulas to one side here.  Po and Rimmington’s ‘Chinese:  A Comprehensive Grammar’ (Routledge) has a good explanation for why ‘我好’ is not a well-formed answer to ‘你好嗎?’ (which I’m guessing is the context.)  Having the predicative adjective unmarked implies a contrast, ‘I’m good (but not him!)’.  A degree adverb like 很 is needed to get a neutral reading.  P and R further remark that ‘in fact the degree adverb很  hen3 ‘very’, unless it is emphasized, does not really mean ‘very’, and its integration into an adjectival predicative is more often than not to counteract an implication of contrast.’ (p.60)  Still, many other adverbs would work in this slot, for example 非常 fei1chang2, an unambiguous ‘very’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some additional points that could suggest that  很 is not a copula:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Statements like N 很 Adj can be reformulated with a degree complement, so that 很 is not in copula position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;那個書好得很  ‘That book is very good.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When negated with 不, 很 isn’t needed, i.e. 他不好  is well-formed, although 不太好  ‘not so good’, adding a different degree adjective, is common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another predicate structure can also occur with some adjectives (generally ones that are non-gradable):  ‘是…的’.  A few adjectives can appear in predicates with either structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;他的話很對 or 他的話是對的    ‘What he says is correct.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things like the number of syllables will affect how Mandarin adjectives behave in collocations and as predicates.  P and R discuss a number of distinctions that affect how adjectives are used syntactically – qualifiers vs. quantifiers, gradable vs. non-gradable, derogatory vs. commendatory etc.  Introducing the notion of ‘copula’ into this would probably just confuse things, I suspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, in Classical Chinese 是 meant ‘this’.  Thus its use as a copula in Mandarin is a case of grammaticalization, although according to P and R this is only one of its many uses.  Cantonese uses 係 (pronounced haih, the Mandarin reading would be xi4) as a copula in sentences like 我係美國人 ‘I am an American.’  I would be interested to know in what ways the usage of Cantonese 係 parallels that of Mandarin是 and where usage differs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T03:04:12.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5974" CreationDate="2013-11-24T07:11:35.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the parts of Asia where many tonal languages are spoken (China and mainland Southeast Asia), it’s very hard to find examples of languages just losing tone.  Thomason and Kaufman, in their book ‘Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics’, mention a language called Wutun, which belongs to the Chinese language family, but has borrowed many grammatical features and much vocabulary from Tibetan, and has also lost phonemic tone.  “According to the Wutun speakers’ own oral history, they are descendants of Chinese immigrants to the region who were forced to assimilate to the surrounding Tibetan culture.  Few now speak another Chinese language, but many/most speak Tibetan as their second language.”  So in this kind of special contact situation, it’s possible for tones to disappear and a “tonal isolate” to arise.  Otherwise it doesn’t seem to happen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only know about Asia though, not about other world regions where many languages have tone.  It’s quite possible that you could come up with some “tonal isolates” elsewhere.  Swahili?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a lot to say about Mon-Khmer languages.  There are small MK languages all around mainland SEA, and the diversity within the family is much greater than for Tai.&#xA;The linguist ML Shorto produced a dictionary of proto-Mon-Khmer, and it’s possible that he reconstructed a breathy/modal phonation distinction for the protolanguage.  While Khmer doesn’t have either contour tones or phonation distinctions, it does have what’s called ‘register’, basically a vowel split.  Khmer consonants belong to one of two series, which determine how the vowels are pronounced.  Khmu (spoken mainly in northern Laos) is another MK language that has undergone tonogenesis, but only in some dialects (I think the wiki page on Khmu explains this in detail.)  I was taught a few words in Khmu while trekking around Luang Namtha – I think what I heard there was breathy phonation rather than tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T07:11:35.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4372" CreationDate="2013-11-24T10:20:43.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to check out this page &lt;a href=&quot;http://sealang.net/thai/chinese/middle.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sealang.net/thai/chinese/middle.htm&lt;/a&gt; which indeed claims that the word is related to 要. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;เอา Prapin &lt;em&gt;gloss&lt;/em&gt;: to want&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Prapin&lt;/strong&gt;: 606 (class 1)  &lt;em&gt;Chinese gloss&lt;/em&gt;: idem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Karlgren&lt;/strong&gt;: 1142a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Big5&lt;/strong&gt;: 要 (1) yao1 {yao4} (0) yao4 yao3 {yao1} (1) [1] [v] invite; request the presence of [2] [v] engage; date; make an agreement [3] [v] ask for; demand; claim; make a claim; request; requests [4] [v] coerce; force; blackmail; threaten [5] [v] stop [6] [v[ censure; investigate; examine [7] waist; midriff [8] a Chinese family name (0) [1] necessary; essential; necessity; important [2] must; should; ought to [3] [v] want; demand; need; require; desire; take [4] [v] summarize; [n] summary; generalization; synopsis [5] will; shall (future tense) [6] brief [7] if; in case&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;GB&lt;/strong&gt;: 要 same&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;StarLing:1452&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;OC&lt;/em&gt;: ʔew  &lt;em&gt;MC&lt;/em&gt;: ʔjew  &lt;em&gt;Gloss&lt;/em&gt;: waist, waist-band&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;PT/PSW&lt;/strong&gt; เอา  aw  &quot;to take (as is)&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Brown&lt;/strong&gt;:  cited.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Jonsson&lt;/strong&gt;:  [ *?- (A3)  B101-3 ]  &lt;strong&gt;PSW&lt;/strong&gt;: *?aw  &quot;to take&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Li&lt;/strong&gt;: [ *?+əu (A1) 13.1:243 ]  &lt;strong&gt;PSW&lt;/strong&gt;: *?au  PT: *?əu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2772" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-06-17T00:58:53.400" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T00:58:53.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2013-11-24T10:33:25.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French Academy does go through orthographic reforms - the last one was done in 1990.  It's certainly not as radical as German reforms but is quite present such as aiguë -&gt; aigüe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2772" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T10:33:25.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5993" CreationDate="2013-11-24T11:53:26.640" Score="2" ViewCount="982" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the formal syllable identification rules, you have the following (with an example pronunciation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MacDonald =&amp;gt; Mac + Don + ald (`/məkdˈɒnl̩d/`)&#xA;McDonald  =&amp;gt; McDon + ald (`/məkdˈɒnl̩d/`)&#xA;Kvitova   =&amp;gt; Kvit + o + va (`/kəvˈɪtəvə/`)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the number of vowel sounds (syllabic or not) in the last two examples does not match the syllable split. A (&lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt;) has been inserted between two of the consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this pronunciation pattern change the syllabification rules to align with the number of spoken vowel/syllabic consonant sounds, or is it more a pattern of speech to smooth over adjacent consonants that do not flow easily together (e.g. the &lt;code&gt;kv&lt;/code&gt; pair in &lt;code&gt;kvitova&lt;/code&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;code&gt;Mc&lt;/code&gt;, should this be considered a prefix like &lt;code&gt;be&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;de&lt;/code&gt; and others are, and be considered a syllable on its own -- that is, should it follow the syllable pattern of &lt;code&gt;MacDonald&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;Mc&lt;/code&gt; should be considered a syllable, is the &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; the nucleus? If so, does that make the &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; phoneme syllabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="185" LastEditDate="2013-11-24T14:18:57.940" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T14:33:16.447" Title="Is the /k/ sound in McDonald considered syllabic? (and insertion of /@/ when pronouncing syllable onsets)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4507" CreationDate="2013-11-24T13:36:05.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;บ is used in Thai as a negative particle in poetic contexts, I think.&#xA;For example, in the บทสวดมนต์ สรภัญญะ  :&#xA;ตัดมูลเกลสมาร, บ มิหม่นมิหมองมัว&#xA;&quot;Who have cut the roots of defilements and are not sorrowful, not dark and gloomy.&quot;&#xA;Translation source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://paultrafford.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-buddha-prayer-song-translated.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://paultrafford.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-buddha-prayer-song-translated.html?m=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2772" LastEditorUserId="2772" LastEditDate="2013-11-24T13:48:22.063" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T13:48:22.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5990" CreationDate="2013-11-24T14:33:16.447" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; reasonable analysis under which &quot;mcDon&quot; is a syllable. It is two syllables, irrespective of whether you write an 'a' in it or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Kvit&quot; (or &quot;kvi&quot;) is one syllable except for those people who find it impossible to pronounce the cluster &quot;kv&quot;, and for them it is two syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T14:33:16.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-24T17:30:15.057" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is to try to find the origin of the word kokkova. I have an antique/primitive pin made of ivory which if  I had to guess would say that it is walrus but not 100% sure. It is scrimshawed with a basic line design and the word Kokkova. (it is possible that the &quot;v&quot; is an &quot;r&quot;) I thought it could be an inuit piece but again unable to say definitively. Thanks, Devo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2775" LastActivityDate="2013-11-24T17:30:15.057" Title="Kokkova or kokkora carved on ivory" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3523" CreationDate="2013-11-24T18:43:17.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Standard Italian&lt;/em&gt; has a pretty entrenched dinstinction between &lt;em&gt;passato remoto&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;passato prossimo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;imperfetto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;passato remoto&lt;/strong&gt; ~ remote perfect/preterite complete actions in the past (from Latin perfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;passato prossimo&lt;/strong&gt; ~ present perfect &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;imperfetto&lt;/strong&gt; ~uncompleted action (Latin imperfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In everyday usage speakers in the south of Italy tend to used &lt;em&gt;passato remoto&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;any kind of perfect&lt;/em&gt;, which is more or less the same usage as in Classical Latin. On the other hand everyday usage in the north of Italy is &lt;em&gt;passato prossimo&lt;/em&gt; for all kinds of perfect. Passo remoto is rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the two-way distinction of &lt;strong&gt;northern Italian&lt;/strong&gt; also applies to &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt;, where passe simple is used both as a remote and present perfect, in contrast to imparfait. Passe simple (passato remoto) is rare, except in writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As fas as i know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the three-way distinction in &lt;strong&gt;Standard Italian&lt;/strong&gt; also applies to &lt;strong&gt;Spanish&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the two-way distinction in &lt;strong&gt;southern Italian&lt;/strong&gt; (Classical Latin) also applies to &lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-11-26T02:11:31.180" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T02:11:31.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3505" CreationDate="2013-11-24T19:10:24.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only Italian colony with any substantial settlement was Libya which mostly occurred in the 1930s. Just before WWII over 100,000 or 1/8 of the inhabitants were Italian settlers, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo-libici&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Italo-Libyans&lt;/a&gt;, many of whom left during and after the war. A common estimate for 1962 is 35.000 Italians in Libya. They were ordered to leave after al-Gaddafi took power, though it seems there was still some 1,500 in the country by 1982.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was simply no time for a Libyan Italian dialect to evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-11-25T03:30:09.457" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T03:30:09.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-25T02:46:25.640" Score="2" ViewCount="1410" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is: Would you classify apostrophes and hyphens as punctuation marks? Now, Webster and a lot of other sources define them as punctuation marks. I know for sure that in Russian linguistics they are not and their functions in Russian aren't different from those in English. My arguments for them not being punctuation marks are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;both the apostrophe and the dash have very little, if anything, to do with syntax;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the apostrophe is used for contractions or to express the grammatical form of a word (possessives) or connect two words (like &quot;we're&quot;) rather than separate them like the other punctuation marks do (the latter function applies to the dash as well);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;punctuation marks indicate aspects of the intonation, i.e. whenever we have full stops, question marks, colons, dashes etc. in writing, we make pauses or have intonation changes in speaking. However, we don't do this for apostrophes and hyphens.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I'd say that the apostrophe is a diacritical sign/ascending stroke used to indicate a missed vowel or for other purposes and the hyphen is a sign to connect two parts of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you agree or disagree, please, leave your arguments!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2776" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-11-25T14:52:52.030" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T01:05:33.867" Title="Are apostrophes and hyphens punctuation marks?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6087" CreationDate="2013-11-25T05:39:58.223" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching around but as far as I can tell there is no established name for the aspect demonstrated by sentences such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'll read this report over the weekend.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The debt has grown over time...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The negotiations took place over three days.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Bob blinked repeatedly over the next few minutes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast the last one with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Bob blinked repeatedly &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; the next few minutes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is more than one thing going on. Would you say &quot;durative&quot; is one of the qualities? I tried many variations of the last two sentences to try to get something that differed only by the preposition, without sounding strange. Does the first one sound more intentional to you? I am actually just trying to understand temporal uses of &quot;over&quot;. I have noticed a telic sense, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I read the entire book over five days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I read the entire book for five days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; can both be used for giving a sense of duration, but they seem to differ in telicity. Do they differ subtly in their duration sense too though? I feel like &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; has more of a sense of continuity than &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Over&lt;/em&gt; constructions sound like they could have stops and starts throughout the time period. I want to call it &quot;distributive aspect&quot; but apparently that is being used for something else: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDistributiveAspect.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsDistributiveAspect.htm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are just lots of things going on here that can't be given one label?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T16:49:53.167" Title="What aspect or feature do &quot;over TIME&quot; constructions have?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-25T13:18:59.120" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for as many very reliable Japanese-English corpora as possible so I'd like to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other manually aligned corpora besides KFFT's and&#xA;Utiyama's?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the most accurate automatically aligned corpora (according to metrics) and how do they compare to manual ones in practice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2779" LastEditorUserId="2779" LastEditDate="2013-11-25T15:57:21.583" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T15:57:21.583" Title="Where can I find Japanese-English (manually) word-aligned corpora?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5952" CreationDate="2013-11-25T15:43:08.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is that you can uses lépés individually, and it's recognizable, but it's not very natural Hungarian looking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2754" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T15:43:08.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-25T17:23:39.633" Score="10" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified by a computer can also be quickly solved by a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking is whether there is any concept or project of a decidedly linguistic nature that would make you think, &amp;quot;Hey, that reminds me of the P versus NP conjecture in computer science,&amp;quot; supposing that you are already familiar with said conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2780" LastEditorUserId="13357" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T14:06:16.363" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T14:06:16.363" Title="Does the P versus NP conjecture in computer science have any direct relevance to linguistics?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5998" CreationDate="2013-11-25T19:15:39.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think such punctuation marks must be contained in linguistics since these marks make some differences in meaning of a written or oral sentences. It show us that punctuation and semantic are related to each other, and we could say punctuation is embedded linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;please let me know your idea about my answer.Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T19:15:39.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-25T21:06:20.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's much harder to show that it's not relevant to any branch of linguistics than to show that there is at least one application of the P-NP problem in linguistics. But I haven't heard of any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably obvious why it is not relevant to branches of linguistics that don't have any computational component, such as historical linguistics. But other, rather more computational branches, of linguistics also seem to have a lot of other problems to care about. In corpus linguistics, important questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I speed up the process of compiling a corpus, for example transcription of spoken material?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I ensure my corpus is a representative sample of the language at hand?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In computational linguistics, interesting questions might concern how parsers or taggers can be improved. If we compare their performance to that of humans, automatic parsers and taggers still have quite some way to go. But the way to improve them is probably not to reduce computational complexity because what computers currently lack and humans have is not more computational power, but real world knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably parsed this initially with the prepositional phrase &quot;in my pajamas&quot; attached to the verb phrase, as an adverbial. And that's the only sensible reading of this sentence. Initially, you would not even consider (consciously) that &quot;in my pajamas&quot; could attach to &quot;an elephant&quot; because this does not agree with your knowledge of what elephants do. Only the second sentence makes that plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An automatic parser doesn't have real world knowledge at its disposal, and can't exclude the reading &quot;elephant wearing pajamas&quot; right away as non-sensical. Technically, there is not a single correct parse of this sentence, but multiple. Only ranking the different parses and their meanings by likelihood solves the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge is to get this knowledge into parsers. But then we would actually need a computer program that understands human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in essence I believe the P-NP problem is quite irrelvant to linguistics. But I'm looking forward to any examples showing the opposite :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T21:06:20.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2013-11-25T22:36:42.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Kwakw'ala (Kwakiutl) Boas 1947 grammar describes as deictic system of 3 degrees combined with a distinction visible/invisible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronominal demonstratives &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Close to 1st person&lt;/em&gt; visible -&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt; invisible &lt;strong&gt;-gaʔ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Close to 2nd person&lt;/em&gt; visible &lt;strong&gt;-ux&lt;/strong&gt; invisible &lt;strong&gt;-uʔ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Away from 1/2nd pers&lt;/em&gt; visible &lt;strong&gt;-iq&lt;/strong&gt; invisible &lt;strong&gt;-iʔ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The visibility distinction may be a typical feature of Nothern Wakashan languages in general (cf Emmon Bach (2006) Paradigm regained: Deixis in Northern Wakashan, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistcs Vol 14:267-281&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T22:36:42.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-25T23:10:06.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a notion of computational complexity in generative linguistics when, say, one is trying to justify a theory/framework by considering its physio/psychological plausibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is: If one considers a human brain (and therefore the linguistic processing centres, thereof) as a hyper-parallelised computer, any theory that appears to blow up with an NP solution can be seen as less likely, or even ruled out. Our hardware -- &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; hardware -- can't support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have direct references off the top of my head, but I believe this is an argument against Optimality Theory. The solution space is so vast that it quickly becomes untenable to process and, therefore, unlikely that this is actually how our brains work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1175" LastEditorUserId="1175" LastEditDate="2013-11-25T23:16:34.747" LastActivityDate="2013-11-25T23:16:34.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-26T00:00:22.130" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was for sure having a difficult time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what aren't the public afraid of?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Had this candidate waited for the results to the elections in vain?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to draw these using Binary Merge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2782" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-11-26T10:15:57.793" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T10:15:57.793" Title="Drawing trees using Binary Merge" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5998" CreationDate="2013-11-26T00:46:47.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jlawler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the article. I found it quite interesring. I may sound too nitpicking, but I wouldn't agree with the abstract here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The modern suite of punctuation marks includes the period ‘ . ’, comma ‘ , ’, colon ‘ : ’, semicolon ‘ ; ’, left and right parentheses ‘ ( ) ’ (and other brackets, square ‘ [ ] ’ and curly ‘ { } ’), interrogation and exclamation marks ‘ ? ! ’ (bracketed with their inverses ‘ ¿ ¡ ’ in Spanish), dashes of several lengths ‘ - – — ’, single and double quotation marks ‘ “ « » ” ’, and the apostrophe, or raised comma “ ’ ” (not to be confused with the prime mark ‘ ′ ’, which is a diacritic)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author provides 3 different dashes. I agree with the last two, but the first one is called a hyphen and it, again, does not separate words into sentences or changes the meaning of a whole sentence, but connects two words (like the apostrophe) - exactly the reason why they should not be considered as punctuation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another abstract here proves my point about intonation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Still another use – indeed, the original use – of punctuation is to provide some indication of the intonational and rhythmic intentions of the writer, as the written words indicate the lexical and grammatical intentions. For instance, the comma in English is often claimed to represent an intonation sequence of mid-low-high-mid, like the one used in counting:&#xA;Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, ... They serve, to those who follow this theory, to represent the ‘authorial voice’, and guide conventions for reading aloud. This of course applies to English only, and should not be considered to apply to other languages, like German, where the rules for punctuation are specifically governed by syntactic considerations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't fully agree with it either. The punctuation marks do not necessarily express the author's voice - they mark the boundaries of sentences, phrases, clarify the meaning of the sentence. It just happens that we use intonation and pauses for this in speaking and punctuation marks in writing. German does it as well, perhaps not in the same way English does, but in the following sentence, wouldn't you have short pauses, where you have commas: Meine Freundin, die übrigens jetzt in der Schweiz wohnt, schreibt an mich jeden Tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author also mentions that the rules of punctuation are far from being standardised. What does it mean? If one is talking about the &quot;author's style&quot;, it's one thing, but the rules of punctuation exist in every English speaking country, otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as a punctuation mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2783" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T00:46:47.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-26T01:04:37.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Xophmeister's answer is pretty good. I wanted to chime in with the paper he or she was searching for, and since I don't have enough reputation to comment, I had to post an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I would not exactly say that the P-NP problem is causing theoretical linguists to lose sleep. However, contingent on the conjecture that P does not equal NP, there is a problem for Optimality Theory. Idsardi (2005) proves that the problem of generating an &quot;intermediate candidate set&quot; in OT is NP-hard. Thus, by conjecture, the flavor of OT examined by Idsardi is computationally intractable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As suggested by Xophmeister, theoretical computational linguists are interested in complexity in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idsardi, William J. (2006) A Simple Proof that Optimality Theory is Computationally Intractable. Linguistic Inquiry 37: 271-275. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/~idsardi/papers/2006li.pdf&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2486" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T01:04:37.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5998" CreationDate="2013-11-26T01:05:33.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@zahra:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the answer! I absolutely agree with you. Punctuation marks change the meaning of a sentence. A classical example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's eat everyone!&#xA;Let's eat, everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apostrophe does not do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its a dog.&#xA;It's a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I would talk about a grammatical mistake, wrong spelling or even a wrong word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2783" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T01:05:33.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-26T02:04:37.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is. I am referring to the Stanford project &quot; QUANTITATIVE FORMALISM: AN EXPERIMENT&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This paper is the report of a study conducted by five people – four at Stanford, and one at the University of Wisconsin – which tried to establish whether computer-generated algorithms could “recognize” literary genres.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=255&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=255&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am given to understand that most people familiar with the conjecture conjecture that it is false, that is, creating a work of art is orders of magnitude more difficult than appreciating/recognizing a work of art, and I certainly concur in conjecturing that the conjecture is false. This Stanford project would certainly support this position. If a computer, under present-day technology, can distinguish between genres, I think we would all agree that we are still ages away from the day that a computer can CREATE a worthy work in any genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the news recently it has been reported that baboons can distinguish words from non-words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the news story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/dan-dan-baboon-read-dan-read-181901087.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/dan-dan-baboon-read-dan-read-181901087.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question, then, can be considered as a special case of the more general question that can be catchily-phrased as, &quot;Can baboons do linguistics?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conjures up the image of the proverbial room full of monkeys (/baboons) randomly pecking away at typewriters. Will they every produce, say, Hamlet? Of, course, given enough time. But that is consistent with conjecturing that the conjecture is false, because although they (or, an algorithm) may be able to recognize literary phenomena in polynomial time, it would, presumably, take much more than polynomial time to CREATE a literary phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am at one with my duality.&quot;&#xA;--Woody Allen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2780" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T02:04:37.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-26T08:14:26.743" Score="3" ViewCount="1923" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you explain for me what's the difference between base component and syntactic component of a language ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right that both of them included some transformations that by applying such transformations, a deep structure  yield to surface structure? Also, what's the role of lexicon in these components? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-11-26T10:15:07.773" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T18:04:16.310" Title="Difference between base component and syntactic component" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2013-11-26T11:30:54.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most dialects of Wú have 7 or 8 tones, however some such as those around Wujiang have up to 12 or 15 tones, depending on which topolect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, 5 tones is a pretty small inventory. Shanghainese has the lowest number of tones in Wú with 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="152" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T11:30:54.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-26T17:38:32.097" Score="8" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mereological theories of events usually assume that the domain of events forms a join semilattice with no bottom element.(Landman 2004's &quot;Indefinites and the Type of Sets&quot; is one of the few exceptions I've found.) There are probably good reasons that most researchers assume that there is no bottom element - i.e., I assume that there are negative consequences to assuming a bottom element, and that these have been discussed somewhere in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some of these negative consequences? (Or where could I find a discussion of some of them?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T20:52:18.900" Title="Why do most semantic theories assume no bottom/null element for mereological approaches to events?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6013" CreationDate="2013-11-26T18:04:16.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terminology in this area was established in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of Transformational Grammar. At that time, the &quot;base&quot; denoted deep syntactic structure (D-structure), as opposed to surface syntactic structure (S-structure). The specific architecture of the syntax in the theory has long since been revamped entirely, but the terminology from that era remains. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern syntax still uses terminology such as &quot;base generated&quot; or &quot;base position&quot; when it wants to acknowledge that a given constituent is in a derived position, meaning that it has been moved or copied into its surface position. Modern GB (Government and Binding) and MP (Minimalist Program) theory do not, however, acknowledge deep structure in the sense that it was understood when &quot;base component&quot; was a clear reference to deep structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of deep structure is that it was not created by transformations, but rather the transformations applied to a deep structure yielding a surface structure. The lexicon provided the lexical items (words) for the construction of deep structure, but it played little to no role in the transformational genesis of surface structure (from deep structure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-11-26T18:04:16.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-27T06:16:47.837" Score="5" ViewCount="788" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example. In the sentence fragment &quot;red leather stool&quot;, red is a color, leather is a covering of the stool, and stool is a chair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any database, corpus or repository, that lists the applicable modifiers of objects (eg: chair, car, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2788" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-11-27T13:44:31.820" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T18:16:09.963" Title="Is there a corpus of English adjective, adverb, etc metadata?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2013-11-27T13:01:07.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example I've seen in pre-Modern English is the 2 plurals of &quot;brother&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Brothers&quot; with the meaning of &quot;my parent's other offspring&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Brethren&quot; meaning &quot;people of my same religion or political affiliation&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English took most of its plurals from a single declension (accusative?). But in this case it preserved a plural from another case (nominative?) and gave it a slightly different meaning - I suspect the overabundant plurals in Italian have the same origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T13:01:07.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5979" CreationDate="2013-11-27T18:26:55.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find the terms &lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;copular&lt;/em&gt; defined in most linguistics dictionaries, and they are widely used in modern syntax textbooks (e.g. Radford 2004, Carnie 2013), so the brief answer to your question is yes, the term &lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt; is still quite current. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I think confusion arises about copulae in English concerns &quot;be&quot; in particular. Like other copulae (&lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;taste&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; takes a predicative expression as its complement, but unlike these other copulae, copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; behaves like an auxiliary verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It allows subject-auxiliary inversion:&#xA;a. &lt;em&gt;Fred is hungry.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;b. &lt;em&gt;Is Fred hungry?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as a postdependent:&#xA;a. &lt;em&gt;Fred is hungry.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;b. &lt;em&gt;Fred is not hungry.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It licenses VP-ellipsis:&#xA;a. &lt;em&gt;Susan is hungry, and Fred is hungry, too.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;b. &lt;em&gt;Susan is hungry, and Fred is, too.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this all means is that copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; has the status of an auxiliary verb. In other words, it is both a copula and an auxiliary verb. I think many linguistics texts fail to acknowledge this trait of copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;. They tacitly assume that copulae are not auxiliary verbs. While that is true of most copulae in English, it is not true of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, which is by far the most frequently occurring copula in the language.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2013-11-27T18:34:49.583" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T18:34:49.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2013-11-27T19:34:45.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin has a pretty large class of nouns like these, which are actually called &lt;em&gt;abundantia&lt;/em&gt; in the grammatical tradition. They're second-declension nouns which occur as both masculine and neuter, with no difference in meaning. Examples: &lt;em&gt;baculum/baculus&lt;/em&gt; 'staff', &lt;em&gt;cingulum/cingulus&lt;/em&gt; 'belt', &lt;em&gt;collum/collus&lt;/em&gt; 'neck', &lt;em&gt;pileus/pileum&lt;/em&gt; 'cap', &lt;em&gt;vallus/vallum&lt;/em&gt; 'palisade'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally there are third-declension nouns with two different stems, with identical meanings, e.g. &lt;em&gt;femur&lt;/em&gt; 'thigh', stem &lt;em&gt;femor-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;femin-&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;iecur&lt;/em&gt; 'liver', stem &lt;em&gt;iecor-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;iecinor-&lt;/em&gt;. Or the meanings can be slightly different: &lt;em&gt;pecus, pecor-&lt;/em&gt; 'herd of cattle' vs. &lt;em&gt;pecus, pecud-&lt;/em&gt; 'single head of cattle'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek also has some nouns with multiple stems, e.g. &lt;em&gt;oneiros&lt;/em&gt; 'dream', stem &lt;em&gt;oneiro-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;oneirat-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T19:34:45.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6024" CreationDate="2013-11-27T19:49:29.080" Score="4" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has a somewhat unusual construction exemplified by sentences like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He had his car stolen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He had his house repossessed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's had three books published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are different from the causative &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; construction: e.g. (1) doesn't mean &quot;He caused his car to be stolen&quot;. What this construction seems to do is line up the subject with an argument that could be called an &quot;affectee&quot;, i.e. someone affected by the action; another term might be &quot;beneficiary&quot;, but in the broad sense of a referent who is either advantaged or disadvantaged by the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three questions about this construction, one synchronic, one diachronic, and one typological:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the semantics of this construction? What constraints are there on the semantic role of the subject and its relationship to the action of the verb? For example, one constraint seems to be that the subject should be aware of the action: &lt;em&gt;He had his car stolen, but he didn't realize it&lt;/em&gt; sounds strange to me. Also, it seems like the action has to be agentive (though the agent is someone other than the subject): &lt;em&gt;He had his key lost&lt;/em&gt; is obviously bad. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When and how did this construction arise? Is it historically an extension of the causative &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; construction?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other languages have similar constructions, i.e. ones that line up the subject with an &quot;affectee&quot; or &quot;beneficiary&quot; argument, and what do these look like morphosyntactically? (The &quot;benefactive pivot&quot; construction of some Philippine languages seems to be one example.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-11-28T03:12:01.583" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T07:03:53.737" Title="The &quot;affectee-subject HAVE&quot; construction in English" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6021" CreationDate="2013-11-27T23:52:52.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know whether it counts, but these sentences look natural for a Russian speaker, may be because Russian has a somewhat similar construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;У него (есть) машина = He has a car = literally: At him (is) a car. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;У него украли машину = He has his car stolen = literally: At him they stole a car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;У него&quot; = &quot;at him&quot; is usually used to express possession in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-11-27T23:52:52.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-28T01:17:33.423" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John wants him to be special more fervently than Bill's mother does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. John believes him to be smart more fervently than Bill's mother does.  (?*him=Bill)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2765" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2013-11-29T15:24:12.573" LastActivityDate="2013-11-29T15:24:12.573" Title="Could &quot;him&quot; refer to &quot;Bill&quot; in the following sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6021" CreationDate="2013-11-28T03:34:00.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can try and provide an answer for questions 1 &amp;amp; 3, based on Ritter &amp;amp; Rosen 1993's paper &quot;Deriving Causation.&quot; The answer to 1 is more syntax-semantics interface than semantics though (given that Ritter &amp;amp; Rosen do more syntax-semantics-interface style analyses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Ritter &amp;amp; Rosen 1993 argues that &quot;have&quot; is a &quot;functor predicate&quot; which means that (i) it can introduce an argument (like a lexical predicate) but (ii) it lacks lexical semantic content (like a functional predicate), and thus does not encode a particular theta role for the argument it introduces. Rather, the &quot;theta role&quot; of the introduced argument is derived from the event structure that &quot;have&quot; introduces/modifies. This is meant to account for the observation (which you made above) that the argument &quot;have&quot; introduces can sometimes be introduced as a causer, or as an experiencer/affectee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They argue that the introduction of additional arguments to a construction correlates with the introduction of additional event structure to a predicate. So since &quot;have&quot; systematically introduces a new argument, it also systematically introduces more event structure. It is unspecified, however, for what kind of extra event structure it contributes. It can thus be interpreted as extending the event beyond the original starting point of the event - in which case the introduced argument will be interpreted as the causer of the event. Or it can be interpreted as extending the event beyond the original ending point of the event - in which case the introduced argument will be interpreted as the experiencer/affectee of the event. (I tried to schematize this below in a sort of diagram.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) John had half the students walk out of his lecture. (Ritter &amp;amp; Rosen 1993:525)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(a) Base Predicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;|...walk out of class...|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(b) Have + Predicate: CAUSATIVE: Extend initiation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;|......have.....|...walk out of class...|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(c) Have + Predicate: EXPERIENCER: Extend result&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;|...walk out of class...|......have.......|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also observe that the &quot;causer&quot; reading is not possible with unaccusative verbs. (This relates to your observation that there is an agentivity requirement.). So all unaccusative verbs in the &quot;have&quot; construction will be interpreted as introducing an &quot;affected&quot; argument. (Or be unacceptable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Unaccusatives with &quot;have&quot; - only &quot;Experiencer&quot; readings  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(a) I had my car spin (on the icy road)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    (b) I had the water in my pool freeze.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    (c) I had my car crumple in the accident  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood their analysis, they aimed to account for this fact by arguing that &quot;have&quot; can only extend event structure, not introduce new event structure. And because unaccusatives don't underlying have causation/agentivity, &quot;have&quot; in an unaccusative construction can only extend the event's endpoint, so the introduced argument must be interpreted as the experiencer/affectee. (I don't know if this quite gels with your observations about awareness. Except maybe that &quot;ignorance is bliss&quot; and in order to be an experiencer/affectee, you have to know about your misfortune?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other languages with similar predicates, they propose that the Japanese adversative -rare is similar to &quot;have,&quot; but specified as extending the endpoint (hence the argument is always an experiencer/affectee), and that the French faire is similar to &quot;have&quot; but specified as extending the initial point (hence the argument is always a causer). There are also both benefactive and malefactive interpretations for some Salish applicatives (see, for example, Kiyosawa &amp;amp; Gerdts 2010. Some googling has also resulted in a book &quot;Benefactives and malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies&quot; by Zuniga and Zeppo (2010). That might give you a good place to look for the crosslinguistic morphosyntactic properties of malefactives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry I've got nothing on the diachronic question. Totally not my forté. Sorry also that I haven't read the later article by Ritter &amp;amp; Rosen (1997) - I'm not sure if they stick with their 1993 analysis, or change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ritter, E., &amp;amp; Rosen, S. T. (1993). Deriving causation. Natural Language &amp;amp; Linguistic Theory, 11(3), 519-555.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ritter, E., &amp;amp; Rosen, S. T. (1997). The function of&amp;lt; i&gt; have. Lingua, 101(3), 295-321.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gerdts, D. B., &amp;amp; Kiyosawa, K. (2003). Psych predicates and applicatives in Salish. In annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Halifax, Nova Scotia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zúñiga, F., &amp;amp; Seppo, K. (Eds.). (2010). Benefactives and malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies (Vol. 92). John Benjamins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="177" LastEditorUserId="177" LastEditDate="2013-11-28T07:03:53.737" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T07:03:53.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6023" CreationDate="2013-11-28T04:35:04.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have tested such examples on informants extensively. The coreferential reading is very unlikely, but it is not completely impossible. The opposite order of noun and pronoun allows the coreferential reading easily, of course:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) John wants Bill to be smart more fervently than his mother does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acceptability contrast across the two variants illustrates for me that above all, linear order (i.e. precedence) is a main factor influencing the distribution of pronouns in relation to their antecedents (and postcedents). Pronouns in a large majority of cases prefer an antecedent, as opposed to a postcedent. Only in very limited cases is the opposite order preferred, e.g. &lt;em&gt;In her Bed, Zelda spent her sweetest hours&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like these have played a central role in the development of binding theory. Reinhart (1976, 1983) appears to have struggled with the acceptability of such data. The marginality of the coreferential reading in the first example (in the question) motivated her to allow some similar examples to allow the coreferential reading, and others to disallow it. This is precisely what is done with the two examples in the question, where the first is deemed to be much more acceptable than the second. The acceptability contrast between the two is probably not near as robust as the question assumes. Reinhart sought to accommodate degrees of acceptability in terms of sentence vs. VP adjuncts. If the coreferential reading is deemed possible, the adjunct at hand is a sentence adjunct, but if it is not possible, then it is a VP adjunct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with Reinhart's explanation in terms of c-command is that acceptability of such cases is not black-and-white, yet it should be black-and-white given the approach to binding in terms of c-command that she was espousing. In fact this a major weakness in the study of syntax in general in my view. Marginality is messaged in one direction or the other in a manner that supports the particular theory at hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the answer to the question is that the coreferential reading for both example sentences may be possible, but it is quite unlikely. The Wikipedia article on binding has more to say about such cases: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_Theory&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_Theory&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T04:35:04.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-28T05:02:57.503" Score="1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tibetan alphabet is a kind of abugida where glyphs may combine into new different forms, taking different positions in their combinations according to their types (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books?id=E6uk2CT0BpsC&amp;amp;pg=PA39&amp;amp;dq=masculine%20feminine%20tone%20in%20traditional%20tibetan%20grammar&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=KMSWUtK2DY3o4QSRiID4CA&amp;amp;ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=masculine%20feminine%20tone%20in%20traditional%20tibetan%20grammar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see H.B. Hannah, pp. 16- 45&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each glyph has an initial tone, either high or low, which, in turn, may be changed depending on an subjoining glyph, thus making from three to five or four tones altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the thirty initial glyhps are grouped, according to classical Tibetan grammar, into five genders: Masculine, Common, Feminine, Very Feminine, Barren and Neuter (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books?id=E6uk2CT0BpsC&amp;amp;pg=PA39&amp;amp;dq=masculine%20feminine%20tone%20in%20traditional%20tibetan%20grammar&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=KMSWUtK2DY3o4QSRiID4CA&amp;amp;ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=masculine%20feminine%20tone%20in%20traditional%20tibetan%20grammar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see H. B. Hannah&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While classical Tibetan grammar is more or less unanimous, the dialects of Tibetan vary to a great extent and may even have no tone distinction (as it is the case with the dialect of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amdo&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do Tibetan tones also have gender properties, or is this a property of the glyphs only?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do the gender property of the tones and/or that of the glyhps change under tone sandhi  they undergo when (sub)joined with other glyphs? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the tone sandhi, please see the data by &lt;a href=&quot;http://depts.washington.edu/icstll39/abstracts/icstll39_sung_kuo-ming.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sun Kuo-ming&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~duanmu/Tibetan92.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sun Duanmu&lt;/a&gt; as generously provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/363/gaston-mlaut&quot;&gt;Gaston Ümlaut&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T12:46:58.937" Title="Gender/tone sandhi in [classical] Tibetan grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-28T11:56:45.683" Score="9" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different languages have different grammatical numbers. For most IE languages, these are Singular, Plural and, sometimes, Dual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages have grammatical numbers differentiated by the quantity of 'items' (from Dual to Trial, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bislama,&lt;/a&gt; and Quadral, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sursurunga_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sursurunga&lt;/a&gt;). Many Austronesian languages have paucal number depending on quantity of 'items' counted (up to 27).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages (including samples of extinct Sumerian) have two more types of grammatical number not defined by the quantity of items, namely, Collective (as opposed to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singulative_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Singulative&lt;/a&gt;) and Distributive (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Navajo&lt;/a&gt; or in Finnish 'kuukausittain' = 'by [separate groups of] months', 'parvittain' = by [separate quantities of] animal groups, 'kerroittain' = 'by [separate groups of] times [of events]', etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sumerian, according to Kaneva (&lt;a href=&quot;http://kiengir.net/library/kaneva-it-shumerskiy-yazyk-2006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2006 in Russian only&lt;/a&gt;) also had a 'Sortive' type of grammatical number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ancient Tocharian languages (at least in Western Tocharian), there had been a Dual and a Pair Grammatical numbers; the former was applyed for random pair combinations, and the latter, for natural and inseparable ones (like 'eyes', 'nostrils', etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Basque, there is also a type of 'Indeterminate' (literally, 'Infinite') grammatical number ('mugagabea'), or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.buber.net/Basque/Euskara/tense.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verb aspct.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other types of grammatical numbers in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-11T13:37:02.173" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T13:37:02.173" Title="What are the other types of grammatical numbers different from those determined by 'quantity of items'?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3523" CreationDate="2013-11-28T13:18:36.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the phenomena which could reasonably fit your requirement of being about subject/object relation, Italian allows passivization of causatives. I believe this is quite rare among Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the rare but completely acceptable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;La machina è stata fatta riparare a Gianni da Maria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The car is been made repaired to Gianni by Maria&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;em&gt;La voiture a été faite réparé par Jean par Marie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is completely impossible (in fact quite unthinkable, at least for this native speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T13:18:36.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-28T13:26:10.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What I'm asking is whether there is any concept or project of a decidedly linguistic nature that would make you think, &quot;Hey, that reminds me of the P versus NP conjecture in computer science,&quot; supposing that you are already familiar with said conjecture.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure. Take a look at essentially any article by Thomas Graf for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thomasgraf.net/papers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Research page of Thomas Graf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T13:26:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6027" CreationDate="2013-11-28T15:38:20.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Transnumeral&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is sometimes used for the form in some systems that are neutral to the other distinctions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg. Basque&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;etxe&lt;/em&gt; : house - transnumeral &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;etxea&lt;/em&gt; : (a) house - singular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;etxeak&lt;/em&gt; : houses - plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leza &amp;amp; Skopeteas (2004). Numerus IN Booij et al Morphologie/Morphology Vol2, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=l7UWMZq7FGIC&amp;amp;pg=PA1054&amp;amp;lpg=PA1054&amp;amp;dq=Transnumeral%20number&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=bm0si3a6Dg&amp;amp;sig=WXGpnq18rhCgRJei2CQ-p7RxENo&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;p 1054&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T15:38:20.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-28T20:24:22.430" Score="4" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;A central distinction between dependency grammars (DGs) and phrase structure grammars (PSGs, also known as &lt;em&gt;constituency grammars&lt;/em&gt;) is the understanding of the initial division of the clause. Traditionally, PSGs divide the clause into a subject NP and a predicate VP. The predicate VP corresponds to a finite VP constituent - there are also nonfinite VP constituents, of course. DGs reject this initial binary division, which means they reject the notion that finite VP exists as a constituent (but they acknowledge nonfinite VP constituents). Thus in order to evaluate the two competing approaches to syntactic structure, the empirical evidence that can be brought to bear on the (non)existence of a finite VP constituent is central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is as follows: What theory-neutral evidence can be produced to either verify or refute the existence of a finite VP constituent? I already have a solid opinion about this matter. I am interested, however, in learning how others respond when exposed to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T13:18:20.653" Title="Does finite VP exist as a constituent?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6031" CreationDate="2013-11-28T20:58:10.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existence of a VP constituent is language specific. There are detailed constituency tests. One of the definitions of a language being configurational is the existence of a VP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main evidence comes from sentence topology. In German, for example, no finite VP can be identified because the sentence splits into Vorfeld, Mittelfeld, etc., that is, it's organized along a completely different scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-11-28T20:58:10.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6031" CreationDate="2013-11-29T00:57:39.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is methodologically misconstrued - any hypothesis can be verified or refuted only within a certain paradigm/framework, cf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;scientific statements can only be made within a theory&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (Bierwisch 1971).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Igor Mel'chuk (Mel'cuk 1988: 12) puts it very nicely - the following applies to any syntactic theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By its logical nature, dependency formalism cannot be &quot;proved&quot; or falsified. [..] Dependency formalism is a tool proposed for representing linguistic reality1, and, &lt;strong&gt;like any other tool, it may or may not prove sufficiently useful, flexible or appropriate for the task for which it has been devised; but it cannot be true or false&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine - Alex B.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be no theory-neutral evidence to refute or verify the existence of a finite VP. As a matter of fact, just in your question there are the following assumptions: the existence of a VP, finite VP, constituents etc., cf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;constituents are neither essential nor fundamental to linguistic structure&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (Langacker 1997: 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see also Carnie 2008: 18 &quot;we will find many instances where these [constituency - Alex B.] tests can give false results and results that are contradictory with the output of other tests.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2013-11-29T22:18:41.323" LastActivityDate="2013-11-29T22:18:41.323" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-29T13:38:10.827" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a program that will count information such as the most common terms in text, number of pronouns etc. I'm looking to input many song lyrics to see the most prevalent terms and the usage of pronouns and themes within each song for a sociolinguistic study. Does anyone know of any programs that can do this? I know of LIWC (Linguistic Enquiry &amp;amp; Word Count) but I have never used it and am hoping for a good recommendation before I purchase one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T20:26:30.100" Title="Corpus analysis program" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5967" CreationDate="2013-11-30T00:23:03.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You haven't mentioned, which Hebrew you mean and what format you expect. Presuming, you are interested in the Modern Israeli Hebrew and that the format is not so important, the best choice would be (Hebrew-Hebrew) Even-Shoshan Dictionary: it includes both words in vocalized form and in ktiv male; plural and smikhut forms are provided for nouns, and basic inflected forms - for verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are scanned versions of the 1979-edition on the web and there is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.babylon.com/product/dictionary/4742/7/7/1/1/1/The+Unabridged+Even-Shoshan+Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;electronic version from babylon&lt;/a&gt;, but it's for money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T00:23:03.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4668" CreationDate="2013-11-30T07:57:06.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to check a paper by Nicolas Tournadre called ‘The dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese bilingualism:  current situation and future prospects’ (2003).  There is a section of the paper on ‘the sociolinguistic context and Tibetan-Chinese mixed speech’.  This mixed speech is an urban phenomenon, and Tournadre claims that ‘many young people in the urban areas are incapable of forming a sentence in Tibetan without using Chinese words.’  He goes through some categories of words that frequently appear in Chinese.  Numbers are one of the main ones, which is interesting.  since numbers are part of the core vocabulary and thus ought to be (we might assume) more resistant to change.  Tournadre doesn’t mention any borrowing of grammar or syntax, but there are some examples of code-switching and overall he seems to cover the sociolinguistic side of the issue well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a pdf of the paper on Tournadre’s website, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tournadre.nicolas.free.fr/index.php/publications/articles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tournadre.nicolas.free.fr/index.php/publications/articles&lt;/a&gt;.  His ‘Manual of Standard Tibetan’ is an excellent textbook (co-written with Sangda Dorje).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing the question, I’ll add that he also mentions that there are equivalent terms in Tibetan for all of the vocabulary that appears in Chinese in these code-switching situations.  Most speakers know these terms, but choose not to use them for sociolinguistic reasons.  It’s not that the Tibetan language is changing and acquiring new words or structures from Chinese, as your question seems to imply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2013-11-30T08:08:45.227" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T08:08:45.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6003" CreationDate="2013-11-30T17:26:57.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess many mathematical formalizations of linguistic issues can lead&#xA;to complexity analysis, and possibly to NP-hard problem. Usually it&#xA;does not matter too much because we are dealing with small&#xA;problem. Even if a sentence is long, the complex parts of its&#xA;structure are likely to be local to a smaller identifiable subpart.&#xA;Complexity is often mathematically interesting, but linguistically&#xA;irrelevant.  Furthermore, there are often ways to encode cheaply with&#xA;proper structures situation that would lead to combinatorial explosion&#xA;(simple example: long prepositional attachment). Shared forests can do&#xA;that in parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take an example from computer science. The typing algorithm for the&#xA;language ML has a double exponential complexity. Pretty bad, except for&#xA;the fact that the pathological situations are never encountered in&#xA;practice, and the language has been in use for more than 30 years.&#xA;Note that even in this bad case, structure sharing techniques can do&#xA;away with one of the two exponentials (as long as you do not try to&#xA;print results). There are other examples of the non relevance of complexity analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, does this mean that computational linguistics should not worry&#xA;about complexity and NP-hardeness. I would think these are more likely&#xA;to crop up when doing complex corpus processing to extract linguistic&#xA;information about a language. Corpora are usually large, so that&#xA;anything exponential will be a real problem. My experience there is&#xA;limited, and the techniques I used did not raise that kind of issue,&#xA;as I recall, but this is definitely the area of computational&#xA;linguistics where I would worry about such issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personnally do not think the topic is very relevant to psycho-linguistics,&#xA;because our brain is swamped by complexity much before we reach&#xA;exponential complexity. High polynomial complexity is often beyond our&#xA;ability. But then, I am not a psycho-linguist and I read few papers&#xA;about it. They were concerned with sructural complexity of small&#xA;examples, not with asymptotic complexity of large example, which is&#xA;what P=NP is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2013-11-30T17:26:57.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6041" CreationDate="2013-11-30T19:59:47.840" Score="6" ViewCount="2477" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused as to how I'm to pronounce Sanskrit's &quot;v&quot; letter. My teacher mostly pronounces it as a &quot;w&quot; in words such as &quot;deva&quot;, &quot;svara&quot; or &quot;dvipa&quot; but invariably utters a &quot;v&quot; in syllables &quot;vra&quot; or &quot;vya&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition my teacher once quoted, from an old Indian grammarian, was that &quot;semivowels arise when the other vowels approach vowel 'a' &quot; which clearly suggest the intimate relationship between &quot;w&quot; and &quot;u&quot; (as in good), as well as between &quot;y&quot; and &quot;i&quot; (as in deep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they were so thorough in their classification of sounds, I'm sure the ancient Indian grammarians would've noticed the &quot;v&quot; as a labio-dental consonant, different from semi-vocalic &quot;w&quot;, and given it its own name and place in the alphabet - so I believe that letter was supposed to have just one sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try really hard to always pronounce &quot;v&quot; as &quot;w&quot;, but my &quot;vya&quot; sounds more like a rapid &quot;wiya&quot;, and &quot;vra&quot; sounds really like &quot;ura&quot;. But then, trying it the other way around (always as &quot;v&quot;) yields &quot;dvipa&quot; or &quot;hva&quot; to become almost impossible to be said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T17:31:14.060" Title="How is Sanskrit &quot;va&quot; supposed to be pronounced?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-11-30T21:00:14.480" Score="5" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Europeans it's easier to learn English than Japanese. Is the the same true for Chinese?&#xA;As far as measuring difficulty I would propose the amount of hours that you need to study the language to get a comparable level in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2549" LastEditDate="2013-11-30T22:46:29.937" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T06:48:08.107" Title="Is it more difficult to learn Japanese or English for a Chinese?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2013-11-30T21:37:53.493" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Whitney's &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (p. 20):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;...as the original &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; has in most European languages been changed to &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;, so also in India, and that from a very early time: the Paninean scheme and two of the Prātiçākhyas (VPr. and TPr.) distinctly define the sound as made between the upper teeth and the lower lip -- which, of course, identifies it with the modern &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;-sound.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As hippietrail points out in comments, though, this could just as easily describe a labiodental approximant [ʋ] as a labiodental fricative [v]. W. S. Allen's &lt;em&gt;Phonetics in Ancient India&lt;/em&gt; (which I don't have at hand) is sure to have more information on how the grammarians described this sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T17:31:14.060" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T17:31:14.060" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6055" CreationDate="2013-11-30T22:25:29.523" Score="9" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone could direct me to papers/sites that describe this, and a summary or something, that would be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just a parameter for languages? What do linguists think so far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;&quot;Which store did you buy the book from?&quot; and &quot;From which store did you buy the book?&quot; are both allowed in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know from Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1993, 1995) that the motivation for Wh movement is a +Wh feature and that locality constraints must be satisfied... perhaps this is related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1685" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T12:21:48.227" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T19:31:08.593" Title="What motivates / allows preposition stranding in English, but disallows it in other languages, like Mandarin?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="28" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-01T06:46:21.317" Score="-3" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose an alien life comes to Earth, and challenges us to answer a question that will allow them do determine if we can communicate without ambiguities and solve controversies in a rational way. The question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Humans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We know that 48÷2×(9+3) is 288, and we know that 48÷2y is 2 when y is (9+3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that, what is the result of expression 48÷2(9+3)? Is it 2 or 288?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They warn us that there is only one right answer, based on math and linguistics theorems, which is either 2, or 288. In other words, we cannot give answers such as &quot;ambiguity&quot;, &quot;depends&quot;, &quot;neither&quot;, &quot;you are cheating&quot;, &quot;2 or 288&quot;, etc. We must pick 2 or 288, and give one of these numbers as the answer. If we answer correctly, they will proceed with friendly relations. Otherwise, they cannot forward us about the outcome of a wrong answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They give us 10 hours to come with an answer. The government quickly assembles a committee with experts in both math and linguistics. If you were a member of such committee, which answer would you defend, and why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2797" LastEditorUserId="2797" LastEditDate="2013-12-05T06:52:33.883" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T06:52:33.883" Title="How to solve 48÷2(9+3) from a linguistics perspective?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2013-12-02T12:26:03.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6040" CreationDate="2013-12-01T06:48:08.107" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntax isn't a huge factor when it comes to language learning difficulty. Turkish shares a similar syntax with Japanese but Chinese is probably a whole lot easier for the Japanese to learn. Of course Japanese grammar is tricky for the Chinese learner, but when you see the grammar mistakes made by Chinese learners of English, you can't say that English grammar is easy for them. Syntax and grammar are two different things really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2772" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T06:48:08.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6043" CreationDate="2013-12-01T08:06:38.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using only the alien's input (i.e., ignoring cultural differences among scholars, experts, tools and literature), we must observe that the aliens are informing us about what they believe to be universally accepted conventions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;48÷2×(9+3) = 288&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;48÷2y = 2, given y = (9+3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that, we can identify two clearly distinct semantic elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;explicit multiplication&lt;/strong&gt; happens &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; division, hence 48÷2×(9+3) = 288.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;implicit multiplication&lt;/strong&gt; happens &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; division, hence 48÷2y = 2 when y = (9+3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All common elements (numbers, symbols, etc) are behaving equally in both sentences, and we can assume that they must behave equally in the question expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, the expression 48÷2(9+3) has an &lt;strong&gt;implicit multiplication&lt;/strong&gt;. Hence it must happen &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; division, and the correct answer is 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2797" LastEditorUserId="2797" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T08:45:04.730" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T08:45:04.730" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6043" CreationDate="2013-12-01T09:01:19.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a linguistic perspective, there is no such thing as a theorem. There are some recognized heuristics for determining the difference of meaning/function of linguistic units. @fernacolo demonstrated one of these above. But there are more interesting things linguistics (the study of all of language - not just words, clauses and sentences) has to say about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example shows the difference between axiomatic and conventional aspects of the practice of mathematics. How notation is used to denote the order of operations is a matter of convention. The explicit conventions in the language of maths as used on Earth is that x and simple concatenation both mean multiplication and that multiplication has an order priority over other operations. Therefore, using these two conventions the answer is 2. However, there is also a human tendency to group things together so when polled, a group of people will be about evenly split between the two answers, quite possibly giving different answers at different times. However, the alien letter seems to imply that there is a difference in interpretation of notating multiplication by concatenation or by 'x'. But this is completely arbitrary. There is no such convention among mathematicians. We can guess that the aliens are using these two notations to indicate the prioritization of operations but that is on a very small sample and it is conceivable that this holds some other meaning to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alien lifeform with any level of linguistic insight, should be asking, not whether we have a way of communicating without ambiguity - because we don't, but rather whether we have procedures that help us disambiguate. And the answer to that is yes. In math, to resolve potential ambiguities about the order of operations, we use bracketing, which would remove any ambiguities about the answer in this problem. We have another way of resolving ambiguities which asking about each other's assumption. Therefore, removing that possibility from the interaction is misunderstanding the totality of linguistic tools at our disposal. The 'human' way of answering the question would be: &quot;It seems that you make a distinction between 'x' and concatenation to indicate the order of operations. Is that correct?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T09:01:19.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6027" CreationDate="2013-12-01T11:26:12.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether that answer your question, but English and French also have the &quot;partitive&quot; meaning some indeterminate quantity of something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French: du pain, de la salade, de l'argent, des épinards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: bread,  some bread ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shares its written form with the singular or plural, but is really neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-01T12:26:46.580" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T12:26:46.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-01T17:41:52.347" Score="5" ViewCount="1801" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple decades ago when I was in middle school in Colorado, I was briefly taught to diagram sentences using the Reed-Kellogg system. I have heard that the practice of teaching sentence diagramming in schools in North America has fallen out of favor. But at Youtube, one finds numerous videos instructing one how to produce them. I am currently writing an introduction to a translation of Lucien Tesnière's &lt;em&gt;The Elements of Structural Syntax&lt;/em&gt;. Tesnière's stemmas are similar to the Reed-Kellogg diagrams in a major respect. I am therefore interested in learning about the extent to which the Reed-Kellogg diagrams are still taught in schools in North America and elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the extent to which the art of diagramming sentences is still taught in schools today? Is the practice gaining or losing?  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T14:46:44.587" Title="How widespread are Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6051" CreationDate="2013-12-01T18:02:38.460" Score="3" ViewCount="2131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what SBAR means and how do I correctly represent in a tree this sentence? Why there are 2 S? Original sentence is: After she ate the cake, Emma visited Tony in his room. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ROOT&#xA;  (S&#xA;    (SBAR (IN After)&#xA;      (S&#xA;        (NP (PRP she))&#xA;        (VP (VBD ate)&#xA;          (NP (DT the) (NN cake)))))&#xA;    (, ,)&#xA;    (NP (NNP Emma))&#xA;    (VP (VBD visited)&#xA;      (NP&#xA;        (NP (NNP Tony))&#xA;        (PP (IN in)&#xA;          (NP (PRP$ his) (NN room)))))&#xA;    (. .)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2801" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T13:44:54.470" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T13:44:54.470" Title="Stanford parse tree - What does SBAR mean?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2013-12-01T18:08:12.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be a direct answer to your question, but since your problem seems to be restriction on travel rather than obligation to use only books, you have other possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can learn a lot by watching films and TV programs in the language of interest. Where I live, we get TV programs from many countries.  Films on DVD can be good too, and you can buy them by internet. One thing I found quite productive is to watch a film with both sound and subtitles in the language you are learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T18:08:12.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6049" CreationDate="2013-12-01T18:52:13.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I guess the answer goes here, not the comments; oops.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this reference (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bulba.sdsu.edu/jeanette/thesis/PennTags.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bulba.sdsu.edu/jeanette/thesis/PennTags.html&lt;/a&gt;), SBAR is &quot;SBAR - Clause introduced by a (possibly empty) subordinating conjunction.&quot; In this case, that conjunction is 'after'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two S because 'she ate the cake' is an S, embedded within the larger S via the SBAR structure (using 'after'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T18:52:13.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-01T20:06:10.097" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently studying English language acquisition and an early elementary grade leveled subject's assessment results. The subject was asked to repeat a series of complex sentences. One of the sentences read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My friend likes to eat ice cream when it's very hot out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My friend likes to eat ice cream when it's really hot outside.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know which type of morpholocical word formation would changing the word &lt;strong&gt;out&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;outside&lt;/strong&gt; fall under? Derivational or compounding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what about replacing the word &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; even though they both never change their grammatical category? Would this be a simple substitution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any input would be appreciated. &#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2802" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T20:38:01.077" Title="Curious to understanding a word formation" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6052" CreationDate="2013-12-01T20:38:01.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why morphological formation is relevant. Just as with &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;, the subject has substituted another word of similar meaning: it just happens that &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; contains the same morpheme as &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I don't know whether or not it is relevant that &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; in this sense is rather restricted in its use: it can follow a verb of being, going or putting (&lt;em&gt;when I was out&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I'm going out&lt;/em&gt;), or an adjective of weather (&lt;em&gt;it's cold out&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;it was wet out&lt;/em&gt;) but not very much else. So the subject has substituted a possibly problematic word by a more straightforward one.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2013-12-01T20:38:01.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-02T05:46:38.660" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;my question concerns languages with clause chaining - that form sentences composed of a string of non-finite medial clauses followed by a finite final clause, or a finite initial clause followed by a string of non-finite sequential clauses. Languages such as Turkish, Korean, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are typically the semantic constraints of clauses which may be chained together in this way? Is it typical for them to have to all take the same logical (though obviously not marked) aspect, mood, voice, etc.? Must there be a uniform semantic relation between them, such as a sequence of events where there is a &quot;then&quot; relation between clauses, or a conjunction where there is an &quot;and&quot; relation between them? How strict or loose are the constraints governing what clauses can come in a single chain and when a new chain must be started?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2013-12-02T05:46:38.660" Title="Semantic Variability of Clause Chaining?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6042" CreationDate="2013-12-02T14:51:10.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I write this as an answer because the comment thread is too long already for (what I take to be) the spirit of SE sites. The language used by the author of the question (parameter, wh-movement and the two references to Chomsky) strongly suggests that he wants (or at least is comfortable with) an answer within minimalist linguistic theory. Within this framework, the answer given by P Elliott in comments seems to me to be quite perfect. The main points, as I see them, are the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As P Elliott said, prepositions stranding is a rare phenomenon cross-linguistically, with just a handful of examples outside the Germanic family. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Answering &lt;em&gt;it is just a parameter&lt;/em&gt; would be theoretically very unsatisfactory. At the very least, one would want to this parameter to impact different parts of syntax, so that one could make experimental predictions of the form &lt;em&gt;If a language tolerates preposition stranding, then...&lt;/em&gt;. Ideally, one would also want these correlations to be built on theoretical grounds which are independently motivated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;K.Abels' thesis &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000049&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; does just that. As P Elliott said, the core of the thesis is the isolation of a condition on movement (the anti-locality condition) which is certainly independently motivated in the derivation by phases conception of minimalist syntax. This condition entails that preposition stranding is possible only when PP is not a phase, something that can be investigated experimentally independently. For instance, though it might not be explicitly stated in his work, it follows from E.Reuland's analysis of binding theory that there should be a correlation between languages allowing preposition stranding and languages allowing binding of a reflexive in a PP, and this is indeed not a trivially false prediction, as is shown by the comparison below. In (297) of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000049&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, another (highly non-trivial) prediction is also offered and argued to follow from the antilocality condition: a language allows clitic pronouns as complement of a preposition if and only if it has clitic pronouns and allows preposition stranding. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another well-known experimental prediction relating preposition stranding to other syntactic phenomena is the so-called Merchant's generalization: a language allows preposition stranding if and only if it allows preposition stranding in elliptical wh-construction (so called sluicing constructions) &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.uchicago.edu/~merchant/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jacob often thinks about him (him≠Jacob). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nathan pense souvent à lui (lui=Nathan or lui≠Nathan).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000049&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Successive Cyclicity, Anti-Locality, and Adposition Stranding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://home.uchicago.edu/~merchant/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2013-12-02T14:51:10.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5979" CreationDate="2013-12-02T15:28:20.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been noted by Nancy Levin in her 1980 paper ‘Main Verb Ellipsis in Spoken English’ that copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; cannot be elided under pseudogapping ((2); an example of pseudogapping is given in (1)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) She will enjoy your book more than she will &lt;s&gt;enjoy&lt;/s&gt; mine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) *She had been happy more often than she had &lt;s&gt;been&lt;/s&gt; miserable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can check now whether &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; of the progressive behaves differently than what is called “copula be” in terms of pseudogapping, i.e. whether the first can be elided under pseudogapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) She has been enjoying your book more than she has &lt;s&gt;been enjoying&lt;/s&gt; my book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that (3) is grammatical, but not being a native speaker of English I can’t be sure. If (3) is indeed grammatical, then the contrast with (2) might show that we should distinguish between a copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; and a progressive &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; based on the syntactic behavior of the two verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be argued that the difference between (2) and (3) is the result not of two different types of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; but of the different elements left behind: an adjective in (2) (&lt;em&gt;miserable&lt;/em&gt;) and a noun phrase in (3) (&lt;em&gt;my book&lt;/em&gt;). But Ed Zoerner and Brian Agbayani argue in their 2002 paper ‘A Pseudogapping Asymmetry’ (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ledonline.it/snippets/allegati/snippets5007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ledonline.it/snippets/allegati/snippets5007.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) that adjectives can be the remnant of pseudogapping. Also, it seems to me that pseudogapping of copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is impossible even when the remnant is a noun phrase (but NP-remnants are possible when progressive &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is pseudogapped).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) a. *It has been John’s house for longer than it has &lt;s&gt;been&lt;/s&gt; my house&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; b. They have been living in my house for longer than they have &lt;s&gt;been living&lt;/s&gt; in your house. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, adjectives can be remnants when they are not complements of copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) She is wearing blue and I am &lt;s&gt;wearing&lt;/s&gt; red&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, apart from this possible syntactic argument, it has been assumed in the literature that the meaning of the &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; in (6a) is different than the meaning of the one in (6b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) a. She is a surgeon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. She is drinking tea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been assumed in the literature (e.g. Barbara Partee’s 1986 paper ‘Ambiguous pseudoclefts with unambiguous be’) that the &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; in (6a) is a function taking as arguments a predicate-type argument and an individual-type argument. This has never been suggested for the &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; in (6b). If there are indeed two different meanings, then there should be two different lexical items. (See also P Elliott’s answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4760/interchangeable-arguments-with-english-copula&quot;&gt;Interchangeable arguments with English copula&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When developing our syntactic parser for English, we at &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/?ref=1035&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contextors&lt;/a&gt; chose to distinguish between several kinds of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;: copular &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, progressive &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, passive &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, among others. Our motivation was mainly practical: we found that making these distinctions helped us manage our rule system more efficiently. In addition, it helped in developing further applications based on our parser, for example a tense recognizer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-12-02T15:37:28.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4750" CreationDate="2013-12-03T01:29:30.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is excellent. I would like to answer the question as well, adding an overlooked aspect of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some derivationalists will likely defend the first interpretation of syntactic movement listed in the question, stating that syntactic movement (or copying) is a real condition of the human faculty for language. Humans have an innate ability to move syntactic units around in their &quot;minds&quot;. Thus syntactic structures are generated in a bottom-up fashion, whereby certain constituents first appear in one position and are then moved to higher positions, and this all occurs in the mind before the actual structure is uttered by the speaker.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other syntacticians and grammarians (including myself) reject this conception of how humans produce the syntactic structures of utterances. For me, a more plausible understanding of how humans produce utterances is that they access constructions in a lexicon (or constructicon) in an online fashion as they actually speak utterances. On this sort of account, the syntactic structures of utterances are produced left to right, not bottom up. They are produced left to right moving in the same direction that our speech organs can produce sounds and in the same direction that our comprehension absorbs meaning. This sort of account rejects the first interpretation of syntactic movement in the question, although it does not necessarily agree with the second. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A difficulty facing those syntacticians (like myself) who reject the innateness hypothesis of Chomskyan syntax is the fact that much of the terminology associated with the study of syntax was established in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when Transformational Syntax (think deep and surface structure) were the main game in town. Thus since the terminology that we use today was established at that time, the presuppositions that that terminology bears remain intact in the field of syntax in general. Terms such as &lt;em&gt;extraposition&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;extraction&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;scrambling&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fronting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;topicalization&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;shifting&lt;/em&gt;, etc. all carry the presupposition of movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a non-derivationalist wants to examine, for instance, the phenomenon denoted by the term &lt;em&gt;extraposition&lt;/em&gt;, he/she is faced with a dilemma. He/she can use the term &lt;em&gt;extraposition&lt;/em&gt; (which presupposes that something has been &quot;extraposed&quot;) so that his/her audience knows immediately the phenomenon that is meant, but in doing so, he/she has to accept that the term itself expresses the unwanted presupposition of movement. Or he/she can avoid this unwanted presupposition by choosing another term, but this option has the drawback that introducing unknown terminology is difficult. Doing so requires more patience of the reader/listener, a fact that will likely reduce the size of the audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am describing here is a situation that perpetuates the transformationalists' interpretation of syntax. The transformationalist has a major advantage, since if the non-transformationalist wants to be understood, he/she is almost forced to employ a terminology that actually supports the transformationalists' stance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and the short of all this is that many more syntacticians, grammarians, and linguists would likely choose the second option listed in the question than the first, and there are others like myself who completely reject the first and distance themselves from the second, choosing instead a third interpretation which sees &quot;syntactic movement&quot; and &quot;transformations&quot; as constructions that are stored in the lexicon/constructicon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T01:29:30.823" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6060" CreationDate="2013-12-03T14:40:14.617" Score="3" ViewCount="2638" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: headstrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a noun: The headstrong don't easily give up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an adjective: The headstrong youth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2243" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T17:25:53.840" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T22:56:46.967" Title="What's the term for a word that can be read both as a noun and an adjective depending on where it is used?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-03T14:47:24.440" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a first glance it seems to be obvious/expectable (at least to some extent) that the more frequently a word is used in language the more synonyms it should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody point out whether this has been proved scientifically/statistically and works/publications some data on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1174" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T03:15:42.100" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T03:15:42.100" Title="Connection between word usage frequency and number of synonyms for the word" Tags="&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2013-12-03T16:01:44.497" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there are lot of Adj/N pairs in English, your example seems to be of the specific type 'Nominal Adjectives' (e.g. 'the meek', 'the poor').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say they're nouns in their own right; you can't clearly swap them into other sentences ('A headstrong doesn't give up' or 'I'm looking for a headstrong'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when it is true that there are identical N/Adj pairs, they're often nouns used as adjectives ('ham' in 'ham sandwich'); that is, 'noun adjuncts'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there's a very common practice in English (very popular in recent marketing) of what you could call 'zero-derived deadjectival nouns': 'Think different', 'Eat fresh', etc. Less obviously marketing-based examples are things like 'I was attacked by some toughs'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, English has a number of non-homophonous homonym N/Adj pairs: e.g. 'concrete'/'concrete'. However, even when such a pair is homophonous, it would be the same: a homonym/homophone pair of two distinct words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T06:04:16.760" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T06:04:16.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1275" CreationDate="2013-12-03T17:14:41.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Icelandic is a very isolated language and by that I mean that it isn't really surrounded by any other languages close by. The only language it was influenced by in the last couple of hundred years is probably Danish, which has to do with the fact that the Danish conquered Iceland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Icelandic was able to change, but there were no other influence besides that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also nowadays it has picked up some English words, but they made a committee (like to French) to preserve the language and to invent new Icelandic words for new stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2811" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T03:10:38.543" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T03:10:38.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2013-12-03T21:26:31.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best term to denote &lt;em&gt;headstrong&lt;/em&gt; when it functions like a noun is &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt;. The term &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt; is broader than the the term &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;. Any word that functions as the head of a noun phrase is a nominal. Thus if the head of a noun phrase looks like an adjective (e.g. &lt;em&gt;the good&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the helpful&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the first&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the best&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), then one can use the term &quot;nominal&quot; to denote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terminology in this area is of course not used consistently. There is confusion about the distinction between &lt;em&gt;nouns&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nominals&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;substantives&lt;/em&gt;. For most of us, the noun concept is relatively clear. The term &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt; is less clear, but my understanding of it is that it is a broader concept, encompassing nouns, pronouns, and any other word that functions as the head of a noun phrase. The term &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt; is older and has fallen out of use. It seems to have been more prominent in the grammars of European languages. It denoted a noun in the narrow sense (not including pronouns and adjectives used as nouns).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class of adjectives that can be nominals if they are plural and introduced by &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is large, e.g. &lt;em&gt;the old&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the fat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the skinny&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the friendly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the robust&lt;/em&gt;, etc. But there may be an animacy requirement on the adjectives that are used in this way. It doesn't seem to work for adjectives that modify inanimate objects, e.g. *&lt;em&gt;the wide&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;the red&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;the rough&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;the smooth&lt;/em&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-03T21:26:31.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-04T00:18:49.027" Score="1" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which arguments can prove that the Greeks and Romans did not practice linguistics in its modern meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2814" LastEditorUserId="23416" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T19:43:47.310" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T06:39:19.897" Title="Schools of Greeks and Romans linguistics" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2013-12-04T11:51:00.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2013-12-04T02:25:47.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not know what you call linguistics in its modern meaning&#xA;(probably not the same thing I would). Linguistics has so many&#xA;aspects. Were grammarians in former centuries doing linguistics? What&#xA;of Alexandrine grammarians, though their work was not quite similar to&#xA;later grammarians a millenium later (and some). What of these later&#xA;grammarians ? Grammatical concepts evolved slowly and I suspect (I am&#xA;only an amateur) often with prescriptive rather than descriptive&#xA;intent at first (e.g. the Académie Française in the 17th century).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neverthelees, the Greek civilisation was very adept at analysing texts&#xA;and discourse (is that modern linguistics?). It actually lead to the&#xA;discovery of logic and rhetorics. And logic happens to be now, in&#xA;various guises, a fondamental ingredient of language analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They started things, and building up concepts and organized thought&#xA;and knowledge is a very long process of evolution. This brings&#xA;questions on the structure of this evolution, But it is probably not&#xA;the place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were the Greeks doing modern physics. Well, they knew some laws. Does&#xA;that qualifies them even though they knew nothing of the modern&#xA;description of the world, of the standard model, of atoms and&#xA;electromagnetism, or of gauge theories. Archimedes is indeed&#xA;considered a great physicist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Post-scriptum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found by chance a very relevant reference, though &lt;strong&gt;Indian&lt;/strong&gt; rather&#xA;than Greek or Roman. According to Wikipedia, the Indian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit grammarian&#xA;Pāṇini&lt;/a&gt; did very early work in the 4th century BC, that apparently had&#xA;a strong influence on modern linguistics. Still according to&#xA;Wikioedia, Pāṇini's work is purely grammatical and lexicographic&#xA;(Sanskrit morphology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his monograph &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200110030312/http://www.helsinki.fi/esslli/courses/readers/K54.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mathematical Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;András Kornai starts the foreword as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematical linguistics is rooted both in Euclid's (325BCE ­ 265BCE)&#xA;axiomatic method and in Pāṇini's (520BCE ­ 460BCE) method of&#xA;grammatical description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pāṇini's contribution was first noted here by Gaston Ümlaut, in a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6064#comment-13953&quot;&gt;comment above&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that may be another proof that our early forefathers&#xA;did real science, ... and that it was not limited to Greece or Rome and the Mediterranean area as western&#xA;culture would sometimes have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="31457" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T06:39:19.897" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T06:39:19.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-04T06:39:12.723" Score="4" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember reading something years ago on this subject --an article in a magazine or something, I don't even remember-- but what I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; remember is the theme that it's supposedly common for languages to conflate &amp;quot;sense of touch&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;emotional well-being&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is a common metaphor in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The rock feels rough.&amp;quot; (Implication: the speaker felt/touched it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I feel rough.&amp;quot; (Implication: the speaker felt/touched themselves?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; this actually a pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the situation with &amp;quot;fühlen&amp;quot; is much the same in German, but that doesn't count unless the metaphor developed independently, with no inter-language borrowing or common inheritance from a shared parent language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese &amp;quot;genki&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;original energy/spirit/air&amp;quot;?) seems like an immediately obvious counter-example to me. (And I would guess that Japanese originally obtained it as a borrowing from Chinese, so...? I obviously can't conclude much from that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what sort of studies may have been done on this? Any widely-accepted conclusions...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2816" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T20:08:30.037" Title="Conflation of &quot;sense of touch&quot; with &quot;emotional well-being&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-04T14:51:16.137" Score="2" ViewCount="1190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning about English grammar, but as a programmer, I have natually gravitated towards learning about syntactic structure. I am learning from &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.washington.edu/wassink/LING200/lect14_syntax2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;university lecture notes&lt;/a&gt; which I found through Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The production rule for a sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S → NP (Aux) VP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the author does not address sentences which are of the general form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;NP Aux Adjective  (where the Aux is a copula, like is, are etc)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;John is tall.&#xA;He is gentle.&#xA;They are unwell.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: another unaccounted case would be sentences of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;NP Aux NP  (where the Aux is a copula)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Donald is a programmer.&#xA;John is an artist.&#xA;He is a kung-fu master.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the production rule above &lt;code&gt;S → NP (Aux) VP&lt;/code&gt; account for such cases, or do I need another production rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2685" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T03:03:38.943" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T03:03:38.943" Title="English Phrase Structure Rules and adjectives" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6068" CreationDate="2013-12-04T17:37:22.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase structure rules you are learning stem from the 1960s. Those rules are still taught by some in introductory linguistics courses, and they seem to still be accepted by many in computational linguistics. Theoretical syntax, however, progressed beyond those rules decades ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusion with the examples you are considering stems from the status of AUX. My guess is that the person who wrote the notes does not view the copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; as an AUX. What this means is that for the author of those notes, a sentence such as &lt;em&gt;John is tall&lt;/em&gt; does not contain an auxiliary. The copula is construed as a main verb, which means the VP is &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;. So there is no reason to introduce a new phrase structure rule to cover such cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize that those old phrase structure rules will not get you very far when it comes to building an understanding of the syntactic structure of sentences. What happens to the VP, for instance, when subject-auxiliary inversion occurs, e.g.  &lt;em&gt;Is John tall?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-04T17:37:22.353" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-05T05:09:23.690" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;We were given some data and the questions below. I don't need someone to tell me the answer, I just need someone to help explain what X after X construction is. It makes NO sense to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major questions: what is the structure of the construction itself? What type of phrase is it, what’s its head? Jackendoff presents one analysis where the first N is the head, and the rest is its complement. He ultimately favors an analysis where this is a strange sort of PP, though, with the P as its head. You should present possible trees of each of these types and choose one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2820" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T03:01:54.670" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T03:01:54.670" Title="X after X construction?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6031" CreationDate="2013-12-05T10:35:22.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comparatives may provide evidence in support of finite VP being a constituent in English, but the evidence is quite theory dependent. In her 1983 paper ‘Comparative Ellipsis: A Phrase Structure Analysis’ (which can be downloaded from her website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/xling12napoli.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/xling12napoli.html&lt;/a&gt;), Donna Jo Napoli distinguishes between two types of comparatives. Belonging to the first type are comparative clauses like those in (1) (taken from Napoli (676: 4)), which can be accounted for by processes that are known to be involved in other types of sentences with missing material in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) a. Mary wrote more books than John did&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; b. Mary loves Fellini more than John, Bertolucci&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; c. John would lie to Sue sooner than Bill would to Jane&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &#xA;  d. I organize more than I actually run her life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1a) is an example of VP-ellipsis; (1b) of gapping; (1c) of pseudogapping; and (1d) of Right Node Raising.&#xA;To the second type of comparatives belong those that cannot be accounted for by general processes; the examples in (2) are taken from Napoli (679: 8, 9) (my representation of the missing/unpronounced material doesn’t follow her account).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) a. John sent books to more people than [&lt;sub&gt;ComparativeClause&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;S&lt;/sub&gt; Sue sent books to ∅&lt;sub&gt;x many people&lt;/sub&gt;]]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; b. John sent books to more people than [&lt;sub&gt;ComparativeClause&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;S&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; Sue] &lt;s&gt;sent books to&lt;/s&gt; ∅&lt;sub&gt;x many &#xA;   people&lt;/sub&gt;]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (2a-b), &lt;em&gt;∅&lt;sub&gt;x many people&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; designates the material that is obligatorily not pronounced in the comparative clause, and the striked-through portion designates material that is not pronounced but could have been pronounced. Napoli argues that the pronounced material after &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt; must be a constituent of the embedded comparative or else form a constituent together with the material that is obligatorily unpronounced. She supports her claim by contrasting the grammatical sentences in (2) with the ungrammatical ones in (3) (again taken from Napoli (679: 8, 9)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) a. * John sent books to more people than Sue sent books &lt;s&gt;to&lt;/s&gt; ∅&lt;sub&gt;x many people &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  b. * John sent books to more people than Sue sent &lt;s&gt;books to&lt;/s&gt; ∅&lt;sub&gt;x many people&lt;/sub&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Napoli assumes that &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; is a coordination word in (2), and that it may coordinate phrases belonging to categories other than the sentence, among them verb phrases; (4) is again taken from her paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) I eat more than drink&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it seems to me that we can also find comparatives where the pronounced material following &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt; is a finite verb followed by its direct object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) He more often eats cakes to gain weight than [&lt;sub&gt;ComparativeVP&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; ∅&lt;sub&gt;x often&lt;/sub&gt; drinks water &lt;s&gt;to gain weight&lt;/s&gt;]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept Napoli’s generalization, this means that the sequence finite verb + direct object must be a constituent of the comparative VP in (5), as is shown in (6). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) He more often eats cakes to gain weight than [&lt;sub&gt;ComparativeVP&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; ∅&lt;sub&gt;x often&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; drinks water] &lt;s&gt;to gain weight&lt;/s&gt;]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastEditorUserId="2715" LastEditDate="2013-12-05T13:18:20.653" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T13:18:20.653" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-05T18:45:46.917" Score="4" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) tend to say that &quot;My friends came with their wife, who were all blowing their nose.&quot; (no polygamy, a cold epidemic but no monstrosity either), whereas Germanic langagues tend to say that &quot;My friends came with their wives, who were all blowing their noses.&quot; (!) Any explanation for the difference? Which is more represented in the Indo-European family of languages? Which would be the original way of seeing things and which a contamination by another family of languages?&#xA;&quot;Mes amis sont venus avec leur femme, qui toutes faisaient trompeter leur nez.&quot; ('blowing their noses' would be 'qui toutes se mouchaient' without any mention of the nose; that is why I chose 'qui toutes faisaient trompeter leur nez' which is not common at all but has the merit of including the word nose, in the singular, of course)&#xA;I know I would write 'avec leur femme' even though following it with a verb in the plural does look strange, less so, however, if you add 'toutes', the way I did in the edited version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2825" OwnerDisplayName="user58319" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T02:47:22.363" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T06:46:24.083" Title="My otherwise monogamous friends came to the party with their wives" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6073" CreationDate="2013-12-05T19:46:55.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French you can write either “leur femme” or “leurs femmes”; both are considered correct. It is purely an orthographic issue, as the pronunciation is the same in both cases. But to write “leur femme (sing.), qui faisaient (pl.)” seems to me enormously illogical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin I would definitely say “Venerunt amici cum suis uxoribus”; to say “cum sua uxore” is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2013-12-05T20:18:48.443" LastActivityDate="2013-12-05T20:18:48.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-05T21:42:38.910" Score="3" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finding it difficult to figure this out in sentences like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) I have a job to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) I need you to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, &quot;have&quot; and &quot;need&quot; assign theta-roles to &quot;a job&quot; and &quot;you&quot; respectively, but since an NP cannot receive multiple theta-roles, how do you explain the fact that both NP's are respectively interpreted as the object and subject of the infinival verbs in these sentences? The theoretical framework is minimalism. Let me know if this question is not clear enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2827" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T02:45:41.340" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T03:42:43.857" Title="Theta-role Assignment in Infinitival Clauses" Tags="&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-05T21:56:44.320" Score="3" ViewCount="663" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to diagram the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The activist continued to protest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the basic structure and what movement is taking place but I'm confused as to how to diagram the V followed by an infinitive (continued to protest). Could someone please explain? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T02:37:37.830" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T08:56:55.593" Title="Deep structure tree VP help" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2013-12-06T01:08:17.970" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;strong&gt;აფალინა&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;/apʰalina/&lt;/code&gt;? the Black Sea bottlenosed dolphin (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accobams.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=852%3aTursiops%20truncatus%20ponticus&amp;amp;catid=34%3asite-content&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tursiops truncatus ponticus&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is/used to be common in the Black Sea and has a similar name in (all?) languages bordering on the Black sea: afalina (Turkish), афала (Bulgarian), afalin (Romanian), афаліна (Ukranian), афалина (Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-12-06T14:54:05.517" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T14:54:05.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6082" CreationDate="2013-12-06T05:04:36.470" Score="2" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that phrase structure rules have been very inconsistent over my studies. I've seen NP = (det)(adj)N ; NP = (det)N(PP); these definitions seem to change with context. Is it just because there's no strict phrase formalisms in language? Or am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T18:45:21.620" Title="Why are phrase structure rules always inconsistent?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6077" CreationDate="2013-12-06T10:20:02.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid the analysis depends on the theory of grammar you're using. In most CF-based formalisms, &quot;continued&quot; would be an I that takes a VP (&quot;to protest&quot;) as its complement. In this case, however, the sentence seems to contain a complex predicate (or clause union). Lexicalist theories assume that both verbs are co-heads in a complex (composite) predication. In any case, one would represent the sentence as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[IP [NP the activist] [I' [I continued] [VP to protest]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T10:20:02.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6080" CreationDate="2013-12-06T18:45:21.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to describe a given language, even in a given&#xA;formalism. I would think that at any time, a language is always&#xA;inconsistent. Diachronic evolution seems a good reason to believe&#xA;that. Latin has slowly evolved into Italian, Spanish, Catalan,&#xA;Roumanian, Portuguese and French (what did I forget?). Actually there&#xA;have been many more dialects and variants that did not all&#xA;survive. And the evolution has been progressive. How can you expect to&#xA;have consistency in such an unstable context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know of such experiments, but I would guess that no two&#xA;people will agree everywhere on the grammaticality of some sets of&#xA;sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that shows most for the visible (surface) syntax of languages. One&#xA;task of linguistics is to identify deeper and more stable concepts&#xA;that structure the language in a more consistent way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters for surface syntax, that you are considering, is more to&#xA;understand adequate and tractable formalisms that will let you&#xA;describe the language (almost) adequately, and develop techniques to&#xA;attain from that the deeper structure. Distinct surface descriptions in&#xA;the chosen formalism can hopefully give you similar understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, even the choice of the formalism can be open, and there are&#xA;many competing. Even if you consider only phrase structure, the&#xA;variant you have been using seem to be the context-free variant of&#xA;Chomsky.  But others, with interesting descriptive properties have&#xA;been developped, such as tree-adjoining-grammars, to give an&#xA;example. Then these formalisms can form a skeleton to be completed by&#xA;more detailed information (features).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also relations with the lexicon have to be established, and structural&#xA;information and features can be attached to the lexicon.&#xA;Interestingly, when choosing or designing a formalism, independently&#xA;of the language to be described, there will be tension between the&#xA;&quot;phrase structure skeleton&quot; and the lexicon, regarding where some of&#xA;the structural information should be placed. Emphasizing the lexicon&#xA;can also be done by lexicalizing the phrase structure skeleton (which&#xA;is what Greibach normal form does for context-free languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are other very different kinds of formalisms, such as&#xA;categorial grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is to acquire the knowledge, understanding and effective&#xA;usage of natural language description tools. Then you use these tools&#xA;to give the best description you can of the natural language&#xA;structure. We do not all have to agree on what might be the best&#xA;description of the structure of a natural language (hence the&#xA;variations you complain about), but we need common descriptive tools&#xA;to understand each other when discussing these issues.  The formalisms&#xA;are (part of) the language needed by linguists to exchange and discuss&#xA;meaningfully about the natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T18:45:21.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2013-12-06T18:50:24.650" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you couldbe right... I also have thought about this. I myself found that there are a lot of words and names that have a similar sound and also a similar meaning. could be coincidence, but i compared the (seemingly semitic) german words with the ancient hebrew words and also with some latin languages and in many cases the latin languages didn't copy all the semitic words that the germans did copy. one example: the verb calling/shouting (there are different version of this word, both in hebrew as in the germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Germanic languages:&#xA;1. Dutch: roepen. Danish: ringe. German: rufen. Norwegian: ring. &#xA;2. Dutch: schreeuwen. Danish: rabe. German: schreien. Norwegian: rope.&#xA;3. Dutch: brullen. German: röhren. Danish: brol. Norwegian: roar. Eng: roar.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Hebrew:&#xA;1. רוע Ruwa/Roa = Shouting/calling&#xA;2. רנה Rinna = giving a shout/calling out&#xA;See the bibles verses: Jozua 6:16 &amp;amp; Psalm 17:1 for an example of those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin: clamor &amp;amp; vocatio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientifically this may not be usable, especially because in this example I used the modern words. Nevertheless, also looking at the Y-DNA profiles of the german men there is a real mixture visable between two groups. One which is very comon in the western latin european countries (R1b) and is present in about 50-90% of the men and another group (I1) which is less comon (20-30%) mainly found in northern europe and scandinavia. The I1 group is most closely related to what today are the semitic people (group J: arabs, jews etc.) and are believed to have migrated already a while ago from the area of israel/iraq/syria etc. to europe. the R1b group has it's origins more in the area of eastern iran/afghanistan etc. and could have always spoken a indo-european language. The I1 group however could have originately spoken a semitic language before they mixed with the R1b's. Because the R1b group is much bigger nowadays (I1 is in no place the dominant group) it seems logical that the I1's slowly adopted the indo-europen language as they mixed in. However we still find some traces in the german languages that remind us of the semitic heritage of part of the germans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my theory ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2833" LastActivityDate="2013-12-06T18:50:24.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6086" CreationDate="2013-12-07T09:04:54.610" Score="9" ViewCount="9830" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bleeding is when rule A prevents rule B from applying. But counterbleeding is when two rules are ordered too late to bleed. I see counterbleeding the same as feeding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you have some segment X. Rule A and B may only apply to X. A applies first and changes X-&gt;Y. Next, B applies to Y but it is in vacuous application, so nothing happens. In this scenario A is said to bleed B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's say we have rule A and B, but this time let's just say A applies to X or Y. Now, when we apply rule B first. Let's say B changes X-&gt;Y , and next A applies to Y. If A had applied first, then it would have bleeded B. This seems to be a feeding relationship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-07T16:17:13.067" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T03:43:32.720" Title="What's the difference between counterbleeding, bleeding and feeding?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6067" CreationDate="2013-12-07T09:24:27.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a full answer to your question, but I'd like to point out that there's some good evidence that there are little to no universals in language. (relevant paper here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/LIN_106:_UCB_files/Evans-Levinson09_preprint.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/LIN_106:_UCB_files/Evans-Levinson09_preprint.pdf&lt;/a&gt; ). So it would be a safe bet to assume that the touch metaphor is not ubiquitous in language. That being said, there is probably a more satisfying historical explanation for the metaphor's distribution...which is beyond me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T09:24:27.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6084" CreationDate="2013-12-07T16:18:49.187" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to start by going through some more detailed definitions of the various rule orderings, with examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If rule A creates the environment for rule B to apply, then rule A &lt;strong&gt;feeds&lt;/strong&gt; rule B, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: ɣ → ∅ / V_V&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: e → i / _e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/teɣe/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: tee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: tie&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [tie]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the order A B is a feeding order, then the order BA is a &lt;strong&gt;counterfeeding&lt;/strong&gt; order, i.e. applying the rules in order BA would &lt;em&gt;fail to feed&lt;/em&gt;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/teɣe/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: ----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: tee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [tee]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterfeeding is &lt;em&gt;opaque&lt;/em&gt; in the sense that the surface form violates the generalisation that [ee] sequences are generally altered via the raising rule (B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If rule A destroys an environment that could have triggered rule B, then A &lt;strong&gt;bleeds&lt;/strong&gt; B, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: V → ∅ / VVC_&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: stop → fricative / V_V  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/heidinir/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: heidnir&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: ----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [heidnir]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the order AB is a bleeding order, then order BA is a &lt;strong&gt;counterbleeding&lt;/strong&gt; order. So, applying the rules in the order BA would &lt;em&gt;fail to bleed&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/heidinir/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: heiðinir&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: heiðnir&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [heiðnir]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterbleeding is an &lt;em&gt;opaque&lt;/em&gt; rule ordering: The surface form violates the generalisation that fricatives appear between vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, onto your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that based on the definitions i've given, counterbleeding is not the same as feeding. In the feeding example, rule A creates the environment for rule B to apply - if rule A hadn't applied, then rule B couldn't apply. In the counterbleeding example, application of B simply does not &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; rule A from applying - even if rule B hadn't applied, rule A would still have been able to apply. Let's consider your concrete example in light of this. Let's say that X is a stop and Y is a fricative, and the environment in question is intervocalic, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let's say you have some segment X. Rule A and B may only apply to X. A applies first and changes X-&gt;Y. Next, B applies to Y but it is in vacuous application, so nothing happens. In this scenario A is said to bleed B.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: stop → fricative / V_V&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: stop → [-voice] / V_V  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that in the order AB, application of A will &lt;strong&gt;bleed&lt;/strong&gt; application of B. Exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ada/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: aza&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: ----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [aza]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Now let's say we have rule A and B, but this time let's just say A applies to X or Y. Now, when we apply rule B first. Let's say B changes X-&gt;Y , and next A applies to Y. If A had applied first, then it would have bleeded B. This seems to be a feeding relationship.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: [-sonorant] → ∅ / V_V&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: stop → fricative / V_V  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ada/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: aa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: ----&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [aa]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ada/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: aza&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: aa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [aa]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because A applies the [-sonorant], it should affect both stops and fricatives. If we apply A first, it will destroy the environment that triggers B, so A bleeds B, therefore the order AB is a &lt;strong&gt;bleeding&lt;/strong&gt; relationship, and the order BA is a &lt;strong&gt;counter-bleeding&lt;/strong&gt; relationship. BA does not count as a &lt;strong&gt;feeding&lt;/strong&gt; relationship, because A would have applied even if B had not applied, so although B does, in a sense, create the environment for A to apply to, B's application is not &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to create the environment that A applies to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final note: In practice, since B is triggered by a set of environments that are a proper subset of the set of environments that trigger A, B will block application of A to stops due to the &lt;strong&gt;elsewhere principle&lt;/strong&gt;. If this wasn't the case, then we wouldn't have any evidence for the existence of B in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: Amalia Arvaniti's lecture slides for ACTL 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-12-08T03:43:32.720" LastActivityDate="2013-12-08T03:43:32.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5999" CreationDate="2013-12-07T16:49:53.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ended up saying in my paper that there are two aspects: distributive and durative. I think distributive is a decent term for things like &lt;em&gt;I've met a lot of weird people over the years&lt;/em&gt;. Durative is meant for expressions like &lt;em&gt;Production has doubled over the past three months&lt;/em&gt;. Not sure if that is any different than &lt;em&gt;in the last three months&lt;/em&gt;. Also not entirely sure if I like durative, but oh well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T16:49:53.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6067" CreationDate="2013-12-07T20:08:30.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese does have 気持ち, which roughly translates into &quot;holding of spirit/air&quot;, meaning &quot;feeling&quot;, and it is not a Chinese loan (perhaps calque, but I don't know any Chinese dialect using a similar word) as it is a native Japanese compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, umm, you are using your hands to hold air...which could be related to the &quot;touch&quot; thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T20:08:30.037" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6034" CreationDate="2013-12-07T20:26:30.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a number of other programs out there as well, but a lot have flaws. Having control over what you can search and what your outputs are is really useful, so you'll need to learn some regular expressions and a wee bit of coding (not much, I promise!). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural Language ToolKit&lt;/a&gt; can do this nicely if you're willing to learn a bit of python. I'd also recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0415962706&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;QCLWR&lt;/a&gt; but the learning curve is a bit higher for R than for python. R and python are both free, btw. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2838" LastActivityDate="2013-12-07T20:26:30.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4837" CreationDate="2013-12-07T21:51:28.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess most signed languages are known to too few speaking people for&#xA;such an occurrence to be likely. It is not so much a matter of prestige as a matter of population size and communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are also very limited&#xA;signed languages used by speaking people when they have to communicate&#xA;silently or from a distance. It would have a better chance for &quot;word&#xA;borrowing&quot; from the signed to the spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of that, I did think of one expression in English that seems&#xA;to answer the question: &quot;&lt;em&gt;to give the finger&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (sorry if that example&#xA;may break some rules - this is linguistics here).  There are probably&#xA;some others examples. Maybe, &quot;&lt;em&gt;to wave someone goodbye&lt;/em&gt;&quot; would qualify too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting point about &quot;&lt;em&gt;to give the finger&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is that it can be used in contexts where it is not actually describing a physical movement, but can be interpreted directly as meaning strong refusal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar analysis applies to &quot;&lt;em&gt;waving goodbye&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, meaning &quot;aknowledging&#xA;departure or loss&quot;. It can sometimes refer a description of the&#xA;actual signed gesture, like &quot;&lt;em&gt;giving the finger&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. But it clearly only have the abstract acknowledgement&#xA;meaning when applied to something other than a person. For example, in&#xA;the sentence &quot;if you trust bankers, you can wave your savings&#xA;goodbye&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also counter-examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression &quot;&lt;em&gt;Back-scratching&lt;/em&gt;&quot; refers to exchange of favor, not to&#xA;actual physical scratching. However, it is irrelevant here because&#xA;scratching someone's back is not considered a mean of communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression &quot;&lt;em&gt;to nod approval&lt;/em&gt;&quot; does refer to the signed gesture of&#xA;approval, but (afaik) is only used to actually describe the signed&#xA;gesture. One would not say &quot;&lt;em&gt;the man nodded&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to mean that he expressed&#xA;agreement by any mean, but only to mean that he expressed agreement by&#xA;actually nodding. So the verb &quot;&lt;em&gt;to nod&lt;/em&gt;&quot; cannot be considered as&#xA;borrowed from the signed language, but only as a reference to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2013-12-10T12:24:44.430" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T12:24:44.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-09T06:05:02.240" Score="4" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in Mongolia trying to learn some Mongolian and I've come across their cute word for &quot;litlle&quot;, &quot;small&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;жижиг&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On previous trips through Turkey I recall learning a similar cute word for &quot;little&quot;, &quot;small&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;küçük&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no fanboi of the Altaic Hypothesis but it's pretty accepted here and of course there is lots of contact between Mongolic and Turkic to allow loanwords by some route. Though I would've thought this would be core vocabulary not usually borrowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T12:09:41.400" Title="Could Turkish &quot;küçük&quot; and Mongolian &quot;жижиг&quot; be related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6092" CreationDate="2013-12-09T12:09:41.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first two similar syllables of the Mongolian word pose a difficult problem for those who want to correlate them with the two different syllables of the Turkic word. Actually, the modern Khalkha Mongolian &lt;code&gt;жижиг&lt;/code&gt; comes from the Old Mongolian &lt;code&gt;didig&lt;/code&gt;, which also has the two first syllables identical, and the Turkish &lt;code&gt;küçük&lt;/code&gt; comes from the Proto-Turkic &lt;code&gt;*kičük&lt;/code&gt;. So, my answer is: no, they are not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T12:09:41.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3691" CreationDate="2013-12-09T18:58:02.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within Germanic, it's only the North and West Germanic languages that have /y/ (and /œ æ/, which you didn't ask about, but which owe their existence to the same umlaut phenomenon); Gothic lacks these sounds and they're accordingly not reconstructed for Proto-Germanic. It's possible that Northwest Germanic languages got these sounds as a result of Uralic contact, since such contact certainly occurred; front rounded vowels pattern areally (see jlawler's WALS link above), so a diffusion scenario is not implausible. But I don't actually know of any evidence for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, Attic-Ionic Greek also had /y/, so Germanic languages aren't alone in IE in having this sound; and in Greek it seems to have been a language-internal development, without any contact source.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether &quot;Germanic phonetics is less similar to the rest of IE&quot;, it's no more dissimilar than Irish with its velarized and palatalized consonants, or Indic with its voiced and voiceless aspirates. Lots of IE languages/branches have phonological peculiarities that set them apart from the rest of the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-12-09T19:24:04.680" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T19:24:04.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4869" CreationDate="2013-12-09T19:32:41.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/relatives.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relative clauses&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/51126/15299&quot;&gt;embedded question complement&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-clauses&lt;br&gt;&#xA;can be very tricky to identify.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of the sentences presented contain embedded question complement &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-clauses,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;none&lt;/strong&gt; of the sentences presented contain restrictive relative &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-clauses.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relatives and questions use almost the same set of &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are some differences, though.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For one thing, &lt;em&gt;whether, how,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; can never be used as relative pronouns:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;**the answer whether he was coming*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;**the way how he walks*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;**the car what he drives*  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is severely restricted in what nouns it may modify as a relative pronoun; basically only &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;the reason why he came&lt;/em&gt;, but not **the cause/purpose/intent(ion) why he came*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These restrictions on &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words contribute to the frequency of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in relative clauses,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;since &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; can be used instead of &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word, and is not restricted like &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/cliffs-equi-raising.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Complements&lt;/a&gt;, on the other hand, are clauses used as nouns,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;while relatives are clauses used as adjectives, to modify nouns.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e, complement clauses can be the subject &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; the object of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;clauses that have the appropriate (complement-taking) predicates.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first, second, and fourth original sentences contain &lt;strong&gt;direct object&lt;/strong&gt; complement clauses,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;governed by the respective transitive predicates &lt;em&gt;remember, remember,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;discover&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third original sentence contains a &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt; complement clause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;governed by the complex predicate &lt;em&gt;remains a mystery&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(This predicate, btw, has already been done some things to;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/remainders.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for more details than you need on that subject, see here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's enough to be going on with for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2013-12-09T19:32:41.330" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3691" CreationDate="2013-12-10T01:42:28.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close front rounded  /y/ also occurs in Romance Piemontese and Lombard in NC/NE Italy, These languages are sometimes called Gallo-Italian but their /y/ (in Lombard also /ø/) are probably not related to French. There are no fronted round vowels in neighboring Occitan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T01:42:28.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-10T03:14:05.807" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages with vowel harmony seem to have two main divisions of vowels plus a neutral division.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main division is along one vowel dimension such as frontness/backness or +/- ATR (advanced tongue root). These are the divisions I'm referring to with &quot;strong&quot; in scare quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neutral category is a different type because neutral vowels can mix with vowels of any &quot;strong&quot; category, so I'm not concerned with these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested to know if there exist any languages where each non-neutral vowel in a word must be a member of one and the same category out of three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be interested to hear about languages with more than three &quot;strong categories&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T10:49:15.860" Title="Are there languages with three non-neutral &quot;strong&quot; divisions of vowel harmony?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-10T03:42:48.703" Score="3" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say you were to to pick up a dictionary and look up a word in Chinese before the advent of any type of phonetic notation system such as Pinyin or Bopomofo. How would words in that dictionary be organized? Would you look up characters by radical? Would they be organized semantically? Did it try and account for China's massive linguistic diversity in any way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T23:48:11.943" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T20:54:55.260" Title="How did a logographic orthography like Chinese organize its word-stock before any type of phonetic notation?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6097" CreationDate="2013-12-10T10:43:16.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language with a triple vowel harmony distinction is Manchu. In this language there are three &quot;strong&quot; vowels, &lt;code&gt;a, e, o&lt;/code&gt; and two &quot;weak&quot; ones, &lt;code&gt;i, u&lt;/code&gt;. The vowel harmony in Manchu is a bit tricky, in a word a &quot;strong&quot; vowel can be followed by the same &quot;strong&quot; one or by any of the &quot;weak&quot; ones, but a &quot;weak&quot; vowel can be followed by a &quot;weak&quot; vowel or by &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;, but never by &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;. That is, three sets of vowels are possible within a word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a, i, u&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;e, i, u&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;o, i, u&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3rd row can also be like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;o, o, ..., i/u ..., a, i, u.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the 3rd row can change into the 1st one, so we can say the vowel harmony in Manchu has a stair-step character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to that vowel harmony, suffixes in Manchu are of the two kinds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some have a &quot;weak&quot; vowel and they never change, since they can be added to roots that have any vowels: &lt;code&gt;-mbi&lt;/code&gt; - present tense, &lt;code&gt;-fi&lt;/code&gt; - participle: &quot;arafi&quot; (having written), &quot;genefi&quot; (having gone), &quot;songofi&quot; (having wept), &quot;arabumbi&quot; (make write), &quot;genebumbi&quot; (make go);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;others have three variants, with each of the strong vowels: &lt;code&gt;-sa/-se/-so&lt;/code&gt; - plural noun suffix, &lt;code&gt;-ha/-he/-ho&lt;/code&gt; - past participle: &quot;araha&quot; (wrote), &quot;genehe&quot; (went), &quot;songoho&quot; (wept).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change of the 3rd row into the 1st one can be illustrated by &quot;songobuha&quot; (made weep), where the &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; in the causative suffix &lt;code&gt;-bu&lt;/code&gt; changes the 3rd &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; row into the 1st &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; row, so &lt;code&gt;-ha&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;-ho&lt;/code&gt; is added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://altaica.ru/LIBRARY/tungus/avrorin_manchu_gr.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;В. Аврорин, Грамматика маньчжурского письменного языка, СПб, &quot;Наука&quot;, 2000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-10T10:49:15.860" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T10:49:15.860" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:07:10.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thing TKR's and Aorists' answers combined hold the key; the s developped into an h-sound (like most initial sigmas) which caused the subsequent rho to be aspirated and voiceless (al aspirated consonants in Ancient Greek were voiceless contrary to Sanskrit which has voiced aspirates as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result probably was an initial rho that took a slightly longer while to be pronounced than a single rho; in most compounds with words that have initial rho this rho is doubled to mark the geminate (and voiced?) pronunciation after prefixes and prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2847" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:07:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2623" CreationDate="2013-12-10T15:36:17.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very interesting and intriguing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First one has to distinguish between open questions (Where have I put my car keys?) and yes-no-questions (Have I forgotten my car keys at your place?).&#xA;In open questions the question is marked by interrogative adjectives, pronouns (τίς) or adverbs (ποῦ, πότε) which probably had a different pronunciation than their indefinite counter parts, as one could deduce from their different accentuation (τις, τινές  / που,πού / ποτε, ποτέ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian -a languages that doesn’t mark questions by automatically inverting the inflected verb and the subject either- open questions usually don’t have a rising intonation, whereas yes-no-questions have; the question is marked by words like ‘Where? What? Who?’ at the beginning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could assume that in Greek likewise the open questions were only marked by a different pronunciation of the interrogative word at the beginning of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different case are the yes-no-questions; in Russian these are either marked by the interrogative marker ли (but it sounds a bit elevated) or by simply pronouncing the sentence with a raised tone towards the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek the interrogative particle ἆρα is often not present in sentences that are clearly intended as questions (Plato’s dialogues), like it isn’t in Russian.&#xA;Another similarity between both languages is the rather free word order which is used to convey nuances of stress on particular information in a sentence or reported speech;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I can hardly believe in Ancient Greek declarative sentences weren’t distinguished from yes-no-questions without ἆρα by a certain way of changing the melody/intonation in the question; there must have been a difference in melody/intonation to mark the spoken sentence as a question, mustn’t it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2847" LastActivityDate="2013-12-10T15:36:17.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T03:58:17.497" Score="3" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the Mongolian word for &quot;new&quot; is &quot;шинэ&quot; (or in traditional script, &quot;ᠰᠢᠨ᠎ᠠ&quot;). Since final vowels are not pronouned it's spoken as &quot;shin&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Han character for &quot;new&quot;, &quot;新&quot; is also pronounced pretty much as &quot;shin&quot; in Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the Mongolian word also derived from Chinese? It seems like it ought to be core vocabulary but as its been borrowed into Korean and Japanese it seems quite possible though those other languages facilitated a greater degree of borrowing due to using the Chinese writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T14:42:59.703" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T17:52:16.177" Title="Is Mongolian &quot;шинэ&quot; / &quot;ᠰᠢᠨ᠎ᠠ&quot;, meaning &quot;new&quot;, a borrowing of Chinese &quot;新&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6105" CreationDate="2013-12-11T10:52:21.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This word can well be connected with its Chinese counterpart. The Old Mongolian for it is &lt;code&gt;sine&lt;/code&gt;, the Kitan (Super Old Mongolian) is &lt;code&gt;*shen&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T10:52:21.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T11:06:04.763" Score="0" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which words were borrowed from German in American English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2853" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T11:19:43.143" Title="Borrowing from German in American English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2013-12-11T13:23:15.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6107" CreationDate="2013-12-11T11:19:43.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://german.about.com/library/blvoc_gerloan.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of the words borrowed from German into English (mind, there are 3 pages there). I leave it up to you to decide if it is British or American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T11:19:43.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6105" CreationDate="2013-12-11T13:25:32.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To begin with, the Chinese phoneme is not exactly sh but it sounds more like &lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt; in Swedish &lt;em&gt;käften&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to the information provided by YS, &lt;em&gt;more exact&lt;/em&gt; spelling of the other language is &lt;a href=&quot;http://ikipedia.org/wiki/Khitan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Khitan&lt;/a&gt; (with H) or Liao and its relation to Mongolian is at least disputable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Khitan word does not prove anything, because this is a distant language of a disputed and not widely recognised branch, &lt;em&gt;but these are the minor inaccuracies.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What really matters is that the final vowel used to be pronounced in older Mongolian only, but not in Khitan (which is clear even from the poor and insufficient evidence provided by YS). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is far more important that the proto Sino-Tibetan word for 'new' has been reconstructed as ¤saR; that is, as a monosyllablic word with a final consonant R &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521118077&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(see Paul K. Benedict, p. 163).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T09:36:02.137" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T09:36:02.137" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T16:23:17.660" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would need to do a contrastive study on how &quot;would&quot; is dealt with in Generative Grammar and that of Leech and Svartvik (A communicative grammar of English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone worked on such a thing before? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate your thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&#xA;Mike&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2854" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T16:23:17.660" Title="Generative Grammar" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6112" CreationDate="2013-12-11T17:38:09.407" Score="9" ViewCount="2685" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of years ago I encountered the world δυσμενής, meaning hostile, in an ancient Greek text I translated. If I recall correctly, this can be pronounced as &quot;dusmenè&quot;. This always intrigued me, because being a speaker of Dari (which is a dialect of Farsi), I recognized the word, as in the Persian language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D8%B4%D9%85%D9%86#Persian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;دشمن&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (pronounced &quot;düşman&quot;) means enemy. Coincidentally I know that in Punjabi you have the word &quot;ਦੁਸ਼ਮਣ&quot; (&quot;duśamaṇa&quot;), which means foe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have already noticed that a lot of Punjabi words are borrowed from Persian, through my own experience with the language while travelling Punjab. However I am not familiar with other cases of Persian borrowing Greek words, especially a word as common as &quot;enemy&quot;. Historically, there is a link between the regions, as Alexander the Great conquered Persia, and the (Hellenistic) Seleucid empire kept it under control for over a century.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there any reason to believe this word is borrowed from Greek? Or is there another, more reasonable alternative (such as Arabic perhaps)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2855" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T08:06:30.560" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T21:46:18.943" Title="Is دشمن (&quot;enemy&quot; in Persian) borrowed from δυσμενής (&quot;hostile&quot; in ancient Greek)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6111" CreationDate="2013-12-11T18:04:59.480" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;dušman and δυσμενής are Indo-European cognates. The Persian word comes from Old Iranian *duš-manyu- (cf Avestan dušmanah-),  “whose mind is bad”. The Punjabi word (also Hindi, Urdu etc.) is a borrowing from Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T18:04:59.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6132" CreationDate="2013-12-11T19:41:15.163" Score="6" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taught (according to Role and Reference Grammar) that epistemic modality applies at clause level while deontic modality applies at core level. So in theory a sentence which has both would have the epistemic modality &quot;further away&quot; from the verb than the deontic. For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I [&lt;strong&gt;probably&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;have to&lt;/strong&gt; wash the car]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then what is happening in a sentence like &lt;em&gt;I should probably wash the car&lt;/em&gt;? It seems more natural for me to say it that way than &lt;em&gt;I probably should wash the car&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:54:56.473" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:54:56.473" Title="Epistemic modality inside deontic scope?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;&lt;scope&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6111" CreationDate="2013-12-11T21:09:42.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;But I remember coming across the Sanskrit word sumanas which is directly connected to its antonym 'εὐμενής'; I believe duḥmanas exists in Sanskrit as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2847" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T21:09:42.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1275" CreationDate="2013-12-11T21:31:13.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One aspect I seem to be missing in other reactions is the literary tradition; I've read that the fact Icelanders love(d) to read the stories from their past has helped to adhere to a type of early standardised language.&#xA;Also the regular national meetings at the parliament at Þingvellr are said to have had their influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2847" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T21:31:13.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2013-12-11T21:44:18.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This kind of phonological ambiguity is&#xA;frequent enough, also because sound may be distorted. Actually, it has&#xA;been considered important enough in speech processing that a specific&#xA;representational device was created for it. It is the so called &quot;&lt;strong&gt;word&#xA;lattice&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; used to represent in a compressed way the various sequences&#xA;of words that could correspond to the phonological sequence, each word&#xA;corresponding to a subpart of that sequence. Note that the different&#xA;sequences of word may imply different way of cutting of the string into parts&#xA;corresponding to words as for example (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holorime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;taken from wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) &quot;a&#xA;cruise, eh, lass?&quot; and &quot;accrues, hélas!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some parsing techniques can directly accomodate word lattices, as they&#xA;would a word sequence, and either eliminate some variants of the&#xA;phonological ambiguity because they cannot be made syntactically&#xA;correct, or treat them as a syntactic ambiguity problem, using&#xA;whatever means at their disposal for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exercise in phonological ambiguity have been pushed to an extreme with&#xA;holorime verses. A well known one in French is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gall, amant de la Reine, alla, tour magnanime!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Galamment de l'Arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîmes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can fin several more at &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vers_holorimes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vers_holorimes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2013-12-11T21:44:18.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-11T22:06:49.617" Score="6" ViewCount="2428" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently applied for an English teaching position in Brazil and had to take a test in which they asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose the correct part of speech for '&lt;strong&gt;FOUND&lt;/strong&gt;' in the setence &quot;A whale &lt;strong&gt;found&lt;/strong&gt; dead on the southern Spanish coast was found to have swallowed 17 kg of plastic waste, including plastic bags.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options were:&#xA;a) Noun&#xA;b) Adjective&#xA;c) Verb&#xA;d) Adverb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chose letter C, as I assumed it was a reduced passive. When the key to the test was made public they considered letter B as the correct option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got confused.... From what I understood, although there is an adjective clause I was supposed to give the part of speech. I felt mislead. But I'm not sure I have misinterpreted the question itself. I thought about formally requiring the anullment of this question. What do you think about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2859" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T07:40:26.620" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T08:38:33.783" Title="What part of speech is 'found' in this sentence?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4619" CreationDate="2013-12-12T01:07:20.427" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Short answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a favoured structure for storing ambiguous parse trees.  It&#xA;is usually called a &lt;strong&gt;shared forest&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;it is simply a grammar that&#xA;generates only the sentence parsed with exactly the same parse trees&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;as the grammar of the language (up to a renaming homomorphisme for the non-terminal symbols). This applies to Context-Free grammars,&#xA;but also to several other formalisms such as Tree-Adjoining Grammars.&#xA;It can be used as a generator to enumerate the individual parse-trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shared forests are often presented as a graphs, with various&#xA;qualification, but these graphs are only representations of grammars.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;They appear in all general context-free parsers in the literature&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Longer answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is a good question. However, the sentence you emphasize&#xA;in boldface is, in my opinion, the wrong way to worry about&#xA;representing ambiguity, even though it is the usual way to state it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you ask for a data structure, you are asking for a device to do&#xA;processing, but you forget to worry about the intrinsic nature of that&#xA;device, about the meaning it may have in your model of language&#xA;processing. In some sense you emphasize the doing over the understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is actually an abstract answer that applies to numerous cases,&#xA;numerous formalisms, independently of the parsing algorithm used, such&#xA;as the CKY algorithm, Earley's algorithm, and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant concept is that of a &lt;strong&gt;shared forest&lt;/strong&gt;. It is a condensed&#xA;form of all the correct parse trees for the sentence, However, though&#xA;the concept of shared forest was widely used in the parsing&#xA;literature, it did take some time to understand what it was, other than a convenient data structure. The understanding opened it to generalizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I am skipping several fine points, see my &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/7374/#18006&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to another &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/7374/&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea (described in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/798690/Recognition_can_be_harder_than_parsing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1995 paper by Lang&lt;/a&gt; and in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dickgrune.com/Books/PTAPG_2nd_Edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grune-Jacobs book&lt;/a&gt;) relies on the fact that context-free languages, and&#xA;many other syntactic formalisms are closed under intersection with&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regular languages&lt;/a&gt; (Type-3 grammars in Chomsky hierarchy). Furthermore, this closure property is constructive,&#xA;which means that given a grammar G (in some syntactic formalism, such&#xA;as CF grammar, or tree adjoining grammar, or many others) generating all syntactically&#xA;correct sentences of the language, and a formal specification R of the regular&#xA;language, it is possible to exhibit another grammar F, that generates&#xA;only the syntactically correct sentences that belong to the regular&#xA;set, with exactly the same ambiguities as with the original grammar G. This&#xA;grammar F is a shared forest (there are many &lt;em&gt;equivalent&lt;/em&gt; ways of building such a grammar - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=981641&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Billot &amp;amp; Lang, &lt;em&gt;The structure of shared forests in ambiguous parsing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Basically, the relevant rules of the original grammar are homomorphique images of the rules of the shared forest, through a renaming homomorphism of the non terminals. The shared forest uses &quot;specialized copies&quot; of the non-terminals of the original grammar so as to control more tightly the generative power of its rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set of one sentence is a regular set, and the construction&#xA;applies. Then, the shared forest F can be used a a generative grammar&#xA;that generates only a single sentence, but with differents parse-trees&#xA;corresponding to all the parses with the original grammar G. So, for example, it can be used to enumerate all the correct parse-trees for the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can generalize to many situations. For example, when there is&#xA;phonological ambiguity, as in the question&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3514/&quot;&gt;Phonological ambiguity that changes the syntactic structure&lt;/a&gt;, this ambiguity&#xA;regarding the words actually uttered can be represented by a word&#xA;lattice, which actually defines formally a regular set of (not&#xA;necessarily syntactically correct) sentences.&#xA;The same construction intersecting the regular set with the grammar G&#xA;can be used, accounting at the same time for lexical/phonological&#xA;ambiguity and for syntactic ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what about this construction of the intersection. For CF&#xA;grammars, there is an old construction that was published some 50&#xA;years ago (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25000219?uid=3738016&amp;amp;uid=2129&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=70&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;sid=21104717280497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bar-Hillel, Perles, Shamir 1961&lt;/a&gt;). All later algorithms, such as CKY, Earley, chart parsing,&#xA;etc, that produce a shared forest are actually only variants of that&#xA;construction that may optimize some steps so as to avoid some useless&#xA;construction steps while producing the shared forest F. Similar&#xA;constructions exist for many other classes of grammar than the CF&#xA;grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next issue is to develop techniques to choose the right tree in&#xA;the forest. This can be achieved in various ways but remains a very&#xA;open topic. For example it is possible to associate features or data&#xA;with specific algebraic characteristics (semi-ring) to the lexicon and&#xA;parts of speech, together with composition rules associated to the&#xA;grammar rules, to identify the &quot;better&quot; parse-tree. The Viterbi&#xA;techniques to chose a most-likely parse-tree according to some&#xA;probabilities fall in this category. Alternatively, the choice of&#xA;correct parse-trees may be postponed to later stages of analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is (the skeleton of) the whole story, afaik, regarding shared&#xA;forest. Much is still being developped on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem too abstract, but it gives a good and actually simple&#xA;mathematical understanding for organizing the technology. But that&#xA;does not mean that all is simple when you get into actual details, for&#xA;example with sophisticated feature structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another advantage of the approach is that it gives a cleaner view of&#xA;issues by separating the operational from the denotational. What this&#xA;means is that the relevant entities you may be interested in, such as&#xA;trees or forests, are specified by abstract mathematical definitions,&#xA;on the basis of desirable properties, without specifying any actual&#xA;method to effectively compute them. The operational algorithms that&#xA;will compute them (the parsing algorithms) are elaborated separately,&#xA;and have to be proved correct with respect to the denotational&#xA;definition. This separates the issues of conceptual perspicuity and&#xA;computational correctness and effectiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that the complexity of the relevant structures can be analyzed from the mathematical definitions, independently of the algorithms that computes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to come back to your question, shared forest have gained wide acceptance among NLP practitioners. The abstract view of it as the grammar of an intersection is less well known by those who are not mathematically oriented, though it is nearly 20 years old. This ignorance/rejection of mathematics is unfortunately the source of much waste of time and energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the grammar view of the shared forest is an abstraction, which may be implemented in various ways, some being more easily computed with than others. Hence the grammar is sometimes a bit harder to see when described an an implemented structure in some algorithm descriptions. It may also happen, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/27937/how-do-i-reconstruct-the-forest-of-syntax-trees-from-the-earley-vector&quot;&gt;the case of Earley's algorithm&lt;/a&gt;, that the parse forest grammar is derived from a binarized version of the original grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bibliography&lt;/strong&gt;: search the web with the keywords: &lt;em&gt;parsing intersection forest&lt;/em&gt; - many papers are open access somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references &lt;strong&gt;on stackexchange&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25903007/algorithms-or-data-structures-for-dealing-with-ambiguity/26132215#26132215&quot;&gt;answer to Algorithms or data structures for dealing with ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/7374/recovering-a-parse-forest-from-an-earley-parser&quot;&gt;Recovering a parse forest from an Earley parser?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/7374/recovering-a-parse-forest-from-an-earley-parser/18006#18006&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/22621/complexity-of-a-glr-parser-on-an-ambiguous-grammar&quot;&gt;Complexity of a GLR parser on an ambiguous grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/27937/how-do-i-reconstruct-the-forest-of-syntax-trees-from-the-earley-vector&quot;&gt;How do I reconstruct the forest of syntax trees from the Earley vector?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T11:01:42.577" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T11:01:42.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2013-12-12T03:54:11.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no consensus on how participles should be classified as for POS. Different treebanks/taggers mark them as adjectives or verbs. Some theories would classify this example as a verb as for form and an adjective as for function. It's all about terminology. In any case, the question in the test was unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T03:54:11.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2013-12-12T04:17:01.153" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer C, the one you chose, is somewhat better than answer B. However, passive participles like &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; straddle two syntactic categories, verb and adjective. They can behave like an adjective with respect to a noun that they modify, i.e. they can be dependent on a noun as if they were a clear adjective, but they clearly maintain their verbal quality with respect to the material that they head. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verbal quality of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; in the example can be seen in the fact that reduced relative clauses like &lt;em&gt;found dead on the southern Spanish coast&lt;/em&gt; allow an analysis in terms of ellipsis. One can construe the words &lt;em&gt;that was&lt;/em&gt; as having been elided: &lt;em&gt;A whale (that was) found dead on the southern Spanish coast was...&lt;/em&gt; The verbal quality of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is also visible in the fact that true adjectives cannot be modified by adjuncts such as &lt;em&gt;on the southern Spanish coast&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. *&lt;em&gt;A whale enormous on the southern Spanish coast...&lt;/em&gt; Further, when attributive adjectives modify nouns, they usually precede the noun in English, e.g. &lt;em&gt;an enormous whale&lt;/em&gt;. The fact that the passive participle follows the noun that it modifies is thus a further indication that it is more verb-like than adjective-like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever wrote the question is valuing the one criterion more than these others. They are taking the fact that &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; modifies the noun &lt;em&gt;whale&lt;/em&gt; like an attributive adjective would as decisive. In so doing, they are shortsighted and ignoring the verb-like qualities of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I think you are justified in protesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T04:22:27.987" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T04:22:27.987" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2013-12-12T13:13:02.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question's a bit ambiguous: you could be asking about silent consonants which do exist in the writing but are never pronounced, or those that are there but pronounced only depending on what sound follows (i.e. next word's initial sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1st case it's because French orthography is veeery conservative, in some regards even more than that of English, so it retains spellings closer to Latin even if nobody speaks like that anymore, like &quot;est&quot;: nobody has pronounced that &quot;s&quot; in more than one thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2nd case is a type of sandhi, &quot;t&quot; in &quot;est&quot; does have a sound in &quot;est-il&quot; but is silent in &quot;est rien&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T14:45:09.587" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T14:45:09.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2013-12-12T16:15:47.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical, pure versions of Mesoamerican languages used for the most part a base-20 system. If you go to some indigenous towns in rural Mexico, you may still listen to old people using base-20 numbers in modern versions of Maya, Nahuatl and a handful of other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, though, young people are adopting a base-10 numbering system similar to that of Spanish (when not preferring Spanish altogether), some other indigenous languages dropped the base-20 earlier. And then there's a very small, isolated indigenous language in northern Mexico which uses base-8. It's disappearing as well, so you'd better hurry and record number samples before it goes away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T16:15:47.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4180" CreationDate="2013-12-12T17:01:38.377" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;English spelling &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; phonetic, to a certain extent. It's just it was meant to (more or less) write down the language as it was about 700 years ago, and there's not been a consistent or generalized effort to update the spelling to reflect the newer developments in pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is far from alone in this department. Japanese was still written (when written in kana) as it was pronounced in the Heian era even though nobody had spoken like that in centuries (i.e. writing &quot;kehou&quot; but pronouncing &quot;kyô&quot; for &quot;today&quot;), it underwent a minor reform during the Meiji era, but didn't really have a phonetic writing until after WW2. Likewise, written Tibetan still reflects the then-current pronunciation of when Buddhism was massively (re)introduced in the 6th century, so if you see Dbu-Rgya-Tso (Tibetan alphabet can be considered a simplified, regularized version of Devanagari) it must be pronounced &quot;U-gya-tsho&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages change over time and across distances. Standardized spelling is always a compromise between a purely phonemic approach (to make learning to read as easy as possible), maximizing the readableness (so to say) of old books and hiding dialectal variation in the language (to allow a book to be understood by the greatest possible audience). This is not something to be ever done lightly, and in the case of English it would become doubly difficult after so much time has elapsed without a much needed reform...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-12T18:04:40.103" LastActivityDate="2013-12-12T18:04:40.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-12T20:23:24.437" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't come up with a better title so let me just say that I'm sorry for misleading you if this question isn't even close to what you expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all my &lt;strong&gt;observation&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the three languages that I know (swedish, english and spanish), a construction similar to &lt;code&gt;some + one&lt;/code&gt; is used to signify one person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone = some + one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;någon = några/något + en&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;alguien = algo + uno (? I'm not really sure if this actually applies to spanish) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I talked to a friend who is Polish and he told me that in the polish language they have a separate word for &lt;code&gt;someone&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to my question, which is a twoparter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Could this construction be viewed as strange? With this I mean is it common to go from many (some) to one to construct a word, instead of using lets say something like &lt;code&gt;many+one&lt;/code&gt;. I realize that this is a very weird question and I'm sorry but I really am having problems formulating this question. I'll happilly try to respond to any comments or requests for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a construct unique for latin/germano/european languages (I know very very little about linguistics so feel free to explain it to me like I'm five)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2865" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T11:55:32.900" Title="Why do we use &quot;someone&quot; to signify one person?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2013-12-13T01:55:03.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotal here, but when I was in school in the late 1990's/early 2000's we spent a day or two on these once, although I can't remember what grade it was or who the teacher was (a lot of my English teachers were older, so they might have had to learn it in the 40's or 50's when they were in school). I remember thinking they were kind of cool but kind of confusing, and most kids had a really hard time with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging from the difficulty many Intro Ling students have with identifying things like prepositions and determiners/articles, my sense is that this type of stuff isn't really taught now in the K-12 system, unless it's on some state standardized test or the SAT. It seems to me most of the test-prep is centered on vocabulary words, particularly low-frequency ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2838" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T01:55:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6126" CreationDate="2013-12-13T03:00:21.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not strange. As for Polish, one could say &quot;ktoś&quot; (kto-ś - who-some), but there's frequent use of &quot;jeden&quot; (one) and &quot;człowiek&quot; (man) in similar contexts. I think it's just a general grammaticalization tendency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T03:00:21.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3629" CreationDate="2013-12-13T15:32:11.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Preliminary note: I tried to be as general as possible, but the variety of&#xA;syntactic descriptions of Natural Language is such that it is unlikely&#xA;that everyone will find here his preferred brand of syntax or parsing. For example, the parsing of lexicalized descriptions of language is not directly accounted for. I am not sure that this&#xA;can be helped in any reasonnable way. My purpose here has been mainly to explore the range of questions that could or should be addressed when considering the complexity of natural language parsing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point is that &quot;&lt;em&gt;Parsing of a human-language text&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is an ill defined task. Complexity analysis is a mathematical endeavor which makes sense only within a mathematically well defined framework. You can therefore ask such a question only with respect to a given formal description of the language syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another preliminary point is that parsing is supposed to analyze syntax only, not semantics. But where is the border between syntax and semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is parsing ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parsing is always done with respect to a grammar (term used loosely to&#xA;mean a description of the syntax) of a language in some appropriate&#xA;formalism (formal framework). So the complexity classes are also&#xA;classifying these formalisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the concept of parsing itself should be precisely defined,&#xA;It is clear that it is an algorithm taking as input a sentence&#xA;(meaning only a linear sequence of words) and produces as output a&#xA;structure that give a more explicit description of the sentence&#xA;emphisizing the structural properties that make it belong to the language specified by the given&#xA;grammar (I am trying very hard not to be too specific).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, with a generative grammar, the output of the parsing&#xA;process may be a structure that describes precisely how the sentence&#xA;can be generated by that grammar, when it is syntactically correct,&#xA;i.e. when it belongs to the language described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it is known that natural languages are generally&#xA;syntactically ambiguous, i.e., that some syntactically correct&#xA;sentences can be structurally described in several ways (generated in&#xA;differents ways). Note that a sentence can be syntactically ambiguous,&#xA;even though there is no semantic ambuiguity.  Now the result expected&#xA;from parsing could be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just be a yes/no answer stating whether the sentence is syntactically&#xA;correct. This is usually called &lt;em&gt;recognition&lt;/em&gt;, rather than parsing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any of the possible structural descriptions of the input sentence;&#xA;when it is syntactically correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all the structural descriptions of the input sentence; when it is&#xA;syntactically correct.  This itself opens a spectrum of possibilities&#xA;as there may be different ways of representing this (possibly&#xA;infinite) set of parses, which may be more space efficient or easier&#xA;to use for later stages of the sentence analysis.  See for example&#xA;the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4619/&quot;&gt;Is there a favoured data structure for storing ambiguous parse trees in Natural Language Processing?&lt;/a&gt; ;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one or more structural descriptions of the input sentence, when it is&#xA;syntactically correct, satisfying some preference or selection&#xA;criterion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the nature of the expected structural description may&#xA;vary. Typically, the result of parsing a sentence according to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree-adjoining_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree&#xA;adjoining grammar&lt;/a&gt; (TAG) can be a (set of) derivation(s) tree(s) or a&#xA;(set of) derived tree(s). Derivation trees and derived trees are&#xA;distinct for TAG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious that the complexity is the same for all choices of&#xA;what is expected as parsing result for a given formalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is complexity ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the formalisms, and the result expected from the parsing process,&#xA;are properly defined, it is of course possible to classify the parsing&#xA;process for that formalism of in some complexity class, or more&#xA;precisely to do a complexity analysis of the parsing process, as&#xA;complexity classes come in many flavors : time complexity or space&#xA;complexity, asymptotic worst case complexity or average complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though people often think of asymptotic worst case time complexity, it&#xA;may make more sense in practice to consider average complexity. So&#xA;such clssifications into complexity classes should be interpreted with&#xA;care from a pragmatic point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that complexity is often considered with respect to&#xA;the size (number of words) of the sentence to be parsed. But&#xA;complexity may also be analyzed with respect to the size of the&#xA;grammar used to analyze a sentence. This is important as some people&#xA;tend to increase the size of the syntax description in order to&#xA;capture rarer or more subtle phenomena. This does not come for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many formalisms are composed of a formal generative skeleton (such as&#xA;context-free grammars) where various attributes (features,&#xA;probabilities, ...) can be associated to the rules constituents,&#xA;having to respect various constraints associated to the rule. The&#xA;addition of these attributes and the respect of these constraints&#xA;increases, often drastically, the complexity of the formalism, making&#xA;it NP-hard, and even possibly Turing-complete (allowing you to encode&#xA;as a parsing problem any algorithm you can dream of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are zillions of subcases providing interesting&#xA;complexity problems to people inclined to such studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect commonly analyzed is the complexity of skeleton formalisms,&#xA;without any attribute. Typically parsing context-free languages has&#xA;time complexity O(n³), which is fairly low and quite tractable in&#xA;practice. However, some structural organizations of the sentences&#xA;cannot be captured by CF grammar. A classical example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cross-serial&#xA;dependency&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than add attributes to somehow encode the information necessary&#xA;to handle such structures in a very general feature mechanism, some&#xA;scientists consider that it is more effective, and possibly more&#xA;perspicuous, to complexify a bit the skeleton formalism. This for&#xA;example lead to the development of Tree Adjoining Grammars (time&#xA;complexity O(n⁶)), then to a hierarchy of formalisms with increasing&#xA;polynomial complexity, and the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kornai.com/MatLing/mcsfin.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mildly context-sensitive&#xA;formalisms&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P92/P92-1018.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linear Context-Free rewriting&#xA;systems&lt;/a&gt;.  One remarkable aspect is that, though the polynomial&#xA;worst-case complexity may seem high, structures producing high&#xA;complexity may be few, so that things remain very tractable in&#xA;practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to underscore, again, that  complexity analysis&#xA;does not necessarily tell the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T15:32:11.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6135" CreationDate="2013-12-13T17:56:17.257" Score="6" ViewCount="8493" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Khmer use writing systems that don't use spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are other such languages?&#xA;Is there a list of these languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:56:43.583" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:56:43.583" Title="Is there a long list of languages whose writing systems don't use spaces?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6115" CreationDate="2013-12-13T22:05:28.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scope of logical elements (including modal verbs and adverbs) is, in my view, one of the least understood areas of the syntax and semantics of natural language. As TKR points out in his comment, word order is not necessarily decisive for determining scope relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most widely discussed type of examples where one can see that word order is not determining scope possibilities occurs with quantifiers, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Every boy has a crush on some girl&lt;/em&gt;. Sentences like this one are ambiguous despite the fact that the one quantified expression precedes (and c-commands) the other. The universal quantifier &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; can take wide scope, which means we are talking about numerous girls, or the existential quantifier &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; can take wide scope, which means we're talking about just one girl (she must be very desirable indeed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At other times, it seems that word order is in fact decisive. For instance, one can make a strong case that simple precedence is the/a main factor that is determining the scope of negation and thus impacting where negative polarity items (NPIs) can appear, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I did not see anybody, and&#xA;     a. *anybody did not see me. &#xA;     b.  nobody saw me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest (and in my view the best) explanation for the deviance of the a-clause is the fact that the NPI &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt; precedes the negation &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and is therefore not in the scope of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;. But this explanation conflicts with the data from quantifier interaction, where it seems that linear order has little impact on the scope of quantifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the example sentences in the question, linear order is apparently not impacting the scope of the modal elements in relation to each other in a clear way. What is impacting the relative positions of the modal adverb and modal verb is intonational prominence. Modal adverbs prefer to immediately follow an intonationally weak auxiliary verb rather than immediately precede it. Thus the order in the first sentence in the question is fine because &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; is not an auxiliary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I probably have to wash the car.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; is not an auxiliary because it does not license subject-auxiliary inversion (&lt;em&gt;??Have I to wash the car?&lt;/em&gt;), nor does it take &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as a postdependent. What this means is that the modal adverb can easily immediately precede &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; just like it can immediately precede other non-auxiliary verbs, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; He probably washed the car. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a true auxiliary is present, though, then there is a clear preference for the modal adverb to immediately follow the auxiliary verb. This is the case in the second example sentence in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I should probably wash the car. &#xA;              vs.&#xA;?I probably should wash the car. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence, in which the modal adverb &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; immediately follows the intonationally weak auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;, is clearly preferred over the second sentence, in which the order of the two words is reversed. That intonational considerations are indeed the relevant factor is evident in the fact that acceptability judgements are not robust. The second sentence is marginal, but not impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same phenomenon is observable with floating quantifiers, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ?The boys all have left.&#xA; The boys have all left.&#xA;&#xA; The boys all left. &#xA; The boys all have to leave.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The floating quantifier prefers to immediately follow, rather than immediately precede, the intonationally weak auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;.  It can, in contrast, easily immediately precede the intonationally more prominent non-auxiliaries &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the intonation pattern prefers to be the one way as opposed to the other is mysterious. What is clear, however, is that linear order is not really impacting the scope of epistemic and deontic modal verbs and adverbs in relation to each other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2013-12-13T22:12:21.020" LastActivityDate="2013-12-13T22:12:21.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-14T01:13:56.477" Score="8" ViewCount="1159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a connection between the word &quot;nine&quot; and &quot;new&quot;? The two words are similar in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2873" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T12:11:57.867" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T12:11:57.867" Title="Are &quot;nine&quot; and &quot;new&quot; etymologically or historically connected?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6133" CreationDate="2013-12-14T02:16:40.487" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Colin Fine says, the words are somewhat similar in Proto-Indo-European: 'nine' is PIE *h1neun, 'new' is PIE *neuo-. The latter word seems clearly derived from *nu 'now': 'new' is 'that of now'. Phonologically it seems difficult to relate *h1neun to *nu/*neuo-, both because of the initial laryngeal and the final n, neither of which could be added by any regular derivational process; and semantically there's no obvious relationship between 'nine' and 'new'. So they're most likely unrelated - although see fdb's answer for some reasonable arguments to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T00:12:53.287" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T00:12:53.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2013-12-14T04:59:52.660" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Corrections and additions to your list&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Korean&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; use spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lao&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Burmese&lt;/strong&gt; (Myanmar) don't use spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt; uses spaces between syllables instead of between words (except some few recent loanwords).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tibetan&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Dzongkha&lt;/strong&gt; use other marks to separate syllables rather than words and don't use spaces in the way that English or other languages use them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_L%C3%BC_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tai Lü&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - when written in the New Tai Lue script can be found written both without spaces between words and with spaces between syllabes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most minority languages written in the major Southeast Asian scripts (Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Thai) probably don't use spaces either, but I don't have details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minority Southeast Asian languages using their own native scripts (Tai Lue etc) might not use spaces, but I don't have details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other observations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I believe scripts that had different final forms of letters, such as &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt; used them to provide hints about word boundaries since spaces between words were not always consistently used in ancient times.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2017-01-01T22:13:45.060" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T22:13:45.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6111" CreationDate="2013-12-14T08:28:12.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are not borrowed, they are cognates. The Proto-Indo-European word was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dusmenēs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which meant &quot;hostile&quot; (from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dus-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;bad&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;men-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;think&quot;). See Mallory &amp;amp; Adams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T08:36:13.367" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T08:36:13.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2013-12-14T09:26:31.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Old Ethiopic language Ge'ez a double dot (:) was used to separate words. The Modern Amkharic language of Ethiopia also uses the double dot, although spaces are now used increasingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nastaʿlīq form of Arabic calligraphy &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_separator#Types_of_word_divider&quot;&gt;uses&lt;/a&gt; vertical arrangement to separate words. The beginning of each word is written higher than the end of the preceding word, so that a line of text takes on a sawtooth appearance. Nastaliq spread from Persia and today is used for Persian, Uyghur, Pashto, and Urdu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T09:45:37.970" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T09:45:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2555" CreationDate="2013-12-14T09:48:39.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word &quot;right&quot; comes from Proto-Indo-European word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯reĝtos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which meant &quot;correct&quot; and had cognates &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯reĝr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;directive, order&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯reĝs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;king, ruler&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯reĝti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;guides, directs&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯reĝi̯om&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;kingdom&quot;. The root itself meant &quot;direct, straight&quot; and reflected in many English words both inherited and borrowed, such as &quot;direction&quot;, &quot;correction&quot;, &quot;rectum&quot;, &quot;region&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian and Polish word &quot;pravo&quot; originates from a different PIE root and cognate with the English word &quot;first&quot; and German word &quot;Frau&quot;. The basic meaning of the root &quot;per-&quot; was &quot;over&quot;, &quot;through&quot; as in PIE adverb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but later the meaning also shifted to &quot;against&quot; as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;proti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;forward, ahead&quot; and further to &quot;first&quot; as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prou̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later word, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prou̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, meaning &quot;first&quot; was used to designate a province headsman (&quot;first&quot; in the settlement), and later &quot;judge&quot; and &quot;lord&quot; (with feminine form &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preu̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;mistress, lady&quot;, reflected in German &quot;Frau&quot;) and gave rise to the Slavic legal term as well as the Russian terms meaning &quot;correct&quot;, &quot;just&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-12-14T09:59:35.850" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T09:59:35.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2013-12-14T10:53:39.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a widespread conception that if a person wants something very much, he will think of it every time, and as such, will see it while sleeping. As such the word for seeing during the sleep also often used to designate a desire for future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example even though Russian has separate words for the both, still the word for sleep vision can be used figuratively for a desire. &quot;Поступить туда на работу - это его сладкий сон&quot; &quot;Getting that job is his sweet dream&quot;. In this case the word for sleep vision is used to mean the desire. Note that to mean the desire one has to add the adjective &quot;sweet&quot; because otherwise the word also can mean an unpleasant sleep vision, for example &quot;страшный сон&quot; means nightmare. One can also say &quot;Он видит эту должность во сне&quot; &quot;He sees this position when sleeping&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such I would conclude that using the sleep visions metaphorically for desires remains highly productive and not necessary inherited from any proto-languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want also to point out that English language has different words for visualized desires not connected with sleep, for example &quot;reverie&quot;, &quot;vision&quot;, &quot;aspiration&quot;, &quot;imagining&quot;, &quot;desire&quot;, &quot;infatuation&quot;, &quot;idealization&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for unpleasant sleep vision, &quot;nightmare&quot; can be also used in English and Russian to mean an outcome of which the person is very afraid of, even if not sleeping. &quot;The loosing of this competition is his nightmare&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T09:20:33.920" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T09:20:33.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1325" CreationDate="2013-12-14T11:45:24.637" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it was very much. The roots would be either just concatenated, or the thematic vowel -o- or the glue suffix -i- would be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯entio̯q̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;face&quot; (thing in front of eyes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯rĝipta̯i̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; swift-winged &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cleumntom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; good reputation &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;demspotis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; head of family &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯icpotis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; settlement elder &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dmpedos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; house floor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;du̯eiplos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; double &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dusdius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; bad weather (literally, bad sky)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ğeo̯uq̆olos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; cowherd &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆tu̯rpedos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; tetrapod&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sma̯ecsia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; carriot (having one axis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;somoĝne̯i̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; blood relative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One also should note that the most of PIE personal names were compounds of two roots, similar to Greek Cleopatra, Alexander, Theophilos, Patrocleus or Slavic Yaroslav, Vladimir, Yaropolk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2020-03-17T17:42:29.030" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T17:42:29.030" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-14T13:30:27.870" Score="5" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just noticed that if you look in several English and Mongolian dictionaries that the Cyrillic Mongolian word &quot;khan&quot; is given as either &quot;хан&quot; with a short vowel, or  &quot;хаан&quot; with a long vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So far the only traditional Mongolian script I can find is &quot;ᠬᠠᠭᠠᠨ&quot;, but I'm not sure which OSes / web browsers will render that correctly on Stack Exchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel length is usually significant in Mongolian as in other &quot;Altaic&quot; languages. Is this an exception? Or was there some spelling reform in Mongolian that changed it over the years? Or are some sources simply wrong? Maybe they are both Mongolian words with slightly different senses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Хан&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/khan#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wiktionary &quot;khan&quot; etymology section&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%BD#Mongolian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wiktionary &quot;хан&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mongolian Wiktionary &quot;хан&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Pocket Dictionary &quot;хан&quot; (defined as &quot;khan&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Pocket Dictionary &quot;хаан&quot; (defined as &quot;king&quot;, &quot;emperor&quot;, &quot;monarch&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Хаан&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_%28title%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia &quot;khan&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/khan#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wiktionary &quot;khan&quot; translation section&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia &quot;Genghis Khan&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kublai_Khan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia &quot;Kublai Khan&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%81_%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mongolian Wikipedia &quot;Чингис хаан&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mongolian Wikipedia &quot;Хубилай хаан&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D3%A8%D0%B3%D1%8D%D0%B4%D1%8D%D0%B9_%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mongolian Wikipedia &quot;Өгэдэй хаан&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Pocket Dictionary &quot;khan&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Pocket Dictionary &quot;king&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T11:07:56.307" Title="Are Mongolian &quot;хан&quot; and &quot;хаан&quot; the same word despite the usually important difference in vowel length?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2013-12-14T13:45:16.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should clarify the question a bit to make sure you mean 'writing systems', not languages. Spoken language doesn't use spaces (or pauses) in the same way or same place as written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more generally, space in writing is a recent invention to aid in ease of reading. The writing systems of Ancient Greek and Latin did not use spaces. Neither did those of Mesopotamian languages or Ancient Egyptian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T13:45:16.817" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6133" CreationDate="2013-12-14T14:56:05.480" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a long-standing discussion. The idea is that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans counted on the four fingers (not including the thumb) of one hand. *oktō is a dual meaning “two spans”. The word for “nine” introduces a “new” set of four. The mentioned phonological objections are not insurmountable. The initial laryngeal has been posited mainly to explain the initial vowel in Gk. ἐννέα but this is not the only possible explanation (prefixed ἐν according to Schwyzer, Griech. Gr. I, 591). In principle you could reconstruct the PIE word for “nine” as *newṃ (Latin novem) and regard this as the neuter singular of *new- , with secondary assimilation of n…m to n….n in Germanic etc. This is all pretty much mainstream IE theory; of course, none of this is certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T14:56:05.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2013-12-14T15:54:53.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian āhista آهسته “slow, gentle” begins with a long ā. The Indo-European privative prefix *ṇ- appears in Iranian (and still in Middle Persian) as short a- before consonants and an- before vowels. In New Persian initial a- becomes zero and initial an- become n-. So it should be obvious that the long ā- in NP āhista is not the privative prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T15:54:53.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2013-12-14T16:06:57.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two Khalkha Mongolian words, &lt;code&gt;хан&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;хаан&lt;/code&gt; (according to the &quot;Big Modern Russian-Mongolian and Mongolian-Russian Dictionary&quot;, by Yury Kruchkin, 2006, 115,000 entries, &lt;code&gt;хан&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;хаан&lt;/code&gt; are mentioned on page 563, the dictionary is downloadable &lt;a href=&quot;http://dfiles.ru/files/v4fhyonbt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, 77 MB).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel length in Mongolian and other Altaic languages is the result of disappearance of the velar &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ɣ&lt;/code&gt; between vowels, the vowels then are assimilated to result in a long vowel. That is why, the Modern Khalkha Mongolian word &lt;code&gt;хан&lt;/code&gt; comes from the Classical Mongolian &lt;code&gt;qan&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;хаан&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;qaɣan&lt;/code&gt; after the intervocal &lt;code&gt;ɣ&lt;/code&gt; ceased to be pronounced (that is the traditional transliteration of the Classical Mongolian, in the following quotation from Ferdinand Lessing he transliterates the &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;). Note, that the word &lt;code&gt;qaɣan&lt;/code&gt; has also an English rendering, it's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khagan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khagan&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his &quot;Mongolian-English Dictionary&quot;, 1960, page 906, Ferdinand Lessing wtites a commentary about the two words, &quot;Both of these two forms occur in Mongolian literature more or less interchangeably, and are rendered into English as Khan. However in modern usage &lt;code&gt;xaɣan&lt;/code&gt; is used only for the Great Khan or for a foreign sovereign while &lt;code&gt;xan&lt;/code&gt; is applied to lesser Khans.&quot; The dictionary is superb, it is, actually, Classical Mongolian - Khalkha Mongolian - English, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://altaica.ru/LIBRARY/mong/Lessing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt; (a scan, 137 MB).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up, it is not only Mongolian that has two words to mean &quot;khan&quot;, English also has both of them, &quot;Khan&quot; and &quot;Khagan&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-14T16:06:57.083" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2013-12-14T16:07:10.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDITED: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bolor-toli.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bolor-toli.com&lt;/a&gt; there are two distinct хаан and хан&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;хаан  'khan, sovereign, monarch' and related terms, eg. хаан цол. 'khanate',  хаан ширээ, 'throne', хаан төр 'realm', &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;хан only appears as a modifier eg хан бүргэд 'imperial eagle', хан хүү 'prince' (хүү =son, offspring), хан боргоцой 'pineapple', хан хурмаст 'ether' (хурмаст = sky, heaven)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at least in modern Khalkha, khan is хаан, while хан &lt;em&gt;seems to be&lt;/em&gt; a distinct word with related meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T04:10:42.497" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T04:10:42.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-14T18:07:40.567" Score="3" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that there seem to be many words that have travelled the globe due to trade, such as the word orange or rice, which have plausible origins in proto-Dravidian. Meanwhile, it is hypothesized that the language (if it is a language, which some people argue against) recorded in the Indus script is a Dravidian one. All this makes me wonder if these numerous possibly-Dravidian Wanderworts are indicative of the Indus Valley Civilization's success in trade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Sanskrit_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; of Wikipedia lists 7 English words with possible Dravidian origins, notably:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Orange&lt;/strong&gt;, through Old French orenge, Medieval Latin orenge and Italian arancia from Arabic نارنج naranj, via Persian نارنگ narang and Sanskrit नारङ्ग naranga-s meaning &quot;an orange tree&quot;, derived from proto-Dravidian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rice&lt;/strong&gt;, via Old French ris and Italian riso from Latin oriza, which is from Greek ὄρυζα oryza, through an Indo-Iranian tongue finally from Sanskrit व्रीहिस् vrihi-s &quot;rice&quot;, derived from proto-Dravidian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sugar&lt;/strong&gt;, through Old French sucre, Italian zucchero, Medieval Latin succarum, Arabic: سكر sukkar and Persian: شکر shakar ultimately from Sanskrit शर्करा sharkara which means &quot;ground or candied sugar&quot; (originally &quot;grit&quot; or &quot;gravel&quot;), from proto-Dravidian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it likely that the Dravidian language that these words came from is the language of the Indus Valley Civilization? Is this a poor, uninformed idea? or, alternatively, am I late to the party and this is already intuitively obvious to historians? What are your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T11:21:32.213" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T11:21:32.213" Title="Wanderwort origins and the Indus Valley Civilization?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;indus-script&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2013-12-14T18:34:10.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The eldest form of this word (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khagan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Khagan&lt;/a&gt;) had been rendered in Chinese chronicles as Kehan (可寒, The Great Cold; later as 可汗, The Mighty Sweat). The title referred then to the ruler of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianbei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Xianbei&lt;/a&gt; tribe. The language of that tribe was agglutinative and, presumably, proto-Mongolian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is not to be mistaken for the '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_Khaganate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian Kagan&lt;/a&gt;', which actually is a Russian rendering of Swedish haakan (håkan), a.k.a. hawk (hence, Russian ´yasny sockol´, or ´the bright hawk' used as a form of address in Russian folklore narrated texts). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is even more complicated by the fact that there had been a real Bulgarian Kaganate near Volga (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Bulgaria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Volga Bulgaria,&lt;/a&gt; which later adopted Islam).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The titles of Khagan and Khan had been used simultaneously as early as by 4th / 6th centuries, by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouran_Khaganate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rouran&lt;/a&gt; people (in Mingolian, the Nirun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my intuition is that the Khagan is a Bulgaric adoptation of the Occidental word Haakan (Håkan), while Khan is an authentic 'Oriental' term. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baekje_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Baekje&lt;/a&gt; word for Khan is Ke (瑕), The Fault. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that these two words are different, although they seem to be similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T11:07:56.307" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T11:07:56.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6154" CreationDate="2013-12-14T23:20:01.780" Score="4" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say some hypothetical language had the phones [g],[k],[ʔ],[h]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and we determined /g/ to be the UR of the following allophones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/g/: [g],[k],[ʔ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But upon further examination, you may be able to argue for the glottal stop being the UR of another subset of allophones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ʔ/: [ʔ], [h]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So based of this definition, the segment ʔ is functioning both as an allophone of the phoneme /g/, and as its own phoneme /ʔ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T01:57:27.943" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T05:02:14.450" Title="Can a phoneme function as an allophone?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2013-12-15T00:07:24.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If ʔ is an allophone of g, I don't see how you could argue that ʔ is also its own phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't the model look like this instead?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/g/ : [g] , [k] , [ʔ] , [h]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2878" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T00:07:24.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2013-12-15T02:32:28.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be tantamount to an &lt;strong&gt;archi-phoneme&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/g/: [g], [ʔ]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/k/ [k], [ʔ]  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;and that [ʔ] in a given position, eg word final, corresponds to both [g] and [k] elsewhere then for that position you have an archi-phoneme that includes /g/ and /k/. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'&#xA;Please note  that it's the &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; [ʔ] that is the allophone of &lt;em&gt;two phonemes&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;A phoneme is not a sound but a class of sounds.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="2708" LastEditDate="2013-12-15T04:22:59.890" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T04:22:59.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6155" CreationDate="2013-12-15T04:51:03.140" Score="1" ViewCount="3865" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading about binding theory and I have a little problem. The book (1) says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A binds B iff:&#xA;&#xA;(i)  A c-commands B;&#xA;(ii) A and B are co-indexed.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and c-commanding is defined as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Node A c-commands node B if and only if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(i)   A does not dominate B,&#xA;(ii)  B does not dominate A, and&#xA;(iii) The first branching node that dominates A also dominates B.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far so good. But then there are a few examples. One of them is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Poirot's brother invited himself. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, according to the author, &quot;brother&quot; is c-commanding &quot;himself&quot; and they are obviously co-indexed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gRbhz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tree diagram of the sentence&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as the definition goes, the first branching node for &quot;brother&quot; here is NP and it clearly doesn't dominate &quot;himself&quot;. So how can the c-commanding be valid here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Haegeman, 1994. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, 2nd edition, page 211&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T23:28:00.033" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T23:28:00.033" Title="Problem understanding binding theory and c-command" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2013-12-15T05:02:14.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this has been suggested decades ago. The representatives of the so called Moscow phonological school (in the Soviet Union, greatly influenced by Nikolai Trubetzkoy) argued that in such cases we deal with archiphonemes, /X/. One of the most famous examples is below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) kosa (braid.NOM.SG.) - kos (GEN.PL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) koza (goat.NOM.SG.)- koz (GEN.PL.), the latter pronounced as 'kos'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, /s/ and /z/ are considered phonemes- there are a lot of minimal pairs, but in this example the opposition is neutralized. It's not quite clear, based on phonology only, whether we have an allophone [s] of the phoneme  /s/ or /z/ in (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T05:02:14.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6153" CreationDate="2013-12-15T06:37:07.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The binding theory as presented in Haegeman's book has long since been abandoned by most people who study binding phenomena in a serious way. That book presents the traditional binding theory according to Chomsky (1981, 1986). While it may be good to study and learn that stuff to gain the big picture of the development of syntactic theory, be aware that the account of binding you are learning there is just a reference point nowadays. It's validity is defended by almost no one anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have Haegeman's book here with me, so I cannot verify the example in her book. Taking what you give at face value, I can see why it is confusing. But as Alex B. points out, the way to interpret the example is that the relevant NP is &lt;em&gt;Poirot's brother&lt;/em&gt;, not just &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt;. The first branching node to dominate this entire NP is IP, so the definition sort of works. The confusion stems from the fact that you've got two nouns, &lt;em&gt;Poirot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt;, and it seems like one of these should be the relevant node for the definition, whereas what is really going on is that the two together form the relevant NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare your example with a similar example like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  *[His1 sister] invited himself1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of c-command and condition A of the theory make the correct prediction in this case, because the reflexive pronoun &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; should be bound in its governing category. Since its binder &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; is embedded inside the NP &lt;em&gt;his sister&lt;/em&gt;, it does not c-command out of the NP and therefore cannot bind &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you learn about the DP-hypothesis (NPs are really determiner phrases, not noun phrases), you will begin to see why the traditional binding theory that is presented by Haegeman (and many others) doesn't really work anymore. On a DP analysis, the possessive determiner &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; heads the subject DP in (1), which means it should be the relevant unit that c-commands out of the subject DP. In other words, if one assumes a DP analysis of noun phrases, the traditional binding theory does not work anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that the greater message is that you should be prepared to experience further confusion and that as you progress to further stages of the development of syntactic theory, you will see that the field has been changing too fast.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T06:37:07.270" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6157" CreationDate="2013-12-15T10:02:19.927" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see this kind of analysis / comparison in linguistic textbooks where they basically provide literal translation of a sentence with grammar notes (like verb tense, noun case etc.). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;French:&#xA;Je    vais     en  ville.  &#xA;I  go:PRS:1SG  to  town.&#xA;&#xA;Russian: &#xA;     Idu         v   gorod.&#xA;go:IPFV:PRS:1SG  to town:ACC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a great way of demonstrating how a foreign language works so I'd like to find more information about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering if there is a technical term for this type of analysis / comparison or if there are rules or guidelines for how this procedure should be done properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2284" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T03:58:02.710" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T03:58:02.710" Title="Literal translation with grammar notes when analyzing or describing a foreign language" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6156" CreationDate="2013-12-15T11:08:21.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The kind of  structure you ask about is known as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss&quot;&gt;interlinear gloss&lt;/a&gt;. It consist minimally of three lines: the first line being the language being analysed, with segmentable morphemes separated out by hyphens; the second line is in the analysis language and has a gloss (usually a grammatical category label) for each morpheme in the first line and is spaced out so that each glow lines up vertically with the appropriate morpheme in the first line; finally, the third line is a free translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds complicated so here is an example to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1. Latin&#xA;    insul  -arum&#xA;    island -GEN.PL&#xA;    'of the islands'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A useful set of conventions for constructing interlinear glosses are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ldtc/website/syllabus/sp06/LehmannGlossing.pdf&quot;&gt;Christian Lehmann's rules for interlinear morphemic glosses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2013-12-15T11:08:21.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-15T13:39:21.703" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've actually found &lt;a href=&quot;http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/en/textstat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one called &quot;textstat&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't recognize different word forms of one word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are there programs that do detect comía, come, cómelo, comiera as forms of comer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T07:07:33.973" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T18:20:53.840" Title="Software to form a word frequency list for a Spanish book" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-15T15:13:55.023" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't like English dictionaries that use pseudo-IPA to indicate pronunciation. I've seen none indicating that most plosives should be aspirated, but when they're in &quot;sp&quot;, &quot;st&quot; and other combinations they're not - that I had to discover thru reading linguistics books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no dictionary I've seen yet mentions the English sandhi rules, which once you discover (even if for yourself) your pronunciation suddenly sounds much better to your native speaker friends, even if they can't state why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had to discover for myself that &quot;of&quot; is always pronounced as &quot;ov&quot; when next word starts with a vowel, that the &quot;-s&quot; ending (of plurals and possessives) is usually turned to &quot;-z&quot; when surrounded by dentals of followed by a vowel, and some other rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a book or dictionary that lists all these? This would be an enormous aid to those of us who study English as a Second Language without the aid of naive speakers - who, anyway, most of the times are not aware of these rules even though do recognize a good pronunciation when you use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T03:31:56.183" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T03:31:56.183" Title="Dictionary with real IPA and English sandhi rules?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6163" CreationDate="2013-12-15T22:11:46.680" Score="5" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beside &lt;em&gt;fari&lt;/em&gt; (to do), grammars like &lt;a href=&quot;https://quaelibet.net/cours/gr1_4.pdf#page=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; give six other forms of the infinitive in Esperanto:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;          simple / progressive   / perfect      / prospective&#xA;(active)  fari     esti faranta  / esti farinta / esti faronta&#xA;(passive) ???      esti farata   / esti farita  / esti farota&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't find the passive equivalent to &lt;em&gt;fari&lt;/em&gt;: is it something like &lt;em&gt;esti fari&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="489" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T16:15:50.890" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T16:15:50.890" Title="infinitive passive in Esperanto" Tags="&lt;esperanto&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6162" CreationDate="2013-12-16T01:17:18.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is all very simple, there is a marvellous Esperanto &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_voice#Middle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;middle voice&lt;/a&gt; derivational suffix &lt;code&gt;-iĝ-&lt;/code&gt; which makes every root passive (at least from the point of view of an English speaker). Followed by the infinitive suffix &lt;code&gt;-i&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;-iĝi&lt;/code&gt;) it forms passive infinitives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;fari - &quot;to do/make&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fari%C4%9Di&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fariĝi&lt;/a&gt; - &quot;to be done/made&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, that making passives with this suffix lies in the sphere of derivation, word building, and not in the sphere of conjugation, that can be the reason you haven't at once remembered about it as a passive suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-16T13:20:29.513" LastActivityDate="2013-12-16T13:20:29.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6954" CreationDate="2013-12-16T05:35:09.157" Score="2" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I generate a language model with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SRILM&lt;/a&gt;'s ngram-count and then use &lt;code&gt;ngram -unk -ppl text -lm model&lt;/code&gt; to get log probabilities and perplexity values, are the perplexities normalized for sentence length?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2756" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-09-21T15:58:16.517" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T15:58:16.517" Title="Is perplexity in SRILM normalized for sentence length?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;&lt;evaluation-metrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-16T21:37:44.067" Score="9" ViewCount="3111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what the most succinct written language is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would call one language more succinct than another if that language could communicate the same idea as another with fewer characters.  I am not a linguist, so please forgive me if there is anything about this post that is misguided and feel free to make any corrections needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2888" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-14T20:19:01.127" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:40:58.613" Title="Most succinct written language" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6167" CreationDate="2013-12-16T22:23:05.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of the symbols a written language uses is inversely proportional to the length of the text in that language, the more symbols a language has, the shorter texts are. This is true for any notation system, not only human languages. For example, our decimal numeral system uses 10 different symbols (0 to 9), and the binary numeral system uses 5 times less symbols, only two (0 and 1), so we have number &quot;9&quot; (one symbol) which in binary system is &quot;1001&quot; (four symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What follows from this is that the language with the biggest number of symbols will have the shortest texts. Chinese, with its 50,000+ symbols of which up to 3,000 is required to read a newspaper and 8,000 needed for an educated person, is the first candidate for the Most Succinct Written Language Award.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: There are constructed languages that are designed specially for the purpose to compress so much information into a single word that it would take a whole sentence in any natural language. The most famous among such languages is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil&quot;&gt;Ithkuil&lt;/a&gt;. It has a very complicated &lt;a href=&quot;http://ithkuil.net/11_script.htm&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt;, an Ithkuil sentence written in that script contains much fewer &quot;characters&quot; than there are words in the English translation of the sentence. So, if you consider constructed languages too, than Ithkuil is also a good candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-17T00:47:13.580" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T00:47:13.580" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-17T01:01:13.023" Score="1" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be my first series of questions on this book (Second ed).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Chomsky warns that several answers to the question &quot;On what basis do we actually go about separating grammatical and ungrammatical sentences?&quot; that immediately suggest, could not be true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Please clarify this first: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cubeupload.com/im/na0wMq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cubeupload.com/im/na0wMq.jpg&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Supposing the sentences (1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. and (2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. , clarify this part for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cubeupload.com/im/1uMUlC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cubeupload.com/im/1uMUlC.png&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2890" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T01:01:13.023" Title="Questions on Chomsky's &quot;Syntactic structures&quot; #1" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-17T04:01:07.067" Score="6" ViewCount="1689" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often I want to make my own corpus of a new language I've become interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very happy to make my own tools and have plenty of programming experience. I have made my own tool to gather plain text random samples from a specified language edition of Wikipedia and it has worked pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes a language doesn't have its own Wikipedia, or its Wikipedia is too small or shows too many artefacts being heavy on articles on certain topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like is a tool that crawl the web and gather pages using only a certain language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to do anything linguistic, raw HTML is usable, plain Unicode text is better, but if it can also do things like word frequency, normalizing, lemmatizing, etc that would be a great bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current language of interest is Mongolian written in the traditional script, which does indeed seem to have a large enough web presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a tool that could help me with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T14:29:02.033" Title="Tool for building a corpus by crawling the web?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6162" CreationDate="2013-12-17T06:49:42.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any Esperanto adjectival root can be turned into a verb of state by simply adding the verbal endings.  This gives rise to another class of passive infinitives derived from passive participles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Passive Participle    Derived Infinitive    Meaning&#xA;------------------    ------------------    -------&#xA;farita                fariti                to have been done&#xA;farata                farati                to be in the process or state of being done&#xA;farota                faroti                to be done sometime in the future&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because passive participial suffixes are unavoidably temporal, you can't create intemporal passive infinitives this way (for that, use &lt;b&gt;fariĝi&lt;/b&gt; suggested above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, you can, of course, do the same thing with active participles to create a series of temporal active infinitives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Active Participle     Derived Infinitive    Meaning&#xA;-----------------     ------------------    -------&#xA;farinta               farinti               to have done&#xA;faranta               faranti               to be doing&#xA;faronta               faronti               to be about to do, to be going to do&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2892" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T06:49:42.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6177" CreationDate="2013-12-17T07:30:22.147" Score="-1" ViewCount="8616" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I mean by no diacritics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Czech has: ř, ů, á, š ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spanish has: Ñ, á ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;German: ä, ö, ü...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italian: è, ò, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least in Europe, I am not aware of a language that doesn't use diacritics. Of course, except English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I also excluded classical Latin, because it's, obviously, &lt;strong&gt;based on&lt;/strong&gt; it -&gt; Latin alphabet/letters and it's practically dead language maybe with the exception of Vatican and some Academia, Medicine and Science departments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2: By diacritic I mean this: &#xA;di·a·crit·ic noun \ˌdī-ə-ˈkri-tik\&#xA;: a mark that is placed over, under, or through a letter in some languages to show that the letter should be pronounced in a particular way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about other languages in the world that use only 26 (or less) Latin characters like English. Are there any? Or is English the only language without any accents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Maybe you could argue that there is one special &quot;symbol&quot;and that is &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. I'm , I've, John's etc. However, these are mostly abbreviations of I am, I have etc. so it is not necessary to use. And John's father could be written like &lt;code&gt;the father of John&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;or if you are a historian ;D &lt;code&gt;Johnes father&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2182" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-04T11:06:11.067" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T21:07:25.560" Title="Is English the only language (except classical Latin, Cyrillic, symbol languages and auxiliary languages) that has no diacritic symbols/accents?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6077" CreationDate="2013-12-17T08:56:55.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might also add to the discussion the question of &lt;strong&gt;grammatical function&lt;/strong&gt;. In theories that include the specification of grammatical function (subject, object, etc.) in the syntactic representations they posit, the question arises what grammatical functions can be realized by non-finite VPs (or clauses). There is a discussion of this question by Rodney Huddleston in Chapter 14 of &lt;i&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/i&gt; (pp. 1206-1220). He argues that non-finite clause complements in English usually do not realize the object function (which is mainly realized by NPs), but a different function, which he dubs &lt;i&gt;catenative complement&lt;/i&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion of the grammatical functions of finite clause complements across several languages can be found in the paper “The grammatical functions of complement clauses” by Mary Dalrymple and Helge Lødrup (which can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://folk.uio.no/helgelo/old.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the second author’s webpage&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you might find it useful, here is a tree for your sentence that follows by and large the syntactic framework in &lt;i&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/the_activist_continued_to_protest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h9CVR.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/the_activist_continued_to_protest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enlarge image&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T08:56:55.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2013-12-17T10:55:00.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin, Indonesian .... I am sure there are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T10:55:00.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2013-12-17T11:31:36.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Many Slavic languages don't use diacritic marks. For example, modern Russian and Ukrainian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit I'm expanding your question a bit, but I hope I have good reasons to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, although the marks look suspiciously similar, we should not mix them because they differ by their function:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apostrophe&lt;/strong&gt; in English possessive is a punctuation mark. It is not a diacritic mark since it does not affect pronunciation. Instead, it lets the reader not to confuse plural over the possessive;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diaeresis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Hiatus), often used in Romance languages of Europe, is used to force reading two symbols separately, not as a diphthong. One of the most common examples where it could be suitable for English is the word &lt;code&gt;cooperation&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;oo&lt;/code&gt; can be misread as &lt;code&gt;[u]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Umlauts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are yet another class of diacritic marks. Their goal is to modify pronunciation of the vowel or a consonant. These are very language-specific. For instance, in German the umlaut over a vowel would make it centralized and/or lowered;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; has a dot over it for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_%28palaeography%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purely scripting purpose&lt;/a&gt;: it was hard to read it from the Gothic script of 14th century;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stress mark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; looks like an apostrophe, but used to resolve ambiguity of the stressed syllable in a word;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, Russian &lt;code&gt;ё&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;й&lt;/code&gt; do not belong to any of the groups above. They represent independent phonemes, a palatalized &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt; (as in English word &lt;code&gt;York&lt;/code&gt;) and a palatal consonant &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; (as in English &lt;code&gt;may&lt;/code&gt;), correspondingly. Considering above, they can't be considered diacritic marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also examples in other languages: Spanish &lt;code&gt;ñ&lt;/code&gt; is often treated as an individual consonant, not a modified &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;, and the same applies to Swedish/Norwegian &lt;code&gt;å&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also can find that &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1960/1009&quot;&gt;almost no language is 100% phonemic&lt;/a&gt;. In other words, there's no one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes and graphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, due to historic reasons, &lt;strong&gt;this gap was treated in different manners&lt;/strong&gt; for different languages. In English, it lead to huge differences of how the words are written and read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[tɪə]&lt;/code&gt; (noun as in &lt;code&gt;teardrop&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[tɛə]&lt;/code&gt; (verb as in &lt;code&gt;to tear off&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If it happened in another language like French or German, one of these words would most certainly obtain a diacritic mark&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarizing&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English &quot;suffers&quot; of the same inconsistency between phonemes and graphemes as other languages do. However, historically, this inconsistency has been rather ignored than resolved grammatically;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are languages like Russian that &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; ignore this inconsistency and hence are not using diacritic marks;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Again, absence of diacritic marks doesn't magically resolve the ambiguities above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T15:56:55.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2013-12-17T11:43:12.683" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, diacritics &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; used in English, in borrowed words, sometimes optionally (like in the words &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/cafe?q=caf%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;café ~ cafe&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/facade?q=fa%C3%A7ade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;façade ~ facade&lt;/a&gt;), but sometimes there is no alternative spelling without diacritics (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/%C3%9Cbermensch?q=%C3%BCbermensch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Übermensch&lt;/a&gt;). Diacritics and ligatures can be used in foreign names, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86neas_Mackay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Æneas Mackay&lt;/a&gt;. Here is a Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; about English words with diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Asia and especially in Africa where most of the languages use Latin alphabet, there are several languages that do not use any diacritics or special letters. Here is a list of some of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malay/Indonesian. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/malay.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manusia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagalog. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tagalog.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hmong. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hmong.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/mww/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zhuang. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zhuang.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://za.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veizgiek_Bakgoh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Africa&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swahili. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/swahili.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binadamu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt; (letter &lt;code&gt;ng'&lt;/code&gt; is very rare and can be used optionally)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Xhosa. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/xhosa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://xh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abantu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt; (letter &lt;code&gt;ng'&lt;/code&gt; as in Swahili)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zulu. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zulu.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://zu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikhasi_Elikhulu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somali. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/somali.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://so.wikipedia.org/wiki/Af-Soomaali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sample&lt;/a&gt; (English sources name an apostrophe as a Somali letter, but Somali sources don't, see the sample page)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T21:07:25.560" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T21:07:25.560" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8413" CreationDate="2013-12-17T12:36:17.370" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, let's say I have several mp3 files with native speaker's pronunciation.&#xA;What I need is playing one of them, pronounce after it and so on with the next sound pattern. Then play all the sequence and look for my errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I can do it with Audacity, but it takes rather long.&#xA;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T05:58:15.130" Title="Software for pronunciation training with my own sound files" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-06-20T19:26:00.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2013-12-17T12:54:35.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The languages without diacritics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Europe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cornish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Greenlandic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Welsh&lt;/a&gt; (apostrophes only)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian is not exactly a diacritic-free language because of its letter &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ёё&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, many Germanic languages render their umlauts with Latin alphavet only: ü = ue, ä = ae, ö = oe, å = aa (the latter three letters were used in one of the Danish orthography systems changed thru times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, such languages as Japanese or Chinese are absolutely diacritics-free :-))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T04:46:41.427" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T04:46:41.427" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2013-12-17T13:40:03.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;English in fact, uses diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English i is ı plus a diacritic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this respect it does not differ from German ä, ö, ü.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also consider some other letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English G is C plus diacritic (Classical Latin has no &quot;G&quot; letter)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English Y is V plus diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English W is a ligature of two V's, Classical Latin had no such letter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T13:40:03.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6186" CreationDate="2013-12-17T21:02:36.783" Score="8" ViewCount="1375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a discussion with a friend about whether a &quot;cave man-style&quot; language was likely to have ever existed.  You know, the stereotypical &quot;Fire bad!  Need hunt, go tree-place now!&quot; sort of thing.  I guess for this purpose we can define it as a language with very few (if any) structural rules, verb conjugations, prefixes/suffixes, variable word forms, complex sentence structures, or grammatical rules.  A language where each word has a single form, and you communicate thoughts just by putting words next to each other without structure or organization.  &quot;Need food.  Rabbit run fast.  Hungry.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, it seems natural that the first phase of language development would be very simple, even awkward, before linguistic rules were solidified.  (This was my friend's argument.)  The idea is that without any education or enforced consistency the new language would remain merely functional, complex only to the point necessary for communicating information, and would only grow beyond that with the advent of &quot;linguistics&quot; as a field of study, which might not happen for thousands of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, (this was my argument), I'd imagine that as soon as language begins to develop and you start making up words for actions, objects and places, it probably wouldn't be very long before &quot;tree-place&quot; becomes &quot;the local forest,&quot; and &quot;lion bad&quot; becomes &quot;lions are bad&quot; or even &quot;when you see a lion it is bad.&quot;  I tend to think sentence structure arises naturally from the organization of the speaker's thoughts, and while nitty-gritty grammar rules (like &quot;who&quot; vs &quot;whom&quot;) might not develop for a long time, things like verb tenses, possessive nouns, and prepositions would develop quite quickly.  (Btw, I know some languages still don't use some of these things, but the overarching idea of sentence structure and grammatical complexity is more what I'm talking about, rather than verb tenses specifically, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my question is this:&lt;/strong&gt; do we have any evidence of the very, very first phases of linguistic invention?  Maybe some feral group of children who developed their own language, or a remote population uninfluenced by local tongues?  Is there any way to know how quickly complex sentence structure developed?  Or have those first few steps been lost to history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2830" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T18:17:31.610" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T22:10:59.363" Title="Did a &quot;cave man-style&quot; language ever exist?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6185" CreationDate="2013-12-17T21:41:41.773" Score="11" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;English does not allow an imperative to be used in a subordinate clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eat that pizza!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*There's a pizza on the table, which eat! (=&quot;which I order you to eat&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*I told you eat that pizza!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A superficially similar variant of 3 is grammatical: &quot;I told you, eat that pizza!&quot; - but here the imperative clause is not subordinate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's no obvious reason why this should be so. Pragmatically, an imperative is usually paraphrasable by a declarative, e.g. &quot;I order you to Verb&quot; or &quot;You must Verb&quot;, and such declaratives are subordinatable like any others. Indeed, Ancient Greek allows subordinate imperatives to a limited extent (examples from Smyth's Greek Grammar, p. 411):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kratêrés eisin ... hôn krât' érepson&lt;/em&gt; &quot;There are mixing bowls ... the rims of which fill!&quot; (=&quot;the rims of which you must fill&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;oîsth' hò drâson?&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Do you know what do (impv.)?&quot; (=&quot;Do you know what you are to do / what I'm telling you to do?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: which other languages allow subordinate imperatives? (By &quot;imperative&quot; here I mean a morphological form whose main or sole function is to express a directive speech act. There are languages where &quot;subjunctive&quot; forms of various kinds can be used to express commands in both main and subordinate clauses, but I'm not asking about those.) Are subordinate imperatives cross-linguistically rare, or do they only happen to be rare in modern European languages? And if they are rare, why should this be? (Presumably the answer should have to do with the differing pragmatic status of the content of main and subordinate clauses: e.g. in declarative sentences, the content of a subordinate clause often cannot be directly affirmed or denied, which seems relevant somehow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T09:27:47.473" Title="Languages with subordinate imperatives?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6181" CreationDate="2013-12-17T22:23:50.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in pidgin/creole formation.  I have to imagine that early phases of pidgin development have very simple grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2612" LastActivityDate="2013-12-17T22:23:50.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2013-12-17T23:36:48.357" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word final consonants in French &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; pronounced, but only under certain conditions that has to do with group- or phrase phonology; they are usually not pronounced at the end of a phrase or a word uttered in isolation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptions of late 17th century French suggest a stage where most consonants were (still) pronounced, but some were elided mainly before other consonants.&#xA;These elisions eliminated some consonant clusters inside word groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modern French&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word-final consonants &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; pronounced when the next word starts in a vowel in certain groups, the phenomenon known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_%28French%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;liaison&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liaison is considered obligatory within some groups, eg between article and adjective/noun &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;les enfants /lez‿ɑ̃.fɑ̃/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;between subject/object pronoun and verb (or verb followed by subject/object pronoun) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nous avons /nu.z‿a.vɔ̃/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; between phrases, eg between a subject noun and verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mes amis arrivent /me.z‿a.mi (*.z‿) a.ʁiv/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Late 17th Century French&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemporary descriptions of 'good' pronunciation emphasize cases &lt;strong&gt;when word final consonants are elided&lt;/strong&gt; and not pronounced, i.e. the reverse of modern descriptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from &lt;em&gt;L'art de prononcer parfaitement la langue françoise&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=QJQPAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1689&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;il fait, on lit, vous dites, les mains, vos parens&lt;/em&gt;, qu'on prononce à peu près comme s'il y avoit, &lt;em&gt;ifai, onli, voudite, lémains, vauparans&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; (p 101)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like in modern French in these examples the final consonant of a pronoun/article before another consonant was not pronounced, but (group) final -s had not yet been generally dropped:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;le(&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;) mains, vo(&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;) parens &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;vous(&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;) dite(s)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like in modern French (group) final -t in these examples was dropped, and unlike the 'l' of il is also elided before a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;on fai(t)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;i(&lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;) fai(t)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples suggest that &lt;strong&gt;consontants were elided first inside specific word groups&lt;/strong&gt; to simplify clusters, eg from |vousdites &gt; voudites|, |ilfait &gt; ifait|, before they were elided anywhere else. Most of these elisions also apply for modern French, but some have been reversed like in the case of 'il fait.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;em&gt;La Génie de la langue françoise (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=sTY5RgcVDGAC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1684&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) which has this to say about word final -f:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;F is &lt;em&gt;always pronounced&lt;/em&gt; in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;..&lt;em&gt;Bref, chef, fief, grief, nef, esquif, if&lt;/em&gt;, arbre; &lt;em&gt;Iuif, motif, naïf, tarif, vif: nominatif, genetif&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp;c, &lt;em&gt;indicatif, subjonctif,&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp;c, &lt;em&gt;neuf&lt;/em&gt;, de &lt;em&gt;novus&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; [p20]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;F is &lt;em&gt;only pronounced&lt;/em&gt; before vowels, and at the end of a line of verse or phrase (period) in these words:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;..&lt;em&gt;bœuf&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;œuf&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;neuf&lt;/em&gt;, de &lt;em&gt;novem&lt;/em&gt;. On dit &lt;em&gt;un œu dure&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;du bœu salé&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;neu soldats&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. [p20]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this point in time for some words the -f was never elided, but for some it was elided but only before consonant in the same group, 'bœuf' (beef) but 'bœusalé' (salted beef), 'neuf' (nine) but 'neusoldats' (nine soldiers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;F is not pronouced before plural s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Au pluriel on prononce toûjours &lt;em&gt;des grièz&lt;/em&gt;, du singulier &lt;em&gt;grief&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;des bœus&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly most of the words the first group - where -f is never elided - are adjectives, and would most commonly occurs as the final word in their group. The elisions in the second group are not current in modern French, but some elisions before plural are, 17 Cent 'bœus' for &quot;bœufs&quot; is today 'bœu' since plural -s is now generally dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2013-12-27T22:26:31.613" LastActivityDate="2013-12-27T22:26:31.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6182" CreationDate="2013-12-18T00:14:10.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, it is possible to use imperatives in different kinds of clauses, including attributive clauses (like your English example 2). Both of your Greek examples can well be translated into Russian with imperatives in the same positions as in Greek. The Russian language lacking Subjunctive and Optative moods, its imperative can be used in their meaning, such cases I will exclude from my answer, although Russian is brimming with them. I will give examples with the imperatives used only as direct commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following examples imperatives will be italicized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, my translations of your examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English example 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*There's a pizza on the table, which eat! (=&amp;quot;which I order you to eat&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Лежит там пицца на столе, которую ты &lt;em&gt;поедай&lt;/em&gt; немедля.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are mixing bowls ... the rims of which &lt;em&gt;fill&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Посуда там стоит, которую ты до краёв &lt;em&gt;наполни&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know what &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ты знаешь, что &lt;em&gt;сделай&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are some examples from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ruscorpora.ru/en/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian National Corpus&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://search.ruscorpora.ru/search.xml?env=alpha&amp;amp;mycorp=&amp;amp;mysent=&amp;amp;mysize=&amp;amp;mysentsize=&amp;amp;spd=&amp;amp;text=lexgramm&amp;amp;mode=main&amp;amp;sort=gr_tagging&amp;amp;lang=ru&amp;amp;nodia=1&amp;amp;parent1=0&amp;amp;level1=0&amp;amp;lex1=%EA%EE%F2%EE%F0%FB%E9&amp;amp;gramm1=&amp;amp;sem1=&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem2&amp;amp;flags1=&amp;amp;m1=&amp;amp;parent2=0&amp;amp;level2=0&amp;amp;min2=1&amp;amp;max2=1&amp;amp;lex2=&amp;amp;gramm2=V%2Cimper&amp;amp;sem2=&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem2&amp;amp;flags2=&amp;amp;m2=&amp;amp;p=1&amp;amp;docid=84445&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Выложите&lt;/em&gt; лакомство в фруктовую вазу, края которой &lt;em&gt;украсьте&lt;/em&gt; так, как вам подскажет фантазия.  - &amp;quot;*&lt;em&gt;Put out&lt;/em&gt; the delicacies on a dish, the rims of which &lt;em&gt;decorate&lt;/em&gt; the way your fantasy suggests.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://search.ruscorpora.ru/search.xml?env=alpha&amp;amp;mycorp=&amp;amp;mysent=&amp;amp;mysize=&amp;amp;mysentsize=&amp;amp;spd=&amp;amp;text=lexgramm&amp;amp;mode=main&amp;amp;sort=gr_tagging&amp;amp;lang=ru&amp;amp;nodia=1&amp;amp;parent1=0&amp;amp;level1=0&amp;amp;lex1=%EA%EE%F2%EE%F0%FB%E9&amp;amp;gramm1=&amp;amp;sem1=&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem2&amp;amp;flags1=&amp;amp;m1=&amp;amp;parent2=0&amp;amp;level2=0&amp;amp;min2=1&amp;amp;max2=1&amp;amp;lex2=&amp;amp;gramm2=V%2Cimper&amp;amp;sem2=&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem2&amp;amp;flags2=&amp;amp;m2=&amp;amp;p=1&amp;amp;docid=85821&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Возвратись&lt;/em&gt; теперь в своё владение, в котором &lt;em&gt;ожидай&lt;/em&gt; меня (...).  - &amp;quot;*Now &lt;em&gt;go back&lt;/em&gt; to your domain, in which &lt;em&gt;wait&lt;/em&gt; for me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://search.ruscorpora.ru/search.xml?env=alpha&amp;amp;mycorp=&amp;amp;mysent=&amp;amp;mysize=&amp;amp;mysentsize=&amp;amp;spd=&amp;amp;text=lexgramm&amp;amp;mode=main&amp;amp;sort=gr_tagging&amp;amp;lang=ru&amp;amp;nodia=1&amp;amp;parent1=0&amp;amp;level1=0&amp;amp;lex1=%EA%EE%F2%EE%F0%FB%E9&amp;amp;gramm1=&amp;amp;sem1=&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod1=sem2&amp;amp;flags1=&amp;amp;m1=&amp;amp;parent2=0&amp;amp;level2=0&amp;amp;min2=1&amp;amp;max2=1&amp;amp;lex2=&amp;amp;gramm2=V%2Cimper&amp;amp;sem2=&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem&amp;amp;sem-mod2=sem2&amp;amp;flags2=&amp;amp;m2=&amp;amp;p=12&amp;amp;docid=8825&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;. Все действия могут проходить по определенным принципам и правилам, которых &lt;em&gt;придерживайтесь&lt;/em&gt; в реальном бою. - &amp;quot;*All the actions can take place according to certain principles and rules, which &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; in a real combat.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://feb-web.ru/feb/chekhov/texts/sp0/pic/pic-0621.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a letter&lt;/a&gt; by Anton Chekhov:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Привези&lt;/em&gt; мою фуражку маленькую, которую &lt;em&gt;возьми&lt;/em&gt; у Ольги. - &amp;quot;*&lt;em&gt;Bring&lt;/em&gt; me my small cap, which &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; from Olga.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T09:27:47.473" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6181" CreationDate="2013-12-18T04:57:14.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is essentially the lexical protolanguage hypothesis of language evolution, favored by Derek Bickerton, Ray Jackendoff, and others. You can find a nice discussion of this in Tecumseh Fitch's 2010 book The Evolution of Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T04:57:14.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6188" CreationDate="2013-12-18T10:23:36.490" Score="2" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Why?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've taken a great interest in linguistics lately and want to learn more about the basic principles but also advanced topics we built into different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I was browsing through Wikipedia, I tripped over an article about the so called &lt;strong&gt;distributive case&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link to article&lt;/a&gt;). Instantly I tried to find out more about it, but alas this concept seems to be quasi non-existent in English and German (my 2nd and 1st language), so I tried to go with the Latin example in the German Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exapmle&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;bis bina sunt quattuor&lt;/em&gt; (in numbers: 2 x 2 = 4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Analysis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analsysis so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bis&lt;/em&gt; relates to the word &lt;em&gt;bi&lt;/em&gt;, which simply means &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt;. The suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; changes the meaning to &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bina&lt;/em&gt; means pairwise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;sunt&lt;/em&gt; is basically third-person plural of &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sum&lt;/em&gt; in Latin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;quattuor&lt;/em&gt; simply means &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't really understand now is why this sentence is like this.&#xA;Basically the information for &lt;em&gt;two times&lt;/em&gt; is doubly present in the example.&#xA;Once in &lt;em&gt;bis&lt;/em&gt; and once &lt;em&gt;bina&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Why isn't the sentence &quot;&lt;em&gt;bis bi sunt quattuor&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which would roughly translate to &quot;&lt;em&gt;Two times two is four&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Or maybe &quot;&lt;em&gt;bina bi sunt quattor&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which would be something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;A pair of twos is four&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;The meaning of the example translates to &quot;&lt;em&gt;Two times a pair of twos is four&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which sounds quite odd to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the sentence like the exapmle and not like one of my conceptions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does anyone have more material about the distributive case itself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: Due to a wrong interpretation of the word &lt;em&gt;bina&lt;/em&gt;, I mistranslated the sentence.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Question 2: Thanks to a hint by Yellow Sky, I'm now collecting useful ressources about &lt;em&gt;collective numerals&lt;/em&gt;, which are kind of a prestage for &lt;em&gt;distributive numerals&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2897" LastEditorUserId="2897" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T14:30:06.393" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T14:30:06.393" Title="Distributive case in Latin" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6187" CreationDate="2013-12-18T11:02:07.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, &lt;code&gt;bi&lt;/code&gt; is not used in Latin as a separate word, the Latin for &quot;two&quot; is &lt;code&gt;duo&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I cannot see why that sentence surprises you. It really means &quot;twice pairwise&quot;, &quot;twice in pair&quot;, but isn't that the same as &quot;two pairs&quot;, &lt;code&gt;::&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bina&lt;/code&gt; is plural of the word &lt;code&gt;bini&lt;/code&gt; (pair), so the verb &lt;code&gt;sunt&lt;/code&gt; is plural. I would translate the Latin sentence as &quot;Two pairs make four.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T11:02:07.940" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-18T11:28:40.107" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;So. I've started using this powerfull (though inconvenient) piece of software Praat. And when i try to measure my own vocals formants of single vowels and these of native speakers (spanish) we all hit near respective median values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when i start analyzing vowels in words, say lobo.&#xA;Female voice gives respectively   (553,1287)  (494,807) for first and second o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Male voice (541,1134) , (505,1080)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My attempts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(529,1235), (511,1120) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(488,1292) , (500,1128) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(514,1238) ,    (504,1165)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mean values for spanish o (Quilis y Esgueva 1983): (474.5,888.4) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's going on here and why the F2 shifts so much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean this shift from f2 of a standalone vowel to f2 of the vowel in lobo of native speakers and mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="2881" LastEditDate="2013-12-18T22:46:17.617" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T22:46:17.617" Title="Praat for detecting not single vowels but vocals in a word" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6187" CreationDate="2013-12-18T13:40:05.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, bina is not “the plural of bini”. This word exists only in the plural. In the nominative case you have masculine bini, feminine binae, neuter bina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-18T13:40:05.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-18T18:23:56.037" Score="-2" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word (pl. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;баре,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ['bа:rʲe]) is roughly rendered into English as 'gentry' meaning 'a noble person without a position at imperial court'. The &lt;em&gt;boyar&lt;/em&gt; is possibly not a cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What surprises me the most is that the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bár&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in Old Irish (especially in its poetic speech, or in &lt;em&gt;bérla na filed&lt;/em&gt;) had meant &lt;em&gt;´a wise chief'&lt;/em&gt;, while the most ancient Irish sources provide a word for ´&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bárnía&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;', or &lt;em&gt;´wise warrior´&lt;/em&gt;, and this word is even more resemblant to the Russian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;´barin´&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word барон 'baron' is not a possible source, because it does not coincide with the plural form (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;бароны &amp;lt;=барон&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; VS &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;барин =&gt; баре&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). However, the plural of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;боярин&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;бояре&lt;/em&gt;, which suggests a pattern, but does not explain the intervocal [j] in  &lt;em&gt;boyar&lt;/em&gt;. What is the etymology of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;boyar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, by the way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the question is: are there any reliable etymologucal sources (please do not quote any Vasmer or the like) which might help me in shedding some light on this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T16:36:27.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T16:36:27.243" Title="What is the origin of Russian барин ['bа:rʲin]?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6194" CreationDate="2013-12-19T10:16:50.580" Score="10" ViewCount="1828" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Polish name &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikolaj&quot;&gt;Mikołaj&lt;/a&gt; is held to correspond to the &lt;em&gt;Nicholas&lt;/em&gt; family of given names, as evidenced by the Russified name of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miko%C5%82aj_Kruszewski&quot;&gt;Mikołaj Kruszewski&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is an odd sound change, my question is why? My first guess would be interference from Michał and other variants of &lt;em&gt;Michael&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T15:38:33.960" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T04:56:25.380" Title="Why is Mikołaj the Polish reflex of Nicholas?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6193" CreationDate="2013-12-19T11:25:04.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are absolutely right, the change N &gt; M is due to the influence of &lt;code&gt;Michael&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That happened not only in Polish, but also in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ukrainian: &lt;code&gt;Микола, Миколай&lt;/code&gt; (Mykola, Mykolaj)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belarusian: &lt;code&gt;Мікалай&lt;/code&gt; (Mikalaj)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Czech and Slovak: &lt;code&gt;Mikuláš&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upper Sorbian: &lt;code&gt;Mikławš&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower Sorbian: &lt;code&gt;Miklawš&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovenian: &lt;code&gt;Miklavž&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD: Best wishes on Saint Nicholas' Day, which is celebrated today by most of the Eastern Orthodox!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T04:56:25.380" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T04:56:25.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6181" CreationDate="2013-12-19T14:09:07.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any isolating language would have this type of structure: no difference between parts of speech, no conjugation, no cases, no declentions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structures like 'fire bad', or noun + adjective, are typical for Russian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These structures are also typical for Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since even animals have a certain type of language, we have no sufficient data on the existance of a protolanguage of human beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T14:09:07.440" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6181" CreationDate="2013-12-19T15:12:36.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The early versions of Nicaraguan Sign Language were more or less like that - these deaf-mute people would sign sentences like &quot;I go house Pedro&quot;, &quot;this road not good&quot;, &quot;I want food now&quot; and so on. As it evolved, newer speakers have added complexity onto it: agreement between verb and object, markers for time and mood, spatial references, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-19T15:12:36.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6191" CreationDate="2013-12-19T23:05:10.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contact of Slavs with the Celtic people was very long ago, in the 4th - 2nd centuries BC, in the times when the Proto-Slavic language still existed, the few Slavic words that can be explained by that contact were borrowed into the Ptoto-Slavic. Because of this, it looks quite improbable that the long Celtic &lt;code&gt;á&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;bár&lt;/strong&gt; would give the Slavic &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;code&gt;болꙗринъ&lt;/code&gt; which was a short vowel in those times. &lt;code&gt;Болꙗринъ&lt;/code&gt; is the original form of &lt;code&gt;барин&lt;/code&gt; since the latter was attested much later. Besides, Slavs didn't have aristocracy BC, so the word couldn't appear that early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the attempts to explain that word by Celtic influence break against the laws of phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T00:19:05.197" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T00:19:05.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2013-12-20T14:22:16.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was under the impression that all languages are considered isolates until it's demonstrated to a high degree of certainty that they're related to another language. Was I wrong on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There've been various attempts at linking Korean to Japanese and Ainu, on one-hand, and to the Turkic-Mongolic languages on the other. Should the proponents of one of these efforts succeed, then Korean would stop being classified as an &quot;isolate&quot;, which really means &quot;not enough data to accurately say if it's related to something else or not&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T14:22:16.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-20T16:50:06.200" Score="5" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular rule [t] -&gt; [g]/_ V [+velar] (because of anticipatory assimilation)&#xA;I'm unsure of how to actually write this in the most efficient way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know that if [t] changes to [g] due 'anticipatory assimilation'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2908" LastEditorUserId="2908" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T13:02:31.737" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T13:02:31.737" Title="Does [t] become [g] due to anticipatory assimilation?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6207" CreationDate="2013-12-20T18:42:27.563" Score="1" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between &lt;code&gt;kisfan (كِسْفًا)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;kisafan (كِسَفًا)&lt;/code&gt; in Arabic ? Also, what is the singular of it ? If possible (optional), give a suggestion how to search for its meaning in &lt;code&gt;Lisan al Arab&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Lane's lexicon&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2910" LastEditorUserId="2910" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T06:05:18.347" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T06:05:18.347" Title="what's the difference between kisfan (كِسَفًا) and kisafan (كِسَفًا) in Arabic?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-12-21T12:41:08.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6098" CreationDate="2013-12-20T21:39:09.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese dictionaries have arranged characters according to radicals for several centuries, then sorting on next level according to number of strokes. Works when you're looking for the meaning or pronunciation of a character you just saw. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias also attempted sorting by &quot;theme&quot;: animals, plants, metals, etc. Of course, works only if you know a word and are looking for how it's written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical list of radicals is taken to be that used in the Kangxi dictionary, presumed to be one of the most complete dictionaries ever made on Chinese logograms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%29#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%29#History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Japanese I can attest the problem is solved via kana: when searching the kanji for a word you know, they're ordered according to the sorting of kana (aiueo, ka ki ku...) . When you look instead for a character's meaning or its pronunciation, though, they also use the radical + number of strokes method. As a foreign learner, you're in for some surprises for some characters' official stroke steps are not what you could intuitively think of :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastEditorUserId="2785" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T20:54:55.260" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T20:54:55.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6205" CreationDate="2013-12-20T22:15:14.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two words are, actually, &lt;code&gt;kisfan (كِسْفًا)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;kisafan (كِسَفًا)&lt;/code&gt;. They are &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=ksf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;derived&lt;/a&gt; from the triliteral root &lt;strong&gt;k-s-f&lt;/strong&gt; (kāf-sīn-fā, ك س ف) with the general meaning of &quot;fragments, pieces, lumps, to shatter, to make into fragments&quot;. Both words are indefinite &lt;em&gt;singular&lt;/em&gt; masculine nouns in the Accusative Case. The case ending, &lt;strong&gt;tanwīn fatḥ&lt;/strong&gt; over the letter &lt;strong&gt;alif&lt;/strong&gt; (ـًا‎) is an obvious sign the nouns are singular. Still, the second noun, &lt;code&gt;kisafan (كِسَفًا)&lt;/code&gt;, can be used as a collective noun, it can be translated like &quot;a piece&quot;, &quot;(in) pieces&quot;, &quot;a fragment&quot;, &quot;fragments&quot;. The first noun, &lt;code&gt;kisfan (كِسْفًا)&lt;/code&gt;, is &quot;a portion&quot;, &quot;a part&quot;, &quot;a fragment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for looking up words in Arabic dictionaries, you must find out their root first. It is easy with triliteral roots like in these words, but when the root contains &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;, those consonants can disappear in some forms, which makes looking up such words a bit more difficult. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.studyquran.co.uk/LLhome.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lane's Lexicon&lt;/a&gt; our root &lt;strong&gt;k-s-f&lt;/strong&gt; is not found, it must be on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.studyquran.org/LaneLexicon/Volume7/00000141.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; of volume 7, and it is there, in the lower left corner, but without any translation, &quot;See Supplement&quot; is only written there. In the supplement, which is in the end of volume 8, there is again &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.studyquran.org/LaneLexicon/Volume8/00000254.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a reference&lt;/a&gt; (in the center of the page) to still another word (بال), its root is &lt;strong&gt;b-w-l&lt;/strong&gt; with the &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt; disappearing, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.studyquran.org/LaneLexicon/Volume1/00000314.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but there is nothing interesting about &lt;strong&gt;k-s-f&lt;/strong&gt; in that article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2013-12-20T22:35:36.953" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T22:35:36.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6205" CreationDate="2013-12-20T23:21:09.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lane died before he could finish his dictionary. The sections from ك onward were knocked together by his nephew out of Lane's rough draft and are mostly useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-20T23:21:09.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-21T00:01:41.973" Score="1" ViewCount="1165" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the advantages of using a morphologically-based  / lemma-based dictionary in a speech recognition system as opposed to a dictionary of 'Orthography' + 'transcription' or other types (which I am currently unaware of... enlighten me please!)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T00:01:41.973" Title="What are the advantages of using a morpheme-based dictionary in a speech recognition system?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-21T01:21:36.703" Score="4" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics classes seem to be mostly concerned with analyzing language in its spoken form. Written language is seen as almost &quot;parasitic&quot; to spoken language. A language's orthography generally gives an unreliable reflection of its structure. As such, I've been told that you only need to examine language in its spoken form to understand its morphology. However, I feel that this is a rather myopic approach to morphological analysis. For example, consider the relationship between the words 'sign' and 'signify'. Note that 'sign' has a silent 'g', where 'signify' does not. Casually browsing the online etymology dictionary, you can observe that the Latin word 'signum' evolved the old french word 'signe', which evolved into 'sign', which in turn evolved into 'signify'. The orthography, though unstandardized at the time, may explain how /g/ remained recessive in 'sign' and was transferred to 'signified'. I understand that pronunciation was very different in the early 13c, and that this probably is not a very good example. (I know nothing about historical linguistics.) There are probably other processes at work for my specific example. But I hope you can understand the concept which I am trying to convey. Why don't we consider a language's orthography when doing morphological analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2013-12-22T01:47:33.007" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T05:20:57.447" Title="To what extent is a language's morphology tied to orthography, and why do we not consider orthography when doing morphological analysis?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="889" CreationDate="2013-12-21T06:31:05.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To decide, whether the language was Celtic, we need to know about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intervocalic lenition (which, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ru/books?id=ztksXfGwLVgC&amp;amp;pg=PA341&amp;amp;lpg=PA341&amp;amp;dq=lenition%20in%20proto%20celtic&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=-IYFmKAs1B&amp;amp;sig=Bjr-2XCXXAO81pYenGgWjSxi418&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=XjO1UpKxNcOB4gTY04DQBg&amp;amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=lenition%20in%20proto%20celtic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;according to Jaskuła&lt;/a&gt;, was one of the most probable characteristic of Celtic languages).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Word order (which is specific for Continental Celtic and differs from e.g. Italic languages).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The state of prepositions (if there were any).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case endings (if there were any).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Correspondenses between vocal systems of (Proto) Celtic and Lusitanian, which can be given by e.g. theonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T06:31:05.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6224" CreationDate="2013-12-21T10:07:23.113" Score="2" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verbs, auxiliaries and modals constitute the verb group (Vgp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an official term used to describe a [group of determiners] (pre-, central-, post-) that pre-modify the noun in the NP? In the following examples, more than one determiner pre-modifies the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My three] cats&#xA;[Both the] cats&#xA;[All the many] cats&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't call it a determiner phrase because according to the DP-hypothesis, the determiner phrase is an alternative to the NP whereby the determiner heads the whole phrase; hence, DP. This is a whole different topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it, therefore, be called a determiner group or is there an actual term for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2013-12-21T10:19:14.723" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T04:34:37.260" Title="What is a group of determiners called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-21T13:07:29.083" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the phonological process whereby a speaker would use [ʊ] as a replacement for [l]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples off the top of my head; [lɪtl] -&gt; [lɪtʊ], [gɪgl] -&gt; [gɪgʊ], [twɪŋkl] -&gt; [twɪŋkʊ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2908" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T00:23:23.217" Title="What is the phonological process whereby a speaker uses [ʊ] as a replacement for [l]?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6210" CreationDate="2013-12-21T15:40:42.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not correct to say “that the Latin word 'signum' evolved into 'sign', which in turn evolved into 'signify'”. The English words “sign” and “signify” are both borrowed from Old French, which had them from Latin. English does not allow the cluster /gn/ in word-final position; that is why the /g/ is lost in “sign” but retained in “signify”. It is about phonology, not orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T15:40:42.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6214" CreationDate="2013-12-21T23:59:21.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I say this a lot. Like Hippietrail said, it's a progression from the dark l.&#xA;I can say  as [wɫ̩] when it's used as a discourse particle. My dialect tends to turn a syllable final velarized [ɫ] into [w]. As a result, I VERY often say [wː] instead of [wɛɫ]. I can record it if you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, the way it progresses from a dark l to a [w] or a [ʊ], depending on your perspective (is it a syllabic consonant, or a vowel? lol) is because the mouth shape for [ɫ] is almost exactly the same for [w] except the apex of the tongue is touching the alveolar ridge. As soon as the tip lets go, it sounds like [w] and not [ɫ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you don't know, [ɫ] is an /l/ with the back of the tongue velarized. That is, it's nearing the velum (where you produce /k/ and /g/). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the name of this phonological process? I haven't the faintest idea. De-alveolarisation, maybe? Haha, maybe not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2850" LastActivityDate="2013-12-21T23:59:21.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6214" CreationDate="2013-12-22T00:23:23.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's basically a type of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debuccalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;debuccalization&lt;/a&gt;. Although the standard examples of debuccalization are things like &lt;em&gt;s &gt; h&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;t &gt; ʔ&lt;/em&gt;, this is the same kind of process, since the loss of alveolar closure turns syllabic [ɫ] into a kind of laterally colored high back vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T00:23:23.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6220" CreationDate="2013-12-22T01:18:40.497" Score="7" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;What, if any, difference is there between long vowels and a double vowels, i.e. consecutive identical vowels?   For example, what is the difference between /i:/ and /ii/? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, could it be that the former forms one syllable and the latter form two?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or could there be a change in quality in one of the two vowels?   Or a change in pitch, loudness, or duration of one of the two vowels?  (I understand that these possibilities are not mutually exclusive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages that have both phonemic vowel length and double vowels?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the lack of background, but I haven't found an answer to this question on the net.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-22T05:36:07.897" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T05:36:07.897" Title="What, if any, difference is there between long vowels and a double vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6218" CreationDate="2013-12-22T01:31:42.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essential difference is that a long vowel has one peak, and a double vowel has two peaks, usually the peaks are of pitch or loudness, or phonation, if it is used in a language. I know only of the languages in which double vowels form two different syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T01:31:42.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6218" CreationDate="2013-12-22T01:42:34.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonetically, could it be that the former forms one syllable and the latter form two?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, exactly, except that this isn't a phonetic distinction but a phonological one. If you have two successive identical vowels, they're always going to form two syllables; if you have one long vowel, it's always going to form one syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can also be phonetic differences in pitch etc., but not necessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are there languages that have both phonemic vowel length and double vowels?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Ancient Greek was such a language; I'm sure there are other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T01:42:34.623" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6210" CreationDate="2013-12-22T05:20:57.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Common knowledge of writing in a society can and does have an effect on the language structure, and it's been noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's this Israeli linguist (I've forgotten his name) who says so-called Modern Hebrew isn't really a Semitic language... he argues in one of his books how Chinese writing has had a profound effect in the language, by altering the way new words are created and how borrowings are adapted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember Saussure mentioning in a sentence in one of his books &quot;I've been told people in Paris now pronounce the 't' in 'sept' &quot;. I found that really odd, for I had been taught uttering &quot;set&quot; was THE correct way to pronounce 7 in French. So clearly Parisians of his time were adopting an artificial pronunciation based on spelling, which then was declared the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T05:20:57.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-22T13:04:13.523" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hixkaryana is a Carib language, spoken by some 500 people, in the states Amazonas and Pará in Brazil. I am interested in the history of this language, but very little is known. Can someone help me to find out when this language came into existence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2914" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T00:26:06.517" Title="How old is Hixkaryana?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3451" CreationDate="2013-12-22T16:50:56.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend a great book: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Грамматика японского языка. Введение. Фонология. Супрафонология. Морфонология&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by В. М. Алпатов, И. Ф. Вардуль, С. А. Старостин. That's the best piece I ever read on theoretical phonetics of Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The annotation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Данная книга представляет собой общее теоретическое введение к грамматике современного японского языка. Во вводной части определяются общие принципы построения грамматики, рассматривается строение языковой системы, в том числе фонологический, супрафонологический и морфонологический ярусы. В разделе «Фонология» описываются звуки современного японского языка, которые затем объединяются в фонемы; рассматривается фонемная структура слога. В разделе «Супрафонология» описана акцентуация современного японского языка. В разделе «Морфонология» рассматривается звуковая структура морфем и глоссем (слов) японского языка, неодинаковая в исконной и заимствованных подсистемах; описаны разные типы чередований.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-02-22T20:03:57.293" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T20:03:57.293" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2013-12-22T16:50:56.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6212" CreationDate="2013-12-22T18:02:26.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A somewhat more useful way is to do what snailboat suggests above,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;namely ignore the &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt; Hypothesis, which is after all just a hypothesis that can't be disproved,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and go for something that represents the data rather than the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, McCawley 1998 distinguishes between two types of nouny constituent in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nʹ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (pronounced &quot;N-Bar&quot; -- don't ask), which is a phrasal unit headed by an &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (pronounced &quot;N-P&quot;), which is the syntactic constituent type&lt;br&gt;&#xA;corresponding to the logical type &lt;em&gt;Argument of Predicate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(and thus is outside the X-Bar nodal system).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, it's not clear that the subject of  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That he arrived late is very unfortunate.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(i.e, the complement clause &lt;em&gt;that he arrived late&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;which must be a noun phrase since it's the subject), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be said even to &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; a head, and if so, it's clearly not headed by a noun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's simply an NP, since it corresponds to an argument of the predicate adjective &lt;em&gt;unfortunate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The constituent containing determiners that precedes prenominal adjectives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;is then simply, in X-Bar terminology, a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dʹ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  In general, an &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; will contain a &lt;code&gt;Dʹ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For instance, the subject of the following sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quite a few of the more than ten thousand people took his advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be parsable as [&lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; [&lt;code&gt;Dʹ&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Quite ...  thousand&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;Dʹ&lt;/code&gt;] [N &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; N] NP].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether &lt;code&gt;Dʹ&lt;/code&gt; is actually the same constituent type as &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;depends entirely on one's preferred nomenclatural presuppositions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It doesn't bear on descriptions of phenomena, except to counsel one&lt;br&gt;&#xA;to avoid confusing modes of expression; after all, the idea is to be &lt;strong&gt;clear&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2013-12-22T18:02:26.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-22T18:09:54.103" Score="3" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume we have Google's 1T n-grams. I want to be able to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search for n-grams containing all of a set of words (such as finding all n-grams containing the words &quot;dog&quot; and &quot;bone&quot; in any position)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The above search but for n-grams of a particular size only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search for n-grams using a template (such as finding all n-grams which fit the template &quot;the dog __ the __&quot; where the blanks are to be filled with a single word)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2886" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T03:02:49.550" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T08:52:43.830" Title="What is the most efficient way to store n-grams in a database / data structure?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-22T20:17:14.467" Score="5" ViewCount="1786" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently studying Icelandic. Right away at one of the first steps I found a bit of difficulty and I wonder if any of you might be able to help me as the question might be answered based on any highly inflected language. The doubt regards the use of pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below you'll be able to see the Personal and Possessive pronouns that constitutes the Icelandic language, and with them I also put the noun cases that would be also part of the scheme:&#xA;(For the sake of the example I'll only use first person singular pronouns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case&lt;/strong&gt;     &lt;strong&gt;Pronoun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nom&lt;/strong&gt;       &lt;code&gt;ég&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acc&lt;/strong&gt;         &lt;code&gt;mig&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dat&lt;/strong&gt;         &lt;code&gt;mér&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gen&lt;/strong&gt;        &lt;code&gt;mín&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possessive Pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case     Pronoun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nom&lt;/strong&gt;      &lt;code&gt;minn&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acc&lt;/strong&gt;        &lt;code&gt;minn&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dat&lt;/strong&gt;        &lt;code&gt;mínum&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gen&lt;/strong&gt;       &lt;code&gt;míns&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how can I differentiate the usage of the personal genitive pronoun with the possessive genitive pronoun? Does anybody knows of any example (In Latin or German, or even in English if you can figure a way out) or anywhere I could find an explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2915" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T23:53:01.450" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T23:37:49.167" Title="Difference between Genitive Personal Pronoun and Possessive Pronoun" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-22T20:21:37.053" Score="4" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching for two special types of grammatical aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an aspect that has a meaning of 'try or attempt' ex: he made an attempt to ask.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an aspect that has a meaning of 'eventual or definitive' ex: he has gone eventually. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T02:58:21.420" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:25:23.137" Title="Grammatical Aspects" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-22T21:02:33.583" Score="4" ViewCount="784" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chomsky paradigm states that all languages obey certain laws or conditions which ultimately are a function of the physical properties of the brain. Is there a similar constraint on mathematics? Is it thought that there is universal (the universe being humans) structure of mathematics that is the result of the structure of the human brain? If so, is this the reason that math works so well at predicting observations? In other words, since our rules of mathematics arise from the structure of our brains, and it is the same brains making observations based on mathematics, it makes sense that they'd match? &#xA;Might an alien mind not observe such a good correlation between human mathematics and the results of human experiments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2916" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T09:04:39.967" Title="Universal &quot;grammar&quot; for mathematics" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6227" CreationDate="2013-12-22T22:35:14.007" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;(1) is &quot;conative&quot;, though strictly speaking, it's not an aspectual category, since it's about more than just the temporal structure of the event. I don't know if there's a term for (2) (and I'm not actually sure exactly what you mean; some more examples might help).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2013-12-24T05:20:57.920" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T05:20:57.920" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2013-12-23T03:00:10.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is some data on the question from Latvian, which as it so happens makes this distinction.  In Latvian, the first person possessive adjective is &lt;em&gt;‘mans/mana’&lt;/em&gt; (masc/fem).  It declines with the noun it modifies.  The genitive case form of the first person pronoun is ‘&lt;em&gt;manis&lt;/em&gt;’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uses of possessive adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In noun phrases:        &lt;em&gt;mans draugs&lt;/em&gt;           ‘my friend’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In predicate position:      &lt;em&gt;Tas divritenis ir mans.&lt;/em&gt;       ‘That bicycle is mine.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uses of genitive pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In prepositional phrases:       &lt;em&gt;Pirms manis ir bijis tikai viens īpašnieks.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                    Before me, there has been only one owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In constructions requiring the genitive:        &lt;em&gt;Manis nav.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                        I don’t exist./I am not there. (negative construction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vai tev manis trūka?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;                Did you miss me? (genitive complement of &lt;em&gt;‘trūkt’&lt;/em&gt; to miss)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is pretty much in line with TKR’s expectations in his comment.  Note that there is no distinction made between ‘my’ and ‘mine’.  There’s an additional complication though:  possessive adjective forms exist only for the first and second person singular.  For the plurals and for third person, the genitive pronoun is used across the board, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;viņa drangs&lt;/em&gt;   ‘his friend’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;viņas draugs&lt;/em&gt;      ‘her friend’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Viņa nav.&lt;/em&gt; ‘He’s not here.’        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Viņas nav.&lt;/em&gt;        ‘She’s not here.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tas divritenis ir jūsu.&lt;/em&gt;   ‘That bicycle is yours (pl.).’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as TKR pointed out, every language has its own idiosyncracies.&#xA;This is certainly something to pay attention to when learning a language with a well-developed case system.  Have fun with Icelandic!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2013-12-23T03:18:42.780" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T03:18:42.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6225" CreationDate="2013-12-23T05:37:35.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Trie&lt;/a&gt; data structure is commonly used in NLP. This, and its descendants, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Suffix Tree&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_suffix_tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Generalized Suffix Tree&lt;/a&gt; provide both, an efficient way to store commonly occurring sub-sequences, and a fast way to search for sub-sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T05:37:35.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6225" CreationDate="2013-12-23T08:52:43.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could store all tokens in a relational database in a separate table and build up a positional index (sacrificing space for speed of query processing). Then you could use simple SQL expressions to formulate all types of queries you've listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T08:52:43.830" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2013-12-23T10:08:24.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference should be defined by the usage of Nominative VS Accusative. For most Icelandic nouns, it should be obvious, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;armur (an arm):      minn armur (Nom.) =&gt;   minn arm (Gen.)`&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;afi (a grandfather): minn afi (Nom.)   =&gt;   minn afa (Gen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;saga (a story):      minn saga (Nom.)  =&gt;   minn sögu (Gen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the ambiguity you have mentioned exists only in phrases with definiteness marked by possessive pronouns plus nouns of certain declension types (&lt;em&gt;one-syllable feminine words with final a consonant of both declensions and neutrum of both declension types&lt;/em&gt;),  for my intuition is that in sg. definite form no possessive pronoun should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should also be some syntaxical tools to mark a subject VS a possessor (see e.g. an answer by user2619), or a commonsense logic to distinguish animate vs inanimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-25T10:20:00.390" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T10:20:00.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6222" CreationDate="2013-12-23T12:19:52.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best outcome you can hope for is an information about the eldest written record of this language. Comparative language study with a glottochronological method is a way different service which requires time and money, and more time, than money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T12:19:52.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-23T19:27:10.177" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is debate on the existence of this variety within the expanding circle, I think it exists in as much as we can categorise other varieties (i.e. Singlish falls under the 'Asian-English' label).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm searching for examples to support/refute the idea of 'Euro-English', I've investigated countability but I'm in search of more data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone provide any examples of other morphological, grammatical or lexical features which are unique to varieties of English within Europe? Or point me to a corpus/journals which have this data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it not exist, could you point me towards academic literature which refutes its existence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2908" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T23:19:03.637" Title="Does Euro-English exist?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2013-12-23T19:32:10.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that ultimately, this is a question without a definitive answer. But it's not a bad one to ask. My feeling is that it contains the germs of a downfall of the 'Universal Grammar' thesis, since unlike language, mathematics can fairly clearly distinguish between the axiomatic and lawful. So while there are many ways in which some mathematical relativity can be conceived, it has no impact on the universal foundations of mathematics. You don't need to look to aliens. The ancient Greeks saw the world through geometry and saw their arithmetic as being reducible to it (I'm grossly simplifying, of course), and we see the world in exactly the opposite way, reducing geometry to arithmetic. However, these two universes are completely  equivalent, something that cannot be said for two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this first part of the answer takes at face value the very broad reading of the 'Universal Grammar' assumptions. However, I'd say that when read more narrowly (viz when we look closely at the actual principles posited), I'd say that there's no reason to assume that something like this would hold for mathematics. When you look at the grammar of any language, the universal principles posited by the UG theorists only govern a tiny fraction of all the rule-ful patterns present in a language. But with mathematics, you can derive the vast majority of its rules from the underlying axioms. Therefore, I suspect that the Lakoff/Nunez thesis has much more to say about this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I should declare an interest here. I'm an ardent anti-Chomskean (&lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2010/08/why-chomsky-doesnt-count-as-a-gifted-linguist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://metaphorhacker.net/2010/08/why-chomsky-doesnt-count-as-a-gifted-linguist/&lt;/a&gt;) and I translated one of Lakoff's books, so I certainly come with some theoretical baggage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T19:32:10.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6236" CreationDate="2013-12-23T20:26:22.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your idea of &quot;euro-English&quot; is nothing more than Globish. Here are a couple of books, that might help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language&#xA;TIMOTHY FARRINGTON&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The History of English&#xA;DAVID GRAMLEY&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stories of English&#xA;DAVID CRYSTAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these books treat the subject of world variants of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastActivityDate="2013-12-23T20:26:22.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T04:27:06.333" Score="0" ViewCount="1817" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to what I have studied before, when a person speaks a dialect just &quot;in the street&quot; and uses one dialect else &quot;in the school&quot;, he is a bi-dialectal person. Now, I have been faced with &quot;diglossia&quot;. I searched and found that in some Arabic countries, for example, high variety of the language is used for important matters such as political events and religious discussions, and a low variety of the language is used for everyday affairs. How I can distinguish bi-dialect and diglossia? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T05:10:39.173" Title="What's the difference between bidialect and diglossia?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-12-24T11:17:58.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6212" CreationDate="2013-12-24T04:34:37.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer to the question is NO, there is no established term such as &lt;em&gt;determiner group&lt;/em&gt; used to denote the word combinations in the question, and there is a reason why no term has been established to denote such word combinations. This reason is that the relevant words (e.g. &lt;em&gt;my three&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;both the&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;all the many&lt;/em&gt;) hardly qualify as a unit of syntax. At most, one can acknowledge that they form a &lt;em&gt;string&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such word combinations qualify as a constituent in no theory of syntax (that I am aware of), not in phrase structure grammars and not in dependency grammars. Furthermore, such word combinations do not qaulify as chains, that is, they do not qualify as &lt;em&gt;catenae&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;. In contrast, verb predicates (e.g. &lt;em&gt;will have fixed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;has been fixed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;may have been being fixed&lt;/em&gt;) do qualify as chains of words, as catenae. The fact that determiner strings qualify neither as constituents nor as catenae means that it is more difficult to denote such combinations with a particular syntactic term. Theoretical syntax tends to focus on word combinations that are recognizable units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is nothing to stop one from establishing a new term, e.g. &lt;em&gt;determiner string&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;determiner group&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, since there is no pre-established term for such combinations, one has more freedom to call them whatever one wants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T04:34:37.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6241" CreationDate="2013-12-24T05:10:39.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diglossia typically refers to the situation you've described when the two forms are named, 'recognized' varieties. The distinction is a culturally reified one, while changing register is not usually considered to be a clear shift from e.g., 'Work English' to 'Street English'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T05:10:39.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T09:59:52.123" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just ran into this in the novel &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-&quot;Ah! you do not know what I suffer.&quot;&#xA;  -&quot;But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.''&#xA;  -``&lt;em&gt;It will be no use to us if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.&lt;/em&gt;''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The occurrence of &quot;such&quot; here is interesting to me. Is it a pronoun here which is brought instead of &quot;young men of four thousand a year&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the deep structure of the noun phrase of the if-clause? the surface structure is &quot;twenty such&quot;. Is the deep structure &quot;twenty young men who are of 4 thousand a year&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a Reduction Transformation is possible which is better to be used? for example, is it better to say &quot;a man who is of large fortune&quot; or &quot;a man of large fortune&quot;? Any links elaborating on the Reduction Transformations in English would be truly appreciated. As far as I know, there are six RTs. But I need a trustworthy reference for my further studying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2925" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T09:59:52.123" Title="“Such” as a pronoun and “Reduction Transformations”" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T10:09:57.677" Score="1" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project where the aim is to create a dictionary of creativity terms. I am a scholar of social psychology and marketing, and the aim the project is to be able to track ideas and creativity in online forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I was thinking if anyone in here would know what theoretical field I am looking for within linguistics. I have the idea that if fx people are angry, they tend to write certain terms or sets of terms. Also when people are happy they tend to write certain terms or sets of terms. In order for these things or terms to be generic, they should be independent of topic. That means if people are happy about fx their car or their dog, they would use the same terms to express their happiness across the two topics. Where I am getting at is that the mental state of happiness manifests itself as language by the terms we use. So will creativity. One could maybe imagine that when people are creative and solving problems, people would tend to use the sets of terms &quot;i think&quot; or &quot;maybe we could&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone maybe recognize what is the field I am searching for within linguistics and what are the keywords and maybe also authors that have been writing about this stuff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1578" LastEditorUserId="1578" LastEditDate="2014-01-02T19:20:19.973" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T19:20:19.973" Title="The manifestation of creativity in written language" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2013-12-24T11:36:42.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question. What I think should be defined is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What language is concerned? Different languages may predefine different patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The happiness, in my opinion, has nothing to do with happiness of creativity. An unhappy person can be very creative (and sometimes even more so than a happy one).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The terms you are looking for are psycholinguistical markers of emotional states (provided a creativity is a form of emotional state, of which I am not sure).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-24T18:11:55.557" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T18:11:55.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T17:02:29.243" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across with sentence today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even she, who believed herself to be a revolutionary, could no more have broken her marital bangles than she could have driven a stake through her husband's heart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the meaning of this sentence. Here in this sentence two things are being compared. Both are negative sentences. The first sentence is no more than the second sentence. And ultimately giving out a meaning that both the sentences are not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part, that the first is being compared with - &quot;she could have driven a stake through her husband's heart.&quot; - have no negative, yet how it means negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How both the first part and second part tells out that both are impossible to her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="3637" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T21:39:48.763" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T21:39:48.763" Title="No more than - comparing two clause" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-24T21:50:41.697" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has there been any account given for what causes grammatical gender classifications to be used in languages? Is there a purpose in associating a gender to a word? Does this type of classification system help with comprehension or specificity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2924" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T21:50:41.697" Title="What accounts for grammatical gender classifications?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6247" CreationDate="2013-12-24T22:44:43.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about just the meaning of the sentence, rather than the technicalities of the syntactic structure, this is how it works: it isn't explicitly denied that &quot;she could have driven a stake through her husband's heart&quot;, but this is such an extreme scenario that the reader is expected to assume that it is impossible. The first part about &quot;breaking her marital bangles&quot; is stated to be no more possible than the second, therefore it too is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, I think you mean you came across this sentence rather than came up with it - unless you're Amitav Ghosh, that is...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2013-12-24T22:44:43.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-25T09:06:16.637" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading Jackendoff's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199264376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Foundations of Language&quot;&gt;Foundations of language&lt;/a&gt; and I've realised that my knowledge of syntax, morphology and phonology isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. I'm coming from a psych background, and I'm quite comfortable reading psycholinguistics texts. However, (and this is a point that Jackendoff makes) I've realised that the psycholinguistics I've come into contact with thus far seems to downplay the complexity of language. As someone who would like to pursue a career in the cognitive sciences and who has an interest in language, I'd like to address this gap in my knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question for you is this: What are some good resources for those of us who are curious about language, and can comfortably tackle some of the more basic literature, but who don't have the same level of knowledge that a linguistics graduate would have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2929" LastActivityDate="2013-12-25T09:06:16.637" Title="Linguistics resources for beginners" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-12-30T03:01:51.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2013-12-25T15:42:24.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it thought that there is universal (the universe being humans) structure of mathematics that is the result of the structure of the human brain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if we are speaking about basic mathematical concepts, like integers and basic spatial relations. It is now well established, for instance, that infants already possess a concept of number. A good place to start reading about this is the work of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/stanislas-dehaene/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanislas Dehaene&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, is this the reason that math works so well at predicting observations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why yes, for basic reasons of natural selections, we would expect our basic sense of number to provide a description of the external world which is congruent with our other senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, is this the reason that math works so well at predicting observations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that with this question, you envision a much stronger thesis, one which is usually attributed to Kant, as user fdb correctly pointed out. The reason is that the current consensus view that basic mathematical concepts are hard-wired in our brains applies only to very basic mathematical concepts. In fact, I seem to remember reading studies suggesting that not only subtraction with large numbers was not hard-wired, the truth was that our brains are hard-wired to make mistakes while subtracting large numbers (at least when numbers are represented in the usual way). So beyond elementary concepts, the mathematical language developed through the patient working of mathematicians, sometimes (or even often) struggling &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; their intuitions. Such a struggle will inevitably be extremely sensitive to cultural norms and preconceptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous example is the case of negative number, which were truly accepted in the West only 1500 years after the beginning of mathematics as a science, a clear indication (to me, at least) that there are not (in any self-evident way) a reflexive property of the way our brains are organized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Might an alien mind not observe such a good correlation between human mathematics and the results of human experiments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is of course hard to imagine a truly alien mind, but if you have some background in mathematics, you can envision a historical and conceptual development of mathematics truly different from what happened in any human civilization that we know of while remaining meaningful and intelligible to us. Consider for instance how an alien brain perceiving the world mostly though echolocation might envision geometry (my intuition, very feeble of course, would be that such a mind could consider blurring of periodic signals, and hence convolution and Fourier's theory, as much more intuitive than euclidean geometry). For a simpler example, consider an alien mind whose hardwired concept of number would lend itself more naturally to a modular interpretation than to a natural number interpretation (they would be counting in Z/nZ for some n, in effect, rather than in N), and if this seems too strange a thing to you, consider that this is essentially how computers count. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the idea that even a strikingly different conceptualization of mathematics may lead to a re-evaluation of the correlation between mathematical formalization and experiment is too kantian for my taste: after all, our predictions tend to be quite accurate, and I don't see how perceiving the world in an alternate way could change that. In my opinion, the reason mathematics model the physical world so efficiently is that the physical world is by and large simple: a large number of phenomena can be correctly described using a handful of principles (minimize something) and (in fact equivalently, by Noether's theorem) a couple of symmetries. So descriptions of the physical world will involve simple rules, and the abstract study of simple rules is (almost by definition) what we call mathematics. A good way to discriminate the (mostly pragmatic) position I here defended and the kantian position is to notice that the record of mathematics is actually quite mixed: it is great for celestial mechanics (the historical impulse for the kantian position) and physics more generally, but mostly abysmal for biology. This could be quite mysterious from a kantian position, but is crystal clear from a pragmatic one: celestial mechanics is the by-product of essentially a single law, biology is the by-product of billions of years natural selection sieving trough random changes and so is very unlikely to admit a formalization through simple rules.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, because I would feel it inappropriate to clog linguistics.stackexchange with speculation on the cognitive and philosophical content of mathematics, let me mention that one of the core principle of current minimalist linguistic theory is that syntax is the by-product of the necessity of the structures constructed by a single operation (Merge) operating recursively to be legible by the so-called interfaces (for instance, the phonological interface). N.Chomsky, to which this belief about syntax is due, has contemplated in several publications (e.g &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fosssil.in/Chomsky_Phases.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) the possibility that some higher arithmetical capabilities of the human brain (those going further that the elementary ones discussed above) might stem from a recycling of this merge operation in other cognitive context: informally, he suggests that perhaps human beings are so talented at manipulating recursive abstract structures (natural numbers, algorithms...) because our linguistic ability is based on a recursive operation.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-03-25T09:04:39.967" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T09:04:39.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-26T17:30:26.107" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Everybody [?] knows&amp;quot; that there are these pairs of corresponding words in German and English in which an &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; appears in German where a &amp;quot;p&amp;quot; appears in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bischoff, bishop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schiff, ship&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;offen, open&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hoffen, hope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The initial letters of German nouns are capital.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether some book or web page has tabulated a moderately comprehensive list of examples of this, and of other similar phenomena?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2013-12-26T17:30:26.107" Title="Tabulated lists of examples" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6843" CreationDate="2013-12-26T22:04:12.920" Score="10" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;In (spoken) English, the object pronouns &quot;me/you/her/him/us/them&quot; are, in some sense, the &quot;unmarked&quot; pronouns. (I only claim native knowledge of English as it is spoken in parts of the US). By this I mean that, in novel contexts, native speakers seem to prefer these to the subject pronouns &quot;I/you/she/he/we/they.&quot; (Prescriptively, the subject pronoun is often preferred). For instance,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;one-word&quot; answer to a question is the object pronoun. (Who went to the store? Us (natural language). We did (fine). *We.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Object pronouns show up in complex subjects, although this is prescriptively discouraged: &quot;Me and John went to the party,&quot; &quot;Us four are going to the store, are yall?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Object pronouns are usually used as replacements for names in non-sentence contexts, e.g. when making a scorepad or a diagram, one writes &quot;us&quot; and &quot;them.&quot; (Note that in bridge one uses &quot;we&quot; and &quot;they,&quot; and also that this sounds strange.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, in spontaneous speech, I think of myself as &quot;me,&quot; not as &quot;I.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, it is the emphatic pronouns (moi/toi...) that play all of the above roles. (Interestingly, it is prescriptively correct in French to use the emphatic pronoun in a complex subject, rather than the subject pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting that both languages have what seems to be a default set of pronouns for novel circumstances. I can guess a few reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a borrowing from French to English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is left over from the proto-Indo-European pronoun structure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there is a linguistic universal for &quot;default pronouns.&quot; In other words, a language learner learns one set of pronouns as fundamental &quot;names&quot; for people; then, the other pronouns are learned only in specific grammatical contexts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I like about this last theory is that it explains why children tend to start out using the &quot;John and me went&quot; construction in spite of the heavy prescriptive norm against it, and also why adults who learn the prescriptive rule tend to overgeneralize it to &quot;with John and I.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there good cross-linguistic evidence for a &quot;default&quot; set of personal pronouns within a language, or is this phenomenon in English and French better explained by one of the simpler explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T23:53:05.460" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T23:53:05.460" Title="Universals and emphatic pronouns" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-27T01:45:18.760" Score="8" ViewCount="2247" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are gearing up for the new semester at the Thai university where I teach English.  One course I’ll be helping out with is on English pronunciation.  In the unit on sentence stress, the course textbook introduces the idea of stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages:  in the former type, sentence rhythm is determined by units each based around one stressed syllable, while in the latter, each syllable receives an equal beat in ‘machine-gun’ fashion.  In stress-timed languages, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced (as with the schwa in ‘the’, English being stress-timed.)  Presumably vowel reduction happens less if at all in syllable-timed languages.  The contrast in sentence rhythm is illustrated by two pictures: a row of people of different heights walking in groups of two or three for stress-timed, and a row of soldiers of equal height marching in formation for syllable-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book presents English as a stress-timed language, and students learn to differentiate content words (which receive stress) from function words (which are generally unstressed.)  It mentions in passing that Thai, by contrast, has syllable-timed rhythm.  Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia entry on ‘isochrony’ lists Thai with the stress-timed languages.  It cites a study by Dauer (1983).  However, the findings of this study (I don’t have access to the full text) seem to be that there is no empirical phonetic basis for grouping languages according to syllable/stress/mora-based rhythm in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two 2008 entries on the blog ‘Language Log’ by Mark Liberman also question the reality of stress vs syllable rhythm.  Liberman measures the speech rhythms of a Spanish/English bilingual and finds that while his Spanish speech is more rhythmically regular than his English speech, this is due mainly to Spanish having fewer consonant clusters and thus more uniformity in duration of articulating each syllable.  In Liberman’s view there are other motivations for a more uniform rhythm, it’s not a general feature for any given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consulting the bibliography of Thai linguistics in the Routledge Tai-Kadai volume doesn’t turn up anything that directly addresses the question of whether Thai is stress- or syllable-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m an English native speaker who speaks both Thai and Mandarin pretty well.  Mandarin is supposed syllable-timed.  If we look at the rhythm at the level of individual sentences, it’s not hard to find an example that contradicts the general characterization.  The sentence ‘His car broke down’ can translate as follows into each language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin:  他的車子壞了.  Tāde chēzi huài le.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhythm here seems to be trochaic (stressed-unstressed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thai:  รถยนต์ของเขาเสีย    Rót yōn khŏng kháo sĭa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each syllable receives more or less equal stress.  (I’m using ĭ and ŏ to represent rising tones here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this small example, Mandarin seems stress-timed, Thai syllable-timed, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a scholarly consensus about the status of Thai – is it stress-timed, syllable-timed, or something else?  What should we tell our students, who are native speakers of Thai, in this regard?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could I try to measure this myself using Praat or some other easily accessible tool?  How would I go about doing this?  (I am not a linguist, and although I’ve downloaded Praat, I have never used it for anything serious.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-27T15:20:31.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T15:14:57.663" Title="Is Thai a stress- or syllable-timed language, and does it matter?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6263" CreationDate="2013-12-27T10:20:23.697" Score="4" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R.M.W. Dixon's book, &quot;Ergativity,&quot; I read that ergative-absolutive marking is generally morphological.   IIRC, that goes for split-S alignment and fluid-S alignment as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who came in late, split-S alignment occurs when the subjects of some intransitive verbs are marked with absolutive case &amp;amp; do not stand for agents (e.g. with verbs 'die,' 'fall,' etc) and the subjects of other intransitive verbs are marked with nominative case &amp;amp; do stand for agents (e.g. 'jump,' 'blink,' etc.).   Fluid-S alignment occurs when the subject of an intransitive verb is marked with nominative case if it stands for an agent and absolutive if it doesn't.   So one verb could mean 'drop to the ground' or 'fall' depending on the case of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do isolating natural languages ever exhibit non-nominative/accusative morpho-syntactic alignment.  e.g.  Could an isolating language have semantic marking (e.g. arguments occur in order of prototypical agency)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T11:11:35.527" Title="Do some isolating languages have something other than accusative morpho-syntactic alignment?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-27T13:03:30.360" Score="1" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is happening when a sound in RP English usage is non-strident [ð] is replaced by a strident sound [v]? For instance, the word 'Father'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2932" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-27T14:26:01.253" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T02:46:50.733" Title="What ocurrs when a non-strident consonant becomes strident in English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1137" CreationDate="2013-12-28T07:26:46.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is more of a socioeconomic class (and perception of) differentiation. the people i have encountered who pronounce it as w also do not pronounce the r sound the same as more well spoken people. the instance of formality seems to come into play also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2938" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T07:26:46.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6259" CreationDate="2013-12-28T11:11:35.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abkhaz, a northwest Caucasian language, has no cases but it is an ergative language. The alignment can be recovered from head-marking (on verbs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T11:11:35.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6257" CreationDate="2013-12-28T17:49:40.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer this as a linguist. However, being a native Thai speaker, and being someone who educated himself about linguistics much enough to have some idea on stress-timed vs. syllable-timed (acoustic phonetics is one of my particular interests), I believe that I can provide some good information on Thai's prosody (specifically stress and rhythm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, in my opinion, Thai language is neither syllable-timed nor stressed-timed. A good metaphor for understanding this is a &quot;rounded rectangle&quot;. A rounded rectangle is neither a rectangle nor a circle. Having said that, I do believe that Thai language is more syllable-timed than stressed-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone has already pointed out in the comments above, Thais pronounce every word in syllables, because that is what we were taught since the primary school (equivalent to Grade 1 in the US). This is also strengthened by our poems. There are many sub-types of classical Thai poems. Each and every one of these sub-types will have a set of specific rules for the rhymes and number of syllables in each verse. This can explain why no one would label someone who speak Thai in a very syllable-oriented manner as incorrect. He will be perfectly understandable; he just might sound a little too stiff and might sound unnatural. But that's all. This is quite similar to when a native English speaker speaks in monotone. No one would accuse him for speaking sub-standard English; he just sounds uninteresting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Thai natural speech (informal speech) can sound quite close to a stress-timed language, to the point that it might be mistaken as a true stress-timed language. It is also true that if you observe native Thai speakers carefully in their natural speech, they will group words into two or three or four or five or even more syllables, and each group will have one or more quasi-stressed syllables. (I use the term quasi-stressed because those stressed syllables are generally not very dominant.) And, having all that said is still a very simplification at best. There are no exact rules for stressing in Thai. However, without any explicit rules, Thai people can nonetheless speak approximately the same way somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to understand Thai's stressing system is to compare it to English's intonation system. It can vary very widely from one person to another, or one region to another. And, except for those obvious rules (such as, in English's intonation: end questions with rising tone, or end declarative sentences with low tone--which are not particularly true in real English speech), you can confidently say that there is no definite rule at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting point about Thai prosody is that it keeps changing. A highly respectful person once said that he had noticed that Thai people today speak differently from Thai people yesterday. I researched into old video clips, and I've reached the same conclusion. One of my observation is that the more you go back in time, the more obvious the syllable-timed aspect of Thai language is. (For example, you can try watching this old commercial Thai ad: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMvJhe9VX-M&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ถ่านไฟฉายตรากบ&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my belief that Thai become lesser syllable-timed (in other words, more stress-timed) through our exposure to Western cultures, especially through education, technologies, music, and movies. And through my own observation, most younger Thais could sound quite stress-timed like in their natural speech without being aware of it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a partial answer to your first question (&lt;em&gt;&quot;What should we tell our native Thai speaking students&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), I believe that you should treat Thai as a syllable-timed language, because that will align with their prior education better. If your students have minimal exposure to English prosody, the concept of stress-timing will be invaluable for them and will help them to be on the right track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second question (about using Praat to verify this phenomenon yourself), I personally found that another software, WaveSurfer, which is a small program and has a straightforward user-interface, is a perfect fit for my personal needs. You can find WaveSurfer at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TMH KTH&lt;/a&gt; or at &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/wavesurfer/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SourceForge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1482" LastEditorUserId="1482" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T13:14:24.397" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T13:14:24.397" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2013-12-28T22:54:34.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already checked out wikipedia right? &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;&quot;Compound (linguistics)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Have you googled it on Google Scholar at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noun compounds:&lt;/strong&gt; This is common in Germanic languages. For instance, Norwegian &quot;jernbanestasjonsmesterbolig&quot; (jernbane stasjon mester bolig). Not a word you'll find in a dictionary but easily made when needed. The only thing that limits length is practicality. There are plenty of noun-noun compounds in English too but because the newly minted ones are in general spelled with spaces they don't stand out as much. For English you might want to start with Paula Downing (1977): &quot;On the creation and use of English compound nouns&quot;, Language, issue 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a smorgasboard of compounds, read up on Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romance languages tend to compounds of the type verb+noun, like &quot;tocadiscos&quot; (toca discos) IIRC, &quot;plays records&quot; = record player.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Verb compounds:&lt;/strong&gt; You've read &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb&quot;&gt;&quot;Compound verbs&quot; on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Analysis:&lt;/strong&gt; The interesting, less homework-y question here is whether there are open-source morpohological analyzers out there &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe one based on for instance Johannesen and Hauglin (1996) &quot;An Automatic analysis of compounds&quot;? You've alrady checked the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; I assume?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy enough to make one yourself, for Germanic languages at least. You need a wordlist, potentially with declined forms, and if the word you have is not on the list, you try to match the words that are, as prefixes or suffixes, to the word you have. Go for longest match. (You'll also need some info on epenthetic sounds, like -e- and -s- in many Norwegian compounds. Throw away these, at least at first). The trick is that if there's more than &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; nouns you'll end up with potentially more than one tree-structure for the same word. Take &quot;jernbanestasjonsmester&quot;, it can split at least two ways: &quot;jernbane&quot; + &quot;stasjonsmester&quot; and &quot;jernbanestasjon&quot; + &quot;mester&quot; (the -s- is epenthetic). Sometimes that doesn't change the meaning, sometimes it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change the meaning, sometimes it is used by comedians for comedic effect, setting up a joke that uses one split at the start and another later on in the same joke. And then there's the puns it makes possible...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2013-12-28T22:54:34.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-29T08:22:42.590" Score="1" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;And does anyone by chance know any expressions of this kind in Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some others are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queen Ann is dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It rains a lot in England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T12:53:05.120" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T14:02:29.517" Title="What are expressions like «The Dutch have taken Holland» called in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2013-12-30T03:01:12.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2013-12-29T09:18:55.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;1.Any &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;polysynthetic&lt;/a&gt; language would have such a feature having within any of its word-sentences a 'verbal' particle. This is also one of the traits characteristical for French (with no distinction between parts of speech used for word formation, but with occasional differentiation between grammatical forms of the components), because this language may be considered as polysynthetic: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prêt-à-porter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (lit. ready-for-to wear, adj.+ preposition + noun), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bien-dire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (eloquence, lit. 'good-to speak'), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bien-être&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (well-being, lit. 'good-to be'), or words like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pince-sans-rire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a mocker with a poker face, lit. 'pinch-without-to laugh').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This principle of word-formation also includes combinations of noun+verb: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;un couvre-lit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (bedspread, lit. '[you]cover-bed'), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;un tire-bouchon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (corkscrew, lit. '[you] pull-cork'), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;un ouvre-boîte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (can opener, lit. '[you] open-can') or those with plural imperatives (like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cache-cache&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, formally and semantically (almost) equivalent to English hide-and-seek, ) or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;laissez-faire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (negligence, lit. '[you (pl)] let-to be'), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;laissez-passer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a pass, lit. you (pl)] let-to pass'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This principle proliferates in structures of compound verbs with imperatives regarded as nouns, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cessez-le-feu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a truce; lit. '[you (pl)] ceize-the-fire), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;décrochez-moi-ça&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (ragged clothes; a rag shop, lit. 'give-me-this [item of clothes hanging]'), or even &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;le va-et-vient&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (the coming and going, lit. 'the [(s)he] comes ans [(s)he] goes').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Considering a verb as a form of action, we might regard some forms of Finnish and Estonian nouns as words-in-action, too, thus making such untypical (yet grammatical) structures as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;työhönmeno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to [active]work-going), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;poissaolo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (absence. lit. 'away [stative]-being'), or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maahanmuutto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (immigration, lit. 'into land [active]-[causative] change') as specific examples of compound action-nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.In Russian, there is a peculiar feature which could be best described as '[ad]verbal predicates' with verbs with a form which looks much like a 2nd person sg. imperative: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Это просто не-пришей-козе-баян.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = This is strange and ridiculous (lit. 'This is a sheer don't-you-sew-an-acordeon-on-a-sheegoat'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.In Chinese, where a distinction between parts of speech is arbitrary and depends on a syntactical structure, the word is regarded as a verb or as a noun depending on its place within a phrase. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;是&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;这是啥？&lt;/strong&gt;(What is this) is 'is', or 'to be'; yet, although &lt;strong&gt;就&lt;/strong&gt; normally means 'suppling' or 'move' or 'at once', the combination of &lt;strong&gt;就是&lt;/strong&gt; means 'exactly' or 'just like' rather than 'right-now-being' or 'being in a suppling motion'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2013-12-30T13:50:56.550" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T13:50:56.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2013-12-29T09:50:29.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tibetan and Bhutanese names are genderless. I'm not a native of those countries, but travelled to both, and found the same names used for both men and women. I've had it confirmed as much as well that the names there do not confer gender, ie they're used interchangeably between genders. Worth doing some more investigation to be sure. Cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2941" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T09:50:29.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6286" CreationDate="2013-12-29T13:55:00.987" Score="2" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading a book on Government and Binding theory [1] and just finished a chapter on big pro (PRO). At the end of the chapter there is an exercise. Different sentences are written with  faulty representations and the reader is asked to dispute them. One of them is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John opened the door and [&lt;sub&gt;IP&lt;/sub&gt; PRO left].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I was absent when the instructor covered the exercise in class. It's obvious that there couldn't be a PRO within the brackets, because the I (head of the IP) would govern it and that would violate the general rule that PROs should be ungoverned. I also understand that there couldn't be any small pros there either, because the English language is not a pro-drop language and subject pronouns can not be omitted (unless in imperative sentences)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get it up to here. But then the instructor has analyzed this sentence further. He has said that the sentence is an instance of across-the-board extraction and here two VPs (rather than two IPs) have been linked by coordination. He bases his syntactic representation on the VP-internal hypothesis (= The subject originates in SpecVP and usually then moves to SpecIP), saying that the Specs in the VPs are simultaneously moved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to say that the phenomenon is also seen in the objects. For example in the sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does John buy and sell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;What&lt;/code&gt; is the object of both &lt;code&gt;buy&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;sell&lt;/code&gt;. Generally speaking, he says, whenever we have two coordinated structures, if we extract something from one of them we have to do the same with the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has also drawn the tree diagram of the original sentence in question, based on X-bar theory, but unfortunately I only have access to the audio file of that session. That's why I don't think that I fully get what he is talking about, and I don't know how to draw the diagram and explain the process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please, using the original sentence as the example, explain the process in terms of government and binding theory, saying exactly and step-by-step what constituents are moved and how I should represent the sentence syntactically?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Haegeman, 1994. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, 2nd edition, page 288, Exercise 4, 9b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" LastEditorUserId="2879" LastEditDate="2013-12-29T20:07:14.100" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T16:17:14.707" Title="Syntactic representation of Across-the-board Extraction" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2013-12-29T14:02:29.517" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call it a tautology. But this is not really a question about linguistics, but about logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T14:02:29.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2013-12-29T17:05:06.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, English &quot;k&quot;, &quot;t&quot; and &quot;p&quot; are always aspirated, so they have a very slight &quot;h&quot; sound right after them. But, here's the catch: not always! When they're preceded by an &quot;s&quot; they're pronounced pure. Native speakers almost never notice the difference, but it's crucial if you want to pronounce correctly some languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practice reading slowly &quot;It's Pete's &quot; versus &quot;it spits&quot; and you'll notice the difference in the way the &quot;p&quot; sounds: 1st one sounds almost as a soda can being opened at the same time the &quot;p&quot; is uttered, such small &quot;h&quot; sound is the aspirated which is missing in the second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise with &quot;It's Top Cat!&quot; versus &quot;it stops&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T17:05:06.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6277" CreationDate="2013-12-29T17:12:07.333" Score="4" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist so forgive my misuse of terminology... I'm looking for a data structure to represent dictionary entries. A dictionary would have words translated to other languages along with links to other words (synonyms and such), definitions, examples, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordnet structure looks pretty good, but I'm trying to compare it to alternatives. How would one combine multiple wordnets in a single dictionary? Perhaps each word within synset must me linked to its translation in another synset rather than linking synsets together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any suggestions. Are there any real life examples on how other dictionaries do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is for example how Wordnet looks like in xml (nouns file):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;synset id=&quot;n04779053&quot; type=&quot;n&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;lex_filenum&amp;gt;07&amp;lt;/lex_filenum&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;word lex_id=&quot;1&quot;&amp;gt;agreeableness&amp;lt;/word&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;word lex_id=&quot;0&quot;&amp;gt;amenity&amp;lt;/word&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;pointer refs=&quot;n04778630&quot;&amp;gt;Hypernym&amp;lt;/pointer&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;pointer refs=&quot;a00089051&quot; source=&quot;1&quot; target=&quot;1&quot;&amp;gt;Derivationally related form&amp;lt;/pointer&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;pointer refs=&quot;n04779895&quot; source=&quot;1&quot; target=&quot;1&quot;&amp;gt;Antonym&amp;lt;/pointer&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;def&amp;gt;pleasantness resulting from agreeable conditions&amp;lt;/def&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;example&amp;gt;a well trained staff saw to the agreeableness of our accommodations&amp;lt;/example&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;example&amp;gt;he discovered the amenities of reading at an early age&amp;lt;/example&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lapalme/WordNet-XML/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lapalme/WordNet-XML/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2945" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:44:51.830" Title="What is a good way to represent data in a multilingual dictionary? Wordnet alternatives or extensions?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6270" CreationDate="2013-12-29T19:29:31.747" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question concerns a particular analysis of a particular phenomenon by a particular instructor using a particular text that presents a particular framework of syntax. All these particularities make the question difficult to answer in a way that might satisfy the special needs of your situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assessment is that your description of the problem mostly answers your question. The subject &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is simultaneously ATB-moved out of both VPs into the SpecIP. There is no PRO present because the coordinate structure does not contain a control structure - PRO is associated with control. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, drawing GB tree diagrams was never an easy task, since there are many variables that come into play, and my suspicion is that even among those who are well versed in GB theory, the tree diagrams that a given individual produces vary quite a bit from the tree diagrams of other individuals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular tree diagram for your sentences relies crucially on the analysis of coordination, since you are dealing with coordinated VPs. I think you want a tree that positions the VPs equi-level. In each of the VPs, a trace t coindexed with the subject in SpecIP should appear in each of the two SpecVP positions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I can comment that the GB analysis your instructor is looking for would be rejected by many working in syntax today. Your textbook is almost two decades old. In particular, many might prefer an analysis that does not assume ATB-extraction in your first example (but ATB-extraction is plausible for your second example). Instead, one might assume straightforward coordinated VPs that contain no traces. Such an analysis is preferred by non-derivational (i.e. non-transformational) theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2013-12-29T19:29:31.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6275" CreationDate="2013-12-29T19:48:12.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Bond&lt;/a&gt; has done a lot of work in consolidating resources for multilingual Wordnets. Perhaps you don't have to implement any such dataset yourself; the language-pair you're interested in might already be available &lt;a href=&quot;http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:44:51.830" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:44:51.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-29T22:42:07.337" Score="1" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Language a social fiction? &#xA;I'm required to write an essay about the following : &quot;Is language a social fiction?&quot; and honestly I've had a hard time to determine whether language is a social fiction or a social reality and WHEN CAN LANGUAGE BE A SOCIAL FICTION ?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2946" LastEditorUserId="2946" LastEditDate="2013-12-31T22:03:19.547" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T01:59:59.880" Title="Is Language a social fiction or a social reality?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2013-12-31T12:32:05.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2013-12-30T01:15:51.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A caveat: I'm experiencing the tail end of a three day migraine. This answer may not be as clear as I'd like.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of the cognitive structures that make up linguistic knowledge is still a very open question. In fact, the nature of cognitive structures in general is still hotly contested (and rightly so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I answer your questions, I think a little clarification is in order. Models of mental processes (at least from my perspective) are not likely to be accurate representations of the actual, real world functioning of the brain. Like any scientific theory, they're only as good as the predictions they make. So just because a model has support does not mean that it captures the nature of cognitive structures. Rather, it means that it accurately predicts behaviour. What I'm getting at is that different processes can produce the same behaviour, and just because a model makes accurate predictions, does not mean that it necessarily is an accurate model of the cognitive processes involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to your first question. It's important to consider what type of language phenomena you're interested in. Different models attempt to capture the functioning of different processes, and each model has its own set of assumptions about the associated mental functions. Judging by the task you set yourself (which, by the way, is referred to as a verbal fluency test), you're interested in speech production, so we'll look at that. There's two influential theories of speech production, Dell's (1986) spreading activation model and Levelt et al's (1999) WEAVER++ model*. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/~rmk7/HC/HC_Readings/Levelt.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;, by Levelt, is a great primer on the different types of speech production models. Both models assume that lexical knowledge is instantiated in a network, but make different assumptions about how processing proceeds through the network, and the different steps involved. I won't spend any time describing them since the Levelt article does a much better job of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to my first point, this isn't to say that these models are accurate descriptions of the mental lexicon. Rather, they're influential models that do a good job of predicting linguistic behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to your second question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a the level of experimental design, psycholinguistics experiments differ from what you describe in that they usually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Involve random allocation of participants to condition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a large number of participants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have control conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, what you describe is not an experiment at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sources of information used to evaluate models of speech production are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Observational (non-experimental) studies of speech errors where the rate and type of error are recorded (Dell uses data from these as a basis for his model).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Experimentally induced instances of the tip of the tongue (TOT) effect (e.g. Harley &amp;amp; Bown, 1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming tasks in which participants are simultaneously presented with two pictures and the relationship between the pictures is manipulated (semantic, phonological etc). Participants have to name a target object in one of the pictures. Reaction times are recorded. (Meyer &amp;amp; Damian, 2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These data are usually used to support or weaken the argument in favour of a particular model. In the case of the models discussed, they are designed to address predictions stemming from assumptions about the stages of speech production, and the order (if any) in which these stages are processed. For instance, WEAVER++ assumes that syntactic and semantic information is accessed prior to phonological information. Thus the TOT effect occurs when phonological information is difficult to access. Harely and Bown (1998), showed that words with an unusual phonological form are more susceptible to TOT, evidence that supports WEAVER++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the 'priming' studies that Nathan refers to are in fact uses of the masked prime paradigm with a lexical decision task. These are used to investigate the processes involved in visual word recognition (i.e. reading), and are a great way to investigate the information we can access very quickly from written language. For instance, that we compute phonological information from brief (50ms) presentations of non-words (Kinoshita &amp;amp; Norris, 2012). What such information tells us about the mental lexicon is unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't meant to be an exhaustive account of speech production. I've undoubtably presented some contentious information, and excluded some important information. Regardless, hopefully I've given you enough resources to make a start on your own research. Most of the articles I've mentioned are accessible through google, at the very least, Dell (1986) and Levelt et al (1999) definitely are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Don't be put off by the length of Levelt et al (1999). Behavioural and Brain Sciences articles often include commentary by researchers in the same field, so the article itself is only about 35 pages long. The commentary is a great way to a get a feel for how a theory fits in with the rest of the field. Personally, I think it's a great idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 93(3), 283-321. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.93.3.283&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harley, T. A. &amp;amp; Bown, H. E. (1998). What causes a tip-of-the-tongue state? evidence for lexical neighbourhood effects in speech production. British Journal of Psychology, 89, 151.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinoshita, S., &amp;amp; Norris, D. (2012). Pseudohomophone priming in lexical decision is not fragile in sparse lexical neighborhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 38, 764-775.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., &amp;amp; Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1-38. doi:10.1017/S0140525X99001776&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meyer, A. S., &amp;amp; Damian, M. F. (2007). Activation of distractor names in the picture-picture interference paradigm. Memory &amp;amp; Cognition, 35(3), 494-503. doi:10.3758/BF03193289&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2929" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T01:15:51.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6278" CreationDate="2013-12-30T07:41:16.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sapir-Whorf&lt;/a&gt; hypothesis, language is a cognitive mechanism defining our cognitional patterns and therefore defining our [social] realities. Their works, as many more Whorfianist works, are easily accessible online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Daniel Everett, language is [by convention] a cultural  phenomenon. &lt;a href=&quot;http://daneverettbooks.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here is a site with his bibliography and some of Dan's publications&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Millikan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ruth Millikan&lt;/a&gt;, language is a form of biological communication and as such is a property of non-human living [social] species as well - although they don't have to be &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; social. The truth, as usual, is relative and &lt;em&gt;out there&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-01T01:59:59.880" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T01:59:59.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12154" CreationDate="2013-12-30T10:54:06.510" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sandhi in the Vedas and Aranyakas which of the following is more correct (i.e. t-s or th-s):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;स॒र्वेऽस्मात्स्यन्द॑न्ते॒&#xA;sa̱rve'smātsyanda̍nte̱&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;स॒र्वेऽस्माथ्स्यन्द॑न्ते॒&#xA;sa̱rve'smāthsyanda̍nte̱&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is from the Mahanarayana Upanishad section 12.3 (Taittiriya Aranyaka 10.12.3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example is from &lt;em&gt;Mahanarayanopanishad by Swami Vimalananda&lt;/em&gt;, p125. &#xA;The second is from &lt;em&gt;Mantra Pushpam by the Ramakrishna Math&lt;/em&gt;, p41.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You guys were so helpful in my previous question regarding visarga sandhi, I'm assuming that the answer here is simliar in that both may be correct and the second is more of a South-Indian style, but I wanted to make sure.  I'm afraid I couldn't find this in any of the grammars because I'm not sure what the original words would have been (before the sandhi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2674" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T00:01:17.140" Title="Internal vedic sandhi: t-s or th-s? (Sanskrit, Devanagari)" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2013-12-30T10:55:08.357" Score="1" ViewCount="2378" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalama_Sutta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;In this text, acknowledged by both Theravada and Mahayana traditions as sacred&lt;/a&gt;, Buddha gives his speech to Kalamas. According to the dictionaries, the primal Sanskrit meaning of the word कलम (kalama) is ' a thief', which, supposedly, is not the case, since by Kalams in the buddhist text they traditionally mean the inhabitants of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesaputta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kesaputta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Sanskrit form is कालामसूत्र (Kālāmasūtra), with a long [a], but the vowel length is irrelevant to the purpose of the question, since a) the vowel length in Arabic is grammatical, not (primary) phonetic, as it is in Sanskrit, and b) in a case of cross-linguistic interaction (e.g. via a third language or more) the quality/quantity of vowels is a subject to change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is; can there be any linguistic parallels between Arabic &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilm_al-Kalam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;كلام&lt;/a&gt; (kalam) and the addressees of Buddha's word? The similarity between the two could be more than just a phonetic coincidence, since the two words are not just pronounced more or less alike, they also mean more or less similar concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions seems to be not so easy to answer considering some similarities in the description of the Kalam teaching in Islam (which was first mentioned as early as in 8th century) and the essence of the suttra, since both the sutra and the philosophical doctrine emphasise the importance of following rational reasoning and discourse rather than authorities or any other sources of disputable accuracy. Given the facts of existence of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_and_Josaphat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pan-Eurasian fabulae of Barlaam &amp;amp; Josaphat&lt;/a&gt;, recorded from Japan to Ethiophia and further to Portugal, this question can be not so easy to answer at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T16:35:41.583" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T16:35:41.583" Title="Is there any relation between Sanskrit 'kalam' of Kalamasutra and Arabic 'al-kalam'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6131" CreationDate="2013-12-30T11:02:20.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vedic &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; often has no spaces between the letters within a same sentence, with the exception of some signs, and modern Sanskrit has no spaces between the same parts of its compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Russian and Old Greek also used to avoid spaces between the words within a same phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2013-12-30T11:02:20.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2013-12-31T01:18:44.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;British popular singers do tend to sound American -- but obviously not the choristers at King's College!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if Americans can spot the difference though? Does it make you cringe -- like actors doing bad accents?  It would be interesting to hear how Americans feel about this. There are so many US accents, as well as Canadian, perhaps you just don't notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an amateur singer, I try not to sound as if I'm deliberately faking a US accent, but it's difficult -- especially when a song is 'Southern'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2949" LastEditorUserId="2949" LastEditDate="2013-12-31T01:30:37.283" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T01:30:37.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3359" CreationDate="2013-12-31T16:05:19.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall that in ancient Egyptian some hieroglyphs were used &quot;markers&quot; to resolve ambiguity or indicate a noun was a member of a special group, even though not meant to be pronounced. E.g. a beetle sign was placed after a group of signs denoting a bird's name to indicate such noun was meant to be read as a &quot;flying entity&quot; (i.e. really a bird's name) and not as a person's name. There were other characters used to emphasize a noun was a person's name, and names of gods and royalty were inscribed within special cartridges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these signs a kind of punctuation, or mere typographical conventions? Do they have a formal name? They do transmit information, furthermore, information that's not a merely a verbatim transcription of what the actual speech said but actually expands it. Similar to when some printed media add a small cross after a person's name to indicate they're dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emoticons play a similar role in modern electronic communications - they expand the written message, though in this way to compensate the loss of emotional information that in face-to-face communication is transmitted mostly via physical gestures, and to a lesser extent in verbal channels that are not written down: intonation, volume and pauses in the speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T16:05:19.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6270" CreationDate="2013-12-31T16:17:14.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll attempt to go through the various analytical possibilities for your example sentence within the GB framework:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i) John opened the door and left&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 1: (i) involves sentential co-ordination&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hypothesis entails that (i) involves co-ordination at the IP-level. This leaves open a couple of different possibilities for analysing the subject gap in the second conjunct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 1.1: (i) involves obligatory control of PRO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (i) involves control, we know that it must be &lt;em&gt;obligatory&lt;/em&gt; control, since the subject of the second conjunct has to refer to &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt;. There are two separate arguments against this. The first, as you make clear in your question, is that PRO must be in an ungoverned position, but a finite subject is governed by I. The second is that obligatorily controlled PRO must be c-commanded by its controller, which isn't the case here. Here's the tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qut3U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 1.2 (i) involves movement of the subject&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can represent this possibility by replacing PRO in the above tree with a trace co-indexed with the subject of the first conjunct. We can straightforwardly rule this out due to the fact that movement must be to a c-commanding position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 1.3: (i) involves pro&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you state in your question, we can rule this out straightforwardly since English isn't a pro-drop language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we've exhausted the possibilities for analysing (i) as involving sentential co-ordination, we can consider an alternative hypothesis: Namely, the one your instructor laid out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 2: (i) involves VP co-ordination&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothesis 2 is, i believe, compatible with both VP-internal, and VP-external subject hypotheses. The difference between the two is that if we adopt the VP-internal subject hypothesis, (i) must involve ATB extraction of the subject from both conjuncts, whereas if we adopt the VP-external subject hypothesis, no extraction is necessary - the subject is simply base generated in the matrix subject position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 2.1: VP co-ordination + VP-internal subject&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FKWyN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ross (1967) identifies conjuncts as &lt;em&gt;syntactic islands&lt;/em&gt;, in order to rule out extraction of, e.g., a wh-word from a single conjunct, as in the following example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) What did John buy &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; and Mary sold a car?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constituents can exceptionally be extracted from conjuncts just so long as parallel extraction takes place from out of all of the conjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 2.2: VP co-ordination + VP-external subject&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OYEST.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, 2.1 and 2.2 can only be distinguished on the basis of independent evidence for the VP-internal subject hypothesis, such as the distribution of floating quantifiers. Since this is covered in the Haegeman textbook, and it isn't immediately relevant to your question, i won't go into it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2013-12-31T16:17:14.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20013" CreationDate="2013-12-31T21:15:26.283" Score="6" ViewCount="2067" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a difference between Hebrew and Arabic, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a test you can do in Notepad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switch the text direction to right-to-left (it's one of the context menu options)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paste (sorry, it's jibberish) מ 2000-2013 ה&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Observe that the year range is shown left-to-right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paste (ditto as for Hebrew) ة 2000-2013 م&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Observe that the range direction is right-to-left.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use an en-dash instead of the hyphen in step 2, then the range will be formatted as in step 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, the en-dash is the preferred symbol for ranges. Is this just a common bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend who is a native Hebrew speaker told me that the number range looks weird when it's formatted right-to-left, but I haven't been able to find any official info online about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Notepad test doesn't necessarily confirm that ranges should be formatted left-to-right in Hebrew, only that the hyphen has a different effect on number ranges in the Arabic and the Hebrew contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the official word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2093" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T11:55:14.140" Title="Are Hebrew numeric ranges written right-to-left or left-to-right?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-01T04:30:27.370" Score="2" ViewCount="3155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was teaching a linguistics class and I came across this topic &quot;secondary articulation&quot;. It was the first time for me to hear the term. I had always known that the effect of a preceding or following sound is called &quot;assimilation&quot;. But in the book I have , both terms seem to be different. I did some research on both terms, but I can't seem to reach a satisfying conclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say that assimilation involves quality and SA involves just place of articulation. I find that so vague. so, is assimilation the broader term? In other words, is secondary articulation a type of assimilation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also came across the term &quot;co-articulation&quot;. How is it different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2954" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-01T10:57:03.520" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T17:08:02.123" Title="Secondary articulation vs assimilation" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6287" CreationDate="2014-01-01T04:31:09.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Hebrew speaker and I disagree with your friend: ranges are usually written right to left, e.g. 2013-2000. &lt;a href=&quot;http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%9F_%D7%A6%27%D7%A8%D7%A6%27%D7%99%D7%9C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; an example from Wikipedia. It does look strange from an English speaker's perspective, but that's the convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-01-02T03:09:52.290" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T03:09:52.290" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2014-01-01T14:38:48.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nominal compounds are an inherited feature in Indo-European. Classical (i.e. post-Vedic) Sanskrit has lots of very long compounds rivalling anything in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T14:38:48.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-01T15:07:35.263" Score="1" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear fellow linguists,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just an enthusiastic undergraduate student applying for a MA in Applied Linguistic. I have a couple of questions and I need some advice from those of you who are 'in the know' about what goes on in the academic world. The university I'm applying for has listed a bachelor thesis under the admission requirements, but the program I am currently studying in does not include a bachelor thesis. I was told I could submit &quot;an equivalent sample of written work&quot; or an independent research project as a replacement for the thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to do a study of pragmatic competence of EFL learners of English at my university, so I designed a WDCT and administered the survey to 60 students, and found about 10 native speakers as a control group. It's not really a proper cross-sectional nor cross-cultural study because the student groups do not necessarily consist of students who have the same level of knowledge in English, and I didn't find enough native speakers to do some sorts of a statistical analysis. I assumed that because the study program implies progression of language skills from B1 to C1 over the two years, that students' pragmatic competence should also increase over the course of studies (of course, it hasn't). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my questions (I asked for formatting guidelines from the university, didn't get any specific requirements except for an 8,000 word count):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to treat and represent the data in this scenario? (raw, percentages?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the best way to format the paper? I was thinking about APA, but it would be too much paper to send abroad (which is not cheap, as it is measured in grams, and making it double spaced would make it about 30 pages long or so)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I name my sections? APA says not to have an Introduction as the title of the introduction, but some (published) papers have clearly marked sections of the paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it appropriate to acknowledge the professor who was kind of like my mentor during this research, and what is the best way to do it? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all of you who took the time to read this, I really appreciate all your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2956" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T00:04:00.743" Title="How to appropriately format a research paper in pragmatics for applying to a master's program?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-04-15T18:15:40.040" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2014-01-01T17:00:35.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i had to recommend just a couple of textbooks for syntax, semantics/pragmatics and phonology respectively, they'd be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English&lt;/em&gt; (Perlmutter &amp;amp; Soames, 1979).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not easy to get a hold of, and a lot of the theoretical machinery is quite dated, but for the purpose of learning how to actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; syntax, as opposed to just learning a bunch of `facts', this can't be beaten. One of the best textbooks i've used, full stop. There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Syntactic-Argumentation-Structure-English-Perlmutter/dp/0520038282/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;colid=3UTTOGLB30ARI&amp;amp;coliid=I1FOK8SC3NJCKO&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few used copies on amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thinking Syntactically&lt;/em&gt; (Haegeman, 2005).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another textbook more focused on how one actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; syntax, focusing on developing a tool-kit for doing syntactic analysis, as opposed to just learning a bunch of theory-dependent facts. More up-to-date than Perlmutter &amp;amp; Soames. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics &amp;amp; Pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about logic (but were ashamed to ask&lt;/em&gt; (McCawley, 1993)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Given your background in maths, you'll find a lot of this very easy, but i can't think of a better introduction to how logical tools can be used to illuminate aspects of meaning in natural language. I'm also guessing that more formally rigorous approaches to meaning will appeal to you, given your background. If you can handle this no problem, there's also the following...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;An introduction to meaning in natural language&lt;/em&gt; (Cann et al, 2009)&#xA;This provides an introduction to Montague grammar amongst other things, an approach which currently dominates the literature on linguistic semantics. This is bang up-to-date, and provides you with pretty much everything you need to dive straight into the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Understanding phonology&lt;/em&gt; (Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Jacobs, 2011)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm by no means an expert, but i found this to be a concise and reasonably comprehensive introduction to phonology, complete with problem sets and solutions - by far the most important part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to declare myself, i was taught linguistics in a formalist department, which has no doubt coloured my suggestions. For suggestions focused more on functionalist linguistics, see @Taneko's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T17:00:35.903" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-01T17:00:35.903" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2014-01-01T22:38:53.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is slightly modified re-posting of my comment on the original post, so we can get this classed as answered and out of the way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's common practice to summarise the key results within the main body of the paper (graphs are always good), and then give the actual raw data in an appendix so that interested specialists can follow up any specific queries. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can avoid sending a hard copy, APA and double spaced is the way to go. Single spaced would probably be OK, but not ideal. Weigh up the costs/benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I personally like to use numbered sections and sub-sections so that the logical structure of my argument is as clear as possible. We're writing scientific papers, not essays. I imagine that certain journals don't approve of this, but since you're not submitting to a journal it shouldn't be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's important to acknowledge your professor, and anyone else who's contributed to the paper. One convention i've seen is using an initial footnote on the title of the paper as an acknowledgements section. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-01-01T22:38:53.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2014-01-02T16:29:52.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intonation and timing differences between dialects are just as substantial as pronunciation and semantic differences, and psychologically may be the first way we recognize that someone is, say, British. These differences are abandoned in music, because the words must be sung to the tones, and timing, of the songs. (This is why we mishear lyrics to a song from listening to it more often than we mishear what someone is saying to us, even if we are listening in our native language.) The only way to detect accent in music is phonological differences, and even these are distorted by the background music.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically to English, one of the noteable differences between American English and most of the rest of the anglophone world is the pronunciation of syllable-final /r/s. However, it's a common tradition in singing, even among Americans, not to pronounce them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2014-01-02T16:29:52.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6301" CreationDate="2014-01-02T19:51:39.087" Score="3" ViewCount="1122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine a new computer programming language whose keywords and all other syntax were in lojban (or equivalent language - will explain in a bit). Allowing lojban to be a &quot;natural&quot; language itself, would the resulting programmes appear to be natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all lojban  can be expressed in predicate logic (I believe), and all computer programmes can be expressed in predicate logic. Then there could be an isomorphism between lojban and computer programs. So every computer programme could be expressed in lojban, which to a native speaker would appear natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2961" LastEditorUserId="2203" LastEditDate="2015-01-29T00:07:07.900" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T00:07:07.900" Title="Would a progamming language in lojban mean that a program could be written in a natural language?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;lojban&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-01-03T11:32:21.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6297" CreationDate="2014-01-03T11:17:35.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few corrections: lojban, though a human language, is not a natural language; it is a conlang. AFAIK, there are no native speakers of lojban: that would require teaching lojban as one of the primary languages to a very young child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lojban is syntactically unambiguous, and only mostly unambiguous semantically. If there were a lojban programming language, this should not matter because one would avoid writing semantically ambiguous forms (like metaphors). This question has come up on various forums for lojban, Prolog, Haskell, etc., The consensus on those forums seems to be that it is possible, but no one has done it yet. Some people (&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/~rspeer/Public/jimpe.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;e.g. 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gulik.pbworks.com/w/page/7760016/Lojban%20programming%20language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;e.g. 2&lt;/a&gt;) have attempted to implement  such a thing, but AFAIK, for very limited domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T11:17:35.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6304" CreationDate="2014-01-03T17:23:00.950" Score="0" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following Arabic sentence and I am interested in the last three words which create a noun phrase. This np is translated as &quot;Site Vaalat Excel&quot; by google, which does not tell me much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ارجو ان تكون الفواتير على الموقع فايلات اكسيل&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is what is the main/head word in &quot;الموقع فايلات اكسيل&quot; noun phrase? &#xA;For example in English it would be like this &quot;Vaalat Excel site&quot;, so the main word would be &quot;site&quot; with &quot;Vaalat&quot; and &quot;Excel&quot; being attributes to this word. What about Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T18:38:34.773" Title="Explain الموقع فايلات اكسيل noun phrase in Arabic" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4622" CreationDate="2014-01-03T17:34:45.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe not exactly the answer, but here is the syntactic structure for this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not the alien here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [S [&lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt; I] [V [&lt;strong&gt;VP&lt;/strong&gt; am] [&lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt; not the alien here]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which should give you this tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M2loD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastEditorUserId="2967" LastEditDate="2014-01-03T17:42:43.300" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T17:42:43.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6302" CreationDate="2014-01-03T18:38:34.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to read Arabic the first rule is to forget about google translate. It is useless. الموقع is Arabic for “the place”, here in the sense “site”. فايلات is the English word “file” with the Arabic plural ending –āt. The last word is the brand name “Excel” written in Arabic script. Syntactically, fāylāt eksel is a possessive phrase (ʼiḍāfa), literally “files of Excel”. This phrase is in apposition (badal) to al-mawqiʽ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-03T18:38:34.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T00:54:49.713" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; form of verb performs multiple semantic functions; one of those functions is &quot;the action of X&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, the &lt;em&gt;-no&lt;/em&gt; morpheme performs multiple semantic functions, and one of those functions is also &quot;the action of X&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;泳ぐ&lt;b&gt;の&lt;/b&gt;は楽しい&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  oyogu-&lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;-ha tanosi-i&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  swim-&lt;b&gt;NO&lt;/b&gt;-TOP be.fun-PLAIN&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Swimming is fun&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good term for this semantic function of &quot;the action of X&quot; which can be used in comparative linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2969" LastEditorUserId="2969" LastEditDate="2014-01-04T01:28:10.787" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T21:51:51.780" Title="Is there a term to denote the semantics of &quot;the action of X&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3023" CreationDate="2014-01-04T04:10:23.247" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wittgenstein showed that words do not necessarily represent, or refer to, any entity - material or abstract.  Lakoff and Johnson showed that language is metaphorical, and thus not literal, so it can't represent anything.  Darwin showed that dog and human brains are fundamentally the same;  dogs don't use symbolic language, so humans don't either.  If they did, there would need to be brain faculties for representation and computation, of which there are neither.&#xA;     Since words arise to enable actions in the culture, they are muscular actions of the vocal system, and don't symbolize any entity.&#xA;     So in conclusion, no human language is symbolic.  Unfortunately, the illusion of language makes it appear that they are entities performing actions on other non-extant entities.  This verbal logic is always used to justify war.&#xA;     So hopefully, brain research will show that thinking is muscular, and based on cultural peer-pressure (superstition), before the next war justified by illusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2970" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T04:10:23.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2014-01-04T18:53:14.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dialectsarchive.com/united-states-of-america&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dialectsarchive.com/united-states-of-america&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen to these recordings. I don't think they'll all sound the same to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can group accents into larger groups according to shared features. But it's certainly not the case that they all sound the same.&#xA;If you want to look for accents that are very different from the standard, look for areas where diglossia and language contact more in general play an important role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are referring to public speakers in particular, I suspect the fact that they have very similar accents can be accounted for socioliguistically: most of them are trained to speak/sing in the most standard way in order to be easily understandable to wider audiences and recognizable as part of the system they represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2972" LastEditorUserId="2972" LastEditDate="2014-01-04T18:58:42.053" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T18:58:42.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6311" CreationDate="2014-01-04T19:51:49.920" Score="1" ViewCount="16227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying linguistics and now this semester my subject is Syntax. I tried a few times to draw a tree using X-Bar theory and Dp's but I couldn't achieve. Can someone please draw a tree of the sentence down below for me ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going mad while studying Syntax. I would be appreciate if you can do it for me. Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;John says that Mary believes their daughter’s constant failing of her classes surprises her teachers very much.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2974" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T17:28:57.740" Title="X-Bar theory and Trees" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-06-12T18:34:34.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6308" CreationDate="2014-01-04T20:28:54.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the basic X'-theoretic tree structure. The usual provisos apply - you'll get different answers depending on who you ask, but i think most would agree with the basic constituent structure i give here. Note that the inflection on the lexical verb is meant to originate on the &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; head, but i'm agnostic about the operation by which it ends up being spelled out as an affix on the verb. I'm also glossing over the fine structure of the DPs, because getting into that would raise some pretty complex issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yv1eX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the sentence is ambiguous - the most salient reading is the one where the adverbial &lt;em&gt;very much&lt;/em&gt; scopes over the most deeply embedded VP &lt;em&gt;surprised her teachers&lt;/em&gt;. This is the reading i've represented above by adjoining the adverbial to the most deeply embedded VP. Other readings could be captured by adjoining &lt;em&gt;very much&lt;/em&gt; to higher level VPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The tree diagram was built using &lt;a href=&quot;http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phpSyntaxTree&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T20:28:54.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4622" CreationDate="2014-01-04T20:29:12.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below you can see how I would do it. I didn't use triangles to be clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I follow Carnie (2012), just instead of a TP, a tense phrase, I used an IP, an inflectional phrase  (see Tallerman 2005). Supposedly the IP structure is the structure that all finite verbs have and all finite verbs have an inflection as far as European languages are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Here' is out of the scope of the inflection phrase since it's an adjunct; this type of information is not required by the theta roles of the verb. Also, since 'here' is not under the scope of any of the core arguments and you can't have oblique arguments in a sentence like &quot;X be X&quot;, it must be an adjunct and therefore lie outside the scope of the IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can generate the tree using this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S[IP [DP [D' [NP [N' [N I]]]]] [I' [I am] [NegP [Neg' [Neg not]] [DP [D'[D the][NP[N' [N alien]]]]]]]][DP[D'[D[AdvP[AdvP'[AdvP[here]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mtnei.png&quot; alt=&quot;Notice: no triangles were used to improve clarity&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2972" LastEditorUserId="2972" LastEditDate="2014-01-04T20:36:53.980" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T20:36:53.980" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6308" CreationDate="2014-01-04T21:17:10.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below you can see how I would do it. I didn't use triangles to be clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I follow Carnie (2012), just instead of a TP, a tense phrase, I used an IP, an inflectional phrase (see Tallerman 2005). Supposedly the IP structure is the structure that all finite verbs have and all finite verbs have an inflection as far as European languages are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J69u2.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XX      To generate this tree:&#xA;[IP [NP [N' [N John]]] [I' [VP [V' [V says] [CP [C' [C that] [IP [NP [N' [N Mary]]] [I' [VP [V' [V believes] [CP [C' [C ∅] [IP&#xA;[DP [DP [D' [D their] [NP [N' [N daughter]]]]][D' [D ’s] [NP [N' [AdjP [Adj' [Adj constant]]] [N' [N failing]] [PP [P' [P of] [DP [D' [D her] [NP [N' [N classes]]]]]]]]]]] [I' [VP [V' [V' [V surprises]][DP [D' [D her] [NP [N' [N teachers]]]]]][AdvP [Adv' [Adv very much]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2972" LastEditorUserId="2972" LastEditDate="2014-01-04T21:29:10.853" LastActivityDate="2014-01-04T21:29:10.853" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2014-01-04T22:12:25.647" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what they recommend at Oxford as introductory textbooks to students starting a Masters' in Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background and reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macaulay, Monica. (2006) Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for Graduate Students. Cascadilla&#xA;Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Matthews, P. H. (2007) Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pinker, Steven. (2000) The Language Instinct: the New Science of Language and Mind.&#xA;Morrow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robins, R.H. (1997) A Short History of Linguistics. Longman.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Introductory texts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ashby, M. &amp;amp; Maidment, J. (2005) Introducing Phonetic Science. Cambridge University Press. Bach, E. (1989) Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. Albany, NY. State University of New&#xA;York Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapman, S. (2011) Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., and Hyams, N. (2010) An Introduction to Language. 9th edition.&#xA;Thomson Heinle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gussenhoven, C. &amp;amp; Jacobs, H. (2011). Understanding Phonology. Arnold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haspelmath, M. &amp;amp; Sims, A. (2010) Understanding Morphology. Arnold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kearns, K. (2011) Semantics. 2nd edition. Palgrave-Macmillan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meyerhoff, M. (2011) Introducing Sociolinguistics. Routledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;McMahon, A. (1994) Understanding Language Change, Cambridge University Press.     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tallerman, M. (2011). Understanding Syntax. Arnold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2972" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T22:01:41.360" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T22:01:41.360" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-01-04T22:12:25.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T23:27:11.980" Score="2" ViewCount="1156" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is connected to &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/7881/what-basis-do-we-have-for-defining-sabbatismos-in-hebrews-49&quot;&gt;a question on BH-SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have found &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%B1%CE%B2%CE%B2%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CF%83%CE%BC%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a little in regard to the etymology of this word&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the root is obviously Sabbath.  What significance does the greek ending &quot;-ισμός&quot; (&lt;em&gt;-ismos&lt;/em&gt;) have? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if anyone here has any more particular/detailed insight than the Wiktionary offers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific questions:&#xA;Does it self contain any indication of an article (definite or indefinite)?&#xA;in other words, of itself would it be &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; keeping of the Sabbath&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; keeping of the Sabbath&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or do words using an &lt;em&gt;-ismos&lt;/em&gt; ending depend on the surrounding text for any article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be the equivalent of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deverbal_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deverbal noun&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerund&lt;/a&gt; in English?&#xA;Would it be &quot;&lt;em&gt;keeping the Sabbath&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it maintain any number/gender from its root-- &quot;(&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; keep the Sabbath)ing&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:41.937" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T22:37:54.800" Title="What is the etymology of the Greek word &quot;σαββατισμός&quot; (sabbatismos)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-04T23:39:39.733" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about buying things and making payments for them etc... what context would you use &quot;in&quot; vs&quot;by&quot; when referring to the payment.  For example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;She paid by credit card. (felicitous)&#xA;She paid in credit card.  (not)&#xA;&#xA;She paid by mail. (felicitous)&#xA;She paid in mail.    (not)&#xA;&#xA;She paid by check.    (felicitous)&#xA;She paid in check.     (not)&#xA;&#xA;She paid by cash.    (not?)&#xA;She paid in cash.    (felicitous)&#xA;&#xA;She paid by dollars.    (not)&#xA;She paid in dollars.  (felicitous)&#xA;&#xA;She paid by goats.  (not)&#xA;She paid in goats.  (felicitous)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sense is that 'by' is used when talking about a method of transmitting value ie: credit card, mail, check where as 'in' is used when talking about the thing of value you are giving as payment ie: cash, dollars, coins, stock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any relevant literature that talks about this?  or is this just idiomatic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2976" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-05T02:40:47.453" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T02:40:47.453" Title="When do you use 'in' vs 'by' when talking about payments and transactions" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-01-10T14:28:34.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T02:26:40.790" Score="2" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the initial part of stop consonants in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take /b/, the voiced bilabial stop consonant, as an example. When I produce this consonant, prior to the stop release, my lips are closed so airflow through my mouth is completely blocked. To vibrate the vocal cords, I send air through my nose. Does that mean the initial part of my /b/ is identical to the initial part of /m/, the bilabial nasal consonant? Is this how native speakers of English articulate this stop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general in English, are voiced stops articulated in the same manner as their nasal counterparts before the stop release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2979" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-01-24T22:08:25.143" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T01:09:00.460" Title="Are voiced stops in English articulated in the same manner as their nasal counterparts before the stop release?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T02:38:45.267" Score="6" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spectral graphs in the accepted answer of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11/what-is-the-difference-between-voiced-and-voiceless-stop-consonants&quot;&gt;What is the difference between voiced and voiceless stop consonants?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; shows that in English, the initial part (before the stop release) of voiced stop consonants has a lower pitch compared to the vowel that follows. Is it true for all voiced consonants in English? Does the same apply to other languages as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2979" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T15:51:02.390" Title="Does the initial part of voiced consonants always have a low pitch?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T08:10:12.010" Score="1" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend who is a Spanish native speaker said something like this to me recently (in English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*He told her if she was Asian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sentence would be fine if the verb were &quot;ask&quot;, but &quot;tell&quot; cannot make clauses using if/whether. I thought it through further and I guess questioning verbs vs. telling verbs take this pattern, but was wondering if actually something quite different is going on here once I thought it through further. Take the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He told him that he wanted a sandwich / He told him he wanted a sandwich&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She asked her if she wanted coffee / *She asked her she wanted coffee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate that while on the surface, the constructions look similar, actually something different is going on. In addition, there seems to be some constraints with the tense of verb in the clause of the second example with &quot;if&quot; (&quot;that he wants&quot; sounds better somehow than &quot;if she wants&quot;) What is going on here exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, my friend told me that the Spanish equivalent would be &quot;le dije que si ella era asiatica&quot; but he wasn't sure if this was fully grammatical in Spanish either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2286" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T04:24:29.707" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T04:24:29.707" Title="Clauses in sentences with questioning verbs, using &quot;if&quot;/&quot;whether&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T08:42:24.917" Score="0" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those people coming speaking Cantonese, do they tend to sound &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_voice#Hyponasal_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hyponasal&lt;/a&gt;, when they speak Cantonese, and speak English? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-09T15:55:32.737" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T15:55:32.737" Title="Do people speaking Cantonese tend to sound hyponasal?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T13:20:50.087" Score="5" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a list of 15000 sentences for a new language I wish to learn. I also have the English translation of each of these sentences. Additionally, I have a 30 million word corpus for the new language. I have used this corpus to rank the most common words and phrases from the corpus. By phrase I simply mean groups of consecutive words, as I have not performed any kind of semantic analysis. How might I rank the 15000 sentences in order or most valuable to least valuable, with respect to my desire to learn the language. For example, phrases like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the, and, bread, I am, where is it, I can't, woke up, even if, on the other hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are more valuable to a learner than:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiwi, wiped out, fertiliser, sediment, live wire, set in stone, house sitting, in a state, out of state, as a matter of fact&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and should therefore be learned first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language I'm learning is Gaeilge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2982" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T17:49:23.417" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T06:14:04.260" Title="Ranking sentences" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-05T19:01:10.630" Score="2" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the example of 'take' -&gt; 'taker, 'create' -&gt; 'creater' and so on, we might expect that there would exist a noun '*raper' from the verb 'rape'. Instead we have the noun 'rapist'. Is there a term for such non-words that are formed according to the derivation rules of a language but don't exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2984" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-01-05T20:31:31.547" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T08:13:41.437" Title="Term for a non-word consistent with derivation rules" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6321" CreationDate="2014-01-05T21:58:42.160" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say the closest you can get is &quot;infantile speech&quot;, not because it actually is infantile speech but because I think people would understand what type of words the one you are referring to is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words you are referring to, like *&lt;em&gt;goed&lt;/em&gt;, are obtained by overgeneralising rules, which is usually what children do and what adults try to correct.&#xA;Actually, the *&lt;em&gt;goed&lt;/em&gt; was one of the examples in a seminar child speech development I goed to ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2972" LastEditorUserId="2972" LastEditDate="2014-01-05T23:14:47.397" LastActivityDate="2014-01-05T23:14:47.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6313" CreationDate="2014-01-06T02:31:51.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wiktionary contributor &quot;Atelaes&quot; responded to me privately about the further etymology request I posted for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=-%CF%83%CE%BC%CE%BF%CF%82&amp;amp;action=edit&amp;amp;redlink=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-σμος&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;(no entry yet)&lt;/sup&gt; is a fairly standard suffix of action, used to make nouns from verbs ending in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=-%CE%B6%CF%89&amp;amp;action=edit&amp;amp;redlink=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-ζω&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;(no entry yet)&lt;/sup&gt;, similar to English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-tion&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough info to create a suffix entry, but I thought I'd drop you a note, in case it was useful for your discussion (the link you provided doesn't work). Sorry I can't be of more help. -&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User%3aAtelaes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Atelaes&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User_talk%3aAtelaes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;λάλει ἐμοί&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And it looks like I better check the link I made there!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T02:31:51.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6315" CreationDate="2014-01-06T08:04:16.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different kinds of stop consonant /b/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prevoiced /b/: this occurs in Spanish, French, Russian, etc; has a negative VOT. In other words, voicing starts before the closure. You can call it 'voice lagging time'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Partially voiced /b/: this occurs in aspirating languages, and intially. has non-negative VOT (sure, you find some speakers with negative VOT).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens when you open velopharngeal port when you are producing a prevoiced /b/? You hear prenasalized /b/. And you can see prenasalization in Bantu languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="846" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T08:04:16.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-06T11:30:45.523" Score="3" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;My hunch is (like always) there are people in both groups, but what was the original purpose of the theories? Are they mainly linguistic tools for describing various syntactic phenomena, rather than trying to explain cognitive language structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T19:32:40.640" Title="Are phrase structure grammar and/or dependency grammar legitimate theories for describing the cognitive structure of syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6325" CreationDate="2014-01-06T13:17:51.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in the title seems rather different from the two questions in the body of the text, and these two in turn are not synonymous either (the original purpose of a tool may be quite different from what a tool is mainly use for). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, my answer to the question in the title is that they are legitimate theories (because an illegitimate theory is a quite rare beast, it seems to me). The original purpose of any given scientific concept is always hard to ascertain, though in that case one can confidently say that phrase structure rules &lt;em&gt;were not&lt;/em&gt; originally introduced to describe cognitive structure, for the simple reason that their popularization in linguistics occurred &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the idea that there might exists cognitive structure involved in language became largely accepted (and in fact, the development of phrase structure triggered the cognitive reevaluation, not the other way round). As far as I know, the idea that phrase structure grammars could be an accurate model of cognitive capability appeared for the first time in Robert Lees' review of &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt; in 1957, whereas dependency relations were explicitly introduced at the latest in the XIXth century and represent a linguistic tradition coming back much further in time (see Thomas Gross comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the last question,it seems to me that our knowledge of syntactic phenomena is still thin enough so that there is no meaningful distinction between accurate description and theoretical modeling of the cognitive process involved. That said, it is clearly the case that certain strand of phrase structure grammar (minimalism for instance) are prone to posit and work with linguistic concepts which have no immediately accessible linguistic incarnation (for instance unpronounced abstract nodes in trees or abstract Case) whereas other strands dismiss the process as unscientific (angels on pinheads in the words of frequent contributor @jlawler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-06-04T14:05:08.027" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T14:05:08.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6159" CreationDate="2014-01-06T13:22:15.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you had a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/ispell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ISpell&lt;/a&gt; or, better yet, &lt;a href=&quot;http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HunSpell&lt;/a&gt; (for it supports Unicode)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are more intended for spelling-correction. However, since they also try to grok the conjugations and flexions for languages with them, they could be helpful. These programs expose an interface so you can call them from other programs (such as a word processor or a browser), you could create a script that reads your text file and calls it continuously not for the sake of spelling but to get the &quot;base&quot; word (&quot;comer&quot; in your example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T13:22:15.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2014-01-06T21:44:46.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think folk artists tend to embrase their local accents, indeed exagerating the nuances of these accents. On the other hand, pop singers tend to favour a more &quot;international&quot; and polished accent, which makes it more difficult to locate where the singer is from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Dublin (male) and clear London (female) accent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shane Mac Gowan sings with a Dublin accent but speaks with a London accent. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More folk songs sung in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Irish Midlands accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5fBppsntAE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5fBppsntAE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Irish Midwest accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSU687C38zo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSU687C38zo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Irish Northwest accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owS-yzRDK6k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owS-yzRDK6k&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Dublin accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg_3t-CHBZs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg_3t-CHBZs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear Scottish accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAD_E1kaYuY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAD_E1kaYuY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even in more pop like forms you will hear people embracing local accents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very clear English Northeastern accent:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct-qa6SjRZo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct-qa6SjRZo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Northern:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piv0ZK7frnU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piv0ZK7frnU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irish:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Kspj3OO0s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Kspj3OO0s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, artists from non English speaking countries might well &quot;adopt&quot; an accent depending on where their music style is based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American sounding Swedes:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEjLoHdbVeE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEjLoHdbVeE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English sounding Swedes:&#xA; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_q8L8Tksd8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_q8L8Tksd8&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T21:44:46.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-06T16:37:37.817" Score="8" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come here in the hope that there may be some genius amongst you who could have a fair crack at identifying a potential country of origin through speech pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Movies&amp;amp;TV stack, we're &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/16404/where-was-director-tommy-wiseau-born-and-or-raised&quot;&gt;trying to narrow down&lt;/a&gt; the origin of the mysterious 'Tommy Wiseau', a cult trash movie director who is notoriously evasive about his personal history, but is absolutely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if5eP3crl_4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;captivating to watch.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a recently published journal/biography, we're aware that despite claiming to be from New Orleans and speaking French he is actually more likely to be from a former Soviet Bloc country, but nothing else is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way of identifying what language he spoke by analyzing the syntax and grammatical construction of his sentences?&#xA;Could accent (as bizarre as it is) be any indicator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know this is a long shot, but at this point any clue either way is useful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some resources:&#xA;The Room &lt;a href=&quot;http://theroomsoundboard.com/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soundboard&lt;/a&gt;, and IMDB page has many of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/quotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quotes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2990" OwnerDisplayName="John Smith Optional" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.777" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T05:15:30.290" Title="Are there any linguists out there to help identify country of origin from syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;stylometry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6329" CreationDate="2014-01-06T18:08:20.753" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky hypothesized about a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Universal Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, in which part of being human includes having a genetic structure that assumes a certain ordering of Subject, Verb, and Object. Subject precedes Object in the vast majority (around 95%) of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alien artificial constructs (like Yoda-speak or Klingon) deliberately invert the Subject and Object to increase their alien feel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard Chomsky lecture at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in the early '90s. He asserted that if a Martian linguist came to Earth, he would declare that there were a single language (with many dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, this means that only rarely would one be able to distinguish a language of origin based on syntax and grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" OwnerDisplayName="rajah9" LastActivityDate="2014-01-06T18:08:20.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6329" CreationDate="2014-01-07T00:19:11.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be syntactic clues (for example, people whose native language is Slavonic (other than Bulgarian/Macedonian) have no definite or indefinite articles, and often underuse them in English; but this may or may not be noticeable, depending on the person and the quality and length of their learning English. And of course those are not the only languages without articles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't notice any specific syntactic patterns in this clip: I find his English pretty idiomatic American English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do notice a phonetic pattern from time to time: syllable-final consonants are sometimes omitted (for example &quot;Do[n't]&quot; at 1:41 and &quot;insi[d]e&quot; at 1:47). This is a habit I associate with Chinese and - probably more relevantly - Spanish speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that basis (only) I would make a very tentative suggestion of a Spanish speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T00:19:11.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6329" CreationDate="2014-01-07T05:05:41.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no idea about the specific person that you mentioned, or how to go about identifying his country of origin. My answer addresses the general aspect of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are linguists/computational linguists who are working to create software to identify aspects of the author, be it country of origin, or even &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;personal identity&lt;/a&gt;. Speech is definitely an aspect that many are working on (&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.156.6917&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). There are many others who are focusing on the errors of non-native writers (&lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.pascal-network.org/archive/00001433/01/p342-koppel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;). The field, in general, is called stylometry or computational stylistics. If you want to try out some such software, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/computationalstylistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stylo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JGAAP&lt;/a&gt; are good apps to start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T05:15:30.290" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T05:15:30.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-07T14:16:37.573" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an essay and could really do with some help. I am only interested in native language acquisition at this time, there seems to be many sources available on spoken language acquisition but no so many on written.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2993" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T06:59:56.627" Title="What are the main factors that define the difference between spoken and written language acquisition?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6337" CreationDate="2014-01-07T17:27:40.940" Score="4" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently trying to learn Tamil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend who is teaching me seems to be making a clicking sound with one word in particular, and she can't seem to tell she's making it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is குளம் pronounced as [kʊ˞ɭʼʌm] - meaning pool or pond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time she says it my mind is blown when she transitions from the retroflex ɭ to the ʌ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distance between these two sounds seems to be the maximum possible distance it can travel between two sounds. It's as if the tongue is slammed into the floor of the mouth causing a click-type sound. About 50% of the time she says the word I can hear a distinct click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if any phonologists out there have noticed these kinds of unintentional click sounds in any languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, at what point would a click serve some sort of contrastive phoneme? Is it even possible for a language as old as Tamil to develop clicks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-01-07T17:45:40.803" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T04:21:45.343" Title="Do some words have secondary or unintended click consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5904" CreationDate="2014-01-07T17:45:56.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I had the same question, all I could find was the &quot;Dictionary of Prosody&quot; by Alex Preminger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dictionary_of_Prosody.html?id=owL1MgEACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dictionary_of_Prosody.html?id=owL1MgEACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unable to easily find a copy though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese, there is &quot;Dicionário Prosódico de Portugal e Brasil&quot; (1870), by João de Deus de Nogueira Ramos. Again, no easy way to get a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2995" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T17:45:56.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2014-01-07T22:17:11.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't personally observed this phenomenon with clicks, but there are well-known cases of consonant epenthesis that are explained in articulatory terms. For example, it is common to observe an epenthetic [t] between [n] and [s], as in the word &lt;em&gt;chance&lt;/em&gt;, since the early closure of the nasal passage turns the nasal stop into an oral one before the air gets released for the fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the second part of the question, this isn't the sort of situation in which we'd expect contrastive clicks to arise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common to name phonemes according to the form in which they most often surface, out of convenience and convention. So, if phoneme X most often surfaces as [ɭ] but optionally as [ɭ!] in a certain environment--say before non-high vowels, we name that phoneme /ɭ/. We might formulate a rule that says /ɭ/ is optionally realized as [ɭ!] before non-high vowels (or optionally insert [!] between /ɭ/ and non-high vowels). If the next-generation language learner analyzed the [ɭ!] as being the &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; realization before non-high vowels, we might consider [ɭ!] to be the more common realization of phoneme X and therefore call the phoneme /ɭ!/ and reformulate our rule to say /ɭ!/ is realized as [ɭ] before high vowels (and as [ɭ!] elsewhere). Over successive generations, the [ɭ] part of [ɭ!] might even be lost, so the rule would become /!/ is realized as [ɭ] before high vowels (and as [!] elsewhere). In this situation, we could reasonably say that [!] contrasts with &quot;null&quot; (i.e. the lack of [!]) in as much as the hypothetical words [!ʌm] and [ʌm] would mean two different things. And it would contrast with other (non-ɭ) consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But notice that in all of these different cases, the phoneme inventory itself hasn't really changed. Just the allophones of phoneme X and what we choose to call its underlying form have changed, since [ɭ] and [!] or [ɭ] and [ɭ!] would not be contrastive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, for [ɭ] and [ɭ!] to be considered respective realizations of contrastive phonemes, we'd need to see evidence of minimal pairs--for example a lexicon in which [kʊ˞ɭʌm] means one thing and [kʊ˞ɭ!ʌm] means something else. This situation is unlikely to arise spontaneously under the circumstances you're describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-01-07T22:17:11.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-07T22:44:56.710" Score="7" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages that mark evidentiality morphologically, what evidential categories tend to be used for things like creation stories, myths, statements about theology (&quot;God is good&quot;), etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem that &quot;direct experience&quot; evidentials (visual or other) would most likely not be used for such statements, but on the other hand, &quot;inferential&quot; or &quot;hearsay&quot;-type evidentials might not be appropriate either insofar as they imply lesser confidence, at least in cultures where such things are supposed to be known with certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be a problem that missionaries come up against all the time: what do SIL linguists do when they have to translate &quot;In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth&quot; into a language that has evidentials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the answer to this question will be that different languages do different things, and that it will vary based on what evidential categories the language marks -- I'm interested in specific examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T17:40:18.413" Title="What types of evidentials tend to be used for statements about religion, mythology, etc.?" Tags="&lt;evidentiality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6381" CreationDate="2014-01-07T23:09:27.417" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something of a long shot, but I am looking for narratives with English word-by-word glosses in languages that have proximate/obviative marking, direct/inverse marking (aka hierarchical alignment), or preferably both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is how frequently in such narratives, and at what points in the narrative, you get topic switching, where a new referent becomes the proximate topic, and also whether and how this is overtly marked. In other words, how continuous the status of something as 'proximate' tends to be, and where in a narrative discontinuity tends to occur. For this, I need word-by-word glosses of naturally occurring narratives, because a translation by itself won't show the proximate/obviative morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T21:38:30.100" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T21:38:30.100" Title="Glossed narratives in languages with proximate/obviative and/or direct/inverse marking?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6287" CreationDate="2014-01-08T01:02:37.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native speaker, but I have studied Hebrew (albeit) Biblical Hebrew, but as far as I know the right to left syntax of a Hebrew sentence includes numerical sets. Just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2921" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T01:02:37.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6318" CreationDate="2014-01-08T05:12:31.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Objective hyponasality, the kind that can be measured on a sound spectrograph, is almost always the result of a physical obstruction.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader/2006/060207/060207c.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader/2006/060207/060207c.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the speakers of languages that don't have phonemic nasal vowels speak with some nasality.  So hyponasality is noticeable, for example, even in English.  Henry Kissinger is famous for it.   So are people suffering from colds and the consequent swelling or blockage of the nasal passages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's doubtful that marked hyponasality is a function of being a speaker of say, Cantonese vs. some other language.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether Cantonese speakers &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; hyponasal to a given listener, that's a subjective issue.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T05:12:31.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-08T15:41:09.623" Score="2" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was an article published with a diagram showing Lexical Difference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It cites a Russian source &quot;K. Tyshchenko (1999), Metatheory of Linguistics.&quot; I can 't find the source. What I would really would like to know is how &quot;lexical difference&quot; is determined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another source &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng&lt;/a&gt; says english is &quot;Lexical similarity: 60% with German, 27% with French, 24% with Russian.&quot;[1] However, how is this calculated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I would like to know this is I am attempting to write a program using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to compare languages to English. There are a lot of considerations when comparing two different languages: similarity of words, frequency of use, structure of language, ... the list goes on. A lot of these metrics can be determined using widely available models; however, what I do not know, what metrics matter in regards to understanding what languages have similar cultural backgrounds? I am open to other research as well as opinions on what matters when comparing two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &quot;Lexical similarity. The percentage of lexical similarity between two linguistic varieties is determined by comparing a set of standardized wordlists and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate a speech variant that is likely a dialect of the language with which it is being compared. Unlike intelligibility, lexical similarity is bidirectional or reciprocal.&quot; ref &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-info#Dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-info#Dialects&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3001" LastEditorUserId="3001" LastEditDate="2014-01-08T15:48:33.263" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T18:15:00.783" Title="Help understanding “degree of overall vocabulary divergence”" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6355" CreationDate="2014-01-08T16:18:21.090" Score="2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verb second is the phenomenon in which the finite verb is preceded by exactly one constituent. Not all languages have verb second, though, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as can be seen here&lt;/a&gt;. The only thing I do not understand is why a simple clause with a SV order is not considered verb second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The man] bites the dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb is clearly in second place here. So why isn't this called verb second? Is it because verb second has to involve verb movement? Or because the first element should not be the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am puzzled, mostly, because some authors argue - correctly, I believe - that English is not strictly speaking a V2 language. What confuses me about that, is that the most basic sentence in English (as the example given) &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a V2 word order, and also in subordinate clauses English seems to hold a V2 word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He said that the dog [had bitten] him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast with Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hij zei dat de hond hem [gebeten had].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[verb]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:22:41.443" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:22:41.443" Title="A better understanding of Verb Second" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6350" CreationDate="2014-01-08T17:09:11.753" Score="5" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=and&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology of and&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English and, ond, originally meaning &quot;thereupon, next,&quot; from Proto-Germanic *unda (cf. Old Saxon endi, Old Frisian anda, Middle Dutch ende, Old High German enti, German und, Old Norse enn), from PIE *en; cognate with Latin ante, Greek anti (see ante). Phrase and how as an exclamation of emphatic agreement dates from early 1900s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &quot;and&quot; is one of the most common words, I had expected it to trace back all the way to PIE, like words like mother or father, for example, but instead it seems it meant &quot;thereupon, next&quot; as recently as Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &quot;and&quot; a recent word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, what word performed its function before that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did PIE have an unrelated word for &quot;and&quot;, and if so, why did such a common word fall away from usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &quot;and&quot; a cognate to Latin &quot;et&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2760" LastEditorUserId="2760" LastEditDate="2014-01-09T15:07:38.760" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T13:36:17.133" Title="Does &quot;and&quot; come from the PIE word for &quot;and&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6346" CreationDate="2014-01-08T18:15:00.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of that chart is not Russian, but Ukrainian, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguist.univ.kiev.ua/museum/book/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;K. Тищенко. Метатеорія мовознавства, 2000&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, it's available online as a site, but it obviously lacks many illustration pictures. &lt;a href=&quot;http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B8%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE_%D0%9A%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8F%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Professor Kostyantyn Tyshchenko&lt;/a&gt; is the author of more than 180 publications on different languages and on various branches of linguistics, so, taking into account the inaccuracy of the data about the source of the chart on the site you gave your first link to, one can suppose that the chart can actually be from some other publication by Tyshchenko.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T18:15:00.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6348" CreationDate="2014-01-08T18:17:28.847" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the quote in your question you can see that &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; derives from Proto-Germanic so I don't think that we can call it &quot;recent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, according to the quote in your question, &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; is related to Latin &lt;code&gt;ante&lt;/code&gt; and not to Latin &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/et#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;et&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix%3aProto-Indo-European/-k%CA%B7e#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;*-kʷe&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ielex.mpi.nl/meaning/and/languagelist/all/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IELex&lt;/a&gt;) is generally given as &quot;and&quot; which is related to Latin &lt;code&gt;-que&lt;/code&gt; and, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Pronouns.2C_particles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, to English (thou)&lt;strong&gt;gh&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's unlikely for historical linguistics to be able to answer the &quot;why&quot; question in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="828" LastEditorUserId="828" LastEditDate="2014-01-08T19:36:54.630" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T19:36:54.630" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6356" CreationDate="2014-01-08T18:39:58.243" Score="10" ViewCount="18973" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an etymology dictionary for Latin that is available on the Internet? For example, I know of &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://etymonline.com/&lt;/a&gt;, which is a great resource for English etymology, but I have not been able to find an equivalent site for Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone knows of such site, I would be grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2760" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-01-10T00:10:17.970" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T16:05:22.140" Title="Online etymology dictionary for Latin" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-08T21:14:29.723" Score="2" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a clause in Latin that has n words. Latin frequently uses scrambling, so there are n! possible ways to arrange that clause given a free word order. However, Latin writers use only a small subset of those n! clauses. What criterion did they use to determine that subset? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-01-10T00:09:42.920" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T00:09:42.920" Title="Scrambling in Languages like Latin" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6352" CreationDate="2014-01-08T23:21:21.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's not one criterion, but many, which are usually to do with discourse pragmatics and information structure: phenomena like topicalization, focalization, existential and presentative constructions, etc., can cause departures from Latin's usual SOV order. &lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.117/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This recent book&lt;/a&gt; gives a lot of details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T23:21:21.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2014-01-08T23:34:33.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good up-to-date dictionaries are under copyright and not on line. I suggest you get a reader's ticket at a well stocked university library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-08T23:34:33.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6347" CreationDate="2014-01-09T03:06:16.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;SV &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a verb-second pattern: as jlawler says in his comment, the subject is a constituent, so the verb is in second position. Anyone who uses the term &quot;verb-second&quot; would agree with this, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page you link to actually gives examples of SV order as a type of verb-second order: e.g. the very first example, from German, which it says &quot;illustrates the V2 principle&quot;: &lt;em&gt;Die Kinder  spielten    Fussball    vor der Schule  im Park.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe what misled you is that that page says that English has moved from a V2 to a broadly SV order, which might be taken to suggest that SV is something entirely different from V2. But the point is that SV, as the most frequent type of V2, has become the basic unmarked word order in English, while other types of V2 -- in which the verb was preceded by e.g. an adverb, a PP, or an object, and the subject then followed the verb -- have mostly fallen out of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T03:06:16.010" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2014-01-09T04:53:11.137" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most of the resources are behind a paywall. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionaries.brillonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online database&lt;/a&gt; (by Brill) already includes eleven dictionaries, including de Vaan's &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionaries.brillonline.com/latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T20:25:39.493" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T20:25:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-09T12:11:31.787" Score="1" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the fastest way for an American English native to learn other accents, specifically the Boston accent and Received Pronunciation? Books? Audio clips on the web? If so, what books, and what sites are most useful (for learning said accents)? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3006" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T12:37:41.730" Title="Fastest way to learn accents for English native" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-01-10T14:28:49.750" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-09T14:49:55.197" Score="2" ViewCount="955" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two russian words for &quot;now&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;сейчас&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;теперь&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How does the use of these words differ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is one of them more formal than the other? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Which one is the most commonly used word?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What's the etymology of them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2325" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T15:47:52.170" Title="Two words for &quot;now&quot; in Russian" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-01-10T08:16:17.263" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6358" CreationDate="2014-01-09T17:02:04.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference could be described as that between past-perfectiveness (теперь) VS durativeness / progressivness (including future perfectivness) (сейчас). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These categories are not normally distinguished  in Russian language analytically, but rather as a synthectical form of a verb, or by a corresponding adverbal (теперь VS сейчас), or by the both methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Теперь я Чебурашка. (= Now I am Cheburashka; a fictional character from a story for children, meaning 'After some previous history I am what I am').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Сейчас я Чебурашка. (= Now I am Cheburashka, but focusing on the speaker's state at the moment of speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Теперь отправлю пост. (= 'Now I am going to send the post'; meaning that after a sequence of preceding events, the speaker is going to send the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Сейчас отправлю пост. (= 'Now I am going to send the post'; meanig that the speaker is going to publish the post right now, or that (s)he is focusing on the nearest future, cf. the previous example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;em&gt;теперь&lt;/em&gt; marks a present moment as referred to a preceding (past) state of things, or something new (rhema, topic or comment) while &lt;em&gt;сейчас&lt;/em&gt; is 'right now' or 'from now on'. On the other hand, both adverbs can mark a topic/commentary as well, since in Russian a meaning can be derived not from just grammar or syntax or word order, but from an intonation as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2014-01-11T15:47:52.170" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T15:47:52.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2014-01-09T17:32:07.547" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; has lots of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin entries&lt;/a&gt;, and of those many have etymologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find one that lacks an etymology and you'd really like to see it added, it's a little-known fact that you can request it. Click the edit link on the page, if it's a page with entries for several words in various languages that happen to share a spelling, then click on the edit link next to the &quot;Latin&quot; heading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there will already be one or more &quot;Etymology&quot; headings with no details in them. This is mainly where two or more unrelated words in the same language are known to have different origins but coincidentally ended up with the same spelling. In this case the &quot;Etymology&quot; headings will be numbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise the Etymology sections are not numbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology sections come after the language heading and before any &quot;part of speech&quot; heading. They usually go after a &quot;Pronunciation&quot; section if there is one. When there are multiple numbered etymology sections that don't all share one pronunciation, then the pronunciation section is first within the etymology section. &#xA; You'll be forgiven if you get it wrong though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below the Etymology heading you then use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:rfe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;rfe&lt;/code&gt; template&lt;/a&gt;, this stands for &quot;Request For Etymology&quot;. The result will look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;==Latin==&#xA;&#xA;===Etymology===&#xA;{{rfe|la}}&#xA;&#xA;===Noun===&#xA;... stuff ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;==Latin==&#xA;&#xA;===Etymology 1===&#xA;{{rfe|la|Possibly related to Greek &quot;foo&quot;?}}&#xA;&#xA;====Noun====&#xA;... some stuff ...&#xA;...&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;===Etymology 2===&#xA;{{rfe|la|Could this be cognate with Sanskrit &quot;phu&quot;?}}&#xA;&#xA;====Verb====&#xA;... some other stuff ...&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;la&lt;/code&gt; is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 639 language code&lt;/a&gt; for Latin. The comment after the &lt;code&gt;|&lt;/code&gt; is optional and will appear in the entry to give other Wiktionary contributors a place to start looking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To know when there's a response, click the star in the menu and check your watchlist. People may well then discuss it in the talk page before, or they may just add an etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other langauge Wiktionaries probably have similar systems, but they'd be a bit different so I can't comment on them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-12-08T16:05:22.140" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T16:05:22.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6358" CreationDate="2014-01-09T18:13:25.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make an addition to what Manjusri said in his in all respects correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cейчас&lt;/em&gt;, unlike &lt;em&gt;теперь&lt;/em&gt;, can mean &quot;just wait a bit&quot;, &quot;in a moment&quot;, like in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Иди сюда! (— Come here!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Сейчас, я занят! (— Just wait a bit, I'm busy!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;em&gt;сейчас&lt;/em&gt; can refer not only to the nearest future when it is used with a verb in the future tense, as Manjusri said, but also it can refer to the nearest past, in this case it is used with a verb in the past tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Где ты сейчас была? (Where have you been recently?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the two words have slightly different meaning, that's why their usage is not determined by the style, or by how formal/informal your speech is, but only by what you actually want to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of &lt;em&gt;сейчас&lt;/em&gt; is transparent for the speakers of Russian, it is derived from &lt;code&gt;сей час&lt;/code&gt; (this hour, this time). &lt;em&gt;Теперь&lt;/em&gt; is not that obvious, but it also comes from a noun phrase. In the early attested form it was &lt;code&gt;топрьво&lt;/code&gt; which can be analyzed as &quot;то прьво&quot; (тот первый, that first). It has cognates in other Slavic languages, like Ukrainian &lt;code&gt;тепер&lt;/code&gt; or Polish &lt;code&gt;dopiero&lt;/code&gt; (only, until), while &lt;em&gt;сейчас&lt;/em&gt; has none, it is attested only in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in Russian there is the third word that means &quot;now&quot;, that is the cognate of the all-Indo-European n-word with this meaning, it is &lt;code&gt;ныне&lt;/code&gt;. In Modern Russian it has the stylistic coloring of being elevated, poetic, and archaic. It is a cognate of Latin &lt;code&gt;nunc&lt;/code&gt;, Germanic &lt;code&gt;nun/nu&lt;/code&gt; (including English &lt;code&gt;now&lt;/code&gt;), Sanskrit &lt;code&gt;nū&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-01-09T18:22:41.887" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T18:22:41.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6365" CreationDate="2014-01-09T18:49:24.887" Score="4" ViewCount="2888" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it just a coincidence, or was there a reason why they ended in '-er'? I know that all of them derive from PIE, where they also ended in '-er'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is this '-er' the same '-er' particle, as in 'fighter', 'liar', 'runner', etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2760" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:33:28.053" Title="Why do mother/father/brother/sister/daughter all end in '-er'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-01-10T14:29:00.453" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6362" CreationDate="2014-01-09T19:17:23.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European words for “father, mother, sister, brother” are all stems in –r, which appears as -ṛ, -er, -ēr, -ōr in different forms of these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English agent suffix –er, as in &quot;fighter&quot;, goes back to a proto-Germanic *-ārijaz, which is widely held to be ancient borrowing from the Latin suffix –ārius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no connection between these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T19:17:23.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6362" CreationDate="2014-01-09T19:27:33.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This -er is no way a particle, it is probably a very ancient Indo-European suffix of unknown meaning, not connected with the modern English agent -er suffix. These words belong to the so called athematic r-stem nouns (nouns with stems ending not in a vowel, but in -r-). Not only kinship terms belonged to that noun class, the word &quot;water&quot; also belongs to it (Hittite 'watar', 15th century BC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-09T19:27:33.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6362" CreationDate="2014-01-10T06:17:52.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already answerred it, so this is a copy of my &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2878/624&quot;&gt;previous answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was the agent suffix -ter- of PIE. It was used for creation of terms for relatives and for creation of agent nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffix -ter- was used to create a noun for person whose function or profession was to perform the action (irrespective whether he actually did it) while the o-grade of it -tor- was used to denote a person who just did the action. The combination of suffixes -a̯-ter- was used for some relatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the term for daughter in PIE was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhuga̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same suffix in zero-grade, &quot;-tr-&quot; in combination with inanimate ending &quot;-om&quot; was used for creating words for tools, such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ero̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;plow&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯estrom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wear&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tere̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;auger&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;costrom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;knife&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, of course, the PIE superlative -ter-os was also another use of the same suffix. Thus  &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;gela̯teros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; would mean &quot;more joyful&quot;. The word &quot;enter&quot; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;intra-&lt;/em&gt;) is another example of use of this suffix with adverbs: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯en&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;in&quot; + &quot;-ter-om&quot; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enterom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;intestines&quot;, of which locative case is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enteri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;inside&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English suffex -er does not have anything in connection, it is believed to be borrowed from Latin -arius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:33:28.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6348" CreationDate="2014-01-10T07:16:59.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;English word &quot;and&quot; is cognate to another English word &quot;end&quot;, both originating from PIE root &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ent-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;end&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯entom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; literally meant &quot;end&quot; in PIE). The meaning shifted to &quot;in front of&quot; as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and later to &quot;near&quot;, &quot;next&quot;, &quot;besides&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;and&quot; was conducted in PIE with a clitic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-q̆e(t)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which was attached to the last word, like Latin -que (&quot;senatus populusque&quot;, which means &quot;senate and the people&quot;). This clitic comes from the same root as the PIE word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆eta̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;pair&quot; and has pre-PIE origin (cognates produced the numerals for &quot;two&quot; in Uralic languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no conjunction &quot;and&quot; in PIE, although, one could use the adverb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;in addition&quot;, &quot;also&quot;, &quot;besides&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This word exactly evolved into Latin conjunction &quot;et&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T13:36:17.133" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T13:36:17.133" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-10T08:31:56.780" Score="3" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about creating a new word to denote small pieces of knowledge and understanding, like truthful sentences (eagles are birds), or informative news about technology (Google Chrome's market share beats IE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this argument, I chose the word &lt;strong&gt;knowlet&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Know means to &lt;em&gt;hold information in mind&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;realize something&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-let&lt;/em&gt; is a suffix to denote smallness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Know + -let = knowlet (pronounced /nalet/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a correct neologism? What problems might it have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-12T02:15:40.367" LastActivityDate="2014-01-12T02:15:40.367" Title="Does the neologism &quot;knowlet&quot; have correct morphology in English?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;neologism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6357" CreationDate="2014-01-10T12:37:41.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As John Lawler says, start by learning phonetics: this will sharpen your &amp;lsquo;ear&amp;rsquo;, making it possible a) to recognize phonic distinctions which a lifetime of linguistic practice has trained you to ignore, and b) to understand how those distinctions are effected. Rigorously apply what you have learned to your own idiolect. Estrange yourself from your own voice: make yourself conscious of what you do with sounds so you can more easily discard inappropriate features. Take voice classes (stage voice, not singing voice) to amplify your range and exercise muscles you have never used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that is preparatory. You may or may not have time to do it all before you have to emulate a particular dialect, but work as much of it in as you can. It makes your subsequent work more efficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a specific dialect, listen to examples: not words but utterances of several sentences and paragraphs, so you become familiar with the prosody (which at bottom is more important than the phonology to making the dialect convincing). Analyze the phonic features, so you know what you&amp;rsquo;re aiming at. Speak along with the sound clips, being careful to keep your vocal muscles relaxed and responsive; if you tense up, you&amp;rsquo;ll lose control and start imposing your own patterns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, however, you need to appropriate the dialect, accommodate it to your own vocal physiology and your own purposes. Don&amp;rsquo;t imitate your examples slavishly: speak the new dialect as you would have spoken it had it been your native dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you&amp;rsquo;re using the dialect as an actor, keep in mind that intelligibility and characterization both trump accuracy. Don&amp;rsquo;t fall in love with your dialect work for its own sake. It&amp;rsquo;s just a tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T12:37:41.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6367" CreationDate="2014-01-10T13:09:48.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is a correctly formed neologism. The suffix -let forms diminutives from nouns. Or can you mention any verb+let formations? The other question is whether there is any need for such a word. What is actually wrong with &quot;fact&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T13:09:48.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6367" CreationDate="2014-01-10T17:53:13.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as a &quot;correctly-formed neologism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neologisms are, by definition, new, and therefore not provided for in The Rules.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So they're by definition also &quot;incorrect&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, The Rules can change, and that's what happens when a neologism survives.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Rules come to accept it (or at least they ignore it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &quot;knowlet&quot;, there is a fundamental problem, caused, as usual, by English spelling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The root &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; occurs with two pronunciations, though the spelling doesn't change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/no/, like the verb /noz/ in &lt;em&gt;He knows everything.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/na/, like the noun /'nalɪdʒ/ in &lt;em&gt;His knowledge is vast.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for any neologism spelled &lt;em&gt;knowlet&lt;/em&gt;  -- never mind what it sposta mean --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;it &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; be pronounced /'nolɪt/, like the verb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or it could &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; be pronounced /'nalɪt/, like the noun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(There is no hope, by the way, of getting the final syllable stressed, with this spelling)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were ever to become common, there would undoubtedly be some difference&lt;br&gt;&#xA;in  pronunciation, because &lt;em&gt;knowlet&lt;/em&gt; would occur almost exclusively in text.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So there would be phonological dialects from the beginning, and that leads&lt;br&gt;&#xA;almost inevitably to semantic and syntactic dialects as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-01-10T17:53:13.300" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6402" CreationDate="2014-01-10T18:32:55.637" Score="14" ViewCount="5196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a natural language which is known not to follow Zipf's law? I'm interested to see if it's really universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law&quot;&gt;Zipf's law&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; - To clarify a bit - imagine that you could snoop on every conversation held by native speakers everywhere, in every context, over the course of one year, and record every word, and then count the words occurring, and calculate their frequencies, would they deviate from Zipf's law? Now, we can't do that in reality, but for languages with a substantial written corpus, we can have a broad enough sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2760" LastEditorUserId="2760" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T14:44:04.490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T01:23:35.223" Title="Are there natural languages that do not obey Zipf's law?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-11T10:43:45.817" Score="2" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard this claim stated with confidence, but it's difficult to see how it could be deduced from traditional reconstruction. Same question for ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T10:43:45.817" Title="what evidence suggests that PIE was a tone language?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2451" CreationDate="2014-01-11T11:52:02.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew šɛmɛn שמן “oil, fat” is a Semitic cognate of Arabic samn سمن “fat, butter” (with Semitic s1). It is not related to šaḥm شحم “fat, grease” (with Semitic s2 and ḥ) or to the IE words mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that šɛmɛn looks superficially like Latin semen, but the vowels of the former are the result of a specifically Hebrew development (Semitic qatl &gt;  Hebrew qɛtɛl; so-called segolisation). If you posit a proto-Semitic *šamn- the similarity with the Latin word becomes considerably less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-01-11T12:17:02.013" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T12:17:02.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6371" CreationDate="2014-01-11T15:43:06.933" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sample of any text written &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;constraitively&lt;/a&gt; and/or according to grammars of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;avoidance speech&lt;/a&gt; styles (including honorific speech styles for languages with honorific lexemes but without neutrally polite speech styles) would contradict the Zipf's law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be best shown by the phonetical and lipogrammatical example of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_disparition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Void&lt;/a&gt; by Perec. This novel has been written without &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;E,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the most frequently used French letter, and hence has none of the frequently used words in French vocabulary (e.g. it contains no &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;des&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which could have the highest freequencies  in French texts elsewhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the conversation would present a large diversity in lexical occurrence due to the very existance of ideolects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2014-01-11T22:30:15.450" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T22:30:15.450" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-11T18:59:07.190" Score="6" ViewCount="1208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of at least 3 countries in the Sinosphere that have historically used the Chinese script (or scripts derived from it) - Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did it work? Did they use it to read and write their native languages phonetically, or did they just read and write in Chinese instead of their native language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; - Also another thing - did the nature of the Chinese script lead to massive vocabulary borrowing from spoken Chinese to spoken Korean/Japanese, which would not have otherwise happened had it been a phonetic script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2760" LastEditorUserId="2760" LastEditDate="2014-01-11T20:03:44.640" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T11:58:34.860" Title="Can the Chinese script be used to record non-Chinese languages?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2014-01-11T19:40:07.687" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from the three languages you named, I know of at least three additional major languages that have used the Chinese script; which are, Thai, Zhuang, and Mongolian. Several minor ones that have also used it include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Kam, Bai, and Hani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thai &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language#Vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;used to use the Chinese script&lt;/a&gt; until the 13th century, when it was abandoned in favor of an Indian Brahmi-family script. Aparently, it used the Chinese characters to mean what they meant in Chinese, but they were pronounced in Thai, in a similar way to Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zhuang used the Chinese-based characters in the same way, which in Zhuanh is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawndip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sawndip&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and which means &quot;immature characters&quot;. Just like in Vietnamese, Zhuang uses many characters which were created especially for Zhuang, according to the models that the rest of the Chinese characters are built after. The characters which are the same in Chinese and Zhuang mean the same, but in Zhuang they are read using the Zuang words. &lt;em&gt;Sawndip&lt;/em&gt; is still used to write Zhuang, along with the official pinyin-style Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Mongolian, the story is markedly different. Mongolian is likely the winner of the title of the language that used to use the greatest number of different writing systems over the course of its history. The most significant book in Mongolian is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_History_of_the_Mongols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Secret History of the Mongols&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, written in the 14th century in Chinese characters used solely in their phonetic reading for transcribing the Mongol text, irrespective of their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from Mongolian, which used the Chinese script to read and write their native languages phonetically, the rest of the languages that used it used to use each character of that script to mean roughly the same it means in Chinese, only they pronounced it the way the concept was named in their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a rather good Wiki article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_family_of_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Chinese family of scripts&quot;&lt;/a&gt; that can serve as an introduction into this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="21190" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T11:58:34.860" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T11:58:34.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2014-01-11T21:46:54.300" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Japanese at least, both happened: sometimes the characters are used semantically, others phonetically - either according to their Chinese pronunciation (which can come from either a Northern or Southern, earlier or recent form of Chinese) or to the Japanese reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, one of the Chinese readings of the char. &quot;origin/beginning/birth&quot; is &quot;hon&quot;. Now then, the Japanese word for &quot;book&quot; is also &quot;hon&quot; (don't know if its native or a Chinese/Korean borrowing). So instead of adopting the Chinese char. for &quot;book&quot;, the Japanese use &quot;birth/start&quot; phonetically most of the times when they want to write &quot;book&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When char. for &quot;now, immediately, contemporaneity&quot; appears right before the char. for &quot;sun/day&quot;, that specific case is a semantic usage: both together are meant to be read &quot;kyô&quot; (today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That for isolated chars. themselves. Japanese nowadays uses the chars. according to its own structure (SOV), in the very first examples of Japanese writing there's vascilation between trying to follow the S-V-O structure of Chinese or the native one. There's a lot of vacillation also regarding how to phonetically encode words in the vernacular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In A. C., Moorhouse's book &quot;History of the alphabet&quot; I read that something similar happened when Babylonians adopted cuneiform writing from the Summers, and then &lt;strong&gt;again&lt;/strong&gt; when the Hittites adopted cuneiform from the Babylons. So, in a Hittite sample of writing, a set of chars. can be read in Hittite, in Babylon or in Sumerian, depending on context!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-11T21:46:54.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2014-01-12T01:52:14.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I should really call this an &quot;answer&quot;, but I've conducted thought experiments in the past on rendering English in an ideographic writing system. The strategy I used was to break up words into morphemes, and use one character per morpheme (and a lot of morphemes of the same meaning were collapsed into single characters, e.g. -tion, -ment, etc.; morphemes were often also collapsed into normal words with similar meaning). As English has a lot of agglutinative tendencies (particularly in derivation), this was generally very straightforward. For the sake of efficiency, though, I chose not to represent nonessential morphemes, such as verb agreement conjugates. I also chose to not have any orthographic contrast between contractions and their full forms. In any case, this strategy requires a bunch of simple characters for derivative and inflectional morphemes, as there can be many of them per word; Chinese characters could be used, but would be cumbersome due to the number of strokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To pull a few random words from this post and how they would be represented (I actually would often use words to represent morphemes, but you get the idea):&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Really: real -ly&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Conducted: conduct -ed&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Morphemes: morph element -s&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Agglutinative: agglutinate -ive&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Nonessential: non- essence -al&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Their: they -'s&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Inflectional: in- flex -tion -al&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2014-01-12T01:52:14.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-12T04:50:26.783" Score="17" ViewCount="2675" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/1528/italian-number-words-from-eleven-to-nineteen-history-of-a-bizarre-inconsisten&quot;&gt;Sklivvz's advice&lt;/a&gt;, I propose here a question I made in Italian Language. Because I am not sure how I should do this, I will just copy/paste the whole lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's count in Latin from one to twenty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ūnus/ūna/ūnum, duo/duae/duo, trēs/tria, quattuor, quīnque, sex, septem, octō, novem, decem,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ūndecim, duodecim, tredecim, quattuordecim, quīndecim, sēdecim, septendecim, duodēvīgintī, ūndēvīgintī, vīgintī&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/1528/italian-number-words-from-eleven-to-nineteen-history-of-a-bizarre-inconsisten&quot;&gt;symbiotech&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;octodecim&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;novemdecim&amp;quot; were also used in Latin, but they didn't survive. On the other hand, as pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/1528/italian-number-words-from-eleven-to-nineteen-history-of-a-bizarre-inconsisten&quot;&gt;martina&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.garzantilinguistica.it/ricerca/?q=diciassette&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dĕcem (et) sĕptem&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; was also a common form for &amp;quot;septemdĕcim&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Attic Greek it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ΕΙΣ/ΜΙΑ/ΕΝ (heis/mia/en), ΔΥΟ (dúō), ΤΡΕΙΣ/ΤΡΙΑ (treis/tria), ΤΕΤΤΑΡΕΣ/ΤΕΤΤΑΡΑ (téttares/téttara), ΠΕΝΤΕ (pénte), ΕΞ (héx), ΕΠΤΑ (heptá), ΟΚΤΩ (oktṓ), ΕΝΝΕΑ (ennéa), ΔΕΚΑ (déka),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ΕΝΔΕΚΑ (héndeka), ΔΩΔΕΚΑ (dódeka), ΤΡΕΙΣΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (treiskaídeka), ΤΕΤΤΑΡΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΔΕΚΑ (téttares kaì déka), ΠΕΝΤΕΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (pentekaídeka), ΕΚΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (hekkaídeka), ΕΠΤΑΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (heptakaídeka), ΟΚΤΩΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (oktōkaídeka), ΕΝΝΕΑΚΑΙΔΕΚΑ (enneakaídeka), ΕΙΚΟΣΙ(Ν) (eíkosi(n))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's count in Italian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove, dieci,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;undici, dodici, tredici, quattordici, quindici, sedici, diciassette,&#xA;diciotto, diciannove, venti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But numbers from eleven to twenty could also have been, just hypothetically of course (adding accents for clarity's sake):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;diciùno, diciaddùe, diciattré, diciacquàttro, diciaccìnque, diciassèi, diciassètte, diciòtto, diciannòve, venti&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;undici, dodici, tredici, quattordici, quindici, sedici, settèndici, ottòdici, novèndici, venti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, dieciseis, diecisiete, dieciocho, diecinueve, veinte&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;um, dois, três, quarto, cinco, seis, sete, oito, nove, dez,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;onze, doze, treze, catorze/quatorze, quinze, dezasseis/dezesseis, dezessete/dezessete, dezoito, dezenove/dezenove, vinte&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf, vingt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/1528/italian-number-words-from-eleven-to-nineteen-history-of-a-bizarre-inconsisten&quot;&gt;martina's hint&lt;/a&gt; here are the number words from one to twenty in Romanian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unu, doi, trei, patru, cinci, şase, şapte, opt, nouă, zece,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;unsprezece, doisprezece, treisprezece, paisprezece, cincisprezece, şaisprezece, şaptesprezece, optsprezece, nouăsprezece, douăzeci&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French constructions for number words bizarre and inconsistent (whereas in Romanian it seems they are perfectly consistent as well as in Ancient Greek). Is there any academic work on the history of number words in Latin/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/French where the origin of number words from eleven to nineteen is tracked down, documented, explained, discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/1528/italian-number-words-from-eleven-to-nineteen-history-of-a-bizarre-inconsisten&quot;&gt;the answer by symbiotech in the original post&lt;/a&gt; - I am not able to check it, perhaps someone in here can?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3015" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T02:49:43.047" Title="Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French number words from eleven to nineteen - history of a bizarre, inconsistent construction" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6340" CreationDate="2014-01-12T09:38:29.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would look at the Algonquian languages (Meskwaki, Ojibwe, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Migmaq etc.). They display both obviation and personhood hierarchies, and have fairly good collections of published glossed texts. To start out, check out the work of Ives Goddard (the high priest of Algonquian linguistics), Richard Rhodes, Amy Dahlstrom, and John Nichols; you should find something in there. This topic has been pretty well looked-at in the literature, so if all you're interested in is descriptions of what you mention, you can probably already find it in these peoples' published work, and you probably won't have to do your own research (which is not to discourage you if you think you can find something they've missed.) Also, Alfred Kiyana, who was a native speaker of Meskwaki, wrote down quite a few stories that have since been glossed. I'm sorry that I can't give you any texts off the top of my head, but the names I listed should lead you pretty quickly to what you want. Also, for what it's worth, here's a dissertation on obviation in Meskwaki if you're interested in taking a look at the ground that's already been covered: &lt;a href=&quot;http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/990/thomasonlg036.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/990/thomasonlg036.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastActivityDate="2014-01-12T09:38:29.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6371" CreationDate="2014-01-12T23:50:46.570" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zipf’s law, as I understand it, is not really about languages, but about statistics and probability. It is just one of several formulations of the fact that many non-arbitrary sequences of numbers (frequency of words in a given corpus; population size of cites in relation to their rank; annual turnover of ranked companies; etc., etc.) are not evenly distributed along a decimal scale, but are more or less evenly distributed along a logarithmic scale. As such, it ought to work with all language corpora, including texts that avoid the use of certain letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-12T23:50:46.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6387" CreationDate="2014-01-13T11:37:34.843" Score="5" ViewCount="7460" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between grammatical categories &quot;Topic&quot; and &quot;Focus&quot;? They are both optional, and they succeed &quot;Force&quot; and they both seem to stress a part of text. Rizzi places them in the following order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Force ... (Topic) ... (Focus) ... fin IP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the difference between them is not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things I found is that Topic allows known information to be fronted, whereas Focus introduces new information. Though that can't be all, right? I mean, I think it would be strange to solely base such a theory on Information Structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T11:59:52.883" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T11:59:52.883" Title="What is the difference between &quot;Topic&quot; and &quot;Focus&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;focus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6386" CreationDate="2014-01-13T12:27:51.183" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to parse a big list of variable and method names in code and recognise if those are (or are made up) out of real words - essentially, &lt;strong&gt;to recognise if they are obfuscated or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the idea is to build something that understands that the following are non-obfuscated names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VeryLongVarName&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;counter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my_iterator&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the following are obfuscated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aaabbcc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zAxX&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FDSLFUnmfs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also needs going to be language independent - I am not focusing on recognising English (names could be French or anything)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to extract some kind of metric out of each word and if within some ranges then its obfuscated. What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of metric could estimate this - for example randomness of characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing doesn't need to be terribly accurate. If for a given code base it tells that out of 100 names tested, 20% &lt;strong&gt;seem to be&lt;/strong&gt; obfuscated, then its good enough for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(completely newbie to linguistics!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3019" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T13:36:04.370" Title="how to recognise if a string is a real word" Tags="&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6385" CreationDate="2014-01-13T13:36:04.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems more a programming problem than a linguistis problem to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd use a fuzzy parser (probably done in Perl) that attempts to divide such variable names into smaller chunks using either underscores or changes in capitalization, then checks all resulting chunks (including original) vs. a dictionary of words in the target language - taking into account either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Levenshtein distance&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;longest common substring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd get a number of potential matches, assign a score to each (based on less changes required) and, voilá! If a score is high enough, you could be certain it's a match, and thus a word in such language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's such a thing as a universal discriminator to check if a word exists in a language or not - some languages (both natural and created) have very weird capitalization patterns, even within a word (e.g. Irish or Klingon) or can have long sequences of just consonants which nonetheless are valid words (Serbian and Bereber). Worse yet, someone could be typing Chinese characters using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tsang-chieh method&lt;/a&gt;: a seemingly random &quot;JWJ&quot; actually encodes the character 車 &quot;car, vehicle&quot;! Ditto for the &quot;4 corners&quot; method: an initial letter plus a series of numbers &lt;em&gt;could be&lt;/em&gt; a valid word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-13T13:36:04.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6384" CreationDate="2014-01-13T14:43:32.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am slightly puzzled by the fact that you seem to know Rizzi's work but not the answer to this question, but anyway. This answer entirely presupposes the framework in which L.Rizzi is working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rizzi's aim is to describe the articulation of what he calls the &lt;em&gt;complementizer layer&lt;/em&gt; CP of a sentence. He remarks that this part of the sentence (typically found at the left periphery of the clause, and universally so if one believes in R.Kayne's antisymmetry principle) may contain several projections which typically differ in syntactical properties and semantic interpretation. Among them, the one he calls &lt;strong&gt;Topic&lt;/strong&gt; hosts topicalized elements (for the moment, by definition). &lt;em&gt;In Romance&lt;/em&gt;, a characteristic property of an element in that position is that it is left-dislocated and replaced by a coreferential clitic pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le livre que tu m'as conseillé, je l'ai adoré.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The book that you me recommended, I it have adored)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; hosts elements in focus (again, for the moment, by definition) and is distinguished &lt;em&gt;in Romance&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;Topic&lt;/strong&gt; by a number of properties: most saliently focal stress, the necessity for the sentence to be contrastive and the fact that there may be only one &lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; position. L.Rizzi also gives a number of much more subtle diagnosis (weak cross over, quantificational properties...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance (focal stress in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ton&lt;/strong&gt; livre, je l'ai adoré. Pas celui de Nolan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Your&lt;/strong&gt; book, I it have adored. Not Nolan's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now part of the difficulty is that even though these two functional projections are usually easily distinguished in Romance, hence my stress on this family of languages above, the distinction might be quite mysterious or elusive in other languages. For instance, the topic position in Finnish seems to be the normal subject position and as such entirely unmarked. At the other side of the spectrum, some languages mark theses positions overtly, as does the post-position も in Japanese with &lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; (but note that Japanese tolerates multiple &lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; positions, contrary to Romance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual with syntax anyway, more subtle characterizations will depend on what you intend to do with these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L.Rizzi &lt;em&gt;The fine structure of the left periphery&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Elements of grammar: Handbook in generative syntax&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S.Miyagawa &lt;em&gt;Why agree? Why move?&lt;/em&gt; Linguistics Inquiry Monograph 54.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot to cite the following truly wonderful poem. I can't see how anyone could wonder about &lt;strong&gt;Topic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; ever after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.let.uu.nl/%7EOra.Matushansky/personal/rizzi.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On functional structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T13:12:47.273" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2014-01-13T16:22:33.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Slovenian, and here's my perspective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, Slovak and Czech languages are very similar - in fact, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among all the Slavic languages, the one that's the easiest to understand for a Slovenian is Croatian language. Not Slovak!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are they mutually intelligible? To which degree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only to the degree that all Slavic languages are somewhat mutually intelligible. Just like all Germanic languages are somewhat mutually intelligible. For example, Dutch and German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://totentanz0.deviantart.com/art/Slavic-languages-Tree-model-323072173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tree of Slavic languages&lt;/a&gt; - you can see that Slovenian and Slovak are in very different branches. The name similarity comes from the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Slavic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; -- &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Slovanski&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Slovenian), &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Slovansky&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Slovak, Czech)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3020" LastEditorUserId="3020" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T14:47:25.310" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T14:47:25.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-13T16:25:29.580" Score="1" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences below contain a construction which is called Free Relatives. What conditions must be satisfied in order for the sentences to be grammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Mary will eat whatever John cooks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. My mother likes whatever I draw&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. *Hollie likes with whomever Bill goes out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. *Bill hates about whomever George gossips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are free relatives problematic for the theta criterion? Which clause of the Theta Criterion seems to be violated? Could you please help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2973" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-01-13T17:24:56.313" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T14:06:02.260" Title="Why are free relatives problematic for the theta criterion?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6854" CreationDate="2014-01-13T18:55:00.747" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that member Tim Osborne said he is working on a translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Tesni%C3%A8re&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tesniere's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librarything.com/work/2719884&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Elements&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that translation to English? If so, when will the publication  be available?  Also, if any member can identify an already existing English translation of &quot;Elements&quot;, please advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3023" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T23:52:57.977" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T23:52:57.977" Title="About that translation of Tesniere's &quot;Elements&quot; - is it into English?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T05:17:00.843" Score="3" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;In different languages reduplication of the root serves as a means to express plurality (Malay 'orang' - 'a person', 'orang-orang' - 'people') or a greater degree (Russian 'много' - 'many, much', 'много-много' - 'very many, very much').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not in Chukchi. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Chukchi language&lt;/a&gt; has many interesting and unique features, the one that is, probably, the most striking is that some (not all) nouns in Chukchi have the first syllable of the root reduplicated in the singular number, and in the plural form those nouns have simply the root + the plural suffix (usually -т, joined to the root with a vowel that fits the vowel harmony of the word). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation --- Singular --- Plural&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Language --- йилыйил /jiɬəjiɬ/ --- йилыт /jiɬət/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comrade --- тумгытум /tumɣətum/ --- тумгыт /tumɣət/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soap --- мулемул /muɬemuɬ/ --- мулет /muɬet/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worn dress --- кыргыкыр /kərɣəkər/ --- кыргыт /kərɣət/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the logic behind having reduplication to mean singular? Or a language fact can have no obvious logic behind it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does any other language have a similar feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T11:00:19.413" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T13:27:47.963" Title="Root reduplication to mean singular" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T08:03:13.370" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In non-agglutinative languages we have certain word classes that would be considered productive, and we have word classes that wouldn't. Morphological inflection, on the other hand, is from my knowledge (please correct me otherwise) not ever considered productive. Is this the case in agglutinative languages as well, i.e. is the production only occurring on a root-level? Productive morphology would otherwise sound like a fascinating topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T14:43:50.367" Title="Have agglutinative languages productive morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T09:16:52.393" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that Spanish and Italian are freakishly similar (for the most part) whilst French* and German are in some sense alien tongue when compared to the former two, even though geographically the countries are pretty close by? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Alright, perhaps Italian and French do have some similarities across the board. But I am referring to the superficial tone of the languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2703" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T11:19:56.753" Title="Similarities and differences" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6394" CreationDate="2014-01-14T11:19:56.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I join Alennano in hoping that you realise that French, Spanish and Italian are Romance languages, while English and German are Germanic languages. There is some disagreement about the sub-grouping of Romance: many (though perhaps not all) scholars posit a division into Eastern Romance (Italian, Romanian and the other Balkan Romance languages) and Western Romance (Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance). Any such division has to be based on shared innovations within each sub-group. There is no doubt that Spanish and Italian sound rather similar to each other, and sound rather different from French or Portuguese, but this is because Spanish and Italian are both phonologically quite conservative (that is: their sound system has changed less than other Romance languages in comparison with Latin). This is a shared retention and is not relevant for sub-grouping, which needs to be based on shared innovations only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T11:19:56.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T12:22:26.447" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of doing some measurements on readability in various tasks, but looking through available readability tests was somewhat like falling down a rabbit hole. What are the most used ones, and are there any especially well used on academic text and papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T03:31:08.603" Title="What should I think of when choosing readability test?" Tags="&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T15:19:16.953" Score="17" ViewCount="15475" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many ancient languages have a structure that is more complex than that of the &quot;respective&quot; modern languages. Modern languages like English have simpler structure, without case, gender or declination, compared to ancient languages spoken in the same area, such as Latin. Reading Latin texts, I wonder if the ordinary Roman really communicated using such complex constructions. Or perhaps everyday language was simpler than the written one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for ancient Greek and Sanskrit. So why have these languages become simpler over time? Were the constructions we find in ancient written texts usually used in spoken language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3024" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-06-04T10:43:12.833" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T13:03:47.777" Title="Why are many ancient languages so complicated compared to many modern languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2014-01-14T15:36:57.723" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many modern European languages are as complex as Latin, Ancient Greek, or Sanskrit. I'd point out Lithuanian but most Slavic languages are typologically similar to the mentioned ancient ones. And yes, native speakers use all constructions their language provides (all languages change, of course, so there are archaic constructions but it has nothing to the with complexity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW no human language is primitive, English has simpler morphology than Latin but it's more complex elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T03:30:10.477" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T03:30:10.477" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2014-01-14T15:39:17.950" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;No language is &quot;&lt;em&gt;more simple&lt;/em&gt;&quot; than other languages. Old English had just 2 tenses, present and past, now there are 16 of them, future and future-in-the-past forms developed over the time, the continuous aspect appeared, the perfect appeared, so the verbal system acquired much more forms than it used to have. On the other hand, the nouns lost the gender and cases. It is always like that, if something is lost, some new features appear to compensate the loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of a language that gets more and more complicated over the course of time is Chinese. The Old Chinese had no parts of speech, no number, no tense, it was a monosyllabic isolating language. Now Chinese is developing in the direction of getting more complicated, its words are mostly two-syllable now, parts of speech appeared in it, tenses begin to appear, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some languages can become more simple during some period, and then again get more complicated. Hindi is like that, first it lost all the cases which were in Sanskrit, but later it developed a new system of cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T15:39:17.950" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6371" CreationDate="2014-01-14T19:49:21.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with all natural laws, Zipf's law is an approximation. If you take a large corpus, and compute the Zipf curve, it will more or less follow a Zipf distribution (with coefficients thrown in to account for slack).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that for every language it follows the exact rule of 'the second most common lexical item is 1/2 as frequent as the most common'. It's just a lax observation. One can do a regression analysis to discover exactly the coefficients for a particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even within a language there are divergences. It isn't hard to find works whose Zipf curves diverge from the general language's. Joyce's &lt;em&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/em&gt; uses so many rare and made-up words that its tail is thick and long. But children's literature attempts to be easily understood and so has few rare words and drops off much more sharply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zipf's law doesn't just approximate word frequencies but also letter frequencies, city sizes, income ranks, and many other rank vs. frequency graphs. It is taken into account in decrypting substitution ciphers, and also in creating codes (artificial languages) that do not follow Zipf's law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T11:16:10.527" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T11:16:10.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T20:03:37.150" Score="2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I learned Swedish I noticed I went through two phases of learning with regard to understanding the language. First I had to learn the meaning of common words. For example, &quot;mening&quot; means both &quot;meaning&quot; and &quot;sentence&quot;. Secondly I had to associate meanings with groups of consequtive words - idioms, phrasal verbs etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difficulty for me involved a word or a small group of consequtive words. Once I knew them, I could understand the sentence. Is this the same with all languages? For example, if I learned the meanings associated with every word, idiom, phrasal verb etc, would I understand every sentence? Or can there be other complexities at play which effect the meaning of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word order differs accross languages but when learning Swedish I still heard a command when I heard &quot;Nu skall vi gå!&quot; instead of a question &quot;Now shall we go?&quot;. This is due to how we tone the words in the sentence. But maybe this toning is different or missing in certain languages. Anyway, my guess is that the word ordering is so fundamental to any language that you will learn it at the very beginning and that it will be consistent thereafter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2014-01-14T22:59:19.967" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T07:37:50.713" Title="What makes a sentence difficult to understand?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-14T21:14:54.407" Score="-3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have discovered that making a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;communicative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wishing constructions (like in 'have a good trip' or 'merry Christmas') in Russian, they use different structures depending on perfectiveness/imperfectiveness of an action. E.g. an object to wish takes different case forms, either Instrumental or Genitive, depending on perfectiveness or imperfectiveness of an action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Счастливого Рождества!&lt;/em&gt; (Merry Xmas!) &lt;em&gt;Хорошего Нового Года!&lt;/em&gt; ([have] a good NY!) &lt;em&gt;Удачной поездки! (покупки, обновки, etc.)&lt;/em&gt; (= 'Have a nice journey/purchase/new clothes item, etc.) All the nouns are in Genitive (plus a mandatory adjective).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;С Рождеством!&lt;/em&gt; (Merry Xmas!)&lt;em&gt;С Новым Годом!&lt;/em&gt; ([have] a good NY!)&lt;em&gt;С возвращением (поездкой, покупкой, обновкой, etc.).&lt;/em&gt; (= '[what a] nice journey/purchase/new clothes item, etc.)  All the nouns are in the Instrimentive case, no adjective (with the exception of 'New' in the 'New Year') are obligatory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider the event structures of the wishing phrases, we notice that the items from the Paragraph 2 describe future events, while the phrases from the Paragraph 1 describe, mostly, things yet-to-come. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be concluded therefore that there is a kind of 'tacit knowledge' in Russian regarding perfectiveness/imperfectiveness of events, which is not communicated by verbs, but rather by cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the only example, or are there any other examples of 'tacit perfectiveness/imperfectiveness' of events which are not presented by verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T04:28:00.617" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T04:28:00.617" Title="What are other 'tacit perfectiveness/imperfectiveness event markers' in Russian?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-01-16T09:00:22.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6404" CreationDate="2014-01-14T21:35:09.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason for the phrases in the Paragraph 1 to be in the Genitive case, and the phrases in the Paragraph 2 to have &quot;c + the Instrumental case&quot; pattern is that all those phrases are elliptical, the verbs are missing in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we speak about a future event, we &lt;strong&gt;wish&lt;/strong&gt; it will be happy, and the Russian for &quot;I/we wish&quot; is &quot;желаю/желаем&quot;, this verb takes an object in the Genitive case. &quot;Счастливого Рождества!&quot; is short for &quot;Желаю счастливого Рождества!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we speak about a past action, we can only &lt;strong&gt;congratulate&lt;/strong&gt; with it, and the Russian for &quot;I/we congratulate&quot; is &quot;поздравляю/поздравляем&quot;, this verb takes an object with the preposition &quot;c&quot; (with) followed by a noun in the Instrumental case. &quot;С Рождеством!&quot; is short for &quot;Поздравляю с Рождеством!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends only on the verb which is missing, which form the greeting takes, it is the verbs that can refer to the future or past, not noun phrases. Those events are, actually, presented by verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-14T21:35:09.300" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6389" CreationDate="2014-01-14T21:52:31.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wh-phrase in a free relative has to satisfy the subcategorization requirements of both matrix and embedded verbs. For example, in (b), both the matrix verb &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; and the embedded verb &lt;em&gt;draw&lt;/em&gt; require a DP object. The wh-phrase &lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt; is a DP which satisfies both requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (c), however, the matrix verb &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; requires a DP, and the embedded verb &lt;em&gt;go out&lt;/em&gt; requires a PP. The wh-phrase &lt;em&gt;with whomever&lt;/em&gt; is a PP and so satisfies the requirements of only the embedded verb, so that the requirements of the matrix verb remain unsatisfied, which makes the sentence ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free relatives are a problem for the theta criterion because the wh-phrase seems to receive two theta-roles, one from the matrix verb and one from the embedded verb. This fact is a problem for the claim that “every argument is assigned one and only one theta-role”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2973" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-14T09:27:55.960" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T09:27:55.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6319" CreationDate="2014-01-15T06:14:04.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You have a &lt;strong&gt;corpus&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;training set&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build the &lt;strong&gt;weighted&lt;/strong&gt; n-grams for each word in the corpus; [data1]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build n-grams for the words in the training set; It will be &lt;strong&gt;unweighted&lt;/strong&gt; since each word would have low frequency; [data2]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apply word weights from [data1] to [data2];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compute sentence weights for [data2]; [data3]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sort [data3] descending;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;N-gram&lt;/a&gt; is essentially a set of N items (words), which is associated with a Markov property. This property can be called &quot;weight&quot; or &quot;probability&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Say, a corpus contains a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ate a green apple&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;bigrams&lt;/em&gt; for it would be: &quot;I ate&quot;, &quot;ate a&quot;, &quot;a green&quot;, &quot;green apple&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note there can be funnier bigrams like &quot;I ??? a&quot;, &quot;ate ??? green&quot;, &quot;a ??? apple&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;em&gt;trigrams&lt;/em&gt; are: &quot;I ate a&quot;, &quot;ate a green&quot;, and &quot;a green apple&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have actually started moving this way. Computing a word frequency is essentially an &lt;em&gt;unigram&lt;/em&gt;, a corner case of n-grams where the order of Markov chain equals to zero. A single word along with its weight is an unigram by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 1, analyzing the corpus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Say, your corpus contains 30M phrases and 30 of them contain a word pair &quot;green apple&quot;. The bigram would be like:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;green&quot;, &quot;apple&quot;, 0.000001&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;code&gt;0.000001&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;30 / 30,000,000&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result data would be an array of such structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 2, analyzing the training set&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Build the same data for the training set.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Your training set most likely does not contain a representative number of sentences. But this is not a problem since you already have weights from a significantly larger corpus. Hence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;green&quot;, &quot;apple&quot;, ?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Assign weights taken at Step 1 to the N-grams of Step 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 4, computing the weight of the sentence of the training set&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is a bit tricky because you have to invent a good mechanism of computing the weight of entire sentence here. Start with a plain multiplication, but get ready if depending on the nature of your training set, you will have to do a more sophisticated weight computation, for example, using unigrams and/or trigrams as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you gracefully handle zero values, here's why. Imagine your training set contains a greeting phrase like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello John, welcome to my city&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it should be a high-rated phrase, &quot;John welcome&quot; may be missing from the corpus hence leading to multiplication to zero. This is called &quot;zero-frequency problem&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram#Smoothing_techniques&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Step 5, getting the final result&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since you have the weights of training sentences, just sort it along with its translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tools&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't think you need to invent your own tools for building N-grams. There are plenty of those, here's just a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bromberg/ngramcount/ngramcount.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;single link&lt;/a&gt;. You may just use them and then load the results into a spreadsheet program and write a small code of final computing and sorting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T06:14:04.260" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6410" CreationDate="2014-01-15T06:41:21.900" Score="7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told that, in Chinese, terms for &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; used as answers for questions are not needed because one answers yes-no questions by either repeating the verb in the question or adding a negative word to the repetition of the verb in the question.   So the answer to a question meaning &quot;Did the thief take the gold&quot; could be either &quot;take&quot; (the affirmative answer) or &quot;not take&quot; (the negative answer).  I am told that this type of answer to yes-no questions is also found in other languages.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this strategy makes for less ambiguity than we have in English, as we see here:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q:   Did he NOT COME to the party?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A1:  Yes. (affirming that he did not come to the party) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A2:  Yes. (affirming that he did come to the party)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A3:  No.  (denying that that he came to the party)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A4:  No.  (denying that he did not come to the party)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we English speakers can disambiguate such answers in a number of ways, including a tag to the answer.   &quot;Yes, he did.&quot;  &quot;Yes, he didn't,&quot;  ... etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But aside from answering with a verb vs. a negated verb, or using tags as in English, what other grammatical or lexical strategies are commonly used in natural languages to avoid ambiguous answers to negative yes-no questions?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T12:12:05.767" Title="What range of strategies are common in natural languages for providing unambiguous answers to negative yes-no questions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6409" CreationDate="2014-01-15T08:25:24.220" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note, you have mentioned two strategies, not one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An action verb with an optional negative particle;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A supplemental verb (as in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do-support&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in English) with an optional negative particle.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This one is wide spread in analytical languages, e.g. Thai:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;เขา  เป็น  คน     ไทย  [ใช่]   ไหม&#xA;he  is   person Thai   is   interrogative particle&#xA;ไม่  ใช่&#xA;not is&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;is&quot; in the interrogative sentence is optional, but it is always used in the positive answer and often used for negative answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other supplemental verbs can be used, e.g. &lt;code&gt;to be located&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;to do&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Early English had a &lt;strong&gt;four-form system&lt;/strong&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;yes&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; were used to answer negatively phrased questions (&quot;did he not?&quot;) while &lt;code&gt;yea&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;nay&lt;/code&gt; were used to answer positively phrased questions (&quot;did he?&quot;). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28581/did-english-ever-have-a-word-for-yes-for-negative-questions&quot;&gt;corresponding question&lt;/a&gt; at English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In fact, the Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article on Yes and No&lt;/a&gt; describes several more systems, including three-form systems (with two forms for &quot;yes&quot; or two forms for &quot;no&quot;) and systems where there were no special particles for &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot;, e.g. Latin where intensifiers like &quot;certainly&quot; were used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T08:54:47.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-15T10:57:15.407" Score="2" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%C2%AB%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B5%C2%BB#cite_note-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Siberian language&lt;/a&gt; (Ru) is an artificial language project which used to have its wiki pages. Unfortunately, due to the bizzare political processes in modern Russia, the pages were deleted and the inventor of the constructed language was forced to remove its LiveJournal pages about this conlang as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other online resources regarding this interesting project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2014-01-17T20:30:44.697" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T20:30:44.697" Title="Resources on 'Siberian language'" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6392" CreationDate="2014-01-15T13:16:23.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for reduplication, but Tanoan languages of the central US have a system whereby some nouns have bare singulars and marked plurals, while others have bare plurals and marked singulars.  The distinction usually falls along lines of animacy, although exceptions abound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is a system (or the remnant of one) along the same lines?  (Note: Are these words loan words? Could that make a difference?)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as to your last question: Many linguistic phenomena have no apparent logic (apparent to us), because any logic they did have is obscured by time.  For instance, English is well-known for its 'strong' plurals (goose - geese), which often seem random.  But the history of English shows that these developed along very regular lines, which are of course lost to acquirers:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gos (sg) - gosi (pl)  became via harmony&#xA;gos (sg) - gesi (pl)  became via weak vowel deletion&#xA;gos (sg) - ges  (pl)  became via vowel shift&#xA;gus (sg) - gis  (pl)  apparent wtf?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3031" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T13:16:23.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6393" CreationDate="2014-01-15T14:43:50.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think your definition matches the traditional one, which is more about the degree to which a morpheme can freely and grammatically combine with various words (within a given word-class) -- for example, the -er morpheme (as in singer, talker, digger, ...) is extremely productive with Vs, while the -man morpheme (as in workman, postman, journeyman, ...) is also productive, with Ns, but much less so, and the -smith morpheme (as in blacksmith, swordsmith and wordsmith) is rather unproductive, with Ns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;note also that inflectional morphology can be productive or not -- English -ed and -ing are rather productive, but -en is actually rather not productive (run a little 'wug' test on a native speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3032" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T14:43:50.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2014-01-15T16:20:05.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found Pimsleur by accident - as I was waiting in the line in the library, I saw an audiobook &quot;Hindi for beginners&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I borrowed it and started learning Hindi. And here's what I like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every word is broken into syllables and syllables into sounds, making learning pronunciation really easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it keeps quizzing you on words an phrases learned before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's just me, but I found Pimsleur really effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3020" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T16:20:05.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-01-15T16:27:25.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ergative languages like Georgian or Basque have no passive voice, just no voice as a grammatical category. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Verbal_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Debates are going on&lt;/a&gt; if Sumerian, also an ergative language, had the passive voice, but many agree it had none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T16:27:25.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6417" CreationDate="2014-01-15T17:14:03.850" Score="6" ViewCount="2494" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm not a linguist, just a Stack Exchange user who thought this site is the one for this question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often the case that people living in rural areas (in any country) have a &quot;stronger&quot;, less intelligble way of speaking. Why is this so? Perhaps because in smaller population it's easier for new words, new pronunciations to evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occured to me that it might not be the case at all, but that it appears to be so because we take the &quot;urban way&quot; as standard, and in reality, all are equally strong/intelligble. But I think that there really is an objective difference. Is there and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3033" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-01-15T18:34:33.830" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T15:19:07.167" Title="Strong accents and rural areas correlation" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-15T17:38:46.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This pattern does show up a lot, and there seem to be multiple factors driving it. Rural areas (though not only such areas) tend contain small, immobile, tight-knit populations, in which local identity is socially important and outside communication is (historically) limited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one level, simple isolation means there's less exposure to the mainstream forms, and to the 'leveling' effect of contact between speech communities. Such conditions instead seem to favor the maintenance of non-standard language features, and resistance to incoming changes from the mainstream; in the face of incoming changes, such conditions may even promote a reaction of 'exaggeration' of non-standard, local-identity features. Socioeconomic class may often play a role, and rural areas tend to be poorer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that the conditions described have often applied equally well to dense, urban enclaves. In addition, as a general rule, isolation of regions has trended down over time (due to growth of transportation and communications technology). This breakdown of isolation seems to be the major factor in the loss of the distinctive local variety of e.g. Martha's Vineyard, or North Carolina's Outer Banks communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2014-01-17T15:19:07.167" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T15:19:07.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-15T18:30:17.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peasants tend to be conservative in their clothing, religious beliefs, customs, and speech. They're resistant to adopting innovations originating elsewhere but in their small communities, albeit when they do acquire innovations they normally retain them for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The urban poor tend to use and abuse the language in an effort to create their own shibboleths. They frequently invent new words, give new meanings to existing words, and from time to time innovate in grammar. These innovations then spread &quot;up&quot; to the urban middle class and from there permeate the speech of the riches/nobles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this last group adopts them, they suddenly cease being considered &quot;substandard&quot; and become &quot;The Standard&quot; - whereas the speech of the townsfolk, previously considered an exemplary standard, becomes substandard (until they &quot;upgrade&quot;, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see it everywhere: In France, the further you're from Paris the more conservative the language becomes, either in pronunciation (&quot;moi&quot; sounds as &quot;mwè&quot; in Québec and some parts of rural France, ending in &quot;ils pensent&quot; still being pronounced in some regions) and in vocabulary (some areas retain crevette, mar, chatel instead of chevrette, mer, chateau).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same happens in U.K., with Broad Scotts retaining features Standard English has lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In China, the southern so-called dialects are much more conservative than Putonghua (an idealized version of Beijing's dialect). Icelandic is &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; the same language the vikings spoke, whereas modern Danish and Norse are way different, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happens as well when a languages is imposed via a conquest: in rural Mexico, peasant communities that abandoned their indigenous languages long ago in favor of Spanish speak a grossly outdated version of it: ansina, truje, vide instead of así, traje, vi... that's so XVI-XVII century!!! It's now considered very sub-standard, even though that was the prestigious way of speaking long ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cities tend to excercise a standardizing influence over surrounding towns. When you notice small town folks have a strong accent what you're really seeing is people who have not standardized their speech based on how the nearest urban people speak. Cities have the advantage of being highly populated and dense, so have an easier time imposing their ways to the others than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaim: I'm no professional linguist either, just a linguistics aficionado.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T18:30:17.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-15T19:42:04.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Less intelligible to whom? I think what you are trying to mean with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;accent&quot;&lt;/a&gt; here is the form of &quot;accent&quot; that can mean either of three things: 1) a form of speech that differs from some standard, prescriptively more correct form of speech of the same language 2) a form of speech that differs from your own, but is still the same language 3) a foreign accent, where the speaker has learned the language as an adult and cannot pass for a native. Let's ignore 3). The first generally only holds for modern countries with a strong capital city, a high degree of centralization and/or mass media. Preferably all three. The second definition first occurred the moment the very first group of speech-using humans became &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; groups of speech-using humans, + about a generation of passed time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accent sorts under sociolinguistics for a reason. The intelligibility is, among other things, dependent on the status difference between speaker and listener - if, say, the listener considers him/herself to be of higher status, there is less of a penalty if the listener cannot understand the speaker. A low status person on the other hand might depend on being able to understand a high status speaker. Rural people are often considered lower status by people living in cities, ergo, rural people are unintelligible. Power games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving away from the sociolinguistic side, read up on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dialects&lt;/a&gt; as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; area-dependent accents differ. (There are also solely status-based accents, aka. sociolects, for instance those acquired through being stuck in a boarding school.) Dialects are accents turned up to 11, and is why one language can split into two or more languages given enough time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T19:42:04.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-15T20:39:22.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has nothing to do with the country-side. Many cities have strong local dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Glasgow:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrmcxa1yBec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrmcxa1yBec&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Dublin:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViBnWEF7P3c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViBnWEF7P3c&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or London:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUZRjQET6mg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUZRjQET6mg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it has more to do with movement of people. If you have a lot of different English speakers coming to one place, they have to &quot;lose&quot; their dialect enough so as to fit in. In so called working class communities and in the country-side, the population tends to be more static with a stronger local identity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-01-15T20:39:22.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3856" CreationDate="2014-01-16T14:19:19.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about these books I found on amazon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/9042908157&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Languages-Comparative-Orientalia-Lovaniensia-Analecta/dp/9042908157&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1575060213&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Comparative-Semitic-Linguistics-A-Manual/dp/1575060213/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0931464102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Semitic-Languages-Specimens-Grammatical/dp/0931464102/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T14:19:19.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6425" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-16T15:43:03.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia (2014 January 16): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate. Verb valency, on the other hand, includes all arguments, including the subject of the verb. The linguistic meaning of valence derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. This scientific metaphor is due to Lucien Tesnière, who developed verb valency into a major component of his (what would later become known as) dependency grammar theory of syntax and grammar. The notion of valency first appeared as a comprehensive concept in Tesnière's posthumously published book (1959) Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Elements of structural syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3005" LastEditorUserId="3005" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T17:22:08.167" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T17:22:08.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6426" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-16T15:43:03.850" Score="0" Body="Valency is the set of (optional or required) arguments of a predicate, originally applied to verbs, but since extended to nouns and adjectives. Valency is the core notion of Dependency Grammar, and has similarities with the Theta Criterion in Phrase-Structure Grammars such as X-bar-Theory." OwnerUserId="3005" LastEditorUserId="3005" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T17:22:24.777" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T17:22:24.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2198" CreationDate="2014-01-16T15:48:53.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you extend the notion of valency a little, from only verbs to nouns and adjectives (or whatever classes you find in other languages), I guess there's no language without valency-changing rules: Derivation (i.e., change of word class, often signalled in morphology) will probably always involve a change of valency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3005" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T15:48:53.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6411" CreationDate="2014-01-16T15:49:26.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the official site of the Siberian language, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.volgota.com/govor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Сибирска вольгота&lt;/a&gt;, with its grammar, &lt;a href=&quot;http://volgota.com/govor/dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian-Siberian dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, and texts in that language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T15:49:26.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2014-01-16T16:27:12.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've gotten around the problem of inventing a new term (and kind of word) as follows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of adjectives (or articles, for that matter) functioning alone as complete noun phrases came up in the context of a computational dependency grammar for German. Canonical dependency grammar takes the noun to be the &lt;code&gt;governor&lt;/code&gt; of the noun phrase, and the adjective to depend on it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[&quot;don't give up&quot; [&quot;youth&quot; [&quot;the&quot;] [&quot;headstrong&quot;]] [&quot;easily&quot;]] &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, much inflection is carried by the adjective, even more when it comes alone (&quot;strong&quot; inflectional paradigm as opposed to &quot;weak&quot; paradigm when an article is present). This, in connection with the fact that adjectives precede nouns in German, lead me to the idea that the adjective (and the article) &quot;project&quot; a noun to follow. If the noun does not show up, an empty &quot;shell&quot; (lexically empty noun) is left in the syntax tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this analysis can be applied to English as well, you don't need a special Adj/N class, since (a subclass of) adjectives just simply do project nouns. Well, maybe you need a name for this subclass of adjectives which do that. German adjectives do that across the board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3005" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T16:27:12.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2014-01-16T17:15:05.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer does not address the source of the Vietnamese word, just the Vietnamese/Lao connection.  The folk etymologies are interesting enough, why not just leave them be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of the Vietnamese and Lao words are very close if not identical - /fɤ:/.  The Vietnamese tone is a ‘dipping’ tone that drops and then rises, at least in citation form (Thompson’s description).  The Lao tone rises from a low beginning, so it seems to be quite similar to its Vietnamese counterpart.  There is no equivalent word in Thai (although you might see some version of it on the menus of restaurants serving the Vietnamese dish.)  This suggests that Lao has borrowed the Vietnamese word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t see how 粉 would tie in here.  It means flour or powder, and there is a final –n that doesn’t fit.  There might conceivably be a connection with another word for Vietnamese rice noodles, bún (as in the dish bún cha).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we’re on the subject of Southeast Asian noodle dishes and etymology, Thai has a dish called ขนมจีน /kʰənom tɕi:n/ which consists of boiled rice noodles, fresh vegetables and herbs, all mixed together and topped with a curry sauce.  The name appears to mean “Chinese dessert”, but it was actually borrowed from the Mon word for “to boil”.  The proximate source would have been Mon refugees from Burmese wars who settled in Bangkok and central Thailand during the 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T17:15:05.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-16T18:24:15.557" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did the word &quot;they&quot; come to represent &quot;he or she&quot;? For example, &quot;They forgot their coat&quot; can be used to represent a single person of either sex. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-17T02:03:18.137" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T02:03:18.137" Title="They for &quot;he/she&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6409" CreationDate="2014-01-16T19:04:00.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Swedish you use &quot;Ja&quot; to positively answer a positive question and &quot;Jo&quot; to positively answer a negative question. Nej is used otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/theswedishteacher/2011/01/21/ja-eller-jo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/theswedishteacher/2011/01/21/ja-eller-jo/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T19:04:00.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-16T19:27:17.767" Score="10" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I would also be willing to reward the bounty if someone can partially answer the question by stating if my proposed IPA is possible based on the description or not.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am specifically asking about the dialects of Irish spoken in Connemara that have a tendency for a &quot;slender&quot; r with a distinct buzzing. Some friends and I have been discussing this topic on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://irishlearner.awyr.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&amp;amp;t=2740&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish Language Learner's forum&lt;/a&gt; and we cannot come to a consensus. I believe that it might be [ɾ̝ʲ]. The sounds has the teeth closed so that it has the buzzing quality of /ʒ/ but has the lamina raised and tapping the tooth ridge - unlike /ʒ/ which has the posterodorsal part of the tongue bunched up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are examples on Forvo of the sound in question. If there are multiple pronunciations take user &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/user/BridEilis/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BridEilis&lt;/a&gt; as the example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/socair/#ga&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;socair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/iomair/#ga&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iomair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tomás de Bhaldraithe's description in &lt;em&gt;The Irish of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaeltacht_Cois_Fharraige&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cois Fhairrge&lt;/a&gt;, Co. Galway - A Phonetic Study&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;223.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;r'&lt;/strong&gt; represents a voiced palatized flapped alveolar sound. The tip of the tongue makes one tap against the front part of the&#xA;  teeth-ridge. The sounds strikes the ear as somewhat similar to a short&#xA;  voiced palatized alveolar plosive. &lt;strong&gt;When in final position, the&#xA;  contact is released very slowly so that a slight affrication is&#xA;  heard.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The  emphasis on the final sentence is mine as this is the specific sound I am asking about. Here is an image of what I believe the IPA might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GsCQ5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="828" LastEditorUserId="828" LastEditDate="2014-01-19T22:35:43.227" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T15:01:10.577" Title="IPA for Slender Irish /r'/ in Connemara Dialects" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6434" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-01-16T19:41:26.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Goidelic language of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages originating in Ireland.  The Constitution of the Republic of Ireland recognizes it as the national and first official language of the Republic. Despite this it is only spoken by a minority of Irish citizens. Regions where Irish is still spoken as day-to-day language are known as Gaeltachtaí (singular Gaeltacht).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="828" LastEditorUserId="828" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T19:53:58.983" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T19:53:58.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6435" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-01-16T19:41:26.470" Score="0" Body="A Goidelic language of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages originating in Ireland. " OwnerUserId="828" LastEditorUserId="828" LastEditDate="2014-01-16T19:53:49.683" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T19:53:49.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6431" CreationDate="2014-01-16T20:25:22.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In anaphoric reference to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender: he or she.Especially in relation to a noun phrase involving one of the indefinite determiners or pronouns &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This use has sometimes been considered erroneous.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with examples from circa 1375. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the important point for your question is the second clause: of the fifteen the examples the OED gives, all but two contain &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;any(body)&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;no(body)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have started with &lt;em&gt;Everybody&lt;/em&gt; (for example) it is very natural to refer back with &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, because &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; is in a sense plural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the practice of using singular &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; without such an antecedent (i.e. when it represents a particular individual, but whose identity, and therefore whose sex, is not yet known) is much more recent, probably less than fifty years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt; There is a huge literature on this subject: search for &quot;singular they&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T20:25:22.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6431" CreationDate="2014-01-16T20:58:09.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual, Wikipedia has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;great article&lt;/a&gt; regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Late Medieval English used &quot;they&quot; in the singular when the number of possible nouns was unknown or left vague on purpose by the speaker. In most other situations, then native speakers would use &quot;he&quot; as generic - e.g. a dog's toy was &quot;his toy&quot; rather than &quot;its&quot;, and such use was sometimes used also for subjects who could potentially be either male/female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Centuries later, when first the &quot;Politically Correctness&quot; movement came, and then some feminists started to deride what they deemed signs of sexism in the language, the need to get a real neuter-gender alternative to he/she resulted in expanding the use of singular they. You'll also occassionally find other words invented by some feminists ex-profeso to avoid the perceived implied otherness of the feminity, mostly in feminist literature (of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, the most natural way to refer to a sex-less 3rd person would be to use the equivalent of &quot;it&quot;, but in English the distinction &quot;male/female&quot; has become very weak over time, whereas the distinction &quot;animate/inanimate&quot; is still perceived in full force - so the only time &quot;it&quot; can be applied to humans is when they're babies or very very young children. So instead of &quot;A young teenage almost never uses contraception when having its first sexually intimate relationship &quot; you get &quot;(...) &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; first sexual (...)&quot;, as grammatically contorted as it may seem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some papers and writers have simply inverted the common usage of &quot;he&quot; as generic and instead take &quot;she&quot; as the generic unless maleness is needed/specified, so you get more grammatical sentences whilst avoiding perceived sexism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-16T20:58:09.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-17T00:59:45.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on Jeremy Needle's point, the insularity of a community has a great effect on that community's accent and dialect (and in some cases, language). As many people have already pointed out, the reasons this lie in sociolinguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it is important to note that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language change&lt;/a&gt; does not happen by divine intervention. Language change happens because a single person or small group of people make a change; inventing a new word, using an existing word in a different context, or pronouncing a word differently. Sometimes these changes make there way out into the world and become popular (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=UDDwqsz_Kr0C&amp;amp;pg=PA461&amp;amp;lpg=PA461&amp;amp;dq=innovation+diffusion+sociolinguistics&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=S9jTcgsiL5&amp;amp;sig=oCmc5iu6Ge-pkTfwsOFDW0N1vCY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=QHnYUpepOobekgWJ6IGYDQ&amp;amp;ved=0CEUQ6AEwAw#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=%22it%20is%20speakers%20that%20innovate%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;it is speakers that innovate and not languages&quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact method of change is up for debate (in fact, the book I linked to above has an entire chapter devoted to the different theories) but most of the proposed theories rely on changes spreading through social interactions between speakers. For example, using &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Network_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Social Network Theory&lt;/a&gt; it should become obvious why rural areas tend to have more distinct accents/dialects/languages: these communities have relatively few links to outside communities and thus fewer paths through which changes can spread. Additionally, the the generally tight-nit nature of rural communities may mean that innovations can become squashed by social pressure to sound like the rest of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a flip side to this too. If a high-status member of community creates an &lt;a href=&quot;http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Linguistic+Innovation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;innovation&lt;/a&gt;, the tight-nit nature of the community may cause this change to spread faster and the lack of links to the outside communities may prevent this innovation from spreading further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting part is that none of this necessarily means that rural accents/dialects/languages need to be harder to understand than their urban brothers. In actuality, &quot;[un]intelligibility&quot; the OP speaks of isn't so much that rural accents are &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; than their native accents but rather that they are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: there are social factors which make rural communities less likely to adopt language changes originating from the outside but which may also encourage the adoptions changes originating from the inside. Additionally, the same social factors which inhibit rural communities' ability to adopt outside changes also inhibit the ability for changes form inside the community to spread to other communities. Over time this can result in accents/dialects/languages which are very different from the surrounding accents/dialects/languages and thus [potentially] harder for their neighbours to interpret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-01-17T01:05:26.870" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T01:05:26.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2014-01-17T03:58:17.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's purely based on the fact that the standard variety is based off the speech of a region these speakers don't come from. If theirs was the standard and yours wasn't, they'd say the same thing about your 'accent'. Every form of speech is intelligible to those that speak it - and if parts ever become problematically unintelligible, there are natural mechanisms for fixing that problem (e.g. the rampant compounding in North Chinese making up for a drastic reduction in the number of available syllables, making distinctive bisyllabic words out of problematically less distinct monosyllabic ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, areas farther away from sociopolitical centres tend to change slower, due to less pressure to keep up with prestigious norms; though this is at times counteracted by a tendency for areas that are largely isolated from most other speakers to change faster, as they have less of a need to remain intelligible to passers-through. So regional variation can involve varieties that are both closer to and farther from their common ancestor. In Appalachia, Shakespeare remained intelligible with little effort as recently as the last century; and the same remains true of the sagas in Iceland (indeed, I knew a guy who spoke Faroese and took Old Norse as a blow-off class) - yet for me, who speaks enough Norwegian to get by, they are largely nonsense. On the other hand, the languages in the Ryuukyuu Islands south of Japan are -spectacularly- more innovative than mainland Japanese - to me they look like they ought to be spoken by time-travellers from the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a tendency for similar-enough varieties of speech to become more intelligible simply through exposure. In the early days of sound films, British films had to be subtitled for American audiences and vice-versa, but once people had heard enough of each others' varieties, the need for subtitling vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's just an effect of the fact that many people speak versions of a language that isn't the version of a language the majority of people are most familiar with, and their unfamiliarity creates a general perception that non-standard dialects are somehow more universally hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastActivityDate="2014-01-17T03:58:17.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6443" CreationDate="2014-01-17T14:40:41.720" Score="3" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take for example the words 'I' and 'you' (or 'I' and 'we'). Is it more reasonable to analyze them as different lexemes, or as different forms of a same lexeme inflected for grammatical person (or number)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in the comments, it doesn't make much sense to ask what's the &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; view, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of these opposing views? Is any of them more widely adopted in a given context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Original question:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the commonest view is that words like 'I' and 'me' are just different forms of a single lexeme, inflected for grammatical case. But are 'I' and 'you' (or 'I' and 'we') different lexemes or again just different forms of a same lexeme, inflected for grammatical person (or number)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insights for languages other than English would also be very welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3042" LastEditorUserId="3042" LastEditDate="2014-01-18T17:51:18.693" LastActivityDate="2014-01-18T17:51:18.693" Title="Are personal pronouns in English different lexemes or just inflected forms of the same one?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6440" CreationDate="2014-01-18T02:17:28.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; are different forms of a lexeme, it wouldn't make any sense to consider them different lexemes. As for grammatical person, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; etc. are sometimes analyzed as one lexeme in NLP applications (morphological analyzes/taggers). In lexicalist grammars, incorporated pronouns are generally referred to as 'pro' regardless of person, number, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-18T07:03:32.523" LastActivityDate="2014-01-18T07:03:32.523" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6452" CreationDate="2014-01-18T09:24:27.637" Score="5" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a summary of sound change laws of various language families. For example for Indo-European, Uralic, N. Caucasian, Semitic but also within Indo-European e.g. Germanic, Greek etc. Is there a source summarizing this or do I need to make a research separately for each one of those. In any of the cases, please suggest me some bibiography to have a look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appart from the accepted answer, let me add the following chart for Indo-European: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/Content/PiePhonology.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/Content/PiePhonology.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T10:39:44.443" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T15:54:47.367" Title="Sound change charts/lists" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6447" CreationDate="2014-01-18T17:01:33.530" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first I thought that there was only such a thing as lexical do and periphrastic, but recently I stumbled upon something else (unfortunately I do not recall what it was called). Whatever be the case, it seems that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; can be used for quite a lot of grammatical things (&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;-support being one). Could someone give some of these roles &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; can play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-25T19:16:34.437" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T14:06:46.377" Title="Different kinds of do's" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6446" CreationDate="2014-01-18T23:29:26.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, certainly the most common use of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;DS is invoked whenever a construction requiring an auxiliary verb (like Question or Negative):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S: &lt;em&gt;Bill is coming today&lt;/em&gt;  Ques: &lt;em&gt;Is Bill coming today?&lt;/em&gt;  Neg: &lt;em&gt;Bill isn't coming today.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gets applied to a verb chain without an auxiliary verb in it already; i.e, a bare main verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S: &lt;em&gt;Bill came today&lt;/em&gt;  Ques: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Did&lt;/strong&gt; Bill come today?&lt;/em&gt;  Neg: &lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;didn't&lt;/strong&gt; come today.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I used to tell my students, if you don't have an auxiliary verb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;you have to go out and get one, and the one that you get is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support applies to any verb that's not an auxiliary, no matter what it means.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not true, however, of a different kind of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, called &quot;Action &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &lt;code&gt;Act&lt;/code&gt; for short.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(See John R. Ross, 1972. &quot;Act&quot;, in Davidson &amp;amp; Harman, &lt;em&gt;Semantics of Natural Languages&lt;/em&gt; )&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is the &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; that is the pro-verb for any &lt;strong&gt;active&lt;/strong&gt; verb (just like a pronoun is for nouns),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but which doesn't work with &lt;strong&gt;stative&lt;/strong&gt; verbs like &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinguishes &lt;code&gt;Act&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill raked the yard, didn't he?&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, active verb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill use to own that house, didn't he?&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, stative verb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Raking the yard was not pleasant for Bill, but he did it.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Act&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, active verb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;Owning the house was not pleasant for Bill, but he did it.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Act&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, stative verb - therefore ungrammatical, whence the asterisk)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus any number of other uses for &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Why don't we do it in the road?&lt;/em&gt; - both &lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt;'s, no waiting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T14:06:46.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T14:06:46.377" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-19T09:14:12.227" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the paper presented at &lt;a href=&quot;http://depts.washington.edu/uwcl/matrix/sfd/Drellishak%20-%20MA%20Thesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://depts.washington.edu/uwcl/matrix/sfd/Drellishak%20-%20MA%20Thesis.pdf&lt;/a&gt;, two of the most common strategies for coordinating pronouns are a) the use of a conjunction such as “and” and b) the use of a comitative morpheme.    Virtually all languages with the former strategy also use the latter strategy, but some languages coordinate noun phrases only with comitative morphemes.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you can say “Harry and Sally” in one language, you can also say “Harry, with Sally,” to convey the same meaning.   But in some languages, one coordinates noun phrases only with something like “with,” as in “Harry with Sally.”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the paper also mentions another strategy for coordinating noun phrases, namely the use of pronouns as coordinators.   For example, two noun phrases might be each be introduced by the same dual or plural pronoun, as we see in this example quoted from the paper listed above:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quote:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...a “pronominal” strategy in which the coordinator is a dual (DU) or plural pronoun, as in &#xA;Sedang (Mon-Khmer): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;préi    klá préi    koa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3DU tiger   3DU turtle &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘the tiger and the turtle’ (Stassen 2000:17) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;end quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this:   How do natural languages that use the pronoun strategy for coordinating noun phrases express disjunction for noun phrases?   In other words, what strategy or strategies would the speakers of such a language use to express “the tiger OR the turtle”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T09:14:12.227" Title="How is disjunction of noun phrases expressed in languages that coordinate noun phrases by using pronouns?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-19T10:18:05.463" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages with exclusively asyndetic coordination, i.e. in which constituents are coordinated solely by juxtaposition, with disjunctive (or) or adversative (but) meaninigs communicated by adverbs or other word classes that don't qualify as coordinators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T10:18:05.463" Title="Are there any natural languages with exclusively asyndetic coordination?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6451" CreationDate="2014-01-19T15:56:27.393" Score="0" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found in a book about regular expression grammars something that said RE's can be used to describe sentences like this ‘the brown tea pot’ by using re like this np = det+&quot;?&quot;+&quot;(&quot;+noun+&quot;|&quot;+adj+&quot;)*&quot;+noun but that it can't be used to describe recursive structures as in this sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘the man with a big nose’s wife’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain why is that as I don't see it clearly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2654" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T16:53:32.573" Title="Describing recursive structures with regular expresions as grammars" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6450" CreationDate="2014-01-19T18:26:52.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regular expressions cannot handle recursive structures simply &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt;, since regular expressions are defined formally as expressing regular languages, which don't have a recursive structure. If your 'regular expression' expresses a language with a recursive structure, it simply isn't a regular expression in the strict, formal sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the responses to these questions on stackoverflow:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21215505/why-can-regex-not-be-used-to-describe-a-recursive-structure&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21215505/why-can-regex-not-be-used-to-describe-a-recursive-structure&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2255403/why-is-recursive-regex-not-regex&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2255403/why-is-recursive-regex-not-regex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pasted in from my comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T16:53:32.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6445" CreationDate="2014-01-19T22:45:01.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kümmel, Martin: Konsonantenwandel, Bausteine zu einer Typologie des Lautwandels und ihre Konsequenzen für die vergleichende Rekonstruktion. Wiesbaden: Reichert 2007. LVI + 482 S. ISBN 987-3-89500-590-9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-19T22:45:01.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6450" CreationDate="2014-01-20T13:36:10.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As P. Eliott already wrote, REs can't describe recursion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second link needed is to explain where recursion appears in language: Think of &lt;code&gt;The button on the skirt of the girl on the street&lt;/code&gt;, where NPs are nested inside each other. Or think of relative clauses, which are part of a bigger sentence - in that case, VPs are nested. Building NPs from NPs (or VPs from VPs) is what the mathematician calls &lt;code&gt;recursion&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3005" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T13:36:10.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6316" CreationDate="2014-01-20T15:49:15.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, yes--the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the voicing during a stop closure is going to be lower than that of the following vowel. The fact that there is a full closure in the oral tract (for non-nasal stops) means that there is nowhere for the air coming out of the lungs to escape, making it difficult to maintain a high velocity of air through the glottis and thus slowing down vocal fold vibration. When the oral cavity is opened for the release of the stop, the built-up pressure causes the air to rush out initially, making for a higher rate of vocal fold vibration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried recording myself producing some voiced stops in various contexts, and the only time I observed a partial exception to the above generalization was when the voiced stop was between two vowels and the first vowel had a much higher F0 than the second vowel.  In that case, the incoming F0 had enough &quot;momentum&quot; to give at least the earlier part of the stop voicing a higher F0 than the following vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LqAzr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;spectrogram and pitch curve for &amp;#39;aba?&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even in that case, the vocal fold vibration toward the end of the stop appears to slow down to a rate that is slightly lower than the initial F0 of the following vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect this effect to be a language-general one, since it has to do with the mechanics of airflow through the vocal tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-01-20T15:49:15.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-21T07:07:44.067" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project which needs to convert a given speech (in an audio file,only speech no music and other stuffs) into text and later analyze that text.&#xA;It would be a great help if I could able to find a open source tool which would help me in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3057" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T12:43:05.950" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T12:43:05.950" Title="Are there any good open source speech to text trancription tools or programs?" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6457" CreationDate="2014-01-21T23:22:44.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CMU Sphinx is a good library: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-01-21T23:22:44.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-22T13:25:57.273" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;People move a lot and become immigrants in other countries. Many immigrants, in every historical time frame, come to countries without an prior knowledge of the language.&#xA;However, they usually learn the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: for first generation immigrants who don't have an education, that is, they haven't gone to school/university, is it more difficult to acquire the language? You can expect them to have no metalinguistic knowledge. Does this affect the quality of their acquired language, with respect to educated/qualified immigrants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T13:25:57.273" Title="Does being educated affect the rate and the quality of second language acquisition?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2014-01-22T17:31:16.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, signed phonemes were considered to fall into 4 (or 5 depending on who you ask) categories that are sometimes called parameters. These are handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual markers. Interestingly, every sign must have at least one of each of these parameters. The parameters are made up of features (handshape includes selected fingers, abduction, flexion etc.). This &lt;a href=&quot;http://lrc.cornell.edu/students/workbooks/asl/Homeworks/MinimalPairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt; shows some examples of minimal pairs of each parameter. The parameters are useful to an extent, but are somewhat outdated. Newer theories recognize that there is an awful lot of simultaneity in sign language (a single handshape can span multiple locations, for example), and have begun appealing to an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosegmental_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;autosegmental perspective&lt;/a&gt;. This is similar to the treatment of tone in tonal languages like Chinese where a single tone can span several segments. I wouldn't go so far as to say that there are no sign phonemes, but the degree of non-linearity in sign language certainly does challenge traditional ideas about the phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3063" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T17:31:16.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="139" CreationDate="2014-01-22T17:56:16.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not the only example of a language that was developed de novo. When deaf people are born in an environment where sign language is used, they acquire it just like hearing children acquire spoken language. However, between 90 and 95% of deaf people are born to hearing parents. Parents are met with a variety of early intervention options, and sometimes choose not to teach their children sign language opting instead for spoken language based interventions (hearing aids, speech therapy, cochlear implants..etc). Sometimes the spoken language interventions fail, and the children (no longer babies) have not been exposed to language at all. One of the most remarkable discoveries is that these children will invent idiosyncratic signing systems, and these systems are actually much more systematic and complex than the gesture systems that even their mothers use. Essentially, these kids are inventing a linguistic system (albeit simplistic) on their own. These home sign systems can sometimes become languages through two mechanisms. In the Nicaraguan case, a school was established and they came together and over the past few decades their idiosyncratic systems became conventionalized and much more complex. New students come to the school and learn the language from their peers. This is an example of a community sign language. The other way this can happen is in families that are genetically deaf. If these families are in a relatively isolated location, such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language users, they can develop a language over the generations. Children learning village sign language learn it from their parents from birth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I think despite the fact that Nicaraguan Sign Language originated with home signers, it is fair to say that it developed from nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language has been well studied because researchers were there from the inception, and have been able to look at its genesis. There are a handful of village sign languages that have been documented. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is one of the better documented village sign languages. I am working on a new one in a village in Turkey called Central Taurus Sign Language that we discovered last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sandler, W., Meir, I., Padden, C., &amp;amp; Aronoff, M. (2005). The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(7), 2661-2665.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Senghas, A. (1995). Children's contribution to the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mylander, C., &amp;amp; Goldin-Meadow, S. (1991). Home sign systems in deaf children: The development of morphology without a conventional language model. Theoretical issues in sign language research, 2, 41-63.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carrigan, E. M., &amp;amp; Coppola, M. (2012). Mothers Do Not Drive Structure in Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence from Comprehension. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, &amp;amp; RP Cooper,(Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1398-1403).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3063" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T17:56:16.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4837" CreationDate="2014-01-22T18:44:49.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any ASL signs that have made it into mainstream English, but there are a few things that are used typically by people who are part of the Deaf community when talking to each other. The English phrase &quot;true biz&quot; is used quite a bit both in writing and in spoken communicate. It comes from the gloss for a compound in ASL that means &quot;actually.&quot; An exact translation of the compound might be REAL-WORK or TRUE-BUSINESS. Community members will also use the word &quot;pah&quot; to mean &quot;finally&quot; which comes from the non-manual marker that accompanies the manual sign for success. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3063" LastActivityDate="2014-01-22T18:44:49.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6474" CreationDate="2014-01-23T00:56:30.043" Score="3" ViewCount="1355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study undergraduate philosophy. I enrolled in a semantics class this semester, which just held its first exam. One of the questions asked, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the extension, and the intension, of &quot;I'm writing an exam right now.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had thought that extension denoted referent of an expression, and that intension denoted the concept of an expression. But, is their a conceptual equivalent of &quot;I'm writing an exam right now&quot;? Is that expression really a concept? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the extension and intension of that expression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-01-23T22:51:11.610" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T22:51:11.610" Title="What is the extension and intension of &quot;I'm writing an exam right now.&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6396" CreationDate="2014-01-23T03:31:08.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corestandards.org/assets/E0813_Appendix_A_New_Research_on_Text_Complexity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This pdf&lt;/a&gt; summarizes some of the main pros and cons of most of the major readability tests. Flesch-Kincaid is probably the most commonly used, since it's easy to calculate and has been around a long time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @jlawler said, there are no &quot;good&quot; tests of readability. Some texts which are relatively easy to read might have long sentences or long words, but talk about relatively simple, everyday things. Because of the long sentence and long word length, they might score very high on a readability test. Likewise, you could probably talk about really complex, abstract things using short sentences, and score very low on the readability test. Just because you &quot;write at a 12th grade level&quot; does not mean you're a good writer, it just means you write really long sentences with really big words. Most good books are somewhere between a 5th and 10th grade level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2838" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T03:31:08.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6275" CreationDate="2014-01-23T03:41:12.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://omegawiki.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OmegaWiki&lt;/a&gt; is another large-scale, multilingual dictionary reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T03:41:12.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-23T03:48:56.160" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;WordNet fails to distinguish homographs from polysemes; for my use (related to machine translation), I want to collapse polysemes while maintaining homographs. This idea is not new (eg., &lt;a href=&quot;http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-551/om2009_poster12.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reducing Polysemy in WordNet&lt;/a&gt; PDF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any publicly available WordNet resource where this has already been done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3067" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T03:48:56.160" Title="Version of WordNet with reduced polysemy?" Tags="&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6470" CreationDate="2014-01-23T05:34:17.967" Score="2" ViewCount="1220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Categories like &quot;Noun&quot; and &quot;Adjective&quot; can be said to be lexical categories. But what are categories like &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-23T17:44:00.513" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T17:44:00.513" Title="What are the word-order categories &quot;Subject&quot;, &quot;verb&quot;, &quot;object&quot; called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6469" CreationDate="2014-01-23T07:57:34.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subject&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt; are names of &lt;strong&gt;grammatical function&lt;/strong&gt; categories.&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;The grammatical function of a constituent in a sentence is determined by its relation to other constituents in the sentence. The subject, for example, is what the meaning of the &lt;strong&gt;predicate&lt;/strong&gt; is predicated of, and it also agrees with the &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt; of the predicate - the main verb, if there is one - in person, number and gender. Note that &lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt; is not a grammatical function category but a &lt;strong&gt;syntactic category&lt;/strong&gt;. The verb in a sentence realizes the grammatical function of head of the predicate (sometimes called the &lt;em&gt;predicator&lt;/em&gt;), as can be seen in the syntactic structure tree below, where the grammatical function categories appears in blue. You can read a little more about this distinction &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/Syntactic-Structure-Trees#ref=1099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fhtjG.png&quot; alt=&quot;An example of a syntactic structure tree&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/he_ate_the_cake.html#ref=1099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enlarge image&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastEditorUserId="2715" LastEditDate="2014-01-23T08:04:59.330" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T08:04:59.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2014-01-23T11:34:46.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Intensions are functions from contexts to extensions. The sentence contains two indexicals - I and now. What the extension is depends on the theory underlying the interpretation. On Frege's analysis, it's the truth value. In non-Fregean logic, it's a &quot;situation&quot;, or &quot;eventuality&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T11:34:46.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2014-01-23T15:37:32.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Atamari said is actually not entirely correct. When indexicals are involved, there is an additional layer of meaning involved, called &quot;character&quot;, following David Kaplan (1989).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character is a function from contexts in intensions. An intension is a function from &quot;circumstances of evaluations&quot; (i.e. possible worlds, situations, etc.; depending on theory) in extensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Character =context=&gt; Intension =situation=&gt; Extension&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the example, let's assume the context is such that the speaker is Peter and it is Jan 23, 4pm. The for &quot;I am writing an exam now&quot;, we have (in paraphrases):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Character: &quot;The speaker is writing an exam at the utterance time&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intension: &quot;that Peter is writing an exam on Jan 23, 4pm&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extension: &quot;true&quot; (if Peter is writing an exam on Jan 23, 4pm&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the basic idea of Kaplans theory of indexicala. See Zimmermann 2012 for an overview and technical details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kaplan, David (1989): Demonstratives. In: Almond, J &amp;amp; Perry, J &amp;amp; Wettstein, H (eds.): Themes from Kaplan. OUP. 481-563.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zimmermann, Thomas Ede (2012): Context dependency. Maienborn, C &amp;amp; von Heusinger, K &amp;amp; Portner, P (eds.): Semantics. de Gruyter Mouton. 2360-2407.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3070" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T15:37:32.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3118" CreationDate="2014-01-23T19:15:36.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A word--word/&quot;list of words&quot; kind of dictionary is not feasible, because in each language many words have multiple meanings. For many words meanings overlap. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Slovenian     English     &#xA;-------------------------------------------&#xA;zastonj       in vain     (without success)&#xA;zastonj       free        (not costing any money)&#xA;svoboden      free        (not slave)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3020" LastActivityDate="2014-01-23T19:15:36.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-24T15:51:04.553" Score="2" ViewCount="1047" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if it is not the right place to ask this question in SE sites. I am mostly active on SO but I thought it might be a better fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enrolled in a class this semester and there was a question asked that I could not answer. Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In terms of semantics, &quot;crazy&quot; does not mean the same as &quot;sane&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;half crazy&quot; means the same as &quot;half sane&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;almost half crazy&quot; does not mean the same as &quot;almost half&#xA;  sane&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we read their semantics off of trees compositionally from the way&#xA;  they are combined, what kind of tree structures can we assume for&#xA;  them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3073" LastEditorDisplayName="user3073" LastEditDate="2014-01-24T15:59:37.367" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T09:54:45.083" Title="Almost half crazy vs Almost half sane" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6477" CreationDate="2014-01-24T18:28:39.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trees are not going to solve the problem. This is not a syntactic issue; it's &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note, no syntax up my sleeve in the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sane&lt;/code&gt; ... &lt;code&gt;Crazy&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; represents a semantic cline, with &lt;em&gt;sane&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt; at opposite poles.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(They can both be used with &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt;, which can only modify a polar adjective: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He's absolutely sane/crazy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's absolutely freezing/broiling outside&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;vs&lt;/strong&gt; *&lt;em&gt;It's absolutely hot/warm/tepid/cool/cold outside.&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word is &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt;, which is a &lt;strong&gt;vector&lt;/strong&gt; quantity;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;i.e, it points not only to a quantity on a cline, but a &lt;strong&gt;direction&lt;/strong&gt; as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A simple example is the difference between &lt;em&gt;Few people attended&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;A few people attended&lt;/em&gt;.  The same absolute numbers may well be reported by both, but &lt;em&gt;few&lt;/em&gt; is negative, while &lt;em&gt;a few&lt;/em&gt; is positive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This orientation refers to expectations or hopes on the part of the speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Few people&lt;/em&gt; means '&lt;strong&gt;fewer&lt;/strong&gt; than hoped/expected';&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;a few people&lt;/em&gt; means '&lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; than hoped/expected'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Almost&lt;/em&gt; means 'close to, but lower than, some clinal value'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Half sane&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt; both refer to the midpoint on the cline,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;i.e, they &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; point to the same position on the cline.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; they refer to opposite directions on the cline.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Half sane&lt;/em&gt; means 'a sanity value of .5'; i.e, &lt;em&gt;sane&lt;/em&gt; is UP, &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt; is DOWN on the cline.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Half crazy&lt;/em&gt; means 'a craziness value of .5'; i.e, &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt; is UP, &lt;em&gt;sane&lt;/em&gt; is DOWN.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; is always on the DOWN side of a cline position,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;almost half crazy&lt;/em&gt; does not mean the same as &lt;em&gt;almost half sane&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Almost half crazy&lt;/em&gt; announces a &lt;strong&gt;craziness&lt;/strong&gt; value &amp;lt; .5, and thus a &lt;strong&gt;sanity&lt;/strong&gt; value &gt; .5.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is saner than &lt;em&gt;almost half sane&lt;/em&gt;, which announces a sanity value &amp;lt; .5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck doing this with syntax trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T18:28:39.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2014-01-24T18:55:06.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several examples of sign languages that have been invented de novo. Notably, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; and other &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_sign_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Village Sign Languages&lt;/a&gt;. In isolation, when deaf children are not exposed to either a signed or spoken language (which is remarkably common even in developed countries) they invent their own &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_sign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;home sign systems&lt;/a&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/139/is-nicaraguan-sign-language-the-only-language-born-from-nothing/6462#6462&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for a related question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3063" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-01-24T18:55:06.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6315" CreationDate="2014-01-24T22:25:04.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you let air escape through the nasal cavity during the oral closure, then yes--the first part of your /b/ is being articulated in the same way as an /m/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the standard way for native speakers of English to articulate stop consonants. If a native speaker actually (phonetically) voices her stops (i.e. if there actually is vocal fold vibration during the oral closure), the &lt;strong&gt;vocal fold vibration is achieved by passing the air through to the &lt;em&gt;oral cavity only&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This is possible even when the oral cavity is completely sealed (due to the lips being closed, for example) because the air is a gas and is thus compressible. The walls of the cavity may also expand a bit to accommodate the greater volume of air. &lt;strong&gt;You can convince yourself that this is true if you hold your nose shut with your fingers and attempt to &quot;hum&quot; with your lips closed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that &lt;em&gt;maintaining&lt;/em&gt; vocal fold vibration with both the oral and nasal cavities closed is difficult. This difficulty, along with the fact that there are more robust cues to (phonological) voicing in English (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3398/understanding-voiced-consonants/3401#3401&quot;&gt;my response to a related question&lt;/a&gt;), explains why &lt;strong&gt;many native speakers don't actually phonetically voice their voiced stops!&lt;/strong&gt; If you record someone with consistent stop voicing and then go in and replace all of the voice bars with silence, all of the stops will still be perceived by other native speakers as voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T01:09:00.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-25T12:49:52.827" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a discussion on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;coordination&lt;/a&gt; with one of my friends and thought it would be better to ask it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; one of these are coordination and &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mary likes cakes and hates pies. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mary likes and Jack hates pies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Mary bought an ice cream and ate it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe only the third one is coordination. My reasoning is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first sentence the verbs doesn't depend on each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second sentence, the pies are not affected by Mary's liking or Jack's hating. They seem independent events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third sentence however, if Mary hadn't bought an ice cream, she wouldn't have eaten it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my arguments correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3077" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2014-01-26T15:09:05.670" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T15:09:05.670" Title="In which of these sentences is “and” used for coordination?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6482" CreationDate="2014-01-25T14:21:08.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All three sentences involve coordination understood broadly, since all three involve two conjuncts linked by a coordinating conjunction (&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;). The second sentence is the odd one out, as it is what's referred to as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.let.uu.nl/uil-ots/lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Right%20Node%20Raising&amp;amp;lemmacode=350&quot;&gt;right node raising&lt;/a&gt; construction. Note that in the 1st and the 3rd sentences, two constituents are coordinated:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. Mary [VP likes ice cream] and [VP hates pies]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. Mary [VP bought an ice cream] and [VP ate it]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence, on the basis of the surface syntax, looks like it involves coordination of two non-constituents, since the subject and verb don't form a constituent to the exclusion of the object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. [Mary likes] and [Jack hates] pies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given some auxiliary assumptions then, the bracketing given in (c) can't be correct. There's a number of different analyses on the market for (c), including across-the-board rightward movement of the object from out of both of the conjuncts, and ellipsis of the object in the initial but not the subsequent conjunct. Since this isn't relevant to your question, i won't explore it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your arguments seem to be based on the faulty assumption that true coordination must involve coordination of two sentences which are in a specific discourse relationship with one another, such as cause-effect. Coordination is in fact a syntactic phenomenon - what the coordinated constituents happen to mean is irrelevant. If you take 'coordination' to mean something other than syntactic coordination however, then this is just a terminological quibble. If you're interested in the discourse relationships which hold between sentences, and how this interacts with coordination, you might want to take a look at the work of &lt;a href=&quot;http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~kehler/publications.htm&quot;&gt;Andy Kehler&lt;/a&gt;, who has explored such issues in a number of different articles and books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T14:21:08.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-25T14:47:02.647" Score="2" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of syntactic structure, from the below grammar can we conclude that English is accusative language, not ergative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S --&gt; NP VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VPtv --&gt; Vtv NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VPiv --&gt; Viv&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By intuition, I believe it should be accusative but I am confused on why, and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3079" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-27T08:00:00.637" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T18:46:24.857" Title="Accusative vs Ergative" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6484" CreationDate="2014-01-25T16:38:25.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is (still) an accusative language, although the accusative case has only survived with some pronouns (me, him, her, us, them, whom). Thus, we still say “He (subject) saw me (direct object)&quot;. If it were an ergative language we would say things like “him (agent) I (subject) was seen”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T16:38:25.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="538" CreationDate="2014-01-25T16:50:57.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Native American languages obligatorily mark sentence perspective. Aymara is one of them and the following paper provides many examples: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/project/depling13/proceedings/pdf/W13-3712.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pragmatic Structures in Aymara&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T16:50:57.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-25T18:40:44.143" Score="3" ViewCount="1918" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to linguistics and trying to understand how to construct a grammar. I am however having issues on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L= {ww ∣ w ∈ {a,b,c} &lt;sup&gt;∗&lt;/sup&gt; }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a linear indexed language, how can I construct the grammar for this language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3081" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2014-01-25T19:33:36.483" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T16:24:14.540" Title="Grammar for language L = {ww ∣ w ∈ {a,b,c} * }" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6488" CreationDate="2014-01-25T22:29:22.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite not being so hot when it comes to formal language theory, i decided to take a stab at an answer after all (using &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexed_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; as a reference). Here is the grammar for the language L = {ww ∣ w ∈ {a,b,c} ∗ }, which consists of a set of rewrite rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S[x] -&gt; S[xf] | S[xg] | S[xh]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  S[x] -&gt; T[x]T[x]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  T[xf] -&gt; T[x]&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  T[xg] -&gt; T[x]&lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  T[xh] -&gt; T[x]&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  T[] -&gt; E  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where: x denotes an arbitrary collection of stack symbols, S is the sentence symbol, T, f, g and h are non-terminals, a,b and c are terminals, and E is the empty string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivation of the string &lt;em&gt;aabbccaabbcc&lt;/em&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S[] -&gt; S[f] -&gt; S[ff] -&gt; S[ffg] -&gt; S[ffgg] -&gt; S[ffggh] -&gt; S[ffgghh] -&gt; T[ffgghh]T[ffgghh] &gt; -&gt; T[ffggh]cT[ffgghh] -&gt; T[ffgg]ccT[ffgghh]-&gt; T[ffg]bccT[ffgghh] -&gt; T[ff]bbccT[ffgghh] &gt; -&gt; .. -&gt; T[]aabbccT[ffgghh] -&gt; aabbccT[ffgghh] -&gt; ... -&gt; aabbccaabbcc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As desired, the grammar only generates strings ww (w concatenated with itself), where w is an arbitrarily long sequence of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; in any order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A small explanatory note:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grammar works crucially by defining the copying rule &lt;strong&gt;S[x] -&gt; T[x]T[x]&lt;/strong&gt;. This rewrite rule takes the stack of symbols on S, and duplicates the stack on two new non-terminals, which exist only to hold the duplicated stacks (they are ultimately deleted via &lt;strong&gt;T[] -&gt; E&lt;/strong&gt;). Once the stacks have been duplicated, the non-terminals in the stacks are 'popped off' one by one to generate strings of terminals. Because the stacks have previously been duplicated, the strings resulting from popping off non-terminals from the stacks of T are guaranteed to be identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2014-01-25T22:54:58.303" LastActivityDate="2014-01-25T22:54:58.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-26T04:48:21.817" Score="4" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly are the Indo-European predicative mine/yours/ours/his/hers/its/theirs forms, in terms of word class and inflection? Would they be considered the genitive (or even the dative) case of personal pronouns, a nominalized (or genitive) form of possessive adjectives, or something distinct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at German, the forms for the genitive, dative, possessive adjective, and predicative possessive are clearly distinct (e.g. genitive 'meiner', possessive adjective 'mein', dative 'meinem', and predicative 'meins'), though the genitive of personal pronouns is rare in modern German. There is some resemblance between the genitive case of possessive adjectives and the predicative forms; I kind of wonder if there might have been a progression of &quot;It is [one] of my things&quot; to &quot;It is mine&quot;, but that's kind of tenuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English they kind of look like the possessive adjective + -'s, but that's also pretty tenuous. Looking over Beowulf I kind of got the impression that in Old English the dative of possession was used for predicative possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the genitive of the personal pronoun or dative of possession would have been used predicatively in Latin, and I haven't heard of a dedicated predicative form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T00:05:40.883" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T00:05:40.883" Title="Mine, Yours, Ours, His, Hers, Its, and Don't Forget Theirs" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6496" CreationDate="2014-01-26T05:50:44.837" Score="7" ViewCount="1546" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who came in late, &quot;perfect&quot; and &quot;perfective&quot; aspects are not the same.   Perfect aspect pertains to actions that have been completed at the time referenced by the tense.  So English past perfect would be &quot;had eaten,&quot; present perfect &quot;has eaten,&quot; and future perfect &quot;will have eaten.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfective aspect, on the other hand, conveys that the action is conceived as a simple whole.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPerfect.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPerfect.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do the terms &quot;imperfect aspect&quot; and &quot;imperfective aspects&quot; also refer to distinct concepts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:07:19.503" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T09:41:45.060" Title="Is there any difference between imperfect and imperfective aspect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;imperfect&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2014-01-26T20:54:08.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with all grammatical labels used across languages is that they either lose or add some information. A further problem is that the terms are not used consistently by individual researchers or research paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to this question is both yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, in the sense that perfect is generally applied to tense-related phenomena and perfective to aspect based phenomena (with the proviso that this is not often in the same language). So you're better off using perfect when talking about tenses and perfective when talking about aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, in the sense, that tense and aspect are closely interlinked phenomena. In Slavic languages they mostly have independent morphology but in Germanic languages, they mostly don't. So the 'perfect' in 'present perfect' describes the same facet of the tense that 'perfective' describes independently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once compared the English tense system with Czech to some interesting results. I found a lot of functional overlap but also many differences. Ultimately, using similar terminology was broadly helpful but also with a lot of potential for confusion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-01-26T20:54:08.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6501" CreationDate="2014-01-27T00:35:35.170" Score="5" ViewCount="901" Body="&lt;p&gt;My classical voice teacher emphasizes an exercise where I am to sing through a sequence of vowels while maintaining the same open jaw position.  The idea is that a singer should be able to produce vowels with the tongue and lips alone, never needing to adjust the jaw and only moving it when consonants come into play.  In particular, I am to sing &quot;eee&quot; or [i] with a slack jaw, the idea being that only a high tongue, not a closed jaw is necessary to produce that sound.  At the same time, my teacher has suggested that I study IPA to gain a better understanding of vowels, and I see that IPA identifies vowels according to jaw position (close, mid, open) as opposed to tongue height.  My question is whether phoneticians consider jaw position to be an essential element of vowel production, or would phoneticians generally accept that all vowels can be produced with an open jaw as long as the tongue and lips are positioned properly?  When studying IPA, is it safe to mentally translate jaw positions (close, mid, open) into corresponding tongue heights (high, mid, low) or would something essential be lost in doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3091" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T04:42:28.503" Title="Is jaw position essential or incidental in vowel production?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6505" CreationDate="2014-01-27T07:35:05.450" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the technical term from a group of consecutive words with a single associated meaning? For example, phrasal verbs like: &quot;get out&quot; and idioms like: &quot;on the other hand&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-27T07:57:28.780" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T07:48:52.320" Title="Multiple words with a single meaning" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-27T08:10:09.630" Score="6" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that you have a language, let's say it's SVO, has a clause pattern in which the subject typically stands for an agent or experiencer and the object typically stands for a patient or stimulus, and in which neither NP is overtly marked for case.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose that the language has a different clause pattern in which the first argument in the clause takes an overtly marked case, let's call it &quot;case-B,&quot; and the subject typically stands for a patient or stimulus while the object, which has no overt case-marking, typically stands for an agent or experiencer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This second clause pattern is like the passive, except that there's no valency reduction, and the second argument must be an indefinite pronoun if its referent is to be unspecified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is there a natural language with such a scheme?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T00:38:42.670" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T00:38:42.670" Title="Is the case described below hypothetical or does it occur in natural languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6499" CreationDate="2014-01-27T14:56:51.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have understood your model correctly, it describes an ergative structure within many natural languages, dead or living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Sumerian, Georgian, Basque and Tibetan all have the ergative patterns, where an agent of a transitive verb is marked, while the patiens of a transitive verb with a logical subject is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subjects of nontransitive verbs in these languages, on the other hand, have no special markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T14:56:51.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2014-01-27T15:26:40.720" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I should start by mentioning that I studied voice for many years, as well as linguistics (I was a double major in music and linguistics in college). What your voice teacher is trying to get you to do is quite standard in vocal pedagogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer to your question is--yes, it is safe to translate &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mid&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; to the corresponding tongue heights. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@jlawler and @TKR both make valid points. As TKR notes, you can produce some semblance of an [i] with a slack jaw and a high tongue. As jlawler notes, it won't sound like a prototypical [i] for most languages (English, for example). But that's actually OK for singing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jlawler's mention of ventriloquism is quite apropos; ventriloquists learn to seamlessly substitute certain sounds for some of the phones that are impossible to produce without moving their lips from a neutral position--for example substituting a dental [d̪] for the labial [b] (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1074/has-there-been-any-research-into-the-phonetics-of-ventriloquism/1076#1076&quot;&gt;see jlawler's answer to a question about ventriloquism&lt;/a&gt;). The reason that the speech is still intelligible to the audience is that the general relationships among the sounds is largely preserved--&quot;back&quot; consonants are still &quot;back&quot; and &quot;front&quot; consonants are still &quot;frontish&quot;. And vowels still contrast in tongue height and backness. On top of all that, ventriloquists rely on the native speaker ears of their audiences to bias them toward hearing actual words as opposed to gibberish--if the ventriloquist produces &quot;I like ice crean&quot; the audience's ears are going to &quot;hear&quot; &quot;I like ice cream&quot; because that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What trained singers do is in fact a kind of ventriloquism. As long as the appropriate contrasts are in place--/i/ sounds higher than /e/, /e/ sounds higher than /ɛ/, etc., listeners' ears will be very forgiving. The demands of classical singing are very different from those of everyday conversation--singers must project to be heard in large spaces over an orchestra, they must sustain single vowel sounds for many seconds, and they must produce speech sounds over a pitch range that is quite unnatural for speech (especially in the case of females). Because of these demands, we make compromises such as the one your teacher is having you practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of getting too off-topic for this site, I'll just add that, in some cases, voice teachers will have students exaggerate the &quot;ventriloquism&quot; technique toward the beginning of their training, as it allows the students to focus more on minimizing tension and producing a consistent, beautiful sound throughout the vocal range, independent of text. As the kind of coordination required to do this becomes more second-nature for the student, it becomes easier for her to maintain it while producing slightly more &quot;faithful&quot; renditions of a variety of speech sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T21:28:19.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6484" CreationDate="2014-01-27T18:46:24.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is a rather robust generalization called Mahajan's Generalization, which states that ergativity is found in &quot;verb peripheral&quot; languages (VSO and SOV) but not in verb-medial languages (SVO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite the fact that ergativity is a type of argument-alignment, it does appear to be directly related to word order (or, perhaps more accurately, whatever the structural underpinnings of word order are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Mahajan, Anoop. 1994. The Ergativity Parameter: Have-be Alternation, Word Order and Split Ergativity. NELS 24.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Mahajan, Anoop. 1997. Universal Grammar and the Typology of Ergative Languages.  In Alexiadou and Hall (eds.), &lt;em&gt;Studies on Universal Grammar and Typological Variation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3094" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T18:46:24.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-27T23:12:16.010" Score="0" ViewCount="3854" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having some trouble integrating phrases with multiple adjectives into x-bar trees. Based on what I can understand from the textbook, I would get something like this (apologies for the verb triangle):&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1coEa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't seem right to me. I rearranged the sentence and got this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hFNh4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes me think there's a phantom conjunction I'm missing in the first construction. Could someone point me in the right direction (or tell me if I'm completely and utterly wrong)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3095" LastActivityDate="2014-01-27T23:12:16.010" Title="Multiple Adjectives in an X-Bar Tree" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2014-01-28T03:09:30.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some more searching I came across a specific area of research that may shed light on this question and wanted to mention it as a complement to @musicallinguist's very helpful answer and the other comments here.  Apparently there have been a number of studies of how speakers produce vowels when the jaw is held open artificially using a &quot;bite block.&quot;  Many of the studies reference the following paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lindblom, B. &amp;amp; Sundberg, J. (1971).  &lt;em&gt;Neurophysiological representation of speech sounds.&lt;/em&gt;  15th World Congress of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Buenos Aires.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What follows is a quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/explaining_intrinsic_pitch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ohala, J. J. &amp;amp; Eukel, B. W. 1987. &lt;em&gt;Explaining the intrinsic pitch of vowels.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lindblom and Sundberg (1971) showed that speakers can produce&#xA;  acoustically normal vowels when speaking with the jaw in abnormal&#xA;  fixed positions if they produced compensatory tongue gestures.  For&#xA;  example, by increasing the elevation of the tongue they can produce&#xA;  good [i, u] vowels with their jaws propped open by bite blocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, the abstract of a 1980 paper by Wright and Riordan titled &lt;em&gt;Articulatory compensation in the production of vowels with bite blocks&lt;/em&gt; begins with this sentence: &quot;Studies of vowels produced using bite blocks have shown that speakers compensate for unusual degrees of jaw opening thereby preserving acoustic vowel targets.&quot;  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/68/S1/10.1121/1.2004669&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/68/S1/10.1121/1.2004669&lt;/a&gt; and search for other Acoustical Society papers mentioning &quot;bite block.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3091" LastEditorUserId="3091" LastEditDate="2014-01-28T04:42:28.503" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T04:42:28.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6498" CreationDate="2014-01-28T07:48:52.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that there is not a single theory-independent term. It depends on the type of relationship. So &quot;get out&quot; is a &quot;phrasal verb&quot; or &quot;prepositional verb&quot; and &quot;on the other hand&quot; is an idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In construction grammar, all of them could be described as constructions but you'd still want to differentiate between them in communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things are a bit easier with word groups that don't have a relationship but tend to appear together like &quot;bread and butter&quot;. Those are called &quot;collocations&quot;. I wonder if that's what you were driving at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T07:48:52.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-28T16:07:44.667" Score="1" ViewCount="1361" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to draw a tree diagram of this sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1816 they were purchased by the British government and from then on displayed in the British Museum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it leads nowhere. I think I'm fine until &quot;and from the on...&quot; but how can I link this sencond part to the rest? Is the coordinator and on the same level as the PP (In 1816), NP (they) and VP (were purchased (PP by (NP the (N' british government))? &#xA;Could anyone give me a hint how to proceede or even a suggestion of a full diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3098" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-28T18:49:11.977" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T18:49:11.977" Title="How to analyze this sentence in a tree diagram?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1730" CreationDate="2014-01-28T22:53:59.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit late, but may be useful. Several years ago, I read an interview in a celebrities' magazine to a Garifuna singer who was coming to Mexico. After the mandatory chat about his career, his success with his tour, last disc, etc. the interviewer complimented him about his near-perfect Spanish. To which he casually commented her &quot;yeah, people always say we Garifuna are good for learning languages - I speak just as good English and French. I attribute it to the fact we're raised having to learn 2 languages&quot;. The reporter had never heard of the fact so pressed him to speak a bit more of it. I still recall some things of what he said, for that interview impacted me deeply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He referred to them as 2 different languages, though from what I've read afterwards they're considered more as 2 variants of the same language - probably that's the self-perception of the Garifuna people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a child, he had been punished when he dared speak in the man's tongue. He had to use the women's for he wasn't considered a man yet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; to switch to using only the men's language after puberty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A woman could use the men's tongue when speaking to her husband or when retelling something a man had said, or a man could use the women's language when speaking with his wife or a dear relative like a mother or sister. Usually, though, both sexes were expected to speak in their own language and the other side was expected to understand, and then reply in their own tongue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He also mentioned in passing the pressure there was for picking up a Garifuna girl as wife, and how in the end it was a good choice to pick spouses from the community &quot;for outside girls don't understand a lot of things about us&quot; - perhaps this strong tendency towards endogamy reinforces the linguistic situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once read there are a few other examples of sexual diglossia in the world, some other tribes in Africa and the Amazon, and they usually arise just like the Garifuna: when a bunch of men from one tribe/ethnic group pick up girls from a different one as wives, and for some reason neither group completely abandons their tongues. Some African tribes even added a 3rd language to the mix: the &quot;warriors' language&quot;, used only by men in times of war to avoid an enemy's eavesdropper to understand a meeting on strategy or the discussions in mid-battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-01-28T22:53:59.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6510" CreationDate="2014-01-29T05:00:01.523" Score="5" ViewCount="5624" Body="&lt;p&gt;From taking the synset of the word 'fantastic', I got a list of senses below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Synset('antic.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('fantastic.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.02'), Synset('fantastic.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.03'), Synset('fantastic.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.04'), Synset('fantastic.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.05')]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does '&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;' stand for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, taking a synset of the word 'fast':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;.02'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;.02'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;.03'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.04'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.05'), Synset('debauched.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('flying.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.02'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.08'), Synset('firm.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.10'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;.10'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;.01'), Synset('fast.&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;.02')]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again what does '&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;' stand for? And also what does '&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;' stand for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3101" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-01-30T04:48:59.523" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T04:48:59.523" Title="Which part of speech are 's' and 'r' in Wordnet?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6477" CreationDate="2014-01-29T10:27:46.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question your teacher gave you has already been discussed by Barbara Partee in her introductory paper ‘Lexical Semantics and Compositionality’ (see reference at the end) - only she used &lt;em&gt;almost half empty&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;almost half full&lt;/em&gt;. If we assume that the constituent structure of both expressions is as in (1), and also make the assumption in (2), the question then arises how come the two expressions differ in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) [almost [half [crazy/sane]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The meaning of a complex expression is derived by combining the meaning&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;     of each of its elements with that element with which it forms a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adopting (2) means that according to (1), we derive the meaning of &lt;em&gt;almost half crazy&lt;/em&gt; by first combining the meanings of &lt;em&gt;half&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;crazy&lt;/em&gt; and then combining the meaning of &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; with that of &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt;. Since &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt; has the same meaning as &lt;em&gt;half sane&lt;/em&gt;, it’s not clear how &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; gives one meaning when combined with the first and another meaning when combined with the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One way&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem is to deny that the expressions &lt;em&gt;almost half crazy/sane&lt;/em&gt; have the structure in (1) and assign them instead the constituent structure in (3), which is also given by the tree in (4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) [[almost half] [crazy/sane]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;          &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zOj9G.png&quot;&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;           &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/examples/almost_half_crazy.html?ref=1023&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see tree on our website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to (3) and (4), in deriving the meanings of the expressions &lt;em&gt;almost half crazy/sane&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning of &lt;em&gt;almost half&lt;/em&gt; combines each time with another meaning, and therefore it is not surprising that the two final expressions differ in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A second way&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem is to accept the constituent structure in (1), but to deny that &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;half sane&lt;/em&gt; have the same meaning. Maybe the meanings of &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;half sane&lt;/em&gt; always combine with some approximation/precision value, and when such value is not expressed it is taken to be the absolute precision value (the value expressed by &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;). We can now assume that the meanings of &lt;em&gt;half crazy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;half sane&lt;/em&gt; are such that they give the same meaning when combining with the meaning of &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; but not when combining with the meanings of other approximation/precision expressions (like &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A third way&lt;/strong&gt; to solve the problem is to accept the constituent structure in (1), but to deny the principle expressed by (2). We can now assume that in deriving the meanings of &lt;em&gt;almost half crazy/sane&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning of &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; is combined with the meaning of &lt;em&gt;half&lt;/em&gt;, even though it doesn’t form a constituent with this element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Invitation to Cognitive Science&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd edition. Daniel Osherson, general editor; in Part I: &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;, Lila Gleitman and Mark Liberman, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge 1995, pp. 311-360.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T10:35:49.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6508" CreationDate="2014-01-29T10:38:10.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nltk.org/api/nltk.corpus.reader.html?highlight=wordnet#nltk.corpus.reader.wordnet.Lemma.synset&quot;&gt;NLTK documentation&lt;/a&gt; is a bit off. Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/man/wndb.5WN.html&quot;&gt;Wordnet's documents&lt;/a&gt;, I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Syntactic category: n for noun files, v for verb files, a for adjective files, r for adverb files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in another section of the same document:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ss_type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One character code indicating the synset type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;n    NOUN &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;v    VERB &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a    ADJECTIVE &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;s    ADJECTIVE SATELLITE &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;r    ADVERB &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T10:38:10.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6517" CreationDate="2014-01-29T15:04:47.817" Score="16" ViewCount="4326" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108500/&quot;&gt;Les visiteurs&lt;/a&gt; (The Visitors), two Frenchman from 1123 are transported to 1993. In the movie, the visitors from 1123 can understand the speech of the modern French people in 1993, and vice versa, with minimal confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the people speaking Old French and the people speaking modern French really be able to understand each other, or has French changed too much from Old French to be mutually intelligible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3103" LastEditorUserId="3103" LastEditDate="2014-01-29T15:48:31.920" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T18:06:15.357" Title="Are Old French and French mutually intelligible?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2014-01-29T22:49:39.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word აფალინა /&lt;em&gt;aphalina&lt;/em&gt;/ is a word of Greek origin, derived from φάλλαινα, &quot;whale&quot;. This word came from Greek φαλλός which in late Greek meant &quot;penis&quot; due to similar shape of the whale. This word in turn came from PIE root &lt;em&gt;bhel-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to swell, blow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-01-29T22:49:39.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2014-01-30T01:17:59.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not readily, but I don't think it would take them too long to attune their ears either way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious difference is all the consonants which have disappeared in modern French (mostly still represented in the spelling). The fact that many verbal endings have fallen together (&lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-es&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ent&lt;/em&gt;), and the fact that the passé simple has fallen out of use and replaced by a periphrastic tense, would I suspect make the Old French speakers think the moderns were talking a sort of pidgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-01-30T01:17:59.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-30T05:03:38.307" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;A noun that refers to one countable thing is singular.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A noun that stands for one countable portion, part, or unit of some non-countable thing is singulative.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASingulative.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASingulative.htm&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns that stand for things that one does not count (e.g. water, oil, benevolence) are non-count or mass nouns.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMassNoun.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMassNoun.htm&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the term for a noun that stands for more than one countable portion, part, or unit of some non-countable thing?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[As per a comment below by jlawler, I have edited in the following example from English:] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the restaurant, it makes sense to speak of a) some beer, b) one beer, c) four beers, and d) beers all around.  If a) is semantically non-count and b) has singulative meaning, what term do we use to characterize c) and d)?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-01T00:12:16.450" LastActivityDate="2014-02-01T00:12:16.450" Title="What is the term for a noun that stands for more than one portion of an uncountable referent?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2014-01-30T09:09:53.280" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest natural experiment we can make is to expose an untrained contemporary French speaker to a reading of a text from that period. Conveniently, the poems of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr%C3%A9tien_de_Troyes&quot;&gt;Chrétien de Troyes &lt;/a&gt; are only a few decades older. I consider myself a relatively educated native speaker of French with basic (but not extensive) training in the relevant fields, and I must say that even taking into account that poetry is presumably harder than ordinary speech, I find a passage such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mere, ne soliez vos dire&#xA;  que li enge Deu nostre sire&#xA;  sont si tres bel c'onques Nature&#xA;  ne fist si bele criature,&#xA;  n'el monde n'a si bele rien ?&#xA;  - Biax filz, ancor le di ge bien.&#xA;  Jel dis por voir et di ancores.&#xA;  - Teisiez, mere ! Ne vi ge ores&#xA;  les plus beles choses qui sont,&#xA;  qui par la Gaste Forest vont ?&#xA;  Il sont plus bel, si con ge cuit,&#xA;  que Dex ne que si enge tuit. »&#xA;  La mere antre ses braz le prant&#xA;  et dit : « Biax filz, a Deu te rant,&#xA;  que mout ai grant peor de toi.&#xA;  Tu as veü, si con je croi,&#xA;  les enges don la gent se plaignent,&#xA;  qui ocïent quanqu'il ataignent.&#xA;  - Voir non ai, mere, non ai, non !&#xA;  Chevalier dïent qu'il ont non. »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;extremely hard to understand (and yet it is so famous that I knew most of the exchange beforehand), and in particular much harder to understand than anything Les Visiteurs say in the film (but who doubted that about a comedy marketed at families?). That said, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; understand most of it and many French can read these texts fluently. More generally, I find that the main difficulty I encounter when reading texts from that period is that I don't know the exact meaning of a couple of grammatical words or constructions (so that I'm not quite sure whether the sentence is, for instance, hypothetical or assertive). The syntax is very odd but completely understandable and the vocabulary is a mixed bag, with the overwhelming majority of the words at least ringing a bell, but with a fair number of them having manifestly a slightly different meaning that the one I am used to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, I would say that an educated native speaker of French would probably require only a few days of training to be able to follow a conversation in XIIth century French, but that the first encounter would probably be quite puzzling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: So, there is a very easy to find out. I asked a friend with a PhD in Old French to read once the text above at normal delivery speed to a group of twelve students (age 18 and 19) with no prior knowledge of Old French (a few of them even wondered afterwards what the language was, but a few others volunteered that it was a tale of knighthood in Old French), nor in fact of Medieval literature (as evidenced by the fact that none recognized the text even after I provided the translation, even though it is a relatively famous scene from the most famous work of Chrétien de Troyes). They were allowed to share what they had understood afterward. This is what they got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a dialogue between a son and her mother. The son has seen or wants to see beautiful things in a forest. The mother also knows about them and maybe wants to see them. The mother is afraid for her son. Perhaps the son wants to be a knight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has to be compared with the original (my translation, deliberately as close to the original text as can be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mother, didn't you tell me that the angels of God our lord are so beautiful that Nature never made creatures so fair and that there is nothing so beautiful in the world? Beautiful son, and so I say again. I said it once and then again. Silence, mother! Didn't I just see the most beautiful things that may be, going through the Waste Forest? The mother, taking him in her arms, says Beautiful son, may God keep you, for I have great fear for you. You have seen, or so I believe, the angels about whom everybody complains and who kill what they touch. Not at all, mother, no! Knight is their name, they said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compared with the original, I was surprised that none mentioned either God or angels in their summary and interested by the fact that they, like me, find it especially hard to identify mood and modality (about half thought the son wanted to go in the forest see the beautiful things and the other half thought, correctly, that he had already seen them in the forest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-01-31T07:24:32.573" LastActivityDate="2014-01-31T07:24:32.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-30T16:45:47.543" Score="4" ViewCount="4080" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to leverage NLTK and Python to perform some sentence completion. The sentences I'm working with are incomplete and pretty much just read as garbage. An example sentence would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The red dog absolutely always.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use NLTK to turn the above sentence into something more like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The red dog will absolutely love you always.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't need to be this exactly, but something along the lines to make the first sentence actually have meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to NLP and am unsure of how to move forward with this. I figure I could use something like POS tagging and cross reference with a set of training data that could then fill in the missing parts of speech to make the sentence syntactically correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a corpus that is used for this? Is my approach to this reasonable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3104" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T14:56:00.630" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T02:41:21.227" Title="Filling in incomplete sentences using NLP and Python" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-01-31T19:30:42.907" Score="2" ViewCount="967" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the definition of cohesion (which was described deeply in Halliday and Hasan's famous book, &quot;Cohesion in English&quot;,  or shortly summarized in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, the aim of cohesion is to connect sentences together and make them as a &quot;Text&quot;. But is it possible to find cohesion inside of a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;  A) Which book you want? B) I want the red &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Here, &quot;one&quot; is a &lt;strong&gt;substitution&lt;/strong&gt; (more precisely, noun substitution). But what about here:&#xA;  I want the red book and the blue &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Should we consider this &quot;one&quot; as cohesion? Even if it is used in the same sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3113" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T09:14:23.930" Title="Cohesion within a sentence?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-01T00:02:48.103" Score="5" ViewCount="721" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I've been wondering a lot whether or not there's an upper limit on how many contrasting tones a language can have that differ primarily by pitch difference and not so much by the shape or contour of the tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People unfamiliar with tonal languages usually assume the tones are like different musical notes. But usually there are more tones with &quot;shapes&quot; than just pitch differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking Standard Mandarin Chinese as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First tone is just a high note with a flat contour. Pitch is steady.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second tone has a rising contour. Pitch starts lower and becomes higher.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third tone has a contour which falls, then rises. Pitch starts higher, goes lower, then higher again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fourth tone has a falling contour. Pitch starts higher then goes lower.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other tonal languages can and do have more than one tone with a flat contour / steady pitch. Basically just &quot;different notes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also other languages can have for example two contrasting falling tones with one starting high and falling to the mid range, and another starting in the mid range and falling to a low pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, &lt;strong&gt;what are the most distinguished tones in a single language which have a similar shape but different pitch?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T00:14:50.457" Title="Most tones contrasting by pitch and not just contour?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6522" CreationDate="2014-02-01T05:55:30.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moira Yip discusses this issue in Chapter 2 of her book &lt;em&gt;Tone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The short answer: four, possibly five.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, this question is not as straightforward to answer as one might think; tones can be defined in terms of phonological contrast--like phonemes--or phonetic contrasts--like phones. Just like segmental phonemes, tones are often analyzed as surfacing with contours that deviate from their true &quot;underlying forms&quot;. For example, since the pitch contour of a syllable is directly affected by intonation as well as lexical tone, what might otherwise be a level tone might surface as falling in a declarative context and rising in an interrogative context. What's more, tones are often analyzed as undergoing phonological processes--known as &lt;em&gt;tone sandhi&lt;/em&gt;--that are dependent on the identities of neighboring or nearby tones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take Mandarin as a familiar example. You stated that the third tone falls then rises. This is true of a carefully articulated syllable spoken in isolation (or sometimes at the end of a phrase), but actually in practice the third tone almost never really surfaces this way. If it is followed by another third-toned syllable, the pitch will basically just rise steadily. In other environments it often simply surfaces with a low, relatively level contour. In fact, some phonologists analyze Mandarin as having two level tones--high and low--and two contour tones--falling and rising. In such analyses the fall-rise surface contour of tone three is just an &quot;allotone&quot; of that &quot;toneme&quot; that occurs in a predictable environment, i.e. phrase-finally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about Cantonese? &quot;Checked&quot; syllables aside, Cantonese is usually analyzed by phonologists as having six contrastive tones. Three are usually considered level, two rising, and the last is either analyzed as &quot;low-falling&quot; or just very low level. I've made recordings of native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese, and in that experimental context I found that that last tone usually surfaces (in a declarative context) with a contour that falls briefly but then plateaus and stays relatively level at the bottom of the speaker's pitch range. So is that a level tone? Who's to say??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming one can decide which tones in an inventory are level, another challenge is deciding how many of them can be counted as contrastive. Imagine being out in the field with a new, unfamiliar language that appears to be tonal. You record a bunch of words, and there appear to be minimal pairs that suggest that whether a syllable is given a relatively high pitch or a relatively low pitch can affect the meaning of the word it's in. One straightforward analysis is to say that there are two contrastive tones in this language, &quot;high&quot; and &quot;low&quot;. But another reasonable analysis is that some syllables are lexically marked for tone--we could call it &quot;high&quot;--and others aren't. All else being equal, syllables that are marked as &quot;high&quot; get realized with a higher pitch than those that aren't, which by default surface with a lower pitch. Likewise, a language that is observed as having three surface levels may be analyzed as having a &quot;high&quot; tone, a &quot;mid&quot; tone, and a &quot;low&quot; tone, but it may also be analyzed as having a &quot;high&quot; tone and a &quot;low&quot; tone, with unmarked syllables surfacing with a mid-range pitch. So, in theory, Yip notes, a system with &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; phonological tones can produce (&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; + 1) surface tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize what Yip says about the typological facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Underlying&quot; three-tone systems are common: Huajuapan Mixtec, Nupe, Kunama, Punjabi. Most systems that are given &quot;underlying&quot; four-tone analyses--Grebo, Igede, Mambila, Mazateco, Chatino, Jianyang, Cantonese (?)--only display four surface tones. In theory, of course, the logical alternative is to assume &quot;high&quot;, &quot;mid&quot;, &quot;low&quot;, and zero for these languages. Finally, &lt;strong&gt;there are languages that contrast five level tones on the surface, but &quot;most are known only from fairly brief reports, with not enough detail to determine unequivocally whether there are actually five underlying level tones, or whether one or more are derived in some way.&quot; (Yip 27) These include Hei-Miao, Gaoba Dong, Dan, Trique, and Ngamambo Bamileke.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend obtaining a copy of Yip's book!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-02-01T05:55:30.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6522" CreationDate="2014-02-01T13:48:24.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very wide-ranging question. Perhaps I could answer it with reference to one language with which I have occupied myself fairly extensively, namely Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard Vietnamese (Hanoi dialect) has six contrasting tones corresponding to the six tones of the orthography. At a narrow phonetic level they can be described as a complex bundle containing the following elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pitch&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;high, middle, low (high and low pitch with a slight inflection upwards or downwards respectively)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;contour&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;flat, dipping (the pitch dips sharply, and may or may not rise again to a higher level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;length&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;normal, short&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonation&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;unmarked, breathy, glottal, creaky&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The six tones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ngang&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;middle pitch, flat contour, normal length, unmarked phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;huyền&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;low pitch, flat contour, normal length, breathy phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sắc&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;high pitch, flat contour, short length, unmarked phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nặng&lt;/strong&gt;      :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;low pitch, flat contour, short length, glottal phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hỏi&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;middle pitch, dipping contour, normal length, unmarked phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ngã&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;middle pitch, dipping contour, normal length, creaky phonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a more theoretical (phonological) level I would propose a much simpler analysis, involving only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;two registers&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;first (unmarked phonation), second (marked phonation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;three contours&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;flat, short, dipping&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving this analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ngang&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;first register, flat contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;huyền&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;second register, flat contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sắc&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;first register, short contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nặng&lt;/strong&gt;      :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;second register, short contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hỏi&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;first register, dipping contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ngã&lt;/strong&gt;   :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;second register, dipping contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analysis distinguishes only register (phonation) and contour (encompassing length). Pitch is treated as a predictable phonetic feature. It results in a system of at most six tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-01T14:45:05.940" LastActivityDate="2014-02-01T14:45:05.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-02T13:29:03.587" Score="2" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am doing a practical application of formal languages to English Language. Am able to understand the CF grammars with respect to english very easily. (i.e.), for example, CF's are used to ensure whether the words in a sentence are syntactically correct or wrong after applying the production rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, The CF grammar is G=((S,N,V,O),(Bob,himself,reminded),P,Start-&gt;S)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CF rules P are,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S-&gt; N V O N-Bob V-&gt;reminded O-&gt;himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when we apply these rules, we get a sentence &quot;Bob reminded himself&quot; which is a context free language. Likewise, how we can apply a regular grammar to a english language. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3118" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T20:11:34.407" Title="Application of Regular grammar in English Language" Tags="&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2014-02-02T16:59:13.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;semantic in a sentence&quot; is the same of what you called &quot;cohesion in the sentence&quot;. Based on some linguistic books such as &quot;Falk&quot;, semantic has two types: semantic in the word, and semantic in the sentence.&#xA;p.s. Please let me know if you get your answer.&#xA;yours,&#xA;Zahra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T16:59:13.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2014-02-02T19:07:11.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because mathematics is almost a language unto itself, it need not use exactly the same grammatical categories as the discourse language surrounding it. Mathematics itself has &quot;parts of speech&quot; corresponding to the &quot;arity&quot; (valency, rank, adicity, or degree) of an operator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefix unary operators (&lt;i&gt;root x&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;cos x&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;sin x&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;div B&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Postfix unary operators (&lt;i&gt;x squared&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x cubed&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x factorial&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Infix binary operators (&lt;i&gt;x plus y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x minus y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x times y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x over y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x xor y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x mod y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;y to the [power of] x&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x equals y&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;x is greater than y&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, each of the examples you gave does map fairly cleanly onto one or two English parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prefix unary operators&lt;/strong&gt; behave like noun-genitive constructions. For example, &quot;cos τ/4 = 1&quot; &lt;i&gt;the cosine of tau over four equals one.&lt;/i&gt; This is clearest to see with &lt;i&gt;root&lt;/i&gt;, elided from &lt;i&gt;square root of&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Postfix unary operators&lt;/strong&gt; are either participles (as you mentioned) or genitive-noun constructions (&lt;i&gt;2 factorial&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;3 factorial&lt;/i&gt; like &lt;i&gt;Ford parts&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;Nissan parts&lt;/i&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Infix binary operators&lt;/strong&gt; behave like adpositions, the same part of speech as the English words &lt;i&gt;over&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;of&lt;/i&gt; that you mentioned. One might analyze &lt;i&gt;cross&lt;/i&gt; as if it had elided from &lt;i&gt;crossed with&lt;/i&gt; in the same way that &lt;i&gt;inside&lt;/i&gt; as a preposition (&lt;i&gt;inside the trailer&lt;/i&gt;). In this way, &lt;i&gt;plus&lt;/i&gt; behaves as if it were &lt;i&gt;with the addition of&lt;/i&gt;: &lt;i&gt;one, with the addition of one, equals two.&lt;/i&gt; This model solves the problem of &quot;multiple conjuncts joined by the same conjunction&quot;: &lt;i&gt;the book in the bookcase in the room in the house&lt;/i&gt;, not *&lt;i&gt;the book, the bookcase, the room, in the house&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virtually all English adpositions are prepositions, but &lt;i&gt;times&lt;/i&gt; often acts as a postposition: &lt;i&gt;three times five&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;five three times&lt;/i&gt;. Consider the title of the song &quot;Three Times a Lady&quot; by the Commodores: &lt;i&gt;(three times) a lady&lt;/i&gt;, not *&lt;i&gt;three (times a lady)&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception to this is comparison operators, which turn two non-boolean values into a boolean value. These act as copulas (linking verbs, the same category as &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt;): &lt;i&gt;two plus three equals five&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;six is less than nine&lt;/i&gt;. They agree with a singular subject because an object in mathematics is a single thing even if its value exceeds one. I model these by treating the subject as an understood appositive &lt;i&gt;the number&lt;/i&gt;, as in &lt;i&gt;the number six is less than the number nine&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastActivityDate="2014-02-02T19:07:11.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2014-02-03T18:06:43.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, in Farsi (Persian) and Iranian languages, there is pro-drop which is optional to the speaker,&#xA;او به مدرسه رفت (he/she went to school)&#xA;به مدرسه رفت(went to school)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3122" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T02:08:06.333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T02:08:06.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6527" CreationDate="2014-02-03T20:11:34.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with P Elliott, of course, that FSMs are inadequate for modelling English grammar. However, given that we &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; talking about formal languages, &quot;grammar&quot; has a broader meaning; &lt;em&gt;formal grammar&lt;/em&gt;. Regular languages &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Expressive_power_and_compactness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;are equivalent&lt;/a&gt; to finite state automata. And finite state machines have been employed for spelling and morphology checking, correction and analysis (see [&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/C/C94/C94-1066.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kartunnen, 1994&lt;/a&gt;], [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.helsinki.fi/~tapirine/publications/Pirinen-2010-lrec.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pirinen &amp;amp; Linden, 2010&lt;/a&gt;], etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there you have it -- the application of regular grammar in English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-02-03T20:11:34.407" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6534" CreationDate="2014-02-03T23:48:42.100" Score="1" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Dutch friend were telling me that in Dutch there are technically two ways of using &quot;the&quot; in Dutch (het), but that there are no grammatical rules for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that is quite the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own language, Danish, we have &quot;En&quot; and &quot;Et&quot;. In English this would be &quot;a&quot; and &quot;an&quot;. In English the reasoning for these two are simple to explain. Vowel or non-vowel sound on the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Danish however, I could tell you that any Danish person knows when to use either but that they can't explain the rule at all. They &quot;just know when to use it&quot;. The rule have to do with gender of the word (I later discovered), but we never apply the rule consciously because we know subconsciously that what we say is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it's the same in Dutch with &quot;Het&quot;. I am sure there is a grammatical rule for the use of this. So if anyone knew I'd love to hear it as I haven't been able to find a definitive answer for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2056" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T13:23:21.860" Title="Does Dutch have two Het's? (English The)" Tags="&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-02-05T12:08:29.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2014-02-04T00:58:59.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article on Dutch grammatical genders&lt;/a&gt; shows that Dutch has 3 genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, with the masculine and feminine definite article being &quot;de&quot;, and the neuter one being &quot;het&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T13:23:21.860" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T13:23:21.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2014-02-04T02:53:25.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dutch does have two &lt;em&gt;het&lt;/em&gt;'s. One is the neuter singular definite article, the other is the neuter third-person singular pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ik heb het huis gezien&lt;/em&gt; 'I have seen &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; house'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ik heb het gezien&lt;/em&gt; 'I have seen &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T02:53:25.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-04T05:30:54.543" Score="4" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/346/2712&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, librik cited Orin Gensler's observation that Insular Celtic and Semitic share a surprisingly large feature complex. This makes it hard for a layman with ready access to only the &quot;Berlitz&quot; languages (as John McWhorter calls them in ''The Power of Babel'') to become familiar with how a language using verb-subject-object word order behaves without conflating VSO in general with this sort of Celto-Semitic Sprachbund in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Konstanz universals archive&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm aware of a few features predicted by universals to come along with VO (placing the verb before the object) for branching consistency reasons: noun before adjective or genitive, preposition before noun. But I'm interested in what other features VSO statistically pulls in compared to SVO. For example, VSO makes verb and object no longer form a surface VP constituent, and the need to cope with this in some way might bring in &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what other features are associated with VSO across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T00:27:45.303" Title="What morphosyntactic features are associated with VSO?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;vso&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-04T08:45:40.967" Score="4" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dependency grammar&lt;/a&gt;, DG and I have a question regarding constraints of DG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand why do we need &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;constituency grammars&lt;/a&gt;, CG and DG, however I don't completely understand the connections between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constraints of DG:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) every constituent has only one governor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very simple constraint, the same we can observe on the tree of CG, there is just no nodes with two parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) dependency grammar  forms tree, there is no cycles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely makes sense, the same is in CG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Projectivity. There is no intersections between the arcs of dependency tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a strange constraint, it doesn't follow from the CG, because the dependency relation we define only on the level of DG, there is no such a thing in  CG. And for some reason we should define them so that the arcs don't intersect.  But what the reason to do so? And in order to do so we need to change intuitive and simple rules of dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the DG is not a particular case of CG, we cannot derive DG from CG, just because there is no constant set of rules of defining dependency, so DG contains some new information CG doesn't have. If not projectivity constraint, could we talk about  constant set of rules and say the DG is the special case of CF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, what are the connection between DG and CG? What the role of projectivity in DG?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3123" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T13:03:12.587" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T13:03:12.587" Title="Dependency Grammar constraints" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6537" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6538" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" Score="0" Body="VSO: verb - subject - object word order." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:15:58.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:17:26.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:17:26.900" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:17:26.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6540" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:17:26.900" Score="0" Body="SOV: subject - object - verb word order." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T00:53:14.263" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T00:53:14.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:20:30.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-04T12:20:30.540" LastActivityDate="2014-02-04T12:20:30.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6542" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-02-04T12:20:30.540" Score="0" Body="subject - verb - object word order." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T17:16:07.093" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T17:16:07.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-05T04:37:29.400" Score="4" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of good resources on Chinese character frequency available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering about syllable frequency independent of characters, and also tone frequency both separate and in combination with syllable frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to properly derive this data from the character frequency due to characters having multiple readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T04:37:29.400" Title="Mandarin Chinese syllable and tone frequency (not character frequency)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6321" CreationDate="2014-02-05T08:13:41.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand on snailboat's comment above, you might want to consult Laurie Bauer’s ‘English Word Formation’ (Cambridge UP 1983) for some background here.  Quote (p. 87):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blocking&lt;/strong&gt; is the name given by Aronoff (1976: 43) to the phenomenon of the non-occurrence of a complex form because of the existence of another form.  The form which causes the blocking may itself be complex or simplex.  For example, Bolinger (1975: 109) points out that, despite the productivity of –er suffixation in English, there is no word ‘stealer’ because of the prior existence of the word ‘thief’ which carries the appropriate meaning;  the existence of forms like ‘bad’ and ‘small’ blocks the formation of *ungood and *unbig; the prior existence of ‘enlist’ prevents the use of ‘list’ as a verb with that meaning (Clark and Clark, 1979: 798).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, ‘stealer’ or ‘raper’ would be termed by Bauer ‘nonce formations’:  ‘new complex words coined by a speaker/writer on the spur of the moment to cover some immediate need.’ (p. 45)  Blocking takes place when these fail to lexicalize.  As Bauer details, linguists have suggested that there are some suffixes whose formations are never blocked, for instance –ness.  This leads them to posit ‘an inverse relationship  between productivity and lexicalization’.  It also implies that productivity is a cline phenomenon.  Interesting stuff!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Aronoff 1976 is ‘Word Formation in Generative Grammar’, by the way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T08:13:41.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-05T10:20:30.917" Score="0" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the word classes of the adverbial &quot;[...] which is why [...]&quot;?&#xA;is cannot be a lexical verb, can it? &#xA;I thought which is a relative pronoun, and why is an adverb of reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3098" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T06:36:18.060" Title="Word classes &quot;which is why&quot;" Tags="&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-05T11:04:36.773" Score="4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English speaker. What I would like to understand is - if a non native speaker who’s got a fairly decent command on the language (in this case say English) speaks to his or her kid in English, would it increase their kids grasp on English and the ability to comprehend the language better. In essence, does interacting with kids in a foreign language increase the kid’s grasp on a foreign language?  I understand accent, pronunciation, modulation, intonation all these aspects play an important role but my question is primarily about the usage, and by that I mean the usage of words, grammar, phrases, idioms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add one more parameter,  If the family is not resident in a native English speaking country, and in future if the kid travels to an English speaking country would they be able to seamlessly integrate into the English speaking community (nothing to do with cultural values, in this context), and would their ability to comprehend, read, write and speak be as good  OR nearly as good as the native speakers. Have you come across such cases wherein someone mastered a foreign language even without  staying in the country to which the language is native?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3124" LastEditorUserId="3124" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T08:04:45.490" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T00:27:18.997" Title="Mastering a foreign language without staying in a country to which the language is native" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-07T06:37:35.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6545" CreationDate="2014-02-05T14:25:00.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster lists &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; as adverbs. But in several cases, they appear to take a role that mirrors that of the pronoun &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, as a noun phrase head introducing a relative clause. Compare these examples that illustrate how &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; fill the noun-like role commonly associated with a pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;...which is why we do it&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This is why we do it&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This is how we do it&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This is what we do &lt;em&gt;[t]&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (where &lt;em&gt;[t]&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;trace&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How you're doing it is not how you're supposed to do it&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why you did it doesn't matter&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm telling you why it's a pronoun&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the thing that&quot;, &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the reason that&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;the way that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastActivityDate="2014-02-05T14:25:00.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2014-02-05T17:15:16.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sufformative refers to &quot;Perfect&quot; &quot;Inperfect&quot; etc. (1cp etc.) endings. See &lt;em&gt;Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar&lt;/em&gt; by Pratico and Van Pelt, p. 148 #6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3125" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-02-10T02:07:48.923" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T02:07:48.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6519" CreationDate="2014-02-05T18:31:03.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of completing incomplete sentences has actually been adressed&#xA;formally. There are many way to view it. Modifying the grammar is a&#xA;possibility, but not the best method in my opinion, at least if you&#xA;are too crude about it. There are very generic techniques for &lt;strong&gt;ill-formed input&lt;/strong&gt; that can be used to modify in various ways a non-grammatical input sentence, so as to make it grammatical. It can even use weights on the types of modifications considered so as to choose modifications with the smallest weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your problem is a special case. Existing general CF parsing algorithms (not necessarily as currently implemented) can handle that for you without any&#xA;modification of the grammar. Instead, to explain it succintly, you can&#xA;modify the sentence by adding automatically special wildcard symbols between words that can&#xA;stand either for any part of speech, or for a sequence of parts of&#xA;speech of arbitrary length, wherever you wish to allow for more&#xA;words. Then a chart parser can actually parse this input and produce a&#xA;parse forest that represents all the possible sentences that would fit&#xA;your sequence of words, with the necessary additions where you allowed it. Actually this parse forest is a grammar of the language specialized so&#xA;that it generates only grammatical sentences that fit your initial&#xA;pattern. Any small sentence that you generate with that grammar will&#xA;be an answer to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds a bit too easy, but it really is, and it works. It is a very general technique for correcting ill-formed input, and actually subsumes several specialized techniques that have been proposed in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a description of this technique in a rather old paper:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/C/C88/C88-1075.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Parsing Incomplete Sentences&lt;/a&gt; - B. Lang - Coling 88&#xA;(see section 4). It can also be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dickgrune.com/Books/PTAPG_2nd_Edition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grune-Jacobs book on parsing techniques&lt;/a&gt; in&#xA;the chapter &quot;Parsing as Intersection&quot;. The general idea regarding ill-formed input is also described succintly in a paper on parsing as intersection: &quot;Recognition can be harder than parsing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original technical description of the chart parsing technique may seem too mathematical or a&#xA;bit outdated, and the description by Grune and Jacobs may be simpler to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand it more simply, think of your initial&#xA;sequence augmented with wild cards as a finite state automaton that generates all sequences of&#xA;words that you would consider acceptable if they were grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, with the notation of the paper where &lt;strong&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; stands for a&#xA;single part of speech and &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;/strong&gt; stands for any sequence, the sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The red dog &lt;strong&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;  absolutely &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;/strong&gt;  always&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may be read as an automaton with a linear structure, except for a&#xA;loop (on the state between &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt;) that can generate an arbitrary number of parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                              ?&#xA;                                             / \&#xA;   The     red    dog      ?     absolutely  \ /   always&#xA;o ----&amp;gt; o ----&amp;gt; o ----&amp;gt; o ---&amp;gt; o ----------&amp;gt;  o  --------&amp;gt; O&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then chart parsing can be applied to such an automaton to produce a&#xA;shared forest for all the grammatical sequences in the language of the&#xA;finite state automaton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you may actually put more special symbols than you actually need. This will only result in more candidate sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying a chart parser to such an automaton can be done in the same&#xA;way that chart parsers can be applied to word lattices in speech&#xA;recognition. A word lattice can also be viewed as a finite state&#xA;automaton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, all this falls into a more general framework that understands&#xA;parsing as a way of computing the intersection of a phrase structure&#xA;language (not necessarily Context-Free) and a finite state automaton&#xA;representing a set of candidate sentences. The result is a parse forest for all the grammatically acceptable sentences that can be generated by the (non necessarily deterministic) finite state automaton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This represent a basic skeleton for the sentence completion procedure.  Then you may&#xA;have to use other devices to actually choose the words you want to&#xA;insert in place of the missing parts of speech. But that may depend on&#xA;your lexicon and semantic issues. It become more an issue of sentence generation, based on the result of an initial parse of what is given to you.&#xA;You may have to worry about semantics, but syntactic correctness is ensured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;strong&gt;use of NLTK and Python&lt;/strong&gt; for the purpose, I am not sure of&#xA;the adequacy of it as currently programmed, since I am not a user of&#xA;NLTK. However, since NLTK contains a general context-free parser, it&#xA;should be possible to modify it to get the result described above, as&#xA;general CF parsers all work more or less on the same principles. There&#xA;may be one subtle point about handling &quot;input loops&quot;, which amounts to&#xA;handling infinite ambiguity, often ignored by general CF parsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-03-03T12:06:01.147" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T12:06:01.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6552" CreationDate="2014-02-06T02:24:32.267" Score="2" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been using the two terms interchangeably. One of my assignments is asking me to identify cases of both suppletion and irregular inflection. I've been going over course notes/google to no avail--they seem like the same thing to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only bit of difference is that one seems to have a more synchronic focus, and the other a more diachronic one...what's up with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T06:19:04.507" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T20:24:43.250" Title="What's the difference between suppletion and irregular inflection?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6551" CreationDate="2014-02-06T05:32:57.607" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;irregular inflection&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a phonetically similar/same base&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;die Herz&lt;/em&gt; 'heart' nom.sg. - &lt;em&gt;des Herzens&lt;/em&gt; gen.sg., cf. &lt;em&gt;das Ohr&lt;/em&gt; 'ear' nom.sg. - &lt;em&gt;des Ohr(e)s&lt;/em&gt; gen.sg. (Wurzel 1990 :210)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;ox - oxen&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;mouse-mice&lt;/em&gt; (Bauer, Lieber and Plag 2013: 22)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;suppletion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically different bases (historically these forms belonged to different lexemes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;gut&lt;/em&gt; 'good'- &lt;em&gt;besser&lt;/em&gt; 'better'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;go - went&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-02-06T05:47:09.893" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T05:47:09.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-06T06:18:17.507" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm dabbling in Chinese lately and of course most of the vocabulary is new and the phonology is difficult, including tones, tone sandhi, unstressed syllables, and even some aspects of the vowels and consonants, especially in the way they map to Pinyin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I keep wondering about when learners overcome these initial challenges, what are the other most significant aspects which present barriers to adults acquiring the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Chinese has similar word order to English and they are both analytic but it can't all be plain sailing. Are there some difficult aspects of syntax, morphology, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T16:48:45.430" Title="Besides lexicon and phonology, what are the biggest differences in Mandarin that are hard for Westerners to learn?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6521" CreationDate="2014-02-06T08:12:01.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You identified a problem with the current theory of syntax. You can also ask your question another way: Is text subject to the same syntactic relationship we find within a sentence? Which indeed many early text linguists did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But both are wrong questions. Sentence is not a very good unit of description in language because it is an artifact of a particular kind of writing. Which is why many linguists would just stop at a clause and treat everything else as text. In that sense, any multiclausal sentences are just text and anything that keeps them together is a cohesive device (e.g. connectives, concatenation). If you look closely, the only way you can reliably identify a sentence is by the presence of a capital letter and a full stop. Even intonation patterns don't do it for longer sentences - which is why raising the pitch at the end of a really really long question sounds unnatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But looking at your example, you're really asking about the clause. Here you're dealing with both coordination, substitution and co-reference. There's no reason not to think of them as cohesive devices in this context, as well. People generally don't talk about the 'cohesion of a clause' but if the text consists of a single clause, it still has to be cohesive. In fact, even a text consisting of a single word has some cohesion. &quot;There!&quot; refers to an external place. &quot;Duck!&quot; refers to a situation. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T08:12:01.057" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1787" CreationDate="2014-02-06T08:18:28.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The only one I'm aware of is the list you mention. The reason is that relatively few people in linguistics actually still use the X IS Y format (mostly you find it in relatively superficial treatments). Most people see metaphor as much more complex and having a single list would simply lead to proliferation of metaphors like &quot;ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANLINESS IS EU NATIONALISM&quot; (made up example). So I think if we brought together a list of metaphor thus identified in the literature, we'd have a rather embarrassing mixture of various agendas. It would be an interesting project for someone, though. I once started compiling a list of metaphors used in education by people who were inspired by Lakoff and Johnson but didn't get very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-02-06T08:18:28.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36455" CreationDate="2014-02-06T17:55:50.690" Score="4" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Mandarin making more and more in-roads into Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, I'm wondering what characteristics set it apart from Standard Mandarin or other regional Mandarin dialects and/or accents spoken in the south.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking so much about native Mandarin speakers that have relocated to Hong Kong. But about Hong Kongers whose first language is Cantonese but also speak fluent Mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other areas where Mandarin is spoken with identifiable regional differences have Wikipedia articles, but Hong Kong does not. Compare the articles on Mandarin in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singaporean_Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Singapore&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taiwan&lt;/a&gt; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I previously &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/5779&quot;&gt;asked this question on Chinese.SE&lt;/a&gt; but I've reworded it to focus on Hong Kong Mandarin in comparison to other southern varieties.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T23:04:43.010" Title="Differences between Hong Kong Mandarin and southern Mandarin generally?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;&lt;languages-of-china&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1753" CreationDate="2014-02-06T20:43:08.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is not monolithic: some of its subsystems can be regarded as ‘(more) analytic’ and some ‘(more) synthetic’. Welsh is in this regard not different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There cannot be a linear quantitative scale or spectrum partially because of the this; language isn't made of one piece. If one looks for a simple number (‘Welsh is 0.65 synthetic and 0.35 analytic’) xe is bound to oversimplify and erase important, non-negligible details. Oversimplification, caused by mixing flattened descriptions of many language &lt;em&gt;en masse&lt;/em&gt;, is unfortunately too common in typology, resulting in contradictory and unusable conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, considering the language in question, let's take the Welsh verbal system — at least in Modern Literary Welsh, with which I'm more familiar — as an example. It is twofold: it has a basically synthetic sub-system (&lt;em&gt;canai&lt;/em&gt;, for example) and a basically analytic one (&lt;em&gt;oedd hi yn canu&lt;/em&gt;, for example). Even if we could quantify the analytic/synthetic-ness of each sub-system, how can one mix them in order to obtain a single, simple quantitative result? Should we calculate an average…? ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, different linguists might mean different things when using these terms. For introductory reading, I'd recommend chapters V and VI of Sapir's &lt;a href=&quot;http://bartleby.com/186/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3132" LastEditorUserId="3132" LastEditDate="2014-02-08T19:12:59.397" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T19:12:59.397" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-07T01:59:34.017" Score="0" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find it hard to quickly switch between communication conventions in the colloquial speech, and those in a technical environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of this comes from ambiguities of how English as a langue is used, and how loosely or tightly the meaning of the words I'm saying are meant to be translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any tricks that I can employ commonly across both styles of speech for dealing with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;related:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6409/what-range-of-strategies-are-common-in-natural-languages-for-providing-unambiguo&quot;&gt;What range of strategies are common in natural languages for providing unambiguous answers to negative yes-no questions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3135" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T01:59:34.017" Title="What are the best ways to remove ambiguities in spoken English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-07T05:16:13.667" Score="5" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a multilingual online dictionary and I need an open source English dictionary to work off of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordnet is the obvious choice, as it's extremely complete and its license is permissive of commercial use, but unfortunately the senses are much too fine-grained for my purposes. Wordnet also contains many definitions that are too domain specific. For instance, when my users search &amp;quot;bus&amp;quot;, I'd like them to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a vehicle carrying many passengers; used for public transport&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bus topology, the topology of a network whose components are connected&#xA;by a busbar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;busbar, an electrical conductor that makes a common connection between&#xA;several circuits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one option is to perform sense clustering on Wordnet and then disambiguate between the resulting senses in a very general corpus of English text (and return only the most frequent senses)... ugh! I'm hoping someone has done this already? Or better yet there exists an open source, coarse-grained dictionary of general English that I'm not yet aware of? Many thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T14:56:36.627" Title="Is there an open source English dictionary that isn't too fine-grained in defining a word?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3378" CreationDate="2014-02-07T05:26:33.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preface: I don't know of an online tool for this, and I agree that the real solution is to practice IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are a number of alternative phonetic alphabets (as James Grossman mentioned, though SAMPA is probably worse than IPA). Some of them might be easier to read: ARPAbet (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet&lt;/a&gt;) is relatively approachable, for example. However, it still requires some learning to be able to read quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd also need either a dictionary containing both transcriptions to search for words in (extant words only), or an IPA-to-ARPAbet converter; the latter is actually nontrivial because the phones in an IPA string aren't necessarily delimited, there's not an exact correspondence between most phonetic alphabets, and IPA may be used for either phonemic or phonetic transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling, I found this Praat script which appears to contain an IPA-to-ARPAbet conversion function (&lt;a href=&quot;http://students.washington.edu/riebold/files/Arpabet%20Vowel%20Analyzer.praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://students.washington.edu/riebold/files/Arpabet%20Vowel%20Analyzer.praat&lt;/a&gt;); and this Haskell file which seems to contain ARPAbet-to-IPA (&lt;a href=&quot;http://rd.slavepianos.org/sw/sw-83/Sound/SC3/Lang/Data/CMUdict.hs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://rd.slavepianos.org/sw/sw-83/Sound/SC3/Lang/Data/CMUdict.hs&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T05:26:33.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6577" CreationDate="2014-02-07T07:01:41.797" Score="2" ViewCount="927" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an annotation tool which can create annotation tasks automatically using an XML schema?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desirable annotation markup may be specified with an XML schema file. I'd like to be able to import the XML schema into a GUI annotation tool. The tool can then generate markup elements (e. g., in a combobox associated with a fragment of text) corresponding to the elements specified in the schema. I would like to be able to export the text in the XML format correspoding with the schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a Callisto annotation tool, which supports DTD for such tasks. But I haven't found any which supports XML Schema&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3136" LastEditorUserId="3136" LastEditDate="2014-02-08T12:40:54.593" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T01:22:37.403" Title="annotation tool to work with XML Schema" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2014-02-07T11:05:20.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=bus&amp;amp;sub=Search+WordNet&amp;amp;o2=1&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=1&amp;amp;o5=1&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=1&amp;amp;o3=1&amp;amp;o4=1&amp;amp;h=000000000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this WordNet entry for bus&lt;/a&gt;. The senses are already ranked according to how common they are. In addition to that, the first (optional) field, between parentheses, gives an indication of how frequently each word-sense was seen. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wndb.5WN.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Frequency of use is determined by the number of times a sense is tagged in the various semantic concordance texts&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this number corresponds with anything outside the WordNet corpus. However, just stripping away all the senses that don't have this number should help you achieve your goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-02-07T17:12:03.703" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T17:12:03.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-07T13:33:18.087" Score="2" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working in a project where i need to use an ngram model. So, i want to know if an Arabic ngram corpus exist. I have tried to find a corpus but all my researches failed. I know that for languages like English there exist such a corpus (Google ngram corpus for instance but i want an arabic corpus). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2750" LastEditorUserId="2750" LastEditDate="2014-02-08T09:09:59.620" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T09:09:59.620" Title="I am looking for an Arabic ngram corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2014-02-07T15:01:19.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the academic phonological analysis is true only to a small extent. It's more social than physiological: to be palatable to American audiences, and because of the American vernacular being strongly associated with blues and rock n' roll. You can't sing “ain't nothin' but a hound dog” in any accent other than the original, otherwise it sounds weird. Why do non-English-speaking countries sing in American English? The same reason. Because that's what they grew up with, and to reach the audience that will appreciate their sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rock band Lostprophets are a perfect example. Here's their song &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjKmCxyKmas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Fake Sound of Progress&lt;/a&gt;. They sound very American, but they're Welsh. And the Welsh accent is a very distinct accent. The decision to project an image of being American has clearly been very successful for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now compare with rock band &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma9I9VBKPiw&amp;amp;t=0m20s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Arctic Monkeys&lt;/a&gt;, the vocalist Alex Turner is from Sheffield, north of England, and has a very distinct Sheffield accent even when singing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXqYajt67J4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Blur&lt;/a&gt;. Essex, sourthern England. Very southern accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRu6YRr1KtM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oasis&lt;/a&gt;, from Manchester. Very manc accent. Huge in the UK. Not well known in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGkhlqyXzRU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Last Shadow Puppets&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; northern English accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also compare with rock band &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamKl-su8PE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kaiser Chiefs&lt;/a&gt; from Yorkshire, north of England. Also very distinct accent and dialect. “Not very pretty I tell thee” is a very northern turn of phrase that would have no meaning outside the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pulp&lt;/a&gt;, from Sheffield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd8cnPUMPF0&amp;amp;t=3m0s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elbow&lt;/a&gt;, from Lancashire. Guy Garvey (the signer) sounds just like he talks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, there are a lot of big Brit rock bands  you've probably never heard of. I've noted that these are less well known in the US than the UK. Imitating the American accent has a long tradition. The exception to this rule where the English accent is retained is in the punk rock movement starting from the 70's, and a little bit in the Britpop genre in the 90's (e.g. Oasis and Blur) and to a smaller extent in the 2000's (the other bands I've listed above). I wouldn't claim that breaking the US requires having an accessible broad American accent, I'd lean more towards retaining your native accent to be a sign of uncompromising personal pride in where you come from. It takes courage to sing as yourself, and not to imitate clichés you've heard growing up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3140" LastActivityDate="2014-02-07T15:01:19.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6570" CreationDate="2014-02-08T03:52:53.587" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, a noun phrase might break up into these ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You should eat [noun phrase]&#xA;You should eat fish&#xA;You should eat the fish&#xA;You should eat the fresh fish&#xA;&#xA;You should eat NP(N)&#xA;You should eat NP(Det, N)&#xA;You should eat NP(Det, Adj, N)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a finite number of possibilities for the way a noun phrase might be constructed? Or is there an infinite number of possibilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering because I'm starting to see papers that talk about &lt;em&gt;machine learning techniques for noun-phrase detection&lt;/em&gt;, but if there are a finite amount of combinations, then it seems someone would have a complete list of rules or something out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T14:11:22.543" Title="Are there a finite number of noun phrase rules for nlp?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6566" CreationDate="2014-02-08T08:00:48.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it can be easily proven that there are an infinite number of possible noun phrases, AND also that that infinite set can be generated by a finite number of (recursive) rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3094" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T08:00:48.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2014-02-08T12:33:55.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try using &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the English Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. You can download a dump from &lt;a href=&quot;http://dumps.wikimedia.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; look for &lt;code&gt;enwiktionary&lt;/code&gt;. Its structure is quite straight-forward, so it should not be too much of a problem to automatically remove all of the non-English entries and re-format it in a structure you can use for your purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, …, may I ask why do you want to create a multilingual online dictionary? There already are many in existence (Wiktionary (wiktionary.org), to name one, is a community-based, open-source, open-content multilingual dictionary). What is the benefit in having another one? Do you have the resources and ability to create and maintain such a project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3132" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T12:33:55.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6566" CreationDate="2014-02-08T14:11:22.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A noun phrase is only what you (or the linguist you learn from) define&#xA;it to be. Different understandings of a language could possibly lead&#xA;to different definitions of what constitute a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you have some precise idea of what constitute a noun&#xA;phrase, you then have to express that idea so that you can communicate&#xA;it to others. To communicate it precisely, you need to express it with&#xA;some kind of formal (mathematical ?) structure or notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to do that, a simple one being phrase structure&#xA;grammars introduced by Chomsky half a century ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a grammar is constituted of rules describing how phrases (a noun&#xA;phrase for example) are built by putting together (sub-)phrases and&#xA;parts of speech (words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example you could add to your lists of examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should eat NP(NP, Prep, NP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should eat fish from the blue sea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a noun phrase composed with two other noun&#xA;phrases &quot;fish&quot; and &quot;the blue sea&quot;, and a preposition, according to a&#xA;recursive rule.  Examples can be more complex and involve different&#xA;kinds of phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such recursive rules can allow you to make arbitrarily long noun&#xA;phrases, and thus you can have an infinite number of noun phrases,&#xA;though all defined with a finite number of rules (of ways to construct&#xA;them): I added only one rule to your set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, whether you have an infinite or a finite number of phrases of a&#xA;given type depends on the way you understand your language and wish to&#xA;describe it. In general, people do understand languages as having an&#xA;infinite number of noun phrases, which can be characterized by a&#xA;finite number of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I insist on the fact that it all depends on the linguist's&#xA;understanding because there is not &quot;a complete list of rules or&#xA;something out there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually there are usually many such lists for a given language, corresponding to different&#xA;understandings of the structure of the language, corresponding to&#xA;different linguistic theories. It does not show too much for simple&#xA;noun phrases, but the complete description of a language goes far&#xA;beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there are also different ways of expressing the structure&#xA;of the language, with rules or otherwise. The world is a complicated place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-02-08T14:11:22.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-08T20:24:40.650" Score="9" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some examples of negators that have a known (or even conjectured) etymology? What kinds of non-negative meanings can develop into negative meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymologizable negators I know of all arise from a kind of syntagm where a negative is used together with some other element, and that element then takes on the negative meaning, with the original negator sometimes disappearing. Examples are French &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; 'step', &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; 'person'; Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; 'life'; and English &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;ne wight&lt;/em&gt; 'no creature/thing' (where the original negator &lt;em&gt;n-&lt;/em&gt; has remained).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other etymological pathways which can result in negators? I'm interested in any item which falls broadly under the &quot;negative&quot; umbrella: not just verbal negators, but nominal ones (e.g. German &lt;em&gt;kein&lt;/em&gt;/Dutch &lt;em&gt;geen&lt;/em&gt;), negative predicators (e.g. Hungarian &lt;em&gt;nincs&lt;/em&gt; 'is not', Hebrew &lt;em&gt;eyn&lt;/em&gt; 'there is not'), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T07:25:12.993" Title="Diachronic sources of negators" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-08T22:07:13.697" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all languages have adjectives;   some use adjectival nouns (&quot;red.one&quot; instead of &quot;red&quot;) and/or stative verbs (&quot;be.red&quot; instead of &quot;red&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among languages that have adjectives, not all allow comparison of adjectives, and not all adjectives take agreement suffixes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I haven't been able to find on the Net is which kind of inflections for adjectives are the most common across languages that have a word class of adjectives that is morphologically distinct from, say, genitives and relative clauses.   No inflections?  Inflection for comparison?  Agreement?  Something else?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T12:15:02.407" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T12:15:02.407" Title="Across languages that have adjectives, what are the most common grammatical inflections for adjectives?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6580" CreationDate="2014-02-09T23:54:31.030" Score="4" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed in a word like &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt;, the 〈s〉 is pronounced not like a fricative but as the affricate [t͡s] because it is followed by the nasal consonant /n/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this phenomenon (a fricative turning to an affricate when it follows a nasal consonant) true, and if so why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3144" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-10T16:54:09.287" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T16:54:09.287" Title="Do fricatives turn into affricates after nasal consonants, and why?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6574" CreationDate="2014-02-10T00:36:32.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a form of epenthesis. It is quite common, but not universal, and varies both between speakers and with other factors, such as how quickly they are speaking. Whether it appears of not depends on the fine detail of the timing of the different articulatory actions: whether the glottis closes a moment before, a moment after, or at the same time as the tongue leaves the alveolus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, there is often a 't' audible in the sequence /ns/, and sometimes a 'p' in /mf/ (as in &quot;triumph&quot;); but I don't think a stop often appears in the sequences /nz/ (eg &quot;men's&quot;), or /nθ/ (eg &quot;anthem&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T00:36:32.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6562" CreationDate="2014-02-10T01:58:11.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gate.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GATE&lt;/a&gt; is a fairly well known and widely used annotation tool. It allows users to specify &lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/splitch5.html#sec%3acorpora%3aschemas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;customized annotation schemas using XML&lt;/a&gt;. I also believe it natively lets you &lt;a href=&quot;http://gate-users-mailing-list-archive-read-only-no-new-topics-or-rep.1053641.n5.nabble.com/Exporting-to-XML-annotations-and-features-td5000751.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;export your corpus to XML&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would caution you that GATE is very much a tool by engineers for engineers. The interface is a bit clunky and the GATE server requires quite a bit of initial set up. It's most suitable for projects with multiple annotators working concurrently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T01:58:11.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-10T07:01:56.237" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of polarity and emotion lexica that give either a score or a classification as if the score or classification were known. But are there any lexica that for each term or phrase gives the &lt;em&gt;probability&lt;/em&gt; that it is in a particular sentiment class, and for each of the classes in a particular grouping (e.g., pos/neg, various emotions)? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3146" LastEditorUserId="1508" LastEditDate="2014-02-15T05:10:58.457" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T05:10:58.457" Title="Do probabilistic sentiment lexica exist?" Tags="&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6574" CreationDate="2014-02-10T13:07:08.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is indeed quite common, and it makes sense if you think about it in articulatory terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the sequence /ns/. For most speakers, [n] and [s] are quite similar, if not the same, in terms of their place of articulation. But they differ in terms of manner and voicing. The nasal [n] is produced with a full oral closure, an open nasal passage, and voicing, while the fricative [s] is produced with only a partial oral closure, a closed nasal passage, and no voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to transition from an [n] to an [s], three things must happen: (1) The front of the tongue must re-position itself a bit in order to release some air out of the mouth, (2) The velum must raise to block air from escaping through the nose, and (3) The glottis needs to open to allow the passage of air without the oscillation of the vocal folds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all three of these independent articulatory actions happen simultaneously, the [n] transitions into an [s] without any intermediate output. However, if (2) and (3) happen slightly before (1), there is a short period of time when voicing has ceased and air is not escaping through the nose &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the mouth, with the oral closure being that of the [n], i.e. alveolar.  What is the resulting speech segment? The voiceless alveolar stop, [t]! Once (1) kicks in the air gets released and the [t] &quot;gives way&quot; to the fricative [s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, whether we decide to call the resulting [ts] sequence a stop-fricative sequence or an affricate is in some sense academic, since the [t] is really just the result of the [n] and the [s] overlapping articulatorily. (Wow, try to say that last sentence three times fast without any epenthetic [t]s!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-02-10T14:34:37.300" LastActivityDate="2014-02-10T14:34:37.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-10T21:28:40.740" Score="9" ViewCount="1259" Body="&lt;p&gt;The active sentences (1a) and (2a) below can be passivized just like most English active clauses, resulting in (1b) and (2b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1a. His candor struck me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1b. I was struck by his candor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a. Her ideas impress me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b. I am impressed by her ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with the additions below, passivization becomes ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a. His candor struck me as excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3b. *I was struck by his candor as excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4a. Her ideas impress me as farfetched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4b. *I am impressed by her ideas as farfetched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T12:33:58.817" Title="Why can't these English sentences passivize?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6553" CreationDate="2014-02-11T11:30:04.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What can be difficult is highly personal and mother-tongue-dependent, so let me mention just two features of Chinese that seem hard to master, as for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar#Classifiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Classifiers&lt;/a&gt; can pose a difficulty, since they are not used in European languages, they are an areal feature of East Asian languages, and there are many and many dozens of them in Chinese. Now there is a tendency to substitute most of them with a universal classifier 个 [個] gè, still for understanding and reading the texts one has to know them. Numerals and (sometimes) demonstratives must agree with the following NP with a suitable classifier. In this respect it looks similar to European genders, but 2 or 3 genders cannot compare with a hundred of classifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar#Particles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentence-final particles&lt;/a&gt; can also be difficult, since one has to study the peculiarities of their meaning in detail, for they can change the meaning of a sentence completely, and they are not typically used in European languages either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T11:30:04.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6553" CreationDate="2014-02-11T16:48:45.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone with a knowledge of Japanese, when I was studying Mandarin I found I had a distinct advantage over my English-only-speaking peers on several fronts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of classifiers (mentioned by @Yellow Sky)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of sentence-final particles (also mentioned by @Yellow Sky)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Constructions using the &lt;em&gt;-de&lt;/em&gt; (的) particle, which result in a word order that is ostensibly non-English. Often the particle behaves like a genitive &lt;em&gt;-'s&lt;/em&gt;, but when the particle follows a larger noun phrase it's more natural to translate into English with &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, which requires a different word order. Sometimes it behaves like a complementizer and, again, since it appears at the end of the relative clause, it results in a word order that is flipped from what English speakers are used to. Coming from Japanese, these heavy phrases preceding the head noun felt quite natural to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one other thing that constantly tripped English speakers up--in this case my knowledge of Japanese didn't really help me other than to keep me less biased towards one particular language's (see what I did there?) way of doing things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of &lt;em&gt;shì&lt;/em&gt; (是) as a copula &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; for linking nouns to nouns. Over and over I would hear students trying to use the construction N + &lt;em&gt;shì&lt;/em&gt;+ Adj (e.g., &lt;em&gt;I am hungry&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-02-11T16:48:45.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-12T00:25:22.070" Score="1" ViewCount="1982" Body="&lt;p&gt;Might seem like a stupid question but I'm rather confused right now! :) Also if anyone has any answers to the following...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these phonetic forms of Hebrew words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[v] – [b]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bika ‘lamented’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mugbal ‘limited’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ʃavar ‘broke’ (masc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ʃavra ‘broke’ (fem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ʔikev ‘delayed’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bara ‘created’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[f] – [p]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;litef ‘stroked’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sefer ‘book’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sataf ‘washed’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;para ‘cow’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ʔmitpaxat ‘handkerchief’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;haʔalpim ‘the Alps’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that these words and their phonetic sequences are representative of what may&#xA;occur in Hebrew. In your answer, consider classes of sounds rather than individual&#xA;sounds.&#xA;a) Are [b] and [v] allophones of one phoneme? Are they in complementary&#xA;distribution? In what phonetic environments do they occur? Can you&#xA;formulate a phonological rule stating their distribution?&#xA;b) Does the same rule, or lack of a rule, that describes the distribution of [b]&#xA;and [v] apply to [p] and [f]? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the rest of the question, if anyone wants to help out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Here is a word with one phone missing. A blank appears in place of the&#xA;missing sound: hid_&lt;strong&gt;__&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ik. Select the correct statement from the list&#xA;below:&#xA;1. [b] but not [v] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;2. [v] but not [b] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;3. Either [b] or [v] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;4. Neither [b] nor [v] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;d) Which of the following statements is correct about the incomplete word&#xA;_&lt;/em&gt;__ana?&#xA;1. [f] but not [p] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;2. [p] but not [f] could occur in the empty slot.&#xA;3. Either [p] or [f] could fill the blank.&#xA;4. Neither [p] nor [f] could fill the blank.&#xA;e) Now consider the following possible words (in phonetic transcription):&#xA;laval surva labal palar falu razif&#xA;If these words actually occurred in Hebrew, would they:&#xA;1. Force you to revise the conclusions about the distribution of labial stops&#xA;and fricatives you reached on the basis of the first group of words given&#xA;above?&#xA;2. Support your original conclusions?&#xA;3. Neither support nor disprove your original conclusions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3151" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T09:16:48.870" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T12:48:32.293" Title="Is it possible to have an underlying phoneme in complementary distribution?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;compl-distribution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, &lt;strong&gt;complementary distribution&lt;/strong&gt; is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment. It often indicates that two superficially different elements are in fact the same linguistic unit at a deeper level. In some instances, more than two elements can be in complementary distribution with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" Score="0" Body="Complementary distribution" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T09:18:40.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6585" CreationDate="2014-02-12T11:20:08.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In classical (Biblical) Hebrew there was indeed a complementary distribution between hard /p, b, t, d, k, g/ and their soft allophones. For example, post-vocalic [f] is in complementary distribution with post-vocalic geminated [pp] and with initial and post-consonantal [p]. In modern (Israeli) Hebrew gemination is lost, so /p/ &amp;lt; -pp and /f/ &amp;lt; -f are separate phonemes. Also, in initial position modern Hebrew has /f/ in loanwords, contrasting with /p/ in native words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-02-12T11:20:08.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6594" CreationDate="2014-02-13T04:48:02.460" Score="4" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Witness this noun phrase that has an attributive adjective:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the angry girl&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Witness this sentence that has a predicate adjective:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The girl is angry.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both adjectives in the last two examples can be modified by adverbs:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the constantly angry girl&quot; &quot;The girl is constantly angry.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, prepositional phrases seem to me to be ungrammatical when modifying attributive adjectives.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;??the angry with her brother girl&quot;   &quot;The girl is angry with her brother.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So too with modifier complement clauses:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;??the so angry that she could have had a heart attack girl&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The girl was so angry that she could have had a heart attack.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my attributive adjective examples ungrammatical or just ugly?   If they are ungrammatical in English, are they also ungrammatical in other languages?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-13T09:47:22.233" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T13:01:42.080" Title="Can predicate adjectives take more modifiers than attributive adjectives in English? Across languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2014-02-13T14:40:45.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that “the angry with her brother girl” is not grammatically correct in English, though you might have a hard time finding a rule to that effect in an English grammar. On the other hand, the exact equivalent is perfectly acceptable in, for example, German (“das mit seinem Bruder zornige Mädchen”). So there is no “cross-linguistic” ban on this sort of structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T14:40:45.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2014-02-13T15:56:53.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not quite true that these heavy phrases cannot be used as attributive adjectives in English. They can; but they cannot occupy the ordinary prenominal attributive &lt;em&gt;position&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, they are postposited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The plainly-dressed brown-eyed girl angry with her brother stormed out of the room; the other girls remained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some folks treat this as &amp;lsquo;reduced relative clause&amp;rsquo;, but that strikes me as an unnecessary complication, particularly in light of the contrasting construction of the same constituents in German which fdb cites. To my mind, the difference is that German places more importance on keeping the subject and the verb next to each other than English does, whereas English places more importance on maintaining left modification inside the determiner-to-noun chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to shift such phrases to other locations&amp;mdash;but there they tend to be understood as bearing at least some degree of sentential modification as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Angry with her brother, the girl stormed out of the room.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The girl stormed out of the room, angry with her brother.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these imply a causal relationship between the anger and the storming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2014-02-13T16:08:54.743" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T16:08:54.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-13T16:40:01.923" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a multilingual, and since syntax structures vary between various languages, it seems intuitive to me that translation software use syntactic rules to translate between languages. But when I see translation from English to Japanese, I'm puzzled as simple syntax rules seem to be ignored in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the same word can have different meanings adjacent to others, and that causes issues during computing a translation, but wouldn't Syntactic trees help with that? In knowing which phrase a morpheme is in, and what morphemes are in other parts of the phrase, shouldn't it be easier to compute a more accurate translation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3158" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-14T09:17:42.607" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T14:39:07.343" Title="Does translation software use syntactic trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6595" CreationDate="2014-02-13T17:16:15.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Purely statistical MT systems don't use parse trees. However most of today's MT systems use hybrid architectures, i.e. there's at least a shallow syntax module or something alike.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Parse trees can't help with semantic ambiguity. Whatever depends on context is dealt with later in the phase called (pragmatic) interpretation. Syntax provides some hints but what's decisive are semantic rules and constraints. Correct disambiguation always depends on context and common knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-02-13T17:16:15.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-13T22:59:34.297" Score="2" ViewCount="1731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a great similarity between the two words and their meanings.&#xA;&quot;Barary&quot; براري in Arabic is the plural form of &quot;Barr-īyah&quot; بَرِّيَّة, from the word &quot;Barr&quot; meaning land, with the nisbah suffix -īyah, which means pertaining to land, and its plural form was used a lot in Classical Arabic meaning vast lands -very close to the meaning in English.-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched the online etymology dictionary for prairie and this is what I found: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;tract of level or undulating grassland in North America, by 1773, from French prairie &quot;meadow, grassland,&quot; from Old French praerie &quot;meadow, pastureland&quot; (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *prataria, from Latin pratum &quot;meadow,&quot; originally &quot;a hollow.&quot; The word existed in Middle English as prayere, but was lost and reborrowed to describe the American plains. Prairie dog is attested from 1774; prairie schooner &quot;immigrant's wagon&quot; is from 1841. Illinois has been the Prairie State since at least 1861. In Latin, Neptunia prata was poetic for &quot;the sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder, isn't what I mention worth thinking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3161" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-14T09:06:18.010" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T23:35:51.290" Title="Can the word &quot;prairie&quot; be derived from the arabic word &quot;barary&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-14T07:57:19.820" Score="0" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an authoritative link or a standard which linguists use as a reference point (to compare). It would be not bad if someone knows more or less right phonemes (wav) links (with correct formants ..etc). Only direct links to wav-files. (If it's free and isn't proprietary of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All 44 of them. For example: ash, epsilon, schwa, theta, wedge...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1508" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T13:37:27.383" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T13:37:27.383" Title="Where do I get all the phonemes of RP English in audio?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6601" CreationDate="2014-02-14T08:14:48.200" Score="6" ViewCount="1866" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I had asked this question here previously but it turns out &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1831&quot;&gt;that I asked about ejectives rather than aspirated stops&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this time I would like to ask whether there are languages that have a phonemic distinction between the three types of stop consonants common in European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voiced: &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/g/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unvoiced unaspirated: &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unvoiced aspirated: &lt;code&gt;/pʰ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/tʰ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/kʰ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in how speakers of languages that distinguish only two of these three classes adapt when learning a language that distinguishes all three at the phoneme level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first I need to know which languages there are that have the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T13:50:15.527" Title="Languages with a three-way distinction between voiced, aspirated, and unaspirated stops" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6600" CreationDate="2014-02-14T10:21:46.673" Score="15" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;Middle Indian languages&lt;/strong&gt;, and most modern &lt;strong&gt;Indo-Aryan languages&lt;/strong&gt; have a four-way distinction p~ph~b~bh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punjabi has lost the bh-series (‘voiced aspirates’) and replaced it by a difference in tone, so it can be argued that Punjabi has only a three-way distinction p~ph~b (though it could also be argued that it has a four-way distinction at a phonological level at that the aspiration of the bh-series is realised phonetically as a tone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pioneering scholars in &lt;strong&gt;Indo-European&lt;/strong&gt; posited for &lt;strong&gt;proto-IE&lt;/strong&gt; a four-way distinction as in Sanskrit, but most modern Indo-Europeanists think they can get by with a three-way distinction *p~*b~*bh and explain the Indian ph-series as a combination of the p-series with a laryngeal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Classical Greek&lt;/strong&gt; had a three-way distinction p(π)~ph(φ)~b(β).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A similar three-way system has been proposed for &lt;strong&gt;Old&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Middle Chinese&lt;/strong&gt;, but in most (all?) modern Chinese dialects the p~b contrast has been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt; has a three-way contrast in the dental/alveolar series only: t~th~d (the latter written đ).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure there are more examples, but this might do for a start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-02-14T13:58:11.447" LastActivityDate="2014-02-14T13:58:11.447" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6167" CreationDate="2014-02-14T15:44:35.137" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit to clarify that I used the full declaration and not only the article 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to answer your question is to have a sample of the same long text translated in many languages. The only example I know is the universal declaration of human right, which has 380 reasonably complete translations hosted at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/udhr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.unicode.org/udhr/&lt;/a&gt;. Then one just has to count the characters and have the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Caveats of the method&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the method has several caveats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Variety of the Translations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the website, different orthographies of the same language correspond to different translations, which is probably what explains the difference between the two Chinese versions (3737 characters vs 4677). The amplitude of the difference in the two Chinese versions is quite big (20%) for two orthographies which have one character/syllable and encode the same language. It may reflect the stylistic difference of the two translators, and I suppose that this difference can be used as a warning to take all the number below with a big grain of salt. The error bars are likely to be bigger than 20%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the translation do not contain the preamble, while most of the texts contain it. So it’s not exactly the same text each time. Other differences might exist, since I guess no one can check all the 380 languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve come across two identical  texts for different languages (Ashéninka Perené and Cashinahua). I guess it’s a technical error, and other errors are probably in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Specific nature of the text.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a legal text. Poetry, love letters, or historic tales have no reason to have the same succinctness. For example, the translation of article 1 in “Ashéninka, Pichis” seems to turn 2 sentences into 5, with a quote. I can only make sense of this if this article needs to define terms which don’t have exact translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Definition of a character&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have use the simplest definition of a character : it is a Unicode character in the file, as encoded in the file (below the copyright boilerplate). However, this definition has several problems :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The files are full of white spaces &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are not normalized, neither as NFC (é is one character) nor NFD (é would be e+acute accente : 2 character). The upside of this is the presumed use of the more usual form for a language (NFC for Korean, an unnormalized version for Vietnamese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The definition kept by Unicode has sometimes more to do with the history of digital encoding of the scripts than with the real linguistic status of an entity as a character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet where the 2 or 3 letters (jamos) describing a syllable are placed in a square of the size of a Chinese character. Currently, there are two canonically equivalent  ways of encoding a Korean syllable in Unicode : one (NFC) with one character, and one (NFC) with a character for each jamo, that is two or three characters/syllable. All that should of course be invisible to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An other set of example is the way abugidas are encoded. An abugida is an alphabet where the vowel is essentially a diacritic added to the consonant. So the graphical unit is a syllable, but one can distinguish both the consonant and the vowel in this graphical unit. Some of them, like the Ethiopic Ge'ez, used for Amharic, are encoded with one character/syllable while other, like most (all?) Indic scripts are encoded as a complex script with one character/consonnant and vowel, that is typically two character/syllable. While one could argue that this factor 2 corresponds to a more succinct digital representation of the script in the Unicode standard, it does not to corresponds to anything in term of the script itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most succinct language is Mandarin Chinese, in traditional characters, followed by the same language in simplified characters. With little surprise, in the 10 most succinct languages, one has languages with one syllable per character (Chinese, Yi, Amharic, Korean) and Japanese (which is a very special system). However, a few languages (Waama, Even, Cashinahua ,Beti) written in an alphabetical system (latin and cyrillic) make it into the top 10, while some 1 character/syllable don’t make it (Tigrina, Cree, Vai, etc.) and no abjad (alphabet without the vowels) makes it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Article 1 in various languages, as an illustration.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the article 1 of this declaration in a few languages sorted by the total number of character used in the declaration. This number given after the language name and counts the number of characters in the full declaration (i.e. the 30 articles, and the preamble when present).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first give 10 the most succinct languages, then English for reference, and the least succinct language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chinese, Mandarin (Traditional) : 3737&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第一條&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;人人生而自由，在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。他們賦有理性和良心，並應以兄弟關係的精神相對待。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chinese, Mandarin (Simplified) : 4677&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第一条&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;人人生而自由,在尊严和权利上一律平等。他们赋有理性和良心,并应以兄弟关系的精神相对待。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Yi, Sichuan : 4910&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ꋍꏢꏡꌠ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ꊿꂷꃅꄿꐨꐥ，ꌅꅍꀂꏽꐯꒈꃅꐥꌐ。ꊿꊇꉪꍆꌋꆀꁨꉌꑌꐥ，ꄷꀋꁨꂛꊨꅫꃀꃅꐥꄡꑟ。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Waama : 5121&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pɔpɔɔma (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yiriba na bà sikindo dare bà mɛɛri, da seena yirimma mii bà ta da i nɛki bà tɔɔba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Even : 5299 (no preamble)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Статья 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Бэйил бокэтчур омэн хилкич нян урумкэр балдаритно, теми ноҥардук эгдьэн ҥи‐да ачча. Бэйил бөкэтчур мэн долан акагчимур биннэтын.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ashéninka Perené or Cashinahua : 5576&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The the files are almost identical ! It's probably an error. I guess that the following is in one of the languages, but I don’t know which.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Artículo 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yudabu dasibi jabiaskadi akin, xinantidubuki. Javen taea jau jaibunamenunbunven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Japanese : 5865&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;第１条&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Amharic : 6393 (No preamble)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;አንቀጽ፡፩፤&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;የሰው፡ልጅ፡ሁሉ፡ሲወለድ፡ነጻና፡በክብርና፡በመብትም፡እኩልነት፡ያለው፡ነው።፡የተፈጥሮ፡ማስተዋልና፡ሕሊና፡ስላለው፡አንዱ፡ሌላውን፡በወንድማማችነት፡መንፈስ፡መመልከት፡ይገባዋል።&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Korean : 6400&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The file is in NFC: 1 character per syllable. A file dormalized in NFD, with 1 character/jamo would be two or three times longer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;제 1 조&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Beti : 7428&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Atiñ 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abiali bod bese, tege ai sesala, bene etie dzia a mis memvende y'enyiñ, dzom dzia etu fili nkóbó, fili ntsogan, fili mboan. Ve abiali te, mod ose ayem dze ene abe, dze ene mbeñ asu e mod mbog antoa ai mfi na enyiñ ewulu mezen mene sosoo.&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English : 12322&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Article 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ashéninka, Pichis : 28432&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IÑAAPINCATHAYEETERI 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maaroni atziripayeeni, ovaquera intzimapaaque, eero ocantzi iñaashitacaavaitaityaari iromperanataityaari. Eejatzi oquemitari iroñaaca te apantyaaro amanitashireteri atziri ancanteri: &quot;Te pirjiperote eeroca, iriima irinta iriitaque ñaaperori&quot;. Eejatzi oquemitari te oncameethate intzime aparoni atziri antayetashityaarone caari ishinetaacairi pashine irantero. Tema maaroni ayotziro ampampithashirvaayeta, ayotziro tsicarica otzimayetzi cameethatatsiri anteri o tsicarica otzimi caariperotatsiri, irootaque ocovaperotantari iroñaaca entacotavacaayetya anquemitacaantanaquero arentzitavacaatyeeyaami ocaaquiini.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T22:40:58.613" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:40:58.613" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6595" CreationDate="2014-02-15T14:39:07.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not worked personally on machine translation, but as I recall,&#xA;some have been built, or experimented, using syntactic trees, and&#xA;tree-to-tree translation mechanisms (I no longer have the references in mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trees are of course syntactic, rather than semantic, though they can&#xA;be decorated and usually are. However they can help with semantic&#xA;ambiguity resulting from a syntactic ambiguity when languages&#xA;have similarities in some of their syntactic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clean formal ways to extend tree structures so that they&#xA;encode several trees when there is syntactic ambiguity. Then you can&#xA;consider translating this structure to the (extended) tree&#xA;representation for the target language, and thus simply preserve the&#xA;ambiguity.  I remember people discussing this, but I have no idea&#xA;whether it was actually ever implemented. This could for example be&#xA;used for ambiguous prepositional attachment.  But there are probably&#xA;other ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-02-15T14:39:07.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-15T23:15:13.217" Score="0" ViewCount="1750" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a corpus concerning spoken English, where the most common words include: you, the, i, to, a. However, I'm not only interested in words but also groups of consecutive words where the meaning is not derived via semantic composition. My understanding is that these are either &quot;phrasal verbs&quot;, &quot;set phrases&quot; or &quot;idioms&quot;. Are there any others? I collectively refer to these as &quot;semantic units&quot;. So according to my definition, semantic units include: you, the, i, to, a, come on, red sea, on the other hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just now, I'm ignoring the fact that multiple meanings may be associated with a &quot;semantic unit&quot;. For example the sentences: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I set the vase on the table.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I set a time limit on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I set some money aside&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will both increment the frequency associated with &quot;set&quot;. However the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The money has been set aside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will increment the score associated with &quot;set aside&quot; instead. This is because I hardcode my parser with &quot;set aside&quot; and increment its counter each time I observe it in my corpus. I will eventually hardcode the parser with the most common semantic units in order to establish their frequencies. Far from perfect, but my understanding is that my parser would need to be much, much more complicated in order to catch non sequential semantic units like &quot;&lt;strong&gt;turn&lt;/strong&gt; the radio &lt;strong&gt;down&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. However, if you have suggestions as to how I might solve this problem, please advise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I'm giving English examples in my question, I am actually working with Gaelic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of consecutive words which are very common in my corpus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;in the&#xA;i don't&#xA;do you&#xA;are you&#xA;of the&#xA;you know&#xA;all right&#xA;come on&#xA;to the&#xA;this is&#xA;on the&#xA;to be&#xA;out of&#xA;have to&#xA;don't know&#xA;i was&#xA;i know&#xA;i have&#xA;it was&#xA;you don't&#xA;and i&#xA;you have&#xA;i don't know&#xA;have a&#xA;to do&#xA;for the&#xA;in a&#xA;what do&#xA;for a&#xA;to me&#xA;you to&#xA;you are&#xA;what are&#xA;i'm not&#xA;to get&#xA;for you&#xA;to you&#xA;know what&#xA;of a&#xA;what do you&#xA;it is&#xA;and the&#xA;he was&#xA;is a&#xA;is it&#xA;don't you&#xA;what are you&#xA;with the&#xA;you do&#xA;it's a&#xA;to go&#xA;was a&#xA;but i&#xA;all the&#xA;with you&#xA;what is&#xA;what you&#xA;is the&#xA;is that&#xA;me to&#xA;i just&#xA;like a&#xA;be a&#xA;no no&#xA;what i&#xA;and you&#xA;we have&#xA;do it&#xA;you get&#xA;have you&#xA;i do&#xA;with a&#xA;for me&#xA;with me&#xA;of you&#xA;like to&#xA;get out&#xA;it's not&#xA;in my&#xA;like that&#xA;go to&#xA;what the&#xA;of your&#xA;that you&#xA;you a&#xA;in this&#xA;me a&#xA;to know&#xA;you like&#xA;you and&#xA;of this&#xA;just a&#xA;get the&#xA;and a&#xA;not a&#xA;but you&#xA;of my&#xA;in your&#xA;that was&#xA;to have&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examining this list, I can only see 4 semantic units: &quot;all right&quot;, &quot;come on&quot;, &quot;get out&quot; and &quot;have to&quot;. Would you agree with this? What strategy might I use to find all the semantic units in such lists?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-16T20:10:42.040" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T00:10:36.950" Title="Establishing the most common &quot;semantic units&quot; in a corpus" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;&lt;set-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6606" CreationDate="2014-02-16T11:10:37.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think common names for what you look at are &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Frozen+phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;frozen phrase&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or&#xA;&quot;idiom&quot; or &quot;fixed/frozen expression&quot;.  Maybe you are a bit more&#xA;general than that, since you seem to include verbs associated with a&#xA;specific preposition (I am not too sure from your example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some &lt;a href=&quot;http://alpage.inria.fr/~sagot/pub/LG06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;literature&lt;/a&gt; on this, though it seems that most lists of&#xA;such units have been produced by hand, somme being quite large (Gross&#xA;produced a list of 25000 frozen verbal expressions in French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know however that there have been mechanized attempts to&#xA;extract such lists automatically from copora, as is already done for&#xA;other units such as verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is that the characterization of these &quot;frozen&#xA;expressions&quot; is semantical rather than syntactical. Though they may be&#xA;apparently following usual syntax (maybe not always), the meaning of the&#xA;expression does not derive from the meaning of individual components&#xA;(other than possibly through etymological history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would first classify frozen expressions into two categories,&#xA;those that are grammatical, and those that are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, in your example, &quot;all right&quot; and &quot;come on&quot; are not&#xA;grammatical when appearing alone, or followed by a comma with nothing&#xA;in front. (I hope that my knowledge of English is not betraying&#xA;me). For example &quot;this is not a station for the bus you come on&quot; is&#xA;syntactical, and is not relevant for the frozen expression &quot;come on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other frozen expressions are fully syntactical: &quot;kick the bucket&quot;&#xA;and can even take inflection &quot;as he was kicking the bucket ...&quot;.&#xA;They may possibly be identified by lemmatization of constituents and&#xA;semantic analysis, checking in particular the relevance of the&#xA;different parts of speech to the various context in which the&#xA;expression appears.  But I am only guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the case, I doubt you will get very far without serious&#xA;morphological and syntactic analysis. Frozen expressions, or semantic&#xA;units may well be composed of words that are not adjacent in the&#xA;sentence, but correspond to a connected subpart of a tree&#xA;representation of the syntactic structure. (well, tree is the simpler&#xA;kind of structuring technique).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that simple adjacency of words will give you the more&#xA;interesting results. So building this list and trying to extract&#xA;semantic units witout the (syntactic and/or semantic) context of your&#xA;fragments may not get you very far, and may not be very meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that you may also need larger semantic context, to&#xA;see whether it has an impact on your frequencies. Your corpus could&#xA;be divided into sub-corpora corresponding to different sub-languages&#xA;(i.e. spoken by different communities: lawyers, medical doctors,&#xA;scientists, journalists ...). This might bring information, as can the specific&#xA;topics of the differents documents in the corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is all of the top of my head. I have not done the&#xA;research and some of my suggestions may be ill advised. But I do doubt&#xA;you can do anything worthy without syntax analysis, and probably&#xA;lemmatization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a worthy research project, but you may have to put more&#xA;technology in it, imho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-02-16T11:10:37.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T00:30:02.443" Score="3" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was an article in the Guardian recently about a headteacher in the Black Country banning the use of local dialect in school: &#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theguardian.com/educa..&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.theguardian.com/educa..&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;He says he's seeing children coming up through nursery with no ''proper'' english and blaming that on a lack of conversations round the dinner table at home. This policy was also implemented in a Croydon school recently in a bid to ''improve speech'':&#xA;School bans use of slang speech&#xA;What is your position on the use of dialect in schools? Will banning it really improve general literacy? What does it mean for the speakers of the local dialect? Will it affect how widely the local dialect is spoken or how people feel about it - will it change its status in the community? Will it improve the chances of the children economically, or does it just perpetuate class snobbery and elitism? Is the bad economy being used to more strictly curtail the speech and mannerisms of the poor? Why would that be in anyone's interest, linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3178" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T11:25:06.373" Title="What is the sociocultural purpose of banning slang in schools?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6608" CreationDate="2014-02-17T02:51:44.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of two main factors which would motivate such a decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Social Prestige&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot;&gt;diglossia&lt;/a&gt; is any situation where two dialects (or languages) exist along side each other in a single region/community. The most obvious example of this would be the co-occurrence in many parts of China of a local Chinese dialect (Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, etc.) with the standard Mandarin Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally the dialects in a diglossia are split along socio-economic lines, with the upper class' dialect, considered more prestigious, being called the H (high) dialect and the lower class' being called the L (low) dialect (not to be confused with High/Low German, which is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss&quot;&gt;isogloss&lt;/a&gt;). Consider the L Birmingham English and the H &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation&quot;&gt;RP&lt;/a&gt;, or the L &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_English_Vernacula4&quot;&gt;Black English Vernacular&lt;/a&gt; and H Standard American English. Since the H dialect has more prestige, it's natural that humans may [incorrectly] consider this dialect as some how &quot;better&quot; or &quot;more correct&quot; than the L dialect (while linguists view these dialects as merely &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;). As such, one of the reasons for banning slang in a school is to force children into using the &quot;correct&quot; H dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Employability&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The UK is hardly the first country to attempt to ban a specific dialect from schools. Since end of the US's racial segregation in the 1960s, many black families have attempted to give their children every advantage possible in a society with lingering racist tendencies. Whether it be by giving them stereotypically &quot;white&quot; sounding names (black comedian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_D._Hunter&quot;&gt;Reginald D. Hunter&lt;/a&gt; comes to mind) or forcing them to conform to &quot;white&quot; Standard American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sociology and economics indeed show that &lt;a href=&quot;http://freakonomics.com/2008/07/07/how-much-does-it-cost-you-in-wages-if-you-sound-black/&quot;&gt;&quot;sounding black&quot; is a disadvantage in the work force&lt;/a&gt;. I do not have any data on regional UK accents vs. earning potential but I suspect a similar trend takes place. Thus, another possible reason for banning slang in school is not necessarily to force children to use the H dialect but to at least make them &quot;bilingual&quot; in the H dialect, giving them an advantage in the work force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is possible that communication barriers may exist between the H and L dialects (look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_English_Vernacula4&quot;&gt;BEV&lt;/a&gt; or how US TV tends to subtitle Scottish English speakers), I fear that this is probably not the reason speakers of the H dialect receive an advantage in the workplace. Generally there is enough interaction between the H and L speakers in a diglossia that they can understand each other readily. Unfortunately, I suspect this is simply a special case of the &quot;social prestige&quot; factor I described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Will it Work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to say. On one hand, China's heavy emphasis on Mandarin appears to be slowly eroding the use of many smaller regional Chinese dialects, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/you-think-youre-speaking-shanghainese-not-so-fast-666815&quot;&gt;Shanghaiese&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, this trend &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20120416-340111.html&quot;&gt;isn't even limited to areas controlled by the Peope's Republic of China&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Ebonics_controversy&quot;&gt;the controversy surrounding BEV in US schools&lt;/a&gt;, academics (although not necessarily the general population) are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/christ01.html&quot;&gt;starting to favour the embracing of local dialects&lt;/a&gt;, proposing &quot;bilingual&quot; approaches as briefly mentioned above. Similarly, the BBC, after years of forcing reporters to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation&quot;&gt;RP&lt;/a&gt; (also called &quot;BBC English&quot; for now obvious reasons), is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1575790/BBC-chief-calls-for-more-regional-accents.html&quot;&gt;starting to embrace regional accents&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-02-17T03:02:15.097" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T03:02:15.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6536" CreationDate="2014-02-17T05:39:59.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Projectivity is a concept that applies to both dependency grammars (DGs) and constituency grammars (CGs). The extent to which it is applicable to both approaches to syntax is discussed and illustrated with numerous trees here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term itself, i.e. &lt;em&gt;projectivity&lt;/em&gt;, was introduced in the 1960s in early explorations of word order in DG formalisms. The term is generally NOT used in CGs, although the concept is perfectly valid for both formalisms (DGs and CGs). More common terms that the projectivity concept underlies are &lt;em&gt;long distance dependency&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;discontinuous constituent&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;discontinuity&lt;/em&gt;. These terms all point to same thing, i.e. crossing lines in the syntax tree (that are then overcome in various ways, e.g. by movement or feature passing). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to answer part of the question (What is the role of projectivity in DG?) as directly as possible, the role of projectivity is to identify discontinuities (i.e. crossing lines in the syntax tree). When the crossing lines obtain, one is dealing with a discontinuity. There are numerous types of discontinuities, those associated with &lt;em&gt;wh-fronting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;topicalization&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;scrambling&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;extraposition&lt;/em&gt;. Wikipedia has articles on each of these types of discontinuities, and each article has both DG trees and CG trees for illustration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing the other part of the question (What is the connection between DG and CG?) is a difficult task. I disagree with Jlawler's comment in this area (assuming I understand it). There are big differences between DGs and CGs. DGs are much, much simpler than CGs at the most basic level. They often posit about half the amount of syntactic structure as (measured in terms of the number of nodes and edges in the syntax trees). You can teach a kid to diagram simple sentences using dependency, but the same cannot be said for constituency. The extra structure that CGs posit allow one to do things that one cannot do with dependency. For instance, c-command is not possible in dependency-based structures. DGs are, however, likely to challenge all the extra structure that CGs necessitate. They argue that it does not increase our understanding of syntax; the simple DG structures get the job done with much less effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the point about whether dependency and constituency are notational variants of the same thing is mostly decided in DG circles. Most DG people reject the notion that they are notational variants of the same thing. This means that, as stated, you can do things with dependency-based structures that you cannot do with constituency-based structures, and vice versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T05:39:59.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6545" CreationDate="2014-02-17T06:36:18.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question becomes clearer if a concrete example is given, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) They laughed at me, which is why I left. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; here is a relative pronoun. The unique thing about it is that it takes the entire matrix clause as its antecedent -- most relative pronouns have just a noun as (part of) their antecedent. And yes, the wh-word &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is an interrogatve adverb; in this case, it functions as a predicative expression, similar to how a predicative adjective or noun functions. Given these considerations, there is nothing particularly challenging about the formulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question is therefore that the expression &lt;em&gt;...which is why...&lt;/em&gt; is not a single unit, but rather it is compositional, made up of smaller parts that one can identify and combine productively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T06:36:18.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2014-02-17T07:16:16.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stoney's answer touches on the key aspect of the phenomenon that is addressed in the question. There is a rule in syntax that is valid for many European languages (and perhaps for other languages as well) that can be formulated as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Constraint (first formulation)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;A premodifier of a noun (e.g. attributive adjective) may not itself have a postmodifier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In slightly different words: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Constraint (second formulation)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;A predependent of a noun may not itself have a postdependent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples produced in the question that are awkward all violate this constraint. Here are some further examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a. ??a proud of his children father&#xA;    b.   a father proud of his children&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) a. ??the upset with the problem student&#xA;    b.   the student upset with the problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) a. ??a crazy about politics activist&#xA;    b.   an activist crazy about politics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The a-examples all violate the constraint, whereas when the adjective phrase is positioned after the noun, the structure is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivation for the constraint probably has to do with processing efficiency. If one examines the syntax trees for these examples, the a-structures all contain an elbow of a sort that immediately precedes the noun, whereas the b-structures no longer have such an elbow. Syntactic structures that consistently climb (left branching) or consistently fall (right branching) are easier to process than syntactic structures that mix left and right branching. There are numerous phenomena of syntax that are sensitive this aspect of syntactic structures, e.g. extraposition and shifting. These mechanisms serve to reduce center embedding (i.e. the presence of elbows in the structure) and they thus aid processing. The constraint here concerning the pre- and postmodifiers of nouns appears to be a general principle of syntax that also serves to aid processing. It reduces center-embedding (i.e. elbows). This phenomenon is discusssed in detail here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Osborne, Timothy 2003. The Left Elbow Constraint. Studia Linguistica 57/3, 233-257.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T07:16:16.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T11:02:42.540" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;One language dies every two weeks. But where does that statistic come from?&#xA;Everyone is saying it without explicit citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who or which academic paper first noted the death of a language every two weeks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://info.moravia.com/blog/bid/254901/One-language-dies-every-two-weeks-What-it-means-and-what-s-being-done-about-it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;One language dies every two weeks? What it means and what's being done about it&lt;/a&gt; (from the blog &quot;Moravia&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=how%20many%20lnagugaes%20are%20dying%20everyday#q=how%20many%20languages%20are%20dying%20every%20day&amp;amp;spell=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google search for &quot;how many languages are dying every day&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T07:08:30.377" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T07:08:30.377" Title="Who or which academic paper first noted the death of a language every two weeks?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6581" CreationDate="2014-02-17T20:42:00.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alternatives don't sound particularly ungrammatical to me but the issue is caused by disjoining the adjective. The sentences really are variants of &quot;His excessive candor struck me.&quot; and &quot;Her farfetched ideas impressed me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reintroducing the disjointed adjective makes them fine passives: &quot;I was struck by his excessive candor.&quot; &quot;I am impressed by her farfetched ideas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2812" LastEditorUserId="2812" LastEditDate="2014-02-17T20:56:04.023" LastActivityDate="2014-02-17T20:56:04.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6608" CreationDate="2014-02-17T20:56:49.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a scientific account, it may not be accurate, nor am i an&#xA;expert on the subject.  Just what I gathered over the years, for what&#xA;it is worth, in case it may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fifty years ago (and earlier), it was still a general policy in France&#xA;to forbid the use of dialects in schools. They had posters against it,&#xA;and students could be punished for not speaking French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now everyone is sorry that many of these dialects are dying (whatever&#xA;the reason), together with the culture they carried. There are efforts&#xA;to revive them, and some are even officially taught. Some are actually&#xA;more than simple dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was then the socio-cultural purpose? I think it was &lt;strong&gt;simple cultural dominance&lt;/strong&gt;. This was only 2 decades after a time when it was widely believed it was the duty of the country to bring civilisation to other people, especially the colonies. There was little belief in the value of cultural diversity or in the value of other cultures.This was a time when crimes against culture and even against children (deportation) were committed by several &quot;advanced&quot; countries from different continents (I am not referring to war time events).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position, since you ask, is to let people speak what they will&#xA;between themselves, but ask them to learn in class what they have to&#xA;learn. Is it ever good to show disrespect for a culture? You cannot&#xA;impose a cultural identity by force. But you can make a culture&#xA;attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Further thought on the issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not mean that cultural dominance is still the reason today for&#xA;policy makers. But they also reflect trends in society, and my guess&#xA;is that a large number of people still believe in uniformity and the&#xA;role of their superior culture. While the decisions may be taken for&#xA;the best of reasons, they may be politically viable mostly for less&#xA;honorable ones (sorry for the value judgement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am wondering one point about these questions. It may be&#xA;specific to France but I doubt it. Pretty much, &lt;strong&gt;the language spoken is syntax&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;it expresses thoughts.  &lt;strong&gt;What about semantics?&lt;/strong&gt; Of course, semantics&#xA;cannot be as readily addressed and as easily dealt with. But semantics&#xA;is significant, and schools are teaching lots of &lt;strong&gt;myths and rites&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;that forge the common culture of a people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of France, the best known myth is probably that the French&#xA;are all descended from the Gauls.  History books in grammar school&#xA;were alledgedly supposed to start with the sentence &quot;Our ancestors,&#xA;the Gauls, ...&quot;. And since the curriculum was the same in the whole&#xA;country, including oversea districts and colonies, I suspect the Gauls&#xA;must have been a powerful people covering the whole planet (but I have&#xA;no official account or study of actual facts regarding history&#xA;teaching in French ruled territories). This myth regarding the French&#xA;ancestry, and other historical myths have been analyzed and traced to a&#xA;deliberate (?) policy to forge a national identity. Some may be based&#xA;on actual facts, but that is not really relevant. Possibly the&#xA;British identity is forged around the royalty, but I do have some&#xA;doubts that it is the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that, &lt;strong&gt;if one is to analyze linguistic policies in schools&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;it cannot really be separated from other cultural policies. In&#xA;particular, &lt;strong&gt;it should be put in relation with the kinds of myths and&#xA;rites that are being taught&lt;/strong&gt;, explicitly or implicitly, particularly in&#xA;such matters as national language, litterature, history and geography.&#xA;And also what is not being taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even mathematics can play a role. How many high school students know&#xA;that there have been great female mathematicians. They were not many for&#xA;historical reasons, but still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T11:25:06.373" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T11:25:06.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-17T23:56:06.463" Score="0" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at old German orthographies, the long-s (ſ) spelling of the following five words (and I have not found any others so far) contradicts the spelling systematics of all other words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Iſrael, Iſlam, Moſlem, Iſmael, Aſbeſt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broken down to what matters for these words, a long s would only be consistent with the spelling systematics, if it were at the beginning of a syllable. While this is the case for none of these words in their German pronunciation, I can at least explain the spelling of &lt;em&gt;Aſbeſt&lt;/em&gt; to some extent: It originates from the Greek &lt;em&gt;ἄ-σβεστος&lt;/em&gt; and thus the first &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; was at the beginning of a syllable or word part etymologically (the second long s is consistent anyway, since it is followed by a &lt;em&gt;t).&lt;/em&gt; I now wonder whether there is a similar explanation for the other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actual Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any etymological predecessor for any of the words &lt;em&gt;Israel, Islam, Moslem&lt;/em&gt; (muslim) and &lt;em&gt;Ismael&lt;/em&gt; (Ishmael), in which the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; (or a corresponding sound) was at the beginning of a syllable &lt;s&gt;or word part&lt;/s&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the comments and answers so far, I looked into Semitic morphology and understood that the concept of discrete word parts cannot be applied here. Still, my question about syllables stands, since they are relevant for long-s spelling, regardless of the underlying morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I looked for other words of Semitic origin (and with an &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in a comparable position), and found only &lt;em&gt;Kismet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Esra,&lt;/em&gt; both spelt without a long s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastEditorUserId="1822" LastEditDate="2014-02-20T00:09:42.667" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T00:09:42.667" Title="Is there any etymological motivation for “I-slam”, “I-srael”, “Mu-slim” and “I-smael”?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6613" CreationDate="2014-02-18T03:18:45.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;David Crystal&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (2000), see catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99053220.pdf‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long citation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A middle position would assert 50% loss in the next 100 years. This is&#xA;  the view independently arrived at by three linguists reported by&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Krauss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Krauss&lt;/a&gt; in 1992. 34 50% is 3,000 languages. 100 years is 1,200 months.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;To meet that time frame, at least one language must die, on average,&#xA;  every two weeks or so&lt;/strong&gt;. This cannot be very far from the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a conjecture of how language would die according to guess-gestion of other linguist's statistics &lt;strong&gt;not reporting language death&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2202" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T10:25:11.707" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T10:25:11.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6616" CreationDate="2014-02-18T05:02:20.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Islam and Muslim return to one root S-L-M س ل م which means peace and surrender as professor jlawler said. Ismael is composed of two parts which are Isma (or yishma) and El. Isma is from the Semitic root S-M-ʕ س م ع (In Hebrew the S here is Sh) which means hearing. El means God in Hebrew and in Arabic. The word Israel is composed of Isra (or yisra) and El. Isra is derived from the Semitic root Ṣ-R-ʕ ص ر ع which means contending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion:&#xA;All of the words you asked about have roots starting with S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3161" LastEditorUserId="3161" LastEditDate="2014-02-18T05:37:25.393" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T05:37:25.393" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-18T12:57:16.957" Score="2" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a good online Modern Greek dictionary that puts imperfective and perfective (also called &quot;dependent&quot;) verb stems together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the present perfective of &lt;code&gt;βλέπω /'vlepo/ &quot;SEE&quot;&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;δω /ðo/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, apparently many dictionaries don't list the two stems together clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2816" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-02-02T14:16:05.020" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T06:00:46.483" Title="Online Modern Greek dictionary that puts imperfective and (&quot;dependent&quot;) perfective verb stems together?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5931" CreationDate="2014-02-18T16:20:35.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how &quot;comprehensive&quot; it is, but the &lt;em&gt;Portal da Língua Portuguesa&lt;/em&gt; has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/index.php?action=fonetica&amp;amp;act=list&amp;amp;region=lbx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonetic dictionary&lt;/a&gt; that seems to do a pretty good job. An interesting feature of it is that you can change the dialect, choosing among dialects from Portugal, Brazil, Africa and East Timor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T16:20:35.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6616" CreationDate="2014-02-18T21:20:20.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root of the word ‘Israel’ is sin-resh-he (ש ר ה) combined with אל (god).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two syllables in the names Ismael [yishma’el  -ישמעאל ] and Israel [yiśra’el - ישראל] are actually finite verb forms of the same type (yi + first stem consonant + second stem consonant + vowel + third/last stem consonant] which basically indicates: the third person singular masculine verb form [he … s: in casu ‘he hears’ and ‘he fights’].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the words muslim and islām we’re dealing with a passive participle and a noun belonging to the verb ‘aslam’ (to submit, to bring to peace) which is derived from the basic triconsonantal stem S-L-M; the word ‘muslim’ means basically ‘submitted’, and ‘islām’ means ‘submission’; the corresponding third person singular masculine verb form in Arabic from this verb is ‘yuslim’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3184" LastActivityDate="2014-02-18T21:20:20.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2014-02-19T01:39:56.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;-w- can act as a vowel: *drew- &gt; *drw- (zero grade) &gt; *dru- etc.&#xA;If kʷ was -kw- we would see kʷ &quot;disintegrate&quot; in certain situations into -kew-, -kow-, -ku- etc. which doesn't happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T01:39:56.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4477" CreationDate="2014-02-19T01:54:57.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ are realised as /i/ and /e/ in the Saxon dialect and used to be pronounced this way in Silesian and East Prussian dialects of German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sound change is universal and happens everywhere around the world. It's just a simple delabialization. Taken alone, it doesn't prove anything. English had same reflexes, hence we have some irregularities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old English &lt;em&gt;mūs&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Modern English &lt;em&gt;mouse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old English (*&lt;em&gt;mūsi&lt;/em&gt; &gt;) &lt;em&gt;mȳs&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Modern English &lt;em&gt;mice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[y:] &gt; [i:] &gt; [əi] &gt; [aɪ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same for &lt;em&gt;foot&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt; where in the latter [i:] stems from [e:] which stemmed from [ø:] which stemmed from [o] + umlaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek had -y- &gt; -i-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Slavic itself had -ju- &gt; -jy- -&gt; -ji-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T01:54:57.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2014-02-19T02:17:10.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most prepositions are originally, most likely, nouns of their own, in different fossizilied case forms that preceeded or followed the corresponding noun. For example, Latin &lt;em&gt;pro, de&lt;/em&gt; are IIRC believed to stem from ablative forms &lt;em&gt;prod, ded&lt;/em&gt;. Coincidentally, they also require ablative. So, a preposition was originally some sort of abstract apposition to the noun being modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer why we have prepositions instead of postpositions is probably the same answer why PIE's appositions usually place more abstract entities before less abstract entities, e.g. mother Earth, my friend Alice etc. In the same way, I'd think, &lt;em&gt;pro me&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;prod med&lt;/em&gt;) would mean &quot;front-ABL me-ABL&quot;, just two nouns in apposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it developed into full-fledged prepositions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T07:52:25.030" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T07:52:25.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-19T03:53:06.760" Score="2" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does this ‘r’ appear only in ‘wash’ and ‘Washington’ without analogous examples? That is, why does this ‘r’ not also appear in similar constructions (like ‘posh’ (which is never pronounced ‘parsh’) or ‘to josh’ (which never allows for ‘I was jorshing/jarshing’))?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastEditorUserId="489" LastEditDate="2014-02-19T14:54:47.557" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T17:11:29.353" Title="What is the cause of the epenthetic ‘r’ in ‘warsh’?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6627" CreationDate="2014-02-19T06:25:58.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, it seems to be the case that you do get /r/ in those contexts and specific words (also, 'squash', etc.). It may be difficult to find them in text (e.g., for 'posh': 'porsh' and 'parsh' are both problematic for the speller), but they likely exist. I was able to find Google hits for 'jarsh'/'jarshing'/'jorshing', for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that this kind of regularization rule is applied more for high-frequency words than for low-frequency. If 'wash', 'water' are much higher frequency than 'posh', 'josh', then it's reasonable to see fewer instances of 'jarsh'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-02-19T06:25:58.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4006" CreationDate="2014-02-19T20:23:19.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IE *sueigh- should become *εἱχ- in Greek. Beekes, Greek Etym. Dictionary, page 1327 suggests that σῖγα is &quot;probably of onomatopoetic origin”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T15:36:01.173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T15:36:01.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-20T10:57:24.473" Score="3" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English we have several terms, &quot;homonym&quot;, &quot;homophone&quot;, and &quot;homograph&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first one is disliked by linguists as being too vague though might be best used for words with separate etymologies that nonetheless share both pronunciation and spelling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second is for words which share an exact pronunciation though they may differ in spelling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And the third is for words which share a written form but might be pronounced differently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with tonal languages there is another level of granularity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words which share the same sequence of phonemes but at least one carries a different tone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm asking, there's another possibility that I've also taken an interest in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words which share a tone contour but not phonemes. For instance two three-syllable Chinese terms both having tone 3 + tone 2 + tone 4 in that order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-02-20T15:48:11.730" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T16:44:17.250" Title="Term for homophones in tonal languages which share phonemes but have different tones?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-20T10:58:06.070" Score="4" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of only few Uralic loans into Indo-Aryan languages that show migrations from Eurasia to India, Iran etc. What are typical examples of loan words that are unquestionably a result of a migration towards those final destinations and not the opposite (as OOI theory suggests)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-02-20T13:49:26.480" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T19:18:37.683" Title="Loans in Indo-Aryan languages indicating possible migration routes" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;substrate&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6167" CreationDate="2014-02-20T13:26:36.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know which language is the most succint one, but I can tell you that this is actually a question of Information Theory, rather that Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, what you are asking about is which {language, script} combination has the lowest entropy. That is, take a random sentence and cut it off at a random point (including halfway through a word), and ask speakers to make a guess about what comes next. Repeat this a few thousand times and make a statistical estimate of the average uncertainty of your language. Claude Shannon [1] was the first one to apply this method, and he found out that English (written in the standard Roman alphabet), on average, has an information content of about 1 bit/letter. Given that there are 8 bits in 1 byte, the most efficient compressing algorithm might be able to compress a random English text to 1/8th of its original length, but not more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your question can be rephrased as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the most efficient compression algorithm A, which {language, script} combination LS is the one that, given a random text T, A(T(LS)) results in the highest reduction in length relative to the original text?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Shannon, Claude. 1951. Prediction and entropy in printed English. Bell Systems Technical Journal 30:50--64.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T13:26:36.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8799" CreationDate="2014-02-20T15:34:27.847" Score="-1" ViewCount="4355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know Esperanto is constructed on the basis of Romance languages; but what are the main differences and similarities between English and Esperanto?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially from the following aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (how are words constructed and orderly connected? what classifications / parts of speech does English / Esperanto have?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (from what languages does English / Esperanto borrow terms / derived words?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (words in what languages share similar connotations and implications with English / Esperanto words?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What books / resources about analysis on Esperanto (and English) are recommended to get me started on such comparison?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-21T15:12:03.513" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T15:37:06.133" Title="English vs. Esperanto (in grammar, vocabulary, semantics)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-20T16:40:18.060" Score="0" ViewCount="1271" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi could someone help me to identify the different elements cited above in the sentence below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so completely out [of control of the situation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need to analyse the words inside the bracketed PP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3197" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-21T15:09:19.610" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T15:09:19.610" Title="Identify heads, specifiers, complements and adjuncts in this sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3623" CreationDate="2014-02-20T20:50:11.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that &quot;eigenvalue&quot; is a semi-translation of &quot;Eigenwert&quot;. There is no such word as &quot;aqualite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-02-20T20:50:11.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="414" CreationDate="2014-02-20T23:22:58.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this site, I would expect that this question is about&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;linguistically meaningful&lt;/strong&gt; examples of syntactic structures that cannot be represented by BNF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A first minor point is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://cui.unige.ch/isi/bnf/AboutBNF.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BNF&lt;/a&gt; is a programmer/compiler oriented syntax (introduced with the programming language Algol 60) for representing&#xA;what should rather be called more abstractedly &lt;strong&gt;context-free grammar&lt;/strong&gt; (CFG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adequacy of context-free grammars for representing the syntax of&#xA;natural languages has been addressed by many people in different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be also noted that we are mostly talking of a syntactic&#xA;infrastructure, based on formal language theory, since linguist often&#xA;consider as part of syntax various attribute and features that can be&#xA;associated with this syntactic infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most frequently given example of syntactic structure that cannot&#xA;be represented by a CF grammar is apparently the &lt;strong&gt;cross-serial&#xA;dependency&lt;/strong&gt; represented in the following diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSWJV.png&quot; alt=&quot;cross-serial dependency diagram&quot;&gt; (source &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-serial_dependency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a syntactic structure is found in some languages, including Dutch&#xA;and Swiss-German. Here is a Swiss-German example from Stuart Shieber:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                             _____________________&#xA;             _______________|______________       |&#xA;            |               |              |      |&#xA;...mer  em Hans     es    huus          hälfed  aastriiche.&#xA;...we   Hans (dat)  the   house (acc)   helped  paint.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, &quot;we helped Hans paint the house.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are to ways in which context-freeness of a language may be analyzed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;strong context-freeness&lt;/strong&gt;: can this language be generated by a CF grammar so that the&#xA;parse-tree structure conforms the syntactic relations between the&#xA;parts of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;weak context-freeness&lt;/strong&gt;: can the language be analyzed by a CF grammar at all? However, if the language is not strongly&#xA;context-free, the structure of the parse-trees will not reflect the&#xA;proper syntactic organization of a parsed sentence. But then, it is usually possible to retrieve it by other means, once the parsing is done.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been observed since around 1982 that cross-serial dependency is&#xA;not strongly context-free, which is rather obvious. But there was some&#xA;debate regarding weak context-freeness of languages with cross-serial&#xA;dependency. The usual example was cross-serial dependency in Dutch, but there were arguments to show that Dutch was still weakly context-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1985, Stuart Shieber used the case of Swiss-German cross-serial&#xA;dependency as evidence of a weakly non-context-free natural language.&#xA;He used explicit case marking of the language and case based ordering&#xA;rules for subordinate clauses to show that (the cross-serial part of)&#xA;the language is weakly context-free only if the language of strings of the&#xA;form {&lt;em&gt;w a^m b^n x c^m d^n y | n,m&lt;/em&gt; &gt;0} where &lt;em&gt;a, b, c&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; are symbols,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;w,x,y&lt;/em&gt; are strings not including these symbols, and &lt;em&gt;a^m&lt;/em&gt; means a&#xA;repeated &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this language is known to be weakly non-context-free, as can&#xA;easily be shown with the pumping lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, cross-serial dependency can be handled, in the strong structural sense, by a slightly more complex formalism, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree-adjoining_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree-adjoining grammars&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is actually a detailed account of this topic (which I found after&#xA;writing this answer) written by Johan Behrenfeldt  as his MS thesis in&#xA;2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other candidates for non-context-freeness are the &lt;strong&gt;free word order&#xA;languages&lt;/strong&gt;. It is not a type of syntax I know well, but I think it&#xA;should be mentioned. This case is complicated by the fact that some&#xA;languages have partially free &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word order&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though there has been significant work to encode free word&#xA;order into the context-free framework, one may wonder whether it is&#xA;always really meaningful structurally.  The point is that full free word order&#xA;amounts to considering strings as unordered sets of words. This&#xA;implies a much greater combinatorics for associating the words,&#xA;potentially giving rise to exponential algorithms rather polynomial&#xA;ones, as is the case for context-free parsing, which is cubic. This can be&#xA;dealt with by using other information in the parts of speech (morphological marking), through&#xA;different kinds of algorithms with tractable complexity, and some have been proposed (see 4th reference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if there are no constraints on word order (or limited&#xA;ones), the language may well be regular, hence weakly context-free.&#xA;But, in this case, there is little hope to use information from the&#xA;context-free parsing (there is none for a regular grammar) to&#xA;recreate a syntactic structure for the sentence being analyzed. Weak&#xA;context-freeness does not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stuart Shieber, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evidence against the context-freeness of natural&#xA;language&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics and philosophy&lt;/em&gt;, 8, 1985, 333-343.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Johan Behrenfeldt. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flov.gu.se/digitalAssets/1302/1302983_behrenfeldt-johan-alinguists.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Linguist's Survey of Pumping Lemmata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, MS thesis,&#xA;Univ. of Gothenburg, June 2009.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carl Vogel, Ulrike Hahn, Holly Branigan, &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/C/C96/C96-1028.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross-Serial Dependencies Are Not Hard to Process&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;COLING 1996&lt;/em&gt;: 157-162.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Akshar Bharati, Rajeev Sangal, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P93/P93-1015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parsing Free Word Order Languages in the Paninian Framework&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;ACL 1993.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-02-24T02:14:26.350" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T02:14:26.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6606" CreationDate="2014-02-21T00:10:36.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In corpus linguistics, the preferred terms of art are &quot;collocations&quot; and &quot;n-grams&quot; (with n being any natural number). Collocations might be more general, in that they don't strictly need to be sequential (e.g. phrasal verbs with raised objects such as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;give&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;a hand&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're using Python, I highly recommend acquiring (and reading the documentation for) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK - the natural language Toolkit&lt;/a&gt;. But as has been stated previously, the only way to extract meaningful phrases from the set of all n-grams is only possible with some syntactic analysis. For example, restricting the n-grams to complete syntactic constituents (ruling out bigrams like &quot;that the&quot; or &quot;in a&quot;, but accepting trigrams like &quot;on the way&quot; and &quot;the bee's knees&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you might want to look at (related to collocations) is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MI (Mutual Information)&lt;/a&gt;, which can help you decide whether a given set of words form a meaningful unit (eg &quot;plastic surgery&quot;), or whether they're just a sequence of words (eg &quot;plastic bag&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3200" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T00:10:36.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="441" CreationDate="2014-02-21T01:23:30.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning mininamlism: Also Adger's sophisticated Concept of features does not get rid of the basic problem, that do support is irregular - it only applies to negative affirmatives and interrogatives and positive interrogatives (without having an extra emphatic taste to it). Adger tries to capture this via a last resort do insertion, which in my opinion is a far too powerful concept. Fun fact: diachronically speaking do support used to be regular - it could be used in a non emphatic sense in modern English positive affirmative sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3201" LastActivityDate="2014-02-21T01:23:30.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6646" CreationDate="2014-02-22T13:38:46.253" Score="3" ViewCount="1378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to write a program that  generates valid English sentences, but without specifying what structure the sentence takes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want that to be determined by starting at a simple sentence S (NP VP? ) and then mutating it by using grammar rules into a new sentence (NP VP -&gt;NP VP NP) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a finite set of rules I can use? I've searched the way and I cant find a &lt;strong&gt;definitive&lt;/strong&gt; set of rules. Everything I've found seems to caveat it with 'is only a simple set of rules'. Do we only have a simple set to work with? Is there a definitive set of rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the rules I'm talking about are called &lt;strong&gt;Categorial Rules&lt;/strong&gt;...Hear are some I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. S → NP Modal VP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. VP → V AP PP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c. AP → ADVP A&lt;br&gt;&#xA;d. ADVP → ADV&lt;br&gt;&#xA;e. PP → P NP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;f. NP → D N   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does an exhaustive list of these exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3207" LastEditorUserId="3207" LastEditDate="2014-02-22T19:35:10.820" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T21:07:40.667" Title="Is the set of lexical rules, or phrase structure rules finite?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-22T14:46:43.813" Score="5" ViewCount="1677" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1a:&lt;/strong&gt;  What does &lt;strong&gt;'It'&lt;/strong&gt; refer to in the following sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context for the above sentence is provided in the next section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1b:&lt;/strong&gt; What is the justification for choosing anaphoric or cataphoric?  Same for selecting the antecedent/postcedent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1c:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any justification for choosing &lt;strong&gt;anaphoric with antecedent = &quot;the community&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question #2: (Cognitive blindness due to unconscious parsing):&lt;/strong&gt; There was an amazing (awesome, very interesting) misunderstanding between myself and another person (very well respected by me and the community on ell.se).  I think there is a kind of cognitive blindness that occurs when people parse sentences different ways. We stick to our initial, unconscious cognitive parse which can prevent us from seeing other options. Is there a name for this? (See &quot;Important Info&quot; section, below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Instead of EL&amp;amp;U, I thought linguistics would be a more appropriate forum for this question due (at least in part) to the cognitive issues. (I've just recently started exploring the fascinating Art &amp;amp; Science of Linguistics.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS SECTION CONTAINS THE TARGET SENTENCE IN CONTEXT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ell.stackexchange.com, I made an edit to the question &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is this sentence correct?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. (And no, the sentence was not.) The OP thanked me by writing at the top of the question, &quot;Credit to CoolHandLouis for edit help!&quot; To make the acknowledgement less conspicuous (and to save me some embarrassment), I moved it to the bottom.  The next day, a website that reports on writing style (www.AcmeStyleReports.com) posted an analysis of my &quot;top to bottom&quot; edit of the acknowledgement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The style used for acknowledgements can vary, depending on formality, precedents, and community-accepted norms.  Consider the question on ell.se &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is this sentence correct?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. An edit was made to move an acknowledgement from the top to the bottom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be argued that this was stylistically appropriate. On ell.se, the community has a tradition of putting acknowledgements at the end of questions. &lt;strong&gt;It was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The above is the entire context text. It's entirely fictional. (There is no such report and no tradition to put acknowledgements at the bottom.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important Info&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question is very closely related to the ell.se question, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/16737/what-role-does-this-it-take/16851#16851&quot;&gt;What role does this it take?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1, Option 1 (Anaphoric):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IT&lt;/strong&gt; = &quot;The community&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** The selected-as-correct opinion was that &quot;It&quot; is a simple pronoun referring to &quot;the community&quot;.  (It was &quot;the Mafia&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/16737/what-role-does-this-it-take/16851#16851&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What role does this it take?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) The &quot;mental parsing&quot; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;The community&lt;/strong&gt; was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1, Option 2 (Cataphoric):&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IT&lt;/strong&gt; = &quot;to place acknowledgements at the bottom of the questions&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** This is called &quot;Anticipatory It&quot;. In my &quot;mental parsing&quot;, semantic information was dropped: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;It was clearly in the mood &lt;strong&gt;[of the writing style on ell.se]&lt;/strong&gt; to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;It was clearly in the mood &lt;strong&gt;[of the community]&lt;/strong&gt; to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1, Option 3:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;IT&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; = Whatever else you may think about the role of &quot;it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2. Cognitive Blindness:&lt;/strong&gt; Because of my mental parsing, I thought the selected-as-correct answer, &quot;The Mafia&quot;, was an absurd &quot;opinion&quot; that utterly lacked any grammatical sense. I was blind! &lt;em&gt;I did not and could not see &quot;It&quot; as a simple pronoun.&lt;/em&gt;  Another very well-respected member &lt;em&gt;could not&lt;/em&gt; see my &quot;Anticipatory It&quot; as having anything to do with this, because he only saw the simple pronoun construct. After a little debate in comments, we both had an &quot;aha&quot; realization of what we were each missing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/16737/what-role-does-this-it-take/16851#16851&quot;&gt;What role does this it take?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3199" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T22:20:52.747" Title="Is 'It' anaphoric or cataphoric, and what is its antecedent/postcedent?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-02-22T18:43:57.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11617" CreationDate="2014-02-22T18:58:31.443" Score="4" ViewCount="2132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble figuring out the relation between formal grammar and generative grammar. Is one a superclass of another, are they distinct, or are they identical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I've checked my notes, checked Wikipedia, searched for hits via Google, and checked several books including &lt;code&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/code&gt; but I have yet to find anywhere where the two are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3205" LastEditorUserId="3205" LastEditDate="2014-02-22T19:04:16.027" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T21:57:41.540" Title="What is the relation between formal grammar and generative grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2014-02-22T19:26:04.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt; (1957), Chapter 5, Chomsky begins by explaining that he doesn't know whether a Phrase Structure Grammar is capable of describing English, but rejects it as an adequate theory because there are instances where the explanations are extremely complex. I'm not sure if one has been developed since then, but I suspect the answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; in virtue of the limits of PSGs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3205" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T19:26:04.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6642" CreationDate="2014-02-22T21:07:40.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to have a definitive list of the syntax rules for English,&#xA;you first need to know in a definitive way what English is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is probably that you do not agree with your next door&#xA;neighbor on the English-ness of all sentences you may want to&#xA;check. I am not even considering vocabulary which varies greatly from&#xA;person to person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a diachronic view of the language (that means analyzing&#xA;the history of the language) you notice that syntactic structures&#xA;change over time. But there is no big boss saying at some point: today&#xA;we decide that adverbs will always be used in such and such way, with&#xA;all English speakers suddenly following the new rule.  For one thing&#xA;there was no radio, TV or Internet to organize that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the evolution was progressive, the language evolving as new people&#xA;were taking the place of older ones. But at no time is there a precise&#xA;characterization of the structure of the language. No one knows&#xA;exactly was is dead, what is still used, what is coming into being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that that alone will garantee that no single list can&#xA;pretend to be a definitive description of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said, you can always use some set of rule that will be a&#xA;good approximation of the language &lt;em&gt;as you perceive it&lt;/em&gt;. In general,&#xA;choosing the rules is already the beginning a theory for the language&#xA;structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is only so much information about the language you can put&#xA;in the rules. The phrase structure rules you are using are, so called,&#xA;&quot;context free&quot;. That mean they do not offer much facility for carrying&#xA;information such as agreement between parts of the sentence. It can be done, up to a point, but at&#xA;the expense of increasing considerably the number of&#xA;rules. Fundamentally, you need other mechanisms, or other techniques&#xA;than context-free rules, if only to keep to reasonable size the number&#xA;of rules of your grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule are thus only a skeleton for the syntax of the language.&#xA;Such skeleton is always composed of a finite set of rules. However, as&#xA;I said above, it can be completed by other mechanisms (attibute,&#xA;features,...) that may often (not always) be seen as if you extended&#xA;the set of rules, possibly in an infinite way. But that is always only&#xA;a view of it, because the specifications one uses are necessarily&#xA;always expressed finitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are languages with an internal structure of sentences that&#xA;may not even be compatible with this type of syntax specification.&#xA;See for example the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/414&quot;&gt;What is an example of a syntactic structure that can&amp;#39;t be represented by a BNF grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I am skipping semantics (&quot;the bone ate the dog&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have your hands full, even with &quot;only a simple set of rules&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would suggest you look at an introductory book on computational&#xA;linguistics before you start your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-02-22T21:07:40.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6644" CreationDate="2014-02-22T22:22:02.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am giving it a try, but I fear that, whatever the&#xA;definitions chosen, there will be unsatisfied people. Let's discuss it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;formal grammar&lt;/strong&gt; may be defined as a set of string rewriting&#xA;rules that are used to specify a set of strings, in a mathematically&#xA;precise way. In some cases they may associate structural information&#xA;with the string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also tree grammars, used to define sets of trees, and graph&#xA;grammars used to define sets of graph, both by mean of rewriting&#xA;rules.  There may be others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may actually be many way to read a formal grammar:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typically, a&#xA;context-free grammar may be read as a way to generate strings by&#xA;rewriting them according to some rules (I am simplifying a bit).&#xA;All the strings that can be generated form the language defined by&#xA;the grammar. This is the generative reading of a formal grammar.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may also be read as a system of equation over sets of strings,&#xA;the language being the smallest solution to the equation for one of&#xA;the variables. You may call it the denotational reading of the grammar.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may also be read as a tree grammar.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And, it can even be read as the specification of an algorithm to check&#xA;whether a string is in the defined language.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The techniques for attaching other mathematical meaning to the strings&#xA;(or trees, or graphs) may be considered as outside the mathematical&#xA;domain of formal grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But basically, formal grammars are mathematical entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generative grammars&lt;/strong&gt; is more a linguistic concept. In some looser sense&#xA;(I guess) it is a set of rules that specify how linguistic elements&#xA;can be combined to form linguistically acceptable construction, such&#xA;as sentences (syntax) or simple words (morphology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As formal grammars usually have a generative reading, they are often&#xA;used by linguists to specify formally generative grammars, often in&#xA;conjonction with other mathematical tools attached to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a larger sense, generative grammar can also refer to a description&#xA;of mechanisms by which the structure of syntactically correct&#xA;linguistic constructions will emerge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generative grammars are concerned with syntax only, with sentences&#xA;that will respect structural rules of the language. According to such&#xA;rules, and to Noam Chomsky, &quot;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&quot; is&#xA;syntactically an English sentence.  Whether it means anything is for&#xA;Salvador Dali to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Further thoughts on the issue.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, I do not expect to satisfy everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being very knowledgeable in either semantics or pragmatics, I&#xA;gladly take in @jlawler's remark that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;lots of generative grammars&#xA;deal with semantics and pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; [and] only the ones who accept&#xA;Chomsky's assumptions insist of segmenting them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point of view can be vindicated in the following way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the metaphysical issues on human thought and language (and I&#xA;include here all forms of linguistic expression in the word language), the&#xA;human brain and language system (including all senses) may be seen a&#xA;physical device that receives input data, manipulates it in&#xA;various ways, including memorization, and produces other data&#xA;through various means (speech, writing, gesture, ...). In a nutshell, hoping&#xA;not to hurt anyone's feelings,  this is pretty much the description&#xA;of a general purpose computing device. Note that I used the word&#xA;&quot;data&quot; rather than &quot;symbol&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the working of such a machine be theorized formally with a formal&#xA;grammar, viewed as a generative formal system? For example, could&#xA;Chomsky's type 0 grammars be such a generative grammar formalizing&#xA;the human language machine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point to note is that &lt;strong&gt;the human language machine is a physical&#xA;computational device&lt;/strong&gt;. Hence we may wonder whether physical&#xA;computational devices can be fully described by a generative formal grammar. This&#xA;raises two open questions, one in mathematics that may not be&#xA;answerable, and one in physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Church-Turing thesis&lt;/a&gt;. It is a conjecture&#xA;that any kind of algorithmic computability is equivalent to Turing&#xA;computability.  Turing computability is itself proved to be equivalent&#xA;to &quot;computation&quot; by type 0 grammars. Note again the multiple readings&#xA;of a grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conjecture is generally considered not to be provable. I suspect&#xA;it relies on an understanding of computability that assumes&#xA;denumerability of all things computational. Computational devices are&#xA;considered to be symbol manipulation devices, operating along an open&#xA;time-line (there may be other assumptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that covers all possible physical devices remains an open&#xA;problem in physics. There is some research work on these issues. Some&#xA;is attempting to understand what kind of constraints in the physical&#xA;world would imply the &lt;a href=&quot;https://who.rocq.inria.fr/Gilles.Dowek/Publi/finitedensity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;denumerability&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_metric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;time open-linearity&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;hypothesis. Other research is trying to imagine &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;more powerful&#xA;computational models&lt;/a&gt; that could be allowed if some fundamental hypotheses were changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being, short of answering these questions, we have to&#xA;assume the correctness of the Church-Turing thesis for all&#xA;computational devices, including the human language machine. Hence,&#xA;human language, together with the knowledge, memorization and&#xA;interaction that goes with it, must necessarily have  a description as&#xA;a type 0 grammar, which can be read as a generative description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;strong&gt;considering that the whole language process may be described by a&#xA;generative grammar is in this sense an appropriate point of view.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my vindication of it is not fully satisfactory for at least&#xA;two somewhat related reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;this analysis only states that the language abilities of each human&#xA;being can be modeled by a generative formal grammar. But it says&#xA;nothing about a general model that could be used for all human&#xA;beings, with maybe only part of the rules to account for&#xA;differences between people, the other rules being a common core&#xA;that could be taken as representing the language ability of&#xA;mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;type 0 grammars can be very unstructured, and hard to&#xA;understand. They generally do not have perspicuity, unless very&#xA;carefully constructed, organized, and commented. A type 0 grammar,&#xA;however generative, is not necessarily expressing a linguistic&#xA;theory, an organized and structured body of knowledge &quot;explaining&quot;&#xA;the inner working of language so that linguistics phenomena of all&#xA;kinds can be accounted for and even predicted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Even if some magic event gave us a generative grammar for English&#xA;(assuming the existence of a precise definition of English), we might&#xA;not be able to extract from it any useful knowledge about the&#xA;language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit intended to debunk the magic of words, and of formal&#xA;systems, however important they may also be. It is not intended to&#xA;disparage the work that would extend the idea of generative grammars&#xA;to semantics or pragmatics. I often felt       the distinction&#xA;between syntax and semantics to be a somewhat arbitrary convenience,&#xA;and informally took syntax to be what has tractable mathematical&#xA;formalization ... which is not too precise either. The distinction is&#xA;a bit more precise in logic with model theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-02-24T00:23:24.047" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T00:23:24.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T00:50:25.847" Score="6" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on the following phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a. If (you are) hungry, you should say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;b. He touches his nose when (he is) exaggerating.&#xA;&#xA;c. Where (it is) cheap, watermelon sells well.&#xA;&#xA;d. Tom hums to himself while (he is) working.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appearance of the material in parenthesis is optional in each case. My question concerns the analysis of this phenomenon. Does anyone out know what it is called? Is it considered a form of ellipsis? Is there an established analysis of the phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T06:32:58.023" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T06:32:58.023" Title="Is this a form of ellipsis: If (you are) hungry, you should say so?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6648" CreationDate="2014-02-23T10:13:22.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll begin with a mini-rant: paraphrasing one of my former professors, whenever someone uses the term &quot;ellipsis&quot;, I check that my wallet is still where I think it is. As far as I'm concerned (and I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking about ellipsis), &quot;ellipsis&quot; is a term that should be dropped from the terminology of linguistics, because it's more confusing than it is helpful. It simply means that some words are missing. But what exactly is the mechanism that makes them go missing? Even staying within the core of Chomskyan syntax, I can think of at least three different ways in which to account for &quot;missing words&quot;. If you start considering various extensions to Chomskyan syntax, or even other frameworks, things can become more intricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to your question, there are various funny things to notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Ellipsis&quot; always necessarily happens in an embedded clause. Compare &quot;When exaggerating, he touches his nose&quot; vs. *&quot;When he is exaggerating, touches his nose&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the remnant of &quot;ellipsis&quot; is a verbal predicate, it is necessarily non-finite, e.g., *&quot;When exaggerates, he touches his nose&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The implicit subject of the non-finite, embedded clause is necessarily correferential with the subject of the embedding clause. Thus &quot;When exaggerating, he touches his nose&quot; can't mean &quot;When {I/you/she/we/they} exaggerate(s), he touches his nose&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact, the previous point correlates with the attachment site of the &quot;elliptical&quot; clause. Consider &quot;Adam says that Betty scratches her nose when nervous&quot;. If we take &quot;when nervous&quot; to mean &quot;when Adam is nervous&quot;, then only a high attachment site is possible ---that is, &quot;when nervous&quot; modifies the time of saying, not the time of scratching. Conversely, if &quot;when nervous&quot; means &quot;when Betty is nervous&quot;, then &quot;when nervous&quot; necessarily modifies the time of scratching, not the time of saying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, I'd say that you are looking at a case of non-finite predication (a &quot;small clause&quot;) with a null controlled subject. I would call it PRO, but you can might want to call it something else, depending on your theoretical preferences. If so, a good approximation of the syntax would be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[when [PRO_i nervous]] [he_i scratches his nose].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proper analysis will have to be more detailed, but I bet this is a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T10:13:22.450" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T10:22:52.683" Score="0" ViewCount="942" Body="&lt;p&gt;When compressing a source sentence by removing some of its words, what are the main component besides the verb, subject and negation that one has to keep in order to preserve the grammaticality of a given sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2750" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T12:05:20.233" Title="Sentence well-formedness" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2014-02-23T13:06:43.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, you can remove pretty much and preserve grammaticality if you don't care about preserving meaning. The more the easier. &quot;Go!&quot; is a fully formed, perfectly grammatical English imperative sentence. So is &quot;In!&quot;. The confusion comes from the well-formedness paradigm of formal linguistics and is not a real concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you wanted to preserve some basic semblance of what the sentence was about, and you started out with a sentence with a finite verb in it, in English, you need at least the subject, the verb and whatever obligatory phrasal elements there are. So Elephants snore. or Elephants drink water. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T13:06:43.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T17:46:26.150" Score="3" ViewCount="8094" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, I want to know what are the factors to notice in determining semantic features of different parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize some of them like +/- animate, +/- human, +/- male, and +/- young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there any other features? For example, how can I identify different semantic features for words such as book and notebook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-25T01:06:16.397" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T02:02:29.647" Title="How I can identify semantic features?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T18:18:31.253" Score="3" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;A site search has turned me up &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/5892/size-of-active-vocabulary-in-hunter-gather-tribes&quot;&gt;Size of active vocabulary in hunter gather tribes&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3393/which-language-has-the-biggest-vocabulary&quot;&gt;Which language has the biggest vocabulary?&lt;/a&gt;, but neither of those seem to address what I want to know about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise there are problems defining what exactly constitutes a &quot;word&quot; for the purposes of counting them. For simplicity, I'm happy to say that, for example, &lt;em&gt;word, words, worded, wording, wordy, etc.&lt;/em&gt; are all just manifestations of a single word. Correspondingly, &lt;em&gt;wordsmith, blacksmith, goldsmith, etc.&lt;/em&gt; don't really count as separate words at all, for my current context (since they're all directly derivable from XXXsmith).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is, &lt;em&gt;given the above concept of &quot;word&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (or something similar), is there any evidence to suggest that the &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary of Anglophones (the words they actually &lt;em&gt;use in normal speech&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to words they &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, or can guess from context) is significantly different to that of speakers of other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly supplementary to that, is there any truth to the idea that there might be &quot;culturally impoverished&quot; languages? That's to say, languages spoken by people whose culture has less &quot;real-world referents&quot;, so they might not &quot;need&quot; so many words? (no iPads, CAT scanners, or electioneering, for example). If so, do &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; people have a smaller &quot;active vocabulary&quot; than more &quot;complex, advanced&quot; societies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T21:12:31.327" Title="Active vocabulary for Anglophones compared to native speakers of other languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6643" CreationDate="2014-02-23T20:12:47.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the two interpretations suggested in the question, I prefer the first. That is, upon my first reading of the example and the context in which it appears, I immediately concluded that the &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is a standard anaphoric pronoun, referring back to &lt;em&gt;the community&lt;/em&gt;. Only after reading the context and the alternative interpretation carefully was I able to get that second interpretation, i.e. with &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; as a cataphoric (or anticipatory) pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cataphoric interpretation becomes obligatory for me if the example is changed a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) It was clearly &lt;strong&gt;preferred&lt;/strong&gt; to place the acknowledgements at the bottom of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cataphoric interpretation is now obligatory, the anaphoric interpretation no longer being available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;cataphoric&quot; interpretation is associated with a concrete phenomenon of syntax that is sometimes called &lt;em&gt;it-extraposition&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraposition&lt;/a&gt;. It-extraposition is illustrated with the following pairs of sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. It was difficult to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. To understand was difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. It was important that they try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. That they try was important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. I believed it that they would try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. I believed that they would try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples suggest the reach of the it-extraposition mechanism. The &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; appears in a standard argument position (subject, object) and the full clause or &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-phrase is extraposed to the right periphery of the sentence. The phenomenon is extremely frequent and widespread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct answer to the questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1a:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; refers more readily to &lt;em&gt;the community&lt;/em&gt;; the anaphoric interpretation is dominant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1b:&lt;/strong&gt; The anaphoric interpretation is dominant because for the alternative cataphoric interpretation to work, a predicate that licenses it-extraposition has to be present. The predicate &lt;em&gt;in the mood&lt;/em&gt; reluctantly (at least for me) licenses it-extraposition (whereas the predicate &lt;em&gt;preferred&lt;/em&gt; necessarily licenses it-extraposition). We can see that &lt;em&gt;in the mood&lt;/em&gt; does not readily license it-extaposition because the following sentence seems dubious: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) ?To place the acknowledgements at the bottom of the question was clearly in the mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1c:&lt;/strong&gt; The anaphoric reading is motivated by the fact that &lt;em&gt;in the mood&lt;/em&gt; does not generally license it-extraposition, which means that that the alternative, cataphoric reading is not readily available. With no clear alternative, the anaphoric intepretation is preferred.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Incorrect parses that have to be corrected upon a closer reading are sometimes addressed in terms of a &lt;em&gt;garden path&lt;/em&gt;. One is dealing with a garden path reading. A well-known example: &lt;em&gt;The horse raced past the barn stumbled.&lt;/em&gt; The standard parse begins one way (on a garden path), but then it must be corrected when the end of the sentence is reached. Otherwise, the sentence makes no sense. In my view, the cataphoric reading is a garden path interpretation that can be corrected upon scrutiny. The realization that the predicate &lt;em&gt;in the mood&lt;/em&gt; does not typically license it-extraposition (although I see that that interpretation is possible) should motivate the correction to the anaphoric reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T20:12:47.370" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-02-23T20:12:47.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6653" CreationDate="2014-02-23T21:12:31.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few factors that might confound your answer. For example, I'm pretty sure &quot;actively&quot; know several thousand more words than my father does; but then, I have a doctorate and lost count many years ago of how many books I own, whereas my father stopped going to school at age 15 and all the books he owns fit in a single shelf. So that's something you want to control for. If you are going to compare American English against, let's say, Mongolian, differences in education level alone are going to be enough to give you a false positive. Similarly, you want to average across a large cross-section of the population, to avoid effects related to some speakers (e.g., writers, journalists...) having an anomalously large vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you get all those things into account, my best guess is that you won't find any significant differences in vocabulary size. Again to give a personal example, my uncle, who owns a farm, has an &quot;active&quot; vocabulary that includes many dozen words for farming implements, animal parts, different stages in the life of individual animals, types of crops, etc, that I simply do not have in my &quot;active&quot; vocabulary. Similarly, tribal languages of the Amazonian rainforest or the Australian outback lack science- and technology-related words, but they also have words that &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; lack, related to life in that particular environment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T21:12:31.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T23:18:19.063" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the collection of all things that can be referenced in a language; a language's &lt;strong&gt;universe&lt;/strong&gt; perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &quot;universe&quot; of English would contain most all things/concepts we humans encounter. The &quot;universe&quot; of a numeral system would contain all quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a proper name for this concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3211" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T23:18:19.063" Title="Name for &quot;all things able to be referenced&quot; by a language" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-23T23:44:16.120" Score="3" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a very broad question, I understand. I am working in a project where my aim is to detect linguistic features of deception &lt;em&gt;as a person is speaking or writing&lt;/em&gt;. Some work has been done for written text (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology//P/P11/P11-1032.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper by Myle Ott, et al&lt;/a&gt;), but I have not found anything that provides theoretical insight into the &lt;em&gt;development&lt;/em&gt; of the constructs. For example, when an average person lies, does s/he tend to backtrack more often (i.e. say something like &quot;I went there yesterday to ... umm ... no, I think it was the day before&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am from a computer science background, working in natural language processing. Any pointers to linguistic theories will be extremely helpful, and will allow me to connect statistical observations from my experiments to these theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3212" LastActivityDate="2014-02-23T23:44:16.120" Title="Psycholinguistic/Sociolinguistic theories of lying and/or deception" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6659" CreationDate="2014-02-24T06:05:40.780" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who came in late, there are such things as discontinuous morphemes, i.e. single morphemes that are interrupted by other morphemes.   Note this example from this SIL link:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsADiscontinuousMorpheme.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsADiscontinuousMorpheme.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A circumfix surrounding a root from Tuwali Ifugao (Philippines):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;baddang: root ‘help’v.     ka--an: circumfix ‘NOMR’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kabaddangan: word ‘helpfulness’&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do any natural languages have discontinuous coordinators that surround coordinated phrases?   For example, are there coordinators that work like the ones in this nonce example?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice&quot; = &quot;and1 Bob Carol Ted Alice and2&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;my money or my life&quot; = or1 my money my life or2&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the tall man and the suspicious dog&quot; = and1 tall man suspicious dog and2&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2014-02-24T07:01:35.013" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T07:32:18.493" Title="Do any natural languages have phrase-coordinators that surround their coordinands?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6658" CreationDate="2014-02-24T07:32:18.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: not that we know of. The closest you can get is polysyndetic coordination, which follows the pattern &quot;and A and B&quot;. Note that this isn't really circumfixation, it's just each conjunct being preceded by its own instance of &quot;and&quot;. A nice example of this is Brad Pitt's speech in &lt;em&gt;Ingloriuous Basterds&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us. And the Germans will talk about us. And the Germans will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T07:32:18.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6666" CreationDate="2014-02-24T15:05:18.540" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I analyse evidential devices, is it lexical or propositional level of analysis? I would say it is propositional level, because, for instance, modal verbs being taken out of context may have different meanings, objective like 'must' conveying the meaning of 'obligation', and subjective like 'must' conveying the idea of a person's logical inference about something. Am I mistaken?&#xA;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3216" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T09:10:14.487" Title="Analysis of Evidentials" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4826" CreationDate="2014-02-24T15:55:11.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This grammar in the article is ambiguous, and the article says that&#xA;ambiguity is part of the design. Hence you need a parser that can&#xA;handle ambiguity. Many context-free parsers will not do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, NLTK does offer a chart parser, i.e., an algorithm (based on&#xA;dynamic programming) that can parse any context-free grammar and give&#xA;you ways of dealing with the multiple possible parses that a sentence&#xA;may have when the grammar is ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I have no experience with it, and I do not know (for lack of a&#xA;formal presentation that I did not find in the time I had available)&#xA;how easily and effectively it deals with multiple parse trees, of&#xA;which there can be a large number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem that I see is that the grammar you wish to use is a&#xA;grammar for discourse structure, rather than for sentences. This is&#xA;not inherently a problem but has its own specificity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When parsing an English sentence, you need a first phase that recognizes the&#xA;various lexical elements of your language, and identifies their&#xA;possible lexical categories (parts of speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, you obviously have to identify &quot;parts of discourse&quot; which are&#xA;the terminal of the discourse context free syntax you want to parse.&#xA;I guess they are denoted in figure 2 by lower case letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, you may have to cascade two parsers, an English parser to&#xA;recognize your &quot;parts of discourse&quot;, which are used by the second&#xA;parser to analyze your discourse structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, the NLTK parser can handle both. But I do not have hands&#xA;on experience with it, and the description provided is far too long&#xA;for me to have time to grasp its structure without a more condensed&#xA;formal presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding extended rules, such as &quot;T =&gt; A+ D&quot;, if the parser cannot&#xA;handle them directly, they can easily be changed into the usual&#xA;context-free rules. This example can be rewritten as:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;T =&gt; A T and T=&gt; A D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T15:55:11.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6664" CreationDate="2014-02-24T16:43:03.847" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like περι-, προ- preverb keeps its final vowel when added to a radical as in &quot;προ-αιρέω&quot;. But my French-&gt;Ancient Greek dictionary, the old Bailly, tells me that προβάλλω becomes either προέβαλον either προῦβαλον at the aorist 2. I can't find any further explanations in my grammar books : why such a contraction ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone give me an explanation about these two forms ? Do the vowels contractions after προ- depend on the phonetic environment or is it something linked to language evolution ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB : same remark with προκόπτω &gt; imperfect προύκοπτον in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/historiens/xenophon/hellen7.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;extract&lt;/a&gt; but &gt; προέκοπτον in Galatians 1.14 .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2014-02-24T16:54:54.483" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T05:14:57.463" Title="vowel contraction after &quot;προ-&quot; preverb in Ancient Greek" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6652" CreationDate="2014-02-24T22:51:55.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good start could be to look into how &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; classifies words. WordNet uses hyponymy and hypernymy to establish semantic relationships between synsets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you look for 'book', you get the following derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;book &amp;lt; publication &amp;lt; work &amp;lt; product &amp;lt; creation &amp;lt; artifact &amp;lt; unit &amp;lt; object&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3217" LastActivityDate="2014-02-24T22:51:55.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6662" CreationDate="2014-02-25T04:42:05.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contraction of προ- with the augment is optional: both προέβαλον and προὔβαλον (with coronis and acute, not προῦβαλον with circumflex) occur, although in Attic the contraction happens much more often than not. ου is the regular result of the contraction of ο+ε in Attic (and in some other dialects); however, προ only contracts with a following ε when that ε is the augment, so not in e.g. προελθών.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-02-25T05:14:57.463" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T05:14:57.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1820" CreationDate="2014-02-25T07:21:33.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Harris' work was very empirically based, and kernel sentences with their transformations were his tool for analysis.  His student, Noam Chomsky, never worked empirically, yet introduced the notion of a generative grammar, which produces all the grammatical sentences of a language without producing any of the ungrammatical sentences.  The type of transformation you use as an example does not operate on a single tree.  It combines three trees (&quot;Mary bought the horse.&quot; &quot;Mary fed a horse.&quot; and &quot;The horse was red.&quot;).  Combining separate trees opens up too many possibilities for producing ungrammatical sentences, which is a failure to comply with the requirements of a generative grammar.  Remember Chomsky was not working empirically.  His move was to theorize something akin to a computer program that would spit out all and only the grammatical sentences of a language.  After Syntactic Structures, Chomsky moved to eliminate transformations that combined trees, which were referred to as generalized transformations, in order to apply constraints against some of the ungrammatical outputs generated.  Chomsky had an additional tool that Zellig Harris did not have, phrase structure rules.  The distributional benefit, from a generative perspective, of limiting operations to single trees only had the effect of reducing everything to a single unified &quot;deep structure&quot;.  The creation of a unified deep structure allowed for a singular level in which meaning was initially thought to be brought in.  This got a lot of linguists interested in meaning.  No one at that time, therefore, had any motivation for going back to Zellig Harris' manner of combining multiple trees.  However, you will find a return to combining separate structures more recently in what are referred to as unification-based grammars, like Construction Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3219" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T07:21:33.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6660" CreationDate="2014-02-25T09:10:14.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are talking about are modes of existence, which classify propositions (or more precisely, clauses). From a semantic perspective, eventualities (possible situations) have different modes of existence, some of them being evidential. It has nothing to do with presupposition and only marginally touches entailment (in the case of positive modalities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2014-02-25T09:10:14.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T13:35:42.073" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation is as follows: I have been studying my L2 for approximately 4 years. I have spent a total of 10 months immersed in the L2 environment. My current stint has been for 5 months and counting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify the topic, I have been recalling past events, that were originally in English, in Japanese (my L2). This would be fine if it didn't happen without me being conscious of the event (at least initially). This has happened a number of times but I never took note until today. I was particularly tired from the various stressors of life and my current job situation. Therefore, I thought that it may have been a lapse as a result of exhaustion. However, that's when I realized that this has happened on at least 3 or more occasions. I'm not as much concerned as I am curious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this process? Is this a normal experience for everyone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3221" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-02-26T10:00:44.440" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T10:00:44.440" Title="L1 memories being recalled in my L2" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T19:30:55.610" Score="10" ViewCount="1139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having browsed Stephen Bax' paper &quot;A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script&quot; (available &lt;a href=&quot;http://stephenbax.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Voynich-a-provisional-partial-decoding-BAX.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), as a scientist in the natural sciences (physics, mathematics), I find his proposed decoding of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Voynich Manuscript&lt;/a&gt; plausible. However, I have no means of judging whether the evidence is strong enough. To me, it seems both plausible and too tenuous at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the linguistics community's view on Bax' theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3225" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T03:06:00.390" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T03:06:00.390" Title="Is Stephen Bax' partial decoding of the Voynich Manuscript plausible?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;voynich-manuscript&gt;&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-25T21:52:06.057" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following interlocution,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maria&lt;/strong&gt;: &amp;quot;A man fell off the cliff!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tabish&lt;/strong&gt;: &amp;quot;He didn't fall, he was pushed.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My professor concluded, &lt;em&gt;This shows that pronouns cannot be the same as the definite description.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, she regards Maria's description as referencing 'the man who fell off the cliff', and regards Tabish's reply as expressing that 'the man who fell off the cliff (&amp;quot;He&amp;quot;) didn't fall off the cliff', which is a contradiction. But I don't feel confident about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-03-09T17:36:34.253" Title="Why does this pronomial not refer?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6672" CreationDate="2014-02-25T23:31:12.120" Score="18" ViewCount="47017" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I'm not a linguist, and I realize I might be treading in a grey area here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what the differences (and/or similarities) between &lt;strong&gt;native language&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;first language&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;mother tongue&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;L1&lt;/strong&gt; are. The first three, I find, are often used interchangeably in casual conversation. In academic linguistics though, are there generally accepted differences between these terms? Also, where does that leave L1? I believe it's an academic term, but I often see it defined relative to the other three casual terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick Google search seems to reveal there is a lot of confusion around these terms, and possibly no straightforward answer. It also doesn't help that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; groups the four terms into one article and has fewer citations than I would like. The only thing I've been able to gather is that the tendency seems to be for &quot;native language&quot; to mean proficient and for &quot;first language&quot; to mean chronologically first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I'd like to find out (if possible) what term or terms are applicable to the following scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A chronologically first language with which the speaker is no longer fluent or even competent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A language learned to fluency in adulthood (with or without a foreign accent - though I realize the latter is rare).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A language learned to fluency in childhood (within the critical period) that is not chronologically first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize fluency might not be the best word to use...but the words I would normally use are the ones that I'm seeking clearer definitions for!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T09:16:41.517" Title="What is the difference between native language, first language, mother tongue and L1?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2014-02-26T03:21:24.743" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, the fact of the matter is that everybody learns their own languages, in their own ways, in their own times, places, and circumstances. It is normal for kids to have several languages at home, and to pick up others as needed, by playing with other kids. Those languages either flourish through use, or wither and get forgotten by disuse, like any human skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, people vary not only in their unique language experience, but in their skill at apprehending and using it. Also like any human skill. That's a &lt;strong&gt;vast&lt;/strong&gt; amount of individual variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, labels like  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Native language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;First language,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mother tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;L1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;L2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   .. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are invented by people who need abbreviations for commonly-referenced groups of characteristics, usually characteristics that are common only in monolingual places like the USA, where almost everybody speaks only English, and often finds multilingualism threatening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are not terms defined in the Qur'an or the APA Style Manual; they are just abbreviations, which may be useful in certain contexts among certain kinds of professional. That's all, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These terms, and others, may or may not be applicable to the situations you mention. Or to others one can easily imagine. I repeat, they're just nonce forms, with localized definition and localized utility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are Not Ready For Prime Time, in other words, so you shouldn't take them too seriously. &#xA;And they certainly don't cover every possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T03:21:24.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2014-02-26T14:59:07.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a blog post about this very topic last week, on the International Mother Language Day. &lt;a href=&quot;http://multilingualparenting.com/2014/02/21/mother-tongue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://multilingualparenting.com/2014/02/21/mother-tongue/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is unfortunately no clear-cut answer if you speak more than one language. The different terms are used in different contexts and for varying purposes. For me 'mother tongue' and 'native language' are more or less interchangeable. The term 'first language' is as far as I understand not the chronologically first language, but the one a speaker is fluent in and feels most comfortable to speak. This means your 'first language' can change depending on where you live and which language you speak the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first question is intriguing and I also wrote about the scenario in my blog. If you no longer speak the language(s) you learnt as a child, based on the monolingual research terminology, you would be &quot;mother-tongue-less&quot; - however you would have a L1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have become fluent in a language later in life, you have a 'native level fluency'. It's difficult to draw the line with regards to accents - different &quot;native&quot; speakers have vastly varying accents as well, so why would an accent from an other area prevent you from being called fluent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have learnt a language as a child and you are fluent in it, it is one of your 'native languages' - the notion that there could only be one 'mother tongue' or 'native language' comes from a monolingual perspective and doesn't apply to bilingual people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3230" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T14:59:07.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2014-02-26T17:53:25.067" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, none of the terms relate to the fluency of the language. The expression 'first language' relates to the vocabulary and linguistic variations (i.e. grammar, semantics) most commonly used by the speaker, which allows the person to practice a particular 'slang' to communicate within the environment they live in, even if they are not fluent using that particular language (in terms of 'academic' language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mother tongue/native language, however, involves a brain process - training, which starts when we are born and that includes components, elements and other types of communication (i.e. body language) that we adopt when we are little in order to survive within the context, and that create an specific mental structure - code that will dictate our future languages acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3233" LastEditorUserId="3233" LastEditDate="2014-02-26T18:04:15.423" LastActivityDate="2014-02-26T18:04:15.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-26T18:09:05.917" Score="22" ViewCount="2523" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of historical linguistics or of the Indo-European language family. However, it would have been noticeable to anyone who spoke even a little of both Greek and Latin that they shared many similarities, most obviously in basic vocabulary such as kinship terms and numerals, but also in some of the inflectional endings. Further afield, there would have been some scholars or travelers who had knowledge of other IE languages, such as Persian, or even of Indic or Germanic languages, and who could easily have noticed the same similarities (while, on the other hand, someone familiar with a non-IE language -- Semitic, Etruscan -- could have seen that these shared features were absent there). What did they think the reason for this was? Do we have any surviving writings that address the question of why these languages have so much in common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that anyone thinking about this question in those times would have done so in a 'genealogy of peoples' framework, where e.g. the Romans were descended from the Trojans, etc., and tried to explain the linguistic facts that way. But do we actually know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T04:26:29.613" Title="What did the Greeks and Romans believe about language relationships?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2619" CreationDate="2014-02-27T01:01:23.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many Korean dialects, there are no sound difference between ㅐ and ㅔ. I mean almost every Korean pronounce those same. Of course, the standard pronunciation rules in both South and North Korea don't allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3236" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T01:01:23.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2014-02-27T09:53:14.883" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, we do not have any Greek or Roman texts discussing an eventual genetic relationship between Greek and Latin. There was however a heated discussion about whether language was “by nature” (physei) or “by convention” (literally: “by setting” thesei). You can read all about it in Plato’s “Cratylus”. If language is “by nature”, then it would follow that all languages have a common origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T09:53:14.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2014-02-27T15:18:19.997" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greeks had most probably noticed a similarity of their language with &lt;strong&gt;Phrygian&lt;/strong&gt;. Socrates at least did so while speaking to Hermogenes: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Well then, consider whether this pyr is not foreign ; for the word is not easily brought into relation with the Hellenic tongue, and the Phrygians may be observed to have the same word slightly changed, just as they have ydor (water) and kynes (dogs), and many other words&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. They also noticed that their language had changed, compared to the language(s) spoken in Greece in (the period they considered) ancient times [See Herodotus on the Hellenic language, saying it is a branch of Pelasgic, pre-Greek and most probably non-IE]. Diodorus noticed too that the Samothracians whose ancestors had evidenced the Black Sea deluge, were using words belonging to that ancient language (probably a pre-IE Anatolian language) of those times.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you have other authors noticing similarities of various languages, such as Dacian and Thracian, Mysian with Lydian and Phrygian/or Paeonian and so on. There are many scattered comments on languages, but it is not clear how they explained the similarity. Herodotus described the view that Phrygian was the most ancient language in the world, so some people might have seen that as the proto-Indo-European of their time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember how the relation to Latin was explained. I am sure there are comments about it as well, nevertheless by the Romans themselves. If I find more info on that, I will  get back to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T15:18:19.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-27T20:12:32.480" Score="5" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the looks of it Boustrophedon texts should be more efficient to read. However, I can't find any modern day research regarding its effects and reasons why it would have fallen out of use in history (though I can hypothesize it has something to do with the difficulty of writing such texts. However in the modern day where computers are used for input this would make no difference anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3239" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-02-27T22:30:49.763" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T02:51:32.107" Title="Boustrophedonism effects" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2014-02-27T21:32:34.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably it's more difficult to learn to use boustrophedon: you have to learn to read and write in two directions, as well as learning two orientations for each letter. I don't see that it offers any particular benefit that would offset this extra difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you're writing in ink on a paper-like surface, a consistently left-to-right writing direction means you don't smudge what you've just written (assuming you're right-handed). So it seems plausible that expanding use of papyrus might have contributed to the desuetude of boustrophedon, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-02-27T21:32:34.253" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2014-02-28T06:02:06.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This touches me on a personal level for I've tried hard my whole life to get rid of my accent, only to be told time and again I still have a strong Hispanic accent. I've learned a few interesting things on the road, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rhythm. Syllables of Spanish are all more or less same length and at a semi-constant tempo. English tends to accelerate the tempo for unstressed syllables and slow it down a bit for stressed ones. Other languages have their own rhythmic and mellodic-line patterns which differ from English ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sounds. Consonants have allophonic variations depending on environment. And most of the 10+ vowels of English lack equivalents in most other European languages. Nothing really prepares you to utter them save tons of practice. And then, there's a lot of variation in the realizations of some vowels in different dialects. Plus, in most dialects they get blurred in unstressed positions, which takes me to...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sandhi. All languages have it, but English has a moderately complicated one that's usually not represented in its written form (in comics or informal texts it is sometimes, but not consistently). Sounds, both written and not, interact with their neighbours not just within a word but also at the boundaries of words, mutating into others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Über-naïf native speakers. Most of them are not aware of the different pronunciations they use - some even are unable to tell 2 sounds appart even though they clearly make the distinction when speaking. Of course they do can detect when you're sounding &quot;weird&quot; or &quot;better&quot; - but can't state why :(&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T06:02:06.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-28T07:43:55.563" Score="3" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with the concept of thematic roles, just what is on wikipedia. Here is what I have come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;agent: The man runs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;patient: The man was tripped.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;experiencer: The man falls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to compare how different languages combine thematic roles and syntax functions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other thematic roles may be played by the subject of an intransitive verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3241" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T12:19:49.310" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T13:39:42.507" Title="What thematic roles are played by the subject of an intransitive verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-02-28T10:32:45.710" Score="3" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; twice &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯iteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; second &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯oi̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; twofold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯eiplos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; double &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc, with the root du̯ei̯-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯eiros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fearful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;du̯eisos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; hated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with seemingly the same root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any etymological or semantic connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. After making this post I found that de Vaan postulates the following:&#xA;*dus 'into two &gt; bad'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T10:53:51.190" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T11:34:18.677" Title="In PIE are words for two and for hate connected?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6685" CreationDate="2014-02-28T14:46:17.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A theta role is a very simple concept: is the name that we give to the relation between an event and an individual participating in that event. How coarse- or fine-grained we want our theta roles to be is a totally different question. I suggest you pick up Heidi Harley's survey article on theta roles (referenced in the Wikipedia entry) and work your way from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T14:46:17.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6686" CreationDate="2014-02-28T18:10:28.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This connection is possible, perhaps even plausible, as long as you remember that Proto-Indo-European is not a real language but a theoretical construct. Everything about it is conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-02-28T18:34:49.450" LastActivityDate="2014-02-28T18:34:49.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2014-03-01T13:01:42.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the rules formulated by Tim are valid in many languages, but not in all. They are not valid in languages with a very free word order, like Latin or Sanskrit. In Latin you can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;puella fratri irata&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;irata fratri puella&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;puella irata fratri&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fratri puella irata&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T13:01:42.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28438" CreationDate="2014-03-01T21:01:44.243" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and some other languages (such as Portuguese and possibly&#xA;Italian), the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;calculus&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is actually an abbreviation from&#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;differential and integral calculus&lt;/em&gt;&quot; that has taken the meaning of the&#xA;whole expression. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my question is whether the word is still used alone in the&#xA;language with its former meaning of computation, or can it only appear&#xA;with a qualifier specifying what kind of computation it can be, for&#xA;example &quot;tensor calculus&quot;, &quot;construction calculus&quot; or&#xA;&quot;lambda-calculus&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find any example of the use of calculus alone in English&#xA;with its original meaning, except for one case I was given as example:&#xA;&quot;it does not enter my calculus&quot;.  However my feeling is that&#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;someone's calculus&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, i.e. calculus with a possessive or a genitive is&#xA;a kind of frozen expression meaning &quot;someone's plans&quot;, and hence does&#xA;not qualify. Would you agree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate comments on this, and possibly technical names for&#xA;the phenomenon. I am not a native speaker of any of the languages&#xA;mentioned here (and for some, not a speaker at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This derives from a question on SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/22126&quot;&gt;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/22126&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.197" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T14:08:57.580" Title="Abbreviation taking the meaning of the whole expression" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-01T21:22:42.177" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Etruscans had several names in antiquity: the Greeks called them Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi, the Roman Tusci or Etrusci (and their country Etruria). All these names seem to be related, ultimately coming from a root Turs- (or maybe Trus-). (The Etruscans themselves seem to have used a completely different name, Rasenna or Rasna.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus Turs- plus the Greek ethnonymic suffix -en- gives Tyrsenoi (or Tyrrhenoi with the regular change -rs- &gt; -ss-). In Latin, Turs-ci would give Tusci. With metathesis, Turs- becomes Trus-, and this seems to underlie E-trus-ci and E-trur-ia (from E-trus-ia with regular rhotacism). But why the E- in these last two forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding prothetic e- before a consonant cluster is, of course, something that many languages do, but Latin doesn't. Latin has no problem with words beginning tr-, so there's no reason to add an initial e-. The only hypothesis I can think of is that the Romans got this name through some other, unknown language which didn't allow initial consonant clusters, and the e- is due to that language. This is probably an unanswerable question, but has anyone speculated about this initial e-?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-03-01T21:22:42.177" Title="Why the E- in Etruscan?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T05:26:25.463" Score="0" ViewCount="1691" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that Lithuanian and Romanian are related. As such, I want to know, to what extent they are mutually intelligible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3245" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T10:37:51.993" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T10:37:51.993" Title="How much Lithuanian and Romanian languages are mutually intelligible?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;&lt;lithuanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1625" CreationDate="2014-03-02T06:21:18.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was in the literature! Very recently, though. According to the citations in the paper linked below, the idea first appeared in 2009 here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;W. Czerwinski, S. B. Fröschle &amp;amp; S. Lasota (2009):&#xA;&quot;Partially-Commutative Context-Free Processes.&quot; In: CONCUR, pp. 259–273, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04081-8_18&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the description of the commutation rule for symbols, some basic theorems, were given here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;W. Czerwinski, S. B. Fröschle &amp;amp; S. Lasota (2011): Partially-commutative context-free processes: expressibility and tractability. Inf. Comput.&#xA;209(5), pp. 782–798, doi:10.1016/j.ic.2010.12.003&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I found the following free reference first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wojciech Czerwinski, Sławomir Lasota, &quot;Partially Commutative Context Free Languages&quot; ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2747.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2747.pdf&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This free text only appeared about 6 months after this question, so my ignorance was justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper describes a formalization of the commutative context free grammer (what they name, more precisely, a &quot;partially commutative context free grammer&quot;, but this is what is described in the body of my question. The formalization is not difficult, it is exactly by introducing two-element swap operations). The paper also reviews existing literature, and explains in detail how this differs from other ideas which are naively similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The straightforward definition is on page 37, it introduces the &quot;swap operation&quot; for independent symbols, and allows productions which swap, in addition to a standard representation of CFGs. Instead of &quot;plussing&quot; variables and commuting only to the right, it defines an &quot;independent set&quot; of variables which can be moved back and forth to any permutation. This can be more general than what I defined in the question, but it subsumes the right-moving grammars. The paper states an automaton model for the class, using multiple stacks, on page 38.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main theorems prove that the decision procedure for general pcCFGs (partially commutative context free grammars) is NP complete, and introduces a notion of &quot;shuffling&quot; or &quot;interleaving&quot; of grammars, so that you have two different interleaved grammars going on at the same time (this was one of my own original motivation for thinking about this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between what I suggested and the paper is that the paper has a more general class, as it is interested in full automaton theory for such languages, not just in natural language processing. The natural language processing does not require commutation beyond certain natural stopping points--- the commutation steps are only to reorder the ADVERB and ADJECTIVE phrases amongst each other, and with the NOUNPHRASE and VERBPHRASE symbol within the same verb-scope level, they never permute anything into deeper levels of the tree. With this restriction, I am sure that the decision procedure is not NP complete, since the permutation steps can be made to a canonical order level by level. But since this is of current interest, and there is something to reference, one should publish a paper, rather than just say it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication of this for natural language processing is just that you define the parse tree with commutation rules at each level, so that you can permute the adverb and adjective nodes arbitrary on any one level the tree, so long as they don't go inside deeper parts of the tree. A &quot;level&quot; of the tree is one where you haven't introduced a new verb, it is the collection of all things which attach to one verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this additional commutativity structure, you can permute the adverbs and adjectives in any level to a standard context free form, this should not be NP complete or anything, and then parse the sentence in the usual CFG way. I am pretty sure that there are no remaining issues for a formal description of natural language grammar, as all the verified examples of the failure of CFG come from cases where a permutation on one level fixes the structure of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="810" LastEditorUserId="810" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T06:31:55.480" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T06:31:55.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6694" CreationDate="2014-03-02T06:58:04.520" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;They aren't mutually intelligible at all. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, Romanian is a Romance language. Yes, they're related (both are Indo-European), but no more so than, say, English and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T06:58:04.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="889" CreationDate="2014-03-02T14:56:20.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At present, the recent findings of Lusitanian inscriptions confirm the bilingual character (indigenous - Latin) of the so called Lusitanian language. Thus, porcom, taurom, etc. are considered to be Latin loanwords: cp. callaecian mociô, tarvo, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the famous Lusitanian /p/ is observed just now as a alternating form  of /b/, consequence of the harmonization of the occlusive bilabial system owing to the lack of the phoneme p (very similar to gaul and noric languages): cp. BELLUS - PELLUS, BUCCUS - PUCCUS, BROENEIA - PROINETIA, BROCINA - PROCELA, etc.; or they belong to the common onomastic 'stock' of western Europe: cp. *appa-, *kopp-, *tapp-, etc., where the phoneme /p/ is kept in Gaul (APALUS, COPILUS, TAPARUS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that we know about Lusitanian language are placenames, personal names and numerous deities, which only can be identified from the celtic languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3248" LastEditorUserId="3248" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T15:03:17.787" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T15:03:17.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-02T16:28:29.343" Score="2" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the etymology of the Hebrew word יָלַד, transliterated, &lt;em&gt;yalad&lt;/em&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/Lexicon/Lexicon.cfm?strongs=H3205&amp;amp;t=KJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew Lexicon&lt;/a&gt; offers no etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an effort to research the linguistics pertaining to a question on BH-SE, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/8365/how-can-the-3-questions-be-resolved-with-the-math-still-correct&quot;&gt;How can Three Questions be solved and the Math Still be Correct.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The solution requires that &lt;em&gt;begat&lt;/em&gt; be understood as conception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:41.937" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T16:13:03.090" Title="What is the etymology of the Hebrew word יָלַד" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2014-03-02T17:52:51.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has cognates in many other Semitic languages, all with the same meaning &quot;give birth&quot;, so I would say that that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;essence of its meaning&quot;. (I've never seen this root used to mean &quot;travail&quot;, by the way; if it's attested in that meaning somewhere, this is probably a secondary sense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two roots you mention are probably unrelated. &lt;em&gt;y-l-l&lt;/em&gt; &quot;howl&quot; looks onomatopoeic, while &lt;em&gt;y-l-ʕ&lt;/em&gt; (which seems to be a hapax, i.e. possibly a nonce creation in the single verse in which it appears) presumably comes from &lt;em&gt;loʕ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mouth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-03-02T23:19:35.727" LastActivityDate="2014-03-02T23:19:35.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2014-03-03T13:35:49.397" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root w-l-d “to beget” (of a man) and “to give birth to” (of a woman) is found not only in Hebrew and Ethiopic, but in all Semitic languages (Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, South Arabian, Ethiopic etc.) The shift of initial w to y is regular in Hebrew and Aramaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="1774" LastEditDate="2014-03-03T18:03:30.150" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T18:03:30.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-03T20:16:12.857" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a way to select the node(word) level using Stanford dependency parser. But, i haven't found any method that help to get the node level. I will be very grateful for your help &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2750" LastEditorUserId="2750" LastEditDate="2014-03-03T20:27:29.373" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T20:27:29.373" Title="Node level with Stanford dependency parser" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-03T22:26:29.483" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm not sure about the title, but it's the best I can come up with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ELU somebody has asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/155253/how-to-conjugate-verb-in-relative-clause-where-case-changes&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about which form of the verb &quot;to be&quot; to use in the frame&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She gives a blanket to me who ? cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since neither &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; sounds right to me, I am left to conclude that, in my idiolect at least, there is no rule that generates a grammatical sentence, and therefore the frame is ungrammatical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean by &lt;strong&gt;contingent&lt;/strong&gt; grammaticality is that there is nothing intrinsically (&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;) or intuitively (&lt;em&gt;end edit&lt;/em&gt;) ungrammatical about the frame: with any other NP (object NP, if it marks case) in place of &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, there is a choice of verb &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; that makes the sentence grammatical. But with this one particular pronoun there is (on my speculative analysis) no choice which makes it grammatical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anybody come across this line of argument before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T18:56:02.283" Title="Contingent grammaticality" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2014-03-03T22:49:31.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to check Heck &amp;amp; Cuartero 2008 (&quot;Long distance agreement in relative clauses&quot;, available from Heck's website) for a description of the pattern, references to previous works, and an analysis that you may or may not agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-03-03T22:49:31.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2014-03-04T01:28:52.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a problem around constructions like that with most American English speakers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(UK English speakers may claim to speak elsewhise, but pay attention to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;what they actually &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; say, rather than what they &lt;strong&gt;claim&lt;/strong&gt; they &quot;always say&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is that relative clauses virtually always have third person subjects.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This allows the existence of &lt;em&gt;Whiz&lt;/em&gt;-Deletion, the rule that relates  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a boy who is eleven years old&lt;/em&gt; ➜ &lt;em&gt;a boy eleven years old&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;the man who is shovelling the snow&lt;/em&gt; ➜ &lt;em&gt;the man shovelling snow&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a statue which is on the corner which is made of bronze&lt;/em&gt; ➜ &lt;em&gt;a statue on the corner made of bronze&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So many English speakers are uncomfortable with relative clauses with 1st or 2nd person subjects.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Most 1st- and 2nd-person verbs are &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;, and these are normally contracted to &lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;you're&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So &quot;who am&quot; sounds very very strange to most English speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way out -- there are quite a few -- is to insert a noun phrase like &lt;em&gt;a person&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since &lt;em&gt;a person&lt;/em&gt; is third person, one can say &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; instead of fussing with other inflected forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T01:28:52.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2014-03-04T10:15:54.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general question asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has anybody come across this line of argument before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hasn't really been considered in the two existing very interesting answers. If by that you mean the study of frames which are perfectly fine except for a few very specific grammatical categories, the answer is yes: contingent grammaticality in your sense is the source of many puzzling (and much studied) phenomena. To name just two of the most famous and pervasive instances, cliticization in Romance and differential object marking (in dozens of languages) are the source of many contingent grammaticality templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elle a donné une couverture à X.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She gave a blanket to X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is contingently ungrammatical (in your sense) if X is a pronoun and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Juan tocó X.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Juan touched X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is contingently ungrammatical if X is animate and specific. English relatives are another much studied case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X that I know.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is contingently ungrammatical if X lacks an article or conversely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Colin Fine X. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is contingently grammatical if X is a relative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T10:15:54.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-04T17:37:47.770" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various measure for Reading Level.&#xA;Is there a source of information and scores/ratings for individual words? (I'm wondering if some words are only used by certain ages and/or education levels.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is, can anyone point to some sources please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is not, what would be a good (robust/mostly consistent) way to generate such scores?&#xA;Would frequency be good (though I think the texts used to get the frequencies may bias things and result in omissions?). Are syllable counts a viable method? How about looking at the &quot;parts&quot; (phonemes?) of the word, and looking at how common/uncommon they are compared to other words/constituent parts? (Ideally I'd like something that can be applied to any/all words ... so I think frequency may be a problem - unless someone knows a very large frequency resource?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3257" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T17:37:47.770" Title="Words and reading level" Tags="&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6713" CreationDate="2014-03-04T17:43:36.080" Score="1" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;::UPDATED::&#xA;Dictionaries will often present a single word, and then inflected/derived relational forms (such as &quot;house&quot;, and then provide listings for &quot;houses&quot;, &quot;housed&quot; and &quot;housing&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the equivelent of a &quot;head word&quot; for synonyms (much like dictionaries provide for collective variants/inflections of a lemma).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the questions are;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) Does such a thing exist?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) If so, what is it called?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c) If so, are there any examples and/or resources for such?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example1: &#xA;[word] &gt; [word-lemma] &gt; [collective-lemma]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Example2: &#xA;&quot;Domiciles&quot; &gt; &quot;domicile&quot; &gt; &quot;home&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Example3:&#xA;&quot;sprinted&quot; &gt; &quot;sprint&quot; &gt; &quot;run&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There, I hope that is clearer :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;::IGNORE::&#xA;//The below is apparently unclear/confusing - please respond to the above version//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word/term/phrase that means the designated word to represent a collection of related words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries use a &quot;head&quot; or &quot;root&quot; word for variants (House: &gt;Houses, &gt;Housing, &gt;Housed) - is there such a thing for Synonyms and Word Families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've Googled and I've searched here (and Yahoo Answers etc.). I'm not sure if there is such a term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is, can someone please tell me the name? Further, can someone point to a source (such as a thesaurus) that uses it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no such term/reference - what would you suggest as a way to implement it?&#xA;Should I simply go for the shortest word in the group (with the same/similar part of speech/morphological attributes (mood/gender etc.)? Is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3257" LastEditorUserId="3257" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T10:11:39.610" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T10:11:39.610" Title="Head word for Synonyms and Word Families?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6710" CreationDate="2014-03-04T18:28:54.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word you are looking for is &quot;lemma&quot;, also called &quot;headword&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-04T18:28:54.630" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-04T18:45:33.070" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;What word would you use to describe words and groups of consecutively occurring words, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;the&#xA;it&#xA;i am&#xA;it is&#xA;for a&#xA;in the last&#xA;why did&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer a word that would make sense to even non-linguists if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T20:44:29.263" Title="Words and phrases" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2014-03-07T13:47:40.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6710" CreationDate="2014-03-05T01:49:22.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Juri Apresjan, a famous Russian lexicographer, uses the term &quot;synonymic series,&quot; whose &lt;strong&gt;dominant&lt;/strong&gt; is &quot;a lexeme which has the most general meaning in the given series.&quot; For further details see Apresjan 2000, &lt;a href=&quot;http://global.oup.com/academic/product/systematic-lexicography-9780198237808&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Systematic Lexicography&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the dominant of the synonymic series &quot;strong, stout, sturdy, stalwart, tough, tenacious&quot; is strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the level and scope of lexicographic research in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruslang.ru/agens.php?id=text_noss2_title&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Novyj objasnitel'nyj slovar'  sinonimov russkogo iazyka&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Apresjan et al. 2004, 2nd edition), compiled by Apresjan's research group, is unprecedented. Unfortunately, no dictionary of synonyms published in English, German, or French comes even closer to the comprehensiveness and detailedness of Apresjan et al. 2004.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T02:04:57.903" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T02:04:57.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T14:17:16.080" Score="2" ViewCount="5403" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to give something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# John # eat + past # apple&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and get back the grammatically correct sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;John ate an apple.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which software can I use for such generation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2738" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-06T06:54:38.143" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T13:27:50.553" Title="How to generate grammatically correct sentences?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2014-03-05T15:47:17.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example you give displays three grammatical aspects to deal with. First, the subject should agree with the verb by person and number, which is relevant in present tense: &lt;em&gt;“John eats”&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;“John eat”&lt;/em&gt;. Second, you need to construct the verb phrase correctly according to the required tense/aspect/voice, i.e., present-perfect-progressive will be &lt;em&gt;“John has been eating an apple”&lt;/em&gt;. And third, you have to identify that &lt;em&gt;“apple”&lt;/em&gt; is a count-singular noun and therefore it requires a determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More grammatical rules may be relevant for other patterns you might want to support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not aware of any software that does exactly what you describe. However, in Contextors we use an &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/?ref=1088#agreementor_widget&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;internal tool&lt;/a&gt; for the first two aspects above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2673" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T16:40:45.200" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T16:40:45.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-05T17:40:13.170" Score="3" ViewCount="9280" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assumptions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reference&lt;/em&gt;: a unique and real entity that an expression represents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sense&lt;/em&gt;: a facet of a referent that an expression represents. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Connotation&lt;/em&gt;: the settled emotional content of an expression (especially of a word). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Denotation&lt;/em&gt;: the meaning of an expression (especially of a word) less its connotation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Intension&lt;/em&gt;: the truth conditions of an expression [1].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Extension&lt;/em&gt;: all entities that fulfill the the intension of an expression [1].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conflations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concepts of &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt; and of &lt;em&gt;denotation&lt;/em&gt; seem the same. For example, it seems to me that the expressions &lt;strong&gt;pro-choice&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;pro-abortion&lt;/strong&gt;[2] have the same extension[1], the same denotation, but different connotations. So denotation and extension seem the same to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, my concepts of &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;denotation&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; seem nearly the same, except that my concept of &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; includes only expressions that represent unique and real referents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also similarly, my concepts of &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; and of &lt;em&gt;connotation&lt;/em&gt; seem nearly the same, except that my concept of &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; includes only expressions that represent unique and real referents.  (E.g. Bruce Wayne and Batman are two senses of the same referent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which, if any, of the aforementioned terms did I incorrectly define?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What distinguishes &lt;em&gt;denotation&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;intension&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;em&gt;Some meaningful expressions may not comprise all components necessary to state anything true or false. (I.e. unsaturated predicates or arguments). Logicians and linguists use variables to represent an absent component, such as in &lt;strong&gt;∃x(Px)&lt;/strong&gt;, where only &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; has a stated interpretation. In such a case, the intension of the expression &lt;strong&gt;∃x(Px)&lt;/strong&gt; is that [[&lt;strong&gt;∃x(Px)&lt;/strong&gt;]] is true iff it is true that x exists and that the interpretation of P is true of x.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;em&gt;I acknowledge that, strictly speaking, [[&lt;strong&gt;pro-choice&lt;/strong&gt;]] ≠ [[&lt;strong&gt;pro-abortion&lt;/strong&gt;]]. I disregarded that fact for the sake of the example.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="3064" LastEditDate="2014-03-05T19:36:24.243" LastActivityDate="2014-03-05T19:36:24.243" Title="Are 'reference', 'sense', 'connotation', 'denotation', 'intension', and 'extension' mutually distinct terms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2014-03-06T12:32:24.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, a &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent that consists of one or more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sequence of one or more words may be called a &lt;em&gt;string&lt;/em&gt;, since a string is just a sequence of symbols. This definition is used in automata theory and discussion of formal grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3205" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T12:32:24.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2014-03-06T20:44:29.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call them arbitrarily segmented fragments of sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-06T20:44:29.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-07T11:33:43.690" Score="3" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese there are two morphemes which are used before certain nouns as part of the honorific system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;お&lt;/code&gt; (o)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ご&lt;/code&gt; (go)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which terms can be used to refer to these out of &quot;prefix&quot; and &quot;particle&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't asked which is &quot;correct&quot; because I don't know if that's meaningful. But if it is that's fine, otherwise whichever is used by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that other than these Japanese might not actually have prefixes, which might be reason to not analyse these as such either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T10:41:06.820" Title="Are Japanese honorific お and ご prefixes, particles, or both?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4856" CreationDate="2014-03-07T12:45:09.847" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As to the definition &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia, agglutinative language&lt;/a&gt; Esperanto indeed is highly-agglutinative. And &quot;malsanulejo&quot; (there exists a hundred year old alternative, but rare, &quot;hospitalo&quot;) indeed is often cited by both the pro and contra E-o factions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the same stem and same endings for deriving adjective &lt;code&gt;-a&lt;/code&gt;, noun &lt;code&gt;-o&lt;/code&gt;, verb (&lt;code&gt;-i&lt;/code&gt;) is one property. For E-o this has a funny effect on the &quot;internationality,&quot; but assumedly makes the language easier for members of other language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;highly&quot; makes only sense with sufficient affixes being used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-em'       (verbal stem) having a tendency&#xA;-ind'      (verbal stem, passive) worthwile, -worth&#xA;&#xA;emo        inclination, tendency    ridindeco  ridiculity&#xA;ridi       to laugh                 paroli     to speak&#xA;ridema     often laughing           parolema   talkative, loquacious&#xA;ridinda    ridiculous               parolo     speech&#xA;inda       worth                    kverelema  quarrelsome&#xA;batalema   combative&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sample here only, to give a taste of such agglutinative languages. They often are taxed &quot;difficult&quot; for their &quot;strangeness&quot; like the Uralic languages. The reality is: they often are more regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T12:45:09.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2014-03-07T12:45:49.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of things to note: Japanese has other prefixes, mi- and on- are others I think, but even if o- and go- were the only ones, you could still call them prefixes and this is related to the second thing I was talking about: the number of them is not a criterion for establishing whether you can call them prefixes or not, correct me if I'm misinterpreting here, but I think that's what you intended in your last sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If -san as in Daniel-san is considered a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_honorifics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;honorific suffix&lt;/a&gt;, then you could call o- a honorific prefix.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; In that case it does act as a prefix, because it's attached to the word. In Japanese there's no use of hyphens in this sense, so there is no visual separation. You could argue that no distinction is made for words in Japanese in general, and no space is present between them, however the honorific is undoubtedly attached to that word and not to others. See for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;智子さん&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tomoko-san&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-san here is a suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;お元気ですか&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  o genki desu ka&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where we have 元気 (genki - health), です (desu - the copula) and か (particle indicating that this is a question), all preceded by お, the honorific o-.&#xA;You could say 元気ですか (genki desu ka) and it would still be correct, however not appropriate for situations that require some formality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;these are prefixes&lt;/strong&gt;, however, addressing your other point, I wouldn't call honorifics — particles. Particles, when referring to the Japanese language, are a different category and I think you might create confusion in your listener if you called お- a particle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: To be honest, you don't even need to call them &quot;honorific prefixes/suffixes&quot;, since saying &quot;honorifics&quot; is also a noun and not just an adjective.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-03-07T12:45:49.763" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6727" CreationDate="2014-03-07T14:30:44.853" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had always thought that the terms &quot;agglutinative&quot; and &quot;agglutination&quot; referred to the typology of the inflection in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4856/does-the-term-highly-agglutinating-language-refer-to-inflecional-endings-wo&quot;&gt;another question here&lt;/a&gt; there seem to be a number of comments and answers where the terms are understood to refer to derivation, word-building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these two are relevant to the terms in question. Just the first, or a bit of both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is actually about Esperanto, and some of the morphemes could well be analysed as either and/or both inflectional and derivational, since the language is so incredibly regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T01:11:14.877" Title="Does the classification of languages &quot;agglutinating&quot; concern itself with inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, or both?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6725" CreationDate="2014-03-07T23:47:45.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original formulation of the 'aggluttinative type' applied to both derivation and inflection. The key element is monosemantic nature of the morphemes involved (but there are also many other criteria).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the criteria are best illustrated with functional rather than derivational morphemes. Which is why most of the examples given are inflectional. I don't have my books near me to confirm, but I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladim%C3%ADr_Skali%C4%8Dka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Skalicka&lt;/a&gt; (one of the early investigators) mostly considered inflection in his work on Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?d=&amp;amp;id=n2F3KfTWX_AC&amp;amp;q=agglutinative%20type#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=agglutinative%20type&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;See p. 54 here for more details ...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-08T01:11:14.877" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T01:11:14.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2416" CreationDate="2014-03-08T03:58:06.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words for Gypsy are as follows, zingari/zinger/tinker, cigany,atzigano/gitano. Take a look at a book called The Secrets of Society (by Dai'Quiriya Martinez- available at Amazon.com). Many of these are terms for Gypsies that originate in the Middle Ages in Europe and some of these words actually refer to the dark skin color of the Roma (Gypsy) ethnic group. The root for the words zingari/ zinger is zinj. The word zinj has its origins in the word in the name Zanj/Zinj, is from Arabic origins and refers to East Africa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3269" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T03:58:06.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6159" CreationDate="2014-03-08T14:51:15.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can try the Spanish stemming algorithm found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/spanish/stemmer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/spanish/stemmer.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-03-08T14:51:15.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-08T18:34:20.263" Score="4" ViewCount="20300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you explain for me what is the main difference between pragmatics in linguistics and discourse analysis? Both are related to study of use of language in real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2771" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T09:11:02.240" Title="Difference between discourse analysis and pragmatics" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2014-03-09T07:53:30.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaker 1: would you like to go for a drink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaker 2: great! what time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discourse analysist would be looking at how this communicative event works mechanically whereas the pragmatist would be looking at underlying (implicit) meanings (in this case 'drink' means trip to the pub, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3072" LastActivityDate="2014-03-09T07:53:30.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6669" CreationDate="2014-03-09T09:34:26.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A case where a pronoun cannot be substituted by any definite description that may be recovered from the context is discussed by Walter Edelberg in his paper ‘A New Puzzle about Intentional Identity’ (&lt;em&gt;Journal of Philosophical Logic&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;15&lt;/strong&gt; [1986]). Edelberg discusses the  sentence in (1) from Peter Geach’s paper ‘Intentional Identity’ (&lt;em&gt;Journal of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;74&lt;/strong&gt; [1967]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) &amp;nbsp;Hob thinks a witch blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks she killed Cob’s sow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume someone utters this sentence to a group of people who are familiar with Hob, Bob, Nob and Cob and their livestock, but who, up until the moment the utterance of (1) is made, have been unaware of Hob’s and Nob’s belief that a witch has been harming farm animals. Assume further that all the participants in the conversation rightly believe that witches don’t exist and that Hob and Nob are wrong. Such a context provides the two definite descriptions in (2) as possible substitutes for the pronoun &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; in (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) &amp;nbsp;a. &amp;nbsp;The witch who blighted Bob’s mare&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;b. &amp;nbsp;The witch whom Hob thinks blighted Bob’s mare  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edelberg shows that there are circumstances in which the sentence in (1) is true, but the sentences derived by substituting (2a) and (2b) for &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; in (1) are false. He gives the example in (3) (repeated with omissions and slight modifications from his EXAMPLE 2, p. 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) The Gotham City newspapers have reported that a witch has been on quite a rampage. In reality, &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;there is no such witch. Hob and Nob read the Gotham Star and believe the stories about the &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;witch. Hob thinks the witch blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks the witch killed Cob’s sow. Hob &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;has no beliefs at all about Cob’s sow or about Nob’s beliefs, and Nob has no beliefs at all about &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Bob’s mare or about Hob’s beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances in (3), the sentence in (1) is true, but the sentences in (4) are false:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) &amp;nbsp;a.   &amp;nbsp;Hob thinks a witch blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks the witch who blighted Bob’s mare &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;killed Cob’s sow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. &amp;nbsp;Hob thinks a witch blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks the witch whom Hob thinks blighted &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Bob’s mare killed Cob’s sow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can derive from (1) a true sentence if we replace the pronoun &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; by the definite description &lt;em&gt;the witch reported on in the Gotham Star&lt;/em&gt;, but this definite description may not be available to any of the participants in the conversation (perhaps none of them reads the newspapers). The point is that the sentence in (1) may be true even if all the sentences derived from it by replacing &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; with a contextually available definite description are false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2014-03-09T09:34:26.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-10T07:33:33.113" Score="7" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since unaugmented forms are ancient verbal forms (found by example in Homer), older than the augmented ones, and since vowels contraction is still a &quot;work in progress&quot; at homeric times and will be generalized later, I would like to know if &quot;unaugmented contract verbal forms&quot; like the imperfect &lt;strong&gt;τίμων&lt;/strong&gt; (instead of &lt;strong&gt;ἐτίμων&lt;/strong&gt;) are attested in Ancient Greek literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as I know, Chantraine's grammar doesn't give any detail about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB : I changed my title and removed the word &quot;aorist&quot; from it. I want to focus on the imperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:09:29.317" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T03:40:46.280" Title="Unaugmented contract imperfect in Ancient Greek?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;imperfect&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6734" CreationDate="2014-03-10T09:35:56.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not correct to say that the unaugmented forms are older than the augmented ones. From a historical point of view the Greek unaugmented imperfect continues the Indo-European present injunctive, and the unaugmented aorist continues the IE aorist injunctive. Early in the history of Greek the injunctive merged in function with the past tenses of the indicative (imperfect and aorist indicative); the injunctive forms thus became redundant and dropped out of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-10T09:35:56.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-10T16:00:17.767" Score="5" ViewCount="2319" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a well-known split in English between those who use the so-called serial or Oxford comma, a comma before the last item in a list like &lt;em&gt;Able, Baker, and Charlie&lt;/em&gt;, and those who don't. That leads me to wonder: Among other languages that put commas in such a list, which languages put a comma before the last item, which don't, and which have a split like English's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-10T23:22:18.520" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T10:24:49.750" Title="What languages use the serial comma?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-10T20:16:15.053" Score="4" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a job in which I must try to differentiate between persons who are actually psychotic and those who are faking psychosis, and it is often quite difficult.  I would like to identify characteristics of language that have a high probability of accurate discrimination.  I have included an example of language from (I believe) a genuinely psychotic individual.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He stated, &quot;I’ve always been adjusted toward righteousness.  My name is [Abraham Lincoln] so they know I’m a man of good qualities.  They’ve always wanted me to be a leading assister.&quot;  I asked how he has been getting along on the ward.  He stated, &quot;I don’t speak to the people in the dayroom, but whenever I get a chance to speak, I do.  My house - my radiance and substance - my keeping it positive affects my neighbors.&quot;  He mused, &quot;There have been some expensive situations.  They’re unexplainable, as far as the influence and the vibration of the system; the appreciation was hard for me to grasp. It was irresponsible behavior - the staff I was around on 102 - usually it’s the patients or people of lesser quality who make you feel uncomfortable.  This time it was the staff being ceremonial around the medications.  I don’t want to sound like a conjurer so I won’t try to explain it.  It was expensive because I didn’t get a chance to appreciate things, so it cost me a few days of service.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3278" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-03-11T01:56:07.290" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T07:22:38.630" Title="Reference for help in identifying the abnormal syntax or use of language in psychotic individuals" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3530" CreationDate="2014-03-11T00:59:49.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your precise question was whether there was a Greek or Latin name spelt “Jesus” or similarly before the advent of Christianity. The answer is yes. The Hebrew name Yəhošuăʻ (Joshua) is spelt Ἰησοῦς in the Septuagint (the pre-Christian Jewish translation of the Old Testament).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T00:59:49.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6738" CreationDate="2014-03-11T02:16:07.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe &quot;psychoses&quot; is too broad a topic. I have come across studies that show a link between word-usage and &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02115227&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;autism&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/early/2012/02/27/bjp.bp.111.095448.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;schizophrenia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T02:16:07.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6760" CreationDate="2014-03-11T08:22:10.753" Score="5" ViewCount="14169" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two classifications seem to point to the same types of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T06:40:42.163" Title="What's the difference between open/closed class words and functional/lexical categories?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2014-03-11T09:04:07.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Particles&quot; in Japanese are actually a fairly diverse class of words. Some things which are traditionally called particles are suffixes. For instance, the representative plural marker, &lt;em&gt;-tachi&lt;/em&gt; is very closely bound to the noun it attaches to--not even core argument case markers like &lt;em&gt;=ga&lt;/em&gt;　or &lt;em&gt;=o&lt;/em&gt; can interrupt it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things traditionally called particles, especially the non-core argument-marking case particles are clitics. This is most clearly seen based on the fact that some of them, like the genitive case marker &lt;em&gt;=no&lt;/em&gt;, which, while not being very closely attached to the noun it modifies, it still has some phonological influence. For example, words where accent falls on the last mora, like &lt;em&gt;hashí&lt;/em&gt; LH(L) 'bridge' become accentless when &lt;em&gt;=no&lt;/em&gt; is added: &lt;em&gt;hashi=no&lt;/em&gt; LHH. Compare this with what happens when you add the case marker &lt;em&gt;=ga:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;hashí=ga&lt;/em&gt; LHL--we see the expected pattern for a final-mora accented, two mora word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet other things are postpositions. Here I'm thinking specifically of sentence-final particles like &lt;em&gt;yo&lt;/em&gt;. These clearly don't attach to individual words, but instead to phrases or entire sentences (depending on their scope). They are prosodically independent, have some semantic independence, but are still somewhat &quot;stuck&quot; onto the phrase they modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still other things are likely entirely separate words which happen to be one or two morae long, and thus just happened to be analyzed traditionally as particles. Here I'm specifically thinking of things like the &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; in so-called &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; adjectives (or adjectival nominals, if you prefer), which is actually one of the attributive forms of the copula &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, itself a defective verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about these honorifics you can stick at the beginning of a word? I'd just call them prefixes. They are very closely bound. When an accented noun (of any kind) takes the prefix &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt;, it becomes accentless. So, for instance, intially-accented &lt;em&gt;íkutsu&lt;/em&gt; HLLL 'how many?' becomes &lt;em&gt;o-ikutsu&lt;/em&gt; LHHH. Similarly, &lt;em&gt;iwái&lt;/em&gt; LHL 'congratulations', which has its second mora accented, becomes &lt;em&gt;o-iwai&lt;/em&gt; LHHH. And so on. Even outside of a more rigorous linguistic analysis, such as under the traditional Japanese system of traditional grammatical analysis, to the best of my knowledge, these are not called particles (助詞 &lt;em&gt;joshi&lt;/em&gt;), but rather prefixes (接頭語 &lt;em&gt;settoogo&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="1832" LastEditDate="2014-05-21T03:19:24.843" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T03:19:24.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2014-03-11T14:12:48.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Tom Sugnetic.&#xA;Even though the color names in Tamil are borrowed from English, there was/still is an attempt to create new words by using Tamil roots.&#xA;Name for each new color is formed by combining the names of the basic colors which form it. Generally, (veLLai) white and (kaRuppu) black are used to show the intensity/brightness of the new color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, orange is called as &quot;whitish red&quot;. (வெண்சிவப்பு in Tamil).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dark blue is called as &quot;blackish blue&quot; (கருநீலம்).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pink is called as &quot;younger red&quot; (இளஞ்சிவப்பு).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around 100 new names have been invented for colors in Tamil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3279" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T13:53:24.523" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:53:24.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2014-03-11T14:30:57.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In malaysia, malaysian chinese might speak malay, english, their chinese dialect and mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In India, marriage among different linguistic groups is very rare&lt;/strong&gt;. Majority of the Indians generally tend to be monolingual, especially in villages. some of them might be bilingual or trilingual. A tamilian might speak tamil alone, sometimes english too. A malayalee might speak malayalam alone, or english. Most of them speak their respective state language alone. If they happen to live in borders, they might speak an additional language. Less than 10 % of indians might speak four or five languages. A majority of these multilinguals are bad at writing in languages other than mothertongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning four languages is very difficult. If all the languages are in same linguistic family, it is comparatively easy to learn.&#xA;If all of them belong to different families, (father- chinese, mother - tamil, country- japan, foreign language - english) it is very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, the parents' mothertongues are ignored.&#xA;Reasons:&#xA;1. Both of them tend to speak a neutral language to the child. (may be the country's language)&#xA;2. The parents language doesnot have much to do with the culture of the country or it doesn't have anything to do with jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The local language has to be taught first, since it helps to mingle with the society.&#xA;Even if more than three languages are taught, it is very difficult to learn with high fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However. in places like Bangalore, most people happen to speak 3+ languages due to the interaction with other communities living in the surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3279" LastEditorUserId="3279" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T23:06:12.007" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T23:06:12.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2014-03-11T14:50:11.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a purely cognitive point of view, it doesn't really matter how many languages you introduce, or in which order so long as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the child gets consistent and sufficient exposure to each language starting at some point before age 4-5.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your own use of language makes the child understand that different social situations call for different languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: mom's native language is Arabic, dad's native language is Japanese, family is living in Hungary. Each parent is fluent is the other's native language as well as Hungarian. The ideal environment in this household is one in which, when the child is present, the mother speaks exclusively Arabic, the father speaks exclusively Japanese, and they speak exclusively Hungarian when interacting with locals. Here, chances are the child will end up acquiring all three languages simultaneously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is an idealized situation. More common are situations where the parents are not totally fluent in each other's native languages and/or the local language. In these cases, you'll need to adjust a bit, but you'll be fine so long as you keep points 1. and 2. in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T14:50:11.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2211" CreationDate="2014-03-11T15:17:02.757" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our daughter (29 months old) is currently learning 4 languages. I am a native speaker of Swedish and Greek, while my wife is a native speaker of Turkish. We live in Sweden, so our little one is exposed to Swedish when she's at kindergarden or in contact with relatives. I talk explicitly Greek with her, while her mother speaks only Turkish. Her grandmother speaks only Swedish with her. Me and my wife have been speaking mainly English, so she has snapped up that as well. The result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She understands all 4 languages&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She addresses each one of us explicitly in the language we talk to her.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grammar works well: a) She uses articles in Greek, b) definite/indefinite in Swedish, c) agglutination works fine in Turkish (i think)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In interaction with locals she uses local words to address us e.g. pappa instead of baba, mamma instead of anne.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She knows how to change language context e.g. you asked her to count in all 4 languages separately and she does that without being confused&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She is a late talker, but that is expected. Besides, my friend's monolingual child is a late talker too. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important rule however is one and only: Do not mix up the languages when addressing the child. The language you use to communicate with your child should be your native tongue. If you talk half English, half Spanish at the same time, the child will probably end up not speaking well the language it doesn't hear from its environment. While making a sentence it will be like 5 words in Spanish 3 in English, then 3 Spanish 2 English and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-12T13:57:30.780" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T13:57:30.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6748" CreationDate="2014-03-11T19:19:13.437" Score="17" ViewCount="11537" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, a 'gasp' exclamation seems to be the only word spoken while inhaling. Though it is sometimes implied that the expression is not voluntary, it typically is in most conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was curious though, are there other languages and cultures that actually speak more complex words while inhaling? It seems entirely possible, even if the articulation is somewhat limited. Does anyone know of any examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3281" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T12:25:21.213" Title="Are there any languages or cultures where people speak while inhaling?" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2014-03-11T19:42:53.113" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in such a case you would be talking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ingressive sounds&lt;/a&gt; (the air flows in), whereas most languages are typically egressive (the air flows out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs in Scandinavian languages, sometimes in English (the gasp you talked about), and Brazilian Portuguese. As stated in the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Speech technologist &lt;a href=&quot;http://roberteklund.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Eklund&lt;/a&gt; has found reports of ingressive speech in around 50 languages worldwide, dating as far back as Cranz's (1765) &quot;Historie von Grönland, enthaltend… &quot; where it is mentioned in female affirmations among the Eskimo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find more concrete examples in the page linked above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T13:49:11.483" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T13:49:11.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6734" CreationDate="2014-03-11T19:47:20.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most forms in Homer are uncontracted; contraction is -as far as I know- a specific Attic-Ionic feature (Asiatic Ionic does have contraction occasionally as well in specific cases, but the resulting sounds are somewhat different from the Attic ones)  that has come about later than the necessity for marking past tenses with the augment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you are likely to find a form like τίμαον in Homer, but τίμων (iso ἐτίμαον/ἐτίμων) you will not encounter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3282" LastActivityDate="2014-03-11T19:47:20.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2014-03-12T03:23:53.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Icelandic, people often say the word &quot;yes&quot; (já) while inhaling. But like in the examples of Swedish and Norwegian, this is a special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3286" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T03:23:53.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2014-03-12T05:34:53.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are also the so called &quot;click languages&quot; of Africa. (The movie &quot;The Gods Must Be Crazy&quot; features a lot of it) The only ones I can name off the top of my head are !Xoon and !Kung. &lt;li&gt;&#xA;They are also the only languages I know of where characters we use as punctuation are used as actual phonemes. E.G. &quot;!&quot; is an actual sound in !kung. It's a sound I can describe, but can't seem to wrap my mouth around. Basically do a tongue click against the roof of your mouth and blend into the x sound as in fox or box. This requires air ingress, but just into the throat, followed by an egress, again, just the air within mouth and throat, little lung action at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3288" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T05:34:53.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2014-03-12T10:01:59.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The above-mentioned Wikipedia articles “ingressive sounds” and “implosive consonant” are not too bad as descriptions of the sounds concerned, but are not very comprehensive in their enumeration of the languages affected. They fail (for example) to mention that one major language, namely Vietnamese, has implosive ɓ and ɗ (orthographic b and đ) as part of its phonological system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T10:01:59.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2014-03-12T10:16:54.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German it is considered an error to put a comma before the word &quot;und&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T10:16:54.403" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2014-03-12T12:13:58.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another sound &quot;in English&quot; which is usually written as &quot;tsk&quot; which is the sound you make when you when indicating disapproval (tsk-tsk-tsk).   So &quot;gasp&quot; is not the only ingressive sound used by English speakers :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3295" LastActivityDate="2014-03-12T12:13:58.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-11T16:33:02.423" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I know that the tone component (like in Chinese) is absent in speech as it varies from time to time (it also depends on situation). &#xA;Considering vowels there's an agreement to check only tongue posture and placement (as mouth cavity also varies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is also some aerodynamic limits on the quantity of exhaling air (tongue movements, muscle strength etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is important because when I start learning something its hard to tell the limits of study of any subject. When I have a look at Wikipedia or any other dictionary it doesn't tell mathematically (or so, I mean precisely) when the field of study starts where it ends and which is the smallest examined learning material which could be taken into consideration.&#xA;Geometry of mouth, race question, unit of measurement, boundary of experiments (for example the modelling artificial speech uses a brand-new MRI scans techniques which by themselves imposes some math background limits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1508" OwnerDisplayName="Xsi" LastEditorUserId="1508" LastEditDate="2014-03-13T00:16:25.437" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T00:16:25.437" Title="What cognizable limits are there in Articulatory phonetics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-12T16:00:55.370" Score="2" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the impression that linguists these days generally consider there to be a Japonic language family consisting of Standard Japanese, the Ryukyuan languages including Okinawan, and Hachijo, spoken on another group of islands south of Tokyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many or all of these languages in turn have their own dialects. The distinction between dialect and language being the usual one in linguistics based on whether any two varieties are mutually intelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then it was pointed out to me that the prominent Japanese linguist Masayoshi Shibatani, author of &lt;em&gt;The Languages of Japan&lt;/em&gt; regards these all to be dialects of Japanese. The book was published fairly recently, 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some years ago ISO added language codes for a number of these. UNESCO also recognized them as endangered languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do we know if there is a consensus among linguists on either side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T17:06:51.940" Title="Consensus among linguists about Ryukyuan varieties of Japonic" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2014-03-13T02:55:36.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the language/dialect distinction is that it always, always, always involves politics. Even when trying to do things on a purely linguistic basis, there are far too many borderline cases and questionable situations (e.g. dialect continua, one-sided intelligibility, etc) - you will never end up with a wholly unbiased classification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, most (maybe even all) non-Japanese linguists recognise Ryuukyuuan as a group of languages separate from Japanese, regardless of how many Ryuukyuuan languages they count. I would guess that the 'canonical' Japanese view, that Ryuukyuuan is just a set of Japanese dialects, comes from nationalism and the very inaccurate and outdated view of Japan as an almost totally homogenous country - even Ainu was called a 'dialect', and it's totally unrelated to Japanese! I don't know how many Japanese linguists still regard them as dialects instead of languages, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistic criteria fairly unambiguously support the separate-language analysis - there is a clear gap in intelligibility between the Kyuushuu mainland and the Amami archipelago. It actually turns out that Ryuukyuuan as a whole is genetically closer to Northeast Kyuushuu than anywhere in the south, but it took until 2003 (in a paper by Leon Serafim) for anyone to notice. If you show Japanese speakers a video of someone speaking Ryuukyuuan (without explaining it) and ask them if it's Japanese, they will definitely say it's not - I actually came across a video on YouTube recently that was a quiz asking the viewer to distinguish audio clips of Japanese dialects and Ryuukyuuan languages from clips other East Asian languages :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it may turn out that Ryuukyuuan is genetically a sub-branch of a Japanese-internal dialect group, but it has been innovative enough since it split off that it still counts as a group of separate languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about Hachijou - I know it's very very different from the rest of Japanese, but I don't know if there's a consensus as to a separate status. If I were to venture a guess, I would bet that not only Hachijou but also a number of other dialects from Japan's main islands ought to be considered separate languages rather than dialects - though these might be a bit more muddled by the dialect continuum problem than Ryuukyuuan or Hachijou.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="2132" LastEditDate="2014-03-13T03:01:02.910" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T03:01:02.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2014-03-13T08:59:48.813" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having talked to Shibatani after the book was published, I can pretty safely say that he has since changed his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the basic consensus among linguists who have some specialization in Ryukyuan is that there are at least seven Japonic languages in two subgroups. The first subgroup is the Japanese subgroup, which includes Japanese proper, as well as Hachijo. The second subgroup, Ryukyuan, includes at least Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni. Amami and Okinawan may be a dialect chain (the division between the two is not well studied), and it's almost certain that there are more than just three languages (Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni) in the southern Ryukyus. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/Mouton_Handbook/files/members/05_Ryukyuan_languages.pdf&quot;&gt;proposal&lt;/a&gt; for the forthcoming &lt;em&gt;Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages&lt;/em&gt; reflects the consensus view I outlined above (minus Hachijo, which is not a part of the Ryukyuan subgroup).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ISO codes make absolutely no sense. Nobody that I know of, and no source that I've ever seen groups the languages like they do. Unfortunately, this has trickled down into Ethnologue, which has its own problems in dealing with the Japonic languages. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/ryu&quot;&gt;they claim that there are 984,000 speakers of Okinawan&lt;/a&gt;. While the Japanese government does not track language use data on their census, this number is far too high--first and foremost, it includes more people than actually live in the area where their definition of Okinawan is spoken. The actual number of speakers is likely less than 150,000 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T08:59:48.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6741" CreationDate="2014-03-13T11:17:17.473" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are two different distinctions that, however, often go together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open vs. closed&quot;  is a &lt;strong&gt;diachronic&lt;/strong&gt; distinction meaning how easy a set of expressions can be extended by new elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Functional/lexical&quot; is a &lt;strong&gt;synchronic&lt;/strong&gt; distinction referring to the role played by the expression (e.g. serving as a full verb or as an auxiliary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the functional vs. lexical distinction is a theoretical concept and depends on one's theoretical assumption, whereas &quot;open/closed&quot; is more of an empirical observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jlawler said, the two distinctions often amount to the same expressions as being a functional class makes it less likely for other elements to enter that class because of the important role they play for the grammar and their grammaticalized status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are instances, in which they two distinction do not line up. For instance, prepositions are considered to be lexical categories by many, but they are a rather closed class (for a discussion of the various positions see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/j.zwarts/LexicalFunctional.pdf&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; by Joost Zwarts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: Even if it is true that &quot;functional expressions&quot; have a more abstract, i.e. more grammaticalized meaning, they often still have meaning; e.g. the tense/mood expressed by the auxiliaries in English or many other languages. But there are also cases in which the meaning is more or less lost [do-support with negation, for instance]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3070" LastActivityDate="2014-03-13T11:17:17.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-13T17:26:00.950" Score="1" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not super into linguistics so sorry I won't be using the correct terms here. I also only speak English (though I know tiny bits of a few languages). Also sorry if this is a duplicate, I found it difficult to come up with apt search terms. And a final sorry for getting somewhat programming-technical in this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, my problem is hopefully quite simple to explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building a web site administration area, let's say I have articles, and each article can have one or more authors. The administration area will show, at a glance, the authors of a given article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Article Title | Date Posted | Authors&#xA;--------------|-----------------------------------&#xA;Article #1    | 2014-03-10  | Alice Abrahams&#xA;Article #2    | 2014-03-12  | Bob Roberts, Constance Chamberlain&#xA;Article #3    | 2014-03-18  | Bob Roberts&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question comes because I'm trying to internationalise my application. So far I've managed to get away with allowing my translation framework (Symfony's via Laravel) sort that out for me by doing a &lt;code&gt;choice&lt;/code&gt; style translation when I need to refer to &lt;code&gt;1 X&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;6 Ys&lt;/code&gt; and a simple &lt;code&gt;translate&lt;/code&gt; when just translating messages directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for the column titles (like &lt;code&gt;Article Title&lt;/code&gt; in this example), I can just iterate through the display fields and &lt;code&gt;trans()&lt;/code&gt; the field name (presuming a model's author has entered the correct translations given the convention that the key is the field name). But &lt;code&gt;Authors&lt;/code&gt; is defined as a relationship on the article model, and thus I want to be able to automatically retrieve the translation of the related model and then put it into its plural form for this column heading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, it's trivial to do this - just use the plural. However, there are languages out there that have multiple plural forms. Russian has the 1, 2 and 3+ form, and I think there are some that have 1, 2, 3, 4+. As such, which plural form is the correct one for this kind of 'uncounted plural'? (As a side question, what do these languages do for the 0 form? Is it counted as a plural like it is in English? Is it one of the categories already mentioned (2, 3+) or its own category?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware it could be argued that my premise is somewhat lacking, and that I could use &quot;Author(s)&quot; in the English form (though, again, it's not always as simple in other languages to indicate that something could be singular or plural). Either way, let's ignore that for now, and assume the plural is a good fit. What is the correct way to form the plural I want in the &lt;code&gt;Authors&lt;/code&gt; column? Or is it best left to the article model's author to decide what this word should be, the same way they will be for the model's own fields?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the references to programming don't confuse my question too much. I just wanted to explain why I'm asking the question I'm asking from a background of knowing nothing about the specific target language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit based on the first comment below, I felt it was worth clarifying my question here as the above is somewhat wordy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay so I understand that the 'final' form is always considered the plural (and all others are specific numerical forms). So my questions are below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this mean that, in my example, the 'unknown count' form I should use is the plural (i.e. final form of whichever language to which the application is set)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do different languages/cultures have different rules for which to use (maybe some always use the singular in this case)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that's the case, is there a term for this form that linguists use to refer to it in all languages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If anyone has a background in computer-based translation, what's the way to specify that I wish to use this form to a translation provider?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3306" LastEditorUserId="3306" LastEditDate="2014-03-14T09:20:45.683" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T09:20:45.683" Title="Which plural form to use when unknown quantity" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6738" CreationDate="2014-03-14T05:36:46.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is certainly not something I'm an expert in, but it's interesting enough for me to take a poke around through google.  There clearly is a literature of this stuff out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18768300&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18768300&lt;/a&gt; states that the linguistic features of schizophrenic language are mostly at the macro-linguistic level, which is generally not where computational linguistics techniques are at their best.  My initial impression is that might point you toward running linguistic tests rather than looking at samples of arbitrary language.  IS that viable in your context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindawi.com/journals/schizort/2012/825050/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hindawi.com/journals/schizort/2012/825050/&lt;/a&gt; looks interesting, but it doesn't address the question of lying.  Still, for someone to immitate schizophrenia in this sort of testing would presumably require a very detailed knowledge of how schizophrenics behave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2441888/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2441888/&lt;/a&gt; is also interesting.  It involves measuring patterns of brain activity using electrodes while conducting linguistic tasks.  That would make lying much harder.  Is that viable for you?  (The well known difficulties associated with 'lie detectors' may or may not translate into this context, where it's not the lying per se that's being looked for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really know how on-target these references are, but I imagine that you'll quickly find more by following the citations and reverse citation links (eg through citeseer or google scholar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3308" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T05:36:46.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-14T08:34:24.313" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think about the English language: it is very simple, consisting of only 26 letters. And to my understanding, European languages have finite alphabets as well. Now compare that to Chinese, which has no alphabet but instead thousands of characters - Mao's simplified Chinese does little to make things better. Could a simpler language lead to a greater rate of invention? I mean, the time spent detailing with the nitty gritty details of the language could be spent on more high-level ideas, like mathematics. As a side note, what area of linguistics focuses on rewriting existing languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3006" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T08:34:24.313" Title="Language and Technological Superiority" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-14T08:47:30.883" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to learn accents and have been fortunate enough to make friends in some of the countries I want to emulate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a standard block of text containing all the key phonemes that they might read that would help me get the basics? Honestly, I know &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; about linguistics, I don't even know if such a thing is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3309" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-14T09:41:42.443" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T09:50:06.600" Title="Is there such a thing as standard text for learning accents?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6770" CreationDate="2014-03-14T13:09:46.310" Score="1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since some verbal forms may have an ephelcystic nu (imperfect.3S : ἐπαίδευε/ἐπαίδευεν), I would like to know if [un/]contract forms too may have this ending, as if we had ἐτίμαεν instead of ἐτίμαε and ἐτίμᾱν instead of ἐτίμᾱ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἐτίμαεν seems (?) ok to me but I can't remember having read contract forms like &quot;ἐτίμᾱν&quot; but, if so, I would like to understand why they [doesn't] exist. Is the ephelcystic nu linked to the sounds -ε or -ι ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T23:47:58.713" Title="ephelcystic nu of contract verbal forms in Ancient Greek" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6771" CreationDate="2014-03-14T15:40:13.800" Score="5" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.486 (in a recent French edition) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Da mihi perpetua, genitor karissime&quot;&#xA;(O dearest father, allow me to enjoy perpetual maidenhood !)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;karissime&quot; isn't an error : some manuscripts give this surprising spelling, some others having the expected &quot;carissime&quot; spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the Greek word κάρα somehow influenced the Latin orthography ? I don't understand why the letter K appears in this word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2014-03-16T21:17:29.760" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T21:17:29.760" Title="strange Latin spelling : karissime" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-14T16:23:35.067" Score="3" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;Francis Heylighen and Jean-Marc Dewaele defined a measure of language formality called &quot;F-Measure&quot; in a paper published in 1999 titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Formality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Formality of Language: definition, measurement and behavioral determinants&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  Is there software available that examines English text and determines an F-score, or some other objective measure of formality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3310" LastEditorUserId="3310" LastEditDate="2014-03-14T16:39:19.773" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T18:13:47.553" Title="Software to measure F-Score (formality) in English" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2014-03-14T17:28:56.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling karus is frequent in Latin inscriptions.There does not seem to be any obvious reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T17:28:56.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6766" CreationDate="2014-03-14T23:47:58.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Smyth (134b) says: &quot;Verbs in -εω never (in Attic) add -ν to the 3 sing. of the &lt;em&gt;contracted&lt;/em&gt; form: εὖ ἐποίει αὐτόν &lt;em&gt;he treated him well&lt;/em&gt;. But ᾔει &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; and pluperfects (as ᾔδει &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt;) may add ν.&quot; It can, however, appear in uncontracted forms: Herodotus has e.g. ἐδόκεεν, ἐκόσμεεν, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T23:47:58.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2014-03-14T23:50:00.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old K spelling, which was the original way of spelling [k] before [a], was retained in a few words in Latin, most notably &lt;em&gt;Kalendae&lt;/em&gt;. Evidently in some words there was variation. Why this was the case for certain words and not others, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-03-14T23:50:00.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-15T02:49:54.910" Score="5" ViewCount="3073" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example if I know that [s],[z], [dz] and [ez] are allophones. How do I determine the underlying phoneme sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3311" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T19:34:26.067" Title="How do you figure out the underlying sound of several allophones?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6772" CreationDate="2014-03-15T17:57:17.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a set of phonetically similar phones in complementary distribution, with no contrasts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;then you may assume they are allophones of the same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you call the &quot;underlying sound&quot; is entirely your affair, like naming a species. It's just a name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemes are simply named patterns of sound usage, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;their phonological status may be &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; different from their phonetic status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, English has a phoneme with at least a dozen different allophones, all voiceless vowels.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The allophones include voiceless versions of every English vowel, immediately preceding that vowel.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I.e, [ḁa], [e̥e], [i̥i], [ɛ̥ɛ], where the mark below the vowel indicates voicelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This English phoneme is entirely vocalic phonetically, but it's a consonant phonologically.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In fact, it's the English phoneme /h/, which used to be pronounced as a velar fricative; but&lt;br&gt;&#xA;since it only appears before vowels in Modern English, it has become a mere voiceless vocal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;onset, setting the tongue in position for the oncoming vowel, and then starting the phonation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; starting the voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names are just names, even for phonemes; but the usual convention (not followed with /h/)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;is to use the name of the most common allophone for the phoneme when possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-03-15T17:57:17.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-15T21:30:35.130" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading my Portuguese high-school book searching for some classification and hierarchization of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts_of_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parts of speech&lt;/a&gt;. My book brings me such features in a chapter dedicated to morphology, first I thought I needed to find about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt;, but the given Wikipedia article says that morphology has way more features than parts of speech and I'm specifically interested in parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2509" LastEditorUserId="2785" LastEditDate="2014-03-16T14:53:28.633" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T14:53:28.633" Title="Where can I find a book that enlists, categorize and discuss the importance of parts of speech?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-16T05:37:04.813" Score="1" ViewCount="3302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a bit of trouble with my linguistics homework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know &quot;that&quot; is a determiner. However, I am less sure of its lexical category in this sentence: &quot;Ginny likes that.&quot; I know that a sentence is composed of a subject and predicate. In this sentence, would &quot;that&quot; be a noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3314" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T20:39:39.673" Title="Lexical category of &quot;that&quot;" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6776" CreationDate="2014-03-16T09:58:51.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case you've provided, `that' is a (demonstrative) &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt;, which only works if you already know what it references (or can ostensively define it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1339" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T09:58:51.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2014-03-16T15:01:27.520" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This gets explained beautifully in A.C. Moorhouse's &quot;The Triumph Of Alphabet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Etruscans adopted Western Greek alphabet but then their scribes got lazy and started writing kappa without the vertical line, so it was like a modern day angular parenthesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Falliscans, on the other hand, adopted (Western) Greek alphabet verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when their cousins the Latins started to write, they expanded on both precedents. &quot;Angular bracket&quot; K got cursive-ized into &quot;C&quot; (was put in the place of gamma for in Etruscan &quot;G&quot; sound was an allophone of &quot;K&quot;). Greek &quot;kappa&quot; and &quot;qoph&quot; were imported as well - so they now had 3 letters to represent the &quot;k&quot; sound, when to use each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adopted solution was a convention: use &quot;K&quot; when the next sound is &quot;a&quot;, &quot;Q&quot; before U/O, and &quot;C&quot; if next sound was E/I. Such usage was preserved in the names of those letters which survive to this day in most modern day Romance languages: ka, ce, qu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, &quot;C&quot; expanded its use at the expense of the other 2 until K was almost never used in full-written words. It was retained for some abreviations (as &quot;K&quot; for Caesar) and for a few words like &quot;Kalendae&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T15:01:27.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-16T18:19:19.023" Score="3" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is probing to learn whether semanticists (and syntacticians) draw a distinction between what I am calling here &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;syntactic&lt;/em&gt; predicates. The question concerns the status of the NP &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; in the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Bill is a politician.&#xA;&#xA;b. Bill, a politician, is pandering.&#xA;&#xA;c. A politician (I know) is pandering. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (a), the predicative NP &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; is a property that is predicated of &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt;. In (b), the appositive NP &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; is again a property that is also predicated of &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt;. In (c) in contrast, one cannot view &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; as being predicated of another part of the sentence. What seems to be occurring, rather, is that &lt;em&gt;a politican&lt;/em&gt; in (c) is being predicated of a discourse entity, i.e. of someone in the discourse context. The predicate-calculus-style representations for these sentences might be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a'. is a politician (Bill)&#xA;&#xA; b'. is pandering (a politician (Bill))&#xA;&#xA; c'. is pandering (a politician)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (a'-b'), &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; can be viewed as a predicate in every sense. In (c'), in contrast, &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; is not a predicate insofar as it is not predicated of another part of the sentence. For the sake of putting names on the distinction, &lt;em&gt;a politician&lt;/em&gt; is both a semantic and syntactic predicate in (1a-b), but it is only a semantic predicate in (c'); it is not a syntactic predicate in (c'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terminology I have just used is unique to my understanding. What I would like to find out is whether there is already an established terminology for this distinction. Note that the distinction in predicate types is important for predicting the distrubtion of, for instance, reflexive pronouns (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Susan likes our picture of herself&lt;/em&gt; vs. *&lt;em&gt;Susan said that we like herself&lt;/em&gt;) and negative polarity items (e.g. &lt;em&gt;The discussion of no problem did anyone find interesting&lt;/em&gt; vs. *&lt;em&gt;Discussing no problem did anyone find interesting&lt;/em&gt;). The distribution of these items is sensitive to the difference in predicate types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-16T18:24:25.917" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T22:18:25.323" Title="Is there an established distinction between semantic and syntactic predicates?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6772" CreationDate="2014-03-16T19:34:26.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say you are assuming that the underlying phoneme has intrinsic phonetic content and all of the same features as the surface phones (I don't agree with this personally, but that is what you assume in your first phonology course). What you then do is select your underlying phoneme such that you can write the simplest set of rules (and each rule should be as broadly applicable as possible) that predict the occurrence of all of the surface phones. If you want a shortcut to the answer, and historical data is available, determine the historical sound that all of the allophones descend from (assuming there is just one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2014-03-16T19:34:26.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6734" CreationDate="2014-03-16T23:02:22.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phaenomenon exists in the Ionic dialect. If you study Herodian's works, you will find most dialectal variations in grammar. Particularly, to answer your question, I can recall at least this one example (there are more) that does not take the ἐ- augmentation: the Ionic form φάμεν, instead of ἔφαμεν.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Eustathius Phil. is quite right, then the phaenomenon is more general and conceptual, i.e. the augmentation is absent from both Imperfect and Aorist; this would cover, for sure, the contracted verbs. See this excerpt of his: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;῞Οτι οἱ ῎Ιωνες τὰς μὲν χρονικὰς αὐξήσεις τῶν παρῳχημένων κατασπῶσι συνάρχεσθαι τοῖς ἐνεστῶσι ποιοῦντες αὐτούς, ὡς προείρηται. οἷον &lt;strong&gt;ἀγαπῶ ἀγάπων&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ὀρύσσω ὄρυσσον&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;ὡσαύτως καὶ τὰς διὰ τοῦ ε αὐξήσεις&lt;/strong&gt; καθελόντες τὴν αὐτὴν ἀρχὴν περιποιοῦνται τοῖς ἐνεστῶσι καὶ τοῖς παρῳχημένοις, τοῦ τύπτω &lt;strong&gt;τὸν παρατατικὸν τύπτον&lt;/strong&gt; λέγοντες καὶ &lt;strong&gt;τὸν ἀόριστον τύψα&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation (following a bit the original word-order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;= Because the Ionians the tense augmentations of the past  do in a way, that they begin like the present , as said before. I.e. ἀγαπῶ ἀγάπων, ὀρύσσω ὄρυσσον. Likewise for the augmentations with ε, following the same principle they form both the present and past , saying the imperfect of τύπτω as τύπτον and the Aorist τύψα.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this implies that if Ionians do so, they might have been using also contracted verb forms sometimes, which is quite contrary to the vast uncontracted forms. Yet the correctness of this has to be cross-checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herodian says that this is an Ionian poetic form/preference in order to preserve the verse's metre. But his examples don't happen to include a contract verb, but rather verbs that begin with the 3 changing vowels, i.e. α, ε, ο. Those are ἄκουεν instead of ἤκουεν, ἔλαυνεν instead of ἤλαυνεν and ὀνόμαζεν instead of ὠνόμαζεν. It sounds - at least to me - that contract verbs beginning with those would do the same. Hope this helped a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3318" LastEditorUserId="3318" LastEditDate="2014-03-17T13:00:17.260" LastActivityDate="2014-03-17T13:00:17.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6787" CreationDate="2014-03-17T01:20:18.897" Score="3" ViewCount="1545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question pretty much says it all, I'm curious as to whether every language uses/requires auxiliary verbs to express tense/modality/aspect etc.? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3319" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T11:39:58.003" Title="Are there any languages that don't have/use auxiliaries?" Tags="&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6785" CreationDate="2014-03-17T09:45:54.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The precise answer to that question will depend highly on what is the precise meaning intended for &lt;em&gt;auxiliary verb&lt;/em&gt;. If you insist that an auxiliary verb is a separate word which expresses a precise grammatical property, then Japanese is a likely candidate. In this language, tense, mood and modality are expressed by a specific ending attached to the stem-verb. None of these endings may live a separate existence (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jref.com/japan/language/japanese_grammar.shtml#Auxiliary_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for a reference), so it would seem very strange to call them auxiliary verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, as the same reference indicates, there are verbs in Japanese which have an independent meaning but can also attach to a stem-verb to convey a nuance, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;食べきる (eat it all) vs 食べる (eat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the verb きる which ordinarily means &lt;em&gt;to cut&lt;/em&gt; has been appended to the verb to convey the idea that the action was brought to full completion. Just as one would normally not consider &lt;em&gt;finish&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I finished reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as an auxiliary in English, I would not consider these Japanese constructions to be real examples of auxiliaries (in the traditional sense of English grammar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that using a restrictive definition of auxiliary, there are many more examples, for instance in synthetic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-03-17T09:45:54.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2014-03-17T23:05:29.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Vietnamese central (?) vowels you might find this discussion interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2727474&amp;amp;highlight=vietnamese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2727474&amp;amp;highlight=vietnamese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;especially Palomnik's contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French 'eu' and 'u' are in fact regularly represented by ơ and ư in loanwords from French, although the French vowels are rounded and the Vietnamese are not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-17T23:05:29.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2014-03-18T05:26:05.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to most European languages, Chinese does not use the serial comma. Moreover, Chinese uses a different comma for enumeration from the one used to set off clauses. For instance, you would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;那天晚上，他吃了鱼、牛肉、虾和螃蟹。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That night, he ate fish, beef, shrimp, and crab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;code&gt;，&lt;/code&gt; is the regular comma, while &lt;code&gt;、&lt;/code&gt; is the enumeration comma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference in a very related topic is in the usage of final commas in non-exhaustive lists. For example, you might say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ellos compraron manzanas, plátanos, naranjas, etcétera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;他们买了苹果、香蕉、橙子等等。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They bought apples, bananas, oranges, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Spanish and English both use a comma before &lt;code&gt;et cetera&lt;/code&gt;, while Chinese does not for the equivalent expression &lt;code&gt;等等&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T05:34:09.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2014-03-18T12:40:31.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting response from Ron Maimon, although I am not sure I understand it fully. How can we be sure that proto-Indoeuropeans did not have elements embedded within other elements in a syntactic structure? Nor do I think that English is more &quot;complex&quot; syntactically than Greek or Latin, maybe less regular. Where there are analytic rules, they are obscure and differ spuriously between British and US speakers, as well as within British or US speakers. The word &quot;complexity&quot; sounds self-gratifying enough. A better word for that might be sloppiness. The fact is that proto-Indoeuropeans in a pre-literate age, had a highly inflected grammar, whose origin seems a mystery. Counter-intuitively, with the advent of schooling, languages started to become grammatically simplified. One interesting study I read was that illiterate reciters of epics from India could recite long epics from memory, whereas their children who went to school had to make notes and write everything down and had trouble in reciting these epics. So the explanation may be that illiteracy frees up certain brain resources that can be allocated to an inflected grammar among other things. That still would not explain how proto-Indoeuropean grammar became so highly inflected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culturally, it would cursorily appear that languages became less inflected with the introduction of large numbers of foreign speakers, e.g. in the case of ancient Latin being succeeded by less inflected Romance languages or in the creation of creoles (e.g. modern English). Overall, however, there seems a tendency, even in the emerging less-inflected languages, for scholars to use a more regular and more inflected speech than non-scholars or non-experts. There is, in contrast, also a view or trend among non-scholars that speaking in a non-inflected way is more expressive, but this sounds like some kind of conceit. There is a neurological condition when damage in the speech area induces patients who struggle to express themselves to invent new words of no known meaning. I can see how some people with natural or clinical deficits in the grammar and vocabulary of a language perceived themselves as more expressive in avoiding convention and coming up with the occasional new word, using a foreign word or an irregular expression. Occasionally it might have even sounded like poetic license of a sort and could catch on. Bizarre words like bloke, dude, funk, etc seem to belong to that department. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient writers can be very much enjoyed today. Their style has been often imitated and certainly they had no problem with expressiveness, just because their language was more inflected - that is self-deception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3326" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T12:40:31.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2778" CreationDate="2014-03-18T22:50:32.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is actually more complicated, and more interesting, than indicated in the previous posts. Classical Arabic (al-ʻarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā), as formulated by the grammarians from Sībawayh onwards, is based in the first instance on the language of the poetry of the pagan (jāhilī) period, in essence, a poetic koine combining elements of the various old Arabic dialects. The Qurʼān is in basically the same language, but with some particular morphological and syntactic features, and quite a large amount of specifically Qurʼānic vocabulary. Muslims believe that the Qurʼān is literally the word of God, that it is inimitable and that consequently men cannot, and indeed must not try to, imitate it. This means that the language of Arabic literature of the classical period is actually quite different from that of the Qurʼān.This is rather different from (for example) English writing of the post-reformation period in so far as this consciously emulates the language and diction of the English Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-03-18T22:56:57.850" LastActivityDate="2014-03-18T22:56:57.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2014-03-19T07:39:33.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lydian language&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was distinct from all other Indo-European languages for its agglutinative features. I don't know all the details, but there was an extensive usage of infixes. Generally, all Indo-European Anatolian languages had some kind of agglutinative qualities, apparently because of the substratum languages that were agglutinative e.g. Hattic and Hurrian. Nevetheless, that does not qualify them as agglutinative in the same sense as Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Basque, Berber and so on. On the other hand &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tocharian languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; changed their IE infectional structure into the agglutinative morphosyntactic type with multi-morphemic endings and suffixes e.g. Toch. B cämp-am-ñe-tstse 'to have the ability'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a conclusion, there are very few IE-languages that can be counted as having agglutinative features. As a native Swedish speaker I &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; consider myself speaking a language with agglutinative qualities in the same extend as when I compare to Lydian, Tocharian or languages from the Uralic, Caucasian and Altaic language families. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T08:50:44.283" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T08:50:44.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-19T12:00:08.620" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nextnature.net/2013/01/did-forks-really-give-modern-humans-an-overbite/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[European] humans had an ape-like bite until relatively recently, with our top and bottom incisors aligned along their edges. With the invention of the fork around 250 years ago, our teeth abruptly switched to the overbite that is common to nearly every human today. ... This same trend appeared 900 years earlier in China, when chopsticks first came into use.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what I'm wondering is, has anyone tried to look for any evidence of sound-change patterns that may have accompanied these slight shifts of the resting position of the jaw?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2816" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T21:01:12.697" Title="Use of forks/chopsticks and sound change?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6796" CreationDate="2014-03-19T12:54:02.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see from your link that this story was launched by a food writer. Is there any archaeological evidence for this supposed sudden change in human physiology? It doesn't really fit in with evolutionary theory, does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way the fork was not invented &quot;around 250 years ago&quot;. Table forks have been in common use in the Near East and (somewhat later) in Europe for at least 1000 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-19T21:01:12.697" LastActivityDate="2014-03-19T21:01:12.697" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6820" CreationDate="2014-03-19T21:05:01.810" Score="12" ViewCount="7946" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program&quot;&gt;The minimalist program&lt;/a&gt; seems to be very fashionable amongst linguists at present, but for the life of me I can't understand its appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see - and I've read my fair share of the literature by now - there is little minimalist about minimalist grammars. In fact, they seem to overcomplicate things, as they require so much metadata about grammatical constituents and moving and merging operations that one can hardly render an example sentence longer than a couple of words on a single page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why define grammars that require these operations in the first place? Why not stick to simple CFGs or CSGs with rewrite rules that &lt;em&gt;generate precisely the same strings&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing? Is there a sensible reason for the existence of these lumbering structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T22:30:31.887" Title="What is minimalist about the minimalist program?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2014-03-20T02:10:30.133" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be controversial, but it might help you understand its appeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take is that Chomskyan transformational grammar in its various incarnations is now at a stage of development similar to medieval scholasticism or late Ptolemaic astronomy. It's still the dominant paradigm for historical reasons (in this case, the Chomskyan revolution of the '50s and '60s), but has outlived its usefulness and is struggling increasingly desperately to &quot;save the phenomena&quot;, hence all the complicated machinery you describe. The reasons for its dominance are mainly institutional, namely that the large majority of tenured syntax professors these days were trained as Chomskyanists, so that there are many more jobs, conference panels, etc., for linguists working in this model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-11-12T08:26:30.463" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T08:26:30.463" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-20T07:42:35.240" Score="6" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to analyze &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur doesn't discipline his children because he loves them &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to show the structural ambiguity using phrase structure rules that precede X' rules, and that &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; is throwing me off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3330" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-21T05:31:52.270" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T05:31:52.270" Title="Structural ambiguity and 'because'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6801" CreationDate="2014-03-21T01:27:05.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So if you are starting from your rewrite rules, you could either start from S -&gt; NP VP or  S -&gt; S Coord S, then you would get two different bracketings of your phrase markers and still manage to insert all of the same words in the same order once you get to lexical insertion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T01:27:05.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6807" CreationDate="2014-03-21T10:59:56.633" Score="2" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently using John Lyons' 'Semantics' vol 1. In the section &lt;em&gt;1.3 Object-language and Meta language&lt;/em&gt;, after he defines those concepts, he &lt;a href=&quot;http://i.cubeupload.com/cR5uKg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tries to show the difference between &lt;strong&gt;meta-linguistic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;reflexive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; statements in a language, where I get confused by it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain the whole text, especially the red section, in a simpler way, and the core question of mine would be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we treat a reflexive statement as a meta-linguistic statement [a special kind of ; here the object language and meta language are English and meta-English]; and so,is it true that a meta linguistic expression can be far more general than a reflexive one, depending on what language is chosen to be the meta language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If necessary, I can give the previous page in order to provide context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2890" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-23T19:09:50.910" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T19:09:50.910" Title="Differences of 'Meta-linguistic' &amp; 'reflexive' statements" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-21T12:36:03.090" Score="2" ViewCount="2416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know if there is any history between the usages of &amp;quot;yeah-no&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no-yeah&amp;quot; in English, and if the usage of the two terms or an equivalent is used in other languages. Also, is there a distinct difference in meaning between the two phrases in terms of usage and context or are they interchangeable? I've noticed a lot of people including myself tend to use both in everyday language. Example usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person A: I think pizzas are pretty awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person B: No-yeah, pizzas are definitely awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3337" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T21:54:39.633" Title="Origin and usage of &quot;no-yeah&quot; and &quot;yeah-no&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-06-06T15:23:29.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6801" CreationDate="2014-03-21T13:09:21.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know that I have a proper answer, but I would like to&#xA;summarize my findings. Recall that I am not a native speaker,&#xA;and it may impact my perception of the language. Also, I am not taking in consideration other aspects that may help disambiguation, such as prosody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the original example, and two others I found, with different&#xA;conjunctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arthur doesn't discipline his children &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt; he loves them.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arthur doesn't discipline his children &lt;strong&gt;whenever&lt;/strong&gt; they are disobedient&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I do not call &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; make you understand.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is common to all three examples is an undertone of causality in&#xA;the conjunction and the negative form. The issue is whether the&#xA;negation applies to the whole sentence, thus dominating (?) the&#xA;conjunction, or only to the first proposition, which changes the&#xA;meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding syntax, and I am considering only formal languages, I am not&#xA;sure I like to define it with a Context-Free Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a suggestion (approximately):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;S -&amp;gt; NS NCoord S&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NS would be defined so that it derives only on negative sentences,&#xA;and NCoord would derive only on conjunctions that &amp;quot;can be negated&amp;quot; and&#xA;thus cause the observed ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I find this a bit awkward, and I wonder whether it would not&#xA;be more natural with a Tree-Adjoining Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the question remains of when such an ambiguous analysis&#xA;is acceptable. What are the conjunctions that allow the observed&#xA;ambiguity. We have so far examples involving exclusively conjunctions&#xA;with a causal undertone, though the direction of the causality may vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found another example, without causality, which may shed some light&#xA;on this. Unfortunately, it is based a conjunctive form that is&#xA;understandable, but rarely used (according to my search engine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He does not speak &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; thinks like an adult&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He does not speak &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; think like an adult&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case the subject is mute, while in the second case he is&#xA;immature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, people will usually say for the second case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He does not speak &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; think like an adult&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's ignore this, since the rare form is understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if you take the plural for the same examples, you get a single&#xA;form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They do not speak &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; think like adults&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is then ambiguous since there is no verbal inflection to tell&#xA;the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting part, in this, is that the conjunction no&#xA;longer has a causality undertone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is left in common between the conjunctions in the examples is&#xA;that they are related to a logical operator, for which negation also&#xA;has meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be that the distinctive character for relevant conjunctions&#xA;is that they have an associated logical semantics, which naturally has&#xA;a negative interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not a native speaker, and you may be able to come up with&#xA;better examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T13:09:21.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2014-03-21T14:32:24.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A reflexive use of a language A is the use of the language A to talk&#xA;about itself, for example to analyze its own structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, one can use another language B to talk about A. Then B is a&#xA;metalanguage for A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you define a mathematical formalism, say BNF, to&#xA;express the syntax of languages, then BNF can be used (to some extent)&#xA;to define the syntax of English, analyze it, talk about it, and do a&#xA;variety of things. BNF is then a metalanguage for English, or more&#xA;precisely for the syntax of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you could also use English to describe the syntax of English, as&#xA;many grammarians did in the past. Then it is a reflexive use of&#xA;English to describe its own syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting note, not considered in the text you copied, is that a&#xA;meta language like BNF can be used to define its own syntax. Then, it&#xA;is a reflexive use of the metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the part in red says is that, even when we do mathematics, we&#xA;conduct the discussions in English, or whatever language we happen to&#xA;speak (some people believe there is only one). This is only partly&#xA;true as computer scientists and mathematicians are developping systems&#xA;that can conduct mathematical work in a purely formal way. But we tend&#xA;not to do that when exchanging between human beings, and rather use&#xA;natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applied to formal metalanguage, this means that even though we can have&#xA;a specialized language B to express precisely some aspects of English,&#xA;it is only used as a scaffolding to actually express our thinking more&#xA;precisely in English, as we would do (with less precision) if we&#xA;simply used English reflexively. So even the use of metalanguage ends&#xA;up in reflexive use of the language, at least where natural language&#xA;is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, you can talk perfectly well about English in German or other natural languages. In&#xA;this case, German becomes a metalanguage for English.  And native&#xA;German speakers do not have to resort to English to say whatever they&#xA;have to say, thus contradicting in a way the statement in red.&#xA;Nevertheless, this remark does not really weaken the argument of the author, since we use metalanguages for mathematical precision. German as a metalanguage is probably not much more precise than English used reflexively. The&#xA;author is really using the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to mean natural language (his&#xA;responsibility). By the way, this was a reflexive use of English, as I was discussing the meaning of an English word in a sentence, and&#xA;the current sentence is a reflexive sentence talking about itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem is that metalanguages need also to be understood and&#xA;precisely defined. So we could build a further metalanguage for the&#xA;purpose, ... But this would not end. So at some point we cannot escape&#xA;using reflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely what is done when defining the syntax of BNF in BNF.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BNF&lt;/a&gt; is just a specific notation for context-free syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Further remarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot explain this text much more, as he does not seem to me that&#xA;the author justifies all his assertions &lt;em&gt;in the available text&#xA;fragment&lt;/em&gt;.  And furthermore, I do not always agree with them, short of&#xA;more developed arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with the OP's question, I would definitely consider that a&#xA;reflexive statement is a  meta-linguitics statement about the&#xA;language (here English) expressed in the language itself. The language&#xA;is then its own metalanguage. If a language B has and expressive power&#xA;that goes beyond the expressive power of a language A, while fully&#xA;covering it, then one may expect that B would permit more general&#xA;statements, or simply more statements about A than the reflexive use&#xA;of A for itself. But that is somewhat a trivial remark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of view of the author seems however to be that reflexive&#xA;statements in English can cover more ground than the use of a formal&#xA;language, since, for lack of a constraining formalization, it will be&#xA;adaptable to a wider range of concepts and situation. This may well be&#xA;true, at the expense of precision, univocality of expressions, and&#xA;possibly accuracy of reasonning and avoidance of paradoxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it may indeed be undesirable to identify metalinguistic&#xA;statements and reflexive statement as they do not serve the same&#xA;purposes. Except maybe when the metalanguage is itself another natural&#xA;language, hence having pretty much the same properties as English used&#xA;reflexively. Still, it seems that the paragraph in red states that&#xA;this identification necessarily occurs when using a formal metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the last sentence of the first paragraph (which should&#xA;have a question mark added). My view is that there is substance&#xA;(semantics) and names (syntax) used to physically denote that&#xA;substance. Whatever we do is syntactic.  If I write &quot;&lt;em&gt;Socrates&lt;/em&gt; has&#xA;eight letters&quot;, I am certainly using the word &lt;em&gt;Socrates&lt;/em&gt;, but I am&#xA;using it as substance, not as a name for another substance. And one&#xA;never accesses substance directly, but only through a name, if only to&#xA;always proceed consistently. But, the&#xA;author says it is unreasonable. He may have reasons to think that, but&#xA;I do not see that he is giving them.  Furthermore, we remarked that&#xA;using English reflexively, or German as a metalanguage for English, is&#xA;about the same. Using German as metalanguage, would he oppose&#xA;considering &quot;'sesquipedalian'&quot; as a name for an English word. I&#xA;do not know. But that is what it is in formal metalanguages&#xA;(programming languages for example). Would that say something about&#xA;a possible difference between formal and natural languages, rather than about&#xA;the concept of reflexivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the sentence in red. I do agree with it on a first level.&#xA;Usual discourse on English, even when based on a formal metalanguage,&#xA;will make use of English itself (let's forget other languages), and&#xA;will hence fall back on reflexive use of English. But, as I said, the&#xA;formal metalanguage is still there as a scaffolding, possibly not very&#xA;visible. And this scaffolding does structure discourse so that it will&#xA;not wander beyond the limits set by the formal metalanguage. Hence&#xA;there is not much that is changed by reflexive use of English,&#xA;whathever &quot;its richness, complexity and alleged inconsistencies&quot;. At&#xA;best, you can get analogies and support for personnal intuition, but&#xA;without really changing the end result. English is used reflexively in&#xA;a formal sense, but it has little consequence ... unless the&#xA;discourse starts bearing on the adequacy of the metalanguage. But this&#xA;is yet another game, as English is then used as a metalanguage for the&#xA;formal metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather not comment the rest of the text, which encompasses too&#xA;many things, And I do not understand the reason for preferring to talk&#xA;&quot;in terms of use and mention&quot; rather than substance and name as I&#xA;did. I made up this terminology to avoid the more formal syntax and&#xA;semantics. My opinion is that the philosophers'view (according to the&#xA;author) is a lot more limitative because it is absolute rather than&#xA;relative. Recall that higher up I wrote «&quot;'sesquipedalian'&quot;» so has to&#xA;have a name for the notation of the name of a concept. This allows&#xA;recursive use of the concept of naming, while use and mention do not&#xA;allow it, if I am not mistaken in my understanding of their intended&#xA;meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reached this line without skipping, you won a coffee next time&#xA;we meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I thought &quot;sesquipedalian&quot; qualified a bicycle with a broken&#xA;pedal. I was apparently wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-03-21T21:21:03.053" LastActivityDate="2014-03-21T21:21:03.053" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2014-03-21T18:49:00.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing to point out is that the Minimalist Program is a &lt;em&gt;Program&lt;/em&gt; not a &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; (the clue is in the name), following the distinction made by Lakatos. It can be thought of as an injunction to minimise the contents of UG, i.e. to minimise the the amount of linguistic-specific information we invoke in explaining natural language. The copy theory of movement, for example, is minimalist in the sense that it is ontologically more parsimonious than preceding theories, in which &lt;em&gt;traces&lt;/em&gt; were posited as distinct linguistic objects. According to the copy theory of movement, a trace just &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the moved element. Theories are only minimalist to the extent that they attempt to minimise the contents of UG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context Sensitive Grammars are highly unsuitable for analysing natural language, for reasons i've laid out in my initial comments. To reiterate, if we're at all interested in modelling the linguistic competence of an actual speaker, they're completely unrealistic as even just the recognition problem takes polynomial time to complete. Context Free Grammars have been shown not to be powerful enough to model natural language - see the answer to this question, for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4294/could-anyone-give-examples-of-context-sensitive-sentences-that-cannot-be-generat&quot;&gt;Could anyone give examples of context-sensitive sentences that cannot be generated by context-free rules?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly the same criticisms you level against minimalist approaches could be levelled against alternative frameworks, such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, or Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Both involve a high degree of notational complexity, but notational complexity isn't the same thing as theoretical parsimony. One would never think to criticise a physicist for the length of his formulae. Given that natural language is such a complex phenomenon with countless intricacies, it requires sufficiently fine-grained machinery to account for. I don't believe that minimalist accounts are the only or even the best way to think about syntactic phenomenon, but to dismiss them out of hand because of their apparent notational complexity is a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T16:01:33.767" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-22T13:51:09.257" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've played around in Praat a bit trying to identify unknown syllables in Mandarin by just looking at the spectrograms. Since there is a very limited number of syllables in Mandarin (slightly over 400 disregarding tone), it's often possible to guess the right syllable or at least be very close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stops, however, cause problems. It's easy to separate aspirated and unaspirated stops, of course, but what about identifying different unaspirated stops, such as [p/t/k]? I have looked at a number of samples from different speakers and several textbooks, but the theory doesn't match the samples I have, and samples from different speakers seem different and I can't find any pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is pretty simple: Is it possible to distinguish between e.g. [p/t/k] in Praat? I realise that it might be hard with just one sample, but what if samples of all three were available, could you tell which one is which somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case someone wants to look at the samples, I have put [pa], [ta] and [ka]  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5cdmpl7le5a3ez1/IlMXAe9V9w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;on Dropbox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3341" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-22T17:15:04.617" LastActivityDate="2014-03-22T17:15:04.617" Title="Identifying place of articulation of stops in Praat" Tags="&lt;stops&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-22T21:31:01.343" Score="2" ViewCount="1542" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble creating a syntax tree for the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ginny thinks Harry is dreamy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Harry is dreamy&quot; is clearly a sentence. However, I am confused what &quot;is&quot; should be. I think it should be a verb, but then that would mean &quot;is dreamy&quot; would be a verb phrase. However, I've learned that verb phrases cannot have adjectives and &quot;dreamy&quot; seems to be a adjective rather than an adverb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3314" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T14:08:41.930" Title="Help with syntax trees" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-06-09T22:57:52.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6816" CreationDate="2014-03-23T01:43:41.370" Score="5" ViewCount="1868" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that vowels are nasalized before a nasal in the same syllable in English. I am wondering if this would include the schwa [ə] as well? For example, would the schwa in &quot;restriction&quot; [rɪstrɪkʃən] be nasalized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3343" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-25T21:45:21.570" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T22:24:49.070" Title="Is the schwa nasalized before a nasal?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-23T05:06:13.177" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, it seems like one of the more common misspellings on the net (besides then/than, your/you're, etc.), particularly in documents where everything else is spelled correctly, is to use &quot;loosing&quot; in place of &quot;losing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two hypotheses for the relative prevalence of this misspelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Lose&quot; and &quot;loose&quot; have similar meanings (unlike, for example, &quot;then&quot; and &quot;than&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English phonology might predict that &quot;lose&quot; has a long 'o' like in &quot;hose&quot;, while &quot;loose&quot; equates to the 'u' in &quot;moose,&quot; which is what spellers might be aiming for. This reasoning despite the strong (and correct) phonological inclination toward an 's' sibilant in &quot;?oose&quot; but 'z' in &quot;?ose&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Black Eyed Peas popularize the variant in some song that I'm not familiar with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which hypothesis seems more reasonable? Are there any other pairs like lose/loose? Perhaps in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also realize I might just notice this more because I've been paying attention, so maybe I'm just being &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theonion.com/articles/15-most-common-misspellings,35595/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;over-sensitive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="308" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-23T18:45:01.423" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T18:45:01.423" Title="Common misspellings: Loosing losing" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-04-15T18:16:48.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6817" CreationDate="2014-03-23T12:50:43.900" Score="3" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the function is assigned the predicate ( e.g. let &lt;em&gt;f(x)&lt;/em&gt; denote [[ &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is red&lt;/strong&gt;]] ), the domain is the set of all possible referents and the range is the set of all possible propositions. (I.e. if there are two possible referents, [[&lt;strong&gt;John&lt;/strong&gt;]] and [[&lt;strong&gt;Mary&lt;/strong&gt;]] then set of all possible propositions is [[&lt;strong&gt;John is red&lt;/strong&gt;]] and [[&lt;strong&gt;Mary is red&lt;/strong&gt;]].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is that different from expressing them in predicate logic? (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Rx&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T17:14:46.130" Title="How to express semantics in functions" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6813" CreationDate="2014-03-23T12:54:47.630" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is yes--schwa before a nasal in the same syllable tends to be nasalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more nuanced answer is that nasalization in English is not really as straightforward as is sometimes taught in Intro to Linguistics classes. There are a couple of issues to bear in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps precisely because nasalization is not contrastive in English, there is a lot of variation when it comes to the degree to which (and consistency with which) pre-(and post-)nasal vowels are nasalized in that language. If I take a rendition of 'restriction' in which the schwa is nasalized and splice in a non-nasalized schwa instead, native listeners will still hear it as 'restriction'; in fact, most listeners won't even notice a difference if all other acoustic properties of the schwa are appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, phonologists characterized nasalization as a phonological (and therefore categorical) phenomenon, but phonetically the facts are more &quot;messy&quot;. Articulatorily speaking, nasalization is not an all-or-nothing, binary thing (in any language). If one tracks nasal flow during speech, it becomes clear that it takes time for the velum to lower and raise, and especially in continuous speech it is common for it to be only partially lowered during the realization of segments abutting nasals. Abby Cohn showed this in her dissertation and later papers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above issues apply to all segments in the vicinity of nasals, but since schwa is by definition unstressed in English and therefore short in duration and not very loud (relative to all the segments around it) it is even more susceptible to variation and &quot;non-committal&quot; articulation. From a perceptual perspective it is reasonable to suppose that this is because listeners don't rely as much on the information they are given in unstressed syllables to parse speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T12:54:47.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6815" CreationDate="2014-03-23T16:11:11.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within an &lt;em&gt;extensional&lt;/em&gt; semantic framework, the range of the function should in fact be the set of truth values, i.e. {1, 0}, in a standard bivalent logical framework. The domain is the set of individuals. A predicate, such as &lt;em&gt;is red&lt;/em&gt; is analysed as a function from individuals to truth values -- namely, that function which maps an individual to 1 if that individual is red, and to 0 otherwise. The denotation of &lt;em&gt;is red&lt;/em&gt;, as a function from individuals to truth values, can be written in the lambda calculus as follows (following Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer, 1998):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[is red]] = λx. x is red&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to be read as: 'the function from an individual &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt;, iff &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure how to answer the question of how this is different to predicate logic. Using function-talk allows us to derive the truth-conditions of sentences of natural language &lt;em&gt;compositionally&lt;/em&gt;, by using a general rule of composition such as &lt;em&gt;function application&lt;/em&gt; (see again Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer, 1998). Predicate logic is useful for giving the truth conditions of an NL sentence, but it's not much use for giving an account of how these truth conditions are computed compositionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="2328" LastEditDate="2014-03-23T17:14:46.130" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T17:14:46.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2014-03-23T16:49:53.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was actually used in both ways by Philostratos (e.g. Vita Apollonii: τὰς δὲ εὐεργεσίας ὀψὲ διδόναι). But I think we may call it a personal way of expression or a local variant, rather than an established preposition, because this usage didn't survive. The word ὀψέ had been mainly used as an adverb for more than a millennium after Philostratos; so we wouldn't call it loss of anything. We could just say that ancient writers didn't have the same sense of language (or even grammar level). The word could be used though in poetry in Modern Greek, but when writing in a mixed style, not in a standard one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3345" LastActivityDate="2014-03-23T16:49:53.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2014-03-24T02:23:39.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Minimalist Program&lt;/em&gt; has to be compared to previous models in the generative approach to Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Government and Binding&lt;/em&gt; was an earlier theory developed by Chomsky which had several sub-theories such as &lt;em&gt;Case Theory&lt;/em&gt; for assigning cases to nominals, &lt;em&gt;Binding Theory&lt;/em&gt; to deal with anaphors, &lt;em&gt;Control Theory&lt;/em&gt; to deal with implied nominals, &lt;em&gt;Bounding Theory&lt;/em&gt; to deal with wh-movement, and I'm sure there are more. They were treated somewhat independently, and each had various rules and exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Minimalist Program proposed that there was a single model of syntax which could replace all of those earlier theories. Morphemes are assigned to syntactic nodes through generic rules that aren't limited to a particular area of grammar. Rather than needing detailed and exception-ridden rules, morphemes are placed and moved as short a distance as possible. In order to do this a lot more syntactic structures are proposed, often each expressing a single semantic feature. The idea is that each morpheme will absorb a lot of syntactic structures in a predictable way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the minimalism isn't refering to the syntactic structures (which are rather the opposite of minimalistic), but how morphemes are assigned to those. As all theories do it has pros and cons. I'd certainly prefer it to Government and Binding, but I'd prefer &lt;em&gt;Distributed Morphology&lt;/em&gt; or possibly even a non-generative approach to the Minimalist Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-03-24T02:23:39.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6828" CreationDate="2014-03-24T07:33:16.200" Score="3" ViewCount="820" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese and Korean (and I have to assume the Okinawan / Ryukyuan languages also), pronouns are quite different from most other languages from most families in at least two ways I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not quite a closed word class.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pronouns have come and gone over history, whereas in most language families pronouns are amongst the most conservative words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Behave in many ways more like nouns than like a separate special word class.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(There are also many honorific / humble / polite pronouns, but this seems minor in comparison to the above points. It could however be part of the reason for the above points though.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T05:07:09.217" Title="Are there other languages where pronouns behave like they do in Japanese, Korean, and Ryukyuan?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2014-03-24T13:32:34.187" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be at least two quite distinct questions there: &lt;strong&gt;what is minimalist about the minimalist program?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Is there a sensible reason for the existence of the lumbering structures it deals with?&lt;/strong&gt; P.Elliott and curiousdannii already provided general and historic answers to the first question, but I wish to supplement their answers with a more specific analysis of the framework of a typical argument within minimalism as it is usually practiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is minimal?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a typical minimal analysis will strive for is an explanation of syntactic phenomena relying solely on the following list of possible mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bare syntactic structures constructed by the binary operation Merge (yielding only binary trees) usually with only left-adjunction by opposition to much flatter structure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only other operation allowed is Agree, which operates blindly on a small finite set of features all having only positive or negative polarity by opposition to e.g a rich lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agree and Merge are only possible under stringent locality conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The geometric and feature characteristic of nodes of the trees should be mapped  as cross-linguistically severely as possible with interpretive properties.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as possible, the only further conditions put on the system should derive from core computational requirements (for instance two undistinguishable nodes of the tree, in the sense of say graph theory, or two identical set of features should be undistinguishable by the system; I also lump in this interface conditions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list can be deemed minimal because it is a &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; list: it restricts the kind of explanation you are allowed to put forth. Especially, if one takes seriously point 4. and 5., it follows that the analysis of any construction in any given language (say left-dislocation in Spoken French) has to proceed through universal explanations in terms of geometry of the tree and feature properties, explanations which in turn possibly (and do, if the work is to have any value) imply predictions bearing on another totally different constructions (say wh-questions in Spoken French) or a similar construction in a totally different language (say left-dislocation in Japanese). For examples of what I consider good work done in this way, I would cite &lt;a href=&quot;https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/anaphora-and-language-design&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-agree-why-move&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where do the lumbering structures come from and why they are actually empirical success stories for minimalism?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now moving on to the justification of the lumbering structures. As Kayne first noted (as far as I know), the combination of point 1. and point 5. above &lt;em&gt;implies&lt;/em&gt; the existence of many extremely refined functional projections (if only because a binary tree has a lot of internal nodes compared to the number of its leaves). So it is not that these functional projections were introduced, they were &lt;em&gt;predicted&lt;/em&gt; to exist because they were essentially the only solution compatible with the imposed restrictions. This is indeed extremely reminiscent of the epicycles of Ptolemy and extremely worrying: if your theoretical framework leads you to postulate many things nobody has seen, shouldn't you be concerned? That's a very fair criticism but one which actually highlights the predictive power of the core principles above: if our prediction is correct, the functional projection posited (again as the only possible solution within the framework) have to be phonetically overtly present at precisely the assumed position in at least one language. The fact that this has been repeatedly shown to be true is one of the main scientific achievements of minimalism: any serious alternative account should face the challenge head-on and achieve similar predictive power within its own system. A prime example of such a successful prediction is successive cyclic movement (the point of departure between what became minimalism and many other formalization of generative grammar) which is phonetically realized (among may others) in Afrikaans and in cyclic agreement in Chamorro but one can also think about focal projection (realized in Vata) or voice projection (arguably realized in Japanese and Kiswahili). There are of course many more sophisticated ones, from binding theory, the structure of DPs, the properties of nominalizations, the logical interpretation of indefinite objects, the extraction properties of relative clauses... It thus seems to me that the comparison with angels on pinheads is quite unfair: these angels have been repeatedly found &lt;em&gt;ex post&lt;/em&gt; on precisely the pinheads they were supposed to be dancing on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is the appeal?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, as a complete outsider to the field who has never taken a class in linguistics nor ever intend to (so I feel quite immune to any political influence this or that strand of linguistics might have on the curriculum or, &lt;em&gt;a fortiori&lt;/em&gt;, on the hiring process), the appeal to this approach mostly stems from its cross-linguistic potential: as mentioned above, by nature, explanations valid in one language will make predictions and suggest insights for others. While it is quite easy to give a formal description of any specific linguistic phenomenon for a given language (any &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy&quot;&gt;texas sharpshooter&lt;/a&gt; can do this), it seems to me that when it comes to the study of cross-linguistic correlations, minimalism is currently the only game in town. That said, I do think that the comparison with the Ptolemaic system is not off the mark: minimalism might currently be the most precise and clearest unified account we have of syntactic phenomena (just as Ptolemy's system, as famously argued by Otto Neugebauer, endured because of the clarity of its tenets and its very reasonable empirical basis) but it seems fair  to me to say that linguistics is still awaiting its Kepler, not to speak of its Newton.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-03-24T13:32:34.187" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-24T22:58:03.287" Score="16" ViewCount="1733" Body="&lt;p&gt;A tenet of the Minimalist Program is that all syntactic structure is binary branching. Merge always merges two constituents to a greater constituent until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is reached. What empirical evidence does the MP produce backing up this hypothesis? It seems to me that empiricism, i.e. considerations delivered by constituency tests and mechanisms such as shifting and inversion, suggests, rather, that ternary structures are common, i.e. flat structures.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the interest that this question is receiving recently, I'd like to add something to it. This addition is, in my view, the main emperical evidence against strict binarity of branching. Most constituency tests that are widely employed in syntax and linguistics textbooks suggest that syntactic structure is relatively flat. Consider the string &lt;em&gt;Bill a present&lt;/em&gt; in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) Fred gave Bill a present. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On strict binarity of branching, &lt;em&gt;Bill a present&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent (think VP shell). But constituency tests tell us that it is not a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) a.  *Bill a present Fred gave.  -- Topicalization&#xA;&#xA;     b.  *It was Bill a present Fred gave. -- Clefting&#xA;&#xA;     c.  *What Fred gave was Bill a present.  -- Pseudoclefting&#xA;&#xA;     d.  *Fred gave it. (it = Bill a present) -- Proform substitution&#xA;&#xA;     e.   What did Fred give? -- *Bill a present. --Answer fragment&#xA;     e'. *Who did Fred give? -- *Bill a present. --Answer fragment&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, these data demonstrate that &lt;em&gt;Bill a present&lt;/em&gt; is not a constituent. Thus at least in this case, there is evidence in favor of a flat VP structure, since a flat VP views &lt;em&gt;Bill a present&lt;/em&gt; as a non-constituent. I would now like to focus my question on this type of data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some reason why data from standard constituency tests should not influence the debate about whether or not all syntactic structure is binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T14:36:02.320" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T07:09:26.730" Title="What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6821" CreationDate="2014-03-25T03:03:23.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was too long for a comment, and I think it starts to go towards an answer, so I've posted it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assumptions are, as I'm sure you're aware, often problematic. Modern Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Late Middle Japanese, are the odd men out when it comes to pronouns in Japonic languages. Old Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages have pronominal systems that do not really resemble their sister language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okinawan has what might be called a three dimensional pronominal system. First, there is a two-way distinction between non-polite and polite forms. Second, a four-way person distinction (first, second, third, and indefinite persons). And third, a two-way plurality contrast (singular and plural). This description is from Kinjou (1974)'s grammar of Naha dialect Okinawan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All non-first person pronouns show the contrast between polite and non-polite forms. For instance, the non-polite form of the second person singular pronoun is &lt;em&gt;'yaa&lt;/em&gt; [ʔjaː], while the polite form is either &lt;em&gt;'unzu&lt;/em&gt; [ʔun.dʑu] or &lt;em&gt;naa&lt;/em&gt; [naː]. Excluding the second person &lt;em&gt;naa&lt;/em&gt;, all other polite pronouns are formed in an entirely regular way, by adding the contracted form of the attributive copula &lt;em&gt;=n&lt;/em&gt; (uncontracted &lt;em&gt;nu&lt;/em&gt;, homophonous in both forms with the genitive case clitic &lt;em&gt;=nu&lt;/em&gt;) to the bare pronoun, along with a contracted form of the word &lt;em&gt;tchu&lt;/em&gt; [ttɕu] 'person'. So the second person form given above, &lt;em&gt;'unzu&lt;/em&gt;, is from pre-Okinawan &lt;em&gt;*uri nu ttchu&lt;/em&gt;, literally 'the person who is you'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plurality is similarly formed in a very regular fashion. The plural suffix &lt;em&gt;-taa&lt;/em&gt; [taː] is added on to pronouns. Curiously, the pronouns lose any vowel length they may have had, and the intiial &lt;em&gt;t-&lt;/em&gt; in the suffix geminates. So for instance, the first person singular pronoun is &lt;em&gt;waa&lt;/em&gt; (in some morphophonological contexts, &lt;em&gt;wan&lt;/em&gt;), while the plural is &lt;em&gt;wattaa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person is interesting, because only the first and second person pronouns are not polysemous with some other function. The third person pronouns, for instance, are simply the demonstratives. Okinawan has a three-way contrast, between proximal, mesial, and distal, and speakers retain this even in their pronominal usages. So &lt;em&gt;kuri&lt;/em&gt; is not only 'he/she', but 'he/she near me', and you can also have &lt;em&gt;uri&lt;/em&gt; 'he/she near you', or even &lt;em&gt;ari&lt;/em&gt; 'he/she near neither of us'. The indefinite person, &lt;em&gt;taa&lt;/em&gt; doubles as the &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word 'who'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Old Japanese pronominal system is even simpler than this, and is detailed in Vovin (2005)'s grammar of Western Old Japanese, as well as in Kupchik (2011)'s dissertation on the grammar of the various Eastern Old Japanese dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does all this mean for your question? Well, I think Joe Pineda touched on this in his comment. It seems that the particular social circumstances of late medieval and early modern Japan radically altered the pronominal system into a very unusual form. However, it's not that unusual. The pronominal systems of many of the languages of Southeast Asia, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_pronouns&quot;&gt;like Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; or Thai are usually held up as examples of extremely open (in the sense of an open class) pronominal systems. However, I wonder if it's even really the case that these words are pronouns anymore? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think there are good arguments to be made that Japanese pronouns really are a special subclass of nominals (pronouns) that just happen to be less diachronically stable than, say, pronouns found in most other languages. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=hGy6VuXZ8mwC&amp;amp;dq=ishiyama%202008%20pronoun&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot;&gt;Ishiyama 2008&lt;/a&gt; for more extensive arguments about this, but in summary, they don't exactly behave, morphosyntactically, like &quot;regular&quot; nouns (although they are much more noun-like than English pronouns); they are really not that open (you can't just go adding more to them at will); and they have very limited, but very pronoun-like, semantic content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T03:03:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6821" CreationDate="2014-03-25T05:07:09.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;there is ongoing research by a UCLA graduate student (Jun Yashima) that suggests that Modern Japanese &quot;pronouns&quot; are in fact more like epithets in many of their properties (consistent with limetom's answer that that are more nominal than pronominal), and Yashima shows this with various syntactic and semantic tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3094" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T05:07:09.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2014-03-25T05:47:44.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;binding, pronominal binding, and other c-command sensitive operations (e.g. NPI licensing, or association with focus particles like &quot;only&quot;) provide evidence that most structures that are commonly assumed to be 3+ branching are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;here are some of these tests applied to ditransitive verbs:&#xA;BINDING&#xA;I will show Mary herself&#xA;* I will show herself Mary&#xA;I will show Mary to herself&#xA;* I will show herself to Mary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NPI LICENSING&#xA;I gave no student any extra credit&#xA;* I gave any student no extra credit&#xA;* I gave any extra credit to no student&#xA;I gave no extra credit to any student&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PRONOMINAL BINDING&#xA;I sent every girl her grades (✓pronominal binding)&#xA;I sent her grades to every girl (*pronominal binding)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for ditransitive verbs there is other evidence too, with scope, crossover effects, and coordination that converge on a constituency of [V [obj obj]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now here is a pronominal binding test run on a coordinated structure:&#xA;I paid for every boy and his girlfriend (✓pronominal binding)&#xA;I paid for his girlfriend and every boy (*pronominal binding)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;coordinated structures are less transparent, because fewer tests provide obvious support for binary branching, but see Zhang 2009's book &quot;coordination in syntax&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if there are other types of phrases that you think ought to be &quot;flat&quot;, I'd love to have a discussion about those too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3094" LastActivityDate="2014-03-25T05:47:44.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-26T12:12:05.730" Score="0" ViewCount="3524" Body="&lt;p&gt;What differences are between paraphrase and rephrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they both retain the  meaning of the original text, and not add new information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they both have similar length as the original text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-03-26T13:08:59.817" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T16:47:22.290" Title="Differences between paraphrase and rephrase" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-03-26T18:37:22.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2014-03-26T16:47:22.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure this is the right site for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my understanding, as a non native English speaker. :-)&#xA;I am answering because I am interested in comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the major difference is that rephrasing occurs in the same&#xA;discourse usually to improve understanding or precision of meaning. It&#xA;is not necessarily done at the same time, or by the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paraphrasing is usually done by another person, who is somehow&#xA;appropriating the phrase (even though she may quote the original&#xA;author), possibly for a different context or different discourse.&#xA;One can paraphrase herself when quoting herself in a different&#xA;context, hence adapting meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think the length does not change too much in either case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that rephrasing tries to preserve or improve meaning, hence can add new information,&#xA;while paraphrasing can adapt it, thus modifying the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T16:47:22.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-26T18:19:20.570" Score="-3" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the vowels have become &quot;harsher&quot; during the vowel shift and has made them sound very different from Latin, Greek, Sanskrit,... which generally use &quot;soft&quot; vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we deduce that the vowel shift has occured due to assimilation of non-Indo-European speakers into original speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as I know, Harsh vowels (like Close front rounded vowel) are widely used in Mongoloid/Altaic languages and give an aggressive spirit to languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-10T12:59:12.840" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T01:08:55.043" Title="Why does the pronunciation of Germanic languages before vowel shift seems to have been more &quot;Indo-European&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2014-03-26T22:50:40.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preserving grammaticality and preserving meaning of the sentence are two different things. If one is interested in conveying meaning and not worried about grammaticality, all function words can be removed, whereas the content words must remain. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. We are arriving tomorrow at noon by train. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence can be reduced by removing all functional elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; b. Arrive tomorrow noon train. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The functional words and elements have been removed: &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;. The content words, in contrast, remain: &lt;em&gt;arrive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tomorrow&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;noon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;train&lt;/em&gt;. Note that the subject pronoun &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; can be viewed as a functional element in this case, since its meaning is certainly understood from context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most native speakers of English would judge the reduced sentence to be ungrammatical, although they would understand it if they know the context in which it was produced. Such sentences are described in terms of telegraph style. Headlines are a good example of language that has had the function words removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the distinction between function word and content word is not always clear, in many cases, distinguishing between the two types is not so controversial. Some widely acknowledged function words are the definite ad indefinite article, auxiliary verbs, and many prepositions. Typical content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The function words form closed classes, e.g. the number of prepositions in a language is small and limited, whereas the content words form open classes, meaning that new content words are being added to the language on an ongoing basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T22:50:40.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6776" CreationDate="2014-03-26T23:33:31.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Jlawler stated in his comment, the &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence in the question is a singular distal demonstrative pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Ginny likes that.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a pronoun because it appears where a noun would often appear, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Ginny likes cake&lt;/em&gt;, and because its content, i.e. what it refers to, is available in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can note in addition that the word &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; functions in a number of other ways, in addition to being a demonstrative determiner or demonstrative pronoun. It can also be a demonstrative adverb, e.g. &lt;em&gt;It was that controversial&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps its most common use in English is as a subordinator (i.e. a subordinate conjunction), e.g. &lt;em&gt;They said that it was finished&lt;/em&gt;. And yet another use of that is as a relative pronoun, e.g. &lt;em&gt;The people that were present were hungry&lt;/em&gt;, although its status in such cases (i.e. whether it is indeed a relative pronoun or not) is a matter of debate. Here is a list of its uses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;demonstrative determiner: &lt;em&gt;Ginny likes that cake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;demonstrative pronoun: &lt;em&gt;Ginny likes that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;demonstrative adverb: &lt;em&gt;Ginny is that hungry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;subordinator (i.e. subordinate conjunction): &lt;em&gt;Ginny said that she likes the cake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;relative pronoun (controversial): &lt;em&gt;The cake that Ginny likes is chocolate&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-26T23:33:31.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-26T23:46:52.027" Score="3" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &quot;part of speech&quot; and &quot;syntactic type&quot; the same concept? If not, what are their differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T12:14:16.730" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T13:12:30.523" Title="Are &quot;part of speech&quot; and &quot;syntactic type&quot; the same concept?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-03-27T00:12:16.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English the distinction is apparent in the competing forms &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;of mine&lt;/em&gt;. The appearance of the preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; of course marks what would appear as the genitive in many related languages, e.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. my book vs. that book of mine&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form &lt;em&gt;my book&lt;/em&gt; is preferred if there is no reason for another determiner to appear. In &lt;em&gt;that book of mine&lt;/em&gt;, the necessity for the demonstrative determiner to appear forces the appearance of the &quot;genitive&quot; form &lt;em&gt;of mine&lt;/em&gt;, since English generally allows just a single determiner to introduce a noun phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German has antiquated forms of the genitive pronoun (&lt;em&gt;meiner&lt;/em&gt; 'of mine', &lt;em&gt;deiner&lt;/em&gt; 'of yours', &lt;em&gt;seiner&lt;/em&gt; 'of his', &lt;em&gt;ihrer&lt;/em&gt; 'of hers', &lt;em&gt;unsrer&lt;/em&gt; 'of ours', &lt;em&gt;eurer&lt;/em&gt; 'of yours', &lt;em&gt;Ihrer&lt;/em&gt; 'of yours'). These forms have basically died out of the modern language, but they can be found on occassion in older texts. When these pronouns appeared, they would usually follow the noun that they modify, e.g. &lt;em&gt;das Buch meiner&lt;/em&gt; 'the book of mine'. There was thus a difference in word order that helped distinguish between the genitive pronoun &lt;em&gt;meiner&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;of mine&lt;/em&gt;), which followed the noun, and the possessive determiner &lt;em&gt;mein&lt;/em&gt;- (&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;), which precedes the noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand Manjusri's answer, but perhaps Icelandic is similar to German insofar as the genitive pronoun (not the possessive determiner!) appears rarely, and check to see if it follows its noun as opposed to preceding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T00:12:16.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2014-03-27T00:26:08.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;part of speech&lt;/em&gt; refers to the traditional word categories. Usually, somewhere between eight to twelve basic parts of speech are posited, e.g. noun, verb, adjective, adverb, adposition (preposition, postposition, circumposition), coordinate conjunction, subordinate conjunction, interjection, ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;syntactic type&lt;/em&gt; is simply vague. It could refer to anything that is assumed in the domain of syntax. It could refer to words, phrases, clauses, other specific word combinations. I have no clear associations with what is meant when I see &lt;em&gt;syntactic type&lt;/em&gt; out of context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T00:31:43.093" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T00:31:43.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2014-03-27T00:47:38.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parts of speech are lexical categories, such as noun, verb, adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With phrase structure grammars, syntactic types, or syntactic categories, are categories of phrases. of well formed sentence fragments, such as noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase.&#xA;They correspond to what is called non-terminal in formal grammars, notably context-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of speech are thus also syntactic types. It is not the same concept, but there is a containment relation between the two concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in lexicalized grammars, phrasal constituents are always associated with a lexical categories, so that syntactic types no longer have much role, or at best have a lesser role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic concepts are somewhat dependent on the syntactic theory and formalisation used. This is obviously to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The differences are not as clearcut as may seem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Replying to a very relevant comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By lexical, I do mean related to word. However, a word can be a&#xA;phrase, so that if lexical applies to words, it can apply to some&#xA;phrases, precisely those that are composed of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it may be a little bit more complex, if we want to keep&#xA;things consistent between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synthetic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;isolating&lt;/a&gt; languages. Then I am&#xA;not sure that lexical should pertain to single word in the context of&#xA;an isolating language (though that seems to be the case from what I read, or do not read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, taking an opposite viewpoint, if lexical elements (lexemes) are to&#xA;be composed of a single word (but, what is a word?), then what is considered lexical category in a synthetic&#xA;language may be considered only as a syntactic category in a more&#xA;isolating language.(see also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1069&quot;&gt;Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this discussion, the issue of what is lexical, or maybe of&#xA;what is part of speech independently of lexicality, is not completely&#xA;clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed the issue is not completely clear at all according to&#xA;Haspelmath in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/martin_haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature&#xA;of morphology and syntax&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/flin.2011.45.issue-1/issue-files/flin.2011.45.issue-1.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folia Linguistica&lt;/a&gt;). Rather than looking for&#xA;a difference between wordhood and lexicality, he questions the very&#xA;concept of word to &quot;&lt;em&gt;conclude that we do not currently have a good&#xA;basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into &quot;morphology&quot; and&#xA;&quot;syntax&quot;, and that linguists should be very careful with general&#xA;claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic &quot;word&quot;&#xA;notion.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The  issue of defining lexical categories raises other problems,&#xA;such as addressed by Grimes in &quot;Refining Parts-of-speech in the Lexicon&quot;, that lead him to state that&#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;parts-of-speech for some parts of the lexicon may need to be defined&#xA;syntactically, rather than lexically. After all, the whole notion of&#xA;parts-of-speech is with reference to the syntax of a language.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing so might escape the consistency problem between isolating and synthetic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure where the consensus lies regarding the possible&#xA;variations in these definitions. There may be better characterizations, or other definitions. Being consistent across the variety of languages seems a daunting task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T13:12:30.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6685" CreationDate="2014-03-27T01:37:11.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My exposure to the notions of thematic roles (or semantical roles) suggests that the particular inventory of roles posited varies quite a bit from one author to the next. The roles that seem to be most accepted are agent, patient, experiencer, and theme. But even these terms are applied variably depending on the grammarian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The roles that are defined most clearly are agent and experiencer. An agent is a sentient being that acts with volition. An experiencer is sentient being that experiences an occurrence, action, or event. Both of these roles can influence actual syntax in concrete ways. Both can establish point of view and thus influence the distribution of, for instance, certain pronouns, e.g. the &lt;em&gt;-self&lt;/em&gt; forms. The role patient is not as clear for me, since I've seen it used in different ways. The question is whether or not a patient should be construed as a sentient being. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role that might be missing from the list in the question is &lt;em&gt;theme&lt;/em&gt;. The theme role seems to be used in a somewhat vague sense when the subject (or object) is not sentient. In this regard, one might classify &lt;em&gt;the man&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The man falls as a theme&lt;/em&gt;, since a nonsentient entity can also fall, e.g. &lt;em&gt;The glass fell&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The leaves are falling&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Further, one can classify the copula as an intransitive verb. When the copula combines with a predicative adjective or predicative noun, the theme role seems to be preferred, e.g. &lt;em&gt;The rain is a drizzle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The room is dark&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T13:39:42.507" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T13:39:42.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6256" CreationDate="2014-03-27T02:42:15.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the/a explanation to the question is provided in librik's comment and part in Jlawler's comment. The disappearance of morphological case from English and French has led to the divergence of the two groups of pronouns. Languages with rich case systems do not have the division, e.g. German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The insight that I think can be added is that the marked forms (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;) appear obligatorily when they constitute the entire subject of an overt finite verb. Adjacency in a strict sense is not necessary, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. He certainly knows vs. *Him certainly knows.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the finite verb is the key component is perhaps most visible in cases of gapping. Gapping allows both the marked and unmarked pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; b. He called her, and she/her __ him vs. *He called her, and her called him.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptive grammar has resulted in a situation that allows both forms in this case. The importance of the finite verb is also quite clear in answer fragments, as illustrated with the example in the question and shown here further: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; c. Who did it?  - Me vs. *I vs. I did. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb in question must be finite. With a nonfinite verb form, the unmarked form of the pronouns is obligatory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; d. For him to leave... vs. *For he to leave...&#xA;&#xA; e. Him leaving was unfortunate vs. *He leaving was unfortunate. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it is possible to describe exactly when the marked form must appear (i.e. when it is the entire subject of an overt finite verb) helps narrow in on the best approach to a comprehensive explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore think one can be confident about the following statements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not a conincidence. There are concrete observable criteria that can be acknowledged for predicting when the division between the two pronoun classes might occur: loss of case and cooccurrence with a finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon exists in both French and English because these two languages satisfy the two criteria mentioned (mainly loss of case). Whether the phenomenon is borrowed from French into English is unclear, but influence does seem likely. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That the phenomenon is left over from Proto-Indo-European is doubtful, since Indo-European languages with rich case systems do not have the division.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That the phenomenon is a linguistic universal (one set of pronouns for names of people and one set of pronouns in special contexts) is unlikely, since languages with rich case systems do not have it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the unmarked forms of the pronouns survive in their quite particlar context (as the entire subject of an overt finite verb) because this context occurs very frequently in language, i.e. subject + finite verb, more frequently than perhaps any other syntactic construction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T22:11:35.527" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T22:11:35.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T03:43:34.113" Score="2" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's proving quite difficult to learn some of the facts about written Korean before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hangul&lt;/a&gt; was given official status by the government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know that metal movable type printing was inventing in Korea &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia#Metal_movable_type_in_Korea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in the 13th century&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know that hangul was devised &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in the 15th century&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know there were three systems of writing Korean without hangul: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyangchal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hyangchal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugyeol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gugyeol&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idu_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;idu&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know that various forms of popular literature flourished from the 16th and 17th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We know that hangul was adopted in official documents for the first time &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in 1894&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes literacy was not widespread until quite recently, but it seems apparent that plenty of documents were written and printed, at least by the government, prior to 1894, without hangul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which system was the most used, or the official system used by the government before 1894?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T01:35:59.973" Title="What was the most usual and most recent system of writing Korean without any hangul at all?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6490" CreationDate="2014-03-27T03:54:15.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My preferred analysis of the forms &lt;em&gt;mine/yours/his/hers/ours/theirs&lt;/em&gt; is that they are &lt;strong&gt;possessive pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas the forms &lt;em&gt;my/your/his/her/our/their&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;possessive determiners&lt;/strong&gt;. A determiner is an immediate dependent of a noun, whereas a pronoun is an immediate dependent of a verb or a preposition. In other words, one looks to cooccurence patterns as the basis for the classification. Note that I am assuming an NP-analysis of noun phrases, not a DP-analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analysis of N-ellipsis bears on this matter. One prominent approach to N-ellipsis is that ellipsis has indeed occurred. At least the noun has been elided, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. He watches my dog, and I watch his.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the ellipsis approach assumes that &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; has been elided. On my preferred analysis, however, ellipsis has not occurred, but rather what is often a possessive determiner has become a pronoun. In other words, the form &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; is a direct dependent of the verb &lt;em&gt;watch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the varying forms in part, e.g. &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;ours&lt;/em&gt;. The -s appears to accommodate a different position in the syntactic hierarchy. On this account then, there is no motivation to distinguish between a predicative use of these words and other uses, since the predicative use is the possessive pronoun (not the possessive determiner). Any time the form at hand is not the direct dependent of a noun, it is a pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation works for German, as well, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; b. Ich mag sein Haus, und er mag meins  vs. *..,  und er mag mein  &#xA;&#xA;    I  like his house, and he likes mine vs. *..., and he likes my. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is systematic variation according to whether the form is a direct dependent of a noun or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to answer the question as directly as possible, I believe the forms &lt;em&gt;mine/yours/his/hers/ours/theirs&lt;/em&gt; do not stem directly from genitive forms, and they do not stem directly from dative forms, but rather they are distinct forms that stem most directly from the possessive determiners (case neutral). They are particular forms that arose to accommodate a distinct cooccurrence pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T03:54:15.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T05:40:49.423" Score="3" ViewCount="815" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that homonyms are words that sound alike but have different meanings. They may or may not be spelled the same. For example, the word 'fair' is spelled and pronounced the same for three words with three different meanings. We may talk about a girl with a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; appearance going to see the county &lt;code&gt;fair&lt;/code&gt;. She paid a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; price to get into the &lt;code&gt;fair&lt;/code&gt;. &#xA;I was wondering how does it impact English Language Learners' comprehension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3354" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T17:23:59.797" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:54:18.370" Title="How do homonyms impact English Language Learners' comprehension?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T11:05:45.687" Score="0" ViewCount="560" Body="&lt;p&gt;When learning a language you generally want to have a teach with clear pronunciation. If you're planning to learn by immersion, if it's a language spoken in several places, you want to choose the place where the local variety is spoken clearly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance some people would avoid going to Australia to learn English, and Mexico is popular for learning Spanish because people &quot;pronounce every letter&quot;, unlike say in Nicaragua or Cuba. It's easier to learn how to discern and reproduce the sounds if they are distinct. This is for adult learners. Obviously children can learn any variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prestige variety&lt;/a&gt; will be chosen for things such as news reporters, as was the case with the BBC requiring &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RP&lt;/a&gt; for presenters for many years until quite recently. But what I'm wondering is whether there are languages which don't have a &quot;clear&quot; or &quot;distinct&quot; variety like this, or for which the standard or prestige variety is not one considered to be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could it be that it's actually all subjective and prestige varieties are assumed to be the most clear on an &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; basis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-27T11:33:23.073" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T16:32:23.500" Title="Languages where the prestige or standard variety is not &quot;clear&quot; or &quot;distinct&quot;?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;prestige&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3184" CreationDate="2014-03-27T14:15:54.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;push open&lt;/em&gt; is a phrasal verb and in both examples in the question, &lt;em&gt;the door&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object, not an object of a preposition. The test mentioned in Jlawler's comment is indeed an easy way to identify the particle of phrasal verbs. One substitutes a definite pronoun in for the NP. If the pronoun must precede the particle, one knows that it is indeed a particle and not a preposition. Here are more examples of how the test works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a.  He walked over the mess.&#xA; b.  He walked over it. &#xA; c. *He walked it over. - &quot;over&quot; in this case is a preposition, not a particle&#xA;&#xA; a.  We talked over the issue.&#xA; b. *We talked over it.&#xA; c.  We talked it over. - &quot;over&quot; in this case is a particle, not a preposition&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples demonstrate that &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;walk over&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition, and &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;talk over&lt;/em&gt; is a particle, which means &lt;em&gt;talk over&lt;/em&gt; is a phrasal verb. The pronoun diagnostic with further examples is used in the Wikipedia article on phrasal verbs here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question concerns the phenomenon of shifting that occurs with phrasal verbs. What is it about the syntactic structure that allows shifting to occur with phrasal verbs? The relevant difference across the particle of phrasal verbs and standard prepositions is that the particle and the NP object are sister constituents in the structure, whereas when a preposition is present, the NP is the dependent of the preposition. In other words, the structure is flat with phrasal verbs, whereas it is more layered when the preposition is present. Shifting is discussed in Wikipedia here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;. The article includes examples involving phrasal verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T14:15:54.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6847" CreationDate="2014-03-27T14:53:01.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that it's almost certainly the case that it is all subjective. Some of this might have to do with the mapping of speech sounds to the orthography. Sure, you could say that some varieties of Spanish are closer to the ideal that Spanish orthography presents, but none aren't immune to some difference. And what do you even do with English, where the orthography doesn't map very well to the phonology in any variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to provide a good counter-example, competency in Celtic languages, as well as Nivkh, is measured in part by native speakers with initial mutations serving as a proxy. For instance, when a definite noun (including proper nouns) are in the genitive case, they lenite. So &lt;em&gt;Cáit&lt;/em&gt; [kaːtʲ] 'Kate' &gt; &lt;em&gt;muintir Cháit&lt;/em&gt; [ˈmˠɪnʲ.tʲəɾʲ xaːtʲ] 'Kate's family'. Speakers with good command of the morphosyntactic-phonological conditioning for these mutations are viewed as good speakers of the traditional variety. Less competent speakers aren't able to do this as accurately, and are viewed as speaking &quot;Standard Irish&quot; (which is very much not the prestige variety in this respect) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/slice/publications_and_news_letters/publications/standard_languages/O_hIfearnain_and_O_Murchadha_-_The_perception_of_Standard_Irish_as_a_prestige_target_variety_-__p_97-104.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ó hIfearnáin and Ó Murchadha 2011&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T14:53:01.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4709" CreationDate="2014-03-27T15:02:38.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered the term &lt;em&gt;partitive phrase&lt;/em&gt; used to denote such phrases. I think, however, that the best designation for phrases such as &lt;em&gt;a lot of interest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;two of them&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a bit of time&lt;/em&gt;, etc. is &lt;strong&gt;quantifier phrase&lt;/strong&gt; (not &lt;strong&gt;determiner phrase&lt;/strong&gt;). A non-determiner quantifier (&lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt;) is the head of these phrases, not the/a determiner. This choice is supported by the appearance of the preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; in each case. This preposition typically appears in English as the direct dependent of a noun. Thus since one assumes that in a phrase such as &lt;em&gt;loads of interest&lt;/em&gt;, the noun &lt;em&gt;loads&lt;/em&gt; is the head, it makes sense to view &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; as the head in &lt;em&gt;a bit of time&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the impact of such quantifier phrases on the NP vs. DP debate (an issue mentioned in the comments), I think they support the traditional NP analysis more than the DP analysis. A DP-analysis of such phrases would have to view &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;a lot of time&lt;/em&gt; as the head. An example like &lt;em&gt;two of them&lt;/em&gt; allows the determiner to appear, e.g. &lt;em&gt;the two of them&lt;/em&gt;. To be consistent, the DP-analysis of such phrases has to assume the presence of a null determiner if an overt determiner is absent. I do not see that there is any empirical evidence supporting the presence of a null determiner for phrases such as &lt;em&gt;two of them&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;three of us&lt;/em&gt;, etc. The Wikipedia article on determiner phrases has some interesting arguments for and against the DP-analysis: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-03-27T15:02:38.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-27T23:49:12.653" Score="4" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone recommend a good comparative grammar of the Germanic languages -- or, failing that, good historical grammars specifically for Old English and Old Norse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, what I want is a historical grammar that gives a comparative overview of the Germanic languages from the Proto-Germanic period (or even from PIE). But since I'm mostly interested in Old English and Old Norse, specific historical grammars for those languages would be useful too. Preferably written in English, but any western European language is good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have Prokosch's Comparative Germanic Grammar, but it's from 1939, and is obviously idiosyncratic in some of its views even for that period. I've read Ringe's recent monograph on Proto-Germanic, but that doesn't (yet) go beyond the PGmc stage. Suggestions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T17:49:45.800" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T15:22:33.350" Title="Germanic comparative grammars?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-28T15:16:52.657" Score="2" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposing to use Festival to build a speech synthesis system and HTK for a speech recognition system.&#xA;The language is a Native American language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which system would be harder to accomplish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3359" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T19:03:38.540" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T06:09:16.767" Title="What is harder? Speech synthesis or speech recognition?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6391" CreationDate="2014-03-28T21:44:20.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There will be an English translation of Tesniere's Elements appearing with John Benjamins later this year (2014) or early next year (2015). The translation is complete and currently in production at Benjamins. The stemmas are being added. Contracts have been signed. The matter is a done deal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-28T21:50:39.863" LastActivityDate="2014-03-28T21:50:39.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6847" CreationDate="2014-03-29T00:19:24.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are doubtless many languages where the prestige idiom is “clearer” than many non-prestige dialects. But I can think of counter-examples. In the non-prestige “rustic” dialects of Southern France (accent du midi) people say things like “une minute” with 5 distinct syllables, “the way it is written”, while in standard (Parisian) French one says “un’ minut’” with just 3 syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T00:19:24.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6865" CreationDate="2014-03-29T15:58:41.863" Score="4" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the maxims of universal grammar is that children's language acquisition indicates the existence of a genetically preprogrammed language faculty. Because a child cannot master certain complex tasks, yet manages language - so the argument seems to go - there must be something else, something innate that enables said child to speak and understand sentences from an early age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a fairly convoluted conclusion. Considering that millions of children acquire languages every year, and that a sizeable subset of these children learns multiple languages with great ease, the more fitting conclusion seems to be: &quot;language is not too complex for children to acquire&quot;. (For, at the risk of sounding painfully obvious, they are children and they do indeed acquire it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nativist deduction seems a non sequitur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is it about language that should be too complex for children? How would one define this complexity? Are there any neurological reasons why this complexity should not be grasped by a child's growing brain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T06:01:07.750" Title="Is language really too complex for children?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6847" CreationDate="2014-03-29T16:32:23.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more I think of this question, the more I conclude it's highly subjective - and what's not subjective might be the result of linguistic background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a child I was mostly taught US English. The 1st time I was exposed to Received Pronunciation I was awed at how much more clearly I could distinguish the sounds in the language - to me at least, Americans usually speak as though they had a hot potato in the mouth, blurring a lot the sounds they produce ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When studying Portuguese, I found I could understand chatting Brazilians better than Portugueses, even with their &quot;ti becomes chi&quot;, etc. sound changes - European Portuguese has much more complex vowels. But then I found I could understand &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; European Portuguese much better than Brazilian (spoken or written) since its spelling is much closer to the one of Spanish plus it retains some grammar constructs that have since diverged in Brazilian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess &quot;clearer&quot; lies in the ears/eyes of the beholder :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T16:32:23.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-29T22:13:03.797" Score="5" ViewCount="1848" Body="&lt;p&gt;In english there are two ways to express a present action:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I go&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am going  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, In German there is really only one way to express a present action:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich gehe  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If English is a Germanic language, why does English have the present continuous (&quot;I am walking&quot;) while German does not?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3362" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-30T08:43:11.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T12:15:44.200" Title="Why does English have progressive aspect but German does not?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2014-03-29T22:47:47.557" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, “why” is usually a bad question. Actually, in several Indo-European languages the old present tense has died out completely and been replaced by the present participle plus copula. This has happened in Hindi and other North Indian languages. There are similar things in other language families, e.g. in Aramaic. English seems to have gone halfway in this direction: the inherited present tense and the participle+copula exist side by side, but they have been differentiated semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-03-29T22:47:47.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6864" CreationDate="2014-03-30T04:28:31.590" Score="4" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, but I took &quot;linguistics 101&quot; in college, and remain interested in the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect of the linguistics field that has baffled me for years is the fact that much of the discourse in it hinges on the ability to distinguish &quot;grammatical&quot; from &quot;non-grammatical&quot; sentences (or fragments thereof), but the details of this discrimination are never made clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I used to think that these classifications were based on surveys of native speakers, but at some point a professional linguist told me that such a procedure is &lt;em&gt;relatively&lt;/em&gt; uncommon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens when experts disagree on whether a particular sentence is grammatical or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really expect a satisfying answer to this question here.  Rather, I'm looking for pointers to articles that focus on the question of establishing objective/operational criteria for establishing grammaticality.  (It's basically two big questions rolled into one: 1) is it important to have an &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; criterion for labeling sentences grammatical or ungrammatical; and 2) if the answer of &quot;1&quot; is yes, what should this criterion be?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd prefer to start exploring this question by reading those authors who think that having such an objective standard would be a good thing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3363" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-30T08:34:27.617" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T08:34:27.617" Title="Is there an accepted objective criterion of &quot;grammaticality&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6895" CreationDate="2014-03-30T05:45:15.163" Score="10" ViewCount="6867" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;http://naacl2013.naacl.org/Documents/deep-learning-for-nlp-naacl-2013-tutorial.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://naacl2013.naacl.org/Documents/deep-learning-for-nlp-naacl-2013-tutorial.pdf&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;+1.4% F1 Dependency Parsing&quot;. How is the F1 score computed when comparing dependency-based parse trees? (I know how to compute the F1 score when I have a confusion matrix in a classification problem)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PARSEVAL metric does not work for dependency-based parse trees since they don't generate constituents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T20:13:55.413" Title="How is the F1 score computed when assessing dependency parsing?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6861" CreationDate="2014-03-30T05:45:33.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your first question, it is vitally important if linguistics is going to be scientific (or at least rigorous) to have an objective way of dealing with grammaticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question, however, is a bit more involved. I would personally split what a lot of people (even linguists) call &quot;grammaticality&quot; into several separate things, but mainly into acceptability, an empirical claim, as well as a variety of theoretical claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is &lt;strong&gt;acceptability&lt;/strong&gt;. This is an empirical claim you can test either introspectively or experimentally by asking speakers if a sentence is acceptable or not. The reason why something is acceptable or unacceptable can vary. It could be that something is syntactically wrong with the sentence (for instance, &lt;em&gt;*Herself hit Jean&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;herself&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jean&lt;/em&gt; refer to the same person should be judged as unacceptable by all competent English speakers). But it could also be that something is semantically wrong with the sentence (for instance, Chomsky's example of &lt;em&gt;!Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&lt;/em&gt;, which is grammatically fine, but semantically nonsensical). Or it could even be pragmatically wrong, where it is semantically and morphosyntactically okay (for instance, &lt;em&gt;#My goldfish thinks I'm a lousy cook.&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are associated theoretical claims--why a certain sentence is unacceptable. It could be &lt;strong&gt;morphosyntactically ungrammatical&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a theoretical claim about what is morphosyntactically allowed or not in a given language. It could be &lt;strong&gt;semantically unacceptable&lt;/strong&gt;, which means that the meaning just doesn't work. Or it could be &lt;strong&gt;pragmatically infelicitous&lt;/strong&gt;; something about the wider context of an utterance means it just doesn't work. And, of course, none of these are mutually exclusive. While Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;Colorless green ideas...&lt;/em&gt; is semantically unacceptable, for example, it is also pragmatically infelicitous. These arise not because of any sort of empirical test (though that's a good way to find them), but as a consequence of the linguistic systems a given language of a given speaker has in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One article more or less in the vein of what you're looking for, which deals with gathering acceptability judgments of morphosyntax, is &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=8721849&quot;&gt;Sprouse and Almeida 2011&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T05:45:33.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6857" CreationDate="2014-03-30T06:01:07.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You misstate the crux of the so called &quot;poverty of the stimulus&quot; argument. It does not say that language is too difficult for children because it obviously is not. The point is that even with remarkably impoverished stimulus (with some very few extremes like feral children being the exception), children seem to acquire syntactic structures for which they simply did not receive enough input to form meaningful generalizations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This argument has been attacked from many angles, some from misunderstanding but others, in my  view completely convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A lot of argumentation is about whether children don't really receive a lot more implicit instruction in grammaticality. And that's certainly true. But the POtS argument does not dispute that. It merely says that even with almost no such stimulus, children still acquire those structures. It also says that the sort of linguistic nurturing we take for granted is not at all common across cultures which still does not inhibit acquisition. So this is the one part of the argument that stands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A more successful attack is that on 'learnability'. This argument says that for POtS to stand, we would need some objective concept of learnability for each structure. Something that would quantify how much exposure to natural language a person needs to learn something. And not even a hint of that is offered by POtS proponents. Moreover, many of the claims on exposure have been challenged by corpus analysis. Of course, just because we can't specify learnability in a falsifiable way, it does not mean it does not exist. Samson wrote a whole book punching holes in this concept.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another challenge (my favourite) is that universal grammar does not really represent much of what language is. It's a handful of rules (more or less disputed by linguists) of limited relevance to communication. Let's just look at the awesome amounts of language a child has to learn that UG has nothing to say about. Thousands of words, each with incredibly complex usage rules. A child has to develop judgements about register, social appropriatness, dialect, etc. So there's a lot to learn and it's obviously not too much. But if you were to write it all down, it would fill volumes. So why are a few relatively simple structures such a standout? Isn't more likely that we're missing something about how they're acquired than needing to posit a whole new universe of hard-to-prove innate structures?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But the killing blow was dealt by Thomasello and researchers in his tradition. Most convincingly, research by Ewa Dabrowska showed that children really don't acquire the troublesome stuctures in the same way that Universal Grammarians imagine. They acquire things like recursion only partially and are not at all able to generalise to more complex instances. In fact, this variability persists into adulthood. Ability to process complex recursions varies by how much exposure one has had to language in which they often appear. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to the question &quot;What exactly is it about language that should be too complex for children?&quot; is that on the surface almost everything &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be too complex but in reality  almost nothing is. The only things that are too complex, are those that not everyone can learn or not learn equally well. But those depend on a combination of availability of input and generalized (rather than very specific) ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T06:01:07.750" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2014-03-30T06:09:16.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without question, it is an order of magnitude more difficult to implement speech recognition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do passable speech synthesis knowing nothing about context, grammar, etc. You will get some issues with homographs but other than that you will get recognizable speech. Now, it will be greatly lacking in prosody and stress, so you need to do some language analysis to be successful but it's all doable and been done. There are toolkits out there that will help you build speech synthesis for any language even without sampling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the speech signal is just too noise for speech recognition to be done with any level of success without some understanding of language. This is mostly done stochastically these days, so the recognizer will guess what is likely to come next. So unlike with synthesis you need huge amounts of speech data to process. Again there are open source toolkits that will help you get started, but the amount of work you have to do for a new language is huge and the results will never be as impressive as with speech synthesis given the same amount of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T06:09:16.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6861" CreationDate="2014-03-30T06:48:26.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me try to provide an alternative answer to @limetom. It is a very good summary of the standard position in formal linguistics but does not answer all aspects of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to have a highly scholarly linguistics that does not dwell on questions of grammaticality at all or only incidentally. Both corpus linguistics and construction grammar are more interested in typical usage than in introspective judgements of speakers about acceptability. Even functionalist approaches are not too concerned with grammaticality as such.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The other problem with grammaticality is that there is absolutely no objective measure of it. Chomsky famously copped out and said that any reasonably competent native speaker is just as good a judge of whether a sentence is grammatical or not. That is demonstrably false - one only needs to attend a graduate linguistics seminar to see that people's intuitions differ. In some cases, we can do surveys but even if we get 90% judgement of grammaticality, we still only discovered a variability in the input.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is not to say that we cannot or should not be interested in speaker judgements about language. We want to look at how people correct themselves and each other. We want to see where they seem to be following some pattern in diverging from a standard or simply don't know or commit a slip of the tongue. But we can determine the standard patterns by analysis of actual usage - ie. the &quot;scientific&quot; method of observation. Introspection will still play a role in the analysis but the whole enterprise will not hinge on it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, language is more than sentences (which are an object of writing rather than speech anyway). It is used for communication and self-expression. It is messy and complex. As part of it, people make judgements about acceptability and that is worth studying properly. But grammaticality itself is not a concept you need outside this narrow confine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need grammaticality in some branches of applied linguistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when you have an algorithm for generating sentences that is likely to spew out almost anything and you need a formal way of limiting the output of that algorithm. This is where you try to approximate native speaker patterns and turn to their intuitions about these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, is foreign language instruction. But here you have to construct a sort of inter-language that matches some key patterns of native speech but is not exactly the same. So you turn to generalized grammatical intuitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in contexts like copy editing or essay marking, native speakers turn to their intuitions to identify patterns that are unacceptable for some reason. Accidental slips, divergence from standard into dialect, lack of observance of register, etc. Much more is going on here than 'grammaticality' but often the people performing similar tasks will couch their efforts as avoiding things that are 'ungrammatical'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T06:48:26.230" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6812" CreationDate="2014-03-30T17:59:28.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In doubt you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online Stanford Parser&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ROOT&#xA;  (S&#xA;    (NP (NNP Ginny))&#xA;    (VP (VBZ thinks)&#xA;      (SBAR&#xA;        (S&#xA;          (NP (NNP Harry))&#xA;          (VP (VBZ is)&#xA;            (ADJP (JJ dreamy))))))&#xA;    (. .)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And view the parse tree with some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ductape.net/~eppie/tree/download.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntax Tree Editor&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CjE7W.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2014-03-30T19:14:54.473" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T19:14:54.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6873" CreationDate="2014-03-30T20:46:35.313" Score="8" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused regarding the distinction dependency- vs. constituency-based tree: to me they look like they encompass the same information but presented differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in the Wikipedia example the constituency-based tree and dependency-based tree seem to contain the same information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvQuE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same in Klein, Dan, and Christopher D. Manning. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2004/main/pdf/341_pdf_2-col.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus-based induction of syntactic structure: Models of dependency and constituency&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2004.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uDmHo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what situation a constituency-based tree cannot be constructed from a dependency-based tree, and vice-versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-03-31T09:30:28.953" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T02:01:16.477" Title="In what situation a constituency-based tree cannot be constructed from a dependency-based tree?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6872" CreationDate="2014-03-30T23:05:51.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All headed constituency-based structures (i.e. endocentric structures) can be easily translated to the corresponding dependency-based structures. One need merely collapse all the projections (minimal, intermediate, and maximal) of a word down to one node. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-headed constituency-based structure (i.e. it has exocentric structures), however, cannot be translated to a dependency-based structure, because dependency by its very nature views all syntactic structures as headed (i.e. endocentric). See the distinction between endocentric and exocentric structures here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocentric&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocentric&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All dependency-based structures can also easily be automatically translated into corresponding constituency-based structures. But here's the difference: the constituency-based structures that result from the translation are necessarily quite flat, much flatter than most constituency-based grammars want to assume. Above all, the resulting flat structures do not acknowledge a finite VP constituent. Without the finite VP constituent, there is no way to do much of standard Chomskyan syntax. For instance, all explanations of syntactic phenomena that build on c-command are not possible without the finite VP constituent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between dependency and constituency is quite profound. Dependency is a strict one-to-one ratio (words to nodes), whereas constituency is a one-to-one-or-more ratio (words to nodes). If one operates with a dependency-based model, the amount of syntactic structure that one can posit is very limited. Whereas if one is operating with a constituency-based model, one has the ability to assume much more layered (i.e. taller) syntactic structures. One has the ability to acknowledge many more groupings of words (i.e. constituents) in the constituency-based model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an experiment, count the number of nodes and edges in the two trees in the question. The dependency-based tree contains 7 words and 7 nodes with 6 edges. The constituency tree, in contrast, has 13 nodes and 12 edges. These numbers bear witness to drastically different ways to approach the syntax of natural language. Dependency-based models are minimal, whereas constituency-based models are maximal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pertinent question is whether the extra structure that constituency enables is warranted. My personal view is that it is not, but each grammarian has to make up his or her own mind about that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-03-30T23:11:40.863" LastActivityDate="2014-03-30T23:11:40.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2014-03-30T23:46:10.260" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that even the most ardent supporter of minimalism should recognize that this is an important and deep question: indeed, even though Patrick Elliott is right to recall that the hypothesis of strict binary branching could be made on the basis of parsimony only, it is clearly the case that many syntactic structures appear to be ternary (or more) and so that the hypothesis that all syntactic structures are built from the bottom-up by recursive applications of a binary operation is &lt;em&gt;extremely counter-intuitive&lt;/em&gt; and should never be assumed lightly. In fact, this hypothesis is quite recent in the literature of generative or transformational syntax: as far as I know, it was first argued for by R.Kayne in 1981 and gained dominance even within the relevant strand of linguistics only in 1994/1995, so after more than 30 years of hierarchical analysis of syntactic constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When trying to organize this answer, I realized that I would face two obvious difficulties: 1) binary branching is a theoretical hypothesis, with immediate theoretical consequences but with quite sophisticated and elusive direct empirical consequences and 2) the analysis of empirical facts is not independent of the implicit or explicit theoretical framework as a wide range of contradictory interpretations can describe equally correctly any given single phenomenon (as can be seen for instance in Tim Osborne's criticism of bta's answer). A geocentrist will not be impressed by the fact that Newton's law of gravitation explains why the orbits of planets around the Sun obey Kepler's law as for him there are no orbits around the Sun to explain; and conversely, a heliocentrist will not be particularly convinced by the remark that adding a seventh epicycle yields unparalleled experimental accuracy to the prediction of the apparent movement of Jupiter. Hence I decided to present empirical evidence in the form of correlations, that is parallel occurrences of syntactic phenomena, whenever I could with the accompanying claim that the theoretical arguments I am evaluating are able to predict this correlation or not: the empirical evidence below therefore do not reside in any specific analysis of, say, reflexivity in English or of wh-movement in Japanese, but in the fact that an analysis of reflexivity in English allows to make correct predictions about wh-movement Japanese. That said, one has to start somewhere, so I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; assume without further discussion that tree-like descriptions are useful in syntax: anyone subscribing to a completely linear theory of syntax will presumably not care about whether (for him non-existent) syntactic trees are binary or not, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;C-Command&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the first step to understand the empirical arguments in favor of binary branching is to understand the peculiar importance the notion of c-command has come to gain in (a certain kind of) syntactic theory. A number of seemingly disparate syntactic phenomena (licensing of pronouns and anaphors, quantifiers scope, NPI licensing, wh-movements, clitic movements and reduplication, licensing of cataphoric ellipsis…) all turned out (under some interpretations) to be sensitive to that specific topological relation. Yet why would that be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, independently of any theoretical presuppositions, one can observe that both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) It seems that Tatsuki is angry because Masako bought something but I don’t know what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The picture of himself that Tatsuki took is nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are grammatical in English whereas their direct Japanese translations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) *Tatsuki ga Masako ga nanika o katta kara okotteiru rasii ga, watashi ha nani ka shiranai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) *Tatsuki ga totta zibun no shashin ha kirei. (with the interpretation that zibun refers to Tatsuki)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are not. The apparent causes of ungrammaticality seems very different for (3) and (4) yet a linguist who believes that anaphor licensing and wh-movements are both sensitive to c-command is able to give a unified account for this (at least in the sense that he would predict that (1),(3) are grammatical if and only if (2),(4) are). Likewise, from the acceptability of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Nos vamos acostumbrando a este país poco a poco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) Vamos acostumbrándonos a este país poco a poco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Spanish, he might have been able to predict the respective acceptability of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) Vámonos acostumbrándonos a este país poco a poco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) *Nos vamos acostumbrándonos a este país poco a poco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Argentinean Spanish, or at least would have been able to formulate the prediction that the acceptability of (8) would logically entail the acceptability of (7). Or again, his hypothesis that wh-movement would have to be successive cyclic from c-commanding positions to c-commanding positions would not by itself predict that Afrikaans realizes overtly copies of the wh-word as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(9) Met wie het jy nou weer gesê met wie het Sarie gedog met wie gaan Jan trou.&#xA;Whom did you say again that Sarie thought Jan is going to marry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but given that they are, they turn out to be precisely where the c-commanding positions have to be in comparable sentences in English or French based on any of the other diagnosis above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a number of alternate explanations and descriptions can be given for any of these facts taken in isolation: the specificity of the c-command account is that a single principle motivates the causal relations between each of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Binary Branching&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why should c-command, by opposition to any other topological property starting with the much simpler rule of sisterhood, play such a significant role? Here we have two concurring but quite distinct &lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; answers. Kayne’s answer is that absent stringent supplementary formation rules, very few hierarchical structures can be converted unambiguously into linear sentences. Binary branching structures with asymmetric c-command satisfy this desirable property. So in fact, according to Kayne at least (but the idea seems largely accepted in minimalist syntax) not only is binary branching the unique mode of branching allowed, &lt;em&gt;asymmetric&lt;/em&gt; binary branching structures are the unique structures allowed, yielding the prediction that no binary structures like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10) [A B]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are actually possible even though they are an obvious model for coordination, for instance, and the even more counter-intuitive prediction that the number of functional projections in a given syntactic trees should be roughly half the total number of nodes (as follows from some math that I skip here); seemingly predicting the existence of far more functional projections that would be assumed based on a superficial analysis of the sentence. Chomsky’s answer is that the simplest linguistic operation we can imagine to construct hierarchical structure is binary (asymmetric) set-theoretic union of labelled terms (with the asymmetry coming from the projection of one of the the labels). The recursive application of this operation predicts the importance of the c-command operation, in a way that is worth summarizing as it will play a role later on: under this model of bottom-up recursive applications of a binary operation with no supplementary operation, interactions between heads are by construction limited to interactions between a head and its complement and the easiest type of movement to conceptualize is movement from the complement to the specifier of the head. This gives movement to a c-commanding position as the simplest syntactic operation available and more generally strongly suggests that elementary syntactic operation should occur between c-commanding positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Empirical support for binary branching beyond c-command&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So binary branching is not primarily empirically motivated, it is a theoretical simple assumption which has the desirable effect to predict the special status of c-command in syntax, yet there would be no point in formulating theoretical hypotheses if they did not suggest empirical insights. Here are a few. First, the binary branching hypothesis suggests that the importance of c-command is not a syntactic fundamental but rather the reflex of the easiest possible relation between heads. Hence, one predicts, for instance, that as long as the functional heads assumed to be involved in anaphor binding are in mutual c-command relations, binding ensues even when antecedent and anaphor are not in a c-command relation. For what its worth, just like the prediction that wh-movement was successive cyclic, this was a genuine prediction in the sense that it was articulated and argued for before any example of the phenomenon was known. It turned out to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(11) Det ble introdusert en mann for segselv. (Norwegian)&#xA;It was introduced a man to himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The precise mode of relations between heads that is implied by binary branching also predicts the relative acceptability of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(12) What did you order? What did Sophia order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(13) What did no one order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(14) Toi, tu as commandé quoi ? Sophie, elle a commandé quoi ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15) *Personne, il a commandé quoi ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even though the c-command relations are all exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a further example, the extremely strong constraints on structures imposed by strict application of asymmetric binary branching implies the hypothesis that much more hierarchy than is usually visible or even plausible at first glance should exist. To give an example, the hierarchical structure Kayne was forced to posit for nominalization such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(16) The election of Obama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;implies that the complement of &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; c-commands the leftmost phrase at some point. Again, this was a genuine prediction, in the sense that the empirical data confirming this prediction were later found (in Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(17) Het over zichzelf praten van Jan.&#xA;The about himself talking of Jan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(18) Het aan zijn eigenaar teruggeven van elk geleend artikel.&#xA;The to his owner returning of each borrowed article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, countless further phenomena have by now been analyzed in this way from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springer.com/education+&amp;amp;+language/linguistics/book/978-94-007-1569-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;morphology&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springer.com/education+&amp;amp;+language/linguistics/book/978-90-481-9697-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;person-case constraints&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/linearization-chains-and-sideward-movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parasitic gaps&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-agree-why-move&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wh-agreement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Binary branching is a theoretical hypothesis, and as such should not be expected to have direct empirical consequences, much less direct empirical consequences which can be recognized as such from a theoretical framework different from or directly contradictory to the one it presupposes. Within its own theoretical framework, it predicts the ubiquity of the c-command relation while predicting where the c-command relation will yield incorrect predictions, with a broad range of empirical consequences; anaphor binding outside c-command, weak-cross over effects in nominalization, intervention effects in left-dislocation and island effects in elliptical questions being just a few sampled here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T20:38:08.477" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T20:38:08.477" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-03-31T02:59:44.487" Score="18" ViewCount="2983" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Cer, Daniel M., et al. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/lrecstanforddeps_final_final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parsing to Stanford Dependencies: Trade-offs between Speed and Accuracy&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; LREC. 2010. :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jShYv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is dependency parsing so much faster than constituency parsing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T19:35:03.573" Title="Why is dependency parsing so much faster than constituency parsing?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2014-03-31T13:27:50.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've purchased the book &quot;Building natural language generation systems&quot; by Ehud Reiter and Robert Dale, isbn 978-780521-024518. The book is old (issued in 2000), but enough to get the basics and the keywords for further search. The keywords:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;surface realisation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linguistic realisation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;systemic functional grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;functional unification grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meaning-text theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deep syntactic structure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several systems are briefly described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KPML, Automatic Domain-independent Multilingual Natural Language Generation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/kpml/README.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/kpml/README.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SURGE, A Syntactic Realization Grammar for Text Generation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/surge/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/surge/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RealPro, text generation engine, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cogentex.com/technology/realpro/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cogentex.com/technology/realpro/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2738" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T13:27:50.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2014-03-31T13:51:59.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked Michael Covington, whose name is on one of the faster parsers, and he replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the inner workings of any of these parsers (not even the one with my name on it, which was implemented by Joakim Nivre).  Choice of programming language may have a lot to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is that with dependency parsing, the search space can be considerably smaller because you're only linking together nodes that already exist, not creating an unknown number of new ones.  The person to ask is Joakim Nivre.  Here's the paper that, in some sense, started the ball rolling: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/dgpacmcorr.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/dgpacmcorr.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T13:51:59.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6906" CreationDate="2014-03-31T14:34:06.360" Score="26" ViewCount="14571" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did (or more specifically &lt;em&gt;what caused&lt;/em&gt;) English lose declensions whilst they were retained in German? I ask as I have recently been reading into the various Germanic languages and it struck me that Old English had an equally if not &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; (in that Old English still retained an instrumental case - albeit largely only for preposition) developed case system and yet it has completely vanished from modern English today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, both Middle English and Middle High German had a very similar case system (although both has undergone syncretism and simplification of their case endings) as is demonstrated by comparing the two tables of strong nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;┌───────┬────────┬────────┐&#xA;│       │singular│plural  │&#xA;├───────┼────────┼────────┤&#xA;│nom    │engel   │engles  │&#xA;├───────┼────────┼────────┤&#xA;│acc    │engel   │engles  │&#xA;├───────┼────────┼────────┤&#xA;│gen    │engles  │engle   │&#xA;├───────┼────────┼────────┤&#xA;│dat    │engle   │engle(n)│&#xA;└───────┴────────┴────────┘&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_High_German#Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle High German&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;┌───┬────────┬──────┐&#xA;│   │singular│plural│&#xA;├───┼────────┼──────┤&#xA;│nom│tac     │tage  │&#xA;├───┼────────┼──────┤&#xA;│acc│tac     │tage  │&#xA;├───┼────────┼──────┤&#xA;│gen│tages   │tage  │&#xA;├───┼────────┼──────┤&#xA;│dat│tage    │tagen │&#xA;└───┴────────┴──────┘&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However by the Early Modern English period the English language has all but abandoned cases (possibly only retaining a form of the genitive), whereas Early New High German retained them much as they do today (most significantly in articles and adjectives).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that in linguistics &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is a difficult question but are there any sources on this or hypotheses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3371" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T22:28:47.133" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T22:28:47.133" Title="Why did English lose declensions while German retained them?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2014-03-31T16:08:15.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an expected consequence of creolization. English became a creole language due to Normann conquest, and it is expected process for creoles to lose cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-03-31T16:08:15.843" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3420" CreationDate="2014-04-01T01:32:13.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there will be an increasing amount of debate about this in the next few years. The above answers from Tim Osborne and P. Elliot give a lot of general discussion about how to compare these two forms of grammar, but no comparison with respect to specific constructions. I provide a lot of this in my article in the proceedings from the second Depling conference held in Prague last August. Those interested in more details can see these proceedings at a website called Proceedings.com. It invites you to buy these proceedings for $95, but I think you can also read individual articles online for free. Mine is on pages 197-207. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own answer is that DG is better, partly because it is simpler (many fewer nodes), but also because of the specific difficulties for constituent grammar discussed in that article. At the instigation of PElliot, I have found another source which is free. The link is: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/project/depling13/proceedings/pdf/W13-3722.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/project/depling13/proceedings/pdf/W13-3722.pdf&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recent posts on this topic show that computational linguists have come to the same conclusion. Other things being equal, less is better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Maxwell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3375" LastEditorUserId="3375" LastEditDate="2014-04-03T02:48:25.377" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T02:48:25.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6872" CreationDate="2014-04-01T02:01:16.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can go the other way too (From Dependency Grammar(DG) to Constituent Grammar(CG)), but it is more complicated, and unlike going from CG to DG there is no one kind of step that can do it all. To change the ones that are exocentric in CG, need a different procedure from the one in which both types of grammar are headed. You may have to introduce an entirely new symbol, such as S, which has nothing corresponding to it in DG, unless you recognize S as a projection of V. And different CG people have different opinions about the number of extensions a given node has. So you have to make a choice in each case and hope that it works for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Maxwell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3375" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T02:01:16.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2014-04-01T02:13:28.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no experience building parsers, but I would guess that Dependency parsing is faster because the trees that need to be built are simpler. If you know a given word's part of speech, you have to answer just one more question: which other word in the sentence is its parent? In CG parsing, you need to know which other word or words in the sentence are in the same constituent, and what kind of constituent is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The programming language can play a role as well, but it is also possible that we now have such specialized programming languages that a given language can do only one kind of tree or the other. In that case, I expect the languages that can do only DG trees to be simpler than the ones that can do only CG trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3375" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-01T09:43:48.123" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T09:43:48.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2014-04-01T06:41:34.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parsing speed obviously depends on a lot of factors, but in this case I would say that algorithmic complexity is the most important. The transition-based dependency parsers (all except MSTParser and RelEx) use greedy decoding and achieve linear complexity (or quadratic in the case of the Covington algorithm). This should be compared to the constituency-based parsers, which are all based on CKY-style dynamic programming, which is O(n^5) for lexicalized models. MSTParser is somewhere in between. It uses dynamic programming, but thanks to the Eisner style split-head representation it runs in O(n^3) time. The more constrained nature of the dependency parsing problem, mentioned in several comments, also plays a role in that it tends to give tighter &quot;grammar constants&quot; (fewer cases to consider in each derivation step), and it also facilitates the use of split-head representations to reduce complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3376" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T06:41:34.627" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-01T21:47:32.557" Score="2" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Cer, Daniel M., et al. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/lrecstanforddeps_final_final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parsing to Stanford Dependencies: Trade-offs between Speed and Accuracy&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; LREC. 2010. :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ITVAc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All 5 presented constituency parsers generate POS tags. Do constituency parsers always generate POS tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T21:47:32.557" Title="Do constituency parsers always generate POS tags?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-07-24T14:48:32.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-01T22:30:30.820" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a projective dependency parsers can only output projective tree&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says: &quot;a large majority of sentences in most languages are projective, i.e. they do not contain discontinuities. Only about 15-25% of actual sentences contain a discontinuity&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, assuming that in English about 15-25% of actual sentences contain a discontinuity, the maximum accuracy (i.e. percentage of correct parse trees for entire sentences) that can achieve a projective dependency parser in English would be 75-85% (since it would fail for all non-projective sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this reasoning correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T17:28:50.867" Title="What is the maximum accuracy that can achieve a projective dependency parser in English?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-01T23:05:20.197" Score="2" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikpedia page on discontinuities&lt;/a&gt;, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Worth noting is that a large majority of sentences in most languages&#xA;  are projective, i.e. they do not contain discontinuities. Only about&#xA;  15-25% of actual sentences contain a discontinuity, and the percentage&#xA;  of discontinuous dependencies is even much less, approximately 1-2%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence contains a discontinuity if and only if it is non-projective sentences, but what does discontinuous dependencies mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastEditorUserId="3364" LastEditDate="2014-04-01T23:13:58.627" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T23:33:14.890" Title="What's the difference between discontinuity and discontinuous dependencies?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6888" CreationDate="2014-04-01T23:33:14.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are crossing lines in the syntactic tree, then one or more discontinuous dependencies is present. A projectivity violation is a discontinuous dependency. There are a lot of terms used to denote such dependencies, many of which are listed at the start of that Wikipedia article (discontinuous dependency, long distance dependency, displaced constituent, discontinuity, projectivity violation, etc.). These terms are denoting the same thing for the most part, although there are preferences acoss various theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at some of the trees in that article, the discontinous dependencies are the ones where the solid dependency edge (line) crosses one of the dotted projection lines. Note that each of the trees that contains crossing lines contains just one such discontinuous dependency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting question concerns how theories of syntax address the crossing lines. Chomskyan syntax has traditionally assumed syntactic movement: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_movement&lt;/a&gt;. Other grammars (HPSG, LFG, some DGs) assume feature passing instead. In any case, most theories examine the tree structure and consider the path through the tree that one can trace from the displaced unit to its governor/head.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-04-01T23:33:14.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2014-04-02T03:31:19.207" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DxoenfgAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;oi=ao&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Collins&lt;/a&gt; gives a nice explanation in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlangp-001/lecture/303&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MOOC on NLP&lt;/a&gt;, summarized in this slide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDrvY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with the usual &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYK_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKY algorithm&lt;/a&gt; in PCFG parsing, which is based on dynamic programming and yields a constituency-based tree, you have a time complexity of O(n^3 * G^3) as the dynamic programming algorithm is also looking for which non-terminal to choose (hence G^3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in dependency parsing, the dynamic programming algorithm (e.g. (Covington 2001) that jlawler cited) doesn't have to choose any non-terminal, so the time complexity is simply O(n^3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since G (the number of non-terminals in the grammar) is in the order of 50, if your O(n^3) takes 10 seconds to run (in the dependency parsing case), it will take almost 10 minutes if it becomes O(n^3 * G^3) (in the constituency parsing case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Covington 2001) Covington, Michael A. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/dgpacmcorr.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A fundamental algorithm for dependency parsing.&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; Proceedings of the 39th annual ACM southeast conference. 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a nice overview of dependency parsing algorithms: Kübler, Sandra, Ryan McDonald, and Joakim Nivre. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00169ED1V01Y200901HLT002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency parsing&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 1.1 (2009): 1-127.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T03:53:38.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-02T05:19:53.473" Score="2" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of language shift, where population A changes language because of contacts with population B? I am not looking about examples where population A was conquered or colonized by B. I am looking for examples where population A had an interest in changing to the language of population B, because of extensive contacts, social status etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-16T13:38:32.890" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T13:38:32.890" Title="Language shift because of contact or interest" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3818" CreationDate="2014-04-02T16:42:25.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;iterative&lt;/em&gt; fits best, although &lt;em&gt;durative&lt;/em&gt; is another possibility. The verb &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; can express iterative and/or durative aspect, meaning that it indicates the repetition of an event or action that persists. &lt;em&gt;Iterative&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;durative&lt;/em&gt; are listed as an aspect in the Wikipedia article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at that article, however, the number of aspects that one needs to accommmodate all the various morphological and lexical mechanisms across languages that can express what we broadly construe as &quot;aspect&quot; is very large. My assessment is that the science in the area is not exact, nor can one expect it to be exact based on all the nuances. The grammarian therefore has a measure of freedom in the nomenclature he/she employs to denote the aspect at hand. The particular inventory of aspects posited is likely to vary from one grammarian to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is no different in other areas of grammar. The inventory of semantic roles (thematic roles) assumed varies from one grammarian to the next. The inventory of adjunct categories (causal, concessive, temporal, manner, etc.) also varies from one grammarian to the next. Why should it be any different for the inventory of aspects that the grammarian posits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a more concrete way to approach the classification of a verb like &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt;. It is not an auxiliary verb, since it does not license subject-auxiliary inversion or VP-ellipsis, nor does it accept &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as a postdependent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a.  He kept laughing.&#xA; b. *Kept he laughing?&#xA; c. *She kept laughing, and he kept, too. &#xA; d. *He kept not laughing. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; is unlike &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; of perfect aspect, which is a clearly an auxiliary. &lt;em&gt;Keep&lt;/em&gt; is, rather, a subject-to-subject raising verb like &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;She began helping&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;quit&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;He quit eating&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;You started drinking&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;They stopped protesting&lt;/em&gt;). See the aticle on raising here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;. This class of raising verbs takes the progresssive participle as complement. Each of these verbs expresses aspect: &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; express inchoative aspect, &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;quit&lt;/em&gt; terminative aspect. As a class, they might all be called aspectual (subject-to-suject) raising verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; is an aspectual (subject-to-subject) raising verb that expresses iterative/durative meaning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-03T16:20:55.730" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T16:20:55.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6896" CreationDate="2014-04-02T18:19:40.767" Score="3" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose some recent hominins such as Neanderthal had a spoken language (currently, as far as I'm aware, we are uncertain if they did, but suppose we knew they did). If this were the case, would it be possible to uncover their influence on known language families through linguistics, or is the time gap so large that any influence would be essentially lost in the noise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3382" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T14:19:48.870" Title="Would it be possible to discover through linguistics if any non-human languages influenced known language families?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6863" CreationDate="2014-04-02T19:08:22.743" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kübler, Sandra, Ryan McDonald, and Joakim Nivre. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00169ED1V01Y200901HLT002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency parsing&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 1.1 (2009): 1-127. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 6: Evaluation &gt; Section 6.1: Evaluation metrics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The standard methodology for evaluating dependency parsers, as well as&#xA;  other kinds of parsers, is to apply them to a test set taken from a&#xA;  treebank and compare the output of the parser to the gold standard&#xA;  annotation found in the treebank. Dependency parsing has been&#xA;  evaluated with many different evaluation metrics. The most widely used&#xA;  metrics are listed here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exact match&lt;/strong&gt;: This is the percentage of completely correctly parsed sentences. The same measure is also used for the evaluation of&#xA;  constituent parsers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attachment score&lt;/strong&gt;: This is the percentage of words that have the correct head. The use of a single accuracy metric is possible in&#xA;  dependency parsing thanks to the single-head property of dependency&#xA;  trees, which makes parsing resemble a tagging task, where every word&#xA;  is to be tagged with its correct head and dependency type. This is&#xA;  unlike the standard metrics in constituency-based parsing, which are&#xA;  based on precision and recall, since it is not possible to assume a&#xA;  one-to-one correspondence between constituents in the parser output&#xA;  and constituents in the treebank annotation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Precision/Recall&lt;/strong&gt;: If we relax the single-head property or if we want to evaluate single dependency types, the following metrics can be&#xA;  used. They correspond more directly to the metrics used for&#xA;  constituent parsing.&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Precision&lt;/strong&gt;: This is the percentage of dependencies with a specific type in the parser output that were correct.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recall&lt;/strong&gt;: This is the percentage of dependencies with a specific type in the test set that were correctly parsed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;F-measure&lt;/strong&gt; (β=1): This is the harmonic mean of precision and recall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of these metrics can be unlabeled (only looking at heads) or&#xA;  labeled (looking at heads and labels). The most commonly used metrics&#xA;  are the labeled attachment score (LAS) and the unlabeled attachment&#xA;  score (UAS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LAS, as we have presented it above, gives an evaluation of how many&#xA;  words were parsed correctly.However, this may not always be the point&#xA;  of interest. Another way of evaluating the quality of dependency&#xA;  parses is using sentences as the basic units. In this case,we&#xA;  calculate for each sentence what the percentage of correct&#xA;  dependencies is and then average over the sentences. The difference&#xA;  becomes clear when we look at a test set containing 2 sentences: Let&#xA;  us assume that for the first sentence, the parser assigned correct&#xA;  dependencies to 9 out of 10 words. For the second sentence, we have 15&#xA;  out 45 words correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The word-based LAS would be LAS_w = (9 + 15)/(10 + 45) = 0.436. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The sentence-based LAS is calculated as LAS_s = (9/10 + 15/45)/2 = (0.9 + 0.333)/2 = 0.617.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the light of this distinction, we can call the word-based LAS&#xA;  micro-average LAS and the sentence-based one a macro-average LAS.&#xA;  Another way of calculating a macro-average LAS is by averaging over&#xA;  all dependency types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T19:08:22.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6894" CreationDate="2014-04-02T19:49:55.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proposal is complete science-fiction. Not only is it too far in time (and it is, by almost an order of magnitude, as the proto-language we know the most about was maybe spoken in 3500BC whereas the most studied recent Hominid group, &lt;em&gt;Homo neanderthalensis&lt;/em&gt;, disappeared roughly 35,000 years ago) but the correct analogy would be to ask someone who is completely colorblind to find a slightly reddish ball in a mass of orange balls: the best we can do at present is trace (with great difficulty) the variation of Neanderthal's DNA in human populations. From this kind of data, it would already be extremely hard to get non-trivial results on the movements of populations leading to this distribution of Neanderthal DNA (especially as East Asian populations have the highest rate of Neanderthal DNA, quite counterintuitively, see for instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genetics.org/content/194/1/199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Of course, tracing the evolution of a delicate and transient cognitive and cultural phenomenon such as language is immensely harder than tracing population movements (for which we might at least hope to find archeological evidence). Not to mention the fact  that questions on mutual influences between well-recognized family of languages (such as indo-european and uralic for instance) are already far beyond the scientific consensus on the historical evolution of languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To recap: even considerably easier problems both in the study of the influence of other hominid groups on &lt;em&gt;Homo Sapiens&lt;/em&gt; and on past mutual influences in languages are currently totally out of reach. The project described is presently about as scientifically credible as reaching the speed of light with a steam engine.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T19:49:55.947" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6891" CreationDate="2014-04-02T21:06:41.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many examples of languages spreading more through cultural influence than through the force of arms: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Koine Greek&lt;/a&gt; is an important cultural example for Western civilization. However, Koine Greek wouldn't have spread so quickly through Asia Minor without the conquests of Alexander. Likewise, the Louisiana purchase arguably reflects at least partly the vast military imbalance between France and the United States (just look at what happened to Texas and California). If you want a clear cut example of a language undergoing a radical evolution purely under cultural influence, you can look at the evolution of prehistoric Japanese to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Old Japanese&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Middle_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Early Middle Japanese&lt;/a&gt; under the influence of Chinese (mostly through the spread of Buddhism). The grammar, lexicon and phonology of the Japanese language changed quite radically in a century or so in order to incorporate the cultural, literary and religious influence of China. No military component at all was involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T21:06:41.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6891" CreationDate="2014-04-02T22:15:35.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were some towns in Northern Australia and Eastern New Guinea where the native Austronesian peoples switched from their native languages to Polinesian so as to better comunicate with the sea-faring traders (who were usually Polinesians).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swahili also expanded enormously in Eastern Africa once it became perceived as a language of trade, reaching far away from the area where the Swahili people (with their mixed Bantu-Arab heritage) natively resided. Though in Swahili's case its expansion meant it was &quot;added&quot; to the languages the villagers' merchants (usually polyglots) would learn, as opposed to obliterating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-04-02T22:15:35.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6894" CreationDate="2014-04-02T23:52:48.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it is very much the case. Just listen to the way some people&#xA;bark.  (belated April first contribution)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and more seriously, it is most likely that some animal cries (is&#xA;that language) originated human words by imitation.  They can first enter&#xA;the language via onomatopoeias, and may later evolve on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best known example today is &quot;tweet&quot;, but &quot;bark&quot; or &quot;tchirp&quot; could&#xA;probably qualify too. Though the origin of &quot;bark&quot; could be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding real language, such as may have been spoken by Neanderthal&#xA;people, it is probably too far away in time, as was said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the distinct possibility that intelligent communication&#xA;requires structures that are universal, not because we are all&#xA;similarly wired, but because that is what communication entails&#xA;(which would then cause us to be similarly wired).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a non-human specie evolved language independently of us, it could&#xA;well be that their language structure would not surprise too much&#xA;human linguists. Then, if such beings had influenced human languages 5&#xA;or 10 thousands years ago, possibly less, it might not even be&#xA;detectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-04-03T14:19:48.870" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T14:19:48.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-03T00:28:32.550" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a language with the sound [r͡ʙ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only name I can come up for this sound would be a simultaneous bilabial and alveolar trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything more scientific than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It cannot occur after /s/, /k/, or /ts/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3144" LastEditorUserId="3144" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T00:40:19.120" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T00:40:19.120" Title="What is the linguistic name of [r͡ʙ]?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2014-04-03T02:30:12.803" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, maybe because Standard German is an artificial construct based on the Middle High German language of the Bible and many Germans learn it as sort of a second language (after their native dialect). So it's deemed to be pretty conservative. English speakers, on the other hand, seem to adopt language changes into their literary language faster than speakers of other languages. If you look at German dialects, some of them have lost cases almost like English, for example Low German almost doesn't have cases, except for the oblique case for masculine singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2014-04-03T02:30:12.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6905" CreationDate="2014-04-03T14:23:09.807" Score="1" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's widely claimed that Japanese and Korean have very similar grammars despite their differences in (non Chinese-derived) lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether they're actually genetically related can be regarded as an open question though the consensus has them in separate families but recognizes at least a strong Sprachbund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In assessing the extent of the similarities and differences I'm interested in Korean's adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Japanese there is a class of adjectives that behave like nouns, they are called &quot;-na adjectives&quot;. The second class of Japanese adjectives conjugate very much verbs and are called &quot;-i adjectives&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a similar division in the adjective system of Korean, or is this one of the differences between the two grammars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T03:38:25.803" Title="Does Korean have two classes of adjectives correlating to the -i and -na adjectives of Japanese?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6904" CreationDate="2014-04-04T03:08:52.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still not entirely sure if I'm understanding &lt;code&gt;-na&lt;/code&gt;-type adjectives correctly, but I figured I'd give you an overview of Korean adjectives. I suspect that Korean does have the &lt;code&gt;-na&lt;/code&gt;-type adjectives you want but I think they also have &lt;code&gt;-na&lt;/code&gt;-type verbs too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both adjectives and verbs in Korean inflect in almost identical ways. Both take sentence-ending inflections (such as the formal &lt;code&gt;(ㅂ/습)니다&lt;/code&gt;, less formal &lt;code&gt;(아/어)요&lt;/code&gt;, etc) and tense inflections (such as the past tense &lt;code&gt;았/었&lt;/code&gt;). Compare the verb &lt;code&gt;가다&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to go&lt;/em&gt;) to the adjective &lt;code&gt;크다&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to be large&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;갑니다  (&lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;, formal)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  크나다  (&lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt;, formal)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;가요    (&lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;, casual)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  커요    (&lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt;, casual)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;갔어요  (&lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  컸어요    (&lt;em&gt;was big&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both adjectives and verbs can inflect as noun modifiers but use slightly different particles. Adjectives use &lt;code&gt;ㄴ/은&lt;/code&gt; for both past and present. Verbs also use &lt;code&gt;ㄴ/은&lt;/code&gt; for past, but use &lt;code&gt;은/는&lt;/code&gt; for present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;가는 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who is going&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  큰 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person is/was large&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;간 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who went&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  큰 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who is/was large&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe they use the same for future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;갈 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who will go&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  클 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who will be large&lt;/em&gt;, although semantically this seems weird)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, both Korean verbs and adjectives can use the &lt;code&gt;X + do&lt;/code&gt; construction. Usually the &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is a noun derived from Sino-Korean vocabulary. &lt;code&gt;노래&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;song&lt;/em&gt;) + &lt;code&gt;하다&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to do&lt;/em&gt;) = &lt;code&gt;노래하다&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to sing&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, &lt;code&gt;강&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;strength/health&lt;/em&gt;) + &lt;code&gt;하다&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;강하다&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt;). However, even when using this construction they still use their respective noun modifier inflections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;노래*&lt;em&gt;하는&lt;/em&gt;* 사라 (&lt;em&gt;the person who is singing&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  강*&lt;em&gt;한&lt;/em&gt;* 사람 (&lt;em&gt;the person who is strong&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way I can think of to treat an adjective as a noun is using &lt;code&gt;ㄴ/은 것&lt;/code&gt; (literally a noun modifier + &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; ). Verbs also follow the same pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;강한 것 (&lt;em&gt;the strong thing&lt;/em&gt; but I believe &lt;em&gt;being strong&lt;/em&gt; is also possible)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  노래하는 것을 좋아해요 (&lt;em&gt;I like singing&lt;/em&gt;, literally &lt;em&gt;I like the singing thing&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-04-04T03:38:25.803" LastActivityDate="2014-04-04T03:38:25.803" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2014-04-04T06:44:55.637" Score="26" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The loss and weakening of unstressed syllables at the ends of words..... had disastrous effects on the inflectional system, since many endings now became identical.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; — (Barber, 1993: 157)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no simple answer to the question, &lt;em&gt;why exactly&lt;/em&gt; English has lost the majority of its inflections. Here's just one idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The articulatory stress began to fell on the first syllable;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The (various) inflection endings began to be uniformly reduced to &lt;em&gt;schwa&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The inflections have been subsequently unused, obsolete, and abandoned;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The inflection markers have been replaced by more complex syntax features of the language;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the end of the Old English period (end of the 11th century), the word endings (containing inflectional markers) became &lt;em&gt;less articulated&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inflection vowels such as &lt;em&gt;-a, -e, -u&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-an&lt;/em&gt; appeared to be &lt;strong&gt;uniformly reduced&lt;/strong&gt; (weakened) to &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;, (pronounced &lt;code&gt;[ə]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;schwa&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word-final &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; after &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; apparently lost in unstressed syllables. With the course of time, the remaining &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; was abandoned as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Middle English &lt;em&gt;drinken&lt;/em&gt; (from OE &lt;em&gt;drincan&lt;/em&gt;) became first of all &lt;em&gt;drinke&lt;/em&gt; and then &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt; (ref. Baugh and Cable, 1993; Burrows and Turville-Petre, 1992).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same source claims that the example word &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt; got to its final stage in the North by the 13th century, but spread to other regions by the 15th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is said that the same effect has occurred to in most dialects of Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Crystal (ref. 1995:32) suggests a possible &lt;strong&gt;explanation&lt;/strong&gt; why such reduction may have occurred. Through the evolution of the Germanic languages, in most words &lt;strong&gt;the articulatory stress fell on the first syllable&lt;/strong&gt;. He suggested that such stress pattern may introduced some difficulties to the &lt;strong&gt;audibility of the inflectional endings&lt;/strong&gt;, especially in day-by-day conversations, especially with phonetically close &lt;em&gt;-en, -on,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-an&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One should also consider one of the potential implications of Chomskyan linguistics, suggesting that &lt;strong&gt;all human languages are equally complex&lt;/strong&gt;. This means, in particular, that a language with a simpler &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; would more likely to have a more complicated and non-straightforward &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;. This implies that OE has gradually developed a more complex syntactic structure to replace the obsolete inflectional endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle of constant complexity is widely &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9412/msg00214.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;disputed&lt;/a&gt;, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other theories well may worth your further research, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leith (1996) draws attention to the argument that &lt;strong&gt;the OE inflectional system was inefficient&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, In the case of &lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt; (man) and &lt;em&gt;hand&lt;/em&gt; (hand) there is little distinction between the cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Sing    Plural  |  Sing   Plural&#xA;Nominative  mann    menn    |  hand   handa&#xA;Accusative  mann    menn    |  hand   handa&#xA;Genitive    mannes  manna   |  handa  handa&#xA;Dative      menn    mannum  |  handa  handum&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...hence, the entire inflectional system may become abandoned due to its incomplete usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others observe that OE could significantly reduce its inflections because it became a &lt;strong&gt;trade language&lt;/strong&gt; after the Anglo-Saxons defeated a Norse invasion in 878, leading to its simplification — as suggested in &lt;em&gt;&quot;Adventure of English&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by Melvin Bragg, 2004;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the other answers suggest, &lt;strong&gt;pidgin and creole&lt;/strong&gt; languages often appear to be simpler than &quot;local&quot; languages. David Crystal (see above) considered this factor important;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-11-27T00:19:44.617" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T00:19:44.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6912" CreationDate="2014-04-05T04:04:14.920" Score="9" ViewCount="1318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear a lot of people talk about how &quot;new&quot; linguistics is, or how &quot;small&quot; it is compared to other fields. Pāṇini studied grammar in the 4th century BC. Surely it didn't take until recent history to study it scientifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T11:19:26.967" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T12:28:24.417" Title="How old is linguistics as a discipline?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2014-04-05T04:22:46.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've used Esperanto in 34 countries and lived abroad for work and study for 16 years. If you want a language to meet many people in many regions Esperanto can easily fulfill this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2213" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T04:22:46.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7105" CreationDate="2014-04-05T08:21:15.963" Score="4" ViewCount="4478" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Wells' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexical Sets&lt;/a&gt; define a FOOT vowel /ʊ/ for words like 〈full〉, 〈look〉 and 〈could〉, and a STRUT vowel /ʌ/ for words like 〈cub〉, 〈rub〉 and 〈hum〉. However, I am from the North of England and do not have the FOOT-STRUT split and am having a hard time identifying and hearing the difference for words in each group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can look up each word in a dictionary to find that e.g. 〈hundred〉 has the STRUT vowel, however I want to be able to identify the STRUT vowel when people are speaking it (e.g. on recordings of Public Domain books on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librivox.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LibriVox&lt;/a&gt;, or on TV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Geoff Lindsey, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/vowels.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Standard British English&lt;/a&gt; the STRUT vowel is actually [ə]. In his &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/strut-for-dummies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; on the STRUT vowel, he notes that old RP speakers (esp. Queen Elizabeth) use [ɐ] for the STRUT vowel. I can recognise the difference in the more pronounced examples, but not generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lindsey transcribes 〈governing〉 pronounced by Kasia Madera as [ˈgəvnɪŋ] and 〈up to〉 as [əp tə] on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/STRUT.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;STRUT vowel&lt;/a&gt; page. Here, I can recognise the [tə] in 〈to〉 but am having difficulty identifying the STRUT vowels as [ə]. Is this because they are actually shifted slightly toward the [ʊ] vowel and thus harder to identify as [ə] (e.g. when comparing COMMA and STRUT vowel pronunciations), or is it my brain being trained to think that 〈up〉 is pronounced [ʊp] so does not hear the [ə] as a [ə]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the TRAP-BATH split I can identify when people exhibit this and use [ɑː] for BATH. Is this because the FOOT and STRUT vowels are closer together than TRAP and BATH, thus making the difference less noticeable? Is it because there isn't any (or marginal) free variation/difference in the BATH vowel sound, making it clearer and more consistent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I learn to recognise where people are using the STRUT vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="185" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T14:03:03.517" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T18:35:44.290" Title="Understanding the STRUT vowel as a listener without the split" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2014-04-05T08:22:13.890" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question. Not that it matters all that much, but it's always good to periodically revisit the directions one's discipline has taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the problem is that there's linguistics and then there's study of aspects of language for a particular purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexicography, pedagogic grammar, philosophy of language - they all have a long tradition in the West. You could almost say that applied linguistics came first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the earliest significant works of linguistic theory was the Port Royal grammar of 1660 but it can in no way be seen as even a pre-cursor of modern linguistics. Its importance was retrospectively recognised by Chomsky but it had almost  no direct influence on the development of the discipline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The true starting point of linguistics as a separate discipline is generally identified in the work of William Jones (more than 100 years after the Port Royal grammar). Jones recognized commonalities between several Indo-European languages and thus started what is still recognizable as modern philology. From him, we can trace the developments of the following century almost in a direct line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be another 100 years before we could point to something that looks like truly modern linguistics. By this I mean, an empirical research paradigm aimed at discovering the principles behind the workings of individual languages, their building blocks and language as a general phenomenon. Some names that stand out along the way are Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hermann Paul but it's not until the work of people like Otto Jespersen, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Vilém Mathesius at the start of the 20th century that we get output that we can read and still find linguistic affinities with (note: philologists can go all the way to Jones). de Saussure is by far the most famous but mostly through the efforts of his students. The competence/performance dichotomy can be directly traced to him (Chomsky's inventing history by pointing to the Port Royal grammar as his true antecedent. It was really the structuralists.) And, of course, it is only slightly later that Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield contributed their significant syntheses that echo in the work of linguists to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also not neglect the developments in affiliated disciplines which have been developing along side (if often slightly behind) general linguistics. Phonetics and phonology, psycholinguistics, and even philosophy of language each have their own interesting histories and intertwining but separate interests from those of linguistics. Then there are those of subdisciplines like sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, etc. which each also have trajectories that are worth pursuing most of them not really starting until the 1950s. In many people's mind, linguistics is identified with generative linguistics but that is only one of the many subdisciplines of the field whose importance was artificially inflated at least in part due to US defense funding of AI research (see Frederick Newmeyer's histories on this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly Pāṇini's is always only mentioned as a footnote. Yet, his influence on all the Sanskrit scholars must have been significant. When you compare his meticulous treatment of Sanskrit grammar (including phonology) from at least 400 BCE with the meager output of European grammarians since the days of Plato, you cannot be in awe. Arguably the work of Indian grammarians provided models of best empirical practice for European students of Indo European languages but it is hard to estimate exactly what impact it's had on linguistics as we know it today. But it is without question the greatest work of empirical and theoretical linguistic inquiry prior to about the mid 1800s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let's talk about the question of &quot;scientific&quot; study of language. Chomsky and his followers often cover up their embarrassing ignorance of the &lt;strong&gt;vast&lt;/strong&gt; field of linguistics by dismissing anybody not in their formalist tradition as somehow not scientific enough. Whatever you think about Chomsky's own theory (and I think it is an impressive achievement if not really that much about the empirical phenomenon most people would describe as language), this is just pure and unadulterated nonsense. It's a rhetorical rather than an empirical device that is unfortunately all too common in academic discourse. But it is no less disreputable by its ubiquity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post Script:&lt;/strong&gt; Many alternative perspectives could be offered on this subject. I have certainly focused on the work with which I am most familiar and to which I feel a great affinity. However, I suspect that for all its biases, that mine is fairly mainstream perspective on the history of linguistics. I would accept quibbles and corrections on almost  every particular but the overall trajectory would probably remain the same. I wrote this from memory (relying on Wikipedia to check the spellings of names) influenced as much by my reading of the source materials as histories of linguistics I read and classes in the history of linguistics I took about 20 years ago. I spend a lot of time trying to find connections between old and new understandings of language but mostly in a rather unsystematic manner, so I took this opportunity to summarize some of my mental notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T08:28:12.460" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T08:28:12.460" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-05T08:43:18.527" Score="1" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out the simplest rules to describe the following: &lt;code&gt;[s] —&amp;gt; [š] / __[i]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. s becomes š before an /i/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment I have: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[+strident] -&gt; [-anterior] / __ [+son, +high]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm still not sure about how to put it in the most general, concise way. I've seen other rules that achieve the same result, the most complicated being:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[-son, -voice, anterior, cont] --&gt; [-anterior, -back, -delrel] / &lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;_[+son, +high]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;We haven't really touched on [delrel] yet, but I assume it's 'fricativisation' (?).&lt;/strike&gt; Basically, I'm still unsure about what is and is not necessary to include to make the rule as general and concise as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the dataset is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/lamba.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/lamba.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (not my school, but same data). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3192" LastEditorUserId="3192" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T23:42:50.517" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T09:43:26.610" Title="Phonology s to š before /i/" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-05T10:36:09.863" Score="3" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically speaking, if I were to use a rule-based approach to generate grammatically correct strings for a language L, I would implement a phrase structure grammar G = (V, T, R, S) consisting of non-terminals, terminals, and rewrite rules. This approach would be constituency based and rely on recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an equivalent way to use dependency grammar to generate the same strings? How would one formally describe such a system? (A brief stint on Google yielded &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/publications/WPL/90papers/UCLWPL2%2015%20Fraser.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this prolegonema&lt;/a&gt; and a handful of other articles, but otherwise the subject matter on this seems to be sparse.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T13:03:20.157" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T21:59:15.920" Title="How does a dependency grammar generate strings?" Tags="&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1724" CreationDate="2014-04-05T10:52:38.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of Afrikaans, the two most salient features would be the spelling (as has been pointed out by Henry) and Afrikaans' double negation, which is absent from both Dutch and Flemish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a text peppered with &quot;die&quot;, &quot;'n&quot;, &quot;hierdie&quot;, &quot;daardie/daai&quot; (determiners) or &quot;hy&quot;, &quot;sy&quot;, &quot;my&quot;, &quot;julle&quot;, &quot;hulle&quot; (personal pronouns), &quot;is&quot; (copula: present tense), &quot;was&quot; (copula: past tense), you're probably looking at Afrikaans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negation can be spotted in the form of the words &quot;nie&quot;, &quot;niks&quot; and &quot;geen&quot; closely followed by a second &quot;nie&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details, check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Afrikaans_and_Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastEditorUserId="3329" LastEditDate="2014-04-07T20:07:15.460" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T20:07:15.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6914" CreationDate="2014-04-05T17:37:03.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context free rewrite rules - as associated most with early Chomskyan syntax - can easily be reworked in terms of dependency: G = (T, R), where T is the set of terminals and R is the set of rewrite rules. The distinction between nonterminal symbols (V) and terminal symbols (T) disappears, only terminals remaining. If one needs a start symbol, it would probably be V (verb). Standard context free rewrite rules (i.e. constituency-based rewrite rules) have the folllowing form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; VP --&amp;gt; V NP&#xA;&#xA; NP --&amp;gt; AP N&#xA;&#xA; AP --&amp;gt; Adv A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These same rules in the dependency-based system might be expressed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; V --&amp;gt; __ N&#xA;&#xA; N --&amp;gt; A __&#xA;&#xA; A --&amp;gt; Adv __&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;__&quot; marks the position of the head. The first rule states that a verb takes a noun as a postdependent; the second rule states that a noun takes an adjective as a predependent; and the third rule states that an adjective takes an adverb as a predependent. These rules could generate the string: &lt;em&gt;drink very cold beer&lt;/em&gt;. It should be apparent that the same sort of recursion associated with the constituency-based rewrite rules is also possible with dependency-based rewrite rules of this sort, e.g. V --&gt; __ V. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Frazier (the paper you linked to), Gaifman (1965) produced such dependency-based rewrite rules, and if I remember correctly, Hays (1964) does something similar. Hays' paper is in the literature list of Frazier's paper (again, the paper you linked to). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some more general comments about rewrite rules are warranted. Theoretical syntax mostly abandoned rewrite rules decades ago. The number of rewrite rules that one needs to begin to accommodate the combinatory potential of the lexical items of natural language is very large (certainly at least in the hundreds), so large that the notion of rewrite rules existing separate from the lexical items is not really insightful. Rewrite rules seem to remain prominent in computational circles, but most of theoretical syntax now views them with skepticism, their value residing mainly in the role they have played in the development of syntactic theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that standard constituency-based rewrite rules generate structure top down. In contrast, the MP (Minimalist Program, Chomskyan syntax since about 1995), generates structure bottom up. Thus if one wanted to employ rewrite rules for modern Chomskyan syntax, one would have to invert and reverse the vertical and horizontal order of the rules, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Adv A --&amp;gt; AP&#xA;&#xA; AP N --&amp;gt; NP&#xA;&#xA; V NP --&amp;gt; VP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules would generate the string &lt;em&gt;drink very cold beer&lt;/em&gt; working from the bottom of the structure moving upwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of modern syntactic theory (in theoretical circles) is now more lexicalist than early Chomskyan syntax. What this means in part is that syntax is understood more in terms of the combinatory potential of lexical items (think &lt;em&gt;subcategorization&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;valency&lt;/em&gt;) than in terms of combinatory rules that exist independently of the lexical items. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-05T17:49:59.343" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T17:49:59.343" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6911" CreationDate="2014-04-05T21:03:09.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In RP, and in general in the South of England, there are minimal pairs like “look” vs. “luck”. Do you not hear this difference in Southern speakers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-05T21:03:09.447" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6920" CreationDate="2014-04-06T18:38:52.317" Score="3" ViewCount="932" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; on structural linguistics, you will bump into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Structural linguistics is now regarded by some professional linguists&#xA;  as outdated and as superseded by developments such as cognitive&#xA;  linguistics and generative grammar: Jan Koster states, &quot;Saussure,&#xA;  considered the most important linguist of the century in Europe until&#xA;  the 1950s, hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about&#xA;  language,&quot;[3] while cognitive linguist Mark Turner[4] reports that&#xA;  many of Saussure's concepts were &quot;wrong on a grand scale&quot; and Norman&#xA;  N. Holland[5] notes that &quot;Saussure's views are not held, so far as I&#xA;  know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacanians, and&#xA;  the occasional philosopher;&quot; others have made similar&#xA;  observations.[6][7]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I take from this, is that structural linguistics no longer has any relevance in modern linguistics. Is this the full story, or are there fields which still consider structuralism important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T04:02:24.980" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T04:02:24.980" Title="Does structural linguistics still have relevance today?" Tags="&lt;structural-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6919" CreationDate="2014-04-06T19:38:58.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia entry is both right and wrong on this account. Here are some perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Few linguists would call themselves structuralists, today (although some still would admit that heritage when asked). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Structuralism was an explicit theoretical framework (most cogently expressed by the Prague Circle in their Theses from 1929) in its most productive phase but for many it descended into a few random prescriptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saussure does not represent the entirety of structuralism. He is indeed probably wrong on most things, however, he still represents a good starting point to introducing people to the study of language and I find Mark Turner's comment very injudicious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Structural analysis of language is still the go to method for most language researchers even if they don't subscribe to the theoretical assumptions behind it. Indeed, Chomsky has been rightly called a structuralist (by Frederick Newmeyer) even if he started out in opposition to the structuralist establishment of his day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many of Saussure's views are simply assumed by many modern linguists but it is important to understand they were formulated for the purpose of introductory lectures and published by his students from their notes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many linguists would benefit greatly from engaging with many structuralist classics more deeply. I'd recommend Jakobson, Hjelmslev, even Saussure's course, itself. Definitely read the Prague Circle Theses. I found some of the most starkly formulated ideas about structuralism in Mukarovsky (although I'm not sure about the translation status). Of course, probably the most accessible (both in terms of language and ease of obtaining the text) would be Bloomfield's language, a founding text of American descriptivism. Combining it with Sapir's language will give you a pretty solid idea of how actual structuralists thought about language. [Although neither was an out and out structuralist, you can easily read them side by side with people from Prague, Copenhagen or Paris and see huge affinities.]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not only is structuralism still alive in much of modern analytic work, so is its precursor, Russian formalism. You could do a lot worse than read Propp's Morphology of the Fairytale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is true that much of the structuralist agenda got mangled by incautious non-empiricist applications in other disciplines such as literary theory or philosophy. But I'd still recommend that good structuralist literary analysis is probably the best place to start.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My tentative personal recommendation would be to start all undergrad students of linguistics on a dose of structuralism and slowly dismantle it over the course of their study. I find that going in the opposite direction does not necessarily work, as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS:&lt;/strong&gt; For those who read Czech, I wrote at some lengths about the Prague School and Cognitive Linguistics in the afterword to my translation of Lakoff's &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt;. Full text here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogling.info/node/30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cogling.info/node/30&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;My conclusion:&lt;/em&gt; There are many important connections in the idea of functional motivation of linguistic structures but when pressed Prague linguistics returned to formal analyses and never developed a cognitively realistic semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-04-07T06:41:26.063" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T06:41:26.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1603" CreationDate="2014-04-06T22:27:21.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Palatalisation of /k/ before front vowels happens all over the place: Russian, Greek, Turkish, Persian etc. etc. Historically it happened in proto-Indo-Iranian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-06T22:27:21.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6919" CreationDate="2014-04-07T06:41:19.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't see how anything we've done in linguistics in the modern era could have happened without some of the insights of structuralism. And if you think about the practical uses that linguistics has been put to since the early 20th century... How would you go about describing an uncodified language without it? It's no good asking naive informants what their cognitive structures are....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3394" LastActivityDate="2014-04-07T06:41:19.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-08T18:03:41.950" Score="6" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know any good introductions to Formal Language theory and Formal Grammar, that covers the mathematical basis of Syntax and things like context free grammars and pushdown automata? In particular, I'd like to be able to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parikh’s theorem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pentus' proof that Lambek-calculus grammars define only context-free stringsets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the theorem of Chandra, Kozen and Stockmeyer &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bûchi’s theorem and Doner’s theorem  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Rev_Kracht.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoffrey Pullum's review&lt;/a&gt; has put me of reading a book called &quot;The Mathematics of Language&quot; by Markus Kracht. He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Readers of The Mathematical Intelligencer will probably get on with it well enough, but others should be warned that Kracht assumes a lot of mathematical sophistication: graduate students whose first degree is in humanities or social science may experience symbol shock. Kracht does not pamper those who crave intuitive presentations. He will not explain that a finite automaton accepts exactly those strings on which there is a run beginning in the start state and ending in a final state; he will expect you to see that immediately when he tells you (on p.96) that L(A) = {⃗x : δ({i0},⃗x)∩F ̸= 0/}.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review has also put me off several other introductions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;W. J. M. Levelt’s truly excellent 3-volume 1974 textbook [6] had remarkably wide coverage (Lev- elt’s psycholinguistic interests lead him to cover work on ‘learnability’, also known as grammar induction, which Kracht does not touch on), but sadly has long been out of print. And the standard text by Partee, ter Meulen and Wall [9] is now more than fifteen years behind the leading edge of research, especially with respect to grammars and automata. (Though it was published in 1990, the Partee el al. volume reports as open the question of whether the complement of a context-sensitive stringset is always context-sensitive, which was settled in the affirmative in 1987, at Partee’s insti- tution!) Though strong on formal semantics, it completely misses important topics in other areas (parsing and computational complexity, for example), and it looks positively fusty beside Kracht’s much more up-to-date and considerably more mathematical book.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd be grateful to hear if there are any introductions to this field which people can recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3409" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-08T18:11:49.403" LastActivityDate="2014-04-08T18:11:49.403" Title="Formal Language theory (context free grammars, pushdown automata)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2014-04-08T22:24:40.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ossetic: first in Greek script; then in Church Slavonic script; then (in South Ossetia) Georgian script; then in amplified Cyrillic (Russian script with several newly invented characters); then Latin script; then simple Cyrillic script (Russian script with only one special sign: æ). Six alphabets, not bad for a still living language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-04-09T11:34:02.387" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T11:34:02.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6934" CreationDate="2014-04-09T22:45:13.287" Score="4" ViewCount="572" Body="&lt;p&gt;X-bar PS rules are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;XP' -&amp;gt; &amp;lt;spec.&amp;gt; X'&#xA;X' -&amp;gt; &amp;lt;adjunct&amp;gt; X' &amp;lt;adjunct&amp;gt;&#xA;X' -&amp;gt; X &amp;lt;comp.&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's stopping us from generating phrases like the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[SPEC Really [N'[N house]]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[SPEC Running [D'[D the]]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[QUANT'[QUANT every][PP[P'[P inside]]]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Assuming we're dealing with the English language for simplicity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T23:56:13.693" Title="Why doesn't X-bar theory overgenerate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6935" CreationDate="2014-04-09T23:19:49.087" Score="5" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst searching for the origin of irregular verbs, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=31712&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this forum&lt;/a&gt;, which points out, among other things, that irregular verbs are more often than not common words. Is there a reason for this? And why does this happen more in some languages than others? (Also mentioned on the forum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T17:57:13.623" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T17:57:13.623" Title="Why are irregular verbs usually common words?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;irregularity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6932" CreationDate="2014-04-09T23:51:50.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is because high-frequency words are less likely to be affected by paradigmatic levelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T23:51:50.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6931" CreationDate="2014-04-09T23:56:13.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question can be interpreted to be asking how X-bar theory prevents nonsensical phrases such as &lt;em&gt;the really house&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;running the&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;every inside&lt;/em&gt;. The answer is that no aspect of X-bar theory prevents such phrases from being generated. The X-bar schema merely provides the scaffold for phrases. It is a rough schematic outline that all phrases supposedly conform to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What blocks such nonsensical phrases from being generated is the combinatory potential of the lexical items involved, i.e. of the words. The combinatory potential of words is often explored in terms of subcategorization and/or valency. subcategorization and valency traits dictate how lexical items can combine with each other. These characteristics exist independently of the X-bar schema. The X-bar schema takes these traits for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The valency traits of the adverb &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; require that it take a verb as its head. The valency traits of the quantifier &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; require that it take a noun as its dependent (on a DP analysis of noun phrases). The valency traits of the preposition &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; require that it take a verb or a noun as its head and a nominal as its dependent. These valency requirements prevent the X-bar schema from overgenerating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting is the fact that X-bar schema was largely abandoned by much of Chomskyan syntax in the mid 1990s, so-called &lt;em&gt;bare phrase structure&lt;/em&gt; (BPS) taking its place. The MP (Minimalist Program) does not assume the X-bar schema. Ray Jackendoff, who produced the seminal book &lt;em&gt;X-bar Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (1977) abandoned the X-bar schema decades ago. He now advocates much simpler syntactic structures than those associated with X-bar theory - see his book with Peter Culicover &lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (2005). Many other approaches to syntax (e.g. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree-Adjoinig Grammar, Word Grammar, Meaning-Text Theory) never assumed the X-bar schema. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if there is skepticism about the X-bar schema and its potential to provide a universal basis for exploring the syntactic structure of natural languages, this skepticism finds much company among many grammarians.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-04-09T23:56:13.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6932" CreationDate="2014-04-10T00:46:10.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The forum linked to in the question provides the key points that answer the question. Irregular forms like those asociated with irregular verbs occur frequently in a language. They have to occur frequently because if they did not, they would disappear, becoming regular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vivid example of this principle is provided by the strong verbs in Germanic languages (which includes English). The strong verbs are irregular in their conjugation pattern, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; sing-sang-sung&#xA; run-ran-run&#xA; eat-ate-eaten&#xA; stand-stood-stood&#xA; keep-kept-kept&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong verbs like these, with their irregular conjugation patterns in terms of a stem vowel change, denote everyday actions. This is important because it means that they occur frquently in everyday communication. The conjugation of weak verbs, in contrast, is regular, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; work-worked-worked&#xA; lift-lifted-lifted&#xA; move-moved-moved&#xA; place-placed-placed&#xA; study-studied-studied&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strong verbs often experience a stem vowel change in their simple past and past participle forms, whereas the weak verbs consistently build these forms with the &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; inflectional suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of strong verbs in a Germanic language is relatively small, just about two hundred in English and German. The number of weak verbs, in contrast, is huge, in the thousands. Every new verb that enters the language is weak, e.g. &lt;em&gt;google-googled-googled&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;skype-skyped-skyped&lt;/em&gt;. What this means is that the pattern for weak verbs is productive and alive in the language. The pattern for strong verbs, in contrast, is dead and frozen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the history of Germanic languages, the conjugation of strongs verbs, which often involves a stem vowel change, is much older than the pattern for weak verbs, which, again, involves the &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; suffix. At some point in the development of Germanic, the pattern for weak verbs entirely replaced the pattern for strong verbs. The pattern for strong verbs simply died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frequent occurrence of a strong verb is essential for maintaining its status as a strong verb. There are a few strong verbs in English that are in flux, i.e. they are becoming weak verbs. This can be said of, for instance, &lt;em&gt;hang&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;I hung it up&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;I hanged it up&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;It hung on the wall&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;It hanged on the wall&lt;/em&gt;. The other day I came across the form &lt;em&gt;slided&lt;/em&gt;; I had to stop and ponder whether that was correct or incorrect, e.g. &lt;em&gt;It slid down the hill&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;It slided down the hill&lt;/em&gt;. With strong verbs that occur really frequently, in contrast, there is no hesitation for me, e.g. &lt;em&gt;He ate it&lt;/em&gt; vs. *&lt;em&gt;He eated it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;She ran to the store&lt;/em&gt; vs. *&lt;em&gt;She runned to the store&lt;/em&gt;. Strong verbs like &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt; occur frequently enough that our sense of the correct form is robust. The strong verbs &lt;em&gt;hang&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;slide&lt;/em&gt;, in contrast, occur less frequently and as a result, they are tending in the direction of the productive pattern of weak verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;paradigmatic leveling&lt;/em&gt; denotes the greater phenomenon. The paradigma (i.e. the conjugation pattern of verbs or declension patterns of nouns) associated with the words in question is &quot;leveled&quot;, meaning that it becomes regular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T00:52:47.757" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T00:52:47.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6938" CreationDate="2014-04-10T03:04:59.890" Score="2" ViewCount="623" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear that only complements and specifiers can contain the argument for a verb. But there are certain structures with ditransitive verbs I believe you can represent as an adjunct.&#xA;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bill gave Jessica a gift&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ARG___|CAT__|Theta Role&#xA;1.....|NP...|agent.....&#xA;2.....|NP...|goal......&#xA;3.....|NP...|theme.....&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can represent this a number of ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TzVim.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mob2y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T04:36:27.037" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T09:27:20.320" Title="Can adjuncts be arguments?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2014-04-10T03:37:36.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &quot;hear that only complements and specifiers can contain the argument for a verb&quot; ... well, that's really a matter between you and your syntax confessor. Not everybody believes that this is true, however, or even useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Three-place predicates&lt;/a&gt; typically have, well, three arguments. In English,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subject, Direct Object,&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Indirect Object&lt;/strong&gt;, in terms of grammatical relations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source, Trajector&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Goal&lt;/strong&gt;, in terms of semantics (these are almost all transfer verbs)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Semantically, the Trajector is what moves, and it moves from Source to Goal,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;usually with energy provided by the Source. )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These verbs often govern the Dative Alternation, syntactically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill gave Jessica a gift.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill gave a gift to Jessica.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One really can't expect to read this all off one PS marker, however cheerfully decorated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T03:37:36.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2014-04-10T03:49:17.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the argument vs. adjunct distinction is essential for most theories of syntax, and there is no theory I am aware of that would view any part of the sentence &lt;em&gt;Bill gave Jessica a gift&lt;/em&gt; as an adjunct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many adjuncts can be identified using certain diagnostics. Take the adverb &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; as an example: &lt;em&gt;Bill did it yesterday&lt;/em&gt;. It can be separated off and put in a conjoined clause: &lt;em&gt;Bill did it, and that happened yesterday&lt;/em&gt;. This is not possible with arguments: *&lt;em&gt;Bill gave a gift, and that that happened Jessica&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;Bill gave Jessica, and that happened a gift&lt;/em&gt;. Arguments are typically nouns (or noun phrases) as with &lt;em&gt;Jessica&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a gift&lt;/em&gt;, whereas adjuncts are typically adverbs or PPs. It is therefore quite certain that neither &lt;em&gt;Jessica&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;a gift&lt;/em&gt; in the original example can be viewed as an adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the reason for confusion stems from the X-bar theoretic approach to sentence structure. If one is striving to be true to the X-bar theoretic approach, then one of the two structures shown in the question might indeed be the preferred analysis. The problem with both of those trees, however, is that they are not confirmed by diagnostics for constituent structure. Most tests for constituent structure (topicalization, clefting, pseudoclefting, proform substitution, and answer fragments) identify &lt;em&gt;Jessica&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a gift&lt;/em&gt; as constituents, but they fail to identify &lt;em&gt;gave Jessica&lt;/em&gt; as a constituent. According to the two trees, &lt;em&gt;gave Jessica&lt;/em&gt; should be identifiable as a constituent.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again in my view, a much more plausible account of the sentence ejects the X-bar analysis and allows n-ary branching, i.e. it allows relatively flat structures. On such an analysis, the VP is flat; it views &lt;em&gt;Jessica&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a gift&lt;/em&gt; as sister constituents. Such an analysis is consistent with the results of the named tests for constituent structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-10T03:54:49.077" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T03:54:49.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="651" CreationDate="2014-04-10T15:06:40.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lethologica - In other words, when you have the word on the tip of the tongue but you keep losing it and can't quite grab hold of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3418" LastActivityDate="2014-04-10T15:06:40.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-10T21:42:43.043" Score="1" ViewCount="3871" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if I am answering the question correctly can anyone please comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphology is the study of words.   It deals with understanding of word parts (morphemes).  To facilitate student’s learning and help develop their vocabulary it can be helpful to use a morphological approach.  This approach would allows student build on their current vocabulary by adding prefixes and suffixes to root words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3354" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T11:01:38.563" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T11:01:38.563" Title="How does Morphology apply to reading and teaching English Language Learners how to read?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-11T07:39:14.063" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Esperanto scientific, some technology-specific, or financial dictionaries available online cover vast range, but mostly old terminology that was around for many years.  How does one translate or borrow (loan) new words that appear (very rapidly) for example in IT industry, finances, or adjacent highly volatile areas, in those cases not covered by standard &lt;a href=&quot;http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/affixes.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;affix rules&lt;/a&gt; of Esperanto?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;: I once noticed that &quot;CPU stepping level&quot;, often used (as a noun) as simply &lt;em&gt;stepping&lt;/em&gt;, was translated as &lt;em&gt;tretante&lt;/em&gt;, which is obviously wrong (nouns must end in &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt;).  I started to think how to properly translate it.  Despite its simplicity, etymology of this English word is quite &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;complex&lt;/a&gt;: notice how two completely different nouns are formed from the original &lt;em&gt;step&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;stepper&lt;/em&gt; (machine) and &lt;em&gt;stepping&lt;/em&gt; (in the context of CPU/IC, kind of a version number).  While transition from &lt;em&gt;paŝo&lt;/em&gt; (step) to &lt;em&gt;paŝilo&lt;/em&gt; (stepper as a machine) can be more or less straightforward, further transformation (stepping as indirect result of stepper complete work, generation thereof) is not.  The closest candidates are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Category suffixes &lt;em&gt;-aĵ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ec&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noun suffix &lt;em&gt;-id&lt;/em&gt; (if at all possible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-aĵ&lt;/em&gt; shows a concrete, tangible manifestation of the root (aĵo = a thing), but &lt;em&gt;stepping&lt;/em&gt; is not that of &lt;em&gt;step&lt;/em&gt; or even &lt;em&gt;stepper&lt;/em&gt;.  It denotes something which was noticed as convenient, distinct reference point, akin to revision or version (edition), yet clearly related to the &lt;em&gt;stepper&lt;/em&gt; machine and the way it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ec&lt;/em&gt; shows a quality or characteristic defined by the root (eco = a characteristic, quality), but it normally applies to adjectives, not nouns; &lt;em&gt;paŝeco&lt;/em&gt; would rather refer to some property of the machine, or the process itself (e.g. certain operational parameter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-id&lt;/em&gt; denotes the offspring of the creature defined in the root.  Usually used for living creatures like kittens (&lt;em&gt;katido&lt;/em&gt;), but also for halogenic salts (&lt;em&gt;klorido&lt;/em&gt;).  It is unclear if it can be used (and be understandable) elsewhere (&lt;em&gt;paŝido&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;paŝilido&lt;/em&gt; both do not exactly make much sense to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More and more English nouns appear which end in &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; and, unlike &lt;em&gt;casting&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;screening&lt;/em&gt;, derived as result of some intricate procedure, or interpretation of its results, with no direct and simple relationship to the root, or had significantly evolved over time (e.g. &lt;em&gt;marketing&lt;/em&gt; and other financial words like &lt;em&gt;futures [contract, exchange]&lt;/em&gt;).  Are there any guidelines or somewhat general rules available for constructing coherent Esperanto equivalents of these nouns (ending in &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt;) for special, complicated cases like these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3421" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T11:22:42.817" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T11:22:42.817" Title="Constructing/borrowing of complex scientific/technological/financial vocabulary in Esperanto" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-04-11T12:31:52.003" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6945" CreationDate="2014-04-11T15:32:38.913" Score="-3" ViewCount="1039" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the &lt;strong&gt;recent controversial issues&lt;/strong&gt; in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;socio-linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that are receiving the experts' attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3420" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T16:59:08.170" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T16:59:08.170" Title="recent topics in linguistics" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2014-04-11T16:41:02.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6943" CreationDate="2014-04-11T16:23:29.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like you are not yet near being in a position to select a dissertation topic in linguistics. Locating a good dissertation topic depends on a number of factors. In particular, it should be something that your/a thesis advisor and dissertation committee have at least some understanding of. A good dissertation topic will fascinate you. To know what fascinates you in linguistics, you will have gained exposure to a number of subfields. You then probe for a good topic in the particular subfield that you find most interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question had been phrased as follows, you would probably be closer to locating a potential dissertation topic: &quot;I am looking for a good dissertation topic in pragmatics. What are a couple of key issues in pragmatics that are controversial and receiving attention by experts in the field?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since one is likely to spend a couple of years working on a dissertation, the subject matter has to be something that one finds really interesting. Without the inspiration, one can flounder for years trying to complete the project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While my knowledge of socio-linguistics and pragmatics is sparse, I might be able to respond insightfully to a more narrow question concerning syntactic theory. Others in this forum might also be able to respond insightfully if the question is expressed more narrowly, addressing the particular subfield that interests you and them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-11T16:42:19.383" LastActivityDate="2014-04-11T16:42:19.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6940" CreationDate="2014-04-12T21:28:30.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Skilled readers are known to rely on morphology to help them segment words and support fluent reading. However, it doesn't matter whether this segmentation is correct. For instance, the -er in 'teacher' and in 'corner' is equally useful for somebody who is trying to quickly decode those words. Somebody who cannot do that will have to develop a greater inventory of words they have to learn to read as disconnected chunks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any way that can support learners metacognition is likely to be helpful in reading as well as writing and speaking. Showing both first language and additional language students the principles of word formation is likely to be extremely helpful for any language (perhaps even more so in English where segmentation at the level of morphemes can help overcome the irregularities at the level of grapheme-phoneme correspondence). Just be aware that the point is not to get the analysis right as long as you can use the analytic strategy to help you with a word or an expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-04-12T21:28:30.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6950" CreationDate="2014-04-12T22:52:42.563" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English (and I believe in other languages, though I'm not certain), question&#xA;words like &quot;how&quot; and &quot;what&quot; can be used as intensifiers, in phrases like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How beautiful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What splendor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What a beautiful child&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can image analyzing the first as some kind of adverb, and the second as some kind of determiner--at the very least, they both both seem to be the same kind of thing as in the corresponding question phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How big is she?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What apple do you want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm absolutely lost as to how to analyze &quot;What a beautiful child&quot;--can anyone help me out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3425" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T01:43:41.140" Title="How are phrases such as &quot;How beautiful&quot; usually analyzed?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6949" CreationDate="2014-04-13T01:32:20.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of literature that addresses the subject matter in the question directly. I have, however, thought about such cases quite a bit, and I have an unpublished paper that addresses some of the relevant data in part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interrogative word &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; is often a predependent of an adjective. It is asking for the relevant degree associated with the property expressed by the adjective, e.g. &lt;em&gt;how big&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;how loud&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;how helpful&lt;/em&gt;, etc. These are relatively straightforward adjective phrases (APs), as pointed out in the question. I do not see anything mysterious or unusual about them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning examples with &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, I think &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; often functions basically just like &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;What apple do you have?&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;Which apple do you have?&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;What ideas is he promoting?&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;Which ideas is he promoting?&lt;/em&gt; In these examples, both &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; are functioning as interrogative determiners. On an NP analysis of noun phrases, they are predependents of the nouns that they introduce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the analysis of examples like &lt;em&gt;what a beautiful child&lt;/em&gt; are indeed more challenging. They are challenging because it appears as though the noun &lt;em&gt;child&lt;/em&gt; takes two determiners, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;. This seems to be a particular idiosyncracy of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;. Other interrogative determiners are incapable of doing the same, e.g. *&lt;em&gt;Which a beautiful child&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, English has a construction that seems related, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; how big (of) a fool&#xA;&#xA; too crazy (of) a man&#xA;&#xA; that bold (of) a move&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, the preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; appears optionally. With &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, the preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; cannot appear, e.g. *&lt;em&gt;what of a beautiful child&lt;/em&gt;. Furthermore, the indefinite article is obligatory in such cases. With &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, the indefinite article need not appear, e.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; what beautiful children&#xA;&#xA;            vs.&#xA;&#xA; *how big (of) fools&#xA;&#xA; *too crazy (of) men&#xA;&#xA; *that bold (of) the move&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples further illustrate that the ability of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; to appear in NPs such as &lt;em&gt;what a beautiful child&lt;/em&gt; is an idiosyncracy of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;. One analysis of the construction might view &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; as a nominal that takes an indefinite NP as its complement: &lt;em&gt;[what [a beautiful child]]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the following data can be construed as involving a type of ellipsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; How crazy (she is)!&#xA;&#xA; What a beautiful child (she is)!&#xA;&#xA; What fun (that was)!&#xA;&#xA; How entertaining (that is)!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ellipsis mechanism optionally elides a definite pronoun and a form of the copula. This mechanism shows up in other constructions, e.g. &lt;em&gt;If (you are) interested, you should contact me&lt;/em&gt;. I call this ellipsis mechanism &lt;em&gt;slicing&lt;/em&gt;. I will share my unpublished manuscript on slicing if anyone is interested. I can be contacted via my email; my address is on my Wikipedia page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tjo3ya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tjo3ya&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-13T01:43:41.140" LastActivityDate="2014-04-13T01:43:41.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6971" CreationDate="2014-04-13T16:19:35.623" Score="4" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does language transfer occur from French to English within native french speakers' mind?   Can we observe this phenomenon ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3420" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-13T16:23:44.697" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T06:29:15.800" Title="Language transfer for second language learners (French-English)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-14T10:18:09.800" Score="3" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a lot of grammar frameworks postulated since the last century, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MP&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LFG&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_and_reference_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RRG&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198299554.001.0001/acprof-9780198299554&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RCG&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning%E2%80%93text_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MTT&lt;/a&gt; to name a few. I like reading about languages, but a lot of publications about languages are couched along such grammar frameworks, and for someone like me who has no academic background in Linguistics and has not read a lot of  linguistics literature, its difficult to evaluate which grammar framework has more explanatory power, or which of their features are robust cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably contentious to ask which is the best, so what I would ask instead is, if we could come up with one particular feature, characteristic or attribute in a specific grammar framework that is invalidated cross-linguistically and which grammar framework addresses it best. It would be ideal if in the reply we could specify which languages and language features are counter-evidences of which grammar framework features. This is to avoid closing this question for not being constructive (soliciting &quot;debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion&quot;). I'm thinking along the lines of responses like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/500607/what-are-the-lesser-known-but-useful-data-structures&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1451319/asp-net-mvc-view-engine-comparison&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as possible, please limit each answer to one feature per grammar framework, unless a set of grammar frameworks share this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if its possible, can this be made a community wiki? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6826/what-empirical-evidence-can-be-produced-that-all-syntactic-structure-is-binary-b/6874#6874&quot;&gt;this excellent discussion&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;binary branching of all syntactic structure in MP&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a very good example and is the one that made me think of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: In light of @prash's comment, what I am looking for are falsifiable &quot;predictions&quot; that flow out of these grammar frameworks/formalisms, in a Popperian sense. What cross-linguistic data could prove a formalism's feature to be true or false as against other formalism? Instead of looking for data that support such formalism, one should look for data that falsifies such. In the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;binary branching of all syntactic structure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; discussion, MP posits a binary nature of syntactic structures which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~tania/CMGD/Beyond%20the%20constitient.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tim Osborne&lt;/a&gt; show is untrue. The weight always goes to nonconforming data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if all formalism can accommodate all cross-linguistic data, applying Occam's razor can tell us which formalisms have the same explanatory power in spite of fewer assumptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That by itself is a count against some formalisms. Actually, I don't know much about these things, I was just following the discussions and very much interested in knowing other features which fall under the same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T12:59:55.160" Title="Grammar framework features that are not supported cross-linguistically" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6952" CreationDate="2014-04-15T01:27:15.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer that produces a list of clear criteria that could be used to test the predictive accurracy of grammar frameworks would be difficult. The grammar frameworks listed in the question generally all have components that can be accessed to make predictions, and if a given grammar framework is lacking in a specific area (it makes no predictions in that area), it can always be augmented in one way or another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neverthelesss, I think I can provide one major criterion. In the list of grammar frameworks mentioned in the question, worth noting is that two are constituncy-based (MP and LFG), one of them is dependency-based (MTT), and the other two are (to my knowledge) not so explicit about the dependency vs. constituency distinction (RRG, RCG). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of my papers (such as in the one linked to in the addendum to the question), I attempt to call out all constituency-based theories by pointing to the diagnostics that are commonly employed in syntax textbooks to identify syntactic structure, i.e. to the tests for identifying constituents (e.g. topicalization, clefting, pseudoclefting, proform substitution, answer fragments). I emphasize that all constituency-based frameworks make a terribly inaccurate prediction in this area. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Fred likes music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. *Likes Fred music.                        - Topicalization&#xA;&#xA;b. *It is likes that Fred music.             - Clefting&#xA;&#xA;c. *What Fred does about Music is likes.     - Pseudoclefting&#xA;&#xA;d. *Fred does so music.                      - Proform substituion&#xA;&#xA;e. Q: What does Fred think about music?            &#xA;   A: *Likes.                                - Answer fragment &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon these data, one can conclude that the verb &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; alone is NOT a constituent, since all five of the tests agree that it is not a constituent. Yet all constituency-based grammar frameworks (really, all of them!), necessarily view &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; as a constituent. In constituency-based systems, every single individual word is a constituent by definition. Hence constituency-based frameworks seem to be terribly flawed at a basic level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dependency-based frameworks, in contrast, make the correct prediction because they do not view the finite verb &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; alone as a constituent. It is not a constituent because it dominates other words. Dependency-based frameworks are therefore making the correct prediction. The point is touched on at the end of this article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt; and it is debated entertainingly at length on the talk page for that same article here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3aConstituent_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constituent_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the question, this is a major criterion that can be used to assess grammar frameworks. The criterion concerns constituency tests and what they tell us about syntactic structure.The dependency-based frameworks destroy the constituency-based frameworks in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience with this issue (which has accummulated over many years) is that constituency-based frameworks have two ways of dealing with the problem. They preferrably ignore it by ignoring dependency-based frameworks as much as possible. Dependency grammarians are all very clear about the dependency vs. constituency distinction, whereas many constituency grammarians seem hardly aware that dependency even exists. This situation is starting to change, however, mainly because of the increasing use of dependency for automated parsing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the rare occassion that a constituency grammarian is confronted directly with the issue and thus forced to respond, a common answer appeals to projection levels (minimal, intermediate, and maximal). The tests for constituents diagnose for maximal projections, not for minimal, or intermediate ones. This observation does indeed address the shortcoming to a large extent. The tests can identify only those constituents that are maximal projections (i.e. complete phrases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is where Occam's Razor enters the picture, as suggested in the question. Dependency makes the correct prediction without the onerous distinction between projection levels. In other words, to overcome the shortcoming, constituency-based systems need a much greater theoretical apparatus, one that acknowledges much, much more syntactic structure and also distinguishes between types of constituents (minimal, intermediate, and maximal ones). According to Occam's Razor, one should, rather, cut out the extra structure and onerous distinction by assuming a dependency-based system instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, one major criterion that directly provides what the question is asking for is the approach to constituent structure. The diagnostics for constituent structure can be used to evaluate grammar frameworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-04-15T02:39:03.380" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T02:39:03.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6165" CreationDate="2014-04-15T09:39:51.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope it is not too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both ppl and ppl1 are normalized according &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/manpages/srilm-faq.7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/manpages/srilm-faq.7.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;, which is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;entropy rate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3428" LastActivityDate="2014-04-15T09:39:51.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6844" CreationDate="2014-04-16T00:22:53.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely, most of the official government documents before 1894 were written in classical chinese, whose system is not much different from that of pre-modernized china.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3424" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-16T01:35:59.973" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T01:35:59.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="519" CreationDate="2014-04-16T04:30:01.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has the suffix &lt;i&gt;-age&lt;/i&gt; as one way of indicating that a noun is mass. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-age#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary defines it&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;Forming nouns with the sense of collection or appurtenance.&quot; It's not a regular marker of mass, but it's a fairly productive derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;i&gt;break&lt;/i&gt; is a single fracture or other failure; &lt;i&gt;breakage&lt;/i&gt; is one or more such failures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Jargon File lists &lt;i&gt;lossage&lt;/i&gt; as &quot;impl[ying] a continuing lose of which the speaker is currently a victim.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;Voltage&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;amperage&lt;/i&gt;, derived from the unit names &lt;i&gt;volt&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;ampere&lt;/i&gt;, denote the mass quantities of electrical potential and current.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wiktionary entry lists &lt;i&gt;-ery&lt;/i&gt; as a synonym, as in &lt;i&gt;hosiery&lt;/i&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;i&gt;hose&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;shrubbery&lt;/i&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;i&gt;shrub&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;badassery&lt;/i&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;i&gt;badass&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T04:30:01.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6959" CreationDate="2014-04-16T10:07:48.597" Score="2" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite obvious that there are a lot of Persian loanwords in Turkish. Some words, though, I cannot easily figure out which way they travelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example &lt;em&gt;trk.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;küçük&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;frs.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;kucak&lt;/strong&gt;. I have found etymologies for both of them. Is it a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same applies to for example &lt;em&gt;trk.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;kör&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;frs.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;kūr&lt;/strong&gt; (blind). Where does it come from? Any hard and fast rules for these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-16T10:59:15.340" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T11:43:57.993" Title="Turkish loanwords in persian or the other way round?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-16T11:30:00.347" Score="1" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a programmer and I am interested in Natural Language Processing. I studied it a bit in college, but it was years ago and anyway it wasn't enough for a good knowledge of the field. I'm particularly interested in Markov chains and n-grams, mostly to build something that would let me analyzes and collect data from texts of various kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of software libraries that do exactly this, but I wish to really understand the theory and the basics. So what I am really asking is for a book (or more than one) to study natural language processing. I know that there is a lot of probability theory involved, so I would also like to study probability from scratch, if you have something to suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3433" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T15:24:46.307" Title="Where to study probability and natural language processing from?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-04-30T11:46:48.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6957" CreationDate="2014-04-16T11:38:32.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no hard and fast rules; each word has to be looked at separately. kūčak “small” and kōr “blind” both occur already in Middle Persian, and the latter also in Sogdian (written kwr), so they cannot very well be Turkish loanwords. Turkish kör is probably a borrowing from Sogdian or Persian or some other Iranian language; küçük is presumably Turkish and not connected with Persian kūčak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-04-16T11:43:57.993" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T11:43:57.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6962" CreationDate="2014-04-16T13:17:56.573" Score="1" ViewCount="1433" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a statistical or linguistic method that could give the degree of similarity between the meaning of two sentences. I have found in literature many distance measures (euclidean distance,..) but what i am looking for is how much a given sentence is close to other sentence semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example:&#xA;(S1) The beautiful cherry blossoms in Japan.&#xA;(S2) The beautiful Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S1 is the original sentence.&#xA;S2 is the sentence obtained from S1 by deleting the words &quot;cherry&quot;,&quot;blossoms&quot; and &quot;in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so , suppose we have a similarity function DISTSIM(S1,S2) that has the two sentences S1 and S2 as parameters. I want this function to return a big distance between S1 and S2 since they do have different meaning. Because beautiful modifies cherry blossoms and not Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2750" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T15:03:13.477" Title="Two sentences with the same meaning" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2014-04-16T15:23:01.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific examples you mentioned seem to contradict the general question you are asking. The sentence fragments, S1 and S2 has some surface-level similarity, but are very different semantically; the object that's beautiful is not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, to answer your broader question, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/semeval-2012/task6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semeval 2012&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/sts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2013&lt;/a&gt; focused on Semantic Textual Similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the degree of semantic equivalence. We are proposing this STS task as an initial attempt at creating a unified framework that allows for an extrinsic evaluation of multiple semantic components that otherwise have historically tended to be evaluated independently and without characterization of impact on NLP applications. As a pilot task for Semeval 2012, we will focus on refining the task definition as well as producing experimental results on how well existing approaches to semantic equivalence perform. In parallel, we will gather feedback from the community about establishing a shared software framework for building STS annotation systems. The shared STS framework will allow researchers across the globe to more easily replicate and improve upon innovations developed at other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;STS is related to both Textual Entailment (TE) and  Paraphrase, but differs in a number of ways and it is more directly applicable to a number of NLP tasks.  STS is  different from TE inasmuch as it assumes bidirectional graded equivalence between the pair of textual snippets. In the case of TE the equivalence is directional, e.g. a car is a vehicle, but a vehicle is not necessarily a car. STS also differs from both TE and Paraphrase in that, rather than being a binary yes/no decision (e.g. a vehicle is not a car), STS is a graded similarity notion (e.g. a vehicle and a car are more similar than a wave and a car). This graded bidirectional nature of STS is useful for NLP tasks such as MT evaluation, information extraction, question answering, and summarization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the published papers at &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/S/S12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S12&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/S/S13/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S13&lt;/a&gt;, the relevant sections of the ACL anthology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T15:35:40.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-16T17:06:19.043" Score="1" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the progress of writing an essay at current. I have articulated the following sentence onto the document and the omniscient Microsoft Word has deemed it as &quot;Fragment (consider revising)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Identified as the central problem is an inflated perception of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone explain the problem, if any, with it so that I can appositely amend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3439" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-16T18:00:39.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T17:49:27.350" Title="The infamous green squiggly line on Microsoft Word" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-09-21T16:36:22.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3608" CreationDate="2014-04-16T20:53:10.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of “constituent morphemes” is very problematic in the case of loan words. A loan word like “preposition” is borrowed as a unit. It is not analysable at a synchronic English level. To analyse it you need to retreat to the level of Latin etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T20:53:10.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-16T22:12:26.460" Score="0" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read today that in Japanese, Haikus are based on morae instead of syllables. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; tells me that morae determine &quot;syllable weight&quot; and &quot;in some languages determine stress or timing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't quite understand what morae are, though. Could a Haiku be written in English using morae, or does the concept not translate over?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3444" LastActivityDate="2014-04-16T22:12:26.460" Title="How would a haiku look in English using morae?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6969" CreationDate="2014-04-17T10:23:06.120" Score="4" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is somehow related to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/190/are-some-languages-known-to-have-taken-grammatical-features-etc-rather-than-just&quot;&gt;Are some languages known to have taken grammatical features etc rather than just lexicon from their substrate languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the area of today's Turkey, Iran and parts of central Asia, the Arabic language, Persian language and Turkish languages have for a long time coexisted. Apart from lexical (mutual) borrowings of Persian and Turkish and borrowings of both from Arabic (and to a much lesser extent, as far as i know, borrowings from Persian/Middle Persian to Arabic), there are some grammatical features which Persian and Turkish have in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example Persian possessive suffixes: &lt;strong&gt;dar&lt;/strong&gt; (door) -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;dar-am&lt;/strong&gt; (my door), which in the first person singular even (more or less) coincide with the turkish ones. Is this or could this be some sort of grammatical borrowing? Which way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other coincidences are the &lt;em&gt;copulative suffixes&lt;/em&gt; (if this may be called thus) and - but I do know of only one instance - Persian &lt;strong&gt;lū&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;kūchulū&lt;/strong&gt; reminiscent of Turkish &lt;strong&gt;kücüklü/kücüklük&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T22:35:18.550" Title="Some common features of unrelated languages: Turkish and Persian" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4232" CreationDate="2014-04-17T15:38:30.200" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a variety of language corpora with millions of sentences each: &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/download.html&quot;&gt;http://corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/download.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3445" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T15:38:30.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6967" CreationDate="2014-04-17T23:05:13.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The –lū suffix in colloquial (not standard) Persian is in fact borrowed from Turkish. The –am suffix for “my” is Middle Persian –am, Old Persian –may, Vedic me: in short, Indo-Iranian and ultimately Indo-European. Middle Persian –am is attested long before the earliest contacts between Persians and Turks. The identity with Turkish –am is coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-17T23:05:13.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-18T05:53:04.563" Score="2" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following data show that the prefix &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; can be attached only to transitive verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;List A       List B&#xA;&#xA;reblacken    *rego&#xA;&#xA;resoften     *recry&#xA;&#xA;reharden     *resleep&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verbs of List A whose bases can be used either as transitive or intransitive verbs are all transitive verbs because the prefix &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; only takes transitive verbs as its base. The following groups of verbs behave the same as the base verbs of the List A verbs in terms of 'transitive alternation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 1&lt;/strong&gt;: bounce, coil, drift, drop, float, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 2&lt;/strong&gt;: break, chip, crack, crash, crush, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 3&lt;/strong&gt;: bend, crease, crinkle, crumple, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Group 4&lt;/strong&gt;: abate, advance, age, balance, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1) Can the verbs of List A can be used as intransitive verbs as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2) If the verbs of List A can be used as intransitive ones, what should we do with the morphological rule that the prefix &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; produces transitive verbs in combination with transitive verb bases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3) Even though the number of the verbs showing 'transitivity alternation' is large as shown above, that of the verbs that do not alternate between intransitive and transitive use is much larger. Then, what condition do verbs allow to alternate between these two uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3447" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-18T14:16:50.003" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T14:16:50.003" Title="Questions about transitive alternation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6951" CreationDate="2014-04-18T06:29:15.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;L2 acquisition is studied, and there are many theories which attempt to explain how the L2 is acquired. If this question is for a class you would have to consider what the material is saying to properly answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the basic way that L2 acquisition differs from L1 acquisition is that L2 acquisition is a generally conscious process (using metalinguistics awareness), the level of ultimate attainment will be less and less &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt; as the learner ages, the L1 will influence the L2 permanently, this is known as fossilization, and the time which it will take to learn will differ from user to user unlike L1 acquisition which tends to be on a fairly fixed schedule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L2 acquisition will hypothetically be structured in such a way that starts with the individual's initial hypotheses (what the person unconsciously thinks about the task) that the L2 is structured like the L1. The L2 code (grammar) will be built from the L2 in such a way that bit by bit the rules of the L1 are modified to accommodate this new language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simultaneously bilinguals seem to be neurologically structured like bilinguals, suggesting that two independent codes are constructed using the UG during the critical learning period (using the LAD), this does not seem to be the case for later L2 learners. For later L2 learners the L2 code seems to be relatively dependent on the L1 code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, L2 acquisition from French to English is studied a lot here (Montreal). My psycholinguistics teacher studies L2 acquisition. I could ask him if I did not properly answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to know that like jlawler pointed out, we cannot observe the mind, we only have various (and conflicting) theories positing and predicting underlying cognitive structures and processes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3448" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T06:29:15.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-18T09:32:51.577" Score="3" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I'm going to get any answers, but I am trying to find out whether I can qualify as a native english speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;born in Hungary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moved to US at age 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spoke Hungarian only at home (parents forced us)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spoke in English with everyone else, and most of the time to my mother too&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;completed fifth grade at 11&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after 5th grade moved back to Hungary (lived in US for 8 years)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;since then I went to Uni, did English literature and linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;been teaching English since 2005&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do think in Hungarian and English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;didn't learn to read or write in Hungarian until the age of 11&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm a dual (Hungarian/American) citizen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3449" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-18T09:56:28.277" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T17:45:10.057" Title="Am I a native English speaker? (born I Hungary, lived in US from age 3)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6988" CreationDate="2014-04-18T15:20:55.533" Score="4" ViewCount="928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.474-477 (Apollo is in love with Daphne) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Protinus alter amat, fugit altera nomen amantis&#xA;silvarum tenebris captivarumque ferarum&#xA;exuviis gaudens innuptaeque aemula Phoebes.&#xA;Vitta coercebat positos sine lege capillos.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (rough) translation (adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; since I'm not fluent in English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Immediately the one is in love, and the other flees from love's name;&#xA;in the depths of the woods, from the skins of the wild beast &#xA;she takes delight and she's an emulator of virgin Phoebe.&#xA;A careless ribbon is holding back her hair.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question deals with the &quot;-que&quot; at the end of &quot;innuptaeque&quot;. What does this conjunction coordinate ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archive.org/stream/ausfhrlichegram00steggoog#page/n29/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache&lt;/a&gt; I read that &quot;-que&quot; coordinates either 2 nouns, either 2 adjectives, either 2 pronouns, either 2 adverbs, or either 2 verbs. But in the verses I quoted, &quot;-que&quot; seems to be used to coordinate two propositions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;silvarum tenebris captivarumque ferarum / exuviis gaudens&#xA;+ &#xA;innuptaeque aemula Phoebes [scilicet &quot;est&quot;]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not convinced at all by this solution since the first proposition depends on &quot;fugit altera nomen amantis&quot; and the second one is an independent proposition. But I can't go further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T20:14:14.603" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:07:34.263" Title="Can the Latin conjunction -que coordinate two propositions?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6958" CreationDate="2014-04-18T15:24:46.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; by Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze is a great book to start with. It contains an introduction to both basic linguistic concepts and probability theory.&#xA;The chapters about Markov chains and n-gram models really helped me to understand the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another classic textbook is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Speech and Language Processing&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also two courses on Coursera: &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one by Daniel Jurafsky and Christopher Manning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/course/nlangp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one by Michael Collins&lt;/a&gt;. All three instructors are very well-known specialists in the field and both courses have great syllabus and cover topics you refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T15:24:46.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-18T15:30:36.690" Score="3" ViewCount="1098" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principle of compositionality is formulated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of&#xA;  its parts and of the syntactic rules by which they are combined.&#xA;  (Partee, ter Meulen and Wall, 1990: 318)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have understood proponents of this principle correctly (from mainly reading the Wikipedia article on the subject) idioms and metaphors and other notions demanding extralinguistic contexts are often excepted from this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My wonder is, if we remove all of these entities, what is really left of language beyond simpler predicate logical expressions? Are there alternative to the principle of compositionality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-19T07:44:37.957" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T15:13:49.227" Title="How do idioms and metaphors fit into the principle of compositionality?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2014-04-18T15:32:42.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not correct to say that &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; can only coordinate single words (nouns, adjectives, etc.); very often it coordinates whole phrases. Here, it's coordinating two phrases headed by the nominatives &lt;em&gt;gaudens&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aemula&lt;/em&gt;, both in apposition to &lt;em&gt;altera&lt;/em&gt;. You could translate &quot;the other flees, both delighting ... and emulating ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T15:32:42.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2014-04-18T18:15:59.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is the usage described by Kühner p. 641 no. 4. It is (as he says) very common both in poetry and prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T18:15:59.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4609" CreationDate="2014-04-18T19:52:23.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you tried &lt;a href=&quot;http://wikspeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WikSpeak&lt;/a&gt;? It is a GUI-based tool for converting English texts into their IPA transcriptions. Since it is open source, it should be no problem to extract and examine the functionality that is relevant to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3451" LastActivityDate="2014-04-18T19:52:23.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6975" CreationDate="2014-04-19T00:10:25.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @jlawler points out, by their very definition, idioms are non-compositional. And we could think of metaphors as a sort of non-conventional idioms. Of course, there are many other types of non-literal language such as irony or in fact any speech act, that will present similar problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To preserve the principle of compositionality, you can shove these into the realm of pragmatics (which is where speech acts are typically kept anyway). So expressions like 'kick the bucket' or 'take X for a ride' are simply treated as having a literal meaning where the compositionality still applies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also expand your definition of what constitutes a 'component' or a syntactic rule. Neither of these is very practicable when dealing with actual range of language use but they can keep the principle intact enough for the purpose of formal semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key thing to understand is that 'the principle of compositionality' is not some sort of a universal law of language. It is really only a way to formulate certain axioms for the purposes of formal syntax and semantics. It has no counterpart in natural semantics or in cognitive semantics because there is no need for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-04-19T00:10:25.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-19T01:47:48.190" Score="1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a way to create a new image display in praat that is aligned with the waveform and spectrogram. The image display must be an object in the object window. It must be groupable with the spectrogram. When you zoom in or out of one the other stays aligned accordingly. The images are frames of an ultrasound video located every 33 ms. The tongue position in each ultrasound frame will correlate with the spectrogram and waveform. If anyone can help, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3455" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-04-22T12:14:28.693" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T12:14:28.693" Title="How can I align an image with the spectrogram in Praat?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-19T02:20:17.013" Score="15" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the &quot;simple past&quot; form of a verb can sometimes be used to convey irrealis meanings, without any preterite sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; rich, I'd buy a Porsche.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you only &lt;em&gt;knew&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wish I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; there with you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to be able to say that he &lt;em&gt;wrote&lt;/em&gt; brilliant poetry, but he doesn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's time you &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; to sleep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of several other languages that do this, including French (&quot;si j'&lt;em&gt;étais&lt;/em&gt; riche...&quot;), Ancient Greek, and Modern Hebrew. In languages that have an aspect distinction, it seems to be specifically the &lt;em&gt;imperfective&lt;/em&gt; past tense that does this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the specific set of irrealis contexts (e.g. counterfactual conditionals, etc.) in which past-tense forms can be used in English, and how does it differ from that of other languages that have this conflation? For example, in Hebrew, the conditional examples 1-3 above would be translated with a past-tense verb, but example 4 would need a present form and 5 a future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How widespread is this phenomenon? What other languages do this? Is it a European or Indo-European thing, or is it broader than that? (Hebrew is neither of these, of course, but Modern Hebrew got much of its syntax and idiom from European languages, so could have borrowed this.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the basis for this syncretism? Past and irrealis seem to have nothing in common; if anything, it would make more sense to line up past with realis and future with irrealis. Imperfective and irrealis maybe have a little more in common in that neither expresses a specific, single, real event, but this still doesn't seem like much. Given that this is a recurrent pattern across several languages, is there a cognitive reason for it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T21:56:36.177" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T21:56:36.177" Title="Which languages conflate (imperfective) past and irrealis, and why?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-19T13:00:10.197" Score="8" ViewCount="910" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or would linguistics also include the study of accessory languages like esperanto, artificial languages like Klingon, or even programming languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2464" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T11:34:48.300" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T11:12:00.567" Title="Is linguistics limited to natural languages?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6984" CreationDate="2014-04-19T13:19:22.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that some research has been done on artificial languages, but Linguistics mostly deals with natural languages and especially with spoken language. Written language is not totally excluded but sounds, sound shifts occur in spoken language, not to mention that this is where language evolves the fastest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true however that there are many aspects that Linguistics analyses such as Pragmatics, where you study how context contributes and also changes sometimes the meaning of an utterance, e.g. think about saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;Today the sun is shining&quot;&lt;/em&gt; where &lt;strong&gt;today&lt;/strong&gt; can apply to any day depending on when you say it. Or also &lt;em&gt;&quot;I sentence the accused to 5 years of prison&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, where the meaning (and action) changes if it's said by a judge or a friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;strong&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt; (language and society), &lt;strong&gt;psycholinguistics&lt;/strong&gt; (study about the biological and psychological factors that base acquisition, comprehension and use of language), &lt;strong&gt;neurolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt; (interdisciplinary science between Linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychobiology, cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology), and so on. They are all within Linguistics but you focus on certain aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard of Linguistics dealing with programming languages (as something to study), and I doubt they're relevant under that point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-04-19T13:19:22.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2014-04-19T21:20:09.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110205626/9783110205626.443/9783110205626.443.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Torrego 2009&lt;/a&gt; argues that postpositive copulative connector -que is the &quot;standard coordinator in ancient texts.&quot; Members of the coordinated set connected by -que are usually conceptually close (Torrego 2009: 457).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also mentions that &quot;although rarely, the postpositive -que can coordinate clauses as well.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernout 1964 writes that this enclitic &quot;disparaît de la langue parlée au debut de l'epoque imperiale&quot; (p. 440). It was eventually ousted by the preposition &lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110205626/9783110205626.443/9783110205626.443.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Torrego 2009&lt;/a&gt; also has two extremely useful tables - reproduced in part below (the more pluses, the higher the frequency).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Dk3R.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;que: distribution syntax&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ErsNm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;que: distribution time&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a comprehensive description of the enclitic -que see &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=1RKPZSUBNaMC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hofmann and Szantyr 1965&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-04-20T01:40:28.757" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T01:40:28.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6984" CreationDate="2014-04-19T21:51:15.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is just the scientific study of language. This definition does not limit the scope of &quot;language&quot; to just natural languages. &quot;Language&quot; is, loosely, a means of communication of information, i.e., from one entity to another. Many different kinds of entities communicate with each other. Many &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130507-talking-chili-plant-communication-science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plants&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_communication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;animals&lt;/a&gt; seem to have vocabularies. However, the field of linguistics has not played much of a role in the study of these because of the absence or paucity of syntax in these communications. In the course of training animals, we know that some animals have the capacity to comprehend &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; syntax. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pepperberg's parrots&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;great apes&lt;/a&gt; have shown they can comprehend simple&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; sentences of human languages. This raises the question of whether their native communications have syntax too. If they do, I'm confident that the techniques of linguistics will be applied to study this too, as it will be for the study of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/lingodroids/home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;robot languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, coming to the question, there are plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;q=esperanto%20linguistics&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;as_sdt=1,5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;academic papers on Esperanto&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.de/scholar?start=0&amp;amp;q=klingon%20linguistics&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=1,5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Klingon&lt;/a&gt;. I have not come across the use of linguistic techniques for the study of computer languages, but on an abstract level, these languages are not all that different from each other, and so there is a great deal of overlap in the concepts that are employed to study them&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: simple for a human, hellishly complex for a dog.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2: though within sensible limits. I don't think there will be a day when we study the phonology of HTML.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T16:50:40.993" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T16:50:40.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6996" CreationDate="2014-04-19T22:20:15.020" Score="0" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is to say, is the deep structure supposed to be what's happening in our head when we speak a language? Or is this just to make our model of a grammar consistent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T09:17:56.967" Title="Is a sentence's deep structure representative of i-language?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2014-04-20T05:43:07.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For most Romance languages at least, there's a totally separate set of conjugation forms called the &quot;subjunctive mode&quot;, used to indicate things that could/should/might be, could/should/might become, or that somebody wishes they did as opposed to the &quot;indicative mode&quot; which usually indicates stuff the way it is. Usually, subjunctive present has nothing to do with indicative past, nor subjunctive past with indicative past perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://conjugation-fr.com/conjugate.php?verb=etre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Even French does this&lt;/a&gt;, except its imperfect &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frenchspanishonline.com/magazine/?p=852&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;doubles work&lt;/a&gt; as a kind of subjunctive after conditional &quot;Si&quot; (If). So you do can say &quot;Si j'étais riche&quot; but you must say &quot;Quand je sois riche&quot; for &quot;Quand j'étais riche&quot; implies you have already been rich, but aren't anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem with English is that over time its subjunctive present has mostly merged with indicative past, subj. past with ind. past perfect and so on. Only exception is verb &quot;to be&quot; in formal settings, which goes &quot;if I &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; you&quot; and &quot;I wish he &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; a writer&quot; (which both change to &quot;was&quot; in colloquial settings - apparently native speakers can't resist regularizing the conjugation pattern).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin future tense disappeared in the Vulgar form of the language, reappearing in Middle Ages by using verb &quot;to have&quot; as an auxiliary: &quot;Yo iré&quot; comes from &quot;Yo ir he&quot; (literally &quot;I to go have&quot;), same happened in French with &quot;J'amerai&quot;, Italian &quot;Io parleró&quot;, etc. Don't know much about proto-Germanic but at least English evolved in a similar way using &quot;to have&quot; or &quot;to shall&quot; for the future. So even if native speakers did feel an affinity between irrealis and the future, the lack of a grammatical future tense most probably stopped such merge to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T05:43:07.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6990" CreationDate="2014-04-20T08:29:03.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deep structure appears to be very real. The modern research on the topic of syntax supports this notion to such a degree that the syntactic movement of constituents is basically a truism. Some fairly revealing, though obvious interpretable, data on the topic of the essentiality of deep structure exists in many fields. One of those fields of research is that of syntactic complexity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many experiments have demonstrated that until a syntactic constituent has found its 'original' location, the mind uses up resources 'holding on' to that constituent. Experiments will, for example, produce paradigms were an individual is presented with an apparently moved constituent early on in the sentence, and then later down the sentence place ambiguous anchor, that immediately after processing a certain word, there arises a possibility for there to be an appropriate location for the moved constituent to be located. As the sentence continues, following words disambiguate the potential 'deep location' into an incompatible location. This causes a fair amount of processing strain, and this strain is incremental as more and more 'false origins' are presented. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this doesn't exactly prove that there is a neurological 'structure', it certainly supports the hypothesis. Almost all investigation into the topic reveal very sophisticated phenomena, going from people 'perceiving' prosodic qualities which are not there in anchoring locations, to people conceptualizing the utterance in its basic-most structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deep structure seems to be so representative of our I-language that we will even commit ungrammatical utterances during communication to grammatical and deep structure-like sentences. Chomskyans, and many other linguists, really believe the deep structure to be the intensional (the 'actual' structure) of I-grammar, and for movement to be executed by the parser, which is a component that operates &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the grammar, but &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; the grammar. I'm not sure, but I think that evidence for deep structure is even found in aphasiac studies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that you say &lt;em&gt;to make our model of grammar consistent&lt;/em&gt;, is I think to mean 'to make our external analysis of grammar' consistent. That is what we call 'extensional' analysis. Most modern linguists are postulating theories concerning the 'intensional' (structural) properties of language.  They're saying &quot;that's what's actually happening in the brain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for going on so long!!&#xA;Thank for reading!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3448" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T08:29:03.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6984" CreationDate="2014-04-20T08:37:30.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer to your question is YES - linguistics is NOT limited to 'natural' languages. While professional linguists mostly deal with naturally occurring languages spoken by people for daily communication, the field of linguistics is concerned with all symbolic systems used to express meaning for some sort of a communicative purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are linguists who study signs, linguists who study chimps and other communicating animals, linguists who study artificial languages (from Esperanto to Klingon), linguists who study art and literature. If it's symbolic with a communicative purpose, it's fair game for linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any linguists who study computer languages (partly because of their very specialised communicative purpose) but they could certainly be studied linguistically in very fruitful ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-04-20T08:52:49.253" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T08:52:49.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6998" CreationDate="2014-04-20T09:13:57.457" Score="8" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that many Arabic female names are ending in -a: Fatima, Yamina, Aisha, Aziza. Is this a modern innovation imported from Indo-European languages or a native feature? Also I wonder about nouns and country names like say Jamahiriya, Arabiya etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-04-20T22:27:27.750" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T10:30:10.653" Title="Is feminine ending in -a a native feature of Semitic languages?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6990" CreationDate="2014-04-20T09:17:56.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction to keep in mind is competence and performance. Chomsky is exclusively concerned with competence, ie. the knowledge of the language system. Deep structure is what defines the competence but it is not active in the process of performance (except in some very constrained contexts such as garden path sentences. Nobody assumes that we're actually generating sentences from some deep structures during the process of utterance. However, the deep structure places constraints on what can be said and what is said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Chomsky (and most generative linguists) don't actually use the concept of deep structure any more. The earlier concepts of deep structure have moved to the notion of Universal Grammar. There are some theories like the Prague Functional Generative Description framework that postulate something akin to deep structure (they the FGD people call it tectogrammatic level) but they still would not claim this to be a part of performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your summary and the actual question are contradictory. I-Language is NOT &quot;what's happening in our head when we speak&quot; that's a description of performance while i-language (for Chomsky, if I understand him correctly) is still a part of competence. It's just a different way of looking at what competence is. It is contrasted with e-language to cover all the externalities like communicative and social knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's precisely this sort of question that has led many linguists (myself included) to abandon the performance/competence distinction and postulate the usage-based model of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T09:17:56.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6995" CreationDate="2014-04-20T10:53:14.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feminine ending -at- is pan-Semitic, as in Arabic malik-un “king” vs. malik-at-un “queen”. In pausal position -at-un becomes -ah, so malikatun becomes malikah. There are similar pausal forms in Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. This is all purely Semitic and has nothing to do with Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T10:53:14.997" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6981" CreationDate="2014-04-20T12:59:27.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I doubt this is possible. Praat doesn't have such an object, as far as I am aware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about it, if there were such an interface, it probably wouldn't make sense to show all of the images at once, since 33 ms is such a short interval of time (only encompassing a few glottal pulses) and unless the spectrogram and waveform are stretched out quite a bit there won't be room to place a bunch of image frames side-by-side without overlapping. Rather, you'd probably want a tool that displays a single window for a single image that keeps changing depending on where in the spectrogram/waveform you place the cursor (I'm thinking of something analogous to the function in Wavesurfer that allows you to hover over the spectrogram and see a snapshot of the spectrum that corresponds to the relevant point in time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, though, I'm pretty sure there's nothing in Praat with this kind of functionality. The best alternative I can come up with is to write a script that allows you to select a point on the spectrogram/waveform and then find (in a specified directory) an image file whose name encodes time information that matches the time of the selection. The script would have to open the image file with some other program besides Praat, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others might have other suggestions. If you're really stuck, you could even contact Paul Boersma directly. His contact info is on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Praat page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-04-20T12:59:27.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6972" CreationDate="2014-04-20T15:55:52.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been famously shown (by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/#listpub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Emmanuel Dupoux&lt;/a&gt;, among others) that the ability to differentiate phonemes markedly decreases after the age of 2. Consequently, you presumably have less ability to distinguish the phonemes of English which are absent in Hungarian that someone who was born and raised in an English-speaking family. In that sense, you might not be a native speaker of English (and you wouldn't be even if you had stayed in the US).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The experimental protocol is as follows: subjects listen to increasingly rapid random series of two phonemes X and Y which are distinct in language A but not in language B and are asked to distinguish them. At first the error rate is identical  for both native speakers of language A and speakers who are native speakers of language B but grew up in a language A environment since the age of 2, namely linear with respect to the speed of the series . But after a certain threshold, which is independent of the languages A and B of the phonemes X and Y, non-native speakers lose the ability to distinguish X and Y and their answers become no more correct than random ones whereas the error rate of native speakers keeps following the linear rate for a much longer time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-05-07T12:41:18.540" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T12:41:18.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7021" CreationDate="2014-04-21T22:09:16.740" Score="4" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether some german verbs, like, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bibbern&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plappern&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lallen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and as well some similar english verbs of which now only &lt;strong&gt;&quot;to giggle&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; comes to my mind, are indeed relics of (ultimately) indo-european reduplication? Or are these rather onomatopoetic newbies? are there more examples in modern (IE) languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-21T23:30:04.850" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T17:11:22.740" Title="Relics of reduplication in modern Germanic languages" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6984" CreationDate="2014-04-22T14:33:03.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chomsky Hierarchy, which starts with simple automata and works it's way up the complexity scale to Turing machines, describes regular, context-free languages.  In this sense, &quot;regular&quot; means rule-based and &quot;context-free&quot; means that everything you need to know about the communication is available in the language.  Programming languages behave this way such that their interpreter or compiler is exercising the rule system for the language.  If you break the rules, you also break the language.  The language can only change if you deliberately change the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural language is context-sensitive.  This means that, while rule-based, a natural language always has many other channels of signal that ultimately determine what is being communicated.  This includes prosodic information (things like intonation, stress, timing that don't always make it into the writing system), Body language, situational and environmental factors, etc.  We &quot;play&quot; with natural language using metaphors and idioms and such, where what is communicated is not available by looking directly at the tokens and grammar of an utterance. Natural language continually evolves, and rules come and go as they enter into and fall out of usage over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's big claim is that there is an underlying structure, common across all natural human language, that undergoes a transition to the particular language used by the speaker.  Linguists who study syntax under the Minimalist program learn to work with theory that expresses this underlying grammar, and that work is, in my humble opinion, very similar to the work undertaken by a computer scientist developing the compiler for a new programming language in that many of the same skills are used in both efforts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Accessory and artificial languages&quot;, if they are going to work and survive, must likewise draw from linguistic features already found in natural languages.  They must have a lexicon, syntax, morphology, a sound system (phonology) and if they work well they will develop semantic and pragmatic features as they get used.  In summary, linguistics is everywhere language is, regardless of it's origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3466" LastActivityDate="2014-04-22T14:33:03.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7005" CreationDate="2014-04-23T00:14:58.760" Score="3" ViewCount="1690" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak Malayalam, one of the Indian languages and also Hindi but there are always common words which I assume are original Sanskrit words? So are the languages truly distinct or can I say they are similar dialects? What would be the apt technical word representing such a situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3470" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T17:53:23.663" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T17:53:23.663" Title="Are Indian languages distinct or are they just different dialects?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2014-04-23T00:37:14.923" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are hundreds of distinct languages in India, from two main families, Dravidian and Indo-European. Malayalam is Dravidian and Hindi is Indo-European, so they are not only different languages but unrelated ones. All the major languages of India have borrowed extensively from Sanskrit, hence the lexical similarities you mention; but this doesn't make them dialects of the same language, any more than the fact that the Hebrew for &quot;telephone&quot; is &lt;em&gt;telefon&lt;/em&gt; makes Hebrew a dialect of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T00:37:14.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-23T09:14:05.803" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and (at least a portion of) other Indo-European languages the perfect aspect's foremost role is that of a discourse marker, marking prior events (or events beginning in the past and continuing into the present) serving as background material to the mainline of the discourse. However, many world languages do not have a perfect aspect so to speak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are other mechanisms used by languages to make the distinction between background material and mainline material that happens to be in the past? I know some languages have dedicated morphemes for marking foreground and background material. Is the stative aspect commonly used for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine it's safe to assume that most languages have such a mechanism, given the rather universal need to distinguish foreground and background material in a discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:05:50.117" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:05:50.117" Title="Alternatives to the Perfect Aspect" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7008" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-04-23T11:28:02.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T11:28:02.987" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T11:28:02.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7009" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-04-23T11:28:02.987" Score="0" Body=" The range of words or elements of an expression over which a modifier or operator has control." OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-04-23T16:00:07.843" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T16:00:07.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6984" CreationDate="2014-04-23T11:37:41.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit suprised that my previous contribution ( which I am keeping unchanged below theline) seems to be considered irrelevant. Hence I am trying to&#xA;explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that other answers more or less exclude very formal&#xA;linguistic expression such as programming languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is there is very little literature claiming to relate them to&#xA;linguistic analysis, and even this claim is rather&#xA;weak. Furthermore it does not seem to involve recognized linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another such paper (in addition to the one below) is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Empirical&#xA;  language analysis in software linguistics, Jean-Marie Favre , Dragan&#xA;  Gasevic , Ralf Lämmel3 , and Ekaterina Pek, &lt;em&gt;Software Language&#xA;  Engineering&lt;/em&gt;, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 6563,&#xA;  2011, pp 316-326 http:/www.researchgate.net/publication/225162167_Empirical_Language_Analysis_in_Software_Linguisticsfiled912f50746a8289574.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the point of my contribution was to suggest that there might&#xA;be a continuum between natural language as commonly studied by&#xA;linguists and formally defined languages such as considered by&#xA;logicians or computer scientists. Specialized sublanguages is my&#xA;approach to suggest such a continuum, starting from the constrained&#xA;structure of legal documents and evolving through more tightly&#xA;constrained technical and scientific languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is that mathematicians do study very formal languages&#xA;(algebras or logic formulae), but actually seldom use them for their&#xA;work which is usually stated more informally, meaning closer to&#xA;vernacular. It is also clear that they would prefer their statements&#xA;and proofs to be stated and checked more formally. This gap is now&#xA;being bridged by new software tools such as proof assistants (see my&#xA;first answer&#xA;below). This is not much different from the programming language&#xA;issue, since a result in logic (the Curry-Howard isomorphism) shows that&#xA;proving and programming are essentially the same kind of activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, if the gap between informal and formal mathematical expression can be&#xA;bridged, the same should become true of programming expression,&#xA;allowing in the long run more informal ways for programming computers&#xA;(a personal opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relation between formal and informal expression has for me a&#xA;striking ressemblance to the way analysis of natural sentences will&#xA;associate them to logical formulae, if only as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lawler's&#xA;study guide&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that an analysis of how programming languages evolve&#xA;or are evolved to encompass more advanced semantic concepts might give&#xA;some light on what is considered intellectually convenient to think&#xA;about problems and to express them. Relating the semantic evolution of&#xA;programming and mathematical languages to analysis of semantic&#xA;structures in natural language might be interesting from a linguistic&#xA;point of view, as they strive for more natural ways of stating whatever they have to express.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Former answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious to me that linguistics cannot be limited to natural&#xA;languages spoken by humans, if only for one good reason: analysing&#xA;extreme cases is a good way to test theories, and to understand the&#xA;nature of a topic. Understanding why the bee communication system (to&#xA;avoid the word language) is or is not a language is part of&#xA;understanding what language is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting aspect is that human communities develop&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;sublanguages&lt;/strong&gt; that are specific of groups or activities. My own experience&#xA;in Legalese writing, for example, was an interesting one, both&#xA;regarding syntax and semantics. My impression is that such sublanguages nearly form a continuum from usual natural languages to such formal creations as programming languages, with scientific languages as intermediaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another topic worth studying is the evolution of scientific languages,&#xA;as it is intimately linked with the scientific activity. The evolution&#xA;of mathematical concepts and understanding has led to changes in&#xA;mathematical notation and expression. And conversely, these changes&#xA;lead to new understanding of mathematics as the language becomes more&#xA;perspicuous with respect to the semantic domains adressed. This is&#xA;also true of other hard sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting aspect of these remarks is that they are more of a&#xA;diachronic nature than of a synchronic one ... possibly because the&#xA;synchronic wiew is linguistically poorer, or maybe too technical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suspect that there is much to be learned too from the&#xA;diachronic analysis of Legalese (and this was probably done).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of &lt;strong&gt;programming languages&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit special. They have clearly&#xA;a linguistic aspect as they are also intended for human&#xA;communications. Programmers learn (often the hard way) that they should&#xA;write programs so that they can read (and understand) them a month&#xA;later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with programming languages is that they are supposed to be&#xA;also used by machines that can interpret correctly only very&#xA;constrained expressions. Actually they could do a lot more, but we do&#xA;not trust them (or ourselves) to use more complex means of expressions&#xA;with machines. To take a simple example, people are reluctant to use&#xA;ambiguous syntax to communicate with machines, even though they ae&#xA;very good (much better than humans) at detecting ambiguity and asking&#xA;for more precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect that the development of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_assistant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;formal tools for checking&#xA;proofs and programs&lt;/a&gt;, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Coq&lt;/a&gt; system, will ultimately help to&#xA;develop programming in a less formal way, with a more natural&#xA;linguistic expression, akin to the way scientists are now&#xA;communicating. The formal part would be taken care of by the&#xA;programming environment. This is only predictive, and not to be too&#xA;much relied upon, but I think there may be much to be expected in the&#xA;longer term from the combination of very powerful formal system&#xA;combined with some AI to provide informal context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, I know of at least one work, actually quite old, that is an&#xA;attempt to analyze programming languages from a linguistic point of&#xA;view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The comparison of programming languages: A linguistic approach&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  John B. Goodenough,&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;ACM '68 Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM national conference&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  Pages 765-785,  ACM New York, NY, USA ©1968 &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=810641&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=810641&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=810641&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;abstract&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, the Harvard dissertation written by Goodenough (circa&#xA;1969) is a very big document, but I was not able to retrieve details&#xA;on Harvard site. Internet search shows that this paper is cited by several others, but it is not&#xA;clear that it all makes a significant body of linguistic literature on&#xA;programming languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-04-26T11:12:00.567" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T11:12:00.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2014-04-23T12:09:32.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, there is a linguistic continuum across Northern India. This means that there are no hard borders between Sindhi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya; instead there is a gradual transition from dialects of one to dialects of another. The Dravidian, Munda and Khasi languages do not participate in this continuum, nor does Sinhalese, which, though Indo-Aryan, is separated geographically from the other Indo-Aryan languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T12:09:32.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7007" CreationDate="2014-04-23T16:21:11.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two common mechanisms are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choice of tense, other than the perfect. Romance languages often use their imperfective past tense for narrative background and their perfective past tense (e.g. French &lt;em&gt;passé composé&lt;/em&gt; or Spanish simple past) for narrative foreground. Suzanne Fleischmann wrote an excellent &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0CCkQFjAA&amp;amp;url=http://books.google.com/books/about/Tense_and_Narrativity.html?id=Q9zG7O9Dp7oC&amp;amp;ei=i-dXU-KzOufd2AWbkIGoBA&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHwSmCTes0AHi0GN6zov2TqsZJiFA&amp;amp;bvm=bv.65177938,d.b2I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; about this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main vs. subordinate clauses. There's a tendency for narrative foreground events to be expressed in main clauses, and for background material to be expressed in subordinate clauses. This isn't absolute, but it's a pretty strong correlation in many languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T16:21:11.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2014-04-23T22:59:51.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may moreover be noted that Malayalam could be considered a dialect of Tamil up to somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. From then onwards it went its own way and was heavily - and by far more than Tamil - influenced by Sanskrit, which may be seen by the mere fact, that the Malayalam script incorporates many non-dravidian Sanskrit sounds. Whereas there is only one labial (dental, retroflex, palatal, velar) plosive indicated by the tamil script, there are four of each of them in Malayalam, much like in the Sanskrit script.&#xA;This is reckoned to be due to the influx of Nambudiri-brahmins from northern India from the 8th century onwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T22:59:51.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4573" CreationDate="2014-04-23T23:29:28.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't hundred percent subscribe to Tamil (refering here to classical Tamil Sangam poetry) being mora-timed. The counting of morae (from the first grammar Tolkāppiyam onwards) is somewhat confusing. E.g. there is of course one mora allotted to a short syllable and two morae to a long one, but moreover there is half a mora for overshort u and i and even a quarter mora to an overshort aytam and so on. The terminology of morae seems to be superfluous in Tamil and probably taken from Sanskrit, as can be gleaned from the borrowing of māttirai from Skt. mātrā - mora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically Tamil meter is based not on a dichotomy of long and short syllables but on one of simple and compound metrical units, called nēr and nirai respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compound unit: one short syllable followed by anything.&#xA;Simple unit: the residue single syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These units are then arranged in bars, for example bars of two units each and e.g. four bars to a line. It therefore does bear some likeness to Middle High German meter, which is based on bars and it indeed does insinuate moric equivalence of one long syllable to two shorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, syllabic meter can be considered native to Indo-Aryan, since already Vedic Meter is based on the distinction of longs and shorts, though with much less strict patterns than Classical Sanskrit meter. It seems rather likely, that the moric meters of early Middle Indian and then Classical Sanskrit evolved by midwifery of Dravidian meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. for Tamil Meter Kamil K. Zvelebil - Classical Tamil Prosody, New Era Publications, Madras 1989;&#xA;for suggestion of Tamil meter being purely moric and bar-timed George L. Hart - The poems of Ancient Tamil, University of California Press, Berkeley 1975.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an overall discussion of the evolution of Classical Sanskrit Meter there is an unpublished master thesis of University of Tübingen in Germany, which I could provide, if German is an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T23:29:28.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="335" CreationDate="2014-04-23T23:36:04.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutinating Old Turkish (Uyghur) and Mongolian are similar to the extent of affixes being the same though quite sure these languages are not in any way related. Being no expert of Mongolian, I can't provide details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-04-23T23:36:04.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-24T07:56:50.477" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;The medieval sound changes of New Persian are suggestive of tracing back ultimately to the script, so as if to normalize the writting by adjusting the underlying spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the majhul and ma'ruf vowels ī/ē and ū/ō which are written the same coincide and nearly all sounds indicated by ه at the end of words become -e, irrespective of whither they go back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there instances known of written, &quot;classical&quot; but not artificial languages where phonological changes were or may have been prompted by the script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T11:08:06.273" Title="Do written languages evolve along the lines of the script?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7016" CreationDate="2014-04-24T10:09:25.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that any of these changes can be explained in terms of the script. All Old Iranian final short vowels were lost already in Middle Persian. New Persian final –a (Western Persian –e) is from Middle Persian –ag. This is why /a/ is virtually the only final short vowel in New Persian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T10:09:25.207" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7016" CreationDate="2014-04-24T11:08:06.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian is an example of such a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian there are two distinct letters &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ё&lt;/code&gt;, after a consonant letter &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; is pronounced as ['e] and &lt;code&gt;ё&lt;/code&gt; as ['o], the apostrophe means the preceding consonant sound is palatalized:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;мел [m'el] 'chalk'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;мёл [m'ol] 'swept'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the point is that, as a distinct letter, &lt;code&gt;ё&lt;/code&gt; was introduced rather recently, in the 18th century, and its usage was usually arbitrary, one could always write &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; instead, besides many typewriters had no &lt;code&gt;ё&lt;/code&gt; key, for technical reasons, so all that resulted in confusion of the two letters, mostly in borrowed words, and in mispronouncing of some others, which was so widespread that some of those mispronounced variants became the norm now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Leo Tolstoy's name in standard modern Russian is &lt;code&gt;Лев [l'ef] Толстой&lt;/code&gt;, but his actual name was &lt;code&gt;Лёв [l'of]&lt;/code&gt;, and 99% of Russians are unaware of this. Other examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Goebbels: the correct Г**ё**ббельс is now changed to Г**e**ббельс (the same thing with Göring, Röhm, Montesquieu, Richelieu, and Röntgen, pronounced with [e] in modern Russian);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;мушкетёр 'musketeer' and фуникулёр 'funicular' - the French words from which these two were borrowed ended in -aire, so in Russian they should have had the final [e], still it is [o] now;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;аф**е**ра 'fraud, affair' and гренад**е**р 'grenadier' are commonly mispronounced with [o], although the official dictionaries say it must be [e].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, as you can see, this affects some specific groups of words, in native Russian words nobody mixes up the two letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, your question is connected with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/a&gt;, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#H-adding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;H-adding&lt;/a&gt; etc., that happens in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T11:08:06.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6222" CreationDate="2014-04-24T11:37:16.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages don't technically just &quot;come into existence&quot; as they're products of language evolution that is quite subtle, gradual and slow. Language is not only defined by mutual intelligibility - or lack of it - with other languages, but also by its speakers' concept of a separate linguistic identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you could get a precise date, but as Manjusri stated your best bet would be glottochronology or diachronics as to determine the amount of separation between Hixkaryana and other Cariban languages. I can't recommend sources of whose content I can be certain as Carib languages are quite far from what I know well, but you should research what you can on the history of Cariban languages, Proto-Cariban and most of all this new work published by &lt;strong&gt;Spike Gildea&lt;/strong&gt; in 2012 (&quot;Linguistic studies in the Cariban family&quot;) if you're serious about it as it seems interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T11:37:16.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6126" CreationDate="2014-04-24T11:55:32.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a phenomenon with a single origin; it probably evolved convergently (separate languages developing the same thing). Swedish's close relative, &lt;strong&gt;Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt;, doesn't have this (the word for someone in Icelandic is &quot;einhver&quot;, from &quot;einn + hver&quot; = &quot;one + who&quot;), and its even closer relative, &lt;strong&gt;Norwegian&lt;/strong&gt;, has &quot;noen&quot; which comes from an Old Norse adjective meaning &quot;some(one/thing)&quot;, so it's not a Scandinavian thing, and &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt; has a unique word, &quot;jemand&quot;, that can't be broken down into parts so it's not even a Germanic thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T11:55:32.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7002" CreationDate="2014-04-24T12:24:17.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt;, there are four verbs that are descendants of reduplicating verbs: they're called the &quot;-ri&quot; verbs due to their characteristic past tense suffix that they share with no other verb. These are &quot;snúa&quot; (to turn), &quot;núa&quot; (to rub), &quot;gróa&quot; (to heal) and &quot;róa&quot; (to row). In &lt;strong&gt;Old Norse&lt;/strong&gt;, the verb &quot;sá&quot; (to sow) used to be in this group but Icelandic changed it to a weak verb (its past tense is &quot;sáði&quot; instead of expected &quot;seri&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These four verbs come from &lt;strong&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/strong&gt; strong verbs. These verbs are currently (infinitive and first person past):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;snúa&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; sneri&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;núa&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; neri&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gróa&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; greri&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;róa&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; reri&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;sá&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; *seri)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, the interesting ones are the actual reduplicating ones, &quot;snúa&quot;, &quot;róa&quot;, &quot;gróa&quot; and &quot;sá&quot;. These used to be quite different in Proto-Germanic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;snōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; snúa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; róa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; gróa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sēaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; sá&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Germanic, they formed their past tense by reduplication of the first syllable, with other changes as appropriate of strong verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;snōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; *se-snō &gt; seznō&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; *re-rō &gt; rerō&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grōaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; *ge-grō &gt; gegrō&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sēaną&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; *se-sō &gt; sezō&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to Verner's law, the /s/ in those past tenses changed to a /z/, which then merged with /r/ in Icelandic. In &quot;snōaną&quot; and &quot;grōaną&quot; there was an additional metathesis (to &quot;snezō&quot; and &quot;gregō&quot;), and &quot;grōaną&quot; itself analogically probably aligned with &quot;snōaną&quot; to give &quot;grezō&quot;. I'm not aware of any other such reduplication in Germanic languages; Icelandic's closest relative, Faroese, has already analogically levelled these reduplicative forms and made these verbs fully weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;núa&quot; I am not certain what had happened before it became a &quot;-ri&quot; verb. I cannot find etymological information for it in the dictionaries I use, but it might have been &quot;nōaną&quot; that formed its past tense as &quot;nenō&quot;. How it became a &quot;-ri&quot; verb is something I don't know but I suspect it underwent the same analogy as &quot;grōaną&quot; did from &quot;gregō&quot; to &quot;grezō&quot; (&quot;nenō&quot; &gt; &quot;nezō&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Western Germanic &quot;ge-&quot; prefix doesn't have anything to do with reduplication as it comes from Proto-Germanic &quot;ga-&quot; which itself comes from Proto-Indo-European &quot;ḱom&quot; (whence also Slavic &quot;сън&quot; and Persian &quot;ham&quot;.) The reason it became a past participle marker is that it became added onto verbs to show the perfective aspect/a completed action, and then was spread out to the past in general. Verbs prefixed with PGmc. &quot;ga-&quot; always took on some suffixes that made them nouns or adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-04-24T13:17:37.600" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T13:17:37.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6995" CreationDate="2014-04-24T19:19:26.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semitic nouns originally had three cases:nominative,objective,possessive/oblique; and many feminine nouns took a -ta ending, which shortened to -a@(glottal stop or the like) and then simply to -a(long, and often written as -ah).so, we might illustrate all of the above as follows, using the sus/horse root:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                                   masculine    feminine&#xA;                                                   horse        mare&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nominative - horse/mare as subject.                   sus.u.       sus.at.u&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;objective.   horse/mare as object/extent/direction.   sus.a.(ma/m) sus.at.a(ma/m)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possessive - of horse/mare; horse's/mare's}           sus.i.       sus.at.i&#xA; oblique - to/by/from/with/etc.  horse/mare}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2469" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T19:19:26.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6995" CreationDate="2014-04-24T19:27:21.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely derivation of 'Allah (found as a pre-Quranic name) is 'al-'ilah = the &#xA;(supreme/true/only)God. Arabic 'ilah = Hebrew 'elah &gt;'elo(a)h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2469" LastActivityDate="2014-04-24T19:27:21.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-25T07:10:08.853" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a suffix in Kyrgyz and I am not sure whether it denotes future tense or imperfective aspect. Are there any tests which can help me to distinguish between imperfective aspect and future tense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-06-24T07:45:09.860" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T07:45:09.860" Title="Imperfective aspect or Future tense?" Tags="&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6995" CreationDate="2014-04-25T10:30:10.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Masculine adjectives in Arabic can end in -I: hence, 'Arab.i...and the femininine is made from adding -ya to the masculine: hence, the feminine would become 'arab.i.ya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2469" LastActivityDate="2014-04-25T10:30:10.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7031" CreationDate="2014-04-25T21:28:08.750" Score="3" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take the word pairs &quot;scary&quot; and &quot;scared&quot;, or &quot;pleasing&quot; and &quot;pleased&quot;. The former adjectives give the impression of inspiring the particular emotion, and the latter adjectives are the emotion itself. I.e. if something is &quot;scary&quot;, it makes something else &quot;scared&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what is the qualitative difference between these two types of words? What type of adjectives are they, and is there a particular term for this (admittedly small) class of word pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-26T06:12:44.753" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T16:05:02.977" Title="What is the difference in word pairs like &quot;scary&quot; and &quot;scared&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-04-30T11:46:32.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7045" CreationDate="2014-04-26T01:06:46.857" Score="2" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone give me any information at all on the distribution of fricatives (or the lack thereof) in Australian aboriginal languages, nearby languages, and worldwide?  Additionally, any further or related information would be very helpful.  Any source at all will do, the more the better, but I would prefer well-established academic sources.  Explicit quotations with citations would be handy too (but a quote without a citation is not as helpful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3480" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T01:21:04.350" Title="Australian Aboriginal Languages: Fricatives" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-26T05:23:18.573" Score="7" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;In agglutinative languages there are normally roots for nouns and/or verbs that can have multiple morphemes attached as affixes, following certain rules, to add information such as tense, aspect, mood, person, number, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of diversity among agglutinative languages, some agglutinate several word classes, other languages only one word class. Each language has its own rules with the affixes usually (but not always) fitting a &quot;template&quot; of which affixes come in which position / order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But have linguistic universals of these morphemes been studied to see common tendencies of the ordering of the morphemes across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect some trends and maybe big differences between suffixing and prefixing languages, but it's only a hunch and I don't know where to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2014-04-30T11:09:13.627" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T18:37:19.387" Title="Across agglutinative languages are there tendencies for morphemes to occur in certain orders?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7028" CreationDate="2014-04-26T16:05:02.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many forms ending in &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; stem from full past participles, e.g. &lt;em&gt;scared&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;angered&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;annoyed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pleased&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;destroyed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fixed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;touched&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;relaxed&lt;/em&gt;, etc. These forms actually line up somewhere between adjectives and full past passive participles. The one form may be more participle-like than adjective-like, and the next may be more adjective-like than participle-like. There is a participle-to-adjective continuum of a sort, whereby a given form ending in &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; appears somewhere on the continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many forms ending in &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; stem from present participles, e.g. &lt;em&gt;pleasing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;annoying&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;touching&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;relaxing&lt;/em&gt;, etc. These forms line up somewhere between adjectives and full present active participles. The one form may be more participle-like than adjective-like, and the next may be more adjective-like than participle-like. Thus there is also a present-participle-to-adjective continuum, whereby a given form ending in &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; appears somewhere on the continuum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present participles express active meaning, whereas as past participles often express passive meaning. There is therefore a clear difference between the forms &lt;em&gt;pleasing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pleased&lt;/em&gt;, the former indicating active meaning associated with a cause and the latter indicating passive meaning associated with a patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms such as &lt;em&gt;scary&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;touchy&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are simply adjectives. Whether or not they derived from verbs is not clear (to me), although they seem more like active participles than like passive participles, since the meaning they express is associated with a cause or an agent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T16:05:02.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2014-04-26T16:11:52.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lanna ( northern thai ) has six tones as well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3483" LastActivityDate="2014-04-26T16:11:52.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7035" CreationDate="2014-04-26T19:10:33.327" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a PoS tagger and I was wondering if there is a way to determine if a word is a verb other than looking in a list of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i'm doing is marking all words as nouns, then if it ends with ed marking it as a past-participle verb, if ending ly then as an adverb, if ending in al then as adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT: I'm looking to do this in English.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3484" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-04-28T15:17:41.657" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T15:17:41.657" Title="How to determine if a word is a verb besides looking in a list of verbs?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7037" CreationDate="2014-04-26T19:33:48.280" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a couple questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a B.S. in Environmental science &amp;amp; policy and a couple publications in the environmental chemistry field. Yet I've come to be really interested in Linguistics and particularly language education. I have fluency in Spanish, and elementary knowledge of German and Hebrew, and a very good general understanding of language. Is it plausible to gain acceptance to a Linguistics or Language Education M.A./Ph.D. program? I am confident of my ability but I don't have &quot;paper-credentials&quot; for language as it were, for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is not a question actually about linguistics, yet I know the SE community and would really appreciate an answer from people who are serious/experienced in the specific field. If all goes well and I am able to proceed with this interest of mine, I expect I'll be posting in this SE community more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3485" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-04-26T19:51:23.530" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T11:08:06.257" Title="Plausibility of getting a linguistics education when coming from another field entirely?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7033" CreationDate="2014-04-26T23:36:15.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your goal is POS-tagging, looking up the word in a list may not always be helpful, because the same word may act like one of many classes, depending on its context. (See &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;set&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, unsupervised (i.e. without using annotated data to train a model) POS tagging is a well-researched topic. The paper, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/sgwater/papers/emnlp10-20yrsPOS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Two Decades of Unsupervised POS induction: How far have we come?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; compares several approaches you could use, either for implementation, or for inspiration. As a starting point, I recommend looking into the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cs4705/fall2012/lectures/brown.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Brown clustering algorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xekYkdJS0aM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt;), which, despite being one of the most effective methods mentioned there, is simple enough to be taught in introductory NLP classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-04-27T00:22:00.260" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T00:22:00.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2014-04-27T09:23:14.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to distinguish between tense, aspect and time reference. For instance, the English present continuous combines a present time reference with an imperfective aspect. However, it is often used to denote future time reference as well in some contexts. E.g. &quot;We're leaving at 8 sharp tomorrow morning.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to do is a functional analysis of the whole system of tense, aspect and mood. I tried to something like that for Czech, here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole system of labels for tenses and aspects is really a mixture of tradition and some general principles but their definitions are not reliable to predict actual uses across languages. For instance, in the above presentation I showed that you could easily reimagine a Czech system without aspect or the English system with only three tenses and three aspects. These things are just more or less arbitrary labels for ways in which languages code reference to time, perspective on action progress vs. completeness, repetition, mood, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I find the labels 'tense' and 'aspect' useful shortcuts when describing these complex phenomena - particularly in broadly related languages - but they're just that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T09:23:14.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7034" CreationDate="2014-04-27T11:08:06.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to most post-graduate degrees, it is possible to be accepted to a different field of study from your bachelor's degree. Acceptance usually depends on several factors, including a demonstrable interest in the field, your personal statement, and good recommendation letters. Without having an example of a programme you are thinking of applying to, it is hard to answer your question completely but here is an example of entry requirements for an MA in Linguistics at King's College London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'The programme is particularly suitable for students whose undergraduate degree included a minority of linguistic course units, or who have studied linguistics of a more traditional type elsewhere. It is also suitable for good graduates who have encountered linguistics only indirectly, for instance through psychology, philosophy, or foreign language teaching.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you are able to demonstrate your interest in your personal statement (your languages should help with this), and have a high-quality bachelor's degree, it is likely that you will be considered for the programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was accepted to an MSc in English Language and Linguistics with an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Politics. My first semester was taught rather than research, and despite the steep learning curve, the structure of the course allowed for little prior knowledge of the subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2739" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T11:08:06.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2014-04-27T13:29:50.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Max Plank Institute's Department of Linguistics &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire/tma_description.php&quot;&gt;has a few resources&lt;/a&gt;, including a questionnaire, for dealing with questions of tense and aspect. But as Dominik hinted, tense and aspect are a tricky thing, and a often very intertwined to the point that it gets quite difficult to pick them apart, and even linguists can disagree (for instance, many sources talk about a past and nonpast tense in Japanese, while many others talk about perfective and imperfective aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T13:29:50.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7040" CreationDate="2014-04-27T15:40:22.733" Score="3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently visited Jordan and noticed that many mosaic are commented&#xA;with included text. The text seems mostly ancient Greek alphabet, but&#xA;it also contains non Greek characters such as &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;, obviously&#xA;standing for Σ, at least for some words. Given I forgot most I ever&#xA;knew of Greek, I mostly looked at city names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example yous have the cities &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/mad/sources/sources035.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NϵAΠOΛIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/mad/sources/sources086.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ΔIOCΠωΛIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on two mosaics&#xA;from the 8th century in the Church of St. Stephen at Umm al&#xA;Rasas. Note also the different spellings for city (POLIS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly. on the 6th century mosaic map of the Holy Land in the&#xA;Church of St George at Madaba, there is the city &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.soniahalliday.com/category-view3.php?pri=madaba-mosaic-j18-7-21jt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NIKOΠOΛIC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Look below Bethleem (number 2) on the large this map:&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Madaba_Map_reproduction.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EaUrw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;h century map of Holy Land&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cannot be the cyrillic alphabet, which does not contain ω and was&#xA;created in the ninth century anyway, its authors (saint Cyril and&#xA;Methodius being born between 815 and 827).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate and evolution in the use of Greek characters in&#xA;that part of the world. Unless the use of &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; was justified because&#xA;the ending sigma &lt;strong&gt;ς&lt;/strong&gt; is not easily rendered in mosaic. This does not&#xA;seem too likely as mosaics are pretty good at that level of details (look at the &lt;strong&gt;λ&lt;/strong&gt; for Bethleem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone give some light on this. Was there an evolution in&#xA;writing. How much of it was already done when the two brothers created&#xA;the Cyrillic alphabet, and would it explain some of the new characters&#xA;in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.soniahalliday.com/category-view3.php?pri=madaba-mosaic-j18-7-21jt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third mosaic&lt;/a&gt; (map of the Holy Land) is the Greek spelling of&#xA;Bethleem, with two different epsilons: &lt;strong&gt;BHϑλϵEM&lt;/strong&gt;. And there is also the frequent mixing of lower and upper case (if  I may called them that way, given the time). Was that common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T17:43:42.907" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T17:43:42.907" Title="Was there an evolution of the Greek alphabet in the Middle East?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2014-04-27T17:52:28.810" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are all normal Greek characters. &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; is a form of sigma: it's called lunate sigma, and is a variant that's sometimes used in printed texts these days too. Lunate sigma is a Hellenistic development which occurred in handwritten Greek (not specific to mosaics) for speed of writing. (It's also the origin of the Cyrillic &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; for [s].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ΔIOCΠωΛIC the omega must be a spelling mistake: at this period Greek no longer distinguished the sound of omega (originally [ɔː]) from that of omicron ([o]), and such confusions are common. The two epsilons in &quot;Bethlehem&quot; look almost the same to me; one's a bit more rounded, but that's well within the usual range of shape variation in pre-print era texts. The lowercase-uppercase distinction would not arise for another several centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-04-27T17:52:28.810" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7042" CreationDate="2014-04-28T09:29:46.913" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in Ovid, Metamorphoses , 1.502-503 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                 fugit ōcior aurā &#xA;illa leuī nequ(e) ad haec reuocantis uerba resistit.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (rough) translation :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   But she flees, quicker than the soft breeze,&#xA;and resists these words calling her back again.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm stuck with the scansion of the verse 503 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;illa leuī nequ(e) ad haec reuocantis uerba resistit.&#xA;1  -2-  3  4          5   -6-  7 8   9   -10- 11 12 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the &quot;ad&quot; word this verse seems to have 13 syllables, not 12. There at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/apolloetdaphne/courses/lines-502-507&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one person&lt;/a&gt; thinking that this &quot;ad&quot; should be elided but this correction seems very curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any critic edition of the Metamorphoses. Is the text questionable ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T09:55:28.220" Title="anomaly in a Latin hexameter" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7041" CreationDate="2014-04-28T09:55:28.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verse is correct. ne-qu(e)a-d(h)aec is three sylables: short + short + long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-28T09:55:28.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-28T19:22:31.053" Score="9" ViewCount="9656" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is any conversational corpus available to the public. The ideal corpus would be one made up of AIM messages with users tagged and lots of different users.  I would imagine something like this might not be available and haven't been able to find anything for a while now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess there are some issues with privacy but I am more looking for generic chat conversations so even a corpus with a lot of privacy related things stripped would be helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case nothing like this exists I was looking for websites with large comment sections that I could crawl online (reddit, imgur, youtube) so any suggestions for that list would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3490" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T06:48:41.090" Title="Corpus of Chat/IM/Text Conversations?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7029" CreationDate="2014-04-29T00:25:13.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding Australian languages, have a look at R.M.W. Dixon (2002) 'Australian Languages, their nature and development' (in the Cambridge Language Surveys series). Pp 602ff deal with stop contrasts and fricatives. It's well-known that Australian languages mostly lack phonemic fricatives, but an explanation for this has been proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jcu.edu.au/the-cairns-institute/publications-of-the-cairns-institute/e-lectures/australian-phonologies-and-aboriginal-hearing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andy Butcher of Flinders University&lt;/a&gt; (as you might guess, it remains somewhat controversial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fletcher &amp;amp; Butcher have an article titled 'Sound patterns of Australian languages' in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/311027969X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;upcoming publication&lt;/a&gt; which covers these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; also discusses this issue, surveying the situation across the world and providing a map of the distribution of fricatives (along with some other consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A now dated but still useful reference on the distribution and prevalence of phonemes is Maddieson (1984) 'Patterns of Sounds', CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T01:21:04.350" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T01:21:04.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7044" CreationDate="2014-04-29T04:53:35.387" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.nps.edu/cmartell/NPSChat.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the NPS chat corpus&lt;/a&gt; included with NLTK, also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1416/3492&quot;&gt;NUS text message corpus for text conversations.&lt;/a&gt; You can also use &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.twitter.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Twitter API&lt;/a&gt; to build a corpus of tweets as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3492" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T04:53:35.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-29T05:36:06.073" Score="3" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dixon (the Australianist) has claimed that the Phoenician/Canaanite script is the ultimate source of all known alphabetic (purely essentially-phonemic) scripts on Earth; all other scripts are not alphabetic.  But he claimed this notion as fact more than a quarter of a century ago.  Is this statement still well-established as true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3480" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T17:03:43.827" Title="Origin of Alphabetic/Phonemic Scripts" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-29T06:14:33.663" Score="2" ViewCount="2564" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people know the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, when God broke apart the world's singular language into 70 different branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguists don't give this a second thought, or anything more than folklore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've read some very convincing literature that traces a large portion of many of the world's great languages back to one parent language that is very similar to modern Hebrew.&#xA;The evidence is pretty convincing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the English word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;DiReCtion&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is very similar to the Hebrew word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;DeReC&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; meaning &quot;route&quot;. Another basic example is the Japanese word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;SaMuRai&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; which is very similar to the Hebrew word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ShoMeR&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; which means &quot;watchman&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More example are here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edenics.org/languages-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.edenics.org/languages-3/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what is the reason this theory is not more widely recognized? Is it because it tries to legitimize something from the Bible and is therefore seen as unscientific? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3493" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-04-29T09:52:26.903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T05:38:20.857" Title="Why is Edenics not recognized as a serious linguistic theory?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2014-04-29T07:43:30.570" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern linguistics does not rule out the possibility that all languages of the world descended from a single language. But the mainstream consensus seems to be an agnostic one: Most think that this hypothesis is not testable, at least not with the current data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages change. More you try to track those changes back in time using scientific methods (comparative and internal reconstruction), less you become certain about the properties of the &lt;em&gt;proto-language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, now linguists have a pretty clear picture of the properties of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; language, the ancestor of English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi an many others, conjectured to be spoken some time between 7th and 4th millennia BC. But there are many unresolved problems and uncertainties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These uncertainties cause problems in so called &lt;em&gt;long range reconstructions&lt;/em&gt;. When you try to apply the comparative method to proto-languages, most of the time you come up with things like &quot;the word for 'foot' must be a consonant followed by a vowel followed by a consonant followed by a vowel (CVCV)&quot;. Obviously it doesn't help much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, most mainstream linguists seem to be inclined to think that these uncertainties make long range reconstructions unfeasible past a certain point in time. But some linguists do nevertheless work on long range reconstructions using more or less accepted methods. (check &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, we have very good reasons to conclude that Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be the proto-world language. It's a part of the well-studied Semitic language family. It has current (like Arabic) and historical (like Akkadian) relatives. There is ample evidence that together they go back to an older proto-language: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language&quot;&gt;Proto-Semitic&lt;/a&gt;. And there is also evidence that Proto-Semitic, in turn, goes back to an even older proto-language called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afroasiatic_language&quot;&gt;Proto-Afroasiatic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;convincing&quot; examples you give are not convincing at all. The English word &quot;direction&quot;, for instance, has a well established etymology that goes back to Proto-Indo-European, through French and Latin. Those are &lt;em&gt;chance resemblances&lt;/em&gt;. If you scan enough words, you're eventually going to come up with some words with somehow similar meanings and that look somehow similar between any two languages. So, this definitely isn't a scientific method. Scientific comparison requires &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; correspondences. Many of them. Try to find some material on how Proto-Indo-European was painstakingly reconstructed by linguists with more than a century's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, no, the Edenics is not rejected because it tries to legitimize something from the Bible. It's rejected simply because there is no scientific evidence that supports Edenics and there is ample scientific evidence that rules it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T07:43:30.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2014-04-29T10:17:53.193" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea that all languages derive from Hebrew has been around for a long time. It is a theological construct, not a scientific theory. By the way, the tower of Babel story (Gen 11,1-9) does not say anything about “70 different branches”, nor does it claim that Hebrew was the primeval language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T10:17:53.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7047" CreationDate="2014-04-29T16:57:59.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may or may not be true, depending on what is meant by &quot;ultimate source&quot;: are we talking about specific letter shapes, or just the abstract principle of an alphabet? If the former, no; if the latter, probably yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most alphabets in existence (I'm using the term in its broadest sense to include abjads and abugidas) do straightforwardly descend from the Phoenician script, though often with modifications not only of the letter forms but of the system itself: e.g. the Greek innovation of consistently writing out vowels. One case where there is some controversy is the Brahmi script of India, from which modern south and southeast Asian scripts are descended, but even there the majority opinion is that it derives from some Semitic alphabet (whether or not this was specifically Phoenician).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are also alphabets which were deliberate inventions rather than modifications of an existing model: Hangul, for example. The grapheme shapes of Hangul have nothing to do with those of any Phoenician-derived script, so in that sense it isn't a descendant of Phoenician. However, even in these cases, the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of using an alphabet (rather than, say, a syllabary or a logographic script) seems to have been inspired by some existing alphabet to which the inventors were exposed, which would ultimately have been Phoenician-descended. So in that more abstract sense, all alphabets, as far as I know, are ultimately traceable to Phoenician (or else to another related Semitic alphabet, since Phoenician was not the first of these).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T16:57:59.617" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7053" CreationDate="2014-04-29T17:16:38.727" Score="2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the letters of the Arabic script do not represent any native Persian sounds and thus are used only for Arabic loans. Therefore, e.g., there are four &quot;z&quot;-sounds in the Farsi script, ز ض ظ ذ.&#xA;Now some of these letters are used in native words, for example ذ in گذشتن. Is there any phonetic logic behind that? Are there other examples for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about غ and ق? Is there a hard and fast rule, like (that's what I heard) only geyn being used for native Persian words? (If that be so, in connection with the following question, what about the city قم?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question concerns the names of places in Iran, for example Teheran (now written تهران, earlier طهران) and Esfahan (earlier, as far as I know, اصپهان). Are these place names of Arabic origin and therefore written with the &quot;special characters&quot; or is there some other reason behind that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T18:59:08.980" Title="Use of Arabic script for Farsi" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2014-04-29T18:47:00.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ق occurs in Arabic and Turkish/Mongolian loanwords. غ occurs in Arabic, Turko-Mongolian and a few words of Iranian (but usually not Persian) origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic was the official language in Islamic Iran for a long time and for this reason many place-names are used in an &quot;official&quot; Arabicised form, even if they are of Persian origin e.g. اصفهان for Persian spahān.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of  ذ in a few words of Iranian etymology is a somewhat complicated matter. You can read about it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/DictionaryOfManichaeanVol2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/DictionaryOfManichaeanVol2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pages 93 sqq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-04-29T18:59:08.980" LastActivityDate="2014-04-29T18:59:08.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2014-04-30T00:58:08.723" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an addendum to cyco130's excellent answer, it's easy to see based on simple math that resemblances like the ones you cite can tell us nothing about language relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From looking at some of the materials in the website you link to, the procedure seems to be: (a) ignore vowels; (b) treat consonants as interchangeable if they are members of the same phonetic class, of which there are six (bilabials, dentals, gutturals, fricatives, liquids, and nasals). (You can also metathesize or add nasals to your heart's content, but I'll ignore that.) This means that there are only &lt;em&gt;six distinctive elements&lt;/em&gt; which can be compared. So if we're looking at a word that contains three consonants, there are a total of 6x6x6 = 216 possible types of such words. Within each type, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the words could be related to each other by this method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now how many words are there in the world's languages? At a very conservative estimate, let's say there are 4000 languages, each with a lexicon of 10,000 words. That's 40,000,000 words. Each of the 216 classes would then contain an average of 40,000,000/216 = 185,185 words, &lt;em&gt;all of which&lt;/em&gt; would be considered &quot;similar to each other&quot;. Now all you need is to find some pairs of these words that are also vaguely similar in their semantics, and you have things like &lt;em&gt;shomer - samurai&lt;/em&gt;. As many of them as you want, between any two languages you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you make the phonetic rules stricter, so that you can only compare &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and not with &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; and so on, the math will still mean that most of these resemblances will be due to chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why Edenics is not recognized as a serious linguistic theory, and also why scientific historical linguistics does not work with resemblances at all, but with regular correspondences, which are a completely different concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, the older form of the word &lt;em&gt;samurai&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;em&gt;saburai&lt;/em&gt;, which looks a lot less like &lt;em&gt;shomer&lt;/em&gt;. This is usually the case with these accidental resemblances: the more you know about the words' histories, the less similar they look.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T01:09:45.940" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T01:09:45.940" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-04-30T02:48:21.557" Score="11" ViewCount="3017" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm from a Chinese background. I wonder why there are inflections in many languages, as compared with no inflections in Chinese. I personally suppose that a language should originate simple and easy to use. Why bother to use am/is/are when be can convey almost the same meaning? Why objective cases? Why plurals? (Plurals also complicate expression when numbers are unspecific. In programming, extra steps are needed to determine the right form  to use.) Why not make it simpler especially when a language is used as a means for general communication, and make it easier for learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thanks for your answers. If plurals do often convey necessary information (and in Chinese, characters such as 们, 些 are  added to express plurality when necessary) and objective case may, in my view, denote the object (not to confound with the subject of the next sentence) and avoid repetitive use of the same pronouns in sentences with a clause, what about am/is/are? Is this for phonetic harmony? What about third person singular verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3497" LastEditorUserId="3497" LastEditDate="2014-05-01T00:55:29.910" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T11:54:39.310" Title="Why are there inflections?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7030" CreationDate="2014-04-30T08:14:47.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet for looking at universals is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Universals Archive of the University of Konstanz&lt;/a&gt;. If you go under the search tab, you'll find options to narrow down what you're looking for. I suggest either morphology or inflection as the search domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-01T02:11:04.560" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T02:11:04.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-04-30T13:04:20.447" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic answer is &quot;because there are&quot;. Languages work the way languages work: we can explain &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; something has come about in a language, but &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; questions are nearly always unanswerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is about two different things: the kinds of grammatical distinction made in a language (such as plural, or objective case) and the mechanism by which these are expressed. But my answer still applies in both cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take number: in all European languages, most of the time you cannot say anything without clarifying whether you are talking about one or many (in some languages, one, two or many). To speakers of Chinese, Japanese and many other languages this seems unnecessarily fussy - but while it puts an extra burden on the speaker it arguably makes the hearer's job easier (I recall when I was studying Japanese I was confused for a moment by the phrase &lt;em&gt;yama no naka ni&lt;/em&gt;, which I translated as &quot;in a mountain&quot;, and wondered what kind of house was inside a mountain. Of course it meant &quot;a house in the mountains&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, in Japanese and some other languages it is almost impossible to speak without conveying the relative rank of the speaker and the hearer or people spoken about: these are built into the grammar of the language. To an English speaker this is a great complication in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On inflection particularly: as a matter of fact, English has less inflection than most European languages, but this does not mean that English is necessarily &quot;simpler&quot; than those languages: complexity seems to appear in other ways (for example, in the use of prepositions, the idiomatic meanings of English's wide array of verbal &quot;tenses&quot;, and in the phrasal verbs with which it abounds). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know very much Chinese, but my impression is that while the lack of inflection makes some aspects of the grammar &quot;simple&quot;, others (such as the use of aspectual particles) have their own complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-04-30T13:04:20.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-04-30T18:47:26.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, &lt;strong&gt;because inflections deliver valuable information, otherwise unavailable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we get to a more detailed answer, let me emphasize an important one of the potential implications of Chomskyan linguistics, suggesting that &lt;strong&gt;all human languages are equally complex&lt;/strong&gt;. This means, in particular, that a language with a simpler &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; (like Chinese, comparing to English) would more likely to have a more complicated and non-straightforward &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take an example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;我的&lt;/code&gt; requires two words, while it's English counterpart is a single word, &lt;code&gt;my&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Note, no inflections yet.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ukrainian, the same adjective &lt;code&gt;мій&lt;/code&gt; is declined in agreement with the object. If you take a single word, &lt;code&gt;моїми&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;even with no object&lt;/strong&gt;, this provides with information about plural noun and Instrumental case. You can think of an analogy that a single adjective delivers a syntax pattern: &lt;code&gt;with use of my NNNs&lt;/code&gt; or, in Chinese, &lt;code&gt;用我的NNN们&lt;/code&gt; (where &lt;code&gt;NNN&lt;/code&gt; is a noun). &lt;em&gt;(Obviously, &lt;code&gt;们&lt;/code&gt; applies to animate nouns only).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another aspect. It is widely agreed (*1) that The Indo-European proto-language in its earliest stage consisted entirely of monosyllabic words (don't confuse with PIE). If that is true, an obvious conclusion would be that all kinds of agglutination — including noun/adjective declension and verb conjugation — have been derived from formerly-separate words, just like Chinese &lt;code&gt;的&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;们&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;些&lt;/code&gt; (as in &lt;code&gt;这些&lt;/code&gt;), and many others are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you've met Westerners who study Chinese, you have probably noticed that they often use extra words which would be normally skipped in contemporary Chinese. This happens specifically because it &lt;strong&gt;does matter&lt;/strong&gt; for an English speaker whether they are talking about &lt;em&gt;an apple&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;apples&lt;/em&gt;. They really think that missing plural would lose an important information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarizing all above.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages use different &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; to deliver information;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simpler morphology requires using &lt;em&gt;supplementary words&lt;/em&gt; in order to deliver the same amount of information;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historically, old Indo-European languages &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have only monosyllabic words. With the course of language development, some languages obtained morphologic agglutination. Sino-Tibetan languages remained &lt;em&gt;isolating&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*1) See, for example, Charles S. Halsey, &quot;An Etymology of Latin and Greek&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-04-30T18:47:26.673" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6913" CreationDate="2014-04-30T19:32:15.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the language lacks palatalisation as a phonemic suprasegmental feature, &lt;code&gt;s &amp;gt; ʃ /_i&lt;/code&gt; as a sound change makes perfect sense. If you look at the intermediate stages, they'd probably be along the lines of &lt;code&gt;s &amp;gt; sʲ &amp;gt; ɕ &amp;gt; ʃ /_i&lt;/code&gt;, that is: the fricative /s/ first acquires secondary palatalisation as a result of the influence of the following /i/, which then turns the alveolar into palato-alveolar fricative [ɕ] which is then changed to [ʃ] to maximise distinction between the /s/ and the new sound. The resulting [ʃ] is still an allophone of /s/ before /i/. If the language has distinctive suprasegmental palatalisation, then there'd be no such shift and the allophone of /s/ would remain [sʲ] before /i/. Languages such as &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; had shifted their /*ʃ/ to /ʂ/ to maximise distinction between it and /sʲ ɕtɕ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically the simplest explanation is just &lt;strong&gt;palatalisation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-05-01T08:50:38.613" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T08:50:38.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-01T06:58:52.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised nobody mentioned the concept of &lt;strong&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/strong&gt; in this context. Asking why in linguistics is almost never a good question. But grammaticalization can certainly help explain how. (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process through which words become morphemes is described as the following cline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;content word → grammatical word → clitic → inflectional affix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are many questions about when and how grammaticalization can happen - particularly when it comes to encoding complex concepts like dual or evidentiality. Peter Trudgill (&lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/rjy1CkH1FOE&quot;&gt;http://youtu.be/rjy1CkH1FOE&lt;/a&gt;) recently proposed a hypothesis that certain concepts like these can only be grammaticalized in languages of small communities and tend to be lost through development in the context of expansion and contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is no way to trace the origin of a complex morphological system like that of Slavic or Bantu languages through this process. Nor is it possible to easily account for the detail of associated phenomena like vowel harmony in Turkic languages. RMW Dixon's adaptation of the punctuated equilibrium concept can perhaps give some hints of how these things can happen (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Languages-R-Dixon-ebook/dp/B004YXVVZM&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Languages-R-Dixon-ebook/dp/B004YXVVZM&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T06:58:52.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6686" CreationDate="2014-05-01T10:57:37.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thing is, the PIE prefix meaning &quot;bad&quot; was &lt;code&gt;*dus-&lt;/code&gt; from the root &lt;code&gt;*dwe-&lt;/code&gt;, just as &quot;two&quot; was &lt;code&gt;*dwṓh1&lt;/code&gt; from the root &lt;code&gt;*dwo-&lt;/code&gt;. Their similarity is probably just coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any explanation for the form &lt;code&gt;*dweysos&lt;/code&gt; as that doesn't fit the participle pattern (&lt;code&gt;*-ónts *-ntés *-óntih2 *-ntyéh2s *-mh1nós&lt;/code&gt;) nor for &lt;code&gt;*dweyros&lt;/code&gt; as it doesn't fit an adjective derivation pattern (&lt;code&gt;*-yos *-iskos&lt;/code&gt; etc.) Check your sources, please, then tell me: there might be something I'm missing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-05-01T11:04:15.360" LastActivityDate="2014-05-01T11:04:15.360" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-01T14:13:00.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of language as a code that humans have agreed on in order to communicate with each other. A speaker encodes a thought into the language and the hearer decodes it to understand the thought of the other. In this scenario, there are two main forces competing with each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the desire to be efficient (use as little time and effort as possible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the desire to be clear (give enough information and make it as clear as possible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All natural languages are a compromise between these competing goals, as speakers are trying to maximize their clearness while minimising their efforts. In fact, many historical changes in languages can be attributed to either one of these two forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, languages differ widely in what that compromise looks like. In some languages, a lot of information is packed into inflections, while in other languages, most information is packed into separate words, or into the syntax. You can not say that one approach is better than the other, they are just different ways of solving the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of the inflections is that they provide a very compact way of transmitting grammatical information along with the lexical items. In highly inflectional languages as Latin, it is very easy to recognize the grammatical relations between the words (e.g. what is the subject, what is the object of a sentence). At the same time, it is very compact and therefore efficient - compare any Latin text with its English translation, and you will see that the Latin text is shorter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are no inflections, the same information needs to be encoded in another way - typically with auxiliary verbs, prepositions or through the word order. So while the language may be easier in one area, it will be more complex in another. Inflections are therefore one strategy (of a number of possible strategies) that languages can use to reach a suitable compromise between speaking efficiently and speaking clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="631" LastEditorUserId="631" LastEditDate="2014-05-05T11:54:39.310" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T11:54:39.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2014-05-01T22:14:14.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, in the end it does not actually occur with all instances. A diphthong is not &quot;allowed&quot; to occur before -ρρ-, which means that words with the prefix εὐ- + ρ will not cause gemination, e.g. εὔρους, εὔρυθμος, εὔριζος etc. But, if you split this particular prefix to its possible incontracted form, the phaenomenon will occur, i.e. ἐύρρους, ἐύρρυθμος, ἐύρριζος etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can claim, then - more generally and practically - that whenever one vowel meets the initial ῥ-, it causes a -ρρ- to &quot;save&quot; somehow the presence of h, as also suggested before. This includes compounding, too, as in Greek grammar the concept of &quot;composita&quot; includes not only prefixes, but also whole words (just to disambiguate from today's definitions of prefixes and compounds). Examples: καλλιρρήμων, ὑποδηματορράφος, φυλλορροεῖν, πτερορρυεῖν etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3345" LastEditorUserId="3345" LastEditDate="2014-05-02T07:23:13.620" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T07:23:13.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4869" CreationDate="2014-05-02T00:56:55.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can usually tell the difference by the amount of stress that the wh-word carries. If it carries stress, it's likely to be interrogative. If not, it's likely to be relative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't work, you can try to rephrase. If you can rephrase so the we-word becomes a top level interrogative, it's likely an interrogative in the original clause. If you can rewrite so the wh-word has a head, it's a nominal relative clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you remember when Columbus discovered America? -&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When did Columbus discover America? Do you remember?  - Interrogative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you remember the time when Columbus discovered America? - Relative (not likely unless you're very old)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you remember when we first came here, darling? -&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When did we first come here, darling? Do you remember? - Interrogative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you remember the time when we first came here, darling? - Relative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What caused the fire remains a mystery. -&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What caused the fire? That remains a mystery.  - Interrogative, you still don't know what caused the fire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The thing that caused the fire remains a mystery.  - Relative, you know what caused the fire, and that thing is a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We never discovered what caused the fire. -&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What caused the fire? We never discovered that. - Interrogative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We never discovered the thing that caused the fire. - Relative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last case, the semantic difference is very small, since discovering an object is somewhat synonymous to discovering what that object is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of analysis is specific to English. Many other languages use different words for the two usages, e.g. German: when = wann/wenn, Spanish, what = qué/lo que.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T00:56:55.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-02T01:25:50.047" Score="4" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to understand the restrictive/non-restrictive distinction for relative clauses modifying indefinite noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction seems very clear for definite noun phrases. It's a question of whether the relative clause is necessary to identify the noun phrase from the discourse/context or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: The president…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: Aah, the president.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: The president, who had just toured the country, returned to Washington.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So non-restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: The man…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: What man?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: The man who won the election…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: Aah, that man.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: The man who won the election was instated in the white house.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-definite noun phrases, it seems to me that the same distinction doesn't apply, at least not in the same way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of two kinds of indefinite noun phrases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-specific&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a TV that fits into my bathroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This use of &quot;a TV&quot; is similar to &quot;any TV&quot; or &quot;TVs&quot;. In this case, the relative clause seems restrictive in the literal sense of the word. I'm looking for a TV, any TV, but with the restriction that it has to fit into my bathroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot think of a non-restrictive relative clause that can modify this kind of noun phrase, at least in English. I think one would usually rephrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I'm looking for a TV, which is entertaining.  (Ungrammatical with a non-restrictive reading)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm looking for a TV, because TVs are entertaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specific&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that there are still cases where a restriction makes sense, as for non-specific noun phrases, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw a TV that fit into my bathroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. I might have seen 100 TVs that day, but this was the only one that fit into my bathroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also cases where this kind of restriction doesn't apply, e.g. in descriptions of scenery:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the beach there were chairs that people could sit on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case that really bothers me. It seems that all the relative clause can do is add new information about the specific noun phrase (it's new to the context/discourse, so there is no identification involved), still I see people discussing them as if there is a meaningful restrictive/non-restrictive distinction. They tend to explain it with &quot;How integral is the relative clause&quot; and such, but that does not seem like a useful discrete test to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So finally my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the restrictive/non-restrictive distinction make sense for relative clauses modifying all specific indefinite noun phrases? If so, please explain it and provide syntactic or semantic tests that can distinguish, not vague tests like &quot;is the relative clause integral to the sentence?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="724" LastEditDate="2014-05-02T01:42:37.527" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T10:30:53.093" Title="Restrictive/non-restrictive relative clauses modifying indefinite noun phrases" Tags="&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7068" CreationDate="2014-05-02T09:30:28.817" Score="1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a poem of Hafez I found a pun based on the double meaning of دریاب, at once the present (or aorist) stem of دریافتن, and another word for دریا, meaning &quot;the sea&quot;. Now it would be great to know, whether these words share a common ancestry or not, since the pun, where the sea is pictured as a receptacle, at least shows a possible confluence of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the answer, would be great to also learn, how you found it, since I do not know any solid reference for New Persian etymologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T12:10:51.373" Title="Etymology of persian دریا" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2014-05-02T12:05:34.247" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though cyco's answer mostly says it all, wanted to add my 2 cents. How can you distinguish between a scientific approach and one that isn't? If you've read Karl Popper, you know the simplest litmus test is that of &quot;falsifiability&quot;: for every theory, there must exist at least one possible experiment that could put the theory in the garbage bin by yielding a result contrary to what was expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Edenics&quot; and its kin (Intelligent Design) are for the most part un-falsifiable. Since they're based off faith, you can get away with any illogicity or irregularity in them, as well as any deviation between their predictions and reality by simply claiming such is God's will. Nice if you want to make a theological point, but useless if you want to do science - we humans do science with the aim of understanding our world and trying to predict events in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reconstruction of proto-Indo-European, as well as proto-Semitic and other last-common-ancestor of various language families has been the result of linguists applying methodic analyses of data, looking further than simple commonalities but to the underlying causes of them and searching for regular processes that could explain them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Claiming everybody spoke a proto-Semitic language and then, ex-nihilo, full blown and totally different grammars appeared in less than a generation with no solution of continuity is a far-fetched proposition that requires a lot of hard data to be demonstrated - difficult at best. Except if it's said as a statement of faith in which case no proof is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2785" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T12:05:34.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7066" CreationDate="2014-05-02T12:10:51.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for “sea” occurs across the board in Iranian: Avestan zraiiah-, Old Persian drayah-, Middle Persian drayā(b) (also: zrēh), New Persian daryā; probably cognate with Sanskrit jrayas- ‘expanse’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NP verb daryāftan is of course dar + yāftan, so it is not connected with the word for “sea”, except as a poet’s pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T12:10:51.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2014-05-02T20:08:49.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Concatenation&lt;/em&gt; is what you're looking for.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From David Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics, 'A term used to refer to strings of elements, the elements being seen in a relation of linear succession'. In my logic and semantics texts, a concatenation basically denotes 'any string of symbols - well formed or otherwise'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T17:21:56.940" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T17:21:56.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-02T20:18:41.460" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a good book on different aspects, which would include different types of aspects, not just perfective and imperfective, but deductive, inferential, retrospective, inceptive and many others. I would be very happy if anyone has any suggestions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="1740" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T22:41:16.487" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:41:16.487" Title="Articles and books on aspects" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7070" CreationDate="2014-05-02T21:10:28.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically on aspect, &lt;a href=&quot;http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~filip/Comrie.Aspect.pdf&quot;&gt;Comrie's 1987 &lt;em&gt;Aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 3rd printing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fit aspect into the framework of the rest of linguistic semantics, Frawley's 1992 &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Semantics&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from Erlbaum. Here's &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/meta4/FrawleyEntities.pdf&quot;&gt;an outline of Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt; in Frawley 1992 (on Entities, i.e, nouns), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/meta4/frawleyq.pdf&quot;&gt;questions and topics&lt;/a&gt; for study in the book, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.um.es/lincoing/jv/UNIT1.pdf&quot;&gt;a pdf of the first chapter&lt;/a&gt;, to give you a flavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T21:10:28.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2014-05-02T22:31:57.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that there is not a universally recognized set of terms to cover your needs within linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-word or nonce are often used in the context of psycholinguistic experiments but they generally refer to word-like strings like &quot;trulky&quot; and measure speed of recognition. They would not apply it to a random string like &quot;hsuwoqjlxs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;token&quot; is also no good because it just refers to string instance as opposed to type. It still mostly implies a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As recommended, I'd stick with &quot;string&quot;. You can divide them between lexical and non-lexical (meaning they are or are not in your lexicon). You could use pseudo-lexical for nonwords that are not in the lexicon you're comparing your strings to but look like possible English words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-02T22:31:57.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2014-05-03T04:31:44.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Calque is very common nowadays. Especially, &lt;strong&gt;in indian languages, every new word created has the influence of english.&lt;/strong&gt; The meaning of the english word is taken as it is and used. For example, minnanjal(a tamil word means email): min+anjal=electronic+mail.&#xA;Similarly, seythithaal: seithi + thaal= news + paper.&#xA;For keyboard, the equivalent word is kilimane in kannada. kili+mane=key+place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can surely say that 90 % of new words in indian languages are calque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3279" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T04:31:44.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-03T08:40:56.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Endings  for inflection of verbs and nouns do not fall from the sky. People have to develop them and one may assume that inflection endings were seperate words. When these words are placed to the right of the noun or verb they tend to become shorter  in the course of time and finally melt with the noun or verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin is a language that in this respect is relatively transparent. Let us look at the singular declension of rex/regis king:&#xA;rex regis regi regem rege &#xA;and try to show that these endings correspond with is eius ei eum eo (he, of him, to him, him, from/by him).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accusative: reg+eum &gt; rege.m. The dot stands for the omitted letter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dative: reg+ei &gt; reg.i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ablative: reg+eo &gt; rege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genitive: reg+eius &gt;reg.i.s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nominatis reg+is &gt; regis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to a form regis which is nom and gen which is a bit disturbing. So most substantives of the third declension reduce the nominative to get different forms.&#xA;So nom regis is reduced to regs which becomes reks written rex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At school we have learnt these endings mechanically without a real understanding. It would be better if schools taught pupils that Latin says:&#xA;king-he, king-of him, king-to him, king-him, king-by him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hypothesis that shows how one might imagine that verb inflexions come into being.&#xA;Latin verb forms such as amamus, monemus, regimus let us suppose that the ending -mus corresponds to the personal pronoun nos, we.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let us try to show that it is possible to derive the six endings of present tense &#xA;by using the particple form monent- + the forms of the personal pronoun&#xA;or the forms of esse, to be, in present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;moneo: monent+ego &gt; mone.. ..o - I admonish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;monemus: monent+nos &gt; mone.. nos transformed to monemus - we admonish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mones: monent+es &gt; mon...es - you admonish (singular)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;monestis: monent+estis &gt; mon...estis - you admonish (plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;monet: monent+is/est &gt; mone.t - I consider that is/est was dropped as unnecessary - He/she/it admonishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;monent: monent(es)+sunt &gt; monent - Here as well sunt was dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, dont take this as a historical outline of the evolutionary process.&#xA;It is only a demonstration how these endings might have come into existence.&#xA;But I think this model has some plausibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-03T17:42:39.250" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T17:42:39.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2014-05-03T11:25:38.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To begin with, depending on your understanding of &quot;sentence&quot;, even in English you will find examples of well-formed utterances without verb or subject. For example, &quot;Yes.&quot; may be a sentence.&#xA;So the simple answer to your question is: no syntactic categories are essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interesting are certain patterns of grammatical dependence, which vary between languages. For example, in English, if you use a finite verb, you usually need a subject, too - if you leave out the subject, the sentence is &lt;em&gt;elliptical&lt;/em&gt;. Consider talking about the weather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's raining.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really isn't anything in particular that is raining, and yet, there needs to be a formal subject. The situation is similar in other languages, such as the other Germanic ones (such as German). Other languages, such as many of the romance languages, allow you to freely &lt;em&gt;drop&lt;/em&gt; the subject. In Spanish, you can simply say, without a subject,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Está lloviendo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while the subject is obligatory in many constructions in many languages, it is still possible to construct subject-free sentences, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thank you!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't care.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are elliptical, some aren't. The non-ellipcital ones do not feature &lt;em&gt;indicative mood&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that it is not so much sentences requiring subjects to be expressed, but verbs. &#xA;And that is basically your answer: &lt;em&gt;sentences&lt;/em&gt; generally lack requirements. However, once you introduce certain words in certain functions, such as a verb in the indicative, they tend to have dependencies which must be expressed for a non-elliptical construction. However, even such dependencies can usually be omitted in specific contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3503" LastEditorUserId="3503" LastEditDate="2014-05-03T12:05:20.233" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T12:05:20.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-03T12:27:59.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;what about am/is/are? Is this for phonetic harmony? What about third person singular verbs?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One kind of answer one could give to this is psycholinguistic: what use do people make of such aspects of language? The answer is: plenty, &lt;em&gt;depending on the language&lt;/em&gt;; not so much for specifically &lt;em&gt;am/is/are&lt;/em&gt;. During language processing, they are often used to inform sentence interpretation by telling you &lt;em&gt;who does what to whom&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 70s and 80s, Bates &amp;amp; MacWhinney conducted extensive research on what kinds of &lt;em&gt;cues&lt;/em&gt; speakers of various languages use to figure out what a sentence means. In English, word order is a highly reliable cue; what is directly in front of the verb tends to be the agent, what is directly after it, the patient (the situation is different in intransitive sentences, passive sentences ...). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cat eats the mouse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mouse eats the cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence talks about a very dangerous mouse!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in languages such as Italian and German, phrases may shift around somewhat freely within a sentence. For example, it is possible to say both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Der Junge isst den Kuchen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Den Kuchen isst der Junge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of them mean that the cake (Kuchen, here in the accusative case) is eaten by the boy (Junge, in the nominative). Here it is case that tells us what is being eaten, and what is eating, not word order.&#xA;In other situations, case is a similarly unreliable cue in German. In these situations, &lt;em&gt;agreement&lt;/em&gt; - the specific form of the verb, being dependent in form on its arguments - may be required to help you figure out who does what to whom. For example, English &quot;is&quot; tells you the subject is singular, so if you come across a plural noun, you know it cannot be the subject. For a German example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich weiß, dass die Frauen Peter gehasst hat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich weiß, dass die Frauen Peter gehasst haben. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although verb order and overt case inflection are the same between those two, they mean different things; the first, that &quot;women hate Peter&quot;, the second, that &quot;Peter hates women&quot;. In the first one, the auxiliary &quot;hat&quot; is inflected to show that it &lt;em&gt;agrees&lt;/em&gt; with a singular noun, Peter, so Peter must be the subject. In the second, &quot;haben&quot; must agree with a plural noun, Frauen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bates &amp;amp; MacWhinney demonstrated that native speakers of German rely mostly on case, speakers of English on position, speakers of Italian on agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in sum, in some languages, verb inflection can have very specific and important functions in sentence interpretation; in others, who often rely more on word order, not so much.&#xA;In the specific case of the English auxiliary suppletiva am/is/are, their status as morphologically marked seems to be somewhat of a historic artefact from a time when precursors of English relied more on inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;References&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MacWhinney, B., Bates, E. A., &amp;amp; Kliegl, R. (1984). Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(2), 127–150. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(84)90093-8&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3503" LastEditorUserId="3503" LastEditDate="2014-05-03T12:42:18.417" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T12:42:18.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-03T16:49:21.297" Score="3" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sense: the system of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships between a lexical unit and other lexical units in a language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked up the technical terms; then the technical terms used to define those terms; ultimately, I didn't learn what I needed to learn to comprehend the preceding definition. In layman's terms, what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T10:06:43.537" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T07:32:46.717" Title="What does 'sense' mean in layman's terms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-03T19:00:58.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to assume that languages are the way they are because of conscious design by speakers. This isn't true -- speakers don't have the option to &quot;make [the language] simpler&quot; or &quot;make it easier for learning&quot;. Sure, it's true that getting rid of irregular inflections like &lt;em&gt;am-are-is&lt;/em&gt; would make English easier to learn, but no one's in a position to decree this. Kids learn the language as it exists, and deliberately changing your basic grammar as an adult is very hard. Languages aren't planned, they're the outcome of long, unconscious processes of evolution. This means that the answer to your &quot;why&quot; question has to be looked for in these historical processes (e.g. grammaticalization, as others have pointed out), rather than in the field of conscious human choices (&quot;why bother&quot;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also that, by definition, there's no language that's too hard to learn. (If there were, it wouldn't survive, at least not in that form.) The complexity of inflections and the like is difficult mainly for adult second-language learners, not for child first-language learners. The human mind is capable of astonishing feats of grammatical calculation: English inflections are a piece of cake compared with the morphology of many other languages (take a look at Georgian or Mohawk sometime!). And most (not all) of this complexity is informative, adding meanings (e.g. number, tense etc.) that could otherwise not be expressed as succinctly. So the question can be put the opposite way: given the highly developed human ability to manipulate complex morphology for informative purposes, why &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use this capacity to its full potential?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-03T19:00:58.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-04T05:28:21.083" Score="1" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;When formulating a answer to this question - please note I only have a basic high school level of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I watched a video on X-Bar theory. I am just trying to get a basic understanding.&#xA;What does C-command and M-command mean? I google these terms and come across a relations like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;x dominates y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;x commands y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;dominate&quot; and &quot;command&quot; mean in this sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T09:55:00.667" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T09:55:00.667" Title="Basic questions on X Bar" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7084" CreationDate="2014-05-04T06:46:06.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;dominate&lt;/em&gt; refers to a relation in trees. A given node in a tree dominates all those other nodes below it. If you can trace a line from a given node N1 to another node N2 moving only downwards (never upwards), then N1 dominates N2. Note that when there are two basic relations in trees, dominance and precedence. A given node N1 can dominate another node N2, and/or it can &lt;em&gt;precede&lt;/em&gt; it. N1 precedes N2 if N1 appears to the left of N2. Look at the tree here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-command&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-command&lt;/a&gt;. Read the definition of c-command and the explanation. Examine the tree. I think the concepts are well explained there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The c-command concept (or just &lt;em&gt;command&lt;/em&gt;) stems from the 1960s. There are numerous versions of the concept: command, c-command, m-command, etc. The particular version used depends on the grammarian. In general, the fact that the concept changes and is used variably bears witness to problems with the general idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be aware also that while the X-bar theory and c-command are concepts that are widely taught in linguistics and syntax courses, they are controversial. Many approaches to syntax reject these notions. In the place of c-command, they tend to take the syntacitic functions (=grammatical relations) to be basic and ranked among each other. The subject is rank ahead of the the first object, and the first object is ranked ahead of the second object, and the second object is ranked ahead of a prepositional object. Many phenomena of syntax are then addressed in terms of this ranking of functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some further links that might be helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-command&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-command&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_function&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T06:46:06.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7080" CreationDate="2014-05-04T07:40:28.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's important to provide the full context in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hiphoparchive.org/hiphop-lx/higher-learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hiphoparchive.org/hiphop-lx/higher-learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meaning&lt;/strong&gt; - a notion in semantics classically defined as having two components: &lt;em&gt;Reference&lt;/em&gt;, anything in the referential realm denoted by a word or expression, and &lt;em&gt;Sense,&lt;/em&gt; the system of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships between a lexical unit and other lexical units in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'sense' is used in at least 2 (related but distinct) ways in linguistics. One in lexicography, it's simply used to refer to one of the 'meanings' listed under a lexical items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second comes from the Fregean tradition of distinguishing between reference (the thing the word denotes, refers to, points to) and sense (what makes the reference meaningful in the context of a proposition - I'm being very liberal here). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One synonym for sense is connotation. And from this perspective, the definition makes sense. Connotation can be thought of as a result of comparison to similar words (paradigmatic relationships) and contexts of use (syntagmatic relationships).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody reading the definition without the headword would guess that that's what it was referring to. In the structuralist tradition that would simply be a definition of grammar (as @jlawler points out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T07:40:28.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-04T10:24:43.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are Chinese, but unfortunately I have no knowledge of Chinese. I'm wondering how in Chinese &quot;many children&quot; in &quot;many children suffer from malnutrition&quot; would be expressed.&#xA;Theoretically the speakers  at the dawn of language development had to say &quot;child + many&quot; or &quot;many + child&quot; . For me there is no difference whether the additional information &quot;many&quot; is placed before &#xA;or after the noun. &#xA;If placed after the noun the often used information &quot;many&quot; will be reduced to a short syllable in the course of time and melt with the noun and finally you get a plural marker.&#xA;In linguistics  a distinction is made between syntactic languages (many + child) and agglutinative languages (child+many, with &quot;many&quot; shortened and melted together&#xA;with the noun). But basically both types work with the same elements.&#xA;In one case the two words melt, and in the other case they do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T10:32:39.320" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T10:32:39.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-05-04T12:09:27.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm comparing Icelandic and German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pers. pronoun&#xA;N G D A: eg min mer mig - ich mein mir mich&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find such tables in German grammars, but the genitive is misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the genitive of the pronoun you use the possessive forms, possessive + noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the genitive of the pronoun is limited and very rare. In modern language it is not used at all.&#xA;The only use was as a genitive object after a verb, and verbs with genitive object are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T12:09:27.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-04T14:23:31.457" Score="2" ViewCount="2312" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I break down the Complement further in accordance with X bar theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mEeXZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;COMPL&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T18:17:44.723" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T18:17:44.723" Title="Relative clauses in X-Bar" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7090" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7093" CreationDate="2014-05-04T14:46:11.450" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about the third plural form of medium/passive perfect, in Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grammar explains that some very simple verb like παιδεύω &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be inflected that way :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1S πεπαίδευ-μαι  &amp;gt; πεπαίδευμαι&#xA;2S πεπαίδευ-σαι  &amp;gt; πεπαίδευσαι&#xA;3S πεπαίδευ-ται  &amp;gt; πεπαίδευται&#xA;1P πεπαιδεύ-μεθα &amp;gt; πεπαιδεύμεθα&#xA;2P πεπαίδευ-σθε  &amp;gt; πεπαίδευσθε&#xA;3P πεπαίδευ-νται &amp;gt; πεπαίδευνται&#xA;2D πεπαίδευ-σθον &amp;gt; πεπαίδευσθον&#xA;3D πεπαίδευ-σθον &amp;gt; πεπαίδευσθον&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things become more interessant for radicals with an occlusive like βλέπω :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1S βεβλεπ-μαι &amp;gt; βέβλεμμαι&#xA;2S βεβλεπ-σαι &amp;gt; βέβλεψαι    &#xA;3S βεβλεπ-ται &amp;gt; βέβλεπται&#xA;1P βεβλεπ-μεθα&amp;gt; βεβλέμμεθα&#xA;2P βεβλεπ-σθε &amp;gt; βέβλεφθε&#xA;3P βεβλεπ-νται&amp;gt; ?&#xA;2D βεβλεπ-σθον&amp;gt; βέβλεφθον&#xA;3D βεβλεπ-σθον&amp;gt; βέβλεφθον&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the rules explaining all these forms but the 3P. Obviously, as stated &lt;a href=&quot;http://cosmosmaestrojuandeavila.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/perfecto-y-pluscuamperfecto-copia.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the hypothetical 3P form would be difficult to pronounce and was replaced by &quot;βεβλεμμένοι εἰσί&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;But what was this hypothetical form ? What are the phonetic laws applying here to -πντ- ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;addendum : I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.betsymccall.net/edu/ling/mediopassive.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (p. 5) the interessant form λελειφαται, alas without any reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;addendum #2 : &lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekFeb2011&amp;amp;getid=0&amp;amp;query=Hdt.%202.93&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;τετρίφαται in Herodot 2.93&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T21:25:16.200" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T23:45:24.367" Title="what would be the hypothetic result of *βεβλεπνται in Ancient Greek?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7090" CreationDate="2014-05-04T23:04:59.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be βεβλέπαται. The [n] between consonants would be syllabic, and syllabic [n] went to [a] in Greek. This is the origin of the -αται 3pl. ending in the forms you mention, and also of 3pl. -ατο in the pluperfect. In some verbs these endings were retained, especially outside of Attic (e.g. Homer or Herodotus); but in Attic, these forms were replaced by periphrases. (Although there are Attic examples of -αται: e.g. Thucydides has τετάχαται, ἐτετάχατο.) Presumably this happened because -αται/-ατο don't look much like 3pl. endings, since they don't have a nasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-05-04T23:45:24.367" LastActivityDate="2014-05-04T23:45:24.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2623" CreationDate="2014-05-05T04:03:57.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some help may come from the earliest punctuation systems, which used a upward rising line to indicate a question (an early form of our question mark); the shape of this line is supposed to be a quasi-music note and to indicate to the reader that (s)he needs to fluctuate the voice. Granted these come from well into the common era and are mostly confined to the Latin west, but one could look into similar punctuation systems in the Greek east; this may give you some further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3512" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T04:03:57.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" Score="0" Body="Questions about the grammar, syntax, intonation, etc of asking and requesting." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T06:46:09.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2014-05-05T06:55:18.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will interpret your question as:&#xA;Why does &quot;unnecessary&quot; complexity like inflections not disappear over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the main reason is that the cost of learning is negligible for native speakers, the cost of change is very high for the language community (not only in learning the new version, but also the emotional cost of being disconnected with your past and your culture) and finally, languages do not naturally have the function of unifying large group of people, quite the contrary, local dialects serve to identify and ostracize outsiders quickly (where &quot;outsiders&quot; might be people from a neighbouring valley with a slightly different dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not expect China to give up their crazily complicated writing system anytime soon, for the same reason: The cost of learning for native speakers seems acceptable compared to the cost of abolishing a unifying writing system that every adult has already learned, and it also serves as cultural identification point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastActivityDate="2014-05-05T06:55:18.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3244" CreationDate="2014-05-05T20:18:59.220" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that with time the original word of &lt;em&gt;crocodīlus&lt;/em&gt; has become &lt;em&gt;cocodrilo&lt;/em&gt; in Español, through laziness or just by error. The same thing happens with &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem&lt;/em&gt; (יְרוּשָׁלַיִם (&lt;em&gt;yerushaláyim&lt;/em&gt;) in Hebrew): in Spanish it is called &lt;em&gt;Jerusalén&lt;/em&gt; (with a final &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;). On many occasions I have heard people say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Ansterdan&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (with two &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;'s). Horrible but true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3514" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T23:26:43.960" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T23:26:43.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3244" CreationDate="2014-05-06T08:02:07.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that one should think of the Vulgar Latin that was spoken in many countries by speakers  who were not too firm in Latin or Vulgar Latin. And such  special cases of metathesis that &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; not only jumps from its place before a vowel after it but also to a place in the last part of a long word occur, because a lot of speakers could not reproduce long words correctly. That's how I would explain such curiosities that &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is shifted to a remote position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T23:26:08.843" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T23:26:08.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2014-05-06T11:45:57.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The information in prairie is vast grassland as it is found in USA. I doubt that such vast grasslands existed in Arabian countries. You should check your Arabian word  whether it contains the information grass.&#xA;Vast land is not enough, the Sahara is a vast land too, but no one would take such a word as a name for grassland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is highly improbable that settlers in the New World looked into the Arabian language  to get a new word for the vast grassland they found in Lousiana, especiallly as the French word la praerie for meadow &#xA;was around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just looked up Arabic barari and the translation is praerie, for me that looks more like a borrowing  from the Vulgar Latin *prataria or a coinage from this form. You shoud check the etymology of barari and how old this word is. Simple affirmations about word histories are useless. And normally short words from one language don't become longer in the other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-05-06T12:19:00.907" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T12:19:00.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7089" CreationDate="2014-05-06T17:49:57.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've given what i deem to be a reasonably standard phrase-structure tree for a &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-relative clause, consistent with the principles of X-bar theory below (taking Jackendoff, 1977 as a concrete reference). I'm assuming the DP hypothesis here (i.e. that 'a book...' is headed by a determiner rather than by the noun), but it's easy to re-cast this in terms on an NP if that displeases you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vk9Xr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses are generally taken in generative syntax to involve &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement. Since there is no overt &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word in a &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-relative, this is modelled by positing a null relative operator. Evidence that relative clauses involve &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement comes from facts like the following: (i) Relative clauses can be formed using &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words, as in (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) A book which i bought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) Relativisation seems to obey the same constraints as &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement, e.g. It can cross a finite clause boundary, as indicated by (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) A book that Vera said Op_i that John had bought t_i.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iii) Relativisation is blocked by the presence of a syntactic island. Sensitivity to islandhood is generally taken as being diagnostic of, or even definitional of &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement. This can be illustrated by the fact that (2) is ungrammatical, where movement out of a syntactic island - Specifically, a complex subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) *A book Op_i that a copy of t_i was stolen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (4) Shows that wh-movement out of a complex subject leads to ungrammaticality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) *Which book was a copy of t_i stolen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iv) There are languages in which an overt realisation of a wh-word alongside &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in a relative clause is grammatical, e.g. in Middle English: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) thy freend which that thou has lorn (cmctmeli.m3, 218.C1.31)&#xA;'your friend that you have lost' &#xA;(Retrieved from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch11.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T17:49:57.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6776" CreationDate="2014-05-06T17:55:22.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would formulate it a bit simpler. &quot;that&quot;  is a demonstrative adjective that you can use with or without a noun. When you use it without noun grammars call it a pronoun.&#xA;Actually when you say &quot;That is a book&quot; you mean &quot;That thing is a book&quot; and you simply drop &quot;thing&quot;.  So the pronoun &quot;that&quot; is a bit different from a pronoun like &quot;he&quot; . When you use &quot;he&quot; &#xA;you haven't dropped a noun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my private terminology I say &quot;absolute use&quot; when &quot;that&quot; is used without a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T17:55:22.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3857" CreationDate="2014-05-06T18:28:40.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin grammar the term &quot;finite verbform&quot;  means the use of this verbform is limited to the use with a subject or a pronoun of the first or second or third person.&#xA;Infinite verbforms as infinitive, participles or gerunds don't have this limited use. They are not connected with a subject or&#xA;personal pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-05-06T18:36:38.707" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T18:36:38.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6911" CreationDate="2014-05-06T18:35:44.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Northern English&quot;, the phoneme /ʌ/ of RP and of general &quot;Southern English&quot; does not exist; it is instead part of the phoneme /ʊ/. Historically of course, this is part of a complex split of post-Great Vowel Shift English /uː/ and /u/, usually dubbed the FOOT–STRUT split, named after the lexical sets for /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ respectively. This Wikipedia article on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_back_vowels#Foot.E2.80.93strut_split&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonological history of English high back vowels&lt;/a&gt; shows how the FOOT–STRUT split emerged and gives a brief guide to which orthographies represent which phoneme: in short, the spellings &quot;o&quot; and &quot;u&quot; usually indicate /ʌ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is a clearly defined and well-documented development of the English language, it is found in dictionaries and other authorities which are consulted by learners of the language. These phonemic renditions of English words are of course invaluable for second-language learners of standard English (whether that is Received Pronunciation or General American, which both contain the split).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the necessary skills in listening out for these phonemes requires the development of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_awareness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phoneme awareness&lt;/a&gt;. From copious studies on children, phonemes further removed from the &quot;native&quot; phonemic system are more easily distinguished (e.g. foreign accents are more readily distinguished by primary school children than native accents &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165025409103871&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;according to Floccia &amp;amp; Goslin [2009]&lt;/a&gt;), but that sensitivity to accents decreases with age (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00479&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this 2012 article from Cristia &amp;amp; Floccia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With novel phoneme distinctions for second language learners then, three situations are generally identified (as per &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0267658303sr2190a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Eckman &amp;amp; Iverson (2003)&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both phonemes are novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One phoneme is novel, but the other phoneme is present in the first language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both second language phonemes are present as allophones of the same phoneme as the first language (hence the phonemic distinction is novel whilst the phonetics are more-or-less familiar).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For native Northern English speakers trying to negotiate the FOOT–STRUT split, the second situation is applicable. The problem of language transfer, especially interference from the orthography in this case, is especially relevant. Both are associated via the &quot;interfering&quot; similarity with the first 'language' and through the orthography with the one phoneme /ʊ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, as with the comment, when /ʌ/ is compared with phonetically similar vowels from different language systems where the possibility of interference is so low as to be negligible, e.g. Russian's [ɐ]/[ʌ] or Korean's [ʌ]/[ɘ], the native language transfer mapped it to a different vowel completely, Northern English's /a/. This shows the difference between phonemic and phonetic similarity very clearly: it is very likely that your familiarity with written English and the close affinity of Northern and Southern English that you associate the sound of [ʌ] with /ʊ/ at all; otherwise you associate it with /a/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, while the two sounds [a] and [ʌ~ɐ] are allophones in Russian, in Korean the two are contrastive phonemes (with great ramifications for the grammar too), although of course the phonetics make [ʌ] lean toward [ɘ] or even [ɔ] - there is also a moribund length distinction creating two allophones in quality. In urban Southern English, data seem to suggest change in both STRUT and FOOT, although it seems to be a bit of a chain-shift: STRUT is moving towards [ʌ] (whereas it had been closer to [ɐ]) being backed and raised; while FOOT is being fronted towards [ɵ], as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/projects/linguistics/innovators/documents/Iclave3_article_TorgersenKerswillFox_Final_000.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Torgerson, Kerswill &amp;amp; Fox (2006) report&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short then, perhaps combining your knowledge of English orthography (i.e. its spelling with a single &quot;o&quot; or &quot;u&quot; and occasionally with &quot;oo&quot;) with a recognition that it sounds a bit like /a/ will help you to isolate the STRUT vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2014-05-06T18:35:44.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-06T19:57:17.393" Score="6" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation and meaning of words change over time, as a result of a variety of forces. These forces are well documented and fairly well understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this knowledge, is it possible to coin a word such its meaning or pronunciation changes more slowly? Would you choose specific sounds? Would you choose proximity to other words so speakers are unable to change the sounds in common directions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3516" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-05-07T11:32:25.103" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T10:01:47.973" Title="Can we choose words to avoid change?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-07T03:51:11.163" Score="-1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are trying to find the origin of our family name. Ending with &quot;AU&quot; I thought it might be maybe of german decent. Our last name is &quot;Arsenau&quot;. Any word in german that sounds like &quot;arsen&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last name as been traced back to 1650 in France up until now but we are curious to find the origin of the word prior to this since it doesn't mean anything in french really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3519" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T21:04:39.583" Title="German help regarding the origin of a last name" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T14:00:04.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7111" CreationDate="2014-05-07T05:39:29.137" Score="1" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is is possible to tokenize a text in tokens such that first and last name are combined in one token? For example if my text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; text = &quot;Barack Obama is the President&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;text.split()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;['Barack', 'Obama', 'is', 'the, 'President']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can I recognize the first and last name? So I get only &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;['Barack Obama', 'is', 'the', 'President'] &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as tokens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to achieve it in Python?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3520" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T06:24:19.653" Title="Tokenizing first and last name as one token" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7110" CreationDate="2014-05-07T06:24:19.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, going by definition of the word &quot;token&quot;. What you're looking for is either a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=NP_Chunking_%28State_of_the_art%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chunker&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Named_entity_recognizers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Named Entity Recognizer&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Some of these are written in Python, and some are not. But that should not matter, as you will be using the output of one of these in your (Python) pipeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T06:24:19.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7106" CreationDate="2014-05-07T09:08:52.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a researcher, but what I remember from my studies is that what makes words change pronunciation and meaning is basically people and the use they make of these words. Then you indirectly have culture, places, etc where these people find themselves which will influence as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we understand how these words do change, it's hard to create a word that doesn't respond to these factors or that ignores them because they are not predictable. Changes in meaning are really dependent on use and popularity and indeed, popular words will acquire new meanings or they will be adopted by other countries (many did with English words for example) in order to refer to a certain meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With changes in culture, in technology, science, and society, words will inevitably change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes in sounds are more regular and have less exceptions (real world ones still do), and this regularity is used by linguists, such as in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Comparative Method&lt;/a&gt; which &lt;em&gt;&quot;aims to prove that two or more historically attested languages are descended from a single proto-language by comparing lists of cognate terms.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However one of the principles of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sound Change&lt;/a&gt; is that &lt;strong&gt;Sound change is unstoppable&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;All languages vary from place to place and time to time, and neither writing nor media prevent this change.&lt;/em&gt; In conclusion, your objective might not be reachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T09:08:52.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3960" CreationDate="2014-05-07T11:22:21.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;De.wikipedia has an article &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortsnamen_auf_-au&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Ortsnamen auf -au&quot;&gt;Ortsnamen auf -au&lt;/a&gt;.   Latin aqua meaning water is related with river names having the second part Ach, Ache or with place names ending in -au. Aue is flat grassy terrain beside a river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="4727" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T16:01:48.717" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T16:01:48.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-07T14:32:36.077" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does there exist any reference thesaurus for linguistic and NLP  terms? I know that Wikipedia articles often contain synonyms, but I would like to have a mere thesaurus that I could go through easily (vs. a full encyclopedia) to make sure I know all the jargon (e.g. parts-of-speech = POS = word classes = morphological classes = lexical tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T14:32:36.077" Title="Thesaurus for linguistic and NLP terms" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-07T15:04:46.113" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have extracted the number of each relation in WordNet as you can see below. Some relations, such as hypernym and hyponym, are not in the same size. What is wrong with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;count(*)&quot;  &quot;link&quot;&#xA;&quot;89172&quot; &quot;hypernym&quot; ??&#xA;&quot;89151&quot; &quot;hyponym&quot;  ??&#xA;&quot;21434&quot; &quot;similar&quot;&#xA;&quot;12288&quot; &quot;member holonym&quot;&#xA;&quot;12288&quot; &quot;member meronym&quot;&#xA;&quot;9111&quot;  &quot;part meronym&quot; ??&#xA;&quot;9104&quot;  &quot;part holonym&quot; ??&#xA;&quot;8589&quot;  &quot;instance hypernym&quot;&#xA;&quot;8589&quot;  &quot;instance hyponym&quot;&#xA;&quot;6676&quot;  &quot;domain category&quot;&#xA;&quot;6676&quot;  &quot;domain member category&quot;&#xA;&quot;2697&quot;  &quot;also&quot;&#xA;&quot;1742&quot;  &quot;verb group&quot;&#xA;&quot;1341&quot;  &quot;domain region&quot;&#xA;&quot;1341&quot;  &quot;domain member region&quot;&#xA;&quot;1277&quot;  &quot;attribute&quot;&#xA;&quot;970&quot;   &quot;domain usage&quot;&#xA;&quot;970&quot;   &quot;domain member usage&quot;&#xA;&quot;797&quot;   &quot;substance holonym&quot;&#xA;&quot;797&quot;   &quot;substance meronym&quot;&#xA;&quot;408&quot;   &quot;entail&quot;&#xA;&quot;221&quot;   &quot;cause&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the number are extracted by following query on MySQL version of Wordnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;select  count(*),link from semlinks join linktypes using(linkid) group by linkid&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1190" LastEditorUserId="1190" LastEditDate="2014-05-07T17:13:07.153" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T17:13:07.153" Title="Some discrepancies in WordNet symmetric relations" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2014-05-07T17:18:06.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of types of signed languages (some more like sign vocabularies), so not all have the same properties. Also, they are not limited to deaf communities. Most famously, the Plains Indian Sign Language was used both within and across cultures. It certainly wasn't just a sign  encoding of spoken language which is what many non-deaf sign languages are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are no instances where signed languages developed prior to spoken languages. Nor are there non-deaf communities that only use a sign language as opposed to spoken languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, why questions in linguistics are not a safe place to go but if I were to venture a guess, I would be very skeptical about any explanations relying solely on communicative utility. You can make the argument that in many situations (combat, hunting) signed language would be much more appropriate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that a better candidate for an explanation would be a simple co-evolution. Symbolic communication was simply associated with vocalizations from the start. Since the origins of language have as much to do with socialization and expression of emotion as communication, I would imagine that mapping symbolic meanings on vocal expressions is more productive than with gestures (although paradoxically, now, gestures are used mostly to supply affective content - although in a much more subtle way than just emphatic waving around of hands). So any grammaticalization would happen on the vocal part of language first. But it's a completely speculative guess (although one that would probably have been endorsed by Jespersen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T17:18:06.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6972" CreationDate="2014-05-07T17:45:10.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no straightforward definition of what constitutes a native speaker. This is partly because there's no straightforward definition of what constitutes a language. There are vast differences between the ability of even highly educated monolinguals to utilize the complete resources of a given language. Once you factor in education, register and dialect, you're in a right mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to differentiate between native and non-native speakers at the extreme ends of the scale but in between you have to look at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the purpose of using a particular language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What domains is the language used for&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the social context of use &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example, if the purpose of your determination was whether you can take part in one particular class of phonetic experiments, then just the fact that you're multilingual would be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to be a teacher or a translator, then things are much less clear. You can achieve native-like competence that would allow you to work as one or the other at any age. You can also lose that competence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why nothing about your story can let us determine whether you should or should not label yourself as a native speaker. Have you continued using English regularly for a variety of communicative purposes? Are you confident in literacy-intensive environments? Would you classify yourself as being a speaker of a particular variety of English? Do you speak with a recognizably non-native English accent? Do you have intuitions about English syntax and morphology that converge with other similarly educated speakers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You obviously have a reason to ask. If it's only a question about what you can put on your teaching resume, than I don't think you have to worry. There's no magic behind native speaker teachers. If it's a question that stems form a lack of confidence about your English facility then you have to make a judgement based on the situation. And say things like: &quot;For the purposes of X, I am a native speaker of English. But if you ask me to do Y, I'd recommend someone else.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-07T17:45:10.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7125" CreationDate="2014-05-07T17:55:48.913" Score="4" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the etymology of the Latin suffix &quot;-ālis&quot; (and related forms like &quot;-āris&quot;) as in &quot;nātūrālis&quot;? Do we know any corresponding suffix in other Indo-European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T18:26:42.790" Title="Etymology of Latin suffix -ālis" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14362" CreationDate="2014-05-08T01:10:38.720" Score="2" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemes are realized through phones, morphemes are realized with morphs. What is the corresponding word for a lexeme? A casual google search isn't telling me much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T19:43:08.963" Title="What's the name of a lexeme's &quot;surface form&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-08T02:02:22.973" Score="3" ViewCount="2178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried with basic thing like whether question starts with who/what/.. but there are a lot many sentences which do not start with interrogative words but still demands an answer like &quot;hotels in singapore&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have boiled down the logic that the sentences that are not providing some information but are incomplete in that sense, could fall in the interrogative class only. Are there some references for this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3529" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:43:05.367" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T15:43:05.367" Title="How to determine whether a given sentence is demanding an answer or is providing some information?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7122" CreationDate="2014-05-08T18:26:42.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Part of the info in this answer is from Buck's &lt;em&gt;Comparative Greek and Latin Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, which, though old and outdated in many respects, is probably still reliable on this point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, Latin -āli-(s) goes back to a PIE suffix *-lo-, with reflexes in many branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin -āli- is originally the suffix -li- added to a-stem nouns: e.g. &lt;em&gt;animā- : animālis&lt;/em&gt;. It became analyzed as a single, productive suffix, however, and was extended to other types of stems: e.g. &lt;em&gt;mort- : mortālis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This -li- is the same suffix seen in adjectives like &lt;em&gt;similis, humilis&lt;/em&gt;, etc. But it seems to have been originally *-lo-: compare the Greek cognates of these words, ὁμαλός, χθαμαλός. Transfer of adjectives into the i-stem class was pretty widespread in Latin (not just from o-stems but also from other stem types, cf. e.g. &lt;em&gt;suāvis&lt;/em&gt;: Gk. ἡδύς).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for PIE *-lo-, its reflexes form participles in Slavic and Armenian, and are also found less productively but still commonly in Greek (see the examples above and many others, e.g. φῦ-λον, τυφ-λός), Sanskrit (e.g. &lt;em&gt;bahu-lá-&lt;/em&gt; 'abundant'), and probably other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-08T18:26:42.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7109" CreationDate="2014-05-09T05:59:34.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.duden.de/shop/duden-lexikon-der-familiennamen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.duden.de/shop/duden-lexikon-der-familiennamen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you find some information in the above dictinary of family names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A French dictionary about family names has the name in the French form Arsenault&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.jeantosti.com/noms/a.htm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-05-09T06:07:58.853" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T06:07:58.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-09T08:50:19.817" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a way to classify a given sentence as either habitualis or generic in a language where neither is a grammatical category. Thus, it should be a some semantic feature of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are some kind of extending an event &quot;into customary or usual practice&quot;, as Frawley (2013) puts it. Can it be, for instance, that habitual is rather used to predicate a property of an individual, while generic -- of a kind? Or do they differ in that the former, but not the latter, has an existential presupposition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Whenever I see John, he's wearing a black coat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm grateful for any ideas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few remarks are in order. I don't mean the readings of NPs here, rather the whole sentence as a context that, in (1) licences &lt;em&gt;whenever&lt;/em&gt;. Also, I consider (2) a prototypical example of habitualis, and (3) of generic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Bill used to drink in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Cows eat grass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2014-05-09T19:05:48.640" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T19:05:48.640" Title="Is there a way to distinguish habitualis from generic interpretation?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7305" CreationDate="2014-05-09T09:17:03.050" Score="2" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to check whether an anaphor is &lt;em&gt;obviative&lt;/em&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/anaph.hierarchies-t.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kiparsky's (2002)&lt;/a&gt; sense). Since my pronoun seems &lt;em&gt;subject free&lt;/em&gt;, I need predicates with higher arity (ternary or four-place). An additional problem is that my language uses lexical causatives a lot, so for instance 'show' will be 'let-see' literally. And I want to have at least some predicate that is simplex in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any kind of list that contains meanings that are typically represented by three-/four-place predicates in the languages of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2014-05-31T12:43:41.190" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T12:43:41.190" Title="Looking for three-place predicates to study anaphora" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7134" CreationDate="2014-05-09T11:00:33.043" Score="6" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both Persian and Turkish - as have other &quot;islamic&quot; languages - have a great deal of Arabic vocabulary. Due to an (initially) favourable vowel inventory (and maybe due to the same script being used) these loans have come to Persian in much of their original shape, while their Turkish counterparts do differ quite a lot. There seems to be some regularity, but I did not, up to now, figure it out completely.&#xA;So the question is: how do (especially vowel) sounds change, when a word travels from Arabic to Turkish? How about the same thing for Persian words in Turkish? To understand these processes better: what was the general way of Arabic words coming to Turkish, I mean by way of which idiom or even language did Arabic words come to modern Turkey-turkish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what I figured out up to now is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short vowels a, i and u in Arabic can be realized in Turkish as a/e, i/ı and u/ü respectively. This accords with the vowel harmony and it seems, that there is some connection with a kind of &quot;consonant harmony&quot; which is familiar to me from Old Uyghur, to the effect that the dark vowel is chosen in circumstances of dark consonants like q, 'ayn and the retroflex l. And of course vice versa, the light vowel being used in appropriate consonant surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know more about that, since it does not seem to be the be-all and end-all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T18:01:08.413" Title="Arabic and Persian loans in Turkish" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-09T12:47:31.147" Score="3" ViewCount="1382" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Cuba and perhaps to a lesser extent the Dominican Republic (and perhaps other countries), the 's' is often silent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and why did this come to be? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A layperson's guess (and I am a layperson) is the French influence. Is there a more detailed explanation for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3222" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T21:01:10.037" Title="Origin of silent 's' in some Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2014-05-09T17:49:57.653" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jlawler says in his comment, what's really going on is that [s] has become [h] in certain positions. This is a pretty common type of sound change, which falls under the rubric of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debuccalization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;debuccalization&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Phonetically, what happens in this type of change is basically that the articulation becomes laxer, in that (in this case) the near-closure at the alveolar ridge which is needed to produce an [s] sound is no longer being made, and all that's left in a puff of air, i.e. [h].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the &quot;how&quot;; as for the &quot;why&quot;, that's a more difficult question, as is usually the case in linguistics generally and with sound changes specifically. Seeing that this kind of change occurs fairly often in unrelated languages (see the Wiki page for a similar example from Ancient Greek), it seems to be simply an articulatory tendency that some languages show and others not -- why is anyone's guess. I'm no Romance historical linguist, but French influence doesn't seem impossible in this particular case: the French were colonizing the Caribbean at about the same time that they were losing syllable-final consonants, and if French [s]-loss went through an [h] stage, it's possible that that remained as a substrate influence in Caribbean Spanish. But you could imagine other language-contact scenarios, e.g. possible influence from indigenous languages that lacked an [s] sound. In any case, though, a language-contact explanation isn't really needed here, since this is a common enough type of change that it could have happened on its own without any outside influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T17:49:57.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7124" CreationDate="2014-05-09T20:07:12.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many versions of the English language, most times the intonation at the end of the statement is usually the indication of a statement being an interrogation. There is usually a high pitched tone at the end of the question; when it's asked sincerely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s: Sarcasm may sometimes leave a dipping tone at the end of the question. For example &quot;You leaving.&quot; ...when asked by someone who does not expect you to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3535" LastActivityDate="2014-05-09T20:07:12.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7129" CreationDate="2014-05-10T11:30:51.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nişanyan gives this table in his etymological dictionary of Turkish (&lt;em&gt;Sözlerin Soyağacı&lt;/em&gt;, ISBN: 9789752896369):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Front consonants: ب‎ ت‎ ث‎ ج‎ ز‎ س‎ ش‎ ك‎ ل‎ م‎ ن‎ ه‎ ی‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back consonants: ح‎ خ‎ ص‎ ض‎ ط‎ ظ‎ ع‎ غ‎ ق‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unstable consonants: د‎ ذ‎ ر‎ ف‎ و‎‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can look &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Alphabet&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for what consonants they correspond to in Ottoman Turkish (it didn't change much since then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, emphatic consonants (and some others) were used with back vowels and the rest were used with front vowels. To my experience this explains 80%-90% of the vowel changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But different words have different histories. For example words that were frequently used by common people were further assimilated (vowel harmony, devoicing at coda position etc.) in less predictable ways while words that were used by the educated classes remained closer to the originals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2014-05-10T14:11:22.630" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T14:11:22.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-10T11:52:50.707" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a ready-made concordancer or collocator with a simple search interface that I can upload on my website and have my students use to search a custom corpus. I have been working with AntConc but want something that students don't need to download or run. Are there any tools like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-11T03:36:11.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T09:53:31.807" Title="Is there a web-based corpus tools that I can upload and use with my own corpus?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-10T12:17:13.207" Score="2" ViewCount="2805" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diagram is from a lesson given by someone on YT. My question is with regard to the Adv phrases that follow the linking/copula verb. My understanding is that only predicate adjectives or predicate nominatives can follow a linking verb - not &lt;strong&gt;adverbial&lt;/strong&gt; phrases. Am I misunderstanding something? Is this tree incorrect ? or what have I misunderstood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - is &quot;under water&quot; is a prepositional phrase - so does it fall under a predicate nominative or predicate adjective? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;misleading&quot; is a predicate adjective - as the participle &quot;misleading&quot; functioning as an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eLP0n.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:04:35.520" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T02:04:35.520" Title="Are linking/copula verbs only followed by Adjectives and Nouns?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2014-05-10T12:34:45.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is very language-specific and works well for English, but not for many other languages. E.g. Russian can have an adverbial phrase following a copula, and many languages (like German) don't distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, moreover, many languages (like most of the Altaic languages) have neither adjectives nor adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T12:34:45.260" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2014-05-10T16:02:38.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for a too short answer, but I guess the entire question can be answered in this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original phrase assumes an omitted word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the island is &lt;strong&gt;[located]&lt;/strong&gt; under water&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which forms a pretty nice predicate adjective, as you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T16:02:38.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7136" CreationDate="2014-05-10T16:34:45.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nominals (nouns and pronouns), adjectives, prepositions, subordinators (subordinate conjunctions), and some adverbs can be predicative expressions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicative_expression&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicative_expression&lt;/a&gt;. The notion that a predicative expression must be an adjective or noun is too narrow. While it is true that adjectives and nominals are widely acknowledged as functioning as predicative expressions, prepositions, subordinators, and some adverbs can clearly also be viewed as predicative expressions at times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus in the example in the question, the preposition &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; is a predicative preposition, and the participle/adjective &lt;em&gt;misleading&lt;/em&gt; is also a predicative expression. Here are some more examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. It is on the table.&#xA;&#xA; b. The game was after school got out.&#xA;&#xA; c. That is soon.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preposition &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;, the subordinator &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; and the adverb &lt;em&gt;soon&lt;/em&gt; are predicative expressions. Note that participles (present active and past passive) are predicative expressions too (in fact, they are the canonical type of predicatives), e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; d. It is happening.&#xA;&#xA; e. It is done.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present progressive participle &lt;em&gt;happening&lt;/em&gt; and the past passive participle &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; are predicative expressions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following article provides a good overview of what predicates and predicative expressions can be interpreted as being: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29&lt;/a&gt;. I think real insight about the nature of predicates comes with knowledge of predicate-argument structures. Modern theories of syntax and grammar draw a three-way distinction; they acknowledge predicates, the arguments of predicates, and the adjuncts on predicates. Consider the following example in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; f. The book is on the table.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one views the two-word combination &lt;em&gt;is on&lt;/em&gt; as the predicate, then this predicate takes the two arguments &lt;em&gt;the book&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the table&lt;/em&gt;. This approach to predicates requires, however, that one jettison the (in my view erroneous) stance that the predicate in such a sentence is the entire string &lt;em&gt;is on the table&lt;/em&gt;. The traditional binary division of the clause into a subject NP and a predicate VP is not supported by emperical considerations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will conclude this answer with a mysterious aspect of predicative expressions. Some adverbs can be predicative expressions, such as &lt;em&gt;soon&lt;/em&gt; in the example above. Other adverbs, however, cannot function as predicative expressions, in particular those ending in &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; g. *It is happily.&#xA;&#xA; h. *That is necessarily.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why adverbs ending in &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; cannot function as predicative expressions, but most all other word categories can, is mysterious to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-05-10T16:49:09.773" LastActivityDate="2014-05-10T16:49:09.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-11T05:39:58.143" Score="2" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2 questions are on the diagram.&#xA;In question 1 - I emphasize &quot;function as&quot; because my understanding is that (in English) a predicate nominative - even though it can take the form of a preposition or even a adverb - must ultimately function either as an adjective or a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition - a question 3) Does the verb &quot;BE&quot; always act as a linking/copula (i.e. does it always introduce a subject complement? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q6867.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastEditorUserId="3508" LastEditDate="2014-05-11T06:03:14.863" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T22:26:48.410" Title="Please help me parse the subject complement of" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7140" CreationDate="2014-05-11T10:19:47.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;the one&lt;/em&gt; has an article, it seems fair to treat it like a (pro)noun, so it functions as a noun subject complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For whom you are looking&lt;/em&gt; is as a whole a relative clause modifying &lt;em&gt;the one&lt;/em&gt;, so I would make it one branch from the &quot;predicate nominative&quot; down, so the two branches would be &lt;em&gt;the one&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for whom you are looking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I would probably branch off &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; (the relative pronoun) on the one hand and &lt;em&gt;you are looking for [zero]&lt;/em&gt; on the other; but there is something to be said for doing &lt;em&gt;for whom&lt;/em&gt; v. &lt;em&gt;you are looking&lt;/em&gt;. The problem is that &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; is both the object of the preposition &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; and the node that introduces the relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This below website uses a &quot;silent complementiser &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for my [zero], which seems contrived (the word &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is not possible in that sentence), but do with it what you will. It seems clear that you need to add a node for this [zero], whatever you call it. Perhaps look into &lt;em&gt;wh-movement&lt;/em&gt; for English. An example of how they parse relative clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/InfU9.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch11.html&lt;/a&gt;, figure 39b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2014-05-11T22:26:48.410" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T22:26:48.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-11T11:56:16.093" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there is a term for an adjective that modifies a preceding subject (e.g. &lt;em&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;happy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;) and one that modifies what follows (e.g. &lt;em&gt;I am a &lt;strong&gt;happy&lt;/strong&gt; person.&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T04:56:51.243" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T04:56:51.243" Title="Adjective terms for modifier of a preceding subject and modifier of following noun?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2014-05-11T15:04:42.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses introduced by some sort of agent specifically two different ones hark to two different traditions that were dialectical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3540" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T15:04:42.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7142" CreationDate="2014-05-11T16:15:38.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments by user2619 and jlawler answer the question directly. I can add more information here, so that a deeper understanding of the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is established. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A predicative adjective is (part of) the main clause predicate, hence the term &lt;em&gt;predicative&lt;/em&gt;. An attributive adjective is also a predicate, but one that is not part of the main clause predicate, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. The happy boy is hungry.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main clause predicate is the two-word combination &lt;em&gt;is hungry&lt;/em&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;hungry&lt;/em&gt; is a predicative adjective. The attributive adjective &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; is also a predicate, but it is not part of the main clause predicate, but rather it is a secondary predicate (or embedded predicate). Both adjectives are assigning a property to &lt;em&gt;the boy&lt;/em&gt;, so both are definitely predicates in the relevant sense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a technical standpoint, the distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives can be examined from the point of view of structural syntax. An attributive adjective is a dependent of the noun to which it assigns a property, whereas a predicative adjective is not a dependent of the noun to which it assigns a property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages encode the distinction in terms of word order, as pointed out in the question. In Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, etc.) attributive adjectives precede the noun to which they assign a property, whereas predicative adjectives usually follow the noun to which they assign a property. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While predicative adjectives are often introduced by the auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, they also appear without &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; b. That made me angry.&#xA;&#xA; c. They arrived drunk.&#xA;&#xA; d. Tom sat in the corner upset. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjectives &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;upset&lt;/em&gt; are predicative adjectives; they follow the nominal to which they assign a property. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some languages encode the distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives morphologically. In German, for instance, attributive adjectives bear suffixal endings that show gender, number, and case, whereas predicative adjectives lack these endings entirely, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;e. ein betrunkener Mann - 'a drunk man'&#xA;&#xA;f. Der Mann ist betrunken. - 'The man is drunk.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; ending identifies &lt;em&gt;betrunkener&lt;/em&gt; in e as an attributive adjective, whereas the lack of an ending on &lt;em&gt;betrunken&lt;/em&gt; in f identifies it as a predicative adjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-05-11T16:22:05.713" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T16:22:05.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-11T16:25:20.257" Score="0" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a language called Knashta, and one of the phonemes is /p͡r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this sound would be a trilled affricate, and I'm guessing that it's name would be a voiceless bilabial alveolar trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right or wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3144" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T03:09:02.453" Title="What is the linguistic name of /p͡r/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="522" CreationDate="2014-05-11T18:56:09.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Translation Studies, the concept of 'translation evaluation' is a bit taboo, as it tends to consider that since there is not one single correct translation (esp. in literary texts), that means that there is no wrong translation as well. I personally tend to disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you might want to look into the translator training sub-field of TS. That is bound to  include some sort of evaluation. Also, there were some studies in the 1980s (the time TS was closer to Linguistic theory than ever) where translators were asked to describe the process of translating while they were doing so. Those descriptions, I think, sometimes also included self-evaluations of translation choices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, but it might give you a few ideas. In case you are interested I can look up a few names/papers on the above for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1039" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T18:56:09.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7146" CreationDate="2014-05-11T20:14:25.553" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes &lt;em&gt;affricates&lt;/em&gt; and the like, well it's not part of this arrangement. Anything like this trying to be incorporated in a nomenclature like affricate is serving two masters. Which is bad. Creating a language &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; falls within the parameters of the research Chomsky presented in grammar, phonology, and phonetics. What's more - a language that is so called created is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; a natural language and does not stem from the natural development &lt;strong&gt;all languages follow to the latter&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3541" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T05:14:21.700" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T05:14:21.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4721" CreationDate="2014-05-11T21:21:05.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all words can - according to Arab grammarians - be etymologized, which means in practice: be reduced to a verbal root from which they derive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, for example, while you will find most words in Arabic dictionaries subsumed under their respective root (e.g. &quot;muslim&quot; not under the letter &quot;mim&quot;, but under the root s-l-m), other words are not subordinated under a root, because they cannot. Now, as fdb pointed out, some loans, once they are perceived as Arabic, can be squeezed into that pattern. Others are &quot;left alone&quot;, perhaps not being important enough to generate a need for related words of the same general concept. Still they may undergo the same treatment as native Arabic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example are the so called &quot;retrograde singulars&quot;. From Greek yakinthos &quot;jacinth, hyacinth&quot; Arabic &quot;یواقیت&quot;, &quot;yawāqīt&quot; was borrowed, therefrom a new singular &quot;یاقوت&quot;, &quot;yāqūt&quot;, was formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-05-11T21:21:05.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T05:58:18.390" Score="5" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that in the case of Mandarin Chinese questions do not end with any kind of rising tone unless the last morpheme in the sentence happens to have a rising tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions which don't contain a question word (equivalent of English wh-words) it's usual for questions to end with the particle &quot;ma&quot; with the neutral tone. &quot;Ma&quot; with the rising tone, tone 2 in Mandarin, has other meanings including &quot;hemp&quot;, &quot;sesame&quot;, and &quot;numb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about other tonal languages such as Lao, Thai, Vietnamese? What about tonal languages outside (South)East Asia such as those in Africa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T22:05:53.520" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T05:17:26.583" Title="Are there tonal languages which use a rising intonation for questions?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T11:22:23.300" Score="-1" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could there be some connection between Arabic falaha meaning to till the soil and German pflügen, Pflug or English plough, to plough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T15:37:13.800" Title="Etymology: Arabic falaha, German pflügen, English to plough" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T12:16:30.680" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anything been done in this regard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for research that has been conducted for spell checking of Romanized Devanagari text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose well researched English spell checking algorithms would fail in this scenario as they would not work in this context. Or are they similar? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example correction for user input &lt;em&gt;Aallu&lt;/em&gt;  would be &lt;em&gt;Aalu&lt;/em&gt; or for user input &lt;em&gt;Naafrat&lt;/em&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;Nafrat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if this question is too vague but I am posting it here after lots of google searches without any lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3543" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-12T22:16:13.400" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T09:50:37.853" Title="Spelling Correction on Romanized Devanagari texts" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;devanagari&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7153" CreationDate="2014-05-12T13:11:07.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern spelling correction algorithms work independent of language. However, their statistical models have to be trained for each individual target language. &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This  blog post by Peter Norvig&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start exploring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-13T09:50:37.853" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T09:50:37.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7152" CreationDate="2014-05-12T21:03:28.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not, at least not provably so. Since Arabic and Germanic aren't related (certainly not at a time depth shallower than the development of agriculture), the words can't be cognate. Could one be a borrowing from the other? Well, English &lt;em&gt;plough&lt;/em&gt; has no clear cognates outside of West Germanic, while Arabic &lt;em&gt;falaḥa&lt;/em&gt; has cognates in other Semitic languages (e.g. Hebrew &lt;em&gt;p-l-ḥ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to divide, cut asunder&quot;). If there was borrowing, then, it would have to have been either from a Semitic language into West Germanic, or from a West Germanic language into Proto-Semitic. The latter is impossible because Proto-Semitic predates West Germanic by milennia. The former isn't strictly impossible, but these aren't language groups that are known ever to have been in contact, so it is unlikely. One could hypothesize that borrowing occurred through some intermediary language, but that would be highly conjectural and completely unprovable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-12T21:03:28.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-12T21:36:13.623" Score="4" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;For the hell of it! &#xA;How the hell...&#xA;What the hell...&#xA;Where the hell...&#xA;Who the hell...&#xA;The hell you are!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any linguistic term with respect to &lt;code&gt;&quot;the hell&quot;&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;on earth&quot;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&quot;the heavens&quot;&lt;/code&gt; fall into the same category. Any others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T20:53:50.057" Title="What &quot;the hell&quot; is this?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7151" CreationDate="2014-05-12T21:59:19.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is--&lt;strong&gt;yes, there are many tone languages that express certain kinds of questions (usually echo questions or yes-no questions) intonationally, and more often than not the intonational contour is in some sense &quot;rising&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before continuing it should be noted that there are documented cases of languages--tonal and non-tonal--that mark questions with an explicit intonational pattern that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; rising (see the related question referenced in the comments above: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1370/intonation-for-questions-in-different-languages-and-childs-early-language-devel/1372#1372&quot;&gt;Intonation for questions in different languages and child&amp;#39;s early language development intonations&lt;/a&gt;). I'll set those cases aside for the purposes of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long answer entails answering another question first: &lt;strong&gt;how do you define &quot;rising intonation&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; For example, for the intonation to be considered &quot;rising&quot;, does the slope of the pitch contour at the end of the utterance have to be positive? Or is it sufficient for the more global trend of the utterance melody to shift upwards towards the end of the utterance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you adhere strictly to the former definition, Mandarin echo questions (which do not contain a final -&lt;em&gt;ma&lt;/em&gt; particle) that end in tones other than Tone 4 (the falling tone) would fit the bill, but T4-final echo questions would not, since their final local slope is negative. In Cantonese, however, a relatively steeply positive final pitch slope is observed on all echo questions, independent of tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, an overall upward shift of the pitch range towards the end of the utterance is the criterion, then Mandarin might qualify, regardless of the final lexical tone. It's been observed that the last syllable in the echo question is usually produced with an expanded pitch range. So, even in an echo question that ends in T4, the peak of the T4 contour is higher than it would have been in the declarative version of the utterance, and it is likely higher than the peaks of T4 contours earlier in the utterance (unless those syllables are being emphasized for some other reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both types of behavior have been observed in tone languages from other parts of the world, including Africa. Also, sometimes a &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; of declination over the course of the utterance (declination being the steady downward trend of the pitch range typical for &quot;neutral&quot; declarative utterances) is observed on intonational questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T05:17:26.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7161" CreationDate="2014-05-13T15:15:16.153" Score="8" ViewCount="5924" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to figure out what the &lt;strong&gt;proper syllabification of words in American English&lt;/strong&gt; is and why. PLEASE NOTE: I am interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view, not in terms of hyphenation/spelling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionary.com (Random House) and Cambridge dictionary give those transcriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very /ˈvɛr.i/ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;city /ˈsɪt.i/ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syllable /ˈsɪl.ə.bəl/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, &lt;em&gt;syllabify&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2tk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Penn Phonetics Toolkit (P2TK)&lt;/a&gt; gives those:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very /ˈvɛ.ri/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;city /ˈsɪ.ti/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syllable /ˈsɪ.lə.bəl/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do agree on &quot;people&quot; /ˈpipəl/ for example, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This leaves me with the following questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which set of transcriptions is correct and why? (Or are they both acceptable?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do native speakers typically conceive those syllables? (Do they hear a distinction between one syllabification and the other?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: &lt;em&gt;I'm working on a webapp and training using modern linguistics to help in teaching ESL. (Key features are a focus on sound and the systematic use of IPA transcriptions.) I can see how /ˈvɛr.i/ would help in putting more emphasis on the stressed syllable, meanwhile foreigners thinking of it as /ˈvɛ.ri/ might lead to people giving too much intensity to the unstressed syllable -- but that's just my take on it. I'd like to find out how native speakers think this and what professional linguists make of it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T09:25:05.360" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T19:20:46.783" Title="Correct syllabification in (American) English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-13T17:17:10.587" Score="1" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know of any good videos or sites with a variety of syntax trees. &#xA;I am looking for examples to practice.&#xA;I found one or two videos on youtube but not as many as I expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T17:17:10.587" Title="I am looking for some examples of syntax trees" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-05-13T23:13:09.200" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2014-05-13T17:26:39.613" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no straightforward syllabification method that is accepted by a majority of linguists. As you pointed out, different dictionaries provide different syllabification methods. Usually, syllabification is considered from a phonological point of view (a phonetic perspective is possible but less common, see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguistics can agree that (in English) the nucleus (&quot;core&quot;) of a syllable must be vowel (an exception is made for nasals in certain contexts). If we consider a word with more than one syllable, the next question is whether the consonant(s) between the first and the second nucleus should belong to the first or the second syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Should /r/ in &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; belong to the first, hence /ˈvɛr.i/, or the second syllable /ˈvɛ.ri/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The maximum onset principle (MOP)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MOP says that as many consonants as possible should belong to the second syllable (i.e., the onset of the following syllable should be maximised). What is possible is determined by the phonology of English. For example, there are words like 'road' that begin with an /r/. Hence, we know that /r/ is a possible onset. Therefore, /ˈvɛ.ri/ is the correct syllabification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exceptions to the MOP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some linguists think there should be exceptions to the MOP. For example, one opinion is that stressed syllables must not have an empty coda. This would mean that /ˈvɛr.i/ is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another opinion is that lax vowels such as /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ must not have an empty coda (because there are no words ending in a lax vowel). This would mean that 'hippy' should be syllabified as /'hɪp.i/, not /'hɪ.pi/. Yet another analysis is that (as musicallinguist mentioned) some consonants can be ambisyllabic, i.e. belong to both the preceding and the following syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different syllabification methods, and none of them is universally accepted (also, we have only talked about English here). You say you are interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view (but your description of the question was in phonological terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.: Phonetic syllabification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also possible. Basically, intensity peaks (which are very loud) are syllable nuclei, and intensity troughs (which are very soft) are syllable boundaries (if the loudness difference reaches a certain minimal threshold). But this will likely not help you address your pedagogical concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T09:23:50.607" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T09:23:50.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2014-05-13T19:18:19.250" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dirty little secret of English is that syllable boundaries mostly do not matter (unlike other languages). What is important is the syllable nuclei which are easily identified either as the vowel or a syllabic consonant (such as / n / in 'sudden'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @robert says, the Onset Maximization Principle is most commonly adopted when trying to determine which consonants belong to the nucleus. This principles states, that all things being equal, consonants should belong to the start of the syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this principle is subject to a number of phonotactic constraints. Such as a prohibition of a short stressed open syllable. These constraints are generally derived from what is observed in monosyllabic words (because we know those are possible) as well as from an attempt to have a system that is consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This latter aim lead the phonetician John Wells to offer &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an alternative syllabification principle&lt;/a&gt;, stated thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Subject to certain conditions, consonants are syllabified with the more strongly stressed of two flanking syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)  Where adjacent syllables are of equal grade, consonants are (again subject to stated conditions) syllabified with the leftward syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might lead to violations of certain phonotactic principles such as syllabifying 'limber' as limb/er. But mb is not possible in English as a syllable-final cluster, so the syllabification is lim/ber. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, the two main pronunciation dictionaries of English (Cambridge and Longman) both use a very different syllabification pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel that the Onset Maximization Principle is more often in consonance with native speaker intuitions (although I don't have the literature to back it up) and would also be more beneficial to non-native speakers because it results in syllables with simpler clusters. E.g. 'hospital' is more helpful as 'hos-pi-tal' than 'hosp-i-tal'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T19:18:19.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7156" CreationDate="2014-05-13T20:53:50.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pesetsky (1987, section 5.3.1 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.ucsc.edu/~ardeal/courses/synb-w12/pesetsky1987.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://people.ucsc.edu/~ardeal/courses/synb-w12/pesetsky1987.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) addresses wh-phrases with &quot;the hell&quot; (and its ilk), and there's some bloggish discussion of it here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingcomm.blogspot.com/2011/11/non-question-uses-of-hell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lingcomm.blogspot.com/2011/11/non-question-uses-of-hell.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the discussion there, you might call such phrases &quot;D-unlinkers&quot; (but that would probably date you, and tie you to a particular framework/view of syntax, which may not be what you're looking for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T20:53:50.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-13T22:31:43.307" Score="25" ViewCount="14345" Body="&lt;p&gt;English (as most Indo-European languages) &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; a gender-neutral third person pronoun, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, but it is typically not used for people; if one wants to be gender neutral, one is often stuck using &lt;em&gt;he or she&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there group of languages which make no distinction between gender in third person pronouns, and has no &quot;gendered&quot; pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, instead of saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;Talk to &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; they would instead say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Talk to &lt;strong&gt;that/it&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; If they wanted to make a distinction between gender, they would need to define the subject/target rather than use a pronoun, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Talk to &lt;strong&gt;the man&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3550" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-02-01T17:05:51.193" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T09:48:42.473" Title="Is there a language without gender in third person pronouns?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="17" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-13T22:51:27.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish doesn't have gender in third person pronouns. For example, if one says &quot;Onu, okulda gördüm.&quot;, it can interpreted either &quot;I saw her at school&quot; or &quot; I saw him at school&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2973" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T22:51:27.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-13T23:00:25.563" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many such languages. Examples include Turkic languages (as kiyoshigaang's answer mentions), Uralic languages (such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and doubtless many others. Languages which lack &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender&quot;&gt;grammatical gender&lt;/a&gt; generally will usually lack gendered third-person pronouns specifically (although there are exceptions to this, such as English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T23:00:25.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-13T23:45:44.063" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt; has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/44A#2/&quot;&gt;feature&lt;/a&gt; about gender distinctions in personal pronouns. According to it, there are at least 254 languages without gender distinctions and even 2 with gender distinctions in 1st and 2nd, but not 3rd person pronouns (Iraqw and Burunge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastEditorUserId="873" LastEditDate="2014-05-13T23:52:54.720" LastActivityDate="2014-05-13T23:52:54.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-14T02:31:35.277" Score="11" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions concerning words for colors, one specific and one general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Beekes in &lt;em&gt;Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (p. 181) reconstructs a PIE suffix &lt;em&gt;–no-&lt;/em&gt; that forms adjectives.  An example is * &lt;em&gt;krs-nó-&lt;/em&gt; ‘black’:  Skt. &lt;em&gt;kṛṣṇá-,&lt;/em&gt; OCS &lt;em&gt;črъnъ&lt;/em&gt; *(&amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;čъrsn-)&lt;/em&gt; (so Russian &lt;em&gt;черный&lt;/em&gt;).  Several color terms in Latvian, such as &lt;em&gt;sarkans&lt;/em&gt; ‘red’ and &lt;em&gt;dzeltens&lt;/em&gt; ‘yellow’ look like they might also fall into this category.  Can anyone confirm this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the more general question.  How diachronically stable are color terms?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there is an argument for stability.  We can broadly distinguish core or basic vocabulary from cultural vocabulary.  Introductory historical linguistics textbooks say that core vocabulary tends to be conserved because it is less susceptible to borrowing.*  Most languages will include a certain number of color words in their core vocabulary.  Simply because they are ‘basic’, we can assume that these color words are fairly conservative.  The fact that children learn color words very early also suggests that transmission of these words across generations of speakers is likely to be relatively stable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I can think of several paths by which color words might be replaced over time.  Colors may be associated with certain nouns (like blue with the sky), which might come to be used in place of the color (like ‘salmon’ as a color).  Or some factor of material culture, e.g. how dyes are produced, might influence the color word used.  Examples here might include Chinese characters for colors with the grass, bamboo or silk radicals (藍, 紅), which seem to reflect a physical source like the indigo plant.**  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of Berlin and Kay’s study of color systems, and that seems to be mainly synchronic.  To what extent can we reconstruct color terms for PIE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*cf.  Terry Crowley, &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Historical Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (2nd ed. 1992), p. 153: “Languages are more likely to copy words from other languages in the area of &lt;em&gt;cultural vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;core vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;.  Core vocabulary is basically vocabulary that we can expect to find in all human languages.”  Five basic color words (red, green, yellow, black and white) were included on Swadesh’s 100-word list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**There is an additional consideration:  color words may have other meanings besides that of color, as in Chinese 青  &lt;em&gt;qīng&lt;/em&gt;, which can mean ‘young’ in addition to green or blue.  In extreme cases like Hanunoo, these additional semantic dimensions can accrue and throw into question the existence of a color system as such.  See the discussion of universalist vs. relativist approaches to color terminology in Chapter 7 of William Foley’s &lt;em&gt;Anthropological Linguistics:  An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (1997).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T02:23:56.510" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T10:55:36.707" Title="How diachronically stable are color terms?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;colour-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-14T06:02:22.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;North Indian Languages, eg. Hindi/Urdu (&lt;em&gt;Indo&lt;/em&gt;-European). Even though there are gendered nouns, there are no gendered pronouns. Even first (मैं) and second (तुम-informal/आप-formal) person pronouns are gender-neutral. All nouns are gendered, though. For example, a table (मेज़) is feminine while a pen (कलम) is masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;वह आदमी है। (He’s a man.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;वह औरत है। (She’s a woman.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;वह कुर्सी है। (It’s a chair.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T06:02:22.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-14T08:04:08.533" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what, apparently distinguishes the old world languages from the new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swahili, a language whose origin is shrouded in mystery, there is no such gender distinction. In fact there is no 'gender' at all in its grammar but rather class distinction. Its grammar posses 8 classes and 1 class is to distinguish living things but not plants which fall in another class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, 'kaja', an act of coming, could mean 'he came' or 'she came' of if the context was about a bird or a dog then it would mean the dog came or the bird came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other 7 classes go into an elaborate distinction of objects and concepts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar languages would be Sanskrit, of which almost all the European languages are founded on which had 16 classes, but it is not a living language anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction of classes is not merely the addition of a single word in the sentence such as he or she like in English but rather modifying the entire sentence with the class key word in such a way that every word in the sentence denotes the object being spoken about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language also has pre-fixes and suffixes just like any other but it also has inter-fixes interspersed between words as well as size distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, 'mtu' is a person, 'jitu' is a superlative, a very big person and 'kijitu' is a small person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And best of all these distinctions are merely simple syllable. In fact the entire grammar of the language is based on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3555" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T08:04:08.533" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7175" CreationDate="2014-05-14T08:50:25.200" Score="4" ViewCount="2730" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by the picture below (thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brainlesstales.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brainlesstaless&lt;/a&gt;), when I got home I called to my wife: &quot;Miel, soy casa&quot;. After a short pause, she started laughing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know in Spanish this sentence makes no sense, but it is correct in English. What leads to the dropping of prepositions? How come this dropping is acceptable in some sentences, and not in others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Ksiz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hi Honey, I&amp;#39;m home&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3557" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T10:24:59.827" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T06:04:45.407" Title="Why is it correct to say &quot;Honey, I'm home&quot;, but &quot;Miel, soy casa&quot; is not?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7172" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-05-14T14:28:59.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T14:28:59.820" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T14:28:59.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7173" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-05-14T14:28:59.820" Score="0" Body="The script used to write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and a few more Indo-Aryan languages." OwnerUserId="3290" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-14T16:40:06.983" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T16:40:06.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7171" CreationDate="2014-05-14T15:39:08.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; is not only a noun: it is also an adverb.  This is not predictable: it just happens to be a fact about English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-05-14T15:39:08.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-14T21:01:10.900" Score="2" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although spectrograms contain much more detail, I'm curious how far phonologists and phoneticists can go with IPA alone. Can someone provide some examples of  narrow, detail-rich IPA transcription for various words in English, Spanish, German, Icelandic, etc.? I'd also be interested in seeing how IPA can capture existing phonetic features such as allophones, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, what detail can be denoted in a spectrogram but not IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found the following examples of what I'm looking for on Wikipedia: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pets [pʰɛʔts]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pretzel [ˈpʰɹ̥ʷɛʔt.sɫ̩]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3568" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-05-18T02:52:40.783" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T12:15:54.263" Title="How much phonetic/phonological detail can be captured using IPA alone?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-15T02:10:14.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoken Sinhala has &quot;eya&quot; which is used in place of the English &quot;he&quot;/&quot;she&quot;. It also has gender specific words but in the spoken language I've never heard them used. Some native Sinhala speakers have difficulty separating &quot;he&quot;/&quot;she&quot; in English and use &quot;he&quot; for females with or without auto-correcting to &quot;her&quot;. I believe that in written Sinhala there is gender distinction for third person pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T02:10:14.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7178" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The study of colour terms is a specialized focus of research within the field of linguistic relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently at least four relevant Wikipedia articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms%3a_Their_Universality_and_Evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Color term&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7179" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" Score="0" Body="The study of colour terms is a specialized focus of research within the field of linguistic relativity." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T03:13:17.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-15T04:27:22.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indonesian Language is. We don't use any third person pronouns.&#xA;For example, we can use &quot;Dia memakai sepatu&quot; or in English &quot;He/She is wearing shoes&quot;.&#xA;So the word of &quot;Dia&quot; is sometime biased, between &quot;He&quot; or &quot;She&quot;.&#xA;And for your information, Indonesian Language or in simply most people say &quot;Bahasa&quot; is so interesting. It has no any specific intonation to describe the homophones. And the grammar is so simple. If you want to study about Bahasa, I will tech you then :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3572" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T04:27:22.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-15T08:47:58.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Finnish language we do not have separate words for him/her but instead use the word &quot;hän&quot; to refer to a person of either gender. For finns learning English it can be a challenge to understand that when you refer to a third person you'll also need to specify their gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3575" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T08:47:58.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7190" CreationDate="2014-05-15T11:38:59.313" Score="1" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Madinah Arabic Course videos, the lecturer says that the word الدنيا in the above is na'at (adjective) for مثل.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't الحياة mudaf ilaihi (possessed noun) for مثل and الدنيا is mudaf ilaihi (possessed noun) for الحياة?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, why is الدنيا mansoob (accusative case)? Is it mabni (non-declinable)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2910" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-16T01:21:49.213" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T13:23:43.500" Title="is الدنيا (ad-duniya) in the arabic sentence واضرب لهم مثل الحياة الدنيا regarded as na'at (an adjective)?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-11-29T01:58:41.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7188" CreationDate="2014-05-15T17:42:05.727" Score="8" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several Indo-European languages the verb that denotes possession (&lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt;) is also used to construct verb tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; seen ... I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; a dog. (English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am&lt;/strong&gt; văzut ... &lt;strong&gt;Am&lt;/strong&gt; un câine. (Romanian, am = I have. Note: this past tense in Romanian doesn't correspond directly to present perfect in English, but it's still an example of a tense formed with the equivalent to &amp;quot;to have&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Έχω&lt;/strong&gt; δει ... &lt;strong&gt;Έχω&lt;/strong&gt; ένα σκύλο. (Greek, έχω = I have)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And many others, such as Italian, French, Norwegian, etc.  All sentences above have the same meaning, except for the noted difference in the precise tense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all of these languages are related, it is not that surprising that in all of them the verb &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt; shares these functions.  I used to think that this is just an accidental idiosyncrasy of Indo-European languages, and there's no fundamental reason why it should be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it turns out that Chinese (an unrelated language) is also like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;我&lt;strong&gt;没(有)&lt;/strong&gt;看到 ... 我&lt;strong&gt;有&lt;/strong&gt; 一只狗。 (有&lt;sup&gt; yǒu&lt;/sup&gt; = have, 没有&lt;sup&gt; méi yǒu&lt;/sup&gt; = haven't)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wǒ méi (yǒu) kàn dào... Wǒ yǒu yī zhi gǒu.  (Meaning: I haven't seen ... I have a dog.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian (my mother tongue) doesn't have anything like this (in fact it doesn't even have a verb for possession), so this double function of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; is surprising and counterintuitive to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any fundamental reason why several unrelated languages would all use &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt; in these two seemingly separate and unrelated roles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3582" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:05:41.857" Title="Relationship between possession (&quot;to have&quot;) and tenses (&quot;I have seen&quot;)" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-15T20:12:49.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hungarian, &lt;em&gt;ő&lt;/em&gt; means both &quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot;, and also &quot;it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T20:12:49.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7184" CreationDate="2014-05-15T21:10:21.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These analytical tense forms (perfect tenses) you refer to descend from free word combinations, only later, due to their frequent usage, they got gramaticalized and turned into the verb forms. Even now in English some traces of the expressions of &lt;code&gt;have + Past Participle&lt;/code&gt; which are not a Perfect tense still can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;I &lt;strong&gt;have written&lt;/strong&gt; the letter.&quot; comes from the older &quot;I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; the letter written.&quot; (predicates are in bold type). This older form was something like today we can say &quot;I have my car repaired.&quot; which is not the same now as &quot;I have repaired my car.&quot; Generally speaking, the idea of Perfect is &quot;as for now, the thing is done, I possess (hold in my hands, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt;) the thing made, the job finished.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that some languages, like French and German, form the Perfect tenses from some verbs using 'to be', not 'to have', and all the Slavic languages originally had Perfect only with 'to be', never with 'to have'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T21:59:26.667" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T21:59:26.667" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7184" CreationDate="2014-05-15T22:27:37.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) provides information that is relevant to this question. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/68A#2/25.5/148.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Feature 68A (The Perfect)&lt;/a&gt; is divided into perfect from possessive (i.e. from &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; or the like), from &lt;em&gt;finish&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt;, as well as a category for other perfects and one for languages that don't have a perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;perfect from &lt;em&gt;'have&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/strong&gt; is relatively rare with only seven related and exclusively European languages. It developed from structures like &lt;em&gt;I have the work done&lt;/em&gt;, which were later &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_%28grammar%29#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reanalysed&lt;/a&gt; as having the meaning of the perfect. Of course not all languages are part of WALS, but Mandarin is, and it is categorised as not having a perfect. I'm not saying that your example from Mandarin Chinese is wrong. It's possible - though perhaps a bit unlikely - that WALS is wrong, or that your example is not a perfect after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;perfect from &lt;em&gt;'finish'&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;'already&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/strong&gt; is in fact more frequent, with 21 languages, and distributed over different language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-15T22:34:04.637" LastActivityDate="2014-05-15T22:34:04.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2014-05-15T22:32:52.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;wa ḍrib lahum maϑala l-ḥayāti d-dunyā.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad-dunyā is indeed indeclinable; here it is an adjective (fem. sing. det.) qualifying al-ḥayāti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T10:13:28.923" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T10:13:28.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2014-05-16T00:43:05.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is the right place to ask for 'irab (إعراب), but since there is no arabic.SE you can ask here     &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ahlalloghah.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ملتقى أهل اللغة&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is the answer anyway. The lecturer is wrong, الدنيا is na'at for الحياة not for مثل.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, the word الحياة is mudaf ilaih for مثل but الدنيا is not a mudaf ilaih for الحياة, it's a na'at for it.&#xA;The word الدنيا is not a mansoob, it's an ism tafdeel اسم تفضيل&#xA;The last one is hard for me to say in English so I'll use pure Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;الدنيا ليست مبنية، بل هي معربة ولكن بحركة مقدرة على آخرها منع من ظهورها التعذر لأنه اسم مقصور، فالأصل في الدنيا أن يُكسر آخرها، ولكن كيف تكسر ما آخره ألف؟ فإذ لم يمكن ذلك قُدِّرت الحركة&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3161" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T00:43:05.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-16T01:18:03.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Georgian&lt;/strong&gt; lacks gender specific third person pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ის&lt;/strong&gt; (is) covers &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot;, &quot;it&quot;; and also &quot;this&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;იგი&lt;/strong&gt; (igi) covers &quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mongolian&lt;/strong&gt; is another language that doesn't specify gender in third person pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;тэр&lt;/strong&gt; (ter) is a deictic / demonstrative meaning &quot;that&quot;, and is covers &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot;, and &quot;it&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T01:18:03.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-16T15:45:45.487" Score="1" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could you explain or analyze these written Arabic from the non-concatenative morphology point of view? These verbs are derived from nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bakkala  (to buckle)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;bukla    (buckle)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;tilifu:n (telephone)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;talfana   (to telephone)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;tilifiziu:n  (television)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;talfaza  (to televise)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;zayt  (oil)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;zayyata  (to oil)&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3617" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T14:57:08.847" Title="non-concatenative morphology in written arabic?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2014-05-16T20:48:19.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Arabic, but what I can extrapolate from Hebrew, which I know a bit, is that you treat the consonants of each expression in the same fashion as you do root consonants. &#xA;Let's take the infinitives first. I use capitals for root sounds. The root of &quot;buckle&quot; is BKL. The infinitive pattern is CaCCaCa, where C stands for &quot;consonant&quot;. Now you insert BKL for the Cs in the pattern, and you get BaKKaLa. The same would be true for &quot;oil&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ZYT + CaCCaCa = ZaYYaTa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting point here is the doubling of the middle root consonant, which seems to be required whenever the root is triliteral. &#xA;The infinitive &quot;to telephone&quot; is a quadriliteral root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLFN + CaCCaCa = TaLFaNa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root for &quot;television&quot; has five consonants, and it seems that the final /n/ simply gets dropped: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLFZ + CaCCaCa = TaLFaZa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-05-16T20:48:19.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2545" CreationDate="2014-05-17T07:51:47.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning discourse markers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maynard, Senko (1993) &quot;Discourse modality: Subjectivity, emotion and voice in the Japanese language&quot; (John Benjamins Publishing Company) is seminal work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Newer work can be found in Onodera, Noriko O. (2004): Japanese Discourse Markers: Synchronic and Diachronic Discourse Analysis (John Benjamins Publishing). Check out the reference sections of these books for detailed studies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning wa/ga (not an issue of discourse analysis):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To my knowledge there is no English language monograph dedicated to this issue. Try Heycock, Caroline (2008): Japanese -Wa, -Ga, and Information Structure. p54-83. (Oxford Handbook of Japanese linguistics, OUP) as a starting point. But please note that the Japanese language literature on this topic is massive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the omission of wa/ga/o (not an issue of discourse analysis either):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I suggest you browse Tsujimura, Natsuko (2013): An introduction to Japanese linguistics 3rd. (Wiley Blackwell). She's pretty thorough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T07:51:47.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7135" CreationDate="2014-05-17T09:53:31.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IMS Open Corpus Workbench&lt;/a&gt; might work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3599" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T09:53:31.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2014-05-17T17:51:45.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;bakkala (to buckle)&#xA;bukla (buckle)&#xA;a three consonontal root (b,k,l)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tilifu:n (telephone)&#xA;talfana (to telephone)&#xA;four consonantal root (t,l,f,n)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tilifiziu:n (television)&#xA;talfaza (to televise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;four consonantal root (tlfz)&#xA;zayt (oil)&#xA;zayyata (to oil)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;four consononta root&#xA;z,y,y,t&#xA;i wish this answers your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3601" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T17:51:45.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4292" CreationDate="2014-05-17T18:51:03.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definite descriptions such as &quot;The City of Rome&quot; are the subject of a 2013 paper by Michael Rieppel in Linguistics and Philosophy: &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10988-013-9141-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'The Double Life of the Mayor of Oakland'&lt;/a&gt;. Rieppel analyses descriptions conforming to the general schema: &lt;em&gt;the + N + of + Proper Name&lt;/em&gt;, and draws a distinction between &lt;em&gt;possessive descriptions&lt;/em&gt; on the one hand, as in (1), and &lt;em&gt;identifying descriptions&lt;/em&gt; on the other, as in (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The mayor of Oakland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The city of Oakland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question then, one term used to pick out the class of definite descriptions you have identified is &lt;strong&gt;identifying definite descriptions&lt;/strong&gt;. Rieppel describes the semantics of identifying descriptions as follows: &lt;em&gt;the city of Oakland&lt;/em&gt; denotes the very same thing denoted by the proper name following &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, and simply adds the information that it is a city. Rieppel goes on to provide several diagnostics showing that possessive descriptions can behave as semantic predicates, whereas identifying descriptions never do. Consider, for example, the fact that a possessive description can be coordinated with expressions that are uncontroversially predicative (3), whereas identifying descriptions cannot (4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) She is ambitious, driven, and the mayor of Oakland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) *It is lively, energetic, and the city of Oakland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rieppel points out that there is cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a prepositional linker such as &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; is present. In German, for example, identifying descriptions do not occur with a preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Der philosoph Frege&#xA;    The philosopher Frege&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) Der Stadt Oakland&#xA;    The city  Oakland&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting restriction on this construction is that the expression following &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; cannot just be any expression that denotes an individual, it has to be a proper name. Consider, for example, the contrast between (2) (repeated as (7)) and (8-10):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) The city of Oakland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) *The city of that city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(9) *The city of Agadir's sister city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10) *The city of the sister city of Agadir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even thought (8-10) all involve an expression that denotes an individual following &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, they are nonetheless unacceptable. Rieppel develops an account of the semantics of identifying descriptions which arguably can derive these facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T18:51:03.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7200" CreationDate="2014-05-17T20:33:46.863" Score="3" ViewCount="1305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this inscription on something I recently purchased, not sure what it is. Can you please help identify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8W2pf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Inscription&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3602" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T20:27:52.157" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T16:05:44.107" Title="Please help me identify this language (image)" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-07-14T23:38:58.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7199" CreationDate="2014-05-17T21:35:30.687" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;@prash is right, that is Malayalam, and the text is upside down, it reads &quot;mādhavi&quot;, മാധവി, which is most likely a female name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-05-17T21:35:30.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-18T04:03:09.797" Score="0" ViewCount="1197" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in most accents of English, /r/ is fricated when it follows /t/ and /d/ word-initially, and in some it has become a full affricate /tʃ/. &#xA;If you were going to look at a spectrogram of this, how could you measure the degree of frication of /r/? I'm looking at the affrication of /tr/ and /dr/ and need to know how it differs from just /r/ being fricated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3604" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T05:50:47.743" Title="A question about /t/ + fricative /r/ vs /tr/ affrication" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7201" CreationDate="2014-05-18T05:50:47.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that &lt;strong&gt;there is no difference&lt;/strong&gt;. Phonetically speaking, an affricate is just a  stop closure followed by a period of frication, so [t] plus frication is the same as an affricate. The distinction between an affricate and a stop-fricative sequence is really a phonological one, where the former behaves as a single phoneme and the latter behaves as a sequence of two phonemes. See the related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/179/is-there-a-difference-between-an-affricate-and-a-plosivefricative-consonant-clu&quot;&gt;Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you are talking about, we know there are two phonemes at play--/t/ and /ɹ/. Following the conventions that linguists use for bracketing, this sequence doesn't strictly speaking &quot;become&quot; /tʃ/, since that would indicate one phoneme sequence becoming another phoneme entirely, which only makes sense in a discussion of diachronic change; in a synchronic context, it's more accurate to say that the underlying sequence /tɹ/ is sometimes realized as something like [tʃɹ] (note the square brackets, indicating a phonetic realization). See the related question:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1104/why-are-t-and-d-sometimes-affricated-before-r-in-english&quot;&gt;Why are /t/ and /d/ sometimes affricated before /ɹ/ in English?&lt;/a&gt; Technically, it is the aspiration associated with the initial /t/ that is turning into a fricative, so from a phonological point of view it might make more sense in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; cases to think of this process as the affrication of the /t/ rather than the &quot;fricativization&quot; (or &lt;em&gt;spirantization&lt;/em&gt;) of the /ɹ/. In practice, however, it might be difficult to say where the /t/ ends and where the /ɹ/ begins in the spectrogram, since the tongue usually gets in position for the /ɹ/ before voicing kicks in, i.e., during the apiration/fricative noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how to &quot;measure&quot; the degree of frication in the /tɹ/ on a spectrogram, it's not clear how you would quantify such a property, but the main visual difference between frication noise and aspiration noise is that formant structure is visible in the latter but not in the former. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T05:50:47.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2014-05-18T06:02:43.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just sharing an experience to answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker and have learned English only by reading and listening. I have read tens of English books up until now and have watched hundreds of hours of English movies and TV shows. Now my reading and listening skills are very good. But I have not spoken a word! Well, maybe &quot;a word&quot; would be exaggerating, but I can honestly say that I have not spoken more than a handful of sentences, or in the sense of time, more than a few minutes. My writing is not good also (as you may see from this same answer), because I've used it only in some emails and QA's like here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes that I try to speak English (with myself) I clearly see that I cannot. Finding and choosing words in Real-time takes more time and I speak very slowly and have to think some seconds for some words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my empirical answer for you is &lt;strong&gt;most likely, NO&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm not excluding the fact that some geniuses may be out of this conclusion, but for most of people the answer is No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four skills of language (Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening) are related to each other to some degree, and improving some, will automatically improve the others to a lesser degree, but they are independent more than being interrelated and &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; improving some to final extent, would not bring others to that level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3596" LastEditorUserId="3596" LastEditDate="2014-05-18T06:12:35.913" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T06:12:35.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2014-05-18T08:09:04.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say reading alone is not sufficient. There must be a lot of other activities involved. First of all effective vocabulary work with good dictionaries. Then effective grammar work.  A sound knowledge of grammar  is absolutely necessary. And then the most important thing of all, you have to develop your own faculty of formulation and of expressing yourself. And this must be developed in several stages, beginning with simple tasks such as giving definitions of words, explaining grammar points in your own words. On the next level you can try to give summaries of sectons of novels you read. Later you can try to give  pictures of whole novels you have read or to write articles on topics you are interested in. Participation in forum discussions on the Internet is very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-05-18T10:46:32.393" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T10:46:32.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-18T10:38:04.077" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question focuses on how we should structure expressions with a form of address, such as &lt;em&gt;Mr.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Frau&lt;/em&gt;, etc., or a title, such as &lt;em&gt;Dr.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Prof.&lt;/em&gt;, etc., and a proper name, such as &lt;em&gt;Smith&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Yamada&lt;/em&gt;, etc. In order NOT to open the door to confusing this issue with the problem of the structure of proper names, I want to restrict the discussion to a form of address and/or a title and one proper name.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please note that German, for instance, can have all three items present, and then the order is clear: form of address+title+proper name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor Müller!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titles and forms of addresses are free expressions in English, German, French, and many other languages. They can appear without proper names:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; b. The prof’s not in yet.&#xA; c. Careful, mister!&#xA; d. Wünschen der Herr noch etwas? &#xA; e. Bon jour, mademoiselle!  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it is therefore safe to assume that forms of address and titles must be in a syntactic relationship with the co-occurring proper names within the greater NP. The problem concerns syntax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question then is: How are expressions structured? May we assume endocentric structure? If yes, what’s the head? Is it (f) or (g)? Why? Or are we dealing with exocentric NPs? If so, why?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; f. [Mr. [Smith]]&#xA; g. [[Mr.] Smith]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a final note, there are languages, such as Japanese, where the form of address is a suffix (h). If titles are present, one often deals with compounds (i), at least in Japanese.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; h. Yamada-san&#xA;    &quot;Mr/Mrs/Miss Yamada&quot;&#xA; i. Yamada-saibankan&#xA;    &quot;Judge Yamada&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages that use affixes and compounding, such as Japanese, may offer a hint concerning the internal structure of the expressions in other languages. In Japanese the head is always at the right periphery of its phrase. This property is also in effect in morphology. If true, &lt;em&gt;-san&lt;/em&gt; in (h), and &lt;em&gt;saibankan&lt;/em&gt; in (i) should be the heads.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But would the corresponding expressions also be heads in languages that use free expressions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T15:17:30.313" Title="Is it [Dr. [No]] or [[Dr.] No], or something else?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7176" CreationDate="2014-05-18T12:15:54.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various aspects of disordered speech that cannot be expressed using IPA 2005. This is why, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/ExtIPAChart02.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ExtIPA chart&lt;/a&gt; was constructed. This covers things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interdental/bidental articulation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whistled articulation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sliding articulation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA Extensions&lt;/a&gt; also covers thing like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʩ - velopharyngeal fricative (snoring);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʬ - bilabial percussive (lip smacking);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʭ - bidental percussive (teeth gnashing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is lip rounding. The IPA only supports rounded/unrounded, labiablised and more/less rounding. It does not describe things like compressed vs protruded rounding -- this is implied by the position of the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with a spectogram you can identify the F1 and F2 frequencies of the different vowels in different speakers and get an accurate representation of where they are in relation to each other. IPA is ambiguous depending on the transcriber (e.g. 〈a〉 can be either front 〈a̠〉 or central 〈ä〉).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T12:15:54.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2014-05-18T13:38:08.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the list of individual languages here, &lt;strong&gt;Adyghe&lt;/strong&gt; (Northwest Caucasian) has a third person &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; 'that' used for 3rd person, and &lt;strong&gt;Quechua&lt;/strong&gt; languages do so too, e.g., &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt; 's/he' in northern varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T13:38:08.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2014-05-18T14:20:05.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much guys!&#xA;Are there other languages that apply the same rule as this written Arabic?&#xA;Like whenever the root is triliteral the middle root consonant is doubling?&#xA;I also want to research other words in wrtten arabic, if this &quot;doubling rule&quot; are applied in other words, but i don't know anything about arabic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3617" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T14:20:05.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-18T14:33:49.827" Score="2" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could you analyze the formation of the plural below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Singular - Plural&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;teatər&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;teatri&lt;/em&gt; - theater&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;bobər&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;bobri&lt;/em&gt; -   beaver&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;pesen&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;pesni&lt;/em&gt; -  song&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;psalom&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;psalmi&lt;/em&gt; -   psalm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;bancik&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;bancigi&lt;/em&gt; -   band saw&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;izverk&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;izvergi&lt;/em&gt; -   monster&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/i/ is the plural suffix, and vowels such as /ə,e,o/ are deleted in plurals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3617" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-18T21:54:04.050" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T10:30:16.743" Title="Plural formation in Bulgarian" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7210" CreationDate="2014-05-18T17:37:12.177" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The deletion of certain &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e o&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and all &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ъ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in Bulgarian is an effect of &lt;strong&gt;Havlík's law&lt;/strong&gt;, and the forms &lt;code&gt;/bantsik::bantsigi/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/izverk::izvergi/&lt;/code&gt; are demonstrative of Bulgarian's word-final devoicing; all Bulgarian obstruents lose voicing word-finally and the underlying forms are actually &lt;code&gt;|bantsig::bantsigi|&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;|izverg::izvergi|&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, the plural is formed with, among others, a suffix /-i/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to answering the question, I'd just analyse the plural forms as &lt;code&gt;&quot;word-PL&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-05-18T17:42:46.893" LastActivityDate="2014-05-18T17:42:46.893" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7030" CreationDate="2014-05-18T20:14:29.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to refute tendencies in morpheme ordering, but for a different take on your question, &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11525-010-9185-y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; discusses how ordering can be compositionally driven by scope, based on data from a very agglutinating polysynthetic language Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adyghe affixes are often described in templatic terms, but the authors show it's not universally true in this language. Rather, ordering is often not fixed but determined by semantics. For example, different orderings of the simulative and habilitive suffixes allows to get different interpretations, as in (1) vs. (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) He can [pretend [as if he's taking a star from the sky]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) He pretends [he can [take a star from the sky]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors propose that an affix sits next to its scope, and that scopal morphology is compositional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently there's been &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11525-014-9231-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a paper&lt;/a&gt; that argues, based on Yi (Tibeto-Burman) data, that scopal morphology is not necessarily compositional. The author supports it with opaque morpheme combinations and cases where only one scope can obtain between two morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2014-05-25T16:57:24.913" LastActivityDate="2014-05-25T16:57:24.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13288" CreationDate="2014-05-19T00:17:50.337" Score="13" ViewCount="2308" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does nonconcatenative morphology of the Semitic type (consonantal roots, vocalic templates + affixes) arise diachronically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty easy to see how a nonconcatenative inflectional system could morph into a more typical, concatenative system: sound change could mess up the templates in different ways for different lexemes, leading to analogical extensions and leveling of the vowel alternations. But it's harder to envision a process that goes the other way, starting with a linear synthetic language, or an isolating one, or an agglutinating one, and ending up with a root-and-template system. Probably this is an unanswerable question for lack of data, but are there any plausible speculations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T22:32:47.287" Title="What is known or believed about the origin of Semitic-type root-and-template morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-19T10:20:52.250" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although there are appreciable comments and an answer after this question (thank to Robert and Acattle), I am much seeking for a Knowledge branch, (e.g. an &quot;NLP sub-task&quot;) than an individual research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm searching for an &quot;NLP subtask&quot; which can help recognizing if a micro-blog post is asking a question and more generally &quot;is answerable&quot; or not. For example the tweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A problem shared is a problem halved - so tell us about your one weird phobia&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a question but is answerable; or the tweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;xxx Town is on fire&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is neither a question nor answerable; the tweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;For our next area spotlight: what's your favorite thing in xxx Garden, and why?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a question seeking for answers; but the tweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What do you do in your Time Out? xxx and @xxx want to see your x minute films about your London httpx://xxxxx&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though is a question, not seeking for answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recognition, itself, can be of my interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3610" LastEditorUserId="3610" LastEditDate="2014-05-26T10:23:38.853" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T10:23:38.853" Title="recognizing if a message is question or not?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3608" CreationDate="2014-05-19T13:38:19.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question 3 Pre-, -posit (something that is posited) -ion.both pre and ion are constituent or bound morphemes while posit is the base or free morpheme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3612" LastActivityDate="2014-05-19T13:38:19.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-19T23:48:37.200" Score="5" ViewCount="7239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for languages that have no specific past tense? For example, in the language of Kiribati there is no separation between past and present tense. To indicate the past, one must specify when exactly (i.e. yesterday, a few days ago, last week, last month).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically interested in how societies with oral transmission of traditional knowledge think about the past as related to the present, and how this is embodied in language - are there established linguistic theories about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3614" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T00:16:31.990" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T15:29:49.597" Title="Languages with no past tense?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2014-05-20T09:02:12.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dominik Lukes's answer sums things up really well. Now, that shouldn't discourage you from reading a lot, especially if that's what you like to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Famous polyglot &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kató Lomb&lt;/a&gt; learned most of her languages reading romance and detective stories because that's what she liked to do. She was also a translator and interpret but novels were still her favorite way of picking up the bulk of the language. You might want to pick up her book, &lt;em&gt;How I Learn Languages&lt;/em&gt;, it's a good read and she describes how she picked up her languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think picking up languages on one's own is underrated. I'm still to find scientific research on the topic despite what I see time and again: people who picked up a language mostly from modern media (books, music, TV shows, Internet), as opposed to school and language classes. They may not have had much experience speaking with a live person but repeating lyrics or expressing themselves for hours online, even if just in writing, clearly has had a positive impact on their fluency. It's not the obvious way to learn for native speakers but it seems one &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;very reasonable way&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for foreigners to pick up a new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only hope this helps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastActivityDate="2014-05-20T09:02:12.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7318" CreationDate="2014-05-20T10:53:21.273" Score="6" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start by saying I'm not trained in formal linguistics. So I won't have the slightest qualms being told what I'm saying doesn't make too much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a native speaker of American English. I've studied German, Latin, French, and Japanese in school.  I've been in Japan for almost two years and had worked for years to be ready to move before that. I now, speak, read, and write the language to a decent extent (failed the N1 by 4 points a few months ago). In general, I have not had any difficulty perceiving the sounds produced by Japanese as the same kana they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, however, I've encountered a feature from a subset of Japanese speakers where they produce /rj-/ and I hear /j-/. For example, students introducing themselves  Ryou or Ryuusuke [are Japanese characters allowed on linguistics.se?]. I only hear yo and yusuke even if they repeat it. If different Japanese native speakers say the same names, I clearly hear the /rj-/. The speakers who produce a sound I fail to hear are male native speakers of Japanese aged about 19 living in Hokkaido (and generally native to Hokkaido).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is only a subset even for people in the same sample group. I don't normally have difficulty hearing /r/ or /rj/ from other Japanese speakers and produce them in ways where they are perceived as correct by native speakers in Hokkaido.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background for those not familar with Japanese:  These are two mora openers produced by combing the symbols for &quot;ri&quot; and &quot;yo&quot; and &quot;ri&quot; and &quot;yu&quot; respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) What does the subset of native Japanese speakers who produce a type of /rj-/ sound that I only hear as /j-/ do differently from other speakers? &#xA;(2) Is this a known linguistic property?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gotten some helpful answers from &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/16036/perceiving-initial-r-in-names-likes-%E9%9A%86%E4%BB%8B%EF%BC%88%E3%82%8A%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%E3%81%99%E3%81%91%EF%BC%89-and-%E7%B6%BE%EF%BC%88%E3%82%8A%E3%82%87%E3%81%86%EF%BC%89?noredirect=1#comment36050_16036&quot;&gt;the Japanese.se as to what might be going on that help explain why there ain't much sound there&lt;/a&gt;. Native Japanese correctly hear /rj-/ even though there are minimally different names (in the case ryusuke there is a name yusuke)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; hints at what could be answer in mentioning a flexibility in how the /r/ sound in Japanese can be produced. But my random googling gives many different accounts of what /r/ in Japanese is (&quot;an apical postalveolar flap undefined for laterality&quot;  vs retroflex flap)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByOl7_rBshOvbnVEcG9NVm9lcDQ/edit?usp=sharing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a sample&lt;/a&gt;  of a speaker who produces it in a way that is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; for me to hear.  I definitely hear the leading /r/ on his first try but don't perceive it on his second very well. Can someone tell me how he makes his /r/ sound based on the sample?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3620" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T13:10:00.487" Title="Question regarding leading &quot;r&quot; sounds in Japanese" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7210" CreationDate="2014-05-20T16:37:23.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plural formation in Bulgarian depends on whether the noun is masculine, feminine or neuter.&#xA;On top of that, it also depends if the noun is monosyllabic or polysyllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Masculine nouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monosyllabic&lt;/strong&gt;: in most cases, use ~ove at the end of the word (e.g. stol - stolove - chair). Nevertheless, some masculine monosyllabic nouns have their own plural form and do not use the ~ove ending (den - dni - day; krak - kraka - leg). There are different historical reason for these exceptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polysyllabic&lt;/strong&gt;: form the plural by adding ~i at the end (pisatel - pisateli - writer). Some polysyllabic masculine nouns form the plural through phonetic change. All nouns ending in ~ik change the ~k for ~tsi /~ци/ (uchenik - uchenitsi - pupil; rabotnik - rabotnitsi - workman).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feminine nouns&lt;/strong&gt; form the plural by adding ~i at the end. If the noun end in ~a or ~ya /я/ the ~i replaces it (sestra - sestri - sister; staya - stai - room); nouns that end in ~iya /~ия/ form the plural with ~ii (chiniya - chinii - plate)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neuter&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the noun &lt;strong&gt;ends in ~o&lt;/strong&gt;, the plural is formed by replacing the ~o with ~a (leglo - legla - bed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the noun &lt;strong&gt;ends in ~e&lt;/strong&gt;, the plural is formed by replacing the ~e with ~a (letishte - letishta - airport)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exceptions: Some neuter nouns have their own form (tsvete - tsvetya - flower; oko - ochi - eye). Again - there are different historical reasons for the formation of these words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3622" LastEditorUserId="3622" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T10:30:16.743" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T10:30:16.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6851" CreationDate="2014-05-20T18:02:03.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you are best served with the following volume:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages (Handbücher zur Sprach- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft). De Gruyter. 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-05-20T18:02:03.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7215" CreationDate="2014-05-20T18:04:41.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be interested in the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://tre.docdat.com/tw_files2/urls_41/40/d-39281/7z-docs/4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Question Identification on Twitter&quot; by Li, Si, Lyu, King, and Chan&lt;/a&gt;. This should give you a background on question identification in general as well as an overview of the machine learning techniques typically used for these types of problems. I suspect with this knowledge you should be able to come up with a modified approach that does what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My one caveat is that this type of approach relies on hand-annotated data which is expensive to produce both in terms of time and paying annotators. Unfortunately, the authors of this paper are highly unlikely to share their data with you as &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/3021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Twitter API license agreement forbids the resyndication of Twitter content&lt;/a&gt;. As I said, most modern NLP techniques require large inputs of annotated data and it may not be feasible for you to collect this data yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2014-05-20T18:04:41.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7227" CreationDate="2014-05-20T18:44:05.177" Score="2" ViewCount="3332" Body="&lt;p&gt;I there a resource that lists the phonemes that are used in different languages? I would prefer a ranking of the most common phonemes within each language like in this example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 /ɛ/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 /ə/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;15 /x/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no explicit ranking is available, grouping (&quot;very common&quot;, &quot;common&quot;, &quot;rare&quot;) within each language would help to. The more speaker a language has the more important is this ranking for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to identify phonemes that appear in many words of many languages and phonemes that are rarely used across all spoken languages of the world (weighted by number of speakers). I want to find a set of phoneme of which one could construct a language who's words are easy to pronounce for as many people on earth as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3573" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T12:53:21.393" Title="List of phoneme per language" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7184" CreationDate="2014-05-20T19:16:52.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert's answer leaves us with a puzzle. Since this construction of a perfect with &quot;have&quot; is so rare, it would be a very strange coincidence that it is present in French, German, English, Italian, etc. just by chance. The obvious solution would be to assume that this construction in those language appeared only once, in a language parent of these modern language, that is in Indo-European or at least some dialect of Indo-European of which those languages come form. However, an instant of reflexion shows that this solution does not work. In Latin, common ancestor of French and Italian, there was no composed perfect, in particular, no perfect with &quot;have&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve this puzzle, the great French linguist A. Meillet has proposed that this construction of a perfect with &quot;have&quot; amongst the above said-language was developed only once, probably in germanic languages, and then transmitted not genetically, but laterally, that is by borrowing, into French, Italian, etc.&#xA;This may seem surprising, as borrowing usually concerns words (mostly technical words), not whole grammatical structures. &#xA;However, Meillet argues, this happened in a special situation, where an unusually large part of the population in western Europe was&#xA;bilingual, speaking both a germanic language and a latin language: between the fifth and ninth or tenth century AD, after the invasion of the Roman empire by Germanic tribes. We can see everyday that bilingual people tends to borrow some grammatical or syntactic construction from one of their language to another (my daughter does that all the time, between English and French). It is thus plausible that if sufficiently many people in a country are bilingual, some grammatical construction (the perfect with &quot;have&quot;) can be borrowed to one language to the other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3623" LastEditorUserId="3623" LastEditDate="2014-05-21T12:47:08.030" LastActivityDate="2014-05-21T12:47:08.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6851" CreationDate="2014-05-20T19:29:59.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My standard reference manual has always been Hans Krahe's &amp;quot;Germanische Sprachwissenschaft&amp;quot;. The seventh and last edition is from 1969, which Wolfgang Meid edited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that I'd recommend Streitberg's &amp;quot;Urgermanische Grammatik&amp;quot; from 1896 and Hermann Hirt's &amp;quot;Handbuch des Urgermanischen&amp;quot; from 1931-1934.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastEditorUserId="105" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T15:22:33.350" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T15:22:33.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7224" CreationDate="2014-05-20T19:32:08.720" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ian Maddieson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Phonological_Segment_Inventory_Database&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UPSID database&lt;/a&gt; will take you some of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastEditorUserId="105" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T12:53:21.393" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T12:53:21.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-20T20:40:38.683" Score="2" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are some lists for Georgian prefix-suffix changing parts of speech (with some explanations about the changes occur in roots or stems (e.g syncope ch'am -&gt; ch'm))  sorted in such categories, either verb/non-verb-based or noun/adjective roots. For Verb-based one can find Verb -&gt; Noun ones like :stsavl (teach) &gt; mastsavlebeli (teacher) ; Adj -&gt; Noun like: lamazi &gt; silamaze ; Noun -&gt; Noun: t'vali (eye)&gt; sat'vale (glasses) or mzareuli(cook) &gt; samzareulo (kitchen).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3624" LastActivityDate="2014-05-20T20:40:38.683" Title="Georgian prefix-suffix lists!" Tags="&lt;georgian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7255" CreationDate="2014-05-21T00:24:04.497" Score="6" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I don't know whether this is a genuine &quot;linguistics&quot; problem as of how &quot;linguistics&quot; is defined, but it has bothered my curiosity for so long I have to ask it somewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we scientifically study something, we almost always try to come up with a hypothesis which states what kind of factors made this thing the way it is today. An example: The fact that the majority of creatures breathe oxygen, and have water as the basic medium for metabolism, is explained by the factors that for billions of years on earth, oxygen and water have been the dominant elements in the environment. On the contrary, some creatures live &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; oxygen, because where they live another resource is dominant instead of oxygen. According to the same logic, we could reasonably(though not 100% surely) infer that on a planet where CO is the dominant gas, the creatures, if already formed, will very probably be using CO as an important part for metabolism. By this way, we are constructing a reproducible prediction of how things are formed, based on some observable factors. We are providing an explanation “why” things are the way they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another more relevant example: A popular hypothesis states that Northern European people generally have pale skin, because pale skin absorbs Vitamin D better than dark skin. Another hypothesis states that an agricultural &amp;amp; centralized society formed in China &amp;amp; Egypt because of the closed &amp;amp; fertile nature of their land, while the island/sea conditions of ancient Greece contributed to its commercialism &amp;amp; openness. These are not as easy to attest to as the above hypothesis of why creatures breathe oxygen. But they're still reasonable hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know whether we can apply the same logic to the formation of languages. Languages around the world are very distinct. However I do not believe they just became the way they are today &lt;em&gt;totally out of random&lt;/em&gt;. That is to say, for example, while some languages are synthetic, some others are analytic. While some are tonal, some others are not. These are classifications comparable to the dark/pale skin colors, differences in torso lengths etc among different races. As I have seen, linguistics has largely been about studying &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; are the differences between these different languages, but I haven’t been able to find any study about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; these differences were formed in the first place, or, put it another way, what (practical) factores could have contributed to the different characteristics of different languages. which to me appears to be a fascinating topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does any relevant concentrated study exist on this topic?(I don’t believe such study doesn’t exist at all...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what do they propose? Does any of you have a reasonable hypothesis about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, why? Is it because of the sheer difficulty in realizing such a study, because of our limitation on historical knowledge as well as tools and methods available to conducting such a study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it that I am just talking nonsense and the formation of languages is a totally distinct process, different in nature, that cannot be compared to the examples I proposed? Or is it really just a very random process which cannot be analyzed and attributed to factors as such?(i.e. even given the same environmental/societal conditions, totally different languages characteristics would have been formed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-05-26T12:06:27.807" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T12:06:27.807" Title="Are there systematic studies on HOW language features/characteristics are formed?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6722" CreationDate="2014-05-21T09:33:35.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The expressions &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go-&lt;/em&gt; are prefixes. They are not derivational, but also not inflectional affixes. I believe that's what's causing the confusion between &quot;prefix&quot; and &quot;particles&quot;. Derivational prefixes are the negation prefixes &lt;em&gt;hu-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bu-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mu-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mi-&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;hi-&lt;/em&gt;. Attachment of these prefixes causes derivation from noun to nominal adjective (な形容詞・形容名詞). Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. [[mu- [kankei]]  -na]&#xA;      neg- relation  -attr&#xA;    'unrelated'&#xA; b.*  kankei-na&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure in (a) must be correct, because only &lt;em&gt;mu-&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;kankei&lt;/em&gt; (b), allows the appearance of attributive &lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt;. By the way, be careful with the data &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8E%A5%E9%A0%AD%E8%BE%9E#.E5.90.A6.E5.AE.9A.E3.81.AE.E6.8E.A5.E9.A0.AD.E8.BE.9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;, that's not correct. Rather take a look at &quot;Rickmeyer, Jens. 1995. Japanische Morphosyntax. Groos, Heidelberg&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the meaning of &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go-&lt;/em&gt;: naming them as honorifics is not entirely correct. They can appear in constructions meaning 1. respect, 2. modesty, 3. eulogy (美化語 'bikago' from 美化 'bika' = &quot;euphemism&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; c. o-   musume   -san      respect&#xA;    rsp- daughter -prs&#xA;    'your daughter'&#xA; d. o-   mise -si -mas -u   modesty&#xA;    mds- show -do -pol -npst&#xA;    'I show [you'&#xA; e. o-   mizu               eulogy (refined register)&#xA;    eul- water&#xA;    'water' &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used here examples with &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;go-&lt;/em&gt; means basically the same, but is normally used with Sino-Japanese vocabulary. There are, of course, exceptions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go-&lt;/em&gt; are prefixes, not particles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-05-22T10:41:06.820" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T10:41:06.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2014-05-21T09:43:23.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;ndr&lt;/strong&gt; No, Japanese doesn’t have determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is requested that “credible and/or official” sources be named in the answer, I would recommend taking a look at Bernard Bloch:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1970. Bernard Bloch on Japanese. 1970. R.A. Miller (ed.). New Haven/London: Yale University Press. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloch had many lucid things to say about Japanese, and I doubt he assumed determiners in Japanese. Unfortunately, I cannot verify that with page numbers because I’m on a sabbatical with no access to his work. For those who read German, I suggest taking a look at Jens Rickmeyer:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1995. Japanische Morphosyntax. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rickmeyer bases his account of Japanese morphosyntax in large part on Bloch. Rickmeyer rejects determiners, and calls the words in question &lt;em&gt;adnominals&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Finally, I don’t believe that a discussion of functional categories in GB/MP can meaningfully contribute to an answer - even though I share their conclusion, but for other reasons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this answer I want to base my answer on common ground, on assumptions that most of us can share without compromising any personal or professional tenets. I think there is enough common ground enabling a conclusion if we ponder the next three observations. I will also work from the premise that demonstratives are not by default determiners. Else, Japanese would have determiners because it has demonstratives.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first and second observations are concerned with the tasks we usually attribute to determiners, namely specification and the expression of genus. The third observation concerns the syntactic behavior of &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al., some of which have already been mentioned in other posts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Specification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first observation concerns one function of determiners, namely specification. Specification is gradient, ranging from unspecified (Engl. &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;) to specified (Engl. _the). But &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. only specify objects with respect to proximity and distance referring to speaker and/or addressee. This is clearly different from the kind of specification that accompany determiners in Germanic and Romance languages. In fact the latter kind of specification is expressed in Japanese by the absence or presence of the topic marker &lt;em&gt;-wa&lt;/em&gt;. Image you are about to read a short-story. The first sentence may be either (a) or (b):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. Otoko-GA matikado-ni tat-te i-ta.  &#xA;    A man was standing at the corner.  &#xA; b. Otoko-WA matikado-ni tat-te i-ta.  &#xA;    THE man was standing at the corner.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) is more appropriate because at the beginning of the story no context is available. Everything is new information, hence unspecified. (b), on the other hand, creates the impression that a context already exists, even though you may not have been aware of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But this distinction is not expressed by words like the English determiners, but rather by the (non-)appearance of &lt;em&gt;-wa&lt;/em&gt;. The use of &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. in (a-b) would be totally meaningless. Since specification in Japan uses an entirely different mechanism than determiners, one may ask why Japanese should have &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; mechanisms of specification.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A partial conclusion is the words &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. lack the expression of specification usually ascribed to determiners.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Genus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A second observation concerns an additional function of determiners in, e.g. Germanic and Romance languages, namely the expression of grammatical genus. English, which has expression of genus on in its pronouns, is a stand-alone; its other Germanic family members clearly distinguish genus, and their determiners are their forms of expressions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Determiners, as we know them, have two tasks: they mark a degree of specification, and they mark genus. (They also mark number, but this function does not apply to Japanese at all, so I dispense with it.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our (eurocentric) perspective on genus may be biased if we tend to associate “genus” with natural sexes. That is not how many other languages express their genera. “Genus” is simply a way of carving up a world full of objects, and assigning these objects a meaningful place in a system of subclasses. Grammatical genus is such a cognitively transparent matter that we can immediately understand the Kiswahili genus system of persons, natural objects, groups, artifacts, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Japanese, genus is expressed by classifiers, such as  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;-nin/mei&lt;/em&gt; [person]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;-hon&lt;/em&gt; [elongated object]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;-mai&lt;/em&gt; [flat object]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;-hiki&lt;/em&gt; [small animal]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;-too&lt;/em&gt; [big animal]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to name but a few. These suffixes express genus, which in Germanic and Romance languages is the task of determiners. Again one may ask why Japanese should have a class of determiners, if they neither contribute in specification, nor in the expression of genus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A partial conclusion is the words &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. lack the expression of genus usually ascribed to determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Occurrence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The final observation has partially been made in previous answers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a. &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. appear in word-order positions within the NP that are not associated with determiners.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; haha-ga kat-te kure-ta KONO zubon  &#xA; THESE trousers mother bought me  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. can precede and depend on a pronoun/pronominal noun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; KONO ore  &#xA; THIS I  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. can occur together with a pronoun/pronominal noun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; kare-no KONO kuruma  &#xA; his THIS car  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. also behave differently in noun ellipsis than determiners.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; KONO mono &#xA; THIS stuff  &#xA; *KONO  &#xA; THIS  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e. &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. never appear with the same regularity as the Germanic and Romance determiners. The former are optional, the latter are obligatory (I gloss over the count/mass noun distinction).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That makes it unlikely that &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. are determiners as we usually understand them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we compile the partial conclusions from these observations, namely:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. lack the expression of specification usually ascribed to determiners.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. lack the expression of genus usually ascribed to determiners.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. lack the regularity, the obligatory occurrence, and the word order specifics usually ascribed to determiners. They also behave differently in noun ellipsis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a conclusion, I believe, we would have to at least accept that no compelling evidence is available for the assumption that Japanese &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. are determiners, as we usually understand them. Rather, the lack of the expression of specification and genus, and the lack of parallels in syntactic behavior with determiners in other languages, suggest that &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt; et.al. are best described as adnominals.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question then is: No, Japanese does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T13:13:52.583" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T13:13:52.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-21T20:04:20.473" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6315752-sorry-absinthe-you-re-much-too-slow?ref=ru_lihp_up_abp_4_mclk&amp;amp;uid=6315752&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recent item&lt;/a&gt; largely addressing using dialect in writing, author Elizabeth Bear asserted the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...standard or &quot;proper&quot; English is a social construct intended as a&#xA;  measure of class control and segregation. It doesn't exist as a real,&#xA;  unconstructed thing. The linguist's viewpoint is that &quot;correct&quot;&#xA;  language is any language as spoken by a fluent native speaker. The&#xA;  end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little fascinated by the suggestion that &quot;proper English&quot; is directly related to class discrimination, but I haven't been able to find much to support the idea via Google (mostly I get guides to proper English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've certainly seen some of this anecdotally: I have acquaintances that have directly asserted the people that mispronounce certain words (particularly &quot;nuclear&quot; as &quot;nuke-you-ler&quot; or &quot;ask&quot; as &quot;axe&quot;) are less intelligent than people that pronounce such words correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Ms. Bear's assertion correct? From a linguistic/anthropological perspective, is the insistence on proper English widely considered to be driven by the desire to discriminate or segregate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3627" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-22T02:34:35.047" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T02:34:35.047" Title="Is &quot;Proper English&quot; a Classist Construct?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-05-21T20:21:34.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7238" CreationDate="2014-05-22T06:59:23.700" Score="-1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m working on a small project which involves a large list of words (single words, no sentence) and I would love to have a way to “rate” or “score” each word by some parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I have two parameters I’m looking at:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I’ll use &lt;strong&gt;example&lt;/strong&gt; as example :-)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The length of the word: 7&#xA;The count of each letter: 6 (because **e** occurs twice in this word).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve also thought to divide the word into consonants and vowels but haven’t done so yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from the two parameters, I’ve experimented with two very basic algorithms for “rating” the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;word-length * (word-length/chars-length) or vice versa  &#xA;word-length * (chars-length/word-length)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For first calculation it will be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7 * (7/6) = 8,16666666666669&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for the second it is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7 * (6/7) = 6,00000000000002&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this might be useful I’m not sure that I’m actually knowing what I’m doing here :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if I have a word with a word-length of 15 but the chars-length is only 11, the same two calculations would be &lt;strong&gt;20,4545454545454&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;10,99999999999995&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This number is higher than the above and that might be okay because the length of the word is longer, but the uniqueness is less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve tried to searching Google if there is a more “general” way where a word is rated (not necessarily with these two parameters) but haven’t found anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me making a meaningful “rating” og “score” for a word so both is length and it’s “strengthens” is taken into consideration or maybe have some additional parameters to use for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m sorry if the question does not make sense or if I need to elaborate on something, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- E&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3630" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T15:34:34.273" Title="&quot;Rate&quot; or &quot;score&quot; a word by various parameters" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-22T14:28:45.523" Score="8" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian, Russian, German, Turkish and Czech are generally described as free-word-order languages, but do you know any quantitative, corpus-based, or information theoretic definition of word order? Is it a matter of zero/one (to be free-word-order vs. not to be free-word-order) or it is indeed measured on a spectrum? If so, what is the exact measure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3635" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-05-22T15:12:40.127" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T13:23:26.297" Title="Free Word Order Languages: How Much Freedom?" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7224" CreationDate="2014-05-22T14:47:50.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;not sure whether your question is meaningful at all in case your understanding of 'phoneme' is compatible with mine. in my book, 'phoneme' is 'an abstract class of 'sounds' that results from an analysis of spoken language which attempts to produce as few sound classes as practical and feasible'; instead of 'sounds' i like to use 'phonotypes', which in turn denotes 'universally distinguishable and practically occurring types of phonetically minimal utterances'. whew. that's not even close to being complete, but the upshot is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;we cannot say how many sounds there are in human language, the problem being the same as in the question 'how long is the British coastline'? it has a definite length when you walk around it with finite strides, but it becomes arbitrarily long if you make your strides shorter and shorter. all you can do is to impose a somewhat artificial limit, and this is exactly what phonotypes are for: you discard some precision, and end up basically with the famous and well-known IPA table of human speech sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yuen-Ren Chao, in 1934, wrote a famous piece entitled &quot;The Non-Uniqueness of Phonemic Solutions&quot;, which is a must-read for anyone doing phonology. i will give an example (using Pinyin here instead of IPA): in Chinese, 'sa' and 'sha' are distinct sibilants (apical and retroflex). they do not occur before 'i' and 'ü', but there are 'xi' and 'xü' (with palatalized sibilants). one might conclude that there are at least three sibilants /s, sh, x/ in Mandarin, or that [x] is an allophone of /s/, or else an allophone of /sh/, or else that it is a neutralization of both /s, sh/ before /i, ü/. but it's worse since /h/ does not occur before /i, ü/, either, so maybe [x] is the neutralization of /s, sh, h/? it goes on like that with the vowels: you have 'lou' and 'luo', 'lei' and 'lie', but no *'loi, lio, leu, lue', so maybe [e] and [o] are really &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; phoneme?—i can tell you that a closer inspection of the entire system of Mandarin Chinese syllable finals makes such an analysis very compelling. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the above lead me to surmising that maybe what you really want is counting phonotypes across languages, and maybe which phonotypes often get lumped together to form phonemes. but even &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; will depend very much on the person(s) doing the analysis for a given language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does German 'have' the phoneme /x/ (as in 'ach, Bach, Suche')? it regularly changes to [ç] after a front vowel, so [x, ç] get normally lumped together under one roof (which is intuitively correct for a native speaker). but what do you label that phoneme? label it /x/ or /ç/ or anything else, and your count of phonemes will by necessity omit the important fact that German speakers sometimes utter [x] and sometimes [ç]. Chinese speakers utter a sound very close to German [x] when saying things like 'hu, han, huanghe', but 'is' their /x/ 'the same' as German /x/? it doesn't seem to make sense—both systems do have commonalities, but (1) German [x] does not normally occur initially in a syllable, where Chinese [x] &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; occurs in initial position, and (2) German [x] is closely related to [ç], while Chinese [x] has a (much more complicated) relationship to an alveo-palatal sibilant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it does not seem to make much sense. counting phonemes across languages is little more than counting letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastEditorUserId="3634" LastEditDate="2014-05-22T14:54:48.193" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T14:54:48.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2014-05-22T15:03:13.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't say what problem you are trying to solve. I guess you don't really want to feed those two strings into a function, and when it returns &quot;42&quot; you'll be done and happy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you identify a relevant corpus - a set of documents that contain material 'like' or representative of the text you want to process?  If so, you could use LSA - Latent Semantic Analysis, or PLSA - Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These provide a distance metric (as commented by @jlawler) between phrases or word-sets, with respect to the reference corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3442" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T15:03:13.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7234" CreationDate="2014-05-22T15:34:34.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize my answer does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; directly say what specific formula should be used, but I'm pretty sure it will provide with suggestion how to arrange your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@prash is absolutely right in their comment: you should edit your answer and explain the goal of your computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, whatever your goal is, you may consider &lt;strong&gt;Test-Driven Development&lt;/strong&gt; approach here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take some &quot;testing corpus&quot; of words, write it by yourself;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manually &lt;strong&gt;sort it&lt;/strong&gt; according to the &lt;strong&gt;expected result&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably, you don't even need the actual digital values. The goal is to make sure they appeared in correct order;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then play with &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; algorithms so that they performed sorting according to your tests;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify the corpus whenever you need, and probably you will need to modify the sorting formula as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't be surprised if your resulting formula appears to be complicated and non-obvious, this is the nature of such tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-05-22T15:34:34.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-22T15:54:21.857" Score="3" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/10610/how-to-teach-a-child-a-foreign-language-at-home-when-both-parents-arent-native&quot;&gt;question has already been asked on teaching a child a foreign language&lt;/a&gt; if you aren't a native speaker, but the answers are mixed - the 'right' answer says languages can be taught by a non-native speaker, but the answer with the most votes says you should only speak in your native language with kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My wife and I only speak English at the moment.  We're going to learn Esperanto and have made a commitment to only speak Esperanto with each other once we're fluent.  After speaking in Esperanto for a few months, we're going to learn Spanish and when we're fluent, we will start alternating between Spanish and Esperanto every other day.  Once we have kids, were planning to alternate between Spanish, Esperanto, and English every 3 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this sound like a good plan from a scientific perspective (I am less interested in personal opinions, unless they're supported with experience)?  Are there any academic studies on this topic?  Any objective research on techniques to raise multilingual kids?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, there are many advantages of being bilingual / multilingual (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.multilingualchildren.org/getting_started/pro_con.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.incultureparent.com/2013/07/7-benefits-of-raising-bilingual-kids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) and I want to give my kids these advantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:15.853" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T12:53:03.747" Title="Teaching children Spanish and Esperanto at home from non-native speakers" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-22T16:16:00.390" Score="10" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a Markdown dialect or other minimal markup language that is tailored to the needs of linguists (of all sorts)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect it do treat the following constructs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An asterisk directly preceding a word &lt;code&gt;*wrong&lt;/code&gt; doesn’t start emphasis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A question mark directly preceding a word &lt;code&gt;?doubtful&lt;/code&gt; is put in superscript.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Less-than &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt; and greater-than &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; marks surrounded by spaces show etymology and may be replaced by other symbols like arrows or other prettier symbols &lt;code&gt;≺ ≻&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most strings enclosed in &lt;code&gt;/slashes/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[square brackets]&lt;/code&gt; use (X-)SAMPA or Kirshenbaum and are converted to IPA,&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;except ones preceded by plus or minus sign for &lt;code&gt;[±features]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and also all-uppercase &lt;code&gt;[MORPH(EME)S]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Characters or strings in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;angular brackets&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; are 〈graphemic〉 unless they can be parsed as an absolute URL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Digits, possibly followed by apostrophes (or other symbols), inside round parentheses &lt;code&gt;(1')&lt;/code&gt; mark examples at the beginning of a line and references to them elsewhere. Double parentheses for references &lt;code&gt;((2))&lt;/code&gt; would be tolerable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrases enclosed by single quotation marks &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;’&lt;/code&gt; including accent marks &lt;code&gt;´&lt;/code&gt; are set in italics and are not emphasized (HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;em&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inside regular quotations, round and square brackets are highlighted, especially if they only contain dots &lt;code&gt;[...]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;(…)&lt;/code&gt; or uppercase letters &lt;code&gt;[SIC]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[sic!]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some syntax for simple trees.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Table syntax reused for interlinear glosses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other markup, like &lt;code&gt;|letter|&lt;/code&gt;, could be added by the user easily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That reminds me that I’ve never found a good introduction to the variety of linguistic typography. Everyone just teaches what they uses themself, or expects students to “just know”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T23:57:44.740" Title="Markdown for linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19617" CreationDate="2014-05-22T20:02:48.877" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've encountered &lt;em&gt;more or less&lt;/em&gt; in many different languages. Why is this idiom so widespread? In a few other languages such as Italian it's &quot;more or less&quot;, but in Albanian it's &quot;less or more&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="587" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2014-05-26T12:09:31.690" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T16:43:45.817" Title="More or less - Widespread idiom?" Tags="&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7239" CreationDate="2014-05-23T00:33:03.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mondeto.com/1/post/2011/09/immediate-and-lasting-advantages-of-early-esperanto-1-brain-building.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Australia article&lt;/a&gt; would help in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2211" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T00:33:03.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7235" CreationDate="2014-05-23T06:58:34.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As many pointed out, 'free word order' is a complete misnomer. I don't know of any language where the label would apply without at least some qualification. As TKR mentioned word order is motivated by information structure and pragmatics but also can display certain tendencies of iconicity and be subject to language default. That's why a language like Russian can be called free-word-order but also SVO at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is certainly no way to quantify the free-word-orderedness of languages. Ultimately word order can be twisted in any language in almost any way for a good purpose - for instance poetry. Context and other grammatical elements then function as disambiguators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard explanation for the relatively fixed word order in English is that it is used to encode grammatical information. So in John loves Mary vs. Mary loves John the agent and patient are expressed by position in the sentence whereas in a language like Czech, they would be expressed by a case marker. This is certainly correct in the broad strokes. But even in morphologically rich languages there is a huge amount of homonymy (expecially in the plural) so ultimately, it is the context that differentiates between the agent and patient (there's a Czech sentence that has 126 possible parses because of this). Equally, in English there are all sorts of raising phenomena that make the picture more complicated, as well. Even in English context and semantic defaults can override the word order rules. Whereas in John loves Mary, reversing the word order gives a sentence with a different meaning. When you compare John ate an apple and An apple ate John you see that it's more plausible to imagine both sentences with the same meaning but used in different contexts rather than a scenario where John would have been eaten by an apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in a context where order order is supposedly completely free such as coordination, iconicity (i.e. word order mimicking real world features such as sequence of events) can remove a lot of your freedom. So, you're more likely to say 'bread and butter' than 'butter and bread' when you say preceded with 'I ate some' whereas the word order is more free when you precede it with 'I bought'. And there's no freedom at all in 'He opened the window and shouted out obscenities.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to illustrate how the word order matters in a 'discourse-configurational' language, let me tell you a little joke that appeared shortly after the velvet revolution. It's about two Moravians (who have a healthy disdain for Czechs). One says to the other. I have good news and bad news. Good news is &quot;Češi udělali revoluci&quot; (Czechs started a revolution) bad news is &quot;revoluci udělali češi&quot; (it's the Czechs who started the revolution). So you can see that although the word order appears to be free at the propositional level, it actually encodes completely different communicative meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when you look at this range of phenomena (and there are more), you can see that it would be impossible to quantify. In any language, the situations where you have a completely free choice in how you order the words are very rare and on the other hand, no language completely bars you from twisting the word order for a particular purpose. You could certainly measure the defaults and prevailing orders but that won't show you freedom but rather a distribution of the different configurations each of which have very limited freedom of order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-23T06:58:34.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7235" CreationDate="2014-05-24T10:23:26.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to add it as a comment, but I couldn't so I post it here. &#xA;I think there is a misunderstanding between free word order and scrambling languages.  Free word order languages are those that do not have any order. It is a property of non-configurational languages. (Of course there is a big discussion whether these languages really non- configurational and whether they really do not have any order, but at least it looks like this). Warlperi is one of these languages. On other hand Turkish is not a free order language, its neutral order is SVO. It is a scrambling language. It may scramble objects and adjuncts to a higher position for topic, focus and etc. (there are some other scramblings as well) however, there are restriction on scrambling in Turkish. Not all possible word order combinations are grammatical in Turkish. That's why it is not free word order language, it is a scrambling language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastEditorUserId="1469" LastEditDate="2014-05-24T10:30:21.367" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T10:30:21.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7248" CreationDate="2014-05-24T10:55:33.257" Score="14" ViewCount="2042" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Turkish&lt;/em&gt; there is this word &lt;strong&gt;Kent&lt;/strong&gt; which means city. Some Turkic city names have this as a suffix, like &lt;strong&gt;Başkent&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Tashkent&lt;/strong&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Azerbaijani&lt;/em&gt; the same word, with the spelling of &lt;strong&gt;Kənd&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;Kand&lt;/strong&gt;) means village and we have tens of villages in Iranian Azerbaijan and Republic of Azerbaijan with their names ending in &lt;strong&gt;Kənd&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Təzəkənd&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sarikənd&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;qoşakənd&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yengikənd&lt;/em&gt;, and etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Persian cities and villages and even the language itself, I have not seen any usage of this word. I saw a statement in Wikipedia which claimed that this word is of &lt;em&gt;Sogdian&lt;/em&gt; origin and is related to the Persian word of &lt;strong&gt;کندن&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;Kandan&lt;/strong&gt;), which literally means &lt;strong&gt;digging&lt;/strong&gt;, and metaphorically refers to an inhabited place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does someone have more information about the etymology of this word/suffix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3596" LastEditorUserId="3596" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T14:17:03.303" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T14:17:03.303" Title="Is &quot;Kent&quot; in Tashkent of Turkic origin or Indo-European?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2014-05-24T12:11:30.770" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the monumental &lt;a href=&quot;http://altaica.narod.ru/LIBRARY/e_dts.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Turkic Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Древнетюркский словарь&quot;, Наука, Л., 1969) it is written that &lt;strong&gt;Kent/Kənd&lt;/strong&gt; is really of the Sogdian origin. The dictionary reflects the words found in the Turkic written records of the 7th - 13th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;Kent&lt;/strong&gt; is not there, but the word &lt;strong&gt;Kend&lt;/strong&gt; redirects to &lt;strong&gt;Känd&lt;/strong&gt;, to page 290, and here is the screenshot of the &lt;strong&gt;Känd&lt;/strong&gt; (city) entry. Notice the remark &quot;[&lt;em&gt;согд.&lt;/em&gt; k'nδ] after the headword,&quot; 'согд.' means 'Sogdian':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MwbiW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-05-24T12:29:12.460" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T12:29:12.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7235" CreationDate="2014-05-24T17:37:40.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for giving examples of word order in your mother language. As a typical example, the Persian sentence &quot;من علی را دیدم دیروز&quot;[&lt;em&gt;I saw Ali yesterday&lt;/em&gt;] has exactly 4!=24 grammatical permutations with different frequencies and pragmatic meanings though. To have an interesting cross-lingual comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- Please add translations in your language (Czech,German,Turkish,Russian,etc).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;- How many grammatical permutations are possible in your own language?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical English reorderings are marked by '+':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من علی را دیدم دیروز  /I Ali saw yesterday/     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من علی را دیروز دیدم  /I Ali yesterday saw/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیروز علی را دیدم  /I yesterday Ali saw/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیروز دیدم علی را  /I yesterday saw Ali/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیدم علی را دیروز  /I saw Ali yesterday/   + &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیدم دیروز علی را  /I saw yesterday Ali/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم علی را دیروز من  /Saw Ali yesterday I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم علی را من دیروز  /Saw Ali I yesterday/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم من علی را دیروز  /Saw I Ali yesterday/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم من دیروز علی را  /Saw I yesterday Ali/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم دیروز من علی را  /Saw yesterday I Ali/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم دیروز علی را من  /Saw yesterday Ali I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را من دیروز دیدم  /Ali I yesterday saw/  + {TOPICALIZATION}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را من دیدم دیروز  /Ali I saw yesterday/  + {TOPICALIZATION}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیروز من دیدم  /Ali yesterday I saw/  + {TOPICALIZATION}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیروز دیدم من  /Ali yesterday saw I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیدم من دیروز  /Ali saw I yesterday/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیدم دیروز من  /Ali saw yesterday I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز من علی را دیدم  /Yesterday I Ali saw/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز من دیدم علی را  /Yesterday I saw Ali/  +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز علی را من دیدم  /Yesterday Ali I saw/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز علی را دیدم من  /Yesterday Ali saw I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز دیدم من علی را  /Yesterday saw I Ali/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز دیدم علی را من  /Yesterday saw Ali I/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian all the above variants are totally grammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من علی را دیدم دیروز  /Я Али видел вчера/   + &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من علی را دیروز دیدم  /Я Али вчера видел/   + &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیروز علی را دیدم  /Я вчера Али видел/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیروز دیدم علی را  /Я вчера видел Али/   + {DEFAULT}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیدم علی را دیروز  /Я видал Али вчера/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;من دیدم دیروز علی را  /Я видел вчера Али/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم علی را دیروز من  /Видел Али вчера я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم علی را من دیروز  /Видел Али я вчера/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم من علی را دیروز  /Видел я Али вчера/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم من دیروز علی را  /Видел вчера Али я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم دیروز من علی را  /Видел вчера я Али/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیدم دیروز علی را من  /Видел вчера Али я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را من دیروز دیدم  /Али я вчера видел/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را من دیدم دیروز  /Али я видел вчера/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیروز من دیدم  /Али вчера я видел/   + &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیروز دیدم من  /Али вчера видел я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیدم من دیروز  /Али видел я вчера/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;علی را دیدم دیروز من  /Али видел вчера я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز من علی را دیدم  /Вчера я Али видел/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز من دیدم علی را  /Вчера я видел Али/   +  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز علی را من دیدم  /Вчера Али я видел/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز علی را دیدم من  /Вчера Али видел я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز دیدم من علی را  /Вчера видел я Али/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;دیروز دیدم علی را من  /Вчера видел Али я/   +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3635" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T13:23:26.297" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T13:23:26.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7261" CreationDate="2014-05-24T18:26:20.153" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;How far can we know about the appearance of code-switching?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an example to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Saya baru membeli&lt;/em&gt; Honda CRV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Indonesian, the way to say the letters &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;R&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;cé&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ér&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;vé&lt;/em&gt;. But what if in that sentence, people say them in the English way as &lt;em&gt;cee&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;vee&lt;/em&gt;? Is that code-switching?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3619" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-25T05:44:30.243" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T07:06:50.217" Title="How far can we decide if there's a code-switching?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7229" CreationDate="2014-05-24T21:34:02.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How they came to be spoken we don't know, but the origins of signed languages, out of gestural communication, has been well documented. Check out the work of Susan Goldin-Meadow and others.&#xA;Her &quot;Resilience of Language&quot; is a good place to start. For a less technical approach read &quot;A man without words&quot; by Susan Schaller&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3646" LastActivityDate="2014-05-24T21:34:02.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-25T08:28:07.627" Score="4" ViewCount="1128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to compare two corpora. One with 15000 tokens and the other with 5000 tokens. Can I normalise the word frequencies per 100000 words? Or I have to normalise based on words per million?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3650" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-25T11:03:59.410" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T12:10:53.467" Title="Comparing frequencies of two corpora" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2014-05-25T14:40:32.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be of interest to note, that کندن shows a root-dualism. The Old Indian form of the root is &lt;strong&gt;khan&lt;/strong&gt;, similar Pāzand &lt;strong&gt;χandan&lt;/strong&gt;. So, the New Persian words &lt;strong&gt;χān&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;χāne&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;house&quot; derives from the same root as &lt;strong&gt;kent&lt;/strong&gt;. This shows, that it is quite plausible that a word denoting a place to live should derive from the root &quot;to dig&quot;. On the other hand it maybe explains, why you did not find any use of the word &lt;strong&gt;kent&lt;/strong&gt; in Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-05-25T14:40:32.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2014-05-26T07:09:21.477" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many linguists focus on the spoken language indeed, or at least they claim to. Often times, Ferdinand de Saussure is attributed with, among other things, steering linguistics into this direction around the turn of the 20th century. Alas, for many years to come, linguists saying they’re studying the spoken language were instead relying on written records thereof. This remains a problem today, although the methods of transcription have improved and modern technology makes spoken language better accessible to direct analysis. Yet still, it’s much easier to generate corpora from written sources. As a result, most books(!) on grammar describe literal grammar, not oral grammar, which can be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different – therefore many people (even some linguists) will regard perfectly well-formed oral utterances as “grammatically wrong” or “ungrammatical”. (Note the etymology of &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s the interesting notion of conceptually and medially oral and literal languages, prominently by Koch/Oesterreicher. That means, a book is written in concept and medium, like a face-to-face conversation is spoken in both, but a formal speech is conceptually literal and medially oral, whereas a chat message usually is conceptually oral and medially literal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, gesture/sign language is primary to orally spoken language which in turn is primary to written language. This is true both phylogenetically for humankind and ontogenetically for each individual (even though you can learn a second language in literal form). The fact that writing was created, hence is an artifact, doesn’t mean it’s mere recording of speech (nor thought, as some believe), though. The (conceptually) written form of language developed specific rules that don’t apply to the spoken modality. There are also several things that one can only do in writing proper, although Ong, Watt and many more have provided interesting examples of what spoken language is capable of (especially in non-literate societies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages, most probably, aren’t written at all, i.e. they may be transcribed sometimes, mostly by linguists, priests and administrators, but conversation and “literature” is oral/aural only. That doesn’t require the society to be illiterate at all, since written communication is then often done in a different language. For these, it doesn’t make much sense to study their writing separately, but for most European, many Asian and some other contemporary languages, their writing system (incl. orthography and script) and written grammar are independent objects of linguistic study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T07:09:21.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7229" CreationDate="2014-05-26T11:47:47.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a complex issue but by no means impossible to study, and there is indeed now an increasing body of literature. I think a distinction has to be made between two questions (and I think your question touches on both): (1) why/how did the human language faculty (LF) evolve in the first place? and, once that faculty was in place, (2) why/how do LF and its environment interact so that we end up with radically different languages? For the first question I would recommend James R. (Jim) Hurford's books for a starting point. For the second, Ian Roberts' &lt;em&gt;Diachronic Syntax&lt;/em&gt; is an introductory monograph. Partha Niyogi's &lt;em&gt;The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution&lt;/em&gt; is a good place to launch into more mathematical approaches. Original research is spread over a variety of journals ranging from traditional linguistics forums such as &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; to journals in mathematical biology and statistical physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether and in what sense these processes can be considered random is a tricky issue. The linguistic sign seems to be arbitrary in the following sense: if I were to create a language &lt;em&gt;ex nihilo&lt;/em&gt;, there would be no reason to pick this or that string of phonemes or syntactic structure to represent this or that concept. However, if I were to create a &quot;new&quot; language in the presence of an existing language community so that mutual comprehensibility is retained (at least up to a good degree), there would be such reasons. So there is a basic tension between language acquisition and language change (or coherence and innovation). (I think it is important to note that &quot;the environment&quot; includes the linguistic environment, so that many of the determinants of linguistic diversity - if such determinants there be - may be linguistic rather than something else. The linguistic composition of the existing population may &quot;select&quot; for some grammatical changes rather than other possible ones, much like in evolutionary game theory the fitness of a strategy is dependent on the overall composition of the population.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3599" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T11:47:47.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-26T13:16:24.227" Score="0" ViewCount="2861" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to do a study on tag-switching, but from the literature I read, tag-switching is commonly only found in sentences with '&lt;em&gt;you know&lt;/em&gt;', '&lt;em&gt;I mean&lt;/em&gt;', '&lt;em&gt;right?&lt;/em&gt;', and '&lt;em&gt;isn't it?&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples of tags? Or can we just consider &lt;em&gt;tags&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;fillers&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3619" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T12:14:05.117" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T11:09:15.490" Title="Examples of tags?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7256" CreationDate="2014-05-26T15:13:47.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're mixing two different categories, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tag questions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fillers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You know&lt;/strong&gt; and  &lt;strong&gt;I mean&lt;/strong&gt; are fillers, while I'd consider &lt;strong&gt;right?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;isn't it?&lt;/strong&gt; to be tag questions. The purpose is quite different, and consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're John, &lt;em&gt;aren't you?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I'm not just &quot;filling&quot; the sentence, I'm asking for confirmation, while fillers are there to basically let your interlocutor know that even if you're not uttering something concrete, you're not finished speaking, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was... &lt;strong&gt;uuh&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;I mean&lt;/strong&gt;, I really was... &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt;... about to call you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-05-26T15:13:47.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7267" CreationDate="2014-05-27T03:16:37.750" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one parse &quot;the need for and development of education&quot;? &quot;Education&quot; naturally acts as the complement of both the prepositions &quot;for&quot; and &quot;of&quot;, and the prepositions surely postmodify the nouns under N'. The question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since &quot;education&quot; is the unified complement of both the prepositions, how is it parsed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I've got so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vwxAM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T16:20:22.553" Title="The complement of postmodifying prepositional phrases compounded by &quot;and&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7265" CreationDate="2014-05-27T04:06:21.307" Score="12" ViewCount="1149" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two conflicting theories about the dispersion of the people speaking proto-Indo-European (by which I mean the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, excluding Hittite and other related Anatolian languages), one seeing it around 5000-6000 Before Present (BP), the other one much earlier, between 7500 and 10000 BP. I know that the first one (5000-6000) had the support of most historical linguists, and I know many of the arguments supporting it (like the fact that there is a reconstructed word in proto-IE for the wheel, and archeology tells us the wheel was not invented much earlier than 5500 BP). The second hypothesis, often linked with the hypothesis of an Anatolian homeland for proto-IE, was revivified in 2003 when Gray and Atkinson published in Nature a paper using computational methods inspired from biology to reconstruct the tree of Indo-European languages, and the date of the dispersion of proto-IE around 7900 BP (and the separation of the pre-proto-IE ancestor of proto-IE and Hittite around 8700 BP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know that Gray and Atkinson's findings, especially the dating, were not accepted at that time by the majority of linguists. But it was 11 years ago, and I'd like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have the positions of the community on the date of proto-IE changed since then? Is there a consensus or a quasi-consensus on the question?&#xA;  What is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also be interested by any pointer to a recent (say from the last five years) article or survey on it. I have found none addressing this question of dating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder in particular if other people working like Gray and Atkinson with computational methods, but with a different dataset or methodology, have found a date more in line with the traditional view of 5000-6000 BP. Or if, on the contrary, traditional linguists have changed their mind and began to accept a much earlier date (but I would be surprised if this was the case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3623" LastEditorUserId="3623" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T12:33:16.687" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T05:53:29.037" Title="Current status of the controversy on the date of Indo-European dispersion" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="85" CreationDate="2014-05-27T06:31:39.317" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fukui (1986) argues that the Japanese language is void of the functional determiner category and that the Japanese demonstratives “kono” (proximal “this”), “ano” (distal “that”) and “sono” (medial “that”) are actually prenominal modifiers in form. The Japanese demonstratives are lexical words, much like adjectives, as they do not close-off category projections as how the English functional determiner system does. Fukui (1986) demonstrates whether the Japanese demonstratives are functionally similar to English demonstratives or not by providing the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a.This book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.*John’s this book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) a.That lecture&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.*Yesterday’s that lecture &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above examples convey that the English demonstratives close-off the noun phrase by disallowing pre-modifiers to precede the demonstratives, as seen in the ungrammaticality of (1b) and (2b). Fukui (1986) states that English determiners are a functional category as they project up to the XP level, a structurally closed level. On the other hand, Japanese demonstratives are dissimilar in the fact that they do not close-off the category projection. This denotes that they do not constitute a functional category, but a lexical one instead and are, therefore, not determiners but adjectives. The following examples are also from Fukui (1986):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) a. Kono hon ----------------- This book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. John no kono hon ----------- Lit. John’s this book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Akai John no kono hon ----- Lit. Red John’s this book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese demonstratives allow pre-modification, which denotes that they do not comprise a functional category, but a lexical one. This concludes that Japanese does not have a functional category ‘determiners’ as in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fukui, N. (1986). A Theory of Category Projections and its Applications. Doctoral Dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mustaffa, A. R. (2014). Contrastive and Error Analyses: The Usage of the English Determiners by Japanese Learners of English. Unpublished Bachelor's Thesis. Universiti Teknologi MARA. Retrieved from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1jwmwj3qd1mw5j/Contrastive%20%26%20Error%20Analyses_The%20Usage%20of%20the%20English%20Determiners%20by%20Japanese%20Learners%20of%20English.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1jwmwj3qd1mw5j/Contrastive%20%26%20Error%20Analyses_The%20Usage%20of%20the%20English%20Determiners%20by%20Japanese%20Learners%20of%20English.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T06:31:39.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7250" CreationDate="2014-05-27T07:06:50.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of code switching is the switching between elements of two or more languages by speakers in a bilingual situation. Personally, I think that it is useful to think about code switching even in monolingual situations where there are distinct registers (formal and informal) or dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, neither under the narrow or the broad definition of code switching, this would qualify. This sounds more like the case of borrowing. This is something imported into the language and used by speakers who (presumably) do not switch between two codes but rather have enriched the one code they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I can imagine a situation where using the English spelling out could become a part of a sociolect - for instance, some people using it to indicate belonging to a modern or better off group - in which case, code switching could be a useful model for thinking about its use. But it would always be a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T07:06:50.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7258" CreationDate="2014-05-27T09:04:38.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is your question about an analysis or about automated parsing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon is dubbed &lt;em&gt;right node raising&lt;/em&gt;. Search for it or read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; that gives a nice overview and mentions the current analysis, including one which states an elided constituent on the left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the need for &lt;strike&gt;education&lt;/strike&gt; and development of education&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be your starting point for parsing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T09:04:38.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7252" CreationDate="2014-05-27T12:10:53.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you normalise by 100,000 or 1,000,000 words is essentially a question of style and/or common practice in the journal or sub-field you're in. Mathematically, it makes not difference at all whether you say feature x occurs with a frequency of 10 per 100,000 words or 100 per 1,000,000 words. But you should be consistent, so if you provide other normalised frequencies or compare your results with previous findings, use the same normalisation index. In my experience, most corpus linguists give relative frequencies per million words, this is usually abbreviated as pmw. Some authors prefer normalisation per 100,000 words and call this the Mossé index, but this is in my experience relatively rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason you might want to normalise by a smaller figure (e.g. per 1,000 words) is that some readers might interpret a frequency pmw as suggesting that you actually had a corpus of 1 M. words, not a (relatively small) 5,000 word corpus. So if you give no other normalised figures (from your own or other people's studies), it might be preferable to normalise by 1,000 words - especially if your audience is not very well acquainted with corpus linguistic methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T12:10:53.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7259" CreationDate="2014-05-27T12:50:55.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a consensus that all stages of PIE from oldest (Indo-Hittite) to the latest fit into the interval from 4000 BC to 3000 BC. There is no room to stretch this interval in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that, say, Proto-Greek was so much similar to late PIE that there is no doubt that there was no more than a few centuries separating the both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T12:50:55.790" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7259" CreationDate="2014-05-27T13:05:38.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in a rather recent criticism on Gray &amp;amp; Atkinsons model by Martin W. Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Anixx's answer, that (Pre)-Proto-Greek and other late PIE dialects give us a quite safe time depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="13532" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T05:53:29.037" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T05:53:29.037" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-27T15:25:44.257" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a master student working on networks analysis in general. A network is something that has nodes and there are links between the nodes. Nodes and links could have attributes. An evolving network is one that changes overtime (new nodes and links are added..etc). An example of that is Facebook. Nodes are users and links represent the friendship relationship. Users have attributes (gender, age ..etc). A Facebook network as you know is an example of a social network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that so many people studied traditional evolving networks like social networks, the web, or transportation networks. Currently I'm looking for novel examples of evolving networks to study them. So I thought there might be some examples in &lt;em&gt;linguistics&lt;/em&gt; that could represent some kind of an evolving network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question: Can you give me examples in &lt;em&gt;linguistics&lt;/em&gt; for evolving networks? I dunno maybe words as nodes and links as some kind of a relationship, but the network evolves somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3654" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T16:33:09.993" Title="Examples of evolving networks in linguistics" Tags="&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7258" CreationDate="2014-05-27T16:19:35.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Ivan writes, the example in the question is indeed an example of so-called &lt;em&gt;right node raising&lt;/em&gt; (RNR). I can provide some more background information about the phenomenon. First, note the term itself (i.e. &lt;em&gt;right node raising&lt;/em&gt;) is due to Postal (1974), and it indicates the analysis he proposed at that time. He assumed that in canonical cases of RNR, e.g. &lt;em&gt;[You like] but [I dislike] the cheese&lt;/em&gt;, that at deep structure, two complete clauses are coordinated. The material that ends up being shared to the right is raised out of both clauses and attached to S as an adjunct would be, but only one of them is realized; the other is deleted. Many linguists who have studied the phenomenon (including myself) reject Postal's analysis, but the terminology that Postal employed remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no consensus about the best analysis of the phenomenon. What this means for your example is that you have some freedom to posit a parse that you believe fits your understanding of syntax best. The Wikipedia article that Ivan linked to (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&lt;/a&gt;) gives three possible theoretical accounts; you might choose the one that you think is best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual example you produce is noteworthy. It is noteworthy because it involves RNR at the level of NPs, as opposed to at the level of the clause. RNR can occur at the various levels of syntactic structure, e.g. at the level of PPs, at the level of VPs, at the level of NPs, etc. What makes all examples of RNR interesting is that the coordinated strings, i.e. the conjuncts, do not appear to be constituents. My preferred analysis is to assume small conjuncts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The [need for] and [development of] education.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically consistent with the partial parse shown in the tree in the question. The strings indicated by brackets cannot be construed as constituents in most theories of syntax. This observation goes to the core of the RNR mechanism; it is why the phenomenon is noteworthy and worthy of study. The basic question, then, concerns the strings that can and cannot be coordinated and shared in such cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conundrum of RNR is very visible in the tree. The difficulty concerns the attachment of &lt;em&gt;education&lt;/em&gt;: Where should it appear in the tree? In my view, there is no good answer to this question given the phrase structure parse shown. In other words, there really is no convincing way to include &lt;em&gt;education&lt;/em&gt; in the phrase structure tree. What many would therefore choose to do is assume that a first instance of &lt;em&gt;education&lt;/em&gt; is elided from the first conjunct, as Ivan states. At an underlying level of representation, the following conjuncts would therefore be present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; the [need for education] and [development of education]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think ellipsis is the right way to approach the phenomenon, but it is probably what you want to produce an at least semi-plausible parse. My preferred analysis of such cases is developed in a dependency grammar (DG) theory of syntax; it does not involve ellipsis. If interested, I will happily provide the articles that I have written that examine the RNR phenomenon in some detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-05-28T16:20:22.553" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T16:20:22.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7266" CreationDate="2014-05-27T16:49:15.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an approach to the syntax of natural language that can be consistent with the type of networks that the question is asking about. In a dependency grammar (DG) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&lt;/a&gt;), words are nodes that are linked into a structure by dependencies. Syntactic structure in dependency grammars might be represented in the following way (the tree is taken from the article &lt;em&gt;Grammatical relation&lt;/em&gt; in Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;::&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2gUW8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edges connecting the words in the tree are dependencies, and each of these dependencies bears a syntactic function that indicates how the entire subtree functions with repsect to the entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most work in DG assumes tree structures like the one just shown. One prominent dependency grammar, however, assumes networks as opposed to trees. This DG is called &lt;em&gt;Word Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_grammar&lt;/a&gt;); it is the grammar framework developed by Richard Hudson. The difference between trees and networks is that in a network, a given word can have two or more heads, as opposed to just one head. The book you probably want to take a look at is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;::Language Networks: The New Word Grammar, Richard Hudson, 2007 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find there a sophisticated system of syntax and grammar that may include the type of networks that you are looking for in natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-05-28T16:33:09.993" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T16:33:09.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2014-05-27T16:51:34.383" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a student of mostly dead &quot;classical&quot; languages, most of the &quot;linguistics&quot; I did encounter, was and is historic linguistics aiming at a reconstruction of a postulated &quot;proto&quot;-language, predating the known and handed down languages, which again predate the spoken languages of today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while from my perspective of a semi- to quarter-linguist it makes perfect sense, that linguistics should focus on language as opposed to literature (or: &quot;art&quot;, as esoneill put it), already the question struck me as quite absurd (regarding my experience), since the linguistics I know does not only not focus on spoken language but even near-totally suppresses any reference to &quot;language&quot; as something spoken rather than written. This is, of course, because of the fact, that written evidence endures much longer than the sound of an utterance and so is the only available data for this sort of historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, sometimes even here, stress is laid on the spoken languages. Of course not so much in what concerns &quot;proto&quot;-languages, but there are, for example, attempts to reconstruct the phonology of (Vedic) Sanskrit and it is quite well known that Classical Sanskrit never was a spoken language at all. (Incidentally, this holds true for most of the &quot;classical&quot; Indian languages). This kind of reverses the modern approach to languages, reflected in the answers already given: spoken language is here only appended and ancillary to the written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T16:51:34.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7272" CreationDate="2014-05-27T18:23:15.143" Score="7" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verbal roots of PIE are generally reconstructed as &lt;em&gt;(C&lt;sub&gt;5&lt;/sub&gt;) (C&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;) C&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; e C&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; (C&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;) (C&lt;sub&gt;6&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;; with certain phonetical restrictions, especially on the outmost consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why only &quot;e&quot; should be allowed as a root vowel and why it is generally attempted to &quot;explain away&quot; cases of other root vowels (like &quot;a&quot;), as stated in Tichy's &quot;Indogermanistisches Grundwissen&quot; (p. 35; my approximate translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Next to verbal roots with the ie. base vowel &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, some roots with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; are also documented, e.g. * &lt;em&gt;Hiaǵ&lt;/em&gt; 'to worship'. In spite of all efforts, there has been no success in plausibly explaining away these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Why should all roots have only the root vowel &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and what evidence would a theory postulating that in all PIE roots the only vowel is &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; be based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="3432" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T18:58:29.880" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T22:00:06.333" Title="Why can verbal roots in PIE only contain the vowel e?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2014-05-27T18:30:33.557" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root structure in PIE (of any root except some indeclinable particles) is as follows (s)(C)CeC(C). There were no third layer consonants, except the s-mobile and also there were specific limitations on the consonant composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel could change from e to o, to long e, to long o and to no vowel depending on where the root was used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T18:30:33.557" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2014-05-27T19:14:56.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that PIE roots always contain the vowel &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, it's that PIE roots don't contain vowels. This is a common misconception, unfortunately aided by the traditions of IE lexicography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a root like &lt;em&gt;lei̯k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;-&lt;/em&gt; 'leave'. This root is found in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e-grade, e.g. Gk. pres. &lt;em&gt;leip-ō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;o-grade, e.g. Gk. pf. &lt;em&gt;le-loip-a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zero-grade, e.g. Gk. aor. &lt;em&gt;e-lip-on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this shows is that the vowel (or lack thereof) depends on the grammatical category, not the root. The &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;leip-ō&lt;/em&gt; is due to the fact that this class of present stems are formed with &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, not to anything about the root's lexical entry. The tradition in IE studies is to cite all roots in the e-grade, but it could just as well have been the o-grade (in which case you might now be asking why all PIE roots contain the vowel &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;). It would be less misleading to cite roots as e.g. &lt;em&gt;l-i̯k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, with no vowels at all, but for historical reasons this isn't how it's done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation for the existence of some roots with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, at least those which can't plausibly be ascribed to the combination of &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;h2&lt;/em&gt;, is probably that in late PIE this system was beginning to break down, as it does in all the daughter languages, with consonantal roots starting to give way to vowel-containing stems. But there are very few of these &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-roots, i.e. on the whole the consonantal system is still intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The system I'm describing looks rather like the Semitic root system, but there's an important difference, namely that PIE roots contain consonant clusters which can't be broken up: for example you never see a form like &lt;em&gt;li̯ek&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;-&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-05-27T22:00:06.333" LastActivityDate="2014-05-27T22:00:06.333" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20734" CreationDate="2014-05-28T00:40:58.083" Score="6" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are good etymological dictionaries for Ancient Greek: if you're searching for the origin of a word, you'll probably find information in Frisk, Chantraine, or Beekes. But if you're looking for the etymology of the name of a mythological figure, or an island, or a town, with those dictionaries you're usually out of luck. Some proper names have an entry, but most don't, and there doesn't seem to be any method to which ones are included. Google and etymological websites are rarely helpful. Are there any etymological works for Greek that focus on proper names? Specific journals that tend to publish such articles? Does anyone have any other tips for finding proposed etymologies for a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T21:22:07.403" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T00:24:28.397" Title="Sources for etymologies of Ancient Greek proper names and placenames?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7266" CreationDate="2014-05-28T02:21:57.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your wish is my command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hills, T. T., Maouene, M., Maouene, J., Sheya, A. &amp;amp; Smith, L. B. (2009) Categorical Structure among shared features in networks of early-learned nouns. Cognition, 112(3), 381-396.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hills, T., Maouene, M., Maouene, J. &amp;amp; Sheya, A., Smith L.B (2009) &quot;Longitudinal Analysis of Early Semantic Networks: Preferential Attachment or Preferential Acquisition?&quot; Psychological Science, 20(6), 729-739.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steyvers, M., &amp;amp; Tenenbaum, J. B. (2005). The large-scale structure of semantic networks: statistical analyses and a model of semantic growth. Cognitive Science, 29(1), 41–78. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2901_3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vitevitch, M. S., &amp;amp; Goldstein, R. (2014). Keywords in the mental lexicon. Journal of Memory and Language, 73, 131–147. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.03.005&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T02:21:57.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7277" CreationDate="2014-05-28T02:28:20.920" Score="2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where do predicatives (predicative adjectives and nominals) over the subject or over the object fit into an X-bar-tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pedro pintó a María sentada.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Peter painted Mary seated. (=&lt;em&gt;feminine&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the female ending of &quot;sentada&quot; we know that it refers to Mary, but we don't know whether she was actually sitting while modeling. We only know that in the painting she was depicted in a sitting position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1&lt;/strong&gt;: Is &quot;sentada&quot; an adjunct to &quot;María&quot;? Is it an adjunct to &quot;pintó&quot;? Is it something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pedro pintó a María sentado.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Peter painted Mary seated. (=&lt;em&gt;masculine&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &quot;sentado&quot; is masculine, it was Peter who was sitting while he was painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2&lt;/strong&gt;: Where does the &quot;sentado&quot; fit into an X-bar-tree in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sentado Pedro pintó a María acostada.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ?Seated Peter painted Mary recumbent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q3&lt;/strong&gt;: Now we have two predicatives, one over the subject and one over the object. How can this be represented in X-bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-05-28T11:51:22.723" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T11:51:22.723" Title="Predication in X-Bar theory" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7276" CreationDate="2014-05-28T03:33:12.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classic X-bar theory takes all syntactic structure to be binary branching, a controversial assumption. Data like that produced in the question demonstrate why it is a controversial assumption. The example sentences cannot be anaylized convincingly in terms of strict binarity of branching. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if one is striving to maintain strict binarity of branching, then the structural analysis of the first example sentence might be something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [Peter [painted [Mary seated]]].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small-clause-like structure is present (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_clause&lt;/a&gt;). The words &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;seated&lt;/em&gt; form a constituent, an XP. There is going to some sort vP-type shell structure present in order to accommodate the fact that &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;seated&lt;/em&gt; form a constituent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is good insofar as it reveals one of the central problems with the classic X-bar schema. There is little empirical evidence backing the assumption that &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;seated&lt;/em&gt; should form a constituent. Constituency tests reveal, rather, that the structure is flat: &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent and &lt;em&gt;seated&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent, but the two together do not form a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topicalization does not identify the two together as a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *...and Mary seated, Peter painted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clefting does not identify the two together as a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *It was Mary seated that Peter painted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pseudoclefting does not identify the two together as a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *What Peter painted was Mary seated. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proform substitution does not identify the two together as a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *Peter painted like that. (like that = Mary seated)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer fragments do not identify the two together as a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Who did Peter paint?  --*Mary seated.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: the two words together do not form a constituent. The X-bar analysis, which imposes strict binarity of branching on all syntactic structure, cannot be correct. The X-bar schema is simply wrong. While some may defend the X-bar schema against this conclusion, I think many established linguists would agree with the conclusion. Note in this regard that the importance of X-bar theory resides with its role in the development of syntactic theory. Few linguists take it seriously these days. Similar structures to the examples in the question are discussed in the article on raising: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the lesser questions can be answered much more directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;seated&lt;/em&gt; is the first example is an adjunct, but a particular type of adjunct, namely one that functions as a predication over the object. Such adjuncts are sometimes called &lt;em&gt;participant-oriented adjuncts&lt;/em&gt;, since they function as predications over one of the participants, i.e. over one of the arguments. We know that such expressions are adjuncts because they can be dropped from the sentence entirely, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Peter painted Mary&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sentado&lt;/em&gt; in the second example is also a participant-oriented adjunct, but this time it is functioning as a predication over the subject. We know that it is adjunct because it too can be dropped from the sentence entirely with little change in meaning: &lt;em&gt;Peter painted Mary&lt;/em&gt;. The same is true of the third example.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The fourth example contains both types of participant-oriented adjuncts, one a predication over the subject and the other a predication over the object, as stated in the question. In my view, there is no good way to produce an X-bar analysis of such cases. In fact attempting to do so would be difficult, although it is undoubtedly possible. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these comments may not be quite what the question is looking for, I hope that they help reveal the problems with the X-bar schema in general. My preferred analysis of such examples assumes a relatively flat structure in which the distinction between arguments and adjuncts is encoded in terms of distinct types of dependencies, as opposed to in terms of varying positions in a prescribed structure schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-05-28T03:39:56.730" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T03:39:56.730" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2014-05-28T14:34:28.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some corollaries from graphemics (or grammatology if you prefer), which absolutely is a proper field of linguistics for some of the reasons listed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing came after speech phylogenetically (i.e. historically).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing comes after speech ontogenetically (i.e. individually). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing was made to represent speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing does not represent speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing and speech correspondent with each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing can transcribe speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language is not transcribed spoken language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language evolves in and by itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language follows some rules that don’t apply to spoken language – and vice versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language and spoken language influence one another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language evolves slower than spoken language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written languages may share the same script.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language could use any script.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written language cannot be regulated by a central authority, but orthographies may.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A writing system needs at least one of each: script, orthography, language. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An orthography is a set of restrictions to and exceptions from the graphotactics of a written language; mostly it’s the collection of choices of one of several valid systematic alternatives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows that it’s neither possible nor the goal of a writing system to be a dependent 1:1 mapping of phonemes (or morphemes) to graphemes. It wouldn’t be “ideal” in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T14:34:28.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-28T17:23:03.187" Score="21" ViewCount="7755" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do dependency grammar (DG), and my personal view is that dependency gets the job done more efficiently than constituency by far. The average constituency parse (= phrase structure parse) contains almost twice as many nodes and edges as your average dependency parse. Automated dependency parsing is significantly faster than automated constituency parsing. The point is illustrated with the following trees taken from the article on DG in Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oU03u.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dependency vs. constituency&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependency parse contains 7 nodes and 6 edges, whereas the constituency parse contains 13 nodes and 12 edges. Compared to constituency, the parsimony of the dependency parse is undeniable. This parsimony reaches through the entire theoretical apparatus. If dependency can do everything that constituency can do, Occam's Razor requires that constituency be ejected in favor of dependency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependency vs. constituency distinction is addressed in the following two Wikipedia articles: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually believe that constituency is necessary, but only for the analysis of coordinate structures. Otherwise, constituency makes the study of syntax more complex and complicated than it should be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question in this area is therefore as follows: What can one do with constituency that one cannot do with dependency? Why is constituency needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T23:29:37.487" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T06:24:19.233" Title="Why is constituency needed, since dependency gets the job done more easily and economically?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2560" CreationDate="2014-05-28T20:09:32.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, eš2 and gir15 are two &quot;readings&quot; (as one says in Assyriology) of the same sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T20:09:32.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2014-05-28T21:10:06.187" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a proponent of construction grammar, I am perhaps the wrong person to answer this. But I can see at least two non-computational advantages of a constituency parsing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It lets you directly encode generalizations about the individual components that make up a clause or sentence. Your constituency tree does not take advantage of it (perhaps being influenced by dependency approaches).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It does not require a commitment as to the head of every phrase. So let's say you change your mind about verbs heading the VP, you can do it without changing the parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can get the best of both worlds with something like Categorial Grammar or Unification Categorial Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could be wrong both about my answer or about the point of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-05-28T21:10:06.187" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6571" CreationDate="2014-05-29T07:25:12.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adyghe (ady; Northwest Caucasian) has a negative indefinite &lt;em&gt;zjə&lt;/em&gt; 'no-one, nothing', which is built from the numeral &lt;em&gt;zə&lt;/em&gt; 'one' and an additive particle &lt;em&gt;-jə&lt;/em&gt;, so literally it is something like 'and/even one'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically it would be used in scalar negation, as I call it. With a negated predicate you get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) z-jə    qe-kʼʷa-ʁ-ep&#xA;    one-ADD DIR-go-PST-NEG&#xA;   'Nobody came.' [lit. 'Not even one came']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it also passes the usual tests for negative indefinites, such as constituting a negative answer in elliptical contexts (&lt;em&gt;Who gave you flowers? - Nobody.&lt;/em&gt;). So I think it should fit under your broad umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In various dialects the negative indefinite may have different shapes, including &lt;em&gt;zəcjə&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;cə&lt;/em&gt; 'tooth' and &lt;em&gt;zəparjə&lt;/em&gt; whose etymology I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T07:25:12.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3044" CreationDate="2014-05-29T12:51:59.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have also been wondering about the question of gender-assignment in connection with Urdu, which I think is an outstanding example in what concerns your question. Technically it is New Indian, but the vocabulary is - apart from the basic Indic stratum - very very heavily influenced from mainly three sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Persian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Urdu itself distinguishes a (sort of default) masculine gender and a feminine gender. While Arabic is similar in respect to there being two genders - masc. and fem. - and the masculine being sort of a default gender, the other two sources of vocabulary do not distinguish gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is just to give an idea, because as far as I know, loanword noun morphology in Urdu has not yet been studied extensively, the only available research I am aware of being a rather unhelpful dissertation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/1407/1/Islam%2c%20R.A.%2012.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Morphology of Loanwords in Urdu: the Persian,&#xA;Arabic and English Strands&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the very situation of three different sources with or without gender, most of the items in the list in aaa's answer can be found. Persian nouns ending in -ه, which used to be pronounced in Persian as a short final -a, are pronounced in Urdu with a long final -ā and thereby resemble a class of native masculine words in -ā. They are therefore almost invariably masculine. This would be point 3 in the above list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the borrowed word happens to have a suffix that the borrowing language uses as a gender marker, the suffix tends to dictate gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Persian nouns with a final long -ī are classed as feminine in Urdu, since there is a class of femininae in -ī corresponding to the masculinae in -ā. These are not very frequent in Persian except from abstract nouns like هستی (existence) or نیستی (non-existence). One other example I found is تختی, sort of a diminutive, feminine in Urdu as well. The same thing happened to Arabic کرسی (chair), which is masculine in Arabic, but then feminine in Urdu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy example for point 2 in the list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The borrowed word tends to take the gender of the native word it replaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be the arabic word شمس (sun), which is feminine in Arabic, but masculine in Urdu, corresponding to the native words روی (रवि) and سوریه (सूर्य), the same is maybe true for Persian روز (day), which is masculine by default or via دن (दिन).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to point 4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the borrowed word rhymes with one or more native words, the latter tend to dictate gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is hard to find an example which is for sure assigned a certain gender due to rhyming. But it may be noted, that even words which are phonemically identical like کان (Urdu: ear; Persian: mine) can differ in gender, the ear being masculine and the mine being feminine, in agreement with the predecessor of the native word, Skt. खानि, feminine. This indicates that at least in the case of Urdu, the &quot;native gender&quot; is stronger than the rhyming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the coverage of English loans in the dictionaries I have is still very bad, since English loans, I guess, are still viewed as just a manner of speech that does not partake of &quot;good Urdu&quot;, or rather &quot;pure Urdu&quot;. But what is still interesting, is the handling of Arabic nouns, since Arabic has more or less the same system of genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we can note, that participles are by default masculine like in Arabic and the feminine forms are borrowed along with the masculine ones, e.g. عالم and عالمة or معشوق and معشوقة. But the verbal nouns do differ in gender, for example all the nouns from stem II of the form تفعیل are feminine in Urdu. This I guess, may be due to a general tendency of abstract nouns being feminine (maybe already in Sanskrit: suffixes -ता (f) and -त्व (neuter)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be great, if someone had even more information and examples on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T13:28:00.820" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T13:28:00.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T12:54:23.997" Score="6" ViewCount="2631" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the easiest way to understand what an infinitive is?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How do I know which verb in which sentence is an infinitive?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, let us take this website:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/infinitive_form.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Infinitive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is the example I am interested in:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to run every day.   (The infinitive form with the word &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is&#xA;called the full infinitive or &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-infinitive.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must run every day.   (After certain verbs, the &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is dropped&#xA;(more on this below).)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I run every day.   (This is not in the infinitive form. This is a&#xA;finite verb, i.e., a verb functioning as the main verb.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I differentiate between example 2 and example 3?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How do I know 3 is not an infinitive but 2 is ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If 2 had been &lt;em&gt;I must run to school every day&lt;/em&gt; would that make it a non-infinitive?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably a completely different question, but I will put it here anyway.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When comparing with other languages, if it says &lt;em&gt;infinitive&lt;/em&gt;, should I consider it to have the same meaning as the English infinitive, or can it have a different meaning, according to the language?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us take  the example of Korean. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; has an entry for infinitives in Korean. If I understood correctly, &quot;infinitive&quot; is the form of the verb that is unchanged according to tense, voice or anything similar. (So &lt;em&gt;watch&lt;/em&gt; may be an infinitive but &lt;em&gt;watched&lt;/em&gt; is not). In Korean, the unchanged form of a verb is called &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; (example, &lt;em&gt;watch&lt;/em&gt; = 보다). This root changes form (prefixes, suffixes etc, based on negation, formality, tense, etc). Can this root be called an infinitive as well? (in my opinion, probably not, as the explanations in the wikipedia page I linked seems to use root and infinitive as different entities, but how do I explain the difference)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2428" OwnerDisplayName="user17915" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-05-29T23:07:53.727" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T03:00:31.797" Title="need to understand infinitive" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2014-05-29T13:35:56.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Infinitives are rather different in different languages, and some languages, like Bulgarian, don't have infinitives at all. In some languages infinitives have a special suffix and are easily recognized, e. g. in Russian the most typical infinitival suffix is -ть, like in писать 'to write', читать 'to read', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English the infinitives are in most cases marked by the infinitival particle 'to' (to-infinitive), but sometimes they are not (bare infinitive), still the list of cases when they are not mark is pretty short. The English unmarked infinitives follow another verb. Here is the list of the verbs that are always followed by an unmarked infinitive, infinitives are marked in &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nine defective verbs: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must: &lt;em&gt;I cannot &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb 'let': &lt;em&gt;Let me &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb 'help': &lt;em&gt;He helps me &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; my homework.&lt;/em&gt; (Nowadays many use the to-infinitive after 'help'.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb 'make' in the meaning 'to cause': &lt;em&gt;He made me &lt;strong&gt;cry&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb 'do' (Past 'did') used to form questions, negative sentences, and emphatic sentences in the Present Simple Tense and in the Past Simple Tense: &lt;em&gt;Do you &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; him&lt;/em&gt;? (question), &lt;em&gt;I don't &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; him.&lt;/em&gt; (negative), &lt;em&gt;I do &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; him!&lt;/em&gt; (emphatic);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After 'needn't': &lt;em&gt;You needn't &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; there.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike many languages, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammaring.com/the-forms-of-the-infinitive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the English infinitive has different forms&lt;/a&gt;, 4 for an intransitive verb (they don't have Passive forms), and 6 for a transitive one. English infinitives can change for voice (Active: &lt;em&gt;to write,&lt;/em&gt; Passive: &lt;em&gt;to be written&lt;/em&gt;), for aspect (Non-Continuous: &lt;em&gt;to write&lt;/em&gt;, Continuous: &lt;em&gt;to be writing&lt;/em&gt;), for perfectness (Non-Perfect: &lt;em&gt;to write&lt;/em&gt;, Perfect: &lt;em&gt;to have written&lt;/em&gt;), and there are Perfect-Continuous infinitives: &lt;em&gt;to have been writing&lt;/em&gt;. So, you got it wrong, the infinitives &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change after the grammar categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-05-29T13:41:07.487" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T13:41:07.487" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T14:25:09.880" Score="4" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a possible connection between the Ancient Greek &quot;γυνή&quot; and &quot;γένεσις&quot;. I think semantically a relation between the two terms is plausible. Unfortunately I don't know enough about PIE phonology. Please help.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3668" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T15:10:01.990" Title="Is the Proto-Indo-European &quot;ǵenh₁-&quot; (to produce) related to &quot;gʷḗn&quot; (woman)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7288" CreationDate="2014-05-29T15:10:01.990" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. A palatalized /g/ is a different phoneme from a labialized /g/, and there is no obvious way that they are connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T15:10:01.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7286" CreationDate="2014-05-29T17:34:35.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the last question first, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a term from Latin grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It refers in Latin to one of several tenseless verb forms.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymologically, &lt;em&gt;infinitive&lt;/em&gt; means 'unending' (just like &lt;em&gt;infinite&lt;/em&gt;); here the reference is to lack of tense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other languages, &lt;em&gt;infinitive&lt;/em&gt; is often used to describe one, or more, untensed verb forms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/wow/grammar.latin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Latin terms&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Participle, Gerund,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Gerundive&lt;/em&gt; are also in use for untensed verb forms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What these terms mean, in each language, has to be determined individually. There is no consistency.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the question is about &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; infinitives, and here the trick is knowing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;that there are &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; different meanings for &lt;em&gt;infinitive&lt;/em&gt; in English grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you keep them straight, you won't be easily confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can refer to the infinitive form of the verb, e.g, &lt;em&gt;be, run, go, see, feel, have, admit, ask&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Every verb in English (except defective verbs like &lt;em&gt;born&lt;/em&gt; and modal auxiliaries) has  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Three Principal Parts&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt;, was, been; &lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt;, ran, run; &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt;, went, gone; &lt;strong&gt;see&lt;/strong&gt;, saw, seen;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/strong&gt;, felt, felt; &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt;, had, had; &lt;strong&gt;admit&lt;/strong&gt;, admitted, admitted; &lt;strong&gt;ask&lt;/strong&gt;, asked, asked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These three verb forms are called, in order, the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the Past, and the Past Participle. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can also refer to infinitive clauses of various kinds, which are subordinate clauses&lt;br&gt;&#xA;that use infinitive verb forms, instead of present, past, or participial forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;For him to err&lt;/strong&gt; is human ~ He wants &lt;strong&gt;to leave&lt;/strong&gt; early ~ She's the one &lt;strong&gt;to see&lt;/strong&gt; about that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These are normally marked with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Complements.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;for...to&lt;/em&gt; complementizer&lt;/a&gt;, though the &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;marks the subject of the clause is frequently absent, along with the subject itself. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @YellowSky has pointed out, most infinitive clauses are governed by the matrix predicate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are a number of auxiliaries that must be followed in construction by an infinitive verb form.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the modal auxiliary verbs (including the NPI semimodals &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dare&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;as well as the periphrastic modals like &lt;em&gt;hafta, wanna, oughta, able to,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;need to&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;must be followed immediately by an infinitive verb form, and the same is true of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;in its  &lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt;-Support and Emphatic senses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/strong&gt; you &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; ice cream?&lt;/em&gt; but not *&lt;em&gt;Do you liking/liked ice cream?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; take it out!&lt;/em&gt; but not *&lt;em&gt;I did taking/took it out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These infinitive verb forms are part of a verb phrase and don't use the complementizer &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, because they don't introduce complements, just the next verb in a verb chain. &#xA;See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/VPguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verb Phrase Guide&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Executive Summary:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Infinitive clauses are very complex, and they use infinitive verb forms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Infinitive verb forms are used in infinitive clauses (usually marked by &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  infinitive verb forms also occur with auxiliary verbs in verb phrase constructions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (usually without &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T03:00:31.797" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T03:00:31.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T17:50:02.267" Score="2" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence &quot;Who will John meet in the classroom?&quot;. What would the (s-structured) x-bar tree of this sentence look like? Does &quot;will&quot; still simply go in the T node, or is it a CP-specifier, or what? I'm having trouble charting it since &quot;will&quot; and &quot;meet&quot; are separated by &quot;John&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the site, so I'm not sure how plausible this is, but I'd appreciate a depicted tree if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On an unrelated note, in a sentence such as &quot;Which picture of himself will John hate?&quot;, what is considered the reflexive noun phrase (as it pertains to Condition A of traditional Binding Theory)? I know it'd normally be &quot;himself&quot;, but is it &quot;John&quot; in this case, since &quot;himself&quot; precedes it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3670" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T14:33:41.257" Title="How to apply x-bar structure to split verb phrases?" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2612" CreationDate="2014-05-29T19:14:51.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most often, the expression “false cognate” is used as a synonym for “false friend”. If you google with them, you will mostly find pages that use them synonymously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other meanings have also been proposed. In &lt;em&gt;Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics&lt;/em&gt; edited by Keith Allan, the article “False friends”, p. 308–309, describes false cognates as a special case of false friends, namely false friends that are not etymologically related. And in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=54&amp;amp;t=26999&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Unilang discussion&lt;/a&gt;, it was suggested (without references) that “false cognates are words that look the same and have the same meaning but have different roots”, so that false cognates would not be false friends at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the expression “false cognate” is best avoided, since it has different meanings to different people. When you encounter it, assume that it probably means “false friend”, but with some suspicion: it might mean something rather different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1575" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T19:14:51.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-29T20:43:57.560" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sentence such as &quot;Which picture of himself will John hate?&quot;, what is considered the reflexive noun phrase (as it pertains to Condition A of traditional Binding Theory)? I know it'd normally be &quot;himself&quot;, but is it &quot;John&quot; in this case, since &quot;himself&quot; precedes it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is &quot;himself&quot; now the antecedent NP, and &quot;John&quot; the reflexive NP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3670" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T01:48:32.270" Title="Brief question of terminology for reflexive noun phrases?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7293" CreationDate="2014-05-29T21:07:17.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;John&quot; is the antecedent. As far as I know, it is pronouns that have antecedents, and &quot;himself&quot; is a pronoun, not &quot;John&quot;. &quot;Antecedent&quot; is often used as the general term for both antecedents proper (the preceding ones) and for postcedents (the following ones), so the answer is anyway &quot;John&quot;, but whether is is the antecedent or the postcedent depends on the terminology you use. I would call it &quot;antecedent&quot; irrespective to its position before or after the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T21:07:17.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7293" CreationDate="2014-05-29T23:04:06.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what is traditionally called &lt;em&gt;cataphora&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., the effective &lt;em&gt;antecedent&lt;/em&gt; following the &lt;em&gt;anaphor&lt;/em&gt;. Right, there is a good deal of confusion in the terminology, which is unhelpful when people consider literal meanings of the terms. I agree with Yellow Sky that in typical usage &lt;em&gt;antecedent&lt;/em&gt; is the cover term regardless of its linear position. If the &quot;R[eferential]-expression&quot; &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; were really anteceded by &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, it would be a violation of Principle C (which is attested in some languages, but not really in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I disagree with John Lawler's comment to Yellow Sky's answer. Precedence is thought to be largely irrelevant for binding (although not completely irrelevant and not equally so in all languages). I think Tanya Reinhart showed this in 1976, but correct me if I'm wrong. The following sentence, where the pronoun follows the full NP but c-commands its trace, on co-indexing of &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to be bad for the majority:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Which pictures of John will he hate?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this may lead us to far off topic, talking about reconstruction effects, but you should get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-29T23:04:06.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-30T10:11:54.857" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know whether there is a technical term, preferably an accepted one, for the following type of parenthesis (&lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)    You are, &lt;strong&gt;I believe&lt;/strong&gt;, not healthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (bold) parenthesis always consists of a subject (often a pronoun) and an illocative verb: &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;, etc. See for Russian: Iordanskaya &amp;amp; Mel'čuk (&lt;a href=&quot;http://meaningtext.net/mtt2011/proceedings/papers/IordanskajaMelcuk.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt;). Personally, I'm not convinced that Iordanskaya &amp;amp; Mel'čuk have it right, though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English data are less compelling than the German data. This type of construction looks as if it could be recovered in derivational syntax theories. However, data from German throw doubt on this assumption:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Sie würde dem, &lt;strong&gt;(&lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;) glaube ich&lt;/strong&gt;, niemals zustimmen.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     'She would, I believe, never agree with that.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parenthesis in (2) shows VS-order, with the optional adverb &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;. Note that the parenthesis cannot be the main clause because the propositional object (the clause without the parenthesis) cannot be preceded by a subordinator, such as &lt;em&gt;dass&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know what this construction is called, or if you should know of an analysis of this kind of structure, please post an answer. Please avoid lengthy discussions in the comment section.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-05-30T16:38:48.177" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T09:20:12.847" Title="What's the technical term for illocative parenthesis?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7299" CreationDate="2014-05-30T10:28:44.857" Score="3" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;NPs can function as adverbials as in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I ran a mile.&#xA;I am 5 feet tall.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to confirm this is by substituting the NPs with adverbs, e.g. &quot;I ran fast&quot; and &quot;I am very tall&quot;. &quot;A mile&quot; in the first sentence may seem like the object of a transitive verb, but it isn't as how passivisation proves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*A mile was run by me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, therefore, means that &quot;run&quot; is an intransitive verb with an adverbial, which is &quot;a mile&quot;, an NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second sentence, &quot;tall&quot; is obviously an adjective that functions as the subject complement. This is confirmed by the use of copula &quot;am&quot;, an intensive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem comes when one tries to parse such adverbials in phrase structure form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can NP appear on the left branch as the sister of Adj (denoting premodification of Adj) as how an AdvP can?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;E.g.: [AP [AdvP [Adv very]][Adj tall]]&#xA;      [AP [NP [Det 5][N feet]][Adj tall]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawing [NP [Det 5][N' [N feet][AP [Adj tall]]]] must be out of the question as &quot;tall&quot; should be the one premodified, not &quot;5 feet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've drawn this so far. 'X' is the anomalous part in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XxOgB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T13:56:58.693" Title="NPs as adverbials; how to parse them?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-05-30T13:16:45.083" Score="2" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the relation between Germanic adjectival/adverbial suffixes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-ly, -lich, -lijk, ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Turkic suffixes  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-lik -liq  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that convert nouns/adjectives to nouns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-05-31T09:47:16.287" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T09:47:16.287" Title="What's the relation between Germanic suffixes -ly, -lich, -lijk, ... and Turkic suffixes -lik -liq" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7297" CreationDate="2014-05-30T13:56:58.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would render the X' node as NP; the noun &lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt; is head of the phrase &lt;em&gt;5 feet&lt;/em&gt;. So yes, the NP &lt;em&gt;5 feet&lt;/em&gt; appears as a predependent of the adjective &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. it appears on a left branch underneath the adjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I think the analysis in the question is basically correct (as far as phrase structure analyses go). NPs can indeed function as adjuncts, e.g. &lt;em&gt;They worked on it &lt;strong&gt;two days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The will leave &lt;strong&gt;this Friday&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I stood in front of him &lt;strong&gt;ten minutes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Non-subject NPs can at times indeed appear as predependents; we see this with &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;two days ago&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;five minutes ago&lt;/em&gt;, and with adjectives such as &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wide&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;two feet long&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a mile wide&lt;/em&gt;, etc. In languages with case, the relevant NPs appear in the accusative case, e.g. Ger. &lt;em&gt;Ich habe den ganzen Tag geschlafen&lt;/em&gt; 'I slept the entire day', where &lt;em&gt;den ganzen Tag&lt;/em&gt; 'the entire day' is an adjunct marked by the accusative case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A noteworthy point about the parse tree: The tree is not an X-bar tree. In X-bar trees, all phrases are endocentric, i.e. they have a head. The initial division S --&gt; NP VP is, in contrast, exocentric, since it lacks a head. See the distinction between endocentric and exocentric structures here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocentric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocentric&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T13:56:58.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7291" CreationDate="2014-05-30T14:33:41.257" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kiyoshigaang points to the direct answer to the question. On a GB-style analysis (Government and Binding), &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; is in spec of CP and &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; is in C of CP; both move to those positions from lower in the tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question references T of TP. Thus the question seems to be located in the generative tradition after about 1995, since the generative tradition did not start acknowledging TP until about that time. Producing an analysis that can be agreed upon becomes more difficult in this regard, since as the generative tradition has progressed, more and more functional categories have been added, e.g. AgrP, FocP, TopP, etc. A &quot;correct&quot; analysis and direct answer to the question is therefore increasingly debatable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site is inundated by this type of parse tree question. In my view, the questions bear witness to a major problem with the state of mainstream Chomskyan syntax and modern syntax courses in linguistics in general. Students are being required to produce parses of sentences using an increasingly complex system; they are therefore understandably frustrated and thus seeking help where they might find it. But due to the complexity of the system, it is often difficult to produce coherent answers to the questions. The experts often disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course not the answer that the question is seeking. Producing a clear answer would, though, be difficult, and drawing a modern X-bar-style tree that acknowledges TP is laborious. Perhaps this answer will, however, help generate skepticism about the value of producing such parses to begin with, in a system of syntax that is (in my view) overly complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T14:33:41.257" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7206" CreationDate="2014-05-30T15:17:30.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Dr. [No]]&lt;/em&gt; is the more defensible analysis. Taking the example &lt;em&gt;Mr. Smith&lt;/em&gt;, premodifiers are possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; the good Mr. Smith&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, if &lt;em&gt;Mr.&lt;/em&gt; is dropped, the premodifiers seem quite odd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ??the good Smith&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation suggests that the pre-modifiers are dependents of &lt;em&gt;Mr.&lt;/em&gt;, not of &lt;em&gt;Smith&lt;/em&gt;. Further, &lt;em&gt;Smith&lt;/em&gt; can be dropped completely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; the good Mr.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These facts are accommodated more easily if &lt;em&gt;Mr.&lt;/em&gt; is head over &lt;em&gt;Smith&lt;/em&gt;. If the opposite were the case, &lt;em&gt;the good Mr.&lt;/em&gt; would qualify as a constituent and we would expect it to be identifiable as a constituent; but it clearly is not a constituent, as the proform substitution test reveals: *he Smith.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second argument demonstrating that [Dr. [No]] is the better analysis is that it establishes consistency in hierarchical analysis across English and Japanese. English is more head-initial than head-final and Japanese is of course almost completely head-final. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third insight that supports the analysis is prosody. Phrasal stress tends to fall on an element that appears lower in the phrase. The phrasal stress falls on &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;, not on &lt;em&gt;Dr&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Dr. &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This situation can be compared with compounds, which have the phrasal stress on the first element, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;truck&lt;/strong&gt; tire&lt;/em&gt;. Such compounds are widely taken to be head-final in English, i.e. &lt;em&gt;[[truck] tire]&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence what this all means is that &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt; is in apposition to &lt;em&gt;Dr&lt;/em&gt;. We have the same structural analysis as with standard appositions, e.g. &lt;em&gt;[my friend [Tom]]&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-05-30T15:17:30.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7298" CreationDate="2014-05-30T15:40:27.007" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/_lich&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Duden&lt;/a&gt; and other sources state that -lich is a grammaticalized form of the Middle High German līch [&quot;body&quot;] (which also gave rise to Leiche). -ly, -lich, -lijk (and Scandinavian forms) are actually all of similar derivation and converge to a single Germanic ancestral suffix (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=76UUIcCqMYkC&amp;amp;pg=PA155&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see discussion on details here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Turkic -lik appeared already in the Old Turkic times and probably was related to a similar in form and meaning Mongolian suffix (&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.istanbul.edu.tr/iuturkiyat/article/download/1023009437/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see e.g. here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a hypothesis about common ancestry of the Germanic and the Turkic suffixes via borrowing is at least non-parsimonious. (Not to mention, that there are no genetic links between these two groups of languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2014-05-31T00:48:10.623" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T00:48:10.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7296" CreationDate="2014-05-31T09:20:12.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are conventionally called just &lt;em&gt;parentheticals&lt;/em&gt;. As Dehé (2009) puts it (in a paper on their prosody), &quot;parentheticals are commonly argued to be either external to the syntactic structure of their host &amp;lt;...&gt;, or only very loosely related to it, e.g. in terms of adjunction &amp;lt;...&gt;, Insertion &amp;lt;...&gt;, or adjunction of a maximal projection which involves the application of b-Merge&quot; (p.2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find plenty of references for their syntax in his paper&#xA;(Dehé, N. (2009). Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory. Bibliothek der Universität Konstanz.), including the book &lt;em&gt;Parentheticals&lt;/em&gt; he and Kavalova edited in 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the semantics, they seem to fit well into Pottsian kind of idea that they constitute a separate proposition, probably of a different status w.r.t. truth than the main (host) assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T09:20:12.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7128" CreationDate="2014-05-31T12:41:55.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, after looking at the references jlawler suggested and just browsing around I realised that there are so many three-place predicates that I probably wouldn't want to have a full list. I'm editing the question slightly to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the important thing is that very few ones suit my anaphora needs. The restriction is that (the) two objects are semantic coarguments and could be animate and allow reasonable identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples are: &lt;em&gt;show x x (in the mirror)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;recommend x x&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tell x about x&lt;/em&gt;, and, probably, &lt;em&gt;praise/criticise&lt;/em&gt; (if the language allows the goal argument).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-05-31T12:41:55.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2014-06-01T06:08:35.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some certain New Guinea languages use base-4: Rawo, Nafri, Vanimo, Bukiyip (which has base-3 and base-4, depending on what is being counted) and, in Papua New Guinea,  Wiru and Kewa, along with others.  Another base used in New Guinea and some parts of Africa is 6 (senary) in languages such as Ndom, Khimaghama, and Riantana, much like some California Native American counting systems.  Some of the above have base-5 and base-20 as secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huku (Uganda) and Nimbia (Nigeria) are two instances of base-12, arguably the best base in general (for math especially).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3678" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T06:08:35.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7030" CreationDate="2014-06-01T18:31:02.687" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one of the first major studies was Bybee (1985).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/tsl.9/main&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bybee, J.L. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam:&#xA;John Benjamins Publishing Company.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She proposed the hierarchy Justin Olbranz refers to:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;verb-valence-voice-aspect-tense-mood-modality-person-number&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another prominent study that argues along the same line is Rice (2000):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/morpheme-order-and-semantic-scope-word-formation-athapaskan-verb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rice, Keren. 2000. Morpheme order and semantic scope: Word formation in the Athapaskan verb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-06-01T18:37:19.387" LastActivityDate="2014-06-01T18:37:19.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2014-06-02T07:10:27.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that constituency is necessary, although I acknowledge the notion of &quot;constituent&quot; (I just don't think it's the central notion on which language structure is built). Of course, I have to admit that many linguists seem to view the constituent as an indispensable tool.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that rather than questioning the necessity of constituency, its suitability in producing coherent and accurate answers to linguistic phenomena should be in the focus. (Since it's the prerogative of the questioner to formulate their question, my contribution here is not really an answer.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal doubt about constituency stems from a solid conviction that the notion incurs bracketing paradoxes across the whole grammatical spectrum. Be it displacement, ellipsis, periphrasis, or morphosyntactical phenomena such as multiple auxiliaries, one always needs additional assumptions (movement, merge, etc.) in order to account for the fact that stuff that should go together doesn't do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constituents simply don't seem to be the conceptional units along which language is structured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T07:10:27.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2014-06-02T22:25:07.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, these syllabic liquids occur in the following circumstances (Diaphonemes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help%3aIPA_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɜr/, as in &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fern&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fur&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;worth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ǝr/, as in &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;perceive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʌr/, as in &lt;em&gt;hurry&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;borough&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʊl/, as in &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʌl/, as in &lt;em&gt;dull&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ǝl/, as in &lt;em&gt;bottle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʉl/, as in &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3681" LastActivityDate="2014-06-02T22:25:07.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7314" CreationDate="2014-06-03T12:26:40.063" Score="0" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that the Latin &lt;code&gt;vici&lt;/code&gt; means both &lt;code&gt;road&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;conqueror&lt;/code&gt;. Interestingly, in Hebrew the root &lt;code&gt;כבש&lt;/code&gt; is used for both &lt;code&gt;כביש&lt;/code&gt; (road) and for &lt;code&gt;לכבוש&lt;/code&gt; (to conquer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a few different reasons why this could be. Might anyone clarify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is some connection between road-building and conquering. Perhaps one builds a road in all places conquered?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One language adopted words of a similar root for arbitrary reasons. Then the second language, having one of the words but lacking the other, looked to the first language for how to build the new word off the former.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this phenomenon is not limited to just Latin &lt;code&gt;vici&lt;/code&gt; and Hebrew &lt;code&gt;כבש&lt;/code&gt;. I can post other examples, across other languages, if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T02:31:43.223" Title="Similar reuse of roots across languages and language families" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2014-06-03T18:51:39.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is partially motivated by Dominik Lukes's answer and some of the things I read in the comments that follow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vinartus.net/spa/90e.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chunking&lt;/a&gt; is a kind of constituency parsing. The theoretical motivation for chunking comes from constituency parsing, à la NP, VP, etc. Though chunking is considered to be only &quot;shallow&quot; parsing, i.e. not the &lt;em&gt;proper&lt;/em&gt; kind, it is still useful for practical applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm working on a project right now that needs the software to deal with tweets. Depending on your mindset, such text can either be considered &quot;awful&quot; or, be considered to be of a dialect that parsers haven't been trained for. Either way, &quot;full&quot; parsers of either kind, constituency or dependency, fail pretty badly. Chunking gives me useful nuggets of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/page/demo_view/ShallowParse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fRqcP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Illinois LBJ Chunker&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the fact that it's my own fault that I know nothing about &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/papers/dcs-acl2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency-Based Compostional Semantics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, constituency-based parse analyses map fairly easily to compositional semantics. I believe this claim applies equally well to deeper grammars (LTAG, HPSG, CCG, etc.) that are the intellectual children of the simple Phrase Structure Grammar. After all, the parse trees don't change much between one of these formalisms and another.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I'm not convinced that automated dependency parsing is significantly faster than automated constituency parsing. The speed of parsing depends on many factors such as the algorithms used, the programming language, the quality of implementation, etc. All I can acknowledge right now is that some parsers are fast and some are slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 &amp;mdash; The first time I came across DCS was just a few minutes ago when I googled up some phrases while answering this question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-06-03T20:58:51.017" LastActivityDate="2014-06-03T20:58:51.017" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7312" CreationDate="2014-06-03T20:38:07.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin the two words are unrelated. The basic meaning of &lt;em&gt;vīcus&lt;/em&gt; (of which your form &lt;em&gt;vīcī&lt;/em&gt; is the genitive) is actually &quot;district, neighborhood, village, etc.&quot;, although it does also sometimes mean &quot;road, street&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Vīcus&lt;/em&gt; is from a Proto-Indo-European root &lt;em&gt;weiḱ-&lt;/em&gt; (which gives among other things Greek &lt;em&gt;oîkos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;house&quot;, whence &lt;em&gt;eco-nomy, eco-logy&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;em&gt;Vīcī&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I conquered&quot;, the perfect tense of &lt;em&gt;vincō,&lt;/em&gt; is from PIE &lt;em&gt;weik-&lt;/em&gt;, a different root which gives words meaning &quot;fight, defeat, etc.&quot;. The two roots look very similar, but are distinct lexemes and probably unrelated, since &quot;plain velar&quot; &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;palatalized velar&quot; &lt;em&gt;ḱ&lt;/em&gt; were distinct phonemes in PIE (at least, this is the majority view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two Hebrew words, on the other hand, probably are related. The root כבש &lt;em&gt;k-b-š&lt;/em&gt; has, in addition to the &quot;conquer&quot; meaning, also a meaning &quot;tread down, press, apply pressure&quot;; this gives &quot;road&quot;, since a road is something paved. The two senses look like they could very plausibly be related, namely the &quot;conquer&quot; sense arising from the &quot;tread down&quot; sense -- cf. English &quot;oppress&quot; and metaphors like &quot;downtrodden&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-06-04T02:31:43.223" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T02:31:43.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2014-06-04T08:34:21.243" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases, it seems that when a country is subject to different dominations, there is a sort of simplification of the language's morphology. The domination in most of the case force to use a more simplified language that allows communication between invaders and natives. I found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://ed.ted.com/lessons/a-brief-history-of-plural-word-s-john-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TED video of John McWhorter&lt;/a&gt; regarding the influence of Viking domination on the English language very interesting. Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit were languages belonged to strong &quot;nations&quot; and their inflexion was complicated until these nations could defend them from invaders influence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3024" LastEditorUserId="3024" LastEditDate="2019-12-04T11:39:17.347" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T11:39:17.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-04T12:12:31.073" Score="6" ViewCount="23243" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we wanted to create an all new alphabet composed of as much letters as possible, with each letter corresponding to one distinctive sound. What's the maximum amount of letters we could have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh and please don't answer &quot;an infinite amount&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3686" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T15:37:33.667" Title="How many different distinctive sounds can an average human make?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-09-07T14:00:15.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7220" CreationDate="2014-06-04T13:10:00.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really difficult to answer a question like this; &lt;strong&gt;you're asking &quot;what am I NOT hearing?&quot; and there are potentially an infinite number of things you aren't hearing!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a spectrogram of the sound samples you provided:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xj5J1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;spectrogram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of American English with near-native tendencies in Japanese (my father is Japanese), and to me the initial r- is quite clear in both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of reverb in your recording, so the spectra are kind of &quot;smudged&quot;, but you can clearly make out a voice bar at the beginning of each word (indicated with red braces). These voice bars correspond to the period of time when the speaker's tongue is in full contact with his alveolar ridge (or somewhere slightly behind it) and so the oral cavity is completely sealed, but his vocal folds are already vibrating. As you can see, &lt;strong&gt;the voice bar is actually longer in the second rendition of the word, which one would expect to serve as a &lt;em&gt;stronger&lt;/em&gt; cue to the r-.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often we get cues to place and manner of articulation from formant movement. In a syllable like [da], for example, the first formant will rise from the [d] to the [a] and the second formant will fall, cuing an alveolar obstruent. However, in the case of going from a post-alveolar segment to a [y], the tongue doesn't have very far to go, so the formant transitions aren't going to give us very much information. I've pointed to the first and second formants with blue arrows in the spectrogram; as you can see, the first formant starts relatively low and then quickly rises, and the second formant starts relatively high and then falls. These movements correspond with the [y] transitioning into the following vowel--the [o]. If anything, the aspect of the formants that is cuing ry- as opposed to just y- is that the period of time during which the first formant stays low and the second stays high is relatively short; in other words, &lt;strong&gt;the [y] in &lt;em&gt;ryoo&lt;/em&gt; is probably shorter than the [y] in &lt;em&gt;yoo&lt;/em&gt; would be.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flap-y cluster at the beginning of a word is way out of bounds for English phonotactics, so as a baseline it's not surprising for a native speaker of English to have some trouble consistently hearing the cluster as such. A similar phenomenon causes words like &lt;em&gt;tsunami&lt;/em&gt; to get reduced to [sunami] in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; able to perceive it in some cases, so &lt;strong&gt;the easier question to answer from an experimental point of view (at least to start with) might be &quot;what AM I hearing in the cases where I CAN distinguish between ry- and y-?&lt;/strong&gt; As a phonetician, I would find a native speaker whose ry-/y- contrast is &lt;em&gt;consistently&lt;/em&gt; clear to me (not like the one you recorded for the samples you provided) and record several repetitions of &lt;em&gt;yuu&lt;/em&gt;, several repetitions of &lt;em&gt;yoo&lt;/em&gt;, several repetitions of &lt;em&gt;ryuu&lt;/em&gt;, and several repetitions of &lt;em&gt;ryoo&lt;/em&gt;. I'd ask the speaker to include some renditions that are slower and more exaggerated, so that spectral differences between ry- and y- are more obvious. I'd then make the analogous recordings with a speaker whose ry-/y- contrast is consistently imperceptible to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See where I'm going with this? By recording all four conditions, you can separate out the acoustic cues you are picking up on with the first speaker from those you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; picking up on with the second speaker. For example, maybe the spectrograms from the first speaker will reveal some burst noise for ry- but not for y-, whereas burst noise will be absent for both ry- and y- in the spectrograms from the second speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I haven't fully answered your question at this point; I've made a couple of guesses as to what cues the ry- for a native speaker, but that doesn't necessarily get at what you &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; hearing. The problem is that we don't have sufficient data to do so. Hopefully I've at least made it clear why the data are insufficient and how you can take steps to get closer to an answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T13:10:00.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2014-06-04T14:29:25.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the age of the speakers. At birth, humans have the ability to acquire any sound that they are physically able of producing. If the language they are surrounded by has a certain sound, they will most likely acquire it, and will later be able to produce it. As this acquisition process happens, infants gradually lose the ability to acquire new sounds that are not present in the language they are acquiring. The time this takes is often referred to as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;critical period&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your question of how many sounds a new language can have so that the average adult can speak the language, this crucially depends on what language(s) they already speak. If they know only one language (say, language A), and that language has 28 different sounds, your constructed language can only have those 28 sounds (if you want speakers of language A to be able to acquire the sound system of your new language perfectly). Of course, there are speakers of other languages, say language B with 18 sounds. If your constructed language is tailored to the needs of speakers of language A, speakers of language B cannot acquire it perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another complicating factor is the difference between phonemes and phones. Basically, both can be called sounds, but phonemes are a way of grouping different sounds together to a single meaningful unit. But if two sounds A and B belong to a single phoneme p in a language, another language might have sounds A and B as separate phonemes j and k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-06-04T14:29:25.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-05T03:05:07.493" Score="3" ViewCount="1053" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the NP in the genitive is the specifier of D' under which the genitive 's head subsumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;E.g.: [DP [NP [N' [N Ali]]][D'[D 's][NP [N' [N mother]]]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0qibp.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Malay, nouns in the genitive case aren't marked. Instead, one of the ways possession is denoted is through the position of nouns in the NP. Nouns that are placed consecutively may be in the genitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Malay: Ibu          bapa         Ali&#xA;Lit:   mother (GEN) father (GEN) Ali&#xA;Eng:   Ali's father's mother&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example above is not to be confused with &quot;ibubapa Ali&quot;, which means &quot;Ali's parents&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main problem is the (GEN) terminal. How should nouns in the genitive without explicit genitive case marking be represented&#xA;  in X-bar tree diagrams? Is it plausible to have (GEN) to make clear the genitive feature of the noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I propose, but I'm not sure if it would be accepted by or is theoretically sound for other linguists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aAneF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please disregard the numbering of the nodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2014-06-05T05:23:40.013" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T06:10:12.367" Title="Genitives without explicit genitive case marking" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7320" CreationDate="2014-06-05T04:47:46.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that analysis can hardly be defended in terms of X-bar theory. The analysis shows D'2 lower in the structure than D2, and DP2 as a sister of the head D2. A projection of a head can never appear lower in the structure than the head, nor can it appear as a sister of the head, but rather it must appear above the head. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of points that should be kept in mind when analyzing the structure of NPs. Perhaps the most controversial issue concerns whether noun phrases are NPs or DPs. The question assumes DPs, but that is a controversial assumption. A number of frameworks (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Meaning-Text Theory, etc.) assume NPs, not DPs. Hence one could reject the analysis shown based on this controversy alone. For arguments for and against DPs, see this article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal view is that the traditional NP analysis of noun phrases is more defensible, and I think that the example illustrates a difficulty with the DP analysis in general. Most discussions of the DP-hypothesis remain with single determiners; they do not explore stacked possessives like in the example in the question. Consider the following examples in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1 a. Ali's father&#xA;   b. Ali's father's mother&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is the head of the phrase &lt;em&gt;Ali's father&lt;/em&gt; in (1a), then we should assume that the first &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is also the head of &lt;em&gt;Ali's father's mother&lt;/em&gt; (not the second &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;) in (1b). But intuitively that does does not seem right.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the traditional NP analysis is more consistent with such data, and in fact there is an empirical argument that supports the NP analysis, i.e proform substitution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. Ali 's father&#xA; b.  his   father&#xA;&#xA; a. Ali's father's mother&#xA; b.  his  father's mother&#xA; c.     his        mother&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proform substitution is a test for constituent structure that is widely employed in beginning textbooks for syntax. If a definite proform can be substituted in for a string of words, then that string is likely a constituent. In this case then, &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; can be substituted in for &lt;em&gt;Ali's&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that &lt;em&gt;Ali's&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent. Similarly, &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; can be substituted in for &lt;em&gt;Ali's father's&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that &lt;em&gt;Ali's father's&lt;/em&gt; is also a constituent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these facts with respect to the first DP tree in the question. That tree shows &lt;em&gt;Ali's&lt;/em&gt; as a non-constituent, hence my conclusion is that the first tree in the question is also incorrect. The traditional NP-analysis, which would show &lt;em&gt;Ali's&lt;/em&gt; as a constituent, is more defensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the second tree in the question, I think the constituent structure shown would be accurate for the NP &lt;em&gt;Ali's father's mother&lt;/em&gt;, because the combination &lt;em&gt;Ali's father's&lt;/em&gt; would receive the status of a constituent. But the labeling in that tree is all off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-06-05T04:52:55.977" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T04:52:55.977" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2014-06-05T09:41:56.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know for an average person, but I can describe my own situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's count how many phonemes I can recognize and produce. My native language is Russian, so my phonetics is based on that language with some additions. For sounds existing in Russian I will use the transcription system taught in Russian scools, based on Cyrillic, because IPA is not quite suitable for the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most consonants (with exceptions I will mention) come in 4 variants for me: the voiced hard, voiced soft, voiceless hard, voiceless soft. Some of these variants do not exist in Russian language, yet they are readily distinguishable to me and I can produce them.&#xA;Some quadruples form pairs between each other, corresponding to plosive and fricative variants so to produce octets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vowels come in 2 variants for me: the variant coming after a soft consonants and the variant coming after a hard consonant. I would call them &quot;soft&quot; and &quot;hard&quot; vowels, although the Russian phonology does not use this distinction. For me the distinction is like between German u and ü and o and ö. For me soft vowel comes always after a &quot;soft&quot; consonant and a &quot;hard&quot; vowel always comes after a hard consonant (that's why they are not considered distinct phonemes in Russian phonology), yet for me either &quot;soft&quot; or &quot;hard&quot; vowel can be at the beginning of a word, a distinction not existing in Russian, but existing in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[б], [п], [б'], [п'] - four variants&#xA;[в], [ф], [в'], [ф'] - four variants, forms plosive/fricative octet with the prevuous&#xA;&#xA;[д], [т], [д'], [т'] - four variants&#xA;[ҙ], [ѳ], [ҙ'], [ѳ'] - [ҙ] represents English &quot;th&quot; in &quot;this&quot;, [ѳ] represents &#xA;                       the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thick&quot;. The soft-hard distinction is not &#xA;                       phonemic in any language known to me, yet I can easily &#xA;                       produce and recognize it. &#xA;                       Forms a plosive/fricative octet with the prevuous.&#xA;&#xA;[з], [c], [з'], [c'] - four variants&#xA;[ӡ], [ц], [ӡ'], [ц'] - Russian has only hard voiceless variant and it is difficult&#xA;                       to me to recognize the soft variants because they mix for&#xA;                       me with [д'] and [т']. &#xA;                       Forms affricate/non-affricate octet with the prevuous.&#xA;&#xA;[ж], [ш], [ж'], [ш'] - Russian does not have the soft variant [ж'] &#xA;                       yet I can easily recognize and produce it.&#xA;[ӂ], [ч], [ӂ'], [ч'] - Russian has only soft voiceless variant. &#xA;                       Forms affricate/non-affricate octet with the prevuous.&#xA;&#xA;[г], [к], [г'], [к'] - four variants&#xA;[ғ], [х], [й'], [х'] - for me the hard variant of й is equal to voiced velar&#xA;                       fricative, which does not exist in Russian. &#xA;                       Forms plosive/fricative octet with the prevuous.&#xA;&#xA;[р], [р']            - this has no voiceless variant for me&#xA;[л], [л']            - this has no voiceless variant for me, &#xA;                       groupped with the prevuous as glides.&#xA;&#xA;[м], [м']            - this has no voiceless variant for me&#xA;[н], [н']            - this has no voiceless variant for me, &#xA;                       groupped with the prevuous as nasals.&#xA;&#xA;[ŋ], [ŋ']            - velar nasal not existing in Russian&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this constitutes 50 consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recognize the following vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[а], ['а] - in Russian only the first variant can start a word&#xA;[о], ['о] - in Russian only the first variant can start a word&#xA;[у], ['у] - in Russian only the first variant can start a word&#xA;[э], ['э] - in Russian only the second variant can start a word&#xA;[и], ['и] - in Russian only the second variant can start a word, &#xA;            except some foreign placenames starting with Ы letter.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives 10 vowels, yet the &quot;softness&quot; of a vowel is totally determined by the preceding consonant, except at the word's beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also each vowel can be stressed or not, but no more than one vowel per word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are other phonemes in different languages, but I have just described what I myself can recognize and produce.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-07-21T08:00:56.623" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T08:00:56.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6325" CreationDate="2014-06-05T19:26:18.650" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Tesni%C3%A8re&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lucien Tesnière&lt;/a&gt;, the father of modern dependency-based theories of syntax and grammar (i.e. dependency grammars, DGs), famously wrote the following in Chapter 1 (paragraph 5ff.) of his main oeuvre &lt;em&gt;Éléments de syntaxe structurale&lt;/em&gt; (1959):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;a sentence of the type &lt;em&gt;Alfred speaks&lt;/em&gt; is not composed of just the two elements, &lt;em&gt;Alfred&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;speaks&lt;/em&gt;, but rather of three elements, the first being &lt;em&gt;Alfred&lt;/em&gt;, the second &lt;em&gt;speaks&lt;/em&gt;, and the third the connection that unites them – without which there would be no sentence. To say that a sentence of the type &lt;em&gt;Alfred speaks&lt;/em&gt; consists of only two elements is to analyze it in a superficial manner, purely morphologically, while neglecting the essential aspect that is the syntactic link. [...] The connection is indispensable for the expression of thought. Without the connection, we would not be in a position to express a single continuous thought and we would only be capable of producing a succession of isolated images and ideas, with nothing linking them together.&quot; [Translated from the French]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Tesnière calls a &quot;connection&quot; here is what most modern DGs call a &quot;dependency&quot;. The passage demonstrates that Tesnière had a mentalist understanding of dependencies. One could call it a &lt;em&gt;cognitive perspective&lt;/em&gt;. He viewed dependency structures as cognitive structures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the sentiment expressed in Olivier's answer above (&quot;an illegitimate theory is a quite rare beast&quot;), and implied in a sense in Jlawler's comment above (&quot;A large number of serious syntacticians believe that one needs both dependency and PS relations&quot;). An extreme version of that sentiment states that all theories are legitimate theories. The one theory, no matter its nature, is every bit as good as the next. That is a kum-ba-yah view of science that I reject, i.e. &quot;your science is as good as my science; let's all be happy&quot;, and if we take it seriously, it would actually mean the death of scientific progress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science -- in this case theories of syntax and grammar -- are not all equally good. Some are better than others, and if we are interested in scientific progress, we should constantly be comparing the predictions that theories make. The theories that are making accurate predictions with the least effort are the better ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that a comprehensive theory of syntax needs both dependency and constituency, but not in the way that Jlawler's comment seems to imply. Constituency is needed only for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;coordination&lt;/a&gt;; it is not needed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subordination_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;subordination&lt;/a&gt;. Coordination aside, dependency beats constituency hands down. Dependency makes more accurate predictions than constituency with much less effort. It is in general the better approach to the syntax of natural languages. But that is of course just my view; each linguist has to decide this issue for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-06-05T19:32:40.640" LastActivityDate="2014-06-05T19:32:40.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8384" CreationDate="2014-06-05T22:44:04.177" Score="4" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;possessive adjective&quot; here I mean a fully productive form which is derived from a noun, inflected like an adjective (including agreeing with its head noun in whatever categories other adjectives do in the language), and expresses possession, or some broader set of concepts that include possession. A made-up English example would be if &lt;em&gt;the boyish bicycle&lt;/em&gt; was the regular way of saying &lt;em&gt;the boy's bicycle&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Russian and other Slavic languages have such possessive adjectives, but I gather that in these languages they aren't fully productive, but are limited to certain semantic classes (e.g. names kinship terms), while the unmarked, fully productive way of expressing possession is the genitive case. I'm looking for languages in which such adjectives are the default or the only way of expressing possession. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chukchi &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=eDPxN85-kjYC&amp;amp;pg=PA230&amp;amp;lpg=PA230&amp;amp;dq=chukchi+spencer+possessive+adjective&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=M2MvqkiLy_&amp;amp;sig=wEj1RwJ8qJGlVwvIkAmlvGUJTEk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=fvGQU4jJEtfgoASYiYLYCw&amp;amp;ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=chukchi%20spencer%20possessive%20adjective&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;seems&lt;/a&gt; to be one such language (in fact, it has two different types of such adjectives with differing semantics). What are others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T10:34:40.940" Title="Which languages use possessive adjectives as their primary way of expressing possession?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7329" CreationDate="2014-06-07T01:05:46.603" Score="3" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Information on the Lao language is a bit patchy, especially when you start getting a little deeper and find gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions in and between sources on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lao vowel sounds are spelled using one or more vowel characters and a couple of characters which are also used for consonants or semivowels. There is a distinction between long vowels and short vowels which plays an important part in determining the tone of a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various articles give lists of vowels and diphthongs and tables relating them to their spellings, their length, and their tone. But some words cannot be analysed using just the information in these sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ເຂົ້າໜຽວ &quot;sticky rice&quot; /khao niao/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second syllable appears to contain a triphthong, &quot;ຽວ&quot;. Each of the letters &quot;ຽ&quot; and &quot;ວ&quot; can be used either alone or in combination with other letters, but none of the sources I can find mention them in combination with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As vowels &quot;ຽ&quot; usually represents    &lt;code&gt;/iːə/&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;ວ&quot; usually represents &lt;code&gt;/uːə/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As a consonant or semivowel &quot;ວ&quot; usually represents &lt;code&gt;[ʋ]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt; (depending on dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So what is this &quot;iao&quot; sound in the &quot;niao&quot; of the second syllable? Or should I regard it as two syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I reconcile this with Wikipedia's assertion that &quot;Diphthongs are all centering diphthongs with falling sonority&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where does the &quot;ao&quot; come from in this combination, is it the same sound that is usually spelled &quot;ເ-ົາ&quot; as seen in the first syllable of the word?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-06-08T08:38:29.270" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T11:01:59.323" Title="On Lao triphthongs / tones / orthography" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17731" CreationDate="2014-06-07T11:05:47.170" Score="1" ViewCount="3581" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sure I have come across such a term, but I forgot it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is about words such as &quot;thingamajig&quot; in English, or &quot;таковата&quot; in Bulgarian. When you can't think of a better name, you just use this one as a placeholder in your sentence and hope the listener will be able to understand your meaning from the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my memory is correct, the term was orthographically similar to &quot;cardigan&quot; or &quot;curmudgeon&quot;, but I am not very sure about that part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3695" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T21:26:17.993" Title="What is the word for a word which can mean anything you want it to?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7327" CreationDate="2014-06-07T11:16:46.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;ໜຽວ&quot; is 1 syllable, &quot;ຽ&quot; /iːə/ is a typical Lao diphthong with falling sonority, and &quot;ວ&quot; is a consonant /w/, so this is a CVC-type syllable, /n/-/iːə/-/w/, /niːəw/. Note, that /w/ is allowed as the coda in Lao syllables (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://nickenfield.org/files/Enfield_Lao_Grammar_published_AUTHOR_OFFPRINT.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Grammar of Lao&lt;/a&gt;, p. 35, section &quot;3.3 Final consonants.&quot; Lower on that page there is a list of Lao vowel phonemes and there are no triphthongs there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, /iːə/ is written as &quot;ຽ&quot; only before final consonants, in open syllables /iːə/ is written as ເ◌ຍ, that is another proof that ວ&quot; is onsonant /w/ here. (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://li.payap.ac.th/images/stories/research/lew_2013_a_linguistic_analysis_of_the_lao_writing_system__authors_accepted_manuscript.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 10-11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first word, the &quot;ເ-ົາ&quot; stands for a combination of a vowel + consonant, /aw/, so the two words have just one thing in common, they both end in /w/. However this /w/ is realised phonetically and acoustically in the coda, it is still the same phoneme as /w/ as the initial consonant. Transliterating this /aw/ as &quot;ao&quot; is just a convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-06-09T11:01:59.323" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T11:01:59.323" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="7330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7328" CreationDate="2014-06-07T12:28:44.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer seems to be &lt;em&gt;placeholder name&lt;/em&gt; according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placeholder_name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. This seems a bit limitative, since such a word could also replace a verb, or even a qualifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word in French is &lt;em&gt;pantonyme&lt;/em&gt;, which could be used as well in English (without the final &quot;e&quot;). I found traces on the web of &lt;em&gt;pantonymy&lt;/em&gt;, for example in &#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://paper.ijcsns.org/07_book/201006/20100610.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Visualizing relationships in Hierarchical Small World Networks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Programmers talk of &quot;wild-card&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above concerned words that have become accepted for that role in the language, and are being often used for that purpose. Some are listed in the wikipedia article. A good example is &lt;em&gt;widget&lt;/em&gt; in English or &lt;em&gt;machin&lt;/em&gt; in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still according to wikipedia, a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;nonce&lt;/em&gt; word&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, suggested by John Lawler, is somewhat&#xA;different. It is a &quot;&lt;em&gt;a lexeme created for a single occasion to solve an&#xA;immediate problem of communication, or an invented or accidental&#xA;linguistic form, used only once&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, according to their sources.&#xA;They give a variety of examples, including &quot;quark&quot; before physicists&#xA;made it a full fledged noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while it can play the same role as a placeholder name, this role&#xA;is not a well known and accepted one since the use of the word is not supposed to occur again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be a relation between &lt;em&gt;nonce words&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;neologisms&lt;/em&gt;, in the sense that both are created by their user, which is not the case for a &lt;em&gt;placeholder words&lt;/em&gt;. But I believe that a neologism is usually crafted to suggest a specific meaning, and is often intended for reuse with that specific meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting aspect is that placeholder names may be&#xA;specialized. For example, in French, the non-existent town of&#xA;&quot;Trifouillis les oies&quot; can stand for any small village, far from&#xA;everything. It will be understood by any French speaker (i.e. from&#xA;France). Same goes for &quot;Pétaouchnock&quot; which is an undetermined kind of&#xA;place, rather far from anywhere decent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the non-existent city named Jérimadeth is a &quot;nonce name&quot; for a&#xA;city. It was mentionned only once by Victor Hugo in his poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://poesie.webnet.fr/lesgrandsclassiques/poemes/victor_hugo/booz_endormi.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Booz&#xA;endormi&lt;/a&gt;, apparently only to get his rhyme to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose John Doe plays the same placeholder role for people names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-06-10T21:49:14.787" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T21:49:14.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-09T02:11:38.807" Score="5" ViewCount="2421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen word vectors, word representations and vector embedding in those papers (and in a few other places):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~amnih/papers/wordreps.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~amnih/papers/wordreps.pdf&lt;/a&gt; : words embeddings &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781&lt;/a&gt; : word representations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ai.stanford.edu/~amaas/papers/wvSent_acl2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ai.stanford.edu/~amaas/papers/wvSent_acl2011.pdf&lt;/a&gt;: word vectors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between word vectors, word representations and vector embeddings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that a word vector is a kind of word representation, but how about vector embeddings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T23:35:46.157" Title="What's the difference between word vectors, word representations and vector embeddings?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8678" CreationDate="2014-06-09T12:17:13.407" Score="8" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;In France, the Franco-Provençal language is endangered. The general dialect leveling in France proper is sometimes thought to be a consequence of public policy, the French government having been known for pushing standard French to the exclusion of other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in neighboring Switzerland, the Franco-Provençal language is also moribund, despite being the historic language of Romandy, in favor of standard French (with regional differences). Can this be explained by Swiss public policy? Note that dialect diversity is, on the contrary, very much alive in German-speaking Switzerland (where there is diglossia between standard German and the local dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T05:28:24.567" Title="why did the Franco-Provençal language decline in Switzerland?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2014-06-09T14:38:54.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say, among the Slavic languages at least in &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; such adjectives are quite productive and don't always &quot;intersect&quot; with genitive semantically. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;детская одежда (&quot;childish&quot; clothes = clothes worn by children) ≠ одежда детей (clothes of children, gen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;сталинский режим (Stalin's regime, adj) ≠ * режим Сталина (doesn't exist or a completely different meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;мужской подход (men's approach, adj) ≈ подход мужчины (approach of [a] man, gen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;сестрина книга (sister's book, adj) = книга сестры (book of the sister, gen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;большевистская революция (bolshevists' revolution, adj) = революция большевиков (bolsheviks' revolution, gen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although such adjectives seem to be less productive in &lt;strong&gt;Yiddish&lt;/strong&gt;, it shows a similar system. In Yiddish the genitive is generally substituted by dative with the preposition פון fun (of), although it survives as possessive for animate nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;קינדערישע קליידער (kinderishe kleyder, adj) ≠ קליידער פון (די) קינדער (kleyder fun kinder, dat)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;מענערישער צוגאַנג (menerisher tsugang) ≈ צוגאַנג פון אַ מאַן (tsugang fun a man)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;באָלשעוויסטישע רעוואָלוציע (bolshevistishe revolutsye, adj) = די רעוואָלצויע פון די באָלשעוויקעס (di revolutsye fun di bolshevikes, dat)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only סטאַלינס רעזשים (stalins rezhim, poss)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only דאָס בוך פון מיין שוועסטער (dos bukh fun mayn shvester, dat) or מיין שוועסטערס בוך (mayn shvesters bukh, poss)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2014-06-09T15:00:03.623" LastActivityDate="2014-06-09T15:00:03.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-09T18:08:56.620" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in Chinese, a full stop is &lt;code&gt;。&lt;/code&gt; (U+3002) and a space is &lt;code&gt;　&lt;/code&gt; (U+3000). I need to break paragraphs into sentences and I want to make it compatible with as many languages as possible. What other common languages use special punctuation or spaces?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4702" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-10T10:12:08.577" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T10:12:08.577" Title="Punctuation and spaces in other common languages?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8340" CreationDate="2014-06-10T07:09:41.723" Score="1" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that some of the spoken varieties of modern Sinitic languages include words, morphemes, and/or particles which don't have a set written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm aware that some words or morphemes can be written with more than one character and that arbitrary words, including borrowings from other languages can be written with characters by way of a kind of transliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking about is either morphemes that exist only in spoken varieties of any language or dialect of Chinese and either have no written form, or can only be written in ad-hoc ways using transliterations or other kinds of character substitution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly interested in words/morphemes native to the variety in which they're used but borrowings may also be of some interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-21T14:27:49.047" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T01:46:24.130" Title="Are there any words, morphemes, or particles in any Chinese / Sinitic languages or dialects which don't have a set Hanzi character?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-10T13:17:43.317" Score="-1" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples I have found are: Sindh from India; zindiq(a heretic) from Arabic; and zeen + deen or zin+din (compare to sindon) which is from Hebrew meaning 'leaped the law'; and Sin/Shin is the 21st letter of the Hebrew Alphabet. The word 'sin' as in the Wilderness of Sin can also be referred to as the Wilderness of Zin as the same place. I also find it peculiar that this word 'sind' is phonetically the same as the word 'sinned'. This seems to point to a possible cross-fertilization of language between ancient peoples or rather that the Anglo-Saxons were from one of these nations such as the Hebrews as some in the world have declared. I am looking for more evidence to my inquiry for or against from open-minded scholars out in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3689" LastEditorUserId="3689" LastEditDate="2014-06-10T21:59:30.507" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T19:56:21.263" Title="Can the Anglo-Saxon words 'sind, sinder, sindon' have origins from older languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2014-06-11T00:09:39.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing of similar-sounding words in different languages tells you approximately nothing about any possible connection between the words. Unless you can show that they are part of a wider, regular, sound correspondence between the languages, or that there is a plausible route by which one might have been borrowed, there is no reason to believe that anything other than coincidence is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T00:09:39.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8336" CreationDate="2014-06-11T00:19:42.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly. &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8922&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here is one of many LanguageLog posts on the topic&lt;/a&gt;, showing two signs which use respectively the Japanese kana  の and the bopomofo symbol ㄟ, in both cases to represent a Taiwanese possessive particle [e].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-11T00:23:11.967" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T00:23:11.967" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-11T00:32:49.860" Score="1" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/answers/216673/mind-maps-for-increasing-vocabulary/blog/feed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SpanishD!ct&lt;/a&gt;, an interesting discussion about the use of mind maps in language learning has arisen. (This has been trimmed down from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/26060/1407&quot;&gt;a question on ELL&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there mind maps such as these that are created using corpora, and are they created using distributional or semantic criteria, or both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4kQqD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;tell&amp;quot; mind map&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OVqmQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;talk&amp;quot; mind map&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1339" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T15:45:29.343" Title="Production of mind maps" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8355" CreationDate="2014-06-10T04:52:45.227" Score="28" ViewCount="52177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist. I do not know German nor French. The majority of English vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. Given these facts, I ask for a simple and convincing demonstration (using an example) that the &quot;basic structure&quot; of English is of Germanic, rather than Romantic origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5226" OwnerDisplayName="user70885" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T21:36:46.983" Title="Why is English classified as a Germanic rather than Romance language?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2014-06-10T06:47:47.530" Score="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classification of languages is a &lt;em&gt;historical&lt;/em&gt; thing, rather than a synchronic one. Just like genetic classification of humans—someone who marries into a new family and goes and lives with them is nonetheless still genetically related to the family they came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of the &lt;em&gt;total&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary in English may be borrowed rather than inherited, but the majority of the &lt;em&gt;most common and basic&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary is inherited. This includes such things as numbers (all inherited), most pronouns (except &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, which is Germanic, but not inherited), many basic non-administrative nouns (wood, name, stone, man, woman, ship, way, ox, hound, house, etc.), and many basic verbs (be, have, should, can, will, go, do, live, die, think, bear, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of this basic vocabulary is also among the most irregular in the language, which usually indicates it's been around much longer. Words borrowed from other languages tend to be force-fitted into the borrowing language's most regular morphology, while inherited words suffer no such restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go back to Old English from before the Vikings settled in England, you can clearly see a language (or several closely related languages, if you prefer) that has a high degree of resemblance to other West Germanic languages of the time, in almost every aspect. This (and the fact that this language can be reconstructed back to the common Proto-Germanic language that all Germanic languages go back to) is really the best direct indicator that English is genetically Germanic, rather than Romance. You won't find a stage of English where it is almost identical to any stage of any Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" OwnerDisplayName="Janus Bahs Jacquet" LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T06:54:43.243" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2014-06-10T20:24:10.000" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to get into details of linguistics (which I take it you don't) the best way to see the family resemblance is to take a comparative look at English's closest linguistic relative found on mainland Europe: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages&quot;&gt;Frisian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages#Comparison_of_Frisian_to_English.2C_Dutch_and_German&quot;&gt;Some sample words&lt;/a&gt; in Frisian, English, Dutch, and German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dei, day, dag, Tag  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rein, rain, regen, Regen &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wei, way, weg, Weg &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neil, nail, nagel, Nagel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frisian is of course indisputably a Germanic language, and just from the above its pretty clear both that these very basic words are all related, and that the Frisian variant looks far closer to the English than the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who has never learned other languages, it might be an easy mistake to think that vocabulary is all there is to a language. However, that would be wrong. There's far far more going on structurally in a language than simple word choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delving into the murky waters of linguistics a bit more, we find that Germanic languages actually share a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Common_linguistic_features&quot;&gt;pronunciation and structural features&lt;/a&gt; that are not found in Romance languages. Taking it further, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages&quot;&gt;West Germanic languages&lt;/a&gt; share features not found in North Germanic languages, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages&quot;&gt;Anglo-Frisian languages&lt;/a&gt; share features not found in the other West Germanic languages. Based on all that, its fairly easy to classify English as Germanic, further as West Germanic, and further still as Anglo-Frisian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8124" OwnerDisplayName="T.E.D." LastActivityDate="2014-06-10T22:54:23.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2014-06-11T09:10:09.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who attended and worked at a couple of universities in the UK and Germany, I dare say that Reed-Kellogg diagrams are almost unheard of in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my school days in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) I do remember the practice of underlining parts of sentences in different colours for subject, object(s) and compound predicate. As the German compound predicate (or, as we called it, Prädikatsverband) can be discontinuous, a two-dimensional diagram might have been more appropriate than this one-dimensional technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1147" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T09:10:09.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8336" CreationDate="2014-06-11T10:40:58.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is safe to say that if the language remain alive long enough, it'd be a matter of time until a character is fitted to a spoken word. Even if it didn't originally start with one (i.e., European or certain Japanese loanwords in Taiwanese), or if the original had been lost. This seems to be typically achieved by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choosing a character with a similar sound or meaning in Standard Mandarin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choosing a character that has the same pronunciation in the dialect/language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make up a new character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, given the lack of a unified authority for most such languages, means there's probably a ton of dialectal words that have been written in different ways. And that's compounded by the enormity of the existing range of Chinese characters. On the other hand, that's less that a word couldn't be written properly, and much more the result of an intense marginalisation of these dialects and languages in the past century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The below is taken from my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/8278&quot;&gt;the thread in the Chinese Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few Taiwanese words where the proper Chinese character was unknown or disputed or perhaps non-existent. This, combined with long term marginalisation of Taiwanese as a respectable medium of communication, resulted in a bit of chaos. On the other hand, in 2009 the government made an effort to standardise the writing system, so there's now a designated official characters for the more common words at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, here are some words that apparently had no universally agreed upon correct character (prior to 2009, at least):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;bē/buē&lt;/code&gt;: officially 袂, was/is written as , 未, indicating a negative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;gâu&lt;/code&gt;: officially , was/is written as 賢, 爻, meaning &quot;skilled at&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;buaih&lt;/code&gt;: officially 勿愛 squished together, was/is written as 無愛, 覅, meaning &quot;dislike&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;suí&lt;/code&gt;: officially 媠, was/is written as 美, 水, meaning &quot;beautiful&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tsia̍h&lt;/code&gt;: officially 食, was/is written as 噍, 吃, meaning &quot;to eat&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;phah&lt;/code&gt;: officially 拍, was/is written as 打, 扑, meaning &quot;to pat, slap&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;beh/bueh&lt;/code&gt;: officially 欲, was/is written as 要, 卜, meaning &quot;to want&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;kah&lt;/code&gt;: officially 佮, was/is written as 及, 甲, 合, meaning &quot;together, with&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;m̄&lt;/code&gt;: officially 毋, was/is written as 不, 呣, 唔, indicating a negative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tshù&lt;/code&gt;: officially 厝, was/is written as 茨、戍, meaning &quot;house&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T12:00:13.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2014-06-11T11:32:40.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Bosworth-Toller dictionary (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/027789&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/027789&lt;/a&gt;) , and based on my arabic and modern german knowledge ,i can say that &quot;sind&quot; which means &quot;are&quot;(thus &quot;to be&quot;) have nothing to do with words such as &quot;zindiq&quot; in arabic.In addition,the meaning of the two words is completely different...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, i don't think that some people will wait for others to borrow verbs of 'first class' like &quot;being&quot; or &quot;having&quot; or they will ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2586" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T11:32:40.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2014-06-11T14:56:14.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I'm about to write is like not to help a lot: when I dove into Slavic languages I found out possessive adjectives are more in south Slavic languages languages: Петров стан in stead of стан Петра. In Russian it's more common in folklore songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4711" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T14:56:14.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2014-06-11T14:57:04.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin of the English word for sin is believed to originate either directly (through &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯sentia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the existing, real) or through early borrowing from Latin from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯esonti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;are&quot; with &quot;-ont&quot; being a common present plural 3rd person verb suffix in PIE, from the basic verb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯esti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T14:57:04.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2014-06-11T20:03:10.800" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a common assumption in all the answers so far, which I think is mistaken.&#xA;It is that the question has a well-definied, categorical answer, that English is either Germanic or Romance, and cannot be some mix of the two. The assumption is clearly enunciated in some of the answers, but it is present in all, even in Janus&#xA; very good answer, when he speaks of an early pre-viking &quot;stage of English&quot;, as is a language has at any time T in the past a unique and well-defined ancestor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should remember that language have no parent like a bacteria has one parent and a human being has two. They are complicated structure with not so-well defined boundaries which evolves over time in part by borrowing a lot form other language.&#xA;Most of the time, however, it is true that it is a very good approximation of the reality to suppose that a language has a unique ancestor at a given time of the past. For instance, it is relatively safe to say that the ancestor of Modern french at time 50BC is Latin, because even if there has been much vocabulary borrowing in French since 2064 years, it is marginal and most of the vocabulary and almost all of the grammars can be traced back from Latin.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But English has a very special history. At some point, French-speaking Normans invaded England and became the ruling class of the country. Progressively their French language mixed with old English of the former inhabitants, to give a new language which will in turn evolve into modern English. Now we need to turn to facts to see if this language comes mainly from Old English with some French influence, or from French with some Old English influence, or &lt;strong&gt;anything in between&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the facts have been recalled by Janus, but let me reiterate them here and add new ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A majority of the vocabulary of Literary English comes from French while an important minority is of germanic origin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A majority of the vocabulary of everyday spoken English comes from common Germanic  but an important minority comes from French (for example, current words such as arm, table, chair, plate, car, flower, to push, to cry, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The grammar also shows the double influence: some traits, like the Saxon genitive &quot;The man's car&quot; are clearly Germanic, while some other, like the fact that most nouns take an s in plural comes from French. [This is to be seriously nuanced. See the comments.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe it is safe to say that English has both a Romance and Germanic origin, arguably slightly more Germanic in view of the importance of the Germanic words in its basic vocabulary, and of the form if Germanic origin in its grammar (as a more precise analysis would show). Remember that it is only a convenient approximation to say that a language is &quot;the genetic continuation&quot; of some language of the past, sometimes a very good approximation (&quot;Polish comes from common Slavic&quot;), sometimes just a decent approximation (&quot;French comes from Latin&quot;, but 10% of its basic vocabulary is of Germanic origins, and some of its grammar too, like the &quot;passé composé&quot;), sometimes really an over-simplification (&quot;English comes from common Germanic&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: For more information on a similar view, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; and the references given there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3623" LastEditorUserId="3623" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T10:26:08.827" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T10:26:08.827" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2014-06-11T22:44:57.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question literally, of &lt;em&gt;course&lt;/em&gt; the Anglo-Saxon words &lt;em&gt;sind&lt;/em&gt; and related words are from older languages. Every word is, by definition, from an “older” language, that older language being either an ancestor of the current language or a language providing the source for borrowings. Specifically, these are from Proto-Germanic &lt;i&gt;*sindi&lt;/i&gt;, which is from the Proto-Indo-European stem &lt;i&gt;*h1es‑&lt;/i&gt;, particularly the third-person plural &lt;i&gt;*h1s-énti&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any connection to Arabic is completely spurious, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/8339/91&quot;&gt;Colin said&lt;/a&gt;. It would be extremely surprising (though not completely unprecedented) for a basic word like &quot;are* to be borrowed, which is a strong clue in this case that the relationship to Arabic is imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-06-11T23:08:24.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-12T11:47:51.790" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;A layman's question: Given a sentence whose meaning is unique, is there any standard algorithm to uniquely determine/describe its grammatical structure such that it can be classified in a standard way (i.e. like, if I don't err, what exists in fields like organic chemistry etc.)? If yes, please give some good references. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4724" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T23:30:04.577" Title="Parsing sentences" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2014-06-12T12:41:18.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple competing procedures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is still quite far from proving true even fractions of the grammar of any specific natural language. Even the most basic phenomena are interpreted differently in various paradigms. For the most obvious example: one important fraction within &lt;em&gt;theoretical syntax&lt;/em&gt;, and at least historically the most important one, is Generative Grammar in a Chomskian tradition. For example, GG relies on strictly binary branching trees and assumes every noun phrase carries &quot;case&quot;. This approach is all but marginal in &lt;em&gt;computational linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, where algorithms are created to parse sentences; instead, computational linguistics favors dependency grammar and constructionist approaches. So at the very least, syntactical theory and computational practice are so far anything but unified, or in agreement about a standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does exist are some subfield standards which cover, if at all, only aspects of what you're asking for. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; employs a standard coding scheme, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_(linguistics)#Constituency_tests&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;constituency tests&lt;/a&gt; are a near-standardized syntactical toolkit for establishing what things should be bracketed together. There are also &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;powerful computational tools for classifying sentences according to one specific grammar&lt;/a&gt;, and some parsers count as quasi-gold standards to compare other algorithms to. Yet, a GG syntactican would reject many of these analyses as being all but irrelevant for &quot;real&quot; syntax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, none of these are uncontroversial even within these subfields, and none of them come close to providing a unified standard for exhaustively describing the syntactic structure of any sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1873/is-there-a-well-established-metric-to-measure-the-effectiveness-of-a-parsing-alg?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3503" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T12:41:18.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9677" CreationDate="2014-06-12T19:52:08.610" Score="1" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese there are two accepted reasons vowels in verbs alternate in height. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel harmonizing rule states that where the theme vowel (&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; from -&lt;em&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; from -&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; from -&lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt;) is deleted from the conjugation and retains tonic stress, the root vowel is changed to match the height of the theme vowel.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, the verb &lt;code&gt;levar&lt;/code&gt; has a root vowel &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; whose height is &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;, and a theme vowel &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; whose height is &lt;strong&gt;low&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, where the theme vowel is omitted from a conjugation, such as in the first person indicative (&lt;em&gt;I lead&lt;/em&gt;) the &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;levo&lt;/code&gt;  widens from mid to low &lt;code&gt;lɛvo&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same is true with &lt;code&gt;servir&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;) narrows to &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;narrow&lt;/strong&gt;), so the first person indicative (&lt;em&gt;I serve&lt;/em&gt;) is not &lt;code&gt;*servo&lt;/code&gt;, but it is instead &lt;code&gt;sirvo&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second vowel alternation rule is a general lowering of theme vowels for &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt; height root vowels, where the first rule does not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;servir&lt;/code&gt; whose root vowel, &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, is &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt; is lowered to &lt;code&gt;ɛ&lt;/code&gt; which is &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt; in many conjugations, especially where the thematic vowel is not changed, and retains the tonic stress. Thus - &lt;code&gt;sɛrves&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sɛrve&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sɛrvem&lt;/code&gt;. And in &lt;code&gt;muver&lt;/code&gt; the &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; theme vowel is lowered to &lt;code&gt;ɔ&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;code&gt;mɔves&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mɔve&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mɔvem&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Given that these two are the only accepted vowel alternation conventions in Portuguese, what is causing some speakers to alternate the &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;cantar&lt;/code&gt; to a fronted &lt;code&gt;æ&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;  This convention is especially prevalent in the first person form &lt;code&gt;kænto&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll put a URL to a song here if anybody is interested in hearing it - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WGTENlPlt8#t=31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WGTENlPlt8#t=31&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="740" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T18:35:56.137" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T18:35:56.137" Title="Fronting of a to æ in European Portuguese" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;&lt;vowel-height&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2014-06-12T19:56:21.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like what you are really looking for is linguistic evidence of a Semitic substrate in Old English. Not being a linguist, you chose words which sounded similar in various languages and asked about the potential relationships.  This, as you have found out by the answers you got, is not really the right way to go about establishing such a relationship.  Don't be alarmed, as your mistake is very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to continue this search on your own, you should first read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratum_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; on language strata.  You may also want to read up on historical linguistics generally, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_substrate_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; which specifically concerns itself with a Semitic influence on the Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1581" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T19:56:21.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2014-06-12T23:30:04.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know whether there is any sentence in the world that has a&#xA;unique meaning. I am not sure I can identify all the things that&#xA;contribute to the meaning of a sentence, since it depends on context,&#xA;on the way it is stated or written, on the way people interpret&#xA;various signs that go with it. Even single words seldom have a unique&#xA;meaning. Meaning may also depend on the mood of whoever produces or&#xA;receives the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding algorithms to determine grammatical structure, they are&#xA;dependent on how you define the grammatical structure of a language,&#xA;and that is very far from being standardized (or to put it differently, there are competing ones). It is that definition&#xA;that matters, not whatever algorithm you may produce to recognize the&#xA;structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually unlikely that any single description will explain all&#xA;structures of a language. It is probably as unlikely that two people&#xA;would agree on what belong or does not belong to a&#xA;language. Furthermore, any language you consider is constantly&#xA;evolving in time, and may vary geographically (and dead languages changed over time, so that remaining documents do not necessarily represent the same time or space variant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other word, it is a lot fuzzier than chemistry, and even organic&#xA;chemistry, because the human brain is a very big and complicated&#xA;machine. This fuzzyness is somewhat underscored by the fact that a&#xA;good part of the work on natural language processing is based on&#xA;statistical techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being, the best we can hope for is analyzing a variety of&#xA;linguistic phenomena, and try to condense them into theories that will&#xA;account for most, expecially the more frequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical structures may be more complex than trees, depending on&#xA;what you wish to include. But even ignoring that, I would not really&#xA;see the point of considering together sentences with the same tree&#xA;structure as a special class. What matters in the theoretical support&#xA;that assign such structure to sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that most textbooks on natural language processing will&#xA;have a chapter about describing the structure of sentences, though it&#xA;may change some, depending on the book. This does not mean in any way&#xA;that the knowledge is random, or totally disorganized. There are many&#xA;bridges between the various approaches, and various ways to preserve&#xA;coherence. As I said, the human brain is big and complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in formalization (as you seem to be), there is a&#xA;considerable amount of formal results in &lt;em&gt;computational&#xA;linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. But this does not mean it is able to accurately describe&#xA;all aspects of natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-06-12T23:30:04.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4573" CreationDate="2014-06-13T00:38:36.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a need for a comprehensive review of the origins of the features of Indian Linguistic Area.  Indian subcontinent has been a home of at least 8 different linguistic families viz., Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda, Tibeto-Burman, Daic, Iranian, Nuristani besides other Austro-Asiatic languages such as Khasi (spoken primarily in Meghalaya) and Nicobarese, and the language isolates Burushaski, Nahali, and Kusunda. There is not enough evidence to prove that retroflexion in Indo-Aryan is a result of a direct influence from Dravidian. Moreover, the early Dravidian and Indo-Aryan phonetic systems differ considerably — Sanskrit has initial retroflex consonants and Sanskrit also has a retroflex sibilant ṣ, both of which are absent in Dravidian. Furthermore, Dravidian has a triple contrast between dental, alveolar and retroflex, while the Indo-Aryan languages only has dental and retroflex contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is new evidence to hypothesize that both the Dravidian languages and the Munda languages were recent entrants to the mainland India. In the light of such evidence, there is a need for a deeper understanding of Indian pre-history involving a multidisciplinary perspective to reconcile seemingly contrary positions for a greater clarity on the linguistic prehistory of South Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4728" LastActivityDate="2014-06-13T00:38:36.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-13T00:53:44.620" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did it come different languages share idiomatic expressions, or name something in same words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like, take word &quot;inflammation&quot; for example. In English, it's &quot;in(ner)&quot; and &quot;flame&quot;. In Ukrainian, it's запалення, with за- prefix meaning &quot;action that had started&quot;, and палення means &quot;burning&quot;. In Japanese, 炎症 consists of 炎 — flame, and 症 — disease. In Russian, it's воспаление, with вос- being prefix meaning &quot;inside out, from bottom to top&quot;, &quot;паление&quot; meaning &quot;burning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these languages roughly refer to this medical condition as &quot;inner flame&quot;. Why? Inflammation does not even resemble flame, it may be painless, and it does not necessarily give burning feeling, it may itch, prick or just be dull ache — definitely not what flame feels like. And I strongly doubt there was some English, Ukrainian, Japanese or Russian, who first said &quot;Hmmm, guys, let's call this inner flame! Why not?&quot;, and everybody &quot;yeah, that's so cool, we're going just to calque this into our languages&quot;. So why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It's not the only example, I've had already stumbled across such words in the past, but unfortunately can't recall just now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4729" LastEditorUserId="4729" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T01:59:40.553" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T23:08:29.160" Title="Reasons for things named same way in seemingly unrelated languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-13T02:53:50.200" Score="1" ViewCount="1151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a text classification task. My text is questions and answers in a community question answering website.  I want to extract tags from the title , existing tags, and BODY of the questions and then use supervised learning to learn the tags for each class/category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is lot of noise in the BODY (punctuation marks, fully qualified names of Java exceptions, logs etc). How can I deal with such noise to extract good tags from them. Will some thing like Lucene or OpenNLP or any other library serve my purpose. And what techniques should I use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to capture intention of the user typing the question in NLP. Like for example, Robert understood my question and decided that its programming one and not linguistics. That is the problem I am trying to solve. How to automate that natural language understanding of text in community question answering sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4730" LastEditorUserId="4730" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T15:20:36.753" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T13:05:04.307" Title="Noise Removal -Text classification" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-13T15:18:58.990" Score="5" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Real Academia Española dictionary&lt;/a&gt; and I can't find any information regarding why Spanish uses the preposition &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; for cooking styles, and I've noticed French and Italian do it too. I know that the languages use the word, but I don't understand how in a broad sense outside of cuisine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;fajitas a la parilla&lt;/code&gt; (Spanish) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;mojo al ajo&lt;/code&gt; (Spanish)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;escargots à la bourguignonne&lt;/code&gt; (French)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;spaghetti alla carbonara&lt;/code&gt; (Italian)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense is the &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; being used here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T07:02:34.407" Title="Why do Spanish and other Romance Languages use the preposition &quot;a&quot; for culinary styles?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26769" CreationDate="2014-06-14T10:13:08.957" Score="8" ViewCount="1003" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any living speech varieties of Spanish (geographic, socio-economic) that pronounce the phoneme associated with the letter 'f' as [ϕ], as bilabial rather than labiodental?  Just wondering since when I look at the Spanish consonants, /f/ looks like pretty much the only labiodental as opposed to bilabial /p/, while /θ/ and /t/ are both dental and /x/ and /k/ are both velar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.au/books?id=oSzzpvHCLT0C&amp;amp;pg=PA80#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;From Latin to Spanish: Historical phonology and morphology of the Spanish Language&lt;/em&gt; by Paul M. Lloyd&lt;/a&gt; speculated about Early Latin 'f' being pronounced as [ϕ] in free variation or geographic variation with [f] in the Iberian peninsula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; as well, it says &quot;A common pronunciation of /f/ in nonstandard speech is the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ], so that fuera is pronounced [ˈɸweɾa] rather than [ˈfweɾa].&quot;, but didn't specified which nonstandard speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="1601" LastEditDate="2014-06-16T01:50:41.877" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T12:58:17.183" Title="Any Spanish speech variety where F is pronounced as ϕ?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;&lt;bilabial&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8371" CreationDate="2014-06-14T10:17:08.037" Score="0" ViewCount="11295" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example 'Kick the bucket.&quot; Is it an idiom or proverb? How can I recognize them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4737" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-15T01:19:29.377" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T01:19:29.377" Title="What is the difference between &quot;idiom and proverb&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-06-15T09:18:11.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8370" CreationDate="2014-06-14T11:06:56.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;kick the bucket&quot; is an idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Idiom&quot;=It is a phrase that the meaning of separate words is different from whole phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proverb&quot;=It is a fix sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the differences between proverbs and idioms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&quot;Idioms&quot; are phrases/part of a sentence but &quot;proverbs&quot; are full/fixed sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; sometimes have variants      &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt;have no variants &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; are not intended to have moral lesson       &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt; have a moral lesson( advice, warn,..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; every type of text           &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt; literally or sociocultural texts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; frequently used        &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt; are less frequently used &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; sometimes used literally        &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt;rarely used literally &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7.&quot;Idioms&quot;--&gt; figurative extension of the words meanings        &quot;Proverbs&quot;--&gt; based on folklore, an event/a famous poet, a legends&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4737" LastEditorDisplayName="user4737" LastEditDate="2014-06-14T11:13:05.283" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T11:13:05.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-14T16:14:27.797" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the website, &quot;Edenics- Where Language Began&quot; it is mentioned that the Hebrew word 'zinoot'(fornication) a Zayin-mem word have influenced the English sin&quot;. Since the z and the s are closely associated with each other phonetically can we assume that this is a small linguistical connection forming a plausible route to explore further or is this just speculation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4732" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-15T01:12:12.133" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T01:12:12.133" Title="Hebrew to English connection through linguistics?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8373" CreationDate="2014-06-14T18:03:08.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In contemporary Hebrew, &lt;em&gt;znut&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;prostitution&quot;. It's related to &lt;em&gt;zayin&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cock, dick&quot;. Concerning pronunciation, it is unlikely that Hebrew &lt;em&gt;znut&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;sin&lt;/em&gt; are related. The first Hebrew sound is /z/, the first English sound is /s/. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sin#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;'s the etymology of English &lt;em&gt;sin&lt;/em&gt;. One can see there and &lt;a href=&quot;https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%97%D7%98%D7%90&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that the Hebrew word for &quot;sin&quot; is חטא &lt;em&gt;khe'&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T18:03:08.993" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8373" CreationDate="2014-06-14T20:47:43.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not how etymology works. You need to explain the whole word, not pick out a couple of letters that you think sound similar. The idea that Hebrew is the source of all languages is a theological dogma, not a linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T20:47:43.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8364" CreationDate="2014-06-14T22:15:30.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without seeing your corpus, it is difficult for me to recommend a method you could use. The issue you brought up is not NLP, per se, because it involves preparing a corpus for NLP. However the same set of tools can be used for filtering out &quot;noise&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Normally, source code and console output are formatted differently, with a &quot;&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;&quot; or with custom CSS. You could write regular expressions or use HTML parsers in your favourite language to filter them out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this task is going to be part of a larger tool-chain, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GATE&lt;/a&gt; is a decent way to do things. Its &lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/splitch8.html#chap%3ajape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jape&lt;/a&gt; plugin is what you're likely to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-06-14T22:15:30.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-14T23:26:34.237" Score="4" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a corpus for English (American, GB, Australian) idioms. Preferably created manually, because I already have two, but they are rather small and were built semi-automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4741" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-15T00:59:39.473" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T00:59:39.473" Title="Is there any corpus for idioms?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-15T04:53:50.107" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew triliteral roots whose final consonant is &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; have an anomalous conjugation in most templates. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is only in the passive participle template CaCuC, as far as I can see, that the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; actually appears as predicted: e.g. from the root &lt;em&gt;t-l-y&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hang&quot;, &lt;em&gt;taluy&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hung&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some templates the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; disappears completely: e.g. past 3sg. m. CaCaC, &lt;em&gt;tala&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he hung&quot;; past 3pl. m. CaCCu, &lt;em&gt;talu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;they hung&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other templates an expected &lt;em&gt;ay&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;oy&lt;/em&gt; turns into &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;: e.g. fut. 3sg. m. yiCCaC/yiCCoC, &lt;em&gt;yitle&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he will hang&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strangest of all, in some templates a &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; appears instead of the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;: e.g. inf. liCCoC, &lt;em&gt;litlot&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to hang&quot;; past 3sg. f. CaCCa, &lt;em&gt;talta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;she hung&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two changes (loss of &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; and change to &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;) seem phonetically understandable, though still apparently irregular. But the appearance of &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; has no plausible phonetic basis that I can see. What are the reasons for these anomalies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-16T00:40:21.627" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T10:21:33.623" Title="Anomalous forms of Hebrew roots with final y" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;irregularity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-15T15:44:18.927" Score="1" ViewCount="8069" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;accommodation&quot; in English?  What types of accommodation are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to search in the Internet, but I could not find proper information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4746" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-16T00:36:58.973" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T02:56:58.920" Title="What is &quot;accommodation&quot; in phonetics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6634" CreationDate="2014-06-15T20:20:19.240" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been attempts to connect Uralic languages with the Dravidian languages* (one of the main linguistic families of India), but I am not aware of any attempts to relate Uralic to Indo-Aryan.  In any event, the general consensus is that such deep connections cannot be determined by a few word similarities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*For e.g., you can read: Tyler, Stephen (1968), &quot;Dravidian and Uralian: the lexical evidence&quot;. Language 44:4. 798–812.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4728" LastActivityDate="2014-06-15T20:20:19.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7326" CreationDate="2014-06-16T09:24:19.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least for the Standard Croatian, possessive adjectives &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; the default way of expressing possession. There's even a &quot;language advice&quot; given by the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A genitive construct used to express possession should be replaced by a possessive adjective.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://savjetnik.ihjj.hr/savjet.php?id=90&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://savjetnik.ihjj.hr/savjet.php?id=90&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Croatian — a South Slavic language — I think possessives are quite productive, but there are other strategies too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;genitive case: &lt;em&gt;kuća moje bake&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my granny's house&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;genitive case with prep. &lt;em&gt;od&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;kuća od bake&lt;/em&gt; &quot;granny's house&quot; (not Standard)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with possessive adjectives is that you cannot make them out of nouns with adjectives in Croatian, e.g. &lt;em&gt;moja baka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my granny&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some nouns have two adjectives, one for real possession, other for broad relation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dječak&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boy&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dječakov&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boy's&quot; (possession)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dječački&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boyish&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think having two adjectives for a single noun is really productive, since colloquial words often lack it, e.g. &lt;em&gt;cura&lt;/em&gt; &quot;girl&quot; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;curin&lt;/em&gt; &quot;girl's&quot; (possession) only... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4747" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T09:24:19.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8388" CreationDate="2014-06-16T15:00:40.117" Score="6" ViewCount="1795" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just looking at the words for &quot;ball&quot; in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that Armenian has a word &lt;code&gt;գունդ&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;gund&lt;/em&gt; and Hindustani has a word &lt;code&gt;गेंद&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;گیند&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;gẽnd&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't spot any other language with a similar word, including Greek and Persian. The etymology of the latter word is given as Sanskrit &lt;code&gt;गिन्दुक&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;ginduka&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize the rate of coincidence is high in such short words and that the languages have other words in the semantic area of &quot;orb&quot;, &quot;sphere&quot;, etc. But the fact that they're both Indo-European and the lack of other languages with similar words made me wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T19:43:04.207" Title="Are Armenian գունդ (gund) and Sanskrit गिन्दुक (ginduka) related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8385" CreationDate="2014-06-16T18:20:53.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Highly unlikely. Where PIE /*g *gw/ had shifted to /g/ in Sanskrit, they had shifted to /k/ in Armenian. Also, Armenian /u/ comes from PIE /*ō *u *uH/, so the vowels don't line up. It might, on the other hand, be a borrowing from an Iranian language into Armenian, but they are not native cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T18:20:53.427" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8369" CreationDate="2014-06-16T18:35:24.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is at least one to my knowledge. I have read (and heard) about this realisation of the phoneme. The variety that is commonly mentioned is Andean Spanish, and for this allophone, the main locations where it has been registered are some regions of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1754" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T18:35:24.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8385" CreationDate="2014-06-16T19:11:36.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi gẽd does indeed descend from Skt. genduka-. The latter is considered to be a loan from Dravidian (see Turner 4248). Armenian gund is a borrowing from Parthian or Persian gund &amp;lt; Iranian *gṛnda-. In Middle and New Persian gund is attested only in the meaning ‘testicle’. So the answer to your question is that they are probably not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-06-16T19:11:36.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8380" CreationDate="2014-06-17T10:21:33.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Van de Merwe, Naudé and Kroeze, &lt;em&gt;A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, says (S 18.5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term III he refers specifically to verbs in the Qal perfect 3 masculine singular that end in a ה vowel indicator, for example שָתָה 'to drink', etc. At an early stage of the language these verbs ended in a yod or waw. In other words they were originally III yod and III waw verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb they tabulate to illustrate is גלה 'reveal', which displays exactly the same patterns as you mention with תלה.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They go on to say that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[forms in which &lt;em&gt;a suffix beginning with a vowel&lt;/em&gt; is added:] ... the 3 feminine singular form of the perfect is formed by replacing the final ה with an older feminine ת ending and then adding the suffix ה-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not specifically discuss the &lt;em&gt;pa'ul&lt;/em&gt; (passive participle), but the form גֶלוּי (galuy) appears in the table, and they do mention that the &quot;original י replaces the ה&quot; in other contexts (specifically, before a suffix beginning with a consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T10:21:33.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8393" CreationDate="2014-06-17T18:04:33.060" Score="2" ViewCount="3440" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard claims of English being both very easy and very difficult to learn for L2 learners (in adulthood). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it that the English writing system is difficult to learn while the language itself is relatively simple? How does it compare to other European languages for non-European L1 speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3448" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T12:22:15.197" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T06:56:40.707" Title="Why might English be considered easy to learn and why might it be considered difficult?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2014-06-17T18:53:19.590" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most difficult thing in English is phonetics. While I can read and write in English well, I still cannot understand anything the news outlets say on the TV, not to say to understand any song. It is also a heavy effort for me to speak English, especially the vowels, actually I never know how each vowel should be pronounced so often people do not understand me. I totally do not recognize, and even understand any difference between &quot;a&quot; as in &quot;pay&quot; and &quot;e&quot; and between &quot;ee&quot; as in &quot;sheep&quot; and &quot;ship&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I have difficulty in pronouncing the &quot;th&quot; sound, both voiceless and voiced variety, but this is not difficult to learn, it is difficult to produce, even if I do know the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntax and morphology of English are quite easy, but some difficulty is in learning idiomatic sequences of verbs and prepositions, such as &quot;put up&quot;, &quot;give off&quot;, &quot;put out&quot;, &quot;turn down&quot;, &quot;set in&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writing system is totally irregular so one cannot guess the pronounciation from spelling and vice versa, but this is while annoying, is not the most difficult thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is also annoying with its difficult to pronounce numerals, especially when need to speak quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T22:44:58.343" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T22:44:58.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2014-06-17T20:10:22.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, I have Spanish and English as mother tongues. Both of them seem natural to me, and can switch from one another without much trouble. Thanks to that, I get to see English from in- and outside. Here's what I've noticed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is simple because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everything has a neutral gender, except for people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vocabulary itself isn't too complex. Words are simple and are &quot;multipurpose&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English has you as both formal and informal forms of second person singular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language, in theory, is meant to be concise. (The story as I know it is at the end.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you speak with someone who at least reads a couple of books a month, then you'll notice that the ideas are much more understandable. Therefore, most of the times, it isn't the fault of the listener, but of the speaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is difficult because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vocabulary needed to go the extra mile does get complex. But it is like that in every language, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English has tons of implicit rules that one learns by use. I can't really identify them, but I can notice when someone is not a native speaker just by the way he speaks or writes. There seems to be a hidden code on how to english.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In theory it is a concise language. In practice people use run-on sentences, skip commas, don't use complete sentences, and so on. This just turns a two-sentence idea into ten-line paragraph because the text is structurally incorrect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And of course: the most important rule of English is that every rule is broken. I can't think of an example where the rule stands true &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; time. It is a language of exceptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what I know from my own experience. English is a language that you learn by use. I am learning German and took some French, but the demand for practical use might not be as necessary. I believe that may be due to the &quot;rulelessnes&quot; of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the short story behind the alleged conciseness of English goes as follow: French come. French conquer. French becomes the official language. People don't like French. People speak as fast and concretely as possible in &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;. English gets shorter and shorter, considering it is illegal. Finally no more French. English remains short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4749" LastActivityDate="2014-06-17T20:10:22.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T03:42:58.973" Score="6" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, so-called &quot;future more vivid&quot; conditionals can take one of two tenses in the protasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future: &lt;em&gt;Si aedificabis, venient&lt;/em&gt; &quot;If you build it, they will come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future perfect: &lt;em&gt;Si aedificaveris, venient&lt;/em&gt; &quot;If you will have built it, they will come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference in meaning, if any, between these two constructions? What determines the choice of one rather than the other? Is one or the other more marked in some way? Are there contexts in which only one but not the other can be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T03:58:08.350" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T15:48:24.080" Title="In Latin protases, what's the different between the future and future perfect tenses?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T07:34:13.880" Score="4" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an armchair linguist. By this I mean it's been an absorbing hobby for decades by reading books and online and playing with many languages. But I've never taken any course or other kind of formal training. So I'm lacking knowledge of things which are best learned in a formal setting or which require special equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now interested in knowing exactly where on the cartesian vowel chart each of the vowel phones of my personal idiolect occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have learned that they don't always seem to be the same as those conventionally indicated by IPA symbols in broad transcriptions. I'm a speaker of Australian English but I'm not even sure my vowels match General Australian. We don't really have dialects here but there are some regional differences, sociolects, generational differences, and a couple of mergers and splits that some have and some do not. On top of that I've spent much of the past 25 years travelling or surrounded by foreigners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since vowels are more or less relative rather than having a set of features as with consonants, there seems to be more room for making incorrect assumptions about where one's own phones are located in regards to height and backness. (Obviously rounding is a bit easier.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What methods are used to self-analyse vowels? I'm interested both in traditional methods and technological ones, especially if I only need a PC and free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T01:33:52.500" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T17:24:24.760" Title="How to determine one's own native vowel phone repertoire?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;frontness-backness&gt;&lt;vowel-height&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8396" CreationDate="2014-06-18T09:36:09.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it would be exactly possible to pin down a certain inventory of vowels in your own idiolect because even then they can vary so much depending on the environment that they appear in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, the vowel contrast of /u/ and /ʊ/. I can pronounce those just fine, and I can easily note the difference in the vowel between &quot;book&quot; /bʊk/ and &quot;nude&quot; /nud/. However, if you asked me to contrast between &quot;pool&quot; and &quot;pull,&quot; which in Standard American English are /puːl/ and /pʊl/, respectively, I am physically incapable of pronouncing /puːl/. I pronounce both words as /pʊl/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are all the influences on any given vowel, like nasalization before a nasal consonant, rounding because of the environment in which the vowel appears, etc. Saying three words that have the same vowel are still probably going to all be slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This little gem from &quot;lol, my thesis&quot; basically sums it up: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lolmythesis.com/post/71394267467/it-appears-based-on-experimental-evidence-that-vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;It appears, based on experimental evidence, that vowel perception is pretty much magic.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to somehow try and compare your vowels relative to one another, the best way to do that is to download &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;, fire it up, and start recording. I have no resources on how to properly analyze frontness-backness or vowel height (sorry, I mostly use it for suprasegmental stuff), but it's a place to start. With that you could start comparing all the different vowels you can produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T09:36:09.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8405" CreationDate="2014-06-18T09:57:24.007" Score="1" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, &quot;h&quot; in suffix &quot;-ham&quot; (originated from Old English &quot;home&quot;) are skipped when pronouncing so &quot;-ham&quot; sound like &quot;-am&quot;. Examples are &quot;Fulham&quot;, &quot;Tottenham&quot; etc etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what causes such phenomenon? Are there other consonants behave similarly? And finally when did this happen? On one hand it seems that this happened only recently as American English still read out the &quot;h&quot;, while on the other hand &quot;Tottenham&quot; was spelled as &quot;Totnam&quot; as early as 16th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4753" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T12:25:23.660" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T15:06:52.653" Title="Why is &quot;h&quot; of &quot;-ham&quot; dropped in English place names?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;&lt;toponomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2014-06-18T09:58:04.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really, it depends on what language you're coming from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a lot of people struggle with the phonology of the language because there is a lot more to it than their native language. If you're coming from a language like Spanish with a whopping five vowels, it can be difficult to get a hang of the 21 vowels, give or take, that we have in English. I know speakers of Romance languages that have been in the US for decades and still struggle to contrast certain vowels. The same can be said for /θ/ and /ð/ (the &quot;th&quot; sounds), which aren't super common across languages and can be hard to pronounce if you aren't used to it. However, this doesn't make English &quot;easy&quot; or &quot;hard&quot; to learn, because any language you learn is going to have new sounds that you struggle with. The vowels and some consonants are a struggle for some Spanish speakers, but Arabic speakers won't have much trouble learning the consonants of English, because most of the &quot;hard&quot; English consonants are in Modern Standard Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some learners, the biggest struggle is grammar. Many Europeans learn English and think that the grammar tends to be simpler because there is no gender, verb conjugation is a lot simpler, etc. However, if your native language is Mandarin Chinese, a language with extremely simple morphology compared to English, then learning to put &quot;-ed&quot; or &quot;-ing&quot; at the end of verbs and to put determiners in front of words (like &quot;a&quot; and &quot;the&quot;), is going to be a struggle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, &lt;strong&gt;it's impossible to speak in general terms about why English might be considered &quot;easy&quot; or &quot;hard.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; It depends &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; on your native language. What's easy for one group of learners (Romance language speakers learning the grammar rules) could be a struggle for another (Chinese speakers learning grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T09:58:04.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8401" CreationDate="2014-06-18T10:08:42.967" Score="3" ViewCount="1495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am slightly confused bu the notion of upward-monotonicity and downward-monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand what exactly can be defined as upward-monoty and down-ward-monotony, is this definition of relation between two phrases, or definition of some keywords that change monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &#xA;&quot;I eat banana&quot;-&gt;&quot;I eat fruit&quot;&#xA;this is example of upward-monotonicity (more specific phrase entail more common phrase), so the whole sentence is called upward-monotony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then apply negation,&#xA;&quot;I don't eat banana&quot;&amp;lt;-&quot;I  don't eat fruit&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens, can I call this relation downward-monotony, or applying negation is downward-monotonicity? or &quot;don't&quot; itself is downward-monotony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negation is known for it's property to reverse the monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Driving is dangerous&quot; -&gt; &quot;Fast driving is dangerous&quot;.&#xA;Here, no negation, and still is downward-monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apply negation,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Driving is not dangerous&quot; -&gt; &quot;Fast driving is not dangeroius&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here, negation didn't reverse the monotonicity, so not always negation reverse monotonicity, maybe negation can only change from upward to downward, here what can be called downward-monotonicity, it looks the relation itself is whether [downward-monoty|upward-monotony|no monotony], and some &quot;keyword&quot; could change monotonicity only in one direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, help me to understand the notion of monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: I am competely confused, I found the following examples in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stanford.edu/~azaenen/LING-7800-019/LSABoulder1b.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Monotonicity. page 7&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's dangerous to drive in Rome ➝ It's dangerous to drive fast in&#xA;  Rome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to inference relation, reading the first part must imply the truth of the second part. If my understanding is wrong, please write a correct definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's check the following example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's safe to drive fast in Des Moines ➝ It's safe to drive in Des Moines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that it's a correct instance of inference relation, however it's in the manual, as a counterexample I might assume highway in Des Moines, where driving slow is not safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where my understanding is wrong  or example is not successful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3123" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T19:12:38.283" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T19:12:38.283" Title="The notion of monotonicity" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8400" CreationDate="2014-06-18T13:48:47.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are addressing two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;why is there, apparently, a monotonicity reversal when negating your&#xA;first example (&quot;banana&quot;), but not the second (&quot;driving&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;why is your first example upward-monotonic, while the second is&#xA;downward monotonic?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem has to do with understanding that general terms like&#xA;&quot;fruit&quot; or &quot;driving&quot; may refer to elements of sets that are quantified&#xA;existentially or universally, while specific elements, like &quot;banana&quot;&#xA;or &quot;fast driving&quot; refer to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not address the examples in your addendum. This answer should tell you how to deal with them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is quantification ?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Please skip this part if you already know &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only a sketch. You may find more details on the web or in&#xA;textbook. Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The study of quantification in natural languages is much more&#xA;    difficult than the corresponding problem for formal languages. This&#xA;    comes in part from the fact that the grammatical structure of&#xA;    natural language sentences may conceal the logical structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the problem you encounter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many natural language statements are actually predicate over some&#xA;entities that may be element of sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you may use the predicate &lt;em&gt;Eat&lt;/em&gt; which takes two arguments,&#xA;the subject who eats and the object that is eaten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the sentence &quot;I eat banana&quot; can be interpreted semantically as&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Eat (I,banana)&lt;/em&gt;, which establishes a relation between &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you say &quot;I eat fruit&quot;, &quot;fruit&quot; stand for &lt;em&gt;Fruit&lt;/em&gt; which is the&#xA;set of all fruits, that include banana and many others.  But, how do&#xA;you interpret this sentence: does it mean that you eat all fruits or&#xA;that you eat some fruits. This is not obvious though it seems that&#xA;most people interpret that as meaning that you eat some&#xA;fruits? Furthermore this has to be your interpretation since you&#xA;deduce it from the fact that you are eating banana, which cannot imply&#xA;that you eat any other fruit. All you know is that you eat one fruit:&#xA;banana. So for you, &quot;I eat fruit&quot; must mean that there is a fruit that&#xA;you eat, which can be formally written as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;∃ f ∈Fruit, Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or less formally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is a Fruit f such that Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this interpretation, the predicate &lt;em&gt;Eat&lt;/em&gt; is exitentially quantified&#xA;on its second variable. This mean that we state the existence of at&#xA;least one fruit such that the predicate holds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The predicate could also be universally quantified on its second&#xA;variable which one writes logically as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;∀ f ∈Fruit, Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or less formally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For any f that is Fruit, Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would probably be stated in English as &quot;I eat all fruits&quot; or &quot;I&#xA;eat any fruit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when you state &quot;I don't eat fruit&quot;, it does not mean that ther is&#xA;a fruit you do not eat, but rather that you do not eat any fruit,&#xA;which one can write formally as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;∀ f ∈Fruit, ¬ Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or less formally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For any f that is Fruit, not Eat (I,f)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see that this is a universally quantified statement, using the&#xA;negation of the previous predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a general rule: if you want to negate a quantified statement,&#xA;you change the quantification (from universal to existential, or the&#xA;converse) and you use the negation of the predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule is simple to use in logic. It is a bit more complex in&#xA;natural language in general, and English in particular.  What may seem&#xA;to be a negation in English is not necessarily a negation of the&#xA;logical semantics of the sentence. This can be illustrated by your&#xA;second example analyzed in the next section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Things can be even more complex when there is multiple quantification&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About non-reversal of monotonicity in the second example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your inference &quot;Driving is dangerous&quot; -&gt; &quot;Fast driving is dangerous&quot;&#xA;shows that you understand &quot;Driving is dangerous&quot; as &quot;All driving is dangerous&quot;.&#xA;Here, &quot;Driving&quot; stands for the set of all forms of driving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, logically, the negation of &quot;Driving is dangerous&quot; is not &quot;Driving is not&#xA;dangerous&quot; but &quot;Some driving is not dangerous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then this would not imply that  &quot;Fast driving is not dangerous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if it were true that &quot;Fast driving is not dangerous&quot;, that would&#xA;imply that &quot;some driving is not dangerous¨.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. you have the same reversal of monotonicity:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Some driving is not dangerous&quot; &amp;lt;- &quot;Fast driving is not dangerous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your problem is with incorrect negation of quantifiers, not with monotonicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Driving is dangerous&quot; means &quot;all forme of driving are&#xA;dangerous&quot;, which is a universally quantified assertion. When you negate universal quantification, you have to use&#xA;existential quantification on the negation of the predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The negation of &quot;for any x, P(x)&quot; is &quot;there is x, not P(x)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About the fact that the two examples have opposite monotonicity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue still has two do with quantification, and the&#xA;respective properties of existential and universal quantification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it more visible I will use two other examples, where I make&#xA;quantification explicit. Your examples are harder because they both&#xA;have implicit quantification (which I already explicited above for the&#xA;&quot;driving&quot;example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two examples are chosen to be very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A banana is good&quot; -&gt; &quot;There is a good fruit&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All fruits are good¨ -&gt; &quot;A banana is good&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see that you have upward monotony in the first case because the&#xA;more general phrase is existentially quantified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have downward monotony in the second case because the more general&#xA;phrase is universally quantified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first example is upward monotonic for that reason. If you expland&#xA;the semantics of &quot;I eat fruit&quot;, it is really &quot;There is a fruit I eat&quot;.&#xA;And we have seen your second example is universally quantified, hence&#xA;downward monotonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negation does reverse the monotonicity, as it exchanges universal and&#xA;existential quantification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do not think negation has itself an intrinsic role, at least in&#xA;your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Driving is not dangerous&quot; is negative, but has exactly the same&#xA;meanind as &quot;Driving is safe&quot; which is not negative. Recall that the&#xA;general/specific opposition here is on &quot;driving&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-06-18T23:16:28.667" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T23:16:28.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2014-06-18T15:06:52.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is simply a reduction of the common, unstressed element: the vowel is centralised, and the initial /h/ is lost. (Note that there are few English words with /h/ after a consonant, and apart from names they are virtually all compounds like &lt;em&gt;offhand&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uphill&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar case is the /w/ in &lt;em&gt;-wich&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-wick&lt;/em&gt;, which in many place-names (but not all) has disappeared: &lt;em&gt;Greenwich&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Harwich&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hawick&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Alnwick&lt;/em&gt;. Also compare the usual pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;-cester&lt;/em&gt; as /stə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the 'h' of &lt;em&gt;-ham&lt;/em&gt; follows 's' or 't', many places have a spelling pronunciation: &lt;em&gt;Chesham&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Lewisham&lt;/em&gt;, with /ʃ/; &lt;em&gt;Grantham&lt;/em&gt;, with /θ/. I believe that these pronunciations are quite recent: I remember somebody from Chesham telling me forty years ago that locals said /'tʃɛzəm/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T15:06:52.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T21:10:56.707" Score="0" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finnish is one of the most difficult language in the world. Swedish is one of the most easiest language in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finland and Sweden are geographically located next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason that one of these languages have developed so much more difficult than the other? Though these languages are totally different with each others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;It is partly true that it is subjective what is difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take eg. word &quot;dog&quot; as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English: &quot;a dog, the dog, two dogs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swedish: &quot;en hund, hunden, två hundar, hundarna&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And In Finnish: &quot;Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran, koirassa, koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana, koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin, koirasi, koirani, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme, koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme, koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme, koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme, koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme, koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme, koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme, koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme, koirinenne, koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan, koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan, koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan, koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako, koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko, koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko, koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan, koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan, koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan, koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan, koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan, koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan, koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan, koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan, koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan, koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan, koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan, koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan, koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko, koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko, koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko, koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko, koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako, koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko, koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko, koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko, koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko, koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako, koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko, koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko, koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko, koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko, koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko, koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko, koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko, koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko, koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko, koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko, koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko, koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko, koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko, koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko, koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko, koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko, koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan, koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan, koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan, koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan, koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan, koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan, koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan, koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan, koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan, koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan, koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan, koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan, koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan, koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan, koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And those doesn't even consist of plural forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4757" LastEditorUserId="4757" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T05:07:54.763" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T05:07:54.763" Title="Why some languages have developed so difficult compared to others?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2014-06-18T21:43:54.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my experience teaching English as a second language, many students feel overwhelmed by the flexibility of English. There are many ways to say similar things, and the students often long for 'right' or 'correct' ways to say something. The flexibility of English makes for less rules (easy) but maybe also less structure (difficult), compared to many first languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T21:43:54.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-18T22:30:06.697" Score="4" ViewCount="4079" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people i see over online auction sites and such use software translators for their benefit, but sometimes the outcome can be somewhat curious. Are these inaccuracies caused by the use of informal input language or a lacking algorithmic structure? In case of the latter: which languages are most far apart and arduous to translate directly from one to another for the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3209" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T14:06:01.277" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T01:25:11.787" Title="Which is the hardest language for a software translator to translate into English?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-09-15T08:42:01.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8406" CreationDate="2014-06-18T22:32:04.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as a &quot;difficult&quot; language. Language &quot;difficulty&quot; is some scale or category that is inherently biased. When comparing two languages where one is closer to your native language than the other, the one closer shall be subjectively easier for you than the one less so close. Following your example of Swedish and Finnish, Swedish has hundreds of irregular verbs while Finnish has a one-digit number (most common being &quot;täytyä&quot;, &quot;olla&quot;, &quot;ei&quot;, &quot;erkanee&quot;, &quot;korkenee&quot;); Swedish, as a Germanic language, also has definiteness, a concept really difficult to follow for speakers of languages without definiteness. Additionally, for a Finn Estonian would be easier to learn than Swedish. I could go on, but that would be too specific and off-topic, so I'll just sum this up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language difficulty is &lt;strong&gt;subjective&lt;/strong&gt;. What is difficult for you is very easy for someone else. The reverse also applies. As to why languages develop how they develop and change complexity, that's a diachronics question that can't really be answered as it is far too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-06-18T22:32:04.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-06-19T05:24:45.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on generally syntactic structure of two languages and -yes- some pragmatic issues. To answer your question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the easiest languages to be translated into English by any automatic translation software are the ones which are nearly close to syntactic structures of English such as German, Chinese blah blah.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the hardest ones are the ones which are far away from the target language's (which means English) syntactic structures such as Turkish, Japanese, etc. (because they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;agglutinative languages&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on some pragmatic issues, though. For instance, if you use a informal text in German and translate it into English, the output will seem to be odd. So there is a possibility of translating by a software. Sometimes you even get strange outputs even though two languages have the same typology, so there is no hundred per cent translation on these softwares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="201" LastEditDate="2014-07-01T15:28:40.167" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T15:28:40.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6178" CreationDate="2014-06-19T05:58:15.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yourpronunciationlab.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;yourpronunciationlab&lt;/a&gt; can do that. This app automatically replays the sample, records your repetition, replays the sample and the repetition together then the process starts from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4760" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T05:58:15.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-06-19T07:53:16.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The hardest&quot; is difficult to say. I will say that online translators often seem to have especial trouble with Japanese, as its often implicit anaphors (subjectless sentences and so forth) are extremely difficult for a machine algorithm to infer, so you often get lots of confused pronouns, mixed up genders, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4761" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T07:53:16.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8396" CreationDate="2014-06-19T17:17:52.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of what makes your question a bit tricky to answer is that hidden beneath it is a much more general question--&quot;How do I do phonetics?&quot;--which is obviously an absurdly broad question. The issue is narrowed by the fact that you are focusing on a concrete problem, but addressing it still entails a lot of knowledge about how speech and language work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, several valid points have been brought up in comments and in @Nick Anderegg's answer, and I thought I'd take a crack at formulating a cohesive answer that incorporates the various points and hopefully clarifies some issues for you. But after reading my answer you might find that you have a bunch of follow-up questions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the phonemes /e/ and /ɛ/ are phonological constructs. As @TKR notes, they are only meaningful inasmuch as they contrast in a particular phonemic inventory. The symbols a phonologist chooses to use for the phonemes are really just mnemonic labels--the symbol &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the vowel in question tends to be realized as higher (and maybe fronter) than the one labeled as &lt;em&gt;ɛ&lt;/em&gt; given the same environment. Just to be clear: in a given language, &lt;strong&gt;/ɛ/ may have an allophone that is just as high/front as or higher/fronter than one of the allophones of /e/.&lt;/strong&gt; In such a case, the phonologist might characterize the allophone as [e], i.e., she might say that /ɛ/ is realized as [e] in certain environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So hopefully at this point you understand how the names of phonemes are purely mnemonic. &lt;strong&gt;But even the labels assigned to phones, such as [e] and [ɛ], do not have an absolute meaning in a vacuum. They are still labels of relativity imposed on the realizations of vowels by the phonetician, and they are language-specific.&lt;/strong&gt; The phonetician measures the formants (and other parameters, such as duration) of many instances of the vowels in question, and she sees that they appear to cluster into two groups when everything else about the environment is the same (including, for example, the surrounding phones). &lt;strong&gt;The ones in the higher/fronter group get labeled as [e], while those in the not-as-high/not-as-front group (that are still higher and fronter than &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; vowels she's measured) get labeled as [ɛ].&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that IPA is language-dependent, a point I harped on in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2269/how-can-i-differentiate-between-syllable-initial-%C9%A3-and-%C9%99-using-praat-or-othe/2274#2274&quot;&gt;my answer to 'How can I differentiate between syllable-initial ɣ and ə using Praat or other software?'&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Even if Language A has vowels that are conventionally labeled as [e] and [ɛ], respectively, and Language B also has vowels labeled as such, it doesn't mean that [e] in Language A will be the same as [e] in Language B, even in the analogous environment.&lt;/strong&gt; Icelandic is usually described as having [e] and [ɛ], as is my dialect of English. But when my Icelandic friends produce their version of the English word &lt;em&gt;bed&lt;/em&gt;, I hear it as &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, because the formant values and relative durations of their version of [e] in that word are more appropriate for the [æ] (the allphone I have for /æ/ between /b/ and /d/) in my dialect. Note that Icelandic doesn't have a phoneme that corresponds to my /æ/, i.e. they have more height leeway when it comes to their front-ish vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you starting to see why it doesn't make so much sense to talk in absolute terms of whether you &quot;have [e] or [ɛ]&quot; in your dialect? There aren't &quot;cardinal&quot; measures of height/backness/duration for [e] and [ɛ]--only language-specific relative tendencies. &lt;strong&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is try to see how your pronunciations of certain vowels differ from those of native speakers in the target language.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the perceptual front, you could do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find a bunch of minimal pairs that alternate [e] and [ɛ] in the target language. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronounce them with your one front mid vowel and ask native speakers which word of the relevant minimal pair they perceive you as saying. You'll want to ask a number of native speakers, as their intuitions might vary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analyze their responses. If most of the responses tend in one direction over the other, it will be a hint that your one mid front vowel tends to map to that vowel in the target language. If the responses are more or less 50-50, it indicates that your vowel tends to hover somewhere in the middle of where they would expect their native [e] and [ɛ] to fall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not as straightforward to try to approach the issue from an acoustical perspective; @jlawler is right when he points out that there are a vast number of factors that influence phonetic measurements like formant values and relative duration. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can measure a bunch of native speakers' formant values and compare theirs to yours! &lt;strong&gt;If Speaker A and Speaker B are native speakers of the same dialect of the same language, but they have different head and throat shapes, the formant values for [e] produced by Speaker A will be different from the formant values for [e] produced by Speaker B.&lt;/strong&gt; In fact, the formant values for Speaker A's [e] could map onto the formant values for Speaker B's [ɛ], even if both speakers agree that A is producing [e] and B is producing [ɛ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do on the acoustic front:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Record a bunch of repetitions of a bunch of [e]/[ɛ] minimal pairs for a bunch of native speakers. Record them spoken in a bunch of environments (surrounded by different phones, in isolated words, in words in frame sentences, in careful speech, in faster speech, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Measure the formant values and relative durations (e.g., the ratio of the vowel duration to the duration of a control segment somewhere else in the utterance) of the target vowels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analyze the results and look for patterns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Record yourself trying to produce the minimal pairs, and practice differentiating them such that you eventually find the same &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; patterns in your own formant values and relative durations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope most of that makes sense. As this answer is getting a bit unwieldy, I'll leave it to you to post follow-up questions you may have about the best way to measure formant values in vowels or how certain parameters like F1 and F2 change according to changes in tongue height/backness!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T17:24:24.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-19T18:23:01.247" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I understand is that Defective verbs do not inflect.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Am trying to understand what the difference is between being defective and not inflecting - from reading the below wiki extract I cannot see the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - with modals like can/could and will/would etc - is &quot;could&quot; not a inflected form of &quot;can&quot;? (Inflection via base change to express past tense) How is that not inflection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FROM &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_verbs&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The verbs customarily classed as modals in English have the following properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They do not inflect, except insofar as some of them come in present–past (present–preterite) pairs. They do not add the ending -(e)s in the third-person singular (the present-tense modals therefore follow the preterite-present paradigm).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They are defective: they are not used as infinitives or participles (except occasionally in non-standard English; see Double modals below), nor as imperatives, nor (in the standard way) as subjunctives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3508" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T23:02:45.903" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T20:28:35.413" Title="Whats the difference between the expression &quot;They do not inflect&quot; and &quot;They are defective&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-19T18:35:51.570" Score="5" ViewCount="1150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is syllable a phonetic or a phonological concept? Consider 'syllable counting' as a task: would that be regarded as a phonetic task or phonological tasks? Would it depend on whether words are presented visually or auditorily? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/180&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between phonetics and phonology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2014-06-19T18:41:52.350" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T13:45:31.863" Title="Is syllable a phonetic or a phonological concept?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8418" CreationDate="2014-06-19T19:31:19.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A syllable is a phonological unit. Native speakers of two different languages can hear the same stimulus as having different numbers of syllables if their respective phonologies have different criteria for what can constitute a syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a Hebrew speaker may hear a stream speech and perceive it as [pka] while an English speaker might hear the same stream of speech and perceive it as [pə'ka], since Hebrew phonotactics allow syllable onset kt-clusters while English phonotactics don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes a syllable in a given language is deduced by linguists using phonological information gleaned from various criteria, such as stress/accent/tone assignment, word games, metrical divisions in poetry and music, and orthography (in cases where a language's orthography is syllable-based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syllable counting is a phonological task that relies on learned knowledge about the phonotactics of the language in question. It requires words to be presented auditorily or in some unambiguous phonetic transcription, since orthography is often not a reliable or unambiguous representation of pronunciation (How many syllables in the English word &lt;em&gt;peer&lt;/em&gt;? How about &lt;em&gt;911&lt;/em&gt;?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics is also relevant, of course, since interpreting a stream of speech and mapping it to its phonological representation involves knowledge/awareness of the phonetics of the language at hand. In English, for example, the location of a syllable boundary in relation to an [st] cluster is cued in part by how long the [t] closure is and how long the period of aspiration before the vowel is. In [as.ta] the [t] will have a longer closure and a longer period of aspiration than the [t] in [a.sta].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last note: even within a single language, some words may be difficult to syllabify and different linguists may infer different syllabifications, since different phonological tests may yield conflicting results. In some dialects of English, for example, syllable counts for words like &lt;em&gt;hire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;flour&lt;/em&gt; are notoriously difficult to pin down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-06-20T13:45:31.863" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T13:45:31.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8417" CreationDate="2014-06-19T21:32:34.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first is a statement about their morphology: forms such as &lt;em&gt;*canning&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*wills&lt;/em&gt; do not exist (in those senses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is a statement about their syntax: modals cannot fit into sentence frames like &lt;em&gt;I want to X&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I was Xing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These overlap, in the sense that forms in &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; are both lacking morphologically and unacceptable syntactically. But the lack of a distinct third-person singular form is purely morphological, while the lack of an infinitive is purely syntactic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-06-19T21:32:34.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T02:02:20.307" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to linguistics and I'm having trouble finding out if there's any existing literature on statements that have exhaustible meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By exhaustible meaning, I'm trying to get at something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professor X wants to recommend A and B for a job. To maximize the chance they are hired, X might want to say &quot;A is the best student I've ever had,&quot; and the same for B. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both statements are made together, there is a contradiction. I would say the honor of best student is exhausted (given both statements are made at the same time). Similarly, other statements might have exhaustible meaning. Compliments, especially rivalrous claims, become less meaningful with abundance, even coming from multiple speakers. The previous example just seems to be a special case of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a name for this or anything else worth saying that might have already been said?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4764" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-22T10:06:29.113" LastActivityDate="2014-07-22T10:28:41.187" Title="Name for statements with exhaustible meaning?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8428" CreationDate="2014-06-20T09:27:43.960" Score="2" ViewCount="2977" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for a language to have both left-headed and right-headed compounds? And can one please explain this with examples and with the use of linguistic reasoning based on morphology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T16:06:33.470" Title="Is it possible for a language to have both left-headed and right-headed compounds?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3853" CreationDate="2014-06-20T11:39:06.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I can't give a definitive answer, I can just say it's somewhat to very common. Within the Indo-European family, almost all the branches have at one point had vowel length (Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Indo-Aryan, Greek, Anatolian, Celtic etc.) and many have had it re-innovated (certain English dialects' treatment of /eə &gt; e:/, Belgian French compensatory lengthening before a lost /s/ etc.) . Outside the IE family, there's Uralic where vowel length is quite widespread amongst almost every member of the family, then in Korean, Japanese, certain members of Turkic, Bantu, Mongolian, Afro-Asiatic, Uto-Aztecan, Athabaskan, Wakashan, Algonquian, Mayan etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just shows that it's not really a local phenomenon as vowel length appears in about any area where there are languages; some areas might have vowel length more common, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T11:39:06.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3853" CreationDate="2014-06-20T13:23:32.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the standard resources for this sort of typological information, it would seem, have helpful information to answer this question as accurately as one might like. That being said, both &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Phonotactics Database&lt;/a&gt; can help us give an initial plausible range. Both have entries for long vowels, but these include all long vowels, so, for instance, English is included, despite the fact that while vowels like in &lt;em&gt;beet&lt;/em&gt;  /iː/ are phonetically long, there is no phonemic length contrast in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPSID's dataset says that 51 languages, or around 11% of their dataset have long vowels. Some of these are obvious cases where the entry is spurious, at least as it relates to phonemic vowel contrasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the World Phonotactics Database does not actually give an accessible list of segment inventories, it's dataset contains 1,384 languages with long vowels, around 34% of its total sample. A number of these will likely not represent phonemic length contrasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our estimate should be no less than 10% of the world's languages, based on the UPSID data, and no more than 33%, based on the World Phonotactics Database. Due to the size of UPSID's dataset, my guess would be that the true number is somewhere closer to the number found in the World Phonotactics Database, something like 25% of the world's languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also 3-way length contrasts, but these are quite rare, and all examples I know of (Estonian, Mixe languages, Wichita, etc.) are at least debatably analyzed without resorting to anything more than a 2-way contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2014-06-20T13:23:32.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-20T14:46:51.993" Score="4" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Universal Stanford Dependencies (USD) parsing scheme subordinates auxiliary verbs to content verbs and prepositions to their complements: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/~manning/papers/USD_LREC14_paper_camera_ready.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nlp.stanford.edu/~manning/papers/USD_LREC14_paper_camera_ready.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;USD is contrary to most work in theoretical syntax in this regard. In effect, USD is denying the existence of nonfinite verb phrases and prepositional phrases. Apparently, USD is being widely adopted in many computational circles. Given my background in theoretical syntax, it is difficult to understand how USD can be taken seriously concerning its analysis of hierarchical structures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following questions in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the USD approach to function words (e.g. auxiliaries and prepositions) a matter of debate in computational circles?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What other parsing schemes that parse directly to dependencies (as opposed to converting from constituencies) produce structural analyses that are more in line with theoretical syntax (i.e. auxiliaries as heads over content verbs and prepositions as heads over their complements)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-06-20T14:59:26.583" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T06:10:51.467" Title="Which dependency parsers take auxiliaries to to be heads over content verbs and prepositions to be heads over their complements?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8395" CreationDate="2014-06-21T04:50:49.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the difference between Fut. I and Fut. II has been argued to be aspectual. For example, Ernout and Thomas 1964 mention that Fut. II often expresses &quot;une antériorité par rapport à un fait qui se produira&quot; (p. 226) and this use is rather common in the protasis - cf. their &quot; cette dernière fonction est surtout frequenté en proposition subordonnée, notamment dans les conditionnelles&quot; (p. 226). Their example is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;si hunc librum legeris, laetabor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Schmalz (ed. Hofmann 1928) argues that this aspectual distinction between Fut. I and Fut. II was already lost in Old Latin (3-2 BC), even though it was still (&quot;occasionally&quot;) felt in Classical Latin, cf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Zwischen Fut. II and I bestand ursprünglich ein Aktionsartenunterschied: &lt;em&gt;fecero faxo&lt;/em&gt; ist perfektiv 'ich werde zur Ausführung bringen' , &lt;em&gt;faciam&lt;/em&gt; ist imperfektiv 'ich werde mit der Ausführung beschäftig sein.' Noch bei Cic. scheint der Unterschied des durativen 1. und des perfektiven 2. Futurs gelegentlich zu spüren [...]. &amp;lt;...&gt; Anderseits besteht ebenso sicher bereits bei Plt. zwischen Fut. I und II in Fällen  &amp;lt;...&gt; keinerlei Unterschied; die Verteilung ist lediglich durch die metrische Bequemlichkeit bestimmt (die Formen des Fut. II stehen meist im Versschluss); für die Ermittlung der Aktionsart eines bestimmten Verbums ist daher der Gebrauch  des Fut. ex. nicht geeignet &amp;lt;...&gt;&quot; (Schmalz and Hofmann 1928, p. 563).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schmalz and Hofmann specifically address the use of verb forms in the protasis in §335. Here's a summary of their findings in English (in the order protasis - adoposis, taken from Bertocchi and Maraldi 2011):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xA5rb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T15:48:24.080" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T15:48:24.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2014-06-21T07:01:25.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a bag of random notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Superlatives&lt;/strong&gt; of all sorts, which you mention, should have the uniqueness presupposition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Focus&lt;/strong&gt; often carries exhaustive meaning. See Katalin Kiss's seminal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/417867&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1998&lt;/a&gt; paper for a start. A GoogleScholar search for &quot;exhaustification (operator)&quot; gives a few interesting results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certain questions require a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;list-all&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (1) rather than &quot;mention-some&quot; (2) answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Who (all) came to the party?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Where on campus can I buy a newspaper?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe somebody here can add to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T07:01:25.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2014-06-21T08:29:13.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Starting with your last request that the answer be based on morphology, this is, in fact, one of the problems of compounding, because it's not entirely a morphological phenomenon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Compound gradience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Compounding is gradient, ranging from &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;phrasal&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;clausal compounds&lt;/em&gt;. Here are some examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) [[dark-]room]                       :: lexical&#xA; (2) [[truck-]tire]                      :: phrasal&#xA; (3) her [[don't-[go-[there-]]]face]     :: clausal  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. (1) is a lexical compound because the dependent compound part (&lt;em&gt;dark-&lt;/em&gt;) cannot be modified anymore: *&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; dark-room&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ex. (2) is a phrasal compound the dependent compound part (&lt;em&gt;truck-&lt;/em&gt;) can still be modified: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;military-&lt;/strong&gt; truck- tire&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Languages differ concerning how much they prefer their compounds to be lexical or phrasal. German doesn't like phrasal compounds very much, while English is freer in this respect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex. (3) is a clausal compound, the dependent compound part being the imperative clause &lt;em&gt;don't go there&lt;/em&gt;. This type of compound is more common than the literature on compounding suggests. Some clausal compounds have also become names, the most famous being &quot;forget-me-not&quot;, which is also a clausal compound in German &quot;Vergiss-mein-nicht&quot;, and in Japanese &quot;wasure-na-gusa&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exocentric compounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An &lt;em&gt;exocentric&lt;/em&gt; construction is one the category of which cannot be deduced from (the interaction between) its constituent categories. The most famous example of an exocentric construction is &lt;em&gt;S = NP VP&lt;/em&gt;, the minimally independent syntactic category. However, most categories are &lt;em&gt;endocentric&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the category of the construction inherits the category type of one its immediate constituents. In &lt;em&gt;[[red] cars]&lt;/em&gt;, the entire NP inherits its category from the noun &lt;em&gt;cars&lt;/em&gt;, rather than adjective &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;. The assumption is justified because &lt;em&gt;red cars&lt;/em&gt; behaves, i.e. distributes, more like &lt;em&gt;cars&lt;/em&gt; than like &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three types of exocentric compound are distinguished: &lt;em&gt;bahuvrihi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dvandva&lt;/em&gt;, and a type of compound that includes a verb (Colin Fine's examples &lt;em&gt;pickpocket&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cutpurse&lt;/em&gt; are of this type). Here are some examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (4) skinhead, bluecollar           :: _bahuvhrihi_  &#xA; (5) bitter-sweet, maid-servant     :: _dvandva_&#xA; (6) a. kick-ball, jump-rope        :: verb + noun  &#xA;     b. kick-back, have-not         :: verb + particle&#xA;     c. let-down, shut-out          :: participle + particle&#xA;     d. must-have, has-been         :: auxiliary + verb  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples in (4) are &lt;em&gt;bahuvrihi&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. compounds the meaning of which cannot be reduced (or is difficult to reduce) to the semantic composition of the individual meanings of the constituent parts. &lt;em&gt;Skinhead&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bluecollar&lt;/em&gt; denote persons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The examples in (5) are &lt;em&gt;dvandva&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. compounds with two heads. It's difficult to decide which compound part is the dependent, and which the head.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The examples in (6) show different types of exocentric compounds, all involving verbs. However, all compounds in (6) are nouns. While nouns are present in (6a), they are the objects of the preceding verbs, and hence one cannot assume that this type of compound simply results from syntactic structure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Headedness in compounds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Headedness in compounds is highly asymmetric. If a language has left-headed and right-headed compounds, then it is highly probably that one of these tendencies accounts for the vast majority of compounds in the language (my guess would be in excess of 90%). Most atypical compounds, such as the (probably left-headed) &lt;em&gt;pickpocket&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cutpurse&lt;/em&gt; (type 6a) are at the border to lexicalization, i.e. the entire compound is learned and memorized as one lexeme.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The preferred direction of headedness in compounds is inherited from syntax. The English NP has a clear word order within the NP, and the same order is present in compounds. That is, English minimal NPs are left-branching (i.e. right-headed), and hence compounds are also right-headed. When the underlying structure is not a minimal NP, then English compounds can take a right-branching, i.e. left-headed, structure:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (7) lady-in-waiting, bride-to-be&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compound heads in (7) are &lt;em&gt;lady&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bride&lt;/em&gt;. PPs and &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-infinitival VPs must follow nouns, and this constellation is also reflected in compounds. I think that compounds of the type shown in (7) are significantly more common and more productive than &lt;em&gt;the light fantastic&lt;/em&gt;, which to me neither seems overly productive, nor a compound. A bare adjective can rarely follow a noun, and if it does, we're probably dealing with a lexicalized construction. If the adjective is not bare, e.g. modified by an adverb, or if more than one adjective appears, then an appositive construction following the noun is possible:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(8) all the children [big and small], a man [tall and handsome]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like those in (8) show again the proximity of compounding to syntax. A dependency-based account to compounding can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://depling.org/proceedingsDepling2011/papers/gross1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T17:03:32.760" LastActivityDate="2014-06-21T17:03:32.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-21T19:31:49.907" Score="3" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a &lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt; of resources to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar and generative grammar that help me from zero to recent-research level [I myself do formal mathematical logic and am not totally zero :-) so don't worry if the resources are solid and tought]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Up to date&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; resources that also &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;include criticisms and debates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are highly preferred; and don't forget i have not much background in linguistics specially Chomsky; so i want a 'from Introductory to advanced' list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3563" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-06-21T20:20:53.547" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T14:34:08.033" Title="Resources to Chomsky's Universal Grammar" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-21T21:42:28.857" Score="6" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word stress in MSA follows a precise set of rules, which are described consistently in various Arabic grammar textbooks, e.g. Ryding's &amp;quot;A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic&amp;quot; (2005). However, none of the textbooks I have consulted describes what happens to the stress when the word starts with an elided hamza (&amp;quot;hamzat al-waSl&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;اقرا &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iq-ra'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Read!&amp;quot; [2nd person, male])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the rules, the first syllable should get the stress, however the presence of an elided hamza indicates that the &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; sound is auxiliary, so logically the stress should fall on the second syllable. Is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;واقرا هذه الكليمات &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;waq-ra'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; haa-dhi-hi l-ka-li-maa-ti (&amp;quot;... And read these words!&amp;quot; [2nd person, male])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the first example, here the hamza actually gets elided. Where does the stress fall? If it falls on the first syllable, it means that the conjunction &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; gets the stress, but it seems unnatural that a particle would get the stress. So does the stress fall on the second syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;اب وابن &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a-bun wa-bnun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;A father and a son.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case both the first syllable and the second syllable (of both words) are auxiliary, so where do the stresses fall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;اخذت ابنا وذهبت a-khadh-tu &lt;strong&gt;bnan&lt;/strong&gt; wa-dha-hab-tu (&amp;quot;I grabbed a son and walked away.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the first syllable is elided, and the second syllable is auxiliary, so that the actual word is reduced to zero syllables. Where does the stress fall in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4769" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T21:25:24.080" Title="Arabic word stress in the presence of an elided hamza (&quot;hamzat al-waSl&quot;)" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2014-06-22T02:59:32.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Add &lt;strong&gt;Persian&lt;/strong&gt; as a free word-order language to your list.&#xA;I was wondering Which languages are free word-order. I almost founded part of the answer in this post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4770" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T02:59:32.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8434" CreationDate="2014-06-22T06:33:22.520" Score="4" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, most loanwords from Japanese are pronounced similarly to the Japanese word. It isn't an exact match, for example with &quot;karaoke&quot; the pronunciation of the second &quot;a&quot; differs between English and Japanese, but it's fairly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, many languages that are unrelated to English, but are not from East Asia, have a similar pronunciation as the Japanese word. For example, according to Wiktionary, the Hebrew word for origami is אוֹרִיגָמִי (origami). (I don't know whether Hebrew got the word from English, or directly from Japanese)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the pronunciation of the Chinese translation of words that, in English, are loanwords from Japanese, is radically different from the pronunciation of the word in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Chinese, but it meant that when I was speaking in English with Taiwanese people who were native speakers of Chinese but reasonably fluent in English, they didn't understand some Japanese loanwords I used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm finding it a little hard to find good examples, but &quot;origami&quot; seems to be one. None of the Chinese translations of origami seem to have a similar pronunciation to the Japanese word. (I could be mistaken though - maybe the pronunciations of the Chinese words &quot;摺紙&quot;, &quot;折紙&quot;, &quot;折纸&quot;, &quot;折紙藝術&quot;, and &quot;折纸艺术&quot; are the closest thing you could have to pronouncing the syllables of &quot;origami&quot; in the Chinese language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the case? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because Chinese speakers take the written form of the Japanese word, turn it into a written Chinese word, and then pronounce the word the way they would pronounce a native Chinese word that was written the way it was written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, are words that are Japanese loanwords in English derived from Japanese words that are ultimately derived from Chinese words, and it's the Japanese word that's &quot;different&quot; in pronunciation, not the Chinese word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, in which languages is the pronunciation of words that are loanwords in English greatly different from the pronunciation in Japanese? For example, does this happen in Korean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T07:19:38.270" Title="Pronunciation in languages from East Asia of words that are Japanese loanwords in English" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="557" CreationDate="2014-06-22T07:33:35.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, the so-called &amp;quot;word order&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;normally&lt;/strong&gt; SVO :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Il boit du lait&amp;quot; (He's drinking some milk)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Il (S) boit (V) du lait (O)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This word order roughly appears at the end of the Medieval Period when the mark of the subject (Latin nominative -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;cas sujet&amp;quot;) and of the object (Latin accusative -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;cas objet&amp;quot;) disappear progressively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But there are exceptions.&lt;/strong&gt; By example, French speakers use VSO when asking a question in a very formal way. Compare the three ways to say &amp;quot;Is he drinking some milk ?&amp;quot; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Il boit du lait ?&amp;quot; (very informal, SVO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Est-ce qu'il boit du lait&amp;quot; (the normal way to ask a question, est-ce que + SVO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Boit-il du lait ?&amp;quot; (very formal, VSO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same exception with imperative constructions (VO, like in English) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Donne-moi du lait !&amp;quot; (Give me some milk !)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the so called &amp;quot;t euphonique&amp;quot; placed between some verbs(*) and their subject in a VSO construction, like in :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aime-t-il le lait ? (Does he like the milk ?) where a &amp;quot;t&amp;quot; is placed between &amp;quot;aime&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;il&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is nothing but what remains from the Latin VSO corresponding words :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Amat-ille&amp;quot; (Latin) &amp;gt; something like &amp;quot;aimet-il&amp;quot; in Old French &amp;gt; today written &amp;quot;aime-t-il&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;notes :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) &amp;quot;verbes du premier groupe&amp;quot; : aime-t-il, pense-t-il + aller (va-t-il)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T04:52:14.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2014-06-22T17:32:55.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes as you speculate, when Chinese borrows a Japanese word, its pronunciation is often determined by the Chinese characters, no matter how it is pronounced in Japan. This results in loanwords that sound totally different, especially when they are native Japanese words, rather than Sino-Japanese words (i.e. Japanese-coined words that are made of Chinese-originated roots), as is the case in your example of &lt;em&gt;origami&lt;/em&gt;. Other examples include &lt;em&gt;torikeshi&lt;/em&gt; (ja) / &lt;em&gt;quxiao&lt;/em&gt; (zh) (取消 'cancellation'), and &lt;em&gt;tetsuzuki&lt;/em&gt; (ja) / &lt;em&gt;shouxu&lt;/em&gt; (zh) (手続/手续 'procedure'). This often happens in proper names as well. For example, the auto manufacturer &lt;em&gt;Suzuki&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced &lt;em&gt;Lingmu&lt;/em&gt; in Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean also has words that are borrowed from Japanese as the form of Chinese characters. Examples include &lt;em&gt;toriatsukai&lt;/em&gt; (ja) / &lt;em&gt;chwuykup&lt;/em&gt; (ko) (取扱/취급 'handling'), and &lt;em&gt;hagaki&lt;/em&gt; (ja) / &lt;em&gt;yepse&lt;/em&gt; (ko) (葉書/엽서, 'postcard'). However, proper names in Japanese are usually borrowed phonologically in Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4774" LastActivityDate="2014-06-22T17:32:55.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8437" CreationDate="2014-06-22T20:41:28.803" Score="0" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I determine if a noun is the name of a person based on other words in the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I was able to determine that a noun is a place by it following ' to ' or ' from '.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there words that nouns, which are people's names, tend to follow in English sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, or there are too many words, how can I determine if a noun is a person's name without looking a and comparing to a list of names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4775" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T18:46:20.543" Title="determine if noun is person or person's name" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-23T07:37:21.433" Score="9" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the fact that this question is rather specific, but anyway I would like to give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese Sign Language has three manual alphabets: one for representing kana-characters, and two for Latin characters. The first Latin-character manual alphabet is adopted from American Sign Language (ASL) with minor adjustments. My question concerns the second Latin-character manual alphabet which I call &quot;JSL Latin manual alphabet&quot;. All three can be viewed here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~kem/yubimoji/yubi-gaz.htm&quot;&gt;http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~kem/yubimoji/yubi-gaz.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are used according to the purpose. According to my personal experience, when spelling a string of Latin letters such as the name of an internet page or the title of a movie, most commonly signers would use the ASL-based manual alphabet. On the other hand, when the letters form an abbreviation such as &quot;NHK&quot; or when a single character is combined with numerals such as in &quot;B8&quot; (designating a subway exit number), signers would tend to use the JSL Latin manual alphabet. I also noted an age difference: Younger JSL signers are more apt to use the ASL-based manual alphabet while the older generation prefers the JSL Latin manual alphabet. Still, both are presently in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns the JSL Latin manual alphabet (i.e. the last one on the page above). It is perculiar as it at times uses one hand, at other times both hands. I have checked a list of manual alphabets of the world (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.michaelszczepanski.de/fingerabc.html&quot;&gt;http://www.michaelszczepanski.de/fingerabc.html&lt;/a&gt;), but it does not resemble any other manual alphabet that I have seen so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and where was it introduced into the Japanese Sign Language and what is it based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4776" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T13:36:59.970" Title="What gave rise to the manual alphabet for Latin characters in Japanese Sign Language?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8435" CreationDate="2014-06-23T09:03:14.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually it will not help much, but there is a model called Hidden Markov Model which is simply based on statistics and probabilistics. You can get more information by a probabilistic computational linguistics book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not very good at mathematics and HMM is much more empiric rather than rational. The only thing I know about HMM is (very very basic):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Working on a corpus. (A bunch of text, I mean.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tokenizing every single sentence. (Take care of yourself. == take, care, of, yourself)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking the statistic of corpus. (take: 34, care: 27, yellow: 13, blah blah...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taking the statistic of every single token's sequel. (The statistic of &quot;What do 'take' take at the before or (generally) next of token?&quot;. ^^ take: care(13), this(11), my(7) || care: of(7)...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WpKot.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to person names, there can be a way to determine it. Firstly, you take corpora which are simply based on literature (because they include so much names than other text types). Then you tokenize it, take the token and sequel statistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you have to know which tokens follow the person names. Let's look at those sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My dear Watson told me that the thief had took the emerald away before we reached there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My name is Sarah.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is my very best friend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emily brought your book back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David played the piano.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those sentence, all person names took those places: &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; In verbial sentences, right before the verb; &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; in noun sentences, right after the copula; &lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; in noun sentences, right before the copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our very limited a bunch of sentences above, we will take the names which are &lt;em&gt;the head of a noun phrase&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;right before the verb or copula&lt;/em&gt;, because &lt;strong&gt;they are the easiest ones to determine&lt;/strong&gt;. In this step, you must use regular expressions. Firstly, you must find the tokens right before the copulas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;before(&quot;am||is||are||was||were&quot;):&lt;/strong&gt; book(156), chair(143) ... ... John(2) ... ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the usage of person names is very low, you can easily determine them. Now you can determine right after the copulas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;after(&quot;am||is||are||was||were&quot;):&lt;/strong&gt; the(456), my(332) ... ... Sarah(4) ... ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a probability that a special name can be the head of a phrase, this will not help that much. Coming to verbial sentences, for now, you can only determine past tense or perfect tense (!!) sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;before(&quot;+*ed||have +*ed||has +*ed||had +*ed&quot;):&lt;/strong&gt; I(455), you(352) ... ... David(5) ... ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those sentences, +* means every single characters which contains at least one character in it. Those will find -for instance- &quot;played, leaked, climbed&quot; etc. verbs which seem in an order on past suffixication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you must use a programming language (Python is my best.), NLP library (NLTK in Python) and regular expressions (nearly every language contains). I know that will not help much, but if you work on big literature corporas, I think you will acquire more person names and you can even develop your own way to determine person names. Those steps are very very basic, so I recommend you to take a statistical computational linguistics book or talk to any computational linguist as jlawler says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="3687" LastEditDate="2014-06-23T18:46:20.543" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T18:46:20.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8439" CreationDate="2014-06-23T14:18:21.383" Score="6" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;iii) He died &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt;. They served the coffee &lt;em&gt;blindfolded&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;br/&gt;iv) &lt;em&gt;Furious&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  he stormed out of the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The AdjPs in [iii-iv] function as &lt;strong&gt;predicative adjunct&lt;/strong&gt;. Those in [iii]&#xA;  are integrated into clause structure and hence modifiers, while that&#xA;  in [iv] is detached and hence a supplement. All adjectives that can&#xA;  function as predicative adjunct can also function as predicative&#xA;  complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(CGEL, p.529)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CGEL says the predicative adjuncts in [iii], &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;blindfolded&lt;/em&gt;, are modifiers. Which of the next modification does the book mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The words used to modify nouns are typically &lt;strong&gt;adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;, and the&#xA;  words that similarly modify verbs are &lt;strong&gt;adverbs&lt;/strong&gt;.” (CGEL, p.526)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether the modifiers in [iii] function as both predicative that depict the subjects and modify them; or even thought they describe subjects, they are integrated into the structure by modifying the verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1728" LastEditorUserId="1728" LastEditDate="2014-06-23T14:25:32.317" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T16:01:11.343" Title="Do predicative adjuncts modify nouns or verbs?" Tags="&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8438" CreationDate="2014-06-23T15:40:08.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adjectives in question do indeed behave in a unique way. They are dependents of the verb, but they are predications over the subject (or object), e.g &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; He died young.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt; is a direct dependent of the verb &lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;, but it is a predication over the subject &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. it assigns the property of youngness to &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt; is behaving like an adverb/adjunct syntactically because it is a direct dependent of the lexical verb &lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;, but it is definitely an adjective insofar as it looks like an adjective and is assigning a property to a (pro)noun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Jlawler points out, the terminology used to denote these words varies. Some call them &lt;em&gt;depictive adjuncts&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;participant-oriented adjuncts&lt;/em&gt;. Depictive adjuncts are &lt;em&gt;stage-level&lt;/em&gt; predicates; the property that they assign is not an intrinsic characteristic of the noun, but rather its applicability is transient. Adjectives that assign intrinsic properties cannot occur in this use, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *Bill died interesting.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt;, which is a transient state because we all get older, &lt;em&gt;interesting&lt;/em&gt; is intrinsic and inalienable. The distinction between stage-level and individual-level predicates is discussed at the bottom of the article here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct answer to the question is therefore as follows: predicative adjuncts modify the verb if one interprets &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; to mean 'be syntactically dependent on', or they modify the subject or object if one interprets &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; to mean 'assign a property to'. Note that typical attributive adjectives unify both of these meanings of &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; the young man&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt; is both syntactically dependent on &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; and it is assigning a property to &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-06-23T16:01:11.343" LastActivityDate="2014-06-23T16:01:11.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8442" CreationDate="2014-06-23T18:38:32.407" Score="2" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was curious about evidentiality. In Turkish, evidentiality can be seen as {-mIş} suffix, but English does not have any suffix to express. Take a look at this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Babası ona yeni ayakkabı almış.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;father+GEN he+DAT new shoe buy+EVI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, his father bought new shoes to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modality&lt;/strong&gt; is defined as the speaker's expression, belief etc. statements. &lt;strong&gt;Aspect&lt;/strong&gt; is defined as how the verb related to the flow of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I say evidentiality is a &lt;strong&gt;modal&lt;/strong&gt;, it also contains an imperfective function in Turkish, or if I say evidentiality is an &lt;strong&gt;aspect&lt;/strong&gt;, it has the speaker's expression as you can see in English translation (an &amp;quot;appearantly&amp;quot; meaning and imperfective verb bending of &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot;). Not only English translation, but also its express can be sensed in Turkish by its native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was curious how to call evidentiality: A modality or an aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:53:18.077" Title="Evidentiality: Aspect or Modality?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8440" CreationDate="2014-06-24T00:04:56.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidentiality is very closely related to modality. It isn't related to aspect. &lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;, morphemes very often combine multiple meanings, and they can form paradigms with semantically unrelated morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about Turkish, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar#Inflectional_suffixes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia calls &lt;em&gt;-miş&lt;/em&gt; a 'inferential perfective'&lt;/a&gt;. It &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar#Bases_of_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;describes&lt;/a&gt; it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The inferential past or &lt;em&gt;miş&lt;/em&gt;-past can be understood as asserting that a past participle is applicable now; hence it is used when the fact of a past event, as such, is not important; in particular, the inferential past is used when one did not actually witness the past event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation would be that the &lt;em&gt;-miş&lt;/em&gt; suffix marks both inferential evidentiality and perfective aspect. It primarily contrasts with the perfective suffix &lt;em&gt;-di&lt;/em&gt;. If you don't want the perfective aspect or its implied past tense, then you can use one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar#Compound_bases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;compound sufixes&lt;/a&gt; to override the perfective part of &lt;em&gt;-miş&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T00:04:56.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7025" CreationDate="2014-06-24T00:14:51.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the others have said, Tense Aspect and Mood are tricky. Their morphemes often combine meanings, and they imply even more. A language may not formally mark a category so it becomes convention to use another category to communicate the one that isn't marked. &lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.49/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood&lt;/em&gt; by Bhat&lt;/a&gt; is a good book on the topic. Check your library because it's way overpriced!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To precisely determine what the suffix marks will be hard, but there is one easy test: can it be used to communicate past continuous/imperfective? If so then I think it's straightforward to call it an imperfective rather than future. If not, then unfortunately the test won't help you know either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T00:14:51.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31182" CreationDate="2014-06-24T11:23:40.210" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was very surprised to learn &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%28khbo/lou&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;prior=e#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(in LSJ s.v. ἑκηβόλος&lt;/a&gt;) that ἑκηβόλος originally meant &quot;attaining his aim&quot; and not &quot;far-shooter&quot; as I always thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Liddell-Scott-Jones recalls the &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; interpretation of the word (ἑκη- &amp;lt; ἑκάς=far), this dictionary doesn't explain the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; form, hence my questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) What's the etymology of &quot;ἑκη-&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Do we know some Greek authors explaining how they understand the epiklesis ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;addendum&lt;/strong&gt; : I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://dominique.thillaud.free.fr/Eurindien/etymologies.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; a good(?) analysis of another problem concerning the epiklesis &quot;ἑκατηβόλος&quot;. According to Dominique Thillaud, ἑκη- can be...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;either (ϝ)ἑκάς as the Ancients thought; but if, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec/Chantraiine-DictionnaireEtymologiqueGrec_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as Chantraine said&lt;/a&gt;, ἑκάς comes from *swe-kas (reflexive pronoun + distributive κας as in ἀνδρακάς) we can't get the ἑκατη- at the beginning of ἑκατηβόλος.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;either (ϝ)εκών, (ϝ)εκόντος as in ἑκάεργος (who acts of his own free will) or as in &lt;strong&gt;ἑκηβόλος (who shoots of his own free will)&lt;/strong&gt;. It's Dominique Thillaud's preferred hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T05:04:52.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T23:01:56.800" Title="original sens of ἑκηβόλος, an epiklesis of Apollon" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8444" CreationDate="2014-06-24T11:40:00.957" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;i think it's rather the same—if you fling far and do hit, you're attaining your aim, right? from the letters, it just means 'there-throwing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T11:40:00.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8452" CreationDate="2014-06-24T13:30:39.333" Score="5" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some analytic languages sometimes use the same prepositions for nouns and pronouns,e.g.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;'I'm proud OF him' vs. 'I'm proud OF his book'.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Agglutinative languages may use the same affix for nouns and pronouns too,such as in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,fusional languages seems to intend to use different declensions for nouns and pronouns,e.g.&lt;strong&gt;'JOHN'S book' vs. 'HIS book'.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Often,pronouns are inflected irregularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,is there any fusional language where nouns and pronouns share at least one same declension?&#xA;If pronouns or nouns have more than one declensions,this means at least one of them is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is,what is the language?if not,what is the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. I'm an amateur,so in the question there may contain some mistakes;if so,just post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3665" LastEditorUserId="3665" LastEditDate="2014-06-25T05:30:57.563" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T05:30:57.563" Title="Is there any fusional language where pronouns and nouns share the same declension?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2014-06-24T14:54:46.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to bump an old thread, but I came across this question, and it really resonated with me because I have thought about this subject a lot (mainly because I hated learning Kanji so much). As a person who knows more Korean (5yrs of study) than Japanese (4yrs of study), I think that the reason Koreans are able to function fine without kanji is because Korean has more vowels than Japanese does. Korean has 10 different vowels, whereas Japanese has 5 vowels. Since in Korean, every jamo has to have a vowel, I believe that there about ~400 different letter blocks that you can have in Korean (I could be wrong). Furthermore, even in Korean, there are different ways of writing a word/name which sounds the same. For example, 민아 and 미나, 윤아 and 유나, 각오 and 가고. Therefore, this variety eliminates the need for kanji in Korean. However, this is not the case in Japanese because Japanese only has 46 sounds compared to the 400 some Korean letter blocks.  This results in a lot more homophones.. I am by no means a Kanji lover, but imagine trying to write Japanese medical terms without Kanji! Like どうぶつゆらいかんせんしょう. Talk about a headache. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4781" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T14:54:46.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-24T15:16:05.643" Score="2" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He entered the room &lt;strong&gt;drunk&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He left the room &lt;strong&gt;angry&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that both &lt;strong&gt;drunk&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;angry&lt;/strong&gt; are the examples of what is called &lt;strong&gt;resultative adjuncts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? What does the term mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T14:42:50.120" Title="&quot;He left the room angry&quot; Is this a resultative adjunct?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8448" CreationDate="2014-06-24T15:52:06.730" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples given in the question are not examples of resultative adjuncts. Resultative adjuncts give the result of an action, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We scrubbed the tub clean.&#xA;&#xA;The situation worried us silly.&#xA;&#xA;The music soothed her into a meditative state.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expressions &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;into a meditative state&lt;/em&gt; are resultative adjuncts because they give the &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of the scrubbing, worrying, and soothing. In these cases, they are predications over the object, not over the subject. The syntactic analysis of such adjuncts is that they are direct dependents of the verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjectives &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; in the examples in the question are more accurately characterized as &lt;em&gt;depictive&lt;/em&gt; adjuncts. They &lt;em&gt;depict&lt;/em&gt; the state of a participant during the process expressed by the verb. Depictive adjuncts are typically predications over the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An appropriate umbrella term that subsumes both resultative adjuncts as well as depictive adjuncts is &lt;em&gt;participant-oriented adjuncts&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;into a mediative state&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; are all participant-oriented adjuncts because they assign a property to one of the participants in the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that one can distinguish between participant-oriented adjuncts and &lt;em&gt;participant-oriented complements&lt;/em&gt;. The following sentences illustrate participant-oriented complements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; That made me angry. &#xA;&#xA; That sounds good.&#xA;&#xA; It tastes terrible.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjectives &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt; are now complements (they're not adjuncts), because their appearance is obligatory. The following sentences are bad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *That made me.&#xA;&#xA; *That sounds.&#xA;&#xA; *It tastes.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare these sentences with the following quite good sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We scrubbed the tub.&#xA;&#xA;The situation worried us.&#xA;&#xA;The music soothed her.&#xA;&#xA;He entered the room.&#xA;&#xA;He left the room.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences are all fine, indicating that when &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;into a mediative state&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; do appear in them, they are adjuncts (not complements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-06-24T15:58:06.083" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T15:58:06.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8448" CreationDate="2014-06-24T16:03:47.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the university I was taught those are predicatives, and these are sentences with compound nominative predicates (like in &quot;He &lt;strong&gt;is drunk&lt;/strong&gt;). Your bold words are adjectives, and the verbs (&quot;entered&quot;, &quot;left&quot;) in such sentences are, actually, play the role of the linking verbs (like &quot;be&quot; or &quot;become&quot;), although many otherwise action verbs can be used as the verbal part of such predicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the proofs of such a view at it is that the &lt;em&gt;a- adjectives&lt;/em&gt; can be used at the end of such sentences. By &lt;em&gt;a- adjectives&lt;/em&gt; I mean those ones like &quot;asleep&quot;, &quot;awake&quot;, &quot;afraid&quot;, etc.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He lay &lt;strong&gt;asleep&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The door stood &lt;strong&gt;ajar&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;a- adjectives&lt;/em&gt; can be used only as predicatives, never as attributes (which differs them greatly from most of the other adjectives, some even consider them to belong to a separate part of speech, &quot;statives&quot;, &quot;the words of the category of state&quot;). The point is, action verbs are used as linking verbs with the &lt;em&gt;a- adjectives&lt;/em&gt;, and it looks very much like the sentences with &lt;em&gt;a- adjectives&lt;/em&gt; is just a special case of the sentences of your kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T16:03:47.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2014-06-24T21:07:15.823" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;the problem is a bit in the framing of your question: &quot;Why was korea &lt;strong&gt;able to remove kanji&lt;/strong&gt; but japan wasn't when &lt;strong&gt;both languages use homophones&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;. i see two problems with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;firstly, all human language have homophones to a greater or lesser degree&lt;/strong&gt;. it is true that Chinese and especially Japanese are somewhat internationally renowned for having big numbers of homophones (there's a humorous short story about two neighbors running into each other in the street and having an extended chat about nougaku, not realizing that while the one is talking about 農学 (agriculture), the other is talking about 能楽 (No theater)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;secondly, your question is biased in favor of abolition of kanji&lt;/strong&gt;, making it look like it was the natural and desirable way for any language that has been using kanji to replace that writing system with a more sound-based one; that may or may not be true, but this partisan stance begs the question whether the Japanese and the Koreans have ever collectively &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to stop using kanji. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i guess the somewhat baffling answer to this question is that &lt;strong&gt;for a long time in their histories, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans have wanted to abolish kanji / hanja&lt;/strong&gt;. as for the Japanese, while the well-known kanji usage regulations stipulated after WWII did limit the number of kanji, they are still used in great numbers. one often sees obscure kanji and kanji with obscure readings. every japanese can at almost any given point in time opt to switch to using kana in place of kanji, and in fact this sometimes happens (like my former landlady who posted a sign containing '石っけん' rather than '石鹸', as she deemed the former to make for an easier read for her foreign student residents). the fact that many japanese continue to write many kanji clearly shows they're not willing to abolish this system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;likewise, the Koreans have for the 500 years between Sejong's invention of hangeul and their widespread, nation-wide and almost exclusive adoption resisted the urge to 'rid' themselves of kanji. it is only in the 20th century that hangeul rose from being an auxiliary script that many literati looked down on to the primary means of written expression that we see today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rephrasing your question, i think we should better ask: &lt;strong&gt;why &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; the Koreans stop using kanji, and the Japanese &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;, plain and simple, and i think the answer lies to a big part in: &lt;strong&gt;a matter of preference and choice&lt;/strong&gt;. homophones have relatively little to do with that; as has been pointed out, when you do have a 'phonetic' script at your hand, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you can state yourself unambiguously in speaking, then the same should hold when writing with that phonetic script, homophones or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i'm also afraid i can't quite follow &lt;strong&gt;@lzmtky&lt;/strong&gt;'s argumentation with those vowelcounts and whatnot. firstly, reading 'どうぶつゆらいかんせんしょう' i do have every difficulty with that string as you, but &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is really caused by reading habits, not by the fact that that string is not in principle very readable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;further, there are rather more than 400 syllable blocks in Korean—Unicode defines 11,172 precomposed hangeul syllables (not all of which are in frequent use). your number for Japanese 'sounds' is also slightly misleading: there are 45 (not 46) kana with distinct sounds, but: there are an additional 25 kana with (han-) dakuten, of which 2 have to be subtracted because they're phonetic duplicates; further, there are the youon digraphs (a la しゅ), of which there are 27 with distinct sounds. that leaves us with 45 + 23 + 27 = 95. but what have we counted here? well, that's about the number of different &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29#Japanese&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;morae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Japanese, not what is commonly assumed the basic building block in segmental phonetics—that would be the number of distinct vowels and consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to compare an alleged number of 400 hangeul syllable blocks with an alleged number 46 distinct kana is pretty unjustified; it is comparing two writing systems at best anyhow, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; two sound systems. for that to do, you must obviously (at least) count vowels, consonants, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; their possible combinations. if your intention was to present syllable counts (and thought, reasonably, that the amount of distinct, common hangeul blocks will just about equal the number of distinct Korean syllables), well then you'd have to take into account that a Japanese syllable may have more than one mora: おおさか has four morae, but only three syllables; likewise, かわい has three morae, but only two syllables. i think we can safely say that Japanese has more in the vicinity of 200 distinct syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;commenting on your statement that &quot;even in Korean, there are different ways of writing a word/name which sounds the same. For example, 민아 and 미나, 윤아 and 유나, 각오 and 가고. Therefore, this variety eliminates the need for kanji in Korean&quot;, let me ask: are you saying that &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; there's more than one way to spell a given Korean word, &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; it is not necessary ('eliminates the need') to use kanji? that's, like, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; there's two ways to reach my bank from my house, &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; i don't have to ride the bicycle? i don't get that logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T21:07:15.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8446" CreationDate="2014-06-24T23:19:03.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are many languages. For example the Oceanic languages are often very regular in their inflections. A single example is the language Kakabai, from Milne Bay, PNG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kakabai has a set of suffixes which are used to construct all the pronouns, while also marking inalienable possession on nouns. Here are the pronominal markers (exc=exclusive, inc=inclusive, Food=possessive pronoun for food noun class):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      Personal  Possessive  Food  Suffix&#xA;1sg   tagu      egu         kagu  -gu&#xA;2sg   tam       em          kam   -m&#xA;3sg   tana      ena         kana  -na&#xA;1exc  tama      ema         kama  -ma/mai&#xA;1inc  tada      eda         kada  -da&#xA;2pl   temi      emi         kemi  -mi&#xA;3pl   tedi      edi         kedi  -di&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These suffixes are also used as object markers on verbs, to mark agreement on adjectival nouns, and the third person markers are also used to mark definiteness. This means that almost every word can end in &lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt;, and in practice probably half of them do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This data is my personal research, which has not yet been published.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-06-24T23:19:03.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-25T08:51:14.937" Score="3" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've returned my language focus to &lt;strong&gt;Lao&lt;/strong&gt; now that my travels through Asia have finished and I'm back home. There are not as many or as high quality resources available for Lao as for many other languages so I'm looking for some help to find some things I'm interested in for my investigations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to find either or both a &lt;strong&gt;word frequency&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;syllable frequency&lt;/strong&gt; list for Lao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally I make my own frequency lists but as Lao lacks word breaks creating a frequency list requires a good &lt;strong&gt;morphological analyser&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syllables are said to be unambiguous but I'm not convinced. I'm thinking about making my own syllabification algorithm but have not yet done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anybody is aware of a freely available &quot;syllabifier&quot; or morphological analyser for Lao, those would also be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T15:29:38.807" Title="Word and/or syllable frequency data for Lao" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8453" CreationDate="2014-06-25T09:39:42.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found this one, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/icu-tokenizer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;icu_tokenizer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The icu_tokenizer uses the same Unicode Text Segmentation algorithm as the standard tokenizer, but adds better support for some Asian languages by using a dictionary-based approach to identify words in Thai, Lao, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and using custom rules to break Myanmar and Khmer text into syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm bad in coding, I cannot test it myself, so I just hope it will be of some use for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-06-25T09:39:42.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-26T02:12:38.383" Score="1" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had been in precarious situations his entire life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know here in this sentence &lt;strong&gt;his entire life&lt;/strong&gt; is used as an adverbial phrase and, hence there was no need of placing a preposition before that phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is just an example, and there are many such sentence like this where some phrase or sometimes clauses are used as adverb, and therefore they don't take a preposition before them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how to determine which phrases and clauses can be used like an adverb correctly this way, and under what circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-27T00:52:20.307" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T00:52:20.307" Title="Phrases and clauses used as an adverb, and hence don't take a preposition" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8455" CreationDate="2014-06-26T03:58:00.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question has (again) to do with the argument vs. adjunct distinction. Often the term &lt;em&gt;complement&lt;/em&gt; is used in place of &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt;, although the argument notion is more clearly defined. Arguments are usually noun phrases (NPs), whereas adjuncts are typically adverbs, prepositional phrases (PPs), or clauses. Sometimes, however, PPs and clauses can be arguments instead of clauses, and on occasion an NP can be an adjunct instead of an argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example sentence in the question contains the NP &lt;em&gt;his entire life&lt;/em&gt;, which is an adjunct as opposed to an argument. The question calls it an adverb, although that term is less precise. For me, an adverb is a single word that functions as an adjunct (e.g. &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;willingly&lt;/em&gt;, etc). Hence I would not call &lt;em&gt;his entire life&lt;/em&gt; in the example sentence an adverb. I would, rather, call it an NP that is functioning as an adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated, NPs are usually arguments, not adjuncts. There are certain uses, however, where NPs clearly function as adjuncts. A common such case is when the NP expresses time duration, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; She slept all day. &#xA;&#xA; He worked the entire afternoon.&#xA;&#xA; He stayed the whole year. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NPs &lt;em&gt;all day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the entire afternoon&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;the whole year&lt;/em&gt; are adjuncts; they express the duration of the event or action expressed by the verb. We know that they are adjuncts in part because they can be omitted without altering the basic meaning of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; She slept.&#xA;&#xA; He worked.&#xA;&#xA; He stayed. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, similar use of NPs as adjuncts occurs with expressions of distance, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; She drove the bus ten miles.&#xA;&#xA; They flew two thousand miles over the ocean. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NPs &lt;em&gt;ten miles&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;two thousand miles&lt;/em&gt; are adjuncts. We know that they are adjuncts in part because they can be omitted without changing the basic meaning of the sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; She drove the bus.&#xA;&#xA; They flew over the ocean. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages that have case such as Latin and German mark these NPs with the accusative, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Sie hat den      ganzen Tag geschlafen. &#xA; she has the-acc. entire day slept&#xA; 'She slept the entire day.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NP &lt;em&gt;den ganzen tag&lt;/em&gt; 'the entire day' is marked accusative, which is an indication that it may be functioning as an adjunct (and it is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recognizing NPs that are adjuncts may be somewhat tricky. It's easier to recognize PPs and clauses that are adjuncts, however, because these categories are typically adjuncts rather than arguments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To build an understanding of these matters, it's beneficial to read what one can find about the argument vs adjunct distinction. Wikipedia is a place to start: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_%28grammar%29&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_%28linguistics%29&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T03:58:00.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8460" CreationDate="2014-06-26T06:20:44.060" Score="4" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very basic understanding of vowel harmony.  This is probably why I cannot answer this question myself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a language evolve to have vowel harmony?  Is it just that the speakers preferred the sound &quot;quality&quot; of limiting and requiring certain vowel combinations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What functional purpose does vowel harmony serve if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4786" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-06-26T09:21:20.273" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T17:43:12.960" Title="Is there a functional value to vowel harmony?" Tags="&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-26T07:28:04.893" Score="3" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am designing a language where a single case affix expresses both loc and gen. How should such a case be labelled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;house-GEN.LOC 'in the house'; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he-GEN.LOC house-3POSS 'his house'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4787" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T15:17:36.947" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T05:44:18.107" Title="How does one gloss a case that has both locative and genitive meaning?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2014-06-26T12:17:47.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possible situations I can think of, and how you'd gloss it depends on which situation it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language has both locative and genitive cases, but for this word the allomorphs happen to be the same: if you can determine from context which case it is, then simply gloss it as that case. If you can't, then make a guess and note the ambiguity in a footnote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language has one case with both locative and genitive meanings: decide what you think is the prototypical meaning and gloss it as that. Then in your discussion of the cases explain the range of meanings it conveys. I'd probably go for the genitive in this case because in many languages it's already so diverse. Or label it Case #3. No need to confuse more people with counter-intuitive case names!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-06-26T12:17:47.433" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2014-06-26T18:43:29.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;my guess would be that human languages prefer a state where a good measure of redundancy can be found in most utterances, as this helps listeners to understand correctly, reassure themselves they did, correct errors (due to the speaker's sloppyness, ambient noise or whatever) or ask for repetition when unsure: that is, speech has a built-in 'error-correction code' as it were. this explains why probably no natural language uses all of its phonemes in all possible combinations—there are always &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonotactical&lt;/a&gt; restrictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vowel harmony is such a phonotactical restriction, but one that (at least seemingly, in strictly segmental phonology) works at a distance. for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Turkish&lt;/a&gt;, there are two dimensions involved in VH, [front] and [round]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;              Front                 Back&#xA;      Unrounded   Rounded   Unrounded   Rounded&#xA;High      i          ü          ı          u&#xA;Low       e          ö          a          o&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;in Turkish, some suffixes may have four different (surface) forms, e.g. Türkiye'dir &quot;it is Turkey&quot;, kapıdır &quot;it is the door&quot;, but gündür &quot;it is day&quot;, paltodur &quot;it is the coat&quot; (taken from Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;note that this analysis suggests that the way the vowels partake in VH is a so-called &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; categorization, as the divisions presented here neatly follow articulatory and auditory categories (i.e. positioning of speech organs and spectral features) that are well attested to be phonotactical factors of some sort in lots and lots of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because of this naturalness of vowel harmony, both speaker and listener know that if you meant to say 'it is day', then 'it is' must be 'dür', not 'dur' or 'dir' or anything. this is convenient for the speaker as they can perform less gestures (they can be lazy and just leave their lips rounded for the entire duration of 'gündür'), and useful for the listener: if &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; believe to just have heard, say, 'gündir' or 'gündur', then surely they must have heard wrong, the speaker is at fault (happens), or maybe 'it is day' is not the intended meaning of the utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;note that i have suggested a suprasegmental reasoning here, assuming that the 'nd' in 'gündür' is indeed articulated with lips rounded. that may or may not be the case in the language discussed here, but it would still make phonological sense to adopt a Firthian stance here and assign [round]ness and [front]ness to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of 'gündür', not only the two vowels that are separated by consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in fact, some languages do seem to have restrictions that can hardly be explained by a static suprasegmental feature extending over syllables or words; for example, in Mandarin / Putonghua / Modern Standard Chinese, (1) each syllable can only have one /i/ and one /u/; (2) /i/ and /u/ always have a more a less audible vowel in between them (i.e. the syllable nucleus, so /i/ and /u/ always end up in the periphery of the syllable unless when they come alone); (3) /ü/ functions as a combination of /i/ and /u/ in that syllables that have an /ü/ can not have another /i/ or /u/. one effect of these rules is that in Chinese, you have /uai/ (pinyin: wai) 'only' and /iau/ 'want', but no */uau/ and no /iai/ (in fact, the latter syllable vanished from the mainland standard within the 20th century, although it is still used in Taiwan, so we can see the rule is not a 100% one but does appear to have some force). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; analysis it does look like the restrictions on /u, i/ do work on a distance, as an initial /i/ has to 'skip the a' to have any effect on the terminal vowel. this is not commonly understood as a case of vowel harmony, but in the broader picture, it is not fundamentally different from the restrictions on vowel distribution in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastEditorUserId="3634" LastEditDate="2014-07-17T17:43:12.960" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T17:43:12.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8462" CreationDate="2014-06-26T19:55:34.467" Score="4" ViewCount="1866" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/a/40776&quot;&gt;Possibly&lt;/a&gt;, the name &lt;em&gt;Jebediah&lt;/em&gt; derives from the name &lt;em&gt;Jedediah&lt;/em&gt;. If so, then what phonological phenomenon is this an example of, and what are other examples of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:05.260" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T22:31:11.457" Title="Jedediah → Jebediah: how?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8461" CreationDate="2014-06-26T21:14:22.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could be an example of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissimilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dissimilation&lt;/a&gt;. One prevailing theory about the mechanism for this kind of phenomenon is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obligatory_Contour_Principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP)&lt;/a&gt;. Similar (output) patterns are well-attested in Arabic, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a quotation from Frisch, Pierrehumbert, &amp;amp; Broe (2004), referencing the history of this observation: &quot;Greenberg first observes that there are no roots that repeat the same consonant in first and second position (e.g., ∗dadam, though McCarthy (1994) reports one verb of this form). Many verbs are found with identical consonants in the second and third positions of the root. Examples include madad ‘stretch’ and farar ‘flee’.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may notice right away that the Arabic pattern is different from your example (the constraint applies to first and second consonant position, not second and third).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="228" LastEditDate="2014-06-27T11:04:36.233" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T11:04:36.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8453" CreationDate="2014-06-27T00:43:04.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found one paper on the Internet which presents a syllabification algorithm for Lao:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.panl10n.net/english/outputs/Working%20Papers/Laos/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206_E_N_296.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Syllabification of Lao Script for Line Breaking&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find it fully describes what it purports to though and it seems to cover syllable structures I'm so far unaware of in Lao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-27T15:29:38.807" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T15:29:38.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-27T12:14:49.443" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pretty dog told the story the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is obviously some redundancy in the 'whom' of telling and the 'what' of telling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can consider questions derived from this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What did the pretty dog tell the story?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like answering &quot;the story,&quot; unless said with a kind of blankness, is a bit redundant. Is this phenomena well-known or studied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4798" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T14:01:16.887" Title="Redundancy from grammar" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2014-07-22T03:29:58.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8464" CreationDate="2014-06-27T14:01:16.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do you choose such a bad example? Talking to a story does not mean&#xA;much, and thus distracts from what you are trying to say. Why not use&#xA;&lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;feed&lt;/em&gt;, as in &quot;he fed the animal the animal&quot;, which may be&#xA;ambiguous, but can make (double) sense, as we do not know what animals&#xA;in the context are being referred to, and there must be at least two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point is that I do not see any redundancy. Redundancy implies&#xA;that the same information is given twice, possibly in different of&#xA;indirect ways. This is not the case here since the two occurences of&#xA;&quot;the animal&quot; correspond to NP clauses that have different roles, which&#xA;shows when you exchange them, when non identical, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    he gave the snake the mouse&#xA;&#xA;    he gave the mouse to the snake&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course &quot;he gave the animal to the animal&quot; is as ambiguous as &quot;he&#xA;gave the animal the animal&quot;, short of semantic disambiguation (few mice have eaten live snakes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-06-27T14:01:16.887" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8469" CreationDate="2014-06-27T20:38:11.917" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the meaning of pronouns (the antecedents) are understood from context. And, this allows for a more abbreviated and fluid means to communicate. However, even when the antecedents are mutually understood, you still must say the pronouns to follow English sentence structure rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a language such as Japanese, once the context is understood, you only say the words that have new meaning, or clarify meaning. You are not forced to constantly re-state mutually understood meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English::&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;See that pink cadillac? It is very fast. Do you like it? Did you know it is on sale.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;agh!!! We both know what is fast, what you might like, and what is on sale. But, the English language forces you to pointlessly keep saying &quot;it&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that languages such as Japanese are more evolved (towards communicating the same meaning with fewer words). English native speakers are on this path. I mean, they created pronouns to exploit mutually understood meaning. Why else use pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="4801" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T22:05:32.353" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T22:05:32.353" Title="Are languages that can derive more meaning from context more advanced?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-28T12:53:42.073" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there is 'voiced &amp;amp; unaspirated' and 'aspirated &amp;amp; unvoiced' categories of speech. I have heard there is a 3rd category. What is it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4807" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-29T00:36:03.337" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T13:56:07.857" Title="Is unvoiced &amp; unaspirated a category of speech?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8467" CreationDate="2014-06-28T13:15:25.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aspiration and voicing are not mutually exclusive phenomenon. You can certainly have a plosive that is voiceless (the more usual term for what you give as &quot;unvoiced&quot;) and unaspirated (the one you are missing above), like [p] in English &lt;em&gt;spin&lt;/em&gt; [spɪn], one that is voiceless and aspirated, like [pʰ] in English &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt; [pʰɪn], one that is voiced and unaspirated, like [b] in English &lt;em&gt;bin&lt;/em&gt; [bɪn], and you can even have voiced and aspirated consonants, like [bʰ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last category is debated. &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=VqEXghQ-ow0C&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PA9#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ladefoged (1971: 9)&lt;/a&gt; claims that such a sound &quot;has yet to be observed&quot;, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&amp;amp;type=summary&amp;amp;url=/journals/oceanic_linguistics/v045/45.2blust.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Blust (2006)&lt;/a&gt; has shown that Kelabit, an Austronesian language, contrasts a series of voiceless unaspirated stops, voiced unaspirated stops, and voiced aspirated stops. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tutuʔ/ 'fall from a height'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tuduʔ/ 'seven'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tudʰuʔ/ 'salt' (all from Blust 2006: 314)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2014-06-29T00:08:28.227" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T00:08:28.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8466" CreationDate="2014-06-28T14:41:48.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The responses so far have been that no language is &quot;more evolved&quot; than others. But in fact, no language needs more or less context than another. Context is essential in interpreting all language. What varies is what type of construction needs what type of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages are redundant. They're just redundant in different places in different ways. A great example is plural marking. Strictly speaking, you almost never need the plural marking to get the plural meaning across. The context almost always provides enough information. And it always does in counting. Thus some languages (like Hungarian or Chinese) don't have plural marking on nouns preceded by numbers. But they may require some other redundant feature such as Chinese structural particles. Most often these contribute to some kind of overall cohesion (agreement, vowel harmony, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find similar variation in gender or tense markings. Some languages always specify a time reference or a category reference, others very rarely do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you should not that what is obligatory in written language could well not be required in spoken language. So the example you give, would be relatively plausible in certain types of English spoken discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T14:41:48.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3990" CreationDate="2014-06-28T17:54:35.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Lingua franca&quot; is a borrowed phrase from (Medieval) Latin, and best analyzed as only tangentially related to the &quot;lingu-&quot; morpheme that participates in the rest of English morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2250" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T17:54:35.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8466" CreationDate="2014-06-28T22:01:53.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages that rely heavily on context, such as Japanese, usually do that because of pressure to be more efficient with utterance time. Japanese has very simple syllable structure and so needs many syllables to state a given thing. To compensate for this it drops redundant information to reduce syllable count (speakers also talk extremely fast in syllables per second). Isolating languages like Chinese face a similar pressure because adding additional information requires adding additional words, which is expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But doing this comes at a cost of clarity. As was stated in another thread, redundancy allows robustness and error correction in communication. Situations where a character only hears part of a discourse and grossly misinterprets what is being said are common in Japanese (and similar languages') comedies, and pro-drop is an especially common cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have become extremely aware of these kinds of pressures and tradeoffs in the design of my isolating constructed language Caia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2014-06-28T22:01:53.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-28T22:09:16.430" Score="2" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;A different question made me wonder what is the norm for Indo-European with regard to pro-drop? I know Italic languages generally do it, while Germanic languages generally don't. What about the rest of Indo-European languages? Do we suppose Proto-Indo-European did it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: are there any Indo-European languages that have developed a topic-prominent structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-06-29T00:37:37.037" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T23:45:47.220" Title="Pro-Drop Typology in Indo-European Languages" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8473" CreationDate="2014-06-29T02:35:45.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin all usually omit subject pronouns unless the subject is somehow emphasized (although I believe it's somewhat more complicated than this in Hittite, in that some intransitive verbs, but not all, always do appear with subject clitics.) Presumably PIE was similar. The fact that there are clear cognate sets for the first- and second-person pronouns but not for a third-person pronoun also points in this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It stands to reason that Germanic languages, and other IE languages that require explicit subjects, developed this feature because of the loss or syncretism of personal endings on the verb. This is borne out by the fact that French requires subject pronouns (or proclitics) while Spanish and Italian don't, since in French, many verbs have a single form for four out of the six person-number combinations, while in those other languages the verb ending usually indicates the subject unambiguously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the topic-prominent question: Ancient Greek is somewhat topic-prominent in the sense that its word order largely depends on information-structural/discourse-pragmatic categories rather than syntactic ones, so that clauses tend to be organized in a Topic-Focus order (rather than SVO, SOV or whatever). It also allows clause-external topic NPs preceding a clause with its own subject NP, just like e.g. Japanese sentences of the form &quot;That palm tree (topic) leaves (subject) are big&quot; (example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), though these aren't very frequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T02:35:45.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-29T14:47:40.030" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working with 2 japanese corpora called 'waei' and 'reiji'.&#xA;They are legacy data, so I have no README or else to tell me the topic of either of them. But I need to know what they are about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Japanese is limited.&#xA;From what i found on the internet, mainly &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/edvakf/EijiroX/blob/master/src/background/eijiro.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eijiro corpus is a crowd-driven example database that can be divided into 4 subsets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eiji:  '英辞郎'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ryaku: '略語郎'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;waei:  '和英辞郎'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reiji: '例辞郎'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eiji is en-&gt;jp&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;waei is jp-&gt;en&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ryaku is abbreviations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reiji no Idea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know more about this (and for sure)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4809" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T14:47:40.030" Title="What are the subsets of the Eijiro corpus about?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8473" CreationDate="2014-06-29T15:07:22.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the bonus question, contemporary variants of spoken French, for instance the dialect of French you would expect urban dwellers in their 20s or early 30s to speak, is arguably topic prominent, with the subjects and/or objects rarely sitting in their canonical position but rather in right or left dislocated positions. This preeminence of subjects in topic positions fits very awkwardly with the syntax of standard French, which rigidly requires a subject for any finite verb, so the usual result is that the subject is left-dislocated and a resumptive pronouns shows up right next to the finite verb, usually in a morphologically reduced form. It also features clause-external topic NPs, as in TKR's answer about Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written examples are by nature hard to find for these spoken constructions, but the official title of the number one hit of the summer 2006 is a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zidane y va marquer (to compare with the standard Zidane va marquer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gloss: Zidane TOPIC 3rd-person-singular Future score.&#xA;Zidane is going to score&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Zidane sits in topic position and the canonical subject position required by French is filled with a morphologically reduced 3rd-person pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from my own experience (from 2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Les gens de notre génération, c'est toujours les pères, kizont du mal à communiquer avec (to compare with the standard Les gens de notre génération ont toujours du mal à communiquer avec les pères).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gloss: People of our generation TOPIC it is always the fathers FOCUS 3rd-plur-have difficulties to communicate with. People of our generation always have difficulties communicating with fathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listening to any French radio marketed to youths or watching contemporary French movies will yield dozens of other examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T15:07:22.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8429" CreationDate="2014-06-29T15:43:58.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Language Instinct&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Steven Pinker&lt;/a&gt; is a good entry point for the subject of psycholinguistics and universal grammar.  Much of it is an explanation and updating of Chomsky's work. It is written at a level that can be comprehended by non-specialists.  I would read it first as an introduction to the subject before moving on to more rigorous or mathematical works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastActivityDate="2014-06-29T15:43:58.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8429" CreationDate="2014-06-29T17:44:21.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given your background in mathematical logic, I'd say that there isn't any better place to learn about Chomsky's contributions than by reading Chomsky himself. If you want to chart the development of Chomsky's own thinking at the macro level, I'd recommend reading the following works in the order given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/a&gt; (1957)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Issues_in_Linguistic_Theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Current Issues in Linguistic Theory&lt;/a&gt; (1964)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/a&gt; (1965)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectures_on_Government_and_Binding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lectures on Government and Binding&lt;/a&gt; (1981)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Barriers (1986)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Minimalist Program (1995)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T14:34:08.033" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T14:34:08.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8481" CreationDate="2014-06-29T22:09:23.970" Score="11" ViewCount="2546" Body="&lt;p&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/a/62085/36556&quot;&gt;has been suggested&lt;/a&gt; that to construct an uncrackable yet memorable passphrase with 256-bits of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a_measure_of_password_strength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entropy&lt;/a&gt;, the passphrase should be manifested as a poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer made an estimation of the entropy per word based upon the frequency of common words but deferred to linguistic experts to determine the entropy lost by grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the expected per word entropy of random yet grammatical text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4812" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T11:46:43.583" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T11:46:43.583" Title="What is the entropy per word of random yet grammatical text?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;entropy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8480" CreationDate="2014-06-30T01:19:26.370" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The figure for entropy of any language will depend on the model we use for computing it. This is quite like how someone who speaks English well would see lesser entropy in English than someone who barely speaks the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model that Shannon used gave him a figure of 11 bits per word. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019995864903262&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grignetti (1963)&lt;/a&gt; reported 9.83 bits per word. Some of the relatively modern techniques described in Chapter 6 of the classic &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manning and Schütze textbook&lt;/a&gt; show entropy values of about 7.9 bits per word, when tested on Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt;. This example, being from a textbook that's over a decade old, is likely to have been superseded by better models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all this, if I had to guess, I'd estimate about 5 bits per word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: The paper by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019875&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Montemurro &amp;amp; Zanette (2011)&lt;/a&gt; answers your question a somewhat more directly. For English, they report an average entropy of 9.1 for shuffled text, and 5.7 for the original text. So, that shows you how much you gain by taking &quot;grammar&quot; (read &quot;word order&quot;) into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I think if someone were to devise software that takes real grammar into account, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. we could conceivably achieve about 4 bits/word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, in all this, Finnish comes out an interesting language, with an entropy of 7.1 bits/word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-06-30T12:14:56.440" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T12:14:56.440" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4697" CreationDate="2014-06-30T03:12:29.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences accurately represent one form of African American Vernacular English. The names, however, do not represent how any black Americans that I have ever met would render those names. The pronunciation of those names in the sketch is a satire on how some black Americans choose deliberately unusual names. The implication is that the substitute teacher is accustomed to non-standard names and does not know how to parse common names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject of naming choices among African Americans is a rich subject for comedians that has been mined numerous times.  It also holds interest for social scientists trying to understand those choices.  I have heard and read both in past, but I am having trouble putting my hands on such a source at this moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T03:12:29.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8484" CreationDate="2014-06-30T06:51:53.227" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like a term used by linguists that stands for the predicate minus the arguments of the verb.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible candidate is “verb group.”   This link, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/verb%20group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/verb%20group&lt;/a&gt;, defines “verb group” as follows:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;verb group  ( verb groups    plural  ) A verb group or verbal group consists of a verb, or of a main verb following a modal or one or more auxiliaries.     Examples are “walked,” “can see,” and had been waiting.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the latter definition doesn’t come from a linguistics source as far as I can tell.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible candidate is “verb phrase.”     The SIL Linguistic Glossary site (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAVerbPhrase.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAVerbPhrase.htm&lt;/a&gt;) gives two definitions:   a definition from traditional grammar that resembles the above definition of “verb group,” and a definition from generative grammar that is synonymous with “predicate.”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which term would fill the bill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T07:04:31.500" Title="What term do linguists use to denote the predicate minus the arguments of the verb?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8483" CreationDate="2014-06-30T07:04:31.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29#Predicators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;predicators&lt;/a&gt;. See footnote 13 for sources.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some people call them &lt;em&gt;predicate chains&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;verb chain&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T07:04:31.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8467" CreationDate="2014-06-30T13:56:07.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit and accordingly a lot of middle Indian and new Indian languages have for each of five positions of plosive-articulation all combinations of voiced/non-voiced and aspirated/non-aspirated stops. The alphabet is structured accordingly, for each of the positions (from back to front: velar, palatal, retroflex, dental, labial) there are five sounds (examples from the labial &lt;em&gt;varga&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-aspirated voiceless: [p]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aspirated voiceless: [pʰ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-aspirated voiced: [b]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aspirated voiced: [bʰ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nasal: [m]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this, I don't really get Ladefoged's claim cited in @limetom's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T13:56:07.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8488" CreationDate="2014-06-30T15:19:29.493" Score="4" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly there are morphological &quot;tendencies&quot; (case inflection, no TAM marking) -- but what about the semantic or syntactic characteristics (even if they are just tendencies and not universal)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose pronouns are typically nouns. Same for numbers (again, maybe only typically) -- but are there any other categories that are typically (or even always?) nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4787" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-03T03:43:04.880" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T03:43:04.880" Title="What are the necessary and sufficient characteristics of a word to be considered as nominal?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8487" CreationDate="2014-06-30T18:09:16.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question will likely vary from grammarian to grammarian. My short answer is that distribution is a necessary condition for identifying nominals and morphological criteria, e.g. plural -s, are sufficient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be classified as a nominal, a given token of a lexical item must be able to appear in a position that is associated with nominals. In other words, the distribution of the lexical item is a necessary condition. So, for instance, if an expression can appear as a subject, it is a candidate for nominal status, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Tom stopped.&#xA;&#xA; It stopped.&#xA;&#xA; The laughing stopped.&#xA;&#xA; The first stopped.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;Tom&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the laughing&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;the first&lt;/em&gt; can appear as subjects, one might classify each as (containing) a nominal. In other words, since these expressions can appear in a position that is associated with stereotypical nominals, they are all candidates for nominal status. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that satisfying a necessary condition does not mean that the candidate is definitely a nominal. It just means that it is potentially viewed as a nominal. Thus one could argue that &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; in the fourth example is actually not a nominal, but rather it is an adjective that immediately introduces an elided noun (&lt;em&gt;the first&lt;/em&gt; whatever). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sufficient condition for identifying nominals is the ability to take plural -s. Any item that forms its plural with -s is, I believe, going to be accepted by most as a nominal, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; boy  vs. boy-s&#xA;&#xA; time vs. time-s&#xA;&#xA; discussion vs. discussion-s&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these lexical items form their plural with &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, they are easily classified as nominals. The &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; condition is sufficient. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another criterion that one might employ and view as sufficient is the ability to be introduced by the definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; or the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;. If one takes this criterion as sufficient then &lt;em&gt;laughing&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; above are definitely nominals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are of course numerous expressions that have the distribution of typical nouns (necessary condition), but that one has difficulty classifying as a nominal based upon morphological criteria (sufficient condition). As Adam points out, gerunds are a good example. Gerunds have the distribution of nominals and they can be introduced by an article, but they do not take plural -s, e.g. **the laughings*, **the discussings*, etc. Thus whether or not one classifies gerunds as nominals is going to depend on which criteria one takes to be more important. My stance takes gerunds to be a separate category that straddles two other categories. Gerunds are nominals with respect to their head but verbs with respect to their dependents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the big picture, each grammarian will decide for him- or herself which criteria are most pertinent for classifying lexical items. I think there is therefore variability in how exactly the term &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt; is employed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-06-30T18:09:16.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-06-30T19:56:13.200" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;For experiment design experts, I want to know if it's possible to design an experiment on PsychoPy or Open Sesame in which the subject does a self paced reading (with measuring the reading times for each word), and then after they've read the last word, they judge the sentence whether grammatical or not (also need RT measured from the end of reading the sentence until responding to the grammaticality question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope what I'm asking is clear. I'm not familiar with the two programs but I plan on learning (well, I played with PsychPy for a mini experiment!). I just want to know whether or not I'll be able to do such an experiment with either of these of these programs before going any further in my methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4818" LastEditorUserId="4818" LastEditDate="2014-06-30T22:10:19.117" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T08:45:44.267" Title="Two tasks in one experiment design (self-paced-reading &amp; grammaticality judgment)" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8494" CreationDate="2014-07-01T04:47:54.920" Score="3" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is lemma defined for adverbs? For example, what is the lemma of &lt;em&gt;diagonally&lt;/em&gt;? An even more difficult example would be &quot;What is the lemma of &lt;em&gt;nationally&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; Is it &lt;em&gt;nationally&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;national&lt;/em&gt; ,or &lt;em&gt;nation&lt;/em&gt;? Or lemma is simply the word itself, for adverbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; it says that lemma is the canonical form chosen from a lexeme (a set of forms carrying the same meaning). Is it true if I say that since &lt;em&gt;diagonally&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diagonal&lt;/em&gt; doesn't carry the same meaning (even it changes word class), then the two of them is not part of the same lexeme, and hence one can't be the lemma of another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the case, then is there any example of an adverb that has a different lemma?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4073/what-is-the-notion-of-lemma&quot;&gt;What is the notion of lemma?&lt;/a&gt; but it doesn't seem to answer my question directly (and there is no answer in that question either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T07:22:49.900" Title="Is it sensible to ask for the lemma of an adverb?" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8493" CreationDate="2014-07-01T12:09:56.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If adverbs are an independent part of speech that cannot be inflected,&#xA;it follows from the definitions you give (which I also checked in&#xA;Wikipedia), that any adverb is trivially its own lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may be often the case in English (not my mother tongue, in case&#xA;it was not noticed). But not always: for example, some short adverbs&#xA;can be inflected for comparative and superlatives like adjectives are:&#xA;such as &quot;fast&quot;, &quot;faster&quot;, &quot;fastest&quot;. In this case, all three adverbs&#xA;lemmatise to &quot;fast&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Correction:&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fast&quot; may be seen as an adjective used adverbially, while&#xA;the corresponding French &quot;vite&quot; is an adverb, and does not inflect,&#xA;hence my possibly improper choice for an example. I was trying to get an&#xA;exemple different from &quot;well - better - best&quot; (given in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverb#Uses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;though even well can be seen as an adjective as in &quot;he is well&quot;. This seems less the&#xA;case for &quot;badly - worse - worst&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems somewhat difficult to find a clear example since words formed and used as adverbs, such as &quot;kindly&quot; from &quot;kind&quot;, can be inflected but are also used as adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No other example coming to my mind at this time, I am leaving it open for people who have a better knowledge of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverb#Adverbs_as_a_.22catch_all.22_category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;different kinds of adverbs&lt;/a&gt;, playing different&#xA;roles in sentences, and it seems that some such classes are not inflected at&#xA;all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also vary with languages, though a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverb#Adverbs_in_specific_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest that adverbs almost never inflect (at least they never say they do).&#xA;The only exception seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Austronesian languages&lt;/a&gt;, the best example being a widely known word &quot;wiki&quot; which has &quot;wikiwiki&quot; as comparative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-07-01T13:02:00.423" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T13:02:00.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-01T14:51:13.970" Score="10" ViewCount="1086" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just tried to answer a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8493&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that amounted to knowing whether&#xA;adverbs can be inflected. Then, doing a bit of search for examples,&#xA;I came up with the impression that, in many cases, I could not tell&#xA;adverbs from adjectives from looking at uses (though I wonder whether&#xA;that is not more specific of US English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the adjective &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; can be derived into the&#xA;adverb &lt;em&gt;kindly&lt;/em&gt; that is also used as an adjective (probably a million&#xA;occurrences on the web), and is indeed presented as both by Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems however that comparative is different as, for some reason,&#xA;adverbs are supposed to form the comparative only with &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;, while short&#xA;adjective can do it by inflection such as &quot;kindlier&quot;. (minor question:&#xA;Is that an absolute rule?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question really is more about the distinction between adverbs and&#xA;adjectives as distinct parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John Lawler &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4805#4811&quot;&gt;puts it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adverbs have long been called a ‘wastebasket’ category in syntax. Their definition is very general: adverbs are distinguished from adjectives, which modify nouns, by saying that ‘adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs’; to this one can add that they may also modify phrases and clauses as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I understand why nouns should have their special part of&#xA;speech as modifier, while all others get a common one. I am even less&#xA;sure when I find that very many words can be used as both, at least in&#xA;English. It does not seem to be the same in some/many other languages,&#xA;but there is no reason that parts of speech should always be the same,&#xA;or is there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would tend to paraphrase John Lawler by saying, with apologies for&#xA;the abuse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Noun&lt;/em&gt; adverb&quot; is not a type of adverb.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's a type of adverbial &lt;strong&gt;construction&lt;/strong&gt;, or usage;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one of the things some adverbs can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if the question seems naive, or is due to my limited vision of&#xA;the language. I would be interested in knowing the current wisdom on&#xA;this, and why these remarks may or may not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T14:55:02.210" Title="What really makes adverbs different from adjectives?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-01T15:23:46.500" Score="6" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin the similarity between the nominative plural and genitive singular is most striking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;porta&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and &lt;strong&gt;portae&lt;/strong&gt; (Nom/Pl), &lt;strong&gt;portae&lt;/strong&gt; (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;portarum&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;servus&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and &lt;strong&gt;servī&lt;/strong&gt; (Nom/Pl), &lt;strong&gt;servī&lt;/strong&gt; (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;servōrum&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third: &lt;em&gt;māter&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and mātrēs (Nom/Pl), mātris (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;mātrum&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fourth&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;manus&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and &lt;strong&gt;manūs&lt;/strong&gt; (Nom/Pl), &lt;strong&gt;manūs&lt;/strong&gt; (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;manuum&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fifth: &lt;em&gt;fidēs&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and fidēs (Nom/Pl), fideī (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;fidērum&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the First, Second and Fourth declensions, Nominitive Plural is the same as Genitive Singular. The other two don't follow the same pattern, but don't deviate very far from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in English, we say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and &lt;strong&gt;dogs&lt;/strong&gt; (Nom/Pl), &lt;strong&gt;dog's&lt;/strong&gt; (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;dogs'&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some other examples I've found especially while studying Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ко́мната&lt;/em&gt; (Nom/Sing) and &lt;strong&gt;ко́мнаты&lt;/strong&gt; (Nom/Pl), &lt;strong&gt;ко́мнаты&lt;/strong&gt; (Gen/Sing) and &lt;em&gt;ко́мнат&lt;/em&gt; (Gen/Pl)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T01:19:04.820" Title="Is there some intrinsic relationship between the nominative plural and genitive singular?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8473" CreationDate="2014-07-01T23:45:47.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very skeptical about the very notion of pro-drop it is not a feature of syntax but rather of text. However, a typology of subject marking across IE languages is not a bad idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavonic languages generally have rich enough verbal morphology not to need explicit subject marking. Yet, they vary in the degree they mark subject external to the verb. In a language like Czech, using the pronoun is similar to raising in English, whereas in Russian it is pretty much obligatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-01T23:45:47.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-02T05:19:02.863" Score="3" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some background: This is a conlang that I'm developing as part of my job. It's a difficult task, but I want to make it as realistic as possible. I have to make a detailed grammar so that other linguists can write dialog for characters. Obviously, I can't foresee everything, so I'd like to base the details of this language in existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a highly agglutinative language with derivational and inflectional suffixes, perhaps like Quechua. It has case. There are no prepositions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'about' should be a suffix too, but I don't see any reference for such a suffix in the literature.  Here are some sentences I'd like to be able to gloss in the grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3SG.PRES-be joke dog-about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  `it is a joke about dogs’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1SG.FUT-tell you-DAT tooth-about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘I will tell you about a tooth.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you can’t just tell me how to categorise this suffix, but any input would be helpful. For one thing, I’m not sure if it’s best classified as inflectional or derivational. Also, I cannot really think of a good gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4787" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-07-03T00:03:38.547" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T16:48:19.967" Title="What sort of morpheme is this suffix meaning ‘about'?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8496" CreationDate="2014-07-02T12:22:40.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about “intrinsic”. It is, however, main-stream Indo-Europeanist theory that the suffix * -es marks both the genitive singular and the nominative plural m/f in proto-Indo-European. Though I would concede that this does not really answer your question but merely projects it back to a hypothetical proto-language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T12:22:40.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-02T15:28:43.230" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;A.   Consider the phrase that is boldfaced in sentence (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  &quot;It can live &lt;strong&gt;both in water and land&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the phrase grammatical as it is, with no preposition before &quot;land&quot;?   Or should the phrase be &quot;both in water and on land&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.  Now consider the phrase that is boldfaced in sentence (2):   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)  &quot;He is responsible &lt;strong&gt;for the loss and damage to&lt;/strong&gt; the article.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phrase grammatical as it is, with no preposition after &quot;loss&quot;?   Or should the phrase be &quot;loss of and damage to&quot;?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="2927" LastEditDate="2014-07-03T13:07:41.317" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T13:07:41.317" Title="Are the phrases &quot;both in water and land&quot; and &quot;for the loss and damage to&quot; grammatical?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-07-02T22:34:46.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-02T19:31:02.623" Score="2" ViewCount="734" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using John Saeed's 'Semantics'. Now in chap 4 I see he is trying to formalize sentence relations such as entailment, synonymy, contradiction, etc., by some kind of different truth tables he calls composite truth tables(in which he uses arrows to show the direction of inferences for any truth value assigning to propositions.&#xA;My question is: Can we reconstruct these tables in usual truth tables as in propositional logic? Why? if yes, is there a general algorithm or rule for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. An example as a (composite) Truth tabular definition for synonymy he suggests the following:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p        ,      q&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T     -&gt;      T                                   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F     -&gt;      F                                   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T     &amp;lt;-      T                                   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F     &amp;lt;-      F&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question would be that can we find a composition of formulas containing only p and q and logical propositional connectives?(Or even predicate if necessary) [which is equivalently a usual truth table for it]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance defining synonymy as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(phi  is synonym to  psi) iff [ (phi &amp;lt;-&gt; psi) is a tautology ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3563" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T19:31:02.623" Title="Composite truth tables for sentence relations (entailment, synonymy,etc.)" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8500" CreationDate="2014-07-02T22:48:23.993" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The morpheme would probably be best described as a case suffix. In natural languages the &lt;strong&gt;oblique&lt;/strong&gt; case often has the meaning of concerning/regarding, but it also has other meanings. If you wanted a label purely for this meaning I think you'll need to make one up. One option would be &lt;strong&gt;regardive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd wonder though if you're really being tied too much to the English. Notice that in your first example the case marks a relation between two nouns, but in the second it marks a relation with the verb. Languages with productive case will have verbs which require their arguments to be in particular cases, just as many English verbs require their arguments to be prepositional phrases. Would it be possible to say &quot;1SG.FUT-tell you-DAT tooth&quot;? Without that contrast the case marker is actually almost semantically empty. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, because many languages do, but it just seems to me that the only reason the suffix is there is because the English translation would use the word 'about', not because it necessarily makes language-internal sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; is really polysemous and has two meanings: &lt;em&gt;tell to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tell about/of&lt;/em&gt;. That's why it almost always requires one of those prepositions. In your constructed language there's no reason why &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; should also have those two meanings - it would probably be more natural to have two verbs. If you did that then you wouldn't need the suffix. And if you did that then you could reconsider what the suffix actually means: does it mean a joke with dogs in it? If so then one of the spatial cases would be very appropriate. Just as in natural languages, physical relations can be extended to metaphorical relations in conlangs too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of basing it on English prepositions I'd encourage you to think about basing it on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thematic relations&lt;/a&gt;. Your conlang will be less Englishy if your cases are based on those relations rather than translations from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-07-02T22:59:35.330" LastActivityDate="2014-07-02T22:59:35.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-03T01:43:41.240" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are ancient ruins of fortresses in Tbilisi and Derbent which share a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Tbilisi there is ნარიყალა &lt;em&gt;Nariqala&lt;/em&gt; and in Derbent there is Нарын-Кала &lt;em&gt;Naryn-Kala&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of the name ნარიყალა in Georgia is that it was given this name by the Mongols and that it means &quot;little fortress&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I can't find Mongolian words meaning &quot;little&quot; or &quot;fortress&quot; which resemble the words used in the name. But they also don't resemble Georgian words with those meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only found out about the similarly named fortress in Derbent because the Russian Wikipedia articles of each are linked. I haven't found a story about the name of this fortress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could these be now obscure Mongolian words or is it just that I'm using a dictionary from modern Mongolia and the Mongols responsible spoke a very different variety?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could it be that the Mongols took words from some third language to give this name? I know the Caucasus has had many rulers over the centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could it be something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-03T08:12:27.577" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T02:25:26.900" Title="Etymology of &quot;ნარიყალა&quot; and &quot;Нарын-Кала&quot;: Mongolian? Turkic?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8505" CreationDate="2014-07-03T02:21:44.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I've found half of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish &lt;code&gt;kale&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;fortress&quot; and comes from Arabic &lt;code&gt;قلعة&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;nar&quot; / &quot;narin&quot;, that could come from a King of Georgia, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_VI_of_Georgia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;დავით VI ნარინი&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Davit VI Narini&lt;/em&gt;. The story is that there were two King Davids at that time, the other being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_VII_Ulu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;დავით VII ულუ&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Davit VII Ulu&lt;/em&gt;, with these names meaning &quot;junior&quot; and &quot;senior&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those don't seem to be the normal Georgian words for those concepts and so far I haven't found their sources to be Turkish or Mongolian either. Another puzzle ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T02:25:26.900" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T02:25:26.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8543" CreationDate="2014-07-03T03:37:24.660" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only beginning to review phrase structure rules, so let's take a very basic example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A sentence consists of a noun phrase + a verb phrase.&quot;  S --&gt; NP + VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the NP can consist of &quot;NP + NP,&quot; right?   Or NP --&gt; NP + NP + NP and so on ad infinitum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this noted in the most-used phrase structure grammar notation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T10:11:18.317" Title="Do phrase structure rules for natural languages explicitly mark which constituents can consist of coordinated constituents of the same type?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8505" CreationDate="2014-07-03T06:20:31.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second part is certainly from Arabic &lt;em&gt;qalʿa&lt;/em&gt;, a word loaned all over the Orient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part may be from a given name. Armenian has Նարին &lt;em&gt;Narin&lt;/em&gt; and Turkish has &lt;em&gt;Narin&lt;/em&gt;, both from Persian نارین &lt;em&gt;nārīn&lt;/em&gt; ‘fresh, shining, clear, polished, elegant, adorned’. Or directly from the Persian appellative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2180" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T06:20:31.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8507" CreationDate="2014-07-03T07:51:59.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_%28linguistics%29#Mismatch_in_syntactic_category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mismatches in syntactic category&lt;/a&gt; are acknowledged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T07:51:59.357" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-03T11:02:00.787" Score="2" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polar antonyms, (graded antonyms?) are those that are opposite of each other, yet may possess a range of words/states between them;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tiny, small, medium, large, huge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word or term for any words that fall between the two poles/end of the spectrum/range?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are there any references/resources that cover such words (is there a set of rules, or is it arbitrary or discretionary?)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've googled and binged, but found nothing useful so far, (nor the search here).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The only thing I can think of is looking for words that share the same concept (such as 'size' for the above) - but that seems a lot of work, and I'm not seeing a lot of resources there either (WordNet only?).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your time and any assistance you can give me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4830" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T02:44:06.567" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T02:44:06.567" Title="words between polar antonyms - what are they called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8520" CreationDate="2014-07-03T12:34:26.567" Score="5" ViewCount="1162" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various discussions, also on SE network, about the usage of &quot;gender-neutral&quot; language, where most controversies arise around using the pronoun &quot;he&quot; to address any user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such problems are caused by the fact that the English language has almost completely lost grammatical gender of the nouns, but it still has gender-specific pronouns. Therefore, any  (such as &quot;user&quot;) can be addressed as &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot; or &quot;it&quot; (in most Indo-European languages, the &quot;correct&quot; pronoun is defined, for example, in Polish &quot;user&quot; is masculine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there (many) other languages which also have the same situation, so no grammatical gender of the noun, but gender-specific pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgian or Chinese, for example, have no grammatical gender, but also no gender-specific pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1609" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T02:40:53.527" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T20:41:13.693" Title="Gender-specific pronouns in languages without grammatical gender?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8495" CreationDate="2014-07-03T12:52:47.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their definition is very general: adverbs are distinguished from adjectives, which modify nouns, by saying that ‘adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have (mostly) answered yourself by giving that definition. Adjectives describe nouns, and the adverbs describe other parts of speech. In English, the same word function often as many part of speeches, depending on the position in the sentence, so that distinction is not so obvious (distinction by slow -&gt; go slowly, but no distinction fast -&gt; go fast)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not sure I understand why nouns should have their special part of speech as modifier&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because nouns in numerous languages has a special property: gender or class. If the adjectives must agree in gender/class with the noun, you have there very clear distinction: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adjectives&lt;/strong&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;changing&lt;/strong&gt; part of speech (declension)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adverbs&lt;/strong&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;unchanging&lt;/strong&gt; part of speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the languages that has free word order the distinctive endings of the adverb allow also to determine, which words is described by them (noun or verb). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the significance of the distinction between adjective and adverb depends on the language. In Polish it's quite fundamental, but I suppose, in Chinese it's used mostly by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1609" LastActivityDate="2014-07-03T12:52:47.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-07-03T13:18:42.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most challenging (not to say, practically impossible with current development of NLP) is to translate between languages that are built around completely different concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Indo-European languages or languages like Chinese, Georgian, Swahili, the concepts are similar. You have nouns described by verbs and adjectives, those are described by adverbs. There are pronouns. There are prepositions and other modifiers, which can be attached as separate words or as prefixes or suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find something very different, look to polysynthetic languages, which have a large number of prefixes and suffixes, much bigger than in agglutinating languages like Hungarian. Look for example at the Navajo language. It is organized around verbs, not nouns. There are verbs that provide the functionality of adjectives. There are numerous moods and aspects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, even creating NLP tools to analyze a polysynthetic language is a big challenge, compared to NLP parsers for other group of languages. I'm not sure if translating between polysynthetic languages would be easier than between polysynthetic and non-polysynthetic language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limited corpora for such languages is another factor, that makes that task even harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1609" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T02:32:26.690" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T02:32:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-03T17:47:20.693" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any phrases were a conventional grammar gives multiple syntactic analysis for the same phrase (without changing the meaning) or even fails to give a consistent structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about this because I was wondering whether grammars were totally consistent or they presented some ambiguities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would word classification be a similar case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2795" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T02:28:12.713" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T11:12:02.670" Title="Is there any phrase where common syntax fails?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-04T06:37:40.630" Score="8" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many definitions of adverbs, like those in Polish grammar theory, state that adverbs are an invariable part of speech (they do not conjugate with verbs) in opposite to adjectives, which decline with nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the 'universal rule'? Is there any documented case of natural language, in which adverbs conjugate together with a modified verb (for example, by person or tense)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1609" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-07-04T18:14:53.883" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T18:31:53.027" Title="Does any language conjugate adverbs?" Tags="&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8546" CreationDate="2014-07-04T08:35:45.700" Score="2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In informal German, e.g. spoken conversation or text chat, it is possible to omit certain personal pronouns and sometimes inflected forms of &lt;em&gt;sein&lt;/em&gt; ‘to be’, too (similar to Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ich&lt;/em&gt; gehe nachhause. → Gehe nachhause.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘I’m going home.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wir&lt;/em&gt; sind gleich da. → &lt;em&gt;Sind&lt;/em&gt; gleich da. → Gleich da.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘We’ll arrive there soon.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Es&lt;/em&gt; ist kein Kuchen mehr da. → &lt;em&gt;Ist&lt;/em&gt; kein Kuchen mehr da. → Kein Kuchen mehr da.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘There’s no cake left.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Es&lt;/em&gt; regnet. → Regnet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘It’s raining.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works best and is most common for first person pronouns, either singular or plural. If a third person pronoun is omitted, it usually implies neuter, i.e. &lt;em&gt;es&lt;/em&gt; and neither &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; (m) nor &lt;em&gt;sie&lt;/em&gt; (f). Interestingly, it’s not only used if the inflected verb is unambiguous on its own, e.g. &lt;em&gt;ich bin, du bist, es ist; wir &lt;strong&gt;sind&lt;/strong&gt;, ihr seid, sie &lt;strong&gt;sind&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. However, elision may be suppressed if it would create ambiguity, e.g. not *&lt;em&gt;geh’ nachhause&lt;/em&gt; which would be equal to the imperative, although &lt;em&gt;ich geh’ nachhause&lt;/em&gt; is pretty much standard now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second person pronouns are only omitted in questions, but more often they’re just shortened, becoming a verbal enclitic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bist &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt; gleich da? → (Bist &lt;em&gt;d’&lt;/em&gt; gleich da? →) &lt;em&gt;Biste&lt;/em&gt; gleich da? → Bist gleich da?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Geht &lt;em&gt;ihr&lt;/em&gt; nachhause? → (Geht &lt;em&gt;’r&lt;/em&gt; nachhause? →) &lt;em&gt;Gehta&lt;/em&gt; nachhause? → *—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic &lt;em&gt;terminus technicus&lt;/em&gt; for this phenomenon? I’m looking for one that is more specific than &lt;strong&gt;ellipsis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T06:32:23.680" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T06:32:23.680" Title="Term for omitted pronouns?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-04T09:08:29.543" Score="8" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that at least in the Andes, a lot of people say e.g. [awa] for &quot;agua&quot;[agwa]. What's the phonological rule behind this? Is it really [w]? Why did this happen in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4787" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T08:12:12.350" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T06:12:32.823" Title="How is an intervocalic &quot;g&quot; pronounced in Andean Spanish?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8515" CreationDate="2014-07-04T18:31:53.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about conjuation in specific, but &lt;strong&gt;inflection&lt;/strong&gt; of adverbs is definitely possible. There are numerous examples in various languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: can man travel &lt;strong&gt;faster&lt;/strong&gt; than light&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: kann man &lt;strong&gt;schneller&lt;/strong&gt; als das Licht reisen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serbo-Croatian: da li može čov(j)ek putovati &lt;strong&gt;brže&lt;/strong&gt; od sv(j)etla&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all three of these languages, the bolded word is an inflected adverb (originally fast/schnell/brzo). I'm not sure about other languages, but these three do definitely have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-07-04T18:31:53.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8511" CreationDate="2014-07-05T01:35:15.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thai lacks grammatical gender, but men and women use different first person pronouns.  Actually it’s more complicated than that, there are a number of ways to refer to oneself depending on context and the relative status of speaker and addressee.  But the choices are different for men and women, generally.  For example, women who want to sound polite may need to refer to themselves as ‘mouse’ when talking to higher status people.  A linguistic study of this by Diller and Chirasombutti found that “Thai women are required by the prevailing linguistic system to ‘place themselves’ through self-reference selections in a more finely-determined social space than that required of male speakers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also correlates with sentence-final polite particles (men use &lt;em&gt;khrap&lt;/em&gt;, women &lt;em&gt;kha&lt;/em&gt;).  It’s such a thorough-going system that it would be extremely difficult to change – getting rid of it would be a radical alteration in the ways politeness is communicated.  On the other hand, you could say it’s PC even though not gender-neutral, because it can accommodate transgender people.  E.g. a biological male who identifies as a woman can use feminine pronouns/particles to assert his/her gender identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Dixon (&lt;em&gt;Basic Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; vol 2, p. 200), “very many languages” do distinguish gender in third person singular pronouns only, so you may be able to find some without grammatical gender that do so.  But be aware that there are many other possibilities cross-linguistically, as with Thai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:  A. Diller and  V. Chirasombutti, &quot;Who am ‘I’ in Thai? – The Thai First Person:  Self-reference or Gendered Self?&quot; in P. Jackson and N. Cook eds, &lt;em&gt;Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand,&lt;/em&gt; (Silkworm 2000), pp. 114-133.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T01:35:15.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8522" CreationDate="2014-07-05T07:21:23.583" Score="0" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm working on this conlang as part of my work and the deliverable is a simple grammar. To facilitate reference, I've divided up the suffixes between inflectional and derivational forms. But of course inflection and derivation are not really binary categories. There are some which are fuzzy. How would you categorize this one, which is used on nouns in 'have' constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;four dog-pl-have be-1sg&#xA;'I have four dogs.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cat-have be-1sg-neg&#xA;'I don't have a cat.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contrasts with the genitive:  dog-pl-1poss I-gen 'My dogs'.&#xA;Based on the languages with which you are familiar, this more inflectional or derivational? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2014-07-05T10:36:36.433" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T08:13:54.393" Title="Is this nominal suffix more inflectional or derivational?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8521" CreationDate="2014-07-05T09:51:16.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the somewhat nonesense glosses (are you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; going to stick a verb as a suffix onto a noun :P), what you marked now for is case; it's possibly a possessive, could also call it genitive. Your possessive construction is basically now &lt;code&gt;noun-POSS copula&lt;/code&gt;. This firmly falls into the category of inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelated to the question, I suggest you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/LGR08.02.05.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR)&lt;/a&gt;; they really help with both conlanging and actual linguistics work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-07-05T09:51:16.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8530" CreationDate="2014-07-05T14:19:28.580" Score="4" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8467/is-unvoiced-unaspirated-a-category-of-speech/8486#8486&quot;&gt;Is unvoiced &amp;amp; unaspirated a category of speech?&lt;/a&gt; it was pointed out to me, that the aspirates in Indic languages, notably Sanskrit, are from a truly phonetic perspective not aspirates, but breathy-voiceds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there's some things I wonder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I guess this reconstruction of pronounciation is based on modern Indian languages. That correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not: how is the reconstruction being done?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(and this is the cruncher:) Is there any such reconstruction of the stops of PIE, and if yes: what is it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T12:06:27.817" Title="Were the so-called aspirates of PIE ever aspirated?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-06T01:41:58.400" Score="2" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Chappell &amp;amp; McGregor (1996: 4) there are four typical types of inalienably possessed nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spatial relationships such as the ’top’ or ’front’ of something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;physical parts, especially human body parts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kinship bonds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;objects which are essential for a person’s survival&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is frequently recognised that inalienability does not actually express the semantic category of possession but instead the category of &lt;em&gt;meronomy&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;partonomy&lt;/em&gt;, expressing that one noun is related to another by being part of it. So as Goddard &amp;amp; Wierzbicka (2002: 50-51) say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both possessive constructions and “body part” constructions can be extended in various language-specific ways to include other types of semantic relations. In particular, it can be argued that so-called “inalienable possession” constructions in many languages are based on the prototype of the body part construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physical parts and spatial relationships can be easily understood as being expressions of meronomy, but it's harder to see how kin terms relate to meronomy. (It is similarly hard for the essential objects type, but that's for another question.) To complicate matters further, I have examples from two languages where the kin terms do express meronomy, &lt;em&gt;but they express very different types of part-relations&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Koromu (Papuan, PNG) the kin terms express a relationship of being part of a family (Priestly, 2008: 285, emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;everyone in this place thinks like this about some people&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;“these people are all parts of one thing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am part of the same thing”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;they don’t think like this about other people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Kakabai (Oceanic, PNG) the kin terms express a relationship of being part of the movements of your blood (my personal research):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;“tauḡa-gu”         banina   ba  tagu  kwasini-gu  isuna&#xA;older.sibling-1sg  meaning  is  1sg   blood-1sg   part-of-the-goings-of&#xA;‘“My older sibling” means [this sibling] is part of the movements of my blood’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are many more examples where kin terms express some other meaning other than a straight forward (metaphorical) part relation. So why are they typical inalienable nouns when there is no consistent part relation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;References&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chappell, Hilary &amp;amp; William McGregor. 1996. Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability. In Hilary Chappell &amp;amp; William McGregor (eds.), &lt;em&gt;The grammar of inalienability&lt;/em&gt;, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Goddard, Cliff &amp;amp; Anna Wierzbicka. 2002. Semantic primes and universal&#xA;grammar. In Cliff Goddard &amp;amp; Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), &lt;em&gt;Meaning and universal&#xA;grammar&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 1, 41–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Priestly, Carol. 2008. The semantics of “inalienable possession” in Koromu (PNG). In Cliff Goddard (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Cross-linguistic semantics&lt;/em&gt;, 277–299. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T06:33:53.523" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T06:33:53.523" Title="Why are kinship terms typical examples of inalienablity but not meronomy?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;possession&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8523" CreationDate="2014-07-06T10:48:12.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody knows what PIE sounded like. The symbols used to represent PIE phonemes are essentially &quot;algebraic&quot; symbols. When we propose a PIE phoneme *bh, this is merely shorthand for &quot;the PIE phoneme which is reflected by Skt /bh/, Greek /ph/, Latin /f/ etc.&quot; The conventional transcription has no phonetic content.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T10:48:12.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-06T11:27:29.813" Score="2" ViewCount="6447" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical charactersitic of inflectional suffixes is that they are productive (can occur on many words) and obligatory (are required by virtue of certain grammatical constraints). Simplistic though this may be, I was wondering about the suffix -er in English. This suffix is typically derivational insofar as it changes the category of the word bake&gt;baker, for example. But is it not also highly productive? Fish&gt;fisher, sleep&gt;sleeper, mouse&gt;mouser, eat&gt;eater, smell&gt;smeller, read&gt;reader etc etc etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what basis is this form truly derivational then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T16:44:08.787" Title="The suffix -er in English: Why is this derivational?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2014-07-06T12:49:46.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-er&lt;/strong&gt; a derivational suffix because it changes the word class to which the entire expression belongs. That is what defines derivational affixes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bake&lt;/strong&gt; is a verb, but &lt;strong&gt;bak-&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a noun. (I assume the stem &lt;strong&gt;bak&lt;/strong&gt; because the final letter &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is not pronounced.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Productivity is not a sufficient criterion for the distinction of inflection and derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English uses zero-conversion, i.e. the possibility that one expression belongs to more than one word class, e.g. &lt;em&gt;The dog wants to &lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;a &lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. That means that one must take care when looking at the verb/noun distinction in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T12:49:46.870" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2014-07-06T13:04:19.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, subject pronouns in the Vorfeld (spec-C) can be omitted. (I think Hubert Haider discusses this phenomenon in one of his books.) Note that this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; possible in subordinated clauses:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1. a.  Ich gehe nach Hause.&#xA;    b.  Gehe nach Hause.&#xA; 2. a.  Er sagt, ich gehe nach Hause.&#xA;    b. *Er sagt, gehe nach Hause.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that (2b) is ungrammatical even though a subordinating conjunction is missing in (2.a). The word order in (2a) clearly shows V2-order, which is associated with main clause word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning your second set of examples, you are quite correct in assuming cliticization. The position, in which this is possible in many languages, is called the &lt;em&gt;Wackernagel position&lt;/em&gt;, technically the second position in the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T13:04:19.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8523" CreationDate="2014-07-06T17:09:58.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although fdb is correct that a symbol like *bh should not be taken to imply any specific phonetic content, these phonemes obviously had such content, and it's possible to speculate about what it was. The facts that lead people to think that the PIE &quot;voiced aspirates&quot; were breathy voiced stops as in Indic have to do with their reflexes in the daughter languages, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Indic, they appear as breathy voiced stops. (In some modern Indic languages they remain such, in others they have become plain voiced stops, and in some Gypsy dialects they have become voiceless aspirates, as in ancient Greek.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Greek, they appear as voiceless aspirated stops.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In several branches (Anatolian, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Iranian, Germanic, Armenian), they appear as voiced stops.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Italic, they appear to have first changed to voiceless fricatives, with various later developments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were stops. (A change of stops to fricatives in Italic is much more likely than a change of fricatives to stops in all the other languages.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were voiced. (They're voiced in the large majority of daughter languages; also, Indic has a separate voiceless aspirate series with which they contrast.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They seem, on the evidence of Indic and Greek, to have had some kind of phonation feature that distinguished them from the plain voiced stops. They must have been distinct from these in some way (since they show different reflexes in about half the branches), and the distinction seems to have had to do with a more open glottis state.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting all these features together, you arrive at breathy voiced stops. That said, this conclusion is far from unproblematic: first, because only one sub-branch (Indic) then actually preserves the original sounds into the historical period, which is maybe a bit strange; second and more importantly, because the system of contrasts that you end up with for PIE stops (voiceless / voiced / breathy voiced) is cross-linguistically either extremely rare or nonexistent. So it's still an unsolved problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T17:09:58.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8495" CreationDate="2014-07-06T19:25:24.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we step off linguistic terminology to some philosophy, everything becomes more straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjectives define properties of &lt;em&gt;&quot;things&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Adverbs define properties of &lt;em&gt;&quot;relations&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human logic operates with two fundamental categories, &lt;em&gt;&quot;things&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;relations&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Things&lt;/em&gt; are linguistically represented with nouns, pronouns, and noun-like entities like Gerund and Verbal Noun in English (other languages have similar constructs as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Relations&lt;/em&gt; can be of two fundamental types: (1) relation between two &lt;em&gt;&quot;things&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in a sentence or a &lt;em&gt;&quot;thing&quot;&lt;/em&gt; against itself, or time, location, etc. (verbs and verb-like constructs) and (2) relation between a &lt;em&gt;&quot;thing&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and similar &lt;em&gt;&quot;things&quot;&lt;/em&gt; out of the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;em&gt;adverbs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;adjectives&lt;/em&gt; belong to the 2nd category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjective&lt;/strong&gt;. Think of what is the actual purpose of &quot;green&quot; in &quot;a green apple&quot;? Here, &quot;green&quot; defines a certain &lt;strong&gt;property (attribute)&lt;/strong&gt; by which this apple is different to other apples out of the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;strong&gt;Adverb&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;Fast&quot; in &quot;to run fast&quot; denotes a relation of a certain &quot;way to run&quot; against other &quot;ways to run&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Obviously, &lt;strong&gt;Adverb&lt;/strong&gt; can be &quot;attached&quot; to an adjective: &quot;a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; green apple&quot; denotes some &lt;strong&gt;property (attribute)&lt;/strong&gt; of &quot;greenness&quot; against other &quot;greennesses&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...or to another adverb: &quot;to run &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; fast&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we can answer your question in a very simple manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why nouns should have their special part of speech as modifier, while all others get a common one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not because of nouns. It's because of &quot;things&quot; and &quot;relations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives define &lt;strong&gt;attributes&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;things&lt;/strong&gt; (nouns, pronouns, etc.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Adverbs define &lt;strong&gt;attributes&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;relations&lt;/strong&gt;, where &lt;strong&gt;relations&lt;/strong&gt; can be actions (verbs) or other &lt;strong&gt;attributes&lt;/strong&gt; (adjectives or adverbs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Yet again, sorry for a rather philosophic answer than a linguistic one. I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest this, but I'm sincerely not aware about any academic researches over this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2014-07-06T19:39:59.490" LastActivityDate="2014-07-06T19:39:59.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2014-07-07T00:55:28.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you've said the correct distinguishing factors between derivational and inflectional affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary factor I think is that derivational affixes often change the part of speech of a lexical item, and inflectional affixes don't. What this means is that the concept of the lexical item changes substantially. There is a huge difference between the concept of &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt;, a physical action, and the concept of &lt;em&gt;a runner&lt;/em&gt;, a person who regularly runs because of it being their habit or job. These conceptual differences mean that derived words are often listed separately in dictionaries. Additionally, semantic change will affect the related parts of speech separately. Consider the difference between &lt;em&gt;a lecture&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to lecture&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a lecturer&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;To lecture&lt;/em&gt; has changed it's meaning so that it now almost always means to tell someone off with a long speech. &lt;em&gt;A lecturer&lt;/em&gt; retains the original meaning of someone who teaches through speeches. &lt;em&gt;A lecture&lt;/em&gt; has both meanings. But note that not all derivational affixes do change the part of speech: the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ship&lt;/em&gt; turns the noun &lt;em&gt;friend&lt;/em&gt; into another noun, &lt;em&gt;friendship&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inflectional affixes generally don't communicate real-world or dictionary information. They instead communicate semantic categories. There's no hard and fast rule about whether something will be a semantic category or not, but we all know the really common ones: plurality, tense, agreement markers etc. No English dictionary would have separate entries for &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dogs&lt;/em&gt; because the concepts are too similar, which is a good indicator that the plural marker is inflectional. No English dictionary will have separate entries for &lt;em&gt;jumped&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;jumping&lt;/em&gt;, so those tense/aspect markers are inflectional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's a little bit hard to decide whether an affix is derivational or inflectional. Which one is &lt;em&gt;dis-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;disclose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T00:55:28.980" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-07T06:04:15.530" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do any languages distinguish between indefinite and definite articles thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one beer 1sg-drink `I drank A beer.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;beer 1sg-drink `I drank THE/A beer.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, is it possible for a language to mark only the indefinite meaning? In this case, there is no definite meaning, strictly speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term or terms that describe this kind of scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T06:04:15.530" Title="(in)definite articles" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21131" CreationDate="2014-07-07T08:13:54.223" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between finite and nonfinite complement clause? Typologically speaking, what are the criteria I could use to distinguish one from the other two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am not really asking for an analysis of a particular example (rather for criteria in general), here's an example to fuel discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1sg-know Joao-GEN mandioca-ACC eat-NMZ-3POSS &#xA;'I know (that) Joao eats mandioca' &#xA;(lit. 'I know of Joao's mandioca eating.')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2014-07-07T10:08:39.757" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T17:10:06.507" Title="Criteria to distinguish finite from nonfinite complement clauses?" Tags="&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2014-07-07T16:44:08.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not convinced that either one of these answers in correct. Most Indo-European languages have suffixes that make verbs into participles (i.e. adjectives), like English go &gt; going, Latin amo &gt; amans, Greek legō &gt; legōn. All grammars describe these as inflectional elements. They are not listed separately in dictionaries. I have the feeling that the distinction between “inflections” and “derivational suffixes” is largely artificial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T16:44:08.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-07T17:48:55.753" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know or can suggest a term for the following expressions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;lady-in-waiting  &#xA;brother-in-law  &#xA;sergent-at-arms  &#xA;bride-to-be  &#xA;etc.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expressions like those above are special for (at least) two reasons:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. The plural attaches to the first noun, rather than to the entire expression, hence  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ladies-in-waiting  &#xA;brides-to-be&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*lady-in-waitings &#xA;*bride-to-bes &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. The dependent PPs do not seem to be modifiable, hence the next examples are bad:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*lady-in-long-waiting  &#xA;*bride-to-be-late  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more that distinguishes these expressions from nouns with adjunct PPs, but this should suffice as background.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas what these expressions are called? Or do you have a suggestion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T17:48:55.753" Title="What's the term for N-PP expressions such as &quot;lady-in-waiting&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8539" CreationDate="2014-07-07T19:51:02.780" Score="1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see IPA representations of words (e.g in Wikipedia) that render the American accent of English (instead of British). Is there any agreement on which English accent IPA should render or does it depend on the authors native accent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T20:45:10.343" Title="IPA for English: British or US standard?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8537" CreationDate="2014-07-07T20:44:48.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, there's the question of what exactly constitutes &quot;British&quot; English: is it RP, Estuary, something else? It's usually taken to be RP, so let's go with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The agreement is basically: do what standard you adhere to, better if you know both ways. Nothing forces you to use General American over RP or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T20:44:48.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8537" CreationDate="2014-07-07T20:45:10.343" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA can be used to render any dialect or accent you like.  (Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/vowels.html&quot;&gt;an example where IPA is used&lt;/a&gt; to show differences between two dialects of English.)  It can be used in a narrow way, transcribing more precisely the sounds of a particular accent; or in a broad way, ignoring certain distinctions in favor of larger features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English itself has no standard dialect, anyhow.  Even the high-level split between American and British English is far from sufficient to describe how English is actually pronounced across the globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2014-07-07T20:45:10.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8541" CreationDate="2014-07-07T21:39:44.200" Score="3" ViewCount="865" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/lexicon.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English and Chinese, for example, put the subject first, the verb in&#xA;  the middle, and the object at the end for an SVO word order. Irish and&#xA;  Biblical Hebrew are VSO languages that put the verb first. Latin and&#xA;  Japanese are SOV languages that put the verb at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that in all of these it is the position of the verb (1,2 or 3 in the triplet) that changes. The object never precedes the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q : Is this always true in all human languages? And untold bonus glory for speculation on - why might this be so?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4848" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T07:56:24.523" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T07:56:24.523" Title="Does subject precede object in all natural languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8540" CreationDate="2014-07-08T07:54:22.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the comments on the question provided a summary answer: NO. This can can be summarized in two points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are languages where Object-Subject word order is possible (albeit rare).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even in the languages nominally Subject-Object dominant, it is possible and indeed common to reverse the order to Object-Subject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are two aspects of this question worth answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it worth even tracking the SOV order in languages and then asking this question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the subject more likely to precede object across all human languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re 1. The whole SOV/VSO/... thing is mostly an artefact of a linguistic theory that is concerned with the surface order of words in a sentence. It is clearly a remnant of the analytic nature of the languages spoken or focused on by the theoreticians. Not all traditions are at all concerned with word order nearly as much and will ask questions with a different bias. It may be worth keeping an eye on how the ordering of words is used to express certain meanings, but the order itself is really incidental. Of course, the whole subject/object deal is itself incidental to concerns of agent/patient relationship (experts on ergativity would do well to weigh in, here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re 2. Given the revised emphasis and refocusing of our concern about word order from 1, we can ask why (with all the caveats in mind) do people tend to express the agent/patient relationship in a linear order going from agent to patient. The answer probably lies in what I would like to call (inspired by George Lakoff) 'motivated iconicity'. If time and action are conceptualized in space, then when that space is conceived as directional away from the actor, language may replicate that direction with word order. There are no universals here, just tendencies that may aggregate to very strong trends. There's some research on iconicity but not nearly enough to make this more than a supposition. But perhaps one worth further investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T07:54:22.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-08T10:06:19.320" Score="0" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a research concerning error analysis. I want to ask whether these errors would affect what meaning a native speaker will interpret these sentences as conveying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In magic realism it’s the element of magic realism that shows the&#xA;real world. &lt;strong&gt;It’s mean&lt;/strong&gt; that the real setting, the real life,&#xA;show, showed that it is the realism, the word realism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Defocalization &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; in magic realism narrative text because this&#xA;style has &lt;strong&gt;it owns&lt;/strong&gt; way to see the perspective of narrator toward the&#xA;story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible would you give some explanations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4844" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-07-17T08:52:41.520" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T08:52:41.520" Title="Do these errors affect how native speakers understand these sentences?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8507" CreationDate="2014-07-08T10:11:18.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not directly aware of a source that produces phrase structure rules for coordinate structures, but I can imagine a notation like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; NP --&amp;gt; NP, ... and NP&#xA;&#xA; VP --&amp;gt; VP, ... and VP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these rule, the three dots &quot;...&quot; represent an unspecified number of coordinate NPs or VPs, zero to very many. Note that the &quot;and&quot; is positioned immediately in front of the final NP or VP in the coordinate structure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Thomas Gross' answer and the comments above point to something more important about the question. If one is trying to capture the essence of coordination in natural language using traditional phrase structure rules, the attempt is going to fail miserably. Phrase structure rules as the are commonly understood do not begin to provide the theoretical apparatus necessary to shed light on the nature of coordination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps above all, phrase structure rules alone cannot handle non-constituent conjuncts, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Did he] or [did she] solve the problem?&#xA;&#xA;Fred called [you yesterday] and [me today]. &#xA;&#xA;Does [he write] and [she read] the poems? &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coordinated strings marked by the brackets in these cases do not qualify as any recognizable unit of syntax in most theories, i.e. they are not VPs or NPs or ... To deal with such data, many theories have to introduce additional machinery, for instance they assume ellipsis in terms of conjunction reduction or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;right node raising&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem for phrase structure rules is associated with conjuncts that are distinct in syntactic category as pointed out by Thomas Gross, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Sam is [conservative] and [a closet Republican].&#xA;&#xA; Larry is [unhappy] and [trying to find a new job]. &#xA;&#xA; Jim called [last night] and [during class today]. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coordinated strings are distinct in syntactic category in these cases (Adj+NP, Adj+VP, NP+VP), hence an account of such cases in terms of phrase structure rules is quite at a loss; there are hardly any conceivable rules that could capture such coordinate structures. The notion of syntactic function is a more promising way to approach such data, i.e. the coordinated strings must be alike in syntactic function, as pointed out by Thomas Gross. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greater point is that one is not going to get far with phrase structure rules as they are commonly understood. They are quite incapable of shedding light on the nature of coordination and many other areas of syntax. When it comes to coordination, I have worked on them extensively and would be happy to point to relevant literature that provides another means of analysis (and one that I think is much more promising than phrase structure rules), if anyone is interested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T10:11:18.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8542" CreationDate="2014-07-08T10:53:06.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble parsing both of those sentences. Even if I make the change from &quot;It's mean&quot; to &quot;It means&quot;, example one is still is not grammatical. &quot;show, showed&quot; and &quot;the realism, the word realism&quot; double up the verb and direct object of the subordinate clause in a non-standard way.  The only way I can make sense of this is in oral speech where the speaker changed their phrasing mid-sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example is even less clear.  I tried to read it as &quot;use&quot; and &quot;uses&quot; and to change &quot;has it owns&quot; to &quot;has its own&quot; and &quot;of narrator&quot; to &quot;of the narrator&quot;, but the sentence is still lacking something, probably a direct object for &quot;uses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your actual question, the meaning is altered because it is not clear what point the author is trying to make and the whole of communication is altered because you end up going over it several times to try to get the intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I somehow think (without any particular evidence) that when discussing an abstract topic, it is more important to get the grammar right than when discussing concrete topics because it is harder for the listener or reader to make the leap to what the speaker or author is really trying to convey.  If a non-native speaker was talking about, say, a dog rather than the qualities of a genre of literature, you could use general knowledge to fill in some of the gaps and understand the intent better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T10:53:06.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8514" CreationDate="2014-07-08T11:12:02.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If ambiguity is what the question is most concerned with, I think the short answer to the question is no: distinct structural analyses of an utterance almost always point to distinct meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, however, numerous sources of ambiguity, syntax being one and lexical meaning being another. If the grammar does not have a way of acknowledging the cues that disambiguate the utterance at hand, an incorrect structural analysis is easily possible. Consider the following sentence in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; We like the baby in the crib. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence might mean that there are two babies, one in the crib and one on the floor, and we like the one in the crib, not the one on the floor, or it could mean that we like to keep the baby in the crib as opposed to, say, on the floor. The difference in meaning is captured in the syntax in terms of whether &lt;em&gt;in the crib&lt;/em&gt; is a dependent of &lt;em&gt;baby&lt;/em&gt; or of &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;. A second example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a Peruvian silver tray&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This noun phrase might mean that the tray is made of Peruvian silver, or it could mean that they tray is Peruvian, whereby the silver may or may not be Peruvian. The ambiguity is again captured in the syntax in terms of whether &lt;em&gt;Peruvian&lt;/em&gt; is a dependent of &lt;em&gt;silver&lt;/em&gt; or of &lt;em&gt;tray&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conventional grammar is going to fail to produce a plausible structural analysis of these cases if it does not have a means of disambiguating the meaning. The cues that are important for disambiguation are usually present in context, but if the grammar does not have a way to register these cues, the danger of producing the wrong syntactic analysis is great. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;a Peruvian silver tray&lt;/em&gt;, the disambiguation cue comes in the form of intonation. If the phrasal accent is on &lt;em&gt;Peruvian&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. a &lt;em&gt;PeRUvian silver tray&lt;/em&gt;, the tray is made of Peruvian silver, but if the accent is on &lt;em&gt;silver&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. &lt;em&gt;a Peruvian SILver tray&lt;/em&gt;, the tray is Peruvian. Concerning the first example, i.e. &lt;em&gt;We like the baby in the crib&lt;/em&gt;, I am not aware of an intonational cue that disambiguates the utterance. I assume, rather, that the general meaning context would disambiguate the utterance, e.g. whether or not there is more than one baby in the discourse situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again, if the grammar being used does not have a means of acknowledging these cues, it will often produce an incorrect syntactic analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar situation obtains for lexical ambiguity, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I am blue today. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence could mean that I am wearing blue today, or more likely, it means that I feel sad today. This ambiguity resides completely with the meaning of &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt;; it is therefore not in the syntactic structure, since both meanings have the same syntax; &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective in both cases. The disambiguation cue is present in the context of utterance. If I am standing in front of you wearing blue, then it is clear which meaning is intended. Syntax, however, has little to do with such cases.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, there are in fact certain cases in which two underlying syntactic structures are assumed for one and the same unambiguous phrase. This has been proposed for certain noun phrases, e.g. &lt;em&gt;the old fish with stripes&lt;/em&gt;. Such noun phrases behave in a unique way with respect to diagnostics for constituent structure, and this has motivated some to propose that there are in fact two distinct underlying structures for such prases. In my view however, that sort of approach is a cop out. One might as well throw up one's hands and declare that one has no idea what is behind the confusing results delivered by the diagonostics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T11:12:02.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2014-07-08T11:45:19.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered various analyses of and terms for the phenomenon, &lt;em&gt;topic drop&lt;/em&gt; being one of them and &lt;em&gt;left edge ellipsis&lt;/em&gt; being another. I have used the latter term, i.e. &lt;em&gt;left edge ellipsis&lt;/em&gt; (LEE), in my writings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples in the question all submit to an analysis in terms of left edge ellipsis (LEE). LEE occurs in relaxed registers (everyday conversation, emails, text messages, etc.). The ellipsis reaches in from the left edge of the utterance, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (Do you want) Coffee or tea?&#xA;&#xA; (Have you) Been working a lot lately?&#xA;&#xA; (I am) Quite tired. (I) Will go to bed soon.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LEE cannot occur if the elided material is not at left edge of the utterance, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *Now (I am) quite tired.&#xA;&#xA; *Soon (I) will go to bed.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German examples in the question all submit to an analysis in terms of LEE. In fact the ellipsis of just a 1st or 2nd person pronoun is a particularly frequent type of LEE in German, English, and many other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can list a couple of sources (not by me) that discuss the phenomenon in its various forms if anyone is interested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T11:45:19.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8542" CreationDate="2014-07-08T14:23:01.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're both ungrammatical, but it's clear that what's happened is misplacing the final {&lt;code&gt;-Z&lt;/code&gt;}.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;It's mean&lt;/em&gt; should be &lt;em&gt;It means&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;it owns&lt;/em&gt; should be &lt;em&gt;its own&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could easily happen in a transcript of spoken material, or it could happen during speech by a learner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find those little intrusive {&lt;code&gt;-Z&lt;/code&gt;} morphemes in English, like English articles and auxiliaries and pronouns and empty prepositions, to be a mine field of possible mistakes and misunderstandings. Lucky for me I learned it before I went to school. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-07-08T14:23:01.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-08T17:36:45.280" Score="0" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, but when I make the sound which should be /tʃ/, I have been told that I begin it by placing the tip of my tongue briefly between my teeth, as if I was going to start a dental fricative. It strikes me that this is somewhat unusual &amp;ndash; the tip of the tongue should start behind the front teeth, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more accurate way of describing the sound I am producing? i.e. is it still a voiceless palato-alveolar affricate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Having read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17245/how-to-pronounce-ch-j-sounds&quot;&gt;this on English Langage Learners SE&lt;/a&gt; I think I may be producing a sound closer to [t͡ɕ] [voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate], although my anglophone-ears struggle to distinguish these two.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4855" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T10:18:16.487" Title="What name should be given to this allophone of /tʃ/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;idiolect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8550" CreationDate="2014-07-08T22:01:33.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're doing it by touching your teeth, you're more likely pronouncing (if I'm reading correctly) either /tθ/ (voiceless &lt;strong&gt;dental&lt;/strong&gt; affricate) or /t̪ɕ/ (voiceless &lt;strong&gt;denti-alveopalatal&lt;/strong&gt; affricate). A voiceless &lt;strong&gt;postalveolar&lt;/strong&gt; affricate would rather be /tʃ/. I'm not actually sure of the exact sound you're making as I can't hear you, but this is my best guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-07-09T08:22:57.997" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T08:22:57.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8553" CreationDate="2014-07-08T22:55:32.777" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question may be a bit basic - I'm reading Rowlett's &quot;The Syntax of French&quot; (great text), without much background in syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This approach to theta-role assignment also means that thematic dependants only ever merge as specifiers; they can't be complements. Thus, direct objects and dependent clauses are merged as specifiers rather than complements. The complement position is restricted to a grammatical (rather than a thematic) dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to his last sentence, I am looking for some examples which illustrate the difference. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2194" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T10:10:47.717" Title="Example of a 'grammatical' (vs thematic) dependency" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8552" CreationDate="2014-07-09T00:07:20.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within the book itself, you have a perfect example on page 126 (maybe your 125 because the paragraph you quote is on my page 12).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jean, il m'aime bien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NP &lt;em&gt;Jean&lt;/em&gt; has no thematic relation to &lt;em&gt;aime&lt;/em&gt;: it obviously does not fit anywhere in the thematic hierarchy outlined by Rowlett (and you can omit it and still get a perfectly well-formed sentence). Examples of thematic dependency abound in the sections 2.1.3 and 2.2.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that within this perhaps seemingly innocuous paragraph is hidden (in plain sight) a very strong and very controversial theory of universal rigid mapping from syntax to semantics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T00:07:20.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8557" CreationDate="2014-07-09T03:52:56.713" Score="4" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are complement clauses that contain finite verbs be noun phrases?   Consider English's &quot;that&quot; complementizer.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.  Clauses introduced with &quot;that&quot; can be be replaced with pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)   I know that the insects will rule the Earth.  --&gt;   I know it.   I know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.  &quot;That&quot; clauses can also be subjects, objects, and complements of at least one copular verb.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)   That Erin left Joe bothered me.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3)   I heard that Erin left Joe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4)   Sue told me that Erin left Joe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5)   The truth is that Erin left Joe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C.   But I can't think of an example in which a &quot;that&quot; clause can serve as an object complement.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6)   *I find the music that it sickens me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D.   And the choice of prepositions that can take &quot;that&quot; clauses as objects seems restricted.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7)   Everything was fine, except that Mary had fallen ill.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8)   *The apartment was okay before that the rats showed up.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.   And since when can a noun phrase have tense?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my quandary may lie in my mis-analysis of some of the preceding sentences.   Part of my quandary may have to do with the possibility that the choice of finite vs. non-finite complement clauses in given contexts vary from language to language.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T06:51:10.260" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T06:51:10.260" Title="Are complement clauses with finite verbs noun phrases?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8554" CreationDate="2014-07-09T05:34:45.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there's no reason to analyse them as noun phrases. We can test it by considering whether they can occur in the types of phrases that noun phrases can occur in, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an adjective modifier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*big that Erin left Joe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a possessor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*your that Erin left Joe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or with a plural or quantifier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*five that Erin left Joes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are ungrammatical which is strong evidence that these &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; phrases are not noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T05:34:45.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8552" CreationDate="2014-07-09T08:17:50.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've now read the relevant section. I indeed find the quote on my page 11. The quote appears in Section 1.5, which presents the &quot;Theoretical Framework&quot; employed in the book. This framework is a highly idealized version of syntactic structure that builds on some very specific presuppositions about the nature of syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Lawler's comment is on the money in my view. One has to swallow a lot to go with this sort of understanding of syntax. In particular, the following presuppositions are present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All syntactic structure is binary branching.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All syntactic structure is right branching.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous empty elements are present in the structure, i.e. theta heads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All arguments merge as specifiers, whereby the predicates to which they belong appear originally to their right as complements of the empty theta heads.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leftward movement (actually copying) occurs on a massive scale in order to achieve surface word order. For instance, verbal predicates must move leftward in order to precede their object arguments, e.g. one wants &lt;em&gt;eat meat&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;meat eat&lt;/em&gt;, one wants &lt;em&gt;believe that it works&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;that it works believe&lt;/em&gt;, one wants &lt;em&gt;say it&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;it say&lt;/em&gt;. etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, this is junk science. It sounds impressive, but it's nonsense. In order to buy into this view of syntactic structure, one has to take the leap of syntactic faith that I associate with much of Chomskyan syntax. I even think many Chomskyans would reject the understanding of syntax that is put forward in the book. The approach is, for example, contrary to basic notions of X-bar theory, in which complements (as well as many specifiers) are arguments. On the approach in the book, all complements are actually predicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer the actual question, my understanding of the final sentence in the passage is that the head-complement dependency associated with standard X-bar-type structures is actually present, but its presence is manifest as the dependency between the theta head, which is always an empty element!, and the predicate, which is represented by X in the complement position. The empty theta head θ takes a predicate X as its complement; a dependency exists between the two. But since the dependency is unlike the dependencies that are traditionally assumed, Rowlett calls it a &quot;grammatical dependency&quot;, a nebulous term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence Rowlett appears to be stipulating two basic types of dependencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical dependencies between empty theta heads θ and their predicate Xs (head-complement dependencies) and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thematic dependencies between empty theta heads θ and their specificiers (specifier-head dependencies), these specifiers being what one traditionally understands to be the arguments of the predicate Xs. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowlett is thus pursuing an approach to syntax that takes specifiers to be the arguments of complements in a sense, as opposed to the arguments of head predicates, which is much more standard. I think such an approach is going to be difficult for many a syntactician to swallow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-09T10:10:47.717" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T10:10:47.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8554" CreationDate="2014-07-09T14:14:35.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The finite clause (with or without the complementizer &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;) is a different syntactic category than the noun phrase, as can be seen from the fact that finite clauses have a different distribution than noun phrases. Some examples are given in your question and in @curiousdannii’s answer above; two more examples are given in (1) and (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a.  I resent it that he never visited&#xA;    b.  * I resent it his behavior&#xA;    c.  I resent his behavior   &#xA;(2) a.  They consider [his behavior] rude&#xA;    b.  *They consider [that he left early] rude  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) demonstrates that certain verbs that take finite clauses as semantic complements can (or must) be separated from them by non-referential &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;; but this is not an option for noun phrase complements of the same verbs. (2) demonstrates that noun phrases can appear between a verb that selects them as argument and a predicate (&lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt; above) that is also an argument of the verb; but this is not an option for finite clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, phrases of different &lt;strong&gt;syntactic categories&lt;/strong&gt; may sometime overlap with respect to the &lt;strong&gt;grammatical functions&lt;/strong&gt; they realize in the sentence. Both noun phrases and finite clauses (with the complementizer &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;) may be the subject of a sentence, for example. You can read a little bit more about the difference between syntactic category and grammatical function in &lt;a href=&quot;http://contextors.com/Syntactic-Structure-Trees?ref=1077&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2715" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T14:14:35.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-09T18:10:20.417" Score="1" ViewCount="829" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to test whether people are able to distinguish different phonemes from each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;men (/mɛn/) and man (/mæn/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user of the software is supposed to hear the correct pronunciation and then decide which of the two choices he heard. &#xA;I'm searching for a good list of word pairs that especially covers sound pairs that are hard to distinguish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't care about the language of the words as long as the resource clearly lists IPA and I can somehow access an audio file with the correct pronunciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2081" LastEditDate="2014-07-09T22:17:07.043" LastActivityDate="2014-07-09T22:17:07.043" Title="Database of words that differ by one phoneme" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T03:04:16.973" Score="2" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the composition rules of these sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;let the cat out of the bag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take off clothes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;burn the candle at both ends&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;the C-Rule of &amp;quot;bring home the bacon&amp;quot; is:&#xA;VC(&amp;quot;the bacon&amp;quot;,NP,AJ2)VA([home],A,AJ1);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is also a good reference to explain the C-Rules: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unlweb.net/wiki/index.php?title=Composition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;C-rule&amp;quot; in the UNL Wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4824" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T21:43:56.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T21:43:56.290" Title="What are the composition rules of these sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T03:34:16.210" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;While both German and Danish have different forms of adjectives in definite and indefinite noun phrases, noun phrases with possessive personal determiners pattern with the indefinite noun phrases in German, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ein guter Mann - a good man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mein guter Mann - my good man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Der gute Mann - the good man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while they pattern with definite noun phrases in Danish (and presumably Norwegian and Swedish): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En god mand - a good man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Min gode mand - my good man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Den gode mand - the good man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a curious fact, since AFAIK the words are pairwise cognates. Is there a logical explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T06:37:33.373" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T06:37:33.373" Title="Definite or indefinite adjectives with possessive personal determiners in Germanic?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T05:38:34.553" Score="6" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;What parts of speech are the most susceptible, and the least susceptible, to linguistic change? And why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that nouns are the most susceptible, and that closed word classes, such as articles and conjunctions, are the least susceptible. For example, when was the conjunction “and” anything other than “and”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And have there been cases of the parts of speech that are the more conservative elements suddenly changing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas? Or maybe suggestions for where I can look for such a discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="curious-proofreader" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T14:24:12.320" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T13:57:20.677" Title="What parts of speech are the most, and least, susceptible to linguistic change? And why?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2014-07-11T09:10:40.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing is inherently more conservative than anything else because pretty much every word is changed as time goes on. Some words acquire irregularities, but these get reanalysed as regular patterns over time. A few examples are in &quot;man/men&quot; and &quot;work/wrought&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, conjunctions are just regular words that change. Let's take your &quot;and&quot; for example. It derives from Old English &quot;and/ond/end&quot;, which derives in turn from Proto-Germanic &quot;*andi/*anþi&quot; or &quot;*undi/*unþi&quot;. German has from that source &quot;und&quot;, Dutch has &quot;en&quot; and Scots has &quot;an&quot;. Further away in the Germanic family, there's &quot;ok/og/och&quot; in Scandinavian, from Proto-Germanic &quot;*auk&quot; whence also English &quot;eke&quot;, and Gothic had a suffix instead, &quot;-uh&quot;. This is all the product of semantic shift (change in word meaning over time) and sound change (change of word shape over time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T09:10:40.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8568" CreationDate="2014-07-11T09:39:52.267" Score="4" ViewCount="18823" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do all languages have in common ? I'm looking for a list of features (such as grammatical, semantic or phonetic elements) that are present in all natural languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4864" LastActivityDate="2014-07-12T01:48:16.343" Title="What do all languages have in common?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-07-15T06:26:45.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8564" CreationDate="2014-07-11T10:00:36.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the basics are the same: all languages have consonants and vowels, and always more consonants than vowel qualities. All of them have verbs and, slightly controversially, all of them have nouns. The reason for the controversy is that some languages have nouns that look and behave a bit like verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages have syntax, the core words for body parts, the basic colour terms for &quot;black&quot; and &quot;white&quot;, at least for &quot;parents&quot; and &quot;children&quot;. Words for &quot;night&quot;, &quot;day&quot;, &quot;moon&quot;, &quot;rain&quot; etc.are also universal. All languages have pronouns of some kind, at the very least first person and non-first person. All languages have a way of expressing possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can't cite sources, it is often believed that all languages have at least some rudimentary morphology: even Mandarin Chinese has a derivational suffix. Furthermore, all languages have a strategy they use to distinguish agent from patient, as well as some other thematic relations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably more, but these are the basics that all languages (I think) share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T10:00:36.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-11T13:37:24.950" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(0) For Bill to have been arrested so soon was disappointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) ?It was disappointing for Bill to have been arrested so soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence (1) is grammatical, it seems to suggest, that disappointing is an adjective which has one theta-role available. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) That Bill has been arrested so soon disappointed Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) That Bill has been arrested so soon was disappointing (for Mary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) It was disappointing that Bill was arrested so soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) That Bill was arrested so soon was disappointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One analysis might posit two traces in the sentence (0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[CP For Bill1 to have been arrested t1 so soon]2 was disappointing t2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the D-structure is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e2 was disappointing [CP for e1 to have been arrested Bill so soon].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes the analysis of sentence (1) obvious. &#xA;If the analysis is incorrect, how could you explain (1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another analysis might be (D-structure):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[CP for e1 to have been arrested Bill so soon] is disappointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the CP has to move to a position after disappointing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e2 is disappointing [CP for e1 to have been arrested Bill so soon].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what position could it move into? In addition it should leave a trace, not &quot;it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of those two analyses is correct (if any)? If the first one is correct it seems like &quot;is disappointing&quot; works like an unaccusative/passive verb. How to analyze it? &quot;disappointing&quot; is an adjective, but what is the copula? (I or V?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some analyzes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I' [I -s] [VP [V' [V be] [AP [A' [A disappointing] [CP trace] ] ] ] ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;-s&quot; is an auxiliary&#xA;&quot;be&quot; is a verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I' [I is] [AP [A' [A disappointing] [CP trace] ] ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;is&quot; is an auxiliary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct analysis according to GB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4865" LastEditorUserId="4865" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T14:00:54.153" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T16:53:11.733" Title="What is the structure of the sentence &quot;For Bill to have been arrested so soon was disappointing.&quot; according to the GB theory" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8566" CreationDate="2014-07-11T15:24:30.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The structure is derived from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;  [np&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; [s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; [np &lt;code&gt;Unspec&lt;/code&gt; np]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;   [vp &lt;em&gt;arrested&lt;/em&gt; [np &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt; np] [advp &lt;em&gt;so soon&lt;/em&gt;] vp]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;   s]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  np]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp; [vp &lt;em&gt;was disappointing&lt;/em&gt; vp]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    s]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject complement clause  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[s [np &lt;code&gt;Unspec&lt;/code&gt; np] [vp &lt;em&gt;arrested&lt;/em&gt; [np &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt; np] [advp &lt;em&gt;so soon&lt;/em&gt;] vp] s]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is passivized, producing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[s [np &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt; np] [vp &lt;em&gt;was arrested so soon&lt;/em&gt; vp] s]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is marked with a &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;for-to&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; infinitive complementizer required by the matrix predicate &lt;em&gt;disappointing&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[s &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;For&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [np &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt; np] &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;to&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [vp &lt;em&gt;have been arrested so soon&lt;/em&gt; vp] s]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;producing the infinitive complement clause subject of the psych predicate adjective &lt;em&gt;(be) disappointing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(The &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; comes from converting the past tense morpheme in &lt;em&gt;was arrested&lt;/em&gt; into an infinitive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;next&lt;/strong&gt; step, which is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; taken in the example, is to Extrapose the heavy subject, producing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; was disappointing for Bill to have been arrested so soon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a much easier structure to parse, since it's completely right-branching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a sketch, of course. What counts as &quot;the structure of&quot; this sentence, in your case, is a matter to be negoiated with your teacher, or confessor, or whoever determines &lt;code&gt;The Rules&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-07-11T16:47:02.937" LastActivityDate="2014-07-11T16:47:02.937" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8564" CreationDate="2014-07-12T01:48:16.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any linguistic answer to this question has to be at least partly theory laden. There are many approaches to linguistic universals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most general points would be:&#xA; 1. All natural languages can be acquired by people born into a community of speakers, or learned by people as a second language (with well-known limitations).&#xA; 2. The propositional content of all natural languages can be translated from one another given limitations of vocabulary and contextual understanding.&#xA; 3. The non-propositional content of all languages can be conveyed between one another through some means of human communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above it follows that all languages will have the same physiological, cognitive, and neural underpinnings (whatever those may be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that seems quite trivial. So when people ask those questions, they are generally looking for some feature like nouns, vocabulary, syntactic constraints. Here the people making the strongest claims are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Universal Grammar which claims that all languages share certain constraints on their syntax which are the only way to explain their learnability. However, there are only a handful of these and those are virtually incomprehensible. This is a position most often associated with Chomsky and most popularly explained by Steven Pinker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantic Primes claims that there are about 60 words that are common to all languages and through which all meaning can be described (they call this Natural Semantic Metalanguage). It is based around the work of Anna Wierzbicka and the group does some really interesting research even if their broader claim is a bit less palatable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern linguistic typology (whose perspective was taken on in @Darkgamma's answer) makes much weaker claims few of which stand and fall with a single counter example. The most accessible explication of this position is RMW Dixon's 'Basic Linguistic Theory' which, while not always most uptodate on all issues, gives an accessible overview (over three volumes). Historically, this work on universals was associated with Joseph Greenberg but now the project is much less interested in universals than common patterns and tendencies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical linguistics also makes some claims about universals mostly to do with common origins. The strongest claims are made by some branches which try to find common origins of all languages, e.g. Nostratics, who are not necessarily taken seriously by the mainstream. But even more traditional historical linguistics makes some claims about fairly universal principles of language change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, both 3 and 4 sometimes call themselves comparative linguistics, so it's sometimes hard to know what is meant by the term without some context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I recommend that every linguist or even anybody interested in language spends some time with modern linguistic typology (which has moved far beyond the inflectional/agglutinting business). While Dixon's 'Basic Linguistic Theory' may not be the first thing on the list, it should be required reading for any linguistics graduates long before they read anything by Chomsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS) &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info&lt;/a&gt; is a great place to check any claims as to universality, even if it (unavoidably) relies on data of uneven quality. But it also nicely illustrates the extent and the limitations of the current evidentiary base for claims about universals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-12T01:48:16.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8599" CreationDate="2014-07-12T15:52:28.447" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for, supposed, inability to understand someone due to racial prejudice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example many people &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; foreigners can't speak their language, so when a foreigner &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; speak their language they can't understand. Even if said forigner can speak said language fluently some people are unable to get past their prejudice and actually 'understand' what is being said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T14:20:07.440" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T08:01:34.790" Title="Term: Prejudicial Inability to Understand" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-12T22:47:44.803" Score="0" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, a grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language that operates on a higher level in order to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if a formal grammar of a formal language is a metalanguage of the formal language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T09:38:07.327" Title="Is a formal grammar of a formal language a formal language?" Tags="&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-12T22:54:15.267" Score="0" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus&lt;/a&gt;–Naur_Form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF) is a family of metasyntax notations,&#xA;  any of which can be used to express a context-free grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that a context-free grammar is a metalanguage of a context-free language, and EBNF is a syntax for the context-free grammar as a metalanguage, and therefore EBNF is a metasyntax for the context-free language as a object language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A metasyntax describes the allowable structure and composition of&#xA;  phrases and sentences of a metalanguage, which is used to describe&#xA;  either a natural language or a computer programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the widely used formal metalanguages for computer languages&#xA;  are Backus–Naur Form (BNF), Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF), Wirth&#xA;  syntax notation (WSN), and Augmented Backus–Naur Form (ABNF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that EBNF is a metalanguage of  a context-free grammar being a formal language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some relevant definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The syntax of a formal language is its structure, and is specified by&#xA;  a formal grammar of the formal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A metalanguage of a formal language is a formal language used to specify the formal language (make statements about the formal language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The object language of a metalanguage is the language described by that metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Metalanguage/Metasyntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Metalanguage/Metasyntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The syntax of a metalanguage is called a metasyntax of the object&#xA;  language of that metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T14:19:21.370" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T21:48:50.027" Title="Are Backus–Naur Form (BNF) and Extended Backus–Naur Form metalanguages or metasyntax?" Tags="&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8570" CreationDate="2014-07-13T09:38:07.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is confused. You confuse a grammar (an entity) with its expression (a language). So by very definition, the grammar of any language (formal or informal) is expressed in a metalanguage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the difference between &quot;formal&quot; and natural languages is that a grammar of a natural language is always expressed in a metalanguage which is a part of natural language in the broadest possible sense (point made strongly by Gadamer in his Hermeneutics). In this, the Wikipedia quote is not very accurate because metalanguage can very easily be applied to itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a grammar of a formal language is more likely to be expressed by a different order language. Even a simple A -&gt; B contains a symbol not of that language. However, this all depends on a metaphor of thinking about formal languages as language, in the first place. It's very useful but needn't be taken to extremes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T09:38:07.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-13T22:03:04.600" Score="-1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of the study of words in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you call the study of sentences in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does English grammar or linguistics concerns about the study of units larger than sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other units do English grammar or linguistics study, according to this order &quot;... &amp;lt; word &amp;lt; sentence &amp;lt; paragraph &amp;lt; ...&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="218" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T14:17:37.283" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T14:17:37.283" Title="What are the names of the study of words and of the study of sentences in English?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8574" CreationDate="2014-07-13T22:12:43.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morphology&lt;/strong&gt;: the study of the structure of words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;: the study of the history of words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt;: the study of the structure of sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discourse analysis&lt;/strong&gt;: the study of conversations and texts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-07-13T22:12:43.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8579" CreationDate="2014-07-14T16:12:15.337" Score="5" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to show my students how intonation contours in Praat can help identify English interrogatives. An obvious example is &quot;He's coming.&quot; vs &quot;He's coming?&quot; -- but perhaps those of you more familiar with prosody or intonation have better ideas in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T14:16:20.173" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T14:16:20.173" Title="What's a good minimal pair to highlight interrogative prosody in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8578" CreationDate="2014-07-14T16:20:50.883" Score="4" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I extract pitch in praat all those little numbers show up! What are those values standing for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lnBoo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;little numbers and pink lines&lt;/a&gt; (1263x665, 172 KB)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-07-14T22:18:35.963" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T22:18:35.963" Title="What are those little numbers when I extract pitch in Praat?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8577" CreationDate="2014-07-14T17:16:16.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the 'Pitch help' button in the object window when the Pitch object is selected. I'm going to simplify this answer a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pitch estimation is inexact, so those numbers are basically the ranked candidates for pitch (y-axis, marked in Hz at intervals of 100 Hz) at that point in time (x-axis, marked in seconds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you zoom in a little, you'll see they're stacked vertically, with the best candidate  (highest integer) highlighted in pink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'pink lines' are actually patterns of the best candidates. Pitch cannot be estimated for unvoiced portions, so you'll see those intervals marked in blue across the bottom ('Unv'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T17:16:16.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8576" CreationDate="2014-07-14T17:31:27.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often helpful to avoid voiceless sounds as much as possible in prosody stimuli, to get a clearer pitch track. For example, &quot;Mary will win&quot; has no voiceless sounds (from: Pierrehumbert, J. (2000). Tonal elements and their alignment. In Prosody: Theory and experiment (pp. 11-36). Springer Netherlands.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For demonstration purposes, you may also want to use a longer sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-07-14T17:31:27.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8582" CreationDate="2014-07-15T02:48:50.037" Score="0" ViewCount="1607" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/28876/those-who-vs-them-who&quot;&gt;ELL site&lt;/a&gt;, but as I haven't received any answer from grammatical point of view, I am asking the same question here. Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pity those who lost their money in gambling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pity them who lost their money on gambling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the first one is correct, but I think there is nothing wrong grammatically with the second sentence, as both &lt;strong&gt;them&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;those&lt;/strong&gt; are pronoun. Am I wrong somewhere? Please help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanking you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T14:13:40.800" Title="&quot;Those who&quot; vs &quot;Them who&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8580" CreationDate="2014-07-15T04:30:39.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jlawler's comment contains the direct answer to the question. Definite personal pronouns (I/me, you, he/him, she/her, it, we/us, they/them) cannot take a restrictive modifier. In other words, they cannot take a dependent that narrows the set of entities that they denote. This trait of personal pronouns underlies their use as test words for constituent structure. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (a)  The man with the hat knows the woman with the scarf.&#xA;&#xA; (b)  He knows her. &#xA;&#xA; (c) *He with the hat knows her with the scarf.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (a) is the starting sentence. Sentence (b) shows proform substitution; the personal pronouns &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; have been substituted in for the noun phrases &lt;em&gt;the man with the hat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the woman with the scarf&lt;/em&gt;. Based on the acceptability of sentence (b), one concludes that both &lt;em&gt;the man with the hat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the woman with the scarf&lt;/em&gt; are constituents. Definite pronouns such as &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;) take the place of constituents, in this case of complete noun phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unacceptability of sentence (c) reveals that the strings &lt;em&gt;the man&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the woman&lt;/em&gt; in (a) are not constituents. In other words, the definite personal pronouns &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; cannot take dependents (=modifiers), since they necessarily replace an entire noun phrase. This fact explains why &lt;em&gt;them who lost their money&lt;/em&gt; in the question is bad English. The relative clause &lt;em&gt;who lost money&lt;/em&gt; is a postdependent (=postmodifier), and as such it cannot modify &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; (because &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; as a definite personal pronoun cannot be modified).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plural demonstrative pronouns (&lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt;) behave differently. They can take postdepndents (=postmodifiers, i.e. a modifier that follows them), e.g &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (d)  These with hats know those with scarves. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simply a trait of the plural demonstrative pronouns (&lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt;) -- there is no good explanation why plural demonstrative pronouns behave differently than definite personal pronouns; they simply do. Note that the plural demonstrative pronouns also behave differently than the singular demonstrative pronouns in this regard, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (e)  *This with a hat knows that with a scarf.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Singular demonstrative pronouns (&lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;) are behaving like the definite personal pronouns; they cannot take dependents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination &lt;strong&gt;plural demonstrative pronoun + restrictive relative clause&lt;/strong&gt; can actually be viewed as a particular construction in English and related languages. That is, it is a combination that occurs relatively frequently and has therefore been lexicalized. German has a very similar construction, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (f) Diejenigen mit einem Hut kennen diejenigen mit einem Schal. &#xA;     those      with  a   hat  know     those   with  a   scarf.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By acknowledging that one has a particular construction, one is in a sense admitting that there is no real grammatical &quot;explanation&quot; for the phenomenon. It simply exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note that there are certain apparent exceptions to the principles mentioned above. There are uses of personal pronouns that actually allow modification, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (g) He who studies a lot gets a good grade. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the personal pronoun &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is not referring directly to a specific entity, which means it is not definite; it is, rather, being used as an indefinite pronoun; it means 'the one, anyone', e.g. &lt;em&gt;Anyone who studies a lot gets a good grade&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-15T11:20:06.727" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T11:20:06.727" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8580" CreationDate="2014-07-15T10:31:58.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;God helps them who help themselves&quot; is a well-known proverb in English. Your second sentence (&quot;I pity them who...&quot;) is correct English, though not perhaps the most usual way to say this. There is nothing wrong with &quot;He with the hat knows her with the scarf&quot; either. Both belong to an elevated (literary) style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T10:31:58.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-15T11:18:09.687" Score="3" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that all Praat scripts operate on recordings. Is there any such thing as a script that performs an analysis &quot;on the fly&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T11:17:04.870" Title="Can any Praat scripts perform real-time analyses?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8584" CreationDate="2014-07-15T20:40:47.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing by &quot;on the fly&quot; you mean you can be speaking into a microphone and seeing a waveform, spectrogram, pitch contour, etc. produced as you speak into the microphone? Praat cannot do this, but WaveSurfer (another free speech analysis program) can. You can decide ahead of time what types of display windows (called &quot;panes&quot; in WaveSurfer) to have open, and then as soon as you hit the record button all the displays start scrolling across in real time. As soon as you start speaking into the microphone, you can see the various panes responding accordingly. When you hit &quot;stop&quot;, the scrolling stops and the displays become static and you can interact with them largely in the way that you would in Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat is great for certain things, but WaveSurfer is great for demonstrations in classes when first introducing the concept of a spectrogram. It shows very quickly what different types of segments look like in a spectrogram, as well as the relationship between loudness and waveform amplitude, pitch and glottal pulse frequency, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-07-15T20:40:47.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-07-16T06:46:22.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose the hardest ones are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Agglutinative languages&lt;/a&gt; like Japanese, Korean, Turkish etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use an agglutinative language (even you are using very formal wording) and don't check resultant sentences, translators can make very big mistakes. If I take Google Translate into consideration, the problematic part is to make translation engine to understand words and their structure correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Source ----understanding---&amp;gt;   Meaning  ----translation-----&amp;gt;  Destination&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the hardness of the problem, automatic translators can't split words into its parts correctly, especially in agglutinative languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve this problem, you can use your own algorithms your own corpus. My approach is to revise source sentences. I split long sentences into small ones, changing complex source words with simple ones. If you make translator to understand the meaning, it can successfully translate it to any language. Though, these revisions make source text too simple too read. But it is preferable if you use automatic translators frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4883" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T06:46:22.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-07-16T09:16:29.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulty arises not from the various linguistic properties of the language pair as many here suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google machine translation direction for &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;Chinese&lt;/strong&gt; pair looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;German -&amp;gt; English -&amp;gt; Chinese&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where English is a &lt;em&gt;bridge&lt;/em&gt; language, a language that is used in between German and Chinese. This is done to save resources and development time, so that instead of creating segmentors, tokenizers, parsers, shallow/full syntax rules for every language pair combination you create these linguistic resources for just one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example. &#xA;We shall try to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://translate.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;translate.google.com&lt;/a&gt; to translate a phrase &quot;to lose a suit&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;Chinese&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;проиграть процесс -&amp;gt; 失败西装&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;失败西装 in Chinese is &quot;to lose a jacket&quot;, which happens because suit is an ambiguous word in English: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;проиграть процесс -&amp;gt; fail in a suit -&amp;gt; 失败西装&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So answering your question, I'd say that &lt;strong&gt;the hardest language to translate from is the one which has a higher syntactic/semantic ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;. That's why using English as a &lt;em&gt;bridge&lt;/em&gt; language can cause translation inconsistencies as the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastEditorUserId="2967" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T16:10:07.307" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T16:10:07.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2014-07-16T10:00:03.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope I understood you question correctly.&#xA;I think Chinese gets the closest to the language you're talking about. I am not familiar with &lt;em&gt;aspectual coercion&lt;/em&gt; term but I would not say that Chinese does not allow it. There are sentences in Chinese where &lt;code&gt;Tense&lt;/code&gt; in not expressed in either morphological or syntactical way but inferred from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;他_He 说完_to finish talking 后_after 过_to pass 五_five 分钟_minutes.&#xA;5 minutes passed after he finished talking.&#xA;&#xA;昨天_yesterday 我_I 吃_eat 豬肉_pork&#xA;He ate pork yesterday.&#xA;&#xA;他_He 前天_the day before yesterday 到_arrive 北京_Beijing 的_*descriptive particle* &#xA;He (is/being) arrived to Beijing the day before yesterday. &#xA;&#xA;上个_Last 星期_week 天天_every day 下雪_to rain。&#xA;It was raining every day last week.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese if everything is clear from the context the speaker is allowed to drop certain functional words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastEditorUserId="2967" LastEditDate="2014-07-16T10:19:57.937" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T10:19:57.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2014-07-16T10:23:00.033" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;passenger:  How long will the bus stay at the station?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conductor: from two to two to two two&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this is an example of phonological ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4884" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-07-16T13:32:32.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-17T03:13:22.210" Score="0" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often said that it is difficult to match up the structure rules of a grammar with psychologically realistic models of competence.  I was wondering if the semantic component was especially problematic (even over and above the challenges relating to the syntax in this regard). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4825" LastActivityDate="2014-09-15T18:53:13.380" Title="Is the semantic component of a generative grammar especially difficult to incorporate in psycholinguistic proccessing models?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T14:05:36.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-17T12:34:47.320" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a conlang at the request of a script-writer who wants something very accurate. No problem for me since I spent a lot of time describing minority languages. The point is, the  producers request a very realistic grammar so that future episodes can be consistent. Fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, this conlang has several dialects. While the dialects are distinguished mainly by morphology and lexical differences, there are some minor phonological differences, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is a kind of uvular harmony in dialect 1 but not dialect 2 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dialect 1.  xeqepo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dialect 2. heqepo (x-initial words are disallowed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple, right? Sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, were this a natural, human language, which would more likely be the more conservative dialect (based on this particular property alone). i.e.: Is it more likely that there's a rule &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;h-&gt;x/_Vq&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;x-&gt;h/_[word-initially &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-07-17T14:22:22.877" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T15:59:10.443" Title="Uvular harmony?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-17T12:52:31.247" Score="3" ViewCount="1361" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8558/database-of-words-that-differ-by-one-phoneme&quot;&gt;general question about minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt; and got a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/minimal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; that provides a comprehensive list of English minimal pairs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a similar list for German minimal pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:56:44.017" Title="Resource for German minimal pairs" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8594" CreationDate="2014-07-17T17:34:42.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking two different questions between the title and the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is generative grammar difficult to incorporate into cognitive processing models?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Not particularly. In fact, because generative grammar constraints what is meant by language. This makes it much easier to design experiments within the paradigm. However, you have to remember that, as originally formulated, generative grammar does not make any predictions about the online processing of language. It is exclusively concerned with 'competence' rather than 'performance'. But it is easily laid out into experimentally isolatable components, and a lot of psycholinguists have chosen to adopt its general approach as a sort of 'basic linguistic theory'. Unfortunately, this has led to a significant impoverishment of psycholinguistic research in the last forty years or so. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the semantic component of generative grammar difficult to reconcile with psycholinguistic models?&lt;/strong&gt; This makes the assumption that there is such as thing as a coherent semantic theory of generative grammar seeking cognitive plausibility. All the theories I've looked at are based on some version of formal logic. This is not too difficult to model experimentally but if you look at actual psycholinguistic research, nobody looks at this much (beyond some work in inference and presupposition). That's because natural language semantics is much more difficult to map onto generative linguistics than natural language syntax. So in practice, most psycholinguists rely on a sort of folk theory of meaning informed by various models.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question that would be more interesting to ask is: &lt;strong&gt;Do we have enough experimental psycholinguistic evidence to support a comprehensive processing model of natural language semantics and pragmatics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that is definitely NOT because of point 1. We need a far richer experimental paradigm within psycholinguistics that is not confined to the lab (I find Discursive Psychology very inspiring in this respect). We need psycholinguists to look at the broader semantic research (and not just the scraps off the table of working syntacticians). We need to jettison primitive concepts based on the dictionary model of meaning and look at semantics as a process that happens both consciously and unconsciously, individually and collectively, cognitively and affectively. We need to once and for all bury the semantics/pragmatics distinction. We need a non-storage model of memory and recall. Far more research on framing and cross-linguistic research in non-WEIRD contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these things exist in germinal form but we're far from a model of how meaning is processed that could serve as general hermeneutic underpinning for the interpretation of a broad range of phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-17T17:34:42.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8602" CreationDate="2014-07-17T22:50:09.643" Score="3" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a comprehensive list about which phonemes in the English language can be distinguished via lip-reading and which can't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-19T04:16:17.733" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T04:16:17.733" Title="Which English phonemes can be distinguished via lip-reading?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2014-07-18T07:15:06.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge there is no specific term for the example of people not being able to understand foreigners because they believe that foreigners cannot understand the language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me to be the combination of several psychological biases.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first that comes to mind is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;expectation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;experimenter's&lt;/em&gt;) bias. It basically says that we experience what we expect to experience. Since we expect foreigners not to understand our language, we're closing off the possible experience of foreigners communicating in our language. &#xA;We thus develop a psychological &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;blind spot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The entire situation also requires that we make the (unconscious) decision to treat foreigners more alike than we would people we know. This is called a &lt;strong&gt;representativeness heuristic&lt;/strong&gt; based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representativeness_heuristic#Similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;similarity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If a foreigner speaks our language better than we expected, and we can't block it out, then we can make things harder for the foreigner by speaking faster, use more slang, etc. The foreigner will find it harder to cope, and thus fulfill our expectation. We thus create the &quot;reasons&quot; to deal with our &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cognitive dissonance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning pronunciation, it is established that there is a tendency of native speakers to infer more than they should from the less than perfect pronunciation of foreigners. Native speakers often conclude that the foreigners they talk to are less intelligent, less educated, and of a lesser social status than they really are, all the while forgetting that most of the times, the native speakers are mostly less capable of speaking the foreigners' language, than the foreigners are of speaking the native speakers' language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, this tendency seems to be countered to a great degree by how diverse a society is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-07-18T08:01:34.790" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T08:01:34.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-18T14:22:13.660" Score="5" ViewCount="4313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know what ergative verb is -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentences -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I opened the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The door was opened (by me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The door opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a transitive verb in sentence #1, and sentence #1 is in active voice. The doer here is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and what is affected by &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; action is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;door&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence #2 is in passive voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence #3 is in middle voice. The verb &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is used as intransitive way. And here the doer of the action (verb) is not important and is not mentioned. What is affected is the subject - &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;door&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. So here the verb - &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; - is used in ergative form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider sentence #1 and sentence #3. The object of the transitive verb in sentence #1 is the subject of the intransitive verb in sentence #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all intransitive verbs can't be used in ergative form, nor all ergative verb can take everything as subject. For example -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He fired a gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gun fired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He fired a bullet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bullet fired (we can't use &amp;quot;bullet&amp;quot; as the subject of this ergative verb) - Incorrect sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MY QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All ergative verbs are transitive verb in nature. But when they are used in ergative form they acts as intransitive. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How to decide which verb can be used in ergative form and which verb can not? Is there any technique - logical or grammatical or anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How to decide which subjects are appropriate for a particular ergative verb, and which are not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T16:55:25.867" Title="Ergative Verbs and some discussion about them" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="26" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8595" CreationDate="2014-07-18T15:59:10.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started writing another comment, but I figured I'd just bite the bullet and turn it into a response...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not quite true that there's no way to figure out which dialect is more conservative; it's just that there's no way to figure it out with the one data point you've provided. As a phonologist I'd look for more data to support one rule vs. the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are other examples of [χ]-initial words in D1 that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; contain uvulars later in the word, and those words are pronounced with an initial [h] in D2, then I'd go for the second rule. If, on the other hand, there are in fact words that start with [χ] in D2, then I'd go for rule 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that by saying &amp;quot;χ-initial words are disallowed&amp;quot; you're basically asserting that the former is true, in which case the data point you gave does not provide strong evidence for uvular harmony in D1. Simpler to assume that the underlying form is just /χeqepo/. But if there is a word that starts with [k] in D2 that is pronounced with an initial [q] in D1, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would be stronger evidence for uvular harmony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect 1:&lt;/strong&gt; qaqewa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect 2:&lt;/strong&gt; kaqewa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if there is evidence from morphology in D1, like a root that starts with [k] or [h] gets changed when a uvular-initial suffix gets attached to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i doku - 'one lathe'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wa doquqe - 'two lathes'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hahewa - 'I eat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hahepi - 'you eat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hahewe - 'she eats'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;χaχeqa - 'we eat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-07-18T15:59:10.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8598" CreationDate="2014-07-19T00:34:32.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have a look into visemes. These are like phonemes, but relate to what the face is doing (esp. the mouth) for each phoneme. More than one phoneme can map to a viseme (e.g. voiced and voiceless consonants have the same viseme as the distinction is due to the vibration of the vocal chords, not the shape of the mouth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, although there was earlier research into confusion of similar phonemes, the visemes were first created by early Disney animators. They defined 12/13 facial shapes for the 45 or so English phonemes. They are also used in text-to-speech applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other classifications can have a different number of visemes,, for example the Microsoft Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) defines &lt;a href=&quot;http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms720881%28v=vs.85%29.aspx&quot;&gt;21 visemes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does not appear to be any clear consensus on the phoneme to viseme classification. I'm not sure what it is like in the lip reading field (a Gamasutra article mentioned there were 18 lip reading visemes, but I was not able to find a reference to this in my brief search, although visemes were mentioned in connection to lip reading in other results).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the problem of context, where the shape of the mouth is influenced by the previous and next phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, the simplified viseme model does not account for the shape of the cheeks and jaws, nor the position of the tongue, which can all be visual clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to lip read will take the movement of the facial features into account and make inferences based on context (e.g. a t/d shape after &lt;code&gt;[shi:]&lt;/code&gt; could be &lt;code&gt;sheet&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;she'd&lt;/code&gt;). This is similar to how speech recognition software works, but that operates on the acoustic (audio) signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T00:34:32.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2014-07-19T01:25:11.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not really any given language that is hard to translate. The problem is contextual words or phrases that mean different things (either in English or in the language being spoken). This includes colloquial phrases, cultural differences (e.g. the boot or trunk of a car). There are also domain specific differences (e.g. &quot;International Phonetic Alphabet&quot; in linguistics and the navy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;she took the lead in the dance;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he took the lead in the box to the dog's new owner;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they took the lead in the box to be analysed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the phrase &quot;took the lead in the&quot; is the same, but 'lead' is referring to 3 different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is referring to leadership;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is referring to a dog lead or collar;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is referring to the metal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also phrases like &quot;that's rubbish&quot;, &quot;that's pants&quot;, etc. that can indicate that something is not very good. Likewise, phrases like &quot;that's mint&quot;, &quot;that's the bomb&quot;, &quot;that's cool&quot;, &quot;that's wicked&quot; can indicate something is very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with &quot;wicked&quot; it can also mean the musical based in the Wizard of Oz universe, among its other definitions. Likewise, there is a German band called Die Toten Hosen (&quot;the dead trousers&quot;), which Google translate leaves in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, while &quot;that's pants&quot; translates to &quot;das ist Hosen&quot; in German, it translates back to &quot;that is pants&quot; in English, mainly because it preferentially uses pants over trousers (e.g. translating &quot;Hosen&quot; to English), due probably to its US English slant (pants mean underwear in England).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software translators also do a poor job when encountering poor grammar (e.g. not capitalizing the correct words in German, leaving out punctuation, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suspect that Hebrew would be difficult because from what I understand it tends to leave out the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T01:25:11.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8605" CreationDate="2014-07-19T13:02:24.190" Score="2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently setting to investigate on a subject in the history of languages, but as a self-taught outsider I am stuck before finding out some key words to start searching the Web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to investigate the following hypothesis: the split between the most distinct language groups in today's existence may have its origin in Africa, before the colonization of the &quot;outside world&quot; began. The population that flowed out of Africa would have consisted of many individual bands, each with its own, very distinct language. Some of these must be the origin of all today's out-of-Africa languages, but not necessarily exactly one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;has this hypothesis been considered at all?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if yes, has it already been positively dismissed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;are there any key terms related to this which would be googlable?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4895" LastEditorUserId="4895" LastEditDate="2014-07-19T13:13:51.960" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T15:26:53.203" Title="Origin of world languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8604" CreationDate="2014-07-19T15:26:53.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes. It's called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;out-of-africa&quot; theory&lt;/a&gt;. It's a paleoanthropological hypothesis with substantial support from genetics, in particular studies on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mitochondrial DNA&lt;/a&gt;. Much work has been done by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Luca_Cavalli-Sforza&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza&lt;/a&gt; and others. See his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20050307134942/http://www.fsbassociates.com/fsg/genespeopleslanguages.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Genes, Peoples, and Languages&lt;/a&gt;. The linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merritt_Ruhlen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merritt Ruhlen&lt;/a&gt; is one of the most important linguists to test Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ehl.santafe.edu/main.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Santa Fe Institute&lt;/a&gt; website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No. But language superfamilies remain a problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the links provided above are relevant. A further term is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#Linguistic_diversity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diversity&lt;/a&gt; (but try to google more, the Wikipedia section is not that illuminating), see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#Language_families_of_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language families&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning your specific assumption that isolated bands leaving Africa contribute to the founding of distinct language families, is, however, problematic. Diversity studies comparing African vs. non-African languages consistently show that the two major African language families &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger-Congo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Niger-Congo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilo-Saharan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nilo-Saharan&lt;/a&gt; are much more diverse among &lt;strong&gt;themselves&lt;/strong&gt; than all other non-African language families &lt;strong&gt;combined&lt;/strong&gt;. (That, by the way, is also consistent with genetic diversity: there's more genetic diversity within Africa, than in the rest of the world combined.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This can either mean that many bands leaving Africa have not contributed to the current &quot;gene-pool&quot; of language(s), or it can mean that there weren't that many bands to begin with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I believe that the latter is the more compelling assumption because it matches what is known from studies on mitochondrial DNA. See this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/worldgeographymainpage/worldstatistics5.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;picture&lt;/a&gt;, which shows that only group L3 left Africa. This group may have been diverse, and surely consisted of different bands over a certain time span, but their genetic proximity suggests cultural proximity, and hence linguistic proximity. The assumption that members of this group used mutually incomprehensible languages is far-fetched, given that these bands weren't that large to begin with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T15:26:53.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2014-07-19T15:29:52.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle, sound laws are universal within any given language. (I say “in principle” because every rule has its exceptions). This means that the same sound laws will affect all words regardless of whether they are nouns, verbs, prepositions or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T15:29:52.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8600" CreationDate="2014-07-19T21:05:09.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not have the linguistic competence of the users who commented the&#xA;question. So I only took the question as asked, and looked also at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the concept, as presented, looks very arbitrary to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are examples involving the verbs &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;float&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.a: The door opened,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.b: He opened the door to a small garden,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.a: The trunk floated,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.b: He floated the trunks down the river,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.c: The man floated near his capsized boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the analysis of a previous question, case 1.a is an&#xA;ergative use of the verb &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt;, used transitively in 1.b. But then&#xA;the sentences 2.a and 2.b should be analyzed in the same way, which&#xA;implies that 2.a is an ergative use of the verb &lt;em&gt;float&lt;/em&gt;. But then,&#xA;sentence 2.c should also be ergative. Is that the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, in successive variations, what of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man stood near his boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man walked near his boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dog walked near his boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man walked his dog near his boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About question 1&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;'s answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, an ergative verb is a verb that can be either&#xA;    transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when intransitive&#xA;    corresponds to its direct object when transitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be illustrated by the question examples. But if you look&#xA;at the second example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He fired a gun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gun fired a bullet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that is transitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if the verb &lt;em&gt;shoot&lt;/em&gt; is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He shot the gun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He shot a man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gun shot a bullet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gun shot a man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I am not sure one would say intransitively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gun shot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it all seems a bit more complicated that the simple rule of&#xA;Wikipedia and your first question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-07-19T21:22:03.053" LastActivityDate="2014-07-19T21:22:03.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-20T02:35:48.663" Score="3" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using the 1 billion word language corpus to build a model with 1 and 2-grams.  When using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://kheafield.com/code/kenlm/estimation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lmplz&lt;/a&gt; program that comes with kenlm, I noticed that the arpa file seems to have higher probabilities associated with 2-grams than derived 1-grams.  For example, the log probabilities of &quot;sick&quot; and &quot;feel sick&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sick : -4.48&#xA;feel sick : -2.6995&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain why this occurs?  I would have thought that the probability of a single word in a text would be higher than a pair of words in the same text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in the following text, not including punctuation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I feel happy, so very happy.  You make me very happy.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;11 1-grams&#xA;9  2-grams&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving probabilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;happy&quot; 3/11 = 0.27&#xA;&quot;very happy&quot; 2/9 = 0.22&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to think of a situation where a 2-gram would be more probable than a 1-gram contained within the 2-gram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4897" LastEditorUserId="4897" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T02:46:43.937" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T00:15:33.493" Title="Probabilities for 2-grams are higher than 1-grams in arpa file produced by kenlm" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8608" CreationDate="2014-07-20T02:49:15.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could occur when the single word is much more commonly used in a set phrase or idiom than on its own.  For example, it is much more common to see the word 'eke' with an 'out' than it standing alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4898" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T02:49:15.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-20T02:50:38.160" Score="6" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8600/ergative-verbs-and-some-discussion-about-them/8607#comment20583_8600&quot;&gt;a recent comment on the question &lt;em&gt;Ergative Verbs and some discussion about them&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/482/jlawler&quot;&gt;jlawler&lt;/a&gt; introduced a term I had not previously encountered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The rose smells good&lt;/em&gt; is completely different; this &lt;em&gt;smell&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/105101/15299&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flip sense verb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, with quite different syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term I've put in bold links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/posts/105101/revisions&quot;&gt;an answer to a question on our English Language sister site, &lt;em&gt;“Taste” is to “flavor” as “touch” and “sight” are to what?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Where &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/users/15299/john-lawler&quot;&gt;John Lawler&lt;/a&gt; uses the term a few more times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two of the verb classes differ in whether they're volitional, and the other one is an experiential sense with special &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Flip&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; syntax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The third type is the &lt;strong&gt;Flip verbs&lt;/strong&gt;: sound, look, smell, taste, feel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Again the three chemical/kinesthetic senses don't change, though only feel works as a &lt;strong&gt;Flip verb&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The subject of a &lt;strong&gt;Flip verb&lt;/strong&gt; is not the experiencer, but rather whatever is causing the sensation being experienced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if this is a term I ought to be familiar with. Some brief Googling hasn't turned up very much. Is it perhaps better known under another name, or only used by a single author? What is the provenance of this term? Where can I learn more about the concept named by this term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I just noticed that of course &lt;em&gt;jlawler&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;John Lawler&lt;/em&gt; must be the same person. I wonder how to get different usernames on two SE sister sites (-:&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T02:50:38.160" Title="What currency does the term &quot;flip sense verb&quot; have in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-20T09:55:15.457" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;the title pretty much says it, if deletion happens with shipping to the interfaces SEM/PHON, can a valued, uninterpretable feature still be a goal for another probe of this feature? In a DP, maybe as long as the whole DP is not deactivated by Case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4899" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T09:55:15.457" Title="In the Minimalist Program, can valued uninterpretable features still act as goals before they are deleted?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8618" CreationDate="2014-07-20T11:07:45.083" Score="2" ViewCount="14755" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, as a native German speaker, I apologise for my incorrect use of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After thinking about some different languages and wandering astray on this exact Stack Exchange, I began to notice similarities between natural languages and programming languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both languages strongly distinguish between syntax and semantics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both of them serve the purpose of communication to explain what something is or what is to be done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both types of languages have a base composition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we imagine the human mind as a very advanced compiler for all the natural languages, then we can see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;book&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Buch&lt;/code&gt; and something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADT Book&#xA;{&#xA;    variables&#xA;    title;&#xA;    pageCount;&#xA;    publicationDate;&#xA;    content;&#xA;    rating;&#xA;    ...&#xA;&#xA;    functions&#xA;    read;&#xA;    rate;&#xA;    ...&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all describe one and the same thing: a book, or specifically an object with a title and so on. It might seem like the definition of a book is much more complicated in a programming language rather than a natural language but what we forget is that for our human-compiler-mind &lt;code&gt;book&lt;/code&gt; is a shortcut for an object with the specific properties as described in the ADT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now one could object that the two types react differently to syntax errors, because a syntax error in typing (&lt;code&gt;teh&lt;/code&gt;) is still correctly recognised as &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; whereas a missing semicolon will cause a compile error in programming languages. What we forget however is that this implicit correction of syntax is just a &quot;feature&quot; of the human-compiler-mind because it is already about 200000 years old and has evolved a great deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another noteworthy objection is that while a programming language is designed by us humans, the origin of natural languages is unknown although theories exist. Based on these theories, one can assume that the natural languages have evolved from some kind of pre-lingustic forms of communication, just like the programming languages have evolved from someone soldering something on a board to writing code on machines running with those soldered boards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now regarding everything I have tried to say, my questions are: Are there really any differences between natural and programming languages? If yes, which ones are there and how big of a difference do they make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geo.brown.edu/People/Grads/Chen/MyOtherProjects/GradeSchool/Natural%20Languages%20vs%20Programming%20Languages.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Programming and natural languages&lt;/a&gt;, Alex Chen, September 16, 2004&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://meetrajesh.com/archives/natural-vs-programming-languages.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural vs Programming Languages&lt;/a&gt;, Rajesh Kumar, December 22, 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/projects/nuprl/cs611/fall94notes/cn2/subsection3_1_3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Artificial Language vs. Natural Language&lt;/a&gt;, Cornell University, Fall 1994 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jefflau.net/the-similarities-and-differences-between-languages-and-programming/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Similarities and differences between languages and programming&lt;/a&gt;, Jeff Lau, December 29, 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4829" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T22:33:19.447" Title="Any difference between natural and programming languages?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7047" CreationDate="2014-07-20T16:41:13.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old Persian cuneiform script is an alphabet, not a syllabary. Despite a superficial resemblance to Babylonian cuneiform, all attempts to derive it from a Babylonian, or any other, model, have failed. It seems to have been invented ad hoc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good discussion here: P. Lecoq,  'Le problème de l'écriture cunéiforme vieux-perse',  Acta Iranica 1ère série, 3, 1974, 25-107.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-07-20T16:52:30.020" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T16:52:30.020" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7047" CreationDate="2014-07-20T17:03:43.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Second objection: The South Arabian alphabet (in turn the parent of the Ethiopian alphabets) does not derive from &quot;Phoenician/Canaanite script&quot;. Rather the North-West Semitic (&quot;Phoenician/Canaanite&quot;) and South Semitic scripts have a common, as yet unknown, ancestor. This can be seen from the extra consonants shared by South Arabian and Ugaritic scripts, but missing in Phoenician and Canaanite scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T17:03:43.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8616" CreationDate="2014-07-20T18:53:19.130" Score="6" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pejorative_suffix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suffix&lt;/a&gt; (or some other alteration) that gives a pejorative meaning to a word.  For example, in Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pájaro&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bird&quot; + &lt;em&gt;-aco&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;pajarraco&lt;/em&gt; &quot;big, ugly bird&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you call a suffix that gives an &quot;anti-pejorative&quot; meaning to a word?  For example, imagine if you could do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pájaro&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bird&quot; + &lt;em&gt;-iñalo&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;pajariñalo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;beautiful bird&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T22:04:17.517" Title="What's the opposite of a pejorative suffix?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2014-07-20T21:04:21.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages, the way to express a positive attitude is to use a 'diminutive' which is used more often for terms of endearment rather than denoting a small size. Conversely, in languages that have an augmentative, it is often used to express pejorative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is so often the case in language, these terms are not really symmetrical along some imaginary scale. A language may have a very complex system of diminutives with only the most rudimentary augmentatives or no augmentatives at all. Also, both diminutives and augmentatives can be used for positive and negative evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T21:04:21.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8612" CreationDate="2014-07-20T21:33:31.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;All three of your assumptions about natural languages are questionable. They describe models used by linguists very many of which have been inspired by computer-like algorithms not language itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Natural language does not &quot;strongly distinguish between syntax and semantics&quot;. In fact, they are very closely interlinked. Syntactic constructions are used to express all kinds of meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Natural language is used to communicate much more than &quot;to explain what something is or what is to be done&quot;. It's not even clear that communicating that kind of information is what language evolved to do (see e.g. Dunbar's thesis). Nevertheless, focusing on the kind of semantics that can be expressed by a programming language is what has been keeping the developments in semantics back.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Natural and programming languages are compositional in very different ways. While you can define all the compositional rules in a programming language, a natural language is much freer - which is what makes language change possible. It also makes the expressive potential of a natural language significantly larger than that of a programming language. There's no irony in a programming language (that's not to say that programmers cannot express puns or even parody each other's code - but they're communicating those to other humans, not the computer).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, while the language as computer code metaphor has some limited aptness and utility, it is more misleading than useful. Most linguists will have long rejected it if they ever maintained the mapping. If natural and programming languages were even a little alike, we would have working algorithm-based parsers and full-blown AI, already. But natural languages are not algorithmic at all. Understanding and speaking them is more akin to pattern recognition than feature analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think is a much more interesting subject for research (and greatly understudied) is the rich and complex ways in which programmers use programming languages to communicate with the computer and each other. In that, programming languages are much more like natural language. For instance, we could find parallels of dialects, accents, and registers in programmer communities. We will find eloquent programmers and those who struggle to get their meaning out there. Not understanding the complexity, often leads people to erroneous statements that one can learn to code in a day. But it is no truer to say that memorizing and German dictionary and learning the rules of German syntax will make you 'speak German' than to say that learning all the rules of C will enable you to write a computer program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-20T21:33:31.933" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8625" CreationDate="2014-07-20T22:05:53.403" Score="8" ViewCount="4623" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8558/database-of-words-that-differ-by-one-phoneme&quot;&gt;general question about minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. words that differ by one phoneme) and got a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/minimal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; that provides a comprehensive list of English minimal pairs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a place where I can find a similar list for French minimal pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T06:53:42.510" Title="List of French minimal pairs" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8622" CreationDate="2014-07-21T11:44:36.063" Score="1" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages have three noun classes corresponding to men, women and a third gender? Where can I find lists like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4903" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T22:47:38.403" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T22:58:40.793" Title="Which languages have three noun classes corresponding to men, women and a third gender?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8620" CreationDate="2014-07-21T12:50:20.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you asking about languages that distinguish between (1) nouns for animate male beings, (2) nouns for animate female beings, (3) nouns for inanimate beings, then the answer is that very few languages classify their nouns in this way. One of these few is English, with its pronouns he, she, and it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about what is properly called grammatical gender, where the nouns for animate male beings are of masculine gender, nouns for animate female beings are of feminine gender, and nouns for inanimate beings are distributed more or less arbitrarily between two (masculine and feminine) or three (masculine, feminine, neuter) genders, then this is the situation in most of the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, but virtually no where else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T12:50:20.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8620" CreationDate="2014-07-21T13:43:48.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; has this information available in Chapter 30.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert at WALS I think the map from this link will show all languages with grammatical gender but you can narrow the list down by choosing &lt;code&gt;3&lt;/code&gt; from a dropdown menu, though that doesn't hide the other languages form the map:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/30A#map&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/30A#map&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives us a list of just 26 languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Abkhaz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barasana_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Barasano&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defaka_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Defaka&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godoberi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Godoberi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grebo_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grebo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Greek (Modern)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Icelandic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannada_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kannada&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ket_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ket&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoekhoe_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Khoekhoe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koromfe_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Koromfe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavukaleve_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lavukaleve&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangarayi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mangarrayi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Marathi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nicobarese (Car)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oneida&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanimuca-Retuar%C3%A3_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Retuarã&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Seneca&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tamil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidore_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tidore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ukrainian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardaman_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wardaman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wari%E2%80%99_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wari'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it's apparent that since English is included that this list might include languages which only make the distinction for pronouns and not nouns. If you want a list with only languages such as German and Russian I'm afraid I don't know how to narrow down the list on WALS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems odd to me that the majority of Slavic languages are not included. This could be due to an animate/inanimate distinction leading to analyses that they have four genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T13:43:48.740" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-21T15:43:07.567" Score="11" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages seem to have some sort of repeating and/or singsong equivalent of the phrase &lt;em&gt;so-so&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Arabic: نصف نصف (&lt;em&gt;nisf nisf&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Chinese: 馬馬虎虎 (&lt;em&gt;mǎma hūhu&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Greek: &lt;em&gt;έτσι κι έτσι&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Hebrew: ככה ככה&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Italian: così così&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Japanese: まあまあ (&lt;em&gt;māmā&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Malay: &lt;em&gt;jadi-jadi&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Maori: &lt;em&gt;na-na&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Thai: เรื่อยๆ (&lt;em&gt;rêuay rêuay&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Welsh: &lt;em&gt;mor-mor&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a common origin somewhere I'm not understanding, or some theory to explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Kathy Santos" LastEditorUserId="100" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T10:54:33.527" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T10:54:33.527" Title="Why do so many languages have a phase like &quot;so-so&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8623" CreationDate="2014-07-21T16:54:12.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a common origin? No. Is there some theory to explain this? I propose one: common need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078273&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items&lt;/a&gt;, Dingemanse et. al. have found that in 10 languages, (and less carefully studied, 30 languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. ...the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. ... it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of &lt;em&gt;convergent evolution&lt;/em&gt;. Huh? is a universal word ...because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose a similar mechanism for &quot;so-so&quot;: although it is not the same word in every language, there is a strong need in language for a short, meaningful expression that connotes the ambiguity of &lt;em&gt;so so&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add that in French, the expression is &lt;em&gt;comme ci comme ça&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;asi asi&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;mas o menos&lt;/em&gt;), in Finnish &lt;em&gt;niin ja näin&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: why would the word/phrase be echoic? &lt;em&gt;So-so&lt;/em&gt; is a short phrase that truly admits to the bad existing with the good in approximately equal measure. It's a hard thing to talk about (&quot;Well, he's in the ICU in a coma on a respirator, but the neurologists tell us there's still a fair amount of brain activity, and no evidence of increasing intracranial pressure, so it looks like he might come out of this, but we don't know how intact he'll be.&quot;). How's your marriage? So-so. How are your job prospects doing? So-so. Sure, there are minor events that could be applied to. But the principle is the same. If someone wants to be honest but doesn't want to elaborate, so-so indicated the ambiguity: some good, some bad. Like this, like that (French, Italian and Spanish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how I understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" OwnerDisplayName="medica" LastEditorUserId="4888" LastEditDate="2014-07-23T18:56:22.187" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T18:56:22.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8619" CreationDate="2014-07-21T17:16:05.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moved from comments.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider generating such lists yourself. I'm not saying asking if that work has already been done is wrong. :) Computationally, it's not a trivial job. This link (billposer.org/Software/minpair.html) purports to provide an open source (GNU license) program to find minimal pairs in a provided dictionary. You'd want to provide a phonemic dictionary, of course, for phonological minimal pairs. If it's not adequate, you could also examine the algorithm and modify it to suit your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be interested in generating your own words (according to some pattern of phonemes, presumably), and then simply checking if they are in the dictionary. Or, and this is based on your original question, you can test people on minimal pairs of nonwords (in something like an AXB task, I guess); for the purpose of assessing their phoneme perception, this option is the typical choice. It helps to minimize the influences of semantics, frequency, lexical neighborhoods, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@JeremyNeedle: I like using real words. Given a phonemic dictionary I have no issue with doing the programming work. Where do I find the computer readable phonemic dictionaries? –  Christian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can be a little trickier, and it's language specific. For French, I believe Lexique is a good choice (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexique.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lexique.org&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Researchers have also had success using eSpeak (&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://espeak.sourceforge.net&lt;/a&gt;) to convert orthography to phonemes, for French and other languages (for eSpeak performance figures, see &lt;em&gt;Marian, V., Bartolotti, J., Chabal, S., Shook, A. (2012). CLEARPOND: Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities. PLoS ONE 7(8): e43230. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0043230&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T17:16:05.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8623" CreationDate="2014-07-21T17:21:07.370" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called reduplication. It is a wide-spread phenomenon in most languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-21T17:21:07.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-21T17:26:03.733" Score="1" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first StackExchange post, so please let me know if I need to add additional information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a comprehensive database that has words broken down by their morphology. For example, the word 'protected' would be 'pro', 'tect', and 'ed'.  Similarly having would be 'have' and 'ing'.  In each case the prefixes, roots, and suffixes would be identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a resource, preferably, open-source that would serve this purpose?  I'd like to be able to use this resource to feed into teaching activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, between me and my friends we should be able to handle any programming needs if we need to tweak things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4905" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-22T00:32:09.467" LastActivityDate="2014-07-22T03:28:20.290" Title="Looking for a Morphology Database" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8627" CreationDate="2014-07-21T18:28:01.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;CELEX certainly has this information (at shallow and deep levels of morphological analysis). It is not free. I wasn't able to find a free alternative in a quick search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also morphological analysis tools for building this database yourself, though it's an area of active research. You might start by trying the resources here (&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Morphology_software_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Morphology_software_for_English&lt;/a&gt;). NLTK does not appear to do morph analysis out of the box, but further exploration there may also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, pro+tect+ed is unlikely to be the right parse, because 'tect' is not an English morph (though it is in the Latin source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2014-07-22T03:28:20.290" LastActivityDate="2014-07-22T03:28:20.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8646" CreationDate="2014-07-22T07:54:36.623" Score="4" ViewCount="2017" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be the wrong place to be asking this question, but I'm not entirely sure what kind of advantage using a language like Prolog gives you over an object-oriented language like Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason why Prolog is popular in both linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the two fields are connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="13357" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T14:44:52.030" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T14:44:52.030" Title="Why are functional/logic programming languages like Prolog or Haskell popular with computational linguistics and AI?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-22T09:42:59.953" Score="12" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1206/do-linguists-measure-the-relation-distance-between-languages-how&quot;&gt;another Linguistics.SE question&lt;/a&gt;, an answer makes this claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difference between French and German is so much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese that one would be hard pressed to say they are of similar distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This however contradicts what I find with some very brief googling of the phrase 'lexical similarity':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; states that the 'lexical similarity' between French and German is 29%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While someone else claims that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to lexical statistical data of any two languages within the&#xA;  Sinitic branch (for example Wu and Mandarin), the data will always&#xA;  reveal that there is less intelligibility between them than any two&#xA;  Romance languages in Europe. For example, French has lexical&#xA;  similarity of about 75% to several other Romance languages. In&#xA;  comparison, Mandarin has 31% lexical similarity with Wu (Shanghainese)&#xA;  and 19% with Yue (Cantonese). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/publish/articles/003543/bookpart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is therefore this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it obvious that the difference between French/German is much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Indeed, if the numbers in the above sources are to be believed, English is more similar to  Russian [24%] than Mandarin is to Cantonese [19%]. Is this possible?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3222" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T12:03:57.993" Title="Is it obvious that the difference between French/German is much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8861" CreationDate="2014-07-22T10:43:25.463" Score="-1" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;Facebook recently reported a controversial experiment in which they found that if people use read words with positive emotional valence in their facebook news feed they will themselves use more positive words in the status updates that they write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They themselves seem to have used a payed software to do the analysis. Is there a free word list that gives me for all English words a score about their emotional valence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T09:22:46.940" Title="Free list of emotional valence of words" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-22T13:31:46.900" Score="0" ViewCount="1561" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in semantic shift undergone by words, and I am aware of classic examples like 'gay', which has shifted in meaning since the 1900s. However, are there any words that have actually undergone multiple such changes from, say, 1850 to the present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4913" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-25T10:46:33.300" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T10:46:33.300" Title="Are there any words that have changed usage/meaning multiple times (multiple semantic shifts) from 1850s to present time" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2014-08-16T06:49:22.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2438" CreationDate="2014-07-22T14:30:28.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese has four “central” vowels, orthographic â, ă, ư, ơ. There are at present two conflicting analyses. One group of scholars says that â, ă are a higher and a lower central vowel, and ư , ơ are a higher and a lower back unrounded vowel, but others say that â, ă are short central vowels and ư , ơ are long central vowels. Both theories have their strengths and their weaknesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a rather detailed discussion here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2727474&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2727474&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-07-24T17:01:34.810" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T17:01:34.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2014-07-22T23:33:14.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the links I'll provide are in German, but they seem to apply perfectly to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/?p=318&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic differential analysis and author identification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/?p=921&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of computer-aided author identification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/?p=250&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Text classification and author identification using complex n-grams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/?cat=22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Linguistic differential analysis and author identification&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first article describes the use of a vector model. A message board is used as testing ground for author identification based on usage of certain vocabulary and word frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the third variable corresponds loosely to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;kriminell&quot; -&gt; &quot;criminal&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;auf der schiefen Bahn&quot; -&gt; &quot;not on the right track&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;straffällig&quot; -&gt; &quot;has been convicted&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;History of computer-aided author identification&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little context: The &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militante_gruppe_%28mg%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;militante gruppe (mg)&lt;/a&gt; was a radical left group that carried out small attacks on property in the early 2000s. Andrej Holm, a sociologist specializing in gentrification and similar topics, was detained by the police on the basis that he was part of the (mg). Authorship identification techniques were used to identify him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author first tries to group texts based on function words and concludes that it isn't a suitable metric for authorship identification. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/characterizing-authorship-style-using-linguistic-features/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; disagrees with that conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author then tries to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/?p=250&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complex n-gram models&lt;/a&gt;. This type of procedure is great for identifying the type of text (e.g., fiction, blog post, scientific journal) but isn't suitable for author identification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, there is machine learning using various metrics (e.g., average sentence length, relative frequency of intensifying particles, relative frequency of passive voice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting decision tree is shown here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.security-informatics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/decision_tree_mg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DyUFi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Decision tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One criticism is that shallow nodes have a higher chance of being wrongly classified, and that this method, again, identifies the type of text rather than the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that all these methods have shortcomings in not having enough data or classifiers. There are various other methods, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-1030&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;local histograms&lt;/a&gt;, character n-grams (which supposedly works really well), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://engineering.purdue.edu/purpl/level2/papers/soboroff97visualizing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latent Semantic Indexing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4916" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T17:41:43.750" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T17:41:43.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-23T08:50:51.297" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;What educational material can you recommend me for learning (Egyptian) Hieroglyphs given the following goals and background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must have an understanding of the the geographical and spatial variations of the written language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must be able to read a &quot;significant&quot; part of existing, original texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must be able to write simple texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can read, write and speak several languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know anything about Hieroglyphs or any related modern languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have some time I can spend on this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4919" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T14:15:58.623" Title="University Level Hieroglyphics Material" Tags="&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-23T11:42:07.367" Score="2" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to the recent passing of my grandmother I've been thinking more and more of something she said when I was a little child. She said something like &quot;The Finnish language can utterly destroy a person verbally&quot; and &quot;When I argue I prefer to do this in Finnish&quot;. Naturally this was quite interesting then, but needless to say she did not want to say any examples in front of our parents. Me being Swedish with no knowledge of Finnish whatsoever wants to know if anyone could enlighten me in this matter? Are other languages more limited in terms of profanities etc. than the Finnish language? If so, does anyone have any kind of explanation of how it came to be so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4920" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-16T13:38:42.563" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T13:38:42.563" Title="So the Finnish language can destroy people verbally, or...?" Tags="&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-07-23T18:16:57.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8639" CreationDate="2014-07-23T12:04:49.457" Score="0" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;In alphabetic languages (broadly speaking - anything other than a logographic script) which are written right-to-left, are the characters within a word written in the same direction as the words, or are they aligned differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we pretended that English was written right-to-left, how would the sentence &amp;quot;My name is James, I live in the UK&amp;quot; be written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KU eht ni evil I ,semaJ si eman yM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UK the in live I ,James is name My&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T09:12:51.677" Title="In alphabetic languages written right-to-left, are the characters within a word written in the same direction?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8635" CreationDate="2014-07-23T13:17:42.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar is old, but still very useful for self-teaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T13:17:42.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8637" CreationDate="2014-07-23T15:40:14.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reading&lt;/em&gt; RTL is way much different from &lt;em&gt;writing an LTR language RTL&lt;/em&gt;, which basically means that the text render-er (or the person) is not doing its (their) job properly to &lt;em&gt;display&lt;/em&gt; the text correctly. So, in the countries where they read RTL, they read the RTL language RTL, not English in RTL, because English is an LTR language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of RTL languages are Persian, Urdu, Dari, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. and if you really want to know which one they look like more, the answer is 1. However in some of these languages, like Persian, math and numbers are done LTR, just like English. So arithmetic are done LTR, and 67 is just 67, not &quot;76&quot;. I won't judge about the other languages, since I do know that some of these rules change in Arabic for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would recommend reading some articles or even try learning these languages to even a small extent, if you really want to understand how these languages work, since the whole answer cannot fit in one single post here. (:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4823" LastActivityDate="2014-07-23T15:40:14.413" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8631" CreationDate="2014-07-23T17:53:40.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emotional valence is an extremely complex topic. Emotional state and the expression of such a state is bound by biology, psychology, culture and society. It's methods were not grounded in a consistent self esteem measurements so it's difficult to tell what if anything they proved. They could have just &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qRC4Vk6kisY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PFUDOR&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to make such a software to quantify emotional state is to have individuals announce their current feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1916" LastEditorDisplayName="user1916" LastEditDate="2014-07-24T16:47:14.600" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T16:47:14.600" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8632" CreationDate="2014-07-24T01:57:05.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some English words have undergone multiple semantic changes, but you might have trouble finding multiple changes within the restricted time from 1850 to the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=silly&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Silly&lt;/a&gt;:   from &quot;happy&quot; to &quot;blessed&quot; to &quot;pious,&quot; to &quot;innocent&quot; (c.1200), to &quot;harmless,&quot; to &quot;pitiable&quot; (late 13c.), &quot;weak&quot; (c.1300), to &quot;feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish&quot; (1570s). Further tendency toward &quot;stunned, dazed as by a blow&quot; (1886) to today's &quot;frivolous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=fanny&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fanny&lt;/a&gt;:   from &quot;a diminutive of Frances&quot; (1700-1800's) to &quot;female genitalia&quot; (1879) to &quot;buttocks&quot; (since 1920's in America only).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=swell&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Swell&lt;/a&gt;: from &quot;a morbid swelling&quot; (1200) &quot;rise in sea&quot; (1600) or &quot; a rise music&quot; (1803) to &quot;wealthy, elegant person&quot; (1786) to &quot;good, excellent&quot; (1897). Just for fun also see &quot;An Unfinished Story&quot; by O Henry (1906): &quot;Well, ain't you the lucky one? Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a swell time, Dulcie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T01:57:05.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-24T05:42:30.483" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an article that benefitted from a native-speaking linguistic consultant. I have several linguistic consultants, but this gal in particular really did a lot. She even helped train the other linguistic consultants. How should I refer to her? &quot;Chief Linguistic Consultant&quot; seems a bit inappropriate (since she is a Native American). I asked her for her preference and she has none, she doesn't even mind &quot;chief&quot; -- but I want to keep things professional and keep up appearances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the standard way to refer to such individuals in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T05:42:30.483" Title="Linguistic consultants" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14455" CreationDate="2014-07-24T10:13:45.783" Score="6" ViewCount="1231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do native speakers of different languages make different mistakes when speaking in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, do native speakers of Japanese make different mistakes than native speakers of Russian when they speak in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_English&quot;&gt;pronunciation differs&lt;/a&gt;, for example Japanese speakers are more likely to get &quot;R&quot; and &quot;L&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JapaneseRanguage&quot;&gt;mixed up&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm also interested in other things, such as grammatical errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T23:24:04.393" Title="Do native speakers of different languages make different mistakes in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2014-07-24T20:07:50.737" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recognizing accents is a relatively easy task... for people. Identifying the native language of writers is an actively researched field of Computational Linguists. So active that the field, &quot;Native Language Identification&quot;, has its own conferences now. I paste from &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/nlisharedtask2013/home&quot;&gt;their website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Native Language Identification (NLI) can be useful for a number of applications. In educational settings, NLI can be used to provide more targeted feedback to language learners about their errors. It is well known that learners of different languages make different errors depending on their L1s. A writing tutor system which can detect the native language of the learner will be able to tailor the feedback about the error and contrast it with common properties of the learner’s language. In addition, native language is often used as a feature that goes into authorship profiling, which is frequently used in forensic linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... to say nothing of helping governments identify &quot;radicals&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quiz, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish/&quot;&gt;Which English&lt;/a&gt;, was quite popular on social media, a couple of months ago. It attempts to find out both, which dialect of English your own English is most like, and what your native language is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-07-24T22:09:42.173" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T22:09:42.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8596" CreationDate="2014-07-24T20:43:47.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German word for minimal pair is Minimalpaar: &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalpaar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;de Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then search for examples using that word. Here is one slideshow I encountered:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.germsem.uni-kiel.de/ndnl/materialien/wintersemester0910/Einf%20Sprwiss%204%20-%20Phonologie.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonologie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples are:&#xA;mahlen, zahlen, kahlen, fahlen, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4926" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T20:43:47.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8629" CreationDate="2014-07-24T21:34:22.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imperative programming languages perform the instructions in the order you specify. Procedural languages (e.g. C) are imperative languages that allow you to group instructions into named blocks called functions or procedures. Object orientated languages like C++, Java and Python extend procedural languages with additional features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prolog works in a completely different way to imperative languages. With prolog, you define facts, e.g. &lt;code&gt;noun(Tom).&lt;/code&gt;. You can also define rules that infer things from other things (i.e. define relationships). These then allow you to perform queries on an input given the facts and rules in the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A use case for Prolog in computational linguistics would be in constructing syntax trees from a given sentence. The facts would be the part of speech classification for each word, and the rules would be how the parts of speech group together in syntax tree constructs (e.g. noun phrases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prolog (and related languages) are popular for a type of AI approach called an expert system (of which the syntax tree construction above is an example). Expert systems have been applied to different domains, e.g. medical diagnostics, to varying degrees of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why languages like Prolog are popular for writing expert systems is that they are specifically constructed for writing expert systems, so you don't have to write a lot of boilerplate or repeated code as you would in another programming language. In computer science, this is an example of a domain-specific language -- kind of like how different fields define their own words and their own terminology for things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T21:34:22.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8571" CreationDate="2014-07-24T21:48:50.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia definition of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about statements in another language. That is, it is a language designed to describe the constructs of another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia then defines a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metasyntax&lt;/a&gt; as the syntax or grammar of a given metalanguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Backus-Naur Form (BNF) is a metalanguage which defines a metasyntax (i.e. a metagrammar) that you use to write statements in BNF to describe the constructs in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-07-24T21:48:50.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8635" CreationDate="2014-07-25T07:27:52.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would definitely start with Gardiner: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Grammar:_Being_an_Introduction_to_the_Study_of_Hieroglyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Grammar:_Being_an_Introduction_to_the_Study_of_Hieroglyphs&lt;/a&gt;. That's what I used back in the day and it was concise and clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a number of caveats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You ask introduction to 'hieroglyphs' but that's just the writing system. What you really mean when you want to read text is understanding of Ancient Egyptian. This is a Hamito-Semitic language (now called Afro-Asiatic) which means it shares some features with Hebrew and Arabic - so it helps a little if you already have some familiarity with those but not much when it comes to any of the details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Egyptian is not a single language just like Old English and Modern English are not the same language. So you need to pick a time you want to study. Gardiner is an introduction to the language of the 'Middle Kingdom' which will enable you to read some famous stories like Sinuhe but also later texts written in the form (different from language spoken at the time).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hieroglyphics is just one of three scripts in which Ancient Egyptian was written. The others being Hieratic and later Demotic. (It would be four, if you count Coptic which was written in a modified version of the Greek alphabet.) So your focus should vary depending on the period you want to study and the types of texts you want to study.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your goals are certainly achievable but do expect to spend a lot of time with Gardiner and read a lot of texts. Don't expect to be a fluent reader any time soon, though. Most of your reading will be done with frequent references to a dictionary for a long time to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T07:27:52.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2014-07-25T07:46:27.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a much more complex and fraught question than it may seem. There are really two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do speakers of different languages make &lt;strong&gt;some errors&lt;/strong&gt; influenced by their first language? The answer here is, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, of course. Sometimes it's called L1 interference or transfer and has been studied extensively. Contrastive linguistics (mentioned by @jlawler) thought (erroneously) that this could even be used as the basis for all language teaching. The types of errors influenced by L1 are most obvious in pronunciation but also pop up frequently in idioms, vocabulary choice and also in much of syntax. Morphology is much less susceptible to L1 interference in non-related languages. So an English person learning Russian will make similar mistakes to a Spanish person learning Russian. But a Czech person learning Russian will be more influenced by their own morphology which functions on similar principles and sounds similar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can also ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does your &lt;strong&gt;native language determine absolutely the type of errors&lt;/strong&gt; you will make in English? Then the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. Not all features of native languages transfer over. And some features you would expect do not. So for example, even native speakers with rich verbal morphologies continue to make mistakes such as 'Jane walk.' even at intermediate level. So even though English verbal morphology is almost non-existent, it is still a challenge for them. Also, speakers of languages with very different syntax from English don't often transfer their word order into English in obvious ways. The interference may occur only in certain contexts and with certain constructions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want more details, I recommend Rod Ellis's classic 'The Study of Second Language Acquisition'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T07:46:27.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T09:53:40.557" Score="5" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know any minimal pairs for /p'/ and /p/, /t'/ and /t/ or /k'/ and /k/ in Georgian (or any other indigenous caucasian language)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a seminar paper about ejectives in caucasian languages and would like to prove their phoneme-status with one or two nice (simple) minimal pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4928" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-07-25T15:53:46.013" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T00:14:00.230" Title="Georgian minimal pairs with p' t' k'" Tags="&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T15:33:13.697" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finnish, among a few other languages, is known for its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;partitive case&lt;/a&gt;. I have been told that in some Germanic language, partitive case is required whenever SV-order is absent. SV-order is absent, e.g., in the following English example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     There are cows in the barn.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the subject &lt;em&gt;cows&lt;/em&gt; follows the verb &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;, SV-order is absent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During a recent discussion of this kind of existential construction in English, someone mentioned to me that in some Germanic languages semantic subjects following the verb would be marked by the partitive. To my chagrin, I failed to follow up on this matter. I have never encountered anything like partitive case in Germanic languages, even though I learned five of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know whether there is a Germanic language with partitive case? If yes, is the partitive case then used for semantic subjects that follow the verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:33:13.697" Title="Do Germanic languages have partitive case?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8651" CreationDate="2014-07-25T15:55:19.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here you go. Note also, that all these six words differ only in the first consonant, so they can be used to form a minimal pair for any two of the six consonants you are interested in. The language is Georgian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ფარი - /pari/ - shield &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;პარი - /p'ari/ - parry (a fencing term)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;თარი - /tari/ - tar (a long-necked, waisted lute)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ტარი - /t'ari/ - handle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ქარი - /kari/ - wind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;კარი - /k'ari/ - door&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T15:55:19.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8496" CreationDate="2014-07-25T17:02:14.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001722&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; by Pavel Caha on &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lingbuzz&lt;/a&gt; that addresses this exact question. Put simply, Caha argues, within a nanosyntactic framework, that the underlying structure of gen.sg=nom.pl nouns is something like this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   [[[gen.sg] N] nom.pl]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that any gen.sg=nom.pl noun is viewed as a noun with a genitive singular complement that projects into the nominative plural.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please, I'm just the messenger. Don't shoot me! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T17:02:14.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8651" CreationDate="2014-07-25T17:03:47.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are asking about languages of the Caucasus in general you might also want to know that Ossetic has five ejective stops (written пъ, тъ, къ, цъ, чъ), but they are marginal, occur only in loan words or words of unknown etymology, and do not constitute minimal pairs with п, т, к, ц, ч.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T00:14:00.230" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T00:14:00.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T18:30:17.643" Score="3" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/29140/is-or-are-the-only-thing-that-i-want-you-to-hit-right-now-is-are-the-books/29170#29170&quot;&gt;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/29140/is-or-are-the-only-thing-that-i-want-you-to-hit-right-now-is-are-the-books/29170#29170&lt;/a&gt;, I provided the following, problematic,  wording (especially &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bold italic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), and I need help to better understand this issue so I can fix my answer:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The thing is the books. (Reduced form of Sentence 2.a)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fundamentally, Sentence 2.a (the so-called &quot;correct&quot; answer), is grammatically defective. Recall there is another grammatical rule: the subject and subject's complement should match in number.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; The reduced sentence makes the disagreement between the subject's and complement's plurality obvious. What is one to do? Language is linear and we know &quot;The thing is X&quot; is better than &quot;The thing are X&quot;, so we go with the former, which is the subject-verb agreement rule. But what is &quot;the books&quot; then? It must be thought of as a collective noun, even if it doesn't look or feel like one. Forcing something to be a collective noun is related to the idea of notional agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others noted that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;grammatically defective&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is too strongly worded.  There is no such &quot;grammatical rule&quot; for subject/complement agreement.  Please help me understand/improve upon my line of thought here.  I'm stating that Sentence 2.1 presents a fundamental &quot;conflict&quot; or &quot;error&quot; (however one might define &lt;em&gt;error&lt;/em&gt;) at some level (morphological, syntax, grammatical, semantic):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing is the books.  (Or, &quot;The thing is the objects.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the &quot;obvious&quot; morphosyntactic plurality conflict, the above sentence feels so wrong that I think many native speakers would think it &quot;simply&quot; grammatically incorrect. However, @F.E. gives counter examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And here are some more grammatical examples, where the number of subject and predicative complement don't agree: &quot;They were a problem to us all&quot;, &quot;That so-called work of art is simply four pieces of driftwood glued together&quot; (CGEL, page 254-5). As CGEL says: &quot;What is required is semantic compatibility, not syntactic agreement . . .&quot;. There are more examples on page 512: &quot;The only thing we need now is some new curtains&quot;, &quot;The major asset of the team is its world-class opening bowlers&quot;, &quot;Our neighbors are a nuisance&quot;, &quot;This gadget is five different tools in one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think all the examples given above can be explained as notional agreement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt; If we explain this phenomena in terms of notional vs syntactic agreement, where does &quot;grammatically correct/incorrect&quot; fit in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Can a simple sentence such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;The thing is the objects.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; be grammatically incorrect while more complex sentences such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;The thing is four pieces of driftwood glued together.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; be grammatically correct?  (The answer, in my mind, must be no; this is my conundrum.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Would it be better to say that Sentence 2.a has a low level of (linguistic) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 4:&lt;/strong&gt; How about a low level of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_well-formedness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gradient well-formedness&lt;/a&gt; and that it's semantically difficult to be (linguistically) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptability_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;acceptable&lt;/a&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 5:&lt;/strong&gt; Do we simply draw a hard line and say &lt;em&gt;&quot;The thing is the objects.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is 100% grammatically correct?  I didn't particularly &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; this option based on intuitive notions of &quot;grammatically correct&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Please help me and be kind; I'm trying to improve my understanding. I'm looking for cool, objective advice on how to look at this.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I numbered my questions so they can be easily referenced, if desired.  My preference is the final answer would sufficiently answer all the questions, but of course that can be done explicitly or implicitly.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3199" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T01:16:29.467" Title="Subject/Complement Agreement. How to describe problem with &quot;The thing is the objects.&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2967" CreationDate="2014-07-25T21:49:32.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A semicolon alone can be used to coordinate two main clauses; this signals a closer relationship between two independent clauses. Some refer to this stylistic device as the Semicolon Alone Method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/writing/styleguide/punctuation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.reference.com/writing/styleguide/punctuation.html&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Semicolon (;)&#xA;   ... Punctuation sometimes regarded as a weak period or strong comma and used in ways similar to periods and commas. A semicolon can mark the end of a clause and indicate that a clause following is closely related to the previous clause. ... &#xA;  Separates (but also links) independent clauses in place of a coordinating conjunction or ellipsis, e.g. The package was due last week; it arrived today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhetorical figure of leaving out conjunctions (in this case 'and' before 'Life') is called asyndeton, or asyndetic listing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4931" LastEditorUserId="4931" LastEditDate="2014-07-25T22:37:52.480" LastActivityDate="2014-07-25T22:37:52.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-25T22:30:44.177" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;People who aren't english native speakers often tell me that their English is better than their native tongue, which is kinda odd since they use their native tongue most of the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I wonder if it possible for a native speaker who isn't proficient in his own language to become a near native-speaker. Is it possible for this person to reach a level of proficiency in the L2 that enables him or her to handle college-like material in the L2? By 'isn't proficient', I mean someone who dropped out of high school and who isn't an eloquent speaker or writer, but who is determined to be fluent and will not rest until he has achieved that goal. Is this goal realistic? Won't his low proficiency in L1 limit his acquisition of the L2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if one only speaks one's L1 for 30 years, can L2 proficiency ever surpass L1 proficiency given consistent striving to improve the L2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4932" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-26T02:54:36.343" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T23:11:22.357" Title="Does your dominant language proficiency determine the degree of possible proficiency in L2?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8656" CreationDate="2014-07-25T23:32:31.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question addresses an aspect of English syntax that is still somewhat in flux. The mechanism known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_copular_constructions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copular inversion&lt;/a&gt; should be part of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct answer to the question(s) is that acceptability judgments exist on a cline. There is more than one principle that influences the choice of subject. When these principles conflict, acceptability is degraded to a greater or lesser degree. Consider the following datum from German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Was wir brauchen sind/*ist neue Vorhaenge.&#xA; 'What we need are/*is new curtains'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, plural generally trumps singular when it comes to choosing the subject. Thus in this example, &lt;em&gt;neue Vorhange&lt;/em&gt; 'new curtains' is indisputably the subject of the sentence, a fact that makes &lt;em&gt;was wir brauchen&lt;/em&gt; 'what we need' the predicative NP. A related observation occurs in the following case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Der Klempner bin/*ist ich.&#xA; 'The plumber am/*is I.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first person pronoun &lt;em&gt;ich&lt;/em&gt; is indisputably the subject in this sentence. First person pronouns trump third person NPs when it comes to choosing the subject (second person pronouns also trump third person NPs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English cannot rely on morphological markers to identify the subject, since it lacks the inflectional richness of German (and many other languages). English relies much on word order instead. There is thus a very strong tendency to take the NP that immediately precedes the finite verb to be the subject, regardless of the factors that influence subject choice in a language like German (singular vs. plural, first or second person vs. third person, definiteness). But English and German are closely related, which means the principles of subject choice in German are not entirely dead in English; they survive in a weakened state and are influencing our sense of acceptability. They are responsible for the awkwardness of the sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The problem is the books.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, subject-verb agreement for a sentence like this obtains with the plural NP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Das Problem sind/*ist die Buecher.&#xA; 'The problem are/*is the books.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor that is influencing how these sentences are interpreted is the mechanism of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_copular_constructions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copular inversion&lt;/a&gt;. Consider the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1a. The discussions were tedious.&#xA;&#xA; 1b. Tedious were the discussions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence 1b is strongly marked; it needs a quite special context for it to occur, but given this context, it can be acceptable. It involves copular inversion; the subject NP has inverted to the other side of the finite verb, forcing the predicative adjective to appear in first position. Copular inversion in English is a remnant of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;V2 principle&lt;/a&gt; of Germanic languages. Now with examples 1a-b in mind, consider the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2a. The discussions were a problem.&#xA;&#xA; 2b. ??A problem were the discussions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on an analyis in terms of copular inversion along the lines in 1b, one could argue that copular inversion has occurred in 2b as well, which would make &lt;em&gt;the discussions&lt;/em&gt; the subject. But 2b is strongly marginal at best. The tendency for the NP that immediately precedes the finite verb to be granted subject status is too strong in English. But the acceptability judgments are not robust in such cases, since the V2 principle is not entirely dead in English; it is still influencing our sense of acceptability, if only to a minor extent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, acceptability judgments are often not black-and-white, but rather two or more principles of subject choice can be in competition, reducing acceptability to a greater or lesser extent. Someone who has mastered the language knows how to avoid the competition by using alternative formulations or how to use it to his or her advantage in order to create the desired effect of unusual or marginal language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-27T01:16:29.467" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T01:16:29.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-26T13:46:30.450" Score="2" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, there are many different verbs which can combine with &lt;em&gt;clausal complements&lt;/em&gt;. These verbs can be further sub-categorised as to whether they embed a propositional &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clause, or an embedded question. Some verbs, such as &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;, may only embed a proposition (i). Other verbs, like &lt;em&gt;wonder&lt;/em&gt;, may only embed a question (ii), and still other verbs, like &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, may embed either a proposition or a question (iii). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i. a. John believed [that Mary came]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. *John believed [who came]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ii. a. *John wondered [that Mary came]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. John wondered [who came]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iii. a. John knows [that Mary came]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. John knows [who came]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns the properties of &lt;em&gt;nouns&lt;/em&gt; that can combine with clausal complements, and how they relate to the paradigm above. Note that there are many nouns, such as &lt;em&gt;belief&lt;/em&gt; that can combine directly with a propositional clausal complement. They do not require a prepositional element (iv), unlike Noun Phrase complements to Nouns (v).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iv. a. The belief [that evolution is false] is thankfully extremely rare.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. *The belief of [that evolution is false] is thankfully extremely rare.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;v. a. *The photograph John is being developed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. The photograph of John is being developed. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, based on my tentative investigations, nouns which combine with questions are rather uncommon, and those that can combine with questions require a prepositional element (vi). In this respect question complements to nouns seem to behave more like DPs than &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vi. a. *The knowledge [who came] is extremely valuable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. The knowledge of [who came] is extremely valuable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question has an empirical aspect and a theoretical aspect: (1) The empirical question is to what extent this set of facts is unique to English. Are there other languages where interrogative clauses can freely combine with nouns? What happens in languages with case-marking for example? (2) The theoretical question is why question complements to nouns would behave more like Noun Phrase complements than &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clause complements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T07:51:09.217" Title="Nouns and Interrogative Complements" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2014-07-26T19:45:43.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest thing I can think of are honorifics in a number of East Asian languages (most prominently, Japanese, but also Korean and Thai). See, for example, the entry about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese#Respectful_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sonkeigo&lt;/a&gt; on wikipedia. Japanese also has a number of suffixes to proper names to indicate respect and deference (e.g., &quot;-sama&quot; 様, roughly translatable as &quot;highly respected&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T19:45:43.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8671" CreationDate="2014-07-26T22:37:30.660" Score="4" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that often while walking in the street in a foreign country, I will be able to recognize that someone nearby is speaking a language I'm familiar with without actually being able to make out the words. This effect is most pronounced for my mothertongue, where sometimes just hearing what seems to be an onomatopeic sound will be enough. Is there a basis for this phenomenon ? Do languages have a sort of frequency signature that we can immediately identify ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4923" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T23:24:15.593" Title="Why is it possible to identify a language without hearing the words?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2014-07-26T22:47:57.677" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three questions: Can one have improper grammar and good syntax?  It sounds like the answer is 'no.'  Can one have proper grammar and poor syntax?  I think yes, happens all the time. Which suggests a simple distinction: grammar is the uber-structure, and syntax is it's subset, and therefore one that is more subjective than its boss. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4937" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-07-27T08:41:26.617" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T08:41:26.617" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8658" CreationDate="2014-07-26T23:11:22.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about what 'language proficiency' is. The key things to remember are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language proficiency is not a binary state. You can't say that you either have it or not. Everyone is proficient in some ways and not in others. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no maximum language proficiency. The label 'fully proficient' has no basis because language is not finite.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language proficiency cannot be measured along a single progressive state. You always have to define what you are able to accomplish in a language with what level of accuracy and fluency. (The ACTFL levels are a very good guide to what this might look like.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language competence may not be manifested in all contexts equally. So a speaker will find it easier to draw upon their underlying competence with vocabulary, morphology and syntax in certain situations than others. For instance, speaking at a conference vs. renting a car.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not all aspects of language may exhibit the same level of 'proficiency'. Most often it is the pronunciation that is seen as deficient but morphology, idioms, etc. will also be subject to localized issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above holds for L1 and L2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being aware of this, you can formulate an answer to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many situations, in which an L1 speakers may find it easier to communicate about certain areas in L2. They will have the right vocabulary but also know the right ways of formulating their thoughts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are cases of variable regression so a speaker will loose some of their L1 and L2 will become their main language. This is often seen in emigres.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible even for people with severely impaired L1 to acquire L2 in many contexts. E.g. differential educational opportunities. In cases of underlying language impairment, the person may exhibit the same deficiencies in L1 and L2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People often have prejudicial views of their own language proficiency which they equate with 'knowing the grammar'. Therefore, they may be assuming that because they know more about the 'grammar' of one language, they know the language better. Similarly, native speakers often label educated non-native speakers as speaking 'better English' than them because they use certain constructions and choose more formal vocabulary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-26T23:11:22.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8662" CreationDate="2014-07-27T00:19:31.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning the first question, German behaves similar to English regarding the content clauses that nouns can and cannot take, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1a. die Tatsache, dass er das gemacht hat&#xA;     'the fact that he did that'&#xA;&#xA; 1b. *die Tatsache, wann er das gemacht hat&#xA;     'the fact when he did that'&#xA;&#xA; 2a. *die Frage, dass er das gemacht hat&#xA;     'the question that he did that'&#xA;&#xA; 2b.  die Frage, warum er das gemacht hat&#xA;      'the question why he did that'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German has morphological case, but I am not aware that this fact has any influence at all on the distribution of content clauses (that's what I've encountered these clauses called, i.e. &lt;em&gt;content clauses&lt;/em&gt;). Whether or not a given noun can take a declarative or interrogative content clause is an idiosyncratic trait of the noun; it is a lexical matter, i.e. part of the valency of the noun. Certainly semantic considerations play a role in determining valency traits, but my guess is that semantics will get you only so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question receives a clear answer that is purely syntactic in nature (as opposed to lexico-semantic). &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses have a distribution that is more limited than embedded wh-clauses. In particular, wh-clauses can easily appear as the complement of a preposition, whereas &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses really cannot, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 3a  *We looked at that he did that.&#xA; 3b.  We looked at why he did that.&#xA;&#xA; 4a. *They talked about that he did that.&#xA; 4b.  They talked about why he did that.&#xA;&#xA; 5a. *the discussion of that he did that&#xA; 5b.  the discussion of why he did that&#xA;&#xA; 6a. *We were struggling with that he did that.&#xA; 6b.  We were struggling with why he did that.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These data motivate the stance that prepositions can freely take wh-clauses as complements, but not &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses. Of course the pertinent question is why this should be the case. I believe there is a solid syntactic explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explanation resides with the analysis of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses and wh-clauses (matrix vs. embedded). If one assumes that the head/root of a that-clause is the subordinator &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; and the head/root of an embedded wh-clause is the wh-element, then the explanation comes into view. The subordinator &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; does not have the status of of a nominal, whereas wh-elements do (because of their wh-feature). In other words, prepositions are subcategorizing for a nominal dependent; &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-subordinators do not have nominal status, whereas wh-subordinators and wh-elements do have this status. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explanation relies crucially on the stance that the wh-element is the head/root of the embedded wh-clause. So for instance, in the following embedded wh-clause, the wh-element is the head/root of that clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;7. the explanation about why he did that&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By assuming that &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is the head/root of the clause &lt;em&gt;why he did that&lt;/em&gt;, we can produce a coherent syntactic explanation of the acceptability judgments in 1-7. The wh-feature on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; renders &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the equivalent of a nominal category, which means that it can be the immediate dependent of a preposition. Since the subordinator &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; lacks the wh-feature, it cannot be the immediate dependent of a preposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I address this issue (i.e. the analysis of matrix and embedded wh-clauses) directly in two of my/our publications. I would be happy to provide copies to anyone who is interested (my email is tjo3ya@yahoo.com). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one further point: the overarching issue is touched on briefly in an (in my view convincing) argument against syntactic movement. Observe the following acceptability contrast -- the examples are taken from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 8a. *We talked about that he was sick for days.  &#xA; 8b.  That he was sick, we talked about for days. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This acceptability contrast consitutes what is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;movement paradox&lt;/a&gt;; it is originally due to Joan Bresnan, I think. If topicalization really involved syntactic movement, then both of these sentences should be acceptable. The fact that 8a is bad demonstrates that the topicalized clause in 8b cannot have originated in its &quot;base&quot; position shown in 8a. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T07:51:09.217" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T07:51:09.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8496" CreationDate="2014-07-27T01:19:04.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Latin first and second declensions the identity of the Nom. pl. and Gen. sg. is probably accidental. The former is imported from the pronominal declension, where the PIE ending for o-stems was *-oy, which regularly became -ei in early Latin and -ī in Classical Latin. The latter is of unknown origin, but is shared with Celtic. That these two are different suffixes is shown by the fact that (a) in early Latin inscriptions, only the Nom. pl. is spelled -ei, while the Gen. pl. is always spelled -i; and (b) even in Classical Latin, there is a difference between the forms in the case of words in -ius/-ium: the Gen. sg. may contract -iī to -ī (e.g. consilī for consiliī), but the Nom. pl. never does. That's for the second declension; the first declension simply took over these -ī endings from the second declension, giving e.g. &lt;em&gt;animā-ī&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;animae&lt;/em&gt; in both Nom. pl. and Gen. sg. (although the older forms in -ās are still attested for both functions). (The fifth-declension Gen. sg. in -ī has the same analogical origin.) In the fourth declension, the identity of the Gen. sg. and Nom. pl. goes back to PIE (see fdb's answer); I don't know of any evidence bearing on the question of whether that identity is meaningful or accidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T01:19:04.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8670" CreationDate="2014-07-27T14:27:16.990" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can any sort of prosodic information (e.g. rhythm, intensity, pitch) be seen/understood just from a waveform alone (without reference to e.g. spectrograms)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-07-27T23:10:02.520" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T14:24:39.410" Title="What, if any, prosodic information can be gleaned from a study of a waveform?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8669" CreationDate="2014-07-27T23:09:39.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely. Here's a waveform of my rendition of the word &lt;em&gt;prosody&lt;/em&gt; with a declarative intonation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Mk6s.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;waveform and text grid for the word *prosody*&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duration&lt;/strong&gt; - As you can see, it's quite clear where the chunks of unobstructed periodic voicing as opposed to aperiodic noise are (though sometimes the exact placement of a boundary between the two can be tricky), and it's quite simple to measure their duration. In this case, the first and third vowels are comparable in length, while the middle vowel is much shorter. This makes sense, since the first vowel is stressed and the last vowel is unstressed but word-, phrase-, and utterance-final. The middle vowel is unstressed and word-medial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you might not be able to do is measure the respective durations of two adjacent sounds with similar acoustic properties--two fricatives, for example, or two vowels. In such cases we usually depend on being able to see the spectrum (to see where in the spectrum the frication noise is concentrated, or where formants are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intensity&lt;/strong&gt; - The relative intensity of a sound can be gleaned from the amplitude of the waveform.  It's clear that the first vowel is the most intense, while the second and third are quite similar to one another in their intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fundamental frequency (&quot;pitch&quot;)&lt;/strong&gt; - The average fundamental frequency (F0) of any portion of a voiced sound can be calculated by dividing the number of glottal pulses by the duration of the chunk in question. For example, if we zoom in on the first vowel...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/slH1d.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;waveform and text grid for the first vowel of *prosody*&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...we can see that there are 16 glottal pulses in 0.152 seconds. 16 divided by 0.152 is about 105, so the average F0 of the vowel is about 105 Hz. If we do the same for the second and third vowels, we get 91 Hz and 86 Hz, respectively. So, as expected for declarative intonation, the stressed vowel, which is also the first vowel in the word, has the highest average F0, and the F0 drops for the second vowel and then drops a bit more for the last vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, of course the F0 of a vowel does not usually stay exactly the same through the course of the vowel; if we wanted a more precise measurement we could measure the time between every two pulses and then divide 1 by that time to get the fundamental frequency for that part of the vowel. If we then plotted the results on a line graph we'd get a nice fundamental frequency contour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T14:24:39.410" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T14:24:39.410" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8664" CreationDate="2014-07-27T23:24:15.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Languages can often be distinguished based on prosodic information alone. Studies show that a newborn infant can distinguish different languages, provided the languages being compared are prosodically different enough from one another. A newborn is also predisposed to recognize her mother's native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one study (Nazzi, Bertoncini, and Mehler 1998), French newborns could distinguish English from Japanese and English/Dutch from Italian/Spanish, but not English from Dutch or Italian from Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory is that prosodic information, but not segmental information, can be perceived from inside the womb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J., and Mehler, J. (1998). &lt;em&gt;Language discrimination by newborns: toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.&lt;/em&gt; Journal of Experimental Psychology 24(3) 756-766.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-07-27T23:24:15.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2014-07-28T11:32:09.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously yes. In a lecture in Cambridge where a third of the students were fellow Germans, I once heard one of them say: &quot;This have I not known.&quot; (This is the kind of situation the German verb &lt;em&gt;fremdschämen&lt;/em&gt; was coined for.) Other hair-raising examples of stereotypically German English include &quot;Can I become a steak, please&quot; and the mythical &quot;You can say you to me&quot;. Fortunately I learned not to say things like &quot;I want to have an own apartment&quot; long before I first got one in an English-speaking country. Some people are less lucky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more interestingly, I often catch myself forgetting the plural &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; on an English noun. Although this happens to native speakers as well, I strongly suspect that in my case it's related to the fact that this particular plural ending is pretty rare in German and that the endings that we do use tend to disappear under the typical transformations that turn German words into their English cognates. (So basically, I appear to be treating English like a dialect of German to some extent, deriving a lot from German through regular transformations and then making adjustments if necessary. Sometimes the last step gets left out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germans don't normally have a lot of problems with articles in English. Habit of leaving out all articles or adding the articles in exactly wrong situations is mostly reserved to the speakers of the languages that don't have the articles, such as the Russian. Confusions about singulars and plurals is most often observed in speaker of language that don't have them, like Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-09-26T09:39:42.573" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T09:39:42.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4739" CreationDate="2014-07-28T13:14:53.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You aren't just looking for the technical term &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prestige&lt;/a&gt;, are you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T13:14:53.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3439" CreationDate="2014-07-28T15:18:51.957" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't give you any definitive answers, but as this question has been open so long I guess some plausible speculation is acceptable. I imagine that the move from SVO to SOV worked like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest stage that is of interest to us is when word order was very free due to ample inflections, but with a preference for SOV as the default. People deviated from SOV when they wanted to stress something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it was so easy to stress something in this way, people overdid it, as they always do. They started stressing a part of speech that didn't really need stressing - the subject - in every other sentence, then in almost all sentences. The few SOV sentences, which didn't stress anything, tended to move into the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something similar can be observed in the unusual syntax often used for German jokes. As is well known, in Germany it's illegal to confuse the public by telling a joke without wearing suitable attire or following the correct word order. Where many English jokes start with &quot;A man walks into a bar&quot;, German has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kommt ein Mann in eine Kneipe (literally: Comes a man into a pub)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the meaningless stress on the verb in this example and the next one. It's not just the first sentence, either. Often most sentences have this structure, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sagt der Mann zu der Frau (literally: Says the man to the woman)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of a German joke using this attention-grabbing word order, sentences without it tend to stay in the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That you could now put a sentence in the background by following the old-fashioned word order must have made it possible to use such sentences as a substitute for subordinate clauses. Of course for us SVO is just normal, so let's model this by using VSO instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meet an American rancher and a German farmer. They are arguing who has more land. Says the American, &quot;I have so much land that I need an entire day to drive around it.&quot; Replies the German, &quot;Years ago I also had such a slow car.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence is in the background as if it was a non-restrictive relative clause attached to the first. (&quot;Meet an American rancher and a German farmer, who are arguing who has more land.&quot;) For this interpretation it plays a role that the object - to which the relative clause refers - comes last as in our artificial VSO example, or historically (if I am right) in SVO. The interpretation would make less sense if the first sentence were in SOV order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the word order change from SOV to SVO had two effects: (1) One could distinguish main clauses and subordinate clauses even before unambiguously coordinating words such as relative pronouns existed. (2) Subordinate clauses referring to the object of the main clause could be placed immediately after the object. (Few subordinate clauses refer to the verb.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is my response to &lt;strong&gt;Question 1&lt;/strong&gt;: It may well have happened the other way round, and by the mechanism I described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2&lt;/strong&gt;: The other modern Germanic languages are more or less spoken today where they originated and with only average contact to other languages. English is the result of transplanting and mixing dialects spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark to a country with a lot of Celtic speakers and later on adding a French-speaking ruling class. Apparently this (or something else) has made it progress faster on the path from SOV to SVO, on which V2 is just an intermediate stage. (German word order is clearly in motion. Recently it's becoming more and more acceptable to use V2 instead of SOV in clauses introduced by &lt;em&gt;weil&lt;/em&gt;, for example. Also in some cases, Dutch and some German dialects order non-finite verbs differently than Standard German does: German &quot;dass sie bezahlt werden sollen&quot; vs. Dutch &quot;dat ze betaald zullen worden&quot; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dat ze zullen worden betaald&quot; vs. Flemish &quot;dat ze zullen betaald worden&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3&lt;/strong&gt;: Apparently, after a previous consensus that Old English was V2, there is currently a new discussion on this. It's not hard to find interesting recent work. Your proposal of its being left-peripheral, if I understand you correctly, doesn't explain the 5% or so of verb-last sentences in it any more than V2 does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2014-07-28T22:28:30.270" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T22:28:30.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4739" CreationDate="2014-07-28T17:03:29.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments explain specifically why this phenomenon occurs in Western European languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One hypothesis for why this might last and why it might be seen in other languages: the &quot;foreign&quot; words never entered the everyday spoken vocabulary of the language, but typically existed in writing and formal speech. In many examples, e.g., &quot;nativity,&quot; they still haven't entered the everyday vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the modern-day assignment of prestige is then &quot;the word that I had to go to school to learn is more prestigious than the word that I don't remember learning because everyone says it all the time.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example the other way, the Latinate &quot;etc.&quot; does not seem more erudite to me than &quot;and so on&quot; or &quot;and so forth,&quot; because it is used in everyday English speech. Similarly the French &quot;beef&quot; does not sound more erudite than the English &quot;cow.&quot;  Of course that is just personal perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2014-07-28T17:03:29.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8332" CreationDate="2014-07-28T17:13:06.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is actually Swiss German that is the special case. The Swiss used to use Swiss Standard German (a very different beast with little difference to standard Standard German) about as much as Germans speak and spoke Standard German. But during the Second World War, for obvious reasons Standard German suddenly had very low prestige. The Swiss extended their dialect use enormously and even started writing in dialect. (This is still tricky even today, as there is no standard.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there was no such situation with standard French, and as a linguistic minority, French speakers in Switzerland have an incentive to identify to some extent with French culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialect leveling is of course a pretty universal phenomenon. I am sure it was accelerated by French policies, but I guess it's hard to say by how much. It certainly happens with German as well, with the notable exceptions of Swiss German and Luxembourgish, which are on the path towards full national languages for political reasons. I'm a native German speaker myself who never learned to speak a dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has always been the case, while languages and dialects disappear, new ones are formed and, initially ridiculed or marginalised. E.g. in Germany a new sociolect of urban youths is developing, in which a Turkish influence and special features of some German dialects are supporting each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T01:33:50.010" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T01:33:50.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-29T06:56:01.140" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try as I might, I cannot find a term that technically describes errors in re-telling a story, sometimes known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chinese whispers&lt;/a&gt; or by other similarly idiomatic expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have thought &quot;narration error&quot; would be a suitable term, but Googling finds it is not used as a linguistics phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would reflect the idea of &quot;speech error&quot;, which is a widely used term to indicate errors from the morpheme to the phrase level (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_error&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Speech error&lt;/a&gt;). This covers 'slips of the tongue', spoonerisms and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can anyone find me an understandable and neutral term (one that does not arbitrarily refer to telephones, grapes, milk, or Chinese people)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4944" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-07-29T13:00:17.623" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T13:33:42.317" Title="If we can talk of &quot;speech error&quot;, what do we call &quot;narration error&quot;?" Tags="&lt;discourse&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2014-07-29T07:31:30.883" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Norman conquest was hardly a case of 'French' colonization. France barely existed at the time. The Normans were fervently not French in their self-identity and can't even really be said to have spoken 'French'- rather they spoke a dialect of the Latin-based languages spoken across the old Roman world, the Parisian dialect of which would later develop into the standard French language of more recent centuries. The Normans of 1066 would simply have called their language 'Romanz' i.e. Roman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Normans appear to have adopted English as their first language far more quickly than generally thought, some scholars believe this transition was complete as early as the 1150s. There is a court record of a knight unable to speak Norman/French at all soon after that date. From that point on a more modern French (rather than the older Norman dialect) was spoken as an acquired prestige language, rather like the clergy spoke Latin. So the idea of a Francophone aristocracy throughout the medieval period is misleading - the powers that be did speak Norman and then French during the early middle ages, but mostly as a second language and only in certain contexts. Eventually this fascinating cultural fashion simply died out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4945" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T07:31:30.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8679" CreationDate="2014-07-29T13:33:42.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an authoritative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I'm not sure one exists. I'd never heard a neutral term for it, but I like your suggestion. It looks like people could almost use 'retelling error' (&lt;a href=&quot;http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/16/1/16.abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/16/1/16.abstract&lt;/a&gt;), but haven't. I think it's a good candidate, though: 'retelling' seems to be the most precise term for what you describe, and it is already in use in academic papers about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'error' half is sometimes referred to as 'mutation' or just 'change', but I think you're correct to go with 'error' (and for the reason you mention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-07-29T13:33:42.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-29T19:16:26.833" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lingua francas exist because they allow people with different native languages to communicate, with an emphasis on flexibility to the detriment of rigor. Were a lingua franca's spelling made strictly phonetic, it could result in different spellings of the same words depending on the native language of the speaker, which would hurt communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is currently the global lingua franca, and mostly as a quirk of history has much less phonetic spelling than comparable languages. I would argue that the relative divorce between English spelling and pronunciation helps it be a lingua franca, and that English's role as a lingua franca retards efforts to rationalize English spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have lingua francas historically resisted phonetic rationalizations, and have they lost lingua franca status when such efforts have altered the spelling of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4948" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T03:15:15.680" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T19:36:18.260" Title="Have the spelling systems of lingua francas historically been less phonetic than those of native languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T06:04:04.697" Score="3" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the etymology of the names of the kings from the Iliad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides these two, I would be also interested in the etymology of the names of the other heroes from the book, such as Hector and Paris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct that Hector shares etymology with the word &quot;sector&quot;, that is the one who cuts/strikes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T02:52:07.483" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T21:37:00.417" Title="Etymology of Agamemnon and Priam" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8685" CreationDate="2014-07-30T06:24:06.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agamemnon&lt;/strong&gt; - Greek Ἀγαμέμνων &quot;very steadfast&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Priam&lt;/strong&gt; is from the Luwian compound &lt;em&gt;Priya-muwa-&lt;/em&gt;, which means &quot;exceptionally courageous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Héktōr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a derivative of the verb &lt;em&gt;ékhein&lt;/em&gt;, archaic form &lt;em&gt;hékhein&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to have&quot; or &quot;to hold&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Héktōr&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Éktōr&lt;/em&gt; as found in Aeolic poetry, is also an epithet of Zeus in his capacity as &quot;he who holds [everything together]&quot;. Hector's name could thus be taken to mean &quot;holding fast&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paris&lt;/strong&gt; is considered to be derived from Phrygian and means &quot;wrestler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T06:24:06.780" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:07:31.413" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to determine the part of speech in the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German:    Mario Götze ist &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; der besten Fußballspieler der Welt. (partitive genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:   Mario Götze is &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the best soccer players in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4950" LastEditorUserId="4950" LastEditDate="2014-07-30T13:20:29.273" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T23:03:34.613" Title="What is the word class of the first part of a partitive genitive?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8689" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:21:18.923" Score="-2" ViewCount="8803" Body="&lt;p&gt;And it's not only that! Novem is Latin for nine, and Decem is ten, and yet the months are eleventh and twelfth respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the origin of that? Why are the months called the way the are called? What caused this offset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4951" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T02:51:14.810" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T02:51:14.810" Title="Why is October the tenth month even though Octo means eight?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8688" CreationDate="2014-07-30T13:37:21.713" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The numerical names of months date back to the time when in the Ancient Rome the year began in March, so September was really the 7th month, October the 8th, and so on. January became the first month in 45 BC when Julius Cesar reformed the calendar introducing what is now known as Julian calendar. In those times July and August also had numeric names, Quintilis and Sextilis respectfully. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar&quot;&gt;Roman calendar article&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T13:37:21.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8687" CreationDate="2014-07-30T15:25:35.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim Osborne has produced a lengthy answer. A response to his answer requires more space than is available in comments. I have therefore modified my own answer in order to produce a response. The response follows my answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German and English are too different, with German exhibiting case/genus morphology via its inflectional suffixes, that is simply absent in English. Hence determining which part of speech one is dealing with, may yield conflicting cross-linguistic results. The answer below concerns the German example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think German &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; is still an article. It appears with the nominative inflection &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, which is blocked whenever a noun appears together with it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (1)   Da ist ein Mann.&#xA;  (2)   Da ist einer.&#xA;  (3) * Da ist ein.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nominative appears, of course, because the entire post-verbal construction is the predicate noun, which must take nominative case.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The phenomenon exists not only with the indefinite article &lt;strong&gt;ein&lt;/strong&gt;, but also with the negative article &lt;strong&gt;kein&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (4)   Kein Spieler fehlt.  &#xA;  (5)   Keiner fehlt.&#xA;  (6) * Kein fehlt.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the indefinite article &lt;strong&gt;ein&lt;/strong&gt;, and the negative article &lt;strong&gt;kein&lt;/strong&gt; belong to the same subclass, namely that requiring the mixed declension.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The interrogative article &lt;strong&gt;welch&lt;/strong&gt;, however, belongs to the strong declension:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (7)   Welcher Spieler ist schon ausgewechselt?&#xA;  (8)   Welcher ist schon ausgewechselt?&#xA;  (9) * Welch ist schon ausgewechselt.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples (1-9) are all in the nominative masculine because the example in the question is, too. Other inflections are, of course, possible, depending on genus and case.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The property the examples (2), (5), and (8) share with the example in the question is that a noun fails to appear with the article. As a result, I would view the syntactic heads of the partitive genitive expressions still as articles.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The plural of these construction is, by the way, also an article, namely &lt;strong&gt;einige&lt;/strong&gt;. However, other articles are possible, too, such as &lt;strong&gt;viele&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;wenige&lt;/strong&gt;, or constructions such as &lt;strong&gt;ein paar&lt;/strong&gt;. These expressions are articles.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Response&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim Osborne interprets my answer (above) as invoking noun ellipsis. Doing so is his prerogative, but that doesn't make it true. &#xA;In fact, I do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; claim that such a form of ellipsis is involved, rather I state that &quot;a noun fails to appear with&quot; forms &#xA;such as &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt;. The attempt to construe that as the advocacy of noun ellipsis is far-fetched.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim Osborne seems to view his example (3b) as evidence for his position. While (3b) is indeed ungrammatical, there is a grammatical&#xA; alternative that Tim Osborne fails to mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (10) Sie sind welche (*Fußballspieler). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10) now has an article, namely the one that must appear in the plural of indefinite nouns and of uncountable nouns. To construe &#xA;Tim Osborne's (3b) as something I would be forced to uphold is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;strawman&lt;/a&gt;-argument.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tim Osborne's examples (4) are irrelevant because they show VP-ellipsis in English. These data do not contribute to an understanding of the German data.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two counter-arguments against the pronoun hypothesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.If &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; is a pronoun, rather than an inflected article, then two scenarios are possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. The pronoun is morphologically exocentric. That means that the word/part of speech class of &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; cannot be derived &#xA;from the combination of &lt;strong&gt;ein&lt;/strong&gt;, an article, and &lt;strong&gt;-er&lt;/strong&gt;, or other inflectional affixes. Since &lt;strong&gt;-er&lt;/strong&gt; is an &lt;em&gt;inflectional&lt;/em&gt; suffix, &#xA;it cannot cause derivation. We would have to assume  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (11) Art+Infl = P&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus we are forced into the assumption of exocentricity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. One could assume the pronominal variations are morphologically simple in form, but complex in meaning. That means one could &#xA;assume that the word/part of speech class is simply P, rather than &lt;em&gt;X-Infl&lt;/em&gt;, but that assumption would not hold for semantics.&#xA; One would then have to assume to different sets of these expressions, for instance &lt;strong&gt;einem&lt;/strong&gt; as an article &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; as a pronoun, marking non-feminine dative &#xA;singular. Thereby one would violate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Occam's Razor&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. 'A plurality is not to be posited without necessity'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It seems more parsimonous to assume that articles enact pronominal functions whenever they appear in the absence of a superordinated &#xA;noun, regardless of this absence being caused by noun ellipsis or not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.The adverb &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; can precede German articles, but it cannot precede pronouns.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (12)   So einer gefällt mir.&#xA;        lit. 'I like such one.'&#xA; (13) * So er gefällt mir.&#xA;        lit. 'I like such him.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples such as (12,13) could be produced in much greater number, for every case and every genus. The fact that the &#xA;adverb &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; can precede &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt;, but not &lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; would require an explanation. If &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; continues to be an article &#xA;in (12), then such an explanation is easily accomplished.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My proposal is that words such as &lt;strong&gt;einer&lt;/strong&gt; in the partitive constructions continue to be articles. Nouns are not elided, they are entirely absent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tim Osborne's response is built on a strawman-argument, namely that I propose noun ellipsis. I did not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tim Osborne's answer incurs either the problem of exocentric morphological structure, or a violation against Occam's Razor.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It also fails to deal with the adverb &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt;, which can precede articles, but not pronouns.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-08-02T09:24:19.847" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T09:24:19.847" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-30T18:31:27.603" Score="3" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I write educational resources about Japanese. In my explanations, I try to avoid using overly technical terms so as to avoid scaring my readers, who tend to be people without a linguistic background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think many people who have studied a foreign language have probably heard the term &quot;diphthong&quot; before, but I'd wager that not many casual learners actually understand clearly what it is. For that reason, I've taken to using the term &quot;gliding vowel&quot; and illustrating what it is by using the English &quot;long o&quot; sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my searching online, it appears that &quot;gliding vowel&quot; is an accepted synonym for &quot;diphthong.&quot; I prefer the term &quot;gliding vowel&quot; because it is possible for an uninitiated person to instantly imagine what it probably means. The term is clear and memorable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible critique I can see against this term is that it is similar to &quot;glide,&quot; which I do understand indicates something different. (And, full disclosure, in the past, I have incorrectly have called gliding vowels glides, an error I am correcting as I revise my materials.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to strike a balance between technical accuracy and approachability. Is &quot;gliding vowel&quot; a term that a linguist would take issue with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4954" LastActivityDate="2014-07-30T18:31:27.603" Title="What is the consensus regarding the term &quot;gliding vowel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8695" CreationDate="2014-07-30T22:15:05.413" Score="1" ViewCount="949" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have used Praat to manually find formants of vowels in a word. Can we do this programmatically (automatically)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I looked at speech recognition tools like CMUSphinx. Didn't find them useful for my use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help will be appreciated. Please do direct me to some ongoing research or reading material in case such a tool doesn't exist as of now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are your inputs like? - Scripted words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple talkers (per recording) or single - Single User per recording.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Field quality or lab - A closed environment, less external noise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Long recordings, or single sentences, or single words - Just Single Words like Sit, seat, east&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What level of automatic do you need? That I speak a word with vowels and I can get its formants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4956" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T02:45:01.943" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T02:45:01.943" Title="How can I detect Formants programatically" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8687" CreationDate="2014-07-31T09:01:57.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Thomas that the situation in English and in German is not the same. I do not, however, agree that “einer” (nom. sing. m.) is an article. The indefinite article in the nom. sing. m. is “ein”. “Einer” is primarily a cardinal number. “Einer der besten Fußballspieler” is parallel to “Zwei der besten Fußballspieler”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both languages “einer/one” functions in certain contexts as a pronoun (“einer ist gekommen” in the sense “someone came”), but English has gone further than German in this direction. Thus in English you say “the big ones and the little ones”, but in German you cannot say this; you need to say “die großen und die kleinen”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T09:01:57.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-31T10:10:18.710" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHGRK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that, if I zoom into a .pitch file in Praat, the little numbers (pitch candidates) that are displayed are stacked into vertical lines?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T20:19:20.563" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T12:02:03.100" Title="Why are f0 candidates stacked vertically in all .pitch files in Praat, like this one?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8692" CreationDate="2014-07-31T15:05:11.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because of the simplifying constraints you describe, your problem is manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One approach is to use a forced aligner to automatically locate the segments in a given word; the output would be a TextGrid tier with intervals marked for each segment. I'm not personally experienced with this, but I've seen it done and I know it's a common practice. Maybe start with (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/&lt;/a&gt;) or (&lt;a href=&quot;http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk&lt;/a&gt;) for alignment. This works well with single-word, pre-scripted, lab-recorded input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, your system would select the appropriate intervals (e.g., 'segment labeled /i/', but also 'all intervals labeled with any of /aieou/', etc.), and extract formant values at some number of subintervals (this is @musicallinguist's question: 'how many subintervals?'). A common starting point is about 3 (25%, 50%, and 75% into the vowel), but you can always get more or fewer. This can all be done in Praat (scripted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T15:05:11.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-07-31T17:58:55.777" Score="0" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there word elements, including suffixes, from Old English or other languages that have been linked to their ancient deities and the people that served them, to which these elements are still in use today in the evolution of their language?    e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jehovah/Jesus Christ a.k.a. Cristos; Christus derived to: Christian; Christianity; Christen; Christendom; Christening; Christhood; Christmas; Christadelphinian &amp;amp; Anti-Christ to name a few. The suffix 'ist' has been applied to many modern English words over the centuries. Have other deities produced this kind of impact upon society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this clarifies better what I am asking for the sake of the academic community.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3689" LastEditorUserId="3689" LastEditDate="2014-08-04T13:33:54.267" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T13:33:54.267" Title="Word elements relating to ancient deities" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-08-01T19:53:07.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8683" CreationDate="2014-07-31T19:36:18.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even a brief look down the list of Lingua Francas (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas&lt;/a&gt;) will show you that there is &lt;strong&gt;no tendency&lt;/strong&gt; toward more opaque spelling systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are more fundamental misassumptions here that are worth pointing out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lingua Francas do not require to be written at all. They can be spoken or written or both.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lingua Francas vary in how much their structures are impacted by their cross-communicative function. English for instance has not developed any notable structural features in its role as Lingua Franca. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not confuse Lingua Franca with concepts like Pidgin or Creole. While there are certain limited features that we can expect many Creoles to have in common, there is no such commonality with Lingua Francas. I suspect you will find certain commonalities in their use by non-native speakers due to imperfect learning but this may or may not have an impact on the language structure itself depending on context of use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wonder if the question may have been inspired by the case of Chinese where the  orthography itself serves as a sort of Lingua Franca. Divorce between orthography and pronunciation is very useful for the many Chinese languages that use the characters without regard to pronunciation because the characters don't give any hints as to pronunciation. But this is not the case with English (or any non-pictographic system of orthography). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's really no such thing as 'phonetic spelling'. It is much better to talk about opaque and transparent orthographies. The latter are more predictable but they will still adhere to some sort of an ideal representation (often linked to a standard) rather than represent speech directly. English is one of the more opaque systems but this in no way enables communication. It simply makes it harder to learn. Also, English has resisted long-standing efforts at spelling reform long before it became the Lingua Franca it is today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T19:36:18.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8711" CreationDate="2014-07-31T19:38:19.623" Score="3" ViewCount="1850" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking at English to help my teen out, readying for college.  Didn't realise how little I knew.  In this specific case, I'm stuck with the large number of types of verb - finite/infinite, transitive/intransitive, auxiliary/main, stative/dynamic, ergative etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can find bits and pieces about such, but I'm not seeing anything simple and clear.  Does being one type exclude from being another?  Can you have a transitive-stative-auxiliary verb (all in a single word instance)?  Are there other names/types?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My big question is - why do my dictionaries not include all these labels?  I think my Collins references being in/transitive, or auxiliary - but nothing about stative or dynamic.  Where can I find such information?  Is there a better dictionary (online?)?  Can it be identified/deduced from context/usage?  If so, how (resources welcome)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4830" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-31T08:32:46.033" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T08:32:46.033" Title="English verbs - how many types/classifications?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8696" CreationDate="2014-07-31T21:51:58.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Days of week&lt;/strong&gt; may be a good example of what you are looking for.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In many IE languages, names of those are derived from ancient deities representing individual planets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In most Indian languages, the word for &lt;strong&gt;Sunday&lt;/strong&gt; is Ravivāra or Adityavāra or its derived forms — vāra meaning day, Aditya and Ravi both being a style (manner of address) for Surya, the chief solar &lt;strong&gt;deity&lt;/strong&gt; and one of the Adityas.&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In many Languages of India, the word for &lt;strong&gt;Monday&lt;/strong&gt; is derived from Sanskrit Somavāra. Soma is another name of the Moon &lt;strong&gt;god&lt;/strong&gt; in Hinduism.&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-07-31T21:51:58.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-01T02:43:44.967" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hungarian language seems to have many phonetic features uncommon in other Uralic languages- for example, phonemic voicing in its stops and sibilants and the presence of a labiodental fricative /f/.&#xA;My question is: are these innovations of the Hungarian language family, or do they come from borrowing? If they are native innovations, how did they arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastEditorUserId="1901" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T19:42:32.067" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T19:42:32.067" Title="Consonantal innovations in Hungarian" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8698" CreationDate="2014-08-01T09:34:58.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm stuck with the large number of types of verb - finite/infinite,&#xA;  transitive/intransitive, auxiliary/main, stative/dynamic, ergative etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first statement here gives an impression that verbs are 'classified' in a strict hierarchical scheme, as for say plants or animals. But the classifications are overlapping. Imagine if we had silly classes like {2-lettered / 3-lettered / 4-lettered ...} and {beginning with a / beginning with b ...}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even debate over whether auxiliaries should be considered as verbs as they are so different in function and behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=essay---parts-of-speech.pdf&amp;amp;site=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sussex University linguists&lt;/a&gt; give an article which, while not perfect, addresses the issues faced when analysing word classes; the section on verbs gives a good overview of the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/notesonverbs.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nordquist&lt;/a&gt; has an introduction to the way verbs are analysed, which will be a start, but each individual type of classification really needs individual study. Other terms to look at include punctive or punctual / durative; multi-word; delexical. The 'subjunctive' and 'middle' usages also need to be examined; there are plenty of threads on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add this as a comment above; I can't yet, but the following needs saying. The usages of say &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;I have been here before&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I have a car&lt;/em&gt; are totally different, syntactically and semantically (where appropriate!) In the first sentence, have is the auxiliary, whose function here is to combine with be to give the intended construction; in the second, &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; is a main / lexical verb meaning &lt;em&gt;possess&lt;/em&gt; or similar. Those people saying that auxiliaries are not verbs would almost certainly insist that these are two different words. At the very least, it should be seen that saying '&lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; is auxiliary - transitive' is less than helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4961" LastEditorUserId="4961" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T11:30:07.817" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T11:30:07.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2014-08-01T11:11:52.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's what we are used to, but it's not a priori 'normal' that verbs inflect for person and number - or indeed for anything. Proto-Indoeuropean did inflect for person and number and that takes a long time to disappear, so that's what most languages familiar to us still do. For various reasons, English is particularly progressive in many respects and has lost the inflections. But sooner or later it will acquire &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; verb inflections. The example of French shows how that works, because there it's happening right now. So let's look at the history of French. Some of the details may not be completely right as I didn't look up anything. It's only the general idea that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Classical Latin: &lt;em&gt;canto&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb has the first person singular ending. If you absolutely want to stress it's the first person singular, you can use a personal pronoun. In the course of the centuries, with increasing frequency people did that even when there wasn't a strong reason to stress anything. Ultimately it became normal to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Later Latin: &lt;em&gt;ego canto&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is redundant. We have a pronoun and a suffix, which both give the same information about person and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As everyone already knew the person and number before the verb suffix was even pronounced, people pronounced it more and more sloppily. At the same time, the personal pronoun &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt;, being used so much, gradually acquired a simpler pronundation &lt;em&gt;je&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;em&gt;je chante&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is little person/gender information in the verb suffix, and it's not needed because this information is already in the personal pronoun. The personal pronoun &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; doesn't automatically feel like it carries stress any more. And we definitely can't leave it out any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, a new personal pronoun emerges that can be added to indicate stress:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;em&gt;moi, je chante&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases (not this one -- yet), the normal person pronoun is contracted with the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point in the development of French, ignoring the spelling and history but only focusing on oral French as it is used today, we could say that French verbs are inflected on both sides and that the empathic pronouns &lt;em&gt;moi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;toi&lt;/em&gt; etc. are the real pronouns of French. The suffixes will disappear more and more, until French verbs are marked for person and number by a prefix rather than a suffix. For example like this. (The example is not phonetically plausible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Implausible but illustrative future French: Moi jchante, toi tchante, il/elle lchante, nous nchante, vous vchante, eux lchante.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is English almost finished with suffix shedding? Why does it look as if German has hardly started?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English branched off the German-Danish dialect continuum when people from around the German-Danish border moved to Great Britain. The various constitutive languages were mixed in a natural process in which nobody tried to make the result behave like Latin. Some who were originally speakers of Celtic languages or of French were also involved. The result was a rapid simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other Germanic languages have been a bit slower with some changes, and German much slower. For a long time it was just a dialect continuum, not a standard language with dialects. The endings got simpler in each dialect, but I guess in different dialects this happened differently. When scholars wanted to create a written language standard (17th-18th century), they were not interested in simplifying the inflections, but in making them as similar to Latin as was possible by picking suitable endings from the various dialects. The result was a standard language more conservative than all the dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare the recent history of German and Dutch, you can get the impression that German is changing much slower because standard Dutch updates when the dialects change, whereas German doesn't. It seems that for most Dutch speakers, standard Dutch is an averaged dialect, whereas for most Germans, standard German is an almost unchanging standard which dialect speakers learn like a foreign language. That's why the endings haven't started to disappear in German yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T14:22:59.013" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T14:22:59.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8696" CreationDate="2014-08-01T12:26:10.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assumed the question implied words other than the days of the week,&#xA;interesting because different but &quot;functionally&quot; related deities have&#xA;named them such as Frigg in English for Friday, and Venus in French&#xA;for vendredi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  guess it also excluded the names of planets and other bodies of the&#xA;solar system, which are direct reuses. However some of them produced&#xA;derived word. For example &lt;strong&gt;martian&lt;/strong&gt;, originally intended to denote the&#xA;inhabitants of planet Mars, has become common enough to be sometimes&#xA;used to just mean extra-terrestrial being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have many words, often adjectives, with a meaning related to&#xA;characteristics or attributes of the gods, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;venereal&lt;/strong&gt;: having to do with physical love, mostly used in medical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aphrodisiac&lt;/strong&gt;: substance that increases sexual desire, from the&#xA;  Greek goddes Aphrodite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;martial&lt;/strong&gt;: related to fight and army, from Mars, Roman god of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jovial&lt;/strong&gt;: from the Roman god Iupiter (genitive Iovis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bacchanal&lt;/strong&gt;:  a crazed party with drunken revelry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cereal&lt;/strong&gt;: and all derived words, from Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;volcano&lt;/strong&gt;: and all derived words, from Vulcan, the name of a god of fire in Roman mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vulcanize&lt;/strong&gt;: and all derived words, from Vulcan, the name of a god&#xA;of fire in Roman mythology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hermetic&lt;/strong&gt;: from Hermes, via the vocabulary of alchemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The names of many chemical element s derive from names of ancient&#xA;gods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cerium&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the asteroid Ceres, named itself after the Roman&#xA;goddess;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Copernicium&lt;/strong&gt; named after Copernicus, western god of astronomy;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Helium&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the greek  Helios, the sun or sun-god;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Iridium&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the greek Iris, goddess of rainbows;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Mercury&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the Roman god Mercury;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Neptunium&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the planet Neptune, named itself after the Roman god;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Palladium&lt;/strong&gt;: named after the asteroid Ceres,named itself after the Greek&#xA;goddess Pallas Athena;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Plutonium&lt;/strong&gt;: Named after Pluto, named itself after the Roman god Pluto;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Uranium&lt;/strong&gt;: after the planet Uranus, itself named for the greek god Ouranos;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Vanadium&lt;/strong&gt;: from Vanadís, one of the names of the Vanr goddess Freyja in&#xA;Norse mythology;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a few others to be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_etymologies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of chemical element name etymologies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to end this list, which is certainly far from complete, one word&#xA;referring to two gods, one male and one female: &lt;strong&gt;Hermaphrodite&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T12:26:10.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-01T12:50:07.800" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;My son Josh and I have come across the terms &quot;gapping&quot; and &quot;ellipsis&quot;.  Well, I always thought ellipsis was&quot;...&quot; and meant you were reporting information with omissions - but it seems it may also mean 'omitting one or more words, the meaning of which may be deduced/extracted from prior words' (or something like that).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But, it seems not everyone holds the same view - some think they are different, some related etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we have both noticed is that it seems that gapping etc. Happens on &quot;small clauses&quot; ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is that correct?&#xA;If so, visit only on dependant/subordinate clauses, and only the relative kind?&#xA;(So many names/labels, sometimes for the same thing?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we are wrong, can you see where we have gotten it wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and Josh just asked if the different namemes are to do with what is omitted ( verb, pronoun etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4830" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T15:28:29.293" Title="small clauses - are they always ellipted/ellided/gapped?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8705" CreationDate="2014-08-01T15:28:29.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are numerous types of ellipsis that are acknowledged by linguistics. Here are some examples of the various types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Gapping&#xA; (1) Should I call you, or &amp;lt;should&amp;gt; you &amp;lt;call&amp;gt; me?&#xA;&#xA; Stripping&#xA; (2) Should I call you, or &amp;lt;should&amp;gt; Bill &amp;lt;call you&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA; VP-ellipsis (verb phrase ellipsis)&#xA; (3) If I call you, Bill will &amp;lt;call you&amp;gt; too. &#xA;&#xA; Pseudogapping&#xA; (4) Bill has been calling me more than he has &amp;lt;been calling&amp;gt; you.&#xA;&#xA; Answer fragments&#xA; (5) Who has been calling you? -- Bill &amp;lt;has been calling me&amp;gt;.&#xA;&#xA; Sluicing&#xA; (6) Bill is calling me, but I don't know why &amp;lt;he is calling me&amp;gt;.&#xA;&#xA; Null complement anaphora&#xA; (6) I am trying to understand this, and you are also trying &amp;lt;to understand this&amp;gt;.&#xA;&#xA; Comparative deletion&#xA; (7) He drinks more cola than she drinks &amp;lt;cola&amp;gt;. &#xA;&#xA; N-ellipsis (noun ellipsis)&#xA; (8) She took the first train, and he took the second &amp;lt;train&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pointy brackets indicate the elided words. These eight do not exhaust the list of ellipsis types, but they are the most widely acknowledged. Note that small clauses are not included in this list. To my knowledge, small clauses are not generally taken to involve ellipsis. Here are some examples of small clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Fred wiped [the table clean]. &#xA;&#xA; Susan opened [the window wide].&#xA;&#xA; Larry calls [you a genius]. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The square brackets mark the small clauses. They are called &quot;small clauses&quot; because they are indeed small -- they contain just a subject and a predicate -- and because they lack a verb (no verb appears inside the square brackets). They are not generally considered to involve ellipsis because there is no way to acknowledge elided material, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *Fred wiped [the table to be clean]. &#xA;&#xA; *Susan opened [the window to be wide].&#xA;&#xA; *Larry calls [you to be a genius].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To come more directly to the question, gapping and small clauses are distinct phenomena of syntax. Gapping is widely acknowledged as a type of ellipsis, whereas small clauses are not generally taken to involve ellipsis. So the notion that gapping results in a small clause is not accurate. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ellipsis&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gapping&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;small clauses&lt;/a&gt; are discussed in Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T15:28:29.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-01T17:23:43.450" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Internet one can find lists of misheard lyrics. But are songs really more difficult to understand than normal speech? And if so, why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to check out the term &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mondegreen&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4963" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T21:55:47.190" Title="Are songs more difficult to understand than normal speech?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8708" CreationDate="2014-08-01T18:02:42.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things that make songs easier to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Songs are carefully written speech with no unintentional grammatical mistakes, hesitations etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many singers (not all, obviously) pronounce very clearly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that make songs harder to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With songs, communication is usually not the principal purpose. They are typically performed/played in a context in which the text makes little sense. Hence there are no contextual cues for the overall meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Songs are not prose. Lyrics tend to use rarely heard words and strained grammar to make words rhyme, lines scan etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some songs are older than any other texts we are usually exposed to, and contain obsolete grammar / obsolete words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reason many singers - especially classical singers, who normally perform without electronic amplification yet can be quite loud - pronounce so clearly is because otherwise the audience would only hear the vowels and, given that vowel quality is connected to pitch, intonation etc., would even have trouble interpreting them correctly. They can't solve this problem, though, they can only mitigate it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2014-08-01T21:55:47.190" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T21:55:47.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-01T19:08:44.913" Score="0" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NXT query language includes the query function &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/nxt/nxtdoc/docquery_property_tests.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TEXT&lt;/a&gt;, which should return the textual content of the variable it applies to. In theory, Switchboard should support this. The file README.SWBD-QUERIES.TXT, which comes with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2009T26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NXT Switchboard Annotations&lt;/a&gt; download, recommends using TEXT to query the orthography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;($w word): (TEXT($w) == &quot;the&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is how to query the orthography.  Posix regular expressions work&#xA;  here, too.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;($w word): (TEXT($w) ~/the.*/)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this doesn't seem to work for word or phonword-type variables (works for phone-type variables though). There is no error message, just 0 results, so I'm guessing &lt;code&gt;TEXT($w)&lt;/code&gt; just doesn't return anything. I know I can get around this by accessing the orthography attribute directly (&lt;code&gt;$w@orth ==&lt;/code&gt; ...), but this won't work for non-terminals. So if I want to access the entire text under a certain non-terminal (which could dominate a number of terminals), there's no straightforward way of doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="166" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T04:00:15.977" Title="Switchboard queries with NXT (the TEXT function)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8698" CreationDate="2014-08-01T22:57:50.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classification of anything in linguistics always has to be focused on what you want to achieve. All classifications come from a certain perspective. So there will never be a definitive answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, it may be useful to have a bit of a point of reference when reviewing the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must also not confuse classification based on properties intrinsic to the verb or its use with the classification of the actual uses. So e.g. infinitive / finite verb describes the state of the verb, as does the person or tense. Transitive, on the other hand, is an intrinsic property of the verb (or at least one of its senses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll find people talk about different classes of verbs in two broad categories: syntactic and semantic (they overlap and interact but it's useful to keep the distinction in mind - no matter how provisionally). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntactic classifications&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transitive/intransitive/ditransitive (to see sth, to sleep, to give sth to sb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main/auxiliary (I have a book vs. I have seen a book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modal verbs like can, must, may, should, etc. (although the primary definition is semantic, what sets them apart are syntactic properties)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrasal verbs (walk in, put up - sometimes called 'prepositional' even if not all particles are prepositions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irregular verbs (this is more of a morphological class of verbs with irregular participles e.g. go - went - gone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find these (and more) in most grammar books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantic classifications&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;State verbs (to know - has syntactic implications because will resist -ing as in I'm knowing) v Action verbs (to kick) is probably the most common axis of classification with many variations and elaborations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perception verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbs of motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are virtually no limits to semantic classifications of verbs. They are also less likely to be useful for learners. You will find them in research literature rather than use guides and grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these categories will be exclusive, others complementary. So for instance, a single verb cannot be transitive and intransitive at the same time. But a verb can have multiple senses, so for instance 'I see' vs. 'I see you'. Some categories do not apply to some types of verbs. So for instance, the transitive/intransitive distinction does not apply to modal or auxiliary verbs. Some semantic categories will tend towards certain syntactic categories but with many exceptions, so verbs of motion will tend to be intransitive (to go, to walk - but to drive sth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, then there are also &lt;strong&gt;cross-linguistic comparisons&lt;/strong&gt; related to verbs. For examples, some languages tend to express the manner of motion as part of the verb (verb-framed, e.g. enter) and others do it with an external particle (satellite-framed, e.g. come in - more common in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, remember that few of these classifications will work &lt;strong&gt;across languages&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;For instance, German has strong/weak verbs, Russian perfective/imperfective, etc. Modal verbs in some languages don't stand out as much as they do in English. Some languages don't have the infinitive, etc. Many languages will classify verbs according to their morphological properties into various classes and models sometimes numbering in the low tens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-01T22:57:50.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-02T00:05:32.213" Score="6" ViewCount="2494" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how the rhotic consonant was pronounced by the ancient Anglo-Saxons.  Was it pronounced as an alveolar like Modern English or more like the trill Scots use in certain words?  Were there any differences in its pronunciation by speakers of the different dialects of Old English, as far as we can tell a thousand years later.  Does Old Norse contain the same rhotic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I'd like to know how to properly pronounce the name Ælfric.  It seems like if the 'r' is pronounced the same way as today, the name should be pronounced just like someone trying to pronounce Alfric (as in Alf (the puppet) - Rick).  So let me know if any of the other letters have different sounds but the limited (layman) resources I've seen tend to say that that is how those letters are pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4964" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-02T08:38:05.503" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T09:57:49.330" Title="How did one pronounce an 'r' in Old English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8687" CreationDate="2014-08-02T01:00:32.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question can be explored in terms of N-ellipsis (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_ellipsis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;noun ellipsis&lt;/a&gt;, also known as NP-ellipsis). N-ellipsis is illustrated in the following b-sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1a. Er ist ein Fussballspieler. 'He is a soccer player.'&#xA; 1b. Er ist einer. 'He is one.'&#xA;&#xA; 2a. Wir kennen einen Fussballspieler. 'We know a soccer player.'&#xA; 2b. Wir kennen einen. 'We know one.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon the a-sentences, one can argue that the b-sentences involve ellipsis; one assumes that the noun &lt;em&gt;Fussballspieler&lt;/em&gt; has been elided (=omitted). The ellipsis account would assume that a null node is present in the syntax, occupying the position of the elided noun. If ellipsis has occurred in this manner, then the forms &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;einen&lt;/em&gt; are indeed articles as Thomas Gross' answer suggests, since there is in fact a covert (=elided) instance of &lt;em&gt;Fussballspieler&lt;/em&gt; present. The primary syntactic trait of articles (definite and indefinite) is that they introduce nouns. The forms &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;einen&lt;/em&gt; would be classified as instances of the indefinite article by virtue of the fact that they are in actuality introducing a noun, albeit a covert noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative analysis of such cases argues that ellipsis has in fact not occurred. It sees the forms &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;einen&lt;/em&gt; in the b-sentences as indefinite pronouns. The primary trait of pronouns is that they occupy the position of a noun, referring to an earlier (or later) instance of the noun in context that they replace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, there are solid emperical observations demonstrating that the latter analysis should be preferred. In other words, the &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; in the example sentence in the question, i.e. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Mario Götze ist einer der besten Fußballspieler der Welt.&#xA; 'Mario Goetze is one of the best soccer players in the world.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is an indefinite pronoun; it is not the indefinite article. I therefore disagree with Thomas Gross' answer and mostly support fdb's comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first observation supporting the analysis of &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;einen&lt;/em&gt; in the b-sentences above as indefinite pronouns is the systematic variation that occurs in inflection with such words. The variation is visible across sentences 1a (&lt;em&gt;ein&lt;/em&gt;) and 1b (&lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt;). The syntax is marking when the article/pronoun functions as an article and when it functions as a pronoun by way of the inflectional endings &lt;em&gt;-&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second observation supporting the anslysis of &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;einen&lt;/em&gt; in the b-sentences above as indefinite pronouns is the fact that if such cases truly involved ellipsis of a noun, one might expect ellipsis to be possible in the absence of the article altogether. But such attempts at ellipsis fail, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 3a. Sie sind Fussballspieler. 'They are soccer players.'&#xA; 3b. *Sie sind. 'They are.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ellipsis of nouns were in general possible, one would expect 3b to be acceptable. In other words, the ellipsis analysis requires that one account for the fact that ellipsis in such cases requires the presence of an overt word (e.g. the indefinite article) introducing the ellipsis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third observation is particularly telling. This observation concerns the partitive genitive example in the question. A primary trait of ellipsis in general is that it occurs optionally. This point is illustrated with an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_phrase_ellipsis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VP-ellipsis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 4a. He will call, and she will call, too.&#xA; 4b. He will call, and she will, too.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these sentences are perfectly acceptable. Whether or not one elides &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; is up to the speaker. Given this observation about ellipsis in general, examples of the partitive genitive should allow the elided noun to occur if they are indeed instances of ellipsis. I think the noun cannot appear, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 5a. *Ich kenne einen Fussballspieler der Fussballspieler. &#xA;      'I know a soccer player of the soccer players.'&#xA;&#xA; 5b.  Ich kenne einen der Fussballspieler. &#xA;      'I know one of the soccer players.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, given such observations that ellipsis is not actually occurring in cases of so-called N-ellipsis, there is little motivation to view forms like &lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt; in the example sentence as the indefinite article; it is, rather, an indefinite pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-08-03T23:03:34.613" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T23:03:34.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8685" CreationDate="2014-08-02T09:27:16.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The currently favoured theory (e.g. in Beekes, with references) is that *Ἀγαμέμνων, variants –μέσμων and –μέμμων, is from * Ἀγα-μέδ-μων, from μέδομαι “to be concerned with”, and not from μένω (which would not really account for the second μ). Of course, in etymology everything is a hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T09:27:16.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8694" CreationDate="2014-08-02T11:56:39.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vertical &quot;stacks&quot; correspond to frames; in other words, the pitch candidates are stacked vertically because Praat attempts to measure the &quot;pitch&quot; (actually fundamental frequency) at every frame. The horizontal placement of each stack corresponds to the occurrence of each successive frame over time, which is why they are equally spaced. The vertical placement of each candidate in the stack is dictated by its frequency (in Hz), as specified by the frequency axis on the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers at the very top are not pitch candidates, but rather measures of relative intensity of the sound in each frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about the display of the PitchEditor on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/PitchEditor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Praat help page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-08-02T12:02:03.100" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T12:02:03.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2014-08-02T12:18:13.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hazard the following answer. If you will consider for a moment, parts of speech are word categories, and can be used to create phrases. So they are essentially phrase-level syntactic categories, functional modifications necessary to make correct phrases. The concept of &quot;syntactic category,&quot; if I am not mistaken, includes these plus sentence level concepts like subject, object, predicate, clause, etc.  A noun is a word root so modified morphologically or simply by word position as to be capable of heading a noun phrase, combine with adjectives, or other functional roles; but a NP as such has no &quot;subject&quot; nor is one in itself. &quot;Subject&quot; is a sentence-level functional category. In the modern sense this a syntactic category. Of course in languages like Latin sentence level morphology is built into words through inflection. If you take the phrase puella bona you have an item morphologically marked for functional role as sentence subject. But it is of course still only a noun phrase and not an actual subject. And puella can never head a VP or PP, not because of its inflection, but because it is a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4967" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T12:18:13.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8487" CreationDate="2014-08-02T23:42:59.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No one has addressed the semantic aspect. Since language is primarily about communication, an over-emphasis on syntax is not sensible. Yes, it is important to examine how words are strung together in accepted constructions, but if we divorce language totally from attempts to describe reality, we're into merely playing games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old primary-school introduction to the noun was that a noun 'is the name of a person, place, or thing'. While this is ridiculously simplistic, it wasn't intended as anything more than an introductory working definition. Obviously, 'thing' means a &lt;em&gt;pencil&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ruler&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;radiator&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; ... to a young child, and pictures and actual examples would be provided to reinforce the referent - token coding used in language. A thinking person will soon seek a more precise definition of 'thing'. Should we include these: &lt;em&gt;essay hole colour fire warmth silence height independence idea absence blame&lt;/em&gt; ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be a joint consideration with distribution, the company a putative noun keeps. When a child first starts to speak, nouns (&lt;em&gt;mama drink teddy&lt;/em&gt; ...) are the words almost always uttered first: they command attention and get results. Next, verbs tend to be added (want drink; mummy cuddle; cuddle Jimmy ...) to better express desires, eg what to do with the referent. And this S / V (or V / O) pairing forms the usual basic sentence structure. So we can expect nouns and verbs to appear next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other juxtapositions need to be considered when trying to decide on part of speech, or, more sensibly, what function a string has in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I took the dog a bone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I took the dog a walk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although these structures seem identical in form, the underlying meanings are obviously different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first, 'a bone' is the direct object, obviously having a nominal role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the second, 'a walk' really modifies or even completes the verb, so is adverbial or part of a complex verb group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John Lawler wisely points out, it's far more sensible to focus on how a word or group of words is functioning in a particular sentence than to try to convince yourself that it's more of a verb than a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4961" LastActivityDate="2014-08-02T23:42:59.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-03T03:09:12.063" Score="-1" ViewCount="2617" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is language itself scientific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is language, grammar, standardized, and prescriptive, made by scientific methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are rules, standards, repetitions and patterns of how we speak and right so well known enough to be science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My research is having asked &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Mental-Health/Are-rules-and-standards-patterns-and-repetitions-of-language-and-grammar-sane-scientific-psychological-mentally-healthy-good-and-or-reality-tested?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Are rules and standards (patterns and repetitions) of language and grammar sane, scientific, psychological, mentally healthy, good and/or reality-tested?&lt;/a&gt; as I study &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;grammatology&lt;/a&gt; (asking how it is empirical and longitudinal a study, language effects being by certain rules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is a science of language, now how is language a science?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1657" LastEditorUserId="1657" LastEditDate="2014-08-04T02:29:17.057" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T02:55:54.240" Title="Is language scientific?" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;&lt;literacy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-08-06T13:08:15.273" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8719" CreationDate="2014-08-03T09:17:42.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was the work of Aristotle science? Were geocentric theories of the universe science? Science is related to methodology within a given framework of understanding, and to the ways of evolving that framework. It is necessarily historical and academic, whatever the subject, as it can only be a cooperative endeavor in constant evolution. Regarding language, there are often two views: descriptive and prescriptive. The former is science and the latter is politics. Science always start with gathering data and examples, then finding rules to structure and condense that knowledge. In natural language too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the answer to your question in unequivocally yes. Linguistics, the study of natural languages, is scientific, even if some would-be contributors may not work scientifically ... as in all sciences. There are certainly fine points that are yet to be mastered, but the technological success of computational linguistics is enough to prove experimentally that phenomena are better and better understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the literature on linguistics is equally convincing for someone with scientific maturity and experience. But, as in all sciences, there is still a frontier to be explored and settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the study of language may have had originally prescriptive aspects, that has probably been true of many other areas of knowledge, that were often contrued as dogma, often also for political and social reasons, pretty much like religion (not to mention an american law, still pending before a state Senate, stating that PI=3). Current works in linguistics is very open to confronting variuos theories of what language is and how it evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-08-03T14:18:07.263" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T14:18:07.263" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-03T15:10:02.750" Score="0" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently procured an artefact, which was excavated in Yemen. At the bottom of the artefact there is engraving as shown in the picture. Some of the letters (on two sides) look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but I am not sure, and I have no idea what the ones in the middle are....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please help me figure out what this is (and preferably what it means)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIVnd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIVndm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43JRt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43JRtm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4971" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T23:28:08.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T23:28:08.870" Title="What is this language? Is it an ancient language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8721" CreationDate="2014-08-03T16:10:33.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of these letters are clumsy imitations of Ancient South Arabian script, others are made up. It looks like a fake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many years ago I worked as a volunteer at the National Museum in San’a. The storeroom of the museum was full of this sort of thing. The government had the enlightened policy of paying farmers for any “antiquity” they brought in, even if it was obviously fake. The idea was to discourage them from selling authentic antiquities on the private market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. These comments refer to the first picture; the second one was added later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-08-04T09:03:44.673" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T09:03:44.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8725" CreationDate="2014-08-03T19:52:46.660" Score="1" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where on the Internet can I find sound files so that I can hear the alveo-palatal consonants?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been relying on this chart ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... to help me transcribe material in the IPA, but it seems to be missing characters for the alveo-palatal consonants, namely these:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolo-palatal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolo-palatal_consonant&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the latter site has characters for the alveo-palatal consonants, but I can't seem to find sound files for them on the Internet, not even here:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, where could those sound files be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T06:49:35.723" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T06:49:35.723" Title="Where on the Internet can I find sound files so that I can hear the alveo-palatal consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8723" CreationDate="2014-08-03T20:40:08.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try the Paul Meier website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paulmeier.com/consonants/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.paulmeier.com/consonants/&lt;/a&gt;. Hover the mouse over the symbol to see its name, and press for the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T20:40:08.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8723" CreationDate="2014-08-03T21:00:13.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be what you have in mind, but you could try language-specific sites. For example, if you go to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and switch the input type to Pinyin, you can search for any syllable in Mandarin using Pinyin input. The results will provide hyperlinks to audio samples of a native speaker pronouncing the syllables. For example, if you type in 'xi', it will take you to the following page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=xi&amp;amp;searchtype=pinyin&amp;amp;where=whole&amp;amp;audio=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=xi&amp;amp;searchtype=pinyin&amp;amp;where=whole&amp;amp;audio=on&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on any of the hyperlink-ified syllable names, and you will get to hear the voiceless alveo-palatal fricative pronounced by a native Mandarin speaker. The following syllables in Mandarin start with alveo-palatal consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tɕʰ]: qi, qia, qian, qiang, qiao, qie, qin, qing, qiong, qiu, qu, quan, que, qun &#xA;[tɕ]: ji, jia, jian, jiang, jiao, jie, jin, jing, jiong, jiu, ju, juan, jue, jun &#xA;[ɕ]: xi, xia, xian, xiang, xiao, xie, xin, xing, xiong, xiu, xu, xuan, xue, xun&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar site exists for Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, be sure to check the box for 'Search using romanized Japanese'. Then type in one of the following syllables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tɕ]: cha, chi, chu, cho&#xA;[dʑ]: ja, ji, ju, jo&#xA;[ɕ]: sha, shi, shu, sho&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results page will show little play buttons next to the entries; you can click on these play buttons to hear the syllables pronounced by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are comparable sites for other relevant languages, but these are the ones with which I'm familiar!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-08-03T21:00:13.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8719" CreationDate="2014-08-04T02:55:54.240" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language itself may try and work to be scientific, but while linguistics examines scientificness, language itself grew through many systems aside from science itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Language itself is culture, not science.  Grammar is a science because there are established rules and constructions; however, it is not an exact science as there are too many variables, and the rules even change at times.&quot; -mwestwood, college teacher, commenting about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/language-400350&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Why do we regard the study of language as a science?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; might be part of the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language scientificness is a worthy study, with linguistics ready to help analyze. In a sense, science is learning language, and language is learning science too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1657" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T02:55:54.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8721" CreationDate="2014-08-04T09:03:02.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can read the writing on your second picture. It has (from right to left) the letters ḥqn / mf; I assume there is more writing on the sides and the back. The visible letters do not form complete words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-04T09:03:02.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2014-08-04T15:44:11.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several factors at play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The implementation language: C/C++ is faster than Java is faster than Python&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The algorithm: Most of the constituent parsers, as well as MSTParser, use a dynamic programming approach with O(N^3) time consumption. The ones with &quot;Nivre&quot; in the name use a stepwise deterministic approach with O(N) time consumption. The &quot;Covington&quot; algorithm has O(N^2) time consumption&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The classification algorithm: &quot;Nivre Eager Feature Interact&quot; uses a classification algorithm that is more expensive than the normal linear classifier used by most others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, there is something called the &quot;Grammar constant&quot; - In constituent parsing, you have labels on the phrases, and deciding on which labels are appropriate depends on the label set.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are constituent parsers that implement an O(N) algorithm similar to that used by most dependency parsers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.sutd.edu.sg/~yue_zhang/doc/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;User Manual of ZPar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/srparser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford SRParser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stanford SRParser is about 30x as fast as the &quot;Stanford&quot; parser from the table, with better accuracy. It is still slower than the dependency parsers, presumably because of the &quot;grammar constant&quot; - it is reasonable to expect a constituent parser to be 2-3x slower when using a roughly comparable algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The table above does not use a &quot;roughly comparable algorithm&quot;, so it is more of an apples-to-oranges comparison based on the most popular software implementations that people use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4976" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-11-19T19:35:03.573" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T19:35:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8735" CreationDate="2014-08-05T01:30:31.907" Score="2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lao is a little underdocumented compared to other languages, both in terms of actual linguistics and in terms of prescriptive norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a semivowel letter, ວ, which has a few roles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consonant /v/ at beginning of syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consonant /w/ at end of syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A long vowel diphthong at the syllable core: &lt;code&gt;/u:ə/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part of various vowels' orthographies which are spelled using a combination of two or more symbols: ◌ັວ &lt;code&gt;/uə/&lt;/code&gt;, ◌ົວ &lt;code&gt;/u:ə/&lt;/code&gt;, ◌ົວະ &lt;code&gt;/uə/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A glide /w/ between a syllable-initial consonant and another syllable-core vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the last role. I'm actually working on a Lao syllabifier / lexical analyser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I have read but cannot find the source that if a syllable has a tone mark it should be placed over the main initial consonant letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally there is only one such letter in the initial consonant, including a placeholder / glottal stop symbol for syllables which begin with a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are several digraphs which can commence a syllable: ຫງ, ຫຍ, ຫນ, ຫມ, ຫລ, and ຫວ. The diacritic in ຫຼ is a second Unicode character so it behaves like a digraph for my purposes too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are syllables of the form &lt;code&gt;C + w + V&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; is the initial consonant letter, &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; is the letter ວ, and &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; is a vowel. Since ວ is a semivowel it could be seen as part of a consonant cluster grouped with the preceding consonant or part of a diphthong grouped with the succeeding vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In syllables without a tone mark the distinction is moot. But when there is a tone mark, does it belong over the &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; or over the ວ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some sources, such as my Lonely Planet Lao Phrasebook, words like ກ່ວາ (used for forming comparatives) have the tone mark over the consonant, before the ວ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other sources, such as SEAlang, the same word is only listed under ກວ່າ, with the tone mark over the ວ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Wiktionary there is automatic transliteration functionality for Lao which gives a correct transliteration only if the tone mark is over the &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spellings with the tone marks over the ວ always seem to have many more Google hits than the spellings with the tone marks over the &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, but both always exist. However this could just illustrate that popular usage does not meet prescribed orthographic norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also much Lao text on the internet using old orthography so the moving tone mark could be a difference between old and new orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm interested in finding the actual true current modern standard official orthographic rule covering this, if such a rule exists.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also wondering whether there might be any ambiguous edge cases where two of the functions of ວ might run up against each other. Such as syllables beginning with &lt;code&gt;/vw-/&lt;/code&gt; or with &lt;code&gt;/Cw-/&lt;/code&gt; followed by any of the vowels spelled with a combination of symbols that include ວ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-05T01:39:35.687" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T17:36:34.880" Title="Lao orthography: ວ as part of consonant cluster or part of diphtong and placement of tone marks" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8737" CreationDate="2014-08-05T05:12:18.300" Score="9" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter &quot;j&quot; is pronounced differently in the following major European languages:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English:  just  &lt;code&gt;/d͡ʒʌst/&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: justo &lt;code&gt;/ˈxus.to/&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: junge &lt;code&gt;/ˈjʊŋə/&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French:  juste  &lt;code&gt;/ʒyst/&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the sound so varied in these languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: The foregoing was first posed &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/8329/10864&quot;&gt;on Spanish SE&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4978" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T02:23:28.383" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T04:54:38.363" Title="How is it that such varied sounds (in major European Languages) came to be represented by the same letter &quot;j&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8740" CreationDate="2014-08-05T08:25:03.607" Score="0" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;My goal is to build semantic representation of Russian sentences, i.e. to extract verb predicates and fill in the actant words. The tool I have is some kind of a shallow syntactic parser which works with analytically built CFGs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what are these predicates? Is there a typology or classification behind them? I need some theoretical ground for defining this predicate-argument structure for myself properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4979" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-06T02:22:24.917" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T00:01:16.227" Title="Theory behind the semantics of predicates" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8733" CreationDate="2014-08-05T09:22:41.353" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid this question may be closed as off topic, but I am struggling to find a more applicable stack to ask this in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in the very early stages of studying Babylonian, and I am struggling with how to type the normalised text as it contains a lot of diacritic characters, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;upaššišū, upaṭṭirā&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present I have some auto-correct rules setup to correct a'm to ā (I actually use backtick rather than an apostrophe but Stack doesn't like it), but this only works when the a'm is a separate word, so it really breaks the flow of typing; and hence comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice would be gratefully received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4980" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-05T14:18:23.233" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T14:18:23.233" Title="Possible methods of input for languages with a lot of diacritic characters" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8732" CreationDate="2014-08-05T09:34:24.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to solve your problem is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx&quot;&gt;create your own keyboard layout&lt;/a&gt; (it applies if you use MS Windows, or just google the phrase for other platforms). You can use Latvian keyboard layout as a base, it already has &lt;strong&gt;š&lt;/strong&gt; and vowel letters with macrons (like &lt;strong&gt;ā&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ū&lt;/strong&gt;). You'll only have to define the keys for the letters with the under-dot, like &lt;strong&gt;ṭ&lt;/strong&gt;, and for &lt;strong&gt;ḫ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T09:34:24.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4428" CreationDate="2014-08-05T12:41:25.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't refer to specific research for this case, but according to language acquisition theory, language is a tool or retrieval system that accesses a cognitive conceptual base. This base is where concepts that are formed by our earliest experiences are stored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that experience is stored in clusters such as &quot;things with 4 legs&quot; or &quot;people's names&quot;. New languages access this one experiential-conceptual base, but each language attends to somewhat different details and thus categorizes differently any given phenomenon. The task in new language learning is to develop a new place in the brain to store the new sound, grammar, concept, etc. patterns (note that languages take up their own territory in the brain, which is why some multilingual stroke patients will lose one language but not another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in your consciousness, the &quot;front office&quot; or &quot;work space&quot; of your brain, there is interference from first language patterns and concepts. Your mother tongue draws you back to familiar habits and familiar conceptualizations of things, all as if they are implicitly &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;correct&quot;. Your mother tongue is whizzing along out-of-awareness, but the language you are learning has to be made explicit to some degree, then stored in its territory to hopefully function out-of-awareness as a language should. This explicit learning is the hard work of second language learning because (1) your first language is more a hinderance than help and (2) you have to rely heavily on those work space resources (language learning makes you tired!) because the new language territory is not fully formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then: Your English effortlessly accesses the cluster &quot;people's names&quot; (though it's relatively easy to forget names because there is so much overlap, so many Steves and Ashleys), but your Chinese has difficulty accessing that cluster, maybe because there's the surname-given name issue to deal with. Maybe &quot;first names&quot; and &quot;being on a first name basis&quot; are closely related clusters connected to &quot;people's names&quot;. You indicate that you show respect or friendliness by remembering (first) names. Anyway, Chinese presents a cognitive twist that can cause frequent derailings on the path from the Chinese language territory to the common conceptual base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The theory of the common underlying conceptual base is from Istvan Kecskes.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4981" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T12:41:25.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8729" CreationDate="2014-08-05T17:36:34.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling issues in this case are identical in Thai and Lao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;กว่า  /kwaa/ (low tone)  ‘more than’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;กว้าง /kwaang/ (falling tone) ‘broad’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ด้วย /duay/ (falling tone) ‘also’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ด่วน /duan/ (low tone) ‘urgent’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples from Thai.  In the first two, the [w] letter is a glide, so the tone mark goes above or slightly after it.  It is part of the onset consonant, not the rhyme.  In the last two, the [w] letter is part of the rhyme, so the tone mark goes before it, over/after the consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at rhyming words, you could confirm this.  For instance, /kwaa/ can rhyme with /khaa/, but /duan/ would not rhyme with words ending in –an, like /kan/ ‘with’.  That’s because the [w] is part of the onset in the first case, part of the rhyme/coda in the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are exact Lao equivalents for all the examples given, if you want to look them up.  I recommend getting a good Lao dictionary if you want to learn about word shapes in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T17:36:34.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8739" CreationDate="2014-08-05T17:36:58.957" Score="5" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I gather that [r] (trill) was realized as [ɹ] in different dialects of Old English and Middle English, but when [r] was used, was it an allophone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, did [r] vary predictably with [ɹ] (or maybe the flap [ɾ]) in specific phonetic contexts, e.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;word initial?&#xA;between vowels?&#xA;when long /rr/?&#xA;in consonant clusters?&#xA;word final?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recommendations on articles/books with more info are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4983" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T22:11:22.983" Title="What were allophone rules for [r] in Old English and Middle English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8730" CreationDate="2014-08-05T19:41:22.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question that probably has a quite straightforward answer: &lt;strong&gt;historical development&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various European languages adopted the Latin alphabet through different routes and mapped it  differently onto their phonological systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit of a special case (similarly to 'u' and some others) since in Latin, it did not represent a separate phoneme but was only a graphical variant of &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; used in certain contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it wasn't until quite late that various languages decided to use it to represent different sounds as the need arose. For instance, German started using &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; to represent /j/ only in late 15th century. In Czech, for instance, &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; represented the long vowel /i:/ while /j/ was written as /g/ until the beginning of the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has more details for other languages: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T19:41:22.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-05T21:31:17.880" Score="9" ViewCount="6362" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a Natural Language (like English for instance) describe anything?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are our thoughts limited by our language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the number of words in a Natural Language is a finite set, can this set describe an infinite number of concepts, notions or ideas?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a core or reference set of vocabulary that can describe any concept?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What drove me to ask this question is my adoration to mathematics and its nature. Although any mathematical concept can in principle be formalized i.e. it can be expressed in terms of the axioms of set theory (ZFC), rarely the mathematicians do that. Instead they use natural language (English in particular) to describe and communicate mathematical concepts. So the following two questions came to my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is natural language limited? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does natural language put constraints on the amount of mathematical discoveries that humans can make?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steven Pinker has a nice presentation that touches upon this issue (particularly at the minute 20):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-B_ONJIEcE&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-B_ONJIEcE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4985" LastEditorUserId="4985" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T16:16:09.570" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:00:35.320" Title="Is Language infinite?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8736" CreationDate="2014-08-05T22:11:22.983" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no certain answer to this question, as the various realizations of /r/ in OE/ME (and in early Germanic languages generally) are far from straightforwardly clear. A good recent article by Piotr Gąsiorowski, arguing that /r/ was already highly variable in OE, can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinyurl.com/molkulw&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-05T22:11:22.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8731" CreationDate="2014-08-05T23:54:42.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware that anyone has produced a typology of predicates in the sense of semantic predicate-argument structures. Of course loads and loads is written about semantic predicate-argument structures, but any attempt to produce a typology of these predicates is going to be fraught with much difficulty, since determining exactly what should and should not count as a predicate is difficult. I myself have written about how predicates are manifest in syntax, so perhaps I can help by illustrating the difficulty facing the intended endeavor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first a couple of points of opinion: I suggest ejecting the &quot;CFG&quot; part of the question. Attempting to produce a typology of predicates based on a CFG backbone is going to be difficult and convoluted. Predicate-argument structures are much easier to deal with using a dependency-based model. I can back this claim up with my own research (if anyone is interested). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming a dependency-based model of syntax and semantics, Igor Melʹc̆uk's works are a good place to start. Two of his most known works are listed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Melʹc̆uk, Igor A. (1987). Dependency syntax : theory and practice. Albany: State University Press of New York. ISBN 978-0-88706-450-0. Retrieved 24 August 2012.&#xA;&#xA; Melʹc̆uk, I. (2003). Levels of dependency in linguistic description: Concepts and problems. In Ágel et al., 170-187.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melʹc̆uk also has a more recent book that focuses on semantics. I haven't looked at it personally, but I imagine it is going to have a detailed account of semantic predicate-argument structures. Note as well that Melʹc̆uk is Russian. But also beware, Melʹc̆uk's works can be difficult to access for those who do not have a firm basis in the theory of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a typology of lexical verbs is actually what you are interested in, many dictionaries provide sentence frames indicating how verbs are used. For instance, I have Wahrig's &lt;em&gt;Woerterbuch der deutschen Sprache&lt;/em&gt; here in front of me now. It classifies verbs into about 100 different types according to their valency. Perhaps this is what you are actually interested in. If so, I imagine that there are dictionaries of Russian that also provide sentence frames indicating the valency of verbs. If the term &quot;valency&quot; does not call up clear associations, try reading this article &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to actual predicate-argument structures. A typology of predicates would have to be able to accommodate the following data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1a.  The house is new.&#xA;&#xA; 1b.  the new house&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The predicate-argument structure across these two utterances should be closely similar. Using simplified predicate-calculus-style representations, this is what one gets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1a'.  is new [the house]&#xA;&#xA; 1b'.  new [the...house]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, one views &lt;em&gt;(is) new&lt;/em&gt; as a predicate taking &lt;em&gt;the house&lt;/em&gt; as its argument. Yet from a syntactic point of view, the two utterances are obviously quite different structurally. Thus if one is interested in producing a typology of predicates, the typology should accommodate this sort variation in syntactic structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second example should further illustrate the challenge of establishing a typology of predicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2a.  The people are laughing at him.&#xA;&#xA; 2b.  The people laughing at him are mean.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again using simplified predicate-calculus-style representations, one might assume the following predicate-argument analyses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 2a'. are laughing [the people, at him]&#xA;&#xA; 2b'. are mean [laughing [the people, at him]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing to note in this case is the manner in which one predicate-argument structure serves as the argument of another predicate. In other words, the theory of predicate-argument structures that one employs should be able to recognize the embedding of predicate-argument structures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many many further challenges facing any attempt to produce a typology of predicates. A third example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 3a.  Fred showered.&#xA;&#xA; 3b.  Fred took a shower.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences are almost synonymous, which means they should have almost identical predicate-argument structures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 3a'.  showered [Fred]&#xA;&#xA; 3b'.  took a shower [Fred]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The challenge that such data present should be apparent. The theory of predicate-argument structures that one assumes should be in a position to recognize when the object is part of the predicate (as opposed to being an argument of the predicate). In this case, &lt;em&gt;a shower&lt;/em&gt; is not an argument of &lt;em&gt;took&lt;/em&gt;, but rather it forms the predicate with &lt;em&gt;took&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I think the endeavor is facing major challenges. There is no consensus about what does and does not count as a predicate in theories of semantics and syntax. The difficulties sketched here are going to require a decision after every turn.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-08-06T00:12:44.130" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T00:12:44.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-06T02:21:07.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes: &quot;The sky is blue.&quot; I just described something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only in much more limited ways than might seem to be intuitive. For an introduction to this area you could start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Linguistic relativity&lt;/a&gt;, the famous &quot;Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No natural language satisfies your precondition of having a finite set of words (until they become dead languages). But even a hypothetical language with a very small vocabulary would have no limit on combination of words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are surely many of these. Many dictionaries develop them to help prevent circular definitions among other things. &lt;a href=&quot;https://simple.wikipedia.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The &quot;Simple English&quot; edition of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is based on such a premise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T02:21:07.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8752" CreationDate="2014-08-04T21:58:38.797" Score="3" ViewCount="1615" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, language changes over time, but in languages that exist without writing, it changes naturally just influenced by itself. So when writing was introduced, did that start to influence speech too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have heard people say we must pronounce &lt;em&gt;King&lt;/em&gt; with a slight &lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt; at the end, others say that the &lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt; is not pronounced but ends with the normal sound of &lt;em&gt;NG&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case is the foreigner who pronounces the letters in words similar to his own language and therefore initiates a different/new way of pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" OwnerDisplayName="Aprendice" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-06T10:10:33.943" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T00:26:57.690" Title="Writing influences speech and viceversa?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8757" CreationDate="2014-08-06T10:20:56.917" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does the state-of-the-art in speech synthesis take into account prosody? It is not clear to me how e.g. Klatt Durational Model, IITM Durational Model, Sums-of-Products Model, or even Neural Network Models (which predict the durations of syllables, and then derives phone durations from syllable durations, learning the underlying interactions in the context) of prosody in synthnetic speech have any overlap with prosodic theory in theoretical linguistics. Or am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2014-08-07T05:40:09.013" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T18:30:27.820" Title="How do prosodic models inform improvements to speech synthesis?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-06T14:24:41.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, anything that is describable, up to a point, as we can only describe on the basis of shared understanding that comes only from shared experience. I.e., we can always describe the objective (the wavelength of color red) but not the subjective (redness to a blind person). Regarding the indescribable, I should mention&#xA;&quot;colorless green ideas&quot; whose state of slumber is an important&#xA;linguistics research topic). Can you describe more precisely what you mean&#xA;by &quot;describe&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given that our thoughts are able to extend languages, which get&#xA;richer as time passes, one would think that language does not limit our&#xA;thoughts. But since thinking is sensitive to training, linguistic habits do influence our thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;since anything that can be described, alluded to, defined,&#xA;computed, lied about can be thus mishandled with only two symbols&#xA;usually noted &quot;0&quot; and &quot;1&quot;, I would guess the answer is yes. We can&#xA;describe an infinity of things, but only a &lt;em&gt;denumerable infinity&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Contrary to popular belief, it is likely that the reals do not exist&#xA;... most of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, while the number of word currently in use is undoubtedly&#xA;a finite set, as is the number of words that have been in use. The&#xA;number of words that can be is undoubtedly infinite. The number of&#xA;words that will be depends on the future of the universe, but will&#xA;most likely be finite at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the sign language together with a few grunts. That is all our&#xA;ancestors had, and they developed the rest from that. As long as shared experience is available.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, there is more to language than the language itself. Is&#xA;the working of our brain part of language or not? Is language&#xA;separable from experience? How much of&#xA;language is limited by the physical concept of representation? How&#xA;much of language is dictated by intrinsic concepts of communication&#xA;(logic)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To emphasize the importance of shared experience in language&#xA;and communication development, I would like to point out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pioneer&#xA;plaque&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Voyager golden record&lt;/a&gt;. The plaque was intended to&#xA;communicate with unknown being, and the designers tried to communicate&#xA;their message by referring to physical and atronomical experience that&#xA;any advanced civilisation should normally have (as far as we can&#xA;predict), or referring to the only non-natural experience we can&#xA;share: the spacecraft itself. The record contains images and sounds,&#xA;which is more direct experience sharing than actual communication&#xA;language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-08-11T17:18:11.020" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T17:18:11.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-06T15:12:22.233" Score="0" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;It just occurred to me that this construction is very peculiar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Pronoun:      I had better get going.&#xA;NP:           The cat had better be home.&#xA;Expletive:    There had better be food on the table.&#xA;Gerundive C:  Eating cake had better be good.&#xA;Wh-C:         What he saw had better be worth seeing.&#xA;Infinitive C: ?To fish had better calm my nerves. &#xA;Relative C:   *That she kissed the frog had better amuse me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject has to be a NP or a pronoun and can't be a relative clause. This may be because relative clauses are abstract and can't be the things or actions someone would expect to have done or been something. Infinitive clauses should be grammatical, but I'm not so sure. The verb that follows &quot;had better&quot; being infinitive is, I suspect, due to the subjunctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any other example where it would be grammatical to substitute the word &quot;better&quot; with any other comparative (adj/adv), noun, or verb (&quot;better&quot; can be a noun and infinitive verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What part of speech is &quot;better&quot; in the construction?&#xA;&#xA;Are there any other constructions quite like it?&#xA;&#xA;Is this an example of a fossilized construction?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-06T14:07:11.890" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T08:06:05.017" Title="NP + &quot;had better&quot; + Infinitive V" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8745" CreationDate="2014-08-06T15:23:02.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED has this under &quot;have&quot; 20 a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The past Subjunctive had = would have, is used idiomatically with adjectives (or adverbs) in the comparative, as better, liefer, sooner, rather; in the superlative, as best, liefest; or in the positive with ‘as’, as good, as lief, as soon, as well, to express preference or comparative desirability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the earliest form of these expressions, in Old English the adjs. léofre, betre were construed with be and the dative, e.g. him wǽre betere = it would be better for him. In Middle English, side by side with this, appears have and the nominative, in the sense ‘he (I, etc.) would hold or find it better or preferable’. The use with the positive, and superlative, and the extension to rather are later; the use of as soon, sooner, well, is recent, since liefer and better began to be felt as adverbs. (See exhaustive treatment by F. Hall in Amer. Jrnl. Philol. II. 281.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T15:23:02.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-06T18:32:13.597" Score="-5" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Classical/Biblical Hebrew an Indo-European language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And/or - To what extent is Classical/Biblical Hebrew an Indo-European language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4992" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T03:08:44.680" Title="Is Classical Hebrew an Indo-European language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-06T19:45:29.927" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The headline question: &lt;strong&gt;Is language infinite?&lt;/strong&gt; should perhaps invite more scrutiny than it's generally given these days. It was posited by Chomsky in the context of a particular view of language: &quot;A small set of rules operating on a large but finite set of words, generates an infinite number of sentences.&quot; The problem with this definition is that it assumes a very bounded and discrete view of all elements: rules, lexical items, sentences. Language is not organized in sentences and the difference between words and rules is likely an artifact of dictionary making and grammar writing. But even if we did assume that, there is no guarantee, that the actual number of possible sentences is infinite rather than just unimaginably and practically inexhaustibly large (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/bcscholz/Infinitude.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as was argued by Pullum and Scholtz in 2010&lt;/a&gt;). As a matter of practical fact, &lt;strong&gt;while the set of possible expressions in a given language may or may not be infinite, the actual set of all expressions ever uttered (even if we ignore language death) is going to be finite (because we cannot ignore the heat death of the universe)&lt;/strong&gt;. Now, the set of expressions actually produced by humans (or even machines) is going to be too large to practically enumerate by current (and possibly any) technology but it's going to be finite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;it really does not matter whether language is infinite at all&lt;/strong&gt; (other than to keep certain formal theories internally consistent). What matters is that &lt;strong&gt;any language is going to allow a set of expressions that is sufficiently large for any purpose&lt;/strong&gt; a human language can be put towards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not mean that  the answers to your other questions are straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can any language describe anything?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, this depends on what you mean by describe. There are two ways you can approach it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exhaustive definition that will communicate between any two people all the relevant features of a phenomenon in such a way that cannot be confused with anything else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the first point is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, language cannot describe everything in a perfectly communicative manner. In fact, I'd argue that language cannot describe most things. However, the answer to the second way of putting the question is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Language can talk about everything. It uses deixis to  point and analogy to compare. These ways are never definitive but they are good enough for language to carry the explicit cultural and interpersonal knowledge it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue is often tied to infinity of expressions. But that's a non-sequitur. We could have an infinity of expressions in a language that does not match a single item in an infinite set of phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are our thoughts limited by our language?&lt;/strong&gt; The problem with this question is that we don't really know what thoughts are (or really what language is). So the answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, our language limits what we tend to think, but &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; language does not preclude the possibility of any thought (in the way we think of thoughts).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can a finite set of words describe an infinite set of ideas.&lt;/strong&gt;  This makes several unwarranted assumptions. First, words don't describe ideas, they are used to create expressions (by rules if you subscribe to the words/rules theory of language or unification if you don't). Second, expressions do not really directly map onto a discrete set of ideas/notions/concepts. They co-create them. So in some way the question makes no sense. But even if you did subscribe to the simplistic notion of 'String of words'='Idea', you could generate enough strings in a language to match enough ideas to last humans the rest of the existence of Earth regardless of whether a language is finite or not. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a core or reference set of vocabulary that can describe any concept?&lt;/strong&gt; Again, remember all the caveats about the limits of 'description'. However, even with a simplistic view of what 'describe' means, the answer is that in practice there is not. However, different theoreticians have tried to come up with different sets of semantic primitives that can be used to describe anything. Sometimes this only applies to a subset of reality (logic, mathematics) but not necessarily. Anna Weirzbicka constructed a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural semantic metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; that only consists of about 70 words found across all languages. She claims that these can be used redescribe any human concept. However, these descriptions are not very practical for every day use, even if you did subscribe to the very notion of semantic primes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; There has also been some debate as to how large languages actually are, with some linguists claiming that language is actually not just infinite but uncountably infinite (&lt;a href=&quot;http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcb/Research/absurdity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here for details of the discussion&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T23:00:35.320" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:00:35.320" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8747" CreationDate="2014-08-06T21:45:17.767" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classical Hebrew is not an Indo-European language. Modern (Israeli) Hebrew has however been described as a language with Semitic morphology and Indo-European (specifically: Yiddish) phonology and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-06T21:45:17.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-07T03:40:06.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Wilhelm von Humboldt's phrase that language is 'the infinite use of finite means' has been cited by Noam Chomsky, who in turn has frequently referred to the concept of infinite language, a speaker's competence, which in Chomsky's terminology is their ability to produce a potentially infinite number of correct sentences.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://usingenglish.com/speaking-out/language-infinite.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://usingenglish.com/speaking-out/language-infinite.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by sense that language can grow to evolve to describe and analyze any idea, language is countable to a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;While formal language theory usually concerns itself with formal languages that are described by some syntactiical rules, the actual definition of the concept &quot;formal language&quot; is only as above: a (possibly infinite) set of finite-length strings composed from a given alphabet, no more nor less.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question measuring language may have many answers, towards examining what's countable to language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1657" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T03:40:06.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8742" CreationDate="2014-08-07T05:26:25.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The influence of speech on writing is quite well-known, so I won't go into that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to the influence of writing on speech, Chomsky gave a talk at Google recently, where he spoke about various things. &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/Y3PwG4UoJ0Y?t=52m26s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;At one point&lt;/a&gt;, a questioner asked about the relation between writing and speech. The question was very different from yours, but his answer applies here. After Chomsky talks about the work of Ken Hale on &quot;cultural gaps&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://evelin2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/hale-gaps-in-grammar-and-culture.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;probably this article&lt;/a&gt;), Chomsky mentions another study, of Middle English (author and title not mentioned) that showed that &quot;&lt;em&gt;the use of complex constructions... which had embedded elements in them increased as literacy increased&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Chomsky then posits an explanation for that, having to do with speech being constrained by our limits of short-term memory. He concludes that &quot;&lt;em&gt;once literacy spreads, you get much more complex linguistic usage, even in speech, because it carries over from writing to speech&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, the influence of speech on writing is getting more and more prominent these days because (1) most people are literate and (2) many people communicate a significant portion of day-to-day affairs via short texts of various sorts (instant messaging, SMS, tweets, etc.). The drive for economy has led them to invent a huge number of abbreviations. Some of these have spilled over into speech as abbreviations (&lt;em&gt;OMG!&lt;/em&gt;) and words (ASAP =&gt; &lt;em&gt;ay-sap&lt;/em&gt;, YOLO =&gt; &lt;em&gt;yo-lo&lt;/em&gt;). I'm sure a teenager could give you many more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-08-07T05:39:08.437" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T05:39:08.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8758" CreationDate="2014-08-07T16:26:16.887" Score="5" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying the Sanskrit mantra that starts with asato ma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;असतो मा सद् गमय        asato mā sad gamaya &#xA;तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय       tamaso mā jyotirgamaya&#xA;मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय        mṛtyormā amṛtaṃ gamaya&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the first two lines is &quot;lead from the unreal to the real. Lead me from darkness to light&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the 'to' particle in English, it would seem to be that the dative case should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the words सद् and ज्योतिर् are being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that after having broken down the sandhi, we are talking about सत् and ज्योतिः&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are nominative. Why not dative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3660" LastEditorUserId="13293" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T10:38:45.090" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T10:38:45.090" Title="Why are these Sanskrit words in the nominative case" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8743" CreationDate="2014-08-07T16:45:44.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of systems make little to no use of phonologically informed prosodic models. Some just can't, others are designed to and ostensibly do, and others have the potential to but don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One widely used type of synthesis system involves the storage of hours of digitized human speech. In this type of system, which uses a method called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Concatenative_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unit selection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, pieces of the digitized waveforms are concatenated to produce new utterances (like a ransom note made out of letters and words cut out of magazines, only the units are fragments of speech). Because it uses bits of actual digitized human speech, the voice quality sounds quite natural. However, the overall quality of the output for any given utterance is limited by what units are available in the database, and sometimes the system must use a unit that is optimal in one dimension (its formant values, for example) but suboptimal in another dimension (its duration, for example). The result is output that can sometimes have very natural-sounding voice quality but prosody that is all over the place and not at all natural-sounding. The algorithms for unit selection are statistically trained, and so in theory they may take into account certain prosodic factors, like if the utterance is a yes-no question they may try to select units for the end of the utterance that were originally from the end of a yes-no question. But more often than not, questions produced by these systems won't even sound like questions. You might wonder why the systems don't just manipulate the units to have the appropriate durations and F0 (fundamental frequency), as predicted by prosodic models. In fact, this technique was explored in the past, but it has largely fallen out of favor because it often distorted the speech so much that the voice quality stopped sounding natural. If you've worked with PSOLA manipulation in Praat, then you are familiar with this kind of distortion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another type of synthesis system, which uses &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Formant_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rule-based formant synthesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, involves modeling speech &quot;from scratch&quot;--that is, constructing a set of rules to predict the values of a bunch of different parameters (formant values, durations, F0, etc.). The rules yield a final set of parameter values for an utterance and those parameter values are sent to a synthesizer that converts them into a waveform. Since this kind of system doesn't rely on any pre-stored human speech, developers have a lot more control in terms of how the prosody of the output can be manipulated. A prosodic model can be translated directly into rules that form part of the entire rule set. The downside to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; using pre-stored speech is that it is difficult for the voice quality of the output to reach the level of naturalness reached by the highest quality unit selection systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third type of system is one that uses large amounts of natural speech data to train &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hidden Markov Models&lt;/a&gt; (HMMs). In this kind of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#HMM-based_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;statistical parametric synthesis system&lt;/a&gt;, the training results in sets of decision trees that ask questions about the input context at each node (the decision trees are statistically derived analogs to the linguistically informed rules in the rule-based formant systems). These decision trees are stored, along with the HMMs themselves. For a given utterance, the synthesizer takes the HMMs selected by the decision trees and converts them into an output waveform. The HMMs are trained on F0 and duration information, among other things, so in theory if the training databases contain the appropriate types of prosodic information and an appropriately wide range of prosodic contexts, the resulting decision trees should capture the correct prosodic generalizations. In practice, however, it is quite difficult for such databases to be created. The output of HMM-based systems tends to be judged as less &quot;glitchy&quot; than that of unit selection systems, since it uses parameters instead of pre-stored speech units, but the voice quality is often criticized as sounding too &quot;smooth&quot;. The intonation is not as erratic as with unit selection systems, but conversely it is often judged as sounding too flat or &quot;bored&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, components of these different types of systems could be combined to exploit their respective advantages. For example, the knowledge that goes into creating the prosodic rules in a rule-based formant system could be used to inform the labeling of the training data as well as to properly delineate the set of questions available for the decision trees in a statistical parametric system. To my knowledge, however, no such system has been developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-08-08T18:30:27.820" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T18:30:27.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8756" CreationDate="2014-08-07T17:39:40.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not nominative. Both of them are neuter nouns, which means that nominative and accusative look the same. In fact, they are in accusative case and you might want to call it &quot;accusative of direction&quot; or &quot;goal of movement&quot;. Same holds true for &lt;em&gt;amṛtam&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T17:39:40.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8761" CreationDate="2014-08-07T18:44:52.510" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the logic of Latin nouns derived from pluperfect verbs. For example, we have &lt;em&gt;facta&lt;/em&gt;, things done, and &lt;em&gt;scripta&lt;/em&gt;, things written, but I thought the pluperfect gerundive would be something like &lt;em&gt;scribenda&lt;/em&gt;, things having been written. What exactly is the syntactical logic behind Latin pluperfect gerundives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-08T09:19:06.773" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T09:19:06.773" Title="Latin nouns derived from pluperfect verbs" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8759" CreationDate="2014-08-07T18:58:08.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Facta and scripta are perfect passive participles in the neuter plural. They are not pluperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-07T18:58:08.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8759" CreationDate="2014-08-07T20:08:44.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of confusion here... Let's try to clear it up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms like &lt;em&gt;facta, scripta&lt;/em&gt; are neuter plural forms of the perfect passive participle. The meaning of the perfect passive participle is &quot;having been (verb)ed&quot;, so &lt;em&gt;factus, -a, -um&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;having been done&quot;; &lt;em&gt;factum&lt;/em&gt; as a neuter used nominally means &quot;thing having been done, thing done&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;facta&lt;/em&gt; is the plural of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gerundive, a.k.a. future passive participle, is something completely different. Its meaning is &quot;that will be (verb)ed&quot; or more often &quot;needing/deserving/etc. to be (verb)ed&quot;. So &lt;em&gt;scribendus, -a, -um&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;(something) to be written&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;scribenda&lt;/em&gt; are &quot;things to be written*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pluperfect plays no part here at all: neither of these are derived from the pluperfect, and there's no pluperfect gerundive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-08-08T01:53:23.553" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T01:53:23.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-07T22:22:16.060" Score="3" ViewCount="4763" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I use C's and V's to describe syllable structures in a way that rules out highly unlikely syllable structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I recently looked up the fact that &quot;The structure of the Hawaiian syllable can be represented as being (C)V(V), where the round brackets around C and second V mean that the syllable-initial consonant is optional and the syllable may have a long vowel or diphthong.[30]&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The latter quote was from the Wikipedia article on Hawaiian Phonology:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_phonology&lt;/a&gt; ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we remove both optional elements from the syllable structure listed above, we get V.   So if we have a Hawaiian word that's six syllables long, there's nothing in the description of the syllable structure that rules out a Hawaiian word with this structure:   VVVVVV.   For that matter, what part of the (C)V(V) expression would rule out a Hawaiian word with the following structure?   VVVVVVVVVVVV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not necessary for the C &amp;amp; V notation to rule out words with the latter structure, why is it not necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T22:37:26.857" Title="How can I use C's and V's to describe syllable structures in a way that rules out highly unlikely syllable structures?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8768" CreationDate="2014-08-07T23:07:56.483" Score="2" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, &quot;homorganic&quot; means having the same place of articulation, and is said of sounds like [k] vs. [g] and [s] vs. [t].   (I couldn't find a definition from a linguistics source on the Internet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the term &quot;homorganic&quot; be applied to vowels and glides?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is the offglide in the diphthong [ɑɪ] homorganic with the vowel [ɪ]?      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-08T09:20:12.637" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T15:46:07.370" Title="Can the term &quot;homorganic&quot; be applied to vowels and glides?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T04:51:24.787" Score="2" ViewCount="601" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently trying to learn Arabic but think that instead of learning vocabulary piece by piece, it would be better to learn the root consonants for nouns, adjectives and verbs and rules for vowels to change their gender, tense, voice etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any source that can be suggested where I could comprehensively learn this? Either free online or as a popular paid book....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-08T09:16:42.627" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T16:34:03.913" Title="Learning Arabic through roots" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8765" CreationDate="2014-08-08T09:24:44.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is definitely the best way to learn Arabic. When I was a student (many many years ago) I learned a lot from the “Cours de langue arabe” by D’Alverny, which follows exactly this principle from the outset. (I do not know, however, whether you can read French). After you have acquired the basic grammar you can of course start using Wehr’s dictionary (either in its German or its English version) which, like all good Arabic dictionaries, is arranged strictly by roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T09:24:44.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T15:26:48.273" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a source(database, dataset, etc.) that lists English Loanwords into Mandarin Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-09T07:29:18.763" LastActivityDate="2014-08-09T07:29:18.763" Title="Is there a source that lists English Loanwords into Mandarin Chinese?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8764" CreationDate="2014-08-08T15:46:07.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jlawler pretty much answered this already in his comment, but I thought I'd post an official answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, yes--it's sensible to apply the concept of homorganic-ness (homorganism??) to things other than consonants. As you mention, one could consider the offglide in the diphthong [ɑɪ] to be homorganic with the vowel [ɪ], or the glide [w] to be homorganic with the vowel [u].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, however, the term is rarely used in this way. One possible reason is that vowels and approximants are more difficult to characterize in terms of &quot;place of articulation&quot;. What is the &quot;place of articulation&quot; of [a], for example? or of [ɹ]? And as for the diphthong [ɑɪ], some people transcribe it as [aj]. Its pronunciation can be more like [ɑɪ] or more like [ai]/[aj] (i.e., with a more extreme high-front offglide) depending on the context or how carefully it's pronounced, even for the same speaker. Does that mean that the former is homorganic with [ɪ] and the latter is homorganic with [i] and [j]? What would such a distinction be useful for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings up a more general point--a label like &lt;em&gt;homorganic&lt;/em&gt; is meaningful in linguistics only inasmuch as it is useful for delineating certain properties of speech/language units or relationships between/among speech/language units. Phonologists started noticing that consonants often form &lt;em&gt;natural classes&lt;/em&gt; along certain dimensions--one of them being &quot;place of articulation&quot;. That is, they noticed that consonants whose oral constrictions are made in the same or similar place in the mouth tend to group together in terms of the phonological processes they undergo/trigger. And they also noticed that certain phonological processes are sensitive to sequences of consonants that have the same place of articulation, hence the usefulness of the term &lt;em&gt;homorganic&lt;/em&gt;. (In phonetics it is also sometimes useful to identify homorganic relationships among consonants, as doing so may bring certain phonetic patterns to light.) When it comes to vowels, phonologists found it more useful to categorize them along several &quot;place-related&quot; dimensions, like height, backness, etc. As @jlawler pointed out, if two vowels are articulated at the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; same place, they are trivially the same vowel and trivially &quot;homorganic&quot;; but then in that context the label is not very useful. The exception I can think of is a nasalized/non-nasalized pair. I'd wager, however, that it's unlikely that you'll find a process involving sequences of nasalized/non-nasalized vowel pairs in a language that makes such a distinction phonemically! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-08-08T15:46:07.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-08T20:26:12.170" Score="3" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to find so little in iTunesUniversity, though maybe I need different search criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any open source resource to make or manipulate synthetic speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-09T07:16:59.267" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T09:11:55.207" Title="What are the best online resources for learning about (and making?) synthetic speech?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-09T19:51:46.247" Score="9" ViewCount="1148" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#Evidence_from_the_Uralic_languages&quot;&gt;This section&lt;/a&gt; of the Wikipedia article on laryngeal theory lists proposed IE-to-Uralic loanwords containing laryngeals. Several of these have quite basic meanings: &quot;woman&quot;, &quot;person&quot;, &quot;do&quot;, &quot;give&quot;, &quot;go&quot;. Though not unheard of, it's unusual for languages to borrow such basic vocabulary, especially in large numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How well-accepted are these conjectured borrowings? Are there other examples of proposed IE-to-Uralic loans with similarly basic meanings?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If these really are loanwords, under what kind of sociolinguistic scenario could such borrowing have taken place, and is such a scenario (presumably involving a high degree of prolonged contact and intermixture) plausible or supported by any evidence?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, of course, some believe that IE and Uralic are genetically related, in which case these words could be cognates rather than borrowings. The IE-Uralic relationship is an open question, but accepting the possibility for the sake of argument, is there anything about these words that would rule out their being cognates (e.g. relative chronology)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T00:46:22.090" Title="Did Uralic borrow basic vocabulary from PIE, and if so why?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="37410" CreationDate="2014-08-10T10:37:23.070" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to read more about descriptive personal names, such as &quot;Red Cloud&quot;, &quot;His-Horse-is-Crazy&quot;, &quot;Salmon Eater&quot;, &quot;Twilight Sparkle&quot;, &quot;Rainbow Dash&quot;, &quot;One who yawns&quot;, &quot;Sitting Bull&quot;, &quot;One man bucket&quot;, &quot;Black Elk&quot;, etc. I have been exposed to a term that describes them, but have not been able to discover it through searching. What is the term for these kinds of names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5004" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T16:40:08.520" Title="What is the linguistics term for descriptive names?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8769" CreationDate="2014-08-10T14:38:20.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some resources, in no particular order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article on Speech Synthesis&lt;/a&gt; gives a pretty good overview on the topic, although it's a bit thin in its discussion of statistical parametric (i.e., HMM-based) synthesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/Contents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis&lt;/a&gt; gives example audio clips that exemplify the evolution of rule-based formant speech up until the 1980s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about developing HMM-based synthesis, you can visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the HTS Homepage&lt;/a&gt;. HTS is a free toolkit that, along with another free toolkit called HTK (a more general toolkit for building and manipulating hidden Markov Models), allows you to develop your own HMM-based synthesis system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open-source speech analysis program &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; includes functions for doing speech synthesis, including its KlattGrid functions, which allow you to create formant synthesis output by specifying values for a bunch of parameters. It also has functions for creating and manipulating HMMs and neural nets, but I have never used those functions and know nothing about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all of the above are a bit daunting for you to approach (there's a steep learning curve when it comes to speech synthesis), try the online interactive Klatt synthesizer. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech/tutorials/synthesis/vowels.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Simplified Vowel Synthesis Interface&lt;/a&gt; allows you to experiment with synthesizing vowels in isolation (by manipulating the first three formants, F0, duration and overall gain). On that page there are links to more complex interfaces, including the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech/tutorials/synthesis/ceevees.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CV syllable interface&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech/tutorials/synthesis/ceevees.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;full Klatt synthesis interface&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any site or free toolkit that allows you to &lt;em&gt;develop&lt;/em&gt; your own waveform-based unit selection system. There are, of course, demo pages on sites of particular commercial systems, such as AT&amp;amp;T's Natural Voices system. There is also an open-source system called &lt;a href=&quot;http://mary.dfki.de/Download/openmary-open-source-emotional-text-to-speech-synthesis-system-released&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenMary&lt;/a&gt;. You can read an overview of unit selection synthesis in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/papers/IEEE2002/allthetime/allthetime.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;presentation by Alan Black&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T14:38:20.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8366" CreationDate="2014-08-10T16:52:20.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, dishes &quot;à la&quot; stands for &quot;à la façon de&quot; which you could translate as &quot;in the style of&quot;. So, &quot;à la bourguignonne&quot; means as it's done in that area of France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same idea for the other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes the words &quot;à la&quot;, &quot;au&quot;, or &quot;aux&quot; point to some ingredients. For example: in &quot;Courgettes farcies au saumon&quot;, the last part indicates that salmon is stuffed into the zucchinis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3660" LastEditorUserId="3660" LastEditDate="2014-08-11T07:02:34.407" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T07:02:34.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-10T17:05:27.317" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does it mean that a sentence is an egocentric constraint? I have this sentence: &quot;They really released the bird from the cage&quot; and I have to argue that this is an egocentric constraint. I would really need to find out what this mean. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5007" LastActivityDate="2014-08-10T17:05:27.317" Title="Egocentric constraint" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8769" CreationDate="2014-08-11T09:11:55.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some additional resources to musicallinguist's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eSpeak&lt;/a&gt; -- This is a formant synthesis-based speech synthesizer along the lines of the Klatt synthesizer that supports a large number of languages. I also have a version at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rhdunn/espeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rhdunn/espeak&lt;/a&gt; that makes it easier to build the program and associated voice data on POSIX systems (Linux, Mac, BSD, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rhdunn/klatt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;klatt&lt;/a&gt; -- This is an implementation of Denis Klatt's formant synthesizer. This code is a modernized version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/speech/systems/klatt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;klatt304&lt;/a&gt;. This does not produce speech from phonemes, but uses formant parameters as the input.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cainteoir Text-to-Speech&lt;/a&gt; -- This is my text-to-speech program. It currently interfaces to other speech synthesizers (eSpeak, MBROLA, svox), and provides linguistics and text-to-speech tools (a phoneme converter, a pronunciation dictionary manager, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Festival&lt;/a&gt; -- This is a text-to-speech program that supports different synthesis types (concatenative synthesis, Hidden Markov synthesis (HTS and clustergen)). It also includes facilities for building voices via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.festvox.org/download.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FestVox&lt;/a&gt;, along with several &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.festvox.org/dbs/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example voice databases&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.festvox.org/flite/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Flite&lt;/a&gt; -- This is a light-weight C implementation of festival, designed for constrained systems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MBROLA&lt;/a&gt; -- This is a program that synthesizes audio from phoneme, length and pitch contour information, with a lot of voices available in several different languages. This is not open source, but is free for non-commercial, non-military applications only.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn more of the theory, you need to research/look for specific topics (e.g. those referenced in the above programs). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linear Predictive Coding (LPC)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Residue Excited LPC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formant Synthesis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can search these topics on video sites like YouTube. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzL-pxcpo-E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzL-pxcpo-E&lt;/a&gt; -- Using Speech Synthesis to give Everyone their own Voice) -- This gives a high-level overview of the different techniques.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mjh0PSUv0M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mjh0PSUv0M&lt;/a&gt; -- Speech Synthesis by Kim Silverman -- Note that he gives some inaccurate information (e.g. he criticizes a pronunciation dictionary for having different phonemes for the &lt;em&gt;comma&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;roses&lt;/em&gt;[1]).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF8C86C2E163D8E4E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF8C86C2E163D8E4E&lt;/a&gt; -- &quot;Electronics - Digital Voice and Picture Communication&quot; (NPTEL) -- This has various videos on Linear Predictive Coding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the associated references (e.g. in the Klatt program and the Festival documentation). These reference the different papers published on different text-to-speech topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] John Wells' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexical Sets&lt;/a&gt; only has a &lt;em&gt;commma&lt;/em&gt; set. The &lt;em&gt;roses&lt;/em&gt; lexical set is needed to differentiate accents where &amp;lt;-es&gt; is pronounced as '[əz]' or '[ɪz]' in sibilant fricative contexts, and &amp;lt;-ed&gt; is pronounced as '[əd]' or '[ɪd]'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T09:11:55.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8770" CreationDate="2014-08-11T09:43:06.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IE-to-Uralic loanword transfer phenomenon is quite messy. There &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; those basic vocabulary terms that look alike, but it goes beyond that sometimes. The conjecture that the borrowings are borrowings is moderately well accepted, though people have been pointing out the exact same problems you just did: they are so fundamentally basic it's almost silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides &quot;give&quot;, &quot;do&quot;, &quot;woman&quot;, &quot;person&quot;, there's also &quot;wet/water&quot; (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;wed&lt;/strong&gt;- and * &lt;strong&gt;woder&lt;/strong&gt;- corresponding to PU * &lt;strong&gt;weti&lt;/strong&gt;), &quot;fish&quot; (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;(s)kʷálo-&lt;/strong&gt; (whence &lt;strong&gt;whale&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;squalus&lt;/strong&gt;) corresponding to PU * &lt;strong&gt;kala&lt;/strong&gt;), &quot;to stab, push&quot; (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;neiǵʰ-&lt;/strong&gt; corresponding to PU * &lt;strong&gt;nikka&lt;/strong&gt;) et cetera. Sure, these range from really basic to somewhat peripheral, but there are some words that look very related but are extremely unlikely to be borrowed, such as the first (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;me,&lt;/strong&gt; * &lt;strong&gt;méne&lt;/strong&gt; (acc. and gen.) and PU * &lt;strong&gt;mun&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;minä&lt;/strong&gt; (just nom.)) and second person pronouns (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;tū́&lt;/strong&gt; and PU * &lt;strong&gt;te&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;tun&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;tinä/cinä(?)&lt;/strong&gt;), the demonstrative pronouns (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;so-&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;to-&lt;/strong&gt; and PU * &lt;strong&gt;sä&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;tä&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;), a couple of case endings (PIE * &lt;strong&gt;-m&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-od&lt;/strong&gt; (accusative and ablative) and PU * &lt;strong&gt;-m&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-ta/tä&lt;/strong&gt; (same cases)), as well as some conjecture relating to some other endings that might look related (PIE 1SG/PL and 2SG/PL endings * &lt;strong&gt;-m&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-me&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-s/tHa&lt;/strong&gt; (active and perfect forms), * &lt;strong&gt;-te&lt;/strong&gt;, corresponding to PU * &lt;strong&gt;-m&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-me&lt;/strong&gt;, * &lt;strong&gt;-t&lt;/strong&gt; and * &lt;strong&gt;-te&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really looks like you'd have to strain to say all those were borrowed, though I admit that may be my opinion. Here in Europe, there's some small to moderate mainstream support for this Proto-Indo-Uralic thing: mainstream linguists such as Frederik Kortlandt and Robert Beekes say that it is possible that the two language families are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I cannot answer your second question as it's not something I'm familiar with, but regarding the third one, I can say that it is extremely uncommon for basic vocabulary to be borrowed, core morphology even more so. There are a plethora of Indo-European borrowings in Uralic that entered the language(s) at various points in time, sure, but borrowings and loanwords can also stand side-by-side with cognates.&#xA;(I think I'm going off on a tangent now, so I'll stop here; I hope the answer was good enough). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-08-12T00:46:22.090" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T00:46:22.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8712" CreationDate="2014-08-11T10:06:30.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Old English /r/ was probably the same as the Old Norse /r/. As to its exact pronunciation, we can't really know but we're pretty sure it was something like a trilled [r] or tapped [ɾ]. We don't really know the exact sound in Old Norse either but we're almost certain it was a trilled [r] as that's the most common initial reflex of the sound in all Scandinavian languages, as well as the intervocalic, preconsonantal, postconsonantal and final reflex of the sound in Icelandic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the vowels in Ælfric weren't reduced like in modern English: the /i/ in Ælfric was more like English &amp;lt; ee &gt; (phonemically /i:/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-08-12T00:30:00.487" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T00:30:00.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8771" CreationDate="2014-08-11T18:34:15.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing special about them, AFAIK. A huge number of personal names, everywhere, are like that. For example, George (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/george&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;earth-worker&lt;/a&gt;) , Alfred (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/alfred&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elf-council&lt;/a&gt;), etc. look just as descriptive. Most names are either formed like this, or express some devotional idea. The names you mentioned sound odd to us because their community chose to translate the names into modern English. Translated, your own name, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/michael&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;who is like God?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, is not all that different from the names you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T18:34:15.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-11T19:05:12.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would jump up one level and along the way disagree with your statement regarding the capabilities of mathematics.  There is no system that can describe anything. Reference Godel, Escher, Bach and other like works. or more poetically &quot;The Terrain is not the map&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5012" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T19:05:12.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8770" CreationDate="2014-08-11T21:03:05.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although most linguists would agree that there is a considerable amount of vocabulary shared by Uralic and Indo-European languages, there is not really any consensus as to why this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mainstream view is probably still that developed by Björn Collinder in his copious publications, which distinguishes various strata of IE borrowings into Uralic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: borrowings from proto-IE into proto-Uralic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: borrowings from proto Indo-Iranian (the ancestor of the Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages) into proto-Fenno-Ugric (that is: the ancestor of all the Uralic languages other than Samoyedic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third: pre-modern borrowings from IE languages into individual Uralic languages, notably the borrowings from Alanic (the ancestor of Ossetic, an Iranian language) into Hungarian, or the borrowings from proto-Germanic into Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth: borrowings in relatively modern times, e.g. those from Swedish into Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very strangely, all of these seem to be borrowings in one direction only. The Uralic languages seem in each case to have been recipients only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-11T21:03:05.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8786" CreationDate="2014-08-12T06:42:31.207" Score="3" ViewCount="15492" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between assertive and non-assertive words?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to find an answer in my online linguistics sources such as the SIL Glossary of Linguistics Terms.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only source I could find was an English Grammar site, namely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishgrammar.org/nonassertive-words/#mjsDTl7shKvqoAB0.99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.englishgrammar.org/nonassertive-words/#mjsDTl7shKvqoAB0.99&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This source states that assertive words are generally used in declarative sentences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of assertive words include &quot;some, once, already, somebody, something, sometimes, somewhere, someone.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source also explains that non-assertive words are used &quot; in questions and negatives. They are also used in if-clauses and with adverbs, adjectives, verbs, prepositions and determiners that have a negative meaning.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of non-assertive words include &quot;any, anything, anybody, ever, &amp;amp; yet.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I read the source, I wasn't able to determine exactly what the semantic or pragmatic difference between assertive and non-assertive words is.   I'm hoping that someone can spell this out for me, and/or recommend a source that explains the difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the link provides an example is given of an assertive word used in a question, namely  &quot;Did you want something? (Suggests ‘I think you want something’.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T05:39:38.710" Title="What is the difference between assertive and non-assertive words?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8784" CreationDate="2014-08-12T11:06:16.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other terms for &lt;em&gt;assertive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-assertive&lt;/em&gt; in this context are &lt;em&gt;realis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;irrealis&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;negative polarity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using &lt;em&gt;some, somebody&lt;/em&gt; etc. the existence of the entity in question is asserted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is somebody hiding behind the box&lt;/em&gt; means that the speaker assumes that there is a person hiding there, although they are not aware who it is. The existence of the person is real/realis. By contrast, &lt;em&gt;Is there anybody behind the box?&lt;/em&gt; does not make the assertion, but simply raises the possibility. The existence of the person is hypothetical/irrealis. The same is true of negation: &lt;em&gt;There isn't anybody behind the box&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A complication arises from the fact that, as you mentioned, assertive words can sometimes be used in questions or negated contexts. We can, for example, contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there anybody behind the box?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there somebody behind the box?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these two, 1) is the more usual, or unmarked way of phrasing the question. 2) is special, in that the speaker assumes the answer to the question might by yes, and is perhaps troubled by the fact (such as in a horror movie).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-assertive words can also be used in assertive contexts, but this is again marked and used for a particular effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There must be something we can do. I would do anything to help him!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assertive &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is the default choice and asserts that there is an action that might be appropriate. &lt;em&gt;Anything&lt;/em&gt; is marked in this assertive context and stresses the emotional involvement of the speaker and the force of the statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T11:06:16.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8784" CreationDate="2014-08-12T17:13:40.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you have been misled.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(BTW, &lt;em&gt;misled&lt;/em&gt; is the past form of &lt;em&gt;mislead&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishgrammar.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;English grammar&quot; site that you have been looking at&lt;/a&gt; is, in a word, junk. &#xA;It's full of incorrect and misleading information; it seems to be just one person's ideas,  most of which are, alas, not very useful or helpful, since the person is not a professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least in terms of grammar. The punctuation and creative writing parts may be of some use, but&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I doubt it. Anybody who doesn't know that English grammar has nothing to do with English punctuation is hardly qualified to give advice on either. &#xA;Online information that is free is often worth what it costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @robert points out, the correct term for what the site (but noone else) calls &quot;non-assertive words&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/63728/15299&quot;&gt;Negative Polarity Items&lt;/a&gt; (NPIs). They are the special, idiomatic cases. The other set of words, which the site (but, again, noone else) calls &quot;assertive words&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;some, once, already, somebody, something, sometimes, somewhere, someone&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are in fact variations on the quantifier &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;, plus a couple of temporal adverbs (&lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These words frequently alternate with NPIs in negative contexts, including questions and &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;-clauses.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negation is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/CELS-Negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; complex subject&lt;/a&gt;, and whenever there is a negative word or two in a sentence --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;especially if there is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/q-neg.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a quantifier or two&lt;/a&gt; in the sentence -- there will be strange grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Guaranteed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Executive summary:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; 1. Don't believe everything you read.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  2. Don't trust anything about &quot;grammar&quot; on that &quot;grammar site&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  3. Don't use their terminology, either; they manufacture names from ignorance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  4. Learn something about negation, which means learning something about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguice.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;logic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/VPguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-08-12T17:13:40.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-13T00:52:34.103" Score="2" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a project that I need to do that involves quite a bit of computational linguistics. My background in linguistics is very high level - I wonder if there are any good introductory linguistics textbooks that will enable me to quickly get up to speed on the &quot;practical&quot; side of it. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be able to understand and work with dependency trees that are outputs of many NLP tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be able to manipulate natural language generator rules, based on a good understanding of different syntactic rules/categories/relations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's okay if the textbook has lots of theories, but my primary focus is on quickly getting up to speed on the practical applications side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5017" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T05:38:50.243" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T04:02:00.670" Title="Introduction to linguistics from a practical application standpoint" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-13T04:31:43.410" Score="4" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to learn Arabic using a combination of Arabic for Dummies (AFD) and Google Translate. AFD seems to use transliteration while Google uses actual script. However, there seem to be differences for the same words between the two media. I wonder if this can be because AFD is using diacritics while Google does not and this may be due to the fact that Google may be using some dialect form while AFD may be using MSA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the phrase for &quot;I am writing&quot; is &quot;ana aktubu&quot; while in Google is &quot;أنا أكتب&quot; (ana aktb). Is this because Google is using dialect (which one?) or some other reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-13T05:36:56.480" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T21:48:04.507" Title="fattha, qasra, damma in google arabic translate" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8792" CreationDate="2014-08-13T06:56:43.990" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am have been nominated to teach an accelerated course on phonology to grad students. The course emphasizes lab work and hands-on methods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's a creative and innovative idea to demonstrate some aspect of e.g. pitch which is engaging and meaningful, that students can participate directly in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided unlimited resources but little time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T15:03:17.813" Title="What's an interactive, hands-on creative way to show the role of prosody?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8788" CreationDate="2014-08-13T10:03:25.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never looked at AFD, but google translate is useless for Arabic, and indeed for all languages. My suggestion is that you buy a proper Arabic grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I am writing” or “I write” is just ʼaktubu, but if you want to stress the “I” you can also say ʼana ʼaktubu. It is spelt&#xA; أنا أكتب.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T10:03:25.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2014-08-13T14:55:39.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that you use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat's&lt;/a&gt; pitch tracking function to provide a visualisation of pitch (see footnote below). The blue line in the figure below shows first a rise in pitch, followed by a long trough of low pitch, and finally another rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DOMkb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;pitch tracking&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it more interactive, you could have your students record themselves reading the same sentence as a statement, a neutral information-seeking question, a surprised question, an incredulous question, with different emotions etc. and then ask them to compare the visualisation of their intonation using Praat - first the different readings by the same speaker, then in group work similar pronunciations by different speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are slight technical challenges here, depending on your and your students' technical expertise. They need to work with Praat's recording function (or other software), and preferably use headset microphones. Also, women have higher pitch than men (plus there are differences between individuals), so the upper and lower ceiling of the the pitch tracking algorithm might need to be adjusted individually in Praat. But that should be doable with most Bachelor level or more advanced students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your students might also compare their intonation in a foreign language they speak/are learning with that of a native speaker. This idea comes from an &lt;a href=&quot;http://zif.spz.tu-darmstadt.de/jg-12-2/docs/Gut.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article by Ulrike Gut&lt;/a&gt;, which unfortunately is available only in German - but I think you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: Actually, pitch is a perceptual phenomenon, and fundamental frequency is its acoustic basis, but depending on the previous knowledge of your students you might not want to dwell on that for too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T14:55:39.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8789" CreationDate="2014-08-13T15:03:17.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You divide your class into teams.   All of the teams are given the same string that constitutes the same grammatical English sentence--same words, same syntax.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each team tries to endow this sentence with as many different meanings as possible simply by varying the prosody.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rinse and repeat with a different sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T15:03:17.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-13T16:47:00.317" Score="6" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about the appropriate number of languages for a child to learn at home. I'm Finnish and me and my husband recently moved to Finland after living in Spain a few years. My husband's first language is Arabic but we communicate in Spanish. In a nutshell, our child would be exposed to 3 languages at home. Also, I'm an English teacher in an international school and would like to get my child started early with the English language as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it too much for a child to be exposed to 4 languages from an early age? Can the quantity affect the quality of learning all these languages at the same time? Would it be better to leave English out until my child goes to e.g. an international day care?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance for your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5020" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T20:03:48.553" Title="A multilingual home, a pro or a con?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8794" CreationDate="2014-08-13T19:52:56.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of research and many books written on this, and many online resources (as another comment mentions), If you haven't already, try to do some research. From my own experience this has been very positive. My children speak 2 languages (mine and my wife's) fluently, and my daughter has gone to an immersion school in a third language for about a year now with great results. We do a lot to expose them to the languages that are not native to the country we live in, and my wife even does some formal study with my daughter in her mother language (also not native to the country we now live in). Our priority has always been to keep language exposure enjoyable for them - well, at least not a troublesome experience that they resent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2014-08-13T19:52:56.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-13T23:27:22.953" Score="11" ViewCount="1307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why has Paris French mostly lost the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/? As in, the difference between 'Je le ferai' and 'Je le ferais', 'poignée' and 'poignet', or more simply between the é sound and the è sound. According to Wikipédia (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_de_France#Phonologie&quot;&gt;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_de_France#Phonologie&lt;/a&gt;), these words are pronounced identically in nearly all of France. But in Canada, where I live, there's a noticeable difference between the two. What process caused them to merge in France?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a crosspost of the thread in the French Language StackExchange, so tell me if I've mis-tagged this or made any mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5022" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T12:53:22.057" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T17:05:33.053" Title="Why has Paris French mostly lost the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-14T01:39:02.977" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin has some suffixes that turn nouns into adjectives. But there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to which suffixes get applied to which nouns. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;felis&lt;/code&gt;-&gt;&lt;code&gt;felinus&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;canis&lt;/code&gt;-&gt;&lt;code&gt;caninus&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;apis&lt;/code&gt;-&gt;&lt;code&gt;apianus&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;avis&lt;/code&gt;-&gt;&lt;code&gt;avianus&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know where this distinction comes from? Was there perhaps an ending in Old Latin that influenced the choice of suffix and then disappeared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T12:53:00.957" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T12:53:00.957" Title="-anus vs. -inus in (Classical) Latin" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8797" CreationDate="2014-08-14T02:10:04.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a source for this at hand, but I would assume that the -anus suffix originated in a-stems: that is, the original suffix was -nus, but added to an a-stem it was -a-nus. This -anus would then have spread by analogy to nouns that aren't a-stems, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common type of process; for a close parallel cf. the Greek feminine suffix -ssa, which originally arose by the addition of *-ya to t- and k-stems (e.g. *melit-ya &gt; melissa &quot;bee&quot;, *Phoinik-ya &gt; Phoinissa &quot;Phoenician woman&quot;), but then became productive with all kinds of nouns (e.g. basilissa &quot;queen&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T02:10:04.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2014-08-14T03:57:54.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Esperanto is not based on Romance languages – though a lot of the vocabulary comes from Romance languages, many ways in which words are used and some of the grammar are derived from Slavic languages (of which Zamenhof was a native speaker): for example the Esperanto word &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, though borrowed from French &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, actually behaves like the Polish &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;; plus features like having &quot;k&quot; and &quot;t&quot; words (&lt;em&gt;kiel/tiel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kia/tia&lt;/em&gt; etc.) are loosely inspired by Russian (как/так, какой/такой). Though things like its agglutinative system were largely imagined with only marginal inspiration from living languages, and a lot of Esperanto grammar (like the ability to use any root to form any part of speech by changing the endings) were completely new and not based on any language at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to answer your specific questions regards comparisons with English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; – &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; is a non pro-drop language with slight inflection of verbs for both person and tense: &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; verbs are &quot;weak&quot; and so their conjugation can be determined from the root (for example, I climb, you climb, he climbs, I climbed, you climbed). Some verbs however are &quot;strong&quot; (for example, &quot;be&quot;) and their conjugations must be learnt (I am, you are, it is, I was, you were etc.). In English, the future tense, the conditional and the subjunctive mood are expressed using auxhiliary verbs (I will climb, I would climb, I should climb). &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto&lt;/strong&gt; is a non pro-drop language whose verbs do not decline for person (&lt;em&gt;mi grimpas, vi grimpas, li grimpas&lt;/em&gt;) but do for tense and mood (&lt;em&gt;mi grimpas, mi grimpis, mi grimpos, mi grimpus, mi grimpu&lt;/em&gt;). Every verb is regular, like everything else in Esperanto. The future tense and the conditional are expressed by conjugating the verb differently; Esperanto has no specific subjunctive, but the u-mood (often thought of as the imperative) can be used to convey the same meaning (&lt;em&gt;mi pensas ke vi foriru&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; has two participles: the past active and the present active (&lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt;). It has four aspects: &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;perfective&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;progressive&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt;) and the peculiar-to-English &lt;em&gt;perfect progressive&lt;/em&gt; using the past participle of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;been doing&lt;/em&gt;). Using auxiliary verbs (&lt;em&gt;have/be&lt;/em&gt;) in the past and present tense and prepending them with &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; to form the future tense, there are 12 tense-aspect pairs in which a verb can be expressed in the active voice and indicative mood. Another 4 each in the active-conditional, active-subjunctive, active-infinitive and &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; in the active-imperative making 28 in the active voice. In the passive voice there is no simple aspect, so there are 9 tense-aspect pairs in the indicative mood and 3 each in the other four moods making 21 in total, or 49 tense-mood-aspect-voice quadruples in the English language, only 35 of which exist in Esperanto.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto&lt;/strong&gt; has six participles: past, present and future active, and the past, present and future passive (&lt;em&gt;farinta&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;faranta&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;faronta&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;farita&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;farata&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;farota&lt;/em&gt;) (=&lt;em&gt;done, doing, going to do, had done to, having done to, going to have done to&lt;/em&gt;). It has four aspects: &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;faras&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;perfective&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;farinta&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;progressive&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;faranta&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;prospective&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;faronta&lt;/em&gt;). Using &lt;em&gt;estas&lt;/em&gt; in one of the three tenses as an auxiliary verb, or simply by replacing the final &quot;a&quot; of the participle by &quot;-is&quot;, &quot;-as&quot; or &quot;-os&quot;, a verb can be expressed in 12 tense-aspect pairs (including the simple) in the active voice and indicative mood, only 9 of which exist in English. 4 each in the other four moods in the active voice, making 28 in the active voice. In the passive voice (disregarding the ability to expressive some verbs in the simple passive using -iĝ-) their are 9 in the indicative and 3 in each of the other four moods, making a total of 21 in the passive voice or 49 tense-mood-aspect-voice quadruples in Esperanto, only 35 of which exist in English. Unlike in English, every single one of these constructions can be expressed as a single verb.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; has (virtually) no case system left, with all nouns being written in the nominative case and word order being a determining factor in interpreting the relationship between words in a sentence (specifically what is the subject and what is the object of a verb), along with prepositions. Some remnants of the genitive case remain in pronouns: &lt;em&gt;whose, mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto&lt;/strong&gt; has two cases: nominative and accusative. Having only two cases it is a lot more dependent on prepositions than other cased languages like German or Russian, and is probably equally dependent on prepositions as English, but is not reliant on word order to determine the subject and object of a verb like in English. It too has some traces of the genitive case left over from Zamenhof's early experiments in creating the langauge, in pronouns such as &lt;em&gt;kies, ties and ies&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;vocabulary –&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;I won't list examples, but much of the vocabulary comes from Romance languages, some from German and some from English itself (plus some from Slavic languages, Greek and Latin). English is a cognate language to German, and Romance languages like Norman French and Latin had a massive influence on our English vocabulary, so a native English speaker is in a fairly privileged position when it comes to learning Esperanto vocabulary.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;semantics –&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;As I said earlier, the majority of Esperanto words derive their functional roles from the Slavic languages (though for many words that role is a simple one and common across European languages), although I suppose the cultural connotations of some words would be different depending on the mother tongue of the person speaking Esperanto.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you would like to know more your best (and quickest) bet is probably just to learn the basics of Esperanto. Try the beginner courses on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.lernu.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lernu!&lt;/a&gt; – you can pick up the entire grammar of the language in just a few hours. And once you know a bit of Esperanto, you can read the many discussions about grammar in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.lernu.net/komunikado/forumo/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forums&lt;/a&gt; there or check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://eo.wikipedia.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Esperanto Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; which has many detailed articles on Esperanto grammatical concepts. Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; in the English Wikipedia should be a good start for grammar, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; for vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5023" LastEditorUserId="5023" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T01:44:20.680" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T01:44:20.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8808" CreationDate="2014-08-14T12:00:06.950" Score="3" ViewCount="2855" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to rate a sentence by its complexity in the sense of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rating of 1&lt;/strong&gt;: A very simple sentence which is just S+V+O, example: &lt;em&gt;&quot;I eat bananas.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rating of 10&lt;/strong&gt;: An uterly complex sentence with lots of subordinate clauses that is really hard to read through:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What metrics did the research found to identify the difference in complexity between sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some (naive) metrics that I mean could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word count in a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of verbs in a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of subordinate clauses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5024" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T12:52:15.623" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T15:37:00.870" Title="What metrics can be used to rate the complexity of an english sentence?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8803" CreationDate="2014-08-14T13:27:20.230" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in how &quot;see&quot; and &quot;look&quot; relate to each other. I think &quot;hear&quot; and &quot;listen&quot; is similar. Is there specific linguistic terminology that describes how the words relate to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it seems like English has no word that similar to &quot;look&quot; for &quot;smell&quot; or &quot;feel&quot;. Is that true for most/all languages? Are there languages who do something more clever to handle this area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2014-08-14T16:47:43.773" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T20:55:52.783" Title="Relationship between &quot;see&quot; and &quot;look&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8801" CreationDate="2014-08-14T15:47:34.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/action-verbs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Action Verbs&lt;/a&gt; versus &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/stative-verb.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stative Verbs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Action verbs describe some effort a subject takes. In English, they are &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;listen&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stative verbs describe state which a subject is in, &lt;strong&gt;regardless of&lt;/strong&gt; whether or not he/she makes any effort to reach that state. In English, they are &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hear&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/444/what-is-the-difference-between-look-see-and-watch&quot;&gt;there are also verbs&lt;/a&gt; that describe continuous action, like &lt;em&gt;watch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, many languages have such pairs, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai: ดู (look) and มอง (stare, goggle) vs. เห็น (see)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ukrainian: дивитися (look) vs. бачити (see)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..and so on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for a very short answer, but it actually answers the entire question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T15:53:13.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8801" CreationDate="2014-08-14T20:55:52.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;See&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/105101/15299&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sense Verbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. They are, in fact, the two distinct English sense verbs for vision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three varieties of English sense verbs, following the pattern of &lt;em&gt;hear, listen, sound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(only sense verbs of hearing have &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; distinct forms; sight has &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt;, and the others &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; apiece)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Non-Volitional&lt;/strong&gt; verb) &lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;heard&lt;/strong&gt; the song&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;saw&lt;/strong&gt; the painting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;tasted&lt;/strong&gt; the soup&lt;/em&gt; (same for volitional)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;smelled&lt;/strong&gt; the soup&lt;/em&gt; (same for volitional)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;felt&lt;/strong&gt; the fabric&lt;/em&gt;  (same for volitional)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Volitional&lt;/strong&gt; verb)   &lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;listened to&lt;/strong&gt; the song&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;looked at&lt;/strong&gt; the painting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Experiential&lt;/strong&gt; verb)  &lt;em&gt;The song &lt;strong&gt;sounded&lt;/strong&gt; strange (to me)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The soup &lt;strong&gt;looked/tasted/smelled&lt;/strong&gt; strange (to me)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The fabric &lt;strong&gt;felt&lt;/strong&gt; strange (to me)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, basically, you're right. The term you're looking for is &quot;volitional&quot; (meaning doing something on purpose), and it contrasts with &quot;non-volitional&quot; (meaning doing something by accident). It's the same difference as the difference between &lt;em&gt;pour&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;spill&lt;/em&gt; -- pouring is volitional while spilling is non-volitional; otherwise they're the same. There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A15299%20%22sense%20verb%22&quot;&gt;a lot more syntax involved with sense verbs&lt;/a&gt; in English, however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T20:55:52.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8794" CreationDate="2014-08-14T23:05:05.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no hardwired 'limit' on the number of languages a child can learn. In fact, a scenario where a child learns one language for each parent, a language of the community they live in, and a language used in school, is not that uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you must understand that learning a language is not an on/off proposition. People learn different languages in different contexts, for different purposes. So you cannot simply expect somebody who simply grows up will be able to become a professional translator or even use all languages in all contexts with the same facility. This will be particularly obvious for literacy contexts. For example, unless you give them practice and some instructions, your children may struggle with writing in reading in the languages that they only know from spoken contexts. It may sound obvious but many people assume that writing is just writing speech down. It's much more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to be prepared that there will be a developmental time during which the child will appear to mix the languages and this mixing will to some extent continue as code switching into adulthood. There's nothing wrong with that but you might get negative feedback from people who only experience monolingual contexts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that often happens is that children themselves end up resisting using some of their languages because they don't want to stand out from others. Some children are reluctant to speak back to their parents in the language of the parent (even though they understand) if that is the only context they ever hear the language (and if the parent speaks the language of the community in which they live).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key thing to remember is that there's no harm to learning multiple languages from early childhood. There are also some benefits to multilingualism (although I suspect that people overgeneralize from the available research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's also not uncommon for children not to be able speak the native language of one or both of their parents. There are people who cannot even pronounce the name of one of their parents (or even their own) in the 'native pronunciation'. While many people decry it as a missed opportunity, it's important to remember that this is as natural as multilingualism and need not be stigmatized any more than teaching children multiple languages used to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-14T23:05:05.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8635" CreationDate="2014-08-15T14:15:58.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am user4919, who posted the question.&#xA;I bought 'Gardiner', and have found it very useful for a person like me having a decent language-technical background.&#xA;Dominik Lukes, thank you for pointing out some caveats. That's exactly what I mean by my first goal.&#xA;I notice some relations to Arabic, but not much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got two follow-up questions I hope you can help me with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Some of the interpretations of the hieroglyphs in Gardiner seems to be disputed in other, newer works. I.e. how Q1 (stairs) should be transliterated.&#xA;Is there a source for interpretations of the glyphs that is generally accepted as 'the' standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Where do I find a good forum for discussing Ancient Egyptian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5035" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T14:15:58.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-15T14:44:52.633" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of time when I say a word with r before θ or ð, my tongue slides on my palate and it goes to down mouth, behind my lower teeth. This movement produce a sound similar with tap or click, sometimes the tongue don't go until down, but yet produce this different sound.&#xA;I just can produce the sound properly when I say very carefully, what I think a bad behavior, because my brain need to learn do unconscious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's more common when I say the r before ð.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The R and the TH are okay, because R I have on my language and the TH I have learned practicing a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying &quot;More than four thieves&quot; is a pretty difficult without thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This noise is common when we say very fast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you ^^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="5036" LastEditDate="2014-08-15T16:16:30.487" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T16:16:30.487" Title="R before TH sound?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8800" CreationDate="2014-08-15T15:37:00.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you are trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are trying to assess the structural complexity of any given sentence, then metrics like you suggested are useful, as is measuring the complexity of the syntax tree or using something like the Flesch-Kincaid metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are trying to assess how difficult a sentence is to comprehend (e.g. for a specific school grade/age), there are various factors involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One factor is whether a sentence can have multiple valid syntax trees due to the words belonging to multiple part of speech classifications, or have different meanings within the same part of speech classification. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book &quot;All About Reading&quot; was very good. -- to read, or the town?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The wind up the valley was strong.&quot; vs &quot;The wind up toy was old.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;She took the lead out of the box.&quot; vs &quot;He took the lead in the dance.&quot; -- also, the first is ambiguous: the metal, or a dog lead? You need to know the context from the previous sentence(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The mouse was getting old, so they replaced it with a new wireless one.&quot; -- here the context for 'mouse = computer mouse' instead of 'mouse = animal' is only determined at the end of the sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is whether it uses specialist words in a given domain (including archaic words), or meanings for the words. The more of these there are, and the more obscure outside the given field they are (e.g. electricity vs quantum chromodynamics), the more complex the sentence is to understand. The same goes for abbreviations, slang, accentisms (&quot;Aye, tha' be t'one ah war lookin' fer.&quot;), or even pulling in words from other languages (&quot;That is no bueno.&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is whether the sentence uses non-standard word ordering, either for poetic effect or for something like Yoda speak (&quot;Go, you must.&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is if the sentence uses the incorrect form of a word (its vs it's) or the wrong homophone (their vs they're vs there) or the wrong word (e.g. via spell checkers or predictive texting for technical or uncommon terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is mixing or using a different spelling (British English, American English, text/SMS, leet (e.g. l33t), archaic, ...) to what the reader is used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T15:37:00.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8794" CreationDate="2014-08-15T20:03:48.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of linguistics and psycholinguistics, there is no limit for a normally developing child on the number of languages he/she is able to learn. Neural plasticity (the neurons in the brain) is very flexible at a young age, so young children are proven to learn easier, quicker, and better than older ones , not to mention adults. So, it might be better if children are exposed to all the possible languages of their environment as soon as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the amount of exposure to each language and the way of teaching plays an important role to the actual results and rate of learning. In other words, empirical learning (through practice and continuous exposure to authentic material, eg. everyday conversations, TV and so on) facilitates language learning at a young age, as opposed to classroom-based learning (formal education), where different practices are followed and focus is given on different aspects of language (such as grammar use, syntax and so on). In terms of native-like pronunciation, starting speaking a language at a very early age improves pronunciation as well, compared to starting at a later age. There is a linguistic theory, called the Critical period Hypothesis, according to which native-like learning of a foreign language (I believe in your case this would be a second language or any language treated as a foreign either at school or in the child's surroundings) is not possible if an individual starts learning it after a certain age (around 12-14 years old). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are some disadvantages to being exposed to several languages at the same time. Code-switching (changing from one language to the other) is inevitable I guess (this could be seen both as an advantage and a disadvantage). Also, there is a slight delay on the first time the child produces some kind of meaningful speech. If the typical age for a normally developing child to produce speech is at around 6 months for words such as &quot;mama&quot;, &quot;nana&quot; etc. and 18-24 months for sequences of 2-4 words at the same time, multilingual children are observed to produce such sequences later than monolingual ones.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4870" LastActivityDate="2014-08-15T20:03:48.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-16T03:59:35.277" Score="2" ViewCount="777" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humans were/are learning about nature via identifying, observing and studying objects and relations between those objects.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the same time humans were/are assigning names to those identified objects (nouns) and observed relations (verbs), thus developing language ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since, therefore, human language reflects the physical world and it's laws, which are realities, existing independently of human mind, does language contain within its structure the knowledge about those realities?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5038" LastEditorUserId="5038" LastEditDate="2014-08-18T01:12:45.093" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T01:12:45.093" Title="Question re connection between language and knowledge" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-08-20T00:24:39.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8811" CreationDate="2014-08-16T06:01:48.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question as formulated in the last sentence is a resounding no. Language does in no way represent or reflect any underlying truths about the world. In fact, the very definition of language is that it represents one way of reflecting a particular way of perceiving the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different languages represent this reality in different ways. Perhaps the one universal tendency is that much of language reflects certain realities of the human body. However, even here languages will differ in the particulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best you can say that some language structures reflect certain social realities. But this will mostly be limited to vocabulary and phraseology. At any rate, any such correspondences can only be reconstructed, never predicted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, you make a very simplistic link between knowledge, names and physical reality. You could say that all three are constantly interacting in a mutually constructive way. But there is no chain of mirror like reflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately,  you need to problematize both your notions of language and knowledge. Once you see them in all their complexity, the question will make less and less sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-16T06:01:48.700" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8846" CreationDate="2014-08-17T07:16:07.040" Score="1" ViewCount="891" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think the core human 'organs' for speech/sound production can be reduced to the lips, tongue and throat? I realize there are elements like nasals and glottal stops but the other three seem to be the central ones. After all, you can still get something like the 'na' sound with the nose pinched and closed but not if the tongue doesn't touch the roof of the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5042" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T05:46:51.170" Title="Core organs of speech" Tags="&lt;nasals&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8787" CreationDate="2014-08-17T09:05:32.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you ask &lt;em&gt;more Chomskian&lt;/em&gt; side of computational linguistics, but I did not run across a thing on Chomsky's theory on computational linguistics (of course, that does not mean there is not). Statistical linguistics is way more computational since it uses corpora, parsers, statistics and possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is best to start with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=YxcqAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=introduction%20to%20corpus%20linguistics&amp;amp;dq=introduction%20to%20corpus%20linguistics&amp;amp;hl=tr&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=LWzwU8iuG4aI7AbrkIHoAg&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=YiFDxbEX3SUC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=statistical%20nlp&amp;amp;hl=tr&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=bmzwU9_8CIafygP01IHoCA&amp;amp;ved=0CBkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=statistical%20nlp&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;statistical computational linguistics&lt;/a&gt; book and learn n-grams, bigrams, trigrams and other stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say &quot;I want to parse my texts, use corpora and take statistics.&quot;, there are tons of libraries for NLP just like Java's LingPipe, OpenNLP, StanfordNLP, Apache UIMA, GATE, MALLET, FrameNET or Python's &lt;em&gt;holy&lt;/em&gt; NLTK module and you can use those libraries to &lt;em&gt;use texts or corpora to achieve any goal&lt;/em&gt;. (Assume that you work on a research about women and men complaining. You have samples and you use them to take statistics and generalize results. Or assume that you work on a research about a dead language. You can use those libraries to take statistics of that language to define most-common particles in that language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you say &quot;I want to write my own parser, tokenizer, my own corpus database model...&quot;, you have to know any programming language, regular expression and statistics/probability knowledge. I do not know if Ruby does but Java and Python is best fit for this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastActivityDate="2014-08-17T09:05:32.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8815" CreationDate="2014-08-17T10:07:01.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Nasals&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able to approximate a nasal sound with closed nostrils, but if you pinch your nose shut and try to pronounce a nasal sound you will find you cannot do it. You can feel the air building up behind where you have pinched it shut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the nasal cavity acts as a secondary resonator. It is involved in producing nasal vowels from e.g. French and Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Speech Synthesis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech synthesis works on the acoustic signal. The formant synthesis approach is based on Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) techniques from speech signal compression studies. These use a source-filter model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can divide the signal into voiced (where the vocal chords are vibrating, producing an impulse train) and unvoiced (where the source is a chaotic airflow, usually modelled by a random number generator). This forms the source. Some speech synthesizer voices use a signal derived from the original audio recording as the source -- for example in Residue-Excited LPC in the diphone voices from festival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In LPC analysis, LPC coefficients are produced that work to reconstruct the acoustic signal. From these coefficients, the formants (peaks) of the acoustic signal can be derived. Using either the LPC coefficients or the formants produces the same effect -- to filter the source signal, reconstructing the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two formants (F1 and F2) indicate the vowel on the IPA vowel chart being produced, and are used this way in acoustic speech analysis. The other formants add richness and additional harmonics to the phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several techniques for producing the speech signal using the LPC/formant data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the LPC coefficients and residue (remaining signal) -- this is used in concatenative synthesizers like Festival and Flite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the formants, storing them for each segment of sound -- this is used by e.g. the Klatt speech synthesizers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Derive the formants from target F1 &amp;amp; F2 formants for a given vowel -- this is used by e.g. the rsynth speech synthesizer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Model the vocal tract as a cylindrical tube, with the width of each section derived from the F1 &amp;amp; F2 formants -- this is used by e.g. Gnuspeech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to predict the speech parameters (pitch, duration, etc.) including either the LPC coefficients or the derived formant data -- this is used by the HTS and clustergen based voices from Festival and Flite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source is modelling the airflow from the lungs and the vocal chords. The filter is modelling the effect the shape of the path the air travels through the mouth and nasal cavity, controlled by things like tongue shape and jaw height.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not cover the effect of increasing the force of the air through the lungs (volume), closing the mouth (for stops), aspiration and other effects or for non-pulmonic consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-08-17T10:07:01.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-17T23:23:04.633" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a public list of &quot;negation&quot; and &quot;affirmation&quot; cues (I'm not a linguist so I apologize if I am using incorrect terminology). A simple example for a &quot;negation cue&quot; I'm looking for is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I do NOT have candy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;There is an ABSENCE of candy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the capitalized text is negating &quot;I do have candy&quot; and &quot;There is candy&quot;, respectively. I see literature that references working with negation cues, but I couldn't find any publicly available word/phrase sets. Does anyone know where I can look for something like this? Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5044" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-07T04:52:48.923" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T04:52:48.923" Title="Is there a public list of negation and affirmation cues?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8811" CreationDate="2014-08-17T23:39:19.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dominik Lukes said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Plus, you make a very simplistic link between knowledge, names and physical reality. You could say that all three are constantly interacting in a mutually constructive way. But there is no chain of mirror like reflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the most important thing to understand. Language is being constructed while it's constructing. It morphoses 'in the middle' of the whole dynamic of our consciousness, serving as a common 'ground' based on sounds, time, etc., which implies a lot of 'determined' characteristics of human (not only phonetically but culturally and perhaps emotional and psychologically), which as it's obvious holds a very complex structure, a structure that keeps changing and re-using, maybe tendencially simplifying, it's resources in accordance to it's needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since language comes after human synthesis of the perceived world and the whole complex of emotions and the already established concepts (which affects both our input and output), to say that language reflects in pieces external reality in it's full objectivity, or say that language is a system fixed enough to reflect it objectively, is too reducing, it attributes language a place it doesn't have (which doesn't mean it's not highly important).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short, as you formulated your question, the answer is no, language doesn't give any raw or objective information of realities external and independent to us (nature); it simply helps to build up an understanding about our perception of that reality to keep developing through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5030" LastEditorUserId="5030" LastEditDate="2014-08-18T00:08:45.183" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T00:08:45.183" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11421" CreationDate="2014-08-18T12:36:05.237" Score="1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ought to write a paper with corpus-based analysis of a lexical or morpho-syntactic alternation. In other words, the paper should deal with two (or more) nearly synonymous lexical items or morpho-syntactic patterns (or maybe constructions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Details: The alternation should be studied from a 'multifactorial' perspective, which means that the effect of grammatical factors, discourse factors and lectal factors on the variation at hand is examined in one overarching model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these alternations? Does anyone know of different examples of these alternations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2796" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T09:50:31.890" Title="What are lexical and morpho-syntactic alternations?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-18T13:12:11.373" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speaker verification&lt;/strong&gt; is the task of estimating how likely it is that two speech recordings come from the same speaker, while &lt;strong&gt;speaker identification&lt;/strong&gt; tries to match a speech recording with one of a greater number of candidates. Both are important &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_linguistics#Forensic_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forensic linguistics/phonetics&lt;/a&gt; tasks and crucial for law enforcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google and other sources told me that a range of phonetic features such as pitch range, long term formant frequencies, speech rate and articulation rate are used in these tasks. Unfortunately all sources I found were fairly general. My question is: &lt;strong&gt;Which of these (and other phonetic features) are considered most reliable and are most commonly used?&lt;/strong&gt; If it's important for answering the question, I'm mostly (but not exclusively) interested in English here. Also, answers should ideally refer to (academic) sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-08-18T13:12:11.373" Title="What phonetic features are commonly used in forensic speaker identification and verification?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2014-08-18T13:48:07.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question targets mental processes, cognition, far more than language. Can one &lt;em&gt;formulate&lt;/em&gt; for oneself some (mathematical) concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many non-linguistic examples, where symbolic manipulation is hampered or accelerated by the &lt;em&gt;fitting&lt;/em&gt; view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematical &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.wpi.edu/IQP/BVCalcHist/calc2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;differentiation&lt;/a&gt; started with Newton and Leibnitz, two competitive notations, one being far inferior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Soroban&lt;/a&gt; is an Asian abacus, that is mentally much more operative, because it basically is turned 90 degrees, so one forms the digits of numbers. The European abacus got forgotten and in disrespect relatively fast, but the soroban has much more mental merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With pure language to describe things, imagination/projection, plays a significant role. As Wittgenstein expressed, in language we play, use shifting meanings, contextual meaning. To express the behaviour of quarks in physics, they came up with &quot;colour&quot;, three quarks forming a indivisable unity, like Red, Green, Blue. Of course &quot;colour&quot; is inadequate, but the interesting point is, that one sees a wish to project more than there really is, and literally is a very colourful image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You pose a notion that language can be purely formally used to describe phenomna like formal building blocks. And question to what degree this is possible. I think such formal essays are often the results of first searching the right tool to model the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a last example, physics is based on equations (E = mc²). Science philosphy may put this to debate. In linguistics we know other systems than equations like rewrite rules. Wolfram Mathematica's author tried discrete recursive engines to model physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; ideas are much more powerful than words. Afterwards those ideas are formalized in words - after the &quot;aha&quot; moment of insight. And vice versa the prose in words needs an intellectual project of insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Especially:&lt;/strong&gt; it is easy to err in a unsatisfactory notation. Study the soroban or latin numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-19T05:46:19.367" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T05:46:19.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-19T05:02:35.890" Score="6" ViewCount="1490" Body="&lt;p&gt;The online etymology dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=arithmetic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;arithmetic&lt;/em&gt; comes from Greek &lt;em&gt;arithmos&lt;/em&gt;, from PIE *re(i)- &quot;to reason, count&quot; and gives as cognates English &quot;read&quot;, Old High German &quot;rim&quot; &quot;number&quot;, Old Irish rim &quot;number,&quot; and Latin ritus &quot;religious custom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This etymology is suspicious. First, there were no roots starting wit r- in PIE. But this can be explained adding a laryngeal before it. What is more suspicious is that Latin &lt;em&gt;ritus&lt;/em&gt; is known to come from the PIE root a̯er- &quot;fit&quot; and cognate to the words artist, army, aristocracy, Aryan, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the same dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=row&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claims&lt;/a&gt; that English word &lt;em&gt;row&lt;/em&gt; comes from PIE *rei- &quot;to scratch, tear, cut&quot;. As to me, the meanings &quot;to tear&quot; and &quot;to reason, count&quot; seem totally different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;rhythm&lt;/em&gt; the dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rhythm&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; to come via Greek &lt;em&gt;rhythmos&lt;/em&gt; from PIE *sreu- &quot;to flow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I would like a clarification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether Greek &lt;em&gt;rhythmos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;arrangement, order, proportion&quot; and &lt;em&gt;arithmos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;number&quot; related.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether &lt;em&gt;arithmos&lt;/em&gt; is related to artist, aristocracy etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where to put English &lt;em&gt;row&lt;/em&gt; and Russian &lt;em&gt;ряд&lt;/em&gt; &quot;r'ad&quot; meaning &quot;row&quot; (Mallory and Adams put Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;rinda&lt;/em&gt; &quot;row&quot; and Latvian &lt;em&gt;rida&lt;/em&gt; &quot;in rows&quot; as related to &lt;em&gt;arithmos&lt;/em&gt; and count the both related to ratio, artist etc).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where to put the Italic *ord- &quot;to arrange, arrangement&quot; (&gt; Eng. order), whether it is related to PIE &lt;em&gt;a̯rtus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;order, arrangement, juncture&quot; (the dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claims&lt;/a&gt; it is of unknown origin)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-08-19T13:12:26.113" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T14:03:41.740" Title="Are &quot;arithmetic&quot; and &quot;rhythm&quot; related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8823" CreationDate="2014-08-19T10:49:41.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;ἀριθμός and ῥυθμός both have the suffix -θμο-, otherwise they  are not related. The mainstream view, as reflected now in Beekes’s Greek etymological dictionary, is that ἀριθμός is from IE *h2rei- ‘to count’, whence also ON rim ‘account’, OHG rīm ‘row, number’, OIr. rim ‘number’, and ‘probably’, Lat. rītus ‘religious observance, rite’  &amp;lt; *h2rei-ti-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ῥυθμός is from *sreu- “to stream”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of ἄριστος “best” (as in aristocracy etc.) is considered to be uncertain, but it cannot very well be connected to the aforementioned words, nor with Latin ars (as in artist). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-08-19T11:20:10.587" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T11:20:10.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8364" CreationDate="2014-08-19T13:05:04.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perl's &lt;a href=&quot;https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::EN::Tagger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lingua::EN::Tagger&lt;/a&gt; can extract noun phrases and guess at unknown parts-of-speech, although I'm not sure if that's what you meant. It could probably handle things like exception names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5049" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T13:05:04.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2014-08-19T13:57:20.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR&lt;/strong&gt;: Personal pronouns (&lt;em&gt;I, you&lt;/em&gt;), interrogative pronouns (&lt;em&gt;who, what&lt;/em&gt;), quantifiers (&lt;em&gt;all, many, one&lt;/em&gt;) , negative particles (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;) and determiners (&lt;em&gt;this, that&lt;/em&gt;) are less likely to change over time than most nouns, adjectives and verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broad distinction between open-class and closed-class words. &lt;strong&gt;Open-class&lt;/strong&gt; are those that easily admit new members, such as verbs, nouns and adjectives. They also consist of a large number of individual words - It's a daunting task to count all the English nouns listed in any given dictionary. &lt;strong&gt;Closed-class&lt;/strong&gt; are those that do not readily admit new members, such as personal pronouns (&lt;em&gt;I, you&lt;/em&gt;), interrogative pronouns (&lt;em&gt;who, what&lt;/em&gt;), quantifiers (&lt;em&gt;all, many, one&lt;/em&gt;) , negative particles (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;) and determiners (&lt;em&gt;this, that&lt;/em&gt;). They also consist of a rather small number of individual words - It's easy to count all the personal pronouns of the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most individual closed-class words also occur much more frequently in oral and written language than most individual open-class words. Now, frequency of occurrence happens to be one of the main factors influencing likelihood of historical change in linguistics (see, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~x4diho/Frequency%20effects.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diessel (2007)&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, the mental representation of a word is reinforced every time you hear or use it, and children are less likely to come up with innovations in language acquisition, if they hear a certain word very often. It is not true, as @Darkgamma stated, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing is inherently more conservative than anything else because pretty much every word is changed as time goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, every word is changed as time goes on (which is a big problem for linguists trying to learn anything about the prehistory of human languages), but they don't all change at the same rate. Historical linguists trying to determine how various languages are related exploit this by comparing words that are least susceptible to change - see for example the famous &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Swadesh list&lt;/a&gt; (although perceived cultural universality was an important consideration in choosing this list). Note that this list contains many personal and interrogative pronouns, negative particles and determiners. It also contains many verbs and nouns, but again these are frequent words referring to basic concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So personal and interrogative pronouns, quantifiers, negative particles and determiners - as a group - are less likely to change over time than nouns, adjectives, and verbs - again, as a group. But this is not due to any inherent quality of pronouns and the like, but because of frequency of occurrence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-08-19T13:57:20.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-20T03:11:38.267" Score="12" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the lexical similarities between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic is in the interrogative and relative pronouns. For the former, in PIE there's a family of interrogatives beginning *kw-, e.g. Latin &lt;em&gt;quis&lt;/em&gt; 'who?', &lt;em&gt;quo&lt;/em&gt; 'whither?', while on the Uralic side there is e.g. Finnish &lt;em&gt;ku-ka&lt;/em&gt; 'who?'. For the relative, there's PIE *yo-, giving e.g. Greek &lt;em&gt;hos&lt;/em&gt; '(he) who', while Uralic shows e.g. Finnish &lt;em&gt;jo-ka&lt;/em&gt; 'who'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proponents of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis see these as cognates; opponents see them as borrowings from IE into Uralic. It seems bizarre that such items could be borrowed, but stranger things have happened... Or have they? Are there any attested cases of a language borrowing an interrogative or relative pronoun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T02:08:53.060" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T06:18:52.350" Title="Has any language ever borrowed an interrogative or relative pronoun?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6801" CreationDate="2014-08-20T08:28:15.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be missing something but isn't this more a question of negation scope. In which case a simple case of bracketing would explain the difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[NOT discipline] [because he loves them]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[NOT [discipline because he loves them]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd have to be more explicit about the X' problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T08:28:15.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8827" CreationDate="2014-08-20T11:11:49.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I suppose that in English we do say things like “quiddity” or “being qua being”, at least if we are using the language of Scholastic philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T11:11:49.217" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8827" CreationDate="2014-08-20T11:33:00.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, anything can be borrowed, given intensive and prolonged language contact (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books/about/Language_contact.html?id=1QFZpZ9BswQC&quot;&gt;Thomason 2001: 63&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borrowed relative pronouns (sources didn't mention examples):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gondi (Dravidian) has borrowed a Hindi relative pronoun (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books/about/Language_contact.html?id=1QFZpZ9BswQC&quot;&gt;Thomason 2001: 116&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bodo and Rabha (Tibeto-Burman) have borrowed a relative pronoun from Indo-Aryan (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books?id=ZCfiGYvpLOQC&amp;amp;pg=PA276&amp;amp;lpg=PA276&amp;amp;dq=borrowing%20of%20relative%20pronouns&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mc7nc-hgF_&amp;amp;sig=xI0xqcxdWxbrlwW0TpXXvC7itaE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=xHn0U765L8fJOcTkgMgJ&amp;amp;ved=0CEAQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=borrowing%20of%20relative%20pronouns&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Subharao 2011: 276&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a brief search, I couldn't find any examples of borrowed interrogative pronouns, but I'm sure there must be some out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-08-20T11:33:00.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-21T03:12:18.057" Score="3" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;These examples are from Kui, a Trans New Guinean language spoken on Alor island, Indonesia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1)  nya      yai   umasingin  u=ga=sam               u=ga=bur=i.&#xA;     1pl.Sub  v.    n.         appl=3sg.obj.Caus=adj  appl=3sg.obj.Caus=adj=perf&#xA;     we       come  mosque     it.make=soft           it.make=flat=already&#xA;     'We come to repair the mosque.'&#xA;&#xA;(2)  na        er     u=sanam=i.&#xA;     1sg.Subj  n      Caus=adj=perf&#xA;     I         water  make.hot.already&#xA;     'I already heated the water.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prefix &lt;em&gt;u-&lt;/em&gt; at the first sentence functions as an applicative marker but at the 2nd sentence, it behaves as an causative. Is it possible ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5050" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-08-21T11:10:18.230" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T15:01:38.763" Title="Can a language have both nominative/accusative and ergative/absolutive syntactic systems in its syntactic structure?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8835" CreationDate="2014-08-21T17:38:47.437" Score="2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been engaged in a conversation on another site pertaining to frequency analysis, particularly in relation to the 1966 work &lt;em&gt;Buntús Gaeilge&lt;/em&gt;,   Colmán Ó Huallacháin; Ireland. Department of Education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement was made in the discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frequency analyses cannot produce statistically trustworthy results&#xA;  without having a heck of a lot of language data. Even now, corpuses&#xA;  can be spoiled by selective choosing of source material, and they&#xA;  contain billions of words. No matter anyone's best intentions, in 1966&#xA;  it would have been impossible to build a large-scale, statistically&#xA;  relevant corpus, so they would have had to be very selective in what&#xA;  they thought was worth including, and that selective step destroys the&#xA;  objectivity of the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this has prompted me to wonder about the answer to the following question(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is considered a large enough sample size when being used to guide the creation of pedagogical resources such as foreign language courses and why? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a bonus question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any actual merit to the statement bellow? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No matter anyone's best intentions, in 1966&#xA;  it would have been impossible to build a large-scale, statistically&#xA;  relevant corpus, so they would have had to be very selective in what&#xA;  they thought was worth including, and that selective step destroys the&#xA;  objectivity of the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="828" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-08-21T21:36:04.603" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T21:36:04.603" Title="What is considered the smallest possible sample size for word frequency lists used in FL instruction?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8923" CreationDate="2014-08-21T19:18:15.610" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once learned a term meaning a similar word that cannot stand for it in every context, i.e. a synonym that doesn't work in &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; instance the original word can (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a hypernym). What is this term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:36:56.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:36:56.203" Title="Term for a similar word that cannot stand for it in every context?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8833" CreationDate="2014-08-21T19:33:40.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is considered a large enough sample size when being used to guide the creation of pedagogical resources such as foreign language courses and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How large your corpus should be depends on what exactly you want to use it for, and what alternatives are available. If you want to know the 2,000 most frequent words of a language, a 1 M. word corpus will be sufficient to conclude that these words should be taught earlier than the words with frequency ranks 10,000 to 12,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if a much larger corpus is available (say, 10 M. words), you will want to use this one. But in 1967, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brown Corpus&lt;/a&gt; of American English, the first modern computer-based corpus, just became available, with a size of 1 M. words. Nowadays, much larger corpora are available for many languages and dialects. But for a smaller language, if a 1 M. word corpus is available, it will allow you to answer many questions (regarding frequent lexis etc.) that you couldn't hope to answer without a corpus of this size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any actual merit to the statement below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter anyone's best intentions, in 1966 it would have been impossible to build a large-scale, statistically relevant corpus, so they would have had to be very selective in what they thought was worth including, and that selective step destroys the objectivity of the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Brown Corpus shows, this was in fact possible in the 1960s. Also, being selective about what you include is a good approach in empirical research. Rather than including just any language samples that were available, the Brown Corpus samples published material from a range of genres. The corpus make-up mirrors closely what was published in 1961 in the US, so that it can claim to be representative of 1961 written American English. This is basically the same approach as carefully choosing a group of 1,000 Americans (based on socio-economic and geographical criteria) to determine voting patterns, rather than asking 10,000 completely randomly selected Americans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;completely random&amp;quot; approach is also used nowadays, for example to compare web-based megacorpora. If you want to investigate low-frequency phenomena this is great, but a huge, automatically compiled corpus comes with its own set of problems - and depending on the research question, sometimes a web-based mega-corpus might be appropriate, and sometimes a carefully compiled smaller corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T19:33:40.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2701" CreationDate="2014-08-21T22:02:54.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are tons of diachronical researches on Turkish, Arabic language and Persian language but great amount of those works are owned by literally prescriptivists and written in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keywords:&lt;/strong&gt; Arapça, Farsça&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not mind if it is Turkish or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://katalog.tdk.org.tr/web/catalog/search.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;library of TDK (Turkish Language Foundation)&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately there is no single electronic documents but you can search &lt;strong&gt;keywords&lt;/strong&gt; in catalogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://tez.yok.gov.tr/UlusalTezMerkezi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;National Thesis Center&lt;/a&gt; for searching any thesis. If you are abroad, there is no ability of downloading since registering is allowed for university members (including students) in Turkey, but you can take names and mail them to share their works with you. Coming to search, there is a search bar in the site below, you can use &lt;strong&gt;keywords&lt;/strong&gt; to see the thesis on diachronic researches on it. (National Thesis Center also provides English site prefence for foreingners.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://yazmalar.tdk.org.tr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;catalogue for original manuscript&lt;/a&gt; by TDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not forget all those resources are written in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to look for an English resource, those are so rare but have a possibility of being much &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1265368?uid=3739192&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;sid=21104076225081&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this work&lt;/a&gt; seems to be a research on phonological structure of Arabic loanwords in Turkish. (Not free.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a page from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_replaced_loanwords_in_Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=3005584&amp;amp;fileId=S0020743800029214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This work&lt;/a&gt; seems much more sociological, but it is worth to be seen. (Not free.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1580400?uid=3739192&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=4&amp;amp;sid=21104076225081&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is about Persian-Turkish relation. (Not free.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T22:02:54.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2701" CreationDate="2014-08-21T22:45:16.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nişanyan’s Turkish etymological dictionary is available on line: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/&lt;/a&gt;. It is an excellent resource which clearly identifies the Arabic, Persian and other loanwords in modern Turkish. If you want to pursue the borrowings in the opposite direction (Turkish to Persian) there is “Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen : unter besonderer Berücksichtigung älterer neupersischer Geschichtsquellen, vor allem der Mongolen- und Timuridenzeit“, in four thick volumes, by Gerhard Dörfer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-21T22:45:16.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8841" CreationDate="2014-08-22T07:02:40.183" Score="4" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the following letter in some documents I'm going through:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUAqr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't seem to find this letter in any IPA tables, nor can I find anyway to type this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find/type this letter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's it called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T07:25:12.857" Title="IPA letter: m with vertical straight line underneath" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8840" CreationDate="2014-08-22T07:25:12.857" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vertical short line marks a syllabic consonant -- when the nucleus of a syllable is a consonant. The interjection &lt;em&gt;hmm&lt;/em&gt; in English might be transcribed [m̥m̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; notes, it's represented in Unicode with combining characters U+0329  ̩ combining vertical line below or U+030D  ̍ combining vertical line above, depending on whether the IPA symbol it's attached to has a descender or ascender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2014-08-22T07:25:12.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-22T16:24:32.100" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;More and more people on television are pronouncing &lt;em&gt;street&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;shtreet&quot; and &lt;em&gt;storm&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;shtorm&quot;, replacing the initial /s/ with /ʃ/.  Where and when did this start in mainstream America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5062" LastEditorUserId="2081" LastEditDate="2014-08-23T02:22:50.370" LastActivityDate="2014-08-23T02:22:50.370" Title="Palatalization in English words like street, storm, etc" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-08-23T02:20:13.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-24T05:11:07.523" Score="0" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently was shown this article that claims that the Hebrew alphabet, when viewed in what appears to be a spectrogram, the actual frequencies in which the letter hits creates a shape of the physical letter itself. It is hard to explain, see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://absolutetruth613.blogspot.com/2012/06/seeing-sounds.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is, I have done a lot of searching and am unable to find the original research paper. The article above claims &quot;the article is too extensive and technical for reproduction here.&quot; I want to see the extensive technical version. Has anyone seen this? Is anyone familiar with this idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5069" OwnerDisplayName="Mike " LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T08:23:43.063" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T08:23:43.063" Title="A spectral analysis of Hebrew pronunciation, looking for source" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-24T05:48:22.470" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of the use of the terms 'count nouns' and 'mass nouns', but this dichotomy doesn't seem to lend itself to a viable explanation to Japanese students of which nouns in English allow for counting and which don't. There are several categories for identifying countable and uncountable nouns: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Countable structures, characterized by the intrinsic property that they have an identifiable overall structure or shape, often related to function as in the case of chairs or tables, and, therefore, can be separated (at least visually) and counted one by one. The substance that the structures are made of are of secondary (apples) or of little if no importance (glass, aluminum, or plastic chairs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) An uncountable substance, which has no intrinsic shape and therefore is incapable of being separated into characteristic structures that can be counted--gasses (air), liquids (water), metals (gold)--the stuff that structures are made of. They may be quantified by volume or mass or number of containers or imposed structure (tank of, glass of, ingot of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rice (uncountable 'substance') is an example of a conglomerate for which the separation into countable grains is difficult and usually useless and so only the conglomerate is dealt with usually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) An uncountable miscellany of structures (collective) that have some common feature--furniture, greenery, stuff (in my bag)--used when we can't or don't need or desire to identify the structures/substances more precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) An uncountable object having some bilateral symmetry that apparently dominates the character of the (plural) noun--eyeglasses (two pieces of glass), scissors (two blades), pants and shorts (two legs), but not shirts--so that they are counted in pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these basic categories with prototypical examples, we can often identify the nature of more abstract concepts metaphorically and assess their countability--facts and ideas (structures/objects) vs. information (substance). We can bounce around ideas (balls) or block the flow of information (water) or let it leak out. We can talk about the greenery in a yard or the culture in a country flourishing (flowering) or decaying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: Is there a systematic categorization (extension) of these ideas with a standard nomenclature that I may reference?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5067" LastEditorUserId="5067" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T00:58:33.333" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T00:58:33.333" Title="Reference for a standard, systematic, conceptual categorization of count and noncount nouns?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8815" CreationDate="2014-08-24T07:21:35.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word, no.   There are more organs involved in speech production than the ones you list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that &quot;the throat&quot; is not a single organ, but a set of organs and cavities.  The ones involved in speech production include the true vocal folds, which are part of the larynx, which lies below the pharynx.  The true folds phonate when they are brought close together and a stream of air from the lungs flows through them to produce all voicing.  The vocal folds also produce glottal consonants, and the pharynx  makes the pharyngeal consonants possible.   The larynx and the pharynx together also form part of the resonating chamber through which speech sounds propagate.  The whole chamber is the vocal tract, which includes every space from the true vocal folds to the lips and nostrils. The shape of the vocal tract can be altered in many ways to produce many sounds thanks, not just to the tongue and velum, but to I forget how many muscles in or for its walls and organs.   Yes, the cheeks are involved in speech production too.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more, our perception of speech sounds as sequences of discrete consecutive sounds grouped into discrete words is an illusion.   It is the result of the brain's ability to decode actual speech, which is a stream of often overlapping sets of acoustic cues with no spaces between them other than the spaces created by blocking airflow entirely, and by stopping to inhale.  Many of the motions for speech sounds, including the onset of voicing, whose timing makes the difference between our perception of voiced and voiceless consonants, occur at speeds most conveniently measured in microseconds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the velum, aka &quot;the soft palate,&quot; from which the uvula hangs, has muscles and is every bit as important to articulation as the lips, tongue, larynx, and pharynx.  It can not only help to produce velar sounds like [k], [g], [x], and others;  it also closes (most of the way) the aperture between the oral and nasal cavities, differentiating oral vs. nasal sounds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't notice the velum because it's farther back in the mouth than the tongue and lips, and kinesthesia gets weaker the farther toward the core of the body you go.   (That's why you can feel where your fingers are, but not where your pancreas is.)   And, as you probably know, the uvula itself can be used to produce consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;em&gt;modeling speech production is not a simple task&lt;/em&gt;.  (Consider, for a moment, all the neurology that I haven't mentioned.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you read up on speech science for more information.  You can always start here at Wikipedia.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_science&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2014-09-04T05:46:51.170" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T05:46:51.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8848" CreationDate="2014-08-24T07:56:38.660" Score="4" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Glottopedia, lexical pitch accent happens when the only indicator of an accent (aka stress) on the syllable is pitch--elevated pitch on the accented syllable.   (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Pitch_accent_%28lexical%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Pitch_accent_%28lexical%29&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, stress in Swedish is apparently encoded as pitch, as we see in the &quot;Stress and Pitch&quot; section of this article on Swedish phonology.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefullwiki.org/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thefullwiki.org/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch&lt;/a&gt;  According to this article, &quot;The phonemicity of this tonal system is demonstrated in the nearly 300 pairs of two-syllable words differentiated only by their use of either grave or acute accent [which indicate tone].&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this to languages in which accent is conveyed not only by elevated pitch, but by increased loudness and duration.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Accent&lt;/a&gt;   English is such a language.   So when we differentiate watching a RE-peat on TV and re-PEAT-ing an action, all three factors can come into play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as most of you know, there are languages, including Swedish, in which vowel length is also phonemic.  Finnish and Swedish (no relation) both have vowels that come in long and short pairs.   In fact, the article on Swedish Phonology mentioned above has some good sound files that illustrate the contrast.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether there are natural languages in which phonemic vowel length and lexical pitch accent are independent of one another, such that the language could have different lexemes with forms like these.  (I'll use a &amp;lt;1&gt; to indicate high tone here.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pa:za1   paza1:   pa1:za   pa1za:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish seems to be such a language, but the article doesn't come right out and say it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T14:31:58.880" Title="Are there languages in which lexical pitch accent and phonemic vowel length vary independently?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8847" CreationDate="2014-08-24T12:00:55.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tokyo Japanese has both lexical pitch accent and phonemic vowel length:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ここ　/koko/ &quot;here&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;個々　/koꜜko/ &quot;individual&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;高校　/kookoo/ &quot;high school&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;孝行　/koꜜokoo/ &quot;filial piety&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and third are unaccented, while the second and fourth have lexical downsteps following the first mora.  The first two have short vowels, while the last two have long vowels (indicated here with a simple doubling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2081" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T12:00:55.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8844" CreationDate="2014-08-24T13:20:40.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source for this is in a book called &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/9659123108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Coming Revolution&lt;/a&gt; by Zamir Cohen. I glanced at the book once and I can't say I recommend it as a scientific publication. (A much fuller review is &lt;a href=&quot;http://rebeljew.blogspot.com/2011/08/coming-revolution-by-zamir-cohen.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you want). One of the differences between books and a peer reviewed journal is that books don't have to be reviewed and approved by other experts in the field - they just have to convince a publisher they'll sell. That means that a book can, for example, only present one side of a scientific debate (even if it's a minority opinion maintained by very few) and still make it to the bookshelf, whereas a peer-reviewed article wouldn't make it past the experts who would notice the imbalance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find an online preview, so I'm afraid that if you want to see the original &quot;source&quot; you may have to buy the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5068" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T13:20:40.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-24T15:42:40.810" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I brush my toddler's teeth, I want good access to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_terminology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lingual&lt;/a&gt; (inside) side of the lower back teeth, to brush them. Thus, I want my kid with parted lips and teeth and with the tongue pulled away from the lower back teeth. When I say &quot;say [a]&quot;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;, that parts the lips and teeth, but the tongue oftentimes remains resting against the lower back teeth. What can I say (&quot;say […]&quot;) to get the desired mouth position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&amp;nbsp;&lt;/sup&gt;I think that's the transcription, anyway. The sound I say is the (central?) one I use in &lt;em&gt;dot-com&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;flop&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Tom&lt;/em&gt; (not the back [ɑ] in &lt;em&gt;calm&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;). Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinyurl.com/qqm8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tinyurl.com/qqm8&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="228" LastEditDate="2014-08-24T17:54:40.653" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T17:54:40.653" Title="Suggestions for brushing the insides of lower back teeth" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2015-03-11T16:36:35.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8850" CreationDate="2014-08-24T16:30:46.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like your toddler is producing a front [a]. You might try getting a back [ɑ] with &quot;say &lt;em&gt;aw&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (the sound in &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;law&lt;/em&gt;, in most US dialects anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T16:30:46.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8847" CreationDate="2014-08-24T16:50:05.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek appears to have been such a language. Although of course we can't know the exact phonetic correlates of accent in a dead language, it's thought to have been a pitch-accent language, and had phonemic vowel quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it's even more complex in that a high pitch could occur on &lt;em&gt;either mora&lt;/em&gt; of a long vowel, so that you get a distinction between V: with all low pitch, V: with high pitch on first mora and low on second, and V: with low pitch on first mora and high on second. Likewise for diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some phonological and morphological constraints on where in the word a high pitch can appear, so there aren't as many strict minimal pairs of the various possible kinds as you might expect, but there are some. Examples, writing a double vowel for a long vowel so that I can show which mora the high tone is on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;óomos 'shoulder' / oomós 'raw'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;phóboon 'of fears' / phobóon 'frightening'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;paídeusai 'educate!' / paidéusai 'to educate' / paideúsai 'he might educate'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eí 'if' / éi 'you are'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T16:50:05.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23351" CreationDate="2014-08-24T21:03:24.940" Score="6" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, we call &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; &quot;double-u&quot;, referring to the original representation of [w], which looked like &lt;code&gt;uu&lt;/code&gt;, or two &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt;s. Then, in French, they pronounce it &quot;double-veh&quot;, presumably because the modern form looks like two &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;s or &quot;veh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: do all languages which utilise the Latin alphabet do a similar thing, giving a name to the letter which refers to either the letters &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;? Or the converse question: is there any language which has a unique name for &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt;, whose etymology is not linked to another letter in any recognisable way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T09:13:09.837" Title="Does any language using the Latin alphabet have a unique name for &quot;w&quot;?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8853" CreationDate="2014-08-24T22:37:52.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Robert said, it is /ve/ in German, and thus also in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T22:37:52.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8844" CreationDate="2014-08-24T22:42:37.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add this: what is usually called Hebrew script was in fact borrowed from Aramaic. The Old Hebrew script, as found in the oldest Hebrew inscriptions, looks more like Samaritan script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-24T22:42:37.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8856" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8859" CreationDate="2014-08-24T22:47:12.553" Score="6" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether anyone knows the Proto-Indo-European equivalent of the Greek suffixes -ina (-ίνα) or -issa (-ισσα), or whether PIE has any different feminising suffixes that work similarly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5072" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T14:49:23.093" Title="Is there a PIE feminising noun suffix?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2014-08-25T00:11:28.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest known form of the North Semitic alphabet is the Ugaritic alphabet. The order of the letters is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ʾa  b   g   ḫ   d   h   w   z   ḥ   ṭ   y   k   š   l   m   ḏ   n   ẓ   s   ʿ   p   ṣ   q   r   ṯ   ġ   t   ʾi  ʾu  s2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the voiced stops b g d and the liquids/nasals l m n are NOT grouped together without a break. There is no perceptible logic to this order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T00:11:28.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8856" CreationDate="2014-08-25T04:04:16.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main PIE feminine derivational suffix was &lt;em&gt;-ih2&lt;/em&gt;: compare *deiu-o- 'god' with *deiu-ih2 'goddess' (Skt. &lt;em&gt;devī&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this suffix is actually the indirect source of the Greek suffix &lt;em&gt;-ssa&lt;/em&gt;: when added to a stem ending in -t or -k, you get e.g. *melit - *melit-ih2, which becomes in Greek *melitya and then &lt;em&gt;melissa&lt;/em&gt; (Attic &lt;em&gt;melitta&lt;/em&gt;). From cases like these the suffix was reinterpreted as being &lt;em&gt;-ssa&lt;/em&gt; and extended to other types of stems (e.g. &lt;em&gt;basilissa&lt;/em&gt; 'queen').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T04:04:16.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8864" CreationDate="2014-08-25T07:06:44.947" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the word spirtuality or spirit derived from?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it's origin based on the Christian idea of the Holy Ghost, or perhaps something earlier, like how the Greeks and Romans believed in spirits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5073" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T10:43:42.463" Title="What is the word &quot;spirituality&quot; derived from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-08-25T19:01:23.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8631" CreationDate="2014-08-25T09:22:46.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After searching a while I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sentiwordnet&lt;/a&gt; which gives for each word a positivity, a negativity and a objectivity rating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T09:22:46.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-25T09:44:30.867" Score="0" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few hunter gatherer languages like Pirahã that basically only have words for the numbers 'one' and 'two'. Sometimes speakers of those languages can say four by saying 'two-two' or maybe six with 'two-two-two'. That however takes effort. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there cases where the English language has similar problems of mapping semantic distinctions that do exist in other languages and that aren't fixed simply by borrowing a few words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there cases where other languages are simply much more efficient to speak about a subject matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-08-26T02:18:13.660" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T17:58:25.443" Title="Where does English need a lot more effort to say the same thing than another language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-26T15:55:38.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8866" CreationDate="2014-08-25T10:38:33.523" Score="1" ViewCount="3041" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the root &quot;ject&quot; mean? It occurs in words such as &quot;subject&quot;, &quot;object&quot;, &quot;project&quot;, &quot;injection&quot;, &quot;surjection&quot;, &quot;bijection&quot;. As far as I know these words came to English from French and, in turn, from Latin. Prefixes &quot;ob-&quot;, &quot;sub-&quot;, &quot;pro-&quot; also came from Latin as Wiktionary says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5074" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-08-25T12:35:32.137" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:35:32.137" Title="Meaning of the root &quot;ject&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8860" CreationDate="2014-08-25T10:43:42.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;a fairly good source to answer questions on English etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=spiritual&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=spiritual&amp;amp;searchmode=none&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T10:43:42.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2014-08-25T10:51:42.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;it is interesting to list the letters in this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;A b c d &#xA;E f g h&#xA;I j k l m n &#xA;O p q r s t&#xA;U v w x y z&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is slightly more ordered than we should expect from pure chance. it does not work as well if we do it in a more early-Roman way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;A b c d&#xA;E f h&#xA;I k l m n&#xA;O p q r s t&#xA;U x&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;just mentioning this here because i believe it may be interesting. if anything, the alphabet has grown a tad more orderly over time through the addition of new letters and their respective placements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T10:51:42.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8863" CreationDate="2014-08-25T11:03:22.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root is Latin &lt;strong&gt;iaciō&lt;/strong&gt; (throw, cast), whose supine is &lt;strong&gt;iactum&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of Latin ablaut (vowel change), prefixes like &lt;em&gt;sub-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ob-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pro-&lt;/em&gt; trigger a vowel change to *-iectum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T11:03:22.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3156" CreationDate="2014-08-25T12:18:27.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it must be noted that words &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt; means different thing that word &lt;em&gt;фрязин&lt;/em&gt; does. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%84%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt; means deviation from traditional iconographical painting while &lt;em&gt;фрязин&lt;/em&gt; is derived from &lt;em&gt;франкин&lt;/em&gt; as it was noticed in the answer of user &quot;Mechanical snail&quot;. Also in wikipedia's article linked there is not word &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;фряг&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derivation of &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;фрязин&lt;/em&gt; can be assumed from &lt;a href=&quot;http://iconography.academic.ru/397/%D1%84%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; where &#xA;it is noticed that &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt; appeared under the influence of artists from Europe. Those artists might be called &lt;em&gt;фряги&lt;/em&gt; so icons made in their style might be called &lt;em&gt;фрязь&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5074" LastEditorUserId="5074" LastEditDate="2014-08-25T12:33:43.643" LastActivityDate="2014-08-25T12:33:43.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8856" CreationDate="2014-08-25T13:12:13.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feminine suffix in PIE is believed to be -i̯ea̯, though the ablaut grade in nominative is not certain. Traditionally reconstructed as -i̯ea̯ (because of long vowels in Latin), but Beekes hypothesizes that the Nominative form was -ia̯, while in other cases it could become -i̯ea̯. A form -a̯/-ea̯ also can be seen in some words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix is believed to originate from the suffix -ia̯ for collective number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some reconstructed PIE words with the suffix include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯oldhia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; a dugout boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eua̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; grandmother &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bhrea̯tria̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; brotherhood &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;colia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; hiding place, dug-out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯rudhia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; rust&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;deiu̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; goddess  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯sntia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; being &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ma̯eghu̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; young woman &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;neptia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; nephew (fem) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pie̯u̯eria̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fat woman &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preu̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lady, mistress&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;potnia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lady&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯eĝhia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; track, road &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most animals had feminine form &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ena̯tia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; duck &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯ele̯nia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; female elk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cu̯nmusia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; dog-fly &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;melitia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; honey-bee &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;plusia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; flea &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; she-wolf &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix could be combined with other suffixes as well, to form constructs like -ikea̯/-ika̯/-ikia̯, -tria̯/-tra̯/-teria̯, -nia̯, -u̯ia̯ etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2014-08-26T14:49:23.093" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T14:49:23.093" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-26T01:56:51.373" Score="0" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a  Malayo-Polynesian language in Bengkulu, Indonesia with about 350,000 speakers called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejang_language_(Sumatra)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rejang, Redjang, or Rejangese&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejang_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;It has its own native Brahmic abugida.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if it also has a Latin orthography which is used to a degree equal to or greater than the native script. It could also be possible that all writing is in the national language, Indonesian, leaving Rejang as mostly a spoken language in modern times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information in Wikipedia and the Internet generally is sparse. Some solid information on whether and to which degree Rejang is written in Latin script would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T01:56:51.373" Title="Does the Rejang language have a Latin orthography in use?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8862" CreationDate="2014-08-26T10:23:47.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that it is built on the assumption that English is somehow the default, a natural language, from which other languages diverge. That is absolutely not the case. English is just as exotic to other languages as other languages are to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &quot;mapping semantic distinctions&quot; is going to bring up all sorts of mismatches for any given pair of languages (even fairly closely related ones). The vast majority of these will concern the lexical labelling of categories. Which means that they cannot be easily resolved by lexical borrowing because they concern conceptualisation. For instance, there's no easy way to map the different ways of saying bread between English and Czech. The English category is more general and it causes troubles for Czech speakers of English because they expect a separate words for their fine grained categories. See this list of Czech words that describe something not easy to express in English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oocities.org/athens/forum/7953/word.html&quot;&gt;http://www.oocities.org/athens/forum/7953/word.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prepositions are also going to be hard to map well. For instance, in English you have to conceptualise tree as a container to say, someone is sitting 'in a tree' whereas a language like Czech says 'on the tree'. So you can see, it's a mutual mapping issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are also many grammatical distinctions in English that will be difficult for speakers of other languages. They might have to do with definiteness (articles) and the complex system of tenses. For instance, there's no easy way to say in Czech (and many other languages) 'I will have been cooking for 2 hours by the time you arrive.' without significant circumlocution. Conversely, Czech's aspectual system makes it easy to distinguished someone was 'shot and killed' and 'shot and not killed' without ever leaving ambiguity, whereas English always has to specify the outcome or leave it ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list is endless. The semantics of all languages maps onto other languages only approximately once you get out of the sterilised world of logical semantics into the world of real language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T10:23:47.613" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8872" CreationDate="2014-08-26T14:58:09.120" Score="1" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that there are 3 parts to the vocal cords: the true vocal cords, and the &quot;false&quot; vestibular folds and ventricular ligament. I read that the vestibular serves some function in chanting and such but was not clear what purpose the ventricular is used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5042" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-08-26T15:15:12.683" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T15:25:05.660" Title="Roles of the vocal cords" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8871" CreationDate="2014-08-26T15:25:05.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may have misunderstood your informational source. The terms &lt;em&gt;vestibular folds&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ventricular folds&lt;/em&gt; respectively refer to the same anatomical structures. They are synonyms. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_fold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on vestibular folds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T15:25:05.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5930" CreationDate="2014-08-26T16:12:53.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Term of address' might be one way of referring to such expressions.&#xA;I believe 'honorific' denotes both the Mr/Mrs type and the sir type. However this may not include less formal terms like bro etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines as jlawler, it seems that the noun 'vocative' can be applied to these kinds of words as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5077" LastActivityDate="2014-08-26T16:12:53.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-27T08:51:24.930" Score="2" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formants&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to produce an acoustic description of vowel quality. Basically, the first formant (F1) corresponds to vowel height, and the second formant (F2) to vowel backness, as shown in the following example for English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/49YsC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: I'm looking for a description of the Polish vowel system that is based on formant measurements (published sources please).&lt;/strong&gt; Despite my best attempts I have been unable to find any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T10:07:59.747" Title="Acoustic description of Polish vowels" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8874" CreationDate="2014-08-27T22:32:52.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America would seem to meet your requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wieslawa Cholewa and Charalampos Karypidis. 2008. 'A multidimensional acoustic analysis of vowels in two Polish dialects' JASA 123: 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article is available from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/123/5/10.1121/1.2932842&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JASA website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2014-08-27T22:32:52.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8879" CreationDate="2014-08-27T23:27:07.513" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a student who knows English, and whose mother tongue is Russian. I started studying English around 15 years ago and never put any effort into it. I just grew organically and managed to get to academic IELTS 7.5 4 years ago. Since that time my skills have only improved. But now I need to study 1 more language - Finnish, which seems to be a total nightmare (in comparison to English - but its only my personal feeling about it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have started noticing that when I learn Finnish too much on one day, I start forgetting English words. If I switch to English, I do cope well, but sometimes words just slip away from my mind. On the other hand, Finnish words in my mind mingle with the words from Russian and English. And now the questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is it possible to forget a language if one already has proficiency in it at around level B2-C1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) How many languages is it possible to learn and maintain at level B2-C1, because in the long term I would also like to learn German and Japanese (probably next 10 years), and I do not want to forget other languages I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Are there any special exercises or activities employed by multilingual people to maintain their skills at decent level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) How much time a week is required to support 1 language which is already at the level mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) How many languages an average person can maintain at level B2-C1 simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Sorry if the question is too broad. It is just my curiosity. But I suppose that this place is the right place to ask it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5081" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T19:59:22.720" Title="How to cope with many languages at the same time" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-09-02T15:31:12.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-28T01:21:11.657" Score="1" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been looking at how nouns behave with determiners and plurals and such. So things like mass, count, and collective nouns. One oddball that I have found is &quot;weather&quot;, and I am wondering if there are other words like it in English. I am thinking specifically of the general sense of weather, whether(*ahem*) it is sunny or cloudy or fire and brimstone is pouring down out of a tornado. As opposed the sense of weather meaning rain or wind or anything marked, like &quot;There's going to be some weather on the weekend&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have come up with a list of test sentences and I wonder if anybody can think of other words that can substitute for weather in all of them and still be valid or invalid as the case may be. Abstract words like &quot;music&quot; almost work, but &quot;weather&quot; seems to require some amount of specificity unlike &quot;music&quot;. For example #3 would be valid if &quot;music&quot; was used. And so would #5 if you said &quot;Listen to music!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a unique word? Also, am I still mixing up different senses of the word here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The weather is terrible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This weather is terrible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Weather is terrible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look at the weather!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Look at weather!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*This planet has many weathers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*This planet has much weather. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It looks like the weather will be good today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's great to have some nice weather for a change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Interesting weather is on the way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Weather is on the way. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that it is enough to specify &quot;weather&quot; with just an adjective or &lt;em&gt;some + ADJ&lt;/em&gt;. This seems like a unique property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;I believe the uniqueness of &quot;weather&quot; can be demonstrated in just these three sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*This is weather.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*These are weathers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is nice weather.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Weather&quot; can not stand on its own as a singular or a plural, but with an adjective it can. In fact the the first two sentences are sufficient. I can't think of any other noun that can't stand on its own in a NP as either singular or plural. I think that when an adjective modifies &quot;weather&quot; it takes on a different sense, the same sense as &quot;There's going to be some weather on the weekend&quot;. Even if it is just mild weather or nice weather it is still something that can come and go as opposed to THE weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="2373" LastEditDate="2014-08-28T19:33:20.853" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T19:33:20.853" Title="Are there other words that behave like &quot;weather&quot; in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2014-08-28T05:44:18.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given your examples, I'd recommend that you don't think of the case as GENITIVE at all but only a LOCATIVE with a metaphorical extension of property and possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a very good precedent with languages like Russian which expresses possession as location: SHE HAS A BOOK = A BOOK IS BY HER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of semantic extension is very common with cases. Plus, there's some (not implausible) argument that genitive should not be considered a case because it does not denote syntactic relationships at the clause level (but that's a discussion for another thread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T05:44:18.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8876" CreationDate="2014-08-28T06:00:55.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) It is possible to lose proficiency in any language if not used. This may take many forms from total loss to reduced vocabulary or just decreased fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &amp;amp; 5) There's no hard limit to the number of languages one can acquire. For example, many historians will learn 4 or 5 languages at quite high level to be able to read sources. For conversation, the limit is set more by opportunities and need to use the language. Learning and maintaining a language is a fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming but there doesn't seem to be a limit in terms of brain or memory limitations. Your goal of English, Finish and German is not all that extreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) There are many strategies polyglots use. I'd recommend watching interviews with polyglots on YouTube. Like this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CBlMYYf8Uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CBlMYYf8Uk&lt;/a&gt;. Many of these were collected in the book 'Babel no More' (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.babelnomore.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.babelnomore.com&lt;/a&gt;). You can also read the Benny Lewis' blog entries on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog&lt;/a&gt;. Using his methods is a plausible way to achieve proficiency but requires high commitment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) There's no set time. Once you achieve that level of proficiency, you don't need to maintain the languages so hard. Just make sure you read, listen, write and speak in each language once in a while. However, you will have to work very hard to get to that level. Still, you will have to discover how much time works for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-08-28T19:59:22.720" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T19:59:22.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2014-08-28T10:19:56.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I want to mention that it is pretty possible to think in another language(not your mother tongue) spontaneously. I claim that because I experienced that. I used to think (automatically) in German , dream (of course automatically) in german (in my dream i used to talk even to my family and my relatives in German) and my mother tongue got somehow awkward so that it was difficult for me to use correct grammatical structures and appropriate words. I even wasn't so efficient at German and I was in the middle of B1 level  when I used to dream in German.(I learnd German from the beginning in Berlin.) &#xA;I think mother - tongue is a clear phrase and it means the language you have learnt growing up in an environment during the very first years of your life. However, I believe in another term - &quot;first language&quot;. I hold an opinion claiming that you are able to have several passive first languages. One of your first languages can become active based on your situation.&#xA;I think when you &quot;own&quot; a language, it is one of your first languages. I mean having an intuition in the language by &quot;owning&quot; the language. It depends on the manner of learning. Besides, as my experience proofs it has nothing to do with your level in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P. S. To complete the evidences, I got my mother tongue back arround one month after going back to my homeland and after several months studying English in my homeland when I went to Germany again, in a couple of days I was again more comfortable with German and some of the conditions changed to the same as before going to my homeland (and this time my level in German was much lower!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5083" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T10:19:56.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8903" CreationDate="2014-08-28T13:06:58.177" Score="6" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking on the web, wikipedia for example, at the concept of&#xA;constituent, it is associated with the concept of phrase structure,&#xA;and rather quickly with context-free languages (as the paradigmatic&#xA;example), or more generally Linear Context Free Rewriting System&#xA;(LFRS), which have standard, well analyzed formal definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the concept of dependency, things seem to fall more on&#xA;the linguistic theory side, with much less mathematical formalization.&#xA;My question is whether there are accepted reference versions of&#xA;dependency grammars that are well defined and analyzed from a&#xA;mathematical point of view. Is there a specific dependency formalism&#xA;that could play for dependency the paradigmatic role played by CF&#xA;grammars for constituency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking for example at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for Dependency Grammars&lt;/a&gt;, there is no such formalisation that is suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T20:04:24.800" Title="Is there a paradigmatic formalism for dependency grammars?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8884" CreationDate="2014-08-28T13:45:54.923" Score="6" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish, the glove compartment of a car is called &quot;torpido gözü&quot;, the literal translation of which is &quot;torpedo compartment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the dictionaries I have access to has an etymology for the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I scanned the words for glove compartment in quite a few languages and apparently the Romanian word is &quot;torpedou&quot;. Romania and Turkey are not immediate neighbors and other neighboring countries don't seem to use this word. But I can't rule out local or slang words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be quite a few car models in the past named &quot;Torpedo&quot; and there may be a connection but I couldn't come up with a specific explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the etymology for this usage or at least does anyone have a hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there any other languages that use the word &quot;torpedo&quot; for glove compartment (slang or local words are welcome too)? Maybe it can shed some light on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T20:03:43.267" Title="&quot;Torpedo compartment&quot; for glove compartment?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2701" CreationDate="2014-08-28T18:03:09.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Geoffrey Lewis's book &lt;a href=&quot;http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199256693.do&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent resource about the Turkish language reform which aimed to &quot;purify&quot; the Turkish language by replacing borrowings from Arabic (and, to a lesser extent, from other languages) with supposed &quot;pure Turkish&quot; words. As the title says, it did succeed to a great extent, but not without consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a linguistic book per se, but it provides valuable background and historical perspective on the attitude of different groups of people towards Arabic borrowings in Turkish and their replacements. One can build a very good understanding of the sociolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, I just want to add that as a native Turkish speaker and a linguistics enthusiast, it's one of my favorite books of all time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T18:03:09.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8882" CreationDate="2014-08-28T20:03:43.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Torpedo* in the meaning of &lt;em&gt;dashboard / front panel&lt;/em&gt; in a car also exists in Ukrainian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, the etymology seems to be quite complicated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;torpedo&lt;/em&gt; — &quot;electric ray&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;19th century — sea mine;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1870's — self-propelled sea mine;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1900's — cigar-shaped racing car;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later, the meaning has changed towards &quot;hood&quot;, and further to &quot;dashboard/front panel&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; OED has the following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=torpedo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of &lt;em&gt;torpedo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1520s, &quot;electric ray&quot; (flat fish that produces an electric charge to stun prey or for defense), from Latin torpedo &quot;electric ray,&quot; originally &quot;numbness, sluggishness&quot; (the fish so called from the effect of being jolted by the ray's electric discharges), from torpere &quot;be numb&quot; (see torpor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; When sea mines have been invented, they received name of &lt;em&gt;torpedo&lt;/em&gt; because of their ability to strike anything that touches it. The same OED says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sense of &quot;explosive device used to blow up enemy ships&quot; is first recorded 1776, as a floating mine; the self-propelled version is from c.1900.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; Subsequently, this term moved towards &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo#Invention_of_the_modern_torpedo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-propelled sea mines&lt;/a&gt; that have been invented in 1870's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; Before 20th century, cars looked rather like horse carts. With the progress of automobile technology and car racing, the designers equipped their cars with cigar-shaped bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HJo22.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Old racing car&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Image courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;http://oboi.ws/wallpaper-5794/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;oboi.ws&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/riker-torpedo-racer-sets-the-world-speed-record-for-electric-cars&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; illustrates usage of the term (note, a proper name yet):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nov 16, 1901: Riker Torpedo Racer sets the world speed record for electric cars.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On November 16, 1901, a spare, low-slung car called the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Torpedo Racer&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;—basically a square platform on bicycle wheels—breaks the world speed record for electric cars in Coney Island, New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the front panel of the depicted car makes a line with the hood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.&lt;/strong&gt; Subsequently, when the wheels became covered inside the body, the front part of the car did not look like a &lt;em&gt;torpedo&lt;/em&gt; anymore, so the term has changed its meaning, and now we know it as a synonym of &quot;dashboard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-08-28T20:03:43.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-08-29T02:28:15.100" Score="7" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make a dictionary on the web where people can automatically look up words in a text they're reading online. While I have the words and their definitions, the problem is that many times the word in the text won't be in it's root form - for example the word in the text may be המלכה (the queen) instead of מלכה (queen), where the latter is in the dictionary but the former is not. For nouns it doesn't seem too hard to drop the suffixes indicating plurals and/or the set of possible prefixes, but for verbs this seems like a tough job. Has any work been done on algorithms that can be applied to a word in Hebrew or Aramaic to obtain the root? Note that I'm asking for Hebrew and Aramaic because I believe that the languages are similar enough that what works for one should work for the other. Even if they do necessitate different languages, I will eventually want to do both, so info on either is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5068" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T12:07:25.763" Title="Finding the root of an Aramaic or Hebrew word" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8887" CreationDate="2014-08-29T08:24:46.097" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider possessive determiners when the owner is a third person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages, the determiner depends on the natural gender of the speaker (English: he-she-it) or, in languages with grammatical gender, on the grammatical gender of the owner (German: sein-ihr, Russian: его́  - её).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently read a book about Italian, which only has one possessive determiner stem (suo). The book explained that the possessive determiners in Italian were not inflected for the gender of the possessor, but for the possessed, &lt;em&gt;in contrast to German&lt;/em&gt;. I considered that statement nonsense, because possessive determiners in German are inflected for the possessed, whereas the stem is determined by the possessor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the adequate name for the dependency of the possessive determiner on the possessor? In particular, possessors in 1st and 2nd person usually fall out of the gender pattern, but in languages with many genders/noun classes, is this dependency a gender-related concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T13:48:45.110" Title="Possessive determiner depending on grammatical gender of owner" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8886" CreationDate="2014-08-29T12:26:59.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you are looking for is &lt;strong&gt;Agreement&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0118.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition of Agreement&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Agreement&lt;/strong&gt; is a phenomenon in natural language in which the form of one word or morpheme covaries with the form of another word or phrase in the sentence. [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Agreement is perhaps the quintessential morphosyntactic phenomenon, since it involves the morphological expression of a relation that most researchers take to be a syntactic one [...]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possessive#From_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia:Possessive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In some languages, possessive determiners &lt;strong&gt;are subject to agreement&lt;/strong&gt; with the noun they modify [...], in terms of relevant categories of gender, number and case.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since personal pronouns may also agree in number and gender with their own antecedent or referent, the possessive forms may consequently &lt;strong&gt;show agreement with either the &quot;possessor&quot; or the &quot;possessed&quot;, or both&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia:Agreement&lt;/a&gt; also refers a synonym: &lt;em&gt;Concord&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Since you mentioned Russian, most Slavic languages have a rather complex possessive determiner agreement, depending on grammatic Person being used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1st and 2nd Person agree with the &quot;possessed&quot; (by number and grammatical gender):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;дом [dom] (house, masc.): мой [moj] (my) дом, наш [nash] (our) дом, твой [tvoj] (your/sg.) дом, ваш [vash] (your/pl.) дом;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;книга [kniga] (book, fem.): мо&lt;b&gt;я&lt;/b&gt; [maj&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;] (my) книга, наш&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; [nash&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;] (our) книга, тво&lt;b&gt;я&lt;/b&gt; [tvaj&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;] (your/sg.) книга, ваш&lt;b&gt;а&lt;/b&gt; [vash&lt;b&gt;a&lt;/b&gt;] (your/pl.) книга&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;место [m&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;esto] (place, neut.): мо&lt;b&gt;ё&lt;/b&gt; [maj&lt;b&gt;o&lt;/b&gt;] (my) место, наше [nash&lt;b&gt;e&lt;/b&gt;] (our) место, тво&lt;b&gt;ё&lt;/b&gt; [tvaj&lt;b&gt;o&lt;/b&gt;] (your/sg.) место, ваш&lt;b&gt;е&lt;/b&gt; [vash&lt;b&gt;е&lt;/b&gt;] (your/pl.) место&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3rd Person agree with the &quot;possessor&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;он [on] (he); оно [ano] (it) — note the pronoun is the same:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;дом [dom] (house, masc.): е&lt;b&gt;го&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;vo&lt;/b&gt;] дом&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;книга [kniga] (book, fem.): е&lt;b&gt;го&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;vo&lt;/b&gt;] книга&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;место [m&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;esto] (place, neut.): е&lt;b&gt;го&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;vo&lt;/b&gt;] место&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;она [ana] (she) — again, the pronoun is the same:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;дом [dom] (house, masc.): е&lt;b&gt;ё&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;jo&lt;/b&gt;] дом&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;книга [kniga] (book, fem.): е&lt;b&gt;ё&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;jo&lt;/b&gt;] книга&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;место [m&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;esto] (place, neut.): е&lt;b&gt;ё&lt;/b&gt; [je&lt;b&gt;jo&lt;/b&gt;] место&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: table above is for Nominative case, and I only used singular &lt;em&gt;possessed&lt;/em&gt; object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2014-08-29T13:48:45.110" LastActivityDate="2014-08-29T13:48:45.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8900" CreationDate="2014-08-29T21:17:38.170" Score="1" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that in a head-final language like Turkic ones In complement clauses embedded clause is a TP, the verb occupies T position and the subject Spec-TP. Let's also assume that we have an evidence that over the complement clause there is an NP and Dp. For certain reasons the subject moves from spec-TP to Spec-DP( for Gen case). Is it possible that verb also moves from T to N or D for specific reasons or is it absurd to think that verbal element moves to nominal head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1469" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T13:12:32.277" Title="Head to head movement" Tags="&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2014-08-31T08:18:23.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formalizations of dependency theory exist. In fact I have a colleague who specializes in mathematical formalizations of principles of syntax, and he is more a DG guy (dependency grammar) than a PSG guy (phrase structure grammar). But he and I disagree about the value of the formalizations that he employs. I do not understand his formalizations and see little value in them, and he probably thinks I am of inferior intellect because I do not understand his formalisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question uses a couple of terms that I am not sure about. For instance, what exactly is meant by &quot;paradigmatic formalism&quot;? If what is meant is the context free rewrite rules of early Chomskyan syntax, they can easily be reworked in terms of dependency. See the question and my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6914/how-does-a-dependency-grammar-generate-strings/6917#6917&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in this regard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the constituent unit, the question is correct that it is associated more with constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars) than with dependency grammars. However, if one defines the constituent over tree structures as done in many syntax textbooks (of phrase structure grammars), then the constituent unit is valid for both dependency-based and constituency-based structures. On both approaches, a constituent is a complete subtree. The main difference in this regard is that dependency-based structures acknowledge many fewer constituents than phrase structure grammars. This point is discussed and debated at length &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constituent_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (in an entertaining and heated fashion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few basic facts about the status of dependency grammar can be helpful at this juncture. Dependency-based theories of syntax have been on the periphery of the mainstream for about 50 years. The dominance of constituency (as associated with the Chomskyan tradition) is undeniable. However, in the past 15 years or so, dependency is gaining ground, especially among computational linguists. Dependency-based structures are really simple and transparent compared to constituency-based structures, hence they seem to be more appropriate for the goals pursued by computational linguists, who are less motivated by the theoretical stringency of the syntactic models they assume. My personal view is that the simplicity and transparency of dependency structures also translates to a more solid and emperically verifiable theory of natural language syntax in general, and I enjoy debating the point with anyone who wants to have a go at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in sum, the impression expressed in the question that dependency seems to be less formalized from a mathematical point of view is not something that DG people like me worry about. In fact I'm comfortable with this state of affairs, since I view many of the formalizations as a diversion, a sort of smoke screen. In fact my suspicion is that heavy mathematical formalizations applied to syntactic structures is a way a masking the fact that one does not really have anything insightful to say about the linguistic phenomena one claims to be investigating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T08:24:43.780" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8892" CreationDate="2014-08-31T08:42:26.567" Score="5" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;A colleague of mine owns a ring and asked me what language this character is from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Azrtl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak Japanese so I could pretty much rule out that and Chinese (her first guess). It's not Korean nor Thai either; to me it seems like Sanskrit. Yet I cannot find the character online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please identify this character for me? Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5091" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-02T07:51:59.567" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T07:53:18.657" Title="What language is this character from?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;writing&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2014-08-31T10:15:21.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're seeing is more of an illusion of history. Both constituency and dependency analysis have their origins in theories of syntax. It is an accident of history that the most famous algorithmic formalisation of syntactic analysis is based on constituent analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both produce trees and can therefore be subjected to tree analysis and graph theory. Both dependency and constituent-based grammars can be generative and non-generative and therefore will be concerned with different aspects of the formalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-08-31T10:15:21.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8890" CreationDate="2014-08-31T12:25:04.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the sacred syllable “om” in a rather stylised Devanagari script. In plain unicode text: आँ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-02T07:53:18.657" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T07:53:18.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8895" CreationDate="2014-09-01T06:27:32.223" Score="14" ViewCount="4674" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know in Chinese, the days in a week from Monday to Sunday are called 星期一, 星期二, ..., 星期六, 星期日, which are verbatim translated as weekday one (or 1st weekday), weekday two (or 2nd weekday), ..., weekday six (or 6th weekday), however, not weekday seven (or 7th weekday) but weekday sun. Similarly, the twelve months from January to December are called 一月, ..., 十二月, which are 1st month, ..., 12th month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder is there any other language naming the days and months by number like Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5094" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-09-04T10:30:13.557" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T07:51:21.547" Title="What languages use numbers to name the week days and months?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="14" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T06:49:00.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese uses ordinal numbers to number five of the seven days of the week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feira&lt;/em&gt; coincides with the term for fair, not the fair of fairy tales, but the fair that is an open-air market. But this is a distortion of the &lt;em&gt;féria&lt;/em&gt; word, which means &lt;em&gt;holiday&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English name — Portuguese name — Portuguese name using ordinal digits — Literal English meaning — Ecclesiastical Latin name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sunday — Domingo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monday — Segunda-feira — 2ª feira — second-fair — feria secunda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thursday — Terça-feira — 3ª feira — third-fair — feria tertia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wednesday — Quarta-feira — 4ª feira — fourth-fair — feria quarta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tuesday — Quinta-feira — 5ª feira — fifth-fair — feria quinta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Friday — Sexta-feira — 6ª feira — sixth-fair — feria sexta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saturday — Sábado&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;em&gt;terça&lt;/em&gt; is a shorthand used only in this context for &lt;em&gt;terceira&lt;/em&gt;, the feminine for &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were not the names of the days in Old Portuguese, as Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Page on days of week&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Saint Martin of Dumio (c. 520–580), archbishop of Braga, decided not&#xA;  to call days by pagan gods and to use ecclesiastic terminology to&#xA;  designate them. This may be the origin of the present Portuguese&#xA;  numbered system. Martin also tried to replace the names of the&#xA;  planets, but was not successful. In the Middle Ages,&#xA;  Galician-Portuguese retained both systems. The Roman gods' names are&#xA;  still used in Galician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean and Japanese has inherited the method of numbering months from Chinese, but use a different enumeration for days of the week: 日月火水木金土.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="5146" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T16:07:54.773" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T16:07:54.773" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T08:54:02.057" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The seven-day week is first attested in about the first century BC, in two different forms: the planetary week (where each day is associated with one of the seven visible planets) and the numbered week (where most of the days have the names of numbers, beginning with 1 = Sunday). The planetary week is first attested in Rome, while the numbered week appears to be a Jewish invention, later adopted by Christians. Some modern languages (like English) use a form of the planetary names, others a form of the numbered week (e.g. Portuguese, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian etc.). The Chinese names for the days of the week are a modern innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the numbering of the twelve months of the lunar calendar is an ancient Chinese tradition, continued by the present-day use of numbers for the Gregorian months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-09-01T09:58:02.117" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T09:58:02.117" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T10:13:59.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek is using numbering as well for 4 out of 7 days. Those are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monday (δευτέρα / 2nd)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tuesday (τρίτη / 3rd)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wednesday (τετάρτη / 4th)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thursday (πέμπτη / 5th)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no numbering for months. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T10:13:59.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T11:57:34.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Czech names for &quot;Thursday&quot; and &quot;Friday&quot; are &quot;Čtvrtek&quot; and &quot;Pátek,&quot; based on the words fourth (&quot;čtvrtý&quot;) and fifth (&quot;pátý&quot;). The name for &quot;Tuesday&quot; is &quot;Úterý,&quot; which I believe is based on the Russian for second, &quot;второ́й&quot; (not certain on this one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for months, Latin should qualify, with names like September, October, November and December (based on 7, 8, 9 and 10 in a year starting with March).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5096" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T11:57:34.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T12:46:30.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swahili uses numbering for Saturday (&lt;em&gt;Jumamosi&lt;/em&gt;, weekday one) through Wednesday (&lt;em&gt;Jumatano&lt;/em&gt;, weekday five). The word &quot;juma&quot; by itself means week. Its names for Thursday (&lt;em&gt;Alhamisi&lt;/em&gt;) and Friday (&lt;em&gt;Ijumaa&lt;/em&gt;) are derived from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5097" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T12:46:30.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-01T12:49:55.480" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be more explicit, I think about a collection of &quot;abstract&quot; sentences which could be categorized in such a way that they would be easily identified in any language. For example, some typical phrases classified in question/location/movement-from/present would be: &lt;em&gt;Where are you from?&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;D'où viens-tu ?&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Woher kommst du ?&lt;/em&gt; ; ... and others in assertion/time-period/past could be: &lt;em&gt;It was during the 1970s.&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;C'était dans les années 70.&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Es war während der 1970er.&lt;/em&gt; The result would be a set of elementary sentences that could be learn by language learners to memorize key words or usual phrase structures in a foreign language or that could be a tool for interested people to compare how different languages express the same idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I am not a professional linguist or anything related to this, so I hope the vocabulary/examples I used is not somewhat confusing for you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T12:49:55.480" Title="Is there a data set of elementary typical phrases translated in different languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8888" CreationDate="2014-09-01T13:12:32.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to presuppose the framework of minimalist syntax as it has been practiced in the last 20 years, so my answer is in this framework as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this framework, categories like N, D and T are not primitive but should rather be considered as convenient placeholders for common configurations of syntactic features. Now a tension inevitably appears: either you &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; T (and the rest) by such a specific configuration, or you choose to call T the syntactic object that actually occurs in your language of study closest to the usual configuration. Under the first choice, then the answer of your question depends on your definition of N and T, but usual choices will preclude the movement you imagine (N is not supposed to be able to probe, and even if were, it is unclear to me what it could possibly probe in T). If you go the second route, then it all depends on your choice of language and like curiousdannii, I'd be interested in specific examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, based on the few hints that you provide, I imagine that you are interested in genitive subjects in relative clause in Turkic languages. I base my answer on the case of Turkish, which is the only situation I understand (even to a limited extent). In that case, you can notice that the verb exhibits a nominalizing suffix before the agreement morpheme, so that the most straightforward explanation is head movement of V to a defective T (pseudo-nominalization) followed by movement of the subject to spec TP followed by an Agree operation with a nominal C for purpose of genitive Case assignment. This last Agree operation is typically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accompanied by movement as far as I can tell. This accounts is theoretically very different from the head movement you suggest but I will note that pseudo-nominalization followed by raising of the subject and Agree with a nominal C looks superficially very much like head movement of T to N, so perhaps this is indeed what you had in mind. If this is indeed what you had in mind, the way to tease out the two accounts is adverb placements: if T moves, then the subject should be able to surface to the right of T-adverbs; if the subject moves then agrees, it should be to the left of T-adverbs. Again, an example could help (and the works of Kornfilt seem to be a good reference). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T13:12:32.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T15:02:33.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latvian language names weekdays as Monday - 'first-day' (pirmdiena), Tuesday - 'second-day' (otrdiena) etc except for Sunday which is named svētdiena, literally 'holy-day'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages also have some (not all) weekday names derived from numbers - for example, in Russian Tuesday / Вторник is derived from второй (second), Thursday / четверг from четыре (four); according to wikipedia it occurs in other slavic languages as well - Slovak, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also the gap between this pattern and some other languages (like the Portuguese example) that would start numbering from the Sunday instead - the start of the week is not an arbitrary choice if weekday names literally refer to their numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3285" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T15:02:33.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8913" CreationDate="2014-09-01T19:12:49.763" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether anyone has carried out an analysis of the Kanji (or Hanzi), the traditional Chinese characters used in Japanese and some dialects of Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I wonder whether anyone has put in the effort to annotate the various typographical and semantic links between elements of the lexicon. For example, a 'typographical' link would involve e.g. some shared radicals in the ideogram; a 'semantic' link would e.g. link a 'composite element' (that is, one composed of several ideograms) to each of its constituent ideograms, which would themselves already be considered elements of the lexicon even if they never appear alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I am looking for a WordNet-like construction that places the 'typographical' level at the forefront of the investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2194" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T17:24:43.043" Title="Systematic analysis of the Japanese lexicon (specifically, Kanji)" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2014-09-01T20:04:24.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some remarks are necessary before answering such a question. CFGs have been an important step in the history of formal grammars, but it is not exactly the example we want to follow in DG and in natural language modelling in general. CFGs are string rewriting systems, that is, grammars that generate sets of strings of words. But to speak English is not to be able to generate all the acceptable strings of words in English. To speak English is to be able to &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; English sentences, that is, to associate a meaning to appropriate strings of words. Or conversely, to express every meaning we want to express, that is to associate a string of words to a meaning (excluding phonology, prodosy and so on). (This point was already stated by Tesnière 1959, ch. 6, §4: &quot;speaking a language involves transforming structural order to linear order, and conversely, understanding a language involves transforming linear order to structural order.&quot;)&#xA;CFGs have been successful because the derivation of a string can be interpreted as a constituency tree. But the CFG itself does not really generates the constituency tree. This problem was solved with the tree grammars, and the most famous of them, TAG (Joshi et al. 1975). Such grammars are interesting because they simultaneously generate a string of words and a tree structure. This is a good step in the direction we want to follow to model natural languages and define formal DGs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we can answer the question. We can propose grammars generating strings whose derivations can be interpreted as dependency trees. It is even possible with CFGs (see the strong equivalence between Hays' grammars and &quot;lexicalized&quot; CFGs in gaifman 1965). But it is not really what we want. It is simpler and more useful to define grammars that directly generates linearly ordered dependency trees (which is more or less equivalent to transductive grammars associating strings (= linear order) to dependency trees). A very simple way to generate a linearly ordered dependency tree is to generate it by pieces, like TAG with constituency trees. The simplest DG we can imagine as only to kind of rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;lexical rule generating nodes, for instance (Mary, N), (Peter, N), (loves, V) …&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dependency rules generating dependecies, for instance (V, N, subj, &amp;lt;), (V, N, obj, &gt;) …&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule (Mary, N) says that &quot;Mary&quot; is a noun (N).&#xA;The rule (V, N, subj, &amp;lt;) says that between a V and N we can generate a subject dependency where the dependent (N) is before (&amp;lt;) the governor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a grammar generates &quot;Mary loves Peter&quot; and its dependency tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the details and the generative as well as the transductive interpretation of such a grammar, see my paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kahane.fr/component/docman/doc_download/94-transductive-mexico2001.html?Itemid=126&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;KAHANE Sylvain, 2001, What is a natural language and how to describe it? Meaning-Text approaches in contrast with generative approaches, Invited talk, Computational Linguistics, Proc. CICLing, Mexico, Springer Verlag, 1-17.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous grammar is very simple. It only works if we suppose that the dependency tree is projective. To generate non projective depednency trees we need a more complicated formalism, such as topological grammars (GERDES Kim &amp;amp; KAHANE Sylvain, 2001, Word order in German: A formal dependency grammar using a topological hierarchy, ACL, Toulouse)&#xA;The previous grammar cannot control the subcategorization. To do that we can extend the locality domain of the rules and to have rules corresponding to bigger pieces of the tree than just one node or one dependency (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kahane.fr/component/docman/doc_download/71-pug-acl2006.html?Itemid=126&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kahane S. (2006) Polarized Unification Grammars, Coling-ACL, Sydney&lt;/a&gt;). Note that this last formalism, PUG, is a &quot;paradigmatic&quot; formalism which allows to define a wide paradigm of grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5103" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T20:04:24.800" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T20:38:14.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Korean, the months are referred as numbers followed by the word 월 to indicate month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;January     일월 (Month 1, or 1'st month)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;February    이월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;March       삼월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April       사월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May         오월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;June        유월 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;July        칠월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August      팔월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;September   구월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;October     시월 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November    십일월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;December    십이월&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5104" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T20:38:14.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-01T21:14:46.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean and Japanese both number the months exactly the same way as in Chinese.  However, both Korean and Japanese have their own set of names for the days of the week, based on the Chinese characters 日、月、火、水、木、金、土 for sunday through saturday, respectively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5105" LastActivityDate="2014-09-01T21:14:46.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-02T01:20:11.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard Basque has a sort of ordering system for the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday: &lt;em&gt;astelehena&lt;/em&gt; (week+first), &lt;em&gt;asteartea&lt;/em&gt; (week+middle), &lt;em&gt;asteazkena&lt;/em&gt; (week+last).  The etymology of the standard names for the other weekdays is not transparent.  One of several plausible etymologies for &lt;em&gt;osteguna&lt;/em&gt; (Thursday) is &lt;em&gt;bost&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;eguna&lt;/em&gt; = five+day.  This implies a different numbering system (beginning with Sunday) than what is used for M-W.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T01:20:11.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-02T03:54:26.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt; uses numbers for both months and weekdays&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;January:  Tháng 1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  February: Tháng 2&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  December: Tháng 12&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For weekdays&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Monday    → Thứ hai  (2nd day of week)&#xA;Tuesday   → Thứ ba   (3rd day of week)&#xA;Wednesday → Thứ tư   (4th day of week)&#xA;Thursday  → Thứ năm  (5th day of week)&#xA;Friday    → Thứ sáu  (6th day of week)&#xA;Saturday  → Thứ bảy  (7th day of week)&#xA;Sunday    → Chủ Nhật (Lord's day)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, albeit the name, it should be noted that in Vietnam Monday is the start of week, and there is a song about that which everyone should learn from kindergarten, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was said that this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cjvlang.com/Dow/dowviet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;possibly originated from Portuguese&lt;/a&gt; when the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries came to Vietnam and created an alphabet based on Latin characters for Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples are the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cjvlang.com/Dow/dowmon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mongolian&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Buryat languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which use 2 systems for day of week names, one based on the planets and one based on ordinal numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Mongolia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Cyrillic           Transliteration     Rough meaning&#xA;Sunday      бүтэн сайн өдөр    büteŋ saiŋ ödör     'full good day' (='full holiday')&#xA;Monday      нэгдэх өдөр neg    dekh ödör           'first day'&#xA;Tuesday     хоёрдахь өдөр      khoyor dakh' ödör   'second day'&#xA;Wednesday   гуравдахь өдөр     gurav dakh' ödör    'third day'&#xA;Thursday    дөрөвдэх өдөр      döröv dekh ödör     'fourth day'&#xA;Friday      тавдахь өдөр       tav dakh' ödör      'fifth day'&#xA;Saturday    хагас сайн өдөр    khagas saiŋ ödör    'half good day' (='half holiday')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In inner Mongolia they use slightly modified names based on Chinese names&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;           Cyrillic                    Transliteration            Rough meaning &#xA;Sunday     гарагийн өдөр               garagiŋ ödör               'week day' &#xA;Monday     гарагийн нэгдэх өдөр        garagiŋ neg dekh ödör      'first day of the week' &#xA;Tuesday    гарагийн хоёрдахь өдөр      garagiŋ khoyor dakh' ödör  'second day of the week' &#xA;Wednesday  гарагийн гуравдахь өдөр     garagiŋ gurav dakh' ödör   'third day of the week' &#xA;Thursday   гарагийн дөрөвдэх өдөр      garagiŋ döröv dekh ödör    'fourth day of the week' &#xA;Friday     гарагийн тавдахь өдөр       garagiŋ tav dakh' ödör     'fifth day of the week' &#xA;Saturday   гарагийн зургаадахь өдөр    garagiŋ zurgaa dakh' ödör  'sixth day of the week'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Buryat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Cyrillic        Transliteration Rough meaning &#xA;Sunday      гарагай нэгэн   garagaj nägän   'one of the week'&#xA;Monday      гарагай хоёр    garagaj ȟojor   'two of the week' &#xA;Tuesday     гарагай гурбан  garagaj gurban  'three of the week' &#xA;Wednesday   гарагай дүрбэн  garagaj dürbän  'four of the week' &#xA;Thursday    гарагай табан   garagaj taban   'five of the week' &#xA;Friday      гарагай зургаан garagaj zurgaan 'six of the week' &#xA;Saturday    гарагай долоон  garagaj doloon  'seven of the week' &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please find the traditional Mongolian texts as well as more information in the link since it's hard to paste the vertical texts here without breaking the layout&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also read about the names of week in different languages here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cjvlang.com/Dow/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Days of the Week in the West, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Mongolian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2015-10-02T07:51:21.547" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T07:51:21.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-02T11:00:48.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In colloquial Croatian, months are just called &lt;em&gt;prvi mjesec&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;the first month&quot;), &lt;em&gt;drugi mjesec&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;the second month&quot;) and so on; they do have their proper names (&lt;em&gt;siječanj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;veljača&lt;/em&gt;...) but the proper names are more formal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5112" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T11:00:48.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3091" CreationDate="2014-09-02T11:23:51.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I can help you. Parallels exists in modern Slovenian and Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Slovenian, you would use dual with any two objects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matjaž in Janez &lt;em&gt;sta&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;bila&lt;/em&gt;... (dual of verb) &amp;quot;Matjaž and Janez were&amp;quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dva človeka &lt;em&gt;sta&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;bila&lt;/em&gt; (dual of verb) &amp;quot;Two men were&amp;quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, I suppose, &amp;quot;independent dual&amp;quot;, the same thing you had in Old Church Slavic and is somehow preserved in Slovenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Croatian, you would use dual/paucal &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; if words for 2, 3, 4 or &amp;quot;both&amp;quot; are present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matjaž i Janez su &lt;em&gt;bili&lt;/em&gt; (only plural possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dva čovjeka su &lt;em&gt;bila&lt;/em&gt; (dual/paucal of past participle)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's the &amp;quot;connected&amp;quot; dual, like in Russian. It's restricted to constructs where words for 2, 3, 4 or &amp;quot;both&amp;quot; appear, it's not enough to have A and B, you must have the word &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; somewhere to trigger dual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe &amp;quot;restricted&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bound&amp;quot; dual is a better term, since it's use is bound to some specific numerals. Hope this helps you a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For various views on dual, check this work, pages 40-91, especially page 85.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/297021/2/azu_etd_12790_sip1_m.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/297021/2/azu_etd_12790_sip1_m.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T11:37:31.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-02T11:38:08.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, the weekdays are called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום ראשון First day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום שני Second day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום שלישי Third day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום רביעי Fourth day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום חמישי Fifth day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יום שישי Sixth day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;שבת Day of rest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, Sunday is literally &quot;First day&quot; and all the days follow from there. Saturday is &quot;Day of rest&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T11:38:08.287" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-02T12:40:49.210" Score="9" ViewCount="9187" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6801/structural-ambiguity-and-because&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; posed by another user observed that the following sentence is ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) Arthur does not discipline his children because he loves them.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence can mean either that Arthur refrains from punishing his children because he loves them or he actually does punish them, but he does so for some other reason than that he loves them (perhaps he just wants to be cruel). The two readings can be understood in terms of the scope of the negation. The first reading has the causal adjunct clause scoping over the negation (because [not]), and the scond reading has the negation scoping over the causal adjunct clause (not [because]). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns a closely related sentence that has the adjunct clause fronted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (2) Because he loves them, Arthur does not discipline his children. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the ambiguity has disappeared. The only reading in (2) is the first reading where cause scopes over negation (because [not]). I have two precise questions in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do others agree? Does sentence (2) lack the ambiguity that is present in (1)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is yes, then why should this be the case? Why is the negation capable of scoping forwards over the cause in (1), but incapable of scoping backwards over it in (2)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the second question, note that negation is easily capable of scoping backwards in other cases, e.g. &lt;em&gt;All that glitters is not gold&lt;/em&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; scopes backwards over &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon the many helpful answers and comments below, I would like to give the original question a new direction. The answer to the first part of the question is apparently a strong &quot;yes, sentence (2) is NOT ambiguous&quot;. The answer to the second part of the question remains somewhat open, although the suggestion and comments below present avenues for exploration. One of the avenues concerns the role of intonation, and another suggests a strong role for pragmatics. While I cannot discount these possibilities outright, I currently have a hypothesis I am entertaining that has not yet been disproven. This hypothesis is expressed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Hypothesis&#xA; Negation can scope forwards over arguments and adjuncts, but it can scope backwards&#xA; only over arguments (not over adjuncts). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data that have appeared in the question, the answers, and the comments support this hypothesis. I have not yet encountered an example in my own explorations that contradict it. Here are the examples that appear on this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (2) **Because** he loves them, Arthur does **not** punish his children.&#xA;&#xA; (3) At **every** party, Fred did **not** dance.&#xA;&#xA; (4) He **definitely** did **not** do it.&#xA;&#xA; (5) #**Because** he loves chicken, Arthur does **not** eat.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of these sentences, the first bold operator is (in) an adjunct, and in each case, there is no ambiguity. The negation cannot scope backwards over the adjunct. In cases where the negation does scope backwards, it does so over an argument:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (6) **All** that glitters is **not** gold.  (*all that glitters* is the subject argument) &#xA;&#xA; (7) He was helping **every** student at **no** time. (*every student* is the object argument)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences both allow the reading in which the negation scopes backwards over the preceding operator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and the short of all this is that the original question can now be redirected as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any evidence suggesting that negation can ever scope backwards over an adjunct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to this question is no, then I think it has become possible to produce a coherent and principled account of the scope of negation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T12:44:01.677" Title="What is the scope of negation?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8902" CreationDate="2014-09-02T17:24:43.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you're looking for an electronic database (as opposed to the rich tradition of character analysis in paper dictionaries and such).  &lt;a href=&quot;http://kanjivg.tagaini.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;KanjiVG&lt;/a&gt; is based on character appearance and includes data on the components of each kanji; it's easy to parse the XML to do things like finding all kanji with a given component, etc.  Sorry for the self-plug, but I once &lt;a href=&quot;http://namakajiri.net/nikki/testing-the-power-of-phonetic-components-in-japanese-kanji/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;used it to estimate&lt;/a&gt; the predictive power of Japanese phonetics components; perhaps the data files in that post can prove useful to you in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also Wenlin's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Character Description Language&lt;/a&gt;, but it's non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The individual role of components – which may be semantic, phonetic, or both – is much fuzzier and harder to analyze with certainty, and many competing proposals exist.  For character-level information, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjidic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kanjidic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unihan&lt;/a&gt;.  There are some online resources which deal in decomposing characters; e.g. in English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://chineseetymology.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sear's&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://zhongwen.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zhongwen.com&lt;/a&gt; (I have &lt;a href=&quot;http://namakajiri.net/kanjigen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a simple tool&lt;/a&gt; to compare such sites; see the documentation for details).  I've tried to contact these authors to ask if we're allowed to mine their sites and use the data, but got no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2014-09-02T17:24:43.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2014-09-03T10:23:54.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian uses numbers for five of the days of the week, by tagging a cardinal number onto the word for Saturday:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saturday = شَنبه (shanbeh)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sunday = یَکشَنبه (yakshanbeh) literally, &quot;one Saturday&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monday = دوشَنبه (dushanbeh) literally, &quot;two Saturday&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tuesday = سَهشَنبه (sehshanbeh) literally, &quot;three Saturday&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wednesday = چِهار شَنبه (chihar shanbeh) literally, &quot;four Saturday&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thursday = پَنج شَنبه (panj shanbeh), literally &quot;five Saturday&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Friday = جُمعه (jumeh), from Arabic, the day for congregational prayer, as in 'Jami mesjid' - Friday mosque.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for day in Persian is 'ruz'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5120" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T10:23:54.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8832" CreationDate="2014-09-03T11:55:31.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sticking to the question of the title, yes, some languages exhibit clearly both a nominative-accusative syntactic systems and an ergative-absolutive system. A famous example of such a language is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlpiri_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Warlpiri&lt;/a&gt;, in which agreement follows a nominative-accusative pattern and case marking follows an ergative-absolutive system. References for this, and more generally the syntax of split ergativity, can be found (among many other sources) in the works of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jlegate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Julie Anne Legate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T15:01:38.763" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T15:01:38.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-03T13:03:22.537" Score="3" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a terminological issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phoneme is only in the mind of the speaker /s/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phonological segment is that which the speaker articulates [s]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is it that the speaker &quot;hears&quot;? Is there a name for this unit? It isn't spoken, so it can 't be the phonetic sequence, but it also isn't necessarily the &quot;same&quot; thing as the /s/ in the speaker's mind, so it can't be a phoneme. Is this an allophone??&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T18:13:11.583" Title="When I hear the sound &quot;s&quot; am I hearing [s] or /s/... or?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8916" CreationDate="2014-09-03T13:31:20.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if there is a word for no. 3, but I believe you are on to a genuine problem. My experience is that native speakers of any language “hear” what they think they ought to be hearing (in effect: a phoneme) and not what their ears are actually telling them. We had a discussion very recently on another site about the Arabic word phonologically /dʒanb/, phonetically [dʒamb], meaning “side”. A speaker on Forvo was definitely saying it as [djand], with [d]. The non-native speakers in the forum recognised this immediately, but the native Arabic speakers were insisting that they heard [dʒanb]. Have a look for yourself: &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2887668&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2887668&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-09-03T13:43:03.873" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T13:43:03.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="246" CreationDate="2014-09-03T17:01:59.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's an alphabet without names for the characters because if there wasn't, how can they spell the words? In certain circumstances spelling is neccessary. Even logographic scripts like Chinese have &quot;names&quot; for the strokes and &quot;names&quot;/pronunciations for the radicals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strangest I've ever seen is the character ん/ン(n) in Japanese. To spell it we only produce a nasal sound inside the throat without a vowel because in Japanese that character represents the coda and is the only one that cannot produce a complete syllable alone. So IMO it's hardly called a &quot;pronounceable name&quot; although we can still spell the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T17:01:59.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8796" CreationDate="2014-09-03T17:05:33.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Parisian speaker of French, I may overhear the problem since I intuitively sort out the quality of sound according to the spelling and the context, but I don’t feel that so many confusions occur at the end of words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In French, since the final syllable bears the stress, it is least able to lose distinctions. So, the phenomenon jlawler points for Vulgar Latin should not happen in French. Indeed, the /e/-/ε/ distinction is largely lost in the middle syllables of words or phrases, when I feel it is still clearly made at the end. Clearly, some people may make confusions, especially in less frequently used words (e.g. the distinction between &lt;em&gt;lé&lt;/em&gt;, fabric or wallpaper strip, and &lt;em&gt;lai&lt;/em&gt;, lay [as opposed to clerical], two very infrequent words, is sometimes heard the wrong way round). But I have never been aware of a confusion on &lt;em&gt;poignée/poignet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The other example you bring in is, not by chance, a future as opposed to a conditional. Well, for the future tense, the link sent by jlawler is very interesting: the French future and conditional are crafted just as explained for Spanish, but, unlike the conditional, the future (at least in France, and for many decades) is being replaced by a new analytic form; in oral (France) French, one wouldn’t say “je ferai” but “je vais faire” in at least 90% of the cases. If you absolutely have to say it, you will pronounce “ferai” just like “ferais”, at least in Paris, hence the current misspelling (always the conditional form misused to note a future). But context normally tells you when it’s a future, and in general it isn’t. Now, since the future tense has dropped out of the oral language, I guess many children first discover it at school, at least for some forms, and at about the same time they learn that the digraph -ai- is pronounced /ε/: this is one of the few consistent rules of French spelling, and the future (and perfect) 1st singular forms are exceptions. (The Wikipedia article says that &lt;em&gt;j'ai, quai, gai&lt;/em&gt; should be pronounced with a closed /e/, which sounds awkward to me.) Curiously, the future and still more the perfect are two tenses that are practically out of use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By the way, I don’t know why we are taught to pronounce a closed /e/ in these forms (&lt;em&gt;chantai, chanterai&lt;/em&gt;): I think very possible that at some point it was decided by grammarians in order to help distinguish the forms in oral speech, one or two centuries ago when they still were in use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But conversely, if you take perfectly usual forms as present perfect of the 1st group and imperfect, &lt;em&gt;j’ai chanté&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;je chantais&lt;/em&gt;, the distinction always is very clear to the ear. So I don’t think that the distinction is being lost.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We must also note that this /e/-/ε/ opposition has no counterpart, in final open syllables, for the other medium vowel sounds, closed and open o, and /ø/-/œ/: in final positions you can only have the closed /o/ and /ø/ (with the only exception of the &lt;em&gt;donne-le&lt;/em&gt; occurrence of final “e muet” in a stressed position, pronounced /œ/, or metalinguistic occurrences when you have to name a word like &lt;em&gt;le, je, ce&lt;/em&gt;). So, being asymmetrical, it may be especially weak. The same may occur with the long e/ä opposition in Standard German (/e:/-/ε:/), which has no equivalent for long medium vowels (there are no long open o or ö), and maybe therefore is not consistently maintained.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A last question: has “France a higher population of immigrant second-language learners than Francophone Canada”, as TKR says? I am not sure how much these new dialects take part in this evolution, which I think has begun many decades ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5126" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T17:05:33.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8834" CreationDate="2014-09-03T18:39:37.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by others, &quot;true synonyms&quot; do not exist. At least not when taking pragmatics into account. If we ignore pragmatics for a moment, we could claim that, e.g., &lt;em&gt;At most five people will come to the party&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Less than six people will come to the party&lt;/em&gt; are (truth-conditionally) equivalent. In any case, even this example is not uncontroversial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the question: The term used (at least in semantics) is that of a &lt;em&gt;near synonym&lt;/em&gt;. For example, entities in the world that may be referred to both with mass and count nouns (e.g. &lt;em&gt;foliage&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;leaves&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;coins&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;clothes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;clothing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;footwear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;shoes&lt;/em&gt;). While roughly interchangeable, they behave, morphosyntactically, according to their mass/count role (e.g. pluralization is only licensed for the count expressions in each pair listed above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T18:39:37.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2014-09-03T18:54:37.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a mereological approach with a bottom element see Link (1983). For reasons why the bottom element is not desirable see Link (1998:284ff). He discusses this at length when talking about processes. Specifically: &quot;[...]&lt;em&gt;processes are mereologically structured entities that form my basic&#xA;particulars. I assume that their mereology is classical, but not explicitly&#xA;atomic. In particular, there is no such thing as &quot;the null process,&quot; i.e., the process lattice doesn't have a bottom element.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. This is not very specific, but I would suggest you read that subsection to get a feeling for the philosophical arguments against a bottom element. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other reasons for not wanting a bottom, which I prefer. A simple one is, when dealing with spatial entities (e.g. point in space linked to events, as most event structures assume them nowadays), you would not want to assume there to be something that is a part of everything (which bottom is), committing us to an overlap across the domain -- which is implausible. This is my own reason and also the one given in (Geach 1949, Simons 1987, Lewis 1991 and Varzi 2007). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the reason is more why you'd want a bottom, rather than why you would not want one. Technically we don't lose much without it, as we still get structure isomorphic to a complete Boolean&#xA;algebra with the zero element removed (as shown in Tarski 1935).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T18:54:37.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4609" CreationDate="2014-09-03T21:06:54.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're probably not still wanting answers, but I'll add this for posterity. &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;espeak&lt;/a&gt; is a command line speech synthesis program. It outputs to various formats (including IPA), and has various different voices. For instance, English has voices en, en-us, en-sc (Scottish), en-n (Northern English), en-rp and en-wm (West Midlands). There are many other languages, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1807" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T21:06:54.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8834" CreationDate="2014-09-03T22:38:42.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the word you are looking for is plesionym. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-NearSynonyms-95.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-NearSynonyms-95.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5129" LastActivityDate="2014-09-03T22:38:42.253" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8912" CreationDate="2014-09-03T23:19:54.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The citation is probably&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/innerislands.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ross, John (1984) &quot;Inner Islands&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In Proceedings of 10th Berkeley Linguistics Society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely hard to find (although I'd bet jlawler has a copy available). It deals (inter alia) with the interaction of negation, adjuncts, and questions in scope/&quot;extraction&quot; phenomena. It's a fun paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &quot;standard&quot; explanation is in terms of constituency, as mentioned, more specifically in terms of a hierarchically organized phrase structure tree and making use of the notion of c-command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, Kuno &amp;amp; Kuroda (I think?) had a paper circa 1996 or 1997 in Linguistic Inquiry describing/explaining inner (aka &quot;weak&quot;) islands in terms of semantic and pragmatic properties. Also a good paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chapter on weak islands in Partee et al (1990?) is also really good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-09-04T02:42:55.040" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T02:42:55.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-04T03:17:28.667" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is a problem I've been struggling with for quite some time now. English is a second language for me despite the fact that I've spend a lot of my childhood years in Australia (grades 1 through 6), after which I moved to my home country where I rarely used English outside of school.&#xA;Now that I've moved back to Australia, I often get comments from my native speaking friends on both my written and spoken English. But no means would I say that I'm terrible at English. I'm able to speak and write the language with a great deal of proficiency and confidence, and with perfectly acceptable grammar. Nonetheless, my sentences seem to sound a little bit off at times, and often too formal (especially in speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to identify some of the possible issues like using the wrong prepositions (eg. &quot;make a note in my calendar&quot;), or avoiding them altogether by relying on adjectives (&quot;house keys&quot; instead of &quot;keys to the house&quot;), which I suppose is fine but can make my sentences very clunky and difficult to comprehend. But there is also a more complex dimension to the problem, particularly relating to sentence structure and the way I tend to express my ideas. It is these aspects of my written language that I am most keen on improving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ill give an example. I was filling a form the other day that required an address. Since I was staying temporarily at my friends house, I wrote: &quot;The address I provided is my for friend's house. I am staying with him for a few weeks. I will provide a new address when I move&quot;. My friend, who is a native speaker, told me to write: &quot;I am staying at a friend's house for a few days until I find a place of my own&quot;. Now this will definitely seems trivial to native speakers, but its a sentence structure that wouldn't come naturally to me. Needless to say that it is by far a better sentence to use. Perhaps this doesn't have to do with my English per se, but more so with my writing skills in general, as I would probably have ended up with an equally terrible sentence had I used my native language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the issue for me is nonetheless the same, which leads to my question:&#xA;What do you think would be the best way for me to improve writing fluency so that I sound more like a skilled native writer? Will reading books help, and if so, can you recommend a few that I can start with? (I rarely read aside from academic papers, textbooks, and newspaper articles).&#xA;While I have come to terms with the fact that I most likely will never a reach a native level of proficiency, particularly in speech, nonetheless, any improvement would definitely help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice, comments, or criticism are greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5130" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T05:39:21.467" Title="How can I improve my writing fluency in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-09-04T09:10:47.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8925" CreationDate="2014-09-04T05:39:21.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading widely can certain support your writing but it seems you already read quite a lot. However, from your example it seems that your reading predisposes you to more complex and formal sentence structure than is appropriate in all contexts. So including some fiction and informal correspondence in your reading may help. Listening to conversations would also be a good supplement - podcasts are a good source of semi-formal language. Also, remember the level of formality and approach to writing is as much cultural as linguistic. This post by Francois Grosjean illustrates that nicely: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201408/bilingual-challenge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201408/bilingual-challenge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the only thing that can improve your writing is practice in writing. There are many guides that will suggest structured programs such as this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Build-Fluency-Muscle-Six-Week-Programs-ebook/dp/B0055WYDQA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Build-Fluency-Muscle-Six-Week-Programs-ebook/dp/B0055WYDQA&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what it boils down to is: write regularly in small chunks in the genres you want to improve. Write even if you don't have anything to write, just for practice. You can even start by copying texts, then reformulating some of the sentences, then starting with mini essays and finally move on to longer texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following a structured program will help because it will make it easier to measure your progress. But just allocating 15 minutes a day to writing (with gradually increasing complexity) should give you a boost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T05:39:21.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8912" CreationDate="2014-09-04T08:25:02.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'constituency' answer by @jlawler certainly explains the question but perhaps this is a good opportunity to question the whole constituency / negation scope approach to the problem. This may sound funny coming from someone who suggested it in the first place as an answer to the original question. But to explain the ambiguity of &lt;em&gt;Arthur does not discipline his children because he loves them&lt;/em&gt; it seemed to be the most expedient approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just because bracketing the constituents seems to be a good heuristic, it does not necessarily mean that there is such a thing as a scope of negation. I would suggest that a construction / frame-semantic based approach to negation is far more fruitful and would avoid many of the issues Ross had to grapple with in his paper on &quot;Inner Islands&quot;. Here are some off the cuff thoughts on this (if anyone has any references to construction work on negation - I'm sure there's plenty, I'd be happy to see).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, negation with NOT is a construction with a form that looks something like this: NOT &lt;strong&gt;_____&lt;/strong&gt;  with the meaning of 'NOT whatever'. Therefore, the example &lt;em&gt;Because he loves them, Arthur does not discipline his children&lt;/em&gt; does not carry the meaning where the Arthur actually does discipline his children. That would have to be expressed as &lt;em&gt;It is not because he loves them, that Arthur disciplines his children.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to return to pragmatics (or frame semantics - as I would call it) to explain the ambiguity. Compare the original sentence with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur doesn't eat chicken because he loves it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only does that perfectly formed sentence not produce two meanings. It struggles to produce one. This is because in the frame of not eating chicken, the love of all chickens and not chicken as a dish is what matters. So we can have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur does not eat chicken because he loves chickens / animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur does not eat his pet chicken because he loves it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, none of these produce a dual meaning because 'eating' something because of loving it, does not make sense in the blend of the frames of loving a living thing and eating a living thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constituency has nothing to do here. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is because he loves it, that Arthur doesn't eat his pet chicken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a lawful rephrasing of the previous sentence but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*It is because he loves it, that Arthur eats his pet chicken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although possibly, if we made the frame more plausible by placing it in time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is because he loved it, that Arthur finally ate is ailing pet chicken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar procedure would help deal with many Ross's examples. For instance, he rules out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*How long didn't that concert last?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when placed within a pragmatic context, it can be framed as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What did you say? How long didn't that concert last?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the same works for his two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What did no imitation pearls touch?&#xA;  *What did no imitation pearls cost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two can be brought together with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did I hear you right? What did no imitation pearls cost? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly to (but without the syntactic changes of):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What did you say did no imitation pearls cost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between touch and cost (if we indeed buy into that particular intuition)? Touching is an intrinsic property of all objects, whereas cost needs to brought into the frame with further elaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus Ross's classification of adverbials can be rephrased as semantic frame specificity. They differ in how much work has to be done in order for the meaning to be brought into the frame and thus made available for negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is also the construction &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;_&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; NOT (intonation/irony) that produces sentences like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I really love this itchy bright blue sweater my mother made me. NOT!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(PS: I understand, that this is very sketchy and welcome any comments of people who have thought harder about this than over a short breakfast.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-09-04T12:44:01.677" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T12:44:01.677" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8928" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-09-04T10:31:29.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-09-04T10:31:29.160" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T10:31:29.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8929" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-09-04T10:31:29.160" Score="0" Body="request for references of languages that satisfy the criteria set in the question." OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T11:33:46.427" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T11:33:46.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-04T12:29:39.810" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Left- and right-dislocation in German behave differently regarding the case the dislocated expression takes. Left-dislocation seems to be lenient, as it allows the nominative as well as the case the resumptive pronoun takes:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) a. DER MANN, DEN kenne ich nicht.&#xA;     b. DEN MANN, DEN kenne ich nicht.&#xA;        'The man, I don't know him.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1a), the dislocated expression &lt;strong&gt;DER MANN&lt;/strong&gt; appears in the nominative case, even though the resumptive pronoun &lt;strong&gt;DEN&lt;/strong&gt; is in the accusative case. In (1b), the dislocated expression is in the accusative, thereby matching the case of its resumptive pronoun. I am German native speaker, and for me both (1a) and (1b) are good.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Compare these data to those of right-dislocation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (2) a. * DEN kenne ich nicht, DER MANN.&#xA;     b.   DEN kenne ich nicht, DEN MANN.&#xA;          'I don't know him, the man.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (2a), where the right-dislocated expression appears in the nominative is now ungrammatical. If the case of the right-dislocated expression matches, as in (2b), the sentence is good.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What principle could account for this asymmetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T13:31:42.200" Title="Case matching asymmetry in German dislocation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2014-09-04T13:31:42.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think these sentences are structurally different. In (1a) “der Mann” is what we used to call “nominativus pendens”, but which nowadays is usually called “topic”. For inflected languages like German, Greek, Latin, the old terminology has the advantage that it points out that the topic is in the unmarked (i.e., nominative) form, and not in the case required by the syntax of the main clause. In German, and I think in most languages, the topic needs to be announced at the beginning of the sentence. That is why (2a) does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1b) and (2b) the direct object (“den Mann”) has been extrapositioned, and its normal place in the sentence has been filled by a pronoun. This, I suggest, is a different structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-04T13:31:42.200" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-04T18:59:10.593" Score="2" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the theta role in one language (ex. English) - L1 the same as in another language - L2,&#xA;when this two sentence are about the same ? Can anybody give me example, when they are different ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-05T01:51:43.437" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T05:01:26.157" Title="Are theta roles universal?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8939" CreationDate="2014-09-05T15:35:05.937" Score="12" ViewCount="3090" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have multiple forms of the verb &quot;to be&quot;. For example, Spanish has &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt;, while Nepali has हो and छ. Some other examples are given in &lt;a href=&quot;http://theseriousandthefrivolous.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-verb-to-be-in-different-languages.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this nice blog post&lt;/a&gt;. My question is: what other languages have multiple forms of &quot;to be&quot;, and what is the scope of the different forms of this verb in those languages? I searched about online and could not find too much on this beyond the above blog post, but it seems an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; To clarify, I am asking for examples of languages where at least two different verbs are used for the different meanings in the list provided by @bytebuster below. For example, while in English we use the same verb &quot;to be&quot; in all four cases, in Spanish we would, I think, use &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; for 1, 2 (permanent properties), and 4; &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; for 2 (temporary properties), 3. I hope that clarifies my question, but I am certainly no expert in linguistics, so let me know if not!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="5138" LastEditDate="2014-09-09T08:52:25.753" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T17:45:00.820" Title="Languages with multiple forms of the verb &quot;to be&quot;" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="14" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-05T16:49:58.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polish&lt;/strong&gt; has two forms of &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;być&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the &lt;strong&gt;unmarked&lt;/strong&gt; form, and the present tense differs from the infinitive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;jestem, jesteś, jest (I am, you are, he/she/it is)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other form is &lt;strong&gt;habitual&lt;/strong&gt;, and the present tense has the same stem as the infinitive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bywać - bywam, bywaś, bywa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T16:49:58.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-05T17:58:56.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dutch there is &quot;zijn&quot; and &quot;wezen&quot;. &quot;Wezen&quot; is the oldest and most informal form. Today it can no longer be used in all phrases and it is mostly used as an infinitive. &#xA;&quot;zijn&quot; is etymologically younger, but it now dominates the other verb. It is used in the same way as 'to be' is used in English. &#xA;Yet &quot;wezen&quot; will continue to live on, since &quot;zijn&quot; has no past tense of its own and has adopted the past forms of &quot;wezen&quot;: was, waren and geweest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5140" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T17:58:56.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-05T19:06:13.957" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently creating a small-ish corpus of online conversations that I wish to analyze quantitatively and qualitatively from a pragmatic perspective (speech acts level mainly). The problem is that I am stuck on how to go about linguistically annotating/ tagging it (it's my first time):&#xA;should I just add tags using a normal word-processor / text-editor or should I try to use an XML editor (and which)? Or is there some better way to go about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with XML but I have used LaTeX (if this is of any help?) and it seems that HTML or XML are nowadays more commonly used and favored for corpus annotating. On the other hand, I am only interested in quite simple pragmatic annotations for written language (which should be less complicated and demanding than annotating spoken discourse) so I don't know if using an unfamiliar medium is worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5142" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T19:06:13.957" Title="How to annotate a corpus of written discourse for pragmatic analysis (speech acts)?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-05T19:40:03.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many, indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIR, most of them have &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; in four meanings (which are the same word in English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be (an object &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; is a part of set &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;), e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;this &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; an apple&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be (an object &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; has property of &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt;), e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;the box &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; red&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be (located at), e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;I &lt;strong&gt;am&lt;/strong&gt; at the office&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to mean, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;to live &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; to love&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; has &lt;code&gt;เป็น&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ใช่&lt;/code&gt; both in meaning of (1) and (2) (somewhat overlapped — out of scope of this question), &lt;code&gt;อยู่&lt;/code&gt; for (3), and &lt;code&gt;คือ&lt;/code&gt; for (4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-09-05T19:40:03.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-05T21:41:22.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian normally does not use the verb 'to be' in the Present Tense ('есть' for all numbers and persons), it just omits the verb altogether:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is a young woman. - Она молодая женщина. - 'She young woman.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in bookish style, different substitutions of 'to be' are used so as to make the text unambiguous (these are, actually, the multiple verbs for 'to be' you are asking about). Using the meanings numbering suggested by @bytebuster, which I find great, meanings #1 and #2 can be expressed by using the verb 'являться' (to be, to present oneself, to appear):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is a criminal. - Он является преступником.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning #3 is rendered by 'находиться' (to be situated) in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am at the office. - Я нахожусь в офисе. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning #4 is rendered by 'значить/означать' (to mean):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To live is to love. - Жить значит/означает любить.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-09-06T07:38:15.600" LastActivityDate="2014-09-06T07:38:15.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-06T11:25:28.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese has the exact same verbs as Spanish, with the exactly same meanings: ser and estar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it could be expected, they are only exactly equally spelt as Spanish on their infinitive form, not when conjugated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="5146" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T17:09:04.593" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:09:04.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-06T13:44:53.540" Score="1" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an old program called SPAD-T that is still used for textual analysis. Can anybody tell me where to find it? Otherwise can anybody send me a copy of the software? It shouldn't be copyrighted.&#xA;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5147" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T01:25:27.097" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T10:02:44.383" Title="Where can I find SPAD-T?" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2014-09-06T21:24:07.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some nowadays Indo-European languages you can still see rests of base-20 numeral systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in France French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Number — French spelling — English translation — Expansion (where possible)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;70 — Soixante-dix — Sixty-ten&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;71 — Soixante-onze — Sixty-eleven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;72 — Soixante-douze — Sixty-twelve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;73 — Soixante-treize — Sixty-thirteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;74 — Soixante-quatorze — Sixty-fourteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;75 — Soixante-quinze — Sixty-fifteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;76 — Soixante-seize — Sixty-sixteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;77 — Soixante-dix-sept — Sixty-seventeen — Sixty-ten-seven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;78 — Soixante-dix-huit — Sixty-eighteen — Sixty-ten-eight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;79 — Soixante-dix-neuf — Sixty-nineteen — Sixty-ten-nine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;80 — Quatre-vingts — Four-twentys&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;81 — Quatre-vingt-un — Four-twentys-one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;82 — Quatre-vingt-deux — Four-twentys-two&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;83 — Quatre-vingt-trois — Four-twentys-three&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;84 — Quatre-vingt-quatre — Four-twentys-four&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;85 — Quatre-vingt-cinq — Four-twentys-five&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;86 — Quatre-vingt-six — Four-twentys-six&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;87 — Quatre-vingt-sept — Four-twentys-seven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;88 — Quatre-vingt-huit — Four-twentys-eight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;89 — Quatre-vingt-neuf — Four-twentys-nine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;90 — Quatre-vingt-dix — Four-twentys-ten&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;91 — Quatre-vingt-onze — Four-twentys-eleven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;92 — Quatre-vingt-douze — Four-twentys-twelve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;93 — Quatre-vingt-treize — Four-twentys-thirteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;94 — Quatre-vingt-quatorze — Four-twentys-fourteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;95 — Quatre-vingt-quinze — Four-twentys-fifteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;96 — Quatre-vingt-seize — Four-twentys-sixteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;97 — Quatre-vingt-dix-sept — Four-twentys-seventeen — Four-twentys-ten-seven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;98 — Quatre-vingt-dix-huit — Four-twentys-eighteen — Four-twentys-ten-eight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99 — Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf — Four-twentys-nineteen — Four-twentys-ten-nine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; There is a process of elision of the &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; on &lt;code&gt;Quatre-vingts&lt;/code&gt; when it has a number after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens because the Gauls, a celtic people, had a base-20 counting system. In my personal opinion, it is strange that the forms septante, huitante and nonante, used in Swiss French sound outdated in almost all the French territory. Shouldn't things evolve exactly in the opposite sense, towards simplicity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in Danish numbers have a similar mechanism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Number — Danish shorthand spelling — Danish full spelling — English literal translation — Not so literal English translation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;50 — halvtreds — halvtredje-sinde-tyve — half-three times twenty — half-to-tree times twenty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;60 — tres — tresindtyve (tre-sinde-tyve) — three times twenty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;70 — halvfjerds — halvfjerde-sinde-tyve — half-four times twenty — half-to-four times twenty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;80 — firs — firsindetyve (fire-sinde-tyve) — four times twenty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;90 — halvfems — halvfem-sinde-tyve — half-five times twenty — half-to-five times twenty &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;em&gt;sinde&lt;/em&gt; word is obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see also that in other languages, like Portuguese and English that the twenty numbers between 11 and 19 are spelt on a different form than 21 to 99, which may be some&#xA;hint of a past vigesimal system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Number — Portuguese — English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;11 — onze — eleven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12 — doze — twelve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;13 — treze — thirteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;14 — catorze — fourteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15 — quinze — fifteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16 — dezasseis — sixteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;17 — dezassete — seventeen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;18 — dezoito — eighteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;19 — dezanove — nineteen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, in Portuguese, you say 24 as &lt;em&gt;vinte e quatro&lt;/em&gt; , literally &lt;em&gt;twenty and four&lt;/em&gt;, but you don't say 14 as &lt;em&gt;unte e quatro&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;deste e quatro&lt;/em&gt; (in Portuguese: 1=um; 10=dez)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same reasoning goes for English: you say &lt;em&gt;twenty-four&lt;/em&gt; for 24, but you don't say &lt;em&gt;onety-four&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tenty-four&lt;/em&gt; for 14.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, in German, the numbers between 21 and 99 have their position changed when spelt. So for 24 you say &lt;em&gt;vier-und-zwanzig&lt;/em&gt;, literally &lt;em&gt;four-and-twenty&lt;/em&gt;. This also does not happen between 11 and 19, the system also seems the previous ones. This can also indicate a historic link to a 20-base numeral system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, spelling 24 in German, seems spelling 80 in French!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="5146" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T17:15:22.157" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:15:22.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8916" CreationDate="2014-09-06T22:35:45.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the hearer perceives must clearly be called a phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The produced phone will either be interpreted as the phoneme that the speaker intended, or it will be interpreted mistakenly to be another phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, such mistakes may occur when a non-native hearer, or a hearer of a different dialect, interprets the phone as a phoneme of his first language and doesn't take into account a feature that the speaker takes into account. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there's no /a/ phoneme in Finnish, it's either /æ/ or /ɑ/, but a French native speaker hearing Finnish words will interpret both [æ] and [ɑ] as his native phoneme /a/, and hear no difference unless he consciously pays attention to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea that the language influences what we hear has been called the &quot;phonological sieve&quot; or &quot;phonological filter&quot; (I don't know if there's a standard english translation) and has first been put forward by Trubetzkoy and what fdb talks about in his answer is the same phenomenon. Our brains get used to treating some phonemic features as relevant and ignoring others as irrelevant, depending on our first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there are limits to this. If the phone heard is phonetically too far removed from the prototypical sound of any phoneme of the hearer's language, it'll be interpreted as gibberish, or even as noise. That's how a European will hear a click. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="2105" LastEditDate="2014-09-06T23:23:03.123" LastActivityDate="2014-09-06T23:23:03.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8947" CreationDate="2014-09-07T10:38:37.253" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there programs that take a recording of human speech as input, perform some kind of phonetic analysis and then return a graphic readout of the phonemes that have been found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently trying to familiarize myself with basic articulatory phonetics and I'd been hoping to find some means of objectively verifying whether I can reproduce the sounds correctly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably this program would be Open Source and able to be run on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5150" LastActivityDate="2014-09-07T13:10:46.967" Title="Software that analyses a speech recording and displays a graphic readout" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8946" CreationDate="2014-09-07T12:52:20.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are talking about creating a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spectrogram&lt;/a&gt;. One program that does this is Praat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is WaveSurfer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/wavesurfer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sourceforge.net/projects/wavesurfer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat is widely used, so you will find a lot of helpful documentation on it. There are also a lot of free Praat plug-ins and scripts available for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WaveSurfer allows you to see the spectrogram (and waveform, and other visual feedback) for an input sound in &quot;real time&quot;, that is, as soon as you start speaking into the microphone you start seeing the spectrogram scrolling across the window (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8584/can-any-praat-scripts-perform-real-time-analyses/8586#8586&quot;&gt;this related question/answer&lt;/a&gt;). It also allows you to create spectrograms in color (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4262/software-request-spectrograms-that-represent-intensity-with-a-colour-gradient/4265#4265&quot;&gt;another related question/answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-07T13:10:46.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8961" CreationDate="2014-09-08T07:46:57.207" Score="4" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background and Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the German Stack Exchange, we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/15573/2594&quot;&gt;a lengthy discussion regarding the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;Gefäß&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It was undisputed that a &lt;em&gt;Gefäß&lt;/em&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an item which can contain liquids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;movable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not flexible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument was about whether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    4. artificial (in the sense of being modified by humans in any way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should be added to the definition. My opponent would not call something &lt;em&gt;Gefäß&lt;/em&gt; which complied to points 1 to 3 but not to point 4, e.g., a peculiarly shaped stone; I however would. The problem was there are very few objects for which point 4 makes a difference, as the vast majority of objects complying with points 1 to 3 also complies with point 4 anyway. Thus I considered the discussion rather moot, as few people have ever made up their mind as to whether point 4 is essential to the term &lt;em&gt;Gefäß&lt;/em&gt; and it would hardly affect the actual usage of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this made me think of whether people are actually likely to include aspects such as point 4 into their personal definitions of words, as it seems innefficient to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any study or general linguistic argument regarding whether we tend to include less relevant details in our personal definitions of words, i.e., details which do not strongly affect the range of meanings a word covers. Or do we have some sort of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occam’s razor&lt;/a&gt; instead, which keeps our personal definitions simple?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that I do not ask how to solve the dispute in the example or analyse the example issue. I am really interested in general  tendencies towards or against detailed word definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T20:45:39.400" Title="Do individuals have an Occam’s razor for word meanings?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8949" CreationDate="2014-09-08T10:10:43.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preface: As far as I know, this issue is usually not discussed in linguistics (however, see e.g. concept learning and conceptual inference). The usual view in semantics would be that words (lexical items) are not stored as 'definitions', i.e., sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, there is a mash-up of prototypicality, semantic similarity and frequency effects, as well as some properties on top. Whether and how these sources of information are combined to give you 'the' meaning of a word is not clear at all. A trend on the rise is to analyze a lot of these inferences, e.g. about the properties of entities denoted by a word, as non-monotonic or probabilistic inferences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A succinct and general answer to your question: No (at least not that I know of). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more useful answer: There are two ways to go about this. (1) Assume that speakers store world-knowledge and relate it to the words they use, thereby enriching their lexical content. If a &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; is usually an artifact, then speakers may make a (!defeasible!) inference that a &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; is an artifact. This inference lives as long as no evidence to the contrary is encountered. In this sense, &lt;em&gt;artifact&lt;/em&gt; is stricly not a part of the lexical meaning of &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; but an enrichment. (2) Test whether &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; behaves like other artifacts, linguistically. If they do across probes, then being an artifact is a part of the lexical meaning of &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum, since Gricean reasoning was mentioned already: Pragmatics is usually taken to deal with language use and not the information stored/related to a word (which is what I take your question to be about). A Gricean theory could tell help you decide whether speakers infer that &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; is an artifact (see (1) above) but not whether your own definition of &lt;em&gt;Gefaess&lt;/em&gt; includes information about it being an artifact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T10:10:43.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-08T12:29:50.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question and useful answers. But I'd suggest that the question should really be about the variety of non-verbal predicates across languages. (I.e. She runs. vs. She is young. or She teaches. vs. She is a teacher.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find that languages (even with the Indo European family) vary greatly. Some use a copula in all cases, others only in the past or future or not at all. Some use a copula only for nouns but not adjectives. Some use a simple copula but use a case ending to express the same difference as ser/estar - so called predicate instrumental. Or to express an result such as the predicate dative. Languages differ in how they express definiteness of the non-verbal predicate (e.g. the infamous 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'). I'd say even things like the partitive genitive and other forms of predicative expressions of possession belong here. Things like subjects and locations also come into play (e.g. there is, 'it is cold to me').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, limiting yourself to the forms of the verb 'to be' only confuses things because it limits you to comparing things that are superficially alike and exclude things that may be more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T12:29:50.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2014-09-08T13:35:14.307" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, the Korean language can assimilate any words from any languages on the fly.  Vocabulary wise, it has the capacity to be the superset of all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3037" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T13:35:14.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8954" CreationDate="2014-09-08T13:45:33.840" Score="1" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always had difficulty in distinguishing phrases from compound words. To me, spelling a compound word without spaces between the constituents seem to be mostly arbitrary. For example the spelling of English words/phrases &quot;mountain lion&quot; and &quot;junglefowl&quot; seem totally arbitrary to me. I don't understand why the first is considered a phrase and the second is considered a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I hear a definition based on semantic shift along the lines of &quot;if the newly formed entity presents a semantic shift, it's a new word&quot;. But there are many phrases with important semantic shifts that are not considered a single word like &quot;beating a dead horse&quot; and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also observed that some compound words in Turkish (I couldn't think of English examples but I'm sure they exist) present certain phonetic, prosodic or morphological changes compared to their phrasal origins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;pazar ertesi&quot; (&quot;after Sunday&quot;) -&amp;gt; &quot;pazartesi&quot; (Monday)&#xA;[sound change]&#xA;&#xA;&quot;açık göz&quot; (&quot;open eye(d)&quot;) -&amp;gt; &quot;açıkgöz&quot; (shrewd)&#xA;[stress shifts to the last syllable as if it's a single word]&#xA;&#xA;&quot;ayak kabı&quot; (&quot;foot cover&quot;) -&amp;gt; &quot;ayakkabı&quot; (shoe)&#xA;[if one adds a suffix that starts with a vowel, it takes an epenthetic &quot;y&quot;&#xA;instead of a &quot;s&quot;, the expected one if it was two words]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, these changes prove that, in the minds of the speakers the newly formed entities became new words; they behave like a single word instead of a phrase. So I can understand why they are considered compounds instead of phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any objective definition that separates a compound word from a phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T14:19:05.143" Title="Is there an objective definition of compound words?" Tags="&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8953" CreationDate="2014-09-08T13:59:53.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the English spelling of compounds is to a large degree arbitrary, but I also think there is an objectifiable distinction between compounds and phrases, at least in Indo-European languages. In languages like Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German nominal compounds can be recognised from the fact that the first member is normally uninflected, e.g. magnanimus as opposed to magnus animus, or Großstadt vs große Stadt. As in many other languages, in English compounds generally have only one stress. There is thus a difference between a gréenhouse and a gréen hóuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T13:59:53.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8953" CreationDate="2014-09-08T14:19:05.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is none. People usually assume a continuum between complex words (transparent complex meaning, but compositional) and multi-word expressions (collocations that have idiosyncratic [non-compositional] meaning). Compounds are somewhere in between. For a very recent Workshop on the topic see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~vhenrich/cclcc_2014/presentations/CCLCC-2014_Hinrichs-Henrich_introduction_to_the_worhshop.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;these slides&quot;&gt;these slides by Hinrichs and Henrich&lt;/a&gt; that give a broad exposition and references. The seminal work cited on compounds is usually Bauer 1983.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and by the way: English compounds do not &quot;generally have only one stress&quot;, as claimed by fdb. See recent papers by Melanie Bell, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Assigning prosodic prominence in the English 'noun-noun'&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T14:19:05.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-08T15:38:45.207" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Bertrand Russell's &lt;em&gt;Analysis of Mind&lt;/em&gt;, after he gave only a few examples, he wrote &quot;But it is unnecessary to prolong the catalogue of the uses of language in thought.&quot; At the height of excitement, I was hugely disappointed by this abrupt end. Now I'd like to create exactly such a catalogue. Please don't hesitate to post anything that comes to your mind. Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3037" LastEditorUserId="3037" LastEditDate="2014-09-08T17:36:10.857" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T23:31:07.533" Title="What are the uses of language in thought?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-09-09T11:43:45.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8956" CreationDate="2014-09-08T17:42:34.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is Russell's list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The advantages of words for purposes of thought are so great that I&#xA;  should never end if I were to enumerate them. But a few of them&#xA;  deserve to be mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first place, there is no difficulty in producing a word,&#xA;  whereas an image cannot always be brought into existence at will, and&#xA;  when it comes it often contains much irrelevant detail. In the second&#xA;  place, much of our thinking is concerned with abstract matters which&#xA;  do not readily lend themselves to imagery, and are apt to be falsely&#xA;  conceived if we insist upon finding images that may be supposed to&#xA;  represent them. The word is always concrete and sensible, however&#xA;  abstract its meaning may be, and thus by the help of words we are able&#xA;  to dwell on abstractions in a way which would otherwise be impossible.&#xA;  In the third place, two instances of the same word are so similar that&#xA;  neither has associations not capable of being shared by the other. Two&#xA;  instances of the word &quot;dog&quot; are much more alike than (say) a pug and a&#xA;  great dane; hence the word &quot;dog&quot; makes it much easier to think about&#xA;  dogs in general. When a number of objects have a common property which&#xA;  is important but not obvious, the invention of a name for the common&#xA;  property helps us to remember it and to think of the whole set of&#xA;  objects that possess it. But it is unnecessary to prolong the&#xA;  catalogue of the uses of language in thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russell, Bertrand. &lt;em&gt;The Analysis of Mind&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2529/2529-h/2529-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2529/2529-h/2529-h.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3037" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T17:42:34.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8956" CreationDate="2014-09-08T22:59:44.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I did not read Bertrand Russell's &lt;em&gt;Analysis of Mind&lt;/em&gt; but two things come to my minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only a word may stand for an abstract or complex concept, but it helps us to develop on these concepts, building again more elaborated concepts that would have been inaccessible to our mind otherwise. I believe that the history of human thought is written like this. How to even think about republic without the concept of democracy, vote or individualism. Sometimes, taking a closer look at this concepts, that we take for granted and are the foundation of what we believe, can revolutionized our vision of the world. Simply because behind these words there was something more complex than we were assuming so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time I believe that unfortunate associations have also a great place in the history of thought. Mixed semantic, errors, misinterpretation or translation can open our mind to new perspectives. They can lead to complex theory, good or bad. &quot;Race&quot; is an example of how a fuzzy concept based on only one or maybe few unclear human phenotype can lead to a considerable amount of thought production. I think &quot;consciousness&quot; is another of this term that produced some of the most interesting thought without anybody beeing really sure what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="996" LastEditorUserId="996" LastEditDate="2014-09-08T23:31:07.533" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T23:31:07.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8956" CreationDate="2014-09-08T23:24:40.747" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words can be used for typographical conveniences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Theoretically, it is unnecessary ever to give a definition ... the&#xA;  definitions are no part of our subject, but are, strictly speaking,&#xA;  mere typographical conveniences. Practically, of course, if we&#xA;  introduced no definitions, our formulae would very soon become so&#xA;  lengthy as to be unmanageable; but theoretically, all definitions are&#xA;  superfluous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words can embody our choice of consideration and express notable advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, a definition usually implies that the definiens is worthy of&#xA;  careful consideration. Hence the collection of definitions embodies&#xA;  our choice of subjects and our judgment as to what is most important.&#xA;  Secondly, when what is defined is (as often occurs) something already&#xA;  familar, such as cardinal or ordinal numbers, the definition contains&#xA;  an analysis of a common idea, and may therefore express a notable&#xA;  advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whitehead &amp;amp; Russell. Principia Mathematica. Chapter 1. Page 12, Merchant Books, 1910&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3037" LastActivityDate="2014-09-08T23:24:40.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7124" CreationDate="2014-09-09T06:07:21.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no mechanical way to determine the communicative intent of a sentence with 100% certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things like word order, word choice, intonation, punctuation, etc. will help but all sentences are used within a broader communicative context to achieve various speech acts. Sometimes, these are clearly signalled. Other times, they require a complex human understanding of the situation in order to be able to fully parse what's going on. And, remember, often, even humans misunderstand each other. How often do you hear people answer rhetorical questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the simple 'How are you?' Most often, it is used as part of a greeting and it does not require an answer. But very often it does. But speakers may have to elaborate. 'I really mean it.', etc. Or people will follow up a question with - 'This is a rhetorical question.' You will even hear things like 'This is a rhetorical question but I'm going to answer it anyway.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T06:07:21.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8949" CreationDate="2014-09-09T06:23:19.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantics (and to a certain extent cognitive or even social psychology) studies the sort of thing you're after. But nobody (I know of) would formulate the problem in this way. An ancient school of Buddhist semantics (the name of which eludes me) postulated that the meaning of a word was everything that it wasn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the whole idea of meaning being the kind of definition that you would find in the dictionary has been completely rejected by many in semantics. It's still a useful shortcut to say things like 'a word means something' or 'a word has a meaning' but nobody would think of meaning as an unproblematic thing, any more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning is best described as a process which has a linguistic, cognitive (psychological) and social dimension. Words and phrases trigger certain ideas, images, frames, etc. which blend with others as well as the context. The way this happens depends on the language, the speakers knowledge and also the shared knowledge of a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in effect, we don't have a personal definition of a word in our head. We have a complex network of uses, images, propositions, etc. associated with the word. A definition such as the one you listed is simply another way of using the word in context. It is a product of social interaction and an expression of our metacognitive ability (ability to reflect on our speech and cognition), not the actual meaning or a description of that meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a linguistic perspective, it is important to think of dictionaries as just another text (albeit one with metalinguistic aims) and not a template for some sort of a mental lexicon. That does not mean a dictionaries or word definitions are not useful (or even indispensable tools). They are. But they must not be confused for anything more fundamental than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T06:23:19.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8965" CreationDate="2014-09-09T07:51:08.203" Score="4" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14467&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; blog post suggests a rather interesting concept of writer/reader -responsible languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this quote expresses the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English is a &lt;strong&gt;writer-responsible language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That means it is the responsibility of the writer to make sure the message is understood. Writing is clear, direct and unambiguous. Schools teach from early on the importance of  structure, thesis statement and topic sentences when writing in English.  A good writer assumes no or little background knowledge on the part of the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are &lt;strong&gt;reader-responsible languages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That means the reader is responsible for deciphering the message, which is often not stated explicitly. For an American who is expecting direct and explicit information, this style can be very confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussing it &lt;a href=&quot;http://ivan-gandhi.livejournal.com/2878169.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here (mostly in Russian)&lt;/a&gt;, I suggested that the distinction is very close to the distinction between &lt;strong&gt;synthetic versus analytic&lt;/strong&gt; languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Indeed, in synthetic languages the speaker/writer is responsible for building the phrase by using morphemes in proper inflections, using correct particles, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;OTOH, in analytic languages, the relationship between the morphemes are often retrieved by the reader by using context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no credible proofs, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how well the distinction between writer-responsible and reader-responsible languages matches the distinction between synthetic and analytic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T11:31:21.533" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T11:31:21.533" Title="How is &quot;Writer/reader-responsible language&quot; correlated with synthetic/analytic languages?" Tags="&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-09T09:46:48.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most Indo-European languages the forms of the verb &quot;to be&quot; had developed from at least two stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bheua̯ti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;develops into, becomes&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯esti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;is&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T09:46:48.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-09T16:23:24.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese has three verbs which correspond to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;imasu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be located&quot; (of animates)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;arimasu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be located&quot; (of inanimates); also &quot;exist&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;desu&lt;/em&gt;  &quot;be identified as&quot;; &quot;have some property&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T16:23:24.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8962" CreationDate="2014-09-09T21:56:19.417" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the blog post itself concludes, reader/writer responsibility is really a property of the culture, rather than language. This is right in that the idea is simply a rephrasing of Geert Hofstede's high/low context cultures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This in itself is problematic because all language and culture requires context. Languages and cultures simply differ in what context they use when for what. That's why things like irony are often impossible to translate because they are context specific. That applies even within language/culture. For instance, if I call someone 'a proper genius' you won't know if I'm being ironic, unless you also know if that person is considered clever or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why there's no point in looking for a link between analytic and synthetic languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that when you see a name written on a wall in Czech, you know if I'm talking to the person, about the person, or giving something to the person simply from the form. But that still does not vacate the need for context. Plus it's certainly not how any language is primarily used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it's important to talk about the role of context but this is not a very fruitful generalisation. Hofstede's distinction actually makes sense in the context of business negotiations and office politics (he conducted his research on IBM's employees around the world) but not universally and certainly not when it comes to the classification of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-09T21:56:19.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-09T23:11:42.947" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese has a strange coincidence in the preterit perfect tense of the verbs &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; (to go) and &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; (to be): they are conjugated exactly equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portuguese — English to go | English to be&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eu fui — I went | was&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tu foste — You (singular) went | were&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ele/Ela foi — He/She went | was&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nós fomos — We went | were&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vós fostes — You (formal / plural (outdated)) went | were&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eles/Elas foram — They (masculine/feminine) went | were&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of this verb conjugation convergence phenomenon? Do you know more examples of it occurring in any language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="5146" LastEditDate="2014-09-10T19:00:05.587" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T17:09:13.560" Title="Verb conjugation convergence" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8966" CreationDate="2014-09-10T03:03:31.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corbett calls this (in Spanish) &lt;strong&gt;overlapping suppletion&lt;/strong&gt; in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/suppletion-Lg-PREPRINT.pdf&quot;&gt;2007 paper&lt;/a&gt; in Language. Stump is credited with the term &lt;strong&gt;heteroclisis&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://webilc.ilc.cnr.it/~pirrelli/ESF_workshop/materiali/maiden/fulltext.pdf&quot;&gt;Maiden (2009)&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T03:03:31.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T15:49:40.503" Score="2" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martinet's &quot;double articulation of language&quot;: With phonemes we build morphemes, and with morphemes, words.  I'd like to get a sense of how productive are these combinations: With only a few phonemes we can build more than X morphemes, and with those people have built more than Y words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to count phonemes, and languages seem to range from ~13 to ~112.  &quot;Words&quot; (lexemes) are fuzzy things, but we can get an easy rough estimate from dictionaries (more than 150k in the OED).  So from the first level to the third we jump 3 to 4 orders of magnitude.  But what about morphemes? What's a typical number of morphemes in a speaker's lexicon? (I'm not sure if we can use Chinese characters as a good representation of the set of morphemes, but if so it would suggest the low ten-thousands…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T06:26:25.570" Title="Is there an estimate for the typical number of morphemes in natural language?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T20:34:44.333" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, a deictic particle -ī can be attached to demonstratives to strengthen the &quot;this here&quot; meaning: e.g. houtos &quot;this one&quot;, houtosī &quot;this one right here&quot;. What is the origin of this -ī?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indo-European has the so-called &quot;hic et nunc &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which appears in the present verb endings and in other places, but this &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; is short while the Greek &lt;em&gt;ī&lt;/em&gt; is long, so equating the two isn't straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T20:34:44.333" Title="Etymology of Ancient Greek deictic -ī" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-10T21:46:35.403" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In IPA a consonant can have different places of articulation such as Bilabial, Labio-dental, Dental etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to create a IPA chart that doesn't take much space. For that purposes the words are too long. Instead of using words, I would like to describe the places of articulation of the IPA characters with symbols. Is there an existing set of symbols for the places of articulation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2549" LastEditDate="2014-09-10T22:26:26.163" LastActivityDate="2014-09-10T22:26:26.163" Title="Symbols for IPA categories" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8974" CreationDate="2014-09-11T02:30:31.257" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made accounts on some forums that seem quite lackluster. Quora can be fun, but it's not really enough. Reddit fails in this regard. I would love to find a forum for discussion that I can look forward to visiting on a daily basis. It can be a community/sub-forum of a larger scientific site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an undergraduate in Linguistics interested in the cognitive sciences, generally speaking. I'd like to learn and discuss with spirited members of the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LinguistList has a selection of attractive mailing lists but not many of them fit the bill of active and relevant to my interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on attending the LSI next Summer at UChicago. My objective is to get as involved and engaged with others in the field as possible, as I am currently located at a small liberal arts school with very few colleagues in linguistics – mostly working in a self-guided study format (tutorials and small, niche classes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance! Perhaps, as a result of this inquiry, I will have the opportunity of joining some exciting discussions with some of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5048" LastEditorUserId="5048" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T02:48:20.363" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T06:41:34.993" Title="What are some alternative communities/forums that are home to engaged linguists?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-09-27T13:28:41.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T06:16:42.630" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to do a research about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedure_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prowords&lt;/a&gt; - procedure words - those are used in army to communicate. In what field of linguistics I will find the study about procedure words? Is it in morphology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5166" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:49:00.803" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:49:00.803" Title="The study of Procedure Words" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;study-of-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8968" CreationDate="2014-09-11T06:26:25.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of a morpheme is that it is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Morphemes do constitute words but they also include root words. Therefore there's no point in trying to enumerate them in a single language let alone across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could enumerate things like inflectional or derivational morphemes which would are always very limited inventories but that would not really help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the double articulation thesis is that you have a system of articulation meaning (morphemes, words, sentences, texts) that is built upon a system of articulation without meaning (phonemes, syllables, etc.). It is not intended to support a separate thesis about the productivity of language associated with Chomsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing to remember is that although strictly speaking morphemes are built out of phonemes, phonemes actually don't combine into morphemes. They combine into syllables which do not have a straightforward relationship with morphemes (a morpheme can consist of two syllables, e.g. 'simple' but one syllable can also represent two morphemes, e.g. 'runs'). Syllables then combine into metric/intonational units which again do not always map straightforwardly onto words, phrases, clauses and sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T06:26:25.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8971" CreationDate="2014-09-11T06:41:34.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would start with building a collection of linguistics blogs you follow and engage in discussions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the comment threads on Language Log &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/&lt;/a&gt; are frequently very productive, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Reddit is a bit free wheeling, it's also not a bad place: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistics tag on Tumblr &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/linguistics&lt;/a&gt; also often has items that generate discussion. Start Tumbling and you may soon find yourself engaged in discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about LinguistList is that it is a collection of mailing lists. Most lists are for specific subfields and you have to find one in which you are interested.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/lists/get-lists.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://linguistlist.org/lists/get-lists.cfm&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T06:41:34.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T11:58:49.513" Score="1" ViewCount="573" Body="&lt;p&gt;About a month ago I began studying Korean and I am now at a stage where I have some familiarity with the writing system and the phonology.  A native speaker is available to me, and while she tells me my pronunciation is reasonably good for a beginning student, I still feel unable to reproduce the affricates ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ and their voiced allophones.  Neither my language helper nor I have any formal linguistic training, and our attempts to figure out how she makes these sounds have been fairly unfruitful.  I consulted several instruction manuals but they have have not exactly been able to sort out my confusion.  See for yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Speaking Korean&lt;/em&gt; by Francis Y. T. Park: &quot;This sound is an unaspirated lamino-alveolar affricate&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Introductory Course in Korean&lt;/em&gt; by Fred Lukoff says they are dental&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Historical, Literary and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language&lt;/em&gt; by Alexander Arguelles says they are palatal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lehrbuch der modernen koreanischen Sprache&lt;/em&gt; by Wilfried Herrmann says they are alveolar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably noticed every author suggests a different place articulation.  I am especially stunned by the coverage.  If I look hard enough, will I find a work that claims they are velar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone make sense of this and especially reveal the true place of articulation to us?  Are there dialectal or diachronic differences at play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5150" LastEditorUserId="5150" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T12:04:38.133" LastActivityDate="2014-10-12T12:44:14.540" Title="The true place of articulation of Korean affricates" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T12:58:52.850" Score="0" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question arose when I wrote this sentence -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John was crying for who/whom he lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now while writing I got confused whether to use &quot;whom&quot; or &quot;who&quot;. I know there is no problem if we use &quot;whom&quot; here. But I was curious to know if &quot;who&quot; is also possible or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After giving some thought I came to this conclusion that &quot;who&quot; is also right. I am writing my thought below behind coming to this decision. &lt;strong&gt;You have to answer whether my decision and the thought process behind coming to this decision is both right.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thought process -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John was crying for [who/whom he lost]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as I know &quot;whom&quot; is already right option, I will consider only &quot;who&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John was crying for [who he lost]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The portion &lt;em&gt;who he lost&lt;/em&gt; is a dependent clause. And the &quot;who&quot; from this dependent clause has nothing to do with the &quot;for&quot; that comes before this clause, so there is no chance to read [for who]. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.B&lt;/strong&gt; - I have asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/62272?noredirect=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, though a different way in ELL forum, but as I have not got enough satisfied answer or any answer that deals with the grammar that I seek, I decided to ask this question here again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T13:59:47.103" Title="Who and whom confusion for this sentence?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2014-09-11T15:46:17.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8976" CreationDate="2014-09-11T13:49:58.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasoning in the question is both right and wrong. First, however, here is a guideline for using &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always use &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; except when &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; immediately follows a preposition. In such a case, &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; sounds better. The following variants are therefore most acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. the one who he is waiting for&#xA;&#xA; b. the one for whom he is waiting&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following variants are stilted or odd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; c. ?the one whom he is waiting for&#xA;&#xA; d. ?the one for who he is waiting&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving on to your reasoning, it is, as stated, both right and wrong. It is right insofar as the pronoun &lt;em&gt;who/whom&lt;/em&gt; belongs to the subordinate clause &lt;em&gt;who/whom he lost&lt;/em&gt;, but it is wrong insofar as it also belongs to the matrix clause; it is the object of the preposition &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example involves what is known as a &lt;em&gt;free relative clause&lt;/em&gt;. The root of a free relative clause is the pronoun. This pronoun has a dual function. It is both part of the matrix clause as well as part of the subordinate clause. Here are some more examples of free relative clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) I like WHAT he said.&#xA;&#xA;(2) WHAT she did was stupid.&#xA;&#xA;(3) They will support WHOEVER she chooses.&#xA;&#xA;(4) She depends on WHATEVER he does. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words in caps are the relative pronouns. These pronouns serve in both of the clauses, the matrix clause and a subordinate clause. Note that the pronouns of free relative clauses are often marked with &lt;em&gt;-ever&lt;/em&gt;. In this regard, the example sentence produced sounds better to me if &lt;em&gt;-ever&lt;/em&gt; is added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; John is crying for whoever/whomever he lost. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even this sentence does not sound so good to me. I prefer the following formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; John is crying for the one he lost, whoever that was.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This formulation avoids the problem concerning the correct form, &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;. The grammar of English has many gray zones, just as the grammar of any language does. Being a good writer involves knowing how to use alternative formulations to avoid the gray areas, and knowing how to deliberately access the gray areas to create a certain effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T13:59:47.103" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T13:59:47.103" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T14:12:12.910" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides English, is there any other language where the 2nd person singular converges with the second person plural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is there any other language where the informal singular 2nd person converges with the formal one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T14:58:14.890" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T23:30:20.737" Title="2nd person convergence in other languages than English" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T14:30:06.157" Score="4" ViewCount="1948" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin was a language which predominant order was Subject-Object-Verb, as in the example proverb &lt;em&gt;Errare Humanum Est&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why all its modern descendents are predominantly Subject-Verb-Object order? Or are there some that I don't which order is not that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can assert the SVO order on Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian, which are the most represented in Europe. May be there is some not so popular language that is not SVO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-09-11T14:43:04.657" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T12:05:08.607" Title="Why are Latin descendants SVO?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;sov&gt;&lt;svo&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7152" CreationDate="2014-09-11T15:37:13.800" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;this may help, there are many connections(not sure about the german one though, could have been done at the time of the crusades?), as we have been traditionally taught, the words in the Quraan rooted from the Arabic/Semitic Fa-La-Ha, i dont know its dual-roots, but here is a site i found with many reference most seem legit and accepted by Arabic scholars as well as Muslims scholars &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memidex.com/fellahin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.memidex.com/fellahin&lt;/a&gt;, anyways the connection to success is a bit obvious if you understand Islamic or Arab philosophy  or even Sufism. Tilling the land for farming is how we use it, but farming takes steps stages, so example Allah has used it in Quraan Chapter 23 Verse 21 word No2 as aflaḥa, its a Verb in 3rd person masculine by gender singular form IV perfect(past) verb, know in Arabic the morphology &#xA;is in form 4/IV which tends to means it makes intransitive verbs transitive, and transitive verbs doubly so.&#xA;a verb is this form has the meaning of, he made himself do or perform an action. A reflexive causative, i.e. he made himself do something transformative to a place or a state. also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://quran.com/23/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://quran.com/23/1&lt;/a&gt; tick all translations to compare and you'll see the basic idea&#xA;So i hope this clears up the connection of Success and Farming, basically Fa-la-Ha means to go through a process to achieve in a given field, traditionally farming. so its kind of a root used in context of success, prospering, but it is used when the success is based on a systematic process in the connect above its been used in the past/perfect sense it has been completed it is so. hope this helps&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5167" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T15:37:13.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3365" CreationDate="2014-09-11T15:45:53.507" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that it came from the old Arabic alphabet, not taught because it is hard to change the order we know now. &lt;em&gt;Abjad&lt;/em&gt; related to the numerical/mathematical science of Arabic, where letters have numbers assigned to them. Yes, this is all rooted from proto-Semitic or Phoenician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with arjan: the scholars quoted are quite unbiased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5167" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T14:48:56.640" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T14:48:56.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T18:32:03.247" Score="2" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/matt-goldrick/blankensee-clarkgoldrickkonopka06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Change as a Source of Word Order Correlations&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Brady Clark, Matthew Goldrick, and Kenneth Konopka, is among the many sources dating back to Greenberg (1966) stating that language learners prefer a consistent branching order over an inconsistent one. For example, OVAux (object-main verb-auxiliary verb) constituent order and its opposite (AuxVO) are more common than &quot;brace&quot; orders such as AuxOV (German). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consistent branching with the verb phrase as the head of the sentence would predict VSO or VOS. Yet SVO is about as common as the apparently more consistent SOV, despite nouns coming on both sides of the verb. SVO looks superficially like a &quot;brace&quot; order rather than consistently left-branching or right-branching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what makes the subject an exception to this consistency? Or in SVO, is the noun the head of the sentence in the sense that Aux is the head of the verb and the verb the head of the object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-09-12T14:56:56.957" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T14:56:56.957" Title="Why is less consistent SVO more common than VSO or VOS?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;vso&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1376" CreationDate="2014-09-11T18:40:53.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Krivoshein de Canese and Acosta Alcaraz' (2007:102) &quot;Gramática Guarani&quot; gives as &quot;comparativo the inferioridad&quot; ('inferiority comparative') the affix -ive, which attaches to the standard of comparison NP. Their example is &quot;Susana omba'apo'ive Anagui&quot; meaning 'Susana works less than Ana'. However, -i is a diminutive, and -ve is the comparative of superiority so... it seems that the meaning of inferiority is obtained compositionally from the superiority comparative...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3355" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T18:40:53.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-11T23:07:32.173" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese it occurs a phenomenon of &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; word repetition. The first &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; is translated to English as &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, and the second is the reflexive pronoun of the singular 3rd person, as the last word of the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He washes himself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She washes herself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It washes itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portuguese phrase — Literal English translation — English meaning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Se se investir em ouro, a empresa ganha dinheiro — If itself invest in gold, the company earns money — If we invest in gold, the company earns money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evitar apertos de mão, mesmo se se trata de mãos lavadas — Avoid handshakes, even if itself treats about washed hands — Avoid handshakes, even if it is about washed hands&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of this phenomenon? Does it occur in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T23:17:22.147" Title="&quot;se se&quot; in Portuguese" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8984" CreationDate="2014-09-11T23:17:22.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a case of two or more homonyms (or homographs) accidentally occurring next to each other. I do not think there is a name for it, but it occurs in all languages and is quite banal. An English example: THE POLISH POLISH POLISH BOOTS WITH POLISH POLISH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-11T23:17:22.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-12T06:18:15.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Anixx already wrote - the origin of &quot;be&quot;-verbs in nearly all Indo-European languages is multi-rooted. I came across some account of the problem in Leon Stassen, Intransitive Predication, p.97-100&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3173" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T06:18:15.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8975" CreationDate="2014-09-12T11:58:51.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll find claims that Korean coronal consonants are velar! This is unlike for example Mandarin Chinese's j- q- x- range [as transcribed in Hanyu Pinyin], which diachronically was a merger of a velar and an alveolar series in front of high front vowels. In standard Chinese though, this would never be realised as anything resembling the velar series k-, g-, h-. This points to one possible reason for the apparent confusion: should ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ range be &lt;em&gt;phonologically&lt;/em&gt; labelled &quot;palatal&quot;, &quot;palato-alveolar&quot;, or even &quot;alveolar&quot;. The &quot;fundamental&quot; nature of these phonemes has been under great debate, and so even the IPA symbols used to transcribe the phoneme vary widely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the basis is to do with palatalisation, introduced to students of beignner's Korean with ㅅ and ㅆ in front of Korean's high front vowel ㅣ (and of course in the iotated vowels / before the yod glide). However, palatalisation after ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ  is way weaker than for ㅅ, ㅆ e.g. 저 and 져 are much more similar to each other than 서 and 셔 (indeed, for some speakers the former pair are pronounced the same). For &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dibrary.net/search/dibrary/SearchDetail.nl?category_code=ct&amp;amp;service=KOLIS&amp;amp;vdkvgwkey=23415761&amp;amp;colltype=YON_ART&amp;amp;place_code_info=132&amp;amp;place_name_info=%EC%97%B0%EC%86%8D%EA%B0%84%ED%96%89%EB%AC%BC%EC%8B%A4(3%EC%B8%B5)&amp;amp;manage_code=MA&amp;amp;shape_code=B#abstracts_view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt;, this indicates a palatal nature to the phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diachronically, it's actually the ㅅ, ㅆ range that changed though. In Late Middle Korean of the 17th century, palatalisation stopped being contrastive after sibilants, including ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ. Hence you see both 사람 and 샤람. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yoonjungkang.com/uploads/1/1/6/2/11625099/kang_2010_phonology.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This 2012 paper&lt;/a&gt; states that Korean dictionaries for French speakers published at the end of the 19th century explicitly state this fact. As English loanwords were adopted into the Korean language, both /s/ and /ʃ/ were transcribed unsystematically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently though, before back vowels /ʃ/ ended up getting a lot more iotation than before front vowels. This would seem to imply that a contrast between 셔 corresponding to English /ʃʌ/ and 서 from English /sʌ/ started to emerge (and the same for ㅜ /u/). Interestingly though, before front vowels, the vowel ㅜ is often added, e.g. 쉘 for &lt;em&gt;Shell&lt;/em&gt; and 가쉽 for &lt;em&gt;gossip&lt;/em&gt; - an effect of the phonological restriction in Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ this wasn't replicated, and as standard rules were laid down for Korean transcription, iotation was more or less officially disallowed. As palatalisation was not all that contrastive (and not phonological, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447011000684&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;according to this 2011 paper&lt;/a&gt;), it has also therefore not been consistent, and the extent and notability of the palatalisation has been debated quite a lot. Hence we see the inconsistency across different descriptions. All-in-all, I think it's just down to the field of Korean linguistics having developed and matured later than for English or French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a phonetic account, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/84160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2004 study using stroboscopic-cine MRI from Phonetica&lt;/a&gt; says it's an alveolar place of articulation with a laminal tongue shape. A relatively detailed &quot;user's&quot; account of the articulation is found in the 2012 book &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XMYgAwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Sounds of Korean&lt;/a&gt; on p.77. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T11:58:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2014-09-12T12:30:09.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a superstition to think that all languages are predominantly SOV, SVO, VSO or some other combination of these hieroglyphs. This is not true of Latin, and certainly not true of ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit or Avestan, where the word order is almost completely free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As TKR has very rightly pointed out, the “proverb” “errare humanum est” is not an example of SOV because humanum is not an object but a predicate adjective. By the way, this “famous proverb” is not actually quoted by any ancient author; the oldest attested version of it is in St Augustine of Hippo, who in fact wrote “humanum fuit errare”, so: predicate + verb + subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, I would actually agree that in the modern Romance languages the usual sequence is SVO. In cases like “je t’aime” one could argue that “t(e)” is not a direct object but part of the verb complex; it is not a word in its own right. We also say things like “Toi je t’aime”, which you might want to analyse as OSOV, though I would analyse it as topic + (clitic+clitic+verb). Neither “je” nor “te” can be used as an isolated statement in French. The response to the question “Whom do you love?” is not “te” but “toi”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-09-12T15:43:04.120" LastActivityDate="2014-09-12T15:43:04.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-12T19:00:12.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese I don't think there's a direct equivalent of to be in English, but there are some words to describe the meanings like @bytebuster said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an object x is a part of set X: &lt;em&gt;là&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;đây &lt;strong&gt;là&lt;/strong&gt; quả táo&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (this is an apple);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an object x has property of y: &lt;em&gt;thì&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;cái hộp &lt;strong&gt;thì&lt;/strong&gt; đỏ&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (the box is red)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;located at: &lt;em&gt;ở&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;tôi đang &lt;strong&gt;ở&lt;/strong&gt; văn phòng&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (I am at the office);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to mean, e.g. &lt;em&gt;yêu là chết trong lòng một ít&lt;/em&gt; (a sentence in the famoust poem by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu%C3%A2n_Di%E1%BB%87u&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xuân Diệu&lt;/a&gt;) which can roughly be translated as &quot;to love is to die a little bit in the heart&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However &quot;thì&quot; may not be used very often, instead they are dropped completely, for example &quot;cái bánh này ngọt&quot; - &lt;em&gt;the cake is sweet&lt;/em&gt;, or &quot;trời lạnh&quot; - &lt;em&gt;it's cold&lt;/em&gt;, esp. when going with exclamation words like &quot;em đẹp lắm&quot; - &lt;em&gt;you're so beautiful!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T02:20:09.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T02:20:09.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6562" CreationDate="2014-09-13T01:22:37.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another GUI interface tool for annotation you can use is MAE (Multi-document Annotation Environment) written by Amber Stubbs.  It requires you to supply your own .DTD file (essentially .xml), which defines the possible annotation tags and links for the annotator.  It also allows the creation of non-consuming tags, which are for links that do not have any corresponding text / image in the annotated document, but are necessary to create to satisfy the annotation guidelines / specification.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MAE is designed specifically for linguistics undergraduates to perform annotation of documents.  It is written in Java and the source is openly available.  So if you need to tweak something, it can be done.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;google-code link to MAE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/mae-annotation/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FMAE%2Fbin%2Fmae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/p/mae-annotation/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FMAE%2Fbin%2Fmae&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T01:22:37.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9000" CreationDate="2014-09-13T10:41:10.447" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Predicative elements can also be adjuncts as in &lt;em&gt;He wrote most of his poetry &lt;b&gt;drunk&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: the contrast between predicative and ordinary (non-predicative) thus cuts across that between complements and adjuncts, though it has less grammatical significance in the case of adjuncts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (CGEL - The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p.217, footnote.3.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are like  hieroglyphics for me that need to be decoded. Can you decode?&#xA;This is my vague understanding or misunderstanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between predicative [=‘&lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt;’, predicative adjunct in the example] and ordinary [=other adjunct, for example ‘&lt;em&gt;when he was drunk&lt;/em&gt;’ in ‘&lt;em&gt;He wrote most of his poetry &lt;strong&gt;when he was drunk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.’] is contrary to the contrast between complements and adjuncts, though &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;(?) has less grammatical significance in the case of adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1728" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T06:30:05.643" Title="The contrast between predicative and ordinary" Tags="&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3636" CreationDate="2014-09-13T22:20:20.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The realisation of Tigrinya vowels, especially the 'sixth-row' vowel (marked as central in your table) differs and depends on the environment.&#xA;Please do contact me though if you're still learning Tigrinya, let's share resources for this under-documented languages. cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1605" LastActivityDate="2014-09-13T22:20:20.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2014-09-14T00:28:30.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean has two verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ida something has a characteristics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;issda, to exist, to be in a location for people and objects (negated by eopsda, to be absent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives are verbs in their own right, so the phrase &quot;A is blue&quot; will contain a conjugation of adjective blue. They're called stative verbs, and can be thought of as containing both the adjective and the verb &quot;to be&quot;. Since adjectives are verbs, you can't put adjectives directly next to a noun but have to make a very short attributive clause (i.e. &quot;that-is-blue A&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5177" LastEditorUserId="5177" LastEditDate="2014-09-18T15:35:51.380" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T15:35:51.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-14T03:47:07.143" Score="1" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8912/what-is-the-scope-of-negation&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; concerning the scope of negation. I received helpful feedback from a number of linguists who frequent this forum. My efforts to discern the scope of negation continue, and in this regard, I have a new question that is related to my earlier one. However, this new question focuses only on the readings that are and are not available. I am concerned with three sentences. The first two of the three are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; A. Arthur does not discipline his children because he loves them.&#xA;&#xA; B. Because he loves them, Arthur does not discipline his children.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon the responses I received, it is safe to say that sentence A is ambiguous, but that sentence B lacks the ambiguity. The pertinent readings are paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Reading 1: 'The reason Arthur does not discipline his children is that he loves them.'&#xA;&#xA; Reading 2: 'Arthur disciplines his children, but not because he loves them (but &#xA;             because...).'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence A allows both of these readings, whereas sentence B allows only Reading 1. This much seems to be agreed upon by everyone who responded to my earlier question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon the data just presented, I hypothesized that the negation cannot scope backwards over an adjunct. I challenged the forum to provide a counterexample. Well, a colleague of mine has in fact produced a counterexample that (in my view) clearly contradicts my hypothesis. This counterexample is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; C. ...but discipline his children because he loves them, Arthur does not.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me and my colleague, this sentence allows the reading that has the negation scoping backwards over the cause (Reading 2). So based on this result, my earlier hypothesis can be discarded. However, there is an aspect of example C that is not clear for us: Is it ambiguous? If it is ambiguous, which readings are available? Is it ambiguous in the same way as sentence A? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My colleague and I agree that sentence C is ambiguous, but we disagree concerning the available readings. One of us believes that sentence C is ambiguous in the same way as sentence A (Reading 1 and Reading 2). The other believes that the ambiguity in sentence C is different than for sentence A (Reading 2 and Reading 3). The putative third reading is paraphrased roughly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Reading 3: 'Arthur does not discipline his children, though he does love them.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to restate my questions as clearly as possible: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is example C ambiguous?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is ambiguous, which readings are available (Reading 1, Reading 2, Reading 3, and/or perhaps some other reading)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a couple of days later after posting the question above, a new piece of evidence has been brought to my attention. This new evidence answers my question, I think, so I want to share it here. Observe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; D. ...but discipline his children because he loves them, Arthur does not because&#xA;    he's never at home. &#xA;&#xA; E. *Arthur does not discipline his children because he loves them because he's never&#xA;     at home. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the acceptability judgments here are accurate, they demonstrate that Reading 1 is not available for sentence C. Reading 1 interprets the subordinate clause &lt;em&gt;because he loves them&lt;/em&gt; as giving the cause of the the absence of punishment. In sentence D, however, the cause of the absence of punishment is the second &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;-clause, i.e. &lt;em&gt;because he's never at home&lt;/em&gt;.  Thus Reading 1 is incompatible with the addition of the second &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;-clause. Reading 3, in contrast, is quite compatible with the addition of the second &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;-clause. Conclusion: Sentence C is ambiguous, allowing Reading 2 and Reading 3, but it does not allow Reading 1. Here are further examples that illustrate the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; F. ...but go to bed because I was tired, I did not because I had to finish my paper.&#xA;&#xA; G. ...but open the window because she was hot, she did not because it was hotter&#xA;    outside.&#xA;&#xA; H. ...but pass the test because he had studied, Sam did not because the test was &#xA;    simply too difficult.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences are all incompatible with a reading along the lines of Reading 1. I'd appreciate any further comments concerning these additional data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T12:59:58.243" Title="What is the scope of negation (again)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;scope&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2014-09-14T05:09:55.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the confusion is due to the varied use of the terms &lt;em&gt;attribute (attributive)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;predicate (predicative)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt; (≈&lt;em&gt;complement&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt;. Depending on how one wants to use these four terms, one can cut the cake in various ways. One can, for instance, emphasize the distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Attributive vs. predicative&#xA; (1) The fat man is hungry. vs. The man is fat. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first sentence, &lt;em&gt;fat&lt;/em&gt; is an attributive adjective, and in the second sentence, &lt;em&gt;fat&lt;/em&gt; is a predicative adjective. The distinction here concerns whether the adjective at hand appears inside or outside of the noun phrase (NP) to which it assigns its property. An attributive adjective assigns its property to the noun phrase in which it appears (&lt;em&gt;the fat man&lt;/em&gt;), whereas a predicative adjective assigns its property to a &quot;subject&quot; expression in which it does not appear (&lt;em&gt;the man&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An orthogonal distinction is that between arguments and adjuncts, e.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Argument (≈complement) vs. adjunct&#xA; (2) Today was hot. vs. We left today. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first sentence, &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; is an argument (the subject argument), and in the second sentence, &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; is an adjunct (an adverb). Predicates (&lt;em&gt;was hot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt;) demand arguments (&lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; in the first sentence and &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; in the second sentence), whereas they allow adjuncts to appear (&lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; in the second sentence). The defining trait of an adjunct (as opposed to an argument) is that it is additional information that is not necessary to complete the meaning of the utterance; &lt;em&gt;We left&lt;/em&gt; alone is also an acceptable sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage in the question is referencing these two distinctions, although the use of terminology is indeed not so clear. The adjective &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt;, which the passage states is &quot;not ordinary&quot;, might be more accurately designated as &quot;not attributive&quot;. In the example sentence, i.e. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (3) He wrote most of his poetry drunk.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the adjective &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; is predicative (i.e. non-attributive) because it appears outside of the nominal expression to which it assigns its property (&lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;), and it is an adjunct insofar as it represents additional information that is not necessary to express a complete thought; the sentence &lt;em&gt;He wrote most of his poetry&lt;/em&gt; can appear without &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; (versus, for instance, just **He wrote*). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the big picture, there are significant differences from one grammarian to the next in the use of these terms. There is therefore some freedom for the student of grammar and linguistics to develop a nomenclature that best fits his or her own understanding of the phenomena at hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2014-09-14T06:30:05.643" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T06:30:05.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8999" CreationDate="2014-09-14T08:14:18.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that with sufficient framing, all three readings are possible (if not perhaps always straightforward):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arthur explains things to his children kindly because he loves them. But discipline his children because he loves them, Arthur does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should discipline your children out of love. Arthur beats his children out of frustration. But discipline his children because he loves them, Arthur does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this culture, you must discipline your children if you love them. Arthur coddles his children because he loves them. But discipline his children because he loves them, Arthur does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as fun as it is to ponder these things, I think it underscores a problem with the kind of linguistics that generates hypotheses that can be decided by acceptability of different sentences or their readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chomskean thesis that simply the views of competent native speakers are enough to adjudicate any sentence is problematic. For one, it makes the whole edifice of linguistics rest on a good night's sleep or a chance overhearing of a conversation. But more importantly it generates law-like hypotheses that impose order - similarly to physics - making language seem like an impersonal force (UG) within which we operate. But linguistics (if it must be like a science, at all) should be more like biology. Starting with a description of what is. It will establish some useful classifications but will ultimately focus on observation and documentation. What principles, it will find, it will formulate to assist itself and not the dictates of some external discipline (such as logic or computer programming).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we learn about language (as it is used by people) by either rejecting or supporting your hypothesis? I would much rather start with a question that asks: &amp;quot;What are the ways in which people negate things and what ambiguities arise in the process? How do different people deal with such ambiguities in different contexts? Are different people attuned differently to such ambiguities at different times? etc.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like these might come up given an exhaustive survey but they would not necessarily deal with these examples from the perspective of scope or directionality of negation but rather from the perspective of meaning construction and context. Native speaker intuitions (and introspection) would necessarily have to play a role but they would not be the primary driving force behind the creation of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-09-14T08:14:18.563" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-14T16:41:33.390" Score="4" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the grammatical variation that is found between prose writers in what is putatively a single dialect of Greek, Attic. Such variation exists on various levels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonology: e.g., some writers write -ττ-, others -σσ-; Thucydides writes ξύν where most writers prefer σύν.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphology: e.g., desideratives in -σέω are fairly productive in Thucydides, but not in most other writers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphosyntax: e.g., Xenophon has purpose clauses with ὅπως + fut. ind., where other writers tend to use the subjunctive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to identify such distinguishing features for the major Attic prose writers. I assume this has been done for different authors to different extents. Where would I find such information about specific writers (presumably some commentaries might discuss this, but which ones?), or even better, a comparative study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T04:59:26.450" Title="Grammatical variation between Attic Greek prose authors" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9003" CreationDate="2014-09-16T01:31:57.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a general introduction to the ways that Greek dialect and style interact over time, Geoffrey Horrock's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405134151.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Greek: a History of the Language and its Speakers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will have the best overall coverage.  A lighter (though still fairly technical) approach is in Leonard Palmer's &lt;em&gt;The Greek Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a website for an advanced course in Greek Rhetoric and Prose Style which could perhaps be organized better, but has a lot of good info: &lt;a href=&quot;http://greek701.ws.gc.cuny.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Greek 701&quot;&gt;Greek 701&lt;/a&gt;.  The links off the syllabus have the most information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5170" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-09-16T04:59:26.450" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T04:59:26.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-16T12:21:43.290" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know of any pronunciation or phonetics software that would be useful to ESL learners? I have read that software with spectrographs or xrays showing tongue placement are very effective. I am wondering if this, or similar software, could be used in a language lab setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2130" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T11:33:19.693" Title="Pronunciation software?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2014-09-16T14:39:11.660" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By observing Mycenaean (Linear B) words, we can assume that Greek never had geminate consonants. The system occurred as syllabic with all syllables open, i.e. ending in vowels. As the language evolved, phonetic changes such as consonantal assimilations, silence of some sounds (digamma, koppa etc.), syncopations and the application of suffixes after stems - among which geminate consonants - occurred, but also other clusters of 2 or 3 consonants, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3345" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T14:39:11.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9011" CreationDate="2014-09-16T14:40:55.767" Score="2" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the word &lt;strong&gt;Huawei&lt;/strong&gt; a pentaphtong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-09-16T14:58:22.320" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T17:13:01.850" Title="Is Huawei a pentaphtong?" Tags="&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-03-11T09:24:27.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9010" CreationDate="2014-09-16T16:29:04.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean 华为; unsimplified 華為; pinyin Huáwéi. This word consists of two syllables, with a diphthong in the first syllable and a triphthong in the second syllable; whatever-phthongs are always within the same syllable. So in this case 2 + 3 does not equal 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-09-16T17:13:01.850" LastActivityDate="2014-09-16T17:13:01.850" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T00:58:29.953" Score="5" ViewCount="862" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prototypical example of languages with unusual open and closed categories, which is mentioned almost every time that the topic comes up, is Japanese, where pronouns are an open category and verbs are more of a closed category (though here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://aveneca.com/cbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&amp;amp;t=3855&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some interesting discussion on this point&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to hear about more examples, not so much of languages with unusual closed category (as with &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2216&quot;&gt;other closed-verb languages&lt;/a&gt;, although it would be interesting if you can propose other languages with closed-class adjectives. Nahuatl, as I understand it, is one.) but &lt;strong&gt;about languages with unusual open classes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, I'd like to hear about languages with open classes that are more commonly closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T16:25:14.797" Title="Languages with different open and closed word classes" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9012" CreationDate="2014-09-17T06:02:10.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese has two adjectival word classes (see for an overview &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adjectives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One can be inflected, and members of this class can end in &lt;strong&gt;-i&lt;/strong&gt;, an inflectional suffix marking attribution (among other functions). These adjectives are often called &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;-adjectives (traditionally &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%A2%E5%AE%B9%E8%A9%9E#.E6.97.A5.E6.9C.AC.E8.AA.9E.E3.81.AE.E5.BD.A2.E5.AE.B9.E8.A9.9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;keiyooshi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Since they can be inflected, and thus appear as a clause head, they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;valency&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second class takes &lt;strong&gt;-na&lt;/strong&gt; in attributive position, and they cannot be inflected. These adjectives are often called &lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/strong&gt;-adjectives, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_%28Japanese%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;adjectival nouns&lt;/a&gt; (traditionally &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%A2%E5%AE%B9%E5%8B%95%E8%A9%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;keiyoodooshi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The i-adjectives are a closed class, and the na-adjectives are open. Only very rarely does it happen that a new member is included into the i-adjectives. One example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/256776/m0u/%E3%81%8D%E3%82%82%E3%81%84/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kimo-i&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; kimo-i &amp;lt; kimochi yo  -ku   na -i&#xA;          feeling good-adv  neg-npst  &#xA;          'makes someone feel bad'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The i-adjectives being the closed adjectival class in Japanese is also reflected by the relatively low number of basic members, about 130.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-09-17T06:02:10.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T06:13:12.140" Score="1" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a linguist, I have a good idea of what linguistic properties of a sound can be: be they describable in terms of distinctive features or whatever. But what, then, are spectral properties? It's not clear to me if they are distinct from or partially overlapping with linguistic properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T14:38:43.387" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T15:03:45.007" Title="How are &quot;spectral properties&quot; distinct from &quot;linguistic properties&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-17T12:13:51.827" Score="18" ViewCount="2395" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often said that Japanese doesn't really have a pronoun word class, such as in the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Pronouns&quot;&gt;Japanese Grammar&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although many grammars and textbooks mention pronouns (代名詞 &lt;em&gt;daimeishi&lt;/em&gt;), Japanese lacks true pronouns. (&lt;em&gt;Daimeishi&lt;/em&gt; can be considered a subset of nouns.) Strictly speaking, pronouns do not take modifiers, but Japanese &lt;em&gt;daimeishi&lt;/em&gt; do: 背の高い彼 &lt;em&gt;se no takai kare&lt;/em&gt; (lit. tall he) is valid in Japanese. Also, unlike true pronouns, Japanese &lt;em&gt;daimeishi&lt;/em&gt; are not closed-class: new &lt;em&gt;daimeishi&lt;/em&gt; are introduced and old ones go out of use relatively quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is also often said that Japanese does have pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What arguments are used to answer this question? Does it stem from a lack of agreement over how to define a pronoun? If so, under which definitions does Japanese have and not have pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-17T14:37:59.730" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T19:31:26.070" Title="Does Japanese have pronouns?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8978" CreationDate="2014-09-17T12:36:24.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happened to Dutch much longer ago than in English. The original Germanic 2nd person singular pronoun is no longer recognised as a Dutch word, unlike &quot;thou&quot; in English which is still recognised as an archaism. The word &quot;du&quot; got replaced by the plural form &quot;gi&quot; (later &quot;gij&quot;) in Middle Dutch, as it was polite to use the plural form. This politeness eventually spread, replacing &quot;du&quot; entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Gij&quot; developed into &quot;jij&quot; in standard Dutch and the old form &quot;gij&quot; is now recognised as an archaism and regarded as the Dutch counterpart of the English &quot;thou&quot;. At that time the 2nd person singular and plural were the same, just like the current situation with English &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation didn't remain stable, however, as people started to say &quot;je lieden&quot; (meaning &quot;you people&quot;) for the plural meaning. This developed into the current 2nd person plural, which is &quot;jullie&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dutch language also gained a new polite 2nd personal pronoun. People started using &quot;uwe edelheid&quot; (&quot;your nobility&quot;) as a formal form of address, which was shortened to &quot;u.e.&quot; and subsequently simplified to &quot;u&quot;. (Note however that there already was a word &quot;u&quot;, which was the oblique case of &quot;gij&quot; and goes all the way back to the time it was still only plural.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: the Dutch 2nd person singular converged with the 2nd person plural. But then Dutch developed a new plural and a new polite form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: my personal knowledge and Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5195" LastEditorUserId="5195" LastEditDate="2014-09-18T23:30:20.737" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T23:30:20.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9014" CreationDate="2014-09-18T14:37:19.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Spectral properties' are, essentially, acoustic properties. The term 'spectrum' is usually used in reference to frequency, especially when looking at relative intensities across a range of frequencies (e.g. peaks in the spectral envelope or 'formants').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess 'spectral properties' is a subset of 'linguistic properties' but there are some spectral properties (e.g. the intensity of the 12th formant) that are most likely irrelevant to linguistics. Despite this I guess there's no reason why even such properties couldn't be studied as part of phonetics (NB I'm not meaning to suggest that phonetics is not part of linguistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T14:37:19.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9012" CreationDate="2014-09-18T16:25:14.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideophones constitute an open word class in some languages (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&amp;amp;context=ling_fac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;The Phonology of Kisi Ideophones&quot;&gt;Kisi&lt;/a&gt;).  These should really only be &lt;em&gt;unusual&lt;/em&gt; to those completely unfamiliar with languages of Africa, and some of East Asia.  Japanese has plenty of these, though I'm not sure they're considered an open word class there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5170" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T16:25:14.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9051" CreationDate="2014-09-18T19:10:04.393" Score="5" ViewCount="901" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am researching dialects in Chilean Spanish , and one feature that is often mentioned (and one that you can hear all across Chile in conversation) is the varying pronunciation of the 'ch' sound. I have only a basic knowledge of the IPA from undergrad level, and I have two different papers that describe what I think is the same feature in two different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Lower-class&lt;/strong&gt;, stigmatised pronunciation of 'ch' in (e.g.) &lt;em&gt;mucho&lt;/em&gt; [ʃ]      (fricative, sounds like the English 'sh').&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;2. Middle class&lt;/strong&gt;, standard: affricate [tʃ] or [t͡  ʃ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(similar to 'ch' in standard English).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;3. The upper-middle and upper class&lt;/strong&gt; pronunciation is described in 2 different ways in 2 different papers. (From my time in Chile, I can describe it as more like a 'tch' sound, e.g mutcho).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as [t͡ʃ̟    ], which I read as an advanced/fronted voiceless post alveolar affricate. (2004)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as [t̚ tʃ], which I interpret as not audibly released /t/ followed by a standard /tʃ/ sound, meaning basically a longer /t/ sound in the phoneme. (1998)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are 4 and 5 the same sound, just described in different ways? Or are they describing different phonemes? I think 5 corresponds more closely to what I heard when I was in Chile. One possible explanation is that the phoneme has subtly evolved in the ~14 years between the two studies. As far as I'm aware this sound does not exist in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5201" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T01:19:47.480" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T01:19:47.480" Title="For the 'ch' sound in Chilean Spanish, do these symbols differ?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4516" CreationDate="2014-09-18T21:30:50.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my experience, the vowels most likely to be deleted are going to be the vowels in the first syllable of a consonant-initial word, unstressed syllables whose deletions result in pronounciations still &quot;possible&quot; in the phonetic system, vowels in the same syllable (especially &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;) with sibilants (which makes the sibilant syllabic), and word-final consonants (that are &quot;heard&quot; normally via an extra aspiration of the previous consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So taking a word like &lt;em&gt;interesante&lt;/em&gt;, you end up with the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; fully realized, the first &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; omited because &lt;em&gt;intre-&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly pronouncible, the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; has stress and won't be omited, and the &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; causes a heavy aspiration on the &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; will often be heard as simple a syllabic /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not the most detailed answer I can provide but Portuguese isn't as much my forte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2014-09-18T21:30:50.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3730" CreationDate="2014-09-18T23:42:16.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;People had already given me the answer I was looking for, but as comments to the question. I'll just paste them here for posterity, and mark the question answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jlawler:&lt;/strong&gt; 'Receiver' is not a grammatical term; I assume you mean 'modify'; and what you call a 'complement' is called an 'object'. Prepositional phrases can modify other phrases or whole clauses, as well as nouns. &lt;em&gt;With an umbrella&lt;/em&gt; modifies &lt;em&gt;the woman&lt;/em&gt;, a noun phrase; it's identificational, describing the woman. &lt;em&gt;With a telescope&lt;/em&gt; modifies &lt;em&gt;saw the moon&lt;/em&gt;, a verb phrase; it's instrumental, describing the means used. &lt;em&gt;He saw the woman with a telescope&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous between these two meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cerberus:&lt;/strong&gt; Another useful term is &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt;, which more or less means &quot;that which is modified&quot;, so the scope of the prepositional phrases is different between the two examples: in the first one, the scope of &lt;em&gt;with an umbrella&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;(the) woman&lt;/em&gt;; in the second one, the scope of &lt;em&gt;with a telescope&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;(John) saw the moon&lt;/em&gt;. Here is an interesting article about the scope of adverbial clauses, although it uses many technical terms at some point: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/circulo/no4/kwee.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Adverbial clauses, Functional Grammar, and the change from sentence grammar to discourse-text grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-09-19T09:08:52.940" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T09:08:52.940" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2014-09-18T23:42:16.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9025" CreationDate="2014-09-19T00:40:17.340" Score="2" ViewCount="5094" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the sentence that's been confusing me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compared to dogs, cats showed more enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this should be a complex sentence because there's one independent clause and one dependent clause. But there is no subordinating conjunction here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When compared to dogs, cats showed more enthusiasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one fits the definition of a complex sentence (independent clause, dependent clause, and a subordinating conjunction &quot;&lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: how to detect complex sentences of the former type?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3212" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-09-19T00:42:21.707" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T17:49:13.357" Title="Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction?" Tags="&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9024" CreationDate="2014-09-19T03:03:07.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is struggling with what school grammar (the type of grammar that many of us were taught in middle school) considers to be a clause as opposed to what theories of syntax consider to be a clause. According to school grammar, a complex sentence consists of two or more clauses, where a clause is generally understood to contain at least a subject and a predicate, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; When one considers the reactions of the dogs, the cats showed more interest.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence has two clauses, each of these clauses containing a subject and predicate. The first clause, i.e. &lt;em&gt;when one considers the reactions of the dogs&lt;/em&gt;, contains the subject &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and the predicate &lt;em&gt;considers the reactions of the dogs&lt;/em&gt;, and the second clause, i.e. &lt;em&gt;the cats showed more interest&lt;/em&gt;, contains the subject &lt;em&gt;the cats&lt;/em&gt; and the predicate &lt;em&gt;showed more interest&lt;/em&gt;. The latter clause is the main clause, and the former clause the subordinate clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What one should be aware of in this area is that school grammar simplifies and bunches concepts so that they can be presented to young minds more easily. When one studies these distinctions in some detail, one quickly sees that the traditional definitions do not work very well. The question has touched on just such an aspect of clauses where one can see that the traditional definitions do not help so much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause concept is much more extensive than what the question assumes. In othe words, the question is proceeding from too narrow of a definition of the clause. The example sentence contains what can be construed as a nonfinite clause. Further examples of nonfinite clauses follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. Disgusted with the situation, he stormed out of the room.&#xA;&#xA; b. She worked all night, having no choice.&#xA;&#xA; c. Being required to work on Wikipedia articles upset the students.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences contain the constituents &lt;em&gt;disgusted with the situation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;having no choice&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;being required to work on Wikipedia articles&lt;/em&gt;, whereby these constituents can be interpreted as the predicates of clauses. The subjects of these clauses are implied, i.e. they are easily understood from the context. For sentence a, &quot;he&quot; is the one who was disgusted with the situation; for sentence b, &quot;she&quot; is the one who has no choice; and for sentence c, &quot;the students&quot; are the ones who are required to work on Wikipedia articles. Like most languages, English has mechanisms in place that allow it to express predicates without also having to state the subjects, since the subject is easily retrieved from the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one desires a formal linguistic concept for the issue at hand, it is &lt;em&gt;control&lt;/em&gt;. The theory of control explores when the subject of a predicate has to be expressed overtly and when it can be implied from the context. In any case, one is dealing with clauses because the subject is present (either overtly or covertly).    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the notion that a subordinate clause must be introduced by a subordinator (= subordinate conjunction) is wrong. While it is true that many subordinate clauses are indeed introduced by a subordinator, there are types of subordinate clauses that are not introduced by a word that is taken to be a subordinator, e.g. relative clauses and indirect questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T03:03:07.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T07:25:30.120" Score="8" ViewCount="1582" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English alphabet has two &quot;cases&quot;, UPPER CASE and lower case. Japanese hiragana has one case. Are there any writing systems, with, say, 3, 4 or more cases? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5203" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-22T01:44:32.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T15:15:20.327" Title="Are there writing systems with more than upper case and lower case?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2014-09-19T08:34:51.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;English and other Latin-script writing systems have upper case, lower case, italic, bold etc. Arabic has as many as four different forms for each letter (initial, medial, final, isolated). It is all a question of how you define &quot;case&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T08:34:51.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="89" CreationDate="2014-09-19T09:57:26.150" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Zuckermanns hybridisation hypothesis is not as extreme as the relexification approach suggested by Horvath &amp;amp; Wexler (1997: Relexification in Creole and Non-Creole Languages). Zuckermann rejects the notion of Modern Hebrew (or, as he likes to call it, 'Israeli') being a Slavic language with a Hebrew lexicon, but he also rejects the traditional revivalist approach, according to which Modern Hebrew is a genetic successor of Ancient Hebrew. This is, as mentioned in a post above, stating the obvious, and there is nothing disquieting about it. However, the notion of Modern Hebrew being a hybrid and not 'purely' Semitic can be viewed as a threat to the idea of a linguistic return to one's Semitic roots, hence the 'shock' Zuckermann's theories have caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5205" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T09:57:26.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9031" CreationDate="2014-09-19T13:35:14.760" Score="0" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to learn &lt;em&gt;French vowel sounds&lt;/em&gt; using &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this IPA chart&lt;/a&gt;. My question is about this chart. I use it for the first time and I am interested how comprehensive it is. Does a position at this chart fully &quot;describe&quot; a vowel? With what do I have to complement this chart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the explanation is confusing, for example for a &lt;em&gt;close-mid vowel&lt;/em&gt; I read: &quot;the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel.&quot; How would I measure this two-thirds? Especially it is difficult for back vowels, I don't feel the back of my tongue at all, I don't know how high it is located.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, any help or additional information concerning this chart is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5207" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T14:32:03.683" Title="How to work with an IPA chart?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9030" CreationDate="2014-09-19T14:15:28.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact pronunciation of vowels differ from language to language, from dialect to dialect and even from person to person. Vowels are also influenced by the other surrounding sounds. So the short answer to your first question is: No, that chart does not fully describe the exact vowels as pronounced by a native French speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels have many distinguishing features like back/front, open/close, rounded/unrounded. These features together form a &lt;em&gt;vowel space&lt;/em&gt; and that chart is a two dimensional representation of that vowel space. But the vowel space is continuous; for example, Turkish also has an open vs. close /e/ but the Turkish close /e/ is more open than the French close /e/. IPA does have diacritics to notate finer distinctions but they're rarely used in the context of a single language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, vowels have other distinguishing features like buccal/nasal, rhotic/non-rhotic, short/long etc. French happens to have nasal vowels too. They're not represented in that chart (but they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there is no substitute to listening to native speakers and practicing (a lot). Having said that, learning how to pronounce the generic IPA sounds can be an excellent starting point for almost any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T14:15:28.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9030" CreationDate="2014-09-19T14:32:03.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forget about measuring the two-thirds; it's very hard to introspect the exact tongue position.  Instead, try to locate the IPA sounds in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a language you know&lt;/a&gt;; for example, if you look at the wiki page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_front_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;close-mid front unrounded&lt;/a&gt; [e], you’ll find it's contained in English “play” (which for some speakers is [e] and for others, [eɪ] – pay attention to the start of the sound).  Now just try to pronounce this English sound and compare it to the sample French recording.  I believe you’ll find it to be close enough most of the time; if not, try to experiment until your voice sounds like the recording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In fact there are minute differences in the exact position of a typical English [e] and a typical French one, but as long as your [e] is closer to French [e] than to [i] or [ɛ], it’s more than good enough.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some vowels may not be present in any language you know.  For example, [ø] isn’t in English.  In this case, start from a vowel you know, and then try to modify it until it resembles the recording.  Comparing the IPA descriptions, you’ll find [ø] is just like [e] except it's &quot;lip-rounded&quot;.  Try to find any vowels you know with this feature – e.g. [u] in English &quot;boo&quot; is also rounded.  Now produce an [e], but round your lips as in [u].  You should get the hang of it soon.  Whenever in doubt, record your own voice and compare it to the native sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2014-09-19T14:32:03.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-19T21:00:48.073" Score="0" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the brief span of time I have studied this ancient poem, particularly verses 1829-30, I have read several translations. While observing each individual rendering of the text, it was evident to me that confusion still persists between the translations. Which translation therefore might be considered the most accurate by the top linguists in the world and what was the criteria they used to come to that conclusion?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4732" LastEditorDisplayName="user10165" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T13:03:48.713" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T13:03:48.713" Title="Translation of &quot;Beowulf&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9036" CreationDate="2014-09-19T23:19:16.023" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a piece language learning software, which will include a component that lets the user read texts with a translation on the side. The texts will be chopped up into segments, and have the feature that, if you hold your mouse over a certain segment, the corresponding segment in the translation is highlighted, so that you can easily keep track of where in the text you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, how small can I make these chunks, before translation between different languages would be unnatural, stilted or impossible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safest thing to do would be to simply cut the text in pieces at full stops. This however, would lead to certain really long sentences, in which the reader easily could lose track of where she is, thus making the program a lot less useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then is, could I cut the sentences into smaller portions than complete sentences, and still expect every part to be translatable on its own into various languages? If so, where would I make the cut?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;He was a poor man who certainly would not be able to afford this car&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to expect that I here could cut this sentence in two, between &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;? Can I expect all languages to have the structure necessary to cut this sentence into two logical pieces like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, I'm thinking that, since for example in Spanish, the subject of a phrase is usually omitted (as it is expressed by the conjugation of the verb), I could not segment my sentences into phrase constituents without running into trouble if translating my program into Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is a possibility that my language will be translated into languages whose structure I'm completely unaware of, I need to chope the sentences up in a way so that I'm sure not to get any unpleasant surprises during translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm wondering is how I can chop up my sentences without avoiding trouble when trying to translate the individual parts into different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I have phrased my issue clearly. Any insight on this matter is much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5209" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T02:09:53.037" Title="In how small chunks can I chop up a text for piece by piece translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8731" CreationDate="2014-09-19T23:55:15.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are going for a computational approach to predicates, I think you may wish to consider consulting &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/projects/verbnet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VerbNet&lt;/a&gt;.  It deals a lot with knowing just what arguments a (verb) predicate can take and also classifies verbs in many different semantically  categories.  I do not think there is a Russian form of VerbNet yet, but I think it is a relevant resource to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also wish to read about &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/English_Verb_Classes_and_Alternations.html?id=6wIZWOrcBf8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Beth Levin's work&lt;/a&gt; on verb classes.  This could prove helpful in creating your own ontology of Russian (verb) predicates, but I suspect that such a resource may already exist or at least someone has worked on it.  I know there has been work for an Arabic VerbNet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="4974" LastEditDate="2014-09-20T00:01:16.227" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T00:01:16.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9034" CreationDate="2014-09-20T02:09:53.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is clear, and I think I can provide a simple answer: Sentences! The smallest chunks the application can acknowledge will be sentences. If the application tries to go smaller than sentences, say to clauses, it will crash when confronted with languages that have syntactic structures that are quite different from European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the example provided in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; He was a poor man who certainly would not be able to afford this car.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages that have a lot of head-final structures, e.g. Chinese and Japanese, relative clauses precede the nouns that the they modify. Thus when this sentence is translated into these languages, the translation should produce a much different order of elements in the clause. Using the English words, an ordering of elements closer to the following would result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; He was a poor [certainly would not be able to afford this car] man. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relative clause appears in brackets, and this clause precedes &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;, the noun that it modifies. Thus one could not split the translation of the original sentence between &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; and have the translation be coherent for Chinese or Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if the translation chooses to remain within a given language family, e.g. Germanic languages, then the chunks could be smaller, probably at the clause level. But going smaller than clauses would be difficult. Consider the following two examples, an English sentence and its German equivalent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I think that she will try to help.&#xA;&#xA; Ich denke, dass sie zu helfen vesuchen wird. &#xA; I   think  that she to  help    try    will&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The order of the verbs in the German sentence (help-try-will) is the opposite of what it is in the English counterpart (will-try-help). What this means that an attempt to go smaller than clauses down to phrases, in this case to verb phrases, is going to encounter significant difficulties due to the quite different ordering of elements across these two closely related languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I think the endeavor is facing an impossible challenge. The goal is unattainable. What would be possible, however, is to acknowledge just certain chunks of information that do translate easily from one language to the next. In other words, if the endeavor jettisoned the goal of providing comprehensive chunk by chunk translations and accepted the fact that there are only certain chunks that translate neatly, one could provide the translations for these neatly packaged chunks without having to deal with all the other chunks that do not translate neatly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T02:09:53.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6964" CreationDate="2014-09-20T12:15:11.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jlawler mentioned, the main &quot;problem&quot; is simply that Word doesn't recognize exactly the same things as (un)grammatical as actual people do. This isn't really the fault of the programmers - we're still learning things about English even today - but the result is that there are discrepancies between the program's verdict and a native speaker's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fragments&quot; are also a particularly common area for these discrepancies; this is due to (possibly-outdated) conventions in formal writing, rather than conversational writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5211" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T12:15:11.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6964" CreationDate="2014-09-20T17:49:27.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's a fragment?&lt;/strong&gt; Some languages allow the speaker to omit pronouns clearly implied by context, a feature called &quot;null subject&quot; or &quot;pro-drop&quot;. WALS lists this as &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feature 101: Expression of pronominal subjects&lt;/a&gt;. Spanish and Italian allow a null subject, but French and English do not. This means that all complete sentences in English must have an explicit subject; otherwise, you end up with not a sentence but a fragment. Fragments occur often in spoken English due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/66972/70625&quot;&gt;conversational deletion&lt;/a&gt;, but formal writing avoids conversational deletion outside dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a fragment?&lt;/strong&gt; No. This sentence has a subject: &quot;an inflated perception of knowledge&quot;. Microsoft Word just can't find it because the writer inverted the constituent order from English's more common order, which puts the subject before the predicate. The sentence starts with &quot;identified&quot;, the passive participle form of &quot;identify&quot;. This form is identical to the past tense form &quot;identified&quot;, and Word sees an initial finite verb and assumes that what follows it isn't a subject. So it guesses that the writer may have accidentally performed conversational deletion in an inappropriate context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undoing the the inversion would make the sentence easier for Word to parse, and probably for human readers as well, as jlawler pointed out in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An inflated perception of knowledge is identified as the central problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the inversion the only thing tripping up Word?&lt;/strong&gt; This sentence would likely have a green squiggly for another reason: the passive voice. In addition to a subject and object, a verb also has an agent (someone performing an action) and patient (the thing on which the action is performed). English is an &quot;accusative&quot; language, meaning that the sentence's subject is usually the agent. It does allow promoting the patient to a clause's subject using &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; followed by a participle, and writers often do this when the agent is unknown or unimportant. However, overuse of passive voice tends to sound unclear or evasive, as in &quot;mistakes were made&quot;. For this reason, many style guides recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/33497&quot;&gt;avoiding excessive use of the passive voice&lt;/a&gt;. Thus Word will probably draw a squiggly for that too. In fact, one style guide called &quot;E-Prime&quot;, promoted by the General Semantics movement, eschews all use of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; as a blunt instrument to avoid passing off judgments as facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T17:49:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2014-09-20T23:23:35.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know too much about more than 2 cases, except for one&#xA;language (see answer end), but only one case was quite common, and,&#xA;from what I read, the use of two cases is historically fairly recent, at least for writing with Greek or Latin origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I learned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/7039/was-there-an-evolution-of-the-greek-alphabet-in-the-middle-east&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, some (at least) ancient&#xA;languages, such as Latin or Greek, had only one case. What is now&#xA;taken as lower case was the everyday fast scripting for common tasks,&#xA;while important books, documents and monuments used exclusively the&#xA;well formed version now known as uppercase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for exemple quite clear with the letter Xi. The well formed&#xA;version, used on monuments is Ξ, which is not so easy to write as it&#xA;has 3 separate lines. The cursive version was ξ, which is clearly a&#xA;way of writing the three lines without raising the stylus, when you&#xA;are trying to write fast, even if it does not look as nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article on this topic&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but the difference&#xA;  between the two variants was initially stylistic rather than&#xA;  orthographic and the writing system was still basically unicameral: a&#xA;  given handwritten document could use either one style or the other but&#xA;  these were not mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntactic uses of cases and  capitalisation is a fairly modern&#xA;practice. Actually, despite modern usage, the ancient distinction is&#xA;more a difference of font (letter style) than a difference in case&#xA;(orthographic forms of a given font).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And fonts kept evolving, new ones being created, throughout history,&#xA;as shown in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evolution_of_minuscule.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia chart&lt;/a&gt;. But they are not seen as distinct cases.&#xA;Neither are italics, bolface, underlined, barred or shadowed variants, which are also stylistic, though sometimes used to convey a technical intent, rather than obey a grammtical rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When discussing these issues, it is probably important to distinguish orthogonality of the existing variations (as in lowercase-italics-boldface-times font),&#xA;and the uses made of these variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we consider the case of Greek, written as we do now with two&#xA;cases, it does have variants for some letters that could be seen as&#xA;additional cases. This is the case in particular for sigma, with&#xA;uppercase Σ and two lower case σand ς, the second (lunate sigma) being&#xA;used when ending a word. There may be others, but I am no expert on Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-20T23:23:35.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9045" CreationDate="2014-09-21T02:26:14.740" Score="8" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of designing a self-paced-reading &amp;amp; a grammaticality-judgment-task experiment, which should be performed by second language learners. It is crucial to the study is how the subjects differ in their proficiency levels based on which their results on the SPR and GJT will be interpreted. While I need to assess proficiency, the experiment is long enough itself and, therefore, making it difficult to test them on a regular proficiency test besides the experiment they're required to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the GJT is a variable meant to be tested in the experiment, I cannot use it as a proficiency measure in addition to the limitations they may involve when it comes to testing language proficiency. Therefore, since the experiment will include many filler items (distractors), I'm trying to find a way to make use of such items to test proficiency without affecting the other target items I'm measuring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking is whether there are any testing possibility within this experiment's framework that can be useful to be taken as a reliable measure of language proficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The experiment involves a sentence self-paced-reading window and then follows it another window with the grammaticality judgment question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The self-paced reading task is intended for only part of the sentence, so other parts are open for possible use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4818" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-09-21T16:49:30.830" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T12:12:07.707" Title="How can I embed language proficiency assessment within an unrelated experiment design?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2014-09-21T07:52:07.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases it is easier to read than speak it because in reading you can take your own time and there is usually no doubt about what word is used. In speaking you need an active knowledge of words, their meaning, and pronunciation. That is just a lot more than a passive knowledge required for reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this may all be different in languages that use a different alphabet... like Japanese, Hindi, Thai, Arabic, or Greek&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5215" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T18:35:20.127" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T18:35:20.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-21T08:41:39.807" Score="8" ViewCount="654" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some time I've been looking for a dictionary of Old Norse that reflects an early situation in the language; this kind of resource has been amazingly hard to find, for some reason. Most dictionaries I find reflect a bit of a later stage than what I am looking for, usually reflecting a dialect (most commonly Old West Norse). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the dictionaries I've seen have undergone shifts from &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ǫ́&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;á&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ʀ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;r&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, have usually merged &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;æ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;œ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and have undergone a more Icelandic shift of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ð&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in various positions. They also fail to represent the distinction between &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ę&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; found only in the earlier language. I think all of them additionally have later forms of the copula as well (&lt;code&gt;vera&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;er&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;vesa&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;es&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I would also be interested if anyone knows and could recommend an Old Norse dictionary that preserves nasalisation on vowels (as per the First Grammatical Treatise) in any stage of the language (i.e. not obligatorily an older form of Old Norse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm basically asking if anyone knows of an Old Norse dictionary that doesn't rely on a later dialect (say, dictionaries of Old Norwegian or Old Icelandic which are most often labelled as Old Norse) and instead gives older, more archaic forms of words, as used around 800 AD, that preserve all the vowel and consonant contrasts of an older stage of Old Norse. I'm also looking for a &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; of such a stage of Old Norse and would be immensely grateful if anyone could provide. I would appreciate if the resources were web-based but, knowing that books would most likely contain this as opposed to the Internet, I won't mind resources in print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T16:22:33.820" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T20:45:49.800" Title="Help me find an early Old Norse dictionary (or even a grammar)" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9042" CreationDate="2014-09-21T13:02:03.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, ask.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;On a scale of one to X, where one is not proficient at all and X is perfectly proficient, how well would you say you speak (language)?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Standard choices for X I understand are 5, 7, and 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're worried about priming or the Dunning-Kruger effect, these are going to be present anyway from the fact that your experiment is testing in this particular language; I doubt asking explicitly will intensify these effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a more subtle approach might be to include a &quot;don't know&quot; option, or a &quot;how-certain-are-you&quot; question, for each grammaticality-judgment. Then, you could rate proficiency based on their percentage of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5211" LastActivityDate="2014-09-21T13:02:03.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2014-09-22T01:59:55.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for the &quot;normal&quot; sense, but in some other important senses there is a kind of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages which use Latin script with some extra digraphs or ligatures not present in English. Of these there are a couple in which some of those digraph or ligatures have three case variants, but only by one way of looking at case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lower case: &lt;code&gt;ǆ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǉ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǌ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǳ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upper case: &lt;code&gt;Ǆ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Ǉ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Ǌ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Ǳ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Title case: &lt;code&gt;ǅ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǈ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǋ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ǲ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a kind of corner case that might only come up in typesetting and computerized fonts since the title case digraphs and ligatures are obviously made up of an upper case initial letter plus a lower case final letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot more analogous glyphs in Ancient Greek, where certain letters could be written as diacritical marks depending on upper vs lower vs title case. This stuff is pretty confusing and I make no claims to understand it. Here are the Greek glyphs that Unicode categorizes as &quot;Letter, titlecase&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ᾈ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾉ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾊ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾋ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾌ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾍ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾎ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾏ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾘ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾙ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾚ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾛ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾜ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾝ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾞ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾟ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾨ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾩ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾪ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾫ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾬ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾭ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾮ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾯ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ᾼ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ῌ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ῼ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T05:47:24.900" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T05:47:24.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2014-09-22T02:45:16.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georgian script&lt;/a&gt; has the resources to have three cases, since it has three distinct complete sets of glyphs to cover the same single set of sounds. Yet in practice Georgian is almost always unicameral and only occasionally bicameral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asomtavruli&lt;/strong&gt;, also known as &lt;strong&gt;Mrgvlovani&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Ⴀ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Ⴁ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Ⴂ&lt;/code&gt;, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nuskhuri&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;ⴀ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ⴁ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ⴂ&lt;/code&gt;, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mkhedruli&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;ა&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ბ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;გ&lt;/code&gt;, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asomtavruli was the original form, Mkhedruli is the current form, with Nuskhuri occupying an intermediate place in history. This is only a bit more complicated than how the Latin alphabet evolved the &quot;uppercase&quot; letters at one stage of history with the &quot;lowercase&quot; letters evolving much later. Only later still were the two actually used together as true upper and lower cases. Before this Latin script was unicameral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though Georgian has been mostly unicameral through history, there have been bicameral uses too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Nuskhuri&lt;/strong&gt; manuscripts, &lt;strong&gt;Asomtavruli&lt;/strong&gt; are used for titles and illuminated capitals. The latter were used at the beginnings of paragraphs which started new sections of text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nuskhuri&lt;/strong&gt; was augmented with &lt;strong&gt;Asomtavruli&lt;/strong&gt; illuminated capitals in religious manuscripts. The combination is called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Khutsuri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georgian linguist Akaki Shanidze made an attempt in the 1950s to introduce &lt;strong&gt;Asomtavruli&lt;/strong&gt; into the &lt;strong&gt;Mkhedruli&lt;/strong&gt; script as capital letters to begin sentences, as in the Latin script, but it didn't catch on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my own experience, some software on some operating systems treats Georgian as a bicameral script so that if you use the uppercase function on normal, &lt;strong&gt;Mkhedruli&lt;/strong&gt;, script it will change letters to &lt;strong&gt;Asomtavruli&lt;/strong&gt; in a way not really done in Georgia. This is probably due to Unicode capitalization tables created by somebody without a full understanding of Georgian and those tables being used in other projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T02:45:16.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9044" CreationDate="2014-09-22T09:22:19.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a reasonable list of grammars and dictionaries here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnordische_Sprache&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnordische_Sprache&lt;/a&gt;. (The English version is less useful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T09:22:19.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9050" CreationDate="2014-09-22T10:35:31.660" Score="3" ViewCount="15647" Body="&lt;p&gt;In class last week we were looking at pronunciation ... and something caught me out.  Why are some words spelt very similar to multiple others, yet pronounced so differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because of their origin, or because they are different types of thing (pear and bear are living, the rest aren't), or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any strange rules I could learn to help correctly pronounce a new word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4830" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T16:33:16.030" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T06:27:33.767" Title="dear, ear, fear, gear, hear, near ... why are bear/pear pronounced differently?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9049" CreationDate="2014-09-22T18:21:40.003" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question isn't just about spelling, because when these spellings were standardised, it is highly likely that all these words ending with &quot;-ear&quot; were pronounced in the same way. However, gradually between the 15th and 17th centuries as standardisation was setting in, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt; occurred, changing the pronunciation of the vast majority of the vowels in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This group rhyming with &quot;ear&quot; is usually called the &lt;code&gt;NEAR&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot;&gt;lexical set&lt;/a&gt; in modern English, and was pronounced /eːr/ in early modern English; in Received Pronunciation this is usually /ɪə̯/, often smoothed to [ɪː]; in the General American standard, it's usually /iɹ/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set which was distinct but similar in early modern English was that pronounced with /ɛːr/, as exemplified by the spelling &quot;-are&quot; as in the lexical set &lt;code&gt;SQUARE&lt;/code&gt;. This is /ɛə̯/ in Received Pronunciation (smoothed to [ɛː]), whilst in General American it is /ɛɹ/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what time did to sounds of &lt;code&gt;NEAR&lt;/code&gt;, why were words like &lt;code&gt;bear&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;pear&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;swear&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;wear&lt;/code&gt;, as well as &lt;code&gt;werewolf&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ere&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;there&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;where&lt;/code&gt; (compare with the spellings of &lt;code&gt;here&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sphere&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mere&lt;/code&gt;) so different, ending up joining the &lt;code&gt;SQUARE&lt;/code&gt; set? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, something analogous happened to &lt;code&gt;great&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;break&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;steak&lt;/code&gt;. Were they to follow the regular pattern set down  by &lt;code&gt;eat&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;meat&lt;/code&gt;, they would have merged into the same set as &lt;code&gt;meet&lt;/code&gt; /eː/ by the end of the 16th century, and then changed into /iː/, modern lexical set &lt;code&gt;FLEECE&lt;/code&gt; by the end of the Great Vowel Shift. Instead, they only went as far as /ɛː/ by the end of 16th century, then went to /eː/ and then to modern /ei/, lexical set &lt;code&gt;FACE&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all exceptions to the Great Vowel Shift. Notice that these exceptions represented by &lt;code&gt;bear&lt;/code&gt; and by &lt;code&gt;great&lt;/code&gt; appear to be closer to their older pronunciations than their lookalikes &lt;code&gt;near&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;meat&lt;/code&gt;. It appears that the former pair &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift#Exceptions&quot;&gt;resisted&lt;/a&gt; the Great Vowel Shift to some degree. But &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they were able to resist it, and why &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; resisted it, are questions as yet unanswered. On a practical level then, these ones should be seen as exceptions and memorised (one particularly relevant one is the dual pronunciation of &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt;, which splits according to meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00335636209382561&quot;&gt;One paper from 1962&lt;/a&gt; complains specifically about how divergent the pronunciation of the spelling &lt;code&gt;ea&lt;/code&gt; is in modern English, despite the fact that most of the words with this pronunciation are of Anglo-Saxon origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2014-09-22T18:30:21.013" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T18:30:21.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2014-09-22T18:22:51.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As chilean I find more accurate this description to the ch of middle class, let's call it &quot;neutral&quot;, and the upper class ch, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neutral CH: t͡ɕ     ʨ   voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate&#xA;UpperC CH: t͡ʃ  ʧ   voiceless postalveolar affricate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can listen to UPCH here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_affricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_affricate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and NCH here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering your question, what do you mean with &quot;not audibly released /t/&quot;, if it's no audibly there is no need to transcribe it, I would rather interpret it as a kind of gemination with the t, a short gemination if that's possible. Any way, and test it yourself, UPCH: the part immediately after the tip of the tongue press against the alveolusi and the front palate, while in NCH the same part of the tongue press against the front palate only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps instead of bringing confusion to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5218" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T18:22:51.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9049" CreationDate="2014-09-22T20:05:39.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michaelyus has given a good answer to the &quot;why&quot; part of your question. To reply only to the last part of the question: there are not any &quot;strange&quot; rules you could learn to help you to pronounce a new word. There are not even any non-strange rules. You do have to look up new words in a dictionary. Some things in life require effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-22T20:05:39.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-23T07:39:10.040" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to translate into Mongolian the sentence &quot;I have no home&quot;, and into Icelandic the sentence &quot;However, I have the road&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried Google Translate, but couldn't fully trust the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find sub-stackexchange categories of &quot;Mongolian&quot; and &quot;Icelandic&quot; so I gathered it would be appropriate to post this thread here :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help or pointer would be awesome! Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5220" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T13:45:26.067" Title="Translations into Mongolian and Icelandic" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2014-09-23T11:38:15.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9053" CreationDate="2014-09-23T10:57:40.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically loaded, the things you request translated. Ah well, such is life. Based on my non-native knowledge of Icelandic, I'd translate both as: &quot;Ég hef ekki heimili &lt;strong&gt;en er ég með veginn&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (with the part you need highlighted). As for Mongolian, wait for some other answer I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-09-23T13:45:26.067" LastActivityDate="2014-09-23T13:45:26.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9059" CreationDate="2014-09-23T20:58:27.717" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written German has verbs like &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;können&lt;/em&gt;&gt; ‘can’, but some (quick, lazy, …) speakers – myself included – pronounce this word form without any /e/ or schwa sound in the second nucleus. There are still two syllables, the usual IPA transcription [ˈkœnən] thus would be wrong (and so would be [ˈkœn̩ən] with U+0329 added to show the ambisyllabic status of the [n]). I’m not sure what would be the correct one: [ˈkœn̩], [ˈkœnn̩], [ˈkœn̩n̩], [ˈkœn̩ː]? It’s definitely not pronounced just [ˈkœn]! I even wondered whether it could better be described by a tonal marker, as in [ˈkœn↑].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T07:12:16.620" Title="IPA notation for syllabic [n] after another [n]" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T06:59:42.013" Score="0" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the velar stop [kʰ] and the ejective [k̛ ]? And how are they pronounced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5227" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T09:48:45.470" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T09:48:45.470" Title="What is the difference between velar and ejective stops?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9055" CreationDate="2014-09-24T07:01:54.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ˈkœnn̩]&lt;/code&gt; is probably the one you're looking for. As far as I know, it's two separate sounds in German, so &lt;code&gt;[ˈkœn̩]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ˈkœn↑]&lt;/code&gt; are out of the question. &lt;code&gt;[ˈkœn̩ən]&lt;/code&gt; is also out of the question because it would either be trisyllabic or have a non-syllabic schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T07:01:54.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9055" CreationDate="2014-09-24T07:12:16.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be [ˈkœnn̩]. IPA notation hardly depends on what precedes. And since the first syllable remains closed (doesn't it?), there must be a pure [n] there. Besides, &lt;em&gt;könn-&lt;/em&gt;, [kœn], is a distinct morpheme, there is no morpheme [kœ], so one still can break [ˈkœnn̩] into morphemes: [ˈkœn.n̩], which cannot be done with the other variants you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T07:12:16.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9057" CreationDate="2014-09-24T07:22:54.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aspirate &lt;code&gt;[kʰ]&lt;/code&gt; is a pulmonic consonant and the ejective &lt;code&gt;[k']&lt;/code&gt; is a, well, ejective consonant. You might want to check &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/381/can-you-give-me-some-tips-on-how-to-pronounce-ejective-consonants&quot;&gt;another question here&lt;/a&gt; related to ejective consonants and their pronunciation. If you speak English reasonably well (i.e. as either a L1 speaker or a moderately long-time learner) you'll find that the words &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;skid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;kid&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; are, respectively, &lt;code&gt;[skɪd]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[kʰɪd]&lt;/code&gt;. You can extrapolate on that for other consonants then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T07:22:54.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9008" CreationDate="2014-09-24T08:41:08.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on American English pronunciation software &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.saundz.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Saundz&lt;/a&gt; that is intended to help ESL learners improve their pronunciation. It features a 3D animated teacher who demonstrates movements of vocal organs, so that students can see tongue placement, jaw movements, as well as air stream (with nasals, for example). There are 40 basic American English sounds and more than 400 words they can see, listen to and record, since in the practice mode, they also have the ability to make their own recordings and can compare them with recorded native speakers' pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is appropriate for language lab use since it's web-based (although other platforms are supported), so no individual installations are required. Basically, all the equipment needed is a headset. We ran a field test of ten non-native English speakers, on which all of them showed some improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5228" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T09:22:59.897" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T09:22:59.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T11:25:39.137" Score="4" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether the Phrygian city &quot;Ankara&quot; (today capital of Turkey) meant really &quot;anchor&quot; in Phrygian? We know it means anchor in Greek, a sibling language to Phrygian with many isoglosses, but was the meaning exactly the same in Phrygian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in Pausanias &quot;Description of Greece&quot; (1.4.5) where he mentions the city of Ankara and says &quot;ἄγκυρα δέ, ἣν ὁ Μίδας ἀνεῦρεν&quot; (the anchor which Midas found). Considering that άγκυρα comes from the PIE root *ang-/*ank- &quot;to bend, bow, curve, cavity&quot;, I am wondering whether the original Phrygian myth refers to the plataeu of Ankara which is like a basin and not an anchor. Why would Midas find randomly an anchor 900m above sea level? Not to mention that the anchor is not mentioned as being significant for something. Could it be that the Phrygians who told the story to Pausanias said ἄγκυρα without thinking that in Greek it explicitly means anchor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-11T07:09:45.860" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T07:09:45.860" Title="On the etymology of Ankara / Phrygian Ἄγκυρα" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;phrygian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9064" CreationDate="2014-09-24T11:33:15.990" Score="6" ViewCount="3873" Body="&lt;p&gt;New to Latin, I can't help but wonder about the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every text I found online claims that since words are inflected (enough) to indicate the roles they play in a sentence, word order has no syntactic importance in Latin, but does it really not matter? Is inflection really sufficient to unambiguously specify what a word does in a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1) What if you have a compound sentence:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A young man has a friend that has a dog.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated into Latin, with proper declension (singular nominative, and assume the nouns are all masculine), we can tell that the adjective &amp;quot;young&amp;quot; doesn't modify &amp;quot;a friend&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a dog&amp;quot;, but if I place it in a random place in the sentence, how can we tell that it modifies &amp;quot;a man&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;? (If &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; can't be modified, how about &amp;quot;... a good friend ...&amp;quot;? How do we know &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; isn't modifying &amp;quot;a dog&amp;quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2) Even if you have only a simple sentence, there can still be a problem. Consider:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After visiting my best friend, I ride my broken bike to a store to buy a green apple.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &amp;quot;best&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;green&amp;quot;. If I understand the grammar correctly, &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bike&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;apple&amp;quot; are all accusative. Assuming they are all masculine. How do you match the adjectives with the nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are also two genitive&amp;quot;my&amp;quot;s, just to make things more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw, by &amp;quot;new to Latin&amp;quot; I mean &amp;quot;a few days into Latin, having read a few Wikipedia articles and some other intros I found on  the web, barely able to decipher a Latin sentence with the help of Google translate and Wiktionary&amp;quot;, so please be gentle if you use Latin examples in your reply. And please forgive my impatience. I am more curious about the linguistic features of Latin than concerned with its practical uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T18:26:52.810" Title="Does word order really not matter in Latin?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9063" CreationDate="2014-09-24T12:44:05.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) &quot;Young&quot; in your sentence will be in the nominative case agreeing with the nominative case of &quot;man&quot;, but both &quot;friend&quot; and &quot;dog&quot; will be in the accusative, which excludes &quot;young&quot; modifying &quot;friend&quot; or &quot;dog&quot;, since only adjectives in the accusative can modify them in your sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the free word order in those languages that allow it, functions &lt;em&gt;within a clause or a predicative word-group&lt;/em&gt; and words from one clause or group aren't inserted into another one. Don't overact as for how free the word order can be, language is needed to make others understand what you say, the free word order only helps it by highlighting this or that part of the sentence, the speakers are absolutely aware of the situations when the sentence can become ambiguous and they avoid that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence &quot;My neighbour is my friend&quot; (Vicinus meus est amicus meus), in Latin all the nouns and possessive pronouns in it are nominative masculine. What's the use of messing it up by putting the words, say, this way: &quot;*My my is friend neighbour&quot; (Meus meus est amicus vicinus)? Can you think of at least a single reason somebody would say it that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T12:44:05.237" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9063" CreationDate="2014-09-24T18:54:17.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right, word order does sometimes matter, but even then, it was subject to stylistic variation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, Sallust in his book on the War with Catiline had this colorful description of the conspirators (rough word-by-word translation in parentheses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;quicumque (&lt;em&gt;whoever&lt;/em&gt;) [&lt;em&gt;as a&lt;/em&gt;] inpudicus (&lt;em&gt;shameless person&lt;/em&gt;), adulter (&lt;em&gt;adulterer&lt;/em&gt;), ganeo (&lt;em&gt;glutton&lt;/em&gt;), [&lt;em&gt;with their&lt;/em&gt;] manu (&lt;em&gt;hand&lt;/em&gt;), ventre (&lt;em&gt;belly&lt;/em&gt;), pene (&lt;em&gt;penis&lt;/em&gt;) …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this passage matches up the perpetrator (adulterer, glutton) with their instrument (hand, belly, penis), and although there seems to be an ongoing discussion whether the text has been mangled a bit (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1088826?uid=3739560&amp;amp;uid=2129&amp;amp;uid=2134&amp;amp;uid=370688771&amp;amp;uid=2&amp;amp;uid=70&amp;amp;uid=3&amp;amp;uid=5911624&amp;amp;uid=67&amp;amp;uid=23803&amp;amp;uid=3739256&amp;amp;sid=21104737795253&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), it seems pretty clear that the instruments were never in the same order as the perpetrators, but were either in exactly the reverse order (as a Chiasmus) or in some other altered order, for reasons of style. The reader was supposed to reconstruct the correspondence from the meaning of the words, without an explicit syntactic hint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2020" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T18:54:17.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9078" CreationDate="2014-09-24T19:26:02.033" Score="3" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm especially interested in parsing sentences written in English (dependency or constituency). Ideally I'd like to have an estimation of how much improvement solving each of those major sources of errors would result in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T16:42:24.937" Title="What are the major sources of error for state-of-the-art parsers?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T20:46:07.370" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beth Levin published research on verb classes/alternations - is there similar for the adjective category of words?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I can see references to countable/uncountable, gradable,absolute, of quantity/quality etc. - but no resource that seems to list the word form and the (potential) features.  Things like WordNet don't appear to cover this either - does anything?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any morphological indicators, or am I looking at context/syntax based indicators if I am to try to manually identify features of an adjective?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any information and assistance - big.j.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5235" LastEditorUserId="5235" LastEditDate="2014-09-24T21:48:30.363" LastActivityDate="2014-09-24T21:48:30.363" Title="adjective features - similar to beth Levin's verb classes?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T21:08:48.120" Score="6" ViewCount="4357" Body="&lt;p&gt;My family are Pakistani, but I never learned Urdu as a child. I'd like to learn a little, primarily as a means of keeping this part of my heritage alive. However, the pragmatist in me realizes that Hindi is a far more useful language (number of speakers, more advanced economy) and that Hindi will likely be easier to learn due to the volume of e.g. Bollywood, Rosetta Stone, etc available. I know the two languages are similar, and I already can read Arabic script, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do Hindi and Urdu actually differ? Is the relationship between the (spoken) languages more like the relationship between Glaswegian English and American English or Spanish and Portuguese?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are their grammatical forms exactly the same?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do they differ in terms of pronunciation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do they differ in terms of vocabulary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I hire a Hindi teacher, would a Pakistani be able to tell I was learning Hindi? Would I be able to make myself understood if I were talking to my (urdu speaking) grandparents?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5236" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T01:52:48.080" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T12:41:35.390" Title="How different are Urdu and Hindi?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-24T21:15:15.833" Score="1" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to write a program that can automatically group e.g. 'happiness', 'happily', 'happy' into 'happy':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do I need to read to get a handle on this subject? What is it called? What is the state-of-the-art?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any out of the box tools I can use for this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WordNet claims to include some cross-POS links, and its home page states that &quot;Relational adjectives (&quot;pertainyms&quot;) point to the nouns they are derived from (criminal-crime).&quot;. How do I access these using, for example, Python's NLTK?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read some posts referring to 'nounification' (I guess I want to 'adjectify') but can't find any solid answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appreciate the help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5236" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-09-27T09:33:38.173" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T01:50:13.030" Title="NLP conversion between parts of speech and pertainyms?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T09:36:22.020" Score="2" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have verbs and I would like to find their corresponding noun for either subject or object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &#xA;run:subject -&gt; runner&#xA;kill:subject -&gt; killer&#xA;kill:object -&gt; dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also would have groups of them&#xA;e.g.&#xA;kill:object, shoot:object, attack:object -&gt; victim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there any why or resource that would help me to construct such a mapping?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5239" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-25T14:57:57.463" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T06:25:46.087" Title="Given a verb get a noun that corresponds to subject or object" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-25T09:42:24.170" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that most NLP systems I can easily investigate on the Internet don't handle ambiguity at all, or only handle within components of the pipeline and not between components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance it seems typical that text segmentation, morphological analysis, POS tagging, parsing, semantic analysis, etc do not pass ambiguity information along to the next stage, even if one or more individual stage might have some awareness of ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for any NLP system I can play with (free or online or open source, etc) that embraces the concept of ambiguity through every stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm interested in this is that an early stage can easily choose an interpretation which a later stage finds less acceptable and reject an interpretation that could be accepted by later stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T09:42:24.170" Title="NLP system with end-to-end ambiguity support?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9072" CreationDate="2014-09-25T15:13:38.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, subject or object do not enter into this in any way. It looks like you're looking for nouns corresponding semantically to verbs. Once you have the nouns, they can be subject or object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such one to one mapping. Verbs that describe  actions or states can have corresponding nouns that describe those actions or states as concepts. However, each of these can describe different perspectives of those verbs. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to run = a run (one act of running), running (the act of running)&#xA;to kill = a kill (one act of killing), a killing / killing (the act of killing)&#xA;to teach = teaching (the activity of teaching), *a teach (one act of teaching - does not exist other than in idioms like 'a teach in')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these can work in different ways through idioms and metaphoric extension. So you have sentences like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She made a killing on the stock market.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The killing of civilians is unacceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sniper made 5 kills that day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other suffixes used for various other semantic purposes: translate &gt; translation, agree &gt; agreement, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples, teach &gt; teacher, and kill &gt; killer make actors out of the verbs. This is a very productive method that works on any English verb (even though you won't always get an idiomatically straightforward result, e.g. inspector v. inspecter). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have agent nouns, you can also have patient nouns. E.g. the taught, the killed. Or a special, more limited, case train &gt; trainer &gt; trainee but not teach &gt; teacher &gt; *teachee. There are a slew of other suffixes used for Latinate roots. E.g. officiate &gt; officiant, translate &gt; translator, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be that you're actually looking for morphological derivatives of verbs which are called deverbatives or deverbals. These can be either nouns or adjectives, and in English, they're simply the participle or infinitive forms of the verb used as nouns or adjective. That is very simple both morphologically and syntactically. But you need to be careful about the semantics. There's also a subtle semantic and syntactic distinction between sentences like 'the running of a company is hard' and 'running a company is hard'. But that would probably just complicate things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?espv=2&amp;amp;bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;amp;bvm=bv.76247554,d.ZGU&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;biw=1223&amp;amp;bih=841&amp;amp;um=1&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;q=related:aWEmSfilj6I5LM:scholar.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; will show you some of the complexities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T15:13:38.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4198" CreationDate="2014-09-25T15:36:31.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A great place to start is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collocates.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.collocates.info&lt;/a&gt; which is based on COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). It is incredibly comprehensive (not free but the prices range from $45-$250).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This site also answers the question as to how many collocates there are in English? 4.3 million. That is from the perspective of all possible collocate relationships (even incredibly weak ones). You can only ask that question meaningfully if you have a purpose in mind. For instance, collocates to help students learn. Collocates that should trigger text autocomplete. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for collocations for students, then you can start with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0194325385&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford Collocations Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; which lists 250k collocations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://prowritingaid.com/Free-Online-Collocations-Dictionary.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;free online collocations dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. But you can only search that, not browse the whole list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For NLP purposes, your best source is COCA or the already mentioned Google Ngrams (which has many limitations, also mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-25T15:36:31.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9072" CreationDate="2014-09-25T22:28:20.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you look into &lt;a href=&quot;http://olst.ling.umontreal.ca/pdf/CowieLFs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexical Functions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. They are used in specialized dictionaries called &lt;a href=&quot;http://olst.ling.umontreal.ca/pdf/ecd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; and describe semantic relationships between lexical units. Specifically, what you want is the &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; function:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;(&lt;em&gt;to teach&lt;/em&gt;) = &lt;em&gt;teacher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;(&lt;em&gt;to kill&lt;/em&gt;) = &lt;em&gt;victim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where S&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; returns the agent noun and S&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; the patient noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think an exhaustive ECD has been constructed for English. However it's not clear whether you are looking for an existing tool that returns actantial nouns or trying to build your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Mel’čuk, I. (1998). Collocations and lexical functions. In A. P. Cowie (Ed.), &lt;em&gt;Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and applications&lt;/em&gt; (pp. 23-53). Oxford: Clarendon Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Mel’čuk, I. (2006). Explanatory combinatorial dictionary. In G. Sica (Ed.), &lt;em&gt;Open problems in linguistics and lexicography&lt;/em&gt; (pp. 225-355). Monza: Polimetrica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T04:25:55.827" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T04:25:55.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9067" CreationDate="2014-09-26T00:27:20.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A nice study:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kummerfeld, Jonathan K., et al. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=3038718774570155353&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parser showdown at the wall street corral: An empirical investigation of error types in parser output.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstract: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Constituency parser performance is primarily interpreted through a&#xA;  single metric, F-score on WSJ section 23, that conveys no linguistic&#xA;  information regarding the remaining errors. We classify errors within&#xA;  a set of linguistically meaningful types using tree transformations&#xA;  that repair groups of errors together. We use this analysis to answer&#xA;  a range of questions about parser behaviour, including what linguistic&#xA;  constructions are difficult for state-of-the-art parsers, what types&#xA;  of errors are being resolved by rerankers, and what types are&#xA;  introduced when parsing out-of-domain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/stuW5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and kudos to the authors for providing the &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/berkeley-parser-analyser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another nice overview from &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DxoenfgAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;oi=ao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Collins&lt;/a&gt; given in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlangp-001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MOOC on NLP&lt;/a&gt; (lecture &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlangp-001/lecture/139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Week 4 - Lexicalized PCFGs &gt; Completed Evaluation of Lexicalized PCFGs (Part 2) (11:28)&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NQg3H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Strengths and Weaknesses of Modern Parsers&#xA;  (Numbers taken from Collins (2003)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Subject-verb pairs: over 95% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Object-verb pairs: over 92% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Other arguments to verbs:  93% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-recursive NP boundaries:  93% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;PP attachments:  82% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Coordination ambiguities:  61% recall and precision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T16:42:24.937" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T16:42:24.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-26T03:02:15.043" Score="3" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have inflectional or agglutinating morphology - they have words with multiple or many forms due to aspect, degree or comparison, gender, mood, number, tense, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of languages do not indicate boundaries between words in their written form. I include in this category languages which indicate boundaries between all syllables. The languages of this type I know of are Burmese (Myanmar), Chinese, Dzongkha, Japanese, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese. Plus a number of minority languages of Southeast Asia such as Mon and Shan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am only asking about inflectional morphology and not about derivational morphology or compounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Segmentation for languages without word boundaries presents a challenge to natural language processing due to ambiguity. Lemmatization of inflected forms is also a challenge due to ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only language I can think of for which NLP must tackle both these problems at once in Japanese. But are there any others I've overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T10:43:28.420" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T10:43:28.420" Title="Are there any languages besides Japanese which are both inflecting/agglutinating and do not indicate word boundaries in writing?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9088" CreationDate="2014-09-26T04:29:02.543" Score="0" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;Binding Principle C states that &lt;strong&gt;an R-expression must be free&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Steven King]&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; is [Richard Bachman]&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Richard Bachman is Steven King's pen name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence is grammatical, but violates Principle C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can binding theory explain this? I was thinking that context and extra syntactic information might have something to do with it, or perhaps that the indices are not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5242" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T23:28:18.303" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T01:47:15.870" Title="Binding theory - coindexes that produce grammatical sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9079" CreationDate="2014-09-26T09:32:45.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for a beginning: ancient Greek and Latin did not indicate word boundaries. All the letters are evenly spaced. Sanskrit separates only at the end of a verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T09:32:45.807" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9080" CreationDate="2014-09-26T11:45:50.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A purely syntactic answer starts by pointing out that Principle C of binding theory, as the other ones, should not be confused with a law of nature. It is more properly a rather vague description of a general tendency of human languages and it is in the course of trying to formulate it more precisely that we expect to find interesting phenomenons, examples and counter-examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now onto your more precise question. Nowadays, the formalization of linguistics which consider the questions of binding to be important have (unanimously, as far I know) rejected the use of indices except as convenient book-marking device, and this is especially true of the most direct descendant of the theory which produced the principles of binding theory you refer to in the first place (minimalist syntax). So you are right that indices are not necessary (and might even be misleading). As to how your example would be treated, my first remark is that the current implementation of binding theory that I consider the best ultimately relates binding phenomenon to the properties of transitive verbs so does not consider binding effects (or the lack thereof) in equative sentences as reflecting the same fundamental properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you could have a look at chapter 3 and 4 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/relators-and-linkers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt; for interesting comments on the structure of equative sentences and in particular for the claim that such equative sentences in fact involves inversion of a complex structure and (roughly and informally) always have the structure of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What Stephen King is, is Richard Bachman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are convinced by this proposition, then it follows that such sentences are not clear cut violations of Principle C, just like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Feeling proud of himself, he left the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a violation of Principle A. Further enquiries (within that framework) would entail investigating the syntactic properties of the functional head Den Dikken calls a Relator; an interesting syntactic question, in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T11:45:50.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9164" CreationDate="2014-09-26T12:55:22.850" Score="17" ViewCount="12512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using WordNet Interface in NLTK, which facilitates computation of a number of similarity metrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Path similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leacock-Chodorow Similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wu-Palmer Similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resnik Similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jiang-Conrath Similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lin Similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried computing all of them on words w1 = 'love', w2  = 'hate', w3 = 'romance'. On all the metrics, the similarity scores obtained were higher for the pair 'love' and 'hate' rather than the 'love' and 'romance'. Shouldn't it have been the opposite case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5244" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-26T14:48:39.757" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T07:07:56.940" Title="What do WordNet::Similarity scores mean?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9086" CreationDate="2014-09-26T17:43:15.017" Score="2" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say there are three people, Bob, John and Jane. There are also three languages, L1, L2 and L3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John is a fluent speaker of L1 and L2. Jane is a fluent speaker of L2 and L3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob only knows L1, but wants to learn L3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John, to help his friend Bob, translates a list of vocabulary from L1 to L2. Then he passes it on to Jane, who translates the words from L2 to L3. Thus, Bob has a dictionary of words between L1 and L3, as a tool for learning L3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, given any set of three languages, is there likely to be significant &quot;telephone game&quot; or &quot;chinese whispers&quot; effect by doing this? Does Bob risk learning inaccurate or plain wrong definitions of words by working this way? Are there any good examples of this? Would this depend any on the language families of L1, L2 and L3? Would this be more, or less, complicated with full sentences, than with loose words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5209" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T20:05:29.660" Title="&quot;Telephone game&quot; effect when translating between languages" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9085" CreationDate="2014-09-26T20:52:51.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does Bob risk learning inaccurate or plain wrong definitions of words by working this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, he does, in most cases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, languages are often ambiguous. You may grasp the meaning by the context, but if there's no context, you don't know, for example, what is the meaning of &lt;em&gt;refrain&lt;/em&gt;, is it a verb or a noun? If it's a verb, it can be &lt;em&gt;to repeat&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to stop yourself of doing something&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other paradoxes may also occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;time flies like an arrow&quot; &amp;rarr; &quot;each of a type of flying insect, &quot;time-flies,&quot; individually enjoys a different arrow (similar comparison applies)&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana#Analysis_of_the_basic_ambiguities&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, no translation yet, it's just a result of machine-aided syntax analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would this depend any on the language families of L1, L2 and L3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity is not an attribute of &lt;em&gt;translation&lt;/em&gt;, it's a property of an individual language. Translating between two languages belonging to the same language family, &lt;strong&gt;you preserve the original ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;, hence the translated word works fine in the same contexts as it did in original language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, if the languages are too far away, they naturally have different sets of homonyms, different rules of morphology, idiomatic constructs, phraseology, and so on. In this case, during translation, you &lt;strong&gt;should choose a single meaning&lt;/strong&gt; that may appear to be wrong in another context.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Obviously, the more translations in chain, the higher the risk of a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would this be more, or less, complicated with full sentences, than with loose words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more context, the smaller the inaccuracy is because the translator knows &lt;strong&gt;which context&lt;/strong&gt; to pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-09-26T20:52:51.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9072" CreationDate="2014-09-27T06:25:46.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordnet&lt;/a&gt; might be helpful. Not Wordnet proper but one of the &quot;standoff files&quot;, the Morphosemantic Links database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Wordnet home page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The majority of the WordNet’s relations connect words from the same part of speech (POS). Thus, WordNet really consists of four sub-nets, one each for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, with few cross-POS pointers. Cross-POS relations include the “morphosemantic” links that hold among semantically similar words sharing a stem with the same meaning: observe (verb), observant (adjective) observation, observatory (nouns). In many of the noun-verb pairs the semantic role of the noun with respect to the verb has been specified: {sleeper, sleeping_car} is the LOCATION for {sleep} and {painter}is the AGENT of {paint}, while {painting, picture} is its RESULT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T06:25:46.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9080" CreationDate="2014-09-27T07:22:08.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Gross' comment above is on target. Nouns and pronouns (and other linguistic categories) have both identity of sense and identity of reference. The default situation sees a pronoun adopting both types of identity from its antecedent, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt; A. Fred&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; likes his&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; meal.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definite pronoun &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; takes both types of identity (reference and sense) from its antecedent &lt;em&gt;Fred&lt;/em&gt;. The traditional binding theory (Principles A, B, and C) from the 1980s was developed to address the distribution of pronouns (reflexive, reciprocal, and personal), whereby the theory was not generally distinguishing between these two types of identity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definite pronouns (e.g. &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) have an identity of reference that they adopt from another entity in context, and the standard case is for them to also adopt identity of sense from the same entity. There are many cases, however, where there is divergence, i.e. the pronoun adopts the identity of reference of an antecedent (or postcedent), but it does not adopt the identity of sense of that antecedent, e.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt; B. She&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; is my friend&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;. &#xA;&#xA; C. My friend&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; is her&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;. (Pointing at someone across the room)&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example B violates principle C of the traditional binding theory, and example C violates principle B thereof. These violations are, in fact, not really violations because they involve a divergence of the two types of identity. In each sentence, the coindexed expressions have the same identity of reference, but they have distinct identities of sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; in English is the stereotypical example of a pronoun that takes only identity of sense from its antecedent (or postcedent), e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; D. Tom read a book, and Sam read one, too.&#xA;&#xA; E. Tom read a book, and Sam read it, too.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence D has the indefinite pronoun &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; adopting just the identity of sense from its antecedent &lt;em&gt;a book&lt;/em&gt; (a book, but a different book), whereas sentence E has the definite pronoun &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; adopting both the identity of sense and the identity of reference from &lt;em&gt;a book&lt;/em&gt; (the same book). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example in the question illustrates this same divergence of the two types of identity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; F. Steven King is Richard Bachman.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two names &lt;em&gt;Steven King&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Richard Bachman&lt;/em&gt; have the same referential identities, but distinct identities of sense. The traditional binding theory, when it is presented in a superficial manner, does not distinguish between these two types of identity. This is the source of the confusion expressed in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2081" LastEditDate="2014-09-29T01:47:15.870" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T01:47:15.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-27T10:56:44.570" Score="0" ViewCount="1016" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the both words in Latin name for &lt;em&gt;brown bear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ursus arctos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; originate from the Proto-Indo-European word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯rtcos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;bear&quot;. Is this a tautology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T14:37:07.217" Title="Is Ursus arctos a tautology?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-27T11:49:34.853" Score="0" ViewCount="560" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was the first who finished last.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He was the first who finished second.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ............................ third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kind of silly statement some kind of pleonasm? There's only one who takes up a certain place at the end of the race, so you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; say he is the first who took it, which is also clearly redundant. Please let me know if this can be considered pleonasm (and which type of pleonasm if yes) or it's something else, or I should ask it somewhere else (English SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5248" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T02:57:03.300" Title="Redundancy needing definition" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-10-13T21:19:45.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9089" CreationDate="2014-09-27T17:51:40.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not rare for the same Latin word to be used both for a genus and a species of the same genus. For example, canis canis, or the examples cited by Yellow Sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more mainstream laryngealist reconstruction of the IE ancestor of Greek ἄρκτος and of Latin ursus would be *h2rtḱo-. I will not quibble about this, but do suggest that you put an asterisk before reconstructed forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-09-27T19:06:15.660" LastActivityDate="2014-09-27T19:06:15.660" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2014-09-28T00:21:34.673" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;HINDI, mother tongue of 40% people of India, is ideally phonemic. And not only Hindi, most of the Indian languages are ideally phonemic. And not only this, it has letters with all possible phones produced by us except for the sound of 'e' as in 'pet' . It's because there is no word in Hindi with that sound. Still, to write such words in Hindi letters a vowel is used with the sound of 'a' in 'came'. Since it has no use in Hindi, it becomes perfectly phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5251" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T14:12:58.317" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T14:12:58.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9085" CreationDate="2014-09-28T20:05:29.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers by @bytebuster is certainly accurate but I would like to elaborate on certain aspects I would consider important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you were to translate individual words from L1 &gt; L2 &gt; L3 you are almost guarantee a game of telephone. In fact, all you have to do is to try to do this between L1 and L2. When you then go try to use the words in a sentence, you'll get almost immediate nonsense. Word to Word translation without context will only work on the most concrete and universal words such as 'orange' or 'automobile'. Even words like 'bread' or 'beer' may get you into trouble depending on the languages. And you can forget it with verbs 'go', 'see', etc. Sentences may still give you some issues but when you get to complete texts (assuming competent translators), you actually get relatively good results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not at all a hypothetical situation. Explorers and conquistadors often used native translators who only knew one language who would find somebody who knew another language spoken by the locals and translate this way. I think Cortez is reported to have done so but I think you'd find reports going to antiquity. I'm sure any such translation would have had to rely on a lot of negotiation and clarification. Also, throughout the ages many texts (most notably the Bible) would be translated from Latin rather than the original sources. Today, you would mostly find original translations of published books but newspaper reports are often translated from third languages (most often English). There are even some academic disciplines where at least some data is collected in this way. Some aspects of Holocaust studies come to mind. Survivor memoirs have been written in so many languages (Czech, German, Italian,...) that no one scholar is likely to master all of them and many rely on English translations. Comparative religion is also likely to rely on at least some translation, as is much of anthropology, etc. What you will find in all of these examples is that nothing like a 'game of telephone' develops. In fact, these third translations are pretty faithful. Of course, they lose all nuance and any semblance of language play but they get the gist over. There will be many local mistranslations and misunderstandings but fewer than one might expect. As always, the more shared context, the easier this will be.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One area where this type of translation is quite routine is poetry translation from less commonly taught languages. It is quite unlikely that a there is a Hungarian poet who is also very good at Urdu. So such a person might collaborate with someone who speaks Urdu and Hungarian who will convey the meaning and point out any language play when they want to translate Urdu poetry. Of course, here, we're not looking for accuracy of meaning but rather keeping the gist and impact. My favorite book is 12 Czech translations of Poe's Raven - of which at least half of the 'translators' (all well-known Czech poets) did not know much if any English. There is a lot of diversity of expression but in all 12 instances you feel like you're reading Poe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T20:05:29.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-28T20:37:36.073" Score="-1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you clarify what language these writings are in and what they say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWJlS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YBq18.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5253" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2014-09-29T02:07:32.087" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T07:38:48.323" Title="Unknown language on back of paintings" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-02-02T21:46:00.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2014-09-28T20:55:12.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish has many genderless names e.g Deniz &quot;sea&quot;, Devrim &quot;revolution&quot;, Yuksel &quot;raise&quot;, Özgur &quot;free&quot;, Ilhan &quot;ruler&quot;, Ismet &quot;ethical, honest&quot;, Fikret &quot;idea, opinion&quot;, Ömür &quot;lifetime&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure there are more, but I am not aware of those. Some Turkish member can provide more examples. I guess the Turkic names are the ones that are usually genderless, unless they refer to something that is specifically female or male e.g Asena &quot;she wolf&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T20:55:12.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9095" CreationDate="2014-09-28T21:35:24.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first one is called Поцелуев мост (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.saint-petersburg.com/bridges/potseluev-bridge/&quot;&gt;Potseluev Bridge&lt;/a&gt; or literally &lt;code&gt;Bridge of Kisses&lt;/code&gt;) and the second one Утро (Morning). The artist is Покидышев (Pokidyshev).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transliteration_table&quot;&gt;transliteration table&lt;/a&gt; is useful when you need to translate Russian but aren't familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. I use it with Google Translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-09-28T21:45:57.157" LastActivityDate="2014-09-28T21:45:57.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9100" CreationDate="2014-09-29T00:32:30.150" Score="4" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, until fairly recently, recitation of the English alphabet was often suffixed by saying &quot;and per se and&quot;, roughly translating to &quot;and, by itself, '&amp;amp;'&quot;. This suggests that the ampersand was almost sort-of a letter in the English alphabet -- this seems strange to me, because that would make it the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; letter which represents an entire word (Latin 'et', meaning 'and') rather than a phonetic sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the ampersand considered a full citizen of the original Latin alphabet, and, if so, did it evolve into some vestigial afterthought in the modern English language? If so, were there originally other Latin letters that represented full words rather than phonetic sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5256" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2014-09-29T08:52:04.010" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T08:52:04.010" Title="Is the Ampersands a Letter in the Latin Alphabet?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9099" CreationDate="2014-09-29T06:47:44.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the ampersand was not a letter but rather developed from &lt;strong&gt;a ligature&lt;/strong&gt; between e and t in the Latin word &lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt; (and - as in etc). It has its origins in 1st century BC and seems to have been in common use since 1st century AD. You can read more about its history on the excellent blog (or book) Shady Characters: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2&quot;&gt;http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T06:47:44.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9102" CreationDate="2014-09-29T08:36:17.640" Score="4" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to understand the how strong verbs in Germanic languages work, and reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; I understand that class 4 strong verbs originated from, in PIE, vowel + a sonorant (&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there seems to be many words whose vowel is not followed by &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; but are of class 4. For example, German &lt;em&gt;sprechen&lt;/em&gt; and Dutch &lt;em&gt;spreken&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; is class 4, yet in Old English and Old Dutch the same word seems to be a class 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article it is noted that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Get, speak, tread&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;weave&lt;/em&gt; were originally of class 5, whereas &lt;em&gt;swear&lt;/em&gt; was originally class 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did these verbs &quot;switch&quot; class? And how can a verb like &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; become a class 4 verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5258" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T09:42:54.460" Title="Why is &quot;speak&quot; a class 4 strong verb?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9101" CreationDate="2014-09-29T09:42:54.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a general levelling pattern in the verb morphology of Germanic languages. Wiktionary otherwise mentions &quot;speak&quot; as a strong &lt;strong&gt;class 5&lt;/strong&gt; verb, primarily due to the fact that it used to be &quot;spake&quot; in the past tense. The reason it became classified as a &lt;strong&gt;class 4&lt;/strong&gt; verb is that it replaced the older form, &quot;spake&quot;, with a (possibly analogous) form &quot;spoke&quot; that matches the class 5 pattern of &lt;code&gt;e/a &amp;gt; o&lt;/code&gt; (break/broke, tear/tore, wake/woke etc.); additionally, some other class 4 verbs, like &quot;get&quot; were borrowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no switching of verb classes when it came to the verbs you mentioned: the Great Vowel Shift basically tore apart class 5 and spread its verbs around after they analogised, likewise with class 6. It's more of a change of terminology than an actual switch of ablaut class. The example you gave, &quot;swear&quot;, hasn't really changed that much: in Old English it was &lt;code&gt;swere/swōr&lt;/code&gt; and in modern English it's &lt;code&gt;swear/swore&lt;/code&gt;. The disintegration of classes 5 and 6 also took place with class 7 and class 2. There's still class 1, class 3 and class 4 strong verbs that remain partially regular and semiproductive in a variety of dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other languages' verb classes, it's again due to their vowels' history and entirely unrelated to that of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T09:42:54.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9111" CreationDate="2014-09-29T11:33:52.700" Score="10" ViewCount="2778" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Wikipedia page &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of the English language&lt;/a&gt; it is mentioned that English is a &quot;borrowing language&quot;, with the implication that there are many loan words in English. &lt;strong&gt;What other languages may be considered Borrowing Languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, what are languages called that resist loanwords? For instance, I am aware that the French resist polluting their tongue with loanwords and coin French words for concepts that originate in non-French areas. Is there a term for this type of language as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, is it correct to term the language &quot;Borrowing Language&quot; when the feature is not a feature of the language itself but rather a feature of the culture of the speakers who define the direction that the language evolves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T20:12:32.243" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T19:50:31.080" Title="Examples of Borrowing Languages" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9089" CreationDate="2014-09-29T14:37:07.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a terminological question, because the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ursus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ursus and arctos&lt;/a&gt; are cognates is beyond doubts I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sphere where these two words come together is taxonomic nomenclature, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct name for scientific species names which have identical (or repeating) generic and specific names is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted-sites/iczn/code/index.jsp?booksection=glossary&amp;amp;nfv=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tautonyms&lt;/a&gt;. They are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted-sites/iczn/code/index.jsp?nfv=true&amp;amp;article=18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;allowed in zoological nomenclature&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/main.php?page=art23#23.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forbidden in botanical nomenclature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of &lt;em&gt;Ursus arctos&lt;/em&gt; is not even tautonymy in the strict meaning, i.e. no tautonomy-related articles of the Zoological (or even Botanical) Code would be applicable here. This could be called a &quot;semantic&quot; tautonymy and it is not covered by the Codes, meaning that it is no better/worse than any other non-tautonymous name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T14:37:07.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9110" CreationDate="2014-09-29T15:54:26.453" Score="14" ViewCount="1681" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question that I have is a simple one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Of every neuter noun, pronoun, or adjective, in any IE language (as far as I know), the nominative and accusative cases agree in all numbers. Why is this?&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the IE languages, case syncretism seems to be a pretty common phenomenon. The dative/ablative plural in Latin is a well-known example, and there are further examples in Hittite and Sanskrit. However, as far as I know, these particular examples are usually (partly) explained in terms of usage overlap. That doesn't seem to be very likely here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to come up with a naive guess. My first (and only) idea was that neuter nouns often stand for inanimate objects, and these wouldn't ordinarily be construed as agents of voluntary or intentional actions. So it makes sense that, at least in certain contexts, nominatives of neuter nouns simply wouldn't come up. And browsing through Homer, I must say that neuter nouns are indeed rarely the subject governing a (transitive) verb, although examples of this happening do occur: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;ὡς οὖν δεινὰ πέλωρα θεῶν εἰσῆλθ᾽ ἑκατόμβας &#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;So when the terrible portents (neut.) had thus interrupted the hecatombs of the gods (Iliad, 2.321)&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having tried my luck in the literature, the only relevant observation I could find was in section 13.2.10 of &lt;em&gt;Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; by Beekes and De Vaan, who connect the phenomenon with the PIE (or pre-PIE?) ergative. Not being a linguist, I found their explanation too brief to be convincing. So if this theory represents a majority opinion of any kind, I would greatly appreciate some additional explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5257" LastEditorUserId="5257" LastEditDate="2014-10-13T00:38:56.240" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T20:27:42.633" Title="Why do neuter nominative and accusative always agree in IE languages?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-29T16:26:30.313" Score="3" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on how entities take a new sense over time. I am trying to find out a large english corpus (free to download) which should have the time annotation of the origin of the text. I suppose some newspaper corpus and/or blog corpus should be fine for my work. Appreciate if someone could point to such corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5261" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T12:40:16.767" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T12:40:16.767" Title="Time annotated corpus: plain text english corpus" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2014-09-29T17:28:31.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that “borrowing languages” is a meaningful concept in linguistics. All languages have borrowed from other languages, though obviously not all to the same degree. Just to stay with your question, French has borrowed lots of words from mediaeval and scholastic Latin (as opposed to the “genuine” French words derived organically from Vulgar Latin), and modern spoken French has borrowed heavily from English (despite the strictures of purists). Sanskrit borrowed heavily from Dravidian. Classical Arabic borrowed from Aramaic, Middle Persian and Greek, and Modern Arabic dialects have borrowed lots of words from Turkish, French, English, and (in Iraq and the Gulf) from Persian. So which language is not a “borrowing” language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T17:28:31.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-09-29T20:11:27.293" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a dictionary that I can download as a text file which specifies the grammatical gender of nouns in both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I would like something like:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/svensktyskordbok00hoppuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/svensktyskordbok00hoppuoft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a format which I can automatically parse.&#xA;I am only interested in nouns so a partial dictionary would do too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5262" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-09-30T02:42:03.927" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T02:42:03.927" Title="German/Swedish dictionary to download as a text file" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2014-09-29T20:16:09.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While that term is not particularly a part of general linguistic parlance, I think I understand what you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such examples, you might want to look at the languages of eastern Asia which have almost without exception borrowed massively from Chinese. Japanese even replaced some of its numbers with numerals of Chinese origin and generally has a Chinese alternative for almost any native word - or even just a standalone Chinese term without a matching native one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more ancient examples, you could look at Sumerian and Akkadian which had mingled and mixed so thoroughly between one another that they borrowed grammar, core vocabulary, syntax and phonetic features, in either direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T20:16:09.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9105" CreationDate="2014-09-29T21:02:59.613" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to write you an e-mail but I'll write my answer here instead ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, most Indo-European scholars disregard the ergative hypothesis. However, I do not know any other reason for the equation of the neuter nominative and accusative. So, I'd like to present the reason why I believe that a prestage of PIE was an ergative language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most Indo-European languages the neuter nominative and accusative are identical. The Anatolian languages, however, are exceptional in this regard. In these languages we find that neuter nouns take a special ending &lt;em&gt;-ants&lt;/em&gt; when they are the subject of a transitive sentence. This ending has been called the 'ergative'. However, there are different viewpoints on whether this actually is a case in the Anatolian languages or it is a 'personifying' suffix &lt;em&gt;-ant-&lt;/em&gt; together with a nominative masculine/feminine ending &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;. To answer this question one needs to dive deep into Anatolian philology. In my opinion, the answer is that there was in Proto-Anatolian a &lt;em&gt;semantical&lt;/em&gt; suffix &lt;em&gt;-ant-&lt;/em&gt;, that developed into a proper case ending &lt;em&gt;-ants&lt;/em&gt; in the separate Anatolian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next question then is what the Proto-Anatolian case system looked like. In my opinion (I have not seen an account of someone exploring this perspective, but feel free to provide literature!) Anatolian would not have needed to create a separate ergative case for neuter nouns if there had been a case to give to neuter nouns in the Agent position (= subjects of transitive sentences). This is also what we find in older stages of Anatolian languages. Here the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ant-&lt;/em&gt; has a semantic value, but there are no cases of neuter Agents in the 'nominative-accusative' case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping in mind that the first split in the Indo-European language family is commonly considered that between Anatolian and 'Common Indo-European' (the rest), we can reconstruct the following (MF = nonneuter, N = neuter, A = agent, S = subject (of an intransitive sentence), P = Patiens (object of a transitive sentence)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anatolian: &#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MF: A = S = &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, P = &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;N: A = X, S = P = &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CIE:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MF: A = S = &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, P = &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;N: A = S = P = &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do we reconstruct for PIE? There are two possibilities: either A = &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt; is original and Anatolian lost it, or PIE had a gap in the system which CIE restored. To my mind, the second possibility is more likely, since it is a very common development to fill a gap in a grammatical system, whereas it is very strange to create a gap in the system for seemingly no reason. One possibility to create the gap is that in PIE there was a close connection between morphological neuters and semantical inanimates. However, this relationship was not perfect in PIE (for example &lt;em&gt;kweklos&lt;/em&gt; 'wheel'), and we find no comparable behaviour in nonneuter nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So (at least in my opinion, which, again, does not represent the majority of scholars) in PIE neuter nouns did not have a form in the A-position. We have to explain why this is the case. In my opinion, the cleanest way to give an explanation why a nominative-accusative system would even make a distinction between A and S is because it developed from an earlier ergative-absolutive system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Indo-European, we can even sketch a quite detailed scenario for this development. We start from a Pre-PIE ergative language with ergative marker &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; (which would have agreed with the genitive, as the Hittite evidence shows) and an absolutive marker &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;. There were animate and inanimate nouns, but there was no morphological distinction between the two. Then at one point the system changed to a nominative-accusative alignment pattern. For the accusative all nouns took the old absolutive ending &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;. The nominative was more complicated. Animate nouns generally occured as the subject of transitive sentences, so they took their nominative from there, and they became the masculine words in PIE. Inanimate nouns, however, could by their nature not occur in the A position, and as such took their 'nominative' from the absolutive &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;. It was, however, not a true nominative as it could not be used in the A position. This generalisation was only mate after Anatolian split off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my view on how PIE developed: the 'nom = acc' for neuter nouns in Common IE and the Anatolian ergative are both solutions to fix a gap in the PIE declension system, that came into being as an original ergative system partly changed into a nominative system. This is reasonably close to the Leiden point of view, but other schools of Indo-European linguistics might differ. I'd be interested to hear any other points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5263" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T21:02:59.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2014-09-29T21:48:03.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, there is no such category as a 'borrowing language' equivalent to 'agglutinating language'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, whatever variation there is among languages is cultural rather than linguistic. Although individual speakers may perceive this more viscerally (and report it as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's probably that there is not even a single scale along which you could grade cultures/languages. You will have to look at areas of linguistics practice, historical periods, registers and source languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For example:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could compare English and German, Russian and Czech, Czech and Slovene and would find interesting differences. English will appear to borrow more technical words than German (cf. history vs. Geschichte) but the languages may be more similar at the colloquial level (cf. German 'Handy' for mobile phone). Czech will have been more resistant to borrowing at the literary level from German than Russian was but rife with borrowings at the colloquial level. It will have consciously borrowed words from Slavonic languages in the 19th century but not in the 20th. Czech will further differ from Slovene in how it transcribes foreign names. For example, Mr Beech may be transcribed in Slovene as Bíč but kept as Beech in Czech texts. However, Mrs Beech would be almost always converted into the female for form Beechová.  They will not differ much in exonyms (such as London). These are not strictly borrowings but they indicate how the languages tend to integrate 'foreign' elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note above how easy (convenient) it is talk about languages when what you're talking about is the practices of different groups of speakers of those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T21:48:03.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9071" CreationDate="2014-09-29T22:32:52.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9071/nlp-conversion-between-parts-of-speech-and-pertainyms#comment21945_9071&quot;&gt;your comment&lt;/a&gt;, you seem to be looking for positive words with the intent of performing &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/sentiment-analysis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sentiment analysis&lt;/a&gt; (generally lists are divided into positive, negative, and neutral). Here are some lists to get started with (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/1rzfRnK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Google search&lt;/a&gt; will turn up plenty more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/opinion-lexicon-English.rar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hu and Liu, KDD, 2004 (~6800 words)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jeffreybreen/twitter-sentiment-analysis-tutorial-201107/tree/master/data/opinion-lexicon-English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breen, &lt;em&gt;Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tutorial&lt;/em&gt;, 2011&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://alexdavies.net/twitter-sentiment-analysis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Davies, &lt;em&gt;Sentiment Analysis Word List&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mpqa.cs.pitt.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Pittsburgh MPQA&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.cs.pitt.edu/~wiebe/pubs/papers/emnlp05polarity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see also paper&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mashape.com/list-of-20-sentiment-analysis-apis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There are also several APIs you use for sentiment analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, word lists are only marginally helpful in detecting/classifying sentiment. It will capture the low-hanging fruit, but not more complicated or ambiguous phrases such as &quot;watch the movie&quot; (which is a positive movie review, but a negative book review).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as extracting pertainyms goes, any good POS-tagger will allow you to identify the predicted direct object of a verb and whatnot, but as you are likely aware, this is fraught with its own complications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-09-29T22:32:52.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2014-09-30T03:06:17.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in general borrowing is a process that occurs in every language, there are some factors which mean it occurs more in some languages, one of which is a taboo against naming the dead. In such languages, the taboo means not only that you cannot say the names of dead people, but also vocabulary which is contained in names or sometimes even is just somewhat similar to names. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silinternational.net/~simonsg/reprint/Word%20taboo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gary F. Simons (1982)&lt;/a&gt; found that 59% of the words of the Swadesh 100-word list in the languages of Malaita are found in the names of people. To avoid the taboos, words are borrowed from neighbouring languages and dialects. These languages will often have many synonyms, so that when one word becomes taboo, another can take its place, with the cycle repeating when it too becomes taboo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T03:06:17.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9116" CreationDate="2014-09-30T09:54:46.127" Score="2" ViewCount="1237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying phonetics as part of a Linguistics degree, and in my textbook, the author discusses how we make our vocal folds narrow, almost touching, such that air passing through vibrates. This is how we produce voiced sounds like /ɑ/ or /b/ or /iː/. The question is: why does simply contracting the vocal folds produce this vibration? The textbook only says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the edges of the vocal folds are touching each other, or nearly touching, air passing through the glottis will usually cause vibration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Peter Roach, English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course 4th ed, 2009, Chapter 4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what physical process means that air passing through will cause vibration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T20:54:23.720" Title="How does passing air through a narrow glottis cause vibrations?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9114" CreationDate="2014-09-30T14:31:52.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process is described briefly under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_folds#Oscillation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vocal folds&lt;/a&gt; in Wikipedia. The air pressure forces the vocal fold out of the way, but then the fold springs back under its own elasticity, interrupting the air again. When that happens repeatedly, it forms an oscillation, which is audible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T14:31:52.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9114" CreationDate="2014-09-30T14:36:51.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process that results in the oscillation of the vocal folds is actually somewhat complicated and may be tricky to grasp if you are &quot;not good at physics&quot;, but let's give it a shot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A somewhat vague explanation is that, due to the way the shape of the vocal tract causes air to flow through the glottis and past the vocal folds, the fluid pressure (where a &lt;em&gt;fluid&lt;/em&gt; is a liquid or a gas) just above and just below the glottis is constantly shifting and either causing the vocal folds to come together or pushing them apart. This cycle of the vocal folds hitting together and being pushed apart happens over and over again, many times a second, creating a periodic oscillation or &quot;vibration&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early models of vocal fold oscillation relied on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bernoulli Principle&lt;/a&gt;, which says that, as the velocity of a fluid increases, its pressure decreases. It was thought that the flow of air through the glottis caused the air pressure between the vocal folds to decrease, causing them to &quot;collapse&quot; together. The full closure of the glottis was then supposed to cause the air pressure below it to build up until it &quot;blew&quot; the folds open like saloon doors, allowing air to flow through it again until the whole cycle started over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on researchers realized that this model was too simplistic and that these forces alone couldn't explain the continual oscillation of the folds, given the vibration-dampening properties of tissue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote below explains how the model was refined to explain what really happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the glottis is closing, the airflow begins to decrease, but the&#xA;  air that is above the glottis does not &quot;know&quot; this, so it continues to&#xA;  move with its same speed (because of inertia). This creates a region&#xA;  just above the vocal folds where the air pressure decreases, because&#xA;  air is not coming from the bottom through the glottis as fast as it is&#xA;  leaving above. When the vocal folds are opening, fluid pressure&#xA;  against the walls is greater than when the vocal folds are close&#xA;  together. Thus, it is the asymmetry of driving force (air) that&#xA;  sustains oscillation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/model.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;, which gives a more in-depth discussion on the topic and also provides some animated graphics to illustrate the various concepts involved. For example, it explains why the vocal folds don't just move together and apart as two uniform blocks but rather oscillate in a wave motion, as shown in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kHdhbEnhoA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-09-30T14:36:51.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9121" CreationDate="2014-09-30T21:51:01.263" Score="1" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently hear a lecture with the topic &quot;Spoken Language Processing&quot; and I have problems to understand SAMPA. I know that the IPA encodes the phones of human languages, so its possible to encode the exact pronunciation of a word. The SAMPA then encodes a subset of these phones with ASCII code language dependent. My professor has one sentence in his slides describing SAMPA with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SAMPA encodes phones but already with a phonemic touch&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't understand what that means. When I'm looking at the German SAMPA for example, are that phones or phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problems with SAMPA occur with further topics of language recognition. For example the definition of triphones in my lecture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; context-dependent phone models with left and right phone context&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, triphones consists of phones from my point of view. The examples I found (+ these in the lecture) are in SAMPA notation. But until now I have several resources defining triphones in terms of phonemes (one phoneme with left and right context). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can understand my problem with phones, phonemes in combination with SAMPA and topics like triphones. Maybe someone is able to help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meiner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5269" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T08:57:54.230" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T08:57:54.230" Title="SAMPA of a language - phones or phonemes?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;sampa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8700" CreationDate="2014-10-01T01:02:27.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_sound_correspondences_between_Hungarian_and_other_Uralic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Wiki page&lt;/a&gt;, Hungarian voiced stops and fricatives result from regular sound change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voiced stops result from a nasal+stop sequence, e.g. &lt;em&gt;nt &gt; d&lt;/em&gt;; except for /g/, which comes from Proto-Uralic *ŋ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voiced fricatives result from intervocalic stops: &lt;em&gt;VtV &gt; VzV, VpV &gt; VvV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for /f/, it results from lenition of initial /p/; and likewise /h/ from initial /k/, but only before back vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, these regular sound changes might themselves be ascribable to language contact in some way, since all the new sounds are ones that occur in neighboring Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T01:02:27.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2014-10-01T01:09:36.470" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a language with only 9 phonemes: 3 vowels: |e, a, o| and six consonants: |p t k m n s| with no tones and V or CV syllables.&#xA;take-ka toke te toke teke? (Do you want to speak the easy language?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5270" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T01:09:36.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9090" CreationDate="2014-10-01T04:44:11.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jlawler is right;  there is nothing wordy about your three statements.   They are not redundant, and in fact need to have more words added to them to make them clear.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statements not only make perfect sense but are compatible with one another if they refer to different sets of tasks, with each set consisting of more than one iteration of the same task.  Qualifying phrases would have to be &lt;em&gt;added&lt;/em&gt; to clarify this.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(During the three races on Tuesday) he was the first to finish last. &#xA;(During the three broad jumping contests on Wednesday) he was the first to finish second. &#xA;(During the three pillow-making contests on Thursday) he was the first to finish third. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T02:57:03.300" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T02:57:03.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9117" CreationDate="2014-10-01T07:30:27.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'phonemic touch' of SAMPA is not really a feature of SAMPA but of it's developmental relationship to IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two key things to know about IPA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As Colin Fine says, it is always only used approximately. To encode every last fronting of a vowel, devoicing of a consonant, etc. would be prohibitively time consuming. So a phonetician will only transcribe with as much precision as is necessary to illustrate what they're focusing on. Which is why in a dictionary, you will find IPA used purely phonemically, because the phonemes are what matters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since IPA is really used as an aid to communication among linguists (with some extension to the broader public), it has developed language-specific flavors. For instance, in British English the [æ] is pronounced more like [a] today. But due to local custom (sort of backward compatibility) it is still commonly transcribed as [æ]. Phoneticians know what is going on and are more precise when needed while nobody else really cares because there's no phonemic contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a way, IPA itself is used with a 'phonemic touch'. SAMPA is really a straightforward one-to-one mapping of IPA characters to ASCII characters. But because it has many fewer characters to deal with, it didn't make sense to just map the entire IPA to it. So SAMPA was developed for the needs of individual languages. What's more, it's mostly focused on segmental transcriptions and ignored prosody. There are other versions like X-SAMPA and SAMPROSA that try to make it more equivalent to the full IPA. However, even then it will only be used as phonetically or phonemically as IPA itself would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find more info about the history and use of SAMPA on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T07:30:27.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-01T11:31:09.663" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for material on this topic but always seem to fail to find something, and that's probably because the terms, although kind of accepted, seem to be too vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By these terms I refer to when languages express possession of abstract concepts that cannot possibly be possessed in a literal way: &lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;it.&lt;/em&gt; Ho paura = I'm scared), &lt;strong&gt;pain&lt;/strong&gt; (I have an headache), &lt;strong&gt;needs&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;it.&lt;/em&gt; Ho fame = I'm hungry), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you aware of materials that list occurrences and or examples on this, specifically for English? I'm aware of an article written by Paolo Ramat, Gianguido Manzelli and Elisa Roma, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Remarks on marginal possession: are feelings owned?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; from &lt;em&gt;Mediterranean Languages&lt;/em&gt;, but that's about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I'm referring to examples in English (or Italian, if you know any) where someone can express possession of something abstract/impossible to possess by using the verb &lt;strong&gt;to have&lt;/strong&gt;. So expressing a possession that sounds literal but is not, such as &lt;em&gt;I have an headache&lt;/em&gt;, since I do not really possess the headache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-10-01T15:56:19.197" LastActivityDate="2014-10-01T15:56:19.197" Title="Pseudo-possession or marginal possession" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-02T00:47:10.090" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The various European languages (as a geographic entity, and excluding the Uralics) present an interesting distribution in their words for &quot;library&quot;. In particular, English, Irish, Welsh, Basque, Maltese, and a rare few others have a word derived from Latin &lt;em&gt;liber&lt;/em&gt; &quot;book&quot;, such as our own &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically every other language in the group has some variant of ~&lt;em&gt;bibliotek&lt;/em&gt;, descended from Latin &lt;em&gt;bibliotheca&lt;/em&gt; &quot;library&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any single discussion of why each language has ended up with whichever word it has today, as opposed to individual etymological dictionaries for every language? I'm very interested in reading such a self-contained work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I'm particularly interested in &lt;em&gt;historical&lt;/em&gt; reasons for why the words got to where they did, as opposed to just etymological genealogies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5003" LastEditorUserId="5003" LastEditDate="2014-10-02T01:29:09.033" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T01:29:09.033" Title="Is there a compilation of the various etymologies of the words for &quot;library&quot; across Europe?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T14:03:22.100" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-02T15:09:00.373" Score="5" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is a dream confined to sci-fi for at least a few decades, but, I'd like to know if anyone has ever tried to create a computer model for the creation of a language, or at least researched into the same. Or perhaps attempted to simulate/extrapolate the development of an existing language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-10-02T20:18:41.003" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T22:05:28.797" Title="Has anyone attempted to simulate the creation/development of a language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9124" CreationDate="2014-10-02T17:41:03.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be a fascinating project if it were feasible, but unfortunately it's well beyond the current state of knowledge about linguistic change; and even if we knew much more than we do, it's still possible that language would turn out to be too complex and ill-bounded a system to model at all adequately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know enough about how, and especially why, language changes to be able to model it. For example, we know what kinds of sound changes are frequent in languages, but we don't know why they happen when they do in the languages that they do. We know morphological analogy happens, but we can't predict when it will happen and in what direction. Syntactic change is even more mysterious. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these phenomena have their roots in realms that are not (or not purely) linguistic, e.g. acoustics, sound perception, communicational pragmatics, or even random facts of cultural history, so you'd have to model all these as well. And language change arises from usage, not from the abstract structure of a language, so you'd have to model language use in all its contexts. Basically, you'd have to model a world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that it's impossible to model very specific, limited aspects of language change. Adam Albright claims he has a model that successfully predicts the direction of analogical change given certain usage statistics. Probably there are other such small-scale attempts out there, which maybe others here can mention. But a general model of language change, unfortunately, is almost certainly more than a few decades away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T17:41:03.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9124" CreationDate="2014-10-02T17:47:17.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the scale you're referring to. There is certainly active research in artificial language learning, agent-based and social network modeling of language evolution, novel language development by robot agents, social effects (micro and macro) on linguistic change, word formation constraints/factors, 'telephone game' experiments on language convergence, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T17:47:17.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9124" CreationDate="2014-10-02T22:05:28.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody, has modeled the whole of language development (to many moving parts, although a kind of a SIMS game with language would probably not be out of the realm of possibility). But there have been models of certain parts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people working on the newly opened area of language evolution/origins have conducted experiments that they used to model the changes in meaning. Simon Kirby is well known for his experiments. There's a whole centre for Language Evolution and Computing at the University of Edinburgh: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/lec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/lec&lt;/a&gt;. He describes some of his models in this lecture: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3-R3Ii35nY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3-R3Ii35nY&lt;/a&gt; and more details can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/3283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/3283&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, modeling of language change goes all the way to the postulation of sound change laws in the Indo European languages. But computational modeling is much more recent and not nearly as common. Most models are concerned with child language development or adult learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-02T22:05:28.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8885" CreationDate="2014-10-03T22:49:30.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, you are looking for lemmatization tools for these languages.&#xA;I admit to not knowing anything about Aramaic, but I do know that Hebrew is considered harder than English with regards to stemming/lemmatization (I'm afraid I don't have a credible source for this at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potentially good place to start might be the MILA center for processing Hebrew (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mila.cs.technion.ac.il/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mila.cs.technion.ac.il/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5275" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T12:29:17.027" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T12:29:17.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-04T11:47:08.860" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Uriagereka's 1999 article, Multiple Spell-out, the term cascade is used in several places. I just conjecture its meaning but don't get exact one. What does a cascade mean in syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5276" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T12:27:51.097" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T22:27:40.023" Title="What does the term cascade refer to in syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2014-10-04T17:08:44.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not about cases, but about CVC - consonant pattern frequency. Less consonants (comparted to the mother tongue) - an easy to learn language, more - hard. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingvoforum.net/index.php/topic,68876.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lingvoforum.net/index.php/topic,68876.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2584" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T17:08:44.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2014-10-04T17:27:49.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, it appears that all the people discussing this issue, like me, are non-native Japanese speakers. It would be nice to hear from a native Japanese speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My wife is Japanese, and I've asked her a similar question as to why Japanese, being a Polysyllabic language, as opposed to monosyllabic Chinese, doesn't entirely use an alphabet or phonetic syllabary. Her answer was that 1) it would wipe out many centuries of written text and 2) she can read and grasp content much faster (i.e. speed read). Think of reading numbers as an analogy. Which is faster to read and comprehend: 234 or two hundred thirty-four? Granted, it takes longer to learn Kanji and the two or more pronunciations of both Kun and On readings. But to her, to abolish Kanji would be akin to cultural apostasy. And her name and its meaning looks so beautiful and elegant written in Kanji than in soulless Kana. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not fluent in Japanese nor do I know hundreds of kanji, but I have noticed that the majority of verbs (I'm not talking suru verbs) are of native Japanese origin and use the Kun pronunciation that don't exhibit homophones. Ditto most surnames. The homophones come into play with many borrowed Chinese words (typically nouns, abstract ideas, and compound words) using the On pronunciations, much like English borrowing Latin words. It is the borrowed Chinese words that introduce the homophones and possible miscommunication. However, I believe most Japanese understand spoken Japanese through context. And of course there should be no confusion with homophones in written Japanese as the Kanji has an explicit meaning when read even though many homophones exist.         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5278" LastEditorUserId="5278" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T17:32:59.393" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T17:32:59.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9129" CreationDate="2014-10-04T20:54:49.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it is &lt;strong&gt;a derivational cascade&lt;/strong&gt;. I think it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/people/person/juan-uriagereka/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Juan Uriagereka&lt;/a&gt;'s terminology. Uriagereka 2005 writes that command units (or CU's, objects formed by the continuous application of Merge to the same object) are spelled-out at the end of each derivational cascade. The more common term in the Minimalist Program is &lt;strong&gt;a phase&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-10-04T22:27:40.023" LastActivityDate="2014-10-04T22:27:40.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9135" CreationDate="2014-10-04T23:09:43.810" Score="2" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read about alpha, but back in time there was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Greek_numbers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;another notation, using the vertical sign |&lt;/a&gt;. I'd like to know how they pronounced it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: with a bit of more research, I've actually found that the vertical sign was &lt;em&gt;iota&lt;/em&gt;, the only letter which wasn't used due to being the first of the number name. Here's the link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm&lt;/a&gt;. So, was &lt;em&gt;hen&lt;/em&gt; the name of 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5281" LastEditorUserId="5281" LastEditDate="2014-10-05T12:58:55.937" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T15:24:14.923" Title="How did the ancient Greeks say out loud &quot;1&quot; (which was written in another way)?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9134" CreationDate="2014-10-05T10:35:06.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When counting, the Greeks (like everyone else) obviously used their word for “one”; they did not read the names of the letters that were used as numerals (α´, β´, γ´ etc.). It could be debated which gender they used when counting. Presumably, when counting specific items they would have used the gender of the thing in question. For simply counting in an abstract way maybe they used the masculine (like Russian один), maybe they used the neuter (German “eins” is etymologically neuter, though in modern German used only as a number name); two-gender languages seem always to use the masculine (French “un”, Arabic wāḥid etc.).The modern Greeks use the neuter ένα, if that is anything to go by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-10-05T15:24:14.923" LastActivityDate="2014-10-05T15:24:14.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6581" CreationDate="2014-10-06T07:19:01.413" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several problems with the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 1:&lt;/strong&gt; The question assumes that passivization is actually a process that exists in language. It's carried over from the transformational heyday and feels so normal we might not even question it. But this is the context in which it should be questioned. In the constructional paradigm, this question does not come up because both passive and active as separate (if related) constructions, so you would not look at how one transforms the other. Instead, you would look at how each of these constructions could express similar meaning. And as several people pointed out that is very much possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was struck by his excessive candor (his excess of candor).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was impressed by how far fetched her ideas were.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 2:&lt;/strong&gt; You're focusing on the passive construction instead of the &lt;em&gt;verb a noun as adjective&lt;/em&gt; construction. Something is clearly going on there with how it works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Before you can deal with 2, you have to leave the realm of generalized syntax and focus on constructional semantics (Note: This is similar to the argument by Sportliche 1990 mentioned by Alex B. but without postulating new entities). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be best helped by some more real examples. I went to COCA and searched for &lt;em&gt;.[v&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;em&gt;.[p&lt;/em&gt;]  as &lt;em&gt;.[j&lt;/em&gt;]. This generated some more examples that suggested more of a context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would appear, the 'as something' only works when there is no force schema implied by the 'agent patient' relationship. For example, you have no problem with the passive equivalent as you can see in 3 and 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They viewed me as excessive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was viewed by them as excessive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can even get the active construction to not work as in 5 or 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*She struck him with a bat as excessive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*I impressed my seal into the wax as excessive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You clearly have to use the metaphorical meanings of 'strike' and 'impress' where the force dynamics is suppressed. Here are some more corpus inspired examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It struck me as a bit odd. / ?I was struck by this as a bit odd. / ? I was struck by this as a bit funny.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She saw them as human. / They were seen (by her) as human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The police identified them as gang members. / They were identified by the police as gang members.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They identified themselves as heterosexual. / *They were identified (by themselves) as heterosexual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the difference between 10 and 9. The AS construction can accept a more explicit agent-patient schema when dealing with a noun but the passive version somehow makes the schema too explicit with a property unless the verb itself suppresses the schema (as 'view' did in 4.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably more to the subtleties of the AS construction in different meanings but I hope I showed, that this is ultimately not about the passivization (should something like that even exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-10-06T08:34:33.120" LastActivityDate="2014-10-06T08:34:33.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9146" CreationDate="2014-10-06T13:52:07.073" Score="2" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just listening to some Mongolian and it struck me that the word for &quot;language&quot;, &lt;em&gt;хэл&lt;/em&gt;, is quite similar to the Estonian word for &quot;language&quot;, &lt;em&gt;keel&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's not accepted that these languages are related, but some linguists accept various hypotheses that they are, along with Turkic, Japonic, Korean, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also aware that coincidences are especially common in single-syllable words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm interested to know if anyone remotely credible includes these terms in their higher-order protolanguage reconstructions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely I'd be interested to see if known sound changes in these languages/families rule out any relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T16:15:06.820" Title="Might Mongolian &quot;хэл&quot; and Proto-Fiinic &quot;*keeli&quot; be related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9141" CreationDate="2014-10-07T11:02:27.637" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are related. They both derive from Eurasiatic word for tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T11:02:27.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9141" CreationDate="2014-10-07T16:15:06.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According S. Starostin et al., Estonian &lt;code&gt;keel&lt;/code&gt;, along with Finnish &lt;code&gt;kieli&lt;/code&gt; comes from Proto-Uralic &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Furalic%2Furalet&amp;amp;text_number=%20282&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;kele&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I have no knowledge of Uralic languages nor access to any mainstream Uralic books, so I can't comment on how reliable this reconstruction is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe the Altaic theory and its particular reconstruction by them, Mongolian &lt;code&gt;хэл&lt;/code&gt; comes from Proto-Altaic &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Falt%2Faltet&amp;amp;text_number=1041&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;*k'i̯ali&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Here, I have to say that their case about Turkish &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Falt%2Fturcet&amp;amp;text_number=%20262&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;kelime&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and related forms not being Arabic because of &quot;front vocalism and final e&quot; is plain wrong. Turkish &lt;code&gt;kelime&lt;/code&gt; is a very regular reflex of Arabic &lt;code&gt;كليمة&lt;/code&gt;, including front vocalism and final e. I personally noticed many similar errors and dubious claims about Turkic in their &lt;a href=&quot;http://suvar.org/books/etymological_dictionary_of_altaic_languages.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Altaic dictionary&lt;/a&gt; and others pointed out other problems concerning other languages. So it's by no means mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, based on these reconstructions and some others, they also reconstruct a Proto-Nostratic &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Fnostr%2Fnostret&amp;amp;text_number=%20%2095&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Ḳä[lH]ä&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is the answer to your question if you find them &quot;remotely credible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-10-07T16:15:06.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-07T19:53:07.857" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many stories of a child speaking several languages when his parents speak different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But languages can differ significantly, so I'm curious whether pairs of 'incompatible' languages exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5295" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-10-07T20:18:50.917" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T21:18:16.657" Title="Is it true that one can be bilingual in any pair of languages or are some languages 'incompatible' with one another when learned in childhood?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2014-10-08T05:19:52.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short version: &lt;strong&gt;no, but there is a useful perspective gained treating them as such.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, perhaps more controversially: &lt;strong&gt;not until recently.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, as was repeatedly emphasized to me in introductory linguistics courses, language is a fuzzier concept than our everyday use of it might suggest: dialects of &quot;the same language&quot; might not be mutually intelligible, as in the case of Chinese, or two countries might distinguish &quot;their&quot; languages from each others despite being perfectly able to carry on conversations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the remainder of this answer focuses on English, as this is the language I have firsthand experience of; it may generalize to other languages, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the advent of the Internet and text communication has catalyzed the rate of change in written English, to the point where it may well be changing as rapidly (and diversely) as spoken English. Nevertheless, there is a fairly tight feedback loop between the two on account of the vast majority of English writers also being English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the term &quot;LOL&quot;. I think it is reasonable to say that this is not a term that would ever appear in spoken English without its textual counterpart; pre-Internet, written English was exclusively for formal or private use. I've witnessed the term make its way into spoken conversations, where it was pronounced either letter-by-letter or (slightly more recently) as a single syllable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More recently still, the term has come &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; into written English as, variously, &quot;lawl&quot;, &quot;lulz&quot;, or &quot;lel&quot;; all express or refer to some form of amusement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should probably note here that this sort of written English is not what you would find in a dictionary - it is conversational, informal, and an artifact of typed (or texted) interface limitations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is true that there are no &quot;native&quot; written language speakers, I wonder whether part of this absence might be due to the props required: the relative ease of learning a spoken or signed language means that the situation where a written language might &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; natively &quot;spoken&quot; never comes up (nor should it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that written English has impacted spoken English before, and vice versa - just ask anyone who's failed a spelling bee. Acronyms such as &quot;radar&quot; and &quot;laser&quot; are inventions dependent on the alphabet - that is, the phonemes, so to speak, of written language (the technical term I believe is &quot;graphemes&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5211" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T05:19:52.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9155" CreationDate="2014-10-08T17:46:58.747" Score="7" ViewCount="2005" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages where a vowel and a consonant can be allophones of the same phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5300" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-10-08T21:09:48.937" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T13:11:37.893" Title="Can a vowel and a consonant be allophones of the same phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9153" CreationDate="2014-10-08T18:01:23.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the top of my head, French comes close. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; &quot;the approximants [j], [ɥ] and [w] correspond to /i/, /y/ and /u/ respectively. While there are a few minimal pairs (such as loua [lu.a] 's/he rented' and loi [lwa] 'law'), there are many cases where there is free variation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also many linguists consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; *i and *u as vocalic allophones of *y and *w (or vice versa). Some people also suggest that PIE &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory&quot;&gt;laryngeals&lt;/a&gt; had vocalic allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess approximant/vowel allophones not to be uncommon cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T18:01:23.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9153" CreationDate="2014-10-08T21:08:37.263" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this question may be trickier to answer than you realize--it largely depends on your definition of &lt;em&gt;vowel&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;consonant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a structural phonological approach to defining those terms (i.e., if whether something is a vowel or a consonant depends on where it occurs in the syllable), then they are by definition in complementary distribution, so there's no way to prove that any vowel and any consonant &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; allophones of the same phoneme. We may say that [j] and [l] must be realizations of different phonemes, because we have minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;.  Similarly, [oʊ] and [i] must be realizations of different phonemes because we have minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;boat&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;beat&lt;/em&gt;. But there can't be a minimal pair that contrasts in the inclusion of a vowel vs. the inclusion of a consonant in the same syllabic slot. Pairs like &lt;em&gt;yon&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;eon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fro&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;furrow&lt;/em&gt; don't count, because in such cases both the segmental makeup &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the syllabic structure is varying. (Note that the same is true for the French example in @cyco130's answer.) In such a model, one might look to distinctive features as a guide for identifying consonant vowel pairs that might be considered allophonic pairs. In particular, &lt;strong&gt;one might consider approximant/vowel pairs in French, English, etc. (of the type that @cyco130 describes) to be allophone pairs by virtue of the fact that their &quot;features&quot; (other than +/-syllabic) are the same.&lt;/strong&gt; Of course this kind of criterion is entirely dependent on the feature set you use!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have other criteria for &lt;em&gt;vowel&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;consonant&lt;/em&gt;, like 'vowels must be voiced' and 'all fricatives are consonants' (regardless of whether they are syllabic or not), then it may be possible to find some other types of cases that would qualify. For example, it is well-known that in continuous speech in Japanese high vowels often get devoiced after voiceless consonants. It is even common for the vowel to &quot;disappear&quot; altogether and be replaced by a lengthened version of the consonant before it, effectively being realized as a fricative*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/de.su/--&amp;gt;[de.sː] &#xA;/ki.ta/--&amp;gt;[kç.ta]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how you analyze such cases, &lt;strong&gt;you could argue that these surface fricatives in Japanese are allophones of the underlying high vowels.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is actually an articulatory and acoustic difference between the voiceless vowel [i̥] and the voiceless fricative [ç]. What is often described as the former is more accurately described as the latter. In the case of [i̥], the main constriction (and therefore the source of turbulent noise) is in the glottis; in [ç] it's between the tongue and the hard palate. I would argue that some realizations of /h/ in English are not voiceless vowels (as @jlawler claimed) but rather fricatives. Try pronouncing the beginning of the word &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; and compare that sound to a whispered /i/ vowel. They are probably produced differently and sound different. But the /h/ in &lt;em&gt;hot&lt;/em&gt; is pretty much realized the same as a whispered /a/ vowel. So &lt;strong&gt;one could make the argument that some allophones of /h/ are voiceless vowels and others (namely those before /i/ and /j/) are voiceless fricatives!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T13:01:14.550" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T13:01:14.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9149" CreationDate="2014-10-08T21:18:16.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no limit on how similar or different two languages have to be for bilingualism. The historical experience suggests that this is not even a very good question to ask. There are  millions of people bilingual in languages with completely different lexical bases, different syntax and morphology as well as phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knowing a language is a not an on / off state. It is a continuous development and changes over a person's lifetime.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multilingual people most often don't know both languages in the same way because they learned them in different contexts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-08T21:18:16.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9181" CreationDate="2014-10-09T02:38:14.640" Score="4" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got into a debate the other day with somebody over whether the capitalized and decapitalized forms of certain written words (say, &lt;em&gt;Polish&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;polish&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;China&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;china&lt;/em&gt;) could be considered homographs or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it hinges on whether capital letters and lowercase letters are considered allographs of the same grapheme or not (are &quot;b&quot; and &quot;B&quot; both ⟨b⟩?), and a quick Google showed that some sources consider them to be allographs while others deny this fact because capitalization can change meaning (as above with &lt;em&gt;shine a surface&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;originating from Poland&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more authoritative source on this subject? Does anyone have an idea of what the general opinion on this subject is, or what people use to justify this opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1642" LastEditorUserId="1642" LastEditDate="2014-10-14T21:33:19.337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T21:33:19.337" Title="Are capital and lowercase letters considered allographs?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2014-10-09T06:35:05.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it can be used to record lots of other languages and you can find the complete list &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_writing_system#Chinese_characters_and_derivatives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/em&gt; a new type of script called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_n%C3%B4m&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;chữ nôm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; based on Chinese characters is created. There are many ways to construct the new characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrow the whole Chinese character and meaning with its Sino-Vietnamese reading. Sometimes it's also used to represent a Vietnamese reading, in this case a diacritic is written to indicate that it should be read with the Vietnamese sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create completely new characters. Most will consist of a radical for meaning and a radical for the Vietnamese sound, just like how most Chinese characters are formed. For example the character for number 3  (&quot;ba&quot;) is composed of 巴 for the phonetic part and 三 (three) for meaning. Some characters are created by combination of multiple characters like the character  (giời/trời &quot;sky&quot;, &quot;heaven&quot;), which is made from the Chinese character for sky 天 and 上 (&quot;upper&quot;). Some others are simplication forms of the Chinese version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must know Chinese before learning &lt;em&gt;chữ nôm&lt;/em&gt;, which make it even more complex than Chinese characters, hence less people can understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the below example which means &quot;My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday&quot;, the newly created Nom characters are written in brown whereas characters borrowed directly from Chinese are shown in green. The blue ones are the modern Vietnamese alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Han-nom_parallel-2.svg/1300px-Han-nom_parallel-2.svg.png&quot; alt=&quot;sentence with Han and Nom characters&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:47.870" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T06:35:05.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-09T11:22:32.343" Score="2" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8730/how-is-it-that-such-varied-sounds-in-major-european-languages-came-to-be-repre&quot;&gt;On a related question&lt;/a&gt;, the OP points out that the grapheme &lt;code&gt;j&lt;/code&gt; has a variety of pronunciations throughout various languages: as [ʒ] in French, [j] in German, and [x] in Spanish. Does any other language pronounce  using the voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T01:06:04.793" Title="Which other languages pronounce &lt;j&gt; as [dʒ]" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9159" CreationDate="2014-10-09T11:30:49.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'J' stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T11:30:49.083" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9153" CreationDate="2014-10-09T11:40:51.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest we leave proto-Indo-European out of this. You cannot really use hypothetical reconstructed languages to illustrate points of phonology and phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin qui and cui are a minimal pair; the former was presumably /kwi/, the latter /kui/ or possibly /kuj/. My recollection is that the poets scan the latter both as two syllables and as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French loua /lua/ and loi /lwa/ are indeed a minimal pair, but only in lento speech. At normal speed they are both realised as [lwa].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jlawler’s remark about English /r/ is interesting. But I am not sure whether it is meaningful to analyse Southern British English “fear” phonologically as /fi:r/ rather than as /fiə/; in the latter case &quot;r&quot; would be purely orthographic/historic for the phoneme /ə/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T11:40:51.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3724" CreationDate="2014-10-09T12:25:47.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is really old, but I guess I'll still answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One main counterpoint against the commonality of polymorphemic words in, say, Old Chinese, is the fact that Old Chinese monosyllables are actually reconstructed to be quite complicated. &quot;施氏食狮史&quot; (shi shi shi shi shi in Modern Chinese) was pronounced something similar to [ɕia dʲi̯ěɡ dʲi̯ək ʂi̯ər sli̯əɡ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, we have Old Chinese evidence like the &lt;em&gt;Shijing&lt;/em&gt; which were written before Classical Chinese was established as a standard. In fact, &quot;Classical Chinese&quot; arose from an imitation of Old Chinese during Middle Chinese-speaking periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite clear that Classical Chinese was quite divergent from the vernacular during Middle Chinese periods. Middle Chinese vernacular grammar is reconstructed to be more similar to grammars of current conservative Chinese languages such as Hakka and Cantonese. This means that, say, Su Shi would not be writing essays the way he speaks at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2028" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T12:25:47.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9153" CreationDate="2014-10-09T13:54:08.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Standard German, the R behaves like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prevocalic /r/ is pronounced [ʁ] or [ʀ], but postvocalic /r/ is pronounced [ɐ]. This is not merely an orthographic convention: Adding a suffix can produce a new syllable and turn [ɐ] into [ʁ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Rad&quot; (wheel): [ʁat]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Bär&quot; (bear): [beɐ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Bären&quot; (bears): [be.ʁən]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Bauer&quot; (farmer): [baʊɐ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Bäuerin&quot; (female farmer): [bɔʊə.ʁɪn]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not a linguist, so the transcription may not be 100% accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5305" LastEditorUserId="5305" LastEditDate="2014-10-09T14:05:29.403" LastActivityDate="2014-10-09T14:05:29.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9084" CreationDate="2014-10-09T20:27:25.387" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most &lt;strong&gt;accessible&lt;/strong&gt; resource that explains the difference between each of these word similarity metrics would be Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin's ubiquitous &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0131873210&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speech and Language Processing 2nd Edition&lt;/a&gt;.  Specifically, pages 652-667 in chapter 20 (Computational Lexical Semantics) briefly and comprehensively cover each metric/algorithm in a way that anyone with just a basic understanding of math, language, and graphs can understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will do my best to summarize each metric, using Jurafsky and Martin as my primary citation (attribute all my summaries to that book), annotated with my own understanding / insight where relevant / useful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly we can group the metrics based on what parameters they operate on.  Roughly there are two groups: (1) metrics which use only a thesaurus (e.g. WordNet) and (2) which use a thesaurus &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; probabilistic information from distributions in corpora.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These metrics belong to the thesaurus-based ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Path similarity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leacock-Chodorow Similarity (Leacock and Chodorow 1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wu-Palmer Similarity (Wu and Palmer 1994)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these work?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Path similarity computes shortest number of edges from one word sense to another word sense, assuming a hierarchical structure like WordNet (essentially a graph).  In general, word senses which have a longer path distance are less similar than those with a very short path distance, e.g. &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; (expectation is that &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; is more similar to &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; than it is to &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The path similarity can be defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sim$_{\text{path}}(c_1, c_2) = \text{pathlen}(c_1, c_2)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where $c_1$, $c_2$ are word senses, and $\text{pathlen}(c_1, c_2)$ is the shortest number of edges between those two word senses in a given thesaurus like WordNet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leacock-Chodorow Similarity, or LCH, is practically the same thing, except it uses the negative logarithm of the result of path similarity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sim$_{\text{path}}(c_1, c_2) = -log \text{pathlen}(c_1, c_2)$&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The negative logarithm is in the domain of information theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wu-Palmer metric (WUP) is very similar to LCH, except it weights the edges based on distance in the hierarchy.  For example, jumping from inanimate to animate is a larger &lt;em&gt;distance&lt;/em&gt; than jumping from say Felid to Canid.  In some sense we can think of it as sort of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;edit distance&lt;/a&gt;, assigning type changing operations a higher cost the higher they are in the hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These metrics belong to the thesaurus- and corpus-based ones (also called the Information Content metrics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resnik Similarity (Resnik 1995)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lin Similarity (Lin 1998b)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jiang-Conrath distance (Jiang and Conrath 1997)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically each of these algorithms center around calculating the probability of the lowest common subsumer between two word senses $c_1$ and $c_2$, which is the lowest node in the hierarchy that is the parent of both $c_1$ and $c_2$.  The probability comes from the distribution sampled from, i.e. the corpora used.  Resnik is the simplest implementation of this, while Lin expands it by considering similarity as both the information content shared between two senses, and the difference.  Jiang-Conrath is actually a distance function, best summarized from the chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jiang-Conrath distance&lt;/strong&gt; (Jiang and Conrath, 1997), although derived in a completely different way from Lin and expressed as a distance&#xA;  rather than a similarity function, has been &lt;strong&gt;shown to work well or&#xA;  better than all the other thesaurus-based methods&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  (p. 656)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried computing all of them on words w1 = 'love', w2 = 'hate', w3 =&#xA;  'romance'. On all the metrics, the similarity scores obtained were&#xA;  higher for the pair 'love' and 'hate' rather than the 'love' and&#xA;  'romance'. Shouldn't it have been the opposite case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jurafsky and Martin answer this question directly in the chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Word relatedness characterizes a larger set of potential relationships&#xA;  between words: &lt;strong&gt;antonyms&lt;/strong&gt;...have a &lt;em&gt;higher relatedness&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;low&#xA;  similarity&lt;/em&gt;...Word similarity is thus a sub case of word relatedness. &#xA;  In general, the five algorithms we describe in this section &lt;strong&gt;do not&#xA;  attempt to distinguish between similarity and semantic relatedness&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  (p. 653)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this (and the basic understanding of each similarity metric), the word senses of &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt;, while antonyms, are very related, since they essentially belong to the same semantic type (one's feeling for something else).  Thus, it would be expected that the metrics give a higher similarity to them, than say &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;romance&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;romance&lt;/em&gt; is very similar to &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;, but its type is not as close as say &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dislike&lt;/em&gt;.  This hypothesis is quickly confirmed by testing the WUP metric:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; wn.wup_similarity(dislike, love)&#xA;0.7692307692307693&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; wn.wup_similarity(romance, love)&#xA;0.25&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would leave it as an exercise to compute this for other metrics, but I am 100% certain you will get similar results for any other metric.  What you could do is investigate metrics that consider similarity and not relatedness, i.e. would rank the similarity of &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;romance&lt;/em&gt; higher than &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt;.  Jurafsky and Martin don't seem to give any references to papers about this, however.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="4974" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T07:07:56.940" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T07:07:56.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9175" CreationDate="2014-10-09T21:05:08.560" Score="8" ViewCount="2987" Body="&lt;p&gt;In p.26 of &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis&lt;/em&gt; by Sportiche et al. (2013), the authors specify that syntax trees aren't allowed to have more than two children:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We never find morphological trees in which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i. a given node has more than one mother;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii. a mother has more than two daughters;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii. any node lacks a mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re the second bullet point, a syntax diagram is given that looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  A&#xA;/ | \&#xA;C D E&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, apparently this is not acceptable when specifying morphological structure; I assume it's the same for syntax trees. This model seems to be exactly the same as a binary tree. Why is this model necessary? I understand that binary trees are very useful structures in computing, but I figured that the use of trees for syntax analysis predated their use in computing. Is there an inherent advantage to using binary trees for syntax diagrams, without considering computing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T01:25:55.860" Title="Why are syntax trees binary trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-10T01:01:15.850" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any available algorithm that can take a set of words and attempt to find a word that best represents the &quot;center of mass&quot; of all those words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be easy if we can define a distance on words, which then it is just a case of finding the center of mass, which is basic stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a set of words(or even phrases) that represent concepts. Suppose further I'm trying to find a the word that best describes the common concept represented by all of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g., The set {Red, Blue, Green, Yellow}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would probably have the center &quot;Colors&quot;, or it would, at least be something close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The location of &quot;words&quot; would have to be based on their &quot;definitions&quot; since the words themselves have no inherent meaning. Of course, there are multiple words for the same concept and multiple concepts for a single word, so it is not a very easy task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example above, all the definitions of each of those words would probably have &quot;color&quot; in it in some form or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal here is to be able to find the best word(s) to represent a set of concepts represented by other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully that is somewhat clear. I'm not expecting the solution to be &quot;exact&quot; or mathematical, just something that is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5310" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T13:04:34.490" Title="Center of a set of words" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9157" CreationDate="2014-10-10T03:57:31.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Overall, I'd say it's a bit of a gray area (depending on your criteria for allographs).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the one hand, as you've noted, capitalization can change the meaning of a word: there are, in fact, minimal pairs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, capitalization in online conversations is often used to indicate emphasis (LIKE SO) - often capitalizing several words or sentences in succession will result in responses of &quot;stop shouting&quot; or similar.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, that use of capitalization for emphasis is similar to that of bold or italicized text (though in my experience capitalization is considered the &quot;loudest&quot;), and I would certainly agree that &quot;b&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and &quot;&lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are all allographs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5211" LastEditorUserId="5211" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T11:53:18.123" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T11:53:18.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-10T13:25:16.540" Score="1" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled across this Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Wijngaarden_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Van Wijngaarden grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cut-down quote of the intro paragraph picks out the elements that I found tantalizingly interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Van Wijngaarden grammar ... was invented ... to &lt;strong&gt;define rigorously some syntactic restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; which previously &lt;strong&gt;had to be formulated in natural language&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;despite their essentially syntactical content&lt;/strong&gt;. Typical applications are &lt;strong&gt;the treatment of gender and number in natural language syntax&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm trying to find concrete examples of how to actually apply this Van Wijngaarden grammar to natural languages. (Gender, number, and I'm assuming stuff like verb inflection subtypes etc too...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be pretty easy to find equivalent concrete examples of how the Backus-Naur Form can be applied to (limited subsets of) natural English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, this page, under &quot;3.1 THE SYNTAX OF A SIMPLE ENGLISH FRAGMENT&quot; (no direct link to section; ctrl-f to it), has a good demonstration of how to build up to stuff like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sentence ::= subject verb (objects) {prepositional_phrase}&#xA;&#xA;subject ::= noun_phrase&#xA;&#xA;objects ::= (noun_phrase) noun_phrase&#xA;&#xA;noun_phrase ::= pronoun | modified_noun&#xA;&#xA;modified_noun ::= (specifier) (number) {adjective} {prepositional_phrase}&#xA;&#xA;prepositional_phrase ::= preposition noun_phrase&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm looking for something like that, but for Van Wijngaarden grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2816" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-10-10T14:29:41.290" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T14:29:41.290" Title="Van Wijngaarden grammar - concrete examples?" Tags="&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2014-10-10T13:53:21.950" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slovenian language is one of smallest group of Slav's languages. Anyway, our language is very old and have the greatest cases of simillarity with sanskrit, specially rig-veda one. There are quite good linguistic proofs. Beside this there are NO proofs in writings of old historians, that Slovenians (Venets, Slaves, Slovenets,...) came in 6th a.d., even more, for Croats and Serbs are good documented comming. So I beleive, that Slovenes are part of very old culture of Europe, as Poles, Chechs, Slovaks. We have all Slovan language, but I see Slovak language very simillar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5313" LastActivityDate="2014-10-10T13:53:21.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9165" CreationDate="2014-10-10T17:43:59.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;My original answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said in a comment I am not completely sure about the&#xA;meaning/context of your question. I am answering with respect to&#xA;syntax, though my remarks are so general that they could apply to&#xA;nearly any context, whether morphological (if you use trees for&#xA;morphological structure) or syntactic, or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding binary trees, anything that can be represented by trees can&#xA;be represented by binary trees, so it may be a matter of&#xA;simplification. Another good point of binary trees is that they are&#xA;the most convenient and effective for factoring structures and&#xA;information. That can help factor linguistic descriptions of language&#xA;structures, or factoring ambiguous analyses of a given&#xA;sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, though you seem uninterested by computational&#xA;consideration, because binary trees give better factorization,&#xA;parsing sentences with type 2 grammars (context-free) is faster with&#xA;binary trees and also takes less space, when you attempt formally to&#xA;analyse ambiguities. The theoretical complexity is in power of n+1,&#xA;where n is the maximum number of daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though complexity is usually a matter of asymptotic behaviour,&#xA;this is not completely irrelevant, because the complexity increase is&#xA;observable even on smallish examples. This means that considering only&#xA;binary trees might make sense from a psycho-linguistic point of view&#xA;... inasmuch as trees are considered relevant for psycho-linguistic&#xA;models of whatever you are analyzing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reply to some comments, including my own.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the quote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have access to the 2013 edition of the book, but I did find&#xA;what seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/stabler/isat.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an earlier version&lt;/a&gt; since it has only 246 pages&#xA;instead of 470, and the quoted text does not appear on the same page,&#xA;but on page 21 instead of 26.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote I found is slightly different as the third bullet point&#xA;reads in my version (where it is second):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that we never find morphological trees in which&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i. ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ii. more than one node lacks a mother&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  iii. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes more sense than the quote given in the OP's question, since&#xA;otherwise, the structure should be infinite or looping, which is not&#xA;compatible with what I know of trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still fail to understand the reason for excluding morphological&#xA;trees in which &lt;code&gt;i. a given node has more than one mother&lt;/code&gt;. However the&#xA;authors states a few lines later that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Trees in general then obey the following conditions: i. Every node but&#xA;  one (the &quot;topmost&quot;) has a mother ii. No node has more than one mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my guess is only that the first bullet of the text quoted in the question was both tautological, and&#xA;awkwardly stated. All trees have the property, so that none needs be&#xA;excluded on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About morphology and syntax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear from the book that the above quote is about morphology.&#xA;I have no opinion about its linguistic accuracy. But it is also clear&#xA;that the extension to syntax trees is only the OP's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence it would be better if the comments or answers were clear on&#xA;whether they address the book, or the OP's personnal assumptions when stating&#xA;&lt;code&gt;I assume it's the same for syntax trees&lt;/code&gt;, which he does not seem to&#xA;sustain with arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I am without opinion on the matter, but this part of the book&#xA;does not seem to me to be related to Chomskyan syntax (maybe because&#xA;of my ignorance on the matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the use of binary trees in this morphological context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own, probably limited and simplistic, experience of morphology is&#xA;that it can most often (with few exceptions) be defined by finite&#xA;state machines, defining regular sets. Regular sets of morpheme&#xA;strings can be defined by regular grammars, which are either left or&#xA;right linear. Representing the sequences as trees rather than strings&#xA;would be pointless, except for the fact that left and right linearity&#xA;are not normally not mixed (so as to preserve the regular character),&#xA;but it seems natural to use one for prefixes and the other for&#xA;suffixes (though there is surprisingly no explicit tree example in the&#xA;book to justify that). This then justifies exhibiting the structure&#xA;with binary trees, that differentiate left and right linearity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the use of binary trees in syntax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I want to make it clear that I do not have the&#xA;qualification to have an opinion about linguistic theories. But I do&#xA;have experience and opinions (that I can hopefully sustain) about&#xA;formalization techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was clear that my statements are of a very general nature, and thus&#xA;do not support any linguistic theory over another. It is only my way&#xA;to give a kind of general support to the idea of binarization, which&#xA;is more than the OP did, as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I state that binary branching structures are more efficient, all&#xA;I mean, and I said as much, is that it helps factoring. If you use a&#xA;context-free grammar, you can use the rules:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &lt;code&gt;{ A --&amp;gt; BCF , A --&amp;gt; DEF }&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;  or &lt;code&gt;{ A --&amp;gt; UF , U --&amp;gt; BC , U --&amp;gt; DE }&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you have for some reason an ambiguity between BC and DE, you can at&#xA;least share the information regarding the presence of F at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is at least one situation where this efficiency gain shows as a&#xA;complexity result, which is context-free parsing. Its complexity is&#xA;lower on binarized grammars ...  or at least binarized parse-tree (to&#xA;make sure to cover an apparently little known point about Earley's&#xA;algorithm). If this is not a solid example, I do not know what is.  I&#xA;am however conscious of the fact that asymptotic arguments are of&#xA;limited value (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6003/does-the-p-versus-np-conjecture-in-computer-science-have-any-direct-relevance-to&quot;&gt;which some seem to ignore&lt;/a&gt;), becahave its valueuse the brain deals&#xA;only with small examples, but I did try to account for that in my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording of my answer (above) was careful. I was expecting&#xA;reactions about the existence of structures that should be viewed as&#xA;ternary, or more. I do not deny that, and spoke of &lt;em&gt;representation&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;The fact is that a representation is chosen for convenience, and can&#xA;then be abstracted for perspicuity if deemed necessary. Abstraction&#xA;may mean seeing one ternary node where representation uses two binary&#xA;ones. And while the ternary view may be essential, there is still the possibility that the binary view is relevant in a different context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if you do consider that the ternary aspect of &lt;code&gt;A --&amp;gt; BCF&lt;/code&gt; is&#xA;essential, you can represent it with &lt;code&gt;A --&amp;gt; UF , U --&amp;gt; BC&lt;/code&gt;, while&#xA;specifying that &lt;code&gt;U --&amp;gt; BC&lt;/code&gt; has no meaning on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, my intent is only to see what general arguments can be given&#xA;for binarization, on an abstract basis, without attempting to consider&#xA;any specific syntactic theory of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T10:55:59.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-10T20:51:56.123" Score="9" ViewCount="1302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand what a matrix clause is, but was curious why it's called a &quot;matrix&quot; clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-11T01:59:36.433" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T11:01:10.950" Title="Why is a matrix clause called &quot;matrix&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-11T04:31:50.453" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for any plots, etc. that show performance metrics on various NLP tasks as a function of year. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/facial-recognition-technology-shows-improvement/4796&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following figure&lt;/a&gt; shows the evolution of performance of face recognition systems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rx0Np.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-04-20T15:22:24.753" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T15:22:24.753" Title="Any NLP performance timeline?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-11T04:40:03.720" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether an acronym should be considered as an &lt;em&gt;icon&lt;/em&gt; or an &lt;em&gt;index&lt;/em&gt;. On the one hand, an acronym is similar to what it stands for, on the other hand, there is often (but not always) a formulaic relationship between the acronym and what it stands for. Some acronyms, such as USA, might not be similar enough to what they stand for to count as an icon and might be better viewed as an index, but that is not so clear in other cases, such as InterPol. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the semiotic view on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5316" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-11T22:54:40.603" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T22:54:40.603" Title="Would an acronym be classified as an icon or an index?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9178" CreationDate="2014-10-11T07:55:48.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be classified as neither.   Icons &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; resemble what they stand for.  For example, a globe is an icon to the extent that it &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; resembles Earth.  No such resemblance exists between an acronym and that which it stands for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An index &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; resembles an effect or thing affected by what it stands for.  For example, a symbol that resembles smoke can be used to stand for fire.  No such resemblance exists between an acronym and that which it stands for.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acronyms are as arbitrary as any other conventional symbols.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, read &lt;a href=&quot;http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolindexicon.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolindexicon.htm&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T07:55:48.057" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9157" CreationDate="2014-10-11T13:17:18.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest 'it depends' as answer. Whether or not &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; are to be considered members of the same grapheme or allographs of one single grapheme (call it &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt;) is not so much a statement about reality as it is a statement about the assumptions that you built your theory on. This is exactly the same state of affairs as in phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give a simple example. In phonology, you look for minimal pairs and sound correspondences to determine whether or not two observed phones (i call them 'phonotypes') belong to one or two phonemes. Using that method, you find out that [d] and [t] belong to two distinct phonemes in German, because [de:r] and [te:r] and many other pairs are consistently kept apart. You also find out that what is written &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt;, [ç] and [x], should be allophones of the same phoneme (call it /x/), because of such word pairs as &lt;code&gt;lachen&lt;/code&gt;—&lt;code&gt;lächeln&lt;/code&gt;, 'Loch&lt;code&gt;—&lt;/code&gt;Löcher` where [x] and [ç] are interchanged consistently, depending on the quality of the preceding vowel (it's a natural change where velar vowels go along with the velar consonant and palatal vowels with the palatal consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all fine until someone comes up with a counterexample. There's a actually at least one minimal pair in German which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; distinguish between [ç] and [x], and that's &lt;code&gt;Kuhchen&lt;/code&gt; [ku:çən] ('small cow', diminutive of &lt;code&gt;Kuh&lt;/code&gt;) vs. &lt;code&gt;Kuchen&lt;/code&gt; [ku:xən] ('cake'). While you hardly in your lifetime will overhear a German speaker say &lt;code&gt;Kuhchen&lt;/code&gt;, building diminutives with [-çən] (and [-lain]) is a demonstrably active process in German, which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used on a daily basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks that [ç] and [x] &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be viewed as members of the same phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until, that is, someone comes along to point out a flaw in your analysis, and that would be the negligence of morpheme boundaries in your analysis. True, [ku:çən] and [ku:xən] do look like a minimal contrast, but only until you put back those boundaries: then, [ku:#çən] (&lt;code&gt;Kuh&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;-chen&lt;/code&gt;) and [ku:xən] (single morpheme) do look different, and this difference can be understood of what is causing /x/ to come out as [ç] in the one case and as [x] in the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, whether or not we can establish a phoneme /x/ = [ç, x] will depend not on the German language, but whether your theory does or does not take morpheme boundaries into account.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, whether &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;, , ,  and so on) are 'same' or 'different' will depend on your use case. Write down &lt;code&gt;MIND THE GAP&lt;/code&gt; on a piece of paper and stick it to the wall, everyone will thank you for the warning and understand it just as well as &lt;code&gt;mind the gap&lt;/code&gt;; write &lt;code&gt;EINSTEIN WAS WRONG&lt;/code&gt; in your essay, and your teacher will pick up the red pen because she thinks only &lt;code&gt;Einstein was wrong&lt;/code&gt; is correct orthography for an essay. Write  on a sign in Germany these days and people will find it strange, use it the same type in a newspaper masthead and people will find it customary. Use &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;, and  interchangeably in your personal notices and it's up to you, confuse them in mathematical formulas and that important maths periodical won't publish you. Same isn't same, different isn't different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2014-10-11T13:17:18.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-12T12:42:46.677" Score="0" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we define the term 'government' in syntax, we should exclude the interfering nodes which asymmetically c-command node B.Why can't we allow asymmetrical c-command while we accept symmetrical c-command? In other words, why should we allow the interfering nodes which symmetrically c-command B? Please let me know, please. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5321" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T10:20:01.207" Title="in the definion of government, why can't we allow asymmetrical c-command while we accept symmetrical c-command?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-12T20:48:51.873" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natural selection, based on Darwin's theories, states that organisms with characteristics that benefit survival survive while the weaker, less adapted individuals are weeded out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages also evolve over time, which is shown by the many languages around the world, all the dialects within each language, and the difference in language from older texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do languages evolve the same way as species evolve? Do languages or parts of languages change based on how well they suit those who speak it? What exactly drives linguistic evolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5324" LastActivityDate="2014-10-12T20:48:51.873" Title="Are Biological and Linguistic Evolution Similar?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-10-13T03:37:07.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-12T23:08:35.110" Score="5" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I admit a Romance bias in asking this question, perhaps expressing what I'm looking for is quite common in other families)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After answering a question recently on the Spanish SE on tense sequencing, I got to wondering.  Many languages make frequent use of a pluperfect, either via direct formation or auxiliar verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I suppose many languages could form it by combining two ways of talking about the future (English: &quot;I will be going to V.&quot;, Asturian: &quot;Diré V.&quot;), they tend not to be used that often, rather being substituted by the standard future forms supplemented with adverbs to indicate the sequencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages/language families that dictate future tense sequencing as strictly as past tense sequencing such that they either require or regularly use a plufuture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Some overly simple examples based on the verb &lt;em&gt;swim&lt;/em&gt; , but I think it will make sense even if there's a few nits that could be picked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the three basic time frames (past, present, future)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David swam, John swims, and Mary will swim.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David nadou, João nada e Maria nadará.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if we shift the point of reference to the past, the verb forms all shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yesterday David had (already) swum, John swam, and Mary would swim.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ontem David (já) nadara, João nadou e Maria nadaria.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, let's say instead of shifting the reference backwards, we shift forward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tomorrow David will have swum, John &lt;em&gt;will swim&lt;/em&gt;, and (then) Mary &lt;em&gt;will swim&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amanhã David haverá nadado, João &lt;em&gt;nadará&lt;/em&gt; e (depois) Maria &lt;em&gt;nadará&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that expressing John and Mary's swimming use the same verb constructions.  The only common way to show that Mary's future swimming comes after John's future swimming is to use an adverb, although theoretically I suppose the following would be possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tomorrow David will have swum, John will swim, and Mary &lt;em&gt;will go to swim&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amanhã David haverá nadado, João nadará e María &lt;sup&gt;?&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;irá nadar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except that the meaning of &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; here for me curiously shifts from its future sense meaning to the movement sense, causing &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; to take its &quot;for the purpose of&quot;.  I'm not 100% certain of the grammaticality of the Portuguese one, although it's Spanish counterpart &lt;em&gt;irá a nadar&lt;/em&gt; would have the same interpretation as the English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'm looking for would be a language where, in order to properly express the future-shifted version, the John and Mary's &lt;em&gt;will swim&lt;/em&gt; would be constructed differently in an effectively obligatory nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-13T02:15:40.027" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T11:28:13.517" Title="Are there any languages with a plufuture for tense sequencing?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9182" CreationDate="2014-10-13T08:31:49.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have troubles parsing the question unambiguously. My answer assumes the question means &quot;Why are symmetrical c-commanding nodes not barriers to government whereas asymmetrically c-commanding nodes are (potentially) barriers to government?&quot; but I encourage you to rewrite the question with more details in case I misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this assumption, the historically accurate answer was that this was a pure stipulation based on the fact that such an &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; fix gets the case assignment and binding properties right. The main problem with allowing symmetrical c-commanding nodes as barriers is the inherent ambiguity this involves: since binary trees have no ordering (so that their common drawing is deceptive), it would be impossible to define which node is a barrier for the other in the generic situation were symmetric c-commanding nodes to be allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such stipulations should always be regarded with great skepticism and accordingly a good deal of works in that branch of syntax in the last 30 years has been devoted to eliminate them (the impetus behind the so-called minimalist program). Within the framework of minimalist syntax, the answer to your question follows from the data structure of the syntactic objects constructed by Merge, as I encourage you to work out for yourself (or ask about).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2014-11-12T10:12:15.013" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T10:12:15.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9184" CreationDate="2014-10-13T12:24:55.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;German has two future tenses (called 'Futur I and II' in popular grammars), and if they are used together, this comes close to what you're asking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German: Wenn ich gegessen haben werde, werde ich satt sein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gloss: When I eaten-past-partcpl have will, will I not-hungry be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tenses: ............. Futur II ..............................Futur I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: When I will have eaten, I will not be hungry any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, German Futur II does not express an action taking place after the action expressed by Futur I. Instead, Futur II expresses an action taking place in the future, but before another action expressed by Futur I. In this respect it is similar to the pluperfect, which expresses an action that took place before another action expressed by the perfect/past tense. But the relation between Futur II and Futur I is not a mirror-image of the relation between pluperfect and perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Futur I is the unmarked tense here. Used on its own, it just refers to an action taking place in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T12:24:55.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-13T16:10:44.723" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Observed in fluent speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a native English speaker, the following would be expected instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening here?  It looks like the speaker is inserting the adjective inside &lt;code&gt;a vowel&lt;/code&gt;, and then not transforming &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;an&lt;/code&gt;.  It looks like a rule-ordering bug to me.  Is there a name for this particular glitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5302" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-14T01:33:33.200" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T01:33:33.200" Title="&quot;an&quot; -&gt; &quot;a&quot; When Describing a Noun With Adjectives" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-13T17:36:55.443" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Natural Language Processing, I think NLP is a challenging field, the syntax and semantic ambiguities could cause a lot of problems. For example I think for these problems machine translation is a hart task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore probably many approaches and methods has been applied to the field, I would like to know what are the latest and most promising approaches and methods in the field of NLP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does these techniques are dependent highly to the target language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5241" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T07:28:18.180" Title="What is state of the art in the field of NLP?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-10-14T11:45:45.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9204" CreationDate="2014-10-13T18:33:09.623" Score="1" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write the following line (Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.30) with its metric peculiarity :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;per Chaos hoc ingēns uāstīque silentia rēgnī&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Ov.%20Met.%2010.30&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;something like&lt;/a&gt; : By this huge void and these vast and silent realms...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a dactylic hexameter with the &quot;hoc&quot; being treated as a long syllable (for another example, &lt;em&gt;confer&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Verg.%20A.%202.664&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0055&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this line in Eneid 2.664&lt;/a&gt; : Hoc erat, alma parens...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; -    u u  -  -  -    -  -  u  u -  uu  -  -&#xA;per Chaos hoc ingēns uāstīque silentia rēgnī&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is : how can I show that &quot;hoc&quot; is treated as a long syllable ? I don't want to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a macron&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;hōc&quot;) since the vowel is short (hoc &amp;lt; hodce; the word being read &quot;hocc&quot;). I can't use some wordprocessor or CSS tricks : I have to use pure Unicode output. I thought to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synizesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;synizesis&lt;/a&gt; symbol (something like ho͡c) but this Latin word had nothing to do with a synizesis !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any better idea ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-14T01:28:37.820" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T00:58:51.390" Title="unicode symbol(s) for a long syllable in a Latin text" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4286" CreationDate="2014-10-13T20:34:42.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question was recently resurrected, I'd like to provide a broader perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the question of the evolution of language is often confused between three quite independent (although related) issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the evolutionary selective advantage of language? Or what evolutionary purpose does language serve?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the origin of language? What were the features that were first selected on? What was the first language like? What were the first phases of language like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the mechanisms by which language develops and changes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has rightly long been deep seated skepticism in linguistics about questions 1 and 2. It has only been quite recently (maybe last 20 years) that the questions of language evolution in the early stages have been considered to provide serious insights, mostly due to the use of models. However, there is no universally accepted answer to 1 and 2. There is not even universal agreement on whether language is a directly selected feature or an epiphenomenon of other kinds of natural selection resulting in the neural and anatomical features making language possible. It's also not clear whether the early stages of language were more holistic (larger units imbued with complex meanings becoming modern language through articulation and analysis) or very particular (small units with small meanings being synthesized into larger units). It's not even clear if language has a single origin. These questions can likely be never settled completely and often reflect the worldview and current philosophical leanings of their investigators more than comprehensive analysis of extensive evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the answers to questions 1 and 2 can only be speculative, there is vast literature documenting the answers to question 3. We know a lot about the mechanisms by which language changes at all levels. Phonetics to lexicon or syntax. The process of grammaticalization. The processes of Creolization. The various social aspects of prestige, code switching, and standardization. All of this knowledge is partial and there are no definitive predictive models. But we certainly know where to look for more data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the wealth, depth and breadth of the evidence, it makes no sense to ask the fourth popular question. Is language change subject to the evolutionary processes of natural selection? Language (as it is now) is a phenomenon with a strong social dimension and therefore it makes no more (or less) sense to think of it as evolving by natural selection than it does any other social phenomenom (from fashion to war). While models inspired by various selectionist metaphors can certainly be illuminating (e.g. see Dixon's thesis of punctuated equilibria or even Dawkins' memes when applied to the lexicon), they are always very partial and break down when we try to universalize them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the existing evidence and future research paradigm it is unlikely that language change needs the metaphor of natural selection to explain what's going on. This is partly because there's so much cultural (Lamarckian) selection involved and partly because the processes of encoding and transmission of the features on which selection could operate are relatively well-known and look nothing like the straightforward digital encoding present in the genes (even when we take the more recent environmental modifications into account). You could certainly look at some of the changing units of language (for instance words or salient phonological features) and study their 'reproductive' success. But that instantly transforms the feature you're studying into an organism and the whole metaphor becomes too circular to explain much of anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, while I wouldn't go as far as the 19th century French academics who forbade any discussion of language evolution, it is not a question very high on most linguists' minds. All the fundamental questions have been argued to death and few people think a resolution is in sight. Occasionally a fascinating hypothesis comes along that shines a light on other aspects of language (I was quite taken with Dunbar's work and found Dixon's arguments very fruitful), but ultimately it's not a fundamental question of modern linguistics. It sparks popular imagination and individual curiosity of many but we will most likely be left to ponder these dilemmas forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-13T20:34:42.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9165" CreationDate="2014-10-14T01:25:55.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several different views on the acceptability of trees where a mother has more than two daughters (i.e. non-binary branching).  Much current work in the Minimalist Program (e.g. the Sportiche work cited) allows only binary trees.  In earlier versions of syntactic theory (e.g. Chomsky 1981), non-binary trees were allowed.  And in some alternatives to Minimalist Program (e.g. LFG, HPSG), such non-binary trees are still allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emphasis on binary trees owes much to the work of Richard Kayne, who has argued that they are the only kind that should be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5335" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T01:25:55.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9157" CreationDate="2014-10-14T07:00:27.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Except in leet speak, they’re certainly not &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; homographs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grapheme&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;allograph&lt;/em&gt; are terms that are seemingly easy to define, hence formal definitions don’t vary much (especially if you don’t count the useless “visual phoneme” and “alias for letter/character” ones), but when it gets to actually using those terms, many scholars stretch their meaning as they seem fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When two text strings or graphic words consist of the same &lt;strong&gt;letters&lt;/strong&gt; (language neutral), you could say they’re “equiliteral” or something. Roman letters have cased variants (and more) which are not differentiated for this. ⟨China⟩ = ⟨china⟩ = ⟨chinɑ⟩&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they consist of the same string of &lt;strong&gt;characters&lt;/strong&gt; (language neutral), they’re encoded identically – “homocyphers”. ⟨China⟩ ≠ ⟨china⟩ ≠ ⟨chinɑ⟩ Characters are not cased and include punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they use the same &lt;strong&gt;glyph&lt;/strong&gt; cluster (language and script neutral), they’re visually identical – “homovisual”. ⟨China⟩ ≠ ⟨china⟩ ≠ ⟨&lt;em&gt;china&lt;/em&gt;⟩&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they’re the same run of &lt;strong&gt;graphemes&lt;/strong&gt; (script neutral), they can be considered homographs. The thing is, as mentioned above, not everyone agrees what exactly a grapheme is. Some will consider &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&gt; a single grapheme in English, others will not, yet others will make that decision dependent on context. Many scholars unify uppercase and lowercase variants of the same letter for graphemes, which can be a justified simplification for most written languages using the roman script (except German), because many a graphemic analyses excludes proper names for they’re too complex bearing graphotactics from times long gone and foreign languages and sentence-intial cap or graphostylistic title-case (like all-caps) can be described as systematic rules. That being said, graphemically it’s always ⟨china⟩ = ⟨chinɑ⟩ and maybe ⟨China⟩ = ⟨china⟩, but ⟨China⟩ ≠ ⟨china⟩ also occurs and sometimes ⟨China⟩ is said to be out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Those terms inside quotation marks I just made up badly. I hope they help to get the idea, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T07:00:27.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9189" CreationDate="2014-10-14T07:28:18.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most NLP problems are language- and resource-dependent, therefore comparing different approaches is not that simple.&#xA;There are two types of sources which can tell you what approaches are the best in the sub-fields of NLP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Papers with surveys of methods&lt;/strong&gt; in the specific subfield (I provide random papers from my field as examples). For example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~ponzetto/pubs/poesio10a.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~ponzetto/pubs/poesio10a.pdf&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/lot/readings/Mitkov_1999.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/lot/readings/Mitkov_1999.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. Papers like this describe main approaches and methods in the subfield.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evaluation forums&lt;/strong&gt;. There is a tradition of evaluation forums, something like competitions between systems which performs specific task. Some well-known examples are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SemEval&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SemEval&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.evalita.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;EVALITA&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://romip.ru/en/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ROMIP&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dialog-21.ru/digests/dialog2014/materials/pdf/ToldovaSJu.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RU-EVAL&lt;/a&gt;. These evaluations show what techniques can achieve state-of-the-art results and what is the level of state-of-the-art in the sub-field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T07:28:18.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7239" CreationDate="2014-10-14T12:53:03.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's many parents who have learnt Esperanto &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; to teach it to their kids so that their kids are raised bilingual, actually. I'm not sure how much info you can find in English on it, but there are YouTube videos and websites for this among other things (also, I'm not sure if such sites are entirely in Esperanto or not, but most likely they don't have English...). I specifically remember a Dane who was asking in English on Youtube, what people thought about teaching Esperanto to his kid (and then he did end up making his kid a native Esperanto speaker), but there should be more out there and it would be fairly easy to just contact them and ask if they know about studies. There's even conventions or sections of conventions intended for parents with Esperanto-speaking children, so in the worst-case scenario you can just visit one of those and ask people there (as they themselves might have even been involved in research projects). You can also try writing to any English-speaking Esperanto club to see if they know of any research or are willing to translate any to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should certainly be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of research, as in general a lot of the Esperanto research focuses on kids (ex. how fast do kids learn it, how much does it help them with subsequent foreign languages), but likely it's only small studies. There's a few YouTube videos of kids who are native speakers talking, where it is assumable that their parents aren't native speakers (I'm thinking of one compilation video in particular, of kids of various ages and from various countries). The only study on native speakers I can think of has been where this one guy interviewed them and noted down what kinds of mistakes they make and how they use the grammar; a summary is readable on Wikipedia. Lastly you can pretty easily find older native speakers on the internet and simply ask them about how they were raised, how their skills were, if they know of any research etc (that is, if you learn Esperanto you can ask them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About only speaking your native language with your kids... It's pretty easy/fast to become so good at Esperanto that it FEELS like your native language, and it's certainly possible to reach native-level fluency in foreign languages in general, so honestly I don't think it's a problem. Either way I wouldn't quite worry about it, as there are plenty of parents who speak languages other than their native ones to their kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the logical-ness as commented in one of these comments here, it's been mentioned quite a lot that Esperanto is better for teaching/learning logic than languages such as Latin and English are — this mostly translates to that people think it's a good language for science, math, and computer programming (as in, it's good for testing ex. programs which parse language information). Again I'm not sure how many studies have been on it or that are described in English, if you go to the &quot;open library&quot; website there are a few books that you can read for free that describe various studies and general information. Though the books on there are older, the info is still valid since the language has hardly changed since then (the structure is the same, there's just more words now). I think most of the research is actually published and relatively difficult to get a hold of, as it would need to be purchased or ordered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry I can't help more. It seems like most studies of Esperanto tend to come from Esperanto users themselves, and they don't have enough money to do many studies. There are even fewer studies on native speakers, probably in part because most people who don't know about Esperanto assume that there are no natives. Although (and I'm not actually joking here), if you want to become famous in Esperanto-land all you have to do is make some studies or reports of your own on native-speaking children. You could start doing this before you have your child and see what your research suggests!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T12:53:03.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6636" CreationDate="2014-10-14T15:01:22.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar (how are words constructed and orderly connected? what classifications / parts of speech does English / Esperanto have?):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is extremely like Japanese, where there is a root word (that has no stem-change) which simply changes in ending or prefix according to which role in grammar it is playing, and where verbs can (and often do) compound onto each other. Also it's the same in where there are very very few exceptions. This basic concept is modernly very different in English, as for example, we have many mismatching pairs like &quot;city, urban&quot;, &quot;rain, pluvial&quot;, &quot;fear, coward/poltroon, scary&quot; and so on. In Esperanto every single pair stems from the same root, and there are a few more suffixes than in English, ex. one for &quot;to cause&quot; and one for &quot;to become&quot; (this was present in Old English and we have remnants of it today, ex. in &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt;dazzled). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no &quot;famous, red, blue, wet, dry, lethargic, celestial&quot;, as in Esperanto they're &quot;fama, ruĝa, blua, malseka, seka, letargia, ĉiela&quot;. All are adjectives in both languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;angrily, wetly, very, lethargically, on Mondays&quot; are &quot;kolere, malseke, tre, letargie, lunde&quot;. All are adverbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;sincerity, hound (dog), dilapidation, epoch, eczema, shoulder-blade&quot; are &quot;sincereco, hundo, ruinigo, epoko, ekzemo, skapolo&quot;. All are nouns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;pony, puppy, kitten, duckling&quot; are &quot;ĉeval&lt;strong&gt;ido&lt;/strong&gt;, hund&lt;strong&gt;ido&lt;/strong&gt;, kat&lt;strong&gt;ido&lt;/strong&gt;, anas&lt;strong&gt;ido&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (ido means &quot;an offspring&quot;, so it's like &quot;baby horse&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on and so forth. Changing the prefix or suffix is the way to get the corresponding related pair (unless you want to use a synonym, but this is the normal way). Kolere is angrily, kolero is anger. Ĉiela is celestial, ĉielo is sky. That sort of logic is the basis of the entire language. Patro is father, bopatro is father-in-law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words are basically constructed in the same way as English - the starting word of a compound modifies the ending word of the compound (an oft-cited example is &quot;songbird and birdsong&quot;). Most of the prefixes and suffixes have some sort of equivalent in English too. The difference is that in Esperanto, practically any word can be compounded — this includes prepositions being compounded to each other, or prepositions being prefixed to verbs etc. (as is done in Swedish, among other languages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;to pick &lt;strong&gt;out&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; can be said in exactly that word order, but &quot;to &lt;strong&gt;out&lt;/strong&gt;pick&quot; can also be said. Prefixes and suffixes can also be compounded to each other, for an easy example pra-avo (grand-pa), pra-pra-avo (great-grand-pa). Numbers can also be compounded into words, ex. unu-op-ulo (&quot;one-collective-being/person&quot;, meaning &quot;individual&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for word order in general, it has very little rules. The definite article and the word &quot;no&quot; have to come before the word they describe (but the adjective that describes the noun, can come either before or after the noun, for example). Words marking questions (like &quot;does&quot; in &quot;Doesn't he want to eat?&quot;) have to be the very first word in the sentence or clause that introduces the question. The rest of the so-called word-order rules are basically just trends, people have decided that one trend or another gives a certain flavour and so on. The same is true for compounds, in that it's just usually a trend as to whether a word is written as a compound or written separately, both are allowed in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Esperanto it's perfectly acceptable to have sentences just as in English, with &quot;I eat apples on Monday&quot;, but also perfectly acceptable is as in Swedish, &quot;On Monday eat I apples&quot;, or even bigger variations like &quot;I apples on monday eat&quot;. This is thanks to an accusative case existing, but even then, the rule is that &quot;the accusative doesn't have to be used if the meaning is obvious&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for verb tenses and moods, everything that can be said in English is perfectly able to be said in Esperanto. The difference is that Esperanto speakers tend to not use all of the more precise forms. For example, Esperanto can easily say &quot;I had been going&quot;, but instead people will simply say &quot;I went&quot;. This mirrors Japanese, Swedish, etc. In a similar vein, Esperanto verbs do not conjugate according to number or gender, so it essentially looks like &quot;I am, he am, they am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts of speech are just the same as in English if you ignore that it has the accusative case, and there are a few items that are simply more clarified than English. There are nouns, adjectives, adverbs, exclamations, prepositions, conjunctions and &quot;particles&quot; (I forget what they're called - words that aren't really any of these categories). There's present, future, and past tense, also the subjunctive and command form; other forms like &quot;I want to go&quot; are expressed with compounds or prepositions etc. The more clarified parts are that Esperanto has a distinct word for reflexive pronouns, like &quot;I did it to &lt;strong&gt;myself&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, versus &quot;I don't like it, &lt;strong&gt;myself&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. The only cases are nominative and accusative, but there is effectively a genitive because the same ending for adjectives is also the possessive ending (though we can also denote a posession using &quot;of&quot;, as in English &quot;the hair of the dog&quot;). There is no indefinite artcle in Esperanto (which mirrors Icelandic, Japanese, etc) but if necessary we can say &quot;one dog&quot;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vocabulary (from what languages does English / Esperanto borrow terms / derived words?):&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Originally, most words were from Latin and German. This branches into similarities with languages such as French, Yiddish, English, and Danish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modernly, Esperanto borrows either the most international word, or the only word that can be borrowed (ex. &quot;geisha&quot; is of course only available from Japanese). In some cases, authors took words from languages they knew and so even if there were more international words, those words became the common ones (some vulgar words are like that). So, just as with where most of English's loanwords come from, most of Esperanto's new/loanwords nowadays come from Latin or Greek. Most technology words are therefore basically the same in both languages, such as &quot;television&quot; or &quot;internet&quot;, where there's just one or two letters in difference between the languages. The Esperanto is &quot;televidilo&quot; (a compound of &quot;tele- + see + tool&quot;), as the Latin roots themselves are tele- and videre (to see); for internet it's &quot;interreto&quot;. Medical and botanical/animal words however are pretty much always borrowed from Latin. There are a few trends like that how most time words (day, month, year, minute - tago, monato, jaro) were all originally borrowed from German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Esperanto doesn't borrow words, it simply makes them up from existing roots. For example, &lt;strong&gt;bildliteraturo&lt;/strong&gt; means comics, and &lt;strong&gt;bild&lt;/strong&gt; is picture in German, Swedish, etc. Of course, &lt;strong&gt;literature&lt;/strong&gt; comes from French and Latin (in Latin it's literatura, apparently). The same word in Swedish would be &quot;drawn series&quot;, and in Japanese for example the compound includes &quot;picture/painting&quot; instead of &quot;literature&quot;, so as you can see Esperanto creates the word from its most logical form instead of directly borrowing the way another language created it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics (words in what languages share similar connotations and implications with English / Esperanto words?)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;There are a great many of these in base/root words, thanks to English's large vocabulary and the fact that, of course, no language uses words completely literally and everything can be a metaphor or implication anytime one wishes. For example:&#xA;pluvial - pluvia&#xA;hound (dog) - hundo&#xA;paper - papero&#xA;to comprehend - kompreni&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that, once a word becomes a compound word, it usually ceases to look the same as English. Also there are &lt;em&gt;cultural&lt;/em&gt; implications of certain words that are different from country to country, so they aren't always the same in Esperanto. This is especially true because Esperanto is least known about in the English-speaking world, and English's effect on Esperanto is actually very minimal compared to most other languages (ex. only 20% of translations into Esperanto come from English; other languages tend to be more like 60-80%). But here are synonyms with shades of meaning in Esperanto that correspond to synonyms with shades of meaning in English, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't ask about it, but I figure you're probably wondering - Esperanto has made &quot;neologisms&quot;, slang, and sometimes has its own special implications on words. For example, a &quot;green pope&quot; is someone who talks about Esperanto constantly (green is the &quot;colour of Esperanto&quot;). A &quot;necessary-place&quot; is a toilet/bathroom. There are also verbs and so on named after people, this is equivalent to saying &quot;he's a Marxist&quot;, or &quot;a McCarthy-ism&quot;, where the name of a certain famous person has taken on a particular meaning; only of course Esperanto has its own famous Esperanto speakers it takes the names from. Outright slang words are relatively few as it would complicate the language too much, but there are also unique meanings strongly implied with certain words that are only known to people who know Esperanto and/or its history (which, frankly, is most Esperanto speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by the other person who replied, if you really want to know it you have to learn it (you don't have to become fluent even). It's honestly very fast to learn, all you need to do is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16967/16967-h/16967-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;get a dictionary like this one which has a list of prefixes and suffixes&lt;/a&gt;, then look up words on the online dictionary on lernu.net (which often breaks them into their compounds too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastEditorUserId="5337" LastEditDate="2014-10-14T15:37:06.133" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T15:37:06.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3957" CreationDate="2014-10-14T15:45:05.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, this is exactly how Esperanto was originally planned.&#xA;Instead of taking words from other languages, all the vocabulary was one- or two-syllable words (ex. ab, ba, ca, ac, all being different root words). Then the creator of Esperanto realized that he couldn't even remember what the vocabulary meant himself, and so he thought that if he couldn't remember then no one else would be able to either. Eventually he realized it would simply be easier to remember if the roots were form languages he already knew, even if they were long. (After he had already decided he was going to take words from French/Latin and German, that's when he realized he should take only the most international words, it's not that he had this whole idea from the beginning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak for any other constructed language, but it might be that the creators found out the same as he did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastEditorUserId="5337" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T13:01:55.690" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T13:01:55.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2014-10-14T16:08:25.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are languages created by groups, but they aren't international and they're more like dialects of existing languages. For example, Mandarin, New Norwegian, and Modern Hebrew; these are all successful constructed languages (or dialects) but I doubt they were made by a single person. You can also argue that languages like French or Icelandic, which almost always create all new words instead of taking loanwords for new ideas and things, are artificial (this is done by groups and organizations too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for a world-wide language project, the people who want to create a good international language have no money, therefore no support, advertising, clout, etc. The existing organizations, like the UN, which by all means should create their own language or use some kind of bridge language like Esperanto, don't want to do so because it means &quot;change&quot; (they're scared of changing stuff and then failing even more than they are now, on the language issue). For example, ANY language no matter if constructed or not, would get big if it sent abroad as many movies as the USA does; likewise, anyone would try learning a language if they were given a fistful of cash in order to do so (meaning, learn it and we'll pay you extra to act in a movie for it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the people who do have this kind of money don't care one bit, for example, many rich Americans donate extremely little money to charity compared to, for example, rich Swedes - and creating or sponsoring an international language is just like a form of charity. Otherwise, organizations actually look for solutions in the wrong area without even considering the constructed language idea, ex. simply telling everyone to learn whatever is the biggest language at the time (French, Latin, English, Chinese), simply spending more money on translators, simply trying to have kids learn 3 foreign languages in school, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last aspect is English itself, basically English-speakers are much less likely to learn other languages and they're much more likely to force their language on others (McDonald's advertises in English here in Sweden, for example). This is true whether it's the UK or the US, but the problem is that those countries are where a LOT of money is, a lot of organizations, and so on - and they live in such an English-speaking bubble that they don't actually realize how much of a language problem exists for the rest of the world. The basic idea that most countries nowadays have is, if the English-speaking population doesn't like something, it's not going to get enough money or support for it to become a world-wide success (which isn't true at all, but it's the psychology that matters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T16:08:25.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3397" CreationDate="2014-10-14T16:27:24.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Apologies, I'm writing this comment in a way so that even passersby who have zero knowledge of Esperanto can make more sense of it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the research, honestly there's quite a few very easily findable online, especially via Wikipedia reference links on various pages related to Esperanto. The &quot;open library&quot; has a few books with research summaries in them at least, &lt;a href=&quot;https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7194639M/Esperanto_as_an_international_auxiliary_language.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one being here.&lt;/a&gt; The one problem is that when you're reading only in English, they tend to only be looking at how Esperanto helps with Romance languages (because that's all English-speaking countries tend to care about, not because Esperanto only helps with those). If you know anyone who speaks Esperanto, it's much easier to find the research on it through that, and there are also relatively a lot of studies on it done by France so try searching in French if possible. (There's even been notes, if not exact studies, in Swedish among other languages). While I've read a lot of reports, I haven't kept the links to any of them, but I found them by simply searching for general information about Esperanto. Any remaining research reports basically need to be actually purchased from somewhere (ex. a University).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's just a couple:&#xA;Modern research, date unknown, better sources for it must be able to be found: About how the Chinese counting system improves mathmatics grades, among other things. Esperanto uses the same exact counting system, the words are just a tiny bit longer to say: &lt;a href=&quot;http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2012-2013: Various reports from Australia on the effects of using Esperanto in primary school as a first second-language for the children: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esperantoresearch.org.uk/site/publications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.esperantoresearch.org.uk/site/publications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I haven't saved any more links, here I will show you some examples I've personally gathered, for why Esperanto helps with learning other languages. It's not exact scientific research but it ends up being pretty obvious in showing how Esperanto helps, I think anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to first summarize the main idea, by saying that in Esperanto, word-construction (compounds, affixes), grammar markers (anger vs angry vs. angrily; accusative case), certain words (reflexive pronouns), and so on are simply the basics of grammar of &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; languages, especially Indo-European ones. It's the same as going through a page of a book, and colour-coding which words are adjectives in one colour, which words are nouns in another colour, which are direct/indirect objects in another colour. That is partially what greatly speeds up the learning of other languages; it very, very clearly teaches you when to use each form of a word in a sentence, whether it's in Esperanto or any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially compared to English, Esperanto has a small base vocabulary with few synonyms, which very closely mirrors languages like Japanese and Swedish; the remaining necessary words are created by compounds in all three of these languages. That's another main reason for why Esperanto speeds up learning, because the English-speaker's brain is already trained to use &quot;only basic words&quot;, as must be done in most foreign languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for some explicit language comparisions so you see what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Vocabulary and word make-up&lt;/strong&gt; (forgive me for not bolding the relevant parts, I'm too lazy):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto (EO): kat-ido, hund-ido, ĉeval-ido&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish (SV): katt-unge, hund-unge, häst-unge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese (JP):こねこ、こいぬ、こうま&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English (EN): &quot;baby cat, baby dog, baby horse&quot;, kitten, puppy, foal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———  (EO) manĝ-voli, tranĉ-ilo, vet-eto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Greenlandic) neri-uma, savi-mmik, eqquiniu-nnguaq&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(JP) たべ・たい、こ・がたな、こ・かけ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) &quot;eat-want, cut-tool, wager-ette&quot;, to want to eat, a knife, a small bet. Note that in Japanese instead of cut-tool, &quot;small sword&quot; is said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Accusative case:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EO) ĉi tie, ĉi tien, hejme, hejmen, ekstere, eksteren, li, lin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(SV) här, hit, hem, hemåt, ute, ut, han, honom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) here, hither, home, homewards, outside, out, he, him&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———— (EO) La kato kuras sub la sof&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; (Faroese, FO) Kettan rennur undir sofun&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) The cat runs around under the sofa (without leaving the underside of it) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———— (EO) La kato kuras sub la sofo&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FO) Kettan rennur undir sofun&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) The cat runs underneath the sofa (it runs from outside of the sofa, to underneath it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Reflexive pronoun difference:&lt;/strong&gt; (I don't know French etc. but I'm fairly sure they have the exact same difference)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EO) La knaboj ludas kun sia kato &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FO) Dreingirnir spæla við sína kettu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &#xA;(SV) Pojkarna spelar med sin katt&#xA; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) The boys play with their cat (their own cat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———— (EO) La knaboj ludas kun ilia kato &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(FO) Dreingirnir spæla við teirra kettu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; (SV) Pojkarna spelar med deras katt &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) The boys play with their cat (a cat owned by someone else)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———— (EO) Faru ĝin mem. Li ŝatas sin. Ĉesu vundi sin mem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(SV) Göra det själv. Han gillar sig. Sluta skada sig själv&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EN) Do it yourself. He likes himself. Stop injuring yourself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, even in non-Indo-European languages such as Greenlandic and Japanese, there can be some direct similarities to Esperanto. This definitely isn't &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the similarities but it's just a a taste. It's really hard to describe most of the similarities in just a few words or examples since English is just too different, plus I don't want to go into the grammer etc. of Japanese and so on, so I don't want to go on any further. That includes giving better examples of compound words among other things. Sorry about that, I'm just too lazy. Of course, every similarity is what helps you with a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastEditorUserId="5337" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T14:08:02.037" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T14:08:02.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3520" CreationDate="2014-10-14T17:08:38.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been studies (or at least small amounts of research) done on Swedish University students, among other nationalities, where the students learnt Esperanto AFTER already knowing multiple languages (in the case of Swedes, most know English, Swedish, and French/German/Spanish at least - and then continue their third language or pick up a fourth one in Uni). There was &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; a significant improvement in the people who learnt Esperanto compared to the normal people. Sadly I can't link you to the info on this where I read it, as it's in Faroese which doesn't even have Google Translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea is, if you're already very strong in grammar then there's no need to learn Esperanto. If so, the only way it would help, would be in vocabulary, as Esperanto's vocabulary is something like 60% Latin or Romance. This actually isn't something to scoff at, as there have been a few studies where ex. people who knew Esperanto could translate a French sentence without having ever learnt French (I personally, just today, understood a basic Spanish conversation that I was overhearing, thanks to Esperanto too). If you're a bit weak in grammar, for example you always forget when to use an adverb, then Esperanto will still help. And in all honesty, it's so fast to learn that it can't hurt you to spend some time on it even if you think it's useless - at the very least, you can easily find an Italian penpal who knows Esperanto well enough that you two can actually talk properly enough for them to give you really good help on Italian (this is relatively hard to do in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T17:08:38.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1912" CreationDate="2014-10-14T17:39:34.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, my sources for this are in Swedish and/or from old periodicals from the actual time when Esperanto was new, so I can't link anything. If you can read Swedish, find the book called &quot;100 years of Esperanto&quot;, and in Esperanto there's another book you can try, &quot;La Esperanto-Movado en Upsalo&quot; (as I remember the title).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what happened is, the book first came out in Russian, and from there people just found it as something amusing or interesting to do in their free time. That's how it spread very minorly to other countries, through bilingual people who translated it. Once it got to Germany, some people who had visited Germany and who were students at the University of Uppsala noticed it and decided to not only form a club (there was also a German club at this time, but it was the only club in the world I think) but also, when they heard that Esperanto was starting to be banned in Russia/a Russian Esperanto periodical was closed down, they started their own which grew to be very big and influental in the first few beginning years. (Swedes are easily outraged about injusticies so honestly that's probably why they started it, also Uppsala is very well-known for being a &quot;linguistic research capital&quot;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They managed to get funding from people outside of Sweden, among other things, and used it to distribute flyers (they also got flyers from Zamenhof himself and wrote to him a lot, asking about stuff). Their periodical was simply called &quot;Lingva Internacia&quot; or something like that, but it included all sorts of stuff, like both local Swedish news and Esperanto news. The club and so on was written about in the Swedish newspapers too, among other things, so that's how it got some more publicity. Basically for about five years, Uppsala was the &quot;capital of the Esperanto world&quot; due to this, and they influenced other groups to start making their own periodicals. I believe the very initial list of potential subscribers was obtained by mailing Zamenhof himself and asking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When other countries started having more periodicals and clubs too, they also started being advertised in the countries' local newspapers - this was sometimes in a normal news-y way, but other times the members actually paid for advertising in the hopes that it would make new members; this was a very expensive thing to do at the time. This doesn't mean that the clubs or periodicals were any big (it only takes two people to form a club!). Don't forget that this is also a time when you did normal advertising in the newspaper, so anyone looking for an Esperanto penpal or teacher would likely use the newspaper to place the ad. It was also possible to subscribe to periodicals even if you lived abroad, so ex. there were French readers of the English Esperanto periodical. Of course, this was also a different time from today, where it was extremely normal to try out new things and different clubs and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like most of the people simply heard about the language from friends or from various newspaper articles about it. A lot of people simply told even strangers they met about it (ex. on the train). Even back in the 1920's and earlier though, there were elementary schools (among other things) who were teaching the language to children in preparation of either &quot;the general future&quot; or for them learning another language later. The craze about this was honestly slowly growing to be very big, even train personnel and the police in a few different countries were being instructed in Esperanto for training for dealing with foreigners. Though of course, the world wars and then the monolingual English speakers growing to power really squashed a lot of it. And of course, most people used it as a hobby instead of thinking about it as a serious world language, but they did at least consider it fun so that's how it was propelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember reading that news about Esperanto was randomly broadcast on the radio in its early days; that's how I heard it reached the Faroe Islands for example. Also, a lot of the people who initially learnt the langauge were very educated to begin with (ex. rich French people, rich Swedish University students), so they had some influence on other people already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those days were also different from today in that people needed a world language, but there really was none - English certainly wasn't big (German and French were much bigger!), but it was an age of new technology, new ideas about psychology, and easier/cheaper travel between countries and so on. But honestly I think the main point was that people were bored and thought learning a new language was simply &lt;em&gt;fun&lt;/em&gt; when they heard about it, and &lt;em&gt;it was an easy way to make foreign friends and get foreign news&lt;/em&gt; (this is a point I've read about quite a few times when I read texts from the same era - the local news was usually not at all accurate regarding foreign countries, and people loved collecting stuff like stamps and postcards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Something I forgot! I've read that people used to take a text (ex. a book) in Esperanto, and then translate it in their head, reading aloud, in real-time in front of their friends in order to convince them of how easy it was to understand and how fast it was to learn. This is mentioned in that one book that's a collection of Zamenhof's answers about grammar and vocabulary questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teachers were mainly pressing the fact that it was a good test of how good students were at language (&quot;if they fail at Esperanto, we know they're no good at language and it's useless to teach them ex. French in secondary school&quot;), and that it really gave the kids enthusiasm about history and geography, since the teachers were having the main part of learning Esperanto center around having the students send letters to lots of different countries in it. This is mentioned in quite a few places and pretty much corresponds with what modern educational tests with Esperanto are saying today, but I remember one source for this is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/esperantoasinter00leagrich&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/esperantoasinter00leagrich&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastEditorUserId="5337" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T14:10:29.407" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T14:10:29.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9190" CreationDate="2014-10-14T18:28:44.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see any problem with the way you did it in your second grey box: you put a macron immediately above the long vowels, and indicated the scansion of the verse (heavy and light syllables) in a separate line above the text. That is standard procedure. But if you want to call attention to the unorthographic scansion of “hoc”, you could always write “hoc(c)”, that is: “written hoc but presumably pronounced hocc”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T18:28:44.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-14T23:36:15.597" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;German and English languages have a common root but an innumerable amount of differences. One of them is how infinitive is formed. In English we have to+verb: &quot;to stand&quot; in German we have a verb ending with &quot;en&quot;: &quot;stehen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know which of these two forms appeared first, and if there was any time when they co-existed in the same language at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2998" LastActivityDate="2014-10-14T23:36:15.597" Title="Did German or English form of infinitive appear first?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9190" CreationDate="2014-10-15T00:58:51.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some American textbooks for (modern) languages will use an underdot (U+0323) to represent stressed syllables that must be memorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you explain to your reader what you mean, that could be a good alternative: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;per Chaos học ịngēns uāstīque silentia rēgnī&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't look as good with SE's default font, but most serif fonts I've seen prints quite nicely.  If it's for screen use, instead of the dot, you could maybe go for U+0329 (vertical line underneath) for better visibility: “per Chaos ho̩c i̩ngēns…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T00:58:51.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2014-10-15T14:16:03.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should look at the number of books published per year, and the rate of how fast Wikipedia pages in Esperanto are being created, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were one or two really nice Wiki pages in Esperanto that had charts of a ton of this kind of data (and compared to the growth rate of English), but I lost the links, sorry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistiko_de_Esperantujo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistiko_de_Esperantujo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also talked about the historical number of webpages and words in Esperanto on the internet, the amount of Esperanto on facebook, and the number of registered accounts on CouchSurfing that listed Esperanto, and the number of registered accounts on Lernu.net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I remember, the general trend was that every year it fluctuates but there's very slowly growing more and more, the average number of books published per year that are over 48 pages numbers at 120, and the only data in which the use of Esperanto seems to be going DOWN is in the number of people being members in Esperanto clubs and associations. (Nowadays, at least in the USA and many places in Europe, people in general aren't joining as many clubs as they used to overall no matter what it's for - also nowadays books can really easily be self-published online, so of course the book numbers can't reflect the real numbers either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastEditorUserId="9955" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T21:05:09.403" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T21:05:09.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T14:27:12.907" Score="3" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of speech assignment provides a pos to a word.  In many pos systems this can occasionally produce errors due multi-word expressions of one form or another.&#xA;When 'we' look at the text, we may see it as a compound, common sequence, set phrase or idiomatic expression etc. And we tend to see them as singular pieces.  For example, frying pan, computer screen, kicked off.  These are not really individual words, but singular concepts represented  with spaces in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the thought in my mind is whether it would make sense to assign only a single pos to some/all mwe's?  Has anyone done research into such an approach?  Are there any obvious grammatical flaws people can see? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T05:14:57.653" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T05:14:57.653" Title="singular part of speech for multi-word units and expressions?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2377" CreationDate="2014-10-15T14:51:29.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ease of learning, reading, and pronunciation. Therefore there can't be consonant clusters (imagine Russian), or sounds not in most languages (ex. English's þ, ð, and w, the distinction in its two l sounds, or its many vowels), and the alphabet/syllabary should look distinct &lt;em&gt;even if the person hasn't learnt it yet&lt;/em&gt; (ex. katakana, runes, hobo symbols, or most of the roman letters - not Arabic, Braille or kanji). This is not just so that the language doesn't feel impossible, but also to help hard-of-seeing people and dyslexic people who recognize letters slightly more based on &quot;shape&quot; (it's hard to explain, but telling the difference between o and 0, or n and h in bad handwriting, can be very hard for example). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it needs to be able to be written on mobile phones and computers with very little effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means there needs to be very little grammatical exceptions (if any), and all of the most common words are very short, ideally one syllable (ex. &quot;is, eat, need&quot;). Otherwise the language is cumbersome. There also needs to have a flexibility like Esperanto, wherein you can say either &quot;I go&quot; or &quot;I am going&quot; depending on construction, but the usage is restricted to individual's tastes. The point is that, &lt;strong&gt;people like things that are customizable.&lt;/strong&gt; They want to be able to play with the language and feel like it's their own, so it can't be so rigid. (This is also why videogames such as The SIMs and Don't Starve get really popular - it's basically free choice on how you want to play the game.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also can't be tones or pitch to change meaning, as this is largely seen as difficult. Basically, look at Japanese and Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ease of word order. While a language like English has very fixed word order and relatively simple grammar, it not only makes it difficult for people from drastically different languages, but the problem comes that if you're not allowed to have a different word order and convey the same meaning then you're going to lose support of everyone in favour of a &quot;more logical&quot;  language (ex. you should be able to be correct as long as the correct meaning is understandable through &lt;em&gt;common sense&lt;/em&gt;). Likewise, the language has to be tolerant of mistakes, as people generally have a fear of being wrong and the culture that eventually arises from the language should be friendly towards learners (not &quot;i'm better than you at it, it's difficult so i'm smart&quot;) in order to not discourage people in learning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for vocabulary. It needs to ALL make sense through &lt;em&gt;common sense&lt;/em&gt;. For example, a &quot;water cooker&quot; needs to be able to mean a &quot;tea kettle&quot; and be correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It needs to be learnt in a fast amount of time, and be very, VERY easy but still not lacking things. This is especially true since you will need to capture large amounts of monolingual speakers, for example most English-speakers. The average person from the USA doesn't even feel like they have enough time in the day to cook dinner &quot;from scratch&quot; (I've even heard complaints about how &quot;it takes such a long time for water to boil for my instant ramen&quot;), but at the same time English speakers pride themselves on the small nuances that come in word pairs like &quot;handrail, banister, balustrade&quot;, and often believe that other languages don't have them. So the constructed language has to heavily cater to both of these aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There needs to be proof that the language works and that people speak it. Meaning, before you even publish the book that teaches it, set up a forum for it, translate material and write original material in it, have some audio recordings, etc. People already say things like &quot;you're learning Icelandic? WHY?&quot; because they believe it's useless and there's nothing worthwhile in it, so you have to combat this very strongly starting from the very beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vocabulary has to be usable in daily life. You need to be able to write blog posts or software in the language, for example. At the same time there needs to be technical words too, like for textbooks. Otherwise people either see it as useless or as not &quot;sophisticated enough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last and most important step is that you need lots of money for &lt;strong&gt;advertising&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't mean ads as in the traditional way, I mean to create products that use the language - for it to get big, it needs to be in cartoons, tv shows, on product packaging, etc. People need to just go to their favourite website and notice the name of the language on the sidebar, for whatever reason. It needs to show up when Google searching. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get online news and bloggers to write about it, you can ask indie companies about putting some words of it on their CD cases and organic soy milk, etc. Basically it has to somehow reach the mass public without them in any way actually looking for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5337" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T14:51:29.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1329" CreationDate="2014-10-15T15:56:47.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE was spoken in Eastern Europe between 4000 and 3000 years BC (6000-5000 years before now). Apparently it is far from what time scale that u want. The language was similar to Ancient Greek and Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therere is a lot of online sources on PIE language, including the Pokorny dictionary, Wikitionary and others. If u want I can provide some links, but I am afraid it is not exactly what u would want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T15:56:47.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:35:55.417" Score="3" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study Chinese as a second language. Listening is my strong point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read, I go through this process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;see character  imagine myself speaking the pronunciation  think of meaning (from the sound)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second step is perhaps described as speaking without actually opening the mouth to form the words and requires about the same amount of time as actually speaking aloud.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English translation only comes in when I encounter newly learned words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is as if I am relying on my listening ability to read.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second step seems really inefficient. With practice, I could change to this, but I am not sure it is ideal to skip the middle step:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;see character  think of meaning (from the shapes of the characters)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder which is a more natural approach that a native speaker will take to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do adult native speakers of a language that uses a logographic writing system, such as Chinese, similarly internally &quot;speak&quot; the pronunciation or do they skip directly to the meaning? Or use some other way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might this 3-step process be a normal stage a child acquiring this as their L1 would initially use, but later develop away from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2700" LastEditorUserId="2700" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T21:42:09.007" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T22:57:40.740" Title="Do native speakers of languages using logographic writing internally vocalize while reading?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9213" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Multi-word expression&quot;. Occasionally &quot;multi-word entity&quot;. A concept used in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9214" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" Score="0" Body="&quot;Multi-word expression&quot;. Occasionally &quot;multi-word entity&quot;. A concept used in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" LastActivityDate="2014-10-15T21:45:19.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-15T22:31:02.650" Score="3" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have parsed the following sentence in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/corenlp/process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford CoreNLP demo page&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford parser demo page&lt;/a&gt;. Although both result in a parse that can imply purpose semantics (hinging on the &lt;code&gt;advcl&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;sbar&lt;/code&gt; accordingly), clearly the parsers don't capture &quot;in order to&quot; as an expression whose meaning much transcends the relationships between its own word constituents (as in an idiom).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;he went to the shop in order to buy food&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of parsing, or pre-processing stage, may yield &quot;in order to&quot; as a single unit of meaning, thus making it amenable to semantics derivation same as a preposition affords? e.g. &quot;for&quot; may commonly imply purpose semantics, and having &quot;for&quot; parse as a preposition assists in deriving purpose semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T05:15:21.997" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T05:15:21.997" Title="Stanford NLP parsers and idioms that have common semantic meaning" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T03:58:13.810" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;ἁλιπτοίητος&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liddell and Scott seem somewhat uncertain how this links to other Greek words, though they affirm the reading as &quot;driven by fear across the sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Greek is rusty, and I don't know that I was ever much good at breaking out the root-words joined together here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked for philological and etymological entries, but found nothing much beyond LNS reiterated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone unpack this word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5349" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T07:08:25.833" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T07:08:25.833" Title="Help me unpack this Classical Greek word?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-10-16T09:57:52.640" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T05:00:50.587" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6068/english-phrase-structure-rules-and-adjectives&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt; some mentions of a formal grammar definition for English. It is mentioning there a definition called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/erg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps anyone here would know about loosely equivalent sources that like this one are fit for direct use by software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, questions relating to that single resource called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/erg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt; :&#xA;The download archive of it has a readme that is only a change log / release notes. How should the content of this huge archive be interpreted? what ontology does it use for its production rules? in what ways does one use it with the related software LKB and/or PET?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T07:09:35.463" Title="Formal definition of English grammar" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9217" CreationDate="2014-10-16T05:36:11.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first stem is ἁλι- derives from the word ἁλς meaning &quot;sea&quot; or generally the water close to the shore. Then you have πτοίᾱ which means &quot;terror, fright, fear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T06:47:57.817" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T06:47:57.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9217" CreationDate="2014-10-16T07:03:50.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literally, ἅλς means ‘salt’ (with which it is cognate), but it is used metaphorically for ‘sea’. In compounds the stem is ἁλι-, by analogy to the –i stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T07:03:50.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T07:06:37.157" Score="3" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the languages I know more about I can't think of any cases of consonant phoneme clusters that are not made up entirely of consonant phonemes which also occur on their own in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if this is not a universal phonology rule at all and if that's the case, what are some languages and consonant clusters that don't fit this pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T11:31:48.723" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T00:42:57.263" Title="Are there languages with consonant clusters that include consonants that never occur alone?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T09:46:19.557" Score="3" ViewCount="1500" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the following formula on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;morpheme + derivational morphemes + desinence (inflectional morphemes)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed immediately by the comment &lt;em&gt;not not necessarily in this order&lt;/em&gt;. But all the languages that I'm more or less fluent (Turkish, English, French) do follow that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general tendency for inflectional suffixes to follow derivational ones, or for derivational prefixes to follow the inflectional ones? In other words, is there a general tendency for derviational morphemes to be attached closer to the root morpheme? Can someone point to some counterexamples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/7030/across-agglutinative-languages-are-there-tendencies-for-morphemes-to-occur-in-ce&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is related, but not specific enough; none of the answers address the derivational/inflectional dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T06:17:03.850" Title="Order of derivational and inflectional affixes" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9209" CreationDate="2014-10-16T11:35:33.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but for some reason I cannot comment - I've had to create an account!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jlawler&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Indeed, NounPhrases cover many things, but it is also far larger in scope than what I referred to (no articles or determiners unless they are part of the &quot;entity&quot;).&#xA;I think it also misses phrases such as &quot;kicked off&quot;.&#xA;I'm not disputing that NP is correct, it just seems slightly further along the chain than where I'm looking at at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hippietrail&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm aware of the differences and volume of PoS tagsets.  That doesn't negate the question though.   I do agree that some of the approaches are somewhat askew.  Look at how long people went before fathoming the issues regarding multi-word units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a rephrase would be better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had the choice, when processing text for PoS tagging, would you treat set phrases and obvious multi-word entities as singular &quot;words&quot; (regardless of the presence of hyphens/spaces)?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would you tag &quot;frying pan&quot; as [Adjective Noun], or just [Noun], or an alternative noun representation ([Comp.Noun], [Noun-Comp], [Noun Comp-Adj/Nn etc.)?&#xA;Does anyone know of a tagging system or approach that does or has tried this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you both for commenting.  I hope I've made it a little clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;curiousdannii&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes. The examples given were two-word phrases.  And yes, many taggers will accurately tag them most of the time, in most cases.  And yes, higher level parsers would also identify them as being adjoined.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But that is Not the question being asked.&#xA;The question asked was whether it should be the case that they are tagged as a collective, rather than as individually.  The question asked was whether there were any known systems that did this, or theories that covered treating MWE's as singular pieces rather than multi-part pieces.&#xA;Think of it this way, they are not individual words when you read them, so why should they be tagged as such?  In certain structures/context, they convey different semantics when together than individually.  When that happens, they stop being separate words, and instead produce a singular entity.  &quot;Big pan&quot; is not the same as &quot;frying pan&quot;.  &quot;falling pan&quot; is not the same either.  Nor is &quot;full-&quot;, &quot;deep-&quot;, &quot;shiny-&quot;, &quot;old-&quot;, &quot;ageing-&quot; etc.  Yet many of those will fit one of the patterns that &quot;frying pan&quot; does, depending on what PoS you assign to the first word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Moderators/Admin - sorry for the answer-abuse ... but unsure how to respond considering the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5351" LastEditorUserId="5351" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T11:43:56.620" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T11:43:56.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9223" CreationDate="2014-10-16T11:38:46.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia “formula” is indeed highly problematic in so far as it assumes that derivation and inflection are effected solely by suffixation, which is manifestly not true in many languages. For example, in Arabic yatakātabūna “they write to each other” the root is k-t-b, the first /ta/ is a derivational morpheme, the prefixed /ya/ and the suffixed /ūna/ are inflectional elements. So what comes before what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-10-16T11:47:59.310" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T11:47:59.310" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9234" CreationDate="2014-10-16T13:00:11.393" Score="7" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question out of gross ignorance, so I may be way off the mark here. If that's the case, the answer should be easy to provide in the negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My background&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an American, I spent the first ~29 years of my life monolingual, as most Americans do.  Then I learned Spanish and some Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My observations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English (or perhaps in America?) is a fairly strong reaction against gender-specific pronouns when they are used to refer to people of mixed or unknown gender. This often leads to awkward grammatical constructions to avoid &amp;quot;favor&amp;quot; toward men in speech or writing, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the singular &amp;quot;they&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using &amp;quot;he or she&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;(s)he&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;he/she&amp;quot; when simply &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; would suffice from a grammatical standpoint&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternating between &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; throughout a book, article, or other work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rewording a sentence so that no personal pronouns are used at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The addition of entirely new &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gender-neutral pronouns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, I have not seen any of these grammatical gymnastics. The only case I've ever seen, and it's been rare, of using a gender-neutral pronoun where a gender-specific one would make more grammatical sense is in the case of the word &amp;quot;amig@s&amp;quot; in place of &amp;quot;amigos.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish is, of course (and in contrast to English) permeated with gender-specific nouns. It's common to refer to myself (a man) as &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; in certain contexts, and its not awkward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aquí hay muchas personas y yo soy la que traje la cerveza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly translates to (I have translated more literally than normal to demonstrate my point)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are many persons, and I am she (the one) which brought the beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the reaction against gender-specific pronouns when referring to mixed or unknown genders a product of a languages' gender (or relative lack thereof)? And if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately is the reaction against gender-specific pronouns primarily an Americanism, and incidental to the differences in language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I only aware of this reaction against gender-specific pronouns in the language I speak most fluently, because these subtleties are lost on me in Spanish and Portuguese where I'm less likely to pick them up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A partial theory&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I offer this theory not because I think it is likely to be substantially correct, but because it's the only theory I've thought of, and it should serve as an example of the format of an answer I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In languages that have gender for practically every noun, the issue is less visible. When one is accustomed to referring to trees, forks, cars, and houses a male or female, even though they clearly have no male or female characteristics, it seems much less unnatural to refer to oneself or ones group of friends as a gender that may or may not relate to their actual sex.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further, because of the permeation of gender in these other languages, as in my example above, even men are sometimes feminized in speech and writing, so there's not a strict or obvious &amp;quot;male dominance&amp;quot; in effect to which one can react.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T13:01:01.310" Title="How does the reaction against gender-specific pronouns relate to a languages' use of gender?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9226" CreationDate="2014-10-16T13:30:43.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We usually use masculine with interrogatives &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We usually use the gender of specific noun by which we refer to the people: human(masculine), person(feminine), client(masculine) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we use он/она (he/she). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The most difficult case is not when the gender is unknown, but when it is mixed (transgender people and the like). In this case we really in trouble. Some people may use neutral gender in this case jockingly, but this use is prejorative because neuter gender usually means inanimate things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T13:30:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-16T14:02:00.430" Score="3" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using verbnet to test whether a sentence matches a frame, how does one determine whether the semantic role specified in the verbnet frame is appearing in the sentence or not? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbs.colorado.edu/verb-index/vn/escape-51.1.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this verbnet class&lt;/a&gt; there is a frame &lt;code&gt;Theme V {{+path}} Destination&lt;/code&gt;. Is it somewhere specified how is it to be determined for a given sentence, whether it indeed has a &lt;code&gt;Theme&lt;/code&gt; role or not, whether or not it indeed has a Destination role or not, in the right location? how does one identify a &lt;code&gt;Destination&lt;/code&gt; v.s. a non-Destination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And likewise is &lt;code&gt;path&lt;/code&gt; defined anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I could locate this inside the otherwise definitive description of verbnet found &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbs.colorado.edu/verb-index/VerbNet_Guidelines.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:40:23.100" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T04:05:20.577" Title="VerbNet semantic roles and preposition groups - how to determine matches" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbnet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9226" CreationDate="2014-10-16T23:12:31.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'singular' or indefinite &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; has been a part of the English language &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage_by_respected_authors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;since at least Chacuer (writing in 1395)&lt;/a&gt;. In some dialects other neutral pronouns such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neutral use of &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; was prescribed by eighteenth and nineteenth century grammarians. As is often the case, I think these prescriptivists were wrong and unhelpful. By teaching people to shun the indefinite &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; and use &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; this way they created an artificial gender non-neutrality, which the political correctness movement of the 20th century then fought against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that because political correctness is not limited to English, if this conflict is not a part of other languages it is because they did not have prescriptivists perverting their languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-10-16T23:12:31.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9235" CreationDate="2014-10-17T00:35:41.710" Score="7" ViewCount="969" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize that this is probably technically off-topic as it relates to copyright legalities of corpus construction. However, it is a practically very important issue for corpus linguistics and so I was hoping that I could ask the question here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, I would like to make a corpus for academic research purposes using publicly accessible news web pages (like BBC news). I am primarily interested in developing statistical models of news topics and how they change over time. I will not distribute the corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technical aspects of developing this are not a problem. The question I have is whether I am in violation of copyright by making a robot that downloads webpages and statistically analyses their content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why this is not obviously copyright violation is because the act of downloading and statistically analyzing webpages is essentially what e.g. search engine robots do, and they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in violation of copyright (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081017/0150532568.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone been in a similar situation already and have some wisdom to share on the matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5353" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T15:20:59.090" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T22:08:09.257" Title="Do I have copyright issues when making a corpus from the web?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2014-10-17T07:02:44.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As one &lt;a href=&quot;http://vslovare.ru/slovo/slovar-dalja/tpru!/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;can see&lt;/a&gt; there are still words derived from it, like &lt;code&gt;Тпрусё&lt;/code&gt; and some variations like &lt;code&gt;птрути&lt;/code&gt;. I could ask if there are more cases if interested.&#xA;In Sanskrit I'm not aware of such a phenomena. You can see my list of ligatures (=consonant clusters) at &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nagari/nW3k9-gFKao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nagari/nW3k9-gFKao&lt;/a&gt; Liste-460-Rigveda-Ligaturen-Statistik-G.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2584" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T07:02:44.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9226" CreationDate="2014-10-17T08:04:26.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not an unreasonable hypothesis but it when you look at the details, the gendered morphology of a language only plays a partial role in how the language expresses underlying cultural gender bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In languages that require constant expression to gender in verbal or adjectival agreement (like Russian or Spanish), you're unlikely to come up against the issue of the epicene pronoun as you do in English. Because the pronoun does not refer to an implicit assumption about a default gender but to the agreement with the referent. So in Czech, a sequence like. &quot;If a person likes something, he/she will buy it.&quot; will use the feminine pronoun because  the word 'person' is feminine. However, you will find that men will actively avoid trying to refer to themselves in female gender. E.g. with sentences like &quot;I am the person who said...&quot; men would try to find different ways of saying this without having to end with a sentence that has 'I' to be the subject of a sentence with a feminine conjugation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But the issue of gendered language is not really about the pronoun. The pronoun reflects the default framing of a man being in a position of power and access to resources. So for example, the assumption that a doctor is male and therefore a sequence like &quot;A: I went to see a doctor. B: What did he say?&quot; reflects a male bias in the framing of the term doctor. Many languages require that professions morphologically mark gender. Therefore, in the above sequence you'd always have to say if you went to see a male or female doctor. However, this does not remove the issue of gender bias. Because in sentences like 'I should see some kind of doctor.' or 'All doctors are rich.' The default (unmarked) gender will be male. So if you said something like 'All doctors[fem] are rich.' You would be in fact stating that all women doctors (as opposed to men doctors) are rich.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are many other ways in which these languages express bias through defaulting to masculine gender. For example, in Czech the past tense plural agreement is male by default unless you are talking about an all female group. All it takes is one man in a group and the agreement switches to male. Another example in Czech is the use of feminine nouns when referring to men in a negative way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ubiquitous marking of gender causes all sorts of other issues with which the speakers of these languages have to deal on a daily basis. For example, if the language (like Czech or Russian) expresses gender in the verbal agreement, a woman talking to man will have to work harder to switch between the genders when talking about hypotheticals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of the nature of gender and morphological agreement, many of the solutions proposed for English would be difficult to implement. For example, in English you can deal with the default assumption of gender relatively simply. For example: &quot;The doctor will need to be good if he or she wants to succeed.&quot; But in a language with rich gender morphology, you would have to say something like: &quot;The doctor[fem] or doctor[masc] will need to be good[fem] or good[masc] if he or she wants to be successful[fem] or successful[masc]. So the imposition on the speaker is much greater.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are many factors that come into play when trying to explain why languages like these do not lend themselves to reforms designed to even out the gender prejudice similar to those in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But morphology and noun gender are not the only (and perhaps not even the main) reason why many of the cultures which speak these kinds of languages do not deal with the issue. The reasons are primarily cultural, historical and political. For example an easy reform for many Slavic languages would be to stop inflecting women's surnames with -ova (which implies possession by the male - e.g. Nováková implies implies Novák's). There are very many good  linguistic tools for a language like Russian or Czech to deal with nouns without gender marking by simply not inflecting them. Yet, nobody has advocated that and when I tried to at least not put the -ova morpheme at the end of foreign female names of my translations, my (female) editor insisted on putting them there. The fact that there's little appetite for radical or even small scale action is due to the lack of a history of feminist movements dealing with language and also active anti-feminist campaigns (often supported by women) in these countries. The issue is complex and far outside the scope of this SE. However, it does speak to the close linkage between politics and claims about the 'nature' of this language or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T08:04:26.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9232" CreationDate="2014-10-17T10:39:21.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not in a position to give any legal references, but as far as I know this should be perfectly legal. In fact, many corpora that are not publicly distributed rely on material that the compilers do not have the copyright for. Moreover, Mark Davies, the compiler of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt; and Corpus of Historical American English thinks it is legal to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) provide snippet views for concordance lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) distribute the original texts verbatim with a couple of words every 200 words removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He argues that this falls under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt; and provides loads of copyright material in his corpora to other people. What you are planning to do is surely much less of a copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T10:39:21.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-17T17:49:54.707" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using the SALT software, how does one transcribe non-standard verb tenses used in AAVE. For example, &quot;We  is going to the store.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5359" LastActivityDate="2014-10-17T17:49:54.707" Title="SALT Software transcription" Tags="&lt;aave&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-18T14:38:13.643" Score="5" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seriously struggling to identify a name for the relationship between such words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are transactional terms,of which there are two parts.&#xA;They may even show tense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John &lt;em&gt;gave&lt;/em&gt; me an apple.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;em&gt;got&lt;/em&gt; an apple from John.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was &lt;em&gt;given&lt;/em&gt; an apple by John.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could &lt;em&gt;buy&lt;/em&gt; it from you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You could &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; it too me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;John &lt;em&gt;sold&lt;/em&gt; it to me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;em&gt;bought&lt;/em&gt; it from john.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have thought it was an antonym, but searching for &quot;gave&quot; didn't show me &quot;got&quot;.&#xA;Is there a special name for such opposing pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5364" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T11:37:29.393" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T11:37:29.393" Title="What is the term for pairs of words with converse meanings such as (gave&lt;&gt;got) and (bought&lt;&gt;sold)?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-18T17:39:50.780" Score="2" ViewCount="1067" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most sound changes that involve consonantal place of articulation are gradual changes between two POAs that are contiguous: for example, a velar gets gradually fronted until it becomes a palatal. What are some examples of changes where a sound skips from one POA to another that is not contiguous to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;labiovelar stop to labial (very common; at least 5 independent examples in IE alone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interdental fricative to labiodental (also common)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;debuccalization changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T17:47:36.537" Title="Examples of discrete place-of-articulation changes" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9238" CreationDate="2014-10-18T21:53:52.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few sound changes in natural languages that skip over another phoneme's place of articulation. Many involve &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;British English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-labialization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R-labialization&lt;/a&gt; is realization of &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, normally a alveolar approximant &lt;code&gt;[ɹ ~ ɻ]&lt;/code&gt;, as a labiodental approximant (&lt;code&gt;[ʋ]&lt;/code&gt;) in dialects of southeastern England. Non-Cockney tend to hear this sound as &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt;. This appears to have happened in Haitian Creole as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;American English (possibly related): Realization of &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, normally a pharyngealized velar approximant (I think), as a velarized bilabial approximant &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt; in Elmer Fudd's derhotic idiolect (and to a lesser extent that of Barbara Walters).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French, German, and Hebrew: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guttural &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;r&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is realization of &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, originally an alveolar tap or trill &lt;code&gt;[r ~ ɾ]&lt;/code&gt;, as uvular fricative or trill &lt;code&gt;[ʀ ~ ʁ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; is all over the place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a couple that do not involve &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; phonemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taiwanese (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hypercorrection&amp;amp;oldid=627613762#Chinese_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt; becomes realized as &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;[f]&lt;/code&gt; in some sociolinguistic contexts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Spanish sound spelled soft &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; used to be a postalveolar fricative &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1444/2712&quot;&gt;in the seventeenth century&lt;/a&gt;, it moved back past the velar place of hard &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; and became an uvular fricative &lt;code&gt;[χ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T17:47:36.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9212" CreationDate="2014-10-18T22:57:40.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper shared by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psy.pku.edu.cn/~zhouxiaolin/2009%20Zhou%20et%20al.%20LCP.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;snailboat&lt;/a&gt; is a great survey of the issues. But all it does is really show how complex the issue is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no one clear meaning to vocalization. Also, there is not just one type of reader. There will be a difference between fluent experienced readers, beginning readers, struggling readers, reluctant readers, levels of education, etc. Also, there is no one 'Chinese'. So there are multiple questions to answer here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do readers of logographic languages like Mandarin Chinese (which is pretty much the only such language available for investigation) subvocalize at the level of the phonological representation in a way that readers of languages with alphabetic scripts are apt to do?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do readers of Mandarin vocalize the words at all or do they just form direct mental representations of what they see written? In other words, is reading a Chinese character more like seeing a symbol (e.g. toilet sign with man or woman, traffic light or arrow) or is it more like reading a word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the variation between different types of readers depending on how they acquired the language. What other dimensions of variation are there?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no definitive answers available. I would look at some of these for further investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is likely to be a mix of cognitive processes involved in the reading of Chinese characters. (Just like there is in reading English.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to take into account is the fact that all people who have learned to read Chinese in the last 60 years or so will have done it through the medium of Pinyin which relies on deconstructing the words into their phonological representations. (Taiwan uses Bopomofo - a similar non-Latin based phonological system.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many people do the majority of their character writing on computers and phones - and therefore through Pinyin so the phonology of words is re-emphasized. In fact, Victor Mair just published an interesting blogpost on how many educated people are &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15217&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forgetting how to write even simple characters&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, despite the strong linkage of characters to sound, there are at least some aspects of writing that do not correspond to any vocalization. E.g. 他 = he 她 = she but tā = he/she. So the reader sees the person is a male or female but the hearer will not hear that distinction. And there are many visual word/character puns in Chinese as well that cannot be vocalized.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is some research that seems to hint that there is less incidence of dyslexia in Chinese (dyslexia is a disorder of phonological processing) or rather the problems a dyslexic brain encounters with a Latin-based orthography don't become apparent in Chinese - but that may be more related to issues of identification. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many readers of the Chinese script do not actually speak Mandarin so may vocalize the characters differently - although I suspect that this issue is a lot more complicated than just saying the characters make communication between different languages possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-18T22:57:40.740" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9293" CreationDate="2014-10-19T05:53:27.817" Score="4" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Treebank conversion which I found in the web are from constituency treebank to dependency treebank, I wonder why there is little works in the opposite direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that nowadays dependency parsing is more promising and &quot;the state of art&quot; in the field of NLP? if yes why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5241" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T21:16:15.810" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T21:16:15.810" Title="dependency or constituency treebank?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;treebanks&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-19T09:37:24.593" Score="3" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's my first post here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was planning for a long time to learn another foreign language. Polish is my mother tongue and I also speak english. Not on a professional level of course but I'm pretty satisfied with it. I can understand and I'm understood most of times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, yesterday I came across a youtube video made by a man who speaks 8 languages. He stated that today's methods of teaching languages at schools are completely incorrect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said that &lt;strong&gt;learning grammar in the beginning was a bad idea&lt;/strong&gt;. As an example, he mentioned his daughter who was 4 years old and spoke polish, spanish, english and portuguese. Such a kid mustn't have a clue about any grammar. Kids don't know about adjectives, attributives and stuff like that and still they are able to wield those languages. It's stunning, isn't it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His suggestion was to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find 1000 most common words in a given language and memorize them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do something he called &quot;absolute immersion&quot; which can be listening for 4-8 hours a day to some news radio channel even without fully understanding it (not music, because it stimulates other part of brain or sth like that) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading texts with phonetic notation and physically repeating it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here come my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you think about that way of learning new languages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has anyone tried this? If yes, how would you describe the result?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you know any good websites where I can find XXXX most commom words in a given language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you got any other good and rather fast method?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5367" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T18:59:54.013" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T02:59:57.597" Title="Way to learn foreign languages" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9242" CreationDate="2014-10-19T18:45:18.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any advice on learning an additional language is kind of like dieting advice. It has probably worked for a few people at some point. But it generally involved unrealistic expectations about behavior and resources. This particular advice is more than a little kooky because it completely ignores communication but it would certainly take you some of the way towards learning the language. But memorizing 1,000 words is not trivial. Also, completely unfiltered radio or TV is probably not very useful without at least some initial guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to devote that much time and effort to learning a language, Benny, the Irish polyglot offers more comprehensive advice in the same vein on his website here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluentin3months.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fluentin3months.com&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language learning is hard and it takes a lot of time. So whichever way you slice it, you will have to put in the hours. The internet is certainly a helpful resource for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the point about adults modelling their learning after that of children, that is completely unrealistic. Children have different motivations, life experiences and generally not as fully developed cognitive strategies as adults. Giving up on those (such as by ignoring any grammar at all) is foolish. However, the biggest obstacle will be inhibitions and trying to maintain your linguistic identity. So that's certainly a lesson, you can learn from children. Simple immersion without marshaling at least some of your adult cognitive advantages would be unwise. There is also a lot of individual variation in how well different adults learn without some sort of guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an even better resource is therefore &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.ntpu.edu.tw/~language/workshop/read2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rebecca Oxford's learning strategy inventory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-19T18:45:18.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-19T18:49:06.753" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have terms like hyponym and hypernym, which convey the relationships &quot;subcategories&quot; and &quot;supercategory&quot;.  Metaphorically, one could think of such relationships as similar to parent/children relationships.  But what about words for &quot;siblings,&quot; in other words, words that all share a hypernym?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, colours.  Red,blue and green are all colours.  They are all hyponyms of &quot;colour.&quot;  So what term applies to such &quot;co-hyponyms&quot;?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider vehicles.   &quot;Bike,&quot; &quot;car,&quot; &quot;truck,&quot; &quot;bus,&quot; &quot;train,&quot; and &quot;boat&quot; are all hyponyms of &quot;vehicle.&quot;   Of course, the situation is more complex than I've made it look so far.  For example, &quot;land vehicle&quot; and &quot;water vehicle&quot; are hyponyms of &quot;vehicle&quot; but each have hyponyms, e.g. &quot;car,&quot; and &quot;train&quot; on one hand, and &quot;boat&quot; and &quot;submarine&quot; on the other.  But does this complexity obviate my question?   What term do we apply to &quot;land-vehicle&quot; and &quot;water-vehicle&quot; owing to their shared hypernym, &quot;vehicle&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked online - wiki etc. tons of terms and Greek prefixes - but I haven't seen one for sibling or &quot;same type&quot;.  The closest are &quot;syno-&quot; and another prefix meaning &quot;brother.&quot;  Are there any ones more suitable?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5368" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:29:43.240" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:29:43.240" Title="Is there a term ending in &quot;-nym,&quot; that signifies terms that all have the same hypernym?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9260" CreationDate="2014-10-20T01:28:15.393" Score="-1" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this kind of flag since i was born, it was given by some japanese friends of my father as a gift for my birth. But today neither me or my father know the meaning of what's written in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone knows in what language is it written and what does it means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;horizontal orientation&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omnTt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;horizontal orientation&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or if it's inverted&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NjgP8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;or if it&amp;#39;s inverted&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in vertical orientation&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KtuSe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;in vertical orientation:&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zoom at the caligraphy&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YSWRe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;zoom at the caligraphy&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5371" LastEditorUserId="5371" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T16:15:16.520" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T22:06:36.467" Title="What language is this and what does it means?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-09-29T14:53:11.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9244" CreationDate="2014-10-20T01:36:54.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual term is a &lt;em&gt;co-hyponym&lt;/em&gt;. Here's a screenshot of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110226614/9783110226614.456/9783110226614.456.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cann 2011: 459&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Ogbb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T01:36:54.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-20T01:54:55.890" Score="6" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) that many homophones develop as a result of phonemic mergers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I, like many Americans, have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot.E2.80.93caught_merger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;cot-caught&quot; merger&lt;/a&gt; where I do not make a distinction between the &quot;au&quot; and the &quot;short o&quot;. This means that for me &quot;caught&quot; and &quot;cot&quot; are homophones, as are &quot;Don&quot; and &quot;Dawn&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-English example would be a &quot;Kaf-Qof&quot; merger in Hebrew where כּל (&quot;kol&quot; meaning &quot;all&quot;) and קוֹל (&quot;qol&quot; meaning &quot;voice&quot;) are both pronounced &quot;kol&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there a tendency for the number of homophones in a language to increase over time? It seems like once a group of people stop making a distinction between two phonemes, it is very hard for them to start making a distinction again. That would imply that older versions of a language had fewer homophones and more recent versions more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reluctant to buy into the hypothesis stated above because many trends in languages are cyclical with a frequency in the thousands of years. For instance agglutinating vs. isolating; it is likely that languages are one, then the other, then back again. If homophone frequency only increased over time, we would all only be grunting identical sounds after several thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious counterweight to the mergers is comprehensibility. If too many mergers occurred, the language would become more and more difficult to use to communicate. This implies a limiting factor, but it does not really explain why we haven't inherited mergers and sets of homophones from (say) three thousand years ago. Is there a counteracting force where people make (possibly new and different) distinctions between previously identical phonemes to undo some of the mergers and make what were previously homophones become unique? If so, what is that phenomenon called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastEditorUserId="4810" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T13:15:14.163" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T10:32:38.733" Title="Is there a trend toward more homophones over time? What can counteract that trend?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14452" CreationDate="2014-10-20T08:08:15.877" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's obviously easier to pronounce and, perhaps even acquire, a sound or sequence not present in one's native language if one watches carefully a speaker's mouth. What is this phenomena called? Where can I read more about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T11:44:40.867" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T09:35:49.490" Title="What is the role of watching articulation in learning pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9237" CreationDate="2014-10-20T08:27:03.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are looking at pairs like ‘buy’ ^ ‘sell’; ‘take’ ^ ‘give’; ‘come’ ^ ‘go’. I am not sure that there is name for this, but we are dealing with pairs of verbs with the same fundamental semantic content but opposite directionality. ‘Come’ means to move toward the speaker, ‘go’ means to move away from the speaker; ‘buy’ means to transfer an object into the possession of the speaker; ‘sell’ means to transfer it from the speaker to another person. In English we  use two etymologically distinct words for ‘buy’ and ‘sell’, but German uses ‘kaufen’ and ‘verkaufen’, that is: ‘sell’ is ‘buy’ with a directional prefix. Compare English 'import' vs. 'export'. You will find the same sort of thing frequently in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T08:27:03.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-20T08:31:55.830" Score="2" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I record five friends, each individually. I label the recordings 1-5. All are the same gender and the same age-range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have another recording. I am not allowed to hear the recording. Is it possible to identify from which friend it came? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T11:23:45.857" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T14:19:06.010" Title="How can I recognize someone's voice from a spectrogram? A puzzler!" Tags="&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2014-10-20T08:38:48.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on whether we are talking about phonology or about phonetics (you do not specify). If it is phonetics then there are lots of examples of allophones that occur only in clusters and not on their own, for example in English the unaspirated [t] in ‘stop’. But I suspect that phonology is another matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T08:38:48.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-20T09:37:27.380" Score="5" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some typographic conventions adhered to in most of linguistic literature where it applies. This includes punctuation &lt;strong&gt;affixes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/phonemic/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[phonetic] and [±feature]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;⟨graphemic⟩ or &amp;lt;graphemic&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;including &lt;strong&gt;quote marks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘semantics’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“quotation”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or just &lt;strong&gt;prefixes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/338/meaning-of-star-asterisk-in-linguistics&quot;&gt;*wrong&lt;/a&gt;, *reconstructed, *ungrammatic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also &lt;strong&gt;italic type&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;object language&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other possibilities are employed by some scholars (in some fields) but not others, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;typographic effects&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bold face&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;serif/roman vs. -/grotesque vs. cursive/ vs. blackletter/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;monospaced/fixed-width&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;l e t t e r s p a c i n g&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲, l̶i̶n̶e̶-t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶, o̅v̅e̅r̅l̅i̅n̅e̅&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;letter case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sᴍᴀʟʟ cᴀᴘs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UPPERCASE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Initial Caps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;InternalCaps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;camelCase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;snake_case (infix)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;paired affixes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{braces}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(parentheses), ((doubled))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‹guillemets›, «guillemets», ›guillemets‹, »guillemets«&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other &lt;strong&gt;prefixes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?question mark&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#hash sign&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;strong&gt;separators&lt;/strong&gt; (infixes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vertical|pipe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;middle·dot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and math-like “operators”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;, &gt;, =, ≈, …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or arrows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;→, ⇒, ←, ⇐, ↖, ↗, …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have quite a collection of such semantic styles (sometimes conflicting), but it’s quite unsystematic yet and without authoritative source for the most part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, also conventions for supra/para-textual structures like diagrams, e.g. syntax trees and interlinear glosses, and tables, e.g. mandatory optimality theory tableaux with hand symbol ☞, small-caps in column headers and ugly cell borders. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR)&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, employ single quote marks, space, hyphen, equals sign, uppercase/small-caps, period or underscore, semicolon, colon, backslash, greater than, digits, empty set symbol ∅, parentheses, angle brackets and tilde. Discourse transcriptions in conversion analysis follow complex conventions of their very own (CA, DT, GAT, HIAT, CHAT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still have not found meta research that produced an overview of linguistic typography. If there is, I will appreciate pointers very much. Until then, what kinds of typographic conventions, especially inside normal prose, are used in various linguistic fields besides the aforementioned standards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclosure: I’m planning to design and implement a flavor of &lt;a href=&quot;https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt; (or rather &lt;a href=&quot;http://commonmark.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commonmark&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarlymarkdown.com/Scholarly-Markdown-Guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scholarly Markdown&lt;/a&gt;) tailored to linguistics and would like to reuse or at least support as many existing conventions as possible, also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/7240/markdown-for-linguistics&quot;&gt;Markdown for linguistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T17:35:14.780" Title="Linguistic typography documented?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2014-10-20T09:42:04.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot identify the speaker just by looking at the wave or the spectrogram. Speaker recognition is a big topic with quite a bit of controversy and you need specialized stochastic tools for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Mark Liberman's recent post on this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15175&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15175&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that voice biometrics have come a long way but I don't see them showing up in open source speech analytic tools any time soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T09:42:04.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2014-10-20T14:19:06.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer may be more mundane than you were thinking. Using the 'biometrics' tag for this question may be misleading, because it might imply to some people that the answer has to do with &lt;em&gt;automated&lt;/em&gt; speaker recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you are just asking &lt;strong&gt;how you, as a person, might identify your friends via visual representations of their speech.&lt;/strong&gt; This is definitely doable, as long as you know what to look out for, you are choosing from a small set (as you mentioned), and the recordings include enough speech to provide you with the requisite information for telling your friends apart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look at speech all day for a living, and I have gotten to know the voices of a few individuals pretty well. &lt;strong&gt;I can tell who's who based on various factors, including pitch range, intonational patterns, voice quality, and dialectal traits, all of which can be gleaned from a spectrogram.&lt;/strong&gt; @Dominik is right about automated voice biometrics not being a widely available feature in open source speech analysis tools, but as a human I have a couple of advantages over machines--I am a native speaker of human languages and I have knowledge about phonetics and phonology--that enable me to distinguish the important parts of the signal from the unimportant noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T14:19:06.010" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2014-10-20T15:10:28.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you need to think about the theoretical implications of what you are asking. The question presupposes that you know going into an analysis that a certain sequence of speech sounds in a language is the realization of multiple phonemes in that language. But the usual criterion for assigning phonemic status to the subparts of a sequence of speech sounds is precisely what you are saying would be lacking for this hypothetical language--the observation that the subparts (or sounds that could conceivably be realizations of those subparts) occur independently elsewhere in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a language that is just like English except that it doesn't have [t] or [ʃ] in isolation (while still having [tʃ]). The most sensible phonemic analysis of such data would be that [tʃ] represents a single phoneme, /tʃ/. Now substitute any other sounds for [t] and [ʃ] in this example. How would you ever argue that the constituent sounds represent individual phonemes if they never appear independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-10-20T18:18:29.940" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T18:18:29.940" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2014-10-20T17:10:31.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonological change is not composed solely of mergers and losses. You can have chain shifts, where the net number of phonemes stays more or less the same. It is also possible that the number of phonemes increases, in phonemic splits and additions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemic additions are usually via contact with another language. A good example in English is the phoneme /ʒ/, which was imported from Middle French loanwords; the basis for this was that the Middle English /z/ was already palatalising into [ʒ], so the &quot;foreign&quot; phoneme was already phonetically present in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemic splits are usually a result of interaction between sounds in the language, and often branch out from allophones. In British English, the &lt;code&gt;FOOT&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;STRUT&lt;/code&gt; /ʊ/-/ʌ/ split of the mid-17th century and the &lt;code&gt;BATH&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;TRAP&lt;/code&gt; /ɑː/-/æ/ split of 17th-/18th-century London are the most well-known. Taking the &lt;code&gt;BATH&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;TRAP&lt;/code&gt; split: it was the result of phonetic lengthening before fricatives like /f/, /s/, /θ/, later even /ns/ that brought it about. However, it had incomplete diffusion through the language, preventing it from becoming a complete chain shift. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment in southern British English, what has been called the &lt;code&gt;WHOLLY&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;HOLY&lt;/code&gt; split is emerging, where /əʊ/ of the &lt;code&gt;GOAT&lt;/code&gt; set has an allophone [oʊ] before the dark, almost vocalised final /l/ when in the same syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reversal of phonological merger can occur, but a net reversal and a retardation/resistance to change are different. The case of &lt;code&gt;meat&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mate&lt;/code&gt; in the English of 16th to 17th-century southern England (specifically London) is one of the better known cases of the former, where &lt;code&gt;meat&lt;/code&gt; had been /ɛː/ at the end of Middle English, maintained that phoneme through the 16th century, and had closed to /iː/ by the 17th-century; whereas &lt;code&gt;mate&lt;/code&gt; had been /aː/, merged into /ɛː/, and then re-emerged as /eː/ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-due.de/~lan300/22_Mergers_and_Near_Mergers_(Hickey).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as summarised in this 2004 paper&lt;/a&gt;), although it has been analysed as 1) contact between sociolects as reintroducing the phonemic split, or 2) only a near-merger occurred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Localised resistance to change can also result in a form of reversal, although this is unlikely to be phonemic. The &lt;code&gt;STRUT&lt;/code&gt; vowel in colloquial London English has moved from quite near cardinal /ʌ/ to a more central /ɐ/ and back towards /ʌ/ with the rise of &quot;Estuary&quot; English over the 20th century (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/projects/linguistics/innovators/documents/Iclave3_article_TorgersenKerswillFox_Final_000.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 2006 paper&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T17:10:31.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9245" CreationDate="2014-10-20T22:06:36.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It says (vertically, top to bottom) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichikawa_Danj%C5%ABr%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;市川團十郎&lt;/a&gt;, which is the stage name of numerous generations of Kabuki actors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure of the significance of the ぬ motif -- that's just a syllable from the hiragana syllabary with no clear independent meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The circle is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;円相&lt;/a&gt;, a brush-drawn circle which is meditated upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third object looks like a sickle, but again I'm not sure of its significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2014-10-20T22:06:36.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-20T22:56:46.120" Score="58" ViewCount="44240" Body="&lt;p&gt;As many amateurs and beginners know, IPA is difficult to memorize and internalize at first. Does software exist where one can paste in IPA text and hear synthesized speech (ideally in the form of a web page converter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that such software would have to have caveats: it would be language specific since IPA to sound mappings can vary among languages, it would sound artificial and thus not be a completely accurate compared to the real sound of a given dialect, it might not get syllable stress right without diacritics. Nonetheless, it could be helpful when one reads a IPA representation of a dialect that one does not have a recording of and has not heard in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3378/does-an-ipa-to-english-translator-exist&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is similar, but not the same as it is basically asking for a text-to-text lookup table. Some of the links in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3387/4810&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; are good for audio of individual phonemes (fascinating in itself), but do not seem to aggregate them into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&amp;amp;t=36673&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This online forum&lt;/a&gt; mentions a converter &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to be mostly discontinued and not IPA as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this does not exist, I am considering writing a crude one based on the clips from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt; I wonder what I will learn through &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T04:32:52.973" Title="Is there an online tool to convert IPA symbols into audio sound?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T03:04:28.077" Score="3" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a special term to describe the mental translation of a word? E.g. when one sees a recently learned term, they may think of the L1 meaning rather than directly think of the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2700" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T01:31:10.080" Title="Is there a special term describing mental translation between L1 and L2?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9106" CreationDate="2014-10-21T08:19:57.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a corpus of internet discussion boards that is split up into weekly files that spans 4 years. It is freely downloadable here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/usenetcorpus.download.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/usenetcorpus.download.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5379" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T08:19:57.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8336" CreationDate="2014-10-21T10:27:35.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing a language-learning book in the local public library today and came across this note on page ten of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Get-Started-Cantonese-Yourself-Enhanced-ebook/dp/B00FEDJ6AS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1413885345&amp;amp;sr=8-1&amp;amp;keywords=9781444174991&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Get Started in Cantonese&lt;/em&gt; published by &lt;em&gt;Teach Yourself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LANGUAGE TIP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not all the written forms of Cantonese have been standardized. For example, &lt;strong&gt;aa&lt;/strong&gt; could be written as 呀,吖,or丫;&lt;strong&gt;lāa&lt;/strong&gt; could be written as 啦,罅, or 喇.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T01:46:24.130" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T01:46:24.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T13:15:41.780" Score="3" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm researching proto-Indo-European, and have seen a few remarks which imply that an -es suffix for plural was a likely component of the language (including here on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/8501/5322&quot;&gt;L.SE&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;).  Is this a widespread academic belief?  Is the suffix found in many Indo-European languages, other than (in a form) English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just to confirm: if this suffix &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; believed to be to descend, did it represent plurality or just duality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5322" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T21:12:15.127" Title="Does an -es suffix for plurality have Proto-Indo-European roots?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9266" CreationDate="2014-10-21T14:13:22.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Virtually all IE languages have masculine and feminine nominative plural forms with endings that can be derived from *-es. For example Latin patres. These are plural, not dual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T22:57:00.633" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T22:57:00.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2014-10-21T18:45:14.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andy Wedel has done some really interesting work on factors in the maintenance of lexical contrasts (syntactic category, frequency, functional load).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~wedel/publications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Check the top three papers here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T01:43:49.930" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T01:43:49.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T22:15:12.090" Score="0" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've begun teaching myself Hieroglyphic Egyptian with James Allen's introduction. He presents a table of transcriptions in European format (he has one with computer, budge, British, and proto-Semitic transcriptions on the next page.) So it goes something like this. (i'm showing names and symbol names.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vulture Aleph,&#xA;Reed Leaf (Nothing),&#xA;Dual Strokes j,&#xA;Double reed-leaf y,&#xA;etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is the reed leaf does not have a transcription or name. It also would not make any sense for it to be either the transcription of dual strokes or the vulture. In all the other cases, he adds an &quot;or&quot; at the end of the line. So in his table it would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owl or&#xA;Unknown Object w&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's going on with the reed leaf?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5382" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T21:14:10.697" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T21:14:10.697" Title="Reed Leaf Unilateral Transcription in Hieroglyphic Egyptian. Why isn't there one? Or is there?" Tags="&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-21T22:52:09.990" Score="1" ViewCount="3626" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, what is it called when, for instance, the following happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mad(noun) &gt; madly (adv) &gt; madlyness (noun) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-22T01:04:05.953" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T13:54:24.717" Title="What is it called in linguistics when you change a word from one part of speech to another?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9269" CreationDate="2014-10-21T23:04:13.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably reading James Allen's &quot;Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs&quot;, 3rd Edition, 2014, because both in the 1st Edition (2000) and in the 2nd one (2010) he has those signs this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(vulture) aleph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(reed-leaf); also (dual strokes) j&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(double reed-leaf) y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(owl); also (unknown object) w&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, every pair of the signs that are transliterated the same ways has &lt;code&gt;; also&lt;/code&gt; separator in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I have no access to the 2014 3rd Edition, so if you (or somebody else) could post here a snapshot of that page, that would help answer your question in a more definite way, but still I am sure that is just a kind of a typography fault, for I doubt that the &lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt; (I guess, that's the right term to be used here) of an Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph could change radically during the last 4 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T23:04:13.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9270" CreationDate="2014-10-21T23:05:01.517" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: We say &quot;part of speech&quot;, not &quot;word of speech&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: &quot;madlyness&quot; is not an English word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third: The term you are looking for is &quot;derivation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-21T23:05:01.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2014-10-22T04:54:33.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there are more homophones in Mandarin than in its ancestor Middle Chinese, but this is compensated for by increased use of compounding.  Still, other Sinitic languages like Cantonese did not lose as many distinctions and (as far as I know) still have an increased frequency of compounds, so it’s debatable whether this is a case of compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Haudricourt’s theory of tonogenesis, which applies to Chinese, Vietnamese and many other Southeast Asian languages, final consonant mergers led to contour tones, and voiced/unvoiced initial mergers led to low/high tones, generally.  So new distinctions in the rhyme arose (or were already present but became phonetic) to replace the consonantal distinctions that were lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T04:54:33.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9266" CreationDate="2014-10-22T08:53:03.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in PIE the masculine and feminine nouns in nominative usually had zero ending or -s or -os. In plural these would beciome -es, -oes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wolf -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯lq̆oes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wolfs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pa̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; father -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pa̯teres&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fathers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T08:53:03.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-22T12:53:31.593" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the topic of &quot;subjectivity in language&quot; is all new to me, I am looking for an introduction to the topic that 1) gives an overview of the phenomena usually associated with the topic (evidentiality? modality?) and/or 2) contains information on how subjectivity is expressed in different languages. Thanks a lot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5383" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T23:50:05.203" Title="Is there a good introduction to subjectivity in language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-22T13:46:45.407" Score="2" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, tonogenesis occurs when consonants merge. The merging of initial consonants results in register tones and the merging of final consonants results in contour tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are concrete examples of this in Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T04:03:05.183" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T11:36:49.243" Title="What are examples of Haudricourt's tonogenesis in Chinese?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-22T15:44:03.360" Score="-3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example what is the &lt;strong&gt;origin of name Catherine&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology Dictionary says that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's from &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; Catherine, from &lt;strong&gt;Medieval Latin&lt;/strong&gt; Katerina, from &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt; Ecaterina, from &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt; Aikaterine. The -h- was introduced 16c., probably a folk etymology from Greek katheros &quot;pure.&quot; The initial Greek vowel is preserved in Russian form Ekaterina.&#xA;As the name of a type of pear, attested from 1640s. Catherine wheel (early 13c.) is named for St. Catherine of Alexandria, legendary virgin martyr from the time of Maximinus who was tortured on a spiked wheel. Her name day is Nov. 25. A popular saint in the Middle Ages, which accounts for the popularity of the given name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the origin of this word is &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;? or &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;? or &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to find out?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:05:05.443" Title="How to find origin of a borrowed word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9276" CreationDate="2014-10-22T17:25:26.323" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formation of the &quot;four tone&quot; system of Middle Chinese, which resulted in a historically attested distinction (see the various &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rime_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rime dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; compiled in the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties), is meant to have derived from the &quot;cheshirisation&quot; of the final consonants of Later Old Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding the &quot;reflexes&quot; of these ancient consonants requires &lt;strong&gt;comparative evidence&lt;/strong&gt; from corresponding cognates across the Sino-Tibetan family. One such cross-comparison (&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nIvqAC7FNBQC&amp;amp;pg=PA31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;found on pages 30-31 of the &lt;em&gt;ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) comes from comparing Middle Chinese &quot;tone B&quot; or 上聲 (Mandarin Pinyin: &lt;em&gt;shǎngshēng&lt;/em&gt;) with Chepang, from the Mahabharat ranges of Nepal; the connection is strengthened with evidence from tone 1 of Tiddim Chin in northwestern Myanmar. Examples cited include：&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;羽 = waʔ (Chepang), va:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (Tiddim)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;尾 = meʔ (Chepang), mei&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (Tiddim)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;苦 = kháʔ (Chepang), xa:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (Tiddim)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it is also possible to glean hints of the original glottal stop that gave rise to 上聲 within the Sinitic varieties. Just as &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6N7LRVvgWpIC&amp;amp;pg=PA322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page 322&lt;/a&gt; of Baxter's &lt;em&gt;A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology&lt;/em&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are in fact modem Chinese dialects which have a final glottal stop in words which are &lt;em&gt;shǎngshēng&lt;/em&gt; in Middle Chinese; the dialects cited by Mei are Wēnzhōu 溫州 in Zhèjiāng, generally assigned to the Wú group, and four Mǐn dialects: Pǔchéng 浦城 and Jiànyáng 建陽 in northwestern Fújiàn, and Dìng'ān 定安 and Wénchāng 文昌 on Hǎinán island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baxter goes on to talk about &lt;strong&gt;loanword adaptation&lt;/strong&gt;, involving &lt;em&gt;shǎngshēng&lt;/em&gt; syllables being chosen to represent the short vowels of Sanskrit (it must be remembered Sanskrit did not have final glottal stops) when transcribing early Buddhist texts into Chinese; he states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This shortness is a natural concomitant of the final glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line of evidence has also been found for the &lt;em&gt;qùshēng&lt;/em&gt; 去聲 tone of Middle Chinese, which is presumed to have derived from Old Chinese *-s. Sanskrit and many other Indic languages had final -s (or one of the other sibilants, conventionally romanised as -ś and -ṣ in IAST), and these were transcribed with characters that would later have the &lt;em&gt;qùshēng&lt;/em&gt; tone of Middle Chinese. One example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;बृहस्पति &lt;code&gt;Bṛhaspati&lt;/code&gt; = 毗里害波底 which in Baxter's reconstruction of Middle Chinese is &lt;code&gt;bjij-liX-hajH-pa-tejX&lt;/code&gt;; -स्प-, the syllable -&lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt;-, has been transcribed with 害, which would have been &lt;em&gt;qùshēng&lt;/em&gt; 去聲, as marked in the transcription with the capital &lt;code&gt;H&lt;/code&gt;, and corresponds to the final -s of the Sanskrit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same principles apply to the much later development of the cheshirisation of voicing leading to the lower register tones. With comparative cognate evidence, the Wu group, including Shanghainese and Suzhounese, still retains a marginal form of voicing (usually &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathy_voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;breathy voice&lt;/a&gt; in practice) where the Yue group such as Cantonese has one of the lower-pitched tones (tones 4, 5, 6 in Jyutping). Some loanword adaptations are also evidence for this: compare the modern tones of the transliteration of the above Sanskrit word (e.g. 毗, which corresponded to voiced बृ in Sanskrit). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, we actually have documentary evidence: the three-way distinction between 全清、次清、全濁 in the obstruents (plus the 次濁 for the sonorants) was recorded in the rime dictionaries, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Chinese)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;comparing these form&lt;/a&gt;s with the modern forms is straightforward. The classic example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;東 dōng (Mandarin Pinyin), dung1 (Cantonese Jyutping), tong (Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;同 tóng (Mandarin Pinyin), tung4 (Cantonese Jyutping), tông (Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can see that cheshirisation has left aspiration as well as tone change in Mandarin and in Cantonese. It is not always the case that the net result is tone change: in Mandarin, what was &lt;em&gt;shǎngshēng&lt;/em&gt; 上聲 and &lt;em&gt;qùshēng&lt;/em&gt; 去聲 was split according to voicing and then re-merged, losing the voicing contrast but without net tonogenesis. Both Cantonese and Hokkien exhibit (or rather maintain the result of) tonogenesis though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;凍 dòng (Mandarin Pinyin), dung3 (Cantonese Jyutping), tòng ([Literary] Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;洞 dòng (Mandarin Pinyin), dung6 (Cantonese Jyutping), tōng (Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2014-10-24T11:36:49.243" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T11:36:49.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2014-10-22T17:36:50.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowing happens in stages. The English name Catherine is borrowed from French, the French from Latin, the Latin from Greek. From an English point of view the origin is French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-22T17:36:50.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9288" CreationDate="2014-10-23T00:02:06.053" Score="6" ViewCount="4144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen the &quot;-er&quot; sound in English (like in &lt;em&gt;butt&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) transcribed in all three of the above ways, but I've heard there are subtle differences between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these differences, if there are any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1642" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-25T04:21:05.240" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T04:21:05.240" Title="What's the difference between [ɚ], [ɹ̩], and [əɹ]?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9282" CreationDate="2014-10-23T01:10:08.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;[əɹ] denotes an [ə] vowel (schwa, or the mid-central vowel) followed by an [ɹ] (alveolar approximant, or &quot;English R&quot;) sound. Key is that you can hear the transition from the vowel to the consonant, such as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-us-administer.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this audio example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice these two sounds often melt into one in US English. The [ə] is rhotacized, also known as r-colored, resulting in [ɚ]. (See the Wikipedia article titled &quot;R-colored vowel&quot;. It has an audio example comparing [ə] with [ɚ]) Basically this means you pronounce an English R with your mouth in the [ə] position. It is one sound. &lt;a href=&quot;http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AEn-us-adviser.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an audio example where you can hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diacritic under ɹ in [ɹ̩] means the sound is syllabic. In other words, it is an R pronounced as its own syllable, as opposed to being part of a syllable preceding or following it. I don't know exactly how this is different from [ɚ] if at all, but my first impression is it might suggest the mouth does not have to be in the [ə] position. I did some Googling, and according to a few random folks on the internet it is actually synonymous to [ɚ] or [ɝ], but I have not seen a credible source yet so do not take their word for it just yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So in short:&lt;/strong&gt; [əɹ] is ⟨er⟩ pronounced as two separate sounds while [ɚ] and [ɹ̩] are when it's pronounced as one sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5390" LastEditorUserId="5390" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T01:15:34.827" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T01:15:34.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9275" CreationDate="2014-10-23T08:05:51.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good introduction is Heiko Narrog's &lt;strong&gt;Modality, subjectivity, and semantic change&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.jp/Modality-Subjectivity-Semantic-Change-Cross-Linguistic/dp/0199694370/ref=sr_1_4?s=english-books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1414051393&amp;amp;sr=1-4&amp;amp;keywords=narrog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This link&lt;/a&gt; accesses the Japanese amazon site, where you can, if you're quick, have a look inside. Just click on the picture of the book cover in the upper left corner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T08:05:51.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9287" CreationDate="2014-10-23T10:05:53.050" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following data (spoken American English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John said &quot;I'll come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was like &quot;I'll come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What John said was: &quot;I'll come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?What John was like was: &quot;I'll come.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an analysis of this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T10:57:06.027" Title="why can't quotative &quot;be like&quot; be fronted?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8874" CreationDate="2014-10-23T10:07:59.747" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ended up asking on the phonet mailing list. This is a summary of the responses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gonet, W. (1993). Próba okreslenia normy wymowy polskich samoglosek ustnych. Opuscula Logopaedica in Honorem Leonis Kaczmarek. Lublin: UMCS, 232-252.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jassem, W., M. Krzysko and P. Stolarksi (1984). Czestotliwosci formantowe samoglosek jako cechy fonematyczne i osobnicze w swietle statystycznej analizy dyskryiminacyjnej. Warsaw: Instytut Podstawowych Problemów Techniki PAN.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Majewski, W. and H. Hollien (1967). Formant frequencies of Polish vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 42:5, 1031-7.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mrówka, P. (2007). Algorytmy kompensacji warunków transmisyjnych i cech osobniczych mówcy w systemach automatycznego rozpoznawania mowy. Wroclaw: Instytut Telekomunikacji, Teleinformatyki i Akustyki, Politechnika Wroclawska (PhD dissertation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nowak, P. (2006). Vowel Reduction in Polish. University of California, Berkely (PhD dissertation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rojczyk, Arkadiusz (2011). Overreliance on duration in nonnative vowel production and perception: The within lax vowel category contrast. In: M. Wrembel, M. Kul, K. Dziubalska-Kolaczyk (eds.) Achievements and Perspectives in SLA of Speech: New Sounds 2010, Volume II. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strycharczuk, Patrycja and Peter Jurgec (2008). Prosodic influences on formant frequencies of Polish vowels. Paper given at the 3rd Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, July 9, 2008.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weckwerth, Jaroslaw (2013). Formant values of English and Polish vowels in highly proficient Polish learners of English. Poster presented at NewSounds 2013, Montreal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T10:07:59.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2014-10-23T10:48:18.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BE like&lt;/em&gt; is not an integrated collocation meaning &lt;em&gt;SAY&lt;/em&gt;. Rather, &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; is a “discourse marker” which signals that what follows is worthy of particular emphasis or peculiar interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John was [like [totally excited about it]].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  John was [like [jumping up and down]].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  John was [like [“I’ll come”]].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the ‘quotative’ version, &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; indicates that what follows is an imitation and demonstration of what John ‘was’.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &lt;i&gt;Wh-&lt;/i&gt;cleft should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; John was like “Oh all right, I’ll come”—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; No, no, no, what John was was like “I’ll come! I’ll be there!”.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T10:57:06.027" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T10:57:06.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9282" CreationDate="2014-10-23T11:53:45.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While what @Raizin says about [əɹ] is technically true--it is supposed to denote a sequence of two phones--I have seen [əɹ], [ɚ], [ɹ̩], and [ɝ] all used to refer to the same speech sound. The thing is, while schwa is given its own place in the vowel space chart, in practice its formants (other than the first formant) tend just to be transitions between the consonants surrounding it (unless it is phrase-initial or phrase-final), so it's more of a chameleon vowel, blending into its surroundings. Consequently, a schwa-r sequence is going to be virtually indistinguishable from an 'r-colored schwa'. Furthermore, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between unstressed [ɝ] and [ɚ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, more often than not, it's a matter of convention rather than of phonetic distinctions. For example, I know one phonologist who sticks to [ɝ] and [ɚ] for transcriptions of American English, and by convention she uses [ɝ] in stressed positions (as in 'sir') and [ɚ] in unstressed positions (as in 'ulcer'). It's true that the formants of the vowel in 'ulcer' are going to tend to be a bit less extreme (i.e., a bit more centralized) than those of the vowel in 'sir', especially at faster speech rates. But they aren't always, and yet she lets phonology, not phonetics, dictate which symbol she uses. This follows the convention of transcribing the vowel in the unstressed syllable of 'submit' as [ə] and that in the stressed vowel of 'substance' as [ʌ], even if instances of those respective words can be found in which the formant values of the vowel are identical in the two cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-10-23T17:59:08.560" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T17:59:08.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2014-10-23T18:32:53.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might try using mbrola. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html&quot;&gt;http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a downloadable speech synthesizer, where you type in a sound and it uses diphone synthesis to play it back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To play a given sound, you would type in something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;_ 200 10 120&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a 300 10 120&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;_ 200 10 120&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above text means, line by line &quot;play silence for 200ms, and at 10% of that 200ms duration, the pitch should be 120Hz. Then play the sound /a/ for 300ms, and at 10% of that the pitch is 120Hz, and then play 200ms of silence again.&quot; So it goes duration [tab] pitch-time [tab] pitch value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't use IPA, it uses X-SAMPA, but you can easily convert between the two scripts, and the sound file databases will also have IPA in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5393" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T18:32:53.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2014-10-23T22:36:45.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowing can also go back and forth. The word &quot;flirt&quot; is used in&#xA;French, both as a noun (for the act or for the person) and as a verb&#xA;(&quot;flirter&quot;). It was clearly borrowed, a few decades ago, from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flirting#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;it is said&lt;/a&gt; (among other possible origins) to possibly&#xA;derives from the French &quot;conter fleurette&quot;, borrowed a long time&#xA;ago (16th century). I will not get into the etymology of &quot;conter fleurette&quot;, since a&#xA;quick scan of the web shows many not so compatible views of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-10-23T22:36:45.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9241" CreationDate="2014-10-24T07:30:50.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a rather simple answer to this question. This answer is that conversion from dependency to constituency is not really possible, at least not in the way imagined. Dependency structures are usually flatter than the corresponding constituency structures. What this means is that when one translates from dependency to constituency, the result is a rather flat constituency structure. Most constituency grammars assume more layered structures than dependency-based systems can acknowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a constituency structure is entirely headed, then it can always be easily translated to the corresponding dependency structure, and the resulting dependency structure will be considered valid by most people who do dependency parsing. The opposite does not hold, however. If a dependency structure is translated to the corresponding constituency structure, the resulting constituency structure will be flatter than most people who do constituency parsing want to assume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To restate the point in other terms, it is possible to automatically translate layered constituency structures to rather flat dependency structures, but translating rather flat dependency structures to layered constituency structures is impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I cannot confidently answer the last part of the question, since I am not working in NLP. However, my limited exposure to trends in NLP suggests that the answer is yes, i.e. dependency parsing is indeed the &quot;state of the art&quot; in the field of NLP. From what I understand, dependency parsing is now preferred in many NLP circles because it is in general simpler and faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-10-24T07:30:50.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-24T09:46:42.463" Score="-1" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;in this following paper , if we go to page no- 126 we will find a table with all acoustic features of all german Phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/luur/download?func=downloadFile&amp;amp;recordOId=2302713&amp;amp;fileOId=2302716&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/luur/download?func=downloadFile&amp;amp;recordOId=2302713&amp;amp;fileOId=2302716&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can you kindly refer to any link or documentations where i can get the list of the similar features for english Phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5395" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-25T11:49:19.890" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T11:49:19.890" Title="acoustic features for english phonems" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-24T10:21:56.647" Score="0" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to conduct research on German based on cloze probabilities. Cloze probabilities are not trivial to collect, so I am asking if there exist any publicly available corpora of German sentences with cloze ratings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3503" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-25T11:22:55.437" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T11:17:42.680" Title="German sentence corpus with cloze norms" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-24T18:07:41.377" Score="0" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;the sentence is: Lucy reported that scientists wonder if the medicine will work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/Users/tcalnitsky/Desktop/assignment2.jpg&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bJblY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;tree diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5394" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T05:33:23.390" Title="Is this tree diagram correct?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-10-27T02:51:18.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9300" CreationDate="2014-10-25T01:07:56.767" Score="-2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this question is rather dumb and ignorant for this community, but nevertheless -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following image I am having hard time recognizing most of the names of the languages, particularly the 3rd and 4th panel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/HbiZsEl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/HbiZsElm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone provide a list of the languages mentioned in the image, thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3209" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T13:20:16.600" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T13:20:16.600" Title="What languages are these?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-03-08T15:40:53.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9299" CreationDate="2014-10-25T02:25:08.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leftmost: Belarusian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1st panel: Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Macedonian, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd panel: Hebrew, Uyghur, Urdu, Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, Tigrinya, Amharic, Nepali, Marathi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3rd panel: Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhalese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4th panel: Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simplified characters), Chinese (traditional characters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-10-25T05:16:47.653" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T05:16:47.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2014-10-25T02:59:57.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acoustic features are independent of the language used. Thus, phones that are common between German and English have the same features. Also, the features are typically based on their details from the IPA charts. The phones listed on that page are in X-SAMPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a discussion of the feature-based model, you can check out the Virtual Linguistics Campus videos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pa0pm8a_dY&amp;amp;list=PL6F55740D1D073ADC&amp;amp;index=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonology - Distinctive Features I&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXRL5KNNXwg&amp;amp;list=PL6F55740D1D073ADC&amp;amp;index=6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonology - Distinctive Features II&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a list of IPA phonemes for English at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the IPA consonant and vowel charts at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the equivalent X-SAMPA at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can work out how the features map to the IPA consonant and vowel tables, then apply that to the phonemes from English not present in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may need to define the feature set differently, as phoneme features are typically defined in a minimal way to express the phones in a given language, and may not accurately model the IPA. For example, the document defines &lt;code&gt;ç&lt;/code&gt; as a mix of consonant and vowel terminology (high fricative) instead of consonant terminology (palatal fricative) -- this is because it uses coronal for &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; (alveolar) and palatal for &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt; (post-alveolar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you define the set of features depends on what information you want to preserve, and what information you want to ignore. It also depends on how many languages you want to support using the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a feature set that covers the majority of IPA phonemes, you may want to look at Appendix A (feature abbreviations) of Evan Kirshenbaum's ASCII-IPA at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/faq.html&lt;/a&gt;. I am using an extension of this in my Cainteoir Engine application to support all IPA phonemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The features are stored as either binary or enumerated value features defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/blob/master/src/include/cainteoir/phoneme.hpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/blob/master/src/include/cainteoir/phoneme.hpp&lt;/a&gt; -- for example, &lt;code&gt;voiced&lt;/code&gt; is a binary feature, but place of articulation is an enumerated value.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The list of 3-letter feature codes is defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/blob/master/src/libcainteoir/phoneme/phoneme.cpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rhdunn/cainteoir-engine/blob/master/src/libcainteoir/phoneme/phoneme.cpp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature codes I am using are Kirshenbaum's features, with the following extensions/modifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;alp&lt;/code&gt; -- alveolo-palatal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;con&lt;/code&gt; -- consonant (implicit if &lt;code&gt;vwl&lt;/code&gt; is not listed; used for querying features)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;epg&lt;/code&gt; -- epiglottal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;sib&lt;/code&gt; -- sibilant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;lbp&lt;/code&gt; -- labio-palatal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;nsy&lt;/code&gt; -- non-syllabic diacritic (for diphthongs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tie&lt;/code&gt; -- tiebar (this phone is tied to the next phone, for affricates and other co-articulated phones)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;orl&lt;/code&gt; -- Kirshenbaum intended this for &lt;code&gt;oral stop&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;{orl,stp}&lt;/code&gt;) vs &lt;code&gt;nasal stop&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;{nas,stp}&lt;/code&gt;), but uses &lt;code&gt;{stp}&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;{nas}&lt;/code&gt; for these instead, treating &lt;code&gt;stp&lt;/code&gt; as a plosive, therefore I am ignoring it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have additional features for missing diacritics, intonation, tones, stress and length. This allows me to encode the entire IPA code chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have features for things like sonorants, liquids or glides (as used to describe some english phonemes in the SAMPA for English chart at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm&lt;/a&gt;) as the IPA nomenclature covers these and I haven't encountered a situation where the additional features are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kirshenbaum feature model differs from the other models as it labels each value with a 3 letter code. Thus, it will assign 2 features to a single binary feature (e.g. &lt;code&gt;vcd&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;+voice&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;vls&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;-voice&lt;/code&gt;). I prefer the Kirshenbaum approach as the user-visible model as it is easier to implement (e.g. when processing phoneme set definitions) and allows the internal representation to be changed easier (so you don't have to modify anything using the feature labels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T02:59:57.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9282" CreationDate="2014-10-25T03:23:38.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English phonology (esp. American English), these are all different ways of transcribing/representing the same thing -- a rhoticized schwa sound -- when using a broad (phonemic) transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;/ɹ̩/&lt;/code&gt; transcription is similar to other syllabic consonants, where you may see them transcribed with either a schwa before them, or with a syllabic diacritic. Some transcriptions (e.g. the OED) even leave out the syllabic diacritic, although for LETTER (Wells' lexical set), they use &lt;code&gt;ə(r)&lt;/code&gt; to denote it being rhotic in some accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found &lt;code&gt;[ɹ̩]&lt;/code&gt; used in the &lt;code&gt;us1&lt;/code&gt; MBROLA text-to-speech voice (as &lt;code&gt;r=&lt;/code&gt;) for &lt;code&gt;ɜː&lt;/code&gt; [NURSE] and &lt;code&gt;ɚ&lt;/code&gt; [LETTER] (as American English does not to distinguish the two).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T03:23:38.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9304" CreationDate="2014-10-25T10:37:24.647" Score="1" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the guide, in general, for translating scientific terms from English to other language? I know, of course, that we need a person who have good competence on the field containing that word. Nevertheless, that person mostly don't have good competence on linguistics. So, what is the guide for this situation? Please explain in detail. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-26T06:51:23.470" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T08:05:57.563" Title="How to translate a scientific term to Vietnamese?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9303" CreationDate="2014-10-25T20:05:46.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the translation of scientific terms is one of the greatest areas where a &quot;normative procedure&quot; is in place (some could argue it is a form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;linguistic prescription&lt;/a&gt;). In the case of Vietnamese though, there is no central body for linguistic regulation similar to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Académie Française&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in the case of the French language. I believe that there is no official regulator in the case of the Vietnamese language at present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when users of a language seek a source for language regulation, they may turn to a variety of sources. Monolingual dictionaries have always been the bastion of linguistic self-regulation in modern literate societies. With the rise of the Internet, certain websites have become major sources of such information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trust in a source's accuracy is a major factor for such sources, especially so in the scientific community. In modern science, with its emphasis on traceability, it is entirely possible for a translated paper to be the reference for a new scientific concept or finding in any language. However, a simple concept like chirality will be likely be part of more fundamental educational training, and perhaps its entry into the language might have pre-dated the first scientific papers in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such a case then, the new word has come into the language like any other new word in the language: as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;loanword&lt;/a&gt;, or possibly a calque. A dictionary for the translator that specialises in a particular field may be a possibility. In Vietnamese, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pj6yBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT481&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one such English-Vietnamese medical dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, which does employ the word &quot;chiral&quot; in Vietnamese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trung tâm &lt;em&gt;chiral&lt;/em&gt;: trung tâm của dyssymmetry trong một phân từ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For actual usage one can consult the wider Internet. &lt;a href=&quot;http://z3.invisionfree.com/superstudents_10a/index.php?showtopic=68&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There is a forum post dating from 2007&lt;/a&gt; in Vietnamese, where &quot;chiral&quot; is used by default, but a gloss is given too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hai bàn tay của chúng ta có tính chiral (&lt;em&gt;đối xứng bàn tay&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like a calque: the components are the Sino-Vietnamese phrase &quot;đối xứng&quot; [對稱] meaning &quot;symmetry&quot;, and the phrase &quot;bàn tay&quot; for &quot;hand&quot;. This has also been used in Vietnamese Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monosaccarit có bốn nguyên tử cacbon trở lên có thể chứa nhiều nguyên tử cacbon &lt;em&gt;đối xứng bàn tay&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T04:50:04.363" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T04:50:04.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9275" CreationDate="2014-10-25T21:51:00.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you'll probably find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evidentiality-Alexandra-Y-Aikhenvald/dp/0199263884&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Alexandra Aikhenvald and her book on evidentiality&lt;/a&gt; a good starting point on the cross linguistic front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course, subjectivity is much more complex than the associated morphosyntax. I think Ari Verhagen &lt;a href=&quot;http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199226702.do&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cognitive linguistic treatment of Intersubjectivity&lt;/a&gt; addresses many important issues related to the semantics and pragmatics of subjectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-25T21:51:00.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2014-10-26T00:56:26.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English does use diacritics in some loanwords. In American English they are often optional, but in British English they are more common and in formal writing would be considered obligatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most noteworthy Indo-European language aside from English that seldom uses diacritics is Dutch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Japanese: The dakuten and handakuten are diacritics. In fact, many European diacritics are also based on letters, with the diaresis/umlaut being based on a Fraktur 'e'. The origin of the symbol isn't really relevant in deciding on whether or not it's a diacritic, the role it has in the language now is the main factor. The Japanese diacritics also aren't directly descended from anything in Chinese, they emerged separately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basque uses the letter Ñ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh uses a lot of diacritics (diaresis/umlaut, acute, circumflex and grave), and given that they can appear on all vowels including y and w, they have a greater subset of characters than French or German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5405" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T00:56:26.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T01:19:43.233" Score="-1" ViewCount="1169" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are the true diphthongs of English distinguished from each other and other vowels with traditional distinctive features theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-26T13:41:08.683" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T13:41:08.683" Title="What features distinguish the true diphthongs of English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9297" CreationDate="2014-10-26T05:33:23.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tree might be correct if one assumes a GB (Government and Binding) theoretical framework from about 1990. The tree is adhering to the standard X-bar schema quite closely, consistently positing three projections for each head (minimal, bar-level, and maximal). But there are some aspects of the tree that are unusual or not clear. The analysis of the C-C'-CP heads is strange. C' should branch downards into C and IP, but it looks instead as though C' is appearing as a second specifier of IP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who is learning/drawing these sort of tree structures should be aware of a couple of things about them. The tree appears to be assuming that all branching is binary. This is a widespread assumption in the GB/MP tradition, but there are many frameworks of syntax and grammar that reject the strictly binary branching structures (e.g. HPSG, CxG, DGs). These frameworks assume that branching can also be n-ary at times. Furthermore, a strict adherence to the X-bar schema is no longer consistent with more recent work in the MP (Minimalist Program). The MP assumes bare phrase structure instead of the X-bar schema, which means that the strict adherence to the three levels of a head is no longer necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall comment is therefore that one should not take one particular type of tree-analysis for a given sentence too seriously. The analysis will vary significantly based upon the theory of syntax one assumes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T05:33:23.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9307" CreationDate="2014-10-26T10:36:24.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American English, the &quot;true&quot; diphthongs are considered to be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ay/, as in &lt;em&gt;I, by, buy, try, five, tie, lye, hi, high&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;jai alai&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/aw/, as in &lt;em&gt;ow, bough, how, brown, snout, out, trowel&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;sauerkraut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/oy/, as in &lt;em&gt;soil, toy, coin, Troy, ploy, oink,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hoi polloi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are complex vowel clusters, starting at a phonemic low vowel (/o, a/), and continuing with a gesture toward a high front vowel /i/, represented as a semivowel /y/, or towards a high back vowel /u/, represented as a semivowel /w/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;untrue&quot; diphthongs are the tense vowel phonemes /i, e, o, u/, which are predictably terminated by a gesture toward /i/ (for /e, i/) and toward /u/ (for /u, o/). These are not marked as diphthongs in Kenyon and Knott's transcription of American English phonemics, because they're predictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for distinctive features, the precise representation depends on which version of &quot;distinctive feature&quot; theory one wishes to use, and what its constraints and presuppositions are. Consult your phonology instructor for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5407" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T10:36:24.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T11:17:59.917" Score="0" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know only a few,like semantic level to approach its very meaning, &#xA;the morphology level to understand how single words are build, &#xA;syntax level to understand the inner structure of sentences. &#xA;I would like to understand the whole picture about those levels, which do exist and what is their unique approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T09:56:58.397" Title="How many levels to approach language exist in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T13:47:53.167" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a tokenizer/parser thing to parse &amp;amp; diagram a bunch of sentences gathered from ordinary language use.  Most of it parses just fine by following rules, but from time to time there are errors in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What strategies do linguistis use to deal with mistakes in the corpus? Do we kick out the mistakes or fix them, which feels like tampering with the data, or do we extend the rules to account for &quot;recoverable mistakes&quot; (the must be recoverable or else even I wouldn't be able to figure out what it means). Or is there some other strategy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-10-27T13:36:59.967" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T22:59:49.187" Title="How should grammatical errors be treated in parsing and tokenisation?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-26T14:28:12.287" Score="0" ViewCount="873" Body="&lt;p&gt;The levels are as far as i ve been told: &#xA;discours,syntax,morphology and phonology.&#xA;What is the unique approach towards language of each of them?&#xA;Are there further levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T22:44:16.560" Title="What are the different approaches of the levels of language analysis as introduced in structural linguistics?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T13:58:05.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9319" CreationDate="2014-10-26T21:24:09.907" Score="9" ViewCount="12311" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is that it aims to provide a set of letter-based values that represent and map to fundamental sounds present in human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question refers to the English language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any standardised sentences or short passages of text that when spoken will include all or most of the sounds of the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, these should be grammatically correct, 'easily readable' and use 'commonly known' words (I accept these are subjective terms). My aim is to create a set of recordings from multiple individuals to use for further study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5414" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T15:49:12.403" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T15:49:12.403" Title="Does sample text exist that includes most English sounds represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9314" CreationDate="2014-10-26T22:44:16.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most people would want to start with phonetics which is the functionally undifferentiated substrate of phonology (to generalize greatly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, on the other end, you'd also want to include things like the lexicon or semantics and pragmatics (which some people - myself included - would consider to be the same thing). There's also the paralinguistic level (gestures, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But much more importantly, the whole concept of levels is highly problematic in linguistics.  Language does not operate in those straightforward lines. So there are people studying 'morphonology' or the relationship of phonology and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem is one of disciplinarity. For example, there are people who would consider phonetics to be a 'science' distinct from linguistics. And while it is true that phonetics requires different skill sets, it's not immune from the interests of language as a whole.  In the same way, syntacticians have their own approaches and theories that are often quite difficult to grasp for the uninitiated linguists from other disciplines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very idea of linguistic levels of distinction can be a useful heuristic but there's also a very strong case for rejecting the notion as reflecting the fundamental nature of language. Look to cognitive / construction grammar and usage-based theories of language for a critique. However, even those people (like myself) who do not believe in 'levels' as the key organizing principle of language, will refer to them as shortcuts when talking about certain areas of description, so it's certainly worth learning more about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-10-26T22:44:16.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T11:21:01.870" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adverb is a part of speech, so there is a clear distinction between other part of speeches. But what about the inner structure of this category?&#xA;So far, i happened to know that one subset of adverbs is called distributive adverbs, i do not know the definition, but words like: few, some, all, none belong to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:48:19.950" Title="What are the subsets of adverbs?" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9317" CreationDate="2014-10-27T12:48:19.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge Dictionary site &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ru/%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0/%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F-%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0/adverbs-types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;classifies the adverbs&lt;/a&gt; into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time adverbs: now, today, still&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Place adverbs: nearby, upstairs, here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manner adverbs: quickly, badly, slowly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Degree adverbs: absolutely, enough, perfectly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Focusing adverbs: especially, just, mainly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evaluative adverbs (surprisingly) and viewpoint adverbs (personally)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linking adverbs: then, however, consequently&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T12:48:19.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9315" CreationDate="2014-10-27T13:32:13.067" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most widely used reading passage in research on English phonetics and phonology is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Wind_and_the_Sun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The North Wind and the Sun&lt;/a&gt;. It includes most English phonemes and is used, for example, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/~olsonk/ipa.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Illustrations of the IPA&lt;/a&gt; (translated where necessary, although it is then not guaranteed to include all phonemes of the language in question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Deterding &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=591448&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;argued&lt;/a&gt; that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://videoweb.nie.edu.sg/phonetic/courses/aae103-web/wolf.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolf passage&lt;/a&gt; is a better alternative to The North Wind and the Sun. It includes all English phonemes and is better in terms of the occurrence of phonemes in syllable onsets and codas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reading passage designed specifically to record learners of English is &quot;The Tiger and the Mouse&quot;. It was used in the compilation of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/leapcorpus/files/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learning Prosody Corpus&lt;/a&gt; (the corpus manual includes the text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T18:24:49.370" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T18:24:49.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9315" CreationDate="2014-10-27T14:08:16.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Phonemes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at a phoneme set for English (e.g. Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA for English&lt;/a&gt;), that lists the phonemes found in English, excluding dialectal variations. As such, you need a set of sentences that include at least one word listed in the given phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dialect being used is important, because that affects the distribution of phonemes. This includes splits, mergers and sound shifts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Wells has a reasonable analysis for vowels using Lexical Sets -- groups of words whose vowel share the same sound. Different lexical sets may share the same sound, in which case they are merged. For example, modern (non-conservative) English accents don't make a distinction between NORTH and FORCE. Also, American and British English use a different sound for the vowel in SQUARE and several other vowels; most of this is due to a rhotic vs non-rhotic distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you need to take this analysis into account if you want to properly account for different accents. You will also need to extend the lexical sets if you want to account for Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Liverpudlian accents that preserve various Middle and Early Modern English distinctions, having resisted various mergers such as MEAT-MEET=FLEECE (&lt;code&gt;/eː/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt;=&lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt;) and FIR-FUR-FERN=NURSE (&lt;code&gt;/ɪɾ/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/ʌɾ/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/ɛɾ/&lt;/code&gt;=&lt;code&gt;/ɜː/&lt;/code&gt;). An understanding of the historic splits and mergers is useful for understanding these accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, you need to account for other splits in progress, such as the BAD-LAD split found in Australian English and American and Canadian English accents with Canadian raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive description of various accents and the different splits and mergers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to be aware that different people transcribe different sounds differently depending on what information they choose to preserve. You need to be aware of this if you choose different sources for phonetic information. For example, Wikipedia is not consistent across different articles. Likewise, the CMU pronunciation dictionary is not consistent -- it mixes different American accents and in some places mixes up phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phones&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phoneme can have different realizations depending on the context and accent. For example, &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; is usually aspirated at the start of a word (&lt;code&gt;[pʰ]&lt;/code&gt;). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia page has information on possible phones for given consonant phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the phone realizations are the result of forward or backward assimilation, or other processes. For example &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; is typically realized as &lt;code&gt;[ɱ]&lt;/code&gt; before &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/v/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To account for these, you should be interested in diphone coverage. If you want to modify phonemes based on their environment to model processes like assimilation, you should be interested in triphone coverage. It can work with diphone coverage, but it makes the processing more complex. Both of these increase the amount of units involved (although not all combinations are present in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sample Texts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For diphone coverage, you can look at diphone synthesizers. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://festvox.org/cmu_arctic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMU arctic databases&lt;/a&gt; use 1150 utterances (1132 sentences) from several Project Gutenberg texts. These voices (including the Canadian, Scottish and Indian voices) have the phonemes transcribed in Arpabet, which is a US English phoneme set. Thus, the information in these voices don't preserve accent features (that is, the Scottish accent is Americanized, losing at least the FIR-FUR-FERN (&lt;code&gt;/ɪɾ/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/ʌɾ/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/ɛɾ/&lt;/code&gt;), LOCK-LOCH (&lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt;) and WINE-WHINE (&lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt;-&lt;code&gt;/ʍ/&lt;/code&gt;) distinctions). I don't know how good the coverage is for non-General American accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dialectsarchive.com/the-rainbow-passage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rainbow Passage&lt;/a&gt; is used by the International Dialects of English Archive, so should have good phoneme coverage across accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speech Accent Archive&lt;/a&gt; uses an elicitation paragraph for comparing its accents. This paragraph (&quot;Please Call Stella&quot;) is found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/about.php#1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;footnote 1&lt;/a&gt; on the about page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another elicitation paragraph I have found was &lt;a href=&quot;http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/the-tiger-and-the-girl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tiger and the Girl&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can search google for other elicitation paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="185" LastEditDate="2014-10-27T14:31:51.077" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T14:31:51.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-27T14:46:03.867" Score="1" ViewCount="2584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if my examples are technically really considered nested sentences, but i try anyway, if i got it right a nested sentence is one or more separated sentences fused into one: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David hates lizards. Lizards hates David. &#xA;fuses into: David hates the lizards, who hates David.&#xA;          David hates David hating lizards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David hates lizards. David hates the queen. &#xA;fuses into: Queen hating David hates lizards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David hates lizards. Lizards hates blondes. Blondes hate David.&#xA;might fuse into: David hates David hating blondes hating lizards.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does your linuistics say about nested sentences in general, are the rules to make them universal ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T19:03:25.533" Title="What kinds of nested sentences exist in languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9313" CreationDate="2014-10-27T16:29:26.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science must be reproducible, and closely connected to experimental data&lt;/em&gt;. This has consequences on scientific&#xA;practice, and in particular on the how experimental resources and&#xA;copora should be dealt with, which can be translated in what I would&#xA;consider rules of scientific ethics (which are not confined to&#xA;linguistics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A corpus of data should be precisely sourced and documented with all&#xA;relevant information regarding the context and means of its&#xA;creation. It should, as much as technically feasible include the initial&#xA;raw data.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A corpus should not be tampered with for any reason, by anyone&#xA;including particularly its creator.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, it is naturally permissible to &quot;correct&quot;, reprocess,&#xA;annote, document or otherwise modify a corpus as long as all&#xA;modifications are reproducibles by anyone, thus based on processors&#xA;or separate data files that can be reapplied to the original files&#xA;to get the modified version of corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, any phenomenon observed when processing a corpus should be traceable by anyone,&#xA;for example to determine whether it comes from the original data or&#xA;from whatever modification was applied to the corpus. This includes&#xA;correcting what may seem obvious errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As long as you are transparent regarding these rules, you are free to&#xA;do as you choose&lt;/em&gt;, preferably justifying your choices on the basis  of&#xA;your intent or technical means. Others may disagree with you, but they can then do so on an objective basis, and possibly do competing work on that same basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the issue of defining: &lt;strong&gt;what is an error?&lt;/strong&gt; I do expect&#xA;they can be categorized to some extent, though an alleged mistake&#xA;could possibly belong to several categories.  What you want to do may&#xA;depend on these categories and unless you identifies a clear misconception in the rules you have been using, I would not suggest you modify them to account for what you consider errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Errors are inherent to any form of information exchange and linguistic&#xA;information is no exception. Whenever possible, systematic (mechanized) error handling,&#xA;should thus be a normal component of any natural language processing&#xA;system. It has its own importance from a technological or scientific&#xA;point of view, even if it may have intrinsic limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To consider a specific example, I was involved in a project that did&#xA;morphology based part-of-speech recognition to create lexicons. The&#xA;system worked pretty well on most words. But there was a statistical&#xA;dimension that caused chance errors to occur. Cases that were&#xA;considered uncertain were reviewed by hand. But whatever modifications&#xA;were made (by hand) to the raw output of the system were collected on&#xA;a file, so that they were traceable, and could also be replayed or&#xA;compared with the output of later version of the system. The idea is also that one should not correct twice the same error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My philosophy is that anything done by hand should be minimized,&#xA;traceable, and replayable in other contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="2129" LastEditDate="2014-10-27T22:59:49.187" LastActivityDate="2014-10-27T22:59:49.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9270" CreationDate="2014-10-28T01:39:47.590" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot 'change' a word from one part of speech to another. The words already exist or they don't. (You can form a new noun from a verb, but you are not 'changing' it to a noun.) A noun is a noun and cannot be a verb. Some words exist as several parts of speech ('set', 'run', 'form', 'hold', etc.), though usually with somewhat different meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the shifts in meaning of 'house' in 'house wine', 'the part of the car that houses the engine', and 'this is my house'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have separate spellings for noun, adjective, and verb forms ('beauty', 'beautiful', 'beautify'). As I said above, you can use some words as nouns or verbs, but you are not 'changing' them to do so. You do not have the authority to do this if it has not already occurred long ago. 'Car' for instance is a noun, not a verb, and cannot be used as one. 'To sign' the verb and 'sign' the noun are different words, just like 'beauty', 'beautiful', 'beautify'; one is not 'changed' into the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5422" LastEditorUserId="5422" LastEditDate="2014-11-01T02:21:16.873" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T02:21:16.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2136" CreationDate="2014-10-28T04:06:37.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting juxtaposition in the well-known romanza &lt;em&gt;Musica Proibita&lt;/em&gt; -- within a&#xA;few lines we have &quot;perche me l'ha proibita&quot; [a choice perhaps influenced by the adjectival&#xA;use in the title] and &quot;la frase che m'ha fatto palpitar&quot; [this locution may have some affinity with the exceptional usages with &lt;em&gt;faire&lt;/em&gt; in French, mentioned in a preceding post].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case [i.e., regardless of my bracketed comments above], both of these phrases do conform to the usages that others have already set forth here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5423" LastEditorUserId="5423" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T04:12:06.203" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T04:12:06.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-28T10:54:44.897" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to work out the lexical density of a spoken text. My problem is with contractions that include a primary auxiliary verb as a main lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. She's intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand 'she' would count as a function word. The 'is' would count as a lexical word. Although it's a primary auxiliary verb in the sentence, it is acting as the main lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Intelligent' would also be a lexical word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how would I calculate the lexical density? Are there 2 lexical words and 1 function word? - 3 tokens in total = 0.66. Or are there 1.5 lexical words and .5 function words? - 2 tokens in total = 0.75&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5424" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T13:37:49.373" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T13:37:49.373" Title="Lexical density" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-28T13:55:13.130" Score="4" ViewCount="712" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if a language exists without the ability to express the notions of 'I', 'We', 'they' etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to communicate without these concepts being expressible as a referential function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5425" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T17:41:41.367" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T17:41:41.367" Title="Is there a language without words which correspond to the concepts 'I', 'They', 'We'" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-28T13:59:46.550" Score="1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be frank, I am very unsure about this, but having two sets and not knowing how they relate, there are four possibilities so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns and pronouns are own sets without any connection between them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns and pronouns share a common part with each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns are a subset of pronouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronouns are a subset of nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is actually their relation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5309" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-29T13:15:38.313" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T13:15:38.313" Title="Is pronoun a subset of nouns when referring to parts of speech?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9328" CreationDate="2014-10-28T15:46:20.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages the pronouns for the 3rd person singular and plural are, at least etymologically, demonstrative pronouns. Most languages have personal pronouns in the 1st and 2nd person singular and plural, but in some languages (especially in South-East Asia) these are not used in polite discourse, but are replaced by kinship terms or other substitutes. For example, in Vietnamese, if I am speaking to an older man, I will not say “Can I help you?”, but the equivalent of “Can nephew help uncle?”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T15:46:20.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9335" CreationDate="2014-10-28T18:06:27.707" Score="3" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a scan of a genealogical document (ca. 1895) from a Catholic church in Brodowe Łąki, Poland. I believe that the document pertains to the baptism of my great-grandmother, but I can't quite be sure until I know what it says. I showed the image to some Polish relatives, and they couldn't recognize any of the writing besides the names (my great-grandmother's name was Zofia Miecznikowska, but we have reason to believe she might have been baptised by the name Anna). We think the text might actually be written in Latin, but the handwriting is quite ornamental and difficult to read. Would anybody be able to decipher what this says, or even what language it's written in? The relevant paragraph is the one on the top right (the record numbered 41). (To see the image at full size, right-click and click &quot;View Image.&quot;)&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3ToNr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;baptismal record of Anna Miecznikowska&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5428" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T21:07:47.390" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T21:07:47.390" Title="Please help me identify this language (w/ image)" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9334" CreationDate="2014-10-28T18:12:32.863" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Russian, the pre-1918 orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that in the village of Brodowe Łąki on the 11th (23rd) of June 1895 came Walenty Miecznikowski, aged 45, a worker from Blenda, and in the presence of witnesses Franciszek Fonk, aged 40, and Jakob Fonk, aged 35, both land-tillers from Blenda, he presented a female baby, having said it was born the day before at 7 p.m. from his legal wife Franciszka, born Kierzynowska. During the holy baptism conducted that day the baby was given the name Anna, the god-parents being Jozef and Marijanna Borsy. This Act was signed by the Administrator of the Brodowe Łąki Parish and read to them. Signature: priest Michail Sawicki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-10-28T18:51:17.590" LastActivityDate="2014-10-28T18:51:17.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9329" CreationDate="2014-10-29T13:07:55.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will depend on both the language you are analysing and your analytical framework, but in most cases both nouns and pronouns could be categorised as a subcategory of the &lt;strong&gt;nominals&lt;/strong&gt;. Other subcategories of the nominals include (in some languages) proper names, participles, adjectives, and co-referencing affixes/clitics. The nominals could also be called substantives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns and verbs are the two arch-categories of the open word classes. If a word can take morphology such as case, gender or number, then it will usually be analysed as a nominal. The different nominal subcategories will have different restrictions on which morphology they can take. Or if there is no difference, then it can be argued that what would be two word classes in one language are actually one word class in another. The adjectives are the classic example of a word class that can be either a pure nominal, a pure verb, a pure independent category, or something in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T13:07:55.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T14:29:06.307" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that grammaticalization is a fancy way of saying that words that contain a lexical meaning can change over time into words that gradually lose their lexical function, but then gain a grammatical function. Someone on this site presented this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;originally a word holding just lexical meaning, that could be&#xA;conjugated like today's &lt;em&gt;wollen&lt;/em&gt; in german. &lt;em&gt;Ich will, Ich wollte, Du willst,  Wir&#xA;wollen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the precursor of today's &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; lost its ability to be conjugated and their lexical meaning to become an indicator for the future. &lt;em&gt;I will come, We will come&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will became even shorter, that exemplifies a further loss of its original lexical function: &lt;em&gt;I'll come, we'll come&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;theoretically the last stage will could reach is when it became an affix:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I comel, we comel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the information was easy to require, but what about the forces that enhance the transitions from one to a further stage? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are considered those forces of circumstances to enhance this process within the linguistic community dealing with this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:18:20.907" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T13:41:25.460" Title="What are considered to be driving forces behind grammaticalization?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T16:51:58.353" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Birds, flowers, children belong to the part of speech of nouns,&#xA;to fish, to pick, to play to verbs,&#xA;swift, smelly, nice to adjectives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those are the easy ones, what about clitics and affixes and such alike, do they belong to a category within the same linguistic realm or sth. different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the connection between part of speeches and affixes/clitics that makes sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T14:36:06.300" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T14:36:06.300" Title="Do affixes and clitics belong to an own part of speech, part of sentence or another category ?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T17:08:21.323" Score="-1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asked to get an understanding for what discourse analysis is. As for now, this terms has no meaning to me at all, I've tried to read about the concept in different off-and online encyclopedias, but I only stumbled across further key terms i had to knew in advance, once I've looked for the new key term, further key terms emerged, so my conclusion is, that to understand the concept of discourse analysis i have to understand many key terms in advance which are connected in a tree-like structure with unknown depth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you provide in this thread key terms and key ideas that are indispensable on the road to discourse analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-05T23:13:21.503" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T23:13:21.503" Title="What linguistic key terms are necessary to be understood in order to understand the idea behind discourse analysis?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-11-05T01:20:04.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-29T19:32:05.357" Score="-1" ViewCount="6452" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Daenerys should probably keep that green dragon-egg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the syntactic category of &quot;probably&quot; here? Is it an adverb? If so, what substitution test should I use to verify that it is an adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T09:37:22.810" Title="What part of speech is &quot;probably&quot;, and how can it be substituted?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9342" CreationDate="2014-10-29T19:44:09.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an adverb, since it is used between the parts of the compound verbal predicate; since there is the adjective 'probable', and an adjective + the '-ly' suffix produces an adverb; and since it modifies the whole sentence and that is one of the functions of adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english-thesaurus/probably&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;synonyms are&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in all likelihood, in all probability, as likely as not, very likely, most likely, likely, as like as not, ten to one, doubtless, no doubt, all things considered, taking all things into consideration, all things being equal, possibly, perhaps, maybe, it may be, presumably, on the face of it, apparently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T19:44:09.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9340" CreationDate="2014-10-29T21:19:47.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no necessary correlation between clitics or affixes and parts of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English &lt;em&gt;'ll&lt;/em&gt; is a verb (contraction of &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;em&gt;n't&lt;/em&gt; is a negator (contraction of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, traditionally treated in the catch-all POS of 'adverb', but it doesn't behave like any other adverb); &lt;em&gt;-me&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-'em&lt;/em&gt; are pronouns (as in &lt;em&gt;gimme&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;got'em&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; are pronoun clitics, &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; is (part of) a negator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-10-29T21:19:47.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9347" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:37:56.770" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T05:37:56.770" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T05:37:56.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9348" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:37:56.770" Score="0" Body="The Germanic language spoken natively in Sweden." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:12:06.027" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:12:06.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9349" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:38:56.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T05:38:56.620" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T05:38:56.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9350" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:38:56.620" Score="0" Body="The large variety of languages spoken in Africa." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:12:15.803" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:12:15.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9351" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:46:58.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T05:46:58.400" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T05:46:58.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9352" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:46:58.400" Score="0" Body="Abbreviations formed by using the initial letters/components in a phrase or word. E.g., NATO (from North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), Benelux (from Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) etc." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:12:42.957" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:12:42.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9353" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:48:01.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T05:48:01.930" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T05:48:01.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9354" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:48:01.930" Score="0" Body="An optional part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, if removed, will not otherwise affect the remainder of the sentence." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T09:12:32.270" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T09:12:32.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9355" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:48:36.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T05:48:36.760" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T05:48:36.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9356" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-10-30T05:48:36.760" Score="0" Body="A class of words that modify the meaning of a verb, adjective, another adverb, clause, or sentence. Examples in English are &quot;quickly&quot;, &quot;often&quot; or &quot;today&quot;. Not to be confused with adverbials (sometimes also called &quot;modifiers&quot;), which may consist of a group of words and not necessarily of adverbs." OwnerUserId="783" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:26:41.390" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:26:41.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9339" CreationDate="2014-10-30T12:02:16.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the underlying mechanisms of grammaticalization &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization#Mechanisms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;are well summarized here&lt;/a&gt;, namely (semantic) bleaching, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-categorialization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;de-categorialization&lt;/a&gt;, phonetic erosion, and obligatorification. These mechanisms are gradually incurred by frequency of use, and lead to the conventionalization of a specific (mostly) grammatical usage of expressions. If one is interested in grammaticalization, having a look at the work of Hopper, Traugott, Heine, Kuteva etc. and at the Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (Narrog &amp;amp; Heine eds.) would make for a good start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T13:41:25.460" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T13:41:25.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9376" CreationDate="2014-10-30T12:21:38.940" Score="2" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Stack Exchange, so if this question fits better on another board, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for Windows-compatible software that will create a concordance from .pdf and .txt files. Ideally it would work with languages that have diacritical marks (Spanish, French) in addition to English. Is anyone aware of a program that can do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched online already and have so far only been able to find old software whose sites no longer work very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T14:26:48.160" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T18:41:18.863" Title="Windows software to create concordances from .pdf and .txt files?" Tags="&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T12:33:53.627" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In biology, there is a simple two stages distinction of the emergence of life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abiogenesis&lt;/strong&gt;, the emergence of a (very simple) life form from non-living matter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evolution&lt;/strong&gt;, the further emergence of features by random variations and selective pressure. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there proposed stages in linguistics (historical linguistics?) to subdivide the timeline according to particular key-events ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;layman-assumption&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so , how deep might the division complexity be?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would the division be very regular or perpaps far more subdivided at the beginning of the timeline?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What might be the problems in in seperating the timeline in emergences bound to linguistics and those not a linguistic part anymore?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="5434" LastEditDate="2014-10-30T16:49:24.820" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T16:49:24.820" Title="What stages of emergence of linguistic features are proposed among the world of scholars?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-30T13:09:37.827" Score="0" ViewCount="693" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently there is some relevant book which claims, more or less:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case marking particles and adpositions are not identical, one is a morphological, one a syntactic unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This claim was heard third hand via a student of Japanese. Does this claim have merit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T23:20:33.597" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T00:04:49.307" Title="What is the difference between case marking particles and adpositions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9341" CreationDate="2014-10-30T14:16:28.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For lists of the linguistic terms with their short explanation see these links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~sam/teach/IntroGenLing/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;General linguistics terms&lt;/a&gt; - terms are grouped according to the field of linguistics, downloadable variant available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/LinguisticGlossary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Small glossary of linguistics&lt;/a&gt; -  terms are grouped according to the field of linguistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/cjpountain/linggloss.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glossary of linguistic terms&lt;/a&gt; -  terms are listed alphabetically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/388/2689&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on our Linguistics Meta SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T14:16:28.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9365" CreationDate="2014-10-30T15:04:08.707" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of international languages, i've seen multiple instances of languages that are mutually intelligible but are considered different languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serbian and Croatian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Luxembourgish and High German dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Galician and Portuguese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is about the formal definition of language and dialect in lingüistics, and the difference between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5441" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T15:28:25.980" Title="What's the difference between separated languages and a separated dialects?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-11-05T11:39:31.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9364" CreationDate="2014-10-30T15:28:25.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In cases of mutual intelligibility, it is the political entities that are responsible for the separation. Sometimes it is a matter of ethnic groups sharing a language or speaking two dialects of it (e.g. Serbian and Croatian, Bulgarian and Slavic Macedonian). In other cases the political entities do not matter, therefore the same language (by name) is spoken in different countries e.g. (Greek in Greece and Cyprus, Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics you treat languages or dialects practically for what they are. However, that is not an easy task either. Two languages with 88% common vocabulary might be more intelligible because of shared phonology, than two dialects that share 93% of the vocabulary. So, what is a language and what is a dialect in that case? An example can be seen within Swedish, where certain west-Swedish dialects might share more with eastern- Norwegian dialects, than the south-most Swedish dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-10-30T15:28:25.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9368" CreationDate="2014-10-30T19:12:05.467" Score="7" ViewCount="1261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the yoga context, it is common for gurus to give multiple origins of a specific word in order to 'dig' a deep meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let us take the word मन्त्र.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a first explanation from Wikipedia: The Sanskrit word mantra-&#xA;(m.; also n. mantram) consists of the root man- &amp;quot;to think&amp;quot; (also in&#xA;manas &amp;quot;mind&amp;quot;) and the suffix -tra, designating tools or instruments,&#xA;hence a literal translation would be &amp;quot;instrument of thought&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an alternate explanation at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.visiblemantra.org/etymology-of-mantra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditional Etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One folk etymology of mantra is it is that which saves (trā- &amp;quot;to save,&#xA;rescue&amp;quot;) the one &amp;quot;who, in thought, formulates it and meditates upon&#xA;it&amp;quot; (man-). [Gonda : 248]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is NOT about this specific word but rather whether it's possible, in linguistics, for a word to have multiple origins each being valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to think only one must be right or, at least, one has to be better and more accurate than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3660" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T20:54:31.330" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T23:35:36.847" Title="Can words have multiple, different origins" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2014-10-31T01:03:08.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is a language with a great morphological variety, and one of the (declared or undeclared) aims of the linguists of &quot;ancient times&quot; from Pāṇini onwards was to safeguard or even further enrichen this variety. Although a postulate of the native Sanskrit grammarians was to derive in an unambiguous way each and every word from a verbal root, there are a great many instances where simply from a morphological point of view (disregarding for a second the semantic part) two or more different etymologies of one word are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as to the specific content of your question, first of all, the word you most likely refer to is &lt;em&gt;mantra&lt;/em&gt; (only short vowels), the standard etymology if which is as you stated the verbal root &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; + the suffix &lt;em&gt;-tra&lt;/em&gt; which in general designates the tool of the action of the verbal root (like &lt;em&gt;netra&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;tool of leading&quot; or &quot;eye&quot;) but also the place, where it happens (like in &lt;em&gt;kṣetra&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;field&quot; or &quot;place of reign&quot;) and other minor connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for the word in question the first of the possibilities seems more justified, by virtue of numerous other examples of the same kind of derivation. As Gonda in your quote points out, the other one is more of a folk etymology, probably leaning on the word &lt;em&gt;gotra&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;shelter for cows&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;-trā&lt;/em&gt; is a verbal root with the meaning the OP indicated. But while &lt;em&gt;gotra&lt;/em&gt; is a noun compound, &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; is not a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, AFAIK the verbal root + &lt;em&gt;-tra&lt;/em&gt; type of nouns is generally neuter, while &lt;em&gt;mantra&lt;/em&gt; is generally masculine. This may indicate, that even the more probable of the two etymologies is not wholesale correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T01:03:08.993" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-31T03:25:24.447" Score="9" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The linguistic center of gravity principle states that a language&#xA;  family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest&#xA;  diversity.&quot;&#xA;  (Wikipedia  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_theory&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you direct me to further discussion of this theory online?&#xA;I haven't been able to find very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5442" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T03:44:48.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T22:14:46.570" Title="Where can I learn more about the 'linguistic center of gravity' theory?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-31T11:17:01.433" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Friesland is a region in northern Netherlands where the Frisian language is spoken. As part of the Netherlands, Dutch is also spoken. So for natives of Frisian language there should be an educative option so they can master the rules of their language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How's this achieved? Do the public schools enforce some kind of time proportion of language use or compulsory languages for courses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5441" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T13:40:09.927" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T13:40:09.927" Title="Language policies in education for Friesland" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-31T11:24:45.313" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Switzerland there are 4 official languages, Italian, French, German and Romensch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are the education laws on the places where each one of these languages is spoken? Do the public schools enforce some kind of time proportion of language use or compulsory languages for courses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5441" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T11:24:45.313" Title="Language policies in education for Switzerland" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-10-31T16:11:50.463" Score="3" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look up a Chinese character and its meaning in classical Chinese, there is a good chance you get a long list with many different semantically unrelated meanings. Take 而 for instance, that bears the meanings: 1. and, 2. but, 3. than and a few further functional meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the statistical evaluation of the polysemy of the Chinese words of that time, &#xA;how did the statistics change over time, did the polysemy increase, decrease, stay more or less the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T23:30:35.383" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T23:30:35.383" Title="How polysemic on average were Chinese words around the time of the creation of Chinese characters?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9359" CreationDate="2014-10-31T18:31:57.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The probably most widely used concordance software is Laurence Anthony's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/antconc_index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AntConc&lt;/a&gt;. It has a range of functions beyond producing concordances, such as determining word counts and collocations. It can also handle regular expressions. AntConc is free and runs on a number of different platforms. I regularly recommend it to students, use it in teaching, and know many colleagues who do. This may be subjective, but I think AntConc is (together with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordSmith&lt;/a&gt;, which is not free) widely accepted as a standard tool in corpus linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AntConc cannot handle pdf files. You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AntFileConverter&lt;/a&gt; (scroll down on the website) to convert your files from pdf to txt. Note that how well this works may vary depending on the pdf files - there might be issues with special characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-10-31T18:41:18.863" LastActivityDate="2014-10-31T18:41:18.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9378" CreationDate="2014-10-31T23:14:51.023" Score="1" ViewCount="11207" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of morphology is that a word is taken and many different words are glued to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is not this true for both agglutinative and polysynthetic languages? Or what is the finer level of distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-01T23:46:32.120" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T02:10:11.207" Title="What is the distinction between agglutinative languages and polysynthetic ones?" Tags="&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;polysynthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2014-10-31T23:46:21.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;A word is taken and many different words are glued to it&quot; — that's wrong for both agglutinative and polysynthetic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In agglutinative languages, a string of affixes is &quot;glued&quot; to a root, each affix with its own grammatical meaning, an affix doesn't combine several grammatical meanings, like in Latin 'pueris' (from boys) the affix '-is' means plural + ablative case at the same time. An example of a word of an agglutinative language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Turkish &lt;em&gt;evlerimden&lt;/em&gt;: ev-ler-im-den &quot;from my houses&quot; - HOUSE-plural-my-ablative.case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In polysynthetic languages there are also many morphemes in a word, so that noun, verb and adverb morphemes can combine in one word in such a way that a whole English sentence is needed to translate such a word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yupik &lt;em&gt;tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq&lt;/em&gt;:  tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq &quot;He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer.&quot; REINDEER-HUNT-future-SAY-negation-AGAIN-third.person.singular.indicative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polysynthetic languages are often agglutinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="9587" LastEditDate="2015-05-11T20:01:52.353" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T20:01:52.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2014-11-01T02:20:32.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, German has even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; ways to express progressive aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich bin am Gehen (am-Progressiv, it becomes more and more accepted)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ich bin beim Gehen (competitor to am-Progressiv)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ich bin im Gehen (very limited as it cannot be used for every verb and context. &quot;im Gehen&quot; means that you're about to go (ie. when someone calls you as you are about to leave))&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ich bin dabei zu gehen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ich gehe gerade&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The am-Progressiv is regarded to be highly grammaticalized with the least restrictions while dabei/gerade work more on a lexical level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that German is in general far more lenient on which tense, aspect etc. you have to use. Therefore, progressive aspect is not as obvious in German as it is in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5446" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T02:20:32.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-01T05:03:57.200" Score="-2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether they call &quot;winter&quot; the December, January and February or the opposite, the June, July and August? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T05:47:39.267" Title="How do people of Southern hemisphere refer to seasons?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-11-17T14:29:02.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9381" CreationDate="2014-11-01T05:42:29.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Southern hemisphere moderate climate zone the colder season is also called 'winter', but the winter months are June, July and August, since all the countries that use the Gregorian calendar have the same month at a given time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-11-01T05:47:39.267" LastActivityDate="2014-11-01T05:47:39.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2014-11-01T06:21:07.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutination is a form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inflection&lt;/a&gt;. So is fusion (aka amalgamation).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The major difference is that agglutinative paradigms are one-dimensional,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;while fusional paradigms are multi-dimensional. Consequently one fusional inflection can refer to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;many categories (e.g, Latin &lt;em&gt;-tis&lt;/em&gt; '2nd person plural subject of verb in present tense, active voice, indicative mood), whereas one agglutinative inflection refers to one category (e.g, Turkish  '-im_ '1st person subject' and  &lt;em&gt;-iz&lt;/em&gt; 'plural subject' -- &lt;em&gt;-imiz&lt;/em&gt; together means '1st person plural subject').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages with a lot of inflections are called &lt;strong&gt;Synthetic&lt;/strong&gt; languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Their inflection may be either agglutinative or fusional.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Turkish.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Turkish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is an example of an agglutinative synthetic language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/wow/scans/Wow-7.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is an example of a fusional synthetic language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages that have so much inflection that there is no simple way&lt;br&gt;&#xA;to distinguish an inflected word from a clause are called &lt;strong&gt;Polysynthetic&lt;/strong&gt; languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Lushootseed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is an example of a polysynthetic language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inflection in a polysynthetic language may be agglutinative or fusional or compound-root.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Generally there's some of each, but there are an awful lot of complex paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5407" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T02:10:11.207" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T02:10:11.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2014-11-02T00:12:52.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are instances where a word has been altered by folk-etymology, or by analogy with another word. For example, the English word &lt;em&gt;admiral&lt;/em&gt; is ultimately a borrowing from Arabic &lt;em&gt;amir al-bahr&lt;/em&gt;, but the 'd' is thought to have appeared by confusion with &lt;em&gt;admirable&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that particular case one could say that the word has two sources. But such examples are the exception, not the rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T00:12:52.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-02T04:45:26.860" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying the &lt;a href=&quot;http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/toulmin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Toulmin model of argumentation&lt;/a&gt; to use it in the analysis of Presidential debates. I have tried to read many sources, but I couldn't really find an exact answer about which part should come first in using this theory: a claim or data (evidence). It says that the Toulmin model is based on the development of syllogism. His theory is based on deductive reasoning, which goes from general to the specific. This means it starts from a claim first. However, there are some studies that still use this theory even though its argument starts with data first.  I appreciate any answer :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5448" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-11-02T10:12:34.343" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T10:12:34.343" Title="Toulmin model of argumentation" Tags="&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2014-11-02T12:58:04.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is correct that English “admiral” – and the cognate words in other European languages – is a “contamination” (as we say in historical linguistics) of Latin admiratus “admired”, and amiralis (=Arabic ʼamīr + Latin suffix -alis). In this sense it does in fact have two etymologies merging in the same word. However, ʼamīr al-baḥr “prince of the sea” is modern Arabic, not classical Arabic. Thus the derivation of “admiral” from ʼamīr al-baḥr is a (modern) folk etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. There is a very detailed entry on &quot;admiral&quot; in the OED, if you have access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T12:58:04.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-02T17:19:11.120" Score="0" ViewCount="686" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know, that there is a relation between part of sentence and part of speech, namely elements from parts of speech can be combined following certain rules in order to be used as a part of sentence within a sentence. A word is a member of a part of speech alone for being this word, but a combination of parts of speech can be used as different parts of sentence according to the role they play within the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is there a set of parts of sentence that is the same set for every language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-11-02T17:24:27.957" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T21:01:50.853" Title="Do all languages share the same set of parts of sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T08:26:03.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9389" CreationDate="2014-11-02T17:44:47.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. Some languages, namely the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ergative languages&lt;/a&gt;, don't have such parts of sentence as &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; which are typical for most European languages. Instead, they have &lt;em&gt;agent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt; which don't directly correspond to subject and object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the two English sentences &quot;The man has arrived.&quot; and &quot;The man saw the boy.&quot; the subject is &quot;the man&quot;. If you translate these sentences into Basque, you'll get &quot;Gizona etorri da.&quot; and &quot;Gizonak mutila ikusi du.&quot; The first word, &quot;gizon&quot; (man) is marked with different cases in the two Basque sentences, in the firs one it is patient, in the second one it is agent, and the word &quot;mutil&quot; (boy) is the patient in the second sentence, it is marked with the absolute case ending -a, just the same way as the word &quot;gizon&quot; (man) in the first sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T17:44:47.790" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2014-11-02T18:35:20.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a fun example from 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese' by Axel Schuessler. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sè 色, Old Chinese *srək&#xA;English: color / look / appearance / sex &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology 1: Sino-Tibetan: Lushai saar 'prismatic colors', 'healthy looking, rosy, ruddy'. The Lushai and Chinese words both refer also specifically to the healthy attractive&#xA;color of the face. The OC word derives therefore from an earlier *sər-k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology 2: The twist towards 'good looks / charms of women' &gt; 'sex' may be due to an Austro-Asiatic substrate, note Khmer /sreek/ 'thirst or lust after' &amp;lt; /reek/ 'enjoy oneself'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Schuessler is correct, which I am in no position to judge, then an existing word gained additional meanings under the influence of a similar sounding word in a substrate language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5404" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T18:35:20.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9367" CreationDate="2014-11-02T19:19:02.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;maybe the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there are two unrelated languages, &#xA;two words in both languages happen to have a similar pronounciation and similar meaning. &#xA;now,  those two words merge into one, while doing so, the fused new word shares a part of the semantic meanings of the one and other language. Since their meanings overlapped already by accident before it got fused, it is not possible afterwards to reconstruct its two origins. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T19:19:02.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2014-11-02T20:24:17.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be of interest: Early Contect between Celtic and English (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-due.de/IERC/early_contact.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.uni-due.de/IERC/early_contact.htm&lt;/a&gt;(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The concern of the present section is with the development of the progressive form in English. There are basically three views on this (Filppula 2002b): (i) it was an independent development in English (Curme 1912, Nickel 1966, Visser 1963-73, Mitchell 1985), (ii) it arose under the influence of Latin, perhaps via French (Mossé 1938), and (iii) it results from contact with Celtic (Keller 1925, Dal 1952, Preußler 1956, Wagner 1959, Braaten 1967, Ó Corráin 1997). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;As has been pointed out by many authors previously (see Mittendorf and Poppe 2000: 119) a type of progressive structure in which a gerund was governed by a preposition existed in Old English: ic wæs on huntunge ‘I was hunting’ (Braaten 1967: 173). This type of structure is also found in vernacular German, with an infinitive, as in Ich bin am Schreiben [I am at write-INFINITIVE] ‘I am writing’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In this context a further consideration is necessary which Mittendorf and Poppe deal with in their examination of the progressive (2000: 120-2). This is the typological perspective. As noted by other scholars such as Comrie (1976: 98) and Bybee and Dahl (1989: 77) progressive aspect is frequently expressed — in many unrelated languages (Mittendorf and Poppe, loc. cit.) — by means of a locative structure meaning to be ‘at’ and ‘in’ an activity. Furthermore, the step from structures like ic wæs on huntunge to I was hunting is small, involving only the deletion of the preposition. The fully developed progressive form appears in Middle English, but the apparent time delay between the contact with Celtic in the Old English period and the surfacing of the progressive later can be accounted for by the strong tradition of the written standard in Old English and should not be given as an argument against Celtic influence as some authors are inclined to do, see Nickel (1966: 300), for instance, and Dal (1952: 113) who rightly explains the time gap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The progressive is found in all Celtic languages and is clearly represented by the Irish structure ag + verbal noun as in Tá mé ag caint léi, lit. ‘is me at talking with-her’. This in itself is a good example of a locative expression for the progressive aspect and is typologically parallel to the Old English ic wæs on huntunge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In summary one can say here that in both Old English and Celtic one had a progressive aspect, realised by means of a locative expression and with a similar functional range (Mittendorf and Poppe 2000: 139). Both languages maintained this aspect and English lost the locative preposition and increased the syntactic flexibility and range of the structure, perhaps under the supportive influence of contact with Celtic.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-02T20:24:17.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T11:32:44.130" Score="5" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, class 10 contains only a handful of verbs ending in either &lt;em&gt;-олоть&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ороть&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, looking at the list in Wiktionary, class 6 contains only one verbs in &lt;em&gt;-рать&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;орать&lt;/em&gt;) and none in &lt;em&gt;-лать&lt;/em&gt;, except some ending in &lt;em&gt;-брать&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-драть&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-срать&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that these two classes both belonged to class III in Proto-Slavic (&lt;em&gt;consonant + j + thematic vowel&lt;/em&gt;), and the difference arose only in that in class 10 the preceding consonant is a liquid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5258" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T01:14:05.663" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T11:33:31.457" Title="Origin of Russian class 6 and class 10 verbs" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T11:34:41.493" Score="13" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a theory about tonogenesis for the Chinese language, thus Chinese had once a more complex syllable-structure and no tones. In the course of time, the syllable structure became less complex and tones emerged to compensate this loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about the other way, the loss of tones. For instance, I read a short notion about old Greek being a language that features pitch accent, if am right pitch accent is the alteration of the frequency, is this similar to tone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T03:05:04.430" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T03:05:04.430" Title="Are there documented languages that evolved from tonal to nontonal?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;&lt;typological-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9398" CreationDate="2014-11-03T12:24:38.090" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally assumed that proto-Indo-European had a pitch accent, which survives in the notation of Classical Greek and of Vedic, but which has disappeared in Modern Greek as well as in Classical Sanskrit and the Middle and New Indo-Aryan languages. The IE pitch accent survives at least partially in Lithuanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T12:24:38.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9398" CreationDate="2014-11-03T14:26:55.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Older stages of Japanese held much richer inventories of tonal contrast than the modern &quot;standard&quot; Tokyo dialect, which is rather restricted in its lexical tonal contrasts. And some other modern dialects have lost lexical tonal contrasts altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent&lt;/a&gt; provides a map that shows areas where such non-tonal dialects are spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T14:26:55.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9397" CreationDate="2014-11-03T15:24:53.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are correct. This is the way how &lt;code&gt;ъ&lt;/code&gt; vowel morphed in Modern Russian comparing to Proto-Slavic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; P.Sl | Modern Ru | Example&#xA; ъла  |  оло      | г(ъ)лас-голос, х(ъ)ладъ-холод&#xA; ъле  |  оло      | м(ъ)леко-молоко (but: млечный), м(ъ)ладой-молодой, г(ъ)лас-голос&#xA; ъра  |  оро      | г(ъ)радъ-город, в(ъ)рата-ворота, к(ъ)раткий-короткий&#xA;                  | ст(ъ)ража-сторож, з(ъ)лато-золото&#xA; ъре  |  ере      | б(ъ)рег-берег (but: прибрежный)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule is not exhaustive, e.g. in some cases &lt;code&gt;ъ&lt;/code&gt; has reduced at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ч(ъ)резмѣрный - чрезмерный&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…or expanded into a full-featured &lt;code&gt;о&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;е&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; п(ъ)рег(ъ)радить – перегородить&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar rules for verb conjugation retained, so you may safely consider verbs with &lt;code&gt;-оло-&lt;/code&gt; equivalent to those with &lt;code&gt;-ла-&lt;/code&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Wikipedia article for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Полногласие&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that even the word &quot;полногласие&quot; itself has reduced vowel that hasn't been morphed: &lt;code&gt;глас&lt;/code&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;code&gt;голос&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-11-03T15:24:53.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T16:10:58.787" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, it is obvious, narrative writing is a subject of linguistics. &#xA;Nevertheless, the many topics I browsed through in this site randomly very seldom dealt with narrative structures and processes, it is more about analyzing words, phrases, sounds, sentences, some historical linguistics, but comparatively rare when it is dealt with the analyzing of real literal products. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like you to suggest me terms, names etc. all the entities that deals with topics like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how can be narratives analyzed,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what might be universal truths for all kind of narratives, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the purpose of narratives etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a long topic, I do not expect answers, but hints for further sources and terminology so I had a starting point to investigate myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-05T11:40:42.140" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T11:40:42.140" Title="Which linguistic terms, concepts, theories are particularly associated with narrative writing?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;framework&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-03T22:36:06.787" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once knew an Armenian girl from Yerevan and she said the Armenian people are the Hy (pronounced like &quot;Hi, how are you&quot;) and their language is Hy-idan. However, the wikipedia writes the name of the language as &quot;hayeren&quot;. What explains the discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:20:45.857" Title="Name of the Armenian people/language" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4401" CreationDate="2014-11-04T00:15:04.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norwegian, this is the case (I think):&#xA;- A glottal stop may be used for some vowel-initial words. But it is merely a question of style. A famous dialect-phrase from the southern part of Norway; &quot;Æ e a å eder&quot;. This can be pronounced both without any glottal stops, as well as with five glottal stops, one before each vowel. The glottal stops are typically included for the ease of understanding.&#xA;- I don't think glottal stops in vowel-initial words are used phonemically at all in Norwegian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T00:39:40.113" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T00:39:40.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T08:21:35.280" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In gesture studies, a beat is described as a gesture which punctuates discourse and signals important parts of speech. I am working on gesture and I have to differentiate beats from other types of gestures in ELAN. What are the different phases of a beat gesture? What is the significant phase of a beat gesture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5455" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T08:21:35.280" Title="How do you code a beat gesture in ELAN?" Tags="&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9398" CreationDate="2014-11-04T09:51:25.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2014/01/tonal-vestige-in-korean-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Korean was a tonal langauge until the 16th Century&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, even today the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyeongsang_dialect#Tone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gyeongsang dialect still uses tones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my ancedotal experience, remanents of tone are still visible in the &quot;standard&quot; Seoul dialect as well (mostly related to length of articulation), but they aren't ubiquitous among speakers and are not taught to Korean Second Langauge learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2014-12-26T06:06:32.597" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T06:06:32.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T15:07:53.843" Score="-1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;suppose you want to express an event like &quot;a man picking up an apple from the dirty floor and puts it onto the table&quot;, you have many possible ways to formulate a text expressing this even, for instance (with maybe some tiny semantical variations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A man, an apple, a table and the event of him pickin it up and placing it on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a man picks up the apple. a man puts the apple onto the table.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the apple is placed upon the table by a man.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;there is a man. there is an apple. there is a table. there is an event. the event is the man is placing the apple on the table. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular name for a set/class that contains all the possible ways to express the event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there something (distantly) similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-05T11:40:14.407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T11:40:14.407" Title="What is the name for the set of all texts expressing the same event?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9405" CreationDate="2014-11-04T15:20:45.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Armenian” is հայերեն for which the usual transliteration is hayeren. ր is a single-tap /r/, as opposed to the trilled ռ, transliterated as ṙ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:20:45.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T15:32:49.063" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on simulating what changing the English orthography (s.t. it would be (more) transparent) would do to the reading process. A natural question that arises is: If the spelling is tailored to the phonology of one particular dialect, what happens to a speaker of a different dialect, when confronted with that spelling? For that I need a resource, which could be one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A dictionary of words with phonetic transcriptions for at least two dialects of English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A corpus with phonetic transcriptions for each of at least two dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A corpus with transcriptions in one dialect and a dictionary of transcriptions in another&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A corpus with transcriptions in one dialect and a set of rules (:|) for getting pronunciations in that dialect to those of another&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of any such resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5459" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T15:32:49.063" Title="Dictionary of English Dialects" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T16:23:58.917" Score="1" ViewCount="1990" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a nice 2-channel recording in Praat. I want to illustrate the waveform for an article, but when I select file&gt;draw visible sound, the result is both channels. Is there any way to adjust this so just one of the two channels appears? Otherwise I use space unnecessarily and, since I want to compare a few different waveforms, one after another, it gets confusing fast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2014-11-04T16:33:42.787" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T10:52:39.777" Title="How do I draw just one channel of a waveform in Praat?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9413" CreationDate="2014-11-04T16:31:37.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the objects window, choose &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Convert &amp;gt; Convert to mono&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This converts your recording from stereo to mono by overlaying the two channels. Then draw as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the two channels differ substantially and you want only one of them (instead of a mixture of both), you can load the recording into &lt;a href=&quot;http://audacity.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Audacity&lt;/a&gt; and split the stereo track into two mono tracks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T16:31:37.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-04T17:13:27.207" Score="-1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there always one unique way to partition a sentence into its constituents or, like in the following picture, is it possible to analyze a sentence into parts several different ways? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jOZoj.png&quot; alt=&quot;rows of dots indicating words with red underlines representing parts of sentences&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three rows of dots represent the same sentence, and the red underlines represent constituents, such as a noun phrase, compound verb, or prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T02:27:11.163" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T07:28:44.443" Title="Is the determination of the constituents within a sentence without exception nonambiguous?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2014-11-04T17:51:59.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way one analyses a sentence and divides it into parts depends on the system of analysis one uses. The sentence that follows, for example, can be divided in several ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man hit the young girl with a thin cane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The old man] [hit the young girl with a thin cane.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The old man]  [[hit] [the young girl with a thin cane.]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The old man] [[hit] [the young girl {with a thin cane}.]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The old man] [[hit] [the young girl] {/with/ a thin cane}.]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-04T17:51:59.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9403" CreationDate="2014-11-05T07:35:50.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subdomains of discourse analysis, dialogics (Bakhtin), and the study of narrative discourse markers (Labov &amp;amp; Waletzky) may be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is significant literature on this topic, so you can start by googling some of the concepts above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T07:35:50.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9410" CreationDate="2014-11-05T07:36:01.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the study of &quot;event co-reference&quot; and is something of a challenge for computational linguists who may want to associate different texts describing aspects or perspectives of the &quot;same&quot; event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T07:36:01.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T13:52:44.967" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for historical linguistics, it is about how features of language change. I stumpled upon here about people writing about grammaticalization, tonogenesis, transformation from one typology to the other, semantic change etc., but i could not find so far sth. like a list that sorts the many features that constitute a language according to the likeliness for change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you provide either links or lists or ideas about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T16:05:30.670" Title="Do certain features of a languages change faster on average ?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T14:00:54.137" Score="-2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I browse through a book on grammar teaching of a particular language, there is a good chance I'll encounter the term &quot;part of sentence&quot;. Actually, I can not remember having peeked into such a book without this term contained. So, at least, in the realm of teaching it is a key-term. But in which respect does this term fail for linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s. is this also the case for part of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorDisplayName="user10165" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T16:39:47.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T16:39:47.423" Title="For what reason is the term &quot;part of sentence&quot; not considered a linguistic standard?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T14:07:47.710" Score="1" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;When i write, i put a comma according to my gut feeling. therefore i left a lot of marks on my way to the end of the sentence that sum up to a bubble of insecurity. Anyway, i am not even sure it comma placement is a serious phenomenon in linguistics, could you provide further enlightment as for languages in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-09T09:24:10.747" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T09:24:10.747" Title="Are the rules for comma placements universal?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9424" CreationDate="2014-11-05T14:30:29.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Part of speech,&lt;/em&gt; sometimes termed &lt;em&gt;word class&lt;/em&gt; these days, is a recognised term to cover labels such as &lt;em&gt;noun, verb, adjective&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Though we may speak of 'a part' or  'parts' of a sentence, there is no agreed meaning for a linguistic term 'part of sentence'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-05T14:30:29.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2014-11-05T14:47:14.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are not, every language has its own rules for comma placement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Russian a comma is needed before 'что' (that) introducing subordinate clauses, but in English no comma is used there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Я знаю, что он придёт. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know that he'll come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, there are two different commas, the regular comma &lt;code&gt;，&lt;/code&gt; (逗号) which is used o join together clauses, and, unlike English, it is allowed between a subject and its predicate, and the enumeration comma &lt;code&gt;、&lt;/code&gt; (顿号) which is used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list, e.g. 'A、B、C'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2014-11-08T06:49:37.013" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T06:49:37.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9430" CreationDate="2014-11-05T16:30:32.647" Score="13" ViewCount="30420" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a word's root and a word's stem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5465" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T00:39:02.163" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T01:45:38.713" Title="What is the difference between a word root and a word stem?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-05T18:44:57.670" Score="6" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here I define a &quot;spoonerism&quot; as the exchange of onset sounds between initially accented words in a phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;sh(oving l)eopard&quot; instead of &quot;loving shepherd&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;f(ighting a l)iar&quot; instead of &quot;lighting a fire&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be seen as long-distance metathesis like that which produced Spanish &lt;em&gt;palabra&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;milagro&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;peligro&lt;/em&gt;. Or it can be infixation of modifiers (&quot;loving&quot; into &quot;shepherd&quot;) or of VP heads into their nouns (&quot;lighting&quot; into &quot;fire&quot;), though I find that less likely because the article is also infixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Runny Babbit&lt;/em&gt; by Shel Silverstein is a &quot;billy sook&quot; of poetry that takes place in a fictional setting in which talking animals use spoonerisms as a normal part of their grammar.&#xA;This got me wondering if any natural languages grammaticalize this sort of long-distance metathesis of onsets.&#xA;And if so, is it commonly analyzed as infixation or metathesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of about two languages with grammatical metathesis.&#xA;One is Fur, spoken in southwestern Republic of the Sudan, which moves a verb's onset after its first vowel if the preceding pronoun ends in a consonant.&#xA;Wikipedia's article about Fur gives these examples: &lt;em&gt;lem-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lick&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-elm-&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;ba-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;drink&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-ab-&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Rotuman has similar adjacent metathesis for all but the last morpheme of a phrase.&#xA;This is metathesis but not the sort that can produce spoonerism, as it could be analyzed as an epenthetic vowel that takes the following vowel's quality due to an umlaut-like spreading phenomenon (Fur &lt;em&gt;lem-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; *&lt;em&gt;-e-lem-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-elm&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T06:05:02.657" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T06:05:02.657" Title="What languages use grammaticalized spoonerisms?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9428" CreationDate="2014-11-05T23:28:36.233" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Metaphors.pdf&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;. Both terms refer to plants, but words are not plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphors are rarely exact, so there's no reason to expect the difference between &lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stem&lt;/em&gt; to be consistent for all languages. The distinction is only useful in a highly inflected language like Latin; in English both words are used in the same way -- to indicate what one adds an affix to. Since there are very few affixes in English, it really doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, however, it does. Latin verbs typically have at least two, and frequently three, different stems: the infinitive stem, which forms the nonperfect tenses and some non-finite forms, and the perfect stem, which forms the perfect tenses and other non-finite forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case, gender, tense, person, number, mood, and/or voice suffixes are added to the appropriate stem. But each stem is formed from a basic root, for each verb. I.e, the metaphor is that the root is the base, and there are several stems growing out of it, all covered with fully inflected leaves formed by adding suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Latin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'love', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;amã&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;amãv&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;amãt&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vid&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'see', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;vidē&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;vīd&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;vīs&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;aug&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'help', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;augē&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;aux&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;auct&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cap&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'start', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;capi&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;cēp&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;capt&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details are available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/wow/grammar.latin.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/wow/scans/Wow-7.pdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5407" LastEditorUserId="5407" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T05:56:04.270" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T05:56:04.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9438" CreationDate="2014-11-06T05:50:25.343" Score="2" ViewCount="851" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ySMSb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Jitter in praat&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you impressionistically guess if a voice has a high degree of &quot;shimmer&quot; (as opposed to a lot of &quot;jitter&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know these variable have to do with hoarseness or breathiness, but I have difficulty distinguishing one from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T15:29:06.233" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T16:07:30.823" Title="How do I hear &quot;shimmer&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8745" CreationDate="2014-11-06T07:57:18.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'd better go home now (you'd is you had, past subjunctive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This formula of expression is not logical, it is transformed and there is no convincing explanation how it came to this illogical form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In normal grammatical English this would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be better for you to go home now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's much longer. You simply have to see the above formula as a special&#xA;idiomatic expression. And sometimes in the course of times such expressions change their form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously some speakers feel that something is wrong with this expression and an attempt is made to better it by dropping  &quot;had&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You better go home now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;better&quot; is the normal comparative of the adjective good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Oxford's explanation (have, 20a, posted by fdb) you get an idea that the above mentioned expression was transformed several times. But it would not be easy to reconstruct the various and exact stages of development of this expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2014-11-06T08:06:05.017" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T08:06:05.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2014-11-06T09:36:49.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has much less cases when comma is needed compared to Russian because Russian has free word order. In English the same information is conveyed with the order of the words. For instance, comma may totally change the meaning of a Russian sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Казнить, нельзя помиловать = Execute, cannot pardon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Казнить нельзя, помиловать = Cannot execute, pardon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Нельзя казнить - помиловать = If it is impossible to execute, then pardon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules for placing commas is a very difficult part of Russian grammar and even not all native always put commas the correct way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T10:24:10.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2014-11-06T10:19:10.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commas in English are used to represent &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/commas.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a particular intonation profile&lt;/a&gt;; they go by &quot;gut feeling&quot; if one's gut feels the intonation of a sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, they have nothing more to do with grammar than intonation does -- i.e, plenty, but not anything one can define easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5407" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T10:19:10.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-06T12:28:05.950" Score="1" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;traditional grammar&lt;/em&gt; I am referring to the grammar used in books about teaching languages, this grammar uses terminology, that is not perceived as standard in linguistics. For example terms like part-of-sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, I am referring in this context to how the parts of a sentence (do not confuse this with parts-of-sentence) are analyzed following concepts from the terminology of linguistics like syntax trees and grammar theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;addressee&lt;/em&gt;, I am referring to the person addressed within the sentence, for instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Love&lt;/strong&gt;, you have not washed the dishes yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jerome&lt;/strong&gt;, come on and help me get rid of that white clown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hey, &lt;strong&gt;Mister&lt;/strong&gt;, wanna kiss my sister? one dollar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Teresa&lt;/strong&gt;, should I prepare pancake or fish?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T00:44:06.763" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T00:44:06.763" Title="How do both traditional grammar and linguistics categorize addressees within sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;vocatives&gt;&lt;traditional-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9435" CreationDate="2014-11-06T13:46:54.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The direct address is not a part of the sentence and, as far as I know, it is not included into syntactic trees. Some languages like Sanskrit, Latin, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc. have a special Vocative case to mark the direct addresses, but since cases are needed to mark the syntactic function of NPs within a sentence, and the vocative expressions have no function like that, some linguists argue that it is not a case, it is just a special vocative form of the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct address has two main functions, to identify the party addressed (and to express one's attitude towards it, cf. 'Sir' vs. 'you bastard' as direct addresses) and to attract the attention of the addressee to what one says, in the latter case the direct address functions very much like interjections, e.g. 'hey!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T13:46:54.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9423" CreationDate="2014-11-06T16:05:30.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A less-than-quick Google search links to an article on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/Article.aspx?id=0048-57050601075S&amp;amp;AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#.VFuYavnF_pU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;doiSerbia&lt;/a&gt; website that seems to say that adjectives and nouns are probably most susceptible to diachronic change, but the conclusions were based on corpus analyses within the last half a century. I don't know how true this is but to each his own: there might be some truth in that, might as well not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a generally-known and otherwise pretty unsourceable statement that most commonly used lexical items are the most prone to irregularity and change, which makes sense as they are more frequently used. Don't know where I heard it or picked it up, but I'm a firm believer in it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be backed up by looking at the statistical fact that the copula, some elementary terms regarding kinship, obligation, quality and quantity (&lt;strong&gt;good, bad, big, small&lt;/strong&gt;), grammatical polarity (&lt;strong&gt;yes, no&lt;/strong&gt;), pronouns and numerals are most commonly irregular and exhibit unpredictable and unexpected changes and are the ones that most frequently show suppletive paradigms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in highly regular languages that have a very high level of regularity, the copula and core terms have patterns that deviate from the norm (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;olla&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to be), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;veli&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (brother) in Finnish, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;olmak&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to be) in Turkish etc.) even while most of the rest of their vocabulary sticks to established and regular patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T16:05:30.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9431" CreationDate="2014-11-06T16:07:30.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert on this, but results from a couple of studies I found suggest that you are not alone in your perceptual difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One study, outlined in an article by Meike Brockmann-Bauser, Paul N. Carding, and Michael J. Drinnan, entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.egms.de/static/en/meetings/dgpp2011/11dgpp26.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do jitter and shimmer measure perceptual hoarseness?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, compared perceptual assessments by voice experts to instrumental measurements of jitter and shimmer, and it found no clear correlation between either of those measures and degree of perceptual hoarseness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Among pathologic voices, as measured by G of the GRBAS scale, there&#xA;  was no clear association of jitter or shimmer with dysphonia severity.&#xA;  Further it was not possible to reliably distinguish normal from&#xA;  pathologic sounding voices by jitter or shimmer. Therefore we conclude&#xA;  that neither jitter nor shimmer are an objective index of perceptual&#xA;  hoarseness.&quot; (from the discussion section)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another study carried out by Jody Kreiman and Bruce R. Gerratt (UCLA), the results of which are presented in a PowerPoint presentation entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=6&amp;amp;ved=0CDgQFjAF&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.isca-speech.org%2Farchive_open%2Farchive_papers%2Fvoqual03%2Fpresentations%2Fvoq3_057.pps&amp;amp;ei=PZJbVOH7IpW_sQTgxoLICg&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHFdXl-KB4ukyxvNudKkvZRpMfPsQ&amp;amp;sig2=ETUk9KphLXJ3YSupTA0Kyw&amp;amp;bvm=bv.78677474,d.cWc&amp;amp;cad=rja&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jitter, Shimmer, and Noise in Pathological Voice Quality Perception&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, two experiments were carried out.  In the first experiment, subjects were presented with sample recordings of human voices with perceptual irregularities. For each stimulus, they were given the opportunity to control the settings for jitter, shimmer, and noise on a synthesized speech sample to match, as best as they could, the human sample. Their responses were highly variable when it came to jitter and shimmer, but more consistent when it came to noise. The experimenters posited two possible explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Listeners may be insensitive to differences in the amounts of jitter and shimmer in a voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Listeners may have difficulty determining which level is the correct response because they cannot separate jitter or shimmer&#xA;  perceptually from the composite noise component.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second experiment, subjects were presented with a series of synthetic speech samples, which varied along various dimensions including degree of jitter, degree of shimmer, and degree of noise. Overall, subjects did quite poorly and distinguishing jitter and shimmer. They did marginally better when noise was absent (not a likely scenario in the real world), but even then their sensitivity was still &quot;limited&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presentation has many clickable sound clips, so you can hear examples of what the subjects heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T16:07:30.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9441" CreationDate="2014-11-06T21:55:08.613" Score="4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a comprehensive audio database of the IPA, spoken by the same individual. I realize the this restriction may not include the full set of the IPA and I'm willing to settle on the largest subset. The database needs to be free to mix in with other open-source projects, so the examples found in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook_downloads.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook_downloads.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would not work. The closest I've found is the collection of Wikipedia phones, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiced_bilabial_fricative.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voiced bilabial fricative&lt;/a&gt;, but these are spoken by different individuals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T23:05:26.533" Title="Is there a public sound bank of the IPA?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phones&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9440" CreationDate="2014-11-06T23:05:26.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;York University (Ontario, Canada) has a site where you can hear all the IPA sounds: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-06T23:05:26.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9573" CreationDate="2014-11-07T00:17:00.897" Score="7" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many Romance languages, the first person plural and singular forms are completely different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French (aller): &lt;em&gt;je vais&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nous allons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian (andare): &lt;em&gt;io vado&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;noi andiamo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catalan (anar): &lt;em&gt;jo vaig&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nosaltres anem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be something equivalent in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.conjuga-me.net/verbo-ir&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portuguese&lt;/a&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=ir&amp;amp;Submit=Go&amp;amp;D1=6&amp;amp;H1=106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gallician&lt;/a&gt; (but not, surprisingly, in Spanish) and presumably in other Romance languages. The best I could find out for their etymology is that they come from the Latin &lt;em&gt;ire&lt;/em&gt; which can explain some of the other forms of this irregular verb (&lt;em&gt;j'irais&lt;/em&gt; for example) but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where do these v- and a- forms come from and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;why are the singular and plural forms so different in so many languages? Do they really come from &lt;em&gt;ire&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, what's up with this verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2458" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T05:12:30.450" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T22:20:52.393" Title="Why are the plural and singular first person forms of the verb &quot;go&quot; so different in the Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9444" CreationDate="2014-11-07T01:17:10.137" Score="11" ViewCount="3702" Body="&lt;p&gt;One day while discussing things with my friends, we came across the topic of trying to pronounce the sound [g&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No such symbol actually exists in the IPA to my knowledge, but hypothetically it would be a velar stop that's both voiced and aspirated at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can such a sound actually be made? &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-onset_time&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; they're opposites in terms of voice onset, which would make them mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1642" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T13:46:18.567" Title="Can a stop be both voiced and aspirated?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2014-11-07T01:44:27.903" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely yes, only your phonetic notation is not very correct. Proto-Indo-European had such stops, Sanskrit and most Indian languages have them, too ([bʱ], [d̪ʱ], [gʱ], [dʒʱ], [ɖʱ]), the very name of India in Hindi, भारत [ˈbʱaːrət̪], has the [bʱ] sound, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Hi-Bharat.ogg&quot;&gt;listen to the word here&lt;/a&gt;. Note, since the stops are voiced, so the aspiration is also voiced (which is reflected in the aspiration symbol &lt;code&gt;ɦ&lt;/code&gt;), there is no problem in pronouncing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathy_voice&quot;&gt;article on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; about such consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T01:44:27.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-07T10:17:54.393" Score="1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;This started out as a trivially simple question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How many phonemes are there in the different dialects and accents of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just needed a simple reference for a point about the teaching of phonics (it's built on the assumption that Br English has 44 phonemes while many if not most speakers in the UK do not distinguish between 44 phonemes in their speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I just wanted a simple number. 44 phonemes in RP, X phonemes in Wales, X phonemes in Birmingham, etc. The figure 44 phonemes is all over the place but nothing about the huge variation in that number by speech community (not counting the variation in what recognized as a phoneme in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few places that address the complexity of the issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j27/fonemes.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j27/fonemes.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j30/number.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/journals/j30/number.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2014/11/english-spelling-and-finnish.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2014/11/english-spelling-and-finnish.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'm not only stuck on finding an answer to my original question (as imperfect as it may be), I'm also stuck on a way of formulating the question itself. Should we be asking about the size of an individual's phonemic inventory? Or should we be asking about different lects. How about the size of passive vs active inventory (or the nature of perception of phonemic contrasts in other dialects by speakers with dialects without those contrasts - e.g. children in Newcastle watching a US movie or listening to West Coast rap)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a minefield. But it's not just a theoretical preoccupation, there are also some practical applications that would benefit from having a clearer picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonics instruction manuals that take accents into account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computer software that can identify phonemes in a word based on a speaker's preference&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computer software that can track a learner's progress in English phonology and orthography with respect to the dialect they're interacting with&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any hints at an answer, help with formulating the question better or even just suggestions for further readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; As I was thinking about this, perhaps a better way would be dealing with vowels and consonants separately and use John Wells' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/stanlexsets.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lexical sets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as a way to count vowels. This is the standard way of comparing dialects, so maybe it's a better concept to use for the practical purposes I mentioned than the more abstract notion of phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-11-07T11:14:39.140" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T21:56:27.867" Title="Size of phonemic inventory of individual speakers across different accents and dialects of English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8788" CreationDate="2014-11-07T19:37:30.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diacritics are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; used, because native speakers derive the correct pronounciation without them. They are only used to clarify ambiguities, e. g. let's say there is a word 'kab', one would write the k and the b, but would leave out the fattha. If 'kib' is also a word, and if 'kib' would also make sense in that particular context, in which 'kab' was used, a fattha is placed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sry, that I couldn't provide a real, existing example. I still am a learner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T19:37:30.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-07T19:48:13.407" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do infants use the patterns of distribution among closed class words to acquire syntax?  Has anyone simulated the process?  If we start formulating our theories as we begin to recognize words, and we come to recognize the highest frequency words first, then I guess infants then start noticing high frequency bigrams.  How do we get from bigrams to compositional constructions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;3. &#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5478" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T05:26:07.697" Title="neonatal syntax acquisition" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9445" CreationDate="2014-11-07T19:53:59.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diaphoneme chart in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; may give you some of the information you need.  It suggests, for example, that there are some 38 vowel phonemes produced in total across the major varieties of English, though fewer are recognised in each variety; for example, RP, Scottish English and Irish English have 27 each (not exactly the same 27) and Welsh English has 29. Unfortunately, the varieties are very broad, and the phonemes of  dialects within the varieties are not covered. Also, it says nothing about the distribution of the various consonant forms. Still, it's better than nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-11-07T21:56:27.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9263" CreationDate="2014-11-08T14:33:12.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the term you re looking for is Code Switching. Though this term focuses on the change of language among speakers of more than one language, perhaps a deep analysis of this &quot;linguistic&quot; code switch would reveal that it goes in parallel with a cognitive &quot;code switch&quot;. I mean code switching occurs at two levels: cognitive and linguistic. As far as i know, there is no term describing this phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5474" LastActivityDate="2014-11-08T14:33:12.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-08T15:40:42.673" Score="0" ViewCount="809" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are some interpretable and some not? Where do they come from? There is a claim that in some languages, like Hebrew, finite T can have either a 'full' set or a partial set - but how is that determined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5482" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-09T08:55:29.990" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T08:55:29.990" Title="What are phi features?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9549" CreationDate="2014-11-09T13:16:03.527" Score="0" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm helping some native English speakers to learn Swedish. I have a large list of sentences which I wish to organise by linking each sentence to its associated set of meanings. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jag: &#xA;    Jag är glad: I am glad.&#xA;    Jag känner till det: I know it. &#xA;    Jag åker till Stockholm: I'm travelling to Stockholm&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;Känner till:&#xA;    Jag känner till det: I know it. &#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;Till:&#xA;    Jag åker till Stockholm: I'm travelling to Stockholm&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Så since &quot;Känner till&quot; is a phrasal verb, I do not associate sentences containing it with either &quot;Känner&quot; or &quot;Till&quot;, but rather with &quot;Känner till&quot; as this is the meaning of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, take the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What are you thinking about?&#xA;Vad tänker du på? Literally: (What think you on?)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I believe in it.&#xA;Jag tror på det. Literally: (I believe on it.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think these sentences contain phrasal verbs but I'm wondering how I should organise these from the perspective of an English speaker learning Swedish, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Vad&quot; = What, &quot;tänker&quot; = think, &quot;du&quot; = you, and &quot;på&quot; = on. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Vad&quot; = What, &quot;tänker på&quot; = think about, &quot;du&quot; = you.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in other words, will a native English speaker easily map &quot;I believe on it.&quot; in Swedish with its English equivalent or if it is better for them to associated &quot;think on&quot; in Swedish with &quot;think about&quot; in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T15:28:44.340" Title="Identifying phrasal verbs" Tags="&lt;idiomaticity&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2014-11-09T15:40:43.930" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if noun classes did not ultimately derive from the very earliest forms and most primal forms of language, probably long before H. sapiens entered the scene, which may have had a very small lexicon of nouns and verbs and no qualifying words such as adjectives and adverbs? In the case of gender classes one can imagine a very early and primitive form of language with three nouns -- man-thing, woman thing and thing-thing. Eventually these simple very general nouns developed more specific forms, such as human-man-thing, human woman-thing, animal-man-thing, animal-female-thing -- and just thing-thing. As the need arose to be more specific about certain things (and as the linguistic component of the brain developed) it became necessary to distinguish between, say, an animal-man-goat-thing and an animal-sheep-thing and so on. And there could have been a primal distinction between round-lumpy-thing, long-thin-thing, sharp-thing, reddish-thing and so on. As more and more distinctions became necessary or useful, and as the brain developed, each of these primal words would have spun off more and more related names for classes of things -- all of them remaining in their original class. So from a single stem grew more and more branches and twigs. drawing ever finer distinctions -- but retaining some memory of the main stem from which a whole class of nouns grew. Later nouns would have been combined and recombined, have prefixes, infixes and suffixes added to them, to form more complex nouns which would have taken their class from either the one or the other component. Eventually, as languages became more complex, purely phonetic similarities or contextual influences (nouns ending on a vowel rather than a consonant, for example, or having other superficial similarities; or the influence of early religions), nouns could have shifted into other classes. It's not unreasonable to assume that our present vast lexicon of nouns could have derived from just a dozen or so primitive nouns, retaining some echo of their primal origin. It has been said that the average Parisian concierge used to have an active vocabulary of little more than 800 words or so. If we look at adjectives and even verbs, some modern American movies seem to do quite well with one basic adjective/adverb (the F word) and a handful of verbs (often the F word plus a preposition -- f-off, f-up, f-about ... etc) Language did not originate overnight, it probably started developing as the earliest hominids tried to communicate with simple sounds, and from then on there would have been a continuous and unbroken development and steady increase in complexity over a period of almost a million years in which each primal noun became a massive tree with branches, twigs, leaves and fruits. We sometimes hear statements that language developed a 100 thousand years ago or 200 thousand years ago. Patently absurd. We should perhaps look for the origin of many basic features of our languages in the mists of a very distant past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5487" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T15:40:43.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9459" CreationDate="2014-11-09T16:31:55.633" Score="4" ViewCount="701" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background-Info:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In contrast to mandarin Chinese, which can only have a few consonants at the and of a syllable, e.g. ma&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;, ma&lt;strong&gt;ng&lt;/strong&gt;, Cantonese syllables can contain &lt;strong&gt;p,t,k&lt;/strong&gt; at their end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, these consonants are so called &lt;strong&gt;unreleased&lt;/strong&gt; stops. That is, the tongue gets into the right position, but, in opposition to usual stops, there is no pressure build up and released in a little oral explosion of air. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious, if three syllables like &lt;strong&gt;ap, at, ak are discerned auditory&lt;/strong&gt;, i repeated these syllables to myself and it is like being tricked, i can not tell, if i hear or do not hear a difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;What about Cantonese people, are they able to discern them just by listening the syllables without any further context that might help deduce which syllable is meant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T03:58:02.330" Title="Are the unreleased stops in cantonese discernable by listening?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;cantonese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-09T19:32:52.430" Score="3" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John wants to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;normally analysed as consisting of 2 clauses? (John wants, PRO to read)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the idea of PRO but why must &lt;em&gt;to read&lt;/em&gt; be a completely different clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the traditional syntax say about such examples? Does it also claim that there are 2 clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John wants a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is only analysed as 1 clause. (Or am I mistaken?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there a difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5490" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T02:20:58.947" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T00:56:39.957" Title="Why are infinitive complements analysed as separate clauses?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9457" CreationDate="2014-11-09T19:46:21.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English also has so-called unreleased stops, mainly in consonant clusters, e.g. &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt; [æk̚t] vs &lt;em&gt;apt&lt;/em&gt; [æp̚t]. The phonemes that have no audible release are certainly contrastive in English here; they are simply masked by the release of the /t/ that follows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course the case of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;glottal stop&lt;/a&gt;, which can be considered phonemic, especially in connected speech. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/glottal-stop-is-different-from-zero.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this example from John Wells's blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;start button&lt;/em&gt; = [stɑːʔ bʌʔn]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;star button&lt;/em&gt; = [stɑː bʌʔn]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean is another language that has final unvoiced stops that are unreleased: ㅅㄷㅌㅎ are all realised as /t/, ㅂㅍ as /p/, and ㄱㅋ as /k/. With the large number of loanwords coming from English into Korean, many of which have a final stop that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; released, the epenthetic vowel /ɯ/ (written ㅡ) is usually inserted. For example, &quot;&lt;em&gt;lamp&lt;/em&gt;&quot; /læmp/ is borrowed as &quot;램프&quot; /ɾæmpʰɯ/. Hence in Korean, the difference between released and unreleased phonemes is keenly felt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can this perceptual acuity occur? It is a mistake to think that a plosive consonant's identity comes only from its release. Traditionally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/no-audible-release.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as summarised on the same blog&lt;/a&gt;, plosives are analysed into three phonetic phases: approach (also called closing), hold and release. The approach phase can influence the vowel's phonation, as the earlier blog post states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...it may be more an effect on the phonation of the end of the vowel than just an instant of silence, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the closing gesture as the vowel is shut off into the plosive consonant is what is perceived. This can even be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/courses/spsci/iss/week6.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;visualised&lt;/a&gt; on spectrograms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2014-11-09T19:52:38.587" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T19:52:38.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9458" CreationDate="2014-11-09T21:37:33.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clauses are usually made up of &lt;strong&gt;finite verbs&lt;/strong&gt; in predicates and additional dependent information. &quot;John wants to read&quot; and &quot;John wants a book&quot; are more-less equivalent. Non-finite verbs, such as &quot;to read&quot; (a full infinitive) are usually parts of a &lt;strong&gt;verb chain/verb catena&lt;/strong&gt;. The difference between those two is just that there is a noun in the second sentence and a non-finite verb in the first. Both are &lt;strong&gt;mono-clausal&lt;/strong&gt;. You might've gotten the bi-clausal bit of data from some book; it is probably mistaken (at least as far as I know). It might have a different definition of clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-11-09T21:37:33.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9457" CreationDate="2014-11-10T03:58:02.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Cantonese people are able to discern unreleased stops just by listening the syllables without any further context that might help deduce which syllable is meant, moreover, other people in dialect areas like Hu Nan, Fu Jian, Jiang Xi,Zhe Jiang, Jiangsu,Shanghai in China can discern them. With the spectrograms and hearing test, we can find that consonants before vowels or after vowels are determined by the changing trend of formants of vowels, the releasing of the stops is at most one of the distinctive features of consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T03:58:02.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2014-11-10T05:01:13.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Chomsky(see what Chomsky says in: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6799/what-is-minimalist-about-the-minimalist-program/9464#9464&quot;&gt;What is minimalist about the minimalist program?&lt;/a&gt;), linguistics is  science. Yes, essentially it is, since it is part of biology, and the intelligent part of biology,or part of the psychology. Both  biology and psychology are full with controversy, letting lone linguistics, because, say, the phonomenon Both  biology and psychology are too complex to be tested today or near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the following does not belong to evidence supporting linguistics is part of biology.But the analysis of genome involves heavily formal language theory or natural language theory.A lots of  practical models for language are adopted in study of genome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One function of language is communication, it involves society. But it can be studied in the way by which we study mass behavior and communication, say,by graph theory. So it is mainly relevant to science, relevant to humanity to small extension. For example, Zipf's law is originated from linguistics, and generalized Zipf's law is found to be valid over economics,and physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the mainstream of linguistics would be study by ways of science of nature. But it is a pity that a lot of linguists are trained in way of humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T06:49:30.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2014-11-10T05:25:28.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Take any theory of language you like, you may or may not be interested in the questions raised in the minimalist program: why does the theory have these principles, not others.  If you are interested, you are pursuing the minimalist program.  MP is just normal biology, which proceeds from trying to discover what are the mechanisms of development and evolution to the further &quot;why&quot; question: why these, not others. This deeper inquiry -- which, incidentally, goes back to Turing's work on morphogenesis, on physical principles in development and eviolution, which he took to be the true science of biology -- seeks to determine what I've called &quot;third factor&quot; principles, such as computational efficiency.  That's MP.  It's analogous to what's called the &quot;evo-devo revolution&quot; in biology in the past 20 years or so.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what Chomsky explains what the  MP means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T05:25:28.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-10T08:34:38.697" Score="2" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question asked on another forum concerned the use of different verb forms in the subordinate clause in the following &quot;mandative&quot; sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's important that you do not be late&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's important that you not be late&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's important that you are not late&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was interesting to me that the first option passed by a few native speakers as acceptable phrasing. Theoretically, &quot;be&quot; is not negated with &quot;don't&quot; in the present tense or subjunctive in English which means that it can't be understood as a tensed - present verb form, (We don't say: I don't be late but I am not late), or a subjunctive where the verb form is plain and it is negated with &quot;not&quot; (It is important that you not move the body part being imaged until the entire CT exam is complete.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only remaining possibility then is that &quot;you do not be late&quot; is an embedded imperative - &quot;(You) don't be late&quot; would work as a main clause. But the problem is that, as is claimed by linguists, imperative sentences cannot be embedded within a larger clause in English, they can only be used as a main clause. This would make it an odd quirk in the usage of imperative.&#xA;The use of &quot;do not be late&quot; doesn't sound good to me, especially when the clause is not extraposed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That you do not be late is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate if someone would explain this to me, and comment on the acceptability of &quot;don't be&quot; in this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5492" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T12:28:44.557" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T18:54:26.573" Title="Mandative construction verb form problem" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2014-11-10T09:00:16.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of a subjunctive thing, with &quot;&lt;strong&gt;it's important that you be late&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; vs. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;it's important that you do not be late&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Nothing imperative about it as far as I can tell except that it has the exact same form. It's probably sounding bad to you because the subjunctive is mostly obsolete and has fallen out of use but it's still there in places and native intuitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T09:00:16.500" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2014-11-10T09:40:05.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Darkgamma suggested, this is a subjective issue.  The use of the present subjunctive is becoming less common in British English. While not everybody would agree with Somerset Maugham, &quot;The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is put it out of its misery as soon as possible&quot; (&lt;em&gt;A Writer’s Notebook&lt;/em&gt;, 1949), probably not many people today would say or write &lt;em&gt;It's important that you not be late&lt;/em&gt;. With other verbs, we simply say &quot;It's important that you don't ...&quot;. As BE does not form a negative with DO, except for the imperative, the natural expression for BE in this construction is &lt;em&gt;It's important that you aren't late&lt;/em&gt;. However, some speakers may produce &lt;em&gt;It's important that you do not be late&lt;/em&gt; by analogy with all other verbs. This may be influenced by the negative imperative form 'Don't be late', which is similar in meaning, but I don't think we can say we have an embedded imperative here.&#xA;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastEditorUserId="5449" LastEditDate="2014-11-15T16:02:54.437" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T16:02:54.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2014-11-10T12:57:07.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists may do their best to work in a scientific way, but Linguistics is not a science in the sense of &quot;the study and knowledge of the physical world and its behavior that is based on experiments and facts that can be proved, and is organized into a system&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/science&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That water freezes at zero degrees Celsius at a certain atmospheric pressure is something that can be verified. The very subject-matter investigated by linguists, language, is not so verifiable. With modern scientific sound analysis devices, phonetics is that branch of linguistics that comes closest to justifying the description of  descriptive science - the phonetic symbols are as precisely defined as the International System of Units for scientists, and a claim such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; per cent of speakers of language &lt;em&gt;M&lt;/em&gt; will aspirate  plosive &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; when it begins an utterance, but not aspirate it when it follows consonant &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&quot; can be checked repeatedly and confirmed - or rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the field of syntax, however, the tools of the linguist are vague. The scientist knows what oxygen is, but there is no such thing as a 'noun'. 'Noun' is simply a label for  word that shows certain properties and is used in certain ways.  Few linguists agree &lt;strong&gt;completely&lt;/strong&gt; on what these properties and ways are. If there is no agreement on terminology, there can be no truly scientific discussion of syntax.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the Linguistic Society of America, in its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/science-linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Science of Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; site says that Linguistics is a 'human science' like others such as psychology, neurology, anthropology, and sociology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T12:57:07.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9944" CreationDate="2014-11-10T16:46:23.843" Score="4" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in languages and linguistics, can speak a few languages (English, French, Mandarin, some German, Japanese, and Esperanto) and would like to eventually learn more (Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, maybe Italian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;are there any fields of linguistics that would be particularly useful for learning languages, and especially, their grammar?&lt;/strong&gt; (and give me a broader understanding of linguistics along the way) And any resources (books, websites - a Wikipedia page?) for those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few books referenced on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4161/resources-comparing-grammars-of-different-languages&quot;&gt;Resources comparing grammars of different languages&lt;/a&gt; that seem interesting, but I don't know enough to really evaluate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language typology looks like it could be useful, though I'd rather avoid discussion of features that only appear in a few uncommon languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5493" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T12:52:33.367" Title="What sub-field in linguistics should I study to help me learn foreign languages?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T08:28:35.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9474" CreationDate="2014-11-10T20:43:27.707" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating the following video from English to Russian: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCclg_TU0o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCclg_TU0o&lt;/a&gt; - it's an interview with John Cusack. I can't get what's the meaning of what he said on 3:20 - 3:33. And can't understand a few words as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody write and explain it to me?&#xA;Thank you!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5494" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T22:04:06.553" Title="Can't understand the meaning of a sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-11-11T00:02:51.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2014-11-10T21:13:35.290" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there's no more disagreement among linguists than among experts in other disciplines, if you compare like with like (in as much as this can be quantified). You just have to look at exactly what about language linguists disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A huge body of knowledge about individual languages, families of languages and language in general has been accumulated by linguists over the last two hundred years or so. We can describe the basic structure of any language, we can make good predictions about language acquisition, language learning, language change and language death. Sociolinguistics, dialectology, areal linguistics, comparitive linguistics, etc. have all gathered as much knowledge about language and languages as biology has about the natural world (taking into account the relative sizes of the disciplines and their subjects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We even have some fairly uncontroversial universals like, all languages have something like nouns, verbs and most likely adjectives. All languages are acquired over a certain period of time. All languages change. All languages can be used to express any human purpose (with some limitations of vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of speakers - e.g. can't speak about computers if you don't have a word for them or if you don't know what they are even if you have a word). We know massive amounts of the different orthographies used to express various languages today and through history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no more disagreement among linguists about many of these things than there's among biologists studying the classification of finches. You can read almost any introduction to linguistics and get most of the key basics covered in a similar way. In fact, you can even read de Saussure or Jespersen (from about 100 years ago) and still get a good sense about what language is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are huge areas of disagreement but they mostly have to do with how to model these different findings. There are formal and functional approaches to interpreting the data. There's focus on corpus linguistics, etc. But again these differences are no more than those between different ways of looking at quantum theory or the different approaches to taxonomy in biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the elephant in the room is Chomsky, who wields completely outsize reputation relative to his actual contribution to the study of language mostly due to his reputation in political circles (btw: most people don't know that he chose linguistics because of the political leanings of his teacher Zelig Harris). That is not to say, that his contribution is not significant. It is just not nearly as revolutionary in retrospect, as the story goes. Sure, it completely transformed the field for about 30 years, but if you look at linguistics in general, you'll find that it's much more like it was in the days of Bloomfield, than in the 1970s and 80s. Unfortunately, linguistics seems much more divided as a result because of the Chomskean tradition largely ignored other findings and reduced the scientific nature of linguistics to those that can be captured through rather constrained algorithms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, there are many people who call themselves linguists who are unaware of the richness of our knowledge about language. But I don't think as a discipline, linguistics is in trouble. A good example is Pinker's Language Instinct. I completely disagree with the 'instinct' part of the book, but yet, I have no hesitation in recommending it to students as a basic introduction to the study of language. Simply because even with what I believe to be a completely wrong model of language, the underlying knowledge is solid enough that students learn something useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've addressed different aspects of this issue &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2010/08/why-chomsky-doesnt-count-as-a-gifted-linguist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (about Chomsky), &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2012/09/the-complexities-of-simple-what-simple-language-proponents-should-know-about-linguistics/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (about language in general), &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2014/01/5-things-everybody-should-know-about-language-outline-of-linguistics-contribution-to-the-liberal-arts-curriculum/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (about language knowledge) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2014/11/what-language-looks-like-dictionary-and-grammar-are-to-language-what-standing-on-one-foot-is-to-running/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (about models of language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-11-10T21:19:11.150" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T21:19:11.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9472" CreationDate="2014-11-10T21:43:10.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure you are on the right forum for this sort of question, but here it is anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I thought it was sort of a...uhh..kind of a funny, kitch, black,&#xA;  absurd idea, and I thought if I'm gonna be self-referential, sort of&#xA;  postmodern..if somebody's gonna do that they are gonna be mean to&#xA;  me..it might as well be me..so yeah, I said..I should take shots at&#xA;  myself.. you know..and then..but all movies are risks..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say for sure without watching the whole interview, but it seems that he wrote or co-wrote the script for his role in a movie. He is quipping that when he learned that the role was going to be self-referential - connected with his personal character, he was aware that the script writer would necessarily have to be mean to him, so he decided to write it himself - personally take shots at himself and save others the trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5492" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T21:43:10.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9472" CreationDate="2014-11-10T22:04:06.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well I thought it was sort of a kind of a funny kitsch, black, absurd idea and I thought if I'm going to be self-referential and sort of postmodern.  And you know if somebody's going to do that and they are going to be mean to me, it might as well be me.  So you know I said, I should take shots at myself you know (and then) but all movies are a risk (so you just) I thought we could do it and I worked with a friend Steve Pankoid who I'd done High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe with and you know it was just a fun, weird, bizarre comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T22:04:06.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-10T22:45:54.557" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered a few random sources, that explains to a layman what a semantic net is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONV38l39PsE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONV38l39PsE&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this source explains, there are three different relations within a semantic net:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is-a-relation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;has-a-relation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is-an-instance-of-relation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Netz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Netz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German Wikipedia-article on semantic nets lists more relations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;additionally to the above three relations, four further are enumerated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synonymy &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antonymy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Causation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feature &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All 7 relations being described by having or not having features of reflexivity, transivity and symmetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a standard set or different sets of relations for semantic nets within linguistics?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-11-10T22:45:54.557" Title="How many different relations exist for a semantic net?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-11T07:55:10.373" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar#Grammar_frameworks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;, there're a number of grammar frameworks. Which framework the terms &quot;predicate/ complement/ adjunct&quot; belong to? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2906" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T01:08:56.843" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T01:08:56.843" Title="Which grammar framework the terms &quot;predicate/ complement/ adjunct&quot; belong to?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;framework&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2014-11-11T08:03:02.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although all sub-fields in linguistics, including typology, might give you some insight into the languages that you learn, I think that the study of second language acquisition might be the most useful to you for obvious reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia articles usually have external links to more in-depth resources, so you might start here:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T08:03:02.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2692" CreationDate="2014-11-11T08:58:24.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though this was answered a long time ago, I feel there is a need for clarification. As Sverre mentioned, &lt;em&gt;-nnr-&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;-ðr-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;Old Norse&lt;/strong&gt; per regular rule, but this is often avoided: words like &lt;strong&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/strong&gt; *­&lt;em&gt;hanþaz&lt;/em&gt; (clever, sharp, &quot;quick&quot;) gave Old Norse &lt;em&gt;hannr&lt;/em&gt;, then *­&lt;em&gt;swinþaz&lt;/em&gt; (strong) giving &lt;em&gt;svinnr&lt;/em&gt;, as well as *­&lt;em&gt;minniz&lt;/em&gt; (small in quantity) giving &lt;em&gt;minnr&lt;/em&gt;.  This isn't that frequent, with not a lot of words featuring no alternative form that has -&lt;em&gt;ðr&lt;/em&gt;-. It's also noteworthy that many Norse words can take either the -&lt;em&gt;ðr&lt;/em&gt;- or -&lt;em&gt;nnr&lt;/em&gt;- form and in many cases they can even alternate without any visible pattern. &lt;strong&gt;Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Faroese&lt;/strong&gt; usually have words that reflect the -&lt;em&gt;nnr&lt;/em&gt;- variety but -&lt;em&gt;ðr&lt;/em&gt;- can also sometimes pop up here and there, and, even in some cases, such as with &quot;annar&quot; in both languages, we can see a complex (yet in this case regular) alternation between the two forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T08:58:24.873" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-11T10:13:20.090" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a sentence &quot;Someone has to walk the shore and map the island, see what else there is&quot;. The &quot;map&quot; word is a verb, but it's commonly used as noun, i.e., in most of dictionaries, the first word sense for &quot;map&quot; is tagged as noun, and it's then followed by a verb sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we usually call this usage of &quot;map&quot;? is it denominalization?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any online collection/ resource publicly available for a such of usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2906" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T00:56:42.030" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T00:56:42.030" Title="Word commonly tagged as noun but use as verb" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2014-11-11T10:39:42.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English the categories of noun and verb aren't that clearly cut. You can use most nouns as verbs, if the semantic information you intend to transmit is understood. This usage is completely normal and regular: to give a contrived example, you could say English is nouning verbs (forced chuckles abound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually considered derivation by way of a zero morpheme, if you force a word to be one class. You can think of it like this: you have a noun, &lt;code&gt;map (n)&lt;/code&gt;, and a zero derivational morpheme &lt;code&gt;-Ø&lt;/code&gt; that changes nouns to verbs, verbs to nouns, whatever. You attach it to the noun, making &lt;code&gt;map-Ø (v)&lt;/code&gt;, and get a verb, &lt;code&gt;map (v)&lt;/code&gt;. It's a convoluted analysis and we don't really need it to understand what's going on but it's there for whoever wants it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many nouns and/or verbs can be used like this: &lt;code&gt;kill (v)&lt;/code&gt; becoming &lt;code&gt;kill (n)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sleep (v)&lt;/code&gt; becoming &lt;code&gt;sleep (n)&lt;/code&gt;. This is mostly a relic of older morphology being washed away by sound change. Note that this is impossible with noun-verb pairs that are already established and made with non-zero morphemes or suppletion. An example of that would be &lt;code&gt;die (v)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;death (n)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of such derived elements is usually quite related to what they're derived from: &lt;code&gt;pen (v)&lt;/code&gt; means write down something, by extension from &lt;code&gt;pen (n)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;kill (n)&lt;/code&gt; denotes a killed prey by extension from &lt;code&gt;kill (v)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sleep (n)&lt;/code&gt; is the state of sleeping, from &lt;code&gt;sleep (v)&lt;/code&gt;. Even your own example, &lt;code&gt;map (v)&lt;/code&gt;, means making a map of an area - this is extrapolated from its origin in &lt;code&gt;map (n)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2014-11-11T10:39:42.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-11T22:12:44.467" Score="0" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background-Explanation:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;A sound can be described by a list of articulatory features: If the list is sufficient to determine the function of the sound in a particular language, it matches the requirement of phonology, that means not a specific sound has been described, but a class of sounds that fullfill this function, though not identical. For instance, /a/ read by child, male, woman, man with a sorethroat, dwarf, giant etc. is nevertheless recognized as this particular vocal described by a few features (like: openness, nasality vs. orality, position of the root of the tongue etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All features that are of no importance for describing a sounds function in a language are called redundant features. But exactly some of those redundant features are characteristic to describe the persons characteristical voice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just imagine, you could by a list of such redundant features capture a voice that could be described as &quot;sounds like Barack Obama&quot;, &quot;sounds like Nick Nolte&quot;, &quot;sounds like Dave Chapelle&quot;, or less specific &quot;sounds like a middle aged, tall white man from the south with a high testosterone level and missing upper front teeth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;What are, or what are possible canditates for these redundant features to describe a sound more characteristically than in phonology?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T21:20:41.293" Title="What phonologically redundant features can capture the characteristic of a voice more specifically?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9486" CreationDate="2014-11-12T00:01:06.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To achieve the level of specificity you desire, you'd have to dispense with abstract, high-level features and instead make use of acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency, formant values, bandwidths, and noise frequency values (if there are consonants involved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using your example of just an [a] vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The size of the person's throat would affect the relative magnitudes of the formant values, with larger throats (adults as opposed to children, men as opposed to women) corresponding to lower formant values.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Older speakers might have more breathiness (more aperiodic noise and less periodic voicing exciting higher formants) and more creakiness (pairs of &quot;double&quot; glottal pulses or less regular cycles of pulses) in their voices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Someone with a more nasal voice quality might have a broader first formant bandwidth.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9250/how-can-i-recognize-someones-voice-from-a-spectrogram-a-puzzler/9256#9256&quot;&gt;this related question about voice recognition&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T00:01:06.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9489" CreationDate="2014-11-12T01:15:29.420" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I try to read an article related to India (in particular indo-aryan languages) certain special characters emerge which I do not know how to pronounciate. For instance:  Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini contains &lt;strong&gt;ṣ,ṭ,ṇ&lt;/strong&gt; - but there are more.  I have tried to look them up in the IPA-list, but no such characters exist there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a standardized transscription-system? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to allocate those special characters to IPA-characters?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T00:54:45.970" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T00:54:45.970" Title="What are the IPA equivalents for the special characters used to transscribe indian words?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9488" CreationDate="2014-11-12T01:22:22.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Phonology&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; you can find all those special characters together with their IPA counterparts.&#xA;By the way, these special characters are parts of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt;, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T01:22:22.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2014-11-12T07:30:45.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the headline question is very simple. None. Do what millions of successful language learners (and teachers) do, completely ignore linguistics. Just compare linguists and historians - you'll see that linguists are no better at learning other languages. Historically, advances in language learning have not generally come from advances in linguistic theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most impact linguistics has had on language education is functionalism. In that case, you will want to read Halliday and people writing in that tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I found it useful to have a decent grounding in phonetics and phonology for language learning but only up to a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems you're more interested in learning about languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're more interested in finding out about the variations in grammars across languages, you will be better served by contrastive linguists (or typology) like RMW Dixon - his Basic Linguistic Theory is a true delight. But the reading list would be practically endless. Bernard Comrie, William Croft, Martin Hasplemath, all of these people have lots of useful things to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in how language works in general, then there are also many options. Even though I don't agree with his conclusions, I would still recommend Steven Pinker but there are many other popular authors. David Crystal is one that comes to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or simply, buy pretty much any introduction to linguistics and see what will strike you as worth exploring in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T07:30:45.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-12T23:02:10.987" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously the political landscape of the Americas was a hugely complex thing during the period of European colonization, and what was true of one Native American group was almost never true of all of them. They were distinct cultures and nations, and probably didn't consider themselves sub-sets of a larger group at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm wondering if any native language developed a word for those peoples who were native to North and South America, as opposed to Europeans or other extra-continental arrivals? Was there a Massachusett word that encompassed all tribes but excluded the British and French, or an Incan term for &quot;those people who aren't Spanish or Portuguese&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Europeans were obviously from different nations and cultures as well, but there were plenty of terms related to international identity, such as &quot;European&quot; or the concept of &quot;Christendom&quot;. Did the native peoples of North and South America have, or develop in opposition to the colonizers, any similar terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2830" LastActivityDate="2014-11-12T23:02:10.987" Title="Did any indigenous American languages have/develop a word for &quot;Native American&quot;?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9458" CreationDate="2014-11-13T00:30:22.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the analysis of generative grammar, there is a D-structure for a sentence, which is usually much different from the S-structure of the sentence. By D-structure, you can know why, to understand D-structure, you have to know a lot of reasons or evidences that support those structures.So, it seemingly is not consistent with traditional analysis.see Chomskyan works for reference. BTW, I don't think clause is an important notion of generative grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T00:30:22.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-13T00:45:37.357" Score="8" ViewCount="3065" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a silent visual applause by flapping one's hands instead of clapping is used by several communities: some deaf communities, some autistic communities and some buddhist communities. It would appear that autistic communities borrowed it from ASL. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://libguides.gallaudet.edu/content.php?pid=351741&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Visual applause: Where did it come from?&quot;&gt;Visual applause: Where did it come from?&lt;/a&gt; This sign came to ASL from LSF in 1985. At least the buddhism tradition of vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh also uses the visual applause instead of clapping. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of visual applause in these communities, in particular in LSF community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several expressions are used to describe this sign. Here are a few I encountered: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;deaf applause&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;visual applause&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;silent applause&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;flap, don't clap (in autistic communities)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;flapplause (in a post by an autistic)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;twinkles (by the Occupy movement)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5502" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T14:54:20.973" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T15:03:32.157" Title="What is the origin of the silent visual applause sign?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" Score="0" Body="Questions about the sprachbund that covers both the Indic languages and the Dravidian languages, which are unrelated but share a lot of phonetic and phonological properties." OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T00:55:59.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-13T01:06:10.017" Score="4" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about &lt;em&gt;subtle&lt;/em&gt; differences in &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; sounds across varieties of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;subtle&lt;/em&gt; I mean I want to ignore the obvious large differences such as the trilled &quot;r&quot; in Scottish English and the various rhotacised vowels in American and Canadian English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not asking about tapped or flapped &quot;t&quot; or &quot;d&quot; sounds which could be characterized as kinds of &quot;r&quot; sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know about characteristic differences, if they exist, between the &quot;r&quot; sounds in English varieties at the phonetic and phonological level. I notice that different dictionaries which use IPA choose different symbols for the &quot;r&quot; phoneme, but this could be for reasons related more to typography than the actual sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there differences which would influence the choice of IPA symbols or diacritics in either phonetic or phonemic transcription? Are there differences too minor to show in transcriptions but still analysable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T11:31:23.340" Title="Other than Scottish rolled &quot;r&quot; and North American rhotacised vowels, are there any differences across &quot;r&quot; sounds in English dialects?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2014-11-13T01:42:02.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example I know of is that in Hebrew, Egypt (at least biblically; I couldn't say for sure about modern Hebrew but I believe so) is referred to as mitsrayyim. I believe the etymology is something like &quot;from two rivers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5503" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T01:42:02.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-13T03:06:16.333" Score="-1" ViewCount="1191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the surname &quot;Babjak&quot;. I've been researching its origin and meaning for a while now, but I haven't found anything substantial. As far as I know, it traces its roots to Slovak origins. I was wondering if the name (or any of its variants: Bebjak, Bebiak, etc.) had a meaning in the Slovak or in any other Slavic languages. It certainly does not seem to mean anything in Hungarian, yet it's not an uncommon name in Hungary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the etymology of this surname?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5504" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T04:15:20.433" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T03:20:41.680" Title="Origin and meaning of the surname &quot;Babjak&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-01T21:27:40.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2014-11-13T05:53:21.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll limit a few examples to the varieties of English found in the UK here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Northumbria&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;There's a phenomenon known as the &lt;em&gt;Northumbrian Burr&lt;/em&gt; in Northumbria in the North of England wereby (older) spreakers &quot;typically pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, often with accompanying lip-rounding ([ʁ(ʷ)])&quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_of_English_Dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Survey of English Dialects 1950-61&lt;/a&gt; even states that this is not only found in the syllable onset, but also maintained in the coda position (with any occurrence of /r/ being rare in British Englishes, other than Scottish varieties, South East, South West and part of Lancashire - e.g. Blackburn, Burnley).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;South Wales&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In my part of South Wales, itis not uncommon to hear older (and indeed younger), rural speakers pronounce /r/ as an uvular trill in both Welsh and English. I believe this is more common in the varieties of English spoken by bilingual (Welsh and English) speakers. As a small note, it should be worth mentioning that this is not something common in Welsh and that it would not be thought of as &quot;standard&quot;.&#xA;I know of older males who have this feature, but also younger speakers (my mother being of them) and even people I went to school with, now in their 20s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just two examples within the UK that I know of, but there are plenty of other nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T05:53:21.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9504" CreationDate="2014-11-13T08:37:02.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a native speaker of Ukrainian which is very close to Slovak, and taking into account that the surnames like that (Баб'як [bab'jak], Бабяк [ba'bʲak]) are common in Ukraine too, I can explain the meaning of it. &quot;Баба&quot; means &quot;woman&quot;, &quot;бабка&quot; means &quot;dragonfly&quot;, so the surname is derived from one of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.analizfamilii.ru/Babyak/proishozhdenie.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.analizfamilii.ru/Babyak/proishozhdenie.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T11:25:25.427" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T11:25:25.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2014-11-13T12:15:14.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cruttenden notes &quot;There are more phonetic  variations of the /r/ phoneme than of any other English consonants.&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Gimson's Pronunciation of English&lt;/em&gt;, 2001.207)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the variations in British English he notes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ɾ] alveolar tap  - in RP and Liverpool and Newcastle dialects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ɹ] post-alveolar approximant  - in RP and some Scottish dialects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ʋ] labiodental approximant  - in RP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[r]   lingual trill - in RP and some Scottish varieties&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ʀ] uvular trill - extreme north-East of England and for some Scottish speakers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ʁ] uvular fricative - extreme north-East of England and for some Scottish speakers&#xA;ʋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T12:15:14.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9504" CreationDate="2014-11-13T15:31:01.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be little doubt that the origin is a Slavic nickname. This is because in ancient times it was very common among Slavs to give nicknames in addition to the official name received at baptism. In case of the Cossacks, this had security reasons in order to hide their origin from oppressing forces. The result was a huge number of nicknames, which subsequently became the basis for surnames. (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sources seem to agree that the most likely origin for the name is the Slavic word &quot;baba&quot;, which can mean old women, grandmother, witch, and midwife. This latter can indicate that the word was used as a metonymy referring to an occupation or job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The -iak part at the end is a diminutive or augmentative. (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. Ukrainian link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surnames like &quot;Баб'як&quot; (Bab'jak) and &quot;Бабяк&quot; (ba'bjak) are common in Ukraine. (1,4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.1. The surname Babiak may have its origin in the old common nickname &quot;baba&quot;, a married woman of the lower classes. (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.2. Other possibility is the word &quot;бабак&quot;, which refers to the bobak marmot aka steppe marmot. This nickname could have been given to sedentary, thick, or lonely people living an unsociable, introverted lifestyle. (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.3. Other origin may be the word &quot;бабка&quot;, which means dragonfly. (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. Polish link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Babiak exists in Polish. (3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II.1. The root can be the word &quot;baba&quot;, meaning woman, old woman, or hag. &quot;Babiak&quot; may have originated as a variant of &quot;babiarz&quot; (womaniser, skirt-chaser). Alternatively, it may have been a matronymic tag for the bastard son of an unwedded lass. (3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II.2. The surname may have been formed from the male baptismal name &quot;Baba&quot;, which was very common in Poland in the XIV century. Many variants derived from this origin, and are often found in documents: Novgorod peasant Iwashko Babin, 1495; Moscow homeowner Gregory Babin, 1504 (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III. Slovak link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Babiak&quot; and &quot;Babiák&quot; can be found in the Slovak language. (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III.1. &quot;baba&quot; means old woman; can be used as derogatory term for gutless men. (5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III.2. Other sources suggest the origin word to be &quot;bob&quot; (beans) or &quot;bobo&quot; (bogeyman). (5) The Hungarian environment may have caused the &quot;o&quot; to transform into &quot;a&quot;, however this is unlikely as &quot;Bobiak&quot; cannot be found in contemporary Slovak. (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the reply here by user &quot;Yellow Sky&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) www.analizfamilii.ru/Babyak/proishozhdenie.html&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) forum reply by user &quot;Polonius3&quot; found at link&#xA;www.polishforums.com/genealogy-6/meaning-last-name-surname-23560/78/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) forum.index.hu/Search/showArticleResult?topic_id=9056730&amp;amp;aq_ext=1&amp;amp;aq_text=babjak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/8853/ne35_13ml.pdf?sequence=1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the word &quot;baba&quot; means baby in Hungarian. However, it used to be employed as a term of affection as well between lovers and newly weds - much like in English. Many Hungarian folk songs contain the term &quot;babám&quot; (my baby) often referring to young women. However, contemporary Hungarian shuns this expression as it is considered archaic. On the other hand, &quot;bába&quot; means midwife, a term still used occasionally. Some traditional Hungarian folk fairy tales refer to the recurring character of the witch as &quot;vasorrú bába&quot; (iron nosed old women).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5505" LastEditorUserId="5505" LastEditDate="2014-11-13T20:52:32.223" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T20:52:32.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-13T16:10:53.563" Score="1" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to understand how to articulate the sound ṛ from IAST (transliteration system for indian languages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Wikipedia i have found this explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ऋ     पृ  [ərə] (traditional) or [ri] (modern, North-Central India)   ṛ&#xA;    syllabic alveolar trill: closest to er in butter in rhotic accents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I understand how to articulate an &quot;alveolar trill&quot; - &lt;em&gt;you put the tip of your tongue onto the fleshy part above your upper teeth, air-pressure is accumulating behind it untill it is strong enough to push it open, once the air escapes the pressure falls and low-pressure causes the tongue close again and the cycle starts again. Not one cycle, but its repetition is what makes it a trill&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not make any sense with the term syllabic alveolar trill and how this relates to an alveolar trill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: &#xA;Could You explain to me what exactly is happening with ones articulatory organs while such a sound is produced and what the difference to a regular alveolar trill is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T16:24:39.277" Title="What is the difference between an alveolar trill and a syllabic alveolar trill?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9510" CreationDate="2014-11-13T17:13:12.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syllabic would indicate the sound can stand on its own (as a syllable) rather than requiring a vowel nucleus. It would be similar to bottle in American English; that is, the second syllable is just /l/ without any other sounds (especially vowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a syllabic alveolar trill would be an alveolar trill that stands on its own, as it says similar to the second syllable of butter (although in American English the /r/ is not a trill).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5506" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T17:13:12.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9510" CreationDate="2014-11-13T17:14:58.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing special happens, only that sound is a vowel, it makes a syllable. Like the Czech &lt;code&gt;smrt&lt;/code&gt; which means 'death', the syllable starts with [sm], then goes the vowel [r̥], then goes [t], a syllable of the type CCVC is formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing special in the pronunciation of the [r̥], besides the fact it makes a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-13T17:14:58.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-14T01:04:56.150" Score="2" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we have gotten about the expected per word entropy of random yet grammatical text is just some upper bound of the the expected per word entropy, because we have not found the exact way to compute the probability of words. The models we adopt to compute the probability of words is just approximate models like bi-gram,trigram,etc,since the precise model of language,say,the grammar has not been established. By entropy formula and models we adopt, we can estimate that the exact entropy is smaller than what we have gotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of the approximate results about entropy per word, if the algorithm is correct,and assumptions are approximately valid, one can choose the least one from them. That is it. One should not expect perfect answer in the near future, just focus on the correctly approximated least one that appears.It is not difficult, since so many search tools are available in the days. what is important is that we can just get some upper bound of it,and the best solution is to choose the correctly approximated least one.So I think  anyone that claims his model is precise, is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone does not agree with what I say above without any reason, I am wondering, if anyone can give any evidence to refute what I say above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Tarski's theorem on truth which can be deduced from Godel's incomplete theorem, the  related theorems, have led to model theory, which is the fundamental part of semantics.The definition of pragmatics is somehow the third part of linguistics or semiotics, it is somehow what can not be incorporated into grammar and semantics,Shannon's classic article, has definitely claims that information does not considered any meaning of symbols, which excludes semantics and pragmatics.  So we can conclude,any statement that claims to obtain precise information per word of a language by classical information applied to  &quot;semantics&quot; and &quot;pragmatics&quot;, is misunderstanding and misapplication, and serious researchers have to carefully know the difference among them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now, any evidence or valid theory can refute the relation among information theory, semantics, and pragmatics I say above? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any evidence, or reference that can refute all I say above. If there is controversy over any definition or theorem about information theory, I will post the question on other professional forum relating to information theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T16:14:54.620" Title="Can the entropy per word be caculated precisely?And relation among information theory, semantics, and pragmatics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9523" CreationDate="2014-11-14T02:16:33.673" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of Spanish.  I also learned English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now trying to learn Latin.  Obviously, the Spanish --&gt; Latin route is a lot more preferable than the English --&gt; Latin route given that Spanish has a much more general language structure than English.  For example, because Spanish has a distinction between the Preterite and the Past Imperfect whereas English does not, this is a distinction with which I will have no trouble in Latin.  Also, Spanish is a rather close descendent of Latin, so they must have much in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firstly, what kind of structural differences in Latin are completely foreign to Spanish?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondly, are there any good books from which to learn Latin (using Spanish) that take advantage of the language structure already present in Spanish?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5507" LastEditorUserId="5507" LastEditDate="2014-11-14T03:50:32.337" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T10:57:05.273" Title="What are the benefits of learning Latin using Spanish?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-14T05:06:16.020" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;the meaning of words depends solely on mental concepts inside the human brain&quot; illustrate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An internalist or externalist position ? Brief reason why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5508" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T08:56:35.910" Title="&quot;The meaning of words depends solely on mental concepts inside the human brain&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9518" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2014-11-14T05:32:52.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-11-14T05:32:52.093" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T05:32:52.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9519" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2014-11-14T05:32:52.093" Score="0" Body="Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication." OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-11-15T14:10:34.453" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T14:10:34.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9517" CreationDate="2014-11-14T08:56:35.910" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just like it is not possible to define life, soul, so is the question. One theory could be dividing the world into living beings and non living beings. But delving on such themes will mean we are off topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5486" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T08:56:35.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-14T10:09:50.147" Score="3" ViewCount="956" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can there be intransitive verbs which take an indirect object? &#xA;In the sentence &quot;It pleases me&quot; is &quot;me&quot; an indirect or direct object?&#xA;What languages frequently have indirect objects in a sentence without direct objects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3409" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-15T13:48:56.183" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T03:27:59.320" Title="Intransitive verbs that take Indirect objects" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9516" CreationDate="2014-11-14T10:57:05.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am answering your first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Spanish shares a lot of vocabulary with its ancestor, Latin. On the other hand the morphology of Latin is much more elaborate than that of Spanish (6 cases, 3 genders, active and passive voice, lots of tenses…). In this sense it is more like German than Spanish. I once met a man who worked as a teacher in a Spanish-German bilingual school in Argentina and he told me that they had developed a very successful method of using German to teach Latin grammar and Spanish to teach Latin vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-14T10:57:05.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9515" CreationDate="2014-11-15T01:12:02.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several points here that I should address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What we have gotten about the expected per word entropy of random yet grammatical text is just some upper bound of the the expected per word entropy, because we have not found the exact way to compute the probability of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree (roughly) with the first part of the sentence; we are getting closer and closer to the upper bound of the expected per-word entropy. I disagree with the second part because there can't be an &quot;exact way&quot;: entropy figures can be exact if were're dealing with a closed-world system, but when it comes to text, no matter how large the corpus, new text is usually bound to contain words never seen before. A sentence like &quot;pass me the SATA cable&quot; would never have been uttered a couple of decades ago, but are fairly common now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The models we adopt to compute the probability of words is just approximate models like bi-gram,trigram,etc,since the precise model of language,say,the grammar has not been established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bigrams, trigrams, N-grams are all models of language, just as grammar models used in parser are. As before, there is no point looking for a &quot;precise&quot; model because the real-world language is best handled with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-world_assumption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-world model&lt;/a&gt;. But my point here is that there are plenty of grammar models. And some of them could be quite usable for deriving entropy figures for text. Table 1 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P06/P06-1055.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learning Accurate, Compact, and Interpretable Tree Annotation&lt;/a&gt; shows the different (specialized) classes of words that the algorithm has induced. NNP-14 are months, NNP-4 and NNP-5 are common terminal words of names of corporations, etc. So, an IN-5 is rather more likely to be followed by something that ends with NNP-4, and an IN-2 is more likely to be followed by NNP-14, and so on. After all, such grammar models contain the probabilities of the co-occurrences of words with these POS tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are lots of the approximate results about entropy per word, if the algorithm is correct,and assumptions are approximately valid, one can choose the least one from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's helpful to think of algorithms as being &quot;correct&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot;. Is the grammar model used in the Stanford Parser &quot;correct&quot; because it can parse many sentences perfectly, or &quot;incorrect&quot; because it parses many sentences incorrectly? I think it's more helpful to think in terms of &lt;strong&gt;degree of suitability&lt;/strong&gt; of each algorithm for a particular task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One should not expect perfect answer in the near future...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what &quot;perfect&quot; would entail in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I think anyone that claims his model is precise, is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no one who made such models claimed that their model is precise. As far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shannon's classic article, has definitely claims that information does not considered any meaning of symbols, which excludes semantics and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Shannon's model for entropy has no concept of meaning or even sequence. Each symbol (letter or word, in our context) is assumed to occur completely independent of another symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxlZM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Shannon&amp;#39;s definition of entropy&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above equation has no conception of sequence. Later models that don't ignore the sequence, such as n-gram models and Markov models have shown significantly better entropy figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So we can conclude,any statement that claims to obtain precise information per word of a language by classical information applied to &quot;semantics&quot; and &quot;pragmatics&quot;, is misunderstanding and misapplication, and serious researchers have to carefully know the difference among them.&#xA;  The question is now, any evidence or valid theory can refute the relation among information theory, semantics, and pragmatics I say above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope from all that I have explained above, it's clear that Shannon's definition of entropy was the beginning of the field of information theory, and not the end of it. In short, Shannon entropy sets a lower bound for a random sequence of symbols, but we know natural language is decidedly not a jumble of words. With better models, we get lower entropy figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Semantics&quot; does not have just one, static meaning. For the context of entropy, we could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributional_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distributional semantics&lt;/a&gt; to predict the next word or phrase in the sequence &quot;pass me the &lt;strong&gt;______&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Ngram models would only predict the list of objects that they have previously seen in the context of these words in their training corpus. Models based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D08-1094&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word meaning in context&lt;/a&gt; could do better and predict a candidate from all the words or phrases that denote tangible objects that can be held with one's hand, even if they had not been seen in the context of &quot;pass me&quot; before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Models based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/forum/5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frame semantics&lt;/a&gt; could use the context of the utterance &quot;pass me the &lt;strong&gt;______&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; to predict the missing word. In the context of a garage, it could be tools like hammers, screwdrivers, etc; in the context of a dining room, it could be salt, pepper, spoon, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-11-15T03:06:43.937" LastActivityDate="2014-11-15T03:06:43.937" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2014-11-15T11:43:37.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;do not be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [? ? ?]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;not be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [subjunctive mandative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;are not&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [covert mandative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your last two examples (#2, #3) are unremarkable, and are completely acceptable in today's standard English. It's that example #1 that is interesting, and I'm assuming that is the one that you are mainly interested in discussing. Here are my thoughts on what the subordinate clause in example #1 might be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example #1's subordinate clause doesn't seem be an imperative clause for several reasons. (Though, the sentence does seem to be intended by the speaker to be a mandative construction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First reason:&lt;/strong&gt; The analytic &lt;em&gt;&quot;do not&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is of somewhat doubtful acceptability in (main clause) imperatives that have &lt;em&gt;&quot;you&quot;&lt;/em&gt; as overt subject, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;You do not be so cheeky&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. (Info borrowed from &lt;em&gt;CGEL&lt;/em&gt; page 928-9.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;CGEL&lt;/em&gt; says on page 802-3 that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;[ Analytic &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; ] is particularly unlikely when the imperative has an overt subject, and in the case of &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; it can be regarded as ungrammatical: …&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the ungrammatical example they provide is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[9.ii.b] * &lt;em&gt;Do not you renege on our deal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second reason:&lt;/strong&gt; In imperative clauses, the versions that have an overt 2nd person subject (&quot;you&quot;) would have the same meaning as those that have no subject and those that use a vocative. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Come here.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; -- [no subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b. &lt;em&gt;&quot;You come here.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; -- [subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c. &lt;em&gt;&quot;You, come here.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; -- [vocative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those above three examples are basically interchangeable, especially as to their meaning; and also, I would expect all three versions to have the same level of acceptability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in example #1, its subordinate clause doesn't seem to have the same acceptability (nor, perhaps, even the same meaning) for the corresponding alternates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.a &lt;em&gt;It's important [that &lt;strong&gt;do not be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [no subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.b &lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;do not be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [original #1, subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.c &lt;em&gt;It's important [that, you, &lt;strong&gt;do not be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [vocative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version #1.a seems to be completely unacceptable; and version #1.c seems weird--though, its subordinate clause does sound like it is an imperative clause. And so, the three subordinate clauses don't seem to be interchangeable here, and that gives more weight to not consider the original example #1's subordinate clause to be an imperative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CAVEAT: Though, it probably should be pointed out that a main clause imperative in a coordination might not always do so well here either. (Examples of imperatives in a coordination: &lt;em&gt;Say what you like, it won't make any difference; You do that again and you'll regret it; Do that ever again and I'll brain you; Act in haste and repent at leisure; Come over here and you'll be able to see better; You hurry up or we'll be late&lt;/em&gt;.) But from those examples, the only one that I'm seeing as being awkward is &lt;em&gt;&quot;You come over here and you'll be able to see better&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What it might be:&lt;/strong&gt; Example #1 might be an attempt by the speaker to combine an emphatic &lt;em&gt;DO&lt;/em&gt; with a subjunctive clause. That is, the &quot;do&quot; in &lt;em&gt;&quot;It's important [that you do not be late]&quot;&lt;/em&gt; might be an emphatic &quot;do&quot;; though, it does seem to be unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking this because example #1 seems to convey the same meaning as the (subjunctive) mandative. Example #1 might look a little bit unusual, but otherwise, it doesn't sound too bad to me (AmE speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for your last question, which concerns the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;don't be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is basically the same as your example #1, except that this example is using synthetic negation instead of analytic negation. Let's see how the three alternate versions (&quot;you&quot; as overt subject vs no subject vs vocative) look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4.a &lt;em&gt;It's important [that &lt;strong&gt;don't be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [no subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4.b &lt;em&gt;It's important [that you &lt;strong&gt;don't be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [original #4, subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4.c &lt;em&gt;It's important [that, you, &lt;strong&gt;don't be&lt;/strong&gt; late].&lt;/em&gt; -- [vocative]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version #4.a seems to be completely unacceptable; and version #4.c seems weird--though, its subordinate clause does sound like it is an imperative clause. And so, the three subordinate clauses don't seem to be interchangeable here. This is the same conclusion we had when we performed this test with example #1a-c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between example #4 and your original example #1 is that example #4 seems to sound smoother (to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: &lt;em&gt;CGEL&lt;/em&gt; is the 2002 reference grammar by Huddleston and Pullum et al., &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4995" LastEditorUserId="4995" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T18:54:26.573" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T18:54:26.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9550" CreationDate="2014-11-15T12:56:42.380" Score="10" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hurricane&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, Spanish works about the New World in the 1500s wrote the word we spell in modern English as &quot;hurricane&quot; alternatively as &quot;huracan&quot; or &quot;furacan&quot;. A spelling with an initial &quot;f&quot; has been preserved in many of the other Iberian languages: Portuguese, Galician, and Asturian, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did this &quot;f&quot; in Portuguese &quot;furacão&quot; come from the Americas, or was it created in Iberia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language#Latin_f-_to_Spanish_h-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there is evidence of word-initial &quot;f&quot; being pronounced in Spanish as a glottal [h] as early as 863 A.D., but the word-initial [h] sound in words affected by this was still usually written as &quot;f&quot; until the 1500s. (Also around this time, /f/ was borrowed back into Spanish. It's unclear to me what this could mean about the earlier status of the sound [f] itself when not word-initial.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the Iberian languages that spell hurricane with an &quot;f&quot; today did not undergo the f → [h] sound changes of Castilian Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me unsure of how to understand words like &quot;huracán&quot;, heard and written by Spanish explorers in the 1500s or earlier. It seems to me that there could have been possible confusions between word-initial [f] and [h] both in pronunciation and in spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurac%C3%A1n&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Juracán&lt;/a&gt;, which Wikipedia says is a &quot;phonetic name given by the Spanish colonizers&quot; from an indigenous &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taíno&lt;/a&gt; word. This would support an [h] sound, but unfortunately, the article on Juracán is poorly sourced. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on the Taíno language&lt;/a&gt; says that the reconstructed phonemes of that language do not include an [f] sound. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arawak_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arawak language&lt;/a&gt;, in the same language family and still spoken today, does include a similar sound (bilabial [ɸ]). There's &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huracan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a similar word (&quot;Hurakan&quot; or &quot;Jun Raqan&quot;?)&lt;/a&gt; from the K'iche' (Quiché) Maya, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%27iche%27_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;whose language does not seem to have an [f]&lt;/a&gt;. Neither does the reconstructed &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Mayan_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Mayan language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the local word was pronounced with something glottal, not an [f] sound, and spelling confusion or hypercorrection caused the birth of a different pronunciation in part of Iberia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I just getting my head spun around by not reading the right sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given what we know today, which of the following is most likely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original word was pronounced with an [f] or similar sound&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original word was pronounced with a glottal [h] or similar sound&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original word happened to be pronounced in both ways by different tribes, a coincidental parallel to the sound differences existing in Iberia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From any of these beginnings, I suppose the current state of the word in various languages could have come from some combination of mispronunciations, hypercorrections, and spelling pronunciations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5514" LastEditorUserId="5514" LastEditDate="2014-11-15T14:06:45.240" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T22:23:24.163" Title="Before being borrowed by Europeans, was &quot;hurricane&quot; ever pronounced with an initial &quot;f&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-15T23:37:19.180" Score="4" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing lemmatization as part of a classifier right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if it makes sense to first use a dictionary lookup, to find the lemmas (wordnet) and after that additionally, to apply a (porter-)stemmer to the word vector?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have most lemmas after the first step of course, you never know, can the usage of a stemmer after the first step harm? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5522" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T01:16:54.027" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T11:40:46.233" Title="Combine dictionary lemmatization with stemmer" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9533" CreationDate="2014-11-16T04:03:48.283" Score="4" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a general way to parse the trees in the Penn TreeBank for arbitrary patterns, e.g. perhaps I want all trees which have a plural subject and whose sister VP has a modal verb daughter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example would be finding all trees which have a VP headed by some verb and which have a daughter PP headed by &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;.  This isn't even a subtree match--it's only matching an incomplete part of the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem very easy, because the trees are not regular structures but are presumably context-free (or even context-sensitive).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about converting the trees to strings, but regex obviously doesn't not work for this.  Regex is useful for finding whole (sub)trees, but I wish to find patterns among different phrases/nodes in the tree.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T11:22:43.327" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T07:41:32.857" Title="How to search Penn TreeBank for arbitrary patterns?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2014-11-16T04:24:42.490" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find a reason for the ordering of sequence in English alphabet system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance take U and V. Transformation of (letter no. 21) U-shaped curve (flat, scattered below) to (letter no. 22) V-shaped curve (steep) in many economic, social, and behavioral cycles is gradual, process demanding consistency (unity of effort) so that downward curvature polishes to a point after iteration meaning operation accomplished or victory achieved. From shape perspective, V is then improvement, perfection of U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chances are that most will not agree with my line of thinking. As a result, I am not posting here any more of my observation but would love to do so if there is any word of support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5486" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T04:24:42.490" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9531" CreationDate="2014-11-16T07:04:55.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is tagged for NLTK, but if you're free to switch, Stanford NLP has a product called &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tregex.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tregex&lt;/a&gt; which does exactly this kind of tree search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be able to shell out to the Tregex binary, which has a fairly useful CLI as well. See documentation on &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/course/6/6.863/OldFiles/tools/tregex/javadoc/edu/stanford/nlp/trees/tregex/TregexPattern.html#main(java.lang.String[])&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TregexPattern#main&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find some introductory documentation &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/manning/courses/ling289/Tregex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I work in the Stanford NLP Group and have contributed to the Tregex project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1487" LastEditorUserId="1487" LastEditDate="2014-11-16T20:27:58.883" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T20:27:58.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9529" CreationDate="2014-11-16T07:08:32.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose it depends on the task. If you don't often expect to see out-of-vocabulary words (i.e., words for which you don't have lemmata), there is no point in stemming—in fact, it might be harmful in that it might normalize two words of different meaning to the same stemmed string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, stemming can be harmful. It'd be best to try lemmatization vs. stemming in isolation and see how it affects classification performance in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1487" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T07:08:32.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T08:40:40.330" Score="4" ViewCount="3215" Body="&lt;p&gt;From this &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/6.863/www/PennTreebankTags.html#SBAR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of tags&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SBAR&lt;/strong&gt; - Clause introduced by a (possibly empty) subordinating&#xA;  conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateconjunction.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; explains what a subordinating conjunction is.  But how can you have an empty subordinating conjunction?  What are examples of sentences that should be SBAR not just S?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T05:49:58.467" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T13:30:05.870" Title="What exactly is the SBAR label from the Penn TreeBank?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T12:40:06.400" Score="6" ViewCount="2226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it known if there was some weird flipping of [Ei (egg in German) and eye] with [Auge(eye in German) and egg] that happened historically or do you think the apparent similarities are coincidence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5523" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-17T02:20:10.580" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T12:44:08.643" Title="Ei (egg in German) and eye; Auge (eye in German) and egg" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2014-11-16T13:30:05.400" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;New High German (NHG) &lt;em&gt;Auge&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt; are believed to descend from Proto-Germanic *augan- and Proto-Indo-European *ōkū-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NHG &lt;em&gt;Ei&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;egg&lt;/em&gt; are from PG *ajjam- and PIE *ōiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are not related. The homophony of modern English &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt; with modern German &lt;em&gt;Ei&lt;/em&gt; is accidental. There is no “weird flipping&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T15:32:05.033" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T15:32:05.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2014-11-16T15:00:29.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, egg comes from something like PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ōu̯iom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;egg&quot; (some speculate, from the word for bird).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eye comes from PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o̯oq̆u&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;eye&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-11-16T15:00:29.777" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2014-11-16T15:15:47.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the entries from DWDS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ei n. aus Schale, Eiweiß und Eigelb bestehendes Hühner-, Vogelei, ahd. (8. Jh.), mhd. asächs. mnl. nl. ei, mnd. ey, aengl. ǣg (engl. egg aus dem Anord.), anord. egg, schwed. ägg führen auf germ. *ajjam bzw. (wegen des r- Plurals im Aengl. und im Hd.) auf *ajjaz. Der anlautende Vokal kann auf eine schwundstufige Form (ie. ə) zurückgehen oder Kürzung des im Germ. zu ā gewordenen ie. ō sein, das sich in den Formen verwandter Sprachen findet, griech. ōón (ᾠόν), lat. ōvum, kymr. wy, aslaw. ajьce, russ. jajcó (яйцо). Als Ausgangsformen können für diese Sprachen im wesentlichen ie. *ōu̯i̯om, daraus gekürztes *ōi̯om, und wohl auch *ōu̯om angesetzt werden. Zweifellos besteht eine Verbindung zu ie. *əu̯ei- (oder *au̯(e)i- ?), *u̯(e)i- ‘Vogel’ in aind. vḗḥ, vī́ḥ, lat. avis ‘Vogel’, wahrscheinlich auch griech. aietós (αἰετός) ‘Adler’. Je nach Beurteilung des Ablautverhältnisses im Rahmen der ie. Wortbildung wäre danach Ei ursprünglich ‘das zum Vogel Gehörige’ oder der Vogel das ‘Eiertier’. Anders SCHINDLER in: Die Sprache 15 (1969) 166, der für seinen Ansatz ie. *ō-ə̯ui̯-óm ‘Ei’, eigentl. ‘das beim Vogel Befindliche’, von einer präpositionalen Verbindung (mit ie. *ō ‘nahe bei’, s. Ohnmacht) ausgeht. Schon früh wird ‘Vogelei’ auf die Eier anderer Tiere (Insekten, Reptilien, Fische) sowie allgemein auf die weibliche Keimzelle übertragen. –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auge n. Organ des Gesichtssinnes. Ahd. ouga (8. Jh.), mhd. ouge stimmt mit asächs. ōga, mnd. ōge, mnl. ōghe, nl. oog, aengl. ēage, (angl.) ēge, engl. eye, anord. auga, schwed. öga, dän. øje, got. augō überein. Die Herleitung von germ. *augan- aus ie. *okū- ‘sehen, Auge’, das sich aus aind. ákṣi, griech. ómma (ὄμμα), Dual ósse (ὄσσε), lat. oculus (s. Okular), aslaw. oko, russ. (älter) óko (око), lit. akìs ‘Auge’ erschließen läßt, ist durch die germ. Lautgestalt erschwert, wird aber doch für wahrscheinlich gehalten. Allgemein nimmt man an, daß der Vokal eines regulär entwickelten germ. *agw- (dieses z. B. noch in ahd. awizoraht ‘augenscheinlich’, um 800, acsiunī ‘äußere Erscheinung’, 9. Jh.) unter dem Einfluß von germ. *auzan- ‘Ohr’, vgl. ahd. ōra und (mit grammatischem Wechsel) got. ausō (s. Ohr), umgebildet wurde. Vielleicht hat dabei auch Ausgleich zwischen verschiedenen Flexionsformen eine Rolle gespielt; vgl. FEIST 364. –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language, not an attested language. The issue here is not the precise reconstruction of long-lost sounds, but merely the observation that “eye” and “Ei” are not related etymologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, Beekes reconstructs IE *h₂ōui-o for “egg” and *h₃ekw for “eye”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T18:22:40.490" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:22:40.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9556" CreationDate="2014-11-16T18:00:58.273" Score="1" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a syntax tree with a subordinate clause phrase (as opposed to just a sentence) whose left daughter is a verb in the imperative, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Wash your laundry tonight.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6182/languages-with-subordinate-imperatives&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; and also these resources which define a subordinate conjunction: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateconjunction.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/grammar_subordinate.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000377.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, but none of them said an imperative verb could be a subordinate conjunction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last, I also searched several thousand parsed trees but not a single left daughter was a verb to the subordinate clause phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that it's a tagger mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here is the utterance for context&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Review your homework for 30 minutes and make sure it is complete.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tree, &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt; is assigned the part-of-speech label for a subordinating conjunction, being the left daughter to that subordinating clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T04:53:47.757" Title="Are imperative verbs starting a command subordinating conjunctions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T20:26:42.737" Score="15" ViewCount="1346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who introduced the notation &lt;em&gt;e̯&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;a̯&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;o̯&lt;/em&gt; (vowels with inverted breve below) for Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and when?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed with so-called &quot;laryngeal&quot; consonants, spelled *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. These were lost in branches other than Hittite but left traces on adjacent short *&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; as well as compensatory lengthening in descendant languages. Based on how they color *&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, it's likely that these sounds were fricatives [x], [χ], and [xʷ], corresponding to the velar, uvular (formerly &quot;plain&quot;), and labiovelar plosives. Occasionally when these are syllabic, I've seen them spelled with the &lt;em&gt;schwa indogermanicum&lt;/em&gt;: *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lately I've been seeing reconstructed PIE with *&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, and *&lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; with half-circles under them. I'm guessing that these correspond to syllabic allophones of laryngeals *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and *&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Am I right? What source introduced this orthography and why? Is it aesthetic, to make PIE look more like &quot;words&quot; and less like mathematical formulae, for the same reason that Pinyin uses accent marks instead of tone numbers? Or is there some new insight into the reconstruction of how the laryngeals were pronounced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how do you type these, other than copying and pasting from elsewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T14:32:59.977" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T02:01:10.267" Title="Spelling of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9528" CreationDate="2014-11-16T21:08:16.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not very familiar with the history of Portuguese phonetics, but my guess is that when the word &lt;em&gt;huracán&lt;/em&gt; was imported in Spanish (being then aspirated, unlike now), when it got to the Portuguese, they likely lacked the sound and so &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; was probably a pretty good substitute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T21:38:17.827" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T21:38:17.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-16T22:17:04.860" Score="7" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a pretty basic question concerning the Earley parser: In case of syntactic ambiguity ( &lt;strong&gt;S -&gt; NP VP(V NP(NP PP))&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;S -&gt; NP VP(VP((V NP) PP)&lt;/strong&gt; ), are both parses stored in one chart or in two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the grammar im talking about is the following:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;S -&amp;gt; VP NP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V VP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; VP PP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; NP PP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Det N&#xA;PP -&amp;gt; P NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;so you while parsing could either attach a PP to an NP or to an VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my question is detail is how the &lt;strong&gt;graphical chart&lt;/strong&gt; would look like, meaning the positions of predict, scan and complete. I was assuming that both parses would be stored in one (big) chart. So S' will then be found in, let's say, s[0][8] and s[0][16] ? Is that right?&#xA;An attached image or link with a graphical chart parsing through an ambigous sentence would help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;greetings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5529" LastEditorUserId="5529" LastEditDate="2014-11-17T13:36:37.510" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T13:36:37.510" Title="Earley Parser: Ambiguity" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9543" CreationDate="2014-11-17T00:22:47.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earley parser is one example of chart parser, also called dynamic&#xA;programming parser. There are many other kinds such as the CYK parser,&#xA;the GLR and GLL parser, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of chart parsing is to build a unique chart that will&#xA;mimic all possible parsing computations, since there may be&#xA;exponentially many (or even infinitely many in pathological cases). It&#xA;is organized so that parts of computations that are common to distinct&#xA;parses are somehow shared. This is so effective that the whole&#xA;computation is done in cubic time at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic chart parser is a recognizer. However the chart can&#xA;incorporate a structure that also keep track of the corresponding parse&#xA;trees, or more precisely of all parse-trees corresponding to these&#xA;computations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This structure for the parses trees tries to share common subparts (as&#xA;the chart does for parsing computation), so that exponentially many&#xA;parse trees can actually be represented in a unique structure that has&#xA;a cubic size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I understand your question correctly, the answer is that the&#xA;two parse-trees (or as many as there are) are all stored in the same&#xA;structure associated to the unique chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a structure is often called a shared forest, but its organization&#xA;can vary a bit, depending on the specific algorithm. The structure&#xA;used by Earley's algorithms is not too easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, I suggest you look at the question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4619/is-there-a-favoured-data-structure-for-storing-ambiguous-parse-trees-in-natural&quot;&gt;Is there a&#xA;favoured data structure for storing ambiguous parse trees in Natural&#xA;Language Processing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a detailed intuitive explanation of how sharing is organized to get an a possibly exponential (or even infinite) number of trees in a cubic structure, you may look at the first 6 pages of this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/publication/2747609_Towards_a_Uniform_Formal_Framework_for_Parsing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1991 paper by Lang&lt;/a&gt;. It does contain some simple examples. There are other papers on the web with such examples (I could copy some here, if really needed ... but since they are available with comments ...). One important point to keep in mind is that those diagram give you the a kind of purified version of the basic mechanism. It may be a lot more confused in actual parsers because this is encoded and interacting with the specific parsing process (This is the case for the Earley parser). But describing that is usually much too technical. I discuss a bit, about Earley's parser, in an answer to a question on another SE site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/27937/how-do-i-reconstruct-the-forest-of-syntax-trees-from-the-earley-vector&quot;&gt;How do I reconstruct the forest of syntax trees from the Earley vector?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting an infinite number of trees in a cubic structure should not be too surprising. After all, CF grammar can be pretty small and still represent an infinite number of trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would have tried to show sharing of subparts in your example, but I do not understand your notation. May be you can explain it: I could not draw trees from what you wrote. What is the + for? What does it mean to have an open parenthesis not preceded by a syntactic category?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:38.197" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T12:13:46.057" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2014-11-17T04:25:29.333" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notice the &lt;em&gt;consistent phonetic correspondence&lt;/em&gt; between the English -&lt;em&gt;(e)y&lt;/em&gt;- and the German -&lt;em&gt;(i)g&lt;/em&gt;- or -&lt;em&gt;(i)ch&lt;/em&gt;-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hone&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; - Hon&lt;strong&gt;ig&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;ester(day) - &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;estern, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;da&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; - Ta&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;e - Au&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;e, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palatalization&lt;/a&gt; of -&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;- in certain Germanic dialects, like English. The same English -&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;- is also the equivalent of the German -&lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;- or -&lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt;- (as in &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;ear - &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;ahr, &lt;em&gt;etc&lt;/em&gt;). Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Egg&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ei&lt;/em&gt; (pronounced &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt;), just like the other pairs above, are forms of the same word. Unlike the others, though, all of which are native to English and derive from an initial Germanic &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;-form, this one is inherited directly from the Nordic &lt;em&gt;egg&lt;/em&gt;, and its original form is actually in &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; (we know this because otherwise we'd expect Latin &lt;em&gt;o&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;o&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;um&lt;/em&gt;, for instance). Apparently, Nordics not only kept the original Germanic &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; intact, but sometimes even legitimate Germanic &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; (possibly a hypercorrective tendency).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastEditorUserId="2352" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T20:34:12.050" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T20:34:12.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9584" CreationDate="2014-11-17T05:22:07.923" Score="7" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is very common to hear two- and three-year-olds in English saying &quot;I falled down,&quot; &quot;She gived me it,&quot; etc. And the frequency of a verb form is inversely related to the age at which one is likely to master it, indeed to the point where past tenses such as &quot;lay&quot; and &quot;shone&quot; are becoming archaic in most dialects of NA English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the journey of a child's acquisition of verb (or noun/adjective) forms look like in a heavily inflected language, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/sketch.html&quot;&gt;Tundra Nenets&lt;/a&gt;, which inflects for subject, object, tense, and sixteen moods?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basque, which only has ten or fifteen inflected verbs, but they can have &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/AditzLaguntzaileaZubereraz.png&quot;&gt;a thousand forms&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attic or Epic Greek, with its hundreds of forms and countless manifestations of suppletion and deponency? (Obviously there would be little data on L1 acquisition here, but a language with similarly many irregularities?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=VfLZFtszOCQC&amp;amp;lpg=PA9&amp;amp;ots=ehjkjVrwC3&amp;amp;dq=noun%20classification%20in%20Koyukon%20athabascan&amp;amp;pg=PA9#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=noun%20classification%20in%20Koyukon%20athabascan&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;Koyukon Athabaskan&lt;/a&gt; (Alaska), with classificatory verbs specifying &quot;the shape, material, consistency, size, location, arrangement, and number of their nominal arguments&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polysynthetic languages, such as Mohawk?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking in particular for an analysis of which categories start to be incorporated correctly at what age, and what children do beforehand to express the same ideas. (For example, do they speak an inflected language as if it were more agglutinative?) Even a narrative of one child's journey in learning the grammar would be most welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T17:36:59.610" Title="L1 acquisition of morphology in heavily inflected languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9455" CreationDate="2014-11-17T08:01:07.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you are best served by keeping the verb and the particle together. The two items, e.g. &lt;em&gt;tänker på&lt;/em&gt;, express one specific meaning. In the case of &lt;em&gt;tänker på&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning is still relatively transparent (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_compositionality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;compositionality&lt;/a&gt;), but there are many cases where the meaning expressed by the phrasal verb construction is not readily deduced from the meaning of its individual parts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Catena&lt;/a&gt;-based &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dependency grammar&lt;/a&gt; is a good instrument to capture these kind of idiosyncratic constructions in a surface-oriented manner, which has been, and is proving, helpful to students. Regarding your problem, see in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29#Idiosyncratic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the paragraph linked here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T15:28:44.340" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T15:28:44.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9528" CreationDate="2014-11-17T13:03:39.727" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From this book in Asturian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D'una voz indíxena americana HURAKAN que'l cast. &lt;em&gt;huracán&lt;/em&gt; fexo llegar al fr. &lt;em&gt;ouragan&lt;/em&gt; y al it. &lt;em&gt;uragano&lt;/em&gt; (REW s.v. hurakan). L'ast., lo mesmo que'l port. &lt;em&gt;furacão&lt;/em&gt;, gall. &lt;em&gt;furacán&lt;/em&gt;, cat. &lt;em&gt;furacà&lt;/em&gt;, almiten el castellanismu orixinariamente aspiráu adautándolu con &lt;em&gt;f-&lt;/em&gt; acordies col sistema fonolóxicu que desconocía l'aspiración d'aniciu, a nun ser na variante or. de la nuesa llingua. Ye claro que la existencia de términos averaos fónicamente nestes llingües, como tola familia rellacionada col ast. &lt;em&gt;furar&lt;/em&gt; 'aufuracar', hebo perfavorecer l'adautación.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Kd-1FsueoIYC&amp;amp;pg=PA193&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Propuestes etimolóxiques (4) - Diccionariu Etimolóxicu de la Llingua Asturiana (DELLA)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Xosé Lluis García Arias (p.193)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As translated by guifa in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an indigenous word HURAKAN that the Castilian huracán gave origin to the French ouragan and the Italian uragana (REW s.v. hurakan). The Asturian form, along with the the Portuguese furacão, Galician furacán, Catalonian furacà, taking in the originally-aspirated Castilianism, adapting it with f- to fit the phonologic system that didn't have the initial aspiration, not being in the original version of our language. It's clear that the existence of phonetically-close terms in these languages, such as all those related to the Asturian furar 'aufuracar', aided the adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grasp of Asturian is pretty poor, but I think the gist is that as a loanword from Spanish to Portuguese/Galician/Catalan as well as Asturian, the other Iberian languages automatically adapted the &lt;em&gt;h-&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;f-&lt;/em&gt; in this loanword, &amp;quot;according to the phonological system&amp;quot; regardless of the original language's use of /h/. There is also the possibility of interference from the language gaining the word, here saying that the Asturian &lt;em&gt;furar&lt;/em&gt; favoured the adaptation. This was also the case with English &lt;em&gt;hurricane&lt;/em&gt;, where the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; was introduced through the influence of &lt;em&gt;hurry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T22:23:24.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9044" CreationDate="2014-11-17T13:06:16.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got a new ON dictionary here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has mainly later dialect words, but you will find more archaic ones too. Looks like it has just been released, so I guess by time more words from the period 800-1100 AD will show up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-11-17T13:06:16.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9540" CreationDate="2014-11-18T04:53:47.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As requested by user3898238 in his comment to mine, I try to provide an answer:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The verb &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt; is, wrongly, labeled as a subordinating conjunction for the possible reason that in English conjunctions precede the clause they head. Since a subordinating conjunction is absent, the program simply chooses the next available option, i.e. the initial word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My explanation for the program apparently seeing a subordinating structure, instead of a coordinating one, would be that the presence of the coordinating conjunction &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; forces a two-clause analysis. And many computer linguists (i.e. the people who build taggers, etc.) view coordination as akin to subordination (cf. the treatment of coordination in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning-Text_Theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MTT&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my personal experience, computer &quot;linguists&quot; make terrible linguists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T04:53:47.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2014-11-18T11:24:36.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English (and certainly in the Romance languages, and similar to what Tim Osborne mentions with older German), when you use the possessive adjective as a determiner, the noun is treated as definite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My book &lt;sub&gt;EN&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mio libru &lt;sub&gt;AST&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mi libro &lt;sub&gt;ES&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To force an indefinite interpretation, you can't just add in an indefinite article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*A my book, *My a book &lt;sub&gt;EN&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Un mio libru, *Mio un libru &lt;sub&gt;AST&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Un mi libro, *Mi un libro &lt;sub&gt;ES&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way in English is to switch to an alternate structure.  Ditto in the Romance languages, which language depending have different ways of adjusting structure so that the possessive adjective (if it stays as an adjective) loses its determinative prowess. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A book of mine. &lt;sub&gt;EN&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Un libru mio, un libro de mio &lt;sub&gt;AST&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Un libro mío &lt;sub&gt;ES&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd imagine that most languages with a definite/indefinite distinction have the possessive adjectives imply definiteness, with any other forms (via pronouns, etc) allowing for idefiniteness determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2014-11-18T11:24:36.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9541" CreationDate="2014-11-18T16:47:11.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned with &quot;syllabic&quot;, in PIE some consonants could be considered semi-vowels, that is they could become phonetic vowels beween consonants (vocalize). &#xA;For instance, &lt;code&gt;u̯ -&amp;gt; u&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;i̯ -&amp;gt; i&lt;/code&gt; Some researchers also suppose that &lt;code&gt;r, l, n, m&lt;/code&gt; (sonorants) could also vocalize into &lt;code&gt;r̥, l̥, m̥, n̥&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually nobody knows how the laryngeals were pronounced. I encountered authoritative sources that claimed that laryngeals could not be vocalized at all and other ones which claimed that laryngeals in fact vocalized at least between consonants. Indeed it is difficult not to vocalize the laryngeal in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pa̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The issue is complicated by the fact that syllabification rules are largely unknown for PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for instance the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eu̯a̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;grandfather&quot;. It can be syllabified as [aewaos] or as [xeuxos]. In support of the first theory speaks the fact that other Eurasiatic and Nostratic languages had a similar word for father (ʔab/ʔaw/ʔabbā/abu in Afro-Asiatic, appe in Uralic, ap in Dravidian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also the PIE word a̯epa̯ &quot;water&quot;. As you may know that p often corresponds to k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt; in various languages (optics/ocular, quintic/pentagon, wolf [f &amp;lt; p]/Russian volk, Latin vesper/ Russian vecher [ch &amp;lt; k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;]). As such the word &lt;code&gt;a̯epa̯&lt;/code&gt; seems strikingly similar to the word &quot;a̯eq̆a̯&quot; which also means water. But a̯eq̆a̯ is sometimes considered a borrowing from non-Indo-European (but related) languages. So if a common ancestor of those languages and Indo-European (say, Eurasiatic) had the word, it could be reflexed in PIE as a̯epa̯ and in another offspring as aqua (and then borrowed in this form to PIE). Thus the laryngeal a̯ likely corresponds to just /a/ is sister families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another theory. It claims that at least in some words the laryngeal a̯ corresponds to /t/. This could be dialectal or due to borrowings from sister families. Back to the word for grandfather &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eu̯a̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, there is also a PIE word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teuta̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;kin&quot;, &quot;clan&quot;. As you can see, it corresponds to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eu̯a̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; up to the gender. And it gave a lot of reflexes meaning &quot;grandfather&quot;, &quot;father&quot; or &quot;elder relative&quot;. Consider English &quot;dad&quot;, Russian &lt;em&gt;дед&lt;/em&gt; &quot;grandfather&quot;, &lt;em&gt;дядя&lt;/em&gt; &quot;uncle&quot;, тётя &quot;aunt&quot;, Ukrainian and South Russian тятя &quot;father&quot; etc. Semantically, the word meaning &quot;kin&quot;, &quot;clan&quot;, or &quot;tribe&quot; could evolve as &quot;grandfathership&quot;, a group of people headed by a &quot;grandfather&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this point of view the word for water &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eq̆a̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;flowing water body&quot; would be related to the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;flowing water&quot; (which again corresponds up to a gender), compare for instance, Russian течь &quot;to flow&quot;, &quot;leak&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third example being the PIE words &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ecsom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tecsom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, both meaning &quot;sharp tool, chopper&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that in PIE the feminine suffix -a̯ also stood for collective number and for abstract nouns. Thus, if &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teq̆os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a stream, then &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teq̆a̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would mean &quot;a set of streams&quot;, &quot;flow&quot;, &quot;river&quot;, compare &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nebhos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;cloud&quot; (the -os is suffix here rather than ending) -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nebhesa̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;set of clouds&quot;, &quot;sky&quot; (Russian &quot;nebesa&quot;). Similarly, if &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teutos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a relative then logically &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teuta̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is set of relatives, kin, clan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T02:24:19.313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T02:24:19.313" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-18T17:02:09.370" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a CRF parser that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/datamade/name-parser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;splits a name string into components&lt;/a&gt;. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bob Belcher =&amp;gt; &amp;lt;GivenName&amp;gt;Bob&amp;lt;/GivenName&amp;gt; &amp;lt;Surname&amp;gt;Belcher&amp;lt;/Surname&amp;gt;&#xA;Belcher, Bob =&amp;gt; &amp;lt;Surname&amp;gt;Belcher,&amp;lt;/Surname&amp;gt; &amp;lt;GivenName&amp;gt;Bob&amp;lt;/GivenName&amp;gt; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for research on typical phonological differences between given names and surnames, particularly in the United States. Something like the results on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/Papers/2007/fredrickson_annie.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonological differences between male, female, and unisex first names&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already know about &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_family_name_affixes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;surname affixes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5548" LastEditorUserId="5548" LastEditDate="2014-11-19T06:02:45.380" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T06:02:45.380" Title="Phonological Differences Between Given Names and Surnames" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2014-11-20T14:08:53.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9535" CreationDate="2014-11-19T00:43:42.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be being thrown by &quot;clause&quot;, which need not mean &quot;sentence&quot;. Consider the following pair of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) [&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; I can't believe [&lt;strong&gt;SBAR&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; John went without me.]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) [&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; I can't believe [&lt;strong&gt;SBAR&lt;/strong&gt; __ John went without me.]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases we have a sentence that contains a main and a subordinate clause. In (2), the subordinating conjunction (which goes by several other names as well, e.g. &quot;complementizer&quot;) is &quot;empty&quot; (for various, theory-dependent definitions of &lt;em&gt;empty&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T00:43:42.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-19T01:08:45.597" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sprachgesetze, verbatimally laws of language, are stochastic statements about features of a language based on empirical evaluation of a corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sprachgesetze I found are mainly quantitative statements about features on syntactic (piotrowki-law) or lexical level. Do you know of any Sprachgesetz concerning semantics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T05:45:40.310" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T05:45:40.310" Title="What Sprachgesetze are suggested by Quantitative Linguistics on semantic level?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-12-03T21:06:09.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9562" CreationDate="2014-11-19T07:05:41.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some laws concerning polysemy. Please look at: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lql.uni-trier.de/index.php/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lql.uni-trier.de/index.php/Main_Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5554" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T07:05:41.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-19T11:47:15.833" Score="4" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My mother and &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; went to the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My mother and &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; went to the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many (most?) English speakers today will accept both of these as grammatical. But it would be hard to argue that they represent different syntactic structures. So how do various linguistic frameworks account for situations like these in which multiple cases can be assigned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: There's quite a bit of discussion in the comments about what role case plays in English today, and what it would mean for cases to be fixed or not. When I asked this question I was thinking of case as an inflectional category which is applied to nouns (in English only pronouns) in certain contexts. The Nominative and Accusative cases do not have an intrinsic meaning connected with the subject or object, but get assigned to constituents according to various rules. Potential English rules could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assign the nominative case to the subject constituent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assign the accusative case to a noun following a conjunction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assign the accusative case to all other nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various frameworks would formulate these assignment rules in different ways, but I suspect they'd end up being quite similar in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first example was ungrammatical these rules would suffice. But since it isn't, and if we don't consider there to be any evidence for different syntaxes, then can a list of rules like this allow for both cases to be assigned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably some frameworks which don't assign cases according to rules like this; I'd appreciate answers from frameworks that do, such as generative grammar. Note that my example is from English but I don't think this is an English-only phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T09:43:48.840" Title="How do various frameworks account for situations when multiple cases can be assigned?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;framework&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9564" CreationDate="2014-11-19T19:07:58.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems pretty straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Halliday's &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt; standpoint, both sentences are &lt;strong&gt;equivalent&lt;/strong&gt;, since they deliver the same message and have exactly the same communicative implications — in this particular case, they both denote two acting subjects: &lt;code&gt;my mother&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;generativist&lt;/em&gt; standpoint, the major thing that matters is whether the sentence is &lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; or not. In other words, whether or not a native speaker of a certain language would tend to use this formulation in their speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have a major caveat: There are two essentially different approaches: &lt;em&gt;descriptive grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prescriptive grammar&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Descriptive grammar&lt;/em&gt; refers to the structure of a language as it is &lt;strong&gt;actually used&lt;/strong&gt; by native speakers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Prescriptive grammar&lt;/em&gt; refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it &lt;strong&gt;should be used&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no strict choice of Descriptive versus Prescriptive. AFAIU, in Western culture the &lt;em&gt;Descriptive&lt;/em&gt; approach takes over. Hence, the difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;em&gt;Descriptive&lt;/em&gt; grammar, it can be said that both &lt;code&gt;My mother and I&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;My mother and me&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;em&gt;Prescriptive&lt;/em&gt; grammar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/23535/tom-and-i-or-tom-and-me&quot;&gt;someone may say&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As to the people who tell you that you should always use &quot;I&quot; in conjunction with a name: they are &lt;strong&gt;WRONG, WRONG, WRONG&lt;/strong&gt;! Ignore them! It's a form of &quot;hypercorrection&quot;--when you &quot;correct&quot; something that's already right based on some rule that doesn't actually apply.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another example of Nominative &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; versus Accusative &lt;code&gt;me&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ucsc.edu/2002/04/107.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Professor Geoffrey Pullum&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If someone knocks at your door, and you say &quot;Who's there?&quot; and what you hear in response&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is &quot;It is I,&quot; don't let them in. It's no one you want to know.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2014-11-19T19:07:58.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-20T07:31:40.923" Score="-1" ViewCount="4660" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to get a summarized idea about A-movement.&#xA;I wish you could help me out with this . &#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5561" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T13:19:58.650" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T13:19:58.650" Title="What is A-movement ? Can I find a short essay that can explain it?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9568" CreationDate="2014-11-20T07:52:17.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_movement#A-movement_vs._A-bar_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here for the distinction between&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;A-movement&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;A'-movement&lt;/strong&gt; (=A-bar-movement).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In short, A-movement moves syntactic objects (words, phrases) into positions where grammatical functions can be assigned. See the examples and the explanations on the page referenced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please note that the concept of A-movement is taken for granted only in Government and Binding (GB) Theory, and related offshoots. The textbooks by Andrew Radford provide a very good introduction to the distinction you ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T07:52:17.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-20T13:01:36.063" Score="-1" ViewCount="773" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write a simple program in Java, which being fed with English texts will be able to generate word usage statisitcs (e.g. topmost frequently used words in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that purpose I need a database, which can provide me with [word to lemma] entries. Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;went -&amp;gt; to go&#xA;me -&amp;gt; I&#xA;slowed -&amp;gt; to slow&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on. Where can I get such a database?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-20T13:19:30.917" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T13:28:07.567" Title="Looking for word to lemma free database" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9570" CreationDate="2014-11-20T13:11:00.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Denis, you might want to have a look at the perseus project database: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T13:11:00.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9570" CreationDate="2014-11-20T13:28:07.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are opens source tools that do that. They are called lemmatisers -  &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford Core NLP includes one.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2014-11-20T13:28:07.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9442" CreationDate="2014-11-20T13:36:44.263" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aller#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; (a source I should perhaps have checked before asking), the &lt;em&gt;all-&lt;/em&gt; forms ultimately derive from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vulgar Latin &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alare#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;alare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (attested in the 7th century &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichenau_Glosses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reichenau Glosses&lt;/a&gt;). This has traditionally been explained as deriving from Latin &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambulare#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; via or together with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambler#French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ambler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (compare Old Provençal &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amblar#Old_Proven.C3.A7al&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;amblar&lt;/a&gt;, Italian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambiare#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ambiare&lt;/a&gt;, Romanian &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umbla#Romanian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;umbla&lt;/a&gt;), but this explanation is phonologically problematic. Several theories have been put forth since the 17th century to explain how ambulare could have become aller.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aller#cite_note-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; Since at least the 18th century, some have suggested that aller derives not from Latin but from Celtic&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichenau_Glosses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;, Gaulish *aliu: compare Welsh &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elen#Welsh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;elen&lt;/a&gt; (“I was going”), Cornish ellev (“I may go”), and also Franco-Provençal alâ, allar and Friulan &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%C3%A2#Friulian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lâ&lt;/a&gt; (“to go”) (compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lin#Friulian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lin&lt;/a&gt; (“we go”), lât (“gone”)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vado#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vādō&lt;/a&gt; (“go”) supplies the present tense forms and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ire#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;īre&lt;/a&gt;, present active infinitive of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eo#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eō&lt;/a&gt;, supplies the future and conditional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As was explained to me by @Sindry, this type of mixed etymology is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppletion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suppletion&lt;/a&gt;, instances of which  are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used lexical items in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T22:20:52.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-20T13:52:26.050" Score="7" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually it is assumed that in PIE the verb forms for the singular first, second, and third person are respectively -m-, -s-, -t- (cfr. Latin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The personal pronouns, instead, have the second and third person inverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this the case? I am no expert, but I thought that personal endings could have formed by agglutination with some forms of personal pronous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is very much related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4425/what-is-the-origin-of-t-and-s-words-for-second-and-third-person-possesive&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5563" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T03:04:00.293" Title="Why do PIE verbs have suffixes -m-, -s-, -t-, while personal pronouns have m-, t-, s-?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9458" CreationDate="2014-11-21T00:15:47.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends who you talk to, but I think there's some logic in saying that a clause is simply another name for a verb phrase. (Ignoring non-verbal clauses.) Two verbs mean two clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Infinitive arguments can have their own set of independent arguments and adjuncts. Here is a complex example, but I think it illustrates that there are two clauses quite clearly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Last night&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;at the bus stop&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;the son&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;wished&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;strong&gt;the father&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;to read&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;a story&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;in bed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;when they next went to grandma's house&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two locative adjuncts: &lt;em&gt;at the bus stop&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in bed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Two temporal adjuncts: &lt;em&gt;Last night&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;when they next went to grandma's house&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Two subject arguments: &lt;strong&gt;the son&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;the father&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;And the infinitive verb has its own set of object arguments which are not arguments of &lt;em&gt;wish&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;a story&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strip all that back and you get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The son wished to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than propose that it has a different structure I think it's best to say that it has the same structure: two clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-21T00:56:39.957" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T00:56:39.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9587" CreationDate="2014-11-21T07:58:20.287" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2005, the IPA phonetical alphabet got extended by including the labiodental flap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labiodental_flap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The wikipedia-page shows a good overview.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am wondering if the labiodental flap is restricted to be only an initial phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone got any example of words using the labiodental flap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T03:40:33.950" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T03:40:33.950" Title="Is the labiodental flap used only in the beginning of words?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-21T08:06:45.643" Score="-1" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vowels can change from short vowels to long vowels in time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from a diachronic perspective, what is happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please fill in with some examples of vowels that have been prolonged and that have been used to reconstruct language families using the comparative method?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-04T15:59:12.257" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T15:59:12.257" Title="What is the linguistic process behind prolonging of vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9580" CreationDate="2014-11-21T12:33:02.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what you mean by &quot;prolonged&quot;, but if you want to know how long vowels can appear in a language that earlier had none of them, one way of it is when a consonant between 2 vowels disappears and the vowels merge. The Turkic and Mongolian languages that have long vowels got them this way, the earliest Turkic and Mongolian languages had no short vs. long distinction. For example, the Old Turkic word &lt;strong&gt;oɣul&lt;/strong&gt; (son) developed like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;oɣul&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;oul&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;ool&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;oːl&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now in Altay, Tuvan, etc. it is &lt;strong&gt;oːl&lt;/strong&gt;, with a long vowel, spelled &lt;strong&gt;оол&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T12:33:02.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9548" CreationDate="2014-11-21T17:36:59.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a classic reference on the topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/mithun/pdfs/1989%20Acquisition%20of%20polysynthesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mithun M. 1989. The acquisition of polysynthesis. &lt;em&gt;J Child Lang.&lt;/em&gt; 16(2):285-312.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the paper, she gives five case studies of children learn Mohawk, a famously complex polysynthetic language spoken in New York and Quebec.  Her tentative conclusion is that for very young speakers phonology is more important than morphology: children start with stressed syllables and work outward from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5575" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T17:36:59.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2014-11-21T21:55:42.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not only word-initial though it does seem that it's almost always syllable-initial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many examples, assembled at &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/1/article/262?htmlOnce=yes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'a cross linguistic lexicon of the labial flap'&lt;/a&gt; by Olson and Hajek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the O&amp;amp;H examples show it occurring in word-initial or intervocalic position, but there is at least one example of it in a consonant cluster (tho heterosyllabic), from Karang (Niger-Congo, Cameroon):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/pekⱱekⱱek/ ‘very high’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a single example in the O&amp;amp;H dataset of a word-final occurrence, from Dii (Niger-Congo, Cameroon):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ɓáⱱ/ 'sound of a horse galloping'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2014-11-21T21:55:42.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9238" CreationDate="2014-11-22T02:07:50.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have enough reputation to put this as a comment, so I'll just leave it here: one way that a sound change can occur between two PoA without ever moving through all of the intermediate positions is through secondary articulations that gradually become more prominent, while the original primary articulation is lenited or lost. This is in fact present in your example of &quot;labiovelar stop to labial&quot;, and is also the reason for phenomena like r-labialization (many english varieties have actual phonetic labialization of /r/, without losing the rhotic articulation.) While these sort of changes appear to &quot;jump&quot; from one articulation to another, the process can still be a gradual one, since both articulations can be present at the same time.&#xA;Besides labialization, some other secondary articulations that can become primary are palatalization and glottalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes like debuccalization are probably a true example of &quot;skipping&quot; discontinuously from one articulation to another.&#xA;Another example would be the change t &gt; k commonly seem in Polynesian languages, which seems to occur without passing through all the &quot;intermediate&quot; articulations that are physically between them in the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T02:07:50.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9594" CreationDate="2014-11-22T03:49:21.027" Score="5" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Malay there is a syllable-final &lt;code&gt;-h&lt;/code&gt; with some unique properties distinct from the &quot;normal&quot; syllable-initial &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt;. But in all the accounts of the language I can only see a single symbol used, the regular unadorned &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Malay phonology&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/h/ is pronounced clearly between like vowels, as in &lt;em&gt;Pahang&lt;/em&gt;. Elsewhere it is a very light sound, and is frequently silent, as in &lt;em&gt;hutan ~ utan&lt;/em&gt; ('forest'), &lt;em&gt;sahut ~ saut&lt;/em&gt; ('answer'), like Romance languages. The exception to this tendency is initial /h/ from Arabic loans such as hakim ('judge').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Lonely Planet Malay Phrasebook, 2nd Edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;h&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;always pronounced. Stressed a little more strongly than in English, as if you were sighing. This heavy pronunciation is especially evident for words of Arabic origin, when the 'h' appears between two vowels that are the same;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(h)&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;at the end of a word, in brackets, a breathier, slightly prolonged version of the preceding vowel sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what options do we have when we want to do narrow transcriptions to illustrate the actual sounds in detail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T05:28:26.823" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T05:28:26.823" Title="Are there letters or diacritics in the IPA suitable for narrow/phonetic descriptions of the Malay final -h?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9612" CreationDate="2014-11-22T07:41:24.810" Score="1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;The logo for Wikimedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary project&lt;/a&gt; features a narrow transcription IPA of the term:&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vub9f.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding English syllabification produces [ˈwɪk.ʃənˌrɪ] (&lt;code&gt;WICK-shun-rih&lt;/code&gt;), which I find strange.  I personally pronounce it as [ˈwɪk.ʃən.ɛːɹˌi] (&lt;code&gt;WICK-shun-air-ee&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that some dialects allow dropping syllables in fluent speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the last syllable.  The ending feels quite wrong; in particular, I remember learning about a specific preclusion against lax vowels word-finally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a problem here?  Is there a dialect that pronounces this word in this way?  If so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5302" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T03:13:48.100" Title="Correctness of Wiktionary IPA Translation" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9589" CreationDate="2014-11-22T11:00:31.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Malay textbook I have (&lt;a href=&quot;http://booksshare.net/books/lunguistics/dorofeeva-t-v/2006/files/dorofeeva-malayskiy-yas.djvu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Дорофеева, Т. В.; Кукушкина, Е. С.. Учебник малайского (малайзийского) языка. М. Академия гуманитарных исследований, 2006&lt;/a&gt;) does use a special IPA symbol for the word-final &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; and the one between different vowels:  &lt;strong&gt;boleh&lt;/strong&gt; /boleʰ/, &lt;strong&gt;tahu&lt;/strong&gt; /taʰu/. See page 26.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The textbook is very detailed in its phonetic part and uses the IPA to explain the pronunciation of the alophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T14:47:45.217" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T14:47:45.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9589" CreationDate="2014-11-22T11:24:03.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cited Wikipedia article is extremely weak. “Elsewhere it is a very light sound, and is frequently silent, as in hutan ~ utan ('forest'), sahut ~ saut ('answer'), like Romance languages.” First of all, this is ungrammatical (it should be “as in Romance languages”). More significantly, it appears that the anonymous author does not understand the difference between phonology, phonetics, and spelling. The &quot;h&quot; in (for example) French “homme” is not a “very light sound” but merely a historic spelling for /zero/. Malay /h/ is a phoneme, which can be realised phonetically in different ways, though to call it “a very light sound” is not exactly the pinnacle of phonetic sophistication. Insofar as it is a phoneme, it is legitimate to represent it with a single symbol /h/ in phonological transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T12:05:31.300" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T12:05:31.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-22T11:50:23.240" Score="2" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me with the analysis of copular or linking verbs in X-bar theory. What would be the position of subject in sentences like &lt;code&gt;&quot;Mary is beautiful&quot;&lt;/code&gt;. Is &quot;Mary&quot; the theme of adjectival predicate &quot;beautiful&quot; or the theme of &quot;be&quot; verb is? See the X-bar trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8BeZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;two potential trees for &amp;#39;Mary is beautiful&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it makes more sense for it to be the theme of adjective (Fig 2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T05:08:02.633" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T05:08:02.633" Title="X-bar analysis of Copular verbs?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2014-11-22T12:22:55.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The transcription /ˈdɪkʃ(ə)n(ə)ɹɪ/ is not very good either. In British “received pronunciation” you can say either /ˈdɪkʃənɹɪ/ or /ˈdɪkʃənəɹɪ/, but you cannot say */ˈdɪkʃnɹɪ/ or */ˈdɪkʃnəɹɪ/. The twice bracketed /(ə)/ is misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T12:22:55.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-22T16:13:04.620" Score="3" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this webpage &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/nonfiniteclauses.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/nonfiniteclauses.html&lt;/a&gt; prof.Geoffrey Pullum's explains basic syntactic tests used in distinguishing raised from ordinary subjects/verbs. The verb &quot;stop&quot; passes the first test for raising verbs: &quot;It stopped raining&quot;, which shows that &quot;stop&quot; doesn't impose selection restriction on the type of the subject, taking &quot;dummy it&quot; in this sentence. The other test is passivizing the non-finite catenative complement, applied to this sentence it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;HP stopped controlling the programs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which after alternating the voice of the non-finite clause, and taking the object in this clause as the subject in the matrix, becomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Programs stopped being controlled by HP.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the sentence doesn't mean the same as the active one, which, according to the given criteria, should mean that &quot;stop&quot; is not a raising verb in the previous sentence. &quot;Controlling the programs by HP was stopped (e.g by the authorities)&quot; is how I read it, meaning &quot;Programs were no longer controlled by HP&quot;, rather than &quot;Controlling the programs was stopped by HP&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, the typical &quot;raised subject/object&quot; is semantically connected only to the non-finite clause, while with &quot;aspectual verbs&quot; such as &quot;stop&quot;, &quot;begin&quot;, &quot;continue&quot; the subject is obviously the &quot;doer&quot; of &quot;stopping&quot;, &quot;beginning&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read on the internet and in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that &quot;stop&quot; and similar aspectual verbs are to be understood as &quot;raising&quot; verbs. I'd like to know if &quot;stop&quot; is to be analyzed as a raising verb in the example I provided and if so, whether such analysis has any bearing on the relation between the aspectual verb and its verb complement, where the former can be seen as a phase in the event described by the later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5492" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T05:08:39.243" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T01:53:02.837" Title="Raising aspectual verb &quot;stop&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34655" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:44:21.870" Score="6" ViewCount="601" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which mutually intelligible language groups are spoken by more than 1 million people in Cameroon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Cameroon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is not very helpful. the map below is the most useful thing I found thus far, which teaches me that there are 5 main language families. It doesn't tell me if languages in those families are mutually intelligible and how many people speak those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I want to know is that I'll be in Douala next week and I'd like to spend some time on helping people &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ebola_translation_task_force&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;translate Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; articles about Ebola into African languages. At this point it's not very clear which languages would make sense for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v4AyF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Languages in Cameroon, Nigeria and Benin&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2991" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T14:34:16.573" Title="Which mutually intelligible language groups are spoken by more than 1 million people in Cameroon?" Tags="&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-22T10:08:40.650" Score="3" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a question that bothered me for a long time when I am learning another language.&#xA;English is not my first language, so when I was being taught, they told me all these grammars like like the tenses, single/plural and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got confused all the time why they have to make the language so complicated themselves. Why can we just say &quot;He eat a lot.&quot; in stead of &quot;He eats a lot.&quot;? I mean both sentences are understandable but the rules of English say the former is wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is &quot;What's the use of Grammar if it makes the things more complicated?&quot; Since people have higher possibility to make grammatical mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5589" OwnerDisplayName="Clinttt" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T01:24:20.597" Title="What's the use of Grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-22T10:28:35.530" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very short version: the use of grammar is that you could not have asked this question without using grammar!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are making one big assumption, and as a result, you miss the main point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grammar was devised by people trying to create a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in some cases, this has actually happened. But in general his is just a &lt;strong&gt;huge&lt;/strong&gt; misunderstanding. Grammar is made by the people that speak the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is what people use to communicate with each other. Over time, language evolves, it changes. And over a time of thousands of years, nobody ever wrote a grammar book! Well, probably that also had to do with &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; not having been invented yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even after we started to write, most people never saw a grammar book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, &lt;strong&gt;everybody knows grammar rules!&lt;/strong&gt; Because grammar is not what someone writes down for you to learn, it is how people use the words in a language to make meaningful sentences!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's the use of grammar? It makes it possible for people to use a language. Without grammar, I would expect you to understand the meaning of the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and walk come have john dog home some the oranges after&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used all the words from a normal English sentence, but I have willingly removed that pesky grammar that makes it difficult. So my words are in no particular order, I did not conjugate any verbs, and for good measure I removed all punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's see what happens when I apply &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; to those words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After walking the dog, John came home and had some oranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am not going to give you a list of all the grammar rules I used to form that sentence, but there are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of them! I can use them without even &lt;em&gt;knowing they exist!&lt;/em&gt;. Native speakers learn the grammar rules of their mother-tongue when they learn how to speak. Nobody teaches a baby how to conjugate verbs, yet they learn by copying and understanding patterns. A grammar book is nothing else than a collection of those same rules that children learn by themselves when they are quite young. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes it seem difficult is that those rules are different between languages, so the rules for English may look very new and unfamiliar compared to the rules of your native language. That may seem unfair and complicated, but trust me, an English speaker learning your language has the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2947" OwnerDisplayName="oerkelens" LastEditorUserId="2947" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T19:18:00.983" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T19:18:00.983" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-22T13:30:47.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar is what allows you to connect the meanings of individual words into a more complicated meaning that connects different concepts together. Without some agreement about how we do that, we can't express these more complex concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, &quot;He eat a lot&quot; is perfectly understandable. We say that it's a mistake because it isn't the normal way of expressing that concept, but it still gets the point across. But consider a sentence such as &quot;John eaten alligator&quot;. Is that supposed to mean &quot;John was eaten by an alligator&quot; or &quot;John has eaten alligator&quot; (quite common in the southern US)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you could argue that insisting on &quot;he eats&quot; instead of &quot;he eat&quot; is unnecessary complication and just an opportunity to make mistakes. But it does have some use, by adding redundancy to the language, which gives you more than one chance to understand. For example, suppose that, in a noisy room, somebody asks &quot;Who wants a drink?&quot; Because of the noise, you're not quite sure if they said &quot;You wants a drink?&quot; However, that would be ungrammatical, so you assume they asked &quot;Who wants a drink?&quot;, rather than &quot;You want a drink?&quot; If we didn't use a different form of the verb for the second and third person, you'd have to ask them to repeat themself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This answer was written while the question was still over on English Language and Usage SE. I suspect it doesn't meet the standards that would be expected of an answer here on Linguistics so if it's inappropriate, just yell and I'll delete it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5585" OwnerDisplayName="David Richerby" LastEditorUserId="5585" LastEditDate="2014-11-22T19:07:57.540" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T19:07:57.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-22T16:09:07.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if after he/she/it the verb in present tense had no ending -s the grammar would have to describe this. But your suggestion is naive, it would be impossible to destinguish between present indicative and present subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find the single ending -s in the present tense too difficult you should learn Latin where each of the six verb forms in present tense has a different ending. Besides,how is it in your mother tongue? Do you think your mother tongue is a language without a system? And the description of how the system of a language works is called grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And such language systems evolve over a very long time, more than a thousand years.&#xA;How a language system works is not the decision of a single person. In the long evolution of English this language has managed to get rid of five verb endings in present tense compared to the six endings in Latin. A great achievement of simplification. If the community of speakers has kept the last ending it has a cause. Perhaps you think about what ambiguities would arise without this last ending. Think of the plural problem in English. Sometimes singular and plural have the same form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" OwnerDisplayName="rogermue" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T16:09:07.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-22T16:54:56.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never learned English grammar. English is my &quot;mother tongue&quot;, in other words I picked it up at home by hearing my parents speak it, by reading books, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I went to school I only learned French grammar, Latin grammar, German and Greek grammar, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd argue that you learn the &quot;rules&quot; of English grammar in order to learn to speak the kind of English that is &quot;natural&quot; and in a sense &quot;unlearned&quot; to 'native' English-speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like me, my brother's elementary/primary school was French, where we learned the rules of French grammar. When he was sent to an English school aged about 10, he said to his parents, &quot;But I don't know the rules of English &lt;em&gt;grammaire&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and they replied, &quot;Don't worry: you already know them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally I hear rules like, in English you would say, &quot;the little red house&quot; and not &quot;the red little house&quot;. Rules like these are taught, and they are true, but I never learned them: I don't even realize that such rules exist, it just sounds a bit 'wrong' if you say it the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that Grammar is necessary for comprehension is going a bit far. I spent a year in Italy where I would &quot;get by&quot; with just vocabulary that I picked up, without learning grammar such as how to decline verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;The Italian mine to hear like this.&quot; You can just about make out what I'm trying to say, even without grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically a country like France spoke many regional dialects. Pronunciation was different in each region, words were different, words were spelled as they were pronounced. The laws and law courts were in Latin. After a while they wanted to change that: they wanted the laws to be in French, so that ordinary people could understand them. In order to do that they needed to change French: to define French: to make French unambiguous, and uniform across the whole country. So they defined rules of grammar and spelling, and taught them in school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="ChrisW" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T16:54:56.457" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-22T17:12:25.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short and simple answer: grammar is natural and without it there is no language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer answer: in the beginning there is pidgin. Pidgins develop where a group of people with no common language have a pressing need to communicate, often related to work or trade. Pidgins have a lexis sufficient to talk about work/trade, and barely any grammar though that also depends on how you define 'grammar'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pidgin may migrate out of the situation that generated it, into a domestic setting, and then it becomes a creole. A creole has a larger lexis to accomodate domestic items and starts to develop grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day, depending on social and political factors more than on linguistics, the grammar and lexis of the creole might be codified into grammar books and dictionaries, which allow it to be taught in schools. Now, it is a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note here are that the grammar arises naturally - there is no sinister 'they' inventing grammar, only a 'they' who codify it. Why does the grammar arise naturally? Because grammar is needed for the creole or the language to function effectively. A pidgin might get by with minimal grammar because it has minimal functions, but the extended functions of a creole or language need grammar to avoid chaos. Consider this  short sentence... a verb with two arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John shot David&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know, in English, that John had a gun and David recieved a bullet, and it all happened in the past. We know that because the rules of English grammar tell us what the word order should be and to mark the verb as past. Without those grammar rules all we would have is two people and a shooting, at some indefinate time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about third person -s...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is already a simplification. In OE the third person was conjugated with some weird symbols that I can't reproduce here, and pronounced as &lt;em&gt;-eth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ath&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-th&lt;/em&gt;. In ME those three were simplified into a single &lt;em&gt;-eth&lt;/em&gt; used for all third persons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He eateth a lot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which in Modern English is simplified even further to &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, used to mark that person as being absent from the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" OwnerDisplayName="Roaring Fish" LastActivityDate="2014-11-22T17:12:25.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-22T22:24:13.337" Score="1" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been researching the word &quot;Idora&quot; for a couple years now in hopes of discovering the meaning as it applies to the defunct trolley park &quot;Idora Park&quot; formerly in Youngstown, Ohio. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Idora Park&quot; was named as the result of a contest in 1899. The local newspaper simply stated that the word was believed to be &quot;indian&quot; and was the former name of &quot;Lanterman Falls&quot;- a waterfall very close to the property. The falls were in fact known as Idora Falls, as can be seen in a 1874 atlas of Youngstown. The earliest reference I can find to the falls being associated with the name is in a Mahoning Register newspaper article from 1872. The article claims that the falls have been inaccurately referred to as the Mahoning Falls, while the falls in fact exist on a tributary or affluent of the Mahoning River. Instead, the author confidently goes on to proclaim the correct name as the Idora Falls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who do not know the Ohio River well, Big Beaver branches north from the river before it even reaches the Ohio border. One of the branches of Big Beaver is the Mahoning River. Once the Mahoning reaches Youngstown, there is a small branch that heads south currently known as Mill Creek. It is on this small tributary that the falls flow next to an old mill now known as Lanterman's Mill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the origin and meaning of &quot;Idora&quot; as used to name places like the &quot;Idora Falls&quot;? Is there a source that the Youngstown author drew from to declare the name with such confidence? The name &quot;Idora&quot; doesnt appear on any map of the Ohio or Mahoning River that I have seen, yet the 1872 community apparently thought the author's claim held some weight. I greatly appreciate any help you can send me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZFQE2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Announcement of Idora&amp;#39;s new name in Nov. 25, 1899 issue of Youngstown Vindicator&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5567" LastEditorUserId="5567" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T22:52:19.727" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T22:52:19.727" Title="What is the origin and meaning of the word/name &quot;Idora&quot;? (Shortened)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;&lt;toponomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9609" CreationDate="2014-11-22T23:57:04.597" Score="0" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;zuo4cuo4 is the pinyin-notation for 做错 = doing wrong.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To my ear zuo4 and cuo4 sound very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need the IPA notation to understand the difference in articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T15:50:43.877" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T15:50:43.877" Title="What is the IPA notation for Chinese zuo4cuo4 做错?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9608" CreationDate="2014-11-23T00:11:44.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pinyin:&lt;/strong&gt; zuò cuò&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IPA:&lt;/strong&gt; [t͡swo˥˩  t͡sʰwo˥˩]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between the Pinyin &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; is that the latter is aspirated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T14:50:23.420" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T14:50:23.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9608" CreationDate="2014-11-23T00:45:42.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also the issue of tone sandhi. In this combination zuo4 does not descend as low as as cuo4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T00:45:42.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9574" CreationDate="2014-11-23T03:04:00.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy (though of course conjectural) to connect 3sg -t in verbs with the t- of the demonstrative pronoun, which (as I said in my comment) actually only has s- in the masc. and fem. nom. Then the questions become (1) whether this t- has anything to do with the 2sg pronoun tu, and (2) whether the 2sg verbal ending -s has anything to do with the s- of the masc./fem. nom. of the demonstrative pronoun. I suppose a semantic change from second person to third person or vice versa is not impossible, but I would wager that the answer to both questions is no, and the similarities are coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T03:04:00.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2014-11-23T03:13:48.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lax vowels generally cannot end words, but there are exceptions. A more complete rule would be that English has no stressed word-final lax vowels. The unstressed vowel /ə/ can come at the end of words like &quot;comma&quot; and, in non-rhotic accents such as Received Pronunciation (the traditional &quot;posh&quot; British accent), &quot;letter&quot;. Another unstressed final vowel that is lax in Received Pronunciation is /ɪ/, which in this position corresponds to the sound pronounced /i/ in other varieties of English. I understand that the lax pronunciation is one of the more old-fashioned features of RP, and it isn't widely used in modern British pronunciation (the change from [ɪ] to [i] is referred to as &quot;happy-tensing&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T03:13:48.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9608" CreationDate="2014-11-23T03:30:45.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA just provides a set of letters and diacritics with descriptions of what sounds they represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't provide rules for how these must be used for any particular language. Hence you will find for many languages, including English and Mandarin Chinese, that many sources will use the IPA a bit differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English Wiktionary doesn't yet provide IPA for this term but I'm requesting it. In the meantime, by piecing together pieces of other entries there I'd say the current editors working on Chinese would render it into IPA this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/t͡su̯ɔ⁵¹  t͡sʰu̯ɔ⁵¹/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think tone sandhi is going to change it again so I'll provide an update when I have one...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer is in. Check the new English Wiktionary entries for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%81%9A%E9%94%99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;做错&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%81%9A%E9%8C%AF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;做錯&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/t͡su̯ɔ⁵¹⁻⁵³ t͡sʰu̯ɔ⁵¹/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T08:23:03.850" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T08:23:03.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-23T06:16:07.403" Score="2" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;To mark what is being regarded in Japanese is について (&lt;em&gt;nitsuite&lt;/em&gt;), and in Korean, 에, but do these two concepts completely overlap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;돼지고기&lt;strong&gt;에&lt;/strong&gt; 질렸어요.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I got tired of pork&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a translation into Japanese use について? I ask because 에 seems like a 'weak' relationship marker, whereas 에 관하여 seems 'strong.' Is there a difference in Japanese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5587" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-11-23T11:13:21.217" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T13:36:13.633" Title="&quot;Regarding&quot; in Korean and Japanese" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9614" CreationDate="2014-11-23T13:36:13.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Japanese would not use について because the verb to be used would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/2618/m0u/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;あきる&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, see also &lt;a href=&quot;http://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E9%A3%BD%E3%81%8D%E3%82%8B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The reason is that あきる requires the object to be marked with the case particle &lt;strong&gt;-ni&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;私は豚肉に飽きた。&#xA;watashi-wa butaniku-ni aki-ta.&#xA;'I grew tired of pork.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression について is often better translated as &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;私は言語学についての本を読んだ。&#xA;watashi-wa gengo-gaku-ni tsuite-no hon-o yon-da.&#xA;'I read a book about linguistics.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning &lt;em&gt;regarding&lt;/em&gt; can also be expressed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E3%81%AB%E9%96%A2%E3%81%97%E3%81%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;に関して&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E3%81%AB%E5%AF%BE%E3%81%97%E3%81%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;に対して&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T13:36:13.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-23T18:51:20.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to offer an alternative perspective to all the answers offered so far. First, I'd like to rephrase the question and then react to the other answers with some general points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you ask what is the purpose of grammar, you really want to know what is the purpose of morphology? And, in fact, this is one of linguistics' great puzzles (although not one that is often discussed openly). By and large morphology is redundant in all languages. As you say, it does not matter whether you say 'John likes' or 'John like'. In fact there are many dialects of English where 'John like' is just fine. There's certainly no potential for misunderstanding. The vast majority of inflectional morphemes are not necessary to convey the desired meaning. That does not mean that they do not convey meaning that would not be lost without them (e.g. in Czech accusative and locative often differentiate between a directional and locational meaning of a preposition or even the English plural morphemes are pretty useful) but that the meaning is generally sufficiently clear from context or could be easily recovered through some other means. There are various very powerful models that explain the process of the emergence of inflectional morphology but no clear explanation as to why it's there. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So by and large you can do without morphology but can you do without syntax? That depends on what you think syntax is. If you think about it as mostly word order, then you always need some way to order words one after another. And there does not seem to be one natural, logical way to do it. Subject-Verb-Object may seem natural to us but any other ordering seems to be just as fine. But how necessary is it? Not very. Most sentences are fine in pretty much any order. There are some high profile examples where the sentence alone is completely ambiguous (e.g. Parents love children.) but they would generally be rescued by context (e.g. in Czech 'Parents love children' is always ambiguous without context and in English, you're more likely to disambiguate by including 'their' before the object). But even in languages with relatively fixed word orders, there are many contexts (like poetry) when it can all be upended and mixed beyond recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While there are no languages without some sort of word order conventions, surely syntax is not about the order of words, at all! It's all about capturing the underlying relationships between words and giving them some sort of communicative or configurational function. Nouns become subjects to express agentivity, adjectives become attributes, verbs predicates, etc. We need to capture how agents and patients relate to each other, make sure we know what it is that prepositions modify, link anaphors to their referents, etc. And sure enough, all languages do that in one way or another. But they all do it in a profoundly redundant manner. Almost anything that you might think is essential for communication based on your observations of one language will be found missing in another language. All attempts at finding grammatical universals have failed to find anything plausibly invariable. Even the famous 'Universal Grammar' is just a collection of a handful of some general tendencies. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All the answers to the question, have assumed that there is such a thing as grammar. And not just that. They also assume that grammar is the fundamental expression or carrier of the deeper purposes of language. But I'd like to propose that there's in fact no such thing as grammar. Grammar is consequence of its artifacts, the grammar books. I've written &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2014/11/what-language-looks-like-dictionary-and-grammar-are-to-language-what-standing-on-one-foot-is-to-running/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a long post about thinking about grammar in different ways&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Construction grammar offers a much better way of thinking about grammar as an inventory of conventional ways of expressing meanings through sounds, words, parts of words, and combinations of words (constructions). And it's relatively easy to explain why we want to have conventional ways of speaking. Everything in human interaction is governed by convention (tacit agreement). In makes the interaction more predictable, easier to teach to new generations, more useful in differentiating in-groups from out-groups, and of course, it also make interaction more efficient. Not having to negotiate your conventions at the start of every interaction is very helpful. Even redundancy makes great sense because you often deal with the transmission of information over noisy channels (e.g. in a noisy place). Of course, over time, conventions tend to pile on top of one another and the efficiency will suffer. But no matter how morphologically or syntactically complex, no language seems to have transcended the equilibrium of efficiency. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last point has to deal with two important &lt;strong&gt;objections&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i. What about the obviously different cognitive natures of the conventions of grammar when compared to the conventions of culture? It's much more difficult (and quite different) to 'learn a language' than it is to 'learn a culture'. Our ability to behave in conventional linguistic ways is embedded so much 'deeper' in us than our ability to behave in culturally conventional ways. Just compare acquiring the phonological distinctions of a language with learning to politely refuse an offer of food. This is a good point to which I only have a partially satisfactory answer in that the conventions of culture are much deeper and more complex than people imagine. But I have to admit that they still seem qualitatively different from the conventions of language. &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2013/08/sunsets-horizons-and-the-languagemindculture-distinction/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;I've addressed some of this in another post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii. Isn't talking about an inventory of conventional ways of expression just renaming what we've always talked about as grammar? Yes and no. In claiming that grammar is just an artifact of the grammar book, I'm not suggesting that the grammar book is a deluded enterprise. For millenia, grammar book writers have been describing real conventions and have done a great job in putting together taxonomies of these conventions. So when rethinking the nature of language without 'grammar', we don't need to start over and jettison all those old rules. They're pretty handy for what they are. But we need to rethink their place in our understanding of language. We must not confuse all those taxonomies of linguistic conventions with language for which we then need to find cognitive and neurological correlates. These taxonomies that were developed for the convenience of the reader and writer (and often influenced as much by the convention of the genre as anything else). The structure of language does NOT look like the table of contents of a grammar book. There's probably not even such a thing as a single structure. But that is often what we're lead to believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in &lt;strong&gt;conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;, even though this question may seem a bit naive, it is actually a profound puzzle to which linguistics does not have a complete answer. The fact, that we can be so dismissive of the question only indicates how much we need to rethink what we've been taking as givens about language for at least a hundred years. There are many linguists and other cognitive scientists who are doing that. But perhaps few who would want to be as radical about it as this. But I suspect that in a few generations, this will not seem as bold, as it may now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T18:51:20.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-23T20:50:41.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just found nice piece of explanation by Michael Swan and I've decided to share it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mikeswan.co.uk/elt-applied-linguistics/what-is-grammar.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Michael Swan | What is grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5490" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T20:50:41.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2014-11-23T21:59:04.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correction to the Tamil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;avai (அவை) is the plural of athu used in formal speech and in writing, not athugaL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plural of both avan and avaL is avanga in every speech community I have ever heard (and is also used to refer respectfully to individuals).  I would not be so bold as to say Avaluga is never used but I would need more details before I accept it as an attested variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5594" LastActivityDate="2014-11-23T21:59:04.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2014-11-24T01:24:20.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make a short answer. You have it backward. Linguistics, like other&#xA;sciences, tries to provide description of what is. &lt;strong&gt;Linguistics is descriptive,&#xA;but not prescriptive.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one invented grammars (except for very few artificial languages),&#xA;or other language strucutures, They happened because that is how&#xA;humans, collectively, felt it convenient to talk, for whatever good or bad reason. Possibly it is good,&#xA;possibly it is bad, but it is not really open to value judgement: &lt;em&gt;it&#xA;just is&lt;/em&gt;. And no one is making a decision one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense it is neither more nor less absurd than many other social&#xA;rules, and following it is necessary for social life. You do not walk&#xA;naked to work when it is hot. Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, many social rules can be described, and some times&#xA;explained. That is the work of scientists. Do not pick on them, or on&#xA;anyone. It is a collective thing that cannot be controled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people have tried, not even to make the rules, but only to&#xA;document them and freeze them. This was more or less the role of the&#xA;Academie Française for French, when it was created some 4 centuries&#xA;ago. But the language evolved despite the Academie, and the Academie&#xA;had to follow. You cannot be prescriptive, even with a good&#xA;description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evolution of life is based on chance, but still follows some general&#xA;rules. For example, any trait that will save energy expenditure is&#xA;favorable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probable that, to some extent, languages evolve similarly, under&#xA;environmental constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also languages represent concepts that people want to&#xA;communicate. These concepts can actually vary from culture to culture.&#xA;It may vary in the words. Some Nordic languages may have more words&#xA;for &lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt; or for &lt;em&gt;snow&lt;/em&gt;, with nuances that do not matter to us.&#xA;Some culture give genders to objects, while other do not. Some have&#xA;tenses that express very specific relation that have less significance&#xA;for other. The grammar is often only part of a mirror of cultural&#xA;evolution, of the way people think.  And what really matters when&#xA;learning a language is to learn to think in that language. That is&#xA;much harder than grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T01:24:20.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-24T04:51:55.007" Score="6" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know linguists like to say &quot;no languages are older or younger than other languages&quot; because they all evolved from ancient roots. With exceptions such as Nicaraguan Sign Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me explain that I'm specifically talking about cases where one settled language splits and one branch gains a degree of non-mutual-comprehensibility with the trunk. I'm interested only in the cases where few linguists would disagree that the result is two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent cases I can think of are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yiddish from High German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Afrikaans from Dutch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maltese from Arabic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without getting too deeply into controversial cases, would one of these or some other I've overlooked be the most recent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-25T02:36:21.010" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T19:46:35.810" Title="What is the most recent example of a language which has split from another and become non-mutually comprehensible?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2014-11-24T08:28:59.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Veredomon already explained, German does have ways to express the progressive aspect, and even more than one. The real difference is that English, like the Celtic languages, has the unusual feature that marking the progressive aspect is not optional. Here is why it makes sense that German hasn't developed obligatory progressive marking (yet?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages develop a way to express the progressive aspect because often you want to stress that something is going on right now. Once there is an established way of expressing that, people tend to generalise it further and further for much the same reason that people say &lt;em&gt;brilliant&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tremendous&lt;/em&gt; instead of just plain &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;. Example: &quot;I promise I will pay tomorrow. I am not just promising it, the paying tomorrow is such an irrevocable fact that one could say I am practically paying right now. (Though of course I can't because I can't access my money yet.) You could say I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; paying, though not right now but tomorrow. That's it: I am paying tomorrow!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among other ways of marking the progressive aspect, German and Dutch have a construction that is similar to one that may be the origin of the English progressive as there are some similar examples in Old English. (Old English didn't have a progressive like modern English does, but a few sentences have survived that look suspiciously like the Dutch/English progressive. I can't find the source right now, but I think one example was, in literal translation, &quot;[be] on the hunting&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am cooking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ik ben aan het koken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich bin am [= an dem] kochen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So literally, in Dutch and German you say &quot;I am at the cooking&quot;. Even for the literal translation I used the gerund/present participle in English instead of the Dutch/German infinitive because in each case that's how the language forms nouns from verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dutch and German constructions are a bit wordy, but straightforward enough. I believe the main thing that prevents them from being used so often that they become obligatory where applicable is that they don't generalise well to more complicated cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am cooking the food.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ik ben het eten aan het koken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;? Ich bin das Essen am kochen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where it gets weird, because literally, in Dutch and German you say &quot;I am the food at the cooking&quot;. (Since &lt;em&gt;het eten / das Essen&lt;/em&gt; is literally &lt;em&gt;the eating&lt;/em&gt;, we could even translate this as &quot;I am the eating at the cooking&quot;.) In Dutch this is already firmly established. In German it's definitely colloquial, and even when it is used colloquially, it indicates that the speaker comes from the Ruhr district, a large and populous area near the Dutch border.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely that the progressive will become obligatory in Dutch and German before it is simplified a lot. There is already a construction that is structurally essentially the same as the English progressive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am someplace to cook.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ik ben koken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich bin kochen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider cases such as &quot;I am skiing&quot; / &quot;I am someplace to ski&quot; or &quot;I am hunting&quot; / &quot;I am someplace to hunt&quot;, it appears that semantically this second construction is close enough to the progressive that it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; acquire a progressive meaning. But for now the two are held separate, and the simple construction is currently blocking the simplification of the progressive by simply dropping &lt;em&gt;aan het / am&lt;/em&gt;. I.e. you can't simplify the progressive that way because if you do you are not extending a language so as to make new sequences of words grammatical, but you are saying something that already has a different meaning. By the way, this construction may well be at the origin of the strange object placement in the Dutch (and dialectal German) progressive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am someplace to cook the food.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ik ben het eten koken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich bin das Essen kochen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that this parallelism exists, it is natural to interpret &lt;em&gt;aan het / am&lt;/em&gt; as a progressive marker. Which interpretation of course makes it even less likely to be dropped when expressing a progressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to these problems, the most common way of expressing the progressive aspect in Dutch and German is still by adding adverbs such as &lt;em&gt;nu / gerade (right now)&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am cooking the food.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ik kook nu het eten.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich koche gerade das Essen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way of marking the progressive aspect is very unlikely to become obligatory because (to my knowledge) there is no precedent of obligatory adverbs in Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T12:15:44.200" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T12:15:44.200" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2014-11-24T09:05:43.520" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has not lost its cases completely yet. The distinction between nominative, oblique case (result of the merger of accusative and dative) and genitive has survived in the personal pronouns, e.g. &lt;em&gt;he / him / his&lt;/em&gt;. The general genitive has turned into the clitic &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch, which branched off German relatively recently, has reached a similar stage recently. Not too long (less than a hundred years) ago, Dutch still had cases. But nowadays it looks like in contrast to English even the genitive is going to be lost completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clear indicators of case loss in German as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some constructions traditionally requiring a genitive the dative is now more common, at least in colloquial speech (e.g. after &lt;em&gt;wegen&lt;/em&gt;). Even for indicating a possessive relation the genitive sometimes just doesn't sound right any more and is avoided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In most German dialects dative and accusative have been fused into a single oblique case. A notable exception is that in some Alemannic dialects nominative and accusative have been fused instead. The city dialect of Berlin is famous for the 'confusion' of dative and accusative pronouns. Which isn't actually confusion. It's just that in that dialect the dative and accusative pronouns exist in parallel and have exactly the same meaning. Consequently dialect speakers select between them based on criteria that have nothing to do with the case system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Carsten that language change appears to happen slower in Standard German in general, when you compare it to English and Dutch. Standard German is the result of a conscious effort of scholars to forge a common language for a huge dialect continuum at a time when the masses became literate because the salvation of every peasant appeared to depend on the correct choice between Rome, Luther, Calvin etc. As these scholars were guided by Latin, they picked variants from various dialects to strengthen distinctions that were already on their way out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the German-speaking area the approach to the standard language is more similar to that in France than to that in England or the Netherlands. It is not so much seen as something that emerges from how the language is used. It is more like a foreign language that dialect speakers have to learn at school. (Many German dialects are not really mutually intelligible with Standard German.) Consequently it is somewhat detached from the dialects and has its own separate dynamic. It is influenced by the corpus of existing literature as much as by modern colloquial speech, so naturally it moves rather slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T09:05:43.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2014-11-24T19:24:40.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not (I believe) want to get into the tedious discussion of what is a “language” as opposed to a “dialect”. I think most of the instances of what you are asking about involve situations where an already written language is provided, for political reasons, with a new system of writing as a way of distancing itself from what had until then been regarded as a form of the same language. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese &gt; Galician&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian &gt; Moldovan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Persian &gt; Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and probably many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T20:25:20.193" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T20:25:20.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9634" CreationDate="2014-11-24T22:51:18.580" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider these two sentences below, which employ some kind of temporal adverbial / adjunct.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I) &lt;strong&gt;Yesterday&lt;/strong&gt; John won the Turkey Raffle.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(II) John &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; wins the Turkey Raffle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why is the sentence below ungrammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(III) *John &lt;strong&gt;yesterday&lt;/strong&gt; won the Turkey Raffle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(IV) Mary has &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; vacationed in Brazil for the Thanksgiving Holiday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(V) *Mary has &lt;strong&gt;this year&lt;/strong&gt; vacationed in Brazil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(VI) *&lt;strong&gt;Always&lt;/strong&gt; Mary has vacationed in Brazil for the Thanksgiving Holiday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect my assumption that words like &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; have the same (lexical/semantic) analysis as phrases like &lt;strong&gt;yesterday&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;this year&lt;/strong&gt; is incorrect.  Yet I don't see any strong reason why sentences like (III) and (V) &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be ungrammatical, other than a quirk of English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastEditorUserId="4974" LastEditDate="2014-11-24T23:47:14.600" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T23:53:36.843" Title="Why do time adverbials like &quot;yesterday&quot; have a different distribution than adverbials like &quot;always?&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2014-11-24T23:14:33.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some ways there are a huge number of dialects which are no longer mutually intelligible. How well would someone with a broad Texan accent understand someone with a broad Scots accent? How well would someone speaking African American Vernacular English understand someone speaking Australian Aboriginal English? But these are usually considered to be all one language because even though the extremes may not understand each other, there is a chain of dialects between them which can all be understood. (And most people can speak at different registers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an example might be the Melanesian creoles of Tok Pisin, Bislama and Torres Strait Creole. They were developed in Queensland in the 1870s onwards, but the first two were then taken back to PNG and Vanuatu. Some people say that they are still mutually intelligible, but after spending some time with one of them I'm sceptical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T23:14:33.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-24T23:44:50.710" Score="3" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is stemming from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/13935/what-is-the-difference-in-hope-and-faith&quot;&gt;question on BH-SE&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Are faith (πίστις) and hope (ἐλπίς) related linguistically?&#xA;Is it at all possible that ἐλπίς is actually el/eli + πίστις or something + faith?&#xA;If not, is there any insight from linguistics into the differentiation between these two words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:47:41.937" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T15:07:45.207" Title="πίστις &amp; ἐλπίζω related linguistically?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9631" CreationDate="2014-11-24T23:53:36.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many differences between the time adverbials (like &lt;strong&gt;yesterday&lt;/strong&gt;) and &quot;adverbials like &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time adverbials are very much like place adverbials (&lt;strong&gt;home&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;there&lt;/strong&gt;), both of them specify a particular &lt;em&gt;location&lt;/em&gt;, in time or in space. Also, both of them are not very specific, we can substitute each of them with lots of synonyms, I can say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Last year&lt;/strong&gt; I went to the sea.&quot; or I can say just the same by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Last summer&lt;/strong&gt; I went to the sea.&quot; or by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Last August&lt;/strong&gt; I went to the sea.&quot; or by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;On August 10&lt;/strong&gt; I went to the sea.&quot; And the same goes about the place adverbials, &lt;strong&gt;on my sofa&lt;/strong&gt; can be substituted by &lt;strong&gt;in my room&lt;/strong&gt; or by &lt;strong&gt;at home&lt;/strong&gt;. Note, none of those substitutions won't change practically anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Adverbials like &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; are different. First, their number is limited, they are a closed group, while time and place adverbials are innumerable, they are an open group. Then, they have no synonyms, &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; looks very much similar to &lt;strong&gt;often&lt;/strong&gt;, still the difference is obvious. These adverbs are very closely connected with verbs, they actually change the meaning of verbs, there is a huge difference between &quot;John comes to us.&quot; and &quot;John &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; comes to us.&quot;, the periodicity of the action is absolutely different in the two sentences, but if we take &quot;John came to us &lt;strong&gt;last Tuesday&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; and &quot;John came to us &lt;strong&gt;last Wednesday&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; there is no difference in the manner the action happened, only its location in time is different. It is this interconnection with verbs that makes it possible for them to occupy the place immediately before the predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-11-24T23:53:36.843" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9633" CreationDate="2014-11-25T00:49:42.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are not considered to be related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;πίστις ‘faith, trust’ and the verb πείθομαι ‘to trust, obey, be persuaded’ come from Indo-European *bhidh-, related to Latin fides, with *bh- &gt; *ph- &gt; p according to Grassmann’s law.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἐλπίς ‘hope’, ἐλπίζω, ἔλπομαι ‘to hope’, is from Indo-European *uelp-, perhaps cognate with Latin voluptas. There is no prefix involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Partial overlap with jlawler.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T00:49:42.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T06:07:41.997" Score="1" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum), which was published in 2002, expanded the scope of the part of speech &quot;preposition&quot; to such a great extent that a significant number of words formerly labeled as &quot;adverbs&quot; and &quot;subordinating conjunctions&quot; in the traditional grammar were subsumed under &quot;preposition&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston claimed in the book that such a dramatic re-analysis of parts of speech resulted from many years of research in the field of linguistics by many linguists. When I first read the book, it almost sounded like a majority of linguists, if not all, would agree with such a re-analysis. And I thought that the rationale behind the re-analysis was robust at least logically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it's been more than a decade since the book was first published. And it still seems that non-linguists have yet to embrace the re-analysis. (I don't know about linguists in general.) No dictionary that I know of has reflected the re-analysis, when many are quick to update such newly-minted words as &quot;selfie&quot; in their entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because the linguists actually don't agree that the re-analysis is necessary, or simply because the learning curve of non-linguists is not steep enough to bring about the change even in a decade, or because the re-analysis was not really accepted at all among linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-25T13:32:21.787" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T21:15:53.543" Title="Preposition vs. Subordinating Conjunction in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2014-11-25T10:57:53.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent example from Southern Africa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfecane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mfecane&lt;/a&gt; in South Africa in the early 1800's, caused by Shaka's military campaign, created a whole lot of social upheaval, the repercussions of which were felt as far away as Tanzania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the midst of all the attacks and counter-attacks, invasions &amp;amp;c, a powerful group of Sesotho speakers (the Makololo), having adopted many of the techniques used by Shaka, went on the rampage, ended up in Southern Zambia, and subjugated a community of Luyana speakers. The original conqueror died and his daughter took the reins, his daughter gave up the throne to her brother, and her brother was defeated by the Luyana some 30 years after the initial invasion, chasing most of their invaders out of their homeland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During those 30 years the Makololo had forced the Luyana to speak Sesotho -- a rather distantly related language with clicks, a large number of vowels, a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, and many other features which made the language difficult for Luyana speakers -- and the result is that the Luyana speakers developed a new language derived almost entirely from Sesotho (essentially, a creole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sesotho &gt; Serotse/&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lozi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Silozi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;over a period of a few decades, as recently as 170 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T10:57:53.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6313" CreationDate="2014-11-25T11:06:07.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern Greek the ending -σμος is a rather common ending from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbs ending in &lt;code&gt;-ζω&lt;/code&gt; which normally have corresponding nouns ending in &lt;code&gt;-σμος&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words that may not derive from verbs (if such verbs exist anyway) but take this ending to create a new word which would have an abstract meaning like an idea, ideology, attitude etc. These often are loanwords (that some of them came back to Greek -in Greek they are called αντιδάνεια-) or simply translated words from other languages.&#xA;Examples:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Greek: καπιταλισμός (capitalism) does not derive from verb &lt;code&gt;καπιταλίζω&lt;/code&gt; (does not exist in Greek as word) but it's just a translation of a foreign word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;παρασιτισμός&lt;/code&gt; (parasitism) is another such example which also uses as the first part a Greek loanword in which the ending was added. These often are work of french people who took original ancient (or medieval) Greek words and formed new ones. There isn't also any &lt;code&gt;παρασιτίζω&lt;/code&gt; (although it could be understood under some conditions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific answers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it self contain any indication of an article (definite or&#xA;  indefinite)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek the article is never attached to the noun or adjective. In this form it often coincide with the vocative case but for these &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case#Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nouns&lt;/a&gt; it's an exception and it just it nominative without article. When found in this form it implies an indefinite article but not a number (that is in English it would be &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; but not &lt;code&gt;one&lt;/code&gt; since in Greece it's just one word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other words, of itself would it be &quot;a keeping of the Sabbath&quot; or&#xA;  &quot;the keeping of the Sabbath&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do words using an -ismos ending depend on the surrounding text for any&#xA;  article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek has cases so the case depend on the surrounding text. In Greek all words have similar rules, not like in English for proper nouns, so it would take an article to match its case if necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the original question I guess that the etymology is simple enough:&#xA;It derives from the verb &lt;code&gt;σαββατίζω&lt;/code&gt; (and this from Hebrew &lt;code&gt;Sabbath&lt;/code&gt; as you have mentioned) and it's not created by the second method since it's quite old word and at that time the adding of &lt;code&gt;σμος&lt;/code&gt; in irrelevant words to apply a new meaning was not known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. In Greek &lt;code&gt;Σάββατο&lt;/code&gt; means Saturday not Sunday and it has lost the original Hebrew meaning since the typical day of pray (if it's kept) for Greek-speaking people is Sunday (&lt;code&gt;Κυριακή&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5600" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T11:06:07.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9633" CreationDate="2014-11-25T11:18:48.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would edit the question but it wouldn't make much sense after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So, let me explain that faith is πίστις but hope is not ἐλπίζω but &lt;code&gt;ελπίς&lt;/code&gt;. Ελπίζω is the verb not the noun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The etymology of those two words is not related:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ἐλπίς &amp;lt; ἔλπω (make someone have hope)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;πίστη &amp;lt; πείθω&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as you can see.&#xA;As for the conjugation it self is also different:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ελπίς (nominative) -&gt; ελπίδος (genitive)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;πίστις (nominative) -&gt; πίστεως (genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5600" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T11:18:48.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T13:58:46.930" Score="2" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia mentions 4 subgroups of affixes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;prefix, the affix is in front of the word &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;suffix, the affix is behind the word&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;infix, the affix is within the word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;circumfix, the afix is separated into two parts, before and after the word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in Arabic, the derivation of words is based on roots and patterns, to form a real word one has to combine the  root and pattern, so that they are interlocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to this, in Chinese one can combine, for instance,  起来 and 请客 by interlocking them into: 请起客来. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this kind of affixation called ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-03T11:11:03.423" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T11:11:03.423" Title="What is an affix called that is interlocked?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9640" CreationDate="2014-11-25T14:06:53.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These affixes are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;transfixes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T14:06:53.667" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9657" CreationDate="2014-11-25T18:33:55.383" Score="5" ViewCount="2425" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any words probably understood by “everyone” in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this question needs multiple clarifications, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By a 'word' I mean a word used in the spoken language; it need not be listed in any dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 'word' may be a loan; the point is not its origin, but whether it is universally understood.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As to the meaning of such would-be universal words, although it may be expected to differ a bit across languages, it should still be &lt;strong&gt;roughly the same&lt;/strong&gt; in all of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By words being 'understood', I mean that most/all? people speaking the languages involved will convey and retrieve roughly the same meaning when they use them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please try to give me answers listing the words (if any) that you think are understable by most/all? people in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T09:17:59.217" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:15:14.617" Title="Are there any words understood by speakers of any language in the world?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2014-11-25T21:46:06.057" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, any word for a unique proper name. For instance, Obama, Putin, Apollo, Pluto etc will be roughly the same in all languages (although in Chinese they can be pronounced very differently from the original).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-11-25T22:18:14.730" LastActivityDate="2014-11-25T22:18:14.730" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T21:54:06.640" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia tells about the difference and relation between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. Whereas the lexical aspect is a specific way to put focus onto how to observe an event on a semantic level, the grammatical aspect is its concrete realization either by means of syntax or morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question aims to the following: Since each language has either syntactical, morphological or both ways of realizing an event, is it possible to express every lexical aspect by what choice of realization ever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example: &#xA;Is there a language that is not able to express the concept of inchoativeness or progressiveness? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T23:57:35.663" Title="Can every language express any lexical aspect?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-25T22:55:11.503" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;In wikipedia i found a list of methods of teaching foreign languages - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_pedagogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language pedagogy&lt;/a&gt;. But it's seems that we not have a well recognized method or methods, or more effective then others, or at least teaching methods for which there a consensus among researchers? Can someone tell which theories (some points in theories) is predominant or more effective today, after i think 20 years of research in foreign language teaching? (Ex. Never translate words in L1, show images instead. Use IPA for teaching sounds of FL, never use the voice of teacher as an  example. Memorize adverbs first, then interjections, only this order work for successful foreign language learning). So, can i find a list of well established theories or recommendations somewhere?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5603" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T01:00:33.290" Title="What method of teaching foreign languages is more effective?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2014-11-26T00:29:31.730" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;mama&quot; and &quot;papa&quot; are two words which can be understood by every one in the world, because it is almost the same or similiar across all language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T00:29:31.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9695" CreationDate="2014-11-26T00:41:24.140" Score="4" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently came across Chomsky's universal grammar, and I'm very much wondering about one specific question. I was trying to find references, however didn't find any explanation in the huge amount of literature on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Chomsky's theory suggests that linguistic ability manifests itself without being taught. The only way I can imagine that the information is directly encoded in our DNA. The universal grammar suggestions complex constructions such as recursion. As far as I know, evolution happens at very large time-scales - so within a few 100.000 of years, the information about complex linguistical structures is very unlikely to be encoded into the DNA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that conclude that the language of our ancestors 1 million years ago already had the capability to construct recursion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the information about language encoded in some other way (which way?)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What else solves my apparend misunderstanding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks alot (from an obvious non-linguist ;-) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5604" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T09:44:21.987" Title="Chomsky's Universal grammar and Evolution of human languages" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="519" CreationDate="2014-11-26T00:56:56.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Asturian, they are marked by gender.  Uncountables (or mass nouns) are neuter.  Words that be both countable and not will change gender with the countable form being masculine or feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;L'arena ye &lt;strong&gt;blanco&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt;. (the sand is &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt;, as mass)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;L'arena ye &lt;strong&gt;blanca&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FEM&lt;/sub&gt;. (the [grain of] sand is &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt;, as countable)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the pronouns change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L'agua, ¿ves&lt;strong&gt;lo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt;? (the water, you see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;?, as mass)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L'agua, ¿quiéres&lt;strong&gt;la&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FEM&lt;/sub&gt;?  (the [bottle of] water, you want &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;?, as countable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's interesting is that the split to the neuter from masculine/feminine didn't get fully realized with nouns (the neuter aspect of verbs and clauses — conserved even in Spanish — is total).  It got stuck on prepositioned articles and adjectives, which still agree with the inherent gender of the nouns.  Everywhere else — postpositioned adjectives, predicative adjectives, pronouns, article+adjective sans noun, etc — display the neuter form.  So if you say &quot;La blanca agua&quot; (the white sand) &lt;em&gt;blanca&lt;/em&gt; has a feminine form, but you could, for instance, say &quot;La blanca arena ye guapo&quot; (the white sand is pretty) where &lt;em&gt;guapo&lt;/em&gt; is in neuter even though &lt;em&gt;blanca&lt;/em&gt; shows a feminine form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per comment's request, here's some information on the Asturian neuter (thankfully Asturian is well documented, you can get the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academiadelallingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Gramatica_Llingua.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gramática de la llingua asturiana&lt;/a&gt; on-line from the Academy of the Asturian Language, and it's not too terribly hard to read if you already know one of the Iberian Romance languages).  Their examples are probably better than mine, but mainly show off the material-as-uncountable-as-neuter aspect that a lot more nouns can pick up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VII.2.1 El xéneru y el númberu - El neutru - Carauterístiques xenerales&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  El neutru ye un xéneru qu'apaez nel artículu, nos axetivos, nos referentes y nos pronomes personales qu'entren en concordancia con sustantivos non cuntables y con otros elementos d'asemeyaes carauterístiques. […] la presencia del neutru nel axetivu o nel referente ye pura repercusión del calter non cuntable del términu principal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The neuter is a gender that appears in the article, in adjectives, in referents and in personal pronouns that enter into agreement with uncountable nouns and with other elements &lt;sub&gt;[verbs, clauses, and situations]&lt;/sub&gt; of similar characteristics.  […] the presence of the neuter in the adjective or in the referent is pure consequence of the uncountable character of the principal term.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;XXII.2.3.2.B El grupu nominal Subordinación del grupu nominal - La concordancia nel grupu nominal - La concordancia de xéneru - La concordancia del neutru&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ha recordase qu'esisten, per un llau, sustantivos siempre non cuntables y, per otru llau, sustantivos que puen ser cuntables o non cuntables acordies col contestu en que s'empleguen. Los primeros piden concordancia neutra; los segundos, según los casos, piden concordancia de masculín o femenín, o de neutru.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Exemplos de concordancies con sustantivos siempre non cuntables: &lt;em&gt;echa lleña &lt;strong&gt;seco&lt;/strong&gt; al fueu, fartucóse de carne &lt;strong&gt;asao&lt;/strong&gt;, ye dineru bien &lt;strong&gt;ganao&lt;/strong&gt;, lleche &lt;strong&gt;preso&lt;/strong&gt;, lleche &lt;strong&gt;cuayao&lt;/strong&gt;, ¿d'ú sal esi fumu &lt;strong&gt;blanco&lt;/strong&gt;?, llegó xente &lt;strong&gt;mozo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Exemplos con sustantivos que puen ser cuntables o non cuntables: &lt;em&gt;atopó nel llibru una fueya &lt;strong&gt;seca&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, pero &lt;em&gt;ta tol suelu enllenu de fueya &lt;strong&gt;seco&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;mancóse con una piedra &lt;strong&gt;picuda&lt;/strong&gt; en güeyu&lt;/em&gt;, pero &lt;em&gt;a la vera'l ríu hai muncha piedra &lt;strong&gt;menudo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;apuntó'l teléfonu nun papel &lt;strong&gt;blancu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, pero &lt;em&gt;baxó a la llibrería a mercar papel &lt;strong&gt;blanco&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;nun comí más qu'una pera &lt;strong&gt;madura&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, pero &lt;em&gt;llegó un camionáu de pera &lt;strong&gt;maduro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;em&gt;tien un güesu &lt;strong&gt;rotu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, pero &lt;em&gt;ye una figura de güesu &lt;strong&gt;trabayao&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It ought to be remembered that on the one hand there exists nouns that are always uncountable, and the other, nouns that can be either countable or uncountable according to the context in which they are employed.  The former needs neuter agreement; the latter, according to the case, need agreement in masculine or feminine, o in neuter.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Examples of agreements with nouns that are always uncountable:&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;  put some &lt;strong&gt;dry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; wood on the fire, he/she/it engorged him/her/itself with &lt;strong&gt;roasted&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; meat, &lt;strong&gt;spoiled&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; milk, &lt;strong&gt;spoiled&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; milk, where did this &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; smoke come from?, some &lt;strong&gt;young&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; people arrived&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Examples of nouns that may be countable or uncountable:&lt;/em&gt; he/she found a &lt;strong&gt;dry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FEM&lt;/sub&gt; leaf in the book, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; the ground is covered with &lt;strong&gt;dry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; leaves/foliage;  he/she got by a &lt;strong&gt;chipped&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FEM&lt;/sub&gt; rock in his/her eye, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; at the river's edge there's lots of &lt;strong&gt;smooth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; rock(s); he/she wrote down the number on a &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;MASC&lt;/sub&gt; sheet of paper, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; he/she went to the bookstore to buy &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; paper; he/she/it has a &lt;strong&gt;broken&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;MASC&lt;/sub&gt; bone, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; it's a figure made of &lt;strong&gt;sculpted&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sub&gt;NEUT&lt;/sub&gt; bone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="5202" LastEditDate="2014-11-26T12:44:02.563" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T12:44:02.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2014-11-26T01:00:33.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody learns languages differently, depending on how they learned their own languages, how close the language they're learning is to them, what their motivations are, how hard they work, whether they're literate, whether they're intelligent, and a whole lot of other things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, there can be no method of teaching that will work best. Some ways will work with some students when used by some teachers. Other combinations won't. You have to try a lot and see what works with which students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, you should realize that no theory about foreign language teaching methodology is authoritative; most textbooks believe they are better and say so, but there's no evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T01:00:33.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2014-11-26T01:05:34.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am not wrong, in some languages, the word for &quot;mama&quot; is used for other relatives rather than &quot;mother&quot;, for example, &quot;mama&quot; means &quot;father&quot; in Georgian, also, &quot;mama&quot; means &quot;grandmother&quot; in Manchurian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is said that the Eyak language don't have bilabial consonants in native words, they probably don't even have words like &quot;papa&quot; and &quot;mama&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it is said that &quot;huh&quot; is a word that has the same meaning in (almost) every language, however, there could still be counterexamples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5595" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T09:44:26.153" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T09:44:26.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-26T01:46:00.147" Score="0" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in my first year of the Master's study in applied linguistics, and I'm trying to come up with my research question, which will form the basis of my thesis topic. I've found the famous routine by Abbot and Costello &lt;em&gt;&quot;Who's on First&quot;&lt;/em&gt; might have something to offer for a linguistic analysis, but couldn't pin down what specific type of analysis it can be. As I'm also looking for advisors with pragmatics/social linguistics/translation theory expertise, I'd like to hear from anyone who can give me some advice on the specific aspect I can deal with, using this comedy routine as the corpus? Thanks so much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5605" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T07:04:21.940" Title="Abbot &amp; Costello &quot;Who's on First&quot; with a pragmatic (or other linguistic) perspective?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-12-03T21:03:24.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9660" CreationDate="2014-11-26T04:11:22.243" Score="10" ViewCount="1720" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Latin there descend half a dozen (or more) modern languages. Greek, by contrast, has simply changed over time but without branching into separate languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the difference? Both were spoken over pretty wide areas, after all, and I'd have expected that the various koines would eventually have diverged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T19:31:21.163" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T19:31:21.163" Title="Descendants of Latin vs. Greek?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2014-11-26T06:36:51.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Plain and simple. But let's break down your question. There are several aspects to the whole idea of 'word in a language' that make the question a lot more difficult to formulate properly. In fact, I'd say that there's two quite distinct questions in here that would require quite different disciplinary approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1.&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a word that (either through loan or historical descent) occurs in the lexicon of all languages in such a way that through some empathetic effort could be made understood by its speakers regardless of their exposure other other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer here is, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. The best candidate may seem 'mama' because it's associated with an early language development but it's not at all universal. Even the underlying concept is not unambiguously universal because of the variety of child rearing practices around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a word that has had such global impact (through media or trade) that it will be recognized and/or understood by all people in the world regardless of whether it is a part of the lexicon in their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the answer is a simple &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. The most plausible candidate here is 'OK' that will be recognized by a good chunk of the global population. But there are vast swathes of the globe that will not have been reached by 'OK'. You don't even have to go as far as 'uncontacted tribes'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is simply &lt;strong&gt;too much variation among languages and cultures&lt;/strong&gt; for there to be even a single universal word. However, there are many words that will certainly have a good chance of being understood around much of the industrialized world but never by all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There probably not even too many &lt;strong&gt;gestures&lt;/strong&gt; that are universal. 'Smile' and 'pointing' are probably the best candidates but their meanings are significantly modified by context across cultures so even though they may have the same underlying referent, their use could still be misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T06:36:51.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9655" CreationDate="2014-11-26T07:04:21.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that the primary thing going on in that routine is the break down of 'conversation repair'. The two interlocutors simply repeat the same conversation repair approach and do not learn from its failure. The constant repetition is what makes it funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also interesting how through constant repetition, the players make the rather implausible notion of players being nick named 'Who', 'What', 'I don't know', 'Why', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, once those elements are in place, you're dealing with structural and lexical ambiguity. This particularly well illustrated in this sequence where Costello tries to initiate conversation repair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Costello: When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the&#xA;  money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abbott: Every dollar of it. And why not, the man's entitled to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Costello: Who is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abbott: Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Costello: So who gets it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abbott: Why shouldn't he? Sometimes his wife comes down and collects&#xA;  it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Costello: Who's wife?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abbott: Yes. After all, the man earns it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Costello: Who does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Abbott: Absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in 'Who does?' the question has a completely different interpretation if 'Who' is treated as a proper noun or a pronoun. If it's a pronoun, the answer 'Absolutely' makes absolutely no sense. However, it's perfectly acceptable if 'Who' is a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T07:04:21.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2014-11-26T07:44:53.063" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would go for the word for silence/calm, namely &lt;em&gt;&quot;SSSS&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. One can argue if it is a word or not, but that is another discussion. It is an utterance that is understood in most if not all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T07:44:53.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9656" CreationDate="2014-11-26T07:56:14.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tsakonian is considered a separate Hellenic language, deriving mostly from Doric Greek and not mutually intelligible by standard Greek speakers. Cappadocian and certain Pontic dialects are considered different languages sometimes, but this is debatable. Greek did change mainly in terms of phonology and (partially) grammar, but not that much in terms of core vocabulary. I think Blazec V. demonstrated this few years ago with a glottochronological example (I can get back to you with the title).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek was indeed spoken in a great area, but was replaced (unlike Latin) by other languages such as Arabic, which was closer to the native tongue of the former Greek speakers in those areas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T07:56:14.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9656" CreationDate="2014-11-26T10:00:20.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your distinction between having &quot;descendants&quot; and &quot;changing&quot; has no real basis. The relationship between (let's say) Spanish and Latin is very much like that between Attic Greek and modern Demotic Greek. And the difference between (for example) Tsakonian (mentioned by Midas) and &quot;standard&quot; Demotic is probably not less than that between Spanish and Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T10:00:20.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9656" CreationDate="2014-11-26T10:31:51.917" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's true that Greek was spoken in a large area at some time in human history and indeed it's now spoken mainly in Greece in a mostly uniform way. The main reason that there are not many  Greek-deriving languages is political.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek was spoken mostly in the eastern part of Mediterranean sea, Balkans, Anatolia (now Turkey), now Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt etc even in some parts of Italy where there is still a small bilingual community in south Italy. The speakers of these areas often understood, spoke or even (in a less degree of course) wrote in Greek but the degree Greek was their mother tongue is debatable. Greek was undoubtedly the &quot;lingua franca&quot; of the entire region and this gave it some extra bonus for people to acquire it and use it. But on the other half this also meant that since it was only lingua franca for a large proportion of the population, when the condition changed then other lingua francas took its place. This means that the transaction from lingua franca to mother tongue (even for bilinguals) is a process that apparently did not occur soon enough. The reason for the latter are political. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's check the regions where Greek speaker existed at some time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main political power of most of these areas before the Arabian expansions was Byzantium that was mainly Greek-speaking in a large degree. Of course not all provinces shared the same degree of Greek native speakers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South Balkans and Anatolia were probably at a larger degree native speakers than Egypt for example. This can be explained partially also by the fact that they remains under the political power of a Greek-speaking state (Byzantium).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Anatolia region were not conquered by Arabs (although at some part it did) but by Turkish-speaking people in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Seljuq_wars&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;process long enough&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Ottoman_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ended in the 15th century&lt;/a&gt;. This can be seen today that the Turkish-Arabic language limit is the Anatolia border. During this era a gradual Greek abandoning began that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%9322)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ended in the 20th century&lt;/a&gt; forcibly with the departure of the last remnants of native Greek speakers from Anatolia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many areas that are now Arabic speaking regions like Syria, Jordan, Egypt etc had a quite large spread of a religion diversion from the official Byzantine faith (they are called heresies by the official Orthodox state of Constantinople -now Instanbul-) like &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arianism&lt;/a&gt;. From this variation came the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_Orthodox_Church_of_Alexandria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coptic Christian of Egypt&lt;/a&gt;. The main issue here is that people became estranged by the official authorities of Byzantium and so when the Arab conquered the area they more easily abandoned the old political power (Byzantium) and the language it used (Greek).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Balkans have a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Balkans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;invasions&lt;/a&gt; of Slavic people which where not Greek-speaking. These make a difference since they permanently settled in the (often deserted by wars etc) areas and assimilate with the locals. So the people used a mixture of languages with some being mother tongues and other just lingua francas. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regions besides the (unstable) borders of the Byzantium, present day Iraq, partially Iran, Pakistan and a small part of India, can be considered cases where the native Greek speakers were not the majority at any time and so with the political loss of power they eventually assimilated with other speakers. For example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-Greek Kingdom&lt;/a&gt; which was a Hellenistic kingdom felt even at its political peak the need to make its coins bilingual. That signified the idea that people in charge felt the Greek language is not illegible by a large proportion of their citizens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the spread of Greek language in the area where at some times where spoken.&#xA;As for the part about the variation, I guess this also has to do with political issues: consider the language the Italian speak now and the language they spoke 1 1/2 century ago: there were various and more widespread dialects while now many exist but fewer in number and spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5600" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2014-11-27T05:00:29.283" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T05:00:29.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-26T13:37:51.440" Score="10" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;By counter-intuitive I mean, contrary to intuition of native speakers of some language, or contrary to some popular knowledge about languages (apart many cases of folk etymology)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e. g. &quot;strange&quot; language family; rain in Chinese it's not representation of rain but a wheat after rain; or yellow it's was violet in PIE; for perceive phonemes we also need to see the person who speak, not only hear the sound)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5608" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-11-27T05:00:42.313" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T13:13:23.270" Title="Can you give some examples of counter-intuitive phenomena discovered by linguists?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2014-11-26T13:53:35.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check Qiangic for example - a group of fairly agglutinative languages. There are many other non-isolating ST groups; moreover, the Proto-Sino-Tibetan itself is considered agglutinative by many scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5607" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T13:53:35.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-26T16:19:01.220" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Malay and Indonesian are considered to be very phonetically spelled with the usually cited exception being that orthographic &quot;e&quot; can represent either &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both orthographies the sound &lt;code&gt;/ŋ/&lt;/code&gt; is represented with the digraph &quot;ng&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it guaranteed that every case of orthographic &quot;ng&quot; is pronounced as &lt;code&gt;/ŋ/&lt;/code&gt; or are there cases, assumedly at syllable edges, where orthographic &quot;ng&quot; is actually &lt;code&gt;/ng/&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know &lt;code&gt;/ŋg/&lt;/code&gt; is possible and is spelled &quot;ngg&quot;. Also I believe there are a bunch of sandhi/assimilation rules involving nasals, but I haven't learned those yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T16:19:01.220" Title="Can Malay or Indonesian ever have an /n/ followed by a /g/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9663" CreationDate="2014-11-26T21:14:15.903" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost everything a linguist will know about language will be counterintuitive to many native speakers. I've spent years teaching grammar to native speakers of English as well as intro to linguistics so I have come across a lot of things that completely dumbfound people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some areas to look into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics and phonology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schwa is the most common sound in English!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English has 18 vowels (vs. 5 vowel letters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The very concept of a phoneme seems to stump people&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexicon and Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The extent to which words have changed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The enormous polysemy of many words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The arbitrariness of the sign vs. motivation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax and semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How quickly language becomes intractable when treated algorithmically (something the whole field had to learn) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How idioms work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speech acts are normal and not a misuse of language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presupposition is part of meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sociolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no clear boundary between dialect and language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's no such thing as a 'primitive language'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard English is just one dialect of English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilingualism is the norm not the exception&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Children are not harmed by learning multiple languages at once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code switching is normal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written a post about &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2014/01/5-things-everybody-should-know-about-language-outline-of-linguistics-contribution-to-the-liberal-arts-curriculum/&quot;&gt;5 things people should know about language&lt;/a&gt; and another one with &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2012/09/the-complexities-of-simple-what-simple-language-proponents-should-know-about-linguistics/&quot;&gt;17 things linguists know about language&lt;/a&gt;. Most of those will come as a surprise to non-linguists (and even some linguists raised in certain traditions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-11-26T21:14:15.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9651" CreationDate="2014-11-27T01:20:31.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question one:We don't know negative or positive answer to your question. But we know human being or our ancestors (we are not sure the exact time,and it is not important,I think)have the capability to do recursion or computation, as you know, computability is equivalent to recursion according to Soare's definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we don't know the capability to compute is inherited (innate) or constructed(learned). They are different notions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question two: What do you mean by &quot;the information about language&quot;, the rewritting rules? If it is grammar or rewriting rules, it is really depend on the answer to the first question. It may be encoded in same ways as any other generic information, if we can learn language, otherwise, no other way can be used to encode the information than DNA or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question three:combining Gold theorem (1967) and the poverty of stimulus of language available to baby , we have to conclude that the mechanics of language is innated. But the main problem of the conclusion is  whether Gold theorem's setting is consistent with the one of language learning, and whether  the poverty of stimulus of language available to baby can be proved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2014-11-27T01:30:56.770" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T01:30:56.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9241" CreationDate="2014-11-27T04:08:10.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your second question, &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DxoenfgAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;oi=ao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Collins&lt;/a&gt; gives a nice explanation in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlangp-001/lecture/303&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MOOC on NLP&lt;/a&gt;, summarized in this slide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DDrvY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with the usual &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYK_algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKY algorithm&lt;/a&gt; in PCFG parsing, which is based on dynamic programming and yields a constituency-based tree, you have a time complexity of O(n^3 * G^3) as the dynamic programming algorithm is also looking for which non-terminal to choose (hence G^3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in dependency parsing, the dynamic programming algorithm (e.g. (Covington 2001) that jlawler cited) doesn't have to choose any non-terminal, so the time complexity is simply O(n^3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since G (the number of non-terminals in the grammar) is in the order of 50, if your O(n^3) takes 10 seconds to run (in the dependency parsing case), it will take almost 10 minutes if it becomes O(n^3 * G^3) (in the constituency parsing case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Covington 2001) Covington, Michael A. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/dgpacmcorr.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A fundamental algorithm for dependency parsing.&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; Proceedings of the 39th annual ACM southeast conference. 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a nice overview of dependency parsing algorithms: Kübler, Sandra, Ryan McDonald, and Joakim Nivre. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00169ED1V01Y200901HLT002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency parsing&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 1.1 (2009): 1-127.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T04:08:10.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T07:47:03.010" Score="3" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypersonal_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on polypersonal agreement&lt;/a&gt; states that it &quot;has also been correlated with ergativity.&quot; This is certainly true of Basque, the only ergative language I have any familiarity with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article doesn't give many examples of ergative languages that also exhibit polypersonal agreement, so perhaps this is a weak correlation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to imagine a process by which ergative languages would tend towards polypersonal agreement, but could anyone suggest why such a thing might occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5612" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T07:47:03.010" Title="Why might ergativity be correlated with polypersonal agreement?" Tags="&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;polypersonalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T14:09:45.980" Score="0" ViewCount="1488" Body="&lt;p&gt;My command of the English language is quiet poor, I write by my feeling, and each sentence is just another chain element left behind not knowing how many Errors are within it. The feeling comes close to using roulette as a mean of communication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since English puts more focus on Syntax than my native language (German), i might improve if i learn more about Syntax, especially about established Syntax patterns. As for now, i do not even know if there is simply a hand full of syntax patterns or a myriad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what i know for sure from school:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;simplest possible syntax-pattern: S Pv (Subject followed by verbal Predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2.nd syntax-pattern: S copula Pa (Subject, cobula, adjectival Predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntax-pattern: S Pv O (Subject, verbal predicate, Object)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;synstax pattern: S Pv O1 O2 (sentence with indirect and direct Object)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntax-pattern: S Pv adv_p adv_t (sentence with place and time adverbials)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so, that is all, I hope the examples make it clear what i am searching for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-11-27T14:09:45.980" Title="How many different syntax patterns exist in standard English ?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T16:20:30.673" Score="1" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read, that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one sentence can have different syntax-trees&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is considered a phrase is dependent on the grammar used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are a lot of grammars, basically divided into two groups: phrase-structure grammars and dependency grammars&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This focus on context creates for me the problem to find out, how sentences which are made of a main clause and subclause are represented by a syntax tree or maybe two ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;problematic sentences (e.g.): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I like turtles, because I like green animals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I like turtles and I like turkeys.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I like turtles, because I like green stuff, because green symbolizes luck.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T18:57:30.367" Title="Is a sentence, composed of mainclause and subclause, represented by one or two syntax-trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13052" CreationDate="2014-11-27T18:01:17.860" Score="11" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polish verbs have two &quot;aspects&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lsa.umich.edu/slavic/dept/webbasedlanguage/polish/grammar/Aspect/index.htm&quot;&gt;imperfective and perfective&lt;/a&gt;, which means you use a different word depending on whether the activity you're describing is ongoing or habitual, or if it's definite or completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the two aspects are just differentiated by an (arbitrary) prefix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;jadłem&quot; I was eating, e.g. &quot;I ate an apple every day last summer&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je%C5%9B%C4%87&quot;&gt;jeść&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;zjadłem&quot; I ate, e.g. &quot;I ate an apple yesterday&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zje%C5%9B%C4%87&quot;&gt;zjeść&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but sometimes the two aspects are completely different words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;będę mówił&quot; I will be speaking, e.g. &quot;I will speaking every Tuesday&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%B3wi%C4%87&quot;&gt;mówić&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;powiem&quot; I will speak, e.g. &quot;I will tell you everything&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/powiedzie%C4%87&quot;&gt;powiedzić&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for some verbs, verbs of motion, there are two imperfective forms, determinate and indeterminate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;płynąć&quot; e.g. &quot;to swim to Cambodia&quot; (determinate imperfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;pływać&quot; e.g. &quot;to swim around in the pool&quot; (indeterminate imperfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;popływać&quot; e.g. &quot;to swim for an hour this afternoon&quot; (perfect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: are &lt;em&gt;mówić&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;powiedzić&lt;/em&gt; the same lexeme? Abstractly, they're considered to have the same meaning, having to do with speaking. Are &lt;em&gt;płynąć&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pływać&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;popływać&lt;/em&gt; the same lexeme?  The extreme case is &quot;to go&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;iść&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;chodzić&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;pójść&lt;/em&gt; are the three forms--do they represent the same lexeme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if &quot;lexeme&quot; isn't what the sets represent, what's the right word for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5615" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T10:12:48.760" Title="Are different &quot;aspects&quot; of a Polish verb the same lexeme or different lexemes?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9683" CreationDate="2014-11-27T21:15:36.207" Score="5" ViewCount="12324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know: what is the largest dictionary in the world?&#xA;The English and Malgache &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionaries&lt;/a&gt; are surely not far off with 3.8M and 3.5M entries but I found a blog post talking about a Chinese-Korean dictionary with &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=695&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters&lt;/a&gt;. Is there something larger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with cities&lt;/a&gt; there are various possible metrics. But metrics for dictionaries are much less fluid than for cities. I'm mainly thinking about number of entries (i.e. words) but it'd also be fun to know about the physically largest dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I answered the question myself once I found some more information but I'd still like to see an answer with authoritative sources.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2991" LastEditorUserId="2991" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T11:10:17.720" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T11:10:17.720" Title="What's the largest dictionary in the world?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-27T22:42:37.767" Score="3" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble drawing a syntax tree for 3 sentences and I would appreciate it if someone could help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When did the man find the job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5616" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-11-28T11:37:21.727" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T11:37:21.727" Title="tree diagrams of a question" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2014-11-28T11:35:34.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8359" CreationDate="2014-11-28T00:44:44.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand what you're saying, I would have thought the &lt;em&gt;canto&lt;/em&gt; vowel change (at least how it's pronounced in the song you~ve linked) is because it comes before an 'n'. The 'an' sound in (at least São Paulista) Portuguese to me always seems to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5617" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T00:44:44.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9679" CreationDate="2014-11-28T19:01:46.727" Score="3" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used an automated customer service system that requires reading off one's case id.    The case id I had included the sequence &quot;3F.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speech recognition software was only tripped up by that &quot;F,&quot; which it asked to clarify if it were an &quot;S&quot; or an &quot;F.&quot;  I am assuming it picks the n-most likely phones and asks the user to choose when it meets some threshold of uncertainty.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I spoke to an actual human (on the phone), she also asked if it were &quot;S&quot; or &quot;F.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that having a word which begins with a interdental voiceless fricative causes a following labiodental fricative to be confused.  There were other &quot;F&quot;'s in the id, but these were not confused (nor did they come before any interdental sounds).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T20:18:39.360" Title="Why is [f] ambiguous between [f] and [s] after saying the word &lt;three&gt;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9678" CreationDate="2014-11-28T20:18:39.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @jlawler mentioned in his comment, word-final [f] and [s] are likely to be confused over the phone in general. The place of articulation of a fricative is mainly cued by two things--(1) the center of gravity (or diffuseness) of its noise and (2) the direction of the formant transitions going into and coming out of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of word-final fricatives, if there is a pause or a glottal stop after the word, there are no formant transitions coming out of the fricative, and the transitions going into it are often obliterated by an early cessation of voicing in the vowel that helps cue the &lt;em&gt;voicing&lt;/em&gt; of the fricative. So often the strongest cue that distinguishes a word-final [s] from a word-final [f] is the fact that the [s] is realized with high-intensity noise in the high-frequency end of the spectrum. However, the filter imposed by the phone attenuates the noise in that high-frequency range, rendering [s] noise and [f] noise much less distinguishable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why just that one &lt;em&gt;F&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;3F&lt;/em&gt; was confused, it is highly unlikely that it had anything to do with the interdental fricative at the beginning of &lt;em&gt;3&lt;/em&gt;. Consonant perception (both by humans and by machines) doesn't work long-distance like that. Either it was a coincidence and you happened to provide weaker cues on that particular [f] coda, or there was something different about the context &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the fricative that rendered it more ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-11-28T20:18:39.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2014-11-29T09:14:34.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terminology is important. When I started looking for &quot;largest&quot; instead of &quot;biggest&quot; I immediately bumped into some useful pages, but nothing authoritative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldslargestdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;worldslargestdictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; claims that the Dutch dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_Taal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal&lt;/a&gt; is the largest monolingual dictionary, without any reference. Wikipedia states the same, also without a reference.  Next are the Oxford English Dictionary and the Deutsches Wörterbuch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;worldslargestdictionary.com claims that &lt;a href=&quot;http://logos.it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Logos.it&lt;/a&gt; is the largest multilingual dictionary with 8 million words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2991" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T09:14:34.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-29T11:01:17.243" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've devoured the book &quot;Beginning Syntax&quot; by Linda Thomas, but there are areas it doesn't go into in enough depth (presumably to keep it simple).  For example, modal auxiliary &quot;ought to&quot; - it doesn't explain how to parse that in the sentence tree. It seems like a group of it's own rather than one single MOD. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a website that has many examples of different sentences described in UK style  trees diagrams that would be super helpful.  Obviously I have searched myself but haven't found what I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any recommendations or thoughts - maybe a book if no website exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5625" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-29T12:12:35.070" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T01:14:53.187" Title="Resource that gives examples of many different sentences described in tree diagrams" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2014-11-29T12:57:48.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I assume that with “largest dictionary” you mean the dictionary with the largest number of entries (lemmas), not the one that fills the largest number of pages. In this form, the question probably cannot be answered, given the fact that different languages have different systems of lemmatisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, Wiktionary includes proper nouns, while traditional dictionaries exclude proper nouns. The Dutch WNT covers texts down to 1921 and has 430000 entries. The second edition of the OED (1989) has 291000 entries, but the current on-line version claims to have 600000 words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to problematize the question I would like to mention Arabic, a language considered to have a very large vocabulary. Arabic dictionaries are arranged according to roots. The numerous verbal derivatives of any given root are all counted as a single lemma, while the singular nouns derived from a given root are treated as separate lemmas. The largest dictionary of Classical Arabic, the Tāj al-ʻarūs, is said to contain 120000 “words”. This looks a lot less than the WNT and the OED. However, the Tāj was compiled in the 18th century, the other two in the 20th; the vocabularies of Dutch and English have obviously increased enormously in the last two centuries. Moreover, the Tāj contains in principle only the words found in the Qur’an (not many) and in the early Arabic poets, so let’s say words attested in texts from before about 700 AD. I doubt whether there are many other languages that clock up such a big number by such an early date. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T12:57:48.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2014-11-29T13:35:40.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Svenska Akademiens ordbok is an ongoing work that started in the late 19th century. It lists Swedish words from around 1520 until today. That covers modern and current Swedish. On the Swedish Academy's homepage, SAOB is said to be comparable to WNT, OED and DW (though I do not know if they are referring to size, quality or both). To date it has 36 volumes and covers A through UTSUDDA. I haven't been able to find any statistics beyond what I've given here, but I have sent e-mail to the editor, requesting further information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.saob.se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.saob.se/&lt;/a&gt; (This page is in Swedish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5568" LastEditorDisplayName="user5568" LastEditDate="2014-11-29T13:51:40.733" LastActivityDate="2014-11-29T13:51:40.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-29T23:47:45.210" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know whether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is feasible or has already been done by someone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's possibile to predict its outcome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The experiment I came up with is the following: a random text written in language A is chosen, alongisde a target language B. Then the following two steps are reiterated N times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text is translated into language B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The translated text gets translated back into A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If done by humans, the translator would have to be a different person each time not to get biased (there will have to be 2*N translators). The meaning of the text is assumed to be preserved at each step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this whole process has ended, I'd like to know how the final text in language A differs from the original copy, and what has changed in all the different versions of the text.&#xA;Possible outcomes I have though of so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text converges to a final text for N suffcientely large. (Is the final text simpler, more complex or neither?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text changes indefinitely at each step.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complex or uncommon words/constructions turn into simpler ones, simpler meaning that this word/construction is more common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the synonyms appear in the various copies of the text in a ratio similar to that you have in the spoken/written language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing can be said as the choice of A and B influences the outcome too much. (What would be the right parameter to do so then?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help with the tags is appreciated, as I'm not a linguist nor a linguistics student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5629" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T02:48:00.077" Title="Experiment on reiterated translation" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9688" CreationDate="2014-11-30T05:47:42.693" Score="2" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;/j/ is the semivocalic equivalent of /i/, /w/ of /u/, /ɥ/ of /y/, /ɰ/ of /ɯ/, and so forth, and I've also seen /ɹ/ described as the semivocalic equivalent of /ɚ/. Considering all of this, it seems that approximants can have vocalic equivalents in certain contexts. I'm trying to work out what would be the vocalic equivalent of the bilabial approximant /β̞/. Is there a vocalic equivalent to this sound, and if so what would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5630" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T16:57:25.553" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:57:25.553" Title="Is there a vowel equivalent to the bilabial approximant?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;&lt;glides&gt;&lt;bilabial&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-11-30T15:36:46.917" Score="3" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Islam right direction symbolize good things and I realize that phenomenon in some languages (English, Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages like this and where does this phenomenon come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5632" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T22:41:24.243" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:41:24.243" Title="In which languages does &quot;right&quot; mean both a direction and &quot;correct&quot; (or another positive meaning)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-11-30T19:51:47.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2014-11-30T16:06:26.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, a quick note about the use of / / vs. the use of [ ].  Usually the former is used for phonemes and the latter for phones. Since you are really talking about phones here, I'm going to shift to using [ ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sort of a tricky question. In the examples you give, the state of both the tongue and the lips is expressed by the IPA symbol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[i]/[j] - spread lips, high front tongue&#xA;[y]/[ɥ] - rounded lips, high front tongue&#xA;[ɯ]/[ɰ] - spread lips, high back tongue&#xA;[u]/[w] - rounded lips, high back tongue&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With vowels in general, it's crucial to know what the tongue is doing to be able to distinguish them from one another.  In most of the symbol pairs you listed, the approximant symbol was derived from its vowel cousin's symbol, so the state of the tongue during the articulation of the approximant is assumed to be the same as for its vowel cousin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bilabial approximant symbol, on the other hand, has been derived from its fricative cousin. As such, it puts emphasis on the state of the lips--they are compressed but unrounded. So we know we are looking for a vowel that involves compressed lips but all bets are off as far as the placement of the tongue is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just thinking in terms of sounds from real languages, one candidate that seems to fit the bill is the [ɯᵝ] sound in Japanese, usually represented phonemically as just /u/, since it doesn't contrast with any other high back vowel. Actually, if we're nitpicking, even [ɯᵝ] is probably not exactly right for this sound, since the tongue placement is usually slightly more centralized than the symbol implies. At any rate, the superscript &lt;em&gt;β&lt;/em&gt; is used to indicate lip compression. The approximant cousin of this vowel is usually represented (as you might expect) as [ɰᵝ] rather than as [β̞], since the former gives information about tongue placement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, you could think of [ɰᵝ] as a narrow version of [β̞]--that is, [ɰᵝ] specifies a subset of the sounds specified by [β̞]. And so [ɯᵝ] specifies a subset of the vowel sounds that are cousins to the approximant sounds represented by [β̞]. One might imagine a vowel that is the fronted counterpart to [ɯᵝ], perhaps represented as [iᵝ], that would be just as valid as the vowel cousin of [β̞]. I don't know if that sound is documented in an actual language, but it is logically possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:06:26.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9687" CreationDate="2014-11-30T16:39:03.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/droit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;droit&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and its derivatives have several meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tournez à droite à l'intersection &gt; Turn &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; at the intersection&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Il marche dans le droit chemin &gt; He walks in the path of &lt;strong&gt;righteousness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Une ligne droite &gt; A &lt;strong&gt;straight&lt;/strong&gt; line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2014-11-30T19:50:17.850" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T19:50:17.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9687" CreationDate="2014-11-30T16:57:42.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, &lt;em&gt;derecho&lt;/em&gt; can mean either &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; (as in civil rights, &lt;em&gt;derechos civiles&lt;/em&gt; “civil rights”) or &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt; (as in straight ahead, &lt;em&gt;sigue el camino todo derecho&lt;/em&gt; “Follow the road straight along”).  The feminine form &lt;em&gt;derecha&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; (as in not left, &lt;em&gt;gira a la derecha&lt;/em&gt; “Turn right”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2014-11-30T16:57:42.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9685" CreationDate="2014-12-01T00:00:51.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be the scientific experiment you wish, but something of&#xA;the kind has been done at least once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a short story&#xA;written by Mark Twain (still Samuel Longhorne Clemens), translated&#xA;into French, then retranslated by the outraged Twain to Englih. Of&#xA;course, he then published all three versions together as &quot;The Jumping&#xA;Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a&#xA;Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all of it is now available on the web, though &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/jumpingfrogofcal00twairich/jumpingfrogofcal00twairich_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the version I found&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;does not seem the best one could hope for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T00:00:51.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9685" CreationDate="2014-12-01T02:48:00.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been tried but people seem to have given up on it seeing that it does not help at all. I quote from the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://mt-archive.info/MTS-2005-Koehn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They use a MT system to&#xA;  translate a sentence from English into a foreign language,&#xA;  and then use a reverse MT system to translate&#xA;  the sentence back into English. They then judge the&#xA;  quality of the MT systems by how well the English&#xA;  sentence is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This method is inspired by an urban legend involving&#xA;  a pair of MT systems between Russian and&#xA;  English. The legend proclaims that once someone&#xA;  fed a English–Russian MT system the bible verse&#xA;  “&lt;em&gt;The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.&lt;/em&gt;” When&#xA;  back translating the sentence with the Russian–&#xA;  English system, the system returned “&lt;em&gt;The vodka is&#xA;  good but the meat is rotten.&lt;/em&gt;“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How well does back translation indicate the translation&#xA;  performance of the MT systems involved? As&#xA;  Table 4 shows, not much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WZ6gP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In conclusion, back translation does not only provide&#xA;  a false sense of the capabilities of MT systems,&#xA;  it is also a lazy and flawed method to compare systems.&#xA;  Back translation unfairly benefits from the&#xA;  ability to reverse errors, which only show up in the&#xA;  foreign language. To drive the point home: a system&#xA;  pair that does nothing, meaning, leaving all English&#xA;  words in place will do perfectly in back translation,&#xA;  while being utterly useless in practise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T02:48:00.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9651" CreationDate="2014-12-01T09:44:21.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;People working on language evolution in the intellectual tradition you describe believe the following things (I limit myself to give an accurate rendering of their positions; as none of the opinons described below are part of the scientific consensus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Language is a core human faculty, fundamentally different from animal communication; which they take to be an analogous organ but not a homologous one. The genetic encoding of this faculty is very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) This core human faculty evolved rapidly, probably only once in the &lt;em&gt;Homo Sapiens&lt;/em&gt; evolutionary history at least 20,000 years ago but probably at most 100,000 years (this they believe because on the one hand the ability to learn any human language shows no genetic diversity between populations which separated 20,000 years ago at least and on the other hand there are few indisputable archeological artifacts with a symbolic meaning dating from before 100,000 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Crucially for your question, syntactic structures are fundamentally very simple, in fact as simple as they could be, and exhibit (at a fundamental level) only very small and trivial cross-linguistic variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For them, these three simultaneous opinons are mutually reinforcing and present a coherent picture. For instance, if it is true that 2) the human faculty for language evolved once and relatively recently, then its genetic encoding is in all likelihood very simple, so 1), and so should be its expression 3). Conversely, if you believe 3), then the question of why all human languages should be fundamentally the same naturally arises, and the null-hypothesis would be a combination of 1) and 2). I should say that they also firmly believe that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Evolution of the human capability of language is for the moment way to hard a problem, as is already in fact evolution of immensely simpler cognitive faculties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your precise questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Do they] conclude that the language of our ancestors 1 million years ago already had the capability to construct recursion?&lt;/strong&gt; Absolutely not. They very strongly believe that our closest ancestors at that time scale lacked the current human capability of language. The time scale they propose is an order of magnitude lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the information about language encoded in some other way (which way?)?&lt;/strong&gt; Much simpler biological phenomena show a delicate interplay between genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors, so the null-hypothesis is that the same should be the case for the language faculty. In view of 4), they would probably say that this question is (way) too hard for current science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What else solves my apparend misunderstanding?&lt;/strong&gt; Actually, your reasoning was quite parallel to theirs, but you took as a premise the fact that linguistics structure are complex (to quote from your question with my emphasis &quot;so within a few 100.000 of years, the information about &lt;em&gt;complex&lt;/em&gt; linguistic[s] structures is very unlikely to be encoded into the DNA&quot;). They would agree with your assessment if they considered linguistics structures to be complex, but they believe they are simple.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144795/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401/full&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T09:44:21.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4073" CreationDate="2014-12-01T11:04:15.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all your statement: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English, the lemma of a verb is the 3rd person singular form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is incorrect. The 3rd person singular of an English verb would be &quot;he &lt;strong&gt;asks&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;he &lt;code&gt;digs&lt;/code&gt;&quot; and &quot;he &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Id don't know any dictionary to use this form. So, it probable the infinitive rather than the 3rd person singular although in English it's hard to guess sometimes. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English it usually is the full infinitive (to go) although&#xA;  alphabetized without 'to' (go)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All person &lt;strong&gt;except&lt;/strong&gt; the 3rd person singular coincide usually with the infinitive, with possible exception the verb &quot;to be&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I am&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;you are&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;he is&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;BUT &#xA;&lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, to your question now the same link of Wikipedia just answers your question but I guess you validated the answer as complete enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) is&#xA;  the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of&#xA;  words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words it says that lemma is the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;canonical form&lt;/strong&gt; meaning the form of word that is standardized, deprived of most conjugation ending and transformation and meant to be an anchor for all searches involving all forms this word might appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dictionary form&lt;/strong&gt; just means it's the form you look up in a dictionary for the above reason (easier to search for)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;citation&lt;/strong&gt; falls into the same category as the &lt;strong&gt;dictionary form&lt;/strong&gt;: easier to cite.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of your question which you express your doubts about the &lt;em&gt;inconsistencies of the criteria to give lemma status to a word&lt;/em&gt;, is exactly that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;at some point the original lemma cannot deal exactly with the intend it was used initially, meaning to be searched easily. So, then lexicographer often add new entries which seems to break the lemma contract but they stick to the general rule of a standardized way to search a word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This explains also cases, where multiple lemmas seem to address the same (morphologically) word. Then, there might be a shift in which part of speech the two words belong to, e.g. verb vs noun etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How is it scientifically defined?&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;I don't think there is a large science behind it, it's just a convention that is used to refer to words and search them easily. It's like asking why the words are look up in this alphabetical order and not another order, e.g. by phonology etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5600" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T11:04:15.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9647" CreationDate="2014-12-01T23:57:35.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between lexical and grammatical aspect is not particularly relevant when it comes to cross-linguistic comparisons. Each language has a number of ways of describing events with respect to their duration, completeness, repetition, etc. which is broadly labelled as aspect. Sometimes aspectual meanings are separated from other types of meanings (like mode, manner, time, sequentiality, evidentiality, etc.), more often they are blended together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each language has a unique blend of these expressions that determine what gets routinely said by its speakers. Each language forces speakers to make different commitments as to what is specified and what is not. This could be at the level of grammar or lexicon or somewhere in between. (One of the reasons 'construction' is a better model for this than grammar or lexicon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, most Czech deverbatives contain information about progress or completeness. So for instance, there are two different ways to say 'Shopping is tiring.' that clearly indicate whether it's the process or the complete event. In English, there are ways to express that distinction but they would require a discursive solution. What happens, however, is that most of the time English speakers just don't bother. It's not information that is all that relevant most of the time to Czech speakers, either. But the language forces that commitment. When you're translating, you may discover that this commitment makes things difficult. This is something translators deal with every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in this sense, languages are broadly commensurate when it comes to the communicative needs of their respective speakers.  But they are not commensurate when it comes to replicating each other's grammatical commitments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-01T23:57:35.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-02T04:55:27.883" Score="2" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;By modern language I mean a language spoken since less than two thousands years. By grammatical feature I mean for example passive voice, which doesn't exist in PIE but is found in its descendants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5641" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T06:13:06.857" Title="What are some grammatical features found only in modern languages?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9701" CreationDate="2014-12-02T15:35:21.447" Score="5" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent some time on a research project examining spectrograms and coding vowels for speakers of American English from a few rural regions in the state of Oklahoma.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that certain speakers seemed to consistently target 3 separate peaks (or articulator positions) on certain vowels, such as the /ɛ/ in a word like /hɛn/ (and to my ear such vowels sounded &lt;em&gt;noticeably&lt;/em&gt; different than the English varieties from my AE region).  While I expected to find diphthongs among the data sets, it really surprised me to find a hint of triphthongs in an English variety.  I didn't find much research out there on whether that is actually some sort of a diphthong-glide combination or a &quot;real&quot; triphthong (where the speaker has 3 distinct target areas for the vowel), and I suspect that it is a very limited situation in English, and not a clear example of triphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I really wondered after the project was if there are languages where triphthongs are a regular feature?  Could someone please tell me an example of a language or dialect that contains triphthongs? &#xA;I would love to know.  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5638" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T11:41:21.243" Title="What is an example of a language or dialect that contains triphthongs?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2014-12-02T21:47:01.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Vietnamese word like khiếu contains a core vowel [i] followed by two off-glides [ɜ] and [w]. The first is definitely not an on-glide. Words of this type are very common in Vietnamese and in other South-East-Asian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-12-02T21:47:01.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9720" CreationDate="2014-12-02T22:51:53.483" Score="3" ViewCount="7522" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding (supported by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome#Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) is that Latin was the spoken and written language in Ancient Rome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I was puzzled to read the following piece of Talmud (&lt;a href=&quot;http://hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=19&amp;amp;daf=80&amp;amp;format=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gitin 80a&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;מאי מלכות שאינה הוגנת? מלכות הרומיים. ואמאי קרי לה מלכות שאינה הוגנת?&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;משום דאין להם לא כתב ולא לשון&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is an &quot;improper sovereignty&quot;? That is the Romans. And why were&#xA;  they called &quot;improper&quot;? &lt;strong&gt;Because they don't have a written or spoken&#xA;  language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rashi&lt;/a&gt; there (sv שאין להם) writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;שאין להם לא כתב ולא לשון. אלא משל אומה אחרת&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They don't have a written or spoken language&quot; -- [this means that] they used that of&#xA;  another nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context there is a discussion of the Mishna (&lt;a href=&quot;http://hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=19&amp;amp;daf=79&amp;amp;format=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gitin 79a&lt;/a&gt;-80a) that rules that a bill of divorce (גט) that is dated by any dating system other than that of the current rulership is invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the above information from the Talmud, together with Rashi's explanation, accurate? &lt;strong&gt;If the Romans didn't create Latin, where did it come from?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( &lt;em&gt;all above translations are mine&lt;/em&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5642" LastEditorUserId="5642" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T22:18:50.040" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T18:55:17.593" Title="Where did Latin come from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-03T03:43:43.360" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a student doing some basic research into LFG and I've read some of Falk 2001 &lt;em&gt;Lexical Functional-Grammar: an Introduction to Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax&lt;/em&gt; and there's an exercise in the chapter on c-structure that's been giving me a headache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike GB, LFG has a nonprojective (non X'-category) S. Consider a sentence with no auxillary, such as &lt;em&gt;Joan wrote a book&lt;/em&gt;. Should it be analyzed as an IP (as in (i)) or an S (as in (ii))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QiGH0.png&quot; alt=&quot;tree with VP under I&amp;#39; node&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3kkTf.png&quot; alt=&quot;tree with VP under S node and no IP at all&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Falk also states a principle of &quot;Economy of Expression&quot; earlier in the chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All syntactic phrase structure nodes are optional and are not used unless required to license elements required to create a well-formed f-structure or to add semantic content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now my confusion: On one hand, the I' node does not help us create f-structure or (to my mind) add semantic content. On the other hand, it seems fishy that we should need to fall back to a S node. I feel like there's some loss of information? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me understand what's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my intuition about what it means to &quot;license&quot; f-structure is off, so something even about that might help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T15:27:45.623" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:27:45.623" Title="Non-projective S in lexical-functional grammar" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;lfg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9698" CreationDate="2014-12-03T09:39:02.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really depends on how you think about grammar. Your question sort of implies that it's primary morphosyntactic features you're after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here, it's more likely to be the other way around. Things like dual and evidentiality seem to be disappearing as Trudgill has argued in a recent book (useful video overview here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjy1CkH1FOE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjy1CkH1FOE&lt;/a&gt;). And it is not really a question of 'modern' vs. 'ancient' but rather related to size of community and amount of contact. At least, that's Trudgill's argument. I don't subscribe to it fully but there's enough data there for the answer to the general question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole question of 'modern' language is really problematic. The anthropologist in me would say that it's hiding a world of technological and developmental normativities. Meaning, that it thinks that somehow there's a directionality to language development and that direction is towards our language, the natural way of being. There's a world of argument and data in anthropology to show that we need to consider even supposedly isolated communities to be modern - and I think this applies to languages as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you step outside of morphosyntax, however, you could talk about a lot of language uses that require certain linguistic tools. One of these is writing which requires stylistic, cohesive and other para syntactic devices not likely to be found in languages without a written culture of a certain kind (ie. it's not just about writing spoken words down). So many arguments have been made about hypotaxis being a 'modern' invention, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's good reason to be skeptical about any such claims as absolute because of the fundamental lack of evidence from the past. However, there's probably enough there to start thinking about some broad tendencies. I'm not aware of any critical synthetic account of this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-03T09:39:02.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9711" CreationDate="2014-12-03T17:02:33.547" Score="3" ViewCount="3983" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To lose one's head&lt;/strong&gt; - is it a metaphor or metonymy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head&lt;/strong&gt; here probably stands for the &lt;strong&gt;life&lt;/strong&gt; of a person,so it's probably a metonymy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is it the same for phrase &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to give smb. a heart&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5596" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T08:18:09.290" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T03:44:00.930" Title="Metaphor/metonymy" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9707" CreationDate="2014-12-03T17:59:34.017" Score="1" ViewCount="50028" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have the following CFG rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; (D) NOM&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V (NP) (NP)&#xA;NOM -&amp;gt; N&#xA;NOM -&amp;gt; NOM PP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; VP PP&#xA;PP -&amp;gt; P NP&#xA;X -&amp;gt; X+ CONJ X&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I draw the tree diagram of this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Most cats and dogs with fleas live in the neighbourhood.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the sentence has two different interpretations, with one attributing &lt;code&gt;fleas&lt;/code&gt; to both &lt;code&gt;cats&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dogs&lt;/code&gt; and the other only to &lt;code&gt;dogs&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the case of attributing &lt;code&gt;fleas&lt;/code&gt; to only dogs I drew the following diagram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/49LvB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the second interpretation, I figured I should add the NOM substructure to the first NOM before CONJ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YjuIc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be correct to me, because it reflects the fact that the attribute is equally applicable to both NOMs. But on the other hand, I am writing words on the added branch that aren't there (have been deleted for avoiding repetition) and the tree reads a longer sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my parsing correct and if not how should I make it work right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" LastEditorUserId="2879" LastEditDate="2014-12-03T18:11:52.897" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T06:26:56.803" Title="Drawing tree diagrams of ambiguous sentences generated by a CFG" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9706" CreationDate="2014-12-04T01:00:38.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for parse trees according to your grammar, the&#xA;first tree seems correct, up to the missing &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; symbols, and a missing&#xA;&lt;code&gt;NOM&lt;/code&gt; above &lt;code&gt;fleas&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However your second diagram should look as follow, drawing only the&#xA;relevant part that changes (i.e. under NOM_1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            NOM 1&#xA;         __/   \___&#xA;        /          \&#xA;     NOM            PP&#xA;    / | \_         /  \&#xA;   /  |   \       |    |&#xA;NOM  CONJ  NOM    P    NP&#xA; |     |    |     |    |&#xA; N    and   N   with  NOM&#xA; |          |          |&#xA;cats       dogs        N&#xA;                       |&#xA;                     fleas&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, If you wanted to draw both trees in a single diagram, that is&#xA;possible, but significantly more complicated. But I doubt your book does anything of the kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T01:00:38.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9710" CreationDate="2014-12-04T04:02:07.740" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Spanish speaker and today I was just wondering about this, if it's a case like &lt;code&gt;bizarre&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;bizarro&lt;/code&gt; (which in Spanish means «generous» or «brave», not «weird»).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't fully understand what it means in English, so I'd appreciate a native's opinion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5647" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T05:15:42.233" Title="Is «plausible» a false friend between English and Spanish?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-12-08T08:49:38.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8517" CreationDate="2014-12-04T04:09:04.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least from my experience as a native speaker (of Chilean Spanish), I think it's a more &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; thing to hear that, as an example, I recall the word for someone with a big belly is &lt;code&gt;guatón&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;guata&lt;/code&gt; = belly), which, as it's used in more informal contexts, could be heard as &lt;code&gt;watón&lt;/code&gt;, while it should be written &lt;code&gt;guatón&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5647" LastEditorUserId="13030" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T15:23:53.590" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T15:23:53.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9708" CreationDate="2014-12-04T05:15:42.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plausible means &quot;believable&quot;. It's a false friend, but it has the same etymology. Originally it meant &quot;praiseworthy&quot;, as in Spanish, then it was used to refer to a good argument in a debate - a believable one. Eventually the meaning of &quot;believable&quot; supplanted the original meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5648" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T05:15:42.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9705" CreationDate="2014-12-04T08:09:08.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Metaphor and metonymy are both ways of connecting two concepts (or making one concept stand for another). The fundamental distinction between metaphor and metonymy is that metaphor connects two concepts based on similarity and metonymy based on part/whole relationship (meronymy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical &lt;strong&gt;examples of metaphor&lt;/strong&gt; are 'Our relationship is on rocky ground' or 'We had to battle over who will use the toilet first.' You could easily make a list of point in which the two domains are similar (e.g. when you're on rocky ground, you have to step carefully and in our relationship, everything I do has to be done with care). Note, the similarities are always partial, although sometimes people will debate over where they begin and end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical &lt;strong&gt;examples of metonymy&lt;/strong&gt; are 'Nice wheels' where 'wheels' stand for 'car' or 'France voted no' where 'France' stands for the representative doing the actual voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, you can tell them apart through a simple &lt;strong&gt;substitution test&lt;/strong&gt;. If you can substitute the one word or phrase that's being used to stand for something for the word or phrase used to describe it and get exactly the same meaning, you're more likely to deal with metonymy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can change 'Nice wheels' to 'Nice car' or 'France voted no' to 'The representative for France voted no' and get exactly the same meaning. However, with metaphors like 'I gave her my heart', you cannot simply substitute 'I gave her myself'. (Of course, in many cases, you can do a substitution with metaphor as well. For example, 'All men are pigs' could be rephrased as 'All men are nasty.' But you can see that this does not convey the same meaning and would require much more elaboration than when you substitute 'car' for 'wheels'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer &lt;strong&gt;your specific question&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;To lose one's head&lt;/em&gt; is a metaphor. The phrase is intended to give an image of 'panic'. Although, 'head' often metonymically stands for people (as in '10 dollars per head') or mind/thoughts ('his head comes up with interesting ideas'), you cannot simply say that 'To lose one's head' is the same as 'To lose oneself' or 'To lose one's mind'. (They are in a similar area but have quite distinct meanings.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for 'to give someone one's heart' (to fall in love) or 'to give someone heart' (to give someone hope or courage). It is the whole statement that does the job, and not just the 'hear'. But heart can easily be used metonymically as in 'There are a lot of brave hearts among us' (brave people) and 'Look at those young hearts in love' (young people). These metonymies also rely on the metaphorical connections between heart and courage and heart and love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us to the question raised by @jlawler of whether it &lt;strong&gt;is worth making the distinction between metaphor and metonymy&lt;/strong&gt;. Some people (George Lakoff, among them) would claim that they represent a crucial distinction in figurative language. Others (myself included) would argue that they are in fact achieving a similar conceptual job and often work in conjunction. However, the stereotypical cases are quite straightforwardly different and it is worth maintaining the distinction between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've described the difference between metaphor and metonymy in &lt;strong&gt;more detail in &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2013/12/binders-full-of-women-with-mighty-pens-what-is-metonymy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a longer post&lt;/strong&gt; on MetaphorHacker&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T03:44:00.930" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T03:44:00.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-04T16:26:09.537" Score="14" ViewCount="7629" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just reading a french text with the word créées (created). Are there any other languages where triple letters, especially vowels, can be found occasionally? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5652" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T16:31:50.287" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T23:08:43.593" Title="Which languages have words containing the same letter three times in a row?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="19" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9717" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:21:01.743" Score="5" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norwegian is using vowel length contrastively.&#xA;This is normally shown in ortography by double consonant after the vowel.&#xA;tak(tɑːk) vs. takk(tɑk).&#xA;What other ways are used to ortographically show lengthening of vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T17:53:29.323" Title="What are the different ways used to ortographically show the length of vowels?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:27:07.573" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;It certainly comes up occasionally, but mainly, I would think, across morpheme boundaries where one is a doubled letter and the other is that same letter but in its singular form (as in the new German orthography &lt;em&gt;Schifffahrt&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Balletttänzer&lt;/em&gt;, etc) or where a letter has both consonant and vowel values.  Undoubtedly at some point &lt;em&gt;uvula&lt;/em&gt; and any other words with &lt;em&gt;uvu&lt;/em&gt; would in the past have been written identically until the separation of the &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; (if someone could find an old print reference to a &lt;em&gt;vuvuzela&lt;/em&gt; then you'd have a quadruple &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would imagine most languages (happy to be corrected, of course) would start to simplify spelling if the extra letters don't change pronunciation, or add in punctuation to separate them (as in &lt;em&gt;shell-less&lt;/em&gt; in English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="5202" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T17:36:22.517" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T17:36:22.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:36:25.123" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has several words with triple letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;длинношеее - 'having a long neck', also короткошеее - 'having a short neck'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;змееед - 'snake-eater', the name of a bird&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;доооновский - 'pre-UN'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;зоообъединение - 'zoos' association'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T17:36:25.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9714" CreationDate="2014-12-04T17:53:29.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no end of ways to mark vocalic length across the orthographies of languages. It's either by diacritics, additional letters, special letters or some indirect marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia helpfully lists the different &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Diacritics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diactritical maarks&lt;/a&gt; the most common of which are the macron (e.g. ā) and the acute accent (e.g. á).  as well as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Additional_letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;additional letters&lt;/a&gt; the most common of which is vowel doubling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this you need to add the colon-like symbol (ː) used by IPA for vowel length. In English phonics training, the macron is used to indicate 'long vowels' but these are not contrasted by length alone but rather by quality and length (often the long counterpart being a diphthong) as in 'mat' vs. 'mate'. Even in a case where long counter part is available as in 'pit' vs. 'pete', the contrast is given as 'spit'/'spite' and 'pet'/'pete'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, you could also use separate letters such as the Greek omega vs. omicron but the length distinction has been lost in modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As whole, the question of contrastive and non-contrastive vowel length is much more involved however. Things like stress, diphothongization and allophonic variation get involved so it's rarely as simple as establishing a long/short contrast across the whole vowel system of a language. Even in a language like Czech where every short vowels has a long  counterpart and the length is preserved regardless of stress, things are not always completely straightforward. The puzzling thing is that even though length is fully phonemic in Czech, the loss of the diacritics (such as in the early days of email) leads to only a minimal increase in ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T17:53:29.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2014-12-04T18:23:44.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is assuming Latin as a given size. Probably the answer is more like development over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me break down your question into two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spoken language. Roughly speaking it goes like this. The language comes from where the people is coming from. And at one point their dialect has evolved so much that their dialect no longer is mutually intelligible from the other dialects. Spoken language is normally evolved over a long period of time, rather then created at a specific point in time. Latin is believed to have been evolved from the Italic branch of Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Written language. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It is believed that the earliest Latin inscription known today is a brooch from the 7th century BC. You could read more about this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail&amp;amp;key=Latn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5642" LastEditDate="2014-12-04T19:18:52.890" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T19:18:52.890" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9724" CreationDate="2014-12-04T19:03:13.713" Score="6" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are much debate of when two dialects become languages. Apart from non-linguistic reasons like politics, quality of understanding is most often used to decide whether two dialects are effectively two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is there anyone (academics preferably) stating something like a percentage of words being the same?&#xA;And if so, what percentage are they proposing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T10:17:46.860" Title="What quantity-level of mutual intelligible words are needed for claiming dialects to be languages?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2014-12-04T21:24:08.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the mistake here is to interpret the Talmud as making a statement about Latin from the perspective of historical linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that this is simply a case of establishing legitimacy both over the region (by then completely under Roman control) and the cultural heritage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many contexts, language can stand for people or a particular set of religious dicta. E.g. language stands in for 'word of God' or 'commandments'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commentary could be quite divergent from the original intent or it could be continuing with the theme of delegitimization. E.g. saying, we are the bearers of the original language with a long line of descent going directly to creation whereas the Latins speak a mongrel language composed of many influences and even had to borrow other people's writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there's some scholarship on this in Talmud studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T21:24:08.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:00:21.563" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Romans did have a spoken language and a written language. They even had a very rich literature. Everybody knows this. The authors of the Talmud Bavli, living in Sasanian Iraq, probably did not know anything about Latin. The statement in Gitin 80a is simply wrong. Is that a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-12-04T22:00:21.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9721" CreationDate="2014-12-04T22:04:14.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many measures of lexical similarity or linguistic distances but neither can tell you whether something is a dialect or a language outside a very constrained context. It is easy to come up with a measure for a particular purpose such as determining historical developments or automatically recognizing different languages in a corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what determines a language is as much a social and political matter as it is a question of linguistics. Even mutual intelligibility is not a solution because whether speakers of different languages can understand each other depends not just on pure lexical closeness but also on mutual exposure (which can often be assymetrical). Also, this mutual intelligibility may only be limited to a small subset of the language or only to certain subpopulations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare these two sentences saying 'How do you like it here?' in Czech and Slovak:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jak se ti tady líbí? (CZ)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ako sa ti tu páči? (SK)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They only share one lexeme completely and one with some level of similarity (plus 'tu' is also used in Czech), yet, any Czech of my generation would not even blink twice over the Slovak version. Yet, a small Czech child thought it was English when meeting a Slovak linguist on a holiday abroad. Czech and Slovak are very close (so close that there were even attempts to call them Czechoslovak), yet young Czech speakers are exposed to Slovak less and less and find it difficult to understand Slovak without some considerable effort. Slovaks tend to have more exposure to Czech and therefore, tend to understand Czech better. Things become even more difficult when you look at Czech and Slovak dialects because some of them are closer to each other than to their respective standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one small illustration of how difficult it is to make a categorical statement over whether something is a dialect or a language unless you also state what purpose the distinction is serving. But sometimes one purpose is more important than another. For instance, product labels are always bilingual in Czech and Slovak, yet, in all cases I can recall they have a lexical similarity between 90%-100% (at a guess much more than a typical utterance). Nevertheless, it is considered important to keep both languages separate for a variety of reasons that transcend questions of mutual intelligibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to be explicit about why you want to know this and what you're planning to do with the information. But if the question is just a matter of general interest then &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, there's no one percentage of similar words that will suffice to labels something a language or a dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-12-07T10:17:46.860" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T10:17:46.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-05T06:58:22.810" Score="2" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a german student of English and I have to make a short presentation (about 20 minutes) about the basic assumptions and terms of Cognitive Linguistics. I got a huge collection of books and articles dealing with this subject and I really have problems to define the most important points, all of the books have a different structuring. Can anybody help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5654" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T16:40:12.777" Title="Short summary of Cognitive Linguistics" Tags="&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2014-12-13T22:41:54.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9726" CreationDate="2014-12-05T12:04:52.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually not a bad question and one to which a fairly definitive and informative answer is possible. This would be useful for many other branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Key points of Cognitive Linguistics (this is in contrast to Chomskyan linguistics which is sometimes also referred to as 'cognitive' but with a small 'c'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language is part of our general cognitive ability rather than a separate module&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cognition is rich and embodied rather than algorithmic manipulation of abstract symbols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language is an inventory of constructions which are pairings of form and meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Constructions span both the areas traditionally described as grammar and lexicon. In the most radical formulation the only relationship is part/whole and the only operation is unification. Under this conception the words and rules view of language disappears.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no sharp distinction between semantics and pragmatics (meanings are rich and encyclopedic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantics is best defined through models (frames) which include propositional meaning as well as scripts, schemas, images, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Figurative language (metaphor, metonymy) is not parasitic but one of the central structuring principles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Categories are subject to prototype effects and do not follow the rules of Aristotelian logic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The key syntactic and semantic operation is one of integration (blending) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (I'd recommend Croft and Cruse) will give you plenty of details about each of these points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I skipped something important and perhaps did not formulate everything quite as representatively as possible. Corrections and additions welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2014-12-05T16:40:12.777" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T16:40:12.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2014-12-05T15:13:37.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;ezglot &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ezglot.com/statistics.php?l=ben#number-of-common-words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;compares a number of languages&lt;/a&gt; for lexical similarity, and provides some interesting statistics. For English, widely spoken languages German and French have highest similarity scores..  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5658" LastEditorUserId="5658" LastEditDate="2015-01-02T22:44:24.470" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T22:44:24.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-05T16:34:23.960" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an amateur looking for help! I talk about &quot;heads&quot; and &quot;tails&quot;. Other examples of tails are &quot;don't you think?&quot; &quot;do you see what I mean&quot;, &quot;or something similar&quot;. They are phrases L2 beginners can use to invite corrections or find out whether they have been understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5659" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T09:49:39.193" Title="Is there a term for sentence ending phrases like &quot;if that is the right word&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-05T18:20:39.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;créées&quot; we find three times the letter 'e' but French people say only [kʁee] (with two 'e'), the final 'e' being dropped.&#xA;&quot;créées&quot; : past participle of &quot;créer&quot; : feminine, plural (&quot;Les étoiles ont été créées il y a longtemps.&quot; -&gt; The stars have been created a long time ago.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T07:28:18.603" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T07:28:18.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-05T20:29:09.000" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding was always that any elided material does not count for information structure of the overt sentence, naturally. That is, the material has to be &lt;em&gt;given&lt;/em&gt; to be elided --- but it cannot be a part of topic or focus. A fellow linguist has recently made a remark that seemed to indicate that it may not be the case. I didn't have a chance to clarify it with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: Are there any data and/or analyses suggesting that elided material may count in the &lt;em&gt;computation&lt;/em&gt; of information structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T20:29:09.000" Title="Ellipsis site in information structure" Tags="&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-05T22:02:49.307" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, you can make up such words on your own, as needed. Find words that ends with two of some vowel, like &lt;em&gt;schnee&lt;/em&gt; (snow), &lt;em&gt;tee&lt;/em&gt; (tea) and words that begin with the same letter, and you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tierenzyklopaedie.de/tiere/schneeeule.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schneeeule&lt;/a&gt;, also written as Schnee-Eule to make it less confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwJEq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Schneeeule&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tee-Ei&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Teeei&lt;/a&gt;, also written as Tee-Ei to make it less confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hey5t.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Teeei&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-12-05T22:02:49.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-06T01:29:52.137" Score="2" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is known in general about the relationship between word difficulty and word frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, for a given word, suppose I know the frequency with which it (or its word stem) is encountered in a standard corpus. How can I estimate the probability that the word will be understood by an average speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5661" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T15:21:26.733" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T15:21:26.733" Title="How to determine difficulty of a word if its frequency in a corpus is known?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2637" CreationDate="2014-12-06T10:00:53.083" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A or/and E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels are much more of a continuum than consonants. Within each language different vowels are separated by different contrastivity, like height, backness and roundness. These contrast lines are very much dependent on how many different vowels the language is believed to use phonemically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to describe these vowel sounds, is to write them in plain writing, using the appropriate alphabet. This is not the same as IPA-alphabet, but it is still the most frequent way to describe a vowel sound. It is also a way to actually making continuus vowel sounds to be discrete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exists several lists counting letters in languages. This Wikipedia page gives an overview: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is also difficult to answer, because you are mixing frequency of languages and frequency within languages. What counts most, people talking, percentage of usage worldwide, or percentage of usage within each language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2014-12-06T18:00:06.060" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T18:00:06.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5892" CreationDate="2014-12-06T19:06:22.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Big enough for their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is difficult to answer, because you want to compare two vague sizes, using a flexible measurement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An average hunter gather tribe in Africa. This is not exactly an accurate size. What language do they speak? Vocabulary will of course vary between languages. Do you mean the active vocabulary of an individual, or for the entire language?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The size of Western civilization. Who is that, and what language do they speak? Is it for an individual or for the entirely language? What about loanwords?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Active vocabulary. Languages is believed to have the ability to describe everything. The number of words in an active vocabulary is therefore directly related to the number of different objects, events and so on, the language speakers are exposed to. One study showed that some dock workers in the UK some hundred years ago, had an active vocabulary down to as little as 300 words. Professors in Linguistics could possibly have as many as 120.000 words in their active vocabulary. Languages with many speakers will naturally have bigger vocabulary, since the more people, the more diversified they can be. But that would not necessarily mean that the active vocabulary of a single person in that language would be any bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, yes I think size of active vocabulary between an African hunter, and an American businessman can be compared. When the businessman knows different economical terms, the hunter probably knows the name of more animals, insects and flowers than the other. And I think it possibly could be the same size as well, depending on how much their every-day-life varies from day to day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T19:06:22.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9733" CreationDate="2014-12-06T22:25:48.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really depends on what you want to do with that information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just in the middle of a project where we're trying to come up with measures of difficulty to give people some automatic help when reading texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you can say that the more frequent word, the more likely it is that any random person will understand it. But when you say 'average speaker will understand' do you really mean something like &gt;90% chance that any randomly chosen person who is identified as a speaker of the language will understand? Or are you talking about some subset of people - e.g. those with X years of education, those who watch X type of news, read X type of paper? Will you be saying the word in context or on its own? Will you be presenting in written or spoken form or both? How will you determine whether they understand it (speed of response, content of response, etc.). All of these things will make a difference. You may find that the 'average speaker' you have in mind is actually not 'average' at all but somebody from the WEIRD club (white, educated, industrialized, rich, male, etc.). Words are not difficult and easy on their own, they're difficult in context for particular people. In my experience, people often ask questions like this and don't even realize that they mean 'for particular people in particular context' because they don't know it matters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we're finding is that when it comes to word difficulty for any one individual, things quickly get pretty complicated. The sort of frequency you can get from a corpus obviously plays a role but you also need to take into account the frequency of exposure. So when you're dealing with children, limit your frequencies to children's literature, or try to include spoken language frequencies when dealing with understanding in conversation, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you also need to be aware of immediate context. A child who struggles with reading but is obsessed with dinosaurs may have no trouble reading words like 'pterodactyl' because of the large exposure. Or American children may be more responsive to words like 'president' and 'federal' than English children. In general, children's words are poorly represented in a corpus, but you'll find that more people understand them and think of them as easy. I often find expatriates using these words when they want to simplify their language for non-native speakers who are of course more likely to know the sort of words the native speakers would have learned later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to consider the communicative needs of your audience and what it is that may be difficult for them. Recently, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0465044719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;book about cosmology&lt;/a&gt; came out based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/1133/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;XKCD joke&lt;/a&gt; about explaining a rocket in words with frequency rank less than 1000. The intention was to make the science accessible to more people. Of course, the result was that the author spends more time circumlocuting around words that are missing and replacing 'universe' with 'All there is', 'Big Flash' with 'Big Splash' and New York with 'city that never sleeps'. Those are either easy to pick up or to establish. The difficulty of texts about the Big Bang theory comes because of the complexity of the data and abstract nature of what it describes, not because of the individual words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author also laughably ignored the fact that words have multiple meanings so decided to use the word 'matter' which is only so frequent because it is most often used in a different sense from that in which a physicist might use it. So, this would also be something to keep in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-06T22:25:48.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-07T03:11:01.613" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In biblical Hebrew, we have חננני &quot;have mercy upon me&quot; (Psalms 9:13 - although that's an unusual form; usually it would be with two נs, and the first would be marked with a gemination symbol) and מממלכה &quot;from one kingdom&quot; (Psalms 105:13 and I Chron. 16:20). Other examples would be possible according to Hebrew grammar, such as וווים &quot;and hooks&quot; or כשששה &quot;when six.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T03:11:01.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-07T04:16:07.953" Score="5" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here in Malaysia there are three main ethnicities, Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and most people speak more than one language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four main language groupings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malay - national language and language of the ethnic majority.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese - Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew, Mandarin, and other varieties are all spoken among parts of the ethnic Chinese Malaysians.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tamil - by far the most commonly spoken language among the ethnic &quot;Indian&quot; Malaysians, who are mostly ethnic Tamils.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the generalization / expectation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malays speak Malay and often English to some degree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese speak one or more Chinese variety and often either or both Malay and English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tamils speak Tamil and usually English and often Malay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I had been wondering for the past couple of weeks how common it is for Indians here to speak Chinese or for Chinese here to speak Tamil. It doesn't seem to be usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then two days ago I arrived in Penang and I was talking to a local Tamil who told me he spoke Tamil, Malay, English, and (Mandarin) Chinese, in that order. Not long after this I observed an ethnic Chinese talking to the same guy in fast fluent Tamil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there some statistics or studies on how common this is in Malaysia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the sake of this question I'm interested just in this pair. I am aware the linguistic and ethnic situation here are both much more complicated than I have this simplified intro in my question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2014-12-07T21:04:23.750" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T21:04:23.750" Title="Do we know how common it is for ethnic Chinese and Tamils in Malaysia to speak each others language?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9729" CreationDate="2014-12-07T09:49:39.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many branches of linguistics deal with these types of clauses but I don't recall ever seeing them classed under one term. This is because, they are structurally and functionally quite diverse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them come under the category of hedges (or something like that), others conversation repair or maintanance (you see what I mean), or turn taking prompts (don't you think), others still might be question tags (wouldn't you), etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're syntactically quite interesting because they often look they're a part of a sentence or a clause but discursively do something different. They would also often follow different intonation patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite not being a very high profile part of linguistic investigations (undeservedly), I'd say they are quite crucial to L2 learners seeking to develop their fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like your term 'sentence tails' but you're probably better off calling them something like 'conversation boosters'. Especially since the term 'head' is already used in linguistics for something else. Hopefully, somebody will contribute some better terminology (and it's also possible, I'm overlooking something quite well known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T09:49:39.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5892" CreationDate="2014-12-07T20:48:31.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Active vocabulary size is a very difficult thing to measure or estimate. Is it all the words ever used in a lifetime or words routinely used? How about homonyms and polysemous words? How about functional words and languages that don't have many?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problematic term is 'hunter gatherers'? Do you mean modern hunter gatherers or historical ones? Do you mean small &quot;uncontacted&quot; tribes or large seminomadic societies with mixed modes of subsistence and extensive use of imported technology (think Aleut using snowmobiles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people mention hunter gatherers they usually mean small far-away tribes with minimal external contact. However, these are quite likely not to be very representative of what might have been typical before the encroachment of technologically superior belligerent cultures into their habitats resulting in societies under stress whose language may be under all sorts of pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite all that. The actual vocabulary size of somebody in a small relatively isolated community is not likely to be that much smaller than somebody of similar socioeconomic status living in an industrial society. Remember, hunter gatherer lives are not particularly simple. They tend to have knowledge of large folk taxonomies of plants and animals that can go into the hundreds or thousands. They are also likely to have quite complex kin and clan terminology as well as names for various tools and their uses. They might also have an extensive meteorological vocabulary dealing with seasons, parts of day, etc. They will not lack vocabulary for abstract concepts either. In some such societies, people will also have to deal with taboos resulting in name changes as a result of death. And many of them are also likely to be multilingual due to various influences such as intermarriage or other types of contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will also be some variation among individuals depending on their role in knowledge maintenance, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-07T20:48:31.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9744" CreationDate="2014-12-08T02:44:21.210" Score="0" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just bought this bracelet at a random goodwill shop in Boston and it's beautiful, I would just like to make sure I'm not wearing something offensive or religiously significant. &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/uF4pl2n.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5667" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T13:39:42.137" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T13:39:42.137" Title="Would someone be able to identify this language and translate the text to english?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-12-08T13:39:50.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9743" CreationDate="2014-12-08T02:54:03.583" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you flip it over, you'll see that it's Devanagari, and therefore an Indian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5668" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T02:54:03.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-08T04:32:24.017" Score="5" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a student in psychology, but I have very little familiarity with linguistics. I am doing working on flexible cognition and memory, and we are developing a task that requires participants to select objects that can be used to satisfy goals, while systematically varying the association with the object and the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goals are given as 'tasks' that can be expressed as an infinitive, i.e. &quot;To Dig&quot;, and participants would then select a noun (from a field of distractors) that could best be used to perform the task, i.e. &quot;Shovel&quot; or &quot;Stick&quot;. The latter would be an example of an object that could be used to perform the task, but is not usually associated with the task in the way that a shovel is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to have some 'objective' measure of semantic relatedness between the goal (verb/infinitive) and the object (noun). Unfortunately, Wordnet and many other online databases of semantic relatedness don't let you get measures of semantic relatedness across different parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question: Does anyone know of a toolset that can be used to extract some measure of semantic relatedness between a word pair, i.e. ('Dig', 'Stick'), across parts of speech, while simultaneously allowing me to specify the part of speech associated with each word in the pair? (to stretch the above example, I want to be able to specify that dig is to be understood as a verb, as in 'to dig' not a noun as in 'let's go to the archeological dig')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reasonably fluent in python, and I have already set up NLTK on my computer, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to turn it toward this problem. Hopefully the answer is there somewhere, and if so, code examples would be highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5669" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T14:55:19.367" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T01:25:08.660" Title="Semantic Relatedness metric across Parts of Speech" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9743" CreationDate="2014-12-08T10:52:11.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I rotated your image 180°. The letters are not Devanagari, they are Tibetan, and the language is Sanskrit, it is the famous Buddhist mantra &lt;strong&gt;Om mani padme hum&lt;/strong&gt;, read about its meaning here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_mani_padme_hum&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_mani_padme_hum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T10:52:11.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-08T17:05:45.300" Score="1" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the answers to my last phonetics assignment provided by my professor, the syllable tree diagram for the word /ʌ n t æ ŋ g l̩ / didn't show any ambisyllabic consonants. Our textbook doesn't go into much detail on the topic other than explaining that the first consonant in an onset of an unstressed syllable is shared as part of the coda of the preceding stressed syllable. Knowing this I would assume that the the /t/ in the second syllable would be ambisyllabic,however it isn't and I was just wondering why this would be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, would the /g/ in the third syllable be ambisyllabic as well? Or does ambisyllabicity apply on when there in a stressed syllable preceding an unstressed one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5671" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T23:47:09.833" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T00:20:11.037" Title="Does ambisyllabicity apply to all words?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9748" CreationDate="2014-12-08T18:37:45.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of ambisyllabicity is a theory-specific one. Which segments have &quot;ambisyllabic&quot; status (or even whether ambisyllabicity exists at all) depends on one's model, just as how words get syllabified depends on one's model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are some phonetic phenomena that make it useful to treat certain segments, such as those that fulfill the criteria outlined in your textbook, as ambisyllabic.  For example, in English, nuclei before voiceless consonant onsets in unstressed syllables tend to be shorter than those before voiced consonant onsets in unstressed syllables, which mirrors a pattern seen with voiceless and voiced codas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the criteria mentioned in your textbook, the /t/ wouldn't qualify since it is in the onset of a &lt;em&gt;stressed&lt;/em&gt; syllable.  The /g/ is a more promising candidate based on those criteria. Some models might stipulate additional criteria, for example that the resulting coda in the previous syllable be a legal coda in its own right. If that is the case, then the /g/ in &lt;em&gt;untangle&lt;/em&gt; actually doesn't qualify because a syllable can't end in /ŋg/ (in the dialect I'm assuming your textbook is assuming!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2014-12-08T18:43:01.233" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T18:43:01.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2014-12-08T19:46:32.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From several different sites, sources not verified:&#xA;The number of separate BASIC sounds in a language is often known. I don't know of any languages that have much more than 50 basic sounds or so. All English sounds are made up of just 44-46 sounds, Japanese also has around 44 or so &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; sounds, depending on how you define &quot;basic&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The average human can make over 500 distinct sounds of vowels and consonants. If you include variations on pitch and volume the number is infinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, non-tonal would be on the order of 500 letters. With tonal (consider raising half a step or a full step being considered differently) there really could be an infinite number of letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5673" LastActivityDate="2014-12-08T19:46:32.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-09T04:45:46.763" Score="53" ViewCount="13621" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the case system is devised/imposed by literates and not really natural: it is said that the vulgar Latin that most people really used didn't have e.g. the cases (or all of them) of the 'classical' Latin, so I wonder if the common speakers of languages with cases normally fail using them as the prescription says (e.g. not caring for gender).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know about the situation for German (it seems quite analytic so not too dependent on case for expressing meaning?) and Russian, but any example is welcomed, e.g. Georgian is said to be very morphologically complex; do their speakers simplify it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases it would be better to know about this for people that is not particularly studied, how well they use case systems without studying them at school. If there are studies of this correct/incorrect case use in 'uneducated' (or even studies on schooled ones?) people of countries like these, better, but witnessed/anecdotal answers are welcomed too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5675" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T13:45:41.600" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T11:11:07.710" Title="Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="13" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T07:20:48.123" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Morphological complexity as such as is not related to the level of schooling. Some of the most morphologically complex languages are spoken by people without any education. So, all Russian and German speakers (including those with no formal schooling) use the morphological cases in their respective languages. So did speakers of Vulgar Latin which was really just a vernacular counterpart of Standard Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're referring to is the difference between standard and non-standard dialects which will differ in the use of cases, morphology, etc. This may be identified by speakers of the standard as a 'lack of cases'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, what is related to schooling is the ability to speak the standard dialect not the ability to use complex morphology as such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T07:20:48.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T07:33:02.867" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;All people use cases in Russian. Uneducated people may make some typical mistakes however, so use cases and other things wrongly, but the number of such possible characteristic mistakes is limited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Standard speech requires use of indeclinable possessive pronoun &quot;их&quot; &quot;their&quot;. But uneducated people may decline it, adding the ending &quot;ихний&quot;, &quot;ихнего&quot;, &quot;ихних&quot;, &quot;ихнему&quot; etc. This is considered incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general I would say, uneducated people tend to decline nouns that are usually indeclinable, such as some loanwords, like &quot;пальто&quot;. Uneducated person may say &quot;у меня нет пальта&quot;, &quot;укрылся пальтом&quot;. Also they tend to decline indeclinable surnames. As such, use of cases seems to be more widespread among the uneducated. They just use foreign words the way as they would use native Russian words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There some other possible mistakes. Standard speech requires dative when citing a law or rule &quot;согласно закону&quot; &quot;according to the law&quot;. But the judges and other lawyers often use genitive: &quot;согласно закона&quot; &quot;according of the law&quot;. This is considered wrong and manifestation of &quot;bureaucracy slang&quot; &quot;канцелярит&quot;, but uneducated people also tend to use this form.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T04:09:57.923" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T04:09:57.923" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T10:12:20.320" Score="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The World Atlas of Language Structures Online&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/49&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 49&lt;/a&gt; lists 84 languages with at least 6 distinct cases (24 of them with at least 10 cases). A number of them are spoken in remote areas of Australia or South America where schooling is limited, if it happens at all. As far as I know, speakers of these languages have no problem using the case system in an extremely consistent way. In fact, many of these languages have a degree of morphological complexity that makes me sweat just thinking about it, but native speakers, even unschooled ones, manage to use it flawlessly on a constant basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T14:20:20.993" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T14:20:20.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9757" CreationDate="2014-12-09T12:44:09.680" Score="-1" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to translate the following phrase into Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Unto the Lion and the Lamb&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide a translation into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Google Translate I got the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;In Leo et Agnus&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I'm not sure that it means what I want. When I translate the Latin into English I get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The Lion and the Lamb.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5677" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T13:32:59.953" Title="Translation into Latin" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2014-12-09T13:44:17.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9756" CreationDate="2014-12-09T13:32:59.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Leōnī et Agnō&quot; or &quot;Leōnī Agnōque&quot; which is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T13:32:59.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9780" CreationDate="2014-12-09T16:50:40.290" Score="1" ViewCount="1418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have reviewed the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Liepzig Rules&lt;/a&gt;, and google searches are failing me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't say much about glossing words that don't have any internal morphology.  The gloss of an analytic language by these rules would be a word-for-word translation without any guideposts as to the role of anything, with the exception of free pronouns and a few function words being being replaced with more opaque abbreviations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to gloss an analytic language that has the richness of information that would be found in the gloss of a more fusional or synthetic language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to be glossing an &lt;a href=&quot;http://tokipona.net/parser/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;artificial language&lt;/a&gt;, but that is beside the point. Pointers on how to gloss Chinese, or Khmer or the like would be helpful, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:19:10.433" Title="How do you do an interlinear gloss for an analytic language?" Tags="&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T17:38:52.663" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though as some other posters have noted, some Russians may use dialect case forms, anyone who is out of diapers uses the full case system. Case is a core concept of the language. The very idea that using cases is a burden is alien to Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hear someone speaking Russian while ignoring case and gender, he isn't uneducated, he is a foreigner. He doesn't know it, but nobody is quite sure what he is saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we have the literary language with fairly strict grammar and a relaxed conversational form with loose grammar. For example, the literary form is &quot;It is I.&quot; wereas the conversational form is &quot;It's me.&quot; In the conversational example we use the wrong case. We can do this because case is now so weak a concept in English that nobody notices that the meaning which &quot;me&quot; as opposed to &quot;I&quot; once conveyed does not fit logically into the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, English speakers learning Russian have a very hard time accepting that case is an important concept. They assume that it, as in English, is an affectation of the educated which they can safely ignore. Nothing could be furthur from the truth. If you say &quot;It's me.&quot; (Это меня.) in Russian people will look at you blankly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had some success explaining this to Americans using the following example: In popular culture Tarzan says &quot;Me Tarzan!&quot;. We understand this to mean &quot;I am Tarzan.&quot; This is because our ideas as to the difference between &quot;I&quot; and &quot;me&quot; are hazy. Also, we expect the subject of the sentence to come first. So we accept &quot;me&quot; as the subject even though the fact that it is in the objective case theoretically indicates that it is either the direct or indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a Russian does not expect the subject to come first and very clearly understands the difference betwee &quot;я&quot; (I) and &quot;меня&quot; (me). He will immediately reach two firm conclusions: 1) the speaker is most definitely not Tarzan, and 2) the sentence is incomplete. The part which tells what Tarzan did to the speaker is missing. The sentence would be complete if we added a verb such as &quot;saw&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, a Russian would not consider a form of the language in which the use of cases was relaxed to be simpler. He would probably consider it to be borderline incomprehensible baby talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention a difference in case use between classical Latin and vulgar Latin. I am not well informed about this subject, but some things I have read have left the impression that classical Latin reflects an earlier form of the language before so many cases were lost. There is a general trend for languages to lose cases due to pronunciation shifts or foreign influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT to address comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Andrey Chernakhovskiy and @Annix point out &quot;Это меня!&quot; is a valid utterance if a subject and verb are supplied by the context. The difference between English and Russian is this: If an American says &quot;It is me.&quot;, the grammatical error is not even noticed because case plays almost no role in conveying meaning. But if our American is learning Russian and translates it word-for-word and says &quot;Это меня!&quot;, he is likely to get blank stares because his use of case implies that there are a subject and verb in the context when there are none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Annix compares the ommision of case to the ommision of the word &quot;of&quot; in English. This is a brilliant example. I wish I had thought of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@SixthOfFour asked how Tarzan might speak while still learning Russian. In reality his speach would be incomprehensible much of the time. But in a movie it would contain errors carefully selected to impair comprehensibility as little as possible. In Russian he might leave nouns undeclined, avoid the use of pronouns, and speak in the third person. As @Annix points out Tarzan &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; utter the words &quot;Меня Тарзан!&quot; in a context which implies &quot;зовут&quot;, but in my experience beginning speakers do not understand grammar sufficently to understand that this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT to address points raised by @dainichi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@dainichi comments served to further illuminate the differences between how English and Russian speakers perceive case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@dainichi objected to my description of &quot;It's me&quot; as &quot;wrong&quot; according to the rules of formal literary English. Whether we approve or disapprove of the prescriptive approach, the question that was asked is whether ordinary Russians and Germans use cases and conjugate verbs as the prescriptive rules in grammars require or are these rules an affectation of over-educated snobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example I referred to the well known prescriptive rule for English and Russian which states that the predicate nominative must be in the nominative case. I then cited a well-accepted expression (&quot;It's me&quot;) which violates this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point was that for English it is reasonable to discuss whether and when we should follow this conservative prescriptive rule seeing as it is based on arbitrary or outdated concepts of case. But if we suggested to even the most uneducated Russian that in informal speech &quot;Это меня&quot; (It's me) is an acceptable substitute for &quot;Это я&quot; (It's I), he would think we were either joking or very confused. It is not that he knows and loves prescriptive rules. It is because he is acutely aware of the message about the role of the noun in the sentence which each case conveys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we English speakers were to ascribed this level of meaning to case, we would not be able to say &quot;It's me.&quot; or &quot;Me and my friend went to the park.&quot; because these utterances would appear to be nonsensical. Why “It's me.” is acceptable is an interesting question. Maybe as @dainichi suggests we now perceive “me” as nominative or we have adopted French or Danish practice. Or maybe we just got confused. But no matter what the reason saying &quot;It's me.&quot; would have been practically impossible had we perceived cases as Russians do. This is why even uneducated Russians use the full case system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5681" LastEditorUserId="5681" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T13:32:24.197" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T13:32:24.197" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-09T19:35:33.763" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welsh: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch&#xA;(Longest place name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish: Hawaiiindianer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norwegian: An ortographic rule makes it impossible with three consonants, and seperates them like this: Trafikk-kork&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T19:35:33.763" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-09T20:24:05.063" Score="0" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the longest sequence of vowels in a natural language that you know of? Be aware that this is an orthographic question, not a phonetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please state word, language and translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T20:47:02.817" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T21:22:41.277" Title="What is the longest sequence of vowels in one word that you know of?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-03-11T09:27:47.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2014-12-09T20:46:15.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hooiaioia&lt;/strong&gt; in Hawaiian (meaning &lt;em&gt;certified&lt;/em&gt;), with 8 vowels, seems to have the most consecutive vowels in current human speech. It is also listed in 1976 Guinness Book of World Records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T20:46:15.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2014-12-09T20:59:47.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Avestan āuuōiia “woe!” has seven (orthographic) vowels in succession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avestan kāuuaiiasca “and evil rulers” has eight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In both cases this is a one-to-one transliteration of the Avestan script, which is unfortunately not available in Unicode.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T20:59:47.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9761" CreationDate="2014-12-09T21:09:55.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;6 vowels. Saueøye (sheep eye, in Norwegian. This is a real life example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;9 vowels. Saueøyeeier (the owner of the sheep eye, a constructed word)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7 vowels. Niøyeøye (the eye of a fish called Niøye, not very common word, but possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12 vowels. Niøyeøyeøyeier (the owner of an island named after the eye of a fish called Niøye, this is a constructed word, but still understandable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T21:22:41.277" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T21:22:41.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T21:10:05.477" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been well answered for specifics. I'd only want to add that a little thought would have answered it in general: most of language learning happens before a learner ever goes to school, so level of schooling cannot possibly be relevant. Furthermore, for most of human history, most people have been unschooled, unlettered, and illiterate, and in many places today most speakers do not have advanced schooling. Under those conditions, how would languages with complex morphological rules have ever developed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final point, consider English word order, the rules for which are quite as complex as those for case in other languages. Do you find that English speakers make mistakes in word order if they lack adequate schooling? Any native speaker of English could parse a sentence like &quot;The man that John said Mary expected to receive a watch from hit him&quot; and know that Mary expected the watch from the man (and not from John) and that John was hit by the man (and not the other way around). This is not something you're taught in school, and neither is case (which is used to express exactly the same relationships)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5686" LastEditorUserId="5686" LastEditDate="2014-12-09T22:47:32.157" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T22:47:32.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T22:46:21.657" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;People who natively speak a language that has grammatical cases do generally use them commonly and consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all language features, case systems do also evolve, and it's quite common for there to be variation in case use between different dialects of a language, or e.g. between literary and colloquial language, but (at least from a descriptive viewpoint) this is not so much &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; as simply &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; usage.  In any case (pun not intended), there does not appear to be any clear tendency for case loss in colloquial or &quot;uneducated&quot; language; sometimes colloquial speech does lose case distinctions that are preserved in literary usage, but sometimes it also innovates new case patterns, or new uses for existing cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/9754&quot;&gt;as noted by Anixx&lt;/a&gt;, colloquial Russian sometimes applies case markers to words that are indeclinable according to traditional literary grammar.  Similarly, from personal experience, I can attest that the case system in casual spoken &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnish&lt;/a&gt; is not significantly simpler or less expressive than in formal literary usage, despite the significant morphological and even grammatical differences between the two.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vulgar Latin&lt;/a&gt; that you mentioned, and the &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romance languages&lt;/a&gt; that evolved from it, are something of an interesting special case.  While it's true that there's a strong tendency among these languages to simplify the noun gender and case system they inherited from Latin (while, at the same time, innovating several new grammatical features not found in classical Latin, such as definite articles), this process is best understood in the context of the significant linguistic mixing of spoken Latin with the indigenous (e.g. Celtic) languages of the local population during the expansion of the Roman empire, and later with the Germanic languages spoken by invaders during its decline.  It's not so much that &lt;em&gt;uneducated&lt;/em&gt; Latin-speakers just spontaneously started simplifying the language, but that the simplified Vulgar language evolved from the speech of people speaking Latin as a second language (and, often, learning it from people already speaking a vernacular version of it, with strong external influences), in a process not entirely unlike &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creolization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/9759&quot;&gt;as DavidC notes&lt;/a&gt;, inconsistent and/or radically simplified case usage tends to be characteristic not so much of uneducated speakers, but of non-native speakers whose first language has a weak (or significantly different) case system compared to the language they are trying to speak.  This is because such speakers are unaccustomed to paying attention to case as a grammatical feature (or to the specific case structure of the language in question), and thus have trouble fitting it into their mental framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, English uses prepositions and word order to mark many of the grammatical distinctions that several other languages mark using noun cases.  As an instructive experiment, one might try to invert the situation, and consider the difficulties encountered by a native speaker of some language with a loose word order and few prepositions, when they attempt to learn English.  For example, where a fluent English-speaker would say &quot;Did you go to the theater?&quot;, such a person might come up with, for example, &quot;Went you theater?&quot;  This is not a mistake &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; native speaker (past the age where they're capable of formulating coherent sentences at all, anyway) would make, but for a person just learning English as a second language, it could be quite plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, where a fluent English-speaker would speak of going &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; a hurry &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; car &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the show &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the theater &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the town &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; the lake, a non-native speaker unused to English prepositions might say they were going e.g. &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; a hurry &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; a car &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the show &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the theater &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the town &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; the lake.  Again, most native speakers would immediately see that something was wrong with that sentence, even though it's mostly understandable, but a non-native speaker unfamiliar with English grammar could easily have trouble picking the correct prepositions for phrases like that, just as an English-speaker unfamiliar with noun cases might have trouble picking the correct cases when speaking e.g. German or Russian or Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1) In fact, while colloquial Finnish has all but lost several grammatical features of the literary language, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possessive_affix#Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possessive suffixes&lt;/a&gt;, the noun cases &amp;mdash; of which Finnish has 15 or so &amp;mdash; remain relatively unchanged (except for some morphological variation).  The rare instrumental cases (abessive, comitative and instructive) do tend to get replaced by adpositions or other alternative constructions in casual speech, except in certain fixed expressions, but they're not very common in literary usage, either.  On the other hand, modern spoken Finnish may be in the process of innovating a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; comitative case ending: in casual speech (as well as in some traditional dialects), the postposition &lt;em&gt;kanssa&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;with&quot;) commonly contracts to &lt;em&gt;kaa&lt;/em&gt;, and, especially when unstressed, often merges into the preceding noun as a clitic &lt;em&gt;-kaa&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. colloq. &lt;em&gt;tuu munkaa&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;come with me&quot;).  When used so, it could be loosely analyzed as a novel case marker, even though it lacks several grammatical features of the &quot;true&quot; Finnish noun cases, such as case agreement between nouns and adjectives.  Notably, the closely related Estonian language appears to have gone through essentially the same process several hundred years ago to acquire its current comitative case marker &lt;em&gt;-ga&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T22:46:21.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-09T22:53:54.457" Score="18" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Cases are properly used by pre-school children&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any kid who can speak the language can use the cases properly. There may be edge cases where &quot;the prescribed way to say this is X, don't use Y&quot; - which refers to prescriptive vs descriptive language principles, and perhaps has some parallels to things like British 'acquired pronounciation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full case system is used as soon as kids start speaking in full sentences, only the formalization of cases (e.g. what each case is called) is taught at school. For some issues, there tends to be a 'gap' for small kids at one point kids speak correctly for a limited vocabulary, then start to use some general patterns and make mistakes where those patterns fail, and then learn the exceptions as well. An english example would be a kid using &quot;ate&quot;, switching to &quot;eated&quot; after some months, and then using &quot;ate&quot; again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3285" LastActivityDate="2014-12-09T22:53:54.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-10T14:05:54.253" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I live in Poland, and my first language is Polish, a slavic language somewhat related to Russian, with a quite complicated case system. From my experience, I can confirm what others have written: Every one who normally learned Polish in his or her childhood is able to use the case system with only occasional minor mistakes, usually involving one of several words that do not follow standard declension patterns. However, you may find interesting that poorly (or even moderately) educated people are often unable to tell what case they are using, or may even not know the case system at all (we all learn it at school, but who doesn't care, forgets it quickly). Seems that the ability to use cases has little to do with theoretical knowledge of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is not very surprising in fact. Cases, as any other grammar construct, were not invented by educated individuals. They occurred naturally in the course of language evolution driven by ordinary people hundreds or thousands of years ago. They already had been successfully used, possibly for a long time, when language scientists called them cases and made them established, organized knowledge that could subsequently be taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5695" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2014-12-11T00:15:10.870" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T00:15:10.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-10T18:39:27.243" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek has ἀάατος &quot;inviolable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T18:39:27.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-10T23:51:09.327" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a paper on the history of computational phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle's SPE acted as a catalyst for research in the field, namely by laying the foundations for two-level models and POS taggers. Fraser and Bobrow designed the first phonological rule-testing system the same year (1968). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction of automata in phonological rule systems by Kaplan and Kay, years later, seems to be a turning point. Prince and Smolensky's Optimality Theory in the mid 90's as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are other important papers / innovations in computational phonology?&lt;/strong&gt; I am still doing research, but your input is most welcome. This is my list so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bobrow, D. G., &amp;amp; Fraser, J. B. (1968). A phonological rule tester. &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;11&lt;/em&gt;, 766-772.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chomsky, N., &amp;amp; Halle, M. (1968). &lt;em&gt;The sound pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;. New York, NY: Harper &amp;amp; Row.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kaplan, R. N., &amp;amp; Kay, M. (1994). Regular models of phonological rule systems. &lt;em&gt;Computational Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;20&lt;/em&gt;(3), 331-378.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Koskenniemi, K. (1984). &lt;em&gt;Two-level morphology: A general computational model for word-form recognition and production&lt;/em&gt;. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince, A., &amp;amp; Smolensky, P. (1993). &lt;em&gt;Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar&lt;/em&gt; (Tech Report CU-CS-533-91). Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Boulder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2014-12-10T23:51:09.327" Title="What are the foundational papers in computational phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9777" CreationDate="2014-12-11T01:56:24.003" Score="18" ViewCount="4026" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular reason that Native American names, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting_Bull&quot;&gt;Sitting Bull&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse&quot;&gt;Crazy Horse&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hawk_(Sauk_leader)&quot;&gt;Black Hawk&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cloud&quot;&gt;Red Cloud&lt;/a&gt;, are translated into English phrases?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, no other culture's names are treated as such: the vast majority seem to have their names converted (more or less) phonetically, so Hirohito (Emperor of Japan) is simply referred to as &quot;Hirohito&quot; and not &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.babynamespedia.com/meaning/Hirohito&quot;&gt;Abundant Benevolence&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  Marcus Antonius has become Mark Antony to modern people, but Julius Caesar remains Julius Caesar, and not &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/julius&quot;&gt;Soft-Down&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/caesar&quot;&gt;Beard&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;  Genghis Khan's name was &quot;Temujin,&quot; but I've never seen him referred to as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/temujin&quot;&gt;Iron Man&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even names that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; phrases or poetic nicknames, like &quot;Joseph Stalin&quot;, are usually rendered similarly to their native language (&quot;Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin&quot;) rather than being translated into something like &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Origin_of_name.2C_nicknames_and_pseudonyms&quot;&gt;Joseph of Steel&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; even though that was &lt;em&gt;his intent&lt;/em&gt; in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something about Native American languages that makes the translation of their names more accurate or natural than a phonetic rendering?  Is it a cultural matter, that their names have some inter-lingual significance that other cultures' names do not?  Was there a deliberate choice or commentary on this practice as it was developing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or did someone just translate a name one day, and the practice stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2830" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T09:11:12.950" Title="Why are Native American names translated?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2014-12-11T02:22:13.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked myself the same question in 2011 and simply began to observe. Extending this idea to account for internal thought as well, I noticed some patterns. I am currently presenting my idea in a college mathematical modeling course. Here is a diagram I designed (I have most of the body filled out as well)&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sNEtW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Body Diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5705" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T02:22:13.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2014-12-11T08:25:40.747" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Estonian &quot;&lt;strong&gt;jäääär&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (&quot;edge of the ice&quot;) comes to mind. It contains the letter &lt;strong&gt;ä&lt;/strong&gt; 4 times in a row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2014-12-12T08:28:24.417" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T08:28:24.417" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2014-12-11T12:02:50.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was also looking for the answer of this question and had trouble finding a good, detailed explanation. Fortunately I found a book that might help anyone who would like to know how 'aticu, aticum' became '-age'.&#xA;&quot;Cultural and Linguistic Factors in Word Formation: An Integrated Approach to the Development of the Suffix -age&quot;, by Suzanne Fleischman (University of California Publications)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6708" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T12:02:50.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9772" CreationDate="2014-12-11T15:15:03.830" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question about modern practice is '&lt;strong&gt;convention&lt;/strong&gt;'. In general  awareness Native American names have the form of 'Epithet Object/Animal' such as 'Red Cloud' or 'Crazy Horse'. Therefore you will see activities like children picking 'Native American Names' in this format. This is puzzling (or possibly even traumatising) to actual Native American children who're just as likely to be called George or Bill as anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many would claim (with some justification) that this convention has the result of creating the exotic other and minimizes the achievements of Native Americans as well as the malign impact of the intruders who are now the 'natives' of the land. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the origins of this convention? This would need a detail study of the sources but I suspect that it goes back to the Sioux Wars because all the most famous Native Americans known by their 'translated' names are Lakota (Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud). They were made further famous by cultural efforts such as Buffalo Bill Wild West show. All the prominent natives of earlier eras are known by names approximating the sounds of the original language (Squanto, Pocahontas, Hiawatha, Geronimo, Tecumseh, Seattle, etc.) But it's possible that the tradition goes further back (and I'm sure the various ins and outs are far more complex).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the names of people like Sitting Bull were translated rather than used in their original form is not clear to me (I couldn't find any research). But one reason could be their particularly expressive nature when compared to other native naming conventions. It could also be that their bearers chose to translate them when communicating with English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic naming is a very complex and thorny issue (not least because different people ascribe different levels of importance to names). For example, many people choose to anglicise their names (Istvan to Stephen or Friedrich to Fred) others do not (Ivan vs John). Even within English you have identical sources for different names (Ian, John, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T15:15:03.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-11T16:36:29.650" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has there been any comparative studies of Swadesh lists from different language, regarding percentage of vowels vs. consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages can occassionally be &quot;derogative&quot; talked about as &quot;only being incomprehensible vowels&quot;. Is there any way to actually putting some facts behind, using comparative Swadesh lists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any hints to further investigation would be very much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T19:22:08.477" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T10:04:40.500" Title="Using Swadesh lists to find languages with most frequent vowel use?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;swadesh-list&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9772" CreationDate="2014-12-11T16:48:42.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, the names in the other languages like Greek or Arabic that have their meaning in those languages are standardized, for example 'Abdullah' meaning 'God's Servant' was and is given to millions of people, while the Native American names are unique and individual, they are given to just one person each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T16:48:42.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9758" CreationDate="2014-12-11T22:19:10.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interlinear glossing for isolating languages is often done without any extra tiers or labels beyond the usual ones. This is largely because, as is pointed out in a comment, the free translation in an interlinear gloss provides a way into understanding the constituency, even where this is not shown by morphosyntax and associated morphemic gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But extra forms of labelling are sometimes used to show constituency. These amount to a kind of bracketing (although they may not use actual brackets) and may be placed on an extra tier. Christian Lehmann discusses this, with examples, in section 4.7 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ldtc/website/syllabus/sp06/LehmannGlossing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper on interlinear glossing&lt;/a&gt;, though he urges keeping bracketing to a minimum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of constituency labelling is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/files/publication/j2010_3_05_5319.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article on the isolating language Weining Ahmao&lt;/a&gt; (Miao-Yao/Hmong-Mien family, China), particularly pp 590ff. The glossed texts are also nice examples of the previous point about the use of free translations to understand the phrase structure of the vernacular text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WP article on the grammar of Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; (the canonical isolating language) also has numerous examples with interlinear glosses and in a number of cases uses labelled coloured bars to show constituency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2014-12-11T22:19:10.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2014-12-12T03:13:24.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right way to compare the number of the words of each language vocabulary is having this by counting the word entries of each language &#xA;Greek and Sanscrit language have the most expended vocabulary and the reassons are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;120.000 off 250.000 ancient Greek words still using in modern Greek vernacular language (καθ'ομιλουμένη ή καθομιλούμενη).In India (Sanskrit) they use 80.000 from 190.000 ancient words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modern Greek language has over &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://users.ntua.gr/nborbil/Article1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;350.000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; word entries (λήμματα,ρίζες των λέξεων) so the number of the derivative words in Greek vocabulary is much bigger than 350.000 (translate the page from Greek to English).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One word has the maximum number of different meanings in Greek language (Arab and Sanscrit also).This is what we call  * &lt;em&gt;polysemy&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~~~Over 60.000 word entries derived from Greek to English language (also 50.000 words derived to German language).This is a small &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enhancemyvocabulary.com/word-roots_greek.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.~~~&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most scientific and  ** &lt;em&gt;technological&lt;/em&gt; words we use in the whole world have their origin in Greek and Latin language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~~~All languages derivates words from each other!Greeks uses latin(Italian),English,Turkish and many more words in their daily life.~~~&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*poly&gt;πολύ (means very,much,a lot,lots of),semy&gt;σημασία (means significance,relevant synonym with sign&gt;σήμα)→poly+semy→ &quot;πολυσημία&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** techni&gt;techne&gt;τέχνη (means art,skill) , logical&gt;λογική (means sanity,reasoning,rationality from the word λέγω [verb](means talk,think)&gt;λογια[adjective]): techno+logical→ &quot;Τεχνολογία&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello @robert !!I had to edit the comment in order to answer your question!&#xA;In &quot;no3&quot; i wrote about 3 languages not only one...Greek,Sanscrit and Arab.I strongly recomment you reading &quot;no2&quot; also!! You have to click at the bold blue words in order to see the references i had in mind.I could write more references but as you know links in comments accommodates up to 2 links for new members beause of their small commenting reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A team of professors of linguistics in philosophical class at the University of Athens (ntua),leading by Dr.Christopher Charalampakis,had a 20 year research about this topic we discuss.This research took place in Greece (NTUAthens) in cooperation with the Irvine University in California and it deals with the number of the word entries and NOT the words of the greek vocabulary!This is where the &quot;polysemy&quot; is a practical problem setting almost imposible counting the exact number of words in any language but is much safer and right to count the word entries of any language!Homonyms,vertical polysemy and polysemy is inseparable of the amount of the word entries every language has.According to this research Arab,Greek and Sanscrit vocabulary have the most word entries so the polysemy in those three languages is in the highest &quot;rank&quot; because of the complex grammar and the complex syntax they use!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~~~Here is a small example of a grammar difference that affects in the polysemy of a word: If you check closer in the English grammar you will find 44 conjunctions,in Greek grammar there are-62,Sanscrit- 49(5th century)-56(17th century),Arab-51.~~~&#xA;If you want more references about this you can check documents relevant to this topic from Liddell Scott and Jones,Dr.Francisco Rodríguez Adrados and also Columbia University (edu) researches they had in the past 10 years about the midle eastern and south asian linguistic changes and vocabulary deteriorations they suffer.&#xA;Thank you very much :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6716" LastEditorUserId="6730" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T10:02:34.873" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T10:02:34.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9878" CreationDate="2014-12-12T08:18:17.127" Score="-1" ViewCount="654" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some words starting with /ɕ/ in (Chinese) Mandarin become /x/ in some dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;鞋 /ɕjɛ/ -&gt; /xai/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;下 /ɕja/ -&gt; /xa/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How close are /ɕ/ and /x/ pronunciation-wise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this kind of deviation make sense, logically?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T17:21:03.890" Title="How close are pronunciations /ɕ/ and /x/?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-12T08:58:59.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Germany, every child learns grammar (including cases) by age 10/11. I doubt it makes a big impact on how they speak, and I would say incorrect case use has nothing to do with being &quot;unschooled&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using dialect or slang might be correlated to education, but educated parents are as well. While &quot;schooled&quot; people might speak more &quot;conscious&quot; and some may actively try to speak &quot;proper&quot;, I feel the determining factors are more 1) parenting and 2) environment. Both are related to schooling, but more as correlation than causation, I would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, see the book &quot;Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod&quot; to see how (even educated people) slaughter the language and misuse cases regularly. I read parts of it and I must say, the &quot;problems&quot; described are present among a majority of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T08:58:59.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-12T10:34:37.880" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I read three sentences build of made-up words with correct German declination and conjugation, so you were able to parse this sentence although it beared no semantic meaning. It was something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wasanten matusen.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tole matust.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Ist) Tole Wasant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading this as a German speaker, you won’t understand a word but could derive from the morphemes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wasant&lt;/em&gt; is a subject and the singular of &lt;em&gt;Wasanten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;matusen&lt;/em&gt; is a verb (conjugation is &lt;em&gt;matuse, matust, matusen).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tole&lt;/em&gt; is a subject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the sentence seems to mean something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People or things called &lt;em&gt;Wasant&lt;/em&gt; do an activity called &lt;em&gt;matusen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person or thing called &lt;em&gt;Tole&lt;/em&gt; does also this &lt;em&gt;matusen&lt;/em&gt; activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Tole therefore also a Wasant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so far I do pretty good remember my example. But I cannot find it again and wonder who came up with it first? And what was the original spelling of the made-up words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T20:58:57.027" Title="On the search for an example sentence from a German textbook" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9786" CreationDate="2014-12-12T11:34:44.230" Score="7" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, when talking casually about languages, people will say that one language is harder to learn than another. I always thought that this was a common misconception, and that other than the relationship to one's native language, there doesn't seem to be any real variable that affects the amount of time it takes to learn one language as opposed to another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this was more or less a given in linguistics, so I was surprised to find that the Wikipedia disagrees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_complexity&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_complexity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this authoritative? The only link is to an old web discussion. What is the state of the art opinion from experts about this? It would not shock me if a relatively recent creole, for instance, genuinely took &quot;less time&quot; to learn for adult non-speakers, but I find it harder to believe there are two non-recently-formed languages such that one takes significantly less time for adult non-speakers with similar backgrounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T03:08:36.933" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T03:08:36.933" Title="relative complexity of languages" Tags="&lt;complexity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9785" CreationDate="2014-12-12T13:10:41.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the major idea behind the linguistics perception of all languages (except the pidgin ones I guess) is that all languages are good to what they are made for: to make people using it communicate clearly and effectively. That said all languages include all words and meanings necessary to achieve the communication. So, when people compare languages, words, vocabulary size etc they often project to a different language idea of their own language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of the latter are when we are looking for a specific word to a different language that we cannot find. Or that the equivalent word is broader in sense than the one we are looking for. This often reminds me about the story of Eskimos having a huge amount of word to refer to the snow (I don't know how many words there are and I guess it's probably true if we consider they live an environment full of snow) while other languages does not have this diversity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me apart from your opinion (with which I agree) that the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;relationship to one's native language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the main factor which determines the difficulty to learn a language. Other factors that can affect someone trying to learn a language is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of different alphabet or an alphabet different than an already known well enough. To make it clearer: I am Greek native speaker, we use Greek alphabet which resembles the English one but it's obviously not the same. So, since my English are good enough I can apprehend German for example relatively easier being familiar with English alphabet than if I weren't familiar with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If in the language learning you also include pronunciation, then the closeness to your native or a well comprehensive language is also important. By this I mean only phonetic closeness. Example, Greek and Spanish are two distinct languages with different alphabet but really close phonetically: the only real differences is that Spanish do not use the 'z' sound and have a rough 'rr'. This fact make me learn easier this language in the sense that I don't need to invest time learning the pronunciation of various words and also I can understand quite easily the words being spoken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another aspect that I can think of is the vocabulary shared between the language to learn and the already comprehensible by the learner languages. Example: English has made a really good job at inserting a huge amount of Latin-originated words through French mostly. This makes really easier for a person knowing English to find the correct French word. Thus he must just adopt to the French case system (non existing in English).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't clarify what the previously mentioned relationship means so if it doesn't include the inflectional system of language to be learned. For example English native speaker find it harder to understand adjective cases than a person with an already  comprehensive knowledge of language having cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not refering to other factor that are assumed to be equal for all subject learning a language:&#xA;Living in a country which the language is spoken or having friends speaking the language etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One good link for language diversity (and you can make your own conclusions over complexity what ever sense you give the word yourself is &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5600" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T13:10:41.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9799" CreationDate="2014-12-12T16:57:23.443" Score="1" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing some &lt;em&gt;anecdotal&lt;/em&gt; research into what indicates sarcasm in spoken form. My goal is to find indicators of sarcasm without relying on the meaning of the words and sentences themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intonation is the most obvious indicator of sarcasm that I can think of. The sentence has the intonation of a declarative sentence, but it's structured as an interrogative one, or vice versa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Did you want my dog to eat your breakfast?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;How happy am I that breakfast is ruined.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also noticed a pause mid sentence, and some elongation of vowels, too - but I'm not sure how to  quantify this observation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there commonly known indicators of sarcasm that are expressed orally in English which are not lexical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6722" LastEditorUserId="6722" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T05:48:31.147" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T11:17:55.487" Title="What are common non-lexical indicators of sarcasm expressed orally in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9785" CreationDate="2014-12-12T17:05:52.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled upon two approaches to measure language difficulty, one by a Natural Language Processing company and the other by the Foreign Service Institute by the US and both have clear shortcomings. But it is still interesting to add next to questions like language relatedness, grammatical complextity or the phone/graph-distance the intention of the one who is asking (e.g. Language Processing vs. Learning Advice) - so you may take a look for yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approach 1: A weird language (i.e. a language with many features most other languages do not share) is a hard language. Ibidon &lt;a href=&quot;http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;compared language&lt;/a&gt;s with the help of the World Atlas for Language Structures and created a list of the weirdest languages of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approach 2: Time to learn for a certain proficiency. Obviously many factors come together, but the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;study&lt;/a&gt; by the Foreign Service Institute of the US-State Department is still interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T17:05:52.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2014-12-12T17:52:16.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work with a large number of non-native English speakers, and probably the biggest indicator of fluency for me is the use of articles (a, an, the), which is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/488/6722&quot;&gt;Hippie Trail's answer&lt;/a&gt; covers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is entirely observational, I do not have research to support my findings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definite articles (&quot;the&quot;) are missing. I think this is because in many languages, definite articles communicate an extra level of meaning, or maybe have more defined rules for usage. In English, It's easy to know that you must use &quot;the&quot; with a superlative (&quot;The fastest&quot;), but it's hard to figure when to use it with a proper noun (&quot;The United States&quot;). Especially when other languages have more rigid rules about article usage with proper nouns. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indefinite articles (&quot;a&quot;, &quot;an&quot;) are missing. I suspect this is because in many languages the indefinite article can be assumed.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles instead of determiners on mass nouns . I recognize this a great deal in American vs. British English: &quot;a cup of coffee&quot; vs.&quot;a coffee&quot;. American English doesn't allow you to say, &quot;I need a coffee&quot;. We say, &quot;I need a cup of coffee&quot; or &quot;I need some coffee&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my response again, but, with the articles modified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I work with  large number of non-native English speakers, and probably&#xA;  biggest indicator of fluency for me is use of articles (a, an, the),&#xA;  which is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/488/6722&quot;&gt;Hippie Trail's answer&lt;/a&gt; covers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is entirely observational, I do not have some research to support&#xA;  my findings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Definite articles (&quot;the&quot;) are missing. I think this is because in many languages, definite articles communicate extra level of meaning,&#xA;  or maybe have more defined rules for usage: In English, It's easy to know that you must use &quot;the&quot; with superlative (&quot;The fastest&quot;), but it's hard to figure when to use it with proper nouns (&quot;The United States&quot;). Especially when other languages have more rigid rules about article usage with some proper nouns. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Indefinite articles (&quot;a&quot;, &quot;an&quot;) are missing. I suspect this is because in many languages, indefinite article can be assumed.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Articles instead of determiners on mass nouns . I recognize this great deal in American vs. British English: &quot;a cup of coffee&quot; vs.&quot;a coffee&quot;. American English doesn't allow you to say, &quot;I need a coffee&quot;. We say, &quot;I need a cup of coffee&quot; or &quot;I need some coffee&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See? Sounds more...non-native. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone else here has offered a ton of great answers, and I agree with them whole-heartedly. I think a fascinating area of research would be determining native language by misuse of articles in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6722" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T17:52:16.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9745" CreationDate="2014-12-12T18:53:00.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a toolset, but I can think of a factors  that you'd need to account for to determine 'relatedness' across parts of speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, consider for the eight parts of speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adjective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adverb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronoun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;preposition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conjunction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interjection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm taking a guess at this, but I'd say that not all eight parts of speech communicate an equal level of ' semantic relatedness'. So, evaluate &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; each part of speech influences the others. I'm a web developer with an interest in computational linguistics, so here's  my hair-brained theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns are the person, place, thing, or idea. Probably the highest level of relatedness you could evaluate is between nouns. &quot;Shovel, dirt, hole&quot; &quot;John&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives describe nouns and pronouns. There will probably be a high level of relatedness between adjectives and nouns/pronouns. You could probably determine the level of relatedness based on proximity to the noun. &quot;dirty shovel&quot; &quot;black dirt&quot; &quot;little John&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun. Since it's used in place of some sort of noun (&quot;he&quot; instead of &quot;John&quot;), it removes semantic relatedness. But, a verb must agree with a pronoun, so you can connect a verb to the actor with it. &quot;He digs with the shovel&quot; &quot;He digs with it&quot; instead of &quot;John digs with the shovel&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Verbs tell you what a noun or pronoun is, was, or will be, or could be &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; - so there's problem a very high level of 'relatedness' between nouns and verbs. So maybe verbs have equal weight as nouns? &quot;to dig, to bury, to uncover&quot; &quot;John digs with the shovel&quot; &quot;Jane was buried with the shovel&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adverbs modify verbs,adjectives, and other adverbs. So, this could get tricky. Consider the phrase, &quot;He digs very fast with the very heavy shovel&quot;. &quot;Very&quot; is modifying both a verb and adjective. If your focus is on nouns, then &quot;very&quot; really has a very weak semantic relationship. You'd have to look for... adverbed adjectives in order to find a strong semantic relationship: &quot;He laboriously digs with the shovel&quot;. So... maybe '-ly' adverbs have a slightly stronger relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Preposition. A preposition communicates relationship between nouns &quot;with the shovel, from the ground&quot;. I'd say the relationship is super low. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjunction. Conjunctions join clauses together. I'd say the relationship is very low.  &quot;He digs with the shovel and whistles&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interjection. Words like &quot;ouch&quot;, &quot;hey&quot;, or &quot;argh&quot;  have a significant &lt;em&gt;emotional&lt;/em&gt; relationship to something in the sentence. This could be &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; studies, all on their own. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&#xA;I don't know of a tool, but if I were building one, it'd work like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ignore pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Focus on nouns and verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then find relatedness between adjectives and nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And Also find relatedness between adverbs and verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then find relatedness between adverbs and adjectives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then find relatedness between interjections and (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adverbs modifying verbs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6722" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T18:53:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7109" CreationDate="2014-12-12T21:04:39.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A research with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verwandt.de/karten/absolut/arsenau.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verwandt.de&lt;/a&gt; shows that there is only one entry in a German telephone book with this surname - and the origin is somewhat near to the French border...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T21:04:39.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9486" CreationDate="2014-12-12T21:20:41.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonology, &quot;feature&quot; is not the same as &quot;property&quot;, so no &quot;feature&quot; would be relevant in distinguishing Barack Obama's voice from George W. Bush's. Also, features are not necessarily based on articulation (muscle-movement). Individual voice quality is a consequence of individual differences in physiology (vocal tract length, vocal fold anatomy), individual differences in acoustic goal (i.e. in producing [ɪ], the mental construct that individuals strive for is not the same), and individual differences in articulatory plan (people also walk differently). Constructing a theory of the mechanisms underlying an sound wave is vastly more complex than constructing a theory of the acoustics of a sound wave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to start would be to focus on one acoustic property and measure that property for a wide range of speakers (preferably constraining dialect, e.g. to &quot;Southern California English&quot;); you could look at age, sex and some measure of speaker size, also social properties like education level, race, gender-identification, income etc. and see if there the data can be sorted according to those factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T21:20:41.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9785" CreationDate="2014-12-12T21:37:50.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;People who say that mean &quot;from my perspective&quot;, so it may well be true, applied to adult acquisition. Mandarin speakers probably have an easier time learning Cantonese than English speakers do. As for Wikipedia, errh, no, it is not authoritative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related but distinct question about &quot;complexity&quot; in an absolute sense, that is, is some one language intrinsically more complex than some other. Some people may think that &quot;easiness&quot; and &quot;(structural) simplicity&quot; are interchangeable, but they are not. Total complexity isn't a measurable property of any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T21:37:50.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2014-12-12T22:40:02.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would propose a three-way distinction to illuminate the complexity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocabulary - Set of words familiar to any one individual speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lexicon - Set of words available to a particular linguistic community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dictionary - Complete set of words attested in a language across all linguistic communities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: this is simply for the purposes of elucidating the question of size - not an objective, hard and fast distinction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would hypothesize that both vocabulary and lexicon would be roughly comparable across similar types of communities over time. So a rural community in modern American will have roughly the same lexicon as a rural community in Ancient Rome. Equally, a community of scholars in a discipline will be operating with lexica of similar magnitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to look for a difference, it would be in dictionaries. And here English has the claim to probably one of the largest dictionaries purely by virtue of spanning a number of linguistic communities in many different environments over a long period of time. But the vocabulary of any one individual speaker will be much more limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the things people have mentioned here are a bad place to look for size differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying any one area where one language has more synonyms than another (e.g. English having multiple words for many verbs) - each language has different areas of diversity and redundancy and areas of compression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking at typological differences (e.g. German creating new words through compounds vs. English using phrases)  - these phenomena only account for very marginal differences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing or tendency to avoid borrowing (e.g. French vs. Russian) - all languages in contact borrow - or create new words to reflect needs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homonyms - some languages (particularly those with more limited phonologies/phonotactics may have more homonyms than others but even that doesn't impact on overall size - unless we limit ourselves to counting unique headwords regardless of sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, this question has no precise answer nor does it really need one. The important thing for a language is its facility to create as many new words as are necessary to its speakers. And in this all languages are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-12T22:40:02.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3058" CreationDate="2014-12-13T02:26:09.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Brazilian (so, I speak Portugese). I have researched about this lyrics, so I think the first part may be in Zulu. Even though I'm not sure about it, the lyrics' translation could be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Zulu)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lare, Lare! Lare, lare, lare! (Distress, distress! Distress, distress, distress!) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unga zu ngaru nge? Unga zu ngaru nge? (Cold you send this as a priority? Cold you send this as a priority?) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zambele, ngaru nge. Unga zu ngaru nge? (By mercy, you send this. Cold you send this as a priority?) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Portuguese)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vida de negro é difícil (The life of a black is so difficult)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;É difícil como o quê (It is so difficult as a thing) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eu quero morrer de noite (I want to die at night)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Na tocaia me matar (In the ambush I want to kill myself)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eu quero morrer de açoite (I want to die so whipped)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Se tu, negra, me deixar (If you, black woman, leave me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vida de negro é difícil (The life of a black is so difficult)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;É difícil como o quê (It is so difficult as a thing) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu amor, eu vou-me embora (My love, I am going to go away)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nessa terra vou morrer (On this land I will go to die)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Um dia não vou mais ver (Someday I will not see)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nunca mais eu vou te ver (Never again I will see you)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vida de negro é difícil (The life of a black is so difficult)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;É difícil como o quê (It is so difficult as a thing) ... (repeat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(you can hear both parts on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XecW-4v-5zo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XecW-4v-5zo&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6732" LastEditorUserId="6732" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T03:27:24.953" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T03:27:24.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9504" CreationDate="2014-12-13T05:17:39.243" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All wrong. Babjak is russinian surname derived from russinian word bab, meaning bean. Thus babjak was a farmer growing beans. Russinians are small slowly vanishing nation living as minority in Slovakia and Ucraine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6734" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T05:17:39.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9222" CreationDate="2014-12-13T06:34:19.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; some consonant than only appeared in clusters, the standard analytic assumption would be to reduce it to some consonant that does not appear in clusters, thus if [γ] only appeared in clusters and [h] never did, then we would simply assume that [γ] comes from /h/. To show that such an analysis is impossible, you'd have to have a language that allows pretty much any possible cluster, which is extremely rare. That said: glottal stop only appears before nasals in North Saami. Which leads to another path of re-analysis, where &quot;glottal stop&quot; is interpreted as the surface realization of glottalization on nasals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the question is perfectly sensible, I think there are so many ways to wiggle that it is effectively impossible to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following up given OPs question... I'd be happy with rewording to eliminate wiggle-room, but I don't know what that wording would be. I don't think the problem is ambiguity in the question, it's the looseness of our underlying theories. Reduction in underlying inventory has long been a desideratum of analysis, hence we don't posit both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops in the English underlying inventory. This means that you are virtually compelled to analyze out of existence putative cases of segments with defective distribution. What principle could we adopt that would &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; this practice (and should we)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is stated in terms of phonetic outputs, then the answer is &quot;there are plenty&quot;, such as English [ɬ] which only appears after [s,f] and aspirated stops; or [ʈ] (in some dialects, phonetic value approximate) which only appears before /ɹ/. So to favor a positive answer to the question, we would need to limit abstract analysis; to favor a negative answer, we would encourage (require) such analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T00:42:57.263" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T00:42:57.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9787" CreationDate="2014-12-13T11:17:55.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You pretty much summarised the main linguistic indicators of things like sarcasm or irony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;intonation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pause&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stress &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;emphasis or volume of voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also many paralinguistic  signals such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gestures &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;facial expressions &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;symbols (in writing) such as emoticons, quotation marks,  italics,  etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, often sarcasm is not overly indicated. The things that are used to disambiguate include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;context &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;situational knowledge &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speaker negotiation (the extreme being holding a sarcasm sign as in Big Bang Theory) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T11:17:55.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2014-12-13T12:24:38.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another fact which you have to keep in mind is that there are composed words and multi word-expressions. In languages like German they tend to be written without spaces (German &quot;Mitbewohnerabschiedsfeier&quot; vs. Spanish &quot;Fiesta de despedida de mi compañero de piso&quot;) and as there are several millions of common combinations in everyday use as well as in technical language (and several million more that are ad hoc compositions) one could argue that those languages have a significant larger vocabulary. On the other hand, I would say that a word is not definded by surrounding whitespaces (&quot;black hole&quot;) so the decision which language has the larges vocabulary is even harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T12:24:38.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9802" CreationDate="2014-12-13T12:30:24.313" Score="0" ViewCount="2487" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder that, among the oldest languages spoken today, which one is the best preserved resembling its oldest known form in terms of grammar and vocabulary. I know that we are limited in our knowledge about the language history before writing is invented so an answer starting with written languages is good enough too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What fascinates me is a simple word like &quot;selam&quot; (or &quot;shalom&quot;) used in greetings actually comes from Sumerians thousands of years ago. I wonder if there is a language which preserves its oldest known form at broader scale from thousands of years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1414" LastEditorUserId="1414" LastEditDate="2014-12-13T13:31:02.130" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T04:17:47.393" Title="What is the least changed language in use today?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9801" CreationDate="2014-12-13T13:15:41.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything about this question makes unwarranted assumptions about how language works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authentic is not a valid concept in language. Also historical similarity is always a modern construction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At best you could ask about which language had best documented links with its earlier phases in the distant past. In that case, some candidates could be Sanskrit, Modern Greek, Modern Hebrew (a great example of conscious construction), Liturgical Coptic, Mandarin. Obviously even Latin could in some respects still make this list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every single one of these examples is fraught with controversy and questions about identity,  continuity, evidence, etc. So while it is important to ask questions about the processes driving the development of languages, words like authentic or oldest are far too normative and politically laden to be of any use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T13:15:41.603" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-13T13:33:38.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a tiny bit of anecdotal evidence and a remainder that being competent at something doesn't require comprehension (as Daniel Dannet put it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is true, that native speakers (my mother tongue is Russian) have very good command of this aspect of the language, the kind of knowledge is often not well-understood by the speakers. The notoriously difficult question to ask a less-educated Russian speaker is to ask them to decline the word &quot;кочерги&quot; (plural of &quot;poker&quot;, a kind of tool one would use to stir firewood in the oven). In particular, the problem arises with producing the genitive case. Typically, a less educated native speaker would produce a form which implies masculine gender: &quot;кочергов&quot; - which is incorrect, the correct one would be &quot;кочерёг&quot;. Even though the word may sound like it is archaic, it's not what causing the problem (and in fact the word is still in use today - it is used to name any object of an appropriate shape), the problem is in grammatically incorrect, but phonetically more appealing form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect, that seems not to be covered here is that those who learn Russian as their second language (typically the second generation of immigrants) usually aren't very good with declination, especially if their first language doesn't have cases (such as, for example, Hebrew).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6738" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T11:11:07.710" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T11:11:07.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3752" CreationDate="2014-12-13T17:59:29.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional view is that Germanic b/d/g were at least medially voiced fricatives (v/dh/gh) after Grimm's Law and that Verner's law voiced f/s/th/kh after unstressed vowels to match them.&#xA;Professor Kortlandt of Leyden university puts the alternative, that Verner's law comes before Grimm's. He believes that IE b/d/g were actually ?p/?t/?k in IE (as still in many English and Danish accents) and that therefore IE bh/dh/gh were actually closer to b/d/g. He sees Verner's Law as a voicing of p/t/k to b/d/g after unstressed vowels.&#xA;Ned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6744" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T17:59:29.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8916" CreationDate="2014-12-13T18:13:11.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a much more general problem of epistemology. Suppose a man strikes an anvil with a hammer and you hear it; then the epistemologists question would be, do you hear the man hitting the anvil, do you hear the force of impact between two hard surfaces, do you hear the acoustic waves coming from that contact? That debate has raged for centuries and is manifested in the splits between idealists and realists, and between direct realists vs. indirect realists. IMO the correct answer is &quot;Yes, all of the above&quot;. So, you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; hear the phoneme /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about phonemes are, of course, vastly less answerable since we can't even agree on the ontological status of the &quot;phoneme&quot;. A &quot;phoneme&quot; is not necessarily an underlying segment (once a segment has been changed by some rule, it isn't what it was underlyingly), nor is it necessarily a segment that it to be changed into something else (so /t/ in &quot;top&quot; is eventually destined to be changed into aspirated t, but /t/ in &quot;stop&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ever changed to something else). Numerous theories of phonology distinguish between the phonological output and the articulatory implementation of that phonological output, in which case it would not be possible for a person to (directly) articulate a phonological segment -- that which is articulated is neither a segment nor phonological. (See Mark Hale &lt;strong&gt;Historical linguistics: Theory and method&lt;/strong&gt; for discussion of the chain between speaker's stored representation and hearer's perception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since philosophers can't agree whether we can see a cow, rather than seeing light wave reflecting off of cow molecules, linguists can't be expected to have a clearer theory of what we perceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T18:13:11.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9801" CreationDate="2014-12-13T18:38:08.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be useful to first have a metric of change, to know whether a small amount of change over a thousand years is equivalent to twice as much change over two thousand years. Here are two candidate languages. Icelandic has been written for about 900 years, and hasn't changed much. Lithuanian has been written for about 500 years, and also hasn't changed much in that period (so Icelandic would probably be &quot;least changed&quot; given its longer period of attestation). But, Icelandic has changed much more from proto-Indo-European (spoken between 6 and 12 thousand years ago, depending on theory), compared to Lithuanian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-13T18:38:08.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-13T21:39:21.940" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a dissertation from 1973 by Richard Coulter Brittain &quot;Critical History of Systems of Sentence Diagramming in English&quot; which outlines development of syntax diagramming until the work of Chomsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is some article/book/chapter/dissertation containing history/overview/comparison of different systems of syntax diagramming used in modern linguistics, i.e. in Chomsky and later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6747" LastEditorUserId="6747" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T12:00:05.557" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T11:20:29.250" Title="Is there some article/book containing history/comparison of different systems of syntax diagramming used in modern linguistics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2014-12-13T22:31:10.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Czech people mean that it's a unique sound (believe me, I'm a Czech and a linguist), but it's not. There were at least &quot;ř&quot; in some northern Polish dialects, in Sorbian. It's usually said to be pronounced with two or three flaps, but some actual phonetic contributions have evidence that it's mostly one flap, rarely two flaps and very rarely three flaps (just because we're usually pretty lazy about pronouncing them) - so the same &quot;ř&quot; sound as for example in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6748" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T10:12:19.290" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T10:12:19.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2014-12-14T01:45:57.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; German (it seems quite analytic so not too dependent on case for expressing meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true only to a certain extent: it is quite frequently possible to choose between alternative constructions which use different cases and/or prepositions also, articles can be used to mark the case. So you can often avoid a case you don't like (like in English: use genitive 's or a construction with of). Also, there is some ambiguity due to cases looking the same (long example below). In practice, word order is a fall-back for &lt;em&gt;guesstimating&lt;/em&gt; the meaning in situations where there is ambiguity with the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native German speaker (but no linguist) I'd also say that  correct use of cases does not have too much to do with education. Kindergarden children will use e.g. the accusative correctly when asking for a toy. In fact, in a sentence like &quot;Gib mir den Ball.&quot; incorrect use of cases would sound like a foreigner learning German but decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like a child. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is a (perceived) &lt;strong&gt;link between use of cases and education&lt;/strong&gt;. But I think it is spurious (perceived only) in the sense that correlation is not causation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first crucial point is: what defines &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; use of a language? Language evolves, and the German language is possibly evolving towards fewer cases (English is ahead in that respect: currently only 1 1/2 or 2 cases left). German may also arrive at retaining only nominative and accusative*. The accusative example with the small child was not accidental in the sense that the &quot;mistakes&quot; with cases in everyday spoken German are typically avoidig genitive e.g. by a dative construction and accusative instead of dative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put the mistake into quotation marks: is it a mistake if a large and growing proportion of the speakers use a new construction (or the relative frequencies of  two constructions shift) or is it a very normal sign of an evolving language? Not to speak of dialects which may have used the &quot;wrong&quot; construction for hundreds of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example where current and historic evolution of the language stands out quite prominently (and which is all about cases and extracting meaning and ambiguity):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point where the evolution to drop declination is mostly done are proper names which are not declinated any more: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice schreibt Bob einen Brief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, it is not clear who writes to whom: either Bob writes to &lt;em&gt;Alice&lt;/em&gt; (and it is emphasized that the letter is to &lt;em&gt;Alice&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to Dave), or Alice writes a letter to Bob. The latter will be the default assumption as word order is considered to resolve the ambiguity.&#xA;The alternative is to put the preposition to make it unambiguous: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; An Alice schreibt Bob einen Brief.  | Alice schreibt einen Brief an Bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goethe wouldn't have had the problem: in his time, also normal names were flexed: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alicen schreibt Bob einen Brief.  | &lt;em&gt;(What is the dative of Bob? Roberten?)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is clear that Alice is the recipient. But nowadays that would sound super old-fashioned. Another possibility is to use an article to mark the case: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Der Alice schreibt Bob einen Brief. | Alice schreibt dem Bob einen Brief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Artice with name sounds decidedy southern)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there are still some remainders in every day language of the cases for names: it still feels really weird not to flex an adjective that is part of the name. E.g. I'd send my complaint &lt;em&gt;der&lt;/em&gt; Deutsche&lt;i&gt;n&lt;/i&gt; Bahn (dative). But when I had a scholarship of the Telekom foundation, they insisted I should thank der Deutsche &lt;em&gt;[no n]&lt;/em&gt; Telekom Stiftung as it is their proper name and should therefore stay nominative. They are ahead of me (and most other German native speakers) in dropping the cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the point where I think &lt;strong&gt;literary education&lt;/strong&gt; comes in: classics of literature are usually slightly dated and therefore written in a language that is now perceived as old-fashioned. And even if we don't go back as far as Goethe, between concurrent constructions the fashion (= which is considered correct) can shift considerably within, say, a hundred years. Written texts will lag behind the developments of spoken language. Because a large body of read texts is actually older and also because this slightly dated body of text defines what is considered correct written language which also makes written language evolve slower than spoken language.&#xA;I think at least for German, many constructions whichare considered  appropriate for (educated) written texts  would be perceived as old-fashioned in spoken langusage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking these two points together, my guess is: &lt;strong&gt;The perception of educated = using cases more correctly may just come from education = knowing classic texts, which are written in an old-fashioned way (seen from nowadays spoken language). If this happens while the language drops or changes cases, the natural lag between written texts and spoken language may be responsible for the perception&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.germanistik.uni-mainz.de/pdfs/hist/Nuebling/Nubling%202012%20Eigennamendeflexion.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This essay (Nübling 2012)&lt;/a&gt; cites a book that says in the 18th century, accussative and dative versions of names started to be considered &lt;em&gt;vulgar&lt;/em&gt; and the upper classes dropped this flexion. So here we have a (historic) &lt;strong&gt;counter-example: less use of cases being considered more educated&lt;/strong&gt;. It also cites Goethes &quot;Leiden des jungen Werthers&quot; (1774) loosing the genitive to &quot;Leiden des jungen Werther&quot; for the 2nd edition (1887). Or, actually: not loosing the genitive but switching from a doubly marked version (genitive article + genitive name) to the modern version where marking the case once (genitive article) is enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another really fancy example: Many of my well-educated friends would cite  &quot;trotz dem &lt;em&gt;(Dativ)&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as one of those examples how the dative construction is killing the genitive, and say it should be &quot;trotz des &lt;em&gt;(Genitiv)&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (so would I have said before googling about this questoin...). But &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sprachlog.de/2013/11/21/zur-lage-der-deutschen-flexion-oder-dativ-genitiv-tod/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt; talks about the opposite shift from dative to genitive just occurring in the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6749" LastEditorUserId="6749" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T02:04:42.223" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T02:04:42.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9815" CreationDate="2014-12-14T13:41:23.077" Score="3" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;So a popular theory in the pronunciation of Hebrew is that &quot;Biblical Hebrew&quot; (or, at the very least, Hebrew up to the point to the fall of the Second Temple and well into the 8th century CE) had pharyngeal pronunciations for certain letters that are lost in modern Israeli Hebrew today. The ayin was actually an &quot;3ayin&quot; where the letter is pronounced as a pharyngealization of which ever vowel the niqqud shares. The teth is not just a &quot;T&quot; sound, but rather a T with this constriction with the pharynx. The same with the tsade as well, as it is actually an &quot;S&quot; with the same constriction as with the teth. Some scholars dispute this and claim that these pronunciations came later and were borrowed by South-West Semitic languages (namely Arabic) while many others claim that these were common pronunciations 2000 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if this is the case, then how come there is no &quot;Dad&quot; in Hebrew, Syriac, and other Levant languages? The &quot;Dad&quot; is just that some pharyngealization that is done on the consonant &quot;D,&quot; so why does this letter only appear in South-West Semitic languages (once again, namely Arabic)? If a people could pronounce &quot;Teth&quot; &quot;Sade&quot; and &quot;Ayin&quot; as pharyngeal letters then wouldn't it be pretty simple to also pronounce a &quot;Dad&quot; as seen in Arabic? Is it fallacious to think it's weird that the &quot;Dad&quot; should be expected in Levant Semitic languages? Does this show problems with theories of pharyngeal letters in Semitic languages (and that these letters of Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets actually changed pronunciation due to Arabic influence)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6752" LastEditorUserId="6752" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T14:08:31.510" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T22:09:47.620" Title="Concerning Semitic Pronunciation of Pharyngeal Letters" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9640" CreationDate="2014-12-14T18:42:48.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Semitic root-and-pattern morphology&lt;/a&gt; can be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;transfixation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.let.uu.nl/uil-ots/lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Template%20morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;templatic morphology&lt;/a&gt;, but in the morphological literature you're perhaps more likely to find the terms &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;non-concatenative morphology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;discontinuous morphology,&lt;/em&gt; which would include transfixation as well as other processes such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reduplication&lt;/a&gt; and morphologically conditioned segmental (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ablaut&lt;/a&gt;) or non-segmental (e.g., tonal) changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some prominent theoretical analyses of non-concatenative morphological processes include Prosodic Morphology (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/b.9780631201267.1996.00011.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;McCarthy &amp;amp; Prince 1995&lt;/a&gt;) and A-Morphous Morphology (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UT1R55Bj-yIC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=a-morphous%20morphology&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anderson 1992&lt;/a&gt;); Anderson goes so far as to question the theoretical status of the morpheme on the basis of patterns of this type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6753" LastEditorUserId="6753" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T21:58:24.433" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T21:58:24.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6281" CreationDate="2014-12-14T20:35:24.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sandhi here is:  सर्वे (all)+ अस्मात् (from this) + स्यन्दन्ते (flow) .&#xA;The continuation of this verse is स॒र्वेऽस्मात्स्यन्द॑न्ते॒ सिन्धव: सर्वारूपा: ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This translates to: 'All kinds of rivers flow from this.' &#xA;अस्मात् is the singular ablative form of the masculine demonstrative pronoun 'एतद् '. Which is appropriate because in this sentence, the pronoun 'this' is the source of the rivers that flow away from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the answer to your question is- The correct letter here is 'त् 'and not  'थ्' . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &#xA;Complete verse &lt;a href=&quot;http://estudantedavedanta.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://estudantedavedanta.net/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Dictionary: &lt;a href=&quot;http://spokensanskrit.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://spokensanskrit.de/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6755" LastEditorUserId="6755" LastEditDate="2014-12-14T20:41:26.320" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T20:41:26.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-14T22:00:28.773" Score="8" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's interesting that English uses the verb &quot;to drink&quot; intransitively exclusively when talking about alcohol, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I drink a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But transitively when talking about anything else, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I drink water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if many languages make this distinction, or have a separate verb entirely for drinking alcohol to drinking non-alcohol? I realise that &quot;many&quot; and &quot;other languages&quot; are vague terms, but I'm just looking for a general indication as to whether this is a common phenomenon, or isolated to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T06:09:19.017" Title="Do other languages distinguish the verbs &quot;to drink&quot; when talking about alcohol?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9811" CreationDate="2014-12-14T22:09:47.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with Steiner 1977 &lt;em&gt;The case for fricative-laterals in Proto-Semitic&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard reasoning behind reconstructing a series of emphatic (or something'd) consonants lies in nonrandom distinctions in correspondences across branches of Semitic. There is a correspondence between Targum Aramaic ʕ and Arabic ḍ (&quot;ill&quot; = mraʕ (Aramaic). mariiḍ (Arabic)), in fact I think Old Aramaic kept all of the hypothesized PS consonants distinct. What is not at all clear is what the original phonetic value of the consonants were, so if Arabic emphatics derive from multiple sources (glottalization vs. lateral fricatives), then it would not be surprising to lose one but not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T22:09:47.620" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9698" CreationDate="2014-12-14T22:57:30.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hard, or perhaps impossible, part of the question is the implied &quot;and did not exist in any language spoken more than 2000 years ago&quot;. That seriously restricts the testability of the claim since records of languages more than 2000 years old are rather sparse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of Bantu languages (especially in the Lacustrine group), there is a grammatical distinction between past tense of today vs. past tense of yesterday vs. past tense of longer-ago. This is a pretty rare grammatical distinction, and it does not reconstruct to proto-Bantu. I propose that this is an example. I don't mean that I think that languages were in principle incapable to making such a grammaticalized distinction 2000 years ago, but I don't have any evidence that any languages did.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-14T22:57:30.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9600" CreationDate="2014-12-15T01:54:19.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe too late for you, but... The largest language-group of that type is Beti-Fang language (Fang, Bulu, Ewondo, Ntumu, Eton) which is probably large enough; otherwise, there are Douala and Cameroonian Pidgin spoken by a million or more people (and French and English, the official languages), but for the most part, you have to aggregate across languages to get a million speakers and then the languages are not mutually intelligible (such as, the various languages referred to as &quot;Bamileke&quot;). The safest best for Cameroonian languages is that any two languages are not mutually intelligible, and then you can list some exceptions like Ewondo-Bulu etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T01:54:19.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9698" CreationDate="2014-12-15T06:13:06.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One such feature is high divergence between the spelling and pronounciation as seen for instance, in English and French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T06:13:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11540" CreationDate="2014-12-15T07:20:55.160" Score="3" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any language where there exist words for smells not derived or already disconnected from words for smelling objects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, those derived from verbs, of obscure etymology, or not having the corresponding noun in the contemporary language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other feelings there are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bitter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - from a verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;gholtos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; apparently already meant yellow color at PIE stage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sweet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯ea̯dus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; already meant &quot;sweet&quot; in PIE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯roudhros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; already meant &quot;red&quot; in PIE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sour&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - from PIE word for cheese &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;seuros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but long forgotten since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for words meaning particular smells, not just &quot;good smell&quot; or &quot;bad smell&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-01-22T15:34:58.043" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T12:35:23.910" Title="Is there any language where there exist words for smells not connected with smelling objects?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T07:27:29.017" Score="5" ViewCount="3722" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a &lt;em&gt;filler&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;discourse marker&lt;/em&gt;? There are words that seem fall into both categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_marker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on the latter&lt;/a&gt; is sparse and lacks examples, but what it does say on the matter is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Traditionally, some of the words or phrases that were considered discourse markers were treated as &quot;fillers&quot; or &quot;expletives&quot;: words or phrases that had no function at all. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then goes into linguistic jargon. What is the difference between the two groups? Can the difference be explained to someone without an education in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3550" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:57:59.457" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:57:59.457" Title="What is the difference between a filler word and a discourse marker?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;filler&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2014-12-15T08:09:59.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that filler words are one sort of discourse marker, but the former term is less well defined and less consistently used than the latter. The sense that I consider most central is epitomized in English by &quot;um&quot; or &quot;like&quot;: a sound that indicates that the speaker is not currently emitting content, but will presently do so, and wishes to retain the floor. (&quot;like&quot; is usually used to fill a much shorter gap, but the usage is otherwise quite similar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other discourse markers can impart some connotative nuance to an utterance - the difference between the connectives in &quot;He's a programmer, [and/but] he likes poetry&quot; don't distinguish any denotational sense, but the contrast does convey two greatly differing sets of beliefs (real or adopted for effect) about programmers and poetry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5686" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T08:09:59.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2014-12-15T10:09:00.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Czech raised alveolar trill that is represented by &lt;strong&gt;ř&lt;/strong&gt; in Czech orthography is phonetically quite unique. However, there are apparently certain Polish dialects where it exists as an allophone of 'rz' (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_trill#Raised_alveolar_non-sonorant_trill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;See this listing on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gwarypolskie.uw.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;task=view&amp;amp;id=218&amp;amp;Itemid=58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This resource on Polish dialects&lt;/a&gt; (in Polish) gives a distribution of these dialects and suggests that the full realization is only sporadic and present mostly among the oldest speakers. I'm not sure of any detailed study that has looked at this from a truly contrastive perspective, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the prototypical phonetic instantiation of ř is voiced, it has a voiceless allophone which is acoustically quite similar to the Polish 'rz' sometimes leading to claims that Polish has the 'ř' phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czechs are taught that 'ř' is unique to Czech (and some other little known language in Papua New Guinea) but again I don't remember seeing any study of this other than anecdotal evidence. Speech impediments related to the sound are called 'Rotacismus Bohemicus' suggesting that this may be a peculiarly Czech sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T10:28:00.203" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T10:28:00.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2014-12-15T10:32:05.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not believe that your observation about English is correct. The verb &lt;em&gt;to drink&lt;/em&gt; when talking about alcohol is not instransitive, because it can take a direct object. Its meaning is context-dependent. Imagine you are talking about a toddler who “drinks a lot”, or about Lawrence of Arabia who came to an oasis and “drank a lot”, or about an athlete who takes good care of their body and “drinks a lot”. Chances are good that nobody would think of alcohol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per your question about languages having a specific word for drinking alcohol: I do not know such a language. It would not surprise me, though. I know about German that has two different words for ‘to drink’. They are differentiated by the nature of their prototypical subjects: The word &lt;em&gt;trinken&lt;/em&gt; is prototypically used for humans, while the word &lt;em&gt;saufen&lt;/em&gt; is prototypically used for animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6758" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T10:32:05.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2014-12-15T11:36:53.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been at least two ways of making a distinction between gemination and mere consonant length:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In late 19th century German linguistics (where the term was introduced, if I am not mistaken), &lt;em&gt;geminates&lt;/em&gt; referred to (long) consonants with a two-peak pressure contour. Hence “geminated”. By contrast, a simple long consonant has only one pressure peak. There have been attempts at measuring the double peak in early instrumental phonetics, for instance in Dieth and Brunner (1943): «Die Konsonanten und Geminaten des Schweizerdeutschen experimentell untersucht». The results were inconclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is another notion of gemination in phonology where it refers to a long consonant that corresponds to two elements on some layer of phonological analysis, whereas a simple long consonant corresponds to a single element that is lengthened (for instance in Ham (2001): &lt;em&gt;Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing&lt;/em&gt;, or in Kraehenmann: &lt;em&gt;Quantity and Prosodic Assymetries in Alemannic&lt;/em&gt;). This is very theory-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The habit of using the term &lt;em&gt;gemination&lt;/em&gt; as a synonym of ‘long consonant’ has always seemed rather unfortunate to me. I think the term &lt;em&gt;long consonant&lt;/em&gt; is preferrable because it is less obscure and has no history of referring to concepts that go beyond mere consonant length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Ancient Greek, &lt;em&gt;gemination&lt;/em&gt; in the first, phonetic sense is pointless, unless there were ancient grammaticians who had observed a double peak in pressure. Some authors may have analyzed it using some phonological sense of &lt;em&gt;gemination&lt;/em&gt;, but I wouldn't know about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6758" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T11:36:53.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2014-12-15T12:18:22.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of the verb “to drink” specifically to mean “to drink wine or another alcoholic beverage” is indeed very widespread. It is not (as Anixx appears to suggest) restricted to Indo-European. In Arabic too šariba means “drink” (in general) and “drink wine”; from the same root you have šarāb “beverage, wine” and šarrāb “drunkard”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T12:50:06.003" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T12:50:06.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T15:36:14.007" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English sentence 'He runs' comprises two syllables. The Spanish sentence 'Corre' comprises two syllables. Both sentences mean the same thing, both sentences take about the same amount of time to say. (For the sake of the question, suppose they take exactly the same amount of time to say.) However, the English sentence comprises two words, whereas the Spanish sentence comprises only one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a native Spanish speaker comprehend the meaning of 'Corre' faster than a native English speaker can comprehend 'He runs'? More generally, all other things the same, does the number of words affect the time it takes a person to understand an utterance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T19:08:36.750" Title="All things equal, does the number of words affect comprehension time?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9819" CreationDate="2014-12-15T17:50:15.533" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norwegian you could use two of the same words you used for tastes; sweet(søt) and sour(sur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could in fact use that to describe several of the senses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Det smaker søtt. (It tastes sweet).&#xA;Det smaker surt. (It tastes sour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Det lukter søtt. (It smells sweet).&#xA;Det lukter surt. (It smells sour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Det høres surt. (It hears sour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Det ser søtt ut. (It looks sweet).&#xA;Det ser surt ut. (It looks sour).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows me that ( at least for Norwegian) this question is closely related to the general understanding of adjectives and adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T17:50:15.533" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9826" CreationDate="2014-12-15T18:25:03.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretical linguistics would have many different ways to answer your question. There are two basic foundations in your question; &#xA;&quot;comprehension time&quot; and &quot;equal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Equal&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;To compare two utterances, you could divide it into words. But you could also divide it into any of these(if not more);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantical meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ortographical letters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntactical usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In that sense your two utterances are not equal in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the things I have listed will have much bigger effect on &quot;comprehension time&quot; than word division.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Comprehension time&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This would take a lot of resources to make a scientific test. I anticipate a lot of individual differences for &quot;comprehension time&quot;, which is determined by many other factors than language alone. To compare &quot;comprehension time&quot; between two languages, and eliminating all other factors, would be a major task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result you possibly can get, if you actually manage to eliminate every &quot;polluting&quot; factor, would be difference in milliseconds. This small difference will never be bigger than the risque of &quot;polluted&quot; data, and therefore you could never possibly come to a scientific conclusion to your question, other than no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2014-12-15T19:08:36.750" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T19:08:36.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8787" CreationDate="2014-12-15T20:25:12.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are books for the practical use of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the NLTK (Natural Language Tool Kit)&lt;/a&gt;, might that fit the bill? For instance the books from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/191-0078107-8184566?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;amp;field-keywords=nltk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;search for &quot;nltk&quot; at amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the books are insufficient, playing with the kit itself might do what you need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T20:25:12.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T21:30:54.407" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the natural tendency of the verbs in spoken language towards more or fewer conjugations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in my language, we use conjugations related to time, person, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we have conjugations in some times and for some person, but we can do a lot just by the knowledge of the infinitive forms and using auxiliary verbs, like we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't identify whether these conjugations get more or less numerous with time, whether there is a natural tendency in languages about this or if there is any underlying logic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any accepted theory about this subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T22:11:36.467" Title="Common change of conjugation of the verbs in spoken languages?" Tags="&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9830" CreationDate="2014-12-15T22:11:36.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main senses in which people speak of conjugations (as countable things). One is (seemingly) arbitrary lexical classes such as -er, -ar, -ir verbs in Spanish. The other is classes of formal distinctions made, such as past, present, future, perfective, negative, focus etc. Such as there is a generally accepted theory, it would be that languages tend to eliminate things that have to be memorized, where there is no discernible rule. (The tendency can easily be resisted, as in the conjugation of &quot;be&quot; and &quot;go&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages also tend to develop &quot;constructions&quot; where the meaning of two words put together isn't literally the sum of the parts, for example &quot;have bought&quot; isn't just the meaning of &quot;have&quot; plus the meaning of &quot;bought&quot;, so you have to also learn a new rule for interpreting the construction. When this is coupled with some kind of phonological reduction of one of the parts, you get &quot;grammaticalization&quot; and the creation of a new conjugational parameter. These two trends, which are also common in languages, encourage an increase in the number of conjugations, and IMO reflect something about the nature of word-formation versus sentence-formation (that more arbitrary facts of combination and interpretation should be registered in the morphology, not the syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any in-depth empirical study across human languages that counts the likely historical increase in distinctions (for example in Bantu verbs) vs. decrease (as in most Indo-European languages or Arabic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T22:11:36.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T22:37:26.353" Score="5" ViewCount="1023" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am always amazed by how similar both languages sound despite being very different in almost every other aspect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that this is a classical example of a Sprachbund, but I am interested in knowing more about which language affected which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What aspects of Spanish pronunciation can be attributed to influence from Basque?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T02:37:41.930" Title="Does Basque sound like Spanish, or vice versa?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9839" CreationDate="2014-12-16T00:52:33.270" Score="5" ViewCount="2005" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the languages I know about, most of them (not Chinese, Japanese, etc.) only have characters or character groups for specific sounds, and also can have a single specific sound generated by placing two or more characters together, such as (in English) 'sh', 'th', 'ch', 'oo', and long vowel sounds caused by an 'e' at the end of the word/syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some characters can represent multiple sounds put together, such as 'x', which in English sounds like 'ks' (or in some cases 'z'). Also, many characters can have multiple sounds, such as 'c' — it can have a hard 'k' or soft 's' sound. Most languages that use characters for sounds have these rules where sound can change depending on other characters paired/near the affected character, and I have not heard of any of these types of languages that has a large set of sounds they use and a single character for each sound that cannot be affected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any languages where the sounds created by pairing a character with an 'h' (ex. 'ch', 'sh', 'th', 'ph'...) have a single character that represents them, or a character for all vowel sounds (ex. 'oo', 'ee', 'uh'...). For example, let's say that 'u' represents the 'oo' sound, 'i' represents the 'ee' sound, 'a' represents the 'ah' sound, 'o' represents the 'oh' sound (without the 'oo' drop at the end) and ☺ represents the 'ch' sound. (Some letters have multiple mouth positions, such as 'o', where you move your lips closer together while saying its sound — I am talking about a character for every mouth position, so this letter would become two letters put together, 'ou'.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would spell some words differently, such as &quot;hi&quot; --&gt; &quot;hai&quot;, &quot;cockroach&quot; --&gt; cacrou☺, and &quot;bone&quot; --&gt; &quot;boun&quot;. Are there any languages that work this way, with a single independent character for every single sound made in that language? This would make it possible to always pronounce a word correctly just by reading it. If no languages such as the one I have described exist, then why? Is it because of the incorporation of words from other languages or the changing of dialect over time, or is it just a question of origin? It would be very interesting if someone could explain this to me (since I don't know much about linguistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6765" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T01:21:08.110" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T04:28:18.337" Title="Why don't any languages have strictly one character for every single phonetic sound?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9832" CreationDate="2014-12-16T03:04:09.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of things that are often cited (and at times disputed) as influences that Basque has had on Castilian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspiration of initial &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;General consensus, although the later of loss of aspiration may be more due to Castilian speakers than Basque speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5-vowel system&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Basque also has 5 vowels that match Castilian's but some many dialects of Basque have additional vowels/distinctions such that it's also equally possible to explain Castilian's without a Basque influence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Confusion of /b/ /v/, later merging to /b/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Competing theories state that the merger happened away from Basque-speaking regions first or that Castilian simply never had a labiodental pronunciation to begin with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reduction of voiced and unvoiced fricatives to unvoiced.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Generally accepted, but with noted dissenting opinions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apical pronunciation of /s/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Others argue that this was a well-extended pronunciation across the Romance-speaking world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Voicing and weaking of intervocalic /c/ /p/ /k/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Frequently attributed to Celtic influence as well.  Interestingly, Basque is said to have helped preserve the unvoiced intervocalics in Aragonese and Béarnese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; in front of words starting with &lt;em&gt;r-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Basque doesn't allow words to start with &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, so like the addition of &lt;em&gt;es-&lt;/em&gt; for words starting with /sk/ /st/ /sp/ in Castilian, they added in &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; and it stuck for some words, but not for others.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is summarized from &lt;a href=&quot;http://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/26136.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“La influencia del sustrato&#xA;euskera en hispano-romance”&lt;/a&gt; (Mary C. Irtbarren-Argaiz).  She goes into great detail evaluating the claims and sourcing them, some of which she doesn't necessarily agree with, but I've included some of the alternate views she mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="5202" LastEditDate="2014-12-16T16:26:22.923" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T16:26:22.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2014-12-16T08:17:30.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discourse markers are really just a catch all term for all the different lexical ways of making text (discourse) hold together beyond the level of the clause. As all linguistic categories (including nouns and verbs) the discourse marker category has fuzzy boundaries and is subject to prototype effects, family resemblances (and the like) - sort of like Lakoff's radial categories. Which is why it is hard to find an easy definition that would include all the things that look like discourse markers and exclude those that don't. But ultimately it's not all that important. What's important is that all those little words that are hard to categorize play an important role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words that are often called 'fillers' (like, so, uhm, etc.) are a type of discourse marker that is used to manage attention, conversation turn taking, or just the flow of the speakers speech, work together with intonation and other non-segmental elements. Whether you call them fillers, discourse markers or something else is less important than it is to recognize the role they play in speech or writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T08:17:30.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9834" CreationDate="2014-12-16T08:46:27.410" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be several common confusions in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetic vs. phonemic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phoneme is a collection of sounds that serve the same function. For example, English phoneme  /p/ sounds like [p] in 'spit' but like [ph] (h represents aspiration) in 'pit'. Speakers don't recognize them as two different sounds, though, because they have function e.g. to differentiate from /b/ pit/bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it would make no sense at all to try to have a different character (letter) for each phonetic sound because there would be hundreds for each language and the speakers would not know how to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonemic orthography vs. perfect phonemic orthography&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages have the kinds of orthographies you want. Finish, Italian, Czech, etc. all have more or less one letter for phoneme (with the occasional digraph or other inconsistency). The problem arises when a phoneme changes because of context. A common situation is final devoicing of consonants. For example, English 'but' and 'bud' are pronounced differently but a German speaker would pronounce both 'butt'. But they would not pronounce 'buds' and 'buts' identically. This is incredibly common in any language. For example, the Czech word 'had' (snake) is pronounced /hat/ because the voiced 'd' is devoiced (into 't') when it's the last sound in a word. But in all its other forms, the 'd' remains voiced. For for instance, in 'hady' (snakes, pl. acc.) remains voiced. This is different from the 'pit'/'spit' example because both /t/ and /d/ are phonemes in Czech and many native speakers would write 'had' as 'hat'. However, the orthography chose lexical/morphological consistency over phonological consistency. As a result, children have to learn how to spell these words - generally, by asking themselves what the other forms of the word sound like. However, there's no inconsistency in pronunciation because the devoicing happens no matter what. There are some orthographies that may choose phonemic consistency in some cases, but no orthography will be perfectly consistent in all respects because there is simply too much that is context-dependent in pronunciation (these many rules of referred to as phonotactics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T08:46:27.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-16T09:24:12.053" Score="7" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, do any larger corpora have categories that pertain to technology, computer science, etc.? Or collections of English documentation and/or manuals related to modern devices, interfaces, technology products, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6769" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T12:42:06.397" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T21:34:51.673" Title="Is there any corpus for technical English? (E.g., computers, IT, modern technology)" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16839" CreationDate="2014-12-16T13:25:37.633" Score="4" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/12/02/googles-english-translation-for-short-japanese-phrase-hints-at-huge-tv-series-length-backstory/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; on Rocket News 24 described a Google Translate bug, in which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;さよなら大好きな人&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was translated into &quot;Episode 78&quot;. This bug is still live as of the time of writing, and you can replicate it independently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know why the machine translate created this mistranslation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005195.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An example of machine mistranslation etymology&lt;/a&gt; would be &quot;Chinese fuck&quot; , where 干 could be translated as &quot;dry&quot; and as &quot;fuck&quot; at the same time. Is there a similar reason why this bug occurred for Japanese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" OwnerDisplayName="March Ho" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T17:39:33.980" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T13:14:37.913" Title="&quot;Episode 78&quot; machine mistranslation etymology" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9843" CreationDate="2014-12-16T17:06:15.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look if the surrounding context has anything to do with Japanese pop-culture. The &quot;花*花&quot; duet had a song in 2012 titled &quot;&lt;em&gt;さよなら 大好きな人&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &quot;&lt;em&gt;Take on Me&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;When the Going get Tough, the Tough Get Going&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are also song titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T17:06:15.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9672" CreationDate="2014-12-16T18:57:30.367" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could very well be explained in a difficult way, but it may also be that you are seeking an easy answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you could say;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;One clause=one syntax tree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a sentence consists of several clauses, you could draw several syntax trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T18:57:30.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-15T15:17:39.640" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the natural tendency of the verbs in spoken language towards more or fewer conjugations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in my language, we use conjugations related to time, person, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we have conjugations in some times and for some person, but we can do a lot just by the knowledge of the infinitive forms and using auxiliary verbs, like we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't identify whether these conjugations get more or less numerous with time, whether there is a natural tendency in languages about this or if there is any underlying logic at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any theory about this subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" OwnerDisplayName="Aprendice" LastActivityDate="2014-12-16T19:07:55.497" Title="Common change of conjugation of the verbs in spoken languages?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9847" CreationDate="2014-12-15T18:19:55.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is a natural process in the long run of historical development that systems that become too complicated are simplified because speakers can't handle them anymore. You can see this in irregular verbs. The number of irregular verbs was relatively large, I guess about 250 to 300 a hundred or 200 years ago. But in spoken language only part ot them are used today. &#xA;Grammatical endings of declension and conjugation have been simplified when comparing Latin, German and English. In English the simplification has been done thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to vocabulary the English vocabulary is so extremely large that no one can handle it. But the normal vocabulary in spoken language is about 7,500 words. (I've read this recently, but have forgotten where.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" OwnerDisplayName="rogermue" LastActivityDate="2014-12-15T18:19:55.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4696" CreationDate="2014-12-17T12:10:24.853" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would still be handy to have keywords for consonants. I tend to think of it the other way round, though, going from spelling to pronunciation. &#xA;Here is my current list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B - BAD, DUMB&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C - CAT, CITY, OCEAN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CH - CHURCH, MACHINE, CHAOS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D - DOG, BAKED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DG - EDGE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F - FUN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G - BIG, AGE, POIGNANT, FOREIGN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GG - EGG, EXAGGERATE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GH - GHOST, LAUGH, THOUGH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H - HAT, OH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J - JOIN, JUNTA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L - LIME, COLONEL, COULD/TALK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NG - LONG, FINGER, ONGOING, STRANGE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P - POP, PSALM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PH - PHYSICS, HAPHAZARD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q - QUEEN, MARQUIS, IRAQ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R - RUN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RH - RHYME&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S - SAME, CAUSE, BIRDS, SUGAR, FUSION, MARQUIS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SH - SHAPE, MISHAP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SS - PASS, MISSION, POSSESS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T - TIME, EDITION, EIGHTEEN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TH - THIN, THAT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V - VEIN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W - WAS, TWO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WH - WHAT, WHO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X - BOX, EXACT, BORDEAUX&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Y - YARD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Z - ZOO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T12:10:24.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-17T12:37:52.370" Score="2" ViewCount="3134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indian here, but it only suddenly struck me now that the abugida systems seem to have no disadvantages at all (except one). I'm only considering what seem like standard measures of &quot;good&quot; : (small) number of symbols, consistency in pronunciation, capacity to express large numbers of sounds, consistency in character combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advantages : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1-1 correspondence between &lt;strike&gt;morphemes&lt;/strike&gt;letters and &lt;strike&gt;phonemes&lt;/strike&gt;syllables, upto 100% consistent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Combinations of consonants and vowels enable learning only a small number of symbols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjuncts allow unlimited combinations of consonant sounds (theoretically ; some sound just awful)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disadvantages :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extremely difficult to typeset mechanically. This applies to pretty much any writing system other than Alphabetic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what I say makes any sense, then until the invention of the printing press, alphabetic systems should have had no great advantages and a disadvantage w.r.t pronunciation. Pictographic/Ideographic/Logographic would lose out on information precision, and syllabaries would lose out in terms of succinctness : each syllable has to be remembered separately. Abjads would lose out in pronunciation as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I overlooking/overemphasising something? Or is it odd that any writing systems other than Abugida and Alphabetic exist at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6775" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T16:54:55.790" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T18:30:52.950" Title="What are the disadvantages of Abugida writing systems?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4696" CreationDate="2014-12-17T12:45:58.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the benefits of lexical sets is that they make communication possible across dialects and IPA conventions without positing a single reference dialect which would also have to include an idealised speaker of that dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say, dialect X has pronunciation Y for vowel X, you may not know what you're talking about because of the way IPA is used as well as the great variation across dialects.The lexical sets also don't just correspond to individual sounds but rather to collections of words that have a particular sound which can generally be identified. The distribution of the vowels is also not uniform. So you cannot say, in dialect X, replace ɑː with æ but you can say that BATH and TRAP vowels have merged. Or you could say, that some speakers pronounce the i in the HAPPY lexical set as schwa without saying anything about the pronunciation of i in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these things are an issue with consonants. The IPA is consistent across all dialects, the variation is less and the distribution is more uniform. So you can say things like in context Z, consonant X is pronounced Y. (E.g. intervocalically, voiceless stops are pronounced as glottal stops). Having a lexical set here would only confuse matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that what you want is simply examples of consonants in English. And those, of course, are readily available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T12:45:58.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2014-12-17T18:06:44.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few disadvantages that people have to contend with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some languages (e.g. Hindi) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_languages#Schwa_deletion_in_Hindi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;schwa is treated inconsistently&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One needs to study not just letters for phonemes but the various forms it can take. Contrast these four forms of /r/: रस्ता  कर्ण  कृपा  प्रदेश  (the last word appears incorrectly for me on Chrome, but correctly on Firefox), or these three forms of /u/: उत्तर कुत्ता रुमाल.  These are particularly troublesome on computers, where programmers have to create a large look-up table for all possible combinations of phonemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indians readily borrow words from English, but most of their vowels can't be notated. This may have been ameliorated if there had been a concerted effort to add new symbols.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, these limitations are specific to indic languages. I have made no attempt to address other abugidas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/ctl/tests/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Testing Considerations For Mozilla Indic Script Support&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/ctl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Supporting Indic Scripts in Mozilla&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T18:06:44.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-17T18:23:31.590" Score="5" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading the King James Version of the Bible and am slowly getting used to the text-—English is my second language. I then wondered with what ease would I be able to understand the English of certain time periods, had I a time machine. I read some snippets from other historical texts and experienced the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shakespeare's plays (late 1500s):&lt;/strong&gt; I need to diligently read the text and especially focus on the word order and verb formations to understand the meaning of the text. I also need to Google a lot of words and phrases. Then, even after all my effort, I still struggle to comprehend most of the dialogue and the tone thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;King James' Bible (1611):&lt;/strong&gt; I find it quite a bit easier than Shakespeare, but I still need to diligently read the text and cross reference a lot of things with my Afrikaans Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress (1678):&lt;/strong&gt; I find it a lot easier to read than all of the above, although still slightly awkward. I sometimes mentally stutter when I come across a archaic verb formation (e.g. the -eth third person singular form) or archaic words from my passive vocabulary. I also have to consult a dictionary every now and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gulliver's travels (1726):&lt;/strong&gt; It almost &quot;reads like a book&quot;. The archaic verb formations are sparsely spread and easy to understand. (E.g. I barely noticed the following: &quot;And if any traveler hath a curiosity&quot;). I still find it handy to keep a dictionary nearby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On the Origin of Species (1859):&lt;/strong&gt; If someone gave me a book that is written in the exact same style and vocabulary as &lt;em&gt;The Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt;, and told me it was written yesterday, it would raise no suspicion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the above sample texts reasonable representations of their respective times? Or are some texts considered far more informal than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my observations somewhat reflect the language of the respective times, then why is there such a vast transformation between the language just prior to &lt;em&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt; and the language in &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's travels&lt;/em&gt;? Why does it seem like English grammar did not change so rapidly during the periods that followed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6781" LastEditorUserId="6781" LastEditDate="2014-12-17T20:17:13.817" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T20:17:13.817" Title="Why did English change so rapidly between the late 1600s and the early 1700s?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2014-12-17T18:30:52.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem that I see comes from viewing vowel marks as secondary, which in practice means that vowel marks are smaller and less visually distinct. If the language has a large vowel inventory this can be a problem. Another problem, which may be accidental and not inherent, is more complex rules for letter shape and positioning, as in the many ligatures of Devanagari or the multitude of positions for placing vowel signs, or the shape irregularities of Ge'ez script. If you were to invent a new abugida script, you could require complete contextual regularity of letter shapes, and positioning all vowels in a consistent position relative to the consonant. The resulting system would be pretty much ambiguous between &quot;alphabet&quot; and &quot;abugida&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-17T18:30:52.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9843" CreationDate="2014-12-18T07:45:16.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is due to one of the mayor disadventages of statistical machine translation systems as the one Google is using: In general nobody knows exactly based on which information a certain mistranslation was created on - so fixing is not a trivial thing. The algorithm just states: Based on hundreds of millions of lines of translated texts in my database A seems to be the most probable translation of B. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T07:45:16.437" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9832" CreationDate="2014-12-18T17:17:31.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most obvious reason why two languages sound similar would be if a large number of speakers were bilingual, which would result in a tendency to use the same phonetics in both. &#xA;I know nothing about whether or why basque and spanish sound the same but would expect that if the majority of Basque speakers are bilingual with Spanish, then Basque and the Spanish spoken in the Basque country would sound similar to a non-speaker of these tongues.&#xA;A good example of this is the English spoken across teh Indian subcontinent, even by native English speakers, in the use of dental consonants phonetically closer to those found in tongues such as Hindhi rather than those used in English English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6744" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T17:17:31.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9832" CreationDate="2014-12-18T19:04:47.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest comparing (monolingual) Spanish in the region, Basque in the same region, Basque in France, and (monolingual) French in that region. If there is an influence on pronunciation (either way), it may be most evident in phonetic details rather than phonemic shifts. I don't speak Spanish (or Basque), and I found, listening to the news in Vitoria-Gasteiz that I had to struggle to tell when they were speaking Spanish vs. Basque, so at the phonetic level they are fairly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-18T19:04:47.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9398" CreationDate="2014-12-19T00:03:10.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Bantu and Proto-Niger-Congo were tonal, and a number of daughter languages have become non-tonal (examples: Kutu, Pogolo, Mbunga, Zaramo, Swahili, in East Africa; most North Atlantic languages; the Gur language Koromfe; the Mande language Bis(s)a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T00:03:10.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6522" CreationDate="2014-12-19T00:14:50.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The largest number of levels (actual level tones, not contours) is 6, in the language Chori, documented in his 1976 U. Wisconsin dissertation &lt;em&gt;Aspects Of The Tonal Structure Of Chori&lt;/em&gt;. He proposes rules for deriving 3 of these tone levels from underlying tone sequences, but those rules are not surface allophonic rules (the conditioning tones are often not actually present), so the &quot;other&quot; 3 levels can't be dismissed as just the result of phonetic implementation. However, there are only 3 underlying tone levels associated with lexical items. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T00:14:50.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4113" CreationDate="2014-12-19T07:28:08.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of zero endings is quite useful in PIE studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for example, two words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nebhos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has no ending&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nepōt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has zero ending&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because the first one is of Neuter gender while the second one is Masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of ending is played by the longer vowel in final syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also a zero ending can be a case marker. For instance, in Nomenative Russian word папа &quot;father&quot; has ending -a, but in Vocative it has zero ending: пап. This is the only singular case where the word has no ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T07:28:08.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9807" CreationDate="2014-12-19T10:19:02.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are best served by taking a look at &lt;em&gt;Andrew Carnie&lt;/em&gt;'s &lt;strong&gt;Constituent Structure&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/constituent-structure-9780199583461?lang=en&amp;amp;cc=usvNumResPerPage=20vNumResPerPage=20vNumResPerPage=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link to OUP&lt;/a&gt;). The focus in his book is less on comparing tree diagrams across different theoretical frameworks, but rather on tracing the notion &quot;constituency&quot; within the generative framework associated with the work of Chomsky. Changes of the concept &quot;constituency&quot; have at times resulted in changes in tree diagramming. Carnie addresses other theories (such Lexical Functional Grammar, Dependency Grammar, categorial, functional, construction, and cognitive grammars) in chapter 9.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T10:19:02.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9843" CreationDate="2014-12-19T10:46:18.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One potential source of this kind of seemingly incomprehensible corpus-poisoning could be the use of translation memories from Computer-Aided Translation tools. Human translators not infrequently have to deal with badly formatted and segmented source texts, and in particular with texts where hard line breaks (etc.) have been used for layout purposes. This results in sentence fragments being handled by the program as separate translation units, while the target text may require a completely different word order. If the translator does not re-join the split sentence in some way (which may not even be possible) but merely inserts the translation in a target-language-appropriate order across the existing units, then the memory will end up containing garbage which applications may then attempt to re-use later (particularly as these fragments are often short - perhaps even single words - and thus more easily matched). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6792" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T10:46:18.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11190" CreationDate="2014-12-19T18:55:15.687" Score="3" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/43503/13883&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on English Language Learners and there they suggested that it might better fit here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a high level and difficult question, however I think it is an interesting question about linguistics and learning the English language (albeit in an abstract manner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If our species went extinct, would it be possible for an alien historian, perhaps a language specialist, interested in deciphering our texts to learn the English language purely by gathering and observing our texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6794" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T22:50:40.567" Title="Could the English language be learned purely by observing written texts?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2014-12-19T19:49:51.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One might think not since we haven't deciphered Minoan (and other languages). It depends on what you mean by &quot;text&quot;. If the alien knew nothing about life on Earth and if all that was available was a collection of letters (i.e. no pictures or anything else to give context to the string  or ) then, no. But if you know what a text is about, and if you have enough texts, it would be possible. Though you might have to contend with cognitive impediments by the alien, e.g. if they are stymied by the inconsistency of how &quot;dwelling&quot; is represented (house, maison, casa, дом, talo, بيت, guriga, nyumba,σπίτι), because they don't know that humans can speak more than one language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T19:49:51.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2014-12-19T19:52:39.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assyriologists, Egyptologists and other students of ancient languages in the 19th and 20th centuries have successfully deciphered lots of long extinct languages solely on the basis of written texts. So in principle it is possible. Having said that, successful decipherment has been mainly with languages that are either cognate with already known languages, or in the same script as known languages, or else they are attested in bilingual texts like the Rosetta Stone (where the same text appears both in a known language and an unknown language on the same document). Some ancient languages have defied successful decipherment (e.g. the language of the Phaestos disk or that of the Indus Valley), precisely because these conditions were not fulfilled. So perhaps extra-terrestrial visitors to our devastated planet might not succeed in cracking any of our languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T19:52:39.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2014-12-19T23:32:13.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although in general terms fdb's answer is excellent he's forgetting one absolutely crucial detail: the size of the available corpus of the language. For any sufficiently large non random code given some known context decipherment will always be possible. Now, assuming that the alien linguist is able to comprehend human life to any basic extend he should be able to decipher any related texts given he has a large enough number of English works (which in turn makes his knowledge of the context grow). And he should be capable of getting the necessary context from fellow alien archeologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean everything could be understood/translated? Not necessarily, words describing for example emotions or experiences that are uniquely human could never be truly understood by an alien per definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, realistically speaking he has to only decipher a couple of very basic concepts and next find a single dictionary and the rest would fall in place pretty quickly :) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3239" LastActivityDate="2014-12-19T23:32:13.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3303" CreationDate="2014-12-20T01:09:47.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's common for someone to insist on particular terminology that he considers clearer, especially when he has a point to prove. In fact, it's so common, it's become &lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Insistent_Terminology#Real_Life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a storytelling trope&lt;/a&gt;. I'll give one set of examples from my native language (English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation publishes a list of numerous &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English words that it encourages people not to use&lt;/a&gt; because it considers them loaded. For example, people say &quot;photoshopped&quot; to mean that a photo is doctored, but FSF encourages use of generic terms (such as &quot;manipulated&quot;) so as not to advertise a particular proprietary software product. For the same reason, it discourages &quot;PowerPoint&quot; and &quot;MP3 player&quot;. Other examples include use of &quot;piracy&quot; and &quot;theft&quot; to mean infringement, use of &quot;consumer&quot; to mean an individual, describing copyright as &quot;protection&quot;, describing a uniform-royalty license offer as &quot;reasonable and non-discriminatory&quot;, describing those Linux operating systems that use GNU C Library and GNU Core Utilities as anything other than &quot;GNU/Linux&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T01:09:47.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2014-12-20T05:42:46.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: ABSOLUTELY.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we have historical examples of humans doing this.  Hieroglyphs come in several varieties and are both context-dependent and inconsistent.  They are terrible to try to reverse engineer.  Nevertheless, with the help of the Rosetta stone, we were able to decipher it.  The Rosetta stone gave a tiny fraction of the 5,000 or so individual glyphs, but with that jumpstart, we eventually got a good idea about almost all of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an absurd amount of written data in modern languages.  Unlike your average &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stele&lt;/a&gt;, the English corpus today contains plenty of training books for kids.  E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dqHzU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;pinterest&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are a goldmine of object-to-concept mappings.  Once you have some nouns and verbs, you can then start to formulate a grammar just by doing educated guesses (That isn't a conjecture; it is a standard assignment given to college linguistics students; it's called &quot;morphological analysis&quot;.  More complicated versions include phonological rules and pronunciation (&quot;phonological analysis&quot;)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for pronunciation, we have Linguistics textbooks that explain articulation in depth.  This could be simulated.  So, any alien would be able to speak correctly too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this considers auditory data, which exists on tapes, records, . . . youtube . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5302" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T05:42:46.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9782" CreationDate="2014-12-20T10:42:00.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;/ɕ/ -- voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;air is directed toward the teeth by the tongue (sibilant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;palatalized postalveolar [ʃʲ] according to Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (alveolo-palatal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;part of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate (palatalized)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/x/ -- voiceless velar fricative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is the fricative equivalent of /k/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ç/ -- voiceless palatal fricative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is the fricative equivalent of a voiceless /j/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: /ç/ is a common allophone of /x/ in other languages (e.g. German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, what I suspect is happening is that in some dialects the tongue tip does not raise enough to the hard palate, but the body of the tongue is shifted toward either the hard palate or velum to compensate (i.e. differentiate it from a [ʃ] sound). This may be because the latter are easier to pronounce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T10:42:00.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2014-12-20T11:57:16.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classic science fiction story &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnilingual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Omnilingual&lt;/a&gt; from 1957 addresses exactly this question in reverse - it has archaeologists exploring the remains of an extinct Martian civilization of a similar scale to ours, with the initial assumption that deciphering the Martian writing will be impossible since there can be no &quot;Rosetta Stone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story basically argues that science can function as a universal Rosetta Stone. Its key scene is when one of the archaeologists realizes that she's looking at a Martian version of the periodic table of elements - recognizable through its structure, which is largely dictated by fundamental facts of nature, not culture or convention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives you the names of all elements, and if you're lucky also numbers. In volume alone, that is more content than the real Rosetta Stone had, though not as linguistically useful since it lacks any information about grammar. On the other hand, you might find interesting regularities in the words that correspond to properties of the elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, look at this bare bones table of elements in Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvtAG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Chinese table of elements&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know the table of elements, you'll quickly notice at least two useful things: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the characters for all gases (such as the rightmost column and the right half of the top row) share one major component (the technical term is &quot;radical&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the character for gold (8th from the right in the lowest of the three central rows) reoccurs as radical in almost all the names of elements that are metals (which is most of them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6799" LastEditorUserId="6799" LastEditDate="2014-12-20T12:24:06.870" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T12:24:06.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-20T13:00:23.993" Score="3" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asked to do some NLP tasks on a language which is agglutinative. I am finding these terms difficult to understand since my background is different. I am looking for some nice books that give a good introduction on these terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2014-12-23T16:14:00.557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T07:37:22.033" Title="Book suggestions for linguistics for Computer Science people" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9880" CreationDate="2014-12-20T19:30:22.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NLP content in this book needs updating, but there is a simple linguistics primer inside &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Foundations of Natural Language Processing&lt;/a&gt; by Hinrich Schütze and Chris Manning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T19:30:22.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9782" CreationDate="2014-12-20T19:30:45.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know for sure that the sound has changed from an earlier /ɕ/, or only that it corresponds to /ɕ/ in Mandarin? I ask because /ɕ/ in Mandarin is actually a merger of two older phonemes; it is derived from /x/ and /s/ in palatalizing environments. You might want to examine if this was a separate development of these sounds, rather than a development through /ɕ/ (which is also a possibility).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2014-12-21T17:21:03.890" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T17:21:03.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9782" CreationDate="2014-12-20T21:03:32.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[ɕ] and [x] are not very close in pronunciation, articulatorily or acoustically. [x] and [χ] are fairly similar, and [ʃ ɕ ç] and fairly similar. Sumelic mentions that [ɕ] derives from /x/ or /s/, which happened relatively recently, and explains the orthographic velars in the spelling of Peking, Chungking, and the dental in Sinkiang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T21:03:32.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-20T22:12:31.440" Score="1" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend told me :   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The syntax is different from semantics. Semantics are concerned with the meanings of single words, not the structure of the sentence&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that true ? If not, how can the structure of a sentence influence its semantics ? Could you please provide some exemples to illustrate all this ?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6800" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T23:42:10.000" Title="influence of the structure of a sentence on its semantics" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9884" CreationDate="2014-12-20T23:42:10.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of sentence structure affecting semantic interpretation is via word order: &quot;The cat bit the dog&quot; has a different interpretation (refers to a different real-world situation) than &quot;The dog bit the cat&quot;. Another example is that &quot;Sharp knives and nails&quot; is ambiguous, in identifying a subset of knives which are sharp, plus any nails, vs. identifying a subset of knives which are sharp plus a subset of nails which are sharp. However, &quot;nails and sharp knives&quot; only means a subset of knives which are sharp, plus any nails. Similarly &quot;He kicked me like a mule&quot; could mean either &quot;He kicked me like he would kick a mule&quot; or &quot;He kicked me like a mule would kick me&quot; (i.e. &quot;like a mule&quot; can refer to either the subject or object (syntactic) function).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you're facing is that semantics is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; just concerned with the meanings of individual words, so your friend is wrong on that point. Compositional semantics is the study of how interpretations are assigned to word combinations (clauses, sentences). But, semantics is not concerned with whether adjectives come before nouns of after; whether verbs go before objects or after; with whether you can say &quot;This violin is easy for John to play&quot; or &quot;*John is easy to play this violin&quot; (AFAIK all native English speakers reject the second). Those are the concerns of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple characterization of the difference is that syntax is about the grammatical system for combining words, and semantics is about assigning an interpretation to any utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-20T23:42:10.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9891" CreationDate="2014-12-21T07:37:56.793" Score="-1" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a striking similarity between the French word &lt;em&gt;chien&lt;/em&gt; meaning dog and Russian word щенок &quot;puppy&quot;, the both words pronounced exactly the same way except the deminutive suffix -ок in the Russian word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially I thought is was a borrowing from French to Russian. But it turned out not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French chien comes from PIE cu̯ōn &quot;dog&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian щенок comes from Proto-Slavic ščenę and is said to be related to Armenian skund, Latin recēns &quot;to start&quot;, Greek καινός &quot;new&quot;, Indian kániṣṭhas &quot;younger&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hints that possibly it is the same PIE root, with s-mobile variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are related, I also wonder, what semantic development is more likely: young-&gt;puppy-&gt;dog or dog-&gt;puppy-&gt;young. I think the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T22:35:20.030" Title="Was there s-mobile in the PIE root for dog?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9880" CreationDate="2014-12-21T07:56:08.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to understand basic linguistic terminology, you might consult The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to isolating languages with one morpheme per word, words in agglutinative languages have multiple morphemes per word. The challenge for NLP when working with agglutinative languages is detecting morpheme boundaries within words. Instead of a syntactic parser, a morphological parser becomes more crucial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6803" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T07:56:08.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-21T14:02:39.003" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some well known techniques in which singing, especially that from less-known languages, has been studied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in prosodic analysis of singing and e.g. song-structure (refrain, chorus, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T14:02:39.003" Title="Linguistic studies of singing: prosody, structure, etc" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3747" CreationDate="2014-12-21T16:58:00.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3755/21961&quot;&gt;@MarkD's answer&lt;/a&gt; is on the right track. I have noticed that in Shakespeare it is quite common for one character to address another as &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; who in turn addresses him as &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;. Particularly I have noticed it between masters and servants and men and women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, in the novel &amp;quot;The Man Who Ended War&amp;quot; (1912) has this exchange between an American journalist and a servant girl in London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; I was very much in­ter­ested in the story your mis­tress told me of the&#xA;falling shut­ter,&amp;quot; I said, slip­ping a half crown into her ready&#xA;fin­gers.&amp;quot; I should very much like to know if any part of the old shut­ter&#xA;is by any chance in ex­is­tence.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maid's eyes glis­tened, as she glanced sur­rep­ti­tiously at the coin in&#xA;her hand. &amp;quot; Wreck's down in t' wash'oose,&amp;quot; she said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; You're from the Coal-pits or the Mines,&amp;quot; I said, smil­ing as I heard&#xA;her di­alect. A dim flush showed in her sal­low cheek. &amp;quot; I'm fra about&#xA;there, sir. Hast ever been there ? There's none like it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; I've been there,&amp;quot; I an­swered, smil­ing again. &amp;quot; There's some fine men there.&amp;quot;&#xA;Her eyes lighted once more. &amp;quot; Hap­pen thou might like to see wreck ? Canst,&#xA;if thou wish.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She clearly does not see &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; as referring to someone of lower social standing since she is using it to address a man of higher class whom she sees as a source of tips. Perhaps using &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; is not seen as condescending by those who speak her dialect and as a result has not fallen into disuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in modern Russian the word for &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; is used much more widely than &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; is used in Shakespeare. But, it is used in an egalitarian way. Only a large age difference allows one person (the elder) to address another as &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; while himself being addressed as &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;. Other than that the choice of &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is dictated by the relationship between the speakers with both using the same word. If they are family members, fellow college students, or brothers in arms they both say &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot;. If they are professor and student or customer and clerk in a store or government official and citizen, they both say &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5681" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T07:07:44.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9887" CreationDate="2014-12-21T22:15:21.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for ‘dog’ is *ḱuon, hence Skt śvā. The word for ‘young’ is *ken, Skt kanyā etc. The two stems cannot be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-12-21T22:35:20.030" LastActivityDate="2014-12-21T22:35:20.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9893" CreationDate="2014-12-21T22:41:35.333" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of two slightly different concepts, both of which I would refer to as &lt;em&gt;synonymy&lt;/em&gt;. As I would like to distinguish the concepts in a text, I am looking for two distinct words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I will use the following two terms (and define them here, because I am not sure whether I am using the correct terminology here, either):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt; consists of any number of inflected forms. It is like a full package of inflected forms, appropriate for its part of speech. For example, the word &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; is like a package that contains the various inflected forms of that word, namely &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;buildings&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; is (in its written form) just a single piece of text; for example, &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; is one inflected form, &lt;em&gt;buildings&lt;/em&gt; is another.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for the sake of this explanation, let us consider &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;edifice&lt;/em&gt; as synonyms (disregarding any different nuances in their precise meanings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of the &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;edifice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of the &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;edifice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;buildings&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of the &lt;strong&gt;inflected form&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;edifices&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, (1) describes a slightly different concept of synonymity compared to (2) and (3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1) implies that each inflected form of &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; can be assumed to be synonymous with the equivalent inflected form of &lt;em&gt;edifice&lt;/em&gt;, if such a form exists (some words can be only used in singular or in plural, for example).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2) and (3) say explicitly that &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; can be replaced with &lt;em&gt;edifice&lt;/em&gt;, and that &lt;em&gt;buildings&lt;/em&gt; can be replaced with &lt;em&gt;edifices&lt;/em&gt;, respectively. However, they do not make any explicit statements about the synonymy relationship between the two &quot;word packages&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The different concepts could be paraphrased as &lt;em&gt;synonymy with respect to words&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;synonymy with respect to inflected forms&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;is there any more concise term?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5098" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T00:24:00.043" Title="Are there different Terms for &quot;Synonyms&quot; when distinguishing inflectable Words from particular inflected Forms?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9892" CreationDate="2014-12-22T00:24:00.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you call a &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt; is actually called a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lexeme&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, what you call &lt;strong&gt;inflected forms&lt;/strong&gt; are actually called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lemmas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The difference between the lexeme-to-lexeme synonymity and the lemma-to-lemma synonymity is actually the point of your question, but I am afraid your question cannot be answered, for the former and the latter are phenomena of different levels, it is like comparing whether 10 fingers are more important than 2 hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synonyms can be of different kinds, the ones of your (1) kind are semantic synonyms, it is the similarity of the lexical meaning of the two words that makes them synonyms. The ones of the (2) and (3) kinds are not only lexical, but also grammatical synonyms, they share not only the lexical meaning, but also the grammar form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T00:24:00.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-22T11:20:45.520" Score="9" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek poeter&lt;/a&gt; Ψάπφω/Ψάπφα beared an interesting name, probably not Greek. I have two questions, about the &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;last&lt;/strong&gt; letter of her name :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) what was the value of the initial Ψ ?&lt;/strong&gt; This letter was later written Σ but I read in a French edition(*) (my translation) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every ancient authors [...] wrote her name with [a Σ]. But when this&#xA;  name appears [in her own poems], it's always written &quot;Psappho&quot; [or&#xA;  maybe Psappha] . [...] However, this written form didn't transcribe a&#xA;  pronunciation beginning with 'ps'. Sappho herself never pronounced her&#xA;  name this way [since she used an old writting system, the 'Egean' one. In&#xA;  this writting system,] one of the signs looks like a right-angled&#xA;  trident and noted one of the consonants used in Asia Minor (a somehow&#xA;  very strong s). [The value of this letter was later misunderstood by&#xA;  the Greeks] who confused it with their psi. [... Same confusion&#xA;  occured in the name of Syrian, written Psyria].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other scholars agree with this analyse ? What's the so-called 'Egean' writing system ? &lt;strong&gt;(see my addendum, infra)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) In her Aeolian dialect, did her name end with -α or with -ω ?&lt;/strong&gt; I read in the same edition as above(*) (my translation) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Sappho's name appeared [in her own poems], it's always written &quot;Psappho&quot; or rather Psappha since the Aeolian dialect uses often the a vowel (a long one) where other dialects, and especially the Attic dialect, uses ē or ō.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other scholars agree with this analyse ? Are there other Aelion words ending in -ā where Attic has -ē or -ō ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Edith Mora (1966), Sappho, histoire d'un poète et traduction intégrale de son oeuvre, pages 25-26.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ADDENDUM&lt;/strong&gt; : thanks to Midas and to TKR, I may add a note. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/12278/illinoisclassica151991BROWN.pdf?sequence=2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwin L. Brown writes&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&quot;[...] the metrics of the Sapphic pentapody in which Alcaeus invokes Sappho by name tells absolutely against a psi-sound as the original initial in &quot;Sappho.&quot;. As Brown points out (same remark &lt;a href=&quot;http://retro.seals.ch/digbib/view?pid=mhl-001:1951:8::22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, page 7), since &quot;Ἰόπλοκ' ἁγνὰ μελλιχόμειδε Σαπφοῖ&quot; (a famous verse composed by Alcaeus) belongs to an Alcaic stanza (× ¯ ˘ ¯ × ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ), the metric shows that -δε Σα(πφοῖ) is to be read ˘ ¯, the last syllable being not taken in account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T19:51:55.487" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T19:51:55.487" Title="Two questions about Sappho's name" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3747" CreationDate="2014-12-22T16:04:07.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/151925/15299&quot;&gt;an answer here to this frequently-asked question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, lots of people kept using &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; and got into trouble for it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is one reason the Quakers emigrated to Pennsylvania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5668" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T16:04:07.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2529" CreationDate="2014-12-22T17:45:29.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked at the SO discussion (and admit that I can't compute the consequences of all of the code). Those guys even admit that hyphenation solutions can't handle quasi-novel data (such as names of Welsh origin). Linguists can contribute linguistic clarity to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I maintain that the SO answers do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; yield correct syllabification, since syllabification and hyphenation are not the same thing. For example, in the SO OP's question, s/he gives the example &lt;em&gt;in-vi-sib-le&lt;/em&gt;, where the penult is closed with /b/ and the final syllable is &quot;le&quot;, whatever that means. The standard understanding over the past almost 40 years is that this word is syllabified [ɪn.vɪ.zə.bl̩] or [ɪn.vɪ.zə&amp;lt;.&gt;b&amp;lt;.&gt;l̩], where &quot;&amp;lt;.&gt;b&amp;lt;.&gt;l̩&quot; is a clunky way of writing ambisyllabic &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major premise is that the procedure would map (spelled) words from text to ?transcribed strings with syllable boundaries, and a minor premise (which I think we should assume the OP had in mind) is that the procedure would do so just on the basis of the letters -- rather than e.g. calling up a hyphenated dictionary and inserting syllable boundaries where there are hyphens (a fairly obvious kludge). English syllabification is partly sensitive to stress, especially to get the correct intervocalic syllabification of consonants. Just based on spelling, you can't automatically compute the stress difference between &quot;latest&quot; and &quot;latex&quot;, or &quot;tigress&quot; and &quot;progress&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I argue that the answer is, &quot;no, it cannot be done&quot;, assuming a self-contained linguistic approach to the problem. (That is, without linking the procedure to an external phonetically-transcribed dictionary or similar object; and without hard-coding a long list of words where the algorithm fails). The primary reason why it would fail in principle is that syllabification isn't based on spelling. The secondary reason why it would fail is because it isn't even clear to linguists what the answer should be. For instance, in many dialects of American English, it's impossible to determine how many syllables there are in &lt;em&gt;towel, foul&lt;/em&gt; -- could be 1, could be two. There is much debate over how intervocalic consonants are to be syllabified (is the first syllable of &quot;hammer&quot; closed? does the second syllable have an onset consonant?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-22T17:45:29.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7146" CreationDate="2014-12-23T03:09:02.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it happens, there is a model of speech production -- the Convertor-Distributor Model (&lt;em&gt;Phonetica&lt;/em&gt; 57:128-38) -- advocated by Osamu Fujimura, which denies that there is ordering of elements in a syllable position such as &quot;onset&quot;. To handle clusters like [pr], the model has bigger inventory of &quot;segments&quot;, so [pr] would be a voiceless labial alveolar trill (assuming a trilled &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;). I don't agree with the model, but the point is that your proposal corresponds to something that exists in linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T03:09:02.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2014-12-23T06:55:40.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question of using calculus or a calculus-like approach has been on my mind for some time.  It's not calculus such that you'd use on a continuous data set, such as the set of real or imaginary numbers, like you'd find in a Real Analysis course, but rather as a philosophical concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's define: Calculus: An analysis of functions and how such functions change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underlying Assumption: There's an underlying function that can describe the mechanism of language change in the more general sense (versus language-specific).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example, given a phonological system in a particular semi-isolated linguistic community, the phonemes will change or shift with respect to time (this is the hypothesis, and by &quot;semi-isolated&quot; I mean that contact with other languages won't be a major factor to language-change).  For a graphic on this, see the entry on &quot;The Great Vowel Shift&quot; in English, by Princeton: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Great_Vowel_Shift.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Great_Vowel_Shift.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be the English-centric example to where a wider typological example would have to be substantiated as universal in all languages.  Supposing The Great Vowel Shift shows us the underlying mechanism or function, then if we're given the Vowel system of the English language in the 1400's, we could predict the dipthongization over the next 150 - 200 years and further shifts thereafter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is to discover some underlying phenomenon that appears linguistically universal whereby we can model linguistic change and through the model we can make a prediction as to what a language will 'look' and 'sound' like via extrapolation of such a model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent with providing my example is not necessarily to answer the question, but to add to the thought process that may help lead to an answer, or better, a linguistic calculus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6817" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T06:55:40.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9894" CreationDate="2014-12-23T09:38:51.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may answer the second of your two interesting questions. As a rule, Aeolic, Doric and some other Greek dialects retain original /ā/ where Ionic and Attic have shifted it to η. This is a famous characteristic of Ionic/Attic. But I cannot think of any examples where Attic ω stands for η in other dialects. There might be examples, but it is certainly not a regular correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware that the name (P)sappho has an accepted Greek etymology. In the absence of an etymology this all remains rather speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2014-12-23T09:59:08.740" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T09:59:08.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2014-12-23T17:16:54.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For calculus to be useful, you first have to have some kind of continuous numeric function. This not being the case with grammar, calculus won't be illuminating for the study of unbounded dependencies or association relations: grammar is based on simple &quot;does / doesn't&quot; logic. However, it is in principle applicable to the study of linguistic behavior, e.g formant values of pronounced vowels, or perhaps a sociolinguistic study of the &quot;Yeah-no&quot; construction. In the former case I would say that the phenomenon itself (vocal tract resonances and physical movements) are fundamentally continuous. In the latter case, even though sociolinguistic changes reduce to binary do / don't choices, the relevant system of relations is so complex as to be intractable, if treated binarily, so numeric functions are the only practical way to discuss many social phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-23T17:16:54.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6288" CreationDate="2014-12-24T17:08:02.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Secondary articulation&quot; refers to vowel-like properties that are superimposed on consonants with various &quot;primary&quot; articulations. So &quot;alveolar&quot; or &quot;bilabial&quot; are examples of primary (consonantal) articulations, and &quot;rounding&quot;, &quot;palatalization&quot;, &quot;pharyngealization&quot; are secondary articulations. The best-known example of secondary articulation is palatalization in Slavic, where most consonants have plain versus palatalized versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of languages, secondary articulations arise from assimilation to a neighboring vowel, for example in Russian, consonants are palatalized before front vowel suffixes such as the suffix for locative (prepositional) -&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; or abstract nouns -&lt;em&gt;izm&lt;/em&gt;; or, in Nupe, consonants are rounded before round vowels (also palatalized before front vowels). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that an assimilation is an effect of a preceding or following sound, which need not be &lt;em&gt;immediately&lt;/em&gt; preceding or following. But almost &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; phonological processes involve a preceding or following segment, and many are not assimilations (for instance, dissimilation, not to mention ornery arbitrary changes such as in Chukchi, &lt;em&gt;tʃ&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;). Unless a rule is context-free (for example, &lt;em&gt;g -&gt; ŋ&lt;/em&gt; everywhere), any rule involves a preceding or following segment, so there isn’t anything special about assimilations or secondary articulations in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a two-way division of phonological properties into &quot;quantity&quot; and &quot;quality&quot; (basically, everything except length), assimilation does involve quality, insofar as quantity is a structural property that doesn't assimilate. It is correct that secondary articulation is about a specific type of place of articulation. However, secondary articulation and assimilation are incommensurable (one is not a case of the other). Assimilation refers to the &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; of one sound becoming more similar to another in any sense, and secondary articulation is a very specific fact about the articulation of consonants (whether via a rule, or simply lexically). Accordingly, Russian [bratʲ] 'to take' has a consonant with a secondary articulation ([tʲ]], and there is no assimilation (the consonant is underlyingly palatalized, and contrasts with [t]: [brat] 'brother').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'coarticulation' is ambiguous between the specialized sense applied to [kp, gb] as in Igbo and other languages with labio-velar stop, where the term has been used at times to make it clear that the consonant in question is a single segment with two simultaneous articulations (not a cluster), and the more common contemporary usage deriving from phonetic theory, where the articulatory state of one segment perseveres or is anticipated, and overlaps that of another neighboring segment. An example of that is how the lips round in anticipation of a following rounded segment in English 'cool', 'school'. The process is continuous over time, as one can see looking at a spectrogram of 'school' and noting the downward-sloping line arising from increased labial constriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coarticulation is similar to assimilation, except that assimilation is a categorial phonological change from one sound to another along a featural dimension, whereas coarticulation is a continuous change, and it is specifically in terms of articulators whereas features are only loosely related to particular articulators. It is hypothesized that coarticulation relates to assimilation, in that coarticulation is a natural phonetic phenomenon, and is often phonologized into assimilatory rules. Many assimilations are due to acoustic overlap, which, if phonologized, can cash out as a change in articulator state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would not be correct to maintain that coarticulation is physically mandated (this is essentially the SPE position). So-called vowel nasalization in English is clearly coarticulatory, as Cohn 1990 clasically shows, and it is specific to English (French has a different pattern). There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; universally-mandated kinds of coarticulation, for example, in Turkish, there is lip protrusion during the production of consonants like /p,t,k/ when preceded and followed by the vowel [u] -- the lips do not suddenly un-round during the production of the /l/ in [pulun]. It is an open research question which instances of coarticulation are due to physical necessity, and which are part of the phonetics of the given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T17:08:02.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9904" CreationDate="2014-12-24T20:28:36.217" Score="4" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be harder to pronounce or would it hinder the flow of speech? Would it make it harder to recognize where a word stops and where the next starts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6824" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2014-12-24T20:32:04.873" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T00:51:30.723" Title="Are there drawbacks for a language where every word starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9903" CreationDate="2014-12-24T20:40:13.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although not for every word, the vast majority of words in Italian that start with a consonant end with a vowel, except loanwords like &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because during the passage from Latin to Italian, words ending with -um and -us lost their finals and replaced those with vowels, such as Rosam -&gt; Rosa or Lupum -&gt; Lupo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also Japanese works in a similar fashion, since the sounds are syllabic (CV and a CCV), except the only isolated consonant N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this would translate to a language where every word starts with a  consonant sound and ends with a vowel sound, although I don't think there would be a problem. If you're creating this language and you see that in large discourses it tends to crate problems, you could place some &quot;device&quot; to help diminish those consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T20:40:13.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9903" CreationDate="2014-12-24T21:22:22.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two general phonological tendencies that are related: the requirement for every syllable to begin with a consonant (e.g. Arabic), and the requirement for every syllable to end with a vowel (e.g. Maori). Taken together, these requirements give you languages which have just CV syllables (Senufo). However: your question was stated in terms of words, not syllables, and as such, that describes a language type that I don't think is known to exist, namely one that doesn't care about consonant clusters and vowel clusters, but requires &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; to begin with C and end with V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation wouldn't be a problem, since syllables at word edges would be a subset of syllables pronounced elsewhere. For the same reason, parsing words would not be a problem, and could be mildly easier (since any sequence C+C or V+V would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have a word break, thus the second segment would not be that of a word-initial morpheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T21:22:22.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9903" CreationDate="2014-12-24T21:46:01.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Irrespective of the words beginning with a C and ending with a V, most languages have different means to help the listener notice the word boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, some languages have only monosyllabic words, so a syllable = a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have vowel harmony, when the vowels inside a word have a common feature while the neighboring words are likely to have this feature different, so when the feature changes, a new word begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stress in all of its kinds is also a great helper, e.g. in Czech all the words are stressed on the first syllable, so a stressed syllable signals the beginning of a new word. In Russian, different syllables can be stressed, but the unstressed ones are reduced and pronounced more quietly, so the loudness of speech changes in a saw-like graph, peaks being the stressed vowels, and the valleys the word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-24T21:46:01.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-25T13:15:05.550" Score="3" ViewCount="1117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to verify if sentence is grammatically correct automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. for sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lemon yellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;verb (predicate) is missing  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or for sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it will rain, we will not go to the cinema tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;future after /if/ is not correct&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or for sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jim want to buy new car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/s/ for Present Simple, 3rd face, singular is missing; /a/ article is missing before a new car.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This I need to construct web-helper for English learners to highlight, at least some, obvious grammatical errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:08:07.927" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T01:08:07.927" Title="English grammar: is it possible to automatically verify correctness" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9908" CreationDate="2014-12-25T13:38:42.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid no, almost any sequence of words can be a correct sentence in English in a particular context, e.g. sentences like &quot;Buffalo buffalo buffalo...&quot;. Your first example is correct, if it is an imperative sentence which means &quot;Make your yellow color more lemon,&quot; a painter can say that to his apprentice. Your third example is correct, if it is a newspaper headline which allows the absence of articles, and 'Jim' is plural, for example it is the abbreviated name of an organization. Not to speak about different local or social varieties of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it can well be done for the EASL class use for the most standard meanings of such sentences where the grammar is prescriptive. Still, there's too much variety even here, and not only grammar, but also some semantic and context analysis is needed, and that makes it much harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T13:38:42.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-25T15:00:10.087" Score="0" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading an article where the authors mention something they call the expected frequency of a word in a corpus without explaining or giving a definition of what this means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article in question is A New Academic Vocabulary List by D. Gardner and M. Davies. You can find a version online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://courses.washington.edu/englhtml/engl563/PDFs/Applied%20Linguistics-2013-Gardner-applin_amt015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://courses.washington.edu/englhtml/engl563/PDFs/Applied%20Linguistics-2013-Gardner-applin_amt015.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way expected frequency is calculated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6825" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T19:51:35.103" Title="Expected Frequency" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9911" CreationDate="2014-12-25T18:19:48.803" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to be able to divide samples into some kind of rows and columns, like &quot;word class&quot; vs. &quot;register&quot;. You compute the percentage of examples in the data for each row and each column, and multiply. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.wmich.edu/s216/book/node113.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Read here&lt;/a&gt; for a quick summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T18:19:48.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9911" CreationDate="2014-12-25T19:51:35.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper you linked to describes how the researchers compiled their Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). They first identified a corpus of academic texts, which they extracted from a larger and more general Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). They then came up with various measurable criteria by which to select words (or rather lemmas, to be precise) from their Academic Corpus.  These criteria involve comparing word frequencies - how often a word appears in the Academic Corpus versus the general COCA.  The frequency of the word in COCA (or the non-academic part of it) is the &lt;em&gt;expected frequency&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the word &lt;em&gt;expected&lt;/em&gt; here is related to the notion of mathematical expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6816" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T19:51:35.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9903" CreationDate="2014-12-25T21:05:05.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Would it make it harder to recognize where a word stops and where the next starts?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the problem of segmentation of an utterance into morphemes, the difference between &quot;experts' exchange&quot; and &quot;expert sex change&quot;. Languages have a couple strategies to solve this, which apply whether or not a language has CV syllable structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One strategy is to adopt predictable stress patterns. In Toki Pona, for instance, the first syllable of a word is always stressed, and the modifier in the phrase ends up carrying the phrase's primary stress. For example the phrase &lt;em&gt;jan pona&lt;/em&gt;, which means &quot;friend&quot;, behaves as a compound noun (/ˌjanˈpona/ which may realize in running speech as [ˌjɐmˈb̥ɔnɐ]) with &lt;em&gt;pona&lt;/em&gt; &quot;good&quot; as its root. Stress in Spanish is not as completely predictable (and it's slightly less CV anyway), but the majority of words that end in a vowel are stressed on the penult (second to last) syllable. In a language with long vowels or geminate consonants, stress may fall a given number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;morae&lt;/a&gt;, or length units smaller than a syllable, from the end of the word, as in Latin and Hawaiian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is to relax the stress constraints, but bias the lexicon against roots that contain the same sounds as common inflections or particles. For example, if two phrases &lt;em&gt;supa yuza&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;su payuza&lt;/em&gt; invite confusion, people start rephrasing their utterances to avoid them. This is also fairly common and plausible, but it does result in occasional puns, as shown in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Mondegreen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mondegreen&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Pen_Island&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pen Island&lt;/a&gt;&quot; page on the literary analysis wiki All The Tropes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2014-12-26T00:51:30.723" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T00:51:30.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9908" CreationDate="2014-12-25T22:23:44.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are many existing services doing exactly what you are asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the one at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverso.net&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not affiliated with them, but I'm using it sometimes when I'm not sure about my wording as English is not my first language. Here's a screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w9uFG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Reverso speller&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As every piece of software, it can be confused by some awkward contexts and phraseologic constructs, but in general it works fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of how to write your own one, most likely, you will need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some word corpus to parse out individual words&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;probably, with flexibility to &lt;strong&gt;misspelt&lt;/strong&gt; words — Markov's chains would help you here;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and also flexible to some common errors (like &lt;em&gt;&quot;misspelt&quot;&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;&quot;misspelled&quot;&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify time, person, number, and declensions;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify their parts of speech (in English, the same word can act in different ways, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;a glass of &lt;strong&gt;water&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;to &lt;strong&gt;water&lt;/strong&gt; flowers&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build all possible &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/syntax-trees&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax-trees&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax-trees&lt;/a&gt; — with enough flexibility to &quot;understand&quot; an erroneously-built phrases;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;check verb and noun governance in VP, NP, and so on;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wrap it into an user interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are software libraries doing syntax trees available. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H2QkA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;linGO&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(image produced by &lt;a href=&quot;http://erg.delph-in.net/logon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the interface that provides online access to the LinGO English Resource Grammar&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that LinGO (and most of similar libraries I'm aware of) are not tolerable to errors. For example, LinGO fails to process &lt;em&gt;&quot;Jim want to buy new car&quot;&lt;/em&gt; , but it works well for a properly-built one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarizing all above, you are taking a very large task. Even for a single dialect of a single language (e.g., American English), it would require thousands of man-hours of work. Nevertheless, if you're still desperate to write it, I wish you the best luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2014-12-25T22:23:44.170" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-26T10:32:13.760" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have long been intrigued by the following fact: in at least certain Western European languages (e.g., standard English, Spanish, and, as far as I can tell, also standard German and French, at least) there is an ill-understood constraint that prevents ‘possessive determiners’ (“my”, “mi”, “mein”, “mon”…, plus ‘Saxon genitives’, in the case of English and German) from co-occurring with most - although not all - restrictive post-modifiers (e.g., relative clauses, participial clauses, PP’s, or non-trivial AP’s), cf. English (1) or Spanish (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) *(What became of) my umbrella that you borrowed? &#xA;(2) *¿(Qué fue de) mi paraguas que te llevaste prestado? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, no such restriction holds between ‘possessive determiners’ and other restrictive modifiers (typically: restrictive AP’s or NP’s - before or after the noun, depending on the language), cf. English (3) or Spanish (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) (Where is) my black and beige silk umbrella?”&#xA;(4) ¿(Dónde está) mi paraguas de seda negro y beis?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nor between modifiers, in general, and non-‘possessive’ ‘determiners’, cf. (5) or (6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) The/that black and beige silk umbrella that you borrowed (was rather expensive).&#xA;(6) El paraguas de seda negro y beis que te llevaste prestado (era bastante caro).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nor between modifiers, and ‘possessives’ that do not function as ‘determiners’, cf. (7) or (8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) (What became of) the/that black and beige silk umbrella of mine/my daughter’s that you borrowed?&#xA;(8) (¿Qué fue de)l/de aquel paraguas de seda negro y beis mío/de mi hija que te llevaste prestado?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although twenty years ago I myself, building upon Steven Abney’s influential theory of the structure of determiners and upon certain arguable constituent structure differences between pre- and post-modifiers, managed to develop and publish what seemed to be a first explanation of that mysterious restriction, I have always felt that that paper of mine was rather a ‘tour de force’, and I still suspect that my would-be 'explanation' could well be at least too parochial, or, worse, an artefact missing something much more basic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give you an idea, in essence my claim was that English (or German) ‘(Saxon) genitive’ and ‘possessive determiners’ (as well as Spanish or French ‘possessive determiners’, etc.) being ‘specifiers’ of some head D (= determiner) at the front of the ‘noun phrase’ could ‘c-command’ and so ‘take scope’ over restrictive pre-modifiers and ‘low’ post-nominal PP’s or clauses (= PP or CP complements of the noun) and so ‘license’ them, but not over post-modifiers, which, I argued, had to be attached ‘higher’, and to the DP itself, rather than the NP. With some technical tinkering, everything seemed to fit well enough, but, as I said, I have always felt as if I was missing something  much more basic like some high-level semantic constraint on the duplication of 'strong' identificational phrases within the same NP/DP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody here a) point me to relevant facts from other European or non-IE languages, and/or b) clarify the nature of that restriction and suggest reasons, synchronic or historical, why it should exist (in many, if not all, Indo-European languages, at least)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T10:32:13.760" Title="Why are genitives/possessives incompatible with restrictive post-modifiers, esp. relative clauses?" Tags="&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9807" CreationDate="2014-12-26T11:20:29.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the diagramming issue has long ceased to be an important topic of discussion or research (after all, you can easily 'translate' labelled brackets, trees, boxes, relational igloos, feature structures, relations, functions, etc. into each other and find ways to prove that they are mathematically equivalent), I think you could still benefit from reading at least the following (oldish) books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edith A. Moravcsik &amp;amp; Jessica Wirth, eds., 'Current Approaches to Syntax'(Syntax and Semantics volume 13), New York, Academic Press 1980. (With info on practically all approaches to syntax still alive ca. 1980)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Sells, 'Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories', Stanford, CSLI, 1985 (good for GB vs. LFG and GPSG)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stuart M. Shieber, 'An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar' (CSLI Lecture Notes, 4), Stanford, CSLI, 1986. (good for LFG, GPSG, HPSG)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giorgio Graffi, '200 Years of Syntax. A Critical Survey', Amsterdam &amp;amp; Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2001. (A generally informative overview of syntactic theory and analytical techniques, including diagramming, since the early 19th c. to the late 1990's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T11:20:29.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9908" CreationDate="2014-12-26T18:03:12.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You already have two answers. One says yes, and the other says&#xA;no. Both give you arguments to support their view. Maybe the problem&#xA;is with the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is, regarding English grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to verify if sentence is grammatically correct&#xA;    automatically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it might be possible, provided you give a definition of what&#xA;is a grammatically correct sentence in English, i.e. you give an&#xA;accurate English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may notice that I am turning your words around, in a somewhat&#xA;tautological way. My intent is to question your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can wonder whether something belongs to a set only if you are&#xA;first careful to define what that set is. Here, your set is defined by&#xA;&quot;English grammar&quot;, which is a bit short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there one prototype &quot;English grammar&quot; in platinum and iridium&#xA;alloy, as there is (or was) for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the meter&lt;/a&gt;, to serve as reference to&#xA;decide whether a sentence is English or not? (BTW, what is a sentence?&#xA;... but I will skip that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is obviously no. But my intent is to tell you that the&#xA;first problem is not with the science or technology for checking&#xA;whether a sentence is grammatically correct, but with defining what is&#xA;a grammatically correct sentence, if it is definable at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They assuming that you manage to agree on some definition, with a&#xA;group of at least two people, you need some formal way of defining a&#xA;grammatically correct sentence, so that grammaticality is well&#xA;defined. Many formalizations of natural language have been&#xA;proposed. One major difficulty is that the subtlety of the language,&#xA;and the great variety of permissible constructions is such that the&#xA;formalizations used can reach very high levels of complexity, such as&#xA;is permitted by Chomsky type 0 grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, at that level of sophistication of linguistic&#xA;description, you may hit limitations of what mathematics, or any&#xA;technology or device can do for you. You are in the realm of&#xA;recursively enumerable formalisms. That may mean that you may have a&#xA;definition that will allow you to recognize grammatical sentences, but&#xA;it will be impossible tho ascertain that a sentence is not grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion is that defining a procedure to check grammaticality&#xA;will hit two kinds of limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;linguistic limitations as grammaticality is an ill-defined concept&#xA;because a language has necessarily a fuzzy characterization;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;mathematical limitations because the mathematical procedures&#xA;required by the more sophisticated definitions of language have&#xA;intrinsic fundamental limitations that cannot be overcome.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you are willing to settle for something that works reasonably&#xA;well most of the time, the answer is yes, it can be done, as suggested&#xA;by other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T18:03:12.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-26T18:20:37.687" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some Americans from the mid-South will use indirect objects in their speech where standard English would use a prepositional phrase.  Is there a name for this phenomenon? Is it correlated with any other geographic or cultural groupings?  What criteria does standard English use to deny the use of an indirect object in these sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these sentences usually use transitive verbs, but it seems like for some verbs, a direct object is OK, but not an indirect object.  My hypothesis is that it is because these are stative (not action) verbs, but I am not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a pan to cook you some eggs. (Standard: Here is a pan for you to cook some eggs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have you a present.  (Standard:  I have a present for you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T18:40:21.603" Title="Is there a term for this use of an indirect object?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9908" CreationDate="2014-12-26T19:56:47.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me try to add another yes/no answer from a slightly different perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot identify the 'grammatical' correctness of any given sentence using the computational methods of today. Even if we leave aside the fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes a grammatical sentence and even if we ignore the fact that inter-rater agreement with human raters is rather low. Any algorithm available today will misidentify or miss far too many issues that would be immediately obvious to a trained native speaker or native-like editor. The key issue is that a human reader also understands the meaning and can gather the intentions of the writer. They also do not operate with a formal notion of grammar but a rather more holistic approach that will take into account genre, personal style, quotation, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, for relatively straightforward texts, it is possible to identify a relatively small subtext of common grammatical issues with some level of reliability. The most common of these include verbal agreement (boys walks), disambiguation of some homonyms (they're vs. there),  and common stylistic preferences (overuse of passive). All of these can be very helpful to many struggling writers as well as catch results of copy and paste errors. However, you cannot really speak about 'identifying correctness' in a general sense. Some of the tools available are MS Word grammar checker, After the Deadline, Reverso and they may even offer an API but constructing a usable algorithm like that from scratch would be very difficult (as in: if you have to ask the question, it's probably too difficult for you).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2014-12-26T19:56:47.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-26T23:05:04.893" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages apart from Japanese, Korean and Javanese encode systematically the relationships between speaker, hearer and referent by means of grammar markers and special sets of vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-22T06:24:21.113" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T02:22:21.827" Title="Which languages marks grammatically for social relationships?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-27T00:36:00.490" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the social relationship between speaker, listener and referent are grammatically realized in japanese and korean. I know there are different levels for the relation between speaker and listener, and between speaker and referent. &#xA;Yet I do not know if the relationship between listener and referent is expressed this way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5434" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T13:08:44.233" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:47:32.977" Title="Is the social relationship between listener and referent grammatically realized in japanese or korean?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-27T16:36:03.757" Score="2" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, as in German, Spanish, French, or Italian, non-lexicalized noun pre-modifiers cannot be 'right-branching' (i.e., they cannot carry either complements or modifiers of their own placed between the modifier's own head and the modified nominal). For example, noun phrases like &quot;*a full of people room&quot;, &quot;*a containing private documents briefcase&quot;, &quot;*a satisfied with his work teacher&quot;, &quot;*a similar to mine academic career&quot;, &quot;*a published in the UK book&quot;, &quot;*A born in 2005 Japanese girl&quot;, &quot;*a near Heathrow airport luxury hotel&quot;, etc. are all syntactically ill-formed (although perfectly transparent from a semantic point of view). That restriction can be shown to follow from Predication theory, Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis and other would-be high-level principles of Language, and at one stage I suspected it could be a sort of 'universal'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I now know that apparently parallel constructions are the rule in Mandarin, somebody told me once, unfortunately without offering details, that they are normal in Russian and other Eastern Indo-European languages, and, so, I suspect they may well exist in still other languages totally unfamiliar to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody here could supply me with examples of well-formed parallel examples from other languages and add careful glosses to help me understand them and check that their structures are really parallel, I would be very, very grateful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T17:47:39.500" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T07:53:04.577" Title="Which languages allow right-branching nominal pre-modifiers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9936" CreationDate="2014-12-27T17:42:53.307" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Japanese is (C)V(N) [plus that geminated stops across syllable boundaries thing], while Mandarin is (C)(G)(V)(G)(/n/ or /ŋ/) and Polynesian languages are just (C)V.  Is there a gradation in what is possible synchronically for a speaker of such languages to learn next, or diachronically for them to (d)evolve from/to?  Is there are a hierarchy that says Korean could be the ancestor of Japanese but not visa versa?  Is it easier for Japanese speakers to learn Korean phonology or Cantonese?  I'm thinking of something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CCV &amp;lt; CVGC &amp;lt; CVC &amp;lt; CVGN &amp;lt; CVG &amp;lt; CVN &amp;lt; CV &amp;lt; V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6831" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T22:08:22.030" Title="Is there a phonotactics hierarchy?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-27T20:59:36.967" Score="10" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a cheap, thorough but reasonably accessible introduction to formal semantics. There appear to be lots of options on the market. I assume there are plenty of experts in formal semantics / computational linguistics /AI / applied logicians who can give me their suggestions while noting the emphases of different textbooks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I didn't see a question like this posted, so I figured this would be worth asking and useful to the wider linguistics community.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6835" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:25:01.997" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T11:07:28.103" Title="Textbooks in Formal Semantics / Montague semantics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4145" CreationDate="2014-12-27T21:05:43.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Turkish&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-ler&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-lar&lt;/code&gt; are the plural suffixes. Both have the exact same meaning and function; the one whose voice is most fitting comes at the end of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;               |    Normal Form    |     Polite Form&#xA;-----------------------------------------------------&#xA;I              |    Ben            |     Biz&#xA;You (sig.)     |    Sen            |     Siz&#xA;He, She, It    |    O              |     Onlar⁽¹⁾&#xA;We             |    Biz            |     Bizler⁽²⁾&#xA;You (pul.)     |    Siz            |     Sizler⁽²⁾&#xA;They           |    Onlar⁽¹⁾       |     Onlar⁽¹⁾&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁽¹⁾ &lt;code&gt;Onlar&lt;/code&gt; is the plural form of &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;, made by adding the plural suffix &lt;code&gt;-lar&lt;/code&gt;. The auxiliary letter &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt; between is just for making it read easier; It would had been difficult to read if it was written as &lt;code&gt;olar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;⁽²⁾ These are made by simply adding the plural suffix &lt;code&gt;-ler&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6834" LastActivityDate="2014-12-27T21:05:43.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9956" CreationDate="2014-12-28T11:51:44.370" Score="9" ViewCount="4976" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last few years I have noticed both with colleagues and from online discussions a tendency for English language writing and speech to become more and more vulgar. That is, I see &lt;strong&gt;explicatives used in casual conversation&lt;/strong&gt;, where in other languages (or even English a decade ago) one would not curse. Specifically, it seems that any sentence in which an adjective could be added, has the adjective &quot;the fucking&quot; added, even in calm everyday speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as an example, I had intended to add a comment to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vector_quantization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Wikipedia Talk page&lt;/a&gt; for a technical subject, not some pop icon. I would expect that such a page would draw the more professional and learned audience. Some comments from that page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why the hell is there a picture of an aeroplane on this page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the hell is a Gaurav?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &quot;the hell&quot; added to both those sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off-line, I notice this phenomenon both from native English speakers (from Canada and from the US) and from ESL speaking colleagues from Hungary, Russia, Israel, and Argentina. Hardly a conversation goes by without the use of vulgarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online, I might explain the phenomenon by the fact that in years recent the Internet has become more accessible to lower classes, but this does not explain the use of vulgarities in a professional setting. Perhaps there is a popular English-language television show that uses this language? Perhaps when the phenomenon started we should have been more diligent in asking people to be polite, and having failed that now such language is considered acceptable? Perhaps the situation has always been such yet as I've become older I'm now more conscious of it? &lt;strong&gt;What might explain the prevalence of obscene language in the past decade?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/11417/354&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for a recent example here on the SE network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; As DietrichEpp observes in the comments, more informal communication is now recorded (i.e. written/online) than in the past (mostly verbal). I would like to address with this question the phenomenon of &lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt; profanity, especially the use of &quot;fucking&quot; as an adjective where no adjective is called for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T04:28:25.090" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T16:23:38.437" Title="Is there a reason behind the phenomenon of English becoming more vulgar with time?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-28T13:06:29.003" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many factors explaining a seemingly larger use of a language profanity, indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, we should remember that during thousands of years, only few people were literate, mostly monks and priests (however, check comments for some interesting exceptions). Hence, many of artifacts (obviously, written ones, not spoken) have been created by &lt;strong&gt;highly-educated, well-mannered, highly religious people&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, they did not use vulgar words. If they did, they would quickly lose social respect, which may mean losing their high social status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the term &lt;em&gt;Profanity&lt;/em&gt; has its origin in Latin &lt;em&gt;profanus&lt;/em&gt;, lit. &quot;before a temple&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion 1.&lt;/strong&gt; What we see in written artifacts, may not represent the entire variety of socio-cultural phenomenons existed by the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, languages evolve. In 17th century, some people would say it is rude to use &lt;em&gt;you/your&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;thou/thy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If the Lord would show thee but this one thing, -- that to use &quot;thee&quot; and &quot;thou&quot; to a particular person is proper language, and Scripture language; and that to say &quot;you,&quot; is improper, and arose from pride, and nourisheth pride, and so is of the world, and not of the Father; and thou should bow thy spirit to him in this one thing, thou little thinkest what a work it would make within thee, and how strongly the spirit of darkness would fight against thy subjection thereto.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- Isaac Penington, 1670.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the same phenomenon in modern Thai. Thai has different pronouns depending on relative social status of a speaker and a listener — &quot;formal&quot; and &quot;informal&quot; ones. However, in mass media the more and more people are using &quot;informal&quot; ones, despite using them even 30 years ago would certainly mean that a speaker admits their &quot;lower&quot; social status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Languages evolve. What was rude yesterday is not rude today and likely will be a language norm tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we know, &quot;everything was better in the past&quot;. :) Of course it is not true. Everyone has established as a person at a certain time. Whenever we see something unusual, we tend to give it a bad name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0241:card%3D961&quot;&gt;mis-attributed to&lt;/a&gt; Socrates (469–399 B.C.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion 3.&lt;/strong&gt; The same person would perceive those changes as &quot;the language gets worse&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="6842" LastEditDate="2014-12-28T21:38:39.627" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T21:38:39.627" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-28T15:45:14.357" Score="2" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading a paper that distinguishes between lexicosemantic patterns and lexicosyntactic patterns (&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.few.eur.nl/frasincar/papers/DeRiVE2011/derive2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page 4, paragraph 2&lt;/a&gt;). I am unfamiliar with these terms and am having trouble understanding what they mean from context/Google. Can someone explain the difference between the two with clear examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5465" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2014-12-28T15:53:27.380" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T03:28:15.020" Title="Lexicosemantic and lexicosyntactic?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-28T19:48:36.567" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When used extensively, profanities tend to get adopted into standard language, thereby losing their &quot;profane&quot; meaning. This does not just happen in English, there are similarities in other languages as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the german word &lt;code&gt;sehr&lt;/code&gt;, which has the same word stem as the english &lt;code&gt;sore&lt;/code&gt;, and originally meant &lt;code&gt;bloody&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;wounded&lt;/code&gt;. At some point in time, it got used more and more as an intensification; by now, it has lost its original meaning completely, and is used just like the english &lt;code&gt;very&lt;/code&gt;. Germans typically don't even know about the original meaning. Go figure what's going to happen to &lt;code&gt;bloody&lt;/code&gt; in Australia in a few centuries - unless the internet gets the various versions of english to converge before that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6839" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T19:48:36.567" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-28T19:48:40.280" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that you are looking at written communication. When you communicate with written language, any meaning usually transported by inflection, mimic and gesture is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see what this poster means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why the hell is there a picture of an aeroplane on this page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the user want an answer to this question? No, this is a rhetorical question. The user wants to express their opinion that this picture needs to go. In face-to-face communication the author would use inflection and facial expression to convey his disagreement. But this is impossible in written communication. So the user uses vulgarity to substitute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the user would write the same sentence without &quot;the hell&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is there a picture of an aeroplane on this page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He could be misunderstood as someone genuinely interested in this design choice who has not formed an opinion yet and wants a serious answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6840" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T19:48:40.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9927" CreationDate="2014-12-28T22:08:22.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to any question about &quot;can learn&quot; has to reduce to the conclusion that anybody can learn any language (as a child), and there really isn't a solid basis for theorizing about how adult language learning of one language might be facilitated by previously knowing another, apart from the obvious fact that Spanish speakers have an easier time learning Portuguese than English speakers do. Likewise, any language of a given &quot;type&quot; can eventually evolve into a language of another &quot;type&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be framed as synchronic entailments, for example, you might posit that any language which allows syllable-final obstruents will also allow syllable-final nasals. From that perspective, any such hierarhy can't be strictly ordered (or, the meaning needs to be clarified). The basic division is into properties of the onset, and properties of the coda. Some languages allow onsetless syllables and others don't; some languages allow complex onsets, and others don't. There is also a hierarchy of possible onset clusters, related to the notion of sonority, where CG is the most ubiquitous cluster type and stop clusters are the least common. Conditions on the onset are generally independent of conditions on codas (e,g, proto-Slavic is assumed to have substantial onset clustering and no closed syllables); however, from a statistical POV, a language with rich onset clustering usually allows coda consonants, and a language with level-sonority onset clusters usually allows codas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T22:08:22.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-28T22:57:23.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the explanation lies in changing cultural values over the past 50 years, especially starting with the late 60's. Certain words have become less socially acceptable (the N word or &quot;retard&quot; – the noun) and swear words have become more acceptable, reflecting ideological changes (that denigrating people based on physical handicap or race is improper; that there is nothing intrinsically bad with a word referring to feces or sex). This is paired with changes in law, so that censors no longer bleep &quot;damn&quot; (the famous 7 dirty words are largely avoided on broadcast TV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-28T22:57:23.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-29T01:24:16.643" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The increase in vulgarities is due to the increase in moral decay on this planet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed more &quot;hell variant&quot; phrases tossed about in the last 2 years than I've probably encountered in my whole life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a clear intent to de-sensitize people's ears to the word hell. I can remember when hell was only talked about by preachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matt 12:34: O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6844" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T01:24:16.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9933" CreationDate="2014-12-29T03:28:15.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lexicosyntactic patterns are strings of words paired with syntactic structures; they depend only on the syntactic categories of the component words, with no reference to their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexicosemantic patterns are strings of words paired with semantic categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a lexicosyntactic pattern might be something like &quot;[John: Noun + Subject] [kicked: Verb] [the: Determiner] [ball: Noun + Direct Object]&quot;, while a lexicosemantic pattern might be something like &quot;[John: Name] [kicked: Active Verb] [the: Definite] [ball: Toy]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6750" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T03:28:15.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T05:26:36.363" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to learn German for professional reasons to a relatively high level (say C1 on the standard European scale). At the same time (or within a couple of years, say), I would like to learn Yiddish for personal reasons. Presently, I'm a beginner in both languages, but I can read them decently. (That is, 20 minutes for a page of German and maybe 40 for a page of Yiddish, where the Hebrew-origin words really slow me down.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already have experience learning languages. In the past, I learned Spanish after learning French and Italian. The result was that nothing happened to my French, which I spoke very well, but I became unable to speak Italian, which I had been fluent in (perhaps B2), though much less than in French. The little Yiddish I've learned has likewise erased, for now, the limited ability I previously had to &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; German (as opposed to understanding it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) How difficult is this going to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) What can I do to make it easier? (For example, learn Yiddish with textbooks &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; German that draw attention to the differences?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Would there be a big advantage in delaying learning any more Yiddish until my German is good? (In that case, I'll certainly lose what I've acquired so far.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is an additional difficulty here besides the similarity of the languages. That's that I expect I'll have relatively few interactions with native speakers of Yiddish, and many with native speakers of German. I already talk to myself in Yiddish about a hundred times more often than to anyone else. My cat comes in second place after me, and at least he doesn't already speak English, so, if anything, Yiddish is more useful with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastEditorUserId="6849" LastEditDate="2014-12-29T07:34:30.493" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T07:34:30.493" Title="Learning German and Yiddish at the same time" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2014-12-31T06:53:43.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T05:45:18.383" Score="10" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phrases in French like &lt;em&gt;la photo que j'ai prise&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;que j'ai pris&lt;/em&gt;) have always struck me as unnatural. I've heard a lot of French people who fail to follow this rule when speaking spontaneously, and I've also heard a lot of hypercorrections in this area (e.g., &lt;em&gt;la photo que j'ai faite prendre&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;je me suis permise de..&lt;/em&gt;), not only from uneducated people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I ask French people whether they think this feature of the language is artificial, they all say that the standard rule is perfectly natural to them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder though if this is an example of a feature of the spoken language that is supported primarily by the fact that it's taught in school, and would die out if not for that. (I've thought the same thing about &lt;em&gt;fewer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; in English - with the difference that the French rule is unquestionably a rule in the written language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to make that question rigorous from a scientific standpoint? If so, what is the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here is a fact that is perhaps worth mentioning. Although you can almost always &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the gender distinction in writing, you can only rarely &lt;em&gt;hear&lt;/em&gt; it in the spoken language. That is, audible differences (such as that between &lt;em&gt;pris&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prise&lt;/em&gt;) is more of an exception. More typical would be &lt;em&gt;la chanson que j'ai entendue&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;que j'ai chantée&lt;/em&gt;, where there is no audible distinction between the feminine and masculine past participles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T17:23:15.697" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T07:11:17.483" Title="Is this natural: gender concord of direct objects with the past participle in French?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-29T06:52:53.873" Score="9" ViewCount="8599" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many place names in English are anglicizations/transliterations of their native names. Of those, many place names in Asia seem to have undergone a change over the past few decades: they've gone from a more anglicized name to a name more faithfully transliterating the original. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the city with Marathi name &lt;em&gt;मुंबई&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;mumbaī&quot;), formerly most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Bombay&lt;/em&gt;, is now most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Mumbai&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the city with Bengali name &lt;em&gt;কলকাতা&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;kôlkata&quot;), formerly most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Calcutta&lt;/em&gt;, is now most commonly (or also commonly) called &lt;em&gt;Kolkata&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the city with Mandarin name &lt;em&gt;北京&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;běijīng&quot;), formerly most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Peking&lt;/em&gt;, is now most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Beijing&lt;/em&gt;; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the country with Arabic name &lt;em&gt;عراق&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;ʿirāq&quot;), formerly most commonly called /ɑjˈɹæk/, is now most commonly called /iˈɹak/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why has the country with Khmer name &lt;em&gt;កម្ពុជា&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;gampuchea&quot;) gone in the opposite direction? Formerly most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Kampuchea&lt;/em&gt;, it's now most commonly called &lt;em&gt;Cambodia&lt;/em&gt;. What historical influences effected this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T12:20:04.263" Title="Why &quot;Kampuchea&quot; → &quot;Cambodia&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;khmer&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8392" CreationDate="2014-12-29T06:56:40.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Foreigners who say English is easy also often claim in the same breath that it &quot;has no grammar.&quot; What they mean by that is that each word has relatively few forms that need to be learned. Irregular plurals and irregular verb forms are fairly limited in number. If you compare this to French, where people need to learn numerous conjugated forms of verbs, you'll see the difference. Since the memory of learning conjugation tables is emblematic for many people of the negative experience they had in school learning some language they may never have made any progress with, they tend to associate that kind of learning with what they consider difficult languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is of course much more than that to grammar, and that kind of morphology is usually not the hardest part of learning a language competently. When it comes to deciding &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; verb form to use, I've observed that second-language speakers probably make more mistakes in English than they do in French (sorry for the unscientific answer). Phrasal verbs are an additional difficulty, and I believe learners need to be very advanced before they can really get a good feel for the meanings of the particles. (They might know &quot;butter&quot;, but would they &quot;butter&quot; their boss or &quot;butter him &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I would say I've seen more second-language speakers with near-perfect French than near-perfect English. This is perhaps less true as regards immigrants; I mainly have foreign-language speakers in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These days, there is one important way in which English may well be easier than practically any other language, for most nationalities anyway. That's that you've already learned hundreds of English words before you so much as set foot in a classroom. This is because in many countries advertising uses English words, there may be many borrowings from English in the language, and it tends to be present in people's visual environment for other reasons too (for example, if they go to the default webpage for a multinational company). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would hypothesize that Americans have a head start in Spanish for the same reason, making it easier to learn for them at the initial stage than Portuguese, for example. I'm not sure how much of this is the learning actually being easier as opposed to a kind of emotional response to seeing familiar words come up. I don't think there are many Americans who don't know that &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;los&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;las&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;the&quot; in Spanish, at least passively. How many know the corresponding words in Portuguese? If you are learning Portuguese, it won't take long to learn them, but it may feel good if you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T06:56:40.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2014-12-29T07:17:50.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me share with you an experience I had in learning Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was utterly incapable of pronouncing the (stressed) high central vowel transcribed &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; (such as in the name Gromyko). The best I could do was the English vowel in &lt;em&gt;hit&lt;/em&gt;. (If you're from New Zealand, this is the &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; thing to do, it turns out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a Russian friend to listen to me pronounce the sound, repeatedly, and try and get it right. He said I had it wrong. I'd try again and again, asking every time I saw him, and never get it. Eventually it seemed he was growing tired of me asking him the same question over and over, and having to give me the same answer every time. So I stopped bugging him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Months later, entirely by chance and for reasons unrelated to language learning, I picked up a book on linguistics and started reading it. One of the first chapters was on phonetics. When I learned about the vowel quadrilateral, I finally had a way of knowing, at least in theory, what I was supposed to be doing to pronounce this strange Russian vowel. I practiced a bit and noticed that what was coming out of my mouth sounded oddly reminiscent of what Russians said. Then I went back to my friend, said some words with the dreaded vowel in them, and got them all right the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T07:17:50.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9894" CreationDate="2014-12-29T08:04:59.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the idea of a strong S is possible or better said sḫ-. I find Browns paper on Sappho's name excellent! He suggests that the name is actually Hattian (or similar language), meaning &quot;numinous&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/12278/illinoisclassica151991BROWN.pdf?sequence=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/12278/illinoisclassica151991BROWN.pdf?sequence=2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T08:04:59.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9948" CreationDate="2014-12-29T14:45:53.007" Score="4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that formants represent the resonances of the vocal tract and that the frequency of a formant is determined by the shape and size of the vocal tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we speed up the speech waveform, that would be comparable to shortening the vocal tract. As I understand it,the sound itself would stay the same, let's say, an /a/ stays an /a/ but it would sound like it was spoken by a person with a shorter vocal tract, i.e. the frequency of the sound will increase as the higher frequencies are boosted due to the shorter resonance body. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following problem. We have the fricative /sh/. When we speed up the waveform, there is more energy in the higher formant frequencies of the sound and /sh/ is perceived as /s/. So, why is it the case that /a/ stays /a/ and /sh/ turns into /s/. Is this just an exception to the rule, or am I confusing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6858" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T15:52:41.037" Title="The effect of speeding up speech waveforms on formant frequencies" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9947" CreationDate="2014-12-29T15:52:41.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, if you compare the [ʃ] of an adult male with the [ʃ] of a 6-year-old child, you will see that the energy &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be lower for the adult male--i.e. the energy does shift a bit with vocal tract/head size. However, you are correct in observing that speeding up the waveform by too great a factor will result in a sound that is likely to be perceived as [s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to understanding why shifting the vowel formants and shifting the fricative noise energy seems to result in different perceptual effects lies in the fact that the noise source of the [ʃ] is created right towards the front of the mouth, while the voicing source for vowels is created way down at the other end of the vocal tract. So, voicing gets filtered through a lot more tract than the [ʃ] noise, which just gets filtered through the front of the mouth. Shifting the vowel formants upward is like shortening the overall tract (making the vowels sound like they are being produced by a smaller head). But shifting the fricative noise upward is shortening the part of the vocal tract that is in front of the point of articulation. This could be interpreted as maintaining the same vocal tract size but moving the point articulation forward (and perhaps unrounding the lips), which results in the perception of a more fronted (and unrounded) fricative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T15:52:41.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9942" CreationDate="2014-12-29T17:41:50.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name in English (as used in the media) started as Cambodia, and changed briefly during the 70's and 80's after the fall of the Lon Nol government. The name &quot;Kampuchea&quot; went the way of the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese governments of the country, and can be seen as making a break with those regimes. English usage reflects French usage, so current &quot;Kingdom of Cambodia&quot; = &quot;Royaume du Cambodge&quot;, &quot;State of Cambodia&quot; = &quot;État du Cambodge&quot;, &quot;People's Republic of Kampuchea&quot; = &quot;République populaire du Kâmpŭchéa&quot; and so on. General use in English (as opposed to official governmental use or use by news agencies) did not follow that political trend, and has remained &quot;Cambodia&quot; throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-29T17:41:50.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9961" CreationDate="2014-12-30T01:42:51.770" Score="1" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at a &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/trees/TypedDependency.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TypedDependency&lt;/a&gt; object like this: &lt;code&gt;root(ROOT-0, fired-4)&lt;/code&gt;, which is part of the StanfordNLP suite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I call the object's .dep() method I get &lt;code&gt;fired/VBD&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I call the object's .gov() method I get &lt;code&gt;ROOT&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These methods have cryptic names, which makes me think that maybe they refer to common linguistic concepts related to dependency parsing (that I don't know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do they mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5465" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T18:33:41.247" Title="What is the linguistic significance of dep and gov methods in Stanford NLP's Typed Dependency class?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-30T03:03:10.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guy Deutcher's book &quot;The Unfolding of Language&quot; offer a possible explanation which I will summarize here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two forces drive the evolution of languages: 1. the desire for greater expressive impact, and 2. efficiency/compactness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desire for efficiency is how &quot;I am going to...&quot; becomes &quot;I'm going to...&quot; and finally &quot;Ima...&quot;, and the quest for ever greater impact is how &quot;That was a big dog!&quot; becomes &quot;That was a huge dog!&quot; to &quot;That was a f*cking gigantic dog!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the more times you hear a particular phrase, the less emotional/evocative impact it carries, so the speaker is forced to employ words from other contexts to amp things back up and achieve the same effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6875" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T03:03:10.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2014-12-30T03:11:38.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do people use expletives?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They use them to intensify or add emotional commentary to the bare statement, or convey the speaker's attitude to the statement, as one of the other answers mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do expletives act as intensifiers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you're not supposed to use them - in polite company, at least. That is, they are taboo. Using a taboo word or phrase is a flag - an indication that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state - sufficiently annoyed or upset or thrilled to be driven to break the taboo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful things, intensifiers, particularly in written language where you can't convey attitude or intensity by tone or volume or physical action. And SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS has limited utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of other intensifiers - superlatives etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all intensifiers suffer from overuse. They start off powerful, then people who are drama queens, or just prone to exaggeration, use them for less and less intense experiences, and they lose power, and become more ordinary. That's why people keep needing to invent fresh new ones. Totes amazeballs, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's changed in contemporary culture, IMHO, is that the modern advertising industry is responsible for gross overuse of intensifiers, swamping us with completely inappropriate usages, and rapidly removing any power from newly created intensifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except expletives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most marketeers are too cowardly to use rude words, luckily, so they are the only intensifiers left with any power at all, that haven't been corrupted by corporate misuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, since they're the only ones left, they're also being overused, as the original question notes, so soon the remaining taboos will be gone, and we'll be left with nothing at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OMG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6876" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T03:11:38.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9971" CreationDate="2014-12-30T08:49:06.137" Score="3" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've studied syntax out of &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Analyzing_grammar.html?id=rSglHbBaNyAC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kroeger's &lt;em&gt;Analyzing Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so I'm familiar with the basic ideas of generative syntax, like trees, constituent structure, and syntactic categories. I later read a paper that analyzed Spanish datives using Lexical Functional Grammar, so I bought &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo3628461.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Falk's &lt;em&gt;Lexical Functional Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to understand LFG, but found there was a gap between the knowledge of syntax that Falk assumes and what I had. I'm looking for a work that summarizes the modern theory of syntax so I can fill in that gap&amp;mdash;something between Kroeger and Falk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the material I've found on Wikipedia or other obvious online sources has been good enough for my purposes; not only does Wikipedia not delve deep enough, it also often seems to assume the reader is familiar with the entire Chomsky oeuvre and explains one difficult concept in terms of another one, which is, in its own article, explained in terms of the first one. Wikipedia lacks depth, lacks examples, and lacks exercises; the first two, at least, are things I can't do without.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking for &quot;X-bar theory for dummies&quot;; I'm looking for a survey of modern syntax, including X-bar theory, aimed at upper-division undergraduates or first-year graduate students of linguistics. Falk says in his preface that &quot;it is assumed the reader is familiar with [...] contemporary derivational syntactic theory (Government/Binding theory and/or the Minimalist Program)&quot;; I'm not familiar with contemporary derivational syntactic theory, so I'm looking for a work by an expert which summarizes the theory in a readable, but technically precise, way, something like what a linguistics professor might assign to third- or fourth-year undergraduates for an advanced theory of syntax class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4909" LastEditorUserId="4909" LastEditDate="2014-12-31T23:38:17.767" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T00:56:33.650" Title="Looking for a good mid-level reference on modern syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9942" CreationDate="2014-12-30T12:10:28.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that at the core this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prescriptivism&lt;/a&gt; as applied to orthography, though more examples would be needed to derive a definitive conclusion. In your first three examples&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, these are official in some way or another: Kolkata and Mumbai were &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaming_of_cities_in_India&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;officially changed&lt;/a&gt; by India's government to better match local languages, while Beijing is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hanyu Pinyin&lt;/a&gt; romanization, the official romanization scheme according to the Chinese government, and also later by ISO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case is similar for Cambodia. In 1989, it's name &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_Kampuchea#Transition:_State_of_Cambodia_.281989.E2.80.931993.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;was officially changed&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;State of Cambodia&lt;/em&gt; from the previous &lt;em&gt;People's Republic of Kampuchea&lt;/em&gt;. This change was made while the Vietnamese-backed government was &lt;em&gt;still in power.&lt;/em&gt; Its unclear, but based on my brief readings, it seems the change was part of wider reforms which were aimed at restoring Cambodia to pre-Khmer Rouge times and improving international image. In 1993, the monarchy was restored, and along with it the official name previously used under the king, the &lt;em&gt;Kingdom of Cambodia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not automatically have to accept official declarations from countries speaking other languages (note that English is an official language of India however). However, unlike other languages, such as French and German, English has no comprehensive language academy such as the &lt;em&gt;Académie française&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung&lt;/em&gt;. This &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; give English a better chance at accepting the official declarations of countries speaking other languages. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: Beijing, French: Pékin&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, German: Peking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: Kolkata, French: Calcutta, German: Kalkutta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: Mumbai, French: Bombay&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, German: Mumbai&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there will always be exceptions. For example Ivory Coast requested they be referred to as Côte d'Ivoire with little success outside official diplomatic communication. Additionally, there's the Burma → Myanmar change, with partial acceptance since that government's legitimacy is questioned. As for Cambodia, it only ever used &quot;Kampuchea&quot; officially between 1975 and 1989.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iraq's a little different in the sense that there's no orthographic change here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000019509867&amp;amp;dateTexte=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;officially recommended&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="3226" LastEditDate="2014-12-30T12:20:04.263" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T12:20:04.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2014-12-30T17:08:14.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This restriction is not universal. Prenominal modifiers in Dutch and German can have complements of their own, although the pattern looks a bit different because these complements precede the head of the modifier (e.g., German &quot;seine [seit 1982 erwartete] Rückkehr&quot;, literally &quot;his since 1982 expected return&quot;). Even English allows complements to prenominal modifiers on occasion. I can't remember exactly where, but once I heard the phrase &quot;a Shakesperian  in magnitude power struggle&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if this restriction were universal, I don't see how it would follow from Antisymmetry. You would have to enact a ban on complex specifiers, which is something that would be clearly wrong in the general case. You could get closer to reality by enacting a ban on complex specifiers to specific heads (e.g., N), but at this point, there isn't any practical difference between adopting Antisymmetry or not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T17:08:14.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9954" CreationDate="2014-12-30T18:33:41.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This extract is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/dependencies_manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford typed dependencies manual&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the plain text format, a dependency is written as &lt;em&gt;abbreviated_relation_name&lt;/em&gt;(governor, dependent) where the governor and the dependent are words in the sentence to which a number indicating the position of the word in the sentence is appended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;dep&lt;/em&gt; is the dependent word, and &lt;em&gt;gov&lt;/em&gt; is the governor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T18:33:41.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9941" CreationDate="2014-12-30T23:12:36.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked a similar question to French stackexchange a while back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/8801/quels-participes-pass%C3%A9s-se-prononcent-diff%C3%A9remment-selon-le-genre&quot;&gt;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/8801/quels-participes-pass%C3%A9s-se-prononcent-diff%C3%A9remment-selon-le-genre&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the answers I got, I'd say your suspicion is correct -- this is a prescriptivism that educated native French speakers seem to think is natural. My experience is that it is rarely done in practice for those verbs such that a genuine difference in pronunciation exists. I imagine that when the difference was pronounced across all paradigms, it was made more frequently in spontaneous speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2014-12-30T23:12:36.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9941" CreationDate="2014-12-31T00:09:56.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin and in other ancient Indo-European languages the form created by adding *-to- to the weak stem is, in the case of transitive verbs, a perfect passive participle, but in the case of intransitive verbs a perfect active participle. The Romance constructions of past participle with “to be” and “to have” continue Late Latin *essere + intransitive p.p. and habere + transitive p.p.p. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) elle est allée = she is (in the state of having) gone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) je l’ai vue = I have her (as one who has been) seen (by me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the participle agreeing in gender with the subject in the former case and with the object in the latter case. At an idealised “proto-Romance” level one would imagine (a) being used with all intransitive verbs, and (b) with all transitive verbs, but there must have been a strong pressure in favour of (b), which eventually wins over the great majority of intransitive verbs as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T00:09:56.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9321" CreationDate="2014-12-31T00:11:45.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think any theory on the market can probably handle such sentences. The first part of the analysis is simple relativization, where a noun in a higher clause also has a role in a lower clause, for example &quot;I saw the man who drank the coffee&quot;, where &quot;the man&quot; is both the object of seeing and the subject of drinking. As a special case, you can arrange your choice of subject and object roles so that the higher subject is also the lower object, and the higher object is the lower subject (the David-hating-lizards example); or other permutations as you consider. The second part is that a would-be postnominal modifiers precede the noun subject to conditions worthy of separate discussion, so that &quot;The man who is singing&quot; becomes &quot;The singing man&quot;, and &quot;The man who is singing bawdy songs&quot; becomes &quot;The bawdy song singing man&quot;. You get &quot;David hates David-hating lizards relativization and preposing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third example doesn't work, which makes it interesting. To make it clearer, we should change the verbs, to wit: David loves lizards. Lizards bite blondes. Blondes hate David. You might think this would yield &quot;David loves David-hating blonde-biting lizards&quot;. The problem is that this doesn't preserve the semantics of the simpler parts, since in this merged version, lizards bite blondes and hate David, whereas we want something where it's the blondes who hate David. Lizards can bite David-hating blondes and David can love blonde-biting lizards, and that's the end of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a limit on relative clause reduction and preposing -- it can't be just any relative clause. Note that you can't say &lt;code&gt;*&quot;I know the bought a house man&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, meaning &quot;I know the man who bought a house&quot;. To be preposable, the clause has to be reducible to a compound (normatively, you should stick in hyphens, which reflect the different intonational structure of preposed clauses). Nouns have to be singular (&quot;book-buying child&quot; but not &lt;code&gt;*&quot;books-buying child&quot;&lt;/code&gt;) and the verb has to be a participial form, not a tense-inflected form (&quot;man-eating tiger&quot; or &quot;moth-eaten pants&quot; but not &lt;code&gt;*&quot;moth-ate pants&quot;&lt;/code&gt;). You can have one VP thing in the clause (&quot;slow-moving car&quot;, &quot;very slow-moving car&quot;; &quot;house-buying business&quot;, &quot;dilapidated house-buying business&quot;), but not a verb-plus particle and an object (&lt;code&gt;*&quot;answer up-looking student&quot;&lt;/code&gt; or anything like that) and not some string of postverbal modifiers (&lt;code&gt;*&quot;book to Sally giving student&quot;&lt;/code&gt; etc.). So, while you can merge three clauses into &quot;David loves lizards which bite blondes that hate David&quot;, you can't do that plus compounding of all of the clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rules for forming relative clauses are not all the same and are highly variable across languages. See Keenan &amp;amp; Comrie 1977 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/L222B/papers/KeenanComrie.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar&lt;/a&gt; for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T00:11:45.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-31T03:12:26.590" Score="2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page on the Wa Language&lt;/a&gt; and came across something strange in the consonant table: the consonants [mʰ], [nʰ], [ɲʰ], [ŋʰ], [rʰ], [jʰ], and [lʰ]. Not only are they aspirated nasals, trills, and approximants, which I have never seen before, but the IPA symbols represent voiced consonants, meaning they are both voiced and aspirated. It is very unlikely that they are meant to be breathy voiced, because there is a prenasalized breathy voiced series [ᵐbʱ] [ⁿdʱ] [ᶮɟʱ] [ᵑgʱ], as well as a breathy voiced fricative [vʱ], all of which have ʱ after them to clearly indicate that they are breathy voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact nature of these consonants? Are they voiced for the duration of the consonant's hold, voiceless for a brief period of time after the release, and then voiced again for the vowel? Are they simply meant to be voiceless aspirated like [m̥ʰ] or even just [m̥]? Or is the table even correct? No sources are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T06:32:52.497" Title="Voiced aspirated sonorants? (Not breathy voiced)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9965" CreationDate="2014-12-31T06:17:35.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact of there being &quot;prenasalized&quot; as well as voiced consonants with this property does not make it at all unlikely that the segments are breathy voiced. You would need to read the phonetic work on this language to know why the distinction is said to be one of breathy voicing -- the Wiki page points you to Watkins, Justin William. 2002. &lt;em&gt;The phonetics of Wa: experimental phonetics, phonology, orthography and sociolinguistics&lt;/em&gt;. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, which is the ultimate source for this table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T06:17:35.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9167" CreationDate="2014-12-31T14:31:12.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to consider an approach based on the &lt;strong&gt;Least Common Subsumer&lt;/strong&gt;, as described in this answer on Stack Overflow: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/18631789/4067134&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/a/18631789/4067134&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, you'll look for the first (if any) shared hypernym (ancestor) in the WordNet hierarchy, or similar resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking in terms of biological ancestry: siblings share a parent, cousins share a grandparent, an uncle and nephew share a common ancestor who is parent to one and grandparent to the other, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Overflow answer linked above provides pointers to WordNet-based implementations in Perl, Python, and Java.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6887" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2014-12-31T14:31:12.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9941" CreationDate="2014-12-31T19:41:30.850" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is normal that you find this rule&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;quot;unnatural&amp;quot;. It is entirely artificial and has no logic. It is considered artificial by most grammarians of the French language nowadays (including &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Grevisse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grevisse&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The agreement with the preceding past participle with &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;  was introduced into French in the 16th century (by &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Marot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clement Marot&lt;/a&gt;) a French Renaissance poet, who was deeply influenced by the Italian language that had a similar agreement with the preceding direct object. But the rule was not made compulsory until the 19th century and it has had its opponents ever since. And it is considered French school children's worst nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an &lt;a href=&quot;http://j-marc.muller.pagesperso-orange.fr/Marot.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; that sums it all up nicely and gives several references.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/enfan_0013-7545_1958_num_11_3_1405&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt; that deals more with the logics of this &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; and its psychological implications when teaching (French) children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say this rule is &amp;quot;supported primarily by the fact that it's taught in school, and would die out if not for that.&amp;quot; you are entirely right, and it is one of the features of French grammar that lots of people would like to do away with, it is the object of endless discussions&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson/document.php?id=3311&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionnaire de pédagogie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Buisson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferdinand Buisson&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;1901&lt;/strong&gt;) in which he proposed a reform of French spelling :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;La règle d'accord enseignée actuellement à propos du participe passé construit avec l'auxiliaire avoir a toujours été plus ou moins contestée par les écrivains et par les grammairiens. Peu à peu elle s'est compliquée de plus en plus ; les exceptions sont devenues de plus en plus nombreuses, suivant la forme du complément qui précède le participe, suivant que le même verbe est employé au sens propre ou au sens figuré, suivant que d'autres verbes accompagnent le participe. En outre, elle tombe en désuétude. Il paraît inutile de s'obstiner à maintenir artificiellement une règle qui n'est qu'une cause d'embarras dans l'enseignement, qui ne sert à rien pour le développement de l'intelligence et qui rend très difficile l'étude du français aux étrangers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule concerning the agreement of the past participle with &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; that is taught nowadays has been always more or less opposed by writers and grammarians. Various additions of exceptions have made it more complex over the years  [...] besides it is now becoming obsolete&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;. It seems useless to artificially persevere in maintaining a rule that is a cause of embarrassment to education, that does not help developing intelligence and makes the learning of French very difficult to foreigners. (Translation's mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the edit in your question, you can roughly say that one can hear the gender agreement when the past participle ends with a consonant&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;. And it is only since the 18th century (Modern French) that the final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; has become silent. Before that it was sounded and it can still be sounded for literary purposes (&lt;em&gt;eg&lt;/em&gt; in poetry, in a song) when necessity arises to have a rhyme or certain line length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accord_du_participe_pass%C3%A9_en_fran%C3%A7ais#Le_participe_pass.C3.A9_conjugu.C3.A9_avec_l.27auxiliaire_.C2.AB_avoir_.C2.BB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Accord du participe passé avec avoir&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://alafortunedumot.blogs.lavoixdunord.fr/tag/accord+du+participe+pass%C3%A9+avec+l%27auxiliaire+avoir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Just one&lt;/a&gt; found in a quick google search.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Let's not forget he was writing at the beginning of the 20th.   century at a time when not as many people could attend school as we do nowadays.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; See &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/8801/quels-participes-pass%C3%A9s-se-prononcent-diff%C3%A9remment-selon-le-genre/8807#8807&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on French Stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T07:11:17.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2014-12-31T23:10:50.607" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up, and hopefully an improvement, to my question on German and Yiddish that was migrated to German from Linguistics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/18895/learning-german-and-yiddish-at-the-same-time&quot;&gt;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/18895/learning-german-and-yiddish-at-the-same-time&lt;/a&gt; (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/577/why-was-this-migrated&quot;&gt;Why was this migrated?&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is known about the process of an adult learning two closely related second languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are some more specific aspects of this question I hope can be addressed, but please feel free to discuss the general question from a broad perspective. Where information on these questions is unavailable, make reasonable inferences from what is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do learning outcomes differ from those of adults studying unrelated languages? How does the extent of interference between the two languages compare, for instance, with interference caused by one's first language in a more typical language-learning situation?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can it be expected that there is a significant advantage to learning the two languages sequentially rather than simultaneously? If so, how big is the advantage? (I know it's hard to quantify these things, but for example, would the advantage be significant enough to make it worthwhile for a typical learner to delay learning one of the languages?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More generally, what strategies specific to this situation have proved, or would likely prove, useful for learners?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T01:30:11.860" Title="Learning two closely related languages" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-01-03T19:15:46.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9958" CreationDate="2015-01-01T00:56:33.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Radford's &lt;em&gt;Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction&lt;/em&gt; was the textbook in my first-year graduate student syntax seminar. As the title implies, it doesn't touch on anything outside Minimalism, but you might still find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T00:56:33.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3429" CreationDate="2015-01-01T02:19:16.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about the word &lt;em&gt;Lahmacun&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahmacun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahmacun&lt;/a&gt; As far as I can tell, the word most likely went from Arabic to Turkish to Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first encountered this dish in Istanbul. Later I ordered some in an Armenian restaurant in the West, and the waiter was loath to admit that the word might be Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6849" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T02:19:16.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9979" CreationDate="2015-01-01T05:52:44.130" Score="3" ViewCount="1586" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really like apples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't really like apples. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sentences #1, 'really' acts as an intensifier. Using &quot;teacher talk&quot;, I would say that 'really' &lt;em&gt;softens&lt;/em&gt; the sentence, but I can't think of a technical term for it. What would that be? Is it simply &quot;qualifier&quot;? Is there another word for the opposite of &quot;intensifier&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6897" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-01-01T13:16:19.953" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T07:54:06.527" Title="Opposite of &quot;intensifier&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-01T09:49:05.983" Score="5" ViewCount="7331" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the modern linguistic school of thought, are Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek related? Hebrew is classified as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afroasiatic-&gt;Semitic&lt;/a&gt;, while Greek is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European-&gt;Hellenic&lt;/a&gt;. However, in Jewish tradition, they are considered related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Sefer Torah&lt;/em&gt; (special scroll with the 5 Books of Moses) is allowed to be written in Greek, due to being able to translate it perfectly. (See answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/18819/translation-to-greek&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/48542/was-a-sefer-torah-ever-actually-written-in-greek&quot;&gt;my question here&lt;/a&gt; about if it was ever done.) However, this Greek that was mentioned is an extinct language (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah,_Tefillin,_Mezuzah_and_the_Torah_Scroll.1.19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per Maimonides&lt;/a&gt;, mentioned in the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Talmud occasionally makes references to Greek words in interpreting Biblical verses as well. I don't have specific examples right now, but i know they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this view shared by modern linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8747/is-classical-hebrew-an-indo-european-language&quot;&gt;Is Classical Hebrew an Indo-European language?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/89/can-modern-hebrew-be-considered-an-indo-european-language&quot;&gt;Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6899" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T13:09:08.950" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T23:17:57.907" Title="Linguistic relationship between Hebrew and Greek" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9976" CreationDate="2015-01-01T11:58:44.523" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are using &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt; in two different senses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguists refer to languages being related, they almost always mean &quot;genetically related&quot; - stemming ultimately from the same linguistic source. Most linguists today do not regard Hebrew and Greek as genetically related, but there is a respectable minority who believe that we can trace relationship further back than Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European to a superphylum, such as Nostratic, or Eurasiatic, depending on the particular theory. In those linguists' conception, Hebrew and Greek are related, but very distantly, in the way that a horse and a fly are very distantly related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever kind of relationship the Jewish tradition talks about it is nothing like the linguistic conception of genetic relationship. It sounds from your account that it is something to do with suitability for use in particular contexts. Such a concept is purely  a product of thinking about languages and not about their innate or historical properties, whereas the idea genetic relationship is predicated on there being an objective historical relationship, that of common descent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2015-01-01T15:29:48.307" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T15:29:48.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9321" CreationDate="2015-01-01T13:21:56.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just answering your headline question, in linguistics we usually talk about three basic kinds of subordinate clause (what you've called a 'nested sentence'): relative clauses, adverbial clauses and complement clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Relative clauses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are clauses (i.e. sentence-like constructions) that modify a noun. The first example in the question 'David hates the lizards who hate David' contains the relative clause '...who hate David', which modifies the noun 'lizards'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adverbial clauses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These modify another clause and have an adverb-like effect, for example: 'He went to bed because he was tired' where '...because he was tired' is the adverbial clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Complement clauses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complement clauses are clauses that stand as subject or object in another clause, for example: 'I thought that you were going', wherein '...that you were going' is the complement clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SIL linguistics glossary has more detail on each of these at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsARelativeClause.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relative clause&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverbial_clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;adverbial clause&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsAComplementClause.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;complement clause&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subordinate clauses are a large and complex area of linguistics and vary greatly from one language to another so there are no universal rules. The above is just a really basic answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T13:21:56.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9974" CreationDate="2015-01-01T19:32:27.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An approximately opposite term to &lt;em&gt;intensifier&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;downtoner&lt;/em&gt; (adverbs like &lt;em&gt;barely, hardly, fairly, relatively,&lt;/em&gt; etc. are sometimes categorized as such, e.g. by Quirk et al. &lt;em&gt;A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, Longman 1985, pp. 445ff), but I do not think you need to look for the opposite of &quot;intensifier&quot; if what you are trying to do is label the semantic function of &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; in your example 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between &lt;em&gt;I like apples&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I really like apples&lt;/em&gt; is, indeed, one of 'strength' or 'emphasis', and saying that in that context &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; is an 'intensifier' or an 'emphasizer' (as Quirk et al., op. cit., p. 447, prefer to call it) is appropriate, I suppose, to the extent such functional-semantic labels can be defined at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what matters to the present issue is that speakers would normally never use that adverb unless they had a reason to 'strengthen' their statement, and the obvious one is that a previous statement of theirs to the same effect, but without the adverb (i.e., &lt;em&gt;I like apples&lt;/em&gt;), has not, in their view, been strong enough.(Or, if the sentence is uttered out of the blue, that some contextual factor has induced the addressee to believe that the speaker does not like apples, or not enough). Hence, &lt;em&gt;I really like apples&lt;/em&gt; can be expected to occur mostly as a 'corrective' statement (the correction consisting in strengthening a previous statement not considered effective enough or in neutralizing the contextual factors that may have led the addressee to the wrong belief that the contrary is the case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correspondingly, whereas &lt;em&gt;I don´t like apples&lt;/em&gt; is a remark you might also make out of the blue, &lt;em&gt;I don´t really like apples&lt;/em&gt; is not likely to occur except to 'correct' a previous statement to the contrary (or, again, neutralize some contextual factor inclining the addressee to believe that the speaker, in this case, likes apples or likes them especially). Hence, the function of &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; is basically the same as above: 'intensification' and 'correction', although, in this case, the lion's share of the correction falls to negation itself, because the crucial difference between the positive and the negative example is that, in &lt;em&gt;I don´t really like apples&lt;/em&gt;, the correction is not a matter of strengthening an earlier weak statement, nor one of 'softening' a strong one to make it more polite; it is a matter of &lt;strong&gt;cancelling&lt;/strong&gt; an earlier statement without too much embarrassment. What &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; does in that context is help negation deny, without making the speaker violate the Gricean principle of Quality in a flagrant way, a previous false statement of his to the contrary (i.e., an unmarked &lt;em&gt;I like apples&lt;/em&gt;). Your intuition that it has a 'softening' effect is probably right, but can be explained by the fact that negating an 'intensified' statement is not as violent a self-correction as negating a non-intensified one, since it is compatible with an interpretation in which only the intensification is removed, while the basic propositional content is preserved (i.e., imagine that what the speaker has in mind is &lt;em&gt;I said earlier that I liked apples - or something has led the hearer to believe that I do - but I did not mean that I particularly like them, although I do not plainly dislike them either, so it is not that I don´t like them, either, so I did not properly lie earlier&lt;/em&gt;. That would avoid the embarrassment of flatly admitting that his earlier statement was not true).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, in my view, you need not look for an opposite term to 'intensifier' to account for the function of &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; in 2. By itself, &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; probably has the same function in both examples, that of an 'intensifier'. It is only when it is under the scope of negation that it may acquire a 'softening' role, but only in the sense, and for the reasons, already explained. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-09T07:54:06.527" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T07:54:06.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9389" CreationDate="2015-01-01T21:01:50.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to first define what a &quot;part of sentence&quot; is. Your question seems to take part-of-sentence to have to do with combining individual words into constituents, but then you also indicate that part-of-sentence is in part defined by functional role. So an NP would be a part-of-sentence, and a subject, or an agent, or a topic, would be a part-of-sentence. Mixing together all of these notions will naturally lead to incoherence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constituent properties have a decent chance for existential universality (that is, there are some that are universal), such as &quot;NP&quot;, &quot;Sentence&quot;. However, not every theory uses the same labeling (so N&quot; is distinct from NP, and some branches of Minimalism don't bother with labeling which they consider to be epiphenomenal). So you would first have to specify what theory of constituency you assume, if you care about the constituency version of part-of-sentence. (And I suspect that you don't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subset of semantic relations that would appear to be parts-of-sentence are probably universal, in that every language has the means of distinguishing such roles (i.e. there are no languages which are incapable of expressing the fact that X is an agent vs. X is a theme; all languages can express the conjunction of two referents). Languages differ wildly in how that distinction is encoded, e.g. by affixation or some kind, by word order, by differential government of agreement, by concatenation with distinct function-marking words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about grammatical relationship (like subject, direct object) can only be answered in the context of a theory of grammatical relationships. Ergativity is an infamous case of that problem, since one theory might take the surface pattern of affixation or word order to be the primary diagnostic while another would say that an ergative language is nothing more than one where passive is obligatory. And there are theories where relations like &quot;subject&quot;, &quot;object&quot; aren't required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-01T21:01:50.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2015-01-02T07:22:05.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native Korean speaker, the issue of homophones in our vocabulary does exist. However, as several people mentioned here, there are far more letter blocks and syllables that are pronounceable and can be created in Korean using Hangul, as opposed to Japanese whose pronunciation itself is somewhat more limited, so to speak, than Korean due to that there are only 5 vowels and each kana representing one syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, for example, しょう　and しょ are two different on-readings of a word and a part of some words containing that sound and, therefore, have different kanji representing them. But they can sound almost identical to someone who's not proficient in Japanese and is not used to the context from which a Japanese person would naturally understand the meaning of the word being mentioned.&#xA;Another reason why we are successful with our exclusive usage of our phonetic alphabet while only using Hanja in school curriculum and in media solely for the purpose of clarifying any potential ambiguity or identifying a term being emphasized, is the use of spacing in sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kanji is important in Japanese in terms of identifying 'blocks of meanings' in a sentence because it doesn't use spacing. Sure, Japanese can entirely be written in its phonetic script. However, it will be cumbersome to look at such Kana-only sentences and identify different parts of the sentence from a long series of meaningless(individually) scripts in order to understand it. That is not the case in Korean where every major part of a sentence is grouped with spaces between each of them. Even so, Koreans still need to have a working knowledge of at least a few hundred Hanja's as well as their readings-we only have 音　reading just like the Chinese do- and their meanings, because 70% of our vocabulary is built based on Hanja and consist of adopted words from China and a lot of words from Japan which convey modern concepts and ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Korea seems to be doing fine going on without mixture of Hanja and Hangul in printed materials, a problem is manifesting itself in which significant number of young Koreans often make mistakes properly spelling some homophones and are negatively affected by a wave of English loan words taking place of existing Korean vocabulary. This seems to me a good enough reason to revive the extensive Hanja education and usage in printed materials and to require Hanja proficiency in all levels of society. I strongly believe Korea needs to readopt Hanja at a comprehensive level in order to resolve the crisis of Korean language in the 21st century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in the 70s and 80s when Korean newspapers heavily used Hanja except for native Korean words and other grammatical elements like particles, it was possible to 'speed-read' an article and comprehend the content under time constraint, for example, when they had to get to work in the morning just by skimming through the keywords printed in Hanja. For the same reason, Korean and Japanese people could, to a certain extent, understand news articles from each other's country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6907" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-01-02T10:22:27.350" LastActivityDate="2015-01-02T10:22:27.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9992" CreationDate="2015-01-02T17:52:58.063" Score="4" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;More generally, what factors determine which phoneme a non-phonemic foreign sound gets rounded to in a specific language when there are multiple possibilities available? Is the choice always consistent within a language or even per speaker? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I suspect that Hebrew roundings of French vowel sounds aren't always consistent: I've heard /y/ rounded to both /i/ (e.g. /brisel/ Bruxelles and for some speakers /ti/ tu) and /u/ (e.g. /fondu/ fondue and for other speakers /tu/ tu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T05:01:45.977" Title="Why do French/German speakers round [ð] to /z/ while Italian/Hebrew speakers round it to /d/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9984" CreationDate="2015-01-02T19:56:30.217" Score="3" ViewCount="408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know why there is a character that is common to both the Koreans and the Vietnamese? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other examples of these kind of similarity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6909" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:22:37.977" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T06:10:35.843" Title="Why does gang-nam and viet-nam both contain nam meaning south when one is in Korean the other Vietnamese?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9983" CreationDate="2015-01-02T20:08:51.863" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nán (南) is &quot;south&quot; in Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: the Middle Chinese form assumed by Sagert &amp;amp; Baxter is &lt;em&gt;nom&lt;/em&gt;. The reconstructions from their book are available &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/BaxterSagartOCbyMandarinMC2014-09-20.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:36:05.103" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T01:36:05.103" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9993" CreationDate="2015-01-02T22:51:02.803" Score="0" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the root of the Armenian word &lt;strong&gt;թագավոր&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;t'agavor&lt;/strong&gt;) and what is it's relation to Greek &lt;strong&gt;ἀγαυός&lt;/strong&gt; 'illustrious, nobble' and the Phrygian honorific epithet (AKENAN)-&lt;strong&gt;ΟΓΑϝΟΣ&lt;/strong&gt; (ogawos)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am reading that the root of t'agavor is a loan from Pahlavi tāgvar 'crown bearer'. Is that true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2015-01-02T23:05:16.603" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T10:23:33.760" Title="The Armenian word for &quot;King&quot; and it's relation to Greek ἀγαυός and Phrygian -ΟΓΑϝΟΣ" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;phrygian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-03T00:16:41.397" Score="6" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Lebanon is an Arabic-speaking country. However, many parents insist on speaking to their children exclusively in English or French and refuse or severely limit the use of Arabic. Is there a linguistic term for such a phenomenon? Does this phenomenon occur in other countries or societies? Is it detrimental to language acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6910" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T23:44:45.617" Title="What is the linguistic term for an environment where parents teach a second language to their children in lieu of the parents' native language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9986" CreationDate="2015-01-03T00:40:39.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;diglossia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is a a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bilingualism&lt;/a&gt; in a society in which one of the languages has high prestige, and another of the languages has low prestige. There were and are lots of societies where that occurs, many of them are mentioned in the articles I gave the links to above. For example, in the 18th - early 19th century Russia French was a high prestige language while Russian a low prestige one, the aristocracy very often had French as L1, for Pushkin, the gratest Russian poet, French was L1.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T00:40:39.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9989" CreationDate="2015-01-03T01:07:14.200" Score="9" ViewCount="2406" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my experience, many languages with absolutely different alphabets colloquially use the same common punctuation marks, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question mark (?), for inquiring/interrogatives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclamation mark (!), for excitement or emphasis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;period (.), for declaration &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, asking a question in a couple different languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's your name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Как тебя зовут?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ما اسمك؟&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;您貴姓大名？ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or exclaiming something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cheers!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;За здоровье!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Στην υγειά σου!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;乾杯!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How have these stayed in common usage throughout the evolution of languages and their alphabets? Were they standardized at some point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6912" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:12:03.697" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T01:12:03.697" Title="Why do languages with such different alphabets use the same common punctuation marks?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2015-01-03T01:33:34.653" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;They were standardized at some point, in the 19th-20th centuries, but many languages still keep their own ancient punctuation, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#Punctuation&quot;&gt;Armenian&lt;/a&gt; period is &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt;, the Armenian question mark is &lt;code&gt;՞&lt;/code&gt; which is put above the last vowel letter of the question word, the Greek question mark is &lt;code&gt;;&lt;/code&gt;, Spanish uses the upside-down question mark &lt;code&gt;¿&lt;/code&gt; at the beginning of interrogative sentences (&lt;code&gt;¿Qué?&lt;/code&gt; 'What?'), the same with the exclamation mark (&lt;code&gt;¡Hola!&lt;/code&gt; 'Hi!'). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tofugu.com/2011/12/08/japanese-punctuation/&quot;&gt;Japanese has specific punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, the period is &lt;code&gt;。&lt;/code&gt;. Amharic keeps the ancient &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge&amp;#39;ez_script#Punctuation&quot;&gt;Ge'ez punctuation&lt;/a&gt;, but it gets outdated now and often substituted with the European-style one. Many Asian scripts of Indian origin, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_script#Punctuation&quot;&gt;Javanese&lt;/a&gt;, still keep their traditional punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T01:33:34.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9991" CreationDate="2015-01-03T02:30:42.943" Score="1" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the difficulty surrounding donkey sentences, to my understanding, is about how hard they are to translate to FOL in a matter that is consistent with other translations to FOL in english.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take &quot;every man who owns a donkey beats it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The knee-jerk translation would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;∀x[(MAN(x) ∧ ∃y[DONKEY(y) ∧ OWNS(y,x)]) -&amp;gt; BEATS(y,x)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is problematic because y is free in the consequent. But now say that we extend the scope of the existential quantifier so it reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;del&gt;∀x(MAN(x) -&gt; ∃y[ ([DONKEY(y) ∧ OWNS(y,x)] ∧ BEATS(y,x)) ∧ DONKEY(y) ])&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;∀x(MAN(x) ∧ ∃y[ ([DONKEY(y) ∧ OWNS(y,x)] ∧ BEATS(y,x)) ∧ DONKEY(y) ])&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did here is extend the scope of the existential to encapsulate the BEATS predicate. Next, I included a conjunction that included another instance of the predicate DONKEY to make the formula more rigorous (because it would evaluate as true if we interpreted &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; as a pig/non-donkey object). &lt;del&gt; Finally, I moved the conditional after the MAN predicate to &quot;tidy up&quot; the universal and existential quantifiers. &lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my intuition, the sentence &quot;every man who owns a donkey beats it&quot; doesn't suffer from ambiguity unless you interpret &quot;beats it&quot; as masturbating. So what's wrong with my translation into formal logic? Am I missing the point of donkey sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I suspect that this stems from the basic fact that it's discouraged to say ∀x(Px&amp;amp;Qx) compared to ∀x(Px-&gt;Qx), but I'm not completely sure why asides from the fact that it's &quot;too strong a claim&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2015-01-03T03:10:16.850" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T20:51:10.580" Title="On donkey sentences: why is this formalization incorrect?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2015-01-03T02:56:43.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your formula means that every man owns a donkey that he beats, which is not what the original sentence means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T02:56:43.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9982" CreationDate="2015-01-03T05:01:45.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a paper that has been written on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thomastsoi.com/wp-content/downloads/The%20Effects%20of%20Occurrence%20Frequency%20of%20Phonemes%20on%20SLA.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thomastsoi.com/wp-content/downloads/The%20Effects%20of%20Occurrence%20Frequency%20of%20Phonemes%20on%20SLA.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author's hypothesis is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sound of higher occurrence frequency in L1 is more likely to be selected as a replacement for a&#xA;foreign sound in L2. The process of replacement, however, cannot possibly rely only on the&#xA;occurrence frequency. Otherwise, the most frequent sound would have been selected&#xA;as a replacement for every foreign sound. Therefore, there should be a set of rules&#xA;determining how similar two sounds are. These rules and the effects of occurrence&#xA;frequency are juxtaposed to determine the result of replacement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5404" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T05:01:45.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9985" CreationDate="2015-01-03T10:17:55.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Armenian word was borrowed from Western Middle Iranian (Parthian or Middle Persian) tāg-āwar (or tāg-āwur) “crown bearer”. It is not attested in Old Iranian languages, but one would expect either *tāk-ā-bar-a- (full grade) or *tāk-ā-bṛ-a- (zero grade, which would explain the –or in Armenian). As you can see, this has no real similarity with the Greek ἀγαυός “admirable, noble”. The etymology of the latter is contested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-01-03T10:23:33.760" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T10:23:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2015-01-03T10:57:05.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic and Chinese the use of Western-style punctuation is very modern, not before the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T10:57:05.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9996" CreationDate="2015-01-03T13:45:01.323" Score="10" ViewCount="44977" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between complements and adjuncts? I always have a problem drawing a tree diagram for the syntax structure of a sentence with placing complements with word level category and adjuncts with different nodes; I don't actually know how to distinguish both and where to put them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6915" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T03:16:22.943" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T03:16:22.943" Title="What is the difference between complements and adjuncts?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2015-01-03T18:30:35.540" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is between &lt;strong&gt;arguments&lt;/strong&gt; (sometimes also called &lt;em&gt;complements&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;adjuncts&lt;/strong&gt;. In general, arguments are expressions that complete a predicate, and that are required by the predicate. Adjuncts, on the other hand, are not required by the predicate, but they do add (usually temporal or locative) information.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here are some examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Paul lives in London. &#xA;(2) Paul met Peter in London.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paul&lt;/em&gt; in (1-2) is the subject of the verbs &lt;em&gt;lives&lt;/em&gt; in (1) and &lt;em&gt;met&lt;/em&gt; in (2). Subjects are arguments. &lt;em&gt;Peter&lt;/em&gt; is the object of the verb &lt;em&gt;met&lt;/em&gt; in (2). Objects are arguments, too. The PP &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt; is an argument in (1), because without a locative PP &lt;em&gt;lives&lt;/em&gt; would mean something else. In (2), however, &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt; can be omitted without affecting the meaning  of the predicate, hence the PP in (2) is an adjunct.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_%28linguistics%29#Arguments_and_adjuncts&quot;&gt;this page on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-01-03T18:30:35.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2015-01-04T00:37:43.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymologically - and more specifically than just &quot;Indo-European&quot;, English is in a language family called &quot;Anglo-Frisian&quot;. Anglo-Frisian languages can be further separated into &quot;English&quot; (English, Scots, and a couple of extinct languages) and Frisian languages. So etymologically, English's closest living relatives would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scots&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extinct languages - Yola and Fingallian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any of the Frisian languages (West, North, and Saterland)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, my friends who speak both Dutch and English have told me that Frisian seems closer to Dutch than English, so taking their word for its value, I'd say you'll be hard pressed to find a language other than Scots that is mutually intelligible with Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, digging a bit further back into the language trees, and looking at the West Germanic languages (of which Anglo-Frisian is a subgroup), Afrikaans has some pretty cool relations to English. Wikipedia gives this as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afrikaans: En ek sê vir julle, wat soek julle hier by my? Ek soek julle nie! Nee, gaan nou weg!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: And I say to you, what do you seek here by me? I do not seek you! No, go away now!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fun little thing: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkqbZB-0EZw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this is a classic folk song&lt;/a&gt; sung in Yola. I've always liked to imagine that it's a bit what non-English speakers hear when they hear English (try starting around 2:15)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6912" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T00:37:43.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-04T11:03:25.807" Score="4" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am researching answer fragments. I have come upon some interesting data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; What have you been telling John to try to get?&#xA;&#xA; a. --  A new bicycle.&#xA; b. -- *Get a new bicycle.&#xA; c. -- *To get a new bicycle.&#xA; d. -- *Try to get a new bicycle.&#xA; e. -- *To try to get a new bicycle.&#xA; f. -- *Telling John to try to get a new bicycle.&#xA; g. -- *Been telling John to try to get a new bicycle.&#xA; h. --  I have been telling John to try to get a new bicycle.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The smallest answer fragment is fine, and the complete sentence answer is also OK, but the intermediate fragments are all bad. Why? Has anyone encountered an explanation of this aspect of answer fragments? Perhaps it is a trait of certain ellipsis mechanisms in general. Does anyone know? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T11:14:03.077" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T13:01:35.543" Title="What is this trait of answer ellipsis?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9908" CreationDate="2015-01-04T12:35:05.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only coherent meaning of &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt; I know of is 'complying/not complying with the rules of grammar G for language L'. If you accept that point of view, provided you formally specify an explicit, complete, and consistent grammar G of L, you will, by definition, be able to tell whether a certain string of symbols is or is not 'grammatical' in L modulo G (= whether or not it is in the set L that can be formally deduced from G). If you agree to further identify &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; (= well-behaved modulo the rules of G and, therefore, acceptable as an object of L), then you can also automatically tell whether a sentence is or is not &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; relative to G. So far, there is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that we have nothing remotely approaching a formally explicit complete grammar of &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;natural&lt;/strong&gt; language, even if by &lt;em&gt;natural language&lt;/em&gt; we meant just 'the state of the internal language L assumed by speaker S at time t,... (replace &quot;...&quot; with a list of parameters encoding all the factors that may condition the state of speaker S's internal 'grammar' G during a specific speech act). Actually, we do not even have anything remotely approaching an explicit grammar of 'the language of speaker S' &lt;em&gt;tout court&lt;/em&gt;, with all such parameters abstracted away for simplicity's or idealisation's sake, i.e., we do not have any explicit grammar of any individual speaker S's idealised 'idiolect', approximately what Chomsky once called 'the language of Jones'), and the bad news is that we are not likely to ever have one of those either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, we are still incomparably further away from having any formally explicit complete grammar of 'English' (or any other language) as people normally understand the terms &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Spanish&lt;/em&gt;, etc., i.e., as the would-be homogeneous 'public languages' millions of people across the world 'share' and use to express themselves, which is the way I presume you understand the object 'English' and the word &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, having the first such grammar of a natural language &lt;strong&gt;in that latter sense&lt;/strong&gt; is not just a question of time and doing much more research; it is simply an impossible enterprise, for reasons clearly explained long ago by Quine in &lt;em&gt;Word and Object&lt;/em&gt; and by many others since (Davidson, Chomsky). We will never have an explicit, complete, and consistent grammar of 'English' in that sense because 'English' in that sense is not a scientifically coherent, definable object; it is just a practically convenient fiction, and it is impossible to develop such a grammar for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since, unless you first do exactly that, no automatic verification procedure can possibly be designed and made to work, either, the answer to your question, as I assume you intended it to be interpreted, is: &quot;No, it is not possible to automatically verify whether a sentence (of 'English', or any other natural language &lt;strong&gt;in the sense explained&lt;/strong&gt;) is or not 'grammatically correct'.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T12:35:05.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9998" CreationDate="2015-01-04T13:01:35.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That trait of elliptical answers is simply 'Focus'. Wh-questions have a Focus, and the answer to them must be an expression that denotes something in the category of entities that the asker has decided ask about, to focus his question on. Violating the syntactic Focus principle can also be considered a violation of principles like 'relevance' (in Grice's sense), since it entails offering information the question presupposes as known and that is, therefore, redundant if repeated, or even as a violation of 'Economy'in Chomsky's sense, and, depending on which theory of syntax you adopt, the unacceptability of examples like your (b-h) above will be explicable as a breach of all or of just some of those principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T13:01:35.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9986" CreationDate="2015-01-04T14:16:59.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Britain it is very common for parents from the Indian subcontinent to talk to their children always in English rather than in Urdu, Panjabi, Gujarati etc. They believe that they are doing their children a favour. In fact, first generation British-born South Asians very often go through their entire life speaking English with an Indian accent, acquired from their well-meaning parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-05T01:06:54.640" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T01:06:54.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2015-01-04T14:37:10.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from Scots, the closest languages to English in terms of lexical difference are probably the various English-based creoles, such as Tok Pisin, Bislama or Jamaican Patois. These have a mostly English vocabulary base, even though much of their grammar derives from from non Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I've not found many numbers to back this up. The closest I found so far is the following diagram from &lt;em&gt;A Grammar of Pichi&lt;/em&gt; by Kofi Yakpo, showing the lexical distance of Pichinglis (spoken in Equatorial Guinea) to a number of other languages including English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JJMSM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Lexical similarity tree diagram (Copyright Kofi Yakpo 2009)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen measures of phonological distance used to cluster English dialects and creoles (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol12/iss2/12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clustering Dialects Automatically: A mutual information approach&lt;/a&gt;), but I've not seen a similar study for syntactic distance. For a description of approaches to quantifying syntactic distance between languages see for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1214_Paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Vector Space Model for Syntactic Distances Between Dialects&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastEditorUserId="6809" LastEditDate="2015-01-04T14:49:07.697" LastActivityDate="2015-01-04T14:49:07.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-05T06:54:19.117" Score="4" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a musician. I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/the-computer-as-music-critic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article in the NY Times&lt;/a&gt; that suggested both words and musical melodies follow Zipf's Law. I had never really thought about it before, but I started wondering do linguists consider music a language? By &quot;language&quot;, I mean loosely a method of communication that has words, a grammar, a syntax, and an alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Other questions I have but need not be answered: does it have an alphabet? Are there words? Is there a grammar? Are music and intonation related?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6811" LastEditorUserId="14972" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T10:56:13.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T10:56:13.387" Title="Is music a language?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10008" CreationDate="2015-01-05T09:36:34.333" Score="3" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are common words in Germanic languages that have a long &quot;o&quot; vowel in the stem, and which in modern German seem to be either &quot;o&quot; or &quot;au&quot; randomly.&#xA;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch ROOD, Swedish RÖD, German ROT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DUTCH DOOD, Swedish DÖD, German TOT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but:&#xA;Dutch KOPEN, Swedish KÖPA, German KAUFEN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch LOPEN, Swedish LOPP (noun), German LAUFEN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a rule, or is it random?&#xA;And what is the reason (maybe high vs. low German)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Danke!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5563" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T09:28:33.437" Title="German long &quot;o&quot; vs. &quot;au&quot;. Is there a rule?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2015-01-05T12:52:33.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really doubt that any study of linguistics will help learn a language. Linguistics is primarily not concerned with learning a language but with new ways of analysing language, which in my view achieve nothing but saying known things with new terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T12:52:33.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10005" CreationDate="2015-01-05T13:01:16.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Rot” and “tot” have a long ō in Old High German, but “laufen” and “kaufen” have the diphthong ou in OHG. ō and ou merge in some languages, in others they go their separate ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-05T13:01:16.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10005" CreationDate="2015-01-05T13:04:09.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Germanic (PG) the prototypes of all the four words had the diphthong /au/ in the root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;rot &amp;lt; PG *raudaz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tot &amp;lt; PG *daudaz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kaufen &amp;lt; OHG noun &lt;strong&gt;koufo&lt;/strong&gt; (“merchant”) &amp;lt; Latin &lt;strong&gt;caupō&lt;/strong&gt; (“tradesman, shopkeeper”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;laufen &amp;lt; PG *hlaupaną&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the transition from Proto-Germanic to Old High German the diphthong /au/ &gt; /ô/ before /r/, /h/ and all dentals, otherwise /au/ &gt; /ou/. Since in &lt;strong&gt;*raudaz&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;*daudaz&lt;/strong&gt; the diphthong /au/ was before the dental /d/, /au/ &gt; /ô/, in &lt;strong&gt;*hlaupaną&lt;/strong&gt; it was before /p/, so this change didn't happen. The exact PG form the Latin &lt;strong&gt;caupō&lt;/strong&gt; transformed into is unknown to me, anyway /au/ was not before a dental there, so Latin /au/ &gt; OHG /ou/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch has /oː/ in all the four words, because in its ancestor language Old Saxon aka Old Low German, the Proto-Germanic diphthong /au/ consistently developed into a long vowel /oː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Swedish, I don't know Old Norse and the Scandinavian languages enough to comment competently on the vowel change they had, maybe someone else here can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-01-07T09:28:33.437" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T09:28:33.437" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-05T13:22:22.963" Score="1" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always perceived an inherent contradiction between Chomsky's 'no tampering' idea and ANY version of Merge (or any Merge-like operation) driven - under the principle of Economy - by the need for features of a syntactic object A to be 'checked', 'satisfied', etc. by 'properties' (features, values) of a second object B. Whether the checking/satisfaction process involves unvalued features becoming valued, or valued features becoming 'licensed', or 'agreeing' between themselves, etc. is inmaterial, as far as I can see, at this level of generality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that any sophisticated reasoning is involved on my part in this respect, on the contrary: I just feel that if, say, an unvalued attribute of a category A gets valued as a consequence of A's being Merged to B (or a valued attribute of A is 'licensed' by, say, 'agreement' with a parallel attribute of B, etc.), then A, B, or both, have been 'tampered with' in a flagrant way. After all, a 'category' (a syntactic object visible to Merge) being ultimately just a set of such 'features', to the extent that the state of whatever attribute-value pair of A or B may be involved is altered by the merger, so is the object A (or B) itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know whether 'no tampering' remains an important principle of current minimalist syntax, but, if it does, I would like to know how that difficulty (if it is such and not just a misconception of mine) has been circumvented, and, if it no longer does, I would still want to know why the idea has been abandoned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T14:24:28.100" Title="Isn´t there a contradiction between 'feature-checking' and 'no tampering'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11068" CreationDate="2015-01-05T15:14:38.693" Score="1" ViewCount="5889" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start learning sign language. The Wikipedia lists &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;several sign languages depending on real spoken languages&lt;/a&gt;, and they all have their origins and families and classifications just like spoken languages, but I also noticed that there is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;international sign language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to communicate with as many deaf people as possible. Should I learn international sign language? Do deaf people learn the international sign language too or only their home country's sign language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine it works like spoken language, i.e., deaf people just learn the variety of their home country. I don't mind learning several languages, but which sign language should I learn first in order to reach as many people as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any deaf friends to ask these questions, but I would love to. I like to communicate with people in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6929" LastEditorUserId="6929" LastEditDate="2015-01-06T14:50:49.763" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T03:48:10.000" Title="Which sign language should I learn first?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T14:02:16.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11053" CreationDate="2015-01-05T17:38:00.143" Score="5" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine a language with PVA/APV dominant word order and SV in intransitive clauses. We see that it's tightly PV and SV whereas both VA and AV are possible. We also know that P and S are both morphologically marked the same. From this we know that the language is ergative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is: usually we talk not in terms of agent/patient but in terms of subject/object, so do I call this SVO/OSV order (S = P) or do I call this OVS/SOV order (S = A)? The former seems intuitive for an ergative language, but I cannot find any sources explicitly stating either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="6926" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T10:28:54.637" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T09:48:03.263" Title="Is the agent in an ergative language a subject or an object?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2015-01-05T17:59:46.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a question which can be answered with a yes/no answer. Music is like a natural language in some respects and very much unlike one in others. Here are some suggested similarities and dissimilarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Music is like (a) language in that:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be described through a system of rules that operate on a limited vocabulary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It combines small building blocks into large components that are like words, phrases, sentences and text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is recursively expressive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has dual articulation in that smaller segments like scales are organized independently of large segments like movements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has phraseology and idioms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can cross-reference between compositions (texts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can communicate emotion both segmentally (sequences of notes) and suprasegmentally (expression, emphasis, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has styles, genres and dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be acquired and learned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is culturally conditioned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Music is NOT like (a) language in that:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It cannot be used to directly communicate propositional meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has radically smaller set of building blocks and rules for their combination than language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It does not have internal instruments of disambiguation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can only be universally acquired in the most rudimentary sense (i.e. everybody can hum a tune but very few people can play an instrument)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is much a greater difference between receptive and productive competence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is much greater variability in individuals' ability to produce music beyond the most trivial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Much more of the production process requires cooperation among individuals&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is much more limited in its dialogic potential (i.e. is most often used for a one way communication between few producers and more recipients or joint co-production of producer/recipients)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure many more similarities and differences could be identified and the ones above could be refined but hope this will give you some idea of what's involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding Zipf's law: It is not really surprising it would be observed here because it mostly concerns distribution of units in a human generated corpus. But it does not follow that music is a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; I've added parentheses around the indefinite articles in (a) language to reflect the comments that music is (dis)analogous to human language in general rather than in particular. I think we could have some more analogical fun here arguing both sides, but it would not be particularly fruitful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T00:05:51.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9974" CreationDate="2015-01-06T04:23:43.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mitigator: Mitigate v. make less severe, serious, or painful: he wanted to mitigate misery in the world.&#xA;• lessen the gravity of (an offense or mistake): (as adj. mitigating) : he would have faced a prison sentence but for mitigating circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6755" LastActivityDate="2015-01-06T04:23:43.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-06T09:27:09.670" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has an order of grammatical difficulty for Modern Standard Arabic been discovered (or proposed) similar to that found for L2 learners of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6934" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T00:04:48.537" Title="Is there an order of difficulty for MSA?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-06T11:30:14.220" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/4488/111&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/4487/111&quot;&gt;How does expressing possession vary across language families?&lt;/a&gt;, there is a classification on some types of Possession across languages. I have tried to look for an overview of Possession in general and also on the different types of it, but I didn't find much so I'd like to ask some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are those classifications only according to Stassen, from his book Predicative Possession or from a more general perspective? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does the answer defines them &quot;values of the parameter&quot; and not &quot;types&quot;, I'm a bit confused by this wording. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, where could I find an exhaustive but general overview of possession?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T09:02:30.917" Title="Understanding possession" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11056" CreationDate="2015-01-06T11:37:24.563" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;My definition of the &quot;World language&quot; is the language most people can understand and use as an international language—not necessarily the language most spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hater of English argued that Spanish or Mandarin would become the &quot;World language&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his reasons, apart from hating the influence of the &quot;enemies' language&quot;, are that they are the languages with the most speakers and that Spanish has a tremendous influence on American business—though I can not vouch for the latter notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that we should put emotions aside and look not only at native speakers of a language, but also take other aspects of that language into account—eg. second language speakers, internet communities, academia, print, countries in which you can partially communicate in that language, and the rate by which the language is acquired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I find the following information and what can we learn from it regarding the supposed &quot;World language&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics to indicate the rate by which English, Mandarin, Spanish etc. are acquired—ie. what is the number of new acquirers (number of new learners plus the native birth rate) minus the number of acquirer deaths within a time window—ie. a language's total acquisition per month or year.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statistics to indicate the total amount of speakers (native and additional). I found the Wikipedia statistics to be incomplete: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any other non-anecdotal information that might be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6781" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-01-06T11:46:56.360" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T01:34:13.313" Title="What stats are available to estimate the possibly coming &quot;World language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-06T15:35:43.567" Score="2" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering to what extent spoken language is important to the intelligibility of written Chinese. I read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Chinese grammar&lt;/a&gt; in which they have words in one particular language (Mandarin maybe?) are written in the text as though it is the only language, when obviously that is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, newspapers in Beijing I assume are written by people who speak Mandarin, whereas in Shanghai I would guess they are written by people who speak Wu. Even so, my understanding is that they use the same character for a concept, even though the words are different. For example, &quot;man&quot; may be spoken differently in Mandarin and Wu, but both cities use the same symbol for the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the underlying language affect the ability to read and write Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, can someone who ONLY speaks Wu understand a Beijing newspaper as well as a Mandarin? And likewise, if a Wu speaker writes a document, can a person who does not speak Wu comprehend the document just as fully as a native Wu speaker can?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2015-01-06T16:14:20.573" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T08:22:28.410" Title="Can Chinese speaking different languages understand newspapers from different cities equally as well?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2015-01-06T17:51:24.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for digging up the article. I am afraid I find it really feeble. “Zipf’s law” (named after the American Nazi Zipf) is an application to word frequency of a very common statistical relationship known in mathematics as the power law. It had been observed, long before Zipf, by the economist Pareto with regard to income distribution, and by the physicist Auerbach (incidentally a victim of Zipf’s beloved Hitler) with regard to population distribution. And, of course, it manifests itself also in music with regards to the harmonics (as has been known at least since Plato). So there is nothing special about the relationship between music and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-06T17:51:24.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10025" CreationDate="2015-01-06T19:24:56.933" Score="6" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are breathy-voiced stops (like [dʱ]) only breathy-voiced during the closure, with the vowel being completely modal-voiced, or do they make the vowel begin breathy-voiced, the way an aspirated stop causes the vowel to begin voiceless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Put more visually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- = Voiceless&lt;br&gt;&#xA;// = Modal-voiced&lt;br&gt;&#xA;~~ = Breathy-voiced&lt;br&gt;&#xA;| = Release&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voiced stops are: [////|////////]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tenuis stops are: [----|////////]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Aspirated stops are: [----|---/////]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, are breathy-voiced stops [~~~~|////////] or [~~~~|~~~/////]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T00:19:44.527" Title="How do breathy-voiced stops work?" Tags="&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10024" CreationDate="2015-01-06T19:41:40.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's more like [~~~~|~~~/////], or I would say it is rather [////|~~~/////].&#xA;They work very much like aspirated stops, only they are voiced, and the breathy voice that follows the release is very much like the voiceless puff of air after the release in aspirated stops, only this breathy voice is voiced, everything is voiced, both before the release, and after it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-06T19:41:40.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10028" CreationDate="2015-01-06T23:55:08.963" Score="6" ViewCount="10857" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that generative linguistics presupposes the  structuralist tradition. Are there any major differences between these two methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-09T04:42:57.223" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T04:42:57.223" Title="What's the difference between structural and generative linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10024" CreationDate="2015-01-07T00:19:44.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It varies across languages. Voicing may cease at the left during the closure. In a number of Southern Bantu languages but not Shona (where they are ,ostly voiced), there is only a little voicing at the start of the closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T00:19:44.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10026" CreationDate="2015-01-07T00:27:57.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental difference is that generative grammar purports to be a model of mental processes and (quasi-classical, non-Sapirian) structuralist linguistics denies that or is agnostic. Technically, GG is a perfectly explicit description of the competence of the ideal speaker-hearer (&lt;em&gt;Aspects&lt;/em&gt; p. 4), but then there isn't much GG around, given the &quot;perfectly explicit&quot; desideratum. Also, bear in mind that many people equate GG with &quot;Chomsky's current theory of syntax&quot;, which is a misunderstanding of the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T00:27:57.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11073" CreationDate="2015-01-07T03:01:22.760" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does NLTK (or any other Python natural language module) have the ability &lt;a href=&quot;http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/410/grammar/adjord.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;to determine the order&lt;/a&gt; of multiple modifier adjectives? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;metal round huge bowl (incorrect)&#xA;huge round metal bowl (correct)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copied and formatted from the link, the order is given by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion&lt;/strong&gt;: An opinion adjective explains what you think about something (other people may not agree with you). For example: silly, beautiful, horrible, difficult.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Size&lt;/strong&gt;:    A size adjective, tells you how big or small something is. For example: large, tiny, enormous, little.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Age&lt;/strong&gt;: An age adjective tells you how young or old something or someone is. For example: ancient, new, young, old.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shape&lt;/strong&gt;:   A shape adjective describes the shape of something. For example: square, round, flat, rectangular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Color&lt;/strong&gt;    A color adjective, of course, describes the color of something. For example: blue, pink, reddish, grey.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin&lt;/strong&gt;   An origin adjective describes where something comes from. For example: French, lunar, American, eastern, Greek.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Material&lt;/strong&gt; A material adjective describes what something is made from. For example: wooden, metal, cotton, paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Purpose&lt;/strong&gt;  A purpose adjective describes what something is used for. These adjectives often end with “-ing”. For example: sleeping (as in “sleeping bag”), roasting (as in “roasting tin”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example above, the correct order would be &lt;code&gt;[size,shape,material]&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T00:40:03.460" Title="Determine adjective order algorithmically" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10009" CreationDate="2015-01-07T14:24:28.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isn't there a contradiction between 'feature-checking' and 'no tampering'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is, for the reasons you outlined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not know whether 'no tampering' remains an important principle of current minimalist syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The no-tampering conditions does remain a very important part of minimalist syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to know how that difficulty (if it is such and not just a misconception of mine) has been circumvented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No solution to that difficulty is part of the scientific consensus of people working in minimalist syntax. Proposed solutions include moving feature checking to the externalization interface (Bobaljik has argued this, for instance) and subsuming Agree with Merge (so that Agree, not being anymore the valuation of features but the comparison of equal features, respects the no-tampering condition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add, though, that the contradiction between the no-tampering condition and feature valuation should not be exaggerated. The no-tampering condition is a &lt;em&gt;principle&lt;/em&gt; which is reasonable for reasons of simplicity of computation as null-hypothesis within the framework of minimalist syntax. Likewise, probe/goal relation in a phase-based architecture is also a plausible null-hypothesis &lt;em&gt;formalization&lt;/em&gt; of relations between syntactic objects within minimalist syntax, for the same reasons of economy of computation. So the difficulty you outline is an instance where the general guiding intuitions of the minimalist program (derives as much as possible of the properties of syntax from economy of computation considerations and interface requirements) yield somewhat conflicting results. To me, this simply indicates that the first formal realization of the null-hypothesis cannot always (or ever) be the correct one. The reason the contradiction does not seem to bother excessively anyone, it seems to me, is that we lack clear empirically testable predictions entailed by one alternative versus the other, so the question of how to solve this difficulty is scientifically somewhat premature.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I will point out that one can easily write a formal system in which everything is structural, Merge applies freely, structure is always preserved by Merge (so the no-tampering condition holds) and yet Agree behaves as in the current feature valuation model (that formal system would rely on a heavy dose of filtering at the point of transfer). This formal system would eliminate the contradiction you outline but, again, as it does not have any obvious empirical advantage, there might be no real point in pursuing it for the pure sake of eliminating a contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T14:24:28.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10011" CreationDate="2015-01-07T19:35:45.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learn the language of the local Deaf population. It does not seem that the international signed language is anything but a hodge-podge of signs. ASL (American Sign Language) is spoken through-out North and South America. Keep in mind that signed languages do not necessarily overlap with spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7940" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T19:35:45.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-07T21:14:33.150" Score="-4" ViewCount="1172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please help me identify this language, it is hand drawn and I would like to know which language describes it the best. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DzHoo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;writing sample&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7941" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-13T14:57:41.323" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T21:07:26.280" Title="Find which alphabet is this" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-02-11T10:31:54.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-07T20:23:46.627" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that English doesn't have specific gender for words like 'cousin' compared to other languages. While some languages seem to have a gender neutral form of he/she, are there some that only have one gender neutral word like 'sibling,' or 'child' and no difference between brother/sister, son/daughter, or niece/nephew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3856804" LastEditorUserId="7942" LastEditDate="2015-01-07T22:24:49.613" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T22:24:49.613" Title="Is there a language with no gender for family relationships?" Tags="&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11027" CreationDate="2015-01-07T20:33:58.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on how much stock you put in the words and findings of Daniel Everett, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%E3_language#Kinship_terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pirahā language&lt;/a&gt; of Brazil is said to have only one word, &lt;em&gt;baíxi&lt;/em&gt; (pronounced [màíʔì]) to mean both ‘mother’ and ‘father’, as well as one word for ‘sibling’—and no other kinship terms at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" OwnerDisplayName="Janus Bahs Jacquet" LastActivityDate="2015-01-07T20:33:58.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11031" CreationDate="2015-01-08T08:30:14.747" Score="-1" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year I had a prof who denied the existence of adverbs, and instead posited a class of words that were labelled &quot;intensifiers&quot;. Many words that would have been otherwise been labeled as an adverb were then labeled as an intensifier. What's the point of the label &quot;intensifier&quot; in the first place, compared to &quot;adverb&quot;? To me, they seem to be two different names for the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T13:05:07.543" Title="Adverbs vs intensifiers" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11030" CreationDate="2015-01-08T13:05:07.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Categories are defined on the basis of distributional equivalence, so there are two possibilities here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your professor thinks that &lt;em&gt;intensifier&lt;/em&gt; is a better name for this particular category than &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt; is, more or less in the same way that some people still use the somewhat dated &lt;em&gt;substantive&lt;/em&gt; instead of the more common &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;. This means that he's just taking issue with the names we assign things, not with the actual existence of those things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your professor believes that the category of adverbs hasn't been properly defined, in the sense that it includes items that are not adverbs. When you correct this mistake, you are left with a different set of lexical items, and he's using the label &lt;em&gt;intensifier&lt;/em&gt; to refer to what he believes are the correct items that belong in this category. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell which without further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T13:05:07.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11052" CreationDate="2015-01-08T13:30:19.497" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the precise scientific name for the following phenomenon: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: &lt;em&gt;Los tios&lt;/em&gt; = aunt + uncle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;em&gt;aunt&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;uncle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no single expression in English which encompasses both the meaning of &quot;aunt&quot; and &quot;uncle&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard this is called &quot;diversification&quot;, and the opposite is &quot;neutralization&quot; - is that right? Can anybody cite a source for that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7946" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-01-08T15:01:17.487" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T20:28:57.437" Title="Lexical diversification" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11036" CreationDate="2015-01-08T15:52:24.930" Score="1" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the statements of the sentence :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is too much, nothing is too little.&#xA;&quot;Alles ist zuviel, nichts zu wenig.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German there are several interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That everything is too much and nothing to little so something in between is probably okay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing (as Object seen) is to little so it can be much more of &quot;nothing&quot; and everything is to much, so, refere to 1. there's a need to get less of &quot;everything&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens if we turn it around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is too little, nothing is too much.&#xA;&quot;Alles ist zuwenig, nichts zu viel.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first interpretation would be that erverything is not enough but nothing is already to much. So it seems like a conflicted statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But if nothing is too much there is much space for somthing so it seems that there is a need to be not only much more of something but much more of everything (what is not enough for one time).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where doese this confusion about &quot;Nothing&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;Everything&quot; comes from ?&#xA;Is it the language or the logic behind.&#xA;Is there a model for this kind of ambiguity ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7948" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-01-10T01:52:53.463" LastActivityDate="2015-01-10T01:52:53.463" Title="Everything is too much, nothing is too little?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10026" CreationDate="2015-01-08T18:12:31.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot really compare structuralist and generative linguistics directly. In broadest terms, generative linguistics is one way to study and model language structure. It is therefore a part of the broader structuralist program (see for instance F Newmeyer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, generativism shares these structuralist commitments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language as an interconnected hierarchical semiotic system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distinction between competence and performance (languge/parole)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meaning and function expressed through distinctive features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language susceptible to syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific concepts such as phoneme, morpheme, lexeme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language units as symbolic pairings of meaning and form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linearity of language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While many of the generativist approaches grew out of a critique of the structuralist orthodoxy of the time, they still stayed firmly within the broader structuralist framework. In some way, generative linguistics could be seen as a contribution to a structuralist theory of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T18:12:31.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2015-01-08T21:13:46.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Everything&quot; almost never literally means &quot;everything&quot;, it is limited by some domain of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Everything is too much&quot; is a bit odd and requires certain contexts, like, there is a presupposed collection of items to be acted on, and you could be suggesting acting on a proper subset of those things. &quot;Nothing is too little&quot;, paired with that, is weird, unless there is some supposition that the lot has to be dealt with as a whole. It could be an indirect way of saying &quot;You should pick just a few items&quot;. (You also have to filter out the extraneous interpretation &quot;everything is too small&quot;). So the first sentence could stand elliptically for &quot;Giving everything would be too much to give, but giving nothing would be giving too little&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Everything is too little&quot; only makes sense (again, filtering out the &quot;small&quot; readings) if you are denying that there has to be a limit on the collection that you're drawing from, that is, reject the presupposition. So, if you were planning on giving away your cash to charity, I could be saying &quot;Not even all your cash is sufficient, you should also give away your house and your stocks&quot;, i.e. go beyond the presupposed &quot;everything&quot;. You can then assert that more emphatically, by saying that there is should be no limit, that there exists no thing that would be too much for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we need a bit more exegesis on the interpretation of the German sentences. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it sounds like German is the same. So this is probably a matter of the pragmatic logic behind saying such things (i.e. why the heck would you ever talk like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-08T21:13:46.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11064" CreationDate="2015-01-08T21:33:12.183" Score="11" ViewCount="1794" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do anyone know where to find the most extensive collection of Swadesh lists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with how many different languages in the collection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T11:47:12.577" Title="Database of Swadesh lists" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;swadesh-list&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2015-01-09T05:27:56.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everything = the entire set of things&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; would not be used in English to mean &quot;any given thing&quot;, because that notion is already occupied by the word &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nothing = the empty set of things&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No-thing = it cannot be for any given thing that that thing&lt;/em&gt; (universal negation in predicate logic, although I'm not sure contextually if it applies here only to real things or imagined things as well; I guess it depends on a level of fantasy engagement)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So take the example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The entire set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too much, &lt;em&gt;the empty set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too little, so some amount in-between is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The entire set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too much, &lt;em&gt;it cannot be for any given thing that that thing&lt;/em&gt; is too little, so there's a need to get as little or less than the least thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swapping...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The entire set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too little, &lt;em&gt;the empty set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too much, so there is a contradiction (even if the entire set were the empty set).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The entire set of things&lt;/em&gt; is too little, &lt;em&gt;it cannot be for any given thing that that thing&lt;/em&gt; is too much, so this is a redundant statement saying we need more than the entire set of things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It might be redundant in a different way, in the case where &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; represents the set of all real things, and &lt;em&gt;no-thing&lt;/em&gt; could be a huge imagined object that is never big enough, no matter how big it is imagined to be)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;em&gt;Nichts&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;no-thing&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Alles&lt;/em&gt; has only the sense of &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt;, so there would seem to be a direct parallel in the logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more weird interpretation is coming to mind: the case where &quot;nothing&quot; and &quot;everything&quot; are partitioned. Like in the Never-Ending Story, the bigger the Nothing got, the smaller everything else got. In that case, there's no contradiction to &quot;Everything is too little, Nothing is too much&quot;, because nothing is itself a thing, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pop philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to retell a nothing-as-something joke:&#xA;A guy walks into a café. &quot;I'd like a coffee without cream&quot;. &quot;Sorry, we're out of cream, can I get you a coffee without milk instead?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7952" LastEditorUserId="7952" LastEditDate="2015-01-09T06:07:30.750" LastActivityDate="2015-01-09T06:07:30.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-09T14:19:13.080" Score="1" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study Turkic languages. Does anybody know a comparative study of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages or a study which proves that Altaic languages have articles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I compared some suffixes of Turkic languages with the Indo-European articles and I observed big resemblances between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7954" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T17:51:07.617" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T17:51:07.617" Title="Articles in Indo-European Languages" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-09T15:40:36.417" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many European languages - at least those I looked into - it is possible to use Present Subjunctive as optative mood (although often considered dated or of limited availability):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thy Kingdom come&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Dein Königreich komme&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Que ton règne vienne&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE is supposed to have had an optative and a subjunctive mood. As Latin evolved, subjunctive and optative mood merged. Proto-Germanic however, dropped subjunctive mood and optative mood became subjunctive. I wonder if Germanic languages never dropped optative mood entirely or if it was reintroduced from Romance languages/Latin at a later point; if therefore there is an unbroken ancestry between present day &quot;subjunctive as optative mood&quot; and PIE optative mood in Germanic languages or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5446" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-10T05:32:50.490" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T22:16:01.410" Title="Present Subjunctive as Optative" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-09T18:05:40.437" Score="0" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a style discussion on another SE site. Part of the discussion&#xA;boiled down to whether the following sentence is appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head and wings with a golden underbelly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users consider that it is not, and that &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; should be replaced&#xA;by &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;.  That can be defended on the basis that a conjunction is&#xA;required and that &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; is a preposition which has no place in an&#xA;enumeration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My perception is that &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; indicate a relation between what follows&#xA;and what precedes that is semantically stronger than a simple&#xA;enumeration, and can indicate for example an unexpected conjonction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may be explained grammatically, since &lt;code&gt;together with&lt;/code&gt; can be used&#xA;as a conjunction. And then I tend to perceive &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; alone as an&#xA;abbreviation of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it legitimate to use such an abbreviation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to my question, which is not specifically about the&#xA;English language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much grammatical codification is there of the appropriate use of&#xA;abbreviation, or ellipsis, in linguistic studies and language&#xA;descriptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noted that according to the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6648/is-this-a-form-of-ellipsis-if-you-are-hungry-you-should-say-so&quot;&gt;a previous question&lt;/a&gt;, ellipsis&#xA;denotes a very restricted kind of abbreviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T10:09:17.263" Title="Is the use of abbreviation and ellipsis as codified as the basic syntax of a language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11041" CreationDate="2015-01-10T02:21:17.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, Altaic is a controversial grouping of languages at best. So take claims about them with a grain of salt, though it may be useful to view them as a language area. But it still doesn't clear up what we're talking about. So-called &quot;Micro-Altaic&quot; (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages)? Or &quot;Macro-Altaic&quot; (Micro-Altaic plus Korean and Japanese)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish (a Turkic language) and Mangghuer (a Mongolic language) both have indefinite articles, but they look nothing like one another. The Turkish indefinite article is &lt;em&gt;bir&lt;/em&gt;, while the Mangghuer indefinite article is &lt;em&gt;ge&lt;/em&gt;. The origin of the Turkic form is fairly clear: it's just the number one, a meaning it retains in modern Turkish. The origin of the Mangghuer is debated, but is likely also from 'one', which is Mangghuer &lt;em&gt;nige&lt;/em&gt; (Slater 2003: 312). Not even people who claim Altaic is a valid grouping claim Turkic &lt;em&gt;bir&lt;/em&gt; and Mongolic &lt;em&gt;nige&lt;/em&gt; are related words, so the innovation must have come after the languages split up, if they even were a singular grouping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These articles do indeed function like other indefinite articles. There are some fine grained differences, but that's to be expected across languages. A lot of work has been done on what is called differential object marking (DOM) in Turkish, where an object can optionally take the accusative case marker &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; for a specific meaning when compared to an object that does not take the accusative case marker. Compare the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ali bir kitabı aldı.&lt;/em&gt; 'Ali bought a certain book.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ali bir kitab aldı.&lt;/em&gt; 'Ali bought a book.' (examples from Enç 1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are tons of similarities (English and Turkish indefinite articles both from a word originally meaning 'one'), but differences (Germanic languages except some varieties of Afrikaans don't have DOM but do have articles, Turkish has DOM which interacts with its articles, Japanese has DOM but does not have articles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T07:12:51.023" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T07:12:51.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-10T06:09:52.250" Score="2" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in Laos studying Lao on my own and came across the fact that different sources have slightly different words for &quot;stairs&quot; and the SEAlang Lao dictionary has even more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ກະໃດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 15 Google results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ກະໄດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 7,400 Google results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ຂັ້ນໃດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 36 Google results, in an old Lao to English phrasebook found on my guesthouse bookshelf&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ຂັ້ນໄດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 75 Google results, in current Lonely Planet Lao Phrasebook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ຄັນໃດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 8 Google results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ບັນໄດ&lt;/strong&gt; - 50 Google results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the last one, they all seem like they could plausibly share an etymology as a borrowing from a language with different phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second syllable / morpheme the two variants &lt;strong&gt;ໃດ&lt;/strong&gt; dài and &lt;strong&gt;ໄດ&lt;/strong&gt; dài have the same vowel quality, length, and tone. Lao shares with Thai the quirk of having two letters for the same /ai/ vowel sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first syllable / morpheme there are three possibilities, all beginning with a velar stop and with a short /a/ vowel: &lt;strong&gt;ກະ&lt;/strong&gt; ká, &lt;strong&gt;ຂັ້ນ&lt;/strong&gt; kʰȁn, &lt;strong&gt;ຄັນ&lt;/strong&gt; kʰán.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are both voiced velars and unvoiced unaspirated velars and in the latter case both the high class and low class consonant letters may be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the syllable / morpheme may or may not end in a nasal. Either way it will be a &quot;live&quot; syllable as far as tone rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting tones of both syllables end up having multiple possibilities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;กระได&lt;/strong&gt; (kraˈday) and &lt;strong&gt;บันได&lt;/strong&gt; (banˈday) seem to be the only possible Thai cognates. The second uses a first syllable / morpheme compatible with our last Lao word, which is not similar to the others so we didn't analyse further. But the first does seem sufficiently similar to all our other Lao words. Could they all be related? From whence do they originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T03:53:17.467" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T08:10:32.550" Title="Etymological reason behind Lao's many seeming variants for &quot;stairs&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-01-11T13:37:59.750" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The brain synthesizes everything and as the brain is so linked to our language, it ends up trying to synthesize your writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Globalization call us on to have a united language and a united writing to improve the relations between cultures. it will save money, effort and time in communications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more important now than ever due that machines will synthesize our language in the near future and the premise of human independence to machines will be paramount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we use Latin letters why do not use the Latin correlations replacing &quot;sh&quot; and &quot;ch&quot; by &quot;x&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The farthest a language is to the latin correlation the biggest the changes it will suffer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wrote english correlatively to latin it would be something like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ui rout inglix korrelativeli to latin it uud bi samzing laik dis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(shorter)&#xA;it sounds the same but it is written in other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7960" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T13:37:59.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4606" CreationDate="2015-01-11T15:58:50.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copper being one of the earliest metals known to humans (it's the main component of bronze), I should rather think that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they are indeed related, there must be a simpler link related to smithery — and, by extension, artifice. We still talk of &lt;em&gt;forgeries&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-01-11T15:58:50.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8608" CreationDate="2015-01-12T00:15:33.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat new to NLP, so if someone else has a more complete answer, please go ahead and clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I believe is going on here is that the 2-gram (and 3-gram etc.) probabilities are actually conditional probabilities, while the 1-gram probabilities are unconditional probabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your example, the probability of &lt;code&gt;sick&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;10^-4.48&lt;/code&gt; = 0.00003311, or a 1 in 30200 chance of occurring. On the other hand, the probability of &lt;code&gt;sick&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;given that &lt;code&gt;feel&lt;/code&gt; precedes it&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;10^-2.6995&lt;/code&gt; = 0.00199, or a 1 in 500 chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;code&gt;P(sick)&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;10^-4.48&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;P(sick|feel)&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;10^-2.6995&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T00:15:33.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11051" CreationDate="2015-01-12T00:58:28.923" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;For adjectives in Farsi (Persian), do they have Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective خوب (Khoob, meaning good), does it have different forms, like in French or Russian? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, all help is appreciated :D! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7966" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T06:28:49.033" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T10:12:24.540" Title="Do Persian Adjectives have Masc. Fem. and Neuter forms" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11050" CreationDate="2015-01-12T01:04:51.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Farsi has no grammatical gender, its nouns are not divided into Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter, neither are its adjectives. Farsi even has no distinction between 'he' and 'she', both of them are the same, /u/ او.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T01:04:51.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11032" CreationDate="2015-01-12T09:34:00.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since English does have terms jointly referring to certain couples of relatives, e.g., &lt;em&gt;parents&lt;/em&gt; (of x), &lt;em&gt;grandparents&lt;/em&gt; (of x), it could be claimed that the absence of a term jointly referring to 'an uncle of x and his wife' is a &lt;strong&gt;'lexical gap'&lt;/strong&gt; in English. That is the only technical term I am aware of to describe phenomena SIMILAR to the one you are interested in. However, that claim might also easily be challenged. For example, it could be argued that, in the English kinship system, terms jointly referring to couples of relatives of x exist (let's say) only when &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; members of the couple are related to x by relations of the same kind (say a blood relationship, rather than a in-law one). Both parents of x, and the four grandparents of x are related to x by (1st/2nd degree) consanguinity, but in the case of the couple formed by an uncle of x and his wife (or an aunt of x and her husband), that condition is not satisfied, and, as a consequence, in English, there would arguably be no reason to expect a single term jointly referring to an uncle of x and his wife. Spanish, of course, would simply be different from English at this point, say in that such a difference between blood and in-law relationships does not prevent the existence of terms jointly referring to such couples as those constituted by an uncle/cousin/nephew... of x and their wives (or an aunt/niece... of x and their husbands, or whatever civil or de facto relationship might be relevant). [That's just an idea that occurs to me by way of illustration; I have not really looked in depth at the kinship terminology of either English or Spanish]. To really determine all the factors that count in this respect, one would have to check how other kinship and non-kinship terms (e.g., &quot;friends&quot;, &quot;neighbours&quot;,...) behave. Of course, as soon as you started comparing the lexicons of many different languages and attempted to define a sort of 'panlinguistic lexicon' (a multidimensional logical space allowing for all lexical items possible in all languages), such apparent or real 'lexical gaps' would proliferate enormously, and you would have to decide what and what not you want to consider a 'lexical gap'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T19:20:12.630" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T19:20:12.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10012" CreationDate="2015-01-12T10:27:06.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned I could not find any sources stating how to determine the subject in an ergative language. Since nobody else could provide them, I will go with what I already reverse-engineered out of existing grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Dyirbal is said to be OSV. When looking at an example it also is PAV. Hence S = A, making my example OVS/SOV. (Same argument can also be made e.g. for Basque SOV =&gt; APV.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I will go forward with that, even though it is rather dissatisfactory, since it makes the concept of subject ill-defined in general and difficult to apply to ergative languages, since it is effectively defined as &quot;whatever is considered the subject in English&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntax has no bearing on subjecthood: in nominative languages the agent of a simple transitive verb can omitted, whereas it is the patient in ergative languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;confusing behaviour with intransitives: in ergative languages we have the intransitive subject marked like the transitive patient, yet we still call the transitive agent the subject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semantics has no bearing on subjecthood: in English the patient can be promoted to subject by passive construction (whereas the antipassive construction of ergative languages has no effect on subjecthood).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;morphology has no bearing on subjecthood: in ergative languages the transitive subject is marked whereas in nominative languages it is unmarked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would much prefer to say that the subject is what is understood to co-refer if omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntactically the subject would remain constant: in both ergative and nominative languages the subject could be omitted, but in the former it would be the patient and in the latter it would be the agent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consistent behaviour with intransitives: in ergative languages we have the intransitive subject marked like the transitive patient, and would indeed call the transitive patient the subject.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semantics has no bearing on subjecthood, but antipassive in ergative languages would just like the passive in nominative languages delete the subject and promote the object - the difference being that the subject was patient in the former and agent in the latter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;morphology would tend to correlate with subjecthood: both in ergative and nominative languages the subject of transitive verbs with default alignment would be the least marked case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as mentioned that does not seem the usual use, so I have to make do with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T10:27:06.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9184" CreationDate="2015-01-12T11:28:13.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Reichenbach's scheme of eventuality, reference point and speech point, the &quot;future of the future&quot; describes where the eventuality is after the reference point, which is after the speech point (S - R - E). This &quot;posterior future&quot; makes the referred event the &quot;act of preparation&quot; rather than the act or event itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=jHUewtzUVbcC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA10&amp;amp;dq=%22abiturus+ero%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;classic example&lt;/a&gt; is the Latin &lt;em&gt;abiturus ero&lt;/em&gt;, which in English is (idiomatically) translated as &quot;I shall be one of those who will leave&quot;. I've also seen the translation &quot;I shall be going to leave&quot;, which is a little more compact but feels a lot less natural. In some English grammar textbooks this is named the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lx7UAniLfJwC&amp;amp;pg=PA230&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;future prospective&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but I agree that this (currently!) looks and feels like a purpose clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen statements that the &quot;future of the future&quot; or &quot;posterior future&quot; is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SDfbz8wpKGIC&amp;amp;pg=PA10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not attested in natural languages&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. I personally think it's just hard to disentangle them from other semantic colourings, much as all future tense-based forms are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kannada reportedly has an auxiliary verb construction with +posterior and +future, and the third person neuter form is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cTNFyNZXkTcC&amp;amp;pg=PA24&amp;amp;dq=%22Posterior%20future%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apparently quite frequent&lt;/a&gt;. But it has an obligatory force to its meaning: &lt;em&gt;one needs to go&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T11:28:13.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10021" CreationDate="2015-01-12T14:14:02.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such statistics don't get much more accurate than those you can see on Wikipedia. And assuming that the rate of growth of a language will remain constant is incorrect: what such statistics tell you is only whether a language once was or currently is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;world language&lt;/a&gt; but do not allow you to predict which one will be next. Whether a language becomes a world language depends on many political, economic and social factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: if someone asked your question in the 15th century, they would have guessed Spanish, Portugese, Chinese or Arabic as the coming world language, but never English - yet what followed was the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;British Empire&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;History of &quot;World languages&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence I suggest you start by reading some history books instead to determine what factors are relevant. (Since the question &quot;how does something become a world language?&quot; has much in common with &quot;how do empires arise?&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Guns, Germs and Steel&lt;/a&gt;&quot; should prove relevant). You will note some things like e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin was spoken in the provinces of the Roman Empire, but had not much currency beyond what Rome controlled by military or influenced economically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages change over time in different directions, hence over the centuries the Latin of Rome became the Romance Languages (yet only when the orthography of Latin was &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;standardized&lt;/a&gt; did people start to realize that they speak a different language). Similarly, Chinese is a collection of languages (or dialects, depending on whom you ask) held together by the writing system. First traces of this you can also see with English (ever tried to call a support hotline outsourced to India?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German lost its status of &quot;language of science&quot; to English as consequence of World War 2 (there always are and were publications in other languages, though e.g. Americans usually ignored publications in Russian not just during the cold war but also before and after).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin lost its status as &quot;the language of Christianity&quot; to the vernaculars in a development starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reformation&lt;/a&gt; and ending with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Second Vatican Council&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French replaced Latin as language of diplomacy in Europe when France was powerful. With the rise of the British Empire, English became more prominent. With the dissolution of the British Empire after World War 2, British English was replaced by American English - an apparent continuity of language only because American English had not yet enough time to diverge from British English, hence the differences are not as readily apparent as it were between French and Latin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The European language has the languages of all its members as official languages and English, German and French as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union#Working_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;working languages&lt;/a&gt;: if the UK exits the EU then English may or may not be dropped, but the relations of Germany and France are such that both German and French will for the foreseeable future both remain working languages: so multi-language environments (driven by the concerns of the speakers of each language) do occur.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Factors determining the coming &quot;World language&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this one can conclude that a language becoming and remaining a world language is mainly characterized by the power of their speaker community, either military (enforcing their language over conquered lands) or economically (if you're everyone's primary trading partner then you can demand them to speak your language). How many people learn a language is only their bet on the prominence of the language (effectively a kind of stock market where people invest in languages they think might become important), but not actually the cause of the language's significance: after all, you want to predict the future world language, not the current one. Instead, one could look e.g. at the following parameters (though as mentioned you should read some history and determine which parameter was relevant in what way): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget#Historic_expenditure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Military power&lt;/a&gt;: while economic colonialism has mostly replaced military colonialism, military spending still determines how well one can support their position with violence (e.g. &quot;speak my language&quot;) or at least how easily they might get wiped out of the race for world language.&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Currently, the United States still spend far more on military than the rest of the world combined, yet China is catching up (and India, too, though with an even larger gap).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian military spending is aimed at recapturing its old empire in eastern Europe, hence not geared particularly at being a world language (though whoever Russia is not at war with has better chances to become world language).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The military of Saudi Arabia will not be a strong boost to Arabic since once the oil runs out they can neither buy more weapons nor fuel their old ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;France, Germany, Italy etc. are members of the NATO which mainly operates in English (though techincally French is also official language). Even if the USA were to suffer a significant collapse, none of them on their own is strong enough to create their own empire and force their own language on it - even if they did it together, it would most likely be the same pattern of languages as in the European Union.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japan and South Korea military spending is because they are very scared of North Korea and China, not because they would be interested in an empire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_GDP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Economic power&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the European Union is economically significant, it can be neglected for the purposes of a world language since it has not a single language but many of them, and at least German and French are in a deadlock with each other, neither willing to force their own language on the other nor to give up the status of their own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The United States are still economically significant and might continue for some time (whether their economic system is sufficiently sustainable or not is a discussion for another StackExchange).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;China's economic strength is slowly surpassing that of the United States, still is growing quite quickly and also has much growth potential. Consider, for example, that China is investing much in Africa to get the raw materials it needs to produce the goods it sells to the West. I think (but do not know) they are likely still speaking English (and French) there, but this is bound to change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;India is still far behind: in principle it has potential like China, but has not (yet) been as successful in using it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South America is not just not very strong economically, they also have little leverage to improve: all they produce (bananas, coffee, oil, ores, ...) you can get elsewhere (e.g. Africa, Russia, Southeast Asia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_religion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Religion&lt;/a&gt; is (like language) usually not a factor of itself (spread by military means is more likely), but let's still look at it:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_population_growth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Christianity&lt;/a&gt; has a lower population growth (both in term of natives and in terms of converts) than &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Islam&lt;/a&gt;. But the native population growth decreases faster in muslims (native population growth being mostly determined by availability of contraceptives). However, the effect from the rate of conversion is rather minuscle compared to other factors (like economics).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other religions do not have conversion rates anywhere close to that. Natural growth of population is indicative of nothing (except availability of contraceptives) - this goes not just for religion, but also for language (since children born into an environment take on the traditions of that environment, both religion and language).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;number of speakers&lt;/a&gt; does not matter, since as already mentioned it is a trace of languages that once were significant, but no indicator of how significant they are going to be:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese is mostly restricted to China, and (the growth of) the number of speakers alone gives no indication how much potential remains (and how much of it actually is outside rather than inside China).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of English speakers is because it is the current world language (technically the current and the one before: first the British Empire, now the USA).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of Spanish speakers is because it was a former world language (when Spain had its own empire - the same applies to France, though in a smaller degree).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi, like Chinese, is mostly restricted to the Indian subcontinent since India was never a colonializing power but rather the victim of it (and thus speaking rather English than Hindi in outside interactions).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of Arabic speakers is due to Islamic conquest. This was a phase which began at the beginning of Islam and pretty much ended with the dissolution of the Osmanic Empire after World War 1. Since then, expansion of Islam is mainly through conversion and immigration, yet this fails to spread Arabic as language, for while it still is the language of the Quran, people usually keep or adopt the language of the country they live in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in the case of a war between the USA and Russia I would be quite confident that (if we aren't all blown to nuclear dust) China will fill the military and economic vacuum and thus Chinese become the next world language. A sufficiently severe economic crisis might also effect this, but more likely it will be a process that takes a few centuries - enough for others to improve enough to pose a challenge to China. Most likely this would be India - though they might just continue speaking English with foreigners rather than demanding Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it has been suggested (can't find source) that with improvements in &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;machine translation&lt;/a&gt; a common language will cease to be necessary: one can simply write (or speak) in their own language, and the others will be able to read (or hear) it in their own language. Hence the most likely scenario is that English over the next few centuries will cease to be the world language, but be replaced by nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Postscript&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I'd point out that the mental associations are not the thing itself: just because everyone loves their mother doesn't make the word &quot;mother&quot; a beautiful word. Similarly, just because they do not agree with American politics doesn't mean that there is any problem with English: indeed, a characteristic of a world language is that for most people the association between the language and the politics of the original speakers of the language is broken. I'm just guessing that they're taking issue with American politics rather than the English language itself, for as I noted most people cannot tell the difference between a word and its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are many features of English that one might find less than appealing. For example, English pronunciation is notoriously complicated (&quot;spelling bees&quot; are a concept alien to most other languages where not imported from American culture). In fact, even though English uses an alphabet it should be more properly called a logography (similarly to Chinese). But this is no hindrance to a world language, but rather a shared feature: pronunciations differ (consider that foreign speakers have always difficulties getting the accent &quot;right&quot;), but the writing is the same (consider that foreign speakers tend to have better orthography than native speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="6926" LastEditDate="2015-01-12T14:20:48.140" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T14:20:48.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11043" CreationDate="2015-01-12T15:27:33.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; is neither abbreviation nor ellipsis of &lt;code&gt;together with&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;together with&lt;/code&gt; is a paraphrase of &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; permits certain forms of ellipsis - &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patterns of ellipsis that have been observed in natural languages &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;can be found on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/with&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;With&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is not an abbreviation of &lt;code&gt;together with&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist two closely related constructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;instrumental&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;he hit it with a hammer&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comitative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;comitative&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;he travelled with her&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/52&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;like about a quarter of languages&lt;/a&gt;, renders both the same, namely with &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt;. However, the &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; can in both cases be paraphrased in different ways: for the instrumental one could say e.g. &lt;code&gt;he hit it using a hammer&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;he hit it by using a hammer&lt;/code&gt;/..., and for the comitative one could say e.g. &lt;code&gt;he travelled together with her&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;he travelled in company with her&lt;/code&gt;/...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say that you choose a longer expression to clarify what you meant. For example, you could ask &lt;code&gt;what was that thing called he travelled with?&lt;/code&gt; and that would apply to both a suitcase (something that accompanies you) and a train (which you use for travel). But if you ask &lt;code&gt;what was that thing called he used to travel by?&lt;/code&gt; it would be clear that the train was meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since there are several possibilities of paraphrasing, you cannot legetimately say that the word itself is an abbreviation. That may not seem obvious with comitative &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;together with&lt;/code&gt;, but how exactly is instrumental &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; an abbreviation of &lt;code&gt;using&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. Where &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ellipsis&lt;/a&gt; actually happens here&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can of course say any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head and        wings.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head and it had wings.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what ellipsis actually does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,  you can't interpret the &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; part as having something omitted because nothing has been omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head with        a golden underbelly.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head with it had a golden underbelly.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; says that that what comes after it plays the same role as what came before it, so the rest can be omitted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; says that what comes after it is a closer description of what comes before it - compare how the preposition &lt;code&gt;by&lt;/code&gt; can be used with instrumental meaning (e.g. &lt;code&gt;he came by bicycle.&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Your example is grammatical, but it doesn't mean what you think it means&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it would be grammatical to say any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head and wings and a golden underside.&lt;/code&gt; (what you intend to say)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;It was a bird with a black head and wings and a golden underbelly.&lt;/code&gt; (hence &lt;code&gt;with&lt;/code&gt; begins the enumeration)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;It was a bird. It had a black head and wings with a golden underside.&lt;/code&gt; (except then of course the underside of the wings and not the belly would be golden)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;code&gt;...wings with a golden underbelly&lt;/code&gt; would usually be interpreted as meaning that the wings had a belly - that is grammatically correct, but semantically strange, so the listener asks himself &quot;did he mean &lt;code&gt;and a golden underbelly&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;with a golden underside&lt;/code&gt;?&quot;, guesses one and goes with that. That is: you have created a grammatically correct utterance which does not convey semantically what you desire to convey, hence the listener has to guess whether you made a grammatical error that happened to yield something grammatically correct or whether you made a lexical error (choosing the wrong word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-12T15:27:33.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9834" CreationDate="2015-01-13T01:07:00.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another hurdle to a 1-to-1 correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in a language has to do with language change and the fact that written language is more resistant to change than spoken language (and writing systems are even more reluctant to change), in general. In fact, you'll often find that languages that come the closest to having such a system are usually either dead, or have developed a written form fairly recently, or their written form is purposefully made to reflect the sounds rather than made to be standardized and preserved (for instance, languages like Lushootseed)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of an argument, imagine that there's a language that just had its 1-to-1 grapheme to phoneme correspondence writing system finalized (and commemorated the occasion by releasing a dictionary, some spellers, learning materials for students, etc.). Individuals become literate, books are written, maybe some political documents are composed. Language changes, and the sound system of a language changes over time as well. If you were to examine this newly written language some number of centuries in the future, you will almost certainly find that the sound pattern has indeed changed, but that the writing system most likely hasn't kept up. As the language continues to change, you will probably see that the graphemes and phonemes are falling out of sync. Maybe some new phonology emerges (for example, devoicing in certain environments like word-finally). Chances are, this will not be reflected in the written language if it's been sufficiently standardized at some point. You might also see evidence of an effort to keep the spelling and pronunciation in a 1-to-1 correspondence, but the effort wasn't 100% successful, resulting even in more disparity. So, as the writing system matures, it tends to diverge from the sounds of the language it's meant to represent. At this point in the history of humanity, we have a lot of languages with written systems old enough to have done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't even necessarily an inconvenience. For example, you consider the noun &quot;sign&quot; and the noun &quot;signal&quot;. &quot;sign&quot; appears to have that obnoxious trait where &quot;ign&quot; is pronounced in an unintuitive way as &quot;ayn&quot; whereas &quot;signal&quot; looks much nicer, its &quot;ign&quot; sounds like it's spelled. These things aren't nice when you're learning a language, but the inconvenient differences in spelling preserve evidence of an etymological relationship between the two. It would have been more difficult to figure out such a relationship between e.g. &quot;sayn&quot; and &quot;signal&quot; if the spelling and pronunciation kept in lockstep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, the value of the knowledge that &quot;sign&quot; is related to &quot;signal&quot; can be questioned, and whether the ability to construct a picture of these connections is worth the difficulty in spelling/reading can be debated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3399" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T01:07:00.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10021" CreationDate="2015-01-13T01:29:09.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems &lt;em&gt;qualitative&lt;/em&gt; requirements of such a World Language have still not been mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Other qualifications:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (as yet) failed Esperanto shows that pure rationality is not the sole issue. (I am both Esperantist and anglophile.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simplicity and effort&lt;/strong&gt; needed to acquire the language. Esperanto can be learnt by small children, the elderly and mentally handicapped with &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; and correct expressiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this is also an economic factor (6 months learning i.o. 6 years). I have never seen statistics that this helped spread the language. The only practical effect seems that Esperanto is quite addictive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quality&lt;/strong&gt; of used language. The foreign English I encounter is - though adequate -. certainly not as rich as native or Esperanto conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Impetus&lt;/strong&gt;, the language having been spread, and being &lt;strong&gt;en vogue&lt;/strong&gt;. This favours English in large parts of the world. It is however astonishing that French had the same characteristics. So it seems easily to be overcome, when history takes another course, as it did for the French supremacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though English is a bit on the decline statistically, it is so &quot;supreme&quot; that an irrational use of English already in the (say German) kindergarten is something sought-after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also English has a large base in science and culture. Especially science will be hard to replace.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neutrality&lt;/strong&gt;, a typical argument of Esperanto, and very debatable, as it means that no financial power and no culture, like the USA, are driving it. It may however trigger a historic decline of English, say in Russia, arabic Asia and China.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Candidates:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What still gives me hope for some form of English is that there does not seem to be acceptable candidate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian in science exists, but Russian no longer is more than a lingua franca in the former USSR.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese needs too much acquisition effort (I guess), since the Latinisation attempt in the prior century was aborted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic would be a nice candidate as it has political power behind it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malaysian or similar languages (Bahasa Indonesia), an amalgamate of them, would be feasible too, if that region became more dominant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish has little imperial effort behind it. Its only spread seems to be immigration in Northern America. Maybe if there were some impulse like UN support of Interlingua.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(It goes without say, that I personally still see some viral power in Esperanto. It would at least cost least effort, go fast and provide quality. A nice light-weight &lt;strong&gt;second&lt;/strong&gt; language.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scenario of the near future:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish US speakers become a majority in the US,&lt;/strong&gt; because of reverse populations drifts: ageing of the English speaking, and poorer Spanish child rich families.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spanish language gets a &lt;strong&gt;regulatory organization&lt;/strong&gt;, founded in the US, covering both Americas and Spain. Spanish gets pushed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spanish becomes &lt;strong&gt;the scientific language in the Americas&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Europe gets a heavier Spanish influence&lt;/strong&gt;. Spanish becomes &lt;em&gt;en vogue&lt;/em&gt;. Loan words, music and television.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spanish has money behind it, but &lt;strong&gt;the South American countries&lt;/strong&gt; ensure its &lt;strong&gt;political neutrality&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish spreads over the world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For this scenario to happen, something drastic has to happen in China. Maybe some reform. As China is a major driving power in the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt the future will take this course. Considering the parallels with the decline of French, and the smaller world, English will dominate for another 20 - 30 years. World resources are draining in absolute numbers. So it may well be a world crisis turns over our international culture in another direction. Hopefully not Basic English with reformed spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastEditorUserId="1611" LastEditDate="2015-01-13T01:34:13.313" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T01:34:13.313" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10020" CreationDate="2015-01-13T09:02:30.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not aware of disputes regarding the classification of predicative possession, so I wouldn't say it's &quot;just&quot; Stassen. Note, though, that his book (like the name says) is primarily concerned with predicative possession and not as much with other forms of possession. For example, &quot;that car is mine&quot; is a predicative expression that expresses possession, but &quot;you crashed my car&quot; is not predicative, while still containing a possessive. Furthermore there are other features of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;possession&lt;/a&gt; that are independent of whether possession is predicative, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;obligatory possession&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/59&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;possessive classes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The answer uses &quot;value of parameter&quot; and &quot;type&quot; exchangably (you can see &quot;type&quot; mentioned below the list). &quot;value of parameter&quot; follows the usage of WALS (the answer linked the map, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/117&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here's the chapter text&lt;/a&gt;) which follows general linguistic usage (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_parameters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;presumably originating here&lt;/a&gt;) where a parameter is a specific construction which can take different forms (= values) in different languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't have any particular reference ready. I often see &lt;em&gt;&quot;Possession: Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization.&quot; by Heine, Bernd (1997), ISBN 978-0-521-02413-6&lt;/em&gt; referenced, but I haven't read it, so I cannot tell you whether it would help you. Maybe go to a nearby university with a linguistics department and ask in the library for what they do have on possession?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T09:02:30.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2015-01-13T09:31:43.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mean like giving it a list of adjectives and it prints them in correct order (or anything logically equivalent)? I'm quite certain that none of them has such a functionality. Furthermore I neither know nor could I find one where the adjectives are annotated with this classification. So the idea of asking it of which class those adjectives are and then doing the ordering yourself won't work, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it should be able to tell you in what order adjectives appear within the corpus. From this you could write your own module which could determine the correct order by asking the corpus which order occurs more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though note that not all adjective combinations will actually appear in corpus and direct combinations will also not be sufficient to make a call. So given adjectives A and B you'll have to ask not just for whether A-B or B-A but also whether there is a chain of adjectives X, ..., Z (1-6 of them) such that A-X X-...-Z Z-B or B-X X- ... -Z Z-A to transitively determine order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T09:31:43.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11026" CreationDate="2015-01-13T10:39:29.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that you have not given a source or at least an explanation how you got to this and the snippet you gave is tiny makes the question virtually impossible to answer - if an answer actually exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can demonstrate that it is highly likely that no answer exists (though the short length of the example makes this argument not as thorough and certain as it could be with a longer example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word boundaries and repetitions of glyphs indicate that this is not simply a listing of the letters of the &quot;alphabet&quot; but is supposed to be a valid sentence of the language. Hence I will continue to treat it as something supposed to be a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The repetition count of individual glyphs does not obey &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zipf's law&lt;/a&gt;: for example, in English &amp;lt;e&gt; is the most common letter, and even e.g. an &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alphasyllabary&lt;/a&gt; has a similar distribution on their glyphs. Of course, just like one can come up with English sentences without &amp;lt;e&gt;, this is also possible in other languages: in a short example the distribution may be quite far off, but this is beyond what is statistically likely even for this length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The glyphs are not as distinctive as expected from an actual language: writing is torn between ease of writing (as few strokes as possible) and ease of comprehension (as clear as possible) - while both discourages overly complex characters, ease of writing demands a lower complexity than ease of comprehension would like to see. While we see some more complex glyphs at the end, distinctiveness is not actually given. Contrast, for example, how the Latin alphabet has e.g. &amp;lt;A O L K S W&gt; or Devanagari has &amp;lt;अ एी पॆ ऌ ऋॎ&gt;. Similarly, I don't think it could be a shorthand system (like e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) since those are usually far more distinctive and far easier to write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The distribution of individual glyphs across the word is unrealistic: the glyphs of the last three &quot;words&quot; are completely different from the rest. Specificially they have significantly more complex glyphs than the rest. A similar distribution in the Latin alphabet would be &quot;dbcea sop likx wrtz&quot;: one can certainly come up with an English language sentence with such a pattern, but it's going to be hard. Or maybe you have given us two examples in one image, not one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The overbar in e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari&lt;/a&gt; serves to mark words as a prosodic unit (compare how English uses spaces for that). The distribution of word lengths usually obeys Zipf's law, which is not the case here, so as marker of word boundary it would be weird. If the line were an integral part of the characters (which the style of writing seems to indicate - note how e.g. the second &quot;word&quot; consists only of broken bars) a different distribution of characters without overbar would be likely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a commenter mentioned, sloppy writing might be imaginable - but I don't consider it likely due to the above characteristics. As per 3, even sloppy writing will first cut down on complex characters rather than on essential information. As per 5, the overbar would be lost before the part below it. Compare how when you write sloppy English you would fail to dot your i's and cross your t's. If the example here were sloppy writing, it would like writing only the dots of &amp;lt;i&gt; and crosses of &amp;lt;t&gt; in English and omitting all the rest (which, actually, would distinguish &amp;lt;t&gt; and &amp;lt;l&gt; better).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence it is highly likely that this is actually no language at all and even if it were it is virtually certain that your snippet is not actually a sensible sentence. Even if it were the equivalent of &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, a different pattern would be expected - even moreso for legetimate sentences of a language. Contrast the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voynich manuscript&lt;/a&gt; which has all the characteristics of real writing - except nobody can read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way: there aren't just alphabets (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari&lt;/a&gt;, the writing system that most likely inspired this, is an alphasyllabary) and writing system does not equal language (since one language may have several writing systems and a writing system can be used in multiple languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="6926" LastEditDate="2015-01-15T08:40:31.893" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T08:40:31.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:13:01.920" Score="8" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swadesh_lists&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (as another commenter already mentioned): 168 languages or language families.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/search.php?query=swadesh%20collection:rosettaproject&quot;&gt;Internet Archive: Rosetta Project: Swadesh Lists&lt;/a&gt;: 1234 languages - the most extensive I know of (unless you wish to go and dig through primary literature).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=new100&quot;&gt;Swadesh Lists for some less well-known languages&lt;/a&gt;: ca. 290 languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be only the raw lists, so if you want a searchable database you'll have to copy them together from those sources yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T11:13:01.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3769" CreationDate="2015-01-13T11:55:21.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the first question as to what methodology can be used to determine whether a set of pronouns are third-person personal pronouns or anaphoric demonstratives,  Cerberus' is right saying that they are demonstrative pronouns if you can also use then adjectivally, i.e. modifying a noun, which is normally not possible with true personal pronouns - though as he also said that difference is quite fuzzy, hence why the third person pronouns were able to develop from demonstratives: according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/43&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;, more than half of languages got their third person pronouns from demonstratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your second question, whether it is common for languages to allow you to use demonstratives both as pronouns and adjectives, as in English, or is that more of an anomaly: according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;, about 70% of languages permit demonstratives to be used both pronominally and adnominally. Hence it's not at all unusual, yet not universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addendum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your question in the comment to this answer: since there are two factors (demonstrativeness and personality) to be tested for, there exist four cases depending on the result for either test:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English &quot;he&quot;:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a demonstrative pronoun because *&quot;I saw him boy&quot; (adjectival use) is not acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is a personal pronoun because &quot;I saw him&quot; (pronominal use) is acecptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English &quot;that&quot; (and 70% of other languages):&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is a demonstrative pronoun because &quot;I saw that boy&quot; is acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is a personal pronoun because &quot;I saw that&quot; is acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equivalent of &quot;that&quot; in 30% languages (other than English):&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is a demonstrative pronoun because &quot;I saw that boy&quot; is acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a personal pronoun because *&quot;I saw that&quot; is not acceptable in those languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English &quot;car&quot;:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a demonstrative pronoun because *&quot;I saw car boy&quot; is not acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a personal pronoun because *&quot;I saw car&quot; (the point is that it is supposed to be pronominal, not that the article is missing) is not acceptable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="6926" LastEditDate="2015-01-17T20:47:19.953" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T20:47:19.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9510" CreationDate="2015-01-13T16:24:39.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of those areas in which the IPA (and its use by transcribers) gets a bit messy. The IPA transcription of an utterance is generally meant to be the phonetic representation of that utterance (leaving aside &quot;phonemic transcriptions&quot;, which usually borrow symbols from the IPA set out of convenience), but very often the assumed phonology for the language at hand is projected onto the phonetic transcription. This tendency is seen, for example, when a transcriber provides a &quot;broad&quot; phonetic transcription that abstracts away from the aspirated/unaspirated contrast because the language in question does not have a phonological aspiration contrast. The IPA even provides a set of diacritics for phonological phenomena like stress and tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;em&gt;syllable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;syllabicity&lt;/em&gt; are generally phonological constructs.&lt;/strong&gt; Please see this related post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8418/is-syllable-a-phonetic-or-a-phonological-concept&quot;&gt;Is syllable a phonetic or a phonological concept?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @jlawler points out in his comment there, there are some phonetic (articulatory) models that include a phonetic notion of a &quot;syllable&quot;, but more often than not, when a transcription includes information about syllabicity and syllable boundaries, the transcriber is imposing her assumptions about the phonology of the language on the transcription. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the syllabic trill aside for a moment, let's think about a (presumably) more familiar example. &lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between [u] and [w]? Well, it depends on the language. What about in English? In many cases, there is no difference, articulatorily or acoustically speaking.&lt;/strong&gt; In spectrograms, the two can look identical, depending on the context, and the tongue and lips can be positioned in the same place for both sounds. So why are they given different symbols and different names (&lt;em&gt;vowel&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;approximant&lt;/em&gt;)? Because in the phonology of English (and of French, which, together with English, formed the basis for much of the IPA), this sound can function as a vowel (i.e. the nucleus of a syllable) or as a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, whether a sound in question is transcribed as [u] or as [w] does not give you any absolute information about how it is articulated. However, because of some well-known, generally agreed-upon principles, such as the tendency for sounds transcribed as vowels to be longer in duration than there approximant counterparts, given the same rate of speech, &lt;strong&gt;it does give you some information in &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; terms--much in the same way that stress marks or tone marks convey information about the syllables with which they are associated relative to other syllables.&lt;/strong&gt; And when [u] and [w] appear in the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; syllable, like in the English word &lt;em&gt;woo&lt;/em&gt;, as a phonetician I know to expect the vocal tract to start more constricted in the [w] than it ends up in the [u] (resulting in higher F1 and F2 in the [u] than in the [w]), and for the duration and intensity of the [u] to be greater than those of the [w]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circling back to the syllabic alveolar trill and the (non-syllabic) alveolar trill, this pair of sounds in the relevant Indian languages is analogous to the [u] and the [w] in English. The &quot;syllabic&quot; version of the sound is used in transcriptions when the transcriber assumes it to be functioning as a syllable nucleus, and the &quot;non-syllabic&quot; version is used in other cases. As other responders have noted, &lt;strong&gt;there is nothing fundamentally different about how the two sounds are articulated, except in relative terms in some contexts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-01-13T16:24:39.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10011" CreationDate="2015-01-14T15:55:12.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with TruthOf42 that your best bet is to learn a local sign language. I see at least two good reasons for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is practical. You will more easily find a course on a local sign language than you will on International Sign Language. Also, unless you want to attend international deaf events, knowing a local language will allow you to communicate with the people in your corner of the world. And although two sign languages might be as distinct (or as similar) as two spoken languages, knowing one will bring you a long way in being able to communicate with people who don't natively speak the specific language that you will be learning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one relies on the observation that much like Esperanto, (almost) nobody speaks international sign natively. This means that although you might find material to learn it, you will not have a native speaker teacher. You might also find that since international sign is a devised language, its grammar might be less developed and might not obey constraints that shape natural language grammars. That is, you will not in fact be learning a language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to which local sign language you should start learning, that depends on where you live! In my experience, I have found that the Deaf people around me in France knew some ASL although they were native in Italian or French sign language. But, if you live in the UK, for instance, it might be more meaningful to learn British Sign Language. This is because BSL and ASL are not historically related and mutually intelligibile as LSF and ASL are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7975" LastEditorUserId="7975" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T03:48:10.000" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T03:48:10.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2015-01-14T16:44:47.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not considered one lexeme. The aspect is just an inherent feature of Polish (Slavic) verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old Polish, the situation was more complicated as most verbs, e.g., wiedzieć, had two simple past tense forms: aorist (wiedziech - perfective) and imperfect (wiedzieach - imperfective). This is how the aspect emerged in Slavic languages but the system was later reorganized, prefixes began to be used to express aspect etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-14T16:44:47.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2015-01-14T17:14:58.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principle of Economy of Expression applies to the general principle of how c-structures are built. In your example the I' node comes from I' -&gt; (I) VP, i.e., this rule is required to create a well-formed f-structure of a sentence that may contain an auxiliary (as in Joan has written...). The same rules are applied to analyze both sentences and the f-structures are identical except for the value of the TENSE attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-14T17:14:58.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2015-01-14T18:33:33.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found can be used both as an adjective and as a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjective Usage: The cherries found in the forest were poisonous.&#xA;In this case, found serves as an adjective qualifying the cherries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb Usage:&#xA;I found a pen hidden beneath the table.&#xA;Here, found works as verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7977" LastActivityDate="2015-01-14T18:33:33.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8787" CreationDate="2015-01-15T00:02:13.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;NLP toolkits generally come with plenty of background material you could read through in addition to the toolkits themselves. You'll usually find research papers and discussions that go along with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=fZmj5UNK8AQC&amp;amp;q=speech%20and%20language%20processing%202nd%20edition&amp;amp;dq=speech%20and%20language%20processing%202nd%20edition&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=OAG3VOzCKuPdmAWT74LADw&amp;amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; might be a good book for you to consider if you are still needing some theory. It offers a good basic introduction to linguistics if you don't have much of a background in that. I think it's pretty standard reading in introductory computational linguistics classes. However, it might still be too theoretical if what you want to do is basically learn how and when to use specific tools or very specific approaches. In this case, start with resources like NLTK, OpenNLP, MALLET, etc. and go from there, read the accompanying materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3399" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T00:02:13.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10029" CreationDate="2015-01-15T00:40:03.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you actually need to come up with the properties for your adjectives, or is the goal to determine whether some order is valid (and properties are just a way of making that determination)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal is to simply say that e.g. &quot;metal round huge bowl&quot; is incorrect, then you can skip the tagging of your adjectives for their properties entirely and go straight to the task of determining whether some combination of adjectives is in a good order. This would be a fairly common NLP task, deciding if some order of words is good or not (this is very vague on purpose since there are many, many approaches to this problem). You should be able to do this with something like NLTK and planning. For example, you could try using a parser and limit your training data to adjective phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to go beyond saying &quot;good&quot;/&quot;bad&quot; for some adjective combination and have each adjective tagged with one of its properties, it's a more involved task. Perhaps you could leverage something like a POS tagger, or something that performs a similar function. In your situation, you have some tags (opinion, size, age, shape, color, etc.) and some words that occur in some order. You'll need to provide some heuristics like &quot;opinion before size, size before age&quot; and start tagging the adjectives in your adjective phrases. Just as a very basic idea. Presumably, if the tags are correct and if the order of properties does hold true in the vast majority of cases, you'll end up with the ability to construct grammatical adjective phrases and make determinations about grammaticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem you're going to run into is your training data. Not sure if something already exists out there that contains these property judgments regarding different adjectives (something to search for!). You'll need a corpus that contains a lot of adjectives and enough adjective phrases with multiple adjectives that you'd be able to derive the property and/or build a model for ordering them. Adjective phrases with multiple adjectives may be common in fiction, but they are far less common in e.g. Wall Street Journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3399" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T00:40:03.460" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T03:22:55.427" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thai and Lao each have three series of stops, unvoiced unaspirated, aspirated, and voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For labials and alveolars, all three exist, but for velars there is no voiced stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the case for all Tai languages? For all Tai-Kadai languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T03:22:55.427" Title="Are there Tai languages (or Tai-Kadai) which have a voiced velar stop phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T07:24:45.170" Score="3" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for language characteristics only found in one single language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Maybe that could shed some lights on language development, since that could be a starting point to investegate why these characteristics are special. And further on, why / why not this characteristic would spread.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any language characteristics you believe is found in one language only, is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language characteristics are unique to only one language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2015-01-15T09:11:28.610" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T17:33:42.990" Title="Language characteristics only found in one language" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2015-01-15T09:43:01.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to find features attested in only one language, you could browse &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;. For example, when &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/81A_99A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;combining word order with alignment&lt;/a&gt;, there are many combinations that appear only once. However, restricting yourself to features that occur in exactly one language is unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A feature being documented in only one language means neither that there are no undocumented or possible languages that share this feature. Hence one doesn't look at a feature occuring in only exactly one language but rather whether there are significantly more/less languages with the feature than without.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the subject comes in most languages before the verb&lt;/a&gt;, whereas &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the object equally appears on either side&lt;/a&gt;. The fact that SV is far more common than VS is already significant, even though there is more than one language showing VS order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much discussion about why SV is more common. It is assumed that some linguistic structures are easier for the human brain to produce or parse. Hence structures that are easier on the human brain would preferentially be innovated by languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the extant languages are not a statistically representative sample: many features we observe might also be because the communities of some language families out-bred and out-conquered other language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while there are quite a few ergative languages in the world (especially clustering in Australia), &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt; is an ergative language isolate in Europe (WALS tells you about geographical distribution, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While linguistic features are usually innovated within a language and then handed down to its descendants (unless they replace it by their own change), occasionally there's also borrowing through language contact - though that is mostly lexicon and far less grammar or phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence when making conclusions you must be careful whether the featural distribution is through extralinguistic happenstance, due to being repeatedly innovated because it's easier to produce, due to language contact or due to any other kind of factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't already, I recommend reading some books relevant to this topic, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Language Universals and Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt; by Bernard Comrie or &lt;em&gt;Typology and Universals&lt;/em&gt; by William Croft or some books on historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T09:43:01.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9778" CreationDate="2015-01-15T10:04:40.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll go out on a limb and say no, there aren't any such studies. You've already asked for &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11037/database-of-swadesh-lists&quot;&gt;a list of Swadesh lists&lt;/a&gt; here, so presumably you're going to make that analysis yourself on those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The uselessness of Swadesh Lists&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the question how much use Swadesh lists would be for that. Swadesh lists are claimed to be a measure of genetic relatedness of languages since the words on that list supposedly are slow to change and rarely borrowed. If you intend to use word lists, better use the whole dictionary instead: the greater number of words means that your result is more statistically reliable. It doesn't matter that you don't have the same words for each language, since you'd give the number of vowels as percentage of the sounds of the whole lexicon or something, which makes it comparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the lexicon would contain both common and rare words - by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zipf's law&lt;/a&gt; mostly the latter, so that might skew things. However, the Swadesh list is not the list of the most common words but has, as mentioned, a different purpose. So for a realistic appreciation of sound distribution I recommend you get a corpus of each language: that would be representative of actual speech and thus be a better data source for what you intend to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The relevance of syllable structure&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard anyone saying &quot;that language is only incomprehensible vowels&quot;. Any examples about which languages that was said of? Though generally people latch onto some characteristic they believe to perceive when in fact it is not as prominent as it would appear - there presumably exist studies on that, but you'd have to ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;on this stack exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we knew what language you spoke of, then one could shape a hypothesis that could be otherwise tested. I consider it likely that &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllable structure&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/12A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;map&lt;/a&gt;) is relevant: e.g. Hawai'ian has a simple syllable structure, Japanese a moderate and English a complex one. Languages with a simple (or moderate) structure presumably sound more vowel-heavy - especially to languages with complex syllable structures like English which allows syllables like &lt;em&gt;strengths&lt;/em&gt; (CCCVCCC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:18.467" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T10:04:40.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T10:53:20.440" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of at least two morphemes in lao which are nominalizers that can convert lexical verbs or adjectives into nouns: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%BA%81%E0%BA%B2%E0%BA%99#Lao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ການ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%BA%84%E0%BA%A7%E0%BA%B2%E0%BA%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ຄວາມ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is whether there are any counterparts which serve the complementary function, that of converting lexical nouns into verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T10:53:20.440" Title="Does Lao (or Thai) have any &quot;verbalizer&quot; morphemes?" Tags="&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;lao&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T14:43:52.663" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;First time asking. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests, I wanted to know the difference between the two names for the &lt;em&gt;Persian Empire&lt;/em&gt; in Latin. (I'm not even sure if both are used...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried asking other people before coming here, but I never got a clear answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7980" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T05:04:24.703" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T05:04:24.703" Title="The Difference between &quot;Imperium Persarum&quot; and &quot;Persarum Imperium&quot;" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-01-15T17:39:17.310" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11079" CreationDate="2015-01-15T16:29:45.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only stylistic difference. Attributes in Latin can precede or follow the head noun so both are well-formed and have the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T16:29:45.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11075" CreationDate="2015-01-15T17:33:42.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are asking whether there are any features which in principle could only exist in a single language, there would be no such thing. OTOH if you are asking whether there are properties that have only been observed in a single language (living or dead), there are such things. For example, Nyole is the only language known to have the phonological rule ŋ → p / N ___. Chori is the only language with 6 contrastive surface tone levels. Dahalo is the only language with both clicks and pharyngeals (or epiglottals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, by the way, that a WALS feature list is about the sampled languages. As it happens, that source identifies Maxakali as the only language with no fricatives of nasals, which seems to be correct since the other cluster of languages (Lushootseed, Twana, Makah, Quillayute) with no nasals has plenty of fricatives. It lists Lango as the only language with single exponence of TAM, agreement and &quot;construct' (presence of an NP argument) -- it doesn't list Acholi, since Acholi is not part of the sample for this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-15T17:33:42.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-15T18:48:29.097" Score="5" ViewCount="3989" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a way to computationally find any actionable clauses within a body of text. Ideally there is a library I could use that I just give a body of text and it spits out the actions that it finds. Next best, would be if there is an algorithm described somewhere that does this which I could try to implement. I don't know much about NLP, but here is what I've found/thought/tried so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most actions occur in imperative sentences, so detecting whether a sentence is imperative or not could help. I'm not sure how best to detect this, but one idea that was given to me was to use the Stanford parser and look for any instances of &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;. If none are found, then this would be considered an action. Just from some testing I did with some sample sentences, I found that some sentences that I consider actions contain instances of &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;. Are there more rules I could possibly add to this to improve the precision? I also have no clue how this will fare in terms of recall rate either. Are there any other completely different approaches you could recommend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some example sentences that I would like to detect as actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Please pass on the enclosed instructions to your teams who are interested.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example, it finds &lt;code&gt;nsubj(interested-12, who-10)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Can you prepare a Powerpoint presentation for 3pm today?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example, it finds &lt;code&gt;nsubj(prepare-3, you-2)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Remember to pick up some milk at the store.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't contain &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7982" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T12:09:34.510" Title="Detecting actions within text" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11083" CreationDate="2015-01-16T00:55:58.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that what you're looking at is a task that resembles intent determination. I would peruse some literature on that topic. For instance, it might be good to approach this as a classification task for verb phrases (is the verb phrase an action item or not?). It seems to me that the heuristic, parser-based approach has some problems and the solution is definitely not as trivial as looking for &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;. You've already found some problematic cases, and there are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason your &quot;action&quot; sentence &quot;&lt;em&gt;Please pass on the enclosed instructions to your teams who are interested&lt;/em&gt;&quot; contains an &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt; is that it contains a subordinate clause, the relative clause indicated by &quot;&lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In the case of the example, if you treat the clauses separately, you'll find that you do indeed have an action item in the clause that doesn't contain &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Please pass on the enclosed instructions to your teams] who are interested.&#xA;(Action item exists in the selected clause)&#xA;&#xA;Please pass on the enclosed instructions to your [teams who are interested].&#xA;(Action item doesn't exist in the selected clause)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that a more problematic case would concern e.g. modals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I should eat a sandwich&#xA;I think you should eat a sandwich&#xA;Please pass on the enclosed instructions to your teams who must attend the meeting.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that each of these three examples contains the action phrases you're trying to find (and in case of the third sentence, it could contain two such phrases). Each meets your criteria for being a &quot;To do&quot; list type of item. However, each of them contains &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the Stanford parser gives you an &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt; in this case of what might look like a definite action item:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Do an assignment&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get &lt;code&gt;nsubj(do-1, assignment-3)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3399" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T00:55:58.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-16T06:45:05.160" Score="5" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just recently learned about the distinction between paucal and plural forms in my native Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Designating groups of counted nouns as smaller or larger than five adds complexity to the language without seemingly giving much in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This level of precision may seem exciting to a speaker of a language that distinguishes between the single and plural forms only, but in practical use I don't see much value in knowing whether there are two to four instances of something or five to infinity instances of the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the practical societal context that originated the paucal form? Where does the seemingly arbitrary limit of four come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7984" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T01:32:34.203" Title="What is the origin of the paucal form?" Tags="&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;&lt;paucal&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-16T08:51:40.257" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to build thesaurus by simply analyzing lots of text, or it's obligatory should be handmade?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also a question:&lt;/em&gt; is there free-to-download&amp;amp;use English language thesaurus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T21:22:53.867" Title="Is it possible to build thesaurus automatically?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-14T20:25:22.833" Score="11" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many Germanic and Romance languages, the perfect tense is formed with the verb 'to have' or 'to be' plus a past participle.  It's easy to find explanations [&quot;I have an arrow (which is) made (by me)&quot; --&gt; &quot;I have made an arrow&quot;] but how did the same construction become so widespread over two branches of I.E.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5650" OwnerDisplayName="David Garner" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T14:59:54.843" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T14:59:54.843" Title="How did the same perfect-tense structure become so widespread in Europe?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11085" CreationDate="2015-01-16T09:51:29.690" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess that endings of &quot;paucal forms&quot; are nothing but a word meaning a few reduced to a morphem whose origin is no longer clear. In English you express the same idea not with a suffix but with expressions placed before the noun such as &quot;a couple of, few/a few&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I assume the same is true for so-called dual forms referring to two things. One may assume that dual morphems have their origin in a word for two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T09:51:29.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11085" CreationDate="2015-01-16T13:35:14.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is not unique to Serbo-Croatian. It can be observed also in Arabic, where you have (for example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;singular: šahr = one month&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dual: šahrān = two months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;plural of paucity: ʼašhur = 3 to 10 months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;plural of multitude: šuhūr = more than 10 months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dual suffix –ān is proto-Semitic. It does not derive from the word “two”, but the word “two” is morphologically dual (e.g. Arabic iϑn-ān). The two plural forms are not formed by adding any word to the singular but follow the rules for nominal derivation from a three-consonant root (in this case š-h-r). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always in linguistics, none of this has any logical “reason”. Language has its own logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T13:35:14.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-16T13:51:54.173" Score="7" ViewCount="1912" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of a resource (web-based or in print) providing a comprehensive list of minimal pairs in Turkish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7986" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T10:00:23.623" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T10:00:23.623" Title="List of minimal pairs in Turkish" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11085" CreationDate="2015-01-16T13:58:58.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all about agreement so it's not a &quot;real&quot; paucal. All Slavic languages have it but it's most conspicuous in BCS and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BCS: Dva mlada čoveka (su došl&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: Dva molodych čeloveka (prišli)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czech: Dva mladí lidé (přišli) / pět mladých lidí (přišlo) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, different numerals require different cases but there's still only singular and plural as far as grammatical gender is concerned. In a formal grammar the rules that define agreement in NPs with numerals would use case and gender with two values (singular/plural). In BCS, for 2-4 the noun form is genitive singular and for 5+ it's genitive plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T04:46:34.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T04:46:34.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2015-01-16T15:11:21.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This construction comes from Latin in the language families you mention but it's not unique to Germanic and Romance languages. This kind of perfect is fully grammaticalized in some Macedonian dialects (Macedonian is a Slavic language), e.g. &lt;em&gt;ima bideno&lt;/em&gt; &quot;has been&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ima imano&lt;/em&gt; &quot;has had&quot;, etc. There's also a similar construction in Northwest Russian which expresses possession with a PP and has an analogous perfect tense, cf. &lt;em&gt;u menja dom&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have a house&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;u menja vse sdelano&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have done everything&quot;. In the Lithuanian (i.e., Baltic) dialects of Belarus there's an identical construction: Possession is expressed with the adessive case and so is the agent in a structurally identical perfect. Since neither Russian nor Lithuanian were influenced by Latin there seems to be a general tendency to this kind of grammaticalization as far as the perfect tense is concerned, the other being the be-perfect (e.g., &lt;em&gt;ich bin gegangen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I went&quot; in German). In fact it occurs in many languages but in most of them it's not fully grammaticalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T15:11:21.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-16T13:59:56.417" Score="0" ViewCount="3148" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is that can one say that a Language or a Dialect is grammatically incorrect? What if I say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is grammatically incorrect modern Hindi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't make sense. We cannot compare a language/dialect with some other language/dialect. I am asking this question because in some other posts some users have claimed the same. I object their claim. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/46743/3448&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; states that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's terrible (incorrect) English. But here ain't means didn't. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling a dialect, terrible, is it's disrespect. We can't say that AAVE is incorrect English. It's similar to say &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doabi_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doabi&lt;/a&gt; is incorrect Punjabi. The problem seem to be the fact that &lt;em&gt;ain't&lt;/em&gt; has a lot of different meanings which depend upon the context. There is nothing wrong with it. There are many words in a language which can have multiple meanings, e.g. the word &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;. Google translator says it has three different meanings. The most odd one to me is &lt;code&gt;for=because&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Is that answer technically correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user claimed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/46871/3448&quot;&gt;their post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If it ain't broke, don't fix it&quot; is not grammatically correct modern English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again they are comparing an idiom of AAVE with standard English. Not only that, an idiomatic expression can never be grammatical incorrect--IMO, e.g. consider the idiomatic expression &quot;&lt;em&gt;I, for one&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Is this idiom grammatically incorrect?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt; What is grammar and which constructions of a particular language, say e.g. English, are called incorrect grammar?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can make some grammatical incorrect statements,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am been...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppose, I am...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I does this...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We keeps done the works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not buy it yet.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say something is grammatically incorrect if we break the rules of the language in which we are speaking by using a set of words in a way which have never been used that way while communicating. If we can communicate well with each other with some idiomatic expression, which is used repetitively, which contain words in a way which are not used that way in other sentences, then I would say it is grammatical correct. I'd even say that there is a new rule in that language which is used in some specific idiomatic expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, grammar is made from a language. A language is not formed from grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we compare languages/dialects to decide which is better? Specifically, Can we say that AAVE is inferior than some other dialect of English, if yes then please provide examples with justification, where AAVE is inferior than some other dialect of English and vice-verca if formal English is inferior than AAVE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand Hindi, Punjabi, spoken Urdu and little bit standard English, could you compare any of these languages and tell which is the best or most superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7987" OwnerDisplayName="user31782" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T11:23:19.700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T12:52:05.973" Title="How can a Language or a Dialect be incorrect or inferior than some other one?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11093" CreationDate="2015-01-16T15:01:25.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've gotten into this debate as a side issue on this forum before, so let me take this opportunity to address it directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we would all agree that, unlike many other subjects, language is defined by consensus and not by some objective reality. What I mean by that is, suppose that everyone in the world agreed that the Earth is flat. Would that make it flat? No. We can perform objective experiments to prove that it is round. When we are talking about science or history, it is very reasonable to say, &quot;I have discovered Everyone is wrong, and the right answer is something else.&quot; But when it comes to language, suppose that I said, &quot;When people say that 'me' refers to the person speaking, they are wrong. 'Me' means 'the tallest person in the room'.&quot; Well, I am simply wrong. If everyone agrees that a word has a certain meaning, than that's what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say that that's the end of the story. Definitions, grammar, all are defined purely and entirely by the consensus of the people who speak and write the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others say that this is part of the story, but that it is also meaningful to say that, even though usage X is more common than usage Y, Y is &quot;better&quot; for some reason. Perhaps it is more consistent with other usages, or Y is clear while X creates an ambiguity, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it's good and fair to say, for example, that we should resist changing the definition of a word because there is already a word with the new meaning but no good alternative with the old meaning. For example, many people today object to the use of the word &quot;he&quot; to refer generically to either males or females as sexist, and so instead use &quot;they&quot; as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown or unspecified gender. Personally I think this is a bad idea, because it loses the distinction between singular and plural, and so makes the language less robust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or to take the example you give of the word &quot;ain't&quot;: &quot;ain't&quot; has half a dozen meanings: &quot;am not&quot;, &quot;are not&quot;, &quot;is not&quot;, &quot;were not&quot;, etc. We already have perfectly good words for all of these (except &quot;am not&quot;). So why create a new, ambiguous word? It's a change in a direction that makes the language less clear. I think it should be resisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be concerned about the idea of denigrating the dialect spoken by some minority of the population. On that point, I think, from the point of view of someone who wants equal recognition of his dialect, the situation is hopeless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some minority -- oh, I should clarify that by &quot;minority&quot; here I don't mean an ethnic or racial minority, but a linguistic minority. This MIGHT coincide with an ethnic minority and it might not. But anyway, if a minority speak in a slang that violates the grammar rules used by the majority, then whether you define language purely by usage, or you define it by logic, either way their language will be seen as inferior. It is different from the majority, and in language majority rules, so they lose. If their grammar is less consistent and well-formed, then by logic they lose. (If some minority group had a slang that had a more well-formed and consistent grammar, the case might be ambiguous. But I've never heard of slang being more regulated than formal speech. Conceivable, but not likely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a statement like, &quot;Sanskrit is just grammatically incorrect Hindi&quot;, well, that sounds like a joke. If someone said that seriously, meaning that Sanskrit is an inferior language because it resembles Hindi but does not follow the same grammar rules, that doesn't sound like a serious argument. I don't know either language and I don't know the history of the languages, so there might be a serious comment somewhere in there about the origin and development of Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8007" OwnerDisplayName="Jay" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T15:01:25.750" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2015-01-16T18:37:10.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using &quot;to have&quot; to show perfect is a key feature of the European sprachbund. It's happened &lt;em&gt;repeatedly&lt;/em&gt; in European languages. For instance in Latin, than later with a new word for &quot;to have&quot; in descendant languages when the last round of suffixes have become worn down to invisibility. It's a &quot;language hailing from Europe&quot; quirk, and I think &quot;sprachbund&quot; is explanation enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't call it widespread though: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/68A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/68A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T18:37:10.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11086" CreationDate="2015-01-16T19:20:45.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head there's WordNet (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Online interface&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/download/current-version/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Download&lt;/a&gt;), which is also used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got no idea how you'd go about making a thesaurus without human intervention. Maybe if you had a thesaurus in language A and a machine translation program trained to translate between language A and language B, it is conceivable that you could use that to get a thesaurus for language B (though of doubtful quality, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T19:20:45.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:05:30.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You were absolutely right to choose option c), and, in my view, should impugn the decision of whoever may have declared b) the right option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is a passive past participle &lt;strong&gt;of the verb&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; and, therefore, categorially speaking, it is itself a 'verb'. It is true that some participles have &lt;strong&gt;homonymous&lt;/strong&gt; adjectives (e.g., &lt;em&gt;interested, interesting&lt;/em&gt;), but &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; one of them, and, even if it were, when followed by an adjective (&lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt;, here) it &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be anything but a 'verb'; in such [ ...__A...] contexts, &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; cannot be an adjective at all. [I asume you are interested only in the first token of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;, the one in bold face, and what follows applies only to that instance of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;, but, as a matter of fact, the second &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; of your sentence is also a passive past participle, and, again, 'verbal', not adjectival].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proof is simple; it rests on just two solid facts: a) in this construction, the adjective &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt; must, in its turn, be analysed as a 'secondary predicate', an 'attribute', a 'complement' or a 'post-modifier' depending on the head &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; (there have been different analyses of the &quot;find x Adjective&quot; construction), and b) in English, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; adjective is allowed to take &lt;strong&gt;another adjective&lt;/strong&gt; as its 'secondary predicate', 'attribute', 'complement' or post-modifying 'adjunct' (which of those functions is attributed to the second adjective does not matter for current purposes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you are skeptical about the latter claim, let me explain it a bit: of course, in English two adjectives may form a single syntactic constituent, as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pale blue&lt;/strong&gt; (shirt)&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;pale&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; jointly constitute a single adjectival modifier of &lt;em&gt;shirt&lt;/em&gt;, but in such cases it is &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt; adjective that modifies the second, never the other way round (i.e., inside the [A+A] constituent &lt;em&gt;pale blue&lt;/em&gt;, it is &lt;em&gt;pale&lt;/em&gt; that modifies &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt;, not viceversa; that's why &lt;em&gt;pale blue&lt;/em&gt; is a kind of blue, instead of a kind of pale-ness). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, English also allows sequences of &lt;strong&gt;mutually independent&lt;/strong&gt; pre-nominal adjectives, as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;big round blue&lt;/strong&gt; eyes&lt;/em&gt; (where multiple standard constituency tests show that &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;round&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; do not constitute a unitary syntactic constituent), but, in such cases, by definition, none of the adjectives can act as a complement or adjunct (etc.) of any other; they are just different syntactic constituents each separately modifying either &lt;em&gt;eyes&lt;/em&gt; (under a 'flat' 'Davidsonian' analysis of modification), or a 'nominal phrase' headed by &lt;em&gt;eyes&lt;/em&gt; (under a binary branching 'Fregean' one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectival phrases formed by two adjectives such that the &lt;strong&gt;second&lt;/strong&gt; adjective is a 'dependent' (whether a 'complement' or an 'adjunct' is inmaterial for present purposes) of the first one are simply impossible in English (although normal in Spanish and other Romance languages, obviously), and yet that is exactly what we would have to say if &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; were analysed as an adjective in the example under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, although 'participles' (and not only passive past ones, active present ones, too) were so called in traditional grammar precisely because they seemed to 'participate' of verbal and adjectival properties (in particular, they could occur in __ N or N __ contexts where the __ slots were typically occupied by adjectives), they are always, and above all, the participial forms &lt;strong&gt;of verbs&lt;/strong&gt;, and so never lose their verbal character. In the case of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;, to stick to the example we are discussing, that verbal nature is manifested by its capacity to take as a complement the same adjectival secondary predicate that the corresponding finite base verb &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; takes in &lt;em&gt;The boys found the whale dead&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; capacity of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; to take &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt; as its 'dependent' (&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; its also being followed by a place adverbial!) that proves crucial to establish its verbal, and therefore non-adjectival, nature. I insist on this because, although Tim Osborne has said above that &quot;The verbal quality of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is also visible in the fact that true adjectives can &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;[emphasis mine] be modified by adjuncts such as &lt;em&gt;on the southern Spanish coast&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;lt;...&gt;&quot;, that statement is, simply, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; true. On the contrary, many unquestionable adjectives &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be modified by place (and, of course, time) adjuncts (cf. &lt;em&gt;That was a kind of whale (extremely) &lt;strong&gt;rare/common/frequent/abundant/valuable/dangerous/aggressive&lt;/strong&gt;....on the southern Spanish coast/a generation ago/until recently&lt;/em&gt;). As a consequence, the fact that &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is followed in our example by a place adjunct does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; by itself suffice to establish its verbal nature, as many adjectives can also be followed by comparable place (or time) adverbials. And, again &lt;em&gt;pace&lt;/em&gt; Tim Osborne, neither is the post-nominal position of &lt;em&gt;found ... coast&lt;/em&gt; an argument for the 'verbal' (here = non-adjectival) status of &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt;, because adjectives may take complements (and modifiers) of their own, and whenever they do, they &lt;strong&gt;must be post-nominal&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. &lt;em&gt;A student of mine keen on cryptography told me that&lt;/em&gt; ..., vs. *A keen on cryptography student of mine told me that...). What does supply the crucial proof that in this case &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; is a 'verb' (in participial form, but still a verb) is the fact that it is followed &lt;strong&gt;by a dependent adjective&lt;/strong&gt;, a construction that would be ungrammatical if &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; were itself an adjective, as already explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-17T08:38:33.783" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T08:38:33.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:05:35.677" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having problems drawing the trees for the following sentence. I'm interested in both the pre and post movement trees for this ambiguous sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lisa wondered when Bart said she saw Nelson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can help me I would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7988" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T20:05:35.677" Title="Wh embedded question ambiguous trees" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-01-16T21:32:56.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11090" CreationDate="2015-01-16T20:43:29.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't appear to be such a list, hence I made you one based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://zemberek.googlecode.com/files/full.txt.tr.tar.gz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this word list&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;i o &#xA;aç iç öç uç üç &#xA;ad od öd &#xA;af of öf uf &#xA;ağ eğ iğ &#xA;ah eh ıh oh &#xA;ak ek ok &#xA;al el il ol öl &#xA;an en in on ön un ün &#xA;ar er ör ur &#xA;as es is ıs us üs &#xA;aş eş iş üş &#xA;at et it ot öt ut üt &#xA;av ev iv ov öv &#xA;ay ey oy uy &#xA;az ez iz öz uz üz &#xA;be de he le ne re ve ye &#xA;bu hu mu su şu &#xA;da fa ha la na ta ya &#xA;em im om um &#xA;hı mı &#xA;ip öp &#xA;ki mi pi si ti &#xA;mü nü &#xA;aç ad af ağ ah ak al an ar as aş at av ay az &#xA;be bu &#xA;da de do &#xA;eğ eh ek el em en er es eş et ev ey ez &#xA;ha he hı hu &#xA;iç iğ il im in ip is iş it iv iz &#xA;ıh ıs &#xA;la le &#xA;mi mı mu mü &#xA;na ne nü &#xA;öç öd öf öl ön öp ör öt öv öz &#xA;od of oh ok ol om on ot ov oy &#xA;si su &#xA;ta ti &#xA;uç uf um un ur us ut uy uz &#xA;üç ün üs üş üt üz &#xA;ya ye &#xA;aba oba &#xA;aça uça &#xA;ada eda oda uda &#xA;adi idi udi &#xA;aha ıha oha &#xA;ahi ehi &#xA;ahı ıhı &#xA;ahu ohu &#xA;ait bit çit dit fit git kit mit yit &#xA;aka ika oka &#xA;aks iks &#xA;ala ela ila ola ula &#xA;ali eli ili pli &#xA;alı ılı &#xA;ama ima oma uma &#xA;ana ona una &#xA;ani eni ini &#xA;ara ıra ora ura &#xA;ark erk irk ırk örk ürk &#xA;art ört &#xA;arz ırz &#xA;asa ısa usa &#xA;asi esi isi &#xA;ası ısı &#xA;aşı ışı &#xA;ast üst &#xA;ata ita ota uta &#xA;ate ete ite öte üte &#xA;ati eti iti &#xA;aut but dut fut gut kut put sut şut tut yut &#xA;ava ova &#xA;aya oya uya &#xA;aza eza uza &#xA;baç haç kaç maç saç taç zaç &#xA;bağ cağ çağ dağ sağ yağ zağ &#xA;bak çak fak gak hak kak lak pak sak şak tak yak &#xA;bal çal dal fal hal kal lal mal nal pal sal şal tal yal &#xA;bam cam çam dam fam gam ham kam lam nam sam tam yam zam &#xA;ban can çan dan fan han kan lan nan san şan tan yan zan &#xA;bap çap hap kap lap rap sap şap tap yap &#xA;bar car çar dar far gar har kar nar sar tar var yar zar &#xA;baş faş kaş maş şaş taş yaş &#xA;bas has kas mas nas pas tas yas &#xA;bat çat hat kat mat pat sat şat tat vat yat zat &#xA;bav çav dav hav kav lav sav tav &#xA;bay cay çay fay hay kay pay ray say tay vay yay &#xA;baz caz daz faz gaz haz kaz naz saz şaz yaz &#xA;bek çek dek fek kek pek sek şek tek yek &#xA;bel çel del gel jel kel mel sel tel yel &#xA;ben den fen gen hen len men nen ren sen şen ten ven yen zen &#xA;beş deş keş leş peş şeş &#xA;bet cet det jet ket met net ret set şet yet &#xA;bey hey ley mey ney pey rey şey &#xA;bez gez kez sez tez &#xA;biç hiç piç &#xA;bil çil dil fil kil mil pil sil zil &#xA;bin cin din hin kin pin sin tin &#xA;bip cip çip dip kip şip tip &#xA;bir çir gir kir lir mir pir tir zir &#xA;bis çis his mis pis sis &#xA;biz çiz diz giz siz tiz &#xA;boğ doğ loğ yoğ &#xA;bok çok dok fok kok lok sok şok tok yok &#xA;böl çöl döl göl höl &#xA;bol dol fol gol hol kol rol sol tol yol &#xA;bom dom kom rom som şom yom zom &#xA;bön dön fön gön jön sön yön &#xA;bor çor hor kor lor mor sor tor yor zor &#xA;boş coş hoş koş loş &#xA;bot kot not pot rot &#xA;boy doy koy poy soy toy &#xA;boz doz koz poz toz yoz &#xA;bre ere öre üre &#xA;bük dük tük yük &#xA;bul çul dul ful jul kul pul tul &#xA;bum hum kum mum şum yum zum &#xA;bun dun hun sun şun tun yun &#xA;bur dur kur nur sur tur vur &#xA;buy duy huy &#xA;büz cüz düz güz süz yüz &#xA;buz kuz muz ruz tuz &#xA;çeç geç meç seç &#xA;cem dem gem hem kem lem nem rem sem tem vem yem zem &#xA;cep hep kep lep tep &#xA;cer çer der fer ger her ser şer ter ver yer zer &#xA;cif lif sif şif &#xA;çiğ fiğ &#xA;çığ sığ tığ yığ &#xA;cık çık gık hık mık sık şık tık vık yık &#xA;cim çim kim mim nim pim sim tim &#xA;çın kın sın tın &#xA;cır dır fır gır hır kır mır pır sır vır yır &#xA;çiş diş fiş hiş niş piş şiş &#xA;cıs fıs kıs tıs &#xA;çıt kıt pıt zıt &#xA;çiy giy siy &#xA;cız hız kız sız vız &#xA;çök dök gök kök lök sök &#xA;çöm göm &#xA;cop hop kop lop pop rop sop top &#xA;çöp löp &#xA;çör gör kör sör tör &#xA;çöz göz köz söz töz &#xA;cup kup sup &#xA;çüş düş &#xA;def lef şef tef &#xA;değ yeğ &#xA;deh leh &#xA;dev gev sev şev &#xA;dik kik pik sik tik &#xA;dış fış kış &#xA;don fon kon son ton yon &#xA;döv söv &#xA;dua şua &#xA;dün gün nün sün tün yün &#xA;dür gür hür kür pür sür tür &#xA;duş huş kuş muş tuş &#xA;ece öce &#xA;ede ide öde &#xA;eğe iğe &#xA;ege öge &#xA;eke öke &#xA;eki iki ski &#xA;ele ile ole öle &#xA;eme ime &#xA;ene ine öne üne &#xA;epe ipe öpe &#xA;erg org &#xA;eri gri iri &#xA;ese ise &#xA;eşe işe &#xA;eşi işi &#xA;eve ive öve &#xA;eye iye üye &#xA;eyi iyi &#xA;eze ize öze üze &#xA;fes kes pes ses &#xA;fos pos sos tos &#xA;gaf haf laf raf saf &#xA;ged yed &#xA;gıy kıy &#xA;göç pöç &#xA;göt höt &#xA;göy köy &#xA;gül kül tül zül &#xA;güm nüm tüm &#xA;güt jüt küt süt tüt &#xA;hac sac &#xA;had şad yad &#xA;hah kah nah pah sah şah vah &#xA;içe üçe &#xA;ifa ofa ufa &#xA;irs örs &#xA;kıç sıç &#xA;kıh mıh rıh zıh &#xA;kıl yıl &#xA;kıp şıp tıp zıp &#xA;kof pof sof &#xA;kös lös tös &#xA;kov şov &#xA;küf püf tüf &#xA;küp lüp tüp &#xA;kus pus sus &#xA;küs püs süs &#xA;odu udu &#xA;ofu ufu &#xA;olu ulu &#xA;onu unu &#xA;önü ünü &#xA;örü ürü &#xA;osu usu &#xA;oyu uyu &#xA;puf ruf yuf &#xA;ruh şuh tuh yuh &#xA;aba aça ada ağa aha aka ala ama ana ara asa aşa ata ava aya aza &#xA;abi adi afi ahi ali ani asi ati &#xA;abu agu ahu &#xA;acı açı adı ağı ahı akı alı anı arı ası aşı atı avı ayı azı &#xA;aft ait alt ant art ast aut &#xA;alp arp &#xA;ark ask aşk &#xA;baç biç &#xA;bağ boğ &#xA;bak bek bok bük &#xA;bal bel bil bol böl bul &#xA;bam bom bum &#xA;ban ben bin bön bun &#xA;bap bip &#xA;bar bir bor bur &#xA;baş beş boş &#xA;bas bis &#xA;bat bet bit bot but &#xA;bay bey boy buy &#xA;baz bez biz boz buz büz &#xA;çağ çiğ çığ &#xA;çak çek çık çok çök &#xA;çal çel çil çöl çul &#xA;cam cem cim &#xA;çam çim çöm &#xA;can cin &#xA;çan çın &#xA;çap çip çöp &#xA;car cer cır &#xA;çar çer çir çor çör &#xA;çat çit çıt &#xA;çay çiy &#xA;caz cız cüz &#xA;cep cip cop cup &#xA;çiş çüş &#xA;çiz çöz &#xA;dağ değ doğ düğ &#xA;dal del dil dol döl dul &#xA;dam dem dom &#xA;dan den din don dön dun dün &#xA;dar der dır dur dür &#xA;dav dev döv &#xA;daz diz doz düz &#xA;dek dik dok dök dük &#xA;deş diş dış döş duş düş &#xA;det dit dut &#xA;doy duy &#xA;ebe ece ede efe ege eğe ehe eke ele eme ene epe ere ese eşe ete eve eye eze &#xA;eda ela eza &#xA;ehi eki eli eni eri esi eşi eti evi eyi &#xA;fak fek fok &#xA;fal fil fol ful &#xA;fan fen fon fön &#xA;far fer fır &#xA;faş fiş fış &#xA;fes fıs fos &#xA;fit fut &#xA;gak gık gök &#xA;gam gem göm güm &#xA;gar ger gir gır gör gür &#xA;gaz gez giz göz güz &#xA;geç göç güç &#xA;gel gol göl gül &#xA;gen gön gün &#xA;git göt gut güt &#xA;giy gıy göy &#xA;haç hiç &#xA;hak hık &#xA;hal hol höl &#xA;ham hem hım hum &#xA;han hen hin hun &#xA;hap hep hop &#xA;har her hır hor hür &#xA;has his &#xA;hat höt &#xA;hay hey huy &#xA;haz hız &#xA;hiş hoş huş &#xA;içe ide iğe ile ime ine ipe ise işe ite ive iye ize &#xA;içi idi iği iki ili imi ini ipi iri isi işi iti iyi izi &#xA;ifa ika ila ima ita &#xA;ıha ıra ısa &#xA;ıhı ılı ısı ışı &#xA;iks irs &#xA;ilk irk &#xA;jel jul &#xA;jet jüt &#xA;kaç kıç koç &#xA;kah kıh &#xA;kak kek kik kok kök &#xA;kal kel kil kıl kol kul kül &#xA;kam kem kim kom kum &#xA;kan kin kın kon &#xA;kap kep kip kıp kop kup küp &#xA;kar kir kır kor kör kur kür &#xA;kaş keş kış koş kuş &#xA;kas kes kıs kös kus küs &#xA;kat ket kit kıt kot kut küt &#xA;kav kov &#xA;kay kıy koy köy &#xA;kaz kez kız koz köz kuz &#xA;kof küf &#xA;laf lef lif &#xA;lak lok lök &#xA;lam lem &#xA;lan len &#xA;lap lep lop löp lüp &#xA;leş loş &#xA;lir lor &#xA;maç meç &#xA;mal mel mil &#xA;mas mis &#xA;maş muş &#xA;mat met mit &#xA;mim mum &#xA;mir mır mor &#xA;nam nem nim nüm &#xA;nan nen nün &#xA;nar nur &#xA;net not &#xA;oba oda ofa oha oka ola oma ona ora ota ova oya &#xA;öce öde öge öke öle öne öpe öre öte öve öze &#xA;öcü ödü ölü önü örü özü &#xA;odu ofu ohu oku olu omu onu osu otu oyu &#xA;oje ole &#xA;pak pek pik &#xA;pal pil pul &#xA;pas pes pis pos pus püs &#xA;pat pıt pot put &#xA;pay pey poy &#xA;peş piş &#xA;piç pöç &#xA;pir pır pür &#xA;pof pöf puf püf &#xA;raf ruf &#xA;rap rop &#xA;ray rey &#xA;rem rom &#xA;ret rot &#xA;rıh ruh &#xA;saç seç sıç suç &#xA;saf sif sof &#xA;sağ sığ &#xA;şah şuh &#xA;sak sek sik sık sok sök &#xA;şak şek şık şok &#xA;sal sel sil sol &#xA;sam sem sim som &#xA;san sen sin sın son sön sun sün &#xA;şan şen şun &#xA;şap şip şıp &#xA;sap sop sup &#xA;sar ser sır sor sör sur sür &#xA;şaş şeş şiş &#xA;şat şet şut &#xA;sat set sut süt &#xA;sav sev söv &#xA;say siy soy &#xA;saz sez siz sız söz süz &#xA;şef şif &#xA;ses sis sos sus süs &#xA;şev şov &#xA;şom şum &#xA;tak tek tik tık tok tük &#xA;tal tel tol tul tül &#xA;tam tem tim tüm &#xA;tan ten tin tın ton tun tün &#xA;tap tep tip tıp top tüp &#xA;tar ter tir tor tör tur tür &#xA;tas tıs tos tös &#xA;taş tuş &#xA;tat tut tüt &#xA;tay toy tüy &#xA;tef tüf &#xA;tez tiz toz töz tuz &#xA;tığ tuğ &#xA;tuh tüh &#xA;uca uça uda ufa ula uma una ura usa uta uya uza &#xA;üçe üne üre üte üye üze &#xA;ucu udu ufu ulu unu uru usu uyu uzu &#xA;üçü ünü ürü üşü ütü &#xA;var ver vır vur &#xA;yad yed &#xA;yağ yeğ yığ yoğ &#xA;yak yek yık yok yük &#xA;yal yel yıl yol &#xA;yam yem yom yum &#xA;yan yen yon yön yun yün &#xA;yar yer yır yor &#xA;yat yet yit yut &#xA;yaz yoz yüz &#xA;zam zem zom zum &#xA;zan zen &#xA;zar zer zir zor &#xA;zat zıt &#xA;zil zül &#xA;aba abd abi abu &#xA;aça açı &#xA;ada adi adı &#xA;afi aft &#xA;ağa ağı &#xA;aha ahi ahı ahu &#xA;aka akı aks akü &#xA;ala alg ali alı alo alp alt &#xA;ana ani anı ant &#xA;ara arı ark arp arş art arz &#xA;asa asi ası ask ast &#xA;aşa aşı aşk &#xA;ata ate ati atı &#xA;ava avı &#xA;aya ayı ayn &#xA;aza azı &#xA;baç bağ bak bal bam ban bap bar bas baş bat bav bay baz &#xA;bej bek bel ben beş bet bey bez &#xA;biç bil bin bip bir bis bit biz &#xA;boa boğ bok bol bom bor boş bot boy boz &#xA;böl bön &#xA;bük büz &#xA;bul bum bun bur but buy buz &#xA;çağ çak çal çam çan çap çar çat çav çay &#xA;cağ cam can car cay caz &#xA;çeç çek çel çer &#xA;cem cep cer cet &#xA;cif cim cin cip &#xA;çığ çık çın çıt &#xA;çiğ çil çim çip çir çis çiş çit çiy çiz &#xA;cık cır cıs cız &#xA;çök çöl çöm çöp çör çöz &#xA;çok çor &#xA;cop coş &#xA;dağ dal dam dan dar dav daz &#xA;def değ deh dek del dem den der deş det dev &#xA;dik dil din dip diş dit diz &#xA;dır dış &#xA;doğ dok dol dom don doy doz &#xA;dök döl dön döş döv &#xA;dua dul dun duo dur duş dut duy &#xA;düğ dük dün dür düş düz &#xA;eda ede &#xA;ege ego &#xA;ehe ehi &#xA;eke eki &#xA;ela ele eli &#xA;ene eni &#xA;ere erg eri erk &#xA;ese esi &#xA;eşe eşi &#xA;ete eti &#xA;eve evi &#xA;eye eyi &#xA;eza eze &#xA;fak fal fam fan far faş fay faz &#xA;fek fen fer fes &#xA;fiğ fil fiş fit &#xA;fır fıs fış &#xA;fob fok fol fon fos &#xA;ful fut &#xA;gaf gag gak gam gar gaz &#xA;geç ged gel gem gen ger gev gez &#xA;gık gır gıy &#xA;gir git giy giz &#xA;göç gök göl göm gön gör göt göy göz &#xA;güç gül güm gün gür güt güz &#xA;hac haç had haf hah hak hal ham han hap har has hat hav hay haz &#xA;hem hen hep her hey &#xA;hiç hin his hiş &#xA;hık hım hır hız &#xA;hol hop hor hoş &#xA;höl höt &#xA;hum hun huş huy &#xA;içe içi &#xA;ide idi &#xA;iğe iği &#xA;ıha ıhı &#xA;ika iki iks &#xA;ila ile ili ilk &#xA;ima ime imi &#xA;inç ine ini &#xA;ipe ipi &#xA;ıra ırk ırz &#xA;iri irk irs &#xA;ısa ısı &#xA;ise isi &#xA;işe işi &#xA;ita ite iti &#xA;iye iyi &#xA;ize izi &#xA;jel jet &#xA;kaç kah kak kal kam kan kap kar kas kaş kat kav kay kaz &#xA;kek kel kem kep kes keş ket kez &#xA;kıç kıh kıl kın kıp kır kıs kış kıt kıy kız &#xA;kik kil kim kin kip kir kit &#xA;koç kod kof kok kol kom kon kop kor koş kot kov koy koz &#xA;kök kör kös köy köz &#xA;küf kül küp kür küs küt &#xA;kul kum kup kur kus kuş kut kuz &#xA;laf lak lal lam lan lap lav &#xA;lef leh lem len lep leş ley &#xA;lif lig lir &#xA;loğ lok lop lor loş &#xA;lök löp lös &#xA;maç mai mal mas maş mat &#xA;meç mel men met mey &#xA;mıh mık mır &#xA;mil mim mir mis mit &#xA;mum muş muz &#xA;nah nal nam nan nar nas naz &#xA;nem nen net ney &#xA;nim niş &#xA;nüm nün &#xA;öce öcü &#xA;oda odu &#xA;öde ödü &#xA;ofa ofu &#xA;oha ohm ohu &#xA;oka oku &#xA;ola ole olu &#xA;ölç öle ölü &#xA;oma omu &#xA;ona ons onu &#xA;öne önü &#xA;ora org &#xA;öre örf örk örs ört örü &#xA;ota oto otu &#xA;oya oyu &#xA;öze özü &#xA;pah pak pal pas pat pay &#xA;pek pes peş pey &#xA;piç pik pil pim pin pir pis piş &#xA;pır pıt &#xA;pöç pöf &#xA;pof pop pos pot poy poz &#xA;puf pul pus put &#xA;püf pür püs &#xA;raf rap ray &#xA;rem ren ret rey &#xA;rol rom rop rot &#xA;ruf ruh ruj ruz &#xA;sac saç saf sağ sah sak sal sam san sap sar sat sav say saz &#xA;şad şah şak şal şan şap şaş şat şaz &#xA;şeb şef şek şen şer şeş şet şev şey &#xA;seç sek sel sem sen ser ses set sev sez &#xA;sıç sığ sık sın sır sız &#xA;sif sik sil sim sin sis siy siz &#xA;şif şip şiş &#xA;şık şıp &#xA;sof sok sol som son sop sor sos soy &#xA;şok şom şov &#xA;sök sön sör söv söz &#xA;şua şuh şum şun şut &#xA;suç sun sup sur sus sut &#xA;sün sür süs süt süz &#xA;taç tak tal tam tan tap tar tas taş tat tav tay &#xA;tef tek tel tem ten tep ter tez &#xA;tığ tık tın tıp tıs &#xA;tik tim tin tip tir tiz &#xA;tok tol ton top tor tos toy toz &#xA;tör tös töz &#xA;tüf tüh tük tül tüm tün tüp tür tüt tüy &#xA;tuğ tuh tul tun tur tuş tut tuz &#xA;uca ucu &#xA;üçe üçü &#xA;uda udi udu &#xA;ufa ufu &#xA;ula ulu &#xA;una unu &#xA;üne ünü &#xA;ura uru &#xA;üre ürk ürü &#xA;usa usu &#xA;üte ütü &#xA;uya uyu &#xA;uza uzu &#xA;vah var vat vay &#xA;vem ven ver &#xA;vık vır vız &#xA;yad yağ yak yal yam yan yap yar yas yaş yat yay yaz &#xA;yed yeğ yek yel yem yen yer yet &#xA;yığ yık yıl yır &#xA;yit yiv &#xA;yoğ yok yol yom yon yor yoz &#xA;yuf yuh yum yun yut &#xA;yük yün yüz &#xA;zaç zağ zam zan zar zat &#xA;zem zen zer &#xA;zıh zıp zıt &#xA;zil zir &#xA;zom zor &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are only the minimal pairs in words of at most three letters. There are quite a few with four letters and more, but the post would then exceed the maximum length, so I left them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case anyone needs the script I used to make this (e.g. to get the minimal pairs for longer words or to adapt it to a word list of another language):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#!/bin/bash&#xA;&#xA;# word list used (assumed to be unpacked in current directory):&#xA;# http://zemberek.googlecode.com/files/full.txt.tr.tar.gz&#xA;&#xA;# remove those numbers after the words that file has.&#xA;sed 's/ [0-9]*$//' -i~ full.txt.tr&#xA;&#xA;# split the word list into files with equal lengths.&#xA;# e.g. 07.tmp will contain 7-letter-words.&#xA;x=1;&#xA;s='.';&#xA;# wc -L full.txt.tr says there are words at most 33 characters long.&#xA;while [ $x -le 33 ]; do&#xA;    z=$x;&#xA;    if [ $x -lt 10 ]; then&#xA;        z=0$x;&#xA;    fi;&#xA;    grep '^'$s'$' full.txt.tr &amp;gt; $z.txt;s=&quot;$s.&quot;; x=$(($x+1));&#xA;done&#xA;&#xA;# now for each word find the minimal pairs.&#xA;i=1;&#xA;unsorted=`mktemp`;&#xA;while [ $i -lt 34 ]; do&#xA;    echo &quot;Examining words of length: $i&quot;;&#xA;    file=$i;&#xA;    if [ $i -lt 10 ]; then&#xA;        file=0$i;&#xA;    fi;&#xA;    j=1;&#xA;    s='';&#xA;    # in each position within the word there may occur a minimal pair.&#xA;    while [ $j -le $i ]; do&#xA;        outfile=`mktemp`;&#xA;        for word in `cat $file.txt`; do&#xA;            tmpfile=`mktemp`;&#xA;            echo $word &amp;gt; $tmpfile;&#xA;            grep &quot;`echo $word | sed 's/^\('$s'\)./\1./;'`&quot; $file.txt | grep -v &quot;$word&quot; &amp;gt;&amp;gt; $tmpfile;&#xA;            # same group of minimal pairs appears multiple times,&#xA;            # so sort each group so duplicates can be found.&#xA;            for x in `sort $tmpfile`; do echo -n &quot;$x &quot; &amp;gt;&amp;gt; $outfile; done&#xA;            echo &quot;&quot; &amp;gt;&amp;gt; $outfile;&#xA;            rm $tmpfile;&#xA;        done;&#xA;        # remove repetitions of same line of minimal pairs&#xA;        # and lines with only one word (i.e. without minimal pairs).&#xA;        sort -u $outfile | sed '/^[^ ]* $/d' &amp;gt;&amp;gt; $unsorted;&#xA;        rm $outfile;&#xA;        s=$s'.';&#xA;        j=$(($j+1));&#xA;    done;&#xA;    i=$(($i+1));&#xA;done&#xA;sort -u $unsorted &amp;gt; result.txt&#xA;rm $unsorted;&#xA;rm *.tmp;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this script assumes that in the transcription one character corresponds to one phoneme. If that doesn't apply then you need to write your own, I was too lazy to account for that. For the same reason this script runs extremely slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="6926" LastEditDate="2015-01-16T20:52:08.500" LastActivityDate="2015-01-16T20:52:08.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2015-01-17T07:36:05.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a school says &quot;found&quot; in the above sentence is an adjective and only this answer is correct and the answer verb is not correct then I would say the examination board is narrow-minded. That's the least I would say. Sometimes test papers are idiotic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T07:36:05.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11043" CreationDate="2015-01-17T10:09:17.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is rather strange, it mixes rather heterogeneous things, and the example you have chosen to introduce it and help your readers answer it is completely inadequate, for reasons already pointed out in part by user66554. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you really want to know is whether ellipsis is subject to rules as rigid as those that govern the construction of phrases, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by 'abbreviation' you mean the diverse strategies used to reduce the redundance (concerning the phonetic content or the graphic representation) of expressions used &lt;strong&gt;in context&lt;/strong&gt;, that includes at least two kinds of resources, one syntactic, the other not. Syntactic abbreviation resources include coordination, substitution by pro-forms, ellipsis, and the use of sentence fragments (in focus) instead of full sentences, and those &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; also subject to rules and principles as rigid as those that govern the construction of the corresponding unabridged expressions, depend closely on such 'basic' construction rules, and can be formulated with the same degree of accuracy. As to non-syntactic 'abbreviation' devices, e.g., the use of acronyms like &lt;em&gt;NATO, USA, TV&lt;/em&gt; etc., the use &lt;em&gt;telly&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;fridge&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;television&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;refrigerator&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mr.&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;Mister&lt;/em&gt;, etc. (there is enormous variety in this chapter, see e.g. Hans Marchand's &lt;em&gt;English Word Formation&lt;/em&gt;), the answer is that they are also subject to rules that can be accurately formulated, but they are lexical, morphological and/or phonological rules that by their very nature apply less generally than 'basic' syntactic rules because the development of the lexicon is subject to contextual and historical factors that tend to produce irregularities, exceptions, or plain singularities, as is well known. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I said, your example - which is colloquial at best, but not really well formed, either syntactically or semantically, for reason also pointed out by user66554 - is not appropriate as an illustration of almost any of those resources except coordination (with or without ellipsis of &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;wings&lt;/em&gt; depending on the scope assigned to &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt;, which alters the sentence's truth conditions), but that is not what seems to worry you, since you focus the discussion leading to your question on the use of &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, which is deviant, and, anyway, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an instance of 'abbreviation' in any of the senses relevant to this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T10:09:17.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2015-01-17T12:17:40.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of the analytic perfect has been studied in the context of grammaticalization but I'm not sure that any one explanation for the spread of the construction has been agreed (perhaps somebody who knows the literature can elaborate). Most likely, different processes led to the emergence of the construction in different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analytic perfect is also the feature of the Balkan Sprachbund meaning you can find it in Albanian and Greek as well as Romanian (Romance) and Macedonian (Slavic). This lends credence to the sprachbund explanation. The construction spread through areal contact and borrowing rather than through historical descent (although historical descent will have played a role in some cases). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it would still be interesting to speculate as to the mechanism of the spread. Generally people talk about direct borrowing or imperfect learning as the main contact change mechanisms. Direct borrowing is a much harder case to be made with syntactic constructions but when one looks at the languages involved, it would be hard to construct a scenario where imperfect learning could account for the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is simply parallel independent development. One of the features proposed as common to SAE (Standard Average European) was an analytic passive with a copula and a participle. It seems plausible that many languages could develop this type of perfect construction drawing on this features. Perhaps reinforced rather than directly introduced through contact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to note that SAE tense and aspect systems are quite complex both diachronically and synchronically so looking at one form in isolation may not be the right approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-17T12:17:40.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4752" CreationDate="2015-01-17T22:27:52.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: look up &lt;strong&gt;Mahajan's Generalization&lt;/strong&gt; regarding the effect alignment has on constituent order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Survey of Alignment&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to recognize that there are several ways in which a language can be ergative, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language#Syntactic_ergativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;syntactically&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;father returned and _ saw mother&quot;&lt;/em&gt; implies in nominative alignment (e.g. English) that &lt;em&gt;&quot;father saw mother&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but in ergative languages it implies &lt;em&gt;&quot;mother saw father&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language#Approximations_of_ergativity_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in derivational morphology&lt;/a&gt;, compounding etc.: e.g. in English &lt;em&gt;&quot;baby-sit&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the baby is being baby-sitted and not doing the baby-sitting, i.e. the object gets incorporated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pronouns&lt;/a&gt;: in nominative alignment like English we have &lt;em&gt;&quot;he runs&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;I see him&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the intransitive subject is marked like the transitive agent; in ergative languages one would instead have &lt;em&gt;&quot;him runs&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;I see him&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the intransitive subject is marked like the transitive patient.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/98&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nominal morphology&lt;/a&gt;: similar to the pronominal case in that nominative languages have &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy-NOM run&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy-NOM see car-ACC&quot;&lt;/em&gt; whereas ergative languages have &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy-ABS run&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy-ERG see car-ABS&quot;&lt;/em&gt;; however, many ergative languages use ergative morphology only on nouns and have nominative alignment on the pronouns since pronouns tend to be higher in the animacy hierarchy, i.e. are more likely to be agents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verbal marking&lt;/a&gt;: a nominative language might have &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy sees-3SG me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; whereas an ergative might have &lt;em&gt;&quot;boy sees-1SG me&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (or, as in the example on the link, if the intransitive subject is a prefix to the verb then a nominative alignment would prefix the agent and suffix the patient whereas ergative alignment would be the reverse).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Survey of Constituent Order&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; apparently offers us no information on syntactic alignment; but on the last three points it offers information we can use to determine correlation between constituent order and alignment. With respect to constituent order we know that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject, object and verb&lt;/a&gt; is most commonly SOV or SVO, rarely VSO, even less VOS and OVS and most rarely OSV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject and object&lt;/a&gt; tends to be SV, only rarely VS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of object and verb&lt;/a&gt; can go either way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Putting it Together&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we combine these features of constituent order with alignment to determine whether there is anything interesting to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nominal morphology:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/82A_98A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject and verb&lt;/a&gt;: where for nominative alignment SV is preferred by a factor of about 20, it's only a factor of 5 for ergative languages; however, the low number of languages in the language makes this not very reliable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/83A_98A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: languages with non-nominative alignment tend more toward OV than languages with nominative languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/81A_98A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject, object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: SOV appears to be strongly favored (accounting for about 80% of languages for each alignment) by both nominative and accusative alignment - about 80% of SVO occurences come from languages with neutral alignment. This is because for SVO order the position relative to the verb determines the role of the argument, whereas for SOV languages the role gets marked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronouns:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/82A_99A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject and verb&lt;/a&gt;: independently of alignment languages seem to prefer SV by a factor of about 5.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/83A_99A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: languages with non-nominative alignment tend more toward OV than languages with nominative languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/81A_99A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject, object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: where nominative alignment shows preference first for SOV, then SVO and finally VSO, ergative alignment does also prefer SOV to VSO, but does not show SVO order. Also note that neutral alignment, unlike nominative alignment, prefers SVO to SOV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verbal marking:&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/82A_100A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject and verb&lt;/a&gt;: where for nominative alignment SV is preferred by a factor of about 10, it's only a factor of 2 for ergative languages; however, the low number of languages in the language makes this not very reliable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/83A_100A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: languages with non-nominative alignment tend slightly more toward OV than languages with nominative languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/81A_100A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject, object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: where nominative alignment shows preference first for SOV, then SVO and finally VSO, ergative alignment does also prefer SOV to VSO, but does not show SVO order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: independently of alignment a strong tendency toward SV can be observed; however, for nominative alignments the strength of the tendency is about twice as strong as for non-nominative alignments which are more likely to permit VS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject and object&lt;/a&gt;: for languages with nominative alignment both VO and OV are observed in approximately equal number (with a slight preference toward VO), whereas languages with non-nominative alignment seem to strongly prefer OV - however, whereas that preference is strong, the number of non-nominative languages in the sample is too small to make this statistically reliable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;order of subject, object and verb&lt;/a&gt;: where languages with nominative alignment prefer constituent orders SOV, SVO and VSO (in that order), ergative alignment does not with SVO order (at least in fully ergative languages); this is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/?q=%22Mahajan%27s+Generalisation%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Majahan's Generalization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally it seems as if ergative languages have a greater tendency to have no dominant word order but more variable word order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that those observation might well be statistical artifacts - I'll leave further research to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Further Reading&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know about alternate word orders permitted within one language (e.g. you can say &lt;em&gt;&quot;him I saw&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, focusing the object to call attention to it) you'll presumably have to look at individual languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According the data from &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;, the following languages might be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_tru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Trumai&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_ypk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yup'ik (Central)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_wrd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wardaman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_goo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gooniyandi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_chk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chukchi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_cav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cavineña&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_tzu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tzutujil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_mac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Macushi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_wam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wambaya&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_coo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Coos (Hanis)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="119" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T01:04:15.160" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T01:04:15.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3769" CreationDate="2015-01-18T06:02:13.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Function words as &quot;he/she/it&quot; can't be there from the beginning. They have to be developed. And the normal way is using the demonstratve adjective + nouns as man/woman/person/thing and then if there are gender-markers using the demonstratives without noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question whether this was seen as a demonstrative or personal pronoun is a question only for us today, it was no question for the speakers of the ancient time. A demonstatrative was a demonstrative. Only when a new form arises as e.g from German dieser to der to er, then one can talk of a personal pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin uses the demonstratives is/ea/id or ille/illa/illud as a substitute for a lacking personal pronoun he/she/it. But this is seen from our modern perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French has developed il (he) from he first syllable of Latin ille (that one there).&#xA;As long as ille was used it was a demonstrative. When il was developed the French had a personal pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T06:09:39.103" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T06:09:39.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8600" CreationDate="2015-01-18T06:34:06.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The door opened&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could derive this from &quot;The door opened itself&quot; with drop of &quot;itself&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, one can explain this with the linguistic term ergative. But the traditional grammar has no problem to explain such verb use with traditional terms (reflexive with drop of the ref. pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T16:43:35.140" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T16:43:35.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T08:16:35.787" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this type of thread is allowed, but I've been pondering the possibility that language began as commands rather than expression of arbitrary thoughts. This is based on the observation that in a majority of world languages the imperative form of the verb is a &quot;root&quot; or &quot;defective&quot; form, lacking in inflections or affixes present in non-imperative conjugations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, I suppose that commands could have been the proto-form of language due to the fact that primitive commands need at most a single verb and a single noun - the object of the sentence; as its the only one, this argument would need no marking for case, and no morphosyntactic alignment. As the ability to add an actor to the sentence, the means by which this is accomplished gave rise to the different alignments as well as topic-prominent structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this idea been explored before? What evidence is there for and against this idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T22:14:17.000" Title="Origin of Language as Commands?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-03-16T09:45:01.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11083" CreationDate="2015-01-18T12:09:34.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The area of research you want to look at is local grammars (an approach developed in the late 1990s). It's been used for identifying things like commands, definitions, etc. in text. The idea is that certain functional areas can be identified through certain construction patterns and keywords based on their distribution in a corpus. These patterns constitute a sort of island of regularity (a local grammar) and can be spotted in the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.computing.surrey.ac.uk/grid/fingrid/papers_files/Reports/6.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example of their application&lt;/a&gt; and here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/kos.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some more background&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the linguistic community outside NLP and corpus studies should pay more attention to local grammars because they have the potential to reveal aspects of how humans deal with complex patterns in texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T12:09:34.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11109" CreationDate="2015-01-18T12:23:45.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where you got the idea that imperatives are generally the 'root' form. See WALS for the distribution of the morphological imperative: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/70A#2/19.3/148.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/70A#2/19.3/148.2&lt;/a&gt;. The vast majority of the language covered have a morphological imperative expressing person. English is the only language in Europe that does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the idea that 'non-inflected' forms of verbs are somehow the default is really just an artifact of dictionary making. So you could easily hypothesize that commands were the original impetus in the development of language. You just cannot make a morphological claim about it. In general, any such theories are pure story telling so it is not a very fruitful line inquiry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T12:23:45.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11109" CreationDate="2015-01-18T14:38:48.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the sceptical comments, what you say is main-stream linguistic thinking. In Indo-European, Semitic, and most other families the second-person singular imperative is identical with the present stem of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T14:38:48.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T14:49:55.903" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Spanish equivalent of &lt;em&gt;It seems that they hate each other&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Parece que se odian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both languages &lt;em&gt;seem/parecer&lt;/em&gt; are one-place predicates (well, both can optionally accept a second argument with the role of an Experiencer, as in &lt;em&gt;It seems &lt;strong&gt;to me&lt;/strong&gt; that they hate each other/&lt;strong&gt;Me&lt;/strong&gt; parece que se odian&lt;/em&gt;, but this is irrelevant to the present question and can be ignored here). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, again, in both languages, under the monadic reading of &lt;em&gt;seem/parecer&lt;/em&gt;, the only real argument is discharged by the clause introduced by &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, which appears post-verbally and, in English at least, clearly occupies the 'complement of V' position. Whether that is also the case in Spanish is less obvious, and will be the focus of this question, but allow me first to briefly complete the scenario in which doubt may arise in this respect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both languages, therefore, the subject position is non-thematic (no argument = no theta role), but a difference arises at this point: English being a non-pro-drop language (= the Extended Projection Principle of Chomsky's early GB/P&amp;amp;P Theory), in English the subject slot must be occupied by a pronounceable 'dummy' (&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, in this case), whereas, Spanish being a pro-drop language, no 'dummy' is required - nor possible, under Economy - (cf. *Ello parece que se odian) and so Spanish clauses of this type apparently have nothing in subject position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in both languages, raising the post-verbal &lt;em&gt;that/que&lt;/em&gt; clause into subject position cf. &lt;em&gt;That they hate each other seems&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Que se odian parece&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, leads to ungrammaticality. The reason, however, has nothing to do with the raising of the clause itself, which is allowed when the predicate is 'heavier', as in &lt;em&gt;That they hate each other seems evident/Que se odian parece evidente&lt;/em&gt;; what blocks the promotion of the clause to subject position in such circumstances is the 'lightness' of the predicates &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;parecer&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., that constraint is a matter of &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; leaving an informationally 'light predicate' like &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt; in the VP Focus (= default end-focus) position, which, by definition, must add informationally 'substantial' content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, I think, my readers will be ready for the issue that interests me and the question(s) that I want to raise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is that whereas, in English, as stated, the clause undoubtedly sits in the complement of V position, in Spanish, where &lt;strong&gt;focused&lt;/strong&gt; subjects are regularly post-verbal (cf. &lt;em&gt;Ha telefoneado &lt;strong&gt;tu marido&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = lit. &lt;em&gt;Has phoned your husband&lt;/em&gt;) the &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-clause might arguably be &lt;strong&gt;either a complement or a post-poned subject&lt;/strong&gt;, and, therefore, evidence is needed to determine which of those hypotheses is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in English, a standard test for the complements/attributes of verbs like &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; is that they can be replaced by &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;. Hence, in a dialogue between A and B, A might remark &lt;em&gt;It seems that they hate each other&lt;/em&gt; and B might, in case s/he agreed, say &lt;em&gt;(Yes,) &lt;strong&gt;So&lt;/strong&gt; it seems&lt;/em&gt;, or, in case B did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; agree, s/he might reply &lt;em&gt;It seems so&lt;/em&gt;, and perhaps add &lt;em&gt;but [I know that] they do not [really hate each other]&lt;/em&gt;. In any case, however, what is left in situ/raised into the Focus position at the front of the clause is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the subject, which remains &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; in both cases, but the pro-form &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; standing for the &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; clause in complement of V position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Spanish, the standard pro-form for definite direct objects of transitive verbs is one of the paradigm &lt;em&gt;le/la/lo&lt;/em&gt;, and, clauses being neuter gender, it would be &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt;, and the standard pro-form for &lt;strong&gt;attributes&lt;/strong&gt; of stative verbs like &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;parecer&lt;/em&gt; (this case) is also &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt;. Spanish, unlike English, completely neutralises the D.O./Attribute opposition (in this respect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, if we wanted to translate the English dialogue between A and B above into Spanish, &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of the possibilities would contain the exchanges A: &lt;em&gt;Parece que se odian.&lt;/em&gt; B: &lt;em&gt;Sí, &lt;strong&gt;lo&lt;/strong&gt; parece&lt;/em&gt;, and, in that case, the Spanish &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-clause would reasonably be analysable as the complement/attribute of &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt;. However, that rendition of the English A&amp;lt;&gt;B dialogue is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the only possibility; B might also reply &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eso&lt;/strong&gt; parece&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;eso&lt;/em&gt; could just as easily be understood as a pro-form for an (in this case post-poned) &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than an in-situ complement/attribute of &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, at least according to my (and my wife's) native speaker intuitions, that choice is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a free one: the 'unmarked' choice is &lt;em&gt;eso&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; is only an additional 'marked' option. In other words, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lo&lt;/strong&gt; parece&lt;/em&gt; would be the Spanish equivalent of English &lt;em&gt;It seems so (but...)&lt;/em&gt;, and compatible with B's addition of something like &lt;em&gt;pero yo sé que, en realidad, no se odian&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;..., but I know that they don´t really hate each other&lt;/em&gt;), whereas &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eso&lt;/strong&gt; parece&lt;/em&gt; would be the Spanish equivalent of &lt;em&gt;So it seems&lt;/em&gt;, and (in my and my wife's Spanish), incompatible (or not easily compatible) with any addition of B's like &lt;em&gt;, pero yo sé que no [se odian/es así].&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to the conclusion that, in the unmarked case, the Spanish &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-clause that follows &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt; is actually a post-poned &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a complement of V in situ, although there is a marked construction that allows it to stay put in the complement of V slot (and, in that case, be replaceable by the pro-form &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; characteristic of all Spanish neuter and definite direct objects and attributes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, under the traditional view that such &lt;em&gt;that/que&lt;/em&gt; clauses are initially generated as &lt;strong&gt;complements&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;seem/parecer&lt;/em&gt;, that analysis leads to a serious theoretical problem, because the would-be &lt;strong&gt;unmarked&lt;/strong&gt; construction (i.e., that in which the &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; clause is raised from its complement of V position and postponed, with or without an intermediate 'stay' at the pre-verbal subject position) actually requires &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; computation than the would-be &lt;strong&gt;marked&lt;/strong&gt; one (i.e., that in which the &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-clause stays put after &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt; and no further computation is needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This unexpected result puzzles me, and I would like to know, first a) whether other native speakers of English and Spanish share the intuitions described above (because, if no other native speakers do, the theoretical problem changes, it becomes 'How can my Economy-driven Language Faculty have allowed me to develop such an &lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;economical construction?'), and then b) whether there is any way to avoid my conclusion that Spanish &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-clauses following &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt; (but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; parallel English &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;-clauses following &lt;strong&gt;seem&lt;/strong&gt;!) are postponed subjects in the unmarked case and complements only in the marked one, and thereby to remove the Economy problem just described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T16:29:37.363" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T05:57:12.410" Title="Are Spanish &quot;que&quot; clauses following &quot;parece&quot; complements or postponed subjects?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11109" CreationDate="2015-01-18T16:25:10.030" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to explore such things if there are no data. The evolution of languages may cover a period of a hundred thousand years or more. A lot of books with a lot of theories have been written but all this is speculation. The beginnings of language are a great mystery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jean Auel in her series of The Clan of the Cave Bear has presented some useful ideas about the language of the Neanderthals.&#xA;In the beginning utterances were connected with a lot of gesture signals. But the Neanderthals appear late in the evolution of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we observe dogs we can hear and see if a little dog is wailing because it is left alone in front of the supermarket or if it is agressive. Without words the animal can convey information. Other animals like bees have developed a complicated system of signals to give information where good plants can be found. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over thousands of years the beginnings of language were  connected with sounds and signals. It must have been an important step when words and word classes were developed. I think at first there was no differenciation between noun and verb.&#xA;You could connect a word with &quot;I&quot; then it was a verb or with &quot;many/no&quot; then it was a noun. It is interesting to think about the beginnings of language - but we know nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T21:12:42.160" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T21:12:42.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2015-01-18T17:14:34.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin perfect feci was later substitued by habeo factum (I have made, perfect with habere to have). This new system abolished with one stroke those numerous perfect forms that have become irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't have time to search for full information about the upcoming of the habeo perfect, here only some short information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=76UUIcCqMYkC&amp;amp;pg=PA361&amp;amp;lpg=PA361&amp;amp;dq=habeo+factum&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=74tJ6mdJKX&amp;amp;sig=_XzK40ZLPHWmT6jrGX2x1yP54x0&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=4uO7VJaVIIqtadeAgYAP&amp;amp;ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://books.google.de/books?id=76UUIcCqMYkC&amp;amp;pg=PA361&amp;amp;lpg=PA361&amp;amp;dq=habeo+factum&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=74tJ6mdJKX&amp;amp;sig=_XzK40ZLPHWmT6jrGX2x1yP54x0&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=4uO7VJaVIIqtadeAgYAP&amp;amp;ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know what is behind the Latin verb endings of the perfect tenses, but they didn't fall from heaven. If you compare the endings of past perfect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;veram veras verat verámus verátis verant &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it looks like the forms of esse were the source:&#xA;eram eras erat erámus erátis erant or the forms fueram fueras etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the endings &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ueram ueras uerat etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the source might have been forms of habere ( to have)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;habueram habueras habuerat etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the forms of esse and habere melted together and gave one basic set of morphems for the perfect tenses. (f)ueram and (hab)ueram can easily become one morphem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that this theory has some probability then the invention of the habeo perfect was nothing else but the shifting of habere at the right side of the verb to the left side of the verb. The advantage was enormous, no melting process, no irregularities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another link to a website about the habeo perfect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/classicsancienthistory/events-and-seminars/earlyandlatelatin/abstracts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/classicsancienthistory/events-and-seminars/earlyandlatelatin/abstracts/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the passage On the use of habeo + perfect participle in early and late Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-01-18T18:12:39.557" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T18:12:39.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2015-01-18T17:51:09.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a paper that addresses this question directly (finally!). Svenonius &amp;amp; Ramchand's 2014 paper (&lt;a href=&quot;http://konferens.ht.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/up/engelska/ENGB02/resources/GLOW36/Abstracts_GLOW_Colloquium/Thursday/Deriving_the_Functional_Hierarchy.pdf&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) offers an explanation for universal &quot;grammatical zones&quot; that appeals both to innate grammatical principles and properties of extralinguistic cognition. From the abstract: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...there remains an irreduceable universal functional hierarchy, for example that which orders epistemic modality and tense over root modality and aspect, and that which orders the latter over argument structure and Aktionsart (as discussed in much previous work). This residual core functional hierarchy (CFH) is unexplained so far by work which follows MUG [&quot;a minimal role for UG']. Rather than simply stipulating the CFH as part of UG, we reconcile CFH with MUG by detailing what nonlinguistic cognition must look like in order for MUG to derive the CFH. We furthermore show how an individual language develops a language- specific RFH which is consistent with the universal CFH, illustrating with a detailed account of the English auxiliary system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T17:51:09.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T18:10:31.957" Score="0" ViewCount="811" Body="&lt;p&gt;what kind of adv and adj are these? what is prep. complement. Can you give ma a couple of examples of adj. and adv. which may function as prepositional complements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8001" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T17:44:41.450" Title="adjectives and adverbs functioning as prepositional complements" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11117" CreationDate="2015-01-18T19:36:05.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do these examples, &quot;&lt;em&gt;on high&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as in &lt;em&gt;The Lord our God who dwelleth on high&lt;/em&gt; (Psalms 63:5) (adjective prepositional complement) and &lt;em&gt;from here&lt;/em&gt; as in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_See_Your_House_from_Here&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;I can see your house &lt;em&gt;from here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (adverb prepositional complement) count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagetools.info/grammarpedia/prepphrase.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://languagetools.info/grammarpedia/prepphrase.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T19:36:05.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11109" CreationDate="2015-01-18T22:14:17.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The impossibility of addressing the question empirically led to the Linguistic Society of Paris banning such papers. So any answers are going to be very speculative and heavy on the conceptual side. Commands would no doubt have been part of earliest language, but logically prior to that is conceptualization and conventional symbolization, that is, the ability to identify &quot;bear&quot; as distinct from &quot;lion&quot; or &quot;kitten&quot;, likewise &quot;eat&quot; versus &quot;feed&quot;. In order to have commands of any kind, you have to have reliable words, otherwise hearers won't have a clue what action they are supposed to perform on what object. That, then, would be the original origin of language, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is plausible that in its beta versions, language was stunningly unclear, and you would just utter single words like &quot;bear&quot;, leaving it to the listener to figure out that, most likely, there is a bear approaching and it's time to run. I would not consider uttering the word &quot;bear&quot; to be a command, even if it resulted in a hearer performing an action (presumably one that I wanted him to perform). Maybe by &quot;command&quot; you mean an utterance where the speaker wishes the hearer to do something, regardless of linguistic form. But then &quot;commands&quot; vastly predate language or mammals, since many animals utter sounds (or smells or colors) in order to get another animal to do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with equating morphological simplicity with phylogenetic utility is that it predicts that objects (accusatives) should be the unmarked case, but in fact, nominatives (agents) are more often the unmarked case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-18T22:14:17.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-18T22:56:07.637" Score="4" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9713/examples-of-words-containing-the-same-letter-three-times-in-a-row-in-any-languag&quot;&gt;this interesting question&lt;/a&gt;, but instead of looking for letters within words which happen to appear repeated three or more times in a row, I'm looking for consecutive identical sequences of letters (which could even be single ideograms in idogram-based languages such as Chinese) within words which happen to repeat three or more times consecutively within the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypotetical examples of sought words (the parts in round brackets are optional and of arbitrary length if present):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A word having the hypothetical form &quot;(qrstuv)&lt;strong&gt;abcabcabc&lt;/strong&gt;(wxyz)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A word having the hypothetical form &quot;(阿比西)&lt;strong&gt;拉拉拉&lt;/strong&gt;(马巴计)&quot; [read: (ābǐxī)lālālā(mǎbājì)]. As most Chinese words are two, three, or at most four characters long, and repeated idiograms tend to come in pairs, I don't think this is possible in Chinese, but you never know, perhaps some esoteric example or an example given in some other archaic ideogrammatic language may fit the pattern! :-)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8002" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T10:26:58.543" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T22:28:16.797" Title="Any world languages having multiple-letter-based or single-ideogram-based syllables where three or more consecutive syllables of any word repeat?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;language-games&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2015-01-18T23:20:46.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No serious attempt has ever been made to justify in semantic (and ultimately ontological) terms the extremely rich inventory of functional categories that Cinque has been elaborating since the late 1990’s for both the clause and the DP (and the categories of their complements, i.e., the ‘entities’ that e.g., Cinque’s adverbials must predicate higher order properties of!), and I’m afraid, for the time being (and for many years to come, at best) you may as well abandon all hope of seeing &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; of the functional categories posited in his cartographic work grounded on empirically credible ontological/semantic categories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernst’s 2002 book, Jackendoff’s much earlier (1972) one, Ross's and other 'generative semanticists' work in the late 60's and early 70's, Beth Levin's work, Abney's dissertation, and a few other works (including those in other linguistic traditions, especially Fregean-Montagovian and Categorial Grammar, but also Dik’s and Rijhoff’s FG work on the structural levels in the clause and the NP, respectively, and Hengeveld’s recent work on Functional Discourse Grammar, however sloppy its 'LF' may be) have contributed to some extent to ground &lt;strong&gt;a few&lt;/strong&gt; of those functional categories, but &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; remain purely stipulative (actually, most of the base-generated categories a Cinquean analysis entails do not even have an adequate descriptive name, not to mention the innumerable additional and completely ad hoc categories that must be posited if observed surface order is to be derived from a Kayne/Cinque-style account of base-generated structure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although ontologists as austere as Quine (or the less austere, but still austere Davidson) may not be in business any more, I suspect, not even the most extravagant contemporary philosophical ontologist would subscribe to the kind of ontology that a Cinquean theory of Language would call for if his syntactic categories were to be invested with credible semantic/ontological content. Hence, although the empirical evidence that has been brought to bear by Cinque and his followers on the existence of such extremely articulated and scope-wise rigid hierarchies inside both the clause and the DP is impressive, all that - in itself excellent - work will have to remain empirically adequate (i.e., predictive enough) perhaps, but merely stipulative, ontologically/semantically vacuous, and unable to really 'explain' anything, at least until linguists decide to investigate intra-linguistic ontology (as opposed to extra-linguistic ontology) in depth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, as far as I know, no sustained work has been done on intra-linguistic ontology since ‘structural semantics’ and particularly Coseriu’s semantic programme became extinct, or at least confined to very obscure academic quarters, in the early 1980’s. The early Chomskian programme(s) (e.g., Aspects, Language and Mind, Reflections on Language, Knowledge of Language), of course, entailed the elaboration of a proper &lt;strong&gt;linguistic&lt;/strong&gt; ontology as a basis for the semantic component of the Language Faculty, but ever since the mid 1970’s the Chomskian programme has given up on that crucial goal, and, particularly since the Minimalist Programme was launched in the early 1990’s, the content of the Language Faculty has been quickly contracting into triviality. Once the lexicon is factored out, what remains is basically Merge (recursion); practically everything else has now been irresponsibly declared the psychologists’ or the cognitive scientists’ job, and, of course, such specialists, like all, or the great majority of, philosophical ontologists, do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; believe in an independent linguistic ontology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, nobody knows or, I'm afraid, is even likely to ever find out, what entities correspond to &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; of the Cinquean categories. Individuals (&gt; DPs), sets (&gt; unsaturated predicates), events (&gt; saturated VPs, or hidden components thereof), states of affairs (&gt; predications/IPs), modal predications (&gt; ModPs), maybe propositions (&gt; Polarity Phrases), and speech acts (&gt; ForcePs) may be ontologically justified (if your ontologist is very generous), and it is relatively easy to justify their respective scope, but that’s about it, as far as I can see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s what makes life so hard for any syntax and semantics teacher that seriously tries to convince his students of the existence of a transparent, compositionality-based, relation between minimalist syntactic representations and the 'semantic' representations the C-I systems are supposed to derive from them at the conceptual-semantic interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T09:43:09.000" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T09:43:09.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2015-01-19T08:04:27.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a few notes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese can be spoken and understood, but Japanese people quite often draw kanji in the air to remove ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to play Pokemon, which has text in all kana, and I found it very difficult. Japanese people I know say that they find all‐kana text very difficult to read in long stretches. I am not (and was then even less) very good at kanji but I found text including kanji and furigana far easier and clearer than kana alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find kanji valuable in that a word’s etymological structure is far more apparent in the word itself than is the case in purely phonetic languages. For example, without consulting a dictionary an English speaker might not know if the &quot;homo&quot; in &quot;homosexual&quot; was Latin homo (man) or Greek homo (same). In Japanese the elements of words are largely clear from their written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point worth considering is that the Japanese are very much more concerned with the way a thing is done and not just its final result. Western people tend to assume certain things about the &quot;purpose&quot; of language that are not necessarily the same assumptions that many Japanese people would make. Efficiency (streamlining the process to get more quickly to the result) is not necessarily the cultural aim of all language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Oh dear, I do have a proper account here but I can't seem to find it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8004" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T08:04:27.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2015-01-19T09:23:54.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since numeral symbols are ideograms, even English has such sequences, for example '666' is often &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtu.be/jsmcDLDw9iw?t=1m50s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pronounced&lt;/a&gt; as 'six-six-six'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T09:23:54.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2015-01-19T10:38:02.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hahaha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that other onomatopoeia also could fit your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2015-01-19T11:07:17.033" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T11:07:17.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11117" CreationDate="2015-01-19T10:58:43.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existence of adjectival or adverbial complements of prepositions is very improbable on purely conceptual grounds, because a) all true prepositions are two-place predicates, b) by definition, a predicate must take one or more arguments as its complements (broad sense, 'subjects' included), c) arguments must be encoded by referential expressions (names referring to 'entities', including time intervals, space regions or states of affairs) and d) both adjectives and adverbs are themselves &lt;strong&gt;predicates&lt;/strong&gt; (of 'nominal' expressions in one case, of verbal or 'extended verbal' projections in the other), &lt;strong&gt;not arguments&lt;/strong&gt; (note that they name nth-order &lt;strong&gt;properties&lt;/strong&gt;, not individuals or situations). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, all, or the great majority of, the cases of P+Adj or P+Adv you might think of if you just look up the part of speech of words in commercial dictionaries are not real adverbs (or adjectives). Typical examples are words like &lt;em&gt;yesterday, today, tomorrow, now, then, here, there,...&lt;/em&gt; traditionally considered adverbs, but long ago reanalysed by serious syntacticians as NPs or deictics pointing to temporal or spatial regions. In some cases, their nominal character becomes obvious as soon as you consider that they may take genitive inflections (cf. &lt;em&gt;yesterday's/today's/tomorrow's newspapers&lt;/em&gt;). In others (&lt;em&gt;now, then, here, there&lt;/em&gt;,...) that evidence is not available for purely morphological or historical reasons (e.g., Modern English deictics do not inflect for case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to apparent P + Adj constructions, the evidence for 'nominal' status of the adjective is perhaps less compelling, and in some cases, there is no obvious analytical alternative yet, but some of those adjectives are the reflexes of translations from Latin (where 'altus'[&gt; high], for example, was both an adjective and a noun meaning 'heaven' amongst other things), or nominalizations of a special kind (e.g., the use of &lt;em&gt;guapo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;listo&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish expressions like &lt;em&gt;ir de guapo por la vida&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pasarse de listo,&lt;/em&gt; etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, in many cases, the would-be P+Adj constructions have been re-analysed (at least within certain syntactic theories) and there is evidence that what seemed to be a preposition is not really such, but an 'inflectional' category or a complementizer (e.g., in English, the &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;consider somebody as intelligent&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;take something for granted&lt;/em&gt;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, thus, given the conceptual difficulties that the mere existence of P+Adj constructions raises, would-be cases of adjectival complements of prepositions probably result from the fact that most grammars have not yet analysed such constructions in sufficient depth, or, if some have, due to the fact that commercial dictionaries are very reluctant to change the 'part of speech' attributions that Greek, Latin and mediaeval grammarians established centuries or millennia ago and that remain in use in the elementary school grammars by which most of us learn the little we know about the syntax of our native languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T17:44:41.450" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T17:44:41.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2015-01-19T13:43:49.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several languages with grammaticalized &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reduplication&lt;/a&gt; with three grades, triplication, which is exactly the thing you are asking about. You can read about these cases on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngproc/Tsay-Myers-TTR-handout.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rose/Tigre.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngproc/Tsay-Myers-TTR-handout.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;aforementioned handout&lt;/a&gt; is from Southern Min:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 repetition: 紅 ang “red”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 repetitions: 紅紅 ang-ang “somewhat red”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 repetitions: 紅紅紅 ang-ang-ang “very red”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These cases are very rare though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2015-01-19T13:43:49.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11129" CreationDate="2015-01-19T23:35:44.847" Score="12" ViewCount="4986" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_communication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;animal communication&lt;/a&gt;, particularly in mammals and historical evidence in early hominoids. Naturally, I am always amazed how much information species like dolphins and orcas can actually get across. Yet at the same time, I realize modern humans share far more complex and intricate information much more rapidly. For instance, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Koko the ape&lt;/a&gt; could express feelings and thoughts in videos I saw, she can't comprehend the idea of a derivative or an integral. She also doesn't have the emotional attachment to stories that humans do, which forms the basis for our books, movies, theater, sports, romance etc. So clearly there are differences in the amount of information other species can express and their ability to use language as a platform for thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do linguists rank languages on some sort of complexity scale that allows us to measure how advanced a given language is? Does this allow us to identify &quot;protolanguages&quot; as I have heard them called and better understand how our own language capacity evolved?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6811" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T19:30:46.627" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T19:30:46.627" Title="Are some languages more advanced than others?" Tags="&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;non-human-language&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2015-01-20T01:11:42.523" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of a language being &quot;more advanced&quot; is rejected by linguists. The problem is that there is no objectively justified standard against which languages can be compared -- there's no goal that languages should be striving towards. Languages are indistinguishable in terms of what ideas that allow you to convey, and even though Saami might seem to be more advanced than English in having a single word meaning 2 year old male reindeer, English is just as good in its ability to express ideas, and it may just take a few more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is actually some interest in developing a scientific notion of linguistic complexity, but there isn't any way to make meaningful statements about complexity of a language. For example, some Khoisan languages have an awful lot of consonants (over a gross), and some pretty unusual ones, so that might seem to be pretty complex. But, their systems are pretty symmetrical, so you just have to get the hang of the different places of articulation, and the different releases, so then it's kind of simple. Words in Khoisan are pretty simple -- one or two syllables, and not a big elaborate inflectional system like in Finnish. But Finnish isn't really all that complex, since the changes in the inflectional system are pretty regular, much more regular than Swedish. So while we might some day be able to say something meaningful about complexity (almost certainly complexity if a specific domain, not overall complexity), a scale of complexity doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of a &quot;proto-language&quot;, BTW, refers to a hypothesis about the nature of a language that was never recorded. There are documents for Old English, Old Saxon, Old Norse, Gothic and Old High German, and these allow us to reconstruct properties of what language (&quot;proto-Germanic&quot;) these Germanic languages descended from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T01:11:42.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9564" CreationDate="2015-01-20T06:41:49.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Case assignment is a big problem for formal frameworks that postulate some sort of deep agentive case-like structures like theta roles in GB because whenever the morphology clashes with the deep structure. It's not too difficult to deal with it as part of the morphology module but cases like this have to be dealt with as an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it is not a problem in the least for functionalist or construction-based approaches. They simply look at it as a pattern fulfilling a function. Of course, your example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mother and me went to the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also has the hypercorrection counterexample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane went to the market with my mother and I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I suspect would also be treated by many as grammatical (in non-prescriptivist contexts). In both of these cases, we're dealing with a coordinate construction where 'me' and 'I' are interchangeable as long as there is some cognitive shielding to the infelicitous interpretation. Note, that sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Me went to the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*She went to the market with I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are both not acceptable. This means that the idea of the case function-form pairing itself has not been lost in English. Something just happens in the coordinate constructions with 'me'. This is similar to the loss of 'whom' in English where 'Whom did your see.' is outside most native speaker intuitions whereas 'Her I saw.' is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not have a nominal case morphology so you can dismiss these examples as easy to file away surface exceptions. But you can find examples even in languages where the morphological case is unstable in even in languages where it is unavoidable. My favorite example is the Czech verb frame 'teach something to someone' which in modern Czech has both the direct and indirect object assigned the accusative case. That's because the direct agentive structure makes sense when either of the objects is on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane teaches math (acc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane teaches John (acc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therefore,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane teaches John (acc) math (acc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in formal (now slightly archaic) Czech, the frame is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane teaches John (acc) math (dat). [Note: The frame is similar to the English 'introduce X to Y']&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that in this case, you can't just shove this into some surface morphological exceptions on top of a stable underlying agentive structure. There are three possible case assignments 'acc acc', 'acc dat', 'dat acc' which both map onto a plausible semantic structure but only two are acceptable in Czech morphologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution in a formal system would have to be to move this problem into the lexicon which is why it is much easier to deal with it constructionally where the division between lexicon and syntax is not as sharp and morphology is not just an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not sure how this would work under Minimalism but since that is essentially a  unification approach, it may not be that hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T06:41:49.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-20T20:46:00.427" Score="3" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages, e.g., Russian (1), Bulgarian (5) or Greek, show perfective readings of morphosyntactically imperfective verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Jakov ezdil    na more dvazhdy za poslednij god.&#xA;    J.    rode.IPF on sea  twice   in last      year&#xA;'During the last year Jacob twice went to the seaside.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reading in (1) is unambiguously existential perfect. What are the possible semantic mechanisms that cause such effects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking maybe it's the temporal adverbials that introduce the perfective aspect. But they don't just do it by themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) Jakov ezdil    (*za) dva chasa.&#xA;    J.    rode.IPF (*in) two hours.&#xA;'Jacob rode {for, *in} two hours.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do the two adjuncts in (1) collaborate to produce the effect? Are there some implicit operators that do the job under certain conditions? I suspect that there is a certain projection (Perf) playing a role, but I can't figure out the details. If there's literature that addresses the question directly, please point me to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a pair without motion verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(3) Jakov chital   lekcii dvazhdy za poslednij god.&#xA;    J.    read.IPF lectures twice   in last      year&#xA;'During the last year Jacob twice gave a lecture.'&#xA;&#xA;(4) Jakov chital   lekciju (*za) dva chasa.&#xA;    J.    read.IPF lecture (*in) two hours.&#xA;'Jacob read the lecture {for, *in} two hours.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an example from Bulgarian (from Iatridou, Anagnostopouluo &amp;amp; Izvorski (2001) Observations about the form and meaning of the Perfect):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(5) ženata    običala     Ivan ot   1980 nasam&#xA;    woman.DEF love.IPF.PT I.   from 1980 till.now&#xA; 'the woman who has loved Ivan since 1980'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T23:45:40.343" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T23:45:40.343" Title="Why can verbs with imperfective morphology have a perfective meaning?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2015-01-20T21:05:20.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ездил&quot; (ezdil) is a so-called repetitive verb, meaning &quot;went several times; went to and fro&quot;, its non-repetitive counterpart is &quot;ехал&quot; (ekhal). Your analysis of (1) as &quot;unambiguously existential perfect&quot; looks wrong, as for me. The meaning of the Russian perfective aspect is the action that has either beginning (поехал, &quot;poekhal&quot;, went, began going) or end (приехал, &quot;priekhal&quot;, came, came and remained), all the other kinds of actions are expressed by the imperfective aspect, they include repeated actions, and the ones which are expressed by the English continuous aspect. Since (1) is about a repeated action expressed by a repetitive verb, there is no perfective meaning in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this discussion, the question there is the same as yours:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/8017/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9-%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4-%D0%B2-%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B8-%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE&quot;&gt;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/8017/Несовершенный-вид-в-значении-совершенного&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:33.300" LastActivityDate="2015-01-20T21:05:20.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2015-01-21T08:26:14.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think anything we know about communication in non-human species can tell us a lot about differences between human languages. Ultimately, a (human) language is as nuanced as it needs to be in purely real-life terms, and there's essentially no limit to any language's power of generating new concepts using just metaphors, synecdoches and suchlike mechanisms that are natural to human associative thinking. &quot;Derivative&quot;, etymologised all the way back, uses the metaphor of drawing water from a stream (Latin &lt;em&gt;rivus&lt;/em&gt;), while &quot;integral&quot; refers to something that is &quot;untouched&quot; (&lt;em&gt;in-teger&lt;/em&gt;), i.e. whole. Both are everyday ideas that, in their literal sense, could probably be expressed in the earliest human languages. If there was a sudden explosion in the understanding of mathematics in the Stone Age, this just shows how quickly the language would catch up. And we keep doing that — a computer's input devices are called, essentially, &quot;a flat piece of wood with things used for closing&quot; and &quot;a kind of small mammal&quot;. We refer to supposed alien spacecraft as &quot;flying things containing something salted&quot;. No matter how far we stray from the literal, our basic building blocks of meaning are still mostly concepts that would be understood by a caveman. So I don't really think &quot;advanced&quot; can be a property of a language as such, rather than the culture using it — and again, different cultures are &quot;advanced&quot; in different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T08:43:22.377" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T08:43:22.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2015-01-21T10:34:12.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you chose are not particularly fortunate but the problem you're alluding to is one commonly encountered when it comes to aspect or tense. For instance, present tense is often used to refer to future events &quot;We're leaving at 5 tomorrow.&quot; And even here you could argue that the aspect is misaligned too. And there are many instances in Slavic languages where verbs with imperfective morphology have broadly perfective meanings (and vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you have is that you chose a verb of motion which has the following properties in most Slavic languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has separate forms for imperfective and repetitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not have a clear perfective counterpart&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has irregular non-analytic future tense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has led many people to perceive what is essentially an imperfective verb as having perfective meanings or being perfective in the first place. I've encountered this intuition among native speakers as well as some experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not helped by the fact that the literature on aspect is very sketchy and ignores much of the data available. The fundamental problem is a fixation with what people often refer to as 'perfective' or 'imperfective' meanings. They're just too general to make sense in every context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find a functional constructionist approach much better to help make sense of the extremely rich and varied area of aspect usage. This combines the morphology and lexicon of aspect and tense with the semantics situated within the TAM (Tense Aspect Modality) space. You don't then ask what is the aspectual meaning of this verb but rather where in the TAM space is a particular Tense-Aspect construction located. For example, you could say Repetivitive-Past is used to talk about past experience not continuing in the present, Imperfective-Present is used to talk about historical narratives, Perfective-Past is used to talk about negatively or emotionally evaluated past repeated experiences. Each of the tense-aspect combinations have multiple such meanings (similarly to English) - I gave the non-prototypical ones - some of which seem directly in contradiction to what you'd predict from the aspectual meaning. Which is why it makes more immediate semantic sense to look at them as separate but related constructions than if you just look at the abstract meaning of 'aspect' and try to go from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a more &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;detailed analysis of Tense-Aspect-Modality in Czech here&lt;/a&gt;. The same principle would work for Russian but the individual constructions would be different - which makes for a more principled cross-linguistic comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T10:34:12.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2015-01-21T11:00:48.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the order they occurred to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serbo-Croat: &lt;strong&gt;mamama/мамама&lt;/strong&gt; — dative, instrumental &amp;amp; locative plural of &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bulgarian: &lt;strong&gt;кантатата&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;the cantata&quot;, and any other feminine nouns ending in -тата with the suffixed definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: &lt;strong&gt;нененецкий&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;non-&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nenets&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T11:13:07.073" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T11:13:07.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11138" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;NLG stands for &quot;Natural Language Generation&quot;. It is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_generation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11139" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" Score="0" Body="Natural Language Generation" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" LastActivityDate="2015-01-21T15:02:50.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3501" CreationDate="2015-01-22T00:24:49.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend you start here. This article disputes the SC theory, but contains good references to the origins of the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hualde, José Ignacio (1989) The Strict Cycle Condition and Noncyclic Rules, Linguistic Inquiry Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 675-680&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1244" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T00:24:49.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9923" CreationDate="2015-01-22T00:32:35.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Various Australian Aboriginal languages have grammatical encoding of the kinship relationships between speaker/hearer/referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&#xA;Blythe, Joe (2013), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/24671960&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preference organization driving structuration: Evidence from Australian Aboriginal interaction for pragmatically motivated grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;. Language, 89:4, pp. 883-919.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1244" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-10-12T02:22:21.827" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T02:22:21.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3501" CreationDate="2015-01-22T01:03:20.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should trace back from Mascaró's dissertation, mentioned in Hualde's article on SSC. The immediate predecessors would be Kean (1974) &quot;The Strict Cycle in Phonology&quot; (LI 5: 179-203) and Kiparsky 1974 &quot;Phonological representations&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Three Dimensions in Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; ed. by Osamu Fujimura. Kiparsky's work on the Revised Alternation Condition is relevant to SSC, since these two have been seen as analogous to electricity and magnetism (&quot;the same thing&quot;). SSC originates (non-phonologically) from Chomsky 1971 &quot;Conditions on transformations&quot;. The Kean article is about Klamath and is a kind of response to papers by Kisseberth especially his articles &quot;The Strict Cyclicity Principle: The Klamath Evidence&quot; (Kisseberth ed. &lt;em&gt;Studies in Generative Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, 1973) and (1972) &quot;Cyclic Rules in Klamath Phonology&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt; 3: 1-34. Kean also cites Halle 1973 &quot;The Accentuation of Russian Words&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 49: 312-348) who cites Kean 1971 which is a never-published paper entitled &quot;Strict Cyclicity&quot;. I seem not to have Kisseberth's Strict Cycle paper, but I assume it mentions Kean's MS and Halle's &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T01:03:20.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3682" CreationDate="2015-01-22T06:27:53.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a feeling at the time that the distance between underlying and surface forms in their analysis was too great, and there must be some absolute limit on how different the two levels of representation could be (say, measured in number of features changed, or whether underlying feature matrices or sequences of matrices had to be a subset of observed matrices). The attempt to articulate any such formal restrictions was quite unsuccessful. With a bit more rational analysis, we came to understand that the issue was not really about the qualitative distance between representations (a.k.a. abstractness), but rather it was about other methodological assumptions that SPE made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary factors that motivated their abstract analysis were (a) their aesthetic desire for symmetry, (b) the wish to formally connect &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; possibly related word forms, and (c) the desire (prevalent at the time) to capture every generalization out there, even ones that deserve to roam free. Since their formal theory of rules was extremely device-rich, a lot of things would be possible then, that were deemed to be formally impossible in later developments of phonology. (Note how I say nothing about the current state...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, they wanted to assume that &lt;em&gt;various&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;variety&lt;/em&gt; have a common root, which led them to a certain abstract analysis of the &lt;em&gt;i ~ ai&lt;/em&gt; alternation, and similar facts drawn from word pairs like &lt;em&gt;derive ~ derivative&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;ɪ ~ ai&lt;/em&gt; alternation led to them positing underlying forms that reflect Chaucerian pronunciation. Then they conclude that the English vowel system really has no underlying diphthongs, except for &lt;em&gt;ɔi&lt;/em&gt;, so that makes way for a symmetry argument that &quot;coin&quot; has to be underlyingly /kœ:n/ (because of the rules they set up, that derivation comes essentially for free, and now there are no diphthongs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPE was an integrated package deal, and great effort was put into accounting for every little fact without having any exceptions, thus a stress puzzle could force a different and more abstract analysis of [ow] (&lt;em&gt;veto&lt;/em&gt; ← /ve:tɔ/, &lt;em&gt;motto&lt;/em&gt; ← /mɔto/). In their analysis, [ˈraitʃəs] 'righteous' derives from /rixt-i-ɔs/ and [dʒəˈræf] 'giraffe' from /giræffe/, and so on. Oddly and uncharacteristically, they also note 2 pages later (p. 152) that &quot;giraffe&quot; could also come from /ǰVrāf/ which is only two steps away from saying that the surface form is the same as the underlying form. The general reaction was that there was something wrong, and &quot;abstractness&quot; was blamed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position is that blame should be placed not on abstractness, but on gratuitous assumptions about morphology esp. the question of whether historically related forms are to be reduced to common roots and affixes in all cases; on their idealizing assumptions about underlying representations; and on the fact that they were trying to operate without an autonomous theory of acquisition (that is, the structure of grammatical theory was supposed to automatically account for all of acquisition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T06:27:53.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11147" CreationDate="2015-01-22T07:26:53.787" Score="0" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependency grammars treat the main verb of a sentence as the root node of a dependency graph. Not all utterances, however, have verbs. (Example: the widely known exclamation &quot;holy shit!&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these types of phrases, what would be considered the root of the phrase from a dependency perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T19:43:42.847" Title="What is the root of an utterance without a verb?" Tags="&lt;roots&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11113" CreationDate="2015-01-22T08:23:57.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't suppose it's meaningful that &lt;em&gt;parece&lt;/em&gt; does not assume 3rd person plural form (&lt;em&gt;parecen&lt;/em&gt;) when there are two or more clauses following it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;Parece que va a escampar &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; que los vientos se detienen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to &lt;em&gt;Un hombre &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; una mujer se sent&lt;strong&gt;aron&lt;/strong&gt; en la banca&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T08:23:57.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-22T08:58:12.537" Score="6" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Semitic languages, the consonant &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; seems to have become &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; (a palatal glide) in certain positions: for example Arabic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;alid&lt;/em&gt; &quot;newborn&quot;, Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;eled&lt;/em&gt; &quot;child&quot;, or Arabic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;araq&lt;/em&gt; &quot;leaves, foliage&quot;, Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;aroq&lt;/em&gt; &quot;green&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories on the mechanism of this change? I ask because &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; (labial to coronal/palatal) doesn't seem like a very common trajectory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any info&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T12:49:12.737" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T12:49:12.737" Title="Semitic: *w &gt; y" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11144" CreationDate="2015-01-22T09:17:05.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependencies are not restricted to verbs and their dependents, rather they exist between all types of nodes. On a conventional understanding, the &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;the one node that is not dominated by one of the other nodes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In your example, then noun &lt;strong&gt;shit&lt;/strong&gt; is the root, because &lt;strong&gt;holy&lt;/strong&gt;, the only other node available, does not dominate it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dependencies are typed, i.e. subclassified. For instance, attributive adjectives, such as &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;white horses&lt;/em&gt;, depend on their nouns. Hence &lt;strong&gt;holy&lt;/strong&gt; should depend on &lt;strong&gt;shit&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;em&gt;Stanford Dependencies&lt;/em&gt; take this to be an &lt;strong&gt;amod&lt;/strong&gt; (adjectival modifier) dependency. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~mcdm/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The 2008 paper &quot;Stanford typed dependencies manual&quot;&lt;/a&gt; lists common dependencies from section 2 on).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning%E2%80%93text_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meaning-Text-Theory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (MTT) labels branches between nodes with syntactic functions. For an example see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar#Syntactic_functions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: Dependency grammar: Syntactic functions&lt;/a&gt;. The dependency between an adjective and a noun is called &lt;strong&gt;attr&lt;/strong&gt;(ibutive) in MTT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastEditorUserId="3593" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T05:37:54.807" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T05:37:54.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2015-01-22T09:35:23.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Finnish, there are many words where the letter &quot;k&quot; drops out in certain case forms, and this occasionally creates a sequence of three identical vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;vaaka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;scale (for weighing)&quot; : genitive &lt;em&gt;vaa'an&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of (the) scale&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;raaka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;raw&quot; : genitive &lt;em&gt;raa'an&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the orthographic convention is to put an apostrophe (&quot;heittomerkki&quot;) in the place where the lost consonant would have appeared. This is done wherever the loss of &quot;k&quot; results in a sequence of two or more identical vowels: &lt;em&gt;reikä&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;hole&quot;) : genitive &lt;em&gt;rei'in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;liuku&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;slide&quot;) : gen. &lt;em&gt;liu'un&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T09:35:23.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2015-01-22T10:38:28.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be relevant that the Germanic and Romance languages don't have &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; past participles, as many other languages do (Indo-European and otherwise). E.g., in English one says &quot;The food was eaten&quot; but not *&quot;The man was &lt;strong&gt;having-eaten&lt;/strong&gt; the food&quot;, where &quot;having-eaten&quot; would be the active equivalent of the passive participle &quot;eaten&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;-perfect construction (&lt;em&gt;have eaten&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) may have spread because it helped to create &quot;symmetry&quot; -- i.e., it created an active counterpart to past passive constructions like &lt;em&gt;was eaten&lt;/em&gt;. (However, it's also possible that Germanic and Latin/early-Romance already had a counterpart construction like this, and the &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;-construction replaced it -- I don't know all the relevant history here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the Slavic languages &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have past active participles -- e.g. Slovene &lt;em&gt;jedel&lt;/em&gt; literally means &quot;having eaten&quot; (masculine singular), &lt;em&gt;spal&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;having slept&quot;, and so on -- it is not surprising that the use of &quot;have&quot; for the perfective has not widely spread to Slavic in the way that it has to Germanic/Romance, since Slavic does not have the same kind of &quot;gap&quot; to be filled. (It would be interesting, though, to know why the &quot;have&quot;-construction has taken root in some Russian and Macedonian dialects, as mentioned above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-01-22T10:46:48.483" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T10:46:48.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9819" CreationDate="2015-01-22T11:19:08.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has at least a couple of words that seem to meet your criteria (the definitions below are from American Heritage Dictionary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pungent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Affecting the organs of taste or smell with a sharp acrid sensation&quot;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;pungens&lt;/em&gt;, participle of &lt;em&gt;pungere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to sting&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;musty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Stale or moldy in odor or taste&quot;, etymology unknown but possibly based on &lt;em&gt;moist&lt;/em&gt; (= &quot;wet&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T11:19:08.297" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9159" CreationDate="2015-01-22T12:25:13.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Romanizations of Armenian, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is used for the letter ջ, which is pronounced [dʒ] in Eastern Armenian, or for ճ, pronounced [dʒ] in Western.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These Armenian letters are also sometimes transcribed (especially in older texts) using &quot;&lt;strong&gt;j^&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, i.e., &quot;j&quot; with a hachek instead of a dot. In this case, the regular &quot;j&quot; (with a dot) would be used for the sound [dz], as represented by ձ in Eastern and ծ in Western. (Incidentally, I don't know of any other case where &quot;j&quot; has been used to represent [dz], but for some reason it was chosen in this case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-01-22T14:22:06.073" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T14:22:06.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2015-01-22T12:39:29.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Canaanaic (which includes Hebrew) and Aramaic, Semitic w normally becomes y in initial position only. The notable exception is the conjunction wa &quot;and&quot;. Usually historic sound changes do not have any identifiable rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T12:39:29.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11154" CreationDate="2015-01-22T13:31:16.127" Score="1" ViewCount="1023" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a beginner in NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the main steps to build a dependency parser?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8016" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T16:44:04.867" Title="Steps to build a dependency parser" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-01-22T17:45:06.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11153" CreationDate="2015-01-22T16:44:04.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose you mean a rule-based parser since nobody would think of developing his own statistical parser (there are so many good open-source libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building a parser is quite complicated. The best way is to have a context-free grammar (CF parsing is trivial) and build up the dependency structures via constraint rules. This is how LFG works, whose f-structures are just plain old dependency trees (in general they are DAGs but can be thought of as trees with coreferences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want a context-free backbone in the parser (which doesn't make much sense for most Indo-European languages), you should devise syntax rules based on feature constraints. The dependency tree of a phrase or sentence is a rooted spanning tree over a graph whose nodes are the words of the phrase with edges representing possible dependencies that conform to the constraint rules. In Latin, for example, one would say that an adjective depends on a noun if they agree in case, gender, and number, such as &lt;em&gt;puella pulchra&lt;/em&gt; (nominative), &lt;em&gt;puellam pulchram&lt;/em&gt; (accusative), etc. Likewise, verb phrases would be constructed via constraints. In a sentence like &lt;em&gt;tu pecuniam debes&lt;/em&gt;, the constraining rules must state that the subject of a verb is in nominative and its direct object in accusative. But note that in most languages you'd need a ton of word order rules (that's why it's better to use a context-free backbone). Moreover a good parser needs a lexicon with valency frames to resolve ambiguous structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple parser can be quickly developed in Prolog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-22T16:44:04.867" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11159" CreationDate="2015-01-23T02:44:36.890" Score="3" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost every language has at least two nasal stops (usually /n/ and /m/), and a language that lacks any nasal stops is extremely rare. And yet, also very rare is any kind of nasal that isn't a stop, so much so that nasal stops are often simply referred to as nasals, as if &quot;nasal&quot; is a manner of articulation on the same level as &quot;stop&quot;, &quot;approximant&quot;, &quot;fricative&quot;, and &quot;affricate&quot;. What's with the abundance of nasal stops and extreme rarity of any other nasal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I'm asking specifically about nasal &lt;em&gt;consonants&lt;/em&gt;, not vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastEditorUserId="6888" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T00:45:14.907" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T00:45:14.907" Title="Why are non-stop nasals so rare?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2015-01-23T02:47:38.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't completely clear to me from your question whether you were asking for examples that &lt;em&gt;weren't&lt;/em&gt; Mandarin or Russian, but at least I thought it would be useful for readers to have examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;爱你的人&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ai ni de ren&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  love you REL people&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  people who love you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;любящий женщин человек&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ljubjashchij zhenshchin chelovek&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  loving women(acc) man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a man who loves women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not proficient in either of these languages, so someone please correct me if I got something wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="724" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T02:47:38.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11045" CreationDate="2015-01-23T04:55:01.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s no reason to assume this is a borrowed word, although Tai languages have borrowed some words with this shape (minor syllable – major syllable, or “sesquisyllabic”) from Khmer and Mon.  Marvin Brown in “From Ancient Thai to Modern Dialects” includes several words with the กระ- minor syllable on his list of common Tai etymons, such as กระดูก /kradu:k/ “bone”.  While he doesn’t list กระได among them, numerous cognates in other Tai languages suggest that if this word is borrowed, it happened very early.  Some of these cognates:  Thai northern dialect /khan dai/, Tai Lue /xɨn dai/, Tai Dam /lai/, Northern Zhuang lae /lai24/.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the variation?  It may be that the standardization process in Lao has not progressed to the extent it has in Thai.  But more generally, it’s likely that the iambic stress pattern of words like this means that the minor syllable is less stable than the major one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T04:55:01.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2015-01-23T04:55:36.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian is classified as an agglutinative language. Also, it seems more likely that rather than simply evolving away from inflection to analytic properties, this only occurs when languages come into contact. Take English, for example. Old English had five cases (if I recall correctly) and lost all but the genitive after hundreds of years of contact with French. Likewise, Mandarin Chinese, being a widely spoken language, would have had to be learned by millions of new speakers who, in practise, would not all have used the language correctly. This is why major languages tend toward analytic properties - inflection is used to a minimum by new speakers. In contrast, isolated groups tend toward languages which have a higher morpheme-word ratio. Australian Aboriginal languages are mostly agglunating; these are used only in small groups of people over large areas, meaning there are few second-language speakers. North American languages are another example, as are the Uralic languages, and even Proto-Indo-European, which was theoretically spoken only in a comparatively small region of the Caucasus. Languages can become more inflected through the process of grammaticalisation. A hypothetical example of this would be if English speakers began using prepositions as prefixes, and after many generations these prefixes lost all meaning as independent morphemes, simply becoming locative cases. Therefore, languages (when isolated from contact with other tongues) could in theory tend toward inflection rather than using analytic structures to convey meaning.&#xA;If I'm incorrect about any of this, correct me. Hope this helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8018" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T04:55:36.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11155" CreationDate="2015-01-23T05:58:08.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nasal fricatives are seriously rare or nonexistent; &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/dissertations/Shosted_dissertation_2006.pdf&quot;&gt;this dissertation&lt;/a&gt; looks at the essentially aerodynamic problem of producing fricative noise and nasalization simultaneously (fricatives require high airflow with major impedance; nasalization provides a no-resistance escape route for air, so thwarts pressure buildup). Nasal vowels on the other hand are not extremely rare though they are &quot;marked&quot;, i.e. less common than oral vowels. Nasalization makes it harder to distinguish vowels, so there is a functional-perceptual reason for the disadvantage that nasalization has in vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T05:58:08.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3652" CreationDate="2015-01-23T06:11:36.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned, modern Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) seems like a fairly straightforward example of agglutinative IE languages: the only major exceptions to the agglutination in these languages (that I can think of) are the verbs whose past tense is formed with ablaut rather than suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armenian (or at least Western Armenian -- I haven't studied Eastern) doesn't seem especially agglutinative in its noun or verb system. Although its nouns do not have gender classes and the plural ending -(&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; is used for almost all nouns (I don't recall any exceptions at the moment), many words have irregular case endings. Its verb system has three main conjugation classes, the personal endings are not the same in the past and present tense, and there are many different patterns in the formation of past-tense stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T06:59:15.517" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T06:59:15.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9926" CreationDate="2015-01-23T06:57:08.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why wouldn't adjectival phrases like English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;born again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (in the religious sense) count as examples of a right-branching nominal modifier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T06:57:08.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11164" CreationDate="2015-01-23T12:34:46.870" Score="0" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw the displacement letters of the words in the transition between languages and dialects.&lt;br&gt;For example in my language (Persian) dialects: &lt;code&gt;Lajegir&lt;/code&gt; converted to &lt;code&gt;Lagejir&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;I don't remember any example for transition between languages but i saw.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is the reasons of this displacements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8020" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T14:59:14.537" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T19:33:10.040" Title="The reasons for displacement letters of the words in the transition between languages and dialects" Tags="&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11162" CreationDate="2015-01-23T19:33:10.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such transpositions (metathesis) might be completely unsystematic. I don't know the specific example you cite, but I suspect that it is just a random example (being CVC metathesis). Other kinds of metathesis are more systematic, and you find it in Hebrew in the 5th binyan when the stem begins with a sibilant -- hitzaken → hizdaken. Some dialects of Arabic have metathesis in order to get guttural consonants out of the syllable coda&#xA;The reason in that case is that metathesis results in a sonority-based improvement in syllable contact. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ffll.ut.ac.ir/fileMag/p-56-english1389.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; (the first in the file) covers some of the reasons, and applies to Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most examples of metathesis are grammatically unsystematic, such as the common example of &quot;ask&quot; being pronounced &quot;ax&quot; in some dialects -- that only happens in the one word and assumes without reason that the underlying form is /æsk/ because that's the Standard English form. Sometimes, infixing is incorrectly labeled as metathesis. But there are some robust examples like Leti, so that one can't deny that the phenomenon exists -- the theoretical mechanism for accounting for such alternations is another matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T19:33:10.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-23T20:06:20.737" Score="0" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can find measures of &quot;readability&quot; but not language complexity (there might be another word for this, I give an example below) online. If anyone knows of any, would you list them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By complexity I mean e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Bob is preparing fish for dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Complex&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Bob wields a sharpened metallic instrument when hacking an ichthyoid. (see image)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vtl5E.png&quot; alt=&quot;a simple vs. complex description of something&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="timothy.s.lau" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T21:34:56.290" Title="Are there measures of language complexity?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11165" CreationDate="2015-01-23T21:30:37.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some links for you to pursue: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/icall/calico08/lu.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.personal.psu.edu/xxl13/downloads/l2sca.html/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;B&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/sr086/SR086_11.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/18066/ctrstreadtechrepv01980i00173_opt.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;D&lt;/a&gt;. A thing is more complex iff it has more stuff in it that the thing you're comparing it to (that simply follows from the meaning of &quot;complex&quot;). There's little hope for an equation between difficulty of comprehension and formal complexity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T21:30:37.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11165" CreationDate="2015-01-23T21:34:56.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been proposed that languages should be judged more complex when children take longer to learn to speak them as a first language.  And specifically, I think I recall, Russian children take somewhat longer to start speaking than for some other well studied languages.  I'm sorry that I can't recall any references for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T21:34:56.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3682" CreationDate="2015-01-23T21:49:12.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most relevant-seeming tests for how naive speakers understand the structure of their language concern rhyming in poetry and how words are deliberately distorted in secret languages (such as pig-latin).  These tests do not so far seem to support the SPE analysis.  (You could look at articles by David Stampe and Paul Kiparsky for discussion along these lines.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-01-23T22:01:00.780" LastActivityDate="2015-01-23T22:01:00.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9522" CreationDate="2015-01-24T10:47:22.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, of course. In German, for example, the verb &quot;helfen&quot; (to help) is intransitive: &quot;ich habe ihm geholfen&quot; (I helped him). It takes an indirect object (dative) that can't be passivized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish has many verbs with so-called noncanonical (indirect) objects where one would expect a direct object. In general, just get a valency lexicon of any language and look for frames of intransitive verbs, you'll find many slots for indirect objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-01-24T16:57:43.943" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T16:57:43.943" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2015-01-24T17:14:21.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very plausible that human languages are more complex than non-human animal languages.  Human languages have grammars which are sufficiently complex that we don't yet understand them very well, while other animal languages don't really seem to have grammatical systems.  But you meant comparing complexity within the human species, rather than across species?  (It wasn't clear to me, reading your question.)  Then no, as the other answers have said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T17:14:21.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8425" CreationDate="2015-01-24T19:17:06.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with Sgall's Functional Generative Description (the theoretical framework used in the Prague Dependency Treebank)? He doesn't have synsemantic words in dependency trees and I think this is the right approach. He has the simple rule that in a phrase with an auxiliary or a preposition the autosemantic word is the head and whatever the auxiliary or preposition contributes to the syntactic structure is an attribute of the corresponding node in the tree. In other words, &quot;I saw him&quot; and &quot;I have seen him&quot; have the same dep. tree. Likewise, &quot;Mary loves John&quot; and &quot;María ama a Juan&quot; have the same dep. tree as far as structure is concerned. To sum up, only content words appear in syntax trees. If for some reason one would like to have function words in dependency trees they should be children of the nodes that represent content words (since they modify them, not vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T19:17:06.393" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11175" CreationDate="2015-01-24T21:01:00.537" Score="4" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize how hard it is to develop a CFG to model an arbitrary English sentence. Some valid discussion points for this topic can be found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/32447/17096&quot;&gt;Is there an EBNF that covers all of English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am interested in the &lt;strong&gt;most comprehensive CFG&lt;/strong&gt; (if not complete) that covers the English language. Surely such a thing has been attempted by linguists, to various degrees of success. As an outsider to the field, I would imagine that there might even be an agreed upon &quot;best approximation&quot; CFG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T20:49:22.543" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T20:49:22.543" Title="What is the most comprehensive context-free grammar for English?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;chomsky-hierarchy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9522" CreationDate="2015-01-24T22:35:24.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;uti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to use&quot; takes an ablative complement: &lt;em&gt;aratro utor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I am using a plow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T22:35:24.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-24T22:44:58.380" Score="5" ViewCount="1991" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, there's a phonemic contrast between /ɕ/ and /ʃ/ in Ubykh, North Qiang, South Qiang and Luxembourgish (though they are merging). Do any other languages exhibit this distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: On a second reading, Wikipedia does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; claim that Toda has /ɕ/; I must have misread the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5648" LastEditorUserId="5648" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T19:13:44.753" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T01:17:19.790" Title="Which languages contrast /ɕ/ and /ʃ/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11172" CreationDate="2015-01-24T23:16:57.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The treatment of English worked out in &lt;strong&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, &amp;amp; Sag is a CFG (with sets of rules given in highly abbreviated form) and is comprehensive in the sense that it includes the main areas of English covered in the TG literature.  It is not a practical description, because there are too many rules, but it is a real unextended CFG.  One of the main ideas was to show that transformations are not required to describe those constructions which they have in the past been used for.  In my opinion, the book does that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pullum, and perhaps the other three authors, came later to think that, after all, natural languages are not context free.  I wasn't convinced though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-24T23:16:57.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11179" CreationDate="2015-01-25T00:06:01.810" Score="2" ViewCount="3921" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read an article in which the author was attempting to explain how &quot;semantic range&quot; works. He explained it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;words don't have &quot;a&quot; meaning; they have a semantic range of possible meanings (e.g. the English words &quot;run&quot;, &quot;set&quot;, &quot;point&quot;, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you determine which meaning is &quot;meant&quot; by the context in which the word is used&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;however, that is not to say that the meaning of a word is determined &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; by its context; a word is not a &quot;blank check&quot;, devoid of meaning, capable of &quot;meaning&quot; anything we want depending on how we choose to use it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;rather, a communicator uses and combines what is &lt;em&gt;already in the language&lt;/em&gt; to convey their message, using words within their established semantic ranges, using context to clarify which definition within the semantic range that they are intending in each instance&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;how do new meanings arise then?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Clearly they do arise, hence the shifts in languages over time. The above explanation of semantic range seems to imply that new meanings are not allowed in a language though. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8028" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T12:59:28.223" Title="If word usage is based on semantic range, how do new meanings emerge?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11176" CreationDate="2015-01-25T01:03:13.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those 'rules' are really too strong. People are constantly creatively changing how they use their languages, and every minute 'microdialects' form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new senses people start using will always have some context, and the new senses will usually be related to one of the old senses, though it might be hard to see just how. One way a new sense could begin would be an inside joke some friends share. One word will make them think of the funny situation, but then later they might start using other words. Word X makes them think of word Y which makes them think of word Z which makes them think of the original joke. X is similar to Y which is similar to Z which is similar to the joke, but to everyone else X wouldn't seem like it had anything to do with the joke at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These little microdialects will exist between friends and families everywhere. Occasionally one new sense becomes very popular and will spread throughout the whole community. The internet is a really interesting place to watch that happen. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; lets you see the new senses people on the other side of the world are developing, while &lt;a href=&quot;http://knowyourmeme.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Know Your Meme&lt;/a&gt; shows 'search interest' graphs which show you when a term gained prominence on the net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An English example is the word &lt;em&gt;awful&lt;/em&gt;. It is clearly derived from the word &lt;em&gt;awe&lt;/em&gt;, and originally was an adjective that meant the thing inspired a lot of awe. I don't know the history of the word, but I'd assume that with other words like &lt;em&gt;wonderful&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;impressive&lt;/em&gt; the word &lt;em&gt;awful&lt;/em&gt; gradually begun to be used only in negative contexts. This pejoration meant that the word now is specifically negative. At the same time &lt;em&gt;awe&lt;/em&gt; became more positive, so that it now seems very odd for the words to be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T01:03:13.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11182" CreationDate="2015-01-25T04:51:24.733" Score="3" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has ever used Google translate knows that the translated version is mostly grammatically correct but often extremely awkward to use in a conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the factor which has prohibited it from gaining wider usage, i.e. sending your Spanish friend a letter written completely in Google translated Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually this is the reason I am asking the question in the first place. I need to email a professor in Mexico, I forgot how to say something along the lines of &quot;I need something could you do me a favor&quot; in a natural way in Spanish. I got something very awkward from Google translate and has been trying to revise it in a more natural language ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think Google translate will ever have the potential to translate language at a level where humans actually communicate? What are some of the challenges preventing this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6909" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:43:43.127" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T23:56:28.280" Title="Why does google translate produce awkward sentences" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11180" CreationDate="2015-01-25T05:13:56.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The challenge is figuring out how human language works, in detail.  If we knew that, we could program top-notch translate programs and do lots of other neat things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T05:13:56.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11180" CreationDate="2015-01-25T05:16:17.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;MT is hard. Google Translate is based on statistical methods with models trained on large bilingual corpora. There are a few rule-based systems that produce better translations but only in closed specialized domains. As for now nobody has an algorithm or method that performs better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to predict the future but I wouldn't hope for significantly better translations in the next years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T05:16:17.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11180" CreationDate="2015-01-25T11:01:00.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question makes some broadly misleading assumptions about both translation and machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is not &quot;grammatical&quot; correctness. It's not a problem for Google to generate superficially grammatical sentences. But sentences only appear as part of text/utterance which is the really carrier of communicative meaning. Any one word or phrase only makes sense in that context. Also, texts have their own idiomatic conventions which depend on many factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have to evaluate MT (machine translation) at the level of the whole text, utterance or conversation. And here you find that often the coherence breaks down. You see translations of texts where there are multiple contradictory interpretations of an event/situation in the target text that are not present in the source text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that unlike with a human translation, machine translation does not start with a thorough understanding of the source text. It combines some basic parsing with stochastic methods - essentially dealing with probabilities based on huge corpora. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because language is basically infinitely variable, even the vast corpora at Google's disposal are not enough to guess at the right equivalents for every sentence. This becomes exponentially more difficult because most sentences only make sense in the context of other sentences. Current MT has almost no way of evaluating the role of context in disambiguation and has to pretty much stay at the level of single sentences with some basic anaphoric parsing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to predict the future of MT but replacing human translators and interpreters is not even on the horizon. I suspect that NLP is very near the peak of the gains that can be made through stochastic processing in the same way it reached the end of what can be done with pure parsing twenty years ago. It will keep improving incrementally but the field is waiting for a new breakthrough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T11:01:00.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11174" CreationDate="2015-01-25T13:38:51.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is also based on information from Wikipedia, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyghe_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Adyghe&lt;/a&gt; contrasts /ɕ/, /ʃ/, /ʂ/, /ʂʷ/, /ʃʼ/, and /ʃʷʼ/, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabardian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kabardian&lt;/a&gt; contrasts /ʃ/, /ɕ/, and /ɕʼ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T13:38:51.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-25T13:54:10.670" Score="4" ViewCount="1061" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it has its origins in the International Phonetic Association, but the idea of a unique alphabet for each speech sound of the world's languages organized by place and manner must've had an origin coinciding with the invention of methods to quantify articulatory gestures, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T16:00:57.600" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T18:28:56.857" Title="What is the history of the International Phonetic Alphabet?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11186" CreationDate="2015-01-25T15:23:40.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least early on, the idea was to provide for each &lt;em&gt;distinctive&lt;/em&gt; speech sound, i.e. phoneme.  Being able to describe all the possible combinations of languages' articulatory gestures or movements seems to me to be more like the program in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  And how do you use a device to quantify articulatory gestures (as distinguished from positions or movements), anyway?  You mean electromyography?  Not around yet when IPA started.  So, no, I doubt you have the history right, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T15:23:40.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11186" CreationDate="2015-01-25T16:38:55.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can read the wiki page &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to get a synopsis and, most important, references to sources. The method of articulatory description is ancient (as in Vedic ancient), constituting the first branch of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I knew there was a book on the topic, I just forgot the reference. Look at Robert Albright (1958). &lt;em&gt;The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its Background and Development&lt;/em&gt;, International Journal of American Linguistics (Vol. 24, No. 1, Part 3); Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T17:40:05.740" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T17:40:05.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11174" CreationDate="2015-01-25T18:16:18.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should take any such claims with a large grain of salt. While there is no question that Toda has a contrast, it is not evident that the phonetic realization is [ɕ] vs. [ʃ]. Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson in &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt; 156ff list the Toda sibilants as [s̻ s̱ ʃ ʂ] and [ɕ] is not listed. They also list the Ubykh sibilants as [s ŝ ɕ s̥], without [ʃ] (they state that [ʃ] does not occur in Ubykh and Abkhaz). Although the wiki entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_sibilant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ɕ&lt;/a&gt; lists Norwegian as having that sound, Kristofferson in &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Norwegian&lt;/em&gt; lists it as [ʂ], and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki entry on Norwegian&lt;/a&gt; likewise does not include [ɕ]. Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson put their charcoal where their informants' mouths are and substantiate the claim that Toda has [s̻ s̱ ʃ ʂ]. I argue that to make that specific a claim (that a language has [ɕ] rather than [ʃ] or [ʂ]), one must use some articulatory-measurement method, or, one must be Ian Catford or Peter Ladefoged (both of whom, alas, have another thing in common).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: corrected ɕ/ʂ typo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T21:47:39.423" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T21:47:39.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9870" CreationDate="2015-01-25T21:14:34.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the title of your question means to you what it literally means, the answer is, plainly, 'NO'. Just by observing written texts, without &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; access at all to the &lt;strong&gt;extralinguistic referents&lt;/strong&gt; and contexts of use of the written expressions, you would be absolutely unable to determine either their 'sound' or their 'meaning' (/use), and you would have no grounds at all to call that set of inscriptions 'English' or anything else, or even less to say that you had &lt;strong&gt;learnt&lt;/strong&gt; English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could study the distribution of each of the symbols figuring in your necessarily finite collection of inscriptions and, with a lot of patience, eventually establish an 'alphabet' (an exhaustive list of the symbols in them) and a set of 'construction rules' for the &lt;strong&gt;observed subset&lt;/strong&gt; of L, i.e., a &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt; (in the broad sense) in which you specified the observed combinations of 'letters' (a sort of 'phonotactics' of L), an inventory of (observed) recurring 'morphs' (bits of 'words' observed to systematically recur in identifiable co-texts), an inventory of observed 'words' (assuming the inscriptions contained punctuation marks, e.g., spaces, something to separate sentences), and you could, on distributional grounds, establish a finite set of 'syntactic categories' of words, and, since your corpus would be, by definition, a closed one, a finite set of recurring patterns of combination of categories of 'words' into 'phrases' and 'sentences', i.e., you could surely reach a fairly detailed set of hypotheses about the 'syntax' of L in the &lt;strong&gt;narrow&lt;/strong&gt; sense, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, without access to the extralinguistic correlates of such 'words', 'phrases' and 'sentences', your 'language' L would have no 'semantics', would thus not even be a 'semiotic' system (in Morris' sense), and, of course, you would not have learnt a human language at all, because what defines human languages is their capacity to 'recursively' correlate indefinitely complex 'forms' with their corresponding 'meanings' (= in Chomsky's terms: infinite use of finite means). On the contrary, by definition, all the written expressions of L you could collect, however large your 'corpus' were, would only constitute a tiny fraction of what the alphabet and the rules of construction would be able to 'generate'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, above all, your L would not be a system of 'signs'. Hence, even if you learnt your 'alphabet' and your 'construction rules' to perfection, even if you subsequently generalized and extrapolated your 'grammar' in order to 'generate' a much bigger complementary set of non-observed, but grammar-compliant and hence predictable new possible 'inscriptions', you would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be entitled to say you had &lt;strong&gt;learnt English&lt;/strong&gt; (or any other human language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The well-known cases in which such sets of inscriptions have been 'deciphered' could occur at all because the decipherers did eventually obtain at least indirect access to what the inscriptions and their parts 'referred to' and 'meant' (with all the caveats that philosophers of language since Quine have established in this respect). Without such direct or indirect access to the extralinguistic correlates of 'inscriptions' and their components, it would have been imposible to even decipher the observed expressions, let alone learn the underlying languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-25T22:50:40.567" LastActivityDate="2015-01-25T22:50:40.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11192" CreationDate="2015-01-26T01:35:13.637" Score="2" ViewCount="1005" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is any language known to contain a glottal stop [ʔ] that isn't tenuis? For example, an aspirated glottal stop [ʔʰ], a palatalized glottal stop [ʔʲ], or a labialized glottal stop [ʔʷ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CORRECTION: It turns out that tenuis is not the right word here. I mean glottal stops with a secondary feature, such as a aspiration or labialization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastEditorUserId="6888" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T00:56:37.563" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T23:27:14.213" Title="Glottal stops that aren't tenuis" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11191" CreationDate="2015-01-26T01:53:06.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An aspirated glottal stop would be a fundamental contradiction (the vocal folds would have to be both spread apart and constricted). &quot;Tenuis&quot; does not preclude having secondary articulation, so [ʔʷ] wouldn't be an example -- tenuis is about phonation. This is a case where the wiki entry is in error, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenuis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; has it right. There are languages with [ʔʷ], [ʔʲ] although they may be described as &quot;glottalized w&quot; etc -- there is no distinction. Examples are Yurok, Klamath, Lushootseed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T01:53:06.170" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11174" CreationDate="2015-01-26T05:55:13.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usage of [ʃ] is not consistent according the Wikipedia, with different scholars use it for different sounds because they cannot tell difference between soft and hard consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T05:55:13.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11176" CreationDate="2015-01-26T06:17:26.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assumption here is that words have only a narrow &quot;semantic range&quot; and can not be applied in ways inconsistent with that range. &#xA;Language is inherently inconsistent. &#xA;Consider both colloquial expressions and innuendo; these do not reflect entirely (semantically speaking) accurate use of a language. Language is a series of sounds with associated ideas and emotions; these sounds don't represent a &quot;thing&quot;, they represent what we associate with the thing as well as the characteristics of that thing itself, but not the actual thing. If another object becomes associated with that &quot;thing&quot;, the word may come to be applied to it too. Consider the etymology of the word &quot;bead&quot; as an example of semantic change. Hope this helped.&#xA;Also, to the &quot;awful&quot; vs &quot;awesome&quot; comment made above, it seems more reasonable when considering the context of the words.&#xA;There are things that are described as awful, referred to with a sense of fear or dread. Consider that sights which capture attention are often called &quot;awesome&quot;, or that the viewer/s are &quot;awestruck&quot;. This could easily have come from the same origin - a terrifying sight that renders a person transfixed, vs an awe-inspiring sight that renders a person transfixed. This also provides a transition point to the meaning of &quot;awesome&quot; when referring to an item rather than a &quot;sight&quot; (eg. &quot;it is awesome&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8018" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T06:17:26.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-26T07:53:08.457" Score="1" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for russian-english parallel corpus, but have found none publicly available to the moment. If you know one, or parallel text database, I would be very grateful for one. (I heard of parallel corpus for news, but haven't found any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the moment I am exploring another idea to build such a corpus. Given that many wikipedia articles in Russian are translated/shortened/abridged versions of English ones and wiki texts are moreless free to use, I would like to do the following thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Auto-translate EN-&gt;RU original articles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use semantics-aware algorithm to try to align original text to russian wiki page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe include some manual adjustments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the idea looks realistic to implement? Has anyone tried anything like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T18:53:25.150" Title="Evaluate idea to autobuild russian-english parallel corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-26T08:37:20.820" Score="1" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can the name of the Greek goddess Demeter come from PIE word for tamer, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dōma̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (especially given the Aeolic form of the goddess' name, Δωμάτηρ)? I am interested in both whether it is possible from sound change perspective and semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T18:12:09.090" Title="Etymology of Demeter" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7065" CreationDate="2015-01-26T10:30:53.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is 'yes', and, of course the restrictive/non-restrictive distinction makes sense for indefinite NPs, too! Why shouldn´t it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can easily generate as many examples as you want of non-restrictive relative clauses accompanying indefinite NPs (be they 'specific' or non-'specific') by choosing NPs that name &lt;strong&gt;unfamiliar objects&lt;/strong&gt; and, therefore, if used, are likely to require a bit of explanation from the speaker to help the hearer get an idea of what is referred to (which, as you know, is &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; characteristic function of non-restrictive relative clauses; these cases are exactly the kind of cases we might expect to need such explanatory clauses, there is nothing special at all to say about them). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I had reasons to assume that you are not likely to know what a &lt;strong&gt;guqin&lt;/strong&gt; (or any other, from our perspective, 'rare' object) is, I might perfectly well say to you something like a), where the indefinite NP is non-specific (i.e., 'intensional', non-referential: such an object existed, but might not be available anymore), or one like b), where it is specific (i.e., referential: there is, indeed, an old guqin in my music room):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) I am currently looking for a guqin, which is a sort of Chinese sitar with seven strings [+ e.g., but I want an old one and they are very difficult to come by]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) I have just bought a guqin, which is a sort of Chinese sitar with seven strings [+ e.g., and I am fascinated by its sound, but it is an old one and it has cost me a fortune. I'd better not tell my wife!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even build examples that contain such non-restrictive relative clauses &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; restrictive ones, as parentheticals, as in c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Tom told me about a former patient, who had never before done any harm to anybody, that one day, for no apparent reason, went into a school with his rifle and killed thirteen children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, there is nothing in c) worth special comment: the non-restrictive relative clause must be adjacent to its nominal 'antecedent', but since the NP in this case also contains a restrictive relative clause that ends in an NP (= thirteen children) that could itself be interpreted as such, to avoid ambiguity the non-restrictive relative clause must be inserted next to 'a former patient'. Since, if it were inserted without commas, it would be interpreted as restrictive and that is not the intended interpretation, there is no choice but to insert it as a parenthetical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you are familiar with the syntactic and semantic tests that generally distinguish restrictive from non-restrictive modification, as I assume, given the way you have worded your question, there is nothing special to add about heuristics: apply the standard tests to a), b) or c) if you are in doubt (but you need not be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T10:30:53.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2015-01-26T12:57:33.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most probably her name derives from PIE *dhǵhōm-. Kretschmer suggests that δᾶ (Δαματήρ) is a pre-Greek version of γη/γᾶ, but I tend to believe Heubeck's (1961) and others suggestion of an Indo-European root for 'earth'. Phrygian has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Γδ&lt;/strong&gt;αν μα&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so that speaks too for a IE-root. Δᾶ seems to be the Doric version of γη/γᾶ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in order to be cautious, we should remember that Phrygian could (or should) have shared substratum with Greek, hence that wouldn't eliminate Kretschmer's theory. However, I don't see much support for it by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2015-01-27T11:54:34.043" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T11:54:34.043" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-26T17:31:25.837" Score="1" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read this term in many papers in NLP: (Gold POS tags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8016" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-29T07:26:07.437" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T07:26:07.437" Title="Gold Part-Of-Speech tags" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11199" CreationDate="2015-01-26T19:28:52.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It refers to the set of &quot;correct&quot; part of speech tags assigned to the tokens (words and punctuation) in a corpus of sentences. The tags are usually annotated and vetted manually by linguistic experts, and used to train and test classifiers, parsers and other processing resources used to process natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T19:28:52.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2015-01-26T21:10:11.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the term 'predicate' is used rather differently in syntax and semantics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntacticians speak of 'predicates' only when a 'predication' relation - 'primary' (as in &lt;em&gt;Bill &lt;strong&gt;came home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) or 'secondary' (as in &lt;em&gt;Bill came home &lt;strong&gt;rather depressed&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;- is established with a syntactic 'subject', which may be &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; (unique) subject of the clause or another NP/DP, in certain cases of 'secondary predication' in which the 'subject' is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the subject of the clause, but an object, or the subject of a subordinate 'small clause', etc., depending on which analysis each syntactician favours (as in, e.g., &lt;em&gt;I saw Bill rather depressed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I consider Bill an excellent teacher&lt;/em&gt;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, syntactic predicates normally or even invariably (depending on the analyses syntacticians adopt), correspond to only &lt;strong&gt;one type&lt;/strong&gt; of what semanticists would call 'first-order &lt;strong&gt;one-place&lt;/strong&gt; predicates', the type in which the argument that must 'saturate' the unsaturated one-place predicate to yield a 'proposition' is discharged, precisely, by the syntactic subject of the clause, but, of course, the undischarged argument of an unsaturated one-place predicate need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; correspond to the subject of the clause; semantically speaking, &lt;em&gt;I sent Bill__&lt;/em&gt; is also a one-place first-order predicate, even though the missing argument is, syntactically, not discharged by a subject, but by a direct object (say &lt;em&gt;the invitation&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;I sent Bill the invitation&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;This is the invitation which I sent Bill&lt;/em&gt;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In semantics, on the contrary, the term 'predicate' is used much more generally. Of course it is applied in cases of 'functional application' that do correspond to syntactic predications, but also to many other cases that do not. For one thing, semanticists, following logicians, speak of 'monadic' (= one-place), 'dyadic' (two-place), and, generally, 'n-adic' (n-place) 'predicates' (and &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; are 'predicates', from the semantic point of view). A transitive verb, for example, is, semantically speaking, a two-place (first-order) predicate, although, obviously, it does not by itself constitute a complete syntactic predicate, and a 'ditransitive' verb is a three-place first-order 'predicate', although it would need to be construed with two objects to constitute a complete syntactic predicate, etc. On the other hand, the 'predicates' the semanticist talks about need not be first-order, they may also be higher-order (2nd, third,... etc., depending on how rich the semanticist's ontology is), and, as a consequence, ad-nominal APs, PPs, relative clauses, etc. internal to an NP/DP, for example, are also one-place 'predicates' (2nd order, in this case, since they are predicated of a common, or modified common noun, that is itself, semantically speaking, a first-order predicate), and, correspondingly, AdvPs, PP's, etc. modifying unsaturated VPs also qualify as one-place (in this case, nth-order) predicates, since they are 'predicated' of partially constructed VPs. Actually, 'adverbials', as Ernst and Cinque, in particular, have shown, may be 'predicated' of entities that syntactically correspond to &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; different types of verbal or extended verbal projections, AuxPs, Modality Phrases, full predications, propositions (with polarity specified), ForcePs etc., etc., which are not first-order entities, either. So, in sum, in semantics, the extension of the predicate 'predicate' is much bigger than it is in syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-26T22:18:01.813" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T22:18:01.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2015-01-26T23:15:49.680" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This etymology seems unlikely to me for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A long o-grade in a Greek agent noun in -ter is at best unusual. I can't think of another such example, at any rate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The -a- of the second syllable is long, as shown by Attic-Ionic Δημήτηρ. Of course, one could invoke folk etymology here, so this isn't conclusive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vowel in the first syllable in the more common forms of the name, Δημήτηρ / Δαμάτηρ, cannot come from PIE *ō.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's pretty clear that Δαμάτηρ is a compound of Δα-μάτηρ, since the first element seems to occur in the name of Poseidon: &lt;em&gt;Potei-dāōn&lt;/em&gt; 'husband of Da' (which he isn't in the traditional mythology, but seems to have formerly been).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not clear why an earth goddess should be named 'Tamer'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-01-26T23:15:49.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6781" CreationDate="2015-01-27T04:47:12.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've correctly recognized that a predicate in syntax is not what's called predicate in formal logic. As has been mentioned above, appositives can be expressed as conjunctions in formal (first-order predicate) logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, what's expressed by the logical predicate is the focus of a sentence whereas the argument is the topic. For example, &quot;Melissa dormit&quot; would be sleep(Melissa). But if you have &quot;Dormit Melissa&quot;, you can't have Melissa(dormit), which is nonsense; formal logicians use lambda calculus to make Melissa a predicate: λf.f(Melissa).&#xA;(I used a Latin example because it has free word order in order for both syntax trees to be identical.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility would be to use Davidsonian semantics which is very flexible and doesn't make you use lambda calculus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T04:47:12.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-27T09:17:07.710" Score="3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;In standard propositional logic, both p and –p are ‘propositions’. In natural language, however, what phrases smaller than TP are ‘propositional’ is much less obvious. For example, take the simplest sentences, sentences like a), b) and c), where a) is specified for ‘default’, positive ‘polarity’, b) has ‘marked’, negative ‘polarity’, and, arguably, c) is unspecified for ‘polarity’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)  Bach composed this concert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b)  Bach did not compose this concert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c)  Did Bach compose this concert?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Chomskian GB/P&amp;amp;P/MT assumptions, a clause like a) minimally contains a ‘saturated’ vP/VP with &lt;em&gt;Bach&lt;/em&gt; in Spec v/V and &lt;em&gt;this concert&lt;/em&gt; in Compl of V, and, on top of  that, at least three ‘functional’ heads that respectively allow for the specification of polarity (Pol/PolP, in one widely used terminology), tense (TP, earlier IP), and illocutionary ‘force’ (ForceP, earlier CP). [Of course further heads may be involved (e.g., unmarked ‘modality’), but I will ignore them here, as they do not substantially alter the issue; let’s leave ForceP/CP aside, too, for the same reason].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the saturated vP or VP would correspond to the syntactic encoding of an ‘event’. I ignore here the question whether a VP must be tensed or not to be able to encode an event and how the sub-events that an 'accomplishment verb' like &lt;em&gt;compose&lt;/em&gt; entails can satisfy this condition to qualify as ‘(sub)events’, although, of course, if it must, then, arguably, only TP can really correspond to en event and everything becomes even more obscure and complicated. But let’s leave that aside, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In at least both a) and b) it would be the respective PolarityP’s that would be ‘propositional’, but shall we say that ‘propositional’ categories start at PolarityP or at the respective X’ level (i.e., at Pol’, constituted by the Pol head, which would already contain whatever features license positive, negative or unspecified polarity, and its vP/VP complement)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about c)? Under the assumptions above, in c) polarity is unspecified, and, as a consequence, its PolP, if it contains one - as I asume - cannot have a truth-value, and so cannot encode a ‘proposition’ at all. Case c), then, would illustrate a kind of ‘sentence’ (in the sense of ‘syntactic category that can be used to perform a speech act’), whose PolarityP would not be ‘propositional’. Some PolPs, then, would be ‘propositional’ and some would not, and, in cases like c), arguably neither TP nor ForceP could be ‘propositional’ either, and as a consequence yes/no questions would contain ‘propositional content’, but no propositional projections. [Of course, granted the existence of negative questions like &lt;em&gt;Didn´t Bach compose this concert?&lt;/em&gt;, one can always argue that c) has just default positive polarity and that that value is 'questioned' at the higher illocutionary level, I know, but the alternative view should not be lightly discarded, should it?]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once thought about this for a while, and went back to Frege, Russell, Strawson and other major early sources, but was unable to reach a really satisfying conclusion, which was an embarrassment, for at the time I always tried to convince my students of the feasibility of a well-behaved compositional semantics even for the highly articulated syntactic structures of current Chomskian theories of the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Could anybody here clarify this matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am aware that this question is only a tiny aspect of a much bigger one that has already been raised here at least once, namely, the ontological and, correspondingly, ‘semantic’ status of the extra- (or intra-!) linguistic correlates of the multiple syntactic heads and projections that figure in current ‘Chomskian’ analyses of the clause, but it seems to me that it is an important aspect and a good starting point for the investigation of that bigger, for semanticists, crucial and, to my knowledge, so far largely unanswered question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-27T09:59:10.167" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T15:50:13.077" Title="At what point in the syntactic hierarchy inside a clause do phrases acquire ‘propositional’ status?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2015-01-27T12:12:19.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the discussion in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt; is good, where he gives an orderly way of discussing such questions of what category a phrase is in.  I can't locate my copy of the book right now, so I'll be rather vague.  He follows the proposal of Ross's paper &quot;NP: Endstation Hauptwort&quot; (exact title?) that category membership is a matter of degree.  He distinguishes (at least) (1) internal composition, (2) external privileges of occurrence, (3) correspondence to logical form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1), for sentence (I'll use that term instead of your &quot;proposition&quot;) would be something like: is there a subject?  Is there a verb and is it finite?  Are there parenthetical expressions of the sort we find in &quot;root sentences&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) would be something like: can it act as antecedent for &quot;so&quot; in such constructions as &quot;but I don't think so&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) would be the correspondence to the sentences (or &quot;propositions&quot;) of sentence logic in a translation into a logical form (as you mention in the beginning of your question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not sure how much the jargon associated with Chomsky's current theories is understood far from MIT, but certainly I didn't understand much of the terminology in your question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T12:12:19.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2015-01-27T14:43:32.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact answer depends on the approach to natural language semantics you use. I've used Jerry Hobbs' &quot;Ontological Promiscuity&quot; (it's an approach to pragmatics and the title of a paper) where a semantic representation is predicative (one could say &quot;has propositional status&quot; because all formulae in the framework are closed) whenever an eventuality is marked as existing or nonexistig (Hobbs' Rexist predicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a simple affirmative sentence it would be the VP but note that typically  there are more predications in a sentence that depend on the discourse context (information structure). The topic implies existence (Rexist) so in a sentence like &quot;The king of France is bald&quot; there are two predications (the other is that fact that France has a king, i.e. a king of France exists; the sentence has no meaning if uttered today). Hobbs uses a version of HPSG, his &quot;The syntax of English in a abductive framework&quot; implicitly describes the relationship between syntactic structures and their logical representaiton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T14:43:32.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11195" CreationDate="2015-01-27T18:53:25.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://rus-ltc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian Learner Translator Corpus&lt;/a&gt; which is constructed from students' translations. Maybe it can be useful for you. It has new interface which is in beta now, so there isn't a link to &quot;About&quot; page. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rus-ltc.org/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here it is&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguatools.org/tools/corpora/wikipedia-parallel-titles-corpora/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;multilingual corpora build from wiki titles&lt;/a&gt; and ru-en is one of the many language pairs. You may also want to look at other corpora and tools on that site, they do a lot of stuff with wiki articles on multiple languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I would recommend to look through &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LREC conference proceedings&lt;/a&gt;, there were significant number of papers about extracting/building parallel corpora automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T18:53:25.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4239" CreationDate="2015-01-27T20:07:28.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tenatively propose that you can not, and that click identity depends very heavily on the burst. I don't know if anyone has run the experimenent, but you can sort of start with recordings of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/nama/nama.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nama&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/xhosa/xhosa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Xhosa&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/xong/!xong.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;!Xóõ&lt;/a&gt;, edit out the burst, and play the result. Ideally you'd want minimal pairs (and actual speakers of the language for your subjects), but you can get a quick DIY answer from these materials. My opinion is that click place cannot be identified at all, not just limiting oneself to formant transitions, but some of the fancy features like epiglottalization might have an audible carry-over past the burst though not something realized in the pattern of formant transitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I'll be less tenative. Tony Traill's 1997 paper &lt;em&gt;Linguistic phonetic features for clicks&lt;/em&gt; ran the experiment with !Xóõ speakers, and found this result. He notes that the anterior constriction does not coarticulate with the following vowel and the posterior constriction coarticulates with the preceding only to the point of indicating some velar constriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-27T21:07:19.347" LastActivityDate="2015-01-27T21:07:19.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-28T00:36:26.393" Score="0" ViewCount="4712" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most English-language news sources and people in America pronounce the name of the city (上海) with a long a sound as in &quot;way&quot; within the &quot;shang (上)&quot; syllable, but it's not pronounced that way in Chinese; the actual pronunciation of 上 is with the &quot;ah&quot; sound as in &quot;father,&quot; and most Chinese dialects pronounce it more similarly to Mandarin than how it's pronounced in English. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8039" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-01-29T06:41:34.280" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T02:33:54.580" Title="Why is &quot;Shanghai&quot; pronounced the way it is in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11209" CreationDate="2015-01-28T01:49:11.363" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, English speakers don't learn the pronunciation of place names from speakers of that language; they use general rules for pronunciation. Hence [br̩lɪn] instead of [bɛrlin], [ɔzlow] instead of [uʃlu], [pɛrɪs] instead of [paʁi], and Qatar (Standard Arabic [ˈqɑtˤar]) is a real problem, so I've heard [ˈkɑɾṛ], [kəˈtɑr] and [kæɾr̩]. Colin Powell would pronounce it as [gʌtr̩], close to the local dialect pronunciation [ˈgitˤar]. We also never pronounce Mandarin &quot;h&quot; as [x], and &quot;zh&quot; and &quot;j&quot; are not distinguished. Additionally, in American English, front vowels are raised a bit more before the voiced velars (g, ŋ) since there's no tense-lax contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T01:49:11.363" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11213" CreationDate="2015-01-28T01:30:01.457" Score="3" ViewCount="10541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always have the impression grammar is just a tool to help studying and learning a language, i.e. it is a scientific tool invented for a language after the language has existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to think of it how most of the constructions of sentences fit the grammar rules, I am also inclined to think a language is created after the grammar rules are first defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of English, which is the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8045" OwnerDisplayName="user1589188" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T23:14:21.783" Title="Which comes first? Grammar or language?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-01-28T02:25:22.720" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists make a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and the answer to your question depends on which of the two you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivists set forth their rules with the idea of causing a more perfect language to come into being, so prescriptive rules come &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; the language that, it is hoped, will conform to those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Descriptivists set forth their rules to conform to a language that they observe, but do not affect.  So descriptive rules come &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; the language that, it is hoped, the grammar will conform to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;Prescriptivism&lt;/strong&gt;: grammar causes language.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Descriptivism&lt;/strong&gt;: language causes grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" OwnerDisplayName="Greg Lee" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T03:13:49.913" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-01-28T03:23:33.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar comes first in Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish, and C++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most other (ie natural) languages, language comes first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8043" OwnerDisplayName="Paul Senzee" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T03:23:33.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-01-28T03:34:42.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar is description of  how a language system works. But in order to describe a language system you need terms for word classes, verb forms and sentence structures.&#xA;Such terms had just to be developed. No natural language begins with grammar. It is different with artificially created languages as Esperanto, but this has already been said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" OwnerDisplayName="rogermue" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-01-28T19:26:17.680" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T19:26:17.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-01-28T04:10:39.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The human linguist, Noam Chomsky, has asserted that if a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.vobs.at/ludescher/ludescher/lacquisition/nativist/nativist%20theory.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martian linguist&lt;/a&gt; were to visit earth, he would observe only one language and one grammar, albeit with many variants. Chomsky posited a (yet undiscovered) Language Acquisition Device in the human brain that recognizes and generates a Universal Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Martian Linguist would have observed that the vast majority of human languages (more than 90%) have the Subject preceding the Object (So with the Verb, the S-O languages would be SVO, SOV, or VSO.) While there are a few scrambling languages (where Object &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; precede Subject), Object preceding Subject sounds foreign to &lt;em&gt;anyone's&lt;/em&gt; ears. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/how-the-klingon-language-was-invented/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguists&lt;/a&gt; and screenwriters intentionally subvert the S-O order to make alien languages sound, well, alien (e.g., Klingon (OVS), Yoda-speak (&lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002173.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSV&lt;/a&gt;)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Chomsky is correct, then both grammar and language are part of being human. It would be impossible to tease out which came first. Your brain is hardwired to speak and understand S-O grammar. It also stores and &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary;jsessionid=ECC1CE6427A236F4CB9DF7D120285F64?doi=10.1.1.139.2564&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;processes verbs and nouns in different parts of the brain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nuqneH! Your question meaningless is. This answer you upvote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" OwnerDisplayName="rajah9" LastActivityDate="2015-01-28T04:10:39.277" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6260" CreationDate="2015-01-29T02:46:50.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[v] and [ð] are acoustically very close together. &lt;a href=&quot;http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/plab/CPLWorkingPapers/pdfs/wpcpl12-Jongman.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jongman et al. 1998&lt;/a&gt; note that the frequency of the spectral peak for labiodental and interdental fricatives is not distinct (but at other fricative places, for z and ʒ, spectral peak frequency is different). They are also the same in terms of duration (they are shorter than the sibilants). Noise amplitude is what makes [v] and [ð] distinguishable -- [v] is louder. A frequent form of sound change is where two sounds are acoustically very similar, meaning that they can be hard to tell apart in sub-optimal conditions (i.e. normal life). Once these changes start, they can spread like wildfire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T02:46:50.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-01-29T12:51:54.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some situations in which grammar precedes language (if I understand the sense in which you are using these words). E.g. I would venture to say that modern-day literate people pay a lot of attention (on average) to whether their speech conforms to what is prescribed in the dictionary, or to the grammar rules they have been taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I were to learn that I had been using a certain word with a different meaning than the one listed in the dictionary, or that I had been conjugating a verb in a way that differs from the canonical pattern (English doesn't have a lot of conjugation patterns to learn, but this situation might come up for a language like French), then I would probably adapt my usage to conform to these norms rather than persisting in my earlier habits. I think quite a lot of English-speakers, and speakers of other highly-codified modern languages, would do the same in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T12:51:54.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11222" CreationDate="2015-01-29T17:39:07.347" Score="5" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've all been there. Say you're reading an article about something, and you come across a new word you've never seen before; how do you find out what it means or what it sounds like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most non-logographic writing languages (alphabets, syllabries, abjads, etc.) it's fairly simple, due to most non-logographic languages more or less being symbol-to-sound mappings, you can more often than not &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; the pronunciation of the word based solely on its spelling; and dictionaries often have words written in a specific order corresponding to the order of the symbols (i.e. alphabetic/lexicographic order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter Chinese. Chinese is a tonal language, an analytic language, and its writing system is a logography. Each morpheme has its own symbol, and the symbol has little-to-no correlation to its sound, and the really abstract looking ones can often look too abstract to decipher based on shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: Say you run into a new Chinese character in printed media (can't copy-paste it), you have no way of guessing how it sounds, and no idea what it's supposed to mean. How do you then figure out what it means and how it reads?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine the lexicographic order of Chinese characters works differently from what it does in Western languages, so I can imagine looking up an unknown word would be next-to impossible without having to sift through the entire dictionary. How would one do this? Native Chinese speaker or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8048" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T23:58:20.750" Title="How does one learn the meaning of a new symbol in Chinese?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11221" CreationDate="2015-01-29T18:12:41.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to find a Chinese character in a dictionary even if it isn's known to you and you don't know its pronunciation. Naturally, to do that you've got to know how to use Chinese dictionaries. There are several different ways a Chinese dictionary is organized and the characters are looked up, and a big good dictionary usually combines several of them, you can choose the one you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main ways the modern Chinese dictionaries are organized are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;radicals&lt;/a&gt;: first you find the radical in the character, you go to the section of the radical in the dictionary, and then by the number of the remaining &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;strokes&lt;/a&gt; you find the character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the four corners: since every character can be imagined as having the shape of a square, you define which stroke is in each of its four corners, which you convert into a numeric index of the character in the dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the right bottom corner: you define which stroke is in the right bottom corner, you go to the section of that stroke in the dictionary, and then inside the section you find the character you need by the system the particular dictionary uses, by the number of strokes, by the order of strokes, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, one hasn't got to sift through the entire dictionary. Still, if you want to look up characters effectively, you have to know the system of your dictionary well, and also know the radicals and strokes together with the numeric indexes ascribed to them in your dictionary, those are a kind of alphabetic order used in European-style dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-01-29T18:22:10.540" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T18:22:10.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9522" CreationDate="2015-01-29T19:44:43.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serbian&lt;/strong&gt; has something like that, if I am understanding you right. Some Serbian intransitive sentences can still have dative, genitive and/or locative arguments; an example for this would be &lt;code&gt;она му[D] прича (о кући)[L]&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;she is telling him about the house&lt;/em&gt;) where there's both a dative listener &lt;code&gt;му&lt;/code&gt; (to him) and a locative topic &lt;code&gt;о кући&lt;/code&gt; (about the house).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are certain that neither of these is a direct object because 1) neither is in either the genitive or the accusative (Serbian DOs must be in either one of those cases) and 2) neither can be made into the subject of a passive verb form: sentences such as &lt;code&gt;*он је причан о кући&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;he is told about the house&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;*кућа је причана њему&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;the house is told to him&lt;/em&gt;) do not work and sound quite ungrammatical. The only passive sentences these two arguments could fit in would be in the spirit of &lt;code&gt;причано му[D] је (о кући)[L]&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;it was talked to him about the house&lt;/em&gt;) and those kinds of sentences still retain both the locative and dative arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it is possible to add an accusative into the example sentence, thus for example giving: &lt;code&gt;она му[D] прича причу[A] (о кући)[L]&lt;/code&gt;. Such a sentence can easily be turned into a passive one, giving f.e. &lt;code&gt;причана му[D] је прича[N] (о кући)[L]&lt;/code&gt; where the former accusative argument &quot;причу&quot; becomes a nominative argument &quot;прича&quot; in accordance with general passivisation patterns in nominative languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way these sentences could be analysed as including a direct object would be to analyse them as having a dropped or implied accusative argument, which is otherwise unheard of in Serbian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also has a parallel in sentences with a non-nominative subject; a sentence with a genitive, accusative or dative subject is usually intransitive, but can also have additional arguments that do not serve as direct objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a genitive subject, these are most often sentences in the mould of &lt;code&gt;нема нам[D] посла[G]&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;there's no job for us&lt;/em&gt;) or have an experiencer (such as &lt;code&gt;тебе[G] ме[G] је срамота&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;it's you who I'm ashamed of&lt;/em&gt;; this sentence has two genitive arguments). With a dative subject, they are usually those with experiencers, such as &lt;code&gt;хладно му[D] је&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;he feels cold&lt;/em&gt;, more directly &lt;em&gt;it's cold to him&lt;/em&gt;). With an accusative subject, they also usually are with experiencers, such as &lt;code&gt;жао ми[A] је детета[G]&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;I feel sorry for the child&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such sentences with non-nominative subjects and additional arguments but without a DO still cannot be passivised. They'd give sentences like &lt;code&gt;*посао нам нема&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*срамотан сам тебе&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*жао сам те&lt;/code&gt;; these sound utterly wrong and ungrammatical. The closest equivalents would have to use different verbs or phrasings for that, giving &lt;code&gt;немамо посла&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;we don't have a job&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;code&gt;тебе се срамотим&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;it's you who I'm ashamed of&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;code&gt;жалим дете&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;I pity the child&lt;/em&gt;), which are all sentences with DOs and a dropped pronominal subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2015-01-29T19:52:23.280" LastActivityDate="2015-01-29T19:52:23.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11247" CreationDate="2015-01-29T21:15:42.440" Score="-1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Question rewritten and retitled, now that I have a better understanding of what I didn't understand, due to comments&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably information I could find on the Internet elsewhere, but I am hoping someone here can explain the difference in a sort of informal way that jibes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;em&gt;bean&lt;/em&gt;. How are 'soup of beans', 'bean soup', and 'beany soup' fundamentally different? As I now understand it, &lt;em&gt;beany&lt;/em&gt; predicates, whereas &lt;em&gt;beans&lt;/em&gt; in 'of beans' refers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the word &lt;em&gt;beany&lt;/em&gt; would refer to the set of 'beany things', and &lt;em&gt;soup&lt;/em&gt; would limit this set to 'beany things' that are also 'soup'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beans&lt;/em&gt; in 'soup of beans' would refer to the set of things that are actually beans (in plural), and 'soup' would limit this to the those that are also 'soup'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand these sets are different, but I still don't quite get it. If they can really be compared at all, what is the fundamental &lt;em&gt;difference&lt;/em&gt; between reference and predication here? Why can't adjectives be said to refer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7952" LastEditorUserId="7952" LastEditDate="2015-01-31T01:38:41.753" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T05:59:57.197" Title="Trying to understand why adjectives do not refer" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T11:13:23.190" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I am totally unaware of the research and most of the basic methodology of Linguistics, but I am really keen on knowing more about languages because I am a passionate learner of new ones, and I find etymology to be the main source of my interest, as well as one of the tools that help me more in learning a new language. Also the comparison between languages words and grammars, fascinate me, and I very often find myself interested and keen on studying a new language only under the push of the enthusiasm that these comparisons hint at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my question concerns references. Where to look for books (and any other kind of material) on &lt;em&gt;comparative&lt;/em&gt; linguistics (accessible to a non-expert), especially on the hidden influences that are clearly visible to anyone who, like me, starts to venture into the realm of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also been wondering for a while if there are any not-too-technical references on the history of languages from a geographical point of view. For example, how migrations and wars , colonisations, etc. influenced the melting, mixing, distortions of different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for your help! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8059" LastEditorUserId="8059" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T17:35:01.533" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T22:40:58.883" Title="History of languages from a geographical perspective" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T16:19:45.443" Score="0" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, which two existing languages are the least like each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T17:15:15.403" Title="Which two languages are the most unlike each other?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-02-02T14:15:37.293" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11228" CreationDate="2015-01-30T16:48:24.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no applicable metric, so the question has no answer. To measure similarity, you could try to enumerate the differences between two (very similar) languages, and keep a tab of the points of difference. For instance, Swedish and Norwegian are very similar, but where Swedish has many plural endings &lt;em&gt;-ar, -or, -er&lt;/em&gt;, Norwegian only has -er. But if that one difference or two -- is the difference &quot;Norwegian only has -er&quot;, or &quot;Norwegian doesn't have -or&quot; and &quot;Norwegian doesn't have -ar&quot;? Then, what would a comparison of Swedish and Finnish reveal? One approach to plurals in Finnish is that there is a non-nominative plural suffix -i- and a general plural -t-. Swedish doesn't have a special case-determined plural suffix, so that's one. Finnish -&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;- is not the same as Swedish -&lt;em&gt;or, -ar -er&lt;/em&gt;, but it is not totally unlike -- both have a lingual (coronal) consonant. So you would have to award fractional points for partial similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except, the Finnish plural -t- is actually not realized as [t] most of the time -- you have to do a fair amount of phonological analysis to get to this conclusion about the plural. So should similarity be based on abstract underlying forms, or on the specific phonetic form in given words? There is no scale for quantifying non-identity, so the question can't be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &quot;mutually unintelligibility&quot; yields the simple conclusion that English is as dissimilar to Greek as it is to Chinese, in other words, most languages are completely &quot;dissimilar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this just in... &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHa7C4Dbjsw#t=59&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; has a striking similarity to Norwegian, but is completely not intelligible with Norwegian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-30T17:15:15.403" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T17:15:15.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T18:09:44.767" Score="1" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English some verbs can be both active &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; passive, depending on the context - for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother is cooking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chicken is cooking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of my mother, I am using the active sense - e.g. my mother is actually doing the cooking. However in the case of the chicken I am using a passive sense, I really mean that the chicken &lt;em&gt;is being&lt;/em&gt; cooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if the same applies in Kiswahili?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mama anapika.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kuku anapika.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the second sentence be understood to mean that the chicken is being cooked? or can it only ever mean that the chicken is the one doing the actual cooking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T14:31:29.543" Title="Are there verbs in Swahili which can be both active and passive?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-30T19:10:03.690" Score="2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unsure which features would be inclusive of trills, any information is greatly appreciated! Also, if anyone knows of a feature chart online that includes trills and could link to it that would be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5671" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T02:50:53.973" Title="What feature classes do ʙ r ʀ belong to?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11226" CreationDate="2015-01-30T22:40:58.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nicholas Ostler's &lt;em&gt;Empires of the Word&lt;/em&gt; should fit the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T22:40:58.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3510" CreationDate="2015-01-30T22:58:38.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Harald Baayen in his book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~hbaayen/publications/baayenCUPstats.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Analyzing Linguistic Data: a practical introduction to statistics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; argues against the value of similar measurements quite eloquently. In Chapter 6.5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we read through a text or corpus, and at regular intervals keep note of how many different types we have encountered, we find that, unsurprisingly, the number of types increases, first rapidly, and then more and more slowly...[Growth Curve of the Vocabulary].... The vocabulary growth rate is estimated by the ratio of the number of hapax legomena to the number of tokens sampled. The growth rate is a probability, the probability that, after having read N tokens, the next token sampled represents from unseen type, a word type that did not occur among the preceding N tokens[Good, 1953, Baayen 2001]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem that arises is that, although we could select the total number of types counted for the full text as a measure of lexical richness, this measure would not lend itself well for comparison with longer or with shorter texts. Therefore considerable effort has been invested in developing measures of lexical richness that would supposedly be independent of the number of tokens sampled.The third panel on the upper row shows the worst measure of all, the type-token ratio, obtained by dividing the number of types by the number of tokens. It is highly correlated (r=0.99) with the growth rate of the vocabulary shown in the panel to its left...We return to this issue below, here we note that there is no sign that the curve is anywhere near reaching a stable value. None of these putative constants is a true constant. The only measure of these last four that is, at least under the simplifying assumption that words are used randomly and independently, truly constant is Yule's K... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Page 244) I chopped some stuff out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to see if lexical density was also unstable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3052" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T22:58:38.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11086" CreationDate="2015-01-30T23:02:34.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I second the WordNet answer; I've automatically generated synsets from it for a project where I was attempting to typify lexical (semantic) distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a great thesaurus, especially if you're a developer, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wordnik&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3052" LastActivityDate="2015-01-30T23:02:34.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2015-01-30T23:42:41.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian &lt;em&gt;воспаление&lt;/em&gt; features an Old Church Slavonic prefix &lt;em&gt;вос&lt;/em&gt;-; suffix -&lt;em&gt;ение&lt;/em&gt; isn't very typical for native East Slavic constructions either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, it's a loanword from Old Church Slavonic. Old Church Slavonic was heavily influenced by Byzantine Greek, and Ancient Greek has &lt;em&gt;ἀναφλεγμαίνω&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to inflammate&quot; which was used both literally and figuratively (in reference to sores) and which has an identical morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see it that in medieval physiology, they heavily relied on a few selected works published in Latin/Greek, which themselves could be inspired by some classical works. English &quot;inflammation&quot; is a loanword from Latin, and &quot;phlegm&quot; is a loanword from Greek as well (related to ἀναφλεγμαίνω mentioned above), they are not native English words. What I mean is that, this is all technical/medical terms, not something invented/used by common people (otherwise we'd have native words here, not loanwords), so the chances are very high it's all just loanwords/calques from some common classical source (scientific/medical work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't know about Japanese, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-01-31T19:00:42.843" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T19:00:42.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2015-01-31T00:16:52.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;French vocabulary can be roughly divided into 3 groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native French words which can be traced back to Vulgar Latin. These&#xA;words usually have the largest amount of phonetical changes (as they&#xA;are most ancient): &lt;em&gt;oculus &gt; œil&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early loanwords from Latin. These words aren't traceable to Vulgar&#xA;Latin, they were reborrowed to French from Medieval Latin, two&#xA;already coexisting languages. These words have fewer phonetical&#xA;changes than the first group. I think this is the case with&#xA;&lt;em&gt;aboculus&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;avugle&lt;/em&gt; (but I'm not entirely sure).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Late loanwords from Latin. This group of words underwent almost zero&#xA;phonetical changes. This is the case with, for example, &lt;em&gt;ocularis&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;oculaire&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T00:16:52.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11231" CreationDate="2015-01-31T01:52:51.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no standard answer, though there is a correct one (I daresay). Trills are voiced sonorants but they have to be distinguished from glides and nasals. Their value for [continuant] depends on how exactly you define/diagnose that feature -- the issue is that trills are &quot;intermittent stops&quot;, so there is some oral airflow (but there is a complete oral constriction). &quot;Voiced oral sonorant stop&quot; would identify the trills, and trilliness would be a consequence of the minimal vocal tract constriction, which is necessitated by the feature [+sonorant]. Essentially, the constriction is so loose that it is temporarily blown open by the increasing air pressure (and the cycle repeats). The only other candidate for &quot;voiced oral sonorant stop&quot; would be [ɾ], so this analysis might not work if the language has [ɾ] and it can be shown that the segment is a sonorant and a stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit]&#xA;Bearing on mind the observations in the comments, and upon reflection, voicing is not an essential feature of trills, just of the trills listed in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-01T22:48:01.967" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T22:48:01.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2015-01-31T02:32:00.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume your choice of -&lt;em&gt;pika&lt;/em&gt; was deliberate -- with &quot;boil&quot;, for example, you have distinct transitive and intransitive (stative) stems -&lt;em&gt;chemsha&lt;/em&gt; and -&lt;em&gt;chemka&lt;/em&gt;. As far as I know, you have to use the stative suffix for &lt;em&gt;kuku inapikika&lt;/em&gt;. This would go for -&lt;em&gt;funga, -vunja&lt;/em&gt; (close, break) and other such verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;em&gt;kuku anapikika&lt;/em&gt; -- both agreement patterns are accepted, because chicken stew is inanimate, if made correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-01-31T19:51:22.543" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T19:51:22.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-31T04:51:42.863" Score="0" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume, considering the Onset principle, that there are not many languages that have a structure with VV or VVV but are there languages that have a CV.VV structure?  If there is, I would assume that these vowels tend to gravitate towards cardinal vowels in order to keep too many phonemes being reduced/neutralized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, I assume languages that have long consonant clusters (like Polish, Georgian or Armenian) have a specific set of consonants available based on what is likely to keep its perceptual cues.  For example, these languages allow long clusters of fricatives because a fricative is more likely to keep its perceptual cue (according to Wright 2004) than a string of stops.  Assuming this, then these languages would have a reduced inventory of other consonants like stops, nasals and liquids, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My professor suggested turning this into a research paper so I'm trying to get a feel of what info is available.  Are there other languages other than the ones that I've mentioned that have long vowel or consonant clusters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8062" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T06:28:36.257" Title="Do languages with long clusters have minimal vowel or consonant inventories?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11239" CreationDate="2015-01-31T06:28:36.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about there being &quot;many languages&quot; with some property are basically unanswerable since there's no contextually reasonable number that constitutes &quot;many&quot;. Anyhow, there are quite a number of languages with VV and VVV -- basically, you just need a language that doesn't particularly care about vowel sequences. You also find CV.VV in languages such as Ancient Greek and many Bantu languages. I don't know what it would mean for these languages to gravitate towards cardinal vowels. In these languages, there are no stress-related reductions so there are not many vowel neutralizations. Vowels are really easy to parse, so there's no inherent problem with long vowels sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages that you mentioned as having long consonant clusters actually have a decent supply of consonants (you can add Berber, Lushootseed and Bella Coola to the list), so I don't think you can say that they have a reduced set of consonants. Perhaps you mean that only a subset of the consonant inventory can appear in consonant clusters. This is fairly typical, and is observed in English where we don't allow stops after onset stops, obstruent clusters in onsets other that sC (and ʃC for some dialects), and so on. In fact, it might be the case that no language which allows onset or coda clusters up to length N allows &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; possible permutations of that length -- there is always some sequencing restriction. It is a theorem of the Clements &amp;amp; Keyser theory of syllabification that longer clusters are more restricted than shorter clusters (because cluster restrictions refer maximally to two consonants, and any three-C sequence has to pass all of the 2-C filters, and passing all the filters gets much harder as the sequence grows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T06:28:36.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-31T13:28:02.980" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following six Spanish sentences are different versions of the question/different questions corresponding to the unmarked declarative sentence &lt;em&gt;Alguien más podría haber estado usando su ordenador&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;Somebody else could have been using your computer&lt;/em&gt;) and all but (6) are acceptable, but how exactly are they derived under current minimalist assumptions, why is (6) excluded, and what consequences follow as to which of them is/are more ‘economical’ (and presumably ‘unmarked’) and which are less ‘economical’, ‘marked’ and reserved for special ‘informational’ uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) ¿Podría haber estado alguien más usando su ordenador?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) ¿Alguien más podría haber estado __ usando su ordenador?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) ¿Podría haber estado __ usando su ordenador alguien más?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) ¿Podría alguien más __ haber estado ___usando su ordenador?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) ¿Podría haber estado usando alguien más __ su ordenador?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) *¿Podría haber alguien más estado __ usando su ordenador?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Word-by-word gloss: &lt;em&gt;podría = could; haber = have; estado = been; usando = using; su = your; ordenador = computer; alguien = somebody; más = else&lt;/em&gt;]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, under any version of late P&amp;amp;P or ‘minimalist’ syntactic theory that assumes the VP-Internal Hypothesis and a conventional hierarchy of projections – say, at least, CP &gt; FocP &gt; TP &gt; PolarityP &gt; ModalityP &gt; AspP2 &gt; AspP1 &gt; VP (where ‘&gt;’ = ‘dominates’) - and leaving aside and open the question of how verbal inflections, ‘phi features’, +Q, etc. are to be licensed/checked, since whatever technical mechanism is adopted in this respect will have to operate in all six sentences and, economy-wise, would not raise differences among them - I suppose it would be possible to derive each of them as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (1) could be derived by leaving everything &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt; (= zero displacements, maximal economy) and if so should be the optimal ‘solution’ and, presumably, the ‘unmarked’ version of the question. [Alternatively, of course, (1) would involve at least (Aux)V-Raising into Foc preceded by earlier (Aux)V-raising from Mod into T and lower (Aux)V-to-Infl raisings of &lt;em&gt;usando&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;estado&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;haber&lt;/em&gt; into the respective Infl heads just above them, but if that is the mechanism by which verbal inflections and other features are ‘checked’, ‘licensed’ or whatever, then all other sentences (2-6) would also involve such displacements and we may as well disregard all such moves for the purpose of establishing which of (1-6) are more or less ‘economical’ and which unmarked/marked].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (2) could minimally be derived (leaving V-Raisings aside) by ‘long’ Subject-Raising (= one displacement, assuming that ‘long’ Subject Raising counts as a single operation, since raising into any intermediate specifier would presumably be gratuitous and impossible = a violation of Economy). However, if the subject may simply stay &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;, as assumed in the earlier derivation of sentence (1), its raising in (2) would seem to be gratuitous (a violation of Economy) and (2) should be bad. Since it is not, the derivation of (1) might be more complex than it seems and (1) would no longer qualify as the optimal solution and the ‘unmarked’ construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (3) could minimally be derived (again, leaving V-Raisings aside) by Subject-Postponement (= adjunction to VP) presumably triggered by the need to leave the subject in ‘End-Focus’ position (= one obligatory displacement, or two, if the subject must first raise to Spec TP, although that would be problematic, as just explained for (2)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (4) could minimally be derived (again, leaving all V-Raisings aside) by ‘long’ Subject Raising, but with the same potential objection raised wrt sentences (2) and (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (5) would require just overt V-Raising of &lt;em&gt;usando&lt;/em&gt; into the Infl head immediately above, but, if that is how it is derived, something must explain why &lt;em&gt;usando&lt;/em&gt; must rise in (5) but not in (1), and the derivation of (1-4) might prove more complex than it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the non-derivability of sentence (6) could be explained simply as a violation of Economy, as there seems no reason for the subject to raise into an intermediate specifier instead of directly into Spec TP, but since even the ‘long’ subject-raising into Spec TP looks like a possible violation of Economy to the extent that sentence (1), with the subject &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;, is grammatical, it is unclear to me whether that explanation stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have deliberately used established terminology hopefully accessible to scholars familiar with some versions of Chomskian syntax, if not necessarily with the latest ones (which is about my own plight, I am afraid). The many ‘if’s’ and hedges above simply reflect the fact that it is unclear to me how the existence of sentences (1-5) and the non-existence of sentence (6) can be accounted for under current ‘minimalist’ assumptions. If somebody here can tell me what the current wisdom is in this respect, I will be very grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-02-01T13:26:24.307" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T13:26:24.307" Title="Alternative subject positions in Spanish questions, economy and markedness" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9522" CreationDate="2015-01-31T14:12:02.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the traditional interpretation of the terms 'transitive' (= capable of taking a 'direct object') and 'intransitive' (= not allowing a 'direct object'), the answer is 'Yes'. Spanish is a case in point. In Spanish sentences parallel to &lt;em&gt;It pleases me&lt;/em&gt;, such as (1) or (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;El discurso del Rector ME/NOS/TE/OS/LE/LES gustó.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ME/NOS/TE/OS/LE/LES gustó el discurso del Rector. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the clitic pronominals are in the &lt;strong&gt;dative&lt;/strong&gt; case and, in Spanish, where, contrary to Modern English, the dative/accusative contrast remains relevant, must be analysed as &lt;strong&gt;indirect&lt;/strong&gt; objects (and, of course, cannot be converted into subjects of passive sentences, etc.). This fact does not show when the clitics are first or second person, as in that case the Spanish dative and accusative forms are, as in English, also homonymous and indistinguishable (i.e., &lt;em&gt;me/nos, te/os&lt;/em&gt;), but it does show very clearly when the clitics are third person: &lt;em&gt;LE/LES gustó el discurso del Rector&lt;/em&gt; (with dative clitics &gt; indirect objects) are fine, but &lt;em&gt;LO/LA/LOS/LAS gustó el discurso del Rector&lt;/em&gt; (with accusative clitics &gt; direct objects) are terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T14:12:02.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-01-31T15:51:36.043" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this here as I'm not seeing a psycho-linguistic group, and I think that is what I'm looking at.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm hoping there is some degree of crossover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific word or phrase used that means how memorable a word/phrase is?&#xA;Are there any resources that list words and phrases with such scores, or a way I could (even roughly) calculate a measure for memorability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, the best I can come up with is Frequency.&#xA;A key component of memory is exposure.  Frequency of usage could, with a little shaving and dressing, be used to represent possible exposure.  I can find resources for frequency of words and phrases.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I could adjust this by length, or even cobble a kind of complexity measure based on syllables.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8038" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T15:51:36.043" Title="Memorability of words?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2015-01-31T15:55:46.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adjuncts are invariably interpreted as nth-order predicates of heads of different ontological types (for n &gt; 1; a first-order predicate is never a syntactic adjunct, it is a syntactic 'predicate'), whereas complements are interpreted as arguments of the predicates that constitute their heads. That holds whether the head is a noun or expanded noun, a verb or expanded verb, an adjective, a few adjective-derived adverbs that do take a complement, or, in fact, any other category, including 'functional' ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the contrary, you try to distinguish complements from adjuncts by syntactic criteria, under current Larsonian/Cinquean 'all-in-spec' approaches there is no way to do so, and criteria like optionality/obligatoriness (or inclusion of complements in phrases substituted by pro-forms like &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;do so&lt;/em&gt;) are notoriously problematic, as well, as certain complements are arguably 'optional', whereas would-be adjuncts like &lt;em&gt;very well&lt;/em&gt; in e.g. &lt;em&gt;They treated us very well&lt;/em&gt; are obviously obligatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your syntactic assumptions, of course, there may be 'locality' criteria that also distinguish complements from adjuncts, but in surface structure such locality constraints may be cancelled by 'displacement' due to information-structure or by related PF constraints. In general, the above-mentioned semantic criterion is, as far as I know, the easiest and most consistent heuristic tool in this respect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-01-31T16:24:19.410" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T16:24:19.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2015-01-31T20:58:33.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish is another language in which the intransitive use of the verb &lt;em&gt;to drink&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;beber&lt;/em&gt;, automatically means 'drink alcohol to excess', as in (1). That happens unless the speaker uses it in the imperative form and the verb is not really used intransitively, as the context supplies the understood direct object, as in (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) ¡Pobre mujer! Su marido bebe. [Poor woman! Her husband is a drunkard]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Toma, bebe despacio. [Here you are, drink slowly][Offering a glass of cold water]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we also have certain other intransitive verbs used in a colloquial register that specifically mean 'drink alcohol [to excess]', such as &lt;em&gt;soplar, pimplar, trasegar&lt;/em&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-01-31T20:58:33.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2015-02-01T00:46:12.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mari language (an Uralic language) doesn't have gender in third person pronouns. Sometimes it crops up when they (usually villagers) speak Russian, as they sometimes confuse &quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's waiting for you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Natasha!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T00:46:12.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11224" CreationDate="2015-02-01T01:41:42.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering this answered by a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noun phrases can occupy argument positions of predicates and in that sense refer to the things that the predicates predicate something of. Adjectives don't occupy argument positions (at least not typically). Predicate noun phrases also predicate and do not refer. Noun phrases with common nouns in argument position also predicate something of the arguments they refer to. These are just conventions of predicate logic, so far as I know, and have nothing to do with linguistic analysis. –  Greg Lee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have anything to add, please feel free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7952" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T01:41:42.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2015-02-01T09:22:56.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aymara also lacks gender in the third person pronouns. Both 'she' and 'he' are expressed with the word &lt;em&gt;jupa&lt;/em&gt;. A sentence like 'talk to him' is given morphologically: talk-2subj.3obj. Stress the gender of the third person in this sentence can only be achieved by adding an additional noun to the sentence (inflected in the dative), e.g. 'man', 'brother', 'boy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T09:22:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2015-02-01T11:42:54.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The majority of languages in the world do not have grammatical gender and do not distinguish between masculine and feminine forms of the pronoun. Those that do distinguish belong to the Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic families, plus a very small number of other single languages. For this reason it is futile to draw up a long list of languages that do NOT have gendered pronouns (Turkish, Finnish…..). It would be more useful to ask which non-Indo-European and non-Afro-Asiatic languages DO have gendered pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T11:42:54.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11255" CreationDate="2015-02-01T12:27:47.997" Score="0" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple models of distinctive features. Wikipedia distinguishes between three main approaches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acoustic:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms,[11]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Articulatory:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ladefoged's system[12] is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** Acoustic &amp;amp; Articulatory **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way are these different models of distinctive features more or less adequate in terms of language description? &#xA;At least from my perspective, most schools of linguistics have converged on Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle's mixed approach. Does this come at a theoretical price? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T18:11:52.067" Title="Theoretical implications of different models of distinctive features" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2015-02-01T12:49:39.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the SPE system is mixed -- it seems purely articulatory, to me.  There is some mention of acoustics, here and there, but this is supplementary information, or to help readers relate the SPE system to earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any &quot;theoretical price&quot;.  If it were to turn out that some features are truly acoustic, then to some extent, the SPE system would be wrong, but that's a theoretical bonus. We want theories to demonstrate that they have some content by being vulnerable to potential counterevidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T12:49:39.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2015-02-01T18:11:52.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL; DR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main division is between substance-based theories (as you listed) and substance-free theories. Examples of the latter are Foley's theory, and Radical Substance Free Phonology (and to a lesser extent, the Parallel Structures Model). The latter class of theories does not require that features satisfy some phonetic predefinition, where the former theories do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SPE position is spelled out on p. 299: &quot;We shall describe the articulatory of every feature... We shall speak of the acoustical and perceptual correlates only occasionally, not because we regard these aspects as either less interesting or less important, but rather because such discussion would make this section, which is itself a digression from the main theme of our book, much too long&quot;. Since SPE is not considered to be a major break with the Jakobson and Halle approach, it would be somewhat redundant to repeat those acoustic characteristics -- but also illuminating, since diffuse, compact and grave do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; translate directly into SPE theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One failure of the wiki classification is that it omits perceptual and aerodynamic definitions of features. The feature [high] is a typical example of an articulatory feature, since it is defined in terms of a specific articulatory movement. [soronant] on the other hand is more of an aerodynamic feature, defined in terms of an aerodynamic result (spontaneous voicing) that must result -- there are many articulatory paths to that result. Heightened subglottal pressure is another. Distributed is also a hybrid articulatory-aerodymanic feature, describing the shape of the resonator but not what you articulate to achieve that end. Then, of course, strident is a strictly acoustic feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For observational adequacy, SPE theory requires a set of features with definitions, plus multiple kinds of coefficients (u, m, +, - and integers). Because SPE is committed to feature matrices being phonetic descriptions of segments, and because for example high and mid vowels across languages are only roughly comparable, they require an auxiliary mechanism for describing the pronunciation difference between [i] in German vs. English. Integer coefficients are necessary in order to satisfy their desideratum of phoneticism. (They reject the notion of &quot;phonetic implementation&quot; and only allow truly automatic properties into a &quot;phonetics&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the SPE theory of phonetic implementation via integer-manipulation turned out to be an uncashable check, and the result was that actual phonetic facts were ignored -- or, for some people, would lead to massive upsets in the analysis. The best-known example of that is the question of [voice] in English, owing to the fact that voiced obstruents are not consistently produced with focal fold vibration, as ideally required by the theory. Therefore &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; would be distinguished on the basis of aspiration, for some people -- but that precludes there being a difference between aspirated and unaspirated &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;, which exists at least on the surface in English. And since &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; can be actually is produced with vocal fold vibrations in some instances, this leads to the quandry that an instance of &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; might be [+voice] or [-spread], depending on how it actually ended up being produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main price that has to be paid comes from the premise that features are phonetic descriptions, not phonological ones. Given that premise, a theory which strictly limits definitions to one kind of phonetic fact is more restrictive than one that allows features to have multiple (potentially inconsistent) definitions. A mixed theory is better able to handle conflicts such as the mixed behavior of &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; as [+continuant] vs. [-continuant]; the consequence of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; flexibility is that a smaller set of features is required (whereas in a strict-definition theory, more features would be required, in order to achieve the observed range of phonological class behaviors). Given the background assumption (the requirement to phonetically define features), there is no &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; price associated with mixed modes of definition, but it does require that you have a language-specific phonetic implementation component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T18:11:52.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2015-02-01T23:08:29.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Inflammation&quot; is not (as you claim) &quot;in(ner) and flame&quot;. It is from Latin inflammare &quot;to cause something to burst into flame&quot; (in + flammare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-01T23:08:29.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11264" CreationDate="2015-02-01T23:32:11.303" Score="1" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying linguistics and currently have Syntax and am trying to understand the X bar theory. Could someone please draw a tree of the sentence down below for me so I could get a better understanding of how the theory works. My professor does not give complex examples in class. All help is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sentence:&lt;/strong&gt; By signing the contract, you allowed your broker to access your personal information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8071" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T03:41:21.700" Title="Sentences using the X bar theory" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-02-02T14:14:52.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9499" CreationDate="2015-02-01T23:53:18.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;1 medal, 2 sides&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess one would need to differentiate between 2 types of social semantic contexts, regarding the same visual applauding sign:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visual waving or other clapping-reminiscent oscillating hand-movements,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semantically referring to (as in: via a variant, alluding culturally to) the &lt;strong&gt;loud&lt;/strong&gt; clap ✋.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not referring to the &lt;strong&gt;loud&lt;/strong&gt; clap ✋.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As, I think, today it's certainly impossible to exactly pin down the date at which this behavior (idem with loud clapping: one can only point to first written descriptions, and further more: I'd guess this behavior is much older than the writing system) arose; I will try to embed its origin in the light of a parallel evolution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A parallel with a structural large-scale evolution&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silent applause might actually, but that is of course mere speculative, have a similar origin as the decline of homicide (and violence in general); since it can be viewed in the light of (and as the extrapolating continuation thereof) the decline of physical violence which might be coupled with the development of loud clapping ✋(and in the next stage then perhaps: silent applause ✋).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;First: let's take the following model as a mainframe, characteristic of violent behavior (amongst others).&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is to be supposed that clapping among humans may have evolved from the action of slapping and cuffing the body, often accompanied by jumping and stamping, which is characteristic of primates in states of excitement. (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stevenconnor.com/clapping.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Steven Connor&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Then, one can assume primates could have used the clapping ✋, as a more symbolic way of representing or channeling this anger or frustration.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clapping ✋the hands together has several advantages over slapping the body. First of all, it produces a much more emphatic, consistent and easily controllable sound. (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stevenconnor.com/clapping.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Steven Connor&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Perhaps the next step could then be silent visual-only clapping ✋?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the above mentioned thought is about clapping, but it isn't about applause. But it is also imaginable that this decline of anger, frustration and adrenaline-outbursts is coupled with a decline of the outbursts at the sympathetic / applauding side of mankind; both inherent and measurable physiologically, as also measurable sociologically in less exuberant applauding behavior. Thus a decline of general (emotionally-induced or -copuled) physical behavior (or at least the smearing out of the peaks of its outbursts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The large-scale decline of violence, homicide and war is documented in&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Steven Pinker, &lt;code&gt;The better angels of our nature. Why violence has declined&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll offer a small piece of review from an article in the NYT by the famous professor of bioethics &lt;strong&gt;Peter Singer&lt;/strong&gt; (source: &lt;em&gt;Peter Singer, &lt;code&gt;Is violence history&lt;/code&gt;, nytimes.com, 6/10/2011&lt;/em&gt;), discussing this book of &lt;strong&gt;Steven Pinker&lt;/strong&gt;, one of today's most famous linguistic psychologist, which also talks about a change (i.c. a difference between the north and the south) in physiological reactions to insults; and a reference to &lt;strong&gt;Norbert Elias' pacification process&lt;/strong&gt;. It also contains an empirical verification of the hypothesis of &lt;strong&gt;Thomas Hobbes&lt;/strong&gt; classic contract theory book &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;Leviathan&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th —­ deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates &lt;strong&gt;Hobbes&lt;/strong&gt;’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “&lt;strong&gt;pacification process&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “&lt;strong&gt;civilizing process&lt;/strong&gt;,” a term he borrows from the sociologist &lt;strong&gt;Norbert Elias&lt;/strong&gt;, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond &lt;strong&gt;more strongly to insults&lt;/strong&gt; than Northerners.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Cautious preliminary discussion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this small glance, I would accept the confirmation of the decline of violence by &lt;strong&gt;Steven Pinker&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I haven't yet found empirical verification of the guess that not only physical violence; thus physical exuberant behavior coupled with it; but also applauding behavior has declined in exuberant appearance (and perhaps the outbursts of the hormone-coupled emotions associated with it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primates, I imagine, can also applaud (I'd guess very exuberantly). But they can not clap ✋(unless they are thought by humans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Elwyn Simons&lt;/strong&gt; (specialist in primate paleontology &amp;amp; morphology and primate biology; researcher of anthropoid origins and evolution) (source: &lt;code&gt;www.esquire.com&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We don't know how far back it goes, not without a time machine. Cavemen and human ancestors — we don't know whether they clapped hands or not. But you don't find primates doing it unless they've been taught to do it. They do clap hands in the wild. It's not to applaud something; it's because they're frightened or want to call attention to food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is imaginable that clapping is a more complex task for them (since it is less exuberant) and silent applause ✋perhaps even more so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So then perhaps humanity's emotions are also subjected to entropic laws?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could offer me a reference to such hypotheses (or an empirical validation or contra-indication), it would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I'll reference to Wikipedia, giving the general picture of &lt;strong&gt;habitus in general and its possible causes&lt;/strong&gt;, via &lt;strong&gt;Norbert Elias&lt;/strong&gt;' &lt;code&gt;The civilizing process&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The first volume, &lt;em&gt;The history of manners&lt;/em&gt;, traces the historical developments of the European &lt;em&gt;habitus&lt;/em&gt;, or &amp;quot;second nature,&amp;quot; the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• The second volume, &lt;em&gt;State formation and civilization&lt;/em&gt;, looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we applaud this? Perhaps we should, silently. ☺&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T12:21:01.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-02T01:14:00.003" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, there are two forms of the formal 2nd person singular pronoun: lowercase &lt;strong&gt;вы&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;vy&lt;/em&gt;) and uppercase &lt;strong&gt;Вы&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Vy&lt;/em&gt;). If I understand correctly, the latter is used in situations where the speaker and the addressee (&quot;you&quot;) have more strictly defined roles (for example, in formal business negotiations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages besides Russian that have &quot;pairs&quot; of pronouns distinguished only by capitalization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any info&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T18:05:38.403" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T10:39:42.687" Title="pronouns with uppercase and lowercase variants" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;formality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2015-02-02T01:18:56.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in German &quot;sie&quot; means &quot;they&quot;, but &quot;Sie&quot; means &quot;you&quot; (polite, singular or plural). Thus also &quot;ihr&quot; (&quot;their&quot;) and &quot;Ihr&quot; (&quot;your&quot;, polite) and &quot;ihnen&quot; (&quot;to them&quot;) and &quot;Ihnen&quot; (&quot;to you&quot;, polite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly in Italian &quot;lei&quot; means &quot;she&quot;, but &quot;Lei&quot; means &quot;you&quot; (polite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-02-02T01:34:40.673" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T01:34:40.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2015-02-02T02:14:06.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just remembered that English sometimes uses capitalized pronouns to address or refer to God (&lt;em&gt;Thou&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T02:14:06.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11258" CreationDate="2015-02-02T03:41:21.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to give it go with drawing it. This also depends on what your professor says is where the subject goes. So, for me, the subject of the sentence/phrase was in the Spec of VP. and then it would raise up through the CPs until it got to the top. Your prof may do it different. Be careful to look for adjuncts, things that don't need to be there for it to make sense, and that will help. Understand that an XP can have multiple bars down... Things that take more than one or two theta roles such as &quot;mary told jack&quot; told has the theta roles of Mary telling and jack being told. Think of how these can be broken down. Look for DPs and start there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also look in your book for examples or email your prof for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8073" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T03:41:21.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11224" CreationDate="2015-02-02T05:59:57.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me the problem seems to be a bit theoretical or belonging to the philosophical field of logic. Perhaps part of your problems would be solved if you called &quot;bean&quot; &#xA;in &quot;bean soup&quot; a noun used as compound element of a noun, and not an adjective. By the way &quot;beany&quot; is not registered as a word in Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T05:59:57.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9095" CreationDate="2015-02-02T07:38:48.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little comment on above. &quot;Поцелуев мост&quot; does not mean 'Bridge of kisses'. It's just 'Potseluev's Bridge' (in Saint-Petersburg, Russia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8076" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T07:38:48.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-02T17:19:10.687" Score="1" ViewCount="5787" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence in question is &quot;Chomsky innocently asked Baker to comment on the changes to the theory during the lecture.&quot; I'm unsure of how to handle the &quot;to&quot; in &quot;to comment.&quot; I asked my TA and she said it would not be a tense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my currently incorrect tree:&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EPKVd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I'm going to have to change it to have it correct, but I'm unsure now if &quot;to comment&quot; just falls under the verb or if it has to be split up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8078" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T16:48:40.833" Title="How do I deal with an infinitive verb in a syntax tree?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4371" CreationDate="2015-02-02T17:41:17.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are so many avenues to explore in this area that its hard to answer this question. I believe there are many ways computers could be used in the decipherment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d7PTaOYAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kevin Knight's research&lt;/a&gt; is particularly relevant in my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in these papers, that are in that direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deciphering Foreign Language by Combining Language Models and&#xA;Context Vectors - Nuhn, Mauser &amp;amp; Ney, &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/bsnyder_acl2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment - Synder, Barzilay, &amp;amp; Knight - &lt;a href=&quot;http://file:///Users/aljohnson/Downloads/62802.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unsupervised Analysis for Decipherment Problems - &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.73.6286&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - Knight, Nair, Rathod &amp;amp; Yamada&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3052" LastEditorUserId="3052" LastEditDate="2015-02-03T03:17:54.583" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T03:17:54.583" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2015-02-02T19:51:33.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adverb &quot;boldly&quot; modifies a VP in &quot;Our mission is to boldly go out there&quot;.  If you also accept &quot;Our mission is boldly to go out there&quot; with the same sense, it's evidence that &quot;boldly&quot; can modify &quot;to go out there&quot; as well, and that consequently &quot;to go out there&quot; is also a VP.  So, then the &quot;to&quot; part of the for-to complementizer must have been Chomsky-adjoined to the VP &quot;go out there&quot;: [VP to [VP go out there ] ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T19:51:33.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-02T19:52:01.317" Score="2" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have diphthongs that end in [j], [w], [ɪ̯], [ʊ̯], and [ə̯], and sometimes diphthongs will end in [e̯] or [o̯], but besides Hmong's [aɨ̯], German's [ɔʏ̯], and all the weird diphthongs that some English dialects have going on (like [əʉ̯], [ɘʏ̯], [æɔ̯], etc.), what languages have diphthongs that end in other vowels, and why are diphthongs like [aɥ] and [aɰ] so uncommon in languages that have [y] and [ɯ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T21:41:35.157" Title="Diphthongs ending in unusual vowels?" Tags="&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2015-02-02T20:12:53.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposing a diphthong not to be a special kind of phoneme, but rather just a combination of a vowel phoneme and a glide phoneme, then if a glide phoneme is uncommon among the languages of the world, so should the corresponding glide part of a phoneme be uncommon.  In your question, you mystify us by writing the glide parts of diphthongs as if they were vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T20:12:53.437" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2015-02-02T21:41:35.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;diphthong&quot; is much abused and undefined. The main issue is precisely whether the two elements are &quot;vowels&quot;, or might one be a glide. Your transcriptions presuppose that one of the elements is non-syllabic (noting the diacritic), i.e. not a vowel but rather a glide. A requirement of being a &quot;diphthong&quot; is being a sequence within one syllable, so [ai] could be a diphthong, but [a.i] could not. These are matters of phonological analysis, not phonetic observation, so you can't determine whether a sequence of two vocoids is monosyllabic vs. bisyllabic, or ends in a vowel vs. glide, just by listening. Some apparent German examples such as [fiɐ̯] &quot;four&quot; are not examples, if you analyze this as the phonetic realization of coda &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. Also note that there is a well-establish distinction between &quot;rising diphthong&quot; and &quot;falling dipthong&quot;. Rising diphthongs would end in a vocoid of greater sonority, such as [a, e, o]. North Saami has only rising diphthongs, ending just on those vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the &quot;other vowels&quot; that you're interested in are vocoids other than &#xA;[j w ɪ̯ ʊ̯ ə̯ e̯ o̯], which means [y ɯ ø ɛ æ œ ɔ ʌ a ɑ...] well I'm not gonna write them all out. So... Norwegian has [øy] ('island') and [æʉ]; Finnish has [yø] 'night' as well as [ey, æy]. Rising diphthongs that end with [a] are not particularly remarkable, existing in Saami languages as well as Faroese and Romanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hallmark, perhaps a defining feature, of diphthongs is that they are a proper subset of the possible monosyllabic vocoid combinations. While Norwegian has [øy], it doesn't have [iy, oy, ay]. I don't know what the evidence is that [ay, aɯ] are very uncommon, at least given the background of general diphthong uncommonness. But I suspect that if it could be shown that they are uncommon, then that would be the product of the uncommonness of [y ɯ] times the uncommonness of diphthongs that don't simply all end in [i u]. Given the facts  of intrinsic duration, a bivocalic sequence ending in a non-high vocoid is likely to have a greater duration on the second part, which would encourage a bisyllabic analysis (ergo not a diphthong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T21:41:35.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2015-02-02T23:14:21.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a simple confusion of a polysemous concept: grammar. Grammar has several meanings when used both by specialists and non-specialists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A set of rules determining how language is used to be acceptable (often in common parlance including things like spelling and stylistics). This is the subject of what is sometimes called 'prescriptive' grammar or 'pedagogical' grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A book describing the rules mentioned in 1. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The structure of language that determines how it is used. This structure is learned by all speakers without (much) external intervention and is largely subconscious. This structure is the subject of study by descriptive linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition, grammar in the 3rd sense is the same things as language and therefore, one cannot precede the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the 'grammar' in the 1st sense does come after language in the sequence of acquisition. In fact, it is mostly a set of stories about language that more or less closely correspond to the actual patterns found in how language is actually used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T23:14:21.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2015-02-02T23:46:23.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verb 'to drink' is polysemous in English with the senses being at least&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to consume any liquid; in this sense, the verb can be used both transitively (I drink water) and intransitively (when somebody's thirsty, they drink). This sense is also available in any tense/aspect ('I drink water every day' and 'I'm drinking water right now.')&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to consume alcohol; in this sense the verb can only be intransitive and used in habitual aspect only ('He drinks' vs. '*He's drinking right now')&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These different senses will be differentiated in English by context. There are also other words that refer to drinking that add some additional meanings (e.g. quaff). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages will differentiate between these different senses lexically and others will do both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Czech has two sense of the word drink: 'Franta pije vodu' vs. 'Franta pije'. But it also has the verb 'chlastat' that only means 'to drink alcohol excessively'. 'Chlastat' is lower register so the neutral 'pít' would be used in more formal situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-02T23:46:23.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2015-02-03T01:08:03.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example saying something like &quot;Han dricker lite för mycket&quot; in Swedish could mean that &quot;He drinks a little bit too much alcohol&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can also say &quot;Han dricker mycket vatten&quot; meaning &quot;He drinks a lot of water&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="8051" LastEditDate="2015-02-03T07:21:56.067" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T07:21:56.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-03T07:04:50.970" Score="1" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our university is making a crash coarse in phonology for first year students so, while there is a dedicated phono module, there's also this streamlined overview of phonological theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My job is to present on autosegmental phonology. Theoretically, no problem -- but most of the examples that illustrate the use of autosegmental approaches have heavy theoretical burdens. African tone, for example, may be a bit too complicated. Are there some good, visual-friendly, examples of how autosegmental phonology provides compelling explanatory power? Perhaps some harmonic process...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T16:29:20.343" Title="What's a good example of the explanatory power of autosegmental phonology... for first year undergrads?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9640" CreationDate="2015-02-03T08:09:39.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to call this an affix. This is Templatic Morphology as opposed to Affixal Morphology as suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/6753/jason-zentz&quot;&gt;Jason Zentz&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/9812/7998&quot;&gt;above&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T08:09:39.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8521" CreationDate="2015-02-03T08:13:54.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would you categorize this one, which is used on nouns in 'have'&#xA;  constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the question, one might figure that if this construction as to be used in a particular syntactic context, this would be inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivation would form lexical units for general purpose...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T08:13:54.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11278" CreationDate="2015-02-03T08:59:11.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason African tone is complicated is because it is difficult for speakers of European languages to visualize tone as a phonological feature on a par with, let's say, manner of articulation of consonants. Vowel height harmony, which you already mention, should be a gentler example, because everyone can intuitively appreciate how a high vowel causes an otherwise non-high vowel to become high. Wikipedia's page on Vowel Harmony has a number of examples that you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T08:59:11.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3816" CreationDate="2015-02-03T15:34:51.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like a standard prefix playing on the homophony with &quot;high&quot; and the acronym formations with &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;nternet/&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;nformation. It modifies its base in a way similar to a diminutive, creating an hyponym with connotation. Here, probably, an approbative effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be a compound, it would need a definite base for &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; which seems quite elusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T15:34:51.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11278" CreationDate="2015-02-03T16:29:20.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume that you're not attempting to motivate using such representations, you're simply presenting this as another formalism for handling standard phonological processes, and the point is to show how it works. It depends on how much you are willing to ignore or arbitrarily stipulate. I would advise against vowel harmonies as a first example, because they add the complexities of locality, underspecification, and no-crossing, in crossing consonants. Instead, I would start with strictly adjacent consonant-to-consonant assimilations like voicing and nasal place. However, this also depends on how much &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; you're willing to add to autosegmental theory, specifically whether you can get away with introducing the notion of feature grouping (&quot;geometry&quot;) so as to have a &quot;place&quot; thing that can spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that (grouping) would be too much, then I suggest sticking to single-feature segment-to-segment assimilations. Which would be voicing, basically. You might be able to include nasalization if you've already dealt with incidental feature changes (where voiced oral obstruents like /b/ become voiced nasal sonorants like [m] -- the obstruent change is incidental to nasal spreading). But I think you should simply deal with the question of grouping, since it is bound to come up in the question period and someone asks about spreading two features simultaneously. In which case, you will be set up to talk about nasal place assimilation, and you can have a much more interesting discussion of the predictions of linear vs. non-linear assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T16:29:20.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2015-02-03T17:08:38.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would question the assumption that &quot;in many countries around the world, especially in Africa, the people natively speak both an indigenous language and French due to French colonization&quot;. It is correct that French is an official language in a number of former colonies, but I believe the assumption that the populace of D.R. Congo, for example, natively speak French is untrue. First, there is a difference between natively speaking a language, and learning a language to a reasonable degree of fluency in school. Second, especially in Africa, there is a difference between the linguistic habits of the urban intelligentsia and the habits of the general population. French is widely used with the middle and upper class in francophone cities, but not so much with rural farmers. Also note that among educated city-dwellers in Africa (esp. Cameroon or Cote d'Ivoire), francophones often do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; natively speak some indigenous language, instead, they just speak French (and maybe know enough Bamileke to talk to grandma). Whether or not French &lt;em&gt;ultimately&lt;/em&gt; expands or contracts in the former colonies depends largely on the extent to which formal education expands to transplant the urban experience into rural areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An obvious difference between England and the former French colonies is the amount of time between the departure of the French (finessing a few assumptions about &quot;French&quot; and &quot;departing&quot;), which alone could account for any actual difference in the status of French in these cases. A less obvious difference is the vastly different statuses of formal education (not important in Medieval England, quite important in modern Africa). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T17:08:38.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2015-02-03T19:18:18.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems possible to conflate professional vs. ad-hoc usage, and inclusivity vs. intent to broadly communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In much literature of fiction &quot;thieves cant&quot; is BOTH professional and inclusive, and would be considered the poster child for the term &lt;strong&gt;argot&lt;/strong&gt;.  If you do not know this language you are not welcome to the contents of its conversations either, an added social aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Slang&lt;/strong&gt; is ad-hoc but is inherently formed out of the intent to broadly communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jargon&lt;/strong&gt; is professional terminology.  In addition, whether or not it is ad-hoc (which may lead to internal slang; see also &quot;TLA&quot;/three-letter-acronym and similar meta linguistic phrases) it is driven from the attempt not so much to broadly communicate, as to DEEPLY communicate - to provide more content in the same amount of verbal space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To complete the grid, language of broad intent to communicate but a professional aspect would lead to those languages that have an enforced formal grammar and approved words.  Possibly French.  For letterings, the Joyo Kanji, with which Japanese newspapers are printed, so that enough of the country can read it even though there are many more symbols in their writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad-hoc language linking groups together that have difficulty communicating otherwise could be a &lt;strong&gt;pidgin&lt;/strong&gt; and would probably avoid slang lest the already rocky communication fail entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a blurred line in the computer industry, because there was a small group of people who collected the industry-and-academia slang and anecdotes into a compilation entitled &quot;The Jargon File&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8081" LastActivityDate="2015-02-03T19:18:18.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-03T22:26:44.373" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/egbWB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;This text was found in Bolu, Turkey, at my uncle's house. What language is it written in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8084" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2015-02-04T04:48:27.427" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T15:53:00.110" Title="What is this language?" Tags="&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-01-30T02:30:46.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9580" CreationDate="2015-02-04T01:15:35.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;used to reconstruct language families using the comparative method&quot; is not literally meaningful, since you can reconstruct linguistic forms or you can make hypotheses about the grouping of languages into families, but you can't reconstruct a family. I think you mean &quot;used in the reconstruction of an earlier stage of a language&quot;. As example of that would be the derivation of long vowels in proto-Indo-European from the loss of earlier laryngeals. That would be a case of compensatory lengthening as Jlawler mentions. In addition to vocalic merger (with or without there having been an intervening consonant), there are various prosodic causes. The Norwegian case, which has a parallel in North Saami, involves a change in syllabification where VCCV could be parsed as V.CC or VC.CV, and the change is from non-branching onsets to branching onsets with no coda i.e. VC.CV -&gt; V.CCV. A frequent instance of that is lengthening of vowels before NC clusters in Bantu. Another very common one is stress-related: stress may be assigned to some position, and that causes vowel lengthening (a number of Bantu languages, Mohawk, etc.). A third context for lengthening is &quot;minimality&quot; related, where monosyllables (typically) have to lengthen their vowel because every word has to have at least two moras (various Bantu, Arabic dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Numerous historical questions are associated with lengthening, such as &quot;does lengthening by such-and-such process require pre-existing phonemic vowel length&quot;, but you'd have to be more specific about what connection between lengthening and reconstruction you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T01:15:35.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-04T09:58:23.293" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE * &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; has widely become &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; in Armenian (e.g. հարց (&lt;em&gt;harts&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;question&quot; &amp;lt; * &lt;em&gt;prsk&lt;/em&gt;-, հուր (&lt;em&gt;hur&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;fire&quot; &amp;lt; * &lt;em&gt;pur&lt;/em&gt;-, etc.). However, some have claimed that the verb փլիլ (&lt;em&gt;pHlil&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;to fall in, collapse&quot;, which begins with aspirated or &quot;fortis&quot; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;, comes from IE * &lt;em&gt;pHol-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fall&quot;, i.e. a root with aspirated &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether this etymology is correct (I know that there is some debate around whether PIE had voiceless aspirated stops to begin with), I would have thought that aspirated [p] would be at least as vulnerable as unaspirated [p] (if not more so) to becoming [f]/[ɸ] and subsequently [h]. But, even if there was no intermediate stage of [f]/[ɸ] in this case (I'm not sure how probable &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; would be without such a stage), is there any reason to think that aspiration would make [p] &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; rather than less resistant to the process that leads to [p] becoming [h]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-02-04T10:26:04.960" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T10:26:04.960" Title="Armenian pH &lt; PIE *p(H)?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11287" CreationDate="2015-02-04T10:16:29.950" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure that the language is Armenian. For example, the second word on the top line is միշտ (&lt;em&gt;mishd&lt;/em&gt;) meaning &quot;always&quot;, and the fourth line has the words քեզ (&lt;em&gt;kez&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;you&quot; and մարդ (&lt;em&gt;mard&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;man&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not fluent enough in Armenian to easily decipher the whole text, but the final line appears to read &quot;January 1861&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-02-04T10:16:29.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-04T12:32:25.053" Score="1" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;In bilingual regions often there's a phenomenon known as code switching, when people swap codes when confronted with a person that uses a different language of their own, even when both people are bilingual. Occasionally the conversation continues with every person using their own language, without switching to the other person's one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Galicia, Spain, it's quite common hearing people speaking Galician with people answering in Spanish. This is not usually a problem since Galician and Spanish are languages with a high mutual intelligibility. I've heard the same happened often in the old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, which were countries with a few languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume every person involved knows every language used, so no code-switching is &quot;needed&quot;, per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any studies on the conditions for this to occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5441" LastEditorUserId="5441" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T12:47:16.663" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T12:47:16.663" Title="Reasons for code switching absence" Tags="&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2015-02-04T12:50:33.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Armenian (at least Western Armenian) seems to place stress mainly on the final syllable. From the little I've read about Georgian, it seems to prefer penultimate stress. Overall, Armenian sounds much more &quot;lilting&quot; when spoken than the Georgian I've heard in various video clips (and more lilting than standard English, for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think that Georgian has far more words that start with consonant clusters (CC-, CCC-) than Armenian does. Armenian tends -- again, based on the Western Armenian I've heard -- to break up initial consonant clusters with a schwa vowel. For example, տխուր &quot;sad&quot; is spelled as if pronounced [dxur], but is actually pronounced [dəxur], and գծել &quot;to draw (a picture, etc.)&quot; looks as though it would be pronounced [kdzel], but is in fact pronounced [kədzel].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other thing: you will probably hear a lot of words ending in -&lt;em&gt;ner&lt;/em&gt; from Armenian speakers, as it is the plural suffix for nouns, perhaps the most common suffix overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know that the question is over 3 years old, but I thought I would answer anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-02-05T07:07:09.650" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T07:07:09.650" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T04:47:06.270" Score="6" ViewCount="8973" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just a little curious about the construction of syntactic trees when they involve infinitives in English.  Basically, I want to know what role does the the &quot;to&quot; play?  I don't think it is like a prepositional, as it normally would be.  An example would be &quot;He asked to go to the store.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8090" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T13:02:19.283" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T13:02:19.283" Title="Infinitive verbs in syntax tree" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T06:56:09.540" Score="0" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find formal grammars? By 'formal grammar' I mean 'a mathematically precise set of rules that generate all (or at least a significant portion of) the grammatical sentences of a language.' It would really help me in my language learning to locate some of these formal grammars in a form that I can read (i.e. not in computer code). I'm looking for Latin and Greek specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8092" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T07:18:36.077" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T07:18:36.077" Title="Where can I find formal grammars?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T08:17:40.430" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are given a $35,000 budget for documentation equipment to perform a typological study of suprasegmental features of language varieties spoken in urban and rural Finland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, one needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a voice recorder to record speech;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an external microphone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a video camera to capture gesture (why not, you already have $35,000!) and tripod&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a small laptop for on-site analysis (with a license to some software besides Praat?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a pair of headphones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a hard case to carry this stuff in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would appreciate any insight into brand names/types and/or additional things y'all recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-05T08:40:29.183" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T16:51:17.770" Title="What are some must-have equipment in a mobile fieldwork kit?" Tags="&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T08:52:27.433" Score="1" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to NLP. I have a few doubts about PCFG parser (NLTK). My understanding is that PCFG parser will return most probable parse tree. So if I'm parsing one sentence with PCFG parser, I'll be getting one parse tree. Is my assumption right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving further, PCFG parser is trained using corpus consisting of 1000 sentences, will I be getting 1000 parse tree (1 per sentence) or only one parse tree? If it is different for each sentence, are the production rules for one parse tree independent of another parse tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the NLTK PCFG parser expect input in Penn treebank format? (I mean Penn treebank is also a parsed tree, isn't it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have to define production rules and assign its probability explicitly? If no, how to do it programmatically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8009" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-05T15:01:16.123" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T15:01:16.123" Title="How do PCFG parsers actually work?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T13:53:14.100" Score="1" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are multi-digit numbers written in Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone wanted to write 123, would they write &quot;321&quot; from the right or in some other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8095" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-07T05:05:39.140" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T05:05:39.140" Title="How are numerals written in Arabic?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T14:29:38.893" Score="-1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taught that in a &quot;subjective phrase&quot; such as one beginning with &quot;If I,&quot; you should use were, not was.&#xA;If true, I see it misused every day by many people and it is annoying.&#xA;Please set me straight or advice where I may find the answer.&#xA;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8096" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T19:56:46.677" Title="I am searching for a rule on the use of was and were preceded by if" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-02-06T11:53:17.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11302" CreationDate="2015-02-05T14:31:46.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, he will write the digits from left to right (the opposite of the direction of writing words) as: 123 or ۱۲۳.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T14:31:46.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11322" CreationDate="2015-02-05T14:59:22.233" Score="1" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in Cambodia and trying to learn what I can of the Khmer language without a teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed some inconsistencies in the Wikipedia articles as I try to get better at both the writing system and the vowel system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_language#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The vowels section of the Wikipedia article on the language&lt;/a&gt; lists several symbols for which there are no counterparts I can find in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_alphabet#Dependent_vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the vowels section of the Wikipedia article on the Khmer alphabet&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɑ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɔə]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ĕə]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ŭə]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ŏə]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this due to different analyses or due to different IPA symbols or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T06:31:22.487" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T12:01:33.183" Title="What is the orthography for each of these Khmer vowels?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;khmer&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11309" CreationDate="2015-02-05T16:54:44.940" Score="1" ViewCount="1140" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many bases does the word &lt;code&gt;girlfriends&lt;/code&gt; have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take this word apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;girl&lt;/code&gt; -- root &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;friend&lt;/code&gt; -- root&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; -- affix that denotes plural form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Base&lt;/strong&gt; may be identical with the word root but can also be augmented with affixes while roots can not. Bases typically express a narrower lexical meaning that a root (ex: &lt;code&gt;[[forest]er]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how many bases does the word &lt;code&gt;girlfriends&lt;/code&gt; have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;girl&lt;/code&gt; -- base? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;friend&lt;/code&gt; -- base?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;girlfriend&lt;/code&gt; -- base?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T10:23:00.557" Title="How many bases does a compound word have?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4371" CreationDate="2015-02-05T16:58:30.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are two big innovations that we would look to today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Computers able to analyze millions of patterns in minutes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cryptographic techniques that use what is known about patterns of a language to discover regularities in the seemingly random noise of a cipher&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the fundamentals would be the same. You always have to start from a fundamental understanding of language. You always need a starting point. And you also need a decent corpus to use whatever quantitative techniques you have on. That's why so many scripts with only fragments and no language available remain a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even parallel texts may not be enough. The difference between cryptography and Rosetta stone is that in the first case you're dealing with at least one known language. (That's why Germans couldn't crack Navajo communications.) And translations are never exact parallels. So one fact Champollion relied on was that 'cartouche' - oval around some text - was used to indicate royal names. That gave him an anchor from which to work backwards. But he still had to come to an understanding that the hieroglyphs are not strict ideographs and then rely on his in depth knowledge of Coptic (he kept a diary in it) to make something of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this could be achieved by pure pattern analysis but it could certainly speed up some aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar thing happened in the decipherment of Hittite which relied on sound philological work once a large corpus of the language was found in a known script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no computer method can help with the decipherment of scripts like Linear A because of the tiny corpus from which to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even where a much larger corpus is available as with the Indus valley Harappan script, it's hard to know what to apply modern techniques on since it's not even clear the script represents a language in the conventional way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T16:58:30.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9986" CreationDate="2015-02-05T17:10:52.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, there is no single term that describes this situation. It is merely one of the many configurations that arise in multilingual environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is not just one single way in which this arises. The examples could be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parents do not speak each others first languages and communicate using a third language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the parents speaks a language of the other parent who does not speak the language of the first parent. The children are only exposed to the language of the other parent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parents only speak a third language to their children to speed up their integration and/or promote their linguistic skills in another language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above can happen in all sorts of combinations of linguistic environments. For example, the neither of the parents speak the dominant language of the country they live in or one of the parents speaks the local language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also various scenarios of prestige and power that will influence how this will play out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that one term would simply not be able to describe this phenomenon accurate  but it is possible that a term is used somewhere in the very specialist literature on bilingualism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another place to look would be research on language contact and especially creolization which often arises in contexts where children acquiring a third language is common in a linguistic area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:10:52.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11306" CreationDate="2015-02-05T17:38:08.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have answered your own question.  One base, &quot;girlfriend&quot;, since that is what the affix &quot;s&quot; is added to, at least judging from the meaning.  Morphologically, I guess it is not entirely obvious that &quot;s&quot; is not affixed to &quot;friend&quot;, since we have the compound &quot;musk oxen&quot; rather than &quot;muskoxes&quot;, where the form of the affix is determined by the second part of the compound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:38:08.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2015-02-05T17:38:31.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The confusion in the answers here arises that in different traditions (and different languages) jargon and argot are used to describe the opposite concepts. This is further complicated by the term slang which is gaining popularity and is more and more used to describe both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is mostly with the labels, not the concepts. Essentially, there are three concepts that differentiate a particular sub-code of language based on the social context of its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code used for professional and specialist communication. Commonly referred to as jargon but also occasionally argot or slang (some dictionaries of slang will include some examples of this code).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code used for lower register (informal) communication by the wider community. This is the most common understanding of 'slang'. But under the French influence also referred to as 'argot' and also not uncommonly 'vernacular', 'demotic' or even 'dialect'  with various nuances dropped or preserved depending on context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code used by outsider (often criminalised) communities often with the specific purpose of keeping communication secret. Most often termed 'argot' in specialist literature but commonly also described as 'slang' (e.g. Cockney rhyming slang).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is worth to always specify exactly what you mean by your terms if the distinction between these three is important. Otherwise, pretty much any of these three terms will get the general sense across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:38:31.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11303" CreationDate="2015-02-05T17:48:47.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell you what is correct (since I'm a descriptive linguist), but judging from what I use and hear from others, I think you use &quot;were&quot; in a counterfactual when the style is formal, and &quot;was&quot; when either the style is informal or you don't wish to commit yourself about the truth of the antecedent clause. E.g., &quot;If I were a prescriptive linguist, I'd tell you to use &quot;were&quot; if you were being formal and I was actually not a prescriptive linguist.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T17:48:47.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11299" CreationDate="2015-02-05T17:49:21.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends in part on the intended use, i.e. recording a village meeting is quite different from well-controlled elicitation with one person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fostexinternational.com/docs/products/FR-2LE.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fostex FR 2LE recorder&lt;/a&gt;. You need at least a head-mounted mic (for the interviewee), and possibly a pair of mics on stands (if you're recording more than one person at a time). I would recommend the Audix headset (but mine doesn't have a number on it). One problem I've encountered is that the headband assembly can be too small, which is a problem if you're working with someone that has a big melon. The other problem (probably a bad luck one) is that the first one (don't remember the brand) I got was way too hot (problems adjusting the input level). Shure has head mics that are more expandable and adjustable, but somewhat prone to becoming permanently floppy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a pair of mics, I would say that it doesn't matter much as long as you spend about $100+ each. Blue makes nice mics. You can get some really nice mics for $20,000 and big deal, you're gonna have truck and monkey noise (if there are monkeys) anyhow. If your sound source is in fixed location, you probably want a unidirectional mic, but if it's all around you, go for an omnidirectional. The other main variable is condenser vs. dynamic. Dynamic mics are more robust but condensers are better for &quot;get the speaker, not the noise&quot;. Since you are a rich man, don't decide, get both kinds. And use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone#Blimps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deadcat (microphone cover)&lt;/a&gt;. I also suggest redundancy: multiple mics are wise, get enough SD cards, have replacement cables. There are multiple issues related to power requirements (the big one being, will you have power?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mic stands are important (don't have a speaker holding the mic, they will fiddle with it). I also suggest acoustic foam / insulation that you could easily put up to improve room acoustics (it applicable) -- sheets / panels, rather than lots of little tiles. Clearly not applicable to the village meeting, but very useful if interviewing a person in a room with concrete walls and nothing on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{ADDED:}&#xA;Actually, one standard solution is to use blankets. I've used 2&quot; Owens-Corning fiberglass but that's not transportable (and it's kind of icky). 1/2&quot; foam padding should do it, and it's cheap enough that you could do a test beforehand and try again if that doesn't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T16:51:17.770" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T16:51:17.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11303" CreationDate="2015-02-05T18:09:11.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak that dialect, where that distinction is made, though many people don't and they just use &quot;was&quot;. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pointless to object to an established dialect that others speak. Since this is something that you were taught and don't natively know the answer to, you should let this go and focus on situations where &quot;creative&quot; stretching of language leads to actual confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my dialect, it's not associated with formality, it's just there. There's a whopping difference between &quot;If I was rude...&quot; and &quot;If I were rude...&quot;, where the former can felicitously be followed by &quot;I apologize&quot; and the latter can be felicitously followed by &quot;I would have have objected to your silly comment&quot;. In the first case, you don't know if you were being rude, and in the latter case you know (believe) that you were not being rule, which is what counterfactuality is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{Addendum}&#xA;There is more to it than mere conterfactuality. I find &quot;If I was/were you, I'd exit here&quot; both acceptable, even though I clearly am not you. The difference is that in this case, I'm not strongly asserting that my being you is counter to fact, whereas in &quot;If I were rude...&quot; cases, the point is deny that you are being rude. I'll have to think over the pragmatic nuances of the two constructions in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-05T19:56:46.677" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T19:56:46.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2015-02-05T20:39:10.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know (I know nothing about Khmer), but one thing going on here is that the first article is talking about vowel phonemes (it uses slashes), and the second one about is talking about pronunciations (it uses brackets).  Phonemes are idealized targets of articulation and need not correspond in an obvious way to actual pronunciations.  I think that matters are even more complicated when it comes to the representation of diphthongs -- there is no rule that says the two symbols in the phonemic representation of a diphthong have to correspond to what those symbols would mean used for separate phonemes (in slashes) or for separate phones (in brackets).  If you asked the authors of articles on phonology what their policies were about all this, they might not be able to tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T20:39:10.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-05T20:59:19.063" Score="9" ViewCount="1883" Body="&lt;p&gt;When speakers of a language coin words for one, two, three, four, etc., for the first time, where do they come up with the forms?&#xA;Are there any common methods used across language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pirahã has words for &quot;few&quot; and &quot;many&quot;. Numerous other languages have only &quot;one&quot; and &quot;many&quot;, possibly adding &quot;two&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_%28linguistics%29#Basis_of_counting_system&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;especially among isolated hunter-gatherer tribes&lt;/a&gt;. If they do express numbers higher than that, it's by counting on their fingers in front of someone else. (See chapters 1 and 2 of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16449/16449-h/16449-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Number Concept&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written by Levi Leonhard Conant in 1896.) But once people invent agriculture and trade, languages tend to come to have some system for counting and expressing, say, the number of animals in a flock or the number of days' travel to some other village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can get past the use of &quot;savage&quot; and &quot;rude&quot; to refer to hunter-gatherers and &quot;Aryan&quot; for Indo-European, Conant continues to describe a common strategy for &quot;five&quot; through &quot;ten&quot;. The word five is often some variant on &quot;having finished one hand&quot;; this is true of PIE as well where &lt;em&gt;*pénkʷe&lt;/em&gt; (five) is related to &quot;finger&quot;. Ten can be &quot;having finished both hands&quot; or (in the case of shod cultures) &quot;one man&quot;, and six through nine &quot;one more [than five]&quot; through &quot;four more&quot;; nine is just as often &quot;one less [than ten]&quot;. Barefoot cultures often adopt base 20 (&quot;one man&quot;) with sub-base 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages borrow numbers when their speakers borrow other cultural concepts. For example, most European languages borrowed &quot;zero&quot; from Arabic, and Swahili appears to have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/post/Origin_of_etymology_of_numbers_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;borrowed six through ten from the same language&lt;/a&gt;. Proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis will cite similarity between &quot;six&quot; and &quot;seven&quot; in IE and Semitic as evidence of common descent, if those words weren't also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3251/2712&quot;&gt;borrowed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conant lamented that the names of one through four appeared opaque in the vast majority of languages studied. Have the past 120 years produced any more clarity on trends in number word etymology among several language families? I tried Google &lt;code&gt;basic numbers etymology&lt;/code&gt; but most results appeared irrelevant, most simply tracing English back to PIE or reiterating that zero was borrowed from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T22:03:39.543" Title="Etymology of basic numerals (number words)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11299" CreationDate="2015-02-05T21:38:17.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past, useful surveys have been done by enlisting the help of many teachers in local schools.  Maybe you could get lots of data quickly by buying lots of little digital recorders and sending them to school teachers, with instructions about what you'd like them to record from their students for you.  There should be some payback, with you sending all the teachers the results of your study, which they could then share with their students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T21:38:17.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11298" CreationDate="2015-02-05T21:45:33.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The attempt to construct formal grammars for human languages has not yet been successful.  Don't expect much.  The most comprehensive efforts have probably been for English.  For Latin and Greek, I doubt you'll find much at all (but I haven't looked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-05T21:45:33.537" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11298" CreationDate="2015-02-06T06:37:52.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A true complete and formal grammar would only hinder your desire to learn a language, so your motivation for asking for such a thing is ill-placed. You also make a false assumption about the nature of &quot;grammar&quot; in linguistics, that a &quot;grammar&quot; is only about enumerating allowed word orders. A complete grammar must include all aspects of the computation, ranging over semantics, syntax, phonology, morphology and phonetics. Also note that no grammar can be self-defining, that is, you must have some knowledge of a theory-external metatheory of the formalization, which means you need a pairing of a grammar and a meta-grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find specific formal accounts of fragments of Greek and Latin, such as Sommerstein's book on Greek phonology, Lightfoot's work on Greek semantics and morphology, Robin Lakoff's dissertation on Latin Complementation, Redenbarger's work on Latin phonology and morphology. These works do not all use the same metatheory. If you were interested in Sanskrit, I would point you to the one extant albeit nigh impossible to use complete formal grammar of a language, the &lt;em&gt;Aṣṭādhyāyī&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T06:37:52.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2015-02-06T08:05:25.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those seem to be taken from Huffman (1970) p.24 and following, which is available on Google Books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.th/books?id=eUUoixAOM6oC&amp;amp;pg=PA24&amp;amp;dq=huffman%20cambodian%20vowel%20symbols&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=7XDUVNftDIyWuASPpgI&amp;amp;ved=0CBsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=huffman%20cambodian%20vowel%20symbols&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cambodian vowel symbols&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you must also take into account whether the initial consonant is first or second series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T08:05:25.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-06T13:32:51.120" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working as a forensic linguist at an upcoming trial. No details to share, but I need something highly professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat is obviously a fine speech analysis program (and I know it well from my university days) -- but is that the program commonly used in industry? What other, more professional options are out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T22:39:38.620" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T06:29:52.470" Title="Aside from Praat, which are the professional options for speech analysis?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2015-02-06T14:41:45.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is no inconsistency in the two Wikipedia articles you gave the links to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowels [ɑ], [ŭə], [ŏə], and [ĕə] are written with the help of a special diacritic sign called &lt;em&gt;bântăk&lt;/em&gt; (a small vertical line written over the final consonant of a syllable, ់).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in a syllable with inherent [ɑː] without any diacritical vowel symbols, bantak shortens the vowel to [ɑ], UN transcription &lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in a syllable with inherent ô, the vowel is modified to [u] before a final labial, otherwise usually to [ŭə]; UN transcription &lt;em&gt;ó&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in a syllable with the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; dependent vowel symbol (ា) in the o-series, the vowel is modified to [ŏə], UN transcription &lt;em&gt;oă&lt;/em&gt;, or to [ĕə] &lt;em&gt;eă&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;k, ng, h&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for [ɔə], to write it another diacritic sign is used, &lt;em&gt;sanhyoŭk sannha&lt;/em&gt; (័), its o-series pronunciation becomes [ɔə] before final (silent) &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is written just in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_alphabet#Modification_by_diacritics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the next section&lt;/a&gt; of your Wiki article. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_alphabet#Consonants_with_no_dependent_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this section&lt;/a&gt; of the same article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And specially for you &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6wrdvQi-cV1LUV0dzkxYXQ0RGc/view?usp=sharing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here is the book&lt;/a&gt; @neubau refers to, complete and downoadable for free, it is the ultimate and precious guide to the Cambodian system of writing which is probably the most complicated among the phonetic writing systems of the world. Please, read the sections that begin at pages 8, 24, and especially 47.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T14:41:45.257" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-06T15:02:10.467" Score="1" ViewCount="5048" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; confused about how to determine underlying representation. Every thing I read seems to contradict the last. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying desperately to solve this problem and I just seem to be going in circles with both 1 and 2. Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**In Maga Rukai, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, certain prefixes show an alternation between a mid vowel and a high vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  1) For each alternation, state the underlying representation. Justify.&#xA;  2) What determines whether the prefix vowel is mid or high? State the rule that would describe this.**&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;o ~ u dynamic verb marker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o-kamɨ   ‘back’                  u-cŋulu ‘connect’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o-dranɨ  ‘make a road’           u-ɖmiŋi ‘make a road’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o-lapɨ   ‘hunt without dogs’     u-lupu ‘hunt with dogs’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;i ~ e negative marker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i-tukruː ‘not hit with stones’   e-kapliː ‘not hold with hands’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i-ulpuː ‘not hunt’ (with dogs)   e-lalpɨː ‘not hunt’ (without dogs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;si ~ se to wear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;si-slivi ‘wear beads’         se-kceŋe ‘wear pants’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;si-krɨkrɨ ‘wear a necklace’   se-kcabu ‘wear leggings’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;te ~ ti to make&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;te-kceŋe ‘make pants’            ti-slivi ‘make beads’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;te-tovnaː ‘build a hut’          ti-kunu ‘make a skirt’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;te-sdamraː ‘cook a side dish’    ti-krɨkrɨ ‘make a necklace’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ke ~ ki harvest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ke-teθo ‘harvest turnip’           ki-sito ‘harvest peanut’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ke-bləblə ‘harvest bamboo shoot’   ki-lpɨlpɨ ‘harvest peas’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ke ~ ki passive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ke-ɖoɖoː ‘be awaited’      ki-klukluɖu ‘be frightened’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ke-kθabɨ ‘peeled’          ki-tɨtɨ ‘be bitten’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8100" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T02:08:35.437" Title="Determining underlying representation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11323" CreationDate="2015-02-06T16:01:00.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to formulate two theories about the two things that alternate and compare those theories to decide which is best.  One theory will be that the mid vowel is underlying and a high vowel is sometimes derived from it.  The other theory will be that the high vowel is underlying and a mid vowel is sometimes derived from it.  Formulate the rules required for the two theories, if possible, and compare the rules for naturalness (assimilations are good).  If one of the theories cannot be made to work at all, because there is no way to predict the observed forms, your work is done -- the other theory must be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't work, you might have to resort to a more complicated theory in which the underlying form is different from both the surface vowels observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just general suggestions -- I didn't try to work your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T16:01:00.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11323" CreationDate="2015-02-06T16:11:52.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;2) The rule for the Maga Rukai prefixes alternation is obvious: if the first syllable after the prefix has a high vowel (&lt;em&gt;i, ɨ, u&lt;/em&gt;), you choose the high variety of the prefix (&lt;em&gt;u-, i-, si-, ti-, ki-&lt;/em&gt;), but if the first syllable after the prefix has a &lt;strong&gt;nonhigh&lt;/strong&gt; vowel (&lt;em&gt;e, ə, o, a&lt;/em&gt;), you choose the mid variety of the prefix (&lt;em&gt;o-, e-, se-, te-, ke-&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) As for this question, it is your job to decide and justify. Use the answer by @Greg Lee, and also use this related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/342/how-to-determine-which-phoneme-a-group-of-allophones-realizes&quot;&gt;How to determine which phoneme a group of allophones realizes?&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Ths paper is also good, it has step-by-step solutions of problems similar to yours: &lt;a href=&quot;http://inguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/ling110/Lecture_Slides/5_Phonology/morphophonology_slides.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morphophonemics: determining underlying forms and rule interactions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T02:08:35.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-06T16:52:28.497" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Possession in Yucatec Maya&lt;/em&gt; by Christian Lehmann (March 2003) and I came across this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prototypical possessum is a concrete entity, normally an individual (as opposed to a mass), but not necessarily highly individuated. It may be empathic or anempathic. The relationship between possessor and possessum prototypically has zero intension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there is no relator which would link the two relata and could thus contribute a meaning of its own. Instead, the relation between the two elements is brought about by the relationality of one of them, which opens a place (an argument position) to be occupied by the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chap. 1.2.2.1.2.1. Possessor and possessum&lt;/em&gt;, p. 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is meant by zero intension?&lt;/strong&gt; And how does it apply to possession? I have read the definition of intension but I am not sure I still understand the concept completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T21:23:03.330" Title="What is the meaning of zero intension?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11331" CreationDate="2015-02-06T17:13:33.073" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw the Hebrew name יעקב transliterated into (American) English by Persian Jews as &lt;em&gt;Yaghob&lt;/em&gt;. I find this curious (because the ע isn't transliterated, but that's a question for another time, and) because the ק, which afaik is voiceless, is transliterated &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt;. Do Persian Jews pronounce Hebrew ק voiced? If so, how did that come to be? If not, why might they transliterate יעקב with &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt; in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T22:51:25.300" Title="Do Persian Jews voice Hebrew ק?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11323" CreationDate="2015-02-06T17:20:41.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Yellow Sky's assertion that the answer is obvious. Given the accompanying instructions, that answer is also incorrect. [Change of heart]. Okay, maybe I misinterpreted the instructions and YS proposed rule is possible. It depends on what your instructor means by &quot;rule&quot;. Conventionally, these kinds of problems require a specific formal mechanism to change the underlying form into the surface form, and a statement of correlation would not suffice. That is the point of requiring an explicit underlying form. But your instructor might also allow an observation of correlation without a specific &quot;how&quot; as constituting a rule. You can probably tell if you've gotten instructions in rule-formalism.[/Change of heart]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, you should not be asking us to solve your homeworks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is an elaboration and generalization of Greg Lee's answer. The general strategy for solving these kinds of problems is to identify possible underlying forms, and pursue the consequences of each choice. If some root is always pronounced as [blah], then there is no reason to think it is anything other than /blah/. If it is sometimes pronounced [blah] and sometimes pronounced [balah], then you have a reason to think it might be /blah/ and a reason to think that it might be /balah/. Each assumption about underlying forms entails a different set of rules, so if the root is /blah/ then you need a rule of vowel insertion to account for the variant [balah]; conversely if the root is /balah/ then you need a rule to delete the vowel to get [blah].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, it turns out that one of these alternatives can be quickly ruled out because there are also roots that are always pronounced [blah] in the same context (e.g. [bunt] in German can be from /bund/ or from /bunt/). That kind of strong evidence disproves one alternative (though you have to check that the alternative representation isn't also likewise disproven, which would mean that you've missed an important fact). If you can't rule out one analysis on factual groups, then you have to appeal to conceptual reasons, such as the simplicity and generality of the rules that each theory entails. That then means you have to have a theoretical framework for evaluating such rules, and that is kind of instructor-dependent. The concept of formal simplicity is very simple, but naturalness is poorly defined and depends on a huge amount of factual knowledge about historical linguistics, articulation, perception, and observation of phonological processes across languages (kind of not available to you at this stage). Instructors differ as to whether they accept the idea of two equally-good solutions, and they may insist that you make a single concrete choice. My opinion is that is teaching bad science, but it happens, so find out whether &quot;either A or B would work&quot; is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that formalizing the rules isn't just an &quot;if possible&quot;, it is an absolute necessity. Very often, students get an idea about an alternative rule but they can't formalize one of the the rules... because it isn't formalizable, with the given assumptions about formalization. That's a big clue -- an underlying representation that entails a &quot;rule&quot; that can't be formalized is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-06T18:17:09.737" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T18:17:09.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2015-02-06T17:30:07.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;intension&quot; is the meaning, excluding the reference.  A demonstrative &quot;this/that&quot;, e.g., might be said to refer to something, but otherwise have no information, and so it would have no intension.  I guess what Lehmann is saying is that Yucatec possession is similar to &quot;have&quot; in English, which says there is some sort of relationship between the subject and object of &quot;have&quot; but says nothing about what that relationship is.  Compare the relation of &quot;I&quot; and &quot;hole&quot; in the example sentence &quot;I have a hole in the pocket.&quot;  Or &quot;the house&quot; and &quot;appearance&quot; in &quot;The house had a strange appearance to it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T17:30:07.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11327" CreationDate="2015-02-06T22:51:25.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name Jacob is well-known among Jews, Christians and Muslims. In Iran this name is known in all communities in the Arabic/Qurʼanic form Yaʻqūb يعقوب but in Persian the Arabic letter q ق is pronounced as a fricative /γ/. The Arabic ʻ ع is silent in Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-06T22:51:25.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-07T01:20:52.983" Score="1" ViewCount="3234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the Arabic definite article /l/ is a common example of this, as it assimilates to the following consonant if it's coronal. This would probably be easier in auto-segmental notation but how would you write the rule in feature notation? I've heard about α place, is there also an α manner or is that not a feature that's used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extra: for reduplication rules, numbers have been used to indicate a copying sound (like 1 2 --&gt; 1 1 2). Would this same method work for assimilation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8104" LastEditorUserId="8104" LastEditDate="2015-02-07T21:59:28.287" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T16:29:45.623" Title="what is the feature notation for total assimilation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9263" CreationDate="2015-02-07T01:31:10.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your term is fine.  It's used in existing research, for example Richard G. Kern's 1994 paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=2552820&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Role of Mental Translation in Second Language Reading&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  This is helpfully discussed in chapter six of Andrew Cohen's book, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1408253992&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2081" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T01:31:10.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-07T02:03:39.993" Score="5" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand how Grimm's law has resulted in pairs such as duo / two, tri / three, penta / five. But how do we get &quot;four&quot;? I looked it up in the dictionary and the IE root is &#xA;‌‌kwetwer-  Why doesn't our number four start with /h/ ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5210" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T19:49:27.127" Title="How do we get &quot;four&quot; when it doesn't follow Grimm's law?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11332" CreationDate="2015-02-07T02:06:37.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends on your metatheory. In standard feature theory, there is no feature &quot;place&quot; or &quot;manner&quot;, so &quot;αplace&quot; or &quot;αplace,βmanner&quot; is meaningless. However, that doesn't stop people from writing rules like that: essentially what they do is redefine the notation and redefine what a feature is (I disapprove, but it happens). The basic problem is that in the linear theory, there isn't anything that refers to classes of features, so you'd have to specifically list all of the changing features, and the rule gets to be pretty big. So this is one of the advantages of autosegmental theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This topic actually comes up &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001951&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, somewhat, in a discussion of what the right formal account of assimilations is. It's clear that we need some mechanism for talking about classes of features, like &quot;place&quot;, but there is more than one way to actually get that -- and there is an alternative (first hinted at by McCawley decades ago) to the SPE feature variable notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Clarification] A feature is understood to be a well-defined acoustic state or articulatory action, which either is or is not. Neither &quot;place&quot; nor &quot;voice&quot; satisfy that requirement, so &quot;place&quot; can't be a feature. Ladefoged did propose multi-valued features that would include place, but those were features in name only, since at the time the only concept that was available for representations was &quot;feature&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[On numbers] Use of the numeric transformational format as found in early statements of reduplication is another possibility for total assimilation, if and only if your theory allows such unrestricted rewrite rules. Phonologists generally hate them. The general format for Arabic-like rules would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[+lateral]  [+coronal] &#xA;    1          2                  →  2 2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notation also could be used for partial assimilation, e.g. place only, by adding the non-changing features to the target element, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[+cons,αvoi,βnasal,γlat...]  [+consonantal]   [αvoi,βnasal,γlat] &#xA;    1                               2       →        2              2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which means &quot;make the copy of term 2 have the features of voicing, nasality, lateralism... that input term one had&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-07T19:07:55.210" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T19:07:55.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11332" CreationDate="2015-02-07T02:19:58.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of an α manner convention, but it would surprise me if no one had ever proposed one.  So many people confuse phonological notation with phonological theory!  If all you want is an easy way to say it, just say &quot;the l assimilates completely&quot;.  That's easy.  If you want a phonological argument, take a look at the SPE argument for α place and see whether a parallel argument can be constructed for α manner.  That would be doing old-style generative phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another theoretical approach is to adopt Stampe's Natural Phonology in which &quot;ease&quot; is interpreted as lack of constraints on the universal phonological processes.  Then every respect in which the l fails to assimilate requires a constraint that prevents an assimilatory process from applying, so the easiest assimilation is the complete assimilation that we find for Arabic l.  You get complete assimilation in the absence of any constraint preventing a feature from assimilating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-02-09T16:29:45.623" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T16:29:45.623" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11334" CreationDate="2015-02-07T02:23:44.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no straightforward explanation for Germanic, but influence from &quot;5&quot; is suspected. There is an article (Patrick Stiles, 1986, NOWELE 8: 3-25) which addresses this but it's not available to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T02:23:44.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11321" CreationDate="2015-02-07T06:29:52.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your purpose, you might want to investigate &lt;a href=&quot;http://speechpro-usa.com/product/forensic_analysis/faw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Forensic Audio Workstation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-07T06:29:52.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8425" CreationDate="2015-02-08T01:36:01.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm actually a grad student on the team at Stanford that's been developing Stanford Dependencies (on which Universal Dependencies is based), so I think I can clarify things for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're assuming that SD and UD are &lt;em&gt;theories&lt;/em&gt;, which they are not. They're frameworks for annotating strings of words, and they never claim to be predictive in any way. The goal of generative syntactic theory is to define formally the set of acceptable sentences in a language; that is, you feed the grammar a string, and if it can come up with an acceptable constituency structure for it then the grammar returns &quot;true&quot;, and if not, it returns &quot;false&quot;. That's it--it makes no claims about psychological plausibility or computational feasibility. SD (and UD) has a different goal--it doesn't try to make claims about psychological plausibility or about grammaticality, but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; try to be useful for computational research. Comparing SD to something like Minimalism is like comparing pens to pencils--it may look like they do the same thing, but there are fundamental differences between them that often render one totally unsuitable to the task at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our framework actually does draw very heavily from theoretical linguistics, just not from Chomskyan linguistics, looking to LFG for answers instead. In LFG, &lt;em&gt;constituent structure&lt;/em&gt; involves relations between tree nodes, like &quot;specifier&quot;, &quot;head&quot;, and &quot;complement&quot;. But these trees don't get mapped directly to semantics--they first get mapped to &lt;em&gt;functional structure&lt;/em&gt;, an intermediate level that involves grammatical function relations like &quot;subject&quot;, &quot;object&quot;, and &quot;clausal complement&quot; (compare these to the UD relations &quot;nsubj&quot;, &quot;dobj&quot;, and &quot;ccomp&quot;). This bipartite system of syntax makes tons of things easier from a theoretical perspective (Warlpiri is the go-to example). You're mistakenly assuming our framework is a representation of c-structure--where you're certainly right that empirically, &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt; material tends to be heads--when in fact it aims to be closer to f-structure--where LFG prefers to analyze &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; material as heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also mention that we at Stanford have a parser that automatically produces UD-style dependency trees, and the way it does this is by first parsing the sentences into tree structures, and then running lots of complicated tregex expressions over those trees to pull out grammatical functions; this is highly reminiscent of how LFG operates. So it actually &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; make a lot of sense from a theoretical perspective, as long as you see it through the right theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SD and UD have really been designed for NLP. NLP people don't care about whether the tools they're using are theoretically well-motivated--they care about whether their model does better than everyone else's, and our dependency representations help them do that. Relation extraction is one example of a computational task that's easy with SD and difficult with a traditional tree grammar. At first glance it seems simple--all you have to do is pull out triples of &quot;predicate(agent,patient)&quot; from a collection of sentences. But, in a tree structure, this gets very messy, because the agent can occur in a wide variety of different tree structure positions. In SD, we abstract away from a lot of this extra noise, which makes the job more manageable for our users (and we even have special relations for passive sentences to make this task even easier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, to summarize&lt;/strong&gt;: SD/USD doesn't make any claims about the existence of phrase structure categories (such as nonfinite VPs or PPs) because a) it's not meant to be theoretically predictive and b) it's meant to represent functional structure, not constituent structure. SD/USD is taken seriously in computational circles because it is easier to apply to practical applications, such as relation extraction, than theoretically motivated constituency structure trees. The USD approach to function words is not a matter of theoretical debate in computational circles, but it is sometimes noted when the choice of hierarchical vs flat structure affects performance. Our SD/USD parser actually does have the option to produce hierarchical structure if the user so desires, where copulas, auxiliaries, and prepositions are heads. But I don't know of any schemes where hierarchical structure is hard-coded in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that answers the questions you had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8106" LastEditorUserId="8106" LastEditDate="2015-02-08T06:10:51.467" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T06:10:51.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2015-02-08T10:53:54.053" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The similarities between pronouns and other grammatical elements in IU and U are too many and too systematic to accept any other explanation than some kind of genetic relationship. But you also have the same similarities with the so-called Altaic languages, and it is not evident how the fundamental branchings go. Also the similarities can go back to some kind of prehistoric Eurasiatic dialectical continuum, rather than a very distinctly confined proto-language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T10:53:54.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2015-02-08T12:40:10.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The similarity of Finnish &lt;em&gt;hän&lt;/em&gt; and Scandinavian &lt;em&gt;hann&lt;/em&gt; / English &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; / etc. is coincidental, or a case of later convergence. Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*h&lt;/strong&gt; goes back to earlier &lt;strong&gt;*k&lt;/strong&gt; (thus &lt;em&gt;hann&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; / etc. may be related to the -&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; seen in Latin &lt;em&gt;hi&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;this&quot;). By contrast, Finnish &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; usually reflects earlier &lt;strong&gt;*š&lt;/strong&gt;, or sometimes another coronal consonant: a cognate of &lt;em&gt;hän&lt;/em&gt; is North Sami &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that the frequency of (or preference for) &lt;em&gt;hän&lt;/em&gt; has been partly influenced over time by its similarity to Scandinavian &lt;em&gt;hann&lt;/em&gt;, but there is no etymological relationship between the two. In Estonian, the 3rd person pronouns are from an entirely different stem: &lt;em&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he&quot; and &lt;em&gt;nad&lt;/em&gt; &quot;they&quot;, related to Finnish &lt;em&gt;tämä&lt;/em&gt; &quot;this&quot; / &lt;em&gt;nämä&lt;/em&gt; &quot;these&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T12:40:10.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-08T15:18:20.773" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;When teaching math to English only students they are often unaware that the numbers from 11 to 19 do not follow the normal rule for saying numbers. It is fun to point this out while leaning about counting in other bases. I have often used my made up words below to help students think about counting in base 16 and then it becomes clear to them that the numbers 11 to 19 are odd words. All I'm trying to do here is reach out to a group that undoubtedly knows many different languages in a hope to find some better made up words that might even come with some justification for their usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my simplified minimum question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a single word for &quot;16&quot; in any language?&#xA;Is there a single word or set of words for &quot;16*16&quot; or 16^2 or 256?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original question and background understanding of counting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intended to be a fun question. I have asked it in other groups but I have never gotten a real good answer. I a scientist and not a linguist as I'm sure you will be able to tell as you read my post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I say numbers in different bases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example using  the root words &quot;hex&quot; and &quot;hexsquare&quot; for base 16.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3C6 -&gt; three hexsquare &quot;C&quot; hex six &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to saying a base 10 number as&#xA;  243 -&gt; two hundred four &quot;tee&quot; three&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lots of background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we all agree that the concept of a number is independent of what&#xA;  base we are in and how we say it in our favorite language. The names of the&#xA;  numbers from {0 -&gt; (n-1)} are arbitrary. Also there are special words for numbers that are used sometimes like score, dozen etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways of saying a number: 1) Read out the digits one by&#xA;  one. However before this can work the two people need to agree on two&#xA;  things, The order the digits will be read (little ending or big ending) and&#xA;  the base. (The number 100101101001 could be in base 18 I just needed to use&#xA;  ones and zeros)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Use our base ten words. Any number in any base can be said in our base&#xA;  ten words. &quot;A&quot; is ten. However this requires the user to convert the&#xA;  non-base 10 number to base ten to say it. (Without much work say: 3A4G8, it&#xA;  is in base 17) (If you do not think we use base ten words to say numbers&#xA;  try this: Write down the numbers 0 through say 20 in base 2 then say the&#xA;  numbers as you point to them and you will notice that your words do not&#xA;  reflect the change in the written symbols. However if you do the same with&#xA;  a list of base ten numbers you will notice that your words change in step&#xA;  with the changing symbols.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is most likely true that there is not a defined way to say numbers in&#xA;  other basses in a formal way. Now as you know us scientist types are more&#xA;  than happy to make up new words when we need them. So let me explain the&#xA;  concept more clearly and I invite you to help me make up some words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you see the &quot;(10 | 16 | n)&quot; just read one of the items in the list. I&#xA;  would suggest on the first read you read the first one, &quot;10&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let me explain what it means to count in a base. I'll do this in base&#xA;  (10 | 16 | n). We count objects up to (9 | 15 | n-1) then when we add the&#xA;  next object we say that we have 1 set of (10 | 16 | n). We set that aside&#xA;  then count up to (9 | 15 | n-1) again. Then when we add in one more object&#xA;  we say, we now have 2 sets of (10 | 16 | n) objects. At some point we will&#xA;  get up to (9 | 15 | n-1) sets of objects and (9 | 15 | n-1) additional&#xA;  individual objects. When we add one more object we will have (10 | 16 | n)&#xA;  sets of (10 | 16 | n) objects which is a total of (10*10 | 16*16 | n*n)&#xA;  objects. We would write that number as 100 for all the bases. But remember&#xA;  the number 100 represents a different about in the different bases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we count in base (10 | 16 | n) we need written symbols and words for&#xA;  the numbers 0 to (9 | 16 | n-1). Once we get up to our first set of (10 |&#xA;  16 | n) we need a word for that set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In base ten that word sounds like &quot;tee&quot;. So I can say the number 68 as&#xA;  &quot;six-tee-eight&quot;. This means that I have 6 groups of &quot;tee&quot; (10) objects and&#xA;  8 individual objects. For larger numbers in base ten we have hundred so we&#xA;  can say the number 352 as &quot;three-hundred-five-tee-two&quot;. Let me write the&#xA;  number more mathematically. 352 = 3*100 + 5*10 + 2 = 3*10*10 + 5*10 + 2. In&#xA;  the second one I explicitly wrote 100 as 10 groups of 10 or 10*10. Now it&#xA;  is clear how the words map to the numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 16 symbols used for base 16 are 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f. It is&#xA;  clear what words to use for 0-9 but what should we say for &quot;a&quot; through &quot;f&quot;?&#xA;  I'm happy with just saying the letter like &quot;a&quot; but not ten or&#xA;  &quot;one-tee&quot;. The number after &quot;f&quot; in base 16 is 10. We can not call this ten!&#xA;  The word we use here needs to be a word for &quot;a set of 16&quot;. In my first post&#xA;  I used the word &quot;hex&quot;. (But this also makes me think about base 6.) In base&#xA;  16 the number right after ff is 100. This is 16 sets of 16. In my first&#xA;  post I used the word &quot;hexsquare&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most interested in base 16 and base 2 so I need words for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16 -&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16*16 -&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16*16*16-&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2*2-&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2*2*2-&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Lets make up some words for the base 16 &#xA;  16-&gt; hex &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16*16 -&gt; dex &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16*16*16-&gt; rex &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I can say the base 16 number e42f as &quot;e rex 4 dex 2 hex f&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that many of you have a much better command of the language and&#xA;  may be able to come up with some good words to use so I can start saying&#xA;  base 16 numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8107" LastEditorUserId="8107" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T00:45:01.323" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T00:45:01.323" Title="Counting in base n" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-02-09T11:40:58.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11343" CreationDate="2015-02-08T16:12:16.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I gather, you're not interested in describing how people say numbers.  Instead, you want to tell them how they ought to say numbers.  This is similar to the approach of the astronomers who recently decided that we ought not to call Pluto a planet.  It is generally contrary to linguistic thought of the last century or so, and I am really not in sympathy with your effort.  I've never liked being told what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But try to have fun, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T16:12:16.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11343" CreationDate="2015-02-08T17:53:48.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You first have to distinguish between actual native numbers, vs. invented ~ imposed systems. English is basically base 10, and so is Arabic, and so on, so there's a bunch of things that you can ask about how people read these base 10 number strings (the basic result is that people gravitate towards binary groups if the string is long enough). Once we meet the Monwaingi in outer space, we can investigate their base-6 numbering system. Natural / existing numbering systems are where it matters what the base is, because there is an actual acquired grammar for such systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also investigate the behavior of adults reading hex strings, though you have to mind the demographics (CS professionals may behave differently from your average lab hacker). I think you would find that people parse long-enough strings into binary pair, using the same strategy that they use for reading street addresses. (That means that 4578 is &quot;45&quot; &quot;78&quot; and not &quot;4,578&quot;). Digits A-F have to be read as letter pairs, so &quot;183F&quot; would most likely be read as &quot;1&quot; &quot;83&quot; &quot;F&quot;, since we avoid mixing English numbers and letter name if possible. But you may find quite a number of behaviors, depending on profession and familiarity with reading hex strings. There's really no market for octal so no realistic chance of testing -- except if you can coopt a psych class instructor into providing you a bunch of undergrad subjects. People are quite unlikely to read &quot;3C6&quot; as &quot;three hexsquare c hex six&quot;, rather than just &quot;three c six&quot; -- the latter is much simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a (decent) sci-fi book that I read decades ago which involved some improvement of human cognition where the author went though a description of how we started slowly saying &quot;one zero zero one...&quot; and ended up develop a linguistic shorthand with expressions like &quot;otter tot&quot; -- can't remember the book. If you know what I mean, you could see what he had to say. But this is strictly science fiction / conlaning, or the stuff of psych experiments, and you can't develop a native numbering system in a psych experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that nobody reads 543638158741648773686798718786416875478 as &quot;five hundred forty three undecillion six hundred thirty eight decillion....&quot;. Given the nature of human cognition, precision and comprehension are at odds. If you need to report the exact value, read the string pairwise from left to right. If you need to convey the rough magnitude, say &quot;about half a duodecillion&quot; and hope that your colleague knows what a duodecillion is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-08T17:53:48.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11347" CreationDate="2015-02-09T05:24:34.077" Score="1" ViewCount="969" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English language &lt;a href=&quot;http://insects.about.com/od/insects101/f/venomous-or-poisonous.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;distinguishes the terms&lt;/a&gt; &quot;poison&quot; and &quot;venom&quot;, with &quot;toxin&quot; sometimes used as a general classifier for both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Venomous organisms deliver or inject venom into other organisms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poisonous organisms, on the other hand, do not deliver their toxins&#xA;  directly. The entire body, or large parts of it, may contain the&#xA;  poisonous substance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other languages in which this is also the case? The ones I know enough of to comment on (Chinese, German) do not appear to make this distinction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-09T05:40:44.030" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T06:24:21.880" Title="What languages other than English distinguish 'poison' and 'venom'" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11346" CreationDate="2015-02-09T06:09:49.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, this is a scientific distinction not generally recognized by the average person in the street. &quot;Poison&quot; is a most general term, &quot;toxin&quot; is a subcase of that (poison produced by biological function) and &quot;venom&quot; is the injected subset of that. French also has &quot;poison, venin, toxine&quot;, and I assume those terms exist in quite a number of languages. If a Norwegian-speaking toxicologist would weigh on we could get a definite answer, but I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; there is no general term for venom which is the same as &quot;poison&quot; = &quot;gift&quot;, though toxin is &quot;toksin&quot;. You can say &quot;slangegift&quot; = &quot;snake poison&quot;, but nothing that covers the whole class of vena. One could check a journal of toxicology that publishes in Norwegian, but I don't think there are any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T06:09:49.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-09T10:36:26.460" Score="7" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his book &quot;Humorous English,&quot; Evan Esar writes, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The &lt;em&gt;blended compound&lt;/em&gt; is the fusion of two compounds, with the terminal word of one being the same or similar to the initial word of the other. By such telescoping ... one's adopted country becomes a &lt;em&gt;stepfatherland&lt;/em&gt;, and Lewis Carroll's dragonfly becomes a &lt;em&gt;snapdragonfly&lt;/em&gt;. Many a piece of wit gains its effect solely through a blended compound.&quot; He proceeds to list a few examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A college education is all too often merely &lt;em&gt;sheepskindeep&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &quot;The subway has created a new animal--the &lt;em&gt;undergroundhog&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &quot;Gossip has been defined as something heard over the &lt;em&gt;sour grapevine&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a technical term for this kind of wordplay? Throughout the book, which is a catalogue of comedic techniques, Esar coins original terms for the phenomena he describes, and so they aren't to be found elsewhere. But I suspect (and hope) that the devices he talks about have more widely recognized names. Would anyone happen to know? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8109" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-02-09T11:24:00.650" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T01:29:19.120" Title="Does anyone know the name of this form of wordplay?" Tags="&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11346" CreationDate="2015-02-09T13:08:32.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Toxin&quot; is a latin word used as the special term in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the difference between &quot;poison&quot; and &quot;venom&quot;, in Russian there are words &quot;яд&quot; and &quot;отрава&quot;. Although nowadays they are used interchangeably, they have different roots. &quot;Яд&quot; is derived from &quot;еда&quot; - &quot;food&quot;, which is analogue to &quot;poison&quot; - &quot;potio&quot; - &quot;drink&quot;. &quot;Отрава&quot; is derived from &quot;трава&quot; - &quot;herb&quot;. So technically we have different words for &quot;poison&quot; and &quot;vegetal poison&quot;, while english-speaking persons differ &quot;poison&quot; and &quot;animal poison&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sample transcription (the real pronunciation may differ): Яд - jˈat, Еда - jɪdˈa, Трава - travˈa, Отрава - atrˈava.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Well, I haven't looked in a book and made a foolish mistake. Both 'трава' and 'отрава' originated from ancient verbs 'травити' (travi'ti) and 'трути' (tru'ti) (consider also Ukrainian 'отрута' (atru'ta) - 'poison'). The latter means 'spend' (also 'consume', 'digest') (also compare to Russian 'тратить' (tratit') - 'spend'; Polish 'trawienie' - 'digestion').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, 'отрава' is about bad food and/or digestion, not about 'vegetal poison'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8076" LastEditorUserId="8076" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T06:24:21.880" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T06:24:21.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11351" CreationDate="2015-02-09T13:38:31.377" Score="2" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone recognize this glyph or ligature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W2SFv.png&quot; alt=&quot;unkown glyph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, it appears on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fondosdigitales.us.es/fondos/libros/765/156/tesoro-de-la-lengua-castellana-o-espanola/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry for &quot;alquimia&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in Covarrubias' &lt;em&gt;Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1611.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8110" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T15:03:40.693" Title="Can anyone recognize this glyph or ligature?" Tags="&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11350" CreationDate="2015-02-09T14:50:11.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This barred q is one of the abbreviations for any one of many Latin words beginning with q, among them the super common relative pronoun &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/qui#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;qui, quae, quod&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which would apply in this case (as the neuter gender form &lt;em&gt;quod&lt;/em&gt;, as seen in full &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QJ9tPQGiSIsC&amp;amp;pg=PA327&amp;amp;lpg=PA327&amp;amp;dq=%22significat%20facere%20ambulare%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=x4s0rkODfI&amp;amp;sig=IAVKdwtUNMUbamdx0jVbJ_HijOI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=vMfYVNyFA4j97AbqlYCQCg&amp;amp;ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22significat%20facere%20ambulare%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T14:50:11.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11350" CreationDate="2015-02-09T15:03:40.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This ligature stands for &lt;em&gt;quae&lt;/em&gt;. Here is a modern type &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/5087940/La_Qu%C3%ADmica_del_1600_seg%C3%BAn_el_Tesoro_Lexicogr%C3%A1fico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;transliteration of that sentence&lt;/a&gt; with the ligature, it is below the image of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Etenim alchim signiﬁcat itinera sive ﬂuxus ab alich, &lt;strong&gt;quae&lt;/strong&gt; signiﬁcat facere, ambulare, seu ﬂuere, unde ars liquans seu fundens metalla abiecta literula, i, ﬁt alquimia facillima formatione&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=5wSAQvmi9i4C&amp;amp;pg=PA181&amp;amp;lpg=PA181&amp;amp;dq=%22Etenim%20alchim,%20significat%20itinera%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Nh_aGRBORn&amp;amp;sig=3e4fdyR87G5NJd4d2XeNgNJCubw&amp;amp;hl=uk&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=UsnYVJr3NIPnygPUhIDwDg&amp;amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Etenim%20alchim%2C%20significat%20itinera%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another source&lt;/a&gt; with the same tranliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T15:03:40.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11315" CreationDate="2015-02-09T20:19:11.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Piotr Gąsiorowski has very recently put forth a hypothesis on the origin of Indo-European kwetwor &quot;four.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://langevo.blogspot.com/2014/09/four-map.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Four: A Map'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He argues that it comes from an archaic word for &quot;pair&quot; or &quot;to pair.&quot; The semantic evidence is good; unfortunately, there are not many branches with a non-&quot;four&quot; reflex of kwet in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T20:19:11.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11698" CreationDate="2015-02-09T23:34:24.823" Score="6" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages that overtly mark present tense, rather than future/past? In other words, is the present ever more marked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a way to search for it in WALS, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T04:02:21.310" Title="Can present tense be more marked?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;&lt;present&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2015-02-09T23:57:39.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In classical Arabic the present tense takes a prefix and a suffix, while the past tense takes only a suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ya-fʻal-ūna “they do”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;faʻal-ū “they did”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly in Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mī-rav-and “they go”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;raft-and “they went”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-09T23:57:39.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11366" CreationDate="2015-02-10T01:37:42.563" Score="2" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often read that English retains 'vestigal' case markers, particularly for the genitive, although some argue that 's is a clitic. Pronouns remain the largest source of marked words indicating the syntactical function.&#xA;My question is this: As word order is generally the most crucial method of indicating a nominal's syntactic function as a subject or an object, should word order be considered a method of implementing case marking in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I will refine my question based on responses given. My original question focused too much on 'case marking'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank Greg and user6726 for their thoughtful replies. I have concluded that 'case markers' and 'word order' are two separate methods of indicating a nominal's syntactic function. (Sticking with syntax, for now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hierarchically, they are both methods of 'X'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;____________X_____________&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Word order . . . . Case marker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the linguistic term for 'X'. My original assumption was 'Case system'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to all participants for your help in getting me to see that word order is not a variety of case system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greg Lee was right when he categorically said that word order is not a type of case marker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;user6726 has given a broad overview of how case is used in languages other than English and rogermue has given some specific examples of how certain English structures emulate case functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atamiri tied it together (for me) by noting that word order and case markers have certain abstract similarities and, in some cases, perform a similar function. (It appears that case markers are potentially more powerful.) Greg Lee made a similar point about semantic rolls although I was originally considering only syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="379" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T21:06:10.450" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T19:30:41.417" Title="Is word order a method of implementing case in English language" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2015-02-10T01:46:04.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, simply because a case is marked by a suffix, and an order of words is not a suffix.  However, if you follow Fillmore's proposal that cases mark semantic roles (Agent, etc.), it would be reasonable to say that word order in English has the same function as case does in case-marking languages: they both mark semantic roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-02-12T19:30:41.417" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T19:30:41.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2015-02-10T01:47:58.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be a mistake, IMO. &quot;Case marking&quot; has a specific meaning, and presupposes that a language has case (e.g. &quot;nominative&quot;, &quot;accusative&quot; or whatever). There is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; relationship between case and thematic rule / grammatical function, but they are not the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright, Greg hit the button before me. But, case is a morphological modification of a word -- not necessarily a suffix, so it could be a prefix, infix, or &quot;mutation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Furthermore....]&#xA;The primary concept that is relevant here is, roughly speaking, about how some nominal element relates syntactically to other elements of the sentence -- I'm being deliberately open-ended. One example is the relationship between &quot;Bill&quot; and either &quot;cat&quot; or &quot;sold a cat&quot; in &quot;Bill sold a cat&quot;. That relationship can be indicated by word order (as in English), by some kind of abstract featural property realized as morphological affixation of some kind (as in Russian or Kipsigis), or by a seriously complicated system of gender agreement patterns in Khoekhoe; and there are other ways. In English, certain syntactic relations are primarily signalled by word order (and there is very little, though not &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; form-changing as is the case in Chinese). In Sanskrit and Walpiri, these relations are signalled via affixation (and not so much with word order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general form of the question that you're raising seems to be, what are the possible value-pairs of X and Y in the linguistic statement &quot;X can be used to signal Y&quot;? My conclusion is that &quot;X,Y&quot; can in principle be anything. There are no doubt database lacunae in finding all logically possible examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the term &quot;case&quot; is conventionally used to cover a particular X,Y relationship. The &quot;means of signalling&quot; is diverse, but can be covered by &quot;concatenation of elements&quot;, cashed out as an affix or near-affix (like a clitic), or an abstract feature that may spread through a phrase: it would not include governance of verb agreement or word order. The &quot;thing signalled&quot; is about a relationship between a nominal and other things -- back to the open-ended thing. First, that relationship &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be just semantic, not structural. A simple example is that one-word answers to questions about subjects take nominative, about objects take accusative, about locations take locative, and so on, in Saami and Russian (as I understand), and maybe in most languages (not all). Second, in a number of Iranian languages, the relationship between elements in an NP, i.e. nouns and adjectives, is marked with an &quot;Izafe/Ezafe&quot; suffix -- so it's not just about NPs and other NPs or VPs. And sometimes a case can't really be said to mark a relationship between a nominal phrase and something else -- so in Saami, the essive case expresses notions like &quot;Being an N&quot;, &quot;As as N&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doomed, gloomy picture that I'm painting arises from the fact that the concept &quot;case&quot; stemmed from observation of properties of particular set of languages with morphological affixation, and the coherence of &quot;case&quot; in those languages (German, Sanskrit, Finnish, Arabic etc.) is morphological (i.e. (Classical) Arabic nouns can't be simultaneously marked nominative and accusative). Problem arise when you &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; analogies between some new system and a more classical case system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can probably tell, I don't think that &quot;case&quot; is a generally-useful concept for clarifying that relationship, instead I think one is better off looking at the thing signified, or the means of signifying, depending on whether your interest is more in semantax or morphology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T06:12:34.367" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T06:12:34.367" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2015-02-10T06:16:09.350" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see it this way: A case as dative can be expressed by an ending as in Latin, it can be marked by a preposition as &quot;to&quot; in English, and it can be marked by position alone as in the English verb structure verb + dative (of person) + accusative. All three clearly show the case of the noun. ( I know that the general view in English grammars is that English has no cases or dative as in Latin where cases are expressed with endings. But I think this view is a bit narrow. &quot;indirect object&quot; is in my view just another name for dative, the new term doesn't give any new insight into the function of cases. The function of dative can be expressed by more means than ending alone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T06:16:09.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11315" CreationDate="2015-02-10T06:42:42.827" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one puts oneself into the situation of an early age where the invention of words for numbers begins there is only one way to do it, by paraphrasing.&#xA;You can express five by saying as many as fingers on your hand.&#xA;Two: the number of your arms or feet, etc.&#xA;Four: the legs of a cow or a dog&#xA;One: the head of a man or head/tail of an animal &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If signs and geometrical signs have been developed it is possible&#xA;to say:&#xA;Three: the corners of a triangle&#xA;Four: the corners of a rectangle or square. Latin quattuor (four) is very similar to quadratum (rectangle) or quadrus/a/um (rectangular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If words for one, two, three have been developed it is easy to express more numbers:&#xA;Ten: two hands - Behind Latin decem (ten) might be two hands.&#xA;Seven: a hand + two.&#xA;Nine: two hands minus one.&#xA;Eight: two fours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The further development of paraphrases will be shortening and contraction till a word form that is short and easy to speak comes into being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably  the first stage was by means of gestures, such as showing the hand, pointing to the nose or to the legs. Maybe conventions developed for addition and subtraction of two simple numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-02-10T11:25:31.860" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T11:25:31.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-10T07:54:47.987" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages that conjugate nominals for singular vs. plural number are quite common across the world. Languages which also have a dual conjugation are also fairly common. But is there any language which has a 0-number conjugation: a grammatical number indicating 0 of the specified nominal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T16:57:59.163" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T16:57:59.163" Title="Languages with 0 Number?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-10T10:13:40.830" Score="-5" ViewCount="7495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a printout of the Arabic alphabet, reproduced below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BMR7q.png&quot; alt=&quot;Arabic Alphabet&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble is when I look at certain words, I can't make out what letters are in there.&#xA;For example, the Arabic word for camel is جمل.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't find that first letter in my alphabet sheet. It doesn't resemble any of the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there &quot;hidden&quot; letters, or perhaps, are some letters shaped differently in different situations? Are there upper/lower case? What's going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3493" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T13:27:59.020" Title="Why don't some Arabic letters appear in the alphabet list?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11363" CreationDate="2015-02-10T10:21:46.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the letters have separate initial, medial and final forms. جمل is ج plus م plus ل. I suggest you look at an Arabic textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T10:21:46.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2297" CreationDate="2015-02-10T11:09:58.847" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for &quot;Hebrew&quot; in Hebrew is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;עברית &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pronounced &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;eev-rit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see how the various language variations could emerge from there (i.e. V changing to B, adding an H at the beginning)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3493" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T11:09:58.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2015-02-10T11:45:44.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no if you mean morphological case. Word order in English is a method of signalling grammatical functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's the notion of &quot;abstract case&quot; and then one might say that word order correlates with abstract case assignment (in the parlance of generative grammar). There's a more abstract notion of &quot;configuration&quot; and in the so-called configurational languages, configurations (that is, hierarchical word order) determine grammatical functions, such as subject, object, etc. In nonconfigurational languages such as Latin, word order plays no role in syntax sensu stricto (though it is important at the level of pragmatics since it is a means of expressing information structure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think your 'X' has a name in linguistics but both word order and (morphological) case are used to express grammatical roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T11:45:44.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11363" CreationDate="2015-02-10T13:27:59.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here you see the Arabic letters in isolated position, at the beginning of a word, in the middle and at the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T13:27:59.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11394" CreationDate="2015-02-10T18:42:44.863" Score="1" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his book &lt;em&gt;Humorous English,&lt;/em&gt; Evan Esar gives example uses of devices he broadly labels &lt;em&gt;synonymics&lt;/em&gt;. He writes of &lt;em&gt;synonymic puns&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Many a wife sends her husband to an early grave with a series of little digs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They are made for each other. He owns oil wells, and she's always gushing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cleverness of these jokes consists in their use of commonly associated words—&lt;em&gt;grave&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;digs&lt;/em&gt; in the first, &lt;em&gt;oil wells&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gushing&lt;/em&gt; in the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of &lt;em&gt;synonym grouping&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Our florist has two children—a girl who's a budding genius and a boy who's a blooming idiot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I went to see a spiritualist. She wasn't good, just medium. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, these jokes rely on the use of closely related words—&lt;em&gt;florist&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;budding&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;blooming&lt;/em&gt;; and &lt;em&gt;spiritualist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;medium&lt;/em&gt; (intended both as the noun meaning spiritualist and as the comparative between good and bad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the book, which is a catalogue of comedic techniques, Esar coins original terms for the phenomena he describes, and so they aren't to be found elsewhere. The use of &lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt; to describe these devices seems a bit misleading, because they don't use synonyms. They do, however, use words that are quite closely related (but aren’t synonymous). Does anyone know of a technical term for this kind of wordplay? And does anyone know of any examples of its use anywhere else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8109" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T20:14:24.047" Title="What kind of wordplay is this?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11334" CreationDate="2015-02-10T19:49:27.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frederik Kortlandt in   Labials, velars and labiovelars in Germanic. North-Western European Language Evolution 30 (1997), 45-50. addresses how in many cases PIE *kw &gt; p &gt; Germanic f in words such as 'wolf', 'eleven', 'twelve', 'leave', 'liver' and a similar change (gw &gt; b &gt; p) in 'warp'. However he still thinks 'four' gains it's first consonant from similarity to 'five'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T19:49:27.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9153" CreationDate="2015-02-10T20:08:32.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of the word 'little' in Southern English (for example the speech of Londoners). Both l's are regarded by speakers as the same phoneme however the first is a consonant and the second is a back vowel.&#xA;Compare that with Northern English or American English where both are consonants albeit, at least in Northern English, the second is syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastEditorUserId="8118" LastEditDate="2015-02-12T13:11:37.893" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T13:11:37.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2015-02-10T21:13:17.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an affinity between uvularization and pharygealization, described by Jørgen Rischel in &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books/about/Topics_in_West_Greenlandic_Phonology.html?id=kYtkAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Topics in West Greenlandic Phonology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and if some things called &quot;velarized&quot; are actually uvularized, as I believe to be the case, then that may get us further on the way to finding out why sometimes tongue backing evokes pharyngealization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall the feature description of velar/uvular/pharyngeal in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;, which I think is good for this.  All have backing of the tongue body, which for velars is accompanied by raising of the tongue body and for pharyngeals is accompanying by lowering of the tongue body.  But uvulars just have backing.  The idea, I gather, is that the mass of the tongue is pushed back and down to narrow the pharyngeal cavity (though I think muscles of the pharynx are also involved).  However, notice that pharyngealized sounds are in a sense contrary to velarized ones, since the first lower the tongue body while the latter raise it.  So if there is an affinity between velarization and pharyngealization, that's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I think the affinity is between uvularization and pharyngealization (as Rischel found for WG Eskimo), and the matter seems puzzling only because uvularization has been misdescribed as &quot;velarization&quot;.  Those who speak a dialect of American English with supposedly velarized syllable offset [l] can experiment saying words like &quot;fall&quot; and see if they can feel any tongue raising for the &quot;velarized&quot; [l].  I get backing, but not raising, so I think this is actually uvularization.  (Maybe American English syllable onset [l] is velarized.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T21:13:17.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-10T22:05:57.203" Score="2" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Malay, the wh-phrase in interrogatives remains in-situ, but may move to the left periphery of the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Declarative&#xA;&#xA;Malay: Awak makan ayam&#xA;Gloss: You  eat   chicken&#xA;Eng: You eat chicken&#xA;&#xA;Wh-in-situ interrogative&#xA;&#xA;Malay: Awak makan apa?&#xA;Gloss: You  eat   what&#xA;Eng: What did you eat?&#xA;&#xA;Preposed Wh-phrase&#xA;&#xA;Malay: Apakah yang awak makan?&#xA;Gloss: What   that you  eat&#xA;Eng: What did you eat?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of in-situ wh-phrases is characteristic of conversational everyday Malay, whereas preposed wh-phrase constructions are used in more formal registers. It doesn't seem to me that the prepositioning of the wh-phrase is due to topicalisation or focus movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the wh-phrase is preposed, the interrogative corresponds to a pseudocleft in English, e.g. &quot;what was it that you ate?&quot;. The noun that the relative clause modifies is dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this pseudoclefting transformation without the intention of putting the wh-phrase into focus common in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The next question is based on the following tree diagrams)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WVRHZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it plausible to say that there is a zero-copula that links the wh-phrase with the relative clause in the sentence as in tree 1, or is it more plausible to say that there is no zero-copula and that the complementizer is a nominalizer (as argued by some) as in tree 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take is that the complementizer is still a complementizer, not a nominalizer, due to the fact that the noun modified by the relative clause is optional. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Malay: Apakah (benda) yang awak makan?&#xA;Gloss: What   (thing) that you  eat?&#xA;Eng: What is the thing that you ate?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases of predication, can there ever be no linker or copula?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it enticing to say that there is the copula 'ialah', although unpronounced, in the structure. This is to serve as a linker for the wh-phrase and the nominal predicate. However, I can't find any evidence to support my claim about there being a zero-copula besides the fact that copulas are largely optional in Malay. My intuition is that tree 1 seems more plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tree 2 seems a bit strange to me because I've never seen a [+wh][-pred] wh-phrase followed by a [-wh][+pred] complementizer as in tree 2 before, but I'm not so sure about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T22:19:27.157" Title="Interrogatives and Copulas in Malay" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2015-02-10T23:04:58.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find &lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/5483/Litvin_Natallia_MA_2014.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this ultrasound&lt;/a&gt; study useful, since it discusses the inconsistent claims about Russian (concluding that there is both uvularization and velarization and not pharyngealization, depending on the consonant). However, note that her framework (Esling's) makes some definitional assumptions about larynx raising and pharyngealization. Not that I dispute that position, it's just not &quot;the usual&quot;. Secondary pharyngealization (&quot;emphasis&quot;) in Arabic has sometimes been called &quot;velarization&quot;. You can't expect much precision without fancy instrumental studies, plus some clear evidence that there can be distinct categories (e.g. the realization that there are really two lower back places, pharyngeal and epiglottal). See &lt;a href=&quot;http://elanguage.net/journals/bls/article/viewFile/3628/3524&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; for a study showing that Chechen (abstract) &quot;pharyngealization&quot; involves pharyngealization, uvularization and epiglottalization, determined by what specific consonant is involved. Shahin &quot;Acoustics of pharyngealization vs. uvularization harmony&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics X&lt;/em&gt;) argues that there are two types of retraction harmony, but again this is governed by choice of consonant (tˁ vs ʕ) and is not contrastive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, pharyngealization and velarization do not contrast. Both properties are uncommon, so you would not expect to find both contrasting in one language. Both cause significant lowering of F2 and a bit of raising of F1 (I think what makes them different is a lowering of F3 with pharyngeals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-10T23:04:58.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2015-02-11T12:25:49.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are also languages without an obvious present tense, e.g. future/non-future and past/non-past languages. For such languages, the present can be marked on the non-future or non-past tense with aspectual morphology (e.g. continuous aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T12:25:49.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-11T16:01:52.113" Score="1" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a set of framed sheet with this text on it.  I just wondering what language is this...  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FQrUH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T16:08:27.547" Title="What language is this text?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11378" CreationDate="2015-02-11T16:08:27.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Tibetan. You only need to rotate the picture 90° clockwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T16:08:27.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-11T14:41:13.990" Score="2" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that PIE people have present-day descendants in India to Europe, they have divided so starkly: in the given map, most languages from India to middle east upto east Europe are SOV, whereas most in west Europe are SVO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this parent population separate into two? How did they evolve to be distinct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/81A#3/43.20/67.76&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/81A#3/43.20/67.76&lt;/a&gt; as a map reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8123" OwnerDisplayName="aitchnyu" LastEditorUserId="8123" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T17:59:57.217" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:07:28.383" Title="When did PIE people split into subject-verb-object -- SVO and SOV peoples?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2015-02-11T16:26:37.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really know enough about linguistics to be an expert on that exact linguistic difference. However, the map you supplied looks quite similar to the modern separation between the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European and the rest. It is believed that &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Iranian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-Iranian&lt;/a&gt; goes back to about the 3rd Millenium, BC. Their separate recorded history starts around the 9th century BC, when they (and their invention, the chariot) &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;invaded the Iranian plateau&lt;/a&gt;. From there some of them turned east and invaded India as well. Presumably this cut them off a bit from the rest of their Indo-European compatriots up on the western Eurasian Steppe, and already &quot;migrating&quot; into Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a lot of the Germanic languages (but not English), according to that map have no dominant order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8124" OwnerDisplayName="T.E.D." LastEditorUserId="8124" LastEditDate="2015-02-11T19:28:16.103" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T19:28:16.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11410" CreationDate="2015-02-11T19:23:33.673" Score="3" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious if there is an automated way to detect if a given string, representing a sentence, is an 'incomplete' sentence. By this I mean that either the text is not grammatically correct, or is missing words, or doesn't make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous research shows how to fill in missing tokens into a text that is incomplete, which is interesting, but I am looking to just detect if what is given as input is a complete sentence or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that there are many edge cases with something like this, but I am just looking for either state of the art implementations or ideas on how to do this manually, with nltk, opennlp or the stanford tools. Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8125" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T02:26:45.593" Title="Detection if input sentence represents an incomplete sentence?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11369" CreationDate="2015-02-11T22:55:48.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now I don't have a doctorate, but I'd have to have a lot of patience to not just call these jokes punny; a bon mot it is not, not near an apothegm, quippy for sure, I'd probably just call them a &lt;strong&gt;polysemous pun&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;po·ly·se·my (ˈpäliˌsemē ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3052" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-02-11T22:55:48.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2015-02-12T00:22:10.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe, depending... the main issue is distinguishing marking of aspect vs. temporal reference, and what you mean by &quot;tense&quot;. The differences in Classical Arabic between faʕalū and yafʕalūna is sometimes called present / past (tense) and sometimes perfect / imperfect (aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/osudl/Morton204dissertation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anii&lt;/a&gt;, there is an unmarked form, and with eventive verbs, it has a past perfective interpretation, not a present or future (they are incompatible with present or future). There is a complication that statives have a present or past imperfective but not habitual reading. There is an imperfective marker tɪ̀ for progressive and habitual and a future marker tɨ́. It may be best to not think of Anii as having specific tense markers and aspect markers, but rather to think of the system as having markers with some tense and mostly aspectual properties. But it does turn out that the unmarked form isn't a present, it's a past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T00:22:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2015-02-12T02:51:43.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin of accent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a child begins to speak, he/she sets its articulatory base on that of the people surrounding him/her. Different languages have different normal movements of the parts of articulatory base in the time of talking. For that reason the speech effect in the vocal tract is different. When the tissues there are still young and yield to speech actions, permanent changes take place on the pharynx wall. A mechanical speech apparatus is formed in the vocal tract, which is serviceable until the death of the owner. After a certain critical period&#xA;all new acquired languages are spoken with that instrument. As the native language has a limited number of sounds and their characteristics are only for that language, all the others are pronounced incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person can have more than one talking instrument in his/her vocal tract - for instance, when a child is born in a bilingual family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison: a person has a melody in his/her head and he/she can make it audible with the help of musical instruments, whereas each of them has its own &quot;accent&quot;. But the melody can be right with all instruments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why phoneticians do not want to admit that they have no idea about the origin of accent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonhard Klaar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8128" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T02:51:43.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2015-02-12T06:51:15.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All branches show in their most ancient form either SOV order or its traces. That said, the PIE had SOV word order as the default(unmarked) but being a highly inflective language its word order was mostly free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-02-13T09:58:33.533" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T09:58:33.533" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9269" CreationDate="2015-02-12T13:10:36.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you thoughht of learning through Glyph study? It's a Yahoo self-help group where Middle Egyptian is studied.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/GlyphStudy/info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/GlyphStudy/info&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T13:10:36.267" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-12T13:10:36.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11373" CreationDate="2015-02-12T17:40:11.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough linguistics to answer your second question, but the pseudocleft question formation reminds me of the way formal questions are formed in French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Declarative&#xA;French: Tu manges une crêpe.&#xA;Gloss: you eat a crepe&#xA;&#xA;Informal interrogative (wh-in-situ):&#xA;French: Tu manges quoi?&#xA;Gloss: you eat what?&#xA;&#xA;Formal interrogative (preposed):&#xA;French: Qu'est-ce que tu manges?&#xA;Gloss: What is it that you eat?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fixed expression &quot;Qu'est-ce que&quot; with the accusative relative pronoun &quot;que&quot; is used to ask a question about the object of a verb, while &quot;Qu'est-ce qui&quot; with the nominative relative pronoun is used to ask about the subject of a verb. Questions with a preposed wh-phrase can also exhibit simple inversion of subject and verb, as &quot;Que manges-tu?&quot;, but this is another level up in formality and isn't common in spontaneous spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T17:40:11.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11369" CreationDate="2015-02-12T20:14:24.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Puns rely on a range of phenomena that lie somewhere between polysemy and homophony. However, polysemy is a rather complex and fuzzy phenomenon so it's not a perfect fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All your examples are cases of &lt;em&gt;polysemy&lt;/em&gt; such as 'budding genius'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a homophonic pun would be something like &quot;Atheism is a non-prophet institution&quot; or more on the homographic side &quot;You need to Czech Prague out.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is what makes the puns you list work is something you might call &lt;strong&gt;semantic frame dissonance&lt;/strong&gt; caused by polysemy of words in the punchline that fit into the semantic frame triggered by the set up. For instance, words like 'gush' belongs to the frame of oil extraction but it is not being used in the sense that fits with the frame. Thus the humorous effect. The same is the case with a florist having a budding genius and a blooming idiot for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of semantic frame you could talk about 'semantic fields' or you could also conceive of some of the cases as simply collocations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is this kind of relatedness that made the author talk about synonymy but words like oil well and gush are not synonyms, they are simply semantically related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-12T20:14:24.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-12T23:36:30.147" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in cross-linguistic variation in case assignment to single-NP elliptical answers – for example “What did they see?”; “A goat”. By “case” I mean a distinct form of a word selected to indicate grammatical role in the sentence, thus excluding use of prepositions and postpositions (so, “with an axe” is not an instrumental case form in English). German and Insular Scandinavian, Slavic (widely if not universally), Finnic, Saami, Sanskrit, Korean, Classical Arabic and (on weak phonological grounds) Quechua have case. Chinese, Lushootseed, Sundanese and Colloquial Arabic do not. I take the existence of allomorphy to be sufficient grounds for calling something “case” as opposed to being a prepositional / postpositional phrase. If there's NP-internal case agreement, even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation in English is murky because only pronouns are marked for case, though any NP can be marked with -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. Pronouns are nominative (I, he, her, we, they) when they are subjects (“I/*Me went to the store”) though in a subject conjunction, it is optional – “Tom and I/me went to the store”). Otherwise (and when not possessive), the accusative form is used. In eliptical answers, the accusative is used, except when a genitive would be called for in which case you use the “absolute” possessive form or -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; if the answer is an NP. So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Who took the book? Me/*I; Him/*He&#xA;Who did the dog chase? Me/*I; Her/*She&#xA;Whose car did they buy? Mine/*Me/*I/*My; Yours/*Your/*You; Hers/*Her/She; Bob’s/*Bob&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In North Saami, if you ask a question about a subject the (elliptical) answer is in the nominative; if it’s about an object, it should be in the accusative, and so on. On the other hand, in Southern Nilotic, nominative case is possible only when an overt verb precedes the subject, so elliptical answers use the non-nominative form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this background: in what languages is case assigned to elliptical NP answers in the same way as it is to NPs integrated into a full S; in what case languages are elliptical answers given some default case form; and in what languages do you get both patterns, depending on some other factor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Addendum] The S. Nilotic claim is based on my notes on Kipsigis. The citation form of &quot;pig&quot; is &lt;em&gt;ingúrwêt&lt;/em&gt;; &quot;He killed a pig&quot; is &lt;em&gt;kapár ingúrwêt&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;A pig killed him&quot; is &lt;em&gt;kapár ingúrwet&lt;/em&gt; -- case is marked by tone change. Either subject or object can be moved left, and an extracted subject NP does not have nominative tone. So using citation / accusative (names) &lt;em&gt;Mʊ́sa, Chʊ̂ma&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Musa saw Juma&quot; is &lt;em&gt;kakɛ́r Mʊsá[s] Chʊ̂ma ~ kakɛ́r Chʊ̂ma Mʊsá[s]&lt;/em&gt;, and extracted, you have &lt;em&gt;Mʊ́sa kɔ́kakɛ́r Chʊ̂ma&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;Chʊ̂ma kɔ́kakɛ́r Mʊsá&lt;/em&gt;[s]) which focuses the extracted NP. So, movement messes with case anyhow. What I know is that the guy rejected &lt;em&gt;ingúrwet&lt;/em&gt; as a possible form, and I did ask &quot;Even as an answer to 'who killed him'?&quot;. But I didn't pursue that rigorously. Creider &amp;amp; Creider 1989 (&lt;em&gt;A grammar of Nandi&lt;/em&gt;) may fill the gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-13T01:16:36.123" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T02:35:57.930" Title="How is case assigned in elliptical answers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2015-02-13T02:17:01.240" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek's &lt;em&gt;μανθάνω/λαμβάνω&lt;/em&gt; type of words come to mind. &#xA;It's a pretty small group of words, though; maybe a few tens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present: &lt;em&gt;μα-ν-θ-άν-ω, λα-μ-β-άν-ω&lt;/em&gt; (interfix -ν-, suffix -άν-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aorist: &lt;em&gt;ἔ-λαβ-ον, ἔ-μαθ-ον&lt;/em&gt; (augment ἔ-); in older dialects just plain &lt;em&gt;λάβ-ον, μάθ-ον&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T02:17:01.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11405" CreationDate="2015-02-13T16:59:21.017" Score="0" ViewCount="123059" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking a course &quot;Introduction to Translation&quot; and while i'm reading about the things a translator should do before translating a text is to see what are the salient linguistic features in the text? Can you please provide me with examples on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8141" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-02-14T00:56:52.060" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T09:58:22.060" Title="Examples of Linguistic Features?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9209" CreationDate="2015-02-13T17:32:00.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the question and much of the discussion so far contaminated by confusions between language and writing and between word and phrase.  &quot;Frying pan&quot; is a noun; it is a compound, made up of two words, &quot;frying&quot; and &quot;pan&quot;, which are both nouns.  It is not a noun phrase, though you might be able to find a noun phrase (e.g., the subject of a sentence) which just this noun occurring alone, but at the moment, no such example occurs to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that &quot;frying pan&quot; would customarily be spelled with a space between the two nouns that make up the compound, rather than &quot;frying-pan&quot; or &quot;fryingpan&quot;, has really nothing to do with its grammatical category.  Why should it? The space there is just a spelling convention, not a linguistic hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be part of your understanding of the term &quot;phrase&quot; that a phrase has more than one word.  You ought to try not to carry over this understanding to grammar, because the terms &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;noun phrase&quot;, as used in grammatical analysis, have nothing to do with whether a constituent has more than one word.  One of the first things that has to be done in teaching modern grammar to a student who is trained in traditional grammar is to convince the student that a noun can never be the subject of sentence -- only a noun phrase can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, can a multi-word constituent ever be a word, as I have claimed above for &quot;frying pan&quot;?  Yes, and the case of word compounds is one such case.  There are others. Here is a pretty clear one.  A general principle of coordination is that the constituent created by combining two constituents has the same grammatical category as the constituents that were combined.  Combining the verb phrases &quot;run&quot; and &quot;eat sardines&quot; with &quot;and&quot; gives the verb phrase &quot;run and eat sardines&quot;, for instance.  Note that I've categorized &quot;run&quot; as a verb phrase, even though it has just one word in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider the perfectly ordinary sentence &quot;The man and woman left&quot;.  What category is &quot;man and woman&quot;?  It has more than one word -- does that make it a phrase?  No, it's just a noun, formed by the general rule of coordination mentioned above.  Start with two nouns, connect them with &quot;and&quot;, and you get something of that same category -- a noun.  So, if we can agree that a noun is a word, clearly here is a case of a multi-word word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T17:32:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11404" CreationDate="2015-02-13T17:46:38.010" Score="1" ViewCount="1032" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm wondering how much of English words have Germanic roots, how many have Romantic roots and how many have Greek roots etc. In percent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any such table?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T17:14:48.900" Title="How many of English words have Germanic roots, and how many have Romantic roots? (in percent)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2015-02-13T17:51:46.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg/677px-Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;image&lt;/a&gt; displaying what I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 26% of English words have Germanic origins and the other percentages are as followed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin, 29%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French, 29%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek, 6%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other languages or unknown, 6%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From Proper Names, 4% (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0029344700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="8051" LastEditDate="2015-02-14T17:14:48.900" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T17:14:48.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11401" CreationDate="2015-02-13T21:39:55.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic features is an &lt;strong&gt;extremely broad&lt;/strong&gt; phrase. In context of translating, the things I would take particular note of include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28sociolinguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;register&lt;/a&gt;:  a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sociolect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnolect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ethnolect&lt;/a&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dialect&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;slang&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;jargon&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tense&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;aspect&lt;/a&gt; : these may not have 1 - 1 mappings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lexical aspect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;alliteration&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;puns&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;double entendres&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;idiomatic expressions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cultural proverbs, e.g. a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_proverbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kotowaza&lt;/a&gt; in Japanese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assumed social knowledge that is evident in certain language use, like detecting or displaying sarcasm, irony, and more nuanced tones in writing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changes in script, orthography, use of capitals, italicization, small caps, quotes, underlining: for example, how do you represent all capitals in a language with two letter cases, in a language that has only majuscules ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, those are things that would be examples when translating. However, &lt;em&gt;feature&lt;/em&gt; has a plethora of meanings in linguistics. In semantics, it could refer to a semantic class or category. In phonetics, say, a place of articulation. In morphology, a lexical category or inflectional category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3052" LastEditorUserId="3052" LastEditDate="2015-02-13T21:48:13.680" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T21:48:13.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-13T22:44:22.057" Score="1" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading &quot; Thinking Arabic Translation&quot; there's one paragraph that I haven't understood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Decision of Detail: Reasoned decisions concerning the specific problems of grammar, lexis encountered in translating particular expressions in their particular context. Decisions of detail can only be made in the light of strategy. Naturally, however, problems of detail may arise during translating which arise unforeseen strategic issues and oblige the translator to refine the original strategy somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does exactly Decisions of Detail mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean the details in the source text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8141" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-02-14T00:52:57.787" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T05:37:18.547" Title="Decisions of Detail" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-05-22T13:03:12.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2015-02-13T22:45:32.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Malay and Indonesian (which are very similar to each other) are simple in all the respects you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alphabet&lt;/em&gt;: Latin alphabet without any diacritics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;: Shallow orthography, which means that there is a clear mapping between the letters and the pronunciation. No tones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt;: no obligatory marking of numbers or tenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indonesian is used as a lingua franca for a very large country, by people with many different mother tongues. As MatthewMartin mentioned, such languages are generally simpler than average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2015-02-13T22:45:32.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11409" CreationDate="2015-02-13T23:24:45.183" Score="1" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay I'm trying to make a tree and I keep getting stuck and I'm not quite sure where. &#xA;The structure I'm stuck on is something like &quot;think of the boy as my son&quot; or &quot;think of the president as America's king&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I not sure what to do with the second PP (is it even a PP? AdvP seems wrong but it somehow seems like both?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like [of the boy] and [as my son] should be sisters in the tree, but I also kind of see [as my son] as being under [of the boy]. Are either of these right? Or close to right? I tried finding an example and can't find anything very similar. Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S [NP *][VP [V think][V' [PP of the boy][pp as my son]]]] &#xA;(this seems wrong because of the head sitting like a spec in the VP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S [NP *][VP [V think][V' [PP of the boy][V' [pp as my son]]]]] &#xA;(this seems wrong because a double V'- is that allowed?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S [NP *][VP [V think][PP of the boy][pp as my son]]] &#xA;(this seems wrong because it breaks binary branching)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I tried this because it seems to fit nicer, however [as my son] seems to feel more like it needs to be an aspect of 'how' you're thinking. It feels disconnected and misplaced buried in the NP- although it has no reference without [of the boy] so higher seems too important while here doesn't seem important enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S [NP *][VP [V think][PP [P of][NP [D the][N' [N boy][PP as my son]]]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you can help point me in the right direction. I'm not in school now so I don't have a teacher/book- just my memories and Google. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8142" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T00:01:24.933" Title="Syntax trees and comparatives? Maybe adjuncts?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11408" CreationDate="2015-02-14T00:01:24.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you think of the boy?  As your son?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T00:01:24.933" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11383" CreationDate="2015-02-14T00:43:13.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to do it is to have an editing automaton, which is actually a&#xA;GSM (Generalized sequentil machine) that can do modifications on the&#xA;string. Each modification can have an associated cost. You can include&#xA;it in the parsing process, using a chart parser, to get parses up to&#xA;some modification, each with a weight accounting for the number and&#xA;types of modification. This will slow down the parser, but it does not&#xA;change its complexity, because the editing GSM is a finite state&#xA;machine, an thus does not change the language class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get a parse with weight 0, it means that the input string&#xA;could be parsed without any editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very briefly addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25903007/algorithms-or-data-structures-for-dealing-with-ambiguity/26132215#26132215&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on another SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T00:43:13.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8787" CreationDate="2015-02-14T03:00:18.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're asking about how to learn syntax, but I'm not sure.  If you are, I think McCawley's text is excellent, &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  The best part is the exercises at the ends of the chapters. Also, the footnotes are crammed with information.  I've used it as a text for several graduate courses in syntax, and up to the last two chapters, I've done all the exercises myself (it wasn't easy).  I don't really believe in the syntactic theory McCawley pursues (a sort of neo-generative semantics), but it doesn't matter, because the book is mostly about sentence structure -- how you tell what the structure for various constructions is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McCawley's book is rather dense and the discussion is at a sophisticated level.  I've found that most grad students don't like it very much (but they just don't know what's good for them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T03:00:18.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11416" CreationDate="2015-02-14T08:33:17.577" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can see how SL can be a decent metalanguage for doing cross-linguistic semantic work, but I feel like it's severely limited by the fact that you can't translate any kind of non-declarative sentence. This is means that only tiny fraction of any one given language can ever be logically represented. How is symbolic logic useful in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T17:30:38.600" Title="If we can only translate declarative sentences into symbolic logic, then how is symbolic logic useful for linguistics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11418" CreationDate="2015-02-14T13:15:56.980" Score="6" ViewCount="3716" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does any serious scholar really believe that some languages have no distinction between verbs and nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia pages suggest this. I studied physics, so linguistics is not my field at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/763&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the global difference between nouns and verbs?&lt;/a&gt; raises a similar topic, but the final conclusions are missing in almost each answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8144" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T19:48:07.493" Title="Does any linguist honestly believe that nouns and verbs are not universals?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2015-02-14T13:51:29.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, some serious scholars do. (Not me -- I have no opinion.) The earlier thread here which you referred to and the references given there surely show that.  Should a reasonable person believe such a thing?  What's the problem?  You can probably think of English sentences without any nouns, so why shouldn't all sentences of some language be like that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example: &quot;To err is human; to forgive, divine.&quot; No nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to imagine how a human language could do without predicates and arguments, but predicates don't need to have verbs, and arguments don't need to have nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T13:51:29.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11412" CreationDate="2015-02-14T16:54:06.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logic concerns inference.  Can you infer questions?  Can you infer imperatives?  Perhaps, but if so, by introducing assumptions about the nature of human conversation.  I don't see why an extension of logic principles or representations would be necessary.  You can represent nondeclaratives, if you want, in a notation resembling that of predicate logic, but it's not clear that these would count as &quot;logical representations&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some proposals about representation of questions in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, which help to make clear some subtle matters of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T16:54:06.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11412" CreationDate="2015-02-14T17:21:18.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Lewis' account of the logic of imperatives is in terms of the possible worlds in which the imperative is obeyed. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/~simik/pdf/simik-egg-intro-questions.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a handout for a class which extensively deals with the formal semantics of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, there is more to what linguists do than assign semantic interpretations to sentences. We use formalisms for all aspects of language, and at least for the non-quantitative, the interpretation of those formalisms requires the use of logic. &lt;em&gt;Formal&lt;/em&gt; logic is important in interpreting these formalisms, since it provides a clear method of interpretation. Modal logic has proven useful in accounting for the meaning of sentences, and is of no use in interpreting phonological rules. Not every useful tool have to be useful for all problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-14T17:30:38.600" LastActivityDate="2015-02-14T17:30:38.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11451" CreationDate="2015-02-14T17:24:54.430" Score="2" ViewCount="888" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few statistical parsers but I'm interested in rule-based dependency parsing. I have a lexicon, i.e., a list of words with lemmas, POS, and morphological features. What is the best parsing algorithm in terms of accuracy and efficiency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-17T00:59:47.103" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T16:17:09.540" Title="What it the best algorithm for dependency parsing?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2015-02-14T20:34:41.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One has to be careful how the words &lt;em&gt;Noun&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Verb&lt;/em&gt; are understood, if one wants a good answer.  Semanticists talk about &lt;strong&gt;Entities&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Events&lt;/strong&gt;, and leave &lt;em&gt;Noun&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Verb&lt;/em&gt; as formal categories,   dependent on criteria of usage (can it be a subject? can it take a definite article?) instead of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frawley (&lt;em&gt;Linguistic Semantics&lt;/em&gt;, 1992 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/frawleyentities.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ch.3 &amp;quot;Entities&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, p.62) notes that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while it is certainly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; true that nouns always refer to persons, places, or things,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it certainly &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; true that persons, places, and things are overwhelmingly expressed using nouns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because nouns normally refer to entities, and verbs normally refer to events (including states).&#xA;In other words, those definitions of noun and verb from grade school are completely backwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's all kinds of linguistic evidence that most languages &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; distinguish between noun and verb.&#xA;But that's not evidence that categories like &lt;code&gt;Noun&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Verb&lt;/code&gt; can be attached to individual words.&#xA;At least not permanently; lexical categorization is a separate issue. Pretty much any English word, for instance, can be used as just about any open-category part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb. &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; we have good tests for what a given word is being used as -- in a given sentence. Not generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the joker in the question is that it presupposes that there are &lt;strong&gt;words&lt;/strong&gt; in a language.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Most languages &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; have words -- i.e, they can put word-level constituents together into larger ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are polysynthetic languages, like Eskimoan languages and Salishan languages. In a polysynthetic language there is usually a very simple root system with dozens of derivations and inflections that get added on to form even the simplest utterance. And these roots are very general, and have lots of metaphoric and idiomatic associations -- like any other language -- so their possible forms get big very fast. Both in the sense of getting longer and longer, and in the sense of there being almost infinite extensibility of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says something about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/Lushootseed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Skagit (Puget Salish; Northern Lushootseed)&lt;/a&gt; that over 3/4 of the nouns in the language start with the overt nominalizer &lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt; --even the words for 'man' and 'woman'. They're built on CVC roots, as is most of the rest of the language. So in Skagit, while there are nouny things and verby things and you can tell the difference in a given sentence, they don't split up the descriptive labor the way we're used to, and the roots are normally neither verby nor nouny, but can be made to refer to either. Plus there isn't a really well-defined boundary between words and sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So serious scholars will question the presuppositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5668" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T19:48:07.493" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T19:48:07.493" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2015-02-15T01:04:42.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bearing in mind that noun, verb (and adjective) are formal categories, not substantive (semantic) ones, a necessarily-universal presence of the distinction would mean either (a) category membership can be deduced from the meaning of the word or (b) there are formal markers which identify category membership, and all words must have one of these formal markers. Since &quot;eating&quot; (as in &quot;His eating bothers me&quot;) is formally a noun but refers to an action, not a person, place or thing, then semantically-based inference of category membership will give you the wrong results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibility (b) can also be dispensed with. Criteria like &quot;inflects for tense&quot; or &quot;can be immediately preceded by a definite article&quot; don't work -- many languages don't inflect for tense, many languages don't have definite articles, and even in English, the definite article can immediately precede adverbs, adjectives, or whatever else an NP can have before a noun. Nouns vs. verbs do not differ in an identifiable way in all languages languages. The only marginally-plausible potentially-universal formal marker that could signal the noun / verb difference is the dominating syntactic category N vs. V. But there is no independent way to identify whether the lexical item [č'ƛ'aʔ] is dominated by N or V. In other words, words do not wear their formal category membership on their sleeves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to learn in a specific language that there are nouns, verbs and adjectives. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/chung_TL_lexicalcategories.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, Chung gives formal properties of Chamorro identifying nouns, versus verbs, versus adjectives. These properties, such as incorporability, cannot &lt;em&gt;universally&lt;/em&gt; identify nouns, since not all languages have incorporation. So, it is possible that all existing human languages accidentally happen to make a learnable noun / verb distinction. But there is no reason to hold that the distinction is &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; (by design) present in all languages, and as Chung notes is not theoretically required under Minimalist / DM assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T01:04:42.130" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11406" CreationDate="2015-02-15T04:01:49.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s say I’m going to translate an old man’s memoir about growing up in a Thai farming family.  My general strategy would be to aim for a style that is not too formal or academic.  But when I turn to the text itself, I find that the writer has made mention of different plants and animals that are common in Southeast Asia, but not generally known in the West.  How do I go about translating their names?  For example, an edible snail – should I make up a descriptive term in English, keep the Thai word, use the scientific name, or just say “a kind of snail”?  This is a decision about detail.  If I try to avoid any exotic or scientific terms, I will be sticking to my strategy regarding tone, but something will be lost.  If I decide to add footnotes with more detail about these things, that would mean revising my initial decision to keep the tone informal.  So there is a kind of back-and-forth going on – it’s just common sense really. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T04:01:49.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8820" CreationDate="2015-02-15T09:14:10.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical alternation would be the un-/in- prefixes: &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-common vs &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;-effective. They serve approximately the same purpose but combine with different bases. The distribution could be explained with various factors, hence the &lt;em&gt;'multifactorial' perspective&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T09:14:10.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9311" CreationDate="2015-02-15T09:23:44.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The levels you refer to seem to be dimensions of language rather than levels. The different dimensions interfere almost all the time. The same string of words (syntax) pronounced with different intonations (phonetics/prosody) can have very different meanings (semantics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite some other dimensions: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, diachrony, neurolinguistics, language acquisition studies, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia) for more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T09:23:44.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3015" CreationDate="2015-02-15T09:38:13.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one focuses on morphosyntax (inflectional morphology), the differences might be hard to spot. On the other hand, morphological creation of new words (derivational morphology) seems to rely on some different principles. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Idioms are essential to derivational morphology. Existing words change meaning during their existence. The existence of words is so fundamental people argue about it all the time. Sentences usually don't have existence, no one complains about people making up new sentences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New coinage don't have to be transparent. They can be interpreted through their components and through the context. The sum of information as to reach a certain level to achieve comprehension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T09:38:13.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9311" CreationDate="2015-02-15T09:56:58.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends on what sort of questions you want to ask about language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to divide up language is by breaking it into its constituent compositional parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetics - studies the physical speech signal. Sound is interpreted in the brain, which leads us to:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonology - studies the how speech signals are perceived, as well as mental categorization of sounds. These conceptual sound categories may combine to form morphemes, which leads us to:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphology - the study of the smallest units of meaning (e.g. &quot;book&quot;+&quot;-s&quot;=&quot;books&quot;). Morphemes may combine to form words, and those words combine leading us to...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntax - the study of &quot;sentence level&quot; structure--how words combine to form phrases, and those phrases combine to form sentences. Of course, words and phrases just so happen to have meaning, this leads us to...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantics - the study of meaning, both at the lexical and phrasal level. But of course one word may have slightly different meanings in different contexts, which brings us to:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pragmatics - the study of meaning in context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parallel to these levels are disciplines like: psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, computational linguistics, and speech-language pathology. (This list is by no means comprehensive!). These disciplines will use linguistic theory to answer specific questions. For example, a neurolinguist may use popular theories in phonetics and phonology as a framework to answer questions about phonological processes and their neurological realization in the brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to complicate things further--every single one of these levels of analysis have competing theories WITHIN them, and listing them all would be far beyond me. So to answer your question: tons!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T09:56:58.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-15T10:04:24.520" Score="4" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lambda expressions are evaluated &quot;hierarchically&quot;--we resolve functions in the daughter node before we resolve functions in the mother node. In a given constituency, a sister node may define a variable for a lambda expression. But if there are three sister nodes, there will be ambiguity as to which order the variables get assigned. Does this mean that syntax trees must be binary branching in order for lambda calculus to work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T14:09:59.750" Title="Is lambda calculus only applicable if syntax trees are binary branching?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11425" CreationDate="2015-02-15T11:47:51.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Applicable to what? Meaning assembly? For this, λ-calculus is used only in categorical grammars, which are binary-branching by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In syntactic frameworks with a context-free backbone, glue semantics (based on linear logic) is used at times, but it has problems, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning assembly via composition rules is best done using unification. If one uses Davidsonian (or neo-Davidsonian, i.e., Parsonsian) logical forms, every phrase (including preterminals) is associated with an LF fragment and an individual. If you have a ternary (or, in general, a nonbinary) rule, the individual of a subordinated phrase is unified with a variable in the LF fragment of the head. For example, the predicate of &quot;give&quot; is quaternary and the corresponding rule is VP -&gt; V NP NP. Then the individual associated with V (the eventuality) is unified with that of VP. The individual associated with the indirect object is unified with the fourth argument of the predicate of the verb, etc. The subject variable remains open until it's unified later by another rule. Since (neo-)Davidsonian formulae are existentially closed conjunctions of literals, when the parsing is completed we take all literals used during parsing to be conjuncts and add a quantifier for each variable occurring in the LF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above procedure can be informally described as a &quot;relaxed&quot; lambda calculus, but rather than replace variables we unify them. It can also be used in dependency grammars if we add unifications to ID rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-02-15T14:09:59.750" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T14:09:59.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3015" CreationDate="2015-02-15T21:12:00.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human language users commit some things about their language to memory, but for other matters, they wing it.  The memorized things must be finite in number, of course, because we have only a finite amount of time to memorize and a finite capacity to store memories.  But the rest of the language, which we create and understand ad hoc, from expression to expression, is infinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We memorize words, but deal with phrases ad hoc, for the most part.  The number of words is finite (&lt;em&gt;pace&lt;/em&gt; Langendoen and Postal in &lt;strong&gt;The Vastness of Natural Languages&lt;/strong&gt;), while the number of phrases is infinite.  Morphology describes words, a finite list of things, but syntax must describe the infinity of phrases, so syntax and morphology must differ in a fundamental way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry I didn't answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-15T21:12:00.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-16T04:14:51.530" Score="6" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering the variety of systems of writing, the ease with which someone can receive written information in one system of writing is not precisely identical to that of any other, and I am curious to learn from any existing efforts to analyze such information. I would also like to review others' efforts at analyzing the ease of writing compared to that of reading for any given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of course countless individual and social human factors confound the possibility of meaningfully quantifying and comparing such characteristics of natural languages' reading and writing systems. Nonetheless, I trust that I am not alone being obsessively interested in the implications and effectiveness of humanity's efficiency interacting with methods of language input and output.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What disciplines are currently engaged in analyzing perspectives related to efficiency of writing systems, and when did they come into existence?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8150" LastEditorUserId="8150" LastEditDate="2015-02-16T06:59:22.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T10:48:37.043" Title="Comparing writing systems by ease of encoding/decoding information" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2015-02-16T05:37:36.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not agree with your assessment of the facility of reading Chinese: I find it extremely difficult to read Chinese compared to English or even Russian. So there are probably other factor at play, such as the native language of the subject. Is there some experimental literature that supports your belief?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically speaking, this would be a question to be researched within the sub-discipline of psycholinguistics, which in one view came into existence in the 19th century. The problem which plagues questions about the efficiency of writing systems is the problem that plagues all questions about efficiency of human actions, namely the lack of a good scientific framework for measuring efficiency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-16T05:37:36.527" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8787" CreationDate="2015-02-17T03:18:04.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question appears to be concerned with establishing an understanding of dependency grammar (DG). DG is indeed increasingly being used in NLP circles as the most workable approach to syntactic structures -- dependency syntax is quite simple compared to constituency syntax. However, introductory textbooks that approach the theory of syntax primarily from a DG perspective are rare. There are at least two exceptions, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Matthews, Peter. 1981. Syntax. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;van Valin, Robert. 2001. An Introduction to Syntax. Cambrdige University Press.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews' syntax is primarily dependency-based, and van Valin's book devotes a chapter to DG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large majority of textbooks on syntax ignore DG entirely, however. My interpretation of this situation is that developments in computational linguistics are out in front of theoretical syntax. Theoretical syntacticians are entrenched in a constituency-based view of syntactic structures, whereas the computational people have to make syntax work for their computational goals, and dependency is more workable in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is asking for sources about DG, though. There are a number of non-introductory texts on theoretical DG, but many of them are not so accessible. However, I think the following text, although dated, is relatively easy to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Schubert, Klaus. 1987. Metataxis: Contrastive Dependency Syntax for Machine Translation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one is willing to invest some time in a more comprehensive dependency-based approach to the syntax of natural language, then Richard Hudson's works would be good:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hudson, Richard. 2007. Language Networks: The New Word Grammar. Oxford University Press.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hudson, Ricahrd. 2010. An Introduction to Word Grammar. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if one is particularly willing to invest time and energy in establishing a solid base in DG and its use for computational goals, then this conference would allow one to connect to the international DG community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://depling.org/depling2015/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://depling.org/depling2015/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T03:18:04.887" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-17T03:46:46.533" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a paper on extraposition in English (and other right-branching discontinuities). I have found a lot of interesting theory on this but the instructions say that if possible concrete corpus research is to be conducted. I've had some experiences with corpora before, but they aren't really good for analysing syntactic phenomena in my experience. I did some research online and discovered that Treebanks could perhaps help me. Do any of you know any good syntactic treebanks and search tools I could use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8158" LastEditorUserId="8158" LastEditDate="2015-02-17T03:57:45.557" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T03:57:45.557" Title="Researching extraposition in a syntactic treebank" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2015-02-17T17:21:22.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;ease&lt;/em&gt; of perceiving a written text is, indeed, an &lt;em&gt;unmeasurable&lt;/em&gt; thing, since it take too many factors: sociocultural, historical, and even medical.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, note that there is, in general, &lt;em&gt;many-to-many&lt;/em&gt; relation between languages and written systems. For instance, Azerbaijani, Romanian, Serbian, and Uzbek are/were written in Cyrillic or Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you can measure (and improve) the &lt;strong&gt;effectiveness&lt;/strong&gt; of understanding a written text. There is a science studying this, it is called &lt;strong&gt;Rapid Reading&lt;/strong&gt;. This technique is intended to increase the amount of written text per unit of time, so, naturally, it can be measured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many factors slowing down the amount of text we can read and understand per unit of time. These factors are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sub-vocalization&lt;/strong&gt;, a phenomenon when a reader reproduces sounds of the text;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seeing &lt;strong&gt;a fraction&lt;/strong&gt; of the page at single moment;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linear reading&lt;/strong&gt; and &quot;rolling back&quot; to a different place in a previous line to re-read;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading &lt;strong&gt;every letter&lt;/strong&gt; in a word is not effective, since we can normally understand words &lt;strong&gt;wiht&lt;/strong&gt; minor typos. This suggests there can be a more effective writing system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some writing systems are free of some of these negative factors. So, an educated reader (not a language learner!) may benefit from those. The most evident example is Chinese. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the written word has (almost) no relation to how the word sounds, a reader would not sub-vocalize it;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing systems that use blocks (not linear words) can be also read more effectively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/2005/752&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; at Chinese.SE provides with some more details on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T17:21:22.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3640" CreationDate="2015-02-17T22:16:57.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a different way to look at it: you draw the dependency tree above the sentence with each node aligned with the corresponding word in the sentence, draw a line between the words in the tree and their correspondent in the sentence, and check whether there are any lines intersecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure below is for the French sentence &lt;em&gt;À qui veux-tu que Pierre parle ?&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &lt;em&gt;To whom want you that Peter talks?&lt;/em&gt;, 'Who do you want Peter to talk to?'). This sentence is non-projective because &lt;em&gt;à qui&lt;/em&gt; has sort of &quot;emancipated&quot; from its governor to position itself relatively to &lt;em&gt;veux&lt;/em&gt;. The dependency between &lt;em&gt;parle&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; crosses three node projections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TBhUc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9161" LastActivityDate="2015-02-17T22:16:57.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11439" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-18T05:15:33.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependency grammar, often abbreviated as DG, is a particular approach to the syntax of natural languages. DGs view words as directly linked to each other, whereby the links are directed. Phrases consist of a head/root word and its dependents. Dependency grammars stand in contrast to constituency grammars (=phrase structure grammars). Constituency grammars do not view words as directly linked to each other, but rather they take words to be grouped into phrases via phrasal nodes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-02-18T14:47:29.567" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T14:47:29.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11440" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-18T05:15:33.923" Score="0" Body="Dependency grammar, often abbreviated as DG, is a particular approach to the syntax of natural languages. DGs view words as directly linked to each other, whereby the links are directed. Phrases consist of a head/root word and its dependents." OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-02-18T14:47:36.550" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T14:47:36.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-18T08:06:31.390" Score="1" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think English &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is sometimes pronounced thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[s]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some vowel, arguendo [ə]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a stop. This stop is pronounced by simultaneously closing the lips and glottis. So perhaps it'd be called a labio-glottal stop (à la the labio-velar approximant)? And then its release is into the next sound ([m&amp;#x329;]), which I guess would normally be transcribed &quot;[&lt;sup&gt;m&lt;/sup&gt;]&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syllabic [m], i.e. [m&amp;#x329;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are what the labio-glottal stop is called, how it's transcribed, and how to transcribe its release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T20:32:48.897" Title="How to transcribe a labial+glottal stop released as a bilabial nasal" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;&lt;bilabial&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11441" CreationDate="2015-02-18T13:36:30.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After thinking about what you described, I was thinking and I think I realised you were probably referring to the colloquial shortening of the word that is indeed glottalised. I believe this sequence of sounds is best transcribed as some variant of [səʔm] with a pre-glottalised nasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T13:36:30.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11441" CreationDate="2015-02-18T16:19:15.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are presumably hearing it right. &quot;Something&quot; is different from &quot;rotten&quot; in more than place of articulation: &quot;rotten&quot; = [rɑʔn̩]. &quot;Something&quot;, in that pronunciation, is [sʌmʔm̩] (traditionally that vowel is transcribed with wedge unless it's in an unstressed syllable). Syllabicity is not a phonetic &quot;fact&quot; that can be decided by listening, so I included the syllabicity diacritic on phonological grounds.  But transcriptions can be more phonologically-inspired, so if you have a reason to think that the glottal plus nasal is one segment, you can call it a glottalised nasal, yielding [sʌmm̰] and [rɑn̰]. A third option is simply [sʌmm̩] where the glottal closure you be be relegated to a phonetic detail rule. If the point is to be clear about that pronunciation, go with [sʌmʔm̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Addendum]Putting an even finer point on it, you might contemplate [sʌ̃ʔm] vs. [rɑʔn], with or without syllabicity. The question is when the lips start to close, so a later closure would point to this transcription. You can't get even a near-minimal pair with labials, since in Standard English a.k.a. my dialect 'rotten-glottalization' only applies to /t/. But there are analogous examples with alveolar, such as &quot;cotton&quot; [kɑʔn̩] and &quot;Canton&quot; (Ohio, not China) [kænʔn̩], and in the latter I think [kæ̃ʔn̩] is credible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, claims about phonetic outputs require phonetic method to verify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of Greg Lee's observation and focusing on the word &quot;simultaneous&quot;, [p'] would not really be appropriate unless the stop also becomes oral. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; speakers of American English who are aggressive glottalizers and you get [slæp'm̩] for &quot;slap 'em&quot;; the question is whether the thing that you're talking about sounds like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the [sʌmʔm̩] version, glottal closure may be initiated at the point of labial closure, but would not reach full closure. Phonetic simultaneity is actually gradient, and the supposedly &quot;simultaneous&quot; labial and velar closures of [kp] are not truly simultaneous, thus we would like to see just how simultaneous the closures are -- it's not really a matter for introspection, it requires measurement. Also, one must be careful about equating glottal approximation with full and sustained glottal closure. Very frequently, supposed glottal stops are lenited to glottalization in inter-sonorant context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-18T20:32:48.897" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T20:32:48.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-18T18:50:50.307" Score="15" ViewCount="14877" Body="&lt;p&gt;When writing a text message with my phone, I often write &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;good n8&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; to say good night. Yet, I notice that this could also work in many other languages, or if not, it's pretty close. For instance :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language - translation of eight - translation of night&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French - huit - nuit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German - acht - Nacht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch - acht - nacht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish - ocho - noche&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese - oito - noite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norwegian - åtte - natt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish - åtta - natt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian - opt - noapte&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And others...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a mere coincidence, or is there an actual link between both of these words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T07:33:37.813" Title="Is there any link between the word 'eight' and the word 'night'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11441" CreationDate="2015-02-18T19:03:19.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a glottalized p, usually written [p'].  But sometimes this term refers to ejective glottalization, with both closure and raising of the glottis, and of course in English we don't get raising of the glottis. So it's not an ejective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in some other answers, [sʌ̃ʔm̩] is a possible pronunciation of &quot;something&quot; for many of us.  That's what you get when the labial closure for the final cluster is delayed until the [m].  But, though it's also possible, that's not the articulation you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-18T19:03:19.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2015-02-18T20:48:57.327" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Eight&quot; comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;oḱtou&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;night&quot; comes from &lt;em&gt;nokʷts&lt;/em&gt;, so there is some similarity in the historically earlier forms. Due to ordinary sound changes into Italic and Germanic, you find similarities in the daughter languages, which explains the similarities of these words. But 'similar' is different from 'identical', and there is no special connection between these two words. If you look at the &quot;satem&quot; languages (Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Aryan) they look less similar, since &quot;eight&quot; will have something like [š] instead, again due to a regular sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-20T19:22:20.530" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T19:22:20.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-19T11:58:14.960" Score="1" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any characteristic that is unique to the North Germanic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norweigan, Faroese, Icelandic) and the dead ones (such as Old West Norse, Old East Norse, Norn, Proto-Norse) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: I don't consider Elfdalian or Gutnish to be their own languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-09T05:14:53.713" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T05:14:53.713" Title="Is there any characteristic that is unique to North Germanic languages?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-19T15:13:12.240" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a scholar or layperson wanted to submit a discovery of the origin of some obscure word or phrase not previously known, what would be the criteria they should follow acceptable to the academic community? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard of what is referred to as 'peer reviews' as part of the process. Where and how does one get started? To me such knowledge known to everyone can only bolster interest in our language and open the field to greater participation in the research process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4732" OwnerDisplayName="Duane T. Bentz" LastEditorUserId="8051" LastEditDate="2015-02-21T08:19:42.637" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T05:56:34.573" Title="New Etymological Knowledge" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11417" CreationDate="2015-02-19T16:17:09.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependency parsing with ID/LP rules is trivial if you have a lexicon. One uses a (declarative) generate-and-test approach. Dependency trees are rooted spanning trees on a graph with n nodes where n is the length of the processed sentence. One can declare what a tree is and - now comes the linguistic part - where an edge (that is, a dependency) may be. The result are all spanning trees composed of the possible dependencies. Thus dependency parsing is constraint solving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A naïve implementation of the algorithm would have a terrible time complexity. On a complete graph, there are n^(n-2) trees, whence there are n^(n-1) rooted trees. The only viable way is to use the constraints to compute stable models of the underlying theory (there is a one-to-one correspondence between stable models and dependency trees). On Linux one can use clingo (an AI tool downloadable from package repositories). On OS X, the tool can be installed via MacPorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few issues. For languages with case, one needs additional constraints. In Latin, for example, &quot;Metellam vidit&quot; would be parsed using the rule n&amp;lt;-v, that is, a noun can depend on a verb, but the case of the noun decides what role the noun plays in the verb's predicate (in this example, accusative implies direct object). In a sentence like &quot;I gave Mary the book&quot;, word order is what decides that Mary is the indirect object in this sentence. Thus LP rules are needed. One could analyze both objects at once (with one rule) but this runs counter to the idea of dependency grammar as it was originally conceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The computation of stable models is generally very fast but it may take some time when the sentence is long and complex. One could add constraints that enforce projectivity. Most sentences are projective, that is, one can speed up the parser by considering only projective sentences at the first try (no sane theory of dependency syntax would assign nonprojective trees to unmarked sentences). Actually, projectivity is a scale, one can thus try to infer a projective tree, then a planar one, then a well-nested one, etc. But this is only an optimization and no difference would be observable for short sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By adding feature structure unification to the rules it is possible to create deep syntax trees (which are better for further processing such as machine translation or discourse interpretation). For example, auxiliaries are only tense and agreement carriers, they contribute features to the morphosytactic description of a verb phrase, but they have no meaning of their own and are useless for further processing. On the other hand, one needs to add semantic content (the subject) in a sentence like &quot;veni, vidi, vici&quot;. Thus the sketched algorithm builds up surface trees, deep trees, and logical forms in parallel. I can provide source code with a toy grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T16:17:09.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11448" CreationDate="2015-02-19T17:44:38.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The loss of &lt;strong&gt;*h&lt;/strong&gt; in all non-initial positions seems to be a distinctive North Germanic feature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(before a consonant) Icelandic &lt;em&gt;nótt&lt;/em&gt; &quot;night&quot; vs. Old English &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;nea&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(word-final) Icelandic &lt;em&gt;sá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(I/he) saw&quot; vs. OE &lt;em&gt;sea&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(medial) Icelandic &lt;em&gt;tíu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ten&quot; vs. Gothic &lt;em&gt;tai&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change has occurred in modern English, but it did not occur generally in the branch of Germanic that English comes from (as the Old English forms above show).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another such feature is the mediopassive verb form: e.g., Icelandic &lt;em&gt;sjá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to see&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;sjá&lt;strong&gt;st&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to be seen, to see oneself, etc.&quot;. As far as I know, the mediopassive suffix &lt;strong&gt;-s(t)&lt;/strong&gt; is only found in North Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T17:44:38.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11456" CreationDate="2015-02-19T21:51:44.890" Score="30" ViewCount="6203" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; is present in most languages. If I were to present my self in English, I might say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name is DisplayName.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where as in other languages I can both say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mitt namn är DisplayName&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I could use heter like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jag heter DisplayName.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in Icelandic, &quot;nafn mitt er DisplayName&quot;, or &quot;Ég heiti DisplayName&quot;, or in Spanish it would be &quot;me llamo DisplayName&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there no such English word? Has it ever existed? (Old English, Middle English) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="21190" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T11:57:45.660" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T11:57:45.660" Title="Why does English not have a cognate of words like heter, in Swedish, or llama, in Spanish, etc?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2015-02-19T22:37:55.740" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;English does have that verb which is etymologically related to the Swedish &lt;em&gt;heter&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;heiti&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;heißen&lt;/em&gt;, etc. In English it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;to hight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, only it is archaic, still sometimes it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used nowadays, mostly in poetry, for example in the 1943 poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://hermetic.com/parsons/i-hight-don-quixote-i-live-on-peyote.html&quot;&gt;I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote&lt;/a&gt; by John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons, or in the name of the modern punk rock song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR5jgCm_M4U&quot;&gt;Toni-I-Hight&lt;/a&gt; by the band The Arrivals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-02-19T22:37:55.740" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2015-02-20T02:52:18.373" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;English does have a word for it, it's &lt;em&gt;called&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish: &lt;code&gt;Jag heter Danny&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;code&gt;I'm called Danny&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;code&gt;I'm Danny&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;My name's Danny&lt;/code&gt; sounds less 'weird' to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9181" LastEditorUserId="9181" LastEditDate="2015-02-20T15:54:42.787" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T15:54:42.787" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-20T03:38:30.963" Score="4" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm not a linguist, just generally interested in languages, so forgive me if I lack the appropriate vocabulary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/gallery/91Gn6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There are some examples here&lt;/a&gt;, but the general gist is that someone forgets a word (in my case, &quot;shovel&quot;) and substitutes a usually multi-word, often inaccurate or outright wrong synonym (&quot;dirt spoon&quot;). This obviously isn't a common synonym for shovel, but gets the point across, especially when there's a shovel visually present to cement the impression. Other examples include &quot;sea pancake&quot; for manta ray and &quot;cereal water&quot; for milk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There usually seems to be some kind of analogy going on, if not always clear. The speaker tends to default to a similar item and attach an adjective or other descriptor. Not all examples in the link do so, but I'm more interested in the ones that do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is a frequent linguistic phenomenon or if it's just somewhat prevalent on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9183" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-21T08:15:57.977" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T08:15:57.977" Title="Is there a term for a made-up synonym or analogy to describe a forgotten word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2015-02-20T06:00:45.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin word for night is nox/noct-is and for eight octo. There is a similarity of sounds, but I think it is highly improbable that there is some etymological relationship between the two words. I can 't think of any idea that would lead to naming a quantity of 5+3 after night. What has night to do with a number? Even if we don't know the exact ideas behind the words for the numbers we may assume that there is some logic in them. Words are no arbitrary invention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T06:00:45.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-20T10:36:17.113" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often sentences or parts of sentences are combined with verbs or pronoun + verb. However, they don't describe something of the content of the text, they just help to bring the parts or sentences in some kind of a relation (am I right?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Trees are green. &lt;strong&gt;This means&lt;/strong&gt; they are plants.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Trees are green, &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; they are plants.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Trees are green, &lt;strong&gt;that shows&lt;/strong&gt; that trees are plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name for this type of grammar? Is that a special type of a conjunction? Or is it somehow connected to adjuncts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9190" LastEditorUserId="9190" LastEditDate="2015-02-20T22:18:37.470" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T23:51:45.553" Title="Term for when sentences (or parts) are combined with &quot;this means&quot;, &quot;meaning&quot;, &quot;that shows&quot;, etc.?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2015-02-20T14:44:25.493" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my understanding of the other answers, I think English does have this idiom. Only, instead of a &quot;word&quot;, in English &quot;nothing at all&quot; is used (or if you're a programmer, the empty string).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Swedish phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jag heter XX&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is translatable to English as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I am called XX&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is uncommon in spoken English. Instead of directly translating &quot;heter&quot; to &quot;called&quot;, in spoken English it is often expressed as &quot;&quot; (nothing at all):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I am XX&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm XX&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the idiom does exist. But instead of using a word, English uses the first person form of the verb &quot;to be&quot; (the word &quot;am&quot;) as the mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9199" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T14:44:25.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2015-02-20T18:55:35.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question was, '&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; does English not have a version of... heter'. Why does any change happen in languages? As others have said, there used to be one. In Old English you could say, 'Đa deor hie hatađ hranas' (The animals they called reindeer), but by the Middle Ages &lt;em&gt;hatan&lt;/em&gt; had become &lt;em&gt;hight&lt;/em&gt; and then died out, presumably because the alternatives became more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, in Barnsley people would ask, 'What do they call you?' rather than 'What are you called?' but that is a regional variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9203" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T18:55:35.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11476" CreationDate="2015-02-20T19:15:16.257" Score="6" ViewCount="11348" Body="&lt;p&gt;For languages with two genders, is there a name for a noun (or pronoun, adjective, etc) which can be of either gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be quite common for names of professions, for instance, in Latin based languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dentista (Spanish, Portuguese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dentiste (French)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammatical gender, in these cases, follows the natural gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(El buen / La buena) dentista.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries tend to identify the gender of the noun by specifying both male and female:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/dentiste&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionnaire&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dentiste&lt;/strong&gt; /dɑ̃.tist/ &lt;em&gt;masculin et féminin identiques&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dentista#Portuguese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary Portuguese entry&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dentista&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;m f&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;plural&lt;/em&gt; dentistas)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more precise, technical, or concise way to refer to such nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When sipping cocktails and speaking to new Linguist nerds I've met on a bus trip through Europe, must I refer to &amp;quot;That class of nouns for which gender is determined by the natural gender of the referred object?&amp;quot;  Or can I speak of, for instanced &amp;quot;morphological gender&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;dual gender&amp;quot;, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When doing a (purely hypothetical--this isn't a homework question) test, and asked to identify the gender for a list of nouns, must I answer 'M', 'F', and 'M/F'?  Or can the latter category be 'D' (dual?) or 'N' (natural)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T13:52:00.917" Title="Is there a name for a word which can take both genders?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11469" CreationDate="2015-02-20T19:19:54.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;&lt;strong&gt;epicene&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; might be the word you are looking for here (or one possible word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Random House dictionary's definition of &quot;epicene&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grammar. (of a noun or pronoun) capable of referring to either sex, as&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;attendant&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;chairperson&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Kim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;; having common gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T19:19:54.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11479" CreationDate="2015-02-20T19:34:04.310" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In generalizing what I have learned from Japanese &quot;conjugations&quot; I learned quite a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come to the realization that the same verb forms ARE present in English although English uses cue words as opposed to changing the verb ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb forms: Present/future [es, s] [will],&lt;br&gt;&#xA; potential[can, may, might],&lt;br&gt;&#xA; passive, causative, passive causative,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Neg. (imperfect)[don't/won't],&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Positive Past Perfect [did, (ed)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;negative past perfect (never did, did not,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; volitional let's, I suggest you...&lt;br&gt;&#xA; imperative [(you) do this], conditional [when this happens that will happen],   situational [IF this happens THEN this will happen],&lt;br&gt;&#xA; representative [a long list of verbs, and finally formal,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and First person volitional (I want this to happen), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, are these the only tenses/ conjugations you need be concern with when learning ANY language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9184" LastEditorUserId="9184" LastEditDate="2015-02-20T20:06:18.500" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T04:01:45.783" Title="General Grammatical forms of verbs" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11471" CreationDate="2015-02-20T20:20:30.530" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is a requirement that you have grad-student level knowledge of the relevant domain to ask an answerable linguistic question. However, your question &lt;em&gt;presupposes&lt;/em&gt; a lot of stuff, and knowing and controlling for those presuppositions is what makes a great question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, your question is about a series of morphological forms in Japanese. English does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have potential, volitional, imperative forms. It does arguably have negative, past, and a bunch of others that I won't name. English can express the same concepts as are expressed in Japanese with that verb form, it's just that we have to use a syntactic construction. The same is true of the causative. The passive is not, itself, a verb form in English, but passive constructions do take one of those verb forms (which is also used after &quot;have&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, a passive involve an auxiliary, either &quot;be&quot; or &quot;get&quot;, and the &quot;perfect participle&quot; for (or whatever they call it), for instance &quot;The bacon was/got cooked by Marie&quot;. A number of languages have no passive (typically, to achieve the result one uses passives for, you say &quot;They cooked the bacon&quot;; a number of languages have an overt morphological passive affix. There are no &quot;common&quot; morphological forms, but there are probably common auxiliaries. I suggest that that is a totally separate question. In English, causative constructions involve some verb which takes a string &quot;NP V X&quot;, such as &quot;I made Bill leave&quot;, &quot;I had Bill leave&quot;, and there are constructions with infinitives like &quot;I got Bill to leave&quot;. Languages can express causatives syntactically, as in English, or morphologically, as in Japanese. Again, there is no pattern to the shape of causative affixes, and there may be a statistical pattern in syntactic causatives (another separate question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of semantic and syntactic properties that you might encounter being expressed via differences in verb form is enormous, including such things as &quot;do something for a person&quot;, &quot;do something on a round object&quot;, &quot;act quickly&quot;, &quot;I deny your claim&quot;, and on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T20:20:30.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11469" CreationDate="2015-02-20T20:45:27.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean &quot;when &lt;em&gt;talking about&lt;/em&gt; languages with gender&quot;, because you seem to be looking for an English word and we don't have gender. And by &quot;gender&quot;, I assume that you mean &quot;sex-based&quot; systems, since the term &quot;gender&quot; is also used to refer to the pairing of singular and plural forms in Bantu languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Khoe languages, &quot;lion&quot; can be either feminine or masculine, depending on whether you are referring to a male lion or a female lion. That's a case where the form can freely vary depending on the sex of the referent. This is distinct from the Spanish case where the noun form is invariant and the agreement pattern follows the sex of the referent. In Classical Arabic, the noun &lt;em&gt;khalīfah&lt;/em&gt; &quot;caliph&quot; has the form of a feminine noun though the referent and agreement pattern is masculine. So the notion of &quot;can be of either gender&quot; refers to a number of different linguistic situations. Needless to say, asking about &quot;natural gender&quot; opens up a huge can of worms, and you may wish to investigate patterns of agreement among transgender Spanish-speaking dentists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never heard any term used in linguistics to refer to any of these phenomena. If you start calling those nouns &quot;epicene&quot;, people will stare at you for a few years until it becomes familiar, but perhaps you can start a trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-10-20T20:23:51.380" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T20:23:51.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11469" CreationDate="2015-02-20T21:25:36.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In historical linguistics we usually say &quot;communis generis&quot; or &quot;of common gender&quot;, abbreviated &quot;c.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T21:25:36.240" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11465" CreationDate="2015-02-20T22:30:03.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logicians make the distinction between &quot;use&quot; and &quot;mention&quot;, following Quine in &lt;strong&gt;Word and Object&lt;/strong&gt; (though I don't know that Quine was the first).  You can mention language examples, without necessarily intending to convey what would ordinarily be conveyed by saying/writing them.  In your example, &quot;Trees are green&quot; is both used (since it is asserted), then mentioned, when a comment is made made about the linguistic expression &quot;trees are green&quot;.  Quine gave a famous example: &quot;Tiny was so-called because of his size&quot;, where &quot;Tiny&quot; is used to refer to an individual, and mentioned, when a linguistic comment is made about the appropriateness of this name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-20T22:30:03.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11469" CreationDate="2015-02-21T03:45:19.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question, one that doesn't have a obvious answer. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Nouns_with_more_than_one_gender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a section for words like this but no label.&lt;/a&gt;) It depends on how you analyse things...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some people would consider the words to actually be two related but separate words, just as we have &lt;em&gt;actor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;actress&lt;/em&gt; in English. In that case you don't actually have any words which are both genders. Maybe that's a cop-out as it's just pushing the problem down to the level of word roots, but there are some theories which say that all roots could theoretically receive any kind of morphology, and so having a root with two genders isn't anything atypical at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender is often called noun classes (especially when there are more than just masculine, feminine and possible neuter.) There is good evidence for many, perhaps most, languages that the masculine class is the default unmarked class, with the other classes being used for marked words. In some languages you can freely use the less marked classes with words. To make up an example (because I don't remember the specifics, it was from an Australian language) if a yam is in the vegetable class, which is a subset of the neuter class, which is a subset of the masculine class, then yams could be inflected freely with any of the masculine, neuter or vegetable inflections. If you were in such a language, then it could be natural to use which ever class matches the biological gender of the referent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T03:45:19.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11471" CreationDate="2015-02-21T04:01:45.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are those the only tenses/conjugations that exist?!? Definitely not! Look up any intro level textbook at verb morphology and you'll see these categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aspect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;aktionsart&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;epistemology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voice/valency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;illocutionary force&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these categories will have dozens of options when you look at all the world's languages, though an individual language will usually only have a few, if it marks the category at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things you list in your question are just some of the inflections you'll see, and some of them wouldn't even normally be considered to be inflections, as they are derivational!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T04:01:45.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11460" CreationDate="2015-02-21T04:07:56.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yep, these are called &lt;strong&gt;circumlocutions&lt;/strong&gt;. Someone who is frequently unable to remember the right words could be diagnosed with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomic_aphasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;anomic aphasia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T04:07:56.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-21T09:47:59.630" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of resources to generate trees from natural language, but none to generate logical forms. Or maybe you know of some great resources to those ends?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T09:47:59.630" Title="Is there a resource where I can see the logical form of an English sentence?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-21T11:58:17.430" Score="1" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I distinguish between elipsis type 1, 2 and 3, below?&#xA;Type 1 and type 2 &quot;nice day&quot; and &quot;sleeping dog&quot; are both NPs. Type 3 &quot;very sexy&quot; in an AdjP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Have a] nice day! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I see] a sleeping dog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[She is] very sexy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I say that Type 1 and Type 2 are &quot;NP elipsis&quot; and Type 3 is AdjP elipsis (even if it wasn't the NP/AdjP that was elided?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T06:33:00.097" Title="Distinguishing between types of ellipsis where different parts of a sentence remain" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2015-02-21T12:22:02.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope I correctly understand the question as being a general one, rather than particularly about automated parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I was taught in Syntax and believed ever since (but maybe I missed some advances of the dependencies framework).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general: Constituency, but not dependency, shows &lt;strong&gt;units on which syntax operates&lt;/strong&gt;. I.e., constituency reflects the fact that syntactic processes target phrases, rather than words (or sub-trees of the dependency tree), no matter how large those phrases are and what structure they have. Admittedly, dependencies are easy for selectional restrictions and are applicable to a wider range of phenomena &quot;as is&quot;, without further additions/stipulations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dependency doesn't, and constituency does, capture &lt;strong&gt;recursion&lt;/strong&gt;. Syntactically, (1) and (2) are units of the same class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the dog, that worried the cat, that killed the rat...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) the dog&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, they have the same distributional properties, which is immediately visible with labeled constituents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Constituency has a straightforward way to express that &lt;strong&gt;one of the dependents is stronger, or closer, connected to the head&lt;/strong&gt; than another one. E.g., in English this is reflected by word order in certain adjuncts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) builds houses in Brunswick&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) *builds in Brunswick houses &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian PPs the NP is &quot;closer&quot; to the head P than the adverb is, both semantically and shown by word order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(5) [prjamo [nad oknom]]&#xA;     right above window&#xA;'right above the window'&#xA;(6) *nad prjamo oknom&#xA;(7) [[nad oknom] prjamo]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And probably English does the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To refresh this in my head I looked into Yakov Testelets's excellent &quot;Introduction to Syntax&quot; (in Russian). He mentions several attempts to have the best of the two worlds, but haven't read any of them: Hudson's &quot;grammar of words&quot;, Borschev and Khomiakov's &quot;club systems&quot;, and Gladkiy's &quot;systems of syntactic groups&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T12:22:02.997" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11482" CreationDate="2015-02-21T14:44:20.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you are asking whether what matters is what you start out with or what you wind up with.  Broadly speaking, transformational/generative grammar counts what you start with (you could say it's &quot;speaker oriented&quot;), while non-transformational phrase structure grammar counts what you wind up with (you could say it's &quot;hearer oriented&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples look, at first sight, as if what counts is what you wind up with, since in all the cases, you're left with a single constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of terminology, it would not be wise to say that an ellipsis which removes everything except for a NP as NP-ellipsis, because people would think you meant that a NP was elided, not that it was left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T14:44:20.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11315" CreationDate="2015-02-21T20:18:19.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common cross-linguistic trend. I remember reading a section of a book about it - in fact, I was searching for that book when I found this thread - but alas, I can't seem to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non-Indo-European example, Yu'pik does something similar, but a little more thorough. Very roughly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;that which is indivisible&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;following unit&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;addendum&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;spread out&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;arm&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;one having crossed over&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;one having two&quot; (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;one having three&quot; (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;not quite ten&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;above&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;it goes down&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ten two&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ten three&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;not quite fifteen&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;other side&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fifteen one&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fifteen two&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fifteen three&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;not quite twenty&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;whole person&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a number is used in the gloss, obviously, it can be broken down to its own constituents, so 12 is &quot;following unit above&quot;, etc. The only exception is that the &quot;one&quot; in 6-8 is a pronoun, similar to &quot;something&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-yupik/en/ypk-esu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-yupik/en/ypk-esu/&lt;/a&gt; (this source translates 7 and 8 as &quot;two having crossed over&quot; and &quot;three having crossed over&quot;, but this appears to be in error) &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?isbn=311027857X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://books.google.ca/books?isbn=311027857X&lt;/a&gt; (pp. 398-401)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5648" LastActivityDate="2015-02-21T20:18:19.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T02:05:52.927" Score="0" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time back, I noticed that the word &quot;amongst&quot; induces semantic satiation for me very quickly. I don't know why, but that particular word stops making sense to me in very short order, and to be honest, just looking at it while I write this post is already making it not look like a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder - are my problems with &quot;amongst&quot; just idiosyncratic, or can we make generalizations about how semantic satiation works? Are there certain words (or classes of words) that induce semantic satiation more or less quickly than other words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1740" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T19:38:28.230" Title="Are there words that induce semantic satiation more or less quickly than other words?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2015-02-22T03:05:15.467" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes: Japanese, Farsi, and Basque are well-known examples. Japanese verbs (and adjectives) are closed class, with new verbal senses almost exclusively expressed by “do &lt;em&gt;verbal noun&lt;/em&gt;”, as in 勉強する &lt;em&gt;benkyō suru&lt;/em&gt; (studying do) for “study”. This is conspicuous in Japanese due to the large number of Sino-Japanese words, with verbal senses expressed in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not as extreme as Jingulu, admittedly, but a bit better-known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; Japanese verbs have opened slightly in recent years, where the suffix 〜る &lt;em&gt;-ru&lt;/em&gt; is added informally as a verbifier, primarily to recent borrowed words, but this is both recent and marginal: it is not found in the Sino-Japanese lexicon. The best-known and oldest example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%9C%E3%82%8B&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;サボる&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;sabo-ru&lt;/em&gt; “cut class, cut work”, from French &lt;em&gt;sabotage&lt;/em&gt;, which dates from circa 1920, and this appears to be the model for the more recent ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this word-formation pattern persists, this may be an interesting case of a word class opening up, or may instead re-analyzing 〜る as a separate element, similar to existing する &lt;em&gt;suru&lt;/em&gt; “do”, which is the existing verb used in these constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9226" LastEditorUserId="9226" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T02:23:38.340" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T02:23:38.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2015-02-22T05:46:34.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like what Nils has said , this too is pretty common in the korean language.. due to welll.. large amounts of sino words imported from chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the korean equivalent of &quot;to do study&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;study do   practice do.&#xA;공부하다.   연습하다. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: i was told by  curiousdanni that the above mentioned might not constitute as a close verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9228" LastEditorUserId="9228" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T09:39:43.537" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T09:39:43.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T05:49:52.597" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speech often (always?) deteriorates for people with post-lingual deafness. This presumably occurs because of insufficient auditory feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that people with Wernicke's aphasia cannot comprehend language, do they also experience speech deterioration (that is, speech becoming disjointed and/or ungrammatical) over time as a result of hearing themselves speak, but not understanding the sounds they produce?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T20:38:54.723" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T20:38:54.723" Title="Can Wernicke's aphasia lead to grammar deterioration?" Tags="&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;&lt;aphasiology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11450" CreationDate="2015-02-22T05:56:34.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard way of disseminating knowledge in the academic community is to write an article making whatever the claim is, and submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal. If you are simply interested in having people be aware of your claim without the critical review, you can do that with Facebook, Twitter, and a blog. I will disregard book chapters as probably inapplicable, since they involve a scholar inviting you to write a chapter and I presume you don't have the cred necessary for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you want to claim that the English word &quot;chicken&quot; derives historically from the Arabic word دجاج. You would write an article providing your argument, and would submit it to an appropriate journal. Before doing so, you should check what the journal is actually about, so for example, &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Journal of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; would not be appropriate, nor would &lt;em&gt;Oceanic Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. Having discovered the correct venue e.g. the fictitious &lt;em&gt;Journal of Indo-Semitic Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, you submit your article. The article might be quickly rejected by the editor as unsuitable, either in terms of topic or in terms of elementary academic standards (the latter is rare but not unknown), and otherwise, a few dozen weeks after submission, you will receive a decision, which usually includes two or three reviews on the merit of your argument, written by anonymous specialists who usually have publications in the relevant area, plus a cover letter by the editor summarizing the reason for his/her decision. Interpreting and coping with the editorial decision and the individual reviews is itself an arcane political art. It is not unusual to receive a trivial half-page review, an in-depth 5-10 page negative review, and a 3 page or so positive review. That is where you need to pay special attention to the editor's phrasing in the cover letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The job of the reviewers is to use their professional judgment to ascertain that you have used the appropriate research standards for supporting your claim, and that the claim is appropriate for / of interest to readers of the particular journal. The chicken-etymology claim would be rejected as off-topic for most journals, even those that do etymologies for East Asian or Austronesian languages. If the claim is internal to the history of English (e.g. the history of the term &quot;politically correct&quot; then there are English-centered journals for which the claim could be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T05:56:34.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11482" CreationDate="2015-02-22T06:33:00.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your examples involve a type of ellipsis mechanism that is not yet widely acknowledged. It has been called &quot;left edge ellipsis&quot;. This ellipsis mechanism reaches in from the left edge of the utterance. Your examples do NOT involve any of the more widely acknowledged types of ellipsis (NP ellipsis, VP-ellipsis, gapping, stripping, sluicing, answer fragments, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Left edge ellipsis has been explored to some extent in works by Napoli (1982), Wilder (1997), Merchant (2004), and a couple of others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few more examples of left edge ellipsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a. [Do] You want coffee or tea?&#xA;    b. [Do you] Want coffee or tea?&#xA;    c. [Do you want] Coffee or tea?&#xA;&#xA;(2) a. [That is] Ridiculous!&#xA;&#xA;(3) a. [I] Have been working a lot lately.&#xA;    b. [I have] Been working a lot lately.&#xA;    c. [I have been] Working a lot lately.&#xA;&#xA;(4) a. Pointing: [Pass the] Salt!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is elided in cases of left edge ellipsis is pragmatically determined by the context in which it occurs. Conventionalized situations give rise to frequent occurrence of this mechanism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A caveat: theories of ellipsis vary. Some researchers who have studied sentence fragments like the ones in the question would claim that ellipsis has not occurred in such cases at all. They would deny the existence of the mechanism that I, following Wilder (1997), have called &quot;left edge ellipsis&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I agree with Greg Lee's comment about how the terminology is used. Ellipsis mechanism tend to be named according to the category that is omitted, e.g. N-ellipsis elides a noun, VP-ellipsis elides a VP, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T06:33:00.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T11:17:59.140" Score="0" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where did generative semantics go wrong? Why was their conception of language faulty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What were the main weaknesses of generative semantics adherents' claim that &quot;a grammar starts with a description of meaning of the sentence and then generates syntactical rules through introduction of syntactical rules and lexical rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T22:57:27.767" Title="Where did generative semantics go wrong? Why was their conception of language faulty?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11493" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-22T11:32:12.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phrase structure is a widespread approach to the analysis and exploration of sentence structure. Sentences are understood in terms of a part-whole relation, whereby a whole (a sentence) is broken down into its parts, and these parts are broken down into yet smaller parts, etc. until the smallest parts are reached (often just the words). Many of the parts in this process are phrases. Phrase structure stands in contrast to dependency structure. The two, phrase structure and dependency structure, are the main two ways to conceive of how syntactic units are grouped together.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T00:46:42.637" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T00:46:42.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11494" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-22T11:32:12.493" Score="0" Body="Phrase structure is a widespread approach to the analysis and exploration of sentence structure." OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T23:44:48.990" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T23:44:48.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2015-02-22T11:39:03.240" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The long answer would be very long, but the short one is short enough: Your question 'begs the question'; it is simply &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; true that 'dependency gets the job done more easily and economically'. What's more, it does not get the job done at all (if by the job we mean the job the best constituency-based grammars already do, and with great precision, as a matter of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A (syntactic) 'dependency' is just a syntagmatic relation between two minimal signs (under DG assumptions), and, of course, to that extent, DG's basic 'tool' is extremely flexible (so are part-whole relations, though), and that's why it has usually attracted the attention of computational linguists, rather than'pure' linguists, but most syntagmatic relations are &lt;strong&gt;irrelevant&lt;/strong&gt;, why they are irrelevant &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be explained, irrelevant dependencies should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be represented in DG diagrammes if they were really minimal and as efficient as you claim (but they are represented, and the diagrammes are not minimal at all), and those dependencies considered relevant to DG must still be properly defined, because, as far as I know, even 'subject of', 'object of', 'adjunct of' (and, correspondingly, 'predicate of', 'argument of', 'Agent of', 'Patient of', etc.) have &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; yet been properly defined in DG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate with just an example, in &lt;em&gt;My wife has told our eldest daughter to clean the kitchen after today's party&lt;/em&gt; (a slightly more elaborate sentence than one cited in the Wikipedia article on 'Catena') &lt;em&gt;wife&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the 'subject', nor &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt; the 'object', nor &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the 'complement' of &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;told&lt;/em&gt;, for that matter). Needless to say, neither is &lt;em&gt;kitchen&lt;/em&gt; the 'object' of &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;, nor &lt;em&gt;party&lt;/em&gt; the 'complement' of &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;, nor &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the 'adjunct' of &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;, etc. etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If DG wants to call such dependencies 'subject', 'object', etc. it must develop a &lt;strong&gt;completely new theory&lt;/strong&gt; of syntactic functions, and that, of course, will be at a heavy price. I suspect that even if that were possible at all, which I doubt, the resulting theory would certainly not be simpler, nor more efficient, than the extant constituency-based one, on the contrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correspondingly, at the semantic level, &lt;em&gt;wife, daughter, to, kitchen, party&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; 'arguments' of their respective '(maximally unsaturated) predicates' &lt;em&gt;has/told&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;, either, and calling them 'arguments', and assigning 'semantic roles' to them will require &lt;strong&gt;massive&lt;/strong&gt; adjustments in semantic theory and its associated ontology. Just think of the fact that arguments (in the sense we are using the term now) must be referential, i.e., their names must denote (first-order) entities, whereas, of course, &lt;em&gt;wife, daughter, kitchen, party&lt;/em&gt;, etc. do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; denote individuals at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, that, by itself, is an &lt;strong&gt;unsurmountable&lt;/strong&gt; difficulty, but there is more: then, DG will need 'correspondence rules' to 'link' syntactic to semantic terms, and, to my knowledge, those have not been developed either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that such objections emerge even at the most elementary level of metatheoretic analysis, in the simplest grammatical sentences, but there is rather more than that to account for in a natural language, isn´t there? There is, at least in many languages, an extremely subtle 'word order' (just think of the ordering restrictions among the more than forty different classes of adverbs that Cinque has identified), and, of course, there is 'scope','displacement', 'discontinuity', 'island (accessibility) constraints', 'minimality effects', 'superiority effects', 'reconstruction effects', and there is 'binding', and 'control', etc., etc., etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DGs seem to 'work' (of course, only as elementary parsing strategies, ignoring all the above-mentioned difficulties) because they are typically used to parse only the simplest &lt;strong&gt;well-formed&lt;/strong&gt; sentences, as happens in CL work, i.e., they are 'restricted prototypes', trivial toys, at bottom, but a respectable linguistic theory must also explain why ill-formed sentences (or interpretations thereof) are ill-formed, and to do that you must do rather more than draw or not draw arcs between signs more or less at will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not account for &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement by just drawing an arc between &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;buy&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;What did he say he wanted to buy&lt;/em&gt;?, nor explain the ungrammaticality of '*Who did you say that wanted the job?' by &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; drawing any arc between &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt;, nor account for the twofold dependency between the subject &lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; and the two verbs &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;playing&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;He has been playing the guitar&lt;/em&gt; by drawing a couple of arcs between &lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt;, nor predict the binding phenomena by drawing another arc between &lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;He promised Tom to do it himself&lt;/em&gt; or omitting it between &lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;He promised him to do it himself&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on like this more or less indefinitely, in virtually any aspect of a proper syntactic-semantic theory, but will not. The answer to your question is very simple: DGs cannot oust state-of-the-art constituency-based grammars because they are neither empirically comparable to them in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; respect, nor conceptually or representationally any simpler than they are (once all the auxiliary assumptions needed to reconcile DG analyses with the empirical facts are properly spelled out). So far, they have not been, and with good reason: DG is still resting on theories of syntactic and semantic functions that are incompatible with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, going any further is out of the question: even 'translating' the principles of current CG-based grammars into a framework that denies the existence of phrasal dependents (in spite of the fact that there is unquestionable evidence that natural language is structure-dependent) may well be literally impossible, as partly explained above, and as to DG's alternatively developing equivalent principles of its own to properly handle the empirical effects of constituency, allowed and disallowed displacement, correct and incorrect scope, minimality, superiority, island constraints, correct and incorrect binding, control, ellipsis, deletion and empty category effects, etc., well, I will not say it is 'impossible', but none of that remotely exists yet and everything suggests that if a proper theory of 'all that' ever comes to be developed from a strict DG point of view, it will be rather more stipulative and complex, and rather less efficient, than state-of-the art constituency-based grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to explore and try to promote any new theory you fancy, but it is pretentious of DG fans to design little toy grammars and ignore the enormous body of knowledge that CGs have managed to offer us after sixty years of colossal intellectual work by thousands of the best linguists the world has ever produced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In closing, I would like to expand my critical remarks by elaborating on a simple, but powerful (I hope) would-be conceptual argument against Dependency Grammar as programmatically presented in its foundational manifestos. It goes, more or less, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The branches of a traditional constituency-based phrase structure tree represent syntactic relations between the mother node and its daughter nodes. As a consequence, if the sentence S (say: &lt;em&gt;John sent Mary flowers&lt;/em&gt;) is (just for the sake of argument!) analysed as a 'flat' structure with four branches  J + s + M + f, there must be four relevant syntactic relations between the daughter nodes and its mother node. This is, indeed, the case: the relevant syntactic relations are Subject of (S) = &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt;, Head of (S) = &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt; (let's not bring Infl or T into the picture here, OK?), Indirect Object of (S) = &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;, and Direct Object of (S) = &lt;em&gt;flowers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if we opted for a binary-branching analysis, as in current Merge-based theories, the sentence S would have just two branches, which, ignoring the actual labels now used, I will simply call Subject of (S) = &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; and Predicate of (S) = &lt;em&gt;sent Mary flowers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we had not specified that (under that analysis!) the mother node must be the pivot of such syntactic relations, our initial flat tree would also represent irrelevant syntagmatic ‘connections’, mediated by the mother node S, between J and M, J and f, or M and f to which no known relevant syntactic function can be assigned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since CG rests on part-whole relations, that constraint follows from the CG approach as an inherent property and no conceptual problem arises, even if we opt for the flat analysis, and, of course, does not arise at all if we opt for a binary-branching one (which can be turned into an argument for binary-branching analyses, by the way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose we say with Dependency Grammars that the phrasal ‘mother’ node is irrelevant (i.e., that part-whole relations are irrelevant to syntax) and that the only syntactic relations that count are ‘part-part’ ones between the elements of &lt;em&gt;John sent Mary flowers&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., J, s, M and f. That hypothesis predicts the existence of relevant syntagmatic relations between 1) J and s (or s and J), 2) M and s (or s and M), and 3) f and s (or s and f), and let’s grant that, in this simple case, it is possible to label them, respectively, ‘subject of’, ‘indirect object of’, and ‘direct object of’ &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt;. [The opposite strategy, to say that 'verb of'(J)= &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; 'verb of (M) = &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; 'verb' of (f) = &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt;, would leave us in the dark as to the functions of J, M and f, and, of course, would be too uninformative as to be worth considering].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a flat analysis, however, also predicts the existence of additional syntagmatic relations between 4) J and M (or M and J), 5) J and f (or f and J), and 6) M and f (or f and M) for which no known syntactic function label is available (a problem that would not have arisen under a binary-branching analysis of S, recall).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to account for the irrelevance of the syntagmatic relations 4), 5) and 6) is to stipulate that only relations in which the verb is involved count (for clause-level syntax). In other words, there must be a special designated term which somehow acts as the ‘pivot’, ‘head’ or ‘root’ of the whole structure, and that, under DG assumptions, is, in this case, the verb &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for as long as ‘the whole structure’ is not recognized as a relevant syntactic object at all, there is &lt;strong&gt;no way&lt;/strong&gt; to even formulate that property of &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt;: what is &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt; the 'root' of in the proposition Head/Root of (?) = &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt;? What is &lt;em&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; in such an equation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it must be the ‘phrase’ S, in this case, &lt;em&gt;ergo&lt;/em&gt; phrasal nodes must be syntactically relevant categories or it would be impossible to define &lt;em&gt;sent&lt;/em&gt; as the ‘root’ or ‘head of’ anything. Q.E.D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not terribly mistaken, this is a simple, but valid, conceptual argument against all DG theories to the extent they remain faithful to their foundational manifestos. If they withdraw their foundational claims and admit that phrases are syntactically relevant objects and terms of bona fide syntactic dependencies, of course, this argument no longer applies, but, if they do, DGs can hardly be as perspicuous and efficient as CGs. Note that whereas in CG approaches, say X-bar or Merge-based syntax, the theory automatically defines a transparent correspondence between phrases and their heads (if we know the label of the head, we know the label of the phrasal node, and viceversa), in DG such correspondences must be stipulated (as happened in early PS rules!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me a simple, but cogent, reason to challenge the alleged superiority of DGs over state-of-the-art CGs, even if we ignore the theoretical vacuousness of DGs in chapters as important as those mentioned above and compare them to CGs only as mere diagramming tools.                             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Just in case you think I have an axe to grind in this matter, let me tell you that I am by no means an orthodox Chomskyan linguist; I'm just a self-taught linguist and an intellectually open scholar who has bothered to take a good look at many other people's gardens and know very well what it has taken LFG, GPSG-HPSG, CG, OT, FG, Word Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, FDG..., you name it, to barely mimick in their own terms just the most flagrantly necessary components of what Chomskyan P&amp;amp;P Theory had already achieved thirty years ago. What is a pity is that the subsequent 'minimalist programme' has largely repudiated much of that work and taken refuge in a ridiculously restricted concept of Human Language as, basically, free recursion, but that is a different matter].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T10:53:31.577" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:53:31.577" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T11:54:48.477" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists use the term &quot;formant&quot; to refer to refer to those frequency components that e.g. distinguish one vowel from another. Typically, we refer to F1, F2, F3, and F4 and their role in determining the articulatory mechanism used to produce a phoneme or phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there are no phonemes in instrumental music. In what sense, then, if any, is the concept of &quot;formant&quot; comparable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-02-22T12:43:14.500" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T17:59:27.760" Title="How is the concept of formant used in linguistics different from that used in instrumental music?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3451" CreationDate="2015-02-22T14:18:52.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me please also to recommend some good interactive application, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipa-phonetics/id869642260?mt=8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iPA Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;By John Esling&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. While reading about &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt; we can notice, that we don't know the pronunciation of some special symbols: for ex. how to pronounce &lt;code&gt;&quot;ʐ&quot;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;&quot;ɸ&quot;&lt;/code&gt;..? In this case, I strongly recommend this &lt;strong&gt;free application&lt;/strong&gt;. It is easy and very useful to work with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This APP provides a unique and intuitive touch interface for exploring&#xA;  the International Phonetic Alphabet as well as numerous voice&#xA;  qualities and articulations. Simply press any symbol or label in the&#xA;  charts to see and hear an illustrative example. Test your knowledge by&#xA;  playing the random guessing games. Amazing laryngoscopic and&#xA;  ultrasound videos accompany sounds articulated in the throat! You can&#xA;  speed up and slow down all the video examples, view full-screen, and&#xA;  more! Press the INFO button on each screen to access additional&#xA;  information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9210" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T14:18:52.693" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-02-22T14:18:52.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11496" CreationDate="2015-02-22T14:39:41.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people do acoustic studies of instruments' resonances, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with how performers think and talk about their playing.  While learning flute recently, I became interested in pursuing the relation between vowel perception and flute tone using the notion of tone color.  Tone color is something flutists do talk about.  Here is a reference to a post of mine in a forum frequented by flutists: &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.saxontheweb.net/showthread.php?53050-Tone-color-as-per-Trevor-Wye-Examples-%28and-an-update%29&amp;amp;p=2331927&amp;amp;viewfull=1#post2331927&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SaxOnTheWeb post&lt;/a&gt;. But apparently none of the flutists there could make any sense of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my casual reading about flutes, it's not even clear to me that flute tone perception has the two dimensions that would justify the analogy to vowel quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T14:39:41.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11492" CreationDate="2015-02-22T15:14:51.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it was transformations.  In generative semantics, transformations are/were taken to mediate between logical form and speech.  The problem was, there turned out not to be any transformations.  So much for that idea, then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably amongst you all there are some readers who have not yet given up on TG.  So I'll just say very briefly how I became disillusioned with transformations.  It was Gerald Gazdar's account using phrase structure grammar of Ross's across-the-board condition for the coordinate structure constraint.  That hardly even makes sense in TG (how can things move out of several places to wind up in just one place?), while it's predicted in Gazdar's treatment from the condition on coordination that only like categories can be conjoined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very fond of McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, and I think McCawley was headed in a good direction when he formulated the purpose of transformations as fitting conceptual structures into the templates that permit them to be pronounced in the way we humans have learned to do.  It's just that the transformations don't work.  Just look at that the very strange way Conjunction Reduction has to apply so as to yield structures that could have been produced directly by phrase structure rules.  It's awful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T15:14:51.430" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11496" CreationDate="2015-02-22T17:59:27.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;formant&quot; was introduced by Gunnar Fant as &quot;the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P(f)|&quot;, and it is general enough that it is applicable to any acoustic analysis. Of course linguists can embellish the concept in ways only applicable to speech or even phonological analysis, but strictly speaking, there is no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T17:59:27.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11532" CreationDate="2015-02-22T18:48:32.090" Score="10" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Henry V, Shakesperean English is difficult to understand (even for modern native English speakers -- at least for me) without a good amount of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a few scenes conducted mostly or entirely in French, and to my surprise, these scenes were perfectly readable with just a mild knowledge of modern French!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why could this be? I have a few guesses, but I'm not impressed by any of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English has changed more in the time since Shakespeare than French.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's French was &quot;easy&quot; because he is a non-native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Written modern French reflects a much older version of the spoken language than the analogous situation for English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T11:28:16.730" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T11:29:11.823" Title="The French of Shakespeare -- why does it seem so modern?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11502" CreationDate="2015-02-22T19:19:49.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that English has changed more than French since the 17th century. A more likely explanation is that the French passages in Henry V are in prose, while most of the English bits are in verse, and thus inevitably in a more elevated (if you like: more difficult) language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-02-22T21:27:39.720" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T21:27:39.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2405" CreationDate="2015-02-22T19:53:20.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear that British singers do keep a non-rhotic accent (R's after a vowel are not pronounced) but they tend to do a flapped T i.e. they pronounce water as wader, or pretty as preddy (as Americans or Aussies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9238" LastActivityDate="2015-02-22T19:53:20.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T23:05:02.543" Score="2" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the discovery and decipherment of ancient Babylonian and Sumerian texts in the 19th century a theory was offered that the name of the river constellation Eridanus, which appears in the poem Phaenomena by Aratus in the 3rd century BC, was due to the ancient Sumerian city Eridu. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A far more likely origin of the name, to me, would seem to be the IE river deity name/word *danu, which has provided names to a number of rivers known to the Greek world (like Danube), and at least one Celtic river deity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone through any light on this subject? Does &quot;Eridanus&quot; look like an IE derivation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One problem with the &quot;Eridu&quot; theory is that how it might be transmitted to Greece is quite mysterious. The Greeks got their Zodiacal constellations, and others nearby in the sky, from the Late Babylonians. But there is no constellation in any Babylonian texts corresponding to Eridanus or bearing that or a similar name. Somehow knowledge of a Sumerian city name lost circa 2000 BC would have to be transmitted to Greece 1700 years later, without leaving a trace in Babylonian texts.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9224" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T20:36:37.380" Title="Origin of &quot;Eridanus&quot;: Indo-European or Sumerian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-23T05:34:30.090" Score="9" ViewCount="7886" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between coreference resolution and anaphora resolution? More generally, what is the difference between coreferences and anaphoras?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3364" LastEditorUserId="666" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T23:14:10.583" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T13:32:44.113" Title="What is the difference between coreference resolution and anaphora resolution?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11506" CreationDate="2015-02-23T09:57:00.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is difficult to answer due to its brevity and the lack of context in which the terms &lt;em&gt;coreference&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; appear. However, I can provide some orientation that should help increase understanding of how these terms are used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;coreference&lt;/em&gt; denotes a situation where two or more expressions refer to the same one entity in the world of discourse. In a situation where a speaker says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Look at that man over there; he is wearing a funny hat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the phrase &lt;em&gt;that man&lt;/em&gt; refers to the actual man in the discourse situation of the speaker, and the pronoun &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; refers to the phrase &lt;em&gt;that man&lt;/em&gt; (its antecedent), so it too refers to the actual man in the discourse situation, although indirectly. Thus the two expressions, &lt;em&gt;that man&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, are coreferential; they refer to the same one entity in the discourse situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words or phrases that point to other words or phrases are anaphors. The term &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; denotes the actual act of pointing (&lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; is technically already plural, so &lt;em&gt;anaphoras&lt;/em&gt; is incorrect). Any time a given expression (word, phrase, or some combination of words) points to some linguistic expression (its antecedent), it is an anaphor (or cataphor). Pronouns are typical anaphors, but many other types of expressions can also be construed as anaphors, e.g. verbal expressions (&lt;em&gt;do so&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;do it&lt;/em&gt;), adverbs (&lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;), preposition-like combinations (&lt;em&gt;thereof&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt;), etc. Any time one of these expressions occurs in speech or writing, anaphora is present. The anaphor is pointing to some expression in the linguistic or situational context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main point of confusion that arises in this area concerns the presence of anaphora without coreference. Consider the following sentence in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) No man said he was hungry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphora is present in this sentence, since the pronoun &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, an anaphor, is pointing back at its antecedent &lt;em&gt;no man&lt;/em&gt;. But the antecedent &lt;em&gt;no man&lt;/em&gt; does not pick out an actual entity in the discourse world. The expression &lt;em&gt;no man&lt;/em&gt; cannot be construed as referring to anything at all. What this means is that coreference is not present, but anaphora is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one spends some time probing these distinctions, one quickly sees that the terminology is not clear, and often the terms are used inconsistely or unclearly. But that is understandable, since the notions at play are rather fuzzy, even for many seasoned linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An appeal to caution: the term &lt;em&gt;anaphor&lt;/em&gt; has a special meaning in Government and Binding Theory (GB) and the Minimalist Program (MP). These frameworks of syntax use the term &lt;em&gt;anaphor&lt;/em&gt; to denote what most of linguistics in general calls a reflexive pronoun (or a reciprocal pronoun). Thus in GB/MP, words like &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;herself&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;themselves&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;each other&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are called anaphors. The study of syntax and grammar in general uses the term &lt;em&gt;anaphor&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;cataphor&lt;/em&gt;) more broadly, to denote any expression that points to some other linguistic unit or entity in discourse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia articles on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;anaphora&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;coreference&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;binding&lt;/a&gt; can help build understanding about these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm not sure what is meant by &quot;coreference resolution&quot; and &quot;anaphora resolution&quot;. I assume those terms are meant to denote situations in which an anaphor successfully finds its antecedent (or postcedent) in context. Anaphora resolution would, then, fail to occur if a given pronoun appears for which it is not clear what its antecedent or postcedent is supposed to be, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Fred and Tom said he was hungry&lt;/em&gt;. Does &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; refer to &lt;em&gt;Fred&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tom&lt;/em&gt;, or to someone else entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2253" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T13:32:44.113" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T13:32:44.113" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-22T22:16:09.557" Score="4" ViewCount="10562" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that in Europe, most written languages (Spanish, English, German, ect.) use very similar alphabets (Latin), while countries in South East Asia, which are similarly geographically close to one another as in Europe,  use vastly different alphabets from one another (Thai, Mandarin, Japanese, Sanskrit, ect.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9251" OwnerDisplayName="Tom Sterkenburg" LastEditorUserId="9251" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T20:01:23.823" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:25:17.373" Title="Why do European languages use a similar alphabet, but South East Asian languages do not?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2015-02-22T23:40:25.383" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most if not all the area of Europe which uses the Latin alphabet was once part of the Roman Empire, and used Latin as the language of trade even if it wasn't the native language (much like English today).  Many European languages (the Romance family) are direct descendants of Latin, so not surprising they'd keep the alphabet as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After the Empire fell, the Roman Christians used Latin, so it eventually became the language of scholarship, pushing out local writing systems (e.g. Norse, Irish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;China and India are in fact quite isolated from each other.  While I'm no expert (and welcome correction), what I've read suggests that there was more contact between Greece/Rome and India, than between India and China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Japanese does use Chinese characters (kanji) in its writing.  Because the language is very different - lots of inflected endings for tenses &amp;amp;c - they added kana, so each Japanese word is typically kanji+kana.  (I think Korean is similar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="jamesqf" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T06:25:17.373" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:25:17.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2015-02-23T02:29:46.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know that much about south Asian linguistics, mostly European and Eastern Asian, so my answer will be limited but I hope helpful given those limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to remember when comparing eastern vs western script is that for a long, long ways back, European script was phonetic, whereas Chinese script and such was not. By this, I mean that alphabets such as Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Latin were meant to represent sounds, which were combined to represent words. What this meant, and why this is significant, is that it means they are easily interchangeable. The Rosetta stone is an example of how easy it is to crack multiple phonetic alphabets.  Each phonetic language has a symbol for the &quot;k&quot; sound (though some have &quot;kh&quot; differentiated). In addition to being interchangeable, this made it far easier to adapt a certain alphabet to different languages. The Catholic Church in particular had a resounding impact in this; they made it their mission to provide the Bible in numerous languages.  Sometimes, they displaced preexisting scripts entirely; Germanic runes were replaced for the much more fluid Latin script. Other times, alphabets were made entirely from scratch by the church; the single greatest undertaking of this was the creation of Cyrillic script from the Slavic languages, when the Orthodox church requested that the church help them formulate a written means of communication, and two priests by the name of Methodius and Cyril formed an entirely new script composed of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin letters and suited for the consonent and trill heavy Slavic tongue.  So to answer the European side, it started out diverse, but the Church used its influence to push a very efficient script capable of suiting multiple languages throughout the various lands and nationalities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eastern Asia, on the other hand, has traditionally followed a very different form; their script, instead of focusing on somatic components, instead were meant to represent individual ideas and concepts and words. So instead of having six letters for &quot;finger,&quot; they would have one letter for &quot;finger.&quot; The actual script themselves were often meant to relate to the idea, much like the formations of stars are meant to depict constellations. This gets cluttered, however, when you consider two things: 1) it is not easily interchangeable, and 2) multiple lands were doing this simultaneously. Regional divergence was highly significant, and is the reason why there are so many characters that can represent the same idea.  It was also complex and difficult to teach; although certain symbols were universally used such as markings for roads or types of buildings, most of the more abstract concepts of actually writing were essentially impossible to incorporate into the general population. It got to the point that the Korean king Sejong the Great had some of the best minds in his kingdom create a new, somatic alphabet, one that is commonly esteemed to be the most phonetically &quot;accurate&quot; because the characters are not only phonetically representative, but are meant to represent the positions of the tongue and throat while making the sound. Another nation, Japan, also eventually adopted another alphabet following somatic components, as well as adding on a third alphabet later on typically used to represent Western concepts, giving Japan a total of three modern working languages. China followed similar routes as well. So the basis for alphabetic confusion in Eastern Asia is basically that it started as a conceptually similar use of a non-phonetic alphabet, which is very vulnerable to regional divergence, and different lands used different means to eventually cope with this and change it to a regionally acceptable phonetic alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add a little to Sanskrit and Indochinese scripts, though, although I can't go into detail on their development, it is important to point out that despite your assumption, they were not geographically close. India and the main parts of China were significantly seperated, by distance, jungle, and massive mountain peaks. Indochina was isolated by extensive jungle regions not suitable for agrarian societies. The expectation that they would have linguistically similar origins are slim at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9245" OwnerDisplayName="Kasierith" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T20:46:22.713" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T20:46:22.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2015-02-23T09:42:55.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to answer this from Indian perspective. In ancient India (the Vedic Period), &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; has been the &lt;em&gt;lingua-franca&lt;/em&gt;. All our religious texts including the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vedas&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Upanishads&lt;/a&gt;, Ramayana, Mahabharata, etc. have been written in Sanskrit language (the Devanagari script). And India in those times, extended upto Persia in the West and the Himalayas in the east. Some of you were right in pointing out that we had more interaction with Greece and Persia during ancient times than China. The reason being, the Himalaya mountains which acted as a great geographical barrier between India and China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there were no such major obstacles between Greece and India, trade and information exchange was possible. Alexander invaded India just before Chandragupta Maurya established the Maurya empire around 320 B.C. During the Maurya period, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pali&lt;/a&gt; language was gaining more and more importance which was nothing more than a corrupted version of Sanskrit. Indeed, most of the Buddhist texts were originally written in Pali and not Sanksrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you move towards South India, you will find totally different languages (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada) which are written in their own scripts and have no link whatsoever to Sanskrit. The reason for that is speculative, though some scholars suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo Aryan migration hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9244" OwnerDisplayName="Prahlad Yeri" LastEditorUserId="9244" LastEditDate="2015-03-01T17:13:01.847" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T17:13:01.847" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11486" CreationDate="2015-02-23T19:38:28.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I invented the phrase &quot;semantic satiation&quot; in my doctoral dissertation in 1962 (see Wikipedia article on semantic satiation for references and links). I found that emotional words that evoke some intensity are more resistant to satiation with repetition. This varies with individuals as to what words evoke intense emotions. Other words like &quot;amongst&quot; or prepositions like &quot;from&quot; and &quot;to&quot; are quick to lose meaning with repetition. Titles of songs and parts of lyrics can take a lot of repeating before they satiate. Some words that are new or less used actually increase in meaning with repetition before they eventually also lose meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Leon Jakobovits James&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9248" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T19:38:28.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11506" CreationDate="2015-02-23T20:07:28.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by Tim Osborne is very comprehensive and accurate. But perhaps things might be easier when looked at through usage in text linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, co-reference and anaphora can be distinct, they are often used interchangeably by linguists. This is partly because by far the most studied type of anaphoric reference is co-referential.  So you could say that co-reference is one of the processes through which anaphora is encoded. It is not just a type of anaphora because co-reference can also be cataphoric (although some people use anaphora to mean reference in both directions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difference between anaphora and correference resolution follows from the above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T20:07:28.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-02-23T20:44:05.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T20:44:05.343" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T20:44:05.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-02-23T20:44:05.343" Score="0" Body="Aphasiology is the study of language disorders caused by brain damage, as a result of a stroke or progressive illness." OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T23:13:58.297" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T23:13:58.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11506" CreationDate="2015-02-23T21:03:09.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coreference anaphora is just one type of anaphora.  Following George Lakoff, syntacticians distinguish between identity-of-reference anaphora (which includes definite pronominalization) and identity-of-sense anaphora (which includes indefinite anaphora with &quot;one&quot;).  So as a first approximation, the answer to the question is that anaphora includes indefinite anaphora, or that is to say, identity-of-sense anaphora, as well as coreferential anaphora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in &quot;He ate a green apple, but I ate a red one&quot;, in interpretation, &quot;one&quot; means &quot;apple&quot;, but it is the meanings that are the same between antecedent (&quot;apple&quot;) and pro-form (&quot;one&quot;), not the individuals.  He and I did not eat the same apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T21:03:09.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-23T21:18:30.380" Score="-1" ViewCount="685" Body="&lt;p&gt;This RE :&#xA;((?:\w+ )?|((?:(j|J)e )|(tu )|(il ))?)(?:ne )?(?:veu(x|t)\b|voul(ais|ait)\b|voudr(ais|ait)|voul(ez))-?(?:vous)?(?: pas)? qu(e |')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Captures these French sentences :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On voulait que nous mangions du poulet.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Il voulait que je parle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Il voulait que j'aille en France.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Je voudrais qu'il vînt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ne voulez-vous pas que je vienne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voulez-vous que je vienne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AND NOT &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;je voudrais &lt;strong&gt;trouver des gens&lt;/strong&gt; que je pusse estimer et aimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Je voudrais &lt;strong&gt;trouver des gens&lt;/strong&gt; que je puisse estimer et aimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me to add many words after &lt;code&gt;voudrais&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9249" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T23:23:29.853" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T02:02:44.730" Title="Regular expression that captures sentences" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-03-17T21:30:33.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11506" CreationDate="2015-02-23T22:43:18.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An obvious difference I see (or, rather, one Ruth Kempson saw in a 1977 textbook of hers), especially from a cross-theoretical perspective (i.e., leaving terminological issues aside as much as possible), is that 'anaphora' is an intra-linguistically determinable relation, whereas 'co-reference' necessarily requires access to 'extra-linguistic' information. By definition, &lt;em&gt;co-reference&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; implies 'identity of reference', whereas &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; (I ignore here how the term &lt;em&gt;anaphor&lt;/em&gt; - not &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; - is used in Principle A of Chomsky's Binding Theory). In other words, the &lt;strong&gt;relation&lt;/strong&gt; called &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; may (but need not) hold of expressions that are supposed to have the same 'sense' (either in themselves, or only via context-dependent synonymy) but may still have &lt;strong&gt;different referents&lt;/strong&gt; (and usually do), whereas co-reference does not depend on 'identity of sense' at all, but, of course, does strictly require co-referential terms to refer to the same extra-linguistic entity. This is most obvious, perhaps, in the use of &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John has a BMW and his girlfriend has &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt;, too&lt;/em&gt;, where two different BMW's are being referred to, although similar examples can be built with all the other pro-forms (i.e., &lt;em&gt;so, do, do so, that/those, mine, yours&lt;/em&gt;, etc., cf. &lt;em&gt;John finished his thesis in 1990 and Bill &lt;strong&gt;did so&lt;/strong&gt; a year later&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Your thesis is better than &lt;strong&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, etc.). On the contrary, co-referential terms, of course, may (but, again, need not) have completely different 'senses', and yet, by definition, they &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; refer to the same extralinguistic entity. Thus, in &lt;em&gt;My wife is sad because she misses her father&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;My wife&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; have different 'senses', but may still have the same 'referent' (and that's how the sentence is interpreted by default, in the absence of further context); on the contrary, in &lt;em&gt;She is sad because she misses her father&lt;/em&gt;, both tokens of &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; cannot but have the same 'sense', but they still may (or may not) be co-referential, although, in the absence of further context, they will be interpreted as co-referential; in &lt;em&gt;John lost his temper&lt;/em&gt;, finally, &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be co-referential. In view of that, you may expect huge differences in the resources and computational strategies respectively needed to identify 'anaphoric' and 'co-referential' expressions; typically, determining whether co-reference, an extra-linguistically determined property, holds or not between any two expressions will require much more 'pragmatic' information ('knowledge of the world') than identifying pairs of expressions in the strictly &lt;strong&gt;intra-linguistic&lt;/strong&gt; relation of 'anaphora'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-02-23T22:55:27.337" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T22:55:27.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2015-02-23T22:55:36.227" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is fairly straightforward along the lines of historical developments and cultural influences and goes pretty much along the lines offered by jamesqf's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a much more illuminating answer would focus on the problematic nature of the assumptions behind the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Europe and South East Asia are not necessarily the best categories for this sort of comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to writing systems, you may be better off talking about Mediterranean-Atlantic cultural sphere. Here, you will find at least five different (albeit related) writing systems: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew currently in wide usage (millions of users across multiple languages). They can all trace their origins to similar roots but ultimately they underwent independent processes of development and cultural spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side you have at least two historical spheres of cultural influence: Brahmic (Indian languages, Tibetan, Thai, Lao) and Sinic (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese). So, talking just about South East Asia as one area is misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only focus on the artificial concept of 'modern Europe', you will find that the prevalence of the Latin script is due mostly to its mono-cultural origins of learning in Western Christendom. What may now seem like some sort of inevitable default state is, in fact, a consequence of Europe being a cultural and technological backwater for well over a thousand years while other places around the world flourished and promoted the development  of more or less independent cultural traditions strong enough to carry their own literacy. The surface dominance of the Latin alphabet is only about 200 years old coming on the heels of mass literacy in the West spurred by industrial revolution (to simplify things greatly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T22:55:36.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11492" CreationDate="2015-02-23T22:57:27.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;going wrong&quot; is probably not a good way to characterize the development of Generative Semantics. What happened is that it's various proponents went in different directions - neither Ross, McCawley nor Postal were interested in pursuing the programmatic work and spent the rest of their careers on more wide ranging contributions but ultimately partial to the study of language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Lakoff never really abandoned the Generative Semantic program of putting meaning at the center of linguistic inquiry but left the generative, formal linguistic approach. His assessment of Generative Semantics (which can be found most clearly in 'Women, Fire and Dangerous Things') is that it was making unwarranted assumptions about meaning as being subject to formal mechanisms contained in mathematical logic - which Lakoff calls 'objectivism'. Lakoff rejected that in favor of an enriched version of 'frame semantics' having also jettisoned formal syntax in favor of construction/cognitive grammar. So you can say that generative semantics simply evolved into 'cognitive grammar'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at some of Lakoff's writing from the early 1970s (e.g. hedges), you can see a clear continuity of his overall program in the things he's concerned with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T22:57:27.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11518" CreationDate="2015-02-23T23:15:29.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added this: &lt;code&gt;(?: \w+\b)*&lt;/code&gt; which will match 0 or more words before &lt;code&gt;que&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\w&lt;/code&gt; is a word character and is equivalent to &lt;code&gt;[A-Za-z0-9_]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;\b&lt;/code&gt; is a word boundary  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;((?:\w+ )?|((?:(j|J)e )|(tu )|(il ))?)(?:ne )?(?:veu(x|t)\b|voul(ais|ait)\b|voudr(ais|ait)|voul(ez))-?(?:vous)?(?: pas)?&lt;b&gt;(?: \w+\b)*&lt;/b&gt; qu(e |')&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2015-02-23T23:15:29.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11518" CreationDate="2015-02-23T23:59:14.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would really help you out if you write things out with /x which ignores whitespace.  Using it allows you to document your regex which helps find inefficiencies in it and also ways to improve it.  Here's what you have (I've not escaped the actual spaces you encoded, but it should give you an idea of how much easier it is to read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(                 # EITHER&#xA;  (?:\w+ )?       #   [uncaptured word characters] OR NOTHING&#xA;|                 # OR &#xA;  (               #   EITHER&#xA;    (?:(j|J)e )   #      [uncaptured J or j]e&#xA;  |               #   OR&#xA;    (tu )         #      tu &#xA;  |               #   OR&#xA;    (il )         #      il &#xA;  )?              #   OR NOTHING&#xA;)              &#xA;(?:ne )?          # PLUS MAYBE [uncaptured ne]&#xA;(?:               # EITHER [uncaptured]&#xA;  veu(x|t)\b      #   veux/veut AND word boundary&#xA;|                 # OR &#xA;  voul(ais|ait)\b #   voulais/voulait AND word boundary&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  voudr(ais|ait)\b#   voulais/voulait AND word boundary&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  voul(ez)        #   voul AND ez&#xA;)&#xA;-?                # AND MAYBE -&#xA;(?:vous)?         # AND MAYBE [uncaptured vous]&#xA;(?: pas)?         # AND MAYBE [uncaptured pas]&#xA;qu(e |')          # AND que or qu'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It becomes obvious where to add fenceop's suggestion of (?: \w+\b)* in here (I'd also add on an extra &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; otherwise if you have two &lt;em&gt;que/qu'&lt;/em&gt; it will gobble up all but the last one), but first some things you can improve on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first group, notice that both of the initial two options include a group which is followed by &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; (exactly 0 or 1 times).  This means it can also match nothing at all.  You can just put the &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; at the end of the entire first capture group.  Also, you have a space after each element in the nested options (for pronouns).  You can just put this after all of them.  Likewise, no need for parentheses.  For for single letter options, character classes are much more readable and common, so you can change &lt;code&gt;(j|J)&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[Jj]&lt;/code&gt;.  So &lt;code&gt;((?:\w+ )?|((?:(j|J)e )|(tu )|(il ))?)&lt;/code&gt; can be trimmed down to &lt;code&gt;(\w+|([Jj]e|tu|il) )?&lt;/code&gt;.  But since \w is just a default collect if not the ones you've specified, you can drop it even further to a single set of options rather than needing to nest it. But then again, since \w+ would match the others, you can just have \w+.  I don't think that's what you want, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the the group with the verb conjugation, again, character classes are nice and the (ez) does nothing but add a capture group.  Presuming you actually meant to include the word boundary after all of them, you can just use that after the options group.   So &lt;code&gt;(?:veu(x|t)\b|voul(ais|ait)\b|voudr(ais|ait)|voul(ez))&lt;/code&gt; can be trimmed down to &lt;code&gt;(veu[xt]|voulai[st]|voudrai[st]|voulez)\b&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some other improvements: using &lt;code&gt;\w+&lt;/code&gt; to try to match a sequence of letters will fail if there's any punctuation which I believe in French is quite rather common.  You may wish to specify your own character as &lt;code&gt;[A-Za-z,.:;'‘’“”«»()-]&lt;/code&gt; (adding in accented variants needed for French, hyphen must go at the very end or very beginning), or just use &lt;code&gt;\D&lt;/code&gt; which is a non-white space character.  For what you're doing, there's probably no harm in using &lt;code&gt;\D&lt;/code&gt; in place of &lt;code&gt;\w&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the number of non-capturing groups you have, you might want to instead use named capture groups and just ignore all other results, but that's me personally.  Given my suggestions you will get using /x (again, spaces not fully escaped), I'd recommend something closer to this (using named captures pre, neg1, verb, pron, neg2, and extra — extra will contain the text you have in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(?&amp;lt;pre&amp;gt;           # EITHER&#xA;  [Jj]e           #   Je OR je&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  tu              #   tu&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  il              #   il&#xA;)?                # OR NOTHING&#xA;\d+               # AND AT LEAST ONE spacing character&#xA;(?&amp;lt;neg1&amp;gt;ne\s+)?   # PLUS MAYBE ne AND AT LEAST ONE spacing character&#xA;(?&amp;lt;verb&amp;gt;          # EITHER&#xA;  veu[xt]         #   veux/veut&#xA;|                 # OR &#xA;  voulai[st]      #   voulais/voulait&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  voudrai[st]     #   voulais/voulait&#xA;|                 # OR&#xA;  voulez          #   voulez&#xA;)&#xA;(?&amp;lt;pron&amp;gt;-vous)?   # AND MAYBE -vous&#xA;(?&amp;lt;neg2&amp;gt;\spas)?   # AND MAYBE (spacing character AND pas)&#xA;(?&amp;lt;extra&amp;gt;:\s\S+)*?# AND AS MANY SEQUENCES OF (spacing character AND AT LEAST ONE non-spacing) AS NECESSARY &#xA;qu(e |')          # AND que or qu'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or reduced down (without named captures:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;([Jj]e|tu|il)?\d+(ne\s+)?(veu[xt]|voulai[st]|voudrai[st]|voulez)(-vous)?(\dpas)?(\s\S+)*?qu(e |')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a French questions I don't know the answer to.  Does &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; require &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;?  If so, and you wish to exclude ungrammatical phrases, you will need to set up a rather large alternate pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="5202" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T02:02:44.730" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T02:02:44.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11528" CreationDate="2015-02-24T01:35:33.947" Score="6" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a good phrase structure grammar primer, namely &quot;Beginning Syntax&quot; by Thomas, which has been recommended by more than one person on this exchange.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I looked for any similarly elementary text for dependency grammar, I came up short.  The list of books I found at the following link all look too technical for me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;amp;field-keywords=dependency+grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;amp;field-keywords=dependency+grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to find a dependency grammar primer because I heard that it might simplify the description of my conlangs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggested titles or sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="5223" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T13:31:42.667" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T10:58:41.647" Title="Where can I find a good primer of dependency grammar?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11524" CreationDate="2015-02-24T02:26:28.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This book is good though quite old: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/9027718385&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;The Meaning of the Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects&quot;&gt;The Meaning of the Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geert-Jan Kruijff gave a nice course at ESSLLI: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/membres/duchier/teaching/ESSLLI-2002/esslli-history.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DG&lt;/a&gt;, and you can google up his papers on DG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XDG is one of the best dependency formalisms: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/~rade/xdg.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;XDG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T02:26:28.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-24T02:30:19.727" Score="5" ViewCount="7181" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J3gOd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand what is the difference in lignuistic betwen pitch and intensity. &#xA;On the picture (taken from native HK speaker), I have a Cantonese sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nei5 Jiu3 Caa4 Maa3 ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you like tea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nei Jiu&lt;/code&gt; is on the first line. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Caa Maa&lt;/code&gt; is on the second line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blue line shows the pitch (tonality) and yellow the intensity with software Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I find interesting the word Tea &lt;code&gt;Caa&lt;/code&gt; (cf range 0.38348). Indeed, &lt;code&gt;Caa&lt;/code&gt; goes down in terms of pitch &lt;strong&gt;but when it goes down on the pitch, it does not go down in intensity&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a beginner, I was thinking that pitch, and intensity must go on same direction. Can someone explain me why it does not go in the same direction? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9252" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T13:45:21.320" Title="Difference between pitch and intensity" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;cantonese&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2015-02-24T02:58:38.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pitch&quot; is the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency which is the rate of vibration of the vocal folds (in speech). &quot;Intensity&quot; is the perceptual correlate of... I'll say RMS amplitude. There are a lot of things that determine amplitude, such as the openness of the vocal tract. In vowels, Fundamental Frequency (F0) does often correlate with amplitude, but this is often offset by intrinsic amplitude properties of vowels ([a] tends to have higher amplitude, [i u] tend to have lower amplitude).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amplitude is generally not a linguistically-controlled feature at the level of the segment or syllable, but it can be controlled paralinguistically over short periods by talking softly. Pitch, on the other hand, is one of the major physical realizations of tone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T16:06:26.763" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T16:06:26.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11524" CreationDate="2015-02-24T07:48:02.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no good introductory textbook on dependency grammar (DG) in English that I am aware of; certainly nothing at the level of Linda Thomas' book, which is really very basic. The books linked to in the question are not appropriate: Kahane's book is a collection of essays that are not accessible to aspiring linguists. Liu's book is in Chinese. There are, however, a couple of good introductory texts on DG for those who know German, especially Eroms (2000). But unless stated otherwise, I will assume that you do not read German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another point that is worth noting in this area. When a syntax textbook mentions the word &lt;em&gt;dependency&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dependencies&lt;/em&gt;, it does not mean that it is a DG. Phrase structure grammars (= constituency grammars) also acknowledge dependencies, especially when they are discussing &quot;long distance dependencies&quot;. Dependency grammars tend to use the terms &lt;em&gt;dependency-based&lt;/em&gt; or simply &lt;em&gt;dependency grammar&lt;/em&gt; in order to distinguish themselves from constituency grammars.  Thus many of the books lower down on the page that is linked to in the question are actually constituency grammars, not DGs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another interesting point that is worth acknowledging when investigating DG. All DGs are hyper-aware of the fact that they are dependency-based, whereas many constituency grammars (which is by far the majority of grammars) are ignorant of dependency-based syntax. With only a couple of exceptions (Matthews 1981, van Valin 2001, Carnie 2010), most syntax textbooks ignore DG (almost) entirely. The situation is now changing, though, especially in computational linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, however, now a couple of accessible encyclopedia articles on DG that have just very recently appeared, both of which I have written: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Routledge Encyclopedia of Syntax&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415533942/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415533942/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HSK Handbook Syntax -- Theory and Analysis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/311020276X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/SYNTAX-Handbucher-kommunikationswissenschaft-Linguistics-Communication/dp/311020276X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1424763371&amp;amp;sr=1-1&amp;amp;keywords=HSK+Handbook+Syntax+%E2%80%93+Theory+and+Analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in taking  a look at these articles, send me an email (tjo3ya@yahoo.com); I will hook you up with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if there is a real interest in DG that develops, then time spent with Tesniere's book &lt;em&gt;Elements of Structural Syntax&lt;/em&gt; would be a good investment. The history of modern DG begins with Tesniere's monumental work (1959). Tesniere's book remained untranslated into English for decades. But now that situation has just changed (since February 11th), since Sylvain Kahane and I translated the book to English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/9027212120&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Structural-Syntax-Lucien-Tesni%C3%A8re/dp/9027212120/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1424763754&amp;amp;sr=1-1&amp;amp;keywords=Elements+of+Structural+Syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be able to hook you up with a copy of this tome, too, if you contact me. Note that Tesniere's book begins at a rather basic level, and builds, and builds, and builds, for almost 700 pages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T01:42:11.980" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T01:42:11.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-24T14:23:31.080" Score="8" ViewCount="1664" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a footnote in Jurafsky &amp;amp; Martin (2008, p.89) pointing out that, without an end-symbol, an n-gram model would not be &quot;a true probability distribution&quot;. Even after seeking the paper they've referenced, I could not get the point. Here is the example and the footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;s&amp;gt; I am Sam &amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;s&amp;gt; Sam I am &amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;s&amp;gt; I do not like green eggs and ham &amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the end-symbol, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, the authors say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&quot;We need the end-symbol to make the bigram grammar a true probability distribution. Without an end-symbol, the sentence probabilities for all sentences of a given length would sum to one, and the probability of the whole language would be infinite.&quot;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone help me to interpret the quoted part above? Or, does anybody know about some resource that could help me understand what is the need for an end-symbol in n-gram models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9255" LastEditorUserId="9255" LastEditDate="2015-02-24T15:15:00.320" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T23:31:54.730" Title="What's the real need for an end-symbol in n-gram models?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11502" CreationDate="2015-02-24T19:19:01.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's your third point: Written modern French reflects a much older version of the spoken language than the analogous situation for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different languages have different &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;orthographic depth&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. different degrees of letter-sound-correspondences: while no language has a percent 1:1 correspondence, some get closer to that than others. The reason for an orthography becoming deeper is that spoken language changes through sound changes whereas orthography is far slower to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at the time of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;, French orthography pretty much was what it is today - later &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reforms&lt;/a&gt; mostly added some diacritics. However, French spoken language still changed (and changes). So you can easily comprehend written French of that time, but if you pronounce it you would use modern French and not how Shakespeare would have pronounced it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English orthography&lt;/a&gt;, however, just started to be regularized at the time, so the spelling will look weird to you. Besides, English was in the middle of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt; during that time, which made looking for a common orthography rather difficult, and when the dust settled (and the face of English remaining significantly changed) the orthography that prevailed was not the one of Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6926" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T11:29:11.823" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T11:29:11.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11502" CreationDate="2015-02-24T19:40:29.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This discussion has become a bit abstract. If you look at the actual orthography in Shakespeare’s First Folio you will agree (I think) that it does not look very much like modern French. Here is small sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kathe. Alice, tu as este en Angleterre, &amp;amp; tu bien parlas&#xA;le Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice. En peu Madame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kath. Ie te prie m'ensigniez, il faut que ie apprend a parlen: Comient appelle vous le main en Anglois?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice. Le main il &amp;amp; appelle de Hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kath. De Hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice. E le doyts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kat. Le doyts, ma foy Ie oublie, e doyt mays, ie me souemeray&#xA;le doyts ie pense qu'ils ont appellede fingres, ou de fingres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice. Le main de Hand, le doyts le Fingres, ie pense que ie&#xA;suis le bon escholier.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kath. I'ay gaynie diux mots d'Anglois vistement, coment&#xA;appelle vous le ongles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-24T19:40:29.703" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T02:09:09.640" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;When studying an agglutinative language, one sometimes encounters the following type of helpful diagram, which labels a sentence according to the grammatical function of each constitutive element. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a (poorly designed) mock-up of the kind of diagram I am referring to:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pNSGw.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mock-up diagram&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this type of diagram have a name? If so, what is it called?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to find a program (or LaTeX package) that can be used to quickly create these diagrams, but I am not sure what to be searching for! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9258" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T23:26:09.427" Title="What is the name for this type of diagram?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2015-02-25T05:47:12.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a term for this, namely &quot;light verb&quot;, which may help you to Google examples. This is actually separate from the question of verbs being a closed class. Such constructions are common in Kurdish and Indic languages (and Farsi per Nils von Barth, so see &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/butt/main/papers/cp-volume.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for focus on Indic), and some Bantu languages. Korean starkly contrasts with Bantu languages in the potential for loans. Apparently Korean absolutely resists borrowing verbs, but Bantu languages so not, though both have light verb constructions. So I think the question of being &quot;closed class&quot; is different from having relatively open light verb constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T05:47:12.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2015-02-25T08:23:03.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6874/2245&quot;&gt;Olivier's answer&lt;/a&gt;, there is further evidence for binary branching structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there's about as theory-neutral evidence as you can get for binary branching in the NP domain. Consider (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1)  a.  That big brown fury dog&#xA;     b.  That big brown fury one&#xA;     c.  That big brown one&#xA;     d.  That big one&#xA;     e.  That one&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the NP complement of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; had any structure other than binary-branching structure, I'm not sure how you would account for the fact that &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;-substitution can target all of the constituents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also evidence that double object constructions are binary branching. Consider (2); I use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; for coindexation in order to represent the intended meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2)  a.  Mary showed Susan&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; herself&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; (in the mirror)&#xA;     b. *Mary showed herself&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; Susan&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; (in the mirror)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the structure of &lt;em&gt;showed Susan herself&lt;/em&gt; were flat/ternary, there's no immediate reason that (2b) should be ruled out, yet it's bad. If you're worried about me sneaking in the Binding Theory and c-command here, the same thing can be shown with passivization. Consider (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(3)  a.  Mary gave Susan a book&#xA;     b.  Susan was given a book by Mary&#xA;     c. *A book was given Susan by Mary &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the structure of double object constructions were ternary branching, it's not clear why (3c) would be bad. Note that the problem for a flat/ternary analysis of this data is even worse than this, too. (3c) actually is good on the reading where the book is the recipient of Susan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plausibly, somebody advocating a flat/ternary analysis of this data could claim that their theory accounts for the data by assuming that the interpretation of the arguments to the verb depend on the linear order and that passivization also happens via a rule that adverts to linear order. In other words, (3c) is good on the reading where the book is the recipient of Susan because it started out as &lt;em&gt;Mary gave a book Susan&lt;/em&gt; and was transformed into a passive by grabbing the closest DP, &lt;em&gt;a book&lt;/em&gt;. But passivization &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; occur as the result of some rule/transformation that adverts to linear order, as the passivization of dative verbs from German shows. (German examples were adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/28/paper2440.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(4)  a.  Eva     hat Jan     den     Rucksack     gehalten&#xA;         Eva.NOM has Jan.DAT the.ACC backpack.ACC held&#xA;         `Eva held the backpack for Jan'&#xA;     b.  Der     Rucksack     wurde Jan     gehalten &#xA;         The.NOM backpack.NOM was   Jan.DAT held&#xA;         `The backpack was held for Jan'&#xA;     c. *Jan     wurde den     Rucksack     gehalten&#xA;         Jan.NOM was   the.ACC backpack.ACC held&#xA;         `The backpack was held for Jan'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar evidence against a ternary/flat analysis and in favor of a binary analysis can also be shown with the &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-dative verb &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt;. Consider (5) and (6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(5)  a.  Mary&amp;lt;j&amp;gt; explained Susan&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; to herself&amp;lt;i/j&amp;gt;&#xA;     b.  Mary&amp;lt;j&amp;gt; explained herself&amp;lt;*i/j&amp;gt; to Susan&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&#xA;(6)  a.  Mary explained Susan to Bill&#xA;     b.  Susan was explained to Bill by Mary&#xA;     c. *To Bill was explained Susan by Mary&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also evidence that suggests adjuncts are adjoined in such a way so as to create binary branching structure. For example, if the structure of &lt;em&gt;shot a deer with a gun&lt;/em&gt; were flat, there would be no way to explain the two interpretations of (7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(7)  Mary shot a deer with a gun&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) can mean either (i) that Mary shot a deer, and she used a gun to do the shooting; or (ii) Mary shot a deer, and the deer had a gun. These two meanings follow straightforwardly from assuming binary branching structure and that the adjunct can adjoin to either the NP or the &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the last bit of evidence that I can think of at the moment that isn't already covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6874/2245&quot;&gt;Olivier's answer&lt;/a&gt;—there's probably more—comes from morphology. If you buy into non-lexicalist theories, such as Distributed Morphology, then you have further evidence for binary branching structure. I can't imagine, for example, that anybody thinks the structure of &lt;em&gt;governmental&lt;/em&gt; is flat as in [govern -ment -al]. Surely it has to be [[govern -ment]-al]. So if you do everything in the syntax, then derivational morphology is going to be another argument for there being a lot of binary branching syntactic structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's recap. (1) shows evidence for binary branching in the NP domain. (2) through (7) provide evidence against analyzing structures which could plausibly be analyzed as ternary/flat as ternary/flat. (Moreover, the data in (2) through (7) follow straightforwardly on an account that assumes binary branching, some version of the Binding Theory, and some version of Relativized Minimality, the latter two being quite robustly independently motivated.) And the morphological argument is further evidence for there being a lot of binary branching in the syntax if non-lexicalist theories of derivational morphology are right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this answer has not shown is evidence that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; syntactic structure is binary branching, which is at least the title of your question. I don't think it's possible to do that, at least not if you're looking for a completely dispositive case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what this answer has shown is evidence for binary branching in a lot of different types of syntactic structures. And given that binary branching is well motivated in many syntactic structures, the null hypothesis ought to be that all syntactic structures are binary branching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an analogy will be helpful here: I think you would be hard-pressed to make a completely dispositive case that all matter is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. We have good evidence that a lot of matter is like that, so we assume that it all is. But unless you go check every single piece of matter, I'm not sure what dispositive evidence one could offer for such a hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2245" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T08:23:03.820" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11455" CreationDate="2015-02-25T10:44:56.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The normal English (as spoken in England) is 'I'm called'. From the responses given so far I am very surprised to discover this is not used in some american dialects but certainly it is very common in standard English as spoken in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T10:44:56.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9819" CreationDate="2015-02-25T12:35:23.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to research by Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult, there are some languages that use more abstract odor words, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140103085248.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Odors expressible in language, as long as you speak right language&lt;/a&gt;. It appears that speakers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahai_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jahai&lt;/a&gt; can describe odors with the same ease as colors: “Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.srf.ch/wissen/mensch/warum-gerueche-so-unbeschreiblich-sind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Warum Gerüche so unbeschreiblich sind (srf.ch)&lt;/a&gt;, there is an example word from Jahai: &lt;em&gt;pʔus&lt;/em&gt; describes the odor that is found in old rice, boiled cabbage, mushrooms and some hornbill birds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Majid and Burenhult speculate that the ability of Jahai speakers to precisely name odors is determined by their culture. It comes from the importance of the odors in their everyday life as hunters and gatherers in the Malay Peninsula rainforest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6758" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T12:35:23.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T17:41:41.920" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of language learning software, apps, intelligent games on the market, but nearly all of them focuses on grammar and lexical aspects of linguistics. I wonder if any techniques are dedicated to prosodic aspects of language acquisition, to helping learnings lose their accent or children overcome speech impediments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-02-26T05:43:57.443" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T08:20:26.147" Title="Are there any tools on the market that employ prosodic research to help overcome speech impediments?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11566" CreationDate="2015-02-25T18:29:16.877" Score="7" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a language exist whose older forms are known to have lacked the category of grammatical gender, and which proceeded to evolve one (perhaps from a non-gender-based system of noun classes)? Are &quot;pre-gender&quot; stages of language evolution, where they existed, universally a thing of such distant past as to be beyond reconstruction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T04:12:22.390" Title="Has grammatical gender ever been observed to emerge in a language that previously had none?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11505" CreationDate="2015-02-25T18:56:43.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sumerian hypothesis has no basis in fact, and you have raised valid objections against it. As for Indo-European: Ἠριδανός has a short α in the third syllable. It thus cannot be connected either with IE *dān- ‘river’ (which has a long ā) or with IE *dhen- ‘to flow’ (which would be *θεν- in Greek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-02-25T20:11:49.587" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T20:11:49.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-25T20:17:49.913" Score="3" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to learn two Slavic languages, any two initially, and eventually at least one each from the East, West, and South Slav groups. I understand that each language has its own version of the Cyrillic alphabet. Where the same letter exists in the alphabets for two or more Slavic languages, is its sound value, for the most part, consistent across them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Does not necessarily have to include Russian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9265" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T12:25:35.610" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T03:40:31.760" Title="Are the orthographies of the Slavic languages generally consistent?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11544" CreationDate="2015-02-25T20:54:41.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the most part, yes. The phoneme inventories of the languages are not identical so Serbian has &amp;lt;Ћ&gt;=/tɕ/ and &amp;lt;Ч&gt;=/tʃ/ and Russian does not have &amp;lt;Ћ&gt;. There are &quot;major&quot; differences such as &amp;lt;Г&gt; representing [ɦ] in Belarusian and [g] in Russian. Languages also differ in whether spelling reflects phonological rules, e.g. final &amp;lt;В&gt;=/v/ in Russian is [f]. Belarusian changes /v/ to [w] finally and this does result in a changes of letters to &amp;lt;Ў&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T20:54:41.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11544" CreationDate="2015-02-25T21:47:31.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where the same letter exists in the alphabets for 2 or more Slavic languages, is its sound value, for the most part, consistent across them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is mostly true, in the sense that reading a word in a wrong language does not corrupt it too much. The same letter either denotes the same phoneme or a similar one.&#xA;However, there are some mismatches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/i/ is written as &lt;strong&gt;И&lt;/strong&gt; in most languages, except Belorussian and Ukrainian, where in it written &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;; meanwhile the letter &lt;strong&gt;И&lt;/strong&gt; denotes a harder vowel /I/ in Ukrainian, corresponding to &lt;strong&gt;Ы&lt;/strong&gt; in Russian and Belorussian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɛ/ is written &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;  in Ukrainian but &lt;strong&gt;Э&lt;/strong&gt; in  Russian and Belorussian. /je/ is written &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt; in Russian and Belorussian, but &lt;strong&gt;Є&lt;/strong&gt; in Ukrainian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/g/ is written &lt;strong&gt;Г&lt;/strong&gt; in Russian and &lt;strong&gt;Ґ&lt;/strong&gt; in Ukrainian. The letter &lt;strong&gt;Г&lt;/strong&gt;  is pronounced as fricative /ɦ/ in Ukrainian and Belorussian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letter &lt;strong&gt;Ъ&lt;/strong&gt; is a vowel in Bulgarian (pronounced as /ɤ/ or /ɐ/) but is mute (or pronounced as /j/) in Russian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5696" LastActivityDate="2015-02-25T21:47:31.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11544" CreationDate="2015-02-26T03:11:46.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling of Slovene is less phonetic (at least in some respects) than that of some other Slavic languages, most notably that of its neighbor Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, syllable-final &lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt; in Slovene is often pronounced like [w], as in &lt;em&gt;napisal&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(he) wrote&quot;. In Croatian, the corresponding word is &lt;em&gt;napisao&lt;/em&gt;, where the spelling has been updated to reflect the sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, word-final or preconsonantal &lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt; in Slovene is generally pronounced as [w], as in &lt;em&gt;zdra&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;healthy&quot;, &lt;em&gt;posta&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;ljati&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to place&quot;, etc. By contrast, the &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; in Croatian &lt;em&gt;zdrav&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;postavljati&lt;/em&gt; etc. is closer to a true [v] (though not quite the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just realized that maybe your question was only about Slavic languages that use Cyrillic alphabets (which doesn't include Slovene or Croatian), but I will leave this answer here in case it's useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-02-26T03:21:11.310" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T03:21:11.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-26T07:14:09.843" Score="0" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swiss-German has dative and accusative case-marking for its objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &quot;I gave him the book,&quot; &quot;him&quot; must be marked as dative and &quot;the book&quot; must be marked as accusative. It's clear that &quot;him&quot; is the indirect object since you can rewrite the sentence as &quot;I gave to him the book.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the verb &quot;help&quot; requires it's subject to have a dative case, which semantically makes sense since the object is the beneficiary of the action in the sentence. But syntactically, it seems to be of a different flavor, one which I don't understand with my rudimentary knowledge of generative syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, you can't rewrite &quot;I helped Hans build the house&quot; using &quot;helped to Hans.&quot; Second, it looks like &quot;help&quot; is taking an independent clause as an argument with no explicit or even implicit complementizer, but the fact that &quot;Hans&quot; is marked (in Swiss German: &quot;em Hans&quot;) makes it seem as though it is just taking &quot;Hans&quot; as an argument. Is there any discussion in generative syntax or elsewhere about this? Do you know of any references that might help me answer similar questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, if you couldn't already tell, I started thinking about this because of this paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9269" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T11:26:17.193" Title="How is the dative case for help being used here?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11548" CreationDate="2015-02-26T12:08:21.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are confusing English with German. In German (not just Swiss German, but all dialects, and standard German too) the verb helfen governs the dative case. In Old English helpen was similarly construed with the dative or genitive, but in modern English the historic dative and accusative have merged into a single case, generally called objective, illustrated by pronouns like me, him, her, us, them, whom. There is now no morphological distinction between a dative and an accusative case, but there is a syntactical distinction between a direct and an indirect object; this expresses itself in the fact that the indirect object can be paraphrased with the preposition “to”, while the direct object cannot, and also by word order. Thus we say “I gave him the book” or “I gave the book to him”, but we do not use “to” with a direct object. Similarly, we say “I helped him cook” but not “*I helped cook to him”. So why do you want to classify the object of “help” as dative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T12:08:21.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-26T15:30:43.960" Score="0" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please explain 'notwithstanding', only in terms of the adverb 'not' and the root verb 'withstand'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammarist.com/usage/notwithstanding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammarist:&lt;/a&gt; ] &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is mainly a &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammarist.com/grammar/prepositions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preposition&lt;/a&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;in spite of&lt;/em&gt;. Most dictionaries also list it as an &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammarist.com/grammar/adverbs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adverb&lt;/a&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;nevertheless,&lt;/em&gt; but this sense is rarely used in modern English. &lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; is always one word, and this has been the standard spelling for many centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; usually means exactly the same as &lt;em&gt;in spite of&lt;/em&gt;, it is often positioned differently. &lt;em&gt;In spite of&lt;/em&gt; always comes before its object—e.g., “In spite of your feedback, I’m not changing anything.” &lt;strong&gt;But &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; is often postpositive, meaning it comes after its object&lt;/strong&gt;—e.g., “Your feedback notwithstanding, I’m not changing anything.” &lt;strong&gt;Of course, it can come before its object as well&lt;/strong&gt;—e.g., “Notwithstanding your feedback, I’m not changing anything.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/216438/50720&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; explains: 'notwithstanding' etymologically signifies 'not standing against' or 'can't withstand'. Then I intuited  &lt;strong&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/strong&gt;'s signification to vary by position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notwithstanding&lt;/strong&gt; X, Y (happens) = &lt;strong&gt;Can't withstand&lt;/strong&gt; X, Y. = Y, &lt;strong&gt;can't withstand&lt;/strong&gt; X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X &lt;strong&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/strong&gt;, Y.  = X &lt;strong&gt;can't withstand&lt;/strong&gt;, Y.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But 1 is wrong, because 1 signifies the same as 2. So what is wrong with my intuition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T17:38:26.153" Title="Why can 'notwithstanding' be positioned before or after the object without changing meaning?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-26T16:07:41.347" Score="0" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first learned about &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa052501.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Closing Formula for French business letters&lt;/a&gt;, I had found them affected and foreign, especially since I haven't seen them in modern English (though &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/21681&quot;&gt;I'm unversed in complex writing like philosophy&lt;/a&gt;). To my surprise, while seeking letters to read on Founders Online &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/42834/8712&quot;&gt;to improve my reading comprehension&lt;/a&gt;, I encountered this formula in English, though from the late 1700s to early 1800s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. What are some formal terms describing this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Please explain its usage in English vs French? Why did it ebb in English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://founders.archives.gov/index.xqy?q=%22you+to+believe+the+%22&amp;amp;s=1111211111&amp;amp;sa=&amp;amp;r=1&amp;amp;sr=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A search for &lt;code&gt;you to believe the&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; effects &lt;a href=&quot;http://founders.archives.gov/?q=%22you%20to%20believe%20the%20%22&amp;amp;s=1111311111&amp;amp;sa=&amp;amp;r=3&amp;amp;sr=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this letter dated 1804 May 11&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I beg you to believe the Assurances of ...   &#xA;  [ = Je vous prie de croire l'assurance de ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://founders.archives.gov/index.xqy?q=%22you+to+accept+the+%22&amp;amp;s=1111211111&amp;amp;sa=&amp;amp;r=1&amp;amp;sr=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A search for &lt;code&gt;you to accept the&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; effects 234 results of the form:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... beg/entreat/pray you to accept ...  [ = ... vous {la conjugasion de « prier »} d'agréer/accepter ... ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T16:07:41.347" Title="French letter closings in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11555" CreationDate="2015-02-26T20:06:06.697" Score="2" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sentence like &lt;em&gt;His name is Joseph, but you can call him Joe&lt;/em&gt; the names &lt;em&gt;Joseph&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Joe&lt;/em&gt; are not used 'referentially' (to name a certain male individual) but just 'mentioned', i.e., they are used 'metalinguistically' to refer to themselves. Otherwise, of course, such sentences would be nonsensical, as Quine explained long ago, and, for that reason, I instinctively enclose them in quotation marks whenever I have to write sentences like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, as far as I know, at least in English (but also in Spanish, German, French, Italian,... Mandarin) they are not orthographically treated as metalinguistic expressions at all. I mean, they are never enclosed in quotation marks or otherwise marked as cases of 'mention' rather than ordinary referential 'use', are they? Does anybody know why? Are there languages out there in which parallel names in equivalent sentences would be orthographically marked, via quotation marks or similar devices, as cases of metalinguistic, rather than ordinary referential use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-02-27T09:07:15.080" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T12:40:16.877" Title="On use and mention in &quot;His name is Joseph but you can call him Joe&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-26T20:08:59.323" Score="2" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered a number of adjectives while programming that all have the same use case of describing capabilities of a noun. &quot;Clonable&quot;, &quot;serializable&quot;, &quot;runnable&quot;, &quot;hashable&quot;, &quot;immutable&quot;, &quot;iterable&quot; are all examples of this and denote if an object has particular capability. Is there an adjective type that describes all of these -able adjectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9272" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T20:08:59.323" Title="What is the type of adjective that denotes capability?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11553" CreationDate="2015-02-26T21:14:01.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit, there is a quotative particle &lt;em&gt;iti&lt;/em&gt;, which you would use in something like &quot;he is known as Bhagavān&quot;, &quot;he is called Bhagavān&quot;, which seems to be along the lines of what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also happens in Shona and some other African languages, and there's a book on the topic, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/175278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quotative Indexes in African Languages: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey&lt;/a&gt; by Tom Güldemann, which mentions other languages with this construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-02-26T21:41:25.013" LastActivityDate="2015-02-26T21:41:25.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-27T06:50:06.280" Score="2" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a song by rap group NWA they say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The bitch sucked one hell of a dick&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disregarding the potentially offensive nature of the quote, it stood out to me that although &quot;hell of a&quot; is an adjective acting on &quot;dick&quot;, it isn't describing the penis itself, but modifying the act of oral sex (so in this case it's synonymous with &quot;she performs well at oral sex&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is clearly a colloquial use and wouldn't be found in formal text. Are there any examples of this occurring in formal use, and if not, are there further common colloquial answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9276" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T08:06:06.137" Title="Colloquial use of adjective that is actually acting as an adverb -- examples or formal use?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11558" CreationDate="2015-02-27T08:06:06.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wow, the example is indeed probably offensive to some, and I apologize in advance to anyone who is offended by the fact that I am now going to risk an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the question's premise that &lt;em&gt;one hell of a&lt;/em&gt; is frozen expression that functions syntactically like an adjective. Thus &lt;em&gt;one hell of a&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective modifying &lt;em&gt;dick&lt;/em&gt;. Interestingly, the expression &lt;em&gt;suck...dick&lt;/em&gt; is also a fixed expression, that is, the two words &lt;em&gt;suck&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dick&lt;/em&gt; build one meaning together, namely 'fellatio'. The meaning is therefore non-compositional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that &lt;em&gt;one hell of&lt;/em&gt; a is functioning like an adjective because it can be replaced by a clear adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; She sucks good dick. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; functions syntactically and semantically just like &lt;em&gt;one hell of a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is a common occurrence in many languages. A verb and a noun together form a noncompisitional meaning that at times can be expressed with a single verb. Consider the following cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1)  a. Fred showered.&#xA;      b. Fred showered for twenty minutes.&#xA;&#xA;      c. Fred took a shower.&#xA;      d. Fred took a twenty-minute shower.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that the same basic thing is going on in these cases. English, like most languages, has varied means at its disposal that allow it to express closely similar meanings. When the verb and the object noun together form the predicate, as in (1c-d), the language can use an adjective to modify the complex predicate. When the predicate is simple, as in (1a-b), in contrast, the language uses an adverbial expression to modify the predicate (here &lt;em&gt;for twenty minutes&lt;/em&gt;). Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (2)   a. He screwed up terribly.&#xA;       a. He made a terrible mistake.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see the same thing occurring here. The verbal predicate &lt;em&gt;screwed up&lt;/em&gt; in (2a) must be modified by an adverb (here &lt;em&gt;terribly&lt;/em&gt;), whereas the complex predicate &lt;em&gt;made...mistake&lt;/em&gt; can hardly be modified by an adverb (??&lt;em&gt;She made a mistake terribly&lt;/em&gt;), but rather an adjective on the noun must be used (here &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to answer the question directly, the mechanism of modification present in the example in the question is a common type of modification that readily occurs in informal as well as formal language. Complex predicates that are formed with a verb and a noun (or a verb and a PP) can be modified by an adjective, and this adjective then behaves analogously to how an adverb behaves when it modifies a verb directly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T08:06:06.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11544" CreationDate="2015-02-27T08:08:35.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is why you would need to learn just any Slavic language? Generally, people have a reason they want to learn the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if any language will do without regard to usefulness, then I'd recommend starting with a language written in Latin alphabet. In that case, I think Slovak may be slightly more approachable than the others. Both because of the its orthography and phonology. It also has slightly more regular morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the languages that use Cyrillic, you may want to consider Bulgarian - purely because of its limited case morphology, which might make it easier to start. But for this very reason Bulgarian will be less useful as a foundation for learning another Slavic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if you want learn any language well, you'll have to put in about the same amount of work, so it does not matter all that much which Slavic language you pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key commonalities among Slavic languages are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complex inflectional case system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbal aspect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cognates in the vocabulary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you master any Slavic language (except maybe Bulgarian), you will have a really good foundation for learning the next one. But as a Czech native speaker who had to learn Russian, I can confirm that it will still take a lot of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing to consider is how easy it is for you to get the right tools for learning (textbooks, dictionaries, software, videos) and opportunities to practice what you've learned. In that case, you may want to look around you to see, if there happen to be a lot of speakers of a particular language near to where you live. Russian and Polish are the most globally distributed and have the most online resources. But other languages may give you more local opportunities for practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also look into the availability of summer schools for your language. Attending these will be essential to gaining proficiency. So if you find one that is available in a time and place convenient to you, that may determine the language you start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update on orthography:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most of the other answers focus on question of orthography, I've left it out of my answer. But perhaps it is worth noting that all Slavonic languages have orthographies that are relatively transparent in both directions (i.e. spelling can be predicted from pronunciation and vice versa). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a beginner, Polish might present some visual difficulties due to its use of digraphs to represent single sounds but the relationship is mostly regular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian presents more of a difficulty because the pronunciation of some vowels depends on lexical stress which is only marked in textbooks but not in normal writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;South Slavic languages mostly have very transparent orthographies but Slovene does not distinguish certain phonological distinctions in vowels in its alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general, the orthography doesn't make much of a difference in making one Slavic language easier to learn than another. And certainly any similarities/differences will be almost irrelevant when moving from learning one to learning another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-02-28T21:34:26.807" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T21:34:26.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11541" CreationDate="2015-02-27T08:20:26.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some software available. For instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.batcs.accentukonedemo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Get Rid of Your Accent&lt;/a&gt; app and the many &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/search?q=speech%20therapy&amp;amp;c=apps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Speech Therapy Apps&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to speech therapy dealing with impediments, this is often so highly individualised that it almost always requires a trained person to intervene. That is not to say that some computer-assisted solutions would not be possible or useful but any software solution will only be a small part of the intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you look at the kind of work it takes to achieve prosodic proficiency - particularly when it comes to accent removal, you can see that software can only take you so far. I recommend looking at Melody Noll's Ameritalk for some examples: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ameri-talk.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ameri-talk.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T08:20:26.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11553" CreationDate="2015-02-27T12:40:16.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not marked because there is no need for them to be: in ordinary discourse, there is no ambiguity and no practical likelihood of misunderstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing is a technology with a complex mixture of motivated and arbitrary features; but the use-mention distinction is one that has rarely been marked in writing, especially in languages where it is not made in speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a &quot;quotative&quot; particle &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;; but what it follows is not necessarily a literial quotation, so the particle might be thought of as encoding &quot;mention&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T12:40:16.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11542" CreationDate="2015-02-27T17:47:39.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Khasi, an Austroasiatic language spoken in Northeast India, differs from practically all other members of that family (at least those outside the Munda branch, as @user6726 rightly points out)  in having grammatical gender.  There is a paper about this:  Lili Rabel-Heymann, ‘Gender in Khasi Nouns’, Mon-Khmer Studies Journal IV: 247-72 (1977), available online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mksjournal.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every Khasi noun is preceded by a gender indicator commonly known as an “article,” a term borrowed for reasons of convenience from the grammar of Indo-European.  This gender indicator is repeated before the verb, and is then known as a pronominal verbal prefix.  A morpheme identical with the nominal article and the verbal pronominal prefix functions in free form as a personal pronoun.  It might therefore be said that the Khasi pronoun occurs as a free morpheme by itself and as a bound form before nouns and verbs.  In any case, the prenominal and preverbal forms always agree with respect to number and gender.&lt;/em&gt; (Heymann p. 247)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While as far as I know there are no surviving records of earlier versions of the language that did not exhibit this feature, we can infer that what was originally a pronoun came to do double duty as a gender marker.  And the reason for the innovation – contact with Indo-Aryan languages in the region – can also be inferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2619" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2015-02-28T04:12:22.390" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T04:12:22.390" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11542" CreationDate="2015-02-27T22:13:02.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, Indo-European seems to be an example. Silvia Luraghi has an article &quot;The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Folia Linguistica&lt;/em&gt; 45/2 (2011), 435–464) which discusses this, and it appears that there is agreement that the M/F/N system of later languages developed from a two-gender system where masculine and feminine were not distinguished, and the system was based on an animate / inanimate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-27T22:13:02.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11581" CreationDate="2015-02-28T11:16:17.830" Score="1" ViewCount="751" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've learnt, structural case is assigned in certain structural configurations. For example, nominative case is assigned by tensed I/T to nominals in SpecIP/TP. Therefore, the case filter allows the nominal subject to become overt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question relates to the VP-internal subject hypothesis. In Greek, the subject is said to be able to remain in SpecVP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Diavaze  sihna   o   Janis     to  vivlio &#xA;Read-3SG usually the Janis-NOM the book-ACC &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If NOM is always assigned in SpecIP, how is &quot;o Janis&quot; able to obtain NOM?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-03-01T10:09:09.560" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T21:09:47.807" Title="Nominative Case Assignment and VP-Internal Subjects" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-02-28T11:23:08.700" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to have an app makes individual sounds of letters (phonemes) and I'm wondering if, rather than record them all myself, I can force Google's speech synthesis engine to give me individual sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, inputting &quot;s&quot; says &quot;ess&quot;, the letter name rather than making the sound of an s as used the beginning of sandwich. I appreciate there are different &quot;s&quot; sounds (ass vs as) so there would obviously need to be some sort of table of phonemes... does anyone know if such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this was the right place to ask! Thanks  in advance for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9283" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T11:23:08.700" Title="Is it possible to force the Google speech synthesis engine to pronounce individual phonemes?" Tags="&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12761" CreationDate="2015-02-28T17:11:10.973" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally purposed for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/51765/8712&quot;&gt;this ELL question&lt;/a&gt;, the following from &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst31804_Another-who-whom-question.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; claims that which I've greyed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I ask about such a claim for English and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[User 'RuthP' dated 2012 Dec 26:]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That is a(n incorrect) hyper-correctness, to which many people are prey. No, because the only verb you have is &lt;strong&gt;to be&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt;, in this case). &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;To be&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;cannot take an object, because it is an identity&lt;/code&gt;, so in your sentences, &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; are the same. Since &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; is the subject, so is &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: I'm unversed in linguistics, but I'm self-learning this with &lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, 2005, by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Pullum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:21:36.687" Title="Is 'identity' a grammatical term?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8763" CreationDate="2015-02-28T18:14:23.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise that grammatical theory should be responsible for predicting diminishing probabilities of occurrence is a problem. All you can do is generate / not generate a class of structures; so you'd have to identify something about the class that distinguishes it from other structures that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; generated. What you can do with just C and V is very limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should look at the original source of the technology, Clements &amp;amp; Keyser's &lt;em&gt;CV Phonology: a Generative Theory of the Syllable&lt;/em&gt;. Their theory starts with the concept of a &quot;core&quot; CV syllable, and transformations on them. One is &lt;em&gt;allowing&lt;/em&gt; onsetless syllables -- that means that no language has obligatorily onsetless syllables. Another is &lt;em&gt;allowing&lt;/em&gt; syllable codas. This means that no language could have &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; onsetless syllables, or &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; closed syllables. Some languages allow any number of vowels in a syllable, and they allow &quot;*&quot; meaning &quot;one or more&quot; to follow V and C, and in fact allow a specific integer value for any instance of *, thus a grammar could allow a maximum syllable of the form &quot;32 consonants plus 6 vowels plus 12 consonants&quot;. However, as far as I know no case has ever been made for setting a specific numeric limit on consonants, since observed maximum sequences always follow from a separate principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other aspects of the theory address the featural content of syllable-initial and -final sequences, such as the fact that English onsets can be [st] but not [ft]. This is the mechanism that drives most of the power to rule out odd i.e. &quot;unlikely&quot; clusters like [mk]. In a later paper (&quot;The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification&quot;) Clements develops a general theory for encoding sonority generalizations, but there will still be language-particular restrictions on certain sequences. The C&amp;amp;K theory has two sequencing mechanisms, positive conditions such as that onset clusters of obstruent plus glide / liquid (&lt;em&gt;tr&lt;/em&gt;) are allowed in English, and negative conditions that non-strident coronals cannot be followed by a lateral (&lt;em&gt;tl&lt;/em&gt;). Using these kinds of conditions, one can actually allow in unbounded set of onset and coda consonants in English, and derive the observed limit (CCC in onsets for instance) from the impossibility of parsing CCCC while obeying these sequencing conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to &quot;*&quot; in core syllables, it does appear that vowel sequences are different, in that there are languages that allow &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; two Vs in a syllable. Hawaiian would be an example. Within CV theory, one would say that Hawaiian has a (C)V2 syllable template, where V2 means &quot;up to two vowels&quot;, at least if it is true that Hawaiian doesn't allow more than two vowels in a syllable. (I've never seen a phonological argument to that effect, it's just stipulated). In that case, &lt;em&gt;hooiaioia&lt;/em&gt; 'certified' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=AXUDAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA131&amp;amp;lpg=RA1-PA131&amp;amp;dq=HOOIAIOIA&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=OQXajBg8jm&amp;amp;sig=SfWdOwz27QMUNsL73huNLJRNNo8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=8l_xVL_KOYfYoAT0l4HIDQ&amp;amp;ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=HOOIAIOIA&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;documented&lt;/a&gt; as a Hawaiian word, not just an internet meme) would have to be more than one syllable -- 4 syllables, perhaps more. Let us suppose that there is no word with the form &lt;em&gt;CVVVVVVVVV&lt;/em&gt;, which would have to be at least 5 syllables. But there are 9-syllable words like &lt;em&gt;kawaiolaonapukanileo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;choral group&quot;, so there cannot be a word-size limit that words have to be under 5 syllables. The notion of morpheme- or word-structure conditions fell into disrepute and there isn't a formal theory of them, so it's hard to tell how one might state such a limit -- at any rate, it would not be a limit pertaining to syllables, it would be about phoneme sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no word &quot;plagrafufu&quot; in English. There is no reason to elevate that gap to the level of a matter of formal principle, i.e. rule it out. Likewise, there is no reason to specifically rule out apparently non-existent &lt;em&gt;hooiaioiai&lt;/em&gt; in Hawaiian. Especially in languages with long words, the set of &quot;actual&quot; words in a language is often a small subset of those generated by motivated syllable structure principles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T18:14:23.147" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11573" CreationDate="2015-02-28T22:26:01.583" Score="2" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;When languages have a morpheme attached to the word that makes it a question, such as a suffix, is this called a question suffix, an interrogative, suffix, etc? I don't have much experience in morphology to know the terms used to label morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8104" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-03-01T09:46:31.163" LastActivityDate="2015-03-01T09:46:31.163" Title="What is the morpheme that marks a question called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11572" CreationDate="2015-02-28T22:36:20.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most often it is called an interrogative {particle/prefix/suffix}. There's no intrinsic reason for using the 25-cent word &quot;interrogative&quot; rather than &quot;question&quot;, but &quot;interrogative&quot; is a fancy-register word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T22:36:20.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8763" CreationDate="2015-02-28T22:37:26.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me introduce you to the David Stampe's Natural Phonology theory of morpheme structure -- i.e. what patterns of segments in morphemes are possible.  It's simple and elegant.  The possible phonological processes in human language are universal among languages, but we don't necessarily apply all of them, so languages differ in regard to which processes children must suppress, or &quot;unlearn&quot;, in order to master their native languages.  A particular pronunciation will be impossible in a language if it would be changed to something else by a phonological process which remains unsuppressed in that language.  If a speaker is confronted with the problem of pronouncing a word of some language he doesn't know, he will adapt the word to his own native language by applying to it all those phonological processes which he never had to suppress when he learned his own language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the problem of describing morpheme structure for a language is essentially the same as the problem of describing how loan words will be adapted to a language.  The morphemes of the language may have any form which will not be altered by any of the processes which have not been suppressed in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally getting around to the initial question, &quot;How can I use C's and V's to describe syllable structures in a way that rules out highly unlikely syllable structures?&quot;, the answer is that you find those phonological processes which would be applicable to unlikely syllable structures in a language so as to change them to some different pronunciation, but which cannot apply to any native admissible syllable structure of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, for a language with all open syllables, which of the universal processes would be inapplicable to any open syllable?  Those are the processes which children learning the language never had to unlearn, and so continue to be active in the phonological systems of adults.  Those would include processes that delete syllable offset consonants and processes that epenthesize vowels in syllable final consonant clusters or after syllable final consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not possible in Natural Phonology to formulate a theory of admissibility without at the same time giving a theory of loan phonology.  The syllable patterns that fail to occur in a language's words are those which would be altered when a word is borrowed from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-02-28T22:37:26.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T17:26:03.147" Score="-2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't help but notice the older generation frequently scolding the younger ones of &lt;em&gt;corrupting&lt;/em&gt; the language by introducing words like &lt;em&gt;lol, ASAP, brb, OMG, pj, etc.&lt;/em&gt; Indeed, with the astronomical growth rate of mobile app usage, I wouldn't be surprised if these &quot;words&quot; earn the canonical status in Spoken English by the turn of the century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But tracing back this behavior, does it seem too far-fetched to believe that in ancient and medieval times, people actually used to communicate in the languages that seem to emanate rhythmic music today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9244" LastEditorUserId="9244" LastEditDate="2015-03-01T20:15:21.870" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T11:24:56.543" Title="Did people actually used poetic languages like Latin and Persian for basic spoken communication?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11621" CreationDate="2015-03-01T22:44:27.597" Score="6" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned once that ancient texts (for example in Latin) did not&#xA;separate words. Was that always true or only in specific kinds of&#xA;documents and writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have been a bit interested in wordplays, like holorimes and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3514/phonological-ambiguity-that-changes-the-syntactic-structure&quot;&gt;phonological ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;, I started wondering whether the lack of&#xA;separation between words could produce sentences that could have&#xA;different meanings depending on how they were cut into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any knowledge of ancient texts doing that, or similar&#xA;wordplays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Homer was adept to wordplay, but they are&#xA;not more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T19:21:46.663" Title="Wordplay in ancient texts" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-01T23:53:14.827" Score="0" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that the representation of an intransitive verb, &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; in lambda calculus would be &lt;code&gt;lambda x. V(x)&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; is the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I represent an intransitive verb followed by a prepositional phrase? For example, &lt;em&gt;I agree with you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solution is to create a transitive verb &lt;code&gt;agree_with&lt;/code&gt; and use the expression &lt;code&gt;lambda x y. agree_with(x,y)&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a first order representation that doesn't mix the concepts of transitivity and intransitivity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="666" LastEditDate="2015-03-02T10:11:49.657" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T06:52:00.767" Title="How to represent a dative verb in first order logic?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11576" CreationDate="2015-03-02T01:55:51.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written language for the longest time tended in large part to be of literary or legal types.  If you're going to take the time to write out something (or worse, carve it), after all, you might as well make it sound nice, pleasant, formal, and do it in some sort of standardized variant of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have renmants of how people spoke more generally outside of these formal contexts that let us know that the flowery language isn't how most people spoke.  Oftentimes I find evidence of it in my work when someone's moaning, complaining, or laughing about how some other person or group speaks &lt;sub&gt;(language pedantry, I'm sure, is as old as language itself)&lt;/sub&gt;.  But those texts aren't the ones we normally are exposed to in Latin or Persian or other major literary languages of the past, so we often end up with a distorted view of how those languages worked at a quotidian level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T01:55:51.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11567" CreationDate="2015-03-02T12:15:17.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the OP seems to want is a solution consistent with &lt;strong&gt;his own&lt;/strong&gt; (broadly late P&amp;amp;PT) assumptions, not lessons on alternative theories of syntax in which his problem may not arise (if it doesn't; we would have to look at that in some depth). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I know nothing about Modern Greek and I am not even familiar with the way(s) generative syntacticians have analysed Greek clause structure either, herebelow is a proposal that, in my view, solves the OP's problem.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that things in Greek are as the OP says (i.e., that &lt;em&gt;o Janis&lt;/em&gt; sits in Spec VP, whereas the verb has ascended into Infl/Tense), and assuming the - now obsolete - theoretical framework he refers to (basically that of &lt;em&gt;Barriers&lt;/em&gt; plus the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis of late P&amp;amp;P Theory), in which Nominative Case is still 'assigned' by T, etc., there &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; ways to assign Nominative Case to a VP-internal subject &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;. The obvious one is &lt;em&gt;via&lt;/em&gt; association of the VP-Internal subject with an empty category (possibly a 'dummy' or 'little pro', see below) in Spec T, under the assumption that, for Case (agreement, categorial, and thematic) purposes, both are links of &lt;strong&gt;the same&lt;/strong&gt; (subject) 'chain'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in English existential sentences like &lt;em&gt;There has been &lt;strong&gt;a student&lt;/strong&gt; waiting for you in your office the whole morning&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a student&lt;/em&gt;, which remains in Spec VP (compare with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;A student&lt;/strong&gt; has been waiting for you in your office the whole morning&lt;/em&gt;, where it has ascended to Spec T), is said to receive nominative Case &lt;em&gt;via&lt;/em&gt; association, within the same 'chain', with the 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; that occupies Spec T. Recall that, since Spec T is not an a-(rgument) nor a th-(ematic) position, when the subject does not ascend from Spec VP into it, it &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be occupied by a 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, and only 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; can locally 'receive' 'structural Case' from +Tense. That - plus satisfying the Projection Principle, and doing so by providing phonetic content, since English is not a 'pro-drop' language and needs something pronounceable in Spec T - is the only function of 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. Then, so the standard explanation goes, the subject &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt; satisfies the Case Filter because the 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; associated with it does receive structural Nominative Case, cannot 'absorb' it (because it is not an argument), and must leave it 'available' in the subject chain for the NP &lt;em&gt;a student&lt;/em&gt; to 'absorb' it. All that is consistent with late P&amp;amp;PT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the Greek case the OP asks about, to solve his 'problem' it would suffice to claim that &lt;em&gt;o Jannis&lt;/em&gt; is also part of a subject 'chain' that contains a higher link in Spec T. The difference would be that, Greek being a 'pro-drop' language, that 'link' would not need to have phonetic content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on which version of P&amp;amp;PT one subscribed to, that 'silent' higher chain-link might correspond to the 'little' &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt; assumed to 'fill' apparently empty subjects in other 'pro-drop' languages (Spanish, Italian) or be filled by a phonetically empty Greek correlate of English 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, such a pro/dummy-DP chain would not cause any unification trouble at all, because a) there is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; conflicting PF content (which &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a unification problem in the case of English &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;-DP chains!), b) there is a single (Agent) theta role (assigned to &lt;em&gt;o Janis&lt;/em&gt; in Spec VP), c) there is a single Case (Nominative, structurally assigned in Spec T, but 'absorbed' by the overt DP &lt;em&gt;o Janis&lt;/em&gt; in Spec VP), and d) there is a unique set of Agreement ('phi') features (here: person, gender, number) inherently provided by the overt DP &lt;em&gt;o Janis&lt;/em&gt; in the lower chain link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, as far as I can see, such sentences are not problematic for late P&amp;amp;P Theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T21:09:47.807" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T21:09:47.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11583" CreationDate="2015-03-02T13:03:18.807" Score="0" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;What heads can an adverbial phrase have?&#xA;Consider the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    I'll go to bed [soon]_AdvP.&#xA;    I'll go to bed [in an hour]_AdvP.&#xA;    I'll go to bed [when I've finished my book]_AdvP.&#xA;    I'll do it [on my own]_AdvP.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is rather easy to identify the &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt; of the adverbial phrase in the first example, it is &lt;code&gt;soon&lt;/code&gt;. &#xA;What is the head of the adverbial phrase in the second, third and forth example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;code&gt;hour&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;finished&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;own&lt;/code&gt; respectfully? &#xA;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2967" LastEditorUserId="2967" LastEditDate="2015-03-02T14:30:10.167" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T20:59:17.997" Title="What heads can an adverbial phrase have?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11582" CreationDate="2015-03-02T13:53:17.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; are the syntactic heads of the respective examples. The second and the fourth example are PPs, so we can expect a preposition to appear as the head. The third example is a subordinated clause. This clause is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an adverb, but it rather an adjunct that is semantically interpreted as an adverbial.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Identifying the bracketed parts of the examples as &quot;adverbials&quot; is more a semantic decision that a syntactic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T13:53:17.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11582" CreationDate="2015-03-02T14:28:31.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does there have to be a category AdvP?  McCawley suggests in &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt; that an adverb is a modifier of anything other than a noun (for which we have the special term &quot;adjective&quot;).  So lets just use &quot;adverb&quot; in that way, as a term of convenience.  Then for your example &quot;I'll go to bed in an hour&quot;, if the sentence structure makes &quot;in an hour&quot; a modifier of &quot;go to bed&quot;, &quot;in an hour&quot; is an adverb, according to the definition, but its category in the sentence structure is PP (or P-bar).  If you want to reserve the term &quot;adverb&quot; for lexical adverbs like &quot;immediately&quot;, we can call &quot;in an hour&quot; an &quot;adverbial&quot; instead of &quot;adverb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a case for a category Adverb-bar, for a phrase whose head is a lexical adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a neat characterization of &quot;modifier&quot; that emerges from McCawley's analyses, but which he doesn't state explicitly.  A &quot;modifier&quot; is something that is appended to a constituent of some category to create another constituent of the same category.  So &quot;in an hour&quot; will be a modifier of &quot;go to bed&quot;, which let's say is a VP, if we assign the structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[VP [VP go to bed ] [PP in an hour ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Modifier&quot; is another term of convenience which need not be a category that turns up in sentence structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: I see that I didn't get around to answering the question.  Any head whatsoever -- that's the answer, so far as what I said above goes.  I've placed no constraint on what a modifier can be (though there might be such constraints), so anything that could be the head of something could be the head of an adverbial phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-02T20:59:17.997" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T20:59:17.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11578" CreationDate="2015-03-02T22:22:51.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following NLTK feature-based context-free grammar will parse the sentence &quot;X agrees with Y&quot; into &lt;code&gt;agree(X,Y)&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; S[NUM=?n,SEM=&amp;lt;?np(?vp)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; NP[NUM=?n, SEM=?np] VP[NUM=?n,SEM=?vp] &#xA; NP[NUM=?n,SEM=?np] -&amp;gt; N[NUM=?n, SEM=?np] &#xA; VP[NUM=?n,SEM=&amp;lt;?np(?vp)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; BV[NUM=?n, SEM=?vp] PP[SEM=?np]&#xA; BV[NUM=sg,SEM=&amp;lt;\y x.agree(x,y)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; 'agree'&#xA;&#xA; PP[SEM=?np] -&amp;gt; Prep N[SEM=?np]&#xA;&#xA; N[NUM=sg, SEM=&amp;lt;\P.P(X)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; 'X'&#xA; N[NUM=sg, SEM=&amp;lt;\P.P(Y)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; 'Y'&#xA;&#xA; Prep -&amp;gt; 'with'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This representation oversimplifies important aspects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It treats the object of any prepositional phrase as the object of the verb. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It skirts the complexity of a bipartite verb by omitting the second verb phrase. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will, accordingly, fail on sentences such as &quot;I agree with you on something.&quot; or, even worse &quot;I agree on something with you.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastActivityDate="2015-03-02T22:22:51.403" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-03T01:14:00.207" Score="0" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that syntax deals with the ways words are put together to form phrases and sentences, I would like to know how does it relate to linguistics more broadly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9235" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T17:29:35.190" Title="Syntax and linguistics" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11603" CreationDate="2015-03-03T02:24:45.243" Score="6" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like every scholar since Hinds has only mentioned English as a writer-responsible language, which is also used to contrast reader-responsible languages (that are usually identified as Asian languages).&#xA;I've been searching and searching and haven't been able to come up with languages, other than english, that are defined as writer-responsible. The broadest list I've been able to identify as US/UK/Canadian English. But what I'm looking for specifically are languages other than English. &#xA;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9293" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T07:50:17.183" Title="What languages are writer-responsible?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11586" CreationDate="2015-03-03T02:32:19.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To place syntax in a more general context, many use some version of Charles Morris's taxonomy of the general theory of signs, Morris, Charles (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).  My version of it is partly due to what Richmond Thomason says about it in his logic text, and partly due to what McCawley says about grammar in his text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language, or sign system, concerns the signs themselves, the significance of the signs in the world, the people who use the signs.  The study of what signs and combinations of them are part of a language is &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt;, according to Thomason, but &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; according to McCawley. Following linguistic tradition, &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; has a different sense -- the structure of words -- so with McCawley, I use &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of the relations of signs to one another is &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;, including the study of implication, which is &lt;em&gt;logical syntax&lt;/em&gt;. This is how McCawley uses the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of the relation between signs and the world is &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt;.  This is generally how logicians and philosophers use this term, at least in principle, but linguists usually use &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt; to mean some sort of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of how people use the signs in reference to things in the world is &lt;em&gt;pragmatics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the terms in this way, I would say that the original question is actually about &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In usage by linguists, the terms &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;extremely&lt;/strong&gt; fluid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own main interest is in &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt;, but in contrast, McCawley arrived at the view that &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; is both uninteresting and undoable (these are my words, though, not his).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomason's text that I refer to is &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B0006C4MZQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Symbolic Logic: An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;.  McCawley's text is &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226556298&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T02:57:53.337" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T02:57:53.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11586" CreationDate="2015-03-03T03:16:18.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is an extremely broad field, encompassing aspects of sociology, physiology, psychology, computer science, law, education etc. etc. and the structure of languages. E.g. English has certain properties, Chinese has others, and Swahili has yet others. The study of the structure of languages (generally, or individually) at a single time -- like, English as spoken now, by me, or by you, is the study of the &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; of a language. It is obvious that we have words (it may be hard to tell in some cases whether you have one word or two, but it's not hard to tell that there is a word &quot;person&quot; or a word &quot;kill&quot; or a word &quot;snake&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of how words can be arranged into utterances is the domain of syntax. For instance, in English you can say &quot;The children see the man&quot; and not *&quot;See the children the man&quot;, though in some languages you can say that (sometimes only that, somtimes, that as well&quot;). Syntax is related to the field of morphology in that the words &quot;kill&quot;, &quot;kills&quot;, &quot;killed&quot; and &quot;killing&quot; are related words, and you have to pick the right word form in constructing a sentence like &quot;The snake ___ people&quot;, inserting a form of &quot;kill&quot; (&lt;em&gt;kills&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;kill&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;killing&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphology is related to phonology, in that phonology takes simple and invariant parts of words and modifies the pronunciation, for example the past tense is pronounced [t] in &quot;slapped&quot;, as [d] in &quot;scrubbed&quot; and as [ɨd] in &quot;wetted&quot; – there are rules that change the suffix /-d/ supplied by the morphology so that it's pronounced [t] or [ɨd], depending on the context. Phonetics then provides more precise specifications of the physical implementation of individual sounds. Semantics, on the other hand (getting back to syntax) specifies the relationship between the meaning of an utterance and the words, morphemes, and syntactic structures that you use. The division between pragmatics and semantics is subtle and contentious, and you need to ask a separate question about that, if you care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also relationships between semantics and morphology (morphemes often have a particular semantic function), semantics and phonology (there are, occasionally, phonological rules that are sensitive to semantic properties), phonology and syntax, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T03:16:18.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11576" CreationDate="2015-03-03T11:24:56.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question title is yes and no. Speaking about Latin: When the Roman Empire was spread all over the nations facing the Mediterranean Sea, Latin was the official language of the empire, and so it spread as well, growing and developing. However by the time the Roman Empire fell, there was a separation between written and spoken latin, although this had already been true before this particular event. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the first one (used mainly by intellectuals and for documents, ceremonies, bureaucracy, etc) stayed mostly the same, while the latter changed more rapidly. It was spoken by the common people, the peasants, and it was called Vulgar Latin (vulgar here is not intended as &quot;indecent, tasteless&quot;, rather it comes from Lat. &lt;em&gt;vulgus&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;common people&quot;). For this separation we also need to take into account the lack of literacy in the lower classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Roman Empire fell, communications also fell apart and many zones stayed more isolated. Due to various influences (mainly by the populations present in each region) we could have witnessed the birth of various &quot;vulgar languages&quot;, that ultimately became what we now know as Romance Languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, even though Latin had a certain status throughout the ages, not everyone was able to speak or write it &quot;properly&quot;. Certainly not everybody could speak Classical or Medieval Latin, but only a modified version of it which increasingly changed from written latin as time went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T11:24:56.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-03T13:21:26.353" Score="2" ViewCount="2183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was first introduced to lambda calculus as a way to use syntax to compose the semantic value of a phrase from the semantic values of the components of that phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lambda calculus does more than that, but I don't understand how it is more than a notation system for logic.&lt;/strong&gt; (To be clear, I'm not claiming anything other than my limited understanding.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that lambda calculus any order logic. Untyped lambda calculus works for first-order logic. Typed lambda calculus works for higher-order logics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An association with lambda calculus and first-order logic comes because implementation of higher-order logic are less common in programming languages. For example, Python's NLTK only allows first order logic. Lambda-prolog implements typed lambda calculus. More people use Python than Prolog. (I am not sure whether more computational linguists use Prolog than Python.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-03T13:26:39.953" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T09:33:22.480" Title="What is the relationship between lambda calculus and logical form?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2015-03-03T14:47:20.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the lambda calculus is, as you say, a notation system for logic, and for other mathematics.  Linguists need to be specially concerned with notation systems for logic, because natural languages are also notation systems for logic, inasmuch as we generally carry out our logical reasoning in a natural language.  Thus we are drawn to the study of logical notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns and pronouns in natural languages correspond to variables in predicate logic, but some human languages have fewer nouns than others, and there might even be some human languages without nouns.  That is a reason to be especially interested in logic systems that can do without variables, like the lambda calculus or combinatory logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a background article from Quine on eliminating variables from logical and other formal expressions: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2008/05/quine-variables-explained-away.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Variables Explained Away&lt;/a&gt;.  It's interesting that he finds himself inventing operators that look a lot like reflexive and passive constructions in natural languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T14:47:20.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2015-03-03T17:11:53.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lambda calculus is a way of turning open expressions (that is, expressions with free variables) into functions. For example, λx.x+1 is a function that takes numbers to numbers. λx.x+y is a function from numbers to expressions with one free variable (if the domain of discourse are numbers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In natural language semantics, lambda calculus can be used to assemble meaning during parsing. The idea is that every word has a meaning (assigned to it in the lexicon) and syntax helps assign meaning to more complex syntactic units. In higher-order logic, the meaning of &quot;Mary obviously loves John&quot; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;obviously(love(Mary,John))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the lexicon, &lt;strong&gt;||loves||=λx.λy.love(x,y)&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;||obviously||=λP.obviously(P)&lt;/strong&gt;. On this view, syntactic composition is function application (hence the name &quot;functionism&quot; for this approach).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say that lambda calculus is unwieldy for implementing meaning assembly because it isn't monotonic. But it's a wrong approach to use lambda calculus at the level of surface syntax. (Linguistic) meaning is part of deep syntax, hence it should be assembled there. Deep syntax structures are unordered (or can be viewed as unordered for the purpose of semantic representation) and thus a λ-expression can refer to grammatical functions raher than the order in which syntactic structures are built up. In glue semantics (which uses linear logic) the meaning of &quot;love&quot; is taken to be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;λx.λy.love(x,y) : σ(subj) &amp;otimes; σ(obj) &amp;#8888; σ(S) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus in glue semantic the meaning of both &quot;John loves Mary&quot; and &quot;Mary John loves&quot; can be assembled using the same rule though in the latter sentence it's the subject what is &quot;attached&quot; first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However higher-order logic is unwieldy for reasoning as it's more complex and less understood that first-order logic. Davidson, Parsons, Hobbs, and Pietroski (to name just a few) argue that logical forms should be conjunctions of positive literals. On this view, the meaning of &quot;John loves Mary&quot; is the existential closure of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;love(e,John,Mary) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;love(e) &amp;and; Actor(e,John) &amp;and; Patient(e,Mary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where e is an eventuality (also called situation, possible event, or state of affairs). Such logical forms can express everything one can encounter in language (such as quantification and logical connectives) so there's no reason not to use them if it helps elsewhere. And help it does a lot in pragmatically interpreting discourse. Meaning assembly that produces this kind of logical forms can be easily implemented (with or without lambda calculus) in both phrase-based and dependency-based grammar formalisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T23:24:25.890" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T23:24:25.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-03T17:14:00.837" Score="3" ViewCount="1108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am starting studying linguistics independently. I have a few basic doubts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has following types of words: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this is capable of describing anything. But can there be more type of words? Also can we have languages that uses less types of words but still are capable of describing anything&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there is something called auxilary verbs also called helping verbs in english.&#xA;For e.g.:- Does he want that?&#xA;In this sentence &quot;does&quot; is the auxilary verb which adds further meaning to the verb &quot;want&quot;. It is possible that there is single verb which combines both the meaning of &quot;does&quot; and &quot;want&quot;. So are auxilary verbs necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope the questions makes sense. Basically motive of the questions is to understand parts of speech and get an idea on why they are important.&#xA;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9296" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T14:19:35.503" Title="Parts of speech in a language" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11596" CreationDate="2015-03-03T17:31:07.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question makes sense. Auxiliary verbs aren't necessary as there are languages that don't have them. Likewise there are languages without prepositions. Those languages use morphology to express what prepositions express in English (and many other languages). Many Amerindian languages don't have Aux and P. An example: &quot;Juma-t jupa-tak alarapïwa&quot; means &quot;I will buy it from you for him/her&quot; (the suffixes -t and -tak mark ablative and benefactive, respectively, and tense is expressed by the verb ending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T17:31:07.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11596" CreationDate="2015-03-03T19:49:51.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For English, you probably forgot &lt;em&gt;articles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages usually have different sets of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;parts of speech&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;lexical classes&lt;/em&gt;), and the Wikipedia article provides with a decent list of those. For a more detailed analysis, check David Beck's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3B9twxY-7k8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, chapter 4 &quot;Types of lexical inventory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of interesting examples, Thai has &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;noun classifiers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;measure words&lt;/em&gt;). They are used to &quot;compensate&quot; the absence of plural number and also to improve the &quot;rhythm&quot; of the language (a pretty subjective thing which is often forgotten by language learners but is important to native speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are classifiers for types of nouns (animals, people), or based on shape of the objects (round, square, cigar-shaped things), etc. The more or less complete list of Thai noun classifiers is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/ref/classifier-list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, noun classifiers can act as normal nouns, e.g. &lt;code&gt;คน&lt;/code&gt; (see below) is a regular noun meaning &quot;person&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun classifiers are &lt;em&gt;closed class&lt;/em&gt;, so new classifiers are almost never added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;นักเรียน      ๔    คน                    กลับบ้าน&#xA;[nák riːan  sìː  kʰon                   klàp bâːn]&#xA; student    4    classifier for people  return home&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, when you order something in a shop:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ขอ   ไข่ดาว           ๒   ลูก&#xA;[kʰɔ̌ː kʰàj daːw     sɔ̌ːŋ  lûːk]&#xA; want scrambled eggs  2   classifier for round-shaped objects&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-03-03T19:49:51.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6768" CreationDate="2015-03-04T00:45:37.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work with Heylighen &amp;amp; Dewaele's F-score as part of my research. If you need code, please let me know. Here are the three papers I wrote on this topic (another in progress):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~lahiri/cicling2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper 1&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.0069v2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper 2&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.02306.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9298" LastEditorUserId="9298" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T18:13:47.553" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T18:13:47.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11596" CreationDate="2015-03-04T00:56:53.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages have an additional POS termed &quot;ideophone&quot;, which are similar to English words like &quot;bang&quot;, &quot;whump&quot;, &quot;crash&quot;, but frequently with a very wide semantic range, and their syntax can be kind of odd. In Shona, they tend to require an auxiliary verb &quot;say&quot;, for example &lt;em&gt;imbwa yakati mwana n'a&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The dog bit the child&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;yakati&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;he said&quot; and &lt;em&gt;n'a&lt;/em&gt; is the ideophone referring to biting (&lt;em&gt;imbwa&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;dog&quot;, &lt;em&gt;mwana&lt;/em&gt; = 'child'): literally, &quot;The dog said the child 'bite'&quot;. There is a regular verb &lt;em&gt;-ruma&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;bite&quot;, so this can also be rendered &lt;em&gt;imbwa yakaruma mwana&lt;/em&gt;. An ideophone can also be combined with a lexical verb, e.g. &lt;em&gt;imbwa yakaruma mwana n'a&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The dog bit the child 'bite'&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;akabvunza nga nga nga&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he asked persistently&quot; (&lt;em&gt;akabvunza&lt;/em&gt;=&quot;he asked&quot;, &lt;em&gt;nga nga nga&lt;/em&gt; = ideophone meaning 'persistently'). The purpose of the introducer verb &lt;em&gt;-ti&lt;/em&gt; is to provide something for verb inflection to hang on, since ideophones don't inflect. If the ideophone precedes the lexical verb, then the ideophone usually has an introducer (-&lt;em&gt;ti&lt;/em&gt;) and the lexical verb is in the infinitive, so &lt;em&gt;imbwa yakati n'a mwana kuruma&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;the-dog said 'bite' the-child to-bite&quot;) again meaning 'the dog bit the child'. Ideophones have pretty unrestricted syntax (modulo the requirement for the sentence to bear verbal inflection), though perhaps cannot penetrate inside an NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples have provided verb-like and adverb-like semantics; additionally, they can contribute adjective-like semantics, e.g. &lt;em&gt;akavhura nzii bhokisi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he opened the black box&quot; (*akavhura='he opened', &lt;em&gt;nzii&lt;/em&gt;=ideo. 'black'*) – or, &lt;em&gt;bhokisi rakavhurwa nzii&lt;/em&gt; 'the black box was opened'. As far as I know, the ideophone here conveys something about blackness as a consequence of opening the box, like &quot;He opened the box and it was all black inside&quot;. Ideophones do not appear to supply nominal information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are &quot;special&quot; in two areas of phonology. One is they can be monosyllabic, whereas in all other word classes a word undergoes epenthesis to become a least bisyllabic. The second is that they cannot undergo tone sandhi rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T00:56:53.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11604" CreationDate="2015-03-04T01:19:50.597" Score="3" ViewCount="2153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project which requires a corpus of conversational English in plain text (although I can perform some processing as needed). Since I am a student, I need to find a corpus that is free and downloadable. I would appreciate it if someone could provide suggestions for such corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9299" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T16:49:23.077" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T16:49:23.077" Title="Conversational English corpus for download" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2555" CreationDate="2015-03-04T07:02:09.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of two different relations between &quot;right&quot; meaning a direction and &quot;right&quot; meaning correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Biology&lt;/strong&gt;: the right hand is usually stronger; it is the &quot;right&quot; (correct) hand to do things. The left hand is the &quot;left&quot; (remaining; from &quot;leave&quot;) hand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Astronomy&lt;/strong&gt;: in the northern hemisphere, when people get up in the morning and look to the direction of the rising sun (= east), they see it turning slightly to the right of them (= south). Keeping in mind the great importance of the sun, it is easy to understand why they regarded the right side as the &quot;correct&quot; side, and the left side as symbolizing darkness, wrongness and evil.  Note also that in Biblical Hebrew, the same word &quot;yamin&quot; is used for &quot;right&quot; and &quot;south&quot;, and the same word &quot;smol&quot; is used for &quot;left&quot; and &quot;north&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist so I am not sure whether there is evidence to one explanation over the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9302" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T07:02:09.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11588" CreationDate="2015-03-04T07:50:17.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a similar question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8962/how-is-writer-reader-responsible-language-correlated-with-synthetic-analytic-l/8965#8965&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The crux of the answer is that the idea of reader/writer responsible languages is not an objective category of language. It is based on the original distinction made between high and low context cultures which is also highly problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what we know is that all languages require context to interpret the meaning of what is said and written. This is true at all levels from pronunciation, through morphology, lexicon, syntax, all the way to text and discourse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages don't vary in any objective way in the overall amount of context required for interpretation. However, each language (and the same applies to culture) will vary in how much context it requires in any given instance. For instance, English requires context to interpret the genders in a sentence such as &quot;I asked the doctor out on a date.&quot; whereas a language like Russian will know exactly what the genders of all participants were. English, on the other hand, can specify time sequences better in sentences like 'When you get here, I will have been cleaning for 2 hours.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both languages, the writer/speaker will have to decide how much information to include to specify all the details that might be needed for interpretation. And in both languages, there will always be some things left unspecified. This is how language works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when people talk about reader/writer responsible languages (or high/low context cultures), they usually refer to rhetorical traditions. This is not linked to the 'nature of the language' in question. It reflects the way stories are typically told in a culture. This will reflect education and the literary/oral culture canon. Many English-speaking culture (UK/US) have developed a very structured, information-based essay writing tradition. Writers (and speakers) are taught to be explicit about what they are trying to say (e.g. the famous saying: 'Tell them what you're going to say, say what you have to say, tell them what you said.') But in fact, writers are only responsible to follow the convention. And in that, writers are supposed to follow the conventions of any culture. (Also, note that the English conventions I mentioned above only apply to expository writing or speech. Not fiction or other rhetorical styles such as sermons.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conventions will lead to real differences in how writing is structured and what is required for understanding, but there will be no difference in that readers and writers as well as speakers and listeners both have responsibility for creating understanding in any language. And they will use all available linguistically and culturally appropriate tools to make understanding happen (even though the level of understanding required may itself vary). For instance, in American culture it is appropriate to find out the names of people you're talking with by introduction and question. In other cultures, you find out the names by asking someone else. So in those cultures, people spend longer not knowing each other's names after meeting. But that is culturally appropriate lack of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T07:50:17.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2015-03-04T09:16:32.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many spoken English corpora available. But generally, you need to ask more questions than 'plain text' before you find the right one. Length, level of annotation, format of annotation, type of conversation, genre/register, dialect, natural vs. elicited, etc. Those will all depend on the type of research questions you want to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want any one corpus you could try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/santa-barbara-corpus#Contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/santa-barbara-corpus#Contents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CHILDES collection of corpora (most is conversation) - &lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;BASE - British Academic Spoken English &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/base/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/base/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are others (like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/data/obtaining&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Switchboard corpus&lt;/a&gt;) which you can download for a fee or buy on CD (like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/maptask/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edinburgh Map Task corpus&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T09:16:32.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11606" CreationDate="2015-03-04T09:49:14.003" Score="2" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is said that there are three types of modality: deontic, epistemic and dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are sample sentences for each type of modality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; stay as long as you want.&lt;/em&gt; [deontic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be right.&lt;/em&gt; [epistemic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; drive better than you.&lt;/em&gt; [dynamic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two names are said to be derived from the Greek for &amp;quot;biding&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;knowledge&amp;quot;, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as 'epistemic' is concerned, the meaning derived from the Greek is such that I can easily understand why linguists who coined these terms did so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for 'dynamic' and 'deontic', however, it's not as clear to me why 'dynamic' and 'deontic' are chosen to coin the term 'dynamic modality' and 'deontic modality', respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, what's so 'dynamic' about sentence (3)? (3) represents the subject's ability. I mean, what has being 'dynamic' got to do with anything about the subject's ability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's so 'deontic' about sentence (1)? (1) represents the speaker's permission, and not any sort of 'duty' as expressed by the word 'deontic'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the specific meaning of 'dynamic' in 'dynamic modality' that is descriptive of this type of modality?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why use the difficult word 'deontic' when it doesn't actually represent the whole picture of the type of modality that it's supposed to represent?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T14:21:26.490" Title="Why are &quot;dynamic&quot; and &quot;deontic&quot; modalities so called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11605" CreationDate="2015-03-04T16:10:02.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permissive &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; is 'deontic' because its domain is that of obligation: it conveys a sense of &lt;b&gt;un&lt;/b&gt;binding or absence of obligation. &lt;em&gt;You can stay as long as you want&lt;/em&gt; means that you are not 'bound' or 'obliged' to leave at any particular time. This permissive use designates a different kind of possibility than that conferred by physical ability (&lt;em&gt;John can bench-press three hundred pounds&lt;/em&gt;) or logical inference (&lt;em&gt;That can't be true!&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;dynamic&lt;/em&gt; derives from a Greek verb whose root meaning is 'be able', 'have the power', so this use is in fact etymologically closer to the original sense than more familiar uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note by the way that there are dozens of 'types' of modality, not just three. These three come to the fore in discussing English modal verbs because they have been found (somewhat) useful for categorizing the distinguishable ranges of meaning and syntactic use each modal exhibits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2015-03-04T16:15:02.610" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T16:15:02.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-04T21:38:38.887" Score="0" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the hardest language to learn???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9306" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T23:47:11.987" Title="What' s the hardest language to learn?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-05T13:40:22.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2015-03-04T21:52:36.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An approach to answering this is to compile statistics on the average age that children start to talk, learning as natives to speak the various languages of the world.  The higher that age, the harder it must be to learn the language.  The last I heard, by this measure, Russian seems to be quite difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T21:52:36.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2015-03-04T22:36:51.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that undocumented languages with very few speakers are extremely difficult to learn. Even for children. An extinct language with no trace left must be the answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All living languages with compact communities are reasonably easy to learn, the laws of evolution require that. A language that is too difficult to be learned (both by children and by adults) would be doomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5696" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T22:36:51.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11609" CreationDate="2015-03-04T23:47:11.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this is an answerable question. You would have to distinguish between &quot;has acquired the language&quot; from &quot;has not acquired the language&quot;, and you'd have to be able to do it in a way that you're measuring the same thing across cultures / languages. In particular, you would have to distinguish between &quot;has acquired the language&quot; and &quot;has mastered all aspects of our culture&quot;. My experience is that cultures differ substantially in the how important it is to know terms for now-obsolete bean-mashers, and to learn social rituals about the use of &quot;whatever&quot;, so I think any test would be skewed by ideologies about what it means to &quot;have learned&quot; the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-04T23:47:11.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11614" CreationDate="2015-03-05T12:27:50.573" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mishna&lt;/a&gt;, it mentions a musical instrument called a 'סמפוניה', transliterated 'Simp-O-nya'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds rather like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; word &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/symphony?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symphony&lt;/a&gt;, which is a musical composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relation between the two words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9309" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T13:59:55.387" Title="Relation between Hebrew 'סמפוניה' and English 'Symphony'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11613" CreationDate="2015-03-05T12:46:03.847" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;They both come from Greek συμφωνία.This was used in ancient and mediaeval times as a name for various musical instruments, including a type of drum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T12:46:03.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11269" CreationDate="2015-03-05T16:42:46.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you treat the 'sentence' (the 'predication' component of a clause, rather) as a TP, I assume you are broadly subscribing a late version of the Chomskian P&amp;amp;P theory of syntax, and, if so, there are &lt;strong&gt;multiple&lt;/strong&gt; reasons why your tree is completely unacceptable, but I would not say the way you have represented the infinitive is a particularly important one. In that respect, if anything, your Chomskian syntax teacher could, perhaps, object that the lower 'T' should be 'Infl', rather than 'T', or 'T' but specified as [-Tense, -AGR], in opposition to the higher 'T', which should be marked as [+Tense, +AGR], but that's about it. That is not a serious defect, as far as I can see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is really wrong with your tree is that it reflects a strange hybrid theory in which a couple of Chomskian assumptions (the existence of the functional categories T and C as heads of the 'predication' and the 'clause', respectively) coexist with an otherwise traditional 'flat' early phrase structure-style account of everything else. That's why, no matter how you represent the infinitival element, there is &lt;strong&gt;no way&lt;/strong&gt; to reconcile your tree with the late version of P&amp;amp;P Theory you seem to intend it to conform to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose you know that when Chomskian syntacticians like Pollock (and Chomsky himself) started analysing finite predications as TPs (around 1989), they continued to assume most of the results obtained within P&amp;amp;PT in the immediately preceding period, in particular a) Kayne's 'binary branching' hypothesis (1984)[which is incompatible with your analysis of the two TPs, the two VPs and the NP]; b) the three-tiered X-bar theory of Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;Barriers&lt;/em&gt; (1986) [which clashes with the analysis your tree offers for absolutely &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the phrasal categories involved]; c) Larson's 'shell' analysis (1988) [which is necessary to maintain Kayne's 'binary branching' hypothesis, but incompatible with &lt;em&gt;Baker&lt;/em&gt; and the CP, or the two higher PPs in your tree being sisters]; d) the 'VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis' (1986-1988) [according to which &lt;em&gt;Chomsky&lt;/em&gt; should initially be in the specifier of &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt;, a position you do not provide, as you generally fail to acknowledge specifiers]; e) Abney's (1987) 'DP Hypothesis' [which clashes with your NP label and your flat analysis of the 'NP' &lt;em&gt;the changes to the theory&lt;/em&gt;]; and f) a highly elaborate view of the way arguments and adjuncts must be 'projected' and 'attached' in Comp X and Spec XP (or Adjunct X') [which is incompatible with your treating &lt;em&gt;innocently&lt;/em&gt; as a sister of &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Baker&lt;/em&gt; and the CP, and with the PP &lt;em&gt;during the lecture&lt;/em&gt; being a sister of the verb &lt;em&gt;comment&lt;/em&gt; and the PP &lt;em&gt;on the changes to the theory&lt;/em&gt;]. Etc. Etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, no matter what aspect of your tree above is considered, it is hopelessly wrong for the theory of syntax you seem to want to work within, i.e., late P&amp;amp;P syntax (to judge from your use of 'TP'). Whether the infinitival inflection should be labelled 'I' or 'T'[-Tense, -AGR] is, in comparison, a very minor defect you need not worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-03-05T16:42:46.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6644" CreationDate="2015-03-06T00:41:06.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to contribute to your invaluable discussion, if I may. I would like to say something that most pragmatists and cognitive linguists agree with me on. Generative syntax grabbed many linguists' attention for the past 40 years to the extent of letting generative phrase structure rules dominate illegitimately other fields of linguistics. No linguist denies the insight and use of Generative Syntax in understanding language universals, but it is inappropriate to use the same generative rules to generate meaning, for instance; generative semantics, which was an unfortunate extension of the Standard Syntactic Theory, has proved to be a domain bereft of any relevance to the actual world of meanings. Generative semanticists exerted strenuous efforts to fantasize rules simply to validate their theory. It is crucial to draw boundaries between syntactic studies per se and semantic and pragmatic studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jenny Thomas in her book, &lt;em&gt;Meaning in Interaction&lt;/em&gt;, strongly condemns &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the unthinking adoption of grammatical description in the study of pragmatic phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jacob Mey in his article, Reference and The Pragmeme, strongly stresses the role of social context in injecting speech acts with the necessary power to do actions. In other words, formal explanation and analysis of pragmatic phenomena could yield erroneous results that would negatively affect our field.  Vyvyan Evans in his very recent book &lt;em&gt;The Language Myth&lt;/em&gt;, strongly debunks the innateness of language and the whole idea of generating structures and meanings. One can therefore see that in 2015 researchers in all linguistic fields have to start being more realistic about the genuine social mechanisms that produce meanings in different cultures. We need to understand the encyclopaedic reservoirs that contribute to the production of meaning in every single culture. We need to understand the conceptual frameworks that affect the formation of meaning, irrespective of hidden rules that generate X or N meanings or structures. Such generative rules cannot even help us build an intelligent system that can think logically and conceptually. Meaning and its production should rely on social parameters, which are deep inherited in cultures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norman Fairclough in his book &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blockquote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysing Discourse*, stresses the fact that the kind of grammar we need to analyse discourse should be of a social nature; therefore, he recommends Hallidayan Systemic Grammar for analysing discourse. On a further note, many syntacticians strongly believe that the &lt;em&gt;Context of Situation&lt;/em&gt; in infectious. If this is the case, then how can people communicate without any apparent hindrances? I think that time has come to create a serious paradigm shift in linguistic studies. In the advent of technology, we are witnessing great leaps in lexical studies thanks to corporal analyses which shed light upon very insightful accounts of linguistic behaviour. Michael Hoey and John Sinclaire are pioneers in the fields of lexical and corporal studies respectively. They both advocate the importance of understanding lexical behaviour and its impact on the formation of discourse.As such, insights from pragmatics, discourse studies, cognitive studies, and corporal studies all emphasize the importance and the necessity for this paradigm shift that would save linguistics from the domination of the &lt;em&gt;generative black hole&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9310" LastEditorUserId="9310" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T21:57:41.540" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T21:57:41.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6644" CreationDate="2015-03-06T03:11:28.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;generative&lt;/em&gt; grammar is one that is fully explicit, in Chomsky's characterization (and I agree).  Chomsky made the analogy to the way a mathematical function generates a curve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; system is one which is given a representation and is characterized according to the form of that representation.  Formulas which do not meet the requirements on form cannot be part of the system.  A formal grammar, accordingly, consists of a set of grammatical formulas of some sort, which are required to have forms specified for the system.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, for phrase structure grammar, a formal grammar is a set of phrase structure rules (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chomsky hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;), each of which has a left hand side string of symbols and a right hand side string of symbols.  It generates strings of symbols called sentences using a simple procedure set out in the theory, making no reference to any informal operations other than the phrase structure rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Generative&lt;/em&gt; has to do with the relation of the theory to the facts -- it must be explicit.  &lt;em&gt;Formal&lt;/em&gt; has to do whether the theory can be specified according to the forms of its representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's early characterization of his transformational grammar was formal, in terms of the operations transformations could perform on phrase markers.  It was this formality that made it possible to show that that version of transformational grammar did not meet its objective of providing a constrained account of human language (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1987/A1987G350700001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the generative power of transformational grammars&lt;/a&gt;).  Since then, no widely used version of transformational grammar has been formalized, so far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of a &lt;em&gt;generative&lt;/em&gt; grammar which is deliberately informal is the modified version of &lt;em&gt;generative semantics&lt;/em&gt; proposed by McCawley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of a &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;generative&lt;/em&gt; grammar is &lt;em&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, which is a large scale context free phrase structure grammar that reconstructs much, or perhaps all, of classical transformational grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References: for &lt;em&gt;generative grammar&lt;/em&gt; - Chomsky, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;            for &lt;em&gt;formal systems&lt;/em&gt; - Curry, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0486634620&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Foundations of Mathematical Logic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T15:36:25.377" LastActivityDate="2015-03-06T15:36:25.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-06T07:06:10.693" Score="0" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can name a few:&#xA;1. Tones as numbers &#xA;2. Intonation contour as a line above the sentence&#xA;3. Tones as lines above segments&#xA;4. Stress marks before stress syllables ['white house] vs [white 'house]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But can you think of any others, common/accepted or esoteric and unused, it doesn't matter. I'm just looking for a general overview of symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for asking is because I'm interested in how the representation of features can influence analysis. How were symbols for prosodic features different before linguistics became a science, for ex?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-03-06T19:26:07.340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T15:40:45.927" Title="What are the different ways prosodic features of a language are represented throughout the history of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6076" CreationDate="2015-03-07T13:12:31.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The structure of the sentence would actually be something like this (with traditional node labels and only relevant empty categories):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://imgur.com/GcO3vVS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Syntax tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the second verb actually assigns its Theta roles to empty categories coindexed with the phonologically non-empty constituents. Specifically, PRO, which is coindexed with he, is the subject (or agens) of do, and (phonologically null) which is the object (or patient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Theta criterion basically presupposes that whenever you have more theta-roles than overt DPs, you're going to have phonologically empty DPs somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-07T20:02:46.887" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T20:02:46.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11577" CreationDate="2015-03-07T13:28:30.090" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are asking for any knowledge, I assume that the one example I can think of should be an answer. In the Ancient Greek joke collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/quinn_jokes.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Number 232&quot;&gt;Philogelos&lt;/a&gt;, there is a joke where a man calles his wife &quot;He Hera mou&quot;, 'the Hera mine' = my Hera; she calls him &quot;Ozeus mou&quot;, 'stinker mine', my stinker, which at that time or in that dialect was homophonous with &quot;Ho Zeus mou&quot;, 'the Zeus mine' = my Zeus. Yes, it's hilarious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But since the joke was obviously meant to be told aloud, I don't know whether it's the kind of thing you were asking for. On the other hand, all ancient literature was meant to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_%28process%29#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;read aloud&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T12:26:06.340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T12:26:06.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11596" CreationDate="2015-03-07T14:19:35.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem with the question is the assumption that a language 'has' some sort of fixed categories of words joined together by common properties. It is understandable because typical language pedagogy makes it seem that 'parts of speech' are some sort of natural types. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in fact, nothing could be further from how languages operate. These are the &lt;strong&gt;key things to know&lt;/strong&gt; about 'parts of speech' or 'word types'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no definitive list of word types for any given language. Any list will be the result of tradition and theoretical assumptions made by the person compiling a particular grammar. In English grammars, you can find lists of anywhere between 8 and 11. In other languages, you will find wildly different lists. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The criteria for including a word in a particular category combine function, meaning, morphology and syntax in various inconsistent ways. This makes it hard to come up with many meaningful crosslinguistic universals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Word categories do not have clear boundaries. There are many edge cases and possible disputes. Some linguists have talked about things like 'nouniness' to indicate the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only true universally recognized word types that are identified in all languages are nouns and verbs with a strong case being made for adjectives. But even this does not always mean that a word that is a noun in one language cannot be a verb in another and vice versa. In effect, word types are very much specific to each language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite their problematic nature, word types (parts of speech) are very useful when dealing with text. For instance, in natural language processing, language teaching, corpus linguistics, etc. But it is important not to treat them as fixed and immutable. They're just helpful heuristic devices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T14:19:35.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11618" CreationDate="2015-03-07T15:40:45.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; were symbols for prosodic features different before linguistics became a science&quot; presupposes that transcription of prosody predates linguistics as a science, which is untrue, at least at the level of granularity applicable to our knowledge of the history of linguistics. Linguistics as a science developed (thousands of years ago) partially as a means of representing prosody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Representation and analysis are the same thing, in one understanding of &quot;representation&quot;, e.g. in autosegmental phonology a string of H-toned vowels can be represented as one H associated to many vowels. This actually does not &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; lead to a difference in transcription (the other sense of &quot;representation&quot;), although on Optimal Domains Theory, associations (&quot;domains&quot;) are transcribed by br[acket]ting a substring of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way of transcribing syllables is with a period, though brackets are occasionally (rarely) used, and they generally look messy so people don't do that. Tone transcription usually is determined by a combination of fact and ideology. If a language has 4-6 levels and many contours, then accents are not a good choice and people tend to use numbers. If you have 2-3 levels and not a lot of contours, then accents suffice -- and sometimes a certain tone is &quot;unmarked&quot;. This may reflect a frequency of occurrence fact, or a theoretical claim about underspecification (authors are not always transparent about that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Length of segments is likewise represented sometimes with a lengthening sign after the segment, or by doubling the latter (so, &lt;em&gt;gadda&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;gad:a&lt;/em&gt;). The latter often reflects a belief that a long segment is the same as two in a row. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T15:40:45.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-07T16:01:06.137" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word 'excellent', in and of itself, cannot have negative connotations. The word 'exceptional', however, can have both positive, neutral and negative connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one can say that the word 'exceptional' have a higher 'propensity for ambiguity' than the word 'excellent'. Is there a more technical term for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9316" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T02:10:01.827" Title="Is there a term for a word's propensity for ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2015-03-07T16:07:42.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sentences with 'always' or 'never' aren't neccessarily inherently wrong. They just tend to make refuting the sentence very easy: You just need to think of one counterexample to disprove them. On the other hand, if the sentence used 'occasionally', in order to refute it, you'd have to show that it's actually never the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for other words that make it similarly easy to disprove a sentence, you are looking for other words denoting the frequency with wich they are true. A sentence like 'There is exactly one red Ferrari' is still easy to disprove, because you only have to find out that either there is no red Ferrari at all, or that there are more than one. (Which is only marginally harder to do than showing that there is at least one to refute 'There are no red Ferraris.', which is just another way of saying 'Ferraris are never red.')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you count up, things get harder. If you were to say 'There are exactly 295 cities starting with m', to disprove it, I'd have to count cities starting with m until either I reach more than 295 or until I am absolutely sure that there are no more cities starting with m that I haven't counted yet. Vague terms like generally, occasionally or often are virtually impossible to disprove, unless you can prove that the sentence is absolutely never true, which is usually not all that easy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you mean by 'when can these words be used', 'when are these words used in such a way that the meaning of the sentence analysed by formal logic corresponds to the intended meaning of the speaker', they can be used anytime the speaker is convinced that something is unfailingly always the case (or never). That basically narrows it down to either definitions, or characteristics that derive from these definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., if I say 'Fewer lines are always better' (understood as 'If you can get two blocks of code achieving the same output, it is always better to use fewer lines rather than more'), either I am defining 'good' in the context of coding, saying that good code is short (successfull) code (rather than, say, code that is easily readable), or I am assuming a definition of good code that makes it obvious that using less lines is always better (e.g. I pay my programmers by lines, cheapest (working) code is best, --&gt; fewer lines are always better).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-09T20:29:51.200" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T20:29:51.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11569" CreationDate="2015-03-07T16:15:35.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The user obviously gets grammar and semantics mixed up. 'be' denotes an identity, so 'who' and 'we' in your question are coreferential, but semantic coreferentiality does not entail being the same kind of syntactic constitutent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'John cut himself', 'John' and 'himself' are also coreferential, but that doesn't make 'himself' a subject (or 'John' an object). So no, identity is not a grammatical term, it's a semantic term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T16:15:35.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2015-03-07T16:44:37.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the relationship between the part of your question concerning economy of code lines and special words like &quot;always&quot;, but it's possible you can find something of interest in the philosophy of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Goodman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nelson Goodman&lt;/a&gt;, because Goodman dealt with both those matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;evaluation metric&lt;/em&gt; in linguistic theory, proposed in Chomsky and Halle's &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; and elsewhere, requires us in our search for the best account of a language system to adopt the theory with the fewest symbols.  I have heard that Chomsky was influenced to make such a proposal by Nelson Goodman, who was Chomsky's teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then also, Goodman invented a puzzle which many philosophers have worried about, which involves the superiority of certain words, or at least concepts, in the formulation of scientific laws.  See the account of &lt;em&gt;grue&lt;/em&gt; in the Wikipedia article.  &lt;em&gt;Grue&lt;/em&gt; &quot;applies to all things examined before a certain time t just in case they are green, but also to other things just in case they are blue and not examined before time t.&quot; In formulating laws of nature, &lt;em&gt;green&lt;/em&gt; is better than &lt;em&gt;grue&lt;/em&gt;, in spite of the fact that before time t statements about what things are grue are empirically indistinguishable from statements about what things are green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T16:44:37.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11396" CreationDate="2015-03-07T19:10:02.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German and Insular Scandinavian (at least in Icelandic), elliptic answers will be in the same case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T19:10:02.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11448" CreationDate="2015-03-07T19:55:19.293" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also the suffixation of the article (Icelandic epli-&lt;strong&gt;ð&lt;/strong&gt;, Norwegian eple-&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; vs. English &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; apple)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T19:55:19.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11042" CreationDate="2015-03-07T20:20:19.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we accept the view taken by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/5553260/The_PIE_Subjunctive_Function_and_Development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bozzone&lt;/a&gt;, PIE Subjunctive was basically a Future tense. Optative mood, on the other hand, was used for wishes and hopes. Germanic Subjunctive is, at the earliest point it appears, already used for wishes and hopes (Gothic &quot;nimai&quot; - &quot;may he take!&quot;) The function of Germanic subjunctive is curiously similar to French, but since both Gothic and Old Norse use the subjunctive in this way, things would seem to have been like that in Proto-Germanic, before French even existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems like PG didn't just drop the subjuncive mood, then lacked a Subjunctive mood and later decided to use the Optative mood for that, but rather that it never had what now is its Subjunctive mood (PIE Subjunctive mood being quite unlike it) until Optative mood changed its meaning from wishes and hopes only to anything hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-07T20:45:00.990" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T20:45:00.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11586" CreationDate="2015-03-07T20:58:17.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to remember that all the branches of linguistics are related merely by the fact that they each concern something that shows up in our every utterance. &quot;I eat daisies in the Springtime,&quot; uttered by a native speaker, has phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic information, and the utterance and its communicative intent and context can be described in terms of pragmatics. // If you think of language as having three broad areas, form, content, and use, you've got phonology &amp;amp; morpho-syntax under &quot;form,&quot; semantics under &quot;content,&quot; and pragmatics under &quot;use.&quot; –  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-03-07T20:58:17.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11644" CreationDate="2015-03-07T21:59:21.570" Score="5" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, are the triconsonantal roots in Arabic (like k-t-b --write) considered to be discontinuous morphemes?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about the English roots (s-ng -- sing, sang, sung, song) and (beg-n -- begin, began, begun)?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T21:21:40.907" Title="Is it common to analyze grammatically motivated vowel alternation as an occurence of discontinuous morphemes?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11396" CreationDate="2015-03-08T02:35:57.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments above provide some partial answers to the question. I think I can provide a few more insights. I am not, however, a typologist, and have not considered the data from the typologically diverse languages mentioned in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has case, but the fragments of ellipsis can omit the case marker. However, the data is confusing in this area, since if the fragment contains more than one NP, then the case markers become obligatory. If there is interest about this, I can provide more information. Contact me via email (tjo3ya@yahoo.com). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question mentions the distinction in English (and French) between strong pronouns (&lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;) and weak pronouns (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;). The weak forms appear mostly only as subjects in the presence of a finite verb in English. The strong forms are preferred in most other environments. Coordination is particularly difficult, though, since the forms that appear in coordinate structures vary greatly depending on register, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Me and him did it&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;He and I did it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;between Fred and me&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;between Fred and I&lt;/em&gt;. While the strong and weak forms of these pronouns are certainly the remnants of a case system, I do not think viewing these forms as &quot;accusative&quot; or &quot;nominative&quot; pronouns is accurate. I prefer to classify English as a mostly caseless language, remnants of case showing up just in the pronoun forms. French is similar to English in this area, and it seems likely that English was influenced by French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages with robust case systems are consistent with the case forms that appear in fragments, as indicated by the comments. In most cases, the fragment will have the same case that it would have in the corresponding full sentence. This fact has been very important in the debate concerning the nature of ellipsis. It has lead many to conclude that when ellipsis is involved, there is actually null material that is present, and this null material is responsible for assigning case to the fragment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others, however, reject the existence of this null material. They appeal to an intepretative mechanism that requires the fragment to be the same as the antecedent clause in every way except for what concerns the fragment itself. I can provide more information about these competing approaches to ellipsis if there is interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out one important trait of possessive &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;. It is a clitic in English, not a genitive case marker. If it were a clear case marker, it would be restricted to suffixing to nouns. It can attach to entire phrases, however, which makes it a clitic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The guy who we know's hat was on the table. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation should be compared to possessive &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in a language that has a robust case system, such as German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *Der Mann den wir kennen-s Hut war auf dem Tisch.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see here that the possessive suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in German cannot attach to a phrase, unlike the clitic &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in English. What this means is that it is difficult to view possessive &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; as a case marker in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the hypothesis and most direct answer to the question that I would like to offer is that case is assigned to elliptical answers in the same way that it would be if the answer were to appear in a full sentence. Exceptions to this rule (such as the distribution of pronoun forms in English) may have to do with the fact that the language at hand more or less lacks a robust case system to begin with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T02:35:57.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8619" CreationDate="2015-03-08T05:49:22.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I have cleaned up and organized this list significantly, and it is now available &lt;a href=&quot;http://minimalpairs.net/en/fr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had the same question as you, and ended up throwing together some perl scripts to scrape Wikipedia's list of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:French_frequency_lists/1-2000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;10,000 most used French words&lt;/a&gt;, pipe them through eSpeak to get their IPA pronunciations, then do a simple (completely non-phonetic) comparison to come up with a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://aslan.flimzy.com/~jonhall/french-pairs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2921 minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt; (well, groups, really).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I talk a little bit more about it on my &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbally.flimzy.com/list-of-french-minimal-pairs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, and have published my perl scripts on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flimzy/minimal-pairs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, in case you or anyone else find any value in hacking on them yourself, or to use a similar process for other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list is a bit overwhemling. I can't imagine 2921 MPs being useful to anyone, but it's a starting point, and it's easy to browse through and find a few that are valid for ear training, I think.  That will be my next step!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T06:53:42.510" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T06:53:42.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11548" CreationDate="2015-03-08T11:26:17.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the distinction between &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;predictable dative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;idiosyncratic dative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, predictable dative being, for example, the dative in ditransitive constructions like &quot;Ich gebe dem Hans das Buch&quot; (I give the book to Hans) is predictable and the Dative in &quot;Ich helfe dem Hans ein Haus zu bauen&quot; (I help Hans to build a house) is idiosyncratic, i.e. somewhat irregularly assigned, even though Datives like this seem often to correspond to certain Theta roles (e.g. Experiencer or Benefactor, as opposed to Patient). I can refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/ellenw/Woolford%20Lexical%20Case,%20Inherent%20Case,%20and%20Argument%20Structure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; if you want to read up on the assignment of Datives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structurally, &quot;Ich helfe dem Hans ein Haus zu bauen&quot; ('I help the.DAT Hans a house to build') is an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;raising or control&lt;/a&gt;, and 'ein Haus zu bauen' is an argument of 'helfe'. There even is a &quot;complementizer&quot;, 'zu', although I think it is the head of T rather than C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T11:26:17.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11632" CreationDate="2015-03-08T14:01:16.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know what you mean by &quot;common&quot;, but one view is that Indo-European &quot;ablaut&quot; and Semitic &quot;stem formation&quot; are typologically very much the same thing. See for example Kuryłowicz, L’apophonie en sémitique. Kraków 1962.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T14:01:16.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-08T14:42:48.693" Score="1" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;OT offers a tool to see how a surface structure is derived from an underlying one. Autosegmental phonology also allows us to see how a surface form can be derived from an underlying representation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this comparison accurate? I'm afraid not because many rules of OT are based in autosegmental theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me sort out how I should consider these two &quot;things&quot; (tools?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-03-08T14:55:42.957" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T16:29:50.967" Title="Is it accurate to think of OT and auto-segmental phonology as offering explanations on how phones are derived from phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-08T14:58:40.957" Score="2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, bandpass filters were used before the digital era began. Can anyone explain to me how they appeared or were analyzed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spectrograms are usually created in one of two ways: approximated as a filterbank that results from a series of &lt;strong&gt;bandpass filters&lt;/strong&gt; (this was the only way before the advent of modern digital signal processing), or calculated from the time signal using the FFT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the history of the science of phonetics and looking to learn more about how technological innovation shaped the development of the science. Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T20:21:53.533" Title="Spectrograms from bandpass filters" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11637" CreationDate="2015-03-08T16:29:50.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The motivation underlying autosegmental phonology is that phonological processes frequently are not well-described by the 1-to-1 feature-to-segment relations assumed in SPE phonology, especially in the domain of tone. OT was motivated by a desire to reduce phonological mappings to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the notion of constraint, without any (language specific) component of &quot;do this&quot; (only &quot;don't do that&quot;). Neither theory has anything to do with the notion of deriving phones from phonemes, and neither theory assumes that &quot;phone&quot; or &quot;phoneme&quot; is a valid concept. Both theories are logically consistent with the concept of &quot;phonetic implementation&quot; which may provide pronunciation details such as nasalization in English, devoicing of sonorants after aspirated stops and fricatives, and so on. However, both OT and ASP are grammatical theories which deal in categorial processes, and it is generally recognized that most allophonic variation has to be dealt with phonetically and quantitatively. (ASP and OT phonetic models do, of course, exist, just as there is such a thing as OT syntax though not autosegmental syntax)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no rules in OT, so OT rules aren't based in autosegmental phonology. OT practicioners have largely (but not entirely) abandoned autosegmental phonology or any other theory of representation, partly because questions of representation are orthogonal, and partly because it was held that the motivation for ASP was how it allows a better account of phonological rules (correct, I would say), and therefore if the theory presupposes rules, it must be wrong. At this point, I don't think many OT practicioners care about autosegmental phonology, one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T16:29:50.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11639" CreationDate="2015-03-08T16:50:22.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't tell if you're asking about bandpass filtering or about linguistic applications for ideas in acoustics. For the latter, I suggest Martin Joos's monograph &lt;em&gt;Acoustic Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; (1948, Language monographs). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1144.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; gives an overview of the history of acoustic phonetics in the US, from which by reference-tracing you can generalize to outside the US (e.g. to the work of Helmholtz, or Chiba &amp;amp; Kajiyama). I think one can accurately say that when the sound spectrogram became publically available, it revolutionized research into speech, so while the underpinnings go back to before 1945, life starts in 1945 (or shortly after when a commercial model was actually available).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in the technical details of the machine's workings, it is laid out (explained, sorta) &lt;a href=&quot;http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&amp;amp;docid=02629778&amp;amp;IDKey=F2B9EF00FA6D%0D%0A&amp;amp;HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fpatimg.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-08T20:21:53.533" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T20:21:53.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11639" CreationDate="2015-03-08T19:27:04.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first job as a graduate assistant in linguistics in 1965-66 was in Ilse Lehiste's acoustic phonetics lab at Ohio State, and for a time, I spent many hours running a Kay Sonagraph, making sonagrams (spectrograms) from taped informant sessions.  I don't know how the variable bandpass filter was implemented, but you could see what was happening.  The Sonagraph recorded a short sample of speech -- just a few seconds -- then replayed that over and over as the bandpass filter moved its band little by little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strip of special coated paper was strapped on a rotating drum, and an electrode burnt a line of varying darkness, depending on the output of the bandpass filter.  The electrode moved upward on the drum (or downward, I can't remember), so you would be left at the end with a time vs. frequency analysis of the sample, with dark areas on the paper corresponding to the formants.  At least for men's voices, you could also see the vertical striations for individual vocal cord vibrations, and count them to estimate the voice pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time, Lehiste was investigating the acoustics of the overlong consonants of Estonian, and the rearticulations partway through the articulations of the consonants were clear on the Sonagrams as small bursts of energy (quite inaudible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T19:27:04.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-08T21:00:11.130" Score="3" ViewCount="925" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italians, for some reason, tend to accept and use foreign terms quite easily. The foreign terms that have entered and are entering common usage are mainly from the English language. Their usage has been increasing so consistently in recent years that that main Italian language authority &quot; l'Accademia della Crusca&quot; has raised an official allarm regarding the 'invasion' of foreign terminology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a recent study , the usage of English terms has increased by 773% in the last 8 years. L'Accademia has made a petition to '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.i-siena.it/2015/02/salviamo-la-lingua-italiana-dallinvasione-inglese-vola-la-petizione/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Save the Italian Language &lt;/a&gt;' and will officially ask the Italian Government, Public Administrations, Media  and Public Companies to limit their use of foreign words and favour  the Italian equivalent terms instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether  this initiative will be successful or not (I really doubt it), this phenomenon is going to continue for years. I think it is a social-psycho-linguistic issue. That's why I am asking here what is a proper, correct term to define it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. This question is open also  &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/5201/salviamo-la-lingua-italiana&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/233187/an-appropriate-term-for-the-contamination-of-a-language&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:59:26.713" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T20:16:47.610" Title="What is a proper term for the contamination of a language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11632" CreationDate="2015-03-08T21:21:40.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a sociology and history of linguistics question (which is fine, I'm just saying it's a really hard one to answer). I do not think that most linguists or even more than 5% of linguists have a positive believe that Semitic roots and Germanic ablaut-related words constitute instances of the technical concept &quot;discontinuous morpheme&quot;. One of the main reasons is that DM is not a technical concept, i.e. something that has a clear definition. The term derives from a 1945 paper in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; by Zellig Harris, and he in fact reduces ordinary grammatical agreement to the concept of &quot;discontinuous morpheme&quot;, which is not what anybody in the modern world means by the term. His real point was to show that so-called discontinuous morphemes are simply a subtype of morphemes. Given Harris's general assumptions, Arabic &lt;em&gt;maktab, yaktubu, kitāb, katabat, kātib&lt;/em&gt; have a common morpheme, and the elements of the morpheme are never continuous, which means that they are discontinous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is used more often in Semitic linguistics than in the study of ablaut in English, so if you narrow the question to e.g. &quot;discussion of root and pattern morphology by Semiticists&quot;, it might be frequent enough in that domain to be called &quot;common&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T21:21:40.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11643" CreationDate="2015-03-08T22:18:23.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an instance of xenophobia: there isn't a specific terms that relates to languages, because it's never just fear of foreign words, it's always paired with fear of any kind of foreign thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-08T22:18:23.623" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2015-03-09T00:47:52.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The universal quantifier words are like this -- all, no, none, everybody, nobody, each, every, never, always and so on. Some people insist that you have to follow an absolute universality definition of such words, so you can't say &quot;Fred never leaves a tip&quot; if Fred has been in a situation where tips are expected a hundred times and left a tip only once. Most people don't think that way, and would consider the counterexample to be not worth considering -- basically, it's not a datum. If Fred has tipped 5 times out of a hundred, I think it's misleading to say &quot;never&quot; and you should say &quot;rarely&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there could be competing theories of the meaning of &quot;never&quot;, one being the absolute not-even-one-case interpretation, and the others allowing some number of counterexamples. At the level of individual behavior, you find people who act according to the &quot;absolutely none&quot; theory, and you find people who act according to less stringent criteria of non-existence. So either some people have a different meaning for &quot;never&quot;, or else most people don't know the meaning of &quot;never&quot; or don't care about the meaning of &quot;never&quot;. Ideally we would decide this empirically, but I am not sanguine about the probability that the experiment will be performed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your code examples point to something slightly different, since the question is about a continuous value (comparatively better), rather than a simple true/false distinction. If you have multiple evaluative principles, then they may also be hierarchically weighted -- this is what they do in Optimality Theory (well, used to, until &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; changed). &quot;X is always better&quot; means that the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; evaluative cut rejects any non-X options, so any surviving possibilities must be X (and then the second-level principle would kick in to find the best of the all-X subset). So there is competition between &quot;fewer lines of code is (always) better&quot; and &quot;more readable code is (always) better&quot;. Attaching &quot;always&quot; to one of these helps resolve the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T00:47:52.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11643" CreationDate="2015-03-09T11:55:15.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The neutral phrase for this phenomenon is &lt;strong&gt;language contact&lt;/strong&gt; which is one of the ways in which &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language change&lt;/a&gt; can occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have reported in your question is a matter of (having a wrong) perspective. I used to dislike the seemingly vast amount of loanwords, so I can understand those that don't like it, but I changed my mind. Consider this: you're living &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, so your perspective comes from what is happening now. You (a general you) learned a certain language that you call Italian since your childhood, with a specific vocabulary. During your life you've experienced an acquisition of foreign terms, so from your perspective it's been &quot;contaminated&quot; (for lack of a better word) by other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this is a false perspective because the &quot;base language&quot; you learned as Italian is not &quot;pure&quot; at all. It's the result of all the previous influences and borrowings; there is no such thing as truly, 100% pure language. There are more welcoming and less welcoming languages, so to speak, but you won't find a truly immutable, pure language, at least not in the Information Age we're in. Geographically isolated languages might show a higher degree of &quot;purity&quot;, but they can still be influenced, because that's the very nature of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to my previous statement, the Italian you learned is full of borrowed words that you think are perfectly Italian. Just to name a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gazzella (gazelle), comes from Arabic &lt;em&gt;ghazāl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cifra (digit, number), comes from Arabic &lt;em&gt;ṣifr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bistecca comes from &lt;em&gt;beef steak&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manichino comes from fr. &lt;em&gt;mannequin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiordo, comes from Norwegian &lt;em&gt;fjord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grattacielo is a calque from English &lt;em&gt;skyscraper&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's even cliccare, a verb formed by attaching the verb ending -are to the root &lt;em&gt;clic&lt;/em&gt;, from English &lt;em&gt;to click.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has acquired many terms from Italian as well: opera, stanza, pianissimo, a cappella, falsetto, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Italian_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;I could really go on&lt;/a&gt;. It's also not a coincidence that these terms are all related music and theatre. Italian has been the Lingua Franca in Europe in the past, such as during the Renaissance, and many terms are still used in present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be mentioned that many loanwords stay side by side with the local terms, such as is the case with those that are used in defined contexts: The English term &lt;em&gt;corner&lt;/em&gt; is used in soccer matches only, as far as Italian is concerned, while the corresponding word &lt;em&gt;angolo&lt;/em&gt; is used for all instances (including soccer too at will).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: languages change, and one of the ways they do is to assimilate foreign terms. That's just what they do. Trying to &quot;save&quot; a language can be good when the native speakers are dying out, but in this case it's kind of pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-09T18:27:21.453" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T18:27:21.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-09T14:24:19.307" Score="5" ViewCount="7154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the terms 'mood' and 'modality' have been extensively used in the English grammar. First and foremost, modal auxiliaries such as 'can', 'may', 'should', 'must' are said to represent the 'mood', not 'mode', when 'modal' etymologically derives from 'mode', not 'mood'. For example, Oxford Dictionaries has this definition for '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/modal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modal&lt;/a&gt;':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 &lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; Of or denoting the &lt;strong&gt;mood&lt;/strong&gt; of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Boldface mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's funny is, when you click on the word 'mood' in the dictionary's definition, you're directed to the following definition of '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/mood#mood-2__3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mood&lt;/a&gt;' in the dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 &lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; A category or form which indicates whether a verb expresses fact (indicative mood), command (imperative mood), question (interrogative mood), wish (optative mood), or conditionality (subjunctive mood).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition doesn't seem to be the right definition of 'mood' used in the definition of 'modal'. And I think that all this confusion arises from the misuse of the word 'mood'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm mistaken about all this, please someone enlighten me as to any profound reasoning behind the adoption of 'mood' instead of 'mode'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the answers and comments, I've isolated the cause of my confusion, although no other seems to share this confusion. According to the above definition of 'modal', it denotes the mood of a verb. In today's English, however, the only instances where a verb (without the help of a modal auxiliary) indicates 'mood' are limited to the subjunctive and the imperative mood. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[i] &lt;em&gt;If I &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; you, I would be careful.&lt;/em&gt; [subjunctive mood]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ii] &lt;em&gt;She suggested that he &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt; careful.&lt;/em&gt; [subjunctive mood]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[iii] &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be&lt;/strong&gt; careful.&lt;/em&gt; [imperative mood]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Lawler argues somehow that an English verb (without the help of a modal auxiliary) can indicate all the other types of moods such as the indicative, interrogative, optative. But can it? If anyone thinks it can, please provide an example sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in [ii] and [iii], the same form 'be' indicates both the subjunctive and the imperative moods. So technically speaking, there is no such thing as the mood of the verb 'be' per se, unless it's put in context as in [ii] or [iii].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T13:28:40.983" Title="Why use the term 'mood' instead of 'mode'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-09T14:55:41.810" Score="5" ViewCount="1084" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for tools I can use to perform text summarization. Specifically something I could use to summarize personal communication (i.e. email). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably I'm looking for something open source and cross platform (Java?), but I'm open to any suggestion regardless of language or cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any primers/hints on specific techniques or approaches that might work best would also be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9322" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T00:08:56.593" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T23:19:43.777" Title="Text Summarization Tool" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;summarization&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11586" CreationDate="2015-03-09T15:55:43.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way syntax interacts with the other components of a linguistic theory depends on the linguistic theory one adheres to. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning%E2%80%93text_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meaning-text theory,&lt;/a&gt; while not being a theory I use often in my work, gives an interesting point of view on where specific &quot;fields&quot; of linguistics fit with respect to each other. This is because it strives to build a complete and consistent model of how language works in translating any given meaning in a corresponding &quot;text&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it in a nutshell, meaning has a very free structure but also a very high dimensionality. We express it with strings of &quot;sounds&quot;, or of letters, which are basically one-dimension entities, and must therefore have a much more rigid structure if they are to encode the information wholly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning-text theory proposes models with various levels of representation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qHhfP.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Levels of representation in Meaning-Text Theory&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are actually more numerous than shown in this image, but this gives the general idea. To move from one level of representation to the next, you use &quot;components&quot; which, transforming dependencies, create structure and remove dimensionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this point of view, the syntactic component is the one that transforms semantic dependencies into syntactic dependencies. In doing this, it may for instance merge many semantemes (meaning units) into one lexeme (lexical unit), or split one semanteme into many lexemes. It also starts defining a word order for the sentence—in generative formalisms, the word order is usually fixed at the syntactic level, but this may not be entirely true in dependency formalisms. From the representation point of view, it turns a directed graph, first into a directed acyclic graph (deep syntax), then into a tree (surface syntax). This tree is then picked by the morphological component, which translates it into a &quot;unary tree&quot;, basically a string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9321" LastEditorUserId="9321" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T17:29:35.190" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T17:29:35.190" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11649" CreationDate="2015-03-09T16:31:30.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a tool I happened upon recently: &lt;a href=&quot;http://genopharmix.com/TuataraSum/algorithms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Context-controllable Content Summarization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this looks to be related background information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://genopharmix.com/biomimetic-cognition/in_silico_cognitive_biomimicry.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Generating content summarizations similar to the way a human might do so&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence-berkeley-national-lab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word2Vec is based on an approach from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T16:31:30.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-07T09:27:25.093" Score="2" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading particularly the Old Testament, I think I note a pattern formed by many names such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Israel, Abraham, Jerusalem, Solomon, Babylon, Zerubbabel, Lebanon,&#xA;  Capernaum, Zebulun, Galilee, Phoenicia, Samaria, Mediterranean,&#xA;  Benjamin, Bethlehem, Ephesus, Galatia, Italia, Byzantium, Mesopotamia,&#xA;  Melchizedek, Corinthians, Thessalonians, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In pronouncing these names, the pattern seems to be that with names of three or more syllables the accent is on the syllable that is third from last. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ISrael, Abraham, jeRUsalem, SOLomon, BAbylon, zeRUbbabel, LEBanon,&#xA;  caPERnaum, ZEBulun, GALilee, phoeNIcia, saMARia, mediterrAnean,&#xA;  BENjamin, BETHlehem, EPHesus, galAtia, iTALia, byZANtium, mesopoTAmia,&#xA;  melCHIzedek, coRINthians, thessaLOnians etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some other names are not pronounced the way I would expect (stress on the third-to-last syllable). For example, I would expect these names to be pronounced as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;neHEMiah, jerEMiah, HOsea, oBADia, zePHANiah, zeCHARiah...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these are not pronounced like this by most English speakers. Instead, the stress moves to the next-to-last syllable (e.g. neheMIah, jereMIah, etc). Is there a reason that the names in this second group have the stress shifted like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Journeyman" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T22:47:18.183" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T03:35:51.897" Title="Why do these names from the Bible have these stress patterns?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11652" CreationDate="2015-03-07T13:24:27.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically to these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;neHEMiah, jerEMiah, HOsea, oBADia, zePHANiah, zeCHARiah...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are normally pronounced with the stress on the second to last syllable in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Biblical names in English were borrowed from Latin. The general principle is historically that Latin words in English are stressed on the same syllable as in Latin, that is: on the second-to-last syllable if this has a long vowel in Latin, and otherwise on the third-to-last syllable. This is the general principle, but there are exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;NehemIah&lt;/strong&gt; is stressed on the second to last, because the /i/ was long in Latin, whereas &lt;strong&gt;ThessaLOnians&lt;/strong&gt;  is stressed on the third to last because the /i/ was short, so the stress moved one back. These stress patterns are quite consistent with those in other languages that use Latin stress for bible words, such as German, so we can rule out mere chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="fdb" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T03:35:51.897" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T03:35:51.897" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11648" CreationDate="2015-03-09T17:32:00.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;any dictionary&lt;/a&gt; I have access to online says that &quot;mood&quot; is just an alteration of (by which I would understand just a different way of writing) &quot;mode&quot;, which seemed to have happened at some point in the 16th century. It's quite possible that at that time, there was no distinction in pronunciation between a word written &lt;em&gt;mood&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt;. So there didn't need to be any &quot;profound reasoning&quot; behind the existence of mood and mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The grammatical sense of &lt;strong&gt;mood&lt;/strong&gt; is not a &quot;misuse&quot; of mood in the sense of &quot;state of mind&quot;, it's just a homonym.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modal&lt;/strong&gt; referring to the mood of a verb is etymologically sound, since both mood and mode mean the same. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the similarity between modal verbs and mood of verbs, see john lawler's comment. Note that both are connected to the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_modality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;modality&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T13:20:01.723" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T13:20:01.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11648" CreationDate="2015-03-09T19:17:27.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Max P's answer is correct. Just to add this: there are two etymologically unconnected English words &quot;mood&quot;. &quot;Mood&quot; in the sense &quot;state of mind&quot; is an inherited Germanic word. The grammatical term &quot;mood&quot; is (originally) a variant spelling for &quot;mode&quot;, from Latin &quot;modus&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T19:17:27.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11661" CreationDate="2015-03-09T20:34:41.740" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which introductory texts on phonology contain a clear account of juncture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that juncture is a set of suprasegmental phenomenon that conveys the boundaries between words, phrases, clauses and sentences. For example, &quot;a name&quot; and &quot;an aim&quot; are distinguished from one another by distinct junctures. I have heard that the realization of juncture varies from language to language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd like more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T03:35:35.260" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T03:35:35.260" Title="Survey: Do you know of an introductory phonology text that presents a clear account of juncture?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-09T21:21:31.163" Score="1" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, but really curious about how different languages measure up in terms of how many different ways of expressing the same notion they offer. For example, Chinese is definitely a more difficult language for L2 learners than English, but do native Chinese people express themselves in a greater variety of ways than native English speakers? Of course we have to compare the same education level of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My native language of Hungarian happens to offer a great variety of expression, I would say it is more nuanced than English in general. Maybe very highly educated native English speakers speak at the same level of variety as an ordinary Hungarian.&#xA;Other languages, such as creoles are clearly less varied and lack the expressive power of ancient languages. Spanish and Italian in particular also come across as a less varied languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing a way to measure this would be to take a bunch of things commonly expressed and see how many ways people can are able to say it. Or to focus on concepts, like how many ways are there to say the concept covered by the word &quot;although&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any linguists who do this kind of research ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-09T22:03:56.357" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T04:27:59.317" Title="Are there comparative studies of lexical variety in different languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6546" CreationDate="2015-03-09T21:41:36.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it would teach the language to the kid, but you would have to be very systematic about talking to him/her in the language, which can be difficult if it's not your native language. You would have to set a specific time frame, like one day a week that you only use English. I knew a Hungarian girl, whose bilingual Hungarian father only spoke to her in French, because he wanted her to be bilingual as well. She actually acquired it at near native level and never lived in France. She went on to study French and Spanish at the University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T21:41:36.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2015-03-09T22:03:26.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would need to explain what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; mean by &quot;juncture&quot;, since it doesn't refer to an objective observable (it's sometimes used as a term covering a method of describing various facts). As far as I know, no introductory phonology text discusses &quot;juncture&quot;, though there might be some general introduction from the 50's that discusses it. The concept has mostly disappeared from linguistics. Given the example that you mention, which matches the structuralist examples of &quot;juncture&quot;, a &quot;juncture&quot; is an abstract symbol such as &quot;+&quot;, &quot;=&quot;, &quot;#&quot; which rules of allophony could refer to, to get the hard-to-describe difference between &quot;Nye-trait&quot; and &quot;night-rate&quot;. In contemporary theories, &quot;juncture&quot; has been replaced primarily with notions of syllabification, and to a lesser extent &quot;prosodic phrasing&quot; especially for intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosodic phrasing is a fairly advanced topic which isn't usually covered in introductory phonology textbooks, but syllabification could be. IMO the best coverage of those syllabification phenomena covered by &quot;juncture&quot; is in Daniel Kahn's dissertation; but it is difficult to follow. In other words, there isn't an ideal reading, but there might be an okay one, depending on whether you're interested in theories of how syllables are constructed, or in what positing syllables can do for you in describing certain phonological and phonetic variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the utility of the syllable, Hayes &lt;em&gt;Introductory phonology&lt;/em&gt; and Odden &lt;em&gt;Introducing phonology&lt;/em&gt; both have chapters / chapter-sections on the syllable with some interest in utility. I also recommend Selkirk's 1982 paper &quot;The syllable&quot; (van der Hulst &amp;amp; Smith eds.), &lt;em&gt;The Syllable: Views and Facts&lt;/em&gt; ed. by van der Hulst &amp;amp; Ritter (1999) for multiple case studies, and Hermans 1985 &quot;The relationship between aspiration and preaspiration in Icelandic&quot; (van der Hulst &amp;amp; Smith eds., different volume) for a Kahn-like &quot;here's what you can do with it&quot; analysis. Also Clements &amp;amp; Keyser &lt;em&gt;CV phonology&lt;/em&gt;, though it's about C's and V's as much as about the syllable, but still it does provide empirical motivation for the syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-09T23:54:32.867" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T23:54:32.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11648" CreationDate="2015-03-09T22:14:34.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mood is most frequently used to refer to a morphological system (or a syntactic one). The Mood system will mark modality, but it also often marks other semantic categories as well, such as illocutionary force (i.e. interrogative, imperative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the same as how languages frequently mix tense and aspect together in their morphology. Or often languages will mix tense and modality or aspect and modality. So having two terms for mood and modality could actually be a helpful thing: if you hear &quot;modality&quot; then the topic will most likely be about realis/irrealis etc, but if you hear &quot;mood&quot; then get prepared for subjunctives and optatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mood could be considered to be a &lt;em&gt;morphological category&lt;/em&gt; while modality is a &lt;em&gt;semantic category&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T22:14:34.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11648" CreationDate="2015-03-09T23:03:29.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you would like a &quot;popular&quot; account of mood versus modality, you could compare the Wiki entries for &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_modality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistics Modality&lt;/a&gt; versus &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammatical Mood&lt;/a&gt;. These pages indicate that &quot;modality&quot; is a semantic and logical fact related to possible worlds etc. and &quot;grammatical mood (sometimes mode) is a grammatical (usually morphologically marked) feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections—known as grammatical conjugation—that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, whether it is intended as a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.).&quot; Ones of the &lt;em&gt;ways&lt;/em&gt; of conveying modality is via &quot;grammatical mood&quot;. In Indo-European languages, this includes such terms as &quot;indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative&quot;. In Classical Arabic, following Wright, and also Haywood &amp;amp; Nahmad, this refers to &quot;indicative, subjunctive, jussive / conditional, imperative, energetic&quot;. In other words, a &quot;mood&quot; is a grammaticalized / conventionalized way of encoding the aspects of meaning referred to as &quot;modality&quot;. That is, morphology vs. semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I don't hold wiki entries to be authoritative sources on usage in linguistics, in this case I find their distinction to accurately align with how &quot;mood&quot; and &quot;modality&quot; are actually used in linguistics. However, &quot;mood&quot; is more often a term used in grammar writing whereas one does not frequently find grammars that talk about &quot;modality&quot;; at the level of the individual writer, the terms may be in complementary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T23:03:29.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2015-03-09T23:58:49.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, what you refer to is now usually described as phenomena related to the edges of Prosodic units, such as Phonological Phrase or Phonological Word. For example, in (at least my variety of) German, you'd insert Glottal Stops between the edges of Phonological Words, but not between the edges of Lexical Words, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wenn er (&quot;if he&quot;) --&gt; wenn er&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wenn Elefanten (&quot;If elephants&quot;) --&gt; wenn ʔElefanten&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole Phonological Hierarchy is subject to academic discussion, of course, but I believe that if you are interested in (the description of) phonological changes between words and larger (or smaller) constituents/prosodic units, reading up on the Prosodic Hierarchy or on Prosodic Phonology might be your best bet. I don't know any introductory texts, though. (There might not even be any, this is the area of a few specialists constantly disagreeing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-09T23:58:49.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11657" CreationDate="2015-03-10T00:16:28.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bet if you knew more about juncture, you'd regret the time you'd spent learning about it.  It's an old fashioned theory which might or might not be accurate (I couldn't say), but it doesn't really make sense of the facts.  It's also formulated to fit the peculiar methodological ideas of mid-20th century American structuralism, which require you to be able to deduce the phonemic description, including junctures, from observable facts.  I like the description in SPE (&lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;) much, much better, and it has had much more influence in modern linguistics.  In the SPE theory, &quot;junctural&quot; phenomena follow from speakers' understanding of syntactic and morphological structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can take your example &quot;an aim&quot; versus &quot;a name&quot; to illustrate a non-junctural description. The phonetic difference between these two is the lenis &quot;n&quot; in &quot;an aim&quot; versus the fortis &quot;n&quot; in &quot;a name&quot;.  Lenis means weakly articulated, and fortis means strongly articulated.  Lenis articulation is typical of syllable offset consonants in English and in many languages, and in some American dialects leads to flapping of the &quot;n&quot; in &quot;an aim&quot;, [əɾ̃ẽj̃m].  On the other hand, &quot;n&quot; in &quot;a name&quot; fails to flap, because it's fortis, being at the beginning of a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why is one &quot;n&quot; at the end of a syllable?  Well, it's obvious, isn't it?  It's at the end of a word.  But back in the era of juncture and all that, this would have been regarded as a methodologically unsound statement, because when you're observing pronunciation as an analyst, you don't know until after you've figured out the phonemics where the words begin and end!  Thus, the need for junctures, which were thought of as being phonemes, or at least like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nice to have all that behind us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T00:16:28.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11658" CreationDate="2015-03-10T00:16:47.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central notion behind your question, of being &quot;less/more varied&quot;, could &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; refer to something meaningful and testable, but the claim that Hungarian is &quot;more nuanced&quot; than English, or that creoles are &quot;clearly less varied and lack the expressive power of ancient languages&quot; (like, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sumerian, I would suppose), or that Spanish and Italian are &quot;less varied&quot; is lacking in empirical support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistic domain that you're roughly pointing to is crosslinguistic semantics. If you want raw variation, English has the terms &quot;sofa, couch, davenport, divan&quot; which refer to the same object. I imagine there is some similar situation in Hungarian where there are 3 or 4 words for the same thing where English has 1. English also has the words &quot;knife, machete, sword&quot;, but they refer to &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; things, not the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; thing. So you need to clarify whether you are looking for sets of semantically-related words, or absolutely identical words. And you need to also clarify whether you include social-register distinctions, since there are many verbs referring to the sex act and nouns referring to male anatomy in English which have different social consequences -- connotation rather than denotation. So what distinctions are you asking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your later replies, I think I understand the distinction you're looking for. Words and morphemes can be organized hierarchically in terms of what things / actions / states they refer to. For instance, &quot;mammal&quot; refers to a very large set of warm-blooded animals, and the term subsumes &quot;goat&quot;, &quot;reindeer&quot;, &quot;sheep&quot; and other things under one word. In English, we just have &quot;reindeer&quot;, but in North Saami, there are dozens of terms for reindeer depending on sex, age, and body properties (there is also a general word &lt;em&gt;boadzu&lt;/em&gt; that simply means 'reindeer'). Thus the entities identified by &quot;reindeer&quot; in English can be further subdivided by selecting one word vs. another in N. Saami, and N. Saami has a &quot;more-nuanced&quot; vocabulary for reindeer: the set of real-world things identified by English &quot;reindeer&quot; can be further distinguished in N. Saami by selecting other words. Similarly, in Somali, there is a word &lt;em&gt;ari&lt;/em&gt; which refers to goats and sheep, so English is &quot;more nuanced&quot; in terms of these animal identifications (there is no common English term generalizing over goats and sheep, though there is a Latin terms that biologists can use, &lt;em&gt;Caprinae&lt;/em&gt;). The Somali term *ari *is a superset of &lt;em&gt;goat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sheep&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of subset / superset analysis can be applied to any collection of words and morphemes, hence 3rd person pronouns may simply be undiftinguished &quot;3rd person&quot;, or they can be further distinguished &quot;singular and plural&quot;, or &quot;masculine and feminine&quot;, and that allows further distinctions &quot;masculine singular&quot;, &quot;feminine plural&quot; and so on. There are many, many ways of subdividing concepts. English pronouns distinguishes between male and female singular 3rd person referents, and Saami does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages do not differ in their &lt;em&gt;net&lt;/em&gt; expressive capacity, so where they can use a single word-choice between &lt;em&gt;vuonjal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;varit&lt;/em&gt;, we would have to use phrases like &quot;female reindeer between a year and a half old and two years old&quot; and &quot;male reindeer between a year and a half old and two years old&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any realistic hope of computing a general &quot;degree of nuance&quot; value for two entire languages (nor do I see that it would tell us anything about the languages -- just because you can define a function doesn't mean that it refers to something useful). One problem would be in comparing a tense-based inflectional system versus as aspect-based system. In the cases of 3rd person pronouns, reindeer, and goats, we were dealing with subset relations in the referents, but the things that perfective / imperfective refers to is incommensurable with what past / present / future refers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T19:03:19.450" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T19:03:19.450" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T01:46:53.950" Score="4" ViewCount="2436" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin the suffix -que can be used to mean &quot;and&quot;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fames sitis&lt;strong&gt;que&lt;/strong&gt; (Hunger and thirst)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any modern Romance languages that use the suffix -que or something similar to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3362" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T08:32:43.523" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T18:58:47.363" Title="Latin -que suffix in romance languages" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11667" CreationDate="2015-03-10T02:34:04.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://limbaromana.org/en/2014/08/introduction-to-the-etymological-dictionary-of-the-romanian-language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; claims that Romanian &lt;strong&gt;şi&lt;/strong&gt; (and) derives from &quot;-que&quot;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C8%99i&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; derives it from &quot;sic&quot; (thus). (Being Wiktionary, of course without any sources.) To me, going from &lt;em&gt;thus&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; seems like a big leap, but I don't know anything for sure about that. Edit: Apparently not that giant a leap, see comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as actual enclitics go, I'm not aware of any Romance language that uses one, but I only know about the 'big' ones (Italian, French, Castilian, Portuguese, Romanian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T18:58:47.363" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T18:58:47.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T04:55:12.697" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford learner's dictionary has these example sentences under the entry &quot;catch&quot;(verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;become stuck [intransitive, transitive] to become stuck in or on something; to make something become stuck &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;catch (in/on something) : &lt;strong&gt;Her dress caught on a nail.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;catch something (in/on something) : &lt;strong&gt;He caught his thumb in the door.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this causative/inchoative alternation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T04:55:12.697" Title="Does the verb “catch” show the causative/inchoative alternation?" Tags="&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11678" CreationDate="2015-03-10T05:50:41.880" Score="3" ViewCount="1297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the comparative reliance on tonality in Asian languages.&#xA;By this I mean not the number of tones, but the frequency of tonal versus non-tonal words in communication. (When I say non-tonal here, I mean words that are neutral tone and have no other tonal homophones)&#xA;Among large tonal languages, Vietnamese sounds like the most extremely reliant on tonality, and Thai sounds the least. I imagine Vietnamese has much more words that would be indistinguishable if it wasn't for tonality than Thai.&#xA;Based on this, as a speaker of only non-tonal languages, I believe Vietnamese would be by far the most difficult for me to learn.&#xA;Roughly speaking, how often do tonal words appear in Thai? Would you say every 5th word is tonal, or every 20th word, or every other word? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastEditorDisplayName="user9324" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T13:39:53.290" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T17:27:27.863" Title="Is Thai less tonal than Chinese or Vietnamese or Burmese?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T06:56:42.013" Score="2" ViewCount="594" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I understand, earlier accounts of phonetics considered a theory promoted by Helmholtz known as the &quot;vocal resonance account&quot;. It wasn't until the mid-40s that the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production became popular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helmholtz articulators were argued to be an oversimplification (Dunn, 1950) - but this is still hard for me to understand because I don't really understand what the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production offered that Helmholtz' account lacked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone clarify the differences between the two accounts? Do we assume today a version of the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T04:21:29.147" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T04:21:29.147" Title="Phonetic theories of speech production" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11677" CreationDate="2015-03-10T08:33:05.657" Score="1" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was looking for some Arabic lyrics I was wondering why there are numbers inbetween letters in some words (eg. &quot;Aw3a Tes2ny&quot; or &quot;7obak&quot;). Is there a reason behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5243" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T22:28:12.997" Title="Why do transcriptions from Arabic contain numbers instead of letters?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11667" CreationDate="2015-03-10T11:56:26.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If 'something similar' to Latin &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; is good enough for you, present-day Spanish &lt;em&gt;conmi&lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; contains an old preposition or prepositional clitic suffix &lt;strong&gt;-cum&lt;/strong&gt; hidden under the current from &lt;strong&gt;-go&lt;/strong&gt;. [Our &lt;em&gt;conmigo&lt;/em&gt; actually derives from &lt;em&gt;cum mecum&lt;/em&gt;, where the &lt;em&gt;-cum&lt;/em&gt; part of &lt;em&gt;mecum&lt;/em&gt; was originally an adposition/a syntactic affix meaning 'with' arguably similar to the &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; clitic meaning 'and'. That construction was, of course, redundant, a remnant of the stage at which late spoken Latin was becoming a head-complement language, what Romance languages soon were to develop into, but still contained important residues, mainly in VPs and PPs, of the earlier complement-head phase]. Less obviously, present-day Spanish &lt;em&gt;quisqui&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;todo quisqui&lt;/em&gt; (= every body), &lt;em&gt;cada quisqui&lt;/em&gt; (= each person), is a reflex of Latin &lt;em&gt;quis-que&lt;/em&gt; (originally perhaps = somebody &lt;strong&gt;else&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-14T20:41:36.843" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T20:41:36.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11667" CreationDate="2015-03-10T12:30:20.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two French/Italian examples :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o &lt;strong&gt;French &quot;quiconque&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (anyone) &amp;lt; Latin quicumque (anyone)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quicumque = qui + cum + -que&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian : &lt;strong&gt;chiunque&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o &lt;strong&gt;French &quot;chacun&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (each one) &amp;lt; Vulgar Latin &quot;cascunu&quot; &amp;lt; Latin &quot;quisque unus&quot; (every one), maybe mixed with Ancient Greek &quot;unum kata unum&quot; (one by one). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quisque = quis + -que&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T12:30:20.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T13:24:09.180" Score="0" ViewCount="960" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if the rule that dictates when to use &quot;an&quot; or &quot;a&quot; in sentences is Sandhi? If not, what is it? I'm trying to explain why we use &quot;an&quot; or &quot;a&quot; in English beyond the &quot;An is for vowels, A is for consonants (with exceptions)&quot; because they want to know more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9329" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-10T15:11:31.007" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T16:16:08.897" Title="Sandhi [English]" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11673" CreationDate="2015-03-10T14:25:51.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The numbers represent Arabic letters of similar shapes, which mostly don't have an intuitive Roman equivalent: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, 7 is ح and 3 is ع, which represent [ħ] and [ʕ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar phenomenon exists in transliterated Cyrillic, you sometimes see 4 being used for Ч; the similarity in shape is reinforced by the coincidental fact that the numeral &quot;four&quot; begins with that letter in all of the Cyrillic-using Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T14:25:51.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11671" CreationDate="2015-03-10T15:16:47.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be the type of answer you were hoping for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct in asserting that most tone languages can be analyzed from a phonological perspective as including words or syllables that lack a specification for tone. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin can be analyzed as having &quot;neutral&quot; tone specified on things&#xA;like the sentence-final particle &lt;em&gt;-le&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many African languages can be analyzed as having single-tone systems,&#xA;with select syllables being marked for high tone and the rest being&#xA;unmarked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Standard&quot; Japanese, which is usually analyzed as having a lexical&#xA;accent system (a subclass of tone systems), includes words in which one of the syllables is marked for a lexical pitch accent and the rest are not. Some words are&#xA;analyzed as completely &quot;unaccented&quot; (i.e., none of the syllables in&#xA;them are marked for accent).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, in all such cases, there are &quot;rules&quot; that govern what pitch contours are given to the words and syllables that are analyzed as tonally &quot;unmarked&quot;. They are analyzed by phonologists as &quot;unmarked&quot; only because their pitch contours are &lt;em&gt;predictable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, a language learner need not memorize any inherent tone shape associated with them, but the learner does need to be aware of the &quot;rules&quot; that govern their pronunciation, which is invariably dependent on the inherent tonal features of neighboring syllables that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; marked for tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Mandarin, the fact that the particle &lt;em&gt;-le&lt;/em&gt; is unmarked for tone doesn't mean that you can get away with pronouncing it with whatever pitch contour you feel like. What pitch contour is appropriate for the particle depends entirely on the tone of the syllable before it in the sentence. If that penultimate syllable is high or falling, the particle must be lower relative to the penultimate syllable. If the penultimate syllable is low or rising, the particle must be higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In African languages that are analyzed as marking select syllables as &quot;high&quot;, usually all the rest of the syllables are pronounced with pitches that are lower compared to those that are tonally marked. Those other syllables could often just as easily be analyzed as being marked as &quot;low&quot;, but to do so would be redundant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, the traditional analysis of its tonal system assumes that accented words include a syllable that is marked for a locus of a tonal shift from high to low. Syllables leading up to the marked syllable are given a relatively high pitch, and syllables following the marked syllable are given a relatively low pitch (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic system). In words that lack an accent-marked syllable, the pitch gradually rises through the end of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raise all these examples to illustrate the fact that getting the pitch of &quot;unmarked&quot; elements right is just as important as getting the pitch of marked elements right in tone languages. If anything, it can be even trickier for a non-native speaker to learn how to pronounce such unmarked elements. I've witnessed this firsthand watching American college students attempting to learn how to pronounce sentence-final particles in Mandarin--even after getting the basic four tones down, they often struggled with that elusive &quot;neutral&quot; tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I know I didn't directly answer your question in terms of helping you find a tone language with a relatively large number of tonally &quot;unmarked&quot; words, but my point is that you may not want to use that criterion to predict which tone languages will be easier for you to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT in response to comments under the original question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading some of the comments above, I think it's important to point out two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One--in the languages you mention, &lt;strong&gt;tone is contrastive at the level of the &lt;em&gt;syllable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and while most &quot;words&quot; (in the morphological sense) are monosyllabic, many vocabulary items that you as an English speaker would consider to be &quot;words&quot; are compounds comprising multiple syllables. In these polysyllabic compounds, the tone of each syllable must be taken into consideration. I am not an expert in Thai or Vietnamese, and I know next to nothing about Burmese, but in Mandarin, there are almost no vocabulary items that lack tonal specifications. Either they are monosyllabic and the tone on that single syllable is specified, or they are compounds and just a subset (usually just one) of the syllables in the compound gets &quot;stripped&quot; of its underlying tone. The exception to this is monosyllabic particles, but they can't occur in isolation either. So the likelihood of encountering a standalone vocabulary item that is entirely unspecified for tone in Mandarin is pretty much nil. My limited understanding of Thai is that every syllable bears a tonal specification. In Thai orthography, which marks tones, some syllables don't bear a tonal marking, but (as in the examples above) there are rules that govern what tone such unmarked syllables bear. I found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/ref/tone-rules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thai-language-learning website&lt;/a&gt; that lays out those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two--&lt;strong&gt;just because a word happens not to have any alternate-toned near-homophones (what linguists call &lt;em&gt;minimal pairs&lt;/em&gt;), it does not mean that it's not important to be aware of its tonal specifications.&lt;/strong&gt; There's not a perfect analogy in English, but think about a word like &lt;em&gt;beige&lt;/em&gt;. I can't think of any other monosyllabic words in English that start with [b] and end with [ʒ]. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter how I pronounce the vowel in that word. A learner of English would have to learn how to pronounce the word with the correct vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T17:27:27.863" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T17:27:27.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11676" CreationDate="2015-03-10T16:00:14.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;a/an&quot; is not sandhi in my dialect of American English, because it is no longer phonologically conditioned.  Like many, I get &quot;an&quot; before an unstressed syllable starting with &quot;h&quot;, which makes sense, because &quot;h&quot; can be dropped at the beginning of an unstressed syllable, and once it is elided, the &quot;an&quot; now comes before a vowel, and so there is no reason for the &quot;n&quot; to be lost.  But there is already a problem here, because the loss of &quot;h&quot; is a low level phonological rule, sensitive to speed of speech and style, and you don't expect such a rule to trigger a morphologically conditioned rule like &quot;an&quot; ==&gt; &quot;a&quot; /_C . (It's morphologically conditioned, because &quot;n&quot; at the end of other words does not drop.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the bigger problem is that, for me, &quot;an&quot; is used before an unstressed syllable starting with &quot;h&quot; even when the &quot;h&quot; does not actually drop.  That is, I say &quot;a history of France&quot; but &quot;an historical incident&quot; even when the &quot;h&quot; of &quot;historical&quot; is pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it appears that the &quot;an&quot; ==&gt; &quot;a&quot; rule has lost any phonological reference.  Sandhi rules, however, are phonologically conditioned (though they may have morphological conditions also), so I say that the &quot;an&quot; rule is not sandhi, at least for dialects like mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T16:00:14.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11676" CreationDate="2015-03-10T16:16:08.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;sandhi&lt;/em&gt; comes from Sanskrit, and means &quot;putting together&quot;. It refers to sound changes that result from combining morphemes (including words). Most rules of Sanskrit sandhi do not refer to specific morphemes or categories, but some do. For example, the regular vowel sandhi rules do not apply to the vowels [ī ū e] in dual endings. Other Sanskrit sandhi rules apply in specific contexts (not just being blocked). More generally, if you look at the linguistic literature using the term &quot;sandhi&quot;, it generally refers to any sound changes resulting from combining words (and &quot;internal sandhi&quot; is thus a rare usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of h-initial words, there is dialect variation in whether underlying /h/ is still there when the a/an rule applies, in case /h/ is at the beginning of an unstressed syllable. This would pose an analytic problem if you believe that optional rules must all follow morphologically conditioned ones -- such a belief was held for a while in Lexical Phonology, via a bifurcation of postlexical phonology into P1 and P2, but that theory has been disproven anyhow, and has been replaced with the theory that there is an autonomous phonetic implementation component which operates continuously and below the level of the segment. If you can establish that /h/ is not actually fully deleted, just reduced in magnitude, then that would be a prime candidate for a rule of phonetic implementation -- and it would be a real problem to have n-deletion apply &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; this gesture-reduction process. So far, nobody has provided any evidence that h-deletion is other than a regular old categorial phonological rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T16:16:08.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-10T16:49:36.263" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;How was phonetics performed with a phonograph? From the Wikipedia excerpt below, I guess it went something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A segment was recorded on a phonograph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That segment was Filtered each time with a different band-pass filter (I don't understand what this means)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A spectrogram was built up (from what?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th century by the invention of the Edison phonograph. The phonograph allowed the speech signal to be recorded and then later processed and analyzed. By replaying the same speech signal from the phonograph several times, filtering it each time with a different band-pass filter, a spectrogram of the speech utterance could be built up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really interested in learning how phonetics was done before the advent of computers, so any insight into these steps would be very much appreciated. I also read about analysis being done on wax cylinders... That's another story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T19:28:34.243" Title="How was phonetics performed with a phonograph?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11681" CreationDate="2015-03-10T19:28:34.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band-pass_filter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A band-pass filter is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects (attenuates) frequencies outside that range&lt;/a&gt;. That gives you information about a particular frequency range. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_oscillograph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An electromagnetic oscillograph is an oscillograph which measures variations of electric current by having it go through a magnetic coil....Some models ... were ... fitted with a pen to record values&lt;/a&gt;. You can then print that on paper, and use a ruler to measure how far up the page the point of interest is (you need to calibrate it first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T19:28:34.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8620" CreationDate="2015-03-10T22:58:40.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Slavic languages were mentioned above, as they often are in the context of a three-way gender system, but the case is actually a little more complicated. I will limit myself to Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional, Latin-inspired interpretation is masculine, feminine, neuter, the division being mainly defined by phonetics. Feminines end mostly in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, and palatalized consonants, neuters in &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-ę&lt;/em&gt;, and everything else (mostly non-palatalized consonants) is masculine. Plus a few semantic exceptions, e.g. &lt;em&gt;mężczyzna&lt;/em&gt; 'man, male', or &lt;em&gt;poeta&lt;/em&gt; '(male) poet' are masculine despite their endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more modern approach is to distinguish as many as five genders for the singular, but only two for the plural. In the singular, these would be: 1a. masculine (people), 1b. masculine (animate), 1c. masculine (inanimate), 2. feminine, 3. neuter. In the plural, just 1. masculine (people), 2. everything else. This distinction is based, like the traditional one, on endings, but unlike it, this one also takes into account the accusative. Specifically, in which number it is the same as the genitive, and in which it is the same as the nominative. The whole thing is actually a bit complicated. You might want to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/gram00.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/gram00.html&lt;/a&gt;, and especially &lt;a href=&quot;http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/deklin_stat.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/deklin_stat.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that the more you think about it, the more fuzzy the notion of gender becomes. In the case of Polish, it becomes some weird cross between declension types, syntax and semantics, and makes it really difficult to answer your question. I think you'd need a pretty sturdy definition of &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; before venturing anywhere further with whatever idea made you ask this question, and it isn't going to be easy to find or construct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="794" LastActivityDate="2015-03-10T22:58:40.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11652" CreationDate="2015-03-11T00:06:53.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third-to-last syllable (in jargon, the antepenult) is the normal place for nouns in English to be stressed, except for (1) some morphologically complex forms with -ate, -er, -y, etc., (2) syllables are stressed if they have tense/long vowels that underwent the Great Vowel Shift, (3) next-to-last syllables that end in a consonant are stressed (e.g., &quot;veranda&quot;).  There are many exceptions, but this holds more or less, and is well-described in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples are not morphologically complex, so we can forget about (1).  And I don't see any in category (3).  So that leaves (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples with stress on the next-to-last syllable (the penult) would all be explained if we supposed they all have long vowels in the series that underwent the GVS.  E.g., Nehem[i:]a would get stress on the long [i:], then the [i:] would become [ai] by the GVS change, to give us the modern pronunciation with stress on the penult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course just looking at the modern spelling, there is no way to know that the penults in those words are long.  If they're short, they would be stressed on the antepenults, as you note.  NeHEMiah.  And since there are English words pronounced like this, &quot;Bohemia&quot; e.g., I think we just have to say the stress is irregular, and due to the peculiar histories of these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T00:12:04.820" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T00:12:04.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-11T09:55:59.827" Score="1" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: This is cross-posted on ELL.se at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/52099/%D0%A1oncept-of-an-attribute-used-by-russian-grammarians&quot;&gt;Сoncept of an attribute used by Russian grammarians&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to know &lt;strong&gt;all the attributes in theese sentences and how they are expressed&lt;/strong&gt;.The problem is that grammatical terms and rules I use, are different from the traditional or modern English grammars (it's Russian).That's why I was adviced to post here,as people here deal with various grammatical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was such a cruel thing to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dumb with amazement, I slumped into (whose?) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; chair. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;My&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - a simple attribute expressed by a possesive pronun(my)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The best thing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;for you to do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is to leave at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;For you to do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; – a complex attribute expressed by a for-to-infinitive construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The fence (what kind of?) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;surrounding the garden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is newly painted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surrounding the garden - a phrasal attribute expressed by a participial phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did I miss any attributes,or choose the wrong ones???&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And what member of the sentence is &quot;newly&quot; in the last sentence??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INFORMATION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The attribute&lt;/strong&gt; is a secondary part of the sentence which characterizes the referent of its headword (the modified word)&#xA;  qualitatively, quantitatively or situationally. The most&#xA;  characteristic feature of the attribute is that it always refers to a&#xA;  noun or its substitute (a noun-pronoun or substantivised element).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending upon the degree of the closeness of the connection between attributes and their headwords the former are either &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;non-detached&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (close) or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;detached&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (loose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Non-detached&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; attributes form one sense group with their headwords and are not set off from them by commas:&#xA;    A &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; smile of amusement came to Sir Arthur's lips. (Christie)&#xA;The connection between detached attributes and their headwords is very loose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Detached&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; attributes form separate sense groups and are set off from them by commas, sometimes by dashes:&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;Blind and almost senseless&lt;/em&gt;, he still heard the sharp slam of the door. (Cronin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From the point of view of their structure&lt;/strong&gt; almost all parts of the sentence are traditionally divided into simple and complex. But Prof. N.A.Kobrina and other authors of 'An English Grammar. Syntax' (M.,1986) divide them into &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;simple, phrasal, complex and clausal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THE SIMPLE ATTRIBUTE&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;    The simple attribute is expressed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Nouns:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) in the common case (always in pre-position):&#xA;        The &lt;em&gt;village water&lt;/em&gt; supply was two streets down the road. (Hemingway)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) in the possessive (genitive) case (always in pre-position):&#xA;        John is &lt;em&gt;Peter's&lt;/em&gt; brother (Longman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Adjectives:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) most often in pre-position:&#xA;        I am a &lt;em&gt;strange old&lt;/em&gt; man. (Hemingway)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) more rarely in postposition:&#xA;        But they were in a past so very &lt;em&gt;distant&lt;/em&gt;. (Bragg)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Pronouns:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;a) adjective-pronouns (in pre-position):&#xA;        We've made &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; money. (Hemingway)&#xA;        &lt;em&gt;His&lt;/em&gt; voice rose to a shriek. (Maugham)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) noun-pronouns in the possessive (genitive) case:&#xA;        One should wash &lt;em&gt;one's&lt;/em&gt; hair regularly. (Longman)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. Statives:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (very rarely) &#xA;a) in pre-position:&#xA;        It’s nice to be such an &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt; person. (Longman)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) in post-position:&#xA;        But it was a woman &lt;em&gt;asleep&lt;/em&gt;. (Fowles)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. Numerals&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;a) cardinal:&#xA;        I’ve invited &lt;em&gt;one or two&lt;/em&gt; friends round this evening. (Longman)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) ordinal:&#xA;        A &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; month passed... (Maugham).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;6. Adverbs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: in postposition:&#xA;        But you only made up your mind to go the day &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;, hence it was necessary&#xA;         to warn her. (Christie)&#xA;Note: Some adverbs can be used in pre-position: The &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; photo, the &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; president (R.Quirk), but they are felt to be adjectivised to a certain extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;7. Infinitives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: always in post position:&#xA;        But Polly had no wish &lt;em&gt;to travel&lt;/em&gt;. (Capote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;8. Gerunds:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in pre-position:&#xA;        Her eyes rested on the &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; table. (Woolf)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;9. Participles:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; both I and II :&#xA;a) in pre-position:&#xA;        Red Rocks is a &lt;em&gt;struggling&lt;/em&gt; little place. (Wain)&#xA;        'I have only one offering to give', he said, 'a &lt;em&gt;broken&lt;/em&gt; heart'. (Voynich)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) in post-position:&#xA;        There's a fine moon coming up. (Glasgow)&#xA;        Things &lt;em&gt;seen&lt;/em&gt; are mightier than things &lt;em&gt;heard&lt;/em&gt;. (Proverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lO. So-called nonce-words:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;        It was an easy &lt;em&gt;go-as-you-please&lt;/em&gt; existence. (Prichard)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: One should bear in mind that sometimes the function of a sentence part can be treated in a twofold way: as an attribute and as a prepositional object, for instance according to Prof. Barkhudarov L., “of the bridge” in the phrase 'the construction of the bridge' can be treated in both these ways. In the sentence 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that way', the gerundial phrase 'of taking' is commonly regarded as a prepositional object (see their 'English Grammar', M., 1964-p.273).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THE COMPLEX ATTRIBUTE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any other complex part of the sentence the complex attribute is expressed by predicative constructions with verbals (verbids), namely by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;l. For-to-Infinitive construction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (for-complex):&#xA;    There is no need &lt;em&gt;for us to argue about this&lt;/em&gt;. (Longman)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Sometimes the function of the for-complex is ambiguous: it can be treated either as a complex attribute or as a complex adverbial of purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spread a rug &lt;em&gt;for his wife to sit on&lt;/em&gt;. (Galsworthy), in which the for-complex may be treated in a twofold way: “He spread a rug on which his wife could sit” - complex attribute or 'He spread a rug so that his wife could sit on it'- a complex adverbial of purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. (Half)-gerundial constructions&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;always with a preposition&lt;/em&gt;):&#xA;    Dorin was wakened by the second &lt;em&gt;of her husband’s splashing in the bathhouse&lt;/em&gt;.  (Maugham)&#xA;    All along I have realized the significance &lt;em&gt;of that pistol being removed from the   scene of the crime&lt;/em&gt;. (Christie)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. (Absolute) Participial constructions&lt;/strong&gt; (with the preposition &lt;strong&gt;“with”&lt;/strong&gt;):&#xA;    It was a large detached room, well-ventilated, with afire burning at one end.(Cronin)&#xA;    A wide river, &lt;em&gt;with naked children splashing in the shallow&lt;/em&gt;, glided into sight and&#xA;     was gone again. (Mansfield)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. Absolute (prepositional) constructions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (with the preposition &lt;strong&gt;“with”&lt;/strong&gt;):&#xA;    There were several bird-cages, &lt;em&gt;with birds in them&lt;/em&gt;, ranged against the wall.   (Greenwood)&#xA;    He ... gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee &lt;em&gt;with no coffee in it&lt;/em&gt;. (Galsworthy)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Absolute prepositional constructions are always detached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5596" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T11:14:32.110" Title="Сoncept of an attribute usesd by Russian grammarians" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11685" CreationDate="2015-03-11T10:26:24.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You did not include any definition or examples of phrasal attributes, which would be helpful. You missed &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was &lt;strong&gt;such&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;cruel&lt;/strong&gt; thing &lt;strong&gt;to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Such&lt;/em&gt; is a simple adverb, but I have a feeling like &lt;em&gt;to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature&lt;/em&gt; is in some way licensed by &lt;em&gt;cruel&lt;/em&gt;, which would make it kind of one attribute I think (i.e. the thing was &lt;strong&gt;cruel to have happened to ...&lt;/strong&gt;). So it would be a complex (or phrasal? or clausal? What exactly are the definitions?) adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumb with amazement&lt;/strong&gt;, I slumped into my chair.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which appears to be a detached phrasal adjectival attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;best&lt;/strong&gt; thing &lt;strong&gt;for you to do&lt;/strong&gt; is to leave at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Best&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for you to do&lt;/em&gt; are in some kind of relation here, so I would guess that they are the same attribute, but I have no idea by your examples what kind of attribute it might be. (Because &quot;the thing for you to do&quot; would be &quot;the thing you should do&quot;, but &quot;the best thing for you to do&quot; is &quot;the thing which to do would be best for you&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fence surrounding the garden is &lt;strong&gt;newly&lt;/strong&gt; painted. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple adverb, modifiying &lt;em&gt;painted&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the ones you already have are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T10:26:24.630" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11689" CreationDate="2015-03-11T13:27:59.933" Score="5" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that languages do not create complexities in vain, the existence in Mandarin of two different propositional negation devices - via “bù”, an adverb, and “méi” or “méiyou” (verbs) - seems to point to relevant differences between the negated 'predications' and possibly between the ontological properties of the ‘states of affairs/events’ that such predications describe. However, what such difference(s) may be is as yet unclear to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammars of Mandarin I have seen all roughly say that the time interval at which the state of affairs/event is described as &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; holding/having occurred is relevant, and in particular that ‘méi’ is used to negate sentences describing events/states of affairs that were &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the case &lt;strong&gt;in the past&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas “bù” is used to negate sentences describing events/states of affairs that are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the case &lt;strong&gt;at present&lt;/strong&gt; or will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be the case &lt;strong&gt;at some future time&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see no valid ontological difference between non-events/non-states of affairs in that respect, nor any obviously relevant grammatical difference between the predications that must be negated with &quot;bù&quot; and &quot;méi&quot;, respectively. [One of the complications is that there happens to be a &lt;strong&gt;unique&lt;/strong&gt; Chinese stative verb &quot;you3&quot; sometimes meaning 'have', 'possess', 'exist [for somebody]', but also equivalent to 'yes', 'is the case', 'is true' in other cases, that must nowadays be negated with &quot;méi(you)&quot;, not &quot;bù&quot;, in spite of the fact that it obviously refers to a currently holding state of affairs. Another is that the adverb &quot;hái&quot;, meaning 'yet' as in E. &quot;not yet&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; co-occur with (precede) &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;bù&quot; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;méi(you)&quot;, although the sentence in which it appears cannot possibly refer to a non-fact of a past world].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is this: are there any other languages in which a comparable distinction exists between the way sentences must be negated depending on whether they describe non-events of the past or the non-past, respectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T22:46:17.703" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T22:46:17.703" Title="Are there languages, other than Mandarin, in which negation differs depending on the time interval at which a non-event fails to occur?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-11T16:29:01.467" Score="2" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious as what methods &quot;professional language learners&quot; have developed to quickly acquire new languages. By this I mean people who make it a hobby or profession to learn languages. I imagine many linguists fit this category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't call myself a professional language learner, but I do take pride in learning languages, and Cambodian is currently 8th language I'm learning (I didn't get far with a few of them though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the associative methods that I read in a memory book somewhere, which basically means taking a new word and coming up with a word in a language you already speak that sounds similar, and associating that with the meaning of the new word. To give an example, the word &quot;summit&quot; in Cambodian is &quot;kahmpool&quot;. At first seeing this I though of a poodle (dog), it could've been a pool too, but this methods works best if the image you come up with is more exotic. So I imagine a poodle barking on top of a mountain. This is so random that your brain will remember it. So when I think of summit, I will remember this image of the poodle, which in turn will allow me to remember the word &quot;kahmpool&quot;. This method has worked for me in a major way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My base strategy is hardcore, classical vocabulary learning, from lists. I complement this with other methods. To be able to learn vocabulary from lists, I had to learn to read the language first. This took about a year to do, but now I can learn on my own as well as pick up new words from written text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation to use this system fluctuates a lot, but when I am motivated it allows me to proceed at breakneck pace. Over the past three days, I've learned 120 new Cambodian words, spending about an hour each day. And yes some of it does get forgotten, so I have to go back to the lists after a few days or weeks and relearn about 10-20%, after relearning 2-3 times 95% will stick forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize my system would not work with every language. First, it relies on me having learned to read and the written language closely mirroring the spoken language. So it would not work for Chinese, or Japanese, I would need some spoken vocabulary list to learn. I think it would also be difficult for very tonal languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, because I would have trouble making associations and remembering them, since their words are so similar to each other. Right now however, this is working great for Cambodian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious what methods have you guys developed similar to this ?&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T16:29:01.467" Title="How do linguists or professional language learners learn new languages?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-03-12T14:02:56.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2015-03-11T17:43:22.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making no assumptions about Mandarin semantics, it is common in Bantu languages to have numerous tense inflections such as crastinal future, immediate future, immediate past, hesternal past, remote past and so on. These distinctions are encoded by selecting difference prefixes and suffixes on the verb. Usually, for any tense there are distinct affirmative vs. negative forms (negation involving some number of tense-determined special negative prefixes and often some special prefix forms regarding the marking of remote vs. immediate past). So in Bantu, negation is a package of morphemes (thought there are some languages which have a distinct and general negation word applicable to all tenses), and thus &quot;I didn't see(remote) the child, although I did see(hesternal) the child&quot; is not a contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Finnic and Saami (and I think also Mari) there are similar distinctions, in that there is a negative verb which bears all of the inflection, and the form of the negative verb is tense-determined. Hausa has something like that, where the negative particle (partially) indicate tense-aspect and subject person. I suspect that such distinctions are very common in languages where negation is part of inflectional morphology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T17:43:22.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2015-03-11T18:28:39.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic (classical) has a lot of different ways of expressing negatives. laysa refers (usually) to the present time, lam to past time, lan to future time, lā and mā can refer to any time depending on the tense of the following verb. laysa is a conjugated verb, the others are immutable particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T18:28:39.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11692" CreationDate="2015-03-11T20:00:36.533" Score="5" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a bit about the moraic system found in Japanese, but as there isn't much complexity in the case of its syllabic consonants, I am left with a few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; Are there any natural languages in which syllables containing a consonantal nucleus are assigned a mora?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if [l̩] is a possible word in some hypothetical language, &lt;em&gt;how would it most likely be parsed moraically? Would it just have one mora? In some language could it be considered to have zero morae?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; Could one consonant function as both an onset and a nucleus in the same syllable (demonstrated in the 1)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; [ll̩] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; Is it possible for a language have a length distinction for syllabic consonants ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B.&lt;/strong&gt; [l̩:]  ( contrastive with [l̩]?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4)&lt;/strong&gt; Lastly, would there  be a difference in how &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; are counted moraically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9335" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-11T21:57:08.243" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T21:57:08.243" Title="Cross-linguistically, how do syllabic consonants interact with morae?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11691" CreationDate="2015-03-11T20:33:25.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers to your questions have to be prefaced with disclaimers about how one determines that something has a mora, or not -- phonology has embraced and eschewed the concept, and used it for all sorts of things. With that caveat, it has become a matter of virtual principle that every syllable nucleus has a mora (though Piggott 1995 &quot;Epenthesis and syllable weight&quot; allows for amoraic syllables), so yes. In Swahili, there is a contrast between syllabic and non-syllabic preconsonantal nasal, hence [m̩buni] &quot;coffee plant&quot; vs [mbuni] &quot;ostrich&quot;. The noun prefix for cl. 9, found in &quot;ostrich&quot;, also occurs in &quot;dog&quot;, but it is syllabic and stressable ([ˈm̩bwa]). The reason for this exceptional moraicity of the nasal is a minimality condition requiring words to have two moras. To the extent that a language has diagnostics for moraicity, any phonologically syllabic consonant will pas the test of being moraic. However, also note that &quot;syllabicity&quot; is not a self-evident property that can be read trivially off the speech stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a consonant being both onset and nucleus, specifically, [mm̩], is discussed for Hehe in Odden &amp;amp; Odden &quot;Kihehe Syllable Structure&quot;, where that language phonetically contrasts &quot;moraic&quot; nasals and &quot;syllabic&quot; nasals. In this case, both moraic [m̩] and &quot;syllabic&quot; [mm̩] count as a single mora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical Sanskrit is an example of a language with a contrast between long and short syllabic /r/ (and /l/, though that is more about grammarian's theory), and Slovak also has long and short syllabic /r,l/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-11T20:33:25.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11700" CreationDate="2015-03-11T23:37:43.747" Score="4" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well-known that some ergative languages lack morphological case. If there is no case, where does their ergativity show up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:22:10.507" Title="How do caseless ergative languages work?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11697" CreationDate="2015-03-11T23:43:26.027" Score="1" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence &lt;strong&gt;I will go to Belfast tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt;. How do its surface and deep syntax tree differ in a dependency-based grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T04:34:04.067" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T04:39:56.820" Title="How do surface and deep syntax differ in dependency grammars?" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2015-03-11T23:52:34.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may show in a number of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, in agreement: if the language has bound pronouns, they will differentiate between A vs. S&amp;amp;P (where A is Agent, S is the Single argument of an intransitive and P is Patient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is the &lt;em&gt;syntactic ergativity&lt;/em&gt; in the wide sense, i.e., any clustering of morphosyntactic characteristics for A vs. S&amp;amp;P. This includes restrictions on relativization, topicalization and &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement of the ergative, binding and control priority of the absolutive, coordinate omission (girl-1 kissed-1 boy-2 and smiled-2), and even valency changing derivations (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/602217/Ergativity_in_the_Adyghe_system_of_valency-changing_derivations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letuchiy&lt;/a&gt; on Adyghe; it's a language with case, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the work on syntactic ergativity, see Manning's dissertation, Aldridge, and Polinsky, a.o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in a fixed word order language ergativity could manifest in word order (not that I heard of such, but logically possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T13:22:10.507" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:22:10.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11694" CreationDate="2015-03-12T00:22:20.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends of course on the particular dependency grammar (DG) that one chooses. There are many versions of DG, and they disagree about such matters in important ways. Lucien Tesnière, the father of modern DGs, did not distinguish between deep and surface syntax. He would have produced just one dependency analysis of the sentence, and this analysis would have lacked linear order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analysis in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) might acknowledge seven different analyses of the sentence, since MTT acknowledges seven layers of representation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word Grammar would probably acknowledge just one analysis in terms of dependency arcs, and these arcs would appear above the actual sentence, which means there would be just one surface analysis of the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The type of DG that I prefer is monostratal in syntax, so there would be just one syntactic analysis. It looks like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZuE4z.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am forced to produce a deep syntactic analysis of the sentence, there are various ways that I could do it. All of these ways would, though, abstract away from linear order in the tree. Here's one possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lzjiq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analysis lacks linear order. Note, however, that the function words are present in the tree, &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;. Some analyses of deep syntax might assume that function words are not present at that layer; they would then exclude all function words from the hierarchical analysis. Or other DGs might subordinate function words to content words in deep syntax, in which case they would subordinate &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Belfast&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, these questions about the nature of deep syntax cannot be answered. We cannot see, hear, or measure deep syntax in any emperically verifiable way. I therefore prefer to avoid the notion of deep syntax, remaining with surface syntax entirely. Surface syntax is much closer to what we can hear, see, and measure emperically. But I know a number of DG people who strongly disagree with my position in this area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum then, there is no one answer to the question that would be accepted by the DG community in general. There are, rather, a number of competing answers. The one who poses the question should therefore decide for him- or herself which of the answers is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T00:38:30.273" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T00:38:30.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11694" CreationDate="2015-03-12T01:55:28.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deep syntax structures are dags,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only content words serve as nodes there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that deep syntax structures should be as language independent as possible. In your sentence &quot;will&quot; is only a tense carrier and &quot;to&quot;, though being a semantic preposition, functions as a case marker (illative). From a graph-theoretic perspective, to translate a surface tree into a deep dag is to remove all the nodes that represent function words from the graph. Thus at the level of deep syntax a sentence has the same structure in all languages unless there's a lexico-semantic mismatch (in which case the edge labels will be different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In grammars with feature structures, deep structures are constraint-based. In LFG, for example, c-structures are phrase structure trees but f-structures are isomorphic to (deep) dependency dags (if one substitutes thematic roles for grammatical functions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a logical perspectives, deep syntax dags are &quot;hierarchical logical forms&quot;. Lambda calculus could be used to incrementally assemble the logical form and there's a one-to-one relationship between logical forms and dags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth mentioning is information structure which is sometimes added to dags (though it's not part of syntax sensu stricto). It may be expressed as an ordering on nodes (as in FGD). Note that to fully account for syntax one needs a LP component (such as topological trees) which means that surface dependency trees are uninformative since they can be reconstructed from structures at the other levels. They can be view as a blend of topological trees and deep syntax dags. Surface trees tell us little but are structurally closer to the phonetic form of the sentece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; A few definitions might be useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surface syntax trees are totally ordered (graph-theoretic) trees. There's a one-to-one mapping between their nodes and the words in the sentence. Since they're ordered, they can be tangled/nonprojective (nonprojectivity is a scale which includes planarity, well-nestedness, and full nonprojectivity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deep syntax trees are dags that contain only content words. In case of pro-drop or if there are other covert elements, they can contain nodes that have no counterpart in the surface syntax tree (in Spanish &quot;me gusta&quot; the subject is covert). Dags are the same as feature structures (in fact, feature structures are merely a pictorial representation of dags). Deep syntax trees are called &quot;tectogrammatical&quot; in FGD. At this level the literal meaning (linguistic meaning, character) is captured. The representations are scope-free and there's no coercion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Logical forms are formulae in formal logics. Here things get more complicated since there are many different logics. In general a logical form in higher-order logic is structurally very similar to the corresponding deep syntax tree. In first-order logic, logical forms are flattened deep syntax trees. The meaning of words (that is, the chunks used to build up logical forms) come from the lexicon (sometimes they're called &quot;semantic forms&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T04:39:56.820" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T04:39:56.820" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2015-03-12T04:02:21.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Modern Eastern) Armenian has only periphrastic present tense, for example &lt;strong&gt;tesa&lt;/strong&gt; I saw vs. &lt;strong&gt;tesnum em&lt;/strong&gt; I see. In the present tense there are more morphemes - the ending of the participle and the clitical auxiliary. There is a synthetic future tense, too, but it has an additional morpheme (&lt;strong&gt;ktesnem&lt;/strong&gt; I will see).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T04:02:21.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-12T05:59:10.867" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my rudimentary understanding of electronics, the telephone transforms sounds to an electric medium transmitted to a receiver over wires. You don't really need phonetics to make that work, but I'm those days before spectrograms, I guess the invention of the phone may have kickstarted phonetic theories and acoustic analysis. Does anyone have any insight into that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1144.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, the connection between the invention of the telephone and telegraphy in general is mentioned (see excerpt) but never made explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DZGkc.png&quot; alt=&quot;citation&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-03-12T18:53:54.907" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T16:19:31.297" Title="In what way did the invention of the telephone shape the development of phonetic theory?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11693" CreationDate="2015-03-12T06:25:27.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abkhaz is ergative and caseless. Verbs have slots that express their arguments by prefixes. An example of an intransitive verbs is &lt;strong&gt;с-цоит&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I go&quot; (the prefix in the first slot signals the subject's person, gender, and number).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are bipersonal intransitive verbs, such as &lt;strong&gt;с-у-суеит&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I hit you&quot;. The first slot signals the subject and the second slot the indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are transitive verbs. In &lt;strong&gt;и-&amp;empty;-з-боит&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;I see it&quot; what is expressed in the first slot is the direct object. The subject is expressed in the third slot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NPs are optionally adjoined to the verb and agree with it in person, gender, and number, thus allowing for free word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circassian, another Northwest Caucasian language, has the same verb structure but since it has morphological case, the verb agrees with its arguments in person, case, gender, and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T06:25:27.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11685" CreationDate="2015-03-12T14:59:46.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Original Poster's source, an attribute is any type of Modifier, Complement or Determinative in a noun phase, excluding the articles &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;. (I don't know if this comment about articles is correct, but it's what I sense from the tenor of the grammar as described). In other words all the dependents in  a noun phrase apart from articles are &quot;&lt;em&gt;attributes&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. I use the term &lt;em&gt;NOUN PHRASE&lt;/em&gt; here to mean a phrase headed by a noun or pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the above, the term &lt;em&gt;attribute&lt;/em&gt; also covers any adjective phrases functioning as predicative adjuncts (in other words adjective phrases functioning as sentence adjuncts describing an entity depicted by a noun phrase), as well as subjectless non-finite clauses functioning as adjuncts in the sentence, when the subject is understood as one of the entities in the main clause. It does &lt;em&gt;NOT&lt;/em&gt; include predicative &lt;em&gt;complements&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in order to find the 'attributes' in a sentence find the noun phrases. Everything that isn't the head noun or an article, is an &quot;attribute&quot;. There are many ways to help identify the extent of a noun phrase. One of them is to  substitute it with a pronoun. Everything that disappears is almost definitely part of that noun phrase. Everything that isn't the head noun or an article is an 'attribute'. (You'll then need to add any sentence adjuncts which describe any noun phrase entities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't like that grumpy old man with the hat on who always swears at me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't like &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case we can see that &quot;&lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;&quot; has replaced &quot;&lt;em&gt;that grumpy old man with the hat on who always swears at me&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The head noun in the noun phrase is &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;. This means that the following items are attributes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grumpy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;old&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with the hat on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;who always swears at me&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to identify the extent of a noun phrase is this: if it's a noun phrase  functioning as subject, turn the sentence into a question and everything that inverts with the auxiliary verb is part of that noun phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That grumpy old man with the hat on who always swears at me is tiresome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that grumpy old man with the hat on who always swears at me tiresome?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see the noun phrase inverting with &quot;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, indicating again that &quot;*That grumpy old man with the hat on who always swears at me *&quot; is all one noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It was such a cruel thing to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three noun phrases in this sentence. Firstly there is the one word noun phrase &quot;&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. As this word has no dependents it has no 'attributes'. Secondly, there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;such a cruel thing to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attributes here are the modifier of the noun phrase &lt;em&gt;such&lt;/em&gt;, the modifier of the nominal &lt;em&gt;cruel&lt;/em&gt; and the infinitival clause &quot;&lt;em&gt;to have happened to that gentle, helpless creature&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. However, it's possible, if not probable, that the infinitival clause here is a dependent of &quot;&lt;em&gt;cruel&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In this case we may wish to cite &quot;&lt;em&gt;cruel to have happened&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as a single attribute. Now, within that infinitival clause there is another noun phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that gentle, helpless creature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within this phrase we can see the determiner &quot;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and the adjectives &quot;&lt;em&gt;gentle&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;helpless&lt;/em&gt;&quot; which are all attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Dumb with amazement, I slumped into my chair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again we see a one-word noun phrase, &quot;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The other noun phrase here is &quot;&lt;em&gt;my chair&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The head noun here is &quot;&lt;em&gt;chair&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;&quot; must be an 'attribute'. In this sentence, however, we also have the predicative adjunct, the adjective phrase, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Dumb with amazement&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which describes the subject of the main clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The best thing for you to do is to leave at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one big noun phrase here, &quot;&lt;em&gt;The best thing for you to do&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The head word is &lt;em&gt;&quot;thing&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The word &quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is an article and so though it's a dependent, it doesn't count as an attribute (if I have understood the OP's grammar source correctly). This means that the attributes are the adjective &quot;&lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and the post-modifying infinitival clause, &quot;&lt;em&gt;for you to do&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Again, it could be argued that &quot;&lt;em&gt;best for you to do&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is one attribute. However, I doubt it in this case. We could easily have &quot;&lt;em&gt;the thing for you to do&lt;/em&gt;&quot; without the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Within this clause, there's a one word noun phrase that we don't need to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The fence surrounding the garden is newly painted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we can see the noun phrase &quot;&lt;em&gt;The fence surrounding the garden&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in subject position (if we turn the sentence into a question we get &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is the fence surrounding the garden newly painted?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;). The article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; does not count here. The head noun is &quot;&lt;em&gt;fence&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. This is post-modified by the gerund participle phrase &quot;&lt;em&gt;surrounding the garden&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which is therefore an attribute. Within this there is a noun phrase functioning as direct object of the verb &quot;&lt;em&gt;surrounding&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, namely &quot;&lt;em&gt;the garden&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. However, this consists just of the head noun &quot;&lt;em&gt;garden&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and the article &quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Assuming that articles don't count as attributes, there are no attributes in this noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general guide to finding attributes, completely disregard the semantics as much as possible and look at the &lt;em&gt;STRUCTURE&lt;/em&gt; of the sentence. If it's part of a noun phrase and not the head noun, then it's an attribute (unless it is an article). If it's a sentence adjunct (specifically an adjective phrase or subjectless non-finite clause) describing one of the noun phrases, it's also an attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: The book which the Original Poster refers to does not explicitly state whether or not articles should be considered attributes. In one of the author's examples, an article has been highlighted as an attribute. In the others they have been excluded. I assume that the sole occurrence was a typo, but I can't be sure. Articles are not mentioned in the author's list of types of attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2015-03-13T01:02:25.463" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T01:02:25.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-12T17:30:25.713" Score="4" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about how strong are the region-wide or country-wide mass-media institutions (be them newspapers or TV channels) as deterrent of language or dialects differentiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a nation-wide TV channel based in some city (usually the capital) would record and broadcast its shows in the dialect of that city, a likely different one than those of the most distant regions of the same country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we also have several channels spanning many countries, but I am not sure how influential are these ones on the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any serious evidence that the usual and systematic differentiation of the dialects is being deterred by the existence and importance of these institutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I've found three questions related to this one, but they cover somewhat different topics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3495/impact-of-widespread-literacy-and-global-communication-on-language-evolution&quot;&gt;Impact of widespread literacy and global communication on language evolution&lt;/a&gt;: this one focuses on literacy and global communication as a whole, not only to mass-media.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1254/how-powerful-is-literacy-to-slow-down-language-change&quot;&gt;How powerful is literacy to slow down language change?&lt;/a&gt;: this focuses only on literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3920/is-there-any-evidence-that-modern-telecommunication-slows-dialect-differentiatio&quot;&gt;Is there any evidence that modern telecommunication slows dialect differentiation?&lt;/a&gt;: this focuses on modern telecommunication, very related to this question, but it didn't get any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="455" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T09:00:13.700" Title="Globalized mass-media deterring language or dialects differentiation" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11699" CreationDate="2015-03-12T20:51:19.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the telephone did not directly influence phonetics, but there was probably an indirect influence via the invention of the electrical microphone (without which, no phone) and the development of an understanding of how to convert pressure waves to electricity by varying resistance on an electrical circuit. In my opinion, the most important invention of that time for phonetics was the phonograph since it allowed speech to be captured. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics refers to the linguistic study of sound at the physical level. There are many allied fields such as anatomy, physics, electronics and psychology that phoneticians call on, where telephones and the like were significant. Focusing just on &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt; and not broader acoustics and the like, the main technique of phonetics up to the invention of the spectrogram was auditory comparison a.k.a. ear-training, followed by some form of palatography. There were occasional uses of the kymograph to show something about airflow, e.g. in Armstrong's Kikuyu book. Independent of what linguists were doing, engineers developed theories of and tools for sound, which naturally could be used by linguists if they were so inclined, some number of years (many) later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, the relevance of the electrical microphone was its contribution to transduction from pressure waves to something more easily quantifiable and also manipulable via circuitry and then more abstractly by equations. Working backwards from what phonetics has developed into, digital signal processing is sort of the technological &quot;big bang&quot;, and DSP is possible only if there is an electrical-theoretic way to turn pressure waves into current variations (we're out of the domain of phonetics now), and that requires transduction to current (microphone) and quantization circuitry. But you also need a computer to do anything useful with the digitized output. Apart from a very few laboratories such as Haskins and possibly UCLA, phoneticians still had to deal with speech sound at the analog level (hence burnt-paper spectrography) into the 80's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-13T16:19:31.297" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T16:19:31.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11707" CreationDate="2015-03-12T22:02:42.897" Score="5" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching episode 8 of Srugim's third season and noticed, beginning at approximately 19:50 (at least in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hulu.com/watch/671078&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Hulu upload&lt;/a&gt;), this very minor character whose Hebrew sounded weirdly &quot;off&quot; to me. From the context and my imagination, it almost sounded like the speaker might have been an American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't speak Hebrew, and my sole exposure to &lt;em&gt;listening&lt;/em&gt; to it has been through one or two TV shows and pop music. It's thus a bit peculiar to me that I should have picked this up, although from past experience (noticing that a Chinese actor's Japanese was off, despite not knowing Japanese but having some exposure to it via television), this isn't entirely inexplicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my evaluation of the Hebrew here (that the pronunciation is off) correct? If so, why exactly is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9340" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T23:11:27.477" Title="What characterises Hebrew spoken by native English speakers?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11706" CreationDate="2015-03-12T22:23:34.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that you're simply hearing sounds or sound patterns that you're not used to hearing. Perhaps you've learned to recognize the distinct sounds of the uvulars /χ ʁ/ and the pharyngeals /ħ ʕ/, and you notice that instead of those sounds, you hear sounds that aren't quite the same - perhaps something easier for an English speaker to pronounce, but distinctly different in sound. Or perhaps it's the vowels. Perhaps you notice /e/ pronounced as [ɛ] or [ɛɪ̯], or /o/ pronounced as [əʊ̯] or [oʊ̯], or /a/ pronounced as [ɑ]. Or, perhaps the character's /i/ and /u/ were slightly diphthongized rather than being pure vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be that what you're noticing isn't the quality of the speaker's phonemes, but his intonation or rhythm. I don't know much about Hebrew intonation or rhythm (nor did I know much about Hebrew's phoneme inventory, but that information is readily available on Wikipedia), but if Hebrew is a syllable-timed language, and the character you speak of is speaking as if it were a stress-timed language (like English), that would be pretty noticeable. Similarly, if he uses English intonation patterns that aren't common in Hebrew, then that could also be noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6888" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T22:23:34.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11706" CreationDate="2015-03-12T23:11:27.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First thing I noticed were that his r's are American English, then his vowel reduction and intonation as Zgialor mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-12T23:11:27.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11716" CreationDate="2015-03-13T02:45:18.847" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many different accounts of &quot;information structure&quot; (&quot;information packaging&quot;, &quot;topic-comment&quot;, &quot;theme-rheme distinction&quot;). Is there a &quot;frameworkless&quot; formal definition of what topic/focus is? Is information structure part of syntax or semantics or is it an independent level of representation? What does &quot;discourse-configurational&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T15:53:48.717" Title="Formalization of information structure" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11709" CreationDate="2015-03-13T04:37:40.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one for you, but it's not frameworkless.  I don't see how there could ever be a frameworkless formal definition (since &quot;formal&quot; means it is part of a formalized theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A topic is a clause constituent bearing the grammatical relation 0.  This is to be understood as part of an extended version of the theory Relational Grammar, due to Paul Postal and David Perlmutter (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Relational Grammar&lt;/a&gt;).  The 0 is a term relation in the same series as 1 (subject), 2 (direct object), and 3 (indirect object).  RG did not actually have a 0 -- I've added that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 0 relation for topic is subject to the same laws and constraints of RG as the other term relations, the most interesting of which is the Stratal Uniqueness Law, which requires that each term relation appear no more than once in a stratum.  (A stratum is &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; like a derivational level.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T04:37:40.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11709" CreationDate="2015-03-13T05:18:22.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what a frameworkless account of anything would be, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://semprag.org/article/view/sp.5.6/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; is not meat grinder-theoretic and is intelligible on its own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T05:18:22.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11704" CreationDate="2015-03-13T09:00:13.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the question as posed is that it cannot be easily  answered empirically. Dialects are subject to many more processes than simply exposure to media. They have been nivelized long before the presence of mass media. English appears to be in a state of dialect leveling at the moment but that is as much a result of politics as media. They just happen to be happening at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Mass) media can be just as much agents of dialect differentiation as disappearance. For instance, local mass media can give a dialect a legitimacy it would otherwise lack or even result in the creation of new languages. For instance, the constant tug of war between Croatian and Serbian could over time result in the transformation of dialect into language - mass media are as likely to support as inhibit this process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus the process you describe (i.e. the dialect of the center serving as the foundation of an ever expanding standard) has happened long before the presence of mass media. You could say the invention of the idea of a nation state had even more of an impact. A century and a half ago, Czech and Slovak all consisted of a continuum of dialects and it would have been easy to create one standard against which all the dialects would be measured. But due to political influences, this did not happen. Things like literacy and media were used as tools in achieving this outcome but we not just some passive presence that played a role in either direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in any individual case, mass media cannot be predicted to have one result or another. However, the case could be made that overall the presence of unifying communication platforms (literacy, media, internet), the number of dialects decreases as more 'standards' are established and promoted. But these things haven't been around for long enough to be able to say. We don't have good enough records about the past across languages and cultures to have enough data and it is very dangerous to extrapolate from the current state. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be worth bringing up the 'punctuated equilibrium' thesis which RMW Dixon adapted from biology to language. Which could just mean that the apparent slow down of language change some people posit is simply a temporary phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T09:00:13.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T13:03:49.900" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it's probably a dumb question, but is this the same thing? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T20:24:24.817" Title="What's the difference between the output of an oscilloscope and the waveform I get when I record on Praat?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11723" CreationDate="2015-03-13T14:46:54.193" Score="4" ViewCount="1385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, Chinese indeed has its own grammar.&#xA;But I had heard the claim many times, even from some native Chinese speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this misconception arise?&#xA;Why even some native Chinese speakers think that their language has no grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9345" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T01:14:03.007" Title="Why is the misconception that &quot;Chinese has no grammar&quot; so widespread?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11709" CreationDate="2015-03-13T15:07:48.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a purely logical definition (given in the MIT Encyclopedia of cognitive science): If sentence &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is uttered in context &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is a presupposition in &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; if &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; entails &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;. This definition is more or less identical with most linguistic definitions and is equal to that of Jerry Hobbs if &quot;entails&quot; is taken to mean &quot;abductively proves&quot;. Rephrased less formally, presuppositions (topics) can be inferred from context (that is, they're predictable from previous discourse and/or shared background knowledge). The remainder of the sentence is focal (&quot;preferred content&quot; in the MIT Encyclopedia mentioned above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Informally it's often said that the focus of a sentence is what's being said about its topic. In formal logic, focus is then taken to be an &quot;Aristotelian&quot; predicate. The unmarked sentence &lt;strong&gt;John sings&lt;/strong&gt; (John topical, sings focal) is formalized as &lt;strong&gt;sing(John)&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas &lt;strong&gt;JOHN sings&lt;/strong&gt; (John focal, sings topical) would be &lt;strong&gt;λP.P(John)(sing)&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discourse-configurational languages assign topic/focus structurally. Hungarian is said to be one (Kiss, who coined the term &quot;discourse-configuratonal&quot;), other examples include Russian (King) or Georgian (Meurer). This approach only accounts for nonemotive sentences since intonation can mix things up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most languages word order is more or less iconic with respect to information structure. Aside from word order and intonation, some languages have morphological discourse markers. There are topic markers in Japanese and Korean, focus markers in Eastern Armenian and both in (many dialects of) Quechua, to name just a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for formal representation in frameworks, FGD uses an ordering on nodes in deep syntax trees to express information structure. In LFG, there's a separate i(nformation)-structure for discourse functions. In the abductive framework of Hobbs, there's no implicit formalization but whatever can't be inferred/proven is taken to be focal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-13T15:53:48.717" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T15:53:48.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T17:42:23.007" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acoustic theory of speech production as worked out by Gunnar Fant depends on a correspondence between the vocal tract and elementary electrical circuits. But the quote below perplexes me. In what way could electrical circuit theory be informative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was a truly pioneering era in speech research as an outgrowth&#xA;  from linguistics, electrical circuit theory, psychoacoustics and&#xA;  information theory.&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/gunnarfant/halfcentury.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia doesn't really shed much light on the topic, even if it mentions it there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a theoretical level, speech acoustics can be modeled in a way&#xA;  analogous to electrical circuits. Lord Rayleigh was among the first to&#xA;  recognize that the new electric theory could be used in acoustics, but&#xA;  it was not until 1941 that the circuit model was effectively used, in&#xA;  a book by Chiba and Kajiyama called &quot;The Vowel: Its Nature and&#xA;  Structure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.nl/books?id=UY0iAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA16&amp;amp;lpg=PA16&amp;amp;dq=%22electrical%20circuit%20theory%22%20phonetics&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=4et-Q8nt5Q&amp;amp;sig=WH-JDFeiaPCweYJahnEFams7FMU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=-TQEVd3ACMyxaYi_gXg&amp;amp;ved=0CEsQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22electrical%20circuit%20theory%22%20phonetics&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt;, I can find some diagrams like the one below which purports to be a &quot;four terminal network representation of the production of a any non-nasal sound&quot;, but I can't make heads or tails of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/omUjN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&#xA;I'd be grateful for any information that could shed light on how these two disciplines connect. Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-03-14T13:24:42.353" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T22:21:40.443" Title="How was the acoustic theory of speech production informed by electrical circuit theory?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T20:32:42.043" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR.&lt;/strong&gt; Please recommend programs or resources that enunciate and vocalise not only words, but phonetic symbols (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;) or any representation of oral sounds, for at least English and French? I can view the symbols, but need an audible resource to know how to pronounce them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://french.meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/501/4&quot;&gt;Though later curtailed by a moderator, this post&lt;/a&gt; exemplifies French SE questions that concern phonetics, which I require such a resource to pronounce for me. Without one, I've been failing to comprehend these questions since Nov 2013; I can't determine or hear the phonemes (Right word?) discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please beware that I already use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/sashay?q=sashay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OALD&lt;/a&gt; (most entries are accompanied by clickable sound clips for both American and British English pronunciations) and Larousse.com (which only pronounces Parisian French), so I seek more powerful tools than these (eg: that can help me  hear other dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:48:57.950" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T17:10:56.520" Title="Resource: Audible audio prononcer to hear phonetics" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-13T20:54:44.117" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://the-toast.net/2014/03/19/a-linguist-explains-british-accents-of-yore/2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://the-toast.net/2014/03/19/a-linguist-explains-british-accents-of-yore/2/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://entertainment.time.com/2013/09/20/shakespeare-the-way-it-was-meant-to-be-spoken/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://entertainment.time.com/2013/09/20/shakespeare-the-way-it-was-meant-to-be-spoken/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corroborate the necessity of having listened to and registering the Original Punctuation (of Early Modern English) to comprehend Shakespeare (and his nuances and puns). However, for a dilettante like me who may wish to appreciate Shakespeare, how can I determine and listen to such pronunciations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is there some phonetic system that encaspuates and symbolises these pronunciations?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, can I simply input the phonetic notation in some sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/11718/5306&quot;&gt;audio pronouncer&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T13:16:07.717" Title="How to determine and listen to rarer pronunciations?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11718" CreationDate="2015-03-13T21:30:06.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For IPA symbols, there is a severe lacuna in that there is a limited supply with just one speaker. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; gives Peter Ladefoged's rendition of the IPA chart. For vowels, you can get a comparative sample of 3 expert performers (Ladefoged, Jill House and John Wells) on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. This is useful in understanding the degree to which the phonetic values of vowel symbols, especially, is a range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-13T21:30:06.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2015-03-14T00:28:19.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;What is the relation between lambda calculus and LF?&quot; is comparable to &quot;What is the relation between F (any formal system of representation with an 'alphabet' and a set of 'formation rules' that can recursively generate the expressions of LF) and LF?, or even to &quot;What is the relation between a natural language L and the LF of L?, and the answer is rather trivial: the relation is usually understood to be 'representational' (basically: one of 'translation'), i.e., the lambda calculus can (among many other things!) represent the Logical Form of natural languages, as you know very well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I suppose you want to understand better is under what assumptions and in what sense can lambda calculus be considered a better representational system for the LF of natural languages than, say, Predicate Logic, or Predicate Logic 'enriched' with events (plus tense logic, modal logic, possible words, etc.). Such formal languages are more or less 'powerful' (and more or less flexible and adequate) to represent the semantic structure of natural languages in a 'compositional' way to the extent that they acknowledge the existence of additional 'entities' (events, time intervals, etc., and new variables that can be quantified over).As you know, the most austere ontologies acknowledge only individuals (and sets) as in first-order Pred Logic, but Russell, Church, Reichembach and others 'enriched' that ontology with 'higher types', then Davidson added 'events', and others even more generously acknowledged 'times' or time 'intervals', modalities, propositions, possible worlds, etc. Montague, of course, has it all. You can take 'lambda calculus' as a sort of limit, in this respect, since, in principle, due to the properties of functional analysis, it can acknowledge and operate with an infinite number of types of entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enormous advantage of lambda calculus over elementary logics as a matelanguage for the compositional representation of natural language LF comes from the fact that, assuming the analyst accepts &lt;strong&gt;a very rich ontology&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g.,Frege's, for example, in which entities are either 'functions' or 'objects' of &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; types it may be analytically convenient to acknowledge!), it is possible to consider &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; non-atomic expression 'E' of any NL as the 'product' of two 'factors', a function 'F' and its 'argument' 'a', and say that F yields E if 'applied to' 'a'. What's more, since any function can be trivially turned into an argument of a higher order function ('Type Shifting', 'Type Raising', 'Function Composition'), the analyst can recursively 'reanalyse' functions as arguments (and viceversa!) at will, depending on the type of the 'domains' of the functions he may be interested in acknowledging in order to exhaustively analyze E into just two 'factors', an F and its argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by 'any non-atomic expression E', I literally mean '&lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; expression', i.e., not just sentences, words, or intermediate phrases of any level of internal complexity (NPs, VPS, APs, AdvPs, PPs, QPs...) but also STRINGS (continuous or not!) of linguistic material that under other analytical approaches (e.g., phrase structure grammar, with its constituency tests) would not be acknowledged as relevant syntactic constituents and therefore would not be eligible to undergo operations (either in syntax or at LF). Actually, since lambda calculus is based on functional analysis and the latter is so powerful a tool, it can in principle be applied even to sub-morphemic units. In other words, 'features' (= [attribute:value] pairs) or even feature-&lt;strong&gt;values&lt;/strong&gt; can &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; be analysed as 'arguments' (or functions!) if necessary, although, in practice, most syntactic-semantic theories treat minimal 'signs' as unanalysable atoms and seldom or never perform sub-atomic analysis (the event structure of verbs, mainly, excluded). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes lambda calculus an extremely powerful and flexible metalanguage for the representation of the 'factors' that compositionally contribute meaning to NL expressions of any level of complexity. You can take the sense of a DP expression like 'the definition of syntactic categories in English' and analyze it into a function 'the definition of syntactic categories in __' and an argument 'English', just as easily as you can take the function to be 'the' and the argument the rest of that DP (the NP), or the function to be 'the definition of syntactic __ in English' and the argument to be 'categories', etc. In principle, given an LF object O you can 'abstract' ANY component C of O and analyse the remainder as a function F( ) = O.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the consequences that have attracted more attention is that if lambda calculus  is available to compute LF, grammars can be &lt;strong&gt;monostratal&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., it is possible to compute 'meaning' directly from 'surface syntax'. Thus, constructions that in early PSG or 'Chomskian generative grammar' are supposed to involve 'displacement' (e.g., WH-Movement, Topicalisation, Subject Raising, Extraposition, Right Node Raising, etc.) can be computed as if everything was 'in situ' provided certain kinds of PSG (GPSG, HPSG, etc.) or Categorial Grammar work in tandem with Lambda Calculus to generate syntactic structures and calculate compositional LFs, respectively. Also, since in lambda calculus virtually anything can be treated as a syntactic/semantic 'factor' ('constituent'), coordinative or elliptical constructions (e.g., Gapping, Sluicing, Right Node Raising) that under standard PSG approaches create constituency paradoxes, no longer do in Categorial Grammar cum Lambda Calculus. Mark Steedman's &lt;em&gt;Surface Structure and Interpretation&lt;/em&gt;(MIT 1996) or &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Process&lt;/em&gt; (MIT 2000) are authoritative and readable classical statements in this respect. At a more elementary level (and under a Chomskian view of syntax), I. Heim &amp;amp; A. Kratzer's &lt;em&gt;Semantics in Generative Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell, 1998) is also worth reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all that immense analytical and computational power has its negative side, too: grammars must not only be simple and elegant, but also, and above all, empirically adequate, which means able to generate enough without overgenerating, and, as you can imagine, unrestricted categorial grammar cum lambda calculus overgenerates massively, it acknowledges wildly extravagant LF/semantic entities ('objects' and 'functions') which must ultimately correlate with just as extravagant extralinguistic 'entities', and, needless to say, raises formidable linguistic-theoretic, metaphysical and philosophical issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-14T09:33:22.480" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T09:33:22.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11715" CreationDate="2015-03-14T01:14:03.007" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am living in China and studying Chinese. The question is a good one insofar as the misconception is very widespread. I have heard educated people say such a thing, i.e. Chinese has no grammar, people who should know better. Interestingly, however, the source of the misconception originates from both outside and inside of China. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first books written by Westerners about the Chinese language were authored by missionaries during the Ming Dynasty in the 1600s. These missionaries had probably studied Latin and Greek, highly inflected languages. They were interested in spreading Christianity, and in order to do this, they needed to speak Chinese, so they studied it. If one is used to Latin or Greek grammar, then Chinese is undoubtedly a shock due to the almost complete lack of morphological markers. Chinese is quite analytical; it lacks inflections almost entirely. In this regard, it is understandable how those missionaries might have claimed that Chinese lacks grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the misconception that Chinese lacks grammar also stems from within the country. There has been, namely, a considerable school of thought that tries to make sense of cultural differences in terms of language (think Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). Some Chinese scholars have characterized Chinese as a &quot;spiritual&quot;, &quot;non-formal&quot;, &quot;flexible&quot; language, whereas European languages have been characterized as &quot;formal&quot; and &quot;rigid&quot;. This understanding of language has certainly contributed to the misconception that Chinese lacks grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting in this area is that the misconception was relatively prominent in Chinese linguistics not long ago. In fact the misconception was being propogated in recent decades, for example in &quot;General Linguistics&quot; by Shen Xiao Long:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/General-Linguistics-Intensive-Reading-Paperback/dp/7309047664&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.co.uk/General-Linguistics-Intensive-Reading-Paperback/dp/7309047664&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read this book, but my colleague states that it was influential. My colleague also states that the modern understanding of grammar did not really begin to take hold in China until after the Cultural Revolution. It was therefore not until the 1980s that the modern understanding of grammar started to spread in China. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T01:14:03.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11725" CreationDate="2015-03-14T02:46:17.473" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading the literature on Optimality Theory, e.g. Kager (1999), every reference to well-formedness constraints refers to prosodic structure, especially syllable structure. It seems to me that well-formedness could also refer to segmental structure, e.g. phonotactic  or co-occurrence restrictions, e.g *tl or *VN. Do people use well-formedness constraints to apply to structures other than prosodic structure? I suppose the Obligatory Contour Principle might be one case, especially when extended to feature co-occurrence. Also, isn't well-formedness and markedness the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T05:31:37.690" Title="Do well-formedness constraints just refer to prosodic structure?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11724" CreationDate="2015-03-14T04:45:46.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OT construct &quot;well-formedness&quot; is indeed the same as &quot;markedness&quot;, which is to say, any constraint penalizing a particular arrangement of phonological units. (Recall that constraints fall into two taxa, &quot;markedness&quot; and &quot;faithfulness&quot; i.e. Correspondence -- I am leaving out Prec to simplify life, since not everybody has signed on to OT-CC). The OT literature has plenty of markedness constraints that don't refer to any prosodic entities, such as the myriad OCP constraints as well as general sequencing constraints like *NC, *VN etc. Plus... a huge number of segment-markedness constraints. In fact, I conjecture that one can find more posited markedness constraints in the literature that make no mention of prosodic objects than one can find of constraints that do mention them. The crucial theoretical connection between prosody and markedness / faithfulness is that, &lt;em&gt;ex hypothesi&lt;/em&gt;, prosodic structure is not present in inputs (due apologies to Chris Golston, I'm just reporting the belief), so IO faithfulness constraints referring to input prosody wouldn't exist, except insofar as &quot;prosody&quot; is a kind of loose term that could also refer to tone and moraic structure which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; present in underlying forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-14T05:31:37.690" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T05:31:37.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11717" CreationDate="2015-03-14T18:22:02.770" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Electrical circuits are well-enough understood that you can talk about them in terms of equations. If speech is sufficiently like circuitry, speech can be described as an equation, and quantification is the holy grail of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T18:22:02.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2015-03-14T19:05:31.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sound change seems to be licensed not only by gradient changes of place of articulation but also by percieved similarity between an &quot;easier&quot; and a &quot;less easy&quot; sound. Of course, which sounds are easier is not always quite rational. An example of this would be German x/ç --&gt; f, which has radically different place of articulation, but sounds similar. Something like that might have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another explanation for seemingly random sound changes is of course that both sounds are innovations and that originally there was one that was more similar to both of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that sound changes don't have a provable rationale, as fdb mentions, doesn't mean that there aren't any reasons or regularities at all for sound change, and there are indeed some sound changes which you encounter regularly and some that are virtually unheard of, unless you assume some intermediate steps. For example, PIE /s/ --&gt; Albanian /gj/ or PIE /sw/ --&gt; Albanian /d/ are so strange that there are, as far as I'm aware, no scholars maintaining that this happened in one step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T19:05:31.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11191" CreationDate="2015-03-14T19:10:38.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyghe_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Adyghe has labialized glottal stops in phonemic distinction to plain ones, and the Abdzakh dialect of Adyghe and Hausa have palatalized glottal stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T19:10:38.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11730" CreationDate="2015-03-14T19:23:34.033" Score="5" ViewCount="1457" Body="&lt;p&gt;A question in two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One, is there a way, other than original context, to determine whether a name in Old Norse is generally masculine or generally feminine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two, how would one go about feminizing a masculine name (or vice versa) in Old Norse? My particular interest in this case is the god name Mundilfäri, used for a male god; what would the feminine form of it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9214" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T23:31:05.427" Title="Markers for feminine and masculine names in Old Norse?" Tags="&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11729" CreationDate="2015-03-14T20:45:35.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, Old Norse gender can't readily be seen just by the suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Male nouns generally end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in -r, -ll or -nn if strong (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Baldr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Heimdall&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Óðinn&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and in -i when weak (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Loki&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Female nouns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take no suffix (but umlaut) when strong (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Sjöfn&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and end in -a when weak (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Freyja&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, there are a few female nouns (and names) that end with -r or -i, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Urðr&lt;/em&gt;. Also, there are male names that look (and are declined) like female nouns, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Sturla&lt;/em&gt;. As a rule of thumb, a male noun will always have a suffix, whereas a female one needn't, but as the Sturla example shows, that doesn't straightforwardly carry over to names.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any good etymology for the -föri or -fari or -färi in Mundilföri, which makes it hard to correctly predict all the sound changes you might have to do or undo to get a corresponding female form; also, a female form might just not exist since -färi might well be a male noun without a corresponding female one. People seem to think that it comes from &lt;em&gt;fara&lt;/em&gt;, to go or travel, but I am not aware of a way of forming a nomen agentis in Old Norse with -i. Also, I don't know whether or not the Umlaut was derived via i-umlaut. With all these caveats, anything you do is guessing anyways, so you can pick the one you like best:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mundilfara&lt;/strong&gt; (replace male weak -i by female weak -a and undo possible umlaut)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mundilfära&lt;/strong&gt; (or -föra) if you'd like to keep the umlaut&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mundilför&lt;/strong&gt; (or -fär(?) (I can't remember the letter ä in standardized Old Icelandic) for a strong female ending.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-14T23:50:47.293" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T23:50:47.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11717" CreationDate="2015-03-14T22:21:40.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mechanical and electrical components are analogous.  Ideal resistors are mathematically identical to ideal dashpots, ideal inductors are identical to ideal springs, and ideal capacitors are identical to ideal masses (see for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lpsa.swarthmore.edu/Analogs/ElectricalMechanicalAnalogs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Analogous Electrical and Mechanical Systems&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that mechanical filters, like those that shape speech in the vocal system, can be described in terms of equivalent analog electrical filters (see wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_filter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mechanical Filters&lt;/a&gt;), where the mathematical principles are much better-developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific example, from what I can tell, the &quot;current&quot; is the acoustic energy, the &quot;resistance&quot; is the viscosity of the air, the &quot;inductance&quot; is the elasticity of the air, the &quot;current source&quot; is the vocal cords, and the &quot;impedance&quot; is energy absorption by the vocal tract.  You can use then use the equations for these electrical components to describe the mechanical behavior of the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9351" LastActivityDate="2015-03-14T22:21:40.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6226" CreationDate="2015-03-15T01:37:23.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Genitive case of the personal pronoun in Icelandic is used when it's the object of a verb which takes an object in the Genitive case of following a preposition that requires the Genitive case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Þú ættir að &lt;em&gt;skammast&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;þín&lt;/strong&gt;. (&quot;You ought to shame yourself&quot; - You ought to be ashamed. - Genitive Object)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ég kem &lt;em&gt;til&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;þín&lt;/strong&gt; á morgun. (I'll come to you tomorrow - Prep. + Gen.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possessive pronoun, on the other hand, is used to denote possession:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Þetta er hesturinn &lt;strong&gt;þinn&lt;/strong&gt;. (&quot;This is the horse your&quot; - This is your horse.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the 3rd person possessive pronoun, &lt;strong&gt;sinn&lt;/strong&gt;, is only used to denote possession of the subject of the sentence, otherwise you use the genitive case of the personal pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jón hittur afann &lt;strong&gt;sinn&lt;/strong&gt;. (&quot;Jón meets grandpa his&quot; - Jón meets his own grandpa.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Þetta er Jón. Í gær hitti ég afann &lt;strong&gt;hans&lt;/strong&gt;. (This is Jón. &quot;Yesterday met I granpa his&quot; - Yesterday I met his grandpa.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second example, the pronoun (&lt;em&gt;hans&lt;/em&gt;) doesn't refer to the Subject (&lt;em&gt;ég&lt;/em&gt;), so you can't use &lt;em&gt;sinn&lt;/em&gt; and have to use &lt;em&gt;hans&lt;/em&gt;. The use of the article that some answers seem to regard as crucial does not matter in Icelandic, you can use the possessive pronoun both with or without the article. The same goes for word order, the possessive usually comes after the noun, but if you put it before the word, you still use the possessive pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt;, the situation is much the same, you use the possessive pronoun for possession and the genitive of the personal pronoun for genitive objects or prepositions that take the genitive. However, Latin prepositions never take the genitive and German usually special constructions for prepositions, so the genitive of the personal pronoun is really only used for genitive objects, and both Latin (I think) and German have fewer verbs that take genitive objects than Icelandic, so the genitive pronoun is rare in both languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Das ist &lt;strong&gt;sein&lt;/strong&gt; Haus. (This is his house - poss.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wir gedenken &lt;strong&gt;seiner&lt;/strong&gt;. (We commemorate him) (Genitive Object - pers.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wir machen das &lt;strong&gt;seinetwegen&lt;/strong&gt; (rather than wegen &lt;strong&gt;seiner&lt;/strong&gt;). (Prep + Genitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Id est domus &lt;strong&gt;sua&lt;/strong&gt;. (This is his house - poss.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Memini &lt;strong&gt;tui&lt;/strong&gt;. (I remember you) (Genitiv Object - pers.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, the genitive of the personal pronoun can be freely used for possessions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὁ ἰχθὺς &lt;strong&gt;ἐμόσ&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;ho ichthys emos&quot; = the fish mine - poss.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὁ ἰχθὺς &lt;strong&gt;μού&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;ho ichthys mou&quot; = the fish mine - pers.pron.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there doesn't seem any rule that works for all languages out there, the difference is probably just language specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastEditorDisplayName="user9315" LastEditDate="2015-03-17T23:37:49.167" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T23:37:49.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11735" CreationDate="2015-03-15T03:28:30.660" Score="7" ViewCount="1147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the origin of the word 'because' I find it evolved from the phrase 'by cause', which was influenced by the French &lt;em&gt;par cause de&lt;/em&gt; ; 'by cause' appeared in Middle English. What word was in use before, ex. in Old English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9353" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T03:51:27.670" Title="What word did the English use before 'because'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11734" CreationDate="2015-03-15T05:03:31.503" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; mostly uses some form of &quot;forþon&quot; (variations: forþan, forþam, etc.), though in a couple of places (such as lines 2638 and 2641) it uses &quot;þe.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T05:03:31.503" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11734" CreationDate="2015-03-15T08:29:07.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; is an old-fashioned-sounding synonym of &quot;because&quot;: e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I dared not go outside, &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; it was raining.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not sure if &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; was the direct predecessor of &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T08:29:07.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11296" CreationDate="2015-03-15T17:07:15.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Old English, the &quot;to&quot; of &quot;He asked to go to the store&quot; would, indeed, have been a preposition governing a noun (in this case a 'noun of action' in the dative case). Since then, however, the &quot;to&quot; of infinitives has lost its capacity to assign dative case to its complement, its complement no longer behaves as a noun, and &quot;to&quot; has been 'reanalysed' as a 'function word' that governs/selects a VP complement with zero inflection (a 'bare VP'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its precise syntactic category, however, has proven more difficult to establish. Since &quot;to&quot; can precede auxiliary &quot;have&quot; and &quot;be&quot;, it has been considered similar to modal verbs, which also select bare VPs and precede such auxiliaries, and since it licenses VP ellipsis just as modal verbs do (cf. &quot;They asked me to give a talk, but this time I prefer not &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; [give a talk]&quot;), it has actually been occasionally argued to be a 'modal verb', but, of course, its being uninflectable makes that 'verbal' hypothesis improbable, and the fact that when the infinitival clause is negative negation must &lt;strong&gt;precede&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to&quot; definitely discards that analysis as untenable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pace Lawlor above, however, &quot;to&quot; cannot be a 'complementizer' ('Comp', 'C'), either, since a) it must &lt;strong&gt;follow&lt;/strong&gt; the complementizer &quot;for&quot; and the accusative-Case subject that must nowadays accompany it (cf. &quot;It was a mistake &lt;strong&gt;for him to&lt;/strong&gt; tell his wife he had lost his job&quot;), and b) it must also follow interrogative &quot;wh&quot;-phrases in focus that must, in their turn, follow complementizers (cf. &quot;I don't know &lt;strong&gt;what to&lt;/strong&gt; do&quot; vs. &quot;*I don't know &lt;strong&gt;to what&lt;/strong&gt; do&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, Modern English &quot;to&quot; is surely some kind of function word (a 'functional category', in Chomskian jargon) that a) precedes aspectual auxiliaries (which, as stated, makes it similar to modal auxiliaries), but b) cannot be inflected and must follow complementizers, foci, subjects, and negation (which precludes its being treated as a modal verb, or, in general, as an auxiliary, after all). What kind of 'function word' is it, then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems to be in paradigmatic opposition to Tense/Finiteness (called 'Infl' in Chomsky's GB and P&amp;amp;P theories of the early 1980's), Chomskian syntacticians have long classified it as an 'Infl [-Tense]'. However, it cannot literally occupy the same slot [+Tense] does above &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; auxiliaries because tensed auxiliaries must &lt;strong&gt;precede&lt;/strong&gt; clausal negation (negative 'Polarity') (cf. &quot;He &lt;strong&gt;should not&lt;/strong&gt; have accepted&quot; vs.&quot;*He &lt;strong&gt;not should&lt;/strong&gt; have accepted&quot;), whereas, as stated, &quot;to&quot; must &lt;strong&gt;follow&lt;/strong&gt; clausal negation. [N.B.: when it seems not to, as in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;To not&lt;/strong&gt; go to your mother's wedding would be unacceptable&quot; (usually: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Not to&lt;/strong&gt; go to your mother's wedding...&quot;), it is because &quot;not&quot; is not really clausal negation, but VP-internal negation, as it clearly is in &quot;You cannot [&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; go to your mother's wedding]&quot;; note that in that context &quot;can&quot; rejects a clausal complement, cf. &quot;*You cannot &lt;strong&gt;not to&lt;/strong&gt; go to your mother's wedding&quot;; correspondingly, a bare (non-clausal) negative VP is not allowed in subject position, where only infinitival clauses are possible, cf. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;*Not go&lt;/strong&gt; to your mother's wedding would be unacceptable&quot;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, a) &quot;to&quot; is a 'functional category', b) selects bare infinitives, c) is non-finite, so [-Tense], &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; d) does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; alternate with [+Tense] &lt;strong&gt;in the highest T/Infl position&lt;/strong&gt;. In early Chomskian GB/P&amp;amp;P analyses, that was a problem; in later 'minimalist' ones, however, any clause containing n verbs (i.e., a 'main' verb plus n-1 auxiliaries) also necessarily contains n 'Infl' heads, and, under such assumptions, there is no problem in categorizing &quot;to&quot; as an 'Infl[-Tense]' provided it is clear that it must be &lt;strong&gt;lower&lt;/strong&gt; in the tree than the Infl[+Tense] that contains the tense and agreement features that characterize finite clauses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you choose to label it 'I/Infl[-Tense]', or 'Inf'(initival), or anything similar does not really matter, but you should certainly not label it either 'Aux [Verb]' or 'Complementizer'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-15T18:36:15.923" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T18:36:15.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2015-03-15T21:57:14.110" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mmm&quot; is a vocal expression, almost a sound that many people of the USA (and possibly more places) will make... often times expressing that they like something, of find something appealing in a number ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hmm&quot; is also a vocal expression, but in this case it represents feeling inquisitive, imaginative or otherwise pensive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9360" LastActivityDate="2015-03-15T21:57:14.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T00:00:26.907" Score="5" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enualios or Enyalius (Ἐνυάλιος) is, in Homer and other Greek authors, either an epithet of the war god Ares or else the name of a separate god, the son of Ares and brother or partner of Enyo (whose name seems to come from his). The name appears as early as Mycenaean, where it seems to refer to a separate god. What is the source of his name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chantraine says &quot;no etymology, probably pre-Greek&quot;, but the name looks like a well-formed Greek prepositional compound: &lt;em&gt;en-ualios&lt;/em&gt; would be &quot;the one in the &lt;em&gt;hualos&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. This word ὕαλος has several meanings: it later comes to mean &quot;glass&quot;, but earlier on seems to have referred to some kind of crystalline stone, possibly alabaster, but also possibly to amber; and Hesychius gives an additional gloss equating it with βόρβορος &quot;mire, mud, filth&quot;. None of these gives a clear meaning for the name, though: &quot;the one in the crystal/stone/amber/mire&quot; are not particularly obvious names for a war god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good theories out there about the etymology of this name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2015-03-20T23:56:55.550" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T22:33:51.370" Title="Etymology of Greek Enualios" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T02:17:30.353" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Académie française superintends French, a solution seems easier (at least to prescribe and enforce) in French; I exemplify with it. Yet I question the same for  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why hasn't French confected* conjugations or words that cause the defect, for want of efficiency? For example, I remain shocked that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/conj/FRverbs.aspx?v=frire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;« frire »&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; still lacks conjugations that are wholly logical and necessary in modern use; we, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ye&lt;/a&gt; , and they still fry Fries. Instead, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/conj/FRverbs.aspx?v=frire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one must capitulate to &lt;em&gt;« faire frire »&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, unproductively.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Footnote: Pun was intended and found thanks to www.wordfind.com/ends-with/fect/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T14:17:19.230" Title="Why aren't defective words perfected?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T02:41:21.950" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent thread touched on the question of whether Slavic aspectual pairs should be considered part of the same lexeme or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the same logic can be applied to the principal parts of Latin or (especially) Greek verbs. For example, take the following array of verbs from Greek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;peítho:&lt;/em&gt; (present active) &quot;I persuade&quot;, &lt;em&gt;pépoitha&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I trust, rely on&quot; (perfect active), &lt;em&gt;pépeismai&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I believe, trust&quot; (perfect passive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really clear that these forms constitute the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; lexeme, any more than a Slavic aspectual pair like Slovenian &lt;em&gt;postavljati&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;postaviti&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to place&quot;) are the &quot;same&quot; lexeme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &quot;lexematicity&quot; be viewed as a measure of the degree of linkage between forms, rather than a matter of &quot;either-or&quot; connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:21:57.880" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:21:57.880" Title="Do principal parts necessarily belong to the same lexeme?" Tags="&lt;lexemes&gt;&lt;principal-parts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11744" CreationDate="2015-03-16T02:53:09.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this has something to do with different traditions associated with a language, i.e. the different traditions of the people who maintain the language's prescriptive standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, &quot;gaps&quot; are considered valuable features of a language's uniqueness, whereas in other cases, more value is placed on logical completeness. In the case of French (or at least this particular verb), the first option seems to have won out over the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Just to be clear, this is not an explanation of why gaps exist in the first place, but rather of why a gap would be maintained by prescriptive authorities rather than &quot;filled in&quot;.  Gaps are probably originally caused by factors such as semantic likelihood and usage frequencies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T11:11:18.650" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T11:11:18.650" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11750" CreationDate="2015-03-16T07:47:45.600" Score="3" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;The history of the Ancient Greek word κάστωρ (beaver) is unclear. It may be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CE%AC%CF%83%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a foreign loan-word (? Sanskrit कस्तूरी kastūrī, “musk”)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CE%AC%CF%83%CF%84%CF%89%CF%81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a Greek word meaning &quot;shining (animal)&quot; from  καίνυμαι (perfect&#xA;κέκασμαι)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin castōr (a beaver) is nothing but a loan-word from the Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no evidence that Κάστωρ (the proper name) and κάστωρ (the beaver) have a different origin. But as far as I know, nothing in the legend of the Διόσκουροι deal with a beaver, or with a specific animal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a connection between both names ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T07:53:09.987" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T07:28:42.770" Title="connection between Castor (one of the Διόσκουροι) and the animal (beaver)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11749" CreationDate="2015-03-16T08:46:56.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The currently favoured view is that (late) Sanskrit kastūrī- is a loan from Greek, not the other way around. There is no consensus about the origin of κάστωρ “beaver” or its relationship with the name Kάστωρ. The connection with the verb &quot;to shine&quot; is however surely a folk etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beekes writes: “Schrader-Nehring 1917: 138 point out that the animal no longer existed in Greece; the word would be foreign. It is first mentioned in H[ero]d[o]t[us] 4, 109 in the North Pontic area, which is close to the supposed homeland of the Indo-Europeans, so the word could in principle be inherited.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would regard this as a hypothesis rather than as a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T08:46:56.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11744" CreationDate="2015-03-16T10:25:24.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know the Académie Française sees it as her mission to keep the language &quot;pure&quot;, not to invent new and useful words. They just aren't concerned with adding stuff. (But maybe, if you make it popular enough to use an English loanword for 'faire frire', the Académie will invent a new way of doing it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T10:25:24.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T14:21:09.700" Score="1" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, the term &quot;Universal Grammar&quot; is often heard. In contrast, no one ever tried to propose a theory for universal meaning. Specifically, with no universal meaning, how can we understand each other with different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8029" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T05:42:16.100" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T07:05:48.857" Title="Is there a theory of universal meaning?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T14:32:20.003" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, word repetition is very pervasive, for example &lt;em&gt;pao lai pao qu&lt;/em&gt; 'run come run go'.&#xA;However, this direct translation is not good English. Does the native English speaker intend to avoid this kind of repetition? Why would a language like Chinese have such pervasive repetition and another language like English largely lack it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8029" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T23:43:24.840" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T23:43:24.840" Title="Is it right that repetition in English is not so pervasive?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11752" CreationDate="2015-03-16T15:13:59.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you Google on &quot;semantic universal&quot;, you'll get plenty of hits.  Here's a paragraph from Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal#In_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic universals in semantics&lt;/a&gt;.  In my opinion, apart from matters closely tied to human sense perception, there aren't any. Language translation can be done syntactically, without reference to semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;matters closely tied to human sense perception&quot;, I mean colors and perhaps other similar things.  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basic Color Terms&lt;/a&gt;.  The names for colors really do have semantic reference to what things in the world stimulate the rods and cones in our eyes, and they can't be adequately described by syntactic relationships among linguistic descriptions (as many things termed &quot;semantic&quot; can be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T20:22:15.580" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T20:22:15.580" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11752" CreationDate="2015-03-16T16:31:21.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would have to explain what you mean by &quot;universal&quot;. Some people use it for anything found in enough languages that it cannot have arisen by chance (but there can be counterexamples) -- this is the Greenbergian statistical sense. It could be restricted to any so-far un-contradicted generalization about all languages such as that no language has more nasal vowels than oral vowels. Then such generalizations have to be distinguished in terms of the explanatory mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many supposed observational &quot;universals&quot; are epiphenomena that arise from more general facts about the world, and aren't part of a specific faculty of grammatical computation. (Some people simply deny that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; any cognitive faculty that is specific to language, so no further conversation is possible with them). In OT, for instance, it is usually stipulated that there is a constraint penalizing syllables without onsets and another that penalizes syllables with codas (Ons and *Cod) -- the &quot;universal&quot; content is that there is no constraint penalizing syllables with onsets, and no constraint penalizing syllables without codas (no Cod and *Ons). However, the observational &quot;universality&quot; of Ons and *Cod can be derived from non-grammatical facts about perception (meaning that the constraints can be learned rather than stipulated as part of a pre-set toolkit). When referring to &quot;universals&quot;, folks with an interest in universal grammar tend to specifically mean those things that are part of the universal grammar computational apparatus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/talmy/talmyweb/Recent/universals.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Talmy&lt;/a&gt; points to a semantic principle of magnitude neutrality for closed-class words, to the effect that &lt;em&gt;The ant crawled&lt;/em&gt; across &lt;em&gt;my palm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The bus drove&lt;/em&gt; across &lt;em&gt;the country&lt;/em&gt; won't be encoded with different prepositions reflecting the distance. This would be an example of an epiphenomenal semantic universal arising from factors that are outside of grammatical computation. (Talmy is not known to be an advocate of the concept &quot;grammatical computation&quot;). As far as semantic universals in the strong grammatical sense are concerned, it's difficult to establish that there are any, as opposed to truths that follow from more general cognitive properties. People can understand each other, because meaning is a relationship between linguistic form and states of affairs that can be perceived, and with a bit of word, we can all use out perceptual apparatus to understand what state of affairs &quot;My shaved cat was followed by three bears&quot; refers to, even if we have no experience with cats, shaving, bears, or passive constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T16:31:21.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T17:21:29.590" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;So based on linguistic relativity, I'm wondering if there are any ways that people perceive the world differently based on sentence order, or rather, if this has even been studied at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9365" LastEditorUserId="9365" LastEditDate="2015-03-16T22:06:33.310" LastActivityDate="2015-03-16T22:06:33.310" Title="Do subject-object-verb language users perceive the world differently than SVO or VSO users?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-16T21:14:24.060" Score="1" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gauche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gauche&lt;/a&gt; = {adjective} unsophisticated and socially awkward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Why does &lt;strong&gt;gauche&lt;/strong&gt; connote negativity? I read but won't replicate &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=gauche&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; here because it doesn't  explain its negativity in English, at least. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, one of its more formal meanings is synonymous with « maladroit », also negative, but its most common meaning is just &lt;code&gt;left&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. But why's &lt;code&gt;left&lt;/code&gt; negative but 'right' positive? Right = « droit » is positive in both languages. In English, right =&gt; correct. In French, « droit » is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/fren/droit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synonymous with « honnête »&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already tolerate and so ask NOT about definitions, below which I instead purpose to burrow. I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;What are right ways of interpreting or rationalizing this meaning, in order to intuit or naturalise as far as possible and to help me remember?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T04:19:17.647" Title="Why does 'gauche' connote negativity in English and French?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-03-17T20:58:56.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T01:17:06.397" Score="2" ViewCount="836" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognitive Semantics and Formal semantics seems to exist.&#xA;Which is more popular in the field of semantics?&#xA;Why can not they replace each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8029" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T22:59:59.613" Title="Why should cognitive semantics and formal semantics co-exist?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2015-03-17T02:33:46.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognitive semantics strives to reduce regularities about meaning (in the broadest sense) to informal and non-grammatical facts about cognition, and formal semantics attempts to give a symbolic and grammatical account of a proper subset of that sense of &quot;meaning&quot;. Per se, they are logically exclusive, though a formal semanticist can accept the functional explanations proposed by cognitive semanticists for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; meaning properties in language are what they are, and still maintain their theories of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; they are in grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T02:33:46.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11752" CreationDate="2015-03-17T06:24:19.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you need to understand the position of 'Universal Grammar' in linguistics. It is a particular theory that grew out of very specific concerns - mostly having to do with learnability of syntactic structures. It posits a set of universal innate constraints on the syntax of languages - and is not really a grammar. It is highly controversial and linguists don't generally refer to it to solve problems of comparison unless they work within the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is no 'Universal Semantics' that parallels Universal Grammar (in name or in theory structure), concerns with meaning universals go as far back as Plato (in the Western tradition). When Aristotle was outlining his principles of logic, he was in fact thinking of them as semantic universals. In this tradition, many people have dealt with formal logic and logical semantics as if they were in fact describing universal principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cognitive semantics, on the other hand, posits universals in the shared human experience of the world. We all walk upright, have a similar field of vision, interact with objects in our environment, are born to women, grown up in a social setting, have similar internal biologies, etc. These are all reflected in how language is structured both at the level of syntax and meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Both the formal and cognitive approaches are described by Lakoff in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people have sought to go even further and posit universal semantic primes (most notably Anna Wierzbicka).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T06:24:19.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2015-03-17T06:35:12.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognitive and formal semantics can coexist very easily. They not only have different goals but also different objects of study. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Formal semantics&lt;/strong&gt; grew out of formal logic and is concerned with a very limited set of statements that can be truth conditional (about which the truth can be determined). Formal semantics is not much concerned, for instance, with lexical meaning but looks mostly at combinatorics at primitive units. Formal semantics is the natural choice for people working in rule-based natural language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cognitive semantics&lt;/strong&gt; is just a particular perspective on more traditional semantic concerns and tries to root meaning in human experience of the world which it finds in human cognition. It does not deal with primitive units of meaning and therefore is not concerned as much in their combinatorics. However, it looks at how meaning is constructed in speech, so it is not limited to small scale utterances. As such it is more difficult to formalize and use directly in natural language processing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these approaches to semantics co-exist with more general semantics which looks at both lexical and relational phenomena in language as they are found rather than through a specific lens but borrows from both of these as needed. Modern stochastic-based NLP is more likely to draw on both as appropriate, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T06:35:12.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2015-03-17T08:14:23.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formal semantics is simply a (set of) metalanguage(s), a (set of) formal system(s) of representation, and is compatible with &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; 'ontologically substantial' theory of meaning, no matter whether meaning is all in the mind, as 'conceptualists' (e.g., present-day cognitivists and Chomskian minimalists) believe, or all outside the mind, as radical 'realist' referentialist theories of meaning traditionally claim, or partly in the mind and partly in the extramental world, as 'dualist' theories say, or even all &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; Language itself, as in the 'immanentist' approaches of early structural semantics inspired by people Saussure, Hjelmslev or Coseriu, or Katz, and arguably by Chomsky himself for as long as he believed in a non-trivial Faculty of Language. This list, of course, is not exhaustive, it does not quite capture Frege's 'idealist-realist' view of sense, nor Quine's hybrid behaviourist-conceptualist view, nor the late Wittgenstein's conception, nor Putnam's view, etc., but the point is just that formal semantics is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a theory of meaning in the sense all those are or were. The 'entities' (sets, functions, possible worlds, whatever) that the 'alphabet' and the well-formed formulae of formal semantics 'denote' may, ontologically speaking, be 'anywhere', so to speak. No wonder, then, that it should be able to co-exist with any conception of semantics. You can do 'formal semantics' starting from a cognitive semantics perspective. Obviously, to the extent cognitive semantics works with fuzzy categories, representing its analyses according to the rigid standards of 'formal semantics' may be less straightforward, but the conceptual-methodological difficulties defining and operating with fuzzy categories may raise are the cognitive semanticist's concern, not anything 'formal semantics' itself should worry about. Whether formal semantics is ultimately adequate or not to model meaning in natural languages is a different matter, but the same question can be asked with respect to cognitive semantics or any other 'substantial' theory of meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-17T22:59:59.613" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T22:59:59.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11752" CreationDate="2015-03-17T08:36:47.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are quite wrong that no one has proposed theories of universal meaning! Although it is extremely controversial, people have proposed several such theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Chomskian side of things many of the semantic categories would be considered to be universals, possibly all of them (though they are not all &lt;em&gt;grammaticalised&lt;/em&gt; in each language.) We can understand each other because the semantic categories of FIRST PERSON or PLURAL etc are things we all share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; proposes more explicitly that every language is based on a group of around 60 semantic primes: basic components of meaning which are themselves undefinable and yet present in every language. The list is a work in progress, but after over 40 years of work there is a lot of empirical evidence for most in them in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T08:36:47.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-17T11:44:04.317" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask for help with the clarification of some semantic roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what semantic role may be assigned to SUBJECT in the sentences with ´to have´&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to assign role in the German sentence &lt;strong&gt;Das Buch hat ein neues Kapitel.&lt;/strong&gt; (-&lt;strong&gt;The book has a new chapter.&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German grammar book I have (Deutsche Grammatik, Helbig/Buscha) mentions &lt;strong&gt;RELATIONSTRÄGER&lt;/strong&gt; in the sentence with have: &lt;strong&gt;Die Frau hat blondes Haar.&lt;/strong&gt; (The woman has got blonde hair.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Die Frau is labelled in this relation as &lt;strong&gt;the dominant, superordinate element&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas blondes Haar as &lt;strong&gt;the subordinate element&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What semantic roles, however, should I mention in English? The sentence pattern with to have is SVO, or? AGENT, EXPERIENCER, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your answers, have a nice day. Lenka &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9369" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T17:19:37.023" Title="Semantic roles in the sentence with ´have´" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11770" CreationDate="2015-03-17T16:38:29.333" Score="0" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/24102/50720&quot;&gt;This ELU answer&lt;/a&gt; corroborates the helpfulness of etymology while  heeding the Etymological Fallacy. Since I'm interested in French (which is derived from Latin), I can sometimes  apply it to  help myself &lt;strong&gt;'drift'&lt;/strong&gt; into Latin, and so to ♦tolerate English etymology containing Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet whenever an etymology concerns an obscure language (Please advise what is the right &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language family&lt;/a&gt; ?), then I'm a&lt;strong&gt;drift&lt;/strong&gt; and awry. Few can  master all these antiquated dialects, but knowledge of its modern variety does help &#xA;(as attested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6517/5306&quot;&gt;Old French vs 2015 French&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/11532/5306&quot;&gt;French in Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;). So how do you understand such etymologies? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must I learn these languages, at least elementarily? &lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/dbLot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Quora answer&lt;/a&gt; advises so, but learning Ancient Greek, Dutch, German, and Latin all from scratch may consume too much time. What do linguisticians or etymologists do?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I hate to memorise mindlessly or succumb to foreign words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;♦Footnote: I purposely use 'tolerate', and NOT 'understand', because I don't know Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T02:58:19.563" Title="How to understand etymology derived from obscure languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11718" CreationDate="2015-03-17T16:58:58.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify, is the problem that you are you incapable of viewing the phonetic symbols due to using a screen reader or other form of assistive device, or are you capable of viewing the symbols, but in need of a pronunciation resource to know how to pronounce them? If it’s the former, I found a page that’s about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~reng/BrlIPA.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA braille&lt;/a&gt;, but also has links to a variety of accessibility resources for using the international phonetic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any software that can synthesize a complete pronunciation from an IPA transcription, but there are names for each letter that can be used to read them out loud. If you learn the pronunciation of each letter as an independent sound, you might be able to figure out the pronunciation by putting together the sounds of each individual letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T16:58:58.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11765" CreationDate="2015-03-17T17:19:37.023" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dative.  When you give something to someone , you cause them  to have it . Possession in Russian is expressed using a preposition &quot;y&quot; that translates as &quot;to&quot; (though I don't know whether it can be called &quot;dative&quot;) -- U menya kniga for &quot;I have a book&quot; = to me (is) a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T17:19:37.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11766" CreationDate="2015-03-17T21:32:17.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is definitely a question of trust, unless you are an author of etymological dictionaries yourself. Your language has lots of words, and you need to know the etymologes of some of them, so for each of those words you start to &quot;grow&quot; their history in your mind, their earlier forms, more earlier forms, and so on back in time up to the earlieast proto-forms of them you can learn of. This is a part of &lt;em&gt;learning your own language&lt;/em&gt;, although it will definitely give you some knowledge of the languages that came into contact with yours. Everybody comes through this (in this or that form), you should not be concerned about that, it is never late to learn, and you can never learn too much. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-03-17T21:32:17.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11823" CreationDate="2015-03-18T05:15:35.970" Score="1" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is syntax of polysynthetic languages (e.g. Inuktitut, Mohawk) represented in formal theories of syntax? In many cases, a sentence consists of only one or two words so the syntax tree is rather trivial and doesn't seem very useful. How is the extensive pro-drop dealt with formally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T15:18:16.400" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T06:56:12.997" Title="How do formal theories analyse the syntax of polysynthetic languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;polysynthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11742" CreationDate="2015-03-18T06:32:36.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should also consider the PIE preposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯neu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; without &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which could be contracted to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯nu-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if used as a prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then in PIE we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯elios&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; other &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯nua̯elios&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; looks like somebody without others (loner?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this can be supported by the tradition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) one tradition derived it from a Thracian Enyalius, who received&#xA;  into his house those only who conquered him in single combat, and for&#xA;  the same reason refused to receive Ares, but the latter slew him.&#xA;  (Eustath. ad Hom. p. 673.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0104:entry=enyalius-bio-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0104:entry=enyalius-bio-1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is the account by Eustathius (although it seems he in turn refers to Arianos):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EQvup.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While exact sound changes for Thracian are unknown, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacian_language#Sound_changes_from_Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the sound changes from PIE to Dacian&lt;/a&gt;, a closely related language, often considered a dialect of Thracian or vise versa, and spoken in Thrace as well, bring exactly this form. The known differences between Thracian and Dacian do not affect this. As such, PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯nua̯elios&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would give &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;enualios&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in both Thracian and Dacian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-09-29T15:46:22.057" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T15:46:22.057" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T09:25:52.767" Score="0" ViewCount="1015" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &quot;They told me that&quot; or &quot;They told me so&quot;&#xA;OR even much better sentence from one of the provisional answer&#xA;&quot;She taught me Spanish&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which one is the direct object? (My guess is &quot;that&quot; and &quot;so&quot; and &quot;Spanish&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which one is the indirect object? (My guess is &quot;me&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope to get some confirmation and this is really language agnostic, I mean to talk about the semantic underlying in the text. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9382" LastEditorUserId="9382" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T05:41:35.703" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T05:41:35.703" Title="&quot;They told me that&quot; which one is the direct and indirect object?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11777" CreationDate="2015-03-18T11:08:07.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Atamiri points out, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object in the first example and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; is the indirect object in the second example. The traditional explanation is that the direct object is acted upon directly, and the indirect object is affected by the action more or less indirectly. But be aware that these traditional explanations do not always work. There are instances where it is difficult to view the one or the other object as indirect or direct, e.g.  &lt;em&gt;She taught him Spanish&lt;/em&gt; -- in this case, it is difficult to view &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;indirect&quot;, since the the &quot;him&quot; is being directly influenced by the teaching. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T11:08:07.747" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11777" CreationDate="2015-03-18T11:47:08.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since English has no way to mark the accusative case explicitly, the only way to tell the direct object is to find an object without a preposition before it. In your sentence neither object has a preposition, so there is no way you can deny that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; objects are direct, at least formally, judging by their form and the syntax of the whole sentence. Because of this, English is a language that can have two direct objects of a verb, and that can easily be proved: &lt;em&gt;She taught him Spanish&lt;/em&gt; has 2 direct objects, if you remove one of them you can easily see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She taught &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;. - &quot;him&quot; is the direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She taught &lt;em&gt;Spanish&lt;/em&gt;. - &quot;Spanish&quot; is the direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you abstragate from the formal grammar and look at the meaning of the words and at the situation described in the sentence, it is easy to find out what the action is directed at and who it is intended for, but anyway this difference &lt;em&gt;is not expressed&lt;/em&gt; in the English sentence. The order in which the objects are put after the verb doesn't tell about their nature, if a verb has two direct objects we can easily transform the sentence so that to make each of the objects indirect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She taught Spanish &lt;em&gt;to him&lt;/em&gt;. - &quot;to him&quot; is the indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She taught him &lt;em&gt;about Spanish&lt;/em&gt;. - &quot;about Spanish&quot; is the indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why the very idea of a distinction between the direct vs. indirect object becomes vanishingly vague when we speak about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T11:47:08.017" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T12:46:15.643" Score="7" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a meeting with my son's teacher. In the meeting she suggested that I stop teaching him arabic and focus only on English. Arabic is a big part of our family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She said only with reading and writing. She said to wait until he reaches first grade. We recently returned to America. So my question is should I take this advice or should I continue in teaching my son how to read and write Arabic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9384" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T17:56:32.583" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T17:56:32.583" Title="Teaching my son Arabic" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-03-18T22:40:56.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11781" CreationDate="2015-03-18T12:59:12.760" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand you to be saying that you are a native Arabic speaker living in America. Is that correct? In that case I think this teacher has given you extremely bad advice. All professional linguists recognise the great value of learning as many languages as possible when young. Children are the best learners of languages. I assume (correct me if I am wrong) that English is not your own first language. In that case it is much better for you to speak to your child all the time in Arabic rather than in your perhaps less than perfect English. Your child will be exposed to English in school, from his friends, from television and so forth. This way he will grow up in the very privileged position of speaking two languages perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T12:59:12.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T13:48:55.293" Score="1" ViewCount="962" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little confused when it comes to giving a theta role to some of my sentences. I got: &#xA;James got a ball yesterday. where James has the role as BENEFICIARY. Got is the main predicate. a ball is the THEME and yesterday have the role as TIME or is it an adjunct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cat chased the dog for a long time: The cat = AGENT. chased = main predicate. the dog = PATIENT. for a long time = either TIME or an adjunct? just like the sentence above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9375" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T18:50:30.953" Title="Thematic roles adjunct" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3798" CreationDate="2015-03-18T15:46:30.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen two competing theories about this (both of which are mentioned by other commentors) - that either fl &gt; þl in Gothic or þl &gt; fl in everything &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; Gothic, but I think I can expand on these a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most favor the former theory, particularly because at least the word þliuhan can be traced back to IE pleuk-, which would give a PGmc fleuh-.  If this is the case, as archenoo mentioned before, the rule is fl &gt; þl / ## ___ V {h(s),kw}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second theory, however, is mentioned by Voyles in &lt;em&gt;Early Germanic Grammar&lt;/em&gt;. He posits that there was &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; change in Gothic (and presumably pl &gt; þl somehow in PGmc, though he doesn't mention it), and that there was a later NWGmc change of þl &gt; fl, which he relates to the NWGmc change of medial -þl- &gt; -hl-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW I personally favor the former theory, because it seems more natural and a little easier to explain. The jstor article linked in the original question favors the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, though, the difficulty is that there are only four attested words with þl- and, surprisingly, only four attested words with fl-: þlahsjan, þlaqus, þlaúhs, and þliuhan for the former, and flautjan, flauts, flōdus, and flōkan for the latter. There's also one mysterious occurrence of flahtō 'braid', which violates the rules established above, but since there is only one instance of it, I am tempted to attribute this to scribal error (whereas there are numerous consistent examples of þliuhan, and at least a few of flōdus). It could also be a later borrowing, I suppose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9388" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T15:46:30.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11781" CreationDate="2015-03-18T16:45:44.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Teach him Arabic!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the famous line: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Never Let Schooling Interfere With Your Education&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teaching your son a second language will actually make him smarter and expose him to different cultural views.&#xA;Personally, I have learnt Arabic, Zulu and Afrikaans as secondary languages during my schooling.&#xA;Even though I don't speak those languages as fluently as a native, I can still read and write in all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that he will be grateful to you when he grows he up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9389" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T16:45:44.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11781" CreationDate="2015-03-18T17:32:36.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody ever died because he knows too much languages. This is the best thing to do for your child and learning when very young is extremelly easy.  Later it becomes harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YOU Should change the TEACHER, she does not understand anything&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9390" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T17:32:36.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11784" CreationDate="2015-03-18T18:29:20.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What specific label to assign to participants in events/states of affairs is a highly controversial issue because it is practically impossible to 'reduce' (without residue!) the innumerable semantic functions that predicates universally assign to their arguments to a small list of 'proto-roles' or 'archi-roles'. Many linguists more or less agree that some labels are adequate to characterize most of the more important and frequent ones, e.g., 'Agent' (or a much more general one: 'Actor'), 'Instrument' (or 'Means', or both), 'Possessor', 'Experiencer' (or 'Patient', or both), 'Affected', 'Theme' (or both), 'Resultant'/'Effected', 'Recipient', 'Beneficiary/Damnified','Goal', 'Source', 'Path', ...'Time', 'Place'/'Locative', etc., are all popular, but do not expect a consensus on the number of roles each theory distinguishes, on the specific names different linguists prefer to label them, on their definition, or, consequently, on their actual range of applicability. Fillmore tried hard and failed, in my view, and most of the others have not even tried hard. In some theories of the syntax-semantics interface, as a matter of fact, roles are specifically determined by the &lt;strong&gt;individual&lt;/strong&gt; predicates that assign them; for example, 'give' will assign the roles of 'giver', 'given' and 'givee', rather than Agent, Theme and Recipient, whereas 'pay' will assign 'payer', 'paid' and 'payee', etc. Of course, that 'solves' the classification problem, but at a high price: loss of generalization (which is bad, because the original reason why thematic/semantic roles/Cases were 'invented' was to reduce semantic patterns to a small number of types and exploit such a reduction to establish recurrent syntax-semantics correspondences, projection regularities, recurrent alternations, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what you seem to be more puzzled about is a slightly different issue: whether it is only 'participant arguments' (syntactically: subjects and complements) that discharge thematic roles or 'circumstants' - syntactically, 'adjuncts' (of time, place, manner, purpose, etc.) also do, as would seem logical on purely semantic grounds. Thus, with respect to your examples (&lt;em&gt;James got a ball yesterday, The cat chased the dog for a long time&lt;/em&gt;) you ask whether &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for a long time&lt;/em&gt; are instances of a TIME role or just 'adjuncts'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, of course, syntactically they are adjuncts (i.e., not subjects or complements), but, semantically, they unquestionably express 'time' and 'duration' circumstances, and, in principle, you could perfectly well claim that they also 'discharge' roles, in this case TIME and DURATION, perhaps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this, matters have become highly theory-bound and answering your question in a way acceptable to the profession as a whole is probably impossible. The earliest 'modern' theories of 'roles' (mid 1960's), roughly those that coined the terms 'thematic roles' (Gruber's) or 'Cases' (Fillmore's), aimed rather at accounting for syntactic alternations than at defining LF and the syntax-semantics interface, and, with such an aim in view, only 'participants' (= arguments of the &lt;strong&gt;main&lt;/strong&gt; predicate) were supposed to discharge 'thematic roles'/Cases. However, as linguists, from the late 1960's onwards, shifted their focus of interest from syntax &lt;em&gt;sensu stricto&lt;/em&gt; to semantics/LF and the syntax-semantics interface, things changed substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the mere distinction between complements and adjuncts had already proved rather difficult to justify in a substantial number of cases, and by the late 1980's major syntactic theories like Chomsky's (especially following Larson's work on 'shells') were generating subjects, certain complements (not all) and certain adjuncts (not all) in exactly the same position, i.e., in 'specifier of X', which cancelled the clear structural distinctions initially made in early X-bar theory (1970's, early 1980's) between subjects, complements, and adjuncts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Davidson's influential early attempt (1967) to analyse the LF of clauses and the truth-conditional contribution of their syntactic constituents yielded flat sequences of conjoined predicate logic formulae in which 'participants' and 'circumstants' were treated &lt;strong&gt;in exactly the same way&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., as second arguments of theory-internally defined predicates - usually labelled according to their semantic 'role' (Agent, Instrument, Theme, Goal, yes, but also Time, Place, Manner, etc.) - whose first argument was the 'event' as a whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in your first sentence, for example, Davidson would have said that the verb &lt;em&gt;got&lt;/em&gt; denotes a 'Getting' event (&gt;'e') that is claimed to have existed [at some point in the past] via a prefixed existential quantifier over the variable 'e', the subject &lt;em&gt;James&lt;/em&gt; would be rendered by the Pred-Logic clause 'Agent of (e, James)', the object &lt;em&gt;a ball&lt;/em&gt; would appear at LF as 'Theme of (e, a ball)', &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;  the 'adverbial' noun &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; would be rendered by a similar Pred Logic clause, i.e., 'Time of (e, yesterday)'. Such a 'flat' analysis has its limitations, but roughly suffices to capture the original sentence's truth conditions and many people since then (1967) have been happy enough to have at least that as an LF to work with. Assuming that approach is adequate, since all constituents of the sentence incrementally contribute truth conditions to it, the null hypothesis is to try to represent them all in the same way, and, to that extent, syntactic adjuncts are as capable of discharging 'semantic roles' as subjects and complements are. The deep reason is that ultimately &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; are 'arguments' of &lt;strong&gt;one or another&lt;/strong&gt; subsentential predicate; whether they are arguments of the main predicate (the verb) or of some 'subsidiary' one (say, a preposition introducing an adjunct of time, place, purpose, etc. that 'augments' the arity of the main predicate) is irrelevant from the Davidsonian viewpoint: Time, Place, etc. are also 'arguments' of predicates internal to the clause, and arguments are functionally defined and &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; have roles. [Actually, the idea of reducing a complex sentence to a conjunction of atomic predications is much older than Davidson's paper; a practically equivalent analysis had been offered by Wundt in his &lt;em&gt;Die Sprache&lt;/em&gt; in 1900, and I think Wund may have taken inspiration from earlier work by Von der Gabelentz and other 19th c. German grammarians, although I can no longer off the cuff offer precise page references to work I read decades ago]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, depending on the character and aims of your (or your teacher's) favourite theory of 'roles', &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for a long time&lt;/em&gt; will indeed have the 'roles' of Time and Duration, or not, but even if that theory says that only participant arguments of the main verb can receive 'roles', it will still have to distinguish between 'adjuncts', and adding to the general syntactic term 'adjunct' notional labels like 'of Time' or 'of Duration' is still probably the commonest and easiest way to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-18T18:50:30.953" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T18:50:30.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11774" CreationDate="2015-03-18T20:02:51.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is too broad to answer completely (to start with, it presupposes a shibboleth to distinguish formal theories of syntax), but the answer is easy for minimalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment in the question does not apply to minimalist syntax in that minimalist syntax does not assume that the leaves of a syntax tree must necessarily host words. On the other hand, it does argue for common structural features in all languages. So the short answer to &quot;How is syntax of polysynthetic languages represented in minimalism?&quot; is &quot;just like the syntax of non-polysynthetic languages.&quot; This area of research has been very active for the last 20 years, so there is no dearth of material to study if you want to know more. I guess the classical reference is &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Polysynthesis_Parameter.html?id=M11Qfs1HfuoC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Polysynthesis parameter&lt;/a&gt; and I'm personally familiar with the work of &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/barriemichael/home/cv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;M.Barrie&lt;/a&gt; but there are dozens of other references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ivan Kapitonov notes in comments, &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;-drop is not exclusive to polysynthetic languages. As it is one of the most studied syntactic phenomenon, you'll have no difficulty to find work on this topic either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T20:02:51.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11774" CreationDate="2015-03-18T22:49:39.510" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many linguistic theories see syntax and morphology as basically being a single thing: morphosyntax. The same principles and processes occur in both, with the difference between morphemes, clitics and words being hard to define. Their syntax trees therefore include the internal structure of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T22:49:39.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-18T23:05:54.933" Score="3" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with these two sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Alex stopped playing the piano.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I concluded is that the sentence presupposes that Alex had previously played the piano. But why does the presupposition arise? Is it because it is a change of state verb and refers to two successive states?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Alex regrets that he played the piano yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said that the presupposition is that Alex played the piano yesterday and the presupposition arise because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupposition#Factive_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;factive&lt;/a&gt; verbs presuppose their complements? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9375" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T13:47:28.917" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T13:47:28.917" Title="What triggers the presuppositions in these sentences?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;presupposition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2015-03-18T23:21:36.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;1: it's a lexical property of &quot;stop&quot; (contrast &quot;start&quot;, &quot;try&quot;, &quot;deny&quot;); it follows from what &quot;stop&quot; means. Notice that &quot;start&quot; describes a change of state, too. 2: Yes, see Kiparsky &amp;amp; Kiparsky &quot;Fact&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-18T23:21:36.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11777" CreationDate="2015-03-19T05:24:44.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The direct object is the noun phrase immediately after the verb.  That's the one that can be passivized (usually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They told &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; that. (I was told that.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They told &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; so. (?I was told so.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She taught &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; Spanish. (I was taught Spanish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people also allow omission of the &quot;to&quot; of an indirect object in passives (which is confusing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They told &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; to me. (That was told (to) me.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She taught &lt;em&gt;Spanish&lt;/em&gt; to me. (Spanish was taught (to) me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The indirect object is the noun phrase after &quot;to&quot;.  I am partial to the Relational Grammar account which derives the double object construction by promoting an indirect object to a direct object (and demoting the former direct object to Chomeur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T05:24:44.920" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-19T05:47:02.640" Score="3" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulty understanding what are inchoative verbs and how they are different from unaccusative verbs. Is it generally the case that inchoatives are subsumed under unaccusatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs of motion, &quot;roll&quot; for example, show the causative/inchoative alternation. But I assume it is not an unaccusative verb. Then is it okay to say the intransitive use of the verb roll is inchoative, but its subject is not a patient, hence not an unaccusative verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eg. The ball rolled down the hill.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about the verb 'fall'? It's an unaccusative verb. Is it an inchoative verb? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eg. Susan fell.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 'suffocate' as in &lt;strong&gt;'Many dogs have suffocated in hot cars.&lt;/strong&gt;' The subject is a patient. Is it an unaccusative verb? and inchoative as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9326" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T07:34:43.613" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T14:32:47.870" Title="the distinction between inchoatives and unaccusatives" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2015-03-19T11:52:41.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most sentences contain presuppositions. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1)  a. Tom's sister left.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the situation, this sentence can be true or false. But regardless of whether it is true or false, it presupposes that Tom has a sister. Presupposition is identified using negation. If a sentence is negated, the presupposition nevertheless remains intact, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1)  b. Tom's sister did not leave.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both (1a) and (1b), the presupposition is present that Tom has a sister. Negating the sentence did not remove the presupposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to understand presuppositions is to consider the predicates that sentences contain. Sentence (1a) contains two predicates, each associated with a separate proposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1st proposition: 'Tom's sister left.'&#xA; 2nd proposition: 'Tom has a sister.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these propositions contains a main predicate. Predicates are thus capable of constituting propositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key observation about presupposition is that one of the predicates is primary and any other predicate(s) that are present are secondary. In this case, the predicate 'leave' is the primary predicate and the predicate 'have' is a secondary predicate. Presupposition always resides with secondary predicates. From a syntactic point of view, the primary predicate is usually associated with the main verb of the main clause, whereas secondary predicates are expressed elsewhere in the sentence, for instance in a subordinate clause or in a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example sentence from the question, i.e. &lt;em&gt;Alex stopped playing the piano&lt;/em&gt;, two separate predicates are clearly present, namely 'stop' and 'play'. Of these two, 'stop' is the primary predicate and 'play' is the secondary predicate. When the primary predicate is negated, it impacts the truth associated with the primary predicate only; the negation has no impact on the truth of the secondary predicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (2) a. Alex stopped playing the piano.&#xA;     b. Alex did not stop playing the piano. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these sentences presuppose the playing, i.e. Alex was definitely playing the piano, regardless of whether he did or did not stop. While the absence/presence of the negation reverses the truth value of the proposition expressed by the predicate 'stop', it has no impact on the truth value of the proposition expressed by the predicate 'play'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up so far, presupposition is closely associated with the predicates that are expressed in sentences. Primary predicates in sentences do not carry presupposition, whereas secondary predicates can carry presupposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, however, the nature of the primary predicate can impact the ability of a secondary predicate to bear presupposition. Consider the predicate 'say' in this regard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (3) a. Tom said he was hungry.&#xA;     b. Tom did not say he was hungry.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences contain two predicates each time, 'say' and 'hungry'. The primary predicate is 'say' and the secondary predicate is 'hungry'. The primary predicate 'say' is such that it blocks its secondary predicate from bearing presupposition. Whether or not Tom really was hungry or not is unknown, but rather what is known is merely that Tom did or did not claim he was hungry. The absence/presence of the negation has no impact on this state of affairs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other predicates, in contrast, allow their secondary predicates to bear presupposition, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (4) a. Tom knows that Susan is hungry.&#xA;     b. Tom does not know that Susan is hungry.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the speaker is saying that Susan is definitely hungry, regardless of whether Tom does or does not know it. Verbs that allow the secondary predicate to bear presupposition like this are known as &lt;em&gt;factive&lt;/em&gt;. Verbs like 'say' above that block their secondary predicate from bearing presupposition can be designated as &lt;em&gt;non-factive&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, the presence of presupposition is closely associated with the nature of predicates. Some predicates allow presupposition, whereas others do not. There is no easy path to understanding in such cases. One has explore which primary predicates allow presupposition, and which ones do not, and which types of secondary predicates always bear presupposition, and which ones are influenced by the primary predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T12:34:34.720" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T12:34:34.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-19T17:24:35.750" Score="1" ViewCount="2505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little confused about what affix to add first to the stem &quot;elect&quot;. The word is re-election. If I add the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ion&lt;/em&gt; first, then it turns the verb into a noun. The affix '&lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt;' attaches best to verbs (if I'm not mistaken). Should I just attach the prefix first then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9375" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T19:56:17.250" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T20:06:57.397" Title="Can the prefix re- be added to nouns?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11802" CreationDate="2015-03-19T19:04:31.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first test you should apply is whether &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; can be added to a noun and give another noun – *&lt;em&gt;re-tree&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;re-pig&lt;/em&gt; and so on should persuade you that &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; does not attach to nouns. Second is to verify that &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; attaches to verb, e.g. &lt;em&gt;re-take, re-think, re-elect&lt;/em&gt;. Then when faced with a derivation from noun to verb or verb to noun, if on the &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; you find a word of one category X which takes an affix that only attaches to category Y, and if the word also has an affix that converts a Y to an X, then you should assume that the restricted affix is added to the category Y stem &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, and then Y changes to X. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &quot;first&quot;, &quot;then&quot; are used by linguists in different ways — either literally, meaning in time (i.e. there is a claim about processing) or else in terms of lower versus higher levels of attachment in a structural tree (in case you want to avoid any implications about processing). To really put your theory to the test, you should also try to find newly-generated forms, like &quot;re-macadamize&quot; or even &quot;re-pre-macadamize&quot;, which can't reasonably be accused of being historical archaisms (unless you build roads for a living). &quot;Re-think&quot; is a good example since unlike &lt;em&gt;re-elect&lt;/em&gt;, it couldn't have been pre-constructed in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-19T20:06:57.397" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T20:06:57.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-19T19:36:39.697" Score="0" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like I might be in the wrong exchange, but I do not see a NLP exchange, so I figured this was the best bet. My current task is to take short sentences and try to categorize them based on some taxonomy. I'll try to be as detailed as possible in this question, but if you need any more details, I'll do my best to provide them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are two main issues with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dealing with a single sentence, versus having a whole article or document, makes categorizing difficult (as far as I know)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not know what taxonomy I should be trying to use (i.e. a small set of topics, or something larger). I imagine this will be determined based on how accurate I can get this model to work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give some examples of what I am thinking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Barack Obama is a Socialist&quot;  --&gt; This should be categorized as &quot;Politics&quot;, or &quot;US Politics&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Global Warming is a Hoax&quot; --&gt; This should be categorized as &quot;global warming&quot;, or &quot;global warming debate&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Charlie Seen's latest rant about Obama is stupid&quot; --&gt; This should be categorized as &quot;Entertainment&quot;, &quot;Hollywood&quot;, maybe &quot;Politics&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research I have done shows that categorizing with short sentences (and not a large article) makes things difficult, and a common way of dealing with it is to utilize wikipedia / dbpedia. What I would like is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research papers which have tried to categorize sentences, tweets, sm posts, etc into a set of topics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Common methods for dealing with small amounts of text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Links to software, apis etc that may help with categorizing (most APIs I have seen work better with documents)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I know this is a quite a bit vague. I'll try to provide any information needed to help figure out what strategies would work well. Any insights, links and thoughts would be highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8125" LastActivityDate="2015-03-19T19:36:39.697" Title="Categorizing short sentences into a taxonomy" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T00:54:47.387" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;My professor asked us to do a presentation about syntax..and don't know which topic I should present...it'll be a 20 min. presentation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope someone could help me with list of topics so I could choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;........&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've thought about grammatical case..&#xA;But my question is..What points should I talk about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thank you for all of your answers and suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9398" LastEditorUserId="9398" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T23:12:04.597" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T23:12:04.597" Title="Suggestions for subjects about syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-20T08:27:53.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11805" CreationDate="2015-03-20T01:53:19.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I have one suggestion for a topic: dependency vs. constituency. That is, you could present the basic distinction between approaches to syntax that assume dependency and approaches that assume constituency. This distinction is illustrated with the following trees that are taken from the article on dependency grammar in Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c1XvB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, much of the information you need about the distinction is present in Wikipedia, in these articles among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_constituent_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_constituent_analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information is available in many of the links in these articles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why this is a good topic is that it's really important, and further, your professor may not be so aware of the distinction. My guess is that he/she does constituency grammar and has little awareness or knowledge of dependency grammar. This means that the topic would be good for your professor as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ramifications of the dependency vs. constituency distinction are of course really big, but the core difference between dependency and constituency is rather simple, and it can fit nicely into a 20 minute presentation. If you'd like more information, contact me via email (tjo3ya@yahoo.com). I can provide the information you need in the form of good publications from Encyclopedias of Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T01:53:19.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T04:05:20.910" Score="2" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phrase structure grammars, discourse functions (topic, focus) have structural positions (cf. topicalization in English, right-edge focus in Russian, clause-initial focus in Welsh, preverbal focus in Hungarian). What do dependency grammars employ to capture information structure? There are no nonterminals so one can't have an FP, for example, or a TopP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-20T05:37:56.200" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T14:00:38.113" Title="How do dependency grammars account for information structure" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;information-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11807" CreationDate="2015-03-20T06:11:49.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two types of answers to this question, depending upon whether a multistratal syntax (deep syntax and surface syntax) or monostratal syntax (surface syntax only) is assumed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In monostratal syntax, information structure is encoded by linear order alone. This is the same for both grammar types, dependency and constituency. For instance, a topic can be construed as the constituent that appears at the left edge of an utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I have used the term &quot;constituent&quot; to describe the syntactic unit at the left edge of the utterance in a dependency grammar. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1)   a. You still have much to learn.&#xA;&#xA;       b. Much to learn you still have.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a dependency grammar, complete subtrees are constituents. In both (1a) and (1b), the string &lt;em&gt;much to learn&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent, i.e. a complete subtree. In (1b) it can be labeled the &quot;topic&quot;. As a constituent, it has a concrete status in the dependency hierarchy. The following trees (taken from the article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topicalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;topicalization&lt;/a&gt; in Wikipedia) illustrate this state of affairs in both a constituency and a dependency grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NbFnR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These trees illustrate the extent to which notions such as topic and focus are going to receive the same sort of explanation in both dependency- and constituency-based systems. These notions are taken care of by linear order alone, and the distinction between dependency and constituency has no bearing on topics and foci. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a multistratal approach, however, things become more complex, since dependency grammars that posit deep syntax also acknowledge information structure in deep syntax. The main dependency grammars that do this are Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and Functional Generative Description (FGD). However,these DGs can nevertheless also assume that constituents (complete subtrees) are marked in deep syntax as topic or focus. In the mapping that occurs fron deep syntax to surface structure, a topic should then appear at the left periphery of the utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if the question is more concerned with how notions of FocP and TopP in Chomskian syntax translate to dependency grammar, that question is perhaps more difficult to anwer in a coherent manner. The difficulty stems from the fact that modern Chomskian syntax assumes all syntactic branching to be binary. This can lead to a large number of various functional categories, all located above the lexical domain in the syntactic hierarchy. What one has to ask oneself, though, is whether these functional categories can exist without linear order. That is, one has to ask oneself whether one can have a topic that does not appear at the left edge of the utterance. If no such topics are possible, the notion of topic cannot be separated from linear order, so there is no reason to locate the notion of topic in the syntactic hierarchy. But if one can have a topic that is not at the left periphery of the utterance, then one has to ask oneself what the Chomskian syntax tree would look like that acknowledges such a topic. For instance, can a topic follow the finite verb? I think many syntacticians would answer this question with &quot;no&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T06:11:49.577" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11807" CreationDate="2015-03-20T06:54:49.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can't account for information structure at the level of surface syntax. Consider the sentence &lt;strong&gt;илсьірбоит&lt;/strong&gt; (I'm showing it to her; Abkhaz). It has three topical arguments (only topics can be pro-dropped) and since a sentence without focus wouldn't be felicitous, the predicate is focal. But the syntax tree consists of only one node. It's useless. The LFG people suggest to ignore the categorial structure and introduce discourse functions into the functional structure. But it was Tracy Holloway King I think who pointed out that this approach doesn't work for subconstituent focus. It's easy to see that any dependency grammar would have this problem. The solution within LFG was to add a new layer of representation for discourse functions to the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In FGD Sgall et al. reorder their tectogrammatical trees with respect to information structure. But at the same time they require that the trees be projective. I don't think that their solution is particularly elegant but if they weren't able to come up with a nice solution, then there's probably none within the framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible &quot;solution&quot; is to say that information structure isn't part of syntax sensu stricto and capture it at the level of pragmatics. This is what Jerry Hobbs did in his framework and it makes sense, but it also moves us from linguistics to computational logic and/or automated reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T06:54:49.320" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2015-03-20T14:03:27.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re: ananas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the word is Brazilian (from Guarani),but in Brazil the pineapple is commonly called abacaxi, not ananas.  Only the Portuguese regularly distinguish between ananas and abacaxi (the latter to indicate a large Brazilian pineapple)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9402" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T14:03:27.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T14:15:36.783" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Studying Japanese, I finally broke the mindset of trying to turn Japanese phrases into English phrases. Doing this has made the study of Japanese much easier for me. Then I got to thinking, usually I think of linguistics as the study of various sentence structures,and grammar. Now I think that the definition should be the study of how different cultures convey the same idea. Would this be an valid assessment? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9184" LastEditorUserId="9184" LastEditDate="2015-03-20T20:02:12.133" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T18:34:44.430" Title="Defining Linguistics" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-20T15:24:02.397" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; Are there any documented languages in which a certain word class corresponds to a particular phonological structure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; CVC(VC) = Noun &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Polish, the word &lt;em&gt;kot&lt;/em&gt; 'cat' (CVC) corresponds to a noun of the masculine gender. In this sense, the noun-class (Masculine) is encoded phonologically into the word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a phenomenon is prevalent in natural language, could it occur on a higher order, that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; As opposed to simply representing a noun class, could a particular phonological form (see &lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt;) represent an entire word class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9335" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T15:24:02.397" Title="Word classes reliant on phonological form?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11811" CreationDate="2015-03-20T17:08:20.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's valid insofar as linguistics studies both. The two issues are closely related. To express &quot;I have seen him&quot; one can use four words (as in English) or one word. Morphology, syntax, and lexical relations vary greatly across languages. One can study one language (synchronically or diachronically) or one can learn 10 or 20 languages and focus on comparative linguistics, typology, or formal grammar theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T17:08:20.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11811" CreationDate="2015-03-20T20:42:01.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's not a fair assessment, because it incorporates your own theoretical idea into a discipline followed by people with various ideas and approaches.  What about someone who doesn't believe that different cultures do ever &quot;convey the same idea&quot;?  Does that mean he can't be a linguist, because he disagrees with you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-20T20:42:01.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11828" CreationDate="2015-03-20T21:51:52.057" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages like Japanese are said to have case phrases (KP). I don't understand why case particles are considered heads. Why is the structure of NP+ga [KP [DP x] [K ga]] (ie the DP depends on ga)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:37:16.623" Title="Dependencies in case phrases" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11830" CreationDate="2015-03-21T00:35:26.607" Score="1" ViewCount="1770" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted this in the wrong place &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234744/universal-words?noredirect=1#comment505372_234744&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/234744/universal-words?noredirect=1#comment505372_234744&lt;/a&gt;, and it generated some good discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years ago I found in the internet a list of &quot;Universal Words&quot;. i.g. words that exist in the same form (with minor variations) in all (or most?) languages, and that don´t have synonyms (there are no other words in any language to refer to the same thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list included words like: Chocolate, Bikini, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing extensive research (e.g. googling) I can't find any reference to such a list or linguistic concept. The person that posted the list claimed that there was wide consensus from the language/linguistic experts community about most of these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thought about this list/concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9403" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T23:25:20.670" Title="Universal Words" Tags="&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11816" CreationDate="2015-03-21T01:03:57.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an idea that would be taken seriously. First, such a list wouldn't be based on a particularly large sample of languages, so the &quot;universality&quot; of the word would be mere speculation. Second, it doesn't reveal anything significant about language, it only tells you that the bikini was a recent invention and that languages are generally quite willing to borrow words for new things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T01:03:57.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-21T04:15:33.483" Score="-2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;UK: dieu(the motto on passport - French)/deity(English word)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;China: tien(Chinese Wade-Giles... t-&gt;d)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;South Africa: modimo(o-&gt;əʊ)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;New Zealand: atua(Maori... t-&gt;d)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;North America: tirawa(Pawnee... w-&gt;u t-&gt;d)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;South America: tatitu(Aymara... t-&gt;d)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9404" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T05:00:12.853" Title="Why do peoples(Europe, Asia, Africa, etc) call &quot;God&quot; in very similar ways?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-21T11:42:42.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11819" CreationDate="2015-03-21T05:00:12.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, given that there are 7,000 or so known languages, then it is always possible to select some approximate meaning like &quot;god; cow; eat; big&quot; and pick words from those 7,000 languages that are sufficiently similar in meaning and form that you could assume some deeper significance to that coincidence. As a starter, to establish significance, you would need to show that these forms that you offer are actually the words for &quot;god&quot; in those languages. As a case in point, there is no language &quot;South African&quot;. That word (Setswana) means &quot;Man-eater&quot;, which is an expression used to refer to &quot;God&quot;, and derives from the verb 'eat' which is /li/. If your criteria for &quot;similarity&quot; are loose enough, you can always find a &quot;similarity&quot; in a half-dozen languages. I would not be surprised if readers here could identify a half-dozen tangential similarities in the form of the word for &quot;cow&quot; across human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T05:00:12.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11832" CreationDate="2015-03-21T05:41:57.587" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read Alex Alsina's papers on complex predicates and I understand why they are a problem for the syntax-semantics interface. If we wanted to build a syntax tree for a complex predicate in Romance, say, el vaig fer Vinf, how would we express the monoclausality of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a secondary question: Can complex predicates be represented as chains (in the sense of O'Grady)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm interested only in complex predicates in the sense of Alsina, not just any syntactically complex predication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T06:31:09.603" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:27:11.797" Title="Monoclausality in dependency trees" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11774" CreationDate="2015-03-21T06:56:12.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polysynthetic languages do almost all the work in the lexicon so a better question would be how they deal with morphology. There's a formal grammar for Georgian and Abkhaz developed by Paul Meurer. He has a lexicon and a nonconfigurational grammar for the NP adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets more complicated in languages like Greenlandic or Quechua because they can built infinite words (not via recursion though) There's something like a sublexical &quot;microgrammar&quot; that creates &quot;trees&quot; in the lexicon. In other words, syntax is not the problem here, unless the language exhibits incorporation, in which case one has to deal with bracketing paradoxes. I generally like the lexical integrity principle but I think that it simply doesn't work for these languages. This opinion is controversial, though. Quechua, on the other hand, has differential agreement, which means that (lexical) semantics affects morphosyntax. One can vaguely describe the rules but it's very hard to formalize them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for pro-drop, the &quot;dropped&quot; arguments are attached in the lexicon and appear at the level of deep syntax, where one can use them to create the logical representation of the processed sentence. But this is not syntax anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T06:56:12.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-21T07:31:07.460" Score="-1" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;India, Iran, Turkey all have ancient traditions of samovar-making. Yet In Persian, Kashmiri and Turkish they call the device by a borrowed Russian word &quot;samovar&quot; (self-boiler in Russian). I wonder, why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T08:21:26.420" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T10:20:35.043" Title="Why in all languages the word &quot;samovar&quot; is borrowed from Russian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-28T17:30:41.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11815" CreationDate="2015-03-21T08:41:44.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese doesn't have DPs. Those words that can appear in the position associated with determiners/articles, are clearly marked for attribution. The demonstratives &lt;em&gt;kono&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sono&lt;/em&gt;, etc. contain the genitive particle &lt;em&gt;-no&lt;/em&gt;. Others such as &lt;em&gt;iwayuru&lt;/em&gt; 'so-called' contain attributive suffixes, here: &lt;em&gt;-uru&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Concerning your question, the NP depends on the case particle, because the presence of the case particle is the most important criterion for the grammatical distribution of the entire expression NP-Case. Look at the next example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   (1) Kare-wa Tokyo-e modotta.&#xA;       he-top  T-all   return.pst&#xA;       'He returned to Tokyo.'&#xA;   (2)*Kare=wa Tokyo-o modotta.&#xA;                    -acc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), the directional complement &lt;em&gt;Tokyo&lt;/em&gt; is properly marked by the allative case particle &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; (the dative particle &lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt; is also possible). Hence the sentence is good. Example (2) shows the accusative case particle &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;. The result is bad.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the case particles weren't somehow head over the NPs, that effect would be difficult to explain. In fact, assuming the following structure for &lt;em&gt;Tokyo-e&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) [&lt;sub&gt;KP&lt;/sub&gt;[&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt;Tokyo]-e] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;allows one to generalize over the noun &lt;em&gt;Tokyo&lt;/em&gt;, and to arrive at the more abstract next structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) [&lt;sub&gt;KP&lt;/sub&gt;[&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt;N&lt;sub&gt;place&lt;/sub&gt;]-e]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that any noun that references a place could appear instead of &lt;em&gt;Tokyo&lt;/em&gt; in (1).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Assuming that the place noun is head over the case particle would lead one to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt;Tokyo[&lt;sub&gt;case&lt;/sub&gt;-p]]   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structure (5) views case particles as subordinate to their nouns. As a result, any case particle should be good. But example (2) shows that this is not the case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, sentence (1) isn't good because &lt;em&gt;Tokyo&lt;/em&gt; appears; any place name or local noun would be fine. Rather the sentence is good because the allative appears, rather than another case particle (apart from the dative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T08:41:44.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11822" CreationDate="2015-03-21T09:47:53.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first question is difficult to answer because you don't give glossed examples, and because it isn't clear whether you want to know about &lt;strong&gt;idiomatic&lt;/strong&gt; complex predicates.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Assuming that you do, my answer is that capturing idiomatic predicates is difficult for constituency-based grammars. The minimal complete subtree that contains the idiomatic predicate often also contains material outside of the idiom. Since constituency-based grammars can only handle &lt;strong&gt;complete&lt;/strong&gt; subtrees, rather than just subtrees, they cannot capture the minimal unit associated with the idiom proper. Example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1) do X justice&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The indirect object, marked by X, is outside of the idiom &lt;em&gt;do...justice&lt;/em&gt;, but since it appears between the verb and the noun, a constituent-based grammar cannot isolate just the verb and the noun as the carrier of the idiomatic meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O'Grady (1997) proposes the notion of the &lt;em&gt;chain&lt;/em&gt; in order to deal with such cases. Within dependency grammar, the concept is now called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catena_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;catena&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The page cited gives a number of structured examples. A detailed account of how to deal with idioms is given in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cog.2012.23.issue-1/cog-2012-0006/cog-2012-0006.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Constructions are catenae&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2012.00172.x/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Catenae&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zfsw.2013.32.issue-1/zfs-2013-0002/zfs-2013-0002.xml?format=INT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Katena und Konstruktion&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Very briefly summarizing the results in the linked articles, idiomatic structure qualifies as a catena in a dependency grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T09:47:53.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11824" CreationDate="2015-03-21T10:20:35.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you ever wonder whether it might be because the samovar is a Russian invention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T10:20:35.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11815" CreationDate="2015-03-21T10:43:56.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have detailed knowledge of Japanese but in Urdu there are two approaches. One says that the case markers are suffixes, whilst the other assumes that they're particles and posits a KP. A KP in Urdu is something like a PP but it's headed by a case marker (K). In fact, there's a hierarchy: PP&gt;KP&gt;DP&gt;NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the categorial head of a phrase needn't be its functional (lexical) head. Functional heads are content words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-23T03:37:16.623" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:37:16.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11816" CreationDate="2015-03-21T12:39:52.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a list of such words, then be aware that Stack Exchange sites aren't the correct forum &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98334/list-questions-community-wiki&quot;&gt;for discussing list questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the (limited) linguistic significance of these words, it's worth noting that there are actually two types of &quot;universal&quot; words. The first are words that are often (but not always) similar even in languages that have had no contact with each other. The archetypal example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;mama and papa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which are often the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies and so are frequently associated with the parents. Other examples include the interjection &lt;em&gt;huh&lt;/em&gt; (cf &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is 'Huh?' a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items&lt;/a&gt;) and a few onomatopoeias such as &lt;em&gt;haha&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;meow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type of &quot;universal&quot; words are highly successful borrowings such as &lt;em&gt;coffee&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bikini&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;OK&lt;/em&gt;. As @user6726 mentioned, these are not that interesting linguistically, though it's worth noting that these are never truly universal (no word is). Some languages prefer calques (e.g. tequila in Mandarin is &lt;em&gt;lóngshélán jiǔ&lt;/em&gt; ['agave wine']; clarinet is &lt;em&gt;dānhuángguǎn&lt;/em&gt; ['single reed instrument']). Others use new coinages (e.g. coffee in Armenian is &lt;em&gt;surč̣&lt;/em&gt;) and some use alternative character readings (e.g. tea in northern Vietnamese is &lt;em&gt;chè&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from the non-Sino-Vietnamese reading of 茶).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:30.853" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T12:54:15.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-21T15:19:58.907" Score="2" ViewCount="2842" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the main difference between semantic and grammatical predicates is that the former are related to argument(s),while the latter are related to subjects. Are there any more differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9407" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-03-21T15:42:54.560" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T15:42:54.560" Title="What is the difference between semantic and grammatical predicates?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-22T08:54:48.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11822" CreationDate="2015-03-21T18:22:41.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clausal arity can't be expressed structurally at the surface level. I'll modify the Catalan example (I'll use llegir &amp;quot;to read&amp;quot;) and add two more phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) faig llegir - complex predicate (CP), monoclausal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) vaig llegir - not CP, monoclausal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) vull llegir - not CP, biclausal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding syntax trees are identical (up to node/edge labels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complex predicates present a problem to unification grammars. Alsina proposed a solution (in his paper on causatives in Romance and Bantu 1997, page 236) but it's only a technical workaround that &amp;quot;breaks&amp;quot; the monotonicity of unification. We could add semantic forms (SF) to tree nodes in any dependency grammar (faig in (1) would have cause(subj,*) and the main verb would have, in this case, llegir(x,y)) but they can't be unified so it's a useless formalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the second question, I think that most complex predicates are &amp;quot;chains&amp;quot; as defined by O'Grady but there are counterexamples (CPs with &amp;quot;vertical&amp;quot; gaps/discontinuities). But CPs aren't idioms so it shouldn't be particularly surprising. (There are quite a few papers by Butt on Urdu, which is heavy on CPs, with LFG analyses - BTW LFG has &amp;quot;chains&amp;quot; since its inception in 1982, they're just called  differently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that &amp;quot;chain&amp;quot; isn't a precise term because it suggests something one-dimensional whereas the definition allows general connected subgraphs (and there are examples of &amp;quot;chains&amp;quot; that are nontrivial (sub)trees, i.e., not simple paths).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that chains DON'T work at the level of surface syntax. O'Grady defines them explicitly at the lexical level and gives examples why they can't by applied at the syntactic level (as they'd be discontinuous). At the lexical level (Alsina's argument structure) they make perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:27:11.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11811" CreationDate="2015-03-21T18:34:44.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The study of how different cultures convey the same idea&quot; sounds to me like a description of cultural anthropology. Cultures convey ideas through ritual behavior such as table manners and bowing, through music, painting, sculpture, use of incense, architecture, food, clothing and on and on. Apart from being too narrow in excluding the usual activities of linguists, such as describing the structure of a language and investigating the nature of grammar, your definition is too broad in encompassing areas that have never been considered to be linguistics. So from a &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; point of view, it doesn't describe what linguists do, and from a &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt; point of view as a statement about what linguists should do, I don't see a reason for me to switch to the activities of ethnomusicologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;convey the same idea&quot; needs to be tightened up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-21T18:34:44.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11835" CreationDate="2015-03-22T01:10:11.627" Score="4" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone cite reliable source about Serbo-Croatian (Proto-Slavic) etymology of Arabic word for Austria نمسا &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%86%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(nimsa)&lt;/a&gt;? It's sounds very dubious for me. I suppose that we have no evidence of intensive contacts between Arabic world and Slavic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm gonna make it not that sensational like in the title. The Arabic word was borrowed not directly from Proto-Slavic, but (most likely) through Ottoman Turkish through some of Slavic language (&lt;em&gt;according to wiktionary&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9408" LastEditorUserId="9408" LastEditDate="2015-03-22T12:43:59.307" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T12:43:59.307" Title="Is it arabic name for Austria نمسا borrowed from Proto-Slavic?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11834" CreationDate="2015-03-22T03:26:30.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasdai_ibn_Shaprut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hasdai ibn Shaprut&lt;/a&gt; to the king of Khazaria (sometime around 950-960) refers to a Jewish emissary from &quot;N(y)emetz&quot; (נמץ in the Hebrew original) who carried the letter. Hasdai was a minister to Abd-al-Rahman III of the Umayyad dynasty of Spain, and a native Arabic speaker; most likely, then, that name was used in contemporary Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8856-joseph-king-of-the-chazars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; in the Jewish Encyclopedia identifies &quot;Nyemetz&quot; as Germany (and it's not much of a stretch for a name for Germany to be reapplied to German-speaking Austria, especially given user6726's point mentioning the Ottoman empire - they were much closer neighbors). &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There were&lt;/a&gt; Slavic slaves, mercenaries, etc., in Muslim Spain, so the Arabs may well have borrowed the name &quot;Nyemetz&quot; from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T03:26:30.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11834" CreationDate="2015-03-22T08:54:55.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked Wikipedia article (for what little it may be worth) does not claim that the Arabic word is borrowed directly form proto-Slavic. It says that it is “from Ottoman Turkish نمسه (nemse) or نمچه (nemçe), from Serbo-Croatian Nemac, from Proto-Slavic *němьcь” that is: from Turkish, which has it from Serbo-Croat, which derives ultimately from Proto-Slavic. The Arabic &amp;lt; Turkish &amp;lt; Slavic part of this is probably correct. Whether it goes all the way back to proto-Slavic can be debated. Of course, Arabic speakers never had contact with proto-Slavs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-03-22T08:54:55.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-22T18:29:50.943" Score="0" ViewCount="8725" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned two languages during the &quot;critical period&quot;.&#xA;The first language I was exposed to was my &quot;mother tongue&quot;, and so I feel most comfortable speaking in it. &#xA;I went through English schooling, and find it easier to write in English relative to my mother tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9410" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T17:38:21.770" Title="What is my first language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11841" CreationDate="2015-03-22T19:57:16.470" Score="2" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone please tell me what's the dep. tree of &quot;John seemed to fall asleep&quot;? The problem is I don't know if &quot;John&quot; depends on &quot;seem&quot; or &quot;fall&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:35:14.113" Title="Dependency tree with &quot;seem&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9598" CreationDate="2015-03-23T00:37:07.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The raising-equi analysis of &quot;stop&quot;, like &quot;begin&quot;, does not predict synonymy between such active/passive pairs as your examples, but only synonymy with the passive of one sense of the active.  The active should have senses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) [HP stopped [HP control programs]] -- HP is agent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2) [   stopped [HP control programs]] -- HP is not known to be agent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) and (2) can give rise to the same surface sentence.  In sense (2) we predict synonymy with the passive, because the embedded sentence could be passivized before subject-raising.  But the embedded sentence of (1) cannot be passivized, because such aspectual verbs require the subjects of the matrix and embedded sentences to be the same (if the matrix has a subject at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your example is problematic for the usual analysis only if your first example with &quot;HP&quot; as subject means unambiguously that HP was responsible for stopping the control of programs.  If there is a reading in which the responsibility might lie elsewhere, then there is no problem here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T00:37:07.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11838" CreationDate="2015-03-23T01:30:26.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many modern DGs would give the sentence the following structure in surface syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhdLw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a raising verb, that does not change the fact that the subject is generally positioned as an immediate dependent of the finite verb in many modern DGs. The position of &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; immediately in front of the &lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt; and the fact that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; agrees with &lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt; (compare: *They seems...) are strong indicators that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is an immediate dependent of &lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one chooses a DG approach that acknowledges both deep and surface syntax, then one could view &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; as a dependent of &lt;em&gt;fall&lt;/em&gt; below the surface (i.e. in deep syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T01:30:26.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11838" CreationDate="2015-03-23T03:35:14.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In surface syntax it's &quot;John - seemed&quot;. In deep syntax it depends on the theory. &quot;John&quot; would depend on &quot;fall&quot; but sometimes there are two heads and one would say that the subject of &quot;seem&quot; is athematic, i.e., it has no thematic role. XDG does it this way, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T03:35:14.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11843" CreationDate="2015-03-23T16:22:18.947" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the phrases &quot;city of&quot;, &quot;university of&quot;, &quot;county of&quot;, etc? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in, City of New York, University of Florida, County of Cork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5548" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T16:28:04.560" Title="What part of speech is &quot;city of&quot;, &quot;university of&quot;, &quot;county of&quot;?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11842" CreationDate="2015-03-23T16:28:04.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a kind of apposition, it is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition#Appositive_genitive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;appositive oblique&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T16:28:04.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11848" CreationDate="2015-03-23T20:53:32.533" Score="4" ViewCount="1579" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I visited the EzTreeSee website at &lt;a href=&quot;http://eztreesee.coli.uni-saarland.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://eztreesee.coli.uni-saarland.de/&lt;/a&gt; and entered &quot;Mary had a little lamb,&quot; I immediately encountered abbreviations that I had never seen before, to wit...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NNP  VBD  JJ   NN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched the net in vain for the meanings of these abbreviations.  But that doesn't mean that there isn't a link.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where can I find a list of abbreviations for the names of constituents identified in phrase-structure grammar trees? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T19:24:38.190" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T19:24:38.190" Title="Where can I find a list of abbreviations used in tree diagrams of sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11847" CreationDate="2015-03-23T22:53:40.960" Score="0" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not understand how I can learn the Farsi (Persian) alphabet. I try to look at it in order and memorize but it just doesn't stick. Are there any websites that anybody knows about that can help, or other techniques that don't involve rote m&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7966" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T23:02:42.937" Title="Farsi Alphabet Tips" Tags="&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-03-23T23:04:24.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11846" CreationDate="2015-03-23T23:02:42.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A tip: try to write in your own language with the Persian alphabet, that will let you remember it and allow you to acquire faster writing skills. I always did it with all the writing systems I learned, it always works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-03-23T23:02:42.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11845" CreationDate="2015-03-23T23:53:56.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We created eztreesee so that rank beginners can try out sentences without having to install parsers, models, etc. on their own computers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/pnr/depgrapher&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The backend&lt;/a&gt; runs entirely off the Stanford Parser. And therefore, what you see there are Penn Treebank tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official documentation for PTB tags is &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/treebank/doc/tagguide.ps.gz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this weird PostScript file&lt;/a&gt;; you might prefer &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/amalgam/tagsets/upenn.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this quickref&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-03-25T12:38:48.463" LastActivityDate="2015-03-25T12:38:48.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-24T05:38:53.457" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read Kuryłowicz's classic paper &quot;Le problème du classement des cas&quot; and I'm not sure how to interpret what he says about the difference between case affixes and prepositions. Does he in effect say that there's no functional difference between cases and prepositions? (So in a sentence like &quot;I live in Beirut&quot; are there only three functional units?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2015-03-24T15:56:43.063" LastActivityDate="2015-03-24T15:56:43.063" Title="Kuryłowicz on cases and prepositions" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-25T01:01:31.947" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Only English and French can I manage and so ask for. Instead of repeating 'long, difficult' hereafter, denote it &lt;em&gt;mazy&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/42834/8712&quot;&gt;Mazy sentences still stifle my reading comprehension&lt;/a&gt;; so I was gladdened to witness the array of techniques &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235034/50720&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to parse these mazy sentences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. What are these techniques called exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Are there books or resources on such strategies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. What are some other techniques, NOT already discussed below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[All below this parenthesis is optional reading. Each grey line denotes a separate ELU question.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235034/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235034/50720&lt;/a&gt; injects new words to help clarify and complete the mazy sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235055/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235055/50720&lt;/a&gt; both injects new words and punctuations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235174/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235174/50720&lt;/a&gt; fragments the sentence and then indents each relative clause. Is this based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multiple center embedding&lt;/a&gt; as mooted &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/235082/50720&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/152936/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/152936/50720&lt;/a&gt; simply parenthesises the existing sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/153107/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/153107/50720&lt;/a&gt; parenthesises more intensively than .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/217866/50720&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/217866/50720&lt;/a&gt; labels each word with its category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T05:06:37.480" Title="Methods to dissect or parse long, difficult sentences" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11857" CreationDate="2015-03-25T15:49:37.570" Score="6" ViewCount="825" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vocatives, which are basically nouns that refer to the person to whom the speech event is directed, are said to be detached from the sentences in which they occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary, I hate you.&#xA;I don't think I like you, Susan.&#xA;My ill feelings towards you, Carmen, are endless.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for a nominal to become overt, it needs to be checked by the case filter and be assigned case by proper case assigners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If vocatives really are detached from their respective sentences and are not represented in syntactic trees, how are they assigned case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What case vocatives get in English isn't quite clear. Perhaps someone could tell me what case they get in other languages such as German, Greek, Russian or other languages with rich case morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T03:15:36.073" Title="Vocatives and Case Assignment" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;&lt;vocatives&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-25T20:36:15.037" Score="2" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some (mostly lexicalist) theories of syntax assume that there's a 1-to-1 relationship between the words in a sentence and the nodes in its syntax tree. It seems pretty obvious to me. Is there empirical evidence against this principle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8145" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T15:24:08.467" Title="Evidence for/against Lexical integrity principle" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11855" CreationDate="2015-03-26T07:12:48.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vocative is problematic because it's not even clear, it should be considered a case since it plays a discursive rather than syntactic role (although you could make an outside case for the syntax by saying it marks it as not nominative or accusative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Indo-European languages with preserved vocative morphology, it is generally considered to be part of the morphological case paradigm (e.g. 5th case in Czech or 6th case in Latin). But you could just as easily call it a morpheme with a discourse function and exclude it from the paradigm (as some people have tried with the Genitive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Slavic languages have at least remnants of the vocative morphology. For instance, the Russian God! 'bozhe'. But mostly, they just use the nominative form. Czech has a fully preserved and functional vocative morphology that can be used across all classes of nouns (including inanimates). Related languages like Polish or Slovak have all but lost all the vocative morphemes in their modern varieties although there's still some awareness preserved of the archaic forms by native speakers. Vocative is also somewhat preserved in Bulgarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Greek also has functional Vocative morphology which was inherited from Ancient Greek. Latin, of course, is famous for the vocative (which even got mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;famous Monty Python scene&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definiteness is also sometimes used for a vocative function - e.g. in Albanian where it expressed through a suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analytic vocative is found in Irish where it is expressed through a preposed particle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T07:12:48.773" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11855" CreationDate="2015-03-26T16:43:59.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like interjections and topics, vocatives occur only in root sentences (in the sense pioneered by Emonds).  A root sentence is, approximately, (1) an independent, free-standing clause, or (2) a clause conjoined with a root sentence, or (3) a sentence complement to a verb of direct or indirect quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, (1) &quot;O Lord, he is stupid!&quot;, but *&quot;That O Lord he was stupid amazed us.&quot; (where I've put a vocative with a non-root clause), (2) &quot;O Lord, he is stupid, and he is proud of it.&quot;, (3) &quot;O Lord, he was stupid, they all exclaimed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want an interesting way of connecting vocatives with the rest of a root clause, I suppose you might resort to a performative analysis, where the speaker and addressee of a root clause are given explicit form: I (Greg) hereby exclaim to you (O Lord) that he is stupid.  Or something like that.  Less interestingly, you could simply provide for vocatives in a phrase structure rule describing the structure of root clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what it might mean for vocatives to be &quot;detached&quot; from sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-03-26T23:40:28.587" LastActivityDate="2015-03-26T23:40:28.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11855" CreationDate="2015-03-27T03:15:36.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian actually presents a curious example here: on the one hand, as Dominik Lukes pointed out above, it lost the original Slavic vocative case save for a few remnants, but it's also &lt;em&gt;innovated&lt;/em&gt; a vocative form entirely unrelated to the original one. It's highly colloquial and only exists for a single paradigm — if it can even be called a paradigm, because it's only used with first names ending with -а (which tend to be female but also include a number of common male diminutives). It consists in simply dropping the final -a: &lt;code&gt;Sash!&lt;/code&gt; for Sasha, &lt;code&gt;Marin!&lt;/code&gt; for Marina, etc. Narrowing it down further, the name must be paroxytonal, i.e. the syllable preceding the one containing the final -а has to be stressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously it's a reflection of what started out as a purely phonetic phenomenon, but at this point it's used quite consciously in both spoken and written form. Linguists are tentatively calling it the &quot;new vocative&quot; but it would be a bit of a leap to conclude that it's an extra case which is just identical to the nominative in all the other paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complicating it further still, it's not the only example of a Russian &quot;case-oid&quot;, a kind of Pluto in the solar system of Russian declension; there's already a (much older) paradigm-specific partitive (replacing genitive) and locative (replacing prepositional) which only exist for a strictly limited number of nouns, all of which are something of a challenge to the whole idea of cases as something that exists a priori, at least as far as Russian is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps these types of phenomena represent a kind of inflectionary primordial soup which may have also existed in early Proto-Indo-European and other inflecting languages; perhaps something becomes a &quot;case&quot; (in inflecting rather than agglutinative languages, anyway) only once there's a perceived equivalence between certain oblique forms across paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is perhaps why the Indo-European vocative got classified as a case in the first place: there was more than one way to form it, depending on the paradigm, but all of these forms and their respective endings came to be perceived as expressing the same thing — just like with the other and more syntax-dependent cases. Case assignment may be an emergent property of an inflectional system that starts out highly paradigm-dependent and thus, to a certain degree, ad hoc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T03:15:36.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11861" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11871" CreationDate="2015-03-27T10:33:53.160" Score="4" ViewCount="1895" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally &quot;virtual&quot; comes from Latin virtus, which can be translated like &quot;force&quot;, &quot;ability&quot;, &quot;fact&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why nowadays in many languages word derived from &quot;virtual&quot; mean something exactly opposite - something that cannot be touched. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9440" OwnerDisplayName="Zvezdochka" LastEditorUserId="533" LastEditDate="2015-03-27T11:20:24.107" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T18:21:04.460" Title="root of the word Virt" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11861" CreationDate="2015-03-27T12:26:26.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't mean the opposite. A force cannot be touched, nor can an ability or a fact. A thing can; the Latin for &quot;thing&quot; is &lt;em&gt;res&lt;/em&gt;, whence &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &quot;virtual&quot;, &quot;practical&quot;, or &quot;effective&quot; all mean &quot;for all intents and purposes — but not in essence&quot;. They refer to something that, if you like, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; a duck. Which is why in spite of their denoting a positive property rather than a lack of one, they can still be contrasted with &quot;real&quot;, &quot;literal&quot; and &quot;tangible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2015-03-28T02:01:07.263" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T02:01:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-27T14:32:52.317" Score="7" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, here is the word for &quot;I&quot; in the Old Norse dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old East Norse = Ja&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old West Norse = E&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words became, with a natural evolution, the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Icelandic = É&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faroese = E&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bokmål = Je&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nynorsk = E&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish = Je&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish = Ja&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elfdalian  = I&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the word for &quot;and&quot; in Old Norse (both dialects):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old Norse = O&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again, the same changes occured, except for Swedish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Icelandic = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faroese = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bokmål = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nynorsk = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elfdalian  = O&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish = O&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt; (pronounced like a &lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't this change occur in Swedish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing applies for others words like &quot;you&quot; (&quot;þi&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; became &quot;de&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;þi&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;te&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;di&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T10:39:29.150" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T02:38:49.407" Title="Why is &quot;och&quot; (and) not spelled &quot;og&quot; in Swedish?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-27T18:07:34.370" Score="2" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently given a diagram of a spectrogram as part of an assignment. I'm not asking for answers, but rather, how do I start analysing one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the formants seem rather unclear to me, and as an image only, it seems near impossible to differentiate anything else besides vowels and consonants, even the distinctive nasals are hard to see. Any suggestions on how do I start learning and practicing to read one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9439" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T03:47:33.193" Title="How do I start analysing a spectrogram?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11864" CreationDate="2015-03-27T20:24:48.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Measure the durations of the vowels and consonants.  Look for voice bars to find the voiced consonants.  Look for narrowly spaced vertical striations due to vocal cord vibrations and possibly count them to estimate the fundamental frequency.  Trace out the centers of any formants you can see and try to identify the lowest two formants.  Note the slant of formants near consonant boundaries. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-27T20:24:48.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11863" CreationDate="2015-03-28T00:21:45.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When unstressed, Swedish &quot;och&quot; is phonetically [ɔ], which isn't any different from Norwegian &quot;og&quot; [ɔ]. Referencing Danish is really not that informative as Danish has voiced most of its consonants so that even if it had &quot;*ok&quot;, it would've gone to &quot;og&quot; either way (a generic example: Danish vs. Swedish &lt;em&gt;bog&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;bok&lt;/em&gt; 'book').  My thoughts on it are that stressed &quot;och&quot; preserved the hard plosive while its unstressed variant lenited it to [ɣ] which was lost almost everywhere. Irregular sound changes, sure, but those are abundant and particularly full of holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T00:21:45.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-28T00:58:40.110" Score="1" ViewCount="3969" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the rule that predicts the distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9442" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T12:02:40.503" Title="Are [s] and [z] allophones of the same phoneme in Spanish? What is the rule that predicts the distribution?" Tags="&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11864" CreationDate="2015-03-28T03:47:33.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend recording your own speech and getting familiar with how the different types of speech sounds that you produce look in a spectrogram. The more familiar you get with your own speech, and the more expectations you develop, the easier it will become to then start with a spectrogram and &quot;reverse-engineer&quot; it to determine what speech sounds it represents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of what to record, I suggest recording strategic minimal pairs/sets. For example, record &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ha&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, which all start with the same consonant but contain different vowels, and then look at how their respective spectrograms differ. You could then switch it up and keep the vowel constant while varying the consonant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be enlightening to contrast two similar speech sounds by slowly gliding from one to the other--say from an [a] vowel to an [i] vowel, or from [s] to [ʃ] (of course this only works for speech sounds that can be elongated, like vowels and fricatives) and seeing how the spectrum &quot;moves&quot; over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you got comfortable and familiar with your own speech, it would be instructive to compare the same utterances produced by different speakers, so that you can get a sense of the types and range of variation you might expect for a given type of speech sound, as well as what types of visual cues are more robust across speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T03:47:33.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11856" CreationDate="2015-03-28T15:01:23.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is, and for the same reason there is evidence against the 'no tampering' computational principle of current Merge-based minimalist syntax: sublexical elements (typically 'features', [attribute: value] pairs) must be visible to computational operations and result affected by them (e.g., unvalued [A:v] pairs get valued as a result of syntactic operations),and, conversely, sublexical [A: v] features trigger/block syntactic operations. Also, at the semantic level, 'coercion' modifies the internal features of lexical items as they get constructed with neighbouring lexical items, and not only 'locally' (as a consequence of direct 'external Merge' between two lexical units L1 and L2), but also non-locally, as when a noun or verb undergo 'meaning coercion' resulting from NPs or VPs being subsequently constructed with e.g. certain adverbials. Under a strict view of lexical integrity, none of that should occur. Needless to say, parallel reasoning applies to the 'phonological' component of the grammar to the extent sub-lexical phonological features can be affected by comparable features of neighbouring lexical items, obvious cases being 'sandhi' and vowel harmony phenomena. Finally, of course 'lexical integrity' cannot be a principle of any grammar in which at some point (say 'Spell Out', in standard minimalist grammar) the computation branches into two sub-computations, one sending 'meaning'-related information towards the 'conceptual-intentional interface' and the other sending 'sound'-related information towards the 'articulatory-perceptual' one. The latter argument, of course, applies only to theories like Chomsky's minimalist grammar, but the preceeding ones, terminological issues aside, are more generally applicable to all theories of grammar I am aware of to the extent they are explicit as to the computations they presuppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-28T15:24:08.467" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T15:24:08.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11861" CreationDate="2015-03-28T15:55:42.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a whole class of words, called &lt;strong&gt;Antagonyms&lt;/strong&gt; (Auto-antonyms, Contranyms). By definition, words that are antonyms to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/704/27&quot;&gt;a brief list&lt;/a&gt; of such words in English; Wikipedia also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a decent list&lt;/a&gt; of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;em&gt;&quot;virtual&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=virtual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline article&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The meaning &quot;being something in essence or effect, though not actually or in fact&quot; is from mid-15c., &lt;strong&gt;probably via sense of &quot;capable of producing a certain effect&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (early 15c.). Computer sense of &quot;not physically existing but made to appear by software&quot; is attested from 1959.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T18:21:04.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11876" CreationDate="2015-03-28T20:26:10.313" Score="10" ViewCount="5163" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use &quot;low&quot; and &quot;high&quot; in everyday speech when talking about sound, pitch or even frequency. However, if you think of it, the sound of a bassoon is no way closer to the ground (&quot;lower&quot;) than the sound a flute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that most European languages (my native Hungarian included) use the same exact terms so there must be something into it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are different sound frequencies associated with degrees of elevation? Are there languages which use a different abstraction (wide and narrow for example)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Hungarian actually uses &quot;deep&quot; and &quot;high&quot; so I was not precise above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9444" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-26T17:47:17.117" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T11:18:04.080" Title="Why do we call sound pitches &quot;low&quot; and &quot;high&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-03-28T21:52:27.597" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am by no means an expert of either languages but it seemed to me to the root problem is the confusion of the words. The Slovaks call their language Slovenský which just happens to be similar to the word Slovenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, hence the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Slovaks call their language Slovenský, but it has no direct connection to Slovenian language, they don't even share borders together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-04-12T20:42:45.797" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T20:42:45.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-28T22:00:13.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would guess that the physiological basis of this widespread metaphor is the fact that the larynx moves down for uttering a low-pitched sound and up for a high-pitched one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T22:00:13.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-28T22:33:58.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a metaphor, expressing pitch by reference to SPATIAL ELEVATION, and while it is widespread, it is not universal. Other cultures use &quot;sharp/heavy&quot; or &quot;small/large&quot; for our &quot;high/low&quot;. But those two metaphorical frames, at least, still conceive of low pitches as &quot;heavy&quot; or &quot;large&quot;, attributes which would tend to line up with &quot;low&quot; rather than &quot;high&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music829C/Notes/high_low.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Huron's notes&lt;/a&gt; on the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T22:33:58.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-28T22:34:10.140" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;A web search on &quot;metaphor low pitch&quot; yields, among others, these references:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music829C/Notes/high_low.html&quot;&gt;The Metaphor of &quot;High&quot; and &quot;Low&quot; in Pitch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Greek music theorists of antiquity spoke not of &quot;high&quot; and &quot;low&quot; but of &quot;sharpness&quot; and &quot;heaviness&quot;; in Bali and Java pitches are not &quot;high&quot; and &quot;low&quot; but &quot;small&quot; and &quot;large&quot;; and among the Suyá of the Amazon basin, pitches are not &quot;high&quot; and &quot;low&quot; but &quot;young&quot; and &quot;old.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/obsonline/metaphors-for-musical-pitch-vary-across-languages-but-the-basic-principles-are-the-same.html&quot;&gt;Metaphors for musical pitch ...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... The researchers conclude that the low = thick and high = thin associations might be innate in humans, or could be learned from physical experiences very early in life: Another study revealed that even before children can talk they respond to associations between pitch and height and between pitch and thickness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-28T22:34:10.140" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-29T05:34:00.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the frequency is expressed in Hertz the number is actually lower for lower pitch sounds. Higher pitched tones have a higher number. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example middle C is 261Hz and bass C is 130Hz. Bass C is lower than middle C because the number of oscillations per second (Hertz) is lower than middle C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not speak to the history of the use of &quot;low&quot; and &quot;high&quot;, but it's certainly consistent with the physical understanding of frequency. Though I imagine this connection was known very early. It doesn't take much to hear that an object moving back-and-forth faster has a &quot;higher&quot; pitch than one moving slower. Just pick up a thick piece of paper and try yourself. The same applies to percussion in a way, the more beats per second you have the &quot;higher&quot; the perceived pitch is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now low/high is not just a metaphor, but a physical description of the frequency of the sound, in Hertz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, in western musical notation the lower pitches notes are lower on the staff than higher pitched ones. So at least the notation is consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9448" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T05:34:00.533" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11893" CreationDate="2015-03-29T09:02:03.387" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some examples like this from an undated manuscript about an unnamed language and I'm trying to extrapolate some observations about the nominal systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;zumbru&lt;/em&gt; – hat – 'hat'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;zumbru-g&lt;/em&gt; – hat-1poss – 'my hat'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;zumbru-:-g&lt;/em&gt; – hat-FORMER-1poss – 'my former hat' (but not anymore my hat!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to gloss the &lt;em&gt;-:-&lt;/em&gt; suffix here. It means ‘former’ but only seems to be used in possessive constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any other languages that have such a suffix and if so, how is it glossed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2253" LastEditDate="2015-03-31T05:15:00.603" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T05:15:00.603" Title="Do any languages have a nominal suffix meaning 'former' or 'ex-'?" Tags="&lt;possession&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-29T10:12:16.700" Score="3" ViewCount="969" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his March 2014 MIT lectures, Chomsky continues to claim that 'internal Merge', which yields the traditionally problematic 'displacement' property, is, in fact, the simplest and most economical structure-building operation possible, since it minimises 'search'. Of course, the latter observation is true to the extent that the 'target' of 'internal Merge' is locally available in a limited domain of the computational system's 'working space' (a previously built syntactic object {X, Y} that functions as the current active 'locus' of the computational operations), whereas in the case of 'external Merge' the 'target' must be searched for, at best in the whole 'working area', or even worse, in the whole of the speaker's lexicon, if initial one-step lexical insertion via 'numerations'/'lexical arrays' is considered stipulative and dispensed with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this 'elegant' argument of Chomsky's has always made me uneasy, because I cannot help asking myself two very naïve questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Why should it be 'economical' to make a 'copy' of Y if the 'original' Y is already there (in the object {X, Y}) and whatever the computational system may have had to do to Y (possibly nil, if 'no tampering' holds, a highly dubious hypothesis) has already been done to it when the {X, Y} object was formed at the previous 'external Merge' stage? Or, in other words, why doesn't 'internal Merge' violate Economy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 2), since a) 'internal Merge' occurs only when some other head Z is attached to {X, Y} by 'external Merge' yielding a new syntactic object {Z, {X, Y}}, b) is triggered by some feature of Z that requires 'licensing' (checking, valuation,...), and c) entails 'looking into' {X, Y}, a previously built syntactic object, and replicating Y, to what extent is it coherent to claim that 'internal Merge' respects 'strict cyclicity'? Or, in other words: Why shouldn't the &lt;strong&gt;minimal&lt;/strong&gt; computational 'cycle' (i.e., a single application of 'external Merge' to two objects X and Y) count as a 'cycle' when it is the 'basic principle' of the Language Faculty that is at stake? [I know that only certain computation 'cycles', i.e., 'phases', are supposed to 'count' for this purpose, but, of course, that is a stipulation, and, as Chomsky insists, any stipulation is a step backwards on our way to genuine science]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Is this reasoning of mine in any way unfair to, or, simply, the result of misinterpretation/misrepresentation of, Chomsky's position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2015-03-29T18:51:22.780" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T18:51:22.780" Title="Why is 'internal Merge' possible at all in a theory that rests on Economy and Strict Cyclicity?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-29T12:39:31.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When singing or speaking, high-pitched sounds tend to resonate more in the head and low-pitched sounds tend to resonate more in the lungs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many wind instruments such as e.g. flutes are played by blowing air into them from above and controlling pitch by opening a variable number of holes. For the lowest-pitched note, all holes are closed. For higher pitches one opens a number of holes, starting with the lowest one. For the highest pitch all holes are open, including the highest one. (Any musician can see that this is a severe simplification of what's going on, but that's irrelevant for the connection to the metaphor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-03-30T11:49:29.117" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T11:49:29.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11882" CreationDate="2015-03-29T12:48:04.117" Score="3" ViewCount="2264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find myself noticing people saying things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] CLI interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since CLI already stands for &lt;em&gt;command-line interface&lt;/em&gt;, repeating the last letter of the acronym in its expanded form is redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9456" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T15:40:37.757" Title="Is there a word for repeating the last letter of an acronym?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11881" CreationDate="2015-03-29T15:40:37.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess I found the answer: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RAS Syndrome&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;RAS syndrome (short for &quot;redundant acronym syndrome syndrome&quot;) refers&#xA;  to the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym or&#xA;  initialism in conjunction with the abbreviated form, thus in effect&#xA;  repeating one or more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9456" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T15:40:37.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2015-03-29T16:05:10.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish language uses &quot;Thick&quot; for low frequency pitches and &quot;Thin&quot; for high frequency pitches. Turkish reserves &quot;low&quot; and &quot;high&quot; for amplitude of the sound instead. Like: The sound of the thunder was too thick yet too high (in proper English, that sentence actually says the sound was low in frequency but its amplitude was too high).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9457" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T16:05:10.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-29T16:41:54.420" Score="1" ViewCount="1584" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many of the same phonemes in the German language are found in the English language? Same consonants? Vowels? Resources for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9458" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-03-29T23:16:02.653" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T03:05:01.283" Title="Phonemes: German vs. English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11884" CreationDate="2015-03-29T22:38:55.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only context where &quot;same phoneme&quot; makes sense is if identity is based on a fixed and universal feature system like the SPE system, and underlying forms are fully specified (because underspecification leads to a immense degree of indeterminacy what the feature values are in a single language). You also have to make some analytic assumptions about what is phonemic in either language (such as whether there is a flap phoneme in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Phoneme&quot; or &quot;phonemic&quot; has at least two meanings, so you would have to specify what meaning of &quot;phoneme&quot; you have in mind. One meaning is &quot;present in underlying representations&quot;. The other is &quot;is not fully predictable as a variant of some phoneme, looking only at surface phonetic segments&quot; (so, is not strictly allophonic, as would be the case with the rounded and non-rounded variants of /ɹ/). The intermediate territory between these two concepts includes the flap (which can come from /t/ or /d/) or aspiration (caused by stress differences which are then neutralized, as in &lt;em&gt;capitalistic&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;militaristic&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other analytic choices that need to be made, for example, in &quot;gate&quot;, is there a vowel [e] that is distinct from the vowel of &quot;get&quot;? One answer is &quot;yes, it's [get] vs. [gɛt], and another answer is &quot;no, it's [gɛɪt] vs. [gɛt]. Since [ɛɪ] is, in the SPE system, a sequence of phonemes and not one phoneme, the analytic question is whether to add a new segment /e/ (as opposed to a new sequencing of existing phonemes). For German, one can analogously treat [ø:] and [œ] as long and short variants of the otherwise same vowel [ø(:)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you also have to decide what dialect of the language you're interested in, since some dialects of English lack [θ ð] and others lack [ɔ]. My rule of thumb is that if someone doesn't specify dialect, I get to use mine. In the case of German, I'm not a native speaker, but I will use the values of the dialect that I tried to learn in high school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and you also have to decide how to deal with marginal phonemes like English [x] as in &quot;Bach&quot; or German [θ]. I think one should be really conservative in admitting such phonemes, because if you're not, English would end up having phonemic /q/ and /ʕ/ as exemplified by words like [ʕira:q] &quot;Iraq&quot;. And what about the click in the language name Xhosa? You'd need to set some kind of social criterion for filtering out recherché pronunciations by people in the know, if you feel that [ʕira:q] is too unacceptable but [bax] is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it seems like a straightforward question, but it totally isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-29T22:38:55.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-03-30T04:56:15.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slovene shows sporadic examples of features that are typically considered &quot;West Slavic&quot;, and are therefore closer to Slovak than to standard Croatian/Serbian/etc. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Slovene &lt;em&gt;noč&lt;/em&gt; &quot;night&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;no&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;oj&lt;/em&gt; &quot;tonight&quot; (compare Slovak &lt;em&gt;noc&lt;/em&gt; &quot;night&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Slovene &lt;em&gt;dan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;ted&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; &quot;week&quot; (originally &quot;this day&quot;), compare Slovak &lt;em&gt;deň&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kinds of features are more common in dialectal Slovene than in the standard language, but I don't know how the particular dialects compare with each other in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T04:56:15.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-30T10:34:39.933" Score="4" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I asked this on math.stackexchange, someone recommended to go here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for information on the mathematical foundations of formal semantics in linguistic. After some time, I found this book (Mathematical methods in linguistics / by Barbara H. Partee, Alice ter Meulen and Robert E. Wall) which is no accessible for me. My problem is that I do not know exactly what I am looking for, as I am missing the right keywords when searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set theory/ first order logic as a basis for formal semantics or formal linguistic in general&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type theory as a basis for it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Dis-)Advantages of one or the other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for any advice where to look, a short outline or references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9467" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T00:05:33.140" Title="Mathematical foundations of formal semantics in linguistic" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3190" CreationDate="2015-03-30T13:42:22.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compared with English, Chinese does not have the rich performances of tense and aspect. 了 is used for the multiple functions including tense, aspect and mood, for examples:&#xA;我刚才吃了。past tense.&#xA;我们吃了后再走吧。aspect.&#xA;我现在就去吃了，好吧。mood.&#xA;我说了他了。aspect+tense.&#xA;At the same time, Chinese has reduplication which is often treated as aspect. However, the identical use of reduplication cannot be found in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8029" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T13:42:22.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11895" CreationDate="2015-03-30T16:05:33.277" Score="3" ViewCount="12097" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to really understand the difference between linguistic functionalism and formalism, but I can't find any good concrete examples of either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, functionalism is a sort of lower-level analysis of language, while formalism takes a high-level, idealistic approach. But if I were asked the question: &quot;Is theory X an example of formalism or functionalism?&quot;, I wouldn't really know how to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a simple example of a functional theory vs. a formal one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9469" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T18:05:08.947" Title="Functionalism vs Formalism?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11878" CreationDate="2015-03-30T16:20:26.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Guarani, the derivational suffix -kue means former, ex-. It's also used in Jopara, the mix of Guarani and Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T16:20:26.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11890" CreationDate="2015-03-30T16:24:57.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book you mention (Partee et al.) is the best one. If it's not an option for you, I'd recommend this one: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._T._F._Gamut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gamut&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T16:24:57.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11892" CreationDate="2015-03-30T16:33:35.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to nail down a scientific difference between functionalist and formalist approaches, because the goals and domains of investigation are usually disjoint. If you want some opposite ends of the spectrum, you could compare David Stampe's dissertation on Natural Phonology with &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001951&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;. The main question is whether there is an autonomous computational &quot;thing&quot; that we call a grammar. A formalist will say yes, and studies the nature of that computational system. While generativists additionally claim that this computational object is an aspect of the mind, there are non-generativist formalists (certain HPSG practicioners, for example) who make no such claim about the mind, i.e. they just look at the system as a Platonic abstraction. A functionalist, on the other hand, cannot be a Platonist (of course, I may now learn that somehow that has actually happened).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A functionalist focuses on why language behavior is the way it is, attempting to reduce language facts to being a result of more general cognitive properties. Some functionalists don't care if there is a small autonomous faculty for grammatical computation, they are just uninterested -- others (e.g. Robert Port, see his &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; paper &quot;Against Formal Phonology&quot;) are opposed to the concept. Formalists are less interested in functional (non-grammatical) aspects -- they don't deny that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; non-grammatical aspects to language, they are just focused on understanding the grammar part of language. So good formalists have to know how to weed out the functional chaff, and unfortunately, sometimes that doesn't happen and you end up with &quot;formal&quot; theories that basically reify functional expectations (for instance, SPE introduced a formal mechanism of &quot;markedness&quot; into phonology, which reifies various phonetically-based functional tendencies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Newmeyer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fritz Newmeyer&lt;/a&gt; is well-known for his investigations into formalism vs. functionalism, and one would be well-served by reading most of what he has written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T16:33:35.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3309" CreationDate="2015-03-30T17:17:18.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thai language tone is ALWAYS preserved when singing, some of the most exceptionally composed pieces will even use this to their advantage by applying a a lyric that will in turn producing a pleasing melody which add dimensions to the existing song. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I heard, there are about 3 generations of a class of music currently employ in Thai language. The first generation (outside of the traditional classical Thai music which is an entirely different animal) is recently adapt from western music, tone is sometime more or less adapt to the existing melody (but never to discard altogether as it will also make the lyric incomprehensible), second generation make use of lyric which bring about their own melody to the song, and the third generation (current generation) is less concern with lyric-melody harmonic relationship in the second gen and is generally sung independently from lyrical tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First generation music&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvkI7SC4e9I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvkI7SC4e9I&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second Generation&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhYatEZP94&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhYatEZP94&lt;/a&gt; (adopt from Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9472" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T17:17:18.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11890" CreationDate="2015-03-30T20:44:12.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two very elementary books that seem relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Introduction to Symbolic Logic&lt;/strong&gt;, by Hans Reichenbach.  This is a classic with much about the application of predicate logic to the analysis of English, including the analysis of tense and aspect that has become more or less a standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Logics and Languages&lt;/strong&gt;, by M. J. Cresswell.  This requires no more than a smattering of naive set theory, and I think it is a lot of fun.  Cresswell builds up a possible-worlds type of semantics for English.  (A disadvantage is that it never became much known or referred to, for some reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-03-30T20:44:12.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11904" CreationDate="2015-03-31T00:49:10.030" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding (mistaken, see below) is that in basic lambek/categorial grammar, the basic objects are strings. Does anyone know of variants where one can have multiple trees for the same string?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2401" LastEditorUserId="2401" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T20:32:27.197" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T16:58:45.347" Title="Analogs of Lambek grammar that can encode structural ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3190" CreationDate="2015-03-31T07:01:34.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is actually a chapter on perfective-imperfective aspect in the free online resource, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt;, where this hypothesis is discussed and specifically rejected by the authors. Here is the relevant quotation from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if perhaps not so often formulated as an explicit hypothesis,&#xA;  there seems to be a widespread view of tense and aspect as&#xA;  alternatives to each other – that languages tend to be either “tense&#xA;  languages” or “aspect languages”. If this were the case, we would&#xA;  expect a negative correlation between imperfectives and perfectives on&#xA;  the one hand, and pasts and futures on the other. The data presented&#xA;  here provide no support for such a conclusion. In fact, there are&#xA;  considerably more languages in the sample that have both the aspectual&#xA;  and temporal categories, or neither of the alternatives, than have one&#xA;  only. It is plausible that there is rather a positive correlation&#xA;  between all the categories under discussion and the general&#xA;  morphological complexity of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Östen Dahl, Viveka Velupillai. 2013. Perfective/Imperfective Aspect. &#xA;In: Dryer, Matthew S. &amp;amp; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) &#xA;The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. &#xA;Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. &#xA;(Available online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/65&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/65&lt;/a&gt;, Accessed on 2015-03-31.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T07:01:34.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11935" CreationDate="2015-03-31T09:47:22.223" Score="0" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;ӯ - Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ҷ - Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ӣ - Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ҳ - Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;х - Tajik&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ғ - Kazakh&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the difference between қ and к in Kazakh?&#xA;I would prefer an answer that doesn't refer to the IPA. For example, I know that ғ refers to the voiced uvular fricative ʁ, but this tells me nothing about the sound it makes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9476" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T13:13:31.420" Title="How does one pronounce the following cyrillic letters in their respective languages?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11837" CreationDate="2015-03-31T11:59:50.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not mention what you specify as &lt;code&gt;mother tongue&lt;/code&gt; but whatever it is, will be your &lt;code&gt;L1&lt;/code&gt; Language, your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading and writing is a model of language that was created after humans were speaking. &lt;code&gt;Speaking&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;Reading and Writing&lt;/code&gt; are independent of each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever language you learned first to speak, will be your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, &lt;code&gt;native language&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mother tongue&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;L1&lt;/code&gt; Language are equivalent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9416" LastEditorUserId="9416" LastEditDate="2015-03-31T12:05:55.800" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T12:05:55.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-03-31T12:23:45.990" Score="0" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some parameters of speech analysis occur in the temporal domain (those are the ones I typically understand: f0, formants, etc.) - but others occur in the so-called cepstral domain. If I google &quot;cepstral domain&quot; or &quot;cepstrum&quot;, I see mostly mathematical stuff. Not what I'd call intelligible. Perhaps one of you has some a handy heuristic to understand how the cepstral domain differs from the temporal one from a speech perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T11:35:52.460" Title="What is the difference between cepstral and temporal domains?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11898" CreationDate="2015-03-31T14:09:46.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what you mean by &quot;basic&quot; Lambek/categorial grammar, or by &quot;basic objects&quot;. But you can certainly have multiple trees for the same string, at least in a bidirectional categorial grammar, i.e. a categorial grammar with two concatenation operations (\ and /).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A bidirectional CG:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The basic categories are n (for noun) and s (for sentence).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If A and B are categories, then (A\B) and (A/B) are categories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category A, and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category A\B, then &lt;em&gt;ab&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category A/B, and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category B, then &lt;em&gt;ab&lt;/em&gt; is an expression of category A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexicon:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;women&lt;/em&gt; both have category n.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; has category n/n.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; has category (n\n)/n.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression (string) &lt;em&gt;old men and women&lt;/em&gt; now has two different parses: (i) [old men] and women, and (ii) old [men and women].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[old men] and women:&#xA;&#xA;    old       men           and          women&#xA;    n/n        n          (n\n)/n          n&#xA;    -------------&#xA;          |&#xA;       old men              and          women&#xA;          n               (n\n)/n          n&#xA;                          --------------------&#xA;                                    |&#xA;       old men                  and women&#xA;          n                        n\n&#xA;       ----------------------------------&#xA;                       |&#xA;               old men and women&#xA;                       n&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;old [men and women]:&#xA;&#xA;    old       men           and          women&#xA;    n/n        n          (n\n)/n          n&#xA;                          --------------------&#xA;                                    |&#xA;    old       men               and women&#xA;    n/n        n                   n\n&#xA;              ---------------------------&#xA;                          |&#xA;    old             men and women&#xA;    n/n                   n&#xA;    -----------------------------&#xA;                  |&#xA;          old men and women&#xA;                  n&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1567" LastEditorUserId="1567" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T16:58:45.347" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T16:58:45.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11900" CreationDate="2015-03-31T15:43:06.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could listen to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/languages-pronunciations/tg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tajik examples on Forvo&lt;/a&gt;, so that you can &quot;experience&quot; &amp;lt;Ӯ&gt;. Be warned that many of the recordings are crappy, and the volume-swings from token to token can break your eardrums. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/user/ibrahimjon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This guy&lt;/a&gt; made some reasonable recordings. You can get Kazakh &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/languages/kk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T15:43:06.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11837" CreationDate="2015-03-31T17:38:21.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;First language&quot; isn't exactly a well-defined technical term of linguistics, so it can be used literally, as the first language that you learned as a child. I know someone who started life speaking Polish, but the family moved to the US and his Polish kind of lapsed, so he's not really fluent. &quot;Mother tongue&quot; is likewise a problematic term since it can be used to mean &quot;the language that my mother speaks&quot;, relevant in multi-ethnic communities where your ethnic identity comes from your father, but you also learn the language of your mother's side of the family. (This can lead to people thinking that they &quot;can't speak their own language&quot; if they don't become fluent in their father's language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally disregard ability to write as indicative of anything, since many languages in the world are not written, either at all or else very much (that is, there aren't any or many publications in the language and at most it's just written informally in letters to home). So if your first language were Gitonga you might speak that language better than English, but you might struggle with writing Gitonga and be better at writing in English, because you didn't have much experience with writing essays in Gitonga. Your description of the situation suggests to me that your &quot;first language&quot; is not English, but maybe you really are equally conversationally fluent in English and X. I take &quot;most comfortable&quot; to be a self-assessment of oral fluency (favoring X); now maybe you can decide what your &quot;native&quot; language is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T17:38:21.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11892" CreationDate="2015-03-31T18:05:08.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a better way to approach the difference between functionalist and formalist approaches would be to explore the history and personalities involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, there's no opposition between functionalism and formalism. Units of language are used for certain functions and these functions can be described using formal methods. The question really is what are those functions and what are the formalisms used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, functionalism was closely associated with the Prague structuralist school of linguistics (known as the Prague Circle of Linguistics - full disclosure, I'm a member). The functionalist theme developed in the 1930s (later put into in opposition to the functionalism of the Copenhagen school approach of Hjelmslev who understood function more in the mathematical sense). The Prague school was revived in the 1960s and tried to blend functionalist methods into the then increasingly popular formalist approach (inspired for instance by formal semantics of people like Montague). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formalism, on the other hand, is associated with Chomsky (although there were others and even earlier schools) who developed mathematical theories of the combinatorics of grammar combined with the claim that they are facts of language without any reference to their function. But other formal approached to language were also being developed about the same time. I already mentioned Montague, but there was also Bar-Hillel with his categorial grammar. Both of these were much more compatible with functionalist approaches in that they are concerned with formalizing language units that are put to real uses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, functionalism is most closely associated with the British Firthian school of linguistics - it's most famous proponent being MAK Haliday (it is now particularly popular in Australia and New Zealand). This school had the most impact on wide areas of language description from text and discourse analysis to pedagogic grammar (most foreign language textbooks and grammars will be beholden to some version of functionalism). Most of the work on language corpora has come out of the functionalist tradition (in the broadest sense). I think Haliday's three meta functions of language: 1. Ideational, 2. Interpersonal and 3. Textual are still the best delineation of what dimensions a linguistic theory needs to account for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the difference between formalist and functionalist linguistics is not the irreconcilable rift between linguistic theories it is thought of as. I'd suggest any one linguistic theory needs to be judged on a range of issues and whether it is labelled or labels itself as functionalist or formalist, is probably not that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T18:05:08.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6952" CreationDate="2015-03-31T21:11:28.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the premise of the question that the first task of a scientist is to devise a framework that makes potentially false predictions, and thus that looking for false predictions is good scientific practice. It is important to note though, that this game is better played towards one's own favored scientific theory, if only because this game is embarrassingly easy to play already for the most advanced of the exact sciences (just ask a physicist what dark matter and dark energy, which are supposed to constitute some 96% of the Universe, are supposed to be) and so becomes almost inane for a field in its infancy, like linguistics (anyone with a theoretical framework in linguistics should be able to produce on demand ten phenomena the framework cannot explain at all at present, otherwise the framework is simply not serious). Criticisms of other theoretical frameworks can be valuable, but should be done by proposing competing analyses, not by pointing out defects in actually existing ones (so to continue the analogy, by explaining the motions of galaxies and galactic clusters if one does not believe in dark matter). With that in mind...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Core assumptions of minimalist syntax&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usual core assumptions and goals in minimalist syntax are as follows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) There exists an early stage of syntactic computations (narrow syntax) the objects of which are constructed by repeated and recursive applications of a binary operation (Merge) in a bottom-up fashion. &#xA;2) The only operation beyond Merge allowed on these narrow syntactic objects is the operation Agree (that is features co-valuation) and both Merge and Agree are subject to strict locality conditions.&#xA;3) There exists specified and definite domains of computation (phases) the completion of which triggers transfer of the narrow-syntactic object somewhere else (the interfaces) with no return possible.&#xA;4) Everything else is interface conditions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Potentially false predictions following from these assumptions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are tons of them, because the assumptions above are &lt;em&gt;extremely counter-intuitive&lt;/em&gt;, in fact worryingly so. Here are a few examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sensitivity to hierarchical rather than to linear order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows from 1) that narrow syntactic objects are necessarily unordered binary trees. Hence, minimalist syntax predicts that the relevant structures for syntax are those prevailing in binary trees (for instance C-command) and not the most obvious linear ordering of the words in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the &lt;em&gt;caveat&lt;/em&gt; that no language wears its analysis on its sleeve, if one could find a language for which, say, negation was licensed by a phenomenon taking place at the third word of the sentence, or in which adverbs modify the closest verb in the linear order rather than the closest one in the hierarchical order (the infamous &lt;em&gt;Instinctively, eagles that fly can swim&lt;/em&gt; example of Chomsky), or in which cataphoric pronouns were distinct from anaphoric pronouns, or in which questions words were &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt; with no intervention effects, or in which words were systematically interpreted where they are pronounced, or for which binding of reflexives depended on linear precedence, or if there existed a V3 language in the same sense that there are V2 languages, then minimalist syntax would be dealt a serious blow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Successive cyclic movement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because narrow syntactic objects are constructed from the bottom-up (extremely weird), words appearing at the left-periphery of the sentence sometimes (often) have to be merged far deep in the hierarchical structure. Because computations is done by chunks, they then have to move at least out of each chunk to reach their final destination (weird). And finally, because the only way for them to move is to being remerged (extremely weird), the potentially false (in fact &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; seemingly absurd) conclusion that sentences are riddled with copies of words all the way from their departure point to their final stop ensues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the existence of a language immune to island effects, or parasitic gap effects, or obligatory versus optional control effect, or without reconstruction effect would deal a serious blow to minimalist syntax. Beside, minimalist syntax would not have lasted 5 minutes (in fact would not have been born) if said copies were not occasionally found in some languages and constructions precisely where they were hypothesized to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Independence from the interfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obvious, but well-worth being pointed out nevertheless. Minimalist assumptions affirm the independence of syntax from the interfaces. If there existed a language whose syntactic rules depended on phonology or for which, for instance, island effects would show up only for meaningless or unclear questions, then minimalist syntax would disappear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A less trivial potentially false (in fact, again, &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; absurd) conclusion occurs when this principle is taken conjointly with morphology: as soon as one attributes some overt morphology phenomenon to hierarchical position in minimalist syntax, then one has to assume that all languages exhibit (possibly abstractly) the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; morphology effect in the same hierarchical position.This would be proved false, and put minimalist syntax in serious trouble, if for instance a language was found in which licensing of DP by nouns and by verbs were identical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="1707" LastEditDate="2015-04-26T01:53:24.287" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T01:53:24.287" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2015-03-31T22:20:13.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was interested too so I &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/sp/l9.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;looked up this lecture&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition it provides in the second slide is illuminating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cepstrum is defined as the inverse DFT of the log magnitude of the&#xA;  DFT of a signal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so it seems that the steps to get the cepstrum are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perform a Discreet Fourier Transform (DFT) on your time domain signal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take the logarithm of the magnitude of the spectrum that you get. (Because humans, in most cases, don't hear differences in the phase of an audio signal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perform the inverse DFT of the signal getting you back to a time domain signal but one that has been modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you probably know that you take the logarithm because humans hear on a logarithmic scale (that's why we use decibels). And performing the inverse DFT on the logarithm will go back from the frequency domain to the time domain. So, on the face of it, we are essentially trying to get a signal that looks more like our ears would actually hear it as opposed to how it actually looks according to the sensors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence we are turning the input signal into a cepstrum signal that is easier for us to perform ear-like processing on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend reading that paper further to understand it better. And if somebody understands this better than I do then please chime in. You are basically reading my 5 min analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9482" LastActivityDate="2015-03-31T22:20:13.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11915" CreationDate="2015-04-01T14:15:16.927" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;is there a name for the situation where a group of people share a common written language but speak different languages like with chinese.&#xA;e.g. they can read the same newspapers but if they read out the text they would be pronounced differently.kind of the opposite to a synchronic digraphia.&#xA;are there any others apart from chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9491" LastEditorUserId="9491" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T14:40:06.587" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T23:26:18.513" Title="shared written lanaguage, different spoken languages" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11898" CreationDate="2015-04-01T20:49:38.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in the Combinatory Categorial Grammar, type-raising X-&gt;T/(T\X) yields trivially ambiguous derivations such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  X        Y\X&#xA;---------------&amp;lt;&#xA;       Y&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  X        Y\X&#xA;-------&amp;gt;T&#xA;Y/(Y\X)&#xA;--------------&amp;gt;&#xA;     Y&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this seems counterproductive, type-raising is invoked to allow a category to become a functor over a functor (see 'Argument Cluster Coordination' in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/L107/clark-lecture3.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/L107/clark-lecture3.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T20:49:38.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11912" CreationDate="2015-04-01T23:17:56.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual term for this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diglossia&lt;/a&gt;, a word that seems to have first been used for this purpose in Greek to refer to the distinction between the spoken Demotic language and the literary Khatharevousa. The linked Wikipedia article provides several examples, but the one I'm most familiar with is Arabic -- there are many regional spoken varieties that are different enough in phonology and grammar as to form several mutually unintelligible groups, but the written form, so-called &quot;Modern Standard Arabic&quot; (MSA), is less divergent as it tends to be standardized in a form close to Classical and Qur'anic Arabic, and is considered one language. People do also use MSA in some spoken contexts, like reading aloud, speeches or news reports, and many higher-register words used in all contexts in the spoken languages are spoken with an approximation of the MSA phonemes rather than having the form one would expect from the regular sound changes that occurred in everyday words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-01T23:26:18.513" LastActivityDate="2015-04-01T23:26:18.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-02T00:54:23.977" Score="5" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google failed me on this. Any help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9493" LastEditorUserId="9493" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T01:06:18.760" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:48:12.443" Title="Why do many languages tend to use plural forms to impart formality or deference?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11916" CreationDate="2015-04-02T05:46:14.557" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As always, 'why' questions are a really bad idea in linguistics. You can reasonably ask these three types of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical developments within a language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Areal / contact impact between languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hypothesized semantic motivations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling these three will actually give you plenty of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search will reveal the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Historical and areal developments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The plural politeness (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction&quot;&gt;T-V distinction&lt;/a&gt; as it is sometimes called) first developed in European languages in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has spread through language contact to other European languages. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Malton.htm&quot;&gt;English was influenced by French post Norman conquest&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Developments within individual languages have transformed the T-V expression of politeness/formality/social distance in various ways. For instance, making the plural 'you' in English the only form of address, using 3rd person plural in German (and from German extending it to Czech in the 19th century only for Czech to go back to T-V). Or the development of pan/pani (Mr/Mrs) + 3rd person sg in Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: Semantic motivations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several possible hypotheses as to the semantic motivation of the T-V distinction. These may differ across times and places, i.e. the original semantic motivation may not be the one that plays out in later times and places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The origin of using a plural form of address is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/tvdistinction/home/history/latin&quot;&gt;hypothesized to be in the address of the Roman Emperor&lt;/a&gt; in the time when the Roman Empire has two emperors (East and West). This is also where the Royal We may come from.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speakers might also make sense of the form as indicating greater value in the plural (more means better) through a relationship of iconicity. (This could be a ex post explanation of some speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The plural form could also be seen as creating a form of distance or indirectness similar to the use of past forms and other distancing circumlocutions in polite requests (I wonder if you could be so kind as to help me). In this sense, using the third person (whether plural as in German or singular as in Polish) would make the same semantic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note that plural forms can also be used to indicate intimacy between people who do not want to use informal forms as in the use of the first person plural. &quot;Are we ready to have our meal.&quot; This can often be seen as a form of condescension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, semantic motivations are just that - motivations. They can develop in unpredictable ways across times, places and languages and therefore cannot be used for the sort of predictions a 'why' question may imply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T05:46:14.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11916" CreationDate="2015-04-02T13:15:43.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article, but in Middle Persian texts from the first half of the first millennium AD the king is addressed as ašmā bayān, literally “you (plural) gods”. This rather puts paid to the claim that the honorific use of the 2nd person plural pronoun originated in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T13:50:57.703" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T13:50:57.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-02T14:41:59.403" Score="3" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;In english, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)#Clauses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'complete sentence'&lt;/a&gt; seems to refer to having at least a single, complete clause — i.e. a subject (noun) and verb — e.g. &quot;I run&quot;.  This seems to be engrained in the concept of a complete idea or thought, basically a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)#Predicates_in_traditional_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;classical predicate — providing information about a subject&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of a &quot;complete&quot; sentence (or complete idea) is definitely common in other languages (at least latin and germanic).  &lt;strong&gt;Is it common to all languages and cultures?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first it may seem like an arbitrary linguistic construct that need not be obeyed in unrelated languages, but at the same time --- as I tried to suggest above, it seems to be deeply rooted in our way of thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I hoped it was obvious from the context I gave above, but I'm not interested in the pedantic question of what minimal requirements satisfy the &lt;em&gt;purely&lt;/em&gt;-structural concept of a 'sentence'.  E.g. perhaps, &quot;I.&quot;, can be a complete sentence in response to a question, or &quot;Go.&quot;, as an imperitive.  This related, but different, topic is the basis for all of the discourse I've found online, and what I've seen discussed at length by scholars (e.g. Chomsky).  Instead, I'm interested in the the concept of a 'complete sentence' in the context of 'a complete thought' &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, in the context of theory of mind/thought, compared in different cultes and languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9499" OwnerDisplayName="zhermes" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-04-03T11:41:40.007" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T16:28:01.610" Title="Is the concept of a verb-subject complete sentence a cultural/linguistic invariant?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2015-04-02T16:28:19.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose all human languages must have some way of conveying complete ideas, if that means saying something which, if translated into English, would have a subject and a predicate.  But really, that seems to be more a fact about English than about other languages, since it's about how ideas are expressed in English.  If you look specifically at the overt forms of sentences, there doesn't seem to be any real evidence that the subject-predicate form is universal among human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, there are plenty of sentences expressing a complete thought in English and in other languages that do not have the subject-predicate form.  And for another, there are many languages which have VSO word order -- that is, a basic sentence form in which the subject comes between the verb and the object, so that there can't be a single predicate phrase like the verb phrase of English, which contains both the verb and the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia has a short entry on VSO languages: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb%E2%80%93subject%E2%80%93object&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verb subject object&lt;/a&gt;.  From that article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples of languages with VSO word order include Semitic languages (including Arabic, Classical Hebrew, and Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)), and Celtic languages (including Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton), and many Mesoamerican languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T16:28:19.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11916" CreationDate="2015-04-02T16:40:26.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common pattern across language phyla. I disagree with Dominik Lukes' implication that &quot;why&quot; questions in linguistics are intrinsically bad. It's true that our models are not precise enough that we can predict with 95% certainty what structures will exist in a language, but that does not invalidate the quest for scientific understanding of the underlying mechanisms of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since honorific plurals are found across the globe, we can reject the hypothesis that they result (in general) from a localized quirk of Latin (possibly true for Europe), for instance. This pretty much leaves the explanation in the domain of pragmatics and figurative speech. The circumlocution hypothesis is the only one that comes to mind which, in my opinion, is at least plausible -- that is the idea that it is more polite to speak obscurely, so as to not impose a social burden on the addressee. By speaking obscurely, you leave open the possibility of the addressee not understanding (and it's your fault, not his), which avoids imposing a burden to act on the addressee. Additionally, using a form of address that refers to the actual addressee &lt;em&gt;plus others&lt;/em&gt; creates the interpretation that the actually addressee can simply do nothing, since the request is really made of &quot;others&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T21:20:15.187" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T21:20:15.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2015-04-02T17:57:14.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages allow a sentence to consist of a predicate only, without any explicit subject -- not just in contexts like a response to a question, but completely independently. E.g. Hebrew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kar.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;'It's cold.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is literally just 'Cold'; the dummy &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; of English has no equivalent in the Hebrew sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T17:57:14.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2015-04-02T18:04:44.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of languages have sentences without a verb. In Latin you can omit the verb “est” (is) or “sunt” (are) and simply juxtapose the subject and predicate. Some languages nearly always omit “is” in the present indicative: Russian is one and Arabic is another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2015-04-02T21:13:11.003" LastActivityDate="2015-04-02T21:13:11.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2015-04-03T05:40:27.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the concept of 'sentence' and 'complete idea' are a result of the pedagogical grammar tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that simple Subject-Predicate clauses are given as examples in the European linguistic tradition. If they chose, imperative sentences like 'Hand me the keys!', the question would not arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of 'complete thought' is really just heuristic for identifying the minimal semantic core of a sentence. E.g. &quot;A man walks.&quot; and &quot;It rains.&quot; vs. &quot;A wise man walks very quickly when it rains.&quot; But it is clear that the constituent ideas of the above sentence are not complete with respect to the speaker's intention, nor are they complete when compared to the subjectless command &quot;Sit!&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you could argue that &quot;Sit!&quot; expresses a more complete idea than something like &quot;a man walks&quot; which rarely occur on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you can see, the question does not even make sense in English, let alone in a comparative perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, setting the complete idea thing aside, it seems that the subject-predicate structure of a basic declarative clause is present in all languages although the grammar of this can be quite different from English (as in ergative languages). See Dixon's 'Basic Linguistic Theory' for more details. But it would be dangerous to try to make much more of it than the fact that by definition declarative clauses are there to say something (predicate) about something (subject). [&lt;em&gt;Edited to add&lt;/em&gt;] This does not mean that the simple declarative clause is in some way basic to language or the only way to express ideas in language. But in many contexts (logic, philosophy of language, school grammar) people are used to talking about language as if expressing simple predicates was what the rest of the system was growing from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-04-03T15:30:58.130" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T15:30:58.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3190" CreationDate="2015-04-03T08:28:45.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, all Slavic languages use aspect heavily — almost every verb is either perfective or imperfective; however there are tenses, and even a lot of tenses in some languages (seven or more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4747" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T08:28:45.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-04-03T09:38:30.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some similarities between Slovenian and Slovak, but even more similarities between some so-called &lt;em&gt;Kajkavian&lt;/em&gt; dialects in northern Croatia (which are overall similar to Slovenian) and &lt;em&gt;Central Slovak&lt;/em&gt; dialects (which are the basis of Standard Slovak).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's first &lt;em&gt;-me&lt;/em&gt; in 1st pers. pl, Kajkavian &lt;em&gt;imame&lt;/em&gt; &quot;we have&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are overall similarities between Slovak and South Slavic dialects (including Slovene, of course). One similarity is &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt; in 1st pers. sg. of most verbs, just compare forms of &quot;I bake&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Czech &lt;em&gt;peču&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian &lt;em&gt;пекy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovak &lt;em&gt;pečem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian &lt;em&gt;pečem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, there are overall similarities between Southern Slavic and Czech/Slovak. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish &lt;em&gt;król&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian &lt;em&gt;корoль&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovak &lt;em&gt;kráľ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian &lt;em&gt;kralj&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the difference between Slovak and South Slavic languages is just in spelling: Slovak ľ is spelled as lj in the South, and southern spellings don't show that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is long (it is), while the Slovak spelling shows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more similarities, in phonetic development, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4747" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T09:38:30.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2015-04-03T16:28:01.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For starters, you need to distinguish &quot;complete&quot; things from &quot;incomplete&quot; things. Supposing that my intention is to say &quot;Well, I hope that the next time you go to that store, you'll count your change&quot;, but after saying just &quot;well, I&quot;, I'm interrupted. That might be an &quot;incomplete sentence&quot;. It's not actually a sentence, it's part of a sentence, so you have to understand &quot;incomplete sentence&quot; as being a fragment of an &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; sentence. The intended sentence isn't necessarily a complete thought, since I was also thinking that this store cheats people in giving change, and maybe some day the law will get after them, maybe even closing the store or prosecuting the owner, but I didn't intend to say all of what I was thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;a thought&quot; is so hopelessly nebulous that it's really pointless to talk about &quot;thoughts&quot; and their relationship to linguistic form, and instead we focus on something that we understand a bit better, namely propositions. In that case, we might ask questions like &quot;do all sentences convey propositions?&quot;, or &quot;do all linguistic utterances convey propositions&quot;. Many utterances don't count as sentences, by standard syntactic accounts of what a &quot;sentence&quot; is. For example, if I ask &quot;Who took the sandwich&quot; and you respond &quot;Bill&quot;, that isn't a sentence. It can be contextually interpreted as &lt;em&gt;standing for&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Bill took the sandwich&quot;, or &quot;I think that Bill took the sandwich&quot;, or &quot;Bill is the one who took the sandwich&quot;, or any number of other actual sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is no language where speakers are incapable of generating well-formed and intended utterances which are less than a sentence: bare NPs are always possible utterances, and are often used. People don't usually walk into a room and say, with no prior context, &quot;The old grey mare&quot;, but if we automatically convert all utterances into &quot;intended sentences&quot; just in case they don't actually qualify as actual, full, well-formed sentences, then we are just begging the question of the relationship between sentences and propositions -- we are making sentences out of things that aren't sentences, because we can guess what the underlying proposition is. If we &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; interpolate &quot;missing parts&quot; (syntactic deletions and other omissions), then in ordinary speech, most utterances are probably not complete sentences. Yet most often, the intended proposition is easily reconstructable. Therefore, I conclude that complete sentences are not a significant desideratum in communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T16:28:01.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11900" CreationDate="2015-04-03T17:13:25.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First letter   ӯ or Ӯ(capital) - always sounds like u in ('burn')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second letter  ҷ or Ҷ - is same as English &quot;J&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third letter   ӣ or Ӣ - like y in &quot;crazy&quot;, but be careful this letter always comes at the end of the word and there is one more letter &quot;й&quot; which might be used in the middle of word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fourth letter  ҳ or Ҳ - same as English &quot;H&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fifth letter   x or X - this one sounds slightly different from English letters, this would sound more like combination of &quot;k&quot; and &quot;h&quot; =&quot;kh&quot;, actually even while Tajiks are using Latin alphabet for this X they probably type &quot;KH&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And there is also ғ or Ғ in Tajik, if you have heard how does the French pronounce &quot;R&quot; the Tajik Ғ sounds the same. It is like combination of &quot;G&quot; and &quot;H&quot;-&quot;Ghe&quot; but more likely pronounced with a small gargle&#xA;Good luck for learning Tajik&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9503" LastEditorUserId="9503" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T13:13:31.420" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T13:13:31.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-03T22:46:32.853" Score="3" ViewCount="908" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google says the word Sugar originates from سكر in Arabic. Yet the classic dictionary القاموس المحيط says the word comes from شكر in Persian. Any help with the etymology of the Persian word شكر?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9505" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T23:10:36.237" Title="What is the origin of the Persian word شكر meaning Sugar?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11936" CreationDate="2015-04-03T23:10:36.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for “sugar” in virtually all languages goes back to Sanskrit śárkarā. From Sanskrit it developed into North-West Prakrit śakara, which was borrowed into Middle Persian as šakar, and then from Persian into Arabic as sukkar. The words in European languages all derive directly or indirectly from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-03T23:10:36.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11939" CreationDate="2015-04-04T16:16:56.947" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading useful sentences from the Wikipedia article about Esperanto (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Useful_phrases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Useful_phrases&lt;/a&gt;). One in particular caught my eye: Do you speak Esperanto? It is translated as &quot;Ĉu vi parolas Esperante?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any information about this -e -suffix. Why is it Esperante and not Esperanton?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9509" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T16:42:21.623" Title="The -e suffix in a noun" Tags="&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-04-04T20:15:03.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11938" CreationDate="2015-04-04T16:42:21.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They decided to treat that construction as verb+adverb, not verb+object. Adverbs are derived with &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; and singular noun objects are marked with &lt;em&gt;-on&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T16:42:21.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-04T16:49:21.730" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creating flashcards for Spanish was a real pain, so I started trying to automate it.  What I have now is something can take a list of verbs in the infinitive form and generate flashcards with different conjugations (past-tense, present tense, etc).  It scrapes the conjugations from online dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its limited though in that the phrases aren’t long enough to really distinguish which conjugation is needed (to fix this I might try adding time expressions to differentiate past/present tense).  It also does not add an object to the phrase, so there are only intransitive usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to make the card generation smarter, but the code needs to know more about the verbs it is using.  I particular I’d like to know things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the verb reflexive, transitive and/or intransitive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the verb change meanings when used in the past tense?  (like cononcer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the noun a location?  Does it have a plural form?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a linguistics perspective, I suppose I'm trying to put together a generative grammar.  Given the number of people who've tried this, it might sound overly ambitious.  I think in my case it might be feasible because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I only care about generating phrases, not interpreting (I use google translate to produce the other side of the flashcard)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care about generating all possible expressions, just enough to exercise new verbs/nouns (practicing irregular conjugations and whatnot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9508" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T14:20:31.233" Title="online word references for Spanish" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11942" CreationDate="2015-04-04T16:59:56.797" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm writing a term paper for my introductory syntax class on Larson's and Jackendoff's theories of the structure of double object verbs. Jackendoff argues for a more linear, tertiary branching structure, and Larson argues for more complex a hierarchical, binary branching structure that involves movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the two papers I've read there's nothing about extending the theories to verbs with more objects (perhaps because they are rare). So I was wondering if there's a reason that verbs with more than two complements/arguments are so rare and also if there's any way that this phenomena could be explained by structural constraints following from the theories proposed by Jackendoff and Larson. Also, if anyone has suggestions for other articles/papers that discuss syntactic theories of verbs that take more than two arguments that would be great too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Does Greg Lee's answer address the following sentences?: &#xA;&quot;John gave the book to Mary&quot;&#xA;&quot;I bet you five dollars that I will win the race&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9507" LastEditorUserId="9507" LastEditDate="2015-04-04T22:07:24.593" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T22:07:24.593" Title="What prevents verbs from taking more than a two or three complements/arguments?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11941" CreationDate="2015-04-04T19:26:28.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The constructions where verbs appear to take 2 complements are really cases of a verb taking one sentential complement, but where this complement has lost its verb, so that its identity as a sentence is no longer obvious.  &quot;John kept [his beer (stayed) in the fridge until it froze].&quot;  Because we don't notice the concealed sentence after the main verb, we are fooled into thinking there are two complements.  So the question asked can be interpreted this way: is there a way to fool us into thinking that a verb takes more than two complements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because we'd have to start with a sentential complement that had three or more parts.  But sentences have only two parts -- subject and predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-04T19:26:28.527" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11948" CreationDate="2015-04-05T06:55:12.553" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages that feature multiple cases for nouns, the determiners and attributive adjectives agree with their associated nouns for case, among other things.   You can find examples of adjective agreement for case and gender in Russian at this link:   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/adjectiv.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/adjectiv.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages whose nouns have multiple cases but whose determiners and adjectives do not agree with the nouns in case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-04-05T16:05:37.743" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T20:19:46.347" Title="Are there languages whose nouns have multiple cases but whose determiners and adjectives do not agree with the nouns in case?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11944" CreationDate="2015-04-05T08:45:52.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, first of all there is English, which has three cases for pronouns (he, his, him) and two for nouns (dog, dog’s), and where articles and adjectives are invariable for case (the old dog’s house).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a more general level, linguists have a tendency to classify this sort of situation as agglutination rather than inflection. By this analysis, the “s” in this example can be analysed as a postposition affecting the whole article+adjective+noun phrase “the old dog”. You will find this in all so-called agglutinative languages (Turkish, Tamil etc. etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-04-05T17:28:51.513" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T17:28:51.513" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11944" CreationDate="2015-04-05T08:50:41.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Nouns in &lt;strong&gt;Telugu&lt;/strong&gt; are inflected for number, gender and 7 cases. However, the small closed class of adjectives (as opposed to nouns used adjectivally) does not decline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T08:50:41.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10012" CreationDate="2015-04-05T09:48:03.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, there is no fixed rule for &quot;an ergative language&quot;. It seems that you are interested in the phenomenon of &lt;em&gt;syntactic ergativity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It refers to the situation where the S (subject of an intransitive verb) clusters with O (object of a transitive verb; your &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;), rather than with A. Then, S &amp;amp; O together show some behaviour typical of subjects (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~lomo/ergativity/Aldridge2008.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aldridge&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/publications/syntactic-ergativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polinsky&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, argue that it is crucial that S &amp;amp; O, but not A, can undergo A'-movement or specifically relativization (resp.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dyirbal, which you mention, is indeed one striking example of such a language. However, other languages exhibit syntactic ergativity, including some other Australian languages and languages of the Americas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/11695/3328&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for some elaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T09:48:03.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11944" CreationDate="2015-04-05T10:01:18.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Turkish&lt;/strong&gt; has 5 to 8 noun cases (depending on who you ask) and invariable adjectives. Same is true for other Turkic languages (with differing number of cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-04-05T20:19:46.347" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T20:19:46.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-05T13:27:42.137" Score="11" ViewCount="700" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of you may be familiar with the debate between FHC and PJ on the language faculty. The &quot;discussion&quot;, which became quite heated, first appeared as PJ's response to an article in &lt;em&gt;Science&lt;/em&gt; that was entitled &lt;em&gt;&quot;The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by FHC (2002).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PJ's response was called &lt;em&gt;&quot;The faculty of language: what's special about it?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; published in &lt;em&gt;Cognition&lt;/em&gt; (2005). This sparked a number of exchanges. All of the relevant links, as well as much more context, are available via the following page dedicated to the discussion on &lt;em&gt;Language Log&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002422.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JP VERSUS FHC+CHF VERSUS PJ VERSUS HCF&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;(hosted by LL)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Liberman last edited this page on August 25, 2005. At that time, the second PJ response was still forthcoming. It's since been released, but with no further updates, I wonder if the discussion ended and under what grounds? Was an agreement reached?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first found this discussion as a means to locating some comment by Chomsky with reference to Jackendoff's &quot;Parallel Architecture&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11953/has-ray-jackendoffs-parallel-architecture-paradigm-received-a-formal-review-or&quot;&gt;Here is the link&lt;/a&gt; to my question about the conversation surrounding PA, which also includes a very brief summary of the paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5048" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T13:46:23.360" Title="Where did the discussion of the language faculty between Fitch, Hauser, Chomsky and Pinker and Jackendoff terminate?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11944" CreationDate="2015-04-05T17:10:02.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imbabura Quechua is an example, where the case affix is only NP-final (on the head noun). Apparently, there is no NP-internal case agreement in &lt;a href=&quot;http://endeavour.essex.ac.uk/399/1/Comrie-Fest.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hungarian&lt;/a&gt;, though there is supperficial &quot;agreement&quot; in appositional constructions. Spencer argues that the Hungarian markers should be considered &quot;fused postpositions&quot;, and the same could be said about I. Quechua.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T17:10:02.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2015-04-05T19:27:35.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Uzbeks who were know as part of Turkic tribes were using Turkic alphabet &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QViG4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Old Turkic&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is totally dead nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Islam came to Turks they start using Arabic alphabet. But as there are some letters such as &quot;P&quot;, &quot;Ж&quot;-Cyrillic, in Uzbek as are in Persian. That made it same as Persian alphabet, which was so similar to Arabic.&#xA;In the time of Soviet Union Uzbeks began using Cyrillic and since independence They are using both Cyrillic and Latin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9503" LastActivityDate="2015-04-05T19:27:35.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-05T22:54:20.017" Score="9" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ray Jackendoff, a theoretical linguist and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, has been developing his theory of the linguistic Parallel Architecture since departing from the narrow syntactic research first undertaken during his formative years (as a student of Noam Chomsky).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undergoing revision and justification in numerous publications since then, Jackendoff's proposed PA paradigm, a non-syntactocentric approach to interfacing the key linguistic components of syntax and phonology with SM and CI (alias semantics), has evolved to call for a unity of the sciences in solving the problem of language. I first found him in my research for a class on physiological optics wherein I was seeking to report on the intersection of visual perception and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to know what, if any, critical conversation has been sparked as a result of this paradigm's proposal. Have Chomsky or any of the other proponents of GB/P&amp;amp;P/MP responded to this characterization of the linguistic faculty (and its varied implications for cognitive science)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5048" LastEditorUserId="5048" LastEditDate="2015-12-28T08:49:04.767" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T15:39:21.317" Title="Has Ray Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture paradigm received a formal review or criticism(s) from Chomsky and/or others?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11987" CreationDate="2015-04-05T22:56:31.077" Score="-1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for words/phrases which request that someone do something, such as &quot;contact us&quot;, &quot;do this&quot;, &quot;click here&quot;, &quot;share your thoughts&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9512" LastEditorUserId="5668" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T05:46:55.093" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:52:15.210" Title="What is the term for the category of words that request someone else do something" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-05T23:01:31.330" Score="-1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that this is possibly very difficult to answer. What are the oldest known words for the seasons (as major, multi-month divisions of the year) for which we have reasonable scholarly assurance of their pronunciation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that pronunciation shifts gradually, and that terms like 'older' can be quite subjective in linguistics, but I'm curious about terms for the seasons or equinoxes that are well-attested. Additionally, for the sake of the question, two different pronunciations for the same written word count as separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9513" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T17:30:27.347" Title="Oldest words for the seasons for which we have a confirmed pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11955" CreationDate="2015-04-06T00:31:21.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronounciation is 100% known only for words whose sound was recorded. So all words for seasons about whose pronounciation we can be confident were used not earlier than mid-19th century when phonograph was introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T00:31:21.960" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-06T08:53:09.940" Score="3" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to do some smoothing on a corpus and compare the results.&#xA;for train language model without smoothing I used &quot;-addsmooth 0&quot; option&#xA;now I should add two different smoothing and compare them, I couldn't find any command for &quot;Good Turing&quot; and &quot;Kneser-Ney&quot; Smoothing .&#xA;I found somewhere this command :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ngram-count - vocab Lexicon2003-72k.txt&#xA;-read CNA0001-2M.count&#xA;-order 3&#xA;-lm CNA0001-2M_N3_KN.lm&#xA;-kndiscount1&#xA;-kndiscount2&#xA;-kndiscount3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it is modified kneser-ney and I cant understand what is different between &lt;code&gt;-kndiscount1&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-kndiscount2&lt;/code&gt; for example. what is the meaning of that number?(1,2)&#xA;and why we should used them together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to use interpolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9514" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T09:35:50.213" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T11:02:20.443" Title="Different discounting methods with SRILM toolikt" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11955" CreationDate="2015-04-06T17:07:50.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is not just hard to answer, it is impossible, since it's based on two related, undefinable standards: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; pronunciation&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot;. Let's take &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; pronunciation&amp;quot; of English &lt;em&gt;winter&lt;/em&gt;. It is pronounced [wɪ̃ɾ̃ɹ̩], at least in my dialect. However, I do know that it is also pronounced as [wɪntɹ̩], [wɪntɜ], and [wɪnɜ] depending on dialect and individual. There isn't a unique pronunciation, in fact, I vacillate between [wɪ̃ɾ̃ɹ̩] and [wɪntɹ̩]. &amp;quot;Pronunciation&amp;quot; is a vague abstraction which covers classes of acoustic events, and even one individual uttering a word a dozen times will produce a dozen different outputs. The differences may be grammatically insignificant and very hard to perceive, but they exist. The question presupposes that a word has a unique pronunciation for all speakers, which is not the case. So the question need to be sharpened to specify what you mean by &amp;quot;pronunciation&amp;quot;, in particular, the level of detail that you require. In typical linguistic usage, &amp;quot;pronunciation&amp;quot; admits of a lot of imprecision, yet you see people here rejecting candidate words because of the scent of imprecision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More severely problematic is the standard &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot;. What does that even mean? Is there &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot; that &lt;em&gt;winter&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forvo.com/word/winter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ˈwɪnˌtʰɹ̩&lt;/a&gt; or that the Classical Arabic word is [ʔaʃʃita:ʔ]? What is &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot; opposed to? -- no scholarly reason at all? What about &amp;quot;very likely, but not absolutely guaranteed&amp;quot;. If you don't accept my representation of the pronunciation of the recorded sample of &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot;, how do you show that mine is incorrect and that something else is correct? Suppose you uncover a wax recording of English &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot; made 150 years ago, what would be &amp;quot;scholarly assurance&amp;quot; that the resulting representation &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;the pronunciation&amp;quot;? There is a difference between &amp;quot;absolute infallible certainty&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot;, yet you see people being confused between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contend that proto-Indo-European and proto-Germanic reconstructions are &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurances&amp;quot;, though in instances somewhat less certain than assumed Classical Arabic pronunciations. The (Vedic) Sanskrit word &lt;em&gt;ɦimjáh&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;himyáḥ&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot; is probably the oldest attested word for a season passing a high standard of certainty. There is not a shred of evidence to reject the well-established word and phonetic interpretation, so it passes the sniff test for &amp;quot;reasonable scholarly assurance&amp;quot; (though you may need to know more about the tradition of preserving Sanskrit to be assured, in case you are not familiar with Sanskrit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T17:30:27.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11960" CreationDate="2015-04-06T17:49:23.627" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading about different methods used in linguistics, and I've been puzzled by the usage of placenames in identifying substratums in modern languages. Just because some language and its speakers exist in some area for a time doesn't imply that that language and its speakers had any effect on the colonizers/invaders that came through later. As an example, I live in Northern California, and as a result of Spanish explorers coming through this area first, many of the placenames are of Spanish origin. However, once California was annexed by the United States, it was fairly rapidly Anglicized and there has been no Spanish influence on the English spoken here (until perhaps the more recent influx of Mexican immigrants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9515" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:44:22.470" Title="Why are placenames considered to be a valid way of identifying a substratum?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11959" CreationDate="2015-04-06T18:07:07.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Place names are evidence for what the substratal language is -- &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; there is one. Nothing guarantees that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a substratal language, so you have to give evidence for that claim, first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T18:07:07.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-06T17:07:44.080" Score="0" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have much of a background in linguistics, and I can't tell if some of the terms I am seeing are overloaded or unique in meaning.  Specifically, I've been told that language timing can be stress, syllable or mora.&#xA;  At the same time, I've been told a language can be put on a gradient of stress, pitch accent and tonal to categorize it by intonation. So...does this mean that 'stress' refers to &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; timing and intonation, or are they different? It also seems like 'mora' and 'pitch accent' overlap, but they are used with entirely different concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the source of this information was merely convoluted. If not, can someone explain how the above terms are different? If anyone has a better metasegmentation typology I would be delighted to know what it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Bevel" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T17:02:42.573" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T22:05:13.293" Title="Linguistic typology of isochrony and intonation" Tags="&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11961" CreationDate="2015-04-06T18:46:39.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a phonetic concept of &quot;timing&quot; that relates to more or less constant units of duration in milliseconds, so that if a language is &quot;syllable-timed&quot; then you find more consistency of duration according to the number of syllables, but in a &quot;stress-timed&quot; language, stress units (e.g. the stressed syllable and the unstressed syllable after it) will be come closer to having a constant duration, regardless of the number of syllables. This presupposes that we know how to identify a &quot;stress&quot; (such as we have in English). [Just to be clear, my reporting this concept doesn't constitute approval]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a completely different and very messy phonological (not phonetic) &quot;gradient&quot; of stress, pitch accent and tone. A canonical example of stress is Spanish, and a canonical example of tone is Chinese (pick your favorite dialect). Most languages are different from Spanish or Chinese, which has resulted in a third category &quot;pitch accent&quot;. There have been unsuccessful attempts to reduce stress vs. tone to a physical difference, such as the idea that stress is about &quot;expiratory force&quot; but tone is about &quot;controlling pitch&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have found it most useful to focus on the question &quot;what are the properties of this thing?&quot;, rather than &quot;what a priori 'language type' is this best categorized as?&quot;. There do seem to be distinct entities &quot;stress&quot; and &quot;tone&quot;, where &quot;stress&quot; is a rhythmic prominence relationship between syllables and tone is, well, something else -- usually about pitch contour, but often with other phonetic concomitants. There are languages, such as Eton or Zulu, which use both tone and stress. Tone tends to be more contrastive and more densely specified (e.g. most often, every syllable has some tone) and stress tends to be less contrastive and less densely specified. &quot;Pitch accent&quot;, a concept that is highly disputed, is used for things that seem to fall between these poles, such as Tokyo Japanese or Lithuanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mora&quot; is orthogonal to the tone / stress difference: a mora can be relevant to, or irrelevant to, both tone and stress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T19:12:45.340" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T19:12:45.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11961" CreationDate="2015-04-06T19:09:37.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea that language timing can be stress, syllable or mora is highly simplified, and it is actually false if taken to refer to phonetic facts about syllable length in actual speech. In real life, even in so-called &quot;syllable-timed&quot; or &quot;mora-timed&quot; languages, syllables or morae are often realized with measurably different lengths; and in so-called &quot;stress timed&quot; languages, the delay between subsequent stressed syllables can also vary significantly. So if there is anything real behind this classification, it must be something more subtle or psychological. This is a rather controversial topic; there's some good reading available for free online linked in the references of the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony#References&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Isochrony&lt;/a&gt;, including a &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=126&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log post&lt;/a&gt; by phonetician Mark Liberman where he argues that the fact that English syllables are more variable in length than Spanish ones can be explained purely by the fact that English syllables are more variable in complexity (more coda consonants allowed, vowels can be reduced or unreduced, etc.) without needing the concept of a &quot;stress-timed&quot; and &quot;syllable-timed&quot; languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-06T19:19:19.690" LastActivityDate="2015-04-06T19:19:19.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11961" CreationDate="2015-04-07T04:30:17.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some definitions and discussion of relevant terms that hopefully might help clarify some of the linguistic concepts. I'm sorry for the excessive length, which I'll try to trim down as I organize these thoughts better. Pretty much all of the terms you've brought up refer to phonemic concepts, or theoretical elements of the organization of a language's sound system, rather than to phonetic, directly measurable (or audible) features of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syllable:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Overall, the “syllable” is a vaguely defined concept. Many languages can be analysed such that some sounds are considered syllabic nuclei, such as vowels or syllabic consonants. For example, the English word “chasm” has two syllabic nuclei: the first is the vowel “a”, and the second is the syllabic consonant “m”. Once you’ve determined the syllabic nuclei, a word can then be defined to have exactly as many “syllables” as it has syllabic nuclei. Then, by looking at the patterns of how the other, non-syllabic sounds vary depending on where they are in a word, we can come up with theories of syllabification that assign some or all of the non-syllabic sounds in a word to a particular syllable, as either part of the syllable’s onset (before the syllable nucleus) or its coda (after the syllable nucleus).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;The difficulty lies in formulating a theory that clearly assigns every sound to a particular syllable. Sometimes, there are conflicting principles of syllabification, and so different phonologists may have different views on the syllabification of a particular word. Other contentious questions about syllabification: can a single sound simultaneously belong to more than one syllable? Can a word have sounds that are not underlyingly part of any syllable? Do all words in all languages have clearly identifiable syllabic nuclei? If anyone tells you these questions have a simple answer, be skeptical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mora:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;A mora is basically a unit of syllabic &quot;weight&quot; used in the analysis of a language, that may or may not constitute a full syllable on its own. A single syllable can have one or more morae. Typically, the onset (first part) of a syllable is weightless, and thus does not contribute any morae to the syllable. A short vowel is considered to be worth one mora, and a long vowel two. Consonants at the end of a syllable may also be considered to contribute a mora. When analysing Japanese, a short vowel is considered to have one mora, a long vowel is considered to have two, and the syllable codas ん and っ (sometimes transcribed /N/ and /Q/), are considered to each have one mora. It's useful to distinguish morae from syllables because some languages, like Japanese, have phonological rules that refer to both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intonation:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&lt;br&gt;The use of pitch (also volume and other suprasegmental features like this) above the word level: for example, the use of rising pitch in English questions: the pitch is not associated with any particular word, but with a particular type of statement instead. All languages have some kind of patterns of intonation, but not necessarily the same ones as other languages. &quot;Intonation&quot; is not directly related to &quot;tone&quot; or &quot;stress&quot;: non-tonal languages have intonation, and intonation usually doesn't interact with the tone system of a language, but operates on a different level from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonemic tone:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Specific words can be differentiated only by the pitch or the pattern of pitch changes that occurs when they are spoken.  In some languages, tonal patterns apply to words as a whole, and knowing the placement of one particular pitch feature in a word is enough to know what pitch pattern to use for the entire word. Tokyo Japanese has a tone system of this type, where knowing a pitch value and the mora it is located on is enough to predict the pitch pattern of an entire word. The Japanese system is often called a “pitch accent”. Thus, the concept of the &quot;mora&quot; is used to help explain the pattern of pitch or &quot;pitch accent&quot; we see in Japanese words, but the concepts don't have to go together, and not all languages have both.&#xA;Other languages with phonemic tone are analysed as having each syllable specified with an independent tone. However, many of these languages analysed as having an independent tone “for each syllable” in theory actually exhibit a phenomenon where tones on adjacent syllables or in the same word can affect each other: this is called “tone sandhi”. Standard Mandarin Chinese is a language analysed with tone at the syllable level and tone sandhi. Not all languages have phonemic pitch, or &quot;tone&quot;. English doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word stress:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;In some languages, including English, some syllables in a word seem more prominent than others. This is “stress”. “Stress” may be realized in different languages with different combinations of measurable phonetic features, such as pitch, length, or vowel quality. The term “stress” is typically used when there is exactly one syllable that can be identified as the most prominent, and every content word has such a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonemic stress:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&lt;br&gt;In many languages, if you know the precise sequence of sounds in a word, you can predict with certainty where the word's stress is. In other languages, the stress cannot always be predicted; there could be two words with the same sequence of sounds but different placements of stress. English falls into the latter category; this kind of unpredictable stress is called “phonemic stress” or “lexical stress”. Spanish is also in this category; although the stress is predictable from the spelling, it can’t be predicted if you only know the sequence of consonant and vowel sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Connections between Stress, Tone, and Vowel Length&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Of phomenic stress and phonemic tone, languages can have just one, just the other, both, or neither. Both pitch and stress often interact with vowel length as well; commonly, long vowels can have more types of pitch than short vowels, such as &quot;contour pitches&quot; like falling or rising-falling, and long vowels often attract stress in some way or get shortened in non-stressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; In many languages that have both phonemic stress and tone, the two interact in some way. This combined system of stress and tone (and perhaps also vowel length) is often called “pitch accent”. This isn’t particularly related to the Japanese “pitch accent”, so I wouldn't attach much importance to the fact that the same term is used for both phenomena. In particular, there are languages that have a typical stress system, with all words having a single most prominent syllable, and that only have a contrast between different pitches for that one stressed syllable. Many Baltic languages have a system like this, which also interacts with vowel length. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_accentuation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a language with this type of &quot;pitch accent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Timing and Isochrony&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;&lt;br&gt;The concept of “timing” is usually presented as the idea that fluent speakers of languages will try to evenly space out some linguistically significant feature of their words. Supposedly, a speaker of a “stress-timed” language will adjust the speed at which they speak syllables so that timing between stressed syllables is approximately constant. A speaker of a “syllable-timed” language is supposed to adjust the speed at which they speak so that every syllable is approximately the same length. And a fluent speaker of a “mora-timed” language supposedly adjusts their speech unconsciously so as to have an approxomately even timing between any two successive morae. So, it’s very possible you might have heard someone make the claim that all languages fall into one of these types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One complication with this view is that other factors besides stress, number of syllables, and syllabic weight can affect how long it takes phonetically to pronounce a syllable on average. In English, both “large” and “bee” are single stressed syllables, but the first has a more complicated syllable structure than the sceond, which tends to make it take longer to pronounce. There are also good theoretical reasons to think of these three classifications as hypothetical extreme points on a spectrum rather than a tripartite division: even though English is supposedly syllable-timed, most analyses of British English also identify a phonemic distinction in vowel length, which would seem to conflict with a rule of isochrony based purely on the position of stress and nothing else.&#xA;Despite these issues, there are linguists who believe there is a real phenomenon underlying the idea of isochrony, but as you can see, it is not at all a clear-cut classification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T01:10:51.243" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T01:10:51.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-07T16:26:51.010" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://conll.cemantix.org/2012/data.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data&lt;/a&gt; provided by CoNLL 2012 shared task. They mentioned that the data is semi-offset annotated, I couldn't find any interpretation for the term &quot;semi-offset annotation&quot;. Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9422" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-06-08T03:19:05.620" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T03:19:05.620" Title="Semi-offset Annotated Data" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-07T20:09:34.820" Score="5" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1428231269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'A course in Phonetics'&lt;/a&gt; P. Ladefoged writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we consider vowels to be specifiable in terms of three dimensions, this implies that &lt;strong&gt;the cardinal vowels fall on a plane&lt;/strong&gt; in this three-dimensional space, as shown in Figure 9.4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The picture:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rBPda.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 9.4 from the book&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this vowels are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; fall on a single common plane! If this plane existed, it would contain at least &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ɑ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ɔ&lt;/em&gt; by definition and would be something like this (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(geometry)#Describing_a_plane_through_three_points&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;we can construct a plane by three points&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UAQGf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Sorry for inaccurate picture, but the main idea is shown)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there is no way to place all of this vowels on the same plane. (I can assign numeric coordinates to vowels and prove it in a more accurate way by calculations if it's needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong? Is P. Ladefoged wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Mathematical proof for @GregLee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statement&lt;/strong&gt;: There is no plane that contains all of this eight vowels at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proof:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This plane, if it existed, would contain lines a-ɛ and ɑ-ɔ, but this lines are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skew_lines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skew&lt;/a&gt;, so there is no such plane.&#xA;Why are they skew? Because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They do not cross each other, because&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.1. If they crossed, it would be either common point of line segments [a-ɛ] and [ɑ-ɔ], either of rays [ɛ, upwards) (part of line a-ɛ) and [ɔ, upwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ), either of rays [a, downwards) (part of line a-ɛ) and [ɑ, downwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ) because of same height intervals of elements of this pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.2. Line segments [a-ɛ] and [ɑ-ɔ] do not cross&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.3. Ray [ɛ, upwards) (part of line a-ɛ) does not cross with ray [ɔ, upwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ), because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.3.1. Roundness of ɛ is less than roundness of ɔ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.3.2. Roundness decreases upwards in ray [ɛ, upwards) (part of line a-ɛ) and increases upwards in ray [ɔ, upwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4. Ray [a, downwards) (part of line a-ɛ) does not cross with ray [ɑ, downwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ), because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4.1. Roundness of a is less or equals in comparison with roundness of ɑ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4.2. Roundness increases downwards in ray [a, downwards) (part of line a-ɛ) and decreases downwards in ray [ɑ, upwards) (part of line ɑ-ɔ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They do not lay in the same plane, because lines a-ɛ and ɑ-ɔ have derivatives of roundness with respect of height with different signs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9424" LastEditorUserId="9424" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T15:56:08.133" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T20:51:35.993" Title="Do cardinal vowels form a plane in 3D-space?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11970" CreationDate="2015-04-07T20:58:55.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we have to conclude that one of the authors mis-spoke or mis-drew. A plane can be defined off of the positions of [i u ɑ], but not passing through all of the cardinal vowels where they are in the chart. I think with some small adjustment on the position of the vowels in the middle, you can get them all on the [i u ɑ] plane. Perhaps the thing to do is compose the graph numerically based on the [i u ɑ] plane and then see whether the other vowels can be forced into acceptable positions on that plane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: something like this (I'm terrible at drawing-magic).&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FwmiQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-07T22:24:47.797" LastActivityDate="2015-04-07T22:24:47.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-08T08:28:08.790" Score="2" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;distal dog ugly-ADJ.PRED 'yon dog is ugly'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be distinct from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;distal dog ugly-ADJ.ATTR 'yon ugly dog'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this is attested in the world's languages, and if not, if it could be part of a possible human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T14:09:13.700" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T03:53:34.800" Title="Are there any languages that mark predicative and attributive adjectives differently?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11972" CreationDate="2015-04-08T09:21:40.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example German: Der hässliche Hund ~ Der Hund ist hässlich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T09:21:40.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11972" CreationDate="2015-04-08T09:27:31.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, attributive adjectives agree in number and gender, while predicative adjectives (which are used with a copulative verb) do not, and are invariable. In fact, some analyses of German consider the predicative adjectives and deadjectival adverbs to in fact belong to the same category of speech, since an adjective used as an adverb also does not agree and takes the same &quot;default&quot; form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, adjectives agree in number, gender, and case with their referents, but attributive adjectives are distinguished from predicative adjectives by also needing to agree in definiteness. In predicative sentences with adjectives, there is no overt copula for the present tense, so a sequence of definite noun + attributive adjective is distinguishable from an equational sentence consisting of a definite noun + indefinite predicative adjective. (Predicative adjectives can also be marked for definiteness when the semantics of the sentence calls for it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T15:35:06.327" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T15:35:06.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2015-04-08T15:17:56.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPE&lt;/a&gt; feature system is actually the &quot;universal methodology&quot; that you seek.  This is because the features represent independently controllable aspects of articulation.  In his book &lt;strong&gt;Speech Sounds and Features&lt;/strong&gt;, Gunnar Fant called this property of the feature system &quot;orthogonality&quot;.  It means that for the binary features, all combinations of + - are possible, so that 2^(number of features) different sound segments can be distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate feature difference between &quot;consonants&quot; and &quot;vowels&quot; is not terribly clear, but let's say vowels are [+vocalic] and consonants are [-vocalic].  Then the number of possible vowels is the same as the number of possible consonants, and for the consonants classified by the place of articulation features, there are also vowels classified in exactly the same way, by place of articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky and Halle do depart from the orthogonality assumption when they declare the combination [+high,+low] to be impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first person to make theoretical use of feature orthogonality, so far as I know, was William Holder in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/early_modern/holder.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elements of Speech&lt;/a&gt;.  Holder argued that there must be a velar nasal consonant in the series [m, n, ...] to match the places of articulation of [p, t, k].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T15:51:56.970" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T15:51:56.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-08T15:34:21.550" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;What theories do linguists have with regard to the best methods for learning new words for a seconds language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously I have used mnemonics which I think are ok but when I learn new words in English I do so without even thinking about it. Words like facebook, Obama, noob, bling, pimped, twitter, ISIS, wasted, Pussy Riot and linked-in. I didn't consciously learn these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:28:13.740" Title="Learning new words" Tags="&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2015-04-08T15:47:08.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every&lt;/em&gt; generative theory of phonology using features has assumed that consonants and vowels are described with the same features, except for a brief period in the 80's under the Steridian theory which had a segregation of vowel tongue body and consonant tongue body (Velars vs. Dorsals). SPE half-failed to reach the desideratum of full orthogonality, but head-nodded in the direction of [syllabic], leading to the elimination of the last bastion of the autonomous vowel - consonant distinction, and the field adopted [syllabic] the next day. The question presupposes that there is a well-defined distinction between &quot;consonant&quot; and &quot;vowel&quot;, which is exactly what post-SPE theories and observation of language denies; and thus long debates over high vowels versus glides adjacent to the segment which is the syllable peak, the problem of syllabic consonants like /m̩ r̩/ and even syllabic obstruents in Berber, the problematic non-consonantal consonants [h ʔ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the question is ambiguous: &quot;Consonants are distinguished normally by features like place of articulation, manner of articulation, voiced/voiceless, etc. while vowels are usually distinguished by stuff like tongue's position and roundedness&quot;, which could refer to the underlying analytical theory (&quot;why do we distinguish them....&quot;), or it could refer to the facts themselves (e.g. why is voicing not usually contrastive on vowels). Especially if the intent is to focus on apparent disjointness between &quot;consonants&quot; and &quot;vowels&quot;, it's important to clarify what things count as &quot;consonants&quot; versus &quot;vowels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T15:47:08.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11972" CreationDate="2015-04-08T16:04:46.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also North Saami: &lt;em&gt;Gákti lea čáppat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The jacket is nice&quot; (&lt;em&gt;čáppat&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Dát lea čappa gákti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;This is a nice jacket&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T16:04:46.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11968" CreationDate="2015-04-08T19:04:03.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Stand-off_markup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Offset annotation&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym for stand-off annotation, which is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the kind of markup that resides in a location different from the location of the data being described by it. It is thus the opposite of inline markup, where data and annotations are intermingled within a single location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at the data, but apparently part of the annotated material is included in the annotation data (or you have to include it yourself), so it's not fully stand-off markup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="444" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T19:04:03.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11978" CreationDate="2015-04-08T22:20:39.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various techniques in the linguistic field dealing with vocabulary acquisition, even though some linguists do not think much of vocab acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The keyword strategy is when you correlate a difficult word in your L2 to a similar sounding word in your L1 as a means of memorizing the word. For example, when learning the French word mere ‘mother’, you could visualize your mother riding on a mare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some words are easier to learn than others based on word class. For example, nouns are easier to learn than verbs, likely because nouns tend to have a non-abstract, real world equivalent. Some words are easier or more difficult based on word appearance. Things like acoustic similarity to other words may confuse L2 learners. Word length and pronounceability may simply make a word more difficult to process, and thus more difficult to learn. For overlapping typologies, orthography may create a bridge for some words between the L1 and L2.  The ways in which words are formed and their meaning may also play a role in learnability. For example, acronyms must be learned based on cultural knowledge, or homophones and metaphors may confuse readers who are not yet versed in these subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also imitate the phonological loop and try to get natural repetition of words into the everyday studies of students. Repeat the words in realistic contexts. Come up with word banks, create realistic cloze tests alongside the wordbanks, etc. Students should also be encouraged to make notes about and look up difficult words (in a physical dictionary preferably).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the linguist Tom Cobb created a sort of minimum &quot;sufficiency&quot; (referring to Krashen) necessary for L2 learners to acquire new vocab. The keys to this are increasing the knowledge of word families generally and having the specific vocabulary words reoccur (a minimum of six to nine encounters, but preferably more) throughout a class section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastEditorUserId="9529" LastEditDate="2015-04-08T22:28:13.740" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:28:13.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11959" CreationDate="2015-04-08T22:44:22.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Placenames are NOT considered to be a valid way of identifying a substratum. You identify a substratum by examining language contact between multiple languages in an area over time. Then you need to consider similarities in the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. For example, Louisiana French Creole and African American Vernacular English share many similarities that may point to a shared substratum (i.e., West African Pidgin English or other African languages). Why might I think these two languages share a substratum? Well, I might look at the percentage of copula-deletion in my corpus and compare the results to show how they match up to the proposed substratum. I might look at the inclusion of African vocabulary in both languages, such as the word 'voodoo'. Then you might consider the speakers, mainly African slaves and their descendants, their lack of a formal dominant language education, their need to communicate amongst themselves and their masters, and things of that nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Placenames simply do not offer a good strategy of deciding a substratum language and its influence. For example, in the New York area many placenames are Dutch, but you would be hard-pressed to make the argument that Dutch is a substratum of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:44:22.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11954" CreationDate="2015-04-08T22:52:15.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These sentence types are called imperatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dormez-vous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give me that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastActivityDate="2015-04-08T22:52:15.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11972" CreationDate="2015-04-09T00:59:23.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has this feature, too: этот &lt;em&gt;больной&lt;/em&gt; человек 'this &lt;em&gt;sick&lt;/em&gt; person' vs. этот человек &lt;em&gt;болен&lt;/em&gt; 'this person is &lt;em&gt;sick&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T00:59:23.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11972" CreationDate="2015-04-09T02:26:15.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Finnish, attributive and predicative adjectives have different agreement patterns when they are modifying mass-nouns and (most) plural count-nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;valkoi&lt;strong&gt;nen&lt;/strong&gt; lumi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the white snow&quot; (mass-noun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pitkä&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; ihmise&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;the tall people&quot; (plural count-noun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;valkoinen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;white&quot; and &lt;em&gt;pitkä&lt;/em&gt; &quot;long, tall&quot; are in the nominative, just like their head nouns. But, when these adjectives are used predicatively with the same nouns, they appear in the partitive case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lumi oli valkois&lt;strong&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;The snow was white&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ihmiset olivat pitk&lt;strong&gt;iä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;The people were tall&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pattern doesn't apply to singular count-nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;valkoinen lintu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;white bird&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lintu oli valkoinen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The bird was white&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-04-09T03:53:34.800" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T03:53:34.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-09T02:34:27.677" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the [h]-sound in Latin words (&lt;em&gt;habere&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;prehendere&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) was lost before French became a distinct language. But French also has many words of Germanic or onomatopoeic origin that begin with the letter “h”: &lt;em&gt;holà&lt;/em&gt; ”hey!”/”stop”, &lt;em&gt;hein&lt;/em&gt; “eh”, &lt;em&gt;haler&lt;/em&gt; ”haul”, &lt;em&gt;haïr&lt;/em&gt; “to hate”, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it thought that the “h” in the latter group of words was ever pronounced as [h], or is it simply an etymological spelling (in the case of the Germanic-derived words), or used to indicate hiatus or a glottal stop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-04-09T05:13:20.490" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T11:11:09.573" Title="&quot;h&quot; in French words of Germanic / onomatopoeic origin" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-09T03:07:54.487" Score="3" ViewCount="1305" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the distinct stages, landmarks or milestones in language acquisition in regard to phonetic development? What is the order they're &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; reached, and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is it that order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I know that certain types of phonemes are learned at different times. Vowels are usually learned early, and different types of consonants are learned later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; of these developmental stages. Phoneme acquisition charts are easily found, but they don't discuss why certain phonemes are learned before others. I understand it's likely rooted in physiological and/or neurological development, so that's what I'm interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking primarily about English pronunciation and grammar, but would also be interested in info for the entire IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm not a linguistics student or professional, I'm comfortable with technical terms, such as those found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Articulatory Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occlusive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occlusives&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manners of Articulation&lt;/a&gt; and linguistic/grammatical terminology. I have access to resources about these areas of interest once I know where to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Age range can be assumed to be from start of speech until &quot;mastery&quot; of all landmarks. I'm not just interested in a single age, but the full breadth of development. (Unfortunately, I must be broad, since I don't &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; the individual stages, I can't right now ask about them individually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did ask nearly the same question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/19191/what-are-the-stages-of-child-speech-and-language-development&quot;&gt;Parenting&lt;/a&gt;, but it was suggested I come here for a better answer.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:41:15.853" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T09:13:05.743" Title="What are the stages of child speech and language development and why?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-09T11:15:07.443" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of English, but I make (and notice others make) English mistakes all of the time; I change negative to positive and vice versa, I switch &quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot;, I make spoonerisms, I leave 's' off of third person singular, and so on. Mistakes just happen. &#xA;I hear native speakers make mistakes in my second language as well. One difficulty for me in becoming an advanced speaker of this language was in getting over the occasional error. Eventually you realize that natives make mistakes, too, and one's time is better focused on enriching one's manner of expression instead of worrying about spoonerisms (especially if you're the type who makes lots in your native tongue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be helpful to know what the average speaking error rates are among native speakers, so as not to hold oneself to the impossible standard of 0% error. Are there any studies showing average error rates for native speakers of a language? I know &quot;error&quot; can be broadly interpreted, but take my examples above to be approximately what I'm considering an &quot;error&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T11:15:07.443" Title="native speaker error rates" Tags="&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;errors&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11994" CreationDate="2015-04-09T11:42:53.373" Score="1" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;the phrase &quot;It's gonna be okay&quot; phonetically looks like: [ɪts gʌnə bɪ oʊkeɪ]&#xA;There should be a glide (y) or (w) between the words &quot;be&quot; and &quot;okay&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ɪts gʌnə bɪ(y)oʊkeɪ, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ɪts gʌnə bɪ(w)oʊkeɪ&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure which glide should I use. My ear can't distinguish. I'm not a native speaker. Any suggestion is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T22:58:49.933" Title="Glide between the words &quot;be&quot; and &quot;okay&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11993" CreationDate="2015-04-09T14:08:38.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think (w) is possible.  I have [bɨ] there, no glide.  [bi] sounds possible, perhaps with (y).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T14:08:38.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11996" CreationDate="2015-04-09T18:49:13.013" Score="0" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this problem where the difference between men, ben and pen in the Kazakh language was asked. I understand it has something to do with Vowel harmony, but I did not quite understand it.&#xA;Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it helps, here is a link to the question:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ioling.org/problems/sample/i1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ioling.org/problems/sample/i1/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9539" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T19:58:49.247" Title="The words men, ben and pen in Kazakh" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11995" CreationDate="2015-04-09T19:52:48.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;-ben: after z, ž&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-pen: after unvoiced consonants and b, d, g, v&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-men: after vowels, sonorants and possessive forms (the latter is irrelevant here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source (in Russian): &lt;a href=&quot;http://kaz-tili.kz/su_tvorit.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://kaz-tili.kz/su_tvorit.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonant assimilation in suffixes is as typical of Turkic languages as vowel harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2015-04-09T19:58:49.247" LastActivityDate="2015-04-09T19:58:49.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T00:30:05.743" Score="4" ViewCount="19343" Body="&lt;h2&gt;BACKGROUND&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Oxford Dictionaries Online:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/predicator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Predicator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; means &amp;quot;(In systemic grammar) a verb phrase considered as a constituent of clause structure, along with subject, object, and adjunct.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/predicate?q=Predicate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Predicate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; means &amp;quot;The part of a sentence or clause containing a verb and stating something about the subject (e.g. &lt;em&gt;went home&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John went home&lt;/em&gt;).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter example of &lt;em&gt;John went home&lt;/em&gt;, it seems, the predicate is &lt;em&gt;went home&lt;/em&gt; whereas the predicator is &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; being an adjunct and thus not part of the predicator as defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I looked further in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; to better understand the difference. The article recognizes two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Predicates in traditional grammar (e.g., &lt;em&gt;went home&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John went home&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Predicates in modern theories of syntax and grammar (e.g., &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John went home&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, according to the article, causes confusion as to what exactly the term predicate mean, and some grammarians came up with a new term &amp;quot;predicator&amp;quot; specifically for use (2), says the article. No problem thus far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What bothers me: The article in its explanation of (2) says, &amp;quot;Other function words -- e.g. auxiliary verbs, &lt;strong&gt;certain prepositions&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;phrasal particles&lt;/strong&gt;, etc. -- are viewed as part of the predicate.&amp;quot; (Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, remember this definition of the predicate, i.e., (2) above, corresponds to the new term &amp;quot;predicator&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that auxiliary verbs are part of this definition of predicate, because an auxiliary verb can be part of a verb cluster. But so can &lt;strong&gt;certain prepositions&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;phrasal particles&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article has these example sentences (Words belonging to &amp;quot;predicate&amp;quot; (2) are boldfaced as in the article itself; My comments in parentheses.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The butter &lt;strong&gt;is in&lt;/strong&gt; the drawer.&lt;/em&gt; (preposition &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; being part of the predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;should give&lt;/strong&gt; it &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; (particle &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; being part of the predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Susan &lt;strong&gt;is pulling&lt;/strong&gt; your &lt;strong&gt;leg&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; (I don't know why leg is marked as part of the predicate. Maybe a typo?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;QUESTION&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the last one, which I suspect is a typo, I'd like to know whether the preposition &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and the particle &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; belong to the predicate as presented in (2) and thus belong to the new term &amp;quot;predicator&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T03:36:54.447" Title="Predicate vs. Predicator" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11997" CreationDate="2015-04-10T01:56:56.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples in Wikipedia can be viewed as correct. The sentences &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  The butter &lt;strong&gt;is in&lt;/strong&gt; the drawer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)  You &lt;strong&gt;should give&lt;/strong&gt; it &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3)  Sue &lt;strong&gt;is pulling&lt;/strong&gt; your &lt;strong&gt;leg&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;correctly illustrate one particular understanding of predicates. In sentence (1) the matrix predicate is indeed &lt;em&gt;is in&lt;/em&gt;, whereby its arguments are &lt;em&gt;the butter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the drawer&lt;/em&gt;. In sentence (2), the matrix predicate is indeed &lt;em&gt;should give...up&lt;/em&gt;, whereby its arguments are &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;. And in sentence (3), the matrix predicate is indeed &lt;em&gt;is pulling...leg&lt;/em&gt;, and its arguments are &lt;em&gt;Sue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (3) does not contain a typo; &lt;em&gt;pull X's leg&lt;/em&gt; is an idiomatic expression, which means the predicate includes the object noun. 'To pull someone's leg' does not mean that you actually yank on someone's leg, but rather it means that you tease them by telling them something fictitious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The understanding of predicates just described is similar to what one finds in extensive accounts of predicates:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Napoli, Donna Jo. 1989. Predication Theory: A Case Study for Indexing Theory. Cambridge University Press. &#xA;&#xA; Ackerman Farrell and Gert Webelhuth. 1998. A Theory of Predicates. CSLI Publications.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a word of caution is warranted! The use of this terminology varies tremendously depending of the theory of semantics, syntax, and grammar that one adopts. Traditional grammar would certainly reject the understanding of predicates suggested with examples (1-3), since traditional grammar adopts an (in my view) overly simplistic understanding of predicates that has more to do with Aristotle's term logic than with grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty with the terminology is illustrated well when considering the term &lt;em&gt;predicator&lt;/em&gt;. If you look that term up linguistics dictionaries, you find that it is indeed employed as a means of overcoming the confusion associated with the term predicate. The extent to which this additional term successfully overcomes the confusion is, though, debatable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T01:56:56.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T06:03:46.343" Score="0" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;If dogs had brains with the same capacity for language as humans, but retained their canine vocal tracts, what human speech sounds could they produce?  And what speech sounds could they produce that humans could not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9541" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T01:20:30.170" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T16:02:33.473" Title="What human speech sounds could the canine vocal tract produce?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12006" CreationDate="2015-04-10T14:23:32.773" Score="3" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that when linguists talk about mixed languages, they talk about the parent languages that resulted in the creole or pidgin tongue, rather than what language family it belongs to. I've always wondered, however, whether it makes sense to talk about creole languages belonging to a &quot;family&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose there is a mixed language of English and German. Would linguists say that this mixed language is West Germanic? What about the mixed Russian-English language spoken onboard the International Space Station, is it Indo-European?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only the vaguest idea of what creole and pidgins roughly are; I don't really know the detailed ways language families work either. Sorry if this is a silly question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2934" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T16:54:01.707" Title="Do mixed languages have families?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T15:44:46.610" Score="0" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about your opinions on &lt;em&gt;Principles and Parameters Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Do you consider it possible or rather you think that it is impossible that our grammar was structured that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate any respond&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marceli&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5490" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T02:25:42.077" Title="Opinions on Principles and Parameters Theory" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-04-12T20:40:20.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-10T18:57:12.993" Score="0" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, what are conditions under which function words in English are to be stressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on weak/strong/contracted forms in English and the textbook states that &lt;code&gt;WFs are to be used when the function word is unstressed&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when is this the case, when not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9546" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T22:33:03.377" Title="stress of function words in English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12004" CreationDate="2015-04-10T22:33:03.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the cases mentioned by Lawler in his comment, coming at the end of a constituent containing more than one word will often require stress and prevent contraction. &quot;Would you like some ice cream?&quot;  &quot;Yes, I'd like sm ice cream&quot; / &quot;Yes, I'd like some&quot; / *&quot;Yes, I'd like sm&quot; / &quot;Yes, I would&quot; / *&quot;Yes, I'd&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T22:33:03.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12002" CreationDate="2015-04-10T23:05:11.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creoles are not usually viewed as members of the parent languages' family. Nor (obviously) are they viewed as isolates: typically they are simply grouped with other creoles that share a parent. For example see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/creole-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ethnologue's classification&lt;/a&gt;. This is even more true for highly mixed languages such as Michif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is partly as despite the prevalence of phrases such as 'English-based creole', determining the 'dominant' parent is typically controversial or meaningless. Furthermore, since creole grammar is largely original, assigning the creole to a language family is of limited use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastEditorUserId="6809" LastEditDate="2015-04-10T23:13:18.033" LastActivityDate="2015-04-10T23:13:18.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12003" CreationDate="2015-04-11T02:25:42.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that Principles and Parameters theory is not necessarily the manner in which &quot;our&quot; language is constructed. Rather, it is a convenient and elegant way with which to observe cross-linguistic differences and deal with certain issues brought on by interference in the acquisition of a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on Chomsky's Universal Grammar, parameters in language are often seen as binary switches in the language center of the mind, which may be convenient, but it does not fully encompass the true nature of languages, in my opinion (since you seem to be asking for opinion). For example, while it may be acceptable to say that most languages are SVO (e.g., English) or SOV (e.g., Japanese) word order and a language parameter may be set to one or the other, this binary excludes the other four word order attestations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, to say that a language's grammar is constructed based on these theories is much like putting the horse before the cart. That is, the parameter cannot inform the grammar because it is the language itself which informs the parameter; you theoretically set grammatical parameters to the language you acquire natively. Additionally, when we consider certain creolized languages (such as Louisiana French Creole (LFC)), principles and parameters may be even less clearly defined. Consider copula-deletion in LFC, where whether or not the AUX is used is no based on a parameter of any kind because in most cases the speaker can choose to delete or NOT delete the copula on a whim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T02:25:42.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12002" CreationDate="2015-04-11T03:20:33.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, mixed languages, pidgins, and creoles are all different things, so you should &lt;strong&gt;beware using the term &quot;mixed language&quot; as a synonym for pidgin or creole&lt;/strong&gt;. The overarching term that would include all three of these terms and others is &lt;em&gt;contact language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the following from Baker and Mous (1994, p. 5) attempts to define a mixed language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A very rough approximation is that a mixed language has its lexicon and grammar from different sources. On the basis of the lexicon one would classify such languages as belonging to one language family and on the basis of morphology, syntax, and general grammatical characteristics one would classify them as belonging to another language family.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above shows that mixed languages are a melange, but there is reference to parent languages, and it does not include those things which separate a creole from a mixed language. One such difference, according to Mark Seeba, is that mixed languages, unlike creoles, tend to retain the morphological complexity of their input languages (1997).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here on I discuss the main question at hand: &lt;strong&gt;do contact languages have families? The short answer is that it depends. Research can be used to say yes or no.&lt;/strong&gt; The long answer follows below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that daughter languages are typically shown as being born from one parent language, as we might find with English stemming from a Germanic lineage, but even this seems overly simplistic when we consider arguments like Bailey and Maroldt's (1977) Middle English creole hypothesis, which argues that Middle English was a creole born from language contact (primarily Old English and Norman French, but with evident tertiary contact considered key to pidginisation/creolisation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because creoles tend to be the result of contact between at least three languages (although we often only refer to the superstrate and substrate), the act of genealogical tracing becomes more difficult but not impossible or unheard of. For example, I have personally seen language genealogy trees linking Gullah and Black English to a parent African language (i.e., West African Pidgin English) based on various lexical and syntactic rules. I cannot cite the direct source at the moment, but I have seen it used in at least one book in actual tree form, derived into the same structure in my Sociolinguistics seminar, and often explained in expanded form by linguists like John Rickford, Russel Rickford, and Lisa Green. I have read similar accounts for Louisiana French Creole by Thomas Klingler and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could posit a very strong argument for the parentage of any given creole simply through research and writing. Personally, I am on the side that would consider a creole to be the daughter of multiple languages with roots tied to both lineages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information and a wonderful, easy read about pidgins, creoles, and other contact languages, refer to Mark Sebba's, &quot;Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastEditorUserId="9529" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T03:34:20.457" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T03:34:20.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12010" CreationDate="2015-04-11T04:00:45.053" Score="5" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/238661/50720&quot;&gt;Etymonline's entry on 'estate'&lt;/a&gt;  broaches  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=plank&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the excrescent &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Is this excrescence called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the later Romans evidently found &lt;code&gt;words beginning in&lt;/code&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;sc-, sp-, st-&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;code&gt;difficult or unpleasant to pronounce&lt;/code&gt;; in Late Latin forms begin to emerge in &lt;em&gt;i-&lt;/em&gt; (such as &lt;em&gt;ispatium, ispiritu&lt;/em&gt;), and from 5c. this shifted to &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;[1.] The development was carried into the Romanic languages, especially Old French, and the French words were modified further after 15c. by natural loss of &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (the suppression being marked by an acute accent on the &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;[2.] while in &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;other cases&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the word was formally corrected back to the Latin spelling&lt;/strong&gt; (for example &lt;em&gt;spécial&lt;/em&gt;). Hence French &lt;em&gt;état&lt;/em&gt; for Old French &lt;em&gt;estat&lt;/em&gt; for Latin &lt;em&gt;status&lt;/em&gt;, etc.    It also affected Romanic borrowings from Germanic (such as espy, eschew).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9tal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;étal&lt;/em&gt; (nm)&lt;/a&gt; [in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9tal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;], whence &lt;em&gt;étaler&lt;/em&gt;, also experiences the morphology above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Why did the late Romans or Old Francophones find &lt;code&gt;words beginning in sc-, sp-, st-&lt;/code&gt;*&lt;code&gt;difficult or unpleasant to pronounce&lt;/code&gt; ? What engendered this epenthesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Why were some words reverted to the Latin spelling? What &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;other cases&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  were these? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T06:54:25.820" Title="Latin's excrescent e- in English and French" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12009" CreationDate="2015-04-11T04:26:13.247" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally this process is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prothesis&lt;/a&gt; when it occurs at the start of a word (epenthesis occurs between two sounds). This process did indeed involve the addition of a vowel to the start of words with these clusters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History of the prothetic vowel insertion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see here, your source only says that this happened in Vulgar Latin; it is silent on the question of whether this process occured during Old French. To find out whether this was an active process in Old French, the place to look would probably be at words that we know, from some other evidence, had to have come into the language around that time and that started with one of the &lt;em&gt;sc- sp- st-&lt;/em&gt; clusters. If Old French writers added an &quot;e&quot; before words like this, we would know they still had difficulties pronouncing the cluster at the start of a word; if they took words like this into the language with the cluster unchanged, we would know that they no longer had any problem with these clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to Germanic words with the prothetic vowel may indicate this process continued into Old French, but you'd have to know when the Germanic words entered the language. From what's written here, it could also be the case that these Germanic words were first taken in by an earlier ancestor of both French and other Romance languages (that might be what the author means in speaking of &quot;Romanic&quot; loanwords). And of course, Old French was not a uniform language across all the times and places it was spoken: perhaps in earlier Old French there was still prothesis, and in later Old French it no longer occurred. It isn't &lt;em&gt;logically&lt;/em&gt; necessary for the vowel prothesis to have still been an active process in Old French, though: once the prothetic vowels were introduced in Vulgar Latin, they were simply passed on into successive versions of French, and indeed the vowels remain in the modern descendants of these words, despite the fact that the process that created them is now obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a few more details about the history of prothetic &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; in French in an article about prothetic &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; in modern Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 11th century old French, a prothetic vowel before #&lt;em&gt;sC&lt;/em&gt; occurred only after a consonant (e.g., “il out espusethe” [he had married]), not after a vowel (e.g., “la spusa” [the spouse]). In 12th century old French, however, the prothetic vowel generalized, as well as in Iberian Romance languages. Later on, due to borrowings from old Latin, Germanic, and other languages, the systematicity of the prothetic vowel was lost in French, but not in languages such as Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 4, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phalle.free.fr/chapters/ph-js-ad-fc_chapter.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;special&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;especial&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;stuto&lt;/em&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;astuto&lt;/em&gt;: perception of prothetic /e/ in speech&#xA;and print by speakers of Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Pierre A. Hallé, Juan Segui, Alberto Dominguez, and Fernando Cuetos)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note however that in modern Spanish, the phenomenon of &quot;synalepha&quot; means that word-initial &quot;e&quot; will typically be pronounced in the same syllable as the last vowel of a preceding vowel-final word, and in modern French, the definite article &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; has its vowel elided before most vowel-initial words, resulting in &lt;em&gt;l',&lt;/em&gt; so &quot;the spouse&quot; is &quot;l'épouse&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modern French&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, in Modern French there is no such active process of prothesis for words starting with &lt;em&gt;sc- sp- st-&lt;/em&gt; clusters, as we can see from words like &lt;em&gt;scolaire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sportif&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stupide&lt;/em&gt;. These words were not exactly &quot;reverted&quot; to the Latin form just in spelling; rather, they were re-introduced, with both new Latin-based spellings and new pronunciations, by learned individuals who knew Latin, and the terms then developed to become part of the modern French language. (This class of words, which, rather than developing continuously and directly from Vulgar Latin, were re-introduced or altered on the basis of their written Latin source, are sometimes referred to by the name &lt;em&gt;cultismes&lt;/em&gt; or cultisms.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, more intellectual, fancy, rarely-used terms are more likely to have been brought closer to the Latin forms in this way, and the more common, everyday and ordinary words are more likely to have changed and diverged the most from Latin. There are many noun-adjective pairs in French where the noun has some sound changes that were reversed or resisted on the adjective: a relevant example for this particular sound change is the pair &lt;em&gt;école-scolaire&lt;/em&gt;, where we see that the noun has the excrescent &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; and has lost the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; while the adjective simply has the same initial consonant cluster as the Classical Latin word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin of the process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the original Vulgar Latin speakers found these clusters difficult: &quot;why&quot; questions can be difficult to answer in linguistics, unfortunately. However, there's nothing wrong with the question in principle, and hopefully someone with a more expert knowledge of historical linguistics and of phonetics than mine will give you a good explanation. Based on what I know, it tends to be considered easier in general to pronounce clusters following what is known as the &quot;sonority hierarchy&quot;, where at one end are the plosives, sounds that cannot be extended at all like &quot;p&quot; &quot;t&quot; &quot;k&quot;, and at the other end are gliding and liquid sounds like &quot;w&quot; and &quot;l&quot;. In initial clusters, low-sonority sounds like plosives tend to precede high-sonority sounds like glides and liquids, so it is easier to pronounce a syllable like &quot;pla&quot; than it is to pronounce one like &quot;lpa&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fricative sounds like &quot;s&quot; or &quot;f&quot; are generally considered to lie in between these two types of sound in sonority. So by this theory, we should expect the most natural clusters with &quot;s&quot; to be clusters like &quot;sla&quot; and &quot;psa&quot;; a consonant cluster like that in &quot;spa&quot; has the sounds &quot;the wrong way around&quot; in terms of the sonority hierarchy; the cluster is to some degree an exception to the general principle, which might explain why it was made easier to pronounce by inserting a vowel before it in Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be relevant that in Classical Latin, even though &lt;em&gt;sc-, sp-, st-&lt;/em&gt; were tolerated as clusters word-initially, they seem to have typically been syllabified as &lt;em&gt;-s.c-, -s.p-, -s.t-&lt;/em&gt;  in word-internal intervocalic contexts, judging by the operation of the Classical Latin stress rule which is sensitive to syllable weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T06:54:25.820" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T06:54:25.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-11T04:32:00.043" Score="4" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;1. Why do  &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/etreverbs_2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these 16 verbs&lt;/a&gt; require &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; as the auxiliary verb, to form the &lt;em&gt;passé composé&lt;/em&gt;  in French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/etreverbs_3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abbreviated as DMPRRS, these 6 (of the 16)&lt;/a&gt;  are ambitransitive. When transitive, their auxiliary verb reverts to the usual &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;. Why? &#xA;Are there explanations more detailed than John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;'s  beneath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;[p. 102 Bottom]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Learn a European language, including any Germanic language but Swedish, and note that quite often, while most verbs form their past perfect with the verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;—&lt;em&gt;Ich habe gesprochen&lt;/em&gt; (“I have spoken”)—a good little bunch do it with the verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, too—&lt;em&gt;Ich bin gekommen&lt;/em&gt; (“I ‘am come’ ”). Just like in Old English: &lt;em&gt;Learning had fallen away&lt;/em&gt; was “Learning &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; fallen away”: &lt;em&gt;Lār āfeallen wæs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Marking some verbs with be instead of have is a matter of being explicit about a certain nuance: in the perfect, the verbs marked with &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; refer, technically, to a state rather than an action; i.e., something that &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;s. When you say you have arrived, you mean that you have now achieved the state of being there: “I’m here, so let’s get started.” On the other hand, when you talk about how you raked leaves this afternoon, you usually are getting across that you &lt;em&gt;per-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[p. 103]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;formed&lt;/em&gt; the action of raking leaves, not that you have achieved the &lt;em&gt;state&lt;/em&gt; of having raked the leaves and are now ready to have your picture taken.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We English speakers think, “Well, yeah . . .” but hardly feel it necessary to split that hair. The other Germanic languages do split it—and Old English did.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But something strange started happening in Middle English, as usual; now it was the &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;-perfect that was falling away (like autumn leaves). By Shakespeare, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is used with only a few verbs &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(“And didst thou not, when she was gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people?” &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part II&lt;/em&gt;, II, i, 96) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and today, it lingers on only in a frozen form such as &lt;em&gt;The autumn leaves now are gone&lt;/em&gt;. Even there, you may well have thought of &lt;em&gt;gone&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective (&lt;em&gt;The leaves are red, The leaves are gone&lt;/em&gt;), and in any case you can also say &lt;em&gt;The autumn leaves &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; gone&lt;/em&gt;, which, in this case of the grand old Old English &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;-perfect, they have, as always in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[p. 148 Bottom]&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/3415/50720&quot;&gt;[The content is also mooted on English SE]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  And forget our processing that when we &lt;em&gt;have e-mailed&lt;/em&gt; something, an action has been performed while when we &lt;em&gt;have left&lt;/em&gt;, a state has arisen in which we &lt;em&gt;are gone&lt;/em&gt;. When using the perfect, Old English speakers used &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, with a bunch of verbs that referred more to how things ended up than an event happening. Apparently to us today, “states, schmates”—everything is an action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/159240720X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Language Is&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xFQbHnvLonkC&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=%22robust+in+its+germanic+relatives%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=o61SulUblG&amp;amp;sig=mqVqkEkgOK5-LwTrwsKB6tnmJrs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi51o6vouHbAhXCmVkKHQ2FDeAQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22robust%20in%20its%20germanic%20relatives%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 27 Top&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Or, what part of speech is &lt;em&gt;gone&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;She is gone&lt;/em&gt;? Call it an &#xA;adjective—and explain why you can't say &lt;em&gt;a gone dog&lt;/em&gt; as you can &#xA;say &lt;em&gt;a brown dog&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;She is gone&lt;/em&gt; is English's wan gesture toward &#xA;something robust in its Germanic relatives, in which a whole &#xA;group of verbs take &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; in the past, because they &#xA;describe something that is more how you are than what you &#xA;did. To be gone is just that, to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; gone. Sure, it is also technically &#xA;to &quot;have&quot; exerted the action of leaving, but we think more read-ily of the result of the leaving, that one is in the state of being &#xA;gone. Thus just as French has &lt;em&gt;Il est allé&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;He is gone,&quot; German &#xA;has &lt;em&gt;Er ist gegangen&lt;/em&gt;. All of the other Germanic languages have &#xA;the equivalent, or almost all (what's up with you, Swedish?). &#xA;English crudely forces &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; on every verb, and while Swedish &#xA;does, too, that's just one coarseness, as if it happened not to &#xA;learn to put a napkin in its lap but still went about in double- &#xA;breasted suits and cultivated orchids. English, in comparison, &#xA;just-the-facts-ma'am across the board, is Cro-Magnon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T08:04:13.247" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T08:04:13.247" Title="Why is 'be' sometimes the auxiliary verb for the present perfect?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12011" CreationDate="2015-04-11T05:01:56.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;DR &amp;amp; MRS VANDERTRAMP are &lt;strong&gt;verbs that deal with state, movement, and direction&lt;/strong&gt;. They are also used intransitively (without a direct object; e.g., &lt;em&gt;Je suis sorti.&lt;/em&gt;, 'I went out.').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the difference notably when you consider that if some of these same verbs are used transitively or ditransitively, then « être » is no longer the copula. Instead, those verbs then take « avoir » as their copula (e.g., &lt;em&gt;J'ai sorti les poubelles&lt;/em&gt;, 'I took out the trash.').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was birthed. (vs) *I have birthed. (vs) I have birthed two kids.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was outed. (vs) *I have outed. (vs) I have outed the cheaters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples won't match up exactly  cross-linguistically, but the general idea is there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Fagyal et al. (2006), &quot;The combination of the auxiliary verb...and the past participle [in French] might have originally retained the possessive meaning of 'to have' [from Latin], so that &lt;em&gt;epistolas scriptas habeo&lt;/em&gt; might have meant 'I have written some letter' or 'I have some letters that were written'.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that latin roots referring to possesives when using 'have' may be attributing to the need in French for a secondary PAST AUX (« être ») for statives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastEditorUserId="9529" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T06:04:51.193" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T06:04:51.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2015-04-11T12:48:37.343" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;City is ambi-syllabic in /t/. Rapid has an ambi-syllabic /p/, but not the /b/ in rabid, which is actually&#xA;ra-bid. Watcher has an ambi-syllabic /t/. The /p/  in apple&#xA;straddles the phonetic boundary between the first and second syllables. Petrol should not be syllabified as pe.trol (Merriam Webster), pet.rol (Cambridge), or&#xA;petr.ol (Longman). To achieve the implicit assumption that the written syllable must match the heard syllable in a one-to-one manner, we need to claim that /t/&#xA;is ambi-syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9549" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T12:48:37.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12260" CreationDate="2015-04-11T14:43:29.610" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to replicate the results of a paper which didn't share its data methods that clearly. It makes use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2006T13a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Web 1T 5-gram Version 1&lt;/a&gt; data set collected from Google to expand 72 words into 964 by studying the co-occurrences of those words in 4- and 5-grams data set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We expanded the original 72 terms to a lexicon of 964 associated terms by analyzing word co-occurrences in a collection of 2.5 billion 4- and 5-grams&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there be any particular reason why they decided to choose 4- and 5- grams and ignore the uni-, bi- and tri- grams? Would the longer n-gram provide a stronger co-occurrence or maybe it allowed them to apply a weight on the distance from the target word if the window size included the whole n-gram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9550" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T00:42:51.493" Title="Reason for using 4- and 5-grams for co-occurrence analysis" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2015-04-11T16:53:45.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's very clear that a single intervocalic consonant before an unstressed vowel goes in the preceding syllable.  The earliest reference I know of is a paper in &lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt; by James Hoard in 1971.  The title was &quot;Aspiration, Tenseness, and Syllabication in English&quot;.  That they go in the preceding syllable is David Stampe's view in his paper &quot;Divinity Fudge&quot; (CLS) and my and Irwin Howard's view in &quot;Another Mouthful of Divinity Fudge&quot; (CLS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sort of half-way version of this idea became popular in the 70s on the East Coast, which was that such consonants are ambisyllabic.  Why place them in the second syllable as well as the first?  I was never able to discern any reasoning behind this at all.  I guess, something like &quot;Well, everyone thinks they go in the second syllable, and now I find evidence they go in the first, so, duh, they must be in both syllables.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason those consonants so often get put in the second syllable in dictionaries and elsewhere is apparently the way people say things when they sound them out, syllable by syllable.  &quot;City&quot; is &quot;ci-&quot; plus &quot;ty&quot;.  But when you say the syllables one by one, you stress all the vowels, and of course that changes the syllabification, so that now, those consonants go with the following syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence that such consonants go in the previous syllable has to do with the preference of various lenitory processes for applying to syllable offset consonants.  Flapping is the most obvious case, where you find intervocalic t/d/n flapping at the end of a word regardless of whether the following vowel is stressed, but within a word, flapping only before a stressless vowel.  But lots of stuff works that way.  Syllable offset r in English loses its roundness in &quot;very&quot;, e.g.  Syllable offset &quot;y&quot; is palatal, but syllable onset &quot;y&quot; is palato-alveolar.  In casual speech, intervocalic syllable offset k/g can lenite to fricatives, while syllable onset k/g are immune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know you said you're not interested in spelling, but it's amusing that Donald Knuth discussing hyphenation (in the TeXBook, I think) remarks that the verb &quot;re-cord&quot; hyphenates differently from the noun &quot;rec-ord&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T19:20:46.783" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T19:20:46.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12011" CreationDate="2015-04-11T17:38:21.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;why&quot; of it is essentially a question of whether the participle refers back to the subject. The &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; verbs all refer to a changed state of the subject — which is particularly obvious with &lt;em&gt;naître&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mourir&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tomber&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rester&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you might ask: why just those thirteen verbs? Aren't there many more that can be construed to involve a change of the subject's state, and hence require &quot;be&quot; rather than &quot;have&quot;? Why is &quot;I have grown up&quot; &lt;em&gt;J'ai grandi&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;*Je suis grandi&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a reasonable question. In fact, there are languages that are more consistent about be/have, such as Danish: &lt;em&gt;Jeg &lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; vokset op&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have ('am') grown up&quot;, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;Jeg &lt;strong&gt;har&lt;/strong&gt; set noget&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have seen something&quot;. It must have been the case with French at some point as well, before &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; began to take over, so that only thirteen &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; verbs remained in the end, most likely because they were common enough for their existing perfect forms to survive as set phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T17:38:21.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-11T18:41:35.400" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distinguishing between &lt;em&gt;inclusive or&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;exclusive or&lt;/em&gt; in logic is useful. Is there already an ascribed way of using each of these operators in everyday speech in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9552" LastEditorUserId="9552" LastEditDate="2015-04-11T18:55:10.033" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T18:55:10.033" Title="Does English have a common parlance demarcation between inclusive disjunction and exclusive disjunction?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12018" CreationDate="2015-04-11T18:50:31.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with McCawley that the English &quot;or&quot; is always inclusive.  Sometimes extraneous circumstances make the &quot;both&quot; interpretation unreasonable, giving the false impression that there is an exclusive sense.  I think that argument is probably in McCawley's book &lt;strong&gt;What linguists always wanted to know about logic, but were afraid to ask&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-11T18:50:31.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12044" CreationDate="2015-04-11T18:55:27.607" Score="4" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/01/why-is-english-a-germanic-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammarphobia.com:&lt;/a&gt;] The study, published in 1973, offered this breakdown of sources [of English vocabulary]:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Latin: 28.34%;  French: 28.3%;  &#xA;  Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%; Greek: 5.32%;   no etymology given: 4.03%;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  derived from proper names: 3.28%;  all other languages, &amp;lt; 1%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the terms from p 186, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson). Abbreviate 'Ancestral (ie: Mother) Language' to &lt;strong&gt;AL&lt;/strong&gt; and a Daughter Language to &lt;strong&gt;DQ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/dVC42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Quora answer&lt;/a&gt; induced the entitled question, because it avers that knowledge of Latin will improve English, 'in ways that most any second language will improve your first language usage'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eg: Since English vocabulary is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;26% Germanic&lt;/a&gt;, will a dual Francophone &lt;code&gt;Germanophone&lt;/code&gt; Classicist (expert in Greek and Latin) know more about English, than just a Francophone Classicist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T20:44:58.657" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T20:44:58.657" Title="Does learning ancestral languages enrich a daughter language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12025" CreationDate="2015-04-11T22:07:47.700" Score="2" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently thinking about code-switching (i.e. switching between languages within a sentence, social exchange, phrase, etc.) Would switching between dialects or accents of the same language under those same situations be considered code-switching? Is there a certain 'distance' - in terms of structure and usage - that a dialect or accent has to be away from the main language to be considered code-switching?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9555" LastEditorUserId="9555" LastEditDate="2015-04-12T00:06:18.510" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T07:11:04.873" Title="How distinct do two language varieties need to be in order to consider their alternating usage to be an act of code-switching?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12020" CreationDate="2015-04-11T23:44:39.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would not help at all, and could potentially harm your understanding of your primary language. This is because &lt;em&gt;languages are always changing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you tried to improve your primary language vocabulary through learning one of those ancestral languages you would very frequently be tricked by these phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;false friends&lt;/a&gt;: words that look similar but are entirely unrelated&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;false/folk etymology&lt;/a&gt;: often many etymologies we think we know are actually wrong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the etymological fallacy&lt;/a&gt;: even if you manage to correctly identify the correct etymologies, that will tell you nothing about what the word currently means&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter what proportion of the time you'll hit one of these problems - to ensure that you aren't you'll need to check a good English dictionary &lt;em&gt;every single time&lt;/em&gt;. So it won't end up helping you any more than just checking a good English dictionary to start with would help! Learn other languages, but do so for their own sake, not to pretend it will help your English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-13T01:24:04.813" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T01:24:04.813" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-12T02:39:52.883" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following entries on Wiktionary (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;carte&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;French&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;noun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;card&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chart&lt;/strong&gt;; map&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;menu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;card&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English &lt;em&gt;carde&lt;/em&gt; (“playing card”), from Old French &lt;em&gt;carte&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;charta&lt;/em&gt;, from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;χάρτης&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;khártēs&lt;/em&gt;, “paper, papyrus”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;chart&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle French &lt;em&gt;charte&lt;/em&gt; (“card, map”), from Late Latin &lt;em&gt;charta&lt;/em&gt; (“paper, card, map”), Latin (&amp;quot;papyrus, writing&amp;quot;), from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;χάρτης&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;khártēs&lt;/em&gt;, “papyrus, thin sheet”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;χάρτης&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;noun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sheet of paper&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From χαράσσω (kharássō, “I &lt;strong&gt;scratch&lt;/strong&gt;, inscribe”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰer- (“to &lt;strong&gt;scratch&lt;/strong&gt;”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;scratch&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably from a blend of the Middle English words &lt;em&gt;scratten&lt;/em&gt; (“to scratch”) and &lt;em&gt;crachen&lt;/em&gt; (“to scratch”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any further etymology for &lt;em&gt;scratch&lt;/em&gt;. It seems to me that Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;χάρτης&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;khártēs&lt;/em&gt;) is similar to Modern English &lt;em&gt;scratch&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. a mid-point could be &lt;em&gt;krats&lt;/em&gt;). Could these words have the same source as each other considering that the root word is hypothesised to mean &lt;em&gt;scratch&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T02:39:52.883" Title="Could &quot;scratch&quot; be derived from the same PIE source as &quot;card&quot; and &quot;chart&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12021" CreationDate="2015-04-12T07:11:04.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's in no clear cut definition of code switching with respect to language distance. In fact, there is no universally shared definition of code switching - although scholars generally talk about the same range of phenomena. The concept was originally developed to account for switching between two distinct languages during conversation among bilingual speakers of English and Spanish. This is still the stereotypical example in linguistics textbooks where code switching is also closely associated with diglossia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, scholars have used the term even when it comes to quite close varieties of a language from AAVE to Czech alterations in standard and non-standard morphology or Norwegian standard and non-standard usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have to consider the whole range of uses to which code switching is subject ranging across things like filling gaps in linguistic knowledge, humor, in-group identification, social function, etc. These can all happen with very similar or distinct codes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I would argue that code switching is a very useful term to apply even between registers of the same variety. If you consider snippets like &quot;Then Frank spoken unto Karen.&quot; or &quot;Ladies and Gentlemen we are well and truly fucked.&quot; both the speaker and the listeners have to employ very similar cognition and world knowledge as they do in code switching between typologically or genetically distinct languages. A type of code switching is also a feature of conversation in groups with mixed politeness requirements among speakers all speaking in the same register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I teach linguistics to language teachers, I always put special emphasis on code switching because they are likely to encounter a version of it with their students who have to learn a new variety of both school and written style language. Teachers have a tendency to treat all other codes as 'wrong' versions of what the standard which they consider the language. In many cases, accents and dialects make things even more complicated for them with many historical examples of abuse by the school system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paradoxically, there are many examples of borrowing like &quot;He has a certain &lt;em&gt;je ne sais quoi&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are not generally meaningful examples of code switching between English and French - but could be examples of code switching between registers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.colorado.edu/ling/CRIL/Volume19_Issue1/paper_NILEP.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; has a very nice overview of the history of the term code switching even though it does not address the question of closeness directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T07:11:04.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2015-04-12T07:20:46.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acquisition of phonology is fairly well studied for English. And although, there is a lot of variation among individuals and there are no definite sequences or ages of acquisition, you can find fairly reliable tendencies across the population. However, these may not be very useful (to a lay person or even a linguist not trained in speech therapy) trying to determine whether any individual child is developing typically or there is cause for concern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any list of these stages would be too long for here but you can find it in any introductory text on linguistics that covers language acquisition (partly because it is the one area of language acquisition where there is some certainty). This &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; does a very good job of describing some of the key phases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T07:20:46.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12020" CreationDate="2015-04-12T07:38:20.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is generally no. Particularly not when it comes to fluency. Unless you have some sort of an impairment, you already have enough fluency in your first language. Learning French or Latin will do nothing to improve it hinder it. However, learning Latin and/or French may increase your familiarity with the cultural and linguistic underpinnings of much of writing in English over the last several hundred years. So, you may in effect become a more fluent reader. It may also help you understanding distinctions that are hidden in modern English orthography - therefore, you may become a more accurate (and perhaps by extension fluent) speller. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not apply across the board. Learning old Germanic or even older varieties of English will not help you at all with any of the above. As won't learning old Church Slavonic to help you improve your Polish. English is quite a unique case here because language contact has played such a profound role for so long and in so many ways. While language contact has formed all known languages to some extent, I find it hard to imagine learning the source languages would be any use whatsoever in the way I outlined above in any other case of contact-induced change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I cannot stress enough, how marginal any potential improvements would be from learning Latin or French on your English. If you are concerned with your fluency, vocabulary or spelling in English, you would be far better served by learning more of those, rather than trying to fix the problem through another language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you already know the other language (at least in part), you can certainly benefit from drawing on that knowledge. I found knowing English useful when learning French vocabulary and I've also come across a textbook of French from the 1930s based on knowledge of Latin. My (albeit rudimentary) knowledge of Latin has definitely been useful for dealing with English words of Latin origin. But this also comes with the danger of following the patterns of the original language be it with false friends, literally translated idioms or syntactic patterns. I would compare such knowledge to being the occasional useful stepping stone on the muddy journey through language learning but not anything resembling a stone walkway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention knowledge &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; language such as that by scholars. Every scholar of English should know enough about French, Latin or Old English to understand their impact on the current form, but unless they study historical developments of English, they only need to know about it rather than have any detailed knowledge of either of the source languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T07:38:20.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-04-12T10:11:18.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I'm too late commenting there.&#xA;I'm not going to point out how some people wrote some words incorrectly in their examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Slovak and obviously Czech is the closest to me. I can't really understand Slovenian. I can understand it better than Croatian for example, thanks to the fact that Slovenian uses more international words, just like Slovak. But in fact I think I wouldn't be able to differ Slovenian from Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9559" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T10:11:18.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12002" CreationDate="2015-04-12T16:54:01.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;History does not know of any mixed language that would not have a language family (except purely constructed languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus for any creole language can be determined its family to which it properly belongs. Languages never mix in equally, it is always the case that one language heavily influences and changes the other, so that the most core features of the original language (such as numerals, pronouns, prepositions) usually remain more or less unchanged even if all other was mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An English-German mix can either be English heavily influenced by German or German heavily influenced by English but nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T16:54:01.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12043" CreationDate="2015-04-12T18:50:24.237" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in creating files where a source text and translation are interleaved with each other, so that each sentence (or small group of sentences) is immediately followed by its translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we start with a source text and a translated text, the crucial step is figuring out which sentences in the source correspond with which sentences in the translation, since there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I've been using machine translation of the source and looking for shared words between the MT text and the human translated text to correlate sentences. Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wlevine/translation_interleaver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code&lt;/a&gt; and an &lt;a href=&quot;https://rawgit.com/wlevine/translation_interleaver/master/texts/underground_chap1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example of the output&lt;/a&gt; (unfortunately, it gets the first sentence wrong, but after that it does okay).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works semi-decently on the few texts I tried it on, but I'm just stumbling around and I was wondering if there are any standard tools or algorithms for doing something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9564" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T09:25:32.733" Title="How to identify corresponding sentences in source and translation texts?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12034" CreationDate="2015-04-12T18:57:37.743" Score="13" ViewCount="1412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas derives from Aramaic תאומא (cognate with the Hebrew תאום). My understanding was that Aramaic, like Tiberian Hebrew, had the fricative [θ] as a conditioned allophone for the plosive [t], and that the latter would always appear at the start of a word. Why then was Thomas transliterated with a Θ rather than a Τ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-13T13:22:13.987" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T13:22:13.987" Title="Why was the name תאומא transliterated as Θωμᾶς (Thomas) rather than Τωμᾶς (Tomas)?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12033" CreationDate="2015-04-12T20:20:08.377" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is because, at least in the later borrowings, Semitic ṭ ט is regularly represented by τ [t], while t ת is represented by θ [th]. It has  to do with the fact that the Semitic emphatics are unaspirated, while the plain stops are aspirated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fricative pronunciation of Greek θ, and of Aramaic/Hebrew post-vocalic t does not emerge until well into the Christian era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-04-12T20:25:57.803" LastActivityDate="2015-04-12T20:25:57.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-13T00:37:04.510" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for a word, especially a person's name, to have zero characters in it? No letters, no numbers, no punctuation, just totally empty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of some people not having a surname, or not having a middle name, but someone not having a name would be different from having a name that has no letters in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2015-04-13T01:08:14.273" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T03:08:43.097" Title="Can a word have zero characters in it?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-04-13T09:39:22.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2015-04-13T00:59:40.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called 'alignment', and there are open source tools for the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmt.org/moses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.statmt.org/moses/&lt;/a&gt;, and in particular, GIZA++, for the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you want to do MT, you want to start with the vast amount of existing tools and expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9565" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T00:59:40.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12036" CreationDate="2015-04-13T03:08:43.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't count underline as a character, sure.  Though it's old fashioned.  To give the impression that a story was redacted from a police report, but with the name of a principle character concealed, you see things like &quot;After recovering from these violent events, ___ met with this investigator to give his account of the strange goings on.&quot;  Or, translating to contemporary usage, you could have the appearance of a name blacked out with magic marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T03:08:43.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12020" CreationDate="2015-04-13T04:55:53.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer to the &quot;is there any research&quot; question is &quot;who knows?&quot;: you can wait and see if anyone refers to a scientific study, but I suspect that no such study exists. The answer to the question whether knowledge of some other relevant language &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; improves fluency of the target language is &quot;no&quot;. Outside of mathematical physics, most questions with &quot;always&quot; in them have the answer &quot;no&quot;. In this case, the reason is simply that the psychology of second language learning is extremely idiosyncratic, so even strong tendencies can be falsified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should start with questions like, &quot;Does learning Latin help in learning {Portuguese, French, Romanian}&quot;, or (distinctly) &quot;Does learning Arabic help in learning {Swahili, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu}&quot;. In the first case, you would be asking whether learning an actual antecedent language helps in learning the LIQ. Neither Latin or Greek are actual antecedents of English, and the influence of those languages is like the influence of Arabic on Swahili. German and Dutch are also not ancestral languages: only Middle English and Old English are ancestral languages of English. If you invent a very open-ended definition of &quot;ancestral&quot; language where French or Norwegian are ancestral languages since English does contain some words of actual (modern) French and Norwegian (e.g. &lt;em&gt;milieu, lutefisk&lt;/em&gt;), then most world languages would be &quot;ancestral languages&quot;. An &quot;ancestral language&quot; would be an actual historically antecedent state of the LIQ, ergo one no longer spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no denying that knowledge of Arabic can help knowledge of Swahili, Turkish etc. in a minor fashion, but this is a many-way street -- knowledge of one helps acquisition of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other (contact-style) relative, to some minor extent. My knowledge of Arabic has been improved a tad, by learning Swahili -- I can Arabicize words that I learned initially in Swahili, and can make fair guesses about what the Arabic word will be, even though in fact those words went from Arabic to Swahili and not the reverse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T04:55:53.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-13T07:44:53.737" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am implementing the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mcollins/io.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Inside-outside algorithm&lt;/a&gt; to estimate the parameters of a PCFG based on the train corpus. One observation (on existing implementations) is that, the grammar is converted into Chomsky normal form (binarization) prior to the Expectation-Maximization (EM) step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, checking the EM formula, I feel the algorithm can work perfectly without the binarization. Thus, I would like to ask if the binarization step is compulsory, or it is to enhance the performance, or it is just to make the formula clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9568" LastEditorUserId="9568" LastEditDate="2015-04-13T09:39:56.440" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T09:39:56.440" Title="Inside-outside algorithm (PCFG learning) and binarization" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2015-04-13T09:25:32.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known as parallel text alignment (or bitext alignment). A popular open source tool is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mokk.bme.hu/en/resources/hunalign/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hunalign&lt;/a&gt; which partially uses the Gale-Church sentence length algorithm detailed in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://web5.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/courses/old/cs4705-06/J93-1004.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that you are using Ruby as well as the sentence segmentation gem I wrote :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a Ruby gem implementation of Gale-Church check out this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mlj/alignment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gem&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently in the process of writing a new gem that uses a combination of machine translation, relative sentence length and position to align two parallel corpora. I talked a little bit about it in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/diasks2/exploring-natural-language-processing-in-ruby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;presentation&lt;/a&gt; I gave recently. I think you are on the right path with using machine translation as a heuristic to aid in the alignment. I'd be happy to share what I've built so far if you reach out to me by email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9569" LastActivityDate="2015-04-13T09:25:32.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12020" CreationDate="2015-04-13T11:28:34.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have actually asked a few related but different questions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does learning ancestral languages enrich a subsequent language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning any language may enrich your native language(s):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By learning the grammar rules of another language you may become more aware of grammar in your native language(s) by contrast&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related languages may reintroduce you to a word you already know but rarely use. This may increase the vocabulary you use, rather than the vocabulary you know. You might discover a new word in your native language but this is much less likely. You may be introduced to a new concept in the other language and learn a new word that way too&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words from a related language may give you an insight into why certain words in your native language(s) mean what they do, rather than just accepting the words as &quot;just the way they are&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knowledge of a related language may help improve spelling. A common complaint of English is that the spelling (and pronunciation) rules are very inconsistent. This inconsistency diminishes (but does not completely disappear!) when you group words by origin. Words from French, Latin, Greek and Germanic roots via Old English and Middle English have much more consistency internally than they do in common&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research has been done that suggests that being bilingual can improve some aspects of brain function: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/1760&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language - The “bilingual advantage”: Does learning a second language improve working memory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand words often change in spelling, pronunciation and meaning over time or at the point of assimilation from another language. This causes the phenomenon of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;false friends&lt;/a&gt; between languages in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The meanings of words that were originally the same have diverged although their forms remain the same or similar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two unrelated words have coincidentally become the same or similar in spelling, pronunciation or both. E.g. &quot;blesser&quot; in French means &quot;to wound&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does knowledge of more of the AL of the LIQ, always improve fluency in LIQ? Any research on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowledge of language Y will not help &lt;strong&gt;fluency&lt;/strong&gt; in language X. Only more experience in language X will help because all languages are different, and the differences are dynamic and unpredictable. Any research? I don't know but probably not. Reading more in the target language is one way to increase fluency, as long as the written language is not substantially different from the spoken language, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Norwegian&lt;/a&gt; Bokmål (&quot;book tongue&quot;) vs. Nynorsk (&quot;new Norwegian&quot;) and contemporary (spoken) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sinhala&lt;/a&gt; vs. formal (classic) Sinhala. You will probably increase your vocabulary by reading older books (even from as little as 50 years ago) as some words can go out of fashion yet still be widely and clearly understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will a dual Francophone Germanophone Classics scholar know more about English, than just a Francophone Classicist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who has studied Germanic and Italic languages should know more about the history and evolution of English than someone who has just studied Italic languages, for example that &lt;em&gt;childr&lt;strong&gt;en&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ox&lt;strong&gt;en&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;brethr&lt;strong&gt;en&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; have all formed their plurals from a regular Germanic plural suffix &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-en&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, rather than just being considered weird exceptions to the general Modern English rule of adding &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. They should know more etymologies, etc. It is important that they study the history, not just the contemporary languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, is studying another language beneficial to your native language(s) or an antecedent language beneficial to one of its descendants? It depends on the individual, but on the whole I would say yes. When you study related languages you will find more similarities than when studying unrelated languages. You may end up learning more from the differences than the similarities, but you will surely learn something!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2015-05-03T02:31:00.107" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T02:31:00.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-04-14T11:12:58.057" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Georgian. One letter only one sound/speling/, one sound/speling/ only one letter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9570" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T11:12:58.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12047" CreationDate="2015-04-14T15:34:19.003" Score="1" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;the phrase: &quot;Sit down&quot; phonetically looks like [sɪt daʊn]. The &quot;t&quot; and &quot;d&quot; are in the same tongue position. Can we drop the &quot;t&quot; in the first word in this situation in fast/casual speech? like this: [sɪdaʊn]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T18:12:59.497" Title="Consonants in the same tongue position" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12046" CreationDate="2015-04-14T16:29:36.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to be talking fast. Something does happen, and you could call it &quot;dropping&quot;, but /t/ isn't necessarily phonologically deleted. If you do delete /d/, you'd get flapping and the result would be the same as if you deleted /t/. Or the tongue gestures overlap in time, giving the same result as segment deletion. I don't think you can do that in British English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: BTW, this is not a general process, it's limited to a few fixed expressions. Compare most instances of /t#d/ as in &quot;straight down&quot;, &quot;Put Don on the chair&quot;, &quot;Hit Darlene&quot;, &quot;sit downwind&quot; and so on, where there is no dropping. It's the same lexicalized contraction process that you have in &quot;will not&quot; → &quot;won't&quot;, &quot;going to&quot; → &quot;gonna&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-14T18:12:59.497" LastActivityDate="2015-04-14T18:12:59.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12049" CreationDate="2015-04-14T23:11:34.043" Score="7" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have long felt that [f] and [s] are hard to tell apart on the phone, especially when spelling out words letter by letter.  As a non linguist (but audio engineer) it seems to me that the frequencies required to distinguish them are usually higher than the bandwidth of the phone codec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I fell foul of this in a most unfortunate way, and managed to get a parking penalty charge because the automated pay-by-phone system for the car park registered the wrong license plate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to help me prepare the case to contest my parking ticket - can anyone provide me with a citation for this fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9574" LastEditorUserId="9574" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T11:28:02.713" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T18:43:02.453" Title="Indistinguishability of [f] and [s] on phone - citation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12048" CreationDate="2015-04-15T00:45:29.783" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/gordon/fricativeacoustics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; may be useful for its collection of references. &lt;a href=&quot;http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/plab/CPLWorkingPapers/pdfs/wpcpl12-Jongman.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; is a single simple read. The problem is that the spectral properties of fricatives are usually reported in terms of the frequency of the spectral peak, where /f/ and /s/ are clearly different but also above the cutoff frequency for the phone. Another part of the black box that you're up against is that the ASR system doesn't involve a small, phonetically trained human making spectrograms, so you'd need to come up with a reason to think that the system they used has problems. (It isn't generally the case that nobody can distinguish [s] and [f] on the phone, and I think that some ASR systems introduce problems, so learning how ASR works could be helpful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citation for the Jongman paper is Jongman, A., Wayland, R., &amp;amp; Wong, S. (1998). 'Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives: I. Static cues'. &lt;em&gt;Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory&lt;/em&gt;. 12: 195-205. The current URL is &lt;a href=&quot;http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/plab/paper/wpcpl12-Jongman.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/plab/paper/wpcpl12-Jongman.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T18:43:02.453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T18:43:02.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T03:33:23.310" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=splice&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt;'s entry for &lt;strong&gt;splice&lt;/strong&gt; {verb}:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1520s, originally a sailors' word, from Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;splissen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to splice&quot; (Dutch &lt;em&gt;splitsen&lt;/em&gt;), from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;spli-&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;strong&gt;PIE root *(s)plei- &quot;to split, splice&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=flint&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flint&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Dutch word was borrowed in French as &lt;em&gt;épisser&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to split&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;to splice&lt;/strong&gt; are antonyms; so I'm confused. Is this PIE root a contronym?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, how did it become thus? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: I just discovered the pricelessness in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12022/5306&quot;&gt;WARILY&lt;/a&gt; learning PIE roots, for improving my English and French vocabulary. Please pardon this question if it's naive, but please do advise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T13:17:19.500" Title="PIE root *(s)plei-: &quot;to split, splice&quot;?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T05:48:14.617" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say aliens (someone completely new to the language) want to talk with users of it. They've obtained a complete dictionary, and a large selection of natural text (for this hypothetical situation, let's say the full Wikipedia database dump of that language) and unlimited computing power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming they successfully obtain these two pieces of data in textual form, would it be possible with this data to reconstruct the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of this situation, let's say the data is in textual form not in binary (they can see the exact content of it as we would read it) and let's assume they have obtained the correct information (someone who speaks the language gave it to them). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at this from the point of view of aliens; for a story of mine. Could they possibly learn our languages? How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9575" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T07:47:47.713" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T08:01:56.177" Title="Could a language be reconstructed from a dictionary and lots of natural text?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12050" CreationDate="2015-04-15T12:22:55.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED (the uncredited source for most of the entries in etymonline) is a bit more cautious; its entry on “splice” says: “&amp;lt; Middle Dutch splissen, of doubtful origin, but perhaps related to split v.” Both “splice” and “split” are originally nautical terms, borrowed from Dutch. I do not see any great difficulty in the semantic development split &gt; splice. You have to split a cable before you can splice it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T12:22:55.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12066" CreationDate="2015-04-15T14:05:26.853" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in having a few references to (more of less) full grammars of natural languages that would be written under Minimalist approach. Are there any around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, accounts of some major specific phenomena would be good, too, as long as they encompass large chunks of grammar (like word order in Russian -- by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/grammar-and-information-structure-grammar-and-information-structure-a-study-with-reference-to-russian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Slioussar&lt;/a&gt; or by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/a-phase-based-approach-to-russian-free-word-order-a-phase-based-approach-to-russian-free-word-order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dyakonova&lt;/a&gt; -- which cuts across much syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T15:30:53.457" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T22:27:59.300" Title="What languages have been documented using Minimalism?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T15:03:14.580" Score="0" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;In contemporary Boston speech and probably also in Maine it seems to me that the realization of /ɒ/ is widely much less constricted, and in some realizations allophonically more fronted/centralized than RP /ɒ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some good samples, although the first one is clearly chosen to showcase Boston's distinctive broad /aː/ and not /ɒ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbK4cL3QSc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbK4cL3QSc0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiNNsd5Fp80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiNNsd5Fp80&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to notate this vowel in a close transcription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9582" LastEditorUserId="9582" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T19:58:35.360" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T19:58:35.360" Title="How to transcribe allophones of /ɒ/ in Boston English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12057" CreationDate="2015-04-15T16:06:38.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard method exemplified in the illustrations of the IPA is to pick some appropriate symbol, and then situate the vowel more exactly in the vowel space by nudging the vowel up, back, or whatever. The letter &amp;lt;ɒ&gt; is most appropriate. Since there is a contrasting [a],  would not be appropriate. The choice between &amp;lt;ɑ&gt; and &amp;lt;ɒ&gt; should be guided by the question of which vowel the sound in question is more like. That requires a standard of comparison, which you can get &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and on those grounds I would select &amp;lt;ɒ&gt;. (The Ladefoged pages also have definitive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter9/cardinal/secondaryvowels/secondary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Jones recordings&lt;/a&gt;, but no single clickable chart for side-by-side comparisons). There are also diacritics that can be added to vowels to indicate raised / lowered / retracted / advanced / more~less-rounded variants, but they don't combine well and only allow a 2-way distinction (retracted, but not retracted a lot vs. a little). Hence the practice of positioning the vowels in a standard vowel space diagram gives you greater accuracy. The nudge-diacritics are usually used to represent major contextually-determined subdivisions, such as retracted and non-retracted variants of vowels in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, greatest accuracy is achieved by measuring and reporting formant means, or even splatter plots with ovals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit] To clarify, if you can two discern contextually-predictable variants of the back vowel, a fronter and a backer version, then the thing to do is define the &quot;basic&quot; value of the unmodified symbol &amp;lt;ɒ&gt; as that with the most general distribution, and use the &quot;fronted&quot; or &quot;retracted&quot; diacritic (as appropriate) for the restricted variant. This still requires placing unmodified &amp;lt;ɒ&gt; somewhere in the vowel chart, which allows us to vaguely estimate where the other variant is produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-15T19:44:35.270" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T19:44:35.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12051" CreationDate="2015-04-15T19:08:31.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would depend on two fundamental issues, the cognitive system of the aliens and the nature of the language database. The main issue is whether they could figure out the referent of &quot;apple&quot; -- i.e. will they ever be able to figure out an association between the letter string and a real thing. That's where photographs with labels are invaluable. The problem of alien cognition is that their perceptual apparatus may be wildly different from ours, and they may not grasp the concept of &quot;multiple instances of the same type&quot;. Sci-fi authors typically don't veer too far on the weird side, and if your aliens are typical meat aliens that interact with the physical universe in a manner similar to us, then you can assume that it's possible. For example, can they see? do they reside in an alternative physical universe (such as the extra-dimensional aliens who created the Outsiders (Known Space)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a words-only corpus, you could not understand the meaning of &quot;The dog chased the boy&quot; vs. &quot;The dog ate the biscuit&quot;. You would probably be able to discern some amount of word-relatedness such as &quot;apple&quot; vs. &quot;apples&quot;, but probably not &quot;think&quot; vs. &quot;thought&quot; unless you mistakenly make &quot;apple&quot; and &quot;apply&quot; also be related. Without knowing what utterances refer to, you wouldn't &quot;know&quot; the language. This was the one valid point in what is otherwise the stupidest instance of sci-fi language-issues, in the Star Trek &quot;Darmok&quot; episode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T19:08:31.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T20:49:35.900" Score="1" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coud anyone explain why is English word accent traditionally defined as dynamic? Due to some of it's features,history? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9584" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:09:34.700" Title="Why is English word accent traditionally defined as dynamic?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12060" CreationDate="2015-04-15T21:09:34.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That tradition (from the 19th century) first divides languages by applying &quot;tone&quot; to Asian languages (exemplified by Chinese -- they didn't know about Japanese) and &quot;accent&quot; to other things. Then it further subdivides &quot;accent&quot; into &quot;pitch accent&quot; exemplified by Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Greek or Lithuanian, and &quot;stress&quot; or &quot;dynamic&quot; accent for Russian, English, Spanish and so on. The theory (since disproven) was that stressed syllables in &quot;dynamic accent&quot; languages involve greater expiratory force and higher amplitude on the stressed syllable (&quot;power&quot;), but in &quot;pitch accent&quot; languages all there is is a change of fundamental frequency on that syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:09:34.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T21:16:57.467" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling of the word 'admit' has a ⟨d⟩ in both English and the Spanish equivalent, &lt;em&gt;admitir&lt;/em&gt;, but not in Italian &lt;em&gt;ammettere&lt;/em&gt;. Why is the ⟨d⟩ absent in the Italian equivalent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9585" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T00:54:16.607" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T02:30:32.740" Title="Spelling Similarities in English and Spanish but not in Italian and Spanish" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12062" CreationDate="2015-04-15T21:31:46.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would make more sense if you asked where the d went to, rather than how it got there. These words come from Latin admittere. The d is retained in English and Spanish, but assimilated to the following m in Italian ammettere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T21:31:46.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T21:52:06.647" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there collective, sweeping official terms that comprise linguistic traps such as these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymological fallacy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folk etymology  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;False friend &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;False cognate&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;False etymology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T17:29:54.653" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T17:40:24.860" Title="What are the blanket or general terms representing these linguistic pitfalls?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-15T22:23:56.703" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; What resources tie &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-language&lt;/a&gt; roots (eg Proto-Indo-European), to English and French, especially if spelling has changed? I always heed &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12064/5306&quot;&gt;linguistic pitfalls&lt;/a&gt;, but I always try to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;find some right ways of interpreting this language, so that it feels reasonable and intuitive&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm suffering this difficulty with the noun 'faith'. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67760?rskey=NueJ3w&amp;amp;result=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; doesn't track far back enough. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=faith&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; is too terse; it doesn't explain how the spelling of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fidere&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; evolved from &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;bheidh-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from Latin &lt;em&gt;fides&lt;/em&gt; &quot;trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief,&quot;     from root of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fidere&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to trust,&quot; from PIE root &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;bheidh-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;to trust&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I can try to learn words top-down and from the top of the tree model, where I can oversee, behold, and absorb all the fascinating links and networks between seemingly unrelated words &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T22:41:00.573" Title="How to trace Proto-language roots towards English and French?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12056" CreationDate="2015-04-15T22:27:59.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Syntax of French&lt;/em&gt; by P.Rowlett (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/syntax-french&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) would be a canonical answer for French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think it is worth pointing out that the project of writing a full grammar of a given language (identified presumably with the official language of some nation-state) or even of devising a complete account of some syntactic phenomenon peculiar to a certain language (say object agreement in French) is at least somewhat at cross-purpose with the minimalist entreprise in syntax, as the latter is interested in the syntactic phenomena that stem from the core human faculty of language and its interaction with interface properties and thus has almost by definition nothing to say about the former's apparent object of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much more congenial to the minimalist framework is the project of writing a complete account of a cross-linguistically attested syntactic phenomenon (binding of pronouns, &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-movement, agreement, raising, DP-licensing, voice alternations, noun incorporation etc.) or even better of the correlations between those in the terms outline above. Of that variety of work, you'll find no shortage; the one you are apparently interested in, not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T22:27:59.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12065" CreationDate="2015-04-15T22:41:00.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing to do is stop thinking about spelling, and start thinking about pronunciation. Proto-Indo-European had no spelling, and for a long time, neither did Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you need to understand the sound changes from PIE to Latin (for a word like &quot;hundred&quot;, you would need to know the sound changes from PIE to proto-Germanic). Two useful books are Buck's &lt;em&gt;Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin&lt;/em&gt; and Brugmann's &lt;em&gt;Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages&lt;/em&gt;. The latter is more complete and will include Germanic, not to mention Celtic, Indic and so on (leaving out the later-discovered languages), but Buck might be easier to use / understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it most useful to pay attention to English word pairs that come via Latin vs. Germanic, like &quot;abide&quot; (Germanic) and &quot;faith&quot; (Latin), which made it easier to remember concrete examples and thus the various sound laws of Latin and Germanic. Though the list is short enough that you can just memorize the main rules. Consulting the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html&quot;&gt;online Walde-Pokorny&lt;/a&gt; is also helpful. (Amazing! you don't even have to go to the library anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-15T22:41:00.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12062" CreationDate="2015-04-16T02:14:58.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;admitir&lt;/em&gt; is not the inherited form of Latin &lt;em&gt;admittere&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish (i.e. it has not undergone the normal Latin &gt; Spanish sound changes), but a later restoration based on the Latin form. If &lt;em&gt;admittere&lt;/em&gt; had come down from Latin to Spanish without restoration, it would probably look something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;ameter&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. (Compare Sp. &lt;em&gt;atenerse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to adjust (to something)&quot; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;attinere se&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, Italian &lt;em&gt;ammettere&lt;/em&gt; is either inherited from &lt;em&gt;admittere&lt;/em&gt;, or was restored and then adapted to the expected Latin &gt; Italian sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other common Spanish words (perhaps more than in Italian, overall) are restorations from Latin, and they often co-exist with a more obscure word that has the same origin, but has developed through the Latin &gt; Spanish sound changes: for example, &lt;em&gt;rápido&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;raudo&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;regla&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;reja&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;quieto&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;quedo&lt;/em&gt;), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T02:14:58.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-16T04:45:44.060" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I excerpt &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109868?rskey=3fYVTY&amp;amp;result=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;, which I read because I want to understand this etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-logy, &lt;em&gt;comb. form&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... These Greek words for the most part are parasynthetic derivatives; in some instances the terminal element is λόγος word, discourse (e.g. in τετραλογία tetralogy, τριλογία trilogy); more commonly it is the root λογ- (ablaut-variant of λεγ-, λέγειν to speak: cf. Logos n.). In the latter case, the ns. in -λογία usually denote the character, action, or department of knowledge proper to the person who is described by an adj. or n. in -λόγος, meaning either ‘(one) &lt;strong&gt;who speaks&lt;/strong&gt; (in a certain way)’, or ‘(one) &lt;strong&gt;who treats of&lt;/strong&gt; (a certain subject)’. Hence the derivatives in -λογία are of two classes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(1) those which have the sense of ‘saying or speaking’, ...; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) names of sciences or departments of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any Greek. Would someone please explain how one word can evolve into the 2 separate meanings (that I bolded)? I asked about the phrasal verb &lt;strong&gt;'treat of'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/53855%27&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T06:52:24.897" Title="Etymology of English suffix -logy" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12069" CreationDate="2015-04-16T06:52:24.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) These are not really separate meanings in the sense of 'treat' and 'speak' being separate words. Just because two different 'senses' are listed in a dictionary, it does not mean that there are two separate meanings (like 'bank') in the minds of the speakers. You could easily see how 'speaking' about a certain subject in a certain way could be viewed as 'treating' it and the difference simply emerging from context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) There are many ways through which words acquire additional senses, sometimes even splitting into pure homonyms. They often involve things like metaphoric extension (as with logos), metonymy (as with 'foot' of the mountain or supposedly 'bank'), or some other figurative process. Frequently, the new senses become primary (as with 'awesome' or 'mistress'). Things are even more complicated when these developments happen across languages through poor learning or simply new contexts. New contexts also play a role in historical developments within a single language (as with 'sir').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T06:52:24.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12305" CreationDate="2015-04-16T09:54:28.703" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a verb network or verb dictionary project in Japanese which shows verbs with  its own dependencies (like [iku DP DP] [kaeru DP] etc.). Is there any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="3687" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T10:07:53.367" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T16:45:34.200" Title="Is there any verb net project in Japanese?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12081" CreationDate="2015-04-16T15:54:43.387" Score="2" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;in the phrase &quot;It's funny&quot;, the stress is usually on the first syllable of the adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ ɪts ˈfʌ ni ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens when the negation &quot;not&quot; appears? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ ɪts nɑt ˈfʌ ni ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure the adjective won't lose stress. Does the adverb &quot;not&quot; need any stress on it? Perhaps a weaker stress than the adjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestion is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T16:09:27.547" Title="Negation word and stress in English" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12073" CreationDate="2015-04-16T16:06:57.623" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excluding emphatic readings like &quot;it's NOT funny&quot;, there isn't anything resembling an accent on &quot;not&quot;. Because of the vowel quality, the vowel of &quot;not&quot; may seem more prominent than the one in &quot;it's&quot;, but change the first word to &quot;that's&quot; and I don't see any difference at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I've observed that judgments on secondary stress are often messed up when vowel qualities differ (the greater duration of [ɑ] in &quot;it's not funny&quot; may be confused with secondary stress). In &quot;It's funny&quot;, the duration difference in the syllables is greatest so judgments that &quot;It's&quot; is unstressed are strong. In &quot;It's not funny&quot;, &quot;not&quot; is longer and it's shorter than &quot;It's&quot;, which can encourage one to think that &quot;not&quot; is somewhat stressed. By lengthening the first syllable (changing &quot;it's&quot; to &quot;that's&quot;), you reduce the duration difference of the first two syllables, which should convince you that there's no stress on &quot;not&quot; and that any feeling that there is, is a consequence of segmental side-effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T16:38:48.443" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T16:38:48.443" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12083" CreationDate="2015-04-16T16:32:46.707" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen in the English language that colors are used to signify what a person feels or a condition that person exists in (i.e. 'blue' referring to sadness and 'red' referring to anger.) I also know of a German example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich bin blau&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which idiomatically translates to &quot;I am drunk.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other languages use colours for this purpose? Is it a common occurrence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9555" LastEditorUserId="9555" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T16:37:48.660" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T02:28:07.983" Title="Within various languages, how often are colours used to signify a condition or a feeling?" Tags="&lt;idiomaticity&gt;&lt;colour-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12078" CreationDate="2015-04-16T17:26:43.287" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume the word came from a meshing together of 'other' with its indefinite article'. When (and why) did English speakers begin to use this version, instead of 'an other'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why is it still separated from 'the'?  Shouldn't there be a word like 'thother'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6912" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T17:58:47.467" Title="When and why did 'another' start being used as one word?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12064" CreationDate="2015-04-16T17:40:24.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a single term for these fallacies. But I agree that they are related and would benefit from an umbrella term to make it easier to point people to the profoundly problematic nature of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would call them examples of &lt;strong&gt;linguistic essentialism&lt;/strong&gt; - the belief (and often fervent faith and feeling) that there is something fundamental in the historical roots of language that we can access by uncovering the historical roots - or in other words, that words and expressions have a fundamental essence that always leaves a trace. It is a species of extreme philosophical realism. But as a trope, it is extremely popular with philosophers in the phenomenological tradition. Of course, it is a common ailment of the commentariat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible term could be &lt;strong&gt;naive etymologism&lt;/strong&gt; since they are predicated on the myth of the primacy of the history of language. They are also related to prescriptivist and purist tendencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T17:40:24.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12076" CreationDate="2015-04-16T17:58:47.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early 14th century. Thother is used in spoken English, but is spelled 'Thother and is only in conversational register, not formal writing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T17:58:47.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-16T19:43:20.427" Score="-1" ViewCount="692" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/thinkagain-005/lecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; Lecture 1-5 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/thinkagain-005/lecture/subtitles?q=234_en&amp;amp;format=txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcription&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;em&gt;... How to Reason and Argue&lt;/em&gt;, by Prof W Sinnott-Armstrong&#xA;The following is from a question that pops up during the video at 3 min 14 seconds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Question:] When a word DOES describe or refer to an object, is the meaning of that word the same as the object to which it refers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Answer:] No. If my only neighbor is the mayor of my town, the phrases “my neighbor” and “my mayor” refer to the same person. Nonetheless, these phrases still have different meanings, because one is used to describe where that person lives (next to me) and the other is used to describe what that person does (the job of mayor). &lt;strong&gt;But if two phrases have different meanings but refer to the same object, then their meanings cannot be the same as the object to which they refer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you please explain the bolded? How's it right?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If &lt;strong&gt;'two phrases ... refer to the same object'&lt;/strong&gt;, then they must share AT LEAST ONE mutual meaning, namely the one which refers to the object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T16:59:41.377" Title="How can two phrases refer to the same object, but have different meanings?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-16T22:37:28.420" Score="2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://snarkygrammarguide.blogspot.com/2012/11/dispose-vs-dispose-of-grammar-police.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; [D1.] &lt;strong&gt;dispose (v.)&lt;/strong&gt; - (a) to arrange in order; (b) to lean toward or incline (typically used as a past participle).  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [D2.] &lt;strong&gt;dispose of (phrasal v.)&lt;/strong&gt; - (a) to throw away or discard; (b) to settle or attend to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. How and why does the particle &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; change the definition of &lt;strong&gt;dispose&lt;/strong&gt;  from D1 to D2?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why does D2 require the particle &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I already understand and so ask NOT about the above definitions. I heed the Etymological Fallacy. I recognise idioms' illogic, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting this idiom, so that it feels reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. « &lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt; » in French   roughly means   &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; in English. But contrary to D2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[D3.] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/fren/disposer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;« disposer &lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt; »&lt;/a&gt; = have (at your disposal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the particle « &lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt; » (= &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt;) induce opposite definitions (D2 and D3) for the same root verb (though in two different languages)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T02:23:08.337" Title="'dispose' vs 'dispose of' &amp; « disposer » vs « disposer de »" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12073" CreationDate="2015-04-16T23:04:19.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we follow the treatment of stress in &lt;strong&gt;SPE&lt;/strong&gt;, when part of a phrase comes to have stress, stresses on other elements are not lost, but merely become subordinated to the new stress.  If there is no stress at all, a non-diphthongal vowel will reduce to schwa, so if a vowel fails to reduce to schwa, we can take that as evidence that the vowel does have some stress, though the stress may be at a low level due to having been subordinated to other stressed syllables.  (There are complications to this that I won't mention for now, and, of course, many don't accept the SPE stress theory at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a first question to raise about your examples is: do the first vowels of &quot;not&quot; and &quot;funny&quot; reduce to schwa?  My opinion is that they do not.  So, given that, in &quot;It's funny&quot; and &quot;It's not funny&quot;, both &quot;fun&quot; and &quot;not&quot; are stressed.  What the stress levels are, will depend on whether the &quot;not&quot; is taken to be contrastive: &quot;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; funny&quot; versus &quot;It's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; funny&quot;.  If so, the highest stress will be on the &quot;not&quot;: &quot;It's n1ot f2unny&quot; (meaning that the most stress is on &quot;n1ot&quot; and a secondary stress is on &quot;f2unny&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no contrast, primary stress will be on &quot;f1unny&quot;, following the Nuclear Stress Rule, which give the last primary stress in a phrase (here, the verb phrase) the most prominence.  Then, we'll get &quot;It's n2ot f1unny&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have left the stress of &quot;it's&quot; in the examples out of account.  Pronouns are a special case, and I think it might either be stressed or not, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my speech, the vowel of uncontracted &quot;not&quot; always has some stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-04-16T23:13:07.267" LastActivityDate="2015-04-16T23:13:07.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12079" CreationDate="2015-04-17T01:32:56.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the comments on your question say, meaning is not the same as reference. All of the following could potentially refer to the same real world person, but they all have different meanings. Only real world knowledge would allow you to identify that they are co-referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man who murdered Smith&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The man who just came in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The man who stole my heart&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Prime Minister of India&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The last man who walked on the moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The creator of Skynet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The lead singer of U2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if two phrases have different meanings but refer to the same object, then their meanings cannot be the same as the object to which they refer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first half is clear I think. They all mean different things, and there doesn't have to be any shared meaning between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't know what the second half is trying to say. Real world objects don't have meaning in and of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T01:32:56.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12075" CreationDate="2015-04-17T02:28:07.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian we say &quot;sono al verde&quot; when we don't have money (verde = green), and &quot;la vedo grigia&quot; literally I see it gray (gray = grigio) to mean something difficult to do or to realize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9596" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T02:28:07.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12062" CreationDate="2015-04-17T02:30:32.740" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have any word in Italian with DM together, without vowels in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9596" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T02:30:32.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-17T03:05:40.177" Score="0" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a paper on the Ju'Hoansi of South Africa for my anthropology class and I'm trying show how their egalitarian worldview might affect their language structure such as their lack of possessive pronouns. I remember skimming over a theory that stating a society's worldview affects language but I can't remember what it's called. What is the name of this theory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6764" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T06:03:52.453" Title="Name of theory stating &quot;worldview affects language structure&quot;" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12085" CreationDate="2015-04-17T05:20:57.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you write about that, it might be a good idea to accurately represent the facts of the language. For example, the language doesn't have special genitive case variants for pronouns, like English &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;mon&lt;/em&gt; etc. Instead, you just put the 1st person pronoun (or any possessor) before the head noun, as in &lt;em&gt;mí g|à'ásì&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my eyes&quot; (1s eyes), &lt;em&gt;dà'á g!ohsì&lt;/em&gt; (fire smoke) &quot;the fire's smoke&quot;. When the possessor is a noun, possess can optionally be marked with a possessive particle &lt;em&gt;||'àn&lt;/em&gt; plus a pronoun referring to the possessor, as in &lt;em&gt;dà'á ||'àn hì g!ohsì&lt;/em&gt; (fire poss. it(fire) smoke) &quot;the fire's smoke&quot;. It also turns out that possessive marking is obligatory if the possessor noun is modified by an adjective, so &lt;em&gt;dshàú gèsín ||'àn 'msi&lt;/em&gt; (woman other poss she food) &quot;the other woman's food&quot;. If supposed &quot;egalitarianism&quot; means that they have no concept of possession, then you would predict that there is no way to say &quot;my eyes&quot; or &quot;the other woman's food&quot;, but there is in fact a construction that is specific to expressing the notion of possession. Also, if there were no notion of possession, then there couldn't be a verb &lt;em&gt;dcàá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;steal&quot; or a noun &lt;em&gt;dcàákxàò&lt;/em&gt; &quot;thief&quot;, since all stuff would be jointly owned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T05:20:57.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19694" CreationDate="2015-04-17T08:46:02.820" Score="6" ViewCount="2941" Body="&lt;p&gt;While a lot of sources on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kitsch&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; for instance agree that &quot;kitsch&quot; comes from dialectal german word &quot;kitschen&quot;, the meaning of this word is different between wikitionary pages (in the french wiktionary, &quot;kitschen&quot; is said to be &quot;pick up garbage&quot;, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; does not mention this etymology, but refer to a book &quot;Das Buch vom Kitsch&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do we know where it come from and what does this &quot;Kitschen&quot; word really mean (if it ever existed as a base from &quot;kitsch&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="319" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T09:56:20.310" Title="Where does the word &quot;kitsch&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-17T15:19:05.643" Score="13" ViewCount="1494" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evidence is currently known that favors or disfavors the hypothesis that a regular beat of some kind—that is, an “isochrony”—plays some important role in languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've run across some claims that there are three main ways that languages have regular beats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an equal time per syllable,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an equal time between stresses,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and an equal time per mora (a beat that takes less time than a syllable, where a typical syllable takes a small-integer number of morae: one, two, or three).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that hypothesis, different languages or different speakers may depend on different &quot;isochronies&quot; to different degrees, but people rely on &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of isochrony for comprehension of most or perhaps all languages. My question is: what evidence is there about whether this hypothesis is true—do (many) languages depend on &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; sort of regular beat at the same order of magnitude as the length of a word or syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not categorization&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not asking whether languages can be unambiguously categorized as stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed. This question is about whether a hypothesized mechanism of language exists, not about &quot;typology&quot;. If isochrony exists, it might have multiple forms, which might or might not provide a basis for defining categories into which some languages could fit, but I'm not asking about ways to categorize languages. I'm including this paragraph because nearly all the writing about isochrony that I've found so far is arguments about whether languages can be unambiguously categorized in this manner—which is not what I'm interested in. It's OK with me if plenty of languages make use of two or three (or more) isochronies simultaneously. I just want to know if isochrony really matters at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some information I've found so far&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One argument that different kinds of isochrony exist is that the variance in syllable lengths is greater in English, which supposedly depends more on regular stress-to-stress intervals, than in Spanish, which supposedly depends more on regular syllable-to-syllable intervals. However, as Mark Liberman says in &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=126&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; (which is mostly about the categorization argument), that doesn't imply anything about isochrony, because syllables in English have a much greater range of complexity than syllables in Spanish (due to the variety of consonant clusters that English allows before and after the vowel). Liberman says that people have been trying for a long time to save the isochrony hypothesis by postulating various ways to measure the assumed regularity (for examples, runs of successive syllables of the same length), and claims that no one has ever found an objective measure in the sound of speech itself. I don't know if that's true, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A weird argument is that the perception of isochrony disagrees with the timings actually found in the sound signal, and that people adjust the real timings of syllables and stresses to create the perception of isochrony. There must be some interesting evidence for or against this, but I haven't found it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/frp.pdf&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Peter Roach attacks the categorization theory, but also has a note from the author saying that it's out of date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what evidence &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; up to date?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4723" LastEditorUserId="4723" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T11:45:35.450" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T14:42:33.260" Title="What's the evidence for and against isochrony?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;rhythm&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-17T17:16:29.167" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=trepidation&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for &lt;strong&gt;trepidation (n.)&lt;/strong&gt; :]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... from PIE &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;trep-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1) &quot;to shake, tremble&quot; ... , related to * &lt;em&gt;trem-&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tremble&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tremble&lt;/a&gt; (v.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for &lt;strong&gt;trope (n.)&lt;/strong&gt; :]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    ... from PIE &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;trep-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (2) &quot;to turn&quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do both nouns above come from the same PIE root? I notice the enumerations (1) and (2), but do these mean different PIE roots, or different definitions of the same root?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting how this root bifurcated into two different nouns, so that it feels reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T17:16:29.167" Title="PIE root *trep-: 'trepidation' vs 'trope'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2015-04-17T20:48:28.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that many dictionaries use the square brackets instead of slashes, but none of these is actually giving a close or broad phonetic transcription. A dictionary entry is (necessarily?) phonemic. Thus their use of square brackets is (for those who know the difference) incorrect, if not to say annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9603" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T20:48:28.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2992" CreationDate="2015-04-17T21:04:33.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This rule is almost universal across English speaking countries although the change in tone can be missed if you're not use to the rule, it' can be rather subtle. I don't think most people even realize they do this because it's so commonly used in daily speech. This same rule applies in yes or no questions in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9604" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T21:04:33.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11961" CreationDate="2015-04-17T21:54:19.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So...does this mean that 'stress' refers to both timing and intonation, or are they different?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both, and to other things, but it would be better to change &quot;refers to&quot; to the passive &quot;is referred to by&quot;.  You recognize stress by its footprints, sort of like Bigfoot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stressed monophthongal vowels in English don't reduce to schwa, so when I hear an unreduced monphthongal vowel, I know that vowel is stressed.  Stressed vowels like to be accompanied by syllable onset and syllable offset consonants, while unstressed vowels reject them, so when I find an intervocalic consonant leniting in a way I associate with syllable offset consonants, that tells me the following vowel is unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance &quot;bacon&quot; can have [x] substituted for the [k], so I know from that that it's syllabified &quot;ˈbac.on&quot; with unstressed second vowel.  But the [k] in &quot;Baconian&quot; doesn't lenite, so that [k] must belong to the syllable of the following stressed vowel: &quot;Ba.ˈconian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair mentioned in SPE, &quot;Plato&quot;/&quot;motto&quot; is like this.  The t in the first is not flapped, but rather aspirated, so the second vowel must be stressed: &quot;ˈPla.ˌto&quot;, while the t in the second is flapped, so it must precede an unstressed vowel: &quot;ˈmott.o&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-04-17T22:05:13.293" LastActivityDate="2015-04-17T22:05:13.293" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2992" CreationDate="2015-04-18T02:53:11.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because yes-no questions are asked by listing first a positive alternative, then the negative alternative.  In giving a list, each item before the last one gets a rising intonation, so the positive alternative gets a pitch rise: &quot;Do you want to eat, or do you not want to?&quot;  When the negative alternative is suppressed, we're left with just the first list item that still has the rise in pitch at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T02:53:11.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12108" CreationDate="2015-04-18T03:11:59.517" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR123200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;streig-&lt;/strong&gt; =&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To stroke, rub, press&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. European root&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting these three opposing definitions, so that this PIE root feels reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem: Is this root a contronym?   The 3 infinitives in the definition clash, and confuse me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'to stroke'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous; as below, its definition 1 connotes softness but its definition 3 connotes roughness.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'To rub'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; connotes softness.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'to press'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is equally ambiguous; pressure can be soft or hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stroke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stroke&lt;/a&gt;  {verb} {with object} = 1. Move one’s hand with gentle pressure over (a surface), typically repeatedly; caress&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;= 3. Hit or kick (a ball) smoothly and deliberately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=stroke&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline for 'stroke {verb}&lt;/a&gt; when I encountered this PIE root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T23:34:02.793" Title="PIE root streig- : How to reconcile 'To stroke, rub, press'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12113" CreationDate="2015-04-18T04:41:08.033" Score="4" ViewCount="1210" Body="&lt;p&gt;In english, taboo language may be realized as swear words--though I could see some languages not having &quot;swear words&quot; in the english sense, while maintaining &quot;vulgar expressions&quot;. All cultures have taboos. However, do all cultures have linguistic taboos? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T23:37:32.690" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T23:37:32.690" Title="Do all cultures have &quot;taboo language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12085" CreationDate="2015-04-18T05:57:38.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's an accepted term for this. I think this could still be conceived of as a type of 'linguistic relativity', though. Especially, since there's always an interplay between 'reality', culture, and language even in cases of the Sapir-Whorf style of relativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daniel Everett has been proposing a theory of how the Pirahã's evidentiality (and other) features are influenced by their cultural insistence on witness testimony for topics of conversation. He discusses it both in the context of and in contrast to linguistic relativity but I don't think he has a specific label for this position. (See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708001042&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; and his book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T05:57:38.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-18T10:02:16.413" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perfect in English has many faces:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I have done my homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I had already done my homework by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) If I had done my homework yesterday, I would come with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Having done my homework two days ago, I can join my friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) He is said to not have done his homework yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please ignore the awkward examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a unified semantics for the English perfect that would account for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of its possible uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:42:41.057" Title="Is the English perfect really monosemous?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12107" CreationDate="2015-04-18T12:04:10.960" Score="1" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using &lt;a href=&quot;http://norse.ulver.com/dct/zoega/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Old Norse&lt;/em&gt; (by E. V. Gordon) as my resoources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, it is said that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some nouns declined otherwise as masculine &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stems had the gen. sg. in &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; interchanging with &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as &lt;em&gt;sk&amp;oacute;gr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;smiðr&lt;/em&gt; (nom. pl. &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt;), vegr...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the text in bold at all. Does it mean the gen. sg. ending might be either &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt;, or does it mean something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, I find &lt;em&gt;(-s, -ar)&lt;/em&gt; written right next to noun entries, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;stigr&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;st&amp;iacute;gr&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ar&lt;/strong&gt;; pl. &lt;strong&gt;-ar&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-ir&lt;/strong&gt;, acc. &lt;strong&gt;-&#xA;  a&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-u&lt;/strong&gt;), m. path.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;staurr&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-ar&lt;/strong&gt;), m. pale, stake. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;diskr&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-ar&lt;/strong&gt;), m. plate, dish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this related to the gen. sg. ending?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T08:38:27.377" Title="Old Norse: Noun declension gen. sg. -s or -ar?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12101" CreationDate="2015-04-18T13:43:49.087" Score="3" ViewCount="1039" Body="&lt;p&gt;The picture at the bottom is taken from &lt;strong&gt;Introduction To Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Egenes Thomas,&lt;/em&gt; in which we see that, if a vowel different from a or aa precedes the visarga, and if the initial lettre of the following word is r, then the visarge disappears and the preceding i or u is lengthened.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sanskritgrammarf014425mbp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Sanskrit Grammar For Students&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;em&gt;MacDonell, A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; we find the statement that, in the above situation, the visarga should be changed to r, as r is a soft consonant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Therefore I am confused as to which rule is correct, and post here to know what others think about it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is my first post here; tell me if any inappropriate points occur, thanks in advance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mgBZi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9608" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T15:27:51.713" Title="External sandhi rule for final visarga followed by r?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12100" CreationDate="2015-04-18T15:56:21.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the confusion comes from using prepausal forms as the starting point. Both /s/ and /r/ become visarga pre-pausally, so Macdonnell treats /r/ as an 'etymological' exception. You get /punar api/ → [punar api/ but /devas api/ → [devo 'pi]. If the preceding vowel is /a, ā/ and the following segment is voiced, then /r/ remains [r] (except before /r/ where it is deleted). But /as/ is treated the same as /o/ (you could say that is becomes &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;, then is further changed to [a] with hiatus before a vowel, except before /a/). And /ās/ becomes [ā] before any voiced segment so /aśvās vahanti/ → &lt;em&gt;aśvā vahanti&lt;/em&gt; (but /ār/ is unchanged, viz. &lt;em&gt;ahār dāmnā&lt;/em&gt;). Whitney's treatment in his grammar is clearer, IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, &quot;visarga&quot; is not an underlying segment of Sanskrit, is is phonetically voiceless [h] transcribed , and derives from /r,s/. Theoretically, there could be two distinct underlying forms, /grāmayos rāmas/ or /grāmayor rāmas/. In either case, the surface outcome would be [grāmayo rāmaḥ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard reference grammar of Sanskrit is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sanskritgrammari00whituoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by William Dwight Whitney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-04-19T05:07:38.703" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T05:07:38.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4381" CreationDate="2015-04-18T18:19:09.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question makes more sense if it is altered slightly. Sebastian Shaumyan used the term &lt;em&gt;linguistic genotype&lt;/em&gt; in his work on &lt;a href=&quot;http://elvis.rowan.edu/~bps/ling/introAUG.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;An Introduction to Applicative Universal Grammar&quot;&gt;Applicative Universal Grammar&lt;/a&gt; to refer to a simplistic sign system that is heritable in humans and common in all human languages. The particular languages, English, French, Japanese, etc. and their vocabularies would be the phenotypes. This is Chomsky's idea of the Universal Grammar. It can be observed in the fact that if you adopt a chimpanzee, name it &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nim Chimpsky&lt;/a&gt;, and raise it as a human it will not learn to speak a human language. However if a Chinese family raises an English child it can learn to speak Chinese. A chimp can relate symbols to meaning, like the sign for banana to an actual banana. But a chimp cannot make relations between signs in a sensible and consistent manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although, it doesn't make sense to talk about the &lt;em&gt;genotypes of a language&lt;/em&gt; because a language doesn't have the DNA to encode them in, we could talk about the &lt;em&gt;linguistic genotype&lt;/em&gt; in humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for jlawer's comment that is no genotypic basis to language, I would be interested in seeing how he draws this conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9611" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T18:19:09.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4381" CreationDate="2015-04-18T18:41:45.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also do not think language evolution can be Darwinian.  But I am quite willing to believe that human language has a biological basis and that possession of language has been a survival characteristic for us humans.  The problem with assuming that natural selection has been at work is that we can't tell any difference among the various human languages in how they might aid survival.  For social communication, they all work great.  If all human languages aid survival equally, then natural selection cannot have played a part in aiding the survival of some at the cost of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T18:41:45.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12122" CreationDate="2015-04-18T19:46:14.843" Score="2" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find some kind of database of all Hebrew words with the right nikuds? I did find &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dov/lenaked&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a script to add nikuds to words on github&lt;/a&gt;, but the corpus used there is only from words from the bible, so no modern Hebrew words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9612" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T11:57:30.750" Title="Where do I find nikud for a word?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12095" CreationDate="2015-04-18T21:04:25.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definition 3 is surely a recent secondary development in English (and it is an English English definition - pace curiousdanii) used in TV football commentaries.&#xA;To me 'rubbing' is 'soft stroking' and 'pressing' implies something similar without the movement so I would not see them as opposing.&#xA;Presumably 'streig-' is the direct forebear of 'stroke'. *streig- &gt; *straikanan &gt; strācan &gt; stroke.&#xA;Ned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T21:04:25.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-18T23:12:14.160" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between Applicative Universal Grammar and Combinatory Categorial Grammar? They both use type inference rules to define their grammars. Is it simply that CCG uses combinatory calculus instead of lambda calculus? Does it have more to do with AUG focusing on being universal? Other than the addition of composition and type-raising in CCG they seem almost identical. But those seem implicit in AUG too, so what am I missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9611" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T23:12:14.160" Title="What is the difference between AUG and CCG?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12099" CreationDate="2015-04-18T23:27:58.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're interpreting Gordon correctly: these masculines had two variants of the gen. sg. form. The same goes for i-stem masculines: see section 87 (p. 265), &quot;Alternation between &lt;em&gt;-ar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in the gen. sg. was due to partial assimilation to the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stem declension.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2015-04-19T17:59:48.997" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T17:59:48.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12095" CreationDate="2015-04-18T23:34:02.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These definitions aren't contradictory: they all refer to physical contact with some unspecified amount of pressure, and with the possibility of simultaneous movement along the surface. The resulting overall sense is a pretty broad one, but this is often the case with semantic reconstruction: if the reflex in language A means &quot;rub&quot; and the reflex in language B means &quot;press&quot;, it's hard or impossible to tell which of the two was the original sense (or whether both are original), and lexicographers are reduced to simply listing both senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-18T23:34:02.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12098" CreationDate="2015-04-19T08:27:33.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several ways to approach this question. But first we need to question the very concept of monosemy vs. polysemy. They are a stretch even when it comes to the lexicon let alone very abstract constructions such as 'perfect' in English. What would that single meaning even look like? How would be multiple senses related distinct? How is it represented in the competence of native speakers? How do non-native learners acquire a similar competence and how do they represent the perfect meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you approach the meaning of the perfect (as opposed to the present, past and future perfects) you could approach it 1. from a logical perspective on time, action, sequence and completion or 2. from a functional perspective dealing with things like experience, knowledge, perspective. You will also need to deal with modality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To deal with the perfect on its own, we first need to find its usage and this will obviously be embedded in the context of tense, modality and communicative function. However, the question is, when all else is stripped away, are we left with some distinct, single aspectual meaning (like completion) that is the perfect's unique contribution to every case of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My go to approach here is Lakoff's (and others') treatment of things like 'over' and the existential 'there' construction. He showed that they have several related semantic cores (a case of radial categories) which motivate but do not straightforwardly predict their various uses. (While people have found fault with details of the analysis, the key point still stands). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that a careful analysis of the 'perfect' would arrive at a similar conclusion. There are several related highly abstract meanings related to experience, completion and even sequence that motivate its meanings in all (or most) of the various contexts of its use but that any individual use cannot be predicted by them because of the influence of all the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T08:27:33.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12096" CreationDate="2015-04-19T08:37:55.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, there's no clear dividing line between culture and language when it comes to idiomatics and usage rules (as opposed to say phonology). So how do we determine that if a culture has a taboo, that it's not linguistic or does not have a linguistic component?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, how do you know that 'all cultures have taboos'? It sounds like a reasonable assumption but so was that all cultures have creation myths or all cultures have religions. The first one has been disproven and the second one is debated because of the lack of clarity over what is religion when you don't start from a Christian perspective. China, India, Japan, certain Amazonian tribes all have things that may look like religions but they are not very similar to the traditions that gave rise to the concept in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, it's not clear what a taboo is. The original concept came from certain religious prohibitions but has since been extended to things like what one does not do in polity society. While it is extremely likely, that all cultures have the latter, it is not clear that they have the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I suspect that all languages have things that are proscribed in certain contexts. And that these exist at the intersection of language and culture. But without a clear definition of what you're talking about when you say 'taboo' and an extensive survey of a large sample of languages, you cannot really answer this question. Given the difficulty of what formulating the question, I doubt it's worth going to the trouble of trying to come up with an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T08:37:55.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12116" CreationDate="2015-04-19T17:05:32.463" Score="5" ViewCount="618" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's written &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_phon%C3%A9tique_international#Quantit.C3.A9_.28allongement_ou_amu.C3.AFssement.29&quot;&gt;on French Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; that the noun “rose” is represented in phonology by /ʁɔz/ whereas &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/rose&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; is claiming that it should be /ʁoz/. In both case, the associated representation in common phonetics seems to be [ʁoz], which sounds correct for me as a native French speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is right about phonology ? In case Wikipedia is, could you explain ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9614" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T18:11:26.740" Title="Phonology vs phonetics : /ʁɔz/ vs [ʁoz]" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12115" CreationDate="2015-04-19T18:10:49.203" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although /ɔ/ and /o/ do contrast in certain positions in French, the distinction is neutralized before /z/, where phonetically it's always the high-mid vowel that appears: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Mid_vowels&quot;&gt;[oz] but never [ɔz]&lt;/a&gt;. So it's a moot point which of the two to choose as your underlying representation. The French Wiki article opted for /ɔ/ presumably because this is the vowel that's usually found in closed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T18:10:49.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12115" CreationDate="2015-04-19T18:11:26.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French there is no phonological contrast between [o] and [ɔ] in closed syllables. Thus, phonologically you could analyse “rose” either as /ʁoz/ or equally well as /ʁɔz/. It is merely a matter of convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Overlap with TKR's excellent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T18:11:26.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12118" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-19T20:53:21.593" Score="1" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you help me to figure out one thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My task is to comment on the &lt;strong&gt;modifications of consonants&lt;/strong&gt; by the neighbouring sounds(assimilation,ellision). But there are some words in the task where I don't see any modifications of consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bright [braɪt]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  great [ɡreɪt]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  duty [ˈdjuːtɪ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  beauty [ˈbjuːtɪ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know, is it just me,or the task is incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5596" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T16:48:58.690" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T16:48:58.690" Title="Modifications of consonants" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2015-04-19T21:56:49.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &quot;answer&quot; is more of a comment, but it's too long for a comment. I see at least three distinct questions here. One is whether &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language has isochrony; the second is whether &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; languages has some form of isochrony; the third is whether &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; languages have isochrony. Taken in reverse order, I would say that the third question is unanswerable for the foreseeable future. The main problem there is that I don't know what number is in the ballpark of &quot;many&quot;. If I had 3 purported cases, that wouldn't normally be &quot;many&quot;. However, there isn't a huge amount of in-depth phonetic research on a variety of languages, and this is a question that requires a lot of work. There are studies like Lehtonen 1970 &lt;em&gt;Aspects of quantity in Standard Finnish&lt;/em&gt; which give a lot of detail of duration in Finnish, but I can't say that there is a single comparable phonetic study of any of the 2,000 languages of Africa, or 1,200 Austronesian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first question, you may have better luck getting an answer. Estonian (whose durational properties have been extensively studied: Lehiste 2003,  &quot;Prosodic  change  in  progress:  from  quantity  language  to  accent&quot; may be the best &quot;hook&quot; article) is claimed to have &quot;foot isochrony&quot;. However, not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; feet in Estonian have &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same duration, regardless of segmental content. I think the logic of the argument is based on the major incorrectness of the alternative, that duration within the foot is a simple additive function of a constant duration value for each segment in the foot. So IMO, Estonian is your best best for isochrony, and if you find it wanting, that means something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-19T21:56:49.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3287" CreationDate="2015-04-20T00:00:05.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a mathematical physicist who related &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/GraphGrammarsLing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;graphs grammars and Feynman graphs&lt;/a&gt;. She comes up with the, perhaps unwarranted, conclusion that any context free graph grammar determines an insertion Lie algebra and commutative Hopf algebra. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T00:00:05.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13046" CreationDate="2015-04-20T09:42:50.993" Score="12" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;French verbs are, for historical reasons, typically grouped into three classes. The loss of final consonants in French has resulted in a serious divergence, wherein the verb conjugation system of the spoken language is significantly simpler than that of the written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French (informal 2nd person) imperatives for almost all verbs, and in particular all class I and II verbs, are pronounced identically to the second person present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, presumably representing an earlier sound change, the spelling rules for French verbs in Class I are different; the present form ends in a silent &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tu retournes chez toi. /ty rəturn ʃe twa/ &amp;quot;You are returning home.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retourne chez toi. /rəturn ʃe twa/ &amp;quot;Return to your home!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, before the pronouns &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; in the imperative, an &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; is pronounced (as a /z/, due to other historic sound changes that I think aren't relevant to this question). This &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; is also obligatory in the orthography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retournes-y /rəturnzi/ &amp;quot;Return there!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For class II and III verbs (ignoring some highly irregular ones for simplicity), the s is represented in the orthography in all situations; it is usually silent but it is pronounced (again as /z/) before &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reasonable hypothesis would be that the orthographic [s] was historically pronounced in the case of Class II and III verbs, and not in the case of Class I verbs, and then was lost in word final position but retained in the &amp;quot;liaison position&amp;quot; before &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;en.&amp;quot; (This is typical of French sound changes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this contradicts the evidence that the [s] is also pronounced in the liaison position for Class I verbs. This could be a recent development by analogy, but it would be a little surprising, since the Class I verbs are more common and more regular. (In addition, it would be surprising for a relatively recent development to have made its way into the standard orthography as it has.) Does anyone know where this came from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T16:10:10.793" Title="Where do the spelling rules for French imperatives come from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12104" CreationDate="2015-04-20T11:57:30.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.morfix.co.il&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Morfix&lt;/a&gt;. (Since I have to input another 12 characters, here they are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T11:57:30.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12127" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:30:07.227" Score="1" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=scourge&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scourge (n.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c. 1200, &amp;quot;a whip, lash,&amp;quot; from Anglo-French &lt;em&gt;escorge&lt;/em&gt;, back-formation from Old French &lt;em&gt;escorgier&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;to whip,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from Vulgar Latin &lt;em&gt;excorrigiare&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;strong&gt;ex- &amp;quot;out, off&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ex-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ex-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;corrigia&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;thong, shoelace,&amp;quot; in this case &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;whip&lt;/code&gt;,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; probably from a Gaulish word related to Old Irish &lt;em&gt;cuimrech&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;fetter,&amp;quot; from *&lt;em&gt;PIE root &lt;em&gt;reig- &amp;quot;to bind&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rig&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rig (v.)&lt;/a&gt;). ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the etymological fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting the significance of the PIE root in this etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt;. In particular,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did *&lt;strong&gt;reig- &amp;quot;to bind&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  evolve to mean &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;whip&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (I refer to the one greyed)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What happened to the prefix &lt;strong&gt;ex- &amp;quot;out, off&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;? It doesn't look as if though it evolved, because the italicised states only &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to whip&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, NOT &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to whip&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; OUT or OFF, whatever  this latter means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T06:18:16.903" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:18:16.903" Title="Etymology of Old French 'escorgier': How does 'bind' evolve to mean 'whip'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-20T21:35:53.277" Score="2" ViewCount="5323" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though English stress is free there are certain factors or tendencies that determine the place and different degrees of word stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vassiliev describes them as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recessive tendency&lt;/strong&gt; is when stress falls on the first syllable&#xA;  which is generally the root syllable . It can be of 2 subtypes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unstriked – is observed in the native English words and in the&#xA;  assimilated French borrowings having no prefix. ('mother, 'daughter,&#xA;  colour, 'restaurant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Restricted – is characterized by placing the word accent on the root&#xA;  of the word if this word has a prefix which has lost its meaning&#xA;  (be'come, be'gin, a'way)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Rhythmical tendency&lt;/strong&gt; results in alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. It caused the appearance of the secondary stress in&#xA;  multy-syllabic words:ˌorgani'zation,ˌrevo'lution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the rhythmical tendency primary stress is on the third&#xA;  syllable from the end in 3 and 4 syllable&#xA;  words:'cinema,'situate,in'tensity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In words with more than 4 syllables we very often find the influence&#xA;  of both – the rhythmic and recessive tendencies - ˌindi'visible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under the influence of rhythm the accentual structure of the word can&#xA;  be pronounced with one single stress under the influence of rhythm .&#xA;  The rhythmic stress effects the stress patterns of a great number of&#xA;  words in English:'pictu'resque&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under the influence of rhythm compounds of 3 elements may have a&#xA;  single stress on the second syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Retentive tendency&lt;/strong&gt; is characteristic by the retention of the primary accent in the derivation on the same syllable on which it&#xA;  falls in the parent word:'similar - 'similarly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More commonly the primary stress is retained on the derivative word as&#xA;  the secondary accent:'similar – ˌsimi'larity,'personal&#xA;  -ˌperso'nality,'nation – ˌnatio'nality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I need to distinguish types of stress tendency in some words:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;family&lt;/strong&gt; [ˈfæm(ə)lɪ] - stress is on the first syllable, so I thought that it was &lt;strong&gt;recessive tendency&lt;/strong&gt;. BUT it's a three-syllabic word, stress falls on the third syllable from the end and this is a feature of rhyth­mical tendency. So is it really &lt;strong&gt;rhyth­mical&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;formidable&lt;/strong&gt; [ˈfɔːmɪdəbl] and [fɔːˈmɪdəbl]) -&#xA;here you can see a shifting of the stress - rhythmical tendency, or not???&#xA;I know there is also a word formidability [ˌfɔːmɪdəˈbɪlətɪ] and stress is changing here as well, so may it be &lt;strong&gt;retentive tendency&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about words &lt;strong&gt;hundred [ˈhʌndrɪd]- recessive?&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;secretary [ʹsekrət(ə)rı]- rhythmical&lt;/strong&gt;??? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5596" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-04-29T16:50:41.263" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T16:50:41.263" Title="Word stress in English" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12125" CreationDate="2015-04-20T22:01:30.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sense &quot;bind&quot; gives a noun for a thing you bind with, i.e. a &quot;thong&quot; or &quot;strap&quot;; this in turn comes to mean &quot;whip&quot; because a whip and a thong are similar things; and on this is based a verb meaning &quot;to whip&quot;. The prefix &lt;em&gt;ex-&lt;/em&gt; in Latin doesn't always literally refer to &quot;motion out&quot; -- in some compounds, as presumably here, it can mean something like &quot;thoroughly&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T22:01:30.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12126" CreationDate="2015-04-20T23:29:31.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're just talking about &quot;tendencies&quot;, how can one ever tell whether you're right or wrong?  It doesn't seem to me that this can lead to specific predictions about the stress of English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with your reference Vassiliev.  I am familiar with the theory in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; (SPE), which proposes a &quot;retentive&quot; theory, that is, a theory in which the stress of complex derivative words is inherited from the stress of the simpler forms that they are derived from.  I'll give a couple of references to contrary proposals about English word stress, according to which the stress of complex forms is not based on the stress of the basic forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Ross gave one such non-cyclic theory in his article &quot;A Reanalysis of Stress within the English Word&quot;.  It's a long article, so I'll just give an anecdote.  In SPE, Chomsky and Halle give what I guess they think is a killer argument for their cyclic treatment.  And it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a good argument, at first sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the stress patterns of &quot;compensation&quot; and &quot;condensation&quot;.  The first is c2ompens1ation, with no stress on the second syllable, but the second does have stress on its second syllable: c2ond3ens1ation.  Yet the canonical C/V forms of these two words are very similar.  What could explain the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you figured it out?  The difference is that the second word is derived from a verb cond1ense with stress on the second syllable, while there is no such verb as *&quot;compense&quot;.  The SPE proposal is that the derivative form &quot;condensation&quot; retains stress on the second syllable from the basic verb form &quot;condense&quot;, but that &quot;compensation&quot; has no stress on its second syllable, because there is nothing to retain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Ross notes that not all English speakers agree to the facts, here, and points out some other pairs of forms that work the other way around -- stress turns up in the derived form just when there was &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; stress originally in the basic form.  There are &quot;anti-retentive&quot; forms, that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wrote a paper criticizing this part of the SPE theory and making a counter proposal.  That's &lt;em&gt;English Word and Phrase Stress&lt;/em&gt; in Goyvaertz, ed., &lt;strong&gt;Essays on the Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;. For one thing, I argued that the SPE cyclic theory leads to missing generalizations about what sort of &quot;weak&quot; syllables can remain without stress, whether they occur after the last stressed syllable of a word or between stressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-20T23:29:31.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2015-04-21T00:29:04.803" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Does isochrony of syllables or feet exist in any language?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As user6726 pointed out, answering this question is impossible as the vast majority of the currently spoken languages are undocumented. So let us restrict the question to languages for which it can be (and has been) answered. Commonly cited examples of stress-timed languages (where feet were thought to have the same durations) are English and German, and, of syllable-timed languages, Spanish and French. Dauer (1983), for example, showed that in some of the usual suspects, syllables and feet do not have equal durations, not even relatively speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does this mean the concept of syllable-timed and stress-timed languages should be abandoned?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that listeners are relatively reliable in identifying so-called syllable-timed and stress-timed languages. Specifically, even infants can distinguish syllable-timed from stress-timed languages even if only rhythmic cues are provided (i.e. other sources of information, such as intonation, are removed) (Nazzi et al. 1998; Ramus and Mehler 1999; Ramus et al. 2003).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How can we then distinguish syllable-timed from stress-timed languages?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, what is the acoustic reality of differences in speech rhythm? A number of authors have suggested so-called rhythm metrics, which measure for example the degree of variation in the duration of vocalic intervals (sequences of vowels uninterrupted by consonants). One such metric is VarcoV, the standard deviation of the durations of vocalic intervals divided by the mean duration of vocalic intervals. Another is called nPVI-V (the normalised pairwise variability index of vocalic intervals), which is the mean difference between the durations of successive vocalic intervals, divided by the sum of their durations. You get the picture ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basically syllable-timed languages have vocalic intervals relatively similar in duration to each other, while in stress-timed languages there is greater variation in the durations of vocalic intervals.&lt;/strong&gt; One important reason for this is that stress-timed languages tend to have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, unlike syllable-timed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both these rhythm metrics are normalised for speech rate, and a comparison of a larger number of such metrics showed that these two are the most reliable ones (White and Mattys 2007a,b). If you want a relatively non-technical introduction into how these rhythm metrics work, and why they were proposed, I would suggest the book chapter &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/3406476/You_got_the_beat_Rhythm_and_timing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;You got the beat: Rhythm and timing&lt;/a&gt; (disclaimer: This was written by me, but I'm providing this link because most of the literature on the topic can be fairly technical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;P.S.: Syllable-timed languages vs. stress-timed languages?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earlier literature on the topic assumed there are rhythm classes, i.e. discreet sets of languages, either syllable-timed or stress-timed (and mora-timing fit in a bit awkwardly as a third group). The more recent literature has abandoned this view and often assumes a continuum with a prototypical stress-timed and a prototypical syllable-timed pole, which are not actually reached by any languages (see references above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dauer, R. M. (1983). Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics 11, 51–62.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nazzi, Thierry, Josiane Bertoncini and Jacques Mehler (1998). Language discrimination by newborns: Towards an understanding of the role of rhythm.​​​​ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24, 756–66.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ramus, Franck and Jacques Mehler (1999). Language identification with&#xA;suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis. Journal of&#xA;the Acoustical Society of America 105.1, 512–521. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ramus, Franck, Emmanuel Dupoux and Jacques Mehler (2003). The psychological reality of rhythm classes: Perceptual studies. Proceedings of the 15th&#xA;International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003). Ed. by&#xA;Daniel Recasens, Maria-Josep Sole and Joaquin Romero. Barcelona:&#xA;Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 337–342. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White, Laurence and Sven L. Mattys (2007a). Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. Journal of Phonetics 35.4, 501–522. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;— (2007b). Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages.&#xA;Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology 282, 237–257.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="4723" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T15:31:57.310" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T15:31:57.310" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12131" CreationDate="2015-04-21T04:10:18.710" Score="0" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=enterprise&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enterprise (n.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;early 15c., &amp;quot;an undertaking,&amp;quot; formerly also &lt;em&gt;enterprize&lt;/em&gt;, from Old French &lt;em&gt;enterprise&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;an undertaking,&amp;quot; noun use of fem. past participle of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;entreprendre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;UNDERtake&lt;/strong&gt;, take in hand&amp;quot; (12c.), from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;entre-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;between&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=entre-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entre-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;prendre&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to take,&amp;quot; contraction of &lt;em&gt;prehendere&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=prehensile&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prehensile&lt;/a&gt;). Abstract sense of &amp;quot;adventurous disposition, readiness to undertake challenges, spirit of daring&amp;quot; is from late 15c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;how should the etymology be interpreted, to connect the prefixes 'entre-' with 'under-'? &lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Update on 2015 Dec 4:&lt;/code&gt; I might have answered my own question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/61189/50720&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; references&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pp 210-214, &lt;em&gt;An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (2008) by Anatoly Liberman that explicate 'under-' in 'understand',&#xA;which is summarised &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalfloss.com/article/66321/what-does-understand-have-do-standing-under&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; whose final 2 paragraphs recapitulate Etymonline below (which I failed to scrutinise):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=under&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[under (prep., adv.)]&lt;/a&gt; Also used in Old English as a preposition meaning &amp;quot;between, among,&amp;quot; (though this may be an entirely separate root; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=understand&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;understand&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] the &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; is not the usual word meaning &amp;quot;beneath,&amp;quot; but from Old English &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt;, from PIE &lt;em&gt;*nter-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;between, among&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That is the suggestion in Barnhart, but other sources regard the &amp;quot;among, between, before, in the presence of&amp;quot; sense of Old English prefix and preposition under as other meanings of the same word. &amp;quot;Among&amp;quot; seems to be the sense in many Old English compounds [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T20:49:06.977" Title="How does the prefix 'entre' in French's 'entreprendre' compare with the prefix 'under-' in English's 'undertake'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;prefixes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12130" CreationDate="2015-04-21T09:43:55.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How did entre- &quot;between&quot; evolve to mean UNDER in UNDERtake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It didn't. English used one prefix to derive this meaning from the more general root for taking; French used another. You can turn it around and ask, from a French speaker's perspective, how the English &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sous, sou-&quot; evolved to mean &quot;entre&quot;. While we're at it, Russian formed its word for undertaking by adding the equivalent of &quot;fore-&quot; or &quot;pre-&quot; to the equivalent of &quot;receive&quot; or &quot;accept&quot;. The starting point may be more or less the same (&quot;take&quot;), the end point may also be the same (&quot;undertake&quot;), but individual languages simply took different paths to get from one to the other. I don't see a reason to use any specific version as a semantic standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="5527" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T09:49:17.307" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T09:49:17.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T10:26:09.033" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does word TA comes from historically, or a psychically to many languages on earth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ta, sumerian -root&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ta, english -thank&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ta, mongolian -grateful and respectful calling of &quot;you&quot;&#xA;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9627" OwnerDisplayName="user117943" LastEditorUserId="9627" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T10:43:20.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T16:40:43.963" Title="Does word TA comes from historically, or a psychically to many languages on earth?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12135" CreationDate="2015-04-21T11:57:14.333" Score="2" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;when I pronounce the phrase &quot;It was good&quot; in a context like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person A: How was your day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person B: It was good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;was&quot; is reduced to wəz (with a schwa sound). The only word that gets stressed is the adjective. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ ɪt wəz ˈgʊd ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think in American English, the T in &quot;it&quot; is held when it occurs before another consonant. It's held in the throat. It's not a sharp sound with a puff of air. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T12:19:14.453" Title="Word reduction and American T before consonant" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T12:52:37.650" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;i. Justin knitted &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; some outfits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii. Justin knitted some outfits &lt;em&gt;for Mary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference in the thematic roles of the italicized constituents of these two sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both look like beneficiaries to me. However, I'm not sure whether they're the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T12:52:37.650" Title="Is there a difference in the thematic roles of the italicized constituents of these two sentences?" Tags="&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12133" CreationDate="2015-04-21T13:00:08.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, except &quot;it&quot; has some stress, I think: &quot;2it was 1good.&quot; Yes, the t of &quot;it&quot; is held in the throat, in the sense that the glottis is closed during the t.  A term for this is &lt;em&gt;glottalization&lt;/em&gt; (though &lt;em&gt;glottalization&lt;/em&gt; is also used for &lt;em&gt;ejectives&lt;/em&gt;, which have an upward movement of the closed glottis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p and k are also glottalized before another consonant (written p', t', k').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes glottalized p', t', k' are referred to as &lt;em&gt;unreleased&lt;/em&gt;, meaning there is no audible puff of air at the end of the stop closure.  The lack of a release is a consequence of the glottis being closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to consider whether this glottalization affects the t part of the ch affricate (so-called).  For me, it does, when the ch is at the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many people, the t' before a consonant can lose its oral closure, leaving behind only the glottal closure, which is a glottal stop.  p' t' k' can also lose their oral closure and hence turn into a glottal stop before a stop consonant at the same place of articulation (not before s though, at least for me).  In this case, the oral closure of the cluster is simply delayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T13:06:09.527" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T13:06:09.527" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T15:06:20.860" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a class project, I need a typology of the grammatical honorific systems of the world's languages. Specifically, I need to categorize languages into whether they have honorifics for second or third person or both. Also, I need to know how many levels of honorifics are present within each person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of a database or other resource that has information about languages and their honorific systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9624" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T15:06:20.860" Title="Is there a database that has information on the typological variation of honorific systems?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12132" CreationDate="2015-04-21T16:40:43.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is more likely that a language will contain a word pronounced [ta] than that it will contain a word pronounced [sq'əčqs]. You can add to your list Chinese (3rd person pronoun), Norwegian (&quot;take&quot;), French &quot;your (fem)&quot;, Swahili (&quot;lamp&quot;), Vietnamese (&quot;it is&quot;), Yoruba (&quot;sold&quot;). It is not a word of Shona or North Saami, because of minimum-size restrictions against CV words. It also isn't a word of most dialects of English (this is the first I've heard of its putative existence in English -- must be a British thing), but that's kind of an accidental gap (it depends on how you analyze the vowel of &lt;em&gt;law, pa, maw, bra&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequence [ta] is the least-dispreferred across languages in terms of syllable structure and phoneme makeup, suffering only from extreme shortness, but minimum size is not a widely-enforced desideratum of word structure. So the chances are good that a given language will have [ta] as a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T16:40:43.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T17:53:09.777" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/thinkagain-005/lecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;... How to Reason and Argue&lt;/em&gt;, by Prof W Sinnott-Armstrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[At the 7 min 49 s juncture of Lec 2-8, for which Coursera neglects to provide a transcription]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem to be an evaluative word ... but the word 'extraordinary' doesn't say 'extraordinarily good'. You can have things that are extraordinarily bad. To say 'it's extraordinary', is to say it's 'out of the ordinary.' ... So the word 'extraordinary' by itself, is NOT an evaluative word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[At the 7 min 49 s juncture of Lec 2-9 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/thinkagain-005/lecture/subtitles?q=262_en&amp;amp;format=txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcription&lt;/a&gt;):]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get shocked by&#xA;something good or bad.&#xA;It can be shockingly good, or shockingly&#xA;bad.&#xA;And so the word &amp;quot;shocking&amp;quot; by itself,&#xA;doesn't indicate that it's&#xA;E plus &lt;em&gt;[this is the Prof's abbreviation for 'positively evaluative']&lt;/em&gt; or E minus &lt;em&gt;[=  the Prof's abbreviation for 'negatively evaluative']&lt;/em&gt;. So again, you get a&#xA;nothing.&#xA;I mention it only because, it's clear that&#xA;Robert Redford&#xA;thinks that &amp;quot;shocking&amp;quot; is bad, that this&#xA;should not have happened.&#xA;He's suggesting that it's bad, but the&#xA;word&#xA;&amp;quot;shocking&amp;quot; in itself is not an evaluative&#xA;word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some formal terms describing this problem? I guess that I am referring to words whose interpretations can be biased in either direction, depending on the reader's bias? When I first read the adjectives above, I immediately affiliated them with the writer's (Robert Redford in this case) intended connotations. I was not as unbiased as Prof Sinnott-Armstrong, though he does acknowledge the intended connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: Please allow me to ask this here, and not on ELU, because I wish to enlighten myself on the above for French as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T17:53:09.777" Title="What terms define words that may or may not be evaluative?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-21T19:49:25.043" Score="8" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did a rough breathing develop before all words starting with an upsilon in Ancient Greek? This is a commonly noted fact about the distribution of these sounds (or rather spellings), but I’m having a hard time figuring out the etymological reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some words, it is easily explicable as the regular outcome of a word-initial *s- in Proto-Indo-European: *súpnos &gt; ὕπνος (húpnos)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other words, there is no *s reconstructed for the PIE form. Are there any historical linguistics hypotheses about the source of the rough breathing in these words (e.g. a prothetic *s- prefix that later weakened to a rough breathing, a shift [w] &gt; [v] &gt; [f] &gt; [h], a sound change inserting /h/ before all word-inital /u/ at some point in Ancient Greek (that seems phonetically unmotivated to me, although I guess it's the most straightforward option), something like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some example words (I’m taking these from Wiktionary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*wódr̥  &gt; ὕδωρ (húdōr)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*webʰ- &gt; ὑφαίνω (huphaínō)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*upo &gt; ὑπό (hupó), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*uperi &gt; ὑπέρ (hypér) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these last two related to the prothetic s- seen in Latin sub, super? (Wiktionary gives super &amp;lt; *eks-uper, but ὑπέρ &amp;lt; *uperi, which would seem to suggest that it is just a coincidence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question: a rough breathing seems to also have developed in some words that didn't start with upsilon, but that had *w in their PIE form. In most words starting with *w in PIE, like *wérǵom &gt; ἔργον (érgon) the *w simply developed to ϝ (representing the sound /w/) and was later lost, leaving a smooth breathing behind. Why did a rough breathing develop in the following words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*wek(ʷ)speros &gt; ἕσπερος (hésperos)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*wes- &gt; ἕννυμι (hénnumi)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this related to the *s that comes later in each of these roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's also relevant that the PIE word-initial cluster *wr- merged with the reflex of the cluster *sr- in Greek, giving ῥ (rh, rho with a rough breathing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-21T20:47:05.333" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T01:09:16.130" Title="Why does word-initial upsilon always have a rough breathing?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12139" CreationDate="2015-04-21T20:53:35.120" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that in PIE any words starting with r- were prohibited. It is conjectured that this was the case of all sonorants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the pronouns usually rendered with initial i̯- has been recently reconstructed with an initial laryngeal e̯i̯-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of your roots, the u̯ebh- (wasp, web, weave etc) is known to start with a laryngeal, though what laryngeal it was is different in Mallory&amp;amp;Adams and Brill Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T20:53:35.120" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12139" CreationDate="2015-04-21T23:11:00.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek initial /h/ develops regularly from IE *s and non-syllabic *i. But (as you mention) initial υ always has rough breathing, even where it was not preceded by etymological /s/ or /j/. One explanation that has been considered is that Greek initial /u/ developed a /j/ on-glide, very much as has happened in English (unit, use, united…), which then partook in the development of inherited /j/ to /h/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-21T23:11:00.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12139" CreationDate="2015-04-22T01:09:16.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a conjecture, it seems possible that the generalized rough breathing before #u- has to do with the cross-linguistic tendency for high vowels to produce extra turbulence, which can then be phonologized. Most often this takes the form of spirantization or affrication of stops before high vowels, but aspiration can also result: in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VoJsaQXhwx4C&amp;amp;lpg=PA49&amp;amp;ots=9oFt-czFDt&amp;amp;dq=frication%20before%20high%20vowels&amp;amp;pg=PA49#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ikalanga (Bantu)&lt;/a&gt;, stops become aspirated before /i u/. I don't know of an exact parallel to the Greek case, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your second question about the &lt;em&gt;w- &gt; h-&lt;/em&gt; change, this is indeed often said to be somehow due to the following &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt; in most of these words. This isn't unproblematic, though, since (a) the phonetic justification for such a change seems slim, and (b) there are counterexamples of both kinds: ἑκών, ἕδνα with unexpected rough breathing, ἄστυ with no rough breathing where this account would predict it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T01:09:16.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-22T09:07:26.510" Score="1" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on an NLP project where I had to mark an initial list of words, giving a score of either 1 or 2 to each word in the list. I got the list marked by 2 people and found that the agreement factor (kappa) was 80%. Now I am wondering what to do with the words which were not given a same score by both annotators. Should I discard them? Or should I ask the annotators to agree on a single score for those words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9630" LastEditorUserId="9630" LastEditDate="2015-04-22T19:40:08.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T20:20:45.277" Title="What should I do of inter-annotator agreement is below 100%?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-22T12:47:16.413" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an annotation tool to annotate a cross lingual corpus at sentence level, matching sentences from two documents if they are in a paraphrase relationship. Can someone please help me find a tool to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9631" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T09:06:34.297" Title="Annotation tool to annotate a cross lingual corpus" Tags="&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12100" CreationDate="2015-04-22T15:27:51.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most English books on sanskrit attempt to rephrase Panini's grammar rules and in doing so, the conciseness of the rule is lost. An additional side-effect is that it takes several sentences to explain the application of rules. This is the natural outcome of all translations - I am not finding fault with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about the elongation of अ/इ/उ when र् is elided (or made to disappear) is governed by two rules:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;8-3-14 रो रि&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;6-3-111 ढ्रलोपे पूर्वस्य दीर्घोऽणः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example हरिः राजते meaning Hari is resplendent. The derivation always starts with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;हरिस् + राजते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix (or प्रत्ययः) for the nominative singular (प्रथमा-विभक्तिः एकवचनम्) is &lt;code&gt;सुँ&lt;/code&gt; The उँ in सुँ gets elided due to &lt;code&gt;1-3-2 उपदेशेऽजनुनासिक इत्&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;1-3-9 तस्य लोपः&lt;/code&gt; Continuing with the derivation, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;हरिरुँ + राजते &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any स् at the end of a पदम् (word, defined by &lt;code&gt;1-4-14 सुप्तिङन्तं पदम्&lt;/code&gt;) is replaced with रुँ by the rule &lt;code&gt;8-2-66 ससजुषो रुः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As before, the उँ in रुँ drops and we now have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;हरिर् + राजते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &lt;code&gt;8-3-14 रो रि&lt;/code&gt; mandates elision (called लोपः) to a र् as another र् follows. This results in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;हरि + राजते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, whenever the elision of ढ् or र् happens, the previous अण् (i.e अ इ उ) gets elongated (called दीर्घः) So, after performing sandhi, the resulting word appears as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;हरी राजते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second rule you mentioned from MacDonell isn't in conflict with the above. &lt;code&gt;8-3-15 खरवसानयोर्विसर्जनीयः&lt;/code&gt; asks to replace the र् at the end of a पदम् with विसर्गः as any letter from खर् (ख फ छ ठ थ च ट त क प) follows. As you can see, र् is not in this list of letters. An example of this rule would be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामर् + चिनोति (meaning Rama collects)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the र् at the end of राम comes from the application of &lt;code&gt;8-2-66 ससजुषो रुः&lt;/code&gt; and two more rules, as explained above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामः + चिनोति&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further to this rule, the विसर्गः is replaced with स् by &lt;code&gt;8-3-34 विसर्जनीयस्य सः&lt;/code&gt; giving rise to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामस् + चिनोति&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the स् is replaced with स् due to &lt;code&gt;8-4-40 स्तोः श्चुना श्चुः&lt;/code&gt; yielding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामश्चिनोति&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T15:27:51.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12147" CreationDate="2015-04-22T15:23:51.763" Score="1" ViewCount="2648" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words such as &quot;mama&quot;, &quot;papa&quot;, and &quot;cancan&quot; have only one unique syllable, and the whole word is just that syllable repeated once. Is there a name for such words? I am aware of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reduplication&lt;/a&gt;, but I believe it refers only to other forms of a word that consist of repetitions of the base word. I'm looking for a term that refers to the base word consisting of repetitions of a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9633" OwnerDisplayName="Hydrothermal" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T15:40:37.293" Title="Is there a term for words that consist of the same syllable repeated?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12146" CreationDate="2015-04-22T15:40:37.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term is indeed &lt;em&gt;reduplication&lt;/em&gt;. That term does not refer just to forms which repeat an existing base word. Reduplication may copy repeat just a syllable, or two syllables, or an entire word, and it frequently happens that only the reduplicated word exists without there being a simpler form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T15:40:37.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12152" CreationDate="2015-04-22T16:14:00.670" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is believed to &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt; the best female golfer alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this the listener infers: &lt;em&gt;Some people believe that she &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the best female golfer alive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, take a look at another sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is believed to &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; been born in the 3rd century BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By blindly following the scheme associated with the first sentence, it follows that the listener infers: &lt;em&gt;Some people believe that she &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; been born in the 3rd century BC.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is absolutely absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, of course, the listener infers: &lt;em&gt;Some people believe that she &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; born in the 3rd century BC.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there such a mysterious anomalous correspondance between the infinitival perfect and the simple past? Are they deeply connected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T04:55:37.250" Title="Oddity with the English perfect" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12148" CreationDate="2015-04-22T16:37:05.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are. The idea of perfect is &lt;em&gt;the action that happened &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; something else&lt;/em&gt;. When it is present perfect, the action happened before &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, when it is past perfect, the action happened before &lt;em&gt;another moment in the past&lt;/em&gt;. As for infinitives, they don't have any time signature, like past, present, or future, their meaning is &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; as for the meaning of the predicate verb tense - non-perfect infinitives denote actions &lt;em&gt;simultaneous&lt;/em&gt; with the predicate (your 1st example), the perfect infinitives denote the action that &lt;em&gt;precedes&lt;/em&gt; the action of the predicate (your 2nd example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-04-22T16:37:05.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-22T16:54:24.440" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my thesis I would like to conduct a &lt;strong&gt;study on the cross-linguistic distribution of agent markers in passives&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, this marker is usually realized by the preposition 'by', as in (including a possible annotation, not necessarily English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man was killed BY THE DINOSAUR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;man kill-PASS dinosaur-INSTR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, all Passive Agent Markers are expected to display some degree of case syncretism (i.e. they might be used to express multiple different elements, e.g. agents and instrumentals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come across several &lt;strong&gt;issues regarding the proper grouping/categorization of this kind of element&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Languages differ in the amount of distinct passive agent markers and the amount of detail that can be expressed through each marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Especially to the non-native speaker and reader of grammars, properties of particular markers as well as the distribution in a language may be (partially) hidden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Languages differ in what terms may be used to describe equal markers, depending on their syntactic, morphological or lexical properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Authors of grammars may be biased regarding terms of such markers, e.g. one might choose a known term (&amp;quot;instrumental&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;locative&amp;quot;...) over a less well known term (&amp;quot;perlative&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;allative&amp;quot; etc.), which makes it more difficult for the analyst to see which categories exist or which might better be split in two&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depending on perspective and focus, different quality categorizations may be made (e.g. such that have more or less explanatory power)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and many more (if you happen to come up with other problems spontaneously, feel free to note them so I can add them here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There already is one book available on the topic: &lt;em&gt;The Origin of Agent Markers&lt;/em&gt; by Enrique L. Palancar from 2002 (available from his &lt;a href=&quot;http://enriquepalancar.weebly.com/selected-publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homepage&lt;/a&gt;; please note furter, better suited references if you know any). I am however afraid that his &amp;quot;solution&amp;quot; might be too complex for my purposes (the book is  over 300 pages long).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this light I would appreciate answers on the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Which categorizations of passive agent markers exist and which categories are considered most suitable as the right selection to be able to properly analyze the cross-linguistic distribution of said markers?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to ask for further information, examples etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T12:30:50.197" Title="What approaches exist to categorizing kinds of passive agent markers and what are their advantages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;marking&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12148" CreationDate="2015-04-22T17:42:07.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple past is the original past tense of the Germanic languages. It was once used in almost all cases in which we now use either simple past or present perfect. Composites with &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;  (or originally also &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, according to the verb) and the past participle are a relatively recent alternative that has been cropping up in most European languages. Originally this new style of expressing the past arose in situations in which it made literal sense: &quot;I have eaten&quot; means that I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; something &lt;em&gt;eaten&lt;/em&gt; in my stomach because at some point in the recent past I ate. It is still quite restricted in when you can use it. But it is very popular: Whenever you can use it, you must. This is the reason for the semantic distinction between simple past and present perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely that the situations in which the present perfect can (and therefore must) be used will continue to extend. This is an aspect of language change in which German is a bit faster, for a change: In colloquial German you can use the equivalent of the present perfect almost without any restrictions, at least in the south.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there used to be no past perfect and no past infinitive in the Germanic languages. But the present perfect provides an obvious way to construct these: If shifting &quot;He has an apple&quot; into the past yields &quot;He had an apple&quot;, then obviously it should be possible to shift &quot;He has been there&quot; into the past in the same way: &quot;He had been there&quot;. And if the infinitive in the first case is &quot;to have an apple&quot;, then obviously in the second case we should be able to form the (past) infinitive as &quot;to have been there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point someone started doing this; then over the centuries it became standard. Once people became used to shifting present perfect back into the past, or to form past infinitives from it, they felt a pressing need to do the same with simple past constructions such as &quot;He was there&quot; or &quot;He cooked&quot;. The most regular way of doing this would be to add the regular simple past ending &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;, yielding &quot;He wased there&quot; and &quot;He cookeded&quot;. I think we can all feel that this would be much less acceptable than pretending we were starting with the present perfect instead of the simple past. When some people first did this, others probably cringed. Nowadays it's perfectly standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-04-25T04:55:37.250" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T04:55:37.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6281" CreationDate="2015-04-23T00:01:17.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a reason for the appearance of थ् next to त्. This occurrence is not restricted to mantras and can also be applied in spoken sanskrit (लौकिकसंस्कृतम्). If you look up Panini's sutra &lt;strong&gt;8-3-28 ङ्णोः कुक्टुक् शरि&lt;/strong&gt;, there is a vartikam (addendum) which goes like this: &lt;strong&gt;चयो द्वितीयाः शरि पौष्करसादेरिति वाच्यम्&lt;/strong&gt; Firstly, let us understand what is being prescribed by &lt;strong&gt;8-3-28 ङ्णोः कुक्टुक् शरि&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters ङ् and ण् optionally get कुँक् and टुँक् as augments respectively, as शर् follows. For example, consider the words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;प्राङ् + षष्ठः&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By applying 8-3-28, ङ् gets the आगमः (augment) क् &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;प्राङ्क् + षष्ठः&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When क् and ष् combine, we get a संयुक्ताक्षरः (conjunct consonant) called क्ष&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;प्राङ्क्षष्ठः&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vartikam &lt;strong&gt;चयो द्वितीयाः शरि पौष्करसादेरिति वाच्यम्&lt;/strong&gt; says that each of the letters चय् (च ट त क प) should be replaced by their corresponding second letters (छ ठ थ ख फ) as शर् follows. This replacement is accepted by a teacher named पौष्करसादिः, a grammarian prior to Panini. Hence the replacement should be considered optional. Applying this vartikam to the above example yields&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;प्राङ्ख् षष्ठः&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at one mantra snippet posted example by Pand8a, all conditions to apply the vartikam are fulfilled here since त् is one of the letters in चय् and it is preceded by स्, which is one of शर् (श ष स) Therefore, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;अस्मात् + स्यन्दते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;अस्माथ् + स्यन्दते&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you pay close attention to vedic chanting (by learned scholars), you will notice that they always honor this rule, albeit sometimes not knowing of its existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T00:01:17.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12133" CreationDate="2015-04-23T01:09:02.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with @greg-lee that there is probably secondary stress on &quot;it&quot; in your example sentence. Regarding your second question about the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; sound: you are correct that the &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;/ɪt wʌz gʊd/&lt;/code&gt; is often realized &quot;in the throat&quot;.  The technical term for this in phonetics is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottalization&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that the glottis is constricted (partially or fully closed) instead of or in addition to the closure in the oral cavity. There are a variety of ways that linguists have represented this symbolically, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V8Kx4.png&quot; alt=&quot;ways of representing glottalized t&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Glottalization&quot; (or &quot;glottalized consonants&quot;) is also a technical term in phonology, used to describe how sounds pattern together, so it is common to see these symbols used to mark phonological classes of sounds, in a way that does not necessarily reflect their phonetic realization in accordance with the definitions of the symbols in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/full-ipa-chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;. For example, from a phonetician's perspective &lt;code&gt;[tʼ]&lt;/code&gt; is technically incorrect in this case because it is reserved for marking &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ejective consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; which would not normally occur in that environment in English.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your point about the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; sound in your example lacking a &quot;puff of air&quot; (called a release burst) is also correct. In this case, the most likely cause is that there was no oral closure to begin with (i.e., the glottal closure &lt;em&gt;replaced&lt;/em&gt; the oral closure, rather than &lt;em&gt;co-occurring&lt;/em&gt; with it). The lack of a release burst can also occur when full oral closure is made (in English this often happens with utterance-final stops, such as the &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;He wore a red cap&quot;). In such cases, the buildup of intraoral pressure is usually released through the nose shortly after the end of the utterance, making subsequent release of the &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; closure silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Phonetically speaking, ejectives involve &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; closure of the glottis, complete or near-complete closure of the oral cavity (i.e., with the tongue or lips), a raising of the larynx to compress the air in the oral cavity, then a release of that pressure by release of the oral closure. By this definition, ejective sounds &lt;em&gt;cannot be voiced&lt;/em&gt; (because they require complete glottal closure), and cannot be &lt;em&gt;unreleased&lt;/em&gt; (because otherwise they are inaudible).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Similarly, the first symbol is phonetically inaccurate since the &quot;combining tilde below&quot; diacritic is defined as marking creaky voicing (hence it cannot be used with a voiceless sound like &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T01:09:02.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T03:15:21.010" Score="2" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Close central unrounded vowel&lt;/a&gt; has two symbols in the IPA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ï/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears (from my completely unscientific survey of having seen the symbols in use) that the former is the more common.  What is the history of these two forms? Is one preferred? Is one antiquated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:47:07.180" Title="What is the history of /ɨ/ vs /ï/?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12165" CreationDate="2015-04-23T03:56:46.263" Score="0" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand both the etymology of 'scorn', (which derives from) that of the Old French &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/escarn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'escarn'&lt;/a&gt;. So I'm trying to understand both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=scorn&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for 'scorn (n.)' :]&lt;/a&gt; c. 1200, a shortening of Old French &lt;em&gt;escarn&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;mockery, derision, contempt,&amp;quot; a common Romanic word ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Probably influenced by Old French &lt;em&gt;escorne&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;affront, disgrace,&amp;quot; which is a back-formation from &lt;em&gt;escorner&lt;/em&gt;, literally &amp;quot;to break off (someone's) horns,&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from Vulgar Latin * &lt;em&gt;excornare&lt;/em&gt; (source of Italian &lt;em&gt;scornare&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;treat with contempt&amp;quot;),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from Latin &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ex-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;without&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ex-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ex-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cornu&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;horn&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=horn&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;horn&lt;/a&gt; (n.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me dig deeper than the definition, which I already understand and so ask NOT about. I heed the Etymological Fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting of the etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:56:18.227" Title="'scorn': How can a human have horns?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27912" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:03:04.843" Score="-4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=thesis&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for 'thesis (n.)':]&lt;/a&gt;  late 14c., &quot;unaccented syllable or note,&quot; from Latin &lt;em&gt;thesis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;unaccented syllable in poetry,&quot; later (and more correctly) &quot;stressed part of a metrical foot,&quot; from Greek &lt;em&gt;thesis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;a proposition,&quot; also &quot;downbeat&quot; (in music), originally &quot;a setting down, a placing, an arranging; position, situation,&quot; from root of &lt;em&gt;tithenai&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to place, put, set,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;PIE root * &lt;em&gt;dhe-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to set, to put&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=factitious&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;factitious&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me dig deeper than the etymology. I heed the Etymological Fallacy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;what are some right ways of interpreting the etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;strong&gt;&quot;to set, to put&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; evolve to mean the modern definition of 'thesis' ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.europaic.com/Etymology%20of%20L.%20femina%20and%20L.%20fellare.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; answers my question, but I do not post it as an answer hereunder as others may still find something new with which to contribute.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T01:47:03.767" Title="How does PIE root dhē- 'to set, to put', evolve to mean 'thesis'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12163" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:09:21.283" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greek-rooted word &quot;xenophobia&quot; is commonly used to refer to &lt;em&gt;&quot;unjustified fear of an 'other'&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking some words which have related but different meanings: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;unjustified loathing of family/clan/self&quot;&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;unjustified and possibly uncontrollable attraction to the 'alien' or 'other'&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;unjustified attraction to family/clan/self.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no background in linguistics, and hope that someone out there may take pity on me and point me in the right direction.   Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9638" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:48:54.497" Title="Looking for complementary word related to &quot;xenophobia'" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12170" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:27:08.057" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the French feminine noun &lt;a href=&quot;http://littre.reverso.net/dictionnaire-francais/definition/sensualite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sensualité&lt;/a&gt; asexual? The English noun is sexual. Why? I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;But what are some right ways of interpreting the dchotomy, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sensuality&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; only states, but doesn't explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... from &lt;em&gt;sensus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;feeling&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sense&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sense&lt;/a&gt; (n.)). Chiefly &quot;animal instincts and appetites,&quot; hence &quot;the lower nature regarded as a source of evil, lusts of the flesh&quot; (1620s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T03:58:18.953" Title="How did 'sensuality' evolve to connote lechery? Does 'sensualité'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:34:56.893" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=propagation&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for 'propagation (n.)']&lt;/a&gt; ... from &lt;em&gt;propago&lt;/em&gt; (genitive &lt;em&gt;propaginis&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;that which propagates, offspring,&amp;quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pro-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;forth&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pro-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pro-&lt;/a&gt;) + * &lt;em&gt;pag-&lt;/em&gt;, root of pangere &amp;quot;to fasten&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pact&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pact&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pact&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline for 'propagation (n.)']&lt;/a&gt; ... from &lt;strong&gt;PIE root * &lt;em&gt;pag-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;fix, join together, unite, make firm&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;But what are some right ways of interpreting the etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pro-&lt;/em&gt; + PIE root  &lt;em&gt;pag-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; combine to mean the modern definition of 'propagation'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:52:24.897" Title="How did 'forth + fasten' evolve into 'propagation'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12156" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:47:07.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally, the distinction was made between ɯ as a back unrounded vowel vs. ï as a &quot;mixed&quot; vowel. In 1932 (Copenhagen) there were substantial changes, indeed one could say that the old IPA was tossed out for something like the new IPA, and at that point ʉ ɨ were introduced for central vowels. At that point, diaresis was given its current status of marking &quot;centralization&quot;, i.e. movement from the standard reference position to something closer to the center. So actually, ï is a centralized close unrounded front vowel, not a central vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:47:07.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12159" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:48:54.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The antonym for &lt;em&gt;-phobia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fear&quot; - in modern English, at least - is usually &lt;em&gt;-philia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;love.&quot; So for your second definition you'd probably want &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophilia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;xenophilia&lt;/a&gt;, though &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophilia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;allophilia&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;allos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;other&quot;) would also work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;family/clan&quot; the Greek is &lt;em&gt;oikos&lt;/em&gt;, yielding &lt;em&gt;oikophobia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;oikophilia&lt;/em&gt; respectively. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikophobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;first of these&lt;/a&gt; has been used by some contemporary authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:48:54.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12161" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:52:24.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that Etymonline there mentions &quot;offshoot&quot; and &quot;multiply plants by layers.&quot; There's the key: &lt;em&gt;propagation&lt;/em&gt;, in origin, means to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;fasten&quot; a branch of a plant into the ground&lt;/a&gt; so that it grows &quot;forth&quot; into a new plant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:52:24.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12157" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:56:18.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at their definition for the verbal form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Old French &lt;em&gt;escorner&lt;/em&gt; &quot;deprive of horns,&quot; hence &quot;deprive of honor or ornament, disgrace.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horns can be used as a metaphor for honor or glory, as in the biblical &quot;the horns of the wicked... the horns of the righteous&quot; (Psalms 75:10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:56:18.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12158" CreationDate="2015-04-23T04:58:08.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because you &quot;set down&quot; your arguments and propositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T04:58:08.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4262" CreationDate="2015-04-23T08:59:14.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonic Visualiser&lt;/a&gt; is one of the programs I've been using to view/analyze my audio.  It is freeware but it's a pretty decent prog imo.  It does have many options to adjust your Spectrogram and a couple other options to get creative with.  I mostly use it to listen to my techno tracks ;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j2sGt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;RingModulated Synth Pitch Down Filtered Out&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another nice option this prog has is where ever you put your mouse over gives you a dialog box in terms of Time, Frequency, Pitch &amp;amp; Phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GkuI2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A rap i recorded today&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9639" LastEditorUserId="9639" LastEditDate="2015-04-23T09:12:03.623" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T09:12:03.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T09:12:41.380" Score="6" ViewCount="20454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that Spanish and French both belong to the Romance branch and they are very alike. But what I want to make clear is that how similar they are.  I mean that if I have mastered one of them, how much easier will it be for me to learn another one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9640" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2015-04-23T18:03:58.727" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T20:24:38.207" Title="How similar are Spanish and French?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2015-04-23T09:58:26.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;French and Spanish are indeed members of the Romance branch, but French is an oddity within it.  If you speak only English, the &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt; of Spanish are probably much easier than French sounds, so you'd probably make a quicker start in Spanish.  On the other hand, if you learn French first, Spanish would then be &lt;em&gt;relatively&lt;/em&gt; easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5650" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T09:58:26.437" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12160" CreationDate="2015-04-23T13:48:46.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has more words of Germanic origin to draw on than French (such as &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt;), freeing words of Romance origin for special use.  I don't agree &lt;em&gt;sensualité&lt;/em&gt; is asexual. It's just that the sexual aspect doesn't dominate. (In &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt; it's even weaker, since &lt;em&gt;sensuality&lt;/em&gt; exists as an alternative for the sexual meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific negative connotation &lt;em&gt;lechery&lt;/em&gt; clearly has a lot to do with protestant hostility to sexuality. France has been dominantly catholic practically forever (the protestants were expelled or killed), so French is less affected by this perversion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T13:48:46.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T17:27:43.533" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Q’eqchi’ you can derive verbs with different lexical aspects from a base verb, e.g:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbal stem b’ak’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(0) xinb’ak’ = I tied it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) xinb’ak’b’ak’i = I tied it quickly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) xinb’ak’le = I tied it various times&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) xinb’ak’b’e = I tied it quickly various times (combination of 1 and 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) xinb’ak’axiheb’ = I tied them separatly. For instance: Xinb’ak’eb’ li tz’i’. = Ich tied the dogs (together). Xinb’ak’axiheb’ li tz’i’. I tied each dog separately (to a pole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) b’ak’aamilin = I was tied suddenly or unexpectedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there established words for these lexical aspects?&#xA;How do you call it when something happens (1) quickly, (2) repeatedly, (5) suddenly and (4) separately to various objects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is (4) even a lexical aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think (2) might be called &quot;frequentative&quot; (verbum frequentativum), however I am not sure about this and I don't have a clue how one could call the other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T17:27:43.533" Title="Uncommon lexical aspects" Tags="&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-23T17:32:32.307" Score="8" ViewCount="1350" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, when you use &quot;no&quot; or &quot;zero&quot; to indicate a lack of something, the noun is plural:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no horses.  There are no houses for sale.  This costs zero dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How common is this across the world's languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, we're basically saying that 0 is expressed with the plural, 1 with the singular, and 2+ with the plural.  I could easily imagine a language that expressed 0 and 1 with the singular, but I don't know how common such behavior is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      English  │ ???      │ Mandarin&#xA; ───┬──────────┼──────────┼─────────────┐&#xA;  0 │ plural   │          │             │&#xA; ───┼──────────┤ singular │             │&#xA;  1 │ singular │          │ unspecified │&#xA; ───┼──────────┼──────────┤             │&#xA; 2+ │ plural   │ plural   │             │&#xA; ───┴──────────┴──────────┴─────────────┘&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T08:48:12.320" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T15:02:09.733" Title="How common is it for languages to use the plural for zero?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12172" CreationDate="2015-04-23T18:12:50.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assumption concerning English is simply wrong when applied to &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no horses. There are no houses for sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no horse. There is no house for sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite logically, singular or plural is used according to whether the sentence negates a singular or plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is true, though, is that only the plural works with the &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; zero. This is by the same principle by which the plural is used with 0.7, 1.2 etc. It's not impossible that some language might use the plural for -1, 0.2, 1.5, 2, 3 etc. but the singular for 0 in addition to 1, but I don't think it's very likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T18:12:50.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12172" CreationDate="2015-04-23T18:26:19.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Treatments differ in expressions of zero quantity: English often uses the plural in such expressions as no injuries and zero points, although no (and &lt;strong&gt;zero in some contexts) may also take a singular&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;In French, the singular form is used after zéro.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/21792/9983&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/q/1130&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T18:26:19.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8331" CreationDate="2015-04-23T18:57:10.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word vectors are the same as word embeddings. (2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A word representation is a mathematical object associated with each word, often a vector (1). Word vectors/embeddings are one type of word representations, amongst others. Word vectors are one the most common types of word representation in the current NLP literature nowadays.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1): Turian, Joseph, Lev Ratinov, and Yoshua Bengio. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=7872411552705927180&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word representations: a simple and general method for semi-supervised learning&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Proceedings of the 48th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2): &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/MRH9ABxCUZ0?t=28m30s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/MRH9ABxCUZ0?t=28m30s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T18:56:16.917" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T18:56:16.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12172" CreationDate="2015-04-23T19:01:08.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The form of a noun used with a numeral can vary a lot depending on the language, and it's not always restricted to two options. Some languages, such as Hungarian, use only the singular with all numerals, leaving off the redundant plural marker in this case, but using it on nouns not accompanied by a numeral. Some languages, besides singular and plural forms, might also use a dual or a genitive form with some numerals. The following link about internationalization of software contains discussion of the issue.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html%5Fnode/Plural-forms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html%5Fnode/Plural-forms.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this source, languages that use the singular for one and zero, and the plural for other numerals include French and Brazilian Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T19:01:08.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12184" CreationDate="2015-04-23T20:03:54.590" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conjugation of a verb often marks person and number. &#xA;Is there a language where one can actually separate these two traits or are they purely analytical?&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(e.g. one could image a language where a verb would be of the form Stem + person marker + number marker)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9642" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T15:16:27.927" Title="Realization of person in conjugation" Tags="&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2015-04-23T20:25:31.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Q'eqchi' the verb &lt;em&gt;wank&lt;/em&gt; (both existence and location) is completely regular: wankin, wankat, wank, wanko, wankex, wankeb'. Same for future (twanq) and past (xwank).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Q'eqchi' the construction &lt;em&gt;be + predicative noun&lt;/em&gt; (quality) is also 100% regular: to be angry: josq'in, josq'at, josq', josq'o, josq'ex, josq'eb'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastEditorUserId="3657" LastEditDate="2015-04-23T20:33:04.587" LastActivityDate="2015-04-23T20:33:04.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T04:09:01.337" Score="1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pare&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ Etymonline for 'commode (n.)' ]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1786, &quot;chest of drawers,&quot; earlier (1680s) name of a type of fashionable ladies' headdress, from French &lt;em&gt;commode&lt;/em&gt;, noun use of adjective meaning &lt;strong&gt;&quot;convenient, suitable,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Latin &lt;em&gt;commodus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;proper, fit, appropriate, convenient, satisfactory,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt;, intensive prefix&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=com-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;com-&lt;/a&gt;), + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;modus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;measure, manner&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mode&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mode&lt;/a&gt; (n.1)). Meaning &quot;chair housing a chamber pot&quot; first attested 1851 from &lt;code&gt;notion of &quot;convenience.&quot;&lt;/code&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;But what are some right ways of interpreting this etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. How did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;modus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; combine to mean the French 'commode' ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Then how did the French 'commode' narrow into the English 'commode', which inherited fewer meanings? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. My problem: Etymonline above states that 'commode' undertook &lt;code&gt;the notion of &quot;convenience&quot;&lt;/code&gt; only in 1851. So this later acceptation does NOT explain or answer how already in the 1680s, 'commode' already meant 'a type of fashionable ladies' headdress'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T13:30:58.473" Title="Etymology of 'commode' into French and then English" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12177" CreationDate="2015-04-24T06:18:07.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're describing is the very essence of the difference between inflectional and agglutinating language. Thus there are many languages that separate person from number, gender, tense, etc. The person/number syncretism distinction alone is captured in WALS: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/29A#2/16.6/148.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/29A#2/16.6/148.5&lt;/a&gt;. In Europe, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian and Basque all have this feature. But it is found in languages all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one of the foundational dichotomies in linguistic typology although things have moved on a great deal in that field since then, extending far beyond a relatively trivial point of morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note, that not all agglutinating languages necessarily have separate morphemes for person and number. Swahili is a broadly agglutinating language but has person/number syncretism. Just another example that there are no pure morphological types among languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T06:18:07.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T07:02:07.963" Score="1" ViewCount="542" Body="&lt;p&gt;For derivational nouns, if we look at various properties of affixes, I understand they exhibit both affix polysemy and affix homonymy. By polysemy I understand that the the same affix is used in multiple instances of same semantic sense, like Indian, American, African etc. all having the same semantic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also by affix homonymy I understand usage of same affix in unrelated semantic sense like Librarian, Comedian. Here you cant have the semantic sense attached to both Comedian and Library with its source words Library and Comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these notions correct? or Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9644" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T16:29:26.540" Title="In case of Derivational nouns, what is the difference between affix polysemy and affix homonymy?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12172" CreationDate="2015-04-24T07:35:50.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has, probably, the most interesting schema:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    0 - Plural&#xA;    1 - Singular&#xA;2,3,4 - Dual&#xA; 5-20 - Plural&#xA;   21 - Singular  &#xA;22-24 - Dual&#xA;25-30 - Plural &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The genral rule is to check on what &lt;em&gt;digit&lt;/em&gt; the number ends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1 - Singular&#xA;  2-4 - Dual&#xA;5-9,0 - Plural&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  12345 - Plural&#xA;  54321 - Singular&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of long numbers we have to &lt;em&gt;switch&lt;/em&gt; from singular/dual/plural,&#xA;e.g. a phrase &lt;code&gt;&quot;123 451 789 words&quot;&lt;/code&gt;: would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  сто двадцать три миллиона       («миллион» - million - in dual) &#xA;  четыреста пятьдесят одна тысяча («тысяча» - thousand - in singular)&#xA;  семьсот восемьдесят девять слов («слово» - word - in plural)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9645" LastEditorUserId="9645" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T15:02:09.733" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T15:02:09.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12182" CreationDate="2015-04-24T13:19:19.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, commodus,-a already had the same adjectival meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In French, commode originally only meant 'easy, convenient'. Later on, the adjective was substantivated to represent the piece of furniture -- which was easy to use. See the CNRS' website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/commode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;CNRTL&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9642" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T13:19:19.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12185" CreationDate="2015-04-24T16:29:26.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between polysemy and homonymy is often one of degree or the direction you approach them. They are difficult semantic relationships to fix with certainty even when it comes to lexical items let alone constructions with more abstract meanings (like tense or affixes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the examples you give are examples of polysemy NOT homonymy. You have one suffix -an with 2 related senses of relationship to root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;-an in American, African, Australian is not an example of affix polysemy. It is exactly the same affix applied to different words. The meaning of the affix being roughly 'inhabitant of or identifying as X'. Thus (with a bit of you get Martian, Venutian or even Xan.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;-an in 'librarian' and 'comedian' has the meaning of 'related to X through the performance of a job'. You could argue, that there is some polysemy here as well, since a librarian does a job 'in' a library while a comedian 'performs' comedy. But it's a bit of a stretch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more clear-cut example of homonymy in suffixes is -s for plural as in 'books' and for possession as in 'Jake's' (in spoken English only). But this is for inflectional suffixes. I can't think of a derivational suffix homonymy in English but it is quite common in prefixes. For instance, the derivational prefix in- has completely unrelated meaning of 1. direction inward as in 'inhale', 'invite' and 2. negation 'invisible', 'inviolate', 'incredible'.  Both of these unrelated meanings have multiple senses resulting in polysemy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T16:29:26.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T18:39:24.607" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I find a foreign word for a number that starts with a given sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an article about what English might look like if its numerals were in hexadecimal (base sixteen). For this, I need basic number words for ten through fifteen that start with the letters A through F, as those are the most commonly accepted digits for ten through fifteen in written hexadecimal notation. I was inspired by the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to pronounce hexadecimal&lt;/a&gt;, but some parts of that system appear unnatural, especially the completely irregular relationship between words for sixteens and ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a couple in the &quot;translations&quot; section of Wiktionary entries, which I can justify as old loan words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ten: &lt;em&gt;ash&lt;/em&gt;. This is reduced from the Amharic, Arabic, and Hebrew words for ten.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thirteen: &lt;em&gt;dreight&lt;/em&gt; (rhymes with &lt;em&gt;eight&lt;/em&gt;). This is reduced from German &lt;em&gt;dreizehn&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found others elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Twelve: &lt;em&gt;carn&lt;/em&gt;. This is reduced from a &lt;em&gt;carton&lt;/em&gt; of twelve eggs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fifteen: &lt;em&gt;fleven&lt;/em&gt;. This comes from an episode of HBO's &lt;em&gt;Silicon Valley&lt;/em&gt;, where it was a bluff. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/835198/what-is-fleventy-five&quot;&gt;related question on Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;.) But in this article, it would be reanalyzed as a rhyme with &lt;em&gt;seven&lt;/em&gt; that means eight plus seven in much the same way that many languages' words for six through nine are related to their words for one through four, which are half a base less.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for eleven and fourteen, I'm drawing a blank. So I'm looking for examples of a natural language that has a word for eleven that starts with a /b/-like sound, and a natural language that has a word for fourteen that starts with an /e/-like sound, from which I can borrow a word to reduce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:22:09.673" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T19:55:39.677" Title="In what languages do eleven start with /b/ and fourteen start with /e/?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-12T20:56:01.023" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2015-04-24T20:17:37.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;how similar are these two languages&quot; can't be easily answer. There are many levels at which you could make a comparison, and it's not obvious how you want to quantify that. If we're talking just about &lt;strong&gt;lexical similarity&lt;/strong&gt; then the answer is very similar, you can take a look &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T20:17:37.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12189" CreationDate="2015-04-24T20:20:03.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easier part first: Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/jankogorenc/home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Janko Gorenc&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/jankogorenc/natlangnumbers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;collection of numbers&lt;/a&gt;, I was able to find that the Indonesian and Malay word for 14 is &lt;em&gt;empatbelas&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;empat belas&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;empat&lt;/em&gt; on its own means 4), and the Maltese word for 14 is &lt;em&gt;erbatax&lt;/em&gt;, which are both confirmed by Wiktionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding the word for eleven was much more difficult. I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/huli.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; which claims that the language Huli of Papua New Guinea, which has a quindecimal number system, has the word &lt;em&gt;bearia&lt;/em&gt; for eleven. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/tzotzil.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another page&lt;/a&gt; from the same site gives &lt;em&gt;buluchib&lt;/em&gt; as the word for eleven in the Maya language Tzotzil, which has a vigesimal number system. There are citations linked from the site, but I can't access them directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found another language where the phrase for 11 starts with b, but that's because the word for ten starts with b, and eleven is expressed as &quot;ten on one&quot;. It's &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/Arawak.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arawak&lt;/a&gt;, where ten is &lt;em&gt;biandakhabo&lt;/em&gt; and eleven is &lt;em&gt;biandakhabo diazo abaro&lt;/em&gt;. This doesn't seem in the spirit of what you wanted, and the word is a little long to take to use in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-04-24T20:52:31.360" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T20:52:31.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12143" CreationDate="2015-04-24T20:20:45.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I've seen people do, and what I would do, is to get more annotators. Get two or three more people and have them go over the problematic items, and then make a decision based on majority consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2015-04-24T20:20:45.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-24T23:15:22.520" Score="0" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must complete your research paper before I can give you a grade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Having challenges with before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9650" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T00:10:33.150" Title="How do I diagram this sentence in a tree diagram?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-04-25T09:58:21.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12193" CreationDate="2015-04-25T00:10:33.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not easy.  I'd let the logic dictate the syntactic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ necessarily [ A will precede B ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where A = you complete your research paper, B = I can give you a grade, necessarily is expressed with &quot;must&quot;, and precede is expressed with &quot;before&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's going to be a challenge getting from the above to a single tree structure that directly represents your problem sentence. I'm not sure it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T00:10:33.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12189" CreationDate="2015-04-25T01:06:44.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nganasan '11' is [bʲiʔ ŋuʔoi], also in Caddo it's [bínáyʔah háyú wístsʼiʔ]. In Okordia (Okodia), '14' is [eji nii fɪn(ɪ)]. If you want numerals, look &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T01:06:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-25T04:09:24.563" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;declension&lt;/a&gt; = the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number, and gender are identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=declension&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline for `declension {noun}'&lt;/a&gt; rechannels to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=decline&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;decline (v.)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. ... from Latin &lt;em&gt;declinare&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to lower, avoid, deviate, to bend from, inflect,&amp;quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;from&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see de-) + &lt;em&gt;clinare&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to bend,&amp;quot; from PIE * &lt;em&gt;klei-n-&lt;/em&gt;, suffixed form of * &lt;em&gt;klei-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to lean&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lean&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lean&lt;/a&gt; (v.)). &lt;strong&gt;Sense has been altered since c. 1400 by interpretation of de- as &amp;quot;downward.&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/inflection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflection = inflexion&lt;/a&gt; = {Grammar} A change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inflection&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline for `inflection {noun}'&lt;/a&gt; rechannels to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inflect&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflect (v.)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;in&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=in-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in-&lt;/a&gt; (1)) + &lt;em&gt;flectere&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to bend&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=flexible&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flexible&lt;/a&gt;). Grammatical sense is attested 1660s; pronunciation sense (in inflection) is c. 1600. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. About the grammatical meaning of &lt;strong&gt;decline&lt;/strong&gt;, does the prefix &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;de-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;downward&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In other words, which sense applied to &lt;strong&gt;decline&lt;/strong&gt;: that before c. 1400, or after?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4. What does the directionality of these nouns mean? In other words, how does declension entail bending DOWNWARD or FROM, whereas an inflection entails bending INWARDS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me dig deeper than the definitions, which I already understand and so ask NOT about. I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;But what are some right ways of interpreting these connotations of definition, to make the etymology feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T03:02:39.863" Title="How does the sense of direction in grammatical terms, relate to their definitions?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12198" CreationDate="2015-04-25T05:09:02.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inflection goes inward, because the parts of a clause most central to the meaning are the most likely to be marked on the verb, those most peripheral, least likely.  Declension goes downward in the grammatical structure of a sentence, because at the top of the structure we find the least oblique forms, at the bottom, the most oblique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Law Area asks further (in a comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What do you mean by marked on the verb?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marked on the verb by the addition of an inflection suffix agreeing with the subject, perhaps also the object, and perhaps other sentence arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is meant by the top of the structure? Which structure?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top of an inverted tree of the usual sort giving a diagram of the structure of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And oblique?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oblique is a term from traditional grammar referring to grammatical cases most different from the nominative and, in a declension, ordinarily given toward the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suitable dictionary of linguistic terms would do a better job than I at defining these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T03:02:39.863" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12198" CreationDate="2015-04-25T09:45:49.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Declinatio is a technical term in Latin grammar, which has been adopted into English. Its technical use is described as follows in Lewis and Short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Of gramm. lang.: variation, inflection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(α). In the older grammarians, every change of form which a word undergoes; as declension, strictly so called, conjugation, comparison, derivation, etc., Varr. L. L. 8, § 2 sq.; 10, § 11 sq.; Cic. de Or. 3, 54; cf. “also of declension in its stricter sense,” Quint. 1, 4, 29; 1, 5, 63; “of conjugation,” id. 1, 4, 13; “of derivation,” id. 8, 3, 32; 2, 15, 4.—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(β). Among the later grammarians, of declension, properly so called, as distinguished from conjugatio, comparatio, derivatio, etc. So, Donatus: in declinatione compositivorum nominum, p. 174 P. (p. 13 Lind.).”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Ddeclinatio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Ddeclinatio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of “bending down” is connected with the concept of “case”, for Latin casus, translating Greek ptosis “falling”. If you write the different forms of a noun in a list you will “fall” down the list when you move from one form to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T09:45:49.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6813" CreationDate="2015-04-25T22:24:49.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has is a presupposition which may be false, depending on dialect, namely that there actually is a schwa before a tautosyllabic nasal. An alternative narrow transcription of &quot;restriction&quot; is [ɹʷəˈstɹʷɪkʃn̩], with a syllabic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;. There is one trend of transcribing &amp;lt;ər, əl, ən, əm&gt;, and a competing trend of transcribing those as &amp;lt;ɹ̩, l̩, m̩, n̩&gt;. Although those syllable peaks may derive from the reduction of full vowel plus sonorant (&lt;em&gt;tyrant&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;tyrannical&lt;/em&gt;), there is phonological evidence that schwa is eventually deleted. That evidence is a rule reducing &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; to glottal stop before syllabic and non-syllabic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, as in [ˈwɪʔnəs] &quot;witness&quot;, [fæʔn̩] &quot;fatten&quot;. Positing that there is a schwa between /t/ and /n/ needlessly obscures the debuccalization rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may, of course, easily be dialects where there is unquestionably a schwa before those sonorants (i.e. there may be dialects where &quot;prism&quot; is [ˈpɹʷɪzəm]), and there just aren't any syllabic sonorants in that dialect. One may feel (and thus assert) that there &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; is a vowel in the first syllable of &quot;contemporary&quot;, but what you may be observing is the release of the preceding consonant, Unless you consider the alternative that the first syllable is [kn̩] rather than [kən] and given a reason to reject [kn̩], you are stuck with an indeterminacy of analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, surface phonetic transcriptions are still abstractions, which need to be justified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-25T22:24:49.070" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2015-04-26T21:29:48.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I answered a very similar question recently, but I haven't located it.  Please excuse any repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; as the counterpart to logicians' term &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt;, which means an account of what sentences (well-formed formulas) are in a language.  I'd use the term &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; for that, as logicians do, except linguists have preempted the term &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; to mean something different -- an account of word structure.  I believe my use of the term &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; is completely in accord with McCawley's use, in &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  (But McCawley thinks grammar, in that sense, is not useful and is not interesting.  Whilst I, on the other hand, am a grammar lover.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt; to mean the same thing that logicians, and McCawley use it for.  It's an account of the relationships of sentences to other sentences, excluding truth and reference (which is &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt;).  I suppose there could be other relations of significance, but really that boils down to an account of logical implication based on the forms of sentences, which is called &lt;em&gt;logical syntax&lt;/em&gt; (to distinguish it from &lt;em&gt;logical semantics&lt;/em&gt;).  I think it is fair to say that McCawley's interest is in &lt;em&gt;logical syntax&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these senses, syntax presupposes grammar, because until you know what the sentences are, how can you study implicational relations among them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the use in linguistics of these two terms &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;, though, has been all over the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T21:29:48.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2637" CreationDate="2015-04-26T22:58:44.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In spoken language it is very likely the schwa [ə]. The schwa is frequent in speech due to a common form of vowel reduction, centralization. This is especially present in rapid speech where vowels may not be perfectly articulated all the time. Also, many languages that are written abjad-wise have the schwa as their most frequent vowel phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9662" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T22:58:44.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12216" CreationDate="2015-04-26T22:59:19.433" Score="11" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems plausible to me, and I would like to know how to verify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I think &lt;em&gt;xahesh&lt;/em&gt; might be cognate with &lt;em&gt;question&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;xahesh&lt;/em&gt; (IPA: /xɑːheʃ/) in Modern Persian is a noun meaning &quot;request, plea&quot;. The root &lt;em&gt;xah-&lt;/em&gt; is from the verb &lt;em&gt;xastan&lt;/em&gt; /xɑːstæn/ meaning 'to want, desire'. It is spelled &lt;em&gt;xwahesh&lt;/em&gt;, and was pronounced /xwɑːhesh/, as it still is in some dialects like Dari. The suffix &lt;em&gt;-esh&lt;/em&gt; is from Middle Persian -eshn (/eʃn/) (or maybe -ashn) , which has essentially the same function as Latin &lt;em&gt;-tio, tionis&lt;/em&gt;, turning a verb into a noun, though I'm not sure if these two are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several words in Persian beginning with &lt;em&gt;xw-&lt;/em&gt; appear to be derived from PIE roots beginning with *sw. For instance &lt;em&gt;xwab&lt;/em&gt; (/xɑːb/, formerly /xwɑːb/) &quot;sleep&quot; is listed in some etymology dictionaries as a derivative of PIE *swep, cognate with Greek ὕπνος, and Latin &lt;em&gt;somnus&lt;/em&gt;. Another example is &lt;em&gt;xwahar&lt;/em&gt; (/xɑːhæɾ/ or /xwɑːhæɾ/) &quot;sister&quot;, is clearly from PIE *swésōr, cognate to &lt;em&gt;sister&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Schwester&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;soror&lt;/em&gt;, etc. This does not appear to be a strict rule however, since for instance xwandan (/xɑːndæn/, /xwɑːndæn/) &quot;to read, sing&quot;, is supposedly cognate with Latin &lt;em&gt;canō, canere&lt;/em&gt;, from PIE *kan, which is not labialized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Latin &lt;em&gt;quaero&lt;/em&gt; is rhotacized &lt;em&gt;quaeso&lt;/em&gt;, which resembles the h/s counterpart of &lt;em&gt;xwah-&lt;/em&gt;, and has a similar sense to it, I think it's reasonable to guess that the two may be cognates, but I've not been able to find this written down anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is almost certainly because I don't know where to look. I'd appreciate a response pointing out what is the right academic source or procedure for verifying such guesses. For instance, are there standard academic references for looking up the PIE roots of Persian/Iranian words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1000" LastEditorUserId="1000" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T03:34:46.817" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T17:57:38.680" Title="How can I check whether 'question' in English, and 'xahesh' in Persian are cognates?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2637" CreationDate="2015-04-26T23:41:40.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer primarily hinges on the meaning of the construction &quot;has been used by more languages, with more frequency than any other&quot;, especially whether &quot;with more frequency than any other&quot; adds anything to the question, i.e. whether it means &quot;and occurs with greater token frequency than any other&quot;. Since I cannot think of any reason to interpret the clause in that way, I assume that is just another way of asking which vowel is found in more languages. The top contenders are [i] and [a], which in UPSID are a dead heat (language count i=393, a=392). Schwa on the other hand only appears in 134 languages. I would say that it is currently unknown which of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; is found in more languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-26T23:41:40.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-04-27T01:11:34.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Slovak: I think there are two sides you need to be aware of before you consider whether they are similar; for me reading Slovene makes it and Slovak seem similar and I can manage to understand it enough to see the context and point of conversation. But listening to it? I would say that that is where the &quot;it's not similar&quot; arises. I cannot understand Slovene without their &quot;subtitles&quot;. Say I was in a cafe and a pair were speaking Slovene on a nearby table(I can hear them properly). I would, like many, be able to straight away sense it has a Slavic &quot;homely&quot; feeling - all the similar sounds that Slavic words have. Then I would concentrate and see what they're talking about. I would get a frustrated because I somehow cannot understand and after realizing that it is not Slovak or Czech(easy for Slovaks to understand Czech, not so much vice versa) I would try to see what language it is according to how well I understand the words really and from what I know of their typical sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Order of best understanding (listening only):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovak&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Czech &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sorbian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Croatian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bosnian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ukrainian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serbian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belorussian(Losing understanding of context from this language onwards)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovenian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macedonian &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulgarian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the basic order for me personally. If the speaker has a 'deep' sounding voice, it makes it massively easier to understand (still not past Belorussian though). - One more thing that should be noted, I have not learned Russian before(many people were forced to learn fluent Russian in Slovak schools in the past).&#xA;From the list, one can tell that it is not easy for me to understand South Slavic languages, and East Slavic ones vary. REMEMBER this is listening to people speaking without looking at them only!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9665" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T01:11:34.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6952" CreationDate="2015-04-27T12:59:55.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists seem to love diagrams, but what kind of diagrams you give for language expressions bears only a distant relationship to any real differences among grammatical theories, if any relationship at all.  Since you've been interested in binary branching as one way to distinguish formal grammatical theories, I thought you might be interested in the following account of just how trivial a matter this is, theoretically.  You can find a way to write binary branching diagrams for context free phrase structure grammar (cfpsg) or any of its notational variants (including dependency grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence is generated by a cfpsg when there is a correct derivation for the sentence, and a derivation is a list of strings of terminal and nonterminal symbols, the first in the list being an initial symbol (typically S) and the last in the list a string of terminal symbols (say, e.g., a string of phonemes giving the pronunciation of a sentence in the language being described).  It's a very simple theory. Each line of the derivation after the first is produced from the preceding line by using a phrase structure rule to replace some non-terminal symbol with a string of symbols.  The last line of the derivation has only terminal symbols (phonemes, let's say). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tree diagram of the usual sort giving the grammatical structure of a sentence can be produced from the cfpsg derivation in a mechanical fashion, so that the tree structure can be thought of as, essentially, an abbreviated cfpsg derivation.  Trees are grammatical derivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to construct such a tree diagram is to make a branch at each application of a phrase structure rule.  There is a previous line of the derivation and a phrase structure rule, and from these two things, the next line of the derivation is derived by applying the phrase structure rule to some non-terminal in the previous line.  Two things in the tree are combined to form the next node up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there you have it -- binary branching.  As you can see, it's a trivial formal maneuver.  If you wanted more branches than just two, you could arrange for that by applying several phrase structure rules at once in the underlying phrase structure derivation.  Could we ever find out anything interesting about language by playing games with diagrams?  I don't see how.  Diagrams are not theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T12:59:55.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12209" CreationDate="2015-04-27T13:09:04.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Henning, &lt;em&gt;Das Verbum des Mittelpersischen der Turfanfragmente&lt;/em&gt; (1933) p. 187 posited Iranian *xwaz, ‘wish, want’, represented by Middle and New Persian xwāh-, with long-grade present stem, the regular SW Iranian shift of /z/ to /d/, and then a specifically Persian dialect shift of /d/ to /h/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johnny Cheung, &lt;em&gt;Etymological dictionary of the Iranian verb&lt;/em&gt; (2007), pp. 459-460 similarly posits Iranian *xṷaz, represented also by Sogdian xw(ʼ)z, Bactrian χωζ- and others, also the Armenian loanword xuzem. No non-Iranian cognates are known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of Latin quaero, quaestio etc. is debated, but none of the proposed suggestions links up with the cited Iranian root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T16:01:05.180" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T16:01:05.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4842" CreationDate="2015-04-27T14:57:56.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A visarga is replaced by स् whenever a letter from खर् (ख फ छ ठ थ च ट त क प) follows. This is mandated by Panini's rule &lt;strong&gt;8-3-34 विसर्जनीयस्य सः&lt;/strong&gt; (There is yet another rule that amends/modifies this one, but it is not the topic of discussion here). An amendment to this rule is &lt;strong&gt;8-3-36 वा शरि&lt;/strong&gt; which says that the replacement स् to visarga occurs optionally as शर् (श ष स) follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from rudram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;या त &lt;strong&gt;इषुः शिवतमा&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;इषुस् शिवतमा । 8-3-36 वा शरि&#xA;इषुश् शिवतमा । 8-4-40 स्तोः श्चुना श्चुः&#xA;इषुश्शिवतमा &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;strong&gt;8-3-36 वा शरि&lt;/strong&gt; is optional, the other form will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;इषुः शिवतमा&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In vedic chanting, there former sandhi is always applied, i.e you should only chant it as इषुश्शिवतमा&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;यथा &lt;strong&gt;नः सर्व&lt;/strong&gt;मिज्जगद् &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;नः सर्वम् &#xA;नस् सर्वम् = नस्सर्वम् । 8-3-36 वा शरि&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these rules appear too complicated to remember and apply, there is a simple rule of thumb to follow during chanting. Whenever one of श् ष् स् follows a visarga, replace the visarga with the corresponding letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;सन्तः षट् = सन्तष्षट्&#xA;इषुः शिवतमा = इषुश्शिवतमा &#xA;नमः सोमाय = नमस्सोमाय&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2015-04-27T17:01:55.233" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T17:01:55.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2015-04-27T17:30:15.410" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They don't come from the not pure Turkish, the roots of those words come from an ancient and very strong Aryan caste. Their Brahmin are still keeping their secrets in the caves of Kathmandu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written there that once they dominated the center of Asia. All their conquest of the plains of India, the bloodshed and intermingling with local Dravidian populations, and the unforgettable war with Lord Krishna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the modern name of those wise mans here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the common origin of Slavic and Iranian language it should be obvious to you that we are talking about the same people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People think that those are only living Nepal, but, in fact, many cities of Afghanistan and even Kashmir (the place we call Eden) himself are actually named after this caste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9669" LastActivityDate="2015-04-27T17:30:15.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12235" CreationDate="2015-04-28T02:10:48.910" Score="5" ViewCount="4039" Body="&lt;p&gt;This Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-occurrence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; says, &quot;In contrast to collocation, co-occurrence assumes interdependency of the two terms&quot;. But I'm not really sure what that means by interdependency of the two terms. Can someone explain it more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9674" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T20:19:19.373" Title="Word Co-occurrence and collocation difference?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12224" CreationDate="2015-04-28T16:22:29.693" Score="-1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I exemplify with the following, but I ask this in general. How can I learn more about affixes that change meaning, especially those that are 'upended into' their antonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I was researching the etymology of surreptitious: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=surreptitious+&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;surreptitious (adj.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mid-15c., from Latin &lt;em&gt;surrepticius&lt;/em&gt; &quot;stolen, furtive, clandestine,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;surreptus&lt;/em&gt;, past participle of &lt;em&gt;surripere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;seize secretly, take away, steal, plagiarize,&quot; from assimilated form of &lt;em&gt;sub&lt;/em&gt; &quot;from under&quot; (hence, &quot;secretly;&quot; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sub-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sub-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;rapere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to snatch&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rapid&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rapid&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the &lt;em&gt;sub-&lt;/em&gt; prefix invert to its antonym &lt;em&gt;sur-&lt;/em&gt; (French for 'on')? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet (to my surprise), 'subreption {noun}' maintained the &lt;em&gt;sub-&lt;/em&gt; prefix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-04-28T16:58:57.013" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T18:35:01.887" Title="Deceptive affix changes?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12223" CreationDate="2015-04-28T18:35:01.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't an example of antonymy, but of accidental similarity. The Latin prefix &lt;em&gt;sub-&lt;/em&gt; could be assimilated into &lt;em&gt;sur-&lt;/em&gt; before an &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. This is not the same as French &lt;em&gt;sur&lt;/em&gt; 'over', which is from Latin &lt;em&gt;super&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-04-28T18:35:01.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-28T18:43:41.847" Score="0" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/080bA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Quora question&lt;/a&gt; motivated this. Do the Etymonline entries below imply that the  connotation changed in Old French (and so even before English)? I pose the question also for the equivalent French nouns, because it appears to concern both English and French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did 'pity = pitié' evolve to connote negativity? As per the bolded, how did 'piety = piété' affect 'pity = pitié'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=pity&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pity (n.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  early 13c., from Old French &lt;em&gt;pite, pite&lt;/em&gt;t &quot;pity, mercy, compassion, care, tenderness; pitiful state, wretched condition&quot; (11c., Modern French &lt;em&gt;pitié&lt;/em&gt;), from Latin &lt;em&gt;pietatem&lt;/em&gt; (nominative &lt;em&gt;pietas&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;piety, loyalty, duty&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=piety&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;piety&lt;/a&gt;).  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;English &lt;em&gt;pity&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;piety&lt;/em&gt; were not fully distinguished until 17c.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Transferred sense of &quot;grounds or cause for pity&quot; is from late 14c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205571/how-does-be-of-combine-to-mean-possess-give-rise-to#comment485482_205571&quot;&gt;But what are some right ways of interpreting th etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T23:54:39.940" Title="How did 'piety = piété' and 'pity = pitié' diverge and evolve?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12225" CreationDate="2015-04-29T08:01:00.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/144814#eid29888776&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this entry in the OED on 'pity' {noun}&lt;/a&gt; useful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Etymology:  &amp;lt; Anglo-Norman pité, pittee, peté, peti, Anglo-Norman and Old French pitet, pitee, pitié (Middle French pité , pitié , French pitié ) compassion (c1100), piety (15th cent.; rare) &amp;lt; classical Latin pietās (see piety n.). In branch II. probably after Middle French pieté piety n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The sense of Latin pietās ‘piety’ was in post-classical Latin extended so as to include ‘compassion, pity’ (Vetus Latina), and it was in this sense that the word first appears in Old French in its two forms pitié and pieté . Gradually these forms were differentiated, so that pieté , which more closely represented the Latin form, was used in the original Latin sense, while pitié retained the extended sense. In Middle English, both pity n. and piety n. are found first in the sense ‘compassion’, and subsequently in the sense ‘piety’, and the differentiation in sense is not complete until the 17th cent.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T23:54:39.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T23:54:39.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T09:44:14.330" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;What linguistic evidence is there why the writing system used by Russian is considered to use the same script (Cyrillic) as the writing system used for Macedonian or Serbian (when written in Cyrillic letters)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Hungarian text refers to a foreign language proper name (such as the name of a person or town) that is written in the Latin script in its original language, the name is written as in the original language, even if this includes letters or accents that aren't used in Hungarian.  Names written this way can get Hungarian grammatical suffixes, such as for noun declination.  This is not only an academical rule, but is actual practice in news articles for general audience, when they mention names from eg. Slovakian, Croatian, French.  This shows that those languages are written in the same script (Latin) as those other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, proper names from foreign languages not written in the Latin script, such as from Russian, the name is transliterated to Hungarian based on its pronunciation.  As a result, you never words written in the Russian alphabet with a grammatical suffix written in the Hungarian alphabet.  This is because Russian is considered to be written in a different script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there cases when a Russian text contains a Serbian or Macedonian name in its original spelling, containing letters that don't occur in Russian (such as ј or њ), but has Russian grammatical suffixes?  Or is there other evidence that shows that the alphabets are mixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously we can't start treating Cyrillic as two or more scripts now, the way Unicode has decided that Coptic is a separate script from Greek.  It is too late for that because there is already a very large corpus of Russian, Macedonian, and Serbian text represented digitally.  I am merely trying to understand why they were decided to be treated as a single script originally, and especially the linguistic (not political) reasons for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1615" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T21:09:52.737" Title="What evidence is there that Cyrillic is a single script?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-12T20:57:05.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12227" CreationDate="2015-04-29T17:45:01.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the fact that Latin script is used to write French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, Norwegian, Saami (and the list goes on). No two of these languages use exactly the same letters. The meaning of &quot;script&quot; and the interpretation of modifiers like &quot;Cyrillic&quot;, &quot;Latin&quot; has nothing to do with the structure of the languages being written, it has to do with identifying a historical &quot;base&quot; writing system (the letters used for writing Latin; the letters created by Cyril and Methodius; the letters for writing Ge'ez).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question about sociolinguistic writing practices in Russia is a separate question. Most English-speakers modify non-English letters when they face &amp;lt;ø æ ß&gt; in foreign words, yet many English-speakers preserve such letters. Sociolinguistic questions about usage patterns are never well-served by asking &quot;What do speakers of X do&quot;, as though there were no distinctions made in the society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T17:45:01.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12227" CreationDate="2015-04-29T18:16:14.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unicode does not have codes for all the letters of the Coptic alphabet, but only for the fourteen signs that do not occur in Greek as well. Thus, it treats Coptic in exactly the same way as the non-Russian forms of Cyrillic script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I think this question is not about linguistics, but about computer coding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-04-29T18:16:14.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-29T19:10:15.917" Score="3" ViewCount="1179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you please recommend etymology dictionaries for English &lt;strong&gt;that MUST be available online&lt;/strong&gt; (either for free or purchase), BUT subject to the following conditions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Many of the recommendations in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ask.metafilter.com/141443/Good-etymology-book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Ask Metafilter post&lt;/a&gt; don't seem to be online. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. If possible, the dictionary ought to trace back to and discusses the proto-language root&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(ie Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Germanic).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already tried and used, and so please exclude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. the OED. It's either too brusque or fails to explain the connections between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4. Etymonline.com. It also sometimes fails to explain the  connections between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0192830988&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; it's  even  brusquer than Etymonline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to user 'Robert'  below, I exemplify a word unexplained fully by the resources above. Please do NOT answer to 'rogation' here (I can post anew if necessary); this thread is reserved for the content above the line separator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/view/Entry/166876?redirectedFrom=rogation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; fails to trace back far enough; it omits the PIE root. &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=rogation&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; does state the PIE root, but it doesn't connect or explain or reveal the &lt;strong&gt;(gaps in the)&lt;/strong&gt; evolution of meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;rogare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to ask,&quot;   ...    &quot;to stretch out (the hand)  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  PIE * &lt;em&gt;rog-&lt;/em&gt;, 0-grade form of root  * &lt;em&gt;reg-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;move in a straight line&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=regal&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;regal&lt;/a&gt;) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-05-02T15:40:05.660" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T19:53:38.540" Title="Online etymology dictionary for English (more explanatory than Etymonline and OED)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-04-30T15:19:49.453" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we think about the morphology and syntax, the debate arises. Even if they are protagonist parts of linguistic debates, and even if they are usually address separately, the importance of each concept and the confusion between them will vary depending on the main language of study. When it comes to Analytic languages, such as English, Morphology does not play a major role, so the lexicon is highly dependent on syntactic features. However, non-Analytic languages, such as Russian, rely mostly on the morphology of the word. Therefore, in these languages the distinction between morphology and syntax is very clear. However, there is not a strong consensus of where they differ and where they come together. Therefore, this arise the question, are words more independent from syntax in non-analytical languages? Does this affect language processing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9685" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T12:43:21.873" Title="are words more independent from syntax in non-analytical languages? Does this affect language processing?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-11-25T03:42:16.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12221" CreationDate="2015-04-30T20:19:19.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really interesting question. I did some reading, and it looks like &quot;&lt;strong&gt;co-occurrence&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; refers to when terms occur in the same document (corpus, paragraph, sentence). They do not necessarily need to be adjacent. For example, when the term &quot;strong coffee&quot; appears in a document, the term &quot;espresso bean&quot; probably also tends to occur in that document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;collocation&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is two words that frequently appear together, in the adjacent sense. So, &quot;strong coffee&quot; is a collocation, because we see those terms occur next to each other more often than would be expected from pure chance. Hypothetically, the term &quot;powerful coffee&quot; is a synonym, but we very rarely see these two words occur next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia article probably should be edited, to not make the two terms not seem so readily comparable. An example of how the terms should be used in distinct contexts comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/980000/972492/p531-biber.pdf?ip=146.96.252.2&amp;amp;id=972492&amp;amp;acc=OPEN&amp;amp;key=7777116298C9657D%2EB8C12B3A7E0B62A0%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E6D218144511F3437&amp;amp;CFID=507789360&amp;amp;CFTOKEN=18538216&amp;amp;__acm__=1430424179_97c7ef72a2008fe018aef84464fb2f1e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This statistical technique identifies the groupings of &lt;strong&gt;collocations&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  that tend to &lt;strong&gt;co-occur&lt;/strong&gt; frequently in texts&quot; [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some other possibly relevant papers that I came across:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/~sbordag/papers/BordagMC08.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Comparison of Co-occurrence and Similarity Measures as Simulations of Context&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=979678&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Retrieving collocations by co-occurrences and word order constraints&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972492&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Co-occurrence patterns among collocations: a tool for corpus-based lexical knowledge acquisition&lt;/a&gt; (cited above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T20:19:19.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12227" CreationDate="2015-04-30T21:09:52.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian always re-writes foreign words in such a way so that the new spelling to reflect its pronounciation according the Russian reading rules not dependent on the language of origin. At most it can preserve some spelling exceptions where different variants of spelling lead to the same reading, such as starting a word with я- or йа-, ё- or йо-, where the both variants are read the same, but one is more often to be met in foreign words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a Bulgarian name is read differently than would a Russian speaker read looking at its original spelling (or contains non-Russian letters), it gets re-written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even Russian slang or contracted words are likely to be written according to their pronounciation rather than etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-04-30T21:09:52.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12241" CreationDate="2015-05-01T03:19:06.810" Score="0" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: p 139, &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Logic&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2010) by Harry J. Gensler. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.] Translate&#xA;  “unless”&#xA;  as “or.” ...       [eg: A unless B =  B unless A = Either A or B].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[2.] “Unless” is also equivalent to “if not”...     [eg: A unless B =  A, if not B].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though phrased differently, the above is asserted too in p 319, &lt;em&gt;A Concise Introduction to Logic&lt;/em&gt; (12 Ed, 2014) by P J Hurley. However, both books don't dig deeper or explain 1 and 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would someone please explain why &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt; can be substitued as in 1 and 2?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-05-01T16:29:13.290" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:56:59.233" Title="How does 'unless' mean 'or' or 'if not'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-01T17:48:54.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12238" CreationDate="2015-05-01T04:03:02.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When glossing a logical proposition with English words, we are not really using the English language system; it's just a way to represent the unambiguous mathematical concepts in a mnemonic and easy-to-pronounce manner. For this reason, mathematicians and logicians like to present specialized definitions of the words they use. That is what is being done in this passage. You'll only confuse yourself if you try to use the ordinary meaning of English words in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this a rather poor definition for an introductory text; I'm not a mathematician, so it may in fact not be unambiguous, but I find myself unsure if the author means for this to represent &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;exclusive disjunction&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_disjunction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inclusive disjunction&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to me to technically be a definition of inclusive disjunction. Usually in logic, the phrase &quot;Either A or B&quot; is taken to mean that exactly one of the following 3 propositions is true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is true and B is true&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is true and B is false&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A is false and B is true&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in ordinary English, &quot;A, unless B&quot; seems to additionally imply &quot;if B is true, A is not true&quot;. Clearly the author means instead for &quot;A, unless B&quot; to represent &quot;if B is true, A may or may not be true&quot;, but that is an extremely unfortunate definition of the word &quot;unless&quot; in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I can't say much about the linguistic aspect of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evidence from the 2002 edition:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In the 2002 edition, &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=sAe6GppFPDAC&amp;amp;pg=PA124&amp;amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=unless&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page 56&lt;/a&gt;, accessed through Google Books, Gensler uses the notation &quot;D ∨ B&quot; as equivalent to &quot;D unless B&quot;. The ∨ sign is used for inclusive disjunction, so that does indeed appear to be what he means with this supposed translation of logic into ordinary English words. In other words, by &quot;A unless B&quot; he really means &quot;Either A, or B, or both&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-05-02T08:56:59.233" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:56:59.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12238" CreationDate="2015-05-01T05:26:27.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to bear in mind that logic textbooks do not purport to provide translations of natural language into logical symbolism. Instead, they provide conventialized translations of standard logical symbols and expressions of English. It is pretty standard that in Philosophy 150, about half the time students screw up the exercise of matching natural language sentences to logical formalism, because they don't heed the strict conventions in the discipline of logic regarding the meaning of &quot;and&quot; (for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philosophy.stackexchange.com is a good venue for asking questions about the conduct of logic as a discipline. IMO, questions about the conventions of philosophers and logicians is off topic here, and you would be better served focusing, here, on questions about natural language use. Do you want to know about the meaning of &quot;unless&quot;? Then skip the distractor of quirky usage in logic textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T05:26:27.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12238" CreationDate="2015-05-01T06:16:14.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Start with 2.: &lt;em&gt;A unless B&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;A, if not B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;A, if not B&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;if not B then A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, &lt;em&gt;if x then y&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;not x or y&lt;/em&gt; (for the &quot;material implication&quot; of logic)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, &lt;em&gt;if not B then A&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;not not B or A&lt;/em&gt; (from the above, with &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;not B&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, &lt;em&gt;not not x = x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, &lt;em&gt;not not B or A&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;B or A&lt;/em&gt; (substituting &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;not not B&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, &lt;em&gt;x or y&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;y or x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, &lt;em&gt;B or A&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;A or B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;em&gt;A unless B&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;A or B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T06:16:14.837" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T06:43:58.990" Score="0" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following sentence, why is &lt;code&gt;Disesen Artikel&lt;/code&gt; in the front? Does this means it is being raised from some other position in the sentence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Diesen    Artikel wird  der       Burgermeister gelesen    haben?&#xA;this.ACC  article will  the.NOM   Mayor         read.PRES  have.BARE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm supposed to write a tree representing this sentence, but I am simply not sure if it is correct or not. In my tree, I have &lt;code&gt;Diesen Artikel&lt;/code&gt; moving to the &lt;code&gt;Specifier&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;code&gt;CP&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;wird&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;C head&lt;/code&gt;. Does this make sense? What would its &quot;motivation&quot; for moving up be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9678" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:31:39.950" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:31:39.950" Title="German object raising?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T09:20:23.980" Score="-1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Argument that advanced for the emergence of INFL as the maximum projection in sentential construction under the X-bar theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9692" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T16:03:14.070" Title="INFL as Maximal Projection" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-05-01T17:47:01.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-01T09:39:20.147" Score="5" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German polyglot Emil Krebs &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Krebs&quot;&gt;allegedly mastered 68 languages&lt;/a&gt;. Which, frankly, I find unbelievable. I cannot find any reliable source that is well documented, but perhaps recordings of Emil Krebs would persuade me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article, Krebs died in 1930, so it should have been possible to record him, speaking all those different languages. So, my simple question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any recordings of Emil Krebs, speaking languages other than German?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking whether learning that many languages is possible or not - no need to explain your opinion on that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The actual number of languages he learned is also unimportant, I am only interested in recordings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I am not familiar with the tag system of this site, and also could not create the tags I need, because of the low rep. &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/recording&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;recording&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;recording&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/polyglot&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polyglot&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polyglot&lt;/a&gt; would have been nice. Please retag the question if needed and remove this line.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9693" LastEditorUserId="9693" LastEditDate="2015-05-01T09:44:22.510" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T07:36:55.150" Title="Are there any recordings of Emil Krebs?" Tags="&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12243" CreationDate="2015-05-01T16:03:14.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not maximal.  The scope of a past tense does not extend past the clause in which it appears, thus in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tony died. His children carry on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;carry on&quot; is not interpreted as being in the past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If Tony died, his gas station would still make a profit.  His grocery would continue in business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;would&quot; of the last sentence is interpreted as being in the scope of the conditional in the first sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the scope of an if-clause is wider than that of a tense.  The projection of an if-clause extends beyond a clause, so it is wider than that of a tense.  So a tense is not in a maximal projection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-01T16:03:14.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11578" CreationDate="2015-05-02T04:29:19.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to represent &quot;I agree with you&quot;?  Try this: let &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;I agree with you&quot;, then the representation is &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine you don't find that answer very enlightening, but what is wrong with it?  My representation satisfies all the logical properties you said you were interested in.  That's because you didn't say what logical properties you wanted the representation to have, so any representation will do as well as another.  I give you the simplest one that occurred to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T04:29:19.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12249" CreationDate="2015-05-02T08:23:51.520" Score="-1" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have gotten several text messages from this unknown sender and have not been able to identify the langauge so I can translate it. It appears to be quoting the Bible but I am not sure. I found one place that thinks it is  Bashkir but that doesn't seem to parse correctly when I tried that. Any ideas anyone?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AMI SARAMEN FONUFAN.   MATEUS 5:14-16 VS14- AMI SARAMEN FONUFAN. EU TELINIMW A NOM WON EU CHUK ESAP TONGENI MONOLA. VS15-ESAP WOR EMAN ARAMAS A KENI EU LAMP O A ANOMU FAN EU SEPI, NGE EPWE ISETA WON LENIAN , PWE EPWE ASARAMA CHON EWE IMW MEINISIN. VS16-IEI USUN AMI SARAM EPWE TITTIN MWEN EKEWE ARAMAS, PWE REPWE KUNA AMI FOFOR MURINA O MWAREITI SEMEMI LON LANG. Amen!! Pwal lesor allim ami meinisin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9698" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:52:34.180" Title="Can't identify this language" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-01-30T02:27:22.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12248" CreationDate="2015-05-02T08:46:00.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to be the Micronesian language Chuukese (called in that language &lt;em&gt;Fosun Chuuk&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;Most of the information I can find on this language comes from the LDS church, which has sent missionaries and is active in proselytizing the region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LDS church has published magazine articles in this language; you can see some shared words between this and the text you received and the overall similarity in word structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ren ach sia weweiti pwe Jises Kraist i ewe Saramen ewe Fonufan, kich&#xA;  sipwe anapano ach nuku non I me winiti saram ngeni ekkewe ekkoch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lds.org/liahona/2014/03/the-divine-mission-of-jesus-christ-light-of-the-world?lang=mlg&amp;amp;clang=chk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.lds.org/liahona/2014/03/the-divine-mission-of-jesus-christ-light-of-the-world?lang=mlg&amp;amp;clang=chk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what they have to say about the island it comes from, Chuuk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inhabited by 48,654 people in 2010, Chuuk is the most populous&#xA;  state of the Federated States of Micronesia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_case_studies&amp;amp;story_id=205&amp;amp;cat_id=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_case_studies&amp;amp;story_id=205&amp;amp;cat_id=4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on Chuukese (it is a stub):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chuukese /tʃuːˈkiːz/, also rendered Trukese /trʌˈkiːz/, is a Trukic&#xA;  language of the Austronesian language family spoken primarily on the&#xA;  islands of Chuuk in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-05-02T08:52:34.180" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T08:52:34.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12242" CreationDate="2015-05-02T09:29:13.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find your sentence implausible as a question (are you sure it is a question?), but, otherwise, &lt;em&gt;diesen Artikel&lt;/em&gt; is the direct object of &lt;em&gt;gelesen&lt;/em&gt; and must have been raised from the complement position immediately to the left of &lt;em&gt;gelesen&lt;/em&gt;. As to its 'landing site', to my knowledge there is no agreement concerning the details of the structure of the German Vorfeld, but what you have assumed (that it has landed in the Spec CP and that the finite auxiliary &lt;em&gt;wird&lt;/em&gt; has risen into C) used to be the standard view in analyses of German formulated in the late 1980's and early 1990's within the metatheoretical framework of Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Theory. As regards why constituents are raised into the Vorfeld, the usual assumptions are Information-Structure-related, and, in this case, the ascension of &lt;em&gt;diesen Artikel&lt;/em&gt; would probably be explained by German syntacticians as a case of Topicalization. Nevertheless, the German Vorfeld can also lodge Foci - especially Wh-interrogatives and negative items - informationally unmarked subjects, emphatic (i.e., focused) subjects, preposed 'frame' adverbials, infinitives (cf. &lt;em&gt;Versprechen kann ich das nicht&lt;/em&gt;), passive participles, etc., as well as plain Topics, which is why it is debatable whether it consists of just Spec C or, as is more likely, of several informationally different heads and specifiers, as often assumed after Rizzi's (1997) influential analysis of the left 'periphery' of the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T09:29:13.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12264" CreationDate="2015-05-02T11:34:21.000" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those not familiar with &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Han unification&lt;/a&gt;, Unicode uses the same codepoints to encode CJK characters as used in Chinese and Japanese, even when they look slightly different. This has spurred some controversy, since the characters look &quot;wrong&quot; if the default font of the user doesn't match the intended language, unless one uses metadata to specify the language (e.g. the HTML &quot;lang&quot; attribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving pros and cons of Han unification aside, are there any other (non-CJK) examples of glyphs that look (or should look) different depending on the language? Failing that, perhaps there are historical examples where that used to be the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9699" LastEditorUserId="3637" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T18:15:32.143" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T18:15:32.143" Title="Language-dependent glyphs other than CJK?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-02T14:13:34.267" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across this in multiple grammars: Two grammatical cases (e.g. ergative and instrumental) are said to be &quot;homophonous&quot; - they make use of the (apparently?) same marker and yet, they are annotated differently in the examples. What are the factors through which can be decided whether those cases are justifiably labelled distinctly or if I should view them as one, regarding the &quot;difference&quot; between the two simply as &quot;additional semantic information&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two examples for the ergative/instrumental distinction that I had at hand, there are probably better ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the grammar for Ese Ejja (ese, Vuillermet 2012), the author repeatedly mentions the &quot;homophonous instrumental&quot; (p. 197):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the ergative (or homophonous instrumental) case is associated&#xA;  with nouns, then only (gliding) transitional sounds is occasionally&#xA;  heard with the front vowels i and e and with the back vowel o – cf.&#xA;  the missionary transcription for Ernesto + =a .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Bantawa grammar (bap, Doornenbal 2009), &quot;instrumental&quot; is merely called a &quot;role&quot; that ergative might take (i.e. a possible translation, p.75):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ergative may also be affixed to nominals in roles that would&#xA;  usually be called ‘instrumental’. Noun phrases that are marked with&#xA;  the ergative but do not act as the agent in a verb frame translate as&#xA;  instrumental modifiers. There is no separate instrumental case,&#xA;  however. Ergative-marked instrumental phrases are adverbial modifiers&#xA;  denoting either the cause, the method or the instrument of the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2015-05-03T09:31:06.273" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T09:31:06.273" Title="How can it be decided whether two grammatical cases should be taken to be just homophonous (i.e. as separate) or actually equal?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12258" CreationDate="2015-05-02T15:53:16.623" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering, does Latin taught in schools today add/borrow content words to/for its lexicon for things that weren't around (like computer, LED etc.) when Latin was natively spoken? And also, are these words simply borrowed, or do they undergo changes in pronunciation and morphology that one would normally observe in a language that is natively spoken?&#xA;Also, does Latin spoken by the Pope add/borrow content words? etc... same questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this edit clarify what Latin I'm asking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9507" LastEditorUserId="9507" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T17:53:30.573" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T17:53:30.573" Title="Is the modern Latin lexicon productive?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;production&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12252" CreationDate="2015-05-02T16:04:01.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conclusion that &quot;lam&quot; (take it on the lam) and &quot;lamb&quot; are homophonous is justified by the fact that the words are pronounced the same but have different semantic or syntactic properties. But syn-sem sameness / difference can't be measured in a vacuum. So one might then conclude that the nominal suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;I have 4 cat&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is a &quot;plural&quot; suffix and in &quot;I hate cat&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; it's a homophonous &quot;generic&quot; suffix. However, there are perfectly reasonable theories of semantics that allow you to simply say that these instantiate a &quot;plural&quot; suffix, where one semantic property covers both uses. In this case, it turns out that there are a lot of ways of forming the plural, and you don't find &quot;the generic&quot; being formed one way while &quot;the plural&quot; is formed a different way. If you did, you'd have a clear argument for saying that in some cases the two functions are homophonous in certain cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authors may adopt theoretical frameworks that could dictate for example that if semantic functions A and B can be marked distinctively in some language, then that fine-grained distinction is covertly present in all languages. I haven't ever seen anyone say that overtly, but some such thinking may underly the claim of homophony. In the case of &quot;ergative&quot; vs. &quot;instrumental&quot; (at least if you treat &quot;ergative&quot; as a fundamental case relation and not simply the result of obligatory passivization), the semantic and syntactic contexts for selection of one affix vs. the other are disparate enough that distinct descriptions of distribution would be necessary, which then would mean that these are homophonous morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T16:04:01.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2015-05-02T22:21:14.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what is worth it is important to remember that all languages are, to one degree or another, blends of earlier languages. Some scholars have described modern English as a &quot;creole&quot; of old English and Norman French. Indeed some scholars have described the Romance languages of Western Europe (Italian, Spanish, French, etc.) as creoles of Latin and Gothic (Germanic). French, of course, got a second heavy Germanic blending as a result of the Franks. In the case of English, grammatically the language has been heavily influenced by French but, overall, its grammar is still somewhat more Germanic, though truthfully English grammar has morphed so much that a lot of it resembles neither French nor German. Certainly one can argue that English derives a lot more vocabulary from Latin than its Saxon roots but still the core of the language still resembles its Saxon roots more than its Latin influences (similarly one could point to the fact that Maltese has more Latin vocabulary than Arabic, but any linguist would tell you that, at its core, Maltese is Arabic).,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9700" LastActivityDate="2015-05-02T22:21:14.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-03T06:35:57.140" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall hearing that French francophones say the French equivalent of &quot;in three days&quot; where anglophones say &quot;in two days&quot;. (I don't speak French, and can't vouch for it.) That, coupled with a discussion in the Talmud (&lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodashim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;M'nachos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 77:1), makes me wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language of which the following is known? In such a language, wording equivalent to &quot;to add a fifth&quot; or &quot;ten percent more&quot; or the like means the fraction is computed as a fraction of the total (including the fraction). Thus, for example, &quot;add a fifth to 100&quot; would yield 125 and &quot;ten percent more than ninety&quot; would be 100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="228" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T22:17:44.360" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T09:36:09.677" Title="Does &quot;adding a sixth&quot; mean adding a fifth?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12231" CreationDate="2015-05-03T10:52:48.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible the OED version online is abridged. I think I read something of the sort on the website, but unfortunately I can't access it any more via your link (though I could at first, strange...). If it is indeed the unabridged version, I dare say it will be difficult for you to find more extensive commentaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you found a PIE root mentioned under a certain entry in dictionary A but not B could of course mean that dictionary B erroneously omitted a widely accepted etymology for this word. But it could also mean, and I think this is the more likely explanation, that B's editors omitted it because they thought the evidence is not sufficient to include this etymology/reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also asked for literature that &quot;connects or explains ... the evolution of meanings&quot;. I am afraid it might be difficult to find such literature for a wide range of words. Etymological dictionaries are concise in the information they offer because it is expected that readers will know common sound laws and other developments that will fill many of the &quot;gaps&quot; you mentioned. It's not as if every reader will go away with all questions answered, but most of them are. What is available in terms of more extensive literature on specific words will mostly be unsatisfactory because the discussions will be quite specialised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is, similar to jlawler's, that you read a good textbook, such as Baugh &amp;amp; Cable's &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.de/books/about/A_History_of_the_English_Language.html?id=YYE8WxqJjPAC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The History of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;. In addition to this, or if your interest very narrowly focusses on sound change, you might want to read what Wikipedia has to say on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound laws&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verner's law&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grimm's law&lt;/a&gt; are particularly well known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you pursue any of this, it will lead you a bit away from looking at specific words and their reconstructed history. Instead, you'll get the larger picture of how languages develop and change. It's a bit like the difference between learning how many electrons there are in an iron atom, and what that actually means for the chemical reactions that iron can be involved in. I'm not saying that looking at specific words and their histories is wrong, but it can only get you so far, and it's possible you have exhausted this avenue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2015-05-03T10:52:48.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12253" CreationDate="2015-05-04T00:02:26.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Insofar as Linnean binomial nomenclature is in Latin and they are cooking up new names all the time, yes, and apparently it is expanding to galaxies. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.obta.uw.edu.pl/~draco/docs/voccomp.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of Latin computer terms (English to Latin translation). As with English, there isn't a single pronunciation (&amp;lt; principi &gt; = [printʃipi, printsipi, priŋkipi]), so expect variation. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latinitatis.com/latinitas/audio/nuntii1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this newscast&lt;/a&gt; is Latin filtered through Finnish phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T00:02:26.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-04T00:40:30.657" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to know what Linguistic tools are used when proving a bad translation has skewed the original message. I'm writing a paper trying to prove that the message found in present day bibles are very different from message written in Ancient Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9705" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T02:05:00.613" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T02:05:00.613" Title="Linguistic tools: what works best" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12014" CreationDate="2015-05-04T00:42:51.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I failed to realise was the 72 terms were not single word terms but multiple word terms, from 1 to 4 words in length. With this understanding it makes sense to use 4- and 5- grams because some terms can't be used in lower n-gram collections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9550" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T00:42:51.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12262" CreationDate="2015-05-04T02:19:01.417" Score="2" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;In both French and English, the word for become (devenir) includes the word for come (venir), even though the etymologies and words are very different. Why might this be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9706" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T10:05:30.843" Title="&quot;come&quot; in &quot;become&quot; (English) vs &quot;venir&quot; in &quot;devenir&quot; (French)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12261" CreationDate="2015-05-04T10:05:30.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Old English “becomen” actually means “come, arrive”. It takes on the meaning “come to be” in Middle English (the OED has references for this meaning from about the end of the 12th century onwards). It is possible that this shift in meaning was at least influenced by French devenir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T10:05:30.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12265" CreationDate="2015-05-04T12:16:37.750" Score="5" ViewCount="1192" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, the iterative aspect &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;expresses the repetition of an event&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and the frequentative aspect &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequentative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;indicates repeated action&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference or are they synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9587" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T22:31:24.753" Title="What's the difference between iterative and frequentative aspects?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12251" CreationDate="2015-05-04T12:59:47.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few examples, even within the roman script. The OpenType font standard has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;feature tag&lt;/a&gt; for this very purpose: &lt;code&gt;locl&lt;/code&gt;. There is also diachronic variance, hence &lt;code&gt;hist&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most prominent examples are not the base letters, though, but &lt;strong&gt;diacritic marks.&lt;/strong&gt; The French accent acute is flatter than the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twardoch.com/download/polishhowto/kreska.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Polish kreska&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, though coded the same. On the other end, there is no proper justification by way of a minimal pair to treat cedilla, ogonek and comma below as separate diacritics. A written language that has only one kind of diacritic, say German umlaut double dots, will allow much stylistic variation thereof (e.g. look like macron, tilde, double acute etc.) which would be different letters in other languages, say Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T12:59:47.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12263" CreationDate="2015-05-04T16:04:35.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bybee, Pagliuca and Perkins 1996 put it very nicely. Here's what they wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iterative &quot;signals that an action is repeated on a single occasion and differs from the habitual and frequentative, which both signal the repetition occurred on different occasions&quot; (p. 160). Here are the two examples they use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He searched for his keys all morning.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;iterative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He searched for his brother in every city he visited.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;frequentative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, there is a lot of variation in linguistic terminology, esp. in aspect studies. Comrie 1976 argues for the importance of the iterative vs. habitual distinction; thus, the frequentative is viewed as a subclass of the habitual. Carslon 2012 does mention Van Geenhoven 2004, who views the frequentative as a subclass of the iterative; however, Carlson insists that Van Geenhoven 2004 terminology is not general usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-05-04T22:31:24.753" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T22:31:24.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-04T19:06:03.583" Score="1" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=predicate&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ Etymonline for 'predicate (n.)]&lt;/a&gt; ... from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prae-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;forth, before&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pre-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pre-&lt;/a&gt;) + dicare &amp;quot;proclaim,&amp;quot; from stem of &lt;em&gt;dicere&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to speak, to say&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=diction&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diction&lt;/a&gt;). Grammatical sense is from 1630s. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/predicate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ODO:]&lt;/a&gt; {noun} {Grammar} 1. = The part of a sentence or clause containing a verb and stating something about the subject&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149844?rskey=dPJu9P&amp;amp;result=2&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[OED:]&lt;/a&gt; 2.a. = {trans. &lt;em&gt;Logic&lt;/em&gt;.} To state or assert (something) about the subject of a proposition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In logic, English, and French, the subject usually precedes the predicate. Per contra, the prefix &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prae-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (in 'predicate') suggests that predicates would FRONT a sentence or proposition, &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; anything else. So why use 'predicate'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/9063/5306&quot;&gt;Latin's flexible word order&lt;/a&gt;, but even in Latin, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinfaqs/f/070111-What-Is-the-Latin-Word-Order.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the most common form is ... SOV&lt;/a&gt;. So does the prefix &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prae-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; jar with the definitions of 'predicate'?  I heed the Etymological Fallacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T23:01:49.207" Title="Why does the 'PREdicate' follow?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-04T22:21:02.053" Score="2" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring English outside England for the moment, does English have more variation in its accents than other languages do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this practically but unscientifically, is it more difficult for someone from Cornwall to understand someone from Northumbria, than it is for someone from Brittany to understand someone from Marseilles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking as an English person, my fellow countrymen seem sure that our regional accents are uber-diverse, which I think is the narcissism of minor differences, considering that German and French were barely even unified languages 150 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9709" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T11:00:43.610" Title="Is Anglo-English more diverse in terms of accents than, say, French (in France)?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12266" CreationDate="2015-05-04T23:01:49.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin-derived grammatical term &quot;predicate&quot; originates in logical usage, as set forth by Aristotle in &lt;em&gt;The Categories&lt;/em&gt;. Recall that propositions have subjects, and things predicated of them. The Greek term that underlies &quot;predicate&quot; in logic is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B7%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1%CE%B9#Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=kathgori/a-contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;κατηγορία&lt;/a&gt; (hence &quot;category&quot;), which earlier meant &quot;accusation&quot; (in public), combining &quot;down&quot; and &quot;agora&quot;. Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=praedicare&amp;amp;la=la&amp;amp;can=praedicare0&amp;amp;prior=proscribere&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:entry=auctio-cn&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;praedico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; similarly means &quot;to declare in public&quot;. The common semantics behind the terms is &quot;setting forth&quot;. You can't require compositionality of separable prefix + verb combinations in Indo-European. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-04T23:01:49.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12267" CreationDate="2015-05-05T06:39:41.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is essentially a question of perception and politics. Simply counting 'named' accents or doing mutual comprehension studies will get you certain numbers but will not answer the real question: What do accents, dialects, varieties and related 'minority' languages mean in the area you're studying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find some broad similarities such as the creation of prestige levels, standards and historical change. But you will also find a lot of differences in how the prestige is managed (e.g. what do you hear on TV, how pejorative names are used to label accents, how accents are recognized as being part of an identity vs. poor learning, how standards are established, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suspect that the difference between English (in England) and other major European languages is that the current English standard is relatively weak and the the formerly high-prestige accent is relatively low prestige now. You also have a lot of political resurgence of local identities which has led to a relative increase in accent prestige (though not uniformly and not all). You also have relatively high awareness of accents which is broadly reflected in popular literature (My Fair Lady, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My fleeting impression is that in French and German, the standard is relatively strong but is not necessarily as strongly associated with class. Both French and German have many very diverse 'dialects' some of which may have their own literary forms. Contrast that to Russian where accents are not very strongly linked to local identities - perhaps with the exception of Moscow. The language where I can make observations on the same level as English is Czech which has a very strong standard which is much more strongly differentiated from non-standard based on morphology than accent. The only two widely recognized accents are Moravian (with a strong subset of Ostrava region and Brno) which is strongly linked to identity and Prague which is very weakly linked to identity. While there are other regional varieties, they are much weaker both in recognition and identity. The levels of mutual intelligibility vary from almost full to relatively low. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So looking from the perspective of Czech (1/5 of the speakers), UK English will seem much more diverse and the networks of decisions speaker and listeners have to make when assessing someone's identity based on their speech much more complex. This whether or not the actual number of varieties per area or population would vary. I would estimate that coming from Russian, you'd get a similar perspective but would not dare to guess at what English would look like coming from French, German, Spanish or Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T06:39:41.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12267" CreationDate="2015-05-05T10:40:18.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem with this question is that when dialects become too different, they may be called separate languages (subject also to political factors, of course). To make sense of this question, I think we should also include all languages inside the dialect continuum as dialects, though not minority languages that are not part of the continuum at all, such as Welsh (for English), Breton (for French) or Sorbian (for German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if we ignore English outside England, this means cutting off the dialect continuum at a political border. So we should do the same for French, German and any other languages we might want to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these clarifications, it is my understanding that English, French, German and Italian are roughly comparable in the variation of their accents and dialects. What differs between them is primarily the status and penetration of the standard language and the extent to which non-standard accents and dialects are used and the status they have. But for each of these languages, if you take pure dialect speakers from distant regions, they will have a very hard time understanding each other without resorting to some degree to the common standard language. And in each case, a distant dialect becomes relatively easy to understand after only a small amount of exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T10:40:18.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11940" CreationDate="2015-05-05T14:20:31.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding verbs, what about the &lt;em&gt;Real Academia Española's dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rae.es/recursos/diccionarios/drae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DRAE&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every entry provides grammatical information.&#xA;For instance, if you look for &quot;comer&quot;, you find out that it has transitive (&lt;strong&gt;tr.&lt;/strong&gt;) and intransitive (&lt;strong&gt;intr.&lt;/strong&gt;) senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Arrepentir&quot; can only be pronominal (&lt;strong&gt;prnl.&lt;/strong&gt;), whereas the second sense of &quot;arrodillar&quot; is usually used as pronominal. (&lt;strong&gt;U. m. c. prnl.&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;usado más como pronominal&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Llover&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;intr. impers.&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;intransitivo impersonal&lt;/em&gt;), so it doesn't take a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Spanish nouns have a plural form. It is sometimes said that some --like &quot;sed&quot;-- don't, but the truth is you can use any noun as a plural. Probably that's why the DRAE doesn't mark nouns that don't have plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you meant nouns that have a plural form that is identical to the the singular form, like &quot;paraguas&quot;? Unfortunately, that is also not marked in the RAE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's another online dictionary, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fenix.cnice.mec.es/diccionario/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diccionario Salamanca&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It's a learner's dictionary, and it gives the plural form of nouns when it's irregular.&#xA;Try paraguas&quot; or &quot;limpiabotas&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also nouns that are &lt;em&gt;only used in plural&lt;/em&gt;. That is  marked with &lt;strong&gt;pl.&lt;/strong&gt; in the DRAE and with &lt;strong&gt;(plural)&lt;/strong&gt; in the Diccionario Salamanca. Try &quot;víveres&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &quot;location&quot;, does that mean a proper noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, can I ask how does &quot;conocer&quot; change meanings in the past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9712" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T14:20:31.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9016" CreationDate="2015-05-05T15:13:48.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One argument against the &quot;Japanese are not pronouns&quot; thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the definition of &quot;pronoun&quot; refers to the &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; of the pronoun as a substitute for nouns and NPs, but it doesn't define its combinatorial possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some online dictionaries definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology&lt;/em&gt; (odlt.com): A word that can be used as a substitute for either a noun or a noun phrase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html#pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Orbilat.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: any of a small set of words in a language that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/Glossary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glossary of Grammatical Terms&lt;/a&gt;: a word that is used as a substitute for a noun or noun equivalent, takes noun constructions, and refers to persons or things named or understood in the context. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say the main characteristic of pronouns and other pro-forms is their capacity for anaphoric and cataphoric reference, and Japanese pronouns (代　substitute 名詞 nouns) depend for their reference on the reference of words in their context, just like any other pronoun. They don't mean anything by themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question would be, if Japanese pronouns are not pronouns, what are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I think there are cases of adjectives modifying pronouns in other languages as well. I'm native Spanish and there's one use of the personal pronoun that is something something like &quot;silly you&quot;, which I believe is also possible in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9712" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T15:13:48.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19529" CreationDate="2015-05-05T15:53:21.983" Score="5" ViewCount="1064" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages where nouns have gender, adjectives agree in gender with the nouns they modify. But it would be possible to imagine a language where each adjective had its own gender, which it kept regardless of the gender of its noun or pronoun. Thus for example a feminine adjective could modify a masculine noun, and vice versa. Do any such languages exist? And even if they do, why are they so rare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very easy to imagine an adjective having a fixed gender when it is actually formed from a noun in the first place. For example, in French the noun &lt;em&gt;victoire&lt;/em&gt; (victory) is feminine, and the singular adjective formed from this noun can be either masculine (&lt;em&gt;victorieux&lt;/em&gt;) or feminine (&lt;em&gt;victorieuse&lt;/em&gt;). We could drop the masculine form and say both &lt;em&gt;une femme victorieuse&lt;/em&gt; (a victorious woman) and &lt;em&gt;un homme victorieuse&lt;/em&gt; (a victorious man). The quality of victoriousness would be understood to be feminine, and this would be indicated by the ending of the adjective meaning 'victorious', independently of the gender of the noun it modifies. We could also do it like this when an adjective isn't formed from a noun. There must be a problem with doing it this way. What is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9713" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T19:01:30.467" Title="Why in most (all?) languages don't adjectives have gender independently of the nouns they modify?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T16:00:00.180" Score="0" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there uses of linear logic in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've kind of heard of some applications but it's hard for me to see the big picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9714" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T16:34:12.337" Title="Are there uses of linear logic in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12275" CreationDate="2015-05-05T16:34:12.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, linear logic has close connections with Lambek/categorial grammar. The big picture is basically that, with respect to a Lambek/categorial grammar, a proof of the syntactic category of a phrase of a language corresponds to a proof in the logical (e.g. deductive) sense, and that the grammar itself corresponds to a certain substructural logic. As Morrill (2011) puts it, &quot;Technically, the Lambek calculus L is the multiplicative fragment of a non-commutative intuitionistic linear logic without empty antecedents.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Glynn V. Morrill. 2011. Categorial Grammar: Logical Syntax, Semantics, and Processing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Richard Moot and Christian Retoré. 2012. The Logic of Categorial Grammars: A Deductive Account of Natural Language Syntax and Semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those deal mainly with syntax and talk a lot about linear logic. A good book dealing with semantics is Carpenter 1998, although his discussion of substructural logic (Ch. 5, sec. 4, pp. 169-170) is very limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob Carpenter. 1998. Type-Logical Semantics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These references are full-length books. The original work developing linear logic, Lambek/categorial grammar, and their connections was mainly done in article form. The classic Lambek article is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joachim Lambek. 1958. The Mathematics of Sentence Structure. &lt;em&gt;The American Mathematical Monthly&lt;/em&gt;, 65(3), 154-170.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connection between the Lambek calculus and natural deduction/substructural logic was, I think, first studied by Johan van Benthem. Consult the books above for specific and further references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1567" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T16:34:12.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12274" CreationDate="2015-05-05T16:37:56.500" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Beti-Fang subgroup of languages of Cameroon (and I suspect other related Bantu languages) have this property. Example languages are Ewondo, Fang, Ntumu, Bulu. Like most Bantu languages, there is a class system involved in agreement and singular / plural formation. Adjectives, which are pre-nominal, have a lexical class, but demonstratives and numerals, which are post-nominal do not have any lexical class. The agreement properties (NP-internal as well as subject agreement on verbs) of the NP are determined by the first class-bearing word, which would be the noun if there are no adjectives, but the adjective (first adjective) if there are. Alas, I can't put my hands on examples at the moment, but I will insert examples when I get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit]&#xA;Some examples, from Ntumu. Numerals refer to the class number, and nouns have a prefix reflecting their lexical class. Demonstratives are post-nominal; [ém-boro ny-í] &quot;this-1 person-1&quot;, [é-boro b-á] &quot;those-2 people-2&quot;, [ʌ́-nló !w-í] &quot;that-3 head-3&quot;, [mí-nló !m-í] &quot;those-4 heads-4&quot;. Possessive pronouns are post-nominal; [ém-boro wɔ-m] &quot;my-1 person-1&quot;, [é-boro bâ-m] &quot;my-2 people-2&quot;, [á!-bɔ́ dâ-m] &quot;my-5 leg-5&quot;, [má!-bɔ́ dâ-m] &quot;my-6 legs-6&quot;. Numerals are post-nominal; [bi-tɔ bí!-bɛ́ŋ] &quot;two-8 chairs-8&quot;, [mʌ-kɛ́ mʌ́!-bɛ́ŋ] &quot;two-6 leaves-8&quot;. &quot;All&quot; is post-nominal; [boro bʌ́!-sʌ̂] &quot;all-2 people-2&quot;, [mi-nkwɛ́n mí!-sʌ̂] &quot;all-4 crops-4&quot;, [ʌ-jwi á!-sʌ̂] &quot;all-5 (the) banana-5&quot; (i.e. the whole banana). Wh-modifiers are postnominal; [m-boro m-bé] &quot;which-1 person-1&quot;, [boro bʌ-vé] &quot;which-2 people-2&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some adj+N examples. In these, there is a class-agreeing prefix on the noun which I gloss as &quot;AGR&quot; (it is also used in N of N constructions), and there is a fair amount of phonological complexity to its realization but basically the AGR prefix plus the noun's lexical prefix can't be more than one syllable. Given citation nouns [fâm] &quot;male-1&quot;, [bʌ-fâm] &quot;males-2&quot;, [e-lé] &quot;tree-7&quot;, [bi-lé] &quot;trees-8&quot;, we have [e-tun ʌ́+fâm] &quot;short-7 AGR-7+male-1&quot;, [bi-tun bí+fâm] &quot;short-8 AGR-8+male-2&quot; [e-tun e+lé] &quot;short-7 tree&quot; [mʌ-yab m+élé] &quot;tall-6 AGR-6+trees-7&quot;, [bi-tun bí+lé] &quot;short-8 AGR-8+trees-8&quot;. I think this is enough to show the general pattern that the agreement pattern is controlled by the NP-initial adjective, and it can cause deletion of the lexical class prefix of the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noun ([ʌn-sîn] &quot;enemy-1&quot;, [bʌ-sîn] &quot;enemies-2&quot;) governs post-nominal agreement as expected in [ʌn-sín ʌ́!m-bé] &quot;which-1 enemy-1&quot;, [bʌ-sín bʌ́!-vé] &quot;which-2 enemies-2&quot;, and also subject agreement on the verb in [ʌn-sin a-ku] &quot;enemy-1 fell-1&quot; (sorry, no tones in this section), [bʌ-sin ba-ku] &quot;enemies-2 fell-2&quot;. But when there is an adjective, the class of the adjective controls the agreement pattern: [a-yab ʌ+n-sin da-ku] &quot;tall-5 AGR-5+enemy-1 fell-5&quot; (&quot;a tall enemy fell&quot;), [mʌ-yab mʌ+sin mʌ-ve ma-ku] &quot;tall-6 AGR-6+enemies-2 which-6 fell-6&quot; (&quot;which tall enemies fell&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True, more needs to be said about the details, but the point is that in this set of languages, adjectives &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have lexical class, and can actually control agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T18:09:57.400" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T18:09:57.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T17:53:25.103" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to port Cardinaletti &amp;amp; Shlonsky's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistique/shlonsky/readings/Restructuring.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;analysis of Italian clitic placement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; to the Minimalist framework for a term paper. The course is based on Adger's textbook&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; which mostly focuses on syntax trees of English sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to represent simple sentences like &lt;code&gt;Io ci vado&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Io voglio andarci&lt;/code&gt; using syntax trees. In the first sentence, the locative clitic &lt;em&gt;ci&lt;/em&gt; is in a clausal position, and in the second sentence it is attached to the lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that &lt;em&gt;ci&lt;/em&gt; is initially merged as &lt;em&gt;andare&lt;/em&gt;'s complement in VP, but I'm not sure if it's possible to move the clitic to an entirely new projection (LocCL)—between T and vP—later in the derivation to account for the word order in the first sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure how I'd motivate that movement either since clitic climbing is optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Io ci    vado.&#xA;I  there go&#xA;'I go there.'&#xA;&#xA;Io voglio andarci.&#xA;I  want   (to) go.there&#xA;'I want to go there.'&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where are clitics initially Merged in Italian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Cardinaletti, A., &amp;amp; Shlonsky, U. (2004). Clitic positions and restructuring in Italian. &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;35&lt;/em&gt;(4), 519-557.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Adger, D. (2003). &lt;em&gt;Core syntax: a minimalist approach&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T20:10:30.697" Title="Where are clitics initially Merged in Italian?" Tags="&lt;italian&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-05T22:48:12.703" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=participle&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Etymonline']&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  from particeps &quot;sharing, partaking&quot; (see participation). In grammatical sense, the Latin translates Greek metokhe &quot;sharer, partaker,&quot; and the notion is of a word &quot;partaking&quot; &lt;code&gt;of the nature of both a noun and an adjective&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: p 32, &lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (2005) by Huddleston and Pullum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[2.] Traditionally (for example, in the grammar of Latin), ... a participle is &lt;s&gt;one&lt;/s&gt; [a verb-form] that is functionally&#xA;  similar to an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 above only states that a gerund resembles an adjective, NOT a noun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So how do participles partake &lt;code&gt;of the nature of both a noun and an adjective&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Strangely, 3 below instead mentions only a &lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt;, and NOT a noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[3.] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/02/gerund-participle.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; The OED explains that the Latin term was used to refer to “a non-finite part of a verb” that shares “some characteristics of a &lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt; and some of an adjective.”&#xA;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T05:58:12.457" Title="How do participles partake of a noun?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12280" CreationDate="2015-05-05T23:08:57.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Verb and adjective&quot; is correct. Etymonline has got it wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T23:08:57.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12280" CreationDate="2015-05-05T23:16:38.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both nouns and adjectives are called '&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nominal parts of speech&lt;/a&gt;', from Latin &lt;em&gt;nomen&lt;/em&gt; 'noun', the Latin for 'adjective' being '&lt;a href=&quot;http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiectivum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nomen adiectivum&lt;/a&gt;'. I guess that can be the source of the Etymonline confusion. Actually, participles partake of verbs and adjectives, while infinitives and gerunds partake of verbs and nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-05-05T23:36:01.693" LastActivityDate="2015-05-05T23:36:01.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2015-05-06T00:59:00.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google revealed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1qdpoo/ipa_text_to_speech/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Reddit thread&lt;/a&gt;, but beware that this can fail for some words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can think of one, but it's fairly limited to the phonology of&#xA;  American English. Thus, you may get the program to pronounce /kæt/,&#xA;  but not something like /npoks/. Here you go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The syntax of the program is like the following line; just change the&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;value of&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;ph&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [but NOT &lt;code&gt;ph&lt;/code&gt; itself] to the IPA representation of what you want the program to&#xA;  say and give it a shot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;ipa&quot; ph=&quot;kæt&quot;&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, after visiting that website,  replace BLANK with the IPA to be enunciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;ipa&quot; ph=&quot;BLANK&quot;&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google also linked to &lt;a href=&quot;http://johntantalo.com/blog/ipa-tts-bookmarklet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but has anyone else been able to operate this? It was last updated in October 2011 and fails to work on my Firefox browser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://superuser.com/q/721036&quot;&gt;duplicate&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:18:35.307" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T00:59:00.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12256" CreationDate="2015-05-06T09:36:09.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about your percentages, but Latin treated numbers differently from English (or for that matter Greek) but a bit like French. Julius Caesar's first attempt at introducing leap years in 46 BC was a disaster. Sosigines of Alexandria instructed Julius Caesar (in Greek) to make every 4th year a leap year. This was misinterpreted in Rome, counting as you indicate, so between 46 BC and 10 BC there was a leap year every three years; it wasn't until Augustus Caesar conquered Egypt (remember Cleopatra and the asp?) that he realised his predecessor's rather glaring and obvious error. He cancelled all leap years from 8BC to 4AD and then reintroduced them every 4 years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T09:36:09.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-06T19:53:06.140" Score="2" ViewCount="1987" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR (Actual Question:)&lt;/strong&gt; I'm wildered; so please explain &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as though I were 10 years old&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What are the similarities and differences? &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/11648/5306&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; doesn`t compare all 4 nouns simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (2005; by Huddleston and Pullum) uses all 4 terms (3 concurrently, in the penultimate para of page 53). But the book never defines each. OED's definitions (below) are uselessly circular. ♦ Because OED's definition 2 for the noun 'modal' just links  to the definition of the ADJECTIVE 'modal', I quote the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;♦ &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/view/Entry/120568?redirectedFrom=modal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modal {adj}&lt;/a&gt; = 5. a. Of or relating to the mood of a verb. Of a verb or other element: expressing or used to express modality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120571?redirectedFrom=modality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modality&lt;/a&gt; = 5. Grammar. The quality or fact of being modal (see modal adj. 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120575?rskey=s05fom&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mode&lt;/a&gt; = 2. a. Grammar. = mood n.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/mood#mood-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ODO] mood&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; = 1. Grammar.&#xA;a. A category or form which indicates whether a verb expresses fact (indicative mood), command (imperative mood), question (interrogative mood), wish (optative mood), or conditionality (subjunctive mood). (cp &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121879&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED mood n.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:53:58.860" Title="'modal' vs 'mode' vs 'modality' vs 'mood'" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="212" CreationDate="2015-05-06T23:32:44.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of linguists have disliked phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was the linguist you have in mind? It could be Noam Chomsky, if you go clear back to 1964 and his paper &lt;em&gt;Current Issues in Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt;.  Chomsky argued that phonemic theory could be characterized by certain assumptions about the relationships of allophones and phonemes, which assumptions were vulnerable to factual arguments.  Defenders of phonemics naturally attacked the assumptions as not actually characterizing phonemics at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generative phonologists (followers, to at least some extent, of Halle and Chomsky's theories) who had a descriptive interest in phonology have tended to use the term &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; to mean segment of underlying phonological representation, which is probably very, very different from what a phonemicist would have understood a phoneme to be like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-06T23:32:44.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2015-05-07T00:01:40.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no difference in substance, but phonologists love to make theories and phoneticians hate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T00:01:40.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12292" CreationDate="2015-05-07T00:49:23.183" Score="-2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to find an online audible audio pronuncer (ie vocaliser) for and the etymology of the word &lt;strong&gt;irrealis&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;irrealis mood&lt;/a&gt;. To my shock, the word is absent in OED, ODO, even &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memidex.com/_find?i=irrealis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Memidex.com&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. So is 'irrealis' not an official word? Whence does it originate, then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The less reputable &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/irrealis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; claims that it`s an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. What's the French term for 'irrealis mood' ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T08:52:43.367" Title="Is 'irrealis' not an official word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-05-07T03:26:32.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12291" CreationDate="2015-05-07T01:03:41.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no body that keeps track of official words in English (not even the OED), so that part of your question is unanswerable. The terminology is used in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and has been used on the linguistics blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001192.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven't been able to locate the earliest use of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem to be an adjective. Going solely by my own intuition, I would suspect it can also be used as a noun as a paraphrase of &quot;the irrealis mood&quot;, just as we can speak of &quot;the subjunctive&quot; or &quot;subjunctives&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.pons.com/traduction/allemand-fran%C3%A7ais/Irrealis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German-French Pons dictionary&lt;/a&gt; gives the adjective &quot;irréel&quot; and the noun &quot;le mode irréel&quot;. For some reason I can't find this translation for the English-French dictionary, but the meaning is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pur-editions.fr/couvertures/1415613203_doc.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of abstracts for French linguistics papers&lt;/a&gt; uses &quot;irrealis&quot; as a translation of the French word &quot;irréel&quot; (the list is in English, the paper titles are in French.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I did also find a case where the Latin adjective &lt;em&gt;irrealis&lt;/em&gt; was used as a noun referring to this mood in a French linguistics text through &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ldkxAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA281&amp;amp;lpg=PA281&amp;amp;dq=irrealis&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=eUbYwzQqhH&amp;amp;sig=yVfO8msPcdTvGp3KOm9D3XVd-0Y&amp;amp;hl=fr&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=MrpKVeCdKtXsoAT-t4DIBQ&amp;amp;ved=0CEEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=irrealis&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;. (It was italicized to mark it as a non-French term.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T08:52:43.367" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T08:52:43.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12280" CreationDate="2015-05-07T05:40:19.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the others are correct that the normal description is that participles are &quot;verbal adjectives&quot; (an unhelpful and almost meaningless explanation in my opinion), it is worth noting that participles can also be used substantivally, i.e., as a nominal in its own right. So in Greek &lt;em&gt;ὁ λεγων&lt;/em&gt; means 'the one who is speaking' or 'the speaking one', and the same happens in English with gerunds like &lt;em&gt;the happening&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should expect this across languages all around the world. There are two primary word classes: nouns and verbs; generally the more time-stable and the more time-variable. Some languages have distinct modifier classes like adjectives and adverbs, but many do not, with those modifiers being formally in the noun or verb class. Word derivation can change the class of words. Participles and infinitives are two ways in which the variability of a verb is decreased or removed, so that a verb which meant an action gets turned into a word which conveys the idea of the action. The idea of an action is then used as a modifier for either a noun or a verb, but just as with other modifiers, it can then also be used by itself as a nominal in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T05:58:12.457" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T05:58:12.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12298" CreationDate="2015-05-07T08:02:36.373" Score="6" ViewCount="880" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages using the Latin alphabet characters which are written right-to-left?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9612" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T11:01:38.147" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T00:55:02.453" Title="Are there any latin-alphabet languages written right-to-left?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12294" CreationDate="2015-05-07T08:42:01.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I suppose you can write any Latin-based script in mirror writing, as Leonardo da Vinci famously did, but otherwise I think the answer to your question is &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T08:42:01.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-07T09:05:29.140" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proper nouns in English have a capital starting letter and the plural is simpler (e.g. &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; ending gets &lt;em&gt;-ys&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;-ies&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other differences? Especially when analysing/parsing the grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this question is about which grammatical consequences does it have to the rest of the sentence if I find a proper noun. For example, is there some grammar that works only with proper nouns? Or grammar that doesn't work with proper nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is less about on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1529/how-are-proper-nouns-distinguished-from-other-nouns-in-linguistics-not-in-ortho&quot;&gt;how to distinguish them in general&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T10:02:35.233" Title="Proper vs. common nouns: Are there more differences, esp. in grammar, than capital letter and simpler plural?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12301" CreationDate="2015-05-07T11:14:24.863" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn more about breathiness. I understand that the cepstral peak is less prominent in the cepstrum of breathy phonation than plain ol' modal phonation -- but I'm not sure why this may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-07T14:36:15.627" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T14:15:44.817" Title="Why are the higher harmonics less prominent in a spectrum of modal (as opposed to breathy) phonation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12294" CreationDate="2015-05-07T11:36:57.157" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not nowadays, but at least one of the earliest Latin inscriptions was written alternating between left to right and right to left. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Latin#Fragments_and_inscriptions&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Latin#Fragments_and_inscriptions&lt;/a&gt; Since the Latin alphabet looked quite different at the time and this style of writing also involved mirroring the letters themselves, we should probably not count this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T11:36:57.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-07T13:18:50.883" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;(sorry about my english, I'm not a native speaker) I'm studying syntactic trees and I'm having huge difficulties understanding the tree of the following sentence: &quot;why do you wonder who was dismissed?&quot;&#xA;Why does the position of the complementizer C is empty and not filled with &quot;was&quot;? I really don't understand it. If you would be so kind to help me I'd really appreciate it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9724" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T13:34:37.733" Title="Why do you wonder who was dismissed? (Complementizer position)" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12299" CreationDate="2015-05-07T13:34:37.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;who was dismissed&quot; is an embedded question.  It's unembedded form would be &quot;Who was dismissed?&quot;, so no complementizer was added to convert the independent form into the embedded form.  I don't understand why &quot;was&quot; would ever be considered a complementizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-07T13:34:37.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12297" CreationDate="2015-05-07T14:46:39.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It goes back to the properties of the glottal wave. With modal phonation, there is a sharp discontinuity to what is fundamentally a sine wave coming from the glottal airflow function, when the vocal folds slam shut and are blown open. That gives the modal phonatory source a move triangular shape. With breathy voice, there may not be much (or any) of a closure period, so the source wave is closer to a sine wave. A sine wave has just one component, whereas a triangular wave has many components, the most prominent being the fundamental but higher harmonics are also quite prominent. So it really goes back to the spectrum (or cepstrum) of different glottal airflow functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-08T14:15:44.817" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T14:15:44.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9832" CreationDate="2015-05-08T02:37:41.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basque and Spanish have very similar phonetics. This is due to Spanish having its origin in the vulgar latin spoken in a Basque-speaking or previous Basque-speaking population in northeartesn Castile (few kilometers from the border of modern Basque Country). The first documents in old Spanish come in fact from a small village called Valpuesta which lies in the border of modern Basque Country and was undoubtely bilingual Basque-Romance at the time they were written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9727" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T02:37:41.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12071" CreationDate="2015-05-08T16:45:34.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese word net may contain useful data: &lt;a href=&quot;http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/wnja/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/wnja/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9731" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T16:45:34.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-08T20:30:20.460" Score="0" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/cumber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cumber | Origin and meaning of cumber by Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. 1300, &lt;em&gt;cumbren, combren&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to overthrow, destroy, probably a shortening of  &lt;em&gt;acombren&lt;/em&gt; &quot;obstructing progress,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Old French &lt;em&gt;encombrer&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;combre&lt;/em&gt; &quot;obstruction, barrier,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Vulgar Latin &lt;em&gt;*comboros&lt;/em&gt; &quot;that which is carried together,&quot; which is perhaps from a Gaulish word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The likely roots are PIE &lt;em&gt;*kom&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/com-?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;com-&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*bher-?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_52553&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*bher-&lt;/a&gt; (1) &quot;to carry,&quot; also &quot;to bear children.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline failed to explain the meaning of the prefix &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;kom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The definitions below don't apply, because they contradict the meaning of *comboros. *comboros doesn't mean bearing 'beside, near, by, with' something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR123200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kom&lt;/a&gt;    &lt;code&gt;Beside, near, by, with&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2020-05-30T04:40:09.467" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T04:40:09.467" Title="What did the PIE prefix *kom- signify in" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-08T22:08:31.770" Score="3" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for tables of cognates between French, Spanish and Italian (and potentially Latin, Portuguese, Catalan, etc.), so I can run some Python on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they could have extra information such as frequency, pronunciation, meaning, etc. that would be nice too. (I don't need them right away but may in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So far the best ways I see would be either through wiktionary, or by running some kind of distance metrics on translations to find likely cognates. But I'm pretty certain &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt; already did something like that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5493" LastActivityDate="2015-05-08T22:08:31.770" Title="Downloadable list of Romance-language cognates?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12318" CreationDate="2015-05-09T00:13:39.100" Score="1" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please recommend a recent book that summarizes and critiques the current state of knowledge and speculation on PIE and older proto-languages.  (book, please, I will have no electronic contact with the world for 2 weeks.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9732" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:56:34.677" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:21:40.550" Title="Recent book on PIE and older proto-languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12308" CreationDate="2015-05-09T00:58:59.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's mostly just Greek, but maybe you'll find this useful: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brill.com/encyclopedia-ancient-greek-language-and-linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;, G.K. Giannakis (ed.). Also -- but this is more research, not review -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brill.com/products/book/pre-greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pre-Greek&lt;/a&gt; by R.S.Beekes, trying to reconstruct the non-Indo-European substrate. And maybe his Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T00:58:59.897" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-09T06:56:23.373" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed some speakers diphthongising [ʌ] as [ʌɪ]. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMMNrth246k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bea Miller’s Young Blood&lt;/a&gt;, she pronounces “young blood” as [jʌɪŋ blʌɪd] and “us” as [ʌɪs]. Has this been documented elsewhere? Is it a feature of her accent or a new development?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T06:56:23.373" Title="Is diphthongising [ʌ] as [ʌɪ] novel or an accent feature?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-09T13:17:42.350" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understan that with modal phonation the glottal wave has a triangular shape, whereas with breathy voice, the source wave is closer to a sine wave. This means that the higher harmonics are more prominent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other crucial differences between these glottal airflow functions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive me my elementary understanding of articulatory phonetics!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T15:20:08.323" Title="What are the most distinctive differences in the glottal wave between modal vs breathy phonation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12313" CreationDate="2015-05-09T15:20:08.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the difference in the overall amplitude profiles of the harmonics, breathiness can be correlated with cycle to cycle irregularity in period and amplitude. I find it easiest to conceptualize this with constructed waves. In the first case, modal voice would be a more-triangular wave where each cycle has the same duration, and breathy voice would be a more-sinusoidal wave where the duration of cycles varied randomly. (Though not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; great a variation, otherwise you add the building blocks of creakiness). This variation is referred to as jitter. The second is turbulent noise (added amplitude at random frequencies), hypothesized to come from greater airflow though the glottis -- also known as shimmer. One other measurable difference is RMS amplitude, where breathy voicing is associated with lower amplitude. However, I think that is a consequence of the basic sine / triangle glottal wave distinction, and not an independent fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T15:20:08.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-09T17:54:27.067" Score="3" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the word &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt;, the labiodental non-sibilant fricative &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; precedes the alveolar stop &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, which is then followed by &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;. The Oxford Dictionaries Online offers two accepted pronunciations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ˈɒf(ə)n/ /ˈɒft(ə)n/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to &lt;strong&gt;describe&lt;/strong&gt; the phonetic interaction between the &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in the pronunciation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/ˈɒf(ə)n/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sole pronunciation of the archaic &lt;em&gt;oft&lt;/em&gt;, leads me to consider that the final syllable plays a significant role in silencing the t. Though I doubt it is the standard terminology, I would have tended to describe it in laymen's terms with the word picture underlying &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=fricative&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fricative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the fricative rubs out the stop in concert with the final syllable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was discussed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244716/describing-the-phonetic-interaction-between-the-f-and-the-t-in-often&quot;&gt;ELU&lt;/a&gt; site, but I was referred here with my query for a more precise professional description of that phonetic effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9736" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T03:20:07.120" Title="The phonetic interaction between the F and the T in &quot;often&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12308" CreationDate="2015-05-09T18:28:24.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Benjamin Fortson, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1405188960&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Clackson, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521653673&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are recent, well-balanced treatments by scholars of repute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T18:28:24.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12317" CreationDate="2015-05-09T18:53:29.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although this deletion of /t/ also applies in &lt;em&gt;soften, hasten, fasten&lt;/em&gt; and so on, there is no general deletion, as shown by [bɑstn̩] &quot;Boston&quot;, [ɑstn̩] &quot;Austin&quot;, [pɪstn̩] &quot;piston&quot;, not *[bɑsn̩], *[ɑsn̩], *[pɪsn̩] -- deletion is a feature of the -&lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; verb suffix. So this process is a bit of a puzzle. In general, /t/ is subject to phonetic reductions via glottalization in English, so that in &lt;em&gt;hit&lt;/em&gt;, the syllable-final &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; is often unreleased, due to closure of the glottis before release of the lingual closure. Building on that tendency, there is a general rule in some dialects reducing /t/ to glottal stop before &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (syllabic or otherwise), which applies in word like &quot;rotten, cotton, lighten&quot;. The reason for this is that when /t/ is released into a nasal, the burst noise is muffled to the point that you don't hear the high-frequency noise that helps you identify the consonant as /t/. You can tell that there's something there before the nasal in &quot;rotten&quot; because the glottal closure of &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; is audible after a sonorant (liquid, glide, vowel, nasal), as an effect on how the sonorant is voiced (&quot;creaky voicing&quot;). But after an obstruent fricative, you don't have that cue, all you would have is a brief bit of silence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible explanation for why this happens in &lt;em&gt;soften, christen&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;Boston&lt;/em&gt; invokes the relationship to a simpler form, e.g. &lt;em&gt;soft, haste, Christ, oft&lt;/em&gt;. If you syllabify &lt;em&gt;soft&lt;/em&gt; and then add -&lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, you would get [sɑft.ən], but with ordinary syllabification rules, you would / might get [bɑs.tən], balancing the competing needs to give the second syllable an onset but also make the first syllable closed. The aforementioned weakening process pushing /t/ in the direction of glottal stop only applies to &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in the syllable coda, so [sɑf&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;.ən] but not [bɑs.&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;ən].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-09T18:53:29.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-10T20:26:36.173" Score="8" ViewCount="2682" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any help on finding the biggest freely available English corpus that can be used on research? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have found OANC with 15 M words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9746" LastEditorUserId="921" LastEditDate="2015-05-11T20:01:40.333" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T13:00:05.623" Title="Biggest freely available English corpus?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-10T20:33:59.807" Score="0" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to have a good heuristic study on the frequency of special characters and uppercase ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would studying a freely available corpus (around 15m words) generates a good estimation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I would like to study the frequency of occurrence in English of special characters ( e.g. !@#$%^&amp;amp;*()_+?~-/[]{} ) compared to letters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I would like to construct a frequency table for all characters ( e.g. saying the frequency of occurance of @ is 0.05% of all texts )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9746" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-11T04:21:00.827" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T20:45:44.130" Title="Special Characters and Uppercase Frequency?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8560" CreationDate="2015-05-10T20:57:13.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people seem to be under the impression that context free phrase structure grammar (cfpsg) cannot describe discontinuous constituents.  It can, and these are good examples to show that.  Suppose that we can derive a new phrase structure rule (psr) by composing two psrs, according to the scheme [A -&gt; x B y](B -&gt; z) = A -&gt; xzy, where A, B are non-terminal symbols and x, y, z are strings of non-terminal and terminal symbols.  The notation [rule i](rule j) = rule k means that rule i applies to rule j to derive rule k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, for your examples, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. [VP -&gt; let NP out of the bag](NP -&gt; the cat) = VP -&gt; let the cat out of the bag&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. [VP -&gt; take off NP](NP -&gt; clothes) = VP -&gt; take off clothes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c. [VP -&gt; burn NP at both ends](NP -&gt; the candle) = VP -&gt; burn the candle at both ends  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example b., as it stands, is of course not a discontinuous constituent, but with a particle movement rule, [VP -&gt; take off NP] ==&gt; [VP -&gt; take NP off], can be converted into one.  (A constituent is a string of terminal symbols such as &quot;take off&quot;, and a discontinuous constituent is a string of terminal symbols interrupted by a non-terminal, such as &quot;take NP off&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows that the composition of discontinuous constituents, such as the ones involved in your examples, can be simply represented within a very well known theory, cfpsg, without appealing to an idiosyncratic framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-10T20:57:13.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6652" CreationDate="2015-05-11T02:02:29.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at Altaic languages (e.g., Korean, Japanese, etc.) you will find that they have highly developed semantic features that may possibly be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Korean you can find features such as +/- action, +/- abstract, +/- count, etc. The list goes on in Altaic languages, so these may be a good place to look when considering different types of semantic features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, while we do not necessarily have as overt of a semantic feature bundle system, it is not entirely unheard of in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the three transitive verbs 'sit' (e.g., The clock sits on the desk), 'lie' (e.g, The watch lies on the desk), 'stand'(e.g., The vase stands on the desk). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The types of items which can 'sit' might be classified as -animate, +compact (or some designation of the sort). Consider bowls, telephones, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The types of items which can 'lie' might be classified as -animate, + flat. Consider sheets of paper, rulers, shirts, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The types of items which can 'stand' might be classified as -animate, +tall. Consider chairs, tables, lamps, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that we refer semantically interpret these items in the same manner that we interpret phonological features, which is to say we do it more or less unconsciously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9529" LastActivityDate="2015-05-11T02:02:29.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-11T10:10:16.267" Score="1" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the both originate from Proto-Sino-Caucasian, then Chechen language should be close to Chinese. Is there any indication for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9748" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T02:28:16.603" Title="Is Chechen language close to Chinese?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-11T14:59:31.713" Score="5" ViewCount="2564" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a complete layman in linguistics, so the question I have probably has no scholarly merit whatsoever. My question concerns the definite articles in Indo-European languages. Almost all Indo-european languages spoken in Europe have both definite and indefinite articles - for instance, all Germanic languages and Romance languages have them (correct me if I am wrong). Whereas, none of the languages spoken in India that belong to this family have any articles in the same sense as in, say English. Yes, there are determiners like 'one' in those languages which may be considered a kind of indefinite article, but that is debatable. So, is the emergence of definite articles a phenomenon exclusive to European tongues following their split from the Indian? Or is it that the articles in the Indian languages somehow got lost down the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4852" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T09:03:07.683" Title="Evolution of Definite Articles in Indo-European Languages" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-22T13:01:11.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12331" CreationDate="2015-05-11T15:30:17.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Romance and Germanic languages have indefinite and definite articles, but their ancestors Latin and proto-Germanic didn't have them. It's easy to get a feeling for how the numeral &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and demonstratives evolved into them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we start with a language in which it is normal not to use articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) There is tree over there. Tree is tall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be familiar because speakers of languages such as Russian often speak English like this. Sometimes you want to stress it's only one tree, and that the tree in the second sentence is the same as the one in the first sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) There is one tree over there. That tree is tall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it can happen that over the centuries, the style (2) of expressing things becomes more and more popular until finally using &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; doesn't necessarily stress anything any more and style (1) falls totally out of use. At this point, the pronunciation of unstressed &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; becomes more and more careless, until it is distinguishable from stressed &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) There is a tree over there. The tree is tall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this evolution explains why often there is no indefinite plural article but a definite plural article. For indefinite plurals there are too many choices (two, three, four, ..., some, many, ....) to start the process of grammaticalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Romance languages, the indefinite singular articles are still mostly indistinguishable from the numeral &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, and the definite articles, typically spelled &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;il&lt;/em&gt; (masculine) and &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; (feminine), developed out of the Latin demonstratives &lt;em&gt;ille/illa&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;), which became definite articles already in Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if the parallel development in the Romance and Germanic languages is due to mutual or one-sided influence, but it seems clear that it was probably not independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: The boundary between articles and noun declensions is fluid. Articles don't always precede a noun. In languages where they follow a noun, they are often written as suffixes. E.g. this is the case for the definite articles in Danish and in Bulgarian. (You can understand this if you imagine a definite article developing out of &quot;Tree over there is big&quot; rather than &quot;That tree is big&quot;.) So the main difference between the articles in many European languages and the noun declensions in Sanskrit is that the articles distinguish definiteness and singular/plural, whereas the noun declensions distinguish only singular/dual/plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS: There is also a typical reverse evolution that makes articles disappear. They merge into the word they refer to and become prefixes or suffixes which due to lack of stress gradually adjust to their environments and develop irregularities or disappear completely. E.g. the definite articles in Danish and Bulgarian are already written as suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an important source for noun endings that indicate person and number as Latin and Greek, and for declination systems. Proto-Indo-European already had these things, so it's likely that an ancestor of this ancestral language had developed postfix articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a continuous coming and going of articles and declinations. But the process is usually so slow that you have to go back to a pretty unrecognisable stage of your native language before you can see a really significant change in these aspects of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T09:03:07.683" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T09:03:07.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-11T17:53:12.567" Score="0" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know 'Ek sal' means I will. Does Ek gaan mean I will too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ek gaan dit beslis nie so aanvaar nie en ek is besig om regshulp in te win. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9753" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T12:30:19.960" Title="Ek gaan or Ek sal" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-05-12T20:56:20.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-12T03:55:11.753" Score="3" ViewCount="7754" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/180/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; but it omits &lt;strong&gt;prosody&lt;/strong&gt;. The inclusion of &lt;strong&gt;prosody&lt;/strong&gt; confuses me and beclouds the other two terms (again).  Please explain as though I were 10 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/164003-Phonology-phonetics-and-prosody?s=4510a2ab0cfb87d589d6248202eaa8c5&amp;amp;p=846840&amp;amp;viewfull=1#post846840&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Phonetics&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of the neurological bases of speech, &lt;code&gt;the actions and movements of the vocal organs when we speak&lt;/code&gt;, the acoustics of the sound waves carrying speech and how speech is received by the ears and interpreted by the brain, I have [greyed] [...] the part that is of most interest to language teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt; is concerned with the sounds made in a particular language. The wallchart of symbols that some English teachers display in their rooms is usually a table of the English phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prosody&lt;/strong&gt; (or suprasegmental phonology) deall with such things as rhythm, stress, pitch and intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosody looks like a subset of phonology. So how does it compare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T04:46:28.510" Title="What are the differences between phonology, phonetics, and prosody?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12335" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:20:54.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were 10 years old, you would not ask such questions, and there would be no point in answering the question. So I opt to treat you like an adult. If this answer inspires a further question, you know what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosody is neutral as to the phonology / phonetics division, just as &quot;place of articulation&quot; is, which means that it can be studied phonetically or phonologically. The physical manifestations of &quot;prosody&quot; are duration, pitch, and &quot;segmental cohesion&quot; by which I mean whether segments exhibit a special closeness which suggests that two segments might be &quot;in the same X&quot;, where X could be a hypothesized constituent composed of multiple segments, such as &quot;onset&quot;, &quot;rhyme&quot;, &quot;syllable&quot;, &quot;foot&quot;. I deliberately disregard conceptions of &quot;prosody&quot; where &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; is prosody, since that reduces the concept to vacuity. Your source mis-characterises the difference between phonetics and phonology: it seems to adhere to an erroneous theory of the 60's that phonetics is physically automatic and universal, and phonological is anything language-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain things studied in the realm of &quot;prosody&quot; are strictly phonetic, namely the role of amplitude, and &quot;voice quality&quot; (not to be confused with phonation type).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-05-12T05:30:29.163" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T05:30:29.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12331" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:37:24.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're forgetting Slavic languages which generally don't have definite or indefinite articles (with some borderline exceptions) and Lithuanian. You can see the spread of definiteness marking in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/37A#3/47.52/46.49&quot;&gt;WALS map&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymological origins of definiteness marking are quite easy to identify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definite articles generally originate in some sort of demonstrative pronoun. And indefinite articles often come from words like 'one' or 'some'. It's also not difficult to imagine why they might be found useful by speakers. In fact, in modern spoken Czech you can sort of see  incipient use of demonstratives to mark definiteness in some situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't answer the question of why definiteness marking has developed in some languages and not others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the most likely answer is &lt;strong&gt;areal diffusion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is likely that definiteness marking in disparate languages has evolved independently, it is also likely that the clusters of use of articles are due to areal influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of this is the Balkan language area (the famous Sprachbund) where most of its members (except Greek) have a postponed definite article which includes the Slavic members who could not have inherited definiteness historically and the one Romance language where definiteness looks nothing like in the other languages in the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T05:37:24.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12328" CreationDate="2015-05-12T05:43:48.377" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. For two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just because a language might belong to the same family as another language, they may not be outwardly similar at all. Just compare German, Russian and Persian. It takes a very close historical study to link them. Or even just German and French.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of these proto-X families are extremely hypothetical and the evidence for them is tenuous and controversial based on a vague similarity of a few words, a few sound parallelisms and some proposed historical connection. Not infrequently being the pet theory of one author. Of these, Proto-Sino-Caucasian is one of the less widely accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T05:43:48.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12333" CreationDate="2015-05-12T12:30:19.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Afrikaans, but Dutch uses the verb &lt;em&gt;gaan&lt;/em&gt; in the same sense, particularly in Flanders; this use was borrowed, no doubt, from French, which uses &lt;em&gt;vais&lt;/em&gt; in the same way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Je vais voir&lt;/em&gt; (I'll see)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ik ga zien&lt;/em&gt;                            (I'll see; in Flanders)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ik ga kijken&lt;/em&gt;                          (I'll have a look; in the Netherlands)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ik ga hier beslist niet mee akkoord&lt;/em&gt;   (I will certainly not agree to this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1422" LastActivityDate="2015-05-12T12:30:19.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12343" CreationDate="2015-05-13T04:57:16.417" Score="3" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed this trend in some data I'm working with and am searching for an explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8050" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T07:54:15.463" Title="Why is the number 7 often used in Twitter usernames of Arabic speakers?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-14T15:46:57.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12342" CreationDate="2015-05-13T05:00:50.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;7 represents ħ (voiceless pharyngeal fricative). This is referred to as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet&quot;&gt;Arabic Chat alphabet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T05:00:50.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12342" CreationDate="2015-05-13T07:54:15.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is used for Arabic /ħ/ because &quot;7&quot; vaguely resembles the Arabic letter ح&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T07:54:15.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-13T14:48:08.733" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to convert natural language strings into integers for use in a long short-term neural-network. I tried converting to binary, using a bag-of-words, and an associative-array with each letter corresponding to a prime-number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can I convert nl sentences, or just the topic of them, to word-vectors or an array of ints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9765" LastEditorUserId="9765" LastEditDate="2015-05-19T22:37:03.330" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T22:37:03.330" Title="representing a sentence in integers ( hopefully retaining semantic value )" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4165" CreationDate="2015-05-13T15:19:32.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For learning a language primarily from books, intonation and other suprasegmentals should be the most difficult, simply because non-segmental information is not shown in our writing systems.  You can't learn a thing if you have no facts to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For learning a language primarily from the speech of native speakers, intonation should be easiest, because though adults may lose the ability to hear distinctions that are not made in their first languages, we can always hear intonation, because it's so much like music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this would carry over to suprasegmentals other than intonation is not obvious.  I'd guess that it would carry over to vowel and consonant length, at least, since timing is also very prominent in music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T15:19:32.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12345" CreationDate="2015-05-13T15:50:46.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any sense of what you're after, but I have a theory which represents a part of sentence structure with the integers 0-3.  The idea is to describe the parsing order of each sentence part with respect to other parts, with lowest numbered parts parsed first.  The numbers correspond to the integers assigned to verb arguments in Relational Grammar.  The numbers are opposite to the order of application for theories like Categorial Grammar, which represent sentence structure as the application of functions to arguments, where the highest numbered parts are the first applied to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect, the numbers represent the embeddedness of parts of a tree structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T15:50:46.777" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-13T18:55:00.337" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=concomitant&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ Etymonline for 'concomitant (adj.)' ]&lt;/a&gt; ... from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;with, together&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=com-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;com-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;comitari&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;join as a companion,&amp;quot; from comes (genitive comitis) &amp;quot;companion&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=count&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;count&lt;/a&gt; (n.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=count&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ Etymonline for 'count (n.)' ]&lt;/a&gt; ... from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;COM-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;with&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see com-) + stem of ire &amp;quot;to go&amp;quot; (see ion). ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For want of discrimination, I bolded the later 2nd &lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt; prefix, and capitalised the first one.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How and why was a second &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;com-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; fastened onto &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;comitari&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is the 2nd redundant? If the 2nd is necessary, what does it mean especially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some formal terms describing this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:06:02.237" Title="Why are two 'com-' prefixes in 'concomitant'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12348" CreationDate="2015-05-13T19:28:24.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lexicalization. At an earlier stage, the combination &lt;em&gt;kom+i-&lt;/em&gt; might be derived productively and the meaning can be computed compositionally. But it takes on a different meaning from &quot;go with&quot;, and it gets reanalyzed as &lt;em&gt;comitare&lt;/em&gt;. Reanalysis wipes out the memory of the word having come from &lt;em&gt;kom+i-&lt;/em&gt;, and a millenium later someone re-prefixes this verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-13T19:28:24.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T05:50:53.733" Score="2" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work as a literacy tutor in a preschool and part of my job is to help students develop phonological awareness by teaching them how to identify rhymes and alliteration. To make it as easy as possible for kids who are first learning I'd like to find the phonemes in English which are the easiest to tell apart. Not sure of the answer to this question I've been trying short (plosives) vs long (vowels and fricatives) phonemes, and voiced vs unvoiced phonemes. I'm also avoiding phonemes with the same tongue position (f/v, s/z). Does anybody have any information on this topic? Is there any research on the topic? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9767" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-05-18T00:06:37.870" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T00:06:37.870" Title="Which English phonemes are the easiest to distinguish from each other?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T11:55:22.163" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we take a clitic as a part of word that is attached after the ending and attached to the word depending on the word order (examples include -'s in English and -que in Latin), what would be definite articles in languages such as Bulgarian and Danish? Are they clitics or endings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T17:48:15.383" Title="Attached articles, are they clitics or endings?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12356" CreationDate="2015-05-14T13:57:43.393" Score="1" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to learn to pronounce names without looking like an idiot. This includes having the ability to look at a name and discern its nationality, or looking at the pronunciation of a word (like as shown in the symbols at the beginning of most wikipedia pages, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P%C3%B3ly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)  and getting something out of it. How would I do that? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This may be somewhat of a beginner question, so I guess it could fall into the general question of &quot;how does one learn linguistics?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9772" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T15:47:20.540" Title="How do you learn how to pronounce names?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12351" CreationDate="2015-05-14T14:31:55.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a lot of research on phoneme confusability. Here is just one of many similar papers on the topic:&lt;br&gt; &lt;em&gt;Cutler, A., Weber, A., Smits, R., &amp;amp; Cooper, N. (2004). Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(6), 3668-3678.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;The PDF is available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:60592:2/component/escidoc:60593/Cutler_2004_patterns.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:60592:2/component/escidoc:60593/Cutler_2004_patterns.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;br&gt;You may find Table I and Table II helpful, specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T14:31:55.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12354" CreationDate="2015-05-14T15:47:20.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all look like idiots when it comes to pronouncing names. One way you can tell whether someone is a native of the area is how they pronounce &quot;Puyallup&quot;. Sometimes, the same spelling has multiple pronunciations depending on the referent, for example Lima Ohio (lɑjmə) and Lima Peru (lijmə). There can also be relatively free variation in pronunciation, for example Yakima can be [ˈjækəmɑ:] or [ˈjækəmə] though I think the former is prevalent amongst locals -- [jəˈkajmə] is clearly wrong, although possible. Personal names pose the same problem, to the point that &quot;Levine&quot; can be pronounced [ləvˈijn] or [ləvˈajn], depending on which person you're talking about. The name &quot;Nguyen&quot; is pronounced a lot of different ways; usually not the way it is pronounced in Vietnamese, but some brave souls persist. You can make some guesses, e.g. that an Asian with the name &quot;Ngo&quot; pronounces it [ŋo] and an African with the same spelling pronounces it [ŋgo], but it might also be pronounced [ŋo]. Guessing nationality is even harder (is &quot;Lee&quot; Korean, Chinese, Malaysian? Or even not Asian?), or impossible if you mean &quot;what is their citizenship?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is why I always ask the speaker, when introducing a person I don't know, how to pronounce their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T15:47:20.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-14T19:22:53.180" Score="3" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to understand the relationships between two areas of study, folk linguistics (as in Niedzielski &amp;amp; Preston, 2003) and language ideology (as in e.g. Woolard &amp;amp; Schieffelin, 1994 or Silverstein, 2003). They seem to deal with similar questions, but have developed somewhat independently? Anyone able to relate the concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone point to a nice conceptual or empirical review, or the most classical articles? Or any recent research that has successfully addressed both viewpoints? Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Niedzielski, N. A., &amp;amp; Preston, D. R. (2003). Folk linguistics (Vol.&#xA;122). Walter de Gruyter.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of&#xA;sociolinguistic life. Language &amp;amp; Communication, 23(3), 193-229.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woolard, K. A., &amp;amp; Schieffelin, B. B. (1994). Language ideology.&#xA;Annual review of anthropology, 55-82.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The post received a downvote, if you have any advice on how I should better phrase my questions on this site, I will do that. At the moment I don't know how to improve, here or in the future, while I'm sure there are established traditions that would be good to follow. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9774" LastEditorUserId="9774" LastEditDate="2015-05-15T14:43:53.183" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T10:33:46.133" Title="How do concepts folk linguistics and language ideology relate to each other?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12362" CreationDate="2015-05-14T20:08:34.500" Score="6" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question might be too general, or opinion-based, but I was looking for advice on how to extract rare words from a very large corpus. The rare words wouldn't necessarily be consistent from document to document, so traditional tf-idf wouldn't be quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'm looking at restaurant reviews, and want to highlight reviews that use very specific language, e.g. &quot;The steak tartare tasted like cotton candy&quot; vs &quot;The food was good&quot;. The fact that the sentiment was negative or positive is not as important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a binary tf-idf seems to help, as it doesn't overweight the fact that a word was used multiple times in a single document. Is there any other advice as to how this can be detected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T09:42:40.080" Title="Extracting Rare Words From A Corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12364" CreationDate="2015-05-14T21:36:11.593" Score="13" ViewCount="2113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to educate myself on &quot;big picture&quot; in theoretical linguistics, and started with often mentioned universal grammar, but found online resources very confusing. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;while the majority of linguists accept universal grammar, there have been a few linguists who do not accept the theory.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBBS%2FBBS32_05%2FS0140525X09990744a.pdf&amp;amp;code=82f360a3507d3333589a28152cc6112a#page=96&quot;&gt;This survey&lt;/a&gt; counters with &quot;&lt;em&gt;outsiders  have  instead  taken  the  articulate envoys from the universalizing generativist camp to represent the consensus view within  linguistics.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Ouch. Browsing online publications and this site I got the impression that it is a hot topic of debate, and even definitions range from &quot;&lt;em&gt;whatever it turns out to be that all children bring to learning a language&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, to &quot;&lt;em&gt;common elements in all languages related to mental traits that may or may not be language specific&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, to &quot;&lt;em&gt;genetic language specific faculty that does or does not include recursive tree syntax&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which seems closest to Wikipedia's &quot;&lt;em&gt;ability to learn grammar hard-wired into the brain&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. I am not in a position to evaluate various pro and con arguments, but I'd like to understand the overall situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a definition of universal grammar that &quot;majority of linguists&quot; currently accept? Is there a (different) definition that &quot;majority of linguists&quot; currently reject? Was there a time in the past when &quot;majority of linguists&quot; accepted universal grammar in some sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful if someone could provide an analogy with other sciences. For example, Wikipedia's language sounds like what might be said about evolution in biology. Is universal grammar like that? Or is it one of several competing mainstream theories, like corpuscular and wave optics in 18th century. Or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does linguistics have a &quot;paradigm&quot; (agreed upon framework that explains many facts and structures research), be it universal grammar or something else? Is it currently undergoing a &quot;paradigm shift&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am asking is because of phrases I read like &quot;generative grammar has to change&quot;, or even stronger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9777" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T20:01:05.450" Title="Does majority of linguists accept universal grammar?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2015-05-14T22:01:32.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't find the universal grammar &quot;theory&quot; at all interesting.  It's totally unrelated to the scientific aspects of linguistic theory, imo.  It's content is polemic and political.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not totally unlike the climate change controversy.  It's seductive for non-specialists, because it makes sense to everyone, everyone can have an opinion about it (and mostly everyone does), and everyone can argue about it without knowing anything about linguistics (resp., climatology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-14T22:01:32.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12359" CreationDate="2015-05-15T01:08:26.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;concordance software&lt;/a&gt; to do this. It will generate a concordance of your text which will show (amongst other things) how often each word occurs. If you use a KWIC (key word in context) concordancer it will also show the immediate context within which each word occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here's a concordancer for Macintosh OS X computers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/casualconc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CasualConc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T01:08:26.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12335" CreationDate="2015-05-15T06:46:07.273" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real distinction you need to make is between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Segmental phonology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suprasegmental phonology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosody is a feature of suprasegmental phonology of language. It can be studied either with the method and within the theoretical framework of phonetics or phonology. But I would argue that at the suprasegmental level the phonology/phonetics distinction is less relevant than at the segmental level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T06:46:07.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2015-05-15T07:12:23.570" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia claim that 'the majority of linguists accept universal grammar' is highly unlikely to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would posit an &lt;strong&gt;alternative hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;majority of linguists do not care about universal grammar&lt;/strong&gt;. They may be skeptical or enthusiastic about the whole enterprise but they probably do not know enough about it to be able to adjudicate. It is simply far too irrelevant to any of their professional concerns - it only has any bearing on a linguists work if they study syntax in the GB/minimalist framework. Of those who do know enough, there may be slightly more proponents than opponents, simply because adherence to the dogma is part of the GB/minimalist (Chomskean) framework. The opponents come from language acquisition research (like Tomasello at al) or have looked at the claims and evidence out of idle curiosity and are simply incredulous at the poverty of the evidence and the porousness of the argument (like Sampson or myself). This disparity may make it seem to an external observer that universal grammar is accepted. Many of these external observers are clueless students of philosophy who - in grand philosophy of language tradition - are about 20 years behind the latest developments in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was perhaps a bit more personal perspective than appropriate for SE but I'm not sure in the absence of a comprehensive survey, anything more definitive can be said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the comparison of the position of Universal Grammar (UG) in linguistics to other sciences, it is nothing like relativity or natural selection. &lt;strong&gt;It is more like String Theory&lt;/strong&gt;. It is one contentious (rather far-fetched in many people's opinion) way of fitting some of the spurious data into a model. As far as I can tell, UG can describe a lot less of the data and unifies a lot less of what we know about language than String Theory does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UG often goes hand in hand with evolutionary psychology&lt;/strong&gt; which is also highly contentious and more talked about by outsiders than its true position within the sciences merits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to a 'paradigm' in linguistics, I think a good place to start would be Dixon's 'Basic Linguistic Theory' which describes things like those jlawler mentioned in his comments - he describes concepts that are used by most linguists regardless of their theoretical framework. There are &lt;strong&gt;several competing theoretical frameworks&lt;/strong&gt; (that may count as paradigms) of which perhaps these four are the most important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Functional linguistics/grammar in the broadest sense (includes corpus linguistics, discourse studies, conversation studies, linguistic typology, lexicography, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generative/formal grammar (linguistics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Construction/cognitive grammar (linguistics) (close to and possibly fitting under the functionalist paradigm)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minimalism and UG (related and possibly part of the formal/generative paradigm)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fixed spelling of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._W._Dixon&quot;&gt;RMW Dixon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-05-16T06:20:41.973" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T06:20:41.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12367" CreationDate="2015-05-15T07:45:16.073" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I constructed a language L and taught it to a thousand people. In a few years, their level of proficiency is perfect. I ask them to only speak L from now on and send them to an island where they make lots of babies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: will their grown-up children speak exactly according to the way I originally constructed the language, no matter how hard it actually is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T23:41:47.450" Title="Limitations on constructed languages for native speakers to be" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12365" CreationDate="2015-05-15T10:37:42.800" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not, because the rules of language change still apply. Without considerable engineering (whose methods have probably not been invented yet, or at least not been tested on a large scale and refined), it is likely that there will be a lot of corners that are subject to relatively quick change when people start to use the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar situations occur in practice which demonstrate this in the variant &quot;no matter how &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; the original language actually is&quot;. In certain contact situations, a very simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pidgin&lt;/a&gt; can develop and become so successful that many children grow up with it as their native language. Within a few generations it becomes a full &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;creole language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reason to assume that one wouldn't see similar instability issues in the situation you describe, where the new language is complex rather than simple. (Or with a new language of average simplicity.) It's important to understand that the evolution of languages doesn't converge towards a regular, logical and practical state but is caused by factors such as people's desire for succinctness, vivid expression, politeness etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that complications in the original language are definitely not the issue in the way you seem to be worried about them. If the language is easy enough for the first generation to learn perfectly, then it's definitely easy enough for their children to pick up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-05-15T22:22:11.040" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T22:22:11.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T10:59:19.900" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;The areas of study for language attitudes/language regard/language ideology have developed with a somewhat intuitive contrast to studies of language use. Is there a good reference that explains where the boundary between attitudinal (or meta-level) findings, and use (the object-level) should be set? One option is Silverstein's metapragmatics article (1994), however he may have a slightly idiosyncratic take on the whole affair, and 'meta' for him may include more than for a typical researcher of language attitudes. If you argue for an intuitive distinction between the two, then surely counterexamples can be found for a strict boundary between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a ref. to define the meta-vs-object or evaluative-vs-use dimensions of language in a way that does not refer to Silverstein? Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ref: SILVERSTEIN, M. (1994). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33-58.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9774" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T10:59:19.900" Title="What is the go-to reference for a distinction between language attitudes and language use?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12372" CreationDate="2015-05-15T15:02:28.500" Score="0" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the Linguistics Stack Exchange is the best place to ask my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening credits of a cartoon called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_McBoing-Boing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerald Mc Boing Boing&lt;/a&gt; uses cursive. To me, it looks like lowercase &quot;b&quot;s are used for &quot;Boing Boing&quot;. However, the cartoon was released in 1950. Has the way cursive &quot;b&quot;s are written changed since then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following screenshots are all from the opening credits of the short. Notice how several &quot;B&quot;s are capitalized differently from the way &quot;Boing Boing&quot; is written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would a 1950s audience have interpreted the capitalization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/gj0cBvP.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot 1&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/TKF1jTI.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot 2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/G3siKbG.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot 3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/66jWskE.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot 4&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9782" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:52:07.407" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:52:07.407" Title="Has the way cursive capital &quot;B&quot;s been written changed since the 1950s?" Tags="&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-03T19:09:25.507" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2015-05-15T15:10:14.087" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's some nice sources on it in the functionalist camp. Can't find it now, but I think Haspelmath or Croft phrased UG as &quot;whatever is left when we look at all the languages&quot;, which in essence is 1) not much, 2) probably not very informative. Typologists have been arguing against universal categories to be used for cross-linguistic comparisons even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few nice quotes to get you started: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Assuming that it was important to discover generalizations which were&#xA;  valid for all languages, would not such statements be few in number&#xA;  and on the whole quite banal? Examples would be that languages had&#xA;  nouns and verbs (although some linguists denied even that) or that all&#xA;  languages had sound systems and distinguished between phonetic vowels&#xA;  and consonants. (Greenberg 1986, p. 14) via Evans &amp;amp; Levinson, 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The claims of Universal Grammar, we argue here, are either empirically&#xA;  false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies&#xA;  rather than strict universals. Structural differences should instead&#xA;  be accepted for what they are, and integrated into a new approach to&#xA;  language and cognition that places diversity at centre stage. (Evans &amp;amp; Levinson, 2012)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hundreds of implicational universals have already been discovered, and&#xA;  more are discovered every time a typologist investigates a new area of&#xA;  grammar. The existence of so many implicational universals requires a&#xA;  rethinking of the nature of Universal Grammar, which is usually&#xA;  thought of as a set of unrestricted universals. The part of Universal&#xA;  Grammar that consists of unrestricted universals specifying ways in&#xA;  which all languages are identical captures only a very small portion&#xA;  of what is universal about language. It misses most of what is&#xA;  universal about language beyond the basic design features. (Croft, 2004)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There could be a small set of innate grammatical categories and&#xA;  relations (&quot;substantive universals&quot;) from which languages may choose,&#xA;  and a simple grammatical architecture linking the various components&#xA;  of the grammar (&quot;formal universals&quot;). It would be the linguists' task&#xA;  to determine the substantive and formal universals (in other words,&#xA;  universal grammar), and this would constitute the framework. Since it&#xA;  is innate, all languages must be describable within this framework. If&#xA;  this picture corresponded to the reality of languages, linguists' life&#xA;  would be easy and description could be based on a framework. However,&#xA;  all practicing linguists know that things are vastly more complicated:&#xA;  If a universal grammar, as envisaged in the Chomskyan tradition,&#xA;  exists, we are still very far from knowing what it is like. Almost&#xA;  every language presents us with new puzzles, with new categories and&#xA;  structures that do not fit into our frameworks. The idea that a single&#xA;  uniform framework could be designed that naturally accommodates all&#xA;  languages is totally utopian at the moment. So instead of fitting a&#xA;  language into the Procrustean bed of an existing framework, we should&#xA;  liberate ourselves from the frameworks and describe languages in their&#xA;  own terms. (Haspelmath, 2008)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about the basic design constraints can prove interesting on its own though. Keep in mind that there is contention on Levinsons' perhaps a bit harsh statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The talk about innate constraints is under heavy pressure too, modelling work indicates that strong constraints are not really necessary or not very probable to evolve even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question 2 though, no, there is really no agreed upon standard at the moment and way too many &quot;linguistics&quot;-s to go around. Good luck making sense of it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Croft, W. (2002). Typology and universals. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Evans, N., &amp;amp; Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and brain sciences, 32(05), 429-448.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg, J. ed. (1986) On being a linguistic anthropologist. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:1–24. [aNE]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath, M. (2008). Framework-free grammatical theory. To appear in: Heine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9774" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T15:10:14.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12394" CreationDate="2015-05-15T16:28:04.583" Score="3" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an introductory book that covers the cutting-edge research of the linguistics and most of its big branches. It must be written in a textbook format. The answerer must be well-versed in linguistics (well-versed = engages with the contemporary literature on linguistics on academic level/contributes to it or strives to contribute to it in future), and s/he also must have read more than one introductory book to linguistics (so that the end-review is not skewed). There are a number of well-reviewed introductory linguistics books on Amazon, but I wanted a more systematic answer to my question, and hence the reason I'm posting it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9663" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T10:22:21.727" Title="Any solid textbook recommendations to begin studying linguistics?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12369" CreationDate="2015-05-15T16:44:04.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're regular lowercase &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;s, just like the ones in &quot;Gail Kubik&quot; and &quot;Herb Klynn&quot; and &quot;John Hubley.&quot; Why would anyone think they're an uppercase form? Plenty of &quot;Mc&quot; names can be written with the second part lowercased - you'll find &quot;Mcdonald&quot; alongside &quot;McDonald.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T16:44:04.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T16:50:04.210" Score="0" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be very helpful to have for a programming project I'm working on involving grapheme-to-phoneme translation. I've been able to find many rules for phonemes but not too many for allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9783" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T21:27:58.953" Title="Is there a comprehensive list of all (or many) phonological rules (specifically allophonic) of the English language available anywhere online?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T18:05:57.933" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most electronic dictionaries I've found only categorize words into noun / verb / adjective / adverb / etc. (such as WordNet). They don't further refine parts of speech into subcategories like &lt;strong&gt;count/noncount noun&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;transitive/intransitive verb&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;attributive/predicative adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What resources are out there that make these refinements? Open source and free resources are preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9784" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T18:05:57.933" Title="What electronic resources are available that categorize nouns by countability?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12373" CreationDate="2015-05-15T20:20:03.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask about allophonic rules for &quot;the English language&quot;.  There are no such rules.  There are different allophonic rules for the various dialects of English.  But even collecting a set of rules for some major, more or less standardized English dialect would be problematic, because of linguists' very strong tendency to disagree about the facts, to say nothing of their interpretation.  Probably a fair number of linguists would not even agree that there are such things as allophonic rules (but I do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T20:20:03.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12371" CreationDate="2015-05-15T20:43:09.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you may think you do, but you don't need that.  The predominant, traditional method of teaching linguistics is by the case method, akin (I imagine) to the method of teaching law, by the same name.  You get a small set of language forms, you think about it, then give your best shot at analyzing it, write it up, and get evaluative comments from an instructor.  You may perhaps get the instructor's own model analysis, or other students' attempts.  You may agree or not with the instructor's comments, you may or may not see any merit in others' ideas about the data, you may agree that general theoretical ideas you have read about are some help in your problem analysis, or perhaps not, but if you disagree with your instructor about this, you will probably be expected to defend your views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you go on to another problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit chaotic, and some students don't handle this well.  They'd like to have more clarity and organization, and not to be so much on their own.  But those students don't grow up to be linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T20:43:09.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-15T20:46:12.133" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for rule-based methods or any other methods to identify all mentions in a text. I have found several libraries that give coreferences but no exact options for only mentions. What I want is something like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Input text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[This painter]'s indulgence of visual fantasy, and appreciation of different historic architectural styles can be seen in his 1840 Architect's Dream. After a series of paintings on The Last of the Mohicans, [he] made a three year trip to Europe in 1829, but [he] is better known for a trip four years earlier in which [he] journeyed up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains. FTP, name [this painter of The Oxbow] and The Voyage of Life series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The square brackets highlight mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest a way to deal with this. Also, how is it different from coreferences? It would be really helpful if someone could post links to the concerned papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9786" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T18:17:46.293" Title="How to identify mentions in a text?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2015-05-15T20:50:27.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem of the question is that it leaves undefined what &quot;a linguist&quot; is, and there is no common-sense or operational definition that could be applied to conducting a survey, or making an educated guess. If you were to specifically limit the question to professional linguists (post-PhD, paid to do linguistics) working on synchronic grammatical theory (which is what UG is &quot;about&quot;), you'd get a vastly different answer, compared to looking at anybody who self-declares that they are linguists. Since you're asking a sociological question, you ought to spell out the subject pool in some way. A corollary problem with the question is that it obviously can only be answered given a well-administered attitude survey – which I claim is a logical impossibility – and there has never even been a &lt;em&gt;lousy&lt;/em&gt; survey on the subject. The only scientific basis that anyone has for answering this either in the affirmative or negative is some unjustified assumptions about the relationship between what you see published, and what people believe. Otherwise, you're just gonna get people's personal beliefs about UG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in the intellectual content of the theory, as opposed to the feelings of an undefined crowd, I suggest trying to understand what the claim actually is (which means you will find that there are multiple claims). For example, there is a wide misunderstanding of the term &quot;generative&quot; which equates it with &quot;Whatever Chomsky is doing now in syntax&quot;, and likewise &quot;UG&quot; is &quot;Whatever is Chomsky's current syntactic metatheory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fundamental claim of UG is that there exists some set of cognitive tools which are specific to grammatical computations, and that these are a feature of human psychology. There are three attitudes to this premise: acceptance, rejection, and agnosticism. Based on some decades of interaction with theoretical linguists in the US, I conclude that acceptance was predominant into the 70's, and currently, it could be a tie between acceptance and agnosticism. I also think that the concept of substantive universals has taken the strongest hit, which is to say that the idea of a rich set of universal elements such as syntactic parameters and whatever kind of features is, quite possibly, on its last few years of life. But at any rate, you can't meaningfully ask questions about &quot;the theory of UG&quot;, any more than you can meaningfully ask questions about &quot;the theory of epistemology&quot;. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; meaningfully ask a specific question, such as whether most linguists believe, disbelieve, or don't know, whether &quot;movement&quot; is a possible syntactic operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T07:27:01.283" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T07:27:01.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12373" CreationDate="2015-05-15T21:27:58.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in grapheme to &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; translation, you don't need to care at all about allophonic rules. Allophones are not at all reflected in orthography. However, you do need to care about what sense of &quot;phoneme&quot; you are interested in for any translation. People use &quot;phoneme&quot; in many different ways; sometimes they mean &quot;underlying form&quot;, and sometimes they mean &quot;phonetic form, but undoing any rules that introduce derived-only segments&quot;. The usual example of a derived-only segment for English is aspiration, and another example is the flap [ɾ]. But the flap can come unpredictably either from /t/ or /d/, which means that you can't translate from a surface flap to a specific underlying consonant (thus, under one definition, the flap &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a phoneme). Whether or not a flap is a segment of underlying representations is completely unclear. Many people like to assert that there are no underlying flaps, but the reasoning for that is usually that you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; predict a surface flap from some other phoneme, and therefore you can &quot;avoid&quot; having an underlying flap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suggest that you look at the concept of &quot;phonetic implementation&quot;, since a lot of what used to be thought of as coming from &quot;allophonic rules&quot; (such as &quot;devoicing of /l/ after /s/&quot;) is not the result of a phonological rule, it's a mechanical reflection of how the glottis is opened in producing /s/ in English (which is itself in the realm of &quot;phonetic implementation&quot; and not &quot;phonological rule&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T21:27:58.953" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12365" CreationDate="2015-05-15T23:41:47.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with jlawler's comment that the hypothetical scenario is impossible. However, for what it's worth, a somewhat comparable real-life parallel is the case of Hebrew, which was &quot;revived&quot; after centuries of near disuse. Modern Hebrew has undergone a very considerable amount of change in the century or so -- mostly in vocabulary, syntax and idiom, but also in morphology, phonology and phonetics. The extent of change is greater than what any long-established language I know of has undergone in the same period. This suggests that no matter how carefully a constructed language is designed, once it is used in the real world it will quickly start looking very different from what the designer(s) had in mind. This is inevitable given normal human linguistic creativity, the inexorability of language change and the fact that no designer can anticipate all the uses a language will be put to. Since a lot of language change happens during childhood language acquisition, even one generation should be enough to bring about some change -- for example, if the morphology is complex (&quot;no matter how hard it actually is&quot;), you could expect to see some amount of analogical simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T23:41:47.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2015-05-15T23:55:57.560" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number 22 in Dutch (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heardutchhere.net/vocabularynumbers.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;and other numbers ending with 2&lt;/a&gt;) are written as &lt;em&gt;tweeëntwintig&lt;/em&gt; - a compound of &lt;em&gt;twee&lt;/em&gt; (two), &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; (and), and &lt;em&gt;twintig&lt;/em&gt; (twenty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, the diaeresis are added to the last recurring vowel to indicate a change in syllable; English has this also with &lt;em&gt;Zoë&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;naïve&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1614" LastActivityDate="2015-05-15T23:55:57.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12358" CreationDate="2015-05-16T10:33:46.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, language ideology and folk linguistics are not the only concepts to relate in this semantic space. There's also language politics, language policy, language education, folk etymology, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all interact in rather complex but at the same time fairly transparent ways. Some of the connections you can draw:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folk linguistics is an expression of language ideology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folk linguistics is used to achieve aims of language politics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language ideology underlies language policy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language education policy is a battleground of language ideology and politics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, furthermore, you cannot really separate language with other markers of identity when it comes to both folk linguistics and language ideology. It is interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes about culture, race, folk psychology, human nature, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any comprehensive survey of research and thought that explicitly links all of these concepts in a systematic way but at the same time I'd say that any survey of language politics or even just language contact will touch on the underlying phenomena - perhaps with varying emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T10:33:46.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8382" CreationDate="2015-05-16T20:46:52.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accommodation is the modification in the articulation of a vowel under the influence of an adjacent sound, or the modification in the articulation of a consonant under the influence of an adjacent vowel.&#xA;Consonant + back vowel: pool, rude, who (rounded)&#xA;Consonant + front vowel: tea, sit, keep (spread)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9791" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T20:46:52.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8382" CreationDate="2015-05-16T21:48:59.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other meaning, not meaning &quot;coarticulation&quot;, refers to how people change their pronunciation depending on their audience. For instance, my native pronunciation of &quot;root&quot; is [rʊt], which is completely unknown to most non-native speakers, therefore is I ask for the word &quot;root&quot;, I have to pronounce it [ruwt]. Likewise, two speakers may start to sound more like each other, depending on lots of social variables. &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/dissertations/Babel_dissertation_2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a dissertation on the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-16T21:48:59.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12359" CreationDate="2015-05-17T09:30:31.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AntConc's&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Word List tool. It produces a frequency list of all word tokens in the file(s) that you've got open, and links each item on this list to its own KWIC-concordance––handy if you want to see the context in which the word is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One caveat, though: this tool only works with 'single-word' items. Compound nouns  such as &lt;em&gt;cotton candy&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, are not detected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a view to answering your question: I suppose you could collect the least frequent words into a 'mini-lexicon' and then search your corpus for all sentences containing one or more items on this list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach is rudimentary and probably (it's hard to tell) doesn't answer your question; but I'd recommend trying it if you're still stuck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9519" LastEditorUserId="9519" LastEditDate="2015-05-17T09:42:40.080" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T09:42:40.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11306" CreationDate="2015-05-17T10:23:00.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;By definition, compounds have more than one base: &lt;em&gt;mice-killer&lt;/em&gt; is formed from MOUSE and KILL. Unlike Noun-Verb+er compounds, most of them are opaque and the relation between the two vary. There is a long tradition giving names to these different cases. For example, one of the oldest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tatpurusa =&gt; &lt;em&gt;blackboard&lt;/em&gt;: 1 head = BOARD, 1 modifier = BLACK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dvandva =&gt; &lt;em&gt;bittersweet&lt;/em&gt;: 2 heads = BITTER &amp;amp; SWEET&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bahuvrihi =&gt; &lt;em&gt;chatterbox&lt;/em&gt; : no head (as a &lt;em&gt;chatterbox&lt;/em&gt; is neither &lt;em&gt;chatter&lt;/em&gt; nor a &lt;em&gt;box&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A base is a lexeme used in a derivation usually for both the semantic and the phonological part of the construction. In &lt;em&gt;girlfriend&lt;/em&gt; both the lexemes GIRL and FRIEND are used to build the derived word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T10:23:00.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-17T20:42:33.637" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a sentence from &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.uchicago.edu/~bartels/papers/Bartels-Johnson-2015-Cognition.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://home.uchicago.edu/~bartels/papers/Bartels-Johnson-2015-Cognition.pdf&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;We describe what can be gained from connecting cognition and consumer choice by discussing two contexts.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a layman's perspective, &quot;by discussing&quot; may link to either of two former phrases contained in this sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does any school of parsing (e.g. popular ones like dependency parsing, constituency parsing, and others) preserve the ambiguous linkage of &quot;by discussing two contexts&quot; to both &quot;describe&quot; and &quot;connecting&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is preserving the ambiguity only possible by suggesting two separate parses, or is there a kind of parse that, inherently, preserves the ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="2547" LastEditDate="2015-05-19T20:27:53.697" LastActivityDate="2015-05-19T20:27:53.697" Title="handling ambiguity in parses" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12388" CreationDate="2015-05-17T23:42:37.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.  It's a structural ambiguity, meaning there are two possible structures with differing associated interpretations.  Parses are supposed to give you structures.  Since there are two structures, there must be two parses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could invent a notation for abbreviating two partially similar parses in one diagram, I'm sure (use colored pens, e.g.), but notational magic can't change the fact there are two parses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-17T23:42:37.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12392" CreationDate="2015-05-18T01:13:28.743" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there instances in which an entire sentence constitutes a focus--new information?   Consider the following scenario:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three people are talking together about a mutual friend who is in the hospital for a hernia operation.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fourth person enters the room abruptly and interrupts the conversation with any one of the following announcements:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &quot;The President has just been shot.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) &quot;The school has just been quarantined.&quot; &#xA;c) &quot;There's a can of paint leaking all over the kitchen floor.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, each sentence can be broken into topic &amp;amp; comment.  Topics are &quot;The President,&quot; &quot;The school&quot; and &quot;A can of paint&quot; respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, all of the information is new to the three listeners.  None of it pertains to the original topic of discussion.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any sentence in which sentences a) through c) could be called foci from beginning to end because all of the information in them is new?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T12:01:36.513" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T12:01:36.513" Title="Are there instances in which an entire sentence constitutes a focus--new information?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;information-structure&gt;&lt;focus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12398" CreationDate="2015-05-18T04:17:17.747" Score="10" ViewCount="1246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just reading about various Altaic language grouping hypotheses on wikipedia. According the article, evidence for an Altaic language family that would include Turkic, Uralic, Mongolian, Tungusic, etc. has mostly been rejected by specialists in recent years, but fails to give details. Have more promising alternative hypotheses been proposed? Or is this just a matter of there being too little evidence to draw solid conclusions after so much time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any ongoing work on the subject that I could read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9796" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T21:07:30.853" Title="Origins of Turkic language family? Alternatives to Altaic?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12390" CreationDate="2015-05-18T08:16:04.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. Here's an utterance that is all new. But is it a sentence? It all depends on your perspective. I'd argue that as soon as you have a complete clause with an analytically articulated and semantically relevant subject and predicate, you're doing something to mark the topic or focus (theme/rheme). Because you're always doing something to place it into the discourse structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The known/new information approach is only an analogy to the whole point of topic/focus. So while &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Thetic_vs._categorical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thetic sentences&lt;/a&gt; like 'My girlfriend left me' may seem like they're providing all new information in the discourse context of 'Why are you crying?', they're already involved in marking the known aspect of 'X is known to have a girlfriend' and the new aspect 'girlfriend left X'. In Czech, this may be done through word order and/or prosody and in English through definiteness and/or prosody (plus a bunch of other discursive ways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're left with sentences like 'It's raining.' or 'It's cold.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T08:16:04.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12323" CreationDate="2015-05-18T08:32:25.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't beat the Global Web-Based English Corpus proposed by robert---but here are is  another big one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;British national corpus (BNC) &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/&lt;/a&gt; 100 mio words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Wikipedia dump is also huge ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T08:32:25.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12371" CreationDate="2015-05-18T10:22:21.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking for impossible things. A textbook, by definition, covers material that is fairly well-established in the field,[*] and note that the degree of difficulty of the material is not a good indicator of how well-established the conclusions are. If you want to know about cutting-edge research, you need to be reading journals and attending conferences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this is what I tend to recommend to my syntax-semantics students (in no particular order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Radford, Andrew. 2009. Minimalist syntax: exploring the structure of English. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adger, David. 2003. Core syntax. Blackwell. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carnie, Andrew. 2012. Syntax: a generative introduction. Blackwell.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. Introduction to Government and Binding theory. Blackwell (a bit dated, but useful to understand the background of certain current ideas).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larson, Richard, and Kimiko Ryokai. 2009. Grammar as science. MIT Press (possibly the most basic textbook in this list)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lasnik, Howard, and Juan Uriagereka. 1988. A course in GB syntax. MIT Press (same comments as Haegeman 94 apply).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lasnik, Howard, and Juan Uriagereka. 2005. A course in Minimalist syntax. Blackwell (updated version of Lasnik &amp;amp; Uriagereka 88).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uriagereka, Juan. 1998. Rhyme and reason. MIT Press (written as a Socratic dialogue, which some people dislike, but it highlights why certain issues are important, rather than just explaining how to go about solving them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. University of Chicago Press (about same status as Haegeman 94).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sag, Ivan, Thomas Wasow, and Emily Bender. 2003. Syntactic Theory: a formal introduction. CSLI.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional grammar. Blackwell.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heim, Irene, and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Blackwell.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iatridou, Sabine, and Kai von Fintel. 2010. Intensional semantics. Available from KvF's website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chierchia, Gennaro, and Louise McNally. 2000. Meaning and grammar: an introduction to semantics. MIT Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larson, Richard, and Gabriel Segal. 1995. Knowledge of meaning: an introduction to semantic theory. MIT Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[*] or at least in the relevant subfield. For example, you tend to see textbooks with titles like &quot;Introduction to [name of theoretical framework]&quot;. What you find in those are things that are well-established within the framework in question, even though there might be competing frameworks that propose pretty different ways of doing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2015-05-18T10:22:21.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12391" CreationDate="2015-05-18T20:25:14.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alternative to the Altaic theory is that every language group included in there (that is Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic and Korean in its widest form, any theory that directly links Uralic with Altaic has been dead for a century now) constitutes an unrelated language family and any similarity (which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; undeniably there) is due to borrowing and sprachbund effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Altaic languages are in fact related, they must have been separated from each other in an earlier time than, say, Indo-European. Historical linguistic tools are just not enough to prove any relationship beyond reasonable doubt past a couple of millennia. Evidence is just too weak to convince mainstream linguists. Add to that the fact that languages hypothesized to form the Altaic family are attested quite late compared to Indo-European and you're in a very difficult situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reiterate, the alternative (and more widely accepted) theory for Turkic is that it's just in its own language family and not related to anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T12:56:06.977" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T12:56:06.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-19T14:55:27.140" Score="1" ViewCount="1591" Body="&lt;p&gt;Austronesian is usually regarded as a separate family, not related to any other. It is never groupped into Eurasiatic or Nostratic. Yet it seems to me that it may be related to PIE. I wonder whether it is just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the most close relative to PIE among other Eurasiatic languages is considered Chukchi-Kamchadal family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, lets look at numerals. It is accepted that Eurasiatic languages do not have common numerals because counting emerged after the proto-family split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; PIE: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;one united&quot;, PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; PIE: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;du̯oe̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dusa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PIE: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;trei̯es&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;telu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PIE: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆etu̯ores&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;apat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sepat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternations r/l and q̆/p are common in IE family and in world languages. Compare also PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆eta̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;pair&quot;, Proto-Uralic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ket-ka&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;two&quot;, Yukaghir &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ikit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;two&quot;, Itelmen (Chukchi-Kamchadal family) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;katxan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;two&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems numerals greater than four do not coincide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PIE: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;eghom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i-ka-u&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Chukchi: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e-ɣә-mi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i-ka-mi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thou&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Chukchi: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e-ɣә-tu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; PA: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i-ka-su&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that Chukchi-Kamchadal family is usually considered the closest to PIE because it is the only family that has a cognate to PIE's first person singular pronoun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;eghom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; rather than more ancient mi(n)-based. It is hypothesized that eghom is a compound of something like &quot;e̯e + ghe + mi&quot; which meant &quot;it is me&quot;. It seems, Proto-Austronesian had the same pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T13:17:37.880" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T15:18:54.403" Title="Is Austronesian the closest relative to PIE?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;proto-world&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4415" CreationDate="2015-05-20T04:39:24.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/30340343/1226799&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on stackoverflow regarding using Wiktionary which will give you several options.  Here is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=query&amp;amp;prop=iwlinks&amp;amp;titles=test&amp;amp;iwprefix=de&amp;amp;format=json&amp;amp;continue=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=query&amp;amp;prop=iwlinks&amp;amp;titles=test&amp;amp;iwprefix=de&amp;amp;format=json&amp;amp;continue=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T04:39:24.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T06:19:15.783" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE we have the following traditionally reconstructed personal pronouns: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯oe̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;you two&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯ei&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;we&quot; (inclusive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brengtson claims that the original forms should be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tu̯oe̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tu̯ei&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; respectively. He claims that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tu̯oe̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the dual number of the singular second-person promoun while &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tu̯ei&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is locative of it (meaning &quot;I with/at you&quot; -&gt; we with you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this theory solidly substantiated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-05-20T13:31:17.893" LastActivityDate="2015-05-20T13:31:17.893" Title="Etymology of some personal pronouns in PIE" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T15:04:52.810" Score="0" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a simple graduate-student research project with a colleague in the CompSci Department. We want to develop a program that automatically distinguishes a man's voice from a woman's.  We combine linguistic know-how and good ol' fashioned machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To these ends, we have identified a number of voice cues relating to e.g. f0 range. We tested a few people and get pretty good (but not perfect) results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is not about what parameters will further improve our results (I have some ideas already in that direction) but about a hypothetical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say we continue to refine the algorithm, and we test it on 10 people and it performs perfectly. Then 20 people. Also: perfectly.  At what point can we say that the device is &quot;validated&quot;? What's the standard accepted in the literature? Is there a standard metric used? We consider the data we have now as a training and a validation set so the size of this probably also depends on the number of features and variability in the dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T16:47:18.347" Title="What is the protocol to determine sample size in phonetic research?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-20T19:45:53.733" Score="3" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question as a non-linguist native Korean speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use the word &quot;fortition&quot; as a translation of 경음화 or 된소리 되기.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Standard Korean (표준어) does define some complicated rules for the fortition of Korean consonants, but this is not complete enough and never will be to describe how the words are actually spoken in everyday speech. And I personally disagree with many suggestions that the standard makes. The list below explains enough about the irregularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;standard-suggested pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;actual pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(long and short vowels are not distinguished here because they are not distinguished, at least among the people I hear speaking every day)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;효과 : [효과] : [효꽈], [효과] (hyo-gwa : hyo-kkwa, hyo-gwa)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;과대표 : [과대표] : [꽈대표] (gwa-dae-pyo : gwa-dae-pyo : kkwa-dae-pyo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;사건 : [사껀] : [사껀] (sa-geon : sa-kkeon : sa-kkeon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;강가 : [강까] : [강까] (gang-ga : gang-kka : gang-kka)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;관건 : [관건] : [관껀], [관건] (gwan-geon : gwan-geon : gwan-kkeon, gwan-geon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;불법 : [불법] : [불뻡], [불법] (bul-beop : bul-beop : bul-ppeop, bul-beop)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;조금 : [조금] : [쪼금], [조금] (jo-keum : jo-keum : jjo-keum, jo-keum)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;들고양이 : [들꼬양이] : [들꼬양이] (deul-go-yang-i : deul-kko-yang-i : deul-kko-yang-i)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;실험적 : [실험적] : [실험쩍], [실험적] (sil-heom-jeok : sil-heom-jeok : sil-heom-jjeok, sil-heom-jeok)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;시드니 : [시드니] : [씨드니] (si-deu-ni : si-deu-ni: ssi-deu-ni) &quot;Sydney&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;서비스 : [써비쓰] : [써비쓰] (seo-bi-seu : sseo-bi-sseu : sseo-bi-sseu) &quot;service&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;창고 : [창고] : [창꼬], [창고] (jang-go : jang-go: jang-kko, jang-go)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to say about ㅅ insertion (사이시옷), but that will make this post too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the examples, the problems mostly occur in loanwords. This is because, unlike pure Korean words, in the case of which almost always everything is written as it is spoken, loanwords have its own standard rules of writing them in Hangul depending on whether it is Sino-Korean, English, French et cetera. But the words written following these set of rules often does not match how it actually is spoken among the people. For example, the French city Paris is written as 파리 according to the standard, but it is more often pronounced [빠리], not [파리]. Is the problem just as simple as &quot;most of the people speak in this way for this word, and in that way for that word&quot;, like how the modern English orthography works? Or are there some trends or patterns in this irregular fortition phenomenon of the Korean language, that seems irregular but not quite in detail? Can you explain me a bit or cite some related research on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9809" LastEditorUserId="9809" LastEditDate="2015-05-21T05:24:34.653" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T05:24:34.653" Title="Irregular Fortition(경음화, 된소리 되기) in Modern Korean" Tags="&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12410" CreationDate="2015-05-21T05:08:22.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does seem to be a problem of loanwords, and apparently language change, since I understand that older loanword patterns differ from contemporary patterns. You might look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yoonjungkang.com/uploads/1/1/6/2/11625099/harvard2008.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/kenstowicz/ito_et_al.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt;, and references therein. I've been told that the phonetics of tense consonants has been changing over the past 50 years, which may underly these conflicts. Since &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat aspirated word-initial (but not as much as &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt;), then &lt;em&gt;pp&lt;/em&gt; is really a better match for an unaspirated &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T05:08:22.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-21T12:22:48.003" Score="7" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any words that started off different, merged in pronunciation and spelling at some point and then separated again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;E.g. Two hypothetical words in Old English OX and OY are neither homophones nor homonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Middle English MX and MY are homophones and homonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Modern English EX and EY are neither homophones nor homonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words don't have to be in the English family, I'm interested if this has happened in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T18:32:46.920" Title="Are there any words that have merged in pronunciation and spelling and then separated again?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12408" CreationDate="2015-05-21T16:47:18.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This could get too complicated to pursue in comments. I've seen a seat of the pants number of 10 per variable: you might read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tqmp.org/RegularArticles/vol03-2/p043/p043.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. When you've sorted out the logical structure of the question, you should talk to a statistical consultant. The goal would be to have enough talkers that you won't have accidentally omitted some important group. I am betting that you cannot include a good-sized sample of children age 3-6 or 6-12, which means that you're missing an important chunk of the population, unless they are actually &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; important for your ultimate purpose. For voice recognition systems, you may be able to make the simplifying assumption that you won't have to distinguish male vs. female for 5 year olds. You may also be able to make the simplifying assumption that you don't need to identify the sex of talkers who are Chinese or Vietnamese first-language speakers, or African first-language speakers. Or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you don't plan on collecting complex demographic data and doing convoluted tests of significance, you should still plan as though you were going to. If your talkers are all undergraduate students, you may have a problem meeting the goal of doing as good as humans, since undergraduate students are not a representative random sample of humans. Thus I would be more concerned with the diversity of the sample, as opposed to the number of talkers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T16:47:18.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2015-05-21T18:55:17.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's referring to the fact that the Latin alphabet, as well as a variety of words in Latin (though not the language as a whole), come from the Etruscans?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-05-21T18:55:17.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12427" CreationDate="2015-05-22T04:51:18.373" Score="1" ViewCount="3046" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=impute&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline:]&lt;/a&gt;  ... &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;putare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;   [=]   &quot;reckon, clear up, &lt;strong&gt;trim, prune&lt;/strong&gt;, settle&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pave&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pave&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wordz.pl?keyword=putare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Notre Dame:]&lt;/a&gt;  4. think, believe, suppose, hold;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5. reckon, estimate, value;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  6. clear up, settle;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7. Observe that only Etymonline broaches the definitions '&lt;strong&gt;trim, prune&lt;/strong&gt;'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12316/what-are-the-overarching-meanings-of-putare#comment33021_12316&quot;&gt;Following this comment&lt;/a&gt;, I am guessing that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dputo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original meaning&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;putare&lt;/strong&gt; is: 1. to clean, cleanse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how did 1 evolve into all the disparate meanings, as quoted above?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What bigger picture or key notion connects, bestrides, or overlies all of them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: By 'bigger picture', I mean an answer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/24102/50720&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Cognates to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfind.com/ends-with/pute/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; words ending in &lt;strong&gt;-pute&lt;/strong&gt; in English, exist in  French (eg imputer qch à qqn) and Spanish (eg imputar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T08:35:43.817" Title="How did the Latin ''putare' evolve into all these different meanings?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12422" CreationDate="2015-05-22T04:57:59.070" Score="-1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=private&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline :]&lt;/a&gt; ... privus &amp;quot;one's own, individual,&amp;quot; from PIE *prei-wo-, from PIE *prai-, *prei-, from root *per- (1) &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;forward, through&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=per&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per&lt;/a&gt;).  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR123200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[AHI :]&lt;/a&gt; per&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;... from Latin prīvus, single, alone (&amp;lt; &amp;quot;standing in front,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;isolated from others&amp;quot;);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused because someone, who's &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;forward, through&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, sounds open and overt. But this appearance is contradicted by the evolution from the PIE root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T18:27:35.637" Title="The PIE root *per- &quot;forward, through&quot; : How did it evolve to mean 'private' ?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12653" CreationDate="2015-05-22T05:16:04.120" Score="1" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#ked-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ked-&lt;/a&gt; =&#xA;  To go, yield. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does 'to go' relate to 'to yield'? Both verbs appear to differ in meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, what precisely does 'to go' mean here? Is this the right diction?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm confused, because most verbs deriving from this PIE root concern either a submissive 'yield' or hindered progress (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cede&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cede&lt;/a&gt;), neither of which equates to 'to go' somewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T21:14:32.337" Title="PIE root ked- : 'To go, yield'" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-22T05:33:54.700" Score="1" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=abound&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;abound (v.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      early 14c., from Old French abonder &quot;to abound, be abundant, come together in great numbers&quot; (12c.), from Latin abundare &quot;overflow, run over,&quot; &#xA;  from Latin &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ab-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;off&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ab-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ab-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;undare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rise in a wave,&quot; from unda &quot;water, wave&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=water&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;water&lt;/a&gt; (n.1)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;off&quot;, while during a &quot;rise in a wave&quot; ? Is there some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hypotaxis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hypotaxis&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T05:33:54.700" Title="What does the prefix 'ab-' mean in the Latin verb 'abundare' ?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12418" CreationDate="2015-05-22T10:05:43.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My dictionary does not give &quot;prei&quot; but gives &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prea̯i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a prepositional adverb. It is formed by adding the locative ending -i, in a similar way like other prepositional adverbs are formed: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯enti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ndheri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;medhi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It meant &quot;in the front, before&quot;, but also could mean &quot;near, at&quot; (consider for instance its Russian derivative &quot;pri&quot; &quot;near, at&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So something like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prea̯iu̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; logically would mean &quot;the thing at/near somebody&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T10:05:43.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12418" CreationDate="2015-05-22T18:00:05.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's unclear about the derivation given in AHI? &quot;Forward&quot; yields &quot;standing in front, isolated from others,&quot; which in turn yields &quot;single, alone.&quot; From that it is a natural evolution to &quot;something kept for oneself alone and not shared with others.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-05-22T18:00:05.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12436" CreationDate="2015-05-22T19:18:45.697" Score="0" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=para-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Etymonline :]&lt;/a&gt; ... before vowels, par-, word-forming element meaning &quot;alongside, beyond; altered; contrary; irregular, abnormal,&quot; from Greek &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;para-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from para (prep.) &quot;beside, near, issuing from, against, &lt;strong&gt;contrary to&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; from PIE * prea, from root &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;per-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1) &lt;strong&gt;&quot;forward, through&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=per&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;per&lt;/a&gt;).  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR123200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[AHI :]&lt;/a&gt; per&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... IV. Extended form * &lt;em&gt;pr̥əā̆&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2. para&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;; palfrey, from Greek para, beside, alongside of, beyond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how &quot;forward, through&quot; evolved into one of the meanings of the Greek prefix &lt;em&gt;para-&lt;/em&gt;, the one which means '&lt;strong&gt;contrary to&lt;/strong&gt;'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline seems to refer to AHI's particular entry of &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;per-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; labelled by the superscript  1, but nowhere does AHI explain this meaning of &lt;strong&gt;contrary to&lt;/strong&gt;. Strangely, AHI designated  &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt; with the superscript 1, but AHI only features  &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt; once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: My research of the etymology of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=paradox&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;  motivated this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:32:24.037" Title="How did the PIE root *per- (forward, through) evolve into 'para-', to mean 'contrary to'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36831" CreationDate="2015-05-22T19:47:11.813" Score="0" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#dek-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dek-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To take, accept.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [2.] b. dogma, dogmatic; chionodoxa, Docetism, doxology, heterodox, orthodox, paradox,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Greek &lt;em&gt;dokein&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;to appear, seem, think (&amp;lt; &quot;to cause to accept or be accepted&quot;).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did &lt;strong&gt;&quot;to cause to accept or be accepted&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; evolve into &lt;strong&gt;to appear, seem, think&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The connection or relationship escapes me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T20:35:04.307" Title="How did the PIE root 'dek-' evolve into the Greek 'dokein' to appear, seem, think' ?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12424" CreationDate="2015-05-23T19:00:32.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is pretty logical: to go against someone or something, you must first go towards it.&#xA;For example, in Swedish both meanings are expressed with the same  preposition &lt;em&gt;mot&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ett tåg mot Stockholm&lt;/em&gt; = a train to Stockholm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kampen mot rasism&lt;/em&gt; = the fight against racism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vända sig mot solen&lt;/em&gt; = to turn towards the sun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vända sig mot fienden&lt;/em&gt; = to turn against the enemy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5696" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T13:32:24.037" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:32:24.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12417" CreationDate="2015-05-23T19:57:47.190" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're actually not the first one to ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Romans themselves had various explanations to offer. For them, the relation was clear - although they did not necessarily agree with each other.  More recently distinguished latinists such as Ernout and Meillet could not rule out the possibility of two distinct homophonic roots ([[3]] - puto).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for me, I don't have a definitive answer to this one but here are a few dots you might want to connect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic path here could in my opinion be close to the following one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Step 0 . &lt;em&gt;Putare&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;to purify&quot;.  The root can be traced to PIE.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.B. &lt;em&gt;putare&lt;/em&gt; is an ancient form; later Latin uses &lt;em&gt;purifico&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;purus-facio&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;purgo&lt;/em&gt;.  But for now we need to work on &lt;em&gt;puto&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;purify =&gt; as in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to refine&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Applies to precious metals such as gold and silver.&#xA;There is a reduplicative phrase in ancient Roman to emphasize purity for silver:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;argentum purum putum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;purify =&gt; as in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to clean&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to cleanse&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Applies to wool and fleece as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vellus lavare ac putare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Step 1. from purifying to trimming&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;purify =&gt; trim/prune&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meaning of &quot;trimming&quot;/&quot;pruning&quot; is still present in present day Italian (&lt;em&gt;potare gli alberi, potare i vitigni&lt;/em&gt;)  and in derived words such as &lt;em&gt;amputation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Roman world, trimming and pruning is of particular importance for grapevines which are very sensitive to such diseases as mildew and mould caused by various fungi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In order to prevent these diseases, you need to prune your vines so as to keep them well ventilated and remove the dead growth where fungi thrive.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this particular subject you can refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loebclassics.com/view/columella-agriculture/1941/pb_LCL361.425.xml&quot;&gt;Columella -  Res Rustica Book IV&lt;/a&gt; - passim.  Plenty of advice for wine growers and usages of &lt;em&gt;putare&lt;/em&gt; for lexicographers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trivia. There was even a dedicated Goddess for these pruning tasks, whose name was &lt;strong&gt;Puta&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;See this &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puta_%28mythology%29&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for the name and the hmm... putative etymology of hmm... prostitute in various Romance languages (since you heed Etymological Fallacy that's another question albeit potentially a tad controversial :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Step 2. from trimming to simplifying&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing so you also &lt;strong&gt;simplify&lt;/strong&gt; the structure of the plant which becomes less convoluted (a characteristic of vines in particular and vegetation in general) and easier to... grasp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Step 3. from simplifying to accounting&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which could (note the conditional) lead to a derived or parallel meaning of &quot;settling accounts&quot; since there is this same idea of slowly progressing to a simplified figure (the account position) through the elimination of numerous details.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cognates here are of course &lt;em&gt;compute&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;compter&lt;/em&gt; and whence even &lt;em&gt;account&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;compiti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;homework&quot; and many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Step 4. from accounting to forming an opinion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphor from accounting to opinion is a common one in various languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even in Latin: &lt;em&gt;aestumo&lt;/em&gt; (I estimate) originally means to assign a value and by extension to form one's opinion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;To value&lt;/em&gt; is a bit different because it comes from the concept of strength but Present Day Italian uses &lt;em&gt;valutare&lt;/em&gt; as a synonym of &quot;estimate&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Purus and Putus&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned earlier, Romans also had their opinion on that subject.  Here are two examples: &#xA;Varro who writes in Caesar's time has this to offer in his book de Lingua Latina (an early &quot;etymological&quot; Latin &quot;dictionary&quot;) on the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loebclassics.com/view/varro-latin_language/1938/pb_LCL333.231.xml&quot;&gt;dispute&lt;/a&gt;&quot; entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;63&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Disputatio et computatio cum praepositione a putando quod valet purum facere. Ideo antiqui purum putum appellarunt; ideo putator, quod arbores puras facit, ideo ratio putari dicitur, in qua summa sit pura. Sic is sermo in quo pure disponuntur verba, ne sit confusus atque ut diluceat, dicitur disputare.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Disputatio ‘discussion’ and computatio ‘reckoning,’ from the general idea of putare, which means to make purum ‘clean’; for the ancients used putum to mean purum. Therefore putator ‘trimmer’, because he makes trees clean; therefore a business account is said putari ‘to be adjusted,’ in which the sum is pura ‘net.’ So also that discourse in which the words are arranged pure ‘neatly,’ that it may not be confused and that it may be transparent of meaning, is said disputare ‘to discuss’ a problem or question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=LatinAugust2012&amp;amp;query=Gell.%207.5&amp;amp;getid=1&quot;&gt;Gellius 7.5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ALFENUS iureconsultus, Servii Sulpicii discipulus rerumque antiquarum non incuriosus, in libro Digestorum tricesimo et quarto, Coniectaneorum autem secundo: In foedere, inquit, quod inter populum Romanum et Carthaginienses factum est, scriptum invenitur ut Carthaginienses quotannis populo Romano darent certum pondus 'argenti puri puti,' quaesitumque est quid esset 'purum putum.' Respondi, inquit, ego 'putum' esse 'valde purum,' sicut novum ' novicium' dicimus et proprium ' propicium,' augere atque intendere volentes ' novi' et ' proprii' significationem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Verbum quoque ipsum puto, quod declarandae sententiae nostrae causa dicimus, non significat profecto aliud quam id agere nos in re dubia obscuraque, ut decisis amputatisque falsis opinionibus, quod ideatur esse verum et integrum et incorruptum retineamus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The jurist Alfenus, a pupil of Servius Sulpicius and a man greatly interested in matters antiquarian, in the thirty-fourth book of his Digests and the second of his Miscellanies, says: . In a treaty which was made between the Roman people and the Carthaginians the provision is found, that the Carthaginians should pay each year to the Roman people a certain weight of argenti puri puti, and the meaning of puri puti was asked. I replied, he says, that putus meant very pure,' just as we say novicius for novus (new) and propicius for proprius (proper), when we wish to augment and amplify the meaning of novus and proprius.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The verb puto itself also, which we use for the purpose of stating our opinion, certainly means nothing else than that in an obscure and difficult matter we do our best, by cutting away and lopping off false views, to retain what seems true and pure and sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More Online Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[1]] Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dputo&quot;&gt;puto&lt;/a&gt;&quot; on Perseus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some offline sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[2]] 1968 - Oxford Latin Dictionary&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[[3]] 2001 - Alfred Ernout, Alfred Meillet - Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine - 4e ed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[[4]] 2008 - de Vaan - Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If you find this answer to difficult to understand because it has too much detail, you probably need to trim it... QED :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2015-05-23T20:14:20.687" LastActivityDate="2015-05-23T20:14:20.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T05:42:44.487" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=periphery&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;periphery (n.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      late 14c., &quot;atmosphere around the earth,&quot; from Old French periferie (Modern French périphérie), from Medieval Latin periferia, from Late Latin peripheria, from Greek peripheria &quot;circumference, outer surface, line round a circular body,&quot; literally &quot;a carrying around,&quot; from peripheres &quot;rounded, moving round, revolving,&quot; peripherein &quot;carry or move round,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peri-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;round about&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=peri-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;peri-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pherein&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to carry&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=infer&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;infer&lt;/a&gt;). Meaning &quot;outside boundary of a surface&quot; attested in English from 1570s; general sense of &quot;boundary&quot; is from 1660s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Am I right to guess: the modern definitions of this word (eg in English and French) lost the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pherein&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to carry&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; ? A boundary doesn't carry anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. What did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pherein&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; carry? Or am I missing some figurative carriage? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T10:06:57.763" Title="What did the Greek 'peripherein' carry?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T10:47:03.980" Score="0" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; have two different names in Welsh, namely &lt;em&gt;âets&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hâ&lt;/em&gt; (variants: &lt;em&gt;ha&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hy&lt;/em&gt;)? And what other examples are there of letters known in a language under two or more names &lt;em&gt;for the same reasons&lt;/em&gt;? (The reasons for &lt;em&gt;âets&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hâ&lt;/em&gt; may not be the same as those for either &lt;em&gt;zed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;zee&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;aitch&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;haitch&lt;/em&gt; in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9713" LastEditorUserId="9713" LastEditDate="2015-05-26T01:13:55.317" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T18:45:52.787" Title="Why does *h* have two different names in Welsh?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T15:35:21.827" Score="0" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at coordination strategies in the languages of the world and I wonder if all languages have a distinction between conjunction and disjunction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T01:41:34.280" Title="Are there languages in which AND + OR (conjunction and disjunction) are expressed the same?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12431" CreationDate="2015-05-24T15:59:04.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Manchu, and I'm sure in many other languages, they are expressed the same, with a zero, even in English you can do it that way. Without using the actual Manchu words, it looks like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AND: I have milk, cheese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR: Would you like milk, cheese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T15:59:04.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-24T16:03:00.493" Score="10" ViewCount="8485" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the French language is considered as a Romance language, which is derived, in its turn, from the Latin language. The last one has a rich grammatical cases system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested to know, how, during what processes, and why the French language has no the grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the French the grammatical cases ever sometime in the past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9823" LastEditorUserId="9823" LastEditDate="2015-05-24T17:26:52.150" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T10:08:24.237" Title="Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12433" CreationDate="2015-05-24T17:05:48.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old French made a distinction between nominative and oblique. The main cause of this change is a set of phonological changes in Vulgar Latin, where final nasals are deleted, and vowel qualities and quantities are merged. German has undergone similar reductions, but to a lesser extent, which is why German (unlike Norwegian or English) still has some case marking. It's possible that case will evaporate in German in a few hundred years -- you can't really predict the rate at which languages change (see for instance Icelandic, which hasn't changed much at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-24T17:05:48.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12424" CreationDate="2015-05-24T19:38:23.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can observe the same phenomenon with anti (&lt;strong&gt;ἀντί&lt;/strong&gt;), also in Greek which evolves from &quot;in front&quot; to &quot;instead of&quot; and eventually to &quot;against&quot; (more productive in modern languages than in classical Greek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As &quot;in front&quot; in toponymy: Ἀντίπολις =&gt; Antibes, Ἀντικύθηρα =&gt; Antikythera, etc..&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As &quot;against&quot;: αντίδικος =&gt; opponent (same progression and etymology in Latin for &lt;em&gt;opponent&lt;/em&gt; and for &lt;em&gt;adversary&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &quot;in front&quot; to &quot;against&quot;, the semantic path is clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly for &lt;strong&gt;παρά&lt;/strong&gt;, we progress quite easily from &quot;side by side&quot; to &quot;compared to&quot; and in some cases from &quot;compared to&quot; to &quot;contrary to&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the object is literally on our side (as in we can &lt;em&gt;lean on&lt;/em&gt; it, see &lt;em&gt;s'appuyer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;appoggiarsi&lt;/em&gt;) then we don’t have an acceptation of &quot;unfavourable&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Παρὰ θεοῖς καὶ παρ᾽ ἀνθρώποις =&gt; With Gods and men. Favourable.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead, the object is &lt;strong&gt;out of place&lt;/strong&gt; (in this sense of παρά: not in its right place) then the idea is that of &quot;different from&quot;.  This is visible in English in such words as parascience, parapsychology, or even paralinguistics. In classical Greek we have for instance:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Παρά μοίραν =&gt; Contrary to fate, unfairly. We still have to count with the Moirai but this is probably not a favourable factor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Παράδοξος   =&gt; Out of (contrary to) δόξα expectation, opinion&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English also uses &lt;em&gt;beside&lt;/em&gt; to suggest this kind of opposition. Maybe after all this explanation is &lt;em&gt;beside&lt;/em&gt; the point.                     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion, the intended meaning is not as much 'against' (which would be κατά or ἀντί) as '[unexpectedly] different'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; followed a symmetrical/opposite evolution.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(A brief digression: Using &quot;symmetrical&quot; to mean &quot;opposite&quot; is also quite revealing.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - In Old English &lt;em&gt;wið&lt;/em&gt; meant &quot;against&quot; (it still does in &lt;em&gt;withstand&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;withsay&lt;/em&gt; for instance).  From Proto-Indo-European *wi (&quot;separation&quot;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Now &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;alongside&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So this time the semantic shift seems to be &quot;separate&quot; =&gt; &quot;face to face&quot; =&gt; &quot;alongside&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For instance if you pit two armies face to face they actually form parallel lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T14:21:30.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T14:21:30.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12431" CreationDate="2015-05-25T01:41:34.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do you think &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language distinguishes.  Syntacticians generally use the term &quot;conjunction&quot; to refer to a class of constructions including both &quot;and&quot; and &quot;or&quot;, because both of these work the same way, grammatically.  They both connect constituents of the same type and create a new constituent of that same type.  For instance, &quot;Benny likes halibut or despises smelt&quot; has a verb phrase, &quot;likes halibut or despises smelt&quot; which has two constituents of that same type conjoined by &quot;or&quot;, the verb phrase &quot;likes halibut&quot; and the verb phrase &quot;despises smelt&quot;.  If we exchange &quot;or&quot; for &quot;and&quot;, we get a construction of exactly the same type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T01:41:34.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T02:43:43.773" Score="-2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=CONFER&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Etymonline :]&lt;/a&gt; 1530s, from Middle French &lt;em&gt;conférer&lt;/em&gt; (14c.) &amp;quot;to give, converse, compare,&amp;quot; from Latin conferre &amp;quot;to bring together,&amp;quot; figuratively &amp;quot;to compare; consult, deliberate, talk over,&amp;quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;together&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=com-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;com-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ferre&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to bear&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=infer&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;infer&lt;/a&gt;). ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/38737?redirectedFrom=confer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[OED :]&lt;/a&gt; Etymology: &amp;lt; con- together, and intensive + ferre to bear, bring. French &lt;em&gt;conférer&lt;/em&gt; (14th cent. in Littré) does not appear to have been taken into English:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;hence the difference of stress between conˈfer , deˈfer , inˈfer ,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and ˈdiffer , ˈoffer , ˈproffer , ˈsuffer .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/36233#eid8882027&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collate     v.&lt;/a&gt;, formed on the participial stem of Latin conferre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. I was researching the etymology of 'confer', to understand how the two syntagms combined to evolve to mean 'to give or grant something'. My guess is that when two or more people &lt;strong&gt;'bear'&lt;/strong&gt; a hardship &lt;strong&gt;'together'&lt;/strong&gt;, then one (or both) may give the other something as aid or relief. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Anyhow, I then noticed a discrepancy: Etymonline asserts that 'confer' evolved from the Middle French &lt;em&gt;conférer&lt;/em&gt; , but OED doubts this. Which is right?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If OED is right, then whence did the English 'confer' come?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. OED also broaches 'collate' above, but how does this matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T13:31:01.630" Title="Did the English 'confer' evolve from the Middle French « conférer » ?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T03:57:38.620" Score="0" ViewCount="1530" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=parable&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parable (n.)&lt;/a&gt;   &#xA;      mid-13c., parabol, modern form from early 14c., &quot;saying or story in which something is expressed in terms of something else,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Old French parable &quot;parable, parabolic style in writing&quot; (13c.),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Latin parabola &quot;comparison,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Greek parabole &quot;a comparison, parable,&quot; literally &quot;a throwing beside,&quot; hence &quot;a juxtaposition,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;para-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alongside&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=para-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;para-&lt;/a&gt; (1)) + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bole&lt;/em&gt; &quot;a throwing, casting, beam, ray,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; related to ballein &quot;to throw&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ballistics&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ballistics&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Replaced Old English &lt;em&gt;bispell&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;In Vulgar Latin, &lt;em&gt;parabola&lt;/em&gt; took on the meaning &quot;word,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; hence Italian &lt;em&gt;parlare&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;parler&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to speak&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=parley&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parley&lt;/a&gt; (n.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To connect word to the syntagma &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;para-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bole&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, I guessed the sad possibility that an illterate may just  recklessly &lt;strong&gt;throw&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;cast&lt;/strong&gt; words &lt;strong&gt;alongside&lt;/strong&gt; each other. But my guess appears wrong, because &lt;em&gt;parabola&lt;/em&gt; had already evolved to mean 'comparison'. My 2nd guess is that words can be used for comparison, but this connection seems too faint. Maybe I erred again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would someone please explain? &#xA; I heed the Etymological Fallacy. But what are some right ways of interpreting the etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T18:02:21.957" Title="How did the Vulgar Latin 'parabola' evolve to mean 'word'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T04:50:11.567" Score="0" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=stipend&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stipend (n.)&lt;/a&gt;   &#xA;      early 15c., &quot;periodical payment; soldier's pay,&quot; from Latin stipendium &quot;tax, impost, tribute,&quot; in military use &quot;pay, salary,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alms, small payment, contribution of money, gift&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; + pendere &quot;weigh&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pendant&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pendant&lt;/a&gt;). According to Klein's sources, the first element is related to Latin &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stipes&lt;/em&gt; &quot;log, stock, trunk of a tree&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=stipe&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stipe&lt;/a&gt;). As a verb from late 15c. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to imagine how &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stipes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; evolved into &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Would someone please advise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heed the Etymological Fallacy. But what are some right ways of interpreting this etymology, to make it feel reasonable and intuitive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T03:47:30.043" Title="'stipend' : How did 'a tree trunk' evolve to mean 'payment, gift'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12448" CreationDate="2015-05-25T05:11:03.963" Score="-1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=attribute&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;attribute (v.)&lt;/a&gt; [&amp;lt;--]&#xA;      late 14c., &quot;assign, bestow,&quot; from Latin attributus, past participle of attribuere &quot;assign to, add, bestow;&quot; figuratively &quot;to attribute, ascribe, impute,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tribuere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;assign, give, bestow&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tribute&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tribute&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Latin predated English and French, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  pre-existed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;TO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  in the the English and French &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=QwijBEaBqtwC&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=%22transitive+direct%22+verb&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=jveVBaoeqR&amp;amp;sig=AQvZQo20L1JlZnrqCNJASXa88Ps&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=qbeEVfLbMMyjgwTQ44OwBQ&amp;amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwADgK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22transitive%20direct%22%20verb&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;transitive indirect&lt;/a&gt; (derivative) verbs: to attribute X &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;TO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Y, or attribuer X &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Y.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; already means &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;TO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;TO&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; seem redundant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So why is 'attribute' not a ditransitive verb? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please advise of any books or resources that may help with such questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-06-20T00:55:45.443" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T01:04:48.940" Title="How does the prefix 'ad-' function in 'attribute'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-25T11:06:15.207" Score="1" ViewCount="3260" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to traditional grammar, the predicate is the part of a sentence that modifies the subject, i.e., the sentence can be divided into two parts: the subject and the predicate. For example, in the sentence &lt;em&gt;The kids may have started the game&lt;/em&gt;, the NP (&lt;em&gt;the kids&lt;/em&gt;) is the subject and the VP (&lt;em&gt;may have started the game&lt;/em&gt;) is the predicate. I know that the term &lt;em&gt;predicate&lt;/em&gt; identifies elements in the language system and &lt;em&gt;predicator&lt;/em&gt; identifies the semantic roles. The former is related to syntax/grammar while the latter is related to semantics (argument structure). However, inspired by predicate calculus, modern theories of syntax and grammar see predicates as relations between or functions over arguments. Predicates assign a property to a single argument or relate two or more arguments to one other, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Sam helped you&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt; is a predicate, while &lt;em&gt;Sam&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are arguments). Up to this point it's clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Hurford (2007) defines &lt;em&gt;predicator&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;predicate&lt;/em&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Predicator&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The predicator of a simple declarative sentence is the word (sometimes&#xA;  a (partial) group of words) which does not belong to any of the&#xA;  referring expressions and which, of the remainder, makes the most&#xA;  specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence. Intuitively&#xA;  speaking, the predicator describes the state or process in which the&#xA;  referring expressions are involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Predicate&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Predicate is any word (or sequence of words) which (in a given single&#xA;  sense) can function as the predicator of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem arises with the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger entered the saloon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence only contains one predicator (&lt;em&gt;enter&lt;/em&gt;) but the sentence also contains the words &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;handsome&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;stranger&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;saloon&lt;/em&gt;, all of which are predicates, and can function as predicators in other sentences, e.g. &lt;em&gt;John is tall&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;He is handsome&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;He is a stranger&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;That ramshackle building is a saloon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some people illustrate this specific example as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; (predicate) and &lt;em&gt;entered&lt;/em&gt; (predicator)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While others, on the basis of traditional grammar, argue that since &lt;em&gt;A handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; is the subject of the sentence, it cannot be a predicate. According to them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; (subject), &lt;em&gt;entered the saloon&lt;/em&gt; (predicate) and &lt;em&gt;entered&lt;/em&gt; (predicator)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, the sentence can be illustrated as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; (argument of predicate) &lt;em&gt;entered&lt;/em&gt; (matrix&#xA;  predicate/predicator) &lt;em&gt;the saloon&lt;/em&gt; (argument of predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; (as a subject) may not necessarily be acting as a predicate in this specific sentence, but the illustration given in Hurford (2007) may simply mean that these words can act as predicator or predicate in other sentences e.g. &lt;em&gt;He is tall&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;He is handsome&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;He is a stranger&lt;/em&gt;. In all these sentences, the VP (&lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;is handsome&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;is a stranger&lt;/em&gt;) is a predicate and the words &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;handsome&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stranger&lt;/em&gt; are predicators. Is this correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about the first group who label the sentence according to traditional grammar and are confused when they interpret &lt;em&gt;A tall handsome stranger&lt;/em&gt; as the predicate in the sentence &lt;em&gt;A tall, handsome stranger entered the saloon.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9827" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T00:44:55.257" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T00:44:55.257" Title="Predicate: traditional vs. modern view / semantics vs. syntax" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;traditional-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12438" CreationDate="2015-05-25T13:31:01.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etymologies usually are more straightforward than that and the meaning of verbal prefixes is often not quite transparent. Latin ferre means 'bear' in the literal sense of carrying, and probably the notion of carrying something together got mixed up with the notion of giving something from one to the other at some point of time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English 'confer' could very much come directly from Latin, since conferre already is a Latin word - so it doesn't have to be borrowed it via French. (The Latin prefix 'com' becomes 'con' before -f)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The past participle of Latin 'conferre' was 'collatum', so collate is borrowed from a different form of the same Latin verb.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9315" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T13:31:01.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12443" CreationDate="2015-05-25T14:11:38.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read Hurford (2007), but it sounds confused.  Whether an expression of natural language refers and whether it predicates are not exclusive properties.  In the usual rendering of natural language sentences into predicate logic, a noun phrase translates into an argument, which may have a referent, and predications on that argument.  Trying to parse language expressions into referring expressions and non-referring expressions doesn't give you anything like a traditional division into subject and predicate, or between noun and verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in Charles Fillmore's idea about the &quot;subject choice hierarchy&quot; -- a part of his Case Grammar.  Natural language sentences are given representations in which a verb is supplied with a number of arguments, as a logic predicate has a number of arguments, but with each argument is associated a case, and there are general rules for choosing which argument-with-case will be made the superficial subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Predicates don't modify subjects -- they predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T14:11:38.307" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12442" CreationDate="2015-05-25T16:26:28.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As curiousdannii says, the verb, in English and French is transitive; in fact, ditransitive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a larger sense the answer, as usual with &quot;Why&quot; questions, is BECAUSE THAT'S HOW IT IS. Languages are full of redundancies, half-statements, inexactitudes, and downright illogicalities, because they are created by people doing what people do, not by logicians, theoreticians or any other variety of ician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as it happens, in this case there is no illogicality as far as I can see, and the only slight redundancy is that the prefix in a sense duplicates the preposition. But if you dropped it, you'd have &quot;tribute&quot;, which is a different word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2015-05-25T20:32:54.930" LastActivityDate="2015-05-25T20:32:54.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12442" CreationDate="2015-05-25T23:44:02.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;SHORT ANSWER:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ad&lt;/em&gt; has no independent meaning in &lt;em&gt;attribute&lt;/em&gt;. None at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LONG ANSWER:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Attribute, v.&lt;/em&gt; is always transitive: you attribute some quality or act or whatever to somebody. You ask why it does not take an indirect object. According to your line of reasoning the &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; prefix carries the sense of direction to a recipient, so casting the recipient in a preposition phrase should be redundant. We should be able to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;lowast; &lt;/sup&gt;Some scholars attribute Shakespeare this play &lt;em&gt;instead of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;ok&lt;/sup&gt;Some scholars attribute this play &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Shakespeare.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is to mistake a Latin construction for an English one. When the word came into English it &lt;em&gt;already had &lt;strong&gt;ad&lt;/strong&gt; attached&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; was (and is) part of the verb, not the prefix it had been a thousand years earlier. It had (and has) no prepositional sense whatever to anybody except etymological scholars, for &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; is a Latin preposition, not an English one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when the word came into English it was already at least three hundred years since English had routinely employed prepositions as prefixes on verbs, as Latin did and as German still does. Moreover, it was just about as long since English lost its case-endings, which served (among other things) to distinguish indirect objects from direct objects. Both of those factors made it overwhelmingly more intelligible to express 'targets'&amp;mdash;recipients and beneficiaries&amp;mdash;with &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; and  &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; PP rather than as objects. That's what we do with &lt;em&gt;attribute&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;and &lt;em&gt;attach&lt;/em&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact only a relatively few English verbs regularly express targets as objects. John Lawler gives a list &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/levin.verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and even on that list there are a lot of words which seem very dubious to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is, at bottom, based on the etymological fallacy. You cannot argue proper present meaning and use from past meaning and use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-06-20T01:04:48.940" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T01:04:48.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-26T04:51:45.390" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe even what the English translation is? I believe that there are hedera's present, directing it towards Latin maybe? Sorry for the bad quality &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ryo1I.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9665" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T08:25:54.250" Title="Does anyone know what language this is?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-09-01T00:48:50.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12461" CreationDate="2015-05-26T07:21:05.570" Score="1" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verb is used an a root in dependency structure.What if we have multiple verbs in a sentence, which one will be the root of sentence. also what will be the dependency relation between two verbs ??? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9836" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T01:17:07.467" Title="how does a dependency grammar finds a root?" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12449" CreationDate="2015-05-26T08:25:54.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Latin written in a hand I can hardly read and full of medieval abbreviatures that are hard to decipher (for instance, the word looking like Dõs reads &quot;Dominus&quot;). If you really want to read it, get a book teaching medieval abbreviatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T08:25:54.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12450" CreationDate="2015-05-26T08:44:37.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many types of dependency grammar and many types of dependency parsing. Some dependency parsers will generate as many isolated structures as possible and then try to find best way to combine them; in these cases, multiple verbs mean multiple roots to try out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the best way to construe the dependency relation between verbs (such as one gets when one or more auxiliary verbs are present), this is still a topic of debate, so I'd rather not steer you in any particular direction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if it's the parsing side of things you're most interested in, I can recommend &lt;strong&gt;Kübler et al (2009) &lt;em&gt;Dependency Parsing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, unless you're truly desperate for answers, one question mark generally suffices.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9519" LastEditorUserId="9519" LastEditDate="2015-05-26T09:37:15.877" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T09:37:15.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-26T14:43:44.473" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I debated names of scientific terms with my friend, and we both discovered that some of them have the trailing letter &quot;s&quot; while others don't.&#xA;Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mobius strip, Fourier series, Chomsky normal form — you can see there are no &quot;s&quot; letters in the end of the names&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fermat&lt;b&gt;'s&lt;/b&gt; last theorem, Occam&lt;b&gt;'s&lt;/b&gt; razor, Godel&lt;b&gt;'s&lt;/b&gt; incompleteness — while they are present here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could this ambiguity be resolved? What could be its reason or is it just random?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9839" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T16:07:47.987" Title="Why do some scientific possessives have trailing &quot;s&quot; and others don't?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2015-05-26T15:07:32.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aforementioned friend chiming in: I have discovered that the former row of examples is based on a construction known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;noun adjunct&lt;/a&gt;, while the latter most likely employs possessive nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't have the slightest idea when to use which, though, and how one would construct those terms in the first place.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9840" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T15:07:32.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2015-05-26T15:21:49.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the provided examples, I would distinguish as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a scholar points out some recurring abstract phenomenon and gives it a name, we refer to an instance of this abstraction as &lt;code&gt;a {scholar} {label}&lt;/code&gt;. Whereas, when the scholar introduces some tool of reasoning such as a theorem, we refer to the tool using the possessive: &lt;code&gt;{scholar}'s {tool}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So practically to determine which form is appropriate test whether the term, &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;, can fit into an &lt;code&gt;a x&lt;/code&gt; phrase, if it can, use the noun adjunct; otherwise, use the possessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9841" LastEditorUserId="9841" LastEditDate="2015-05-26T15:27:13.350" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T15:27:13.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2015-05-26T16:07:47.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first type, without 's, are nouns (N for short).  The second type are noun phrases (NP for short).  This is made less obvious by a spelling convention which tries to distinguish words from phrases by whether they are written with internal spaces.  A noun phrase is a major constituent of sentences, subject or object, and prepositional phrases.  A noun is an important constituent of most noun phrases.  In many cases, noun phrases are introduced by an article or other determiner, while nouns cannot contain articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two nouns in the examples are compound nouns.  Compound nouns are made up of several words (usually nouns).  In modern English, the individual parts of compounds cannot be inflected, and that is why you find no 's.  There are a few archaic compounds that do have internal inflectional endings, like &quot;sargeants-at-arms&quot;.  Many English compounds have more stress on the first element of the compound, and the first two examples are like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about the example &quot;Chomsky normal form&quot;.  It's not much like the first two examples.  Would &quot;Chomsky's normal form&quot; also sound okay in some contexts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that you can add an article to the noun compounds to form a noun phrase, just as expected for nouns -- &quot;a Moebius strip&quot;.  In the second examples with 's, the noun phrases, the initial word with 's is a determiner -- it is a possessive form that has a similar grammatical function to &quot;the&quot;.  A noun phrase can have only one determiner, so you wouldn't expect to see an article added to these (although it may be an accident of the examples that the referents are unique).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-26T16:07:47.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12441" CreationDate="2015-05-26T19:50:49.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once again, Varro has an explanation to propose. For what it's worth.&#xA;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loebclassics.com/view/varro-latin_language/1938/pb_LCL333.169.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lingua Latina Book 5, 182&lt;/a&gt;.  (Book 5 has a lot of etymologies for many words related to money).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr According to Varro, these coins of little value were commonly offered to the Gods in alms boxes (mites) called &lt;em&gt;stirps&lt;/em&gt; 'trunks' (supposedly carved out of a trunk - see trunk as coffer/chest and then trunk/boot of a car).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although this etymology seems to rely on the similarity between &lt;em&gt;stirps&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;, please note that:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The French word for such a mite in churches is still &lt;em&gt;tronc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stirpe in Present Day Italian still means offspring =&gt; race =&gt; pedigree&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the meanings of &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;stipis&lt;/em&gt; is precisely that of alms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;182&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Hoc ipsum stipendium a stipe dictum, quod aes quoque stipem dicebant: nam quod asses librae1 pondo erant, qui acceperant maiorem numerum non in arca ponebant, sed in aliqua cella stipabant, id est componebant, quo minus loci occuparet; ab stipando stipem dicere coeperunt. Stips ab στοιβή fortasse, Graeco verbo. Id apparet, quod ut tum institutum etiam nunc diis cum thesauris asses dant stipem  dicunt, et qui pecuniam alligat, stipulari et restipulari. Militis stipendia ideo, quod eam stipem pendebant; ab eo etiam Ennius scribit:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;code&gt;Poeni stipendia pendunt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation from Loeb 333:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;182&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This very word &lt;em&gt;stipendium&lt;/em&gt; 'stipend' is said from &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; 'coin,' because they also called an &lt;em&gt;aes&lt;/em&gt; 'copper coin' a &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;; for because the &lt;em&gt;asses&lt;/em&gt; were a&#xA;  pound each in weight, those who had received an unusual number of them did not put them in a strong-box, but &lt;em&gt;stipabant&lt;/em&gt; 'packed,' that is &lt;em&gt;componebant&lt;/em&gt; 'stored,' them away in some chamber, that they might take up less space; they started the use of the word &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;stipare&lt;/em&gt; 'to pack.' &lt;em&gt;Stips&lt;/em&gt; is perhaps from the Greek word &lt;em&gt;στοιβή&lt;/em&gt; heap.' This is clear, because, as was then started, so even now they speak of a &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; when they give money to the temple treasuries for the gods, and those who make a contract about money are said to &lt;em&gt;stipulari&lt;/em&gt; 'stipulate' and &lt;em&gt;restipulari&lt;/em&gt; 'make counter-stipulations.' Therefore the soldier's &lt;em&gt;stipendia&lt;/em&gt; 'stipends,' because they &lt;em&gt;pendebant&lt;/em&gt; 'weighed' the &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;; from this moreover Ennius writes:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;code&gt;The Phoenicians pay out the stipends.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For good measure, I'm including &lt;a href=&quot;http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/erudits/varron/lingua5.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the French translation&lt;/a&gt; which, I find clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;182&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stipendium&lt;/em&gt; (solde) vient de &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;, nom qu'on donnait aussi à la monnaie de cuivre. Comme l'as pesait une livre, ceux qui en avalent reçu une grande quantité déposaient leur argent, non dans une cassette, mais dans quelque lieu convenable, où ils le rangeaient et l'entassaient, pour qu'il occupât moins de place; et de &lt;em&gt;stipare&lt;/em&gt; on a fait &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt;. On pourrait voir aussi l'origine de stips dans le mot grec &lt;em&gt;στοιβή&lt;/em&gt;, qui a le même sens que &lt;em&gt;stipatio&lt;/em&gt;. Ce qui autorise cette étymologie, c'est qu'on appelle &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; l'offrande d'argent que, suivant l'usage antique, on dépose dans le tronc des temples, et que &lt;em&gt;stipulari&lt;/em&gt; et &lt;em&gt;restipulari&lt;/em&gt; se disent de ceux qui s'engagent à payer une somme. &lt;em&gt;Stipendium&lt;/em&gt; est composé de &lt;em&gt;stips&lt;/em&gt; et de &lt;em&gt;pendere&lt;/em&gt; (peser, payer). On lit dans Ennius :&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;code&gt;Poeni stipendia pendunt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T03:47:30.043" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T03:47:30.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12467" CreationDate="2015-05-27T00:51:28.937" Score="0" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#ghabh-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ghabh-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  Also ghebh-.  [=] &#xA;  To give or receive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that anything given by one must be received by another, and vice versa. But my guess doesn't explain this surprising dichotomy in meaning, due to the need of (at least) 2 different parties. I expected two different PIE roots. Or am I missing some deeper connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote: Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12425/how-did-the-pie-root-dek-evolve-into-the-greek-dokein-to-appear-seem-thin#comment33279_12425&quot;&gt;this advice&lt;/a&gt;, I tried to research this in  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226079376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages&lt;/em&gt; (1988) by Carl Darling Buck&lt;/a&gt;, but to no avail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T01:04:13.360" Title="How did the PIE root ghabh- mean both 'to give or receive'?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12450" CreationDate="2015-05-27T01:17:07.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of which verb is the root is largely settled among theoreticians, contrary to what lemontheme writes. The root is the finite verb, not the/a non-finite verb. This is the stance adopted by a large majority of established dependency grammars. Richard Hudson in his Word Grammar framework takes the finite verb as the root. Igor Mel'cuk in his Meanining-Text framework takes the finite verb as the root. The German schools (Eroms, Heringer, Gross, Engel, Lobin, etc.) take the finite verb as the root. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lemontheme is correct only insofar as some computational linguists doing dependency grammar are unsure about the root. These computational linguists are, however, largely ignoring the large body of work that has accummulated over the decades in theoretical circles. Bliss in ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous empirical considerations that identify the finite verb as the root. The finite verb is the main locus of much functional information (person, number, tense, mood, voice). Subject-verb agreement obtains with the finite verb, not with the/a non-finite verb. In English, the finite verb is the left-most verb in the verb chain, making verb chains head-initial. In Japanese, the finite verb is the right-most verb in the verb chain, making verb chains head-final. There are thus broad typological considerations supporting the finite verb as the root.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diagnostics for constituents of the sort that are widely employed in syntax, linguistics, and grammar textbooks support the finite verb as the root. This point will now be demonstrated here. Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; (1)  Fred has studied syntax.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the finite verb &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; is the root here, then &lt;em&gt;studied syntax&lt;/em&gt; is a complete subtree underneath &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt;. If, in contrast, &lt;em&gt;studied&lt;/em&gt; is the root, then &lt;em&gt;studied syntax&lt;/em&gt; is not a complete subtree. Diagnostics for constituents settle the matter, since they clearly reveal that &lt;em&gt;studied syntax&lt;/em&gt; is a complete subtree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; a. ...and studied syntax, Fred has.              -- Topicalization&#xA;&#xA; b. Fred has done so. (done so = studied syntax)  -- Proform substituion&#xA;&#xA; c. What Fred has done is studied syntax.         -- Pseudoclefting&#xA;&#xA; d. What has Fred done? -- Studied syntax.        -- Answer fragment&#xA;&#xA; e. Tom has studied syntax, and Fred has, too.    -- VP-ellipsis&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples illustrate that &lt;em&gt;studied syntax&lt;/em&gt; is behaving as a coherent unit, i.e. as a complete subtree. This verifies that &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; is the root, since only if &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; is the root, does &lt;em&gt;studied syntax&lt;/em&gt; qualify as a complete subtree. To state the point from another perspective, sentences (a-e) would all be bad if &lt;em&gt;studied&lt;/em&gt; were the root over &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point about which verb is the root of the sentence is going to be delt with in detail at an upcoming Depling conference in Uppsala Sweden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://depling.org/depling2015/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://depling.org/depling2015/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My coauthors and I will be presenting a number of papers, all of which demonstrate that, among other things, the finite verb is the root of the sentence. Whether the computational people (who want to take a non-finite verb as the root) will listen, though, remains to be seen. In any case, I will happily share these papers with anyone who wants more information. Contact me at tjo3ya@yahoo.com.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T01:17:07.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-27T05:03:12.480" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to design a word list for a phonetics project. I can use wildcard searches in the corpus such as * sb *  which will return all words that contain this sequence of letters (either medially or word-initially). However, I want to restrict this search to a specific lexical category (nouns). Is there a way to search for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version: How do I ask the corpus for all nouns that contain the sequence of letters sb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T05:38:54.650" Title="How do you search for nouns that contain the sequence of letters sb in the Corpus of Contemporary American English?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12463" CreationDate="2015-05-27T05:38:54.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fairly straightforward and should be captured by the help pages on the COCA site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*sb*.[n*]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/online-corpus-literacy-teacher-for-literacy-teachers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a presentation that explains the basics of COCA searching&lt;/a&gt; (slides 26 - 45). There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftZ_DZHwWm4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a video on YouTube of a presentation&lt;/a&gt; I gave at a teacher's conference (explanation &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/ftZ_DZHwWm4?t=14m50s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;starts here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-27T05:38:54.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12460" CreationDate="2015-05-28T01:44:32.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how it really was, but as a possibility, ghabh- in the meaning &quot;receive&quot; could develop from passive/ergative constructions like &quot;[to] me [it] is given&quot;, and later the construction became active (=&gt; &quot;I receive&quot;). Compare Old English &quot;[to] me [it] likes&quot; (mē līcað), literally &quot;to me it pleases&quot;, which became &quot;I like&quot; (me likes=&gt;I like). The modern &quot;I like&quot; technically means &quot;I please (someone/something)&quot; from the point of view of Old English -- voila, the meaning is reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T01:44:32.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12429" CreationDate="2015-05-28T02:16:52.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect the meaning stems from wall-building, Herodotus has an example: &quot;kata to teichos periphero&quot; (teichos=&quot;wall&quot;). I.e. originally it means &quot;carrying [stones] to place them around something&quot;. Later the figurative meaning appeared, something around the walls, on the periphery of the city (and later - periphery in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, my native Russian uses the exact same word morphologically (ob-nosit = peri-phero).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-05-28T10:06:57.763" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T10:06:57.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11315" CreationDate="2015-05-28T02:27:21.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it interesting that Indo-European numerals from 1 to 4 are declinable and have ablaut nature; meanwhile numerals 5 and higher are indeclinable &quot;stumps&quot;. The only explanation is that numerals 5 and higher were used in simple sequantial counting: 5, 6, 7, 8, perhaps in trade with non-Indo-European tribes. *septm being an obvious borrowing suggests that all the numerals from 5 to 10 could be loanwords from some sort of ancient pidgin, and Indo-Europeans themselves casually counted only up to 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T02:27:21.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-28T06:59:09.413" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Draw the syntactic tree for the deputy’s recent discovery of incriminating evidence; for full&#xA;credit, you must put all specifiers, all complements, and all adjuncts in triangles&#xA;&amp;amp; &#xA;Draw the s-structure tree for Which pudgy pig did the shaggy sheep bite behind the barn?&#xA;For full credit, you must suppress the structures of all specifiers and all adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9855" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T06:59:09.413" Title="Syntactic Tree help" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-05-28T07:52:30.940" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-28T08:17:56.020" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that there is an ellipsis in &quot;It better be&quot;, representing &quot;It had better be&quot;, but what sort of ellipsis is this? Wiki suggests a number of different examples but none seem to really match in the eyes of this rank amateur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9856" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T00:11:29.650" Title="The variety of ellipsis in &quot;It better be&quot;" Tags="&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12471" CreationDate="2015-05-28T10:23:37.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an ellipsis, it's the old subjunctive mood, its present tense form (I be, thou beest, he be), used in the optative sense to express a wish or hope.&#xA;For example, &quot;God save the Queen&quot; uses the same grammatical form (&quot;I hope God saves the Queen&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It had better be&quot; technically is subjunctive+preterite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T10:23:37.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12475" CreationDate="2015-05-28T10:52:10.780" Score="4" ViewCount="4733" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take a course in linguistics in my university, and recently we discussed a 2 terms coined by Gottlob Frege: Reference and Sense. To my understanding this duo tries to explain the distinction and connection between term and it's meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few months ago I was reading some post-structuralist literature. The above duo is reminding me of another duo, in semiotics: signifier/signified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I completely understand the differences between the two. It looks like they are the same thing. Both try to explain the connection between words and objects using meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I might be wrong, and that's why I'm asking you guys for your help :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9857" LastEditorUserId="9857" LastEditDate="2015-05-29T09:56:34.747" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T14:28:47.967" Title="The differences between signifier/signified and reference/sense" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2015-05-28T16:32:03.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two distinctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;signifier/signified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sense/reference (sense/meaning as in the original sinn/bedeutung)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are not only not the same, they are not even particularly related (other than both dealing with meaning). Although, I can see how the confusion could arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;signifier/signified&lt;/strong&gt; distinguishes between two aspects of a sign - the thing that is used to refer to something and the thing (or rather our mental image of the thing) that is being referred to. Thus &quot;dog&quot; is the signifier and an (our mental image of) an actual dog is the signified.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sense/reference&lt;/strong&gt; help us differentiate a case where 1 signified has more than 1 signifier. Frege gives the famous example of 'The Morning Star' and 'The Evening Star' which both refer to the same object ie Venus (yet another signifier/sense).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different use of the word 'sense' from what you will find in lexicography where 'sense' refers to the different related meanings of a single lexical item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason these two distinctions are not related is because they try to solve different problems. Frege was concerned with solving problems of logical semantics based on the truth conditional theory of meaning. Whereas Saussure (originator of the signifier/signified distinction in its most well-known form) was simply trying to delineate the field of linguistics. In my view, both distinctions are being made more of than they deserve and introduce more issues than they solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-05-28T16:32:03.830" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12442" CreationDate="2015-05-28T17:47:57.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, prepositions can be added to verb phrases as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complement&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_%28grammar%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjuncts&lt;/a&gt;. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I will put it &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt; is a complement : &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; absolutely needs something there, you can't say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I will put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I will put it &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; must have been a complement originally, but something happened: this combination has obtained a fixed, specific meaning that must be listed in the dictionary separately: to &lt;em&gt;extinguish&lt;/em&gt;.  So we can say that &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; now combine to form a single verb with its own meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) I will write it &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt; is not a complement but an adjunct: I might instead say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will write it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more, it doesn't really add any meaning. It basically just acts as an intensifier.  Apparently, using &lt;em&gt;to write&lt;/em&gt; doesn't quite feel comfortable without an added preposition, without really requiring it - but the preposition hardly adds any meaning.  Similar examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) I will write it &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) I will print it &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we see that in English, it is really easy for prepositions to get stuck  to verbs into a fixed combinations, without changing the way the verb functions in the sentence; this may produce a specialized meaning, but it may even happen when it doesn't really affect the meaning at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing used to happen in Latin.  A lot.  For instance, it had a verb &lt;em&gt;monere&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;to advise&lt;/em&gt;, and after due time, people would use &lt;em&gt;admonere&lt;/em&gt; instead. In your case, the &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; does change the meaning: &lt;em&gt;tribuere&lt;/em&gt; means different things than &lt;em&gt;attribuere&lt;/em&gt;, but the difference isn't very large.  (You can look them up in Wiktionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1422" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T22:57:54.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T04:42:29.947" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a chart (or good reference) that shows every possible orthographic representation for each phoneme (in General North American English; I don't care about the low-back merger).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/.......au (caught), o (pot), a (garden)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for each phoneme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T13:52:38.987" Title="I am looking for a good chart that maps Orthography to Phonemes for General North American English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T05:04:45.780" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find words in English that mirror the conditioning environments for spirantization of /b, d, g/ in Spanish. I am balancing for proceeding phone, lexical stress, word-internal vs. word-medial etc. I'm holding the following phone constant (to /a/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to search CMUdict for words that have the the exact string of phones I need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I want to be able to search for a word that contains a word-medial token of /b/ that is preceded by /s/, part of the onset of a stressed syllable, and followed by /a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to limit this search to nouns. Like by using .[n*] in COCA. And also to integrate frequency (COCA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can do orthographic searches on the COCA, but I can't search for the actual phoneme pronounced which is why I like searching on CMU dict. On CMUddict I can also search for stress,but I can't do wildcard searches to get word-medial vs. word-initial tokens. I also can't control for frequency.  I have been opening the CMU dict in chrome and doing searchers on the .txt file (using Arpabet) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what I want to do is combine the best of both worlds. I was thinking about generating lists in the COCA and then importing them into CMU dict/ARPABET, but I'm not sure to do this. I'm open for any suggestions. Thanks!!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T14:05:07.173" Title="Making a balanced word list systematically using COCA and CMUdict" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12460" CreationDate="2015-05-29T10:25:18.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to reply to your question in a general way, which answers a lot of the other questions you have posed on here recently. Proto-Indo-European is not a real language, but a reconstructed language. We did not know how PIE words sounded, nor what they meant. The “meanings” that you find in PIE word lists have been assigned to them by modern scholars so as to “explain” the diverging semantics of the real words in the daughter languages. So instead of asking “How did a PIE word with the meaning ‘X’ take on the meaning ‘Y’ in English?” you should be asking “Why do linguists attribute the meaning ‘X’ to the ancestor of the English word with the meaning ‘Y’?” You are asking these questions backwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T10:25:18.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12480" CreationDate="2015-05-29T13:41:56.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be able to do the phone environment searches you describe on the CMUdict. Instead of using a web browser, you need something with regex support (a good text editor). I would recommend something like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sublimetext.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sublime Text&lt;/a&gt; as your text editor.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Searches for word-medial vs. word-initial are simple for a regex beginner:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;'  (.+?AA1.+)' #this matches words with a non-initial, non-final AA1&#xA;'  (AA1.*)' #this matches words with an initial AA1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A complex one like &quot;contains a word-medial token of /b/ that is preceded by /s/, part of the onset of a stressed syllable, and followed by /a/&quot; may be difficult to do in one step (though perhaps easier to do in several steps). There are many good sites for help with regex and testing (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.regexr.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.regexr.com&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining the information of COCA and CMUDict is fairly simple if you're comfortable with scripting/programming. This operation is called a 'join' or 'merge' for tabular data. In Python, for example, you can do this manually by reading in the CMUDict (as a dict) and your COCA-based orthographic word list (as a list). In a loop, you look up the CMU match for each word. Your output will be a new dict (I'll call it 'outputDict').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;for word in wordlist:&#xA;    outputDict[word] = CMUDict[word]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In R, you could simply read in both files as dataframes and do the appropriate join/merge operation. Using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/plyr/docs/join&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plyr&lt;/a&gt; package, it looks like this (assuming wordlist has a column called 'orthographic':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;join(wordlist, CMUDict, by = 'orthographic', type = &quot;left&quot;, match = &quot;first&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other issues:&#xA;CMUDict has a funny doublespace-delimited format, so be aware when you're working with it in Python, R, etc. The Python code provided (and similar approaches) will get confused if COCA has a word that CMUDict &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt;; the join approach won't break, but obviously will not find a phonetic match for those items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-05-29T14:05:07.173" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T14:05:07.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12479" CreationDate="2015-05-29T13:52:38.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with musicallinguist, but you can get this information for a given corpus if you really want to. One option is a tool called &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/phonetisaurus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonetisaurus&lt;/a&gt;, which is one of a family of statistical graphone tools. Its intended function is grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, but one of the data files it builds along the way is a set of grapheme-to-phoneme mappings attested in the input corpus, weighted according to the computational model. It attempts to deal with the issues of context/cooccurrence that musicallinguist noted. This would be relatively tricky unless you're pretty familiar with the programming, and probably more effort than you'll want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-05-29T13:52:38.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-29T21:36:35.893" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anybody knew of a confusion matrix for consonant clusters in the English language.  I've seen CV, VC, and CVC phoneme/syllable confusion matrices, but never any with any sort of consonant cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the research I'm doing,  it would be really, really helpful to have something like that--does anyone know of such a resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9867" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:51:59.793" Title="Confusion matrix for consonant clusters in English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;perception&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2015-05-30T12:04:54.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any difference between signified and reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Lakoff proposed that definite anaphoric constructions are based on identity of reference while indefinite anaphoric constructions are based on identity of sense. &quot;Hank saw a deer before I saw {one, it}.&quot;  &quot;One&quot; has the same sense as its antecedent &quot;a deer&quot;, while &quot;it&quot; has the same reference.  &quot;Hank saw a deer before I did&quot; is an indefinite anaphoric construction, with the missing verb phrase &quot;see a deer&quot; after &quot;did&quot; having the sense &quot;see a deer&quot; as its antecedent, which is the non-finite part of &quot;saw a deer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow the theory of these indefinite anaphoric constructions that they have an underlying form with two instances of the same indefinite expression, so that we begin with &quot;Hank did see a deer before I did see a deer&quot; and substitute &quot;one&quot; for the second instance of &quot;a deer&quot;, or delete the second instance of &quot;see a deer&quot;, then this analyzes identity of sense anaphora as being, really, identity of form anaphora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, since the form is the signifier, in effect this equates the signifier with the sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-05-30T12:04:54.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-31T03:06:55.590" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=litotes&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;litotes (n.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      rhetorical figure in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its opposite, from Greek litotes, literally &quot;plainness, simplicity,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;litos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;smooth, plain, small, meager,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from PIE root &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#lei-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;*(s)lei-&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;code&gt;slimy&lt;/code&gt;, sticky, slippery&quot; (hence &quot;smooth&quot;); see slime (n.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Litotes&lt;/a&gt; adds (negative) words and so increases reading time. So how did it evolve from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;litos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;smooth, plain, small, meager&quot;, adjectives all of which contradict the troubles of hypernegation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about the interpretation of hypernegation as  &lt;code&gt;slimy&lt;/code&gt;, which would consist with the PIE root. But this guess appears wrong, because PIE is invented and so succeeds Greek.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T02:11:20.923" Title="How did 'litotes' evolve from 'plain, simple'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-05-31T05:18:29.597" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what some possible catalysts/ reasons for loss of final -e &lt;code&gt;/ǝ/&lt;/code&gt; in Middle English might have been (For instance, OE &lt;code&gt;/tɑlu/&lt;/code&gt; &gt; ME &lt;code&gt;/taːlǝ/&lt;/code&gt; &gt; MnE tale &lt;code&gt;/teɪl/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering because to my knowledge, all other Germanic languages have retained final &lt;em&gt;shwa&lt;/em&gt; as part of their inflectional system (Dutch &lt;em&gt;&quot;een klein meisje, het klein&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; meisje&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in social as well as linguistic factors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-05-31T09:05:04.437" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T09:05:04.437" Title="What are the possible impetuses for loss of Middle English shwa?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12489" CreationDate="2015-05-31T09:00:16.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Crystal (ref. 1995:32) suggests a possible explanation why such reduction may have occurred:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the articulatory stress started to fall on the first syllable;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;such stress pattern has introduced difficulties to the &lt;strong&gt;audibility&lt;/strong&gt; of the inflectional endings;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;therefore, inflectional endings &lt;em&gt;-en, -on,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-an&lt;/em&gt; first reduced to &lt;em&gt;schwa&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and subsequently disappeared.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more details in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6906/1009&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T09:00:16.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12493" CreationDate="2015-05-31T13:16:32.353" Score="2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in a book that there is a stressed version as well as an unstressed version of the sound &quot;ər&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stressed one usually look like &quot;ɜr&quot; in dictionaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hurt /'h&lt;strong&gt;ɜr&lt;/strong&gt;t/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;her /'h&lt;strong&gt;ɜr&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the unstressed one looks like schwa + r:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;after /ˈæf t&lt;strong&gt;ər&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bother /ˈbɒð &lt;strong&gt;ər&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between the pronounciation of &quot;ɜr&quot; and &quot;ər&quot;? other than the fact that in the stressed syllable the vowel is prolonged a bit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T03:56:48.357" Title="The sound /Ur/ in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12491" CreationDate="2015-05-31T14:28:26.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American dialects, [ɜɹ / əɹ] would be wrong at the phonetic level, since there is just a syllabic [ɹ̩] and no vowel. Elsewhere there is a (predictable) vowel quality difference as in [əˈbʌt]. There could be r-preserving dialects which have a phonetic vowel-plus-liquid sequence, so that there could be a quality difference as well, though I don't know that I've ever heard any such dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-05-31T14:28:26.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12491" CreationDate="2015-05-31T15:01:31.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stressed syllabic r and syllable onset r are rounded, commonly at least, as in &quot;bird&quot;, &quot;bred&quot;.  Unstressed syllabic r and syllable offset r are unrounded, as in &quot;better&quot;, &quot;lard&quot;.  This is for an r-ful dialect. I don't speak an r-less dialect, but I suppose in those dialects, there also wouldn't be rounding in unstressed or offset position of whatever replaces r.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transcriptions you see in dictionaries imply that (what I call) syllabic r is some sort of diphthong.  I don't hear any more change in quality during the articulation of syllabic r than for any other non-diphthongal vowel, so, phonetically, those transcriptions don't make any sense, to me.  There have been phonemic theories of English vowels that try to place them all in a system with simple vowels matched up somehow with diphthongs, and probably, historically, this has played some role in these strange dictionary transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do stressed syllabic and syllable onset r have in common that causes them to work the same way for roundedness?  I have an idiosyncratic theory about that, which is a variation of a theory proposed by Saussure in his &lt;strong&gt;Course in General Linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;.  Saussure has the idea that language structure has two aspects, the paradigmatic, which concerns what role pronunciations play in comparison to others, and the syntagmatic aspect, which concerns how language elements are pronounced in the stream of speech.  (This is a rather free interpretation of what Saussure says, which I may not completely understand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages have different syllable types, as we know, and within a language, there are difference in syllable structure depending on initial versus final, and so on.  This concerns paradigmatic structure.  But, correspondingly, we can find in the stream of speech differences in individual sounds that depend on where the sounds come in a syllable.  This concerns syntagmatic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a syllable, we find that aperture in the mouth is small at the beginning of a syllable, increases to a maximum at syllable peak, then decreases through the syllable offset to the end of the syllable.  Looking at the articulation of individual sounds, accordingly, when a sound is in the onset of a syllable, aperture will be increasing during the articulation -- Saussure refers to this as &quot;explosive&quot;.  At the peak of the syllable, aperture is at a maximum, then in syllable offset, we find sounds during which aperture is decreasing.  Saussure calls the sounds in syllable offset &quot;implosive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Saussure say about the sounds of syllables whose aperture doesn't actually increase smoothly through their onsets or decrease smoothly through their offsets, like English &quot;stretch&quot;, for instance?  He doesn't deal with this difficulty.  But I have a proposal about it.  Instead of explosive and implosive, suppose that the sounds in the onset of a syllable are stressed and those in syllable offset are unstressed.  Arguably, if phonetic features are independent aspects of articulation, as proposed in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;, we need to extend the stress feature from vowels to the interpretation of consonant articulation, anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting back to the rounding of r, then, we can now simplify our account in a principled way.  It is the stressed r that is rounded, whether in syllable onset or at syllable peak, and the unstressed r is unrounded, whether syllabic or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T03:56:48.357" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T03:56:48.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2015-06-01T05:31:15.793" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE it is thought that the femimine gender evolved out of the desire to produce collective nouns - and most collective nouns involved groups of females. e.g ewes, mares etc while the masculine was the lone animal e.g. the stallion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the primitive plural form ending in &quot;a&quot; became a new singular and its plural was a duplicated &quot;aa&quot; which became the &quot;ae&quot; we know in latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explain why agricola, nauta and poeta are in the first declension because sailors came in crews, field diggers in gangs and poets(travelling minstrels) in troops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course over time nouns migrated to different declensions and the clear symmetry was lost. Many classical latin nouns have shifted declensions into modern Italian - and of some declensions have disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once established the declension generalised to become the home of many intangible or abstract nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9878" LastActivityDate="2015-06-01T05:31:15.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-01T08:57:22.787" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment I am coding an automatic cloze generator on Text on the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a summarizer to find relevant sentences in a text based on frequency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use Pos Tagging on the remaining sentences and exclude nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search for distributional similar distractors for the extracted nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present the text with the gaps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this could lead to several gaps in a sentence, which makes it quite impossible to solve it. As for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ________ is a general purpose _____________ that can be programmed to carry out a ___________ of ____________ or logical operations automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers: computer, device, set, arithmetic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I am asking myself how to restrict the number of gaps but I don't know how many gaps are considered as good? I thought maybe reducing it to 1 gap at the beginning or end to not interrupt the reading flow of a user, but this approach seems to me to lead to very obvious sentences if the sentence is &quot;long&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any linguistic rules saying something like, if the sentence is longer than x words, y gaps can be used an the sentence is still &quot;solvable&quot;? Or another approach which solves my problem somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9880" LastEditorUserId="9880" LastEditDate="2015-06-02T11:01:41.000" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T20:28:27.127" Title="How many gaps should a sentence have to be solvable but not too easy?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36685" CreationDate="2015-06-01T15:56:26.787" Score="1" ViewCount="629" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ENTRY: leg-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  DEFINITION: To collect; with derivatives meaning “to speak.” Oldest form *le-, becoming *leg- in centum languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3. lexicon, logion, –logue, –logy; alexia, analects, anthology, catalog, dialect, dialogue, dyslexia, eclectic, eclogite, eclogue, horologe, lectotype, prolegomenon, &lt;strong&gt;from Greek &lt;em&gt;legein&lt;/em&gt;, to gather, speak, with o-grade derivative &lt;em&gt;logos&lt;/em&gt;, a gathering, speech&lt;/strong&gt; (see also 6 below for derivatives independently built to &lt;em&gt;logos&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I was researching the etymology of the suffix &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-logy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-logy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What connects the Greek &lt;em&gt;legein&lt;/em&gt; with the PIE root &lt;strong&gt;leg-&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is this: In Ancient Greek, if one wanted to speak to many people, then these people must be gathered together. I doubt my guess, because I am unsure if the sense of collection refers to some historical particularity of speech, such as the collection of certain rhetoric. My doubt is worsened by my former ignorance of early ways of reading, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/239785/50720&quot;&gt;when I asked this question on ELU&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T04:59:25.273" Title="How does the Greek 'legein' relate to PIE *leg 'to collect'?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12496" CreationDate="2015-06-01T20:45:22.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to define 'solvability' of a sentence with cloze blanks by the number of gaps. What makes a gap solvable is the ability of the speaker to determine what is missing from context. And there is no algorithmic way to define that with absolute precision (in fact, even humans are not all that good at it). Nouns happen to be pretty much the worst possible part of speech to pick at random because they are a very open largely context independent class. So even a simple sentence with a single blank like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jane ate some ____ for dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is unsolvable. There are just too many possible things for Jane to eat. Even with the verb as a blank:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jane ____ some chicken for dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you have at more options than it may appear: ate, had, cooked, made, bought, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the only parts of speech you could do this with with some success are prepositions but even here, you couldn't guarantee 100% accuracy. Consider the blank in '_ the sea'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. Fish live &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. The Johnsons live &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, your best bet would be to look at quite stable collocations, if you're relying on an algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The prisoners lived on bread and _____.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The men and _____ of the jury reached a verdict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could generate your own list of collocations or use an existing one (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collocates.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.collocates.info&lt;/a&gt; or Google n-grams).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could then run a sentence through a prediction tree and every time you'd come with a high enough number of predictability, you could delete the word. I have no idea how accurate this would be but I suspect that you would have to set a high threshold to get much accuracy and this would result in most sentences not having blanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things would be much easier if each blank had a multiple choice. Then you could look for semantically and collocationally distant words. Google n-grams and WordNet and FrameNet would come in handy, here. Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fred ate some ____ for dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the blank was chicken, you could use WordNet to determine that chicken is a type of animal and food and pick distractors that would not collide. E.g. chair, sky, road. Of course, you could still get stuff like 'water' which would be more difficult. Or, you could use FrameNet to determine the frame of 'eat' and only offer things that don't fit the frame. The problem is that you could only do this with quite simple sentences depending on your ability to parse them. And you would still get collisions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fred had to eat his words/crow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We recently tried to do something similar for a project but the best we could do was suggest alternatives to a human adjudicator. But we did not have much time and it wasn't central to our efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, you're looking at a problem unsolvable with current NLP techniques, if your aim is to generate meaningful exercises for language learners that would always provide a unique correct answer without human intervention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 1 (Response to updated question)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have much more leeway if you're presenting users with complete texts rather than sentences because they can build up more of a context to enable them to guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even then you're still essentially playing a lottery if you just randomly eliminate nouns (or any any other words). In the right context, you could remove all the nouns and most of the pronouns and still have a near 100% hit rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John asked Mary to marry him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But ______ told him &lt;strong&gt;_ wouldn't marry  _&lt;/strong&gt; if ___ was the last _____ on _____. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case, above you can even remove proper nouns because of the repetition. However, in other cases you could not remove even a single noun to have a unique completion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They asked us what car our friends the Smiths should buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We said that ________ had recommended to us that we should buy __________.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you are more likely to have luck with repetition but even that is not foolproof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I get a horse or a canoe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Get a _____.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you're better off deleting nouns from the focus rather than topic part of a sentence but these may not be easy to identify automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to find the answer to your question is experiment with a large number of texts and see which algorithm gets you closer to where you need to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also depends on how high stakes the cloze activity is. If it's for a puzzle or a game, that's fine. If it's for reinforcing language learning, you might get somewhere close. But ff it's for an exam, you will not get anywhere near with the current state of NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2 (Quick literature survey):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do a quick search on &quot;automatic cloze generation&quot;, you will find a number of articles describing several promising approaches. However, they focus on the combination of the three following tasks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Focus on finding appropriate distractors (&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/R/R13/R13-1067.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://aclweb.org/anthology/R/R13/R13-1067.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying appropriate sentences with promising keywords (&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/R/R13/R13-1067.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://aclweb.org/anthology/R/R13/R13-1067.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present an educator with options to choose from when constructing exercises (&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.cs.rpi.edu/paper/learning.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nlp.cs.rpi.edu/paper/learning.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are consonant with what I suggested above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-06-03T20:28:27.127" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T20:28:27.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-02T11:27:33.013" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of a text analysis method where one builds a network of sentences that are connected when they contain words that occur on a predefined reference list of words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, lets say I have a predefined list of the following words: &quot;tree&quot;,&quot;forest&quot;,&quot;wood&quot;. Then I have a random text that I want to compare to my predefined list to build a network. Let's say this random text has the following sentences: &quot;He was climbing trees&quot;, &quot;She was in the forest&quot;. Both sentences contain words that match the predefined list. In the network, these two sentences should be represented by two nodes. As the sentences share words from the reference list, the nodes should be connected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really new to text analysis and have no idea how this approach is called. Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9888" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-06-02T12:23:52.373" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T08:13:11.533" Title="What is the name of this text analysis method?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9008" CreationDate="2015-06-02T11:33:19.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two pieces of software that I know of that can show Spectograms.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; is one, and is the more powerful of the two, but may have a steeper learning curve. I think that they are aimed more at linguists who analyse a language rather than those trying to learn a language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/computing/sa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Speech Analyser&lt;/a&gt; Available for windows PC's though there may be a linux version available in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are fairly general speech analysis tools, I can't comment on how useful these would be for use by ESL students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9851" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T11:33:19.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-02T15:58:27.923" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of a book I'm writing, I'm making a language that uses suffixes on number words to represent place values. English uses &quot;-ty&quot; for this purpose to mark tens, but I want to do it to larger place values like hundred or million.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any word-based languages that use suffixes rather than entire words to mark higher place values, so that I can study their numbering systems to come up with better suffixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1642" LastEditorUserId="1642" LastEditDate="2015-06-02T16:15:23.540" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T17:03:13.250" Title="Do any languages use suffixes to represent place value in numbers?" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12502" CreationDate="2015-06-02T17:11:32.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trouble with your question is that it is not clear what &amp;quot;word&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;suffix&amp;quot; mean cross-linguistically; but I think Japanese meets your criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;power-of-ten&amp;quot; suffixes like &lt;em&gt;-hyaku&lt;/em&gt; (hundred) &lt;em&gt;-sen&lt;/em&gt; (thousand) &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; (ten thousand) are a special case of so-called classifiers, such as &lt;em&gt;-nen&lt;/em&gt; (counting people) and &lt;em&gt;-mai&lt;/em&gt; (counting flat things), and are combined with the number word into, probably, a single word, as can be seen by certain sandhi rules; so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nihyaku = 200&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nisen = 2,000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;niman = 20 000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ippyaku (&amp;lt; ichi-hyaku) = 100&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;issen (&amp;lt; ichi-sen) = 1,000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ichiman = 10,000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this system is imported wholesale from Chinese, but I know much less about that, which is why I have concentrated on Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T17:11:32.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-03T04:14:48.623" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=psyche&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psyche (n.)&lt;/a&gt;         1640s, &quot;animating spirit,&quot; from Latin psyche, from Greek psykhe &quot;the soul, mind, spirit; breath; life, one's life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body; understanding&quot; (personified as Psykhe, the beloved of Eros), akin to psykhein &quot;to blow, cool,&quot; from PIE root *bhes- &quot;to blow, to breathe&quot; (source also of Sanskrit bhas-), &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Probably imitative&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; [Watkins].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, at present, I don't have enough time to learn enough all &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12335/5306&quot;&gt;phonology or phonetics&lt;/a&gt;, but from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12067/5306&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, I recognise the centrality of pronunciation. However, how can I learn more about 'imitation' as cited above? I've acquired a book on Historical Linguistics that I'm reading, though too slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case above, the context appears too scant. What imitates what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T04:35:57.060" Title="How do you learn what an old word might have imitated?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12505" CreationDate="2015-06-03T04:35:57.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say [psʉ̥]. Then blow out a candle. Maybe you should record yourself doing this. The sound of you blowing out a candle sounds like [psʉ̥], or could sound like it, if you blown out the candle in the right way. &quot;Imitation&quot; in historical phonology is a very flaccid many-edged sword, but imitation is not a precise art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T04:35:57.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12424" CreationDate="2015-06-03T16:27:30.807" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek prepositions and the verbal prefixes derived from them are a bit mysterious as their various meanings are often very heterogenous. My assumption is that in some prepositions several words have flowed together, which is easily possible if we consider the fact that Old Greek is not a homogeneous language but a side-by-side of various dialects which can influence each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T16:27:30.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12231" CreationDate="2015-06-03T19:53:38.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that you're really more interested in reconstructions than more meaningful and evidence-based etymologies. Maybe, you would find this English-PIE translator useful: &lt;a href=&quot;http://indo-european.info/dictionary-translator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://indo-european.info/dictionary-translator&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also find some info here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key thing to remember is that those PIE *etymologies are not attested forms with direct lines of descent. They are hypothetical constructs based on similar words in distinct languages related through known processes of linguistic change (previously called 'laws'). They are not on the same level of reliability as the more immediate ancestors with actual examples of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reconstructions cannot by themselves illuminate the meanings or journeys of individual words unless you contrast the descendants in several languages. Even then, this remains little more than a curiosity outside of a very specialist discipline of comparative historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-03T19:53:38.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12524" CreationDate="2015-06-03T22:25:37.223" Score="2" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the linguistic phenomenon in which a general term gains a much more specific meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;Prohibition&quot; is used to mean &quot;Alcohol prohibition in the United States&quot; or &quot;Abolition&quot; is used to mean &quot;Abolition of slavery&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew this is common for certain religious terms, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Eruv&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;mixture&quot;, but has expanded to mean &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;something else&lt;/a&gt;. Same with &lt;em&gt;Seruv&lt;/em&gt; meaning simply &quot;refusal&quot;, but being used as refusal to grant a divorce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5361" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-06-05T01:39:05.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T01:39:05.203" Title="What is the term for when a general term is used to refer to something specific?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-04T03:33:51.807" Score="1" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm workiong on a school project and I want to see if there are any studies made to the following matter.&#xA; We all know what a code siwtch is , I wonder if there's something similar in personality, like switches in believes, values, morals, etc. i want to know anything related to it . I hope you guys can help me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9902" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-06-04T16:53:41.260" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T16:53:41.260" Title="Psycholinguistics: any interesting studies in personality switching withing language?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-04T03:38:31.337" Score="2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=know&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;etymology of the Modern English verb 'know'&lt;/a&gt;, when its reference to other languages motivated this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Once widespread in Germanic, this form is now retained only in English, where however it has widespread application, covering meanings that require two or more verbs in other languages (such as German wissen, kennen, erkennen and in part können; French connaître, savoir; Latin novisse, cognoscere; Old Church Slavonic znaja, vemi). The Anglo-Saxons used two distinct words for this, witan (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=wit&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wit&lt;/a&gt;) and cnawan.  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dichotomy  was inculcated in me for French and Spanish, but never explained or explored. So why was 'to know' partitioned?  What's so special? Why did English evolve to unify the verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T05:29:02.950" Title="Why do some languages partition 'to know' into 2 or more verbs?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12513" CreationDate="2015-06-04T05:29:02.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As always, &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; questions are always bad questions to ask in linguistics if you're asking about some putative motivations of historical speakers. We don't have the data (with some rare exceptions like &amp;quot;freedom fries&amp;quot;). At best you can trace the historical developments within a language and note the differences between languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of difference where one language uses several words (or concepts) to apportion reality differently is so common that any individual instance is nothing more than an idle curiosity. It is one of the foundational definitions of language itself that goes back to de Saussure who talked about the net of language being cast on the amorphous sea of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the languages that differs from English in this respect is Czech which has three verbs (Russian for instance, only has 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vědět - to know in general (intransitive - except it can take 'it' and 'something' as direct objects as a in 'I know it' or 'I know nothing', I know that water boils at 100 degrees C.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;znát - to know someone, some place, be cognizant of (transitive: I know Peter, I know London, I know (of) this song)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;umět - to know how (I know how to swim, I know (how to play) this song)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But interestingly, the two languages meet when these verbs are nominalized. English has 'knowledge' and 'ability' and Czech has two nouns that match perfectly (or rather the two nouns derived from znát and vědět are almost perfect synonyms and the noun for ability is derived from a completely different verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many other verbs related to knowledge - 'recognize', 'realize', 'distinguish'. While English has completely separate roots for these, in Czech, many of these are related to one of the verbs for 'to know' - 'poznat', 'uvědomit si', 'rozeznat'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this happen? Or why is Czech different from a more related language like Russian? There is no sensible way to answer this. However, internalizing these differences can give you a better insight into how language works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T05:29:02.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12516" CreationDate="2015-05-31T19:54:03.397" Score="3" ViewCount="1099" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if anybody here is a pragmatics expert because my question relates to this.&#xA;I'm learning about Paul Grice's conversational maxims (quality, quantity, relation and manner) and I have a difficulty to realize what maxim was flouted in this conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: What's on television?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: Nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be grateful I anyone here can help because I couldn't find an appropriate forum to post this question. Sorry if I posted this in wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15599" OwnerDisplayName="Lans Tran" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T21:53:49.790" Title="A question about pragmatics" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12515" CreationDate="2015-05-31T21:05:50.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is always on TV (even if nothing worthwhile), the reply is literally false, so it flouts the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maxim of Quality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Supermaxim:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Try to make your contribution one that is true&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Excerpted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia -- Cooperative principle&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" OwnerDisplayName="Greg Lee" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T16:21:45.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12515" CreationDate="2015-06-02T16:40:51.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The analysis Grice suggested has grave shortcomings, as explained in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unige.ch/lettres/baumgartner/docs/grice/protect/sperber1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On Grice's Theory of Conversation: Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the nonsense that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His mother is an angel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is considered to be a violation of the maxim of truthfulness, whereas the negation of this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His mother is no angel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not. And if 'angel' is substituted by a synonym, 'saint' or 'good person', here, the analysis suggested by Grice does not remain the same. The relevant definitions have to be scrutinised, and someone has to decide when a metaphor becomes dead (and hence a metaphorical usage now has to be regarded as literal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Grice's decision to say that all figurative statements (in particular metaphor, antiphrasis, meiosis and hyperbole) violate the maxim 'Do not say what you believe to be false', it must be true that Greg Lee's answer is correct. However, a pragmatic 'Do not seek to mislead' might be a better starting point. Combining his maxim with labelling metaphor etc 'false statements' leads logically to 'Do not use metaphors ...' (or, as here, idiomatic short forms which have alternative readings in other contexts) which is ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gricean maxims were a good initial model, but should be realised to be inadequate as prescriptions (and they are given in the form of a set of rules). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27575" OwnerDisplayName="Edwin Ashworth" LastActivityDate="2015-06-02T16:47:04.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-04T16:19:34.973" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know what when making verbs about &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; I can use an object placeholder in order to indicate the difference between the first, second and third persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I'm talking to my daughters I might say..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nina&lt;strong&gt;ku&lt;/strong&gt;penda = I love you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nina&lt;strong&gt;wa&lt;/strong&gt;penda &lt;strong&gt;wa&lt;/strong&gt;sichana = I love you girls&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty clear on all that when it comes to people, but what about inanimates or even animates from other noun classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I'm at the zoo and I'm feeling all sentimental about a rhino and I want to say &amp;quot;I love you rhino&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I love you rhinos&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it work like this..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nina&lt;strong&gt;ki&lt;/strong&gt;penda &lt;strong&gt;ki&lt;/strong&gt;faru = I love you Rhino&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nina&lt;strong&gt;vi&lt;/strong&gt;penda &lt;strong&gt;vi&lt;/strong&gt;faru = I love you Rhinos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it simply not possible to address a Rhino in Swahili?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T14:05:29.497" Title="Second Person Inanimates in Swahili" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12515" CreationDate="2015-06-04T17:10:55.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with using Grice to interpret actual discourse as if we could easily map each item exactly onto one of those maxims is that it's going beyond the original intention. Grice did not base it on extensive analysis of a corpus of conversation but rather in response to very specific problems with the traditional truth-conditional or more generally formalist logical semantics, namely those of logical inference. His point was that his theory of implicature can rescue seemingly divergent statements from being outside the realm of traditional logical inference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, in practice, we can find several maxims violated with analysts rarely in agreement as to which one is the most likely culprit. However, this never matters because these are not 'real' maxims that actually empirically govern human conversations. However, they very nicely delineate the realm in which speakers background knowledge is used to make sense of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brief discourse could simultaneously be said to violate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No maxim at all. The conversation was fully informative for both parties (as I have witnessed in real life many times).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maxim of quality. To help identify the hyperbole.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maxim of quantity. To account for the fact, that while the first speaker's hyperbole is understood, they are likely interested in more information to make their own decision.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maxim of relation - depending on the relationship of the two interlocutors. A parent may be less happy with this answer form a child than a partner with whom this may be an established conversational pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maxim of manner. If the context does not make it clear whether this is a hyperbole or a literal statement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one of these I choose depends on background knowledge as well as what sort of thing I'm trying to analyze about the conversation. Am I trying to look at traditional truth-conditional values of each conversation? Then most likely, 2 is the answer I will find more useful. Am I trying to analyze presupposition or power relations? The it will be one of the others. The one downside of Grice's maxim's is that often what is useful about them is lost in pointless quarreling about irrelevant minutia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T17:10:55.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12519" CreationDate="2015-06-04T18:02:47.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can say &lt;em&gt;ninakupenda(,) Kifaru&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I love you, Rhino&quot;, just as you can say &lt;em&gt;ninakupenda(,) Malaika&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I love you, Malaika&quot;. The post-verbal NP is not an argument, and the structure is exactly like &quot;I love you, Lucy&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Ninakipenda kifaru&lt;/em&gt; is kind of dicey, since the agreement should be class 1, since rhinos are animate. However, there is a fair amount of dialect / individual variation on that point. And it would not mean &quot;I love you, Rhino&quot;, it would mean &quot;I love a/the rhino&quot;. Noun class is indicated only on 3rd person objects. So for example &lt;em&gt;ninakupenda kibiriti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I love you, matches&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T18:02:47.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12519" CreationDate="2015-06-04T18:35:48.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do talk about loving a rhino, it might shift &quot;rhino&quot; into the person noun class.  I don't know any Swahili, but I have a slight acquaintance with another Bantu language, Tumbuka, and I heard a Tumbuka folk tale about animals who have an adventure, much like humans do, and all the class agreement particles are shifted to the person class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd guess it would depend on whether you're thinking of Rhino as being a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-04T18:35:48.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-04T22:39:34.657" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wittgenstein coined the term &quot;family resemblance&quot; for collections with multiple overlapping similarities as opposed to universally shared traits. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia mentions&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;It has been suggested that Wittgenstein picked up the idea and the term from Nietzsche, who had been using it, as did many nineteenth century philologists, when discoursing about language families&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find specific references to philologists using the term. Can somebody point them out? Is the concept still useful in modern philology and linguistics? It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBBS%2FBBS32_05%2FS0140525X09990744a.pdf&amp;amp;code=38d8e0be05c4cc60d563057d88374391#page=96&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;languages have few universals&lt;/a&gt;, but many similarities are shared by large selections of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9777" LastEditorUserId="9777" LastEditDate="2015-06-06T00:17:39.190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T00:17:39.190" Title="What philologists influenced Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12511" CreationDate="2015-06-05T00:38:48.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A term commonly used to refer to this process of semantic change is &lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/semnarrterm.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;semantic narrowing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This, along with other types of semantic change as well as the processes involved, are discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WP&lt;/a&gt;. As pointed out in a comment, this process is also sometimes known as &lt;em&gt;specialization&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opposite process is known as &lt;em&gt;semantic broadening/widening&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;generalization&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T00:38:48.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12527" CreationDate="2015-06-05T14:40:29.960" Score="2" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &quot;the mad cow jumped right over the moon&quot;, the adjunct 'right' modifies the preposition 'over' in the preposition phrase 'right over the moon'. As the adjunct 'mad' to 'cow' is an adjective describing the noun 'cow', what part of grammar is adjunct 'right' as it describes 'over'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether I'm describing this properly. I'm taking a first year linguistics course, but this is beyond the scope of what we're currently learning and I'm interested in how to classify this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9908" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T16:34:47.787" Title="Classification of adjuncts in preposition phrases" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12526" CreationDate="2015-06-05T16:34:47.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an adverb, using McCawley's definition of adverb as &quot;a modifier of something other than a noun&quot;.  (I don't think your term &quot;adjunct&quot; conveys anything useful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC, Joseph Emonds characterized &quot;right&quot; as a PP (prepositional phrase) modifier, but also proposed that some bare prepositions were actually objectless PPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-05T16:34:47.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-05T20:56:01.823" Score="10" ViewCount="11266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is the right stack exchange site but here goes..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Couple of people at my workplace seem to whisper or quietly speak the material they read. They do this routinely, and they speak more loudly when they don't understand what they are reading. The latter I've done when trying to figure out how the writer intended a particularly complex sentence to be read, but as far as I'm aware when I read I do so silently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This observation arose from a related debate with my partner about reading in one's head - she claims to hear her own voice speaking the words she sees when she reads. She doesn't understand my claim that I don't hear any voice, let alone my own..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What mechanisms is the brain employing when it reads? Why do some people vocalise their words, and others imagine themselves doing so? Are these concepts related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9909" LastEditorUserId="9909" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:18:44.017" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:18:44.017" Title="Why do some people speak/whisper the words they are reading?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6756" CreationDate="2015-06-06T16:59:09.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are just using old stereotype of Japanese as nationalist/racist which in itself is a prejudice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, if unintelligibility is the drawing line, then there are about 20 languages in japan, one of which is going to be ryukyuan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you said &quot;most (maybe even all) non-Japanese linguists&quot; you probably just referring to those who are familiar with Western convention. If one take Japanese or Chinese convention, Dutch/German or Spanish/Italian are just dialect of Germanic language and Spanish and Italian are dialect of Roman language. This definition make far more sense, if these lanauges are written in characters instead of alphabet. Also, the equivalent Japanese/Chinese word for dialect is 方言, which literally means &quot;regional language/tongue&quot;. I don't think it is not at all problematic to call Ryukyuan as a regional language/tongue/word of Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is whether one apply the definition consistently. For example, if one assert that Ryukyuan is a language because of its unintelligibility, yet deny that Tsugaru speech is a language, then that person is being inconsistent and biased. Also, if one assert that Ryukyuan is just a subgroup of standard Japanese, that person is showing nationalist bias. As long as one recognised that there are different degree of regiona variation in japan and that difference between Ryukyu and mainland is the widest, then how you name each subcategory should be a matter of convention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one follow the &quot;convention&quot; of unintelligibility I'm fine with Ryukyuan being called language in European sense as long as major mainland dialects are recategorised as language. But given that, in Japan, hogen usually refers to unintelligible regional variation, it is an annoying hassule to call ryukyuan as genngo instead of hogen just so we look politically correct in the eyes of Western critics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9911" LastEditorUserId="9911" LastEditDate="2015-06-06T17:06:51.940" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T17:06:51.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12529" CreationDate="2015-06-06T19:19:02.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading aloud is a normal stage when children learn reading in an alphabetic script. (I am not sure about non-alphabetic scripts.) After a while the process usually gets automated to the point where due to certain shortcuts, reading without voicing the words is not just possible, but even significantly faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless some adults still read everything or at least some things aloud. They may not have read enough for the automation to happen, or they may have encountered unusual problems. Or they may have found that they process a text more thoroughly when they force themselves to read slowly by reading aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I am in the curious position that I read silently in my native German and in English, but I normally read books aloud when reading French. I think this is at least in part because I used to do this consciously to improve my French pronunciation and listening comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-06-06T19:19:02.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-07T00:37:48.723" Score="0" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone good at predicate logic and can help me to paraphrase the meaning of the following sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;F=favour D=be a dog P=be a park&#xA;(∀x) (Ǝy) Dx &amp;amp; Py &gt; Fx,y&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;H=hire M=be a manager E=be an employee&#xA;(Ǝx) (∀y) Mx &amp;amp; Ey &gt;Hx,y &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My attempt is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All dogs favor to be at least in one park. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is at least one manager who hires all employees.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this could be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9912" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-06-08T10:08:51.653" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T10:08:51.653" Title="Predicate logic" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-07T03:11:29.537" Score="1" ViewCount="1225" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know a visual sign that is an icon, an index and a symbol at the same time for all speakers in one community? I thought of the visual sign of a dove, but I'm afraid it is not an index.&#xA;Thank you very much! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9912" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T07:54:50.077" Title="Icon, Index and Symbol" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12533" CreationDate="2015-06-07T07:54:50.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like you're asking for help with homework. But it's perhaps an important issue to address, so here it goes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very way the question is formulated shows how confused and pointless this tripartite typology of sign is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask about something being both icon, index and symbol for a community of speakers. But, of course, something being a sign for something in a community of speakers is the very definition of symbol which describes a situation where the signifier (vehicle) is related to the signified (object) through convention. So if something is an icon or index, it should be related by virtue of similarity of contiguity. But we know that all such relationships are conventional and do not hold across cultures. So every possible example of an icon (arrows, maps, images) or an index (symptoms, parts) is also symbolic. But for something to be both an icon and an index is a contradiction in terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, many signifiers are both symbols, icons and indexes but not in relation to the same signified. For instance, smoke is an index in relation to fire, icon in relation to itself (e.g. in a picture of smoke) and symbol if used to communicate some preagreed meaning. But that does not seem to be what you're asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all of this does not help us solve any interesting or useful problems in semantics. It's a classification that's at best of interest to itself. The only important part is the question about symbolic communication (ie about convention) which is why I believe Roman Jakobson brought this to the attention of linguistics. However, ever since it's been treated as some sort of taxonomy on par with Linnean classifications which it is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is much more useful to talk about the range of motivation for the relationship between the signigier and signified (if we even want to talk in such terms). Because, there are many more motivations that enter this relationship than can be captured by such simplistic division. Just think about the fine grained complexity behind the attempted renaming of French to Freedom fries. Or the more common and successful renaming of government departments or academic disciplines. Those are all symbolic but a result of a range of motivations that include those of iconicity (similarity) and indexicality (contiguity) but also so much more (narratives, categorisations, scenarios, etc.) (See Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things for an interesting elaboration of this. Ch. 4 and 5 in particular.) Any simplistic and fixed classification like this one can only get in the way. It is the sort of things linguistics textbook authors and teachers of intro courses revel in but that's more useful as an exam question than a real analytic category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T07:54:50.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12543" CreationDate="2015-06-07T09:12:49.273" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need some help with bibliography to fill some topics that a need for my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im trying to create a pure &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; language where phonetic and syllable are linked to the meaning of the roots of the words, and the syntactic sense (so words are some kind of &lt;em&gt;image&lt;/em&gt; of the meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know something of Esperanto and Toki pona but I have a problem here, and this the reason why I opened this question: &lt;strong&gt;I need some bibliography about the most simple grammars and, specially, I need some bibliography about the most basic vocabulary some that language must have.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im trying to start from the basics: needs and relationships of humans, and going to more abstract things as time, space, quantitative, qualitative, relational or types of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9913" LastEditorUserId="9913" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T23:18:19.103" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T23:18:19.103" Title="Searching bibliography to develop a pure a priori language" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12535" CreationDate="2015-06-07T11:04:41.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a starter for constructed languages I recommend Detlev Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your subquestions seem to go in other directions ... called &quot;language universals&quot; in linguistics and being a highly controversial topic. For simple grammars, look at Creole Languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basic vocabulary is hard to define---but you may want to look at Basic English for a try. Once a language is used everywhere in life it develops a rich vocabulary for everything because it needs to do so. There is no such thing as a &quot;smallest living language&quot; (in biology, some bacteria with (almost) minimal genome exist in the wild, but that's a different story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-06-07T11:14:52.883" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T11:14:52.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12535" CreationDate="2015-06-07T13:05:17.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;definitely read &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfetta_nella_Cultura_Europea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Umberto Eco's book on the Search for A Perfect Language&lt;/a&gt;; he specifically discusses the approaches of Bishop Wilkins and others to obtain a perfect language whose words are (supposedly) logically derived from the order of things themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T13:05:17.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-07T11:43:15.290" Score="1" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book of Genesis Adam identifies Eve (Chava) as &quot;isha&quot; because this word [&quot;ishah&quot;] came from &quot;ish&quot; (man). the hebrew word &quot;ish&quot; is IN WHOLE etymologically the source of &quot;ishah&quot;, which the hebrew text points out. Therefore, is there any other languages (that claim to be the same age as biblical hebrew), in which the word MAN is IN WHOLE the root of the word WOMAN? (we already know that arabic, no matter how far one goes back, is not older than biblical hebrew.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9918" OwnerDisplayName="ninamag" LastEditorUserId="9918" LastEditDate="2015-06-08T08:51:06.297" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:49:40.780" Title="Etymological connections between words for &quot;man&quot; and &quot;woman&quot; in languages other than Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-07T16:25:14.813" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just jump right to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm given the following sentence - &quot;We remembered the scary dream&quot;, with the instructions to draw an X-Bar, and decide whether this is an ECM or a normal control type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is - it looks like a regular, simple sentence to me.&#xA;Trying, or rather, forcing the ECM tests with idiomas and expletive DP, I can reach the conclusion that this is, in fact, an ECM sentence.&#xA;But then it occured to me - if this is an ECM sentence, what's the inner predicate? Is it &quot;scary&quot;? Can &quot;scary&quot; even be considered a predicate? And how does this fit the ECM theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9914" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T16:25:14.813" Title="About ECMs and considering Adjective Phrases as predicates" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2015-06-07T22:48:22.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed the case in Arabic: al-marʼ “man (male)” and al-marʼa “woman”. -a is a productive feminine suffix. Hebrew ʼiš is a Semitic cognate with Arabic ʼinsān “human being (male or female)” which in turn is related to nisāʼ “women (plural)”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: Sanskrit nar- “man”, nārī- “woman”; also the equivalent words in Avestan, nar- and nāirī-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T21:49:40.780" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T21:49:40.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12535" CreationDate="2015-06-07T23:40:55.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;. This is a (controversial) theory of human language which argues that all human languages are built on about 65 'primes' - basic blocks of meaning which cannot themselves be divided into other blocks. After 40 years of research the list has been refined through the study of languages from many unrelated families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;access the list of primes here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/metalanguage-syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a page examining their syntax here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-06-07T23:40:55.567" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12552" CreationDate="2015-06-08T05:18:16.360" Score="3" ViewCount="1253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages change what writing system they use. For example, Old English &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;used to use&lt;/a&gt; Anglo-Saxon runes but eventually used the Latin alphabet, and Mongolian in Mongolia uses the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (while in China they still use the Traditional Mongolian alphabet). Likewise, some languages used to not have any writing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the change in writing system change the language, such as how words are pronounced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T22:11:07.103" Title="Does changing the writing system for a language change the language?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-08T07:43:53.943" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, German, and even Spanish, there is a constituent which appears to be a  a gray area between adverbs and conjunctions: the conjunctive adverb, or adverbial conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of those are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: consequently, hence, therefore&lt;br&gt;&#xA;German: darum, trotzdem, daher&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Spanish: cuando, como, por lo tanto, en consequencia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly, in Portuguese, there seem to be no adverbs classified as conjunctive adverbs. The word groups &quot;por isso&quot; and &quot;em consequência&quot; have exactly the same function as &quot;hence&quot; and &quot;therefore&quot; and bear &quot;por lo tanto&quot; and &quot;en consequencia&quot; as counterparts in Spanish, but they are classified solely as conjunctions, not adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the reason behind this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9919" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T16:16:00.610" Title="Why aren't there conjunctive adverbs in Portuguese?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2015-06-08T08:44:11.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a plain answer: No, it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, only a minority of speakers were literate; therefore the spoken language did not follow the writing. Even in societies were almost all adults are literate, the influence of the writing to the spoken language is rather small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But: A change of the writing system often comes with massive other changes in the speaker's community (like Atatürk's reforms, a foreign invasion, declaration of independence, changing of military and cultural affiliations, success of a new religion) that have massive impact on the language on all levels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a change of the writing system often coincides with a change of the language, but it does not cause it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T08:44:11.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12554" CreationDate="2015-06-08T11:16:25.180" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Java program that includes mapping phrases to RDF resources (named entity recognition).&#xA;It fails in the case of &quot;egyptian&quot; and &quot;Egypt&quot;. &#xA;How can I map such cases automatically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Porter Stemmer does not change &quot;egyptian&quot; and WordNet only includes &quot;Egypt&quot; in the text but not as a direct link, which I cannot extract automatically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Noun&#xA;&#xA;    {09719888} &amp;lt;noun.person&amp;gt;[18] S: (n) Egyptian#1 (egyptian%1:18:00::) (a native or inhabitant of Egypt)&#xA;    {07002660} &amp;lt;noun.communication&amp;gt;[10] S: (n) Egyptian#2 (egyptian%1:10:00::) (the ancient and now extinct language of Egypt under the Pharaohs; written records date back to 3000 BC)&#xA;&#xA;Adjective&#xA;&#xA;    {02983014} &amp;lt;adj.pert&amp;gt;[01] S: (adj) Egyptian#1 (egyptian%3:01:00::) (of or relating to or characteristic of Egypt or its people or their language) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9920" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T19:51:59.613" Title="How to map &quot;egyptian&quot; to &quot;Egypt&quot;?" Tags="&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2015-06-08T11:51:34.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Manchu, there's a group of nouns that belong to different synharmonic groups when they name males (a-group) or females (e-group), here are some of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;haha 'man' – hehe 'woman'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ama 'father' – eme 'mother'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;arslan 'lion' – erslen 'lioness'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T11:51:34.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-08T15:30:38.263" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a web application that allows users to transcribe, word by word, Early Modern English manuscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to tell users when a word they transcribed may be a new spelling variant of that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For doing that I need to interrogate a database via an API call. The database would be a comprehensive list of spelling variations of all words in Early Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried the &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.oed.com/subscriber-services/sru-service/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary API&lt;/a&gt; but it seems a bit unreliable (sometimes it takes 40+ sec to return just a few records).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone done this before? Does anyone know of any other API that could help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, can anyone point me to the most comprehensive list of Early Modern English variations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9922" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-06-08T16:58:33.300" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T16:58:33.300" Title="Early Modern English spelling variations dictionary" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2015-06-08T17:19:45.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;strong&gt;a long list of languages which changed their orthography&lt;/strong&gt; (maybe even several times). Sometimes gradually and sometimes through reform. Some of those changes were relatively small like the move from Schwabacher in German and some other languages, or introduction of diacritics as in Czech. Sometimes quite major such as the change from Arabic to Latin based script as in Turkish or from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in Turkemnistan (having previously switched to Cyrillic from Arabic script), or Korean switching from Chinese characters to its own orthography, etc. You could also think about the introduction of intermediate scripts in the teaching of Chinese writing (such as Pinyin or Bopomofo) or think about the fact that most speakers of languages with orthographies other than Latin are often by-scriptal - just through exposure to things like advertising or the Internet. You also have situations where the same language is written in different orthography depending on location (such as Turkmen being written in Arabic script outside of Turkmenistan). You also have cases where the only (or the main) distinguishing mark between official languages is the official orthography (Serbian and Croatian or Moldovan and Romanian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have ample evidence that the introduction of &lt;strong&gt;a new system of orthography does not change the language&lt;/strong&gt; (in as much as that is even a sensible way to formulate it). But it does have an impact on the community of speakers of the language in question (and as jknappen points out, is often accompanied by other changes). One of the avenues of impact could be simply that the speakers of the language all of a sudden have access to different writing traditions and that subsequent generations will have more limited access to the previous writing tradition of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it has been hypothesized that the introduction of writing to a language does have an impact on the development of syntactic features such as sentence and the formalization of things like genre. However, that is not due to orthography but rather the very nature of writing which is not just transcribing what is said but creates its own ways of saying things. So &lt;strong&gt;introducing writing to a language is very different to changing an existing orthography and is likely to have some impact on the language&lt;/strong&gt; - if only through borrowing of structures of other languages - as in the translation of the Bible which has been one of the first written text in many previously un-written languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T17:19:45.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2015-06-08T17:43:54.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a parallel double-borrowing from Greek with &lt;strong&gt;amphibolum&lt;/strong&gt;.(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Amphibolia (Cic), &lt;strong&gt;amphibolum&lt;/strong&gt;, id. quod,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Amphibologia   &lt;em&gt;....An ambiguity, an equivocation; when a sentence may be construed two ways&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  citing Terence and Quintillian. (Ainsworth, main thesaurus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical borrowing from Greek, rhetorical terms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In late Latin this word is given in Ainsworth 'Voces' dialects, late usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Amphibalum =&lt;strong&gt;amphibolum&lt;/strong&gt; a loose garment, enveloping the body from&#xA;  every side &lt;em&gt;Voss&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the physical meanings of &lt;em&gt;parabola&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;amphibolum&lt;/em&gt; the throwing is physically up/against or around.&#xA; But in rhetoric it is not so much the words, as the meanings that are thrown up against each other, or entangled with each other.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Greek rhetorical use is certainly first century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T17:43:54.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12547" CreationDate="2015-06-08T19:51:59.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One option may be using a more aggressive stemmer. E.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/stem/lancaster.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lancaster stemmer&lt;/a&gt; with NLTK in Python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;In [7]: stemmer = nltk.stem.LancasterStemmer()&#xA;&#xA;In [8]: stemmer.stem('egyptian')&#xA;Out[8]: 'egypt'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T19:51:59.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2015-06-08T22:11:07.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it’s not the case I’m glitching…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There`s some phenomenon which can be named ‘orthographic(al) pronunciation’, a kind of hypercorrection based on received spelling. (The term is coined in Russian (‘&lt;em&gt;орфографическое произношение&lt;/em&gt;’), AFAICS, to denote the impact of spelling on pronunciation.) But all this is the case of an existing, not new but maybe spreading through education, writing system. With an impact – I’ll be surprised if worthy of the 'language change' status.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I’d be even more surprised if such phenomena are observed in relation to changing writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9924" LastActivityDate="2015-06-08T22:11:07.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12568" CreationDate="2015-06-09T00:54:02.090" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Number is typically something that applies to nouns. In English, determinatives enter into scalar relationship and select singular or plural heads, but does it makes sense from a semantic point of view to say that a determinative like &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; is plural or that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; can be singular or plural? What about something like &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt;? I can find lots on number and nouns, but not on the semantic number of determinatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastEditorUserId="9277" LastEditDate="2015-06-10T19:14:10.803" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T19:14:10.803" Title="Can determinatives be semantically plural?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2015-06-09T02:19:25.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even the languages you mentioned as losing inflections in your question gained others, several of the inflections of verbs in romance languages came from periphrastic constructions in vulgar latin, most prominent the future and conditional tenses, for example, french &quot;tiendrai, tiendras, tiendra, tiendrons, tiendrez, tiendront&quot; come from contractions of tenire and a conjugation of habere in latin, the resemblance in the future tense suffixes and conjugations of avoir can even be seen in the modern language, &quot;ai as a avons avez ont&quot;. The conditional endings are of a similar origin, coming from a fusion of the infinitive and the imperfect conjugations of habere. I'm surprised no one above me mentioned this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9925" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T02:19:25.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-09T05:57:16.423" Score="0" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that phonetic analysis can be performed in various domains, among which: time, frequency, cepstral, and spectral. In the time domain, one studies e.g. Rate, energy, and duration. In the frequency domain one studies e.g. f0. This makes logical sense -- but how am I to conceive of these two domains as being independent of one another? I'm looking for more than a mathematical explanation (such as the one that rightly distinguishes cepstral from spectral) - but rather an intellectual framing to scaffold my interpretation of &quot;domain&quot;. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T02:45:59.973" Title="What's a good technique to understand the differences between the time and frequency domains?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12560" CreationDate="2015-06-09T13:12:00.870" Score="1" ViewCount="2837" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a book on America accent and there's a page with exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exercice&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circle the function words in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sky is blue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers are provided at the end of the book. For the first sentence the answer is the word &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, helping verbs and auxiliary verbs are function words, but in the sentence above the word &quot;is&quot; is a normal verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only function word in my sentence is the article &quot;the&quot;. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:44:29.770" Title="The verb BE as function word or content word" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12559" CreationDate="2015-06-09T13:38:08.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional grammar the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; was considered as a main verb (or &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; verb) when used on its own in a sentence. It was only considered an auxiliary when it was used as part of a passive construction or a continuous construction. However, we now understand that auxiliaries are a grammatical class of words that have the same grammatical properties. Lexical or main verbs do not share these properties. But the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; usually does, even when it is the only verb in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auxiliary verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important central properties which characterise auxiliary verbs are sometimes referred to as NICE properties. NICE is an acronym for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inversion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Negation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auxiliary verbs are necessary in English to make negatives with &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;. They also have a tendency to contract with the word &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;. If there is no auxiliary in the positive version of the sentence we use the dummy auxiliary &lt;em&gt;DO&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The giraffes can't stand up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We don't know what to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They mustn't leave.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The elephants aren't happy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentences above we see the negative particle occurring attached to the auxiliaries. When not contracted it must occur directly after the auxiliary in canonical negative sentences. Notice how the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; is fulfilling this function even though there is no following verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inversion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several instances in English when we need to invert the subject and auxiliary verb.  The most obvious is in yes/no questions. Obviously we can only do this if there is an auxiliary! When there is no normal auxiliary in the declarative counterpart sentence we use the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;DO&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the giraffes stand up?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we know what to do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must they leave?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are the elephants happy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice again that the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; is behaving just like the other auxiliary verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we delete material following an auxiliary verb leaving the auxiliary to &lt;em&gt;stand in&lt;/em&gt; for the missing material. In answer to the questions above we can give the following answers. The missing material is in brackets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can! [stand up]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We do. [know what to do]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They must! [leave]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are. [happy]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; is not an exception here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Emphasis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When wanting to add positive emphasis to a sentence, underlining that the sentence is true, we add emphasis by stressing the auxiliary, thereby giving it a full vowel (and preventing any contractions with subject pronouns). If there is no auxiliary in the canonical sentence we need to use the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;DO&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The giraffes &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; stand up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know what to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; leave.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; happy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see then that BE &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a member of this auxiliary verb family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Original Poster's question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Original Poster is right that the word &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is a function word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it is an auxiliary, the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; should be regarded as a function word too. The Original Poster is a skilled English pronunciation enthusiast (this question comes from a book on pronunciation). The verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; behaves like a function word in terms of pronunciation too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;, like many other function words usually doesn't take stress, although like other auxiliaries it is always stressed when part of a negative contraction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is &lt;strong&gt;'happ&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;n't &lt;strong&gt;happ&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like other auxiliaries it is often stressed when stranded at the end of a clause - even when it is not negative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, they &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like other function words, the different grammatical forms of &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; usually have two pronunciations. There is a normal one (referred to by linguists as the &lt;em&gt;weak&lt;/em&gt; form) for when the word is not stressed and not stranded. There is also a &lt;em&gt;strong form&lt;/em&gt;  for when these words are either stressed or stranded or both. For example the word &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt;, when not contracted is usually pronounced /əm/. But if it is the last word or if it is stressed, it is pronounced /æm/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whose coming? I am! (/æm/ because it is the last word, even though it is not stressed here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; coming! (/æm/ because stressed in emphatic sentence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I alone am able to help you. (/əm/ in normal unstressed occurrence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is useful then in terms of English phonetics and phonology to regard &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; as a function word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T15:04:01.597" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T15:04:01.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11993" CreationDate="2015-06-09T14:30:27.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a good rule for determining whether to use a [j] (like the first sound in &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;) or [w] to link two words like this. The first thing you need to know is that the choice depends on the first vowel and not the second. Therefore in terms of the Original Poster's question, the choice is determined by /i/ at the end of the word &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, and not by the beginning of the word &lt;em&gt;ok&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if the first vowel is either a high front vowel, for example /i/ or a diphthong ending in a high front vowel, in other words /eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ/, then we need to use a /j/ to link the words. If you think about it, [j] is phonetically like a high front vowel. It is the same type of sound. So this kind of makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand [w] is phonetically like a high back vowel. When the first word ends in a high back vowel such as /u/, or with a diphthong that ends in a high back vowel such as /oʊ/ or /aʊ/, then we use a [w] to link the two vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the vowel is not a high vowel, or doesn't end in a high vowel, then you may find linking with a glottal stop, [ʔ],  in Gen Am. In non-rhotic Englishes (those which don't have /r/ in the coda of the syllable) such as British RP, you will often find /r/ used to link a non-high vowel with a following vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T22:58:49.933" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T22:58:49.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12559" CreationDate="2015-06-09T14:52:18.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no, you're not right.  If you count auxiliaries as function words, &quot;is&quot; must be a function word, because it's an auxiliary.  See Araucaria's answer for why &quot;is&quot; is an auxiliary.  I thought I would just add a note here about how grammarians reason about such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People trained in traditional grammar tend to make nominal arguments about such matters, i.e., arguments based on what a thing is customarily named.  So, it may seem that &quot;is&quot; in your example, &quot;The sky is blue&quot;, cannot be an auxiliary verb, simply because there is no other verb around that it could be auxiliary to.  Is that a sensible argument?  Not really.  Because it assumes that the term &quot;auxiliary&quot; is a perfectly appropriate term, and that may not be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tendency in modern grammar is to use grammatical terms in a grammatical sense, rather than in a semantic sense.  We count &quot;is&quot; in your example as an auxiliary because it displays certain grammatical properties in common with other words called &quot;auxiliaries&quot;, as Araucaria goes into some detail about.  The fact that this &quot;auxiliary&quot; can occur where there is no verb to which it could be auxiliary means that this old term, &quot;auxiliary&quot;, is no longer perfectly appropriate.  But this is a terminological problem, not a grammatical problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't show that &quot;is&quot; is not an auxiliary by showing there is no other verb around.  All you can show that way is that to refer to it as &quot;auxiliary&quot; is misleading.  But how you refer to it doesn't affect what it actually is.  We should resist the temptation to make nominal arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T14:52:18.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12073" CreationDate="2015-06-09T14:54:14.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words with negative meanings in English are always stressed. If you think about this it isn't surprising as English tends to stress those words that are essential to understanding the gist of a sentence (those items that are sometimes loosely termed &quot;content&quot; words). The word &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is essential for a proper understanding of the sentence, if you don't hear it you'll understand more or less the opposite of the intended meaning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb adding a negative word to an English sentence does not affect whether the other words in the sentence are stressed (ignoring words that become contracted with &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and other oddities like that). It may however affect the &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; prominence of other words in the sentence. In other words it may appear more, or sometimes less prominent than another stressed syllable in the sentence. This just depends on the speaker's delivery of the sentence and any intended nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T16:09:27.547" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T16:09:27.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12566" CreationDate="2015-06-09T17:24:44.553" Score="4" ViewCount="1066" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to study between two languages. In that one is &lt;strong&gt;classical&lt;/strong&gt; language and other is &lt;strong&gt;tongue&lt;/strong&gt; language. How can I compare that two category? Which criteria is used for comparative study?&#xA;I want to study between Sanskrit and &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khandeshi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ahirani&lt;/a&gt; language. In that two languages Sanskrit is classical language (written text source is available) and Ahirani is tongue language written source is not available or rarely available. &#xA;In that case how can we compare that languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I observe some similarity between Ahirani and Sanskrit.&#xA;ex. Shakha (sans) ====  shak (ahirani) [vegetable food] &#xA;par (sans) === paar (Ahirani)  [Very long] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9800" LastEditorUserId="9800" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T18:17:29.497" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T13:23:51.063" Title="Which methodology is use for comparative study between two languages?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12565" CreationDate="2015-06-09T19:16:26.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation for the similarities that you observe is due to the fact that Ahirani derives from something like Sanskrit (a dialect of, or sister language). The Prakrits are probably well-enough attested that you would be better of comparing Ahirani and one of the intermediate languages like the Apabhraṃśas, in the same way that one could compare Latin and French (knowing that French descends from Latin -- so this isn't standard comparative linguistics where one compares the known Algonkian languages and hypothesizes what the original language looked like). However, before you can compare two Ahirani and anything else, you would need to have some materials on the language. &lt;em&gt;Ahirani-shabdkosh&lt;/em&gt; seems to be large enough that you might actually be able to put words of the language next to words of some older language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be useful to first read some of &lt;em&gt;The Indo-Aryan Languages&lt;/em&gt; edited by Cardona and Jain, which would put the development of the languages into perspective (it would tell you what is already known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&#xA;One problem in understanding the development of any modern especially Indo-Aryan language is that languages can freely borrow from each other. Prakrits borrowed from Sanskrit as well as retaining original words which went through centuries of language change; Apabhraṃśas did likewise, and modern languages can borrow from earlier (literary) languages as well as modern languages such as Hindi and Gujurati. Romance languages often have words that descended in the normal way from Latin (for example Spanish &lt;em&gt;leche&lt;/em&gt; &quot;milk&quot;), as well as words borrowed later from Latin (such as &lt;em&gt;lactar&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to lactate&quot;). In order to know whether you are dealing with borrowing or direct descent, you have to know the regular historical rules. If a language has a word like &lt;em&gt;ishwar&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;god&quot;, that is almost certainly a later borrowing from Sanskrit, because &lt;em&gt;shw&lt;/em&gt; was simplified millenia ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-06-09T20:46:05.677" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T20:46:05.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12556" CreationDate="2015-06-09T20:52:08.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's really hard to know what you would mean by semantic plural when it comes to things that are not nouns. Given that quantifiers bring plurality into the equation, you could argue that most are plural - every, many, several, pair, etc. You can say that those that pick out individual items like each or only are singular. But you'd end up with a lot of indeterminate cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages that have agreement between determiners and nouns, the determiners will end up with a plural form. But you get up with all sorts of crazy exceptions. In English, a good example is 'pair' which is semantically plural but you talk about 'a pair of lovers walks in'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're better off just describing the system than worrying about what is ultimately a fundamentally artificial distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-09T20:52:08.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12565" CreationDate="2015-06-10T05:35:13.417" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That what you mean are not comparative (historical) studies with correspondand methodology but contrastive studies with different methodology. Cf. answers above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9931" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T05:35:13.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-10T07:25:45.427" Score="1" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about spectral techniques to detect pathological phonation and came across the plan to establish relations between harmonic-harmonic and harmonic-noise ratios in for certain kinds of dysphonia. But what do these ratios have to do with voice pathologies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T18:59:27.043" Title="What do harmonic-harmonic and harmonic-noise ratios have to do with voice pathology?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12558" CreationDate="2015-06-10T12:35:29.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can think the frequency as the number of some same event happen in a time. So frequency is a &lt;strong&gt;number&lt;/strong&gt; in the domain of time, generally this number is a &lt;strong&gt;qualitative quantity&lt;/strong&gt;. Examples of frequency: few, rare, never, once, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is not an independent domain of time, it is more like a binding of the domain of time and the domain of quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;reverse&quot; to frequency is number of time at some event happen, i.e, how many time happen (not events, just time) at the point some event happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And generally this &quot;number of time at some event happen&quot; is what sometime we call just &quot;time&quot;, but a &quot;pure time&quot; dont rely in any quantity, it is just a dimension of reality (e.g., the concepts past, future or present dont rely on quantities). Generally time and space are mixed in many domains, you never see it &quot;pure&quot; or &quot;alone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So generally when you talk about time, but not ever, you are counting time at some point where something happen (5 minutes, 2 days, etc.) And when you talk of frequency you are counting the number of times some same event happen in a period (period: some quantity of time, e.g. I take a shower 1-2 times per day, I drink about 5 coffees per day, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im not linguistic, Idk anything about these kind of domains that you are talking about... but the general sense for frequency, or time, is this. Mathematically speaking frequency is just that: number of times some event happen in a fixed quantity of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9913" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T12:35:29.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12565" CreationDate="2015-06-10T13:23:51.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first task is to document the spoken language and to collect the already available documentation on it. The results of your documentation will be a dictionary, a grammar and sample texts or conversations in Ahirani (maybe with translations into a better known language). Even amateurs can do a lot of valuable work in the documentation of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have enough material you can start comparing whatever you want to compare: sounds, word forms, conjugations and declensions, syntax, special topics (like names of plants or animals), really whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T13:23:51.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12570" CreationDate="2015-06-10T15:23:22.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know from your previous questions on the topic, the waveform of a breathy voiced vowel is more sinusoidal in shape compared to that of a modal voiced vowel, which is more triangular. The power spectrum of the two types of vowels differ in that more of the energy is distributed over low frequencies in breathy vowels, compared to modal vowels. As I recall, Rothenberg has characterized this as saying that the main difference is in the amplitude of the fundamental, where a breathy vowel has a very prominent fundamental and higher harmonics are much lower in amplitude, and flatter, but modal vowels have a more consistent gentle roll-off across frequencies. By comparing the ratio of two harmonics, one can quantify this relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An obvious technique for quantifying spectral tilt would be regression through amplitude of harmonic peaks. However, this does not work the way you'd expect, since a breathy spectrum is a high fundamental and everything else flatter, and regression essentially treats the fundamental as an outlier. Comparison of H1 and H2 has been the most useful metric since it involves the fundamental, and minimizes the effect of formant differences. There is evidence that planned linguistically-contrastive phonation differences can involve a lengthening of the vocal tract via lowering of the larynx, which leads to formant shifts, which gives you a bit of an unsolvable problem. However, for pathological breathiness, this is probably not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harmonic to noise ratio calculation is based on the observation that with breathiness, there is a lot of non-harmonic noise in the signal (though this is not always true with linguistic breathiness), where the amplitude of the spectrum at a multiple of the fundamental doesn't stand out so distinctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether research on the topic has concluded that there are any reliable acoustic differences between pathological breathiness and phonemic breathiness. (Likewise, creakiness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&#xA;Harmonic-to-harmonic measures are supposed to quantify the concept of &quot;spectral tilt&quot;, which relates to the overall waveform shape which in turn relates to the glottal volume velocity function which relates to how the vocal folds open and close. The ideal (in the sense of an ideal frictionless surface) is that there would be some amplitude at the fundamental, and other amplitudes at multiples of the fundamental, and nothing in between. However, that ain't the reality of it, so besides the energy contributed by the vibration of the vocal folds, there is &quot;noise&quot;, which is low-level random energy (which may have a particular frequency distribution). So then you need a way of discerning the &quot;noisiness&quot; of the signal. As applied to phonation types, as far as I know the added noise should be evenly distributed across frequencies, so you don't expect concentrations of high-frequency noise as you get with [s]; nor should the noise be just low-frequency. So there is a difference in expectation, compared to measures of spectral tilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you mean by &quot;harmonic-to-harmonic ratio&quot; versus &quot;harmonic-to-frequency ratio&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-06-10T18:59:27.043" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T18:59:27.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12545" CreationDate="2015-06-10T16:16:00.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise may be wrong. According to a few web searches, &quot;consequentemente&quot; does exist - see for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2000:0127:FIN:PT:PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2000:0127:FIN:PT:PDF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would have been translated by a native speaker of European Portuguese, probably from English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that such instances usually come as a result of translation from languages that have it, especially English, and that &quot;consequentemente&quot; isn't particularly traditional. But if it was imported, that seems proof enough that it isn't forbidden in Portuguese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I remember reading from Richard Feynman , who was learning Portuguese at the time, that &quot;consequentemente&quot; is something he decided to coin from his knowledge of adverb-building (he couldn't think of how to say &quot;so&quot;.) He says that his using it was praised by one of his Brazilian interlocutors: &quot;He speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words! CONSEQUENTEMENTE!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're the native speaker, so you could be the one to say that &quot;consequentemente&quot; isn't real Portuguese, but it is definitely out there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&amp;amp;pg=PA201&amp;amp;lpg=PA201&amp;amp;dq=feynman+consequentemente&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=etQYgelN-0&amp;amp;sig=TDewf4YPIXWggaWjyrXlm4GZ9MQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CCEQ6AEwAGoVChMItM664sCFxgIVhNcsCh1b9ADi#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=feynman%20consequentemente&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://books.google.de/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&amp;amp;pg=PA201&amp;amp;lpg=PA201&amp;amp;dq=feynman+consequentemente&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=etQYgelN-0&amp;amp;sig=TDewf4YPIXWggaWjyrXlm4GZ9MQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CCEQ6AEwAGoVChMItM664sCFxgIVhNcsCh1b9ADi#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=feynman%20consequentemente&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T16:16:00.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6551" CreationDate="2015-06-10T20:24:43.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could have suppletion and a degree of regular inflection. For example, in French, the verb ALLER ('go') has suppletive stems but its inflectional marks are regular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PRS.1PL : Nous all-&lt;em&gt;ons&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;=&gt; Nous chant-&lt;em&gt;ons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FUT.1PL : Nous i-&lt;em&gt;rons&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;=&gt; Nous chante-&lt;em&gt;rons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually still described as irregular inflection because of the stem allomorphy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another classical distinction would be the difference between say ALLER again in French and BOIRE. BOIRE and ALLER both display stem allomorphy but in the case of BOIRE the differences in stems have evolved from the same phonological representation (allomorphy) whereas the stems in ALLER come from different lexical verbs with defectiveness reassembling to make a new one...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T20:24:43.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8417" CreationDate="2015-06-10T20:28:35.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first statement is about the fact that a form exists but it bears no inflectional marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second statement says that some forms don't exist at all (e.g. there is no gerund for CAN).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T20:28:35.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-10T23:30:12.377" Score="3" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;difference in pronunciation between women and men&lt;/em&gt; when speaking a language, as opposed to the difference in the voice of men and women? The context for the question arises from my looking up the dictionary for some word in &lt;em&gt;French&lt;/em&gt;; the verb &quot;&lt;em&gt;champagniser&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which is &quot;to turn into &lt;em&gt;Champagne&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (as if you could have something like &quot;champagnize&quot; in English). I have translated the relevant part of the entry for your convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/champagniser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Champagniser&lt;/a&gt;, transitive verb, &lt;em&gt;Préparer des vins blancs de crus divers&#xA;  selon la méthode champenoise&lt;/em&gt; (cf. Ali-Bab, &lt;em&gt;Gastr. pratique&lt;/em&gt;, 1907, p.&#xA;  154). &lt;em&gt;Vins de Touraine champanisés [sic]&lt;/em&gt; (A. Daudet, &lt;em&gt;Immortel&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  1888, p. 242).− [ʃ ɑ ̃paɳize]. The majority of the dictionaries, especially since &lt;em&gt;Guérin&lt;/em&gt; 1892, record &lt;em&gt;champagniser&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;em&gt;Besch.&lt;/em&gt; 1845 only writes &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;champaniser&lt;/em&gt;. This form is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Larousse. 19e, Nouveau. Larousse. illustré, Littré&lt;/em&gt;. Such a form is used alongside &lt;em&gt;champagniser&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Quillet&lt;/em&gt; 1965. This written form represents a modification in the pronunciation of the articulation of [ɳ]. The nasal [ɳ] is altered from Old French, through Middle French, up to the beginning of the 18th. Hence you could hear in Paris [ano] instead of [aɳo]. (agneau=lamb) Cf. &lt;em&gt;Bourc.-Bourc.&lt;/em&gt; 1967, § 198. Moreover, G. Straka in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TPWbMwEACAAJ&amp;amp;dq=inauthor:%22Georges%20Straka%22%20femmes&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIpYHaldCDxgIVTxKSCh0yhgDD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quelques observations phonétiques sur le langage des femmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (A few observations on phonetics about the language of women) in &lt;em&gt;Orbis&lt;/em&gt;, 1952, t. 1, no2, pp.&#xA;  340-345) makes the following remark concerning the instability of the [ɳ] consonant which is normally occlusive and palatal: ,,It is sometimes palatal, sometimes velar, and when it is palatal, sometimes the tip of the tongue curves behind the inferior incisors (which is normal), some other times it rests against the alveolar and the hard palate; we can further observe, next to the occlusive articulation of the ɳ, a more or less relaxed and constrictive one. We have explained the instability of this consonant with the fact that, as a palatal, it stands now isolated in the French phonetic system.`` G. Straka (ibid.) underscores that the consonant is more often &quot;atteinte&quot; (unclear to me; it's literally &lt;em&gt;reached&lt;/em&gt;; or the &lt;em&gt;impediment&lt;/em&gt; - as in the speech being impeded phonetically; in any case it's more or less of something) with women compared to men, which he explains with the articulatory energy which is required for pronouncing this consonant, such an energy being less powerful with women than with men. − 1&lt;sup&gt;res&lt;/sup&gt; attest. 1839 (Boiste d'apr. &lt;em&gt;Lar. Lang. fr.&lt;/em&gt;), av. 1845 &lt;em&gt;champaniser&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Dict. du comm.&lt;/em&gt; ds Besch. &lt;em&gt;Suppl.&lt;/em&gt;), 1866 &lt;em&gt;champagniser&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Lar.&lt;/em&gt; 19e); de champagne&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, suffixe. -iser*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ &lt;em&gt;Trésor de la langue française informatisé&lt;/em&gt; (TLFi) - from&#xA;  « champagniser » ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I gather not all vowels and consonants require the same &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articulatory&lt;/a&gt; energy&lt;/em&gt;, and the one described therein requires a particular level, and in that instance there is maybe more of a marked difference between men and women. In the &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt; article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;human voice&lt;/a&gt;, I read women and men have a different size of vocal chords, and this is mostly about &lt;em&gt;pitch&lt;/em&gt;, consistent with what I've observed since childhood, and not my concern here. I found a document called &lt;em&gt;Phonétique acoustique&lt;/em&gt; (Christine Meunier, 2007, on p. 9) where the author says that beyond the ability we have to identify the sex of the speaker based on pitch, it is much harder to come to terms with the reality of the difference in the pronunciation of vowels between women and men; there is reference to the size of the &lt;em&gt;resonators&lt;/em&gt; (bigger for men) and higher &lt;em&gt;formant&lt;/em&gt; values for women (Tubach, 1989); an example is given for the &lt;em&gt;/e/&lt;/em&gt; formant which averages at 365 Hz, 1961 Hz, 2644 Hz (men); and 417 Hz, 2351 Hz et 3128 Hz (women). I don't understand how such values can mean anything besides pitch. &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/q/14035&quot;&gt;Elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; I've asked a language specific question about &quot;&lt;em&gt;champagniser&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, as the ɳ retroflex it supposedly contains is said to &lt;a href=&quot;http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonne_occlusive_nasale_r%C3%A9troflexe_vois%C3%A9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not exist&lt;/a&gt; in the French language.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the main difference, &lt;strong&gt;excluding pitch&lt;/strong&gt;, between men and woman when speaking (pronunciation), and is it one single factor/biological difference or many that make up this difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the difference apply to every sound equally; or more to vowels or consonants, or a subset of either; why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally, does this apply to every language or are there certain languages where this difference will be more/less obvious, and if so, why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. I think this is related to a debate about whether [ɲ] and [ŋ] stand on their own in French or are simply allophone constructs for /nj/; but this is all beyond my nonexistent expertise with any of those topics and not the focus of this question here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2015-06-10T23:30:12.377" Title="Specifics about the impact of natural gender on pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-11T14:33:26.580" Score="1" ViewCount="747" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Cran-&quot; is the eponymous and archetypal &quot;cranberry morpheme&quot;, which Wikipedia describes as &quot;a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning or grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other.&quot; This is roughly what I've always taken a &quot;cranberry morpheme&quot; to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it itself still one? When I start explaining the cran morpheme to people, I realize that what jumps to mind is that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; other words with &quot;cran&quot;: Ocean Spray's well-known Cran-Apple Juice and less-well-known Cran-Strawberry, plenty of &quot;Cran-Orange&quot; recipes on the internet, and the cocktail &lt;em&gt;crantini&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it now seems that &quot;cran-&quot; has an &quot;independent meaning&quot;, which is &quot;pertaining to or containing cranberry&quot;. Can it still be a cranberry morpheme? Am I missing something about what a cranberry morpheme is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T16:27:04.143" Title="Is &quot;cran&quot; still a cranberry morpheme, given Cran-Apple, crantini, etc.?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12581" CreationDate="2015-06-11T16:27:04.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term was popularized by Aronoff in &lt;em&gt;Word Formation in Generative Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, where (p. 10) he characterizes such morphemes as only occurring in one English word. This isn't a technical term requiring definition, so you can't be sure whether &quot;only one word&quot; is a defining property or an incidental one. (His discussion is a bit incomplete since one of the putative morphemes, &lt;em&gt;Boysen&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;boysenberry&lt;/em&gt;, is the name of the inventor of the berry so that isn't really a &lt;em&gt;hapax&lt;/em&gt;). However, that doesn't give &lt;em&gt;cran-&lt;/em&gt; an independent meaning, it simply elevates the morpheme from &lt;em&gt;hapax&lt;/em&gt; to &quot;limited distribution&quot;, making it more like &lt;em&gt;-mit&lt;/em&gt;. Since the coining of those terms, that would make &lt;em&gt;huckle&lt;/em&gt; the only cranberry morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, there has been no inclination in linguistics to identify &lt;em&gt;choco&lt;/em&gt; as a cranberry morpheme, despite appearing as a substring of &lt;em&gt;chocolate&lt;/em&gt;. Notice however that one can form (and encounter in speech) words like &lt;em&gt;chocoholic&lt;/em&gt;. This does not indicate that &lt;em&gt;choco-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-holic&lt;/em&gt; are morphemes, rather it points to a prosodically-based word-formation process where (as a rough approximation) one foot from one word can be compounded with a foot from another word. That is what is behind &lt;em&gt;cran-tini&lt;/em&gt; and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T16:27:04.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-11T17:08:26.147" Score="6" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;This neat diagram was brought up on english.SE &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, based on research by Finkenstaedt, Thomas and Joseph M. Williams describing where words come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/07b9V.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the wikipedia page it also states that latin also includes specialized medical terms, which kind of defeats the purpose in regards to giving an impression of word origins. Is there any source that describes the exact same thing, but multiplies each word 'value' by the amount it is used? Or put differently, taking the entire theoretical corpus of English literature and for each word counts it's origin (germanic, latin/french, unknown, etc.), regardless of whether it already got counted it before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3239" LastEditorUserId="3239" LastEditDate="2015-10-24T08:55:46.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T18:13:29.960" Title="Language origin of english words by usage" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12317" CreationDate="2015-06-11T17:10:25.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interpretation of how &quot;the fricative rubs out the stop&quot; before syllabic n in &quot;soften&quot;, &quot;chasten&quot;, etc., is that first the stop assimilates completely to the preceding fricative, giving us a doubled fricative (i.e., a geminate), then the long fricative shortens, so the t just disappears altogether, but in two steps.  According to an idea of David Stampe's, this is how segment deletions always work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do a deletion in two steps when you can do it in one? (You are probably asking this in your head.)  Well, here is one reason.  If we know it's an assimilation going on, rather than deletion, we expect that it will be subject to any general law that constrains assimilation.  Here, there is an important such law, the Law of Similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you phonologists know about the Law of Similarity?  It's a very powerful phonological principle which requires that when there are contextual constraints on a phonological assimilation process, similarity constraints are allowed, but dissimilarity constraints are prohibited.  The first sounds to undergo a process are those that are most similar to preceding and following sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, if we think that &quot;soft + en&quot; must go through an assimilatory change first, &quot;soft + en&quot; -&gt; &quot;soff + en&quot;, and we know that the change is conditioned in part by what segment precedes the t that assimilates, the Law of Similarity tells us that segments preceding the t that are less similar to t than f is to t may prevent the change t -&gt; f, but segments preceding t that are even more similar to t than f is must also assimilate, since t assimilates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is more similar to a t than f?  Well, f and t are both voiceless obstruents, but they are at different places of articulation.  How about s?  S and t are also both voiceless obstruents, but they are both alveolars, so even more similar.  So we know that if t -&gt; f / sof_en, also t -&gt; s / lis_en.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Law of Similarity was proposed to constrain complete consonantal assimilations in an Ohio State U dissertation by James Hutcheson.  I never read the dissertation, but I'm familiar with a condensed version by Hutcheson that appears in &lt;strong&gt;Proceedings of the 5th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society&lt;/strong&gt; (but I'm not sure it was the 5th -- maybe 6th).  I thought it was such a beautiful idea, I called it &quot;Hutcheson's Law&quot;, for a time, but David Stampe tells me it is expressed earlier in the work of the French phonologist Paul Passy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-11T17:10:25.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2015-06-12T12:36:16.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native German and Russian speakers have no problem with cases for the same reason that native English speakers have no problem with choosing between definite article, indefinite article and no article at all (this is hard for native Russian speakers), or between prepositions: They pick up the rules naturally because everybody around them uses them correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, today's case endings were originally postpositions (like prepositions except that they come after the word they refer to) that eventually fused with the preceding words, whereas English and French have developed a new rudimentary case system with the prepositions &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; (in French &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;) after losing the original Indoeuropean one completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a phenomenon in German is that the inevitable loss of case distinctions is happening faster in most dialects than in the standard language. As a result, children who grow up as dialect speakers and don't hear much Standard German may not learn naturally about the distinction between the two object cases dative and accusative, or may not be exposed to the genitive at all. They will then learn these distinctions in a natural, unsystematic way (i.e. not taught explicitly) along with reading and writing and all other aspects of Standard German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-06-13T17:53:34.360" LastActivityDate="2015-06-13T17:53:34.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12589" CreationDate="2015-06-12T18:55:46.640" Score="3" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure exactly when almost the entire population was exposed to Mass but until Protestantism everyone heard Latin every Sunday and Good Friday and Holy Thursday and Christmas and Epiphany and Jan 1 and Cross-Quarter Day and..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion was, uh, crucial. Their whole lives were about the eternity after death. Why wasn't that enough to keep everyone speaking Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, the more they diverge the less pull towards Mass Latin the common speech will feel but how did it manage to get away from that pull in the first place? Anyway, the comedic end point is that from the Middle Ages to the 1960s Mass was looking at the priest looking away from you, using an alien language, singing Bible verses in alien, and everyone would have to sit through that to avoid Hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9943" LastEditorUserId="9943" LastEditDate="2015-06-12T19:35:07.887" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T12:52:47.017" Title="Why did Latin fragment so much?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12587" CreationDate="2015-06-12T22:54:11.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Diglossia&lt;/a&gt; - the use of two different dialects by the same people for different purposes - is very common round the world - I doubt if it is an exaggeration to say it is the norm, at least where literacy is rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;high&quot; dialect is frozen (for example, for religious reasons) and the vernacular is not, in time they are likely to diverge far enough to become clearly different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also happened in North India, where Sanskrit remained a living literary language for a thousand years after it ceased to be anybody's mother tongue, and the Middle and then New Indic languages developed around it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-06-12T22:54:11.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12587" CreationDate="2015-06-13T07:10:06.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should probably question the premise of your question. Latin did not 'fragment so much'. It went through the expected amount of historical change for a language in its geopolitical situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons why the development were not halted by the Christian canon and liturgical processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The presence of a single canon has never been enough to stop language development. As Colin Fine says - diglossia is quite a common condition. Arabic, Indic Languages, Sinitic languages. Even the many languages developing from English are all evidence of this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the time Christianity became the official religion (and certainly by the time it became dominant and much later universal), the diversionary processes had been long under way. And, of course, Christianity was not originally identified with Latin nor did much of the early intellectual ferment around it happen in Latin. So by the time Latin came to have the sacred liturgical status in the West, it was long gone as a daily spoken language the presence of which could be bolstered by religion. The processes that kept Latin so strong for so long were political and bureaucratic and it was the association of religion with power that solidified the role of Latin in Christianity, not the other way around. It is fairly well accepted that the organization of Western Christianity is the one surviving feature of Roman imperial bureaucracy that persists (albeit in trace form) even till today.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think would be a more interesting question is why this happens sometimes and not other times. The two languages that underwent historical change but almost no splintering are Greek and Persian. They were both the official languages of vast empires and lingua francas long after the political unity ceased. Yet, they never gave rise to new major languages (despite having ample dialects) in the same way that Latin, Arabic, and many other 'proto' languages did and English is in the process of maybe doing. I think it would be possible to trace the cultural and political forces in play that show all the nexus points where these developments were diverted (the presence of strong canons is probably not a strong factor) but they still pose an interesting counter example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-13T07:10:06.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-13T11:23:35.207" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember learning about Bolinger's principle (basically, when there is a verb complement situation like &quot;I like [verb complement]&quot; or &quot;I want to [verb complement]&quot;, gerunds are preferred to express completed/repeated actions and infinitives to express actions that have not yet been completed or taken; so &quot;I like swimming&quot; vs. &quot;I want to swim&quot;) in grad school back in the 90s. I was wondering if corpus linguistics research has provided evidence to either confirm or disconfirm this principle. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9946" LastEditorUserId="9946" LastEditDate="2015-06-13T11:28:53.017" LastActivityDate="2015-06-13T11:28:53.017" Title="Does corpus linguistics research confirm/disconfirm Bolinger principle?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2015-06-14T02:38:01.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what a lexeme is, but if you can construct examples where one form is used as grammatical antecedent for pronominalizing or deleting another, this could show they are the same in some respect.  For instance, in &quot;She was swimming, it looked like fun, and so I decided to, also&quot;, &quot;swimming&quot; licenses the deletion of &quot;swim&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-06-14T02:44:08.220" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T02:44:08.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-14T09:02:04.440" Score="2" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was doing my homework and got stuck with questions iii and iv. The book doesn't contain information regarding these two questions and I don't know what applies here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EGaGE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Column 1) -er is acceptable after stops and nasals (???)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Column 2) -er isn't acceptable after a vowel/semivowel sound or liquid (???)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iv)&#xA;No, when -er means 'a person who does x' it doesn't apply. -&gt; discove&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;er (liquid), ro&lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;er (semivowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have a clue about these answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9948" LastEditorUserId="9948" LastEditDate="2015-06-14T11:57:34.537" LastActivityDate="2015-06-14T11:57:34.537" Title="Constraints for the -er affix" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12057" CreationDate="2015-06-15T00:04:21.240" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never been able to understand the description given to digraph [æ] by Ladefoged and other phoneticians, as lax.  To me, judging just on intuitive kinaesthetic grounds, it seems tense.  And when I say it, but relax slightly to let the articulation centralize, what I get sounds to me like Boston ah (which I write [a]). (I'm not from Boston.) That is, I'm suggesting, that Boston ah is a low front lax vowel, the lax counterpart of the tense digraph vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T00:04:21.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12051" CreationDate="2015-06-15T03:02:41.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking three completely different questions between your title and the actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title is asking about reviving - this would mean making a dead language a live spoken language again. To that the answer would be a qualified yes. Look for instance at modern Hebrew. But that still requires some form of speech to be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The body is asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Learning a language from texts and a dictionary. In that case, yes, it is possible for humans to learn a language in that way (at least the written part of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Learning a language for an alien from texts and a dictionary. The problem here is that a dictionary would not be of any use aliens unless it was a bilingual dictionary between their language and the human language. If it's just the dictionary of (say) English, then that's simply another text in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be possible to make sense of the texts for the aliens only if they could observe the context in which it is used. Simply seeing lots of texts is not enough without some external reference - as attested by the many undeciphered languages. This would be doubly hard since the Aliens would presumably not have the same script or maybe not even the same way of writing (phonetic vs syllabic vs ideographic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T03:02:41.403" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-15T05:35:14.533" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of forensic linguistics practice, I must assess the relative age of multiple individuals based only voice. One crucial variable is VOT, which is known to decrease with age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's say hypothetically that I classify the individuals into two groups: one with a longer VOT than the other. However, I also want to do some statistical analysis to make the nuance of my results clearer by the jury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What statistical techniques are optimal to these ends, in the case of (non)-normally distrubted data - how will normality be characterized? ANOVA, T, Kruskal-Wallis, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-06-15T08:13:53.283" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:11:20.377" Title="What statistical methods are appropriate to comparing e.g. VOT across different groups?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12596" CreationDate="2015-06-15T14:11:20.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you've given enough detail about what you want to do with 'some statistical analysis', but I'll take a stab. I am not a stats expert, so these rough ideas will need to be checked by someone who is; I present them for you to know what to ask about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be able to say 'it's 85% likely that this person is from the longer VOT group', that sounds like a mixture model approach (there are many mixture model packages in your stats environment of choice). But you need enough data to figure out what the groups are, and you're collapsing what you described as a continuous variable into a 2-categorical variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a better approach would be a mixed-effects linear model (using e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LME4&lt;/a&gt;). With VOT as your output variable, this approach would allow you to consider the relative contributions of various factors: speaker_age, but also gender, language background/dialect, control factors like vowel/phonetic context/word_frequency, etc., and (crucially) estimate the interaction of these features. Using the resulting model, you could make predictions and construct confidence intervals for those predictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T14:11:20.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1656" CreationDate="2015-06-15T20:47:12.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alemannic (aka Swiss German) Verb Doubling. A verb surfaces twice but is semantically computed once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;go 'go'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;De  Hans got  go poschte&#xA;the John goes go shop&#xA;&quot;John goes shopping&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;afo 'begin'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;denn fot   s   bluet afo   zirkuliere&#xA;then begin the blood begin circulate&#xA;&quot;then the blood begins to circulate&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;renne 'run', go 'go' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here, 'go' &quot;doubles&quot; 'renne'. My source accounts for it with generative semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;do   isch alles an d   Fänschter grennt go lose&#xA;then has  all   to the windows   run    go listen&#xA;&quot;this is when everybody ran to the windows and listened&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This syntactic phenomenon, Alemannic Verb Doubling, does not exist in other Germanic varieties. Source: I'm writing my thesis on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T20:47:12.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7123" CreationDate="2015-06-15T21:05:20.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inscription&lt;/strong&gt; I'd generally say. You ask for a surface name, so it depends which surface: on the phonological surface, there's these inscriptions or &lt;strong&gt;morphemes&lt;/strong&gt;, which then go to become phones as you said. On the other, the meaning surface, the inscriptions are interpreted as morphemes or morphemes' &lt;strong&gt;features&lt;/strong&gt;, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T21:05:20.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11534" CreationDate="2015-06-15T21:22:29.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with users Gaston Ümlaut, Adam Liter; the closest thing to this is, I think, a gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ctan.org/pkg/expex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;expex&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\usepackage{expex}&#xA;&#xA;\pex                                   %itemizes this paragraph (until \xe) as (1), (2) ...&#xA;\begingl                               % begin gloss&#xA;\gla Fliegen fliegen Fliegen nach //   % end all three lines with a double forward slash&#xA;\glb flies fly flies after //          % this line aligns with gla&#xA;\glft &quot;Flies fly after flies&quot; //       % this one doesn't&#xA;\endgl&#xA;\xe&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-15T21:22:29.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-16T05:16:00.083" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;We've only got a thousand dollars, you know. Winning against him is impossible.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, &quot;winning against him is impossible&quot; does not mean that it is impossible, in general, for anyone to beat him. Rather, it means that the speakers can't beat him at whatever situation they are in. However, words like &quot;for us&quot; and &quot;here&quot; to indicate this are omitted, and I can't come across a term to describe this. The closest I have come to is ellipsis, but none of the examples on wikipedia seem to fit what I'm looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9953" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T05:16:00.083" Title="What kind of ambiguity is this called?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12603" CreationDate="2015-06-16T07:46:26.327" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English appositive constructions, noun phrases can be juxtaposed to convey the fact that they are co-referential.    &quot;I, Don Quixote,&quot; &quot;John, the baker,&quot; &quot;the art-object, a bronzed umbrella,&quot; and &quot;the other dog, the dangerous one&quot; are all appositive constructions.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with robust case-systems, such as Latin, Russian, and Finnish, do appositive constructions typically each comprise noun phrases in the same case?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there typically a case in such languages that marks a noun phrase as apposite another one?   For instance, could genitive be used in this manner to create phrases like &quot;dog-NOM  sighthound-GEN&quot; to mean &quot;the dog, a sighthound&quot;?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T08:52:04.623" Title="In languages with robust case systems, such as Latin, Russian, and Finnish, is there a case in which appositives commonly occur?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12602" CreationDate="2015-06-16T08:19:56.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, and similarly in other languages, the apposite is in the same case as its antecedent, for example &quot;Ego, Claudius&quot; (I, Claudius, both nominative), &quot;Me, Claudium, vidit&quot; (he saw me, Claudius, both accusative.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T08:52:04.623" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T08:52:04.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-16T09:21:56.627" Score="7" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there's a language where grammatical tense is not expressed by inflections on its verbs, but by inflecting some other part of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9954" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-06-16T16:00:36.417" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T04:52:57.287" Title="Is there any language where time is grammaticalised by inflections on something other than its verbs?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11348" CreationDate="2015-06-16T11:34:46.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like L3viathan commented: Portmanteau&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T11:34:46.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2015-06-16T12:18:48.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;People don't simplify something they only know implicitly. Like you don't only use 4 of your fingers because the 5th one is too complicated to involve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suggest that case was invented by someone, imposed on speakers and now aquired by speakers. For the latter to be true, case is a far too complicated morphologic-syntactic phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Der Hund fängt die Katz&#xA;the.N dog catches the cat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Den Hund fängt die Katz&#xA;the.A dog catches the cat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in one, the cat dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No speakers simplify this (Akkusativ and Nominativ) (also see this, in German). Genetiv, however, is a syntactically-not-so-important thing that has always been used in the subpart of language that people consider formal, i.e. for written documents and so on. People prefer  'of' + Dative (so they have Akk, Nom, Dat, and ditch Gen)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;cat's paw (A): paw the.G cat&#xA;          (B): paw of the.D cat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that, when learned as a foreign language (ie not acquired as your native one), people have a hard time getting Case-caused morphology right. I always say, there's no chance I'd get this right if it weren't my native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T23:53:03.903" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T23:53:03.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3024" CreationDate="2015-06-16T12:30:35.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is Alemannic Verb Doubling where &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt; ⇔ &lt;strong&gt;morphologic duplication&lt;/strong&gt;. Iff the verb subordinates another one, there's duplication of this verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Er [got *(go) [poschte]]&#xA;He  goes  go   shopping&#xA;&#xA;Er [got (*go) (zum    Lädili)]&#xA;He  goes       to the shop&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-16T12:30:35.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-16T15:50:50.537" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, there is a lot known about acquisition of second language by adults, and the different degrees of fluency (at least on the phonetic and phonological levels) which are obtainable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What models are most commonly used to describe second language acquisition (in terms of speech sounds)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive my ignorance, I have little experience with second language acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T21:30:28.300" Title="Which linguistic theories account for non native accent?" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12614" CreationDate="2015-06-17T08:11:55.030" Score="4" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Russian, where [k]/[kʲ] and [g]/[gʲ] are phonemically distinct, I've always been intrigued by the fact that several languages that don't have that distinction, and are in fact hardly &quot;into&quot; palatalisation at all, tend to favour what I'd describe as [kʲ] and [gʲ] realisations over &quot;plain&quot; [k] and [g], or at least go for something in between. This includes many varieties of English, as well as French, Swedish, Persian, and perhaps some others that I'm not aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most if not all of these cases, the plain and palatalised versions co-exist as allophones, depending on position; [kʲ]/[gʲ] is especially frequent word-finally. On the other hand, this doesn't happen to any other consonants: the English &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the speaker, is about equally likely to be pronounced as [teɪk] or as [teɪkʲ] (or close to it), while in no English accent does &lt;em&gt;tape&lt;/em&gt; even remotely sound like [teɪpʲ]. Also, the phenomenon appears to be rather sporadic; it exists in French but not in Spanish, in Swedish but not in Danish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any studies or proposed explanations as to why and under what conditions these palatalised allophones develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T14:09:12.823" Title="Palatalised allophones of /k/ and /g/ as a cross-linguistic phenomenon" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-17T13:41:24.457" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Origin of Agent Markers&lt;/em&gt; by Enrique L. Palancar an attempt has been made to list morphemes used both 1.) as &lt;strong&gt;a case morpheme belonging to a noun&lt;/strong&gt; and 2.) as &lt;strong&gt;a morpheme on such nouns that express the agent in a passive (main) sentence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (in the book this is referred to as &lt;strong&gt;case syncretism&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each of those morphemes, there is given a) the &amp;quot;language name&amp;quot; (that was probably assigned in a source grammar), b) the written form and c) one or more specific semantic categories (e.g.: &amp;quot;Ablative&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Perlative&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Instrumental&amp;quot; etc.).&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there are several entries that list unclear language names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Please help distinguish these 3 &amp;quot;Eskimo&amp;quot; languoids. I would like to be able to assign a specific iso code (or glottocode) to each:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Greenlandic&amp;quot; - Suffix &lt;em&gt;-mik&lt;/em&gt; (Semantics: Instrumental, as in &amp;quot;with/using something&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Labrador XIX&amp;quot; - Suffix &lt;em&gt;-nun&lt;/em&gt; (Allative (as in &amp;quot;to some place&amp;quot;), Dative (as in &amp;quot;for someone&amp;quot;))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Inuktitut&amp;quot; - Suffix &lt;em&gt;-mut&lt;/em&gt; (Instrumental, Dative, Cause),&#xA;Suffix &lt;em&gt;-mit&lt;/em&gt; (Ablative, as in &amp;quot;away from somewhere&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a language tree with all the existing languages and corresponding codes at &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/eski1265&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottolog.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The following are the agent morphemes that belong to the 3 most closely related languages that are listed as well. I am quite confident that I am able to assign a specific code to these. You may assume that the languages above are distinct from those below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;West Greenlandic&amp;quot; - Suffix &lt;em&gt;-mit&lt;/em&gt; (Ablative, Cause), Suffix &lt;em&gt;-nut&lt;/em&gt; (Allative, Dative)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Alaskan Yupik&amp;quot; - Suffix &lt;em&gt;-nun&lt;/em&gt; (Allative, Dative)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Siberian Yupik&amp;quot; - Prefix &lt;em&gt;-ke&lt;/em&gt; (Cause)  )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Example agent-marking morpheme in Spanish: &amp;quot;El hombre es matado &lt;em&gt;POR&lt;/em&gt; el perro.&amp;quot; (The man is killed BY the dog.) - &lt;em&gt;perro&lt;/em&gt; is the kind of &amp;quot;agent&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;active&amp;quot;) NP that would be subject in the sentence &amp;quot;El perro mata al hombre.&amp;quot; (The dog kills the man). The morpheme &lt;em&gt;por&lt;/em&gt; however is also used semantically as a marker e.g. of a location, as in &amp;quot;Pasa por el parque&amp;quot; (He passes &lt;em&gt;THROUGH&lt;/em&gt; the park). For this particular morpheme, Palancar therefore lists the perlative category (a locative subtype; amongst others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Just to give you an idea what the original list in Palancar looks like: Here's a short excerpt. It goes on like this for a few pages.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LS4Cc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Excerpt from Palancar&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T21:36:38.127" Title="Distinguishing &quot;Eskimo&quot;/&quot;Inuit&quot; languages by the passive agent morpheme" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12616" CreationDate="2015-06-17T13:57:03.083" Score="3" ViewCount="1301" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could I extract a location from a string like &lt;code&gt;San Francisco 49ers&lt;/code&gt; and get San Francisco from it? The only way I can is by training a neural-network, but training with every city, state, country, location is expensive isn't it? Wouldn't it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another way to approach this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9765" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T15:19:40.633" Title="Extract location from a string with a city, state, country in it?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12610" CreationDate="2015-06-17T14:09:12.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course a difference between p and k is that surrounding vowels don't affect the position of articulation of p, but they do affect the position of k quite a lot.  For your example of [teɪk] vs. [teɪkʲ], I would be surprised if the off glides of the diphthongs were really the same, even though you've written them both identically.  The first one, before the velar [k], is probably more like barred-i, a central vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that, in general, the variation between palatal and velar k is more a story about English vowels than k, and that k just gets carried along for the ride.  Then, also, there is a tradition in phonetics of more or less ignoring the tongue body position of consonants, because, I guess, it is often non-phonemic.  If you said the t (or flap) of &quot;auto&quot; like you say the t of &quot;meaty&quot;, it would sound palatalized; yet the two t's would ordinarily be transcribed the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some American dialects have a lot of central off-glides, sometimes written H, in words like &quot;hit&quot;, &quot;pat&quot;, &quot;pack&quot;, &quot;beck&quot;.  There's an interesting possibility this is due to a velarization of the final consonants. But I've never seen it transcribed that way.  We notice the vowel change, but not the concomitant difference in the final consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The k in words like &quot;bulk&quot; sounds so far back to me, that I'd write it as a uvular.  Of course, that's due to the darkening of syllable offset l.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T14:09:12.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12626" CreationDate="2015-06-17T14:24:33.033" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't study Latin, but I can recognize when a noun is singular or plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's weird that &lt;em&gt;date&lt;/em&gt; is used in the singular form &lt;em&gt;data&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese - a Neo-Latin language - while Dutch contains the form I'd say makes more sense, &lt;em&gt;datum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9957" LastEditorUserId="9957" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T22:17:13.363" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T22:17:13.363" Title="Why does &quot;date&quot; in Portuguese became &quot;data&quot;, while in Dutch &quot;datum&quot; is used?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12613" CreationDate="2015-06-17T15:19:40.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can parse the string with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;regular expression&lt;/a&gt;.  You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Geocoding API&lt;/a&gt; to enter a location like &lt;code&gt;San Francisco&lt;/code&gt; and get data related to that location, like latitude, longitude, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, building your own geolocation service would be very costly - let Google's API do the work for you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3636" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T15:19:40.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12621" CreationDate="2015-06-17T18:29:36.067" Score="-1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per p 24, &lt;em&gt;A Student's Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (2005), by Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polarity is the name of the system contrasting positive and negative&#xA;  clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this question in general, and NOT only for English. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/51324/8712&quot;&gt;Negativity still incapicitate my reading comprehension&lt;/a&gt;, but one recourse is to rewrite negative clauses into positive clauses. For example, these equivalences helped me to parse the negative clauses:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/59542/8712&quot;&gt;cannot ... anything = can ... nothing&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/49065/8712&quot;&gt;not without = only with or only by&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to learn more and be exposed to more such rewrites. So what's this kind of syntactical rewrite or substitution called? Are there any practice books or guides? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any lists or catalogues of such equivalences, for my reference? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T20:38:06.037" Title="How do you learn to rewrite clauses with double negation or hypernegation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2015-06-18T03:17:51.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12615" CreationDate="2015-06-17T19:58:45.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's probably no straight answer, why this happened in two languages. Here's just one hypothesis that may give a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=date&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;etymology&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;&quot;date&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in English (and, likely, in other European languages) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Roman convention of closing every article of correspondence by writing &quot;given&quot; and the day and month -- meaning perhaps &lt;strong&gt;&quot;given to messenger&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; -- led to data becoming a term for &quot;the time (and place) stated.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Roman letter would include something along the lines of &lt;em&gt;datum Romae pridie Kalendas Maias&lt;/em&gt; -- &quot;given at Rome on the last day of April.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we see, the assumed full sentence is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;This message &lt;strong&gt;is given&lt;/strong&gt; on [day, month, year, and place].&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The message&quot; is singular, hence, &lt;em&gt;&quot;datum&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to suppose that &quot;this message&quot; may at some languages/areas change its meaning slightly: &lt;em&gt;&quot;these statements &lt;strong&gt;are given&lt;/strong&gt;…&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;these scripts &lt;strong&gt;are given&lt;/strong&gt;…&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, both plural, hence, &lt;em&gt;&quot;data&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the difference is very slight, it can be supposed that singular/plural variants may cycle, even in the same areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-06-18T13:12:22.297" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T13:12:22.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12619" CreationDate="2015-06-17T20:30:37.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this idea of yours about rewriting negative clauses into positive ones. When a &quot;not&quot; attaches to an indefinite, as when &quot;not&quot;+&quot;any&quot; changes to &quot;no&quot;, it doesn't change the clause to positive.  It just changes where the negative word turns up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Positive clause: &quot;Tom gives some candy to some friends.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Negative clause: &quot;Tom doesn't give any candy to any friends.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that the whole clause is in the scope of negation, because all the &quot;some&quot;s change to &quot;any&quot;s.  Now, when the &quot;not&quot; attaches to the first &quot;any&quot;, if the clause became positive, other &quot;any&quot;s would revert to &quot;some&quot;s.  But that doesn't happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negative clause: &quot;Tom gives no candy to any friends.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the clause remains negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with all the areas of English syntax that were well studied in transformational grammar (like this one), you can find an excellent summary of English negation in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-17T20:30:37.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-18T05:09:35.793" Score="0" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every word in Arabic derives from 3 root letters. Forms in Arabic are a way of modifying these roots to create new words whose meaning is based on the original one. For example, one might turn a verb like &quot;help&quot; into the verb &quot;cooperate&quot;, which carries the connotation of  working in groups. Thus,  essentially each verb in Arabic can be modified from its original root to make a new word with a different meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this different from the role cases play in languages that rely strongly on cases (such as German, Polish, and Russian)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, I thought an example of a case was I versus Me. Me denotes an object while I denotes a subject. Obviously, I and me sound nothing like. So in that sense, cases and forms are very different. But a similarity is that changing / modifying the word yet retaining the original meaning to some extent. Although I and Me are not the same kind of word, both refer to the same person. Similarly, both cooperate and help are related to the same general idea of performing positive, constructive actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps these concepts are unrelated but I was hoping someone could clarify why a bit so that I can better understand what exactly a &quot;form&quot; is in Arabic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6811" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T10:40:03.107" Title="What is the difference between Arabic forms and cases?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12624" CreationDate="2015-06-18T08:41:59.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been mentioned, classical Arabic does “rely strongly on cases”, of which there are three (nominative, genitive, accusative). Declination for case is productive and for the most part regular, while the formation of so-called derived stems of verbal roots is only partially productive and the meaning of these stems is only partially predictable. In the classic description of Arabic grammar the cases are part of morphology (ṣarf), while stem formation is part of word-formation (etymology, ištiqāq).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T08:41:59.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12615" CreationDate="2015-06-18T09:26:34.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (etc.) data, and French date (whence English date) are all taken from Mediaeval Latin data, the plural of classical Latin datum, but reinterpreted in these languages as a singular noun. German and Dutch use the classical singular form datum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are bookish borrowings from Mediaeval or Classical Latin (so-called cultisms) and not organic descendants of the Latin words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T09:26:34.327" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12587" CreationDate="2015-06-18T12:52:47.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Breakdown of the Roman empire&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Roman empire was overrun by mostly Germanic tribes in the 5th century. Without a central power, the speakers of late Latin were left in separate communities with diverging languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New centres emerged (Paris, Florence, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon) and the dialects of those new centres evolved to fully fledged languages (French, Italian, Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Absence of Mass Media&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, English is kept together by mass media (most notably the Hollywood film industry, but also BBC world service, Voice of America, and printed books, journals, and newspapers, and the internet). In the antique times, mass media simply did not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T12:52:47.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-18T13:53:02.487" Score="0" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Afro-Asiatic we have the feminine ending &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which has the following evolution history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-a &amp;lt; -ah&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; &amp;lt; -at &amp;lt; et&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; is a glottal fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In IE (for instance, in Russian, Greek, Latin) we also have the feminine ending &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which has the following history (classically):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-a &amp;lt; ah&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; &amp;lt; eh&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; is the a-coloring laryngeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we by analogy suppose that h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; &amp;lt; t?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives a number of analogies between other PIE words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;euh&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;os&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;teutos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;quot;grandfather&amp;quot;) (also &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;etos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is reconstructed for &amp;quot;father&amp;quot; in PIE -&amp;gt; Russian otets)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(compare Proto-Afro-Asiatic &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;abbah&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;father&amp;quot; here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;eq&lt;sup&gt;u&lt;/sup&gt;-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;teq&lt;sup&gt;u&lt;/sup&gt;-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;quot;flowing water&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;ecsom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tecsom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;quot;axe&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;ecmon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;stone&amp;quot; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tecsōn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;builder&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;eĝos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;teĝos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;quot;leader&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;ersos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tersos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;quot;dry, e.g., land&amp;quot;) (compare also Greek χερσος, &amp;quot;dry land&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can it be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T05:51:56.493" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T05:51:56.493" Title="Parallels between h₂ and t in PIE and Nostratic, what is the explanation?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8600" CreationDate="2015-06-18T15:27:16.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to understand what is meant by 'ergative verb' in English, it may be important to understand the concept of ergativity in the first place. Ergative (or ergative case) generally refers to the marking of agent in transitive constructions while the agent in in-transitive constructions is not marked or is marked in the same way as the patient of a transitive construction (this is called absolutive). Languages where the ergative construction dominates are called 'ergative languages' (although there are no pure languages and there is great variation in the alignment of intransitive Subject, transitive Subject [called Agent] and Object [sometimes called Patient] across languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in contrast to the accusative languages where the dominant way of marking the X Yed Z construction is like in the English: 'She killed him.' (Xnom Yed Zacc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, it makes no sense to talk about ergative verbs. Just ergative constructions or ergative case marking on the Agent (and/or absolutive on the Patient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ergative verb in English refers to verbs that are normally transitive but that can be used without specifying the object because the object is also the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So compare the verb open when use as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John opened the window. / John baked the cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John opened for Mary. / John baked all morning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The window opened. / The cake baked in 20 minutes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?The windows opened itself. / ?The caked baked itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the examples in 3 are ergative because the unexpressed object (patient) and subject (agent) are the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy test of this is whether the sentence can be passivised with the indirect object marking the agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The window was opened by John. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(The door/it/something) was opened by John for Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The window was opened. / *The window opened by John.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The window was opened by itself. (in some sort of cartoon universe)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your questions directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All English ergative verbs are transitive (although some may also have intransitive variants). Ergativity is about expressions of transitivity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The decision on whether a verb can be used as ergative is largely semantic. Can the agent and the patient be the same and are they both expressed in the subject position? So for example, 'cut' or 'kicked' cannot be ergative because if you take away the subject you end up with either an ellipsis or an intransitive verb. E.g. The knife cut deep. or The mule kicks. You could imagine some metaphorical meanings to include ergativity such as 'The engine kicked into gear.' But it's not clear in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The decision about the subject is also semantic. Can the subject be an agent and patient at the same time? Contrast: 'Mary baked in the kitchen all afternoon.' vs. 'Mary baked in the sun all afternoon.' The first is intransitive use of bake and the second is ergative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-18T15:27:16.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-18T22:18:28.837" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone encountered a language in which there is no lexical entry corresponding to English &quot;before&quot; and the relation of temporal precedence is manifested by something equivalent to &quot;earlier than&quot;? I would be most grateful for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me elaborate a bit by means of an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John arrived before George. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John arrived earlier than George.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language in which &quot;before&quot; and &quot;earlier than&quot; as given in the above sentences would be represented by the same lexical entry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1777" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T22:35:22.253" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T22:35:22.253" Title="Languages without a lexical entry for &quot;before&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12630" CreationDate="2015-06-19T00:23:50.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you need a language where &lt;em&gt;&quot;before&quot;&lt;/em&gt; did not &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; have any positional aspect (in English, it has: &quot;be + fore&quot; = &quot;in front of&quot;), like described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/2557/1009&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, then &lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; language is a good example.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word is &lt;strong&gt;ก่อน&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;[kɔ̀ːn]&lt;/code&gt; (first, prior, early).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thai is &lt;em&gt;analytical language&lt;/em&gt;, so there's naturally no lexical distinction between &lt;em&gt;&quot;early&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;earlier&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. All tiny details of the message are constructed with particles, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;ก่อน ที่&lt;/strong&gt;, see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;John arrived before/earlier than George&quot;&#xA;Thai:  จอห์น     มาถึง      ก่อนที่       จอร์จ&#xA;IPA:   tɕɔːn   maː tʰɯ̌ŋ  kɔ̀ːn tʰîː   tɕɔ̀ːdʒ&#xA;Eng.:  john     arrive   prior+at    george&#xA;&#xA;&quot;cool before drinking&quot;:&#xA;Thai:  เย็น    ก่อน   { ที่ }   { จะ }    ดื่ม&#xA;IPA:   jen   kɔ̀ːn    tʰîː    tɕàʔ    dɯ̀ːm&#xA;Eng.:  cool  prior   at      FUTURE   drink&#xA;&#xA;&quot;recent game(s) they played well&quot;:&#xA;Thai:  เกม    ก่อน    พวกเขา       เล่น   ได้      ดี&#xA;IPA:   keːm   kɔ̀ːn  pʰûːak kʰǎw   lên   dâj     diː&#xA;Eng.:  game  prior    they        play  PAST   well&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ก่อน&lt;/strong&gt; is also used in morphology of the word &quot;earlier&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;เมื่อ ก่อน&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;[mɯ̂ːa kɔ̀ːn]&lt;/code&gt;, literally, &quot;at time + prior&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;เมื่อ&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;[mɯ̂ːa]&lt;/code&gt; is just a service word indicating a point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor note. Thai script uses no spaces between the words. Space mark separates sentences instead, just like full stop and comma do in English. I used spaces above so that the reader distinguished individual words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T00:23:50.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12630" CreationDate="2015-06-19T00:39:08.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;BEFORE (in the limited sense of a temporal comparison) is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Semantic Primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;. Though NSM researchers have not considered every language in existence, they have studied languages from every large family, so I'd consider this decent evidence that this is something every language will have. Note that the primes may be represent by affixes or phrases rather than just single words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T14:56:05.893" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T14:56:05.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-19T05:03:48.213" Score="2" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak American English and am trying to learn Sinhala and have found conflicting spelled descriptions of Sinhala words in various learning resources, so I started trying to figure out how to notate more accurately once I hear an authentic native pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found several IPA-for-English learning resources and have learned probably what one would consider basic IPA-for-English, and yet haven't found the sounds that I hear pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a sound that seems halfway between a B or a P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the kind of &quot;hindi&quot; sounding D/T.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume there IPA symbols for these sounds and resources on these somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would it be better to learning a system other than IPA, like NAVLIPI, which is supposed to be suited towards Asian languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NAVLIPI sounds interesting to me, but it seems I'd be learning it based on a book, which seems inferior to having a lot of audio resources such as those that exist for the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know very little about all of this, so thank you for your patience!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9967" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:15:40.907" Title="Sounds for an Indo-European Language, such as Sinhala?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12633" CreationDate="2015-06-19T05:24:22.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems like you have a good ear! I don't speak Sinhala, but I'm familiar with the IPA, so my answer will focus on learning methods for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn IPA symbols, I've found Wikipedia a very useful resource. The Wikipedia article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sinhalese language&lt;/a&gt; lists the IPA symbols necessary to represent all of the words of the language. As you've noticed, some of these symbols are not in the IPA for English, because English and Sinhala have different sound systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn sounds of the IPA that aren't in English, there are two main strategies: the auditory and the articulatory approach. Different people may find one more or less useful for them personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auditory approach&lt;/strong&gt;: As you've already mentioned, you can try to learn these sounds by using audio resources and then repeating what you hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Articulatory approach&lt;/strong&gt;: Another way to learn these sounds is to read descriptions of where they are made in the mouth (articulation) and try to move your tongue and throat in the way described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-06-19T05:33:21.653" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T05:33:21.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12500" CreationDate="2015-06-19T07:57:29.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of such technique and don't see really what this network would look like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-label_classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;classification&lt;/a&gt; or categorization, or topic extraction if you like. In your case it's dictionary-based - you use a dictionary to predict the class or set of classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The network part sounds as your way to represent this information. You'll end up with a set of clusters, each node connected to each other in the same cluster (i.e. all sentences containing &quot;tree&quot;). You'll also have some links between clusters, for sentences that contain words from both dictionaries. This however is no longer an NLP problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some links for text classification: &lt;a href=&quot;https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture/36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Coursera course on NLP&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/text-classification-and-naive-bayes-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Introduction to Information Retrieval book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9971" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T07:57:29.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12609" CreationDate="2015-06-19T21:30:28.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, in SLA (second language acquisition), non-native accent (along with any other proficiency issues) would be attributed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L1 interference or transfer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imperfect learning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption behind L1 interference is that the first language is never completely deactivated. However, no detailed credible model exists for how this would work. The effects are well described but the causes are still hotly debated. Issues with pronunciation are often attributed to some hypothetical critical period in acquiring phonology but in some cases other factors like hearing loss in older learners can also come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the question is also how to define a 'native' accent. There are many English accents (e.g. Indian) that sound non-native to people in the US or the UK but belong to native speakers of English. But in many of these cases, this new 'native' accent is the result of past L1 interference in the development of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-19T21:30:28.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-20T01:52:01.860" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/abstain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;s'abstenir de&lt;/a&gt;    Spanish: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=abstain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abstenerse de&lt;/a&gt;    English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=abstain&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abstain [from] (v.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;lt;--] &#xA;      late 14c., &quot;to withhold oneself,&quot; from Old French abstenir (14c.), earlier astenir (13c.) &quot;hold (oneself) back, refrain, &lt;strong&gt;abstain (from)&lt;/strong&gt;, practice abstinence,&quot; from Latin abstinere &quot;withhold, keep back, keep off,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ab(s)-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;from, away from&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ab-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ab-&lt;/a&gt;) + tenere &quot;to hold&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tenet&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tenet&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/adhere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adhérer à&lt;/a&gt;    Spanish: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=adhere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adherir a&lt;/a&gt;    English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=abstain&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adhere to (v.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;lt;--] &#xA;  directly from Latin &lt;em&gt;adhaerentem&lt;/em&gt; (nominative &lt;em&gt;adhaerens&lt;/em&gt;), present participle of &lt;em&gt;adhaerere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;stick to,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to&quot; (see ad-) + &lt;em&gt;haerere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to stick&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hesitation&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hesitation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/appertain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appartenir à&lt;/a&gt;   English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=appertain&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appertain [to] (v.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&amp;lt;--]&#xA;      late 14c., from Anglo-French apartenir, Old French apartenir (12c.) &quot;&lt;strong&gt;be related to&lt;/strong&gt;; be incumbent upon,&quot; from Late Latin appertinere &quot;to pertain to,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to, completely&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ad-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ad-&lt;/a&gt;) + pertinere &quot;to belong to&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pertain&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pertain&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literate Anglophones and Francophones were fluent in Latin, and so comprehended the Latin prefixes, when these verbs were borrowed from Latin. &#xA;So why did English and French repeat the Latin prefix as a postverbal preposition? To wit, why weren't the intransitive verbs above NOT ditransitive?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the following cognates, the English cognate appears more redundant than the French and Spanish ones. English  added the prefix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;en-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  , but 'ENdow' must still be followed by 'WITH'. French didn't add any prefixes and conveys &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;en-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with 'de'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/endow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doter qqn de qch&lt;/a&gt; (= endow somebody WITH something) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Spanish: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=endow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dotar de algo a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=endow&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;endow (v.)&lt;/a&gt; [...] from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;en-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;in&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=en-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;en-&lt;/a&gt; (1)) + Old French &lt;em&gt;douer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;endow,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from Latin &lt;em&gt;dotare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bestow&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dowry&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dowry&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T21:40:27.420" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T21:40:27.420" Title="Why were prefixes repeated as postverbal prepositions?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-20T02:15:23.990" Score="-2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ics&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-ics&lt;/a&gt; [&amp;lt;--]&#xA;      in the names of sciences or disciplines (acoustics, aerobics, economics, etc.) it represents a 16c. revival of the classical custom of using the neuter plural of adjectives with -ikos (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ic&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-ic&lt;/a&gt;) to mean &quot;matters relevant to&quot; and also as the titles of treatises about them. &lt;strong&gt;Subject matters that acquired their names in English before c. 1500, however, tend to remain in singular&lt;/strong&gt; (such as arithmetic, logic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a right way of interpreting the semantic jump from the original plural &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ikos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to the aberrant singular &lt;strong&gt;-ic&lt;/strong&gt; (before the correct reversion to &lt;strong&gt;-ics&lt;/strong&gt;, in the 16 century, per above)?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please expose and explain all (hidden and missing) semantic drifts and links. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-06-20T02:45:47.867" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T06:28:44.473" Title="How did '-ikos' evolve into '-ic'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12651" CreationDate="2015-06-20T08:35:48.690" Score="2" ViewCount="1821" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find any Czech dictionaries that report the gender of nouns (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Without this knowledge it is impossible to master perfect Czech. So why aren't these ever included?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(sorry if I post this question here but there is no Czech Stack Exchange group  so I  assume this group also covers all those languages that don't have their own group).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9977" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T14:26:44.300" Title="Why aren't there any Czech dictionaries that report the gender of nouns?" Tags="&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-20T08:41:29.227" Score="2" ViewCount="582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a good Maltese grammar book which lists all verb forms, tenses, and declensions. Where can I find one (perhaps anywhere on the Island given that Amazon does not seem to carry such book). I have tried starting a Maltese language group on Stack Exchange but there was little interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9977" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T00:06:09.407" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T00:06:09.407" Title="Where can I get a good Maltese grammar book?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12643" CreationDate="2015-06-20T13:38:45.613" Score="2" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often seen posts on various Stack Exchange sites that have spaces around punctuation marks. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here , spaces around a comma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A space before a question mark ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've only seen them preceding question or exclamation marks and around commas and not before full stops but I may just have missed them. Since this is something I come across quite often, I assume that the OP's native language is written this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there any languages whose writing system require spaces around commas and before question marks? If so, what languages are these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am assuming the answer will be a family of languages. If, instead, I am asking for a long list, please let me know and close as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T17:13:51.863" Title="What languages, if any, require spaces around punctuation marks?" Tags="&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12642" CreationDate="2015-06-20T17:13:51.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, adding spacing before some punctuation marks (not all of them) is done by French and Indians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4645/is-it-ever-correct-to-have-a-space-before-a-question-or-exclamation-mark#comment206109_4645&quot;&gt;In this comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, it is stated that the earlier editions of the English grammar books (whose authors were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_%26_Martin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P.C. Wren &amp;amp; H. Martin&lt;/a&gt;) featured such spaces before some punctuation marks, and that might explain why the habit stuck and the learners kept using it. These books, or rather their updated versions, are still in use in many schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning French, this is the explanation given on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orthotypographie.fr/volume-II/point_cardinal-proverbe.html#Ponctuation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orthotypographie&lt;/a&gt; by Jean-Pierre Lacroux (translated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] this convention is motivated, useful, efficient, badly subtle. As you may know – and as anticipated by typographers from the old ages –, readers do not read letter by letter. Words have ‘outlines’. When so-called ‘high’ punctuation marks (&lt;code&gt;;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;!&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt;) are placed right next to a word, they affect its shape, thereby hampering the reader's perception, be it by a minor or an important factor. This phenomenon is not to be feared with lower punctuation marks (&lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;…&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/a/4401&quot;&gt;Nikana Reklawyks's answer and its relevant question&lt;/a&gt; on French SE for more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: author is N/A, but his screen name was AnIndianGuy.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T17:13:51.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12098" CreationDate="2015-06-20T17:54:41.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'have' parts (clauses) in all of your example data have one thing in common: The predicate (do, the homework) is (with)in perfective aspect. Syntactic theory accounts for this with a feature that's there or not (a switch that's on or off), as a functional (= not heard) &quot;head&quot; in a &quot;phrase&quot; &lt;strong&gt;around&lt;/strong&gt; (= &quot;holding&quot;) the predicate's phrase (a Verb phrase, in turn holding the object's nominal phrase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/93s7k.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T17:54:41.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2015-06-20T18:00:47.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://encs.dict.cc/?s=word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://encs.dict.cc/?s=word&lt;/a&gt; does. I can't give you an answer on why other's don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T18:00:47.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12604" CreationDate="2015-06-20T18:10:54.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English marks tense in seperate words such as Auxiliaries and expletive (dummy) 'do'. In a sentence, these stand, syntactically-speaking: above / serially-speaking: to the left, of a verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This does not help. / This has proved helpful.&#xA;vs&#xA;This did not help. / This had proved helpful.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb = same&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time ≠ same&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T18:10:54.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12098" CreationDate="2015-06-20T22:14:52.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it was Longacre that suggested the English perfect can not be fully analyzed as an aspect, but must be understood to carry a role in discourse: namely, it marks background information that leads to the present foreground events. In this it plays a role similar to the progressive, where the progressive typically marks concurrent background events and the perfect marks preceding background events. It also contrasts with the simple past in that the simple past is generally foreground events in the past while the perfect is background information for the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an explanation could serve to assign the perfect a monosemous (or bisemous, if you want to separate lexical and pragmatic) meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that the above is responsible for the fact that something recognizable as &quot;the perfect&quot; is very common in world languages, but its semantics vary widely between languages. Perhaps it is a common element for marking background information regardless of specific semantics. But that is just top-of-my-head conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:14:52.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12633" CreationDate="2015-06-20T22:15:40.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kapruka.com/dictionary/EnglishToSinhala.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; is to an English-Sinhalese dictionary with sound files. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/sinhala.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; might provide you with something similar, though I did not test it. The UCLA Phoneic Archive has &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/SIN/sin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these materials&lt;/a&gt;: lists of words in English, phonetic transcriptions, and sound recordings – heavy on minimal pairs. This will be useful for getting the hang of the alveolar / retroflex difference, for interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:15:40.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12098" CreationDate="2015-06-20T22:42:41.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I can suggest how to work out the answer.  Take two examples using a given form of &quot;have&quot; in the syntactic environment [S NP __ ... ].  Assume what is in the position NP, the subject, makes no difference.  The two examples have A and B following the form of &quot;have&quot;, say it's &quot;have&quot;, so they look like this : [S NP have A ] and [S NP have B ].  The grammatical categories of &quot;have&quot; in the two examples should depend only on the categories of A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Construct the example [S have [X A or B ] ], where X is some category we don't know about yet.  Is the new example acceptable?  Suppose it is.  Then because the category of a grammatical conjunction of two phrases is the same as the categories of both the two phrases, A and B must have the same category X, whatever that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the categories of &quot;have&quot; in the two examples must the the same, since they depended only on the categories of A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the interpretation of a phrase is a function of the pronunciation and the syntactic category of the phrase, the interpretations of &quot;have&quot; in the two environments we are considering must be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it all depends on the grammaticality of [S NP have [ A or B ] ].  If it's grammatical, the &quot;have&quot;s mean the same.  If in general, we can find grammatical ways of conjoining the complements of the various &quot;have&quot;s of interest, they must all have a single interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-20T22:42:41.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12652" CreationDate="2015-06-20T23:19:42.410" Score="4" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a corpus that contains questions and question types.&#xA;Like in this article, but they didn't attach any link to their corpus.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://polibits.gelbukh.com/2009_40/40_01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://polibits.gelbukh.com/2009_40/40_01.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9980" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T21:13:10.803" Title="Question type corpus" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2015-06-21T07:51:18.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best learner dictionary by far is the one by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Czech-Czech-English-Dictionary-Josef-Fronek/dp/8073352834/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Josef Fronek&lt;/a&gt;. It not only has the gender but also references all the declension models making it easy to find and generate any forms for both nouns and verbs. It is the most uptodate and modern bilingual dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the pocket dictionaries, as far as I know, only &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Czech-English-English-Czech-Concise-Dictionary-Hippocrene/dp/0870529811/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nina Trnka's&lt;/a&gt; dictionary has gender information but it is quite old and has many other imperfections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the online dictionaries, &lt;a href=&quot;http://encs.dict.cc/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DICT.cc&lt;/a&gt; is one of the few that references gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt;, it is very easy. Most Czech-English dictionaries are made for native speakers of Czech who do not need the gender information. Therefore it is not included. In fact, they would probably find it a bit puzzling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since most dictionaries are not made from scratch but rather by building on previous efforts, if the templates do not include gender information, their successors won't either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the three dictionaries above, they were made with non-native learners of Czech in mind (if not as primary audience - except perhaps Trnka). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lonely-Planet-Czech-Phrasebook-Dictionary/dp/1741049725&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lonely Planet Phrasebook&lt;/a&gt; which is aimed at non-native speakers contains gender information but it's not really a dictionary - although it could be used that way with the index.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no reliable way to predict gender from the form of the noun. Here are some of the &lt;strong&gt;key rules&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some which are almost exception proof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;strong&gt;b, g, k, h, ch, d, r, p, n, m, l&lt;/strong&gt; are always masculine&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; are almost always feminine (with a few exceptions that are masculine)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; are always neuter&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;strong&gt;í&lt;/strong&gt; are almost always neuter (with a few feminines)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These will at least help you exclude a gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; are either feminine or neuter (never masculine)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns ending in a consonant are never neuter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The largest Czech monolingual dictionaries do report gender but they are a bit unwieldy for the learner. Some of them are now available to search online. The best for look up of gender is &lt;a href=&quot;http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with the added advantage of being able to look up any form of the word and seeing all the other possible forms. There are no English equivalents in this dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-06-21T08:10:43.533" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T08:10:43.533" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12650" CreationDate="2015-06-21T12:38:57.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this dataset, which is quite good, but I think it has to be more on the internet. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/Data/QA/QC/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/Data/QA/QC/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9980" LastEditorUserId="9980" LastEditDate="2015-06-22T21:13:10.803" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T21:13:10.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12419" CreationDate="2015-06-21T20:03:39.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was puzzling over these meanings for &quot;ked&quot;: 'go', 'give', and 'give up' (possibly 3 separate meanings), looking for a good explanation of words containing this root for my students in an advanced ESL Reading/Vocabulary class.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &quot;Intercede&quot;, &quot;secede&quot;, and &quot;exceed&quot; do not appear to contain a recessive semantic element to them, and even could be taken as somewhat aggressive.&#xA;   So here's a hypothesis I submit for consideration:&#xA;The original meaning of &quot;ked&quot; was 'go', and this was the basis for all the non-recessive words containing &quot;ked&quot;.  But if you go/leave from a battle or hostile encounter, that is giving, giving up, or yielding, so this secondary meaning was later derived.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Does anybody have any information supporting or refuting this hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-21T20:03:39.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3850" CreationDate="2015-06-22T02:35:26.203" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Germanic arose fairly early in southern Scandinavia (c. 2500 BC) as a patois used between indigenous Vasconics, Para-Italic migrants such as the Ligures and Venedi, and Paleo-Baltic invaders from the east. These pre-Germanic peoples solidified into the Proto-Germanics by 2500 BC. In the near future, this will probably be expressed by: Celto-Italic splits into Celtic and Italo-Germanic, followed by: Italo-Germanic splits into Italic and Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9987" LastActivityDate="2015-06-22T02:35:26.203" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3850" CreationDate="2015-06-22T03:11:35.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. But some researchers hypothesize common ancentor of Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Others hypothesize a common ancestor of Italic and Celtic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Latin and Germanic according to these theorires belong to different sub-branches of Indo-European. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in common between Latin and English besides they are both Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note though. That &lt;em&gt;there is&lt;/em&gt; something that links Germanic and Italic: the both are centum languages. But this is not a genetic trait, rather satemization is an areal feature that spread over some region over different branches after they already split. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being centum is the default mode for all Indo-European languages because PIE was centum. That said, Germanic is typologically closer to Balto-Slavic than to Italic, for instance, they share endings of plural Dative and Instrumental cases: the both use &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, while the rest of IE use the derivative of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-bhi̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-bhis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (in Latin -bus), also they share the word for thousand: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tua̯scmtom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, not attested anywhere else in IE (other branches used &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;smĝheslom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for thousand), but Germanic is centum while Baltic and Slavic are satem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T09:23:39.823" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T09:23:39.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-22T20:12:51.960" Score="2" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a tone in notched noise in Praat. We want the noise to be 23 dB less than the tone, so we created a noise coefficient using SNR, applied this to the noise file, and combined it with the tone file to produce a tone in notched noise. We want to check and see that the tone is 23 dB higher than the noise after combining (i.e., to make sure no distortion in dB difference happened due to combining---it should always be 23dB). We think the best way to do this is to go to Analyse spectrum --&gt; To spectrum.... I get a graph with frequency (Hz) on the x-axis and amplitude (dB) on the y-axis. When we look at the spectrum, the peak amplitude of the tone in noise does not match the intensity we obtain by clicking Query --&gt; Get intensity... of the pure tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have checked out Praat's internal manual under the Help button and also the extensive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/david/sspbook/sspbook.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/david/sspbook/sspbook.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. Circle 7 on Figure 7.16 on page 144 is pointing to the measurement that I am reading that is puzzling me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there a discrepancy between Query --&gt; Get intensity... and the measurements we get by clicking on points on the spectrum (a point at the peak at the frequency of the tone and a point roughly where the average noise is)? What is truly being measured on the y-axis? In other words, to what is this intensity relative? Is this the best way to check the difference is 23 dB? Is there another way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9993" LastEditorUserId="9993" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T17:38:31.697" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T09:35:24.300" Title="Praat's y-axis in spectrum graph" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12665" CreationDate="2015-06-22T20:47:39.657" Score="1" ViewCount="960" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm stuck with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scansion&lt;/a&gt; of the second of the following lines I read in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Eur.%20Ba.%20435&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0091&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euripides' Bacchae&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;441 κἀγὼ δι᾽ αἰδοῦς εἶπον : Ὦ ξέν᾽, οὐχ ἑκὼν&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;442 ἄγω σε Πενθέως δ᾽ ὅς μ᾽ ἔπεμψ᾽ ἐπιστολαῖς.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation : &lt;a href=&quot;http://euripidesofathens.blogspot.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael A. Valerie&lt;/a&gt;) : And I said in gratitude: &amp;quot;This is not done of my own will,&#xA;Stranger, but by order of Pentheus, who sent me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    u -  u  -| u-     -     u -  | u -  u -&#xA;442 ἄγω σε Πενθέως δ᾽ ὅς μ᾽ ἔπεμψ᾽ ἐπιστολαῖς.&#xA;&#xA;     ... with a caesura after Πενθέως.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line being a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_trimeter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic trimeter&lt;/a&gt;, I clearly see the first and last &lt;em&gt;metron&lt;/em&gt; : ἄγω σε Πεν ... ἐπιστολαῖς. But what about the second one ? I can't see how to reduce θέως δ᾽ ὅς μ᾽ ἔπεμψ to something like &lt;strong&gt;u - u -&lt;/strong&gt; . Everything happens as if -θέως was read as a short syllable before a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_trimeter#Caesura_and_Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;caesura&lt;/a&gt;. Is it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaeresis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synaeresis&lt;/a&gt; due to the personal name Πενθέως ? See by example Wikipedia's article about the resolutions in iambic trimeters :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In tragedy, resolution is fairly uncommon, and substitution occurs almost exclusively to accommodate personal names that otherwise could not fit the meter.&amp;quot; as stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_trimeter#Resolution_and_Substitution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T09:49:38.047" Title="scansion of a iambic trimeter" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T00:54:42.313" Score="0" ViewCount="1133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I were making a language and I wanted to convey, through writing, anything that a real language could convey, except I didn't want to convey what I wanted to say by using words. Also, in this theoretical language, I didn't want to &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; rely upon inflections. How might one do this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, when I am referings to words above, I am talking about a string of letters seperated by spaces or seperate meanings (other than a synthetic word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if its too vague, I'm trying to be as clear as possible. Ill try to make it a less open ended question as I get comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T01:36:40.397" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T19:14:02.997" Title="How would one make a sentence without using &quot;words&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12662" CreationDate="2015-06-23T05:43:04.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the sentence must be made up of something, if not words. Another unit could be syllables. Usually syllables form words, but not necessarily. One could imagine a &quot;sentence&quot; comprised of non-word syllables, the meaning of which is constructed through specific intonation contours imposed on the syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T05:43:04.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T05:47:03.653" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phrase like &quot;take away&quot;, &quot;more than&quot; ,&quot;times&quot; imply certain mathematical change (subtract,add,divide etc.) in the quantity in current context. For eg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The number of girls &quot;exceeds&quot; the number of boys in the class.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term to categorize such words/phrases which have mathematical significance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2787" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T05:47:03.653" Title="Term for words or phrases signifying change in numeric quantities?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12661" CreationDate="2015-06-23T09:49:38.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Πενθέως the second syllable (-θέως) is scanned as a single long syllable. You can call it contraction or synaeresis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T09:49:38.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12667" CreationDate="2015-06-23T13:30:55.087" Score="2" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about metonymy and metaphors in English proverbs below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An apple a day, keeps doctors away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning: Fruit is an important part of a healthy diet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beggars can't be choosers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning: If someone gives you something you asked for, you should not complain about what you get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that apple and beggars are metaphors? They might be metonymy however especially the word &quot;beggar&quot; has a stronger imageability and a different context than &quot;a person who asks for something&quot;. The word &quot;apple&quot; can be directly generalized as fruit and the first proverb can be considered literal. So this may support apple being a metonymy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any comments or explanations in this issue are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9995" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T16:23:51.957" Title="Metaphor and metonymy in proverbs" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12666" CreationDate="2015-06-23T16:23:51.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on how you think about metaphor and metonymy. In the rhetorical tradition, you'd have to be very specific about how you label each trope. E.g. distinguishing metonymy from synechdoche. But I don't generally find this approach helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in the conceptual underpinnings of proverbs, you're better off with the conceptual metaphor theory which thinks of both metaphor and metonymy as two broad structuring principles of human cognition. Subsuming analogy, parable, simile, etc. under metaphor and synechdoche under metonymy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key distinction between metaphor and metonymy from the conceptual metaphor theory perspective is that between similarity and contiguity (or relatedness). I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://metaphorhacker.net/2013/12/binders-full-of-women-with-mighty-pens-what-is-metonymy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a more detailed comparison on MetaphorHacker.net&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, you can easily see that in the first proverb, the apple stands for fruit (member of a category standing for category) which stands for health (cause for outcome) in a chain of metonymies. Doctor stands for illness (profession for area of expertise). So you can see that the conceptual domain is primarily structured metonymically. However, you also need the relationship of similarity to understand the whole proverb as 'if you eat fruit you will not get ill' by projecting the configuration into a real world situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second proverb, on the other hand, does not depend on metonymy for its conceptual structure. It asks you to project the situation of somebody who is asking without being able to offer anything in return onto your own situation. Therefore, you always need to find something in a given situation that makes one person the beggar and another person the giver and something the gift. So for instance, if you really need a job and somebody offers your a job you don't like but you can't avoid taking it, you might say that this proverb applies here. This is very typical of how metaphors work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T16:23:51.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12471" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:54:18.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumption matches Jlawler's (that phonology is the culprit).  Further, I have assumed that the examples cited by StoneyB (&quot;I got rhythm&quot; and &quot;You been on my mind&quot;) are the same phenomenon (but perhaps not &quot;You done done&quot;, which I would analyze differently).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as what grammatical form we're left with after the /d/ is lost, and we have &quot;It better be&quot;, my assumption is that &quot;better&quot; then becomes a modal.  That would explain why we don't say *&quot;Does he better be careful?&quot;.  Of course, we also don't say *&quot;Better he be careful?&quot;, but I would attribute this (perhaps) to the fact that (perhaps) it's a newer modal whose paradigm hasn't been fully formed yet.  Also, some of the other modals seem to be somewhat deficient in this regard as well; &quot;may&quot; can be used for probability or for permission, but I do not recall hearing or reading &quot;May I be there?&quot; for probability -- only for permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastEditorUserId="9985" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T00:11:29.650" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T00:11:29.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12675" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:14:57.310" Score="7" ViewCount="1417" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humans living in different parts of the world develop different languages; humans living in the same area speak the same language in order to be able to communicate with each other.&#xA;We know that other animals too - at least some species - do communicate with each other, through sounds or movements or other means, although of course at a very basic level compared to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering, do animals of the same species but living in distant parts of the world communicate the same concepts (danger, attraction, threat etc.) using different sounds or movements etc. in different areas of the world ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9996" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:45:27.547" Title="Do animals have foreign languages?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12670" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:23:52.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bird dialects within a species were reported in a Scientific American article I recall from a few years ago.  Perhaps also dolphin dialects have been investigated.  Google will probably get you some references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:23:52.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:44:22.443" Score="0" ViewCount="850" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anybody heard of vowel-backing in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In East-Central Alabama, USA, I have observed forms such as:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suckint ['sOkh Inˀ] for &quot;second&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;butter ['bOD ɚ] for &quot;better&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;woonda ['wUnd ә] for &quot;window&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: I'm using the symbol [O] instead of [^] because it appears to be a mid-back, lax, pure vowel, rather than a mid-central one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I moved here, I expected vowel-fronting (not vowel-backing) in this area.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:44:22.443" Title="Vowel-Backing in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12471" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:54:31.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt the phonology explanation.  My most natural pronunciation of &quot;It better be good&quot; is [ɪʔbɛɾɹbiɡʊd].  If there was a phonemic &quot;had&quot; in there, how could it have disappeared?  The first two things to happen in the reduction to a casual speech form would be loss of the &quot;h&quot; of &quot;had&quot; and then flapping the &quot;t&quot; of &quot;it&quot;.  But once that &quot;t&quot; is flapped, there is no longer any source for the glottal stop that you wind up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:54:31.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:05:26.443" Score="4" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does ASL have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;language games&lt;/a&gt;? They seem very common for spoken languages (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pig Latin&lt;/a&gt; for English), but I can't find any documentation of them for sign languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9999" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T09:34:35.877" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:34:35.877" Title="Pig Latin equivalent for ASL?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12670" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:19:49.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon has been studied a lot over the years. People do not refer to it as animal foreign languages but sometimes the word dialect is used. You will find plenty of descriptions in books on animal communication. Just be careful in your search because a lot of books with this title are about 'speaking' to animals. Most intros to linguistics also have a section on animal communication these days. Sometimes people also talk about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoosemiotics&quot;&gt;zoosemiotics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Localized dialects have been described for all kinds of species with some system of social communication from bees to apes. For example, there is plenty of literature on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;q=bird%20dialects&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;as_sdt=1%2C5&amp;amp;as_sdtp=&quot;&gt;'bird song' dialects&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boundary of what is thought to be unique to human language as opposed to animal communication patterns is constantly shifting so you have to be careful both not to settle for old preconceptions but also not to fall for the latest flights of fancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:19:49.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12677" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:48:07.980" Score="3" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=but&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but (adv., prep.)&lt;/a&gt; [&amp;lt;--]     Old English &lt;em&gt;butan, buton&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt;, except; &lt;code&gt;without&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;outside&lt;/code&gt;,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from West Germanic * &lt;em&gt;be-utan&lt;/em&gt;, a compound of &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;by&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=by&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  + * &lt;em&gt;utana&lt;/em&gt; &quot;out, outside; from without,&quot;  from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ut&lt;/em&gt; &quot;out&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=out&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;out&lt;/a&gt; (adv.)).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not used as a conjunction in Old English. As a noun from late 14c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the two bolded West Germanic etymons (&lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), combine to mean &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess: If an object is &lt;strong&gt;out by&lt;/strong&gt; you, then the object is &lt;code&gt;outside&lt;/code&gt; (of) you. To wit, you are &lt;code&gt;without&lt;/code&gt; the object.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But how does this evolve to mean &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please expose, explain, and bridge all hidden, missing semantic drifts and links. What is a right way of interpreting the etymology, to understand how the semantic jumps abstracted and strayed from the original literal meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/254428/50720&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;, whose etymology stops at Old English and so doesn't retrograde enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:11:36.057" Title="Etymology of 'but', from West Germanic to Old English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12676" CreationDate="2015-06-24T03:16:19.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough about West Germanic (or Dutch) to trace the etymology of composition of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;by&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;ut/utan&lt;/em&gt;.  However, here are a few observations on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In OE, you have both &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;utan&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; (&quot;outside&quot;) and &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;innan&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; (&quot;inside&quot;).  Often found side by side (just as we do today): &quot;inside and outside&quot; =&gt; &lt;i&gt;innan and utan&lt;/i&gt; (e.g. Genesis 1320).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Not only do you have &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;butan&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; as &quot;outside =&gt; except/unless&quot; but also &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;binnan&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; &quot;within&quot;, formed on the same model (&lt;i&gt;be+innan&lt;/i&gt;).&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;   So yes, the adjunction of &lt;i&gt;be&lt;/i&gt; (&quot;by&quot;, PDG &lt;i&gt;bei&lt;/i&gt;) to indicate a positioning relative to self is confirmed.  PDG still has &lt;i&gt;innen&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;binnen&lt;/i&gt;.  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Dutch as well retains &lt;i&gt;binnen&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;buiten&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br/&gt;  &#xA;   If you think of it, it is also present in Present Day English: that's the &lt;i&gt;with-&lt;/i&gt; in &lt;i&gt;within&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;So far so good.&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Now about the &lt;b&gt;semantic shift&lt;/b&gt; from &quot;&lt;b&gt;outside&lt;/b&gt;&quot; to &quot;&lt;b&gt;unless&lt;/b&gt;&quot; which ultimately led to the displacement of &lt;i&gt;ac/ak&lt;/i&gt; (the &quot;but&quot; as a conjunction in Old English).  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Here are a few examples I picked from the corpus of Old English Poetry gradually evolving from from &quot;outside&quot; to &quot;unless&quot;.  All 'translations' are mine and are deliberately literal in order to facilitate the word to word correspondence.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Let's start with a real meaning of &quot;outside&quot;.  This is from the Genesis (as you can recognise). v 1355.&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Feowertig daga fæhe ic wille  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;on weras stælan and mid wægþreate  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;æhta and agend eall acwellan  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;þa &lt;b&gt;beutan&lt;/b&gt; beo earce bordum  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;þonne sweart racu stigan onginne.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;For forty days [my] vengence I will&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;on mankind set, and with a deluge &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;all possessions and possessors destroy&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;that &lt;b&gt;outside&lt;/b&gt; are [of the] Ark's boards&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;when the black storm begins &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;In this excerpt, we even have a more archaic form &lt;i&gt;beutan&lt;/i&gt;.  Clearly, the intended meaning here is &quot;outside&quot;.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Here is an example taken from The Meters of Boethius: (20).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Hwæt, þu, fæder engla, eall þing birest e[ð]elice &lt;b&gt;buton&lt;/b&gt; geswince.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;What, Thou, Father of Angels, all things bearest easily, never tired.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;Here we don't have &quot;outside&quot; but more like &quot;immune to&quot; =&gt; &quot;except&quot; (fatigue).&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;Finally, here is a sample meaning of &quot;except/unless&quot;. Pater Noster (ii)&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Ac hwar cym heo nu, &lt;b&gt;buton&lt;/b&gt; þu, engla god, &#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;But where comes she [the soul] now, &lt;b&gt;except/unless&lt;/b&gt; from Thee, God of Angels.&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;As a bonus, we can see here in the same sentence, that &quot;but&quot; is 'ac'/'ak'.&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As well as &lt;em&gt;ufan and utan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;above and outside&quot; for the rhyme.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, &lt;em&gt;innen&lt;/em&gt; has survived as a verb: &quot;to cash in&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T00:11:36.057" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:11:36.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12700" CreationDate="2015-06-24T11:09:17.837" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of excerpts from the Bible (Septuagint, Nova Vulgata, Elizabeth, KJV):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acts 7:34&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ἰδὼν εἰ̃δον&lt;/strong&gt; τὴν κάκωσιν του̃ λαου̃ μου του̃ ἐν Αἰγύπτω̨ καὶ του̃ στεναγμου̃ αὐτω̃ν ἤκουσα καὶ κατέβην ἐξελέσθαι αὐτούς καὶ νυ̃ν δευ̃ρο ἀποστείλω σε εἰς Αἴγυπτον&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;videns vidi&lt;/strong&gt; adflictionem populi mei qui est in Aegypto et gemitum eorum audivi et descendi liberare eos et nunc veni et mittam te in Aegyptum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ви́дя ви́дѣхъ&lt;/strong&gt; ѡѕлобле́ніе люді́й мои́хъ, ѝже во єгѵ́птѣ, и стена́ніе и́хъ услы́шахъ, и снидо́хъ изъ̑я́ти ѝхъ: и нн҃ѣ грядѝ, послю́ тя во єгѵ́петъ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have seen, I have seen&lt;/strong&gt; the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, and I have heard their groaning, and am come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send thee into Egypt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 Samuel 14:43&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;καὶ εἰ̃πεν Σαουλ πρὸς Ιωναθαν ἀπάγγειλόν μοι τί πεποίηκας καὶ ἀπήγγειλεν αὐτω̨̃ Ιωναθαν καὶ εἰ̃πεν &lt;strong&gt;γευσάμενος ἐγευσάμην&lt;/strong&gt; ἐν ἄκρω̨ τω̨̃ σκήπτρω̨ τω̨̃ ἐν τη̨̃ χειρί μου βραχὺ μέλι ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἀποθνή̨σκω&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dixit autem Saul ad Ionathan indica mihi quid feceris et indicavit ei Ionathan et ait &lt;strong&gt;gustans gustavi&lt;/strong&gt; in summitate virgae quae erat in manu mea paululum mellis et ecce ego morior&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;И речѐ сау́лъ ко іѡнаѳа́ну: возвѣсти́ ми, что̀ сотвори́лъ єсѝ; И возвѣстѝ єму̀ іѡнаѳа́нъ и речѐ: &lt;strong&gt;вкуша́я вкуси́хъ&lt;/strong&gt; ма́лѡ ме́ду ѡмочи́въ коне́цъ жезла̀, и́же въ руку̀ моє́ю, и сѐ, а́зъ умира́ю.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Saul said to Jonathan, Tell me what thou hast done. And Jonathan told him, and said, &lt;strong&gt;I did but taste&lt;/strong&gt; a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a participle followed or preceded by indicative form of the same verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this construct mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1207" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T21:17:46.373" Title="Participle + indicative of the same verb (gustans gustavi, videns vidi etc.)" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13053" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:40:30.917" Score="2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seem I can't use latex commands on here. Latex works on math.stackexchange, maybe it would be a good idea here as well if linguistics.stackexchange is intended to be a place for questions about formal semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am basing my question on chapters 'Montague Grammar' and 'Intensional Type Theory' of Gamut 1991.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I wonder about the interpretation of (higher order) variables in intensional type theory, and the effect on meaning postulates in MG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamut presents 'Meaning Postulate 2', essentially saying that a relation between individuals and second-order properties representing an extensional transitive verb must be equivalent to a relation between individuals, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MP2 (v1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;Exist S, For all x, For all X, Box, Delta(x, X) &amp;lt;--&amp;gt; Caret_Down X(Caret_Up lambda-y Caret_down S(x, y))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, S is a variable of type &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;s, &amp;lt;e, &amp;lt;e, t&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (two-place FO relation), X is a variable of type &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;s, &amp;lt;&amp;lt;s, &amp;lt;e, t&amp;gt;&amp;gt;, t&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (SO property), and Delta is a constant symbol representing any extensional TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the alternative version I have in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MP2 (v2)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;Exist S, For all x, For all X, Box Delta(x, Caret_up X) &amp;lt;--&amp;gt;  X(Caret_Up lambda-y Caret_down S(x, y))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S and Delta as above, but variable X is now of type &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&amp;lt;s, &amp;lt;e, t&amp;gt;&amp;gt;, t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, i.e. a set of first-order properties, instead of a second-order property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope despite the lack of typesetting the difference became clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original MP2 (in the GAMUT version) demands the existence of a relation S s.t. for all individuals x and &lt;strong&gt;for all second-order properties&lt;/strong&gt; X, if Delta holds between x and the SO property X, then the &lt;strong&gt;extension&lt;/strong&gt; of the SO property X behaves in a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 2 instead requires the existence of a relation S s.t. for all individuals x and &lt;strong&gt;for all sets of first-order properties X&lt;/strong&gt;, if Delta holds between x and &lt;strong&gt;the intension of X&lt;/strong&gt;, then the set of FO properties X behaves in a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even shorter, and a bit imprecise: (v1) quantifies over &lt;em&gt;the intension of terms&lt;/em&gt;, (v2) over the &lt;em&gt;extension of terms&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By our definition of the semantics of ITT we can show the equivalence of interpretation of &quot;Intension of alpha&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;(alpha)&quot; (where I is the interpretation function of constants) and &quot;Caret_Up(alpha)&quot;, so leaving quantification aside, (v1) and (v2) could be taken to be equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by our interpretation of quantifiers, &quot;For all X&quot; will range over (semantic) objects, not syntactic objects (i.e. not term symbols, but sets and functions over our domain), so I am not sure if I am right to think the two are equivalent, i.e. whether models of (v1) and (v2) are equivalent w.r.t. any expression of L_ITT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10002" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:34:55.363" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:34:55.363" Title="Are the following two versions of a meaning postulate of Montague Grammar equivalent?" Tags="&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;type-theory&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12679" CreationDate="2015-06-24T18:31:56.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point that Gamut are making here is that (i) verbs like &lt;em&gt;seek&lt;/em&gt; express relations between individuals and second-order properties (not relations between individuals), (ii) verbs like &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt; express relations between individuals, and (iii) we want to be to treat verbs uniformly, but also in a way that is able to handle the contrast between &lt;em&gt;seek&lt;/em&gt;-type verbs on the one hand and &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt;-like verbs on the other hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution is to treat &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; verbs as expressing relations between individuals and second-order properties and then, for a certain subset of verbs (the &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt;-like ones), define a meaning postulate that says that those verbs &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; express relations between individuals. (This is an instance of what in Montague Grammar is sometimes called &quot;generalizing to the worst case&quot;. The same occurs when we assume that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; has some really high type, akin to &lt;em&gt;every boy&lt;/em&gt;, rather than just type &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the way to do that is to say, if delta is the relation that is normally expressed by &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. delta is a relation between individuals and second-order properties, then &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; expresses a relation S between individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why X has to range over second-order properties (and not first-order properties) is simply because X is the second argument of delta, and delta is the relation between individuals and &lt;strong&gt;second-order properties&lt;/strong&gt; normally expressed by a verb (any verb, in Montague Grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1567" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:31:56.553" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12670" CreationDate="2015-06-24T18:45:27.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has definitely been a tremendous amount of study on different whale species and their songs. A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512104252.htm&quot;&gt;Science Daily&lt;/a&gt; article from 2011 outlines the findings of some researchers regarding regional &quot;codas&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Caribbean and Pacific whales have different repertoires of codas, like a regional dialect, but the &quot;Five Regular&quot; call -- a pattern of five evenly spaced clicks -- is thought to have the universal function of individual identity because it is used by sperm whales worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Greg Lee's suggestion that dialects are the thing to research seems to be a good way to go for researching your question. Also, comparing animal &quot;language primes&quot; such as this universal identifier for sperm whales, vs. what other types of sounds may be localized (environment/region specific), could be a tactic as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bees also are known for having dialects: dances which only their particular hives can understand. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dialects-in-the-language-of-the-bee/&quot;&gt;Scientific American article&lt;/a&gt; with this title, but as you have to pay for it and I don't care to do so, I'm unsure its specific contents, but seems it could be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10003" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:45:27.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12674" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:03:42.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/dnapoli1/lingarticles/deafjokesandsignlanguagehumor.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Deaf humor&lt;/a&gt; is primarily visually based. A scholarly article on the subject by Swarthmore College is summarized as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sign language humor in America and Britain may be seen in the creation&#xA;  of new visual signs, the witty reanalysis of existing signs and in bilingual&#xA;  games in which English is manipulated within sign languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A page on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/humor.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LifePrint&lt;/a&gt; outlines a couple of deaf jokes, of particular relevance to your question being the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Production and misproduction of signs is a common way to elicit laughs in ASL. One example, described in Bellugi and Klima's book, The Signs of Language is how we can change the root sign, UNDERSTAND, to LITTLE UNDERSTAND by using the pinkie rather than the index finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same author also lists a few &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/idioms.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ASL idioms&lt;/a&gt; on a different page*:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;TRAIN GONE = missed opportunity to know what is being talked about&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;CIGARETTE GONE = missed opportunity to know what is being talked about.  Note, this is a clever twist on the &quot;train gone&quot; idiom since some people say, TRAIN BACK!  But you can't bring back a smoked cigarette.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;FINISH TOUCH = been there, have physically been to a place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;FISH = &quot;I am done. It is over.&quot;  This is a pun / idiom based on the fact that many Deaf when doing the sign for &quot;FINISH&quot; make a mouth movement that looks as if they were saying the word &quot;fish.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;BASEMENT = Stayed home, didn't go out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;BY-A-HAIR&quot; (pull a hair) = &quot;Whew! That was a close one!&quot; The signer does a sign that depicts the &quot;pulling of a single hair&quot; but the actual meaning has nothing to do with the pulling of a single piece of hair.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;FISH-SWALLOW = gullible.  The signer does a sign which depicts the swallowing of a fish but the actual meaning is that someone is gullible. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;BLOW-BRAINS-OUT = Gee, oh wow, I can't believe that it (a certain piece of information) isn't coming to my mind. I know this but can't think of the right word, or information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;SCRATCH-FOREHEAD = I will never forget that. / &quot;Scarred for life.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;STRICT = &quot;hard nosed&quot; = unyielding, not flexible.  This sign is interesting because the meaning of the sign is interpreted as &quot;strict.&quot; You see the sign and you think &quot;strict&quot; -- you don't think of it as being an idiom. But if you consider the likely history of the sign you can see that it is a combination of the signs &quot;HARD&quot; and &quot;NOSE.&quot; The phrase, &quot;He (or she) is hard nosed,&quot; is obviously an idiom since the literal meaning has nothing to do with having a &quot;hard nose.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The author indicates not to copy/paste this list without permission... given this is from a 2005 email hosted on the page, and I cannot find anywhere to contact Dr. Bill (author) to ask permission, I am going to assume linking and acknowledging this request is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this isn't quite the direct type of language game you were looking for, but it is certainly a type of &quot;play on words&quot; within ASL, so I thought it could be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10003" LastEditorUserId="10003" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T20:09:55.947" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T20:09:55.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T18:04:53.010" Score="3" ViewCount="1139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would the &quot;natural&quot; way of learning a language (the way we learn our mother tongue) be better even for acquiring second (and third, etc.) languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;natural&quot; way to learn a language is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;0) You hear it (as a baby and toddler) understanding first tone and later meaning&#xA;1) You gradually learn to speak it (being immersed in the language, you acquire it &quot;effortlessly&quot;)&#xA;2) You later learn to read and write it&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;forced&quot; (usually it's you forcing yourself) way to learn a language is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;0) You try to read it&#xA;1) You try to understand it being spoken&#xA;2) You try to speak it&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we (am I) doing it backwards? Maybe what we should do is first listen, listen, listen, and only later try to speak it, and then read and write it? I wonder if this would also make the acquisition of authentic accents easier (by first focusing on listening).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I learned German half my life ago and am now learning Spanish. I find that learning Spanish is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more difficult for me than German was. My wife says it's because I'm older (I'm 56); my theory/hope is that it's not so much that, but rather the greater difference between English and Spanish than between English (a Germanic language) and German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="B. Clay Shannon" LastEditorUserId="10011" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T20:53:36.920" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T18:06:39.713" Title="Natural vs. &quot;Forced&quot; language learning" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:14:56.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think so. First of all, babies and toddlers are helpless and receive parenting and caring nearly 24/7. They literally have nothing to do except to passively absorb language. Second, humans are biologically designed to learn language earlier in life, just like geese imprint on their mother extremely early on during a &quot;critical period.&quot; Adults can't learn language like babies and toddlers do because it's not supposed to be that way--that unique neurological ability to naturally pick up language is &quot;intentionally&quot; restricted to infancy.  I can say &quot;fui a la tienda ayer&quot; to a new adult Spanish learner and act it out however I like--but the learner will absolutely not understand. The way babies associated meaning with words is through literally hundreds or thousands of instances of usage in different contexts and settings and environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably would need, therefore, some kind of intense immersion to learn a second language in your proposed &quot;natural&quot; way, and this is completely unrealistic for most learners. Without total immersion, structured, organized learning is the only option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the thing is, with babies and toddlers, when they are in their environment of immersion, they literally have no worries or needs that won't be taken care of because they don't fully grasp the language. An American can't go to Spain not knowing how to speak Spanish and then start crying when he needs to use the bathroom, which is what babies do. And I doubt he'll be able to pick up from simply listening and making repeated, frustrated attempts to express himself how to say, &quot;Is there a public restroom nearby?&quot; Therefore, it is necessary to teach such structured phrases and it is impractical to expect natural passive immersive absorption of language of an adult learner of a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5284" OwnerDisplayName="user67444" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T22:14:56.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:26:33.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure your characterization of adult learning is accurate in general, but your basic intuition is right. It is not that case that the most efficient course for adults is infant-like, however; adults have entirely different mental resources, and &quot;listen, listen, listen, and only later try to speak it&quot; is probably too much passive exposure. Instead, adults benefit from communicative interaction in the language (however clumsy at first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are SLA curricula that already focus on this pattern of 'listen/speak and then read/write'. The truly old-fashioned approaches did indeed reverse this, focusing on written translation as the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a broad literature addressing this question, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition#Classroom_second-language_acquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's entry for SLA&lt;/a&gt; has a number of references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:26:33.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:17:11.393" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese you can build words by putting characters together... there are about 100,000 Chinese characters, and the possible combinations are ~2^100,000, as most words are disyllabic; An estimate of number of Chinese words in use that I've seen was about 5 million words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10012" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:17:11.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-06-25T20:39:13.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the way you state the issue is that you focus on the issue of spoken or written language first. But that is not really the problem. The question of natural vs. 'forced' learning applies to learning just the spoken language (or even just the written language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a well known and well debated distinction in the SLA (Second Language Acquisition) literature. I have not seen the 'forced learning' term but people do talk about 'natural learning'. One of the best known (and influential in the 1980s) was Stephen Krashen's 'Natural Learning Approach' which started off with exactly the same assumption - we should learn second languages more like the way children learn their first language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building on the well-recognised 'acquisition' vs. 'learning' distinction, Krashen introduced a so-called monitor model that illustrated how learned material can slow down 'natural communication' and hinder acquisition. He also talked about the affective filter which in some ways could be labeled as 'forced learning' getting in the way of 'natural learning'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krashen's ideas were not new but built on foundations going back at least a hundred years. There are many other approaches that try to lower the affective filter and replace the monitor with more natural input going from 'Total Physical Response' to 'Suggestopedia'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this approach did not really stand the test of time as singular catch all method. It made a lot of sense but the research to support it is sparse. In short, adults have many very useful cognitive strategies such as memorisation, system building, impulse control, metacognition, ability to read and take notes that can speed up their initial acquisition greatly when compared to children in a similar situation (e.g. attending a class twice a week). So, if they were to give up on those, they would forego a great advantage. However, you're still left with the problem of how they can transition from knowledge of the language to a more naturalistic level of proficiency. Here's where many of Krashen's (and others') ideas have taken better hold. I personally find his 'comprehensible input' hypothesis quite a useful way of thinking about success in learning. And many of the internet polyglots (probably knowingly) mirror many of Krashen's suggestions when describing their ultimate success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the complete picture is even more complicated. You need to take into account learning strategies, learning styles, the individual's situation, etc. Which is why the current approach to SLA practice is one of eclecticism (for instance, when people speak about the 'communicative approach', it is an amalgam of many of the methods that came before). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T20:39:13.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-06-25T22:46:12.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You just don't remember how hard it was to learn your first language.  Babies don't just lie around, taking it all in, until a language system somehow springs forth, formed without any particular effort on their part.  Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crib_talk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Crib talk&lt;/a&gt;, which outlines the discovery by Ruth Weir that after they're put to bed, babies don't just drop off to sleep; they use the time to practice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T22:46:12.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2015-06-26T10:07:49.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to this statement:  &quot;Igbo (Ibo), a language of approximately 18 million speakers in Nigeria, does not have verbs at all.&quot; There is a serious misunderstanding somewhere. Please note the following groups of verbs in the Igbo language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a limited number of simple verb roots&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) a combination of these &quot;simple verb roots&quot; to form &quot;compound verbs&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) a combination of a simple verb root with a suffix to form a &quot;complex verb&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) a combination of a simple verb root with a noun/prepositional phrase  schematically summarized as [VERB+NP/PP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the last group that is called the &lt;strong&gt;INHERENT COMPLEMENT VERB&lt;/strong&gt; structure and which were cited by Soshen above. Many Igbo verbs are formed from these three, but the inherent complement structure is the most productive. The earlier investigators of the structure noted this fact of ONE verb root combining with MANY NP/PPs to form what in an average European language would be expressed through a single verb, for example –gbá ọsọ simply means ‘run', but also includes 'run a race’. For this particular reason, the earlier investigators then called these formations from one verb the clusters of that verb. That is how the name of, for example, &lt;strong&gt;-gba cluster&lt;/strong&gt; arose referring to ALL the inherent complement verbs formed by the verb root &lt;strong&gt;-gba&lt;/strong&gt; as belonging to the &lt;strong&gt;-gba cluster&lt;/strong&gt;. Each verb root therefore was understood as having its own cluster of inherent complement verbs formed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinedu Uchechukwu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Department of Linguuistics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anmabra State&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nigeria&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10016" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T10:07:49.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-06-26T12:53:32.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes Burmese is a good example of 100% phonetic language. Everywhere added to next is how it is pronounced. The lower case added to the main letters or others &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10018" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T12:53:32.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:08:10.103" Score="6" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which, if any, of the world's languages have both the following features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syllable-initial vowels are disallowed; all syllables must begin with a consonant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no glottal stop phoneme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T20:08:05.983" Title="Are there languages that disallow initial vowels and lack glottal stop?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-06-26T20:34:49.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried 'purely natural' ways — terribly inefficient, and lots of mistakes (about the language) learned in the process! (Though, I didn’t spend months on it­ — I just couldn’t afford it.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But on the basis of language facts learned in 'traditional' ways it worked better. However such combinative approaches are all included in methods of 'traditional' SLA, I believe.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, your scheme of a 'forced' way is strange and unfamiliar to me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A standard approach seem to be:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;0.&lt;/strong&gt; phonetics (with a lot of 'how-to' instructions)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 1. an alphabet, basic spelling&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 1. the simplest/'basickest' constructions&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 1. oral/written practice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;all above points together, mixed, with many repetitions &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; 2. deeper and wider into the language…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmmm… Is it too different from a 'natural' way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9924" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:34:49.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12696" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:32:08.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As reported by Lin (1977) (&lt;em&gt;Phonology&lt;/em&gt; 14:403-436), there is no glottal stop and no initial vowels in Piro. If you can get &lt;em&gt;Thargari Phonology and Morphology&lt;/em&gt; (T. Klokeid 1969, Pac. Ling. Series B #12), you can confirm or deny whether that too is an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T17:53:49.537" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T17:53:49.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3373" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:03:08.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sources I have read and heard claimed that /r/-dropping in English began &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the colonization of the US, and that /r/-dropping later started in London, and spread thence to the port-cities of the US (Boston, New York City, Charleston, Savannah).  I learned this in my phonology-class in grad-school, and I have seen sources since then that agreed with it (I will attempt to dig some up if desired), although the exact time-frame claimed for the spread of non-rhoticity in Britain varied from the 1770's to the 1820's.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, /r/-dropping in the Southeastern US is almost gone now.  I'm 45, and I just have it in stressless clusters like &quot;horror&quot; &gt; &quot;horra&quot;, while my daughter pronounces every /r/ everywhere.  Contrast this to what's left of my grandparents' generation from the Florida/Georgia border, who are full /r/-droppers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:03:08.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12678" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:04:38.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the grammatical and rhetorical device usually called figura etymologica, but which the ancient grammarians called “derivatio”, where a finite verb (or a participle) is construed with an infinitive (or other nominal derivative) of the same verb. You can find some examples from European authors in Lausberg’s “Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik” par. 281, e.g. from Virgil (voce vocans Hecaten; ire iter) and from Shakespeare (Julius Caesar: most horrid sights seen by the watch; Hamlet: speak the speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, Arabic and other Semitic languages the construction finite verb + infinitive is very common and usually serves to strengthen or to specify the action of the verb. Some Hebrew examples have been quoted above. In Arabic (for example) you say ḍaraba-hu ḍarban šadīdan, literally: “he-hit-him (a) hit, (a) hard (one)”; where ḍarban is the accusative of the infinitive of the verb ḍaraba “he hit”; in English you could say “he dealt him a hard blow”, or simply “he hit him hard”, avoiding in both instances the (for English ears) uncouth repetition of the same word in two different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. This is a very good question. I do not understand why some people are trying to close it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T21:17:46.373" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T21:17:46.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1195" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:33:37.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumption has been that this [di] for &quot;-day&quot; was a part of general reduction of non-first elements in compounds the likes of [vUł] for &quot;-ville&quot; and [mIn] for &quot;-man&quot; that occurred over the centuries.  That could explain why &quot;freeway&quot; doesn't do it: it's too new.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that English spelling generally has retained the original forms (&quot;-day&quot;, &quot;-ville&quot;, &quot;-man&quot;) even when they were reduced at least by some in pronunciation.  I have observed children sounding out words like &quot;Fri+day&quot;, &quot;milk+man&quot;, &quot;fore+head&quot;, and I therefore suspect that the conservative, etymological spellings of these variably reducible forms in English combined with the mass literacy of the last couple of centuries could be exerting a push in favor of the full, rather than reduced, forms.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:33:37.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-27T19:30:25.270" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/koopman/fr/Koopman-%20The%20Syntax%20of%20Verbs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Koopman (1983)&lt;/a&gt;, there is an explanation for why Chinese, despite being a head-final language, has SVO and prepositional features. She suggested that Chinese assigns Case to the right but theta-roles to the left. Thus complements of PPs and VPs are left of their heads at D-structure, but move to the right at S-structure for Case assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native Cantonese speaker, I find the analysis reasonable. Yet there are many cases in Classical Chinese where SOV and postpositional structures are found, including these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Certain interrogative pronouns:  Famous examples include 沛公安在 (Peigong {what place} at), meaning &lt;em&gt;where is Peigong&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;Peigong at what place&lt;/em&gt; in regular Chinese syntax), in the &lt;em&gt;Records of the Grand Historian&lt;/em&gt;; 吾誰與歸 (I whom with return), meaning &lt;em&gt;With whom would I return&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;I with whom return&lt;/em&gt; in regular Chinese syntax), in the celebrated 岳陽樓記 by Fan Zhongyan. (The copula is not used in the first example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Negative sentences with pronouns in object position: For example, there is 莫之能禦 (nothing him can stop), meaning &lt;em&gt;nothing can stop him&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Mencius&lt;/em&gt; and 莫我肯顧 (nothing me {be willing to} {look after}) in the &lt;em&gt;Classic of Songs&lt;/em&gt;. As a side note, 之 and 我 are both accusative in Classical Chinese. (This differs from Modern Standard Mandarin, where even pronouns lack case marking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Certain fixed constructions: 何 (interrogative word) + Object + 之 (meaningless particle) + 有 (exist), 惟 (only) + Object + 是 (meaningless particle) + Verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Sometimes, the phenomenon appears randomly in a way I can't explain, e.g. 禮以行之 (propriety with perform it), meaning &lt;em&gt;perform it with propriety&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;with propriety perform it&lt;/em&gt; in regular Chinese syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The elements in {} represent, in the word-to-word translations, concepts that take more than one word in English but only one in Classical Chinese.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a related phenomenon: PPs are often placed after the verb in Classical Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, has there been any literature that explains these phenomena under the GB framework? If Koopman's analysis is correct, how do these guys pass the Case Filter? If not, can I be pointed to literature regarding similar phenomena in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking Romance object clitics might be a similar case, but as you can see here, it mostly happens to interrogatives and negative declaratives in Classical Chinese. *吾之見矣。 (*I him see {declarative modal particle}), for example, is ungrammatical (at least I think so), while &lt;em&gt;Je le vois&lt;/em&gt; is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T00:51:34.093" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T00:51:34.093" Title="How can we account for head-final PPs and VPs in Classical Chinese?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2015-06-27T19:42:24.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Cantonese fits your description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary is winning the chess match&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;瑪麗贏緊鋪象棋&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Maalai jeng-&lt;strong&gt;gan&lt;/strong&gt; pou zoengkei&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Mary win-asp. {classifer for chess match} chess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary won the chess match in 5 minutes&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;瑪麗五分鐘就贏左鋪象棋&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Maalai ng fanzung zau jeng-&lt;strong&gt;zo&lt;/strong&gt; pou zoengkei&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Mary five minutes {adverb expressing the result of a condition} win-asp. {classifer for chess match} chess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The train is arriving&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;架火車嚟緊&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Gaa foce lai-&lt;strong&gt;gan&lt;/strong&gt; laa&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;{classifer for train} train come-asp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The train arrived in 2 hours&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;架火車兩個鐘頭就到左&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Gaa foce loeng go zungtau zau dou-&lt;strong&gt;zo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;{classifer for train} train two hours {adverb expressing result of condition} come-asp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cantonese, like all Sinitic varieties, does not mark tense as you can see above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T20:12:51.877" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T20:12:51.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10022" CreationDate="2015-06-27T20:08:33.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All literate Chinese people can read and write in Mandarin, even if they do not speak it. It is common in Hong Kong to be able to read and write in Mandarin but, when reading aloud, use Cantonese pronunciations. Mandarin is the only standard written form of Chinese, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bulk of newspaper articles must be written in Mandarin, though there could be informal columns where local dialects are used. There are a handful in Hong Kong, and they could have those in Taiwan as well, though I doubt that's allowed in the Mainland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T20:08:33.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2015-06-28T02:16:22.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, Martian Language comes to mind, also an Internet phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Martian language (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They substitute characters for 近形字 (characters that look similar) or 同音字 (homophonous characters), and other scripts that obfuscate the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've even made a Simplified Chinese&amp;lt;-&gt;Martian converter &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=4&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0CDIQFjAD&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aies.cn%2Fhuoxingwen.htm&amp;amp;ei=7VqPVcvYIYLUmAX77qnoAw&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHeR0DFZ1WOvdObix905_4D1ttq1A&amp;amp;sig2=lnyUDqkzlruoNne4uBdkwg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I input some poetry inside, and here's the result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Original: 獨自莫憑欄，無限江山。別時容易見時難，流水落花春去也，天上人間。&#xA;Martian: 獨洎嗼憑欄，無限茳屾。別時傛易見時難，蓅氺落埖舂呿乜，迗丄亽間。&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not claim to have a large vocabulary, but 洎 is the only of the substitute characters that I know... so Martian is pretty esoteric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited to add: I've just realised 舂 is another character I recognise. I thought it was 春 at first because of the structural similarity between the two characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited: And just to clarify, 乜 is used in Cantonese transcription, so I recognise it as well, but I'm unaware of its original meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@rogermue: LOLspeak isn't the same as textspeak. It's the kind of broken langauge used in lolcats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T18:53:38.363" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T18:53:38.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2015-06-28T03:09:21.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote about the claim 'that Chinese words can mostly be used as any part of speech.' While the claim is untrue, I can see why people fall for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship between lexical word class and how they appear as parts of speech is much more opaque than in English. There is nothing close to a one-to-one correspondence between the two, but it would be a mistake to say that there is no correspondence - that would be akin to saying that x and y are unrelated in circles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In traditional Chinese grammar, the Chinese sentence is made up of six main components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Zhuyu: Subject &#xA;Weiyu: Predicate&#xA;Binyu: Object&#xA;Dingyu: Adjectival&#xA;Zhuangyu: Adverbial&#xA;Buyu: Complement&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, nouns only belong in the Subject and Object positions, adjectives only belong in adjectival positions, and adverbs only belong in adverbial positions. Verb phrases belong only in predicate positions. Prepositional phrases are more flexible though, and can be objective, adverbial or adjectival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet this is not the case in Chinese. Let's look at where the major lexical categories fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Adjectives can go into subject, predicate, object, adverbial and adjectival positions.&#xA;Nouns can go to subject and object positions.&#xA;Verbs can go to subject, predicate and object positions.&#xA;Adverbs can go to adverbial positions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, clauses and verb phrases can also go to subject and object positions without complementisers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of constructions that would not be allowed in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-Adjectives in adverbial positions (e.g. * *He left sudden* in English but 他突然走了 -he sudden leave-asp. - in Chinese)&#xA;-Verbs in subject positions (e.g. * *Swim is fun* in English but 游泳很好玩 - swim very fun - in Chinese)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this does not mean everything works. For example, adjectives can go to predicate positions, but adverbs cannot! You can say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;張三的死很突然 (Zhangsan-possessive death very sudden)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet you cannot say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*張三的死很忽然 (Zhangsan-possessive death very suddenly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, in Classical Chinese, adjectives and nouns can act as transitive verbs, indicating another flexibiltiy in position, but not in Modern Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Classical: 漁人甚異之 (fisherman very strange it) - the fisherman found it very strange&#xA;Vernacular: *漁人很奇異它 (fisherman very strange it)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T13:07:48.680" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T13:07:48.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9428" CreationDate="2015-06-29T03:27:47.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought to quote from two websites that aided me, but to facilitate reading, I edit slightly and eschew blockquotes (&amp;gt;). The first quote is written with plainer and simpler diction and so ought to be read before the second with more formal diction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-bases-roots-stems-english-language-379959&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1 of 2 quotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bases, stems, and roots are the main components of words, just like cells, atoms, and protons are the main components of matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, the words &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;roots&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is the core of the word. It is the morpheme that comprises the most important part of the word. It is also the primary unit of the family of the same word. Keep in mind that the root is mono-morphemic, or made of just one &amp;quot;chunk&amp;quot;, or morpheme. Without the root, the word would not have any meaning. If you take the root away, all that you have left is affixes either before or after it. Such affixes do not have a lexical meaning on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a root is the word &amp;quot;act&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at what is a &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;base&lt;/strong&gt; and apply them to the root &amp;quot;act&amp;quot; so that you can see how they differ and interconnect to transform a lexical word altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; occurs after affixes have been added to the root, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-act ↝ Re-act-ion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence a &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; is a form to which affixes (prefixes or suffixes) have been added. It is important to differentiate it from a root, because the root alone cannot be applied in discourse, whereas the stem exists precisely to be applied to discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;base&lt;/strong&gt; is the same as a root except that the root has no lexical meaning while the base does: &amp;quot;to act&amp;quot; is the infinitive of &amp;quot;act&amp;quot; and is structured with the base &amp;quot;act&amp;quot;. In many words in our language, a word can be all three: a root, base, and stem (eg: &amp;quot;deer&amp;quot;). They differ in how they are applied during discourse (stem, base) and whether, on their own, they have any lexical meaning (stem, base) or no lexical meaning whatsoever (root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of root, base and stem joined together is the word &amp;quot;refrigerator&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin root is &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/frigus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frīg&lt;/a&gt;, which has no meaning in English on its own, and which requires a change in spelling for suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟹ refrigerāre = Latin prefix + root + suffix, with no meaning in English of its own yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟹ re- + friger + -ate + -tor = prefix + root + 2 suffixes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The 2 suffices now produce lexical meaning = stem; spelling changes are required for suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[The links included with the answer contain the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glossary of Linguistic Terminology&lt;/a&gt; for further information.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsABoundRoot.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsABoundRoot.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStem.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStem.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_difference_between_root_word_and_stem_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 of 2 quotes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Root, stem, base&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Taken from: [...] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/morphology/english-word-formation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English [W]ord-[F]ormation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; [...] by Laurie Bauer, 1983 (published by Cambridge University Press).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Root’, ‘stem’ and ‘base’ are all terms used in the literature to designate that part of a word that remains when all affixes have been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; is a form which is not further analysable, either in terms of derivational or inflectional morphology. It is that part of word-form that remains when all inflectional and derivational affixes have been removed. A root is the basic part always present in a lexeme. In the form ‘untouchables’ the root is ‘touch’, to which first the suffix ‘-able’, then the prefix ‘un-‘ and finally the suffix ‘-s’ have been added. In a compound word like ‘wheelchair’ there are two roots, ‘wheel’ and ‘chair’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; is of concern only when dealing with inflectional morphology.&#xA;In the form ‘untouchables’ the stem is ‘untouchable’, although in the form ‘touched’ the stem is ‘touch’; in the form ‘wheelchairs’ the stem is ‘wheelchair’, even though the stem contains two roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;base&lt;/strong&gt; is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. This means that any root or any stem can be termed a base, but the set of bases is not exhausted by the union of the set of roots and the set of stems: a derivationally analysable form to which derivational affixes are added can only be referred to as a base. That is, ‘touchable’ can act as a base for prefixation to give ‘untouchable’, but in this process ‘touchable’ could not be referred to as a root because it is analysable in terms of derivational morphology, nor as a stem since it is not the adding of inflectional affixes which is in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T19:19:28.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12719" CreationDate="2015-06-29T03:39:05.260" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#i-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;i-&lt;/a&gt;   |   &#xA;  Pronominal stem.   |  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/9430/5306&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; explains the possible difference in meaning between 'root' and 'stem', which induced my question in the title above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. What does it mean for a stem be pronominal? A stem can function as a pronoun? I'm untrained in linguistics. So please explain in plain, simple language, as though I were 15 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:26:07.060" Title="How can a PIE root be a 'pronominal stem'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9428" CreationDate="2015-06-29T05:07:16.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A root is the form to which derivational affixes are added to form a stem.  (Sometimes stems are formed by derivational processes other than affixation.)  A stem is the form to which inflectional affixes are added to form a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, many words have no affixes, in which case there is no point in distinguishing word from stem or stem from root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivation, at least for English suffixes, is conditioned by part of speech, while inflection is conditioned by syntactic environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T05:15:30.433" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T05:15:30.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T08:18:51.750" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the most authoratative references on the notion of shallow parsing (also known as text chunking) in NLP? I am looking for definitions, examples, and discussion of strings of words that qualify as chunks in the sense of shallow parsing. Some surfing on the internet has revealed that the followng article was seminal in this area:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abney, Steven (1991), Parsing By Chunks. Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 257–278.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That article is, however, quite dated. Are there prominent articles or book chapters that explore the concept of text chunking in a broad sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T16:04:41.537" Title="What are the most authoratative references on the notion of shallow parsing?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12722" CreationDate="2015-06-29T12:51:58.603" Score="12" ViewCount="7481" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard of the Mongolian vowel separator from programmers, who regard it as an interesting quirk in Unicode. When I google for it, most of the hits are from those revelling in its geekiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as someone dabbling a bit in Mongolian, I'd like to know: What is it used for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:10:34.690" Title="What is the Mongolian vowel separator for?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:14:27.473" Score="1" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most past participles can act as predicate adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The island was &lt;strong&gt;inhabited&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but there are some words that may look like both parts of speech, but can only be used in one way or the other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The student was &lt;strong&gt;flabbergasted&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &#xA;Flabbergasted is adjectival, but there isn't really a verb &quot;to flabbergast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The lazy employee was &lt;strong&gt;fired&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&#xA;Fired describes what happened to her (verb), but isn't really a trait she would possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a simple way to test whether a given -ed word is one or the other or both? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I've come up with and I'd like your assessment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put the word in these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;the thing seems _____&quot; if it sounds natural, it's a predicate&#xA;adjective.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;the thing has (been) _____&quot; If it sounds natural, it's a past&#xA;participle -- &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; is used for transitive verbs,&#xA;omitted for intransitive verbs.. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your word works in both, it can be used either way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that cover my bases, or is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9784" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:15:04.713" Title="What's a good test to distinguish past participles from predicate adjectives?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12712" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:32:00.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Mongolian, but I'll venture a guess.  There is front/back vowel harmony in Mongolian, so a distinction in writing between word final &quot;a&quot; and &quot;e&quot; is not all that necessary.  It will be /a/ in back harmonic words and /e/ otherwise.  The vowel separator glyph seems to have been pressed into service to make this distinction for the sake of non-human readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found some discussion and illustrations &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ulib.org/conference/genpub/Khaltarkhuu.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on pages 5-6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T20:10:24.343" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:10:24.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12712" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:07:33.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unicode 30 spec says, in section 11.4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;U+180E MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR is a word-internal thin whitespace that may occur only before the word-final vowels U+1820 MONGOLIAN LETTER A and U+1821 MONGOLIAN LETTER E. It determines the specific form of the character preceding it, selects a special variant shape of these vowels, and produces a small gap within the word...&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tables of Mongolian letters in both Bright and Daniels &lt;em&gt;The World's Writing Systems&lt;/em&gt; (ISBN 0-19-507993-0) and Campbell's &lt;em&gt;Concise Compendium of the World's Languages&lt;/em&gt; (ISBN 0-415-11392-X) show distinct forms for vowels A and E only initially, so the issue of distinguishing A and E doesn't seem to arise at the end of the word. The sample glyphs for U+1820 and U+1821 in the printed Unicode standard do not seem to me to match closely any of the glyphs shown in either of those sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the sample of Mongolian in Bright and Daniels (an 18thC blockprint) does show a number of words ending in a glyph which in Campbell's table is the final form of A/E (confusingly, that particular glyph does not appear at all in the accompanying table in Bright and Daniels); and one word (which occurs three times) has this final glyph doubled, with a tiny space between. Normally one would expect that the penultimate letter would take a medial form, so I'm guessing that this is the purpose for which 180E was introduced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:07:33.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12713" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:15:04.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;very&quot; modifies only adjectives, not verbs: &quot;*John very shot my dog.&quot; -&gt; *&quot;My dog was very shot.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:15:04.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12711" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:48:31.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never heard of shallow parsing, but I have a theory that sort of does it.  I don't often see a question that seems to license me talking about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a variant of context free grammar in which I. heads are not assigned to grammatical types (N, A, V, P, ...) but are rather introduced directly by phrase structure rules (S1 -&gt; NP1 loves NP2), and II. grammatical types are distinguished by their degree of embedding, which I note with a digit suffix (0, 1, 2, 3).  My preceding illustration means that a finite clause (S1) consists of a nominative NP (NP1) followed by pronunciation &quot;loves&quot; followed by an accusative NP (NP2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sense in which this gives a shallow parsing is that much of the embeddedness which requires huge tall trees in conventional syntactic theory is there in the psr.  Much of the apparent branching structure accompanies lexical forms of verbs (which are psrs).  I assign intrinsic embeddededness levels to the various auxiliaries of English and the various adverb types (Adv0 is performative, Adv1 is sentential, Adv2 is manner, Adv3 is degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make tall trees if you want, though.  Corresponding to the principle of the transformational cycle, psrs are expanded always starting with the most embedded parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you think of parsing as associating psrs with strings of words and trees, there are many fewer associations required for a tree of a given depth, so the parse is shallow in that sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:48:31.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12709" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:26:07.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase 'pronominal stem' just means the 'stem' of a pronoun. So the stem of the English pronouns 'who', 'whom' and 'whose' is 'who-'. As they are pronouns it is a 'pronominal stem'.&#xA;As the article you linked to says the difference between 'stem' and 'root' is not relevant generally to English, but in this case it is as these words share a root 'wh-' both with the pronoun forms 'what' and 'which' and the adverbs 'where' and 'why'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10008" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:26:07.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:26:53.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language whose writing is 100% phonemic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yes. That is Sinhala the language of Sinhalese 20 million people from Sri Lanka.&#xA;You can write words exactly what you here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can learn how to write and pronounce letters. After that reading words is straightforward task as well as writing words while you hear. There are no two or more ways to pronounce a sinhala word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10032" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:26:53.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12712" CreationDate="2015-06-30T12:10:34.690" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formal description has been already given in the excellent @ColinFine's answer. Let me give a different description in &quot;layman terms&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mongolian characters usually have four distinct forms: &lt;strong&gt;isolate, initial, medial&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;final&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Vowels &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt; have exactly the same glyphs in their final form.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here are the four forms for &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt;, correspondingly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note, both have &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; versions of final glyphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3GHvQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mongolian vowels A and E&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although choosing between &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt; can be concluded from the the syntax &lt;em&gt;(&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; for masculine grammatic gender while &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt; is for feminine)&lt;/em&gt;, there can be semantic difference depending on the final form (stroke up or stroke down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wntho.png&quot; alt=&quot;qara&quot;&gt; &lt;code&gt;[qara]&lt;/code&gt; (to look), &lt;em&gt;stroke up&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yMEgm.png&quot; alt=&quot;qar+a&quot;&gt; &lt;code&gt;[qar+a]&lt;/code&gt; (black), &lt;em&gt;stroke down&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Vowel Separator is used in the second word.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Phonetically, there's a little pause before the final vowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; does not obtain the isolate form. Instead, it only changes to the &lt;strong&gt;second&lt;/strong&gt; final form. Also, &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; gets the final form in the second word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per why the character makes programmers' hell (just in case if you wonder).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the modern-day compilers allows Unicode identifiers (e.g., variable names). You may write your program with variables in your (non-English) language, and your program works just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, using &lt;code&gt;U+180E&lt;/code&gt; may lead you into a trouble because it may or may not be considered a symbol. Here's what happens (assume that &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is the Mongolian Vowel Separator):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;integer variable aXa = 42;&#xA;print aa;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: since the &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; symbol is &lt;strong&gt;invisible&lt;/strong&gt;, the first line on your screen looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;integer variable aa = 42;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trouble one: Unicode versions prior to 4.0 treat &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; as a formatting (thus, valid) character, but trying to use the variable &lt;code&gt;aa&lt;/code&gt; leads you to an error because there is no such variable! There's only &lt;code&gt;aXa&lt;/code&gt;, but you can't see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trouble two: Unicode 4.0 treats &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; as a &lt;strong&gt;zero-width space&lt;/strong&gt;. This means that you're trying to declare a variable with space in its name (&lt;code&gt;a a&lt;/code&gt;) which makes your code unable to compile. But again, due to invisibility you simply don't know what's wrong. The code visually looks perfectly valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eki.ee/knab/lat/kblcmg2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical Uighur script for Mongolian&lt;/a&gt; (PDF)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ulib.org/conference/genpub/Khaltarkhuu.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Retrieval in Texts with Traditional Mongolian Script&lt;/a&gt; (PDF)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2014/12/01/when-is-an-identifier-not-an-identifier-attack-of-the-mongolian-vowel-separator/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attack of the Mongolian Vowel Separator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:10:34.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:05:54.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chat language is a special language based on shortenings because communication must be quick and normal language in written form is too slow in chat room communication. One might call it a shorthand language. Such things develop wherever quick exchange of information is necessary. So specialists at stock exchanges have their own shorthand language as Mombi for German Moment bitte (moment please).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:05:54.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12711" CreationDate="2015-06-30T16:04:41.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this link will be useful for you: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=NP_Chunking_(State_of_the_art)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NP Chunking (State of the art)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9688" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T16:04:41.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T20:47:26.663" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The causative verbs in germanic languages are built upon the preterite of a strong verb. However there's one verb that seems to fall out of that scheme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish: vakna - väcka; German: (auf)wachen - (auf)wecken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's up with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10037" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:01:53.953" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:01:53.953" Title="Why does väcka/wecken seem to be built as a causative although vakna/wachen is a weak verb?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2015-06-30T20:50:53.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin grammar consists of two main parts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part I describes the word classes and what forms these words can take, nouns, adjectives, verbs etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part II describes what parts a sentence has (subject, predicate, objects, predicative complement, adverbials), how sentences are built and special constructions used in Latin sentences as accusative + infinitive or absolute ablative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek word syntax consists of syn- together and taxe from a verb meaning to set, to put, so the idea of syntax is how words are put together to form a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin way to describe language is extremely systematic and accurate. As a pupil in the higher classes I was filled with awe about this systematic architecture of language description. Unfortunately I miss this systematic way in English grammars by native authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T21:07:03.480" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T21:07:03.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12726" CreationDate="2015-06-30T22:48:03.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's different in another way as well - as you can see from the English 'to wake' 'to waken'. Most causatives are created by adding an '-i' in Germanic see the English pairs 'drink/drench &amp;lt; *dranki-' (with i umlaut and palatalisation), 'sit/set &amp;lt; *sati-', 'lie/lay'; in 'wake/waken' an -n is added. &#xA;This is an alternative mechanism for creating causatives, mebbe's related to the other 'n' verbs which create verbs out of adjectives such as 'hard/harden', 'weak/weaken'&#xA;I suspect the reason why lies in the class of verbs - Germanic '*wakanan' is a class 6 strong verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10008" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T22:48:03.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T10:41:46.237" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heim and Kratzer's &quot;Semantics in Generative Grammar&quot;, bases its semantics on some version of transformational syntax. However, it is remarkably inexplicit about formalising the syntax it presupposes beyond the assumption that it applies to the familiar X-bar, binary trees found in the tradition in discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a pithy formalisation of the sort of X-bar theory and tree-theoretic concepts undergirding Minimalism, and a formalisation of the key concepts involved in derivation of trees (movement, etc) so that I can provide a new semantic theory for structures of this kind. I have come across the work of Stabler and others, but have not located the precise parts where (esp. formalisation of X bar theory) some of these matters are stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone give me page references of specific papers that may be useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3409" LastEditorUserId="3409" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T12:55:34.023" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T16:26:55.773" Title="Syntax presupposed by Heim and Kratzer" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T17:40:51.620" Score="7" ViewCount="1898" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have tried Googling where the upward inflection comes from but all I get are &quot;Valley Girl&quot; results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My curiosity in this started with my new German Language course I'm taking and noticed that the inflections are present there as well for questions. If I remember correctly, when I took Italian and Spanish, the inflections were there as well. I thought it was odd that it was such a seemingly universal thing among Languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this used? Are there known origins? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10040" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-19T00:50:00.283" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T06:23:43.053" Title="Why do we use an upward inflection when asking questions?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12734" CreationDate="2015-07-01T20:45:36.803" Score="7" ViewCount="2288" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Praat, I want to select a portion of the sound, extract it, and save it separately from the original file.  This part of the sound is always between 0.108 s and 0.112 s because it is from pure tones.  Here is the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Read from file: &quot;sound.wav&quot;&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound sound&quot;&#xA;Select: 0.108, 0.112&#xA;Extract selected sound (preserve times)&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound untitled&quot;&#xA;Rename: &quot;new sound&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time I run this, I get the error that &quot;Select&quot; (what I use to select from 0.108 to 0.112) is not an option for this object.  The error box reads: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Command &quot;Select:&quot; not available for current selection.  Script line 14 not performed or completed: Select: 0.108, 0.112.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to make this error go away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9993" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T14:35:43.863" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T14:55:46.007" Title="Select a portion of a sound in Praat" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12733" CreationDate="2015-07-01T21:18:35.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to switch the &quot;focus&quot; of the commands to the editor. The way it's written now, it's trying to apply the &quot;Select&quot; command to the object in the object window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Read from file: &quot;sound.wav&quot;&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound sound&quot;&#xA;Edit&#xA;editor Sound sound&#xA;    Select: 0.108, 0.112&#xA;    Extract selected sound (preserve times)&#xA;endeditor&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound untitled&quot;&#xA;Rename: &quot;new sound&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: In the latest version of Praat for Windows (5.4.12), extracted sounds are automatically named &quot;Sound untitled&quot;, hence the penultimate line. You might want to check in your version what the default name is for an extracted sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Following @jja's suggestion, here is a revised version that uses an object ID to refer to the sound (I also replaced 'endeditor' with 'Close' so that it actually closes the editor window, and I dispensed with the selectObject command because I realized that the extracted sound object will already be selected):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;sound = Read from file: &quot;sound.wav&quot;&#xA;selectObject: sound&#xA;Edit&#xA;editor: sound&#xA;    Select: 0.108, 0.112&#xA;    Extract selected sound (preserve times)&#xA;Close&#xA;Rename: &quot;new sound&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @jja points out, the use of an object ID is more robust because it guarantees that you are selecting the exact sound you read in; with the first method, if you have multiple objects with the same name in the object window you might select the wrong one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following @robert's suggestion, here is an alternative that bypasses the editor window (the manual way to access the &quot;Extract part&quot; command is to highlight the sound in the object window and choose Convert &gt; Extract part...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Read from file: &quot;sound.wav&quot;&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound sound&quot;&#xA;Extract part: 0.108, 0.112, &quot;rectangular&quot;, 1, &quot;yes&quot;&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound sound_part&quot;&#xA;Rename: &quot;new sound&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T19:30:28.393" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T19:30:28.393" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T21:55:56.810" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Optional Foreword:&lt;/strong&gt; I understand pronouns such as 'none, no one, nobody', if they're the subject of one independent clause. But the quote below (encountered  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=category&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;herein&lt;/a&gt;) confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask here (and not on the English SE sites), because my ordeal with this problem also in French and Spanish, betrays a deeper linguistic problem, independent of a specific language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(TL;DR)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hrtIDakUpA4C&amp;amp;pg=PT208&amp;amp;lpg=PT208&amp;amp;dq=%22category+should+be+used+by+no-one+who+is+not+prepared+to+state%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=ZT_g7YEbnM&amp;amp;sig=2PHwjR4aWScZt6r_o-5lLlhC3i0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=al6UVf-0G8Sy-AHnn4PoDQ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22category%20should%20be%20used%20by%20no-one%20who%20is%20not%20prepared%20to%20state%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Original Source]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'category' should be used by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no-one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; is not prepared to state [the following]   [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't pinpoint the source of my confusion; so please advise. However, I suspect that I'm troubled by the use of &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; (the relative pronoun) to refer to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no-one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (its antecedent).&lt;br&gt;&#xA; How can a pronoun refer to a nonexistent someone or something? Is this nonsensical?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the sentence above, if 'category' should be used by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no-one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, then no one exists.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So how can you continue to consider this &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no-one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, especially with a relative clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already deduced, and so ask NOT about, the meaning of the above:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One should use 'category' only if prepared to state [the following].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T22:00:59.700" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T05:24:47.147" Title="How can a pronoun refer to a negative indefinite pronoun?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12737" CreationDate="2015-07-01T22:01:55.630" Score="2" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages that express grammatical number in nouns with suffixes, usually there is either a suffix added to an unsuffixed singular to form the plural (&lt;em&gt;cat—cats&lt;/em&gt;), or the suffix (or inflectional ending) is replaced (Italian &lt;em&gt;gatto—gatti&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there, however, any languages that consistently use unsuffixed plurals for nouns and add a suffix to form the singular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of Arabic examples such as &lt;em&gt;ghurfah&lt;/em&gt; &quot;room&quot; — &lt;em&gt;ghuraf&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rooms&quot;, but they're rather sporadic and involve internal flexion. Collective nouns such as &lt;em&gt;al-ˁarab&lt;/em&gt; being the basis for &lt;em&gt;ˁarabîyyun&lt;/em&gt; &quot;an Arab&quot; come closer, but I'm not at all sure they're technically the same noun in different numbers, as opposed to separate nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, I can think of two scenarios in which suffixed singulars and unsuffixed plurals could occur: one where the plural inflectional ending is lost historically but the singular one remains, making it &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; as though something is added to form the singular; and another one where &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the old inflexion is lost and there is no number distinction for a while, until a partitive suffix of some sort is grammaticalised as the new singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T22:22:54.353" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T08:21:06.633" Title="Are there languages that form noun singulars by adding suffixes to plurals, rather than vice versa?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12736" CreationDate="2015-07-01T22:18:32.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. Here's my answer to a similar question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3587/what-kind-of-pluralisation-system-does-welsh-use/3588#3588&quot;&gt;What kind of pluralisation system does Welsh use?&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some words in Welsh use a singulative/collective distinction instead&#xA;  of the singular/plural distinction used e.g. in English. This means&#xA;  exactly what you've shown: the collective term for '(a collective of)&#xA;  trees' is the root, and you add the singulative suffix to get 'a&#xA;  tree'. This is sort of analogous to 'a head of cattle' in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T22:18:32.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12735" CreationDate="2015-07-02T00:06:48.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronouns often don't have reference -- they have cross-reference.  It is like the difference in high-school algebra between constants and variables.  Constants are comparable to simple names of individuals, and when used, they have reference to those individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Variables, like the &quot;him&quot; in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. &quot;Everyone wants someone to love &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;do not refer to individuals until a constant is substituted. Then that constant will be the reference:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. &quot;Horace wants someone to love &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns can sometimes be used referentially, also. In 2, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; refers to Horace.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 is ambiguous in writing, since if the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is stressed, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; could be used to refer to a certain person who is a desired object of affection in everyone's mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easier to discuss the referentiality of pronouns if we can use the notation of predicate logic and avoid distracting multiple interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take an example similar to the one asked about: &quot;No one who respects himself should eat his hat.&quot;  The &quot;one&quot;, &quot;who&quot;, &quot;himself&quot;, and &quot;his&quot; are cross-referenced, though of course no individual is referred to -- the sentence is a generality.  Using a variable to get at the logic of this, we could write &quot;No x such that x respects x should eat x's hat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use restricted quantification, one more step gives us a logical form: &quot;(Any x: x respects x) not(x should eat x's hat)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linguistic literature, instead of the term cross-reference that I used above, one generally finds &quot;coindex&quot;, or even &quot;coreference&quot;, for the relationship between arguments represented by the same variable in a logical form.  This is not the best terminology, since it seems to imply reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T05:24:47.147" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T05:24:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12736" CreationDate="2015-07-02T07:40:12.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you say about Arabic is a bit confused. ghurfa / ghuraf is a simple singular / plural situation, the plural being formed by restructuring the consonants of the singular (which is not at all &quot;sporadic&quot;). There are, however, words with a three-fold distinction between collective / singularative / plural, where the collective is the primary form, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thamar = fruit (collective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thamara = a piece of fruit &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thimār = fruits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thamarāt = pieces of fruit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, both thamar and thamara are grammatically singular (masculine and feminine respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a broader level: in English too the collective “fruit” is the primary form, while “a piece of fruit” is derived from it, though not by suffixation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T18:01:49.727" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:01:49.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-04T02:22:49.040" Score="2" ViewCount="865" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=penance&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;penance (n.)&lt;/a&gt; [←] &#xA;      late 13c., &quot;religious discipline or self-mortification as a token of repentance and as atonement for some sin,&quot; from Anglo-French penaunce, &lt;strong&gt;Old French peneance&lt;/strong&gt; (12c.), from Latin &lt;code&gt;pænitentia&lt;/code&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=penitence&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;penitence&lt;/a&gt;). Transferred sense is recorded from c. 1300.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=penitence&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;penitence (n.)&lt;/a&gt; [←] &#xA;      c. 1200, from Old French penitence (11c.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and directly from Latin &lt;code&gt;paenitentia&lt;/code&gt; &quot;repentance,&quot; noun of condition&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from paenitentum (nominative paenitens) &quot;penitent,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern English, 'penance' differs from 'penitence'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However,  modern French lacks a cognate of the English 'penance'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Instead, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries/english-french/penance/601094&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'penance'&lt;/a&gt; seems to be translated as « pénitence » (nf).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Per contra, per the bold above, Old French did contain a cognate of the English 'penance'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did the same Latin etymon &lt;code&gt;paenitentia&lt;/code&gt; evolve into all this complexity?&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Please expose and explain all hidden, missing semantic drifts and links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unversed in Latin, but I noticed that Etymonline above spells &lt;code&gt;paenitentia&lt;/code&gt; differently: first with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the ash grapheme&lt;/a&gt;, then 'ae' separately. Please advise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T02:22:49.040" Title="'penance' vs 'penitence'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3502" CreationDate="2015-07-04T10:29:25.130" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: since I've updated the package, \mbox is not necessary and I removed it from the example below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I developed a package for typesetting phonological rules: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ctan.org/pkg/phonrule?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonrule&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\phon{x}{\oneof{&#xA;\envr{w}{z} \\&#xA;\envl{v}{\phonfeat{&#xA;+feature x \\&#xA;-feature y}}}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DRclW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Phonological rule example.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code to achieve the rule of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\phonb{\phonfeat{+stop \\ +consonant \\ +alveolar}&#xA;}{[ɾ]}{\phonfeat{+vowel \\ +stressed}}{\phonfeat{+vowel \\ +stressed}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with its output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WISXX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tapping of coronals in AE.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastEditorUserId="2599" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T23:45:16.313" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T23:45:16.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12736" CreationDate="2015-07-04T16:18:15.923" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ukrainian has some nouns like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;листя - leaves (collective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;листок - a leaf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;насіння - seeds (collective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;насінина - a seed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;бадилля - the tops foliage (collective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;бадилина - a single stem or a leaf of a plant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T16:18:15.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-04T19:22:57.483" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created a phonemic alphabet. I realize that because it is phonemic, I do not need spaces or other markers to separate words; the spelling doesn't matter because each letter has one sound and doesn't change, even based on the letter around it. Thus I have two ways to write the same thing, and I was thinking I would use them differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know a lot about linguistics. Based on the way other languages work, like Japanese, what are multiple systems &lt;em&gt;used for&lt;/em&gt; in a language? For example, formal vs informal speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phones&lt;/strong&gt; I am aware of 33 different phones in the English language. Of these I use 30 because some of the sounds are redundant/uncommon (v and w are very similar so I use w, and the &quot;xh&quot; phone in &quot;the&quot; can be replaced with the &quot;th&quot; phone in &quot;theory&quot;, and the &quot;zh&quot; phone in &quot;casual&quot; is rarely used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these 33 or 30 phones I have created an alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Markers&lt;/strong&gt; In English letters make different sounds based on the surrounding letters, like the word &quot;change&quot;, where &quot;c&quot; followed by &quot;h&quot; makes the &quot;ch&quot; sound,  the &quot;g&quot; makes the &quot;j&quot; sound, and the &quot;e&quot; is silent. Because my alphabet is  phonemic (the letters don't change phones), I am able to string words together without markers that separate them; spelling no longer matters, just the sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10052" LastEditorUserId="10052" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T00:51:17.723" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T00:51:17.723" Title="What are multiple writing systems used for in a single language?" Tags="&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2015-07-04T19:38:28.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your alphabet is completely phonetic?  Are you sure?  The &lt;strong&gt;Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; feature system has around 17 orthogonal features which, even if they are all binary valued, gives 2^17 distinct sound segments.  That takes a pretty big alphabet. (Though not all sounds occur in all languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why you think that a phonetic alphabet doesn't need word spaces.  Some writing systems have not marked word divisions, but I don't think it has to do with how phonetic the system is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to answer your question, my impression is that different writing systems for a single language have been maintained by different religious groups of a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T19:38:28.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2015-07-04T23:37:13.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is already such an alphabet: the International Phonetic Alphabet. I assume that you mean that you've created an alternative to the IPA (perhaps one omitting nonexistent sounds, depending on what language this is supposed to be for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Competing alphabets (and abjads / abugidas -- a technical distinction in kinds of non-pictographic writing systems) reflect social distinctions of some kind. The indigenous Vai syllabary is used I suppose you would say to be &quot;traditional&quot;, but Latin-based letters are used to be &quot;modern&quot;. The most frequent divide, as far as I know, is religion (e.g. Sindhi which is written in Devanagari, Gurmukhi and Arabic which roughly aligns with the Hindu / Sikh / Muslim division). There are also nationality-based distinctions such as Latin alphabet for Kurdish in Turkey vs. Arabic script in Iran and Iraq, or traditional Mongolian script in Inner Mongolia (China) vs. Cyrillic in Mongolia (or, Latin on the interwebs). Likewise, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are used along with Latin script, depending on language and dialect, province (Nunavut vs. Labrador Inuktitut).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T23:37:13.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-05T01:09:06.630" Score="3" ViewCount="2150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read the following, I know that 'semantics' is a hyponym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semiotics&lt;/a&gt;, and semiotics a hyponym of 'meaning'. But the semblance of interchangeability between 'meaning' and 'semantics' in certain uses exposes my failure to comprehend the differences totally. So what finer distinctions have I neglected?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Optional Reading and Supplement:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 571:] &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;   The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to&#xA;  comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have&#xA;  both form—pronunciation or gesture—and meaning. See &lt;strong&gt;extension, intension,&#xA;  sense, reference&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 578:] &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;   The study of the linguistic meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and&#xA;  sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source:       &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed, 2014), by Matthews, P. H.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199675128.001.0001/acref-9780199675128-e-2012.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; = Traditionally of something said to be ‘expressed by’ a sentence. E.g. &lt;em&gt;I hate parsnips&lt;/em&gt; would express the thought, judgement, or proposition ‘I hate parsnips’. Forms that express something are meaningful, ones that do not are meaningless. Thence also of the words, constructions, etc. that make up a sentence: e.g. &lt;em&gt;parsnip&lt;/em&gt; means ‘parsnip’ [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199675128.001.0001/acref-9780199675128-e-3015.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semantics&lt;/a&gt; = The study of meaning. Seen by Bréal, in the late 19th century, as an emerging science (French ‘sémantique’) opposed to phonetics (‘phonétique’) as a science of sounds: similarly, for Bloomfield in the 1930s, it was a field covering both grammar, as one account of meaningful forms, and the lexicon. Also seen more narrowly, in a tradition lasting into the 1960s, as the study of meaning in the lexicon alone, including changes in word meaning. Later, in accounts in which the study of distributions was divorced from that of meanings, opposed either to grammar in general; or, within grammar and especially within a generative grammar from the 1960s onwards, to syntax specifically. Of the uses current from the end of the 20th century, many restrict semantics to the study of meaning in abstraction from the contexts in which words and sentences are uttered: in opposition, therefore, to pragmatics. Others include pragmatics as one of its branches. In others its scope is in practice very narrow: thus one handbook of ‘contemporary semantic theory’, in the mid-1990s, dealt almost solely with problems in formal semantics, even the meanings of lexical units being neglected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T14:57:47.800" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T14:57:47.800" Title="How do 'semantics' and 'meaning' differ?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12752" CreationDate="2015-07-05T01:57:01.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantics is the study of meaning, as, for instance, optics is the study of light, or arithmetic is the study of numbers.  They are just different sorts of things -- it's hard to explain.  Your study of something is different from the thing that you're studying.  If I'm trying to figure out how to add numbers, my figuring that out is not the same as addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T01:57:01.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12752" CreationDate="2015-07-05T04:28:27.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My attempt at explaning semantics is as follows. As a pupil I was aghast that a Latin word as ratio could have about twenty meanings and even more.&#xA;I wondered how someone might get such a list into their head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, no one told me that in dictionaries the meanings of a word are arranged as the editor likes, i.e. without any logic. I didn't know yet that a word has a central meaning like the trunk of a tree and that  sometimes a word can develop several meanings just as a tree has several branches. And of, course I had no idea how words can develop several meanings. A word can take on meanings that are very near the original basic meaning. It can take the meaning of the consequences, it can adopt various meanings if the word is transferred into various branches of science such as mathematics, law, literature, music and so on. The ways how words develop meanings are various, but they are logical and follow mostly the same patterns which one can understand easily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantics is an interesting study and I think it is worthwhile having a look into such a book. If someone had shown me that the twenty  meanings of ratio could be arranged in a way that shows how  the word developed so many meanings I would have got an idea that it is possible to get twenty meanings into one's head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment I don't know what good books are available on semantics as I have no need for this sector. If nessessary I do the semantics of a word on my own. But I know from my time as a university student that the books of Stephen Ullmann are good. Link to one title: Stephen Ullmann, The principles of semantics, with a review of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/453707?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/453707?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T01:37:26.937" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T01:37:26.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9428" CreationDate="2015-07-05T06:53:25.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Root, stem, base&lt;/em&gt; are used in various linguistic sectors with slightly different meanings, so in each case you have to get information how a special linguistic field or a special author uses these terms. In Latin grammar &lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stem&lt;/em&gt; have one meaning, in the IE field another, so a general definition of those three terms brings nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T18:37:45.920" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T18:37:45.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2015-07-05T07:09:32.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of a &quot;natural way&quot; of learning a language in the way children do is a bit naive. That would necessitate a mother that learns you to speak, an environment where all the others and you speak this language, it would mean five years of training in this language, then ten years of school where you learn the finer rules of speaking, spelling and writing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An adult person can't try to learn a foreign language in the way a child learns its mother tongue. An adult person has not the urgent necessity to learn language that a child has and children have by nature's programme an astonishing faculty to soak up their mother tongue. But about at the age of twelve nature shuts down this programme as if to say if you haven't learnt language by now I can't help you. Now other programmes are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When children learn a foreign language at school they have lost this astonishing faculty to soak up a language, and an adult has the same difficulties, unless he has learnt already three languages, then the fourth or fifth language is a piece of cake because such a person has developed an effective way of learning a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are effective ways of learning a foreign language and ineffective ways. A lot of  what is done in schools is, in my view, ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T18:06:39.713" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T18:06:39.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12736" CreationDate="2015-07-05T08:21:06.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One might say that plural endings are ultimately nothing but a noun + many, and a singular ending nothing but noun + one. Of course, this is a mere hypothesis and it would be difficult to find any evidence for it, as such things go back to earliest stages of language. But we may assume that singular and plural endings didn't fall from the sky. Man has developed them. At a later stage these endings may have been replaced by morphems developed from words as he/she/it and they.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is not very probable that speakers say &quot;tree+many+one&quot; or &quot;warrior+they+he&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T08:21:06.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12748" CreationDate="2015-07-05T23:44:24.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=19811#more-19811&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A recent post on LanguageLog&lt;/a&gt; discusses this very question in the particular case of Korean. For centuries, Korean has been written in a mixture of Chinese characters and Hangul. In most contexts today, only Hangul is used; but here is a case where it has been written entirely in Chinese characters, apparently because of the formality of the occasion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T23:44:24.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11569" CreationDate="2015-07-06T03:57:18.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the writer means with &quot;identity&quot; is that sentences of the type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing A is a thing B &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(eg:  An apple is a fruit. A dog is an animal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;contain the same idea as in mathematics 2 + 3 = 5. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences with a form of    'to be + subject complement'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;totally differ from sentences with transitive verbs (verb + direct object).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that &quot;identity&quot; is optimal to describe the relation between subject and subject complement. Actually I think a good term is lacking. Even &quot;equality&quot; is not appropriate in all cases. If I say &quot;The child is sick&quot; then I would not say there is an equality between 'child' and 'sick'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formulation &quot;to be is an identity&quot; is totally confusing and a &quot;non-information&quot;. The traditional term is 'linking verb'. The Latin term is &lt;em&gt;copula&lt;/em&gt; meaning ribbon. The verb 'to be' is a mere abstract link between subject and subject complement (a noun, an adjective, an adverb) and has the same function as the sign = in mathematics. And with subject complements 'to be 'is a full verb, and not an auxiliary verb. Auxiliary verbs help to form tenses and similar things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say that the complement after 'to be' gives some information about the subject. We could also say the linking verb 'to be' describes a relationship between subject and subject complement (also called predicative complement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sentence with a transitive verb we have a different situation. A verbal activity goes from the subject over to the direct object. Latin &lt;em&gt;trans-ire&lt;/em&gt; is 'over' + 'to go', and 'transitive' means &quot;going over&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually a good and easy term for sentences of the type &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A dog is an animal - The child is sick - He is here -The book is on the table&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is lacking. My personal term is simply &quot;is-sentences&quot;, defined as a form of 'to be + subject complement'. It is astonishing how many learners wrestle with is-sentences and &quot;transitive&quot; sentences, obviously because grammars neglect this side of language and don't offer appropriate terms for describing language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T04:21:36.687" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:21:36.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:00:20.317" Score="-1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of questioning each word's prefixes, how can I learn more productively? &#xA;E.g. I was researching the etymology of the French verb 'accabler':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/accabler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[I quoted Wiktionary in French; the English version is too brusque.]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Du latin populaire &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;adcatabolare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (« action de jeter sur ») et&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  issu du grec ancien καταβολή katabolê (&quot;action de jeter les fondements&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mais aussi &quot;attaque ou accès d'une maladie&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  du verbe καταβάλλω katabállo (« jeter de haut en bas », « abattre, renverser »),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   de κατά katá (« de haut en bas, vers le bas ») et βάλλω bállo (« lancer, jeter à terre »);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → voir &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A2ble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;câble&lt;/a&gt;' et &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ch%C3%A2ble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;châble&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The root was already prefixed with &lt;strong&gt;cata&lt;/strong&gt;. So why did Vulgar Latin prepose another prefix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cata-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cata-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; adopted, and not &lt;strong&gt;de-&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T02:13:15.910" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T17:55:00.103" Title="How to learn more about contradictory or superfluous affixes efficiently?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12766" CreationDate="2015-07-07T00:29:39.517" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explicit Question (TL;DR):&lt;/strong&gt; I exemplify with English, because it has changed more than e.g. the Romance Languages, for a given time period. For brevity, I use the noun '&lt;strong&gt;disquisition&lt;/strong&gt;' to mean any decent, reputable piece of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What linguistic concepts reveal how  a disquisition (from one time period), differs from another (written from another time period)? &#xA;To wit, in which linguistic concepts do changes in writing differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Optional Reading and Supplement:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;I reify the above: Suppose you encounter a disquisition with no background information (ie: the author, context, or date). As you start to read this disquisition, you will be able to estimate its  time period, spontaneously and subconsciously. (You may not able to distinguish English writing in the 1500s from that in 1600s, but you can probably distinguish writing in Early Modern English from Late Modern English (1800s).) Please help me understand this subconscious ability: What precisely enables the reader to date a disquisition? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, distinction is helped by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;diction: former  mandatory study of Latin (and Greek) explains the prevalence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Latinate over Germanic words&lt;/a&gt; in writing of the 1700s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;syntax: sentences were longer in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not grammar: authors may use different verbs, but tenses remain the same, except the past's preference for the subjunctive mood and literary tenses (eg French, Spanish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T21:22:31.283" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T21:22:31.283" Title="What linguistic concepts reveal changes, in writing from different time periods?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-16T19:48:17.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17100" CreationDate="2015-07-07T04:54:09.123" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know if there has been any research regarding F-score or CF-score (Li, Haiying, &quot;Comparing Two Measures for Formality.&quot; 2013.) affecting learning and/or language learning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T13:00:10.007" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T22:49:22.757" Title="has there been any research conducted on formality and language learning?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12763" CreationDate="2015-07-07T08:18:53.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is very strangely worded, but here's my try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can train any decent machine learning algorithm (e.g., a Support Vector Machine) to recognise the time period where a text was written. Describing the text as a &quot;bag of words&quot; (i.e., transforming it into a a frequency list) is fully sufficient for that task. You can normalise the text to modern orthography and grammar without loosing much of precision and recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding more features (like sentence length, n-grams, etc.) improves precision and recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T08:18:53.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8756" CreationDate="2015-07-08T00:54:05.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a deeper reason for selecting the विभक्तिः (case-ending) for each of the words. The basis for this is Panini's sutra (पाणिनेः सूत्रम्) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1-4-52 गतिबुद्धिप्रत्यवसानार्थशब्दकर्माकर्मकाणामणि कर्ता स णौ&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It mandates that when any of the verbal roots (धातवः) in this sutram (or other roots which carry the same meaning as those in the rule) is used in the causative sense (ण्यन्तावस्था), then agent of action (कर्ता) in the non-causative sentence (अण्यन्तावस्था) shall become the object (कर्म) in causative sentence (ण्यन्तावस्था). The example given to demonstrate application of this rule is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;शत्रूनगमयत् स्वर्गं वेदार्थं स्वानवेदयत् ।&#xA;आशयच्चामृतं देवान् वेदम् अध्यापयद् विधिम् ।&#xA;आसयत् सलिले पृथ्वीं यः स श्रीहरिर्मे गतिः ।।&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest translation for the above verse in English is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He sent the enemies to heaven, he made his own people learn the meaning of vedas&#xA;He made the devas drink nectar, he taught (i.e made learn) Brahma veda,&#xA;He placed the earth on ocean, such a Hari is my refuge.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the sentences in the verse has a causative verb e.g अगमयत्, अवेदयत् etc. In the non-causative form, each sentence can be written as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;शत्रवः स्वर्गम् अगच्छन् - Enemies went to heaven - verb गम् indicating movement&#xA;स्वे वेदार्थम् अविदुः - His own people learned the meaning of vedas - verb विद् indicating बुद्धिः or learning&#xA;देवाः अमृतम् आश्नन् - The devas drank nectar - verb अश् indicating eating &#xA;विधिः वेदम् अध्यैत - Lord Brahma studied veda - verb इङ् indicating study &#xA;पृथ्वी सलिले आस्त - Earth stood (or rested) on the ocean - verb आस, an intransitive verb (अकर्मकधातुः)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the verbs used in the above example are directly called out in the sutram, or have meanings of one of the verbs explicitly mentioned in it. Hence, in the causative construct, the agent of action in each of these sentences becomes the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying the same sutram to the verse &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;असतो मा सद् गमय &#xA;तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय&#xA;मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us look at the non-causative sentences first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;अहम् असतः सद् गच्छानि - I may go from falsehood to truth&#xA;अहं तमसः ज्योतिः गच्छानि - I may go from darkness towards light&#xA;अहं मृत्योः अमृतं गच्छानि - I may go from death to immortality&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the verb गम् (with meaning movement) is used in every sentence, the sutram (quoted above) mandates that the agent of action here (अहम्) shall become the object (कर्म) in the causative construction. Therefore, the sentences will be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;मा (त्वम्) असतः सत् गमय - (You) lead me from falsehood to truth&#xA;मा (त्वं) तमसः ज्योतिः गमय - (You) lead me from darkness to light&#xA;मा (त्वं) मृत्योः अमृतं गमय - (You) lead me from death to immortality&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One source of confusion is that the words in नपुंसकलिङ्गः (neuter-gender) सद् ज्योतिः अमृतम् all have the same forms in nominative and accusative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;सत्/सद् सती सन्ति&#xA;सत्/सद् सती सन्ति&#xA;&#xA;ज्योतिः ज्योतिषी ज्योतींषि&#xA;ज्योतिः ज्योतिषी ज्योतींषि &#xA;&#xA;अमृतम् अमृते अमृतानि&#xA;अमृतम् अमृते अमृतानि&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T18:32:32.677" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T18:32:32.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T05:46:18.673" Score="2" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some palatalized consonants seem to have a greater tendency to &quot;absorb&quot; their palatalization (in various ways) than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in standard Japanese, the former palatalized alveolars &lt;em&gt;tj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zj&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sj&lt;/em&gt; have become [tʃ], [dʒ] and [ʃ]: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;de&lt;strong&gt;sh&lt;/strong&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Isn't it?&quot;, etc.) &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;de&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;(u) &lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;above&quot;, etc.) &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;zy&lt;/strong&gt;au&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;so&quot;, &quot;then&quot;, etc.) &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dy&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;dewa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;morning&quot;, etc.) &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ty&lt;/strong&gt;(e)u&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;teu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Japanese has retained most other palatalized sounds as such: velar stops (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ky&lt;/strong&gt;ōtō, &lt;strong&gt;Gy&lt;/strong&gt;ōza&lt;/em&gt;), back-fricatives (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hy&lt;/strong&gt;aku&lt;/em&gt; &quot;100&quot;), labial stops (&lt;em&gt;rop&lt;strong&gt;py&lt;/strong&gt;aku&lt;/em&gt; &quot;600&quot;) and resonants (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ry&lt;/strong&gt;ōri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cooking&quot;, &lt;em&gt;gyu&lt;strong&gt;ny&lt;/strong&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; &quot;milk&quot;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Norwegian and Swedish, both the palatalized alveolars and velars have changed into something else: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sj&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sj&lt;/strong&gt;ø / &lt;strong&gt;sj&lt;/strong&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sea&quot;) &gt; [ʃ] / [ɧ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;tj&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tj&lt;/strong&gt;ære / &lt;strong&gt;tj&lt;/strong&gt;ära&lt;/em&gt; &quot;tar&quot;) &gt; [ç] / [ɕ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/em&gt; (as in Sw. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/strong&gt;ur&lt;/em&gt; &quot;animal&quot;) &gt; [j]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kj&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;kj&lt;/strong&gt;øtt&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;ött&lt;/em&gt; &quot;flesh&quot;) &gt; [ç] / [ɕ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;skj&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;skj&lt;/strong&gt;orte&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;skj&lt;/strong&gt;orta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;shirt&quot;) &gt; [ʃ] / [ɧ]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;gj&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;gj&lt;/strong&gt;orde&lt;/em&gt; &quot;did&quot;) &gt; [j]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other palatalized sounds in these languages seem mostly to remain as such: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bj&lt;/strong&gt;örn / &lt;strong&gt;bj&lt;/strong&gt;ørn&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bear&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fj&lt;/strong&gt;äll / &lt;strong&gt;fj&lt;/strong&gt;ell&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mountain&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mj&lt;/strong&gt;öl / &lt;strong&gt;mj&lt;/strong&gt;øl&lt;/em&gt; &quot;flour&quot;, Swedish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nj&lt;/strong&gt;ure&lt;/em&gt; &quot;kidney&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are cases like these the norm, cross-linguistically speaking? I.e., are palatalized alveolar obstruents ([tj]/[dj]/[sj]/etc.) generally more diachronically &quot;unstable&quot; than palatalized velar stops, which in turn are less stable than most/all other palatalized consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any info&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T10:48:36.090" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T10:48:36.090" Title="Stability of palatalized consonants" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9269" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:02:01.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reed leaf is transcribed as a 'j'. If you go to page 18 Allen explains that the reed leaf is not actually a consonant but a way to show that there should be a vowel. We have no idea what that vowel is. The dual stroke is exactly the same but appears only at the end of a word to show should be a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore both the single reed leaf and the dual stroke a 'j' is used when transcribing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10073" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:02:01.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12775" CreationDate="2015-07-08T16:07:28.307" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Understanding english syntax mathematically—which demands strictness—is what I want to achieve. However, a wide range of choices I can make upon selecting a book covering related fields makes me puzzled in that I have no idea what is the right way—what are the extensively-adopted steps—to study english syntax in scientific approach. In particular, syntactic theory seems to cover most of my interests but it turns out to be too general to study english syntax only. As calculus is considered one of the prerequisites for mathematical analysis, I wish to know what are the prerequisites for learning english syntax and what are considered classic textbooks covering english syntax and its prerequisites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10074" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T00:30:27.377" Title="What are the general ways adopted by most people to learn english syntax precisely?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12773" CreationDate="2015-07-09T00:30:27.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no mathematics of English for you to learn, unfortunately, but for someone with an analytic bent, I think a careful study of McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, doing the exercises, would be fun and useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I second Lawler's recommendation of logic as the most relevant formal discipline for the study of language, and, specifically, I suggest Hans Reichenbach's text &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ditext.com/reichenbach/logic/logic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elements of Synbolic Logic&lt;/a&gt; (available on line!).  Reichenbach had lots of interest to say about English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the most relevant area of mathematics is that connected with the Chomsky Hierarchy and context free languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T00:30:27.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12994" CreationDate="2015-07-09T00:42:34.637" Score="9" ViewCount="1600" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know if there are other parts of speech -other than particles- in other languages than English or other Romance/Germanic languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T12:37:43.167" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T16:12:47.073" Title="A list of parts of speech" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2015-07-09T06:07:28.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to know that many of the languages tagged on the map as SVO are not actually SVO and that not all correctly tagged languages share the same history with respect to word order. For example, the Romance languages derived from an SOV order, whereas English derived from a V2 order. If I were you I would forget about that map as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10076" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:07:28.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12808" CreationDate="2015-07-09T14:54:03.117" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to stress the difference between ergative and non-ergative inflection with a minimal pair like the one below. Does the gloss and translation make the distinction sufficiently clear? Or is there a better way?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1Subj&lt;/strong&gt;-kill-PST&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I killed him/her/it' (non-ergative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1Obj&lt;/strong&gt;-help-PAST 3FEM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'she helped me' (ergative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T15:35:13.647" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:14:35.580" Title="What's the conventional way to gloss ergative inflection?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12777" CreationDate="2015-07-09T15:18:14.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a quick scan of the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/337_paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Common Parts-of-Speech Tagset Framework for Indian Languages&lt;/a&gt;, nothing stood out as particularly distinct from the POS of European languages. However, on running over &lt;a href=&quot;http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/8875/11/11_chapter%205.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a chapter from Antony's thesis on Kannada&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed two categories I have not seen in most European languages: echo words, and reduplication. Finnish and Hungarian seem to have these two categories of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On second thought, English seems to have echo words too (&lt;em&gt;teensy-weensy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;itty-bitty&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;higgledy-piggledy&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) but I have not come across POS tag sets that recognize these as a separate category, probably because there are just a handful of such expressions in English. In contrast, in Indian languages, these POS categories are open classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T15:18:14.610" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T16:46:05.833" Score="3" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been speaking Dutch daily for 5 years. My mother tongue is Portuguese.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to speak faster in Spanish and English when I thought in Portuguese daily. I think that by forcing myself to think in Dutch I have kind of lost the connection I used to have to words of other foreign languages as well. I say this specially because when speaking in Spanish or English, I catch myself trying to figure out simple words I used to know, now relative to Dutch. It seems now I may be building the word connections all over again relative to Dutch. For sure if I were naturally thinking in Portuguese as it used to be the case, this would be better for my Spanish. But it's more difficult than you think to suddenly stop thinking in Dutch in the middle of a conversation in Portuguese, Spanish or English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand more about language and memory is important for me now to be able to keep the languages I master ready to use. I also find conversations in Portuguese and English significantly more vivid which again demonstrates the importance of the relation between language and memory.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So could anyone give me more insight on this topic? I also did a little research but it seems people only want to promote the benefits of learning new languages and not the negative effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9957" LastEditorUserId="9957" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T17:58:27.417" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T17:58:27.417" Title="Long-term effects of foreign languages on memory" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T17:06:21.660" Score="0" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in the region of Brazil where I come from (triângulo mineiro, Brazilian Texas I'd say.. we are considered the farmers of the Brazil also because of our accent ) people have a very weird way of saying 'no' to others. I discovered that it was weird after moving to the Netherlands where people are unaware of it.&#xA;It's like that: we suck the air in our mouths so that when we release our tongues from the roof of our mouths we make a noise. We do that twice and a bit fast. And this is an informal way of saying 'no' to others.&#xA;I'm very curious to know where this comes from. I don't even no the name of it and I think most people that use it are not aware of its weirdness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9957" LastEditorUserId="9957" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T23:25:09.353" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T23:25:09.353" Title="Where does my weird way of saying 'no' comes from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-09T21:49:53.750" Score="2" ViewCount="1518" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;before&quot; means both &quot;in front of&quot; and &quot;prior to&quot;.&#xA;Not only in English though - in many European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Dutch &quot;voor&quot; means both&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Italian &quot;prima&quot; can mean both (afaik)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in French &quot;(en) avant&quot; means both&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Bulgarian &quot;преди&quot; [predi] means &quot;prior to&quot;, and &quot;пред&quot; [pred] means &quot;in front of&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Serbian &quot;pre&quot; means &quot;prior to&quot;, and &quot;pred&quot; means &quot;in front of&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because in the past, our European ancestors have seen the time differently than us today? Today we see the future in front of us, and the past behind us (or the &quot;ego-moving metaphor&quot;), but in other cultures (and apparently in our languages) it is the other way around - we stand still, while time flows from behind us (the &quot;time-moving metaphor&quot;). So the future is the unknown thing behind us, while the past is &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any scientific papers supporting that guess? I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.ci.uchicago.edu/pub/HNL/LanguageRelevantLiterature/Kemmerer_spatialtemporal_preps.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't seem spot-on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T07:17:49.827" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T03:57:57.917" Title="Why does &quot;before&quot; mean both &quot;in front of&quot; and &quot;prior to&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12796" CreationDate="2015-07-09T23:06:12.420" Score="18" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Romance languages have an &quot;r&quot; in their renditions of the British capital's name: &lt;em&gt;Londres&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Londra&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside the Romance family, I only found it in Turkish &lt;em&gt;Londra&lt;/em&gt; and Breton &lt;em&gt;Londrez&lt;/em&gt;, but those definitely look like borrowings from Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline suggests it's from Latin &lt;em&gt;Londinium&lt;/em&gt; (c.115)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that &quot;r&quot; appeared in Latin on some stage after AD 115, but I failed to find out when and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did that &quot;r&quot; end up in Romance names of London?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1207" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T18:50:26.137" Title="r in Romance names of London" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12790" CreationDate="2015-07-10T01:06:42.780" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;dolphin&lt;/em&gt; is used in may languages including English and Arabic (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.almaany.com/ar/dict/ar-ar/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;الدلفين&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems Arabic dictionaries say originally it has been &lt;em&gt;darfil&lt;/em&gt; while Oxford dictionary says it is derived from the Greek word &lt;em&gt;delfin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I have found an old Arabic text (1000 years ago) in which the word الدلفين is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they have the same origin in Arabic and English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10083" LastEditorUserId="10083" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T01:11:53.240" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:22:18.490" Title="Do the words &quot;dolphin&quot; and &quot;الدلفين&quot; in English and Arabic have the same origin?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12812" CreationDate="2015-07-10T03:15:26.343" Score="1" ViewCount="3124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Came across this while looking up some information for Chinese dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rbged.png&quot; alt=&quot;examples&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the question marks mean as an IPA symbol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T03:25:19.747" Title="IPA: Question Marks" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12788" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:10:15.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic dulfīn is a loan word from Aramaic (in Syriac dolfin or delfin), which in turn is borrowed from Greek. dulfīl is a variant in Arabic. You can find a fluctuation between final /n/ and /l/ in other words, e.g. finjān vs. finjāl. So, yes, both English and Arabic have this name ultimately from Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T09:22:18.490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:22:18.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:26:12.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're asking why &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; is used to denote the past whereas &lt;em&gt;fore&lt;/em&gt; is used, in the spatial referential to denote what is ahead of the observer (cf. forward, afore...).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, a possible reasoning would be that, according to the walking observer metaphor, one would expect to use &lt;em&gt;behind&lt;/em&gt; to denote the past and possibly &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; to refer to the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another way of considering things though: that of the ancestral tracker reading his prey's track.  In the remote past such an ability was central to a man's life and the spatial/temporal parallel was even more compelling than nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the tracker's viewpoint the portion of the track immediately &lt;em&gt;in front&lt;/em&gt; of him has been made &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; and the portion &lt;em&gt;further off&lt;/em&gt; has been made &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually the etymology of &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt;.  In Old English &lt;em&gt;æfter&lt;/em&gt; is a comparative (-&lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt;) of &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; which at the time meant &quot;away&quot;.  We still use this sense of &quot;away&quot; in what used to be the emphatic form &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt;.  So the original meaning of &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; is not &quot;in the future&quot; but rather &quot;further away&quot;.  It came to mean mainly &quot;in the future&quot; only later and was displaced by &lt;em&gt;further&lt;/em&gt; in its spatial reference usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (in &lt;em&gt;before, below, beyond, behind&lt;/em&gt;) is the ancestor of &quot;by&quot; (it was often written bi- as well) just as in Present Day German &quot;bei&quot; and is originally a spatial reference to oneself (as in close by, nearby).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So similarly, the original meaning &lt;em&gt;be-fore&lt;/em&gt; (OE &lt;em&gt;beforan&lt;/em&gt;) simply meant &quot;ahead&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use a similar metaphor when we use &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;immediately after&quot; (&quot;what's next?&quot;) while the original meaning (&quot;close by&quot;) is spatial (PDE nächste:  in der Nähe - nearby).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as you rightly observe, this situation is seen in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example to add to your collection is Latin &lt;em&gt;ante&lt;/em&gt; which originally meant in front of (like ἀντὶ also &quot;in front&quot; in Ancient Greek) and came down to us in Spanish as both &lt;em&gt;antes&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;enantes&lt;/em&gt; &quot;before&quot;  and &lt;em&gt;adelante&lt;/em&gt; &quot;forward&quot; as well as in French &lt;em&gt;avant&lt;/em&gt; (both &quot;before&quot; and &quot;ahead&quot;) but also counts among its derivatives &lt;em&gt;anterior&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;antique&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T03:57:57.917" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T03:57:57.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2015-07-10T19:26:28.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion &quot;before&quot; means &quot;in front of&quot; in both it's spacial and temporal meanings. It's just that in the case of spacial one it is more obvious. It comes from &quot;be-&quot; &quot;fore&quot; and &quot;fore&quot; means &quot;situated towards the front (of something)&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fore#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fore#Old_English&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Even if that something is a period of time (a day lets say). See the example in wiktionary about the temporal meaning of &quot;fore&quot; - &quot;the fore part of the day&quot; (i.e. the morning, the &quot;front&quot; part of the day with which it &quot;starts&quot;).&#xA;So if you want to express that something happened at a time in the past relative to that day one says &quot;be- fore that day&quot;.&#xA;The key observation here is that when the people talked about something in the past they didn't have the notion of an ideal moment in time (a point in time) but rather time intervals (days, months, years) that happened in some relation to one another. A time interval is something that has a spatial analogy (distance) and has a &quot;fore&quot; (front, start, leading) part and another one - the back, the end, the trailing part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10087" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T19:26:28.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12787" CreationDate="2015-07-10T20:04:57.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The insertion of a non-etymological /r/ after a nasal + stop cluster is very common in lots of different languages. Sumelic has already mentioned Spanish hombre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;London does indeed come from Latin Londinium. This is not a &quot;suggestion&quot; but a generally accepted fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish Londra is a borrowing from Italian. The cited Breton form is borrowed from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T20:04:57.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12787" CreationDate="2015-07-10T21:04:51.553" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the fact that &lt;em&gt;Londres&lt;/em&gt; and so on originate from Latin &lt;em&gt;Londinium&lt;/em&gt;, I unfortunately have not been able to find any dictionary entry that explains the etymology of this word and the sound changes that occurred.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I did find a post on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordoriginsorg.yuku.com/topic/10966/Londres#.V_W1c8tlxDG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordorigins Discussion Forum&lt;/a&gt; archive that gives some information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a regular sound change in Old French whereby Cn &gt; Cr in&#xA;  post-tonic (after the stress) syllables. &lt;em&gt;Londiniu(m)&lt;/em&gt; &gt; *&lt;em&gt;Londne&lt;/em&gt; &gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Londre&lt;/em&gt; (the Old French form), just as &lt;em&gt;ordine(m)&lt;/em&gt; &gt; *&lt;em&gt;ordne&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ordre&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  'order' and &lt;em&gt;diaconu(m)&lt;/em&gt; &gt; *&lt;em&gt;diacne&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;diacre&lt;/em&gt; 'deacon.' – language hat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be similar examples of this sound change in Spanish. Using the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rae.es/recursos/diccionarios/drae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diccionario de la lengua española&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; online, I found the following two examples of a Vulgar Latin sequence &lt;em&gt;-ndin-&lt;/em&gt; becoming modern Spanish &lt;em&gt;-ndr-&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=liendre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;liendre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;lendinem&lt;/em&gt; (V. Latin &lt;em&gt;*lendis,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;*lendinis&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=landre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;landre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;glandinem&lt;/em&gt; (V. Latin &lt;em&gt;*glando,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;*glandinis&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words may not be exactly analogous to &lt;em&gt;Londinium&lt;/em&gt;, because they have a short &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;. I haven’t been able to find a definitive statement on whether the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Londinium&lt;/em&gt; was short or long; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_London#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; suggests that it is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it looks like the phonetic result was the same: in any case, the first i in “Londinium” was elided, and the resulting cluster /ndn/ was changed to the easier-to-pronounce /ndr/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound /l/ could also become /r/ in this context, as seen in Spanish &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=alondra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alond&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;alaudu&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;am&lt;/em&gt;. However, it doesn't seem necessary to postulate an intermediate change of /n/ to /l/ to explain the words above with  &lt;em&gt;-ndr-&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;-ndin-.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the change of n to r in these contexts is a common sound change from before the Romance languages diverged, or if it was a parallel development, possibly due to regional influence between the languages that show this change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, n furthermore became r after other nasals in some cases, with an epenthetic voiced plosive inserted in between, as in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hembra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;feminam&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hombre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hombre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;hominem&lt;/em&gt;. However, it seems nasal + nasal clusters developed differently in French: the cognate French words &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;homme&lt;/em&gt; don't have r. (Actually, the situation in Spanish seems to be more complicated than I initially thought, since there are also examples like &lt;em&gt;dueño&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;dominus;&lt;/em&gt; see the following WordReference Forums threads for more discussion: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/spanish-words-of-type-hombre-hembra.1440165/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish words of type homBRe &amp;amp; hemBRa&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/londra-londres-the-origin-of-the-r-sound-in-romance-for-london.3474240/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Londra, Londres - the origin of the /r/ sound in Romance for &quot;London&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how the stress ended up on the first syllable (&quot;Londinium&quot; would be stressed on the second syllable according to the regular Classical Latin stress rule, but the Latin stress system evolved, partly due to things like loss of distinctive vowel length, so stress sometimes falls on a different syllable in the Romance languages vs. in Classical Latin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T18:50:26.137" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T18:50:26.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12805" CreationDate="2015-07-11T03:49:28.293" Score="1" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=consonant&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonant (n.)&lt;/a&gt; [←] [...] from Latin  [...]&#xA;  from &lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;with&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=com-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;com-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;sonare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to sound&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sonata&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonata&lt;/a&gt;). Consonants were &lt;strong&gt;thought of&lt;/strong&gt; as sounds that are only produced together with vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is last sentence false, because &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this IPA Chart with Sounds&lt;/a&gt; displays (and vocalises) consonants that can be pronounced alone? &#xA;If so, which past nationality or peoples &lt;strong&gt;thought of&lt;/strong&gt; consonants as above?    Why? &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/3369/5306&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; doesn't answer the above question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;PS: The above consists with &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 248:] Producing a speech sound requires an open vocal tract and airflow. This is&#xA;  what vowels (like &lt;em&gt;a, e, i, o, u&lt;/em&gt;) do — that’s why any vowel can be a syllable&#xA;  by itself. Consonants (like &lt;em&gt;p, t, k, s, d&lt;/em&gt;) constrict the vocal tract and typically&#xA;  can’t be heard on their own. So it’s no wonder the most common syllable in the&#xA;  world’s languages is the consonant plus vowel (CV) combination that gives us&#xA;  words like &lt;em&gt;so, be, tea, too&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 250:] For example,&#xA;  in most languages, vowels can stand alone as a syllable, but consonants&#xA;  typically cannot. But languages make different decisions about which&#xA;  consonants can be syllabic.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T01:01:20.803" Title="Why might consonants have been thought of, as sounds only produced together with vowels?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12800" CreationDate="2015-07-11T04:54:37.863" Score="0" ViewCount="1182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if N could be a partial vowel much like Y is. Since, at least to my understanding, vowels are used in between many consonant to make a word flow without having to pause, so why isn't n a vowel. One can make the n sound and go directly to an L, R, and some other letters, but one can't go from an n sound directly to a B very well. By this reasoning one could say that it just can't mesh well with enough letters, but there is a similar problem with Y. It can mesh well with only a few consonant -at least this is what I think based off of my trying to pronounce them with other letters of the alphabet-. These y and consonant combinations are yl, ym, yn, and yr. Even then some of the combos are stretching the ability for them to be pronounced well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then isn't n considered a vowel sometimes like y is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T05:17:26.950" Title="Why isn't &quot;N&quot; considered a partial vowel" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12798" CreationDate="2015-07-11T05:17:26.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, it is, if you adopt the linguist's distinction between &quot;syllabic&quot; and &quot;non-syllabic&quot; segment to replace the less-clear notion of &quot;vowel&quot; versus &quot;consonant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; per se is not considered a vowel, but that's because when /y/ functions as a vowel, it is transcribed as [i] – likewise &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; which is transcribed as [u] when it functions like a vowel. Otherwise, /m n l r/ and so on can all function &quot;as vowels&quot;, that is, as syllable peaks, and are transcribed as [m̩ n̩ l̩ r̩]. To confuse things just a bit more, there is also an optional special symbol [ɚ] used to notate syllabic &lt;em&gt;ɹ&lt;/em&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are relatively few languages which present syllabicity contrasts in sonorants -- classical examples are Serbo-Croatian and Swahili. In (American) English, you can transcribe &quot;button&quot; with syllabic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; or with [ən], where the latter reflects the phonological status of syllabic sonorants and the former reflects the lack of an actual vowel segment in the phonetic output. There is actually phonological evidence in favor of the syllabic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; transcription, in light of the reduction of /t/ to [ʔ] which takes place before &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; but not [ə] (e.g. [bʌɾɹ̩] &quot;butter&quot; vs. [bʌʔn̩] &quot;button&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syllabic status of the liquid in &quot;tire&quot;, &quot;pail&quot; in American English is notoriously uncertain, with linguists asserting with great moral certainty at a 50-50 rate that these words are 1 syllable / 2 syllable. Nobody seems to claim that &quot;pain&quot;, &quot;coin&quot;, &quot;time&quot; are two syllables, so there seems to be something special about &lt;em&gt;l, r&lt;/em&gt; when preceded by a so-called diphthong (i.e. &lt;em&gt;yl, yr&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T05:17:26.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T07:08:03.527" Score="1" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if grunts/growls are considered a legitimate part of a linguistic system, but they get used from time to time to convey things like, &quot;I'm gonna kill you&quot; or an angry &quot;Yes!&quot; so I thought I'd ask.  As for place, /ɦ/ seems to be the lowest down the vocal tract, but some grunts/growls are made below that.  So are these still glottal, using the vocal folds to produce a fricative, or are they sub-glottal, whatever that might be...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10089" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:35:25.260" Title="Are there phonetic symbols for grunts/growls and would place be glottal?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12811" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:40:00.007" Score="2" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using &lt;code&gt;cltk&lt;/code&gt;, a Python library for processing of classical languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pos-tagging an example sentence, but I don't understand the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tagger.tag_unigram('Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres')&#xA;# &amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; [('Gallia', 'N-S---FB-'), ('est', 'V3SPIA---'), ('omnis', 'A-P---MA-'), ('divisa', 'T-SRPPFN-'), ('in', 'R--------'), ('partes', 'N-P---FA-'), ('tres', 'M--------')]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does, for example &lt;code&gt;'N-S---FB-'&lt;/code&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.cltk.org/en/latest/latin.html#pos-tagging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;From the docs of cltk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10091" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:29:51.717" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:29:51.717" Title="What do the labels mean in this latin pos tagging?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12730" CreationDate="2015-07-11T13:12:58.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will take your request at face value, not questioning whether you actually &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; minimalist syntax for your (semantic) goals or not, and will provide a literature recommendation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider taking a look at Andrew Radford's work, either his books: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English&lt;/em&gt; (2004), or &lt;em&gt;English Syntax: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (2004), or for an online source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/Radford2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Minimalist Syntax Revisited&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a thorough introduction to the minimalist syntax program, you can do a lot worse than with Radford, in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the above are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; strictly presentations of X-bar theory, as you requested, but they represent the further development of this branch  (bare phrase structure). That said, your &quot;core requirement&quot; seemed to be to only admit binary branching trees, which holds as a principle in the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10002" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T13:12:58.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12797" CreationDate="2015-07-11T19:08:54.560" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin term is a calque from Greek σύμφωνον &quot;pronounced with&quot;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante02/DionysiosThrax/dio_tech.html#06&quot;&gt;Dionysius Thrax&lt;/a&gt;, they &quot;do not have a sound on their own, but, when arranged with vowels, they produce a sound&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0086,034:1456b:27&amp;amp;lang=original&quot;&gt;Aristotle (poetics)&lt;/a&gt; expressed the same view of &quot;mutes&quot; being without sound of their own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Such sounds may be subdivided into vowel, semi-vowel, and mute. A vowel is that which without any addition has an audible sound; a semivowel needs the addition of another letter to give it audible sound, for instance S and R; a mute is that which with addition has no sound of its own but becomes audible when combined with some of the letters which have a sound. Examples of mutes are G and D.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit grammatical tradition, vowels are &lt;em&gt;svara&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;sound&quot;, and consonants are &lt;em&gt;vyañjana&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;ornamentation&quot; (also &quot;sauce&quot; and a bunch of other things). So the view that you're pointing to probably originates with Aristotle, with terminology supplied by Dionysius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T19:19:41.490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T19:19:41.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T21:19:10.717" Score="2" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use tools like AntConc and Wordsmith and produce decent results when analyzing languages like French, German or Spanish? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it deal with special symbols like &quot;à&quot;, &quot;ü&quot;, &quot;ß&quot;, &quot;ç&quot; and similar letters not present in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it deal with morphological diversity, and when counting words, would it know that the pair &quot;parle&quot; and &quot;parlons&quot;, or, &quot;Mann&quot; and &quot;Männer&quot; have actually the same root each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other problems would I need to deal with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10095" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T11:35:30.143" Title="Do standard corpus analysis tools like AntConc and Wordsmith work for foreign languages?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12780" CreationDate="2015-07-12T13:14:35.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most commonly used generic guidelines for glossing in linguistics are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;. Your best bet is to use their labels. Depending on what exactly it is you want to show, you can either use their labels A and P (agent- and patient-like arguments of transitive verbs) and S (sole argument of intransitive), or ERG and ABS. So your &quot;1Subj&quot; would be &quot;1.SG.S&quot; or &quot;1.SG.ABS&quot;, your &quot;1Obj&quot; would be &quot;1.SG.P&quot; or &quot;1.SG.ABS&quot;, and your &quot;3Fem&quot; would be &quot;3.F.SG.ERG&quot;, or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's hard to answer the question without knowing what is actually marked on the morphemes in question in these languages, what is syncretic, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:14:35.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6535" CreationDate="2015-07-12T13:59:35.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's good discussion of this question in Borsley et al., &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=glji0DIjmlgC&amp;amp;pg=PA339&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syntax of Welsh&lt;/a&gt;. Their discussion is focused on Welsh, but they cite typological work such as that of Dryer. That's important because some of the early and very influential correlations proposed by Greenberg, such as the correlation between VSO and noun-adjective order, have since been shown not to hold, and Dryer's sample is much bigger and better balanced. Some that Borsley et al. report as robust, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VSO languages are usually prepositional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VSO languages usually have &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-initial questions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In VSO languages, auxiliaries precede main verbs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:59:35.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2390" CreationDate="2015-07-12T14:14:13.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no reason this couldn't work. Chomskyans tend to be sceptical of the work of neo-Whorfians and vice versa, but that is a sociological/philosophical divide more than anything else, and there is no logical incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the difference between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages &lt;a href=&quot;http://filcat.uab.cat/clt/publicacions/reports/pdf/GGT-10-01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;has been claimed&lt;/a&gt; to have its origins in a syntactic parameter. It has &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1c26TEvx6eAC&amp;amp;pg=PA251&amp;amp;lpg=PA251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;also been claimed&lt;/a&gt; to affect conceptualization of motion events. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; both claims are correct, then we have a syntactic parameter setting which plays a role in structuring non-linguistic cognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I realize this question is rather old, but it's a great question, and I felt it deserved a response!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T14:14:13.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12803" CreationDate="2015-07-13T03:24:19.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CLTK&lt;/strong&gt; is producing parsing programs for classical Languages. Information on the LATIN version, including the copyright notice, can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://kyle-p-johnson.com/notebooks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kyle-p-johnson (notebooks)&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information is posted in a nine-letter string.&#xA;Each position in the sequence signifies a category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nine string sequence:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  .1. part of speech .2.person .3.number .4.tense  .5.mood .6.voice&#xA;  .7.gender .8.case .9.degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.3.4.5.6 follow the traditional sequence for parsing a verb. The verb &lt;strong&gt;est&lt;/strong&gt; is therefore described as &lt;strong&gt;v3spia&lt;/strong&gt; =&quot;verb.- 3rd person.-singular.-  present.-indicative. -active.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of  the codes will not be difficult to learn:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;person&lt;/strong&gt; 1/2/3 &lt;strong&gt;;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;number&lt;/strong&gt; s/p (singular/plural) &lt;strong&gt;;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;voice&lt;/strong&gt; a/p (active/passive) &lt;strong&gt;gender&lt;/strong&gt; m/f/n  &lt;strong&gt;degree&lt;/strong&gt; c/s (comparative/superlative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4.5.8 have larger sets,  (e.g. B means 'ablative' vid.sup.)&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/strong&gt; in .1. for &lt;strong&gt;tres&lt;/strong&gt;  indicates a numeral, but. &lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/strong&gt; in .5. would indicate imperative. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cltk/latin_treebank_perseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Full key.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T03:24:19.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12789" CreationDate="2015-07-13T03:25:19.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA symbol that is similar to a question mark is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottal stop symbol&lt;/a&gt;, which indicates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottal stop phone&lt;/a&gt;, a sound made by completely obstructing and then releasing airflow at the glottis. This sound occurs as a phoneme in many languages and is very common as an allophone and/or articulatory artefact in most. In san serif fonts the glottal stop symbol may appear identical to a question mark but without the dot below [ʔ], or have a horizontal serif at the base as in the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EeA8r.png&quot; alt=&quot; []&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=b7ml0qh2HMcC&amp;amp;pg=PR32&amp;amp;lpg=PR32&amp;amp;dq=pullum+and+ladusaw+1986+phonetic+symbol+guide&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=iCvkwo9MM5&amp;amp;sig=XUOIi0Wa9oJOKw-aLNDxuMBQvq4&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=Hy2jVZfCFafHmwXYlIKABQ&amp;amp;ved=0CEAQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=pullum%20and%20ladusaw%201986%20phonetic%20symbol%20guide&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pullum and Ladusaw (1986, p185)&lt;/a&gt; the glottal stop symbol does originally derive from the use of the actual question mark symbol to indicate a glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T03:25:19.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12730" CreationDate="2015-07-13T16:26:55.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context free grammar (cfg) satisfies your requirements, in a certain sense, when interpreted in a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Among transformational theories, it is Minimal, since it has no transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) It distinguishes X-bar types from X types in a systematic way, by (at least in my interpretation) not having X types as primitives.  To be consistent with traditional grammar, it is usual in cfg to write, e.g., P-bar -&gt; P N-bar; P -&gt; under, ..., but this is a bad move.  It should be P-bar -&gt; under N-bar, ... If we still want to refer to traditional parts of speech, we define: (a) a &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt; is the pronunciation part of a context free phrase structure rule (cfpsr), and (b) a &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; is head of a P-bar.  Similarly for V (head of V-bar) and N (head of N-bar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) It is binary-branching, at least in the most straightforward way of doing derivations and displaying derivation trees.  There is a rule of replacement, allowing a new cfpsr to be derived from two old ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;replacement: From A -&gt; xBz and B -&gt; y, derive A -&gt; xyz, where A, B are grammatical types (i.e. nonterminal symbols), and x, y, and z are strings of grammatical types and phonemes (i.e. terminal symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derivation tree is a branching diagram built up by joining subtrees each of whose mother nodes is a cfpsr derived by the replacement rule and whose two daughter nodes are the two cfpsrs used to do the replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) It's pithy.  Although I used -bar names above, since there are no non-bar primitive syntactic types to distinguish them from, it's not actually necessary to use the bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) There are no primitive transformations (other than the replacement rule), but derived transformations can be introduced as relations on the cfpsrs, following the method used in GPSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T16:26:55.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12783" CreationDate="2015-07-13T16:32:24.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious to me that this style of negation is related to one used by Arabs but also by many other people living around the Mediterranean. It's the same sound, not necessarily repeated, but accompanied by a characteristic head movement. You can see it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ipgtGuzDw8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as the first example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T16:32:24.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-13T17:26:48.530" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The optional subject of an imperative is usually the second person pronoun. I've found something quite peculiar in Malay, where the utterance is an imperative and is passive but the subject is not the second person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Benda yang pelik jangan di-tegur     (*[oleh kamu])&#xA;&#xA;Thing COMP weird NEG    PASS-mention (*[by 2.SG]) &#xA;&#xA;Don't mention things that are weird &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this utterance is one where 2 persons notice something weird, thinking that it's a ghostly entity or something paranormal and one person mentions what s/he sees, smells or hears. It's something like the 'knock on wood' gesture. The active counterpart of this utterance is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Kamu) jangan tegur   benda yang pelik   &#xA;&#xA;(2.SG) NEG    mention thing COMP weird   &#xA;&#xA;(You) don't mention things that are weird&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can also focus-move the arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benda yang pelik jangan ditegur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jangan ditegur, benda yang pelik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benda yang pelik, jangan tegur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jangan tegur benda yang pelik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In transformational grammar, it is said that the internal argument is raised and the thematic subject is turned into an optional adjunct by-phrase. Using the by-phrase in the utterance above is anomalous. However, an imperative necessarily needs a second person subject in English and Malay, but the utterance above demonstrates that there is a mix up somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The negator &amp;quot;jangan&amp;quot; is a direct order which means &amp;quot;do not&amp;quot;. This means that the subject absolutely has to be the second person. In English, it would be very strange to use &amp;quot;do not&amp;quot; with a 3rd person subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this utterance possibly an imperative when the grammatical subject is not the second person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can one register this utterance as an imperative when SpecIP has been occupied by the moved internal argument, not the second person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T08:51:48.443" Title="Passive Imperatives" Tags="&lt;movement&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;malay&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12847" CreationDate="2015-07-14T08:44:54.487" Score="1" ViewCount="3046" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing my own (very small) corpus analysis, including a word frequency list and would like to compare the top, say, 30 words with other such lists. I know that there are things like the GSL/NGSL, the Leipzig-Jakarta list or the Swadesh list. But the latter two are concerned with a different question (stability of words across time) and the former two are intended for study more than for research. Also, my own corpus consists of spoken language (transcripts of videos to be exact) which can be very different from written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question has three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a collection of word frequency lists (top 100 words would be enough) of a number (&gt;10) of languages anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone tried to translate a list of such lists into one common language and readjusted the frequencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the latter exists, how accurately does it approach &quot;the top 100 words spoken by all speakers of all of the included languages&quot; in your opinion? (I realize things get lost in translation quickly, but the lists would be likely to include things like &quot;I/you/we/they&quot;, &quot;to say/to come/to go&quot;, &quot;home/work/school&quot; which are quite universal as concepts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10108" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T19:15:05.390" Title="Most commonly used words across languages?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12821" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:19:06.447" Score="0" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the example auxiliary verb sentences from:&#xA;&quot;Radford, A. English syntax: An introduction, &lt;em&gt;Cambridge University Press&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;2004&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; is an auxiliary verb, gone is a normal verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare to the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; is a normal verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if seeing if two verb are in a row is a necessary and sufficient condition for the first to be an auxiliary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10014" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:30:13.743" Title="If two verbs are in a row, is the first always an Auxiliary?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-16T19:49:18.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12820" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:30:13.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your rule mostly works, but &quot;in a row&quot; fails to capture constructions like &quot;He has definitely gone&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; is still an auxiliary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, trying to analyse syntax just by considering the surface sequence is usually doomed to failure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am walking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I went walking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both have the same surface structure, but most analyses would consider &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; an auxiliary, but &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; not one: &lt;em&gt;walking&lt;/em&gt; is a complement of the full verb &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:30:13.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12909" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:32:18.407" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be an implicit assumption that wordnet only contains lemmas.&#xA;Eg in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9529/combine-dictionary-lemmatization-with-stemmer&quot;&gt;Combine dictionary lemmatization with stemmer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel confidant it is a correct one, the Wordnet interface refers to lemmas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However neither in the wordnet paper&lt;a href=&quot;http://mooo.cf/20140731/Reference/1995%20-%20Miller%20-%20WordNet%20a%20lexical%20database%20for%20English.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, nor in the 5 Papers on WordNet &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/5papers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/235.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/245.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/265.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/278.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=Rehu8OOzMIMC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;dq=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;ots=IqjdQjWRc4&amp;amp;sig=1NMSarjTCLLMe9HYDcJAHEpqUMA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt; mention the word &quot;lemma&quot; at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am starting to have my doubts.&#xA;I am looking for a high quality cite-able source to reassure my doubts.&#xA;Or to correct my misunderstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Referenes:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mooo.cf/20140731/Reference/1995%20-%20Miller%20-%20WordNet%20a%20lexical%20database%20for%20English.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; [Miller, G. A. WordNet: a lexical database for English Communications of the ACM, ACM, 1995, 38, 39-41]&lt;a href=&quot;http://mooo.cf/20140731/Reference/1995%20-%20Miller%20-%20WordNet%20a%20lexical%20database%20for%20English.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/5papers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; [All 5 Papers]&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu/5papers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/235.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; [Miller, George A., et al. &quot;Introduction to wordnet: An on-line lexical database*.&quot; International journal of lexicography 3.4 (1990): 235-244.]&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/235.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/245.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; [Miller, George A. &quot;Nouns in WordNet: a lexical inheritance system.&quot; International journal of Lexicography 3.4 (1990): 245-264.]&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/245.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/265.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; [Gross, Derek, and Katherine J. Miller. &quot;Adjectives in wordnet.&quot; International Journal of Lexicography 3.4 (1990): 265-277.]&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/265.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/278.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt; [Fellbaum, Christiane. &quot;English verbs as a semantic net.&quot; International Journal of Lexicography 3.4 (1990): 278-301.]&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/4/278.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=Rehu8OOzMIMC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;dq=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;ots=IqjdQjWRc4&amp;amp;sig=1NMSarjTCLLMe9HYDcJAHEpqUMA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt; [Tengi, Randee I. &quot;Design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and searching software.&quot; Fellbaum, Christiane (réd.), WordNet: an electronic lexical database, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1998): 105.]&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=Rehu8OOzMIMC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;dq=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;ots=IqjdQjWRc4&amp;amp;sig=1NMSarjTCLLMe9HYDcJAHEpqUMA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Design%20and%20Implementation%20of%20the%20WordNet%20Lexical%20Database%20and%20Searching%20Software&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10014" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T08:24:26.257" Title="Does WordNet only contains Lemmas?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T15:36:05.570" Score="0" ViewCount="833" Body="&lt;p&gt;In describing most languages we can gloss the personal pronouns with English pronouns such as &quot;I,&quot; &quot;you,&quot; &quot;he,&quot; and &quot;we.&quot;  However, it's not possible to do this with all languages.   For example, in many languages, the third person singular pronoun is epicine.  Other languages have third person pronouns that convey information about spatial deixis or animacy.   Hence glosses such as  &quot;s/he/it.ANIMATE.DISTAL,&quot; &quot;it.INANIMATE.PROXIMAL,&quot; and so on.   While glosses like these are possible, they are also a bit clunky and Anglocentric.   Would glosses such as the following be acceptable?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ego&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2per&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3per.ANIM.PROX&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or is there a more common way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to avoid using just 1, 2, 3, 3ANIM.PROX because they may resemble glosses for verbal inflections too closely, even if they are easier to read.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T05:22:42.263" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T05:22:42.263" Title="Glossing and translating personal pronouns absent from Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12823" CreationDate="2015-07-14T16:51:03.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what would make such a gloss &quot;Anglocentric&quot;, especially since &quot;proximal&quot; and &quot;animate&quot; are Latinate terms. I only partially understand &quot;clunky&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to distinguish between translations of linguistic material (into English, or whatever language you are writing in), and word/morpheme glosses. A translation would not be &quot;Ego.nominative see.recent-past non-ego--discourse-participant.accusative&quot;, it would be an idiomatic English sentence like &quot;I saw you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The morpheme gloss would be the place for such subtleties. To be useful, such glosses need to be compact (few letters), which usually means abbreviated (which implies a table of abbreviations). If the language has polymorphemic pronouns with independent elements separately marking &quot;animate&quot; vs. &quot;inanimate&quot;, &quot;proximal&quot; versus &quot;distal&quot;, &quot;visible&quot; vs. &quot;referential&quot; which allows 8 distinct pronoun forms, then abbreviations like &quot;an./inan.&quot;, &quot;prox./dist.&quot;, &quot;vis./ref.&quot; might work. A gloss like &quot;3per.ANIM.PROX&quot; implies that there are three separate morphemes with isolable grammatical functions, and I don't know if that is what you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there is a simple split in 3rd person forms between e.g. &quot;animate singular proximal&quot; and &quot;others&quot;, where one class has some semantic property but the other is of the category &quot;anything else&quot;. A morpheme/word gloss is not the correct place for a discussion of semantic distinctions, and in such a case, you would be better off using an arbitrary distinction &quot;A&quot; vs. &quot;B&quot;, where you explain in the relevant section on word classes that A words are all animate singular proximal, and anything else is B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T16:51:03.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T17:41:44.050" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG_%28rocket%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;german OTRAG rocket company&lt;/a&gt; has had conducted its launches in DR Congo (Zaire at that time) in the late seventies. Several sources refer to those rockets under the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5pJpd9Vi_U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Nzwamba&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language exactly is that? It looks like Swahili to me, but I can't find it anywhere? Google translate suggests the translation to be &quot;Nzwamba&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean in that language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1042" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T21:09:06.523" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T21:41:48.123" Title="Nzwamba OTRAG rocket. What's that and in what language?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-07T00:16:15.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12827" CreationDate="2015-07-14T17:42:37.907" Score="-3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=opprobrious&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;opprobrious (adj.)&lt;/a&gt; [...] from Latin &lt;em&gt;opprobare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to reproach, taunt,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ob&lt;/em&gt; &quot;against&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ob-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ob-&lt;/a&gt;) + &lt;em&gt;probrum&lt;/em&gt; &quot;reproach, infamy.&quot; Etymological sense is &quot;disgrace attached to conduct considered shameful.&quot; Related: Opprobriously; opprobriousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first encountered this word, I interpreted &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ob&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as a negation/negatory prefix, in opposition to &lt;em&gt;probum&lt;/em&gt;. This interpretation is wrong, because it would mean that &lt;em&gt;oppobare&lt;/em&gt; meant the opposite of its true meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prefixes still bedevil and beset me; so please disambiguate the meaning?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Etymonline's separate entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ob-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ob-&lt;/a&gt;, states one use 'as an intensive'. However, this use seems unlikely here, because then Etymonline would've have written thus in the entry above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T18:44:44.160" Title="How did the prefix 'ob-' function in Latin 'opprobare'?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-14T20:45:52.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12826" CreationDate="2015-07-14T18:44:44.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the linked entry on ob-, all of the senses (including 'against') are spatial, not logical. Combining the senses listed, it seems that this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;'reproach' + 'toward, against, across, down, to, about, before, in front of, near' &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T18:44:44.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T02:37:20.997" Score="6" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/259595/50720&quot;&gt;These ELU answers&lt;/a&gt; affirm, but do not explain, the decrease in written sentence length. So why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To allow for comparison with  modern dialects, I restrict this question to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;writing in European languages (for those who desire specificity:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Germanic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italic&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that have remained extensive and prevalent since the 1500s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(I picked this century,  because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern English&lt;/a&gt; started in roughly 1550, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French#Modern_French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern French&lt;/a&gt; officialised in the 1530s)&lt;/sub&gt;,  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;PS: Since posting this question, I have read some explications, but nonspecialist: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?43383-Why-is-most-modern-prose-so-simple&amp;amp;s=b35d388e7b7af2452acde8ee0a17ed0f&amp;amp;p=702090&amp;amp;viewfull=1#post702090&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/RkGOC4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/RkGgjN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T18:31:48.343" Title="Why were written sentences longer in the past?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12823" CreationDate="2015-07-15T05:00:36.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, lexical items should be glossed as words. That is, you just can't gloss the word meaning &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;3&quot;, &quot;3p.MSg&quot;, or anything like that. It is &quot;he&quot;. All the other stuff is for grammatical markers (e.g., agreement inflection, as you point out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in languages where gender differences are collapsed in pronouns, there's a good chance that the third person personal pronoun is a demonstrative. Look into this. A gloss like &quot;that&quot; would be you best choice in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it is good practice to follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leipzig glossing rules&lt;/a&gt; when in doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T05:00:36.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12840" CreationDate="2015-07-15T05:56:05.817" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a cross-dialectical description with three distinct dialects, and would like to indicate with a superscript symbol which dialect a given word/phrase comes from to aid the reader. I thought of raised *s and daggers, but that looks strange. Raised numbers seem to indicate footnotes. Have you ever come across an intuitive solution to this in text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T11:06:28.733" Title="Symbols to indicate different dialects in text" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12807" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:07:36.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Wordsmith 3+ works fine, and in the case of Antconc special characters will sometimes mess when using Concordancer. &#xA;for the second question you can use the lemmatizer in Antconc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T10:07:36.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2015-07-15T14:20:21.640" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit of a cheap shot, but what about 'unable'? Prefix and Suffix with nothing inbetween.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10115" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T14:20:21.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12801" CreationDate="2015-07-15T17:04:26.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you will be surprised how many sounds IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) can describe when you look at the full charts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are additional IPA symbols for &quot;disordered speech&quot; (see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/ipa/consonants-extra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/ipa/consonants-extra.html&lt;/a&gt; ) extending the repertoire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It anything else fails, you can resort to higher level markup (e.g., XML tags like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;grunt/&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;grmbl/&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, they are legitimate parts of a linguistic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T17:04:26.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12801" CreationDate="2015-07-15T19:35:25.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, such sounds may be a part of communication, but so is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRM2OENl2jk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;slap on the head&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjMbVGCnka0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;snort&lt;/a&gt;. If you define language as any audible means of communicating, then (1) it would be and (2) ASL is not language. So it kind of depends on what you mean by &quot;linguistic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very many kinds of noises that humans can make that could be called &quot;grunts&quot; and &quot;growls&quot;. One version of a growl is approximated by the relatively non-exotic IPA transcription [ɹ̰ɑ̰ɹ̰ʷ]. You'd really need a set of recorded samples to match against supposed IPA transcriptions. I don't think that any of the IPA extension symbols are particularly applicable in describing such noises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not such sounds have a place of articulation at all depends on what you mean by &quot;place of articulation&quot;. A traditional phonetic view is expressed by Ladefoged and Maddieson &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;, that POA is a property of consonants (not vowels). But of course you are free to define POA however you want, and phonologists generally assign a place of articulation (or, more accurately, a &quot;place&quot;) to all segment except those occasionally claimed to be placeless. A grunt is like schwa, so the POA of a grunt would be whatever you say about schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sub-glottal POA is an impossibility -- there's nothing to articulate, below the glottis. All sounds somehow involve the larynx and lungs, but that does not give sounds a laryngeal or pulmonic POA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:35:25.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12837" CreationDate="2015-07-15T23:27:12.043" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a program which will be designed to take a text file, and parse all the words into a Concordance, e.g., a sort of dictionary list of all the words sorted in order, with a total count of each word and the location of each instance of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From parsing some short literary works, for example &quot;Green Eggs and Ham&quot; by Dr. Seuss, I have found out that pronouns and articles get a really high word count and seem to pollute the more meaningful words in the result set. Examples of such words are &quot;I&quot;, &quot;the&quot;, &quot;a&quot;, &quot;you&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://repl.it/xOV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this sample program result&lt;/a&gt; for example (just click Run and the list will appear on the right).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: In order for a concordance to be of good quality and useful, should such words be removed from the result set, so that more room is left for the more meaningful words, like &quot;box&quot;, &quot;fox&quot;, &quot;house&quot;, &quot;mouse&quot;, &quot;Sam-I-am&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put it in context of a larger literary work, say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Dracula&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or something like that, where the word &quot;the&quot; or &quot;a&quot; could appear thousands of times, and out of context, those don't provide any useful information for reference, so it would fill pages worth of word references that nobody would really care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any techniques that you recommend for filtering, any established standard or other such reference work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10117" LastEditorUserId="10117" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T23:52:18.990" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T04:54:14.350" Title="Should common short words be left out of a concordance?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2015-07-16T01:21:35.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shakespeare concordance&lt;/a&gt; online, and you can search for &quot;the&quot;, for instance, and get every example in context. All 28,944 times. I would expect that a stylistic study could, in principle, care about the use of &quot;the&quot;, but that might more linguistics than stylistics. You could also exclude the top 50 most-frequent non-lexical words. If you do that, you need to identify lemmata and exclude all or none of &quot;is, am, were, be, are&quot;. It is probably best to not filter, because that limits the utility of your concordance, and anybody that cares can filter your results further (if they know how to filter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would give you a totally different answer if you intended to put the concordance on paper, so it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T01:21:35.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:13:29.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;em&gt;antis&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;those opposed to something&quot;)? Unlike the example of &quot;superette&quot; in the comments, where the prefix is shortened from &quot;supermarket,&quot; with &quot;antis&quot; the prefix isn't taken from any particular word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:13:29.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11086" CreationDate="2015-07-16T12:34:25.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're aim is to create a Thesaurus for a minority language or a language for which there is not already a large dictionary and/or text corpus, you would probably be well served by using the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rapidwords.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rapid Word Collection&lt;/a&gt;&quot; approach in conjunction with software such as WeSay and/or &lt;a href=&quot;http://fieldworks.sil.org/flex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10118" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T12:34:25.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12831" CreationDate="2015-07-16T15:17:46.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a standard way to do this. Rather you can establish symbols or very short abbreviations and write it before the sentence. But it also depends on how you want to represent these examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand what you want to do then: Are they linguistic glosses? Then you can just write it in full form, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SEQPZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;figure 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or just an itemized list? Then you can use conventional abbreviations or create new ones for rare languages, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i2DUJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;figure 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or inline (you could change size, boldness to your liking, this is just an example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfUME.png&quot; alt=&quot;figure 3&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the asterisk has an already established use within linguistics and it would be very confusing of you to adopt it for other purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T11:06:28.733" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T11:06:28.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:31:01.233" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/93176#eid755936&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[OED]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;inasmuch&lt;/strong&gt; {adverb} =     [Etymology:]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  originally 3 words &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in as much&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (in northern Middle English &lt;em&gt;in als mikel&lt;/em&gt;), subsequently sometimes written as 2 words, &lt;em&gt;in asmuch&lt;/em&gt;, and now (especially since 17th cent.) as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I. In phrase &lt;strong&gt;inasmuch AS&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  [=]  In so far as, [...], in proportion as, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;†3. &lt;strong&gt;in as much&lt;/strong&gt; (Notice the absence of  &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  = [4.] In an equal or like &lt;code&gt;degree&lt;/code&gt;, likewise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Beware: Only definition I contains the 4th &lt;strong&gt;AS&lt;/strong&gt;; definition 3 lacks it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already understand and so ask NOT about the definitions 1 and 3 above. Instead, I ask for a linguistic analysis of &lt;strong&gt;inasmuch&lt;/strong&gt; (and similar syntagmas).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To parse it, I consider its original form as 3 separate words (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in as much&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), as stated above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. In &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in as much&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, what do the 3 separate words mean  individually?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For each of the 3 words, which definition from OED matches?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;OED is linked here for your convenience: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&amp;amp;q=in&amp;amp;_searchBtn=Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11307?rskey=bFp1yM&amp;amp;result=6&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/123133?rskey=mtgwpV&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;much&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. How did the bolded 3 morphemes combine to mean definition 4? For example, 3 contains no word that  means &lt;code&gt;degree&lt;/code&gt; in definition 4.   So whence did &lt;code&gt;degree&lt;/code&gt; originate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please expose and explain all hidden, missing semantic drifts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T07:38:51.373" Title="How to parse 'in as much' and similar syntagmas?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T00:47:47.910" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a writer, and I want to write a poem about how one's native language can interfere with the acquisition of a second language. I understand that this is studied in the field of second-language phonology and am looking for an elementary text on the subject, one that is not too difficult for a layperson to understand. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10122" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T21:09:18.913" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:09:18.913" Title="second-language phonology/L1 influence on L2 acquisition" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T01:31:03.320" Score="6" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, here is the English vowel chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6O9c.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really confused, what do &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close(high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open (low)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, Here is what I understood, please correct me if I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, let's look at the vowel &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close (high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position, the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the front of the tongue will be placed high and touch the very front roof of the mouth. The lips are very spread out when saying &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. See the picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/egGJr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, look at the &lt;code&gt;/ɪ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;font&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It is also in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; position. In this position, the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the front of the tongue is placed high and in the position between the front &amp;amp; the central roof of the mouth. However, the front of the tongue does not touch the roof of the mouth. The lips are still spread out but less so than with &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. See the pic below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ptJB6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now, consider the &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close (high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the back of the tongue is raised very high and touches the very far back of the roof of the mouth. The lips are very rounded in this position. See the pic below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27NBl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now, look at the &lt;code&gt;/ʊ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position somehow between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It is also in the position &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the back of the tongue is raised high and somehow between the middle and the back of the roof of the mouth. The lips are rounded in this case but less rounded than &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt;. See the picture below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5pf9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now take a look at the &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; position. It is also in between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the middle of the tongue is raised right to the middle of the mouth. Of course, the tongue does not touch the middle of the roof of the mouth. The lips are neutral in this position. See picture below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmmKJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, consider &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the middle of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open (low)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It also stays between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Technically, if the distance between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is 10, then &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; will stay in the distance of 7 which means it will have 7 units to the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and 3 units to the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the whole tongue is low but not really low like &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;. The front of the tongue somehow stays in the position between the front and the middle of the roof of the mouth, but the front of the tongue is closer to the middle of the roof of the mouth than to the front of the roof of the mouth. The lips are spread out in this case. See the picture below :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rq3SJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I wrong about anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could you clarify and explain how to read the vowel diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10123" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T10:01:10.683" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:30:27.573" Title="Confused about vowel diagram (Vowel chart)—Can you clarify and explain how to read it?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12841" CreationDate="2015-07-18T07:29:48.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You won't clarify the expression &quot;inasmuch as&quot; by parsing. It is an idiomatic word formation and a conjunction and the only way to clarify is to show how the word elements, in, as, much, as can develop the special sense. A similar formation is insofar as, which has a parallel in German &quot;insofern als&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T07:29:48.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-19T06:45:07.900" Score="1" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subjunctive is most often used when expressing volition. Using English and Spanish as examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doctor recommends that you &lt;strong&gt;eat&lt;/strong&gt; vegetables and fruits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El médico recomienda que &lt;strong&gt;comas&lt;/strong&gt; verduras y frutas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it is used in Spanish, but the indicative is used in English (generally when expressing doubt or emotion):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; so easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dudo que &lt;strong&gt;sea&lt;/strong&gt; tan fácil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes vice versa (generally for a hypothetical in present tense using &amp;quot;if&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt; alive &lt;em&gt;(archaic)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Si &lt;strong&gt;está&lt;/strong&gt; vivo&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want him to &lt;strong&gt;tell&lt;/strong&gt; me the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I want that he &lt;strong&gt;tell&lt;/strong&gt; me the truth. &lt;em&gt;(not that &lt;strong&gt;tells&lt;/strong&gt; would work here either)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quiero que me &lt;strong&gt;diga&lt;/strong&gt; la verdad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the English usage of &amp;quot;want&amp;quot; has been completely rewritten to use a different grammatical structure which uses neither the indicative nor subjunctive (but rather the infinitive), and I'm not interested in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: How do various languages choose whether to use the indicative or subjunctive under what is otherwise the same grammatical framework? Are there any differences at all among Romance languages? Feel free to bring up anything that suits the topic, be it Latin, non-Indo-European languages, etc. (yes, I just used the subjunctive there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3324" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T15:59:52.193" Title="Use of subjunctive in various languages" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12819" CreationDate="2015-07-19T08:45:18.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ezglot.com/most-frequently-used-words.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;most frequent words&quot;&gt;http://www.ezglot.com/most-frequently-used-words.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the above site does this something like this for common words, and homepage has a list of few most widely understood. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9602" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T08:45:18.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12846" CreationDate="2015-07-19T15:59:52.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Bantu languages, it is used to indicate &quot;almost doing&quot;, which isn't a subjunctive use I know of in Romance (maybe I just don't know about it). Part of the problem is that there isn't an independent, robust test for whether something is a &quot;subjunctive&quot;. I suspect that if a verb form were used for realis moods, it would not be labeled &quot;subjunctive&quot;. So while I think it is an interesting question what variation there is, there is a presupposition that we independently know what a &quot;subjunctive&quot; is, as distinct from an optative, conditional, potential, or even &quot;future&quot;. Perhaps the key is to identify predicates that &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; call for a &quot;subjunctive&quot; in their complements, and then understand the semantic properties that distinguish that from more general irrealis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T15:59:52.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12807" CreationDate="2015-07-19T16:51:12.800" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are two separate questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Will AntConc and Wordsmith deal with characters not present in English (sometimes referred to as non-ASCII)? This is really a question about encoding of text (not language). AntConc supports unicode UTF-8 which means it should deal with any script. WordSmith only supports a limited subset which means that texts in non-Latin scripts will have to be converted. But none of the examples you give will present any problems. This is a relatively easy issue to resolve depending on the encoding of the texts you provide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question about dealing with morphology is one of lemmas (which are essentialy word stems without any inflection). Both Wordsmith and AntConc support lemmas but you will have to provide a lemma list for each language. There are guides online on how to do it and a pre-made lemma list for English also exists. A good source for data for generating a lemma list for other languages are the many open source spell checks - but it will require work and coding to create those.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T16:51:12.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2015-07-19T17:00:22.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology is fairly straightforward. The temporal meaning of before is secondary to the spatial meaning. This is very common across all prepositions of time: at (5am), in (5 mins), on (Wednesday), between (3 and 4), from - to, through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Conceptual Metaphor theory posits a TIME IS SPACE metaphor that is present across many languages and many parts of the language. It is not limited to preposition. You will find it in adverbs as well as in things people say about time: 'time went by quickly', 'time slips away', 'we need to move the meeting back/forward', 'we need a chunk of time', 'give me space to figure things out'. This is bolstered by the associated metaphor of TIME IS AN OBJECT: 'give me time', 'take 5 minutes', 'employees steal time by going on Facebook', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This often explained by our experience of space and objects being somehow more physically and physiologically primary but I suspect that this is more of a reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T17:00:22.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12777" CreationDate="2015-07-19T17:08:35.110" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this question is that parts of speech are just a construct used for the description of language - not necessarily a real thing in a language. You can see that across languages only nouns and verbs are fairly uncontroversially universal with adjectives being another good but still disputed candidate (See Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you were starting with a different language you might be surprised by things like determiners in the languages you list or prepositions. Other languages may have various classifiers that may seem a bit strange. There are other things that represent a distinct category but do not make it as a part of speech like quantifiers. Even in English, you will find lists ranging between 8 and 11 different parts of speech depending on the authors' perspective and need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also find a lot of variations in the internal typology of parts of speech across languages. So Czech pronouns and English pronouns or adjectives will come out looking quite different (e.g. Czech possessive adjectives).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T17:08:35.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-19T20:17:50.430" Score="5" ViewCount="780" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of a software package or general algorithm that allows the separation of consonant and vowel waveforms from a continuous speech signal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to implement the technique &quot;Harmonic/Percussive Separation using Median Filtering&quot; by Fiztgerald but I can't seem isolate just the consonant or vowel.  I think I might have to specify the median filter length in the time (harmonic) and frequency (percussive) direction to match up with the properties of the vowel/consonant I want to separate but not sure how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could spend ages trying to fine tune this algorithm so I was hoping someone might have a solution already in hand since I am hard pressed for time on this research project (synthesizing speech waveforms for psychophysics experiments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Aside:  The HPS technique mentioned above works by filtering a signal in the frequency or time domain to find the dominant bands that contribute to either a harmonic (time) or percussive (freq) component of the signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10135" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T14:56:28.503" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:56:28.503" Title="Algorithm for Separating Consonant and Vowel Waveforms from Speech Signal" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4429" CreationDate="2015-07-20T09:47:32.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though you already received a good answer, I'd like to point out Gries' 2008 paper &quot;Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora&quot; which is sort of a must-read for anyone doing corpora linguistics. It's available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/research/2008_STG_Dispersion_IJCL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/research/2008_STG_Dispersion_IJCL.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10108" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T09:47:32.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T10:22:25.357" Score="0" ViewCount="1480" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anybody suggest me the websites or PDFs from where I can get the meaning and etymology of Classical Arabic terms or any online dictionary of Classical Arabic language or any PDF of that dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10139" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T14:05:04.987" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T03:37:33.513" Title="Any suggestion for Classical Arabic language online dictionary or PDF?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12856" CreationDate="2015-07-20T12:01:31.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no etymological dictionaries of Arabic, on line or in print. For a good collection of ordinary dictionaries see here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ejtaal.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ejtaal.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T12:01:31.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T13:34:54.180" Score="9" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;Further to comments against &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/260532/do-complex-sentences-always-need-a-conjunction/260611?noredirect=1#comment572488_260611&quot;&gt;Do complex sentences always need a conjunction?&lt;/a&gt; as recently asked on ELU (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9024/complex-sentence-without-a-subordinating-conjunction&quot;&gt;Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction?&lt;/a&gt; here on Linguistics), I'd like to know whether &quot;sentence&quot; is a useful and/or clearly-defined term from the perspective of &quot;linguists&quot; (as opposed to &quot;pedagogic grammarians&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; reason I ask is &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/260532/do-complex-sentences-always-need-a-conjunction/260611?noredirect=1#comment571792_260549&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; by John Lawler, pointing out that &lt;em&gt;in speech&lt;/em&gt; no-one can tell the difference between a full stop and a semicolon (or dash, I assume) &lt;strong&gt;- [so]&lt;/strong&gt; it's something of a moot point whether &lt;em&gt;this current &quot;sentence&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is actually &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also assume highlighted &lt;strong&gt;[so]&lt;/strong&gt; in the above is in principle &quot;optional&quot;, and that from the &quot;grammarian's&quot; perspective it's at least &lt;em&gt;credible&lt;/em&gt; to classify two clauses linked by a &quot;non-full stop&quot; punctuation mark as a complex sentence, regardless of whether a conjunction is explicitly included or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this definition in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yourdictionary.com/sentence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yourdictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;...in speech&lt;/strong&gt; a sentence begins following a silence and concludes with any of various final pitches and a terminal juncture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but I'm not sure how to relate that to, for example, my second paragraph above (if read aloud).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="282" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T10:31:29.920" Title="Is &quot;sentence&quot; a useful and/or clearly-defined term in linguistics" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2015-07-20T14:59:54.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences are useful because a language is a set of sentences.  (And without language, where would we be?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T14:59:54.323" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2015-07-20T16:52:09.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The forepaws of an animal are the paws in front. Our forefathers or forebears are those who were before us. We came after them in time. I see no problen with fore- or before,  &quot;before&quot; could indicate local position and could refer to time. Today &quot;before&quot; is mainly used referring to time as in &quot;before the war&quot; and &quot;after the war&quot;. When local position is spoken of &quot;in front of&quot; is preferred and &quot;before&quot; is mostly used in niches as &quot;before the judge&quot; or &quot;before God&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T16:52:09.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2015-07-20T17:19:50.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentence is not a very useful construct for most things you'd want to study about language. It is only an artifact of a particular kind of written language and it is really hard to provide any definition more specific than 'it starts with a capital letter and ends with a period'. Even then, the beginnings and ends of 'sentences' are fairly arbitrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only analytical concept I can think of where sentence is directly useful is measures of readability which look at the number of words per sentence. This can give a fairly reliable indication of the difficulty of text (providing they are long enough). Sentences are also used when dealing with concepts like subordination and anaphora accessibility but they're not really necessary for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two concepts to look at as much more fundamental are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clauses&lt;/strong&gt; defined broadly as subject and predicate. They can be found in any language and are much more easily and reliably identified. You can usefully study relationships between clauses in speech without recourse to the notion of a sentence and arrive at very similar conclusions. Perhaps, here the term sentence could be reserved for groups of clauses that are linked through hypotaxis (subordination) but even here, these relationships occur in many non-sentence-like contexts. Like: A: It's going to be a great party. B. Yeah! If Johnny decides to show up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Utterances&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;texts&lt;/strong&gt; which are units of expression that can be studied with respect to communicative intent without regard to length or internal structure. Thus, I can treat this entire response as a single utterance/text just as much as the word 'Boo' shouted into somebody's face constitutes an utterance. Looking at the types of utterances, their internal structure and relationships (such as co-reference, turn-taking, repair, etc.) can reveal a lot of useful things about language as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, sentence is just a theoretical leftover from earlier times of theorizing about language based on written sources alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that does not mean that in many practical contexts such as language teaching, composition, etc. sentence should be avoided as a way to communicate about language. It's a very useful, generally understood shortcut that is probably not even out of place in a textbook on syntax. But in thinking about how language works across many languages and usage contexts, it is of only marginal interest. It just happens that most of the language data available to us is in the form that makes sentences seem like an inherent organizing principle of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T17:19:50.887" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T22:04:10.930" Score="-6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of Slavic languages have the word &quot;cena&quot; meaning &quot;price&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slovenian, Slovak, Polish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cena&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Russian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;цена&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether it is related to the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T20:47:35.897" Title="Are cent and cena related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T23:33:17.383" Score="1" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;My girlfriend noticed that I say when I pronounce a word like 'hundred' it sounds like I'm deleting the schwa sound in the final syllable and pronouncing the word mroe like, &quot;hundrd&quot;. Does this fall under schwa syncope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9916" LastEditorUserId="783" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T23:47:53.293" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T23:47:53.293" Title="Schwa syncope in &quot;hundred&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13205" CreationDate="2015-07-21T07:03:31.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple google search tells me that &quot;Haggard&quot; emerged in... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...mid 16th century (used in falconry): from French hagard ; perhaps related to &#xA;hedge; later influenced by hag.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on a Discovery Channel program recently, I got to know about Hagar. She was the wife of the patriarch and Islamic prophet Ibrāhīm (Abraham) and the mother of the Ismā'īl (Ishmael).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...was stranded in a desert, and ran between the Al-Safa and Al-Marwah hills in &#xA;search of water for her son. After the seventh run between the two hills, an &#xA;angel appeared before her. He helped her and told her that God had heard   &#xA;Ishmael's crying and would provide them with water.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot help but wonder, the english word &quot;haggard&quot; meaning -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;looking exhausted and unwell, especially from fatigue, worry, or suffering.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...could easily have emerged from the story of Hagar as even she must have been exhausted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to be sure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: all information from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagar_in_Islam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagar_in_Islam&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10145" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T21:48:58.583" Title="Etymology of &quot;Haggard&quot; has anything to do with Hagar in Islam?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2015-07-21T10:00:24.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with what user6726 has written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you mean by &quot;useful&quot; -- to whom? For what? What constitutes being &quot;clearly-defined&quot; -- do you mean &quot;easy to detect where everybody agrees that the thing is an X&quot;? Substitute any other linguistic term, and you'll get the same range of &quot;yes&quot; / &quot;no&quot; opinions, just from different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my answer is based on your clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm supposing the &quot;raison d'etre&quot; for linguistics is to identify, describe, categorise the various features used in language, and the principles/rules governing how they're used. I realise that there will be people concentrating on different things within the entire field, but I suppose I'm asking how relevant &quot;sentence&quot; is to the average linguist. Or maybe I mean, How important is it in the context of &quot;Linguistics 101&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the last question, I'd say it's eminently important. When I searched on google for &quot;linguistics textbook pdf&quot;, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/20/Text/HayesIntroductoryLinguistics2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Introductory Linguistics -- Bruce P. Hayes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.mu.edu.sa/public/uploads/1378843468.6083The%20Study%20Of%20Language%20%284th%20Edition%28.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Study of Language -- George Yule&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/VargaLaszlo/ICEL-2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Introduction&#xA;to English Linguistics --László Varga&lt;/a&gt;, and so on. In each of these, the concept of &quot;sentence&quot; was used without much of an explanation, relying on its audience to already have a clear conception of it. The last book I cited distinguishes between &lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;utterance&lt;/strong&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sentences have to be distinguished from utterances. A &lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt; is any string of words produced by the sentence-forming rules of a language, these rules are stored in native speakers’ competence. (By &lt;strong&gt;competence&lt;/strong&gt; we mean the native speaker’s intuitive knowledge of language, see Unit 2 above.) So sentences are constructs of competence, they are ideal, abstract entities. For instance, &lt;em&gt;Peter smokes cheap cigars&lt;/em&gt; is an English sentence because it has the structure of an English sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, an &lt;strong&gt;utterance&lt;/strong&gt; is typically the physical realisation of a sentence in a real situation of language use, i.e. in performance. (&lt;strong&gt;Performance&lt;/strong&gt; is the actual use of competence and it involves individual and situational factors, see Unit 2.) Since utterances belong to performance, in spontaneous speech they often contain imperfections, such as hesitations, false starts, lack of concord, etc., especially if the speaker is tired or excited or embarrassed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only point of contention with the phrasing above is that I would rather have said &quot;an utterance is the &lt;strong&gt;spoken&lt;/strong&gt; realisation of a sentence&quot;. Afterall, a sentence is physically realized whether it is spoken, written, or gesticulated (as in ASL), and none of these are any less real situations of language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T10:31:29.920" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T10:31:29.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6380" CreationDate="2015-07-21T10:35:00.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are forces driving language evolution, and we see two of them at work here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first driving force is &lt;strong&gt;Regularisation&lt;/strong&gt;. The irregular pattern of latin (indicated by duodeviginti and undeviginti, showing a counting down from 20 instead of counting up from 10) wasn't able to resist this driving force and all quoted modern Romance languages use &quot;counting up from 10&quot;, i.e. a more regular pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second driving force is &lt;strong&gt;Sound Change&lt;/strong&gt;. At some time and for some descendants of latin, the successors of sedecim and septemdecim became too similar in sound (something like *sedeci and *seddeci), therefore more distinctive forms for the two different numbers were needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different dialects/languages reacted differently to the pressure of theses two forces (evolution is unpredictable, after all). French and Italian made 16 and 17 maximally different (seize vs. dix-sept). Spanish and Portuguese chose a more regular, but still distinct enough pattern (dieciseis and diecisiete). Romanian is the odd Romance language out, where Sound Change didn't put up much pressure and the old latin forms of 16 and 17 are pretty well preserved (şaisprezece and şaptesprezece). Romanian was than able to develop a completely regular pattern up to 19 (nouăsprezece).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITION: In Romanian there is still something left to explain: Romanian has acquired an infix -spre- &quot;to&quot; not present in Latin or the other Romance languages. This exhibits a third driving force to language evolution, the &lt;strong&gt;influence of other languages&lt;/strong&gt;. I daren't decide whether it is the consequence of a Dacian &lt;em&gt;substrat&lt;/em&gt; or a Slavonic or Albanian &lt;em&gt;adstrat&lt;/em&gt;. At least, Albanian numerals (gjashtëmbëdhjetë &quot;16&quot; with -bë- inserted) and Bulgarian numerals (шестна́десет (šestnádeset) &quot;16&quot; with -ná- inserted) show the same pattern of formation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T14:30:57.497" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T14:30:57.497" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12777" CreationDate="2015-07-21T11:15:40.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection, particle (yes, no, to), article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has several forms of verb that can be considered parts of speech depending on viewpoint: present participle, past participle, gerund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian does not have articles, but has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;participle&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgressive_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transgressive&lt;/a&gt;. Both described as a form of a verb in English Wikipedia (English also has participles), but in Russian linguistics they are considered separate parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German language has another form of verb, known as &quot;inflective&quot;. This can also be viewed as a separate part of speech depending on viewpoint. In Russian such words are considered interjections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages (including English and Latin) have clitics, which are sometimes classified as parts of speech, but I prefer to count them as parts or word (morphemes) that come after ending (prefix(es)-root-suffix(es)-ending-clitic). In Russian clitics (-де) are classified as particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T06:57:38.993" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T06:57:38.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-21T14:07:34.470" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask English speakers what they think of the following sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John left three years before Bill arrived. In fact Bill never arrived.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an acceptable sentence? If not, could you identify what you don't like about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1777" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T14:07:34.470" Title="Felicity judgement for English sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12324" CreationDate="2015-07-21T16:53:16.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding corpus size: If you need meaningful results for the less frequent characters, you'll need a larger corpus, such as the ones at &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their web interface accepts queries consisting of punctuation. A sample query is &lt;code&gt;.|,|:|;|!|?|'|&quot;|@|#|$|%|^|&amp;amp;|*|(|)|-|~&lt;/code&gt;, which for the Contemporary American English, Global Web-based English and Wikipedia corpora produces these frequencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;COCA               GloWbE             Wikipedia&#xA; 1 , 23849941       1 , 83847760       1 , 109960441&#xA; 2 . 21304861       2 . 80894692       2 '  79264498&#xA; 3 &quot;  7008881       3 &quot; 17572733       3 .  73633968&#xA; 4 )  1694276       4 )  8668155       4 #  28560000&#xA; 5 (  1688162       5 (  8337855       5 (  25894803&#xA; 6 ?  1620720       6 ?  7853684       6 )  25851855&#xA; 7 :  1360298       7 :  6323921       7 *  18572182&#xA; 8 '   990783       8 '  6179597       8 :  10649543&#xA; 9 ;   782692       9 !  4029929       9 ;   5709259&#xA;10 #   545703      10 ;  2511484      10 -   4912002&#xA;11 -   392700      11 -  2228750      11 !   3248850&#xA;12 !   368622      12 *   137176      12 ?    378872&#xA;13 $   133473      13 @    66127      13 @     20287&#xA;14 &amp;amp;   109713      14 %    27920      14 %     16899&#xA;15 *    81934      15 $    23881      15 $     10455&#xA;16 @    74050      16 #    22256&#xA;17 %     1761&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Wikipedia corpus has &lt;code&gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; encoded as &lt;code&gt;''&lt;/code&gt; and uses &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; as a special character.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you need to study digits, capitals, or the symbols &lt;code&gt;[ ] / | &amp;lt; &amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, you need to download the corpora and do your own analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10146" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T18:59:02.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T18:59:02.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12853" CreationDate="2015-07-21T19:18:48.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure the short answer for this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;there's no algorithm that will always agree with your judgements about what is/isn't a vowel/consonant (cf.  glides) and will always agree with your judgements about where said phones start/end in the signal&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT, a bit of quick Googling turned up the following, which may be useful if you're familiar with Praat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://robfelty.com/academic-files/praat/DetectVowels.praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://robfelty.com/academic-files/praat/DetectVowels.praat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T19:18:48.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-21T19:58:40.433" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to construct a normalization program for text containing diacritics or special symbols. For some languages that I am familiar with, I can obtain a canonical form easily;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ä -&amp;gt; ae &#xA;ö -&amp;gt; oe&#xA;ü -&amp;gt; ue&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;é -&amp;gt; e&#xA;è -&amp;gt; e&#xA;î -&amp;gt; i&#xA;à -&amp;gt; a&#xA;â -&amp;gt; a&#xA;ô -&amp;gt; o&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does such a mapping exist for these languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish/Norwegian, Turkish, Czech, etc. (European/Indo-European).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the mapping? :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10148" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T08:06:32.583" Title="Comprehensive diacritics normalization" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12876" CreationDate="2015-07-21T20:39:58.633" Score="4" ViewCount="1129" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(TL;DR)&lt;/strong&gt; For each IPA phone, are there animations, ams, pictures or videos that depict exactly and precisely the location of your articulators (eg: your tongue), needed to articulate that letter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Optional Reading:&lt;/strong&gt;  Though replete with typos, &lt;a href=&quot;http://karlita2012pedagogiaingles.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; includes helpful pictures and simple explanations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  use charts featuring audio (clips of) pronunciations as &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;such&lt;/a&gt;. However, though based on words on anatomy, IPA's terminology is less precise than a diagram. Listening to the audio clips do not aid me to pinpoint where to place my articulators; I must experiment and guess, inefficiently and futilely. For example, I still don't know where the tongue must be situated to pronounce the alveolar trill &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/3216&quot;&gt;Anecdotes&lt;/a&gt; conflict and haven't helped me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/RNqGaF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Quora answer&lt;/a&gt; affirms the utility in 'familiarity with the anatomy', for mastering the IPA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T02:01:13.817" Title="For each IPA phone, are there animations or videos that depict the vocal tract during articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-21T20:52:19.027" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among others, I recently read the passive definition by Martin Haspelmath (from &lt;em&gt;THE GRAMMATICIZATION OF PASSIVE MORPHOLOGY&lt;/em&gt;, 1990), which states (page 26/27 of the book, the second/third page of the article):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is well known, of course,  that most passives  involve some marking on the verb, but a  number of cases  have been mentioned in the literature that appear to be passives without special verbal&#xA;  morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I claim that in general passive constructions without passive morphology do not exist.  On closer inspection it turns out that the alleged cases of&#xA;  such passives should be analyzed differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to list a few languages that following his approach do &lt;em&gt;not actually have&lt;/em&gt; a passive, but only passive-like structures (or that have less passive constructions than previously thought) - among others English, Mandarin Chinese, Kinyarwanda, Acehnese and Palauan. (Edit: I might have misinterpreted this point a little: He does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; propose that English has no passive at all, he only referred to one particular structure etc. - see the answer below! This does not make my question invalid, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly sure whether I correctly grasp the extent of this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any other languages that are commonly said to have a passive, but that do not, according to this definition?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(E.g. the construction in Irish does not seem to count then, if I understand correctly - in the Doyle 2001 grammar, page 42, it says: &quot;Modern Irish has a periphrastic passive, but no morphologically marked one.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excerpt from the grammar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The periphrastic passive corresponds to  the three types of aspect mentioned above: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Progressive passive - bí + Subject + PRT + VN &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Prospective passive - bí + Subject + le + VN &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Perfective passive - bí + Subject + verbal adjective (VA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ta an  tae a   ól      ag  Maire. &#xA;  is the tea PRT drink-VN    at  Mary &#xA;  'The tea is being drunk by Mary.' &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: Using this approach, are there any languages where one would still consider the existence of a passive controversial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2015-07-24T20:06:28.340" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T20:06:28.340" Title="Assuming that passives need verbal morphology, which languages commonly said to have a passive do not actually count?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12874" CreationDate="2015-07-21T22:50:58.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I should think that there are a number of sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.group.shef.ac.uk/search.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;University of Sheffield&lt;/a&gt; offers videos for every IPA sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the sounds of English, Spanish and German are enough for you, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;University of Iowa&lt;/a&gt; has an animated app/web-app with videos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/ipa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reddit.com/r/ipa&lt;/a&gt; is also noteworthy, as most new apps and websites about the topic come up there at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2016-01-14T23:33:56.510" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T23:33:56.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-22T02:38:36.270" Score="1" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/RGTZTG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; Assistant Professor of Linguistics &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.ku.edu/~a326m085/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Andrew McKenzie&lt;/a&gt;, University of Kansas  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, there is no real reason &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; certain changes happen while others don't.  For instance, the &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; sound from Proto-Indo-European became an &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; sound in Proto-Germanic.  Eventually, this explains why Germanic words like English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt;ather&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt;ish&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt;oot&lt;/em&gt; correspond to Latin or Romance words like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;ater&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;isc-&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;ed-&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;code&gt;We know that in many languages, /p/ changes to /f/ because it's easier to pronounce.&lt;/code&gt;  But we can't explain why /p/ changed to /f/ in Proto-Germanic and no other branch of Indo-European.  There is no why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. The title of my question concerns the sentence coloured in grey above. I already listened to audio clips of these IPA symbols &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Which subfield of linguistics comprises questions like this? What are some good introductory books, written for the layperson? I'm guessing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;historical linguistics and phonology&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T03:47:35.630" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T04:54:16.070" Title="Why is /f/ easier to pronounce than /p/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12877" CreationDate="2015-07-22T04:31:58.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is simply false that &quot;ease of pronunciation&quot; is the reason behind sound changes, although this is a common misconception. In fact, nobody has ever devised a method of objectively quantifying the notion of articulatory difficulty. It is more likely that the change is a result of a chain of &lt;em&gt;perceptual&lt;/em&gt; issues, reducing to the problem of distinguishing aspirated labial stops and fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A three-way study of this topic is necessary, involving phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics. Historical linguistics can frame the initial question, based on remote relations like Indo-European * &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; to Germanic * &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;. Phonetic studies provide the concrete psychological and acoustic basis for speculating about why aspirated /tʰ/ might sound like [ts], and phonology provides the logical glue in terms of the discrete unit sounds of languages where one category changes to another category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we lack the factual information needed to explain why Grimm's Law affected Germanic and not Italic or Slavic, we can explain why GL could have happened in the history of Germanic (and other languages which acted likewise). However: this is not a layman's research topic, it requires a relatively advanced understanding of all three areas.             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T04:54:16.070" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T04:54:16.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12873" CreationDate="2015-07-22T08:06:32.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your two examples both show a different kind of process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, you remove the diacritics and retain the information that they encode. And you do it in a way that is broadly consistent with the conventions of German orthography for removing diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in French, you simply remove the diacritics and any information that may have been encoded by them is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do the latter for any language with diacritics. Simply, remove them and use the equivalent plain ASCII characters. You will increase the amount of ambiguity in the text but not beyond what native speakers would be able to cope with. So in Czech ěščřžýáí become escrzyai. You end up with things like &lt;em&gt;pani&lt;/em&gt; which could be either &lt;em&gt;paní&lt;/em&gt; (Mrs) or &lt;em&gt;páni&lt;/em&gt; (gentlemen). This is typically not a problem in context and occurs less often than you'd think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early days of email before unicode, speakers of languages with diacritics outside ASCII often resorted to simply writing in the ASCII equivalents (and many still do). There were also many ad hoc systems for preserving the diacritics such as e^s^c^r^z^y'a'i' (or a&quot; for umlauts) but they never really caught on because they made the text harder to read than removing the diacritics altogether. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, remember that no all non-ASCII characters in European languages are simply &#xA;formed by adding diacritics. For instance, ß in German which would be typically replaced with ss, ø in Danish or ł in Polish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algorithms for doing this already exist. See for instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.siao2.com/2005/02/19/376617.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.siao2.com/2005/02/19/376617.aspx&lt;/a&gt; and has been implemented in many contexts in software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T08:06:32.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12880" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12881" CreationDate="2015-07-22T09:37:42.143" Score="1" ViewCount="4022" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm always shocked when I see a foreign text with a simple question mark in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish has the upside down question mark to offset a question right from the outset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are Question Marks Universal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T06:52:25.063" Title="Are Question Marks Universal?" Tags="&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12880" CreationDate="2015-07-22T10:43:47.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost, but not absolutely. I'm aware about at least one counter-example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Thai language&lt;/strong&gt;, question sentence is formed by using question particle, ไหม &lt;code&gt;[mǎj]&lt;/code&gt; (colloquially, มั้ย with the same pronunciation). Just like English form, &lt;em&gt;&quot;…, is it not?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;คุณเข้าใจไหม &lt;code&gt;[kʰun kʰâw tɕaj mǎj]&lt;/code&gt; = Do you understand?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ประเทศไทยร้อนไหม &lt;code&gt;[pràʔ tʰêːt tʰaj rɔ́ːn mǎj]&lt;/code&gt; = Is Thailand [weather] hot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also other colloquial question particles, but in neither case question mark is required.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nevertheless, some people would like using question marks to &quot;stylize&quot; their conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#In_other_languages_and_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; contains a list of alternative forms of question marks in Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T10:43:47.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12853" CreationDate="2015-07-22T13:48:04.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know beforehand the content of the speech signal but you just don't know which parts of the waveform correspond to which parts of the utterance, then your problem is reduced to an alignment problem--much easier to deal with than a full-fledged speech recognition (plus alignment) problem. You already know what language it is, and you know what consonants and vowels to look out for and the order in which they occur, so you just need to figure out how to align them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the UPenn Forced Aligner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/readme.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/p2fa/readme.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also have a modified web-interface version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fave.ling.upenn.edu/usingFAAValign.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fave.ling.upenn.edu/usingFAAValign.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not 100% accurate--it needs human correction here and there--but it might at least save you some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T14:55:30.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:55:30.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2015-07-22T22:30:31.887" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with some critics who think Minimalism is an awful theory, if it's even a theory at all.  But I have a different diagnosis than some of what went wrong.  We're looking at another incarnation of the long fight between Empiricism and Rationalism, or, that is, between the search for truth and the search for meaning.  Chomsky is a rationalist, and looking for the truth seems to him useless if you can't find sense as well.  So we wind up with a theory that tries and tries to make sense (opinions, of course, differ whether it does actually make any sense), but which apparently has no claim at all on the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If only Transformational Grammar had worked, our East Coast brethren wouldn't have gotten into this pickle.  The notion that parts of expressions get moved around to make them easier to express (this is roughly McCawley's version of TG) makes perfect sense, to me: transformations mediate between thought and physiology.  It makes syntax much like phonology.  If it were true, both the empiricists and the rationalists would be pleased and could be happy together, with only an occasional squabble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But alas.  It's not true.  Things don't move around.  This creates some tension among the theoretically minded.  To make sense of things in face of the facts, or lack thereof, some have drifted off into a methodological heaven where the truth is discounted.  Others retreat to descriptivism, or maybe just stay confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own view is that giving up on context free grammar was premature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T22:30:31.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12875" CreationDate="2015-07-23T06:15:22.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath's point is really one of terminology. He says that passives have to be morphologically marked and it is not enough for a construction to have a passive meaning with some possible corresponding change in syntax (word order). He does NOT actually say that English does not have a passive. Only that some constructions considered passive because of meaning/syntax such as 'destruction of the city by the enemy' are not actually passives. This is fairly sensible in the cases where additional constructions can claim the passive label - there are lots of constructions in English with passive meanings but no passive morphology (&quot;they killed him&quot; when &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; stands in for a generic de-emphasised agent) or in Slavic languages where things like reflexives are used in a similar way. Although, Haspelmath would accept the reflexive (or other) morphology as a possible way of morphologically marking the passive (a case of functional polysemy). But he does not make it clear how he classified languages where there are multiple morphological ways of expressing the passive but one canonical passive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, that this is an all that interesting thing to ask. It would be somewhat interesting to see how many languages have had 'passive' identified simply under the theoretical assumption that all languages have a passive but it's ultimately a question of terminology. All those languages probably express some passive-like semantics through other means but those constructions do not have all the features of a passive but that is a question of how the term is defined - not one of what actually happens in the language which, as far as I can, tell is not really in dispute in most of these cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T21:43:43.687" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T21:43:43.687" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12880" CreationDate="2015-07-23T06:52:25.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question marks are not universal as is not any punctuation or orthography. In fact, the term universal is generally applied to features of language that arise 'organically' - that is without specific intervention (although the level of intervention in all language change is probably greater than the word 'organic' implies). So it makes no sense to ask is the traffic stop sign universal because it emerged through an explicit policy context. However, you can ask things like 'is the traffic stop sign' used the same way in all countries, do drivers interpret in the same way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for the question mark. While its spread and adoption are not a result of an international legislative process, its use is a result of the spread of Latin orthography in the colonial era - as is the whole idea of punctuation. As a result some marking of questions (and ends of sentences, etc.) has now entered many orthographies including the non-Latin ones (like Chinese) that never previously had them. Of course, we know that punctuation (or even spaces between words) did not arise naturally in all orthographies and it took a good thousand years for them to appear in Latin and Greek alphabetic writing and another half a millennium to achieve some sort of standardization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every language that uses orthography with punctuation (and it has probably made inroads - at least to some degree - to most orthographies now), the same punctuation marks will be used in slightly different contexts and with slightly different meanings and not all punctuation marks will be used (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-written-languages-without-a-question-mark?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;answers to this question on Quora&lt;/a&gt;). Each language will develop conventions and standards for how the punctuation marks should be used and these will differ across languages or even styles/genres within languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual form of the question mark is obviously not universal at all. You already mentioned Spanish but Greek uses the semi-colon (;) (or something very similar to it) to mark questions. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#In_other_languages_and_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;see here for more characters&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T06:52:25.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12889" CreationDate="2015-07-23T16:16:40.763" Score="2" ViewCount="1173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an armchair music theorist and trying to read about John Goldsmith's theory of autosegmental phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone summarize the basic principles behind his theory for a linguistic layman?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6811" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T22:55:38.847" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T22:55:38.847" Title="What is autosegmental phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12888" CreationDate="2015-07-23T16:50:09.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Understand it against the theoretical background that an utterance is composed of a uniform set of some 20 phonetic features, one per segment, in a &quot;solid&quot; matrix, so an utterance with 30 segments has 600 feature specifications. Autosegmental phonology holds that the segment actually subdivides into autonomous &quot;autosegments&quot;, for example (in Goldsmith's dissertation version) there is a &quot;segment&quot; submatrix and a &quot;tone&quot; submatrix. This defines two &quot;tiers&quot;, the elements of which can be related in a fairly relaxed way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So certain segments might associate to one tone, or two or three tones; or no tones (consonants typically do not ever associate to a tone; vowels might not, under certain circumstances). A tone might not associate to anything (in which case it is &quot;floating&quot;), or it might associate to 1, or any number of segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His theory happens to start with the assumption that tones don't associate to segments in underlying forms and that associations come about via rules, but later developments indicated that that was not crucial or indeed viable as a universal assumption. So later research developments focused on explicating the derivational relation between tones and their segments. Additionally, Goldsmith focuses on tone and only presses the frontiers to other features such as nasality lightly (although actually proposes complete autonomization of every feature, at the end of the dissertation) – later word led to the theory of &quot;feature geometry&quot; which holds that all features are autonomous and related to each other in a complex manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T18:56:14.170" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T18:56:14.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12662" CreationDate="2015-07-23T19:14:02.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words are fixed expressions of language that we remember on a long term basis.  If you want to do without words, you're asking for a system with no such expressions.  People would be able to communicate somehow without any conventional, memorized connections between expressions and meaning.  I don't think it's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T19:14:02.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12825" CreationDate="2015-07-23T21:41:48.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not persuaded that the project had that name in the day – I see the links, but there's no hard evidence that that name was originally associated with the rockets. It is possible that it derives from the personal name Nzwamba Simanga, who has promoted that video across the internet. The problem is that without hard historical evidence as to &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the name was assigned, it could be any number of languages (presumably Congolese). If OTRAG assigned the name, it might have been e.g. the name of a local engineer, or a sugestion by a local engineer -- it's unlikely that the Germans would have researched an obscure word in e.g. Kinande with some special meaning like &quot;bird&quot; (anyhow, it doesn't mean &quot;bird&quot; though it could be the name of a kind of bird). There are way too many possibilities, given the number of languages spoken in Congo, and you can't find dictionaries for many of them. So in my opinion, without evidence about how the name was assigned, this can't be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T21:41:48.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12836" CreationDate="2015-07-24T04:54:14.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no rule for what should or should not be included in a concordance. Historically, most printed concordances exclude function words because they are very frequent and their meaning is rarely elucidated by reference to any one word in context. They will probably also not include many common content words not deemed significant by the compilers (e.g. go, sit, watch, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a modern computer-generated and computer-navigated concordances do not have any practical restrictions, so function words are more likely to be included. As result, in corpus linguistics, the term concordance has acquired a more generic meaning than it has had historically, i.e. list of all words (or strings of letters between spaces) in a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, most concordancing software will include a facility for stop words, i.e. a list of words to exclude from the index. This can be very useful for all sorts of purposes - e.g. calculating semantic density or looking for most frequent content words. Lists of commonly used stop words exist for many languages. Here's one for English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ranks.nl/stopwords&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ranks.nl/stopwords&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it all depends on what the purpose of your concordance is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T04:54:14.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-25T02:28:00.400" Score="0" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did  &lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; change semantically and ramify into all the meanings beneath? What underlying ideas or metaphors link them?  Beneath, I chose only the broadest meanings from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/as&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ODO&lt;/a&gt;,  to see the &quot;overall view&quot;. But for an even larger &quot;overall view&quot;, I thank you even more if  anyone can include and explain the numerous other meanings only on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11307?rskey=btuT0Y&amp;amp;result=6&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/as&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as&lt;/a&gt; = |adverb| 1. Used in comparisons to refer to the extent or degree of something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;|conjunction| 1. Used to indicate that something happens during the time when something else is taking place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Used to indicate by comparison the way that something happens or is done:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because; since:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even though:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;|preposition| 1. Used to refer to the function or character that someone or something has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;During the time of being (the thing specified)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=as&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; (adv.)&lt;/a&gt; : &#xA;      c. 1200, worn-down form of Old English &lt;em&gt;alswa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;quite so&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=also&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;also&lt;/a&gt;) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline is too curt.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11307?rskey=btuT0Y&amp;amp;result=6&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; refers to linguistics and  archaic  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anglic&lt;/a&gt; languages, which I don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10165" LastEditorDisplayName="user10165" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T17:52:25.000" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T17:52:25.000" Title="How did &quot;as&quot; (in English) branch into many meanings that look unlinked?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12893" CreationDate="2015-07-25T05:41:26.097" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumption is that English &quot;as&quot; has different sources and one source might be Latin talis - qualis ( of such a kind - of which kind) and there seems to be a connection to German als (when). In some uses, e.g. as yet, there seems to be a connection to German bis (until), and in some English dialects &quot;as&quot; is used for &quot;that&quot; + clause, which might somehow connected with German dass + clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;as&quot; as a conjunction can introduce a temporal, causal or comparative clause. My assumption is that these diverging uses developed by ellipsis such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The time was of this kind (Latin talis)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The cause was of this kind&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The similarity was of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this can only give an idea of how the function word as could develop so many divergent uses. It would be very hard to prove such things in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: &quot;as&quot; is also in Low German. It is used as English as (when) and for comparison, just as English &quot;as&quot; in &quot;as a friend&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T13:48:31.680" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T13:48:31.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12893" CreationDate="2015-07-25T13:05:08.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is with your assumption that the senses listed in the OED are unrelated. This is often the cases when one reads dictionary definitions but in fact, it's not very difficult to see the connections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original meaning seemed to be one of affirmative manner (so) and it is easy to see how it could acquire a temporal meaning since manner describes events. Temporal meanings often translate into causality (e.g. since) and it is also easy to see the connection of manner or causality and similarity. So you can see that the semantic field of 'as' is actually quite tight and it is not difficult to see a connection between sentences such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She's as tall as Joan. (similarity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As Marie would say, I don't like this. (comparison)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He ran as if his life depended on it. (manner)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They came as the phone started ringing. (temporality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We couldn't come as the trains were late.(causality)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;COHA&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see most of these uses attested in the 1810s. I couldn't find any of the causal uses but that's not surprising given the types of genres represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T13:05:08.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-25T15:07:33.743" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;(TL;DR) While reading about preposition &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130549?rskey=Hz4ytl&amp;amp;result=3&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/248242/50720&quot;&gt;avail of&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/245938/50720&quot;&gt;enquire of&lt;/a&gt;), I encountered OED's claim that the postverbal &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; originates from the genitive case, and from Old English. How can this claim be right, because grammatical (eg: genitive) cases affect nouns (and not verbs)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please expose and explain all hidden, missing semantic drifts and links. How should the etymology be interpreted, to understand how the semantic drifts abstracted and severed from the original meaning? What semantic drifts bridge &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; 's original meaning with the postverbal &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Optional Reading]&lt;/strong&gt; 39. In the construction of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. After transitive verbs, the person or thing affected (‘secondary object’) is often introduced by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;(representing an original genitive)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such are balk, cheat, defraud, disappoint, frustrate; accuse, arrest, blame, convict, indict, suspect; possess, seize (a person of); avail, bethink (oneself of);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  also with verbs with non-referential it as subject, as it repents me of;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and formerly with ask, beg, beseech, thank (a person of), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. In many verbal phrases, as&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to have (also get) the advantage of ; to get (also have) the better of ; also formerly in to have compassion (also mercy) of ; to have (also take) pity of ; to keep watch of , demand or do justice of (= on), have the victory of (= over).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. After intransitive verbs. &lt;strong&gt;Many of these in Old English took the genitive&lt;/strong&gt;, and are found with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in Middle and Early Modern English, but this is now rare, except where &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; falls in sense under one of the branches already treated; instances are&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   to reck, repent, rue, beware (orig. be ware) of.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Verbs of sense,  e.g. &lt;em&gt;feel, smell, taste, touch&lt;/em&gt; (still with of in regional or colloquial use),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  verbs of asking,  as &lt;em&gt;ask, beseech, demand, desire, entreat&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and others,  e.g. &lt;em&gt;distinguish, esteem, forget, like, seize,&lt;/em&gt;  formerly construed with of, now take a simple object;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  some, as &lt;em&gt;accept, admit, allow, approve, conceive, recollect, remember&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  still have both constructions;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with others, as &lt;em&gt;hope, look, thirst, wait&lt;/em&gt;, etc.,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has been displaced by &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; or some other preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T06:47:32.180" Title="What's the etymology of 'of' after verbs?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12863" CreationDate="2015-07-25T20:47:35.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavic &lt;em&gt;cena&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Balto-Slavic &lt;em&gt;kaina&lt;/em&gt; (which is still &lt;em&gt;kaina&lt;/em&gt; in Lithuanian). IIRC the word originally meant something like &quot;penalty, punishment, retribution&quot; (see Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;ποινή&lt;/em&gt; &quot;penalty, redemption&quot;; also &lt;em&gt;τίνω&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to pay a price, be punished&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English/French &lt;em&gt;cent&lt;/em&gt; come from Latin &lt;em&gt;centum&lt;/em&gt; (in the meaning &quot;1/100 of something&quot;), which comes from &lt;em&gt;ḱm̥tóm&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hundred&quot;.&#xA;So, English/French &lt;em&gt;cent&lt;/em&gt; are actually related to Slavic &lt;em&gt;sto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hundred&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T20:47:35.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12897" CreationDate="2015-07-26T06:47:32.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be based on the assumption that &quot;because grammatical (eg: genitive) cases affect nouns (and not verbs)&quot;. But that is not the case (sorry). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case is generally expressed through morpheme marking on the noun. But the specific case assigned to the noun depends on entirely on the head of the phrase which could be a preposition (e.g I showed up &lt;em&gt;with her&lt;/em&gt;.) So when the case marking disappeared, the analytic replacement of the synthetic genitive simply took on the role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern grammars and dictionaries of English, the 'of' is included as part of the phrase which simply takes the noun as an argument. But you could just as well think of the 'of' as part of a 'marking' on the following noun phrase that fits into the argument requiring a genitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of metaphors used in linguistics to talk about this. The metaphor from logic is one of argument taken by the verb. Generative grammar (most commonly in its GB incarnation) talks about thematic roles or theta roles. But there's also a tradition of European syntax that talks about the valence of the verb which draws on the idea of valence from chemistry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T06:47:32.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12916" CreationDate="2015-07-26T10:02:14.147" Score="4" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;In books on generative syntax it is often said that LF itself becomes an input to the so-called syntax-semantics interface to satisfy some conditions (e.g. to get rid of uninterpretable values). But that happens only after spellout. Surprisingly nothing is said about how this interface might work before a sentence is generated - if we want to say &quot;John hit Mary&quot;, we must know who is the agent and who is the patient before any generative operations happen - otherwise we might get something like &quot;Mary hit John&quot;. Does that mean that syntax-semantics interface interacts with our &quot;faculty of language&quot; constantly? There still might be no clear answer so I'd like to hear your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T06:06:47.673" Title="Syntax-semantics interface" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12914" CreationDate="2015-07-26T14:43:15.937" Score="4" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking about lower class rural population, I know that German was spoken in cities. There already exists maps which shows some details on the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Sprachenkarte_Deutschland1880.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Map about german language extention&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Sprachen_in_Schlesien_1905_06.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Map about proportion of german speakers in each Silesian districts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see a very clear language barrier between Breslau and Oppole, unfortunately the first map is not precise enough to show where exactly the limit was. The second map show districts, but does not show the language barrier between different villages within a district, so we cannot see exactly which villages are on each side of the former language barrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10173" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T21:43:23.593" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T23:05:46.303" Title="Where exactly was the Polish-German language border in Silesia around 1900?" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12502" CreationDate="2015-07-26T18:16:35.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English -ty stems from an actual, albeit contracted, noun, though (from &lt;em&gt;tigiwiz&lt;/em&gt;, plural of &lt;em&gt;tegun&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ten&quot;). If we still want to regard -ty as a suffix, then Russian has something similar: &lt;em&gt;pyatsot, shestsot, semsot, vosemsot, deviatsot&lt;/em&gt; (500, 600, 700, 800). Although, technically the latter part is still very noun-like (stems from the noun meaning &quot;hundred&quot;), as seen in its declension (NOM trista &gt; INSTR tremiastami); however it's regarded as one word by Russian grammarians, it's spelled as one word, and I think most people perceive it as one single word (I guess it's viewed as one single word because you can't put random words between the parts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T17:03:13.250" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T17:03:13.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12414" CreationDate="2015-07-26T18:33:56.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not quite possible naturally, as it contradicts the law of the regularity of phonetical shifts. However, it can happen, if grammarians are at play. As far as I remember, in most French dialects, the final -ir in verbs was once used to be pronounced without -r (just like -er); that is, for example, &lt;em&gt;sortir&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to exit&quot; and &lt;em&gt;sorti&lt;/em&gt; &quot;exited (part.)&quot; would be homophones (there weren't homophones in Latin). However, later, grammarians prescribed to restore the final -r for infinitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T18:45:32.003" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T18:45:32.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12902" CreationDate="2015-07-26T18:42:00.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the German-Polish border after the first world war followed the linguistic boundary fairly closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T18:42:00.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12913" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:05:11.187" Score="4" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good QA on StackOverflow led me to this great read about Unicode, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)&lt;/a&gt;. It helped me understand the background of why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UTF-8&lt;/a&gt; encoding is so needlessly (so I thought) complicated. Instead, UTF-8 elegantly solves the problem of backwards compatibility, minimum memory usage for the most common cases, and future-proofing (to a reasonable extent). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Unicode simply assigns numbers to all possible &lt;em&gt;characters&lt;/em&gt; in the world, allowing room for more in the future. An 'a' is different than an 'A', but an 'a' in one font is not different from an 'a' in another font, or an 'a' in a different size. UTF-8, on the other hand, is an &lt;em&gt;encoding&lt;/em&gt; scheme where Unicode meets implementation in real-world computer systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me to thinking about Unicode for languages. In theory, to a layman such as myself, all words encapsulate the knowledge of objects and ideas. Just as an 'a' is an 'a' no matter what font, the word 'tree' encapsulates the concept of a tree, no matter the language. But wait, 'tree' is the English encoding of the concept of a tree, isn't it? In other encodings (aka languages) it might be the equivalent of 'tall bush', or 'plant with thick bark', or 'leafy sky scraper'... I think you get the point. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems, with considerable and united effort, a &quot;Unicode&quot; for languages could be developed. Heck, it could probably be captured in Unicode itself, since it allows for future additions. And with this, translation problems could, eventually, be a relic of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a &quot;Unicode&quot; of languages, that either exists now or is in development?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10177" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T10:05:40.597" Title="Is there a unicode for words?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12906" CreationDate="2015-07-27T00:21:47.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words are spelled in alphabetic systems with letters, and the number of different letters required for all the words of human languages is finite and rather small, so you can assign a small number to each letter.  This makes Unicode feasible.  But human languages are made of sentences, and the number of different sentences required for all human languages (or any one of them) is infinite.  This makes a Unicode for languages impossible in principle, since you could never assign a small finite number to each possible sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T00:21:47.830" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12906" CreationDate="2015-07-27T06:46:28.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unicode (within and beyond the BMP) has nearly 75,000 code points for CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean).  The vast majority of these characters are actual words (most modern Chinese words are made of more than a single ideogram, yet most Kanji/Hanzi characters have meanings equivalent to our words).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally Unicode encodes many (at least partially) ideographic writings (many of them from ancient languages: e.g. Hittites, Cretan and Egyptian hieroglyphs, etc...).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Unicode already has a lot of characters for &quot;words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having one character per word could seem a nice idea but there are a few hurdles in the way of course.  If you have one character for each word, you need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Readers and writers with a huge brain to remember them all.  Most Chinese people get away with under 5000 characters though.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A low morpheme-per-word ratio.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Huge font files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A sophisticated input method for your keyboard (if you don't want to end up with large keyboards such as this famous example for Chinese).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFL86.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFL86.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;From Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, a &lt;em&gt;Unicode for words&lt;/em&gt;, as you put it, is probably for the time being a regression for many synthetic languages.  After all, before the advent of computers, the Phoenician alphabet was hailed as an important progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might change with the generalisation of Text To Speech and Voice Recognition technologies.  But we're not there yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T10:05:40.597" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T10:05:40.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12822" CreationDate="2015-07-27T08:24:26.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In WordNet only the base forms of words are generally represented. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [With regards to phrases] In general, only the base forms of words, even those making up compounds such as &lt;em&gt;attorney general&lt;/em&gt;, are stored in WordNet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chapter: &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and searching software&lt;/em&gt;, by Tengi, R. I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From page 105 of the  book: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Massachusetts Design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and searching software, &lt;em&gt;Fellbaum, Christiane (réd.), WordNet: an electronic lexical database, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;1998&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;base form&lt;/em&gt; is used as a synonym for &lt;em&gt;reference form&lt;/em&gt; (as is printed in the section heading in a dictionary), and as wordnet defined lemma: &quot;the heading that indicates the subject of an annotation or a literary composition or a dictionary entry&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10014" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T08:24:26.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T12:35:39.317" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a book about accents at a local library and there was a chapter where the author says &quot;some varieties of a language are more aesthetically pleasing than others&quot;. Some accents are considered “tops”, and these are the ones spoken by the Royals, the Elite, intellectuals and Distinguished Academics, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, a person moving from a rural state to a megalopolis might regard their own accent with distaste and may try to imitate the accent of the locals; for example, a French-Canadian in Paris, a Brummie in London, or a Texan in Boston.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the answer, it's a phrase, with 3 or 4 words, and no foreign terms. It is mentioned in the book on sociolinguistics and accents I was reading. I simply can't remember it. I'm looking for a phrase describing the condition, not the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Clarity: I'm not saying that all French-Canadians, Brummies or Texans are, or should ever be, ashamed/embarrassed/self-conscious of their accents, but it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10184" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T04:04:25.340" Title="Is there a phrase for someone being ashamed of, or self-conscious about their accent when moving to another region?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12906" CreationDate="2015-07-27T12:48:35.163" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To once and for all codify all of human language to enable the unambiguous cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and cross-temporal dissemination of thoughts and knowledge has been a dream for thousands of years. Its earliest origins, at least in Europe, date back at least to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull&quot;&gt;Raimundus Lullus (1232—1315)&lt;/a&gt;; the big names in this story include the likes of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_towards_a_Real_Character_and_a_Philosophical_Language&quot;&gt;Bishop Wilkins, author of &lt;em&gt;An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbolic_thought&quot;&gt;Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz&lt;/a&gt;, and countless inventors of constructed languages around the turn of the 19th/20th c such as, most famously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._L._Zamenhof&quot;&gt;L. L. Zamenhof&lt;/a&gt;, the inventor of Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much has been written and said about these subjects; a very comprehensive, analytic, entertaining and educating treatments of the subjects can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco&quot;&gt;Umberto Eco's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfetta_nella_Cultura_Europea&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Search for the Perfect Language in the European Culture&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is going to work the way that many inventors of such schemes dreamed it could be, and the reasons are manifold. One difficulty that is easy to see is that 'words' do not denote constant, definite concepts—not across languages and not even within a single language across sociolinguistic domains. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you absolutely want to pursue that effort anyway, may i recommend a healthy amount of reading; a few of the subjects that should be touched upon are the question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem&quot;&gt;reality of species&lt;/a&gt;, the demonstrated impossibility to represent 'the world' or 'human knowledge' as a hierarchical system (notwithstanding how many times it has been tried over again), expression of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate&quot;&gt;color words in languages&lt;/a&gt;, discussions about the merits and limits of efforts such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a very straightforward point to start a serious implementation of your idea, may i suggest the following: Assuming that Wikipedia is a near-perfect representation of human knowledge (is it?), we may stipulate that all Wikipedia HTTP addresses that point to an article automatically become 'words' or 'codepoints' in the Universal Word Encoding (technically, this may be achieved e.g. by calculating hash codes from the addresses and translate those to some kind of numbers of some kind of pronounceable phantasy words). Then, let's trace all the translation links of all the words. Wherever there is a strong clustering of articles, we may assume that a given 'word' has a comparable meaning across many languages; we may then again identify that cluster by quoting one of its members (discarding all the synonyms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can see where this goes. It's inevitably going to be a huge amount of pretty hard work. Basically, you'd have to absorb a major part of what's written in the world's encyclopedias. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; @CivFan—&quot;Pointing to the failings of existing solutions does not prove that no good solution is feasible.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way you're right and of course you're free to try and go boldly where no man has gone before. On the other hand, it would be foolish to ignore failed attempts and understand why those have failed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottmar_Mergenthaler&quot;&gt;Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype&lt;/a&gt; succeeded where &lt;em&gt;hundreds&lt;/em&gt; of inventors had failed, namely, to devise a system to speed typesetting by mechanical means; this was, among other things, due to his deep understanding of what can be done and what had been shown to be not viable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have one more example where one should look for failed solutions, and this one is closely related to Unicode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at how Unicode is set up, you will see it is, in essence, just a linear enumeration of known characters / smallest units of writing gathered from the world's writing systems. Now, these characters are indeed collected into blocks that bear such names as 'Cyrillic', 'Greek', 'Arabic' and so on; however, as a rule of thumb, whenever you look at what a given language needs to get written, you'll typically find that it needs characters from more than a single Unicode block; also, the way that words are normally sorted in that language will most of the time only partially match the way those characters are numerically arranged in Unicode. These properties have been well known to the Unicode Consortium right from the outset, and they are not seen as shortcomings; rather, it is the general understanding that the convenient construction of US-ASCII (all 26 letters in right order; conversion between upper and lower case doable by simple bit switching) does not scale when you construct a code for multiple languages and multiple writing systems. This is relevant in so far as you are basing your ideas explicitly on Unicode; now we can quickly agree that the fact that Unicode does (successfully) exist, but a 'semantic Unicode' does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;—&lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be indicative that the latter one is significantly harder to do than the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason why Unicode does not provide, say, bit-swapping case mappings across languages and scripts a la US-ASCII is that Unicode has a linear code space, and there's only so much worthwhile complexity you can build into that single dimension. So, essentially, what this tells us is that if Unicode could not (and should not) make use of ingenuous arithmetic tricks to implement the ability to map lower case letters to upper case letters, then that much fuzzier realm of 'semantics' should be much harder to codify using a 'speaking code'. In essence, this means that whatever you come up with will be most likely either something that is not linearly ordered (but more network like or whatever), or, if it is linearly ordered, be a haphazard enumeration of concepts. This need not even be useless, but i wonder whether it is what you imagine it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastEditorUserId="3634" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T16:00:50.443" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T16:00:50.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12902" CreationDate="2015-07-27T13:07:13.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find some information about the language boundary in the project &amp;quot;Digitaler Wenkeratlas&amp;quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://regionalsprache.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://regionalsprache.de/&lt;/a&gt; (not easy to navigate even with knowledge of German; the main Wenker map is under &lt;a href=&quot;http://regionalsprache.de/SprachGis/Map.aspx?shortUrl=Y1vbU283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://regionalsprache.de/SprachGis/Map.aspx?shortUrl=Y1vbU283&lt;/a&gt; but you cannot click through to the questionaires).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Wenker was primarily interested in dialectology, and German dialects specifically, but he also recoded other languages (in the area in question Polish and Czech dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that there was probably no such thing as a language barrier: Mixed language villages, bilingual individuals and migration from Polish speaking areas to the industrial centres of upper Silesia complicate the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The Wenker atlas does not recognize the Slavonic Silesian language (named &lt;em&gt;Wasserpolnisch&lt;/em&gt; in colloquial Silesian German), this is subsumed under Polish as a dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T23:05:46.303" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T23:05:46.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12912" CreationDate="2015-07-27T13:12:14.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard this referred to as 'linguistic insecurity'. This is neither '3-4 words', nor specifically incorporates the 'move to another region' aspect you mention, but people often talk about 'linguistic insecurity and migration'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T13:38:36.723" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T13:38:36.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12901" CreationDate="2015-07-27T15:27:39.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within the framework that grew from Chomsky's post-70s work, the answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that syntax-semantics interface interacts with our &amp;quot;faculty of language&amp;quot; constantly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is clearly taken to be no. Consequently, you are right that the problem of distinguishing &amp;quot;John hit Mary&amp;quot; from &amp;quot;Mary hit John&amp;quot; exists. The null hypothesis in this school of syntax could be formulated as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unless forced to by strong empirical evidence, assume that the narrow syntax of every human language is the same.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applied to the particular problem you raise, this takes the form of the Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) which was first formulated in Mark Baker's 1985 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/baker85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thesis&lt;/a&gt; in the following way (in the language of X-bar theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Identical thematic relationships between items are represented by identical structural relationships between those items at the level of D-structure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In plain language, this means that these people believe that thematic roles are encoded in the syntax. In a contemporary formulation, the UTAH is usually taken to mean that there exists a step in the building of narrow syntactic objects (so before spell-out) where arguments are introduced in a certain way which is characterized by structural relations only (order and position of first Merge) and which is uniform across language. The element first merged in the structural position of agent, for instance, will always be interpreted as the agent after spell-out, independently of wherever it might have landed at the end of the derivation because of movement/re-merge/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The works in minimalist syntax that I'm familiar with are unanimous that this step occurs very early in the construction of the narrow syntactic object object. A majority of them believe that patients are introduced below agents (so are first merged deeper in the structure than agents) but &lt;a href=&quot;https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/arguments-relations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bowers (2010)&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, disagrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, the majority of works in minimalist syntax believe that &amp;quot;John hit Mary&amp;quot; is semantically distinguished from &amp;quot;Mary hit John&amp;quot; because Mary was first merged in the deeper structural position corresponding to patient in the first sentence whereas John was first merged there in the second one. Importantly, these works believe that &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;John&amp;quot; are first merged in the same loci in all of the following sentences, that &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot;'s locus is deeper than that of &amp;quot;John&amp;quot; and that this explains why &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; is always interpreted as patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John hit Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary was hit by John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(French) Marie, Jean l'a frappée. (Marie, Jean her have hit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add, of course, that the UTAH is just the null-hypothesis. Of course, many syntactic phenomena (ergativity, experiencer verbs...) do not fit well with it and are the objects of many interesting debates (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-951-introduction-to-syntax-fall-2003/lecture-notes/ln8linking_utah.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these notes&lt;/a&gt; of Idan Landau for a first introduction to some of these debates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T15:34:10.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12918" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:03:34.387" Score="9" ViewCount="7389" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, here is the English vowel chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6O9c.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really confused, what do &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close(high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open (low)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, Here is what I understood, please correct me if I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, let's look at the vowel &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close (high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position, the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the front of the tongue will be placed high and touch the very front roof of the mouth. The lips are very spread out when saying &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. See the picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/egGJr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, look at the &lt;code&gt;/ɪ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;font&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It is also in &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; position. In this position, the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the front of the tongue is placed high and in the position between the front &amp;amp; the central roof of the mouth. However, the front of the tongue does not touch the roof of the mouth. The lips are still spread out but less so than with &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. See the pic below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ptJB6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now, consider the &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close (high)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the back of the tongue is raised very high and touches the very far back of the roof of the mouth. The lips are very rounded in this position. See the pic below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/27NBl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now, look at the &lt;code&gt;/ʊ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the position somehow between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It is also in the position &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the back of the tongue is raised high and somehow between the middle and the back of the roof of the mouth. The lips are rounded in this case but less rounded than &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt;. See the picture below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5pf9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now take a look at the &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; position. It is also in between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;close-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the middle of the tongue is raised right to the middle of the mouth. Of course, the tongue does not touch the middle of the roof of the mouth. The lips are neutral in this position. See picture below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmmKJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, consider &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; which is in the middle of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open-mid&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;open (low)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. It also stays between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Technically, if the distance between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is 10, then &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; will stay in the distance of 7 which means it will have 7 units to the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;front&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and 3 units to the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this position,  the tip of the tongue still touches the bottom teeth, but the whole tongue is low but not really low like &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;. The front of the tongue somehow stays in the position between the front and the middle of the roof of the mouth, but the front of the tongue is closer to the middle of the roof of the mouth than to the front of the roof of the mouth. The lips are spread out in this case. See the picture below :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rq3SJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I wrong about anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could you clarify and explain how to read the vowel diagram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10630" OwnerDisplayName="user105551" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T15:01:57.947" Title="Confused about vowel diagram (Vowel chart)! Can you clarify &amp; explain how to read it?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12917" CreationDate="2015-07-16T16:11:31.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Original Poster's descriptions are correct in terms of words, but the actual position of the tongue is a bit more complicated. The diagrams here are not correct. This is because the official terminology is very misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the named parts of the tongue do not correspond to intuition or common sense. When you look in the mirror your tongue looks kind of flat and thin. This is an illusion. Your tongue is really a big fat ball with a bit stuck on the front of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk about the tongue, there is the front bit which we use for consonants. We can flap it about in all kinds of different ways. That's the blade of your tongue. It doesn't count for vowels in any way. The part of the tongue that we use for making vowels is the big ball of muscle behind that. It starts where the your tongue joins the floor or your mouth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hg272.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the stylised diagram above, the blade of your tongue is represented by the small pink rectangular section. The square behind that represents the ball of your tongue. Now when we talk about &quot;front&quot; vowels and the &quot;front&quot; of your tongue raising, we are talking about the front of this back part of your tongue. So when you think of your tongue in normal everyday terms, this is actually about half way down your tongue as you look at it in the mirror. This is what raises towards the roof of your mouth when you make an [i] vowel. The blade of your tongue does nothing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the horizontal axis of the vowel quadrilateral shows whether it is the front of that bulky part of the tongue or the back of it that &quot;is raising up&quot;. The vertical axis represents the distance between the tongue and the roof of the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" OwnerDisplayName="Araucaria" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T09:38:09.073" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12917" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:54:50.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have the correspondence between front vowels and the consonants right.  The front vowels correspond to the palatal consonants (not the labial and dental consonants, which are anterior, not front).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; classification is a standard, though probably most phonologists have some disagreements with it.  The correspondence between the vowels and place of articulation is drawn with the tongue-body features, high/back/low (and maybe coronal): palatal consonants and front vowels are +high, -back, -low; velar consonants and [u] are +high, +back, -low; uvular consonants and /o/ are -high, +back, -low; pharyngealized consonants and [a] are -high, +back, +low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chart you are using was probably constructed from measurements of the first and second vowel formants, rather than by measuring tongue positions, and those formants are associated with cavities in the mouth more than with place of articulation.  The front vowels have high second formants because the cavity in front of the main tongue constriction is small.  So it may help in thinking about classification to think in terms of the size of resonant cavities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" OwnerDisplayName="Greg Lee" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T20:47:10.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12906" CreationDate="2015-07-27T16:39:21.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an obvious difference known between words and letters that should make Unicode systems feasible for letters, but does not apply to words.  So far as I've noticed no one has mentioned it, so despite my having already offered one answer, I think I should mention the obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alphabetic writing systems have letters which correspond roughly to phonemes.  You could think of them as primitive and traditional phonemic theories.  Here are two things we know about the phoneme systems of the various human languages: (1) Each language has a very small number of phonemes -- around 50-200 -- which are very stable over time, and (2) the phoneme systems of the various languages are very similar, making practical phonetic alphabets like IPA and feature systems like that of SPE (with about 17 binary features, giving 2^17 possible sound segments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the words of human languages anything like this, being very small in number and limited (and fairly well understood) in their reference?  No.  Not at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T16:39:21.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7213" CreationDate="2015-07-27T17:49:18.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[speculation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't it be something to do with stress-dependent vowel reduction in one of the ancestors of Proto-Semitic? It can go to great lengths. Say, in Russian, NOM of &quot;horse&quot; is &lt;em&gt;l&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;šəť&lt;/em&gt; (in some regions: &lt;em&gt;l&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;šť&lt;/em&gt;), and GEN PL is &lt;em&gt;ləšɨd&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;; meanwhile the diminutive of &quot;horse&quot; is &lt;em&gt;lɐš&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;tkə&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;little horse&quot;). To an outsider, it may look pretty much like Semitic consonantal roots, but it's not. It' simply predictable cases of vowel reduction thanks to Russian's dynamic stress: phonemes /a/ and /o/ collapse to [ə] in unstressed syllables, except when immediately before the stressed syllable, where it turns to /ɐ/. Additionally, /š/ (also /ž/ and /ts/) can trigger mutation to [ɨ] (soft consonants also trigger mutation to [ɪ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's possible that, in one of the ancestors of Proto-Semitic, something similar could be happening. Then, at some point, the vowel reduction law stopped functioning for some reason, basically fossilizing all those vowel mutations. The type of stress must also change, I guess. After the fossilization, trying to figure out all that mess, the language then would try to find certain post-hoc &quot;patterns&quot;. Note that there are still affixes without problems. Add also (over the course of hundreds, thousands of years):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possible sound losses after that (imagine some sound that would trigger a very specific vowel mutation, but then it would collapse with another sound which had never triggered mutation, and voila, synchronically now there's no way to explain why we have /CV₁/ in one word form, but /CV₂/ in another word form)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;various contractions; for example, imagine a hypothetical language where [əw] &gt; [u]; and later [w] dissappears altogether, leaving forms like &lt;em&gt;CuC&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;CaC&lt;/em&gt;, which stem from &lt;em&gt;CəwC&lt;strong&gt;V&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;C&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;wCV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. -- and you can get something totally different from the original language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel reduction in Russian is still active and alive, but there are some cases of this kind of fossilization already happening (colloquially), for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pl&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;tə&lt;/em&gt; &quot;payment&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;plɐt&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ť&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to pay&quot;, and then the first /ɐ/ in the verb is misrecognized as stemming from /o/ (hypercorrection, as both /o/ and /a/ collapse to /ɐ/), so in 3p sg. we get &lt;em&gt;pl&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;tit&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;pl&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;tit&lt;/em&gt; (the stress change is required by this type of word). Voila, a new kind of pattern has just evolved, ex nihilo, basically, where &lt;em&gt;plat-&lt;/em&gt; suddenly alternates with &lt;em&gt;plot-&lt;/em&gt;, something which never happened in Old Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one of possible explanations, I don't pretend it to be the real answer to how it really formed in Proto-Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[/speculation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T18:23:53.063" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T18:23:53.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T01:34:12.677" Score="0" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know in IPA isn’t used capital letters. There is also the 2nd option for representation acronyms which is to use dots, but in IPA dots is used to represent syllables. And therefore I'd like to figure out how to represent acronyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10191" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T01:50:58.557" Title="How to represent acronyms using IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12923" CreationDate="2015-07-28T01:50:58.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is used to render the pronunciation of a word, so NATO is [ˈnɛɪtʰɔʊ], JPEG is [ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ] and so on. Some people pronounce NATO as [ˈnɛɪɾɔʊ], in which case you'd use a different transcription. IPA isn't a spelling system / general-purpose writing system, it's used to represent pronunciation, thus it doesn't matter if you write IRA or I.R.A (but it does matter if you pronounce it [ɑɪɑɹɛɪ] or [ɑɪɹə]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T01:50:58.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T03:47:20.950" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pardon my ignorance but I don't know a whole lot about linguistics. I actually wasn't aware this was a subject until I started investigating the foundations of mathematics and came upon metamathematics and semantics. Now to me it seems that metamathematics uses semantics to prove theorems in logic via set theory and interpretations/structures. I say &quot;seems&quot; because what logic books I have found seem to be a bit light on the semantic based theorems and only prove a couple formalized rules to produce &quot;derivations/proofs&quot;, and the rest of the theorems of logic are derived from these derivations. It was a little disappointing for me because I found the semantic based theorems more interesting and decided to see if I could find any logic book that provided an introduction to semantics based techniques. This is what led me to linguistics. Apparantly semantics is apart of linguistics. So discovering this I looked to see if I could find what I was looking for in linguistics. Unfortunately for me this is such a vast subject that even within semantics there seems to be many goals and varieties that it has been hard for me to find what I'm looking for. So I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction of linguistics to cover what I have just mentioned. I hope this question is not too broad or unrelated but any help will be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: ok I think my goal is to find a good intro to formal semantics, what is a good intro to formal semantics text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10193" LastEditorUserId="10193" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T10:19:23.273" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T10:19:23.273" Title="Difference between linguistics and metamathematics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-07-28T13:43:57.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T10:10:18.967" Score="0" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I should say I am not a linguist, but try to understand it to help my English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my native language, Persian, we do much use &quot;Ke&quot; (که) which almost corresponds to &quot;which, who, that&quot; in relative clauses and subordinate clauses &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I would like to know how much it corresponds with &quot;that&quot; in English and if the sentences bellow with &quot;that&quot; are grammatical or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ummm.... (just literal translations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) The students who were absent, &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; I prefer not to mention their names, should do this practice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) We were walking, &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; suddenly a car stopped in front of us...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; you said you won't go there. Ok I got it... (conversation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) I was reading a book &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; he entered the room&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5) People who (that) can't accept it, &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; by accident are from your country, &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; off course are respectable, should know&#xA;  ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6) I was so happy &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; I started to cry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are not grammatical, and if you yet understand them, what would be the correct sentence for each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own interpretation is that in Persian we extra pose &quot;Ke&quot; (sometimes to add emphasis) for example the sentence 1 might be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) The students who were absent, I prefer &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; not to mention their names, should do this practice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5241" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T10:31:09.987" Title="Relation of Persian &quot;Ke&quot; and English &quot;That&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-07-29T10:23:44.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12929" CreationDate="2015-07-28T17:13:26.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are my edits, mostly echoing comments already made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) The students who were absent, whose names I prefer not to mention, should do this practice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) We were walking, when suddenly a car stopped in front of us...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) What you said -- you won't go there. Ok I got it... (conversation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) I was reading a book when he entered the room&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5) People who (that) can't accept it, who incidentally are from your country, who of course are respectable, should know ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6) [OK as is!] I was so happy that I started to cry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in traditional grammar, English &quot;that&quot; is analyzed as a relative pronoun, the recent consensus seems to be that &quot;that&quot; introduces relative clauses whose relative pronoun is then elided, but &quot;that&quot; itself is not a pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="5609" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T10:31:09.987" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T10:31:09.987" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12419" CreationDate="2015-07-28T17:15:57.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the key here is relationships. Within any relationship (human to human, human to earth, human to &quot;spirit&quot; or God) any movement (to go) corresponds to a concession on the other end of the relationship (to yield).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of the dynamic between &quot;to do&quot; and &quot;to be&quot;. When considering a single organism, doing inherently alters the organism's state of being&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might say that any two entities in relationship with one another constitute a single organism, wherein if one component acts the other is also affected (or is that &quot;effected&quot;? I get confused). Anyhow, when considering a single-component entity &quot;to go&quot; and &quot;to yield&quot; are two distinct actions; but within a dual-component system &quot;ked&quot; describes the interaction of going and yielding happening at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it seems possible that the root &quot;ked&quot; originated in a context where the distinction between subject and object was blurry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10197" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T17:15:57.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12937" CreationDate="2015-07-29T10:02:08.480" Score="3" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean what was the native language of Wlachs and Dacians before they adopted Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T17:50:02.630" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T09:21:35.133" Title="What is the substrate of Romanian language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;&lt;substrate&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2015-07-29T10:30:53.137" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Dacians spoke a language called Dacian. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing we really know about their language, there are no surviving inscriptions or other texts. Essentially all we have are some toponyms and personal names, and a list of about five dozen plant names (see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dacian_plant_names&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dacian_plant_names&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this small amount of evidence, it is hard to make any sound claims about the Dacian language. It was probably Indo-European, and it is speculatively grouped with the (similarly ill-documented) Thrakian language into a now extinct branch of Indo-European. Thrakian is the language the Wlachs spoke before adopting Latin/Romanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T10:30:53.137" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-29T18:24:42.643" Score="2" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in English Romance languages and Germanic languages, the rendering of fractions usually corresponds to that of the ordinal numbers, i.e a fifth, and a sixth, a seventh, etc. ; it seems to me that conceptually, they are are a different entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To highlight this, in Germanic and Romance languages there seem to be a few exceptions peppered in the lower numbers: English ½= a half  2nd = second , ¼= quarter vs. 4th= fourth.  Spanish: ⅓ = um tercio  3º = tercero .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the texts I've read refer to the set of &quot;half, third, quarter, fifth...&quot; etc. as the &quot;ordinal numbers&quot; of a language.  However, it seems to me they are a separate conceptual entity (innately; but also as demonstrated by the presence of the exceptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistic term for the set of these words in a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of languages which have a set of words (more than 2 or 3) for fractions that are different from both the ordinal number (e.g. &quot;one third&quot;) or the cardinal (e.g. &quot;one over three&quot;) numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastEditorUserId="10201" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T21:35:51.800" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T22:22:59.883" Title="Terminology for the words used to represent fractions in a language? Examples where it is different to the words used for cardinal or ordinal numbers?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-29T23:03:02.187" Score="1" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen both the word &quot;fusional&quot; and the words &quot;inflectional&quot;/&quot;flectional&quot; used as the counterparts of &quot;agglutinative&quot; when describing a morphological process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is there a distinction between &lt;em&gt;fusional&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;(in)flectional&lt;/em&gt; (as it relates to morphological types), or is &lt;em&gt;fusional&lt;/em&gt; simply a more modern terminological equivalent of the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Does the term &lt;em&gt;fusional&lt;/em&gt; include the concept of &quot;stem classes&quot;, or is there a separate term for that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Latin has a different genitive singular ending for consonant stems (e.g. &lt;em&gt;homin&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of the person&quot;) versus &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt; stems (&lt;em&gt;agricola&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of the farmer&quot;), but to call these affixes &quot;fusional&quot; would seem to suggest that they combine (i.e., fuse) different morphological functions, when in fact they seem to constitute a &quot;splitting&quot; of the same morphological function (genitivity) into different forms, based on the final stem-vowel (or lack thereof) of a given word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, an affix like the Greek genitive plural ending &lt;em&gt;-ōn&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;andr&lt;strong&gt;ôn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of the men&quot;, etc.) seems more appropriately described as &quot;fusional&quot;, because this ending combines the two categories of genitivity and plurality but is not separable into two distinct morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the term &quot;fusional&quot; nonetheless be used to describe the variation in the Latin genitive singular between &lt;em&gt;-is&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T07:36:19.847" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T17:05:23.447" Title="stem classes and the terms &quot;fusional&quot; / &quot;inflectional&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2015-07-29T23:19:25.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't encountered a special linguistic term for the denominator in fractions, and I'd be surprised at any linguistic work saying that &quot;third, fourth, fifth&quot; as used in fractions &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an ordinal number -- it's the same (in form -- or pronunciation) as an ordinal number, but what a number &quot;is&quot; also involves its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swahili, there are special lexical items (like &quot;half&quot;) for some fractions, from 1/2 to 1/6 (whereafter a general construction is used &quot;__ part of N&quot;). The lexicalized denominators (nusu, theluthi, robo, humusi, sudusu) are unrelated to the terms for cardinal numbers 2-6 (mbiri, tatu, nne, tano, sita). Ordinal numbers in Swahili are a regular grammatical transformation of cardinal numbers, except &quot;first&quot; is rendered as &quot;beginning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T23:19:25.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2015-07-29T23:34:26.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some think that the Romanian substrate was a language related to modern-day Albanian, but I'm not sure how solid the evidence for this connection is. For example, Romanian &lt;em&gt;viezure&lt;/em&gt; &quot;badger&quot; and Albanian &lt;em&gt;vjedull&lt;/em&gt; &quot;badger&quot; seem to be related (neither is clearly of Latin origin), but it is unknown if they are from a common substrate, or if the word came to Albanian from Romanian, or some other possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T23:34:26.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T02:49:45.093" Score="15" ViewCount="878" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly wondering about vocabulary (e.g. truck vs. lorry; apartment vs. flat) but I suppose I'd be interested to learn about pronunciation too.  Intuitively I feel like this could go either way.  On the one hand, all languages drift and given enough time, this drift should draw the two further apart simply by chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, mass media and internet give us more opportunities to communicate with each other than ever before, and pick up pieces of each other's vocabulary.  For instance, the Northern Californian &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8409040.stm&quot;&gt;&quot;hella&quot;&lt;/a&gt; appears in British English, despite having only arrisen in the past 20 years.  The British &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips#United_States&quot;&gt;&quot;fish and chips&quot;&lt;/a&gt; appear in American English despite having only arisen in the past 150 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are these two dialects more or less alike than they were 10 years ago?  What about 30 years ago?  100 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10204" LastEditorUserId="17257" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T11:45:06.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T11:45:06.340" Title="Are American English and British English growing closer together or drifting further apart?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12940" CreationDate="2015-07-30T06:08:03.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homin&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;agricol&lt;strong&gt;ae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are not in any way &quot;less&quot; fusional than &lt;em&gt;andr&lt;strong&gt;ôn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; — because singular is not an absence of number. They combine singularity and genitivity. As opposed to agglutinative examples such as the Turkish &lt;em&gt;ev&lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;in the house&quot; where &lt;strong&gt;-de&lt;/strong&gt; only carries the locative, and the singular is technically expressed by a null ending: &lt;em&gt;ev.Ø.de&lt;/em&gt;, as demonstrated by &lt;em&gt;ev.ler.de&lt;/em&gt; &quot;in the houses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T06:08:03.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6445" CreationDate="2015-07-30T15:54:47.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a compendium of historical correspondences &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17784007/Index.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is a convenience sample based on whatever sources the (anonymous) author finds, so for example for Bantu it relies on Harry Johnston's, errm, pioneering work. There isn't any linguistic unit &quot;Proto-British East African&quot;, there are gaps (there was no &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; in Bantu so what does the change &quot;&lt;em&gt;h→Ø/V_V&lt;/em&gt;&quot; apply to?). It is surprisingly weak on Uralic (given the volume of research available on Uralic), but it is a work in progress, and worth consulting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T15:54:47.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12940" CreationDate="2015-07-30T16:51:28.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional way to tell the story goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are two parts of Grammar: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1014/482&quot;&gt;Syntax and Morphology&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are two kinds of Morphology: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Derivational Morphology and Inflectional Morphology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are two systems for organizing Inflectional Morphology:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAgglutinativeLanguage.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agglutinative&lt;/a&gt;  systems&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) Fusional (aka amalgamating) systems&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the taxonomy. Agglutination and amalgamation (or fusion) are two different ways to inflect words. The key is the difference in the paradigms. All inflection is paradigmatic, but there are different kinds of paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fusional languages like Latin have multi-dimensional paradigms. If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LatinVerbs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin verb paradigms&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, you can see that almost any verb form appears marked for person, number, tense, voice, and mood. &lt;em&gt;Amātis,&lt;/em&gt; for instance, is marked -- uniquely -- as the second person, plural number, perfect tense, active voice, and indicative mood form of the verb 'love'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a 5-dimensional paradigm. That's fusion. It generates multidimensional well-organized short inflections, each a unique combination of categories. The problem is that there are a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of them, and their combinations tend to be messy and have to be memorized. This poses no learning problem for kids (nothing like this is a problem for kids -- if it were, it wouldn't last), but it's very hard work for an adult to master paradigms like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agglutinative systems, on the other hand, mostly have one-dimensional paradigms which are stacked up (in a particular order determined by each language), producing rather long words consisting of many small inflections, liek this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Bayramlash.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one-word sentence in Turkish&lt;/a&gt;. You can get a flavor of the system with these &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Turkish.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish morphology problems&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of fusional inflections as being melted together, while agglutinative inflections are simply lined up in order, usually with some phonological alteration, but not a whole lot. Again, kids learn all this before they go to school, but adults take a lot of practice getting everything in the right order at speech speeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as stem classes go, that's just a way to classify roots that have the same kinds of inflectional irregularities (see the &quot;conjugations&quot; in the Latin Verbs link above, or the &quot;declensions&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LatinNouns.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin Nouns&lt;/a&gt;). One of the big distinctions is between roots that are marked with a distinctive long (&quot;thematic&quot;) vowel that shows up in the inflections, and roots&#xA; that end in a consonant (3rd conjugation of verbs and 3rd declension of nouns, called &quot;athematic&quot; because they don't have a thematic vowel).&#xA;  - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T17:05:23.447" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16926" CreationDate="2015-07-30T16:57:55.503" Score="2" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that nations are currently opting for the hegemony of the English language in intercultural communication. And though single language civilization model undoubtedly has many perks, I wonder whether the Star Wars model would be a better option. In the Star Wars universe every race speaks its own language but learns to understand oral and written speech of other races. So in school you would not be taught to produce foreign speech but merely to understand it.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anything like this been ever attempted? How successful it was? How successful it can be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10144" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T11:48:59.433" Title="How viable is the Star Wars model of intercultural communication?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12943" CreationDate="2015-07-30T21:50:38.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could find no studies looking at the closeness of British and American dialects of English. But I would say that the question is formulated too nebulously to make it possible to answer easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are studies that show dialect leveling (or reduction in regional variation) within British and American English. But this is always illustrated on specific features and harder to specify in aggregate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while there seems to be less dialectal variety within broader 'English' regional varieties, this has been ascribed to geographic mobility and not necessarily to media influences. While there are fewer Northern or Southern Englishes, there are still huge differences between the varieties that remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this at all translates into leveling between British and American English. There is virtually no regional mobility (to have an impact) and the influence of global media is incredibly shallow - just observe the struggles of transplants in either direction. If media had the sort of influence everyone imagines, you would expect a lot more of merging. There are a lot of examples of mutual impact but none of them systemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would propose that both American and British English have been and still are  developing more or less independently and will continue to diverge over time. I would suggest that literacy and media provide more of an internal cohesion for each variety than a vehicle for mutual comprehension or a future merging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T21:50:38.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12953" CreationDate="2015-07-30T22:03:19.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Multilingualism is extremely common in many regions - people speak several languages in addition to a possible lingua franca or several Lingua Francas - which is not always English or even not mostly English. For example, in many areas of the Amazon, people will speak Portuguese as the main Lingua Franca for communication with officials, an indigenous Lingua Franca for trade and other interactions and one or two other local languages (often as a result of intermariage). This all happens without any major investments in the educational system. However, remember that this multilingualism does not mean that these people have native-like command of all of these languages. Further, in amongst these multilingual people it is not uncommon to find many monolinguals who are very insulated from others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the modern nation-state-induced monolingualism is not only way language skills are configured nor is it the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I don't think the linguistic aspects of the Star Wars universe are sufficiently well elaborated to build a model on them. There are more linguistically realistic universes out there (Tolkien being the high mark in this respect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T22:03:19.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2015-07-31T02:15:56.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In attempting to answer I'll start by assuming a definition of 'aspectual coercion' as involving the use of discourse to force a reinterpretation of grammatically or lexically encoded aspect to make it match the actuality of the event being described (i.e. as per &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.uni-leipzig.de/doelling/pdf/aspectual_coercion.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dölling (2014)&lt;/a&gt;. If this is accepted it would seem likely that all languages can do this to some extent, so any language which does not have grammatical tense would meet the OP's criterion. One of the classic examples is: 'Fred played the sonata for one day'. Playing a sonata is an inherently bounded event, but this is contradicted by the addition of the adverbial 'for one day'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Google Translate with languages which have no grammatical marking of tense I get the following (back translations seemed to confirm that they work tho it would be useful to have comments from speakers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bahasa Indonesia: Fred bermain sonata untuk satu hari&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mandarin: 弗雷德出场索纳塔一天 Fú léi dé chūchǎng suǒnàtǎ yītiān&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cebuano: Fred nakighilawas sa sonata alang sa usa ka adlaw&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T02:15:56.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-31T14:25:31.600" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in knowing what are the vowels found in Canadian English, more particularly in Toronto and Montreal. I know that the low back merger occurred where both /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ merged into /ɑ/ in Canada (if I'm not mistaken). Does this mean that you can't find either of those vowels in Canadian English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time finding a vowel chart for Canadian English, so if someone could post one or simply describe the vowel system and provide a few examples, it would be really helpful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10217" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T14:25:31.600" Title="Can someone tell me the differences between the vowel system in Canadian English and the one in General American?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-31T15:04:44.920" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that creole languages from all parts of the world share many disparate features. Amongst them, how common are third–person, singular, indefinite pronouns (like the French “&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;”) in creole languages? What became of the French “&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;” in Haitian Creole (&lt;em&gt;Kreyòl&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T15:04:44.920" Title="How common are indefinite pronouns in creole languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30776" CreationDate="2015-07-31T23:59:33.937" Score="5" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've wondered about this script since I saw it years ago. I imagine it's an English cipher. Can anyone tell me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OdBVt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OdBVt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9533" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T14:22:34.937" LastActivityDate="2020-01-24T19:01:44.687" Title="Recognize this script?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-01-24T22:18:53.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T01:53:50.390" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any counterparts like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this IPA Chart with Sounds&lt;/a&gt;, but for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PIE&lt;/a&gt; (at least PIE's phonemes)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T02:21:56.927" Title="Chart with audible sounds pronounced, for Proto-Indo-European?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12961" CreationDate="2015-08-01T02:21:56.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Native speakers have been in short supply for the past few millenia. What you can do is decide what phonetic (IPA) value you want to assign to e.g. &quot;p&quot; and listen to that via an authoritative online supplier (also in short supply), or as exemplified in a real language. In picking phonetic values for PIE, you can never determine exact values for /i u e/, for instance (why, is a separate question). You have some major choices regarding &quot;b&quot; (which could be [p'] according to some) and &quot;p&quot; which might be [pʰ] according to some). You are totally on your own with the laryngeals. I suggest that a better and prior question is &quot;what were the IPA phonetic values of the PIE segmental inventory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T02:21:56.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T03:04:12.063" Score="2" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/230654?rskey=n792MY&amp;amp;result=1#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wretch, n. and adj.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Etymology:  Old English wrecca , wræcca , = Old Saxon wrekkio , -eo (applied to the Magi), Old High German reccheo , reccho , etc., exile, adventurer, knight errant (Middle High German and German recke warrior, hero)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt; Old Germanic *wrakja(n)- ,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt; the stem wrak- , wrek- : see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/230577#eid13944131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wreak v&lt;/a&gt;. The contrast in the development of the meaning in English and German is remarkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=wretch&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Etymonline:]&lt;/a&gt; Old English wrecca &quot;wretch, stranger, exile,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;wrakjon&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pursuer; one pursued&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (cognates: Old Saxon wrekkio, Old High German reckeo &quot;a banished person, exile,&quot; German recke &quot;renowned warrior, hero&quot;) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone please explain OED`s last sentence? What's remarkable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above, I see that &lt;strong&gt;* &lt;em&gt;wrakjon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; induced two cognates with opposing meanings (in English, the pursued; in German, the pursuer). Is this  difference what is  remarkable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, should the remark arise from the Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*wrakjon&lt;/strong&gt;? Was this a contronym?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How can the same word mean the subject and the object (ie: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;pursuer; one pursued&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T03:23:29.933" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T08:36:35.687" Title="What exactly is remarkable about Proto-Germanic *wrakjon?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T03:31:09.353" Score="1" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=behind&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;behind (adv.)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;      Old English &lt;em&gt;behindan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;behind, after,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;by&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;hindan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;code&gt;from behind&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hind&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hind (adj.)&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hindan&lt;/em&gt; already meant &quot;from behind&quot;, and It doesn't make sense to  say: &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;from behind&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; So why was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;by&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; added as a prefix? &#xA;How did &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;by&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; contribute to 'behind'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Etymonline above, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/17226?redirectedFrom=behind#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; doesn't pinpoint the matching definition of the prefix &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T00:32:17.447" Title="How did the prefix 'be-' function in 'behind'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12963" CreationDate="2015-08-01T08:36:35.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that you are right about the reason for the term &quot;remarkable&quot;: because the English term (&lt;em&gt;wretch&lt;/em&gt;) is pejorative, whereas German &lt;em&gt;Recke&lt;/em&gt; refers to a figure (a warrior or hero) that is likely to be praised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this contrast is objectively remarkable -- i.e. whether such a semantic development is improbable or statistically rare -- is a different question. But, I doubt that the person who made that statement (in the dictionary entry) was trying to be objectively precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T08:36:35.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T13:24:17.337" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to try and understand Athabascan grammar, but I don't know very much about it, and, because of this I also don't know what kind of Athabasca language I want to learn. I have looked on Wikipedia and I have found it fairly helpful, but where/how might I get a fairly complete understanding of the languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-10-23T15:26:12.987" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T15:26:12.987" Title="Where to learn Athabascan grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12960" CreationDate="2015-08-01T13:40:19.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a professional opinion at all, but I think that it looks very similar to a semitic language's writing system. &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1zhxV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T13:40:19.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T16:56:59.063" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In British English, very often the Rs that are there in the written form of the word are not actually pronounced at all. How, then, could native speakers of early American English eventually recover these Rs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T16:56:59.063" Title="How were Rs recovered in AmE?" Tags="&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12967" CreationDate="2015-08-01T18:43:07.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suggestion 1 is to pick one language as your &quot;wedge&quot; into Athabaskan, either Navaho (very many resources) or Slave (one very good one). Alternatively, for snippets across Athabaskan, you could try Fernald &amp;amp; Platero 2000 &lt;em&gt;The Athabaskan languages&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T18:43:07.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2015-08-01T19:39:17.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here you can find the &lt;em&gt;Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English (SCoSE)&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-saarland.de/lehrstuhl/engling/scose.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.uni-saarland.de/lehrstuhl/engling/scose.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T19:39:17.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12960" CreationDate="2015-08-01T21:38:38.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alphabet looks made up. Lots of angles with not enough curves and loops, not very practical for pen and paper. Therefore I believe it's a substitution cipher (but probably not English). Here are some observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems to be written left to right because the left margin is regular but the right one isn't. Although not definitive, I think it weakens the Semitic hypothesis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of unique signs seem to be consistent with alphabetic writing. I didn't really count them but my estimate is around thirty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word boundaries seem to be observed but there don't seem to be many reoccurring words. This makes languages with articles and frequent prepositions/postpositions unlikely (e.g. the lack of an identifiable &quot;the&quot; rules out English). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My gut says the exclamation point &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the exclamation point. It's only used at the end of words and 3 out of 4 times it is at the very end of the line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few signs seem to have variants with diacritics (dot above and dot below). It might be reflecting the state of affairs in the original language. It also makes English unlikely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most common signs seem to be &quot;upper right corner&quot;, &quot;L&quot;, &quot;o&quot;, and &quot;9&quot;. All four seem to have nearly equal frequencies. For English I would expect there to be a clear winner (&quot;e&quot;). Same (even more heavily) for German and French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course all these points can have alternative explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone needs to do a letter and digram frequency analysis. I wish I had more time :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T04:03:14.877" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T04:03:14.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2015-08-01T23:02:11.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scottish Gaelic has two different verbs &quot;to be&quot;. As does Irish and presumably Manx.&#xA;&quot;Is&quot; for nouns and pronouns.&#xA;&quot;Tha&quot; for everything else.&#xA;Is mi John.&#xA;Tha mi sgith (tired).&#xA;Both verbs are regular, and the only Gaelic verbs with a present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10225" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T23:02:11.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12982" CreationDate="2015-08-02T04:48:10.923" Score="2" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the following (on the 3 derivatives of &lt;em&gt;ducere&lt;/em&gt;), both 'induction' and 'abduction' presuppose 'an effect', but  'deduction' produces &lt;sub&gt;(I intended this use of another derivative of &lt;em&gt;ducere&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt; 'the effect' as the result. This observation suggests that in addition to the Latin root &lt;em&gt;ducere&lt;/em&gt;'s meaning as 'to lead', the stem &lt;em&gt;-duce&lt;/em&gt; denotes an additional meaning (abbreviated to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), that of a direction of logic, capsulised as the additional prepositional phrase:  FROM 'an effect'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. How did the stem &lt;em&gt;-duce&lt;/em&gt;  evolve into this AM?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To wit, why is the starting point of  &lt;em&gt;-duce&lt;/em&gt; 'an effect' (and not a rule or a cause instead)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. In which language and about when did this AM develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud409/l-1951908693/m-1922189140&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; Deduction: Given the rule and the cause, deduce the effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Induction: Given a cause and an effect, induce a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MdrzU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MdrzU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I omit similar diagrams for 'deduction' and 'induction', to minimise this post's length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T19:53:53.267" Title="How did the Latin stem '-duce' evolve to mean 'from an effect'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12983" CreationDate="2015-08-02T05:01:07.850" Score="1" ViewCount="4005" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I verified &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/antipode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the pronunciation of 'antipode'&lt;/a&gt; (/ˈantɪpəʊd/ ), I inexplicably decided to verify separately &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/antipodes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the pronunciation of 'antipodes '&lt;/a&gt; (/anˈtɪpədiːz/ )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This twofold verification emerged necessary, because it revealed that though a back-formation of trisyllabic 'antipodes', 'antipode' was instead disyllabic. Without any verification, I would've guessed that 'antipode' would have been pronounced as (//anˈtɪpədi/ ). So what explains this unpredictable, surprising phonetic difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask here because I see from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=antipode&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; that 'antipodes' originates from Latin, after Greek, after a possible PIE root. So I don't know which language(s) affected the pronunciation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT to clarify]&#xA;My question is why &lt;em&gt;antipodes&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T21:40:00.670" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T05:34:11.920" Title="Why is 'antipode' not pronounced like 'antipodes' without the final 's'?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-09-03T15:29:42.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-02T16:23:31.433" Score="1" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create nice name for international service.&#xA;My idea is based on the fact, the word which consisting of phonemes that have high frequency in the native language, sounds good. So, the same phoneme has making different speech perception for peoples that speak different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know, where I can find the frequency of phonemes (or syllable) consisting of two phones in world languages? Please, do not confuse with bigram, diphthong and digraph. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10230" LastEditorUserId="10230" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T16:51:49.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T08:43:45.757" Title="Frequency of phonemes consisting of two phones in world languages" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12978" CreationDate="2015-08-02T17:31:39.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that good data on frequency is non-existent (sampling problems plus coding problems, viz. whether &quot;u&quot; represents [u, ʊ, o] and even [ʉ]). With that caveat, the most frequent vowel is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and the most frequent consonant is &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;. Hairs can then be split over exactly what vowel is represented by &quot;a&quot;, or how much aspiration &quot;t&quot; might have and still be called &quot;t&quot; rather than &quot;tʰ&quot; or &quot;d&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T17:31:39.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12975" CreationDate="2015-08-02T19:48:01.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The roots of classical logic lie in Ancient Greece. Because of this, many Latin terms dealing with philosophy and logic were either taken from Greek, or modeled after the structure of Greek words (that is, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;calqued&lt;/a&gt;). So I thought that researching equivalent terms in Ancient Greek might shed light on your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Etymonline, the pair of words &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=induction&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;induction&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=deduction&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deduction&lt;/a&gt; were used to translate the Ancient Greek words ἐπαγωγή &quot;epagōgḗ&quot; and ἀπαγωγή &quot;apagōgḗ&quot;, respectively. These are composed of the prefixes epi- and apo- plus a derived form of the root verb &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordsense.eu/%E1%BC%84%CE%B3%CF%89/#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ἄγω&lt;/a&gt; &quot;agō,&quot; which appears to have had a similar meaning to that of the Latin &lt;em&gt;ducere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Epagoge&lt;/strong&gt; is generally translated in a philosophical sense as &quot;induction,&quot; and is said to have meant &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epagoge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bringing to&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in ordinary speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apagoge&lt;/strong&gt; seems to have more variance in translation. While Etymonline lists it as the equivalent of &quot;deduction,&quot; I have also found a paper that translates the term as &quot;abduction&quot; or &quot;reduction&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570868315000506&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The eco-cognitive model of abduction: Ἀπαγωγή now: Naturalizing the logic of abduction&lt;/a&gt;. This paper gives the ordinary meaning of apagoge as &quot;leading away.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T19:53:53.267" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T19:53:53.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12975" CreationDate="2015-08-02T19:49:42.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question has some false presuppositions. In general, when trying to understand the historical relationship between words of English that seem to historically share a root, where Latin in the apparent source language and the subject matter is anything vaguely philosophical, you have to start with the actual origin, which is usually Greek. The relevant terms in Greek are ἀπαγωγή which maps to English &quot;deduction&quot; and ἐπαγωγή which maps to &quot;induction&quot;, as Sumelic says. The English terms developed from Latin, and the Latin terms were translated from Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be entirely off-topic for LSE to get into the details of what &quot;induction&quot; and &quot;deduction&quot; are in philosophy. As philosophical terms, the shortest path for understanding the relation is to understand the concepts ἀπαγωγή and ἐπαγωγή in Aristotle's work. As an aid, I suggest John McCaskey &lt;em&gt;Regula Socratis: the rediscovery of ancient induction in early modern England&lt;/em&gt; (2006 Stanford dissertation), which will get you conceptually (not linguistically, but with due attention to terminology) from ἐπαγωγή to induction, as understood by Bacon. You should be aware that at the conceptual level, συλλογισμός corresponds to &quot;deduction&quot; (synopsis &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), so one can rightly wonder how &quot;deduction&quot; entered the picture in Late Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perseus has nice Greek study tools that point you to instances of particular words, so you can look up &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29pagwgh%2F&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;prior=s#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ἐπαγωγή&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=a%29pagwgh%2F&amp;amp;la=greek#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ἀπαγωγή&lt;/a&gt;. Cicero created the translation &lt;em&gt;inductio&lt;/em&gt;: to understand why, you would need to understand the component parts in Latin, and the component parts in Greek, plus understand Cicero's ideas of what constitutes &quot;good translation&quot;. For &lt;em&gt;dēductiō&lt;/em&gt; you have the additional philological problem of figuring out how it got associated with συλλογισμός. Aristotle's logical terminology is already the result of substantial semantic change within Greek. Concrete meaning associated with the root (which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=a%29%2Fgw&amp;amp;la=greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ἄγω&lt;/a&gt;) are &quot;bring in, invade, introduce, lead away, influence, carry&quot;. The semantic contributions of the prefixes &lt;em&gt;απο, ɛπι&lt;/em&gt; are even harder to pin down -- while the prefixes no doubt had a compositional meaning in pre-Indo-European, you just have to learn the specific meanings of many of these prefix-verb pairs, with the help of some vague semantic family resemblances. Reading the entry for Latin &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ducere&amp;amp;la=latin#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dūco&lt;/a&gt; should show you why Cicero selected that root (you'd need to dig deeper into Latin to determine whether this is really the closest semantically-corresponding root, but it's clearly close enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the source of your presuppositional error was the idea that deduction is about &quot;an effect&quot;. Basically, you were misled by a social-media explanation of philosophical terms which bear scant relationship to the original concepts in philosophy. I would suggest starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/a&gt; to understand the concepts better, then do the etymological search back to the Greek roots. The linguistic content of your question could then be: are there Latin roots besides &lt;em&gt;dūc&lt;/em&gt;- which better approximate the meanings of &lt;em&gt;αγ&lt;/em&gt;-; what are the semantic properties of &lt;em&gt;ab-, in-, de-&lt;/em&gt; as verb prefixes in Latin, or Greek &lt;em&gt;απο, ɛπι&lt;/em&gt;; various questions about the semantics of prefix+verb constructions in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T19:49:42.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12976" CreationDate="2015-08-02T22:21:05.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of no evidence that individuals use both [ˈæntɪpɔʊd] and [ænˈtɪpədijz], though I also can't say that I've even ever heard anyone use &quot;antipode&quot;. I don't control the meaning / use of &quot;antipode&quot;, but the words are not in a regular singular / plural semantic relationship, as &quot;cat / cats&quot;, or &quot;mouse / mice&quot; are. You expect a regular pronunciation relationship between regularly derived inflectional singular / plural pairs. However, there are also word pairs that stand in an etymological singular / plural relationship that don't have a synchronic singular / plural inflectional relationship, such as &lt;em&gt;opus, opera&lt;/em&gt;. We treat these as separate words (and the Romans are responsible for the changes in pronunciation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two words are thus unrelated in Modern English. &lt;em&gt;Antipode&lt;/em&gt; simply follows the regular rules for orthography-to-pronunciation. Perhaps the first person who coined the singular didn't know how to pronounce &quot;antipodes&quot;, and followed the regular rule. The pronunciation of &quot;antipodes&quot; follows alternative rules of pronunciation that are relevant to words from classical languages. In the present case, Latin is a conduit for Greek ἀντίπους, underlyingly /anti-pod-s/ but even in Ancient Greek, the inflection of &quot;foot&quot; was irregular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you will observe in &lt;em&gt;indices, theses, vortices&lt;/em&gt;, there is a special rule for pronouncing &lt;em&gt;es&lt;/em&gt; in Latinate plurals. I expect that many people pronounce &quot;antipodes&quot; as [ˈæntɪpɔʊdz], if they are unaware of that rule (they probably don't teach it in school anymore), and the history of the word. (Similarly, &lt;em&gt;hammamelidanthemum&lt;/em&gt; is mis-stressed with alternating stress starting with the first syllable in a certain famous stress dissertation, since the author was at the time unaware of the etymological makeup of the word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[addendum]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the classical words with &quot;es&quot; plurals either derive from Greek &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;-stem nouns, e.g. thesis, analysis, synapsis, crisis, which had the plural -ɛις, or were Latin third declension nouns with the ending -&lt;em&gt;ēs&lt;/em&gt; in the relevant words. Either source would yield the plural [ijS].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T04:49:58.007" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T04:49:58.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T10:17:20.343" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about the rate of occurence of complex tone contours like the Mandarin Chinese third tone, the falling-rising tone. By &quot;complex&quot; I mean that its contour isn't simply a rising, falling, or steady pitch (except of course under tone sandhi). I'm not necessarily talking about languages like Vietnamese, where tones are distinguished based on secondarily articulated characteristics, namely the breathy, glottal, and creaky-voiced tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: among languages with lexical tone--and more narrowly, languages with contour-based tones (so excluding, for instance, Yoruba)--how common are tones and tonal contrasts like this, as opposed to simpler ones? What are their similarities or differences between these languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd much appreciate any help in better defining and rewording this question, I know the topic of lexical tone is extremely complicated. I'm only using Mandarin Chinese as an example because that's the tonal language that I'm most familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1901" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T17:03:54.590" Title="Chinese 3rd tone: cross-linguistic comparison" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12986" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:15:45.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand your question as asking about tone-collocations on syllables which contain at least three pitch-height elements. I do not understand your basis for excluding Yoruba. One reason might be that underlyingly Yoruba has just H M L, and contours result from rules; but the other is that rise and fall in Yoruba clearly decompose into H and L on a single syllable. So it is unclear whether you are excluding languages with superficial contours, or those where contours are arguably not &quot;atomic&quot; (as Chinese is sometimes analyzed). I will assume that you are only excluding superficial contours. In which case, Mandarin 3rd tone can't be argued to be a complex (tri-tonal) contour. And finally, &quot;tone&quot; is often used to describe the tone profile of entire words so that HLH might be a pattern in a disyllabic word (high+rise), and could be called &quot;a tone&quot;. Such an analysis would be irrelevant, under the understanding that you're looking for tone density within a single syllable. If these assumptions aren't what you had in mind, you should edit the question to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main result is that tri-tonal contours are much less common than bi-tonal contours, in fact very few languages have non-superficial tritonal contours. In no language do you find tri-tonal contours without there being bi-tonal contours. The number of allowed tri-tonal contours is always less than the number of bi-tonal contours. Tritonal contours always seem to involve a change in pitch-movement direction (relevant in a language with 3+ levels), so LML or MHL might be possible but not LMH contrasting with LH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you suspend the consideration of non-superficiality and map phonetic pitch traces to &quot;tones&quot;, tritonal contours become more common, possibly &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; common that bitonal contours, given a fine-enough grained analysis of surface pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:15:45.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12986" CreationDate="2015-08-03T17:03:54.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen the claim that when it comes to tonal contours, contour tonal languages &quot;select from as many categories as possible&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;). They posit the four basic tonal shapes as: level, rising, falling and convex/concave; naturally, standard Mandarin's four tones fit into one of each of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is noticeably absent from standard descriptions of any Yue Chinese group (which includes Cantonese and Toisanese as well as the 10-tone Bobai dialect) that I'm aware of, as well as from the main Hakka varieties and  from the Hokkien branch of the Minnan Chinese group. Both of these groups have more than four phonemic tones (although the Teochew branch of Minnan has a low falling-rising tone for the 阴去 category).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Mandarin varieties, not just standard 普通话 / 國語, have a concave tone. From Wikipedia's page on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Chinese)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;four tones of Middle Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, Jinan in Shandong, Chengdu in Sichuan, and Nanjing in Jiangsu all share this feature with Beijing. The Nanchang variety of Gan and the Wenzhounese variety of Wu seem to also have concave tones (Wenzhounese having this longest of contours reliably paradoxically in the historical 入声 tones, which are the shortest tones in most of the rest of south China!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of those rarities that have both, Fuzhounese of the Min Dong family is probably the most well-known Chinese variety, with the 阴去 tone a concave one, whilst the 阳去 tone is convex. However, to my ear the concave tone is subject to a similar &quot;smoothing&quot; as in standard Mandarin, whilst the convex tone is somewhat more salient. The status of the tones in Suzhounese of the Wu family is subject to debate (as with all the tones of Wu really - tone sandhi has just become too complicated there!): the concave one is well-attested, but the convex one is allophonic to... something else (either low rising or low falling). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving behind the Sino-Tibetan for the Oto-Manguean, Yoloxóchitl Mixtec has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~cdicanio/pdfs/Fieldwork_tone_OM.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;both&lt;/a&gt; too, although I'm not sure what other tones there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just glancing at the literature for Vietnamese phonetics, the case with Vietnamese phonation and pitch-register is particularly interesting, as the &quot;citation&quot; concave tone &quot;hỏi&quot; is probably the one &quot;tone&quot; where the pitch contour is &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; important; the breathiness has been analysed has merely a phonetic realisation. However, it seems that it may be confused with huyền in Hanoi where the rising end of the hỏi contour is weakening. Southern Vietnamese on the other hand does not have a canonical concave tone: hỏi has merged with ngã to form a low-rising tone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What generalisations can be drawn then? Common ancestry? Areal effects? Even support for the maximisation of the distribution of tone shapes is shaky. The only commonality would be that rising and falling tones always exist alongside the concave and convex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T17:03:54.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-08-04T01:03:06.537" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do believe that they have similarities other than those based on Slavic roots. Even though they belong to different subgroups of Slavic languages i.e. West and South respectively, they are geographically close which might have contributed to closer relationship between the two languages &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the point, I'd like to add that these are the only two Slavic languages, and peoples as well, whose names are derived from word &quot;Slavic&quot;. Therefore, in a way, they call themselves Slavs, even though they might have different words to denote Slavs in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10006" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T01:03:06.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="690" CreationDate="2015-08-04T07:39:36.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what I know Ananas in the Arawak language means &quot;flower in the flower&quot; ana = flower The name came with the first encounters with the Taino people in the Caribbean islands that were usually eating these fruits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10237" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T07:39:36.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13002" CreationDate="2015-08-04T08:49:15.313" Score="1" ViewCount="1030" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems some linguists use &quot;naturalistic&quot; -- but I'm not clear on what it means in this context or if it's different from &quot;natural&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T05:51:25.910" Title="How does the term &quot;naturalistic speech&quot; differ from &quot;natural language&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12777" CreationDate="2015-08-04T13:51:59.257" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important message is that about one dozen parts of speech seem to be sufficient for part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Additional markers often include things not classically regarded as parts of speech, such as punctuation, symbols (e.g., for Twitter corpora!) and a &quot;residual&quot; container class for everything else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some disagreement about the content of some classes: Traditionally, pronouns include pronomial adverbs and adjectives. A modern school takes the pronomial adjectives out of the pronoun class and names them determiners (and often, the classical articles are put there, too) and classifies the pronomial adverbs (e.g., &quot;how&quot;) just as adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several attempts to unify POS over languages, and here are some them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EAGLES: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/pub/eagles/corpora/annotate.ps.gz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/pub/eagles/corpora/annotate.ps.gz&lt;/a&gt; EAGLES Recommendations for the morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, ''Obligatory attributes/values, Major Categories'', §4.2.1 on page 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;STTS/HW: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/resources/stts-1999.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/resources/stts-1999.pdf&lt;/a&gt; Guidelines für das Tagging deutscher Textcorpora mit STTS (Kleines und großes Tagset), ''Hauptwortarten'', Tabelle 2.1 on page 4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Tanl_POS_Tagset#Coarse-grained_tags&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Tanl_POS_Tagset#Coarse-grained_tags&lt;/a&gt; Tanl Coarse Grained Tags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UD-17: &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/u/pos/all.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/u/pos/all.html&lt;/a&gt; Universal Dependencies &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UP-12: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.petrovi.de/data/universal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.petrovi.de/data/universal.pdf&lt;/a&gt; Universal POS 2nd paragraph in the right hand column of page 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The summary table below shows the tags drawn from the tag sets quoted above (in their original spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;||= EAGLES =||= STTS/HW =||= TANL=||= UP-12 =||= UD-17 =||= Notes =||&#xA;||  N       ||  N        ||  S    ||  NOUN   ||  NOUN   || noun    ||&#xA;||          ||           ||       ||         ||  PROPN  || proper noun/named entity ||&#xA;||  V       ||  V        ||  V    ||  VERB   ||  VERB   || verb    ||&#xA;||          ||           ||       ||         ||  AUX    || auxiliary verb (includes modal auxiliaries like ''should'' or ''must'') ||&#xA;||  AJ      ||  ADJ      ||  A    ||  ADJ    ||  ADJ    || adjective ||&#xA;||  PD      ||  P        ||       ||         ||         || pronoun/determiner (as one single class) ||&#xA;||  AT      ||  ART      ||  R    ||         ||         || article ||&#xA;||          ||           ||  D    ||  DET    ||  DET    || determiner ||&#xA;||          ||           ||  T    ||         ||         || predeterminer (e.g., '''tutto''' il giorno)&#xA;||          ||           ||  P    ||  PRON   ||  PRON   || pronoun ||&#xA;||  AV      ||  ADV      ||  B    ||  ADV    ||  ADV    || adverb ||&#xA;||  AP      ||  AP       ||  E    ||  ADP    ||  ADP    || adposition (circum-, pre-, postposition) ||&#xA;||  C       ||  KO       ||  C    ||  CONJ   ||  CONJ   || conjunction ||&#xA;||          ||           ||       ||         ||  SCONJ  || subordinating conjunction ||&#xA;||  NU      ||  CARD     ||  N    ||  NUM    ||  NUM    || numeral; cardinal numeral (ordinals are tagged as adjectives or adverbs) ||&#xA;||  I       ||  ITJ      ||  I    ||         ||  INTJ   || interjection ||&#xA;||  U       ||  PTK      ||       ||  PRT    ||  PART   || unique; particle ||&#xA;||  R       ||           ||  X    ||  X      ||  X      || residual; other ||&#xA;||          ||           ||       ||         ||  SYM    || symbol ($, %, §, ©, +, −, , !http://example.org, !a@example.org) ||&#xA;||  PU      ||           ||  F    ||  .      ||  PUNCT  || punctuation ||&#xA;||  13      ||  11       ||  14   ||  12     ||  17     || total number of tags ||&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;STTS/HW lacks generic tags for punctuation and other: They could be supplemented as $ (for punctuation) and X (for other)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UP-12 lacks a tag for interjection; interjections are mapped to the class X &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UP-12 and UD-17 lack a tag for article, it is absorbed into the determiner class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANL lacks the category particle, the Italian negation particle ''non'' is classified as an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANL considers article, determiner, predeterminer, and pronoun as first-class citizens in parts-of-speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T13:51:59.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-04T13:59:15.810" Score="2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, Italian there is a particle ba(h) which is used for exclamation of contempt, excitement, surprise etc. There's pretty similar particle բա in Armenian which is used for expressing amusent as well as for strengthening of affirmation - like in phrase &quot;Ba vontc&quot; (&quot;that's for sure&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand in Proto-Slavic languages there was a particle &quot;bo&quot; - because - which is used as a compound in many words in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other Eastern and Western Slavic languages - abo, libo, lub, ibo. Also in Polish, for example, word &quot;bo&quot; is still used by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in Lithuanian there's a word &quot;arba&quot; - &quot;or&quot;, which is actually exact equivalent of Slavic &quot;або&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &quot;exclamation&quot; ba and &quot;conjuction&quot; ba related? If yes, what is the etymology of this particle. In book &quot;Indo-European and its closest relatives&quot; it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=z4ISPKGtl9YC&amp;amp;pg=PA177&amp;amp;lpg=PA177&amp;amp;dq=ba%20particle%20indo-european&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=EHoia5pHHN&amp;amp;sig=7UxsPfvlf-Pq6TQd4hAdq8g4Y78&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwBWoVChMI9OTp6LuPxwIVBJWICh052wYM#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ba%20particle%20indo-european&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; that the roots of this word can be found as mush as on pre-PIE level. How valid is this claim fron the point of view of modern linguistics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T13:59:15.810" Title="The origin of &quot;ba&quot; particle" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:48:08.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is decidedly &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; -- there is not always a unique way to partition a sentence into its constituents -- and this is so however one defines &quot;constituent.&quot;  This is so because some sentences are inherently &lt;strong&gt;ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;: they have more than one syntactic reading, and so can be represented by different sets of constituents.  The example used in the other answer is a case in point: &lt;em&gt;&quot;The old man hit the girl with a cane.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ambiguity: did the man have the cane or did the girl?  This is not specified in the sentence.  (We may happen to know the answer, but it does not come from &lt;strong&gt;syntactic&lt;/strong&gt; information.  It might be found elsewhere in the discourse, or it might be based on our pragmatic knowledge -- old men are more likely to have canes than girls, etc. -- but it is not coded in &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; sentence itself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two classic kinds of syntactic theories are phrase-structure grammars (PSG) and dependency grammars (DG).  Both represent the sentence as a tree.  In PSG, the internal nodes of the tree name &quot;constituents&quot;, and one leaf of the tree corresponds to one word in the sentence.  In DG each node in the tree corresponds to a word in the sentence, and we say that each node &quot;depends&quot; on its immediate parent node (i.e., the child depends on its parent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Constituents: we must define what we mean by that -- the more appropriate way to analyze the sentence is a tree.  Given a tree, we can speak of constituents by equating the notion of a constituent with the notion of a &lt;strong&gt;subtree&lt;/strong&gt;.  So if we say that each subtree forms one constituent, then your question makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note, that constituents are always nested, so your picture is oversimplified --- it shows no nesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, independently of y/our preferred theory, one could see our example as having constituents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. &lt;em&gt;[ The old man ]  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  [ hit  &amp;nbsp;  [ the girl [ with a cane ] ] &amp;nbsp;  ].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. &lt;em&gt;[ The old man ]  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  [ hit &amp;nbsp;  [ the girl ] &amp;nbsp; [ with a cane ] &amp;nbsp;  ].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In A, &lt;em&gt;[ with a cane ]&lt;/em&gt;  modifies the GIRL (e.g., in DP terms, it depends on the node GIRL).  It tells us which girl was hit: the one with the cane, and not the one with the ice-cream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In B, &lt;em&gt;[ with a cane ]&lt;/em&gt; modifies HIT (in DP terms, it depends on HIT), and tells us exactly how she was hit: with a cane, and not with an oxygen bag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of ambiguity (and many others) is what makes analysis of natural language challenging --- not so for computer languages, where ambiguity is absent by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10242" LastEditorUserId="10242" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T07:28:44.443" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T07:28:44.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12992" CreationDate="2015-08-04T16:01:14.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Natural language&quot; refers to ordinary human languages that children learn: not programming languages or constructed languages. &quot;Naturalistic speech&quot; refers to speech that is &quot;everyday&quot;, as opposed to high-falutin rhetorical style. You would have to investigate the context further, to determine if there is something in particular that is to be avoided as unnatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T16:01:14.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13005" CreationDate="2015-08-04T16:50:13.210" Score="3" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences like the following occur frequently as examples for cross-serial dependencies in Dutch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ik dacht dat Jan Piet Marie zag helpen lezen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the dependencies are depicted only as arcs between &lt;em&gt;Jan&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;zag&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lezen&lt;/em&gt;. I found the following non-projective dependency structure for the above sentence in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COLI_a_00125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COLI_a_00125&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uAv9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uAv9.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This figure does not contain syntactic functions at the edges. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In my conception the figure depicts a graph (in the mathematical sense) whose nodes are word forms. An arrow-shaped edge indicates a dependency between two words, where the direction of the arrow is from head to dependent. This edge can be equipped with a label specifying the type of argument or adjunct (direct object, subject, etc.) the descendent is for its head; which is not the case in the above figure.&#xA;A dashed edge indicates the position of the word in the sentence.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some publications I found constituent structures for this sentence, where &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt; are attached as &lt;em&gt;direct object&lt;/em&gt; in a sibling position to the &lt;em&gt;verb complements&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lezen&lt;/em&gt;, respectively. However, if &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt; is attached below &lt;em&gt;lezen&lt;/em&gt;, then labeling this edge with &lt;em&gt;direct object&lt;/em&gt; does not seem plausible to me (as linguistic layman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the depicted dependency structure plausible at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be appropriate edge labels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9601" LastEditorUserId="9601" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T08:45:19.063" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:01:36.050" Title="What are the syntactic functions in this example of Dutch cross-serial dependencies?" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-04T18:19:13.367" Score="0" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/cgct/publications/Journal%20of%20linguistics%20volledig%20new%20webpage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; paper by Astrid De Wit and Frank Brisard, a unified semantics for the English present tense is proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to their view, the present tense is all about epistemic modality: the present simple is connected to epistemic necessity, and the present progressive is connected to epistemic contingency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is living with her parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence, then, on our view, means precisely the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;She lives with her parents&quot; is true at some epistemically accessible worlds, and false at others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble grasping this as this seems clearly wrong to me. Can someone elaborate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T01:06:04.793" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:06:04.793" Title="Epistemic modality and the present tense in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;present&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13001" CreationDate="2015-08-05T03:02:02.710" Score="0" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://disq.us/8o71xp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Timsensei • 2 years ago&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Learning a new language can be a transformational experience. Monolinguals are in a state of non-transformation in this respect. Chomsky and Pinker may be famous in linguistics but both of them have &lt;code&gt;fundamental flaws&lt;/code&gt; in their understanding of language acquisition due to their monolingualism. [Upvoted 17 times]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognise the absence of authority or identity, but is the above true?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are the &lt;code&gt;fundamental flaws&lt;/code&gt; of Chomsky and Pinker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T05:42:51.773" Title="How do Chomsky and Pinker's monolingualism explain their flaws about language acquisition?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-05T14:28:38.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13000" CreationDate="2015-08-05T05:37:23.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monolingualism is &lt;strong&gt;a common criticism of many Chomskean linguists&lt;/strong&gt;. The issue is not so much the fact that the individuals don't speak other languages. Chomsky studied and knows many languages, taught Hebrew and even wrote his early thesis about Hebrew. Also many researchers in the generative paradigms are native speakers of other languages or study other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that &lt;strong&gt;many of the concepts of generative and by extension universal grammar appear as if English was somehow the default.&lt;/strong&gt; It starts with the first formula every one learns from generative grammar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; NP VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not VP NP or just VP? All of those could be defaults if you started with another language or did not choose to think of a simple declarative sentence as  the core of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in this scheme, a sentence like 'They like Joan.' may appear as somehow more basic than 'Joan likes them.' which seemingly introduces morphology while starting with other languages morphology would be the default. When applied to language acquisition this results in undue focus on the learning of syntax which in some languages pales in comparison to the complexity of the morphology that has to be acquired - much of with complex and subtle semantics combining both syntactic and pragmatic meanings (think evidentiality or classification systems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by no means just a problem with Chomskean linguistics. I've criticised some concepts in construction grammar and functionalist grammar for the same reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that Chomsky (as do most linguists) &lt;strong&gt;assumes monolingualism is the natural and default state of language speakers&lt;/strong&gt;. Whereas about half the world's population is multilingual (and probably even more were so historically). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is &lt;strong&gt;not by any means the fundamental flaw of Chomsky's (and by extension Pinker's) approach&lt;/strong&gt;. Just something critics occasionally trot out to bolster their argument. There many much more intrinsic issues that have been covered extensively elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Postscript&lt;/strong&gt;: There is no virtue or rigor to the statement &quot;Learning a new language can be a transformational experience. Monolinguals are in a state of non-transformation in this respect.&quot; It's just an empty cliche which in this case can be even more confusing because it uses the word transformation (perhaps in subtle reference to transformational grammar which of course has nothing to do with this at all). People put about a lot of platitudes about language learning and they are rarely helpful and never in any way measurable or easy to capture in a systematic manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T05:42:51.773" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T05:42:51.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12992" CreationDate="2015-08-05T05:51:25.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Natural&lt;/strong&gt; language&quot; is often used in linguistics simply to mean language with some hint that it may be different from computer, animal or somehow artificial languages. It is most commonly found as part of the term &quot;Natural Language Processing&quot; which is basically a subfield of computational linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Naturalistic&lt;/strong&gt; language&quot; is much less clearly defined and not really used in opposition to &quot;natural language&quot;. It is often used to imply real, unrehearsed or unguided language - but still natural language (not artificial language made to look natural). The two common terms in which it is used are &quot;naturalistic language learning&quot; (meaning not in a classroom - and naturalistic refers to learning rather than language) and &quot;naturalistic speech&quot; (meaning live, unrehearsed speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T05:51:25.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T08:55:58.727" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already spell checking models available which help us to find the suggested correct spellings based on a corpus of trained correct spellings. Can the granularity be increased to &quot;word&quot; from alphabet so that we can have even phrase suggestions , such that if an incorrect phrase is entered then it should suggest the nearest correct phrase, of course it is trained from a list of valid phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any  existing tools and approaches  which achieve this functionality  or how to proceed for this for an existing large gold standard phrase corpus, say the manchester academic phrasebank ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1758" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T08:55:58.727" Title="Phrase suggestion model using a gold standard corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T13:39:30.457" Score="-1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/125856/68395&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer from English.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what the poster meant, but to no avail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His suggestion nicely deals with the cases of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;, but I don't see how the theory applies to other verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am eating an apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the proposed theory explain the progressive here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are getting married next month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same question for this one as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also, what is with the following said by the poster?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..., decisions that have been taken (but might have not been),...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T19:57:00.487" Title="Theory of Enunciative Operations and the present progressive" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;present&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12998" CreationDate="2015-08-05T13:59:03.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &lt;strong&gt;the first question&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Is the depicted dependency structure plausible at all?&quot;, one would have to answer: &quot;That depends on the type of dependency grammar one employs&quot;. Kuhlmann, the author of the cited paper, uses a (&quot;mildly&quot;) non-projective dependency grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Non-projective&quot; (aka &quot;discontinuous&quot;) is any (sub-)tree structure when a dependency edge (the arrows that connects nodes as in the picture above) crosses over a projection edge (the vertical dotted edge in picture above). This property has been discussed at length within the dependency grammar literature. Please see the Wikipedia page on this topic [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_%28linguistics%29]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Usually non-projectivity (aka discontinuity) arises when the dependency grammar views dependency basically as &quot;government&quot;. In the next example  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Wem  hat er geholfen?&#xA; whom has he helped &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the question word &lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; is governed by &lt;em&gt;geholfen&lt;/em&gt;, rather than by &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt;. A government-based dependency grammar will then connect &lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;geholfen*, which results in a non-projective structure because the dependency edge connecting &lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;geholfen&lt;/em&gt; will cross the projection edge of &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; (and that of &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A number of dependency grammarians regard the limitation on government as too restrictive, and they view the apparent non-projective dependent node (&lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; in the above example) as somehow displaced. My own take on this phenomenon can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.fi/julkaisut/SKY2009/Gross_Osborne_NETTI.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. That paper also contains references to other authors within the dependency grammar framework.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a projective dependency grammar, such as the one I prefer, the depicted structure is not possible. Rather the nodes &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt; would attach, i.e. be connected via a dependency edge, to the highest verb node, namely &lt;em&gt;zag&lt;/em&gt;. Such a constellation is licit under the following condition:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rising&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A node A may be immediately dependent to another B, even though B doesn't govern A, if B dominates the node C, the governor of A.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my example, &lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; = A, &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; = B, and &lt;em&gt;geholfen&lt;/em&gt; = C. Since B &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; dominates &lt;em&gt;geholfen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Wem&lt;/em&gt; may rise in order to connect to &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt;. There are a number of constructions that elicit rising, but they have different syntactic properties.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[I'd also like to emphasize that I believe that the depicted tree structure is inaccurate even on a purely non-projective approach. &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; is governed by &lt;em&gt;zag&lt;/em&gt;, in a specific construction that requires an infinitive verb, here &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;. Hence &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; is not a dependent of &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;. The same holds for &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt;, which must be a dependent of &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;, rather than of &lt;em&gt;lezen&lt;/em&gt;. In non-projective systems, semantics sometimes occludes the appropriate syntactic relationships.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &lt;strong&gt;the second question&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. &quot;What would be appropriate edge labels?&quot;, must first decide on whether the apparatus is projective or non-projective. If it is non-projective, standard (i.e. government) labels are in order. In the Dutch example, &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt; would be the indirect object of &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt; the direct object of &lt;em&gt;zag&lt;/em&gt; (rather than the subject of &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A projective account can choose whether it wants the labels to reflect the actual dependency connections, or the underlying government relationships (which for the most part are identical; only in examples as the ones used here does a difference appear).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yet another aspect is whether the grammar is mono- or multistratal. If the grammar is multistratal, i.e. employs more than one level of description, then labels may be transferred from one level to the next higher one. Or such a grammar may choose to use different sets of labels depending on the strata it uses at a specific moment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the depicted tree structure were correct (which it isn't as I argued above), the labels for all three nominals, i.e. &lt;em&gt;Jan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Piet&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Marie&lt;/em&gt;, would have to be [subject], and obviously that cannot be true because the verbs &lt;em&gt;helpen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lezen&lt;/em&gt; are infinitive forms, and infinitives cannot command subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that helps a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3593" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T13:59:03.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T14:10:37.560" Score="6" ViewCount="913" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not have a linguistic background, but I am working on a research project that involves measuring the complexity of news. One of the metrics that I was interested in is the semantic complexity of a text (newspaper article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use an automated content analysis method to analyse thousands of articles, so this measure (or index) should be universally applicable to any English language text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really now if it's possible to measure semantic complexity in such a way, but any suggestions, references to literature etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10246" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T04:32:27.843" Title="Measuring semantic complexity of a text" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T14:17:12.597" Score="5" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an explanation, or maybe even an observation, how inflection appears in a language? With inflection I mean phenomena like the germanic ablaut (&quot;man/men&quot;, &quot;Mann/Männer&quot;) or the inflection in arabic. These declension or conjugation systems do not seem to be causally related to fusing suffixes to a word root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T18:04:54.983" Title="How does inflection evolve in languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-05T15:34:36.743" Score="-3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe a complex language in necessary for a religious ideology involving man, mind, awareness, material world, immaterial world and such to be passed on. Was sanskrit the first language that was sufficiently complex to convey these kinds of ideas or were there earlier ones? Would a proto-language been good enough for this or is not enough known about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5042" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T17:50:30.390" Title="Was sanskrit first complex language" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-08-05T17:55:23.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13004" CreationDate="2015-08-05T15:36:46.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The writer at ELU is saying basically the same thing as De Wit and Brisard, the authors of the paper cited in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12999/epistemic-modality-and-the-present-tense-in-english&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;, just using different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that neither of these is trying to &quot;explain&quot; all progressives&amp;mdash;they're trying to account for edge cases. The writer at ELU is specifically concerned with the use of stative verbs in the progressive, De Wit and Brisard are interested in a wider range of cases; but both treatments are concerned with situations in which the progressive construction seems to contrast with the simple construction along some other axis than the ordinary perfective/imperfective contrast. De Wit and Brisard locate this axis on a contrast between &quot;epistemic contingency&quot; and &quot;epistemic necessity&quot;, and use a little &quot;possible-worlds&quot; terminology to describe it. I don't see a lot of difference between that and the ELU guy's description: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the form BE+V-ing really does is to indicate that the action or state refered to by the verb in question is presented by the person speaking as actualized (that's the mental operation marked by the suffix -ing) and that this actualization is intimately linked to the situation under consideration (which is the core value of the verb BE). In other words : the action/state is &lt;strong&gt;specifically true in this situation to the (possible) exclusion of other situations.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;decisions made&quot; thing is one of a range of possible situations in which the progressive might be called into play:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that can translate into many things, such as actions that are underway now (present continuous), decisions that have been taken (but might have not been), things that are unusual, things that will take place because of a present decision, or things that the person speaking judges of negatively (I observe it, and I'm not happy about it)...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the progressive means in any particular utterance is (&lt;em&gt;pace&lt;/em&gt; De Wit and Brisard) a matter of pragmatic inference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:36:46.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12943" CreationDate="2015-08-05T15:59:18.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read [in one of David Crystal's books, I think] that a politically-unbiased alien classifying human languages would call Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan dialects of one language, but would say that what's called Arabic would have to be split, so different is it from West to East.  With that perspective, I'd say that the American and British English are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; close.  Grammar?  Differences are really trivial.  Spelling?  Trivial again, although [amusingly] it seems to annoy some 'Little Englanders'.  Pronunciation?  More difference within the British Isles than between standard British and American.  Vocabulary is interesting: even recent inventions often get different names, e.g. cell-phone v. mobile, GPS v. SatNav&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5650" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:59:18.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13008" CreationDate="2015-08-05T17:50:30.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are demonstrably wrong in your belief. Apart from the fact that your definition of &quot;complexity&quot; is far too simplistic and not subject to any kind of measurement, the question of language commensurability has long been settled in linguistics. Perhaps most famously, Sapir summarized the position thus in 1921:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's referring to the fact that all languages exhibit sufficient syntactic and morphological complexity to be put to any use a human mind can put them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that does not necessarily mean that all languages will have developed the vocabulary to describe some of the issues that Plato or Confucius deal with. But that has little to do with complexity. Many of the languages that used to be called primitive address vast biological taxonomies, kinship structures with fine distinctions and subtle cosmogonies. All of these Plato or Confucius would find difficult to address. Also, we should not confuse specialised vocabulary (such as that used by theologians, nuclear physicists or chartered accountants) with complexity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this obviously applies historically as well synchronically. Therefore, not only was Sanskrit not the first 'complex' language, it was not anywhere near the stage where language first achieved the structure and complexity it has now. No language prior to about 6000 years ago has been recorded but the material culture in evidence suggest complex communication tens of thousands of years into the past. However, this brings us to questions of the evolution of language complexity in general which are far outside what can be addressed in this context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some attempts recently to slightly soften this strict commensurability stance but certainly not to the degree your question expects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T17:50:30.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13007" CreationDate="2015-08-05T18:04:54.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been dealt with in literature on grammaticalization. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; has all the detail to get you started on further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there are a number of processes through which lexemes lose their original meanings and through processes like enclitization become morphemes. We can even see some of these in progress as in the English will going from will=want to 'll. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of development has been famously summarized as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;content word → grammatical word → clitic → inflectional affix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T18:04:54.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13006" CreationDate="2015-08-05T18:18:55.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no uniform measure of semantic complexity that you could apply to any text regardless of genre, topic or speaker/listener/reader context. Even within newspaper articles you will find several genres and topic areas where a single measure is unlikely to suffice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;semantic complexity&quot; is used in the literature it generally refers to individual words and categories - e.g. in the context of aphasia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the best place to start your research would be the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;readability&lt;/a&gt; which deals with text complexity in several dimensions by proxy.  Another place to look is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_density&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical density&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, expect this to be a non-trivial problem if you want to go beyond the most simple of measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T18:18:55.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T03:10:07.853" Score="0" ViewCount="1248" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Etymology [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trouver#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; of French 'trouver'&lt;/a&gt; ]&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Old French language&quot;&gt;Old French&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trover#Old_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;trover&quot;&gt;trover&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/truver#Old_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;truver&quot;&gt;truver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Vulgar Latin&quot;&gt;Vulgar Latin&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Latin/tropare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Latin/tropare&quot;&gt;*tropāre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, present active infinitive of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Latin/tropo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Latin/tropo&quot;&gt;*tropō&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Latin&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tropus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;tropus&quot;&gt;tropus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; confer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;trope&quot;&gt;trope&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Etymology [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tropus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; of Latin 'tropus'&lt;/a&gt; ]&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Ancient Greek language&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%84%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;τρόπος&quot;&gt;τρόπος&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (trópos, “a turn, way, manner, style, a trope or figure of speech, a mode in music, a mode or mood in logic”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dtropus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt;] trŏpus , i, m., =       τρόπος.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I. In rhet., a figurative use of a word, a trope&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  II. A manner of singing, a song&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What semantic notions underlie  &quot;figure of speech&quot; (in τρόπος) with &quot;song/a way of singing&quot; (in 'tropus'). Regular human speech differs from singing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T08:22:27.867" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T08:22:27.867" Title="How did the Greek 'tropos' evolve to the Latin 'tropus'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13014" CreationDate="2015-08-06T05:36:13.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An aside to begin with: these were fully explained in the sources you gave. If they are confusing, please ask about how their presentation of their etymologies/their logic, etc., is confusing to you, rather than just asking about the etymology itself. It saves everyone confusion and repeat questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your first question: Greek τρόπος has a much more general meaning than what you seem to think it does; all dictionaries in Perseus agree that it is something like 'a turn, direction,  way' with pretty straightforward expansion into 'a method, manner, style'. The clearly related verb τρέπω 'I turn' also has to do with turning. Textual evidence clearly backs this up as well, with usages for something like the directional 'way' (the LSJ cites Herodotus 2.108 who uses this sense in that passage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why the Etymonline jumped to the 'musical' meaning. Perhaps a typo? There certainly was a musical meaning (like 'style (of play)'), but it would be much simpler to keep it in the realm of 'writing' and 'argument', and just have it 'figure of speech' all the way down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aside: Greek and Roman scholars, when contemporaries, had excellent command of their own language, of course, but also the other language. This bi-directional language contact situation is a very different than a more one-directional language contact situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="1832" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T23:47:24.847" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T23:47:24.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3889" CreationDate="2015-08-06T08:50:47.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most  obvious common feature of Slovene and Slovak is that they kept the original old name for their ethniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Slovo&quot; means &quot;word&quot; in all Slavic (sic!) languages. The old Slavs called themselves &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Slověni&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and that means those speak a language we understand. The others were &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Němci&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (the mute) which means &quot;Germans&quot; today (more or less in all slavic languages). Both Slovaks and Slovenes just kept their original all-slavic name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proglas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proglas&lt;/a&gt;: &quot; Togo že radi slyšite, &lt;strong&gt;Slověne&lt;/strong&gt;, si: Darъ bo jestъ otъ Boga sь danъ,&quot; The &quot;Slověne&quot; does not mean today's Slovenes it means Slavs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The female memeber of the Slovak nation is &quot;Slovenka&quot;, and the name of the Slovak language is &quot;Slovenský jazyk&quot; so that is even closer to the old name than the male &quot;Slovák&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not draw the wrong conclusion that people were speaking &quot;old Slovak&quot; in Great Moravia, that is a complete nonsense raised by some Slovak nationalists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that the Slovene belongs to the Southern Slavic branch and the Slovak to the Western Slavic branch. For me as a Czech it is much easier to understand Slovak, but the intelligibility is still somewhat increased by hearing and reading it more often than e.g. Slovene. Small Czech children can have problems understanding Slovak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T08:50:47.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13019" CreationDate="2015-08-06T19:12:26.500" Score="1" ViewCount="847" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German the sound of 'w' in the English word &quot;wallet&quot; does not exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, it is difficult for native German speakers to speak it any indeed many say &quot;vallet&quot; instead, which is the typical cliche German accent in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what puzzles me is an inverse phenomenon, so to speak: native speakers say the &quot;w&quot; sound instead of &quot;v&quot;: e. g. &quot;wector&quot; instead of &quot;vector&quot;, &quot;conwex&quot; instead of &quot;convex&quot;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how does this phenomenon come to be? I assume the mechanism in which mistakes arise is that a native speaker &quot;forgets&quot; that they are in a foreign language and pronounces the words as if they were spelled in their native language. But how does this invention of new sounds / word pronunciations which don't exist in either language come to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10250" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:12:23.117" Title="How Mistakes in Pronunciation Happen for native Germans speaking English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13018" CreationDate="2015-08-06T19:49:57.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speakers have learned to pronounce this foreign sound, but they still haven't learned the concept of a [v/w] contrast, so they retain the phonology of German but shifted the phonetics to the thing that is typical of English (having [w]). This is known as &lt;em&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T19:49:57.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T22:44:08.987" Score="3" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find each PIE phoneme (which I don't know how to pronounce) transliterated and represented as IPA? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Afterword:&lt;/strong&gt; (Delightedly but fortuitously) Searching 'Grimm's Law' on Youtube directed me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/VnjfHu9eJLM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this helpful video (explained in simple English)&lt;/a&gt;, at whose 2 mins 27 secs juncture, the videographer (though a linguistics student) displays and pronounces (his understanding of) the PIE consonants.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The video above motivated me to watch this user's other videos. &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/9jlcV7DYL3o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;In this one&lt;/a&gt;, he explains and pronounces ALL the PIE phonemes, to his understanding.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T01:36:53.467" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T01:36:53.467" Title="Where are PIE phonemes transliterated as IPA?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13020" CreationDate="2015-08-07T00:02:49.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find one list of phonemes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. These are for the most part IPA symbols, except for ḱ etc. for &quot;palatals&quot; and numerically-subscripted &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;laryngeals&quot;. This represents the standard reconstruction / phonetic interpretation, but there are alternative theories (such as that supposed &lt;em&gt;d,g&lt;/em&gt; were really &lt;em&gt;t,k&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;p,t,k&lt;/em&gt; were &lt;em&gt;pʰ,tʰ,kʰ&lt;/em&gt;). There are non-substantive alternative transcription practices such as use of hooked-ɦ as the diacritic for the voiced aspirates -- IPA doesn't mandate use of one vs. the other, and it isn't clear whether there's a difference between &lt;em&gt;bʰ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bʱ&lt;/em&gt; in languages -- also, the voiced aspirates can be written as &lt;em&gt;b̤&lt;/em&gt;. That article gives a decent overview of controversies regarding the reconstructed phonemic system and transliteration practices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T00:02:49.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13020" CreationDate="2015-08-07T00:13:06.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to keep in mind that there are a number of hypotheses about the exact phonetic value of many of the reconstructed phonemes of Proto-Indo-European. Any modern introduction to Indo-European linguistics--even the Wikipedia article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European language&lt;/a&gt;--should explain what symbols they use and how, specifically, they use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, Mallory and Adams 2006 have a brief discussion, mainly focusing on stop consonants, which are the most debated. Forston 2004 has a more significant discussion. There are many other introductions and many important works specifically on reconstructing Proto-Indo-European phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mallroy, J. P. and D. Q. Adams. 2006. &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Forston, Benjamin W. 2004. &lt;em&gt;Indo-European Language and Culture&lt;/em&gt;. Malden, Oxford and Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T00:13:06.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32078" CreationDate="2015-08-07T02:39:36.450" Score="0" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=thwart&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thwart (adv.)&lt;/a&gt; [...]&#xA;      c. 1200, from a Scandinavian source, probably Old Norse þvert &quot;across,&quot; originally neuter of thverr (adj.) &quot;transverse, across,&quot; &#xA;  (cognate with Old English þweorh &quot;transverse, perverse, angry, cross,&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   from Proto-Germanic *thwerh- &quot;twisted, oblique&quot; (cognates: [...]),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  altered (by influence of *thwer- &quot;to turn&quot;) from *therkh-,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;strong&gt;PIE **terkw-* &quot;to twist&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (cognates: [...]), possibly a variant of *twerk- &quot;to cut.&quot; From mid-13c. as an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-thw1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This excellent helpful explanation&lt;/a&gt; and the above, describe the etymology to engage 'turns', rather than any 'twist', thus my question. This engagement of 'turns' is evidenced in the use of the word 'transverse' above, one of whose Latin etymons is &lt;em&gt;vertere&lt;/em&gt; (= to turn). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please expose and explain the hidden, missing semantic drifts and links. What is &lt;strong&gt;twisted&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T14:25:15.593" Title="Why was 'thwart' assigned to PIE *terkw- &quot;to twist&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-07T14:05:44.510" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; p 13 of 20,  &lt;em&gt;Style&lt;/em&gt; Stands Still, by &#xA;John M. Lawler, University of Michigan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[4.] -ɔl 2-Dimensional  shawl sprawl &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;scrawl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;wall&lt;/strong&gt; (Motion: crawl brawl squall haul fall)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [5.] -æp 2-Dimensional   flap clap lap map wrap slap strap &lt;strong&gt;cap&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;chap&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   -æk 2-Dimensional Connected   plaque stack bracket tacky ash&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     -ap Off 2-Dimensional  bop top hop pop flop (Separate: drop topple lop crop)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [8.] -mp 3-Dimensional  rump hump lump &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; bump tump dump plump&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prof Lawler defines 'dimension' on p 11 of 20. However, I don't understand or can't imagine the difference in dimension between the verbs for 2D and 3D above. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4.] A scrawl is written on a thin parchment or papyrus; so the 'height' of the writing material seems trivial. So should a scrawl be 1D?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5.] How is a &lt;strong&gt;cap&lt;/strong&gt; 2D? Similarly, how is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;chap&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; 2D? Humans (including chaps) can jump, and so can move along the z-, beyond the x- and y-axes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[8.] How is a stump 3D, but a wall (in 4) 2D? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T18:11:12.600" Title="Phonosemantics: Doubts on the dimensions of verbs" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-07T16:00:43.960" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a speech recognition system and to begin with I need all phonemes of English in audio format by which I will be able to compare with my speech fragments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10255" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T18:53:34.780" Title="From where I can get phonemes in audio format?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13025" CreationDate="2015-08-07T18:11:12.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, lemme take these in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dimensionality is the difference between a point, a line, a surface, and a volume.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Respectively, these are 0-, 1-, 2-, and 3-Dimensional images. It's geometric.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pretty much everything physical falls into one of these dimensional classes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And humans deal with, and talk about dealing with, physical objects and phenomena. A &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;scrawl&lt;/em&gt; is a variety of writing. All writing requires (and thus implies) a 2-D surface to write on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;cap&lt;/em&gt; is a variety of hat that fits closely over the skull. That makes it 2-D.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt; is a 3-D object -- the remains of a tree that's been cut down -- that is roughly the same size in all 3 dimensions, like a &lt;em&gt;hump&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;lump&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;bump&lt;/em&gt;. That's what &lt;em&gt;-ump&lt;/em&gt; means.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt; also has the &lt;em&gt;st-&lt;/em&gt; 1-D assonance like &lt;em&gt;stick, stem, stand, stiff, still&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;In the case of &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt;, the 1-D shows up, too; a &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt; is a 3-D object that used to be a 1-D object.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;wall&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, is a 2-D object, pretty straightforwardly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you seem very literal in your interpretations, I add that when I say something is &quot;1-D&quot;, I don't mean that it lacks the other two dimensions, but rather that it has only one salient dimension. Trees are 1-D, walls are 2-D, and stumps are 3-D because &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; have (respectively) 1, 2, or 3 salient dimensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T18:11:12.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13027" CreationDate="2015-08-08T04:49:36.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing. What can be recorded (i.e. what occurs in speech) is an allophone, and phonemes are abstractions built from allophones. Every allophone occurs in a particular context, so the acoustic value of /k/ in &quot;keep&quot; is different from the value of /k/ in &quot;cool&quot;. Allophones also do not have well-defined acoustic beginning and ending points; for example the acoustic properties of [t] in &quot;bat&quot; extend backwards into the vowel [æ] so that one can (somewhat) identify &quot;bat&quot; as distinct from &quot;bad&quot; before reaching the consonant [t]/[d].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T18:53:34.780" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T18:53:34.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-08T20:03:25.923" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mr. Hemmingway, do you write books?&quot; &quot;I do.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Did Mr. Hemmingway write this book?&quot; &quot;He did.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as the pronoun &quot;he&quot; or &quot;I&quot; stands in place of the noun &quot;Mr. Hemmingway&quot;, so the verb &quot;do&quot; or &quot;did&quot; stands in place of the very &quot;write&quot; or &quot;wrote&quot;.  This is complicated by the way in which English uses &quot;do&quot; or &quot;did&quot; as an auxiliary verb in questions: maybe it could be argued that &quot;do&quot; or &quot;did&quot; in the answer is merely the same verb, &quot;do&quot; or &quot;did&quot;, that is the main verb in the question.  That &quot;do&quot;, &quot;does&quot;, or &quot;did&quot; would stand in place of another verb when it is expected to be understood what the other verb is, is very far from the only way in which the verb &quot;do&quot; is used in English.  However, this inspires a question: &lt;b&gt;might there be, in some languages, some verbs whose only function is to bear the same relation to verbs in general that pronouns bear to nouns?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="2602" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T20:09:20.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T06:58:44.973" Title="What is to verbs as pronouns are to nouns?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13035" CreationDate="2015-08-09T06:54:32.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing is to verbs as pronouns are to noun phrases.  The definite pronouns he/she/it share reference with their nominal antecedents.  Pro-verbs, however, are quite different -- they share meaning with their antecedents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T06:58:44.973" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T06:58:44.973" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T21:21:42.830" Score="2" ViewCount="958" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered two terms recently: grammaticalization and grammaticisation. While in most papers I have read so far both terms seem to be used interchangeably, the following paper appears to differentiate between them: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250214/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250214/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, my question: What difference, if any, is there between the two terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks for any suggestions, references or just comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @Gaston Ümlaut's comment, my current understanding of the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gramaticization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as used in the paper is that it is restricted to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;result&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; rather than the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and, perhaps, that it only refers rather narrowly to a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lexeme → grammatical formative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; kind of development, and not, say, the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pragmatic → syntactic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; type of change/result. Is this correct? And have others distinguished the two terms in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T09:35:38.370" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T01:44:51.210" Title="What is the difference between grammaticalization and grammaticization?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T23:05:19.387" Score="1" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen scholars claim that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;sign languages are simultaneous whereas spoken languages are linear&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, however, the notion of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;linearity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; vs. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;simultaneity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is misleading at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, the modality of sign languages, the &quot;&lt;em&gt;optical signal&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, makes it possible to view the articulatory gestures &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas in spoken languages they are mostly &lt;em&gt;invisible&lt;/em&gt; and only &lt;strong&gt;indirectly&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;transmitted&quot; through the &lt;em&gt;acoustic channel&lt;/em&gt; by means of speech signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet from the speech signal, by means of a complex bundle of &lt;strong&gt;frequency&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;amplitude&lt;/strong&gt; information (which is an awful simplification, admittedly), quite a lot of meaningful linguistic information can be extracted simultaneously, such as &lt;strong&gt;vowel quality, pitch&lt;/strong&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we move on to morphology, we can clearly refer to the many kinds of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;non-concatenative/nonlinear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; morphology, such as &lt;strong&gt;apophony&lt;/strong&gt;, be it manifested by &lt;strong&gt;tone&lt;/strong&gt; and/or &lt;strong&gt;stress&lt;/strong&gt; patterns, vowel/consonant &lt;strong&gt;gradation&lt;/strong&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also seen people claim that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;spoken languages are &lt;strong&gt;1D&lt;/strong&gt; (one-dimensional), while sign languages are &lt;strong&gt;3D&lt;/strong&gt; (spatial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, too, seems somewhat strange to propose: apart from the reasons mentioned above, do articulatory gestures not &lt;em&gt;occur in space&lt;/em&gt;? True, they cannot be &lt;em&gt;seen&lt;/em&gt;, but we could just as well say that the articulatory gestures of sign languages cannot be &lt;em&gt;heard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a user of a sign language and my knowledge of sign languages is extremely limited, but my impression has been that the options for employing simultaneity may well be considerably wider only thanks to the character of the communication channel, and that the options can be compared, albeit loosely, imperfectly and a bit ad hoc, for example, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;laryngeal / jaw angle / velum lowering ~ facial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;labial ~ left hand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bilabiality / labiodentality / protrusion / compression ~ left-hand fingers and their configuration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;coronal ~ right hand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tongue-tip/blade configuration ~ right-hand fingers and their configuration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consonants ~ locations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consonant transients in vowels ~ movements between locations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on... Just like with spoken language we may refer to the notion of &lt;strong&gt;tiers&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;autosegments&lt;/strong&gt;, even if the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;feature geometries&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are largely, if not completely, different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would both experts on spoken and sign language agree if I stated that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;spoken languages&lt;/em&gt; are articulated &lt;strong&gt;internally&lt;/strong&gt; and thus transmitted &lt;strong&gt;indirectly&lt;/strong&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;sign languages&lt;/em&gt; are articulated &lt;strong&gt;externally&lt;/strong&gt; and thus transmitted [more] &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be this very &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;directness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that would make &lt;em&gt;iconicity&lt;/em&gt; easier to employ and, indeed, employ it more widely, transparently and systematically, whereas the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;indirectness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of the spoken languages would make the use of iconicity &lt;em&gt;more constrained and difficult to utilize&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I have also come across an article mentioning something that may, indeed, be &lt;strong&gt;unique to sign language&lt;/strong&gt;, and even &lt;strong&gt;truly three-dimensional&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;spatial deixis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Although it effectively weakens, if not cancels, my anti-3D stance, we can still keep it apart from &lt;strong&gt;simultaneity&lt;/strong&gt; and say that sign languages can employ the external 3D space to express spatial deixis, which spoken languages cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be grateful for any relevant suggestions, references or simply comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I have just discovered the question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/543/simultaneity-in-natural-languages&quot;&gt;Simultaneity in natural languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; discusses somewhat similar issues, but, hopefully, mine is still different enough to deserve its existence. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T09:02:35.687" Title="Is the idea of &quot;simultaneity&quot; in sign language as opposed to &quot;linearity&quot; in spoken language really tenable?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T23:37:06.863" Score="2" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;A teacher claimed, but forgot, the   Ancient Greek term that describes adjectives used passively, as used in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The weather has been in a most &lt;strong&gt;curious&lt;/strong&gt; state here since Wednesday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The teacher emphasised his use of &lt;strong&gt;curious&lt;/strong&gt; NOT to mean 'strange', but to mean a state that MAKES one &lt;strong&gt;curious&lt;/strong&gt; (ie: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=curious&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;inquisitive, solicitous&lt;/a&gt;). Does anyone know this term (of causation)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T09:16:27.997" Title="Which Ancient Greek term describes adjectives used passively?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13045" CreationDate="2015-08-10T11:28:05.590" Score="2" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through the sources for early indo-iranian and according to B. Fortson the first documented manifestation of this branch are the proper names in Mitanni Texts. Since the indo-iranian word are very scarce in this documents and, if I understood it correctly, treated as prestigious borrowings, I wonder what is the base language of official papers of Mitanni Empire. I assume that Hurrian was the basic vernacular since the Hurrians stood for the core of the Empire's population, but I can only guess the language of the goverment. On the basis of the time and location I would say Akkadian but it's only an assumption. Does anybody has some solid information on this topic ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:29:49.870" Title="Base language of Mitanni Texts" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13042" CreationDate="2015-08-10T12:03:25.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, the answer is yet: We don't know. The capital cities of Mitanni aren't localised nor excavated. The accounts of Mitanni come from the Hurritic city of Nuzi and from external relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T12:03:25.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13018" CreationDate="2015-08-10T13:12:23.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative explanation: perhaps you aren't actually hearing an English &quot;w&quot;, but a German &quot;v&quot;, which is closer to &quot;w&quot; than the English &quot;v&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1422" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:12:23.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13042" CreationDate="2015-08-10T13:29:49.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mitanni texts are in Hurrian, a non-Indo-European and non-Semitic language. As you mentioned, they contain some loanwords and proper names taken from proto-Indo-Aryan. This form of Hurrian is written in an Akkadian-based cuneiform script, so it is likely that the scribes also used Akkadian for certain types of documents. By the way, &quot;official papers&quot; is not really the right term for a chancery that wrote not on paper but on clay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T13:29:49.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12121" CreationDate="2015-08-10T15:47:39.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known as an &lt;strong&gt;ephelcystic s&lt;/strong&gt; and is analogous to the ephelcystic t in &quot;Parle-t-il français?&quot;. It's euphonic rather than etymological, used to avoid a hiatus between the imperative and the y/en. I believe that historically there would have been an elision instead (&quot;retourn'y&quot;) but I don't have a source confirming this. When still considered incorrect, this type of speech error is called &lt;strong&gt;pataquès&lt;/strong&gt;, from the example erroneous phrase &quot;je ne sais pas-t-à qu'est-ce&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, I believe that the -s in Class II and Class III imperatives &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; etymological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reasonable summary of this on the French Wikipedia articles about &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_en_fran%C3%A7ais&quot;&gt;French liason&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phon%C3%A8me_%C3%A9phelcystique&quot;&gt;ephelcystic phonemes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastEditorUserId="6809" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T16:10:10.793" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T16:10:10.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T00:10:11.190" Score="2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abbreviate 'a language with free word order' to FWOL (eg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1476/what-is-word-order-used-for-in-free-word-order-languages&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/557/5306&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/9063/5306&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/931/5306&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;). I exemplify with Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When trying to read a FWOL, I must firstly &lt;em&gt;consciously&lt;/em&gt; determine the lexical categories of each word, before  the  second step of determining the meaning of each word. Normally, English and French are written as SVO, and so do not pose the first problem, but this problem recurs when reading English or French poetry. For example, in Latin, if the main verb is located at the end of a long sentence, I must then reread the sentence, even thrice, to understand it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lingering hindrance of mine induced my question (in the title above). To wit, on the subject of word order, do FWOL require a different cognitive capability or process?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is unraveling free word order a separate mental skill, which may be subconscious, but which non-FWOL speakers lack and must learn anew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T02:05:18.430" Title="Does understanding free word order require a distinct cognitive process?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T02:15:42.337" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a .wav file and a txt file that I am trying to use with the P2FA aligner. For some reason, it skips every word. I even tried running it with just two words: &quot;the robotics&quot;. My text file is this: THE ROBOTICS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the error I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;max:desktop m$ python ./p2fa/align.py june.wav junemurphy.txt 3.TextGrid&#xA;SKIPPING WORD ??THE&#xA;SKIPPING WORD ROBOTICS&#xA;SKIPPING WORD &#xA;SKIPPING WORD &#xA;./tmp/sound.wav -&gt; ./tmp/tmp.plp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the question marks mean? Both of these words must be in the CMU dict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T19:23:43.113" Title="Why does my P2FA skip every word?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2015-08-11T06:23:55.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welsh shows some signs of a semantic classifying system in its noun plurals. There are a great many plural affixes in Welsh, partly reflecting the old stem-endings of nouns (which have often disappeared in the singular forms due to the loss of final vowels) and partly reflecting new analogical processes based on semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;od&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; very often occurs with animal names: &lt;em&gt;llewod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lions&quot;, &lt;em&gt;cathod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cats&quot;, &lt;em&gt;llwynogod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;foxes&quot;, &lt;em&gt;tyrchod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hogs, boars&quot;, &lt;em&gt;crancod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;crabs&quot;, &lt;em&gt;llyffantod&lt;/em&gt; &quot;toads&quot;, &lt;em&gt;drywod&lt;/em&gt;  &quot;wrens&quot;, etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most widely-known animal names tend to resist this pattern, perhaps through the force of frequency: &lt;em&gt;ceffylau&lt;/em&gt; &quot;horses&quot;, &lt;em&gt;cwn&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dogs&quot; (pronounced [kun]), &lt;em&gt;defaid&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sheep&quot;, ieir &quot;hens&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the nouns with plurals in &lt;em&gt;-od&lt;/em&gt; also have an alternate (and possibly older) variant of the plural: e.g. &lt;em&gt;llyffaint&lt;/em&gt; &quot;toads&quot;, &lt;em&gt;crainc&lt;/em&gt; &quot;crabs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another pattern can be seen with the plural suffix &lt;strong&gt;-ydd&lt;/strong&gt;, which seems to be frequently used with nouns referring to pathways (roads/rivers/etc.), fields and certain other geographical locations: &lt;em&gt;meysydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fields&quot;, &lt;em&gt;heolydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;roads&quot;, &lt;em&gt;afonydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rivers&quot;, &lt;em&gt;corsydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;swamps&quot;, &lt;em&gt;dolydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;meadows&quot;, &lt;em&gt;neintydd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;brooks, streams&quot;, &lt;em&gt;camlesydd&lt;/em&gt; ”canals” and so on. (I haven't seen this pattern with &lt;em&gt;-ydd&lt;/em&gt; pointed out in a reference grammar yet, but based on my survey of the lexicon, it seems pretty likely that there is or has been a semantic aspect to its use.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the &lt;em&gt;-od&lt;/em&gt; suffix, there are words for which &lt;em&gt;-ydd&lt;/em&gt; coexists with a possibly-older plural form: &lt;em&gt;cyrs&lt;/em&gt; &quot;swamps&quot;, &lt;em&gt;naint&lt;/em&gt; &quot;streams, brooks&quot;, &lt;em&gt;camlesi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;canals&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside these features, Welsh retains the IE masculine and feminine gender classes (the neuter having dissolved into masc. and fem.). In the modern language, there is no longer much systematic difference in the way that masculine and feminine plurals are formed, although some patterns can be observed. For example, the vowel &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; is generally more likely to appear in feminine nouns (both in the root and in suffixes): cf. &lt;em&gt;dinasoedd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cities&quot;, &lt;em&gt;modrabedd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;aunts&quot;. (This is because the old feminine ending *&lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;, which disappeared a long time ago in Welsh, had the effect of lowering the vowel *&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; in a preceding syllable to *&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T06:31:07.950" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T06:31:07.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13040" CreationDate="2015-08-11T07:00:31.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Metonymy&lt;/strong&gt; (from a Greek word meaning &quot;change of name&quot;) is the best term I know of for this type of semantic development. It means that the meaning of a word transfers or extends to something that is closely associated with the original meaning. In this case, the meaning of the term &lt;em&gt;curious&lt;/em&gt; expanded from describing a mental state (inquisitiveness) to describing things that cause that mental state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;em&gt;metonymy&lt;/em&gt; is not quite as specific a term as you are looking for, because it does not refer exclusively to the change &quot;mental state -&gt; causer of the mental state&quot;. But, I am not sure that such a specific term exists (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T07:00:31.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2015-08-11T13:24:21.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's make following assumptions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lexeme is a group of inflectional forms connected by the core semantics, the most primitive meaning that points the recipient to a vague semantic cloud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perfective or imperfective aspect is a grammatical category on the same level as number, gender, tense, case etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that basis, I would say that the group of &quot;mówić&quot; and &quot;powiedzieć&quot; and any inflectional form derived from these infinitives ( as: &quot;powiedziałem,mówił,mówiąc,powiedziawszy,powiedzieli&quot; etc.) &lt;strong&gt;is in fact the same lexeme&lt;/strong&gt;. You could even add &quot;przemówić&quot; here and all its forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though suppletion occurs here it still retains the same basic meaning &quot;to speak&quot;, which consitutes a lexeme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lexeme (...) is &lt;strong&gt;a unit of&#xA;  lexical meaning&lt;/strong&gt; that exists regardless of the number of inflectional&#xA;  endings it may have or the number of words it may contain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last thing to add, if you would try to answer that question on the basis of sheer native speakers' perception of language, I would be quite suprised if any Pole considered &quot;powiedzieć&quot; and &quot;mówić&quot; separate in any different way than &quot;zjeść&quot; and &quot;jeść&quot;. And I am stating that as a native Polish speaker :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T10:12:48.760" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T10:12:48.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12679" CreationDate="2015-08-11T13:26:18.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to quickly write down an answer to my own question, on the off chance that someone else will come to LSE with a similar question at some point in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MP2 v1 (the original formulation) and MP2 v2 (my alternative suggested above) are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; identical - see the following (informal) argument by counter-example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that MP2 v2 quantifies over variable X of type corresponding to terms, as opposed to quantification over variable X of type of &lt;em&gt;intensions&lt;/em&gt; of terms like in the original MP2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) The intension of a term, say, &quot;caret_up [lambda X. exist x. P(x) and caret_down X(x)]&quot; (for some constant symbol P), is not generally a constant function, since the extension of a term (i.e. the set of properties denoting the term in w) can vary depending on the world of interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) In IL, the intension of a variable is necessarily a constant function, since for any X of VAR_L, the interpretation of X in w only depends on variable assignment g, which is independent of the world of interpretation. So, for any X of VAR_L, the intension of X, or equivalently: caret_up X, is a constant function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we see from (b) then, MP2 v2 is a weaker statement than MP2 v1, since it only expresses the equivalence of relation Delta holding between x (of type (e)) and a &lt;strong&gt;constant&lt;/strong&gt; function of type (s, ((s, (e, t)), t)) with relation Delta* holding between two objects of type (e). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per argument (a), not every statement we want to fall under MP2 is of this form however, i.e. the intension of a (quantified) term is not generally a constant function. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for any term s.t. the intension of the term is not a constant function, MP2 v2 will not apply, i.e. in models of MP2 v2, &quot;Delta(x, caret_up [lambda X. exist x. P(x) and caret_down X(x)]&quot; is not generally equivalent to &quot;[lambda X. exist x. P(x) and caret_down X(x)](caret_up [lambda y. Delta*(x, y)]), while in models of MP2 v1, the equivalence holds in general (see Thm. 1, p. 177, Gamut II).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10002" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T13:26:18.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T14:59:38.230" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered the notion of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;word ageing&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Lexemes (unless and until replaced through internal or external innovation) grow older and older, and with time they tend to (1) acquire some additional meanings (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;increase in polysemy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) and (2) lose morphological transparency (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonological erosion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have seen this discussed in connection with &lt;em&gt;lexical (in)stability&lt;/em&gt;: If the above holds, then, conversely, if we find words within the (&lt;em&gt;native&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;basic vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt; (such as that represented by the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Swadesh list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) that are both morphologically transparent [compounds or derivatives] and display very little polysemy, or even none, this means that, in all likelihood, we are dealing with (&lt;em&gt;relatively recent&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;innovations&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the relative stability correlates with textual &lt;strong&gt;frequency&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. &lt;em&gt;the more frequent&lt;/em&gt; the lexeme, the &lt;em&gt;higher&lt;/em&gt; its stability), but this is the semantic side of the equation. I wonder if this can be true of the form, that is: (a) &lt;em&gt;Is the form also generally preserved better in the stable part of the lexicon?&lt;/em&gt; And (b) &lt;em&gt;is it thanks to the higher frequency?&lt;/em&gt; And also, if we &quot;measured&quot; the proportion of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;irregularities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (appearing randomly, though not causelessly) within a Swadesh-like list, (c) &lt;em&gt;would they be &lt;strong&gt;lower or higher&lt;/strong&gt; than the ones found in a comparable list of culture-specific lexemes?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the questions I would like to get answers to. Could anyone possibly recommend some reliable bibliographical references to works discussing these phenomena (i.e. mainly &lt;em&gt;frequency/stability&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;polysemy/semantic ageing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phonological erosion/[morpho]phonological ageing&lt;/em&gt;)? I doubt introductory textbooks will be of any use to me, but I might be wrong, so I will be grateful for just anything relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T22:47:43.523" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T22:47:43.523" Title="Word ageing: what reliable bibliographical references can be recommended?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11373" CreationDate="2015-08-11T22:16:45.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Italian: (Che) cosa mangi?  &#xA;Gloss: (what) thing you-eat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The in-situ wh-phrase is not used ('Mangi cosa?' seems akward).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The register is either informal (che ommitted) or formal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More often found in progressive form: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Cosa stai mangiando?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wWeWX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wWeWX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry but the mandarin part is a bitmap because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6249/typing-chinese-character-in-the-main-site?newreg=ee8eb6ee0d0640059821be4cf492ba0e&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.  Please feel free to comment and I will amend/edit accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:37:24.850" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T22:16:45.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T23:44:20.927" Score="3" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;One time in a linguistics class I sat in on, we were discussing ambiguous sentences such as &quot;I killed the man with the spoon&quot;. In English, as written, it is unclear if the subject is using a spoon for the killing, or if the object being killed simply had a spoon in his possession. Learning Polish, I started to wonder if ambiguities like this could be resolved by varying declension of the noun &quot;spoon&quot;. For example, using the genitive case to say that the object possessed the spoon, as opposed to the instrumental case to indicate the the subject used the spoon for the killing, i.e: &quot;Zabiłem człowieka z łyżką.&quot; (łyżką -- spoon, inst.) v.s. &quot;Zabiłem człowieka z łyżki.&quot; (łyżki -- spoon, gen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, is this the correct way to resolve this ambiguity in Polish, or even grammatically correct? Also, do languages with richer case systems have less of these kinds of ambiguities in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10278" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T02:19:22.423" Title="Can a case system in a language help resolve gramatical ambiguites?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13056" CreationDate="2015-08-12T00:13:38.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a native speaker of Czech, which is quite close to Polish, I think &lt;em&gt;ambiguity&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;can be avoided&lt;/strong&gt;, or at least &lt;strong&gt;reduced&lt;/strong&gt;, to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your Polish sentence, it would probably be wrong to use the genitive. In Czech, we would simply leave out the preposition, and I thought the same could be done in Polish (which I can speak a little, coming from a region close to the Czech-Polish border in the east of the Czech Republic), but I was wrong - it could not, as another answer below, apparently written by a native speaker of Polish, explains. Hence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Zabiłem człowieka z łyżką.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (unambiguously &quot;a man holding/possessing a spoon&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Zabiłem człowieka łyżką.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (unambiguously &quot;a man killed with a spoon&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I tought that, in Polish just like in Czech, the &lt;strong&gt;instrumental&lt;/strong&gt; can be used precisely as its name suggests, i.e. to denote &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;instruments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but as the example above suggests, its use is rather &lt;em&gt;comitative&lt;/em&gt; or even &lt;em&gt;possessive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the following Czech parallels showing both the differences and similarities between Czech and Polish in this respect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Zabil jsem člověka se lžící.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (ambiguous, where grammatical)*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Zabil jsem člověka lžící.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (unambiguous: &quot;killed with a spoon&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note that the &quot;prepositional instrumental&quot; is not grammatical in all varieties of Czech, certainly not in Standard Czech. This means that with some, maybe most, varieties, no ambiguity ever arises, whereas with others, it may be avoidable. I suppose languages may vary quite a bit in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T21:41:40.583" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T21:41:40.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13056" CreationDate="2015-08-12T00:21:42.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages would have ambiguity between instrument and attributive possessum (and possibly also comitative `I went &lt;strong&gt;with a friend&lt;/strong&gt;'), and some won't. This is not strictly dependent on case. For instance, the sentence you give will be ambiguous in German&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Er ermordete dem Mann mit der Gabel.&#xA;he.NOM killed DEF.ACC man with DEF.DAT fork&#xA;`He killed the man with the fork.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but will be disambiguated in Russian, where the case is the same, and difference is in whether the preposition is present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) a. On ubil chelovek-a vilk-oj.&#xA; `He [[killed a man] [with a fork].'&#xA;he.NOM killed man-ACC fork-INSTR&#xA; b.  On ubil chelovek-a s vilk-oj.&#xA;he.NOM killed man-ACC with fork-INSTR&#xA; `He [killed [a man with a fork]].'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from bracketing, the ambiguity is structural, so it will be present in any language where these particular adjuncts coincide in their coding, be it case, adpositions, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I can't help with Polish, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T12:16:29.300" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T12:16:29.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T00:38:09.507" Score="6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;To some extent, &lt;em&gt;vowels&lt;/em&gt; can be predicted based on the size of the vowel inventory, so, for example, in a 3-vowel system, it will be /a i u/, whereas in a 4-vowel system, we will get /a i u ɛ/ or /a i u ɨ/ etc. (based on Crothers 1978). We can also predict consonants, to a limited degree, based on their numbers, place of articulation etc. In addition, we can predict the colour terms based on the number of colours distinguished in the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I would like to know what kind of implicational tree can one draw when we think of the TAM categories (separately - as &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aspect&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mood&lt;/em&gt; - or as a bundle), e.g. if a language only has two tenses, what are they (not)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 tenses: &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;non-past&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;non-future&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 tenses: &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 tenses: &lt;em&gt;past I&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;present I&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;past II&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;present II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be grateful for any relevant references too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T23:10:02.707" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T23:10:02.707" Title="TAM categories: Can they be predicted from their numbers (a language's TAM inventory size)?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13056" CreationDate="2015-08-12T01:33:58.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, &lt;strong&gt;the case system can help avoid ambiguity, but it is not a silver bullet&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the functional standpoint, the example sentence is actually &lt;em&gt;two distinct phrases&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;killed (a man who has a spoon);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(killed using a spoon) a man;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of them convey a different message and therefore they can be represented with two distinct syntax trees. &lt;strong&gt;It is only a coincidence&lt;/strong&gt; that they look identically in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you try to express these two phrases in an arbitrary language, you need to obey the language's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_and_binding_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Government and binding&lt;/a&gt; rules that would bind your subject, verb, and object into a phrase. These rules may or may not involve noun cases, particles, articles, bound morphemes, word order, or whatever language &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; existing in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For every language, sooner or later you'll find pairs of messages that produce two identical phrases. &lt;em&gt;Noun cases can make your search a bit longer, no more.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it worth mentioning that such ambiguity has produced an entire type of humor (sometimes, anti-humor), called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attempt to find an unambiguous phrase structure grammars is one of the major reasons for inventing constructed languages. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; has been &lt;strong&gt;deliberately designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;. We can naturally assume that if there was a natural language with no ambiguity, Lojban would have been never created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T02:47:59.390" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T02:47:59.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T04:26:34.120" Score="1" ViewCount="2146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making educational videos (in maths, science, etc.) that I plan to put on YouTube and perhaps elsewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am hoping to reach as wide a global audience as possible. Obviously then, if there is any one language I should use, it is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is: If there is any one single accent in English I should use, what is it? Is there any one single accent in English that is considered by linguists to be the most widely and easily understood across the world? (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/In-spoken-English-which-accent-is-the-most-easily-understood-globally&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Similar Quora question.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3222" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T20:26:12.610" Title="What accent (for the English language) is most widely and easily understood?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13062" CreationDate="2015-08-12T08:59:34.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having taught English for a few years, and being a non-native speaker of English and a native speaker of Czech, I think that if you want to be understood as widely as possible, the variety to choose should be a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;rhotic&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; dialect. Although I generally prefer &lt;em&gt;RP&lt;/em&gt;, because most of my teachers were British, perhaps, I have noticed that the disappearing &lt;strong&gt;/r/&lt;/strong&gt;'s often seem quite confusing to the learners, and even if they learn not to pronounce them in (pre-consonantal) syllable codas, they usually keep having problems catching the word. Add to it the &quot;&lt;em&gt;intrusive&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;/r/&lt;/strong&gt;'s&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;/r/&lt;/strong&gt;'s&quot;, and you can see one possible source of trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequent disappearance and reappearance of sounds might turn out to be a rather universal complication for most, if not all, English learners. On the other hand, the issue is far from this simple, as the ease of comprehension always depends on the particular learner's native language (especially phonological) features, and on their experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;&lt;em&gt;being understood globally&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is really what you are pursuing, then I would recommend something along the lines of &lt;em&gt;Standard North American&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps, which most of my own students tend to find way easier to follow than, say, &lt;em&gt;Received Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; (interestingly enough, the relatively great differences between the two vowel inventories don't seem to pose serious problems for most Czech learners). On the other hand, you might want to consider making it just a little more difficult for the learners using a &lt;strong&gt;non-rhotic&lt;/strong&gt; variety instead, as this could prepare them a bit better for the every-day reality of having to cope with the tremendous (especially phonetic and phonological) variability of both standard and non-standard (or native and non-native) Englishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T09:05:16.257" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T09:05:16.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T06:00:34.120" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;While having a discussion with a friend who oft malapropriates their/there/they're, and to/too/two, he maintains the position that he has a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;disbelief that the current system is the best one&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He contends that all that is &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; is a single word, say, 'ther', that will accommodate all the uses and that since the context can be gained from a spoken conversation, that a &quot;better system&quot;, in his view, would be a system with just the single option - essentially, collapse all homophones into single words with the same orthography, but with combined definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't share this perspective; I find the written word to be a superior form of language than spoken, and detest the bastardization of linguistic rules by people who can't be bothered to proofread and follow grammatic and syntactical rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sentiments aside; what specific &lt;strong&gt;reasons&lt;/strong&gt; are there to persist variant spellings of homophones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also made reference to the supposed 'inefficiency' of having to learn and use the variant homophones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I do not refuse to learn, I just will not go out of my way to re-type, or proof read something when I feel it reasonable that it will be understood. Also, I feel that its requirement is not necessary and the rules should be amended to simply and expedite conversation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - what are good linguistic reasons to retain the heterographic homophones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10282" OwnerDisplayName="Ehryk" LastEditorUserId="10282" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T16:38:20.460" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T19:51:13.957" Title="What are good linguistic arguments for keeping heterographic homophones?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13060" CreationDate="2015-08-12T09:24:58.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a starter, you may look up the Wikipedia article on Grammatical Tense (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense&lt;/a&gt;). Besides &lt;em&gt;past vs non-past&lt;/em&gt; you can also find &lt;em&gt;future vs. non-future&lt;/em&gt; in a two-tense system, e.g., in Quechua.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T09:24:58.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13064" CreationDate="2015-08-12T11:11:06.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only reasons I can come up with are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to avoid or reduce &lt;strong&gt;semantic ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to keep tract of the word's &lt;strong&gt;history&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Czech orthography&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, we keep both &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; and &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;, and both &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;ý&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; and &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;í&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;, although their pronunciations have merged to [&lt;strong&gt;ɪ&lt;/strong&gt;], and [&lt;strong&gt;iː&lt;/strong&gt;], respectively, in most varieties of the language. While it helps the reader to distinguish &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; &quot;beaten&quot; from  &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;byt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; (both pronounced [&lt;strong&gt;bɪt&lt;/strong&gt;]) &quot;flat/apartment&quot;, and &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bít&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; &quot;to beat&quot; from &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;být&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; (both pronounced [&lt;strong&gt;biːt&lt;/strong&gt;]) &quot;to be&quot;, it has a major impact on school children who have to &lt;strong&gt;memorize&lt;/strong&gt; close sets of words preserving the &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;'s and &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ý&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;'s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example from Czech is the use of graphemes for &lt;strong&gt;voiced&lt;/strong&gt; obstruents (such as [&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;], [&lt;strong&gt;ɡ&lt;/strong&gt;], [&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;], [&lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;]) in devoicing environments or their &lt;strong&gt;voiceless&lt;/strong&gt; counterparts in voicing environments to maintain the &lt;em&gt;underlying &lt;strong&gt;phonological&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; information to some extent. This, unlike the &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y/ý&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;/&amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;i/í&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; distinction, can actually make things easier for learners, who usually retrieve the underlying information from the various inflected forms anyway, hence they know, for example, they have to write &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plod&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&gt; [plɔt] &quot;a fruit&quot;, because the genitiv singular is pronounced [&lt;strong&gt;plɔdu&lt;/strong&gt;], and they know they have to write &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&gt; &quot;a fence&quot;, because the genitive singular is pronounced [&lt;strong&gt;plɔtu&lt;/strong&gt;] etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is &lt;strong&gt;not simple at all&lt;/strong&gt; and depends largely on &lt;strong&gt;your preferences&lt;/strong&gt; as a reader or learner, as well as &lt;strong&gt;various properties of the language&lt;/strong&gt; in question plus its &lt;strong&gt;orthographical system&lt;/strong&gt;. Notice that one of the main obstacles Czech learners of English have to face is the high level of &lt;strong&gt;spelling unpredictability&lt;/strong&gt; (spelling-to-pronunciation mapping and meaning-to-spelling choices) and I also remember reading an article mentioning the very same kind of problems pre-to-early-school native speakers of English have to face (which is why it seems to take them much longer to acquire basic reading and writing skills than it takes children trying to acquire a more predictable orthographical system, such as the Czech one). On the other hand, of course, learning the English spelling system &lt;strong&gt;trains learners' memory&lt;/strong&gt;, which could be considered a pro rather than a con.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, being a non-native speaker (and forever a learner) of English, I would welcome a radical reform leading to a simplification and regularization of the English spelling system. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T11:11:06.333" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13064" CreationDate="2015-08-12T12:12:07.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to the Middle English Dictionary, you will see what English looks like when words are spelled according to the way they sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&amp;amp;byte=178070811&amp;amp;egdisplay=open&amp;amp;egs=178073841&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&amp;amp;byte=178070811&amp;amp;egdisplay=open&amp;amp;egs=178073841&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&amp;amp;type=headword&amp;amp;q1=suster&amp;amp;rgxp=constrained&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&amp;amp;type=headword&amp;amp;q1=suster&amp;amp;rgxp=constrained&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, words are spoken differently in different parts of a country and in different parts of the world, and pronunciation changes over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even if we could &quot;decide&quot; on a normalized spelling for each English word (New York accent wins?  London?  Los Angeles?) the spellings would eventually get out of sync with the sound, and for many speakers they would be out of sync from the get-go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One also wants to preserve the ability to read what is already written.  Do you want people 100 years from now not able to read what is written today? How easy do you find Middle English?  or even Elizabethan English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6857" LastEditorUserId="6857" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T12:19:15.357" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T12:19:15.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13056" CreationDate="2015-08-12T15:42:49.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Polish, ambiguity in that case is not existent.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  killed the man with a spoon (man with spoon) - Zabiłem człowieka z łyżką&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I killed the man with a spoon (using a spoon) - Zabiłem człowieka łyżką&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of the polish sentences are completely unambiguous. Instrument of an action is expressed always in the instrumental case, with no preposition at all. The preposition &quot;z&quot; means &quot;with&quot; and provokes instrumental but only syntactically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one case when a prepositional phrase can be used to express an instrument but it occurs only in slang language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's from a Polish native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T22:07:58.437" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T22:07:58.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13056" CreationDate="2015-08-12T16:11:55.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by Dr Jetušek is great but I would strengthen it a little bit: the declension indeed helps to fight the ambiguities and whenever they survive, which is a very small percentage of cases, it is almost deliberate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Czech and Polish use declension with seven cases which were inherited from the Old Slavic system. The declension often plays the same role that require additional prepositions in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seven cases, as ordered by the Czech rules, are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nominative: Who? What?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;genitive: Of whom? Of what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dative: To whom? To what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accusative: [verb, object follows] whom? What?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vocative: We call, we shout.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;locative: About whom? About what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instrumental: With whom? With what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added some translations of the usual &quot;questions&quot; by which the Czech schoolkids actually learn them – almost no children are taught the Latin names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the translation was hard, e.g. in the case of accusative, because English doesn't have seven cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vocative is exceptionally alive and well in Czech and perhaps Polish: to call a person, we have to use a different case. A big portion of the languages have had it but in most of them, it went extinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The genitive (2nd) and the accusative (4th) often have the same form of the word; the dative (3rd) and locative (6th) tend to be similar, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cases help to distinguish lots of different possible meanings of the sentence. Some sentences with the word &quot;wave at&quot; (&quot;mávat&quot;) and &quot;fork&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vidlička mává (A fork is waving, the fork is the subject.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mává bez vidličky (He is waving without the fork.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mává vidličce (He is waving to the fork – as if it were a human.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zvlnil vidličku (He made the fork wavy, he rippled the tool.)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(also: Mává skrz vidličku (He is waving through the fork.))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mává: &quot;Vidličko!&quot; (He is waving and shouting: &quot;Miss Fork!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mává o vidličce. (He is waving, as if waving were a language, and his story is about a fork.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mává [s] vidličkou. (He is waving with the fork.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And others. You may see that the 3rd case automatically translates with an extra &quot;to&quot; while the 7th case almost always translates with &quot;with&quot; to English. So in these two cases, the role of the case for preserving the right meaning is essential, even in the absence of any prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Dr Jetušek wrote, the 7th case does not need an explicit &quot;with&quot; (in Czech: &quot;s&quot; or &quot;se&quot; if the following object starts with &quot;s&quot; or a similar consonant). When &quot;with&quot; is explicitly written down, it sounds like the object possessed the spoon or fork; when &quot;with&quot; is omitted and one only uses the pure 7th case, it almost always means that the word in the 7th case was the tool to achieve the process given by the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2nd case, genitive, often represents ownership when no preposition is added. For example, the following sentences represent different case (1-7) of the word &quot;[Old] Hungary&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Král Uher daroval koně. (The king of Hungary donated a horse [to someone].)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Král Uhrám daroval koně. (The king, probably a different one, donated a horse to Hungary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Král Uhry daroval koňům. (The king donated Hungary to the horses. The 3rd and 4th cases are reverted relatively to the previous example but the order of the words may be kept. The declension is enough to distinguish what is the gift and what is the recipient. Languages with declension unavoidably have a much greater freedom in the ordering of the words.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Král Uhrami daroval koně. (The king donated the horses, through or using Hungary in some way. The Czech sentence isn't quite comprehensible but it is arguably fine from the grammar viewpoint.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seven cases (of declension) are useful to change or preserve the meaning but so is the letter case. The word &quot;uhry&quot; in lowercase means &quot;pimples&quot; which is something else than &quot;Hungary&quot;. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T16:11:55.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13084" CreationDate="2015-08-12T14:21:15.040" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During this time he &lt;strong&gt;became disillusioned with mathematics&lt;/strong&gt;, and after sitting in on a linguistics course taught by Eric Hamp, he became more and more interested in the subject and began taking language courses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._McCawley#Biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prof Lawler's comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/117290/is-there-any-real-difference-between-to-as-a-preposition-and-to-as-an-adverb?rq=1#comment239855_117310&quot;&gt;on ELU&lt;/a&gt; induced me to learn about the deceased linguist Prof James D. McCawley. Does anyone know how and why Prof McCawley &lt;strong&gt;became disillusioned with mathematics&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" OwnerDisplayName="LePressentiment" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T02:11:02.307" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T02:11:02.307" Title="How and why did Prof James D. McCawley become disillusioned with math?" Tags="&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13064" CreationDate="2015-08-12T19:51:13.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final sentence in your post, &quot;&lt;em&gt;...what are good linguistic reasons to retain the heterographic homophones?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what linguistics is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Theoretical linguists, in their capacity as researchers, are never interested in prescribing any rules or maintaining or &quot;retaining&quot; anything. They are interested in making observations about how language works and how it changes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most linguists study spoken (or signed) languages; written records and orthography do come into play in linguistic research, but mainly as tools to gain insight into the historical development of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comments above you ask about a linguistics professor correcting spelling in written assignments. When I corrected my students' phonology assignments, I never cared if there were prescriptive grammar or spelling errors; I only wrote comments if there were errors having to do with the concepts being tested in the assignments. Think of a math teacher grading an assignment involving a geometric proof. Would that teacher take points off for an extraneous apostrophe in a sentence like &quot;Because ABC is a right triangle, the square of it's hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the other sides&quot;? Nope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But actually, whether or not a linguistics professor corrects spelling errors in a written assignment is (as people have mentioned above) irrelevant. You bring up the scenario of an advisor correcting a thesis draft. In that case, the professor might comment on a misspelling, but &lt;strong&gt;not in her capacity as a linguistic researcher!&lt;/strong&gt; Such a comment would merely be in the interest of &quot;playing by the rules&quot; of the academic establishment at large. When my choir director in college took us on concert tours, he dutifully saw to it that the underage members of the group (the majority of us) didn't drink after performances, as that is the law in the U.S. But his personal political belief was that people should be allowed to drink from the age of 18. It would be silly to extrapolate from my music director's behavior that there must be a &quot;musical reason&quot; for maintaining the legal drinking age of 21.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that aside, I invite you to think about what you really mean when you lament the &quot;bastardization of linguistic rules&quot;. The truth is, the way any individual uses language (written or spoken) can be seen as a &quot;bastardization of linguistic rules&quot; from the perspective of someone who lives in a different place or a different time. In my comment below your post I teased you about the dangling participle in your first sentence. Some people would consider that sentence construction to be a &quot;bastardization&quot; of English; as a linguist, I don't care one way or the other, especially since I had no trouble inferring your intended meaning. Even the spelling of &lt;em&gt;bastardization&lt;/em&gt; that you use would be considered a bastardization of the written form of English by those in the UK who would spell it &lt;em&gt;bastardisation&lt;/em&gt; (although their complaints would not be entirely founded from a historical standpoint--see &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/ize-or-ise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this blurb on -ize and -ise&lt;/a&gt;)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T19:51:13.957" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T22:34:17.143" Score="10" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there's a consensus in linguistic nomenclature about using the aforementioned prefix in naming the reconstructed languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we all probably know, in linguistics, there's a custom of naming every unattested, hypothetical, reconstructed mother-language with by adding the prefix &quot;proto-&quot; to the family name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am curious about is, is this a very strict rule and if one would find attestation of even one or two words from the reconstructed language, would it impose a necessity of dropping the prefix from the language name or calling it differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, what about the names in the model of &quot;Common Germanic&quot;, &quot;Common Indo-Iranian&quot;? Is there any distinction here between these and the &quot;proto&quot; type ? Frankly, I have encountered both of those and I am wondering if the choice of using one indicates anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T01:23:53.637" Title="Is the prefix &quot;proto-&quot; reserved only for unattested languages ?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2015-08-12T22:55:15.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would add that, &lt;strong&gt;phonetically&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; is a matter of &lt;strong&gt;timing&lt;/strong&gt;, more precisely of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-onset_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VOT or Voice-Onset Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which refers to the time when your vocal folds begin to vibrate with respect to the moment of release of the consonantal &quot;blockage&quot;. Generally, there is a continuum of values, spanning from &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt; consonants, having a &lt;strong&gt;negative&lt;/strong&gt; VOT, to &lt;em&gt;voiceless aspirated&lt;/em&gt; ones, which have a &lt;strong&gt;positive&lt;/strong&gt; VOT. &lt;em&gt;Voiceless unaspirated&lt;/em&gt; consonants would probably have &lt;strong&gt;zero&lt;/strong&gt; VOT or one that is slightly positive but still close enough to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages may differ in how exactly they segment the &lt;em&gt;VOT continuum&lt;/em&gt; and how they employ it within their &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonological systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. That is why it may be quite tricky to compare &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;voiceless&lt;/em&gt; consonants of one language to &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;voiceless&lt;/em&gt; consonants of another. In two-member systems like that of English, it is sometimes more convenient to talk about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; consonants and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; consonants, one of whose phonetic correlates may be zero-to-positive/negative-to-zero VOT, depending on factors such as the position of stress (again, phonetically, &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; usually refers to relatively greater/lesser energy needed to pronounce them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting case could be some German loanwords in Czech. Both languages have a &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; consonants of a sort, but they differ in the specifics. Czech, for instance, has borrowed the word &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blech&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; &quot;sheet metal&quot; from German, but the &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; stops in the source variety of German had a VOT value so close to the VOT of the &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt; stops in the latter, that the latter has borrowed it as &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;plech&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;. Similarly, &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gesicht&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; &quot;face&quot; has been borrowed as &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ksicht&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; &quot;mug, kisser&quot; (slang &quot;face&quot;), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, wrong VOT values seem to be one of the most common and typical pronuciation mistake among Czech (and other Slavic) learners of English: our &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; VOT is way too long (too negative), which isn't a big problem, but our &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt; VOT is way too short (too close to zero), which may sound like English &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt;. Moreover, English &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt; stops can have their VOT considerably longer in certain positions, producing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;aspiration&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which never occurs in Czech (at least not systematically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, Czech /b/ does sound like /b/ to the ear of a native English speaker most of the time, but so may Czech /p/. The issue is a bit more complicated, because &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; segments are generally &lt;strong&gt;shorter&lt;/strong&gt; than their &lt;em&gt;fortis&lt;/em&gt; counterparts cross-linguistically, which is fairly frequently, though not completely universally, compensated for by the &lt;strong&gt;length of the preceding vowel&lt;/strong&gt; (vowels tend to be a bit longer before voiced and shorter before voiceless consonants). Hence, languages might employ phonetic clues other than just VOT to make distinctions between the different series of consonanants more conspicuous and easier to perceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as mentioned above, some languages may not employ the voicing distinctions systematically, hence replacing [p] by [b] doesn't change the meaning of a word (although it may be perceived as &quot;sounding odd&quot;) - in such cases, we usually say that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;voicing is not phonological&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It doesn't mean, however, that we cannot &lt;em&gt;describe&lt;/em&gt; the level of voicing (VOT) of a particular consonant when it is pronounced. It may only differ in a way that makes it difficult to choose the right &lt;em&gt;cover symbol&lt;/em&gt;. But that's a topic for phonology rather than phonetics, and I'm not sure how deep in this topic you would like to immerse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voicing is a matter of VOT (when your vocal folds begin to vibrate = produce voice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VOT is a continuum ranging from negative to positive values&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negative-to-zero is more or less &quot;voiced&quot;, zero-to-positive is more or less &quot;voiceless&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;high positive values usually result in &lt;em&gt;voiceless aspiration&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;continuum&lt;/em&gt; implies that languages may differ considerably in their levels of voicing: some languages do not differentiate VOT, others differentiate between two values, some may differentiate between three&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where exactly the border between the two or three series lies is pretty much language-specific&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T14:53:18.090" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:53:18.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T00:14:38.000" Score="3" ViewCount="2388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to take a list of words from diferent languages (each language being a diferent file) and compare such lists by using their IPA equivalents to see how many diferent homophones are shared between diferent languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's there any library that will make this easier?&#xA;(convert a string to their IPA equivalent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10289" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T16:47:22.887" Title="How to convert a string to their IPA equivalent" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13075" CreationDate="2015-08-13T06:43:38.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're going to have at least two problems with this which will limit the size of your word lists and/or the number of languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IPA is not a perfectly universal standard directly representing each sound's phonetic qualities without any regard to phonology. Each language has its own conventions and each transcription has a level of detail encoding that is down to the individual decisions of the encoder. (E.g. the different pronunciation dictionaries of English do not actually perfectly correspond to each other.) So you're going to have to create your own basis of comparison and translate the IPA encodings used for a particular language into that. That will be massively time consuming the more languages you look at because you're going to have to actually research what the IPA means exactly in that language - just looking at the IPA will not be enough. So practically, you can really only do this if you already know what you're looking for (at least the area). Also, do not forget that IPA will not capture the different types of variation present in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, there are no tools that can do this universally or reliably for most languages other than English. Many languages have sufficiently regular orthography (Czech, Greek, Spanish, etc.) that they don't actually need to encode their word lists into an intermediary standard such as IPA. In fact, the IPA you see in English dictionaries is just a substitute for such an orthography rather than a phonetically accurate representation. This means that it will be relatively easy to construct a simple IPA converter for most of these languages - but all the caveats from point 1 still apply. This will have been done for languages that have text-to-speech technology but there's no open source list of these that I know of. But you will still have to convert these into a system that makes them comparable for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English, this has mostly been done and there are a lot of online tools. I've used &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.photransedit.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Photransedit&lt;/a&gt; which gives decent (but not 100% reliable) results. But you can also get word lists annotated with IPA such as the &lt;code&gt;[MRC database][2]&lt;/code&gt; (which uses a machine readable format with a 1-1 correspondence to IPA (done before SAMPA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T06:43:38.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12960" CreationDate="2015-08-13T07:47:58.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That looks like  Hebrew cursive script&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the letters seem to be incomprehensible for me but I assume that is due to the writer's personal style. Hebrew cursive can differ dramatically between users, even to the point of being unreadable between individual native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, as it was noticed earlier,  the exclamation marks are placed on the right, which suggests left to right writing which is inconsistent with Semitic scripts. &#xA;Then again, major part of the letters can be connected to Hebrew whilst only a couple of them don't fit any possible character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems unlikely that it is mix of different alphabets but also I don't think that it is very probable to find so many Hebrew characters in non-Hebrew script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A would assume that either this is a mix-up or some Semitic cursive script (maybe Hebrew).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Here you can find the characters and compare them with those from your text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The probable Semitic letters are :&#xA;Tet, Nun, Resh, Samekh, Qof, Tav, Pe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, these peculiar diacritics could stand for Hebrew niqqud but the usage would be extremely inconsistent because I can see only a dot placed below and above a letter and that would be only a tiny fraction of the whole niqqud system. &#xA;But then if we nevertheless considered them niqqud, then this &quot;exclamation mark&quot; could be just letter Vav with an /i/ diacritic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T10:59:46.997" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T10:59:46.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13073" CreationDate="2015-08-13T09:33:48.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we call a certain word &lt;em&gt;Common Germanic&lt;/em&gt; we mean that it is attested in all the major subbranches of Germanic (at least Scandinavian, Western Germanic and Gothic). It may have minor differences in its concrete shape, but we are sure that it is the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also usual to term only such words &lt;em&gt;Common Germanic&lt;/em&gt; that cannot be reliably related to other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the proto- prefix I think it is strictly reserved to reconstructions. When you find some ancient words they belong to some concrete language which will be named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T09:33:48.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T10:23:09.820" Score="4" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I started to read about language typology and then got a hint about PIE ablaut system I have been wondering if there might be any prehistorical connection between these families at least concerning the apophony as a grammatical tool for distinguishing between tenses, aspects etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, I am aware that these families are considered separate genetically by modern historical linguistics, I am also aware of the Nostratic theory, and I know that in this modern stage semitic vowel alternation does not work in the same way as in reconstructed PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interests me is not the hypothetical common ancestor for pie and semitic but the question of the ablaut in these branches :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sources for this phenomenon in both branches&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;could these both systems be considered typologically equal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possible prehistorical contact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;Fortson 2004&lt;/em&gt;, the probable origin of PIE ablaut is just sound change that later became grammaticalised and expanded to the whole verb system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not what is the situation like in Semitic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have some information on the whole topic? I know that it requires going way back to the proto periods and probably its nothing else than pure speculation. Have there been any researches done in this field? Do you have some references ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T14:06:35.130" Title="Possible connection between PIE Ablaut and Semitic vowel alternation" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3093" CreationDate="2015-08-13T13:14:19.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there are languages that do not have the contrast voiced/voiceless for stops. When you write such a language you can choose b or p for the bilabial stop without making any assumption on its (irrelevant for that language) voicedness. This happens, e.g., for many Australian languages (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages#Phonetics_and_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages#Phonetics_and_phonology&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T13:14:19.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4165" CreationDate="2015-08-13T14:46:50.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it depends on the languages involved, and it depends on the segments and/or suprasegmentals involved. For example, in my experience, Mandarin speakers do well with English word stress; however, French speakers have much difficulty. This may be partly due to the ability of Mandarin speakers' ability to make use of tone in acquiring English stress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the problems that French speakers have with English word stress also extend to sentence stress: both are notoriously difficult for these learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly with segmentals: the status of the sounds in the L1 and L2 play a role. For example, if a sound in contrastive in L2 English, such as the voiced interdental fricative, has an allophonic function, such as in L1 Spanish, it seems to be more difficult to acquire than if it does not exist at all in the L1 (Munoz-Sanchez 2003).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for pitch contours, in my experience, I have found, for example, that Arabic speakers have much difficulty with English pitch contours; whereas French speakers do quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think more research needs to be done in this area to provide a satisfactory answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:46:50.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T15:46:50.577" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak North American English. When I pronounce &quot;R&quot;, the fleshy part under my chin inside my jawbone tends to move up. When I stress the &quot;R&quot;, it really moves up and back. I think the back of my throat is constricting, or the root of my tongue is making my vocal tract smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the muscle(s) doing that called? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is that sound described linguistically?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10291" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T18:40:29.463" Title="North American English: R Muscles and Linguistic Description" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13082" CreationDate="2015-08-13T15:57:22.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sound is called &lt;strong&gt;retroflex approximant&lt;/strong&gt;, which means that it produces a stream of air not narrow enough to be classified as a fricative consonant(&quot;sh&quot;,&quot;v&quot;) but also not  wide enough to be classified as a vowel. The retroflexion means that the tongue is curling backwards while producing the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what is the muscle you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T15:57:22.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13071" CreationDate="2015-08-13T16:35:28.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the details, but here's what he said in an interview in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/glot3-5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Glot&lt;/em&gt;, a newsletter for linguists&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Originally, I was in mathematics, but for no particularly good reason — I really hadn’t thought much about what I was getting myself into. I was taking some language courses and enjoyed them and at the same time I got more and more turned off by mathematics. Eventually I thumbed through the University of Chicago time schedule and saw that there was something listed as linguistics. So I sat in on a linguistics course taught by Eric Hamp, which I greatly enjoyed. Then I got a mathematics scholarship to study in Germany, at the University of Münster. But instead of doing very much mathematics, I took all sorts of language courses, including a Dutch course. During that year, I got more and more turned off by mathematics. After I got back to Chicago, I wanted to take a language course just for the fun of it. Japanese was offered at a convenient time, so I took it and I fell in love with the language right away. I also started looking around in the library for linguistic books. I came upon Syntactic Structures and it really turned me on. Not long after that I saw the announcement for the new linguistics graduate program that they were starting at MIT. I applied, got accepted, went there, became a linguist and I have been enjoying life much more.ever since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How come?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linguistics is fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Languages are weird and wonderful things. As long as you are perceptive enough there is plenty to keep you happy and busy. In that respect, I think linguistics is way to hell more interesting than mathematics. There’s a wonderful quotation from Bertolt Brecht at the beginning of Feyerabend’s &lt;em&gt;Against Method&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Ordnung gibt es meistens wo nichts ist. Sie ist eine Mangelerscheinung&lt;/em&gt;. “There is order mainly where there is nothing. It’s a phenomenon of absence.” And, well, &lt;em&gt;Ordnung gibt es in der Mathematik&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess you could say he loved mathematics but he loved data more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T16:35:28.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T17:10:59.353" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I get the impression they're two different lexemes, but would like some opinions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10292" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T09:15:13.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T09:15:13.887" Title="Are 'feminism' and 'feminist' part of the same lexeme, or two different lexemes?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-29T17:57:47.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13062" CreationDate="2015-08-13T20:26:12.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that a rhotic dialect would be preferable, and also along the same lines of preserving distinctions used in other dialects, use a dialect where &quot;cot&quot; and &quot;caught&quot; are pronounced distinctly (I used to suggest central Ohio, but the distinction is dying there). However, there are a number of casual-register phonetic reductions that are now fairly standard in the US, which tend to make American English difficult for non-speakers to understand. In actual casual speech, vowels get seriously reduced or deleted, consonants and entire syllables disappear or are radically changed (e.g. k→x in flapping contexts; coda reduction of /t,k/ in the direction of glottal stop). These are mostly register-governed rules, so if you aim for a slower, less-conversational register, that should bring these features under control. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T20:26:12.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T22:38:44.357" Score="4" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking of developing a software tool that would make it possible to calculate the efficiency of a particular writing system (attested rather than hypothetical) for a particular language (primarily attested, usually ancient and thus also extinct) with respect to the ambiguity of interpretation/reading, whether this ambiguity is caused by &lt;strong&gt;homography&lt;/strong&gt; or any other &quot;deficiencies&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily, I would like to use the tool to find out which of the scripts or writing systems compared make it possible to represent a given [&lt;em&gt;set of&lt;/em&gt;] language[&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;] in writing &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;more unambiguously&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, especially, though not exclusively, with respect to phonetics and phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we may not have access to native users of the scripts, any psycholinguistic testing would have to be carried out only indirectly, on a group of speakers of a different, but typologically similar, language and, perhaps, using romanization/transliteration to avoid having to teach them new graphemes and face literacy/familiarity issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, while I can imagine constructing tests like this, I would like to have a tool that could use as its imput relevant features of the particular phonology PLUS features of the script/writing system used to represent strings of text of the language. Its output would then be some kind of relative or absolute enumeration, a function whose arguments would be the...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;number of phonological combinations a particular string can represent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;their subset with respect to the given language's phonology and phonotactics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, more simply, &lt;em&gt;how many (phonotactically permissible) texts can be transliterated by a particular string of text using the script&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. &lt;em&gt;how many (phonotactically persmissible) texts can a particular string of text written in the script represent&lt;/em&gt; (as compared to another script). It follows that we would always have to apply the tool on &lt;strong&gt;existing text&lt;/strong&gt; and thus, in fact, measure &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ambiguity of reading a particular text written in a particular script&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as compared to the same text being writen in another script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, the following example based on a syllabic script, originally fitted to write a different language, but later (imperfectly) adapted for Ancient Greek, will show better what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Case Study&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Linear B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The predominantly syllabic writing system of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linear B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; displays a lot of ambiguity with respect to the phonology and phonotactics of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mycenaean Greek language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; it was used for. Some examples include...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no disambiguation between /&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;/ and /&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no &lt;strong&gt;voicing/aspiration&lt;/strong&gt; disambiguation in most obstruents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no marking of &lt;strong&gt;initial aspiration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no marking of &lt;strong&gt;vowel length&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;omission of &lt;strong&gt;sonorants&lt;/strong&gt; and /&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;/ in &lt;strong&gt;syllable codas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the script as used by Greeks was capable of representating sonorant-free consonantal clusters by means of two consecutive syllabograms sharing the same vowel component (i.e. &quot;rhyming&quot;), and it delimited words/phrases by means of a vertical stroke between them. (For the sake of simplicity, I am deliberately ignoring non-phonetic graphemes, the ideograms, the script could employ to abbreviate or clarify the meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, a string of two syllabograms such as &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;KA&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; and &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;RA&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; could, in theory, represent the following phonotactically permissible (though not necessarily attested) combinations (note that &lt;strong&gt;M&lt;/strong&gt; stands for any of /m, n, s/ medially, and /m, n, r, l, s/ finally):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(s)K(V)(M)&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;V(M)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gala/, /gla/, /galaM/, /glaM/, /gaMla/, /gaMlaM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/kala/, /kla/, /kalaM/, /klaM/, /kaMla/, /kaMlaM/, /skala/, /skla/, /skalaM/, /sklaM/, /skaMla/, /skaMlaM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/kʰala/, /kʰla/, /kʰalaM/, /kʰlaM/, /kʰaMla/, /kʰaMlaM/, /skʰala/, /skʰla/, /skʰalaM/, /skʰlaM/, /skʰaMla/, /skʰaMlaM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(s)K(V)(M)&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;V(M)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gara/, /gra/, /garaM/, /graM/, /gaMra/, /gaMraM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/kara/, /kra/, /karaM/, /kraM/, /kaMra/, /kaMraM/, /skara/, /skra/, /skaraM/, /skraM/, /skaMra/, /skaMraM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/kʰara/, /kʰra/, /kʰaraM/, /kʰraM/, /kʰaMra/, /kʰaMraM/, /skʰara/, /skʰra/, /skʰaraM/, /skʰraM/, /skʰaMra/, /skʰaMraM/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see now, that a simple &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;KA-RA&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; may have tens of possible interpretations. Clearly, reading Mycenaean clay tablets must have been very difficult at times, especially in case of lists of personal names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine now a three-word clause, each (graphical) word composed of two syllabograms and, in accord with the rules, delimited by the vertical stroke symbol, such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;KA&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;RA&lt;/strong&gt;|&lt;strong&gt;KO&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;RO&lt;/strong&gt;|&lt;strong&gt;KU&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;RU&lt;/strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of possible interpretations increases dramatically, on the other hand, there are some morphosyntactic and semantic constraints and cues which reduce the tremendous ambiguity a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if we, however, unlike in the mainstream Mycenaean Greek reading, but like the fringe (pseudo-)Proto-Slavic reading, (&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt;) interpreted the vertical stroke not as a word delimiter, but a consonantal wildcard - one that is capable of representing up to a dozen different consonants. (&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt;) Consequently, word boundaries could be placed &lt;strong&gt;anywere&lt;/strong&gt; in the string, between &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; two syllabograms. (&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt;) In addition to that, consonant clusters could no longer be resolved by means of consecutive rhyming syllabograms, and (&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt;) neither sonorants nor /s/ could be thought of in syllable codas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While (&lt;strong&gt;3 &amp;amp; 4&lt;/strong&gt;) would reduce the number of options, (&lt;strong&gt;1 &amp;amp; 2&lt;/strong&gt;) would lead to their increase (&lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; stands for consonantal wildcard, &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; stands for arbitrary segmentation done by the reader):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkoloXkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkoloXku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkoloX kulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkolo Xkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXko loXkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaX koloXkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kala XkoloXkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ka laXkoloXkulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkoloX ku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXkolo Xku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaXko loXku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kalaX koloXku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kala XkoloXku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ka laXkoloXku lu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. up to something like &lt;strong&gt;ha raž ho rož hu ru&lt;/strong&gt; (the alternative, pseudo-Slavic, system also fails to distinguish /h/, /x/ and /k/ on the one hand, and /r/, /ř/, /l/ and /ľ/ on the other, along with other missing distinctions in other consonant rows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having described (in a simplified form) the two different systems intended for two different languages, I would like to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the version of the system as used for Mycenaean Greek produce more phonotactically acceptable outcomes, leading to greater potential ambiguity, or is the &lt;em&gt;Slabic&lt;/em&gt; system that may lead to greater potential ambiguity, producing generating/representing larger numbers of phonotactically acceptable readings?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, I feel the mainstream view has a potential to produce less ambiguous results, but how can we quantify that? Once again, I should stress that this would only be about a &lt;strong&gt;potential&lt;/strong&gt; ambiguity, which could only be confirmed or refuted by psycholinguistic experiments, as correctly pointed out by commentators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, we can generalize the question and set the software tool to find out, whether reading a text &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt; writing by means of writing system &lt;strong&gt;W1&lt;/strong&gt; leads to greater nubmers of possible readings than writing system &lt;strong&gt;W2&lt;/strong&gt;, whether also representing the same language, or a different one completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some Follow-up Remarks:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the most significant &lt;em&gt;caveats&lt;/em&gt; never to be neglected?&lt;/strong&gt; Some questions to be asked and parameters my tool should obviously take into account and probably include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the word/phrase &lt;strong&gt;delimiters&lt;/strong&gt; (or any other &lt;strong&gt;punctuation&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are there any?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do they vary (un)systematically?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the grapheme-to-phoneme mappings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the system capable of representing ALL phonemes of the language &lt;strong&gt;paradigmatically&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If so, is it a simple 1-to-1 mapping?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If not, i.e. if multiple graphemes have to be employed to cover some phonemes, can any syntagmatic ambiguities arise (e.g. /ts/ as a biphonematic sequence or an affricate)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If not, i.e. if one grapheme can ambiguously map onto a number of different phonemes (e.g. liquids indistinguishable in Linear B), what constraints can be observed or defined, if any?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the system capable of representing all of the phonemes &lt;strong&gt;syntagmatically&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. are any phonemes (un)systematically omitted/lost?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If so, what are the rules and constraints?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others to be added...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T02:42:24.917" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T06:28:41.340" Title="Calculating writing system efficiency with respect to reading ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13085" CreationDate="2015-08-14T00:49:09.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;feminist&quot; and &quot;feminism&quot; are different forms of the same word, one might expect the following to be interpretable and acceptable English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I support feminism, but I wouldn't want to be one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All my friends are feminists, so naturally I support it, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T00:49:09.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2015-08-14T02:01:21.853" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Eurasiatic hypothesis is very logical, since the Middle East have been a sort of spread sentral for the world population. But this language surely had numerals, at least up to 10, and probably far higher since counting is an obvious act of human intelligence and since the number of our fingers easily suggest the need for numbers up to 10. But at the earliest stages the numerals probably had a strong tendency to be shifted out with new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T02:01:21.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-14T03:21:52.183" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a language L, a target word w, a [Zipfian] distribution of word frequencies (Rank(w)) and a [gamma] distribution of sentence lengths, can we come up with a way to determine the approximate count for how many sentences have w as the max(Rank)?  &lt;strong&gt;That is, how many sentences have w as the least-frequent word?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of phrasing it might be: &lt;strong&gt;given a word w, what is the probability that a sentence containing w also contains some word w', such that rank(w') &gt; rank(w)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally this can be determined empirically by looking at a large corpus of a billion or so sentences and calculating the answer, but I'm curious if there's a way around that.  Perhaps a sample of sentences gives us enough insight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the worst case I have to compute the answer and then use the results to infer similarities in other languages.  If so, what's a recommended corpus of sentences &amp;amp; frequency list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10294" LastEditorUserId="10294" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T22:32:29.757" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T22:32:29.757" Title="Is there a relationship between rank(token) and max(rank(tokens in document))?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-14T13:50:02.857" Score="0" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are words ending in -man (policeman, postman ...)  classified as? compounds or suffixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some books that i've read considered policeman as a suffix, since the element -man means 'person' and it has a weakend pronunciation, which are characteristics of affixes. But I don't see why it shouldn't be considered as a compound. I'm looking forward to some opinions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10297" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T20:42:51.683" Title="words ending in -man: Compound or suffix?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="449" CreationDate="2015-08-14T14:19:01.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be incorrect, as an albanian speaker surrounded by Albanian speakers, I can testify that 'll' is actually an interdental lateral consonant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10298" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T14:19:01.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2473" CreationDate="2015-08-14T17:54:40.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can find a fairly &lt;strong&gt;reliable&lt;/strong&gt; (more reliable than the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, I would say) and pretty much &lt;strong&gt;consensual&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning that even &lt;em&gt;long-rangers&lt;/em&gt; would not object to it other than go much further in their speculations, hypothesizing deeper links between them) information in the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glottolog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; catalogue, as its authors generally tend to avoid controversial classifications that have not gained wider acceptance yet. It does not mean that at least some of the families and isolates are not related, but their relationship may be too deep to ever discover, or the research carried out so far has not met methodological standards, or, perhaps, no particular research into their relationship has been carried out yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if you restrict the listing found on that Glottolog page to the &lt;strong&gt;North America&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;South America&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;macroareas&lt;/em&gt;, you will get a list of &lt;strong&gt;top-level families&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;isolates&lt;/strong&gt; including those that are &lt;strong&gt;not indigenous&lt;/strong&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;New World&lt;/em&gt;. Leaving the relative &lt;em&gt;newcomers&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pidgins&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mixed languages&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sign languages&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unattested languages&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unclassifiable languages&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;artificial languages&lt;/em&gt; out, you will get a list similar to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;NORTH AMERICA / Top-level families:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Algic, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Caddoan, Chimakuan, Chinookan, Chumashan, Cochimi-Yuman, Coosan, Eskimo-Aleut, Haida, Huavean, Iroquoian, Jicaquean, Kalapuyan, Keresan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Lencan, Maiduan, Mayan, Misumalpan, Miwok-Costanoan, Mixe-Zoque, Muskogean, Otomanguean, Palaihnihan, Pomoan, Sahaptian, Salishan, Shastan, Siouan, Tarascan, Tequistlatecan, Totonacan, Tsimshian, Uto-Aztecan, Wakashan, Wintuan, Xincan, Yokutsan, Yuki-Wappo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;NORTH AMERICA / Isolates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adai, Alsea, Atakapa, Beothuk, Cayuse, Coahuilteco, Comecrudo, Cotoname, Cuitlatec, Esselen, Guaicurian, Chimariko, Chitimacha, Karankawa, Karok, Klamath-Modoc, Kutenai, Maratino, Molale, Natchez, Salinan, Seri, Siuslaw, Takelma, Timucua, Tonkawa, Tunica, Washo, Yana, Yuchi, Zuni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;BOTH NORTH &amp;amp; SOUTH / Top-level families:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arawakan, Chibchan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SOUTH AMERICA / Top-level families:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Araucanian, Arawan, Aymara, Barbacoan, Boran, Bororoan, Cahuapanan, Cariban, Chapacuran, Charruan, Chocoan, Chonan, Guahibo, Guaicuruan, Harakmbut, Hibito-Cholon, Huarpean, Huitotoan, Jivaroan, Kakua-Nukak, Kamakanan, Kariri, Katukinan, Kawesqar, Lengua-Mascoy, Matacoan, Nadahup, Nambiquaran, Nuclear-Macro-Je, Panoan, Peba-Yagua, Pri, Quechuan, Saliban, Tacanan, Ticuna-Yuri, Tucanoan, Tupian, Uru-Chipaya, Yanomam, Zamucoan, Zaparoan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SOUTH AMERICA / Isolates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aewa, Aikanã, Andaqui, Andoque, Arutani, Atacame, Betoi, Camsá, Candoshi-Shapra, Canichana, Cayubaba, Chiquitano, Chono, Cofán, Culli, Fulniô, Guachi, Guamo, Guató, Irántxe, Itonama, Jirajaran, Kanoê, Kunza, Kwaza, Leco, Lule, Máku, Matanawi, Mato Grosso Arára, Mochica, Mosetén-Chimané, Movima, Muniche, Mure, Omurano, Oti, Otomaco, Páez, Pankararú, Payagua, Pirahã, Puelche, Puinave, Pumé, Puquina, Ramanos, Sapé, Sechuran, Tallán, Taruma, Taushiro, Timote-Cuica, Tinigua, Trumai, Tuxá, Urarian, Vilela, Waorani, Warao, Xukurú, Yámana, Yuracaré, Yurumangui, Yuwana&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the great features of &lt;strong&gt;Glottolog&lt;/strong&gt; is that it also &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;collects all the relevant bibliographical references&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, so any research you would like to carry out yourself may well start right there. Check out the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/haid1248&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Haida&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; listing, for example, where you can see the &lt;strong&gt;internal classification&lt;/strong&gt;, useful &lt;strong&gt;comments&lt;/strong&gt; and, of course, a long list of useful &lt;em&gt;references&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T18:27:59.927" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T18:27:59.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13095" CreationDate="2015-08-14T18:14:45.257" Score="2" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a thing that I have been thinking about for a while. I know that PIE did not have gender distinction in verb forms, and its presence in modern Slavic languages must be an innovation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am correct this phenomenon occurs exclusively in the Slavic family (I still have in mind only IE languages). My questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the probable origin of it, how did it develop within the Slavic group ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do any IE families or languages besides Slavic contrast between masculine and feminine verbs forms, even in the slightest degree ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any universal lingustic processes that may lead to that ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize that I am only concerned about the &lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course any references to articles, books etc. will be very welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T08:02:03.237" Title="Origins of gender distinction in verbs in Slavic" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13094" CreationDate="2015-08-14T18:48:45.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavic verbs in past tense are simply periphrastic participle constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Našel jsem&lt;/em&gt; literally (etymologically) means &quot;the-one-who-found-it I-am&quot;. And as any normal particple, it agrees in gender with subject. In Russian, the copula is omitted usually; in Polish, it was fused with the verb (suffix -em for 1p sg.), in languages like Czech or Serbian, the copula is still there. In the languages I know (for example, Russian) L-participles are not an active language feature anymore (not used independently), however some of them were moved to the category of adjectives and can be used independently: e.g. Russian &lt;em&gt;gniloj&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rotten&quot; which is now an adjective as opposed to the &quot;real deal&quot;, the real participle (in the modern language), &lt;em&gt;sgnivšij&lt;/em&gt; with a different suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not something unusual. If I'm not mistaken, French &quot;Passé composé&quot; dinstinguishes genders as well: &lt;em&gt;Je suis montée&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;Je suis monté&lt;/em&gt; etc., because etymologically, it's the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T18:48:45.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13087" CreationDate="2015-08-14T23:53:16.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The discussion of Linear B doesn't make any sense to me, so I will skip that part. Here is how I understand your question: you want to know what properties of a writing system optimize accurate identification of {the word / the phonetic sequence} of strings in language. There should of course be a provision whereby speakers of the language have some idea what a given word is, when they don't know the word (e.g. &quot;squamulose&quot;, whose meaning many people don't know but could look up, or &quot;Wahkiakum&quot; which people may not be able to pronounce or spell based on hearing it said). The problem is that efficiency can only be computed by psycholinguistic testing of real people, in which case you have to ask &quot;Who?&quot; Hangul is terribly inefficient as a vehicle for representing Korean pronunciation, taking &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; humans as your subject pool, but limiting the subject pool to just speakers of Korean, it turns out to be quite efficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few cases where there are actually competing writing systems, such as Cyrillic and Latin for Serbo-Croatian, or Lule Saami in Norway and Sweden. Generally speaking, you would always be comparing a hypothetical use of one writing system to an actual use of another writing system -- such as English spelling, vs. IPA transcription; or Cyrillic Russian vs. conventionalized Latin transliterations. The problem is, if you test Russian speakers on their ability to read actual Cyrillic Russian which they are familiar with, vs. a foreign transliteration system that they are not familiar with, you can't be sure whether you're measuring an effect of the writing system, or simple familiarity (I vote for the latter). This would also apply to the aforementioned cases of two writing systems for a language – you would have to control for familiarity, and I don't think there is a practical but valid way to conduct the experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question refers to &quot;phonemes&quot;, a concept which unfortunately is not all that well defined. In some theories, English flap is not a phoneme (it's claimed to not be underlyingly necessary), and in some theories it is (it merges two things which are phonemes, /t/ and /d/). So English spelling either does or does not paradigmatically represent all of the phonemes of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Russian has a phonological rule devoicing final obstruents, which changes one phoneme into another, the spelling system does not reflect that fact (same as in German). That means that the writing system is &quot;suboptimal&quot; in representing pronunciation, but it is actually optimal for word identification, since порок and порог are spelled differently. It is not clear whether you would consider this a case of one grapheme &amp;lt;г&gt; mapping ambiguously to multiple phonemes: it certainly maps to multiple phonemes, but it is contextually predictable. The pronunciation of &amp;lt;г&gt; in the genitive (as [v]) is predictable according to the rule &quot;pronounce &amp;lt;г&gt; as [v] in the genitive singular case ending of adjectives&quot;. Do you mean &quot;referring to nothing besides preceding and following letters&quot;? It's not obvious what you mean by &quot;ambiguously map onto a number of different phonemes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T23:53:16.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13119" CreationDate="2015-08-15T06:48:30.750" Score="8" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;Teachers of Ancient Greek at my university have always been emphasising the importance of being aware of the loss of the intervocalic sigma in the language's history, because it helped to understand some seemingly peculiar inflectional paradigms ( τὸ γένος etc.). Unfortunately they were mostly literature specialist, not linguists, so they only provided us with the most essential information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the dating of that sound change ?Was it during the Proto-Greek period ? Can we find that change in all the dialects ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what the about the forms that actually have an intervocalic sigma? Such as φύσις, βάσις, στάσις etc. or the sigmatic aorist like ἐτιμήσα, ἐπαιδεύσα. While I can understand the nouns as a post-change creation, this aorist seems quite ancient to me, but I very likely might be wrong here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T06:57:46.023" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T21:51:46.447" Title="What is the approximate time of the loss of the intervocalic /s/ in Greek?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-15T07:38:40.340" Score="5" ViewCount="1579" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although my main interest is historical lingustics, I would also like to get a hint of the modern studies of syntax and generative grammar, and as far as I know, Chomsky is currently the most prominent figure in this field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read something about his ideas of language being innate to human beings and also a book on the pretty same topic by Daniel Everett. ( actually his notions are more appealing to me) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the most basic introductory book about generative grammar. Do you have any recommendations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( I have Pinker's &lt;em&gt;The Language Instinct&lt;/em&gt; still unread on my shelf but it doesn't cover this topic, if I am correct )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T15:52:36.550" Title="What is the best introduction to Chomskyan linguistics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13094" CreationDate="2015-08-15T08:00:32.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Iranian languages (maybe Indic as well), the past tense construction involves a verb that is etymologically a passive participle, agreeing in gender with the verb's object rather than its subject: e.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pashto &lt;em&gt;mā xǝz&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; lidǝl&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I saw a/the woman&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literal translation of this sentence would be something like &quot;the woman was-seen by-me&quot;, since the pronoun &lt;em&gt;mā&lt;/em&gt; is an oblique 1sg. pronoun, the nominative form being &lt;em&gt;zǝ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T08:02:03.237" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T08:02:03.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-15T13:05:12.173" Score="2" ViewCount="2123" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Non-Whorfian contexts and missing Czech equivalents&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, I am not sure if this is the right place to ask a question that may just as well pertain to scientific terminology in general. Nevertheless, it was only when I was reading a paper on &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cross-language comparison of intonation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;R. D. Ladd&lt;/strong&gt; that I encountered the use of &lt;em&gt;weak&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; in a context other than the &lt;em&gt;Sapir-Whorfian&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;linguistic relativity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, where two versions of a S-W hypothesis are offered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The &lt;strong&gt;strong&lt;/strong&gt; version says that language &lt;strong&gt;determines&lt;/strong&gt; thought, and that linguistic categories &lt;strong&gt;limit and determine&lt;/strong&gt; cognitive categories[.]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;[T]he &lt;strong&gt;weak&lt;/strong&gt; version says only that linguistic categories and usage &lt;strong&gt;influence&lt;/strong&gt; thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I have never encountered the terms &lt;em&gt;strong / weak hypothesis&lt;/em&gt; (or its translation &lt;em&gt;silná / slabá hypotéza&lt;/em&gt;) in &lt;strong&gt;Czech linguistic literature&lt;/strong&gt;. I might be wrong, but we either do no use these terms in Czech at all, or we do have some analogical terms that simply do not translate as &lt;em&gt;silná / slabá&lt;/em&gt; and that I have only been failing to encounter. In the very few texts I have been able to find on the internet using &lt;em&gt;silná / slabá&lt;/em&gt; among my search criteria the authors seem to be using them, rather idiosyncratically, as direct translations from English, i.e. &lt;em&gt;anglicisms&lt;/em&gt; of a sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Close encounters in Ladd's paper&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I should first explain the particular context I encountered the terms in. In the opening section of the above-mentioned paper, Ladd criticizes the various unversalist opinions on intonation as hardly tenable. He chooses Bolinger and Lieberman to exemplify this, and describing the latter's views her says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lieberman (1967), for example, put forth a &lt;strong&gt;strong hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt; relating intonational phrasing to the control o f breath and subglottal pressure in speech production, in connection with which he made broadly similar claims about universal functions of intonation to those made by Bolinger. Specifically, he suggested that all linguis­tically significant uses of intonation in all languages could be reduced to a distinction between 'marked breath group' and 'unmarked breath group' (corresponding roughly to phrasefinal rise and fall respectively), plus local prominence for accent on individually informative words; lexical tone was seen as overlaid on the two breath group types.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Glimpses of what the distinction might be about&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I have been able to put some pieces together from various online sources, most of which where non-linguistic and none actually discussed the essence of the difference. My current understanding, then, is very roughly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strong hypotheses&lt;/strong&gt; are simply strong claims, perhaps too strong, as they include a lot of details and particular assumptions, making the hypotheses as wholes difficult, if not impossible, to test and defend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weak hypotheses&lt;/strong&gt; are more careful and focused more narrowly on a single aspect of a phenomenon - one that is easier to test, before one ever moves on to the other aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Interpretation of the text by Ladd&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it seems that Lieberman's position is to be seen as &lt;strong&gt;strong&lt;/strong&gt;, because he makes a lot of untestable (?) assumptions at once. If that is the case, what would a &lt;strong&gt;weak version&lt;/strong&gt; of his hypothesis look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be extremely grateful for a fully-fledged answer, but I will also appreciate any comments, references, examples anyone can offer. And if someone can even come up with appropriate Czech equivalents, it will be just perfect! On the other hand, I won't object to migrating this question to another, more appropriate forum, if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T13:05:12.173" Title="How to understand the difference between &quot;Strong&quot; &amp; &quot;Weak&quot; Hypotheses in the case of Bolinger/Lieberman's views of Intonation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12391" CreationDate="2015-08-15T21:01:49.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, there still are a number of linguists believing that some or all of the families considered to belong to the putative Altaic stock are related one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Core Altaic&quot; and &quot;Extended Altaic&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional &quot;core&quot; members were &lt;strong&gt;Turkic&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Mongolic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Tungusic&lt;/strong&gt;, with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Japonic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Koreic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; being added in more recent decades. As to Uralic, to my knowledge, none of the proponents of the Altaic hypothesis believe it belongs to the putative stock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Ural(o)-Altaic&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called &lt;strong&gt;Ural-Altaic&lt;/strong&gt; hypothesis is now considered dead even by Altaicists, who consider Uralic either similar due to areal convergence, or related only very distantly, perhaps within the even more controversial &lt;em&gt;Nostratic&lt;/em&gt; superstock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Eurasiatic&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;Nostratic&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the families included in Altaic form a standalone taxon or not, proponents of the so-called &quot;Nostratic&quot; hypothesis, or a very similar &quot;Eurasiatic&quot; hypothesis, seem to believe that most or all of them belong to a larger stock together with at least &lt;strong&gt;Indo-European&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Uralic&lt;/strong&gt;, and depending on the version, variously also &lt;strong&gt;Kartvelian&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Dravidian&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Eskimo-Aleutian&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Chukotko-Kamchatkan&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Yeniseian&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Nivkh&lt;/strong&gt;, and even &lt;strong&gt;Afro-Asiatic&lt;/strong&gt;, which is by some proponents considered its &lt;em&gt;sister&lt;/em&gt; rather than mere &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Trans-Eurasian&quot; as the most recent work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was Martine Robbeets, a firm believer in the unity of the various &lt;em&gt;Altaic&lt;/em&gt; families, who first coined this less-worn name for the hypothetical stock. Hence, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trans-Eurasian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is probably what you should try and look up if you want to find the most recent work on Altaic. Some of her papers can be found on-line, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orientalistik.uni-mainz.de/robbeets/2004_Swadesh_100.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swadesh 100 on Japanese, Korean and Altaic (2004)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [PDF]. An interesting discussion can be found in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=9zcxQqmkgE0C&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transeurasian Verbal Morphology in a Comparative Perspective: Genealogy, Contact, Chance (2010)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; [Google Books]. See also her bibliography &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orientalistik.uni-mainz.de/119.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary and Where to Look Next&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to what &lt;strong&gt;@cyco130&lt;/strong&gt;'s answer suggests, there are widely accepted families that prove that historical linguistics can go, at least, twice as deep as just &lt;em&gt;&quot;a couple of millenia&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;temporal ceiling&lt;/em&gt; itself is a matter of controversy, which might also be one of the reasons why the Altaic debate is far from settled now. On the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;@cyco130&lt;/strong&gt; is also definitely right in that the evidence for &lt;em&gt;Altaic&lt;/em&gt; is simply &lt;strong&gt;not sufficient&lt;/strong&gt; and quite &lt;strong&gt;imperfect&lt;/strong&gt; at the moment, and until the adherents make a major breakthrough (if they ever do), it is certainly safer and more correct not to &lt;em&gt;lump&lt;/em&gt; the families together (unless you emphasize that you are using the label as a short-hand only). After all, &lt;strong&gt;areal convergence&lt;/strong&gt; is just as interesting and worth investigating as &lt;strong&gt;genetic relationships&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to direct you to some further information, I have just come across &lt;a href=&quot;https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/are-japanese-and-korean-altaic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog article&lt;/a&gt; (now a dead link, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170529053239/https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/are-japanese-and-korean-altaic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available via Wayback&lt;/a&gt;) that gives a nice summary. Some of the most recent critiques that can by no means be neglected have been written by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ehess.academia.edu/AlexanderVovin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Vovin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (an expert especially on Japonic and Koreic) and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://uni-bonn.academia.edu/StefanGeorg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stefan Georg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (and expert on Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolic, among other things). To be sure, some of the criticisms have been addressed or replied to, especially by G. S. Starostin &amp;amp; A. V. Dybo's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/801734/In_Defense_Of_The_Comparative_Method_Or_The_End_Of_The_Vovin_Controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Defence of the Comparative Method, or The End of the Vovin Controversy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2009), or G. S. Starostin's  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/5183539/Review_of_Koreo-Japonica._A_Re-Evaluation_of_a_Common_Genetic_Origin._By_Alexander_Vovin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Review of: Koreo-Japonica. A Re-Evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin. By Alexander Vovin.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2010), but it would appear &lt;strong&gt;critical views are prevailing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T21:07:30.853" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T21:07:30.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-15T21:33:47.173" Score="3" ViewCount="672" Body="&lt;p&gt;The syntax of predicative nominals and predicative adjectives in ancient IE languages and, as far as I know, almost every modern one :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Subject (NOMINATIVE) + copula + predicate (NOMINATIVE)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern Polish and Russian (and on that basis I assume all Slavic although I &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; have solid information on that) the same construction looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Subject (NOMINATIVE) + copula + predicate (INSTRUMENTAL)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about Russian, but in Polish this applies &lt;strong&gt;only to predicative nominals&lt;/strong&gt;. In the predicative adjectives the predicate stands in nominative like expected. Although this is not the case in the Polish literature from the first half of the XX century where the instrumental construction very often appears also in predicative adjectives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is : what is the origin of the instrumental case of the predicate in predicate nominals and adjectives in these languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T21:54:37.453" Title="What is the origin of the instrumental case of predicate in predicative nominals in Polish/Russian?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-15T22:43:07.463" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to find alternative ways of representing vowel phonemes for cross-linguistic comparisons in a unified, systematic way that would also reveal their relative (un)markedness. At the same time, the way has to be as economical as possible, so that it doesn't multiply entities unnecessarily. A question arises here whether the, now traditional, mainstream approach based on binary oppositions is the best one, or if something along the lines of dependency phonology could be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, for instance, that if we represent back rounded vowels as, say, [-front, +round] and front unrounded vowels as [+front, -round], it is not obvious that, inherently, they are both the unmarked classes, whereas [+front, +round] and [-front, -round] are both the marked classes (as if [+front] and [+round] were in quasi-complementary distribution in terms of markedness). Using [back], [front] and [round] as unary features, for instance, is not helpful either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/i/ = [front]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/u/ = [back, round] (as if it was more marked than /i/, which it isn't)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evident imbalance is clear when we make [round] the inherent dependent feature of [back] in the feature geometry tree, because then we would have to make [unround] the inherent dependent feature of [front]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/i/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[front]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;|&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[unround]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/u/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[back]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;|&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[round]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the strictly binary system also fails to account for the reality of [+low] generally decreasing the (ease of) articulatory &quot;implementability&quot; of either [+round] or [+front] due to physiological constraints, again, as if [+low] were somehow opposed to [+front] and/or [+round], at least to some extent. The same is true of the derived, nasal subsystems in which much stronger nasalization is required in the open vowels for their nasality to be perceived than in the closed ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question in a somewhat different wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there theoretical approches in phonology that account better for the cross-linguistic markedness tendencies?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant questions to ask might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does /ɯ/ usually arise from /u/ or from /i/ diachronically? (The example of Japanese seems to suggest the former.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does /y/ usually arise from /i/ or from /u/ diachronically? (Many European languages seem to support the latter.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it correct to assume that among the close unrounded vowels, the markedness hierarchy is as follows: /i/ &amp;lt; /ɨ/ &amp;lt; /ɯ/?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it correct to assume that mong the close rounded vowels, the markedness hierarchy is as follows: /u/ &amp;lt; /ʉ/ &amp;lt; /y/?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be grateful for any comments, suggestions, examples or references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T02:30:48.663" Title="Tackling cross-linguistic vowel markedness system[at]ically: features or what?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T00:45:00.453" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific claim that &quot;Eskimos have X words for snow&quot; is heavily disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is the general concept that certain cultures' languages often have a large number of words for things that are important in that culture valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of this I recently encountered include Lonely Planet's guidebook on Mongolia saying that Mongolian has a large number of words for horse skin colour compared to English (IIRC), and a claim on the BBC that Japanese has a larger vocabulary for apologizing than English (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33901966&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The many ways to say sorry in Japanese&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T16:29:37.230" Title="Is the general concept behind &quot;Eskimo words for snow&quot; true?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13103" CreationDate="2015-08-16T01:08:43.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a general desire to equate unmarkedness with structural simplicity, so that [i], [a] and [u] might have only one feature and [ø] would have more features. If order for this to work out, one either needs underspecification so that some values are not underlyingly present but are filled in by later rule, or are never filled in (i.e. privative features). These are assumptions shared (at least in part) by most theories, ranging from PSM, Dresher's contrast theory, Dependency Phonology and Government Phonology, UFT, and Selkirkian theory, non-exhaustively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming a version of UFT, the relevant vowel place features are [coronal], [labial], [dorsal], and either [open] or [closed] for vowel height (the former being the official Clementsian approach). Accordingly, a front unrounded vowel is formally simpler than a front rounded vowel, and a high vowel is formally simpler than a mid vowel. Unfortunately the reduction of markedness to formal simplicity doesn't progress much further in this theory, since [ɯ] would be as simple as [u] but by usual diagnostics and factual assumptions, [ɯ] is more marked than [u].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I conclude that the attempt to reduce markedness to formal simplicity is a failure, that although one can emulate that effect to some extent, attempts to fit feature theory to markedness complicates phonological theory, and ultimately fails. Instead, attention has been put on what &quot;markedness&quot; is, and asking what really explains those facts. The basic explanatory idea that explains away the grammatical concept &quot;markedness&quot; is &quot;difficulty of distinguishing&quot;. The reason why [ɯ] is less frequent as a phoneme than [u] is that [u] employs two means of signalling low F2, and [ɯ] employs only one. So [u] and [ɯ] are too similar (hard to tell apart), and [u] more clearly / unambiguously represents the percept &quot;low F2&quot;. The prediction then is that to the extent that a surface distinction between X and Y is difficult to maintain, that distinction will tend to be eliminated (and various phonetic and grammatical considerations will dictate what the outcome is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think one should be careful about claims that are based on questionable writing practices. Very often, some language will have a vowel transcribed as &quot;u&quot; which is somewhere between [o] and [ʊ], but for the sake of simplifying an orthography, &quot;u&quot; is used. The distinctions [ɨ / ɯ] and [ʉ / y] are prime examples. If you have a contrast between the members of that opposition, then you might reasonably maintain that a language (like Norwegian) has both [ʉ] and [y]; otherwise, I would be skeptical unless there is acoustic evidence based on formant values of IPA vowels as produced by certified speakers, compared to the vowels of a given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am usually skeptical about the notion of articulatory markedness, which would only make sense w.r.t. articulatorily-difficult gestures (e.g. intricate timing of click movement). It can't be more complicated to raise and back the tongue without protruding the lips than it can be to both raise and back the tongue  &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; protrude the lips. The test case would be a pair of sounds, where it is physically difficult to produce the sounds differently, but when they are correctly produced, they are extremely easy to distinguish, perceptually. The problem is that we can test for ease of perceiving differences, but we have no way to quantify how hard it is to produce [q] (as opposed to [k]) or [θ] (as opposed to [s]). If you speak Czech, [θ] might be really difficult to produce, but that crazy &quot;Czech r&quot; which the language is famous for and I swear after a zillion tries I can't get right, that is no problem (for a Czech speaker). I'm basically willing to put all of my money on the program of reducing segmental markedness to problems of perception, and grant that cases where similar-dounding sounds can end up even more similar-sounding because the articulatory timing distinctions needed to make the phonetic distinction are difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T02:30:48.663" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T02:30:48.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13103" CreationDate="2015-08-16T01:46:53.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patricia Donegan gives a unified and conceptually simple theory of the vowel systems of the world in her 1978 dissertation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/1978phd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the Natural Phonology of Vowels&lt;/a&gt;.  I suggest you look there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T01:46:53.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-16T05:25:08.770" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/876&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; As other commenters have noted, looking for logic in language is almost always futile. No natural language is logical. But there is a historical logic to language development; even if the existence of a phrase is a historical accident, it's sometimes interesting to see when that &quot;accident&quot; took place, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any famous, reputable linguisticians who have advocated and espoused the quote above, which emphasises the import and importance of '&lt;strong&gt;historical logic to language development&lt;/strong&gt;'?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I already know that this (bolded noun phrase) differs from the notion for logic in language, which may not exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T10:28:24.273" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T10:28:24.273" Title="Which famous linguists embrace historical logic to understand language?" Tags="&lt;logic&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13098" CreationDate="2015-08-16T05:48:08.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current generative (Chomskyan) approach to syntax is known as the minimalist program. If you want a rigorous introduction to this formalism, you should check &lt;em&gt;Understanding Minimalism&lt;/em&gt; (2005) by Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes, Grohmann. This text builds heavily on the Principles and Parameters approach to Government and Binding theory. If you are not familiar with GB, you might want to check out &lt;em&gt;Core Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (2003) by David Adger - very readable, but not very good at dealing with 'meta-syntax' (e.g. logical form, spell out, phonetic form). So if you want to make a thorough commitment to the generative framework, Hornstein is preferable. If you want to begin with GB, definitely go with Carnie's &lt;em&gt;Syntax: A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (2012). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generative grammar is concerned with modeling the human language faculty as a computational system, and by computational we really mean in the formal sense described by Church, Turing, and Kleene. Hence, you may want to explore the theoretical backdrop against which generative grammar was created. To do this, open any introductory computability theory text and read the sections on finite automata, formal grammars, and Turing computability or you can check out Barbara Partee's &lt;em&gt;Mathematical Methods in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (1990). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T15:52:36.550" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T15:52:36.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13087" CreationDate="2015-08-16T06:28:41.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is with formulating the task as reading ambiguity. Ambiguity is a function of context not simple homography. Spoken language is full of all sorts of ambiguity some of which is reflected in written language. Orthographies introduce new ambiguities and remove others. For instance, the example of final devoicing given in the other answer. It reduces potential ambiguity with respect to word derivation but introduces potential ambiguity with respect to word shape. But neither of these represent real ambiguities for actual speakers of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's worse, because the types of ambiguities and the corresponding disambiguation strategies will be different across languages, whatever measures you use for comparison will be highly suspect. How do you compare the impact of the unmarked word stress in Russian with the unmarked vowels in Arabic or the unmarked tone in Pinyin? They all have very specific consequences which cannot be captured by a single number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could look at it from the perspective of the learner (native or non-native) but even then, you need a much less precise number. How do you compare the precise transparency of e.g. French, Italian, Spanish and Greek orthographies? We can intuitively say that French and Greek are similar and Italian and Spanish are also similar. But from the perspective of a learner (or any other practical perspective I can think of), the precise ranking of Italian vs. Spanish is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T06:28:41.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13109" CreationDate="2015-08-16T06:39:35.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You (and the source) are confusing the technical and colloquial sense of the word &lt;em&gt;logic&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &lt;em&gt;There's a certain logic to language.&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Even language is logical.&lt;/em&gt; you're saying something like, &lt;em&gt;The way language works make sense.&lt;/em&gt; But this is radically different from saying, &lt;em&gt;Language can be described using the apparatus of formal logic.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguists will agree with the former but many fewer will agree with the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No historical linguist believes that historical changes can be described by logical formalisms but many of them believe (particularly in the past) that it is governed by laws similar to those of physics. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot;&gt;Grimm's Law&lt;/a&gt;. Today, most historical linguists will talk about tendencies or regularities but no one believes that even sound change laws are a given in the same way that the laws of physics are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Labov gave a great overview of the history and present of the thinking on language change in the first chapter of Vol 1 of his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Principles-Linguistic-Change-Internal-Language/dp/0631179143/&quot;&gt;Principles of Linguistic&lt;/a&gt; change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T06:39:35.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13104" CreationDate="2015-08-16T11:19:22.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a great book on that topic - &lt;em&gt;Language : The Cultural Tool&lt;/em&gt; by Daniel Everett.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He states, contrary to the Chomskyan notions, that languages' features are shaped almost exlusively by the culture of the language's users. He presents all this on a basis of the Piraha language, which he studied for quite a long time. The Piraha people are indigenous inhabitants of Amazonian rainforest, being isolated from influence of the &quot;outside world&quot;. On that grounds their language has developed many features that are very peculiar ,not only compared to IE languages, but even the languages from its region and the whole world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer to your question directly: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think right now in linguistics there is no consensus on that topic, but this Everett's book would surely present you one of the approaches. It covers exactly the problem you stated : How strongly can the culture affect language and vice versa.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T16:29:37.230" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T16:29:37.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13117" CreationDate="2015-08-16T11:27:03.090" Score="4" ViewCount="2088" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as in the title :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is a tool on the internet which would help in finding cognates of certain word in as much branches as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I want to find find all the cognates in other languages of the Latin facio, facere to compare the stem creation systems. Ideally with descriptions of changes that occurred and possible references to texts and sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:48:15.940" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T18:40:35.007" Title="Is there a website where you can find cognates of certain word in other IE branches?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2015-08-16T17:36:08.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look up PIE roots from Walde-Pokorny &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This contains a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/IELangTable.html&quot;&gt;language index&lt;/a&gt;, which could lead you to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/Lat.html&quot;&gt;Latin list&lt;/a&gt;, although you'd have to know that &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt; is related to &lt;em&gt;putrefacio&lt;/em&gt; and a number of other words (odd that &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt; itself isn't an entry), which would point you to * &lt;em&gt;dhe&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0376.html&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; would list everything-ish coming from that root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T17:36:08.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2015-08-16T18:52:23.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can also use the Indo-European section of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygtnnl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tower of Babel&lt;/a&gt; database, which is also based on Pokorny, but only &lt;strong&gt;with caution&lt;/strong&gt;, since they sometimes depart from the mainstream interpretations quite a bit. Anyway, &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Cie%5Cpiet&amp;amp;first=1&amp;amp;off=&amp;amp;text_proto=&amp;amp;method_proto=substring&amp;amp;ic_proto=on&amp;amp;text_meaning=&amp;amp;method_meaning=substring&amp;amp;ic_meaning=on&amp;amp;text_hitt=&amp;amp;method_hitt=substring&amp;amp;ic_hitt=on&amp;amp;text_tokh=&amp;amp;method_tokh=substring&amp;amp;ic_tokh=on&amp;amp;text_ind=&amp;amp;method_ind=substring&amp;amp;ic_ind=on&amp;amp;text_avest=&amp;amp;method_avest=substring&amp;amp;ic_avest=on&amp;amp;text_iran=&amp;amp;method_iran=substring&amp;amp;ic_iran=on&amp;amp;text_arm=&amp;amp;method_arm=substring&amp;amp;ic_arm=on&amp;amp;text_greek=&amp;amp;method_greek=substring&amp;amp;ic_greek=on&amp;amp;text_slav=&amp;amp;method_slav=substring&amp;amp;ic_slav=on&amp;amp;text_balt=&amp;amp;method_balt=substring&amp;amp;ic_balt=on&amp;amp;text_germ=&amp;amp;method_germ=substring&amp;amp;ic_germ=on&amp;amp;text_lat=faci%C5%8D&amp;amp;method_lat=substring&amp;amp;ic_lat=on&amp;amp;text_ital=&amp;amp;method_ital=substring&amp;amp;ic_ital=on&amp;amp;text_celt=&amp;amp;method_celt=substring&amp;amp;ic_celt=on&amp;amp;text_alb=&amp;amp;method_alb=substring&amp;amp;ic_alb=on&amp;amp;text_rusmean=&amp;amp;method_rusmean=substring&amp;amp;ic_rusmean=on&amp;amp;text_refer=&amp;amp;method_refer=substring&amp;amp;ic_refer=on&amp;amp;text_comment=&amp;amp;method_comment=substring&amp;amp;ic_comment=on&amp;amp;text_any=&amp;amp;method_any=substring&amp;amp;sort=proto&amp;amp;ic_any=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is what you get if you manage to type &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;faciō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in the Latin search field. You can also try Köbler's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.koeblergerhard.de/idgwbhin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indogermanisches Wörterbuch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which &quot;&lt;em&gt;is based on the IEW and including laryngeal-based reconstructions, but only as alternative lemmas with cross references to the pre-laryngeal ones&lt;/em&gt;&quot; according to Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wish there was a better online tool, and if I had some time, I would be happy either to create one, or help start it, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the body of information concerning sound laws and developments is constantly growing on both Wikipedia and Wiktionary - you might want to try these articles for starters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;History of Latin&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Italic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Italic language&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_sound_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-European sound laws&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_sound_laws_in_the_Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glossary of sound laws in the Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Indo-European vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Wikipedia; includes &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Appendix: List of Proto-Indo-European roots&lt;/a&gt; (Wiktionary),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Appendix: List of Proto-Indo-European nouns&lt;/a&gt; (Wiktionary).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, there used to be a free on-line source that is now hidden behind the paywalls. If your institution has access, though, you can check it out &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionaries.brillonline.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Note, however, that the &lt;em&gt;Leiden school of linguistics&lt;/em&gt; may differ from the mainstream in some points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Oh, and I almost forgot about the indispensable &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexe.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TITUS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, with lots of text samples, corpora, databases, grammatical sketches and much more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T18:40:35.007" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T18:40:35.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2015-08-16T21:47:42.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This doesn't exactly answer your question, but they're close enough that ყ is often used for ﻕ in Georgian words of Arabic origin. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;قرآن -  ყურანი (Quran)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;قصاب - ყასაბი (butcher)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;قهوة - ყავა (coffee)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;حقنة - ოყნა (enema)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;عراق - ერაყი (Iraq)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are some counterexamples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;خلق - ხალხი (people)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;القاعدة - ალ-კაიდა (Al-Qaeda)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that ალ-კაიდა came into Georgian via Russian or English. ხალხი might have come into Georgian from Turkish or Armenian or something like that. That would explain the discrepancies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Georgian_terms_derived_from_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Wiktionary page&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10304" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T21:47:42.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13097" CreationDate="2015-08-16T21:51:46.447" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The loss of intervocalic &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is one of the defining features of Proto-Greek: that is, it occurred before the earliest attested Greek and is common to all the Greek dialects. It is thought to have gone through an [h] stage, which seems to be attested in Mycenaean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intervocalic [s]'s in Greek have several different sources, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some come from earlier [t], by the sound change &lt;em&gt;ti &gt; si&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;basis&lt;/em&gt; from earlier &lt;em&gt;batis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some come from earlier [tj], e.g. &lt;em&gt;pa:sa&lt;/em&gt; from * &lt;em&gt;pantja&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a few come regularly from *tw, e.g. &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; from * &lt;em&gt;twe&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quite a lot are analogically restored, like in the sigmatic aorists: here the &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt; was reintroduced from aorists where it was not intervocalic so had not been lost. Similarly for futures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T21:51:46.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11191" CreationDate="2015-08-16T23:13:47.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=okRdAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA186&amp;amp;lpg=PA186&amp;amp;dq=%22aspirated+glottal+stop%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=QOb4OoKOm6&amp;amp;sig=Xi6T4Jat-pK8iOVcPcyWkm6haH0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CD0Q6AEwBWoVChMImNfgituuxwIVjJmICh2l7whd#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22aspirated%20glottal%20stop%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; cites an article by Bessell (1992) arguing that Nlakapmxcin, a Northwest Coast language, has allophonically aspirated glottal stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tinputz, a language of Papue New Guinea, is claimed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/pacific/png/abstract.asp?id=11161&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to have allophonic word-final aspirated glottal stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(user6726 is of course correct that strictly speaking a glottal stop can't be aspirated, but that doesn't preclude that a language could possess a sound which might nevertheless be reasonably described as an aspirated glottal stop -- i.e. a glottal release immediately followed by aspiration, which I assume is what's happening here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T23:13:47.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13104" CreationDate="2015-08-16T23:28:41.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, English has more &quot;words for snow&quot; than any Eskimo language has. Any speech group will differentiate terms for whatever categories they find useful. But &quot;the number of words for &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; in a language&quot; is no measure of anything at all; it's just mythology in action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Eskimo words for snow are concerned, there's a famous book by Geoff Pullum entitled &lt;em&gt;The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The title essay is available online&lt;/a&gt;, courtesy of the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it you will see that every time you read a remark about how many Eskimo words there are for snow, you are dealing with an author who is clueless about both Eskimo and language, and who is willing to make up facts as they go along for the purpose of using a familiar old saw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T23:28:41.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-17T01:54:09.527" Score="1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a NLP project, where we analyze large text samples (think a novel), and produce some metrics that help us answer interesting questions about the text. One of these metrics is average number of independent clauses per compound sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I determine that a sentence is compound, as opposed to simple or complex (including complex/compound), is by first using the Stanford Parser to obtain the syntax tree, and then doing a variation of the algorithm suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27695995/decompose-compound-sentence-to-simple-sentences&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. My algorithm is a bit simpler because I wanted to see some numbers over a variety of texts sooner, before deciding if they were interesting enough to invest time in a more complicated approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found, across genre and register, was that the average number of independent clauses per compound sentence tended to be around 2. It struck me as weird, because I was expecting more variation, but I don't know if it's actually weird. I tried to find information online about this, but that search didn't produce anything helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any research on the prevalence of different sentence types over, say, a text corpus; furthermore, is there any research on sentence complexity? I want to understand if my algorithm is simply buggy, or if it's reflecting an actual trend that others have already seen as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9318" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T02:01:06.683" Title="Average number of independent clauses in a compound sentence" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24485" CreationDate="2015-08-17T02:10:06.240" Score="5" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm running NLP on large texts, and part of the questions I'm trying to answer have to deal with syntax. I'm using Stanford NLP, including the Stanford Parser. I started out using the probabilistic CFG (PCFG) models, but that can take a very long time to process a large text with a sizable amount of &quot;long&quot; sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently read up on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/srparser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shift-Reduce Parser&lt;/a&gt; on the Stanford NLP website, and according to them it's a lot faster than the PCFG-based parser while sacrificing little accuracy. The published benchmark doesn't explain in much detail what kind of text was used, however, so I don't have a good idea whether the promise of increased performance holds up in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone experimented with the shift-reduce parser, and specifically compared its running time with that of the PCFG variety? It looks to me based on some early testing that the SR models cause the parser to consume a lot more memory, so I'm a little apprehensive about running it on my text corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9318" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T10:14:57.850" Title="Performance improvements of using the shift-reduce Stanford Parser" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13114" CreationDate="2015-08-17T06:27:08.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look for ancient languages or early stages of certain groups, you could try this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.palaeolexicon.com&lt;/a&gt;, but you might need to do some work too. It has an experimental cognate research tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T06:27:08.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13102" CreationDate="2015-08-17T18:03:50.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, instrumental case applies only for past/future tenses, never for present tense (if by &quot;copula&quot; we mean &quot;to be&quot; only; Ukrainian, on the other hand, allows it in present tense as well, but I think it's an influence from Polish). I suspect copula+INSTR could arise from interference with other static verbs of &quot;being&quot;, where instrumental is normal, for example, Russian &lt;em&gt;kazats'a&lt;/em&gt; + INSTR &quot;to appear as X&quot;. In Czech, there used to be a rule (IIRC not enforced today much): INSTR meant temporal being, something like, &quot;I'm a teacher&quot; (I work as a teacher) while NOM meant something which never changes, I don't know, &quot;I'm a man&quot;. The interference: &quot;I work as a teacher (INSTR)&quot; =&gt; &quot;I'm a teacher&quot; (INSTR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why INSTR (and not any other case) is used with verbs like &quot;to appear&quot;, &quot;to look&quot;, &quot;to become&quot; etc. -- is a different question I don't know the answer for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't know the whole picture myself, just shared what I know, I hope it's helpful.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T18:11:11.377" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T18:11:11.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13102" CreationDate="2015-08-17T19:36:28.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question worth asking here is, how &quot;instrumental&quot; is the Slavic instrumental really? &quot;Instrumental&quot; is just a name that grammarians gave it, after its most common usage; but I don't think the pre-literate speakers of Proto-Slavic would think of it as a case for expressing instrumentality. To them, it just was what it was. The case for instruments and passive-sentence agents, as well as the case for times of day/year, as well as the case required by the prepositions for &quot;behind&quot; and &quot;in front of&quot;, as well as the case for being or becoming, as well as the case for modes and manners (every &lt;em&gt;-sky&lt;/em&gt; adverb in every Slavic language is historically an instrumental, plural, neuter adjective. &lt;em&gt;По-русски&lt;/em&gt; is a technically ungrammatical contamination of &lt;em&gt;rusьsky&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;po rusьsku&lt;/em&gt;.) And that latter meaning can probably elucidate how instrumental &quot;felt&quot; to speakers of Proto-Slavic — as a &quot;modes and manners&quot; case, which could equally be modes of doing — as in &lt;em&gt;*maltomъ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;with a hammer&quot; or &lt;em&gt;*slověnьsky&lt;/em&gt; &quot;in Slavic&quot;, &quot;the Slavic way&quot; — or modes of being, as in &lt;em&gt;*byti dobryjimъ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be good&quot;. Or circumstantial modes such as &lt;em&gt;*noktijǫ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;at night&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T19:36:28.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13134" CreationDate="2015-08-17T19:46:14.667" Score="1" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=city&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; Loss of Latin -v- is regular in French in some situations (compare &lt;em&gt;alleger&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;alleviare&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;neige&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;nivea&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;jeune&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;juvenis&lt;/em&gt;. A different sound evolution from the Latin word yielded Italian citta, Catalan ciutat, Spanish ciudad, Portuguese cidade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why might the Latin -v- have been lost in French? The following discusses the influence of the Gaulish language on French. So did Gaulish cause this loss?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratum_%28linguistics%29#Substratum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; One example of a substrate language is Gaulish, from the ancient Celtic people The Gauls. The Gauls lived in the modern French-speaking territory before the arrival of the Romans namely, the invasion of Julius Caesar's militia. Given the cultural, economic and political advantages that came with being a Latin speaker, the Gauls eventually abandoned their language in favor of the language brought to them by the Romans, which evolved in this region until eventually it took the form of the French language that is known today. The Gaulish speech disappeared, but remnants of its vocabulary survive in some French words (approximately 150) as well as place-names of Gaulish origin. [...] In the case of French, for example, Latin is the superstrate and Gaulish the substrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T20:03:45.973" Title="How did French lose the Latin -v-?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-08-25T19:22:07.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-17T21:09:38.200" Score="0" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, double-negatives are considered ungrammatical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We don't have no money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except when you actually mean it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's not nothing in the box... it's full of packing peanuts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in some other languages (I'll use Spanish, as it's the one I know the best), double negatives are grammatica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No tenemos nada de dinero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which can make &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/3775/12&quot;&gt;an intentional double negative awkward&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question here is:  Is there any actual rhyme or reason to languages which use double negatives as a part of their accepted grammar?  Is there a &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt;, other than sheer convention, that &quot;No tenemos nada de dinero&quot; is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way:  The prohibition against double negatives makes logical sense.  Every mathematician and computer programmer knows that negating a negative leaves you with a positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a corollary statement of logic which can be made for the languages which do require double negatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T17:19:49.770" Title="Is there any logic to required double negatives, or is that &quot;just the way it is&quot;?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13102" CreationDate="2015-08-17T21:54:37.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To begin with, it might be a Circum-Baltic areal feature we could call &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;marked predicative construction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to the unmarked/less marked nominative/accusative), as the following source suggests: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=sYk5AAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA84&amp;amp;ots=EdUMK3khc2&amp;amp;dq=%22predicative%20instrumental%22&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;pg=PA81#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22predicative%20instrumental%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the marking of predicate nominals in Baltic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Whether the Slavic languages were the first ones to acquire this construction, which later spread further, I'm not sure, but here's an idea that has just occured to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the instrumental is (at least in Czech) used to mark the &lt;strong&gt;agent of a passive clause&lt;/strong&gt;, such as...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Jan byl zabit vrah-em.&#xA;Jan.NOM was killed murderer-INST.&#xA;&quot;Jan was killed by a murderer.&quot; (INST obligatory)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I'm beginning to wonder whether the predicative instrumental construction could have arisen through a shift in &lt;em&gt;agentivity&lt;/em&gt; - of sorts. I'm only trying to catch a glimpse of something that's just evading my mind now, really, but the notion of &lt;em&gt;temporariness&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;changeability&lt;/em&gt; in the instrumental constructions as opposed to a relatively greater &lt;em&gt;stability&lt;/em&gt; in the nominative constructions also seems to evoke the notion of &lt;em&gt;dynamicity&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;stativity&lt;/em&gt; in a way. A look at the following examples in Czech might elucidate what I mean:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1a. Učinil-i Jen-a.&#xA;    Made.3PL Jan.ACC.&#xA;    &quot;They made Jan.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;1b. Učinil-i učitel-e.&#xA;    Made.3PL teacher-ACC.&#xA;    &quot;They made a teacher.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;2.  Učinil-i Jen-a učitel-em.&#xA;    Made-3PL Jan.ACC teacher-INST&#xA;    &quot;They made Jan a teacher.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;3.  Učinil-i z Jen-a učitel-e.&#xA;    Made-3PL from Jan.GEN teacher-ACC.&#xA;    &quot;They made a teacher from Jan.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. the passive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4a. Jan byl učiněn [jimi].&#xA;    Jan.NOM was made [they.INST].&#xA;    &quot;Jan was made [by them].&quot;&#xA;&#xA;4b. Učitel byl učiněn [jimi].&#xA;    Teacher.NOM was made [they.INST].&#xA;    &quot;The/A teacher was made [by them].&quot;&#xA;&#xA;5.  Jan byl učiněn učitel-em [jimi].&#xA;    Jan.NOM was made teacher.INST [they.INST] (potential ambiguity)&#xA;    &quot;Jan was made a teacher [by them].&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice also...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;6a. Jan je učitel-em.&#xA;    Jan.NOM is teacher.INST.&#xA;    &quot;Jan is a teacher (now, perhaps temporarily, maybe not for real).&quot;&#xA;&#xA;6b. Jan se stal učitel-em.&#xA;    Jan.NOM became teacher.INST.&#xA;    &quot;Jan became a teacher.&quot; (INST required, irreplaceable by NOM here)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;7a. Z Jen-a je učitel.&#xA;    From Jan.GEN is teacher.NOM.&#xA;    (=6a approximately)&#xA;&#xA;7b. Z Jen-a se stal učitel.&#xA;    From Jan.GEN became teacher.NOM&#xA;    (=6b approximately)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I'm picturing something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jan's been made a teacher&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;INST&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Jan is a teacher&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;INST&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As if a non-subject agent (or the more agentive-ish non-subject), unless made oblique by an intervening preposition, required the instrumental by default, originally, perhaps, in the passive only (?), then (?) in other contexts too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;agentivity shift&lt;/em&gt; (if that's the right way to call it) is just a spontaneously materialized idea, really, but somehow I can't stop feeling that the two phenomena are connected in one way or another. I'll definitely keep thinking about this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T21:54:37.453" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13130" CreationDate="2015-08-17T22:00:02.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably not a substrate effect, but a phonetically caused deletion, seeing as the sound was not lost in all contexts but only in specific conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A substrate-based loss would presumably be due to Gaulish not possessing a sound equivalent to that written with Latin &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;, which may or may not have been the case (depending on what exactly that sound was at that time and place, and on what exact sound the symbol V in Gaulish inscriptions represented). But if so, this would presumably have caused complete loss of the phoneme rather than conditioned deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is regularly lost next to round vowels: &lt;em&gt;pavo:rem &gt; peur, avunculum &gt; oncle, iuvenis &gt; jeune&lt;/em&gt;. Between other vowels it generally remains: &lt;em&gt;lavare &gt; laver, levare &gt; lever&lt;/em&gt;. Loss of a rounded consonant next to a round vowel is a very common type of assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases like &lt;em&gt;alleviare &gt; alléger&lt;/em&gt; are part of a different rule, namely that &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is lost before most consonants: in this case it was followed by a [j] (which is how the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; would have been pronounced in this word in Late/Vulgar Latin). Similarly for &lt;em&gt;civ(i)ta:tem &gt; cité&lt;/em&gt; (where the second &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; would have been lost by syncope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T22:00:02.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6668" CreationDate="2015-08-17T22:29:49.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember finding quite a few WTF moments in his paper, but it was a year ago, so to refresh my memory, I opened the paper again, and skimmed through. For example, on page 24, he compares word &quot;coriander&quot; in different languages and tries to compare the phonemes, and, among other things, compares ending -ον in κόριον to -n- in English &quot;coriander&quot;, which are not related at all, as -ον in κόριον is simply a nominative/accusative singular ending which is not manifested anywhere else (dative κορίῷ) -- this is something pseudoscientific folks love to do, compare random morphemes to random morphemes. Not to say 1) he literally leaves it as KORIJADANA as if not knowing how Linear Greek works (and even reconstructs a vowel from -A- in the syllable -DAN-, which is actually just a quirk of the Linear Greek alphabet which was syllabic) 2) κορίαδνα is plural, as mostly plural was used for coriander in Ancient Greek, and for some reason, it's compared to singular κόριον (which kind of makes sense, otherwise there would be no -ν- in κόρια for his comparisons). He also says that 'coriander' in the mentioned languages derives from Greek κόριον, which is nonsense, as κόριον itself is a shortened version of κορίαννον, and most of the mentioned European words actually borrow the word from Latin &lt;em&gt;coriandrum&lt;/em&gt; or Greek κορίανδρον (another variant). His table also compares Modern English &lt;em&gt;coriander&lt;/em&gt; (with lost endings) to ancient tongues directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such strange things here and there suggest me the author is not totally sure what he's doing. On almost every page, there are clueless comparisons of random things to random things with argumentation typical of amateurish linguists the internet is full of. For example, on page 44, he compares &lt;em&gt;Chiron&lt;/em&gt; to Turkic &lt;em&gt;kara&lt;/em&gt; to Russian &lt;em&gt;чёрный&lt;/em&gt; (he found all those examples on Omniglot!). How cool is that? The typical (amateurish and unscientific) argumentation of his is &quot;let's find similarly looking words via Omniglot/Google in different random languages; random alternations like L/R or K/KH/CH don't matter, as for vowel inconsistences, we can explain it via abjad. When a pattern is found, for example K/KH/CH+vowel+R/L (this template works for roots: khal, kir, chur, etc.) while comparing Sanskrit to modern Russian to Sumerian, we can suggest it's a word in the language of the Voynich manuscript as well. We have a vast material of whole 10 words decoded this way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T00:12:39.593" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T00:12:39.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13132" CreationDate="2015-08-17T22:52:46.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just an info to consider: Russian's &quot;double negative&quot; employs two different particles. The actual negation particle is &quot;ne&quot;. The second particle is &quot;ni&quot; and is actually called &quot;intensifier&quot; in traditional Russian grammars. And I think it's a nice way to describe it: the second particle looks like a negation, but it isn't, it's simply an intensifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it this way: a verb can be used as/like a noun, e.g. &quot;To love is to be vulnerable&quot;. So why can't a negation particle be used as an &quot;intensifier&quot;? The role of a word in a sentence is not always 100% its default, strict definition in the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="3186" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T23:28:14.967" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T23:28:14.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13141" CreationDate="2015-08-18T00:25:14.427" Score="-1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whence does this connotation of 'head' as foolhardiness originate? PIE? It appears  in English words of Germanic origin like 'headfirst' and 'headlong', but also Latinate words like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=precipitate&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;precipitate&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What metaphors or key ideas explain and overlie the semantic drifts? What semantic drifts bridge the original meaning (of 'head') with the induced meaning of impetuosity? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The head contains the mind, and so it seems contradictory to impute impetuosity to the head? For instance, feet implies  impetuosity, because the feet enable someone to hurry somewhere recklessly.  I don't know whether ancient peoples knew that the head contained the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T02:06:32.117" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T20:23:30.247" Title="Why does the head connote foolhardiness?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-08-28T19:55:04.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13132" CreationDate="2015-08-18T04:44:02.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;All this demonstrates that you cannot apply simple predicate logic to language - and definitely not the rules of programming languages. The negative markers in different languages work according the internal rules of agreement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just a matter of surface marking and convention. The scope of the negative is determined partly by syntax and partly by context and works differently in different languages. For example, languages with grammatical double negatives make it easier to distinguish between things like 'I have nothing' and 'I don't have anything' in the rare examples where you want to express the possession of nothingness. But even in English, it's possible to make that contextually clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T04:44:02.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13140" CreationDate="2015-08-18T08:12:55.053" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking up Old Chinese reconstructions, I often find square brackets [] in the middle of an reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Baxter-Sagart system says 寺's old Chinese pronunciation is /*s-[d]əʔ-s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that // means it's a broad transcription, * indicates it's a reconstruction, and usually [] means it's a narrow transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does [d] in the middle mean that particular transcription is narrow?  So for /*s-[d]əʔ-s/, other than [d], all other phoneme are in broad transcription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10312" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T08:49:37.943" Title="What do [ ] mean in the middle of a reconstructed pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13139" CreationDate="2015-08-18T08:49:37.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this description,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/BaxterSagartOCbyMandarinMC2014-09-20.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/BaxterSagartOCbyMandarinMC2014-09-20.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the round parentheses indicate that the content enclosed in them may be omitted. The square brackets indicate that one is uncertain about the sound enclosed and it could have been something else with the same meaning, too. They mention an example in which [t] may have been either &quot;t&quot; or &quot;p&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hyphen indicates a morpheme boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T08:49:37.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13137" CreationDate="2015-08-18T09:00:58.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Headlong&lt;/em&gt; evolved from Middle English hedlong, alteration of &lt;em&gt;hedling, heedling, hevedlynge&lt;/em&gt; (“headlong”), assimilated to long. &lt;em&gt;Headling&lt;/em&gt; in Middle English came from  hēafodling in Old English and both of them meant an &quot;equal/peer&quot; or, previously, a &quot;chieftain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The head – yes, ancient people in Europe etc. correctly &quot;guessed&quot; that the mind is located in the head – has something to do with decisions. It can't be &quot;a priori&quot; determined whether the decisions are good or bad. &quot;Headlong&quot; means &quot;without any detailed analysis&quot;. It means that the &quot;head goes first&quot; &lt;em&gt;even though&lt;/em&gt; the head is the organ that should spend some time by thinking, and therefore go last!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the negation is included in the head-based word for &quot;recklessly&quot; is a matter of coincidences. In Slavic languages, &quot;headlong&quot; may be translated as &quot;without the head&quot; – for example the Czech word &quot;bezhlavě&quot; (&quot;bez&quot; is &quot;without&quot;, &quot;hlavě&quot; is derived from &quot;hlava&quot;, a &quot;head&quot;) is one of the synonyms equivalent to &quot;headlong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might conjecture that the Germanic languages meant exactly the same (without the head, i.e. without careful enough of any thinking) but omitted &quot;without&quot; because the Germanic words for &quot;without&quot; are longer than the Slavic words (2 syllables instead of 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP recommended me to add a reply to this comment of the OP into this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks. Would you please explain the apparent contradiction in It means that the &quot;head goes first&quot; even though the head is the organ that should spend some time by thinking, and therefore go last!? You appear to agree with me that the head should go last, because the head allows for thinking. So instead, in fact, why DOES the head go first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that when one is thoughtful, the head goes last, especially when the situation or act is truly dangerous or counterproductive. It's the other organs that go first and the head is the organ that says &quot;slow down&quot;. In other words, the head &quot;should&quot; go last. That's exactly the reason why it is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; for the head to go first – and why we think that it's &lt;em&gt;reckless&lt;/em&gt; for the head to go first, or to go headlong or headfirst! Someone does something &quot;headlong&quot; when he's doing it the wrong way! So the word makes perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a rationalization of an answer. Our almost opposite &quot;without the head&quot; makes perfect sense, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T20:23:30.247" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T20:23:30.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13132" CreationDate="2015-08-18T09:27:10.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different language groups – the rules are usually constant for a whole language group – simply used different conventions how to deal with the negatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Germanic languages are closer to the mathematical logic in the sense that every word like &quot;nicht&quot; flips the meaning of the sentence. It means that one has to count them modulo two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't mean that the other language groups are illogical. They simply use different rules for the co-existence of the negation words. As an example of Slavic languages, Czech has very well-defined detailed rules of the negation (and other things). There are three types of negation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sentence-wide negation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negation of a member&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negation of a word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this list, they are increasingly more &quot;local&quot; negations and each of them has its own rules. The negation of a word is simply a new word with &quot;ne-&quot; (&quot;non-&quot;) added: &quot;nechuť&quot; is the &quot;lack of chuť&quot; (appetite), nejeden is &quot;not [just] one&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The negation of a member – &quot;ne&quot; followed by a space – negates the following word(s) as a member of the sentence. &quot;Tell it not to me but to him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, the most relevant kind of negation is the sentence-wide negation. The rules of Czech, Slavic, and other languages require doing several things at the same moment in order for the negation to be sentence-wide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negate the verb, by adding &quot;ne-&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use negative adverbs if any: &quot;nikdy&quot; (&quot;never&quot;) and &quot;nikde&quot; (&quot;nowhere&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use a negative pronoun if a pronoun is a subject: &quot;nikdo&quot; (&quot;no one&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add the word &quot;ani&quot; in front of nouns that are subjects that don't exist thanks to the negation: &quot;Ani hlásek se neozval&quot; (&quot;Not even one voice could have been heard.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not only &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; but absolutely &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; that the sentence-wide negation respects all of these pieces. They don't negate each other. Instead, they co-operate to create one sentence-wide negation. Carsten describes Russian that presents some parts of the sentence-wide negation as &quot;intensifiers&quot; but whether one of them is considered a cherry on a pie and less important than others or not, it's the case in most such languages that all of the parts of the negation are needed for a correct sentence-wide negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences with four negatives – which are actually just parts of one sentence-wide negative – are common. For example, &quot;Nikdy jsem nikde nikoho nezabil&quot; in Czech means &quot;I have never killed anyone anywhere&quot; but it is literally &quot;Never have I nowhere no one not-killed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastEditorUserId="935" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T17:19:49.770" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T17:19:49.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T09:38:44.033" Score="10" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've been asked what the difference between the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Leiden school&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mainstream&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Indo-Europeanists is. The asker is planning to study in Leiden and has been concerned with the many vague criticisms he has encountered in connection with the &quot;Leidenites&quot;. I've noticed the differences mainly pertain to the (methodology of the) &lt;strong&gt;reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European&lt;/strong&gt; (especially in connection to the &lt;em&gt;accentuation&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;glottalism&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Germanic substrate theories&lt;/em&gt; etc), but there seems to be no detailed, coherent, comprehensive list of the particulars, just bits and pieces scattered here and then. Could somebody possibly make a list like that here, or provide suitable references? It might be both useful and interesting to see what differences there are between other schools and, within the &quot;mainstream&quot;, between its &quot;undercurrents&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T21:39:48.577" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T12:08:45.197" Title="Difference between &quot;Leiden school&quot; and &quot;mainstream&quot; Indo-Europeanists?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13145" CreationDate="2015-08-18T10:05:43.340" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I recognize and distinguish non linguistic inhaling and exhaling in the waveform or spectrogram? I can hear it in the signal but I want to write a script that recognizes inhalation and exhalation candidates semiautomatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T10:37:32.187" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T22:28:20.057" Title="Distinguishing inhalation and exhalation in Praat" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13144" CreationDate="2015-08-18T14:14:28.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMPORTANT: As with most properties of speech, the criteria described below are only going to be useful in relative terms--your script is going to do much better the more specifically it can be trained (either automatically or by you feeding it the appropriate parameters as arguments) for a specific individual in combination with a specific recording setup, since things like amplitude, duration, and formant values are all affected by a variety of factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How breathing noises can be distinguished from linguistic speech noises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inhalations and exhalations are usually only excited by aspiration noise, so if there is strong voicing (i.e., regular glottal pulses and a voice bar towards the bottom of the spectrum), it's probably not an inhalation or an exhalation. (EXCEPTIONS: Sometimes an inhalation can include voicing if it's an audible gasp, as when someone is startled. An exhalation can include voicing if it's a groan or a voiced sigh.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-linguistic breathing, if done through the mouth, is usually characterized by a rather neutral formant structure, with formant values akin to those for a schwa-like vowel. Since the glottis is open, you might see a higher F1 and maybe a higher F2 than for a voiced schwa. (EXCEPTIONS: Sometimes other formant structures might appear, for example if the individual grits her teeth upon inhalation or rounds her lips upon exhalation.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the inhalations/exhalations are through the nose only, there won't be oral formant structure. Instead the noise will be relatively low in amplitude and will be rather diffuse in the spectrum. In that regard it might be difficult to distinguish from fricatives like [f] or [θ] (or from voiceless nasals like the ones found in Icelandic), but it will likely be weaker in intensity than those fricatives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some linguistic speech sounds are characterized by formant structure excited by noise. The aspirated portions of aspirated stops are an example of this, but the period of aspiration will be much shorter for such sounds, and they will be flanked by a burst (short period of frication noise) to the left and voicing to the right. Word-initial [h] is another example, but it too will be shorter than breathing, and its formants will match the formants of the voiced vowel/sonorant following it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breathy releases after vowels or released obstruents at the ends of phrases will probably be the most difficult to untangle from independent breath sounds. In reality, this makes sense, as the end of a phrase can often seamlessly transition into an exhalation. In such cases you will have to look for the formants transitioning from the vowel or consonant values to a more neutral schwa-like structure as well as the fading out of the voicing (if it's a vowel) or frication noise (if it's an obstruent).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that there's a surefire way to distinguish inhalation &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; exhalation. If anything, it's a bit easier to distinguish them from one another if they are side by side rather than if one instance of either inhalation or exhalation appears in isolation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In general, for the same level of &quot;excitedness&quot; on the part of the&#xA;speaker (I'm trying to avoid using &quot;intensity&quot; here, to avoid&#xA;terminological confusion), the exhalations will appear louder (have&#xA;greater amplitude in the waveform) than the inhalations. (EXCEPTIONS: &#xA;If someone gasps really forcefully, as when startled or scared, then releases the air more slowly and quietly, the relative amplitudes of the two may be reversed.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may see more low frequency noise in the spectrogram for&#xA;exhalations, depending on the recording setup, since exhalations can&#xA;cause wind noise across the mic (EXCEPTIONS: The low-frequency wind noise may be less apparent if there is a wind screen or a pop filter over the mic, or if it is a lav mic under the speaker's clothing.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is an extended period of just normal breathing, as when an individual is listening or just waiting to speak, there will be less time between inhalation and exhalation than between exhalation and subsequent inhalation. (inhale-exhale... inhale-exhale... etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-12-30T22:28:20.057" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T22:28:20.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13175" CreationDate="2015-08-18T22:17:28.580" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_letter#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; Silent letters may help to put weight on a certain syllable, telling the reader to put more stress on the syllable (Compare physi&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;s to physi&lt;strong&gt;que&lt;/strong&gt;s). [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the IPA for 'physics' is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/physics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ˈfɪzɪks/&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;and for 'physique' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/physique&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/fɪˈziːk/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. I see that &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt; has fewer letters than &lt;strong&gt;que&lt;/strong&gt;, but which are the silent letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do the silent letters explain the difference in pronunciation? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/227319/50720&quot;&gt;This ELU post&lt;/a&gt; motivated my reading about silent letters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T23:12:07.567" Title="How do silent letters emphasise the syllable in 'physics'?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2015-08-28T20:11:26.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-18T23:17:24.367" Score="4" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a forced aligner in Spanish. Something similar to P2FA for American English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to force align simple sentences in Mexican Spanish for a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T21:40:37.897" Title="Forced aligner in Spanish? (Similar to P2FA)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2015-08-19T09:07:28.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably 'the Leiden School' refers to the views of the professor (who is respected) there. To discover his views look at Kortlandt, Frederik 'Studies in Germanic, Indo-European and Indo-Uralic' (Amsterdam, 2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every University that teaches Indo-European studies will have a leading professor who, if he's worth his pay, will have his own views on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10008" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T09:07:28.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2015-08-19T12:00:42.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leiden school are people who propose some strict rules for PIE and strictly adhere to them. Strict root structure, no vowels except /o/ and /e/, three laryngeals etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their opponents are conservatives who are either skeptic about some of the Leiden rules or those who supports more loose rules (for instance, vowel /a/ in borrowed words, 4 laryngeals, some roots with two vowels etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Leiden is for extensive, numerous, strict, regular rules, their opponents are for less rules and more exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T12:08:45.197" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T12:08:45.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13148" CreationDate="2015-08-19T12:07:35.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just Googling, I found this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://latlntic.unige.ch/phonetique/easyalign.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://latlntic.unige.ch/phonetique/easyalign.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything about it, but they claim to be able to handle French, Spanish, and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T12:07:35.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-19T16:56:40.313" Score="1" ViewCount="963" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the bottom page 6 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ltml.ci/files/articles3/Roland%20Raoul%20KOUASSI.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; paper, the author starts describing Henri Adamczewski's meta-operational grammar theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the author says is complete Latin to me, a complete newbie. Can anyone of you, professional linguists, explain this to me in plain English? How does this explain the distinction between the present simple and the present progressive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastEditorUserId="9580" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T20:00:30.867" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T20:01:30.207" Title="Meta-operational grammar" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;present&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-19T17:25:57.260" Score="4" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;h2&gt;What I am looking for:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As my question suggests, I'm interested in words English has adopted from other languages. More specifically, I'm interested in old &lt;strong&gt;Celtic&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Scandinavian&lt;/strong&gt; (or other) loanwords that later succumbed to the influx of vocabulary of Norman/French origin. In other words, I'm interested in loanwords known to have been replaced by later loanwords. I will be grateful for any relevant &lt;strong&gt;references&lt;/strong&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;(a) Loosening the constraints&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are no or only very few known cases like that, I'm willing to loosen the constraints and extend the range to &lt;strong&gt;any later loanwords&lt;/strong&gt; known to have replaced any other loanwords &lt;strong&gt;irrespective of their origin&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;(b) Further loosening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if this doesn't turn out to be fruitful either, well, then I'll be grateful for &lt;strong&gt;any analogical cases&lt;/strong&gt; from languages &lt;strong&gt;other than English&lt;/strong&gt;. Being a native speaker of Czech, I will be happy to have a look at my own &lt;em&gt;mother tongue&lt;/em&gt;, of course, but it seems the picture was skewed by the artificial revitalization efforts of the National Revival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;One of the why's behind the what&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons why I'm asking this question is the general tendency of the relatively less stable (&quot;cultural&quot;) vocabulary being replaced more easily than the relatively more stable (&quot;basic&quot;) vocabulary. Now, if this assumption is correct, the following scenario seems quite imaginable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given a contact situation whereby &lt;strong&gt;Language A&lt;/strong&gt; undergoes lexical influence from &lt;strong&gt;Language B&lt;/strong&gt;, after some time, most of the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; concepts in Language A still remain relatively &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;intact&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, whereas the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;cultural&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lexicon has seen a significant influx of words from Language B. At this point, another player appears on the scene: &lt;strong&gt;Language C&lt;/strong&gt;. The influence from Language B stops, no more loanwords can be adopted from it, and it is Language C that takes over the role of the major, perhaps only, lexical donor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the principle mentioned above really works, at least to some extent, &lt;strong&gt;Language C&lt;/strong&gt;'s impact on Language A's vocabulary is first witnessed in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cultural&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary. Then, however, it must also be some of the words originating from Language B that first fall victim to the flurry of &lt;em&gt;C-cisms&lt;/em&gt;. With enough time, Language C can have such an impact on the lexicon of Language A that most or all of the loanwords from Language B fall out of use completely making Language A look as if there has never been &lt;strong&gt;any influence from Language B whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Language C&lt;/strong&gt; being the sole source of it (by the way, &lt;em&gt;I'm deliberately ignoring the non-lexical influence from Language B&lt;/em&gt;, which could still survive, perhaps).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've wondered to what extent this hypothetical situation could be compared to what happened in the history of English, if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 1:&lt;/strong&gt; As one of the answerers has pointed out (thank you!), English &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;peace&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a nice example of what I'm interested in. If anyone can provide other words or provide references to sources where they are listed, I will be deeply thankful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 2:&lt;/strong&gt; After some digging, I've been able to find a few mentions of &lt;em&gt;Scandinavian loanwords&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=n3r5AS1sdUoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA20&amp;amp;ots=-0tupAn3zN&amp;amp;dq=scandinavian%20loanwords%20old%20english&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;pg=PA20#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=scandinavian%20loanwords%20old%20english&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I'll re-edit my question if necessary once I've finished reading it and looked up the references mentioned therein to see what information they can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T09:23:53.090" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T09:23:53.090" Title="English &amp; Competing Borrowings: How many &quot;pre-Norman&quot; loanwords are known to have been replaced by &quot;post-Hastings&quot; ones?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-19T18:26:07.400" Score="-1" ViewCount="778" Body="&lt;p&gt;How it happened that the same roller coaster type is called &quot;Russian mountains&quot; in America and &quot;American mountains&quot; in Russia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T09:25:26.727" Title="How it happened that the same thing called &quot;Russian mountains&quot; in America and &quot;American mountains&quot; in Russia?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-08-29T18:02:32.200" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13155" CreationDate="2015-08-19T18:38:48.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster#Russian_mountain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The English Wiki says&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;The oldest roller coasters are believed to have originated from the so-called &quot;Russian Mountains&quot;, which were specially constructed hills of ice, located especially around Saint Petersburg. Built in the 17th century, the slides were built to a height of between 21 and 24 m (70 and 80 feet), consisted of a 50 degree drop, and were reinforced by wooden supports.&#xA;Some historians say the first roller coaster was built under the orders of Russia's Catherine the Great in the Gardens of Oranienbaum in Saint Petersburg in the year 1784. Other historians believe that the first modern roller coaster was built by the French. ... The name &lt;em&gt;Russian Mountains&lt;/em&gt; to designate a roller coaster is preserved in most Latin languages.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B8#.D0.98.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.80.D0.B8.D1.8F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Russian Wiki says&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Термин «американские горки» используется в России потому, что в виде, близком к современному, они были впервые сконструированы в США и получили там очень широкое распространение.&quot; — 'The term &lt;em&gt;American Mountains&lt;/em&gt; is used in Russia since the roller coaster as it usually looks now was first constructed and built in the USA and got very popular there.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T19:20:05.980" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T19:20:05.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13154" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:36:24.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;peace&lt;/strong&gt; (from the Old French ancestor of Fr. &lt;em&gt;paix&lt;/em&gt;) replaced a few different words in Old English, some of which were of Old Norse origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;peace&lt;/em&gt; has historically been used of a treaty or truce (e.g. the 1783 treaty between Britain and the newly-independent United States is called the &quot;Peace of Paris&quot;). In this sense, Old English used a term &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grið&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which is thought to come from Old Norse and be related to Icelandic &lt;em&gt;grið&lt;/em&gt; &quot;truce, mercy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more general term for &quot;peace&quot; in OE seems to have been &lt;em&gt;frið&lt;/em&gt;, a cognate of German &lt;em&gt;Frieden&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;friður&lt;/em&gt;, etc. &quot;peace&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;sibb-&lt;/em&gt; (as in the verb &lt;em&gt;gesibbian&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pacify&quot;), cognate with German &lt;em&gt;Sippe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;family, kinship group&quot;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;sifji&lt;/em&gt; &quot;close relative&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T01:34:20.463" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T01:34:20.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1079" CreationDate="2015-08-20T02:42:48.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are both Latin, &lt;em&gt;Aurora Borealis&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;morning light coming from the north&quot; and &lt;em&gt;Aurora Australis&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;morning light coming from the south&quot;.&#xA;                                                                                                                                            .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10319" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T02:42:48.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-20T06:53:36.323" Score="2" ViewCount="1079" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read* that one reason that f0 varies over time owes to the quasi-periodic nature of vocal chord vibrations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does f0 variation over time have to do with the quasi-periodicity of the signal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/zahorian/pdf/dikshit_algorithm_for_locating_fundamental_frequency.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/zahorian/pdf/dikshit_algorithm_for_locating_fundamental_frequency.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T07:10:20.930" Title="Why are vocal cord vibrations quasi periodic and not periodic?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13159" CreationDate="2015-08-20T07:10:20.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this is really a basic mathematics or physics question. The frequency of a sound is &quot;F0&quot; if and only if &quot;1/F0&quot; is the smallest possible period of time for which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pressure (t) = pressure(t+1/F0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for each moment of time &quot;t&quot;. To be able to define the frequency means to define the periodicity of the pressure waves (sound are oscillations), and the frequency (in Hz) is the inverse of the periodicity (in seconds). For example, a tone with the frequency 500 Hz is periodic and the oscillating pressure gets repeated every 1/500=0.002 second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no such exact periodicity exists for the human voice – which also means that &quot;F0&quot; isn't quite well-defined, either. The vibrations of the vocal cord are complicated and not periodic. They are close to periodic ones but not quite periodic: they are &quot;quasi-periodic&quot;. It means that some frequency &quot;dominates&quot; but it cannot be determined exactly. The vibrations of the vocal cord are aperiodic because different points of the vocal cord vibrate independently and the vibrations can't be divided to simple harmonics because they affect each other, due to &quot;nonlinearities&quot; of the equations governing the vocal cord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, one could consider sounds that are periodic, with the periodicity &quot;1/F0&quot;. Such sounds may be written as &quot;Fourier sums&quot; (Fourier series, Fourier expansions) over the frequency &quot;F0&quot; and the &quot;higher harmonics&quot; such as &quot;2*F0&quot;, &quot;3*F0&quot;, and so on. Each of these higher harmonics would have some coefficient which would describe the &quot;color&quot; of the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the human voice isn't quite periodic so the Fourier series aren't enough. We need a full-fledged &quot;Fourier transform&quot; in which all frequencies, and not just a multiple of &quot;F0&quot;, are represented. Some frequencies around &quot;F0&quot; (and partly its multiples) make higher contributions but the other frequencies can't be completely neglected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T07:10:20.930" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13155" CreationDate="2015-08-20T09:25:26.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not the only example of the linguistic phenomenon whereby language A qualifies some object as B, while language B qualifies the same object as A. English uses “French letters” for “condoms”, while on the other side of the Channel they are called “capotes anglaises”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T09:25:26.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13091" CreationDate="2015-08-20T22:34:20.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Having found out that my answer has been voted down by three people, I have decided to revisit the topic and explain in a bit more detail my view regarding some cases of &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;-formations being &lt;strong&gt;suffixes&lt;/strong&gt; rather than &lt;strong&gt;compound members&lt;/strong&gt;. In order to do so, I have summarized my views at the very end of my answer and provided two corroborating quotations from references I have recently discovered on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is an easy question to answer, because whether a particular morph/component represents an &lt;strong&gt;affix&lt;/strong&gt; rather than a &lt;strong&gt;compound member&lt;/strong&gt; may differ from word to word, depending on a number of factors. In addition, you may need to specify what exactly you mean by &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, because there seem to be differences from variety to variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, there is a &lt;strong&gt;continuum&lt;/strong&gt; spanning from &lt;em&gt;phrases&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;compounds&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;derivations&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;inflections&lt;/em&gt; on the one hand, just as there is one spanning from &lt;em&gt;free forms&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;enclitics&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;bound forms&lt;/em&gt; (and that is already a simplification) on the other, so it may be difficult to define rules differentiating between them within a particular language, and, perhaps, sometimes we may simply have to accept the fact that a particular word represents a transitional formation. Terms such as &lt;em&gt;affixoid&lt;/em&gt; have sometimes been applied to formatives occupying the position somewhere between affixes and compound members by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it's true that &lt;strong&gt;phonological reduction&lt;/strong&gt; may be an indicator of the component's being an affix, but that's just one aspect of the &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; side of the equation. You may also want to look at the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and ask yourself questions such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is the meaning of the resultant form predictable from the meaning of its components?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;If so, in what ways and to what extent?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Cross-linguistically, however, semantic criteria have shown to be not quite reliable either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;-words in English are concerned, you may need to look into things such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;when the word was coined&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;whether the differences in pronunciation correlate with that&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but that may only reveal the diachronic origin and may not be relevant from synchronic perspective. Speaking of which, I have come across an interesting &lt;em&gt;Language Log&lt;/em&gt; post &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; followed by a discussion you may also find worth reading. And &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bender/man.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;'s another page worth looking at (referred to from the Language Log post, in fact, and presumably by linguist &lt;em&gt;Byron W. Bender&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also compare the &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; component with, say, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;. Adding the latter to a &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; base X&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;derives&lt;/strong&gt; the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;doer of X&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. But what exactly does the former derive when we add it to a &lt;em&gt;nominal&lt;/em&gt; base X&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt;?  How exactly does the &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; derive the new meanings? How regular and predictable is the outcome? And if we split &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-man&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-man&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. /mən/ or /mn̩/ and /mæn/, respectively, does the division correlate with anything in the language (e.g. geographical or dialectal distribution, semantic transparency, period of coinage)? How restrictive are the rules combining &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; with X as to its form and part of speech? What about words such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;snowman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [ˈsnəʊ.ˌmæn] and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;frogman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [ˈfrɒɡ.mən / ˈfrɒɡ.mn̩]? And so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these questions may prove to be more relevant than others, of course, and there may be a number of different angles depending on ones linguistic-theoretical background. I could restate my current opinion here, namely that &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; may be seen as (becoming) a &lt;em&gt;suffix&lt;/em&gt; in some words while a &lt;em&gt;compound member&lt;/em&gt; in others, correlating at least in part with the relative recentness of their coinage and the two pronunciation variants reflecting this. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of the history of &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt;, which has (1) remained an independent word (though transformed into a preposition, hence &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; a man&lt;/em&gt;), (2) became a transparently cognate suffix(oid) (&lt;em&gt;man&lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) and (3) evolved into a non-transparently cognate suffix (&lt;em&gt;man&lt;strong&gt;ly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;). Something limilar might happen to &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt; if its semantics gets reduced, which is difficult to predict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you will find at least some of my thoughts useful. To read more on the issue of &lt;em&gt;demarcating&lt;/em&gt; the borders between compounds and derivations, you may want to have a look at Angela Ralli's &lt;em&gt;Compounding versus Derivation&lt;/em&gt; (pre-publication draft available as a PDF &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.philology.upatras.gr/ralli.angela/files/edited_volumes/Ralli_2010_Compounding%20vs%20Derivation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), for example, and I'd suggest that you also read &lt;em&gt;Understanding Morphology&lt;/em&gt; by Haspelmath &amp;amp; Sims (2010, &lt;em&gt;2nd edition&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other references worth reading include &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=kJHavTVbm6MC&amp;amp;lpg=PA103&amp;amp;ots=H5E3rx929Z&amp;amp;dq=%22compound%20member%22%20%22affix%22%20difference&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;pg=PA103#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22compound%20member%22%20%22affix%22%20difference&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sign Language: An International Handbook&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Pfau, Steinbach &amp;amp; Woll (2012) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=BIISCW4DXBgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA71&amp;amp;ots=U1hA2__3It&amp;amp;dq=%22compound%20member%22%20%22affix%22%20difference&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;pg=PA71#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22compound%20member%22%20%22affix%22%20difference&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Morphology Now&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Aronoff (1992). I offer two quotations below, one from the former (p. 103), the other from the latter (p. 71):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can one identify affixes in a language? What distinguishes them from compound members? First, and affix recurs in the language, co-occurring with many different base words, while compound members are confined to few bases. The suffix &lt;em&gt;-ness&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is listed as occurring in 3058 English words (Aronoff/Anshen 1998, 245), while &lt;em&gt;green&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;greenhouse, greengrocer, greenmail&lt;/em&gt;) occurs in about 30. In addition, affixes are more distant from their free word origin. While members of compounds usually also occur as free words in the language, affixes in many cases do not. Therefore, a morpheme that recurs in many lexical items in a language and in addition does not appear as a free form is an affix and not a compound member. Finally, allomorphy is much more typical of affixes than of compound members. This is to be expected, since affixes are more fused with their bases than compound members with each other. However, &lt;strong&gt;the difference between an affix and a compound member is a matter of degree, not a categorical difference, and can be hard to determine in particular cases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, more importantly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to [Grammaticization Theory], affixes go back to earlier lexical items that are reduced semantically and phonologically and become bound to the stem. For many English affixes the diachronic origin in a full lexical item has long been known to historical linguistis - for example, &lt;em&gt;-hood&lt;/em&gt; (cf. Gothic &lt;em&gt;haidus&lt;/em&gt; 'kind, manner'), &lt;em&gt;-dom&lt;/em&gt; (cf. Old English (OE) &lt;em&gt;dōm&lt;/em&gt; 'judg[e]ment, doom', Old High German &lt;em&gt;tuom&lt;/em&gt; 'position, condition'), &lt;em&gt;-less&lt;/em&gt; (cf. OE &lt;em&gt;lēas&lt;/em&gt; 'devoid (of), free (from)'), &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; (OE &lt;em&gt;-līc&lt;/em&gt;, second member of exocentric compounds based on Germanic &lt;em&gt;*līk-&lt;/em&gt; 'appearance, form, body'; thus &lt;em&gt;friend-ly&lt;/em&gt; is originally 'having the appearance of a friend'). &lt;strong&gt;For some English affixes, the origin in free lexical items is to some degree even synchronically transparent - for example, &lt;em&gt;-ful&lt;/em&gt; (cf. &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; (cf. &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First of all, we need to restrict ourselves to cases in which &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; shows &lt;strong&gt;reduced&lt;/strong&gt; pronunciation, namely &lt;strong&gt;/mn̩/&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since this may differ variety from variety, we need to stick to a single variety at a time; after all, a variety (such as a dialect) can and should be considered a system of its own, with its own rules etc.;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We need to check whether the reduction is phonologically or otherwise conditioned, i.e. whether we can predict it from things such as word-length, its components etc. Quite clearly, we cannot - if we are to believe the above-mentioned sources. Examples like &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;Batman&lt;/em&gt;&gt; /&lt;strong&gt;ˈbæt&lt;/strong&gt;.ˌmæn/ vs. &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;batman&lt;/em&gt;&gt; /&lt;strong&gt;ˈbæt&lt;/strong&gt;.mn̩/ vs. (hypothetical) *&amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;bat man&lt;/em&gt;&gt; /ˌbæt.&lt;strong&gt;ˈmæn&lt;/strong&gt;/ appear to prove this. See also no. 8.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orthography is a source of bias we need to take into account, hence the spelling &amp;lt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&gt; shared by both /mæn/ and /mn̩/ has to be considered irrelevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now, unlike /mæn/, /mn̩/ doesn't ever appear as an independent word. In my view, the latter form is much closer to being a suffix, whereas the former is &lt;em&gt;indubitably&lt;/em&gt; closer to being a compound member instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even though it is obvious that it was a specific stress pattern that has given rise to the reduced pronunciation, and that the formations once were true compounds, strictly synchronically, they need not to be, just like in &lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt;, which is not only &lt;em&gt;not a compound&lt;/em&gt; synchronically, it should even be considered &lt;em&gt;monomorphematic&lt;/em&gt; in my view. Again, bear in mind that spelling has to be ignored here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The relevance of the fact that &lt;em&gt;literate&lt;/em&gt; native speakers consider a word as a compound may also be questioned, mainly due to the above-mentioned spelling bias, but also due to synchronic co-existence of affixes and words sharing similar origin and parallel miniparadigms (the connection of /-mn̩/ to /mæn/ may well be secondarily reinforced by the homophonous /wʊ.mn̩/ ~ /-wʊ.mn̩/).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could provisionally assume that the words mentioned in no. 3 represent the continuum (a) &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; ~ (b) &lt;em&gt;compound&lt;/em&gt; ~ (c) &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt; and generalize the pattern based on stress:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a. &lt;strong&gt;primary&lt;/strong&gt;-none&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;primary&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;em&gt;secondary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c. &lt;em&gt;secondary&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;primary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-09-08T20:42:51.683" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T20:42:51.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13174" CreationDate="2015-08-20T23:46:03.200" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to apply NLP to fiction but I don't know how split dialog into sentences. Specifically how to split said tags.&#xA;ex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Awake? How long have been asleep?&quot; asked teenagers at the same time.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do I split it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Awake?&#xA;How long have been asleep?&quot;&#xA;asked teenagers at the same time.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Awake?&#xA;How long have been asleep?&quot; asked teenagers at the same time.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or was it already one sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10325" LastEditorUserId="10325" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T05:27:06.480" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T05:27:06.480" Title="Said tags in Sentence detection" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13091" CreationDate="2015-08-21T09:41:20.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words like “policeman” and “postman” are indubitably compounds. Not only are they compounds historically, but they are still perceived as compounds by native speakers. This perception explains why it is possible to decompose them and stick them back together in neologisms like “policewoman” or “postperson”. By contrast “woman” is historically a compound (formed from the Old English ancestors of “wife” and “man”), but it is no longer perceived as a compound by native speakers. Thus we have been spared “woperson” – at least till now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:41:20.903" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13166" CreationDate="2015-08-21T12:07:57.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the question, it is not clear which language you are using or how you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; the sentence to be split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're looking for a sentence detector, though. If you're using Python, you can use NLTK's &lt;code&gt;sent_detector&lt;/code&gt; module. By default, it will break up your sentence as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; import nltk&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; sent_detector = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; txt = '&quot;Awake? How long have been asleep?&quot; asked teenagers at the same time.'&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; sent_detector.tokenize(txt)&#xA;['&quot;Awake?', 'How long have been asleep?', '&quot; asked teenagers at the same time.']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the placement of the quotation marks is important, you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; sent_detector.tokenize(txt.strip(), realign_boundaries=True)&#xA;['&quot;Awake?', 'How long have been asleep?&quot;', 'asked teenagers at the same time.']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also train a model, using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/tokenize/punkt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;punkt&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, you would feed it examples split up the way you like, and it would learn the pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T12:13:07.070" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T12:13:07.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13171" CreationDate="2015-08-21T18:04:03.443" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=simultaneous&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;simultaneous (adj.)&lt;/a&gt; [:]&#xA;      1650s, from Medieval Latin simultaneus, perhaps from simultim &quot;at the same time,&quot; extended from Latin simul &quot;at the same time&quot; (see similar (adj.)), or from simul with ending abstracted from Late Latin spontaneus, where &lt;strong&gt;the -&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;- is organic&lt;/strong&gt;. [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T18:17:17.030" Title="What does an 'organic' letter mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13170" CreationDate="2015-08-21T18:17:17.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that in &lt;em&gt;spontaneus&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; belongs to the root of the word, it's an organic, natural part of that word, while in &lt;em&gt;simultaneus&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; and the whole ending &lt;em&gt;-taneous&lt;/em&gt; was abstracted from &lt;em&gt;spontaneus&lt;/em&gt; and added to the word &lt;em&gt;simul&lt;/em&gt; 'together'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T18:17:17.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-21T18:19:01.970" Score="8" ViewCount="5385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there etymology dictionaries for French available on the Internet?  To wit, what's a French equivalent of &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://etymonline.com/&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already know about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TLF  informatisé (TLFi)&lt;/a&gt;, but often, it does not retrograde to Latin and PIE etymons;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aise_(Littr%C3%A9)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Littré&lt;/a&gt; suffers from the same problem as TLFi, but is abrupter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/82841/language-learning/82844#82844&quot;&gt;This Area 51 question&lt;/a&gt; is similar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T14:43:48.427" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T05:26:34.260" Title="Online etymology dictionaries for French, beyond CNTRL?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2015-08-21T19:32:50.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have access to a good library you can consult von Wartburg's  Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch in 25 volumes. There is also an abridged French translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T19:32:50.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13166" CreationDate="2015-08-21T21:19:29.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it should be one sentence, but it could also depend on your use case. For example, if you are extracting sentences for the purpose of translation, I think the example you provided should be one sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote a sentence segmenter and tried to find all of the &quot;edge cases&quot; like the example you provided. I then tested all of the popular tools against these edge cases. If you would like to read more about it please check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/diasks2/pragmatic_segmenter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;README here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also give your example a try in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tm-town.com/natural-language-processing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tool here&lt;/a&gt; (there is a browser-based version part way down the page that lets you enter some text) and you'll see it segments it as one sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9569" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T21:19:29.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13147" CreationDate="2015-08-21T23:12:07.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The silent letters do not explain the difference in pronunciation. &quot;Physic&quot; and &quot;physics&quot; are mediaeval or renaissance borrowings from Latin physica. &quot;Physique&quot; is a recent (19th-century) borrowing from French retaining the French spelling and also the French pronunciation with a stressed final syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T23:12:07.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-22T16:50:33.380" Score="1" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ubiquity&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ubiquity (n.)&lt;/a&gt; [...] + &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; &quot;any, also, and, ever,&quot; as a suffix giving universal meaning to the word it is attached to, from PIE root * &lt;em&gt;kwe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Etymonline err? I know that &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6973/can-the-latin-word-que-coordinate-two-propositions#comment16759_6973&quot;&gt;an enclitic, and not a word&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; attests &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; to mean only 'and', as does &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#kwe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AHI&lt;/a&gt; for the PIE  root * &lt;em&gt;kwe&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T13:13:12.077" Title="Did the Latin '-que' mean &quot;any, also, ever'?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13177" CreationDate="2015-08-22T17:20:14.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;-que has generalising force only after pronouns and adverbs, e.g. ubique 'wherever', quisque 'whoever'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T17:20:14.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13048" CreationDate="2015-08-22T18:30:24.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this readme: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum.uu.nl/uilots/lab/resources/p2fa20120228.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hum.uu.nl/uilots/lab/resources/p2fa20120228.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you remember to prepare your orthographic transcript file(the txt file)? It needs markers for pauses and start of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10325" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T18:30:24.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2015-08-23T01:55:35.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aise_(Littr%C3%A9)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Littré&lt;/a&gt; is available online free of charge. It is old (1877) but can provide some interesting etymological insights &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.littre.org/definition/bichet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wGRwP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wGRwP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T01:55:35.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-23T02:09:27.783" Score="5" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nomfoundation.org/common/nom_details.php?codepoint=8d0f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nomfoundation.org/common/nom_details.php?codepoint=8d0f&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;贏&#xA;doanh&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the Vietnamese pronunciation of this character start with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;? From what I have read, this letter represented a &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; in Middle Vietnamese. Reconstructions claim that the Middle Chinese pronunciation was &lt;code&gt;/jiajŋ/&lt;/code&gt; (as reconstructed by Edwin Pulleyblank) or &lt;code&gt;/jĭɛŋ/&lt;/code&gt; (as reconstructed by Wang Li). How do you explain the borrowing of the &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; sound as &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5404" LastEditorUserId="14808" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T13:50:41.577" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T13:50:41.577" Title="How was the /j/ initial in Middle Chinese borrowed into Vietnamese?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-23T03:45:32.067" Score="4" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Please note that in the end this is not essentially a question about English!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intervocalic /t/ in Gen Am English may be realised as a voiced alveolar tap, [ɾ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In words like &lt;em&gt;entertain&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ninety&lt;/em&gt; where the /t/ occurs after an  /n/, it is also often voiced in General American. Given that the nasal stop, /n/, usually involves a full blockage of the air leaving the vocal tract, and that a canonical /t/ is homorganic with a canonical /n/, it is reasonable to suppose that the realisation of the voiced /t/ might actually be an alveolar plosive instead of a tap. So my first question is: is it? Of course, I'm aware that the /nt/ sequence in such words may actually be reduced to a single nasal tap, but I'm only interested in the situation where the /n/ and /t/ are both realised.                                                                                   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second question, however, is whether it's actually possible for a tap to follow directly on from a (nasal or oral) stop made with the same articulators. So, for example, is it even physically possible for [ɾ] to follow an 'unreleased' alveolar [t]? And is it possible for [ɾ] to directly follow an /n/ if the tongue does not lose contact with the alveolar ridge between the two segments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T16:17:25.023" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T19:24:29.547" Title="Should the voiced /t/ in the word &quot;ninety&quot; in General American English be considered a tap or a plosive?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13183" CreationDate="2015-08-23T04:58:58.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When flapping applies to /t/ in &quot;entertain&quot;, &quot;ninety&quot;, /n/ actually deletes and the preceding vowel becomes nasalized, so you have [ɛ̃ɾ̃ɹ̩ˈtʰɛjn, ˈnãj̃ɾ̃ɪj]. The explanation for the correlation between these processes is that a syllable-final nasal in contact with a following homorganic consonant can delete, but deletion causes nasalization of the preceding vowel. When the nasal consonant deletes, /t/ then becomes intervocalic. There may be dialect variation in whether or not deletion+nasalization takes places before just voiceless stops, or before voiced stops as well. The test would be whether &quot;banter&quot; and &quot;bander&quot; can be neutralized-- they don't in my dialect, although both /t/ and /d/ flap in underlyingly-intervocalic context (writer, rider). Restricting ourselves to just the variants where &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; is realized as a nasal, then &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; will be realized as a stop (voiceless, not voiced) and not as a flap, since when preceded by a nasal, /t/ is not intervocalic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the nature of a lingual tap (flap), the tip of the tongue has to be away from the palate and then strike the palate, so between any lingual consonant and a lingual flap, there has to be a moment when the first consonant's constriction is released and the tongue is retracted, and then it can strike the palate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T04:58:58.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2015-08-23T05:10:32.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abstracting away from the specific loanword relationship, there are two kinds of &quot;ð&quot;, a fricative and an approximant. The lenited &quot;δ&quot; (oft transcribed as ð) of Danish is an example, and &quot;ð&quot; in some Kurdish dialects is quite similar. There are also a few Bantu language which have a &quot;non-palatal&quot; [j], that is, a [j] (IPA for &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;) which doesn't have the same tongue-raising usually associated with [j], which sounds very much like the dental approximant of Danish and Kurdish. If Vietnamese had a non-palatal /j/ at that point in its history, that would explain the pattern of borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:10:32.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2015-08-23T05:38:09.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sound /ð/ doesn't exist in Vietnamese. And d in Vietnamese doesn't represent any of the D-like sound as you expected. The d sound in Vietnamese is /ɗ/ which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolar_implosive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voiced alveolar implosive&lt;/a&gt; and written by the character &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_with_stroke#Vietnamese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Đ/đ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Northern Vietnamese the letter d represents the phoneme /z/ which is no way similar to /j/&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. However in the remaining dialects of Vietnamese d still represents the phoneme /j/, so there's no difference from Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that /y/ is the sound of u in French or German ü, not the sound of y&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T05:54:06.127" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T05:54:06.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13177" CreationDate="2015-08-23T12:05:28.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In early PIE the full form of the clitic was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-q̆et&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, it is a root meaning &quot;a pair&quot;, other words with it include &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆eta̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; pair   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆etea̯ti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; counts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆etu̯ores&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; four &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very ancient root, which meant quite the same (a pair) as early as Proto-Eurasiatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T12:05:28.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13177" CreationDate="2015-08-23T13:13:12.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked it up in Pons online Latin-German. There are so many translations of &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; there, including some in which &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; simply doesn't work at all as a substitute, that any dictionary that presents &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; as the only translation must be considered incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also&lt;/em&gt; is essentially a synonym of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; when connecting two sentences. Since &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; can be used in this way, it is not at all surprising that &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; made it on the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fdb has explained where the translation &lt;em&gt;-ever&lt;/em&gt; comes from. This explanation could also justify &lt;em&gt;any-&lt;/em&gt;, since &lt;em&gt;ubique&lt;/em&gt; can also be translated as &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt;. There may well be a better separate explanation for that, but I haven't found one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T13:13:12.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-23T20:24:29.010" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: Removed ancillary wording. My question was how to represent &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; in propositional logic in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; I sometimes pet bunnies.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10233" LastEditorUserId="666" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T15:51:36.783" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T15:51:36.783" Title="How can I represent &quot;I sometimes pet bunnies&quot; using lambda functions?" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-23T20:32:49.520" Score="4" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known that consonant &lt;strong&gt;lenition&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;weakening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; tends to be far more common cross-linguistically than the opposite process called &lt;strong&gt;fortition&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;strengthening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Now, some languages have been considered as having undergone the historical change of &lt;strong&gt;affricates&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;plosives&lt;/strong&gt;. Here's a list of examples I've been able to collect so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Samoyedic */&lt;strong&gt;t͡ʃ&lt;/strong&gt;/ → Kamassian /&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Yeniseian */&lt;strong&gt;t͡ʃ&lt;/strong&gt;/ → Proto-Ket-Yugh */&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Yeniseian */&lt;strong&gt;d͡ʒ&lt;/strong&gt;/ → Proto-Ket-Yugh */&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What other languages can be shown to have undergone similar &lt;em&gt;affricate-to-plosive&lt;/em&gt; fortition?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, quite naturally, another related question arises here: &lt;em&gt;Do the languages with affricate fortition cluster areally?&lt;/em&gt; At least, Yeniseian and Samoyedic have been neighbours for some time, and their proximity might explain why some of them share this peculiar change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to what some, though not all, Yeniseists say, namely that Yeniseian has been rather immune to (mainly lexical) influences from its neighbours, areal patterning like this (if areal indeed), could suggest possible further directions for future research. In fact, the two groups seem to share other fortition paths as well: &lt;strong&gt;fricative&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;strong&gt;plosive&lt;/strong&gt; (with &lt;strong&gt;affricate&lt;/strong&gt; as a possible intermediary step). But for the time being, I'd really like to know what else one could find about &lt;strong&gt;affricate&lt;/strong&gt;-to-&lt;strong&gt;plosive&lt;/strong&gt; changes world-wide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be extremely grateful for any other examples from some other languages, or references to relevant literature discussing them. Many thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T19:31:03.527" Title="Languages showing affricate-to-plosive fortition (especially diachronically)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13189" CreationDate="2015-08-23T21:31:44.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be three issues here. (1) Why is &quot;I sometimes pet bunnies&quot; second order, in view of the fact that it seems to mean about the same as &quot;I pet bunnies&quot;?  What is the second order logical form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Reichenbach's idea about second order logic is that it involves quantifying over predicates.  His example was &quot;Napoleon had all the properties of a great general&quot;, which he gave a translation roughly like (For all properties P)(For all great generals G)(if P(G) then P(Napoleon)).  This doesn't seem much like &quot;I sometimes pet bunnies&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Dragging in non-binary truth values seems gratuitous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T21:31:44.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T02:43:41.757" Score="7" ViewCount="1225" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dating proto-languages is obviously something we can't do precisely, but we can offer reasonable ranges. For example, Proto-Indo-European can't really be much younger than 5 millennia, and let's say that 9 is an upper bound that would satisfy even the Indo-Anatolian and Anatolian Urhemeit proponents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Proto-Afrasian, Wikipedia gives an incredibly wide range of 7500 BC - 16000 BC, with dates before 10000 BC seemingly contested by lexical evidence.&#xA;In any case, this is certainly older than PIE.&#xA;Among generally accepted and proven language families (eg. &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; anything strictly containing Indo-European) what are the others with a remarkable time depth? Are there any which are possibly as deep or even deeper than Afrasian? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9811" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T13:13:02.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T08:14:38.580" Title="Oldest proto-languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13194" CreationDate="2015-08-24T04:24:21.720" Score="-1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=achieve&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; refers to the  &quot;&lt;em&gt;An Etymological Dictionary of the French Language&lt;/em&gt;&quot; by Auguste Brachet, translated by G.W. Kitchin, Oxford, 1878. Its entry for &lt;em&gt;achever&lt;/em&gt;, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/etymologicaldict00bracrich#page/n151/mode/2up/search/achever&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page 152 of 558&lt;/a&gt;, states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For f = v, see § 145. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely, § 145 doesn't explain how « à cheF »  evolved into « acheVer », but &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=TvENAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PR93&amp;amp;ots=SuNF7kFsyZ&amp;amp;dq=%22any%20reason%20for%20this%20strengthening%20process%22&amp;amp;pg=PR93#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;§142 (on pp xcii-xciii)&lt;/a&gt; claims to do so, but I see no explicit elucidation and so I am still confused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] When &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is &#xA;  not final, there is no longer any reason for this strengthening process, &#xA;  and it remains unchanged according to § 140. This is the reason &#xA;  why the feminine of adjectives in &lt;em&gt;-if&lt;/em&gt; is -ive; and why we have bovem, &#xA;  bcuf, but bovarius, bout'ier ; navem, nef, but navirium * , navire , &#xA;  servum, serf, but servire, servir; salvum, sauf, but salvare*, sauver; &#xA;  nativum, naif, but nativitatem, naibelé. &lt;code&gt;The same rule&lt;/code&gt; enables us &#xA;  to explain the relation between the primitive &lt;em&gt;chef&lt;/em&gt; and the derivatives &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;chevet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;achever&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and between such words as brefand brevet, relief and &#xA;  relever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;code&gt;the same rule&lt;/code&gt; explain how à cheF evolved into acheVer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I don't extract from the more laconic French version; whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=F6IFAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP13&amp;amp;ots=adOoptJzZ1&amp;amp;dq=%22Dictionnaire%20%C3%A9tymologique%20de%20la%20langue%20fran%C3%A7aise%22%20auguste%20brachet&amp;amp;pg=PA22#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Dictionnaire%20%C3%A9tymologique%20de%20la%20langue%20fran%C3%A7aise%22%20auguste%20brachet&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;entry on 'achever'&lt;/a&gt; does not broach the phonological changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T08:03:07.027" Title="How does a rule explain how « à chef » evolved into « achever »?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13193" CreationDate="2015-08-24T08:03:07.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A more modern source would probably use the terminology of word-final obstruent devoicing, a process that happened early in the history of Old French (likely due to Frankish influence) where voiced final obstruents become voiceless at the end of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the segment in question, the /p/ in Latin &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; gained voicing in Western Romance as it was intervocalic (something like *kabut; compare Portuguese &lt;em&gt;capo&lt;/em&gt; [kabu]). At one point in the history of most of Western Romance languages, voiced intervocalic stops became fricatives (something like *kavut; compare Spanish &lt;em&gt;cabo&lt;/em&gt; [kaβo]). As the second syllable eroded away in the noun due to a number of phonological changes, it ended up as word-final (*kav), and was devoiced (*kaf) in environments where it was word-final, but not elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T08:03:07.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2015-08-24T08:17:39.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Groups that could possibly contest such dates could be: a) &quot;Old European&quot; (call it whatever you like) in the sense of a group of languages being spoken in central and west Europe before the spread of Celtic and Germanic. b) The group that included the languages (eastern mediterranean substratum?) that were spoken by the first farmers of Anatolia who also crossed into Europe (esp. Crete and the Greek mainland). However, let me raise a caution as we have not enough material to reconstruct those yet, at least not in the same level as we have for Proto-Afrasian. All you got is the pre-Celtic substratum (100 words?) on one end and pre-Greek / Linear A / Eteo-Cypriot on the other end (good luck understanding those). Any dating would be hypothetical. Also, I would be very careful with whatever theories include Basque and Etruscan, their grouping and dating. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T08:59:27.457" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T08:59:27.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T09:34:35.630" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually find scattered proto-Greek word reconstructions, but I never came across literature that focus on the reconstruction of that language. Do you know of any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T09:34:35.630" Title="Literature on the reconstruction of proto-Greek" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2015-08-24T12:33:17.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lưu Vĩnh Phúc has explained correctly how the phoneme written as &quot;d&quot; is realised in modern Vietnamese dialects. But in the context of this question we also need to ask why the Jesuit missionaries who invented Vietnamese Latin script in the 17th century decided to represent this phoneme as “d” rather than as something else. Modern scholarship seems to favour the view that in 17th-century Vietnamese (sometimes called “Middle Vietnamese”) &quot;d&quot; did represent some sort of voiced dental stop. Of course, we do not know exactly how it was pronounced any more than how exactly Middle Chinese was pronounced. Comparative linguistics is mainly about establishing regular sound correspondences rather than about discovering the physiological rationale of these correspondences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to the original question: it is not, I think, so much about how to “explain the borrowing of the /y/ sound as /ð/” as about an internal development in Vietnamese which led to the evolution of borrowed [j] first to a dental stop and then to [z] in some dialects and [j] in others. The big question is whether the [j] in Southern dialects is really a retention of an original [j] – specifically in Chinese loan words – or whether it represents a secondary reversion to an older pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T20:51:15.657" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T20:51:15.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T13:04:42.990" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knows of slot filling corpora such as ATIS. I tried finding ATIS but since I am not a member of LDC I couldnt get access to it. Do you know of any place where I can find a copy of ATIS or similar corpus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10337" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:01:53.430" Title="Slot filling corpora" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13189" CreationDate="2015-08-24T13:38:48.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-intensional/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;intensional logic&lt;/a&gt;. This is the study of how to represent things like &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;taller&lt;/em&gt; etc. You would represent your example sentence with something along the lines of &quot;There exists an infinite set of possible worlds. There exists at least one world where I pet a bunny. However, I do not pet a bunny in every world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T13:38:48.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2015-08-24T14:15:18.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be instructive to note that Sino-Vietnamese readings are not the only Sinitic-based Vietnamese lexemes loaned into Vietnamese: there exist earlier substrata of Chinese loans (compare 呉音 go-on and 漢音 kan-on for Japanese kanji, where 漢音 is the &quot;canonical&quot; Tang China loan). Additionally, there are indications that the Sino-Vietnamese are not strictly limited to the Middle Chinese of the Tang court, but perhaps later borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, going from Middle Chinese /j/ to Middle Hanoi Vietnamese /ð/ to Modern Hanoi Vietnamese /z/ is well-attested. Middle Chinese 喻母 /j/ with 四等 (i.e. a particular distinction in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongniu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;chongniu&lt;/a&gt;) generally went down this route. &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E6%BC%A2%E8%B6%8A%E9%9F%B3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Compare&lt;/a&gt; 遙 diêu, 引 dẫn, 鹽 diêm, 異 dị.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortition of /j/ is not exactly uncommon, often via [ʝ] to [ʒ]. Spanish has been going through this change at the moment, and it is (currently) most salient in the Rioplatense region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real outlier though, is that 贏 was division III in Middle Chinese, so it &quot;should&quot; have become a h- or v- in Vietnamese! How it ended up reallocated under a different division is an interesting question, yet to be explored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think 赢 &gt; doanh is weird, look up what happened to 民!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T14:15:18.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T14:49:39.083" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hornstein 1999 says that theta-roles are features on verbs and a DP receives a theta-role by checking a theta-feature of a VP that it merges with. How would this be represented in a syntactic tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a very simple example in which a DP gets an agent theta role from the little v head. Which tree would it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one where agreement is downward like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SptA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SptA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Downward agreement&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the one where agreement is upward like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vBdDK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vBdDK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Upward agreement&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Boskovic and Takahashi (1998) &quot;Scrambling and Last Resort&quot; explains this well but I can't get the paper online. :/ I'd really appreciate it if someone had a PDF of it and could send it to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10338" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T14:49:39.083" Title="How does the view that theta-roles are features work exactly? For example, in Hornstein 1999 Movement and Control" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13190" CreationDate="2015-08-24T19:31:03.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only remember the Boeotian, Elean, Laconian and Cretan dialects of Ancient Greek which had -δδ- instead of -ζ-, although it's debatable what -ζ- actually represented in those dialects originally (before the phonetical shift): [zd] or [dz] (it can be related to [tj] &gt; [ts] / [t:] mentioned in the comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Bulgarian/Czech/Slovak had [štš] &gt; [št] (including where [štš] stems from [s] + [tš], basically making [tš] &gt; [t]), whereas Russian, for example, had  [štš] &gt; [šš] &gt; [š:] but it's probably not what you want (not an independent shift, needs triggering).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound changes you mention remind me of borrowings from, say, English into phonetically primitive creoles which lack even the most basic sounds like [s]. There, various affricates would be borrowed as [t] or [k] (if present). For example, Japanese &lt;em&gt;mochi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Hawaian &lt;em&gt;[mo:ki:]&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;ginger&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Hawaiian &lt;em&gt;kinika&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know anything about Eniseian languages, but can't the changes you mention actually hint at some sort of creolization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry but nothing else comes to my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T19:31:03.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13130" CreationDate="2015-08-24T20:03:45.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why might the Latin -v- have been lost in French?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were the Latin intervocalic -v- and -b- lost in Romanian as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;alleger from alleviare; neige from nivea; jeune from juvenis.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that in all these instances the -v- is intervocalic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So did Gaulish cause this loss?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, everything is possible, but, given the fact that Romanian has a Thracian/Dacian substrate, I'd say that it's unlikely at best. Of course, it is not theoretically impossible that, for some mysterious reason, these two distant Indo-European branches (Gaulish and Dacian) might have shared some phonetic similarity insofar -v- and/or -b- are concerned, but it seems much more likelier that Latin itself is the cause, since, as far as we know, this is the only common denominator between French and Romanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T20:03:45.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12866" CreationDate="2015-08-24T21:48:58.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no etymological connection between the two. In English, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;-&lt;em&gt;ard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and -&lt;em&gt;art&lt;/em&gt; are suffixes, used in the formation of many words. The word suggests &lt;em&gt;hag&lt;/em&gt; as a root, and is related to the German &lt;em&gt;hag(er)&lt;/em&gt;, having a similar meaning. (In German, -&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; is also a suffix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T21:48:58.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13215" CreationDate="2015-08-24T22:41:12.510" Score="1" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a tool which parses natural language input into nouns and relations. For example sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barack is the president of the United States and lives in Washington DC and went to Harvard University&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should be parsed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barack is the president of the United States&#xA;Barack lives in Washington DC&#xA;Barack went to Harvard University&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;popular NLP (Stanford, NLTK, OpenNLP) tools only works with full sentences and gives funny and erroneous results. What api could process these kind of sentences? Is it hard to build one completely from scratch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10339" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T13:52:28.973" Title="Incomplete sentence parsing and relation extraction" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12787" CreationDate="2015-08-24T22:47:00.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How did that “r” end up in Romance names of London?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most probably by a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotacization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rhotacization&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metathesis&lt;/a&gt;. It is not uncommon for intervocalic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; to become &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., Latin &lt;em&gt;mo&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;umentum&lt;/em&gt; yielding Romanian &lt;em&gt;mo&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;mant&lt;/em&gt;), nor for constructions of &lt;em&gt;vowel-r&lt;/em&gt; to become &lt;em&gt;r-vowel&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., Latin &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; becoming archaic Romanian &lt;em&gt;pre&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T22:47:00.073" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T23:19:43.890" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert in linguistics.  I want to know if there is a site or a program that will allow me to put in complex sentences of novels that I read , then answer with a word tree labeling the various components of the sentence and there relationship to each other, so I have a better idea of what is going on linguistically and semantically. Something that basically does all the work for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10341" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T13:40:51.763" Title="Finding a word tree translater for sentences that does all the work for me" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12583" CreationDate="2015-08-24T23:37:10.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to establish the origins of a language, there are two main things which have to be taken into consideration: basic vocabulary, and grammar. The former is what would weigh the most, were one to engage in evaluating the average occurrence of each word in the literary corpus of a given language, as you suggested in the question. In the case of English, this is overwhelmingly Germanic. The fact that in the total vocabulary of a certain language at a given time in history there may indeed be more words of foreign origin should not surprise you. For instance, were someone to have created a similar pie-chart for the Romanian language spoken (more than) one or two centuries ago, the majority of its total number of words would have been of Slavic origin, despite the fact that Romanian is a Romance language, descending from Latin, which can be quite easily noticed by evaluating its basic vocabulary, and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T23:37:10.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T01:35:31.230" Score="2" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonologically,« lire » and « rire »  sound like a minimal pair, with the first letter as the only difference.  So what might explain the difference between their « participes passé »?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Their etymons are Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reply to comment by user 'sumelic':&lt;/strong&gt;  I'm inexperienced in Latin; so please feel free to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lire#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; originates from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lego#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;legō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, whose active present infinitive is &lt;em&gt;legere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rire#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;rire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; originates from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rideo#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;rīdeō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, whose active present infinitive is &lt;em&gt;rīdēre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T15:19:15.370" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T18:29:53.680" Title="Why is the past participle of the French « lire » « lu », but « rire » « ri »?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13212" CreationDate="2015-08-25T04:08:08.267" Score="6" ViewCount="822" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any programs that will play a sound and allow the user to choose which sound was played?  The options would need to be IPA or some other descriptive method (e.g., voiceless alveolar stop).  Ideally it would be able to start in the phonetics of one language and gradually expand to more sounds and smaller differences between sounds. For example, it could start with phones from a certain dialect of English, and after the basics are mastered it could move into smaller differences, like aspirated stops vs unaspirated stops or alveolar stops vs dental stops, all the while introducing sounds not found in the starting dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in being able to produce and discern more sounds, but when I searched for such a tool, I was unable to find anything that went beyond the basic sounds of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit to account for user6726's answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than &quot;choose the IPA symbol,&quot; this would of course need to be designed as a comparison between two given sounds.  Since I am only interested in ear training and not applications to a specific language, the sound samples do not need to come from natural speech, but could come from one person producing a wide range of different sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5021" LastEditorUserId="5021" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T06:22:26.930" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T15:59:17.787" Title="IPA Listening Training" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13211" CreationDate="2015-08-25T05:28:17.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, no. There are two impediments to such a program. First, there isn't a sufficient database of individual sound recordings. You might cobble together collections of certain common sounds from various resources, for example words containing /a/ or /ɑ/ or /æ/, but it is usually very hard to find recordings of a given putative sound with multiple speakers of a language. Finding multiple speakers for a language is important, because you have to be able to distinguish between peculiarities of a single speaker vs. peculiarities of a language. Taking three speakers to be the minimum sample necessary for making a somewhat credible claim about a single language, note that we still do not know truly language-dependent (as opposed to speaker-dependent) facts of VOT for the languages reported in Lisker &amp;amp; Abramson's classic work on VOT. Now, looking at Cho &amp;amp; Ladefoged 1999 which looks at VOT in a number of languages (all endangered, in a nice twist), they got data from a reasonable number of speakers of each language, and you can see that VOT for the aspirated / unaspirated contrast differs quite substantially across the languages that they sampled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is even more profound, in that the underlying premise is false. That is, were one to listen to samples of the [k] vs. [kʰ] contrast across languages, one could never in principle get the correct answer by listening to any individual sound. Navaho unaspirated [k] is about comparable to Thai aspirated [kʰ] (both languages have a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated). This is especially clear in dealing with vowel height, where the &quot;ɪ&quot; of one language is the &quot;e&quot; of the next language. There are general phonetic ballparks, where a glottalized stop will have a certain range of known variation (and surely some additional unknown variation), but the idea that there is a single phonetic representation of a particular IPA symbol is clearly false. So to ask a listener to make an absolute identification of a particular sound is a conceptual mistake. What &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be useful would be a comparative judgment of similarity between two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substantial though still insufficient raw materials are available via the UCLA phonetics archive. A second possible resource is the Journal of the IPA, via their sketches, which nowadays tend to include online speech samples. Eventually, the materials will be available, and then what remains to be done is better defining what needs to be done with these samples, in order to better grasp the similarities and differences of phonetic segments across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... in light of the comment about expert performances, you can in fact get performances by Peter Ladefoged &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, performing IPA symbols. These are not sounds of a specific language, rather they are reference sounds which may or may not match some actual language. You can also get productions of cardinal vowels by Jones &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter9/cardinal/cardinal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and side-by-side recordings of Ladefoged, House and Wells performing vowels. The latter is informative in that it reveals variation within the community of well-known experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T15:59:17.787" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T15:59:17.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2015-08-25T10:16:45.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the true believers there is proto-world (known under different terms, too) dated somewhere between 100.000 and 200.000 BC. Greenberg and Ruhlen even dare reconstruct some proto-world words like *dik &quot;finger&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you buy Greenberg's idea of Amerind, it must be around 15.000 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Niger-Kongo (not yet constructed, but assumed to be feasible to reconstruct) is ca. 10.000 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On more secure grounds, there are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Proto-Sino-Tibetan: 6.000 BC&#xA;Proto-Austronesian: &amp;gt;4.000 BC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find dates for proto-Tai-Kadai or proto-Pama-Nyunga. Proto-Dravidian is surprisingly young, estimated at 500 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T15:40:50.340" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T15:40:50.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13206" CreationDate="2015-08-25T13:52:28.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I think you are trying to split sentence with coordination structure. Thus, my solution is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;parse the sentence into phrase structure tree or dependency tree&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;define some patterns like (a dependency example) &#xA;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;root-*-&amp;gt;cc-&amp;gt;a2&#xA;    |&#xA;   a1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;and split into &lt;code&gt;root-&amp;gt;*-&amp;gt;a1&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;root-&amp;gt;*-&amp;gt;a2&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the parser and never output one hundred percentage correctly, it should not be too for the sub-structures like coordination structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I know, there seems no such task that &lt;em&gt;splitting a sentence into several sub-sentences and at the same time maintaining the original meaning&lt;/em&gt;. But I've seen someone working on this from scratch and treat it as an SRL-like tasks triggered by &lt;code&gt;coordination&lt;/code&gt; and certain &lt;code&gt;conjunction&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4840" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T13:52:28.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T14:52:16.237" Score="3" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if my questions may sound rudimentary, so please bear with me. :-) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of delving deeper into functional grammar/linguistics (most probably systemic in particular), perhaps with an eye for (and prospects - albeit slim at best - for research some time in the future). I've got hold of quite a few books and tons of papers on SFL/SFG, but I'm finding it difficult to get even a semblance of a grip on three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the state of affairs in (systemic) functional grammar/linguistics in 2015 (rather than the state of affairs in the 1970s to 1990s, when most of the books and papers I have were published)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any underinvestigated areas in SFL/SFG as we speak? I specifically mean areas that may merit a special attention even from a relative beginner and at the same time that don't necessarily rely on massive corpora (I never had any classes on corpus linguistics)? Or alternatively any areas that are underexplored in terms of contrasting Chomskyan grammar and SFL/SFG?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to combine SFL/SFG and historical linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10347" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T14:23:15.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T14:23:15.933" Title="What is the current status of (systemic) functional grammar/linguistics" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T17:48:16.263" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the state of affairs in (systemic) functional grammar/linguistics in 2015 (rather than the state of affairs in the 1970s-1990s, when most of the books and papers I have were published)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because I'm thinking of delving deeper into functional grammar/linguistics (most probably systemic in particular), perhaps with an eye for (and prospects - albeit slim at best) for research some time in the future. I've got hold of quite a few books and tons of papers on SFL/SFG, but I'm finding it difficult to get even a semblance of a grip on the question above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10347" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T08:11:06.927" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T08:11:06.927" Title="current state of affairs in (systemic) functional grammar/linguistics?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-04-18T13:31:54.103" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T18:01:27.077" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to combine SFL/SFG and historical linguistics? I've just thought of diachronic genre analysis as being an interesting area to explore, but my understanding is that that's got more to do with pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10347" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T08:13:05.123" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T08:13:05.123" Title="What's the best way to combine systemic functional grammar and historical linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;interdisciplinary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13210" CreationDate="2015-08-25T18:29:53.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all: I want to say that this question is not at all bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, lego, legere, lēgī, lēctus “to read” belongs to the third conjugation, while rīdeo, ridēre, rīsī, rīsus “to laugh” belongs to the second conjugation. As you can see, they are completely different in each of the four principal parts. So it is not so much a question of similar verbs developing differently as of very different verbs becoming more similar. Languages work in both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin had a fair number of verbs with a perfect participle in –ūtus, for example secūtus from sequor “to follow”. In Romance languages this form has spread to a large number of different verbs, including French venu, Italian venuto, where it replaced the ending of Latin ventus, but this has not by any means happened to all verbs. For example, it affected lego, but not rīdeo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T18:29:53.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13223" CreationDate="2015-08-25T18:54:56.000" Score="-2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already know that 'continuous' is stronger than &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=continual&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;continual&lt;/a&gt;, but that both derive from the same Latin etymon &lt;em&gt;continuus&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/235550/50720&quot;&gt;These answers on ELU&lt;/a&gt; evidence this difference, but does not explain the cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That which is &lt;em&gt;continual&lt;/em&gt; is that which is either always going on or recurs at short intervals and never comes to an end; that which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=continuous&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;continuous&lt;/a&gt; is that in which there is no break between the beginning and the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My research on the suffixes (below) motivate my conjecture: The Latin etymon of &lt;em&gt;-ous&lt;/em&gt; denoted fullness, and so 'continuous' meant fullness of continuity, and so meant no interruptions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the Latin etymon of &lt;em&gt;-al&lt;/em&gt; lacked this denotation of fullness, and so the possibility of interruptions was ascribed to 'continual'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How sound is my conjecture? I ask because I beware of the Etymological Fallacy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-al&lt;/a&gt; Etymology 1 (of 2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From Latin adjective suffix -ālis, or French, Middle French and Old French -el, -al. [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-ous&lt;/a&gt; Etymology : From Old French -ous and -eux, from Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-osus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-ōsus&lt;/a&gt; ‎(“full, full of”). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T20:42:13.977" Title="Does '-ous' imply no interruption, and '-al' the possibility of interruption?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-25T19:21:54.577" Score="3" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;The differences in meanings of doublet verbs such as 3-6 below: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any resources that investigate the big picture behind them?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I abhor to memorise, and prefer to understand, such differences. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are the differences caused only by the prefixes and reflexive pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(s')approcher vs (se) rapprocher&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/rapprocher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The distinguishing prefix&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Spanish translation is not a cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(se) paraître vs (s')apparaître&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=appear&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The distinguishing prefix&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Similarly, Spanish has two cognates: &lt;strong&gt;parecer(se) vs aparecer(se)&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(se) percevoir vs (s')apercevoir&lt;/strong&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.littre.org/definition/apercevoir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The distinguishing prefix&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Interestingly, Spanish has only one cognate: « percibir ». English has 'perceive', while &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=apperceive&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;ei=tbzcVduNEYGBNuqGgNgI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apperceive&lt;/a&gt; is esoteric compared with the commoner French cognate « apercevoir ».&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;croître  vs (s')accroître&lt;/strong&gt; : The latter's Latin etymon is &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/accresco#la&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'accresco'&lt;/a&gt;, whose prefix is &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Interestingly, Spanish has only one cognate: « crecer ».&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T18:37:52.490" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T18:37:52.490" Title="What explains the differences between doublet verbs that differ by a prefix?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13221" CreationDate="2015-08-25T20:42:13.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The substantial discussion on ELU seems to address this: ‘continual’ came first (&quot;without cessation&quot;), then ‘continuous’ arose (“without gaps”), then the latter took over the meaning of the former (presumably, by spatial analogy), and as a result, ‘continual’ got a distinct sense. If this trajectory is correct, how could the original Latin sources of the suffixes be the cause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glancing quickly at CELEX, it looks like there are very few similar pairs in current English, and ‘-al’ is (almost?) never otherwise used in a context where ‘possibility of interruption’ could make any sense. Without other evidence, I'd conclude that this distinction (continuous/al) is an isolated, arbitrary event, and not an example of a general sense of -al vs. -ous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T20:42:13.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13222" CreationDate="2015-08-25T22:50:14.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_%28linguistics%29&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;doublets&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called &lt;strong&gt;doublets&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;etymological twins&lt;/strong&gt; (or possibly triplets, etc.) when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root.&lt;/em&gt; — Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another, more strict definition, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doublets are cognates within a single language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of your question is a bit harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bound morphemes, or &lt;em&gt;affixes&lt;/em&gt;, indeed, do modify the meaning, but their effect may appear very inconsistent. In other words, a complex word may be not equal to sum of &quot;own&quot; meanings of its morphemes. In languages with more complicated morphology, the own meaning of individual morpheme vanishes even more. Consider Proto-Slavic root &lt;code&gt;*perti&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;push/carry&lt;/em&gt;) in modern Polish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;przeć&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to push&lt;/em&gt;) — no prefix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;spór&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dispute&lt;/em&gt;) — &lt;code&gt;s-&lt;/code&gt; usually means &quot;take off from something&quot; or sometimes &quot;join&quot;, but here it means generalization of action, and rough etymology appears to be &quot;pressure on each other&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;opór&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;resistance&lt;/em&gt;) — &lt;code&gt;o-&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;surround&quot;, so the etymology is even less evident: &quot;many people around are pressing&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless knowing exact words, it may appear almost impossible to &quot;build&quot; the words from a root and affixes, even if you are familiar with their meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Individual meanings of morphemes may be irregular or vanished in complex words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The meaning of a resulting word may be too far from sum of meanings of its morphemes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One can &lt;em&gt;deconstruct&lt;/em&gt; an arbitrary word, but it may be hard to &lt;em&gt;construct&lt;/em&gt; it from known morphemes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The only way to know the differences is memorizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T22:50:14.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13230" CreationDate="2015-08-27T06:22:40.360" Score="2" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have decided to give my latest conlang romance vocabulary, but I want the phonotactics of this language to be as simple as possible and yet still be recognizably Romance. (I don't generally spend a lot of time on phonology when I conlang.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, I'd like to know which Romance language has the simplest phonotactics.  I hope that the language or languages that meet this criterion are well-attested so that I can use an online dictionary to look up the roots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T08:20:19.877" Title="Which Romance language has the simplest phonotactics?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13229" CreationDate="2015-08-27T08:20:19.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For every Romance language, the fun is spoiled by later borrowings (from Latin, Greek, English and other languages). Spontaneously, I'd vote for Italian because it simplified many medial consonant clusters by assimilation (like prodotto &quot;product&quot;). But it has acquired new initial consonant clusters (like /zbr-/ in sbrutto) from simplifying the prefix dis-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a conlang, you can go for an even simpler phonology, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T08:20:19.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13217" CreationDate="2015-08-27T13:47:33.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is still a very active branch of linguistics with conferences and journals and many linguists around the world participating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See, e.g., the 42nd International Systemic Functional Congress at RWTH Aachen&#xA;( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfc2015.anglistik.rwth-aachen.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.isfc2015.anglistik.rwth-aachen.de/&lt;/a&gt; ) or the page of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfla.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.isfla.org/&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conference programs should give you an impression on current topics in SFL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T13:47:33.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T16:43:58.313" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some good works of corpus linguistics using the Brown Corpus. Does anyone know of an important early work, and/or an important recent work that uses it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T11:47:49.330" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T06:05:12.903" Title="What are some canonical or seminal corpus linguistic studies using the Brown Corpus?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13233" CreationDate="2015-08-28T11:45:59.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Brown corpus, which is a representative 1 M. word sample of 1960s American English, has been used extensively in research on short-term diachronic change. A number of corpora have, over the last one or two decades, been compiled that extend the Brown corpus. There is a 1990s American English corpus (Frown), and a 1960s and a 1990s British English corpus (LOB and F-LOB). Together, these have been called the Brown family of corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research based on these corpora includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A monograph on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=K7bSpI2dkPYC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PR10&amp;amp;dq=change%20in%20contemporary%20english&amp;amp;ots=XYKkFH0E6K&amp;amp;sig=C4YRcRFDzL7O1poudwbyxMBu8dg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;change in contemporary English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/ijcl/2003/00000007/00000002/art00005&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parts of speech&lt;/a&gt; frequencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recent &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/rodopi/lang/2006/00000055/00000001/art00012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;grammatical change&lt;/a&gt; in general&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=GvpXrMD630MC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA68&amp;amp;dq=leech%20hundt%20smith&amp;amp;ots=PvS2s8ajZ1&amp;amp;sig=UBlZpz92w6Rv_eO9NY4p1EgecWw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Verb structures&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=ETXa4Y6HkFcC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA317&amp;amp;dq=leech%20hundt%20smith&amp;amp;ots=a-dbf-ewAU&amp;amp;sig=X9g9EmwivI8PpNjZUVNNZBlgi5Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;progressive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.218.623&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1930s corpora&lt;/a&gt; of British and American English have been compiled to add to the historical depth of the Brown family, and work has begun on additional corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T11:45:59.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7213" CreationDate="2015-08-28T14:04:06.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you ask what is &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt;, here is the answer that may be a little disappointing to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the oldest attested Semitic language (Akkadian ca. 2500 BC) the typical Semitic morphology is already fully developed. Also Proto-Semitic (dated ca. 3500 BC) has the typical morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything before that is subject to speculation (AFAIK, there is no reasonable hope for a scientific reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T14:04:06.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-28T15:18:03.500" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider 2 heads a and b. b moves to head a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHq7b.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHq7b.png&quot; alt=&quot;http://i.imgur.com/lGdSevs.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the feature [X] get on a1 by virtue of b merging to a2 by head movement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kind of feature percolation still allowed in the Minimalist program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate some citations on this if possible, it seems hard to find on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10338" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T02:42:25.120" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T02:42:25.120" Title="Head to head movement and features in Minimalism" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13241" CreationDate="2015-08-28T21:37:37.960" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in Plutarch (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0111%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Demosthenes.1&lt;/a&gt;) the phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὑπάρξαι ‘τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον‘ (~ to be born in ‘a famous city’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον being a quote from (pseudo-?)Euripides' ode to Alcibiades, cf &lt;a href=&quot;https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L144.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lyra Graeca, iii&lt;/a&gt; , p. 240-241). See the note &lt;em&gt;infra&lt;/em&gt; for more details. The three words given by Plutarch are the only one attested : as far as I know, &lt;em&gt;we don't know what Euripides wrote before these three words&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out the construction of &quot;ὑπάρξαι τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον&quot;  This quote means something like &quot;to be born in ‘a famous city’&quot;, according to various translations. &lt;strong&gt;But why the accusative ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=u%28pa%2Frcai&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=u%28pa%2Frcai0&amp;amp;prior=prw=ton&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:2008.01.0111:chapter=1:section=1&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ὑπάρχω&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;to begin, to be at the origin of&quot; and is mainly followed by the genitive, the Greek case expressing the origin. As far as I know, the accusative is only used after ὑπάρχω if the meaning is &quot;to take the initiative in&quot;. In Plutarch's sentence, the meaning must be something like &quot;to be from ~&quot; and a genitive was expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Plutarch quotes a poem (moreover, written in another Greek dialect!) increases the level of difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the construction ὑπάρχω + acc. with the meaning &quot;to be (born) from ~&quot; natural ? Are there other examples in Greek litterature ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally speaking, is there a linguistic way to explain how the accusative case can express an origin ? Are there other examples in Indo-European languages ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0111%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Plutarch, Demosthenes, 1 :&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ὁ μὲν γράψας τὸ ἐπὶ τῇ νίκῃ τῆς Ὀλυμπίασιν ἱπποδρομίας&#xA;εἰς Ἀλκιβιάδην ἐγκώμιον, εἴτ᾽ Εὐριπίδης, ὡς ὁ πολὺς κρατεῖ&#xA;λόγος, εἴθ᾽ ἕτερός τις ἦν, Σόσσιε, φησὶ χρῆναι τῷ εὐδαίμονι&#xA;πρῶτον ὑπάρξαι ‘τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον’ .&#xA;&#xA;(Bernardotte Perrin, 1919) :&#xA;&#xA;the author of the encomium upon Alcibiades for his victory in the &#xA;chariot-race at Olympia whether he was Euripides, as the prevailing&#xA;report has it, or some other, says, Sosius that the first requisite&#xA;to a man's happiness is birth in ‘a famous city’;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T23:32:51.380" Title="accusative being used to express an origin?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13239" CreationDate="2015-08-28T22:05:12.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον is accusative because it is the subject of the infinitive ὑπάρξαι, “for the famous city to be at (his) beginning”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T22:05:12.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13239" CreationDate="2015-08-28T23:32:51.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After χρῆναι you have an accusative and infinitive construction: &quot;it is necessary for X (acc.) to Verb (inf.)&quot;. In this case, the subject of the accusative and infinitive is τὰν πόλιν, and the predicate is εὐδόκιμον ὑπάρξαι τῷ εὐδαίμονι &quot;to be available / be in existence (as) famous for the happy man&quot;. (τὰν πόλιν εὐδόκιμον is not actually a syntactic unit meaning &quot;the famous city&quot; -- that would be τὰν εὐδόκιμον πόλιν.) ὑπάρχω here is not being used in the sense &quot;begin&quot; but in an expanded sense, very common in Attic prose, in which it gets used as more or less as fancy synonym for εἶναι, often with the added implication that the subject is thought of as some kind of resource -- hence my translation &quot;be available&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a very literal translation might be &quot;he says it is necessary that, first, the city [of his birth] should be famous for the happy man&quot; -- more loosely, &quot;that a happy man should have a famous city [as his birthplace]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T23:32:51.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13244" CreationDate="2015-08-29T00:40:25.303" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=feeble&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;feeble (adj.)&lt;/a&gt; [:] &#xA;    late 12c., &quot;lacking strength or vigor&quot; (physical, moral, or intellectual), from Old French feble &quot;weak, feeble&quot; (12c., Modern French faible), &lt;strong&gt;dissimilated&lt;/strong&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;flebilis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lamentable,&quot; literally &quot;that is to be wept over,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;flere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;weep, cry, shed tears, lament,&quot; from PIE &lt;strong&gt;bhle-* &quot;to howl&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bleat&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bleat&lt;/a&gt; (v.)). **The first -&lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;- was lost in Old French.&lt;/strong&gt; The noun meaning &quot;feeble person&quot; is recorded from mid-14c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the loss of the first -l- part of a larger phenomenon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure whether dissimulation explains the loss of the first -l- here, because nothing in the Latin &lt;em&gt;flebilis&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flebilis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;/ˈfleː.bi.lis/, [ˈfɫeː.bɪ.lɪs]&lt;/a&gt;, seems to sound like the first syllable in Old French &lt;em&gt;feble&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T01:17:57.473" Title="What might explain the loss of -l- from Latin to Old French?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;old-french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13242" CreationDate="2015-08-29T01:17:57.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is dissimilation, or more specifically loss by dissimilation. There are two [l] sounds in the word originally, and one of them dissimilates to zero, i.e. is lost. This is a common type of sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T01:17:57.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13216" CreationDate="2015-08-29T05:54:34.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very broad question, particularly since you put systemic in Systemic Functional Linguistics/Grammar in parentheses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about the &lt;strong&gt;broader functionalist program&lt;/strong&gt;, you can hardly move within linguistics without encountering some aspect of it. You could say that most introduction to linguistics are written from the functionalist perspective. Most of the 'applied' disciplines of linguistics (with the notable exception of Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation and related fields) are broadly functionalist. From lexicography to language acquisition and language teaching. So are sociolinguistics and historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things are a bit more murky when it comes to the &lt;strong&gt;Systemic Functional Linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, you can see its direct impact in a number of fields. Most of the study of text-level and discourse-level phenomena is done (more or less explicitly) within the scope of the SFL approach. For example, Critical Discourse Analysis (as formulated, for instance, by Fairclough) explicitly relies on SFG. But you could also say that much of the work done in corpus linguistics is done under the umbrella of SFL. It would also be difficult to open a modern textbook of English as a second language and not see the impact of Haliday's work. Much of grammar writing is also done in that vein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes things a bit more difficult is, that &lt;strong&gt;Systemic Functional Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; is different from many of the other &quot;Something Grammars&quot; in that it does not come with a very constraining descriptive framework expressed through rules but rather a set of principles and axioms. This makes it a much more useful foundation for useful linguistic work and also slightly impervious to the sort of questions you might ask about generative-type grammars. It does not require constant tweaking of 'rules' and formal tools. As a linguist, you can just get on with things. It also does not require formal allegiance for it to be useful. I often refer to Halliday's three metafunctions of language in my own work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is so often the case, SFL is also subject to regional divisions. Most of the work on it is done in New Zealand and Australia (where Halliday relocated) with some remnants in the UK and around the world. It is therefore not as well known by many linguists who are actually feeling its impact in much of their daily work. Often in contrast to Chomsky whose work has almost no realistic impact on the work of a student of language but is widely known and cited. SFL has a similar problem in MAK Halliday whose stature perhaps makes people reluctant to declare their paradigmatic belonging to SFL for fear of being too constrained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to some &lt;strong&gt;exciting new ideas&lt;/strong&gt; within SFL, I'm very intrigued by Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming and John Sinclair's theory of local grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &lt;strong&gt;further areas of research&lt;/strong&gt;, here you're looking at all of language. Unlike the Chomskean paradigm, SFL does not constrain language to just what can be described through formal means. This makes it much more difficult to point to places with small gaps to fill. In my own work, I try to bring construction grammar and SFL closer together in the study of discourse level construction of arguments. But you can pick any area of language that interests you and keep SFG/SFL in mind as you work on it. You're certain to encounter some unexplored areas as you continue your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T05:54:34.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13233" CreationDate="2015-08-29T06:05:12.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;key early works&lt;/strong&gt; based on the Brown corpus are, of course, Kucera and Francis' 1967 work &quot;Computational Analysis of Present Day American English&quot; and the American Heritage Dictionary. It's greatest long-term impact was in inspiring the creation of other corpora like LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) which then led to some innovative work on grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find very little use of the Brown corpus in modern corpus linguistics research. There are simply too many far better resources. A modern respectable corpus of written language will start at 100 million tokens (as opposed to Brown's 1 million) and try to go much higher. It is sometimes used for teaching purposes and I still see it used for some basic frequency work in non-specialist works - this is probably in part because of its easy accessibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T06:05:12.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-29T15:56:18.473" Score="0" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to create an educational system, and I would like to have more taxonomies than a simple part of speech. For example, I would like to be able to categorize words into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tree =&gt; object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kindness =&gt; attitude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keyboard =&gt; computer part&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Car =&gt; transportation, object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better example can be found at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.world-english.org/wordgroups.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English word groups&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have such classification in any corpus of English language? Is it related to linguistics at all, to categorize words by other taxonomies too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2015-08-30T08:20:28.757" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T16:24:37.657" Title="Do we have a taxonomy other than part of speech?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13250" CreationDate="2015-08-29T20:14:22.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you asked whether there is a corpus with such a classification, I'm going to give you an example of a semantic tagger. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS)&lt;/a&gt; can be run on a corpus just like a parts of speech tagger and relies on a taxonomy of 21 general levels of classification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ONl8Q.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ONl8Q.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below that there are up to four sub-divisions, here is the classification for &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt; expressions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5XVBD.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5XVBD.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a free web-service where you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;try out&lt;/a&gt; the semantic tagger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of the sentence &quot;My dog loves biting the postman.&quot; It's a bit cryptic, but that's because it's supposed to be machine-readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;My_Z8 dog_L2mfn loves_E2+ biting_B1 the_Z5 postman_Q1.2/I3.2/S2.2m ._PUNC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T20:14:22.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-29T22:44:10.860" Score="1" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really do not understand how to create syntax trees. I am having a very hard time and I cannot figure out how to make trees for these three sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i) The&#xA;cat&#xA;with&#xA;the&#xA;long&#xA;tail&#xA;and&#xA;the&#xA;dog&#xA;without&#xA;a&#xA;tail&#xA;walked&#xA;across&#xA;the&#xA;bridge.&#xA;ii) John&#xA;explored&#xA;the&#xA;cave&#xA;with&#xA;a&#xA;flashlight.&#xA;iii) John&#xA;explored&#xA;the&#xA;cave&#xA;with&#xA;a&#xA;narrow&#xA;entrance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10371" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T23:43:31.493" Title="syntax trees from sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-08-30T12:35:18.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13252" CreationDate="2015-08-29T23:43:31.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntacticians generally develop an idea about the tree structure of an expression by using tests.  For your examples, one thing to investigate is which sequences of words could be replaced by definite pronouns (he/she/it/they/...) in a context which would supply interpretations for the pronouns.  Those are NPs.  For your example i), I get &quot;They walked across it&quot;, which gives a first approximation of a tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[S [NP the cat with the long tail and the dog without a tail ] walked across [NP the bridge ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T23:43:31.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12901" CreationDate="2015-08-30T06:06:47.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Realize that linguistic competence (i.e. I(Internal)-language) is the object of study in generative grammar. Hence, syntactic computation consisting of Merge + Move giving rise to LF is NOT meant to model speaker externalization. Its only purpose is to compute/generate the hierarchically structured expressions which already exist in your brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T06:06:47.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13260" CreationDate="2015-08-30T10:42:09.673" Score="-1" ViewCount="902" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; says that standardization took place in year ~1700&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, where is it stated that English language has 26 letters and where are all letters defined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This link &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;says &quot;By the 18th century, the standard Latin alphabet comprised the 26 letters we are familiar with today&quot;. But what is the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD:&#xA;The earliest document advised in answers to this question is &#xA;Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, had the English alphabet codified. &#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Also, americans ITA-1 is dated by year 1929, see www.trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD2: I want something like &quot;there is a book in that library, which is first document which uses modern alphabet&quot;, something like Cawdry, Robert.; T. C.&quot;,&quot;1609&quot;, &quot;A table alphabeticall&quot;. It is said, that it is available electronically for free under CC0 license, but I am unable to find the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10373" LastEditorUserId="10373" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T09:04:31.557" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T09:04:31.557" Title="Which official document defines the English alphabet?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13256" CreationDate="2015-08-30T11:25:20.567" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;None whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no &quot;official&quot; resources of any kind, for any aspect of the English language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are dictionaries and grammars which are widely regarded as authoritative, but none of them have any kind of &quot;official&quot; standing, whatever that may mean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T11:25:20.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13256" CreationDate="2015-08-31T04:37:20.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though not &quot;official&quot;, you can argue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1755, had the English alphabet codified. It was accepted as authoritative.  This is in the time frame you are suggesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1113" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T04:37:20.243" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2015-08-31T10:03:59.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic the ordinal numbers (third, fourth, fifth…) are thālith, rābiʽ, khāmis etc. The corresponding fractions are formed form the same roots, but a different pattern: thulth, rubʽ, khums etc. Similarly in other Semitic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T10:03:59.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T19:08:08.520" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/193400?rskey=S7S02U&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[OED]&lt;/a&gt; 7.  a. With correlative &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; pron. (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11307#eid38320125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AS conj. 17&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Middle English also &lt;em&gt;as that&lt;/em&gt;, taking the place of Old English &lt;em&gt;swelce, swá&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;such as&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = Of the kind or degree that; the kind of (person or thing) that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]  [Examples without ellipsis]  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ellipt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  [Examples with ellipsis]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My guesses on what was ellipted:&lt;/strong&gt; 2.1. No other X ebb, than such as ebbs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ¿=&gt;? 2.3.  No other X ebb, than such &lt;strong&gt;[X]&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;strong&gt;[that/which]&lt;/strong&gt; ebbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.1. Such as do X, will do Y.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ¿=&gt;? 3.3. Such &lt;strong&gt;[people/thing]&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;strong&gt;[that/who]&lt;/strong&gt;  do X, will do Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All ellipses &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ellipt only what was explicitly written at least once (ie: the antecedents). Per contra, no explicit antecedents exist for all ellipted &#xA;in '&lt;strong&gt;such as&lt;/strong&gt;', which I bolded in my guesses above (ie: the nouns &lt;strong&gt;[X]&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;[people/thing]&lt;/strong&gt; and the relative pronouns &lt;strong&gt;[that/which/who]&lt;/strong&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can't pinpoint why, but this ellipsis appears extravagant and wrong, because it  makes &lt;strong&gt;such as&lt;/strong&gt; seem mutilated and deficient. &#xA;Is this type of ellipsis special?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would someone please explain or naturalise it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What were the precise steps or processes behind the ellipsis of 'such as'? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T19:08:08.520" Title="Is the ellipsis behind 'such as' grammatically correct?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-31T19:32:52.133" Score="9" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are English spellings determined for words from languages with logographic writing systems. Since these don't have an alphabetic script the words in the original language don't have a &quot;spelling.&quot; So when originally writing these words in English you cannot simply transliterate character for character such as can be done with, for example, Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the original script is usually describing a phonetic syllable (AFAIK) it would make sense when writing it in English to use the appropriate letter or combination of letters for each phoneme. When it is a sound not used in English one would use the closest approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is how so many far eastern language loanwords and names ended up with such odd English spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese place names beginning with &quot;x&quot; in English. These words are pronounced with an &quot;s&quot; or &quot;sh&quot; sound. How did we end up using an &quot;x&quot; to represent them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did feng shui get it's spelling? Most English speakers pronounce it ''fung shway.&quot; The e makes sense since the actual pronunciation is more like a &quot;ə&quot; but the &quot;i&quot; at the end makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is especially prominent in Korean words and place names. Daehhak-ro is pronounced more like &quot;Tay-on-lo.&quot; Cheong-ryang-ri is more like &quot;Tung-yon-lee &quot; These are of course approximated but the spellings seem way off. Even the capital seems oddly spelled. As far as I've ever heard native speakers pronounce it exactly the same as we pronounce the word &quot;soul.&quot; Why the extra &quot;e?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception seems to be Japanese. Nearly all Japanese words seem to be spelled just as one would expect. Perhaps Japanese phonemes are closer to English than the other far eastern languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a spelling that was retained from the original language, such as for European or Arabic words, it makes sense. Then have to go back to the original language to find out why it has a non-standard spelling. But when the language doesn't have a &quot;spelling&quot; in the phonetic sense of the word why don't we just spell them as they sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10387" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T02:38:42.207" Title="How are English spellings determined for words from eastern languages" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13264" CreationDate="2015-08-31T20:29:20.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Mongolian and so on all have non-logographic writing systems, so only Chinese fills the bill of having no &quot;spelling&quot;. Use of &quot;x&quot; in Pinyin for a palatal sibilant would have come from Portuguese. The details of the history of Pinyin are summarized &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but it would be better to ask on Chinese SE for details about the history of Chinese transliteration. Korean has had a number of transliteration schemes starting with the McCune–Reischauer system, which have been challenging, owing in part to the considerable number of segments that have to be represented. Everybody seems to hate diacritics, so breves on top of vowels are to be avoided; so in the Revised Romanization of Korean, they decided that they could use &quot;eo&quot; to represent schwa, since it wasn't being used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T14:44:41.967" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T14:44:41.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13264" CreationDate="2015-09-01T06:32:30.337" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;General Remarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different languages have different sound systems. So no romanization system can be perfectly faithful to the native language, and at the same time perfectly intuitive to speakers of another particular language. There have to be tradeoffs. In general, any large language not written in the Latin alphabet will have accumulated multiple romanization systems, each designed with different goals in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all have more than one romanization system.&#xA;Standard romanizations for Eastern languages are often designed more for native speakers or second-language learners than for monoglot English speakers. Why English speakers choose to use these standardized but non-intuitive (for them) systems rather than respelling according to English sounds is a different issue. (One factor that possibly contributes to the general preference for not respelling foreign words according to English spelling conventions might be that English spelling doesn't have a very straightforward correspondence to English pronunciation even for native English words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people who choose what system to use in English publications are probably the editors, so I guess you can blame them for these &quot;odd English spellings.&quot; (In particular, I'd imagine the most influential editors in this regard are those of news media and dictionaries.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standardized romanization systems are also used to some extent in romanization of personal names, in which case the individual might have a preference. But in this case, the preference actually isn't always for the standard romanization -- many Koreans adjust the spelling of their family name to match English better, as in &quot;Park&quot; or &quot;Lee.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I'll discuss some specific languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chinese&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pinyin&lt;/a&gt; Romanization system is currently standard for Mandarin Chinese. Other systems have been used in the past, however. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yale Romanization&lt;/a&gt; in particular is considered by some people to be more intuitive to untrained English speakers. In the Yale system, we write &quot;feng shwei.&quot; But Yale was never very prevalent compared to other alternatives, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wade-Giles&lt;/a&gt;, that had different oddities of their own (most notoriously, the use of apostrophes to mark aspirated consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinyin does make sense, though; it just doesn't follow the same pattern as English sound-spelling correspondences. For example, in &quot;feng shui,&quot; the &quot;e&quot; regularly represents a vowel similar to that in English &quot;b&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;t&quot; [ə] and the &quot;-ui&quot; regularly represents a sound like that in the English &quot;s&lt;strong&gt;way&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; [wei̯]. Using -ui instead of -uei does seem a little unintuitive, but it saves a letter, and it is not ambiguous because [wi] does not exist as a sequence of sounds in Mandarin. Likewise, the -iu ending represents &quot;yo&quot; /jou̯/ rather than &quot;yoo&quot; /ju/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Korean&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revised Romanization is mostly used, but there are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Korean&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;other systems of romanization for Korean&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Japanese&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system most used in an English-language context, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hepburn Romanization&lt;/a&gt;, is actually based on English (Wikipedia says it was designed for use in an Japanese-English dictionary). That is probably why you as an English speaker find it the most intuitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the other romanization systems for Japanese are designed for native speakers or people familiar with the language, and look &quot;weirder&quot; to monoglot English speakers. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki_romanization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kunrei-Shiki romanization&lt;/a&gt;. There are also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_romanization_sys.htm#11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;historical systems&lt;/a&gt; that have been used by speakers of other languages, like Portuguese, German and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Arabic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, romanization of Arabic is generally based on the sounds (transcription) as well as the letters (transliteration). Written Arabic normally omits the diacritics that are used to indicate many vowel sounds, but vowels are always included in the romanizations used in English texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T02:38:42.207" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T02:38:42.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-01T07:55:57.023" Score="4" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to do this single-handedly, so I could use some professional help. :) I'm a professor of Ancient Egyptian (and cosmology as well, which means I'm a perfect target for conspiracy theorists regarding aliens and pyramids, so bring it on!) from the University of Zagreb (yeah, that's somewhere in the Balkans), and I deal with comparative linguistics, so I like dead languages. However, I also want that alive ones stay like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yaghan language is a language isolate from Tierra del Fuego. That means that my historical linguistics and comparative linguistics knowledge isn't much of use, and the whole process of learning this language is quite difficult. However, it's more difficult for Cristina Calderon, the last native speaker of this language. Imagine havine no one to talk to in your mother tongue. That could be a dream sometimes, but it's usually a nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, join us at &lt;a href=&quot;http://facebook.com/SaveYaghan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;facebook.com/SaveYaghan&lt;/a&gt;. My plan is to publish bits of grammar and interesting words I find from time to time, in order to experiment with social media, to start the revitalization of this language. Unfortunately, Beyonce didn't retweet me, so I've lost kids as possible new speakers, but all is not lost! :D We're also on twitter: @SaveYaghan. Warning: I spam a lot, in order to get some attention. You can help by retweeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most famous part of Yaghan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QYECd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QYECd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mamihlapinatapai&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's even more fascinating stuff that we can discover. Help me put the Internet to a good cause. I promise each one of you an exoplanet of your choice after I conquer the Laniakea supercluster.  Darmok &amp;amp; Jalad at Tanagra!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10393" LastEditorUserId="10393" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T09:44:58.933" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T09:44:58.933" Title="Help us save a dying language with only 1 speaker left!" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;language-revival&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-09-01T10:16:40.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-01T12:06:36.287" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that physiological parameters like e.g. the size of neck will alter their f0. It's just an impression but it seems to hold - I can usually guess someone's neck size over the phone (at least relatively so). But if I google this, nothing shows up - I see no evidence of a correlation in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some of you guys have some idea of whether there is a correlation between f0 and e.g. neck parameters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2015-09-02T10:05:10.717" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T13:57:06.727" Title="Evidence of connections between f0 and a physiological parameter?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13269" CreationDate="2015-09-01T12:40:45.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, yes and no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vocal F0 range is mainly determined by the length and thickness of the vocal folds. Inasmuch as neck circumference correlates with the size of the vocal folds inside the neck, you could find a loose, indirect correlation between neck circumference and F0 range. For example, adults generally have thicker necks than children, and they generally have lower F0 ranges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are several factors that contribute to neck circumference, and not all of them are associated with larger internal organs. For example, someone with a relatively high body fat index could have a very thick neck but relatively small vocal folds. Similarly, people who take up body building and build up all of the muscles in the neck will see an increase in neck circumference but not a concomitant decrease in vocal range. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, neck &lt;em&gt;length&lt;/em&gt; is going to be more reliable than neck circumference. The length of the neck is determined by skeletal structure, so it is more likely to be in proportion with the vocal folds. In the opera world, conventional wisdom says that the stereotypical tenor has a short neck and the stereotypical baritone has a long neck. But even that metric is not 100% reliable, since ultimately the growth of the vocal folds is independent from skeletal growth and can be influenced by such things as testosterone levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T13:57:06.727" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T13:57:06.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-01T14:21:11.203" Score="5" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Entropy formula for lexical richness is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTJoW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTJoW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The probability p-ith is calculated by dividing V-ith by N, where N is the total number of tokens in the text and V is the number of types. However, I can't seem to grasp the concept of V-ith? Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Dale, Moisl, and Somers (p.551). &quot;Handbook of Natural Language Processing&quot; (2000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10246" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T17:07:29.453" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T16:10:46.810" Title="Shannon's entropy as a measure of vocabulary richness" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;&lt;entropy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13250" CreationDate="2015-09-01T16:24:37.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another kind of resource of interest is a wordnet: It shows several relations between words like synonym, hyperonym, hyponym. The prototypical wordnet is the Princeton wordnet available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T16:24:37.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14361" CreationDate="2015-09-01T23:52:43.307" Score="2" ViewCount="1491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was discovering lately that the only French word using &quot;ù&quot; was the only word &quot;où&quot; which means &quot;where&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the french layout keyboard (aka AZERTY), there's a key only dedicated to this &quot;ù&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were wondering if there are any other languages that is using the character: &quot;ù&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-09-02T10:35:59.020" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T14:09:23.357" Title="ù - Are there other words (in which languages?) other than the french word &quot;Où&quot; that uses it?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13280" CreationDate="2015-09-02T04:52:51.523" Score="6" ViewCount="3639" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always thought that &quot;cw&quot; in Old English represented /kw/, and the same for modern English &quot;qu&quot;, and that the change from one to the other was purely orthographic, since the &quot;qu&quot; digraph was more familiar to Anglo-Norman scribes. But on an English Stack Exchange question, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12326/why-is-q-followed-by-a-u/12333#comment42236_12333&quot;&gt;the following comment with 6 upvotes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should really explain that the second group are almost entirely&#xA;  due to the Normans being unable to pronounce the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon&#xA;  &quot;cw&quot; and so substituting the nearest Latin equivalent, &quot;qu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;qu&quot; was not pronounced exactly as /kw/ by the Normans, any more than&#xA;  it is so by modern Frenchmen: English took several hundred years to&#xA;  smooth the two together. There is an interesting question about&#xA;  exactly which phonemes the Normans distinguished that the Saxons did&#xA;  not and &lt;em&gt;vice versa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? In modern French, I know that &quot;qu&quot; is generally pronounced as a simple /k/. But that doesn't exactly seem to be what this is saying. Does anyone know if there is evidence for some systematic distinction between a &quot;Celtic/Anglo-Saxon 'cw'&quot; and a Latinate &quot;qu&quot; during the relevant time period? If they were distinct, what was the phonetic difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T23:39:25.620" Title="Was the change in spelling from &quot;cw&quot; to &quot;qu&quot; in English associated with any difference in pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13278" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-02T08:55:28.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T09:46:29.890" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T09:46:29.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13279" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-02T08:55:28.180" Score="0" Body="An accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T09:46:20.070" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T09:46:20.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13276" CreationDate="2015-09-02T17:43:08.263" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anglo-Norman French (or Anglo-Norman) was a dialect of Old French that died out as a spoken language by the beginning of the 13th century. It was used by by the ruling elite, which constituted no more than 2-5% of the total population (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405190248.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Upward and Davidson 2011&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Norman Blake&lt;/strong&gt; writes that English monasteries started receiving a lot of monks trained in France who started copying OE texts applying spelling practices found in the languages they were familiar with (Old French and Latin?). He &lt;strong&gt;argues that these changes do not necessarily indicate any phonetic changes&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521264754.002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blake 1992:&lt;/a&gt; 10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, as David Crystal puts it, &quot;the incomers had no interest in preserving the distinctive Anglo-Saxon letters&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.davidcrystal.com/?id=4359&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crystal 2012:&lt;/a&gt; 60). Moreover, the West-Saxon educated elite that was responsible for developing and maintaining the WS standard gradually lost power and by the end of the 12th century their spelling practices were abandoned (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521264754.002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blake 1992&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter Q was rarely used in OE; thus, [kw] was usually spelled &lt;strong&gt;cƿ&lt;/strong&gt; (c followed by wynn). So called &lt;strong&gt;Norman scribes started to latinize it&lt;/strong&gt; by replacing it with &quot;qu&quot; in English words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE cwen =&gt; eME cuen, cwen, quen, quuen, qween, kuen etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upward and Davidson argue that by the 14th century &quot;spellings with QU had become the norm&quot; (p. 149). For more details, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historyofenglishspelling.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.historyofenglishspelling.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trask 2010 basically says the same thing, perhaps in a more understandable way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvKoZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvKoZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important addition. Cecily Clark (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110877007.117&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clark 1992&lt;/a&gt;) argues it is incorrect to ascribe such changes solely to &quot;widespread scribal ignorance of the English language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T23:39:25.620" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T23:39:25.620" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2015-09-02T23:11:26.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have spent a long time pondering upon this question and according to a former U.S. Air force pilot that I had at the University of Dayton as a professor, &lt;strong&gt;a human being can only make 40 distinguishable sounds which are sufficiently different from each other to produce a language&lt;/strong&gt; that can be understood by the person trying to send the information, and the individual receiving the message.  This is very important and why the military uses words like alpha, bravo, and charlie rather than a, b, or c when communicating over the radio. Given the fact that a growl, or a whistle can be considered communicating phonemic sounds (just watch the movies: &quot;Enemy Mine&quot;, and &quot;Guardians of the Galaxy&quot; for samples of growling and whistling) when you think about it, we really can produce thousands of tones for a single sound, and thousands of different sounds in scale just like a soprano singer can.  But how many of those soprano sounds can be distinguished by an untrained ear?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the different consonants as well as the different vowels allow us to separate in our brain processing areas, different &quot;breaks&quot; in the flow of words.  That is why a K has to be sufficiently different from an L, so our brains can distinguish the words.  Imagine a language made only of K's, Q's, and C's.  How can you distinguish words in such a language over a radio transmission?  How difficult would it be for us to understand each other if everything sounded like cancan, King Kong, or quacking!  The human brain does need to identify the differences in order to process the information.  And that is precisely the problem; that there is a limit for our neural pathways (such as the ones in Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain) to process information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aforementioned breaks in spoken communication are called by linguists features of a language and by scientists acoustic signatures.  Specifically plosive consonants like p, t, k, b, d  and fricative consonants like s, z, and v provide the brain with different enough variations to allow for precise communication.  If you are really interested in this follow the work of Dr. Edward F. Chang in how the brain recognizes speech sounds, and an odd language created in the 1950's known as Unifon, consisting of individual phonemic sounds such as the ones in a dictionary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real trick behind all this is finding out exactly what those 40 essential sounds are.  There is a letter in Hebrew that sounds like you are clearing your throat. Chet. This sound was lost from the English language but it is still used by many Middle Eastern cultures.  Did you know that the Egyptians had a hieroglyph drawing of a little chicken which sounded like a W or a diphthong of a Oo (Spanish U) with another vowel! So is a W a single phonemic sound or two? Is it Wal-Mart, or Ooal-Mart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to ask ourselves then, if the original sounds that allowed humanity to communicate in the beginning of our history were enough to be differentiated not only as sounds, but also as symbols?  Can you imagine this two symbols: ///////\, O-////// one for water and the other meaning snake, being confused!!!  Many archaeologist are pointing to the languages known as Proto-Sinaitic / Proto-Canaanite because several of the written symbols that we use today such as the &quot;A&quot; can be traced to the pictoglyphs Canaanites used; in this case of an ox.  As a matter of fact even the name of the letter was maintained. Alp meant ox to the Canaanites. Greeks still call it Alpha. Hebrews call it Aleph.  We call it an A. So not only how many sounds can we distinguish is important, but also where do they come from, and what did they mean for the original cultures that used them!  Can we simply remove them like we removed Chet?  Can we simply substitute the Greek letter Phi for an F?  They sound very similar in Phylum and Fielding, don't they?  Are the C and K the same acoustic signatures in Car and Karma? If so, why do we have two symbols for the same acoustic signature?  How about the V in Volkswagen and the F in Folklore?  Have we reached as a species the point where we need to take a more scientific approach to languages rather than a traditional or cultural approach?  Can we substitute symbols and sounds for binary codes and tri-dimensional colored shapes?  Will this finally solve the problem of communication for blind people, or primitive cultures in Africa, and India without written symbols. Or are we creating in the attempt, an even bigger communication nightmare?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we incorporate the different Oriental and Hindu dialects into just 40 sounds and symbols, when sometimes a single symbol represents an entire word, and they have thousands of such symbols?  Did you know that the word &lt;em&gt;Lung&lt;/em&gt; in some Chinese dialects, means Dragon? One symbol can be an entire word, and may represent or offend an entire culture!!!  Let's take for example the symbols of the cross, and the Swastika. What happens when we tell the Jewish people that they have to use this symbols in a New World Language, because the cross and the Swastika were used by the most primitive cultures in the world for millennia, and we are trying to incorporate as many cultures as possible in this new &quot;common&quot; language... Will they accept this?  In the words of the immortal Star Trek character Mr. Spock: &quot;Fascinating...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you notice that by the way?  The expression &quot;fascinating&quot; is only one word but, the &quot;idiomatic phrase&quot; is: &quot;In the words...&quot;, plural.  So that's another question, how do we incorporate idiomatic phrases, regionalisms, and other technicalities from one language into another where the same words do not exist?  Eskimos have hundreds of words to describe the different types of snow in Alaska.  How many words for snow do you think they have in Puerto Rico!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It will be very difficult for humanity to change the many different symbols and sounds that have defined us throughout the centuries, but at some point in our history we will have to do so in order to progress...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prof. Ramon R. Malave-Marty, overseer4371@gmail.com&#xA;09/02/2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MMQvK.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MMQvK.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Unifon characters&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AG3RD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AG3RD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hieroglyphs, notice the W&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10401" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T15:37:33.667" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T15:37:33.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2015-09-03T03:24:04.950" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion of 'distinctive' sounds indicates that the discussion must be limited to phoneme inventories found in a single language. To do this we can consider the largest known inventories of contrastive (i.e. which I'm taking 'distinctive' to mean for the purposes of this answer) consonants, vowels and tonal features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Consonant inventories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the World Atlas of Language Structures online, chapter 1 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Consonant inventories'&lt;/a&gt;, the language with the largest known set of consonants is !Xóõ (Southern Khoisan), which has 122 consonants. My understanding is that it is not entirely clear that all the !Xóõ clicks contrast across enough environments that we can be fully satisfied with this number, so we could take instead the largest such inventory that does not include clicks; this is usually said to be Ubykh (Abkhazo-Adyghean) with around &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;80 consonants&lt;/a&gt; (not counting the consonants that only occur in onomatopoeia and loanwords).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vowel inventories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WALS takes a simple approach to counting vowel inventories, only counting the &lt;em&gt;vowel qualities&lt;/em&gt; rather than all distinctive vocalic segments. Thus they only consider the three features of height, backness and lip rounding, and ignore length contrasts, nasalisation, etc. With this approach they find the largest inventories to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;around 14 vowels&lt;/a&gt; (German, Indo-European). If we include diphthongs and triphthongs then we have, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://pure.au.dk/portal/files/44857633/jipa34.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fering/North Frisian&lt;/a&gt; (Indo-European) with 22 vowels. Of course, if we move even further from the WALS approach and include secondary articulations such as nasalization, phonation, tongue root retraction, pharyngealization, etc then we could probably find much larger inventories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few languages thought to have up to 9 tones, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kam_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kam language&lt;/a&gt; (Tai-Kadai)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Largest attested segmental inventories&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining the WALS maps we can identify a small group of languages that have large inventories of both C and V. !Xóõ is the largest with Ubykh following, but several others have total C+V inventories approaching 60 or so segments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;!Xóõ&lt;/a&gt; (Southern Khoisan) depending on analysis has anything from 107 phonemes up to 142 (as well as 2 tones) so comes close to the theoretical maximum outlined below&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ukykh&lt;/a&gt; (Abkhazo-Adyghean) has 86 phonemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindhi_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sindhi&lt;/a&gt; (Indo-European) with 62 phonemes, but this includes some vowel length contrasts as well as a phonation contrast on consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Largest theoretically possible inventory&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the more conservative numbers of 80 C, 14 V and ignore tone (potentially 1,120 CV syllables) then we require the orthography to represent only(!) 94 phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If however we combine the maximum consonant, vowel and tonal inventories then we could theoretically have a language with up to 122 C, 22 V and 9 T. This would require an orthography with 144 segmental symbols and some kind of tone-marking as well. If tone marking used segmental symbols (as is common in the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien families) then a further 9 symbols could be added bringing the total to 153. It's worth noting that such a language would theoretically have over 24,000 possible CV syllables! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T22:28:00.017" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T22:28:00.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13289" CreationDate="2015-09-03T04:20:17.607" Score="5" ViewCount="2823" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder why English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share common alphabet and other words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also what is the relation among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10598" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T00:37:34.517" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T00:37:34.517" Title="Why do English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share a common alphabet and many words?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2015-09-03T04:24:50.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;131,072 is the number of distinguishable sound segments in a system of binary distinctive features with 17 different features.  My informal count of the distinctive features in the &lt;strong&gt;Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; feature theory is 17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to derive a writing system that can distinguish 131,072 distinctive sounds, I'd suggest the use of diacritics (lots of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-09-05T01:30:17.093" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T01:30:17.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13284" CreationDate="2015-09-03T06:55:30.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to words, they belong to the same language family called Indo-European (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&lt;/a&gt;). That means that they had a hypothetical common ancestor thousands of years before called Proto-Indo-European. Spanish and French are in turn Romance languages, which means that Latin is basically their ancestor. English has borrowed a great amount of Latin words (Greek too), but not all words resembling Latin are necessarily Latin, as they might be inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Those aforementioned languages, share also common roots with languages from Eastern and northern Europe, although in some cases you need to have a trained eye to see it. Armenian, Persian and Sanskrit are also Indo-European languages that are/were spoken outside the European continent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to the alphabet, Latin derived from Greek that was a phonetic alphabet containing both vowels and consonants. Latin and Greek together spread in all Europe or influenced the creation of other alphabets such as Runic and Cyrillic. Educated Europeans had to know how to read Latin and Greek, hence European grammarians used Latin to write down their own tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T08:10:08.563" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T08:10:08.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7213" CreationDate="2015-09-03T09:57:00.087" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only offer some information obtained from two references I have recently come across when looking for answers to a similar question. Unfortunately, I am neither a Semitist nor an Afrasianist, hence my understanding of the issues is probably imperfect. In spite of this, here is what I have found so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me begin with a few quotations from an interesting dissertation by Simpson (2009), available &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/dissertations/Simpson_dissertation_2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here as a PDF&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine), such as this one (p. 5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The system of root-and-pattern morphology incorporates elements of phonology and syntax. Morphology in general holds a position between these two domains and as a result reflects the results of changes originating in both domains. The unique properties of Semitic morphology exhibit the results of changes from many different domains including morphologically specific ones. Understanding the processes in morphology, syntax and phonology and how they have contributed to this unusual system of word formation provides important insights into the patterns that occur and those that do not. While the patterns and configuration of Semitic morphology are unique, they &lt;strong&gt;reflect processes and underlying mechanisms which are not by themselves unusual&lt;/strong&gt;. These changes rely on basic phonetic and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the inherent ambiguities in language and the opportunities these ambiguities present for &lt;strong&gt;reanalysis&lt;/strong&gt;. This principle can be seen as underlying many of the changes in language and more specifically those encountered in this study. The results of reinterpretation may result in cross-linguistic patterns but these patterns are considered here to be the results of, not the driving forces behind, the changes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also (p. 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;From the history of Arabic it might seem that the system of ablaut patterns is characterized by a slow process of decay, whereby the system of non-linear morphology represents the oldest, or even the original, stage of the language with a subsequent break down of the system over time. However, once the Semitic family is considered as a whole, this scenario does not hold up so well. The history of the Semitic language family and its subfamilies includes &lt;strong&gt;many cases of patterns being lost, but also many cases of new patterns emerging&lt;/strong&gt;. Many of the non-linear morphological patterns of Classical Arabic are likely &lt;strong&gt;innovations not originally found in Proto-Semitic&lt;/strong&gt;. The modern history of most Semitic languages is characterized by both the loss of older ablaut patterns and the formation of new patterns, giving us a very dynamic picture of developments in the domain of ablaut patterns.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And further (p. 68):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;While many patterns characteristic of the earliest varieties have been lost or become obsolete, there are at the same time a number of new patterns and newly productive forms found in many Semitic languages. The types of processes that introduce new alternations or expand the use of existing patterns are proposed to be &lt;strong&gt;essentially the same in non-Semitic languages&lt;/strong&gt; as they are both in the earliest stages of the Semitic and Afroasiatic families and in later varieties of Semitic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author then divides the processes into the following main two types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;segmentally&lt;/strong&gt; conditioned alternations (such as long-distance assimilation leading to umlaut-like patterning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prosodically&lt;/strong&gt; conditioned alternations (basically loss/reduction of vowels in certain contexts, changes in vowel quality/quantity due to the placement of stress, with examples from several languages including Hebrew, Maltese, and the Modern South Arabian languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest that you read the text to learn more. I'm not a Semitist and many of the Semitic-specific details are difficult to comprehend without a proper Semitist background, but otherwise the linguistic reasoning seems rather sensible most of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author himself admits that the ultimate origin of all of the patterning is currently not discernable, but assumes - and I tend to agree - that there is no reason to think it was very different from what we know of the later history of the family and its individual daughters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as far as Proto-Afrasian or Proto-Afroasiatic is concerned, a concise introduction to the issue can be found in Bomhard's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/6200707/Afrasian_Comparative_Phonology_and_Vocabulary_2014_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afrasian Comparative Phonology and Vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2014:15).&lt;sup&gt;[see the note below]&lt;/sup&gt; Apart from some information on how Diakonoff vs. Orël-Stolbova vs. Ehret reconstructions differ and/or compare, there seems to be some interesting information concerning the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic (e.g. p. 37) and pertaining to the origin of the Semitic &quot;templatic&quot; morphology (p. 39-42), a few lines of which I can quote here as well (p. 39):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There has been much discussion, some of it rather heated, concerning root structure patterning within Afrasian. Until fairly recently, there was strong resistance to look objectively at the data from all of the branches of the Afrasian language family, &lt;strong&gt;far too much emphasis being placed on the importance of the Semitic branch alone&lt;/strong&gt;, which was often uncritically taken to represent the original state of affairs. In the Semitic branch, the vast majority of roots are &lt;strong&gt;triconsonantal&lt;/strong&gt;. It is certain, however, that at one time there were more &lt;strong&gt;biconsonantal&lt;/strong&gt; roots and that the triconsonantal system has been greatly expanded in Semitic at the expense of roots with other than three consonants (cf. Moscati 1964:72—75; Ullendorf 1958:69—72; Militarëv 2005).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And further (p. 40):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thus, the Proto-Afrasian root may be assumed to have had two forms, either *CV or *CVC. *CVC could be extended by means of a suffix to form an inflectional stem: *CVC-(V)C-. Originally, these suffixes appear to have been utilized primarily as verb extensions. Depending upon when they became separated from the rest of the Afrasian speech community, each branch exploited to a different degree the patterning that was just beginning to develop in the Afrasian parent language, with Semitic carrying it to the farthest extreme.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it appears that &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; languages such as &lt;em&gt;Classical Arabic&lt;/em&gt; have developed the patterning to an utmost extreme, but &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; not only may the system have been much less &quot;extravagant&quot; at the Proto-Semitic stage, &lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; it was also much less profound at the Pre-Proto-Semitic or Proto-Afrasian stage, which seems to be supported by both, internal evidence (in the former case) and external comparisons (in the latter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I definitely agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/9781/jknappen&quot;&gt;@jknappen&lt;/a&gt;'s answer in that we don't really &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; much, an interesting picture &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; emerging - essentially, one that actually also agrees well with &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/3186/carsten&quot;&gt;@carsten&lt;/a&gt;'s speculative proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[Note: Although Bomhard is a Nostraticist, which could be discouraging to quite a lot of people, references are almost exclusively restricted to Semiticist and Afrasianist literature, with the exception of the Introduction and/or Appendix.]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T06:07:08.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13284" CreationDate="2015-09-03T10:20:21.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The western European languages share the Latin alphabet (with minor deviations) because of the cultural dominance of the Roman empire and later the Catholic Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shared words (that a layman recognises as the same) are typically rather recent coinings, often borrowed from the culturally prestigious languages Latin and Classical Greek. Those shared words are found in the domains of science and technology as well as in religion or politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common Indo-European ancestry is blurred by sound shifts and semantical shifts and expert knowledge is needed to discover it. To a layman, the words&#xA;&quot;tooth&quot; (Englisch) &quot;Zahn&quot; (German) and &quot;dens&quot; (Latin) do not look shared anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T10:20:21.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13284" CreationDate="2015-09-03T11:40:22.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because nations and national languages grew out of a standardization/demarcation of regional spoken dialects which did not have closed borders, and were alike to neighbors (a communication media). Mercantile and military traffic, large migrations, conquerors, the churches all had their influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And out of such an amalgam a national language is standardized by institutions (initially literary), and by shaving speech and grammatical constructs to the same style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back still further, humanity took its origin in Africa and then split up. So even American Indian languages may contain a couple of recognizable words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However development may drift apart, as migration under duress of small groups, that may loose common language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(In understandable language.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T11:40:22.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-03T14:32:01.957" Score="5" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to parse a Spanish corpus with syntactic dependencies. I have tried both Freeling and Maltparser, they both give similar results, but with some divergence. I need the highest accuracy possible, mainly in the dependencies between the verb and its dependents. Which one should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T15:08:14.837" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T16:00:55.730" Title="Maltparser vs Freeling for Spanish dependency parser" Tags="&lt;nlp&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-04T03:09:55.723" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a large political advertising corpus available for download? I am working on a project but the Wesleyan and University of Wisconson corpus are off limits to me. I sent a request on official letterhead with 20 dollars but, because I am a student, was denied. I have downloaded transcripts from CNN and the Living Room candidate but need enough data to perform text mining on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10410" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T03:51:51.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T03:51:51.420" Title="Political Advertising Corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13269" CreationDate="2015-09-04T11:26:51.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MusicalLinguist answer is excellent, but I thought I'd point you in the direction of some interesting literatute. There is research done into the relationship between F0 and physiological factors, but not strictly in linguistics. It's found a lot in Animal vocalisations though. Here's a paper by some researchers at Queen Mary in London. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159111001833&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159111001833&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several caveats however. For example, since it can beneficial to have a low F0 (since it would indicate that you are a larger animal), certain animals can lower their F0 by adjusting parameters such as formants so that they appear bigger than they actually are. I recommend looking at the research of Alan McElligott and his group at Queen Mary, as they study this quite a lot. Here's a link to another paper that discusses this in relation to male fallow deer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003113&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003113&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10412" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T11:26:51.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14297" CreationDate="2015-09-04T14:08:56.140" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the decimal numerals we're all familiar with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And given any number, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1&#xA;100&#xA;156021&#xA;-23&#xA;-212311&#xA;242.2129&#xA;-21.001&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we safely assume that in every language in the world where decimal numerals are not natively displayed, that we can swap each decimal numeral for a static character in these other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for a translation system, so we're not interested in supporting extinct/historic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10316" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T17:45:48.920" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T17:58:02.673" Title="Do all cultures allow for 1 to 1 swapping of decimal numerals?" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14296" CreationDate="2015-09-04T14:25:19.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese/Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;50: 五十 &#xA;1: 一 &#xA;51: 五十一 &#xA;100: 百 &#xA;1000: 千 &#xA;10000: 万&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: In response to a request for further explanation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that '50' is represented by two characters, and '1' is represented by one character (so far so good), but '51' is represented by a concatenation of '50' and '1', resulting in three characters and, thus, a non-one-to-one mapping from numerals to characters. In addition, each successive power of ten gets its own unique character, trivially resulting in several other non-one-to-one mappings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T17:58:02.673" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T17:58:02.673" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13292" CreationDate="2015-09-04T16:00:55.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest to use more than one tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have three different tools you can use majority voting to determine your tags. In case of ties, a human arbiter can fix the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the tools can be trained. When you can afford to create some tailored training data from your corpus you can improve the accuracy of the tagging significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T16:00:55.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-04T17:49:17.687" Score="0" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;Predicate's arguments are just case slots, aren't they? So predicate-argument structure and case structure are just the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10320" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T17:49:17.687" Title="What is the difference between predicate-argument structure and case structure" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7317" CreationDate="2015-09-04T23:23:24.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks about &quot;possible&quot;, not &quot;probable&quot; -- &quot;What's the maximum amount of letters we &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have&quot;. Greg Lee's answer is the closest to being correct. SPE does not actually give a final and definitive set of features (they consider it an open question), and even pre-geometric research indicated that their count of features was low (for example, the lack of [labial], [constricted glottis], [spread glottis], myriad tone features). If you up the feature count to 20, the answer would be 1,048,576. These calculations include various &quot;unattestable&quot; combinations, such as the class of [+hi,+lo] segments, which are physically unrealizable but computationally well-defined. If your standard for &quot;can&quot; is not just grammatical distinctness but also physical distinctness, the number would be smaller by some fraction, and nobody was worked out that function (there are numerous little unrealizable distinctions such as pharyngeal nasal stops). The notion of &quot;possible&quot; is meaningful only in the context of some theory that allows a given situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might suppose that the largest number of actually observed segments is related in some fashion to &quot;possible&quot; segments, but how does one relate &quot;actually observed&quot; to &quot;possible&quot;? You might think that a language with 300 segments is &quot;not possible&quot; since this is quite a bit above the largest known inventory, which would be on the order of 140 segments. But that doesn't mean that a language with 300 phonemes is impossible, it simply means that it isn't very likely to exist. Possible, but unlikely. You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;, theoretically, make a stronger claim about that probability, if you had some idea of the statistical distribution of phoneme inventory sizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is a fundamental problem with the question, that the notion of &quot;could be&quot; intended here is quite unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T23:23:24.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-05T15:33:25.480" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I got into a discussion with my friend concerning sizes of lexicons of different languages. He stated something about Japanese having considerably more words than English. (The exact languages don't matter, my point is about assessing the size of a lexicon)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend's opinion was based in a big part on the difference between sizes of dictionaries which seem inadequate to me as no dictionary provides the whole lexicon. (AFAIK)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very sceptical about any specific assessments of the number of language's words, but I have only my common sense to support that. It appears to me that the difficulty behind that task is based on the impossibility in determining which lexemes to consider &quot;alive&quot;, being actively a part of the language at a certain point in time, and which to consider archaic and no longer productive nor being part of the language at this certain point in time. The other difficulties, in my view, would appear in deciding whether a certain recently borrowed word is already a part of the lexicon as a proper loanword or merely a temporal influence that is very likely to fade in usage after a couple of years . One would also have to strictly determine which specific dialect of the language is to be analised. And then it overlaps with the perennial struggle in delimitation within languages and lects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these problems seem to be mere manifestations of the most basic and obvious fact of language being in constant change. That inherent feature of natural languages, in my opinion, doesn't allow for any accurate estimations of the size of lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you provide any literature on that topic ? Or maybe there are some loopholes in my thought process or a consensus in linguistics that I am simply not aware of ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there was a method of producing a safe assessment, would the margin of error of these assessments allow to state that &quot;Language X has more extensive vocabulary than Language Y&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-09-05T17:50:24.170" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T13:34:26.537" Title="Is it possible to determine the number of words in a language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14305" CreationDate="2015-09-05T18:16:21.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of loopholes. One depends on how you define &quot;is&quot;. &quot;Glit&quot; is not a word of English, but it could be. There are 12-syllable words in English but no 30 syllable words -- but there &quot;could&quot; be. Since I imagine there are speakers of English who can say &quot;I'm catching the train to Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu&quot;, then you either have to admit that as a word of English, or say it isn't English because it is etymologically Maori. The underlying premise if a claim about &quot;words of English&quot; is that English is a well-defined entity, and while I think &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; English is well-defined (though ever-expanding, so well-definition is time-variant) 'cuz it's the language that I speak, there is no such thing as &quot;universal English&quot;, and that goes for all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second regards roots vs. words. If &quot;glit&quot; is a verb, you can form multiple inflected forms from it such as &quot;glits&quot;, &quot;glitted&quot;, &quot;glitting&quot; and so on. Some people don't want to include inflected forms because they aren't &quot;really&quot; different words, they are just forms of one word. Which then requires you to ask &quot;What do you mean by 'word'?&quot;. There are languages with very robust morphology which allow huge numbers of words, and languages with recursive or at least iterative morphology, which have infinite word-formation potential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the realm of questions about what constitutes a &quot;word&quot;, I believe from his comments here that John Lawler has a position to the effect that Lushootseed utterances are not composed of multiple words, they are composed of multiple morphemes, and &quot;word&quot; is not a useful concept in analyzing the structure of the language (leaving aside a possible and under-investigated stress-related facts). It is certainly not obvious that a distinction between &quot;sentence&quot; and &quot;word&quot; is mandatory for the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you are only looking at a count of roots, and if you are taking the I-language perspective, then the repository of roots in an individual's mental representation of their language at a given time is finite, thus countable. That is, no lexicon (repository) has an actual infinity of representations. OTOH, there is no specific number of items which defines the largest possible number of entries in a language repository. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-09-05T19:45:10.890" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T19:45:10.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14305" CreationDate="2015-09-06T01:44:22.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, following the reasoning of &lt;strong&gt;The Vastness of Natural Language&lt;/strong&gt; by Postal and Langendoen, a natural language has an infinite number of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall any good argument from Postal and Langendoen's book. I do recall they say &quot;great grandfather&quot; is a lexical entry and any number of &quot;great&quot;s can be added on to form other words. It seemed to me to be a silly argument, I recall, when I read it. I don't accept their claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-09-06T13:34:26.537" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T13:34:26.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12978" CreationDate="2015-09-06T11:35:37.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[EDIT: It seems I may have misunderstood your question. If &lt;strong&gt;monosyllables&lt;/strong&gt; are, indeed, what you are looking for, please, ignore anything below that pertains to word-length. The rest should make some sense regardless.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a simple answer, as there are quite a lot of factors to consider (both &lt;strong&gt;language-specific&lt;/strong&gt; and [&lt;em&gt;quasi&lt;/em&gt;-]&lt;strong&gt;universal&lt;/strong&gt;). I can only offer a few loose ideas hoping that at least some of them will prove useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I'm not sure that &lt;strong&gt;frequency&lt;/strong&gt; can be straightforwardly linked to &lt;strong&gt;euphony&lt;/strong&gt;. Instead, I'd speculate about &lt;strong&gt;sonority&lt;/strong&gt; being somehow related. Hence, I'd suggest, for instance, that the name would &lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; consist of &lt;strong&gt;open syllables&lt;/strong&gt; (ideally &lt;strong&gt;CV&lt;/strong&gt; combinations) and the C's (consonants) be as sonorous as the particular language permits. Typically, the sounds could be &lt;strong&gt;approximants&lt;/strong&gt; such as /w/ or /j/, &lt;strong&gt;liquids&lt;/strong&gt; such as /l/ or /r/, and &lt;strong&gt;nasals&lt;/strong&gt; such as /m/ or /n/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, other things should definitely be taken into account such as &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt; (and &lt;strong&gt;connotations&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;allusions&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. how can the form be linked to whatever the &lt;em&gt;services&lt;/em&gt; you mention represent?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this leads to other aspects pertaining to both the form and the meaning. For example, is the word an &lt;strong&gt;existing&lt;/strong&gt; one or a &lt;strong&gt;completely new formation&lt;/strong&gt;, and, in the latter case, is it composed of existing morphemes, is it a blend, an acronym, an abbreviation or just an arbitrary concatenation of phonemes (e.g. based on &lt;strong&gt;euphony&lt;/strong&gt; solely)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above can be seen from the &lt;strong&gt;poetic&lt;/strong&gt; perspective, since &lt;strong&gt;aesthetics&lt;/strong&gt; definitely belongs to important and common functions of/in language. Concepts such as &lt;strong&gt;alliteration&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;rhyme&lt;/strong&gt;, but also &lt;strong&gt;rythm&lt;/strong&gt; are just a few to think of. All these things may facilitate &lt;strong&gt;remembering&lt;/strong&gt; the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, getting back to phonetics and phonology, depending on the place of their articulation, &lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; you might consider &lt;strong&gt;avoiding repetition&lt;/strong&gt; of the same or similar consonants in &lt;strong&gt;adjacent syllables&lt;/strong&gt; to make the pronunciation as easy as possible (combinations such as /raliru/, /rirela/, /lalarile/ etc. can be notoriously tongue-twisting in some languages). On the other hand, unlike the consonants, the vowels could be all the same. And, of course, the word probably &lt;strong&gt;shouldn't be too long&lt;/strong&gt;, which can also be language-specific: one, two, three, but probably not longer in languages such as English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there are other things to consider, but the above may be a good start. Here's a random list of a few pseudo-words formed without semantic or (strictly) poetic considerations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;manoli&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lomane&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;limona&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;manili&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ronelo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wanola&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jamalo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;winaju&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T08:43:45.757" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T08:43:45.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-06T21:39:53.463" Score="2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the shifts are obvious such as palatalization, or any consonants with adjacent places and manners, but some other more radical changes are also observed in unrelated languages. For example, Spanish has the vowel breaking of o into ue as well as changing a typically palato-aveolar j into a velar j /x/. Compare that to the Mandarin example of 约 which is pronounced /jyɛ/ in Beijing Mandarin and /jɔ:/ in Sichuanese Mandarin, and 鞋 which is /ʃiɛ/ in Beijing Mandarin and /xai/ in Sichuanese Mandarin (which also resembles the Great Vowel Shift). Given that the chronology of Chinese pronunciation is quite a bit murkier than the Romance languages, maybe &quot;shift&quot; is not the right word to use, but these examples do exhibit a very similar pattern of phonological differences among related languages even with very radical changes. Is there any specific hypothesis as to how pronunciation is passed down and around that would give rise to these patterns across unrelated languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T07:50:03.197" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T07:50:03.197" Title="Why do similar phonological shifts occur in unrelated languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14311" CreationDate="2015-09-06T23:20:49.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you aren't just interested in the specific cases of Chinese and Mandarin. The primary reason for any sound shifts is that at some point in history, the actual pronunciation of a given sound becomes ambiguous, to the point that children learning the language can't really tell which sound was uttered. For example, in most dialects of American English, /t/ at the end of a syllable is produced &quot;unreleased&quot;, so the only acoustic clue that &quot;heat&quot; ends with a /t/ is a pattern of formant transition. If you release the /t/, it is much clearer from the burst of /t/ that there is a final /t/; without the burst, it's hard to tell final /t/ apart from glottal stop. And some people actually pronounce final /t/ as a glottal stop -- they have started a historical shift in syllable-final position from &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ʔ&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, one of the most common sound shifts is from &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;tʃ&lt;/em&gt; before from vowels. It's almost universal that the tongue has to advance a bit when making /k/ before a front vowel, and often we don't notice that little bit of fronting. But sometimes people do, and make that fronting a bit more exaggerated, which results in a palatal stop (IPA [c]). That [c] &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; a lot more like [tʃ] than it sounds like [k], even though [c] is articulatorily more like [k] than it is like [tʃ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Hale in &lt;em&gt;Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method&lt;/em&gt; gives a good account of how sound changes originate from perceptual and analytical ambiguities in speech, which leads to sound changes. The reason why there are considerable similarities in sound changes across languages is that the articulatory and perceptual seeds of sound changes are consequences of anatomy, not grammar: grammar enters the picture when children across generations make different categorial decisions about how to interpret the facts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T23:20:49.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14311" CreationDate="2015-09-07T00:04:18.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The shifts are due to phonological processes which are universal to humans. So the answer to your question is that these unrelated languages are all learned and spoken by humans -- that is the common denominator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two phonological theories I know of that say this, more or less: David Stampe's theory of Natural Phonology (which I agree with, mostly), and the markedness theory proposed by Chomsky and Halle in chapter nine of &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt; (which is interesting, but wrong).  In the SPE theory, the universal part of human phonological systems is the set of markedness conventions, which interpret what happens when the pronunciations of a language lose their special traditional character, and the articulatory system is left to make the best of it, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Natural Phonology, one important source of historical sound change is imperfect acquisition of a language by children.  Children must learn not to apply those universal phonetic processes which are inconsistent with the traditional language they are trying to learn.  When they slip up, a process which the previous generation managed to learn not to apply, now comes to apply, and we observe a sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such sound changes are due to phonetic processes universal to human articulatory systems, so we expect the same sound changes to keep cropping up in languages, regardless of their genetic relationship.  And that's the way it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T00:04:18.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T04:25:34.527" Score="3" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=abridge&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;abridge (v.)&lt;/a&gt; [...] from Old French &lt;em&gt;abregier&lt;/em&gt; &quot;abridge, diminish, shorten,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   from Late Latin &lt;em&gt;abbreviare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;make short&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=abbreviate&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;abbreviate&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sound development from Latin -vi- to French -dg- is paralleled in &lt;em&gt;assuage&lt;/em&gt; (from assuavidare) and &lt;em&gt;deluge&lt;/em&gt; (from diluvium). [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Please see the title of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. This phonological change (is this the right term) did not affect Latin to Spanish, because déluge = &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/fres/deluge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diluvio (nm)&lt;/a&gt; and the cognate for the English 'assuage' is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=assuage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;aliviar&lt;/a&gt;. Does anyone know why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T20:17:11.920" Title="What explains the sound development from Latin -vi- to French -dg- ?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14320" CreationDate="2015-09-07T08:43:15.147" Score="2" ViewCount="4633" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no linguist and I'm unaware of the recent development in linguistics, let alone all the past developments, but I know some of the past developments at the very least, so I'm asking this question to anyone who is &lt;strong&gt;well versed in the current linguistic development&lt;/strong&gt;. (So if you're not familiar with the recent development, please don't bother to downvote this post or answer my question simply because it doesn't make sense to your traditional linguistic knowledge. Not that I really care about this post being downvoted or even being cluttered with boring answers, but that I'd really like to know if there's anyone out there who can think outside the box without getting carried away with the box itself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;BACKGROUND&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is a well-known distinction between a grammatical subject and a logical subject. The former concerns syntax, the latter semantics. The two subjects sometimes are the same as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have no idea.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, both the subjects are &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; and no other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes, depending on whether we want the former or the latter, we might get a different subject in the same sentence. Please see the following dialogue between A and B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: &lt;em&gt;There is chaos.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: &lt;em&gt;That I know.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In A's line, the grammatical subject is &amp;quot;There&amp;quot;, as shown in a counterpart interrogative &amp;quot;Is there chaos?&amp;quot; (the subject-auxiliary inversion), whereas the logical subject is &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; because A is not talking about &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now moving on to B's line, both the grammatical and logical subject are &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; under the traditional definition of these terms. And they say that &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; is the object of the verb &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; and it is simply placed in front of the subject &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;. Right? (If this is not what is normally accepted, please let me know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;QUESTION&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any new development in linguistics that considers &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; in B's line the subject, be it the grammatical subject or the logical subject or some new kind of subject? Because, syntactically, &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; occupies the position of the subject, and semantically &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; is essentially what B is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online has this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/subject&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;subject&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; A noun or noun phrase functioning as one of the main components of a clause, being the element about which the rest of the clause is predicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying this definition to B's sentence, &amp;quot;That&amp;quot; can be considered &amp;quot;a noun functioning one of the main components of a clause&amp;quot;, and the rest of the clause &amp;quot;I know&amp;quot; predicated about &amp;quot;That&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T15:25:49.340" Title="The grammatical subject, the logical subject, and something new" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T13:06:36.077" Score="2" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think it's fair to say Language is more about &quot;intent&quot; rather than a great tool for communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it is a limitation of language in some way, that its so easy to miscommunicate verbally and the great need to always supplement conversations with extra visual clues to get the fuller meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TBH I'm not sure that I have the right &quot;field/category&quot; so feel free to direct it to the right minds! :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but was just interested in what Noam Chomsky was talking about, and would enjoy to hear other people's views to help me understand more about how we communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&#xA;N&#xA;:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Language and Culture &#xA;&quot;this is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think. There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1984----.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1984----.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10424" LastEditorUserId="10425" LastEditDate="2015-09-08T22:07:57.343" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T22:07:57.343" Title="Is language is more about &quot;intent&quot; rather than a great tool for communication?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-09-21T03:00:47.470" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14315" CreationDate="2015-09-07T15:46:54.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no theory I know of that considers the &quot;that&quot; in &quot;That I know&quot; to be a subject.  And I don't know of any reason to think it is a subject.  If you know of any subject-like grammatical properties of such a topic/focus, please tell us what they are.  Then maybe you could get some constructive comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T15:46:54.637" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14315" CreationDate="2015-09-07T19:39:30.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this instance, in this sentence: &quot;That I know&quot;. &#xA;&quot;That&quot; is just a direct object, the subject is unambiguously &quot;I&quot;. Both the logical and syntactical subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T19:39:30.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T19:50:33.757" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to read about the language evolution and the models related to it such as the Schneider's Model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10431" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T19:50:33.757" Title="Theories/Models to explain the language evolution?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-09-21T03:00:09.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:06:15.200" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've attempted an IC analysis of the following sentences and was wondering if anyone with a bit more experience would be able to help with corrections or suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Having discussed it thoroughly, Harry and his girlfriend decided to take the classes on Monday.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S[AdvP Having discussed it thoroughly][NP/S Harry and his girlfriend][VP[V decided][S/Non-finite VPto take][NP the classes][PP on Monday]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In London lies a knight a Pope interred.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S[PP/Premodifier In London][VP lies][NP/S a knight][S/Post-modifier a Pope interred]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After the breakfast dishes were put away, her mother silently thrust a brown paper parcel into her arms and ordered her outside.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[S[PP/Sentence Modifier After [S/Object of Preposition the dishes were put away]][S[NP her mother][VP silently thrust [NP/DO a brown paper parcel][PP/Post-modifier  into her arms]] _/ and  _ [S[V/VP ordered][NP/OD her outside]]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10428" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T20:06:15.200" Title="Correction of introductory IC analysis" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14325" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:24:00.837" Score="3" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been thinking if space counts as a letter? I mean In computer coding when space is in place it count as one character, but what about in real language, is it character also?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10432" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T08:59:41.210" Title="Does space count as a letter in language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14324" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:36:32.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps.  It is proposed in Generative Phonology that a # boundary precedes and follows every syntactic constituent in an expresssion (including the words), and this with various conventions makes ## correspond roughly to the spaces in conventional spelling.  The convention is given in detail in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personally, I don't believe it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T20:36:32.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-07T20:37:26.080" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;&quot;dexenoethnic exonym&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (my own coinage for the purpose of this particular question) I mean an ethnonym/glottonym derived from a name originally applied to a (language of a) different ethnic group, especially (though not necessarily exclusively) linguistically unrelated. Oft-cited examples may include the &lt;strong&gt;Bohemians&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Macedonians&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Wends&lt;/strong&gt;, to name just a few. A similar case might be the &lt;strong&gt;Indians&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears a common development is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Group &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; ethnonym → Group &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; toponym → Group &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; ethnonym&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, an area gets its name from a group that inhabits it, then another group &lt;em&gt;&quot;inherits&quot;&lt;/em&gt; the same area, which later serves as a basis for the name of its new inhabitants, perhaps an exonym at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether there is a study focusing specifically on this area of onomastics. One of the reasons why I would like to learn more is the frequent (ab)use of toponymy and ethnonymy in &lt;strong&gt;nationalist propaganda&lt;/strong&gt; of all sorts (e.g. claims such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;Our nation is superior, because our nation is oldest, because the name XYZ is attested as far as N centuries back!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, I feel developments like this are fairly common and result from language contact situations, but having a comprehensive list of documented cases from all over the world, preferably categorized or typologized, would be immensely helpful. I will be grateful for any useful references, but concrete examples are also welcome, and so are any comments or suggestions. Many thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: If there are no studies dealing with this area specifically, I would be happy to pursue the topic myslef, in which case, however, it would be good to have an appropriate term. I am not sure &quot;dexenoethnic exonym&quot; is very fortunate, so terminological suggestions will be appreciated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10261" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T20:45:56.547" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T12:01:16.980" Title="&quot;Dexenoethnic exonyms&quot;: typological studies, references and/or resources?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;toponomastics&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14317" CreationDate="2015-09-07T21:19:04.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chomsky made the distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. Competence is the internalized knowledge possessed by a native speaker, while performance covers all other aspects of language including its production and comprehension through speech, hearing, or other modalities. According to Chomsky, only competence should be the object of linguistic inquiry.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why? First and foremost, it just makes sense from a methodological perspective. If one believes that language is a biological faculty, one should dismiss its communicative aspect when investigating its internal structure. Do people study limbs on the basis of their ability to throw or kick footballs? Or the eyes' ability to watch movies? No. However, one may still ask whether communication was selectively advantageous in the evolution of the language faculty. This doesn't seem to be the case. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/publication/233820851_Animal_signals_Information_or_manipulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dawkins and Krebs (1978)&lt;/a&gt; makes the point that communication is a type of altruism, and so if it's correct that communication was selectively advantageous, we're led to theoretical difficulties in trying to account for why this altruistic behavior emerged, and on top of that, this sheds zero light on why modern syntactic phenomena in human language is the way it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Merge &lt;/a&gt;explains a lot and if we adopt the hypothesis that the language faculty is the result of a mutation in a single human (i.e. what I think is the ability to recursively Merge), then the widely successful generative enterprise is on solid evolutionary ground. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934&amp;amp;representation=PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bolhuis, Tattersall, Chomsky, and Berwick (2014)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="9616" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T22:01:29.087" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T22:01:29.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T08:47:01.980" Score="1" ViewCount="1305" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, in the original bible passage, Jesus says to Peter &quot;And I tell you that you are &lt;em&gt;Petros&lt;/em&gt;, and on this &lt;em&gt;petra&lt;/em&gt; I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the original Aramaic, the word used is also a noun which translates as &quot;Rock&quot; or &quot;Stone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to wikipedia &lt;em&gt;Petros had not previously been used as a name, but in the Greek-speaking world it became a popular Christian name, after the tradition of Peter's prominence in the early Christian church had been established.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many Latin languages, Petros is rendered as a the word for rock/stone in that language.  For example, French &lt;em&gt;Pierre&lt;/em&gt; is both the name of the saint and a word for stone.  In others, the gender changes (a rock is female and inflects at the end differently to the male name) but the relationship between the words is transparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt; come to be rendered in English as the opaque &lt;em&gt;Peter&lt;/em&gt; when referring to person, Peter.  It's obviously a cognate with the greek and latin words, but how did it enter the language and end up with its current spelling and pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that is travelled as a given name across the channel before the bible was commonly read in English, as an Anglicised form of the Romance language name, and when the Bible was translated, it made sense to the translators to use the existing English name.  But this is just my guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastEditorUserId="10201" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T10:26:09.677" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T08:03:05.487" Title="How did the name for st Peter become to be rendered as &quot;Peter&quot; in English, and why is not rendered as &quot;stone&quot; or &quot;rock&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14324" CreationDate="2015-09-08T08:59:41.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In practice, no. When you do corpus linguistics and part-of-speech (POS) tagging, you consider words and punctuation marks as constituents, but not the spaces between the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you consider spoken language, &lt;em&gt;pauses&lt;/em&gt; are relevant entities, as well as fillers (like em, er), but again not the spaces that separate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T08:59:41.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14326" CreationDate="2015-09-08T12:01:16.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of other examples. The Hungarians are not Huns. The Bulgarians are not Bulgars. The Dutch are not Deutsch/Germans. The Hungarians and Dutch do not use these names when speaking their own languages, but will use them if they are speaking a foreign language like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T12:01:16.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14328" CreationDate="2015-09-08T13:43:02.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are saying about the &quot;Latin languages&quot; is not correct. In French the masculine proper name Pierre is not the same word as the feminine common noun pierre, nor are they identical etymologically: the former comes from Latin Petrus, but the latter from petra. Likewise Italian Pietro vs pietra. Or Spanish Pedro vs piedra. So to answer your question: English handles this translation issue in exactly the same way as the Romance languages. The proper name is borrowed as &quot;Peter&quot;, but the common noun is translated as &quot;rock&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T13:43:02.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T18:02:51.050" Score="1" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a corpus of sentences, which I then use a part of speech tagger to annotate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What algorithms or techniques can I then input the tagged data into? Are the tagged words somehow useful just by themselves? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10435" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T23:51:56.043" Title="What is the purpose of part of speech tagging?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nlp&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T23:33:14.560" Score="1" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATED BELOW&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In portuguese women say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obrigada&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and men say obrigado&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In thai women say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sawadee ka&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and men say sawadee krap&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistic term for these gender based distinctions?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many examples and languages do you know of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, you will always know the gender (identity, even!) of the person speaking/writing, what are the effects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the need to clarify some things based on the answers. The observation is that some languages are &quot;gendered&quot;, in the sense that you speak or write differently based on your gender/sex (identity) - they have (some) gender specific vocabulary. I'm looking for examples of this and arguments on possible implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10436" LastEditorUserId="10436" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T00:37:32.110" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T00:37:32.110" Title="language distinctions based on gender (sex) of &quot;speaker&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14332" CreationDate="2015-09-08T23:51:56.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first use to come to mind is syntactic parsing.  If you have a rule based grammar where your symbols are POS tags, then you could generate the tree representation of the sentence.  Or, if you have a statistical tree parser, then it can use the POS tags as features for determining the tree/parse structure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own experience in NLP in both industry and academic research, I've primarily used POS tags for machine learning features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They often are valuable features in Named Entity Recognition tasks and other ontology labeling tasks.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4974" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T23:51:56.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14333" CreationDate="2015-09-09T00:32:08.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are two different phenomenons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt;. The first one is a regular adjective, inflected according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammatical Gender&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which governs adjective and verb inflections according to the associated noun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is also confirmed by presence of plural forms: MASC/PL &lt;em&gt;obrigados&lt;/em&gt;, FEM/PL &lt;em&gt;obrigadas&lt;/em&gt; and diminutive forms MASC &lt;em&gt;obrigadinho&lt;/em&gt; and FEM &lt;em&gt;obrigadinha&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Don't be confused with the fact that the actual noun or pronoun is omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; politeness particles are of a different nature. There is no noun/adjective/verb inflections in Thai whatsoever. Instead, the politeness particles, like ครับ &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp]&lt;/code&gt;, คะ &lt;code&gt;[kʰáʔ]&lt;/code&gt; only denote the social relationship between a speaker and a listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a Thai mother can address their kid with &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp]&lt;/code&gt; to indicate her power over a kid or to stress some request to be fulfilled, and at the same time a father may address his kid (usually, a young daughter) with &lt;code&gt;[kʰáʔ]&lt;/code&gt; to indicate his father's feelings.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, in military &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp]&lt;/code&gt; is widely used, regardless of the gender. Furthermore, it can be even ครับผม &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp pʰǒm]&lt;/code&gt;, where ผม &lt;code&gt;[pʰǒm]&lt;/code&gt; is a masculine 1st person pronoun (&lt;em&gt;&quot;I&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.into-asia.com/thai_language/grammar/krapka.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thai Words 'Krap' And 'Ka' - Thai Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T15:21:35.227" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T15:21:35.227" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14333" CreationDate="2015-09-09T10:26:07.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages that have grammatical gender a sentence like “I am obliged” will decline the adjective “obliged” for number and gender to agree with the (explicit or implied) subject. (Though there are exceptions, e.g. German). This is how grammatical gender works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T10:26:07.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-09T13:12:04.380" Score="6" ViewCount="942" Body="&lt;p&gt;The suffix &quot;-in&quot; in German modifies an actor noun into a specifically feminine form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Der Lehrer, die Lehrerin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the original nouns have the suffix &quot;-er&quot;, which is widely used in the Germanic languages (at least in English and Scandinavian). However, the suffix &quot;-in&quot; seems to be specific to German. While the &quot;-er&quot; suffix is derived from Latin, I do not know about the &quot;-in&quot; suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;What is the etymology of the &quot;-in&quot; suffix? When did it establish in German? Did it ever persist for some time in other Germanic languages? Is it a German innovation or a Germanic innovation which the other Germanic languages lost over time? If yes, when did this occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5055" LastEditorUserId="5055" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T16:26:14.987" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T10:05:44.280" Title="Feminization suffix &quot;-in&quot; in German: etymology and relatives" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14341" CreationDate="2015-09-09T14:14:28.517" Score="-2" ViewCount="539" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bwkri.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bwkri.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this on a car in my city yesterday, and I have seen several cars with it. Not sure if it's a new trending, if it means something, if it meaningful. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10438" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T14:32:16.287" Title="Can anybody tell me what is on this picture? I think is hebrew" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-09-09T18:34:47.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14339" CreationDate="2015-09-09T14:26:21.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's an image of the hebrew alphabet, and I believe the characters are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aleph Lamed Dalet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to be one of the 72 names given to God in the Kabbalah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WlDes.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WlDes.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After using Google, I believe I found the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f6JTp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f6JTp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ALEPH LAMED DALED: Protection from evil eye &amp;amp; bad dreams. Helps rebirthing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10438" LastEditorUserId="10438" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T14:32:16.287" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T14:32:16.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14338" CreationDate="2015-09-10T07:55:13.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not correct to say that the suffix –in is mainly associated with nouns ending in –er. It is actually attached to all sorts of nouns designating persons (Prinzessin, Professorin ….) or animals (Hündin …). As far as I can see, it occurs only in West Germanic, e.g. in the word for “queen”: Old High German kuningin, Middle High German küniginne, New High German Königin, Dutch koningin. It also occurs in a few words in Swedish, but these are believed to be borrowings from Low German. It does not seem to have any convincing cognates outside of West Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T07:55:13.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6535" CreationDate="2015-09-10T22:56:52.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With VP shells, one way to analyze VSO languages is to say the tense features on the light verb v are strong, while the EPP (Extended Projection Principle) feature is weak (i.e. the subject stays in situ).  Take a VSO language like Scottish-Gaelic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chunnaic Ian Mary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see-PAST Ian Mary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Ian saw Mary.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get a structure like the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/upegD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/upegD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the vP is elided from this structure, we delete both the subject and object and that's what VP ellipsis does in Scottish-Gaelic. The question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am faca tu Mary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q? see-PAST you Mary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Did you see Mary'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be answered by 'Chunnaic' (Yes) or 'Chan fhaca' (No).  Both have their vPs elided. Perhaps this is true for most VSO languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T00:27:45.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-11T03:43:33.500" Score="2" ViewCount="802" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been helping someone trying to create a conlang, and they are insistent that they want seven sonorant approximants. After a bit of desperation, I settled on wa, &quot;vfwa&quot; (which I can't give a good English example of), la, ra, j/ya, and r as in Paris, the way it's pronounced in French. Basically: w, ʋ, l, ɹ, j, and ɰ. I used the alveolar lateral approximate out of desperation, since the other ones sound too similar to their non-lateral counterparts (to me). A dental approximant would feel convenient (since my friend said he didn't like anything uvular, couldn't pronounce pharyngeal, and already used everything glottal we knew of). When I looked up &quot;voiced dental fricative&quot; the results showed ð̞ is what I was looking for. However, there's already a ð sound in the lang, and it sounds identical, to the point of wikipedia using the exact same sound file for both examples. So is there a dental approximant? And if not, what could replace that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10443" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T16:27:13.503" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T16:27:13.503" Title="ð and ð̞: is there a dental approximant?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14347" CreationDate="2015-09-11T05:09:28.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, but getting the hang of it and transcribing it isn't easy. It exists in the Kurdish language Hawrami, in the Bantu language Kamba, in another Bantu language Logoori (described by Elizabeth Leung in a Cornell MA thesis), and in Danish, as the lenited voiced lingual stop. In Kamba and Logoori it is basically the way that /j/ is pronounced; it doesn't ever minimally contrast with both [ð] and [j]. You might check the UCLA phonetic archives for examples of Danish &quot;[ð]&quot;, or find a Danish speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T05:09:28.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-12T04:04:05.770" Score="2" ViewCount="994" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a &lt;strong&gt;Nepali&lt;/strong&gt; language speaker, I can easily produce most sounds in &lt;strong&gt;Devanagari script&lt;/strong&gt; as every letter has the same sound despite the place of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But there may be many sounds that are not pronounced (by people like&#xA;  me) and thus not have any corresponding grapheme in Devanagari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, reading English has always been difficult as the English alphabets sometimes have different sound, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;go&lt;/code&gt; have different sound for the vowel &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I have not learned any third writing script yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would like to know if there is any writing script in the world that can represent all human sounds and is also phonemic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of asking the question is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;a better writing script should be used to store characters (1-byte)&lt;/strong&gt; instead of English alphabets, thus replace the current &lt;em&gt;ASCII&lt;/em&gt; specification. This wont be a complete replacement for all scripts currently used in the world because there will be &lt;em&gt;Unicode&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;This can surely have many benefits like &lt;strong&gt;use of language other than English in programming&lt;/strong&gt;, and true multi-lingual programming can be done.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;There may arise question about difficulties in doing so. But all that computer understands is 0 and 1. So, some new specification should be developed instead of replacing computer architecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10453" LastEditorUserId="13293" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T23:48:36.407" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T16:35:14.070" Title="Which writing script can represent all human sounds?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14338" CreationDate="2015-09-12T09:49:05.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some observations around this suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The German suffix &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; basically has three functions:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can form a female word from a male word. E.g. &lt;em&gt;die Päpstin&lt;/em&gt;. A Pope is unquestionably male, yet it's clear that this would mean a woman who has the office, or a 'Popess'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can form a female word from a word that includes both genders. E.g. &lt;em&gt;die Wölfin&lt;/em&gt;. The word &lt;em&gt;Wolf&lt;/em&gt; carries very little if any connotation of male sex (as opposed to dangerousness). The female derivative is only used with individual wolves or when it's biologically relevant. Only in such contexts is it that &lt;em&gt;Wolf&lt;/em&gt; implies maleness. (There is no established standard for a corresponding male derivation, though some ad-hoc solutions often involve the &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; suffix: &lt;em&gt;Kater&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Katze&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ganter&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Gans&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Enterich&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Ente&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can describe the wife or female partner of a male individuum. &lt;em&gt;Die Bürgermeisterin&lt;/em&gt; was originally not a woman in the office of mayor but the mayor's wife. (In some German speaking regions it is still possible to 'obtain an office or academic degree through marriage', so that older people address their physician's wife as &quot;Frau Doktor&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These three functions overlap in usage. Whether a &lt;em&gt;Päpstin&lt;/em&gt; is a female Pope or a Pope's wife depends on the fictional context. A &lt;em&gt;Königin&lt;/em&gt; (queen) may rule the state herself like Mary Queen of Scots, or represent it herself like Elizabeth II. But she may also be one in a row of temporary wives of a &lt;em&gt;König&lt;/em&gt; like Henry VIII. A &lt;em&gt;Stierin&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;Stier&lt;/em&gt;) is the 'wife' of a bull who must have been mentioned before. This even works for male derivations from female words. A &lt;em&gt;Katerin&lt;/em&gt; ('tomcat-ess') is the female companion of a &lt;em&gt;Kater&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third function is related to the similar German suffix &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;-inus/-ina&lt;/em&gt; that also exists in English to some extent (&lt;em&gt;wooden, golden, ...&lt;/em&gt;). Originally (Proto-Indo-European) used to derive a material adjective from a noun, in some languages it was generalised for a general &lt;em&gt;pertaining to&lt;/em&gt; relation that fits the traditional role of a wife.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slavic languages have similar suffixes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin words ending in &lt;em&gt;-inus&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ina&lt;/em&gt; turned into French words ending in &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ine&lt;/em&gt;. The result is that the masculine form doesn't sound like German &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; at all because the &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; is nasalised. But the final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in the feminine form &lt;em&gt;-ine&lt;/em&gt; is silent, so it sounds like German &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; except it has a longer vowel. The effect is lots of French words whose female version seems to end in &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some Latin words ending in &lt;em&gt;-inus&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ina&lt;/em&gt; that derive from the 'pertaining to' sense of the ending have morphed into the 'female version of' meaning. E.g., &lt;em&gt;Paulina/Pauline&lt;/em&gt; is not parsed as Paul's wife or daughter any more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think based on this, the real question may well be: When and how did the North Germanic languages and English get rid of this suffix for good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T09:49:05.097" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14328" CreationDate="2015-09-12T10:31:18.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with fdb, but I think the question still has a point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Shemayon Keppa (the original [Simon] Petrus) received the Aramaic byname Keppa (rock) at a time when this was not in common use for names in any relevant language. When things were written down in Greek, the name &lt;em&gt;Simon&lt;/em&gt; was just transcribed (not translated), but &lt;em&gt;Keppa&lt;/em&gt; was translated as &lt;em&gt;Petros&lt;/em&gt; ('male Rock') because at the time the original meaning outweighed its then almost non-existent character as a proper name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The masculine ending &lt;em&gt;-os&lt;/em&gt; had to be used because otherwise it would have been a female name. [Fdb says this issue didn't exist in Aramaic, where the word is masculine. Also many languages such as French and German aren't as picky about endings and wrong genders as Latin and Greek.] So this is probably where the word for &lt;em&gt;rock&lt;/em&gt; and the word for Simon's byname first diverged. The translation to Latin essentially preserved the situation that already existed in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The byname became a frequently used first name - not surprising, given Simon's importance and the fact that &lt;em&gt;Petrus&lt;/em&gt; must have connoted something like 'rock guy'. First names obviously tend to undergo completely different developments than other common nouns. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nous avons nommé notre fille Désirée parce qu'elle était désirée.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this French sentence, the name and its explanation differ only in capitalisation. There is no perfect way to translate such sentences because the established practices turn a clear allusion into an opaque one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We named our daughter Désirée because she was planned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some alternatives that are worse for various reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We named our daughter Désirée because she was desired. [In English this is not the correct technical term, so the meaning is obscure.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We named our daughter Désirée because she was &lt;em&gt;désirée&lt;/em&gt;. [Not an English word. This way the allusion is even harder to understand.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We named our daughter Planned because she was planned. [Ridiculous name, and it's simply not her name.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T08:03:05.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2015-09-12T11:35:14.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is called &quot;International phonetic alphabet&quot; (IPA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T11:35:14.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2015-09-12T17:10:37.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only writing system that comes close to what you describe is the IPA, or the now-deprecated APA. However, if you add the consideration of being &quot;phonemic&quot;, then we would have to know exactly what you mean by that. IPA has the resources to write distinctions that are not phonemic (in some language), for instance aspiration which is not phonemic in English though it is in Nepali. IPA has a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of resources, so you can represent rather minute phonetic detail using IPA symbols. Thus IPA can be used to represent any phoneme of any language – assuming you mean &quot;phoneme&quot; rather than &quot;sound&quot; (people can make lots of non-linguistic sounds for which there are no IPA symbols). But it can even represent allophonic differences, so it isn't strictly phonemic (since it is not particular to a single language, and &quot;phoneme&quot; is a property of a particular language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T17:10:37.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-12T17:31:22.437" Score="5" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French (and many other languages), adjectives and pronouns have different classes, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;demonstrative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indefinite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interrogative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;numerical&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;demonstrative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indefinite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interrogative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;personal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possessive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that adjectives and pronouns fall under the umbrella of a &lt;em&gt;grammatical category&lt;/em&gt;, but I can't think of a way to describe how they are further classified - what is the name of the class of modifiers (as listed)? Unfortunately this is probably a very simple question, but I can't find related terms (for English) even in a intro-level linguistics book like &lt;em&gt;How English Works&lt;/em&gt; by Anne Curzan, or through Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: It seems to me that &lt;em&gt;demonstrative pronoun&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;more specific&lt;/strong&gt; than just &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt;. That said, is there a name for the class of words that &lt;em&gt;further specifies&lt;/em&gt; the category (e.g. &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;demonstrative&lt;/strong&gt; pronoun&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm asking about these in terms of &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;. A pronoun can have multiple syntactic categories, for example the word &lt;em&gt;qui&lt;/em&gt; in French functions as an &lt;em&gt;interrogative&lt;/em&gt; pronoun as well as a &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; pronoun. &lt;em&gt;Interrogative&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; belong to &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; category under the pronoun umbrella, but what is that category? It's can't possible just be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esldesk.com/grammar/practice/pronoun-types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'pronoun type'&lt;/a&gt;... I would think that there is some linguistic term to describe this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9821" LastEditorUserId="9821" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T18:40:34.497" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T06:47:35.847" Title="What is the name of this class of grammatical modifiers?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13082" CreationDate="2015-09-12T18:25:16.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Approaching the matter as a phonologist, I could ask what assimilations does &quot;r&quot; participate in.  When &quot;r&quot; follows &quot;t&quot; or &quot;d&quot; in NA English, it becomes an r-colored palato-alveolar fricative, as in &quot;treat&quot; or &quot;dream&quot;.  In Hawaiian English, &quot;r&quot; causes preceding &quot;s&quot; to become palato-alveolar &quot;sh&quot;, as in &quot;street&quot;.  This suggests that &quot;r&quot; is palato-alveolar, which I take to be, essentially, alveolar, but with the blade of the tongue raised and the tip of the tongue lowered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what effect there is on the root of the tongue for an &quot;r&quot;, but I'd expect the root to be advanced (rather than retracted, as you report), since &quot;r&quot; has some affinity with palatals, and they cause enlargement of the pharynx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-09-12T18:40:29.463" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T18:40:29.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-12T22:54:06.970" Score="3" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Data_Consortium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic Data Consortium&lt;/a&gt; often sell data sets for a high price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Data_Consortium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic Data Consortium Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The LDC was founded in 1992 with a grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is partly supported by grant IRI-9528587 from the Information and Intelligent Systems division of the National Science Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it sounds like most / all of its funding comes from the tax payers. Why doesn't the Linguistic Data Consortium release its data sets free of charge? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-09-12T22:54:06.970" Title="Why doesn't the Linguistic Data Consortium release its data sets free of charge?" Tags="&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14356" CreationDate="2015-09-13T03:00:49.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to stop answering in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pronouns&lt;/em&gt;, like other grammatical categories, are a major syntactic class, primarily defined by &lt;em&gt;distributional criteria&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., the contexts where they can(not) occur---so that the set of contexts will be different for each category. Of course, this correlates significantly with their function (or semantics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smaller subclasses can be defined based on different properties, but the ones you are interested in are functional/semantic ones, i.e., defined by their use. That said, they probably have somewhat different distribution, but I don't think anyone uses it in practice to classify them. Also, it can happen in languages that the same pronoun covers more than one function. Thus, it is generally more interesting and helpful to take a viewpoint like &lt;code&gt;how is indefiniteness expressed?'',&lt;/code&gt;how are &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-questions formed?'' etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps you with your question (or maybe to formulate another one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respond to Greg Lee's comments: Of course, modification increases specificity, and &lt;em&gt;female person&lt;/em&gt; is more specific than &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; in the same way that &lt;em&gt;demonstrative pronoun&lt;/em&gt; is more specific than &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, you don't compare things that are not in subset relation, e.g., &lt;em&gt;beginning with letter A&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pronoun&lt;/em&gt;. I don't understand what you protest against, Greg. (Intersective) Modifiers increase specificity, fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T03:00:49.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2015-09-13T08:24:52.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is another universal script, called Shwa.  It can be seen here : &#xA;www.shwa.org&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shwa has two huge advantages over IPA:&#xA; - it's featural, so letterforms give you a good idea of the sound value, and &#xA; - it only needs a 20-key keyboard, not the 160+-key keyboard you'd need for IPA.&#xA;The IPA is adequate for linguistics, but it is not a candidate for a practical script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Shwa only represents vowels &quot;phonemically&quot;, that is, close enough to distinguish them from the other vowels in that language.  It doesn't try to describe the exact vowel sound, since the vocal space is continuous.  For consonants, on the other hand, Shwa can sometimes be too picky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10458" LastEditorUserId="10458" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T13:28:27.457" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T13:28:27.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13275" CreationDate="2015-09-14T10:12:23.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in Italian: the word &quot;più&quot;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10458" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T10:12:23.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7123" CreationDate="2015-09-14T15:27:28.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;LEXEME&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (also &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;LEXICAL ITEM&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, depending on your framework) is, indeed, what you have in mind (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_unit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;emic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; unit) then &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;LEX&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be its counterpart (the &lt;em&gt;etic&lt;/em&gt; unit), with the other realizations being its &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;ALLOLEXES&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (as pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/2555/curiousdannii&quot;&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/a&gt;). Nevertheless, I have seldom seen either of the two terms used in English: you will find them neither in Trask's &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Grammatical Terms&lt;/em&gt; (1996), for example, nor in Crystal's &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language&lt;/em&gt; (1997, second edition) or his &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; (2008, sixth edition) or Strazny's &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (2005) or Malmkjær's &lt;em&gt;The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; (2010, third edition), and you will find merely a single mention of &lt;em&gt;allolex&lt;/em&gt; in Collinge's &lt;em&gt;An Encyclopaedia of Language&lt;/em&gt; (2005) and just a few more in Brown's &lt;em&gt;The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (2005, second edition), although their equivalents certainly do occur, for example, in German and Czech linguistic texts more frequently as far as I am aware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of terminological divergence, probably stemming from different linguistic tradition/framework, can be seen in the following quotation from an article by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-muenster.de/Sprachwiss/en/Mitarbeiter/Lehrbeauftragte/Mugdan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joachim Mugdan&lt;/a&gt; of the University of Münster, Germany, &lt;em&gt;Units of word-formation&lt;/em&gt; (currently in press, available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/allgemeine_sprachwissenschaft/dozenten-unterlagen/mugdan/hsk_16_mugdan_finalversion_k.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here as a PDF manuscript&lt;/a&gt;  (p. 19, all emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;lexeme&lt;/strong&gt; is a set of &lt;strong&gt;grammatical words&lt;/strong&gt; which have the same content, save for their morphosyntactic properties. While grammatical words are linguistic signs, a characterization of lexemes as signs (cf. Aronoff 1994: 9; Montermini 2010: 86) deprives this term of its meaning. Occasionally, a &lt;strong&gt;grammatical word&lt;/strong&gt; is called &lt;strong&gt;lex&lt;/strong&gt; or, in relation to the lexeme it belongs to, &lt;strong&gt;allolex&lt;/strong&gt; (in analogy to allomorph, see section 2.3.).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;grammatical word&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; sometimes been used instead, I find it rather confusing, because it can also refer to words having a grammatical function (i.e. &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; words) rather than lexical content (i.e. &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; words). I myself prefer the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;morphological word&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, or rather &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;MORPHOSYNTACTIC WORD&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, to emphasize its syntactic/&lt;em&gt;syntagmatic&lt;/em&gt; dimension, as opposed to the concepts of &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;phonological word&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;orthographical word&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,  with which it can, but does not have to, coincide in different languages. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;WORD-FORM&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/482/jlawler&quot;&gt;jlawler&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/445/alex-b&quot;&gt;Alex B.&lt;/a&gt; in their comments, as it appears to be far more frequent in the literature and is thus preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T19:43:08.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13275" CreationDate="2015-09-14T16:39:26.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese there are 6 tones and the grave accent is used to indicate the falling tone. &quot;ù&quot; itself means &quot;fat&quot;. But the tone is applied to every syllable in Vietnamese, hence any vowels can have the grave accent on them. For example à, ằ, ầ, è, ề, ì, ò, ồ, ờ, ù, ừ, ỳ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanyu Pinyin&lt;/a&gt; like yùnmǔ (韻母)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd assume it's also common in other tonal languages which use Latin script and diacritics for indicating tone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other non-tonal languages that also use ù&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Ligurian&lt;/strong&gt;, the grave accent marks the accented short vowel of a word in à (sound [a]), è (sound [ɛ]), ì (sound [i]) and ù (sound [y]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Scottish Gaelic&lt;/strong&gt;, it denotes a long vowel, such as cùis [kʰuːʃ] (&quot;subject&quot;), compared with cuir [kʰuɾʲ] (&quot;put&quot;). The use of acute accents to denote the rarer close long vowels, leaving the grave accents for the open long ones, is seen in older texts, but it is no longer allowed according to the new orthographical conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T14:09:23.357" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T14:09:23.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11348" CreationDate="2015-09-14T19:36:19.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the German word &lt;em&gt;Teleskopwort&lt;/em&gt; for this particular type of portmanteau word. A grandmaster of forming Teleskopwörter is the German writer Michael Ende who wrote a book titled &lt;em&gt;&quot;Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_Wishes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_Wishes&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more linguistic reference, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://hypermedia.ids-mannheim.de/call/public/sysgram.ansicht?v_typ=d&amp;amp;v_id=588&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://hypermedia.ids-mannheim.de/call/public/sysgram.ansicht?v_typ=d&amp;amp;v_id=588&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T19:36:19.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-14T21:54:58.423" Score="4" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;The older consonant cluster &lt;strong&gt;sn-&lt;/strong&gt; loses its  &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;ix&lt;/em&gt; &quot;snow&quot; vs. English &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sn&lt;/strong&gt;ow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;cē&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &quot;supper&quot; vs. older Latin &lt;em&gt;ce&lt;strong&gt;sn&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Since word-medial &lt;em&gt;-sn-&lt;/em&gt; was clearly lost within the history of Latin, is the same thought to be true of word-initial &lt;em&gt;sn-&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm pretty sure that &lt;em&gt;sn&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; is not pan-Italic, as I think there are attested forms with initial &lt;em&gt;sn-&lt;/em&gt; from some of the non-Latin Italic languages, but I don't recall any examples of initial &lt;em&gt;sn-&lt;/em&gt; within Latin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Is there thought to be any link between the changes &lt;em&gt;sn&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gn&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because the latter change also seems to have happened within the history of Latin (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gn&lt;/strong&gt;ōtus&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;ōtus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;known, recognized&quot;), although it does not seem to have extended into word-medial environments at all (&lt;em&gt;i&lt;strong&gt;gn&lt;/strong&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fire&quot;, &lt;em&gt;li&lt;strong&gt;gn&lt;/strong&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wood&quot;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T20:12:15.747" Title="*sn &gt; n (in Latin)" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3024" CreationDate="2015-09-15T01:23:13.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In colloquial Spanish, there are examples of reduplication such as &lt;em&gt;El bebé estaba &lt;strong&gt;llori-llori&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (= &quot;El bebé estaba llorando&quot;) that seem to involve non-finite forms of the verb, or deverbal derivations. Depending on how one analyzes such examples, reduplication may be part of the process whereby a verb is converted into a non-verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any cases in Spanish where a conjugated form of the verb is  reduplicated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T01:23:13.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14366" CreationDate="2015-09-15T01:51:36.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Sihler puts it, [in Latin] &quot;an s is lost before most voiced consonants&quot; (para 225), cf. Meiser &quot;&lt;em&gt;(Konsonant+) s schwindet im Anlaut vor Nasal.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Thus, in Anlaut (word-initial) clusters *sn, *sm, *sl the *s is lost. He admits that for *sm and *sl the evidence is &quot;meagre.&quot; There is no written evidence coming from Latin; this is a reconstruction (i.e. educated guess) based on evidence coming from other IE languages and from the development of Latin Inlaut sn, sm, sl clusters - there is written evidence for the latter. Presumably, the change was s =&gt; z=&gt; h (?) =&gt; 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin nix 'snow' &amp;lt;= Proto-Italic *sn(e)iw- (de Vaan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin nido 'nest' &amp;lt;= Proto-Italic *nizdo- (de Vaan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin cena 'meal' &amp;lt;= Proto-Italic *kert(e)snā- (de Vaan), cf. Oscan kersnu, Umbrian śesna, Old Latin cesnas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leumann 1977 adds that Anlaut *sn, *sl, *sm were retained in the Sabellian (or Sabellic) group (para 194), i.e &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin no nare - Umbrian SNATU (Meiser), Proto-Italic *(s)nāje/o- (de Vaan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;strong&gt;*gn&lt;/strong&gt;, there is &lt;strong&gt;actual written evidence&lt;/strong&gt; coming from Old Latin, e.g. gnosco (nosco) or gnatus (natus) (para 220); cf. Meiser &quot;&lt;em&gt;Anlautender Velar schwindet vor n&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; This process must have happened by the second century BCE (Meiser 1998, Weiss 2009), cf. still gn- in GNATEIS (122 BCE), as opposed to the very first n- NATVM (117 BCE). Presumably, the change was gn =&gt; ŋn =&gt; nn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[will add more later]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T20:12:15.747" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T20:12:15.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14371" CreationDate="2015-09-15T08:53:16.873" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as in the topic. &#xA;It seems unlikely to me, I could not find anything about this on wals.info but nonetheless it seems theoretically possible since articulating vowels without voicing is doable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what are other features of vowels, beside POA, length, nasalisation, rounding and tone, are distinguished in the languages of the world ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T09:41:32.923" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T15:19:34.500" Title="Is there a language with phonemic distinction of voicing within vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2015-09-15T14:18:18.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we say that 'before' expresses both 'in front of' and 'prior to', we should not take for granted that these two meanings are treated as the evidence for metaphor or reversely TIME IS SPACE metaphor account for them. Another possibility is that space is just correlate with time. At the same time, we should also consider another question. Why does 'before' not express the space-time meaning at the same time? In other words, do we have the word indicating both space or time in a concrete sentence in other languages? If we can, metaphor is not so general or consistent account for space-time interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10466" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T14:18:18.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14369" CreationDate="2015-09-15T15:19:34.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;WRT the second part of the question (which makes the question a bit incoherent), a number of languages also contrast the phonatory properties of glottalization and breathiness for vowels. In Badaga, retroflexion is contrastive. Rounding is considered to be a &quot;place of articulation&quot; property, so since you mention rounding separate from POA, I would suppose you have a different conception of POA, in which case you may want to know of &quot;pharyngeal constriction&quot; which is a feature of some dialects of Aramaic and Interior Salishan languages, and possibly Berber dialects -- however, sometimes the locus of the distinction is said to be a consonant (as in Arabic). &quot;Advanced Tongue Root&quot; is another distinctively vowel feature. &quot;Pharyngeal constriction&quot; is not ever contrastive with ATR, and since ATR (and pharyngeal constriction) are not particularly coherent from the perspective of crosslinguistic phonetics, they could be subsumed under one category, with difference in physical details being phonetic implementation. Some Khoisan languages have &quot;epiglottalization&quot; as a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voicelessness contrasts in Comanche vowels (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/499/ling.wp.v10.paper1.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;J. Armagosts's paper&lt;/a&gt;), for example [u kúʔokʷekʷai uʔ] &quot;she went to render it&quot; vs. [u kúʔokʷe̥kʷai uʔ] &quot;she rendered it and went on&quot;. A's discussion is classic, in underscoring how fruitless questions about &quot;phonemic&quot; status are unless you define and defend your terms. The surface form [tókʷi̥te] &quot;peep&quot; comes from /to-wihte/, and surface voiceless vowels can be derived by rule, in this case affecting unaccented vowels before coda /h/ (as well as /s/). The reason why voicelessness is phonemic in the surface-oriented perspective is that the thing that conditions devoicing, &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, is itself deleted, so if you can only appeal to things present in the surface form for determining the phonemic status of a segment, then voicelessness is phonemic, yet fully predictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is direct evidence from alternations, e.g. the related form [wíhte] &quot;peep&quot;, which shows in this instance that the /Vh/ analysis is correct. There may be no such evidence in [náki̥nɨɨ] &quot;ears&quot;, so while we know that in &quot;peep&quot; that the voiceless vowel must be derived from a voiced vowel, we can't say that that same analysis is mandatory in numerous cases. However, forms like [náki̥nɨɨ] clearly do not &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; underlying voicelessness on vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question can then reasonably be interpreted in two ways. One is from the strictly surface-oriented perspective, and the answer is that yes, a number of languages have voiceless vowels. The other is from the perspective of a theory that there are no underlying voiceless vowels, and you are asking about counterexamples to that conjecture. Comanche is not a &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; counterexample, since (apparently) voicelessness can be eliminated in favor of a vowel-h cluster analysis. And as far as I know, such a reanalysis is always possible for putative underlying voiceless vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T15:19:34.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14376" CreationDate="2015-09-15T17:47:03.037" Score="4" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over at German Language Stack Exchange, the question was asked what the structure of the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ihr Antrag ist &lt;strong&gt;abgelehnt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is, and what the word &lt;em&gt;abgelehnt&lt;/em&gt; can be classified as. Traditional German grammar apparantly classifies the expression as a static passive (&lt;em&gt;Zustandspassiv&lt;/em&gt;) in which the word &lt;em&gt;abgelehnt&lt;/em&gt; is, of course, the past participle of the verb &lt;em&gt;ablehnen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted an &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/25535&quot;&gt;answer which sparked extended comment discussion&lt;/a&gt; between me and another user, arguing that while that view is not wrong, the bolded word can &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be classified as a predicative adjective (connected to its noun &lt;em&gt;via&lt;/em&gt; the copula verb) and the sentence therefore as a normal &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; sentence. Part of my argument was that the word &lt;em&gt;abgelehnt&lt;/em&gt; can also be used attributively — a position I usually considered open mainly for adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Der &lt;em&gt;abgelehnte&lt;/em&gt; Antrag …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is either of the two classifications (past participle partaking in a stative passive versus adjective) considered wrong?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and if that is the case, what are the arguments for not allowing the ‘wrong’ classification?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find similar cases here on Linguistics, but the only one I found was &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/6119&quot;&gt;this question asking about the word found&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, there is a striking resemblance, but the &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; in the question I just linked was accompanied by further fragments; much more suggesting that &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; be closer to a past participle having replaced a relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T16:36:26.933" Title="Can one word be classified as two different word classes?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-15T18:58:23.903" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;1. Are there linguistics terms that describe the following phonemenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. I desire to learn the possible explanations or reasons that in English, certain verbs interchanged the subject and object to express the same meaning, whereas in other languages, the cognate verbs did not experience such change. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English verbs &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=like&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'like'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=please&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'please'&lt;/a&gt; originally required the object before the subject, as French and Spanish still require. What might have caused the inversion in English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=gustar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gustar algo a alquien&lt;/a&gt; literally translates to 'something likes, to someone'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English and Spanish verbs express longing from the subject's perspective, but French from the object's. What might explain this difference? For example:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/echar_de_menos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Echo de menos&lt;/a&gt; a algo/alquno.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;French: Quelqu'un ou quelque chose me manque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T13:53:31.763" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T14:03:00.463" Title="Are there resources that explore interchange between object and the subject caused by a verb?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T03:13:49.940" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abbreviate ED as earlier &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dialects&lt;/a&gt;  of your modern first language(s). I desire to read writing written in only ED (eg: philosophy written in English or French dated from 1400) and NOT in languages which must be learned from scratch, but I have been failing to understand ED's olden morphology and syntax. Old vocabulary is not a problem because dictionaries address it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Without a &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/24593/8572&quot;&gt;modern gloss or  paraphrase&lt;/a&gt; for the work in ED, should you learn ED? If so, how? As if the ED were new languages? &#xA;If not, how can you understand the original texts written in ED?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. I can read and ask not about writing after 1850, because their grammars resemble today's grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3. I ask not about ED that simply differ too much, and must be learned as a new language (eg: Old  English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4. This question presumes the inefficiency and futility of struggling word-by-word, which I already attempted to no avail. As I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/42834/8712&quot;&gt;on ELL&lt;/a&gt;, it is too inefficient to question anew every long sentence that confuses me, and so I must transcend this approach 'by chance', which feels like a wastefully haphazard, torturous crawl of piecemeal creeps that hobble too narrowly to reach, even the rungs towards, the apex of sentential comprehension sought.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T07:52:32.203" Title="How can you learn to read older dialects of your first language(s)?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14372" CreationDate="2015-09-16T05:40:06.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It lies in the nature of the participle in German that it combines verbal and adjectival aspects. There is a German name for the participle, &lt;em&gt;Mittelwort&lt;/em&gt;, which is coined for this double nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, it is conventional to regard the German participle as a form of the verb. The reason is, that it can be regularly derived from the verb and the the verbal lemma behind it is transparent and obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few participles crossed the border to adjectives diachronically (this happened when the participle survived, but the main verb fell out of use; an example is the German adjective &lt;em&gt;eigen&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T05:40:06.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14372" CreationDate="2015-09-16T16:27:59.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tons of research has been written on the problem of distinguishing between verbal passives and adjectival passives, e.g. &quot;The vase was broken.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a summary of Ward, Birner and Huddleston 2002. They mention a number of tests for English - try to see if they work in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It can be considered an adjective if it passes &lt;strong&gt;more than one of any&lt;/strong&gt; of the tests below:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be modified by &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;be&quot; can be substituted with another verb (e.g. seem, look, remain);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The form in question can be prefixed with un-;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has a stative interpretation:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She is injured and will have to miss the next two matches.&lt;/em&gt; [adjectival]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They were injured when the platform they were standing on collapsed.&lt;/em&gt; [verbal]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They admit there are cases when this construction can be analyzed both as a verbal passive and an adjectival passive, with a slight but significant difference in meaning, e.g. &lt;em&gt;It was magnetised.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details (ambiguous cases, exceptions etc.), see Ward, Birner and Huddleston 2002, esp. pp. 1438-1440.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion: Since you said &quot;&lt;em&gt;can &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; be classified&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; your position is more balanced and more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-09-16T16:36:26.933" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T16:36:26.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T21:20:13.770" Score="2" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know when and how linguistic negation was manifested in&#xA;proto-language (anyone, for example, proto-indo-european)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;linguistic negation&quot; is these patterns of language&#xA;that include negative references, i.e &quot;not this&quot;, &quot;not that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References would be great as well. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post by @TKR on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6571/diachronic-sources-of-negators&quot;&gt;Diachronic sources of negators&lt;/a&gt; approaches the spirit of the question, but it is not what is asked here. The question is about initial manifestation (and historical evolution) of negation in language (part of a greater study of &lt;em&gt;negation&lt;/em&gt;, including linguistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3565" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T07:30:53.870" Title="Manifestation of negation in proto-indo-european?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2015-09-20T00:35:09.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14380" CreationDate="2015-09-17T04:18:54.530" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see a noun such as &quot;Jimmy&quot; in my textbook represented as [DP_Jimmy]. But there is no more detail provided as to its internal structure. This means either the D is null such as:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezs8x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezs8x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or that &quot;Jimmy&quot; is functioning as a D, represented as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e616r.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e616r.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose, like many things in linguistics, this may vary depending on your framework--but which one is more acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T06:18:27.367" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T06:18:27.367" Title="How are DPs generally structured when just encapsulating a noun?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T04:29:27.393" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In previous syntax courses, I could have sworn that adjuncts were drawn as being daughter of X' and sister to X', so there are two X' levels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eg: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzjeF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzjeF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my textbook, they are represented as daughter to XP1 and sister to XP2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CMfZ4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CMfZ4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I misreading something? Or are there multiple conventions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T05:55:45.357" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T05:55:45.357" Title="Multiple ways of representing adjuncts" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14378" CreationDate="2015-09-17T05:35:17.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proper nouns when considered as DPs will be merged with a phonetically null determiner. We can make this specific by positing that certain phonetically null determiners bear a &lt;strong&gt;uproper&lt;/strong&gt; feature, that is an uninterpretable proper feature. This means that these Ds will merge with NPs bearing the feature proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DtcHn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DtcHn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can complicate this further if we assume a nominal shell structure for the NP Jimmy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T05:35:17.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T06:07:49.953" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page on synthetic speech claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are&#xA;  concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It then goes on to describe those technologies, as well as a separate section on &quot;HMM-synthesis&quot; almost as an afterthought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HMM-based synthesis is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov&#xA;  models, also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system,&#xA;  the frequency spectrum (vocal tract), fundamental frequency (voice&#xA;  source), and duration (prosody) of speech are modeled simultaneously&#xA;  by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on&#xA;  the maximum likelihood criterion.[34]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link at the end takes the reader to a webpage without much description of what hmm-synthesis is. But maybe those of you more familiar with speech synthesis have some insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is hmm-synthesis Concatenative synthesis, Formant synthesis, or something else altogether? I am boggled so any help would be great. Just want to get an idea of the kinds of speech synthesis so I understand better the overall strategies for synthesis speech generation. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T14:21:15.463" Title="What kind of speech synthesis is &quot;HMM synthesis&quot;?" Tags="&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T11:41:43.847" Score="2" ViewCount="1042" Body="&lt;p&gt;The acoustic characteristics of the realisation of a given phoneme may vary depending on phonological context. For example, [v] may have a higher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-crossing_rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zero Crossing Rate&lt;/a&gt; if it follows a consonant than if it follows a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this kind of variation be called allophonic?&#xA;Are any and all acoustic differences between two realisations of a given phoneme, no matter how minor, grounds for labeling the two realisations as two separate allophones as opposed to instances of the same allophone that &quot;display some minor acoustic differences&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please support your answers with scholarly references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T15:30:09.590" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T17:15:16.113" Title="When is variation in the realisation of a phoneme allophonic variation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14382" CreationDate="2015-09-17T14:08:24.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, perhaps to some other phonologists, this question is uninterpretable, since it mixes fact and theory.  Allophones are the realizations of phonemes and have acoustic properties.  Phonemes are part of our theories about observable acoustic properties.  Phonemes don't have acoustic properties, only allophones do.  Consequently, any sort of acoustic variation is, of course, allophonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T14:08:24.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-09-17T14:16:45.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serbian language is built on phonemic priciples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Serbian&lt;/strong&gt; is practically the only European standard language with complete synchronic &lt;strong&gt;digraphia&lt;/strong&gt;, using both Cyrillic and Latin&#xA;  alphabets; speakers read the two scripts equally well. The Serbian&#xA;  Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk&#xA;  Karadžić, who created the alphabet on &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Serbian Language Wiki&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10472" LastEditorUserId="10472" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T12:15:09.263" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T12:15:09.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14381" CreationDate="2015-09-17T14:21:15.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;HMM-based systems and concatenative waveform-based unit-selection systems are similar in that they both involve the use of a large database of recorded human speech, and they both involve concatenating stored units to construct something that results in a whole output utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, whereas waveform-based unit-selection systems store actual waveforms from the database and concatenate those waveforms, &lt;strong&gt;HMM-based systems store HMMs that have been trained on the database and concatenate the HMMs.&lt;/strong&gt; These HMM &quot;units&quot; are used to construct a single HMM for the desired output utterance. A set of parameter values is generated from that utterance HMM, and a synthesizer synthesizes the output based on those parameter values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find many resources for further reading by Googling &lt;em&gt;speech synthesis based on hidden markov models&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T14:21:15.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2015-09-17T15:58:47.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English sentence &amp;quot;every man who owns a donkey beats it&amp;quot; can be interpreted as &amp;quot;every man beats every donkey that he owns&amp;quot;, which makes no implication that anything exists. It is true even if there are no men, no donkeys, or no donkey slavery. This means a rigorous wording of this sentence uses only universal quantifiers (&amp;quot;for all&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;for each&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each man x and each donkey y owned by x, x beats y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Move the universal quantifiers (&amp;quot;for each&amp;quot;) to the front:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all x, for all y, if x is a man, and y is a donkey, and x owns y, then x beats y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Poor Lampwick.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be transformed using the definition of implication (if A then B means B or not A):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all x, for all y, either x beats y, or it is not the case that x is a man, and y is a donkey, and x owns y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flattening the negated conjunction with De Morgan's law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all x, for all y, either x beats y, or x is not a man, or y is not a donkey, or x does not own y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also works with the slang interpretation of &amp;quot;beats it&amp;quot;, with &amp;quot;x beats y&amp;quot; replaced with &amp;quot;x stimulates himself&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user left a comment pointing out a third interpretation of the sentence, which I find less likely, that leaves at least some donkeys owned by richer men unabused: &amp;quot;every man who owns a donkey beats at least one donkey that he owns.&amp;quot; This uses a third free variable: one for the man, a second to identify him as a donkey owner, and a third to identify a particular donkey as a beaten one. This third takes an existential quantifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each man x, for each donkey y owned by x, there exists a donkey z that x owns and beats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all x, for all y, if x is a man, y is a donkey, and x owns y, then there exists z where z is a donkey, x owns z, and x beats z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is why natural language processing is beating researchers' asses, so to speak: one has to capture the stereotypes associated with actors in a sentence in order to resolve this ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T20:51:10.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2015-09-17T16:39:34.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problematic example is difficult to interpret because it assumes with no obvious grounds that no one owns more than one donkey.  Taking into account that some may, actually, own several donkeys, it should have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Every man who owns a donkey beats one of the donkeys that he owns.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which clarifies that the owned donkey that is beaten is not necessarily the same donkey as any specific donkey that is owned by the person who does the beating.  The unbound variable y for the poor beaten donkey turns up through sloppiness.  A distinct variable is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T16:39:34.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14382" CreationDate="2015-09-17T17:15:16.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some presuppositions of the question need to be exposed, mainly regarding the term &quot;allophonic&quot;. The historical distinction between &quot;allophonic&quot; vs. &quot;morphophonemic&quot; has fallen into desuetude, to the point that it is rare to find any contemporary mention of &quot;allophony&quot; that accepts the idea that being allophonic (as opposed to something else) is an important and well-defined theoretical concept. Instead, the question is generally expressed in terms of whether a process is &quot;phonetic&quot; or &quot;phonetic implementation&quot;, vs. &quot;phonological&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In SPE theory, things that are typically called &quot;allophonic&quot; are simply (and by fiat) the result of phonological rules, and the term &quot;phonetic&quot; is reserved for unavoidable, physically mandated facts that are not in grammars. Unfortunately, there has been huge confusion in the literature over what kinds of things are &quot;automatic&quot;. For example, vowel to vowel coarticulation is considered by some to be &quot;automatic&quot;, probably because of the word &quot;coarticulation&quot; (since in the transition from an oral segment to a nasal segment, there is, necessarily, some transitional interval). But &quot;vowel to vowel coarticulation&quot; is just another term for &quot;vowel harmony&quot;, which can be contrastive in some languages, and just allophonic in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the huge uncertainty attached to the term &quot;allophone&quot;, questions about whether a particular fact can be called allophonic is fundamentally unanswerable, unless you add a vast amount of theoretical context (e.g. &quot;assuming Bloch's Postulates&quot;). Sensible answers are possible if you ask whether a process is phonological vs. phonetic, and that does require you to accept that both things exist (SPE denies that there is such a thing as phonetics as we now understand it; Bob Port denies that there is such a thing as phonology; so you have to at least presuppose that &quot;phonetics&quot; and &quot;phonology&quot; are referring terms). I would especially tag the work of Abby Cohn as productively making that assumption, as well as work by Pat Keating and Nick Clements. Zsiga's paper in Language on Igbo likewise persuasively makes the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us back to the wording of your question, referring to &quot;this kind of variation&quot; -- specifically making me ask &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; kind of variation. If we define &quot;allophonic&quot; as &quot;phonological, but not contrastive in the language&quot;, then in the context of theories that distinguish phonetic and phonological, ZCR would not be phonological. I haven't ever looked at (even computed) ZCR, but simple visual inspection of waveforms indicates that zero-crossing can be quite volatile, to the point that it does not give way to yes/no categorization. If a property could be analyzed in terms of a small set of categories, then the property &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be phonological, but if it is truly continuous (e.g. formant frequency, duration, amplitude, number of zero-crossings), then it can't be phonological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Mark Hale doesn't do acoustic phonetics, so his take on the matter is not coupled with a bunch of measurements that argue this, but he distinguishes numerous &quot;outputs&quot;, which includes not just the acoustic wave detected remotely, but also the physical output of the mouth, the output of the articulatory system, and the output of the phonetic computation (which takes phonological outputs as its input). The import of these distinctions is that the idea of acoustic differences &quot;no matter how minor&quot; is actually a misconception of acoustics. As you probably know, if a speech event is recorded by multiple microphones (e.g. a &quot;stereo&quot; microphone) which are the &quot;same&quot; from an engineering perspective, the resulting waveforms will be different. Acoustic waveforms will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; differ by some small amount, and clearly we would not say that my choice of microphone brands or positioning brings about allophonic differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to start with some kind of definitional distinction, which I maintain is the &quot;categorial&quot; vs. &quot;continuous&quot; distinction -- phonology is categorial, phonetics is continuous. You also have to have a theory of what kind of information a process has access to, for example, can a phonetic rule access the underlying form of a word (the conventional answer is &quot;no&quot;); can a microphone access the surface mental representation of an utterance (patently not); can a phonetic rule access the output of the phonological computation (probably, and this is where the discussion gets complicated). Given that, plus a proper grasp of the statistical logic behind saying &quot;is same&quot; / &quot;is different&quot;, then the question can be answered, and would tell you that not all systematic detectable variation that can be attributed to surface phonological context is the result of a phonological rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T17:15:16.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T23:43:47.450" Score="0" ViewCount="1434" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how the formally write the rule for assimilation; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mp -&gt; mm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ŋk -&gt; ŋŋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nt -&gt; nn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lt -&gt; ll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rt -&gt; rr&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing it's assimilation when the preceeding consonant is a sonorant. (The above are all the examples I have in my data. Just not sure how to write the formal rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It assimilates from the nom sg to the Genitive, Nom pl, and ablative, BUT doesnt assimilate (it stays the same) when is the Essive sg form. Can anyone tell me why this is?? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No rules seem to apply in the Essive from at all, just the addition of the suffix -na ~ -nae. How can I explain this in rules or otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10476" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T23:56:00.557" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T20:07:27.730" Title="How to write sonorant assimilation rule?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-09-21T03:00:31.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-18T18:55:42.907" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;This questions applies only to the languages which originally did not feature noun case systems and developed it over time through various sound, morphological and syntactical changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By a case system here I mean more or less the Indo-European, flectional one, the categories of number, case have to be marked by just &lt;strong&gt;one morpheme&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that such development would occur through agglutination and/or grammaticalization of various postpositions, prepositions (this one morpheme could also be a prefix) and particles. As I understand, this &lt;strong&gt;excludes the agglutinative system&lt;/strong&gt; of, for example, Finnish or Hungarian.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interest me here are &lt;strong&gt;specific examples of such processes&lt;/strong&gt;, their individual ways of evolution and what can be possibly extracted from them as maybe some universal truth about that kind of language transformation.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T22:19:26.307" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T07:07:40.350" Title="How can case systems emerge diachronically?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14389" CreationDate="2015-09-18T19:14:02.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assimilation you mention is a special case of more general consonant lenition: e.g. &lt;em&gt;täti&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;aunt&quot;) has genitive singular &lt;em&gt;tä&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;. This process of lenition only occurs in closed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard Finnish essive case suffix (&lt;em&gt;-na/-nä&lt;/em&gt;) is of the form -CV, which cannot close the preceding syllable, because the C- is the onset of the following syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the essive suffix does not cause lenition: only suffixes that end in -C (like genitive singular &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;) or that contain a -CC- cluster (like elative &lt;em&gt;-sta&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;-stä&lt;/em&gt;) can cause it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what the usual formal notation is for the feature &quot;closed/open syllable&quot;, and (if I'm not mistaken) you would need to include that in the formulation of this process of nasal assimilation. So, I'm afraid I can't answer that part of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T19:20:37.560" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T19:20:37.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14397" CreationDate="2015-09-18T22:32:50.717" Score="-5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there explanations for the morphological similarities and differences between languages? Which ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10480" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T23:41:19.917" Title="I'd like to know your point of view about that" Tags="&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-09-19T07:37:53.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14396" CreationDate="2015-09-18T23:26:47.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is one, proposed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Donegan, Patricia J. &amp;amp; David Stampe (1983). Rhythm and the holistic organization of language structure. In J. F. Richardson et al. (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on the Interplay of Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, 337-353. Chicago: CLS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper proposes that fundamental aspects of morphological systems and syntactic systems also are influenced by rhythm, specifically fore-stress versus end-stress.  I don't have a personal opinion about whether it is a &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; explanation, since I don't know enough about the relevant areas.  But it is an explanatory theory which has been fairly influential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an online version of the Donegan-Stampe paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/AA/rhythm1983.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rhythm and the holistic organization of language structure&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T23:41:19.917" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T23:41:19.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-19T00:52:03.523" Score="-2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the dimensions along which English &amp;amp; Portuguese differ, and how are these dimensions of variation related and restricted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10480" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-09-19T05:02:03.127" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T05:02:03.127" Title="What are the dimensions along which English &amp; Portuguese differ?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-09-20T10:44:38.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14398" CreationDate="2015-09-19T01:44:53.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know, but I know a good reference.  Roy Major's MA thesis at OSU described the language development of his daughter, Sylvia, as she learned Portuguese and English, and how she came to distinguish the two language systems.  It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1258653953&amp;amp;disposition=inline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonological differentiation of a bilingual child&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T01:44:53.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14389" CreationDate="2015-09-19T20:07:27.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an attempt at an SPE style rule (except that reference to the &quot;.&quot; syllable boundary would not be allowed by SPE conventions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[-son] -&gt; [+son, alpha place, C] / [+son, alpha place, C] __ V C .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main idea here is to get the features of the changed segment right by appealing to the markedness conventions of SPE's chapter 9.  The changed segment is required to be a sonorant consonant which is homorganic to the preceding sonorant consonant, and the other features of this segment will have their unmarked values, as determined by the markedness conventions.  For instance, we'll get [m] after [p] if [m] is the least marked sonorant labial consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T20:07:27.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-19T23:21:05.270" Score="0" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading some &lt;a href=&quot;http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-864-advanced-natural-language-processing-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lec01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;slides of an NLP course&lt;/a&gt;. Slide 25 mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;situational associativity between nouns (the score of the football game).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;situational associativity between nouns&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-09-19T23:21:05.270" Title="What does &quot;situational associativity between nouns&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-19T23:49:09.250" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to work with dependency parsing, as an intermediate step in a text understanding problem. I'm also still trying to understand the terminology and methods. Any pointers (or providers) of tools (algorithms, python code, toy-this or that) so that I can implement a parser for purposes of learning about the mechanics of dependency parsing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that implementing a real parser is a major task. I'm hopeful for just enough information to code a 'toy', to learn more. Yes, I'm hoping I could insert some intermediate &quot;print&quot; statements to dump the state of the parser. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really simple sentences like &quot;Farmers grow wheat&quot; to start with, then adding a few additional bits &quot;Farmers grow wheat in Ohio&quot;, and &quot;Farmers grow wheat in Ohio with water&quot; (which has a few issues to be resolved for understanding). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10490" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-09-26T10:46:32.417" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T05:16:21.683" Title="&quot;Toy&quot; Tools for Dependency Parsing?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14408" CreationDate="2015-09-20T00:33:46.513" Score="6" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Irish &lt;em&gt;clann&lt;/em&gt; &quot;plant; offspring; child&quot; (the source of English &lt;em&gt;clan&lt;/em&gt;) is borrowed from Welsh &lt;em&gt;plant&lt;/em&gt; with the same meanings, which is itself a borrowing of Latin &lt;em&gt;planta&lt;/em&gt;. Why did Irish change the initial &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; was lost in Celtic, so the explanation I've seen given is that Irish did not have initial &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; at the time of the borrowing. But this leads to other questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are in fact numerous Irish words beginning &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;-. These, as far as I can tell, are mostly loanwords. Why the &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in these words but not in &lt;em&gt;clann&lt;/em&gt;? Do the loanwords in &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; date from a later period, and if so when did Irish acquire a &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; and begin to retain &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in loanwords?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why the specific change to &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;? Other than being voiceless stops, the two sounds are not particularly close; one might have expected the &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; to be lost completely, or maybe to be borrowed as &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;. A possible factor is that there are numerous cognate sets where Irish &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; corresponds to Welsh &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; (from PIE * &lt;em&gt;kw&lt;/em&gt;), e.g. &lt;em&gt;cethair : pedwar&lt;/em&gt; 'four'. If speakers were aware of these correspondences, this could explain the choice of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;. Is there any evidence that this might have been the case? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, are there other Irish loanwords from Welsh (or other languages) which show substitution of &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T10:19:33.870" Title="c- in Irish clann &quot;offspring&quot;" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14407" CreationDate="2015-09-20T10:08:23.997" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to a large degree answered the question yourself, really: &lt;em&gt;clann&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a very early loan word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Common Celtic, Common Insular Celtic had no /p/, but it had /kʷ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Brythonic branch changed /kʷ/ to /p/ (keeping the labiality, losing the velarity) quite early on, whereas in the Goidelic branch, /kʷ/ merged with /k/ (retaining the velarity, losing the labiality) somewhat later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the earliest Ogham inscriptions, there are still separate letters for /k/ and /kʷ/, so we know that the change took place fairly close to the ‘proper’ attested stage of Early Irish. Sadly, we don't have any direct evidence that dates the Brythonic change, at least not that I know of. But unless I'm misremembering (and I don't have access to my works on Brythonic sound change at the moment), it can be positively shown to have predated certain other changes that definitely happened quite early on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time when &lt;em&gt;clann&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed, Brythonic /kʷ/ =&gt; /p/ had already taken place, but Goidelic /kʷ/ =&gt; /k/ had not. In other words, Brythonic &lt;em&gt;*pland&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed with the closest equivalent available (the only unvoiced labial plosive in the language), as &lt;em&gt;*kʷland&lt;/em&gt;, which later lost its labiality and became &lt;em&gt;kland&lt;/em&gt; (orthographically since Old Irish &lt;em&gt;cland&lt;/em&gt;, later on &lt;em&gt;clann&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once /kʷ/ was lost in Irish, however, there was no good, existing unvoiced plosive to use as a substitute for /p/, and it was around that time that they started using this hitherto foreign phoneme in loan words, reintroducing the long-lost /p/ back into the Irish language. This was still fairly early on, of course, predating the earliest ‘proper’ Old Irish sources (the Milano and Würzburg Glosses)—early enough, also, that this new /p/ became a natural part of the system of initial mutations on a par with /k/ and /t/, all three being subject to both lenition and nasalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am certain there are other words (either directly from Latin or through the medium of Brythonic) that show a similar route, but I cannot think of any off the top of my head at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Not true, there is one other well-known example I can think of: the Irish word for Easter, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cáisc&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is derived via Latin &lt;em&gt;pascha&lt;/em&gt; and Greek &lt;em&gt;πάσχα&lt;/em&gt; ultimately from Hebrew (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=paschal&quot;&gt;etymonline&lt;/a&gt; for details). That shows the same development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastEditorUserId="2253" LastEditDate="2015-09-20T10:19:33.870" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T10:19:33.870" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14393" CreationDate="2015-09-21T07:07:40.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You pretty much already described the accepted theory of how a case system has emerged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;grammaticalization of various postpositions, prepositions (this one morpheme could also be a prefix) and particles&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is expressed as the cline of grammaticality (oft mentioned in answers here), developed by Hopper and Traugott:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;content word → grammatical word → clitic → inflectional affix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are fairly well attested instances of the development of individual inflectional markers but none (as far as I know) of a whole system that would not be the result of contact rather than &quot;organic&quot; grammaticalization. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization#Clines_of_grammaticality_-_cycles_of_categorial_downgrading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt; has plenty of examples. If you want &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199206476.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199206476&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;enter link description here&lt;/a&gt;more, you can try the Oxford handbooks on grammaticalization and case where a lot of the key researchers in the field wrote contributions. The chapter on diachronic view of the case lists the main processes by which individual cases arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Editorial:&lt;/strong&gt; While grammaticalization is a very plausible (and well documented) process of the development of individual forms, the examples given usually describe the emergence of new structures within existing inflectional systems or the very beginnings of inflection in non-inflectional systems (as in  Creoles). However, the question of how a complex inflectional system such as the Slavic case system can emerge as a whole. Did it appear more or less at once or gradually form by form? We don't know but given how long grammaticalization takes, it is unlikely to have emerged completely gradually but given the complexity, it can also not have emerged at once fully formed. I think the sheer complexity of forms making up the system is underappreciated - for instance, to achieve full consistency Fronek has identified over 100 nominal paradigms in Czech (I'm working on a paper on this). It is quite hard to imagine this being learned (in the traditional manner), let alone evolved. Dixon's punctuated equillibria hypothesis (borrowed from biology) could be a part of the answer but I think there's still a plenty to be discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T07:07:40.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14415" CreationDate="2015-09-21T19:21:10.360" Score="0" ViewCount="2137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preface: Beware that Spanish (eg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_frontal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;los planos coronales&lt;/a&gt;) and Portuguese also derive from the Latin &lt;em&gt;corona&lt;/em&gt;; so this question transcends English etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_plane#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_plane#Etymology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The term is derived from Latin &lt;em&gt;corona&lt;/em&gt; (“garland, crown”), from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;κορώνη&lt;/em&gt; (korōnē, “garland, wreath”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the crown relate to the front? Please expose and explain the hidden, missing semantic drifts and links. How should the etymology be interpreted, to connect the ulterior acceptation with the original meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T11:37:35.140" Title="Why is the Frontal plane called the 'Coronal plane'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14443" CreationDate="2015-09-21T19:35:32.623" Score="-5" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=affricative&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;affricative (n.)&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;      1879, perhaps via German, with -ive + Latin affricat-, past participle stem of affricare &quot;rub against,&quot; from ad- (see ad-) + fricare &quot;to rub&quot; (see friction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: p 40, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Dechaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Affricates:&lt;/strong&gt; These make a stop and then a fricative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: p 79, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt; (6 ed, 2010; by Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer, Robert M. Harnish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;affricate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a single but complex sound, beginning as a stop but releasing&#xA;  secondarily into a fricative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both books above seem to suggest a separation between the stop and fricative. If so, does this separation contradict the etymology of 'affricative', because the prefix &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; seems to imply a connection of &lt;em&gt;fricare&lt;/em&gt; TO something? Did anything drift semantically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T08:47:46.250" Title="Does the etymology of 'affricate' consist with its meaning?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-10-01T06:50:31.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14413" CreationDate="2015-09-21T19:42:58.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It more or less corresponds to the plane defined by the frontal bone. If you wear a garland or crown, that is where it sits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T19:42:58.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2015-09-21T21:19:39.430" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: p 2, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Dechaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[From p 2:] [ ] — We use square brackets to indicate the phonetic transcription of a&#xA;  particular sound, which includes all the information relevant for describing&#xA;  the sound. This symbol is used in phonetics, phonology, and morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ / — We use angle brackets when we want to set apart a single, distinct&#xA;  sound in a phonemic transcription of sounds. This indicates only those&#xA;  distinctive aspects of the sound that make a meaning difference. This symbol&#xA;  is used in phonetics, phonology, and morphology. (For a discussion on the&#xA;  difference between phonetic and phonemic transcription, see Chapter 4.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[From p 59:] We use square brackets […] for the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phonetic transcription&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of any sound,&#xA;  whether contrastive or not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We use angle brackets /…/ just for the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;phonological&#xA;  transcription&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of phonemes — in other words, only for sounds that can signal&#xA;  a difference in meaning. Linguists sometimes call the phonetic transcription&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;narrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and transcription that focuses only on sounds that can change meaning&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T15:21:40.507" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T15:21:40.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-22T01:34:57.223" Score="4" ViewCount="4977" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can you download or obtain (preferably freely) such a chart like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;with each phone pronounced&lt;/strong&gt;, for offline use? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T01:38:56.180" Title="Where can you download the IPA chart with audio?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14417" CreationDate="2015-09-22T01:51:37.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The UCLA phonetics lab has a web page that hosts the materials on the CDs of Peter Ladefoged's books. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a link to his performances of the IPA chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too long to feed into a comment. NTNU has a web page with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA recordings&lt;/a&gt;, which does not work. They have a Norwegian version &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/no/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which does work. You can also download the relevant files where it says &quot;Last ned norske_spraklyder.zip&quot; (i.e. click &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/no/norske_spraklyder.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) which will give you a zip file with the folder &quot;norske_spraklyder&quot;. If you unzip the file and go to that directory, then navigate to the folder &quot;no&quot;, you can click &quot;index.html&quot;. Under &quot;Innhold&quot; you have the option of &quot;Konsonanter&quot;, &quot;Vokaler&quot;, and let's skip the other two. It's quite possible that this still won't play (browser configuration stuff), but in theory you now have the material on your computer. The sound files are in the subdirectory &quot;snd&quot;. So if you want to hear &quot;p&quot;, you can hover over &quot;p&quot; and it will tell you that the sound is &quot;IPA101&quot;, so you can click IPA101.mp3 and hear [aˈpʰa]. You can also click IPA101_i.mp3 and hear a female speaker's production. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T22:37:42.967" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T22:37:42.967" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14424" CreationDate="2015-09-22T04:13:09.230" Score="4" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Anguish Languish&lt;/a&gt; is a silly linguistics exercise to replace all words in a sentence with phonemically similar counterparts with no regards for semantics or meaning. The intent is that the original statement still in some way &quot;sounds&quot; like the original when spoken. An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Gracious! What a lot of words sound like each other!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anguish:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Crashes! Water larders warts sunned lack itch udder!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any standard tools or techniques to computationally determine if a group of words are loose homophones &lt;code&gt;what a&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;water&lt;/code&gt;. It would be ideal if there was some metric that could measure the difference between two sounds, similar to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hamming distance&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T19:52:49.693" Title="Anguish Languish to English Language metric" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14419" CreationDate="2015-09-22T05:29:27.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://aspell.net/metaphone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Double Metaphone&lt;/a&gt;. The idea behind it is to &quot;hash&quot; similar sounds to the same letters, putting words with similar orthography into an equivalence class. One application is in genealogy, where a historical surname might have dozens of realisations. Your examples would encode to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KRSSTLTFRTSNTLKX0R&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KRXSTRLRTRSRTSNTLKXTR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;edit distance&lt;/a&gt; could provide a metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Double Metaphone, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Soundex&lt;/a&gt; and its ilk are only heuristics, and grossly ignore orthography in order to obtain a rough representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T05:29:27.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14423" CreationDate="2015-09-22T09:17:33.463" Score="3" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't under stand (X) and (s/sh) in this sentence.&#xA;As opposed to Hebrew CV(X)(C), the non-Semitic syllable structure of Israeli, (s/sh)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(s/sh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10495" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-09-23T02:02:20.240" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T02:02:20.240" Title="What is X in a syllable C=consonant, V=vowel" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14421" CreationDate="2015-09-22T10:44:58.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know already&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C means consonants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V means vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X means any phoneme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;s means /s/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sh means /ʃ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;() means the phoneme in brackets is optional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2015-09-22T20:40:52.043" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T20:40:52.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14419" CreationDate="2015-09-22T11:07:25.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CMU Pronouncing Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software breaks up a word into machine-readable phonemes, e.g.:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&quot;C M U DICTIONARY&quot;&lt;/code&gt; --&gt; &lt;code&gt;&quot;S IY . EH M . Y UW . D IH K SH AH N EH R IY .&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could then use the phonemes to find approximate homonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T11:07:25.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-22T22:04:47.007" Score="3" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for examples of &lt;strong&gt;dedicated embedding pro-forms for propositions&lt;/strong&gt; in other languages. In particular, I'm curious to know about analogs to uses of &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; in English like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think so. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; has many other uses in English. But I'm only interested in uses where it appears as an argument to attitude verbs like &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;. I'm also not interested in embedded event pro-forms. &lt;em&gt;So&lt;/em&gt; can play this role in English, but it is subtly different than (1). We see it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to do so. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm not interested in normal pronouns acting as embedded pro-forms for propositions. In English, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; can both do this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think {it/that}. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these pronouns are not dedicated embedding pro-forms for propositions like the use of &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; in (1). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I want to know if other languages have expressions similar to &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; that are not pronouns and can be used to anaphorically reference a proposition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10499" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T08:36:52.913" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T23:23:20.840" Title="Propositional pro-forms like &quot;so&quot; English?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;pro-forms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-23T10:27:56.710" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the word like old English teacher has two meanings : a teacher who is English and old, or a teacher who teaches old English. In this case, the ambiguity arises from the fact that Old english can be a complement of the head N teacher and also old can be the adjunct of &quot;teacher&quot;. However, my question is whether the AP old is the complement or adjunct of the N English. I think it's an adjunct in &quot;old English&quot;, like an attribute. Yet, i am not sure. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10502" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:47:09.310" Title="Is &quot;old&quot; in &quot;old English&quot; a complement or an adjunct?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14434" CreationDate="2015-09-23T14:39:55.643" Score="5" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Is there a matrix or table showing how audibly similar the different sounds from the IPA are? I'm looking for a scalar value that somehow measures the oral distance between two phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The following sounds are &quot;close&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ɑ&lt;/code&gt; (f&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ther) &lt;code&gt;ɛ&lt;/code&gt; (dr&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;ss)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the following sounds are &quot;distant&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;uy) &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt; (ca&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nomenclature:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm putting quotes around &quot;close&quot; and &quot;distant&quot; since I don't know the proper term to quantify the oral similarity between two phonemes. Please edit or correct any mistakes I've made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm actually looking for this similarity matrix with a reduced set of the IPA, namely those sounds coming from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ARPABET&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="699" OwnerDisplayName="Hooked" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T20:58:09.733" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T14:08:15.107" Title="Which IPA sounds are similar?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14508" CreationDate="2015-09-23T16:14:46.923" Score="4" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation&lt;/strong&gt;: words in a dictionary are defined in terms of other words, but at some point it becomes circular: words defined by other words that have also been defined using some of the same words. Thus every dictionary must have a minimum set of words that are not defined but can be used to define the rest of words in the dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study should not be that difficult to do, just enumerate all the subsets of words from the smallest to the largest, and see which is the smallest set that suffices to define the rest of the words in the dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that this can perhaps tell us what are the core set of basics concepts that a mind (or a robot) needs to &quot;understand&quot;, and the rest can be generated by definitions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I wonder if somebody can point me to any such study, assuming some exists. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10507" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T14:50:56.213" Title="dictionary with the smallest number of circularly defined words" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14431" CreationDate="2015-09-23T16:16:57.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As described (empirical similarity from many listeners), I think you want confusability, e.g. a ‘confusion matrix'. Here’s an example, from &lt;em&gt;Munson et al. (2003)&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1536630&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1536630&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full reference:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Munson, B., Donaldson, G. S., Allen, S. L., Collison, E. A., &amp;amp; Nelson, D. A. (2003). Patterns of phoneme perception errors by listeners with cochlear implants as a function of overall speech perception ability. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113(2), 925-935.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T14:08:15.107" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T14:08:15.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8710" CreationDate="2015-09-23T16:28:18.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To get all orthography from non-terminals that dominate a WORD element, use the dominance operator; e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;($w word)($d da): ($d ^ $w) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; ($w@orth ~ /the.*/)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, if you prefer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;($w word):($w@orth ~ /the.*/)::($d da): ($d ^ $w) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From memory, I think we made this design choice as a compromise to keep orthography from the phonetic and orthographic transcription separate for some kinds of queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10508" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T04:00:15.977" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T04:00:15.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14338" CreationDate="2015-09-23T19:35:11.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; is from common Germanic and has been reconstructed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/-inj%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;*-&lt;em&gt;injō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  In older forms of German it was &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-inna&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-īn&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-inne&lt;/em&gt; and could still be found with the spelling &lt;em&gt;-inn&lt;/em&gt; in recent centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-en#Etymology_2_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;known in Old English&lt;/a&gt; but its function is fulfilled in more modern English by &lt;em&gt;-ess&lt;/em&gt;.  It is not clear if it was a productive feature in Old English.  Very few English words have preserved this (&lt;em&gt;vixen&lt;/em&gt;, as a commenter mentioned, but not &lt;em&gt;maiden&lt;/em&gt;) so no modern English suffix is listed by Webster's as a descendant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern Swedish there is &lt;em&gt;-inna&lt;/em&gt;, hence &lt;em&gt;värdinna&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;värd&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;gudinna&lt;/em&gt;.  There are also feminine suffixes like &lt;em&gt;-ska&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;kokerska&lt;/em&gt; that have separate etymology.  In Danish and Norwegian it is similarly &lt;em&gt;-inde&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-inne&lt;/em&gt; (eg &lt;em&gt;gudinde&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gudinne&lt;/em&gt;) but in Icelandic it is more complicated (eg &lt;em&gt;leikkona&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;leikar&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;gyðja&lt;/em&gt;).  I could not find an example in their common root, Old Norse, but it seems logical that it existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch it can also be &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;godin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boerin&lt;/em&gt;).  In Low German dialects there are separate suffixes &lt;em&gt;-sche&lt;/em&gt; or similar that may have etymology in common with Scandinavian &lt;em&gt;-ska&lt;/em&gt;, but definitely not with German &lt;em&gt;-in&lt;/em&gt;.  In Yiddish there is also &lt;em&gt;־ין&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kinigin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kinstlerin&lt;/em&gt;), and a few more unrelated feminine suffixes from Slavic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are plenty of relatives and this is not a German innovation.&#xA;  I cannot tell you if it is still a productive feature in all the other languages, my sense is less so, a bit like &lt;em&gt;-ess&lt;/em&gt; in English.  And I cannot tell you if how it is related to any similar suffixes from other Indo-European branches, that would be speculative given the poor written record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T10:05:44.280" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T10:05:44.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14419" CreationDate="2015-09-23T19:52:49.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously this task is accomplished in speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory you could pipe the speech out (speech synthesis) as audio input into a speech recognition system.  However this recognition system would need to be completely basic, with only a unigram model, as any real-world system has an language model (much as we humans have) that is biased to find words that are likely to co-occur in the real world in a given context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking I think that converting each word to phonemes and each phone to some text representation, with a bit of soft matching, would be the easiest way to a result.  (One text representation we should mention here is the IPA.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also start with a list of homophones (listed in Wiktionary data, for example), to get some initial coverage, and some initial equivalencies.  More fashionably, you could start with some training data (existing sentence pairs), and get a system to learn these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some useful applications of this for encoding messages to avoid filters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T19:52:49.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14439" CreationDate="2015-09-23T20:15:21.830" Score="44" ViewCount="6589" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in &quot;we are going out tonight&quot; using a different word for &quot;we&quot; depending on whether you mean &quot;me and some other people&quot; or &quot;you and me (and potentially other people as well)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10511" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T12:54:43.267" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T12:54:43.267" Title="Is there any language that uses different pronouns for &quot;we&quot; depending on whether the spoken to person is included in the group?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-23T20:23:58.887" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this feature is called &lt;em&gt;clusivity&lt;/em&gt;, there are dozens of languages that have it, for example Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Hawaiian, etc. This article has a list of such languages together with their inclusive and exclusive forms of &quot;we&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity&quot;&gt;Clusivity (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T12:24:47.693" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T12:24:47.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-23T23:21:57.407" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Malayalam (no relation to Malay), a language spoken in the southern state of Kerala in India has this feature. You use &quot;njangal&quot; to exclude the person spoken to and &quot;nammal&quot; to include that person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10514" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T23:21:57.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-23T23:41:26.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called clusivity, and although not found in European languages (AFAIK), it is found in South Asia and Australasia at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of how this is used (as taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/QYlVJlmjLEc?t=1m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language (YouTube)&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've just won the lottery!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English this is unclear - is the listener included? If English had an exclusive/inclusive 'we', then it would be clear if the listener was also one of the winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10515" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T15:46:06.193" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T15:46:06.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-24T05:33:06.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese there are 2 types of &quot;we&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;inclusive we: &quot;chúng ta&quot;, to address the speaker, the person spoken to, and maybe others if any&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;exclusive we: &quot;chúng tôi&quot;, to address the speaker and others, excluding the person spoken to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was asked here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-language-which-distinguishes-between-three-types-of-we-1-speaker-and-person-spoken-to-2-speaker-and-others-excluding-person-spoken-to-3-speaker-and-others-including-person-spoken-to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Is there a language which distinguishes between three types of &quot;we&quot;? (1) speaker and person spoken to (2) speaker and others, excluding person spoken to (3) speaker and others, including person spoken to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T05:33:06.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14414" CreationDate="2015-09-24T08:47:46.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't contradict it. Assuming an etymology of &lt;em&gt;ad-fricare&lt;/em&gt;, it literally goes on to translate to &quot;towards a fricative&quot;, which is what affricates, transitions from plosives to fricatives in an abrupt and short interval, actually are. A separation has always existed: they're made up of two sounds blending into one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T08:47:46.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14426" CreationDate="2015-09-24T09:38:49.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some major European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: &lt;em&gt;Я &lt;strong&gt;так&lt;/strong&gt; думаю.&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Думаю, &lt;strong&gt;да&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;(Note: the comma here may be correct but it does not represent a pause when speaking.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch: &lt;em&gt;Dat denk ik &lt;strong&gt;wel&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German: &lt;em&gt;Ich denke &lt;strong&gt;schon&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/schon#Antwortpartikel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian: &lt;em&gt;Credo &lt;strong&gt;di si&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: &lt;em&gt;Creo/pienso &lt;strong&gt;que sí&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But you should also look at the use of &lt;em&gt;sí&lt;/em&gt; as an intensifying adverb (eg &lt;em&gt;Yo &lt;strong&gt;sí&lt;/strong&gt; creo/pienso&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;wel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;schon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sí&lt;/em&gt;, the word in question is, in other situations, the translation of the English word &lt;em&gt;indeed&lt;/em&gt; and/or emphatic &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a side note, in English one could say &lt;em&gt;I do indeed think.&lt;/em&gt; to mean that one thinks in general, but in German it would end up likewise &lt;em&gt;Ich denke schon.&lt;/em&gt;, similarly for Spanish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above translations assume the emphasis in &lt;em&gt;I think so.&lt;/em&gt; is on &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;But the translation depends on the emphasis:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i. emphasis on &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this case English only changes the intonation (from &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt;), but the other languages can drop that word, leaving only &lt;em&gt;(I) think.&lt;/em&gt; I believe in English &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; is nearly obligatory in that case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ii. emphasis on &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dropping the word is again generally optional in the other languages in this case, but not in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iii. &lt;em&gt;I think so too&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Similarly &lt;em&gt;I think so too.&lt;/em&gt; in others can just be &lt;em&gt;I think too.&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I too think.&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;Think too I.&lt;/em&gt; etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iv. negation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In negation, English can still use &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; (eg &lt;em&gt;I don't think so.&lt;/em&gt;).  The others cannot, they end up more like &lt;em&gt;I think not.&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;I don't think&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;I think no.&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitely read about German &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch#German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;doch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, as it likewise can stand in for entire sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I see no equivalent with full coverage.  The combination of ways English handles emphasis and negation and implied objects is unique among its closest relatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T20:52:19.793" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T20:52:19.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2015-09-24T20:53:02.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you tried reading pp 223-244 (Chapter 13) of &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson)? It is too long for me to reproduce here entirely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 233 (at least partially answers your question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linguists give names to some of the stages that kids go through. The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;one-word&#xA;  stage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (12 to 18 months) is also called the &lt;em&gt;holophrastic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;whole sentence&lt;/em&gt; stage.&#xA;  It’s followed by the &lt;em&gt;two-word&lt;/em&gt; stage (18 to 24 months) and then the &lt;em&gt;telegraphic&#xA;  speech&lt;/em&gt; stage (24 to 30 months).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 228 dilates on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11991/what-are-the-stages-of-child-speech-and-language-development-and-why#comment34701_12026&quot;&gt;Prof Lawler's comment above&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop consonants (/p, t, k, b, d, g, m, n, n/) and&#xA;glides (/y, w/) develop early across many&#xA;languages, by around 7 months. Most children&#xA;master the vowels in their target language&#xA;by around 24 months. The last sounds to be&#xA;acquired are fricatives /s, z/, affricates /ts,&#xA;dz/, and liquids /r, l/ because the production&#xA;of these sounds requires fine motor control.&#xA;For example, for children acquiring English,&#xA;fricatives pop in at around 30 months and /l/ and&#xA;/r/ make their appearance at around 36 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until they attain the motor control that allows&#xA;them to produce all the sounds of their&#xA;language, kids often omit or substitute sounds.&#xA;For linguists, such omission and substitution&#xA;“errors” provide a window into the rule system&#xA;that the child is developing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I omit the rest of the page]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T20:53:02.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-25T04:00:34.763" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;This questions concerns the velum for phonetics. I am trying to control my velum and especially to billow it or curve it like a dome, per the 3 minutes and 45 seconds juncture of &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/XXgnPbFhDxg?t=3m44s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Youtube video&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/ahPHt_NCf-I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This other video&lt;/a&gt; discusses more about the velum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot see your own velum, then how else can I practice this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I first learned about the mobility of the velum from p 266, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T04:00:34.763" Title="Can you see movements of your own velum as you articulate?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9248" CreationDate="2015-09-25T04:56:50.590" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only a tyro at linguistics, but I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson) which seems helpful. Chapters 14 and 15 especially should aid you to explore further, but are too long to quote entirely; so I quote a few pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;[p 253, from Chapter 14:] Hearing Language Is Seeing Language&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you speak, you move — you move your face and head, your body&#xA;sways, you shift your weight, you move your hands and arms. Many such&#xA;movements are unconnected to speech: While talking, you can scratch your&#xA;head because it itches. At other times, these same movements are connected to speech: Scratching your head emphasizes your puzzled state when you&#xA;say &lt;em&gt;I wonder where I put my keys&lt;/em&gt;? Linguists call these movements &lt;em&gt;gestures&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;You’re generally unaware of your own gestures and may not notice that you&#xA;do them even when you talk on the phone! However, when you communicate&#xA;face to face, you present perceivers with linguistically relevant information&#xA;from two sensory streams — sight and sound — at the same time. We show&#xA;you how speech and gesture work together in &lt;em&gt;audiovisual&lt;/em&gt; perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;[pp 272-273, from Chapter 15:] Producing speech amodally&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signals that occur in multiple &lt;strong&gt;modalities&lt;/strong&gt; — sounds from the mouth, movements&#xA;of the face or hands, and vibrations you can feel — can be &lt;strong&gt;multimodal&lt;/strong&gt; or&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;amodal&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Amodal signals&lt;/strong&gt; all originate from the same activity and just happen to&#xA;broadcast on different sensory channels. For example, the visible changes in lip shape and face deformations due to jaw movement result from shaping the&#xA;vocal tract to produce audible speech. Researchers consider these signals to&#xA;be amodal (without a specific intended modality) in terms of their production&#xA;even though perception processes them through multiple sensory channels.&#xA;Amodal signals don’t involve extra planning or additional neural and motor&#xA;resources.&#xA;Producing speech amodally means that the signals in each sensory channel&#xA;have a lot of shared structure and convey the same or, at least, related&#xA;information. Perceivers take advantage of this when they process speech&#xA;through multiple sensory channels. For example, it’s easier to understand&#xA;people face to face — when you can see them — than on the telephone. And&#xA;if someone is deaf, being able to see how the movement of the lips, jaw, and&#xA;even the tongue change the shape of the face can be critical for perception.&#xA;This is a form of &lt;strong&gt;speechreading&lt;/strong&gt; that everyone does to some extent without&#xA;special training. (For more on speechreading and multisensory perception,&#xA;see Chapter 14.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T04:56:50.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-25T06:23:04.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example from Tagalog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pupunta kami sa Disneyland! (We're going to Disneyland, but not you!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pupunta tayo sa Disneyland! (We're going to Disneyland, including you!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10534" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T06:23:04.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14487" CreationDate="2015-09-25T06:54:04.403" Score="1" ViewCount="1444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand why having an operation that takes two elements and combines them into a set is particularly useful in describing language. Perhaps it helps in describing how it could be that these strings are generated, but why is this any better than, say, phrase structure rules? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T00:22:52.677" Title="Why is merge useful?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12414" CreationDate="2015-09-25T07:25:49.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have finally found an example meeting the rather strong criteria of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mine&lt;/strong&gt; In older stages of English, &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt; was a form of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; to be used when the following word starts with a vowel (similar to the situation of a/an in modern English). It has now developed to my. It has (at least) two homophones and homographs, the word mine in phrases like &quot;this is mine&quot; and the word mine related to mining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example is &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt; in a phrase like &lt;em&gt;mine apple&lt;/em&gt; in earlier stages of English that is nowadays &lt;em&gt;my apple&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T18:32:46.920" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T18:32:46.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2015-09-25T09:13:05.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard in a Norwegian radio program about linguistics, that all languages the child is learning during the first 3 years, can be considered the childs native languages. This means that a child can have more than one native language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this period, a child is receptive to any kind of sound, and able to learn it. After the first 3 years, the child become less receptive to new sounds, and after some time, not able to distinguish between sounds they have not learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10536" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T09:13:05.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9248" CreationDate="2015-09-25T09:35:49.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root phenomenon is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_theory_of_speech_perception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;motor theory&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;speech perception&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In computing the technique is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-visual_speech_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;audio-visual speech recognition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it pertains to learning:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pronunciation is the result of muscle movements.  Different pronunciations require different muscle movements, just like any other physical activities.  The muscles physically develop with practice, as does the brain's ability to coordinate them.  As to why seeing it done properly can help, it is not so different than learning to kick a ball with a certain technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More reading:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_reading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T09:35:49.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2015-09-25T14:01:12.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't got enough reputation to comment, but I must add this link because WALS is such an amazing tool for these type of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/39A#2/-4.3/205.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will show the answer to your question on a map. Explore other features by clicking Features in the menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9444" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T15:45:59.017" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T15:45:59.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2015-09-25T14:29:39.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; per p 241, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics For Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed, 2012; by Déchaine, Burton, Vatikiotis-Bateson):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Finding transfer errors: The three ways&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists have figured out a pretty good way&#xA;of detecting whether a language learner has&#xA;transferred a property of their source language&#xA;to the target language. If all three of the&#xA;following patterns are found, then it’s likely that&#xA;a transfer error has occurred. (This method isn’t&#xA;foolproof, but it’s pretty reliable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;✓ &lt;strong&gt;Parallelism&lt;/strong&gt;: The learner speaks the&#xA;second language with patterns found in his&#xA;source language. For example, speakers of&#xA;Egyptian Arabic regularly insert the vowel&#xA;[i] between consonants in their L2 English&#xA;forms. Egyptian speakers do this because&#xA;their source language doesn’t permit such&#xA;consonant sequences: This is an example&#xA;of how the phonotactic restrictions of the&#xA;L1 source language affect the learner’s&#xA;L2 language. For example, &lt;em&gt;floor&lt;/em&gt; becomes&#xA;&lt;em&gt;f&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;loor&lt;/em&gt; and three becomes &lt;em&gt;th&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ree&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;✓ &lt;strong&gt;Homogeneity:&lt;/strong&gt; Learners of a particular&#xA;target language who also have the same&#xA;source language all make the same error.&#xA;For example, learners of English who have&#xA;Egyptian Arabic as their source language&#xA;show the same error pattern: They all break&#xA;up consonant clusters with the vowel [i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;✓ &lt;strong&gt;Heterogeneity:&lt;/strong&gt; Learners with different&#xA;source languages should exhibit different&#xA;error patterns. For example, learners of&#xA;English who have Egyptian Arabic as&#xA;their source language have a different&#xA;pattern of errors than learners who&#xA;have Iraqi Arabic their source language.&#xA;(Because these languages are both called&#xA;“Arabic,” it seems like they should be the&#xA;“same” language, but in fact, they are&#xA;so different that a speaker of one can’t&#xA;really understand a speaker of the other.)&#xA;While Egyptian speakers insert the vowel&#xA;[i] &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; consonants in their L2 English&#xA;forms, Iraqi speakers insert the vowel&#xA;[i] BEFORE consonant clusters. So floor&#xA;becomes &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;floor&lt;/em&gt; and three becomes &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;three&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T14:35:19.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2015-09-25T15:07:14.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experiences as a copy editor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native speakers of Russian or Chinese (both languages don't have articles) have difficulties with articles, either leaving them out very often or overdoing them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native speakers of Chinese have difficulties with tenses and with the third person singular marker on the verb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native speakers of French tend to produce long-winded and complicated sentences that just don't feel right in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T15:07:14.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-25T15:56:45.573" Score="-1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a large...ish context free grammar, preferably in flat format (so no XML for example). The language does not matter. Whether it has features or not doesn't matter either. Can you suggest me a good resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am talking about a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10541" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T21:15:51.517" Title="context free grammar ressource" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14456" CreationDate="2015-09-25T17:50:49.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPSG, the book (&lt;strong&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/strong&gt;, by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag) gives a context free psg theory of English which, from the standpoint of syntactic theory, is a great achievement, in my opinion.  It covers all the main parts of English syntax that were analyzed in classical transformational grammar.  It probably would never work as a practical parser, since it was not really intended for that, and it has a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T17:50:49.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14461" CreationDate="2015-09-25T21:01:31.897" Score="8" ViewCount="833" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that K has been derived from Greek kappa and C from gamma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how did it happen that people started to use K in place of C? From what I know there were already C and G in the Latin alphabet to mark as well the /k/ as the /g/ sound, so why did they add yet another letter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how did it happen that in many modern European languages C is used as a /t͡s/ or /s/ sound? I don't think it was used like this in Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T22:03:49.550" Title="How did it happen that K was introduced to Latin alphabet in place of C and C started to mark /t͡s/ or /s/ in many languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14465" CreationDate="2015-09-25T21:53:02.430" Score="4" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently recorded some subjects reading lists of words and sentences. The recordings were taken on a ZOOM H4N recorder, sampled at 44100HZ, on a head-mounted condenser microphone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recordings would be high-quality if there were no echo. I want to do forced-alignement on these recordings and measure intensity as a correlate of the lenition of voiced stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How bad are echoes for taking measurements? Is there a way to filter the echo out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T00:19:46.580" Title="Recordings with Echoes?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14459" CreationDate="2015-09-25T21:58:49.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet&quot;&gt;Old Latin alphabet&lt;/a&gt; had 3 letters for the sound [k]: C, K, and Q. K was used before A, Q before V (the shape U appeared later), and C elsewhere. Besides, C was also used for the sound [g]. Later, K was marginalized and used only in a couple of words, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Kalendae&lt;/em&gt;, and a new letter, G, derived from C, was introduced for the sound [g].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the post-classical Latin dialects, the sound [k] before [i] (spelled I and Y) and [e/ɛ] (spelled E, AE, OE) changed into [s], or [ts], or [tʃ] all of which can be found in the modern Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the European languages which now use the Latin script are or were once Roman Catholic, and the speakers were aware of the strong association of Q with U, and of the fact that C before E, I, and Y is not pronounced [k], and that the only universal letter that means [k] in all the positions was K, it was this K that they chose for the use in their native languages to denote the sound [k].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T21:58:49.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14459" CreationDate="2015-09-25T22:03:49.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the second part of your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling very often represents pronunciation that was once used (although this is not a rule). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The C in the spelling systems of modern Romance languages stands mostly for voiceless velar stop [k] or a variety of palatal or sibilant-like sounds, including [t͡ʃ], [t͡s] or [s]. The second group usually continues [k] which was later fronted and palatalised, for example because of the proximity of a front vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C letter is used for these sounds simply for historical reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T22:03:49.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14466" CreationDate="2015-09-25T23:31:25.333" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;G was created out of C by adding an additional line, for an obvious reason as they represented similar sounds in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is Q pretty much O with an additional line? These two letter do not seem to have anything in common. Is it just a coincidence or they were somehow connected in old Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T04:22:27.170" Title="Why is the letter &quot;Q&quot; visually simillar to &quot;O&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2015-09-25T23:48:58.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polish (and i think also Russian) people have often problems with differencing vowel's length (as they do not do it in their native language). Which often results in changing &quot;sheep&quot; into &quot;ship&quot; and &quot;sheet&quot; into... You know what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most other languages, even ones very closely related to Polish like Czech, vowel length is differenciated so they don't tend to make such mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other example is the &quot;th&quot; (/ð/) sound, which is used in all Scandinavian languages, so naturally speakers of this languages have no problems pronouncing it, but Germans and many other nations tend to say /d/ or /z/ instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T23:48:58.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14460" CreationDate="2015-09-26T00:19:46.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, during the closure of a voiceless stop, the intensity should be zero, but with an echo, it will be that plus whatever the speaker said some time(s) prior, so in &quot;pot&quot;, the amplitude of &quot;t&quot; will include a trace of the vowel. I would be surprised if filtering didn't mutilate the amplitude of the signal to the point that your results would be questionable. If you are simply hoping to show e.g. that amplitude is lower when a voiced stop is lenited, you have independent control over whether a stop &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; lenited, and can be certain that in the context where there is lenition there is not coincidentally a co-varying difference in amplitude on the preceding segment (within 500 msc), then you may still be able to make the case for a categorial correlation, though the actual amplitude values would not be any use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T00:19:46.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14463" CreationDate="2015-09-26T06:34:30.130" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;O is basically just a circle, so unlike with C/G, the visual similarity with Q is trivial. You could equally wonder if C being O with a chunk taken out has to do with anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q and O derive from two different Phoenician letters, qop and ayin; back then, they actually did have something in common since both were &quot;throaty&quot; consonants; however, since the shape of the letters is ultimately hieroglyphic, the similarity is either accidental or — if we credit the theory that the hieroglyphic meaning of qop was &quot;eye of a needle&quot; — based on a real-world visual similarity, since ayin/O represented a (literal) eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T06:34:30.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-26T08:47:05.677" Score="3" ViewCount="1106" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adverb 'only' is known to be able to come in a variety of positions. The following examples demonstrate that it may be generated in positions that aren't so simple to syntactically analyse. The examples below involve control/subj-to-obj raising:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1) Only he wants Max to eat the chicken.&#xA;2) He only wants Max to eat the chicken.&#xA;3) He wants only Max to eat the chicken.&#xA;4) He wants Max only to eat the chicken.&#xA;5) He wants Max to only eat the chicken.&#xA;6) He wants Max to eat only the chicken.&#xA;7) He wants Max to eat the only chicken.&#xA;8) He wants Max to eat the chicken only.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adverbs are usually analysed to modify VPs, so the AdvP is usually generated adjoined to VP. This enables the adverb to occur before or after the VP on the surface. Moreover, adverbs can be preposed to SpecCP. The problem arises when analysing the adverb 'only' when it comes between the verb and (raised) object (3), the subject and HeadIP (4), and between the determiner and noun (7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (3), it is conceivable that AdvP is generated as an adjunct of VP with &quot;want&quot; moving from VP to vP. The split VP hypothesis does deal with this problem in fact. 'Only' is unexcitingly generated as an adjunct of VP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[IP He [vP wants1 [AgrOP Max2 t1 [VP [AdvP only] [VP t2 t1 [CP t2 [IP t2 to eat the chicken]]]]]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, does V always move to v even in simplex, non-raising/control declaratives such as &quot;he only ate chicken&quot;? If it does, is AdvP an adjunct of vP when the adverb precedes the verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, which is a more recent and widely accepted analysis of control - null PRO or subj-to-obj raising?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional problem is when raising verbs such as 'appear' are involved as in the example below. How is 'only' able to appear between HeadIP and SpecIP? The split VP hypothesis doesn't seem to be able to account for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[IP Max1 appears [IP t1 only to have eaten the chicken]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps in the examples involving intra-DP 'only', 'only' is an adjectival of sorts as it seems to be modifying the DP/NP in examples (1), (3), (6), (7) and (8). This could be supported by 'only' being infelicitous with expletives such as raising-it and weather-it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Only it seems that Max is eating the chicken.&#xA;*Only it is raining.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, adjectival 'only' modifies &quot;he&quot; in (1), Max in (3), &quot;the chicken&quot; in (6), and &quot;chicken&quot; in (7). The adjective 'only' is known to modify the NP within the DP, e.g. &quot;the only child&quot;, which is different from 'only' coming before D or after N as in &quot;only the child&quot; and &quot;the child only&quot;. So, how us this formalised? Could it be a quantifier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you all think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T08:47:05.677" Title="The Syntax of 'Only'" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-26T09:26:12.207" Score="0" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;any site (or application) you can recommend to convert phonetic transcription to regular English text?&#xA;Most sites offer the other way.&#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10548" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T17:31:28.160" Title="Phonetics to English Text?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-03-27T06:46:06.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14472" CreationDate="2015-09-26T23:19:56.127" Score="12" ViewCount="6858" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic languages include only three vowels: /a/, /i/ and /u/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese is the only language I know about that doesn't have a /u/ sound - it has /ɯ/ instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do there exist any languages that do not use /a/ or /i/ or they could be considered universal vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T14:12:37.343" Title="Are there any languages without /a/ or /i/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-26T23:50:20.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been claimed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Margi&lt;/a&gt; (Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, Nigeria) has only two vowels, /ɨ/ and /a/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have also been sporadic claims of other languages with small or anomalous vowel systems, for example Iatmul (Ndu language family, Papua New Guinea) has been described &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/214308/The_vowel_system_of_Iatmul_Emerging_phonemes_and_unexpected_contrasts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;variously&lt;/a&gt; as having: one (/a/), two (/ə/ and /a/), three (/ɨ/, /ə/ and /a/), seven and twelve vowel phonemes. So by at least some analyses Iatmul has no /i/ phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer may depend on how flexible /i/ and /a/ are allowed to be. It may be better to recast the question in terms of features, front/central/back and high/mid/low and ask if there are languages with no (e.g.) high vowels, no low vowels, only mid vowels, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-09-26T23:50:20.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-27T00:06:46.280" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;/a/&quot;, &quot;/i/&quot;. First, slash brackets refer ambiguously to &quot;phonemes&quot; or &quot;underlying forms&quot;. Only phonetic forms, notated with square brackets, have directly-observable phonetic properties. A propos that point, there is a high back vowel phoneme in Japanese, which is pronounced more like [ɯ] than like [u], and on that grounds you might claim that Japanese has no /u/ but it does have /ɯ/. The principle here would be that the underlying / phonemic value of a segment is the same as (one of) it's surface values. On that basis, we would have to conclude that Norwegian does not have /u/, because if you compare the pronunciation of French &quot;tout&quot; and Norwegian &quot;to&quot;, the vowel of Norwegian is /ʊ/, not /u/ -- the vowel typically transcribed in IPA as [u] is noticeably lower than the cardinal vowel standard. The problem then is that language descriptions typically leave out that level of phonetic detail, so you often can't tell if supposed &quot;u&quot; or &quot;i&quot; are pronounced as [u, i] or [ʊ, ɪ] or something else. With that caveat, Somali Zigua has the vowels [a ɛ ɔ ɪ ʊ], and not [i, u].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering the question for &quot;/a/&quot; is even more difficult. The vowel &quot;a&quot; of Arabic is distinctly different from the vowel &quot;a&quot; of North American English (as in the word &quot;cot&quot;). The Arabic vowel is rather close to the standard cardinal vowel value of &quot;a&quot;, so under any interpretation, Arabic has /a/. English, at least certain dialects, do not have that vowel (though in some New England dialects it exists in words like &quot;park&quot;). In fact, there is no distinct IPA symbol for notating the low central vowel of &quot;cot&quot;, and language descriptions typically use the letter &quot;a&quot; in case there is only one low unrounded vowel, so it is only when you have a contrast like in Norwegian that people are forced to distinguish &quot;a&quot; and &quot;æ&quot;, or &quot;ɑ&quot; and &quot;a&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some west coast dialects (e.g. in Seattle) the vowel of &quot;cot&quot; is the same as the vowel of &quot;caught&quot; and furthermore the vowel is phonetically more like [ɔ] than it is like canonical [a]. If by &quot;a&quot; you mean a low unrounded vowel, then I would say that Enumclaw English is a language without /a/ (I pick Enumclaw because there is an urban / rural distinction that complicates the matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a classical analysis of Kabardian by Kuipers where the language does not have /i/, or many other vowels, although phonetically the language has a huge number of vowels. This would be an instance of economy-driven phoneme-elimination, for the sake of reducing the vowel inventory to just one phoneme. There is a similar many-to-few reduction of vocoids in Marshallese, which has been analysed as having just a 4-height distinction between /ɨ ɘ ɜ a/, where the 12 surface vowels derive by phonetic interaction between these 4 vowels plus palatalization and labialization on neighboring consonants. Under that interpretation, Marshallese has no /i/. Mark Hale has argued cogently that it is inappropriate to claim that vowels have any specific values of rounding or fronting in the phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2015-09-27T08:34:44.540" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T08:34:44.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14478" CreationDate="2015-09-27T04:59:01.603" Score="6" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Latin teacher was talking about parataxis and hypotaxis using coordinating vs subordination conjunctions. He said that may have been the way people spoke in the past. I don't believe there ever was or is a language that is purely paratactic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any example of languages past or present that do not use subordinating clauses &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10553" LastEditorUserId="10553" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T06:58:47.813" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T06:58:47.813" Title="Are there languages without subordination/only with parataxis?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-27T05:22:15.280" Score="1" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;6 months after asking my original question, I still cannot see any of the connections declared as 'easy to see' or 'not difficult to see' &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12896&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem is with your assumption that the senses listed in the OED are unrelated. This is often the cases when one reads dictionary definitions but in fact,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it's not very difficult to see the connections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[1] I do not see 'see the connections' at all. Please assist me to connect them&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original meaning seemed to be one of affirmative manner (so) and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it is easy to see how it could acquire a temporal meaning since manner describes events. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[2] How does 'affirmative manner acquire a temporal meaning'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Temporal meanings often translate into causality (e.g. since)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[3] How?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and     it is also easy to see the connection of manner or causality and similarity.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[4] How does manner connect with similarity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;[5] How does causality connect with similarity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So you can see that the semantic field of 'as' is actually quite tight and it is not difficult to see a connection between sentences such as: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T16:27:58.337" Title="How are affirmation, causality, similarity, time, etc... connected?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14473" CreationDate="2015-09-27T07:05:35.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, all languages signed or spoken have some form of syntactic subordination. However, languages differ significantly in the types of subordinata constructions present, in how heavily they use subordination and for what functions. For instance, it has been noted that subordination is often weakly developed in &lt;em&gt;polysynthetic&lt;/em&gt; languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in some sense ``this is how people speak'' may well be the case---which does not excluse existence of subordination in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T07:05:35.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-27T08:28:33.893" Score="2" ViewCount="913" Body="&lt;p&gt;My impression is that the concept of a silent &quot;n&quot; is quite common in many different languages/linguistic families . What is the reason that the &quot;silent n&quot; is so common in language as opposed to other sounds?&#xA;Also, can someone bring examples of languages other than those related to English which have this phenomenon (particularly Semitic languages)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10448" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T18:14:58.217" Title="What's the reason behind the &quot;silent n&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14473" CreationDate="2015-09-27T09:24:52.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, your question at the end doesn't really make sense, because conjunction is not subordination. I think you're asking for languages without subordination, so you shouldn't add &quot;or conjunctions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to what I think is your actual question: Are there languages without subordination? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Pirahã&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to be such a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course your Latin teacher is right when saying that &quot;that may have been the way people spoke in the past&quot;, because &quot;that&quot; here refers back to &quot;parataxis and hypotaxis using coordinating vs subordination conjunctions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T09:24:52.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14477" CreationDate="2015-09-27T13:11:21.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon is called &lt;strong&gt;Consonant Clusters&lt;/strong&gt;. They exist in quite a few languages, including the ancient ones. With the course of language's evolution, &lt;strong&gt;contraction&lt;/strong&gt; may occur, effectively changing the phonetic value of these clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;English&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reduction of /mb/ and /mn/&lt;/strong&gt;. Where the final cluster /mn/ occurred, this was reduced to /m/, as in &lt;em&gt;column, autumn, damn, solemn&lt;/em&gt;. — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#Reduction_of_.2Fmb.2F_and_.2Fmn.2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same Wikipedia article also refers many other consonant clusters of English and rules of their (modern) pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also academic works on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heinz J. Giegerich (1992) researches consonant clusters in terms of generative  phonology;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter  Roach  (2002) — a more traditional structural analysis of possible phoneme combinations;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the phonological value of consonant clusters may vary even within the same language, across its various dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other languages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As consonant clusters exist in many languages, they may appear contracted in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt; language has variety of consonant clusters and quite a complicated set of rules of their contraction. Most notable one is maybe ντ = /d/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ντέμης /Demis/, an equivalent of men's name &lt;em&gt;Dennis&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Αντωνης /Adonis/, an equivalent of men's name &lt;em&gt;Anthony&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;αντεννα /adena/ &lt;em&gt;&quot;antenna&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find a comprehensive list of Greek consonant clusters &lt;a href=&quot;http://lyricstranslate.com/en/learning-Greek/Diphthongs-Double-consonants-combinations-ay-ey-mp-nt-gk-gg-Silent-letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/ref/double-consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;consonant clusters&lt;/a&gt; and they are often reduced in informal speech. Most notably, &lt;code&gt;[kr]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[kl]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[kʰr]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[kʰl]&lt;/code&gt; are retracted to &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[kʰ]&lt;/code&gt;, correspondingly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ครับ &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp]&lt;/code&gt;, an affirmative/polite particle, is often pronounced &lt;code&gt;[kʰáp]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary.&lt;/strong&gt; The consonant clusters exist in many languages. They may appear contracted (reduced) in various manners within the language or its dialects. Each language has its own laws of phonetic harmony, and such contraction occurs according to these laws.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There's no common rule, except the statement that the phenomenon exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T13:11:21.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11174" CreationDate="2015-09-27T13:20:50.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native Polish speaker I would say that @Klaas Edema statement about Polish language was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polish speakers consecutively tend to classify [ʃ] in English words as [ʂ]. Moreover, in my opinion, in some words newly introduced to Polish were [ʂ] is followed by [i] (in native Polish words &quot;sz&quot; = [ʂ] is never followed by &quot;i&quot; = [i] but by &quot;y&quot; = [ɨ], and &quot;ś&quot; = [ɕ] is never followed by &quot;y&quot; but by &quot;i&quot;) like &quot;czipsy&quot; = /ʈ͡ʂipsɨ/ = [t͡ʃipsɨ] (meaning &quot;chips&quot;) or when pronouncing some English names with /i/ after /ʃ/ (e.g. &quot;Sheeran&quot;) most speakers will actually pronounce it as [ʃ] not [ʂ] (personally I find [ʂi] almost unpronounceable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would say that in Polish [ʃ] is an allophone of [ʂ] while [ɕ] is a distinctive sound. So, given that, it could be said that Polish contrasts /ɕ/ and /ʃ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastEditorUserId="10442" LastEditDate="2015-09-27T20:05:49.667" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:05:49.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-27T13:40:51.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, there's pretty good evidence that Proto-Indoeuropean didn't have any kind of /a/ sound. The /a/ sounds in descendent languages all seem to have come about through consonants low-colouring their phonetic surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10557" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T13:40:51.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11174" CreationDate="2015-09-27T17:40:49.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit contrasted three sibilants, two of which most probably were [ɕ] and [ʂ] (or [ʃ]).&#xA;The former was an outcome of an Proto-Indo-Iranian affricate that developed from PIE voiceless palatalised velar stop whilst the latter had its roots in PIE /*s/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again here comes the matter of the exact phonetical nature of the second, non-palatal sound, retroflex [ʂ] or post-alveolar [ʃ]. In my view that doesn't matter so much, since Sanskrit didn't contrast all four places of articulation within sibilants (that is dental, post-alveolar, palatal and retroflex). The situation in Sanskrit would be similar to the one in Polish, described by Arsen before. Both [ʂ] and [ʃ] would be allophones of a phoneme that doesn't have to be specifically retroflex or specifically post-alveolar, it just has to contrast with the other two sibilants. In the light of that, it is safe to say that indeed ɕ contrast with ʃ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:40:49.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14477" CreationDate="2015-09-27T18:14:58.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Final &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_reduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;consonant cluster reduction&lt;/a&gt; happened in English, and most of the &lt;em&gt;'-mn-'&lt;/em&gt; examples mentioned in the above comments did not survive into modern Spanish or French either (unless they were re-borrowed from Latin), although they lost /m/ instead of /n/.  It's possible that process had already started when the words were entering English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;deletion&lt;/a&gt; of the sound /n/, there is the example of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eifeler_Regel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;n-apocope in Germanic dialects&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for Semitic languages it seems unlikely there would be very similar processes, due to importance of triconsonantal roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ch/books?id=-ZXnDHDV1jQC&amp;amp;pg=PA59&amp;amp;lpg=PA59&amp;amp;dq=%22n-elision%22+-german+-dutch&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lPsJ5sHsKo&amp;amp;sig=D3-Bd-axooZIwh5SBGhiuoExT3E&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CEcQ6AEwCWoVChMI7ZvM5OWXyAIVy5EsCh3IgA1a#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22n-elision%22%20-german%20-dutch&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Korean dialects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T18:14:58.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-27T19:50:40.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Iranian Persian and Tajik have lost straight /a/, and you can make the case that some English and some German dialects have too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_phonology#Chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Persian phonology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_phonology#Historical_shifts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;its historical shifts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is surely the case for many more languages, but asking us or reading eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Alemannic_German_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Alemannic_German_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; does not scale.  The more interesting question is: What sites or tools exist to search over IPA pronunciations of an entire languages or many languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T19:50:40.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2015-09-27T19:54:58.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that &quot;old&quot; in &quot;Old English&quot;, as in the specific language, is a complement. It cannot be removed from the noun without changing the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to speak of &quot;the confusing English language&quot;, the adjective could be moved into a predicate and preserve the meaning: I'm talking about the English language, and it is confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the same cannot be done with &quot;Old English&quot;. If I am attending a lecture on &quot;the Old English language&quot;, it is not equivalent to say that the lecture focuses on the English language, and that language is old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &quot;Old&quot; in this case is bound to &quot;English&quot; just as the complement &quot;Old English&quot; is bound to &quot;teacher&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T19:54:58.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2015-09-27T20:38:32.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Old English&quot; is a proper noun (or name, at least), and the &quot;Old&quot; part has a fairly transparent etymology as historically derived from the adjective &quot;old&quot;.  It's not an adjective, though its origin is more obvious than the &quot;Village&quot; in &quot;Greenwich Village&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't be against calling it an adjunct, because &quot;adjunct&quot; doesn't really mean anything to me -- a word or phrase connected in some unknown or unspecified way to another neighboring word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a &quot;complement&quot; at all.  A complement completes the meaning of the head it goes with, as for example a direct object is a complement of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-09-27T20:47:09.310" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T20:47:09.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14449" CreationDate="2015-09-27T23:35:36.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merge is more useful as a structure building operation than traditional phrase structure rules or X-bar theory, because unlike the latter, it can freely intersperse with movement. If you require structure building to precede all movement processes, you're in some sense postulating at least two different levels of representation. Economy of derivation principles say that one or zero levels is always preferable to two. Furthermore, once we adopt Merge, movement does not need to be a separate, primitive operation, since any instance of movement is equivalent to copying the relevant object and Merging it. This is known as the copy theory of movement. Note that syntactic computation begins once we select items from the lexicon and form a numeration (i.e a set of ordered 2-tuples consisting of the lexical item and the number of times it was chosen (Lexical Item, n)). Since n can be as large as we wish, it follows that the copy theory of movement does not introduce a new operation into the system. Economy principles are observed. There's much more to be said about our Lord and Savior, Merge. We are humbled by His Recursiveness.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="9616" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T00:22:52.677" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T00:22:52.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-28T07:34:40.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nearly all languages have at least three phonemic vowels, usually /i/, /a/, /u/ as in Classical Arabic and Inuktitut (or /ɐ/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/ as in Quechua), though &lt;strong&gt;Adyghe&lt;/strong&gt; and many &lt;strong&gt;Sepik&lt;/strong&gt; languages have a vertical vowel system of /ɨ/, /ə/, /a/. Very few languages have fewer, though some &lt;strong&gt;Arrernte&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Circassian&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Ndu&lt;/strong&gt; languages have been argued to have just two, /ə/ and /a/, with [ɨ] being epenthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be said that English has no [a] because typically it has only [æ], [ɑ] and [ɒ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the most common vowels is [a̠]; it is nearly universal for a language to have at least one open vowel, though most dialects of English have an [æ] and a [ɑ]—and often an [ɒ], all open vowels—but no central [a]. Some &lt;strong&gt;Tagalog&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Cebuano&lt;/strong&gt; speakers have [ɐ] rather than [a], and &lt;strong&gt;Dhangu Yolngu&lt;/strong&gt; is described as having /ɪ ɐ ʊ/, without any peripheral vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other languages without [i] or [u]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[i] is also extremely common, though &lt;strong&gt;Tehuelche&lt;/strong&gt; has just the vowels /e a o/ with no close vowels. The third vowel of Arabic-type three-vowel system, /u/, is considerably less common. A large fraction of the &lt;strong&gt;languages of North America&lt;/strong&gt; happen to have a four-vowel system without /u/: /i, e, a, o/; Aztec is an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel#Vowel_systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel#Vowel_systems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T07:34:40.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-28T08:47:58.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You write: “Japanese is the only language I know about that doesn't have a /u/ sound - it has /ɯ/ instead.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you are using slashes, I think you are really talking about phonetics (“a /u/ sound”) and not about phonology. Phonology is an abstraction. There is no overwhelming  reason why you should not analyse the Japanese [ɯ] as phonological /u/, nor is there any good reason not to analyse English [æ] as phonological /a/. These are just abstract symbols, like the symbols used in algebra. It would be better to ask whether there are any languages that have fewer than three vowel phonemes. Your question, as it stands, in unanswerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T08:47:58.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T12:46:16.647" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comparative method, being a great accomplishment of historical linguistics, obviously has its flaws. Reconstructions of proto-languages provided by this method can only be perceived as mere abstract resultant of the material used in comparison. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any efforts to authenticate these reconstructions in the cases where direct evidence of the mother-language is actually available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, have there been any attempts to reconstruct Proto-Romance disregarding all the evidence from Latin, an then comparing the results to it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that there are more families where such a procedure could be applied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T14:07:12.157" Title="Have there been attempts to verify accuracy of the comparative method?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T14:05:19.773" Score="4" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to construct a language for a fictional world. From what I gathered in different places, the first element to consider are the phoneme used by the speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since I already have a built world, I know the climate and geography conditions of the country where that language should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, but I think that, in general, languages travel with the people, and evolve depending on the situation (e.g. contacts with other languages). However, I was wondering whether the phonemes used by the languages depends on the natural environment where those languages appeared/are used/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do people in colder countries tend to speak with more guttural languages? Or are there some similarities for languages in similar climate/geography conditions that are not explained by historical or political connections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;As I am more often there, I asked the same question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/26375/are-human-languages-influenced-by-the-climate&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;, until I realised that there were a dedicated site for language related questions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10566" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T17:05:22.567" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T17:05:22.567" Title="Influence of the climate and geography on the phonemes" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;geolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14492" CreationDate="2015-09-28T14:07:12.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the greatest success story of linguistic analysis was Kurylowicz's discovery that Hittite inscriptions provided evidence for the laryngeal theory for IE reconstruction, proposed by Saussure.  But everyone knows about that.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Larygeal theory - History&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another well known case is the comparison of reconstructed Romance with Classical Latin.  As I understand it (not my area), there is considerable disparity, which is passed off as being due to differences between the spoken vernacular and what had become a scholarly language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T14:07:12.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T15:09:39.953" Score="2" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether English &lt;em&gt;crush&lt;/em&gt; and Russian крушить (&lt;em&gt;krushit'&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to crush&quot;) related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T15:36:18.593" Title="Are English crush and Russian крушить related?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14495" CreationDate="2015-09-28T15:25:03.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Slavic &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; cannot correspond to the Germanic &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grimm's law&lt;/a&gt;, Slavic &lt;em&gt;kr&lt;/em&gt; corresponds to the Germanic &lt;em&gt;hr&lt;/em&gt;, e. g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rus. &lt;em&gt;krug&lt;/em&gt; 'circle' : Angl.-Sax. &lt;em&gt;hring&lt;/em&gt; 'ring'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rus. &lt;em&gt;krov'&lt;/em&gt; 'blood' : Old Isl. &lt;em&gt;hrár&lt;/em&gt; 'raw'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rus. &lt;em&gt;krasa&lt;/em&gt; 'beauty' : Old Isl. &lt;em&gt;hróðr&lt;/em&gt; 'glory'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two words are not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T15:36:18.593" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T15:36:18.593" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14493" CreationDate="2015-09-28T16:16:11.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic, spoken in one of the hottest countries on the planet, is far more guttural than Finnish (which nobody would consider &quot;guttural&quot;). There could be a correlation between climate and phonetic typology, but it would be coincidental. The phonetic properties of a language today are heavily influenced by the properties of its ancestor millenia ago -- Arabic has a lot of gutturals because proto-Semitic did as well. And proto-Semitic probably inherited gutturals from proto-Afro-Asiatic. This relates to geography because that ancestor language was spoken in a relatively small area in Northeast Africa, where it is generally not cold. In the modern era, one can easily move across the globe in a few days (I'm being realistic about airplane connections and border crossings), but in the pre-technological era, people tended to stay put for generations. To the point that Khoisan speakers in southern Africa have probably been there for tens of thousands of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for humans, climate is irrelevant to language, and what matters is population movement patterns and contact between typologically-different languages. If this world is populated by non-humanoids who e.g. communicate (sometime) by blowing bubbles in water, then a different mode of communication such as belching fire might be necessary if the setting is Pluto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T16:16:11.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T21:13:34.807" Score="1" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask whether someone has ever tried to classify verbs (and other parts of speech) in a relatively small number of semantic groups /not necessarily disjoint/ and if yes, what groups they have come up with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some (non-exhaustive) examples of groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verbs &lt;em&gt;say, talk, tell, speak, whisper, converse, hint, communicate, negotiate, message, call, ask, inform, etc&lt;/em&gt; all refer to some exchange of information; the verbs &lt;em&gt;do, work out, make, create, build, form, shape, establish, found, think out, compose, etc&lt;/em&gt; express the action of creating/doing something; &lt;em&gt;go, move, displace, come, arrive, run, walk, drive, ride, jump, fly, flit, etc&lt;/em&gt; express movement/displacement; &lt;em&gt;be (be, sind, wess), exist, represent, serve as, possess, have, will, shall, become, able, appear, belong to, etc&lt;/em&gt; express some state of existence or belonging; and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T23:05:15.367" Title="Classification of verbs by meaning?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-28T21:24:08.573" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question concerns distal marking on Wh-words. Pronouns like 'this'/'here' and 'that'/'there' show clear marking of the proximal/distal distinction. Wh-words seem to exhibit some similarities to pronouns in certain contexts, so I was wondering if there might be any cases cross-linguistically of wh-words being marked at all for this distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10569" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T21:24:08.573" Title="Distal features of wh-words cross-linguistically" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14498" CreationDate="2015-09-28T23:05:15.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to the lists John Lawler offered, here is another one, adapted by Wilson (1999:48) from Sutton and Walsh's (1979) fieldwork guide for Australia. This one would be a bit more general, with less classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(intransitive) state&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;change of state&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;communication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;emotion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bodily functions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;impact and violence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;holding and transfer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;environmental, meteorological, celestial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, this list does not include verbs of creation that you've (rightfully) mentioned in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T23:05:15.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2015-09-29T13:59:24.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European is widely believed (see e.g. Beekes) to have only /e/ and /o/ (and their leghtened variants). This is somewhat a simplification because u̯ and i̯ which behave as consonants morphologically, could be vocalized into vowels between consonants. So it is better to just say that PIE had only /e/ and /o/ &lt;em&gt;kernel vowels&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be not the case for the most older stage of PIE, the so-called pre-PIE. In that language it is quite possible that the only two vowels were /e/ and /o/ and possibly even only /e/ because /o/ appeared as unstressed /e/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the traditional reconstruction for the word for daughter is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhuga̯tēr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which has vocalized /u/, but according to Kloekhorst the most ancient form was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dhu̯ega̯tr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-09-29T16:06:56.047" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T16:06:56.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-29T16:12:32.213" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm searching for multilingual rhymes like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Star - far / Stern - fern (German)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I only have this one so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10571" LastEditorUserId="10571" LastEditDate="2015-09-29T16:28:27.380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T16:28:27.380" Title="Is there a list of multilingual rhymes?" Tags="&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14433" CreationDate="2015-09-29T23:05:47.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;every dictionary must have a minimum set of words that are not defined.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about that.  If the dictionary is truly unabridged (and uses only non-antiquated terms in the definitions themselves), every definition would end up being circular in some way.  Lexicography is not geometry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some of the primitive &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; may be undefined in the manner you're thinking of (and as described in the cited Wikipedia article).  But undefined concepts (&quot;semantic primitives&quot;) are different from undefined &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10575" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T23:05:47.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14511" CreationDate="2015-09-30T10:24:02.283" Score="4" ViewCount="1679" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought adverbs didn't modify nouns but then what's going on in these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is nearly two o'clock&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were there for nearly an hour&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The town is nearly forty miles from here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10577" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T17:37:34.187" Title="What part of speech is 'two o'clock' in this sentence?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2015-10-01T11:50:19.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2015-09-30T11:06:48.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Slavic languages the cardinals (единъ (1), дъва (2), трьѥ (3), пѧть (5), съто (100)... /masc (fem and neut are also possible)/); the fractions (половина (1/2), третина (1/3), пѧтина (1/5), сътотна (1/100)  /only fem/) and the ordinals (пьрви (1th), вътори (2th), трети (3th), пѧти (5th), сътотни (100th) /masc (fem and neut are also possible)/) are all different... The fractions are sometimes called &lt;em&gt;дроби&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;partive&quot; ie &quot;fractional&quot; numbers (I can't translate it exactly in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T18:33:22.580" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T18:33:22.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14433" CreationDate="2015-09-30T14:50:56.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The study should not be that difficult to do, just enumerate all the subsets of words from the smallest to the largest, and see which is the smallest set that suffices to define the rest of the words in the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should consider a different definition of circularity. You have a minimum set of words in the defining vocabulary whose definitions are assumed to be known. Then for the rest of the words in the dictionary we need to order them such that their definitions use only the words from the minimum set OR words that have have been defined previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_arc_set#Minimum_feedback_arc_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;minimum feedback arc set problem&lt;/a&gt; and it is actually quite difficult to solve or even to get a good approximation. Basically, starting from an existing dictionary and reordering it to get rid of circular definitions is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8050" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T14:50:56.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14506" CreationDate="2015-09-30T17:37:34.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, but I think that &quot;two o'clock&quot; is a noun phrase, and in &quot;nearly two o'clock&quot; the &quot;nearly&quot; is an adverb modifying the determiner (Det) &quot;two&quot; within that noun phrase.  The constituent structure is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[NP [Det [Adv nearly] [Det two] ] o'clock ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analysis is a little tricky for your example &quot;nearly an hour&quot;, since &quot;nearly an&quot; cannot stand alone, and you have to consider that &quot;an&quot; is a reduced form of &quot;one&quot;.  But at least that makes sense of the construction, because &quot;nearly an hour&quot; does mean that the quantity of hours was almost one, and the full form &quot;nearly one hour&quot; is an acceptable paraphrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T17:37:34.187" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2015-10-01T20:10:27.997" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say this (names indicating gender) might actually be quite a &lt;strong&gt;western-centric phenomenon&lt;/strong&gt; and I'm not sure whether it's even mainstream in the world. It's totally possible that more cultures give genderless names than not. It's just that when names are transcribed into western alphabets, western people won't be able to tell what they originally meant anyways, so they still suppose that gender-specific names as such in their culture are the norm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to think of it, it's actually very weird for us Chinese to see that in western societies 1. there are strict distinctions between male names and female names which are not to be easily violated by social norms and 2. once a female gets married to a male, she changes her surname. Such things never happen in China. And also, your example about Japanese is largely incorrect. While the suffixes you listed are indeed common male/female names, there are also a whole lot of names which are neutral in the same manner as in Chinese. I'd say actually in modern Japan the later case might even be much more than the previous case. One funny historical fact is that during the sengoku period, there was a female lord named 井伊直虎(Ii Naotora), with 直虎 being a totally male and &quot;strong&quot; name (虎 is &quot;tiger&quot;). Well I guess the situation of this question(so many upvotes) reflects the fact that the majority of people here on SE are still westerners then :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T20:16:30.537" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T20:16:30.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8893" CreationDate="2015-10-01T21:03:13.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Estonian days from Monday to Thursday are numbered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esmaspäev - &quot;first day&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teisipäev - &quot;second day&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kolmapäev - &quot;third day&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neljapäev - &quot;fourth day&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reede - (Scandinavian origin, cf. fredag in Swedish &amp;amp; Norwegian)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laupäev - (Scandinavian origin, cf. laurdag in Nynorsk)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pühapäev - &quot;holy day&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10585" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T21:03:13.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14522" CreationDate="2015-10-02T21:19:33.557" Score="3" ViewCount="1605" Body="&lt;p&gt;These three words (as well as many other, these are just examples) are all spelled with double &quot;o&quot;, so I guess all of them were pronounced with long /oː/ before the Great Vowel Shift. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did it happen that in these words the /oː/ shifted into 3 different sounds (/ʊ/, /ɔː/ and /uː/)? It's not the context of the vowel, as all these words have only one syllable and even the same consonant preceding or following the vowel, so what caused them to diverge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T07:11:41.360" Title="&quot;oo&quot; in &quot;poor&quot;, &quot;door&quot; and &quot;doom&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-02T22:14:49.830" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for treebanks that contain both constituency and dependency parse trees. Both should have been manually annotated (i.e. the dependency parse trees shouldn't have been obtained from the constituency parse trees).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T21:16:49.750" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T21:16:49.750" Title="Treebanks that contain both constituency and dependency parse trees" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;&lt;treebanks&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-03T04:03:47.120" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder what types of errors arise when automatically converting consistency parse trees to dependency parse trees, and how frequent they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T04:11:58.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T00:46:20.533" Title="What types of errors arise when converting consistency parse trees to dependency parse trees?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-03T04:42:36.347" Score="2" ViewCount="1009" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my project, I need to extract Subject, Object and Verb from the sentence. I have read that, LFG F structure is what I need. I am using Stanford NLP package. I couldnt find out how to do that in Stanford NLP. I have seen a post using NLTK which converts Dependency parser output to F Structure. Can anyone point to how do that using any of these packages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T04:42:36.347" Title="How to extract Subject, Object, Verb through a parser" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14517" CreationDate="2015-10-03T07:05:46.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both &quot;poor&quot; /pʊər/ and &quot;doom&quot; /duːm/ represent regular developments of pre-GVS /oː/ in modern standard English. The difference is in fact the context. The vowel /ʊə/ is the normal reflex before an /r/, and the vowel /uː/ is the normal reflex in other contexts (in fact, when dealing with a dialect that still retains syllable-final /r/, it's possible to analyze [ʊə] as simply an allophone of /u/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, /ʊər/ has historically been unstable as a phoneme; there are a wide range of possible realizations, and for many speakers in many dialects it has merged with other phonemes. The tricky part is that which phoneme it merges with depends on the dialect and on the particular word. It may merge with /ɔːr/ as in &quot;more&quot;, or disyllabic /u.ɚ/ as in &quot;doer&quot;, or (especially after /j/) with /ɝ/ as in &quot;nurse.&quot; For more details, you can look at the Wikipedia article on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Pour.E2.80.93poor_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English-language vowel changes before historic /r/&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only issue is with the pronunciation of the word &quot;door.&quot; According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=door&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;door&lt;/a&gt;&quot; actually appears to continue two OE words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Middle English merger of Old English &lt;em&gt;dor&lt;/em&gt; (neuter; plural &lt;em&gt;doru&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;large&#xA;  door, gate,&quot; and Old English &lt;em&gt;duru&lt;/em&gt; (fem., plural &lt;em&gt;dura&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;door, gate,&#xA;  wicket;&quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Middle English had both &lt;em&gt;dure&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dor&lt;/em&gt;; form &lt;em&gt;dore&lt;/em&gt; predominated by 16c.,&#xA;  but was supplanted by &lt;em&gt;door&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not totally clear to me from this what the pronunciation of the word was during the Middle English period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary discusses this in their entry on &quot;door,&quot; and also seems unsure of the development of the modern pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The spelling &lt;em&gt;door&lt;/em&gt; points to an earlier pronunciation with &lt;em&gt;ū&lt;/em&gt; or ū from&#xA;  Middle English close &lt;em&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt; , which is further attested by Scots &lt;em&gt;dure&lt;/em&gt; /dør/&#xA;  (also in Cath. Angl. 1483), and is considered by Luick as a northern&#xA;  lengthening of Old English &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; . The current pronunciation may be a&#xA;  retention of that evidenced for 16th cent. &lt;em&gt;dore&lt;/em&gt; by quot. 1597 at sense&#xA;  1aβ. ; but it may also be a more recent modification of /dʊə(r)/ , as&#xA;  in the case of &lt;em&gt;floor&lt;/em&gt;, and vulgar pronunciations of &lt;em&gt;moor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;poor&lt;/em&gt;, as&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pore&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;[...]&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;1597   Shakespeare Richard II v. iii. 75 Open the doore, A beggar begs that neuer begd before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T07:11:41.360" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T07:11:41.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14519" CreationDate="2015-10-03T22:55:18.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hungarian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simkó, Katalin Ilona, et al. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13208204466103146196&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Empirical Evaluation of Automatic Conversion from Constituency to Dependency in Hungarian.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Proceedings of COLING. 2014.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The errors made during [the automatic] conversion were categorized manually in 200 sentences&#xA;  selected randomly from the short business news subcorpus of the Szeged Dependency Treebank, and the&#xA;  most typical ones are listed in Table 1, Column &lt;em&gt;convError&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XC63Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XC63Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T22:55:18.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2015-10-03T23:03:07.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Hungarian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rgai.inf.u-szeged.hu/SzegedTreebank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Szeged Treebank&lt;/a&gt; contains manually annotated constituency parse trees; &lt;a href=&quot;http://rgai.inf.u-szeged.hu/dependency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Szeged (Dependency) Treebank&lt;/a&gt; contains dependency parse trees that were automatically derived from the constituency parse trees, then corrected by human annotators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Szeged Dependency Treebank is a dependency-tree format version of the Szeged Treebank. From the originally phrase-structured treebank, we produced dependency trees by automatic conversion, checked and corrected them thereby creating the first manually annotated dependency corpus for Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corpus contains 82,000 sentences, 1.2 million words and 250,000 punctuation marks. Texts were selected from six different domains, ~200,000 words in size from each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Szeged Treebank 1.0:&#xA;Csendes, Dóra; Csirik, János; Gyimóthy, Tibor 2004: &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/coling2004/W8/pdf/03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Szeged Corpus: A POS Tagged and Syntactically Annotated Hungarian Natural Language Corpus&lt;/a&gt;. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC 2004) at The 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2004), Geneva, Switzerland, 23-29 August, pp. 19-23.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Szeged Treebank 2.0:&#xA;Csendes, Dóra; Csirik, János; Gyimóthy, Tibor; Kocsor, András 2005: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springerlink.com/content/9jaklh50ggxvpqq3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Szeged Treebank&lt;/a&gt;. In: Matoušek, Václav et al. (eds.): Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2005), Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, September 12-16, 2005, Springer LNAI 3658, pp. 123-131.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Szeged Dependency Treebank:&#xA;Vincze, Veronika; Szauter, Dóra; Almási, Attila; Móra, György; Alexin, Zoltán; Csirik, János 2010: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/465_Paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hungarian Dependency Treebank&lt;/a&gt;. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T23:03:07.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T00:06:46.883" Score="-2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Computer language and human language. is it a good subject to research paper related to linguistics?&#xA;Thank you in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10594" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T04:01:01.390" Title="Reearch paper subject" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-10-04T07:23:27.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14406" CreationDate="2015-10-04T02:39:20.400" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question. Try NLTK's dependency parser. Seems to work. Watch for noise in this forum. It is over- moderatoando.NP meaning get your boots ready. Now Ricky has some 'splainibg to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10597" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T02:39:20.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2015-10-04T03:31:41.673" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the 676 total possible bigrams &quot;there are only seven bigrams that do not occur among the 2.8 trillion mentions: JQ, QG, QK, QY, QZ, WQ, and WZ.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norvig also produced data for trigrams through 9-grams &quot;by position within word ... and also by word length.&quot;  Of the 17576 (26**3) possible trigrams, Norvig found 8,653 (see types count in ngrams3 fusion table), so 8923 (50.768%) trigrams did not occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/mayzner.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://norvig.com/mayzner.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norvig is a Google research scientist.  Analysis was based on the Google Books corpus mid 2012.  Norvig normalized words (so word=Word=WORD) and then excluded those that occurred fewer than 100,000 times.  Thus these 7 bigrams might legitimately exist (e.g., &quot;howzat&quot; per Ken Grace in the comments) but are very rare (unless you are interested in cricket).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, some bigrams might not occur depending upon what you mean by &quot;English words.&quot;  Note that some Roman numerals and abbreviations were included (e.g., no Scrabble word contains &quot;qc&quot; but &quot;QC&quot; for &quot;quality control&quot; was common in my technical books).  The list also contains some names and some clearly foreign words (e.g., &quot;forschungsgemeinschaft&quot; in the longest words list must have appeared more than 100,000 times, probably due to funding acknowledgements of the German equivalent of the NSF in scientific papers per Christopher Orr in the comments).  I'm unaware of an English &quot;dictionary&quot; word that contains &quot;xx&quot; but the bigram appeared 79 million times in &quot;Exxon&quot; (formed in 1972), &quot;ExxonMobile&quot; (in 1999), &quot;XXX&quot; (whether strike-through, placeholder, hardcore sex rating, movie or album name, Roman numeral 30, genetic abnormality, kisses, extra strong, elided XXXL size, poison/dangerous label, ... [and now a top level domain]), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list excluded all words that contained numbers or punctuation (presumably also therefore excluding contractions, possessives, and hyphenations).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to Norvig's post, Google Books, and the Brown Corpus (mentioned by acattle), see the Corpus of Contemporary American English (or British or International or others) for easy to use tools and datasets that could be used to extract data patterns that might be of more interest.  Google and Microsoft also provide tools and ngram datasets based on web content.  Wiktionary might also be useful when considering specific bigrams.  Scrabble, word finder, or other game aids might be useful as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://research.microsoft.com/web-ngram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://research.microsoft.com/web-ngram&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Two-letter_combinations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Two-letter_combinations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this answer addresses the limited question of &quot;two [and three] letter combination[s] ... not found in any English words&quot; but not how best to identify &quot;English words&quot; mixed with other text (or vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Primarily added Trigram count, links list, and last paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10596" LastEditorUserId="10596" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T02:05:39.300" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T02:05:39.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14527" CreationDate="2015-10-04T04:01:01.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look up the &quot;Chomsky hierarchy&quot; and &quot;context free language&quot;.  Context free phrase structure grammar describes certain computer languages (the first was Algol 60, I think) and has been proposed as a theory of human languages (in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar), though Chomsky had argued against this in his classic book &lt;strong&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T04:01:01.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T09:48:04.793" Score="4" ViewCount="563" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18801324&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Risks from GMOs due to Horizontal Gene Transfer&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Paul Keese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The introduced gene could not be detected in faeces from &lt;strong&gt;human volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; with intact digestive tracts following the consumption of a meal containing GM soya, indicating that the introduced gene is normally completely degraded in the large intestine.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been translating this article and realized that if I wrote &lt;strong&gt;human volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; word-for-word in Russian - &lt;strong&gt;человеческие добровольцы&lt;/strong&gt; - that would sound outlandish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking logically, what other kinds of volunteer could there be in a genetic study? Rat volunteers? Murine volunteers? Simian volunteers? Bacterial volunteers? The word &lt;strong&gt;volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; implies &lt;strong&gt;human&lt;/strong&gt; in this context. Yet in Russian this semantic redundancy is prominent while in English the phrase seems natural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would gladly accept your reflections on this topic. I expect answers from human volunteers, but since I cannot be sure that an online persona harbors a human being behind it, all other species are welcome to chip in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2306" LastEditorUserId="2306" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T10:54:16.440" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T12:18:07.023" Title="Why is &quot;human volunteers&quot; felicitous in English but not in Russian?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-04T19:41:21.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14533" CreationDate="2015-10-04T10:49:14.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that “human volunteers” is at best pleonastic, and at worst ridiculous. It is certainly not felicitous in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T10:49:14.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14533" CreationDate="2015-10-04T11:00:00.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Human volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; fits well into that passage. &lt;strong&gt;Human&lt;/strong&gt; means that the faeces were of human, not animal origin, and &lt;strong&gt;volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; means those humans deliberately agreed to take part in the experiment, to eat GM soya, and give their faeces to the scholars, that is, the faeces were not collected in some public toilets and were not produced by anonymous people who had eaten food of unknown origin.&#xA;In Russian, the best way to keep both words is to put it this way: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;человеческие&lt;/strong&gt; фекалии &lt;strong&gt;добровольцев&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; – '&lt;strong&gt;human&lt;/strong&gt; faeces from &lt;strong&gt;volunteers&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T12:18:07.023" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T12:18:07.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14547" CreationDate="2015-09-15T02:33:16.223" Score="1" ViewCount="2485" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, we all know that the vowel chart diagram is drawn like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ak22A.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ak22A.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, that is the model, but &lt;strong&gt;how the vowel chart is positioned inside our mouth or how the tongue in the reality is placed according to the diagram?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We got the X-rays of Daniel Jones of 4 extreme point [i, u, a, ɑ] as showed in the following diagram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lG7KN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lG7KN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Ok, It seems that the X-rays of Daniel Jones could be drawn as the followings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0DPA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0DPA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here is quite confusing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some websites interpret how the vowel chart is positioned inside our mouth like the following (&lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 1&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tyEcg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tyEcg.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec3/glides.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other websites interpret how the vowel chart is positioned inside our mouth like the following (&lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 2&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OQS5C.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OQS5C.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-due.de/SHE/REV_PhoneticsPhonology.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other websites interpret like this (&lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 3&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wR2c2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wR2c2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wuglife.tumblr.com/post/67308714646/how-to-remember-the-ipa-vowel-chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;which Interpretation is accurate&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 1, 2 or 3&lt;/strong&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 1&lt;/strong&gt; is the most accurate because it is pretty close the X-rays of Daniel Jones. But I am not sure about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;strong&gt;Interpretation 2&lt;/strong&gt;, it seems that the author implies the position of the tongue of &lt;strong&gt;/i/ &amp;amp; /a/&lt;/strong&gt; is way too close to the front of the mouth. However, in the X-rays of Daniel Jones, the position of &lt;strong&gt;/i/ &amp;amp; /a/&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit retracted &amp;amp; is not too lose to the front of the mouth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seem there is a lack of standard of how to depict how the vowel chart is positioned inside our mouth. &lt;em&gt;That is causing a lot of confusing, right?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10630" OwnerDisplayName="Tom" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T08:11:05.557" Title="Could you tell which pictures, which depict how the vowel chart is positioned inside our mouth, are accurate?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T19:12:45.770" Score="1" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://ctakes.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache cTAKES&lt;/a&gt; to detect negations in physician notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have loaded the provided analysis engine &lt;code&gt;apache-ctakes-3.2.2-bin\apache-ctakes-3.2.2\desc\ctakes-assertion\desc\AssertionMiniPipelineAnalysisEngine.xml&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;in the UIMA CAS Visual Debugger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I run it, I don't see any annotation (except one  &lt;code&gt;uima.tcas.DocumentAnnotation&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8tNG5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8tNG5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Apache cTAKES version 3.2.2 on Windows 7 SP1 x64 Ultimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To run CVD, I've added my &lt;code&gt;umlsuser&lt;/code&gt; as well as my &lt;code&gt;umlspw&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;apache-ctakes-3.2.2\bin\runctakesCVD.bat&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;java -Dctakes.umlsuser=MY_USERNAME -Dctakes.umlspw=MY_PASSWORD -cp &quot;%CTAKES_HOME%/desc/;%CTAKES_HOME%/resources/;%CTAKES_HOME%/lib/*&quot; -Dlog4j.configuration=file:/%CTAKES_HOME%/config/log4j.xml -Xms512M -Xmx3g org.apache.uima.tools.cvd.CVD&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also added my UMLS username and password in &lt;code&gt;\apache-ctakes-3.2.2-bin\apache-ctakes-3.2.2\desc\ctakes-dictionary-lookup\desc\analysis_engine\DictionaryLookupAnnotatorUMLS.xml&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T21:32:14.140" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T21:32:14.140" Title="How to use the AssertionMiniPipelineAnalysisEngine in cTAKES?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;ctakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14539" CreationDate="2015-10-04T19:40:11.523" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;One:  In school, we are often told that an adverb can modify, not only a verb, but also an adjective.   So we have ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i)  verb modifier:   The man leaped suddenly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ii) adjective modifier:   Suddenly afraid, Alice locked the door.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two:  Adverbial clauses can modify verbs.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii) When the grunions come ashore, we all feast.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three:  Is a clause that serves as a complement or modifier of an adjective considered to be adverbial?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iv) That fish was so big (that) it almost swallowed the boat.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or have I misanalyzed a lot of things here?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T20:00:45.920" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T21:30:04.393" Title="Are adjective complement clauses considered to be adverbial?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14538" CreationDate="2015-10-04T21:30:04.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your i)-iii) are adverbs, but I don't agree about what they modify.  I don't know about iv).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In i), it is the event of the man leaping, described by a sentence, which is modified by being said to be sudden.  So &quot;suddenly&quot; modifies a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ii), it is the inception of the state of Alice being afraid, described by a sentence, which is modified by being said to be sudden.  So &quot;suddenly&quot; modifies a sentence. (Alternatively, perhaps it's the state of being afraid expressed by a verb phrase which is modified.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In iii), it's the temporal relationship of two events that &quot;when&quot; concerns, each of the events described by a sentence: The grunions come ashore [at a certain time], and We all feast [at that time]. So the adverb &quot;when the grunions come ashore&quot; modifies the sentence &quot;we all feast&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something that traditional grammarians are not good at, because somehow they've gotten the idea that modifiers always modify words.  Often, adverbs modify phrases. In the typology of adverbs offered by McCawley in &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, the only clause adverbs that modify verbs are adverbs of extent, such as &quot;completely&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T21:30:04.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T21:41:48.393" Score="3" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, there are some linguists that would claim Merge is a cognitive mechanism which came about suddenly at some point in our evolutionary history. Is there any neurological evidence to support this claim, or is it supported purely because it is a parsimonious way to describe how linguistic expressions are constructed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge, at once laying a core part of the basis for what is found at that dramatic moment of human evolution...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T02:16:06.657" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T02:16:06.657" Title="Is there any neurological/biological evidence of Merge?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T22:32:37.337" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;They can conquer who believe they CAN. (auxiliary verb)&#xA;Yes, it IS. (verb in tag question)&#xA;He never grew UP. (preposition)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I actually got these examples from a book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10603" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T04:43:10.427" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T04:43:10.427" Title="Why are the elements at the ends of these sentences stressed?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14552" CreationDate="2015-10-04T22:35:16.200" Score="2" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want a third, preferrably referenced opinion on a terminological dispute here. The problem is the following (though I am avoiding the actual example to avoid unnecessary complication):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German phonetics, consonant duplication indicates a shortening of the preceding vowel. So, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Schafe&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced [ʃaːfə] and &lt;em&gt;schaffe&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced [ʃafə]. In the latter example, I would call &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; a digraph, as it encodes a single phoneme, namely [f].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it may happen that two identical consonants stand next to each other due to word composition, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Schaf&lt;/em&gt; ([ʃaːf]) and &lt;em&gt;Fell&lt;/em&gt; ([fɛl]) are composed to &lt;em&gt;Schaffell.&lt;/em&gt; Now if you ask native speakers to very clearly prounce the latter word or if they are dictating it and want to make sure to be understood, they will probably say [ʃaːffɛl], but in natural pronuciation, the two [f] sounds will merge and the pronunciation will be [ʃaːfɛl] or [ʃaːfːɛl]. Note that the first vowel would never be shortened. (Also, experts would avoid to typeset &lt;em&gt;Schaffell&lt;/em&gt; without an &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; ligature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the controversy is this: Would &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Schaffell&lt;/em&gt; be called a digraph? Or, more abstractly: If two phonemes are merged in pronunciation across a morpheme boundary, would the corresponding letters be called a digraph? The arguments so far boil down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, it would be called a digraph, because &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;corresponds&lt;/strong&gt; to a single sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, it would not be called a digraph, because in the relevant phonetics, &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; does not &lt;strong&gt;encode&lt;/strong&gt; a single sound in this word (though it does elsewhere).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for answers supporting either of these sides (or a third alternative) that are backed up with further arguments or references (other than Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastEditorUserId="1822" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T08:19:13.103" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T16:43:13.087" Title="If two phonemes are merged in pronunciation across a morpheme boundary, are the corresponding letters a digraph?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14542" CreationDate="2015-10-04T22:50:45.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; would be called a digraph because it corresponds to two &lt;em&gt;letters&lt;/em&gt;.  Wikipedia has an entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Digraph&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T22:50:45.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14542" CreationDate="2015-10-04T23:12:06.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Digraph&quot; can mean different things (Wikipedia conveniently has separate articles for some of the separate meanings.) It would not be called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)&quot;&gt;Digraph (orthography)&lt;/a&gt;, because it represents two phonemes at the morphological level. These phonemes are the same/equal (&lt;em&gt;das Gleiche&lt;/em&gt;) but not the same/identical (&lt;em&gt;dasselbe&lt;/em&gt;). It is just two letters next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some possible corroborating evidence is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature#Stylistic_ligatures&quot;&gt;double-f ligatures are proscribed&lt;/a&gt; in such a situation in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other cases where non-equal sounds may be dropped next to each other. For example, the German word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jetzt&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;jetzt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is often pronounced /jɛt͡s/. This does not make &quot;tzt&quot; some kind of trigraph representing /t͡s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T23:12:06.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14541" CreationDate="2015-10-05T01:02:03.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's just the default intonation contour in the absence of the focus pitch elsewhere. If you want to make contrast, your pitch accent (stress) will shift to the contrasted element:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1') They can conquer who BELIEVE they can, not just those who SAY they can.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go into it in detail, Ladd's (1996) &lt;em&gt;Intonation Phonology&lt;/em&gt; is a classic reference, I believe. And maybe someone can help with a shorter text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T01:02:03.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14541" CreationDate="2015-10-05T01:23:20.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That the last stress in a phrase is more prominent than preceding stresses in that phrase was the basis for the nuclear stress rule, see Chomsky, N., M. Halle and F. Lukoff (1956) On Accent and Juncture in English. In M. Halle, H.G. Lunt, H. McLean and C.H. van Schooneveld, eds. For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The Hague: Mouton &amp;amp; Co. 65-80, and see also SPE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to know why is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, the only attempted explanation I know of is proposed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/AA/rhythm1983.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rhythm and the holistic organization of language structure&lt;/a&gt;, according to which English puts accent last because it organizes information with comments following topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T01:23:20.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2015-10-05T01:45:46.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The defined standard for cardinal vowels is the Jones performances. IPA is loosely related to Standard Cardinal Vowels, but the IPA letter &amp;lt; i &gt; can be used for a wide range of phonetic values ranging from Cardinal Vowel 1 to something rather close to [ɪ]. &quot;Accuracy&quot; implies a standard (that is, &lt;em&gt;what thing&lt;/em&gt; does the chart accurately reproduce?), and it isn't clear what standard you are interested in. I am inclined to think you mean &quot;correctly reproduces Daniel Jones' tongue positions&quot;, but perhaps you mean &quot;accurately reflects the vowels [i,u] etc. in English&quot;, or else in Spanish, or maybe Dresden German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you would need to do is map the vowel dots in the x-rays to a coordinate system, using some fixed bony structure as a reference point such as the upper incisors and the palatine process). Unfortunately, the &quot;interpretation&quot; graphs don't scale well to the x-rays, though Interpretation 1 is the best of the three (the other two are schematizations, not drawings of x-rays). In the x-rays, the box that surrounds the extreme vowels [i,ɑ] is twice as long horizontally as it is high, but the box that contains the &quot;vowel space&quot; in picture I1 is only 1.25 times as long as it is high. In fact, I1 looks like Peter Ladefoged, and may be accurate as a representation of Peter Ladefoged. However, I1 is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; a vowel space: it does not give specific points for vowel locations, so it does not at all represent the 4 tongue positions in the Jones x-rays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other drawings are substantially off. So despite the fact that specific vowel positions are not given in I1, the schematized vowel space given there is at least consistent with where specific cardinal vowels are likely to be produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T01:45:46.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12328" CreationDate="2015-10-05T02:28:16.603" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Chechen and I speak Chinese as well. There are some words in both languages mutually understandable and spelled the same way - I guess that's ONE thing that (if it could) would made Chechen close to the Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing is the tones, both in Chechen and Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dunno how what methods the linguists use to refer one language to the other. I have noticed they (those who do so) do not even have a proper knowledge of Chinese/CHECHEN to be able to COMPARE them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10604" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T02:28:16.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2015-10-05T08:11:05.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot really project the whole vowel trapeziod into a single picture of the mouth because the shape of the mouth and the tongue actually change as you move through the chart. So any single picture such as the three above will be inaccurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chart really depicts relative positions of the highest position of the tongue with the edges being the extremes thought possible. So any projection will be just a rough schematic suggestion. But 1 is obviously the closest to some semblance of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T08:11:05.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2015-10-05T16:07:43.870" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why are these sentences ungrammatical?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because when &quot;but&quot; is used twice in one sentence, it's not clear what the author means, as &quot;but&quot; implies a strong counterpoint to another thing, but if there are two other things, then the way their counterpoints apply to each other is unclear (and often in practice, doesn't make complete sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the reason syntactic or semantic?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both, but I expect that the reason for the syntactic rule is the semantic mess made by using two &quot;buts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the issue is more the re-use of the word &quot;but&quot; (which is used to frame an entire clause as an opposition) and the question thus created about the relation between the first part and the third. It has me wondering, &quot;why is the author is strangely using &quot;but&quot; twice like that?&quot; Compare to the same structure with one &quot;yet&quot; and one &quot;but&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The queen tried to kill Snow White &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; Snow White escaped &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; she went through much hardship.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The queen tried to kill Snow White &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; Snow White escaped &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; she&#xA;went through much hardship.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The mountain climbers were tired &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; happy &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; bankrupt.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The mountain climbers were tired &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; happy &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; bankrupt.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still awkward, but clearer. The author hopefully means that the &quot;but&quot; relation is the major opposition of the clause, while the &quot;yet&quot; is a secondary opposition which can be of a different type (and sentence-grammar-analyzers can ignore it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &quot;but&quot; is used twice, it suggests to me that the same type of opposition applies between three expressions, which asks the readers to form a kind of logical triangle in their minds all at once, where the relation between all three may not be so clear or even make sense. When I read two &quot;buts&quot; in a row, I tend to think, &quot;wait, what?&quot; and stop to consider the three potential implied relationships, and whether they're all the same or different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, in &quot;1 but 2 yet 3&quot;, 1 and 3 are both adverse to something about 2, but 1 and 3 may not be adverse to each other - they may be about different things. In both of the examples above, this seems to be because the subject is a person and their well-being is the concern of the sentence, and a person has various aspects to their well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So consider the edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The queen tried to kill Snow White but Snow White escaped. She escaped but went through much hardship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clarifies that there are two relationships, and does not have me thinking what the original single sentence with two &quot;buts&quot; did, which was: &lt;em&gt;So is the author implying some relationship between &quot;The queen tried to kill Snow White&quot; and &quot;she went through much hardship&quot;, or are they just writing sloppily?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6869" LastEditorUserId="6869" LastEditDate="2015-10-05T17:07:01.087" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T17:07:01.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-05T16:30:07.917" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. I have the following physician note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The patient has diabetes. The patient does not have the flu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to extract from it the information that &lt;code&gt;diabetes&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;not flu&lt;/code&gt; are mentioned. How can I do it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ctakes.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache cTAKES&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T16:30:07.917" Title="Extracting the list of diseases as well as their negation from a physician note using cTAKES" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ctakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14542" CreationDate="2015-10-05T16:43:13.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the term hasn't been redefined in linguistics in a special way, all you can get here is the ordinary meaning of the word, which as, as reported in the OED, &quot;a group of two letters expressing a simple sound of speech&quot;. A reasonable interpretation of &quot;simple&quot; is &quot;one, single&quot;. So the two letters &quot;ff&quot;express not two speech sounds, but one. The term is not defined in terms of phonemes or morphological analysis. Nor is it defined in terms of underlying forms or any other abstraction -- it is defined in terms of &quot;speech&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Webster's Third International dictionary provides two definitions: &quot;a group of two successive letters whose phonetic value is a single sound (as ea in bread or ng in sing) or whose value is not the sum of a value borne by each in other occurrences (as ch in chin where the value is \t\ + \sh)&quot; – basically the same as the OED definition, and &quot;a group of two successive letters&quot; – basically, this is wrong, because it would then make &quot;ad&quot; in &quot;admit&quot; (idem &quot;dm&quot; in that word) a &quot;digraph&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &quot;digraph&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a technical linguistic term, all we can offer is standard, well-respected dictionary sources. Theoretically, one could devise a study to determine the definition of the term that best matches the intuitions of the largest set of English speakers, but nobody has done or will do that experiment. Even then, that would be a question about English language word-meaning and usage, not linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T16:43:13.087" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14554" CreationDate="2015-10-05T23:18:13.767" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a construction using an infinitive form such as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I want to go&quot; or &quot;What is to be thought of that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the formal name for the part of speech that 'to' represents? 'To' is part of the verb, but I don't know how to name this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1679" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T23:53:23.830" Title="How is the 'to' in English infinitive forms called formally?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14553" CreationDate="2015-10-05T23:53:23.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/to#Particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;particle&lt;/a&gt;, and since it precedes infinitives, it is often called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.odlt.org/ballast/infinitival_particle.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;infinitival particle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T23:53:23.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14555" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-06T00:19:35.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T00:19:35.330" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T00:19:35.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14556" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-06T00:19:35.330" Score="0" Body="Summarization is the process of reducing a text document in order to create a summary that retains the most important points of the original document." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T21:36:17.187" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T21:36:17.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14559" CreationDate="2015-10-06T03:24:08.417" Score="2" ViewCount="2676" Body="&lt;p&gt;This article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/linkage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/linkage.pdf&lt;/a&gt; , alluded to something called an adjoined clause, which is subordinate, but not embedded.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a subordinate clause and an embedded clause?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that &quot;subordinate clause&quot; is a term for a category that includes embedded clauses, but is not limited to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T07:33:19.590" Title="What is the difference between a subordinate clause and an embedded clause?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14558" CreationDate="2015-10-06T07:33:19.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Lehmann is talking about is Hale's famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://evelin2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/hale-the-adjoined-relative-clause-in-australia-1976.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1976 paper&lt;/a&gt; about the adjoined relative clause in Australia. It discusses (subordinate) relative clauses not being embedded, which spawned the opinion that there is no subordination in Australian languages (because for most 'subordination' and 'embedding' are synonimous indeed). In fact, Hale meant something like &lt;em&gt;not embedded linearly in the sentence&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., not having other material on both sides of them. Nordlinger does an excellent job of clarifying the issue in her &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232995975_Spearing_the_Emu_Drinking_Subordination_and_the_Adjoined_Relative_Clause_in_Wambaya*_Some_aspects_of_this_paper_were_presented_at_the_Blackwood_workshop_on_subordination_in_Australian_languages_March_2002._I_would_like_to_thank_the_participants_of_that_workshop_for_helpful_feedback_and_particularly_Nick_Evans_Ian_Green_Mary_Laughren_Nick_Piper_Nick_Reid_Jean-Christophe_Verstraete_and_the_anonymous_AJL_reviewers_for_discussions_comments_and_suggestions_that_have_helped_shape_and_improve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2006 paper&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T07:33:19.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T14:36:15.860" Score="4" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether there is any statistic data on morpheme-to-word ratio of certain languages. Is this something that can be and has been measured? The languages I am most interested in are the agglutinative languages Tamil and Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could further an average morpheme-to-word ratio be justifiably called a &lt;em&gt;constant&lt;/em&gt; of a given language, at least in a small timeframe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about an upper morpheme-to-word boundary? Does this exist as a &quot;linguistic constant&quot;? Are there comparative tables for different languages? Have specimen of words that actually exhaust this maximum capability of synthesis been recorded somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T14:36:15.860" Title="Statistic data on average morpheme-to-word ratios" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;tamil&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T15:54:53.237" Score="1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;These three words are very similar in English, Russian and Kazakh. At least the Russian set is considered inherited from PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;English - Russian - Kazakh&#xA;&#xA;crush - крушить (krushitь) - қырш (qyrsh)&#xA;&#xA;plash - плескать (pleskatь) - былш (bylsh)&#xA;&#xA;slap - шлёпать (shlёpatь) - шылп (shylp)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noticable is that the second word in Kazakh looks more similar to English than Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people explain it via onomatopoieia but at least the Russian set comes to PIE roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;крушить is from PIE kreu- &quot;crush&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;плескать is from PIE plea̯- &quot;flat&quot;, &quot;wide&quot;, from pel- &quot;full&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;шлёпать is from PIE leip- &quot;sticky&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deriving all these words from one proto-source seems impossible though (especially the Turkic ones). So I wonder whether Kazakh etymology of these words has been ever explained through borrowing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T18:25:15.817" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T07:48:56.657" Title="Are these Kazakh words considered borrowings (from Russian?) or onomatopoieias?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T18:51:31.543" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to some ancient historians (e.g. Herodotos, Dionysius of Halicarnassus) and poets (e.g. Virgil) there was some ethnic relation between the people of the East Coast of Asia Minor (where Troy was situated and where later Lydia evolved) and these of nowadays Italy (either Etruscans or Latins/Romans). I know that this hypothesis is very controversial, however, in the same time it appeared to me that the sound difference between Lydia vs Latium (Lazio) is very similar to this of Lithuania (Lietuva) vs Latvia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is whether there is some etymological relation between the above names? And in case this is just a coincidence, my secondary inquiry is - what are the etymologies of the names, if known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS What is the etymology of the similarly-sounding Slavic word for people, pronounced &quot;люди&quot; (lyudi) / &quot;лугье&quot; (lugye) / ludzie / lide in the different Slavic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="10568" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T19:51:07.963" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T21:40:37.760" Title="Etymology of the tribe-names Latins, Lydians, Latvians, Lithuanians?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8827" CreationDate="2015-10-06T21:18:52.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tuvan, a Turkic language, borrowed the Mongolic word for 'what'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10616" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T21:18:52.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14564" CreationDate="2015-10-06T21:40:37.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymology of &quot;люди&quot; is from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯leudheros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;free, adult person&quot;, or, more precisely, from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯leudhis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;people&quot;. The root initially meant something like &quot;grow up&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T21:40:37.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14570" CreationDate="2015-10-06T22:46:55.900" Score="4" ViewCount="1144" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic term for a palette of words, which are derived / span from the same stem (excluding the so-called &lt;em&gt;doublets&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;warranty&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;guaranty&lt;/em&gt;...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Example:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Act (verb), react (&lt;em&gt;antonym&lt;/em&gt;?), action (verb-noun), actor/actress (a creature doing the verb), active (adjective), etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I don't count explicitly the various inflections of a word in the span (e.g. (s/he/it) acts, (many) actors, ...) as part of what I call a &lt;em&gt;palette&lt;/em&gt; and don't consider pairs of words like &quot;see&quot; and &quot;sea&quot;, which sound similarly but don't have any etymological relation, as &lt;em&gt;palettes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="10568" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T11:42:30.557" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T02:02:27.353" Title="Terminology for a group of words derived from a common stem?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T23:38:24.757" Score="5" ViewCount="993" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciation_of_Latin#Stress&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says about stress in Latinate English words&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In words of three or more syllables, stress falls either on the penult or the antepenult (third from the end), according to these criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the penult contains a short vowel in an open syllable, the stress falls on the antepenult&lt;/strong&gt;: e.g. &lt;em&gt;stá.mi.na, hy.pó.the.sis.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the penult contains a long vowel; a diphthong; a closed syllable (with any length of vowel); or is followed by &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;, the stress falls on the penult.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&#xA;The fact that &lt;em&gt;decorum&lt;/em&gt; is stressed on the penult, and &lt;em&gt;exodus&lt;/em&gt; on the&#xA;antepenult, is a fact about each of these words that must be memorized&#xA;separately (unless one is already familiar with the Classical&#xA;quantities, and in the former case, additionally with the fact that&#xA;&lt;em&gt;decus -ŏris&lt;/em&gt; n. with short &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; syllable became in late Latin&#xA;&lt;em&gt;decus/decor -ōris&lt;/em&gt; m. with long &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; syllable: 'Dómine, diléxi decórem&#xA;domus tuæ').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, English speakers often pronounce words like this with penult stress instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/audio.php?file=stigma03&amp;amp;word=stigmata&amp;amp;text=%5Cstig-%CB%88m%C3%A4-t%C9%99%2C%20%CB%88stig-m%C9%99-t%C9%99%5C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;stigmata&lt;/a&gt; (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/schema?q=schema&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;schemata&lt;/a&gt; (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Uranus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uranus&lt;/a&gt; (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uroboros/ouroboros (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;: /jʊərɵˈbɒrəs/, /ɔːˈrɒbɔrəs/; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ouroboros&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt;:  /uːˈrɒbəˌrɒs; ˌuːrəˈbɒrəs/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any linguistic explanation of this? Native English words don't seem to me to have a general preference for the penultimate syllable, but I may be wrong — please tell me if there's evidence for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem to me that for many English speakers, penult stress is the default for pronouncing &lt;em&gt;foreign&lt;/em&gt; words. For example, in the Anglicized pronunciation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japanese_origin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;words from Japanese&lt;/a&gt;, Japanese pitch-accent seems to be totally ignored, and penult stress is common (but not universal; see &amp;quot;samurai,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;tycoon,&amp;quot; and some pronunciations of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/haiku#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;haiku&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; for counterexamples). Has there been any linguistic research that confirms this idea? If so, do we have any idea of the conditions under which this tendency applies to the pronunciation of a word (does it depend on apparent language of origin, phonological structure, analogy to other specific English words with the same spelling) and how long it has been active historically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T20:51:46.870" Title="Irregular penultimate stress in English words from classical sources" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2015-10-07T00:10:14.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're wanting a term which will refer to the set of words which are related through current derivational processes and have a current shared meaning, then these related words could be said to be part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word family&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made from affixes (Hirsh &amp;amp; Nation 1992, p. 692).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you also want to include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;doublets&lt;/a&gt;, words in one language which share an etymological source but may not seem connected any more, such as, apparently, &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;glamour&lt;/em&gt;, then I'm not sure if &lt;em&gt;word family&lt;/em&gt; would be an appropriate term. All derived words, cognates and doublets are related and in a sense part of a family, but people might not think they would all be included when they think of a &lt;em&gt;word family&lt;/em&gt;. To be safe I'd recommend specifying if you are including cognates or doublets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T00:10:14.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2015-10-07T00:11:07.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't clear what you mean by &quot;derived from&quot;. For example &quot;father&quot; and &quot;paternal&quot; historically derive from the same root in proto-Indo European, but in English there is no derivational relationship between these words. Words that are related in that sense of &quot;derive from&quot; are referred to as &quot;cognates&quot; (e.g. &quot;these words are all cognate(s)&quot;). The term generally refers to related words across languages (so would include Sanskrit, German, Slavic and so on), but you can talk about the set of words in English that are cognates, thus &lt;em&gt;father, paternal&lt;/em&gt; but not πατηρ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of synchronic notions of &quot;derive from&quot;, where e.g. &quot;digging&quot; and &quot;digs&quot; are derived from the same stem, the term &quot;paradigm&quot; is used to cover the relationship, so the set of words morphologically derived from a given stem would be the paradigm of that stem. One can further subdivide paradigms into sub-types, like derivational vs. inflectional paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like you're talking about derivational paradigms. However, it is dubious that there is a synchronic relation between your specific examples – there isn't a clear rule-governed relation between the specific forms. There are a number of nouns derived from verbs that add -&lt;em&gt;ion&lt;/em&gt;, but the form and meaning of those words is too disparate to be subsumed under any rule (see for example rebel, rebellion; repel, repulsion; divide, division; unite, union; torque, torsion; cite, citation). We generally consider such sets of words to not be synchronically related. Which suggests that you are interested in historical relations, not synchronic morphological ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;cognate&quot; in historical linguistics generally refers to the entire set of words having a common source, so the set of English words that are in this cognate set would include &lt;em&gt;agent, agitate, agony, pedagogue, axiom&lt;/em&gt; and a number of other words. You could narrow down the set of words covered by the concept &quot;cognate&quot; by specifying for example &quot;coming from Latin&quot; or &quot;coming from the Latin past participle&quot;. There is no single term that would cover exactly the words that you are interested in, at least based on your examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T00:11:07.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14540" CreationDate="2015-10-07T00:57:12.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neuroscientists/neurolinguists don't typically use the term &quot;Merge&quot; (which comes with some theoretical baggage that they may or may not ascribe to), but there's definitely been some recent neuro work on combinatory linguistic operations. David Poeppel and Liina Pylkkaänen are researchers who come to mind. Some quick googling turned up the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073949&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073949&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the theoretical neurolinguistics side, there's the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/367/1598/1971.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/367/1598/1971.full.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the 3rd paragraph references the left inferior frontal gyrus as being involved in &quot;syntactic and semantic unification [...] real-time combinatorial operations&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.6.971#.VhRnlRNVhBc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.6.971#.VhRnlRNVhBc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from the abstract: &quot;Crucially, a significant interaction demonstrated that the sMMN specifically distinguished syntactic violations from common grammatical strings, but not uncommon from common grammatical word strings. This significant interaction argues in favor of a genuinely grammatical origin of the sMMN and &lt;strong&gt;provides direct neurophysiological evidence for a discrete combinatorial system for word and morpheme sequences in the human brain&lt;/strong&gt; (emph mine---fm). The data are more difficult to explain in the context of serial order models that map co-occurrence probabilities of words.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T00:57:12.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14569" CreationDate="2015-10-07T01:29:58.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarize, I don't know.  But the question seems a little fuzzy, to me.  Are you concerned with predicting how such words will be borrowed into English given their source forms, or is it about how English speakers (not necessarily the borrowers) will say them?  And are you just looking at the &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; of the English word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the SPE analysis, &quot;decorum&quot; could be assigned an underlying form with a tense penult, and &quot;exodus&quot; could be assigned an underlying form with a lax penult, and that would predict the correct stresses, on the penult and antepenult, respectively.  The fact that they are both &lt;em&gt;spelled&lt;/em&gt; with &quot;o&quot; in the penult is neither here nor there.  I don't know how they were borrowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tycoon&quot; and &quot;samurai&quot; aren't much like the other examples you're concerned with that have their last stress on the antepenult or penult, because these words have stress on their ultimate syllables, just as one would expect, since the ultimate syllables have tense vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T01:29:58.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14569" CreationDate="2015-10-07T01:38:52.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the examples you have given more closely. Surely, the key is that in the variants with antepenultimate stress, the penultimate vowel sound is reduced to a near-schwa or schwa sound.  Conversely, in the penultimate stress variants, the vowel will likely be Anglicized in a different way.  Note that in either pronunciation of &quot;Uranus&quot;, the &quot;a&quot; sounds nothing like a Latin a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, the general principle of the rule you cite is maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we initially hear foreign words, we will naturally try to approximate the pronunciation.  There is no good reason why variant pronunciations of foreign-origin words shouldn't exist, especially when English pronunciation itself is so varied - no doubt influencing the pronunciation of the foreign word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1581" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T01:38:52.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14587" CreationDate="2015-10-07T12:29:23.423" Score="6" ViewCount="4250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed many Indians choose to abbreviate their names when they are in a foreign country because it's difficult for foreigners to pronounce them, especially if they are longer. &#xA;So when an Indian meets an American, he doesn't go by his full official name, just a short form.&#xA;Example: Raj, from Rajendra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this only for the foreigners, or do Indians also do that in their home country (in modern times) like in English there is Dan from Daniel and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How are they formed? Is it the first syllable or does it depends on the name? I would appreciate some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this a trend or just an isolated case?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I know that in India there are multiple spoken languages like Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil. Please let me know if it depends on the spoken language or regional traditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10621" LastEditorUserId="10621" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T14:41:31.537" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:55:51.533" Title="How do Indian short form of names work in the USA?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2015-10-07T14:57:07.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the European linguistic tradition, the term &lt;strong&gt;word family&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;morphological family&lt;/strong&gt;) is the most common way to refer to a group of words having the same root (e.g. Booij 2007: 4, Haspelmath and Sims 2010: 17), cf. Bauer 2004, &lt;em&gt;A glossary of morphology&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word-family&lt;/strong&gt;: A word-family is a set of lexemes derived from the same base. &lt;em&gt;Father, fatherly, fatherhood, fatherland, godfather&lt;/em&gt; are all members of the word-family based round &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dressler and Ladanyi 2000 argue there is a difference between &lt;strong&gt;a word-formation nest&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;all synchronic and morphosemantically identifiable derivations from the same base&quot;) and  &lt;strong&gt;a word family&lt;/strong&gt; (both synchronic and diachronic derivations). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also the most usual term in language acquisition studies (see curiousdannii's post above with a quote from Paul Nation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less common terms: derivational family, lexeme family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T02:02:27.353" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T02:02:27.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-07T17:22:06.227" Score="2" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for negation detection software or libraries. Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X are all OK. Any price and license is good too. I am mostly interested in the quality of the detection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ctakes.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache cTAKES&lt;/a&gt; (Java, Apache License 2.0), which contains two negation detection modules, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CTAKES/cTAKES+3.0+-+NE+Contexts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NE Contexts&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CTAKES/cTAKES+3.0+-+Assertion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Assertion&lt;/a&gt;, but the negation detection is not always accurate so I am looking for alternatives, and cTAKES is not always very convenient to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyConTextNLP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pyConTextNLP&lt;/a&gt; (Python package) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/chapmanbe/pyConTextNLP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub repository&lt;/a&gt;), but the package seems to be not so well documented and mostly in beta phase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/negex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NegEx&lt;/a&gt; package (Java, Apache License 2.0) but it focuses on clinical conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T17:33:42.757" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T22:40:18.053" Title="Negation detection software" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5894" CreationDate="2015-10-07T21:11:19.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voodoo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;vodou&lt;/em&gt; in Haitian French Creole, is derived from Fon/Ewe &lt;em&gt;vodun&lt;/em&gt; 'spirit' (pronounced [vodṹ]). As with other chance resemblances, the more you look into the etymology of both words, the less resemblance there turns out to actually be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another word that can mistakenly be taken to be related is &lt;em&gt;juju&lt;/em&gt; [ǰu:ǰu:], from the Hausa word for 'fetish'. As Fon and Ewe are Niger-Congo languages, and Hausa is Afroasiatic, these words could only be related to each other by borrowing, and this seems unlikely. Juju certainly has no relationship, by borrowing or otherwise, to &lt;em&gt;jadoo.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10583" LastEditorUserId="10583" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T14:24:16.583" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T14:24:16.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14589" CreationDate="2015-10-07T23:58:21.820" Score="2" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Y08-1034&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; paper I came across term &quot;surface expression&quot;. What does it mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10625" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T08:38:23.367" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T08:38:23.367" Title="Meaning of surface expressions" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14580" CreationDate="2015-10-08T00:08:02.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surface expression = surface form = input form = the token as it appeared in the text (no stemming, no lemmatization, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the tokens &lt;em&gt;sang&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sung&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;sings&lt;/em&gt; are all surface expressions of the verb &lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R6heE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R6heE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Figure from Martin, James H., and Daniel Jurafsky. &quot;Speech and language processing.&quot; 2nd Edition (2008))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T00:08:02.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-08T00:48:43.340" Score="2" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this isn't considered off topic. Are there any audio-video works of art or linguistics that have highly accurate (based on our best reconstructions) depictions of Classical Latin speech in terms of pronunciation and prosody?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T07:45:36.823" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T07:45:36.823" Title="The Sound of Latin" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14540" CreationDate="2015-10-08T00:57:20.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many aspects of cognition lack neurobiological evidence - consciousness for instance. Now if Cartesian duality is correct (and given its formidable presence in the history of philosophy, it's not a totally insane possibility), it follows  that human cognition will never be completely understood within any biological framework. The language faculty can then be one of the 'magical' aspects of cognition, in which case, biological inquiry will be useless. However, this does not preclude the notion that the language faculty employs computational mechanisms like Merge. In light of such possibilities, the computational approach to the language faculty, namely that sentences are formed via Merge, is correct to the extent that we can successfully account for natural language syntax with Merge along with the other assumptions of the minimalist program (e.g. The Strong Minimalist Thesis). I would say that Merge has been very successful in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it's possible that neurolinguistic research will one day provide a more illuminating account of the language faculty. For instance, perhaps Merge can be localized to Broca's or Wernicke's area. Or as an extreme case, perhaps the language faculty doesn't exist at all, and by extension neither does Merge. That language is nothing more than the result of domain general cognitive processes is a view held by many (e.g. Lakoff and most functionalists). My personal view is that the current generative approach will be vindicated when generative ideas are used to solve the central problem of AI. Once we create robots that speak indistinguishably from humans, using such hated principles of Universal Grammar, generativism's detractors will be at a loss of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="9616" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T21:23:33.060" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T21:23:33.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-08T01:20:32.910" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for data sets that I could use to train and benchmark negation detection systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T01:25:59.900" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T02:02:12.090" Title="Benchmark data sets for negation detection systems" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14582" CreationDate="2015-10-08T01:40:50.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin&lt;/em&gt; by W.Sydney Allen is probably what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T01:40:50.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14590" CreationDate="2015-10-08T02:15:26.637" Score="9" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know people have created languages like Esperanto or Ido to make languages that have desired characteristics. Obviously then people have spent a lot of time creating these languages from the ground up, but has anyone modified an existing language like English by creating a new accent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something with constructed dialect that would make any native listener have no idea where the speaker is from? And do these accents give rise to new uses of preexisting languages like English? Maybe this is done through new grammatical structures or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help, I hope this has been a constructive first post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10626" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T00:16:37.010" Title="We have constructed languages, but are there constructed accents?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14576" CreationDate="2015-10-08T05:48:54.920" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long Indian names are indeed shortened for informal/semi formal  usage in India too. It is typically shortened to the first two syllables. For example Venkataraghavan usually becomes Venkat and in the example you used Raj for Rajendra. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Male names which are thus shortened could be used for semi-formal usage too. Female names are shortened to form nicknames and are not common in formal or semi-formal usage. Eg: Sushmitha could become Sush for casual usage and Nazneen could become Naz. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the first names being shortened, last names are compressed to their initials. This is common for even official usage in many parts of southern India. So, Praveen Ramesh Jalahalli is almost always Praveen R J for most of his life and is referred to on many government documents including his drivers license (except on the passport where people expand the initials). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some parts of Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, it is common for male names to be affectionately shortened to 1.5-2 syllables with a 'ya' suffixed at the end. Eg: Rajendra's friends might  call him 'Rajya'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names ending with a half syllable are often suffixed with a 'u' or 'a'. Eg: Shiv could be Shivu or Shiva in many parts of the country. This is common in languages like Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu which do not often end proper nouns with half syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10627" LastEditorUserId="10627" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T06:04:41.047" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T06:04:41.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14591" CreationDate="2015-10-08T08:09:58.517" Score="5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about dialectal terms. Say that someone consistently uses a dialect of English fluently but, for whatever reason, says something that native speakers wouldn't normally say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This came to my mind when (of all things) I was watching &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/DWe0RZaBvVk?t=654&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a video of Markiplier&lt;/a&gt; and he said this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AH! I didn't say shoot yourself! ...Did you just &lt;strong&gt;shot&lt;/strong&gt; yourself?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any assistance, and sorry if I somehow overlooked a pre-existing question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10629" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T01:51:20.207" Title="Is there a term for errors by native speakers?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14580" CreationDate="2015-10-08T08:18:11.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surface expression basically means the form you see. It is the result of applying a rule to some (hypothetical) underlying form of a word (or phrase). So the deep structure would be something like 'dog+plural' and the surface form of that would be 'dogs' or 'I+direct object' and 'me'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is largely used in generative contexts and even then only historically since the original deep vs. surface structure distinction has been mostly abandoned. It can be a useful shortcut when talking about the results of rules but few people believe that there is actually any such thing as deep structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T08:18:11.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14586" CreationDate="2015-10-08T08:32:16.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most famous is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nadsat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, created by Anthony Burgess for the novel &quot;A clockwork orange&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a common artificial argot used in English literature spoken by uneducated people or criminals. It has a name, but I have forgotten it and therefore don't have a handy handle to it. Characteristic for it are left out consonants (th, r) replaced by apostrophes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Found the word I was looking for: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect&quot;&gt;Eye dialect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T14:09:14.753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T14:09:14.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14588" CreationDate="2015-10-08T08:44:02.833" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no universally accepted term. How you describe such a thing depends on context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in second language acquisition people differentiate between &lt;strong&gt;error&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;mistake&lt;/strong&gt; the first being a sign of a systematic lack of competence in a particular  area whereas the latter is just an accident that does not signify anything about the speaker's ability to produce a given form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other contexts, people talk about &lt;strong&gt;slips of the tongue&lt;/strong&gt; to indicate the accidental nature of these incidents. (This would probably describe your example). However, it turns out that these 'slips' can be quite systematic among native speakers, particularly when it comes to agreement and tense. Some terms to describe these things include &lt;strong&gt;zeugma&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;anakoluthon&lt;/strong&gt; (although the latter is not used in English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mistakes/slips also often occur where there are similar expressions that get blended in the speaker's/hearer's mind. There's a whole  traditional classification of such misspoken expressions that includes terms like &lt;strong&gt;malapropism&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;spooonersim&lt;/strong&gt;,  &lt;strong&gt;eggcorn&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;mondegreen&lt;/strong&gt;, or the recently coined  &lt;strong&gt;crash blossom&lt;/strong&gt;. All of these have detailed Wikipedia entries if you want to find out more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T08:44:02.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14586" CreationDate="2015-10-08T08:54:02.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sense, the national language standards of all languages could be said to be 'constructed' (to different degrees). They tend to be more artificial than other dialects and accents, and their histories can often be traced to some more or less purposeful efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also seem to broaden the definition of accent to dialect which includes grammatical forms. In this case, the 'standard Czech' was 'constructed' in the 19th century. And it's not particularly unique. The rationale behind it was not that dissimilar from constructed languages like Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there's a whole class of constructed languages in the entertainment context like Dothraki or Klingon and with these you'd find constructed accents as well. Joss Whedon's Firefly comes to mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T08:54:02.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14540" CreationDate="2015-10-08T10:10:04.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's any direct evidence for Merge at the moment. However there's evidence for lack of any human-like combinatorial operations in non-human species (so far birds and chimpanzees are tested). &lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This particular paper&lt;/a&gt; tackles recursion in non-human species, you might want to give it a read. They don't use the word Merge, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also bear in mind that Merge itself is not a small thing in our brains that literally takes two objects and combines them. Rather it is a convenient set-theoretical notion to bring clarity in how sentences might be generated (think of it as a function of some sort, if you're familiar with maths). No one argues there's a biological object that allows us to add or multiply numbers for example, yet it is obvious that anyone is capable of that. No one argues that there are visible orbits of planets, yet orbits are there - we can infer that from observing movements and positions of planets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why shouldn't we consider Merge a domain-general capability is yet another, difficult question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T10:10:04.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1871" CreationDate="2015-10-08T12:13:07.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chrome/Chromium uses the open-source &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CLD2Owners/cld2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Compact Language Detector&lt;/a&gt;.  You could use it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not work perfectly, as it is mainly designed to be compact (small, and fully local - no calls to the network), but Google and Chrome are behind it, and it is improving.  It even runs on Chrome for Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for your needs, it may be a good fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in my experience, the right language detection behaviour depends highly on your actual application.  Perhaps you can tell us how you intend to use it?  (Will the strings you pass be pages/sentences/queries/words?  Will it be clean data?  Will there be mixed language input?  Do you care more about accuracy or recall?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T12:13:07.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14597" CreationDate="2015-10-08T14:43:15.213" Score="3" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;In biology &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;humans&lt;/a&gt; belong to the kingdom of animalia and the phylum chordata.&#xA;Every organism that belongs to chordata belongs also to animalia but not the other way around. Animalia is a hypernym of chordata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it doesn't feel like kingdom is a hypernym of phylum. Is there a word for the relationship between the concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T15:03:05.210" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T15:17:03.690" Title="What is the lexical relationship between 'kingdom' and 'phylum'?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14596" CreationDate="2015-10-08T15:17:03.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Kingdom&quot; a higher taxonomic level, higher than &quot;phylum&quot;. &#xA;You can probably say &quot;superlevel&quot;, if you desperately need it in one word, but I would rather say &quot;higher level in the hierarchy/taxonomy/classification&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5696" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T15:17:03.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2015-10-08T23:17:16.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Petrov, Slav, Dipanjan Das, and Ryan McDonald. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2830784708707681209&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A universal part-of-speech tagset.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.2086 (2011).&lt;/em&gt; contains an interesting comparison of the number of tags between different annotated data sets in different languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eVOjT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eVOjT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of tags depends on how much fine-grained the annotations are intended to be, as well as the language itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appendix contains a proposed mappings from language-specific part-of-speech tags to our universal part-of-speech tags. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UvA7b.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UvA7b.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iZ7Jx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iZ7Jx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T23:17:16.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-08T23:56:52.107" Score="0" ViewCount="2492" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, adding -ly to quick to make quickly.&#xA;Or adding -ly to gentleman to make gentlemanly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10637" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T06:54:26.927" Title="Does adding the suffix -ly to a noun or an adjective provide morphological evidence for word class?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14586" CreationDate="2015-10-09T00:16:37.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, the accent with which the narrator speaks in Frank Zappa's rock opera &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-Fish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thing-Fish&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is an example of a constructed English accent/dialect. Correct me, if I'm wrong, and that's a real dialect spoken somewhere, but I've never heard anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator says ['lembəˌtɔːriːz] for 'laboratories', ['pouʃəm] and [sə'luʃəm] for 'potion' and 'solution', [ˈgʌbnɪnt] for 'government', ['boɪdən] for 'burden', [mu'zɪʃnɪnz] for 'musicians', [rə'lɪdʒməs] for 'religious', and ['ʙɔːdweɪ] for 'Broadway' ([ʙ] is a voiced bilabial trill). Also, every [ð] is [d] and every [θ] is [t], there are also some grammar deviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is, the narrator begins speaking from the very first seconds: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfD2_tXiXeo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfD2_tXiXeo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T00:16:37.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14588" CreationDate="2015-10-09T01:51:20.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cacography&lt;/a&gt; is deliberate misspelling intended to convey humorous sense or just exaggerating someone's illiteracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sensational spelling&lt;/a&gt;. It has similar effect, but using literate, but rare or dialectal spelling of a word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(sorry for essentially copy-pasting &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/99/27&quot;&gt;my own answer&lt;/a&gt; at ELL.SE)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T01:51:20.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14600" CreationDate="2015-10-09T01:51:42.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; can be affixed to nouns (gentlemanly, friendly, ghostly, spritely) and adjectives (unlikely, quickly, heavily, lightly), but not to verbs, then it isn't much use as a diagnostic of word class. It also doesn't doesn't combine with &quot;house&quot; or &quot;yellow&quot;, so in case you were looking for an argument than &quot;run&quot; is a verb, the fact that you don't get *runly isn't even proof that run is a verb, since there are also simple gaps in what nouns and adjectives combine with -&lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T01:51:42.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-09T02:27:28.480" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Got this $5 bill stamped with a message in a language I cannot identify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/GYf0wkF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;note&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10638" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-10-09T05:03:45.760" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T00:41:28.697" Title="Help identify unknown language" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-05-07T13:09:19.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14604" CreationDate="2015-10-09T02:39:59.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a Buddhist mantra &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_mani_padme_hum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Om mani padme hum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Sanskrit written in the Tibetan script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NND9g.png&quot; width=&quot;200&quot;&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T02:39:59.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-09T04:58:28.760" Score="12" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one &quot;FLEECE&quot; set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read about the basics of the &quot;MEET-MEAT&quot; merger, but apparently the situation is more complicated than I understood and involves a greater number of lexical sets than just two. Furthermore, the orthography does not always indicate which lexical set a word belongs/belonged to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_front_vowels#Fleece_merger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;meet-meat&quot; merger&lt;/a&gt; actually has acted on the the following, originally distinct, lexical sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In accents with the distinction, the vowel /ɪə/ is usually represented&#xA;  by the spellings ea and eCe, as in neat and complete, and the vowel&#xA;  /ɛɪ/ is usually represented by the spellings ei and ey, as in receive&#xA;  and key, and the vowel /iː/ is usually represented by the spellings&#xA;  ee, ie and iCe as in feet, thief and suite, as well as plain e in the&#xA;  monosyllabic words be, he, me, she, the (when stressed), we and ye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to Wikipedia, some dialects make, or at least made, distinctions that overall require at least &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; lexical sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FEET&lt;/strong&gt; /iː/: mostly from Middle English monophthongal /eː/ (which in turn mostly corresponds to the Old English long monophthong /ē/); sometimes corresponds to orthographic &amp;lt;ie&amp;gt; for reasons unclear to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;ee&amp;gt; (&lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;ie&amp;gt; (&lt;em&gt;thief&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;, apparently in recent-ish borrowings from foreign languages (&lt;em&gt;suite&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TEAM~CREAM&lt;/strong&gt; /ɪə/: from vowels in English and French that originally had a lower vowel quality, but were still long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English long diphthong /ēa/ (&lt;em&gt;team&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English long monophthong /ǣ/ (apparently, if spelling is an accurate guide)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French /ɛ/, which seems to have been lengthened as a rule when taken into English (&lt;em&gt;cream&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EAT&lt;/strong&gt; /ɛɪ/: from original short /e/ lengthened by Middle English open syllable lengthening&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English short vowel /e/ subsequently lengthened in an open syllable (&lt;em&gt;meat, eat&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently distinguishing CREAM and EAT is rare; most dialects (and the orthography) have merged the above two categories into a single MEAT lexical set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;KEY~RECEIVE&lt;/strong&gt; /ɛɪ/: from /ɛɪ/ diphthongs, apparently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from Old English /ǣġ/ (&lt;em&gt;key&lt;/em&gt;) (possibly irregular development?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from /ɛɪ/ diphthong in French/Norman (&lt;em&gt;receive&lt;/em&gt; and similar words)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is very unclear about which dialects have this as a distinct lexical set, and how dialects that don't merge it with other lexical sets.&#xA;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/yorkshire_dialect_and_accent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Heritage Encyclopedia entry&lt;/a&gt; hosted by Project Gutenberg suggests that for (at least some) Yorkshire accents, KEY is actually not a distinct lexical set from EAT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[eɪ] may take the place of /iː/, especially in words such as key,&#xA;  meat, speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the Wikipedia article didn't completely explain the historical development or the synchronic distribution of forms in different dialects, so I was wondering if anyone is more familiar with this topic (or knows how I can access more detailed data about the pronunciation of different words in non-merged dialects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is: in dialects that generally don't exhibit a complete FLEECE merger, are there any &lt;strong&gt;neutralizations&lt;/strong&gt; between the various lexical sets in particular environments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular example I've been wondering about: does anybody know which lexical set the stressed vowels in words like &lt;em&gt;id&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ur&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;diarrh(o)&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; belongs (or belonged) to for non-merged speakers? That is, a phonetically lengthened, but orthographically single &amp;lt;e&amp;gt; located before another vowel in a Latinate word. (I have not heard of any English dialects that have a general distinction between &amp;lt;e&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;ae&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;oe&amp;gt; in words derived from Latin, so I'd assume the same pronunciation patterns apply to these digraphs as for the single letter.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the vowel here seems to be lengthened, not originally long, I would guess it to be in the EAT set. But I also thought that perhaps learned words like this might tend to be influenced by the pronunciation used in &quot;standard&quot; dialects, which tend to have a complete merger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wondered because in Received Pronunciation, FLEECE  when followed by a schwa behaves in a special way: it may be &quot;smoothed&quot; into a centering diphthong /ɪə̯/ (lexical set NEAR). I get the impression that smoothing of a vowel-schwa sequence to a diphthong is even more common for the unstressed happY vowel followed by schwa, as in the word &lt;em&gt;arbor&lt;strong&gt;ea&lt;/strong&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another situation where vowel reduction (and neutralization of contrasts) seems likely to me is in words like &lt;em&gt;cr&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt;, where the vowel is unstressed and comes directly before a stressed vowel (in Received Pronunciation, &quot;create&quot; has the &quot;happY&quot; vowel /ɪ/). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I have more questions about non-merged dialects, but I think that should be enough for now; I'll wait first to see if anyone can help me with this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T08:42:51.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T08:42:51.950" Title="Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14600" CreationDate="2015-10-09T06:54:26.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not provide evidence but it certainly narrows thing down. -ly attaches to nouns and adjectives. It tends to turn nouns into adjectives coward &gt; cowardly, gentleman &gt; gentlemanly and adjectives into adverbs quick &gt; quickly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are exceptions such as like &gt; likely - here it is hard to determine whether like is a verb, noun or adjective but 'likely' is itself an adjective. Of course, due to the flexibility of English in its use of different word classes in other contexts, adjectives are often used as nouns. For instance,  'daily' which is often used as a noun when referring to newspapers or 'elderly' in 'take care of the elderly' or 'friendly' as in 'they played a friendly at Wimbledom'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are also many words that end in '-ly' where it does not indicate a suffix 'family', 'monopoly', 'Italy', 'monopoly'. Or it's not clear on the surface if it's a suffix, such as 'assembly' or it's definitely not a suffix but it looks like one as in 'folly'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to find out more is to go to a corpus and search for -ly on words with different parts of speech. Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BNC&lt;/a&gt; with search terms such as &lt;code&gt;*ly.[n*], *ly.[j*], *ly.[r*]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T06:54:26.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-09T07:49:11.743" Score="8" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone grows up bilingually (say, a Mexican-American who's a native speaker of both English and Spanish), and they learn a third language (say, Mandarin), what accent will they speak it with? (Or maybe it varies depending on the speaker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10635" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T14:49:48.970" Title="If someone grows up bilingually, with what accent will they speak a third language they learn as an adult?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14609" CreationDate="2015-10-09T10:12:45.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having an accent while speaking a foreign language is just applying the phonetics of the native language to the new one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I would assume that in a situation when a bilingual speaker is equally fluent in both his native languages, the phonetic system which is going to be applied depends on the language he uses more often. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is just my personal guess, feel free to criticise it with some references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T10:12:45.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14609" CreationDate="2015-10-09T14:49:48.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other poster indicated, accent is the application of native phonology to another language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if someone grows up speaking two languages, they would necessarily have less of an accent than someone who speaks just one language. Two languages necessarily have a larger phoneme inventory than just one, which means the speaker has more native phonemes to choose from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The perfect example is from Portuguese. In my experience monolingual Spanish speakers have a really hard time pronouncing European Portuguese sounds, particularly the reduced vowels and opened variations of E and O. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas English speakers have trouble pronouncing rolled R and reduced consonants such as the approximates of B, V and D. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, students who grew up speaking Spanish and English do wonderfully learning the Lisbon variant of Portuguese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Mandarin, from what I've heard the Chinese usually classify foreigners differently. Since that language is so unrelated to Spanish and English, typically they just say someone had a Western accent, which it is usually not easy to determine the origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T14:49:48.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-09T16:10:47.967" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;My confusion with these two terms comes from the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when the required target language item is unknown and the learner &lt;strong&gt;borrows&lt;/strong&gt; an L1 substitute, the consequence is an L1 transfer error, but when the learner knows the target language item but fails to access it, and instead &lt;strong&gt;accesses&lt;/strong&gt; an L1 substitute, we have a case of an L1 interference mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then searched online and found that &quot;borrow&quot; implies that a L1 item will be used in a target language situation without any change to the item. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still feel confused with the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10639" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T17:16:26.383" Title="What makes a difference to the meaning of the text with &quot;borrow&quot; and &quot;access&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14612" CreationDate="2015-10-09T17:16:26.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with most terminology, these terms are used in different ways by different authors. But judging from this particular passage, I gather that this author uses &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;borrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for when the speaker only has an L1 version of a word and deliberately uses it as a suboptimal substitute for the target word. The author uses &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;access&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; when the speaker knows the target language (L2) version of the word but inadvertently uses the L1 word instead (presumably because L1 &quot;rolls off the tongue&quot; more easily).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogy: The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;borrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; case would be if you needed to hammer a nail but all you had in your toolbox was a screwdriver, so you deliberately grabbed the screwdriver and used it to bang on the nail (not its intended purpose). The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;access&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; case would be if you had both a screwdriver and a hammer in your toolbox but you were working too quickly and so you accidentally grabbed the screwdriver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T17:16:26.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14582" CreationDate="2015-10-10T00:38:01.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;em&gt;Vox Latina&lt;/em&gt;, Edgar Sturtevant's &lt;em&gt;The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin&lt;/em&gt; is also helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T00:38:01.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-10T06:07:59.970" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;When running cTAKES on several text documents, is there any way to perform the processing using all the cores available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. it is taking around one day to process 2000 of my documents, as it is running on one core only by default, while I have a few cores idling around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TIk9i.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TIk9i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T06:07:59.970" Title="Running cTAKES using all cores available" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;ctakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14623" CreationDate="2015-10-10T09:22:04.290" Score="1" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gwJHuEa9Jc&amp;amp;ab_channel=TED-Ed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; and realised that all mentioned Old English plurals sound pretty natural for me, even though I'm native Czech speaker. Also in German I think inflection seems to follow some universal model. For instance, female form you create by adding -&lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;. But for example word &lt;em&gt;Hündin&lt;/em&gt; ( [hʏndin] - female dog) is an exception which I think relates to the meaning much more than [hundin] would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this caused by? Is the more open vowel in plural/female form common also for Asian or tribal languages or is it ingrained just in the Indo-European ones? Or am I just influenced by the life in Western culture (or used to the correct forms)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T20:55:52.580" Title="Why does inflection in any language sound so natural?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-11T11:43:17.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-10T09:47:51.950" Score="2" ViewCount="2709" Body="&lt;p&gt;If so, is there seen some relation (origin in the Proto-Human language), or did these phrases arose independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2015-10-10T16:11:49.167" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T08:46:08.467" Title="Is there any language which doesn't have &quot;hello&quot;, &quot;thank you&quot; or &quot;please&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;proto-world&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-13T13:16:55.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14617" CreationDate="2015-10-10T13:40:13.233" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only language that has &quot;hello&quot;, &quot;please&quot; and &quot;thank you&quot; is English. Other languages might have other words that they use in somewhat similar circumstances, but I don't think any language has an expression that is used in all of the places that we use &quot;thank you&quot;. Indeed, Americans and Brits don't use &quot;thank you&quot; in exactly the same way (they say &quot;Cheers&quot; in a lot of contexts). Likewise with &quot;hello&quot; and &quot;thank you&quot;, there isn't one fixed expression that is used on the phone and when encountering person on the street in any other culture that I know of, and useage of &quot;hello&quot; is not even uniform in US culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T13:40:13.233" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14622" CreationDate="2015-10-10T13:56:57.513" Score="5" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about the ending -sk(+ optionally an additional vowel) used to create adjectives from names of the nations in Nordic (at least Danish and Swedish) as well as some Slavic languages (at least Polish and Croatian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example (the following lines are in format: English: Danish, Swedish, Croatian, Polish):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish: Dan&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;, Dan&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a, Dan&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*, Duń&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish: Pol&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;, Pol&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a, Polj&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*, Pol&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: Engel&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;, Engel&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a, Engle&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*, Angiel&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;[i/a]*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* -i - masculine form, -a - feminine form. Not to add irrelevant details I didn't mention suffixes for neuter and plural forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't know about the other languages but in Polish -sk[i/a] is used also for some other adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;król (king) -&gt; królew&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/królew&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a (royal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;papież (pope) -&gt; papie&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/papie&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a (papal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zielarz (herbalist) -&gt; zielar&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/zielar&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a (herbal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;niebo (sky) -&gt; niebie&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/niebie&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a (blue)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many surnames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kowal (blacksmith) -&gt; Kowal&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/Kowal&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a (the most popular Polish surname)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jabłoń (apple-tree) -&gt; Jabłoń&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/Jabłoń&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wiśnia (cherry) -&gt; Wiśniew&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;i/Wiśniew&lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it something Proto-Indo-European, or it's just a coincidence? If it's a coincidence, how did it appear in Nordic languages? (If I'm not mistaken -ski ending was used already in Proto-Slavic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T17:56:10.760" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T17:56:10.760" Title="Suffix -sk[a/i] for adjectives derrived from nations in Nordic and some Slavic languages" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14616" CreationDate="2015-10-10T14:32:37.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's just some misconception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arbitrariness of sound-meaning correspondence is one of the most uncontroversial things in linguistics. There isn't anything 'natural' about the form in the language, these are purely formal aspects of sound and its mapping to meaning. Nor is there anything universal about the (phonological) form of inflectional morphology in the languages of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there will be intra-family similarities. But whatever reasons are for your intuition that the sound of some suffix (or ablaut) 'makes sense' for its meaning, it is but illusory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is also &lt;em&gt;phonosemantics&lt;/em&gt;, which is about how certain phonological shapes have a certain 'feel' to them, but that's a different story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T14:32:37.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14616" CreationDate="2015-10-10T15:51:35.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Hund” ~ “Hündin” is like “Mann” ~ “Männer”, or, in English, “man” ~ “men”. These all illustrate what is called “Umlaut”, the fronting of the stem vowel before a suffix with a front vowel. There is nothing “natural” about it. It is however a wide-spread phenomenon in the Germanic branch of Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T15:51:35.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14619" CreationDate="2015-10-10T17:07:15.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The suffix *-isk- is Indo-European. It has offspring in Greek, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, and also in Romance, where it seems to be borrowed from Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T17:07:15.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14616" CreationDate="2015-10-10T20:55:11.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answers have pointed out, &quot;natural&quot; is not a category that is used in linguistics. However, there is a cross-linguistic tendency for plurals to be formed by the addition of a morpheme to the singular - i.e. plurals tend to be longer than singulars. Apart from that, as a Czech speaker you might find some plural forms in other Indo-European languages familiar because they have similarities that go back to the earliest form of Indo-European (proto Indo-European). Also, the umlaut/ablaut pattern to form plurals is shared by (some) Germanic languages, i.e. 'Mann' ~ 'Männer', 'man' ~ 'men'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T20:55:11.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-11T10:56:40.263" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elin is supposed to mean &quot;Woman of Intelligence&quot; in Sanskrit see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Elin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Elin&lt;/a&gt;. However, I was not able to verify this independently in Sanskrit dictionaries on the web or on google books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also does it make a difference if it is spelled Elin or Elyn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be off-topic but I would appreciate it if somebody could take the time to answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10646" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-10-11T14:07:03.660" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T22:04:46.077" Title="Meaning of &quot;Elin&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-11T18:53:21.757" Score="3" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an application to teach English to people. In this application I need to classify texts based on many factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the current knowledge the learner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is his/her interests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How difficult the text is in general&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How difficult the text is for him/her&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 and 2 are done. Yet I'm stuck at level 3. I can't figure out a way to determine the complexity of a given text. I Googled around and found some links. But they're not sufficient and usually are not written in plain English, or not intended for algorithmic needs (mostly suited for humans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also tried to create a simple algorithm myself. It works but it's far from accurate. My algorithm uses PoS tags, word frequencies in a reference Corpus, length of sentences, length of paragraphs, and some other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while sentences like &lt;em&gt;to be, or not to be&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;everything becomes, nothing is&lt;/em&gt; are classified as simple, they are really hard to understand by a layman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we have a well-known approach on estimating and quantifying a given text's complexity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T10:50:21.727" Title="How to find a given text's complexity?" Tags="&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14625" CreationDate="2015-10-11T22:47:34.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A complex constituent embedded in the middle of a larger constituent is difficult to understand.  Ross discussed this in his dissertation &lt;strong&gt;Infinite Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; (publication title) and offered some tentative suggestions about what makes a constituent complex.  McCawley also covers this in his text &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, and gives this example, among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary said that she was tired to John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is only marginally acceptable, since &quot;that she was tired&quot; is complex and is embedded in the middle of the verb phrase &quot;said ... to John&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even before Ross's treatment, Victor Yngve in a study &quot;A Model and an Hypothesis for Language Structure&quot; proposed that (roughly, as I recall it) a large degree of left branching in a construction made it more difficult to process.  Yngve's idea has not been popular; still, it was interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-10-11T23:07:46.217" LastActivityDate="2015-10-11T23:07:46.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-12T03:45:16.860" Score="10" ViewCount="1147" Body="&lt;p&gt;In analyses of Russian, there's a dispute about whether the vowels /ɨ/ and /i/ (typically represented in the orthography as &amp;quot;ы&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;и&amp;quot;, respectively) are separate phonemes, or if [ɨ] is an allophone of /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quoting Wikipedia,&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The five-vowel analysis, taken up by the Moscow school, rests on the complementary distribution of [ɨ] and [i], with the former occurring after hard (non-palatalized) consonants and [i] elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The six-vowel view, held by the Saint-Petersburg (Leningrad) phonology school, points to several phenomena to make its case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Native Russian speakers' ability to articulate [ɨ] in isolation (for example, in the names of respective letters, ⟨и⟩ and ⟨ы⟩),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rare instances of word-initial [ɨ] (including the minimal pair икать 'to produce the sound и' and ыкать 'to produce the sound ы'), as well as borrowed names and toponyms, like Ыб About this sound [ɨp], the name of a river and several villages in the Komi Republic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphological alternations like готов [ɡɐˈtof] ('ready' predicate, m.) and готовить sound [ɡɐˈtovʲɪtʲ] ('to get ready' trans.) between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most popular view among linguists (and that taken up in this article) is that of the Moscow school, though Russian pedagogy has typically taught that there are six vowels (the term phoneme is not used)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and second arguments for the Saint-Petersburg school don't seem particularly compelling to me, since they could easily be artifacts of Russian pedagogy that would be expected if the orthography distinguishes sounds that are actually allophones. I'm not sure I fully understand the third argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But absent from these arguments is any mention of minimal pairs like быть (/bɨtʲ/ &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot;) and бить (/bitʲ/ &amp;quot;to beat&amp;quot;) or мыло (/mɨlə/ &amp;quot;soap&amp;quot;) and мило (/milə/ &amp;quot;cute&amp;quot;). Is there something I'm missing? Why wouldn't these examples indicate that /ɨ/ and /i/ are separate phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T07:33:59.870" Title="Why don't minimal pairs like &quot;быть&quot; and &quot;бить&quot; prove that /ɨ/ and /i/ are separate phonemes in Russian?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14629" CreationDate="2015-10-12T05:42:05.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because they are not minimal pairs. They differ in a consonant. The &quot;бить&quot; has soft б while &quot;быть&quot; has hard б.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T05:42:05.000" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-12T07:07:47.653" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a X-bar theory test soon but unfortunately I don't got access for the answers for questions I did. Can anyone check and tell me if I'm doing right, because I'm confused with complement/adjunct when it comes to prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSR:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/pCSZo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://imgur.com/a/pCSZo&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My work:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://imgur.com/a/HiLQY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://imgur.com/a/HiLQY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: 'his nose up in the air' is supposed to be an idiom, so is 'up in the air' still an adjunct?&#xA;Question 2: Are 'about the Avengers' and 'with no real substances' adjuncts?&#xA;Question 3: I don't know if 'about the outcome ........' is an adjunct. What about 'in France'?&#xA;Question 4: Is 'in fright' an adjunct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully someone can tell me if I'm doing them right, and any mistake that I have made with my trees... Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10649" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T07:07:47.653" Title="X-bar theory and Trees questions! Complement vs adjunct" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-13T11:18:26.600" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14625" CreationDate="2015-10-12T10:50:21.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. There are a number of well-known algorithms for determining a text's complexity. There are several generations of these and most of them are tied to educational attainment such as years of education, education level studied or age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are very much replicable across populations but they do not do a very good job for determining suitability to an individual and/or very short texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the algorithms take proxies for semantic and syntactic complexities in the length of words and sentences. They do not look at phonic complexity - which may have to do with things like consonant clusters, etc. but would require more work. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on Readability&lt;/a&gt; does a good job of summarizing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first generation of these algorithms peaked in the 1960s and 70s and they have been built into many mainstream tools such as Microsoft Word and little free tools can be found online. Since the late 1990s, there have been some efforts in second generation products - see a &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.renaissance.com/research/436.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;review by Renlearn&lt;/a&gt; (which is a commercial actor in this field so keep that in mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lesson is that you cannot really just make up an algorithm without testing it against readers - and that adding factors to the measure does not necessarily improve reliability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things get even more difficult when you try to personalize the measure. You need to know a lot about the user - with beginner or struggling readers, it's their phonic skills which is something we've tried to achieve in our work on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280147388_Building_a_Phonics_Engine_for_Automated_Text_Guidance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonics Engine&lt;/a&gt; but then you need a way to really understand the text at the phonic level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to take into account the reader's interests because if they love dinosaurs a word like Pterodactyl may be actually easy for them. Ultimately, if you want to help individuals, you don't need a tool to help you categorize the texts but to help them access the texts or to help creators create more accessible texts. The tools for this are still not very good and looking at a single dimensional score for texts is more of a hindrance than a help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T10:50:21.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13075" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:51:23.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comment you say that you want to know &lt;em&gt;&quot;how many homophones there are in the top 2k daily words among at least the top 20 languages&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and mention the example of &lt;em&gt;avogado&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what exactly how strict you want the match to be, but in any case you are not seeking exact matches per IPA, rather, your question is: how to find exact translations that are cognates or borrowings but not due to the languages being closely related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I assume also that you do not care that &lt;em&gt;&quot;no&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;Australia&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the same in Spanish and Italian.  I assume also you do not care about words that have been borrowed but taken on a very different meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only care about very common words, then &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; should be a good dataset.  It is structured, tends to contain the most common words, and includes translations, cognates and IPA, and has well-known APIs and open source tools like those for Wikipedia.  In any case you need to start with a list of most common words in the languages that matter to you, or, at least in one language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then (say for a Latin language to Japanese) you can&lt;br&gt;&#xA;0. do some pre-processing on the original to make it a bit more phonetic&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. get the translation (hit a translation API like the Google Translate API, or get it from Wiktionary)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. get Romanisation of (use some lib or get it from Wiktionary) and/or otherwise normalise both original and response (rm accent marks etc)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3. check if they are roughly a match &#xA;4. eliminate those that are not interesting to you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;5. eliminate those that are just false positives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How check for a rough match?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Levenshtein distance&lt;/a&gt; above some threshold is a good metric.  I might truncate the endings a bit, and normalise for length in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we propose how to eliminate those that are not interesting to you, you should clarify what exactly is interesting to you.  In general this approach will yield thousands upon thousands of pairs of words that are very boring.  (If you visit a longish article on Polish Wikipedia and Ctrl+F for the letter 'f' (which really only occurs in borrowed words), you will find mostly boring words like &lt;em&gt;definicja&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;flora&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fauna&lt;/em&gt;...  It is a telling sample.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is far easier to simply go find good lists like  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swedish_terms_derived_from_Nahuatl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swedish_terms_derived_from_Nahuatl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Serbo-Croatian_borrowed_terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Serbo-Croatian_borrowed_terms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But they are not complete, include words where the meaning has shifted, and there are many grey areas for related languages.  (Should 99% of Italian be considered as &quot;borrowed from Latin&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also good heuristics, for example I believe there is really no native Slavic word that contains the letter 'ф', they are all borrowings.  In Japanese foreign words are written in a separate alphabet.  You can certainly develop a system to detect such words for most languages, it will work the same as language detection (character n-gram frequency).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is a massive task, as stealing and borrowing is the way of man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T18:00:20.353" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T18:00:20.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8827" CreationDate="2015-10-13T03:43:14.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowings like that happen quite often between related languages (in cases of diglossia). For example, Russian language borrowed several interrogative/relative pronouns from Old Church Slavonic (a Slavic language, too), although now most of them are out of use (regarded as archaic). Some basic words were also borrowed from Polish (for example, &lt;em&gt;jesli&lt;/em&gt; &quot;if&quot;, despite having several native words for it: &lt;em&gt;ače, koli&lt;/em&gt; etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T03:43:14.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8827" CreationDate="2015-10-13T06:18:52.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish borrowed &quot;ki&quot; from Farsi. Among other uses, it's a general purpose relative pronoun akin to English &quot;that&quot;. It's interesting because Turkish doesn't have native relative pronouns; ordinarily, it uses a different strategy for forming relative clauses, which consists of converting the relative clause into a participal construction. &quot;ki&quot; is a more stylistically marked way of doing it. Perhaps for this reason, &quot;ki&quot; is traditionally analyzed as a conjunction in Turkish grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Turkish borrowed such essential words as &quot;and&quot; (&quot;ve&quot;, from Arabic) and &quot;fire&quot; (&quot;ateş&quot;, from Farsi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T06:18:52.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14617" CreationDate="2015-10-13T08:46:08.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a question at the intersection of language and culture. It has nothing to do with proto-language or much to do with language as such. When you ask for words for 'hello' or 'thank you', you really encounter a whole lot of ways for people to manage interactions that gave rise to how those words are used in present-day English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every culture has to manage contexts where people acknowledge each others' actions. This could be simply coming into each other's presence or exchanging gifts, asking for assistance, etc. The situations will vary and the cultural means will vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cultures, it is impolite to acknowledge certain acts (e.g. by some expression of gratitude) but it maybe equally impolite not to reciprocate that action. Conversely, in other cultures profuse verbal thanks are the norm even in acknowledgements of mundane interpersonal acts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of this is the US where many Europeans end up being slightly rude simply by not saying thank you as often. This is not a clear difference between having or not having an expression or even a shared context of using it - it is simply a question of degree which can cumulatively impact interpersonal relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for things like greetings. It is not just a matter of having a word for 'hello'. It is also a question of when you use it, to whom and how. For instance, in many European cultures it is expected that one says 'hello' when entering public spaces (waiting rooms, smaller shops) with a smaller number of other people to utter a formal greeting (not just a universal 'hello') and to say some form of 'good bye' on leaving. No other interaction is expected. For instance, in the Czech culture it is common (less so now under Western influences) to join people at a table in a full restaurant. It is obligatory to say hello and good bye (both formal) but no other words maybe exchanged. In American English, for instance, a greeting is almost always used as a prelude to some social interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you say is there a word for 'hello' in both languages it may seem yes on the surface but when you look at the variation in usage and forms (Czech has more contextual ways) you must really say no. These differences become much more pronounced when it comes to language whose cultures have had less contact. And of course, you also need to take into account gestures and facial expressions that need to accompany these cultural acts of interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as etymologies go, if you look across languages you will see that there is an enormous amount of borrowing and analogies in forms for greetings. They usually derive from some sort of wish of good fortune or health (bonjour, guttentag, zdravstvujte) or inquiry after well-being (ni hao) on the more formal end. On the more informal end you see some expression of solidarity or subservience (servus, ciao) or getting attention (hello, ahoy) but also often  borrowing (ciao or hi is becoming popular across some cultures). Religious origins can also be seen in some greetings (good bye, Grüß Gott). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forms for thanking are much more complex because expressions of gratitude are much more complex and varied across languages than simple greetings (which are complex enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T08:46:08.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14641" CreationDate="2015-10-12T13:02:24.020" Score="25" ViewCount="3870" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is English the only language to use &amp;quot;You're welcome&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read on a few websites that English is the only language where it's accepted to say, &amp;quot;You're welcome&amp;quot; in response to someone thanking you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages tend to use variances of &amp;quot;it was nothing&amp;quot;, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish - &amp;quot;De nada&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French - &amp;quot;De rien&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish - &amp;quot;Det var så lite&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese - &amp;quot;どういたしまして&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of which are variants on &amp;quot;it was nothing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;don't mention it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that English is the only language where a thank you is met with an acknowledgement that something was done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10660" OwnerDisplayName="Django Reinhardt" LastEditorUserId="10660" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T12:22:27.713" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T12:22:27.713" Title="What's the origin of &quot;You're welcome&quot;?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="22" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T13:31:50.953" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, we sometimes use phrases such as:&#xA;&quot;أهلا&quot; (read: 'ahlan') or &quot;هلا بيك&quot; (read: 'hala beek') in informal Arabic exactly meaning &quot;you're welcome&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that not only English uses the phrase. In Arabic it's common too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Arabic is my mother-tongue (I speak English very well too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ragheb AlKilany" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T14:10:54.470" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T14:03:59.587" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answers show, English is not the only language with this phrase, but we can examine the etymology of it to explain what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When did this usage start?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3d. A polite formula used in response to an expression of thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the first citation in 1907.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did it originate?  It is a natural extension of the use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a. Freely permitted or allowed, cordially invited,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the first citation from ca. 1400.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how 3d evolved from 3a, consider this exchange (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=lVEwAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA271&amp;amp;dq=%22thank+you%22+%22you+are+welcome+to+it%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CCYQ6AEwAmoVChMIq6zlgIS9yAIVRxc-Ch1BcwTe#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22thank%20you%22%20%22you%20are%20welcome%20to%20it%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google books, 1839&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Do you really” – exclaimed Theophan, his voice trembling with joyful surprise – “do you really say so! – what shall I – how can I sufficiently thank you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It matters not,” said the old man. “you are welcome to it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can see that &amp;quot;you're welcome&amp;quot; probably came from something akin to &amp;quot;it's nothing -- you're welcome to it&amp;quot;. This changes its meaning from, &amp;quot;I'm acknowledging that I did you a favour&amp;quot; to a more generous sense of giving that's found in other responses like &amp;quot;it's nothing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why isn't this usage found in French (for example)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe French has an adjective with the exact meaning of 3a. Looking up &lt;em&gt;welcome&lt;/em&gt; in the Larousse English-French dictionary, they paraphrase all uses with meaning 3a. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you're welcome to anything you need,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;servez-vous si vous avez besoin de quelque chose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(help yourself if you have need of something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1049" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Shor " LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T18:53:09.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T14:55:15.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German (which is my mother-tongue) you might say &quot;Gern geschehen&quot; which roughly translates to &quot;It's a pleasure&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gern_geschehen&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. There are also other responses to thank you which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.philhist.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/germanistik/sprachwissenschaft/ada/runde_2/f02/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Some of them are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bitte gerne&quot; (also, more or less &quot;my pleasure&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bitte (schön)&quot; (I'm not realy able to properly translate this into English)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also phrases that mean &quot;it was nothing&quot; or &quot;don't mention it&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Nichts zu danken&quot; (roughly translates to &quot;Nothing to thank me for&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Keine Ursache&quot; (translates to &quot;No problem&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="wastl" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T15:23:09.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T16:20:00.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean has &lt;em&gt;chun-man-ei-yo&lt;/em&gt; (sorry, I got some error trying to enter Korean letters in SE), which means (I would do it) 1000 (times) 10000 times.  Thus it could be interpreted as closer to &quot;It was my pleasure&quot; than the denial of having done anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in Japanese どういたしまして (dou-itashimashite) isn't literally the negation of having done anything.  It is more like &quot;what I have done,&quot; which etymologically possibly comes from a reply like &quot;What have I done?&quot; (semi-denial?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Kimball" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T16:20:00.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T16:31:19.777" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common phrase in Bulgarian is &quot;Pak Zapoviadai&quot; (Пак Заповядай) which translates to &quot;You're Welcome&quot; (to come again). When the words are separated and translated literally it has the meaning of &quot;Come Again&quot;,but, when spoken it is used as a phrase which means &quot;You're Welcome&quot;, since &quot;Zapovqdai&quot; literally means &quot;Welcome&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user142375" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T16:38:14.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:05:08.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my mother tongue (Persian) we use the expression &quot;خواهش میکنم&quot; which we only use it in response to someone thanking us. We have lots of these expressions in Persian like &quot;قابل شما رو نداشت&quot;,  &quot;نفرمایید&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="ceyed" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:05:08.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:28:56.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, English is not the only language to acknowledge a thank you. In Spanish, as an alternative to &quot;de nada&quot; it is not uncommon to respond to a thank you with &quot;cuando sea&quot;, which translates to &quot;anytime&quot;, directly acknowledging that something was done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="n00b" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:34:02.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:30:35.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me add &quot;ole hyvä&quot; from Finnish, which means, literally, &quot;be good.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="qarma" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:30:35.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:39:15.140" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my native Russian, a standard reply to 'Спасибо' (thank you) is 'Пожалуйста' which is probably rooted in something similar to 'you are welcome'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;не за что&quot; (it is nothing) can also be used, but it not as common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Helen" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:39:15.140" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T19:04:25.143" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Visiting Quebec I heard &quot;vous êtes bienvenue&quot; a good few times! I assumed this to have entered the language from English, but this is a part of the world that's very proud of its French heritage (to the extent that the stop signs read &quot;Arrêt&quot;, which isn't even the case in France). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not easy to find online (as it also works in the sense of &quot;You're welcome to visit our hotel&quot;) but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.joualvert.com/html/body_b1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Québecois dictionary&lt;/a&gt; gives &quot;Bienvenue!&quot; at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2607" OwnerDisplayName="Chris H" LastEditorUserId="2607" LastEditDate="2015-10-13T14:17:31.447" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T14:17:31.447" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T19:51:38.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Lithuanian we have a word 'prašau' or 'prašom', which is the usual word said in response to Lithuanian 'thank you'. &#xA;While it literally means something along the lines of 'I'm asking you', it can be used to invite someone to your house, or, say, to a table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story time!&#xA;As you are anxiously waiting for the pizza you ordered - it should be any minute now - you hear your doorbell ring. You fling the door open, and indeed there is a delivery man with your pizza. As you go through your pockets to find the one where your put your pizza money in, you notice that it is snowing quite heavily outside. You wave your hand as if you are showing something lying on that shoe shelf to your left without turning and say 'prašom'.&#xA;Upon hearing that, he man steps in with a smile, trying not to move too much, not wanting to drop any of that snow from his shoulders and beanie in your house. You finally hand him the money, with a generous tip too! It is because you are feeling great today - energetic, happy, wanting to do good, it is one of those days when everything feels right. The man's eyes stop at you for a second, but realizing he's almost staring, he quickly goes to his wallet to get your change. You raise both your hands with palms facing the delivery man and shake them a little, almost like trying to push him away telekinetically. The man's smile widens and he thanks you. You tell him 'prašau'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only used one word twice, first time asking someone to come in (welcoming someone in?), and second time as a response to thank-you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe this is the elusive connection between the two ways of using the 'welcome'? :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10668" OwnerDisplayName="Vykintas" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T19:51:38.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T20:48:24.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mandarin Chinese, we do say something along the lines of you're welcome: &lt;em&gt;bu kuh-chi&lt;/em&gt;. It's not exactly &quot;no problem&quot; because that would be &lt;em&gt;mei wen-ti&lt;/em&gt;. Although both phrases can be used in response to &quot;thank you,&quot; the first one is more popular, and is closer in meaning to &quot;you're welcome&quot; than the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry about the spelling out out the characters in English if they're not correct, and about any missing accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: I grew up in a Mandarin Chinese speaking household; my parents both speak it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Erica" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T20:48:24.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T20:56:46.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Afrikaans, we say &quot;jy's welkom&quot; (&quot;You're welcome&quot;) in response to &quot;Dankie&quot; (&quot;Thank you&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="StormBeast" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T20:56:46.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-12T23:18:06.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Quebecois French, in Eastern Canada, we say &quot;Bienvenue,&quot; which means &quot;[You're] Welcome,&quot; though it's likely this is an adoption of the English phrase since this is not used in France, AFAIK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="x0n" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T23:18:06.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T00:19:34.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In  Myanmar, we use &quot;YaBarTae&quot; which means you are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="nanda" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T00:19:34.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T00:26:34.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Czech also acknowledges that something was done. Our expression for that is &lt;em&gt;prosím [praw-seem]&lt;/em&gt; (which incidentally happens to be the same word as our &quot;please&quot; but it takes a completely different meaning in this context). It's even more &quot;just an acknowledgement&quot; than &quot;you're welcome&quot; is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also go with &quot;není zač&quot; (=there's nothing to thank for (it was nothing)), which I think is a little nicer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="PSkocik" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T00:26:34.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T05:45:32.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Slovak language, we usually use 3 ways to respond on &quot;Thank you&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Nemáš za čo&quot; - there is nothing to thank for - probably most common&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Prosím&quot; - this is similar to &quot;not at all&quot;, while in other cases it is used for &quot;please&quot;. It is probably not the most common, but most official&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Radosť sa stalo&quot; - it was a pleasure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4th, but not very used way can be found:&#xA;&quot;Bolo mi potešením&quot; - similar to &quot;Radosť sa stalo&quot;, but with a bit noble accent. Seems not to be very suited within close relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10662" OwnerDisplayName="Reconquistador" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T05:45:32.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T05:52:29.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Danish we also use the word:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Velbekomme&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;As a formal acknowledgement of a thank you, and its translation in this context to English, would be the same as how &quot;&lt;em&gt;you're welcome&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is used. Even if it doesn't have a word-to-word translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;It was nothing&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is also a common in Danish in line with the Swedish mentioned in the question post, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun fact; As with most Danish words it carries multiple usages, so it's also the word used to wish &quot;&lt;em&gt;Bon appetite&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or as a sarcastic &quot;&lt;em&gt;you're welcome&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;thank you very much&lt;/em&gt;&quot; reply-type statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context is everything in Danish :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30855" OwnerDisplayName="Allan S. Hansen" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T05:52:29.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T06:40:17.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, we say &quot;בבקשה&quot; (Behvakasha) which literally translates to something along the lines of &quot;as per your request&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another word that has recently entered usage as a reply to &quot;Thank you&quot; is &quot;בכיף&quot; (Behkayf) which means &quot;with pleasure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Zabari" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T06:40:17.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T08:39:00.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical dialog in Russian somewhere in shop may be:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Дайте, &lt;strong&gt;пожалуйста&lt;/strong&gt;, вот это. (Give me please this one)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - &lt;strong&gt;Пожалуйста&lt;/strong&gt;, возьмите. (Here you go &lt;em&gt;or in literal translation&lt;/em&gt; Please take it)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Спасибо. (Thank you)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - &lt;strong&gt;Пожалуйста&lt;/strong&gt;. (You are welcome)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see how meanings vary.&#xA;So in certain context &lt;strong&gt;пожалуйста&lt;/strong&gt; is supposed to be treated as &lt;strong&gt;you are welcome&lt;/strong&gt; and not &lt;strong&gt;please&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10797" OwnerDisplayName="user2977229" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T08:39:00.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T09:31:07.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you mentioned it in your question, a few remarks about French use, based on my intuition as a native speaker and experience in various French-speaking countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acknowledging thanks is not nearly as common in French as it is in English or German. Consequently there is no set phrase to do it and “&lt;em&gt;de rien&lt;/em&gt;”, which is indeed pretty common, does not sound polite or elegant to me. Personally, when speaking French, I'd rather say nothing or, if I really have to react, say something &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; that explains precisely why I was happy to do something, return a favour, etc. or why it was not so much bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other phrases that are occasionally heard in this situation. The most formal one would be “&lt;em&gt;Je vous en prie&lt;/em&gt;” (literally “I beg you”) but I have heard “&lt;em&gt;s'il-te-plait&lt;/em&gt;” (literally “please”, only used in that way in the east of France, presumably after the German “&lt;em&gt;Bitte&lt;/em&gt;”), “&lt;em&gt;à votre service&lt;/em&gt;” or simply “&lt;em&gt;service&lt;/em&gt;” and “&lt;em&gt;avec plaisir&lt;/em&gt;”. The last three sound a bit old-fashioned and are perhaps more common in Belgium than in France but they seem pretty close to “you're welcome” in that they do imply that something substantial was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of all this, it seems that there might not be such a big difference between French and English after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4721" OwnerDisplayName="Relaxed" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T13:38:23.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2015-10-13T11:16:14.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish we reply with &quot;Önemli değil&quot; or &quot;Birşey değil&quot; which means, &quot;It's not important&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Plato" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T11:16:14.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14624" CreationDate="2015-10-13T22:04:46.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;elin&quot; exists neither in Hindi nor in Sanskrit as anything remotely close to the meaning you found on the web. The only possibility for this word to exist in Skt. is as a derivation from Skt. &lt;em&gt;ela&lt;/em&gt;, then meaning &quot;possessing &lt;em&gt;ela&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Ela&lt;/em&gt;, though, does not have too much meaning, see here (type &quot;ela&quot; in Harvard-Kyoto input):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;em&gt;elin&lt;/em&gt; then is a masculine. Precisely there is no word similar to &lt;em&gt;elin&lt;/em&gt; in Sanskrit, which could possibly be feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T22:04:46.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T03:22:18.287" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;GeneTag (1) is a tagged corpus for gene/protein named entity recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corpus is annotated as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P00089778A0000 &lt;br&gt;The_TAG concentration_TAG of_TAG alpha_GENE1 2_GENE1&#xA;  -_GENE1 macroglobulin_GENE1 ,_TAG alpha_GENE2 1_GENE2 -_GENE2 antitrypsin_GENE2 ,_TAG plasminogen_GENE1 ,_TAG C3_GENE2 -_GENE2&#xA;  complement_GENE2 ,_TAG fibrinogen_GENE1 degradation_GENE1&#xA;  products_GENE1 (_TAG FDP_GENE2 )_TAG and_TAG fibrinolytic_TAG&#xA;  activity_TAG [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corpus is stored as a list of instances each consisting of (a) an identifier on the first line, and (b) a sequence of tokens on the second line. Each token is of the form word tag where tag can be one of {TAG, GENE1, GENE2}. &lt;em&gt;TAG&lt;/em&gt; represents any word that is not part of a gene name, while &lt;em&gt;GENE1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;GENE2&lt;/em&gt; mean the token is part of a gene name. The index 1 and 2 just works as indicators to distinguish two dierent but adjacent&#xA;gene names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not using the BIO notation (or something &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingpipe-blog.com/2009/10/14/coding-chunkers-as-taggers-io-bio-bmewo-and-bmewo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;similar&lt;/a&gt;)? E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P00089778A0000 &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The_O concentration_O of_O alpha_B 2_I -_I&#xA;  macroglobulin_I ,_O alpha_B 1_I -_I antitrypsin_I ,_O plasminogen_I&#xA;  ,_O C3_B -_I complement_I ,_O fibrinogen_B degradation_I  products_I&#xA;  (_O FDP_B )_O and_O fibrinolytic_O activity_O [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Tanabe, Lorraine, et al. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1214544014446255107&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GENETAG: a tagged corpus for gene/protein named entity recognition.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; BMC bioinformatics 6.Suppl 1 (2005): S3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T03:22:18.287" Title="Why doesn't GeneTag use BIO for its annotations?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T17:17:43.470" Score="2" ViewCount="766" Body="&lt;p&gt;The theory of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural semantic metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; states there are about 70 words we need to describe anything. However, for example DEAD we could express like NOT LIVING and for instance Russian often doesn't use BE in the sentence - that indicates it's not perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could there be in theory some else language system?&#xA;If it is called natural, was any simmilar universal expressions (like be, this, here) seen in animal communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T10:54:30.163" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T10:54:30.163" Title="How far is Natural semantic metalanguage really natural?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T17:23:30.137" Score="-1" ViewCount="1053" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't sound like a consonant. Especially at the end of words. It sounds like a shortened vowel which it follows.&#xA;English word &quot;cat&quot; for example [kʰæʔ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10579" LastEditorUserId="10579" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T19:56:50.593" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T10:17:24.097" Title="Can you explain glottal stop?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-18T01:27:28.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14666" CreationDate="2015-10-14T17:32:36.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it is a consonant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is produced by stopping the airflow in the same way as in producing [p],[k] or [t], it is just made in different place. While the aforementioned obstruents are articulated by stopping the airflow respectively between lips (bilabial stop), root of the tongue and velum (velar stop) and tip of the tongue and alveolar ridge (alveolar stop), glottal stop is produced by stopping the airflow with glottis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English glottal stop function merely as an allophone of /t/ word finally, and (in some dialects) intervocally. But there are languages where glottal stop is a distinct phoneme. The example would be the Semitic family where it is written with letter aleph.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T17:32:36.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14680" CreationDate="2015-10-14T19:17:47.207" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the study of language usage types [a question, an answer, a criticism, a complaint an elaboration, etc]? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard ontology and typology used interchangeably but not sure either is correct - at best both seem to be metaphors is there a widely accepted academic answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10671" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T00:55:51.600" Title="What is the study of language usage types [a question, an answer, a criticism, a complaint an elaboration, etc]" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14669" CreationDate="2015-10-14T19:30:29.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since some of those types make sense only in relation to other parts of a conversation, &lt;em&gt;conversational analysis&lt;/em&gt; is a term used for their study.  This area of linguistics was initiated by the philosopher J. L. Austin's &lt;strong&gt;How to do things with words&lt;/strong&gt;, and he proposed that speech utterances are generally used to perform acts (e.g., the asking of a question, a naming using &quot;dub&quot;, a command or request), so the area is also known as &lt;em&gt;performative analysis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T20:20:20.807" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T20:20:20.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14666" CreationDate="2015-10-14T20:16:22.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some languages, glottal stop is associated with shortness of vowels, but so far as I know, this is not the case in English, except perhaps indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, vowels are shorter before a voiceless sound in the offset of a syllable, and also, the voiceless stops p t k are glottalized (said with glottal closure) in the offset of a syllable before a consonant.  Then, in some circumstances, the glottalized p' t' k' lose their oral closure, leaving behind the glottal closure alone, which is a glottal stop.  This loss of oral closure happens before a homorganic consonant (i.e., with the same place of articulation), or for t', before any consonant.  These things happen only in some dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is a relationship between the shortening of vowels and glottal stop (vowel is shortened before p t k, p t k are glottalized to p' t' k', which then turn into glottal stop), but it's coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other languages, glottal stop has more directly to do with vowel shortness.  There is a language of Brazil, Shavante, which has &quot;clipping&quot; of word final vowels, which consists in shortening the vowels and appending glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from Danish make it appear that glottal stop has something to do with vowel shortness: læser /ˈlɛːsʌ/ &quot;reader&quot;, læser /ˈlɛˀsʌ/ &quot;reads&quot; are cited in the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B8d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;stød&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this is not so in English, in many languages, glottal stop is a phoneme -- just another consonant in the language's phonemic system.  I'm not aware of any shortening of vowels in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T20:16:22.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14665" CreationDate="2015-10-14T20:51:04.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;natural&quot; part of NSM comes from the fact that all of the items in the vocabulary are claimed to be found in all lexicalised in all languages and thus &quot;universal&quot;. This is supposed to establish their status as 'semantic primes' - items that are further inexplainable and from which other meanings can be built. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This in itself is dubious because concepts such as &quot;I, you&quot; may appear as lexical items in all languages but they often do not describe the same oppositions as in English. Also, some of the verbs like 'do' and 'move' do not have the same level of generality across languages - so definitions using them in English tend to be a lot easier to deal with than those formulated in other languages. However, Goddard and Wierzbicka both claim that the primes also have universal 'combinatorial properties' but I'm not convinced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is nothing at all natural about the actual descriptions composed using these semantic primes. Just look at the example cited in Wikipedia which tries to explain the concept of &lt;em&gt;Someone X killed someone Y&lt;/em&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;someone X did something to someone else Y&#xA;  because of this, something happened to Y at the same time&#xA;  because of this, something happened to Y's body&#xA;  because of this, after this Y was not living anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not natural but is intended to be universal. However, it doesn't take into account the differences in tense/aspect encoding, grammar of causality, etc. So in fact, if those descriptions had to be translated into another language, the translator would still have to interpret what was being said, rather than just mapping primes from one language onto the other. Again, the NSM proponents claim that this is not an issue but it strikes me as quite significant (at least from relatively casual reading of the NSM literature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T20:51:04.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-15T02:54:01.823" Score="5" ViewCount="10169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can somebody let me know if this is a reasonable explanation for how the two theories are similar and different? This is not for homework, I'm just try to understand the difference, and my textbook doesn't highlight Chomsky hardly at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sapir-Whorf basically says that human language has a direct impact on how we think by directly influencing other centers of cognition in the brain (highly interconnected centers of the brain) while Chomsky says that human language is quite a bit more separated from the brain, and is something far more innate and isolated from other centers of cognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using the original theories, no new modifications or schools of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10673" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T08:41:40.297" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T17:12:16.333" Title="Sapir-Whorf vs. Chomsky" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-15T02:59:47.870" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that IE languages often derive /v/ from /w/. It is a bit of a rare sound (predominantly IE?). I wonder how /v/ came about in various languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, labiodentals seem to be a more &quot;advanced&quot; sound (that is, languages develop these sounds at later times than others...) I can only wonder why would it feel so much of an &quot;advanced sound&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(sorry if it is too vague)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10648" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T04:08:50.383" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T05:30:34.453" Title="Labiodental sounds in languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14674" CreationDate="2015-10-15T04:37:42.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has more to do with /v/ being a voiced fricative than it being labiodental: note that the bilabial counterpart of /v/ is not /w/, but /β/, which is probably even rarer than /v/. Voiced fricatives as a group are a somewhat localized feature, as you can see on &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/4A#1/51/101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;. Even in languages that are listed as having /v/, it's not always clear that phonologically it should be analyzed as a voiced fricative, since it can pattern with approximants instead (or indeed, be realized as [ʋ]). This is the situation in Croatian, where /v/ is phonologically better seen as an approximant, and a voiced fricative only in dialects. Similarly, [v] or [ʋ] and [w] can be allophones of the same phoneme, which was probably the situation in Sanskrit, as it is in eg. Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: as for how languages get to have /v/, a very reasonable development is b &gt; β &gt; v. This is what happened eg. in Modern Greek. Another possibility is allophonic intervocalic voicing of /f/, which later becomes phonemic. This happened in English, where the distinction was reinforced by a large number of borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9811" LastEditorUserId="9811" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T04:53:16.167" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T04:53:16.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14674" CreationDate="2015-10-15T05:30:34.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is particularly rare, though it is less common than, say, &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, so it depends on what you're comparing it with. I would be especially skeptical about claims regarding [v] versus [ʋ] or [β], because in reality there is a continuum of segments in that region, and claims about choice of phonetic symbol are rarely made based on systematic measurements and a theory of what the acoustic properties of [v, ʋ, β] should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T05:30:34.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14665" CreationDate="2015-10-15T05:42:50.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Natural&quot; in Natural Semantic Metalanguage is intended to contrast with other semantic metalanguages which use non-linguistic symbols and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://semprag.org/article/view/sp.6.1/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt;, which apparently is describing the semantics of &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[[have to ϕ]]&lt;sup&gt;w,f,g&lt;/sup&gt; = 1 iff for all v ∈ f(w) such that there is no v' ∈ f(w) such that g(w)(v',v),[[ϕ]]&lt;sup&gt;v,f,g&lt;/sup&gt; = 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://research-hub.griffith.edu.au/display/n9e1b5940237682b8a706c1555af107a7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NSM explication of &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A] &lt;em&gt;Someone X has to do something (VP)&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a.  it is like this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b.   this someone X can’t not do something (VP)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c.   someone can know this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than using mathematical/logical symbols (∀, ¬, ⊃, ∄), symbols taken from natural language are used (ALL, NOT, SOME, IF). And rather than using the syntax of functions or following the order of operations, the syntax of natural language is used, following (in English for example) the normal order of SVO, adjective-noun etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this is a good idea, and whether it's successful is definitely still up for debate, but that's what the &quot;Natural&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T06:02:42.000" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T06:02:42.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14678" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-15T05:57:48.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T05:57:48.077" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T05:57:48.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14679" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-15T05:57:48.077" Score="0" Body="The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is a framework based on universal semantic primitives taken from natural language" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T08:58:25.067" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T08:58:25.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14669" CreationDate="2015-10-15T05:59:00.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither 'ontology' nor 'typology' are correct. 'Ontology' is a sub-discipline of philosophy  and 'typology' is a linguistic discipline concerned with types of languages (not language use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is 'conversation analysis' the right answer. Conversation analysis - as the name suggests - is concerned with the analysis of conversation. As such, it is concerned with only a subset of spoken language usage. It has made an enormous contribution but does not deal with language as a whole (it also was not initiated by Austin who only has a tangential connection to it - but rather Garfinkel, Sacks and Goffman - the first outlines appeared about the same time as Austin's work). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest you get to a typology of language usage that covers all the things you list would be &lt;strong&gt;stylistics&lt;/strong&gt; (building on the traditional discipline of &lt;strong&gt;rhetoric&lt;/strong&gt;). However, the shortcoming of stylistics is its focus on written language and non-spontaneous speech. So between it and &lt;strong&gt;conversation analysis&lt;/strong&gt;, you will find a good coverage of the issues. Stylistics is also tainted by its frequent normative / prescriptive focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to a typology of broader types of language usage, &lt;strong&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; has made an important contribution through its efforts to sample and represent language across all modalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it must be admitted that there is no subdiscipline of linguistics whose aim is pure typology of language usage. (Even the new 'usage-based' linguistics is not concerned with that.) Therefore most approaches to language use some sort of ad-hoc typology (often drawing on concepts from rhetoric or stylistics without deeper consideration of their foundations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T05:59:00.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14673" CreationDate="2015-10-15T06:25:18.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start at the end. It is impossible to talk about &lt;strong&gt;original theories&lt;/strong&gt; in this context. There was actually &lt;strong&gt;no cohesive formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&lt;/strong&gt;. That is a label assigned later to a set of assumptions about language relativity formulated by Whorf who was inspired by his teacher Sapir. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither can you talk about Chomsky's original theory because in its first formulation in Syntactic Structures he did not focus on questions of universality. It is actually hard to exactly pin point what the 'current theory' is because so many aspects (and terminology) have changed over the years. The latest form, 'minimalism' is virtually unrecognizable from what we saw in the 1950s and 60s even if some of the assumptions about universality remain the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you really need to compare is claims of &lt;strong&gt;linguistic relativism and universal grammar (UG)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is really hard to directly compare the two because they study different domains of language. Universal grammar is largely concerned with &quot;deep&quot; syntax (agentive structures, co-reference, phrase structure, etc.). Whereas linguistic relativity is more concerned with meaning - most often at the lexical level but in its strongest formulation at the level of syntax, as well. In this, UG and relativism could actually quite happily coexist. &lt;strong&gt;Linguistic relativism, in particular, is not tied to any particular conception of language structure.&lt;/strong&gt; In the old formulation of UG, there was a universal set of &lt;strong&gt;principles&lt;/strong&gt; and each individual language set the &lt;strong&gt;parameters&lt;/strong&gt; in how they were expressed. This is pretty inoffensive, so, in theory, you could just have a debate about what the principles and parameters are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is the other assumptions of the UG proponents that is the real crux of the controversy. The key is modularity - where UG assumes that language is a module (or several modules) in the mind (so not divorced from it) that interacts with other modules such as perception, cognition, etc. Linguistics relativists tend to see language as part of the general cognition and linguistic knowledge as just as type of any knowledge. And this then makes any discussion of where the boundary of the universal and particular lies completely non-sensical - the proponents do not talk about the same thing when they say language. If you read them in their 'native habitat' it does not even feel like they're in the same discipline. Which is why when they come into contact and debate each other, they generally talk at cross-purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;many other dimensions of the relativism debate that are much more fruitful&lt;/strong&gt;. See for example, the recent &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2856&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;debate between Mark Liberman and Lera Boroditsky&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T06:25:18.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14673" CreationDate="2015-10-15T06:31:09.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've got it the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Chomskyan&quot; theory of UG is much more of a claim about &quot;the brain&quot;, which (in humans) has specific machinery for language. The idea is that the language is probably not underpinned by the general cognitive mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whorfian stuff, by contrast, is psychological. He does not claim that brains of people speaking different languages are different -- rather, the difference lies in their picture of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your confusion might come from the terminology: cognitive science is more or less neuroscience, while cognition is more of a psychological notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T06:36:20.920" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T06:36:20.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T19:03:31.907" Score="0" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say, I want to know what a &quot;dog&quot; is, so I read the definition for dog in the OED. But, of course, it contains a list of words too so I set out to read the definitions for those as well. This forms a directed graph. Was there any research done on this? I presume, for example, you won't need to understand what a &quot;ventriloquist&quot; is just to understand &quot;dog&quot; -- but , for example, is there a list of words that eventually the definition chains of all words reach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13135" OwnerDisplayName="chx" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T11:46:23.590" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T11:46:23.590" Title="Is there any OED-as-directed-graph research?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14666" CreationDate="2015-10-15T11:01:20.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's use &quot;uh-oh&quot; as an example, right after you say the part &quot;uh&quot; and before you say the part &quot;oh&quot;, that's a glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10677" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T11:01:20.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14666" CreationDate="2015-10-15T12:29:51.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a stop consonant, as it stops the airflow in the glottis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you can't differentiate the sound doesn't mean it isn't a consonant - there are many, many, many consonants which sound indistinguishable if you don't have the right mother tongue. But they are distinguishable if you do speak the right language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, semitic languages are languages in which the glottal stop is a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10679" LastEditorUserId="10679" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T10:17:24.097" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T10:17:24.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-15T18:39:43.833" Score="10" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Proto-Indo-European &quot;third laryngeal&quot;, *h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;, is often assumed to have been a voiced sound based on the fact that some reflexes of the &quot;drink&quot; root *peh&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;- appear to show voicing assimilation of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;: e.g. Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;pibati&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *pi-ph&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;-, Latin &lt;em&gt;bibit&lt;/em&gt; similarly with further regressive assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whenever I've seen this argued, this &quot;drink&quot; verb is the only piece of evidence presented. Are there other words that show assimilatory voicing of a consonant next to *h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;? It's true that *h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; seems to have been the least frequent of the laryngeals, but still, you'd think that more than one data point should be adducible for this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T00:19:20.510" Title="Did PIE *h3 cause voicing in any other words than the &quot;drink&quot; word?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14696" CreationDate="2015-10-15T22:24:50.767" Score="9" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was born in Russia and moved to the US at the adolescent and prepubescent age of 12. Before my relocation to the US I had never really been exposed to the English language at large,  and after my relocation I was promptly forbidden to speak Russian at home and school for my parents,  desperately,  wanted me to nail down English fast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And nail down English fast I did in a sense that I was able to read and write in it quite well after a couple of years of Remedial English, but I was, however,  never able to ditch my thick foreign accent and neither have I been to able, up to the present day, to audially comprehend the English language very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I cannot watch English movies without subtitles and I have difficulties watching TV, as well, though in all fairness, I have no trouble at all communicating with people I know well, howbeit I still have,  sometimes, a hard time understanding strangers when they speak &quot;rather&quot; fast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so the second part of my question is: did my parents &quot;screw&quot; me up by forbidding me to use Russian and not speaking to me in the language both they and I knew the best,  at that tender age,  and instead exposing me to their, at times imperfect and always heavily accented, English thus leaving me semi-lingual or no matter what they did I would still never be able to get down English native-like, at that age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9455" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-10-26T10:17:01.157" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T10:17:01.157" Title="How come I cannot get my &quot;oral&quot; English to a native speaker level after 25 years of trying?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14687" CreationDate="2015-10-16T01:44:44.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One theory is that it was a labialized sound [xʷ] similar to [kʷ]. Weill would you call [kʷ] a voiced sound? I think, no because such compound sounds are usually assigned voicity according the first component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T01:44:44.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13148" CreationDate="2015-10-16T03:05:01.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also the relatively new PraatAlign plugin (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dopefishh/praatalign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dopefishh/praatalign&lt;/a&gt;). I know that Easy-Align is trained on Castilian models and might not be the best for your Mexican data. The documentation for PraatAlign is a little vague on the variety used for training data, but looking at their phone inventory it appears to be a seseo-variety with the palatal lateral so I'm thinking Sevilla or Córdoba. Either way, you could edit either dictionary for your variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my lab we're also working on a Spanish variant of P2FA built using Latin American sociolinguistic interviews as training data. If you're still working on the project, send me a message if you're interested in more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10682" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T03:05:01.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-16T03:40:29.377" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an exhaustive list of upsides of using dependency parsing over constituency parsing (if possible, with references for each upside).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-17T23:50:55.020" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T00:31:45.993" Title="What are the upsides of using dependency parsing over constituency parsing?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14694" CreationDate="2015-10-16T03:44:12.683" Score="-1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the unconventionality of the question, I'm trying to identifying the language in the sample, and possibly obtain a translation of what's written. I figured if there's a community in which I can find help it is Stackexchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a priori I'm not sure that the sample doesn't need rotating by 180°, however, I think this is the correct orientation because of the last character of the first word, which reminds me of an &quot;a&quot; vowel in thai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N1slk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N1slk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sample&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10683" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T06:44:47.390" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T06:44:47.390" Title="Identify and possibly translate a sentence from a language similar to thai" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;khmer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-08T16:07:18.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14693" CreationDate="2015-10-16T06:37:55.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Albeit questions about translation are offtopic on this site, here's the way how to identify the language by yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, note that &lt;strong&gt;it is Khmer&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;In the future, you should always provide with some information where the scan came from.&lt;/em&gt; This will help you limit your search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image is rotated upside-down. Here's the correct orientation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tucqf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tucqf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line reads something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ខំុពេញចិកូនេះដៃទៃន។&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not familiar with Khmer, so mistakes are very possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To type the entire text, you may experiment with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/khmer.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online Khmer keyboard&lt;/a&gt; plus some online translator (like Google or Bing) to get a meaningful result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also refer some basic reference for Khmer &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bongthom.com/akonline/consonants.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonants&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bongthom.com/akonline/vowels.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vovels&lt;/a&gt; to know how to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, your browser may not show the fonts properly (or, let me say, the most nice ones). It depends on the fonts used to display StackExchange. See how it looks in my browser (above) versus the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/khmer.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexilogos Web site&lt;/a&gt; (below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IU8ic.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IU8ic.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T06:37:55.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14688" CreationDate="2015-10-16T07:36:57.317" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear why some people acquire native-like competence in the spoken aspects of a second language (pronunciation, word boundary identification, etc.). Age has been suggested as a determining factor and it certainly does play a role but there's enough research to show that it is not an absolute barrier. In short, there is no absolutely critical cut off point after which this cannot be acquired (perhaps with the exception in performance in word identification under conditions of extreme noise - as some other research seems to suggest - but not in real life situations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is gaps in input in the formative stages of acquisition - this certainly seems to be the case with the present case (judging by the comments). Of course, this would be exacerbated by a lack of integrative motivation (the need to fit in with a peer group). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;thick&quot; accent after a long stay in-country has also been hypothesized as being linked to a strong sense of identity and a link to a number of speakers who speak with a similar accent. This can generally be overcome (or at least mediated) by remedial instruction focusing on accent removal - this is something most English as a second language teacher have almost no training in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would also want to investigate possible other underlying difficulties with perception (e.g. make sure your hearing is fine - it may seem fine for normal interactions but have gaps in certain ranges) or cognition (dyslexia has been linked to poor L2 performance particularly when it comes to some aspects of phonology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the personal part of the question: It is doubtful that your parents 'screwed you up' but their approach may have contributed to your level of competence. This would be combined with other aspects of your situation - such as limited exposure to other speakers. A typical 12 year old transplant should be able to acquire L2 with at worst a slight accent and minimal perceptual difficulties. However, as I noted above, you could look into specialist remediation to overcome at least some parts of your issues. Assuming you watch films in English with subtitles often and are exposed to a significant amount of input in native-speaker English every day, I would say hearing issues are a strong candidate for at least a contributing factor. Otherwise, I would recommend seeking a qualified accent removal coach - try at least a few sessions and see how it goes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="9455" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T23:37:07.107" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T23:37:07.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8643" CreationDate="2015-10-16T23:24:04.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learner English by michael swan enumerates all the ways non-native English speakers make errors. Grouped by language, this book is quite extensive. False cognates, word order, lack of tenses used, article usage, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-16T23:24:04.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-17T03:22:01.167" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any structured database of the ACL Anthology (&lt;a href=&quot;https://aclweb.org/anthology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;former website&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://aclanthology.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;new website&lt;/a&gt;)? By structured database I mean some SQL dump (NoSQL is fine too) that would contain all papers' meta information (venue, date, authors, etc.), and if possible the text as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl-arc.comp.nus.edu.sg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ACL Anthology Reference Corpus (ACL ARC)&lt;/a&gt; as well as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://clair.eecs.umich.edu/aan/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ACL Anthology Network (beta)&lt;/a&gt;, but they don't contain database dump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T03:22:01.167" Title="Structured database of the ACL Anthology data set?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-17T11:10:40.637" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;On WALS' chapter on verbal person marking alignment, it classifies English as having accusative alignment. Later on it discusses a 'restricted' alignment split between first and second person and third person, where first and second person have neutral alignment and third person accusative. I understand this, but not why English is then classed as having accusative alignment instead of neutral when 2/3 of the persons are neutral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10689" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T21:28:21.917" Title="Is English of neutral or accusative alignment in verbal person marking?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19847" CreationDate="2015-10-17T16:59:15.547" Score="2" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;When listening to recordings of spoken Albanian, I sometimes note what sounds like a retroflex /r/; it's less pronounced than in American English, and seems to occur in syllable codas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Albanian phonology resources say the language does have two /r/s, but they're a flap and a trill like in Spanish (and reflected the same way in writing, as &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt;). Neither does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for the sound&lt;/a&gt; list Albanian among the languages that have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a dialectal feature? Or am I hearing things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T17:45:57.353" Title="Retroflex /r/ in Albanian?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;albanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-17T17:30:09.710" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After being literally translated into english, the name of the Turkey (bird) follow some interesting pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In english, they are called &quot;Turkey&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In turkish, they are called &quot;Hindi&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In hindi, they are called &quot;Peru&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In arabic, they are called &quot;Greek Chicken&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In greek, they are called &quot;French Chicken&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In french they are called &quot;Indian chicken&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (wild) turkey is native from North America though (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_turkey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;). My question has been motivated by &lt;a href=&quot;http://9gag.com/gag/aMQm5W1?ref=fsidebar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; 9gag post. I haven't double check their claims but I can tell it is correct in english and in french. In french they used to be called &quot;Poule d'Inde&quot; and by contraction they are now called &quot;Dinde&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for such pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it just pure randomness?&lt;/em&gt; Among all things that we name, there must be at least one that follow some kind of remarkable pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does it reflect the history of Turkeys consumption?&lt;/em&gt; We might eventually be able to trace back the origin of the domestication through the names. If we assume that the names &quot;Turkey&quot; and &quot;Peru&quot; are coincidences, we may think that the indian first domesticated the Turkeys, followed by the French, Greeks and Arabs. However, it doesn't seem to match the history of Turkeys domestication (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_turkey#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;). It is a slightly better fit if we consider the the term &quot;Indian chicken&quot; (in french) refers to the american first nations and not to India.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there some other reason?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3663" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-10-18T01:46:55.047" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T02:10:46.353" Title="Why are the Turkeys name in reference to other cultures?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14692" CreationDate="2015-10-17T21:03:30.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/6875/2680&quot;&gt;dependency parsing is often faster than constituency parsing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two more reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kübler, Sandra, Ryan McDonald, and Joakim Nivre. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2357908457250641490&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency parsing.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 1.1 (2009): 1-127.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One reason for the increasing popularity is the fact that dependency-based syntactic representations seem to be useful in many applications of language technology, such as machine translation and information extraction, thanks to their transparent encoding of predicate-argument structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[There is a ] perception that dependency grammar is better suited than phrase structure grammar for languages with free or flexible word order, making it possible to analyze typologically diverse languages within a common framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T21:03:30.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14712" CreationDate="2015-10-17T21:31:14.723" Score="3" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question may or may not be specific to the General American accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In words such as thin, thick, and throw, the initial /θ/ doesn't sound the same as the /θ/ in words such as math and wrath.  I understand that phonemically they are both (voiceless) dental fricatives, but the initial ⟨th⟩ sounds like a plosive or aspirated dental fricative or stop.  What is phonetic realization of initial ⟨th⟩ in the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10694" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T21:24:38.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T21:24:38.937" Title="Realization of word-initial ⟨th⟩ in the English language" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14710" CreationDate="2015-10-17T23:00:15.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my first teaching gig, I was explaining the use of θ to represent the fricative in &quot;thin&quot;, and a student later asked me about the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thin&quot;... which she pronounced as a dental stop, so [t̪ʰin] &quot;thin&quot; vs [tʰɪn] &quot;tin&quot;. She was from urban New Jersey. If you have a recording, it should be easy to determine exactly what the difference is (if any), but I would go with a dental / alveolar stop distinction as a first guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T23:00:15.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14710" CreationDate="2015-10-17T23:06:47.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are comparing consonants at the beginning of a syllable with consonants at the end.  Consonants at the beginning are fortis, while those at the end are lenis.  This is a very general difference in English and in some other languages.  Saussure called syllable onset, fortis, consonants &lt;em&gt;explosive&lt;/em&gt;, and he called syllable offset, lenis consonants, &lt;em&gt;implosive&lt;/em&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Course in General Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortis consonants use more muscular effort, and consequently for the dental fricatives, the tongue is pressed more forcefully against the upper teeth.  This makes the obstruction to the stream of air through the mouth smaller and makes it last longer.  More air pressure will build up in the mouth, behind the obstruction, and when the consonant is released, there will be a larger explosion of air than for the corresponding lenis consonant in the offset of a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lenis consonsonants are more subject to lenitive changes, such as assimilation, than fortis consonants.  In English &quot;tenth&quot;, the final &quot;th&quot; can assimilate to the preceding (nasal) stop to become a dental stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T23:06:47.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14713" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-17T23:56:00.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-17T23:56:00.497" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T23:56:00.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14714" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-17T23:56:00.497" Score="0" Body="A statistical language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T08:32:04.483" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T08:32:04.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14708" CreationDate="2015-10-18T02:10:46.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems right that this hilarious chain of terms reflects the spread of the domesticated turkey in the Old World. Even more names, with even more geographical references, is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_for_turkeys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/holiday06/turkeys.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; discusses the history of introduction of turkeys in Europe and beyond, and speculates on the variety of names, including the English word &lt;em&gt;turkey&lt;/em&gt;. Version include onomatopoetic &lt;em&gt;tuka, tuka&lt;/em&gt; (resembling the sound it makes), Hebrew &lt;em&gt;tukka&lt;/em&gt; `big bird' (a possible coinage by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.j-grit.com/adventurers-luis-de-torres.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Luis de Torres&lt;/a&gt; a.k.a. Yosef ben Levi Ha-Ivri), and relation to the merchants trading with Ottoman Empire, who were called Turkey merchants and might have played a role in the turkey's spread in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.dictionary.com/turkey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;another article&lt;/a&gt; supports the idea that the &quot;Indian&quot; component in the relevant names refers to the New World. Their version of the etymology of &lt;em&gt;turkey&lt;/em&gt; is that there was confusion of turkeys with guinea-fowls, who came to Europe from Africa through Ottoman Empire, wherefore were called &lt;em&gt;turkey-hens&lt;/em&gt; of -&lt;em&gt;cocks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, it seems that the etymology of its names in different languages is amenable to a thorough exploration, but would involve some work with XVI century texts. Maybe somebody did it already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T02:10:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22803" CreationDate="2015-10-18T04:37:37.200" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Background&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 'ex' was a Gallaudet student (in Interpreting; he was hearing, not Deaf). I gathered a basic survey understanding of the linguistics (well, TBH, the politics) of &lt;code&gt;sign-languages&lt;/code&gt;. I noticed some of his more 'historical' (i.e., manifesto-ish) textbooks and course readings referred to the &lt;code&gt;chereme&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;emic unit&lt;/code&gt; for signed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Issue&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, when I search for the terms chereme and &lt;code&gt;chereology&lt;/code&gt;, I get results that lead me to believe this concept has been abandoned. So, I ask...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have these terms been abandoned?; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if so, by what discourse communities have they been discarded; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for what reason?; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is there a replacement concept?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4955" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T05:05:26.083" Title="Has the ‘chereme’ fallen out of vogue as an emic unit?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14706" CreationDate="2015-10-18T09:39:10.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote from the chapter explains the mechanics of the classification. Split alignment with neutral and non-neutral alignments are classified under the non-neutral alignments. Classifying all split alignments as neutral would clearly not be very informative - although having details on the split might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more importantly, you seem to be confusing accusative marking in English with agreement. Person is not the primary place of neutrality, rather it is the nominal vs. the pronominal system. I &gt; me, we &gt; us, he/she &gt; him/her, they &gt; them, who &gt; whom. In such a system, you can't really talk of the second person being neutral but rather having the same accusative and nominative form - this zero form is common even in language with complex nominal accusative morphologies like Russian and nobody would call them anything but strictly accusative systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the accusative marking survived so prominently in the pronouns in English, it is pretty obvious that the syntax has primarily accusative alignment which is unmarked on nouns. There is other evidence for this in the passive form: The ball broke the window. &gt; The window was broken by the ball. Where the roles are marked positionally and analytically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T09:39:10.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14722" CreationDate="2015-10-18T11:37:37.803" Score="2" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really struggling to 'get' two things on my linguistics course right now, which is heads of phrases and classifiers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that a head determines the nature of a phrase, but I just can't seem to pick the right thing in activities. I.e. in the sentence '&lt;em&gt;the disturbance between the North and the South&lt;/em&gt;' I underlined North and the South as the the head, but my tutor told me it's 'disturbance'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, can someone please explain what classifiers are?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10699" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T11:42:21.717" Title="Heads, classifiers" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-18T13:25:49.270" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages lie on an analytic-synthetic spectrum, where more analytic languages use free/unbounded grammatical morphemes while synthetic languages use bounded grammatical morphemes. Unbounded grammatical morphemes in my area of research (NLP) is also generally known as function words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been looking for quantitative studies of a large number of languages' distribution of unbounded grammatical morphemes for the purpose of placing them somewhere on this spectrum. The wikipedia article on Synthetic language talks about their &quot;degrees of synthesis&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm imagining the reasoning to go something like, &quot;in language X we classify a set of words as function words, which take up N% of the total amount of tokens in our corpus. Since that is a smaller percentage than language Y, we consider Y to be a more analytic language than X.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I haven't had any luck finding such a study. Is there a reason for this, or am I just using the wrong keywords in my search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T13:25:49.270" Title="Looking for quantitative studies on languages' degree of synthesis" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-18T14:08:42.023" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is the case but I can't find any sources saying so. Mind helping me out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Internal Merge necessarily guarantees that a copied syntactic object c-commands its lower copies, but the thing I have in mind is different. To be more precise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It is hard for the children to poop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Hornstein 1999, &quot;the children&quot; starts off in Spec,vP and moves up to embedded Spec,TP. How is the PP &quot;for the children&quot; made then? By copying &quot;the children&quot; and then External Merging it onto the P head &quot;for,&quot; at which point the PP &quot;for the children&quot; Merges onto AP? Doesn't this violate the c-command condition for copies? I need some kind of text which says this is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10338" LastEditorUserId="10338" LastEditDate="2015-10-18T14:22:01.577" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T14:22:01.577" Title="Does a copied syntactic object have to c-command what it was copied from?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14719" CreationDate="2015-10-18T14:22:47.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The head of a phrase is &quot;what&quot; refers to the same entity the whole phrase refers to, so in your sentence &lt;em&gt;'the disturbance between the North and the South'&lt;/em&gt;, that noun is indeed, &lt;em&gt;disturbance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;'the man with a nice suit's dog'&lt;/em&gt;, it's &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, the head of a phrase is the element that determines the syntactic function of the whole phrase. So in a noun phrase it's usually a noun or a pronoun, in an adjective phrase, it's an adjective, a verb for a verb phrase and so on. The head usually comes before its &lt;em&gt;dependents&lt;/em&gt;, which in my example above is &quot;the man with a nice suit&quot;, although this is not always the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classifiers are not really present in European languages (English included), but you can have constructions that support such a feature, for example with uncountable nouns: &lt;em&gt;five heads of cattle&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese however, among others, use classifiers (typically called counters) in more cases. Each classifier is used according to the referent (classifier is bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5&lt;strong&gt;分&lt;/strong&gt; (gofun), five minutes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2&lt;strong&gt;年&lt;/strong&gt; (ninen), two years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;子供四&lt;strong&gt;人&lt;/strong&gt; (kodomo yo nin), four children (literally, &lt;em&gt;children four people-classifier&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has classifiers for cylindrical things, flat, long thin objects, small animals, birds, mechanical, etc. You can see more in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word#Common_counters_by_category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the table for Japanese counters&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T11:42:21.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T11:42:21.717" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14719" CreationDate="2015-10-18T19:21:02.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have grave doubts about the general proposition that a head determines the nature of a phrase, but there are easy cases where there is a coincidence of properties between phrase and head.  The example you give is an easy case, because verb agreement can tell you the number of the noun phrase &quot;the disturbance between the North and the South&quot; if you construct an example sentence where it is subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The disturbance between the North and the South proves that economic circumstances dominate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's &quot;proves&quot; and not &quot;prove&quot;, we know that the subject noun phrase is singular.  Now, compare the numbers of &quot;disturbance&quot;, singular, and &quot;the North and the South&quot;, plural.  Evidently, it is the singular &quot;disturbance&quot; which has determined the number of the subject noun phrase, so it must be the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T19:21:02.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14726" CreationDate="2015-10-18T21:01:37.103" Score="2" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine is trying to make an atheist t-shirt with just the beginning of the shahada.  Does this look like it has been cut correctly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the commas and upside commas on this piece of calligraphy? I understand the fathah vowel marking and the hamza and the shadda, but there are additional comma-looking markings that I don't understand.   There is also something that looks like a bird over the ll of illahi which I don't get because presumably the thing below it is the shadda.&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vE9k5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vE9k5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;la illahi&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10702" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T21:09:06.083" Title="Arabic calligraphy - understanding markings" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-10-19T04:17:21.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14725" CreationDate="2015-10-18T21:09:06.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The commas are just decoration to fill the vacant space. Your atheist statement is very clearly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T21:09:06.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2015-10-19T07:02:51.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Hmong&lt;/strong&gt; language has 8 tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10705" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T13:03:32.457" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T13:03:32.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13148" CreationDate="2015-10-19T10:00:09.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a response to Eric answer but I can't seem to add comments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dopefishh/praatalign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praatalign&lt;/a&gt; uses the models trained by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bas.uni-muenchen.de/Bas/BasMAUS.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schiel et al. from München&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praatalign phonetizes Spanish orthographic transcription on the fly but is also able to apply inter/intra-word pronunciation rules and one or more alternative pronunciations via a pronunciation dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10706" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T10:00:09.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-19T15:43:25.757" Score="4" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that evolution of Spanish tenses stopped, while being in the middle of replacement of conjugated tenses by compound tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some scenarios compound tense was adopted, in some other cases not yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But grammar rules, mass education/media, standardization came along; and carved the usage patterns that happened to exist at that time into &quot;stone&quot;, preventing further evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons for suspicion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have read that around Madrid the compound past(s) are used in situations where Latin Americans would conjugate the main verb not just &quot;&lt;em&gt;haber&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the present perfect is used differently in English vs Spanish, even though according to the respective grammar rules, there should be 1-to-1 correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, grammar rules attempt to explain something mostly arbitrary. Those usage patterns of the past are to some degree accidental, and do not determine the correctness of what someone says in the future. Correctness is determined by the listener, not the rules made by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence for or against, that evolution of tenses (or grammar in general) got stopped around 19/20th century? What about other Latin/Indo-european languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10708" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-10-23T11:19:04.040" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T11:19:04.040" Title="Have the Spanish tenses stopped evolving?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14730" CreationDate="2015-10-19T16:15:07.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages change, it's inevitable. Even an almost geographically isolated language will change: maybe in a limited way, or at a slower pace, but it will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some changes are more visible and happen in a shorter time, like acquisition of vocabulary through loaning or calques, but other changes will take more time, like sound shifts and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure what you mean by &quot;evolution of tenses&quot;, as in how verb tenses are conjugated? They will change at some point, but it might take more than a human lifetime to do so, and that's probably why from your point of view, the language seems &quot;immobile&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there is no reason to think a language has stopped evolving completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T16:15:07.493" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T08:53:44.833" Score="0" ViewCount="778" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason why it's so common for different people to share the same given name?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a normal pattern in most languages. Names like Anna, Mohammed, Wei along with their variations are homonymous to millions of people.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, places with the same name are much less frequent. Homonymous nouns with more than a few distinct meanings are exceptional. Furthermore, when people design a new product these days, they are very careful to choose a new (untaken) name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10710" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-10-22T07:35:09.750" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T07:35:09.750" Title="Why are most given names so common?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14770" CreationDate="2015-10-20T09:00:44.770" Score="2" ViewCount="743" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two spellings of an Azeri name: Alakbar and Ələkbər.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In official contexts (ID or passport), do both forms of the name appear or just the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why do Azeris still transcribe their names if both the forms are written in Latin? I am aware that they used Cyrillic before and they switched to Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the letter ə not supported by software and is it easier to write a more common equivalent, like a?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10621" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T11:12:03.387" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T07:19:51.507" Title="Do Azeri people actually use Ə instead of A in names?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14739" CreationDate="2015-10-20T15:00:25.600" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of the combination of these two meaning types in a single word, which we seem to find in some related languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type A:  a certain teacher / ein  bestimmter Lehrer / un certain professeur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type B:  a certain death / bestimmte Vorstellungen / une mort certaine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I am looking for might look like:  &amp;quot;It originates with the Latin expression ___, which had Type B meaning first and later Type A.  The expression made its way into French and, through it, to English and influenced a similar development for the German word.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to read what follows to answer the question.  I will only try to motivate the question a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type A limits a larger set to a smaller.  By saying, for example, &amp;quot;Certain species of the forest adapted to the change,&amp;quot; we signal that we are talking about a limited subset of the forest species though at this time we won't go into the selection criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, in saying, &amp;quot;A certain popular teacher thought he could make more money by opening his own school,&amp;quot; we signal that we have in mind a particular member of the set of popular teachers though we won't be giving out any names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We may say that type A &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; is not a characterization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type B is a characterization.  If we say, &amp;quot;Death was swift and certain,&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; is on a par with &lt;em&gt;swift&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively we may say that type B &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; is also different from &lt;em&gt;swift&lt;/em&gt; by analyzing the sentence to death having the attribute of swiftness and nobody having any doubt of its coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, only type A usage of &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; can elicit the question, &amp;quot;Which?&amp;quot;  Imagine this conversation:  &amp;quot;Charles is facing a certain death.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Which?  By hanging?  The guillotine? I'm dying to know.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, I mean they are sure to kill him.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all the languages you know have this combination of types A and B in a single word, the connection between the two may seem entirely natural and even inevitable, but I can tell you that it is at least not inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be surprised if the combination occurred independently in many languages.  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T16:11:20.083" Title="The origin of the two usages of &quot;certain&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14734" CreationDate="2015-10-20T15:51:19.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main cause of uniformity in given names is religion. Many Muslims are named Mohamed (and spelling variants) and many Christians are names Mary for obvious reasons. Forces of linguistic change give rise to local variants like John, Jean [ʒɛ̃], Sean, Shawn, Johann, Ivan. When you say that common for people to name the same name, that means you can take all the given names and count up the number of people with that name, and rank then in order of frequency. If there is a small set of culturally-available names like John, Ali, Ram, then you expect most names to be drawn from that set. There are cultures where children are given names meaning e.g. &quot;(death) doesn't know you&quot;, but the chances of many (i.e. millions of) people picking &lt;em&gt;Tilumanya&lt;/em&gt; as a given name is nil. Religion has been the most influential source of this cultural uniformity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T15:51:19.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T16:02:36.740" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Persian, the word for &lt;strong&gt;nest&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;لانه&lt;/strong&gt;, which is pronounced somehow as &lt;strong&gt;/lʌne/&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in everyday spoken language, people usually pronounce it as &lt;strong&gt;/lune/&lt;/strong&gt;, and they usually write it as &lt;strong&gt;لونه&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, considering that transliteration is common in Persian, this simple word is represented in media as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;لانه&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;/lʌne/&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;lane&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in everyday language, people use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;لونه&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;/lune/&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;loone&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;lune&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;loune&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;lone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a computer programmer who needs to work and extend NLP libraries, I really can't find out anything about this phenomenon. I can describe it as &lt;strong&gt;the gap between media/formal language and everyday language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a scientific explanation for this? Has it been studied by linguists? What languages have bigger gaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T16:18:08.953" Title="What do we call this phenomenon of the gap between media and everyday language?" Tags="&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14736" CreationDate="2015-10-20T16:11:20.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin &quot;certus&quot; has both of these meanings, though your &quot;Type B&quot; is very much more common and is clearly the original sense (perfect passive participle of cerno &quot;to determine&quot;). A few examples of &quot;Type A&quot; can, however, be found here under II,A,b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dcertus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dcertus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T16:11:20.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14738" CreationDate="2015-10-20T16:18:08.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The replacement of historic /ɒn/ by /un/ is a well-known feature of Tehran dialect (“Tehruni”), which has become the colloquial koine in the whole of Iran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon that you are observing is what in linguistics is called “diglossia”, where one form of the language is used in formal writing and speech, but another form is used in ordinary conversation. There is a very pronounced diglossia in Arabic, besides other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T16:18:08.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T20:47:49.463" Score="3" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most (or all?) of Germanic languages questions are created by inversion. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am here.&quot; -&gt; &quot;Am I here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know most of Slavic languages do it simply by adding a word before the sentence. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am here.&quot; -&gt; &quot;If I am here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other &quot;methods&quot; of creating a question? I'm especially interested if there exist languages that use inflection in order to do it? Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am here.&quot; -&gt; &quot;I is here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastEditorUserId="10442" LastEditDate="2015-10-21T07:47:34.057" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T19:58:36.687" Title="Do there exist any languages that use inflection to create questions?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14741" CreationDate="2015-10-20T22:28:43.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are other ways of constructing questions. Many Australian languages use a verbal auxiliary which carries some modal meaning, to which they then attach subject and object agreement clitics. The Walmajarri language changes the auxiliary to create polar questions (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ausil.org.au/sites/ausil/files/WP-B-1%20Walmatjari%20-Part%202_0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, p93):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;yani  &lt;b&gt;pa&lt;/b&gt;-lu    mangawarnti&#xA;went  AUX-3pl  girls&#xA;'The girls went.'&#xA;&#xA;yani  &lt;b&gt;nga&lt;/b&gt;-lu   mangawarnti&#xA;went  AUX-3pl  girls&#xA;'Did the girls go?'&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T22:28:43.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14734" CreationDate="2015-10-21T06:32:13.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First names are subject to Zipf's law of distribution (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/11-6-4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper for some examples&lt;/a&gt;). This means that the most frequent name is roughly twice as common as the one after that and so on. The same applies to frequencies of all the relatively frequent words in the corpus of any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not clear what causes this type of distribution because it appears in a lot of systems where human intentionality cannot play a role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With names, it's obvious imitation plays a key role (like fashion) - so not surprisingly the most popular names always happen in clusters over a period of time. (For instance, my first name was incredibly rare in the Czech Republic until the growing fame of the hockey player Dominik Hasek - now, while still not very frequent, it is much more common. In Albania, for instance, you have a relatively lot of people born during a certain period called Lenin.) The sorts of names being imitated will vary a lot across cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also keep in mind that there's huge cultural variability of what a 'given' name means. From no special given name (first son, second daughter, etc.) to ones chosen (and changed) to indicate quality or some events (Sitting Bull). As far as I know, no frequency studies have been done on these non-Western style naming systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current US African American preference for novel names referencing African patterns would also make an interesting case study. Would a system where the main aim is to be different still be subject to Zipf's law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T06:32:13.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4080" CreationDate="2015-10-21T07:26:06.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by improve you mean, easier for adult learners, then a large adult learner population can cause such changes. According to &quot;Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure&quot; by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also suggests that whatever the reason for the change, implies some criteria according to which it &quot;improved&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;examples (note how some of these are &quot;against&quot; each other):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;easier for adult learners (morphological simplification ie becoming isolating, regularity)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;easier for infant learners (morphological complexity causing redundancy to be communicated, but regularity eg children say/expect &quot;gived&quot; not &quot;gave&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;faster/shorter speech and less likely to mix up (irregular conjugation, change of word endings, phonological change)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;foster national/tribal identity by changing differently than sybling languages (some think of the linguistic variety of Europe as &quot;improvement&quot; over proto-indo-european or whatever, similarly all romance languages are seen by some as better than 1 standard latin)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first 2 are taken from &quot;Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure&quot; by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale, the rest I have probably read somewhere, but I do not remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10717" LastEditorUserId="10717" LastEditDate="2015-10-21T07:34:50.220" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T07:34:50.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14741" CreationDate="2015-10-21T09:01:38.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese adds a particle &quot;ma&quot; to form polar questions from declaratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You good 'you are good'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  you good irr 'Are you good?' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, many Andean languages have clitics to form wh- and polar questions from declaratives and imperatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-10-21T13:36:11.523" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T13:36:11.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14741" CreationDate="2015-10-21T10:16:06.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard Korean has an interrogative inflection (as opposed to declarative, imperative and propositive moods), as part of the property known as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;pragmatic mood&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It is characterised by -ㅂ니까 &lt;em&gt;-mnikka&lt;/em&gt; for vowel stems or -습니까 &lt;em&gt;-seumnikka&lt;/em&gt; for consonant stems in the formal polite level (as in 합니까 &lt;em&gt;hamnikka&lt;/em&gt; and 있습니까 &lt;em&gt;issseumnikka&lt;/em&gt;) and -느냐 &lt;em&gt;-neunya&lt;/em&gt; for the formal plain level (하느냐 &lt;em&gt;haneunya&lt;/em&gt; / 있느냐 &lt;em&gt;issneunya&lt;/em&gt;). Adjectives (i.e. descriptive verbs) have a different inflection for the formal plain level: -냐 &lt;em&gt;-nya&lt;/em&gt; for vowel stems and -으냐 &lt;em&gt;-eunya&lt;/em&gt; for consonant stems. For all forms, this may be abbreviated to -니 &lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt; in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is generally no formal inflection distinction in the intimate (informal plain) [although many other interrogative forms are used, e.g. -지 &lt;em&gt;-ji&lt;/em&gt;], the general polite (informal polite), the authoritative (semi-formal polite) and familiar (semi-formal, semi-polite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyeongsang_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gyeongsang dialect group of Korean&lt;/a&gt; (including Busan), in its informal plain layer, distinguishes between yes-no questions and wh-questions by inflection, with an -아 &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; or -나 &lt;em&gt;-na&lt;/em&gt; for yes-no questions and -오 &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; or -노 &lt;em&gt;-no&lt;/em&gt; for wh-questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2015-10-21T10:32:47.950" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T10:32:47.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14741" CreationDate="2015-10-21T19:58:36.687" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a particle /ka/ &amp;lt;か&gt; added to the end of the sentence that marks it as a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Declarative:&#xA;Anata wa nihonjin desu &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Anata wa nihonjin desu ka&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T19:58:36.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14734" CreationDate="2015-10-21T20:33:23.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're effectively also asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why do people have names?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's simply a tradeoff - too many names would be hard to remember, and too few names leads to too many clashes (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Which John?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).  In situations where there are fewer names, people end up adding modifiers (eg &lt;em&gt;&quot;Little John&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Big John&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), modifying the names (eg &lt;em&gt;&quot;Johnny&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) or giving nicknames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why it's slightly more varied for towns and cities, it follows much the same principles.  However we mention far fewer unique towns and cities in our daily lives, and the lifespans of their names are much longer, so the exact distributions are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T20:33:23.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-22T08:37:38.633" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Malay, there are quite a few words and particles that can affix or modify both heads and phrases. The interrogative suffix -&lt;em&gt;kah&lt;/em&gt; is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Kah&lt;/em&gt; affixing heads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tidak-kah sakit   kecederaan itu?            NEG&#xA;NEG  -Q   painful wound      DIST&#xA;Isn't that wound painful?&#xA;&#xA;Dia  makan-kah ayam?                         V&#xA;3.SG eat  -Q   chicken?&#xA;Does he eat chicken?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Kah&lt;/em&gt; affixing phrases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Orang  yang mabuk]-kah yang kamu benci?    DP&#xA;[Person COMP drunk]-Q   COMP 2.SG hate&#xA;Is it drunk people whom you hate?&#xA;&#xA;Dia  berjalan-jalan [di Kuala Lumpur]-kah?  PP&#xA;3.SG wander         [in Kuala Lumpur]-Q?&#xA;Is he wandering in Kuala Lumpur?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there an attested syntactic projection specified for constiutents like this - something like a particle phrase or something? I reckon that the answer has to do with a projection, not in a syntactic tree, but in a morphological tree, since affixes are morphological rather than syntactic and head affixation is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing though - certain words can also be as ubiquitous as this interrogative particle, modifying both heads and phrases. The word &lt;em&gt;juga&lt;/em&gt;, which means &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; can also modify heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Juga&lt;/em&gt; modifying heads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dia  tidak juga terasa sakit                NEG&#xA;3.SG NEG   JUGA feel   pain&#xA;He didn't really feel any pain&#xA;&#xA;Dia  makan juga ayam                        V&#xA;3.SG eat   JUGA chicken&#xA;He does eat chicken&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Juga&lt;/em&gt; modifying a phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Orang  yang mabuk] juga ada  perasaan     DP&#xA;[Person COMP drunk] JUGA have feeling&#xA;Drunk people too have feelings&#xA;&#xA;[Di sana]  juga kawasan berhantu           PP&#xA;[At there] JUGA area    haunted&#xA;There too is a haunted area&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Juga&lt;/em&gt; is an adverbial and is a free morpheme. It can't be the case that it occupies a projection at the morphological level, could it?&#xA;  Syntactically, it should occupy an adjunct projection, but what I&#xA;  can't figure out is what kind of projection it should be since adverbs&#xA;  modify VPs, APs, and whole clauses, and &lt;em&gt;juga&lt;/em&gt; can even modify DPs and&#xA;  PPs and heads like NEG and V. This is somewhat similar tot he question I raised about the adverb also in English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14467/the-syntax-of-only&quot;&gt;The Syntax of &amp;#39;Only&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T09:24:38.863" Title="Particles and Words Affixing Heads and Phrases" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14760" CreationDate="2015-10-22T16:59:07.747" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is change hindered by mass education of grammar rules and idiomatic writing, publishing of lexicons, standardization, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the only manner in which english is allowed to evolve, as things stand now, is by extension of vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have its other aspects (e.g. grammar, pronunciation/spelling) been frozen at the 19/20th century state, when those restricting/standardizing phenomena appeared?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10725" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T06:48:02.217" Title="Does standardisation restrain naturally occurring grammar change?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14759" CreationDate="2015-10-22T19:05:08.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Change is affected by numerous social forces, including education, mass media, and various other forms of social uniformatization. This can both retard and accelerate language change. For example, the widespread adoption of expressions (&quot;sentences&quot;) like &quot;As if&quot;, &quot;whatevs&quot; and so on would not have happened without mass communication gadgets. Central California vowel centralization has spread considerably over the past 30 years, for some social reason. There is a register often used by police department spokesmen which is similar to and attempts to emulate high register talk promulgated by standard education and propagated by the media, which surely would not exist if society were the way it was 200 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no issue of &quot;allowing&quot; English to evolve – no legislation or agency can directly force people to pronounce &quot;which&quot; differently from &quot;witch&quot;, and no law can suppress the pronunciation &quot;boid&quot; for &quot;bird&quot; in New Orleans (and elsewhere). If it becomes socially disadvantageous to say &quot;boid&quot;, then people may be motivated to change their pronunciation. &quot;Boid&quot; can also be a badge of yat solidarity, so it depends on one's goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistic &quot;suppression&quot; is primarily manifested via dialect choice, as exemplified by the spread of Standard General American in the southern states (among those born in the south), since southern dialects are stigmatized in some circles. Since all linguistic change starts at a very localized level as a deviation from the current Standard Language norm, hindering a language change amounts to a language change failing to catch on sufficiently. This happens so often that we don't even notice it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-22T19:05:08.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-22T21:11:41.107" Score="1" ViewCount="883" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone make a PRAAT script that deletes line breaks from intervals in Text Grids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a bunch of transcribing of a word/sentence list. I copy and pasted from a text file that had line breaks between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you say GET INTERVAL LABEL, the transcription will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;feet &lt;br&gt;&#xA;foot &lt;br&gt;&#xA;one &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like a way to delete the line breaks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;feet foot one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I'm asking someone to make a script for me, which is asking for a lot. But, I'm new to programming/PRAAT scripting. I think it would be pretty easy and just involve a find/replace function loop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T13:11:24.220" Title="Praat script to delete line breaks in TextGrid intervals?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14761" CreationDate="2015-10-22T23:12:35.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TextGrids are still just text files. The simplest thing for a non-scripter is probably to open it in your favorite editor and find-replace them there. Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TextWrangler&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sublimetext.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SublimeText 3&lt;/a&gt; if you don’t have a good one you like.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;(I’m not sure that this is even the correct StackExchange for this, or if the tags ‘phonetics’ and ‘computational-linguistics' are relevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the tiers probably contain intervals like:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;intervals [7]:&#xA;    xmin = 1.05&#xA;    xmax = 1.27&#xA;    text = “feet\nfoot\none”&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a dedicated script (sed, awk, Python, …) would be better if this is a common operation, you can indeed do this in e.g., SublimeText. One method is to first select all the ‘text' lines (e.g., Find All with '.+text.+' is fine); then, Replace All '\\n' with ‘ ‘. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method assumes that you can't simply do a global replace of '\\n' with ' '. I think this latter, simpler option should be tried first, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-10-23T05:04:48.660" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T05:04:48.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-23T00:18:33.200" Score="1" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence, 'It was raining' what are the core arguments?&#xA;I think [It] is a core argument and [was raining] is another.  This would mean that &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is a NP and &lt;em&gt;was raining&lt;/em&gt; is a VP.  But if this is the case, then what type of argument (subject, direct object, indirect object, oblique) is &lt;em&gt;was raining&lt;/em&gt; ? Would &lt;em&gt;raining&lt;/em&gt; be a dependent of &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10637" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T00:18:33.200" Title="Identifying core arguments, constituents?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-24T23:14:00.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14761" CreationDate="2015-10-23T01:36:57.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to use an external editor for this. You can make use of the &lt;code&gt;Replace interval text...&lt;/code&gt; command (you might have to upgrade Praat to a recent version if you don't have this command).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how your newlines are encoded, this should do the trick.&#xA;This will loop through all the tiers in the selected TextGrid and check whether it is an interval or point tier. In each case, the appropriate command to replace labels will be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The command uses 6 arguments: the tier to process, the beginning and the end of the point/interval range to process (&lt;code&gt;0&lt;/code&gt; meaning all items), the string to match and its replacement, and whether the match should be done using regular expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Run with a single TextGrid selected&#xA;# (or include in a larger script to process multiple objects)&#xA;for tier to do(&quot;Get number of tiers&quot;)&#xA;  # Use appropriate replace command for interval and point tiers&#xA;  # The command will replace all instances of &quot;\n&quot; by &quot; &quot; in all&#xA;  # interval / point labels.&#xA;  if do(&quot;Is interval tier...&quot;, tier)&#xA;    Replace interval text: tier, 0, 0, &quot;\n&quot;, &quot; &quot;, &quot;Regular Expressions&quot;&#xA;  else&#xA;    Replace point text:    tier, 0, 0, &quot;\n&quot;, &quot; &quot;, &quot;Regular Expressions&quot;&#xA;  endif&#xA;endfor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2015-10-24T13:11:24.220" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T13:11:24.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-23T04:47:36.740" Score="2" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, take &lt;em&gt;believes&lt;/em&gt;, which is a raising to object verb.&#xA;However, employing various selection tests, you can observe that &lt;em&gt;believes&lt;/em&gt; selects an experiencer subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;#the cat believes to be out of the bag&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      *there believes to be a lot of hens here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      *it believes to be raining&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these tests &lt;em&gt;believes&lt;/em&gt; seems to select a specific subject because it rejects instances of tight selection (idioms) and existential there. This behavior is much like subject control verbs, like &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given the tests in object position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?# Harold believes the cat to be out of the bag&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         Harold believes there to be a lot of hens here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         Harold believes it to be raining&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see that &lt;em&gt;believes&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem to select for a specific object, which would leave us to presume it is a raising to object verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that &lt;em&gt;believes&lt;/em&gt; is both subject control and object raising?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This is assuming the VP internal subject hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T10:21:46.890" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T16:57:18.670" Title="Can a control verb simultaneously be a raising verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;control&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14759" CreationDate="2015-10-23T05:54:55.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by @user6726 is pretty much accurate. I'd just like to add a bit by challenging the assumption that the processes of standard maintenance (dictionary writing, usage guides, schooling, public discussion, etc.) are in some way in opposition to 'natural' language change. That is exactly how language change occurs. The normative standard is just one of the dialects with higher prestige in certain contexts and therefore higher motivation for emulation. However, that prestige may wane with time (as happened in the UK) and various challenges will appear to undermine some aspects of the standard - this will include pronunciation, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. For instance, English has seen the spread of [be+Ving] construction to more and more verbs to expressions such as 'I'm liking this more and more'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the processes of standardization did not just appear in 19th century. They were always around but in different forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is did things like mass education and mass media slow down change or slow down change in some areas? This is a question that's difficult to answer because no one knows what the rate of language change should be over relatively short periods of time like 200 years. Some languages change a lot in that time and others remain relatively stable. We know that things like increased contact and social change have an impact but even that is not predictable. RMW Dixon proposed punctuated equilibria as the answer to the question but I'm not aware of any research that followed up on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T05:54:55.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14765" CreationDate="2015-10-23T05:58:14.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not, or at least not &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; in English. &lt;em&gt;Control&lt;/em&gt; is a relation between an argument of the matrix clause and a (big) PRO in the embedded one, which supplies the PRO with reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In examples with &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;, the trace left after raising to object seems to be the only (relevant) empty category in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I [believe [the cat]&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; [t&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; to be out of the bag].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T05:58:14.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14735" CreationDate="2015-10-23T12:19:16.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question.  As always with transliteration, there are compromises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do Azeris still transcribe their names if both the forms are written in Latin? I am aware that they used Cyrillic before and they switched to Latin.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly we should note that there are other languages written in the Latin script for which compromises are made by individuals in international contexts: Uzbek, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and in a sense, any language with non-ASCII characters, like French or German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even English.  &lt;strong&gt;Any non-ASCII alphachar in the Latin version of your name will cause problems&lt;/strong&gt; with software and bureaucracy at some point in life.  Relatively common all-ASCII British or Anglicised names can be problematic or lossily stored (eg &lt;em&gt;McDonald&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Smith-Barnes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ng&lt;/em&gt;) in some software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In official contexts (ID or passport), do both forms of the name appear or just the latter?&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older passports did not include an international (ie English-inspired) Latin-to-Latin transliteration, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Passports_of_Azerbaijan#/media/File:The_description_data_page_of_the_Azerbaijani_biometric_passport.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the new ones&lt;/a&gt; do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3lq7O.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3lq7O.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the new biometric Azeri passport, with English form of names&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note &lt;em&gt;Sevinj&lt;/em&gt;, rendered according to Anglophone expectations even though 'c' is an ASCII character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just as there is an official Latinisation according to many regimes, according to the Azerbaijani regime there is an official &quot;English form&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the official prescriptions, we could expect private individuals to provide such a form in some contexts.  For Azeri specifically, the precedents for Latinisation and internationalisation are Turkish and Russian.  In fact in Russian, 'ə' is rendered as 'a'/'а' (that's Cyrillic), in Turkish cognates it is 'e'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not unique to Azeri nor to 'ə': you will not find many people from Turkey who keep using 'ş' in their names in all their documents in Anglophone countries.  Note however that less English-oriented Latinisations, say of 'Gəncə', are possible:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;French: &lt;em&gt;Gandja&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;German: &lt;em&gt;Gandscha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Turkish: &lt;em&gt;Gence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Serbo-Croatian: &lt;em&gt;Gandža&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;English, but via Russian: &lt;em&gt;Gandzha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, you may still encounter &lt;em&gt;Gäncä&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the trend in European languages these days is away from local phonetic renderings towards English-phonetic renderings (&lt;em&gt;Ganja&lt;/em&gt;) or towards the native Latin version (&lt;em&gt;Gəncə&lt;/em&gt;) if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the letter 'ə' not supported by software and is it easier to write a more common equivalent, like 'a'?&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see with 'c' in '&lt;em&gt;Sevinc&lt;/em&gt;', it is not simply a matter of software compatibility.  That said, no non-ASCII alphachar is supported by all software in all situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'ə' specifically is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6%8F#Unicode_encodings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even more problematic&lt;/a&gt;, although it is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, foreign names, when written in Azeri or many other languages with similar issues, will use these characters: &lt;em&gt;George Bush&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Corc Buş&lt;/em&gt; in Azeri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T07:19:51.507" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T07:19:51.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14789" CreationDate="2015-10-23T19:42:52.793" Score="0" ViewCount="719" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the Irish language equivalent of the name Aidan/Aiden? I know that the name is derived from the Irish language. &#xA;Perhaps a more difficult question: What is... or would be the Scottish Gaelic spelling and pronunciation of the same name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says Aodhán in Irish &#xA;and Aodhàn in Scottish Gaelic (note the accents are different). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all over the Internet there seems to be confusion with the correct pronunciation of Aodhán in Irish... specifically whether there is a &quot;D&quot; like sound when said or there is no &quot;D&quot; and it is in fact pronounced much like Ian. &#xA;fyi: I know the Irish spelling of Ian is not Aodhán &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could find now Scottish Gaelic info on...well almost everything. I'm curious where this Wikipedia editor got that info and whether it's correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also,  a simple one... Cearbhaill is my surname though I use Carroll a lot. &#xA;My family says KYEARLL... ll as in the -OL in Carol. Would you agree? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10733" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T00:42:21.010" Title="Gaelic Spelling and Pronunciation" Tags="&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="814" CreationDate="2015-10-23T21:36:37.123" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every sentence you process gets converted to a series of micro clauses (SVO).&#xA;These are compared to the clauses in your memory.  If no match is found, the&#xA;new clause[s] are stored with a weight equal to your trust in the source.&#xA;If they do match, then the trust is simply increased.&#xA;If a new clause violates the logic of existing clause[s], then there is a disagreement.  The 'politeness' of your response takes into account the trust in each version.  Your memory can retain both versions, each with its own trust value, but housekeeping will look for ways to resolve the clash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T21:36:37.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-10-23T21:48:57.180" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clicks are used by other animals for echo-location.  In an environment with lots of echoing objects, clicks would be hard to use for communication.&#xA;Because they don't use (pharyngeal) airflow (unlike all other phonemes), they would be easy to skip when making up sounds.  {Perhaps there is no research to cite because this is common sense.  It's not common sense if it's wrong...}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T20:22:31.097" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T20:22:31.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2380" CreationDate="2015-10-23T22:00:54.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call it 'momentary aphasia'.  The brain has different modules for input, memory, awareness and output; and all are highly parallel.  The awareness may miss that the output was distracted by a similarity and went on a tangent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T22:00:54.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6643" CreationDate="2015-10-23T22:20:52.747" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the previous answer:  'community' is a realis class noun and 'to place' is an event (infinite, abstract, irrealis) noun.  'It preferred ...' chooses the (anaphoric) class noun and 'It was preferred ...' chooses the (cataphoric) event noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T22:20:52.747" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2015-10-23T22:20:52.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-23T13:49:16.800" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have run into something weird about the etymology of this word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/iron#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; gives some details. It claims that it descends from PIE  *h₁ésh₂r̥ (blood) via Proto-Celtic, and cites two sources to back this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it named after molten iron being likened to blood? What mystery! Also, Wiktionary also gives an alternate derivation, *ish₂ros ‎(“supernatural, holy”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the  *h₁ésh₂r̥ etymology sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10648" OwnerDisplayName="Nihilist_Frost" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T05:07:21.067" Title="Etymology of &quot;iron&quot; - semantic change" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14777" CreationDate="2015-10-23T16:07:34.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says that while it is not impossible that the Celtic and Germanic bases are cognate, it is more likely that the Germanic base was borrowed &amp;lt; Celtic in prehistory, alongside the introduction of iron technology to northern Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; lists three derivatives for the underlying form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) a derivative of the Indo-European base of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ore n.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) a derivative of the Indo-European base of ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ἱερός&lt;/em&gt; strong&lt;/strong&gt; (probably a further sense of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ἱερός&lt;/em&gt; holy, sacred&lt;/strong&gt;: see hiero- &lt;em&gt;comb. form&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iii) a derivative of the Indo-European base of ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ἔαρ , εἶαρ&lt;/em&gt; blood&lt;/strong&gt; (on account of the colour of iron oxide, especially as seen in iron ore);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says that these all pose phonological problems and attempts have been made to resolve these problems by suggesting transmission via Illyrian. Borrowing into either Germanic or Celtic from a non-Indo-European language has also been suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Language and History in the Early Germanic World&lt;/em&gt; (By D. H. Gree) has further discussion on the origin of the word. It is concluded that the Germanic word for 'iron' is unlikely to be native, but rather borrowed from a non-Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closeness of the Celtic isoglosses and the absence of any other counterparts suggests that this source was Celtic, a conclusion borne out by the significant  fact of accent doublets in both Celtic and Germanic&lt;sup&gt;59&lt;/sup&gt;, as well as by the linguistic evidence for the dominance of Celtic iron-working over Germania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;59&lt;/sup&gt; Birkhan (1970), 141.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10661" OwnerDisplayName="ermanen" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T16:07:34.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-24T08:07:57.627" Score="4" ViewCount="44336" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are three main differences between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic transcriptions deal with phones or sounds, which can occur across different languages and speakers of these languages all over the world. On the other hand, phonemic transcriptions deal with phonemes, which can change the meaning of the words in which they are contained if replaced; for example, /bɪt/ and /pɪt/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic transcriptions provide more details on how the actual sounds are pronounced, while phonemic transcriptions represent how people interpret such sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We use square brackets to enclose phones or sounds and slashes to enclose phonemes. So, for instance, it would be incorrect to place the aspirated allophone of the phoneme &quot;t&quot; between slashes--it should go inside square brackets because it's not a phoneme (which means that its omission wouldn't change the meaning of the word that contains it).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any more differences between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastEditorUserId="10737" LastEditDate="2015-10-25T07:02:02.760" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T05:33:10.897" Title="Differences between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12583" CreationDate="2015-10-24T08:41:11.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google books n-gram viewer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can specify start year and end year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://googleresearch.blogspot.de/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://googleresearch.blogspot.de/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are technical, you can use it at a scale large enough to answer your question with &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/bigquery-web-ui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google BigQuery&lt;/a&gt; and the public &lt;a href=&quot;https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/publicdata:samples.trigrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tri-gram sample data&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is also an imperfect data set, and in any case &lt;em&gt;there is no true count of a word's use&lt;/em&gt;, it all depends what you include and how you weight it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may get more concrete answers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://opendata.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://datascience.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://datascience.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:57:30.007" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T08:41:11.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14780" CreationDate="2015-10-24T11:12:02.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemic and phonetic transcriptions are created with different purposes in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemic transcriptions are often kind of a proto-orthography for spoken languages, and they are used to describe languages (in example sentences or grammars) that lack a proper orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic transcriptions are often used by dialectologists to describe how the sounds of dialects differ in space and time. Sub-phonemic sound shifts are a typical research topic in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T11:12:02.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14879" CreationDate="2015-10-24T12:55:41.900" Score="0" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.behindthename.com/name/kai-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;, it is mentioned that Kai might be considered as a Frisian diminutive of Gerhard, Nicolaas (Nicholas), Cornelius, or Gaius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see the relationship between Kai and Gaius (Caius, hence Kaius, Kai), but I wonder if there is any link between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kai and Gerhard;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kai and Nicholas;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kai and Cornelius .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10740" LastEditorDisplayName="user10740" LastEditDate="2015-10-24T13:09:57.187" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T09:46:05.720" Title="Kai as a Frisian diminutive of Gerhard, Nicolaas, Cornelius, or Gaius" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-24T13:49:19.927" Score="5" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make a fun little &quot;Halloweenify&quot; feature where a user types in his or her name and gets a scary version. (Julie becomes &quot;Ghoulie&quot;, Robert becomes &quot;Macabert&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a huge list of Halloween works and a huge list of names, all with their phonemes from CMUDict. (Let's put aside for a second uncommon names.) For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;julie&quot;: &quot;JH UW1 L IY0&quot;&#xA;&quot;ghoul&quot;: &quot;G UW1 L&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's relatively easy to write some code to align the &quot;UW1 L&quot; in these words. But since I don't explicitly know that the &quot;IY0&quot; in &quot;Julie&quot; corresponds to &quot;ie,&quot; I can't get from &quot;Ghoul&quot; to &quot;Ghoulie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what I need is a version of CMUDict, or any other robust grapheme-to-phoneme dictionary, that splits up both the orthography and the phonemes, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;j u l ie&quot;: &quot;JH UW1 L IY0&quot;&#xA;&quot;r o b er t&quot;: &quot;R AA1 B ER0 T&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, it would be easy to reconstruct the original name after adulterating it to make it scary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone seen such a dictionary? I'm also open to more generic g2p solutions, but since this runs in a browser I can use any live heavy-duty ML methods. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10741" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:52:54.900" Title="Mapping graphemes to phonemes in CMUDict" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14784" CreationDate="2015-10-24T14:37:46.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly hard problem (well, 2: the g2p problem, and the word-formation problem). Per-grapheme:phoneme (fun fact: such mappings are sometimes called ‘graphones') dictionaries for English don’t (can’t) exist, because there’s lots of ambiguity and issues of multiple n-gram sizes (as in your example, ‘ie’  = /IY/, but sometime ‘i’ = /IY/, or /IH/, or whatever). Dealing with stress placement is even worse, and possible not solvable by the method I suggest below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had some success with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AdolfVonKleist/Phonetisaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonetisaurus&lt;/a&gt;, a more generic g2p (and, if you reverse the inputs, p2g) tool. It needs to be trained on a dictionary like you describe (orthography list with matched phonemic list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess you’ll also have to match the spooky versions for stress and rhyming, but I don’t know of an existing solution for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most realistic solution is for humans to prepare these spooky versions ahead of time (by hand); the distribution of names is such that you could get reasonably good coverage for most people with a reasonable amount of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-10-24T14:50:52.827" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T14:50:52.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14784" CreationDate="2015-10-24T17:11:46.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We just finished a project for which we developed a Phonics Engine (see paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280147388_Building_a_Phonics_Engine_for_Automated_Text_Guidance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280147388_Building_a_Phonics_Engine_for_Automated_Text_Guidance&lt;/a&gt;) that does exactly that. We have a dictionary (BrEng) that produces mappings such as b:b,a:@,tch:tS - both the code and the final dictionary are available but, unfortunately, the mapping code is very rough and ready and required lots of manual tweaks. Here's the code on GitHub: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mpakarlsson/ilearnrw/tree/master/src/ilearnrw/languagetools/english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mpakarlsson/ilearnrw/tree/master/src/ilearnrw/languagetools/english&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The key files are probably just embedded in the Java code somewhere, so I started a separate repo for the language source files here: github.com/techczech/phonicsengine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="13669" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T15:41:24.433" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T15:41:24.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14780" CreationDate="2015-10-24T18:25:17.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You characterisation is basically right, but could be emended a bit, to reflect different ideologies of phonology (since there isn't just one). The most important is whether or not there are &quot;phones&quot; (or whether phones have a radically different status). A &quot;phone&quot; might be a real mental unit (not physically tangible), or it might be a conventionalised representation of an part of an acoustic waveform. Substance-free theories especially favor the latter interpretation, and SPE-era generativists favor the former (though neither particularly favors the use of the term &quot;phone&quot;). SPE theoreticians do hold that &quot;phones&quot; are comparable across languages and you can say that this &quot;m&quot; and that one &quot;are &quot;the same&quot;, but the substance-free response to that claim is the same as a phonetician's response would be, namely producing a graph of the differences between the waveforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the &quot;change the meaning of words&quot; characterization of phoneme is right, in that it misses the essential property of phonemes and focuses on a possible consequence. Phoneme are whatever underlying sounds exist in a language, which can be the building blocks of lexical and grammatical formatives. Other sounds come into existence by application of rules. That is it. The question arises as to how we know what those underlying sounds are, and a number of operational tests have been called on: one of them is asking whether there are any two words that differ in just the choice of a particular pair of sounds (i.e. a &quot;minimal pair&quot;). Typically, people conceptualize &quot;two words&quot; as being about having different meanings. So, the &quot;change meaning&quot; characterization is sufficient for phoneme identification, but it isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not agree with your second interpretation. Actual sound, which is studied in phonetics, is both produced and perceived in real life. Perception involves hearing, and perception is broader than the concept of &quot;phoneme&quot; (e.g. also applies to cognitive states in humans that arise from being exposed to non-linguistic and non-human sound). Interpretation likewise is something that we do to anything that we have perceived. In ordinary language, we would talk of how speakers &quot;interpret&quot; a given acoustic waveform as referring to &quot;do&quot; vs. &quot;two&quot;. What you are saying in point 2 most closely resembles the distinction between phonetics and phonology, but that's more at the level of introductory linguistics where we teach sound bites that are memorable but not really true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologists and phoneticians generally (though not universally) recognize a distinction between the discrete, symbolic vs. continuous physical aspects of speech: formant measurments are an example of the latter, and the vowel distinction [i] vs. [ɪ] is an example of the former. Any transcription is, by necessity, a discrete symbolic representation. Up to a point, a transcription can give you more details about the physical sound, but there is a huge limit on the precision possible with a transcription, which numeric measurements go far beyond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of square vs. slash brackets is also problematic. I will disregard the problem that many people just don't care what brackets are used and use them indiscriminately. Square brackets represent something that is closer to the physical output, and slash brackets are used to represent something that is further from the physical output. The standard generative convention is that slash brackets go around underlying forms and square brackets go around surface forms. Underlying is not the same as phonemic (note that generative phonology a la Halle rejects the concept of &quot;phoneme&quot; as a distinct representational level). This does lead to a quandry in representing intermediate forms, for example /apa/ → &lt;em&gt;aba&lt;/em&gt; → [ab], where &lt;em&gt;aba&lt;/em&gt; is not the underlying form and not the surface form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have notices that in American English there is a difference in the pronunciation of /t/ in &quot;militaristic&quot; vs. in &quot;capitalistic&quot;, where it is aspirated in &quot;militaristic&quot; and flapped in &quot;capitalistic&quot;. The governing factor is stress and syllable position, and reduces to the fact that &quot;militaristic&quot; is from &quot;military&quot; vs. &quot;capitalistic&quot; being from &quot;capital&quot; -- the stress patterns of those words differ. So the distinction is derived by applying the relevant rules to get &lt;em&gt;ˈmɪlɪˌtɛri+ɪstɪk&lt;/em&gt; whence &lt;em&gt;ˈmɪlɪˌtʰɛri+ɪstɪk&lt;/em&gt;, vs. &lt;em&gt;ˈkæpɪtl̩+ɪstɪk&lt;/em&gt; whence &lt;em&gt;ˈkʰæpɪtl̩+ɪstɪk&lt;/em&gt;. But &lt;em&gt;-istic&lt;/em&gt; also causes a stress shift, and thus you get a surface contrast in aspiration vs. flapping. The phonetic outputs are [ˌkʰæpɪtl̩ˈɪstɪk] and [ˌmɪlɪtʰɛˈrɪstɪk]. The intermediate form contains a non-phoneme so shouldn't be in slash brackets, but it isn't an actually pronounced form, so shouldn't be in square brackets either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;phones&quot; or &quot;allophones&quot; i.e. actual physical outputs are the things in square brackets, then rules of grammar cannot refer to them, because rules of grammar are mental operations on mental objects. A reasonable amount of experimental evidence is emerging to show that the notion of &quot;allophone&quot; or &quot;phone&quot; is suspect, in that it conflates two different things. One is that languages can have distinct sets of sounds which are not yet exploited to make lexical distinctions (so that one sound is a rule-derived variant of the other). Vowel nasalization in Sundanese is a prime example. The other is that languages can have physical variations of sounds which are gradient in degree and timing, which &lt;em&gt;resemble&lt;/em&gt; categorial distinctions in sounds in other languages -- patterns of nasal airflow in English are a prime example. Nasal airflow patterns in English really require physiological investigation because you can't hear the point at which air flows through the nose, or when it reaches its peak. You can, however, hear in Sundanese whether a vowel is nasal or oral, just as you can hear that distinction in French (the difference being that in French, vowel nasalization is phonemic, but it is not in Sundanese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T18:25:17.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14780" CreationDate="2015-10-24T18:51:15.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different linguists have different ideas about phonetic versus phonemic.  Mine is one that I think is close to the original conception of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baudouin_de_Courtenay&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baudouin de Courtenay&lt;/a&gt; and his student &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miko%C5%82aj_Kruszewski&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kruszewski&lt;/a&gt; (to whom we owe the term &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;). My version is a little dumbed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemes are what we hear.  Phonetics is what we say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, naive native speakers hear phonemes, not phonetics.  After a course in articulatory phonetics, speakers start to hear some phonetic detail.  Recognition of dialects requires some ability to hear phonetics, and that doesn't depend on schooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why traditional alphabetic writing systems are mostly phonemic, rather than phonetic, why poetic rhyme is phonemic, and why secret languages like pig latin are based on phonemics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T18:51:15.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14772" CreationDate="2015-10-24T23:45:31.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I'll assume that the way your first and last names are written reflect the official written standard, the Caighdeán Oifigiúil. This amounts to a single way of writing Gaeilge (Irish) even though it has numerous dialects with quite varied pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this system the 'dh' in Aodhán would normally represent a voiced velar fricative (being in a 'broad' context) but I've heard pronunciations that have it as [j] or even elide it altogether. Stress is on the vowel with fada (the accent mark) and that vowel should sound like the one in 'born'. The 'Ao' has a variety of pronunciations, from [i:] to [ei] (and others). You could try something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aodhán: [iˈɣɔ:n], [ˈeiˈɣɔ:n] or [iˈjɔ:n], [eiˈjɔ:n]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your surname, it depends on how precise you want to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cearbhaill: [ˈcʲaɾəwɑlʲ] or [ˈcʲaɾəvɑlʲ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bh can represent either [w] or [v]; note that a brief schwa-like vowel is typically inserted between consonants such as the rbh cluster. If the pronunciation with [w] is preferred in this name then it's not surprising that it would (at speed) surface as how you represent it, i.e. 'KYEARLL... ll as in the -OL in Carol' — nice to see your family has retained the 'slender' (i.e. palatalised) initial consonant!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's likely the case that the majority of speakers of Irish nowadays are those who have learned Standard Irish as a second language. One result of this is that there are many who don't fully acquire aspects such as the velar fricatives and some of the broad/slender variants, as they are found in the unbroken Irish speech lineages. As a result it's not unusual to hear the voiced velar fricative produced as a [g] as this is probably the nearest English equivalent. So you might hear people pronounce your first name as [iˈgɔ:n] or [ˈeiˈgɔ:n].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T23:45:31.143" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-25T11:27:01.413" Score="1" ViewCount="981" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KSTPc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KSTPc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;concerning Praat. I am not entirely sure on how to measure the voicing during a stop closure. &#xA;I marked the consonant closure duration. (You can see part of the vowel.) However, I cannot see where the voice bar ends. Could you give me a few tips?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vYp3H.png&quot; alt=&quot;![enter image description here&quot;&gt;]&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vYp3H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(additional information) The word is &lt;em&gt;bag&lt;/em&gt;. The vowel is &quot;a&quot; and the yellow highlighted part corresponds with the consonant closure duration. I need to label the voice bar, i.e., the stretch of glottal pulses during the consonant closure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10746" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-10-25T21:10:59.470" LastActivityDate="2015-10-25T21:10:59.470" Title="How to measure phonetic voicing during a stop closure?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14793" CreationDate="2015-10-25T15:24:14.407" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an assignment in one of our classes, our teacher had directed us to analyze a set of french words, which included the word [fij] (&lt;em&gt;fille&lt;/em&gt;). However, later, she instructed us not to analyze that word. Presumably, she concluded that [fij] would be too difficult a word for her linguistics 101 students to analyze. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, we never learned the syllable structure for that word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that [j] is a semi-vowel, and that [i] and [j] jointly constitute the nucleus of [fij], and that as such, [fij] is an open syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T19:29:12.497" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T19:29:12.497" Title="Does the French word [fij] (fille) consist of a single open syllable?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14792" CreationDate="2015-10-25T16:11:27.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In transcribing the word as [fij], you are committed to saying that this is a closed syllable (unless you invoke dubious abstract structures where &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; is not syllabified, or is the onset of a syllable containing no vowel). The letter [j] is not a vowel, and under normal assumptions about syllabification, it would be part of the syllable defined by the preceding vowel &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;. That, by definition, makes the syllable closed. You have choices in transcriptions, which do not reflect some immutable phonetic absolute, they reflect phonological analysis. If you want to say that the syllable contains a diphthong, then you should transcribe the word as [fii] (which is different from disyllabic [fi.i]), and if you want to say that the syllable contains a monophthong and is open, then you should transcribe the word as [fi].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also look at actual practices for transcribing vowels of English, because the diversity of practices very clearly show how transcriptions are simply conventionalized and cannot be fully rationalized. The word &quot;fee&quot; can be transcribed many ways, for example [fi, fi:, fij, fɪj...] In general, i-ending diphthongs are written with final &lt;em&gt;ɪ,i,j&lt;/em&gt; as well as raised versions of any of these letters. One is always free to write &quot;car&quot; as [kaɹ] and call it an open syllable by labeling the sequence  a rhotic diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case your teacher presumably gave you a transcription, and wants you to come up with an analysis. The question you might later pose to the teacher is, why that particular transcription? If the answer is &quot;because this is an closed syllable&quot;, then the follow-up question would be &quot;How do you know that it's an open syllable?&quot;. If s/he thinks it is an open syllable, the the follow-up questio would be &quot;why [fij] and not [fii] or [fi]?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-25T16:11:27.180" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14791" CreationDate="2015-10-25T16:35:18.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that you're asking when voicing ceases during the closure period of &quot;g&quot; in &quot;bag&quot;, where the closure is the selected piece. Since you don't have physiological data on vocal fold vibration, you would estimate it from the acoustic waveform, looking for quasi-periodic variations in the waveform. Notice to the right that the waveform is fairly flat, but not totally flat, because there's usually some noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the left edge of the closure for about 10 msc there is relatively clear voicing. There is still a low-amplitude of peaks and valleys for most of the closure, using the section after the release as your point of reference. If you could compare &quot;bag&quot; and &quot;back&quot;, you could more clearly see whether this is present in /k/ as well. If it is, you should disregard that variation as not reflecting &quot;voicing&quot;, since /k/ isn't voiced. Otherwise, if you have low amplitude quasi-periodic variation during consonant closure, then I would say that it counts as &quot;voicing&quot; -- unless you've been told otherwise by your instructor. It is difficult to locate the end of that amplitude variation by visual inspection, and does require a measure of background noise. (60 cycle AC noise would persist through the recording and not just be present during production of certain phonemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-25T16:35:18.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14797" CreationDate="2015-10-25T21:01:27.190" Score="3" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have attempted to access it through both NLTK and the web inteface:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=her&amp;amp;sub=Search%20WordNet&amp;amp;o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;h=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=her&amp;amp;sub=Search%20WordNet&amp;amp;o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;h=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a freely (ie commercially) available, downloadable English dictionary I could use in its place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10751" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:39:59.430" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:39:59.430" Title="Why does Wordnet lack stopwords (&quot;the&quot;, &quot;of&quot;, &quot;her&quot;, etc)?" Tags="&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;stopwords&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14796" CreationDate="2015-10-26T06:28:24.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;WordNet is not a dictionary but a semantic lexical database. The key function of WordNet is to create a network of semantic relationships between words (synonyms, meronyms, etc.) So it makes sense it would only focus on content words and not function words (which is what stop words are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many free online dictionaries - depends on what you need one for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary is really comprehensive and it has a machine-readable downloadable version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T06:28:24.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2015-10-26T06:40:44.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a VSO language but SVO. Hopefully the principles are still illustrative of what would be possible also in a VSO language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered that Khmer has a particle which marks the direct object. I don't think it's compulsory as I just stumbled across it in a word frequency list and looked it up in a dictionary. I'll check my Khmer textbooks this afternoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;នូវ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sealang.net/khmer/dictionary.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the SEAlang Khmer dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ភ្នែកមានចក្ខុប្បសាទសម្រាប់មៀងមើល&lt;strong&gt;នូវ&lt;/strong&gt;រូបារម្មណ៌ដូចកែវយឹត។&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The eye has a pupil which has the same function as a lens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;មនុស្សដែលធ្វើ&lt;strong&gt;នូវ&lt;/strong&gt;អំពើល្អនឹងបាន&lt;strong&gt;នូវ&lt;/strong&gt;ផលល្អ។&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A person who does good deeds will reap good results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T06:57:50.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14796" CreationDate="2015-10-26T07:46:35.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to what Dominik mentioned, WordNet is not a dictionary but rather a list (and growing) of word senses for each word in English. Originally started as a psychology project, it has grown since then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example of WordNet, think of the word &quot;bank&quot;, it can mean: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) a financial institution &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) an area by the river&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WordNet (ideally) is supposed to capture all of these senses (and many more - but for the sake of this example, I'll just list these two). So to answer your title question, those stop words don't need senses (and IMO - it is too complex to deal with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10753" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T07:46:35.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14783" CreationDate="2015-10-26T12:14:46.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very often diminutives of personal names bear no resemblance to the original, consider the Russian &lt;em&gt;Шура&lt;/em&gt; [ˈʃurə] which is a diminutive of &lt;em&gt;Александр&lt;/em&gt; (Alexander), or the English &lt;em&gt;Dick&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;Richard&lt;/em&gt;, or the Spanish &lt;em&gt;Chucho&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;Jesús&lt;/em&gt;. Such diminutives not readily explainable, they are just a convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T12:14:46.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14808" CreationDate="2015-10-26T17:14:50.630" Score="3" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to automatically create a list of words for Charades (in German or English), where one person has to describe, draw or show by pantomime a certain word to the others.&#xA;Humans can intuitively choose words that are neither too easy nor too difficult, that are possible to characterize with the chosen method (especially pantomime is really hard for some words) and that are not boring. However I need help to (1) to define those criteria formally so that I can implement it in a program and (2) to find lexical databases or word lists with all the necessary attributes. The following are my ideas so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Criteria&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Characterization possibility&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I assume: Some POS tags are better than others. Verbs are good for pantomime. Nouns are good in general. Concrete things are easier than abstract concepts. Words like &quot;of&quot;, &quot;and&quot; and &quot;from&quot; are hard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Difficulty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assume difficulty is correlated to popularity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;approximate popularity as: occurrence rank in a corpus, number of links to Wikipedia article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexical Databases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia article/DBpedia resource name (does not provide any linguistic information but good category system and ontology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WordNet has POS tags but no rank&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de&lt;/a&gt; has corpora with has rank but no POS tags&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9920" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T07:51:23.400" Title="How to automatically determine good Charades words?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-26T18:00:04.827" Score="5" ViewCount="1216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a (mostly) self-taught linguist. I was always interested in syntax so I started with Carnie's (2013) Syntax: A generative introduction + few interviews with Chomsky (where I got the general idea of the philosophy behind his research and learned about PoS argument). First I was satisfied with the contents of the book, but after g oogling and reading this and that for about a year I started to question literally every possible explanation of various phenomena ( e.g. why movement in the first place? why autonomous syntax? etc.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me read a few more papers and a couple of books, along with a very good blog Faculty of Language. I needed historical background, knowledge ABOUT the methodology used in modern syntax research and a lot more stuff. This is where it got really serious and hard. I also encountered a lot of irrelevant work and wasted some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now I've studied enough to figure out the most influential works but few years ago I knew nothing about them. So I wonder if there is a such a list of titles one could recommend to any beginner, and, even better, an ordered list so that the beginner doesn't get confused with terminology in different theories (e.g. since ST - GB - MP of the generative enterprise are pretty different). I'd like to know other people's ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T08:31:50.977" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T14:01:52.280" Title="A syntactician &quot;must-read&quot; list" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2015-10-26T18:45:35.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Syntactic_Phenomena_of_English.html?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/a&gt; by James McCawley.  It's the best book on syntax I've ever read, and I used it at least twice for intermediate level courses on syntax.  It's a book for grown-ups, and it's about doing syntax, not about methodology or syntactic theory.  (There is theory there, which I don't much agree with, personally, but it doesn't matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're certainly right to question whether there is syntactic movement.  I don't think there is (despite my above recommendation).  You might want to look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0674344561&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, which reconstructs the main parts of the transformational analysis of English without appeal to syntactic movement.  That is also a book for grown-ups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T18:45:35.770" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14809" CreationDate="2015-10-26T23:15:47.330" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an NLP field analogous to face verification in Computer Vision, where two images of human faces are compared, and the class label describes whether the images are of the same person. I'd like to read literature about comparing two documents, for example news articles, and determining if they describe the same topic, or in the case of news articles, event. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to information retrieval in that I want to compare the similarity or relevance of one document with respect to the other, but the problem statement is slightly different in that this is a binary classification rather than a ranking task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an established field in NLP? And if so what is terms are usually used to describe this task?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10757" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T09:43:56.250" Title="Is there a term to describe comparing two documents to determine if they have the same topic?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2015-10-27T00:46:14.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learn some formal language theory via Sipser's Intro to the Theory of Computation. Having the background will be useful when dealing with Minimalist Grammars and their parsers.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T00:46:14.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-27T02:55:34.010" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;BM25 uses this nonlinear transformation to scale the term frequency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OW2Kx.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OW2Kx.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is a term frequency. &lt;strong&gt;Why is &lt;em&gt;k+1&lt;/em&gt; used in numerator instead of just &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't formula below work equally well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dXrxV.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dXrxV.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is simpler to calculate then the first formula and the resulting scaling is similar as shown on this graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BIPZn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BIPZn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the first formula is drawn in red and the second in blue for k in {1, 2, 3, 4}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because the first formula reduces to &lt;em&gt;1&lt;/em&gt; (no scaling) for &lt;em&gt;k = 0&lt;/em&gt; and the second one can't be reduced to &lt;em&gt;1&lt;/em&gt;? Turning the scaling on and off could be useful in experimenting with different values of &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;, especially in the case where other formulas with their own parameters are involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10756" LastEditorUserId="10756" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T11:15:57.347" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T11:15:57.347" Title="Why use (k+1) instead of k in numerator of BM25 scoring formula" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;information-retrieval&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-10-28T00:22:47.863" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2015-10-27T07:27:25.103" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Greg Lee that McCawley is the place to go for the canonical generative treatment of English syntax and that GPSG is the generative counterpart to that. However, things have moved on since then. I would further recommend looking into &lt;strong&gt;Unification Grammars&lt;/strong&gt; (which is very much at the heart of minimalism under a different name) and &lt;strong&gt;Construction Grammars&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the former, I recommend starting with Ivan Sag et al.'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/sagetal-1986.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unification and Grammatical Theory&lt;/a&gt;. And my personal bible on construction grammar is William Croft's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Construction-Grammar-Typological-Perspective/dp/0198299540/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective&lt;/a&gt; but Adele Goldberg's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Constructions-Construction-Approach-Structure-Cognitive/dp/0226300862&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constructions&lt;/a&gt; are also a good introduction. Of course, &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/viewFile/1794/1566&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fillmore's work&lt;/a&gt; on this was very foundational and elucidates the initial motivations behind the construction movement. Croft does a very good job in the introductory chapter of setting out the construction grammar space and its relationship to kindred frameworks such as the Lexical Functional Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you will find with construction grammar is that many of the problems that the generativist frameworks deal with simply disappear as syntax and semantics are brought closer together. I think Langacker is the best author in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should also not skip &lt;strong&gt;dependency grammars&lt;/strong&gt; if you want to get a comprehensive view of syntactic theory. The work of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Meaning-Sentence-Semantic-Pragmatic-Aspects/dp/9027718385&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sgall and Hajicova&lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure - both were my teachers) has been leading the way in recent decades (e.g. with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dependency-Linguistics-linguistic-dependency-structures/dp/9027255989&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this recent publication&lt;/a&gt;). This work will also highlight the importance of &lt;strong&gt;information structure&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;topic-focus articulation&lt;/strong&gt; (something none of the other frameworks are concerned with - except perhaps in a round about way construction grammar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still a very selective overview, there are dozens of grammatical frameworks within these broad trends: generative (constituency), generative (dependency), constructional. With many more cutting across such as unification or information structure. You could spend a lifetime cataloging them. But I think the reading list above might give you a sense of the scope of the project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tim Osborne reminded me in the comments that  &lt;a href=&quot;http://%20Lucien%20Tensiere&amp;#39;s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Elements of Structural Syntax&quot;&gt;Lucien Tesniere's &quot;Elements of Structural Syntax&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is now available in English translation, so that should definitely go on the list. He is the foundation on which all later dependency grammar frameworks explicitly build. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also reminded me that Jan Firbas' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Functional-Sentence-Perspective-Communication-Language/dp/0521373085/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication&lt;/a&gt; would make for a great introduction to information structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-10-27T08:29:24.120" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T08:29:24.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14801" CreationDate="2015-10-27T07:51:23.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite the comments, this is actually a very interesting applied question that linguistics should be concerned with. It has to do with both syntax and semantics but also paralinguistic isues such as gesture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is that there's no easy way to generate such a list in a way that would replicate a human's instinct for what is easy to represent gesturally. However, you could make certain assumptions about length, frequency and abstractness. You will also want to exclude all function words and words that can be used as auxilliary. As to frequency, you'd probably want to avoid the 500 most frequent words and not venture much past words ranked about 10,000. You would also want to explore the position of the word in WordNet's synset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several lexical databases that may be helpful for this but you will ultimately have to combine them for best results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WordNet&lt;/strong&gt; is one place to go for semantic connections but even better might be &lt;strong&gt;FrameNet&lt;/strong&gt; which has information about semantic frames which will give you an idea about concreteness&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psych.rl.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MRC Psycholinguistic Database&lt;/a&gt; has information about frequency and abstractness (but the frequency data is very out of date)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://elexicon.wustl.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Lexicon Project&lt;/a&gt; has more uptodate data on frequency and other useful characteristics&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordFrequency.info&lt;/a&gt; has very good data on word frequency and parts of speech (some free some paid).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is a great research project hiding in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T07:51:23.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14804" CreationDate="2015-10-27T09:43:56.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;topic models&lt;/a&gt;, and maybe specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Latent Dirichlet allocation&lt;/a&gt; (LDA). Topic modeling, and LDA especially, allow for an analysis that goes beyond simple keyword matching, to get at the &quot;gist&quot; of a document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the goal of LDA is usually to describe a mixture of topics in a document, you could use it in a binary fashion to say Document A includes Topic X while Document B does not include Topic X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T09:43:56.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-26T21:03:53.367" Score="0" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Numerous expressions get their (popular) meaning largely or totally changed with time. Sometime it is in one language and not the others. Sometimes changes go different ways (cf. &lt;em&gt;formidable&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;terrific&lt;/em&gt; in French vs English). For the ones below, is the change typically French, or is it the same in all languages ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;décimer&lt;/em&gt; (decimate): was killing one over ten, now more like &quot;almost all&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;littéralement&lt;/em&gt; (literally) : was meaning to be taken at the face value of the expression, now more like &quot;badly&quot; or &quot;a lot&quot;, but not &quot;literally&quot; at all (argh !)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10762" OwnerDisplayName="Fabrice NEYRET" LastEditorUserId="10762" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T08:39:00.023" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T08:39:00.023" Title="Slip of the meaning of expressions" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14811" CreationDate="2015-10-27T16:12:28.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can’t speak for all languages (or even for all English speakers/English dictionaries), but according to ‘The American Heritage Dictionary’ it seems that the expansion/extension of the meaning of “decimate” that you mention has occurred/is recognized in American English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=decimate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;decimate&lt;/a&gt;, in 2005:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”81 percent of the [American Heritage Dictionary] Usage Panel accepted this extension [from its historical, 1/10th meaning to “the killing of any large proportion of a population”] in the [following] sentence: ‘The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war,’ even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only 36% of this same panel, however, accepted the word’s further extension to non-human killing/destruction in the following sentence: “The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, (with the same disclaimer and from the same source), the expansion/extension of “literally” from its traditional, “word-for-word” meaning to its expanded, “really/actually” (cf: your “badly”/“a lot”) meaning and use as an intensifier has met with more resistance (than has “decimate”) in English, especially when used in an attempt to intensify metaphors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=literally&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;literally&lt;/a&gt;, in 2004 “only 23 percent of the Panel accepted the following sentence, in which “literally” undercuts the sentence's central metaphor: &#xA;“The situation was especially grim in England where industrialism was literally swallowing the country's youth.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When used with “a dead metaphor, which functions as a set phrase and evokes no image for most people, … [t]he Panel mustered more enthusiasm … [with] … 37 percent accept[ing]: “He was literally out of his mind with worry.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”[However,] when there is no metaphor at all, a substantial majority of the Panel was willing to allow ‘literally’ to be used as an intensifier; 66 percent accepted the sentence “They had literally no help from the government on the project.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all from ‘The American Heritage Dictionary’ and the “Usage Problems”/“Usage Notes” under their entries for “decimate” and “literally”) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10765" OwnerDisplayName="Papa Poule" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T16:12:28.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-27T21:22:32.787" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for ways to automatically assess the language register of a person's speech: formal, informal, ... or through some grading mechanism that would associate a 'score' depending on the person's level of language. Imagine Homer Simpson compared to John Steinbeck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read about readability tests such as Flesch-Kincaid or SMOG but find their approach too simple.  Counting words and syllables does not account for idioms, vocabulary, sentence structure,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something beyond comparing the speech with a list of simple words such as the Dale-Chall 3,000 Word List?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I would like to analyze the transcripts of the GOP and democrats debate and see if anything stands out in the way the candidates express themselves. I'm looking at different things, topic modeling, simple sentence metrics, ... . And Informality analysis seems to be an interesting path to follow and may help  emphasize differences between the candidates. The fact that there is no 'settled' metric is all the more interesting since I'll to design and train the method. &#xA;The paper from Mosquera and Moreda cited by Dominik is exactly what I'm looking for. &#xA;Very grateful for all your comments and help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10764" LastEditorUserId="10764" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T10:49:26.137" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T10:49:26.137" Title="How to assess the language register of speech?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14815" CreationDate="2015-10-27T22:12:38.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, here's an idea. I don't have specific references for you, but Linda Shockey did some work at Ohio State comparing vowel formants (and maybe other acoustic measures) in careful versus casual speech.  As you might expect, vowel positions in acoustic space tend to be more peripheral (though Shockey's results were much more specific).  So what you might try is assessing the carefulness level by how far vowels are from schwa (other than schwa itself), using the first two vowel formant levels to measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T22:12:38.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14817" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:23:35.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T00:23:35.607" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T00:23:35.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14818" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:23:35.607" Score="0" Body="Apache cTAKES is a natural language processing system for extraction of information from electronic medical record clinical free-text." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T06:54:37.890" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T06:54:37.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14819" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:28:52.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T00:28:52.617" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T00:28:52.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14820" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:28:52.617" Score="0" Body="Information Retrieval is an area of study concerning with retrieving documents, information or metadata from a collection of unstructured or semi-structured data." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T09:45:13.250" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T09:45:13.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T02:56:37.673" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in normal conversation, in words like engaged or encouraged, I notice that the &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; sounds really weak (almost unvoiced), especially when it comes before another consonant--as in &lt;em&gt;We're very, very &lt;strong&gt;encouraged with&lt;/strong&gt; how things are going.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this really happen in normal conversation, or is it just my impression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T06:37:43.490" Title="Does &quot;d&quot; weaken when it comes after &quot;g&quot; in word final position?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-12-31T18:32:14.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T03:09:47.847" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've learned that negative words like &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; are stressed in sentences. However, I've heard native speakers pronouncing phrases like &lt;em&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; understand what's going on here&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced very fast and lightly, like a flap &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;. Is this so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T06:58:56.853" Title="Stress in negative words and flap &quot;d&quot; in &quot;don't&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14822" CreationDate="2015-10-28T05:21:16.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a debate over whether the p/b distinction is based on voicing or aspiration, owing to the fact that the ostensively voiced stops are rather different from those of French or Hindi. Between voiced segments (especially vowels) they are voiced, but word-initially and finally they may be voiceless unaspirated stops and not voiced (this is speaker-dependent and also dependent on place). There is a complex set of factors that govern whether there will be vocal fold vibration. In &quot;encouraged&quot;, the factors favoring devoicing are very high -- following a long period of obstruent closure, syllable final position, no following voiced segment. So it is quite likely that vocal fold vibration has been extinguished in this context. This is a non-neutralizing process, so even if vocal fold vibration has ceased in the final stop of &quot;edged&quot;, it is still distinct from &quot;etched&quot;. You would have to look at the phonetic details of a particular example recording to say what difference, if any, could be localized to [d] in this pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T05:21:16.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14823" CreationDate="2015-10-28T05:28:06.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In casual register under little-understood conditions, /n/ flaps as well as /t/ and /d/. In American English, this can lead to the impossibility of distinguishing &quot;I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; understand&quot; and &quot;I &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; understand&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T05:28:06.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14823" CreationDate="2015-10-28T06:05:37.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it happens.  Auxiliaries, including &quot;do&quot;, are function words, and so can be unstressed, and before an unstressed vowel, intervocalic [d] can be flapped.  So after a vowel or diphthong, the [d] of &quot;do[n't]&quot; can be flapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T06:05:37.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14815" CreationDate="2015-10-28T07:59:21.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG etc. are measures of text complexity and not register. They only work on written language of certain length (textbooks, newspaper articles, etc.) Register can be inferred from a single word. However, lower readability will probably correlate quite well with high formality. But not in a way that you can simply translate the scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with asking for differentiation of register is that there is no objective definition of the different registers (levels of formality). So you'd have to come up with some exemplars of what the different registers represent. You'll also need some measure of correctness (how do you know your results match the levels). Is the appropriateness to the situation? Socio-economic status of the speaker? All of those in turn are hard to measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The efforts of measuring levels of formality or register made by people like Halliday or Biber use proxies (like presence of certain words) and get pretty good results. But their measures may not be your measures. Other proxies for levels of formality is the proportion of deictics like pronouns or determiners which can then be used as input for machine learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to get a reasonable answer, you will need to specify what exactly you're trying to achieve and for what purpose? What are your resources for achieving that? If you're looking for a simple piece of software you can load a sample in and get a result, you'll be disappointed. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/1461459/Enhancing_the_discovery_of_informality_levels_in_Web_2.0_texts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; which outlines some of the previous efforts in this area. It shows that if your needs are quite general, you can get decent broad results that can improve subsequent analysis. But if you want to get a single score for an individual text, you will probably not get very reliable results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T07:59:21.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14811" CreationDate="2015-10-28T08:08:55.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words (and grammatical structures) change their meaning radically over time in all languages. Or at least, that is the assumption in comparative and historical linguistics and every bit of evidence we have about languages seems to point in that direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to imagine a completely isolated community where the environment would be constant and the change would be minimal but such communities are hard to come by. Even relatively isolated communities like Martha's Vineyard showed linguistic change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some change happens in all languages all of the time. But how much change and how it varies depending on external contexts is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T08:08:55.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T11:26:53.253" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that, unlike other dictionaries, MW seems to list word senses based on the order they have appeared throughout history. Was this just a coincidence, or is this true for MW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T11:26:53.253" Title="Does Merriam Webster dictionary list word senses based on their historical occurrence?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T18:20:39.863" Score="11" ViewCount="2182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some writing systems go right to left, such as Arabic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/57hsN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/57hsN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others left to right, for example modern romance languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dKLGx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dKLGx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages like Japanese traditionally used vertical writing systems where the columns proceed from right to left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/REuuz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/REuuz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there known reasons why these writing systems developed in this way? Does it perhaps have to do with the mediums in which the languages were written or read (for example, on scrolls, tablets, clay)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are there languages which go from bottom to top, for example, or in a different format altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T04:31:08.750" Title="Are there practical reasons why languages developed left to right or right to left writing sytems" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T18:33:48.083" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for phoneme pairs such as [p b] or [s z] which have a voiced and unvoiced variant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Clarification&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In an IPA table, sounds like [p] and [b] are usually paired in the same cell. Is there a term sound types (cells) that have more than one phoneme in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2015-10-28T21:22:55.800" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T17:46:58.240" Title="Term For IPA Phonemes With Voiced/Unvoiced Pairs" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14840" CreationDate="2015-10-29T00:58:14.023" Score="3" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is fairly common on Stack Overflow for users to translate questions and/or responses into English using Google Translate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the more amusing patterns I've noticed is when a translated answer begins &quot;Hello Dear&quot;.  For example, these answers to technical questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15688988/remove-selected-item-from-generic-list-via-a-button-and-listbox/17302146#17302146&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15688988/remove-selected-item-from-generic-list-via-a-button-and-listbox/17302146#17302146&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello dear use the simple code and solve your query...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/20376046/2970321&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/a/20376046/2970321&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello dear you can search in an array fastly by using binaray search...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure they don't mean &quot;Hello dear&quot; as the phrase would typically be used in American English (such as, by my grandmother).  Looking at the names of the posters, I would guess that the language being translated from is one spoken somewhere in South Asia, but that doesn't help me much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: which language(s), and which constructs in those languages are being (presumably) machine-translated in this odd manner, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10772" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T14:11:41.150" Title="What is being translated as &quot;hello dear&quot;, and why?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-11-07T17:11:30.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14834" CreationDate="2015-10-29T01:49:44.233" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/49656?redirectedFrom=demesne#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[OED:]&lt;/a&gt; The Anglo-Norman spelling &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;demesne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of the law-books, and 17th cent. legal antiquaries, was partly merely graphic (the quiescence of original &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; before a consonant leading to the insertion of a non-etymological &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to indicate a long vowel), as in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;mesne&lt;/em&gt; = Old French &lt;em&gt;meien , meen , mean&lt;/em&gt; , modern French &lt;em&gt;moyen&lt;/em&gt; ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   partly perhaps influenced by association with &lt;em&gt;mesne&lt;/em&gt; itself, in ‘mesne lord’,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or with &lt;em&gt;mesnie&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;mansionāta&lt;/em&gt; house, household establishment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing only one &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;demesne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, I am confused by the OED:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Where is the original &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? Where is the non-etymological (so epenthetic) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=demesne&amp;amp;searchmode=none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; states less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:31:57.603" Title="How was the Anglo-Norman spelling of 'demesne' 'merely graphic'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;old-french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14833" CreationDate="2015-10-29T02:13:44.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word comes from Old French &lt;em&gt;demeine&lt;/em&gt;, and there never was an &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; (so, the original &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; was in their heads). The word is first attested in &quot;English&quot; (French-English legal code-switching) without &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;, and with various spellings. The non-etymological &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is the only &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in the word &lt;em&gt;demesne&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of words in French that used to have &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, which was deleted, and it appears that orthographic &amp;lt;s&amp;gt; was added in these words to indicate that the vowel is long (and, I suppose, that the word is French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T04:31:57.603" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:31:57.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T02:18:38.007" Score="0" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preface: I use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/phonation?q=phonate#phonation__4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'phonate'&lt;/a&gt; to mean: `to produce or to utter a phone'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/a/14798/10864&quot;&gt;After 5 years, I finally learned to phonate the Alveolar Trill [r]&lt;/a&gt;, from an explanation that cleverly exploited &lt;strong&gt;English phonology&lt;/strong&gt;  to simulate [r], even though [r] is absent in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this method of learning to phonate called? It is described in p 12 of &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are often&#xA;  described by reference to known sounds. Thus the student might be aided in producing&#xA;  the French sound u in the word &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; by instructions such as “Round your lips while producing the vowel sound in &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;tea&lt;/em&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there books or  resources that use this method, to teach (how to phonate) all IPA phones?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must use this same method to learn how to phonate phones absent in my L1 languages and that I cannot pronounce, because I was not aided by corporeal explanations of phonetics (eg: on loosening your tongue, letting the tongue flap/flutter in your exhalation, etc... ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T05:52:12.807" Title="Are there resources that exploit phones of English, to teach how to phonate all IPA phones?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T02:38:52.920" Score="1" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for downloadable word co-occurrence matrices that were computed on large corpora. word2vec and GloVe have on their website downloadable word vectors, I am looking for something similar with raw word co-occurrence matrices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes/toolkit/_downloads/demo.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes/toolkit/_downloads/demo.zip&lt;/a&gt; contains a co-occurrence matrix for nouns, verbs extracted from Wikipedia, BNC and ukWaC corpora, but the matrix was chopped: it only contains 1550 words. (1550 rows, 10000 columns)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T06:49:10.117" Title="Co-occurrence count data sets" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14835" CreationDate="2015-10-29T05:28:19.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Addressing the question in the title, the answer is no, because no single language has all phones. The question is somewhat ill-conceived, being framed in terms of &quot;phones&quot;, since a &quot;phone&quot; is a concrete sound (it would be way too involved to properly explain what a &quot;phone&quot; is). The IPA does not have separate symbols representing the phonetically distinct vowels transcribed for instance [a] in all languages. Thus there is no single language sound corresponding to IPA [i], instead, very many similar sounds are subsumed under the transcriptional symbol [i]. Articulatory explanations of how to pronounce particular sounds are generally of only ancillary utility: what you need is cleanly-recorded models that you can imitate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have to explain what method you're talking about, in order for anyone to give you examples of that method, or tell you if it has a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked description isn't a conventionalized and general method with a name, it's a description of how an individual (may have) learned to pronounce [r]. The magic step is &quot;I somehow tried to hold the [ɾ] instead of immediately lowering my tongue&quot;. There may be individual descriptions of what people think they did physiologically to learn to pronounce novel sounds, but generally speaking, such descriptions are not a lot of help and are often just wrong. You need a native speaker with a bit of patience and a good ear: that is how I learned the exotic sounds of Lushootseed. Note that there is not just one phonetic type of [ɾ] and one phonetic type of [r], so if you want to master the trilled [r] of Finnish, you need a speaker or at least recordings of Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you could go to London and sign up for the official IPA course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T20:04:30.850" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T20:04:30.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14836" CreationDate="2015-10-29T06:49:10.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collocates.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.collocates.info/&lt;/a&gt; will have the data you need. Note, the full processed list is not free but is not outrageously expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T06:49:10.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T10:32:47.560" Score="3" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is I-lowering language, but on split IP hypothesis([AgrP [TP [VP]]]), verbs move to the head of TP: V-raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/John often kissed Mary./&#xA;On unsplit IP(IP[VP]), [+tense] which the head of IP has moves to the head of VP for realization; I-lowering.&#xA;Whereas on split IP(AgrP[TP[VP]]), [+tense] which the head of TP has is realized by verbs moving to the head of TP; V-raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, on IP split hypothesis, does V-raising occur in I-lowering language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in a sentence which has adverbs like above, after V-raising occurred, the verb is before the adverb; *John kissed often Mary.&#xA;How is the word order correct before spell-out? I would like to know the movement of subjects and verbs. If you know how is the nominative Case assigned, I'd like to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10775" LastEditorUserId="10775" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T18:08:44.470" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T02:39:20.850" Title="V-to-I lowering and split IP hypothesis" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14832" CreationDate="2015-10-29T18:23:34.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this often (in Europe), it is just a direct translation.  It is a peculiarity of Anglophone language or culture that it sounds so strange - and does indeed sound strange in English, being said from one anonymous man to another - as such an expression is common in many languages of Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, even relatively close cousins of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is so common, it is difficult to use this mistake to identify the speaker's native language.  It is likely even standard in South Asian English, at some level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German young men say &lt;em&gt;Mein Lieber&lt;/em&gt; often to each other, in Romanian, Russian and some other related languages it is similar (either &lt;em&gt;my dear&lt;/em&gt; or just &lt;em&gt;dear&lt;/em&gt;, declined for gender).  In Turkey, Arabia, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia and South Asia, words like &lt;em&gt;habibi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aziz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; (Turkish spelling) that can all be translated as &lt;em&gt;dear&lt;/em&gt; are very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is fine between men, even those who don't know each other, a bit like &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say South Asia is a big place with many languages, so I can only speculate, but here is Wiktionary's no doubt incomplete list of cognates of the Persian word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%86#Persian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;جان&lt;/a&gt;, including Hindi and Urdu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tajik: ҷон ‎(jon)&#xA;→ Uzbek: jon&#xA;→ Azeri: can / جان / ҹан&#xA;→ Bashkir: йән ‎(yän)&#xA;→ Georgian: ჯანი ‎(ǯani)&#xA;→ Hindustani:&#xA;    Hindi: जान ‎(jān)&#xA;    Urdu: جان ‎(jān)&#xA;→ Kazakh: жан ‎(jan)&#xA;→ Kyrgyz: жан ‎(can)&#xA;→ Middle Armenian: ջան ‎(ǰan)&#xA;    Armenian: ջան ‎(ǰan)&#xA;→ Russian: джан ‎(džan)&#xA;→ Ottoman Turkish: جان&#xA;    Turkish: can&#xA;→ Albanian: xhan&#xA;→ Macedonian: џан ‎(džan)&#xA;→ Serbo-Croatian: džan / џан&#xA;→ Tatar: җан ‎(can)&#xA;→ Turkmen: jan&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's frankly relatively improbable that Hindi has Persian words that languages of Pakistan do not, so you can bet there are many more.  You can also be sure that there are other expressions with different origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it used to be standard English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-10-30T14:11:41.150" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T14:11:41.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T19:15:54.333" Score="1" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question restricts &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/9516/5306&quot;&gt;the second (unanswered) part here&lt;/a&gt;, with the additional stipulation that the reader has studied and knows no Latin whatsoever (but who knows that Spanish is a Romance language and who recognises Latinate words in Spanish).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-10-29T19:15:54.333" Title="Please recommend books or resources written in Spanish, for learning Latin for the first time?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-10-31T11:50:31.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-29T19:26:25.423" Score="0" ViewCount="1705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can Italians speaking the modern Italian dialect (which is derived from Tuscan) understand old Italian dialects such as Ligurian and Venetian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the English analog be? Would it be like understanding Shakespeare, or Chaucer or Beowulf?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T19:37:09.637" Title="Can Italians understand dialects such as Ligurian and Venetian?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14845" CreationDate="2015-10-30T13:02:33.310" Score="3" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although many languages share the same alphabets, the pronunciation varies greatly. The letters and words alone do not convey sufficient information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic alphabets, on the other hand, are specifically designed for that purpose. They are relatively easy to learn and use, and don't need much more space or time to write down compared to normal alphabets (not including syllable alphabets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've often wondered if language learning on a general level would be easier if phonetic alphabets instead of the established alphabets were universally used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there even been serious attempts to replace current alphabets with phonetic ones, or at least make the usage of phonetic alphabets more popular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10778" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T16:44:52.810" Title="Have there ever been (serious) attempts to replace alphabets with phonetic alphabets?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14844" CreationDate="2015-10-30T16:08:30.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're confusing the issue a little bit. You need to differentiate between the concept of &lt;strong&gt;phonetic alphabet&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;transparent orthography&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction of the IPA or &lt;strong&gt;international phonetic alphabet&lt;/strong&gt; was the one more or less successful attempt at making communication among linguists and language educator more consistent across languages. But most of its uses focus on key phonemic (rather than phonetic) features of the individual language and are subject to convention. So the pronunciations in a dictionary will not reflect many phonetic features like the nazalisation of vowels, etc. These conventions often compete with language change and dialectal variation. Take for instance the 'a' in English 'bat' Its pronunciation varies greatly across English dialects but in Britain has mostly moved from /æ/ to /a/. However, in most neutral contexts /æ/ is still used for consistency's sake. A true phonetic transcription would also record assimilations leading to spelling such as 'books' and 'budz'. To make things even more complicated, many sounds that are recorded by the same IPA symbol across languages do not actually sound exactly the same - this is particularly true for vowels - leading to more confusion and the necessity to learn local conventions for each language when reading transcriptions for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result an adoption of a fully phonetic alphabet that would apply to all languages or even just one language was not ever contemplated because there would be no advantage to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;transparent orthography&lt;/strong&gt; is a much more sensible concept. All it indicates that the way words are written makes it easy for native speakers who learned to associate individual sounds with letters (or groups of letters) to reliably pronounce any string as it was intended. No language is completely transparent in the sense, that it is necessary for readers to learn some conventions about how to pronounce certain letters in context, but there are languages that are almost completely transparent (Italian, Slovene) and those that are almost opaque (Mandarin) or very opaque (English) or somewhat opaque (French). Some othographies are only opaque in one direction (Greek - easy to read, more difficult to write, Arabic - easier to write, more difficult to read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages have successfully reformed their orthographies to be more transparent but English (which is what I think prompted your question) has not. There were some attempts to do this in the US in the 19th century which gave us things like color/colour but they only tinker around the edges. There are several reform movements active in English orthography but they have no prospect of being successful in the short-to-medium term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any possible &lt;strong&gt;advantages of transparent orhographies&lt;/strong&gt; are purely marginal. Opaque orthographies have not prevented cultural, economic or geopolitical success of cultures for which they are typical (see US and China). They have certain obvious disadvantages for learning and use but the transactional cost is so small overall, that the possible long-term gain does not outweigh the huge short-term cost of a switch for a large and powerful culture like the Anglophone world or China. Smaller cultures have often undergone such reform but it was always linked to larger issues of cultural and political identity - never purely because of some sort of rationally judged advantage of a more transparent system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T16:08:30.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14844" CreationDate="2015-10-30T17:15:49.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there have not been any systematic efforts to replace an established writing system with a phonetic-symbol based one. There have been numerous cases where the first writing system for a language is based on or more like a prevailing phonetic transcription, for example Lushootseed, Somali, Shona, Saami, but except for Lushootseed, these have been replaced with a system that reduces the number of special symbols in favor of di- and tri-graphs and less phonetic detail. There have also been politically-motivated script changes which have incidentally swept away less-phonetic aspects of a previous script, such as the replacement of traditional Mongolian (Sogdian-based) script with Cyrillic in 1946, where traditional Mongolian reflects historical pronuciations similar to the way that English spelling reflects older pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (current) North Saami system is revealing, as to motivations for opposing phoneticization of writing systems. There is considerable variability in the pronunciation of words in the language, and a too-phonetic writing system either means that there is no standard spelling for most words, or else most people have to learn an arbitrary dialect that they don't speak, and notions like &quot;most widely spoken&quot; aren't meaningful (they are not traditionally city-dwellers). The current system give much less detail than was present in older transcription systems, which means it is consistent with the speech of many more people and for a given dialect, you can usually figure out how to spell and pronounce, if you know the language. There remain some aspects of the language which can pose problems, such as the spelling &lt;em&gt;a, á&lt;/em&gt; in neutralizing dialects, whether to write &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;ŧ&lt;/em&gt; (you memorize which words have &lt;em&gt;ŧ&lt;/em&gt;), or the &lt;em&gt;nj, ŋ&lt;/em&gt; distinction in neutralizing dialects. The de-phoneticization of spelling has been a success precisely because it is less tied to specific pronunciations, and a unified writing system (hence literature) is thus possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T17:15:49.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14849" CreationDate="2015-10-30T18:36:46.730" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was probably in the 1980s (not sure) and probably in Scientific American (not sure) that I read an article reporting on research that had analyzed the frequency of letters, pairs of letters and triplets and quadruplets of letters in four or five languages.  Two of the languages were English and Italian.  I don't remember the other two or three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors -- or rather, their computer -- then &quot;wrote&quot; a paragraphs in each language using the frequency rules for that language, first for letters only, then for letters plus pairs of letters, then adding triplets and finally adding quadruplets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was fascinating the way the paragraphs progressed from pure nonsense resembling nothing, to nonsense closely resembling each language.  To a non-Italian speaker, the last Italian paragraph -- the one including the quadruplet rules -- looked like Italian.  The English looked as though it ought to make sense....maybe with a few glasses of wine it would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone recognize this article or this research?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this research been followed up?  Are there applications of this research, or linguistic insights resulting from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9732" LastEditorDisplayName="user9732" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T02:28:34.810" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T02:28:34.810" Title="Where to find old article on frequency of letters, pairs of letters, triplets and quadruplets in 4 or 5 languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14848" CreationDate="2015-10-30T20:12:15.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't recognize the article, but you're describing generative orthotactics (possibly as implemented in a Finite State Machine). (See also 'phonotactics', which does the same thing on sequences of phonemes/phones.) You may also have noted various 'Markov' Twitter accounts, which perform this generation using sequences of words, again instead of letters. The concepts of this approach are still used for different applications in fields like automatic speech recognition, phoneme-grapheme conversion, psycholinguistics (see 'wordlikeness'), morphology/language innovation, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T20:12:15.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14839" CreationDate="2015-10-30T23:35:58.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, this represents how generative syntax was done in the late 80s-early nineties. Many of those ideas were abandoned a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, &lt;em&gt;you grossly misrepresented it&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;There were two options, V-raising&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;or I-lowering&lt;/strong&gt; (other variants: Agr-I, AGR-I, Agr-T etc.). French was considered a V-raising language (i.e. with overt verb raising): V moves to Agr, and then it all moves to T. English, on the other hand, was a I (Agr-T) lowering language, which means T lowers to Agr and then T-Agr lowers to V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was problematic about I-lowering (and lowering in general) is that it created an improper chain, with an unbound trace. Two theories were proposed back then, Chomsky 1991 in favor of LF V-raising or Bobaljik 1995 in favor of I-lowering at PF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In MP (in Adger's interpretation), all of the problems above are elegantly solved with the help of strong/weak EPP, strong/weak tense value on &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;, feature checking and phi-features - see chapter 6 in Adger 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T00:20:56.343" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T00:20:56.343" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14854" CreationDate="2015-10-31T00:26:42.480" Score="2" ViewCount="4073" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a set of rules to know when syllabic consonants (l, m, n, ng, r) occur in a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I used to think that there was a schwa before the &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in the words &lt;em&gt;police, employees, problem, seven, inclined, fishery,&lt;/em&gt; etc. But it turns out that all of those words contain syllabic consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine it must be difficult for students who are learning to transcribe using phonetic symbols to determine when to use the syllabic consonant symbols just by hearing the words the professor pronounces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to know when these syllabic sounds occur and therefore when to use the correct symbols in your transcriptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T14:13:15.547" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T14:13:15.547" Title="When do syllabic consonants occur?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14859" CreationDate="2015-10-31T00:53:19.660" Score="1" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;If both &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; are unreleased, as in the words &lt;em&gt;let&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;led&lt;/em&gt;, how do you differentiate between them? Are the different lengths of the short e sound in both words and the context in which they are used the only ways to tell which word is being used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T17:16:01.863" Title="Difference between unreleased t and unreleased d" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14851" CreationDate="2015-10-31T01:37:55.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tradition of transcription which treats all syllabic sonorants in English as deriving from schwa plus sonorant sequences, and that is a phonologically credible analysis. The tradition that transcribes syllabic [n] as [ən] is basically using a broader transcription than the one transcribing this as [n̩]. There is actually phonological evidence that schwa is deleted, coming from an allophonic rule where /t/ becomes [ʔ] immediately before [n, n̩], but not before schwa. You see this in &quot;lighten&quot; ([laɪʔn̩]) but not &quot;light a newspaper&quot; ([laɪɾənuʊs....]). This shows that /t/ and the nasal are phonologically adjacent, thus there is no phonetic schwa after the glottal stop (thus supporting the syllabic sonorant transcription).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that for something like &quot;seven&quot;, there is a brief period between the release of the fricative and moment when lingual closure is made, where there is something that could be called a schwa-like vowel. There is no definitive test that will tell you whether that moment is &quot;a vowel&quot; or simply a transition between a consonant and a syllabic nasal. The same goes for &quot;problem&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the initial syllable of &quot;employee&quot;, I would say that is unambiguously [ɛm...], not even schwa, but that is no doubt a dialect difference, and I can imagine there are dialects with reduction. If you switch to &quot;employ&quot;, I can pronounce that [ɛmploɪ] or [m̩ploɪ] (not particularly natural, but not totally out), so reduction to syllabic nasal is optional for me, word initially. In that context, you don't get *[əmploɪ]. This argues that the apparent schwa-like vowel is just a release feature, and there actually is a rule reducing schwa plus sonorant to a syllabic sonorant (obligatory for me; reduction to schwa is what is optional, for me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; very hard for students to believe instructors telling them that there is a schwa, or that there isn't a schwa, when the student's own pronunciation is different. I am a fairly aggressive reducer, and I found that some students had syllabic sonorants (thus agreed with me) and others had schwa plus sonorant (thus disagreed with me, and some of their colleagues). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T01:37:55.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-31T08:30:24.783" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;In statements of generic truth like &amp;quot;water boils,&amp;quot; does it entail statements like &amp;quot;water exists&amp;quot;? If I describe something not real, am I saying something false? For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dragons have wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since dragons don't exist, the above statement would be false if generic truths like &amp;quot;dragons have wings&amp;quot; entail &amp;quot;dragons exist.&amp;quot; However, portrayals of dragons often show them with wings, so it feels very strange to think of the statement &amp;quot;dragons have wings&amp;quot; as false, and I am at a loss on if I should think of a sentence describing something nonexistent as true or false. The sentence is the same structure as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://grammar.about.com/od/fh/g/gnomicpresentterm.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elephants have trunks&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; which has a link that states &amp;quot;Such statements are true in the past, present, and future--as long as elephants exist.&amp;quot; There are still other sentences that trouble me on whether people would consider them true or false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things stop moving at absolute zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolute zero is impossible to reach, so would this be considered false?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What confuses me about these generic truths is that I'm not sure where, when, and what situation they occur since wikipedia said this about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomic_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnomic aspect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used to describe an aspect, the gnomic is considered neutral by not limiting the flow of time to any particular conception (for example, the conceptions of time as continuous, habitual, perfective, etc.). Used to describe a mood, the gnomic is considered neutral by not limiting the expression of words to the speaker's attitude toward them (e.g. as indicative, subjunctive, potential, etc.). Used to describe a tense, the gnomic is considered neutral by not limiting action, in particular, to the past, present, or future. Examples of the gnomic include such generic statements as: &amp;quot;birds fly&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;sugar is sweet&amp;quot;; and &amp;quot;a mother can always tell&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I made sentences like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a heater that has never been heated and will never heat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a machine that heats that has never heated and will never heat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The machine I described does heat, but that doesn't happen in past, present, or future, so when does it heat? I know that present tense can be used to describe imaginary situations like stories, but the context of my sample sentence is that of a heater that does exist. I could say that the context omits a clause like &amp;quot;If used...heats&amp;quot;, but that would make the sentence a conditional, and &amp;quot;I have a machine that heats that has never heated and will never heat&amp;quot; is not a conditional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9953" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T08:13:56.793" Title="Do general truths entail existence?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2015-10-31T09:25:22.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar phenomenon to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations#Eclipsis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Irish eclipsis&lt;/a&gt; exists in Modern Greek, although more limited in terms of the number of consonants it applies to. According to Wikipedia's article on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Greek_phonology#Sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Modern Greek Phonology&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[when a word beginning with a voiceless stop follows] a number of grammatical words ending in /n/, most notably the negation&#xA;  particles δεν and μην and the accusative forms of the personal pronoun&#xA;  and definite article τον and την [..] /n/ either assimilates for place of articulation to&#xA;  the stop, or is altogether deleted, and the stop becomes voiced. This&#xA;  results in pronunciations such as τον πατέρα [to(m)baˈtera] ('the&#xA;  father') or δεν πειράζει [ðe(m)biˈrazi] ('it doesn't matter'), instead&#xA;  of *[ton paˈtera] and *[ðen piˈrazi]. The precise extent of&#xA;  assimilation may vary according to dialect, speed and formality of&#xA;  speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T09:54:04.183" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T09:54:04.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14842" CreationDate="2015-10-31T09:33:39.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about any material on this topic but I can tell you my experience that I think applies to most Italians, if not all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you need to know that a lot of Italian dialects are considered full-fledged languages, completely independent from Italian, with their own grammar and structures. So understanding is harder because the grammar is different, the vocabulary and the syntax too, not just the pronunciation. Sardinian is one such example, although considering the lack of written standard in its history, a lot of vocabulary (relatively speaking) has been — quite sadly — lost, and various Italian loanwords have entered the language, so an Italian speaker might locate them now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the factors that determine how much you can understand, there's the &lt;strong&gt;distance&lt;/strong&gt; of course, because the closer a certain dialect/language/variety is to you, the easier it will be to understand. Even within the same region, this is still true: Varieties can change from town to town and even from village to village. However this doesn't work in a proportional manner, because other factors enter the equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is &lt;strong&gt;familiarity&lt;/strong&gt;. I have had a lot of contact with Sicilians, for example, so my understanding of it has been increased compared to someone that heard it less. If a friend of mine is speaking on the phone with their relatives/friends in Sicilian, I might understand words or at least, the general gist of the conversation. Of course, there is not one Sicilian. Like I said, they can change from place to place even within the same region. Especially since a lot of dialects lack a written standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more factor is whether you speak &lt;strong&gt;broad&lt;/strong&gt; or not. When Italians say &lt;em&gt;&quot;parlare (dialetto) stretto&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, it means to speak a pure dialect. This usually means that you're not just speaking Italian with a strong local accent. It means that you're usually speaking &quot;strictly&quot; as the locals do: strong accent, (sometimes) almost unintelligible pronunciation with a fast pacing and with words completely mixing with each other, so that it's virtually impossible for someone else to understand what is being said, and of course - local vocabulary/syntax/grammar. If you have little or no familiarity and the speaker is not using any &quot;keyword&quot; (similar words across languages), then you won't likely understand anything. Even with familiarity (but still being from another region), you will probably miss a lot of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-10-31T19:37:09.637" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T19:37:09.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14852" CreationDate="2015-10-31T17:16:01.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look for very widely-spaced glottal pulses in the last 80 msc or so of [ɛ] in [lɛt], which is creaky voice on the vowel. You may also find that F1 and F2 are a bit higher in [lɛt]. (Pick a point defined from the beginning of the vowel, so that you aren't just measuring a consequence of the shortening of the vowel in [lɛt]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T17:16:01.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14855" CreationDate="2015-10-31T17:31:03.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO this question is off-topic and should be on Philosophy SE, but I'll explain why. Even though linguists throw around some of these terms, the crucial issues are not linguistic. Your premise is that dragons don't exist, which is false. &quot;Existence&quot; does not simply mean &quot;have mass and occupy a definite space&quot; – that would be appropriate for an &quot;entity&quot;. Existence is more abstract, and things can exist as concepts. Dragons &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; exist as concepts, they just don't have entity counterparts. &quot;Freedom&quot; likewise isn't an entity, but it exists &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; concept. Aleph-1 &quot;exists&quot;, though only as a mathematical concept. Your heater problem is an instance of a &quot;broken unit&quot;, meaning that you have the wrong understanding of how category-membership is determined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T17:31:03.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14855" CreationDate="2015-10-31T18:29:50.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To interpret some sentences in the way their author intended, you have to imagine circumstances different from those you believe to actually obtain.  If you refuse to do that, you are deemed communicatively uncooperative.  We are all very practiced at creating new worlds as settings for what people say and write.  It's not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere or other, George Lakoff proposed that linguists' grammars should generate pairs of sentences and presuppositions, rather than just sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-10-31T18:29:50.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13222" CreationDate="2015-11-01T01:11:54.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prefix often tends to transitivize the verb: while the verb without the prefix can be used intransitively on its own (eg: le renard approche), the prefixed verb cannot by itself &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(eg:  The following is wrong: ✘ le renard rapproche. ✘).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prefixed verb needs the reflexive (that absorbs the internal argument and detransitivizes the verb), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This generality is not always true, but is quite general though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10787" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-01T14:51:39.733" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T14:51:39.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T04:57:38.847" Score="2" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Key Assumptions:&lt;/code&gt; &#xA; 1. My uncle speaks only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_English_regional_phonology#General_American&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;General American&lt;/a&gt; English&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(so he cannot resort to other languages' phonetic inventories).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whenever he tries to phonate the uvular trill &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ʀ]&lt;/a&gt;, he fails and instead &lt;strong&gt;phonates perfectly&lt;/strong&gt; the voiced uvular fricative &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ʁ]&lt;/a&gt; (so about which I am not asking here).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Having perpetually rewatched &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.group.shef.ac.uk/dialog_main.php?num=17&amp;amp;type=consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this animation of the vocal tract for [ʀ]&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12874/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;), he knows perfectly the physical corporeal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill#Features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;features&lt;/a&gt; of [ʀ], but which still fail to aid him to phonate [ʀ].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So please do not repeat or explain with physical features.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only solution appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/14835/5306&quot;&gt;this method&lt;/a&gt; from which I learned to phonate the alveolar trill, which cleverly exploits and combines phones in English to mimic another phone. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=36017#p774735&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; My trick is say /a/. Then /g/. Then &quot;gra&quot;. Those two sounds are made at the same position of the tongue and uvular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Problem:&lt;/code&gt; Sadly, 5 did not aid my uncle.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So what other (combinations of) phones in English should be tried to phonate [ʀ]? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T05:02:48.723" Title="How do you articulate the uvular trill, when you can already articulate the uvular fricative?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14855" CreationDate="2015-11-01T08:13:56.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are basically restating an hundred-year old problem of logical semantics that has occupied the time of famous philosophers like Bertrand Russell. His example sentence was &quot;The kind of France is bald.&quot; Various solutions were proposed within logic including the 'possible worlds' theory and the 'sense/reference' distinction. @user6726 is right, you would get a far better answer to the current thinking  on this on Philosophy SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is also a linguistics problem. At least from two perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics shares &lt;strong&gt;referential theory of meaning&lt;/strong&gt; and its problems with philosophy. Many semanticians have held some form of the &lt;strong&gt;truth-conditional theory of meaning&lt;/strong&gt;. I.e. the meaning of a statement is its truth value. This is incredibly useful in formal semantics and computational approaches to language but (in much current thinking) a complete dead end for thinking about meaning. So, by bringing up a question like this, you are raising a disciplinary debate about the nature of meaning in language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Purely and uncontroversially within linguistics, your examples raise questions of &lt;strong&gt;speech acts&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;presupposition&lt;/strong&gt; which are two concepts introduced into thinking about language at least in part as an antidote to the truth-conditional view of semantics. The core of the idea is to look at the communicative action performed by a statement rather than just whether it is true or not. In this way, the truth conditions are irrelevant to most language that is spoken. Speakers' intentions, context, assumed knowledge, etc. - all of those are more important to understanding an utterance or text than whether we can map it onto the world or not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of your examples were addressed directly and very powerfully by Michel Fauconnier in &lt;strong&gt;Mental Spaces&lt;/strong&gt; which he later developed with Mark Turner into the &lt;em&gt;conceptual integration&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;blending&lt;/em&gt; theory. I highly recommend their &lt;em&gt;The Way We Think&lt;/em&gt;. George Lakoff has enriched mental spaces with his notion of &lt;strong&gt;idealized cognitive models&lt;/strong&gt; or later &lt;em&gt;frames&lt;/em&gt; which also address many of your questions. I recommend the first few chapters of &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt; to understand the depth of the challenge to the truth-conditional approach to meaning which your question assumes. A more complete elaboration of these issues can be found in Leonard Talmy's &lt;strong&gt;cognitive semantics&lt;/strong&gt;. Look in Part 2 of Volume 2 at &lt;em&gt;semantic interaction&lt;/em&gt; for treatment of the issues you raise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a richer conception of meaning than referential truth, you will find that your problems simply disappear but in that will open a far more complex and interesting world of meaning making in language than Frege, Russell and the like could grasp with their riddles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T08:13:56.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14873" CreationDate="2015-11-01T18:53:17.553" Score="1" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam Webster's dictionary provides two pronunciations for the word carry (\ˈka-rē, ˈker-ē\ ) as well as for marry ( \ˈmer-ē, ˈma-rē\ ). In both cases, the one I hear the most is the pronunciation with [e], i.e., \ˈker-ē\ and \ˈmer-ē\ .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? Is this pronunciation with [e] for words like &lt;em&gt;carry&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;marry&lt;/em&gt; the most common in American English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10737" LastEditorUserId="10737" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T11:29:56.833" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T11:29:56.833" Title="carry &amp; marry [pronunciation]" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-11-06T15:30:57.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T19:00:55.377" Score="1" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying Spanish and Portuguese at university, and I am having some trouble with part of a Spanish linguistics assignment. I would be very grateful if somebody could shed some light on how to tackle this question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mi hermana me ha traído un mapa &lt;em&gt;de Madrid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Show by means of tests whether the italicised strings are constituents. b) If the italicised strings prove to be constituents, state their syntactic function. c) In cases of structural ambiguity, state in words what the different interpretations might be. d)Then indicate the constituent structure with either labelled brackets or trees for each interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N.B. the linguistic tests to be used are reduction, ommission, substitution, movement and 'answer to a question'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10792" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T14:49:43.280" Title="How to determine an immediate constituent of a sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-11-06T15:30:21.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14871" CreationDate="2015-11-01T20:15:41.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first step, I suppose, is to re-state what fact about &quot;answer to a question&quot; refers to constituency (and likewise the other tests). Look at any other two-word sequence, like &lt;em&gt;hermana me&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;traido un&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mapa de&lt;/em&gt; and so on, and see if that fact holds. For some of these word pairs, that relationship does not hold. Questions about &quot;syntactic function&quot; would have to refer to whatever theory of syntactic function your instruction subscribes to. Identifying ambiguities is a native-like speaker magic skill, and sometimes people just can see the other interpretation(s), probably because the alternative interpretation seems silly (e.g. the ambiguity of &quot;he sold a ticket to my boss&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T20:15:41.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14870" CreationDate="2015-11-01T20:27:21.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is correct that at least two pronunciations exist across all speakers of American English. There is no reliable data on frequency of particular pronunciations, and MW certainly hasn't conducted large-scale sociolinguistic surveys. In my dialect, I just have Xɛɹi (&lt;em&gt;mary, marry, merry&lt;/em&gt; etc), and I know people who distinguish [meɹi] &quot;Mary&quot;, [mɛɹi] &quot;merry&quot;, [mæɹi] &quot;marry&quot;, at least I think that is the sound / spelling correlation. I'm not an expert on what constitutes a rhyme (you learn that stuff in junior high and then it fades), but that a disyllable can't rhyme with a monosyllable, so &quot;petty&quot; and &quot;pet&quot; can't rhyme, nor can &quot;airy&quot; and &quot;air&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T20:27:21.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14884" CreationDate="2015-11-02T07:15:31.780" Score="0" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, When describing the sound system of an unknown language, is there any scenario in which you may perform a phonetic analysis before a phonological one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the standard approach is phonological, using minimal pairs, and from there postulate a phonological system and only after make a phonetic analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there exceptions in which a phonetic analysis proceeds a phonological one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T18:21:26.947" Title="Possible to describe phonetics before phonology of an unknown language?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14783" CreationDate="2015-11-02T09:46:05.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymological dictionary of Dutch and Frisian names (dr. J. van der Schaar, Woordenboek van voornamen) mentions &quot;Kei&quot; (pronounced &quot;Kai&quot; in some dialects) and its variants &quot;Kaei, Kaey, Kay, Key. Keije, Keijen&quot; and says they are Frisian and are diminuatives (he calls them &quot;vleivormen&quot;, so affective (positive) names, used in the speech of siblings, e.g.) and refers to names &quot;Gerrit/Gerhard&quot;, &quot;Nicolaas&quot; and &quot;Cornelis&quot;. So the author considers that these names could have derived from any of those traditional names. He offers no definite etymology beyond this. As Yellow Sky said in his answer, such forms are often quite far removed from the their original forms. The Danish name &quot;Kaj&quot; is mentioned under &quot;Gaius&quot;. &quot;Gaius&quot; is not mentioned as the origin of &quot;Kei&quot;, though. He does mention that maybe the Danish Kaj could have the same origin as the Frisian &quot;Kei&quot;, but the Danish can certainly be derived from &quot;Gaius&quot; as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if the name Kai is given nowadays, it's probably because people know the Danish name, which I think is more well-known than the traditional, but rare, &quot;Kei&quot;-forms at the beginning. This is just my impression, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3317" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T09:46:05.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-02T10:04:51.277" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following lines are all from Byron's Don Juan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Passion most dissembles, yet betrays&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even by its darkness; as the blackest &lt;strong&gt;sky&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Foretells the heaviest tempest, it displays&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Its workings through the vainly guarded &lt;strong&gt;eye&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And in whatever aspect it arrays&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Itself, 't is still the same &lt;strong&gt;hypocrisy&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Coldness or Anger, even Disdain or Hate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are masks it often wears, and still too late.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of his departure had been sent him &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;His Spanish friends for those in &lt;strong&gt;Italy&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I perch upon an humbler promontory,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Amidst Life's infinite &lt;strong&gt;variety&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With no great care for what is nicknamed Glory,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But speculating as I cast mine &lt;strong&gt;eye&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On what may suit or may not suit my story,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And never straining hard to &lt;strong&gt;versify&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I rattle on exactly as I'd talk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With anybody in a ride or walk.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar rhymes are found throughout English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this. Was &quot;by&quot; pronounced &quot;bee&quot;; or was Italy pronounced &quot;I-tal-eye&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10795" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T10:04:51.277" Title="&quot;I&quot; before, during, and after the Great Vowel Shift" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-11-06T15:31:17.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14877" CreationDate="2015-11-02T13:19:21.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine a situation where you have a recording of people speaking in some language, but you have no possibility to talk to these people. You can't ask them questions that would lead to finding minimal pairs. In such a scenario, I don't see any option other than starting with the phonetic analysis: try to transcribe the speech signal phonetically, as precisely as you can, and only then look for patterns in the transcription, which may lead to hypotheses about the phonological system of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T13:19:21.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14877" CreationDate="2015-11-02T14:25:18.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, of course you have to start with phonetics, when you're just starting work with an informant.  You can hardly start with phonemics, because there is no way for you to know what the phonemes are.  You could be lucky and have an informant who is already literate in his own language, so he could simply tell you about the phonemes, but then you wouldn't be doing a phonemic analysis -- he would be telling you the analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is arguable that you can't do an adequate phonetic analysis, though, without also doing a phonemic analysis.  In &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;, Chomsky and Halle define what they mean by a phonetic representation by including a requirement that it be a transcription by an expert who &lt;em&gt;knows the language&lt;/em&gt;.  I suppose they have in mind the difficulty non-native speakers sometimes have in hearing some distinctions, like English stress (perhaps because some such distinctions are mistakenly thought to be phonetic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that in first confronting an unknown language, we proceed by at first assuming an incorrect phonemic analysis, and then gradually refining that, as we learn better how to fit the sounds we're hearing into our evolving understanding of the phoneme system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T14:25:18.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14871" CreationDate="2015-11-02T14:49:43.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want extra credit, you might mention some cases where the tests you are supposed to use give incorrect results, depending of course on how your teacher reacts to criticism.  For instance, in &quot;A scoop of ice cream is delicious with chocolate sauce -- it is called a sundae&quot;, evidently &quot;it&quot; is substituted for &quot;a scoop of ice cream ... with chocolate sauce&quot;, but the latter is clearly not an immediate constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T14:49:43.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14877" CreationDate="2015-11-02T18:21:26.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you need to explain what you mean by &quot;phonetic&quot;, &quot;phonological&quot; and &quot;analysis&quot;. You also need to explain what you mean by &quot;before&quot;. To simplify matters, I reduce &quot;phonetics&quot; to acoustics, because that provides the necessary and sufficient basis for any statement about sound systems of spoken languages (and I also restrict the discussion to spoken languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to analyze a language at any level, you need data, which comes in the form of acoustic waveforms. The first piece of analysis that you perform is a segmentation, where you approximately divide the waveform into sub-pieces that correspond to &quot;segments&quot;. Now you (Teusz) need to explain what you mean by &quot;phonological&quot; versus &quot;phonetic&quot;. Presumably, you agree that anything that deals with numeric measurements of the waveform, such as the duration of a sub-part defined by certain properties, or anything having to do with frequencies or amplitude, these things are all &quot;phonetic&quot;. Questions about rule-ordering, underlying forms, cyclicity and so on, are questions about phonology. It is completely unclear where to slot questions such as &quot;is that a cluster [th] or an aspirated stop [tʰ]?&quot;; &quot;is that [d] or [t]?&quot;; &quot;is that sequence [tua] or [twa]?&quot;, along the phonetic-phonology divide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basis of all analysis is a phonetic object, the acoustic waveform, but the very first analytic product is a crude phonological categorization into segments. It is obviously premature to be thinking in terms of contrastiveness at this point: the initial goal is to develop an adequate system for reducing the massively variable acoustic waveform to vastly fewer discrete symbols. Is this a phonological analysis or a phonetic analysis? The input of analysis is a phonetic thing, but the output, a discrete segment symbol, is a phonological thing. So it depends on what you mean by &quot;phonetic analysis&quot; versus &quot;phonological analysis&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the first word you hear is &lt;em&gt;nivaka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;knife&quot;. The objective fact is that there is about 30 msc VOT after the release of the stop, though you are not yet doing an acoustic analysis. There is no phonetic basis for deciding whether to record this as [nivakʰa] versus [nivaka]. It's not until you encounter &lt;em&gt;ehalakha&lt;/em&gt; &quot;basket&quot; with 70 msc of VOT that you understand that &lt;em&gt;nivaka&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ehalakha&lt;/em&gt; contrast in terms of the phonetic property of VOT duration (a.k.a. aspiration). The thing that you have to attend to in the data is a phonetic property, namely VOT, and the product of your observations is a phonological fact, namely a contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discovering this contrast allows, indeed forces you to review your data to discover that you had previously encountered [kʰ] in &lt;em&gt;solokho&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mung bean&quot;, which you believed to be &lt;em&gt;soloko&lt;/em&gt;. Since you happened to be recording everything, you determined that the speaker produced a somewhat atypical token with 50 msc VOT. There is no absolute minimum or maximum VOT value that defines phonetic aspiration, as shown by the fact that the aspirated stops of Thai have a shorter VOT than the unaspirated stops of Navaho (both languages have an aspiration contrast). One consequence of the fact that phonetic values of segments are not absolute is that in lieu of a contrast, you will have a hard time justifying a transcriptional choice. In very many languages, the highest back vowel sounds somewhere between Jones-defined [u] and Jones-defined [o]. IPA letters like [u], [ʊ], [o] represent ranges of formant values, and any attempt to numerically define the range presupposes a phonological categorization -- it would be invalid to include the values of the contrastive phoneme /ʊ/ from a language having the contrast /u, ʊ/ in a data-pool of formant values of [u]. It would be equally invalid to &lt;em&gt;exclude&lt;/em&gt; languages which have no such contrast and where the highest back vowel sounds more like the Norwegian high back round vowel in the word &quot;2&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the word &quot;before&quot; is that it may falsely lead you to believe that you must create a repository of phonetic conclusions which you can subsequently further analyze into phonological conclusions. There is no strict separation of levels of analysis: creation of some phonological conclusions is a prerequisite for creating phonetic conclusions, which can be used to justify further phonological conclusions. The basis of analysis in sound systems is a phonetic object, the acoustic waveform, but the kind of analytic object that results from doing the analysis may be phonetic or phonological, depending on the methods that you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T18:21:26.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2015-11-02T22:48:39.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there are a lot of answers here, but I don't see the right one. We classify languages not by similarities of any sort other than shared sound changes in their histories.  We inherit this geneological model from the 19th century neogrammarians, along with the assumption that sound changes apply without exception.  Then what sound changes does English share with the Romance languages that other Germanic languages do not share?  To my knowledge, none at all.  There is no evidence to support classifying English as a Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a case can be made that English shares some morphology and some phonology with Romance due to a large influx of loan words, including sets of morphologically related borrowed forms.  But I don't know of any phonological rule of English traceable to Romance that could plausibly be classed as an exceptionless sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the clarity of this issue is hard to see because so much doubt has been cast on the neogrammarian hypothesis of exceptionless sound changes.  We could discuss that, I suppose, but I don't see it as an issue, here.  That's the assumption that underlies the genetic classification under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T22:48:39.477" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14887" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-03T02:30:27.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T02:30:27.663" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T02:30:27.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14888" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-03T02:30:27.663" Score="0" Body="Word embedding is the collective name for a set of language modeling and feature learning techniques in NLP where words are mapped to vectors of real numbers in a low dimensional space, relative to the vocabulary size." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T15:46:16.383" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T15:46:16.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14406" CreationDate="2015-11-03T05:16:21.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spacy.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;spaCy.io&lt;/a&gt; has a nice high-accuracy lightweight parser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only need English then it is a good choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T05:16:21.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-04T13:19:36.910" Score="12" ViewCount="2161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and every language I speak or know well, masculine gender is unmarked, and feminine is marked, for any human referent. Is there any known language where this is the other way around?  (Take for example &lt;em&gt;los ricos&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish, &quot;the rich&quot;. Is there any language in which this would naturally be the equivalent of &quot;las ricas&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Possibly also interesting would be languages where female might be the unmarked gender for non-human referents. If anyone knows of one, please do tell. For example the weird use in standard Arabic of the feminine singular pronouns for all plural inanimate referents, like &quot;the films I saw&quot;, &lt;em&gt;al aflaam, al-lati ra'aituha.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that there is at least one invented feminist language (Laadan) but I'm only interested in natural languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T02:25:08.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T02:25:08.013" Title="Is there a language in which feminine is the unmarked gender?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14891" CreationDate="2015-11-04T14:33:25.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are such languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt from the annotation to Heidi Newell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1123162261&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;„A Consideration Of Feminine Default Gender“&lt;/a&gt; (2005):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Languages with gender assignment must also deal with ambiguous and unknown gender.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The gender used for an unknown or ambiguous gender is the default gender.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In some languages all nouns must be assigned a gender.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If the gender is unknown or ambiguous, however, then the language &lt;strong&gt;defaults&lt;/strong&gt; to one of the existing genders.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the great majority of the languages with such a system, &lt;strong&gt;the default gender&lt;/strong&gt; will be either &lt;strong&gt;the neuter&lt;/strong&gt; (if it is available) or &lt;strong&gt;the masculine&lt;/strong&gt; gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“While the use of the feminine is possible, it is nevertheless the masculine which occurs in most languages reported on”.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some examples of this exception are &lt;strong&gt;Maasai&lt;/strong&gt; in Kenya and Tanzania, &lt;strong&gt;Mohawk&lt;/strong&gt; in North America, and &lt;strong&gt;Welsh&lt;/strong&gt; in Britain and it is on these languages I concentrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Maasai demonstrative pronouns use a feminine default,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mohawk uses a feminine default gender in personal pronouns,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and Welsh in cases where a non-referential overt subject is needed, the feminine form is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scroll down the page for View/Download link (PDF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1706/gender-of-mixed-groups-defaulting-to-masculine-how-common&quot;&gt;Gender of mixed groups defaulting to masculine – how common?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T14:33:25.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2015-11-04T17:35:14.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been no systematic meta-typological study of such conventions in linguistics. The closest that you could get would be journal style sheets. Even then, there are outliers, for example use of bold for linguistic examples in-text, found in NLLT, contrary to the more general practice of using italics. It is interesting that while the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/style-sheet_0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unified Style Sheet&lt;/a&gt; reduced the stylistic chaos somewhat, it doesn't touch conventions such as &amp;quot;inline data is to be set as X&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conventions vary over time. It is obviously relevant that in the old days, people used typewriters which have limited abilities to add fancy features (actual italic became possible in the 70's, but required switching typing elements). The current trend is to separate the author's contribution from the physical implementation, by use of &amp;quot;styles&amp;quot; or similar tagging. Thus an inline example would have the attribute &amp;quot;inline_example&amp;quot; or something like that, which might be cashed out as a point-size difference, different font family, bold vs. regular, depending on the current house specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things that we've learned from efforts such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xlingpaper.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xlingpaper&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ELAN&lt;/a&gt; is that we still need to better understand our ontology. An example isn't just an example, it's a complex data structure involving numerous levels of grammatical analysis, sociolinguistic properties (such as speaker-identifiers), or corpus-pointers. A given publication almost certainly does not require encoding all of that information, but it may require representing &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of it. For instance, for the first time in 40 years, I'm working on a language with such a high degree of variation and speaker-specificity that I have to notate all examples as to who they come from. This information is represented computationally as a tag on data, but will need to be translated into something visual, like superscripted initials -- unless the publisher objects and wants something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typographic conventions that prevail at a given time can vary massively depending on sub-field. A certain complex standard for using underscore, bold, parentheses and braces emerged in Optimality Theoretic studies of reduplication and morphological structure. These happen to conflict with an emerging standard for Bantu linguistics, where braces and parentheses denote specific stem-sized sub-constituents of words and underlining (single and double) denotes the different derivational sources of H tones. The use of the &amp;quot;outline&amp;quot; font feature in OT studies enjoyed some popularity, as a high-tech insider gadget, but seems to have fallen into desuetude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that there will ever be a reasonably-complete meta-typographical study of linguistics, covering the centuries of publication that exist and the myriad sub-fields. It might be more efficient to start with some chronological cutoff point. However, that cutoff would probably by about 2020, since use of inline styles and thinking about ontologies in document- and database-creation is not yet common among workaday linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T17:35:14.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-04T18:30:57.777" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking satire literally happens quite often, sometimes it's comical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim (Satirically) : &amp;quot;This play-area is dangerous! We should arm ourselves!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jane (Literally) : &amp;quot;Don't worry Jim, I've got my .45.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you describe what Jane misunderstood about Jim's statement?  Is it possible for either Jim or Jane to know for sure if the other is speaking literally or satirically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Append: both answers mistook the premise of the question, incorrectly assuming which speech was Satirical (of the example here which is gun owners) and the Literal response (of a gun owner). There are more examples plausible if this one is not palatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example. if both were speaking openly and literally, the discussion could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim : &amp;quot;There's no need to be armed in a playground.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane : &amp;quot;Just because the people here are children, doesn't mean we won't be attacked by someone else.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the above is moving away from the topic of the question, which is how to properly describe the misunderstanding of satire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T10:41:09.823" Title="A literal response to satire" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-11-07T16:46:10.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14895" CreationDate="2015-11-05T01:56:03.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Satire is the humorous use of exaggeration or parody, to shame a party into reforming some socio-political flaw of theirs. The context involves a playground of some kind, which we culturally know is occupied by children, and we would conclude based on the mention of &quot;arming ourselves&quot; that the children have weapons. Satire is non-literal, but it isn't surreal. Let's assume that the children are practicing archery. For this to be satire, we need a socio-political flaw to be shaming, which could be a ballot proposal to ban any weapons in public parks (under the rationale that weapons might be used to attack people). Jim opposes the ban, and is pointing to an absurd assumption behind the proposal, that the simple presence of sporting gear that can be used as weapons will cause children to attack passers-by. We also have to assume that Jim successfully engaged in satire: if he was just being a surreal idiot (e.g. the playground was completely empty of people or animals and there is just an empty baseball diamond there), he could still say such a thing, it just wouldn't be satire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane's response (and your characterization of it as a misunderstanding, as opposed to playing along with the satire) indicates that she thinks that using a .45 against children practicing archery is socially-acceptable behavior. There could be many reasons for her to have that belief, for example maybe she grew up in a civil war zone surrounded by child soldiers who actually did kill people. She did not know that Jim &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; thinks that using a .45 against children playing is inappropriate behavior, and she actually disagrees with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to be absolutely sure whether a person's statement is intended literally vs. satirically. The most direct question Jane could ask is &quot;Do you literally mean that?&quot;, but either &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; as a response could be true or false (since people are capable of lying). She might eventually be able to garner evidence to support a suspicion one way or the other, but she couldn't be absolutely sure that he hadn't simply had a change of heart in the interim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T01:56:03.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8480" CreationDate="2015-11-05T02:52:53.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the developer of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://readablepassphrase.codeplex.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Readable Passphrase plugin&lt;/a&gt; for KeePass, which is all about creating random yet grammatical text. So here is a brief empirical analysis of what it produces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the phrases produced, passphrases from a ~14k word dictionary (&lt;a href=&quot;https://readablepassphrase.codeplex.com/releases/view/618050&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;version 0.15&lt;/a&gt; of the plugin) contain &lt;strong&gt;between 7.4 and 9.3 bits of entropy&lt;/strong&gt;, depending on what grammatical forms of a word are allowed. Given that this is when trying very hard to be random, I'd interpret those numbers as an &lt;strong&gt;upper bound&lt;/strong&gt; of the entropy present in normal prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took great pains when developing the plugin to try to count the number of combination different phrases might produce, but this analysis is entirely dependent on my counts being correct. (Entropy is derived based on the part of speech and allowed grammatical forms for each word in the pattern. It is also reported as a range, as different parts of speech affect what is grammatically allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Method&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create 1000 passphrases which follow a fixed grammatical pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine the theoretical entropy of such a phrase based on numbers of words in the dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find average number of words per phrase = total words generated / 100&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find average entropy per word = theoretical entropy / average words per phrase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rinse and repeat for a different pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basic Pattern&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;noun&amp;gt; &amp;lt;verb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;noun&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; - aka strength &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;NormalRequired&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that nouns may be common, proper or derived from an adjective, and may have a definite or indefinite article or personal pronoun. The first noun may also be substituted for a number from 0-999 (digits). The verb uses present, past and future tenses. The entire phrase may be in the interrogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;my trite one examines the supply&#xA;should Waldo knit the sophist&#xA;how does their bifocal thing coil the daydream&#xA;should a secret thing enqueue the decade&#xA;the 1 risk whams a whaler&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average words per phrase: 5.21&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theoretical entropy per phrase (bits, min / avg / max): 39.5 / 44.8 / 46.4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Entropy per word (min / avg / max): &lt;strong&gt;7.58 / 8.59 / 8.90&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Pattern&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;noun&amp;gt; &amp;lt;adjective&amp;gt; &amp;lt;adverb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;verb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;adverb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;preposition&amp;gt; &amp;lt;adjective&amp;gt; &amp;lt;noun&amp;gt; &amp;lt;conjunction&amp;gt; &amp;lt;noun&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; - aka strength &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;InsaneRequiredAnd&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to previous pattern, this includes plural nouns and demonstratives. And continuous present, continuous past, perfect and subjunctive verb tenses, and intransitive verbs. Note that intransitive verbs dramatically shorten these phrases (mostly because the plugin doesn't handle them very well). The conjunction is either &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;should their streaky one variably elevate plus these hoarse liars because of the overdone oddity&#xA;should these mellow ones feasibly repose apart from this torrid poacher but not this depleted hewer&#xA;when does this disfigured one decisively replace except for the deadly intruders or the real sawdust&#xA;the 22 armful of logicians earlier smooched amidst that gay turret and even a homemade skywriter&#xA;their convex thing profited evermore&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Average words per phrase: 13.50&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theoretical entropy per phrase (bits, min / avg / max): 119.49 / 123.03 / 124.17&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Entropy per word (min / avg / max): &lt;strong&gt;8.85 / 9.12 / 9.20&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding extra parts of speech adds, at best, 1.5 bits of entropy per word. While also introducing considerably more complexity (making it much harder to remember the phrase). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get to 9 bits per word, the length and complexity of the phrase are quite out of hand. It would take non-trivial but reasonable effort to memorise, but once done, your very close to the magic 128 bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shorter phrases are pretty easy to pick up (having memorised several of them during development of the plugin!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, for those interested in the plugin, it does have phrases in-between these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10811" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T02:52:53.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14895" CreationDate="2015-11-05T08:09:44.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way of &lt;strong&gt;disambiguating satire or any figurative language&lt;/strong&gt; (and most language is figurative) is &lt;strong&gt;shared knowledge of the world (and culture)&lt;/strong&gt;. The only way for Jim to know that Jane is speaking figuratively is that he knows she actually does not have a .45 or that she is extremely unlikely to have one. Or possibly, assuming Jane is on duty police, having a .45 is in no way relevant to the playground. You also have to start with the assumption that there is some real world context in which Jane could have interpreted Jim's statement as non-hyperbolic (e.g. the playground is a known place for drug dealing). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption that there is some &lt;strong&gt;universal procedure for identifying figurative language&lt;/strong&gt; is behind much of the unjustified British conceit that Americans don't understand irony. But this is simply caused by a lack of shared cultural (world) knowledge. Both Americans and Brits use irony/satire in about equal measure but their usage spheres do not overlap perfectly. The misunderstanding goes both ways but the stereotype developed only in one direction for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this misunderstanding is not only cross-cultural. In any interpersonal relationship, the overlap in shared knowledge of the world (both general and immediate) is imperfect, thus leading to many possible confusions. Language (communication) has many &lt;strong&gt;conversation repair&lt;/strong&gt; instruments such as 'just kidding' but that does not always prevent issues since figurative language (or which irony or satire are just one small part) often evokes very emotional responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:09:44.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14891" CreationDate="2015-11-05T08:37:24.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the vast majority of (if not all) languages that have a grammatical gender assignment with the Masculine/Feminine distinction, the masculine is the unmarked gender. But the system of markedness is going to be much more complex as genders proliferate. For instance, in Czech verbal agreement masculine is the unmarked gender with respect to feminine and neuter but feminine is the default with respect to neuter. Also, the masculine inanimate is marked with respect to masculine animate (at least where agreement is concerned). As Corbett pointed out in Gender: &lt;strong&gt;markedness is not a very good category to apply across all of gender across all language&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of languages, including English, do not have grammatical gender - &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/32A#2/25.5/148.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/32A#2/25.5/148.2&lt;/a&gt;. In English, the gender is lexical or semantic (e.g. the distinction between he/she, actor/actress) in contrast to a language like Finnish which does not have even these distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is also the cultural default, which in most contexts skews strongly towards the masculine. E.g. the cultural expectation that a doctor or boss is a man. This is salient even in cultures where grammatical gender exists and most statements are gender marked. It is impossible to perfectly disagregate the role of grammatical markedness from that of the cultural semantic default, for instance in 'los ricos', grammar plays a role but it is also guided by culture. Another example is the English he/she debate where clearly the supposed grammaticality of the he-default did not withstand a cultural challenge (and was indeed itself a result of an earlier cultural challenge from the other direction). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:37:24.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14891" CreationDate="2015-11-05T12:38:08.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Irish:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a pheann / his pen  &#xA;a peann / her pen &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So peann is lenited when demonstrating male ownership. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Scottish Gaelic:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When addressing a person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a Mhórag! / Morag!&#xA;a Dhòmhnaill! / Donald!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Female names are lenited, while male names are lenited and slenderised with Dòmhnall becoming Dhòmhnaill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T12:50:02.573" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T12:50:02.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14906" CreationDate="2015-11-05T16:52:00.577" Score="3" ViewCount="908" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have searched all over, and found a few but none of them have all known languages that ever existed, does anyone know of one of these? (p.s. I apologize for making language mistakes, as English is not my home language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10816" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T16:57:06.303" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T09:44:43.327" Title="Is there a phylogenetic tree for all known languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14905" CreationDate="2015-11-05T17:04:20.883" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously that would only be possible for languages that we know the existence of. &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Glottolog&lt;/a&gt; fills the bill, as far as I know. There may be gaps where there are some inscriptions that may or may not have been a language (such as the Vinča symbols), but it does include e.g. Minoan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T17:04:20.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T17:18:23.187" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, I've attended a psychological test for the master thesis of a friend of mine. The target is children and adults. So don't scare if you see in the following lines that I speak about animals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask you a minute of patience to read fully my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test is composed by two phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You see animals (on a paper) that may eat two foods, it's choosen by the examiner if the animal eat one food, two foods or none of them. If the answer is two you attach to the animal a &lt;strong&gt;gold medal&lt;/strong&gt;, if it's one a &lt;strong&gt;bronze medal&lt;/strong&gt;, if it's zero a &lt;strong&gt;sad face&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The examiner (using a frog) states a sentence and you have to say if it's &lt;strong&gt;true&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;false&lt;/strong&gt;.The disambiguation emerges at this phase with a particular type of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example.&#xA;In the phase 1 the hippo ate one food (a carrot) and it has a bronze medal.The frog say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hippo didn't eat a carrot or a cucumber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true or false? I answered that's true.&#xA;Why? Because I transformed the sentence to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hippo didn't eat a carrot or it didn't eat a cucumber&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part is false but the second one is true, with an or this means true.&#xA;Anyway, it's possible another transformation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hippo did not ( eat a carrot or eat a cucmuber) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which thanks to De Morgan's laws become&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hippo did not eat a carrot and did not eat a cucumber&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I transformed the sentence beacuse in my opinion conjuction like or/and &quot;must&quot; connect sentences, I.e &quot;the carpet is red or heavy&quot; is not valid, a right one may be &quot;the carpet is red or the carpet is heavy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, you have already understood that the issue is related the negation, logic operator precedence, sentences truncation and De Morgan's laws and how the latter is felt by people (i.e. embedded in natural language).&#xA;I want to deepen in this topic and see what you expert say. In addition feel free to correct my answer and to say that I'm wrong with my test answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the correct transformation to eliminate the disambiguation? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it needed such a transformation to state something about this type of question?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the transformation depend on language (e.g english and russian use the same transformation)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no transformation is needed how do you face with this kind of sentences?does a way exist or may be only interpreted? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These articles are helping me to answer to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/romero/papers/li-hanromero-final-submit.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/romero/papers/li-hanromero-final-submit.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2014sentential-negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2014sentential-negation.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there is a third, but I've to wait for 10 points so it is in the comments)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10817" LastEditorUserId="10817" LastEditDate="2015-11-09T11:08:56.737" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T11:08:56.737" Title="Logic disambiguation in composed sentences with negative predicates and &quot;or&quot; conjunction" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14907" CreationDate="2015-11-05T19:07:38.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a major difference between the natural language use (I do mean &quot;use&quot;) of &quot;or&quot;, &quot;and&quot; and the logical connectors that they traditionally translate. Whether &quot;or&quot; means &quot;at least one&quot; versus &quot;exactly one&quot; is a pragmatic matter, thus &quot;Would you like pie or cake&quot; at a dinner party is probably an offer of pie, cake, or both pie and cake. At a restaurant, the offer &quot;For desert you can have pie or cake&quot; probably means you have to pick one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your description of the experiment isn't clear enough. If it is given that the hippo has a sad face and it ate a carrot, then the proffered rule for medal-assignment is not being followed. Therefore the frog's statement is somewhat immaterial – and perhaps that is the point of the experiment. But that problem aside, your first transformation is the problem. The sentence &quot;The hippo didn't eat a carrot or a cucumber&quot; means &quot;The hippo didn't (eat (a carrot or a cucumber))&quot;, so negation has scope over the two disjuncts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T19:07:38.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T20:57:11.800" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a head, T, moves to C. In the minimalist program, what features cause the movement of that head? I've been looking at literature on head movement but all I can find is papers on arguments for and against head movement and what head movement really is, nothing about the features that drive it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you guys give me some sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10338" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T02:26:08.283" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T02:26:08.283" Title="What features cause Head Movement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14905" CreationDate="2015-11-05T21:45:46.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not just that it's impossible to create a single tree of all languages because of the numerous undocumented extinctions but it's also impossible for currently living (or documented dead) languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glottolog is one great source for world languages, with another being Ethnologue. It is instructive to compare their lists of families (&lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/family&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/browse/families&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.ethnologue.com/browse/families&lt;/a&gt;). They differ in their count by over 300. So, in effect, you would need at anywhere between about 120 and 430 trees to capture the genealogical relationship among the world's languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even this would give you an extremely impoverished view of the historical and contemporaneous relationships among languages. Language also evolve through change and contact - and in many cases, their current shape is as much due to that as to their long-term historical descent. English is itself a perfect example. Genealogically an offshoot of the Germanic branch of the Indo European tree (&lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/macr1271&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/macr1271&lt;/a&gt;) but so profoundly influenced by North Germanic, Celtic and Romance languages that it's hard to think of it as a very good member of the 'original' family. In fact, Glottolog lists English as a new sub-family 'Macro English' covering the huge variety of dialects and creoles around the world descended from the English of the British isles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T21:45:46.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-06T01:17:35.003" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep asking this question over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it seems that the word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks) was coined in 1960s or or earlier.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now we know that people nowadays use the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; to say something that is on the Internet, for example &quot;&lt;em&gt;there are a lot of things on the internet&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that why people don't say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=on%20the%20internet%2C%20in%20the%20internet&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Con%20the%20internet%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cin%20the%20internet%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;look at the Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, it seems that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; was used since 1800, but the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; only was used since 1960s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my theory. I think, in 1960s, a certain person A wrote an article relating to Internet &amp;amp; he used a sentence, which contains the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;there are a lot of things on the internet&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, many other magazines &amp;amp; newspapers narrate this article &amp;amp; suddenly thousands or millions of people read this article &amp;amp; thus remembered this phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. People then start to imitate the person A and say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gradually, everyone use the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let say, what if the person A, the father of the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, used the phrase &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; for the first time in his article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if that is the case, Will people today say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;in the internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the Internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other example is the expression &quot;&lt;strong&gt;listen to the music&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, why not just &quot;&lt;strong&gt;listen the music&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &amp;amp; why we have to as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; after &quot;&lt;strong&gt;listen&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=listens%20to%20the%20music%2Clistens%20the%20music&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Clistens%20to%20the%20music%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Ngram&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;listens to the music&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;listens the music&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;em&gt;Is the development of an English phrase such as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;on the internet&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; a process of natural selection?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any research mentioning that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10630" LastEditorUserId="10630" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T02:23:45.343" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T02:23:45.343" Title="Is the development of an English phrase such as &quot;on the internet&quot; a process of natural selection?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-11-06T10:55:53.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2015-11-06T05:01:53.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically you can &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; express any 漢字(&quot;kanji&quot; in Japanese) character with just Roman characters, it's just that there would be a lot of duplications. There was a proposal in China during the modernization process (about 100 years ago) to just get rid of all Chinese characters and use Roman spelling to represent them instead, which of course was rejected. But you get the idea. So of course representing all hanzi with homophones caused tons of troubles for the Koreans, because there are so many characters which can be represented by the same homophone, but they did it anyway as an effort to cut the Chinese elements out of their culture and signify their &quot;national independence&quot; or something like that. It's in the same vein as their changing the name of their capital from &quot;漢城&quot; (which literally means &quot;city of Han&quot;, and &quot;Han&quot; of course was a dynasty of China and the current major ethnicity in China), to &quot;Seoul&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T09:17:04.247" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T09:17:04.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14919" CreationDate="2015-11-06T07:40:02.953" Score="7" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have a little subsystem that uses a combination of particles of no*, some*, any*, every* or similar to create related question and negation words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what the system roughly looks like this in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With complete sets like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nothing, anything, something, everything&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;noone, anyone, someone, everyone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nowhere, anywhere, somewhere, everywhere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And incomplete sets like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nohow, anyhow, somehow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;never, any time, sometimes, every time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks very similar cross linguistically, although, some sets that are incomplete in one language are complete in another. E.g. Czech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nikdy (lit. nowhen), někdy (lit. somewhen) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because the actual words that compose this subsystem fall across word classes (pronouns, adverbs, adjectives) and functions (e.g. negation vs. positive statements vs. indeterminate statements). I couldn't find any grammar (outside some learner grammars) that actually treats this as a subsystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of any studies and/or grammars of this subsystem in any language (or better still across languages). It's hard to research because there is no one term that I could find that covers all of these words. Yet, they are clearly related - I'm afraid I'm missing something obvious but I've been looking for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T22:29:48.053" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T22:50:06.730" Title="Treatment of or collective term for constructions with no*, some*, any*, every*" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14918" CreationDate="2015-11-06T08:41:23.857" Score="4" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ancient Greek words &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=a%29orghsi%2Fa&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=a%29orghsi%2Fa0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἀοργησία&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;aorgesia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;a defect in the passion of anger&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=a%29o%2Fristos&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=a%29o%2Fristos0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἀόριστος&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;aoristos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;without boundaries&quot; both start with the &quot;alpha privatum,&quot; the negative prefix cognate to English &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; and Latin &lt;em&gt;-in/-im/-ir/-il&lt;/em&gt;. However, every source that I have looked up has said that this prefix is realized as ἀν- &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;- when it comes before a vowel (including one that was historically preceded by a rough breathing /h/).&#xA;What is the explanation for these exceptions, and do any others exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I kind of found the answer, so I guess I will post it in case anyone else has this problem later on. I may have follow-up questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T09:19:55.837" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T12:32:29.213" Title="Why does Greek have 'aorgesia' and 'aorist' rather than 'anorgesia' and 'anorist'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14916" CreationDate="2015-11-06T08:57:09.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a)1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Perseus online dictionary of Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before a vowel [the prefix ἀ-] usu. appears as ἀν- (exc. where ϝ or&#xA;  spiritus asper has been lost, as ἄ-οινος, ἄ-υπνος, when it sts.&#xA;  coalesces with the following vowel, as ἀργός = ἀ-ϝεργός)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this points towards one possible reason for the lack of nu in the words I asked about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking up their etymology yielded the following information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aorgesia:&lt;/strong&gt; related to the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/greek/3709.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ὀργή&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;orgē&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wrath&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the sources listed at the &quot;Biblehub&quot; site, the word orgē may come:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;according to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, from oregomai, the middle voice of &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/greek/3713.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ὀρέγω&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;oregō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to reach out,&quot; which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%80%CF%81%CE%AD%CE%B3%CF%89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; says derives from PIE &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%83re%C7%B5-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;*h₃reǵ-&lt;/a&gt;. This is a problem, since with this etymology there is never a digamma /w/ or spiritus asper /h/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;according to HELPS Word-studies, from the verb &quot;orgáō&quot; or &quot;oragō&quot; [sic] &quot;to teem, to swell&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%80%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%AC%CF%89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; says it is ὀργάω &lt;em&gt;orgáō&lt;/em&gt; and that it is derived from the noun, rather than the other way around).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%80%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%AE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, from PIE *werǵ-/*worǵ-. This suggests a form with digamma once existed, though I have not been able to find that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the etymology attributed to Strong's is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aorist&lt;/strong&gt;: there was historically a spiritus asper /h/ as shown by the related word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%85%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ὅρος&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;horos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boundary.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was confused before researching this because later on, at least in English words of Greek origin, the &lt;em&gt;an-&lt;/em&gt; form started to be used before roots with historical spiritus asper, but I don't know when this occurred. (This can be seen in English words like &lt;em&gt;anemia, anhydrous, anhedonia&lt;/em&gt; etc. I've been trying to find equivalent words in Greek though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T09:23:20.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T09:23:20.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14916" CreationDate="2015-11-06T11:15:20.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of these roots originally had an initial w-. horos “boundary” is from older worwos, as attested by Mycenaean wo-wo, and dialect forms like ορϝος. In the case of orgē “anger” we do not happen to have any attested Greek dialect forms with w-, but IE *uerg- is supported by zero-grade forms like Sanskrit ūrj- “strength”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T12:32:29.213" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T12:32:29.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14915" CreationDate="2015-11-06T14:09:06.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More traditionally oriented grammars call this subsystem &lt;strong&gt;Indefinite pronouns&lt;/strong&gt;. Restricting the pronouns to words that really replace nouns (taking pro-noun literally) and reclassifying the rest of the old pronouns as determiners, adjectives, adverbs and particles is a rather recent innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I found two more terms: In a (hardly citable, but once you have the term you can track it down) &lt;em&gt;Lateinische Schulgrammatik&lt;/em&gt; I found the term &lt;strong&gt;pronomina corelata&lt;/strong&gt; for the pronomial part (including adjectives) of the system you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even better is the next one, it describes the full system. In Esperanto, thoses word are called &lt;strong&gt;tabelvortoj&lt;/strong&gt; (table words). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T22:50:06.730" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T22:50:06.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-06T15:41:08.090" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to compare the frequency of occurrence of a word in two corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example the word fail which occurs 311 times in a  corpus containing language from the sciences (2 million tokens) and 420 times in a corpus containing language from the arts (2.2 million tokens). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many textbooks recommend the LL test for such a task. However my understanding is that: &#xA;1) the LL test assumes parametric distribution &#xA;2) that my data is not normally distributed&#xA;Therefore the LL test would not be suitable for this purpose.  Is this correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10824" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T15:41:08.090" Title="Should I use the Log-Likelihood (G2) test to compare word frequency across corpora?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14915" CreationDate="2015-11-06T20:05:08.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are all compounds of a logical quantifier (no[ne], some, many, most, each, every, all) and a basic noun (thing; body, one; time, ever, when; where; how, way[s]).  Some are also contractions (n[ot]ever, al[l]ways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2015-11-06T20:05:08.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T05:31:36.227" Score="8" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &quot;eu&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;eu gosto (de isso)&quot; while &quot;me&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;me gusta (algo)&quot;. Why such a difference between two languages? What's the historical evolution of this expression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T21:41:10.947" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T22:17:14.257" Title="Why the grammatical difference between &quot;eu gosto&quot; in Portuguese and &quot;me gusta&quot; in Spanish. What's the historical evolution of this expression?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T06:40:10.040" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What are (1) [NP e], (2) control PRO; pro, other instances, and (3) 'e' in the examples? ('NP' here is actually a subscript in the paper)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Barbara Abott's '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.msu.edu/~abbottb/def_and_indef.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Definiteness and Indefiniteness&lt;/a&gt;.' In its 'Introduction,' she enumerates definite noun phrases. In the list I see something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;NP type: [NP e]&#xA;More details: control PRO; pro; other instances of ellipsis&#xA;Examples: Mary tried e to fly; [on a pill packet] e contains methanol [=Ariel 1988, ex. 7a]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are (1) [NP e], (2) control PRO; pro, other instances, and (3) 'e' in the examples? ('NP' here is actually a subscript in the paper)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T13:27:51.210" Title="noun phrase types" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T10:17:13.843" Score="4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an American English Corpus with spoken language exchange. There are many terms used. E.g. eTandem, tandem, etc. &#xA;TIA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10828" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-07T13:14:09.040" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T11:59:13.633" Title="American English Corpus with spoken language exchange" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14932" CreationDate="2015-11-07T10:23:05.640" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, literate native speakers of a language tend to assume that the language’s orthography is significantly more phonetic than it actually is or, with other words, tend to think that their pronounciaton of words is much closer to their spelling than it actually is. &lt;strong&gt;I am interested in studies or general linguistic arguments that back up this experience or refute it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples for the phenomenon I am presuming (note that these are just examples for the general tendency I am inquiring about – they need not be fully or even remotely accurate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speakers of English would think that they pronounce the word &lt;em&gt;misspell&lt;/em&gt; with two separate s-sounds, e.g., /mɪs.spɛl/, when in fact, they rather pronounce it /mɪspɛl/ or /mɪsːpɛl/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speakers of German would think that they pronounce the word &lt;em&gt;Butter&lt;/em&gt; with a vowel and a consonant at the end, e.g., /bʊteʀ/, while they actually pronounce it /bʊtɐ/ or similar (at least in most varieties).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speakers of French would think that they pronounce the word &lt;em&gt;garçon&lt;/em&gt; with a distinct consonant at the end, i.e., e.g., /ɡaʁsɔn/ or /ɡaʁsɔŋ/, while in fact they use a nasalised vowel, i.e., /ɡaʁsɔ̃/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T17:18:23.740" Title="To which extent are people’s perceptions of their own pronunciation influenced by the language’s orthography?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14925" CreationDate="2015-11-07T13:03:10.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in this parlance refers to any &lt;em&gt;empty category&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. a phonologically null element in the structure. They can be of various types indeed, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;movement traces, more often denoted as &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;controlled PRO, i.e. an empty element that typically occupies subject position in infinitives and receives reference via subject or object &lt;em&gt;control&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Mary&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; tried PRO&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; to fly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;small &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt; that occupies argument positions in pro-drop languages: cf. Italian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[1pl]&lt;/sub&gt; parliamo. `we speak'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;under some theories, an empty pronoun in the ellipsis site, and the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; can be verbal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) John didn't win, bit he tried to [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in three, a superscript in the brackets is actually not specific to NPs, it is notation to specify the category of the constituent enclosed in the brackets; thus, [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; cake] means that the constituent &quot;cake&quot; is an NP, [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; ate cake] means that &quot;ate cake&quot; is a VP etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-07T13:27:51.210" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T13:27:51.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14936" CreationDate="2015-11-07T13:35:35.467" Score="3" ViewCount="2902" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should syllable boundary be indicated in the phonetic and/or phoneme transcription? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/dog.gi/ [dog.gi] 'doggy'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/doggi/ [dog.gi] 'doggy'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the choice of one of the two strategies have certain entailments for the analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T17:36:05.540" Title="Is syllable boundary properly annotated at the phonetic or phonological level?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14929" CreationDate="2015-11-07T14:47:25.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it could be either one, depending on the language.  I have my own peculiar theory of syllables, which is a variant of Saussure's idea that syllable structure is a paradigmatic perspective which is reflected syntagmatically, i.e. in the stream of speech, by a phonetic segmental difference between explosive consonants (whose aperture increases) and implosive consonants (whose aperture decreases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An obvious problem with Saussure's version of this theory is that aperture does not uniformly increase at the beginning of a syllable, nor uniformly decrease at the end.  So my revision is to substitute stress/unstressed for Saussure's explosive/implosive.  This is the SPE feature stress, which is defined for consonants (honest -- I checked), but not actually used for consonants, so far.  We could identify it with the fortis/lenis difference, which is sometimes used for consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then we can identify as a syllable a syllabic segment together with any preceding stressed non-syllabic segments and any following unstressed non-syllabic segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes syllables phonetic, and also phonemic if there is a stressed/unstressed (fortis/lenis) distinction for consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C.-J Bailey once gave an interesting argument for syllables being phonemic.  He observed that in some southern dialects there is a distinction between May.a, the first name of the poet Maya Angelou, and Ma.ya, the Central American Indians. I could describe this as a difference in the stress of the y: the former y is unstressed and the latter one is stressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for this particular example, another plausible account is available.  May.a might have the diphthong /ai/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-11-07T15:07:25.743" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T15:07:25.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14929" CreationDate="2015-11-07T15:17:20.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It very much depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're focusing purely on the segmental aspects (ie individual sounds) then syllable boundaries will not offer much additional information and they are not included in most phonetic transcription (they are very prominent in dictionaries where they play a different role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often syllable boundaries will enter the picture if you mark syllabic stress. However, the stress is really carried by the syllable nuclei, so the boundaries are no strictly speaking necessary. In English, there are at least two contradictory approaches to syllable boundaries (Cambridge vs Longman pronunciation dictionary) but in fact, the syllable boundaries are not all that analytically important. In other languages, this may be slightly different. But it is mostly a safe bet that vowel is the syllable nucleus so it is more important to mark syllabic consonants in your transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note. You are using the third method of syllabification which is based on orthography. This is used in phonics instruction but does not constitute transcription. Since, there is only one /g/ in doggy. Your choices are /do.gi/ or /dog.i/. Since there is supposed phonotactic constraint in English against unstressed open short syllables, only the second option is chosen by the two methods but I suspect even that is reading more into it than there actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T15:17:20.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14927" CreationDate="2015-11-07T15:37:24.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there have been many studies of this. A quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=influence%20of%20orthography%20on%20phonological%20representations&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;amp;as_vis=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;search of Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; will reveal many references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153883/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article on non-word processing&lt;/a&gt; has a good overview of the literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is now considerable evidence that orthographic information is activated during the processing of verbal utterances, whether this automatically occurs during speech recognition (e.g., Slowiaczek et al., 2003; Chéreau et al., 2007; Taft et al., 2008; Peereman et al., 2009) or is controlled strategically (e.g., Cutler et al., 2009). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your anecdotes have a good experimental foundation to them. However, I think there's a huge value to collecting anecdotes such as yours, as well. They give examples of how the interface between orthography, phonological representation and normative judgements which would be hard to reveal in a controlled environment. Some &lt;strong&gt;other anecdotes&lt;/strong&gt;, I've found revealing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Czech speakers who refuse to believe that 'kde' is correctly pronounced as 'gde' ([g] in syllable initial position is perceived as alien to Czech) or 'jsem' as 'sem'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English teachers who unproblematically syllabify 'kitten' as /kit.ten/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The move to 'of' as an alternative auxiliary in the present perfect in British English. People will now enunciate things like &quot;I should OF known&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speakers saying things like 'They don't pronounce the G in going' even though no 'g' was pronounced in going or goin'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here's one I've observed in myself and a few other Czechs speaking English which I think is very interesting. Pronouncing 'much' as 'match'. This is a whole chain of influences 'much' is first represented in Czech orthography as 'mač' which as an 'a' which is then 'read out' as if in an English word resulting in 'match'. (Extremly uncommon but I've observed this twice in myself and at least 2 other times in others.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above would be really hard to study in any other way than a systematic collection and analysis of anecdotes but I'm not aware of a study that has done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T15:37:24.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T16:22:15.583" Score="5" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been learning and using English since I was 10. I have always been more or less aware of the /θ/ sound, but it wasn't until I got interested in IPA notation, when I realized English contrasts /ð/ and /d/. Since then this sound somewhat keeps on messing up with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=o49Fy1HS_rM&amp;amp;p=n#/8;10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Let's start with this&lt;/a&gt;. This is a way I ussualy find it pronounced in syllable onset. (I mean the one at the begining of &quot;this&quot; of course). I think it's articulated as a stop. It's very simmilar to &lt;strong&gt;/d/&lt;/strong&gt; for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=o49Fy1HS_rM&amp;amp;p=n#/11;13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Then we've got this.&lt;/a&gt; This is the way English speakers pronunciate this sound, when they are asked to do it clearly. It's also the way I find it pronunciated in syllable coda. For me it's completly different, as it has no stop component anymore. When she speaks it, the tip of her tongue touches her lower lip, what makes me find it &lt;strong&gt;v-like&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;And then there comes Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (the play button on the right). It's again quite different for me. I think the speaker here has his lips wide open while saying it, so the tongue doesn't touch the lower lip, and now it's &lt;strong&gt;z-like&lt;/strong&gt; for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So If we assumed &lt;strong&gt;c)&lt;/strong&gt; is the pure &lt;strong&gt;[ð]&lt;/strong&gt;, would it be correct for me to say that &lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; is actually &lt;strong&gt;[d͡ð]&lt;/strong&gt; (as it has a stop component) and &lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;[ð͡v]&lt;/strong&gt; (as it has a secondary place of articulation at the lower lip)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my assumption that only one of these sounds can be a pure [ð] correct in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; As most of the comments and answers were mostly &quot;what are you asking about?&quot;, I've decided to narrow this post to this question:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;If these sounds are different (and I swear they are), shouldn't IPA give a way to write each of them differently? Is the notation I used (in the last but one paragraph) acceptable?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10442" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:37:25.813" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:37:25.813" Title="Detailed &quot;quality&quot; of /ð/" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T16:27:56.430" Score="1" ViewCount="872" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been asked by my professor to do a research about the characteristics of Theoretical Linguistics, and now I'm stuck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these characteristics that makes theoretical linguistics a scientific study? Please add references when answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10829" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T16:12:25.137" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T17:13:34.360" Title="Characteristics of Theoretical Linguistics" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-11-15T07:39:33.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14929" CreationDate="2015-11-07T17:36:05.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Including syllable boundaries between slash brackets depends on two things: what you mean by slash brackets, and the facts of the particular language. Slash bracket may conventionally be used for underlying forms, in which case you would be saying the syllable structure is underlyingly present, and that would be a highly controversial claim needing justification. Slash brackets are also used to refer to a pre-phonetic level, before the introduction of any predictable properties such as flapping or aspiration are thought to be in English. That is, a phonemic transcription only includes unpredictable phonemes, not predictable allophones. But the position of a syllable boundary is usually predictable by rule. Thus it depends on your ideology regarding the concepts &quot;phoneme&quot; and &quot;predictable&quot;. As is well-known, flapping and aspiration are surface unpredictable in English, so from the perspective of predicting one phonetic property on the basis of another phonetic property, flapping and aspiration are not fully predictable, therefore English does have flap and aspirate phonemes. But from a &lt;em&gt;pre&lt;/em&gt;-surface perspective, these properties and segments are fully predictable. Likewise, surface-contrastive positioning of segments with respect to syllables (as in Hebridean Scottish Gaelic) always appears to be ultimately predictable. The predictive factor may be something abstract and phonological in nature, such as whether a pre-consonantal consonant is moraic versus non-moraic (e.g. Blackfoot or North Saami).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, whether you should include syllable boundaries in a slash-bracket-enclosed transcription depends on what you are trying to say. If you mean that syllable boundaries are actually underlyingly present, then you should say that syllable boundaries are actually underlyingly present (and you should say why you believe that); if you believe that syllable boundaries are fully rule-governed but that those rules do not apply transparently to the surface level, then you should say that syllable boundaries are fully rule-governed but that those rules do not apply transparently to the surface level (and you should say what the source of opacity is). What you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; do is leave people to guess what your theory is regarding proper use of slash brackets and standards of phonemicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for square bracket transcriptions, that again depends on what claim you are making regarding such transcriptions. A very narrow transcription of Blackfoot which was only informed by the facts of pronunciation would indicate that the language manipulates vowel tenseness and consonant duration in a fashion that suggests surface contrastiveness within comparable contexts (thus [ipiksit] &quot;flee&quot; vs [ipɪk:sit] &quot;be anxious&quot;). But that apparent surface contrastiveness goes away given some phonological analysis, if one admits the possibility of contrastive moraic status to consonants. In that case, /k/ in &quot;flee&quot; is non-moraic (and is not in the syllable coda), and the /k/ in &quot;be anxious&quot; is moraic (it is in the coda of the second syllable, and influences preceding vowel quality). Here too it depends on one's ideology of things in square brackets. If one thinks that square brackets should only contain measurable acoustic properties with a transparent, universal relationship between acoustic property and transcriptional symbol, then a surface transcription [i.pik.sit] or [ipik̩sit] vs. [i.pi.ksit]~[ipiksit] would not be legitimate (I use the syllabic tick under &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; to notate &quot;surface moraic k&quot;). But if one allows a more phonologically-informed transcription in square backets, this is a perfectly legitimate distinction. As with slash brackets, what you should do is be explicit your specific ideology, and what claim you are making, and don't leave people to guess what follows from including dots between slash or square brackets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T17:36:05.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14933" CreationDate="2015-11-07T18:04:37.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand the phonetic nature of /ð/, in general, you need to look at recordings of native speakers of languages that have it. The corpus should be contextually varied (e.g. utterance-initial, utterance-final, intervocalic, and so on), and it should not include any &quot;sound performances&quot; like &quot;it is pronounced [ððððð]&quot;. It should also only contain data from actual native speakers of the language in question. In the Wiki recording, it isn't even claimed that this is &quot;in a language&quot;. Some dialects of Finnish &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have [ð] but I don't know if the performer of the wiki recording is such a speaker. I would be somewhat happy to give my rendition of a Danish [ð], but there is no question that it's not a native production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every phonetic symbol stands for a range of pronunciations. I would say that Danish [ð] is different enough from [ð] of Icelandic, Kven, Saami and English that it deserves a distinct symbol. But that would imply the possibility of contrastiveness, which has not been established. Those pronunciations are all within the realm of normal variation for how [ð] is pronounced, across languages and speakers. It would be kind of hard for us to diagnose why you have these different feelings about specific performances of [ð], if that's what you're asking. I suggest that you narrow the question down to something much more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The revision of the question is much clearer. We have known forever that there will be some measurable difference between any two performances of exactly the same word by the same speaker, and questions of sameness / difference in phonetics imply some scale of granularity in measurement. The idea that guides crosslinguistic phonetic comparisons is that languages may differ in what specific values a sound has, so that [i] in German may have a lower F1 than it does in English, and that could be a fact of some linguistic interest, but simple anatomical variation can explain why two speakers of the same language &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; of different languages could have different phonetic values for a nominally same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't judge the three samples referenced in the OP to be particularly different, but one can substitute Danish &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; vs. English &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt;, or various other pairs of sounds that are audibly and systematically different between two languages. Then the question is whether the IPA should add symbols to systematically represent that difference. But the IPA does not purport to represent all possible systematic sound differences. This is most clearly seen in the illustrations of the IPA, where vowels are positioned in a standard vowel space. You will notice that the symbol &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is used very frequently, but the position that it occupies across languages varies considerably. Sometimes one finds a contrast in low vowels such as &lt;em&gt;æ,a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ɑ,a&lt;/em&gt; which constrains the positioning of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, but without a contrast, one usually find that the low unrounded vowel is written &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, even if it crosses into back vowel space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Handbook of the IPA (1999: p. 27) states that &quot;the International Phonetic Association has aimed to provide 'a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word'&quot;. If a language is uncovered which phonemically contrasts two kinds of &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt;, Danish-style (approximant) and English-style (fricative), then one could rightly conclude that there should be two distinct symbols for representing that difference. Until that day (plus time for voting...), it should not. However, also note that there are diacritics that can be added to specify particular kinds of pronunciation detail, so that the Danish &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; could be written as &lt;em&gt;ð̞&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one encounters a language with a voiced dental / interdental affricate, then &lt;em&gt;d͡ð&lt;/em&gt; would be appropriate as a transcription. I would not include that particular performance of &lt;em&gt;ððððð&lt;/em&gt; in the discussion, since this isn't an example of language, it's an example of meta-language and probably not even representative of normal speech for that person. However, there are similar issues that arise in the transcription of language, such as the lip action of Tokyo Japanese &quot;u&quot;, or the labial protrusion of Shona orthographic &lt;em&gt;sv, zv&lt;/em&gt;, formerly transcribed as &lt;em&gt;ȿ,ɀ&lt;/em&gt;. If one encountered a somewhat labialized &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt;, this could be rendered with the seagull diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T18:17:07.403" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T18:17:07.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-07T19:04:27.447" Score="4" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had an argument with a friend, since he didn't find &quot;claustrophilia&quot; in the dictionary he thought it should be called a nonce word. I thought the term &quot;nonce&quot; was for one-off words that arose a single time by a single speaker, whereas a word constructed according to accepted productive rules of English like &quot;claustrophilia&quot;, &quot;Benghazigate&quot;, or &quot;diphosphorus pentoxide&quot; should not be classified as nonce words, even though they do not appear in your dictionary. But is there some other term that does describe words of this class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10836" LastEditorUserId="10836" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T01:39:27.377" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T01:39:27.377" Title="Is this a nonce word or is there another name for a regularly constructed neologism?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14938" CreationDate="2015-11-07T19:27:02.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neologism. Speaking for myself, though, ‘nonce’ is fine for things that are not strictly ‘one-off’. Everything starts with a first time, and 'accepted productive rules' are often precisely how a nonce word would arise, right? To the point that it seems odd to have a specific term for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-11-07T19:48:13.013" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T19:48:13.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14938" CreationDate="2015-11-07T21:01:44.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nonce is used in two senses in linguistics: 1) an 'occasionalism' - word used in a one off conversation and 2) a non-existent word (non-word) following the phonological patterns of the language used as distractors or targets in psycholinguistic experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first sense, 'nonce' is a type of &lt;strong&gt;neologism&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With rare words, it is difficult to exactly determine what term to apply them and ultimately, it's not that important. It would appear that at least one dictionary actually lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/claustrophilia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claustrophilia&lt;/a&gt; and it has some other hits on Google, so it's not clear if it's a neologism or just a very rare words that some people may 'recreate' independently. Therefore, the type of word is not just a property of the lexical item itself but rather of the interaction of the form, its history, speakers' knowledge of the word and the context of usage. Being able to describe what goes on is more important than the label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T21:01:44.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14934" CreationDate="2015-11-07T21:42:01.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question very much depends on who's asking and why. And what stage of your linguistic studies you are at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the lay person, I'd start with James McCawley's &quot;To ask a professional linguist how many languages they speak is just like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.&quot; This pointing to the dual meaning of the word 'linguist' in English but also to the fact that theoretical linguistics is concerned with general principles common to all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also be useful to distinguish linguistics from philology - the latter dealing with a description of specific languages and from pedagogic or prescriptive grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reading I might recommend at this stage is Stephen Pinker's &lt;em&gt;Language Instinct&lt;/em&gt; (although I completely disagree with his conclusions, it is a good initial overview).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition I would have parroted back to a professor during my undergraduate studies would have been something like: &quot;Theoretical linguistics is characterized by a concern with general principles governing how language works using methods including corpus analysis, contrastive analysis, psycholinguistic experiments, etc.).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For readings at this stage, I would go to the classics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otto Jespersen: Philosophy of Grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edward Sapir: Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leonard Bloomfield: Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you wanted to get more in-depth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle: Fundamentals of Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Luis Hjelmslev: Prolegomena to a Theory of Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Noam Chomsky: Cartesian Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MAK Halliday: Explorations in the Functions of Language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But today, I would be more interested in discussing with how various linguists' theoretical preoccupations direct what they study and how. For instance, in order to understand the divide between the Chomskean tradition and the rest of linguistics, theoretical concerns are paramount. Like many social sciences, linguistics has a bit of a science envy, which can lead to overcompensating with formal approaches that obscure more than they reveal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors who addressed this (off the top of my head):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robin Tolmach Lakoff: Language War&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frederick Newmeyer: The Politics of Linguistics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George Lakoff: Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (first 3 chapters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Croft: Radical Construction Grammar (first chapter)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Labov: Principles of Linguistic Change (vol 1. first few chapters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, many more things to read and many more perspectives to consider. This is not just something that can be answered without going into the very foundations of the study of language and that can't (and shouldn't) be done comprehensively on SE. However, we can probably provide a relatively safe starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T17:13:34.360" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T17:13:34.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14934" CreationDate="2015-11-07T23:10:43.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretical linguistics is scientific because it is based on facts.  Language expressions are cited which are proposed to be acceptable, or not acceptable, to native speakers of some language under discussion.  Such facts are taken to argue for or against some linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretical linguistics is not a mature science, and there are often, perhaps always, questions about whether the facts are true, whether they are collected in an unbiased way, and, in general, there are lots of methodological problems.  And there may also be questions about the coherence or lucidity of the theories.  Probably a reasonable case can be made that theoretical linguistics is not &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; science. But it is based on (purported) facts, as you can easily see by looking at practically any dissertation on theoretical linguistics.  So, it is scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-11-07T23:15:57.847" LastActivityDate="2015-11-07T23:15:57.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14933" CreationDate="2015-11-08T23:15:12.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding (a), it is quite common for /ð/ to have an allophonic realization as [d̪] (dental stop) or [d̪ð] (dental affricate) in syllable onset position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't hear a huge difference between your examples (b) and (c).  I would transcribe them both using [ð]. Note that in the video in (b), although the tongue touches the lower lip, it is &lt;em&gt;the point of maximal airflow constriction&lt;/em&gt; that matters when defining place of articulation: in this case, it's between her tongue blade and her upper teeth (regardless of where her tongue tip ended up). Incidentally, she is exaggerating for pedagogical effect; I've never seen the tongue protrude so far when making that sound in normal speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the wikipedia sound file in (c), it might sound more [z]-like to you because it is more nearly an &lt;em&gt;apical&lt;/em&gt; dental articulation (tongue-tip rather than tongue-blade). It is still different from [z] because in articulations of [z] the turbulent air from the constriction hits the rear surface of the upper teeth, not so for [ð].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T23:15:12.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T06:47:54.140" Score="6" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started wondering what share of all world's languages are polysynthetic (on any practical definition of &lt;em&gt;polysynthetic&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the prototype approach, the macroparameter theory (Baker 1995), etc.), and I can't find even a rough estimate. Does anyone know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other parametric values do have counts, for instance, you often learn that SOV languages constitute almost a half of world's languages. But nothing like that for isolation, agglutination and polysynthesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-10T06:09:23.093" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T18:51:20.493" Title="How frequent are different morphosyntactic types?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;&lt;polysynthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T16:14:20.727" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most Semitic language, one of the phonemes is a voiced pharyngeal fricative (ע in Hebrew and ع in Arabic). However, in some dialects of Hebrew, namely Spanish-Portuguese, Dutch Ashkenazi, and Italian, the letter ע has shifted from a voiced pharyngeal fricative to velar nasal phoneme. How could these phonemes shift so drastically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5031" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T19:26:27.643" Title="Phonemic shift: voiced pharyngeal fricative to velar nasal" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14947" CreationDate="2015-11-09T17:03:06.530" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoglottophilia&quot;&gt;rhinoglottophilia&lt;/a&gt;, related to antiresonances and the acoustic structure of these sounds. A parallel case is the change of &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ŋ&lt;/em&gt; in the Luyia Bantu language Nyole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T17:03:06.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14946" CreationDate="2015-11-09T17:14:53.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem lies in the &quot;on any practical definition&quot; part. After decades in the field, I still don't know what the difference between agglutinative and polysynthetic is. Imbabura Quechua is an &quot;agglutinative&quot; language with a small morphology, and Sanskrit is an analytic language with a big morphology. Counting morphemes doesn't help, you have to have more sophisticated metrics of &quot;combinability&quot; and &quot;functional uniqueness&quot;. Even if such notions were computationally defined, processing data from languages would require a lot of work, compared to what's required to determine if the dominant word order is SOV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T17:14:53.347" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T21:32:16.667" Score="-1" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to conduct research on the &lt;em&gt;definiteness system&lt;/em&gt; (how is definiteness marked) in my dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to do this in the light of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky) and am struggling to understand how I can use it. Can you please help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10850" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T15:12:14.137" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T15:12:14.137" Title="What are the basic principles of optimality theory?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14950" CreationDate="2015-11-09T22:01:58.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can do it for phonology, so maybe you can figure out the syntax side differences. Rather than saying what you do, you say what you don't do. A lot of languages have a rule devoicing obstruents at the end of the word, and the standard rule-based account of that is to say that there is a rule making a word-final obstruent voiceless. The OT approach is to say that there is a list of bad things, so having a word-final voiced obstruent is a bad thing. But, changing things is bad, so you have to say that hatred of final voiced obstruents is more important than hatred of changing things. There are a lot of things that you could do to avoid having final voiced obstruents, for example you could insert a vowel. But that involves a specific kind of &quot;changing things&quot;, so if you devoice obstruents rather than inserting a vowel, that means the hatred of vowel insertion is creater than the hatred of devoicing. And so on... there is a long list of possible things you can do (changes between the input and the output) and all changes are bad, to different degrees. And there is also a long list of surface states that you're supposed to avoid, like final obstruents, intervocalic stops, mid vowels, high vowels, and so on. Once you have the correct ordering of all of these principles, there's a conmputation which you can perform that tells you that out of all of the logically possible outputs, only a certain one (the actual one, in that language) is the survivor, since every other possible output has already been ruled out because it results in a greater violation of some more important constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In phonology, we have it easy, because we understand what an &quot;input&quot; is -- it's just an underlying form, whatever the morphology and syntax provides. I totally do not understand how the concept of &quot;input&quot; works in syntactic OT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify, are you talking about the phonological alternation in the pronunciation of the definite article before &quot;sun&quot; letters vs. &quot;moon&quot; letters? That is fairly straight-forward phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T00:29:50.417" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T00:29:50.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-09T22:46:25.430" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to do a research paper in the definite articles of my dialect. Can anyone provide me with any framework that is suitable for analyzing the definite articles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10850" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-10T11:16:52.517" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T06:07:45.530" Title="Tools to work with definiteness" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;&lt;framework&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T02:20:57.473" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;In which languages do non-proper NPs have a default unmarked interpretation as definite, rather than indefinite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the default interpreration of plural and uncountable NPs is normally indefinite (thus, &lt;em&gt;stars&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;some stars&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;some water&quot;). Countable singular NPs generally have no stable interpretation without a determiner, unless they are proper nouns (thus, you generally do not see a plain form like &lt;em&gt;frog,&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;a frog&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the frog&lt;/em&gt;,  etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages that show the opposite tendency to English in this case — not necessarily for all forms of NPs, but for some of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T09:45:28.470" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T07:55:23.750" Title="Definiteness as the default interpretation of NPs" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14952" CreationDate="2015-11-10T08:29:14.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a starter, you may want to look at WALS &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/37&lt;/a&gt; and references therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T08:29:14.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14926" CreationDate="2015-11-10T10:13:38.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jlawyer states &lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Micase&lt;/a&gt; might have something useful for you. It contains some language tutorials. You certainly could use ANTCONC with Micase, it really depends exactly what you want to investigate. It might be worth considering annotating relevant excerpts with a general annotation tool such as Amber Stubbs's &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/mae-annotation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MAE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10824" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T10:13:38.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14959" CreationDate="2015-11-10T17:14:03.343" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that someone asks you &quot;What's the difference between those curves (see the image below)?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ISmK3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ISmK3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the definition of a curve as being &lt;em&gt;&quot;a line or outline which gradually deviates from being straight for some or all of its length.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you formally answer with &quot;One is orange and the other is blue.&quot;? Or because the color isn't a part of the definition of a curve such an answer is invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10856" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T18:32:28.650" Title="Responding to a question about differences of an entity" Tags="&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-11-13T00:20:11.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14958" CreationDate="2015-11-10T18:32:28.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The appropriateness of a response derives from the context in which it is asked. If the context is a math class, then appeal to the formal definition of a curve would be appropriate and appeal to color would not be. If you were at a paint store, the opposite would be the case. Answering with a color answer in a math class would be literally true but also overly literal. Nevertheless, it is not &lt;em&gt;totally&lt;/em&gt; inappropriate in a math class, since precision and explicitness are desiderata in mathematics, and asking &quot;What is the difference...&quot; is really a poor question, since one can refine the question without giving away the answer. One can omit the color difference, which is just a distractor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can answer that one is blue and the other is orange, but I don't think one can &lt;em&gt;formally&lt;/em&gt; answer that way: but the question does not require you to answer formally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-10T18:32:28.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-11T02:27:01.740" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Karaoke (from Japanese), simile (from Latin), tu quoque (Latin), apostrophe (Ancient Greek via Latin), machete (Spanish), and other loanwords with final E sounds all end up with an /i/ at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be fair enough but somehow Italian loanwords get a different treatment. &lt;strong&gt;Their&lt;/strong&gt; final E's end up as /eɪ/!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the difference in shifts be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10648" LastEditorUserId="10648" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T02:32:10.590" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T03:15:26.190" Title="Treatment of final E's in loanwords to English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14960" CreationDate="2015-11-11T03:15:26.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have different judgments on &lt;em&gt;tu quoque&lt;/em&gt; and don't think I've ever heard [tu kwokwi] – I also have a different judgment on &lt;em&gt;karaoke&lt;/em&gt; which I pronounce [karaoke], but I recognize that's not typical. You don't give any examples of Italian words, and the ones that come to mind (numerous food-related words like &lt;em&gt;al dente, latte, farfalle, mafalde&lt;/em&gt; and artsy terms like &lt;em&gt;andante, finale, sotto voce&lt;/em&gt;) are relatively recent or recherche ([e], not [i]). Older and more-established Italian words include &lt;em&gt;minestrone, fettucine, linguine&lt;/em&gt; with [i], and of course often orthographic &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is simply not pronounced in some words (&lt;em&gt;belvedere, trombone&lt;/em&gt;). I think the high-vowel pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;tagliatelle, rotelle&lt;/em&gt; is more standard in the US though I might use [e].&#xA;the ultimate sign of nativization or else Sicilian origin. If there is a tendency for Italian words to be pronounced with [e] compared to words from other languages, I think it is because Italian words are more recent, and there is a greater chance in the US of encountering an actual Italian pronunciation of the word to override the rule that orthographic &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is not pronounced [e].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T03:15:26.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-11T03:23:31.723" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific term for a phenomenon or an ability to accommodate for others' mistakes either in speech or in writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that a native or experienced speaker performs unconsciously or a skill they naturally possess. And something that a learner of a language lacks, which forces them to perform an analysis before realizing the mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10457" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T03:23:31.723" Title="A term for &quot;accommodating for others' language mistakes&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14965" CreationDate="2015-11-11T06:17:48.307" Score="4" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider an archiphoneme N that can be realized as n, ng, or as a nasal on a vowel depending on the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this representation, below, standard i.e. with the archiphoneme as a capital letter on the phonetic level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/adaN/ [a.dan] 'mosaic'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/Nad/ [ngad] 'innards'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/aNid/ [ãid] 'slave&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how does on typically refer to an archiphoneme when providing the phonemic inventory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-11T17:21:40.780" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T17:29:15.760" Title="How is an archiphoneme represented on the phonetic level?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14954" CreationDate="2015-11-11T12:43:47.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A complete list or fraction will be subjective, because each case has nuances - for one thing even languages with definite articles use them differently - and because it is always subjective what should count as a separate language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly speaking, among the languages of Eurasia and the Western world, essentially Slavic, Ural-Altaic (regardless of the dispute around it), Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Berber languages can have definite NPs by default or no articles at all, including for countable nouns.  The oldest forms of Greek and Latin had no definite article, but they later developed them.  Please pardon my ignorance on the rest of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Lmfk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Lmfk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Definite and indefinite articles, World Atlas of Language Structures&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a partly areal feature, for example it includes the Eastern Indo-European languages that had long and intimate contact with Altaic and Dravidian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, no matter the counting methodology used, default definite NPs ie implied definite articles are rare, much rarer than languages with no articles at all.  Furthermore, the overall distribution seems to be consistent between Eurasia, Austronesia, Africa and the New World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the nuance, let us examine some of well-known languages with NPs that are definite by default.  In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar#The_Definite_and_Indefinite_Articles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formal Persian&lt;/a&gt; it is so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the literary language, no definite article is used; rather, it is implied by the absence of the indefinite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Turkic languages it is similar, with some nuances.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Araba sokakta.&lt;/em&gt;  (&lt;em&gt;The car is in the street.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaking it down a bit, we have &lt;em&gt;Car street-IN.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Araba&lt;/em&gt; simply means &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt;, and is in its pure nominative and canonical form.  (You can regard &lt;em&gt;-ta&lt;/em&gt; and its variations either as a locative case ending or as a postposition meaning &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, for our discussion it does not matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, notice that &lt;em&gt;sokak&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;street&lt;/em&gt;) is also a definite NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a good example of default definite interpretation of NPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both language groups, however, there are many cases of countable, and of course uncountable, NPs without any article that would be translated into, say, English with the indefinite article or with no article, for example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;آیا اتومبیل دارید؟&lt;/em&gt; | (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Do you have a car?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Kar var mı?&lt;/em&gt; | (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Is there snow?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in some context would one interpret this as &lt;em&gt;Do you have the car?&lt;/em&gt;, and it is hard to dream up a context where &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is there the snow?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would make sense.  Thus in such instances it functions more like a language without any articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the following, with the indefinite article is strange or emphatic, a bit like English &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;آیا یک ماشین دارید؟&lt;/em&gt; | (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Do you have one car?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Bir kar varmı?&lt;/em&gt; | (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Is there one snow?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it only makes sense in context or almost never.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Slavic languages, there are generally neither definite nor indefinite articles, which is actually very common among the world's languages.  In these cases, the default interpretation is mostly a question of the context, although naturally native speakers do not bother to map every NP to the concepts of definite and indefinite in an English speakers' mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are interested in the overview, some exceptions to the groupings: among Iranian languages, Ossetian and informal Persian and Kurdish can mark definiteness explicitly, and apparently Tajik marks only objects, like Turkic languages.  Hungarian has very simple and explicit definite and indefinite articles, like Western European languages.  Among Slavic languages, Macedonian and Bulgarian and related dialects do have a definite article, like other Balkan languages.  Again, this is definitely an areal feature.  Also, I cannot find a colonial-era creole that does not have a definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, there are always ways to be explicitly definite, eg with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonstrative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;demonstratives&lt;/a&gt;, ie by saying &lt;em&gt;that frog&lt;/em&gt;, and indeed definite articles in many languages were derived from such ways.  To me anyway it is not clear where to draw the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T06:33:39.590" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T06:33:39.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14963" CreationDate="2015-11-11T17:16:14.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An archiphoneme is employed when a surface phone (which has a definite phonetic value) could derive from a number of underlying sounds /x,y,z/ and there is no contrast between these segments in that environment. For example the question suffix of Turkish appears on the surface as [mi, mu, my, mɨ], and rather than arbitrarily select a specific phoneme as underlying the variable vowel, archiphonemicists posit an archiphoneme /I/ – you would have to read the specific ontological claims made by a proponent of the practice, to know exactly what that means. In underspecification theory, it simply refers to a vowel that is high, but not specified for backness or rounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for not reducing the Turkish alternating vowel to allophony is that each of /u, i, y, ɨ/ are phonemes, and each allophone can only be assigned to a single phoneme, that is, allophony does not neutralize distinctions. That's the job of archiphonemes and morphophonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Archiphonemes generally do not exist &quot;on the surface&quot;, which is populated only with phones. An exception is that some people interpret &quot;surface&quot; as being the result of all of the phonological rules, but not including the results of phonetic interpretation. Some people of that persuasion allow the possibility that a given segment may not have full specification of all features, in fact privative feature theories extensively make that claim (that e.g. [u] is round and [i] is not specified for roundness). Those who adhere to privative feature theory at the surface do so also for pre-surface levels; in which case, all segments are &quot;archiphonemes&quot; (in lacking some feature specification), and in privative theory, the notion of &quot;archiphoneme&quot; doesn't make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orthographically, a capital letter is the standard way of indicating an archiphoneme; it's hard to say from your examples whether that would be a standard archiphonemic analysis. Archiphonemes are not phonemes, they are things that stand for classes of phonemes, so would not strictly be included in a list of phonemes. But if you view &quot;phoneme&quot; as simply being &quot;any segment in underlying forms&quot;, then it should be included in a list of phonemes. So it depends on what you mean by &quot;phoneme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T17:16:14.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14963" CreationDate="2015-11-11T17:29:15.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An archiphoneme is really not a phonetic entity.  Trubetzkoy distinguished his archiphoneme from its surface manifestation, which he called the archiphoneme representative (&lt;em&gt;Vertreter&lt;/em&gt;).  However, there is a natural phonetic representation available for the typical case where the phonemes which are neutralized have all the possible values for some phonetic features: just give a feature representation for the archiphoneme which omits those features which differ among the neutralized sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T17:29:15.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T05:19:08.710" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard a myth that group of linguists made an experiment with their own children and taught them only a artificial language (in that myth it was a loglan), but if it was true a scientific paper would be presented. The most close paper I found was this one &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0749596X90900544&quot;&gt;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0749596X90900544&lt;/a&gt; In this experiment children were taught small languages and were old enough for knowledge of some other native language. Another similar case is G. Soros, he is native speaker of Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: was this (or similar) study real?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10865" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-12T06:02:00.217" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T06:02:00.217" Title="Was a study published about some linguists who taught their children only a constructed language?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T07:18:21.090" Score="3" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWya3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWya3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello. I know that it is probably hard to see because it's a small picture. If you zoom in a little on your internet browser you should be able to seem them better. At the end of the selected interval (EH1), underneath the semi-sinusoidal wave form, on the spectrogram, you can see two rows of ripples. In fact, you can see them throughout the entire window, but they are more visible where I have indicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what these are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This recording was done on an H4n and 44100Hz in a attenuated booth. The H4n was plugged into the AC wall charger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastEditorUserId="9847" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T00:09:58.143" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T12:48:20.833" Title="What are these circle-like things on my spectrogram?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-12T11:59:30.527" Score="4" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6366/3571&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; got me thinking about words that exist in many languages but don't exist in a few. It states that there was no word for &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in PIE. I had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;previously read&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;strong&gt;Some languages do not answer yes–no questions with single words meaning 'yes' or 'no'.&lt;/strong&gt; Instead they &lt;strong&gt;typically employ echo answers&lt;/strong&gt;. E.g. &lt;em&gt;Is it hot?&lt;/em&gt; might be answered with &lt;em&gt;It is [hot]&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;It isn't [hot]&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find out which words are &lt;s&gt;missing&lt;/s&gt; unrepresented in a language, where the same concept is commonly represented in other languages as a single word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T00:50:09.017" Title="How can I find which words don't exist in a language?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14968" CreationDate="2015-11-12T17:10:35.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to tell what exactly you're talking about -- not the semi-sinusoidal part in the waveform at the end of EH1, and not the pattern of 4 dots throughout the spectrogram (the formants). If you could use a drawing program to circle the stuff in question, that would be useful. The roundest thing at the end of the selection (EH1) is in the waveform, and that is basically the last few flops of the vocal folds vibrating during /ð/, but with most of the energy at the fundamental. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean rows and not columns, then I assume that is the small red dots, which are marks (formant tracking is on). If you meant columns, and there are about 7 of them visible near the circles you drew, those are individual harmonics. You also see them at regular intervals in the light areas before the circled part. I put in vertical lines separating the things I think you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s5t9Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s5t9Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T00:16:28.410" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T00:16:28.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14969" CreationDate="2015-11-12T17:57:49.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's actually next to impossible to get that information, unless you're doing in-depth personal investigation of the language. You might expect there to be a word for &quot;tree&quot; in every language, unless the language is spoken only in a place that has no trees. Even when there are trees, the boundaries between categories are not universal, and there may not be a distinction between &quot;tree&quot; and &quot;shrub&quot;, in which case you would conclude that the language doesn't have a word for tree or for shrub (but we don't have a word for treeshrub). Most human languages do not have a word for &quot;reptile&quot; or &quot;machine&quot;, though in principle any language could borrow a word from another language, if they wanted to have such a word. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to get detailed semantic information on the precise referents of words in languages, and instead you'll get approximations via western language translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For abstract and functional words, the notion of &quot;equivalent word&quot; is even more problematic. There are, as far as I know, no Bantu languages that have a word that is used exactly the way &quot;and&quot; is used in English. There is a common preposition &lt;em&gt;na-&lt;/em&gt; which is used both for phrasal conjunctions and for instruments and comitatives (whereas in English you can't say *&quot;I danced and Lucy&quot;), and the English consecutive usage (&quot;He bought a car and drive it into the wall&quot;) is usually rendered with a distinct verb tense. So in these language, there is no word &quot;and&quot;, that is no word that is used in exactly the same way as &quot;and&quot; is in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that words can be &quot;missing&quot; presupposes that there is a set of words that languages normally have. English is missing the word for &quot;all-white reindeer&quot;, which is &lt;em&gt;gabba&lt;/em&gt; in North Saami. The reason for that gap should be obvious. The notion of a word being &quot;missing&quot; ought to be paired with the notion (equally false) that there are languages with &quot;extra&quot; words, e.g. the rich reindeer vocabulary of N. Saami, owing to the cultural importance of reindeer among the N. Saami. If you combine these concepts, you could derive an interesting empirical question, namely, what are examples of cross-linguistic word pairs, where the referents of the words overlap substantially but not completely -- or, the referents of a word in one language properly includes the referents of a word in another language. Making that determination requires substantial field work, and can't be based just on how speakers translate words of their language into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the original question has been modified to shift from &quot;missing&quot; to &quot;unrepresented&quot;. I don't see any substantive difference between &quot;missing&quot; and &quot;unrepresented&quot;, although there are connotations of &quot;failure&quot; associated with &quot;missing&quot; that are blurred with &quot;unrepresented&quot;. If something is unrepresented in X, that means that it does not exist in X, which is what it means for a thing to be missing in X. Regardless of the word you use to describe that relationship, the idea of being &quot;unrepresented&quot; is meaningful only if there is an expectation that some specific word-referent pairing is normally found, using something as the standard -- what, then, is that standard? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T06:03:00.887" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T06:03:00.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14969" CreationDate="2015-11-13T09:36:05.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way you can really determine the lack of an equivalent lexeme in a language is through the process of translation (by a competent, experienced translator). The answer by @user6726 is absolutely correct. Let me just offer an additional perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you can only ever really compare two (or possibly a small group) languages to get a picture of alignment. Many people start with the (implicit) assumption of a cultural or linguistic default from which languages diverge. In today's context, the default is usually described by English (an assumption shared even by many non-native speakers). So you get the typical newspaper articles using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'no word for X'&lt;/a&gt; trope which the Language Log rails against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what equivalence looks like. There are countless features of the real (and social) world that are unproblematically not represented lexically in a language - e.g. names for exclusively local fauna or local customs. But there are many more, where the social and physical worlds are the same but the lexical inventory is not. I can see at least &lt;strong&gt;three types of misalignment&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Complete lack of lexeme / construction or corresponding reality (names of physical features, flora/fauna, local customs, etc.). In larger languages with recent academic literature, there are often specialist vocabularies that do contain such lexemes - but they are only available to a very small group of speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lack of lexeme / construction for a shared cultural feature exposed or introduced through contact.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Misaligned usage or category scope of shared lexeme / construction and social reality, arising due to lack of contact.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider a broader definition of word - including the traditional 'lexemes' as well as the broader concept of 'construction' from construction grammar (which removes the endless debate over 'what is a word').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this classification is just a heuristic - any individual case will be a better or worse fit into one or two of these categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the two caveats above, if you look closely at any two languages, you will find that words that do not fit at least to some degree into one of the above are the exception in the core of each of the languages' construction inventory (I suspect that many of the more peripheral constructions are probably more likely to align better in closely related languages - but research would be needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these misalignments may cause smaller or greater communication or translation difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples from my experience of translating between Czech and English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Complete lack of shared lexemes and cultural/physical reality&lt;/strong&gt; (often only present in specialist vocabulary in one language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I translated Lakoff's &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt;, I struggled with the names for Australian animals - it was easy to find the taxonomic names but none that would explain what they meant to the non-specialist reader without footnotes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another word that may fit into this category is 'gerrymandering' which is a fairly unique word - and to some extent practice (as a particular kind of electoral fraud).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lack of lexemes with shared cultural/physical reality&lt;/strong&gt; (often leading to loans or calques)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dominiklukes.net/notes/linguistics/2009/january/nofairinbulgarianun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;written about the Czech word 'prozvonit'&lt;/a&gt; - to call just to let the phone ring with the purpose of alerting someone to action - usually prearranged. It arose with mobile phone usage to save money and is still used to arrange meetings. I have experienced the practice in the UK and even more prominently Albania (and I'm sure it's common elsewhere) but neither developed a corresponding lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples mentioned (such as lack of 'and' in Bantu or 'yes/no' in Mandarin) may fit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a large group of words which seemingly have the corresponding lexeme but the social realities they refer to are sufficiently different that speakers of one or the other language feel the need to adopt a new construction (either a calque or loan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favourite example of this is 'training'. The English corporate use of training (both world and reality) was so different from 'školení' that many people in Czech companies with English-speaking connections, started simply using the English word. Czech bankers also felt that the word 'cash' was more descriptive because of collocations like 'cash flow' that they preferenced it over 'hotovost'. In the voluntary sector, a similar problem arose with the word 'community'. I have seen one person in Kazakhstan interpret 'community service' as have a party. Another good one is 'fun'. I have heard a Russian speaker say 'Poydomte, budet fun.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these may be good candidates for category 3 but I chose to include them here because the lexemes feel sufficiently different to lead to loans rather than just misunderstandings. Some more are listed in the '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oocities.org/athens/forum/7953/word.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Czechs have a word for it&lt;/a&gt;' list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from specialist language that straddles categories 2 and 3 I discovered when translating Lakoff. Czech does not really have a word for 'calculus'. The mathematical discipline obviously exists as does a term for 'differential calculus'. But nothing to describe the subject English students can take. I've looked, asked mathematicians, researched encyclopedias and textbooks. This one is complicated because it can lead either to borrowing or misunderstanding depending on who is experiencing the contact (specialist will borrow or calque, non-specialist will misunderstand).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage or category misalignment for mostly corresponding lexemes&lt;/strong&gt; (leading to misunderstandings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of examples will fit into this category. For instance, the word 'bread' / 'chleba' translates straightforwardly between Czech and English when applied to loaves, however, English also uses it as a category label for which Czech has a different word. There are countless examples of this in either direction - for instance in the expression of manner of motion. Czech 'pivo' means 'lager' by default where as the (Br) English 'beer' means 'ale'. Czech does not even have a good word for 'ale' (which would go in category 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Bush was mocked for saying something like 'The French don't have the word for entrepreneur.' but it is entirely possible that that is the case. In Czech, 'podnikatel' is a good translation but certainly does not have all the corresponding connotations or collocations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very common manner of misalignment is in collocation and what has been called 'semantic prosody' or connotation. The word 'volunteer' is a good example. In my work with the Peace Corps (in 15 countries), this was a word that caused the most issues - since in many of these contexts (former Soviet Union) 'volunteer' had the semantic prosody with non-optional public service - ie a negative connotation. (Community is the other one but it seems to better fit in category 2 because of the frequent loans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it is the cultural classification of a shared cultural reality that is misaligned. For instance, the Czech 'hluboký talíř' which is used for soups only and can either be described as 'plate' or 'bowl' in English without any of the correct cultural connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar case is 'závora' which is a type of gate that goes up and down (often not fully covering the entrance - e.g. level crossings) which simply does not belong in the category of 'gate' in Czech. Both Czech and English 'have a word for it' but its use is more ambigous in English and will leave Czech speakers confused. (Many examples in the opposite direction exist.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example of a misaligned construction, I would list lack of gender reference in anaphora. The English epicine 'they' makes translation very difficult when the gender of the referent is not known. The same for genderless profession names (secretary - Czech has a different word for things like 'Secretary General, doctor). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, etymology gets in the way. E.g. the English 'nurse' has mostly lost its association with gender in the medical context, so a 'male nurse' is fine. The Czech 'sestra' (sister) did not, so no 'male nurse' expression is possible. Going the other way, articles in English specify a lot of things that Czech leaves ambigous (even though it expresses definiteness in other ways - it often just does not make it clear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above (and much more) make the claim for linguistic universalism problematic - and lies behind the constructionist reluctance to look for UG-like or even Greenbergian universals. While the reality behind these differences can be described in both languages (in most language pairs), can those languages be meaningfully described as lexically or constructionally equivalent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T10:23:43.987" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T10:23:43.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T12:51:03.927" Score="0" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for tools to find the language stem in &lt;strong&gt;vowelless Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt;, preferably a full list of suffixes and prefixes with the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small list can be found on wikipedia.&#xA;An extensive list can be found on mila.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full list of rules and rulesets that can be programmed preferably.&#xA;I want to re-code and integrate this code myself, so a Exe or on-line tool does not help. I can read PHP, MS Basic, Python, C or similar languages.&#xA;With this tool i want to analyse Hebrew vowelless text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while still studying the basics of the Hebrew (vowelless!) grammar, i've seen that letters will dissolve when the basic stem of verbs is bended into narrative or perfective form. Then, some verbs do not have a stem of 2 or 3 letters anymore, but are left with a stem of only 1 original letter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such anomalies make it very difficult to program, and for that, &lt;strong&gt;I am primary looking for an existing set of rules on the prefix and suffix.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have that, the remainder is some sort of stem, which could be matched with an extensive database such as the Mila database. If you have any suggestions please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10872" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T18:04:31.807" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T10:59:56.640" Title="finding the language stem of vowelless Hebrew" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T15:55:28.347" Score="1" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for laws (hypotheses, presumed laws) of semantic change such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) &lt;strong&gt;law of differentiation&lt;/strong&gt;: nearby synonyms tend to diverge in meaning over time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) &lt;strong&gt;parallel change&lt;/strong&gt;: words with related meanings tend to change in similar ways over time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if someone could name me similar laws/hypotheses, or provide some literature links. I'm also interested in quantitative linguistic laws relating to semantics, if any exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10873" LastEditorUserId="10873" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T09:09:28.577" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T09:09:28.577" Title="Are there laws of semantic change?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-11-17T21:31:19.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14947" CreationDate="2015-11-13T19:26:27.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;dialect&quot; is misleading in this context. We are talking not about spoken languages, but about reading conventions of a liturgical language, in the same way that (for example) the French liturgical pronunciation of Latin is not a dialect of Latin but a reading convention. In the case of Hebrew, the unfamiliar sounds of the sacred language are replaced by sounds familiar to the speakers of the colloquial language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T19:26:27.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14475" CreationDate="2015-11-13T21:21:44.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the easiest thing is to connect &lt;strong&gt;similarity&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;causality&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the foundation of so called &lt;strong&gt;sympathetic magic&lt;/strong&gt;. If your voodoo doll is similar to you (e.g. by having some of your hair), actions I perform on it, will also happen in you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Temporality&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;causality&lt;/strong&gt; are related in a similar way. I used the example of 'since'. The original meaning is 'from a time', but because when one thing precedes another, it often causes it (in the same way that voodoo dolls do), the meaning can easily shift into one of causality. 'Since we are here, let's have some fun.'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the same process applies to the &lt;strong&gt;temporal meaning&lt;/strong&gt; of 'as' developing from &lt;strong&gt;similarity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did 'as' acquire that temporal meaning? It was used to describe manner in which events happen. 'He ran as if he was possessed.' Ie. 'he was &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; to someone possessed.' Once you have usage in that context, it becomes more plausible to say 'As he ran by the graveyard everyday, he saw a ghost.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &lt;strong&gt;chain from similarity to temporality&lt;/strong&gt; is established. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then it's just a short step to causality. 'As he ran by the graveyard every day, he was eventually possessed by the ghost.' (Running came first, then possession. Thus running caused possession.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, the problem is with the word 'see'. It may sound implausible but analogous processes happen all over languages all the time and if you look at enough of them, you sort of 'naturally' begin to see these relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, they may not be as obvious as seeing something but they are clearly how speakers 'integrate' or 'blend' meanings without trying (something the blending theory describes really plausibly. However, there is also variation among speakers and some resist these semantic extensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you don't find any of this obvious, just accept it happens. Just like most people accept gravity just happens without understanding any of the mathematical models behind it. In a way, this was not obvious a priori, it was established through empirical observation. To continue the physics analogy, we are at the level of Newton (or perhaps Galileo) as to how and why (we know what and can describe it), we are still waiting for an Einstein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T21:27:03.437" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T21:27:03.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14981" CreationDate="2015-11-13T22:50:52.033" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is the top bar of a website that also has the names of other languages spelled out in their native script/letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like this:&#xA;English  |  Español  |  tiếng Việt  |  汉语  |  Filipino&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you think any of the others above look wrong, please let me know. I'm looking for the standard accepted native form. I don't want to offend any volunteer translators on the open source project I'm doing design work for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10876" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T10:44:39.110" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T10:44:39.110" Title="What is the most accepted way to refer to the Filipino (or Tagalog, Pilipino) language?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;&lt;tagalog&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14980" CreationDate="2015-11-14T01:19:32.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Filipino&lt;/em&gt; (register) is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standardized&lt;/a&gt; register/dialect of Tagalog (language).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Meaning, there are other, non-standard, dialects of Tagalog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tagalog&lt;/em&gt; (language) is the native language of &lt;em&gt;Tagalog&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ethnic group&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tagalog&lt;/em&gt; (people) are one of many ethnic groups in &lt;em&gt;Philippines&lt;/em&gt; (country).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are other ethnic groups who have their own languages, and some of these languages are also official/regional in the country.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, a text can be written in &lt;strong&gt;Filipino&lt;/strong&gt;, while verbal services (e.g., phone support) is in &lt;strong&gt;Tagalog&lt;/strong&gt; (assuming that the Web site does not support any other language of Philippines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's yet another view of the problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In practical terms, Filipino is the official name of Tagalog, or even a synonym of it. Today's Filipino language is best described as &amp;quot;Tagalog-based&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Use of term &lt;strong&gt;Filipino&lt;/strong&gt; in this context is a metalepsis which suggests metaphorically that that the national language is based on an amalgam of Philippine languages rather than on Tagalog alone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The language is usually called Tagalog within the Philippines and among Filipinos to differentiate it from other Philippine languages, but it has also come to be known as Filipino to differentiate it from the languages of other countries; the former implies a regional origin, the latter a national.&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_language#Filipino_v._Tagalog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia — Filipino language — Filipino v. Tagalog)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per Chinese, 中文 &lt;code&gt;[zhōng wén]&lt;/code&gt; may be preferred versus 汉语 &lt;code&gt;[hàn yǔ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to be relevant:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/3677/%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87-vs-%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD-whats-the-difference&quot;&gt;中文 vs. 汉语: What's the difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T01:19:32.957" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-14T13:55:42.447" Score="4" ViewCount="2478" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a list of text corpus for korean. Is there any web site where I can find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10880" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T23:55:00.960" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T12:15:20.377" Title="Looking for korean text corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-14T21:54:45.407" Score="0" ViewCount="3915" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism ?&#xA; any suggestions for books to read concerning these topics !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10883" OwnerDisplayName="eman mah" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T23:54:26.590" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T23:54:26.590" Title="Linguistics relativity and linguistic determinism" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-determinism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14977" CreationDate="2015-11-14T23:08:31.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good question but only in the sense that it opens a possibility for rejecting the very premise on which it is based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is, there are no laws formulated for linguistics that could be analogous to some of the laws of physics that would be constant through time and space. The last attempt at this were the sound change laws in the 19th century and those do not take us very far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest linguistics (in its broadest sense) comes to this is a search for universals. There are many debates about what is and can be universal in linguistics - most of them happening in the realm of syntax (with some phonetics). But even the most formal of these universals (as represented by Universal Grammar) do not claim the status of a 'law' with the same predictive modeling power as laws of thermodynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In semantics, universals are viewed with suspicion. Perhaps the most stark statement of universality would be the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.25/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semantic primes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; theory which posits certain core meanings that are shared by all languages - based on empirical research of a large (but still limited) sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonard Talmy outlines some universals in his chapter on &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/talmy/talmyweb/Recent/universals.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Universals of Semantics&lt;/a&gt; but they are very much linked to broader &lt;strong&gt;universals of cognition&lt;/strong&gt; or conversely more constrained combinatory universals from morphology. There are also many broad but not universal &lt;strong&gt;tendencies&lt;/strong&gt; such as the use of space to model time, etc. Some of these were proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/ebach/papers/soassem.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Emmon Bach&lt;/a&gt; in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;amp;context=linguist_faculty_pubs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;reaction&lt;/a&gt; to Everett.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'laws' you propose have been formulated but they could never achieve the status of invariant principles let alone something which you could build predictive models on (despite &lt;a href=&quot;http://lclab.berkeley.edu/papers/xu_kemp_2015_parallelchange.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;computational attempts&lt;/a&gt; at such a thing). The principal problem with them is that they are formulated with the assumption that 'meaning' is something that 'words' have in the same way you see in the dictionary. But meaning cannot be described statically in this way. It is a process that includes a complex networks of usage patterns that are constantly shifting. They are sufficiently stable to allow for communication but not stable or discrete enough to enable prediction or even a foundation for some sort of a retrospective model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some &lt;strong&gt;basic universal semantic processes&lt;/strong&gt; could be formulated relatively easily: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Categorization (cat refers to a class)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hierarchical organization of semantic networks (cat is an animal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use of figurative processes (analogy, similarity) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presupposition and speech acts (traditionally pragmatics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polysemy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use of human bodily experience for conceptualization of abstract concepts (at least some)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Metalinguistic awareness (with huge variation across speakers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ability to express basic logical relationships (not, and, or - but not necessarily lexicalized in the same way)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presence of certain semantic classes (e.g. kin terminology, words for food)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of these are universal by virtue of being &lt;strong&gt;axiomatic&lt;/strong&gt; because without them communication or reasoning would be impossible. For instance, if we found a language that did not use categories - we would find ourselves in an alien world beyond anything imaginable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these do not relate to change, you could expect change to happen within these constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2015-11-14T23:17:34.180" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T23:17:34.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14983" CreationDate="2015-11-14T23:38:08.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic &lt;strong&gt;determinism&lt;/strong&gt; is a broader philosophical and psycholinguistic question about the relationship between thought and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistic &lt;strong&gt;relativity&lt;/strong&gt; is a position that 1. the relationship between linguistic structures and structures of thought (and cognition) is deterministic AND 2. it applies to particular structures of particular languages and their speakers. Namely, different languages cause their speakers to think differently from each other in fundamental ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reading list for this issue is quite long. The current proponent of this position is &lt;a href=&quot;http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lera Boroditsky&lt;/a&gt; and her publications will provide further references. I always liked Lakoff's summary of the issues in chapter 18 of &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt;. And the edited volume &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dPXvxgL2t1oC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rethinking Linguistic Relativity&lt;/a&gt; will provide a good overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most vociferous opponents of relativity is the philosopher Jerry Fodor. Some of the contra arguments and literature can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/archives/sum2015/entries/relativism/index.html#5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-14T23:38:08.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14993" CreationDate="2015-11-15T02:47:09.783" Score="4" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of English, it is almost immediately obvious to me when a speaker is Native American or Black. I find the difference is most obvious in men, I find, but even setting aside dialectical differences, I could easily tell apart a Black woman and a White woman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In North America, these races are often English L1 speakers, and in my part of the country, there isn't a huge Black population like in Chicago or the South, for example that would allow sociolects to describe the change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there described anatomic differences between racial groups?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="10309" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T00:36:18.223" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T00:36:18.223" Title="What gives rise to racial accents? (timbre)" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14986" CreationDate="2015-11-15T03:48:08.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although this isn't completely resolved yet, racial anatomic differences have been said to influence the timbre of peoples' voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16243483&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; reports &quot;significant gender and race main effects were found in certain vocal tract dimensions&quot; of male and female white American, African American and Chinese speakers. And the shape/size of the vocal tract is relevant for timbre (and pitch control), cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689615/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wolfe et al. 2009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T03:48:08.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-15T04:14:20.753" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/hyper/heim1983.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness&lt;/a&gt;' by Irene Heim, she calls 'its' in 'Every cat ate its food' a type of definite NP. Could a possessive adjective be classified as a noun phrase???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Every cat ate its food.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John didn't see a cat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) has a reading where &quot;its&quot;, a personal pronoun, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a type of&#xA;  definite NP&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, functions as a so-called &quot;bound variable pronoun&quot; and&#xA;  doesn't refer to any particular cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T17:31:31.633" Title="Can a personal adjective be categorized as a noun phrase?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15007" CreationDate="2015-11-15T05:10:03.253" Score="0" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Preface:&lt;/code&gt; For differentiation, henceforth 'voiceless' means the phonetic definition;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I define &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elinguis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;elinguis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to  mean a layperson's understanding of an absence of human voice or speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: p 27, &lt;em&gt;The Study of Language&lt;/em&gt; (5 ed, 2014) by George Yule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inside the larynx are your &lt;strong&gt;vocal&#xA;  folds&lt;/strong&gt; (or vocal cords), which take two basic positions.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 When the vocal folds are spread apart, the air from the lungs passes between them&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  unimpeded. Sounds produced in this way are described as &lt;strong&gt;voiceless&lt;/strong&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2 When the vocal folds are drawn together, the air from the lungs repeatedly pushes them apart as it passes through, creating a vibration effect. Sounds produced in this&#xA;  way are described as &lt;strong&gt;voiced&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distinction can be felt physically if you place a fingertip gently on the top of your&#xA;  Adam’s apple (i.e. that part of your larynx you can feel in your neck below your chin),&#xA;  then produce sounds such as Z-Z-Z-Z or V-V-V-V. Because these are voiced sounds,&#xA;  you should be able to feel some vibration. Keeping your fingertip in the same position,&#xA;  now make the sounds S-S-S-S or F-F-F-F. Because these are voiceless sounds, there&#xA;  should be no vibration. Another trick is to put a finger in each ear, not too far, and produce the voiced sounds (e.g. Z-Z-Z-Z) to hear and feel some vibration, whereas no&#xA;  vibration will be heard or felt if you make voiceless sounds (e.g. S-S-S-S) in the&#xA;  same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a layperson, the term 'voiceless' seems counterintuitive because humans can still detect, hear, and listen to voiceless sounds (eg: whispering); to wit, voicelessness = &lt;em&gt;elinguis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. So to a linguist, is 'voiceless' NOT 0% sound or voice? To wit, voicelessness ≠ &lt;em&gt;elinguis&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. If the answer to 1 is affirmative, then why was 'voiceless' selected so carelessly?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Surely this confusing polysemy of 'voiceless' could have been anticipated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-16T23:55:13.617" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:41:14.670" Title="Does phonetics's definition of 'voiceless' differ from the absence of voice?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14989" CreationDate="2015-11-15T05:53:24.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please notice that Yule's definition is not entirely coherent. If there are two basic positions of the vocal cords, and one of them is when the vocal cords are spread sufficiently to prevent vibration of the vocal cords, the other possibility is that the vocal cords are not spread sufficiently to prevent vibration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem here is that just because the cords are not spread enough to prevent vibration, it doesn't follow that that there will be vibration. It can happen that vibration is prevented by the vocal cords being clamped tight together, as they are for glottalized consonants. Clearly in that case the cords are not spread, so if vibration is prevented by closing the vocal cords, this ought to count as voiced, even though there is no vibration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read the account in The Sound Pattern of English, glottal stop and glottalized consonants do count as voiced, even though there is none of the buzzing that an intuitive account of voicing might suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against this, but it can be confusing to the unwary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T04:41:14.670" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:41:14.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14988" CreationDate="2015-11-15T06:51:56.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to match up your question with your examples.  The &quot;its&quot; in &quot;its food&quot; is neither an adjective nor a noun phrase.  It is a definite determiner.  The usual analysis is that this determiner is formed by combining a noun phrase with the &quot;-s&quot; ending.  The definite pronoun &quot;it&quot; is a noun phrase, so &quot;its&quot; is simply a special case where the noun phrase &quot;it&quot; has been suffixed with &quot;-s&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full noun phrases, not just definite pronouns, can take this same &quot;-s&quot; suffix to form such noun phrases as &quot;[NP [NP the man]'s hat]&quot;, &quot;[NP [NP a girl who I used to know]'s car]&quot;, &quot;[NP [NP [NP the hat]'s brim]'s edge]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T06:51:56.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14986" CreationDate="2015-11-15T09:48:12.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often had the experience here in Britain of talking to a person from Jamaica on the telephone, automatically assuming him or her to be black, only to find out that this person was in fact a white Jamaican. For this reason I find it very difficult to believe that there is any anatomical rationale behind so-called Black English accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T09:48:12.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14986" CreationDate="2015-11-15T10:23:02.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several elements to this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your ability to identify ethnicity is much more likely to be a result of perceiving cultural styles of speaking than anything physiological. You would most likely not be able to replicate this with speakers of other English accents. And even less likely if the speaker was just uttering individual sounds without intonation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are probably much worse at this than you think. This sort of thing is incredibly prone to bias. Particularly when it comes to race, you should immediately assume that any generalizations you formulate based on your experience are biased as are your perceptions of any particular instances upon which the generalizations are based.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just like it is difficult to draw a boundary between languages and dialects, it is even more difficult to draw boundaries between 'races'. Nevertheless, some studies seem to show differences in formant frequencies across languages - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6463692_Volumetric_measurements_of_vocal_tracts_for_male_speakers_from_different_races&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; gives a good summary of some of the research. There were also some some significant trends in the configuration of vocal tract (however, with huge in-group variation).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these findings do not necessarily imply anything straightforwardly deterministic about race and the voice (even if we were to accept an unproblematic definition of race). The key quote from the paper is this (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the anthropologists and linguists, the findings also implied that &lt;strong&gt;not all formant frequencies of even a neutral utterance carefully designed to have maximally reduced specific language/dialect influences, could be completely accounted for solely by vocal tract parameters&lt;/strong&gt;. As was indicated in the previous paragraph, there may not be a linear correlation between length and volumetric parameters with the acoustic outputs. In other words, &lt;strong&gt;factors other than morphological differences, such as dialect&lt;/strong&gt; (Yang, 1996), the effect of air perturbation (Mayo &amp;amp; Grant, 1995), &lt;strong&gt;a wide range of speech style, and other cultural-linguistic characteristics may all bring about significant changes to the vocal output of the speakers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T10:23:02.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14988" CreationDate="2015-11-15T17:31:31.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heim's expression is ambiguous, but I think the sense is, if not exactly clear, at least readily recoverable. What Heim means is that the &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; piece of &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; is a pronoun standing for a  &quot;definite&quot; NP, yet has no specific referent&amp;mdash;it refers to no particular cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three strategies for rescuing the expression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Its&lt;/em&gt; is a typo for &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Its&lt;/em&gt; is considered under the aspect &quot;inflected form of &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Its&lt;/em&gt; is an awkward way of mentioning a morphological component while  preserving reference to a constituent actually present in the utterance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T17:31:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8430" CreationDate="2015-11-15T18:33:06.220" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;i am Arabic but i don't now those rules, so if it's not for some exams you don't really need to bother yourself with them. there is no problem if you pronounce them all. it's like US English, some letter in some words can be felt even if not pronounced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;i can tell a simple rule for hamza, we always pronounce it if it's at the start of the phrase. and we don't, when you feel that it sounds like you have pronounced it even if you didn't, you will get the feeling with practice. the words that obligate it's pronunciation change meaning if it's not pronounced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex: &lt;code&gt;ابن وابن&lt;/code&gt; sound : &lt;code&gt;ibn wa-bn&lt;/code&gt;, it will never be mestaked with another word in any context in the phrase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ex: &lt;code&gt;اخذت واخذت&lt;/code&gt; sound : &lt;code&gt;akhadtu wa akhadtu&lt;/code&gt;, if we pronounce it as &lt;code&gt;wakhadtu&lt;/code&gt; it will be mistaken with another verb wakhada or if there isn't other word it will be difficult or impossible to understand what you say.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10890" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T18:33:06.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4632" CreationDate="2015-11-15T18:55:13.370" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;if you learn Arabic you will be able to adapt to any of the Arabic dialects, all Arabic dialect use the same Phonology with some minor exception like some letter imported from other languages mostly the sound &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;j(ج) or ق&lt;/code&gt;, or switching some letter like &lt;code&gt;a(أ)&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;ق&lt;/code&gt;. so i recommend you to learn Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10891" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T18:55:13.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2015-11-15T19:38:04.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;i think there is not, each Arabic country have it's own program of learning, most likely that this programs gonna be close to each others but there is no unified program of progression nor an unified certificate. i am not 100% certain, so i might be wrong.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10891" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T19:38:04.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15004" CreationDate="2015-11-16T13:55:38.790" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are ways, patterns of living in native speaking country, where you are thinking and talking better in second language?&#xA;I am trying to translate words, sentences which is difficult, also don't have too much opportunities to talk, since i am talking in native, which is beeing boring and misunderstood, so it leads to social exclusion, and that is. &#xA;I am worried to go abroad to foreign country, but i would like to have emotional bond with someone, because i can't have emotional bonds in polish, rather. &#xA;Is this better to try learning native, or rather go further way, where i feel better? &#xA;Or are there any places even in internet, where i can talk chat with people talking english? You know i am young person, i don't want to have boring life with a watch in hand and without emotions. You know, they said - learn, so i learned a lot - for now i sam very sad with these emotional bonds, as i am watching my neighbours having great conversations and laughing and a lot of people i want to talk to, but i can't because of this paradox. Is there any option instead of leaving country? no one knows answers, so maybe here i will find a solution for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How it happened - i read a lot of literature and articles in english for eight years, without leaving country. In brain explantation, i have associations of terms hidden in that language, dried in native. So i say in native sentence 1 and don't have association, but when i say in english, then i have five other associations or even more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10896" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T17:03:21.407" Title="Better fluency in second language than native." Tags="&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-11-17T01:20:41.850" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15002" CreationDate="2015-11-16T17:03:21.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understood you correctly, you have a problem in finding people to practice English with. There should be online chats for second language learners and communities where you can practice your English. &#xA;The key is to keep practicing even if you practice it alone&#xA;I know it is hard but keep up the hard work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T17:03:21.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4415" CreationDate="2015-11-16T18:18:35.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't lecture you on the inherent limitations of gloss translations, they are indeed useful some times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, translation UIs as well as Wiktionary and many other sites give more complete information, but the translation APIs do not.&#xA;For Google Translate, some unofficial scrapers like GoSlate do offer dictionary data, though without much guidance on how to parse it:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pythonhosted.org/goslate/#lookup-details-in-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://pythonhosted.org/goslate/#lookup-details-in-dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there are a few techniques that can lessen the problems of a gloss translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take the longest possible match&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Query a dictionary API with the bi- or tri-grams of each sentence first, to find multi-word phrases that are used together often enough to have a dictionary entry.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use a parts-of-speech tagger&#xA;Use a POS tagger on the sentence, then take the matching part of speech returned by the dictionary API.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use a lemmatiser&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Use a lemmatiser to get the canonical ie base form, then do lookup.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[spacy.io is a good lightweight and high accuracy tool for doing [2] and [3] on English data.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T18:18:35.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-11-16T21:45:04.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any paper trying to explain why click consonants might have developed in languages in the first place. But something to keep in mind is that most languages I know use clicks as non-segmental signs, for instance the English interjection tsktsk, or the way you call a horse. Germans have a bilabial click that indicates something like &quot;tough question/don't know&quot;. Intuitively I have a feeling that clicks are very iconic (for instance the click we use with horses somewhat resembles the sound of a gallop, the disapproving tsktsk that of a slap), but my intuition might be wrong and I don't know of any studies on this. Acoustically clicks are quite distinct in the signal, meaning even in difficult conditions they should offer high recoverability compared to say a fricative. On the other hand, complexity comes with a phonological price tag, so such an argument in phonetics has a counter argument in phonology. I could imagine that acoustic distinctness/recoverability is a good thing under difficult conditions (e.g. noisy environment, dense forestation) or communication over a long distance, but whistled language is generally a lot better for this and the environmental conditions around click-rich languages do not really speak for this being a factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/1/65.short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;There is a paper here&lt;/a&gt; which suggests that clicks don't offer any acoustic processing advantage &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; in languages where they are not used as regular segments. And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jall.1997.18.issue-1/jall.1997.18.1.21/jall.1997.18.1.21.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this paper has a nice overview of literature&lt;/a&gt; on linguistic change involving clicks, which might be of interest, but doesn't offer an answer to &quot;why&quot;--in fact one may see this as partial evidence that because clicks are segmentally complex they might be difficult phonologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question of whether clicks were part of a hypothetical proto-human language and then lost elsewhere to be only retained as non-segmental signs, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10848378_African_Y_Chromosome_and_mtDNA_Divergence_Provides_Insight_into_the_History_of_Click_Languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Knight et. al.'s (2003)&lt;/a&gt; paper arguing that this is the case, from a genetic perspective authored by geneticists and anthropologists. And then compare this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iaaw.hu-berlin.de/de/afrika/linguistik-und-sprachen/mitarbeiter/1683070/dokumente/gueldemann-2007a-clicks-and-proto-world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tom Güldemann's (2007) paper in ULPA&lt;/a&gt; responding to that very paper, from a linguistic perspective, arguing that there isn't really that much support for that hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10419" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T17:52:29.713" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T17:52:29.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14989" CreationDate="2015-11-16T22:06:28.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem here is that you equate &lt;em&gt;elinguis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;voicelessness&lt;/em&gt; as both meaning &lt;em&gt;without sound/inaudible&lt;/em&gt;. But &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; is a technical term that does not actually refer to the audible sound of speech generally, as suggested by sayings such as &quot;lose one's voice&quot; or &quot;to have a (nice) voice&quot;, both of which refer to the quality or existence of a person's speech. Instead the term &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; as a technical term refers to vibration of the vocal folds, and &lt;em&gt;voicing&lt;/em&gt; can refer to either the existence of vocal fold vibration or the typology of different types of voice, such as voicelessness, modal voice, creaky voice (think &quot;vocal fry&quot;), etc. Phoneticians, and linguists more generally, understand voice as that technical term, rather than as general term for the sound of speech, which linguists aptly refer to as speech or the speech signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;0% sound&quot; you indicate is what you acoustically get from voiceless stop consonants, such as the sound [p]. If you say &quot;apart&quot; very slowly, you will hear that there is no audible sound at all in the middle portion of the [p]. In comparison, in &quot;abrupt&quot; you can still hear a low frequency buzz during the [b], at least for a little while until the pressure differential across the vocal folds has equalised. So it is true that phonetic voicelessness is usually needed for silence, but it is false that phonetic voicelessness necessitates silence, e.g. the sound [S] in &quot;assure&quot; does not have phonetic voicing but is audible nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the question why voice became a technical term despite potential for confusion, it's no different from most technical terminology really. When people need to describe something new in a very precise way, they often take a more general term that already refers to something related (voicing is implicated in pitch, and hence especially linked to the idea of voice in singing vocalisation) and define that term more narrowly. As long as the term is not already a technical term in the same domain, and all the other people who work in that domain know about the term's specific meaning, there's no problem. Language is full of homophony, and you don't usually get confused by it--even with puns we are extremely good at telling the literal meaning apart from the alternative, simply by using the context it appears in.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10419" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T03:47:50.760" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T03:47:50.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="555" CreationDate="2015-11-17T01:33:21.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Djal (boy) and djall (devil) have been the source of some hilarious mix-ups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10906" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T01:33:21.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T03:24:38.577" Score="1" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have problem understanding the entailment logic on these examples and would like some help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sally works together with Polly. &#xA;Sally works.&#xA;=&gt; I think one entails other, but not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In tennis matches, Bill regularly beats Sue, and Sue regularly beats Jack.&#xA;In tennis matches, Bill regularly beats Jack.&#xA;=&gt; Again, one entails other, but not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Polly thinks that Fido is a dog. &#xA;Fido is a dog.&#xA;Now, this is very confusing to me. I think there is no relationship between these two. They are not mutually entailing. They are not incompatible and one doesn't entail other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my logic right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10907" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T06:22:22.500" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T06:22:22.500" Title="Entailments Relations" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T13:34:44.120" Score="1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a research for my sociolinguistics class. Do you think this is a good topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10909" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T13:34:44.120" Title="How does the use of slang words / language among young people affect their relationship with older generation?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-11-17T21:32:16.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15012" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-17T14:49:58.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T14:49:58.957" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T14:49:58.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15013" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-17T14:49:58.957" Score="0" Body="Entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A) requires the truth of the other (B)." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T13:26:01.670" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T13:26:01.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15015" CreationDate="2015-11-17T17:02:27.630" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be an explanation of why a phoneme would only undergo Lenition only in word initial position directly before  /a/,  but not in any other context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Lenition doesn't happen when the phoneme is preceding any other vowels or when it is in any other position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe no explanation is even necessary. Heck, for all I know it's completely normal - but i think it's be nice to get an idea of why this specific process transpires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T18:22:39.753" Title="Word initial lenition" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15014" CreationDate="2015-11-17T18:22:39.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO you should explain exactly what happens, because your assumption that the process is &quot;lenition&quot; could be wrong. I will assume for the sake of discussion that some stop becomes more fricative-like in this context. An explanation then resides in a couple of phonetic factors. First, in word initial position, you don't have cues from before the stop that tell you anything about the segment, whereas if there is a vowel before the stop, you have formant transitions that tell you that all of the sudden you have a stop. All of the evidence for there being a stop come after the release. Then, with the following vowel [a], the following target has a maximally open vocal tract (whereas a stop has a maximally closed vocal tract). Speakers will tend to anticipate that vocal tract position, leading to subtle variants of the stop that are &quot;more open&quot; vs. &quot;more closed&quot;, which can lead to releases that have more-fricative like properties. Since the release properties of initial stops are so important in manner-identification, this can lead to new allophones like affricates, which can then simplify to fricatives. This is especially applicable to back consonants like velars and uvulars. The prediction is that labials would be least-susceptible to this kind of anticipatory coarticulation leading to re-analysis. (OTOH if this is about Osage, there's a different explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI at the other end of the scale, there is also a similar effect of high front vowels, owing to the constriction formed by [i], and resulting release turbulence being reinterpreted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T18:22:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:01:25.880" Score="2" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a fluent English speaker (lvl C2) and a decent German speaker (lvl B2 and fully prepared for C1). I recently started following a Dutch course for beginners. My fear is that I will eventually forget German due to the fact that I don't use them often anymore and also there is a great overlapping and many common sounds with Dutch, which eventually will create confusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I was thinking that maybe it is a good idea to translate Dutch vocabulary to German (instead of English), so that I don't forget German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anyone who can justify which one of the two options will be the best one? Is there something I should specifically take into account before I dive into Dutch language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10914" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T03:35:45.180" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T08:04:22.723" Title="Beginner to Dutch language: should I translate Dutch to English or to German?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15016" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:56:08.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience learning 8+ languages, the best approach is to &lt;strong&gt;use the best translation&lt;/strong&gt; (etymologically, or in terms of meaning) and/or explanation in language that I understand.  That closeness helps with remembering the new vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are really my notes to myself, they needn't be somehow consistent.  I thus end up with a mixed list; in your case I do believe the list will be more German than English, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eet smakelijk!  -  Bon appetit! (lit &quot;Esst schmacklich&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ziekenauto  -  Krankenwagen (sick + Auto)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ziek-&lt;/em&gt; has no German cognate that occurs to me, but a very obvious English one, so I would use that.  And &lt;em&gt;schmacklich&lt;/em&gt; is not a real German word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding preserving your German skills, learning Dutch will definitely cause some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_transfer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interference&lt;/a&gt;, but it is still better than not using German or Dutch at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens in practice?  I learnt Spanish very fast thanks to Italian, but then I of course had trouble speaking Italian, even though my understanding actually improved a bit, due to knowing and using even more Latinate vocabulary.  It takes more than a few days to completely erase all effects.  On the other hand, even learning and speaking Russian interferes with my Italian and Spanish, for example I have said &lt;em&gt;лучшее&lt;/em&gt; (meaning &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; but phonetically a bit similar to &lt;em&gt;luce&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt;) when I meant &lt;em&gt;megliore&lt;/em&gt; (better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Veel succes!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-11-19T14:26:21.093" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T14:26:21.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T23:30:46.217" Score="1" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for data sets that I could use to perform sequential short text classification (multilabel is OK). By short text I mean ~100 words max. By sequential I mean that the texts should follow each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.colips.org/workshop/dstc4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4&lt;/a&gt;'s data set. In this case, the short text is one dialogue utterance. Each dialogue utterance is classified into one or several speech by category. The classification is sequential since utterances in a dialogue form a sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:21:15.100" Title="Data sets for sequential short text classification" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15066" CreationDate="2015-11-18T06:35:07.690" Score="0" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the relationship between arbitrariness, as a property of language, and coinages? Because coinages are compound not-arbitrary words, do they not correspond to the particular property of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T09:04:53.400" Title="Arbitrariness and coinages" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-11-25T09:11:49.263" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-18T14:15:09.637" Score="-1" ViewCount="753" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what is the meaning of ,&quot; Mar&quot; part of some words such as Margarita, Maria, Martin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your answer!&#xA;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Margarita &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10921" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T14:48:10.003" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Mar&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-11-19T00:50:45.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15020" CreationDate="2015-11-18T14:48:10.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has no common meaning. &lt;em&gt;Margarita&lt;/em&gt; is a Roman name, that word meant 'pearl' in Latin. &lt;em&gt;Martin&lt;/em&gt; is also a Roman name, it comes from 'Mars', the name of the god of war. &lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;/em&gt; is derived from the Hebrew name 'Miriam' (from the Ancient Egyptian 'beloved'), but later it combined with the Latin name 'Maria' which was the feminine form of 'Marius', both words probably derived from the Latin 'mare' - 'sea'. The Latin 'margarita' - 'pearl' - is a borrowing through Greek from a Middle Eastern language, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AF#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;perhaps from Middle Persian&lt;/a&gt;, but it's impossible to say for sure, since every Middle Eastern language seems to have that word to mean 'pearl'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T14:48:10.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-18T16:29:30.277" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you give some examples of how cultures affect languages? It is comprehensible that languages reflect cultures. It would be really helpful if you could provide with at least an example of cultures affecting the way we speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T19:35:04.083" Title="Culture and language" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-11-19T09:29:37.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12732" CreationDate="2015-11-18T16:36:22.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not universal. Alemannic (Swiss German) goes like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hesch da schomol gse?&#xA;______------________&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Wäge wa isch da jetz?&#xA;____-------__________&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rise towards the end of the question, and strict decrease for the last item/word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess it is arbitrary in the human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T16:36:22.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15022" CreationDate="2015-11-18T16:41:16.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one time in Japan it became rude and offensive to protrude one's lips while speaking, it considerably affected the sounds of Japanese, eliminating the sound [f] in all the environments except before [ɯ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T16:41:16.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14924" CreationDate="2015-11-18T16:44:10.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Superficially subject and object markings do not always correlate with semantic &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I won the election.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clearly everybody else (unless you too went to polls) who &lt;em&gt;made you&lt;/em&gt; that way. So the grammatic subject &quot;I&quot; really stands for some experiencer/object first person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question example, one of the lang's is more &quot;transparent&quot; as for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, Icelandic has crazy constructions that mix both of these, like &quot;me.OBJ like.SG. horses.PL&quot; or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T16:44:10.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8430" CreationDate="2015-11-18T17:29:23.870" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually there is rules for what we call hamzat al wasl, that we don't pronounce in middle, and most specifically after some letters(considered a word) like &lt;code&gt;و ف ل ب أ&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 letters verbs:  in order like&lt;code&gt;(كتب أكتب - kataba oktob - write)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5, and 6 letters verbs: &#xA;in order and past &lt;code&gt;(انطلق - intalaka - went)&lt;/code&gt;, and their root(source)  &lt;code&gt;(انطلاق - start going)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;list of this nouns :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ابن، ابنة، ابنان، ابنتان&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;اثنان، اثنتان&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;امرؤ، امرأة، امرأتان، امرآن&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;اسم، اسمان&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but any way this thing is one of the thing that you can ignore, you will catch it without knowing if you learn the basics, as you may know that we don't use vowels because Arabic has magical phrase structures, you will assume them without problems, same happen with a lot of thing, if you learn the basics you will find you self capable of doing a lot of thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10891" LastEditorUserId="10891" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T17:50:34.453" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T17:50:34.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15022" CreationDate="2015-11-18T19:35:04.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/119175/15299&quot;&gt;politeness dances&lt;/a&gt; undergone by European personal pronouns are a good example of a culture affecting a language. Another would be the rapid changes made to Old English while it was spoken mostly by peasants after the Norman invasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be a comment above, except that I am no longer allowed to make comments, for some reason, so I'm testing to see whether answers are similarly occluded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Apparently not. But I still can't enter comments. Ah, well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T19:35:04.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-18T20:57:04.690" Score="2" ViewCount="9464" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, there is a clear difference between the &quot;a&quot; in &quot;at,&quot; and the &quot;a&quot; in &quot;father.&quot; I described the difference by saying that the &quot;a&quot; in &quot;father&quot; is &quot;harder&quot; than the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German word &quot;Vater&quot; is actually pronounced with an &quot;f,&quot; that is, &quot;fater.&quot; I described the consonant &quot;f&quot; as being &quot;harder&quot; than the consonant &quot;v,&quot; at least in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I correctly used the term &quot;harder&quot; in these contexts? If not, how are the differences in sound best described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by my answer to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/26577/what-makes-the-german-language-sound-so-harsh&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; on another SE site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1200" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T11:23:39.143" Title="Am I using the right terms in referring to &quot;soft&quot; and &quot;hard&quot; vowels and consonants?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15028" CreationDate="2015-11-18T22:33:52.960" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; aren't used in linguistics; instead, we describe the difference in terms of the difference in production (the vowel of &quot;father&quot; is a back vowel transcribed as [a] or [ɑ], and the vowel of &quot;at&quot; is a front vowel transcribed as [æ]). In the case of English &quot;f&quot; and &quot;v&quot; (or German &quot;v&quot; and &quot;w&quot;), [f] is voiceless and [v] is voiced. There are a certain number of ordinary terms that get pressed into service in describing sets of sounds, for example hard and soft, slender and broad, light and heavy, clear and muddy, which generally express some kind of positive / negative attitude towards one of the sounds. Usually, the negative term is used to described the &quot;less ordinary&quot; sound. For instance, voiced consonants like &lt;em&gt;b,z&lt;/em&gt; may be called &quot;heavy&quot; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;p,s&lt;/em&gt; which may be called &quot;light&quot;. And it turns out that voiced consonants are somewhat less &quot;ordinary&quot; than voiceless consonants. But there aren't any standards for using these terms in ordinary language, thus when someone says that a certain sound is &quot;hard&quot;, they could be referring to anything, though presumably something that they don't like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T22:33:52.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-19T08:37:21.760" Score="0" ViewCount="872" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi is my native language. I can write English well, and can speak English to some reasonable extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to teach the toddler English, I have been speaking English to her ever since she was born. She is 2.6 years old. I do not speak Hindi with her at all. For past 6 months, I have been speaking English with my spouse too specially in child's presence. Spouse replies in Hindi. There is no other person at home and we don't have many guests too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spouse doesn't talk too much with the child. I do all the talking. The child can understand all the English I speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that she has started speaking many complete sentences in Hindi with a near proper pronunciation (which I never spoke to her), but when it comes to speaking English she just can't speak it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She speaks English when I tell her to repeat after me word by word, but when it comes to speaking sentences, I can see that she can't pronounce anything properly as compared to Hindi. She find it difficult to complete the sentence properly even without my help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She indeed goes to daycare where Hindi is spoken, but those people have other children to care about too. Their job isn't to teach her the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my problem is that if she hears &quot;anyone&quot; saying a sentence in Hindi, she easily repeats it at that very moment itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand I keep on repeating same sentences in English 10,000 times throughout the day, but she speaks them only when forced with quite incorrect pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I wish to know that for a toddler who has just begun to speak, is Hindi easier to speak as compared to English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10926" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T23:18:22.783" Title="For a toddler who has just begun to speak, is Hindi easier to speak as compared to English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15033" CreationDate="2015-11-19T12:50:17.887" Score="3" ViewCount="2681" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've been trying to write down each word as I learn it (I'm currently learning Danish) with IPA, so that I can revise wherever I am, and make sure that I am pronouncing everything right. Here's the problem: What I hear doesn't match what I read. Here's what I'm using as reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;site &lt;a href=&quot;http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=kvinde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ordnet.dk&lt;/a&gt; where I get each Danish word written in IPA (I also use another one that gives the same result for every word, but can't post more than two links because I'm new here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sites where I hear each word pronounced: google translate, duolingo, youtube and &lt;a href=&quot;http://forvo.com/word/kvinde/#da&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;forvo.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I compare the pronunciation, but no matter the slight differences each source gives, none of them match the phonetic transcription I get for that word.&#xA;For example, the word kvinde (woman) - IPA on both sources insists it is /k v e n ə/, and there is just no way in hell that is correct. The &quot;i&quot; in kvinde is NOT pronounced as the IPA &quot;e&quot; (as seen in &quot;met&quot;). It would be more like /k v ɪ n ə/ with &quot;ɪ&quot; (as seen in &quot;hit&quot;).&#xA;This is not the only word or the only letter I've found wrong, it's the case for the vast majority (nearly all) the words I've looked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my sources wrong/unreliable? Which sites should I use? What am I doing wrong? Please, help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10924" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-19T17:48:46.477" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T17:48:46.477" Title="Are there any sources that provide accurate IPA transcriptions for Danish?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15032" CreationDate="2015-11-19T13:32:41.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't panic, your sources are great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that typically dictionaries use some sort of their own transcription, usually the one conventional for the given language. These transcriptions &lt;strong&gt;are not IPA&lt;/strong&gt; (even though they resemble it -- for obvious reasons). Thus, you need first to study what their particular symbols mean. In your case, the Ordbog explains their conventions &lt;a href=&quot;http://ordnet.dk/ddo/artiklernes-opbygning/udtale?set_language=da&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (or click the blue &quot;hjælp&quot; button next to the &quot;play&quot; button).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that page there is a table that gives a symbol of Den Danske Ordbog, example word, &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; transcription, and an &lt;strong&gt;IPA correspondence&lt;/strong&gt;. Find the line with DDO &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;: you see that it corresponds to the IPA &lt;em&gt;raised e&lt;/em&gt;. If you're unfamiliar with IPA diacritics, google any &quot;ipa diacritics chart&quot; -- that's it. Held og lykke!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T13:32:41.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15037" CreationDate="2015-11-19T14:58:45.323" Score="2" ViewCount="2006" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the difference between phonetics and phonology of course, but I have trouble distinguishing the notion of syllable on the two levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm describing syllabic phenomena, how can I know if I am describing phonetic or phonological syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T17:47:11.837" Title="What is the difference between a phonetic syllable and a phonological syllable?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15032" CreationDate="2015-11-19T17:10:52.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would additionally suggest Hans Basbøll's monograph &lt;em&gt;The Phonology of Danish&lt;/em&gt;. The ratio of chat to data is a bit high for my taste, but I think it would be helpful in getting a handle on the orthography to phonetics mapping. He provides detailed IPA phonetic transcriptions. Along with the Danish word index and forvo samples, this would help to concretize the spelling system. Recorded examples are especially important, since the conventional IPA transcription of Danish doesn't (didn't) match my expectations of what symbols should be used to indicate a given sound (especially with vowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T17:10:52.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15034" CreationDate="2015-11-19T17:47:11.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no official opinion polls that address the question, but based on my knowledge of contemporary phonology and phonetics, and phonologists and phoneticians, there is (now) a higher percentage of phonologists who believe in syllables than phoneticians. The premise of there being a &quot;phonetic syllable&quot; is in serious doubt. There are opposite perspectives on the topic within the realm of phoneticians, so John Ohala is a non-supporter of the syllable and Osamu Fujimura is a strong supporter. In addition, there is the well-known huge variation in what constitutes &quot;phonetic&quot; versus &quot;phonological&quot; analysis, with the poles being roughly &quot;the tail end of the phonology&quot; versus &quot;articulatory movements and waveforms&quot;. So without staking out some more specific territory, there is no way to decide on an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard methodological approach to making scientific decisions favors the conclusion that syllables are not necessary to explain the facts, but if they are, they are phonological objects and not phonetic objects. There is no such thing as a phonetic computation of syllable parsing, in the way that one can compute formants, spectral tilt, amplitude and F0. As is the case in phonology, claiming that a certain string of segments is parsed into syllables as [abc.def] as opposed to [ab.cdef] or [abcd.ef] is based on the simplicitity and utility of performing that parse. There is a certain amount of evidence for the syllable based on phonological considerations such as rules which apply to segment sequences within the same syllable -- for example, velar palatalization in Turkish has been claimed (Clements &amp;amp; Sezer) to be syllable conditioned. English consonant allophony has been analyzed as being conditioned by syllable position, e.g. in Kahn's dissertation, but it has also been analyzed as being sensitive to foot position. Theoretically, the case for syllables at the phonetic level could be made in a similar fashion, but the difficulty lies in a chicken / egg question whether syllabification contrasts are primary and observed segmental differences derive from phonetic rules referring to the syllable, or are the segmental differences already there in the output of the phonology, in which case the phonetics has no need to refer to syllables. That is, parsing segments into syllables has no utility in phonetics (or, that would be the claim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, if the facts that you're trying to describe require you to refer to a continuum of values, then you're dealing with a phonetic fact. If you have such evidence that appears to require reference to the syllable, then a case can be made that this is a syllable-sensitive phonetic process, since (as a continuous as opposed to discrete process) the facts can't be disposed of by relegating the process to phonology, where the case for the syllable is stronger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T17:47:11.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15030" CreationDate="2015-11-19T18:31:31.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agreed that for the child there is no difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likely your child is getting more exposure to Hindi through daycare and your spouse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You cannot control the way your children speak: they will develop their own accents and they will learn the languages they think they need.&quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10930" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T18:31:31.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15030" CreationDate="2015-11-19T23:18:22.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several parts to your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is Hindi easier to speak for children? &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; All languages are about the same level of difficulty for children.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How come the child is learning even when she is getting less attention from adults? &lt;strong&gt;Adults are only one source of language learning for children&lt;/strong&gt;. Sometimes not even the main one. She is likely learning as much from her peers as from the teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is the child less willing to use English? This very common with languages that are 'put on' by parents who are not its native speakers. The child learns some of them passively but sees that nobody else is using that language for achieving important things (from their perspective). It's made worse by the child knowing that the parent can understand the other language/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Children in bilingual situations often go through stages of skill in either or both of their languages. Their two languages are never perfectly balanced. So this could just as easily be &lt;strong&gt;just a phase&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T23:18:22.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15028" CreationDate="2015-11-19T23:36:39.310" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no universal technical meaning for 'hard' and 'soft'&lt;/strong&gt; when it comes to sounds. You will not find it used by professional phoneticians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, within many languages, there are &lt;strong&gt;pedagogic conventions&lt;/strong&gt; for describing hard and soft sounds that do not translate across languages. This is often done in an overlap with orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English people speak about the 'hard' and 'soft' 'c' to differentiate between /k/ in 'cup' and /s/ in cell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very different from Slavic languages where 'soft' and 'hard' consonants describe pairs that are palatalized or not. As in /d/ vs. /dʲ/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this applies to vowels. In Czech, for instance, there is a traditional distinction between 'hard y' and 'soft i' which is now only relevant to orthography - the preceding consonant is palatalized for soft i.  However, this refers to a perceived difference in the darkness of the sound which is still preserved in Russian. Czechs will also describe 'ü' in German as hard y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there's no easy way to map the idea of 'hard' and 'soft' when it comes to sounds across languages. However, there seem to be certain &lt;strong&gt;tendencies in how people describe sounds across cultures&lt;/strong&gt;. Certain voiced plosives are more likely to be seen as dark or hard whereas affricates are more likely to be seen as soft or light while voiceless stops may be seen as sharp. This is a whole area of study called '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound symbolism&lt;/a&gt;' or '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Modern_phonosemantics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonosemantics&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you used 'hard' and 'soft' is very idiosyncratic but in the context of a conversation, it may be understood by people. But only if there's enough context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T23:36:39.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15042" CreationDate="2015-11-20T05:32:06.387" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago, I heard of a website that allowed you to search thousands of described languages by feature, like consonant inventory and word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an acronym, and I think it had multiple W's in it. What website am I thinking of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T05:53:27.537" Title="What is the web-searchable database of linguistic features?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15041" CreationDate="2015-11-20T05:52:53.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you're referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt; a.k.a. WALS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T05:52:53.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15041" CreationDate="2015-11-20T05:53:27.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you asking about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wals.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Linguistic Structures&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T05:53:27.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T16:26:40.613" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which branch of linguistics educates on and plunges into the contents of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/14979/10165&quot;&gt;this helpful answer&lt;/a&gt;? I must read more about these concepts because  Function Words especially in English cause many problems for me and derange me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am suspecting either Semantics, Pragmatics, or Discourse Analysis? I was thinking of reading some introductory textbooks in the correct branch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest where I can find detailed explanations or relevant resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10165" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T21:14:11.107" Title="Which branch of linguistics educates on affirmation, causality, similarity, time, etc…?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15044" CreationDate="2015-11-20T18:12:09.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit more complicated than just the branch. Both semantics and pragmatics will deal with aspects of this issue but you also need to pick the right school and the right people to read. People who have done most work in this area are people working in cognitive linguistics and certain branches of functional linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate book that will deal with all of these topics in the way you mention is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toward-Cognitive-Semantics-Structuring-Communication/dp/0262700964/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Towards Cognitive Semantics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Leonard Talmy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite a tome, though. Perhaps a gentler introduction to this kind of thinking about language is Lakoff and Johnson's &lt;strong&gt;Metaphors we Live By&lt;/strong&gt; even though it does not deal with all elements of what you're interested in, it outlines the agenda for that kind of thinking about language and meaning. (Read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2003 edition&lt;/a&gt; - it has an important new chapter in it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the functional perspective, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=SXCJu7RsqqoC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA115&amp;amp;dq=talmy%20givon%20tense%20aspect%20modality&amp;amp;ots=IQ8eu0g5vF&amp;amp;sig=A8ckn682f1IRuOimSzLwjrCGG9k#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=talmy%20givon%20tense%20aspect%20modality&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Talmy Givon&lt;/strong&gt;'s work on tense, aspect and modality&lt;/a&gt; is the most relevant. I think it is complementary to the cognitive work but it is a very different kind of approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T18:12:09.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15044" CreationDate="2015-11-20T18:13:49.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anthropological linguistics.&lt;/strong&gt;  Cultural anthropologists have long had a burning interest in the relationship between a people's worldview and other aspects of their culture.  My former teacher, Cora Dubois, was the first to incorporate psychological testing into anthropological field work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course there is the intriguing work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who proposed that the Hopi conception of time was embedded in their language, and was akin to that of modern physics.  (I'm sorry that I can't be more specific.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T18:13:49.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15044" CreationDate="2015-11-20T21:14:11.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Affirmation, Causality,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hereby swear that I will ...tell the truth;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I launch this ship;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I take this man,  I take this woman..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An early work of great clarity is &lt;strong&gt;How to do Things with Words, J L Austin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T21:14:11.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15049" CreationDate="2015-11-20T23:46:22.610" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are dialects formed? Are they always a diverging branch from the main language or can they be the fruit of a converging process between different languages because of cultural pressure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, when does it become a dialect instead of merely an accent or another language altogether?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;sub&gt;It's a fairly ample question, I'm glad to simply receive reading material on the general subject if a complete answer is not available&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10937" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-21T01:05:04.063" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T01:53:27.873" Title="Accents and dialects" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15048" CreationDate="2015-11-21T01:53:27.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are numerous examples of dialects which result from language contact. A typical case would be Indian English (the dialect of English that has become native to India), which arose from contact between British English and various indigenous languages of India. Similarly, the Highland (northern) Ecuadorian dialect of Spanish differs from other nearby dialects of Spanish in ways that reflect properties of the local indigenous language, Quechua. There are some instances where we can be fairly certain that a dialect difference is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; due to this kind of language contact, such as some NE/SW Icelandic dialect differences pertaining to aspiration -- where there is no substratum or differential external influences that could explain the differences. But it's far from a foregone conclusion that the difference between English in NW England versus London are strictly due to random divergences starting from a homogenous older version of English. In most cases, we simply do not have enough historical evidence regarding the development of dialects to be able to confidently say that a given difference can be due to some kind of &quot;external&quot; influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists don't put much stock in a strict dichotomy between language and dialect, because there's no objective standard for classifying systems as being dialects vs. languages. The best we hope for is a metric of mutual intelligibility. Swedish and Norwegian are classed as distinct languages, but they are close enough that a speaker of one can understand and be understood by a speaker of the other (there are outlier exceptions). There are numerous problems with the concept of mutual intelligibility, for example asymmetries in intelligibility, where spoken Danish is apparently harder for Norwegians to understand that Norwegian is for Danes; and there are &quot;logical inclusion&quot; problems where all speakers of X also speak Y but the opposite is not true (e.g. all Kerewe speakers speak Jita but the reverse is not true). Once a speech form becomes so different that speakers cannot understand each other, then linguists embrace the notion that they are different languages. However, speakers themselves may have a different attitude. Kurmanji, Sorani and Gorani ~ Hawrami are sufficiently divergent language forms that I think they would have to be termed separate languages, but they are often simply called &quot;Kurdish&quot; and referred to as dialects (emphasizing political and cultural unity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;accent&quot;, we put zero stock in that term, which is a term that we abjure, at least when speaking professionally. A &quot;Chicago accent&quot; is the dialect spoken in Chicago (with other social modifiers necessary to pick out the right dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to take a look at William Labov's books &lt;em&gt;Principles of Linguistic Change&lt;/em&gt;, in 3 volumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T01:53:27.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15065" CreationDate="2015-11-21T11:56:44.667" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do people sometimes use &lt;em&gt;givin’&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;giving&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a feature of some dialect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10632" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-11-21T23:44:36.277" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:16:05.057" Title="Why givin’ instead of giving?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15070" CreationDate="2015-11-21T12:33:46.283" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: this question now has a new home at &lt;a href=&quot;https://korean.stackexchange.com/questions/94/when-transliterating-english-words-to-korean-why-does-the-first-f-become-a-%E3%85%8E&quot;&gt;https://korean.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Please visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://korean.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://korean.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; for questions about Korean language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Korean words and sounds do not have an equivalent English form (Example: 한글 -&gt; Hanguel, 서울 -&gt; Seoul) and vice versa, so I believe some kind of standard is in place for transliteration. However, I do not understand why an 'F&quot; character in the beginning of an English word gets transliterated into a ㅎ, which is an 'h' sound.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Fighting -&gt; 화이팅, Family mart -&gt; 회미리 마트, Fanta -&gt; 환타  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not happen when an an 'f' or 'ph' sound comes in the middle of a word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the logic behind transliterating the 'f' at the beginning of a word into a ㅎ ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2428" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:00.990" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T23:02:41.950" Title="When transliterating English words to Korean, why does the first F become a ㅎ?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7217" CreationDate="2015-11-21T13:12:45.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many possible tenses and thus even more possible combinations of tenses, so many that it is unlikely that each has a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseless_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tenseless languages&lt;/a&gt; to not distinguish tenses at all.  Thus they are a subset of the languages with no distinct past tense (as @dainichi commented).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonfuture_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nonfuture tense&lt;/a&gt; implies a lack of distinction between the past and the present.  That subset of languages with no distinct past tense includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rukai_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rukai&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Greenlandic&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechuan_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quechua&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it is unlikely that there exists a language with a nonpresent tense, ie one that distinguishes past and future from present but not from each other, the union of the set of tenseless languages and the set of languages with nonfuture tense is, I believe, what you seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2015-11-24T11:43:15.780" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T11:43:15.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2709" CreationDate="2015-11-21T13:49:42.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grammatical_categories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grammatical_categories&lt;/a&gt; is a helpful superset of the possible dimensions and some of their possible values.  The dimensions that I would consider applicable to verbs:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- agent person + number + gender&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- object (whether there was one, and possibly person + number + gender)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- tense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- aspect&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- mood&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- voice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- negation  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is overlapping functionality, eg passive voice and reflexity ie object, and impossible combinations, eg aspect is not necessarily distinguished in all tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, what some languages express with verbs, other languages express with nouns or adverbs or even random particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also look at verb arguments, ie &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;valency&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T13:49:42.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15053" CreationDate="2015-11-21T14:52:14.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you mean by &quot;graphon&quot;? That's not an English word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally not an absence of education, and it is definitely associated with some accents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you give an example of the context? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10940" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T14:52:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15054" CreationDate="2015-11-21T15:01:00.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/kenstowicz/hybrid.pdf&quot;&gt;Kang, Kenstowicz &amp;amp; Ito&lt;/a&gt; observe that treatment of [f] is a bit more variable. They say that direct loans from English have [pʰ] ([pʰodɨ] &quot;Ford&quot;), but ultimately English-based loans can also come via Japanese, where [h] is an allophone of /φ/ which is the closest fricative in Japanese to English [f]. So this can lead to pairs like &quot;muffler&quot; appearing in Korean as [mahura] via Japanese [mahuraa], or as [mʌpʰɨllʌ], a direct loan from English. This suggests looking at a larger corpus of English loans to check your generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T15:01:00.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-21T21:45:36.670" Score="2" ViewCount="5542" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in the sentence: 'that book weighs six kilos'...what is the word class of 'six'? I know some grammars have 'numerals' as a word class, but if you don't have that, what is it? an Adjective? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10941" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-11-22T13:49:18.720" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T02:34:29.237" Title="What kind of a word class are numbers?" Tags="&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15059" CreationDate="2015-11-22T01:55:34.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've learned it, numerals are like a form of determiners, so 'six books' is similar to 'those books'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8104" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T01:55:34.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15059" CreationDate="2015-11-22T01:57:05.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your ideology of word class, and probably on the language (depending on your ideology of word class). In a number of Bantu languages, they constitute an autonomous word class. They have a unique pattern of class agreement making them distinct from adjectives, quantifiers, and determiners; they have special morphosyntactic rules of combination (do not combine with certain definitizing prefixes, the so-called augment), have special word order (after adjectives, before possessives), and also have distinct patterns of reduplication. The morphological diagnostics actually justify further subdividing numerals into &quot;1&quot; vs. higher numerals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &quot;if you don't have that...&quot;, but the question is, why &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; you have it? That is, to simply stipulate that a language can't have a word class &quot;numeral&quot; is arbitrary and problematic for languages where there is good evidence that they are distinct from other word classes. This doesn't mean that every language has to treat numerals as a distinct word class, so it is possible that there are languages where there is absolutely nothing that distinguishes numerals from adjectives, for example, though I can't think of an example. If your theory of word classes isn't based on an a priori mapping between semantics and word class, then I think the answer would be something like &quot;whatever the facts of the language require&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T01:57:05.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4583" CreationDate="2015-11-22T05:31:08.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's likely that the Laotian borrowed the Vietnamese dish. Pho originates in Northern Vietnam in either Hanoi or Namdinh. Over time Northern Vietnamese migrated South and brought the dish with them. Note that pho is the name of the noodle not the dish, similar to &lt;code&gt;bun (bún)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mien (miến)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mi (mì)&lt;/code&gt;. The reason pho became of the name of the dish is because it is the most popular dish using that noodle. Similar to how tet (tết), which means festival became the name of the lunar new year because it's the biggest celebration in Vietnamese culture. There can be &lt;code&gt;tet trung thu (tết trung thu)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tet trung nguyen (tết trung nguyên)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tet doan ngo (tết đoan ngọ)&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tet thanh minh (tết thanh minh)&lt;/code&gt; etc. Similarly pho noodle is used in many dishes including pho ga, pho cuon, pho xao. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely that Pho came from pot au feu. Pho uses similar cooking techniques to all other Vietnamese noodle soups. Vietnamese people have hundred of noodle soup dishes and pho is just one of them. It is likely thought that the use of beef is a french influence. However saying that pho came from pot au feu is a bit of a stretch. I can understand that many Francophiles who love French culture are enthusiastic about this theory. However it's very unlikely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10943" LastEditorUserId="11451" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T21:56:49.383" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T21:56:49.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15053" CreationDate="2015-11-22T08:44:44.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is very simple. The &lt;strong&gt;-ing&lt;/strong&gt; suffix is pronounced either  or &lt;strong&gt;/in/&lt;/strong&gt; or .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of pronunciation of the &lt;strong&gt;-ing&lt;/strong&gt; suffix depends on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect of English&lt;/strong&gt;: There are three dialectal choices in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. &lt;strong&gt;/iŋ/&lt;/strong&gt; - standard English, many non-standard dialects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;/in/&lt;/strong&gt; - many dialects or non-standard variants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. &lt;strong&gt;/iŋg/&lt;/strong&gt; - some dialects in the UK (here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#/media/File:Ng-coalescence.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nice map&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Register&lt;/strong&gt;: There is also variation between /iŋ/ and /in/ within dialects depending on the register. In this case, /in/ is usually a feature of lower registers. In fact, it is used as a marker of low speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the high status of the Standard dialect, there are no dialects of English now where /in/ is the high register option even though that did not used to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such it is often called 'g dropping' even though there is no actual g there to be dropped. The common explanation is laziness but that is not the case. It is simply a case of variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see more about that in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/000878.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Log post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T08:44:44.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15019" CreationDate="2015-11-22T09:04:53.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good question because it reveals the problematic nature of the &lt;strong&gt;arbitrariness axiom&lt;/strong&gt; in modern linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship between sound and meaning is indeed arbitrary when you look across languages. What is &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; in English is &lt;em&gt;hund&lt;/em&gt; in German. What is 'pig' in English is 'Schwein' in German. There is no inherent relationship between them. When you put them together you get 'pigdog' and 'Schweinhund', and because the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary, you get a pig hunting dog in English and an insult in German. (Although calling someone a 'pigdog' in English is also insulting, it's not a very common one.) But even in the case of perfect calques, e.g. Czech &lt;em&gt;časopis&lt;/em&gt; [magazine] is formed exactly to follow the form of the German &lt;em&gt;Zeitschrift&lt;/em&gt; (lit. time-writing), the relationship between the sound and meaning is arbitrary cross-linguistically or even intralinguistically. The sound for magazine in both languages could have been totally different. This holds even for onomatopoeic words which are motivated by the referent but still fairly arbitrary across languages (e.g. compare the word for cock crowing across languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while this principle is obviously (axiomatically) correct, it is not very informative. Even Saussure (who first proposed it) noted that native speakers often associate the sounds with meanings as if they were natural. This was later confirmed by various research in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Modern_phonosemantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonosemantics&lt;/a&gt;. The logical arbitrariness co-exists with universal tendencies in sound meaning as well as language-internal processes of aesthetic associations between sounds and meanings. This is much more interesting and useful to study than the relatively uninformative arbitrariness axiom. Of course, it is important to remember that it was established in a context of theories proposing essentialist connections between sound and meaning which are easily disproven by the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sort of thing you're describing is not usually a case of sound symbolism but simply the semantics of compounding which will always be somewhat motivated (although in many cases, the original meanings will be opaque to most speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T09:04:53.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15069" CreationDate="2015-11-22T09:22:20.930" Score="1" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just started a linguistic course at university, we've just started Morphology this week. &#xA;I am very new to the subject and I am looking for some guidance about how to approach a morphology exercise. I already studied the basic vocabulary and now I am trying to figure out how to solve practically this exercise. Being new to the topic, I find it really hard to understand what I am really suppose to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About question a:&#xA;I tried to analyse the material and examples I had, reasoning this way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HIS&lt;/strong&gt; (3rd person singular, genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I compared the different forms and I could assume these rules. &#xA;1) When a word starts with p and ends with u, starts with k and ends with a or starts with t and ends with a, I usually add s- at the beginning and -be at the end, and I get this &quot;his ...(word)...&quot;. &#xA;Examples: &#xA;palu &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;palu&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;ku:ba &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;ku:ba&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;tapa &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;tapa&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;2)But if a word starts with g, then I need to add a s- at the beginning and also change the g into a k, adding at the end be like in the previous case. &#xA;If a word start with b, then I will have s- at the beginning, followed by p (the b turned into a p), with -be at the very end. &#xA;And if a word starts with d, then I have s- at the beginning, followed by t with -be at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the &quot;rules&quot; I could observe from the examples given. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YOUR&lt;/strong&gt; (2nd person singular, genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the cases of words that start with p and ends with u, starts with k ad ends with a, starts with t and ends with a, I get &quot;your ..(word)...&quot; form, adding a s- at the beginning and a -lu at the end of the word. &#xA;With words that have g at the beginning I will have a s- a the beginning, the g turns into a k, and lu at the end. &#xA;With words that have b at the beginning I will have a s- at the beginning, the b turns into a p, and lu at the end.&#xA;With words that have d at the beginning I will have s- at the beginning, the d turns into t and lu at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO, I found soooooo many rules to explain how to make a genitive form of a word in these language, how can I identify one common rule? Is there a way of simplifying this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q2O35.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q2O35.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-22T16:49:36.140" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T16:49:36.140" Title="How to generalize over these morphological rules?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15067" CreationDate="2015-11-22T12:30:42.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have actually answered your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the examples given, possessive is formed with the following pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; person Singular: &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; + root + &lt;code&gt;be&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; person Plural: &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; + root + &lt;code&gt;lu&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plus, voiced &lt;code&gt;b/d/g&lt;/code&gt; in the 1st syllable of the root becomes voiceless &lt;code&gt;p/t/k&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must be confused with unability to tell whether or not the vowel matters here. The examples &lt;em&gt;do not provide&lt;/em&gt; sufficient information to judge whether or not the vowel plays any role. Simply because there are no consistency: &lt;code&gt;pa*/ta*/ku:*&lt;/code&gt; cant be compared to &lt;code&gt;be*/do*/ge*&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make sure, ask your teacher to provide with samples starting with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;pe*/po*/pu:*&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;te*/to*/tu:*&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ka*/ke*/ko*&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ba*/bo*/bu:*&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;da*/de*/du:*&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ga*/go*/gu:*&lt;/code&gt;, respectively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, all possible initial consonants (6 ones) and all possible vowels (4), minus six existing combinations = 6 * 4 - 6 = 18.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having 18 additional examples, you will be able to tell whether or not the vowel matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With only 6 examples, the simplest rule applies, &lt;em&gt;vowel does not matter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T12:30:42.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15054" CreationDate="2015-11-22T12:35:26.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean has no /f/ sound (unvoiced labiodental fricative), so it has to approximate it with a sound it does have.  There are two possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅍ is a labial plosive that is heavily aspirated.  The heavy aspiration makes it similar to a fricative, so it sounds similar.  It's also unvoiced, so that helps.  So it's used in loanwords like 파일 (file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅎ is generally an 'h' sound, but its pronunciation actually changes a lot depending on the vowel that follows it.  So when it's followed by an ㅜ (or ㅗ, to a lesser extent) it makes a bilabial fricative sound - quite similar to the labiodental fricative sound of the English 'f'.  So the ㅎ makes a good substitute for the English 'f', at least when we can put an ㅗ or ㅜ after it, like muffler -&gt; 마후라 and fry[ing] pan -&gt; 후라이팬, where we have to insert a vowel anyways.&#xA;This is found in Japanese too, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_%28kana%29&quot;&gt;ふ&lt;/a&gt;, though belonging to the 'h' set, makes a [ɸu] sound - and is written fu in English.  Words borrowed through Japanese will especially tend to use 후 to translate the English 'f' sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, we can see ㅎ used to translate other sounds in European languages - [Van] Gogh is translated 고흐, because 흐 makes a velar fricative sound, and Zurich is translated 취리히, because 히 makes a palatal fricative sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T12:35:26.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15059" CreationDate="2015-11-22T13:44:57.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are lots of &quot;It depends&quot;, but in practically all part-of-speech tagsets I am aware of &lt;strong&gt;Cardinal Numbers&lt;/strong&gt; are a class of their own (called cardinal number, cardinal, oder numeral)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T13:44:57.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14968" CreationDate="2015-11-23T02:28:46.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I figured out what the ripple-like things are. It's just the image rendering on my 2009 mac. When I use a better computer you can't see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T02:28:46.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-23T02:36:18.313" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using relative intensity as a metric for the degree of lenition in voiced stops. Several other papers use this metric but report the minimum pitch: (Warner and Tucker 2011: 1609 &amp;amp; Carrasco, Hualde and Simonet 2012: 156) Why do you need to report the minimum pitch when working with intensity? How does minimum pitch affect intensity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Warner, N., &amp;amp; Tucker, B. V. (2011). Phonetic variability of stops and flaps in spontaneous and careful speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(2009), 1606. doi:10.1121/1.3621306&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carrasco, P., Hualde, J. I., &amp;amp; Simonet, M. (2012). Dialectal Differences in Spanish Voiced Obstruent Allophony: Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish. Phonetica, 69(3), 149–179.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastEditorUserId="9847" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T20:54:13.820" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T21:35:01.353" Title="What is the relationship between minimum pitch effect and intensity?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12732" CreationDate="2015-11-23T06:23:43.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though it may not be universal, I think in general that the rising inflection at the end of a question is actually epi-phenomenal. It is merely a confirmation of the body language of the speaker.  Watch people who ask a question.  When they phrase the question, they finish with a rise of the head,  either directly or to the side.  It is a clear invitation to come forward, to contribute, to continue the dialogue.  Conversely, when a statement is made that is intended to be definitive, the head generally drops, as in a challenge.  There is no invitation to continue.  I think it is useful to remember that language is only the latest and most complex vocal/verbal means of expression of feelings and intents that have been expressed through other physical modalities for millions of years. Language is by no means primary, but has evolved as a means of confirming the other signals being given. Consider the difference between &quot;You're leaving?&quot; as a question, and the command &quot;You're leaving!&quot;  Note how your head moves in each instance....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10948" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T06:23:43.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14982" CreationDate="2015-11-23T13:52:52.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of Korean corpora on this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://semanticweb.kaist.ac.kr/home/index.php/KAIST_Corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://semanticweb.kaist.ac.kr/home/index.php/KAIST_Corpus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to request them and get a code for downloading, and the zip format wouldn't open with the regular windows unzip program.  I had to use a Korean zip program called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bandisoft.co.kr/bandizip/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bandizip&lt;/a&gt; to unzip the files.&#xA;The KAIST raw corpus has just plain hangeul text.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &quot;High-quality morpho-syntactically annotated corpus&quot; was pos-tagged by hand, but has quite a few errors and inconsistencies.&#xA;The automatically-analyzed large-scale KAIST corpus was pos-tagged automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the 국립국어원 has a searchable corpus at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ithub.korean.go.kr/user/corpus/corpusSearchManager.do#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://ithub.korean.go.kr/user/corpus/corpusSearchManager.do#&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven't used it much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T13:52:52.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14982" CreationDate="2015-11-23T18:21:44.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can try a search on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt;. Enter &quot;korean&quot; and &quot;corpus&quot; in the General search slit and search (600+ results) and then use the facets on the right hand side of the site to restrict language (to Korean) and resource type (to Corpus, Dataset, or Collection).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find both spoken and written corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T18:21:44.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15073" CreationDate="2015-11-23T18:41:48.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Observationally, RMS amplitude is positively correlated with F0. When F0 is high, the vocal folds have greater tension and they close more rapidly, which means that there is more force when they meet under high F0 compared to low F0. That greater force, when the vocal folds meet, translates into an increase in acoustic energy in the glottal waveform. That said, the real reason for reporting &quot;minimum pitch&quot; is that Praat uses the variable &lt;em&gt;minimum_pitch&lt;/em&gt; to determine the size of the analysis window. A Praat intensity curve is much smoother than a raw RMS narrow-window computation, so there is a lot of stuff going on in the black box. You report all relevant experimental settings, e.g. sampling rate, bit-rate, and so on, since they affect the replicability of an experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T18:41:48.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T02:41:29.517" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a conjecture that given a particular (multi)set of words without knowledge of ordering, then one ordering is normally much more likely than any others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its not always true,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show me flights from Paris to New York.&quot; is just as reasonable as &quot;Show me flights from New York to Paris&quot;; and just as likely to occur in real world use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the other hand often one ordering is far more likely and reasonable than the others,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The dog chased the cat.&quot; is much more often correct than &quot;The cat chased the dog.&quot;, it is also preferable over &quot;The cat the dog chased.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;though all three are grammatical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indeed the sentence &quot;The cat chased the dog.&quot; may in-fact be the correct sentence (My old neighbor had a cat like that), but how often does it occur? Maybe 1 time in 1000?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so perhaps it is true for 90% (for example) of sentences. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally the question comes down &lt;strong&gt;to given a Bag of Words, how often can a good stochastic language model order them correctly&lt;/strong&gt; (back to the reference the bag came from.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a reference based on corpus statistics. (My own results suggest it is true for the Brown corpus, though I'ld much rather cite an existing well-known work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm primarily interested in English, though a contrastive notes &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/557/languages-with-stricter-and-less-strict-word-order&quot;&gt;with more or less strict word-ordering languages&lt;/a&gt; would be very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10014" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T02:54:05.023" Title="How often can the words in a sentence be rearranged to form different but similarly likely setentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15087" CreationDate="2015-11-24T07:22:52.953" Score="1" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/neutralir.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt;,  the author provides an explanation of nasal variation in Spanish which makes use of an archiphoneme /N/. I put the relevant excerpt below. My question about this is relatively simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it terminologically correct to consider the [m n ɲ] as as &lt;strong&gt;allophones&lt;/strong&gt; of /N/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the phonologist would say, then, is that in Spanish the /m/ ~ /n/ ~ /ɲ/ distinction is suspended or neutralized before a consonant. In this case we posit a so-called archiphoneme, which subsumes all of the nasal phonemes when the distinction or opposition between them is neutralized. The symbol for the nasal archiphoneme is /N/. For example, the words campo, cantar and ancho would be transcribed phonemically as /kaNpo/, /kaNtaɾ/ and /aNtʃo/ respectively. Their phonetic transcriptions would be [kampo], [kantaɾ] and [aɲtʃo].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T18:16:33.560" Title="Allophones of an archiphoneme" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T09:28:48.527" Score="1" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that English has a whole lot of Romance and Latin influence whereas Dutch has less and German has very little. This is the main reason why English is so different compared to its mainland Germanic sister languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the vocabulary of Basic English is overwhelmingly Germanic. Out of the top 100 most common English words, something like 98 or 99 are of Germanic origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we don't expect our preschoolers to understand words like &quot;cognizant&quot;, &quot;recapitulation&quot;, or &quot;commensurate&quot; which are obviously non-Germanic in origin and we stick to the most basic words until high school or so, why then are Dutch and German TV shows aimed at preschoolers so unintelligible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Dutch preschool TV shows, I'd say only about 20% is intelligible. For German, it's close to 10%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a Dutch show aimed at preschoolers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpsq5k7DJWY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpsq5k7DJWY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas the Tank Engine in German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DXXOzwwzo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DXXOzwwzo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10952" LastEditorUserId="10952" LastEditDate="2015-11-24T10:14:51.273" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T20:06:20.420" Title="Why are German and Dutch preschool TV shows so unintelligible to English speakers?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T13:10:20.117" Score="0" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told that in Afghanistan there are two major languages Pashto and Dari, and when you live in Afghanistan you will find that almost all the Afghanistanis could speak Dari and fewer people could speak Pashto. And I was also told that Persian and Dari belong to the same language group and share many similarites. So can I travel around Afghanistan with only speaking Persian? Can everybody understand Dari/Persian in Afghanistan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10956" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-11-24T18:23:10.883" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T10:18:14.043" Title="Can Dari be understood by everyone in Afghanistan?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15084" CreationDate="2015-11-24T13:39:22.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dari is Persian as spoken in Afghanistan. The difference between Afghan Persian and Iranian Persian is about as great as that between British English and American English. They sound a bit different, but they are basically the same. Most Afghans (though perhaps not all) do understand Dari/Persian, even in the Pashto speaking areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T13:39:22.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15093" CreationDate="2015-11-24T14:38:29.037" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the single word 'equimolar' have single-word equivalents for less than or greater than?  If there isn't an officially accepted word for these, could a neologism be improvised using linguistic conventions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10957" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T03:50:36.333" Title="Does the single word 'equimolar' have single-word equivalents for less than or greater than?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-04-26T15:55:19.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15080" CreationDate="2015-11-24T18:16:33.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would not be an example of the relationship &quot;correct&quot;, since you're posing the question without a specific theoretical context, e.g. &quot;Blochian phonemics&quot; vs. &quot;Generative phonology&quot;. The classic and standard (though not historically earliest) taxonomic understanding of the object of study is that &quot;phoneme&quot; is a grouping relation on surface phones, where if phoneme /X/ is defined as the set [w,x,y] then the content of /X/ is all and only the instances of [w], [x] or [y]. It is a requirement that the distribution of [w,x,y] not overlap, w.r.t. context that they appear in. Since the cited usage of &quot;allophone&quot; does not respect that condition, that would not be a correct application of the terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think the above-mentioned classical characterization has been actually believed in for a number of decades, and the page does correctly reflect the more modern understanding of phoneme and allophone where a &quot;phoneme&quot; is an item that can appear in underlying forms, and an allophone is an item that can only appear in surface forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are competing definitions of terms, it would be misleading to say that a given use of the terminology is &quot;correct&quot;, if it is only correct &lt;em&gt;assuming&lt;/em&gt; one definition. If a usage is at odds with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; definitions then we can say that it is incorrect, and if a usage turns out to be consistent with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; definitions then we can say that it is correct. In the present mixed-bag situation, the most you can say is that it is possible -- depending on what definition you're assuming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why people point back to the definitions of the 40's is that they represent the pinnacle of axiomatic, formal thinking on the topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T18:16:33.560" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11221" CreationDate="2015-11-24T18:25:21.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't have a dictionary handy, there are some clues in the characters themselves. Many characters have meaningful radicals embedded in them, as well as pronunciation clues. For example, 妈 &lt;em&gt;mā&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mom&quot; includes the radical 女 &lt;em&gt;nǚ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;woman, female&quot; for semantics and 马 &lt;em&gt;mǎ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;horse&quot; as a pronunciation clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, these are only mnemonic devices, and for many older characters semantic shift and sound changes may have rendered them useless, but occasionally you get a good idea. The first time I encountered it, I was successfully able to guess that 肝 referred to an organ meat (it has the radical 月／肉 used with body parts) and approached the pronunciation &lt;em&gt;gān&lt;/em&gt; well enough to order 猪肝面 &lt;em&gt;zhūgān miàn&lt;/em&gt;, which I learned means &quot;pork liver noodles&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I would highly recommend carrying a dictionary. There are plenty of mobile apps that can look up characters from handwriting input. The one I use is Pleco, which can be upgraded with OCR so you can point your camera at printed text to look it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10889" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T18:25:21.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6633" CreationDate="2015-11-24T22:43:41.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just call them &lt;em&gt;near homophones&lt;/em&gt;. Tone is still a phonemic feature, so there's nothing particularly special. Would you also try to distinguish near homophones that differ only in nasalization of a vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10889" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T22:43:41.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-24T23:23:03.973" Score="1" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really struggling with drawing a tree representing wh-movement in &quot;How was the plot discovered by the authorities?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the main VP, we have &quot;by the authorities&quot; as an adjunct, as well as &quot;how,&quot; which moves all way from its adjunct position to the spec of CP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[How&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; was the plot discovered by the authories t&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;] (only showing the relevant movement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? That is, is &quot;how&quot; rightly an adjunct and/or is there meant to be an intermediate movement in here somewhere? Since there is no embedded clause and there is already a complement (&quot;the plot&quot;), this seems like the only way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10961" LastActivityDate="2015-12-25T07:01:48.657" Title="Is the wh-expression &quot;How&quot; an adjunct of VP?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15053" CreationDate="2015-11-25T00:06:55.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is. You answered your own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one person uses it and then doesn't use it, s/he is probably switching his/her dialect/register/idiolect (however we call it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T00:06:55.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15086" CreationDate="2015-11-25T03:50:36.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all prefixes, Latin and Greek, imply a comparison with Molar solutions as 1.00.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hence: 'values of inframolar solutions,' '...question as to whether an inframolar dose might be effective.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;similarly: 'Conformational study of spectrin in presence of submolar concentrations of denaturants.' and the antonym: 'Supramolar recognition and organization of (bio) molecules around carbon nanotubes.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hypermolar appears to mean the same thing in this particular paper: Hypermolar Buffers (and other treatments) to Unmask IgG Complexes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9692879&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9692879&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Also&lt;/strong&gt;  eurekamag.com/research/006/133/006133206.php &#xA;Biguet J., 1982: Plasmodium falciparum in vitro development and volume variations in hypo molar and hyper molar media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyperosmolar is used exclusively of  Hyperglycemic blood building osmotic pressure, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; paper which may have &lt;strong&gt;hyper molar &amp;amp; hypo molar in the&#xA;  sense  you intend&lt;/strong&gt; is a patent from 1982.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/patents/US4172071&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/patents/US4172071&lt;/a&gt; 23 Oct 1979 - '...&#xA;  equilibrated with an aqueous buffer whose concentration in salts is&#xA;  isomolar or hypomolar as compared with that of blood, and separating&#xA;  the...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and even here as you see the terms are qualified. In all other cases &lt;strong&gt;'concentration'&lt;/strong&gt; appears to be the preferred term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Paramolar and hypomolar lead the unwary into dentistry.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T03:50:36.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15053" CreationDate="2015-11-25T05:16:16.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own most usual pronunciation of unstressed &quot;-ing&quot; has not been mentioned in any of the other answers.  I say [in], and I mean to distinguish the tense [i] of [in] from the lax [ɪ] (as in &quot;pin&quot;).  The reason is that my lax unstressed [ɪ] tenses before a velar nasal to [i] before the word final velar nasal becomes [n].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for instance, the derivation of the pronunciation of &quot;peeling&quot;, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ˈpilɪŋ/ -&gt; [ˈpiliŋ] -&gt; [ˈpilin]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are allophonic changes, not phonemic ones, which is why I use square brackets.  When I &lt;em&gt;aim&lt;/em&gt; for word final /n/, the preceding vowel does not tense.  So, when I see Dorothy Sayers writing final &quot;n'&quot;, for instance &quot;peelin'&quot;, for Lord Peter's dialogue, I would most naturally say that as [ˈpilɪn], since it ends in /n/, not /ŋ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T05:16:16.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-25T05:37:25.927" Score="2" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meaning-changing adjectives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/topics/show/20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Source:]&lt;/a&gt; Some adjectives can mean different things depending on their placement around the noun they modify.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When placed after the noun like &lt;em&gt;normal&lt;/em&gt;, the adjective carries a fairly objective, descriptive meaning.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When placed before the noun, the adjective carries a more subjective, opinionated meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: p 112, &lt;em&gt;A Comprehensive French Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (2007, 6 ed) by Glanville Price&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;146&lt;/code&gt; Some other adjectives have one meaning when they precede&#xA;the noun and a different one when they follow the noun. In some&#xA;cases the two meanings are very clearly distinguishable. In other&#xA;cases, the distinction is less sharp     but&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[1.] there is a tendency for the&#xA;adjective to have a literal meaning or to be used objectively when&#xA;it follows the noun&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[2.] and to have a more figurative meaning or to be&#xA;used more subjectively when it precedes the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What explains these semantic differences (due to syntax) shared by French and Spanish?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I already read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1181/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but could not find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T18:07:44.820" Title="For adjectives which change meaning by position: why are they subjective before nouns but objective after?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15091" CreationDate="2015-11-25T06:50:21.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your analysis is not correct. It is well known that wh-extraction out of adjuncts is impossible. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/huang82.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Huang 1982&lt;/a&gt;. Thankfully, the derivation of your sentence involves neither wh-extraction nor adjunction. Notice that it involves the passive construction &lt;em&gt;The plot was discovered by the authorities&lt;/em&gt;, in which case &lt;em&gt;the plot&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the authorities&lt;/em&gt; are both assigned theta roles by &lt;em&gt;discovered&lt;/em&gt;. Ignoring the technical details of passive constructions, the derivation involves building up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[TP the plot was discovered by the authorities]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the usual manner, we merge in an interrogative C bearing a wh-feature that needs checking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[C [TP the plot was discovered by the authorities]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject inverts with the auxiliary, and then &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; gets merged into the tree to yield&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[how [[C+was] [TP the plot was discovered by the authorities]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T06:50:21.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15098" CreationDate="2015-11-25T07:54:10.973" Score="0" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many words whose origin is traced through Middle English and/or French to Latin or Greek, and then it just stops there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: the word &quot;etymology&quot; itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1350-1400; Middle English &amp;lt; Latin etymologia &amp;lt; Greek etymología, equivalent to etymológ (os) studying the true meanings and values of words ( étymo (s) true (see etymon ) + lógos word, reason) + -ia -y3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it really means &quot;true reason&quot; (for being, I suppose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that we should strive to trace everything back to Sanskrit. However, before Greece, there was ancient Egypt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greeks and Egyptians knew each other well from very early on. (&quot;O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children!&quot; exclaims an Egyptian in one of Plato's dialogues). It would have only been natural for the inquisitive Greeks to borrow a few dozen words from their more advanced neighbors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their heyday, the Greeks documented everything they could, and the Romans documented and indexed everything they got their hands on, and then the medieval monks did a tremendous job preserving a huge portion of it all until finally Johannes Gutenberg invented his proverbial printing press, which quickly resulted in the creation of backup copies of everything pertaining to antiquity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet nowhere in the dictionary do you see a word whose etymology is described as &quot;from Middle English - from Latin - from Greek - from Egyptian.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10795" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T17:09:13.663" Title="Why should etymology stop where it does?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15097" CreationDate="2015-11-25T08:09:36.607" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are essentially asking two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why aren't there etymologies for an English word going back to Ancient Egyptian?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is easily answered: Because such words are rare beasts and you won't find many. Ancient Greek and Latin didn't borrow many words from Ancient Egyptian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do etymological dictionaries stop where they stop?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a pragmatic decision of the compilers and editors. Space matters, and the time to compile the dictionary matters, too. For compound words they usually stop with stating the components, for derived words with the derivation, and for basic words the deeper relations are noted. You will often find notes see this or that lemma for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T08:09:36.607" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15118" CreationDate="2015-11-25T11:41:44.470" Score="0" ViewCount="2193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that technically, most words are also stems (most words can be further elaborated somehow); but stems are sometimes not words, since some stems are bound, that is, they require further elaboration before they are pronounced alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find some examples that proove this point. The only one that comes to my mind is -driv (it is a stem, but not a word, because I cannot just say &quot;I driv my car&quot;. I need to add something to it in order to make sense. Therefore I say driv-en, or driv-e: these are then what we could say &quot;words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other examples come to your mind? Examples in English, Italian or German would be ideal because I speak these languages, but other languages would help as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T20:12:08.150" Title="Examples of stems that are NOT words" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15099" CreationDate="2015-11-25T14:48:46.603" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dis-? I know diss is a word, but the root dis- is itself not a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10965" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T14:48:46.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15095" CreationDate="2015-11-25T15:13:16.630" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on what language and global culture that &quot;phenomenon&quot; might change occurrence or even borderline the cusp of understandable and appropriate commentary either on topic or not rude..etc. In English it is because a subject always discusses an object in written language but if you pay attention to instances such as much of Ebonics often times the mode of speech does not follow colloquial rule. You can separately consider agglutinative vs. fusional languages to derive a complex understanding but it suffices to answer you question in provision of the English language without expanding on the topic of communication styles and effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10965" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T15:13:16.630" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15095" CreationDate="2015-11-25T17:46:58.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, here's a theory.  Some Romance languages distinguish two sorts of attribution: essential versus accidental.  In Portuguese, that's the difference between &quot;estar&quot; (accidental) and &quot;ser&quot; (essential).  Since both orders of modifier-modified are permitted in French (as they are also, marginally, in English), the order has been specialized to express this difference: pre-nominal position for essential and post-nominal position for accidental properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an old way of distinguishing prenominal from postnominal.  It is discussed in the 17th c. &lt;em&gt;Port Royal Logic&lt;/em&gt;, a.k.a. &lt;em&gt;The Art of Thinking&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/port-royal-logic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Port Royal Logic&lt;/a&gt;, using an example that also works in English (which I use here, since I've only read the book in English translation).  The &quot;visible stars&quot; refers to those stars which are permanently classified as being visible to the naked eye under good seeing conditions, an essential attribute, while the &quot;stars visible&quot; refers to those stars you can see on some occasion of interest, an accidental attribute.  When it's cloudy, the stars visible are only a small proportion of the visible stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T17:46:58.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-25T19:09:28.710" Score="-1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I faced this puzzling Fill in the Blank which asks-&#xA;VOT can make a three way differentiation among i.____________________ ii. ________________________ iii. _____________________plosives and fricatives....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10966" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:50:04.043" Title="Relation between VOT and three way distinctions between plosives and affricates" Tags="&lt;affricates&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2992" CreationDate="2015-11-25T23:31:03.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polar questions are usually marked by fronting an auxiliary, as in: 'Did it fall?' or 'Was it big?'.  Content questions are marked by query pronouns, also usually fronted, as in: 'What did he eat?'.  Since the fronting is not obligatory, the question may instead be marked by pitch inflection, as in: 'It FELL?' or 'He ate WHAT?'.  Even with fronting, the pitch cue is often retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2015-11-25T23:31:03.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14976" CreationDate="2015-11-26T08:56:29.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Computational linguistics, there are tools called &quot;Stemmer&quot; or &quot;Lemmatizer&quot; that perform the task you are asking for. Entering &quot;hebrew lemmatizer&quot; into duckduckgo search reveals the following first hit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://code972.com/blog/2013/08/129-hebrew-search-with-elasticsearch-and-hebmorph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://code972.com/blog/2013/08/129-hebrew-search-with-elasticsearch-and-hebmorph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a reference to GitHub&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/synhershko/HebMorph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/synhershko/HebMorph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check this out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-05T10:59:56.640" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T10:59:56.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-26T10:17:45.020" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I measure formants in a Praat graph or diagram? is there any way to calcualate formant frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10966" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T17:26:58.340" Title="Formants in Praat Exercises" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15099" CreationDate="2015-11-26T14:35:05.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not really clear what you are asking for, but German has some bound morphemes that never occur as single words, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;verunglimpfen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;glimpflich&lt;/em&gt; contain a morpheme &quot;glimpf&quot;, but there is no word like *Glimpf&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;unflätig&lt;/em&gt; contains a morpheme &quot;flat&quot;, but there is not longer an independent word *Flat in contemporary German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T14:35:05.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-26T16:43:25.887" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating an annotated corpus of poetry annotated with accent, alliteration, rhythm, and phonetics. I'd like it to handle and input poetry in multiple languages but still be able to add markup (perhaps in layers) for the phonetic markings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like an XML database with a front-end tool for entry and another one for display and concordance.  But it also sounds like something that must already exist somewhere. Who knows what software is already available and which ones are free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10970" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T14:17:27.920" Title="Corpora Tools for Cataloguing and Phonetic Markup?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15112" CreationDate="2015-11-26T17:19:41.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having selected a sound object, you look at it via the view and edit button in the Objects window. Select the Formant tab and make the first entry, Show Formants, be checked. You then have to select a small enough stretch (mouse select) and zoom in (^n) so that a spectrogram appears. Otherwise you'll see a blank window telling you about the maximum length of an analysis window). Then there are two settings tabs, which almost surely you don't need to mess with. To get specific numeric values, select a span of interest and press F1 for first formant, F2 for second formant and so on. Each of these will display the mean F1 (F2....) in the selection. You can also menu-select Formant Listing, which gives you F1-4 in evenly-spaced windows, along with the time corresponding to those red dots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T17:19:41.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2380" CreationDate="2015-11-26T19:39:08.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question obviously directs to &lt;strong&gt;homophony&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;homophones&lt;/strong&gt; - reread the title:&#xA;&quot;When you think one word, but write another, &lt;strong&gt;similar&lt;/strong&gt; sounding &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;, although the reasoning given points to a totally different direction, as you mention &lt;strong&gt;same phonemes&lt;/strong&gt; - which is entirely a different proposition. &#xA;You're pointing to a concrete omission, rather than an &quot;assimilation&quot; of the sound into the next word. In the given example you lose the meaning entirely as the &quot;assimilated&quot; example makes no sense anymore. You have to pronounce and write both words &quot;use&quot; and &quot;shields&quot;, otherwise you'd have to phrase it as &quot;You need youR shields&quot; - where the actual verb &quot;to use&quot; (the action) is subliminally understood and needs not be inserted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10971" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T19:39:08.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15099" CreationDate="2015-11-26T20:12:08.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two relevant terms for word subparts, &quot;stem&quot; and &quot;root&quot;. A root is the smallest meaning-bearing part of a word which carries the lexical meaning. A stem contains one or more roots, but typically excludes inflectional affixes. The problem is that there isn't a well-defined definition or theory of &quot;stem' which allows you to say whether 'cow' is just a root, or is it a root and a stem (though 'cows' would not be either, though it would contain a root and a stem if you think that there is a stem). A typical analysis of Spanish (or Italian) is that a verb word like &lt;em&gt;comer&lt;/em&gt; contains a stem &lt;em&gt;come-&lt;/em&gt; and an inflectional ending, and the stem is made up of the root &lt;em&gt;com-&lt;/em&gt; plus a theme vowel &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;. The main argument for reducing &lt;em&gt;come-&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;com+e&lt;/em&gt; is that verbs end in a very restricted subset of phonemes whereas what comes before that vowel is pretty unrestricted in light of the syllable structure and segment inventory of the language. So either you have to say that there is a really big coincidence that Spanish verb roots all end in /a, i, e/, or you have to say that there's a filter-type rule requiring all Spanish verb roots to end in /a, i, e/ (people tend not to like such rules) – or, you say that all roots have to select one of three meaningless suffixes which is added to the root to form a stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of Bantu languages, verbs have a very rich structure where a root combines with many different derivational suffixes and then a lot of inflectional suffixes, and there can be many layers of analysis, so that a root combines with derivational suffixes to give you a Derivational Stem, then some tense and negation markers are added to give an Inflectional Stem, then reduplication gives the Compound Stem, then object markers give you another thing called the Macro-stem, and so on. See Downing 2001 &quot;Ungeneralizable Minimality in Ndebele&quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking for an example of a case where a root combines with an obligatory suffix to give a stem but the stem always has to be combined with something else, then you could look at Romance verbs. However, the stem is often the same as the informal imperative, so you'd have to look at a verb like &lt;em&gt;contar&lt;/em&gt; with the stem &lt;em&gt;conta-&lt;/em&gt; and the imperative &lt;em&gt;cuenta&lt;/em&gt; to get an example where the stem isn't the same as an existing word. On the other hand, if you don't mean stem in the sense &quot;root plus some obligatory affix&quot; (thus, where the stem is the same as the root), then Jknappen's answer gives examples from German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T20:12:08.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-27T02:58:16.700" Score="2" ViewCount="2755" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first question here.  I normally participate in ELU.  This question was posted yesterday &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/289903/129806&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/289903/129806&lt;/a&gt;.  The OP asks why &lt;strong&gt;They build a house next to mine.&lt;/strong&gt; is not correct.  The accepted answer is not acceptable to me.  John Lawler's answer is more in the right direction (could be a great answer, however I am not able to see that because it assumes understanding of things which I am not completely clear on yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that in the above sentence there is a conflict between the lexical aspect of &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt; and how the verb is being used in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  I'd like to say &quot;There is a conflict between the lexical aspect of the verb and it's grammatical aspect.&quot; however I am not sure if I am using the term &quot;grammatical aspect&quot; correctly.  Am I?  What exactly is the difference between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I can see that there is a difference between a verb's lexical aspect and how it is used in a sentence but often it seems that the use of the verb in a sentence changes it's lexical aspect.  For example, in looking online, I see that sources say &quot;build&quot; is an accomplishment verb and that it is telic.  However, in the sentence, &quot;They build houses for a living.&quot; the verb doesn't have that &quot;accomplishment&quot; sense but seems to make it an &quot;activity&quot; verb.  It also seems to be atelic in the sentence.  What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm motivated to ask this because as an ESL teacher teaching students whose native language is Chinese it is a daily occurrence that students use verbs incorrectly and don't seem to have an understanding of verbs and their lexical aspect which we as native English speakers have.  So, a student will say &quot;I write a book today.&quot; or &quot;I am working in the R&amp;amp;D department.&quot; (but they don't mean it in the &quot;Just doing this for a few weeks while my colleague is on vacation&quot; sense.)  And, the question from  ELU that I linked is a common one, and I would like to develop a good and meaningful explanation to help students understand this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10974" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T03:40:21.910" Title="Grammatical Aspect and Lexical Aspect" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-27T05:02:04.113" Score="15" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question involves  the commonest languages still used in 2015. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prof. John McWhorter&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/4034/5306&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; argue different rates of language change, e.g. the language change from Old Norse to Icelandic&lt;sub&gt;2015&lt;/sub&gt; &amp;lt; the language change from Old English to English&lt;sub&gt;2015&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there or rankings&#xA; any indices that compare such changes?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T04:16:28.427" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T21:49:56.947" Title="Are there any rankings of languages' rates of change?" Tags="&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15120" CreationDate="2015-11-27T07:24:29.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your students won't go far wrong if they follow the rule: For the present tense of a verb referring to an activity or a process (i.e., non-stative), use the progressive aspect.  There is an exception to this rule for generic sentences, as Lawler says, where you don't need to use progressive, and the historical present is also an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a semantic sense, the apparent exceptions are not truly exceptional, since generic sentences do not just apply to the present time, and the historical present actually refers to the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what you're saying about the &quot;lexical aspect&quot; of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-11-27T17:08:50.243" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T17:08:50.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-27T07:54:40.530" Score="4" ViewCount="1605" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we consider that there are phonological observations as to what is an English word and what probably isn't, one could come up with a dictionary of &quot;all possible&quot; English words, i.e. all words that somehow sound &quot;English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This dictionary would probably contain &quot;caterpillar&quot;, but it wouldn't contain &quot;lkdsafj&quot; -- what's important here is that it would also contain words that somehow seem to be proper English words, but have no real meaning at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many words would that dictionary contain (roughly) if we reasonably limit the maximum word length (i.e. no longer than average words in an actual dictionary)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we could take an actual, contemporary English dictionary and compare it to our imaginary dictionary -- say we take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Entries_and_relative_size&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;300,000 main entries of the OED&lt;/a&gt; as our actual English dictionary, which would be the 300,000 most frequent English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the ratio of &quot;words actually in use&quot; (in the context of this question &quot;in use&quot; means: &quot;defined in an actual dictionary&quot;) to &quot;possible words&quot; (words in our imaginary dictionary)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper scientific terminology for the problem/question I'm describing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm using English as an example -- this might have been discussed for other languages as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is any research about this topic, I'd also like to ask if the &quot;actual&quot; to &quot;possible&quot; ratio differs between languages or not, and if it does -- can those differences be explained somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10976" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T00:44:33.683" Title="How many of all possible English words are actually in use (have meaning)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15120" CreationDate="2015-11-27T09:04:12.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As luck would have it, I'm just preparing a talk on aspect at a conference. The problem, with your question is that you're looking at aspect in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your sentence (as a sequence of words) is perfectly grammatical. It only becomes ungrammatical (in as much as that means anything) when you put it in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And what do they do? They build a house next to mine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before you know it, they build a house next to mine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They build a house next to mine, every year, then tear it down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*They build a house next to mine, right now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has no such thing as lexical aspect (verbs that already indicate the completion of the event in their frame) with some exception where the semantics already carries the meaning, such as shop vs. buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs such as &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand are aspect free. This is in contrast to Slavic languages, where most verbs are clearly marked as to aspect. E.g. in Czech, there is no such thing as saying 'shoot (sb) dead'. The verb 'shoot (sb)' already contains the completion (death), whereas a separate verb means 'shot and wounded' (ie. shot without completion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason people's first instinct is to say that &lt;em&gt;They build a house next to mine.&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical, is that they already assume a default 'generic' context. E.g. &lt;em&gt;last year&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt;. This is purely a matter of default frames of reference and collocation. Not grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to approach aspect (following Givón), is through the TAM space (tense, aspect, modality). Any utterance is positioning the meaning somewhere in that space. You are never (or almost never) just expressing one of these, you're always also being committed to the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in sentences 1 and 2, you are talking about a narrative time and negative emotion. It is interesting, how often the 'default' meaning of aspect/tense can be inverted through narration and emotional charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas sentence 3 is a simple propositional statement with time and repetition marker which identify the aspectual reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1-3, the aspectual/modality markers go hand in hand with the tense marking on the verb (plus provide context for its interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time/aspect marker in sentence 4, however, clashes with the tense/aspect marking on the verb. And since that is the one likely to be assumed when no such marker is present, the sentence on its own feels 'ungrammatical'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has important implications for teaching tense/aspect. It needs to be taught alongside its full communicative function, not just with reference to the timeline and an abstract notion of completion. This is quite often done in modern TEFL materials (e.g. Headway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I outlined what this looks like in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/presenting-aspect-as-tense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this presentation&lt;/a&gt; (it focuses on Czech, but gives the English overview for comparison).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T09:04:12.247" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15120" CreationDate="2015-11-27T13:26:46.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English the lexical aspect or aktionsart is not fixed for most verbs, but is context dependent instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present tense events are formed using the progressive aspect in English. A bare present/non-past tense verb instead conveys habitual meaning. Dominik Lukes gave an example (3) of how the habitual meaning could be made explicit. He also gives some examples (1, 2) of how the bare present verb can be used in a present story telling style, but note that this is a rather unusual and marked style. A single sentence in isolation can't really use that style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example sentence &quot;they build a house next to mine&quot; doesn't seem at all natural as a habitual sentence, because the noun 'house' is given the singular indefinite article. A normal habitual sentence would be &quot;they build houses (next to mine)&quot;. So your example, while not strictly ungrammatical, is very unnatural and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/4555/2555&quot;&gt;infelicitous&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T13:26:46.167" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15123" CreationDate="2015-11-27T15:02:27.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn’t find a cite quickly, but the phonotactic space in English is very sparsely filled. If you use a length interval of e.g. 3 to 6 phones, there are (many) millions of legal sequences, but only (as you say), some hundreds of thousands of used English words (possible 1 million, by some estimates). The ‘occupancy’ is greatest at the lowest end of the length scale, and decreases very quickly as length increases. I’m not prepared to say that the decrease is ‘exponential’, but the space of possible words gets huge as more combinations are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple ways to approach this problem empirically, in the absence of citations. One, you could use/make a phonotactic word generator to enumerate the phonotactic space (then use a dictionary search to subtract the real words). &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Two, you could use a measure like ‘lexical neighborhood density’ as a proxy for phonotactic occupancy. There exist dictionaries with neighborhood density measures calculated (or, you could calculate them for a new list, using e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://clearpond.northwestern.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLEARPOND&lt;/a&gt;). The average neighborhood density across lengths might give a rough idea of the occupancy. This second option is a problem because average neighborhood density (as commonly implemented, with a phoneme edit distance of 1) drops to 0 very quickly as length increases. This happens precisely because the occupancy drops so fast, but it’s also annoying in terms of precision.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The question is actually more nuanced, because phonotactic constraints are gradient and probabilistic; there is the question of ‘more likely’ and ‘less likely’ beneath the binary ‘legal/illegal’ concept. Looking at this level, the real words tend to be much more ‘likely’ than sequences sampled at random from the phonotactic space, which you’d expect if real people prefer likelier phonotactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2015-11-27T15:24:55.233" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T15:24:55.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15123" CreationDate="2015-11-27T17:02:37.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zero percent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proof: The prefix &quot;un-&quot; is prefixed to an adjective to form another adjective.  For instance, corresponding to the adjective &quot;true&quot;, we have the adjective &quot;untrue&quot;.  But since &quot;untrue&quot; is also an adjective, we must also have &quot;ununtrue&quot;.  Similarly, &quot;unununtrue&quot;, and so on, ad infinitum.  Yet only one of these additional forms is actually used, viz. &quot;untrue&quot;.  (They all have meaning, however.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One divided by infinity is zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T17:02:37.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15123" CreationDate="2015-11-27T20:18:44.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on how you approach this. It would be relatively easy to generate English non-words using phonotactic rules and then calculate the proportion. As others have said, it is likely to be quite small even if we exclude arguments by recursion which generate unrealistic word forms no matter how supposedly well-formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, something similar has been done in the Lexicon Projects for orthographic forms (for many languages these would be the same but for English they present completely different challenges). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://elexicon.wustl.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;American&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/lexicon-projects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;British Lexicon&lt;/a&gt; projects. However, their aim was not to generate the largest possible number of non-words but rather the largest possible number of plausible forms that could be used in psycholinguistic testing requiring non-words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could possibly use their data to generate a more comprehensive list (e.g. by training a neural network on the patterns combined with some rules). However, I'm not sure if the pay off would be worth the effort - unless you can find some real application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the British Lexicon Project has done work on Dutch, German and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T20:18:44.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15123" CreationDate="2015-11-27T20:36:04.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want such a product, limiting entries to ones no longer than average word length in an actual dictionary would exclude quite a number of actual words, since long actual words are longer than average (that's how averages work). A better approach would be to limit string to something longer than the longest actual word, so that you won't exclude real words. You have to make policy decisions about what the words of English are, for instance is the chemical name of the protein &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;titin&lt;/a&gt; a word with a couple hundred thousand letters; do you include &lt;em&gt;pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis&lt;/em&gt; which most people don't know, or &lt;em&gt;antidisestablishmentarianism&lt;/em&gt; which people mostly know because it's the supposedly longest word of English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd also need to decide what your unit of counting is. The two most obvious possibilities are phonemes, and syllables. It is widely believed (incorrectly, as it happens) that &quot;possible word&quot; is a function of &quot;possible syllable&quot; and &quot;possible number of syllables&quot; (there's more to it than that). So if you determine that the upper limit on syllable count is 15, then all you'd have to do is develop a syllable-generator that gives you all of the syllables of English, so that [pæt] and [præt] are generated, but *[tpæ] and *[rpæt] are not. Armed with all of the possible syllables plus a limit on word length, you have an approximation of all theoretically-possible words of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This syllable-generator would be a bit tricky, since you have to make a decision about what syllables are allowed. We know what [hɪl] is a possible syllable in English, since it is an actual syllable found in &lt;em&gt;hill, Hilbert, Hillman&lt;/em&gt; and so on. It is not clear on those grounds whether [pæf] is a possible syllable, but we can also rely on native speaker intuitions that even if there aren't any words with that syllable, it's still a theoretically possible syllable – unless your theory of syllables is radically empiricist and if it doesn't exist somewhere in an actual word, it isn't possible. So you would need to devise some psychological test to validate your underlying theory of possible syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, prospects for developing a sharp discriminating function for sorting into possible / impossible are dim. Nonexistent types like *[bma] seem to be generally rejected by all speakers, but there are also syllables like ?[zla] which make most speakers uncomfortable but are not as badd as *[bma]. Onset sequences like [zw] don't exist, except in Zwicky and zwieback, which are not usually household words. The sequence [CLV̆LC] where L=liquid and V̆=single lax vowel happens to be non-existent (i.e. *blort, *grolm, *plælk), and by perseverating on this gap, you can shift people's intuitions to the point that such sequences get judged as &quot;not apparently allowed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The famous *sCiV̆Ci generalization, that identical consonants separated by a short vowel and preceded by [s] are not possible, is a generalization that isn't limited to the syllable, so just as *[skɪk] is rejected as not a possible word, *[skɪkuwn] is also rejected, and that sequence spans two syllables. A final problem is that while *[fɪ] is not a possible syllable of English, using the usual test (asking speakers &quot;Could there be a word [fɪ]?&quot;), it shows up in a lot of words, like &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt;. Some people solve this by making the assumption about syllabification, that the word is the combination of the syllable [fɪz] and the syllable [ɪks], but the problem is that people generally do not accept that the second syllable of &lt;em&gt;physics&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;icks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to drop the syllable from the computation. Asking people for intuitions about possible phoneme sequences is even more problematic – you're not going to get good answers to questions like &quot;can an English word contain the phoneme sequence [ændə]?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue is that &quot;possible&quot; is not a self-evident fact. &quot;Possible&quot; can only be determined relative to a theoretical model of the thing in question, and there is no clearly-correct theoretical model of &quot;what a word of English is&quot;. Even the question of what is &quot;phonotactically possible&quot; is very unclear, and typically people use professionally-privileged introspection to determine this, where judgments are based on on-the-fly mental searches for &quot;similar substrings&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative approach that I would give more serious consideration to is developing probability tables based on actual words, which would tell you what the probability of a given sequence of English phonemes is which, by overlapping the computation, could lead you to conclude that &lt;em&gt;arpantize&lt;/em&gt; is a theoretically possible word though not an actual one. If your machine has a relatively short longest sequence for building those tables, for example 6 phonemes, this could be somewhat informative. If you build a probability table based on actual words ranging from 1 to 30 phonemes in length found in some dictionary ranging from 1 to 30 phonemes, all this will tell you is what words are in the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ADDENDUM]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a version of the latter approach &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2553700/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the article and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bncdnet.ku.edu/cgi-bin/DEEC/post_ppc.vi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the calculator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-11-28T00:44:33.683" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T00:44:33.683" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15120" CreationDate="2015-11-28T02:36:03.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's been a lot of terminological variation and hence confusion in aspect studies (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2002.6.issue-2/lity.2002.007/lity.2002.007.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sasse 2002&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://slr.sagepub.com/content/18/2/172.abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Slabakova 2002&lt;/a&gt;). So, when you read any research on aspect, make sure you know how the terms are understood/used in that particular paper. The following is mostly based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195381979.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195381979-e-25&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Filip 2012&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexical aspect includes telic/atelic (and sometimes bounded/unbounded) dichotomy. It is determined by the verb itself, the verb phrase, and even the whole sentence. Not everyone makes a distinction between telicity and boundedness but imho Ilse Depraetere has convincingly shown why it's important (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00984959&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Depraetere 1995&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical aspect includes, among other things, imperfective/perfective (understood differently from what these terms usually mean in traditional Slavic studies). Again, imho Vladimir Plungian (and many others) has convincingly demonstrated that e.g. Russian sovershennyj/nesovershennyj vid does not correspond to PF/IPF (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00806765.2011.631785&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Plungian 2011&lt;/a&gt;). The Russian dichotomy is derivational anyway, which by the way does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; turn it into some lexical aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspectual classes are traditionally states (&lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;), achievements (&lt;em&gt;recognize&lt;/em&gt;), accomplishments (&lt;em&gt;build a house&lt;/em&gt;), and activities (&lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt;). Sometimes aspectual classes are called lexical aspect, so, to avoid terminological confusion and unnecessary baggage, a new term &lt;em&gt;actionality&lt;/em&gt; has been proposed (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2003.6.issue-3/lity.2003.003/lity.2003.003.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tatevosov 2003&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term Aksionsart, because of terminological confusion, is usually avoided in modern aspect research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, your example. The unacceptability of the sentence &quot;They build a house next to mine&quot; under habitual reading is infelicitous because of &lt;strong&gt;extralinguistic considerations.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. They put up a tent next to my house every summer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2015-11-28T03:40:21.910" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T03:40:21.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15081" CreationDate="2015-11-28T11:00:53.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's even worse: Even though Dutch and German separated only a few centuries ago, as a southern German I wouldn't have understood much of your Dutch example before I started to learn Dutch recently. The same problem exists with Yiddish, the other language that is similarly close to German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as if that were not enough, the same problem exists with dialects of one's native language. I mostly know this from German, but it's true for English as well. Most native English speakers will have quite a bit of trouble understanding even standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Scots&lt;/a&gt;, which is somewhere on the boundary between a dialect of English and a separate language. But thick dialects of English proper such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yorkshire English&lt;/a&gt; can be even harder to understand. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWe1b9mjjkM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's original pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; is relatively easy in comparison, but it's still relevant because it demonstrates how pronunciation changes over time. Compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxRzEXiQ66M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Richard III's pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; just a little further back, or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5QAV6lOCnQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chaucer&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, pronunciation has changed much more than spelling, which is one reason why modern English spelling is so chaotic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the examples show, the problem is in the different pronunciation. But once you get immersed into the culture surrounding a dialect of your native language, or a foreign language close to your own, there are two things that make it very easy to pick it up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are regular transformations connecting the pronunciations. Once you have realised that &lt;em&gt;bee-uck&lt;/em&gt; is Yorkshire accent for &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt;, you will form a theory that &lt;em&gt;look, hook, cook&lt;/em&gt; will be pronounced &lt;em&gt;lee-uck, hee-uck, kee-uck&lt;/em&gt;. (I don't know whether any of the last three examples is correct, and I wouldn't know where to check. In general these theories are correct in more cases than they are wrong, and that's enough.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even where words differ, such as &lt;em&gt;ken&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; in Scots and Scottish English, dialect words are often either related to words in the standard language or even exist there with roughly the same meaning, though in the obscurer parts of an educated speaker's vocabulary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal experience has been that as a native German speaker, through very little effort and in just a few months, I passed from understanding hardly any Dutch at all (written or spoken) to understanding it pretty well though still basically unable to speak or write it. The key to this was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;learning a very small number of important differences of grammar;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;learning a very small number of important words that are totally different or false friends;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;internalising the different orthography and the mostly regular pronuncation shifts (this happened automatically along with the previous two points).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that I was able to read Dutch books quickly with very little trouble and no dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastEditorDisplayName="user4938" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T20:06:20.420" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T20:06:20.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-28T14:01:50.777" Score="4" ViewCount="1316" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I learnt that the literal meaning of the main written Japanese form for dolphin, &quot;海豚&quot;, is &quot;sea&quot; and &quot;pig&quot;. The Japanese person mentioning that noted that he didn't know for sure why that was the case. At first I thought it was because dolphin meat was similar to pork, but then I looked further into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B5%B7%E8%B1%9A#Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;海豚&lt;/a&gt; is also used in Chinese. Meanwhile, the English word &quot;porpoise&quot;, which comes from Medieval Latin via French, is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=3689&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;based&lt;/a&gt; on a compound of pig and fish. In addition, the Welsh for &quot;porpoise&quot; is based on sea pig and sea sow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=porpoise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; mentions that Latin had &quot;porculus marinus&quot;, with the theory that its snout looked like that of a pig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammals_as_food&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Marine mammals as food&lt;/a&gt; mentions that in Peru, dolphin meat is referred to as &quot;sea pork&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Meerschweinchen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fact&lt;/a&gt; that the German for guinea pig is &quot;sea pig&quot;, but I'm not looking into that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are some sea mammals called &quot;sea pigs&quot;, especially in Chinese/Japanese? Failing that, has there been any cases of sea mammals being called &quot;sea pigs&quot;, where it is known that the speakers of that language don't eat sea mammal meat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T08:04:21.947" Title="Why are some sea mammals called &quot;sea pigs&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15136" CreationDate="2015-11-28T15:38:49.463" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I am analyzing a phonological process like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/maNioN/ --&gt; [mãn.i.õn] --&gt; [mã.ni.õn] --&gt; [mã.nyõ?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These intermediary forms make sense according to the phonology of the language.  Does the transcription make sense, i.e. having intermediary forms between brackets ? Is it even correct to have intermediary forms? I guess not in OT, but maybe it's tolerated in a rule-based approach, or is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T18:41:00.523" Title="Is it standard to have intermediary forms when deriving surface structures from underlying ones?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15135" CreationDate="2015-11-28T17:06:38.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a question about &quot;standard&quot; is asking for trouble, since there's no definition of &quot;what's standard&quot; and no behavioral test for discerning if something is &quot;standard&quot;. That use of square brackets is, nevertheless, rather at odds with historical professional practice in generative phonology. It may be observed contemporarily in homeworks in phonology classes, where students don't know what is standard and instructors may not feel like making a point of objecting to use of square brackets in pre-surface forms. In journal publications, it is difficult these days to find derivations where you could test what is standard, for two reasons. Most obviously, publications in phonology over the past 20 years which include underlying-to-surface information are usually framed in OT which uses the finger to identify surface forms. The second reason is that square brackets were only used to (completely) enclose segment sequences, but derivations under autosegmental phonology became representationally richer, including all sorts of add-on tiers which were not enclosed in square brackets. So original observed standards regarding use of square brackets fell into desuetude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you focus on papers written up to the 80's, then you will find that square brackets are reserved for the actual output. See Hyman's textbook p. 82, 85, 87 etc. Even then, there was a lot of variation, though not to the point of putting &quot;surface form&quot; brackets around every intermediate representation. Note that square brackets were also used to indicate cyclic bracketing and morphological structure. It was also common to not use square brackets at all in a derivation, because the surface form was the last form in a derivation (see Hyman's textbook p. 128, 130 etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a typographic desideratum in publications to the effect that linguistic data has to be visually distinct from text, when examples are given in a paragraph (as contrasted with a display). That leaves intermediate forms in a tight spot if you give a derivation in the main text / footnotes, which then requires using bold or italics – which is forbidden by some publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T17:06:38.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15135" CreationDate="2015-11-28T18:41:00.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no standard and no way to say what is correct in linguistic theory.  Linguists disagree about theory, and they always have.  This talk about &quot;standard theory&quot; got started when Chomsky outlined some of his ideas and then said that henceforth he would refer to what he had described as the &quot;Standard Theory&quot;.  I have to think that he meant it as a sly joke.  He proposes a &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; for his theory, for convenience of reference, as of course was his right, since it was his theory, but then, subsequently, anyone referring to this theory of his would have to call it &quot;Standard&quot;, even if they just wanted to disagree with it.  Get it?  A pun on a proper noun.  It's Standard (because that's its name), but that actually says nothing about whether it is standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No linguist was ever fooled by this cute little rhetorical trick, but it seems to have thrown a generation of linguistics students into deep confusion.  No real linguist would ask the questions you've asked about what is &quot;standard&quot; and what is &quot;correct&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you want to know whether what you've said about derivational stages in your example will make sense to phonologists, sure, it's perfectly clear. Appealing to intermediate stages of derivation was begun by Leonard Bloomfield, was controversial at the time (even for Bloomfield himself), became a routine part of Generative Phonology, then fell out of favor with some.  But every phonologist knows how it works.  That's not a problem.  Do people agree with it?  Some do, some don't, some don't care.  Has it been designated as part of a Chomskian &quot;Standard&quot;?  Who knows?  Who cares?  That's not a linguistic question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, I don't personally believe in multiple steps of derivation, in either phonology or syntax.  But I would never object to the sort of derivation you give in your example, because that sort of theoretical objection would presumably be beside the point of the analysis you're proposing.  It would be irrelevant, and impolite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about style -- what is currently most fashionable among phonologists -- I don't know (or care).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything wrong with your use of slashes and brackets.  Generative phonologists routinely use slashes for underlying phonological forms and use brackets for phonetic transcriptions of any stage of a phonological derivation.  What you have written seems quite clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-11-28T18:41:00.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15134" CreationDate="2015-11-29T08:26:11.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;sea pigs&quot; in English is translated from &quot;porci marini&quot; in Latin not just because they have similar snouts as pigs do. They also use it in the same way. When gathering food, they submerge their snouts in the sand. Well, they look like pigs, too (look at the round shape with seemingly redundant mass), and have a similar pink color, too. All nations and cultures must have noticed the similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terminology is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; related to their taste, so it's irrelevant that the Asian speakers didn't eat sea pigs. If they named things according to the taste, they wouldn't call them &quot;sea pigs&quot;, anyway, because sea pigs actually taste like chicken. In some regions of Japan, they eat dolphins and use their fat instead of pork lard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastEditorUserId="9284" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T08:32:54.560" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T08:32:54.560" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15147" CreationDate="2015-11-29T11:53:17.583" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for any research that covers introversion, or more specifically, reluctance or inabilty to learn by speaking with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10982" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T07:31:29.203" Title="Has any research been done on the effect of introversion on language learning?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8765" CreationDate="2015-11-29T16:34:03.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this page useful: &lt;a href=&quot;http://arabic.desert-sky.net/verbs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arabic.desert-sky.net/verbs.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Googling &quot;basic Arabic verbs&quot; led me to a number of similar useful pages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copied a bunch of these into Anki for drill. By reading actual Arabic (in small doses such as on Twitter, as I always need a dictionary or auto-translate) I get to see how the basic verbs are used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10984" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T16:34:03.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-29T19:15:47.440" Score="-1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;We take a LHS and RHS in De Morgan's Law. How do we decide upon it?&#xA;How do we know which one to take as RHS and which one as LHS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10966" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T23:18:20.123" Title="De Morgan's Law in Semantics what decides the rhs and lhs" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15141" CreationDate="2015-11-29T19:47:53.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several different kinds of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/IELL-LogicalNotation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;logical notation&lt;/a&gt; possible; few  worry about RHS or LHS.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here are some different notational &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/demorgan.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;conventions for De Morgan's Laws&lt;/a&gt;, taken from this &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Logic Study Guide&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't refer to RHS vs LHS, because logical equivalence is symmetric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T23:18:20.123" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T23:18:20.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2015-11-30T12:20:57.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The location deixis  in Muna language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DEIXIS OF LOCATION&#xA;demonstrative (pronoun/adjective) Aini (this)  aitu, amaitu,atatu, awatu(that)&#xA;Demonstrative (adverbs)          We ini (here)  we itu, we watu (there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10991" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T12:20:57.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2015-11-30T22:22:59.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no general terms that I know of, other than &quot;fractions&quot; I suspect this is the sort of language trading peoples would invent. Who knows what metaphorical pathways there are for their creation. I doubt Pirahã has such language. With time these things become lexicalized and people forget the etymologies and histories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;European&quot; languages I guess you expect them to be regular (and probably &quot;feminine&quot;) as they are probably participles, or as Douglas Harper (etymonline.com) says quoting &quot;Watkins:&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;marking the accomplishment of the notion of the base&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...That it is a result adjective or verb-thingy is not surprizing. In Turkish, for example, to split is &quot;ikiye bölmek&quot; to cut (in)to two. But also, you expect things below ten to be a bit irregular, due to (over)use. Also, arbitrary historical things related to cultural and religious metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has another from of fractional speak:  &quot;one in four&quot; &quot;ten in one-hundred&quot; And Spanish &quot;uno de cada cuantro,&quot; &quot;diez de cada cien&quot; But this is not limited to the badly inbred European languages; Turkish has: &quot;Dörtte bir&quot;,(one in four) &quot;Yüzde on&quot; (ten in 100) all marked with the locative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish also has two lexicalized words like &quot;half&quot; of English or &quot;mitad&quot; of Spanish:  Yarım (half) &amp;amp; Çeyrek (quarter). &quot;Yarım&quot; is a verbal element from another 'to cut' verb (think something like: cutted)- a result noun.  &quot;Çeyrek&quot; comes from Farsi and is composed of familiar Indo-European elements چار يك  VERY literally: four in one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other form in Turkish is verbal 1/4 bir bölü dört approx.: '1 divided 4'. The noun &quot;bölü&quot; is one of the modern Turkish derivatives of &quot;bölmek&quot; which I mentioned before. In Ottoman Turkish they used the Arabic تقسيم Taksim &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish also has regular (in form) ordinal suffix (In Modern Turkish almost everything can be an ending), but I do not know its history and it is NOT used in fractions (I learned this the natural way by making a fool of myself early in my learning experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the ways and language used to describe a &lt;em&gt;fraction of a whole changes&lt;/em&gt; from langauge to language as can be seen from this completelt unrepresentative of the 7000-9000 human languages around today. ....Three seven-thousands at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10497" LastActivityDate="2015-11-30T22:22:59.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15139" CreationDate="2015-12-01T07:31:29.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very &lt;strong&gt;hard area to research&lt;/strong&gt; because of so many confounding variables and the fundamental difficulty of measurement of both introversion (or similar personality traits) as well as progress in learning (both reliability and validity are problematic in most measures). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's been no end of research on personality and SLA (second language acquisition). Most of it has used a version of MBTI (Myers-Briggs). But given all the difficulties, there is no good reliable evidence of a strong correlation between personality traits and learning success. One suggestions made was that personality interacts with other factors (such as learning context) but is not in itself a predictor of learning outcomes. A &lt;strong&gt;good survey of the literature&lt;/strong&gt; is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychology-Language-Learner-Differences-Acquisition/dp/0805860185&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this book by Zoltán Dörnyei&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not at all clear how this should be &lt;strong&gt;applied in practice&lt;/strong&gt;. The most convincing case for using personality as a part of the mix in instructional design with a clear methodology was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaching-Whole-Class-Betty-Leaver/dp/0803966466/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this book by Betty Lou Leaver&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T07:31:29.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-01T07:33:45.640" Score="3" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;If linguistic rules which describe the derivation of surface forms from underlying ones, are meant to account for both production and perception, then it seems that intermediary forms like the two posited below must be reconsidered. How should one best eliminate them, if at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/maNioN/ --&gt; [mãn.i.õn] --&gt; [mã.ni.õn] --&gt; [mã.nyõ?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T11:00:23.677" Title="Eliminating intermediary forms to account for production and perception" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14954" CreationDate="2015-12-01T07:55:23.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized that French may also qualify as an answer to this question. Although indefinite singular countable nouns are marked with &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;un canard&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;une voiture&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), I think that indefinite mass-nouns and indefinite plurals are marked with &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of&quot; plus the &lt;strong&gt;definite&lt;/strong&gt; article: e.g., &lt;em&gt;du lait&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(some) milk&quot; is (at least historically) made up of &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;lait&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; milk&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;des voitures&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cars&quot; is composed of &lt;em&gt;de + &lt;strong&gt;les&lt;/strong&gt; + voitures&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; cars&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although nouns without articles are not interpreted as definite in French, this does seem to be a case where indefiniteness is formed on a definite foundation of some kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T07:55:23.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15153" CreationDate="2015-12-01T09:26:25.003" Score="9" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;Living for the past five years in countries in which English is not the native language has left me feeling that my use of my native tongue has somewhat diminished in daily speech. When I talk to my family back home, for example, I feel myself speaking rather slowly, using simple words, stumbling over word choice, and making simple grammar mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have any studies been done on language loss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10982" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T14:08:36.533" Title="What do we know about primary language loss?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-01T09:53:38.723" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone give me some examples of inanimate pronouns in Hindi? I can't come up with any example myself. I was reading this paper: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.warse.org/pdfs/2014/ijacst04332014.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gazetteer Method for Resolving Pronominal Anaphora in Hindi Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the authors said that they made a list of inanimate pronouns (they call them &lt;em&gt;non animistic&lt;/em&gt;). But I can't find any such pronoun. According to me, every pronoun in Hindi could also be used for animate objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10995" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T12:57:18.917" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T14:23:45.407" Title="Inanimate pronouns in Hindi" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;animacy&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15150" CreationDate="2015-12-01T15:22:47.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me &lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/play+devil&amp;#39;s+advocate&quot;&gt;play the devil's advocate&lt;/a&gt; a bit. Sorry if it looks too informal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have not lost your English. Instead, &lt;strong&gt;you have acquired a new language&lt;/strong&gt; (well, a dialect).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And its name is &lt;a href=&quot;https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia&quot;&gt;Simple English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living in your home country, you naturally communicate using your local dialect. Be it American English, British English, etc. Note that another, non-local dialect still may cause a bit of problem, e.g. for different idiomatic constructs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living in a foreign country, you are surrounded with people who use &lt;strong&gt;Simple English&lt;/strong&gt;, obviously because English is L2 for them. This makes you to change your habits of using your own language, otherwise they would misunderstand you too often. Ability of &lt;em&gt;«speaking rather slowly, using simple words»&lt;/em&gt; is essentially what is meant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you have really acquired another language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;And you have not lost your L1&lt;/strong&gt;. Simple proof is that you still comprehend it when listening or reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real challenge is obtaining an ability to quickly &lt;strong&gt;switch between the languages (dialects)&lt;/strong&gt;, and this is where you should probably point your efforts to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T15:22:47.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15164" CreationDate="2015-12-01T15:47:46.423" Score="0" ViewCount="937" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Praat scripting, and I was wondering if there was a way to &quot;find&quot; a word in a text grid tier and then find a sound in a different tier. I want praat to measure the last vowel in selected words in a large corpus (for which I have text grids). I've googled this but can't seem to find anything. If this isn't possible, would it be possible to find this in perl and then use Praat to find formants?&#xA;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T01:57:18.743" Title="Finding words in a Praat text grid" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15158" CreationDate="2015-12-01T15:56:07.197" Score="0" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Praat scripting but I want to write a Praat script to give me the formant values of a vowel at the midpoint and at the last point (99%) of the vowel. I want to be able to select the vowel and then run the script. Here is what I have so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;begin_vowel = Get start point... tier interval&#xA;end_vowel = Get end point... tier interval&#xA;duration_vowel = end_vowel - begin_vowel&#xA;&#xA;midway = begin_vowel + duration_vowel/2&#xA;ninetynine = .99 * duration_vowel               &#xA;&#xA;# for men&#xA;# To Formant (burg)... 0 5 4500 0.025 50&#xA;# for women&#xA;To Formant (burg)... 0 5 5500 0.025 50&#xA;&#xA;select Formant&#xA;f2_mid = Get value at time... 2 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_mid = Get value at time... 3 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;f2_end = Get value at time... 2 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_end = Get value at time... 3 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;outfile$ = &quot;formants.txt&quot;&#xA;fileappend 'f2_mid' 'f3_mid' 'f2_end' 'f3_end'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I select the vowel in a text grid tier and try to run it, I just get &quot;Command 'Get start point...' not available for this selection.&quot; Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T22:36:33.053" Title="Finding formants" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15148" CreationDate="2015-12-01T17:05:02.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My proposal is that there is just one level of derivation.  So it is not just that there are no intermediate levels of derivation, but also that there is no underlying level, either.  Yet phonological rules continue to be formulated and to apply much as they did in the original Generative Phonology -- I think of this as a revision to Generative Phonology (GP), not a totally new theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several assumptions made in GP that seem to be without any foundation.  I think that all three are wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The application of phonological rules is conditioned only by what is found in their inputs, not their outputs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonological rules apply differently from syntactic and morphological rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derivational rules (phonological, morphological, syntactic) apply serially, one at a time, rather than simultaneously, with all applicable rules applying at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologists are mostly very accustomed to thinking of the relationship between phonemic forms and surface phonetic forms as being a relationship between an underlying level of derivation of some language expression and a surface level for that same expression, but that's wrong, at least in the general case.  It's not necessary for the very same expression to have both a phonemic and a surface phonetic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, for the case where a phrase is composed of several words, each word may be a phonemic form, but the phrase may have a surface phonetic form.  We couldn't do that in conventional GP, because the syntactic rules that combine words into phrase are segregated off into a separate component from phonological rules, but as I noted above, I think that is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can tell the difference between a phonological rule and a syntactic rule, because phonological rules look at sound values, while syntactic rules don't have phonetic reference.  But it doesn't follow that the two kinds of rules apply in different &quot;components&quot; or at different levels of derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when several morphemes are combined by a morphological rule, this often calls into play phonological rules which make detailed adjustments to the sound segments of the morphemes, and the assumption of conventional GP is that the two things happen serially, in separate components.  First, you stick the morphemes together, then you apply certain phonological rules to amend the result.  But why assume those two things happen in separate steps?  No good reason.  I propose that the combination of morphemes into words and the application of certain phonological rules (specifically, the morphophonemic rules) happen all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that I have a lot of ground to cover yet, to make a single level theory of phonology (and morphology and syntax) plausible.  Probably the two most urgent things are to say specifically what I mean by &quot;derivational level&quot; and to say how feeding relationships among phonological rules can be described in the absence of multiple levels of derivation.  I plan to do those things in separate answers, below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Intermediate derivational stages could conceivably be necessary.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about whether there are intermediate stages of derivation is empirical, not just a matter of finding some theoretical symbol-pushing that manages to avoid mentioning explicitly any intermediate steps.  I'll show that by giving a putative counterexample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the pronunciation of &quot;bottle&quot; and &quot;Pat'll&quot; in those American dialects that have voiced [d] for the underlying /t/ in these forms.  How does the /t/ get voiced to a [d]?  Well, I don't know for sure, but the following is plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ends up in the pronunciation as a syllabic [l] begins as a sequence of unstressed vowel, say lax i, and non-syllabic l, and the vowel provides the context for flapping of the preceding t (since flapping happens only intervocalically).  The difference between t and flap t is that the t is an obstruent, but the flap is sonorant.  (This is not entirely clear, but let's assume this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sonorants tend to become voiced, so after the t has flapped, the resulting voiceless flap gets voiced by assimilation, because the preceding and following sounds are voiced (and also sonorant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the vowel before the l is lost and we are left with syllabic l after the flapped t.  You can't say a flap immediately before a following consonant with alveolar contact of the tongue tip, because a flap can have only momentary tongue tip contact, so now the voiced flap becomes a [d] (because of the immediately following l), which is not a sonorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have described this derivation as having a number of intermediate steps, but now let us consider whether or not I can go directly from the underlying form to the surface form by applying the phonological rules involved to make all the necessary feature changes at once, without any intermediate steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that is: No.  My derivation above requires the /t/ at a certain point in the derivation to be a sonorant, but it is neither an underlying sonorant nor a surface sonorant, so evidently there has to be an intermediate stage of derivation, like neither the underlying nor the surface form, at which the /t/ -&gt; [d] is a sonorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it will occur to you that it would be feasible to formulate a phonological rule to simply voice [t] before [l].  If you're not too picky about phonological rules being natural, maybe that will satisfy you.  It makes me rather uneasy. Why would that happen only to alveolar stop and not to other stops?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave the example of &quot;Pat'll&quot;, where I find that /t/ also winds up as [d], to show that one can't simply assume that &quot;bottle&quot; has a phonemic /d/ to resolve the difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this shows that the difference between ordinary GP with multiple derivational steps and my version of GP without intermediate steps is real.  There can be evidence to decide the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Strata&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you count derivational levels?  (There is going to be more syntax than phonology in my answer to this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In describing the relationship between their theory of GPSG and transformational generative grammar, the authors of &lt;strong&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; compare the base structures of TG, generated by context free phrase structure rules, to the structures assigned by a GPSG.  The first step in a transformational derivation is commonly taken to be a tree structure, i.e. a base structure, so that's one level.  The forms that are subsequently derived by applying syntactic transformations are additional levels of derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In GPSG, however, there are no transformations, and consequently there are no additional levels after that first one.  So in GPSG, sentences have just one single level of derivation.  GPSG is, according to its authors, &lt;em&gt;monostratal&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that the grammar assigns just a single structural description, a tree structure, to each language expression it generates.  TG, on the other hand, is &lt;em&gt;multistratal&lt;/em&gt;, due to the transformations, which produce additional levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying hard to be clear, here, because not everyone means the same thing by these terms &lt;em&gt;level, stratum, monostratal, multistratal&lt;/em&gt;.  For instance, the theory of Relational Grammar has no transformations (according to its authors), yet a sentence generated by an RG may have many strata.  So, is RG a monostratal theory?  I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A terminological complication is due to the fact that phrase structure grammars are usually made to describe a tree by starting with a PSG derivation, each step produced by applying a PSR (or &quot;production&quot;), so in a sense, a tree structure already involves multiple derivational steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, the sense of &lt;em&gt;monostratal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;level&lt;/em&gt; found in GPSG is the sense in which I use these terms.  A tree generated by a CFPSG has just a single level, which corresponds to the input to the transformations in TG.  But there are no transformations, either syntactic or phonological transformations, so a given language expression never gets any additional levels after the first &quot;base&quot; leval, and the theory that results is &lt;em&gt;monostratal&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I take up a detail concerning tree representations in Categorial Grammar and how phonological rules apply in creating the structural descriptions of language expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Trees of phonological forms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can phonological rules apply in a generative grammar without creating additional levels of derivation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most popular syntactic theory among logicians and philosophers who have needed a specific model for how human language works has been categorial grammar, CG.  There are lots of variations on it, but we will have one variety if we just take a tree given by a CF grammar of the sort familiar to linguists and add the expressions represented to the categories that name the tree nodes.  In CG, language forms, which have pronunciations and categories, are combined in a step by step manner to create new language forms, creating a tree structure from the bottom up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where a linguist might write a simple tree diagram as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   S&#xA; /  \&#xA;NP  VP&#xA;|    | \&#xA;Pat  V NP&#xA;     |  |&#xA;   eats pike&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a corresponding tree in CG might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Pat eats pike,S&#xA; /        \&#xA;Pat,NP  eats pike,VP&#xA;          |     \&#xA;        eats,V   pike,NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the variety of CG, the way that forms are combined does not have to be simple concatenation, as it is the above example.  In the form of grammar proposed by Richard Montague, arbitrary functions are allowed to determine the result of combining forms.  So, although I haven't seen this proposed elsewhere, I don't see any problem in principle with applying phonological rules to modify the result of combining forms.  That is what I've done in the next example tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [pʰæɾitspʰɑjk],S&#xA; /        \&#xA;/pæt/,NP  [itspʰɑjk],VP&#xA;          |       \&#xA;        /its/,V   /pɑjk/,NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a single tree structure, not a sequence of trees such as you find in transformational grammar, so it is a monostratal derivation.  It is neither an underlying structure nor a surface structure, because of course when there is only one derivational level, there is no meaningful way to characterize a surface versus underlying distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my idea about how phonological rules apply in a monostratal grammar.  Not only is there only one tree for the (unambiguous) example sentence above, but each of the five different language expressions involved is represented just once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, I will describe how rule ordering works when there are no multiple derivational levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. Rule interaction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the generative phonology of SPE, phonological rules apply (a) cyclically, (b) in an arbitrary linear order on each cycle, and (c) each rule applies simultaneously to any segments meeting its conditions in its input form.  I agree with practically all of this, except that for (b) the order is not linear, and for (c), all applicable rules simultaneously apply to all segments meeting their conditions (not just each rule taken individually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, in the SPE theory, phonological rules apply &lt;strong&gt;opaque&lt;/strong&gt;ly, in the sense that when a rule applies to a sound segment, all conditions on the application of the rule must be met in the input to the rule.  I agree with this, also, but I add another mode of &lt;strong&gt;transparent&lt;/strong&gt; rule application, for which it is the output of the rule where relevant conditions on a rule's application are found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms &lt;em&gt;opaque&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;transparent&lt;/em&gt; are taken from Paul Kiparsky, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_opacity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Phonological Opacity&lt;/a&gt;, who uses these terms in almost the sense I have just characterized, except that because Kiparsky was working in terms of a multi-stratal phonological framework, he understood opaque and transparent conditions to be global derivational constraints referring respectively to underlying and surface phonological forms.  Since in the present monostratal theory, for the most part, Kiparsky's underlying forms are the same as the inputs to phonological rules, and his surface forms are the same as the outputs of rules, this difference between his and my usage is of no consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before dealing in more detail below with opaque and transparent application, I'll mention my interpretation of cyclic application and the matter of special phonological boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have implied that I agree with the SPE theory of cyclic application of phonological rules.  I interpret the cyclic principle in phonology as requiring that before constituents can be combined in a phrase structure tree, all applicable phonological rules must first be applied to each constituent.  But this is just what I proposed in the preceding section &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; of this answer.  So this monostratal theory does incorporate the cyclic principle of SPE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rather unhappy detail of the SPE theory is the appeal to several apparently arbitrary boundaries in forms, just to get phonological rules to work right.  These include the + boundary that separates morphemes, the # boundary that separates words, the = boundary, and various labeled brackets distinguishing the categories of words.  No such artificial boundary symbols are required in monostratal phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6 Rule Order&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without multiple stages of derivation, phonological rules can't be linearly ordered, but they can still be ordered.  We can define an ordering relation &quot;before&quot; which works very much like the linear &quot;before&quot; relation of standard Generative Phonology.  (However, it's not quite an &quot;order&quot; in the mathematical sense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, consider the derivation of the pronunciation of &quot;want a pie&quot;, [wʌ̃ɾ̃̃ə̃pʰɑj].  The n of &quot;want&quot; nasalizes the preceding vowel and is then lost before the following voiceless stop t.  The t is now intervocalic and at the end of a word, so it flaps.  The flap is then nasalized under the influence of the preceding nasal vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a multistratal derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/wʌnt/ /ə/ /paj/  underlying (phonemic) forms of the three words&#xA;## wʌnt ## ə ## paj ## a phrase is formed by syntactic rules,&#xA;                  leaving # marks to remember where the words begin and end&#xA;## wʌnt ## ə ## pʰɑj ## Rule 1, aspiration of the word initial p&#xA;## wʌ̃nt ## ə ## pʰɑj ## Rule 2, regressive vowel nasalization&#xA;## wʌ̃t ## ə ## pʰɑj ##, Rule 3, deletion of nasal stop before&#xA;                 a homorganic voiceless stop&#xA;## wʌ̃ɾ ## ə ## pʰɑj ##, Rule 4, flapping of intervocalic t across&#xA;                 following ## boundary&#xA;## wʌ̃ɾ̃̃ ## ə ## pʰɑj ## , Rule 5, progressive assimilation of sonorant (flap)&#xA;                 in nasality&#xA;## wʌ̃ɾ̃̃ ## ə̃ ## pʰɑj ## , Rule 6, progressive assimilation of&#xA;                 sonorant (vowel) in nasality across word boundary&#xA;wʌ̃ɾ̃̃ə̃pʰɑj, convention to lose #&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a monostratal derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/wʌnt/ /ə/ /paj/  underlying (phonemic) forms of the three words&#xA;    a verb phrase is formed by syntactic rules, and                    &#xA;    Rule 1 applies opaquely (/p/ is at the beginning of a word), and&#xA;    Rule 2 applies opaquely (the vowel is followed by a nasal), and&#xA;    Rule 3 applies opaquely (the /n/ is followed by /t/), and&#xA;    Rule 4 applies transparently (the descendant of /t/ is intervocalic), and&#xA;    Rule 5=6 applies transparently (the descendants of the&#xA;             sonorants are preceded by nasal sonorants).&#xA;wʌ̃ɾ̃̃ə̃pʰɑj, surface form&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of &quot;before&quot;:  For two distinct rules A and B, A is before B when either A is opaque or B is transparent.  For a rule that interacts with itself, an opaque rule is not before itself, but a transparent rule is before itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the above example, by the definition, rule 1 is before rule 2, rule 2 is before rule 3, rule 3 is before rule 4, rule 4 is before rule 5/6, and rule 5/6 is before itself.  (Other &quot;before&quot; relations hold as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule order is like the linear order of multistratal Generative Phonology in that both are transitive.  Specifically, for any three distinct phonological rules A, B, and C, if A is before B and B is before C, then A is before C.  The proof of this follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A is before B&quot; means that either A is opaque or B is transparent, by the above definition of &quot;before&quot;.  Every rule is either opaque or transparent, but not both, so if A is opaque, this means it is not transparent.  Thus, &quot;A is before B&quot; means &quot;Either A is not transparent or B is transparent&quot;.  This last is logically equivalent to a statement using the material implication of classical logic: &quot;If A is transparent, then B is transparent.&quot;  But logical implication is a transitive relation.  QED. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7. Alternating Stress&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of three theories in Generative Phonology for describing alternating stress systems and other alternating patterns which seem to require counting syllables from the beginning or from the end of a word and doing something to every other syllable, or perhaps every third syllable.  The syllables affected may be stressed, or their vowels can be shortened or lengthened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three theories are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The SPE theory, which describes them as assimilations-at-a-distance and uses a special ad hoc &quot;parenthesis star&quot; notation with simultaneous application to describe them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irwin Howard's 1972 theory of directional application, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/howard72.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A Directional Theory of Rule Application in Phonology&lt;/a&gt;, which describes them as dissimilations between adjacent syllables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My monostratal theory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, the SPE theory is quite arbitrary and ugly -- not really worth considering, in my view.  Howard's theory makes a lot of sense and works quite well (though the phenomenon itself is typically quite complex and hard to unravel).  My theory is patterned after Howard's, but is simpler, and unlike Howard's treatment, does not require reference to intermediate stages of derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a rough summary, Howard's theory works like this. You determine the direction of influence of a syllable on a nearby syllable: do later syllables cause previous syllables to dissimilate?  If so, you start applying the dissimilation at the end of a word and work your way back, syllable by syllable, to the beginning of the word, applying the rule to each syllable that meets the constraints on the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, do earlier syllables cause following syllables to dissimilate?  If so, you start applying the dissimilation at the beginning of a word and work your way forward through the word, syllable by syllable, to the end of the word, applying the rule to each syllable that meets the constraints on the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a schematic example of an alternating stress system with a regressive dissimilation that stresses a syllable before an unstressed syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tata &amp;gt; ˈtata&#xA;tatata &amp;gt; taˈtata&#xA;tatatata &amp;gt; tataˈtata &amp;gt; ˈtataˈtata&#xA;tatatatata &amp;gt; tatataˈtata &amp;gt; taˈtataˈtata&#xA;tatatatatata &amp;gt; tatatataˈtata &amp;gt; tataˈtataˈtata &amp;gt; ˈtataˈtataˈtata&#xA;and so on.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Howard's treatment seems to me to say exactly the right thing about such systems.  They have self-bleeding processes, where the application of the rule to a syllable prevents that syllable from influencing the syllable preceding.  Only an unstressed syllable can cause the preceding syllable to become stressed, and after the rule has applied to make a syllable stressed, that syllable can no longer cause the preceding syllable to become stressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for me, Howard's directional theory makes crucial reference to intermediate stages of the derivation.  What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it turns out to be more straightforward than one might have imagined.  We simply assume that the stress dissimilation rule is transparent and remove all intermediate stages.  Then, we get the alternating pattern, and we can forget about the special assumptions in Howard's theory about determining the direction of influence, about whether to start at the end of the word or at the beginning, and about whether to move forward or backward in the word to look for the next place the rule might apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how it works, consider the three syllable example above, /tatata/.  It looks at first sight as though there are two different syllables to which the dissimilatory stress rule might apply, either the first or the second syllables.  But it turns out that this is not so.  If we apply the rule to the first syllable, we get a form [ˈtatata], which is incorrect, since the middle syllable has not been stressed, even though it satisfies the rule's condition, that the following vowel in the output form be unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we cannot apply the stress rule to both the first and second syllable to get [ˈtaˈtata], since here the rule has applied to the first syllable even though its condition, that the following syllable in the output be unstressed, is not met.  The only way to apply the rule to all and only the syllables that meet the rule's condition that the following syllable in the output be unstressed is to stress just the middle syllable.  And that is the correct result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly for all the longer examples given above, when the rule is transparent and there are no intermediate stages, the alternating pattern predicted by Howard's theory is the only possible result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 8. Feeding and bleeding.&lt;/strong&gt; (draft)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiparsky's terms &lt;em&gt;feeding&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bleeding&lt;/em&gt; have often been used in discussions of phonological rule interaction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A rule A *feeds* a rule B when the application of A makes it possible&#xA;for B to apply, and A and B both apply.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the example derivation above in part 6, rule 3 feeds rule 4. In the SPE theory, we order A before B.  In monostratal phonology, rule B is transparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A rule A *is counterfed by* a rule B when the application of B would make it possible&#xA;for A to apply, but A does not apply, even though B applies.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No examples so far.  In SPE we order A before B.  In monostratal phonology, A is opaque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A rule A *bleeds* a rule B when the application of A makes it impossible&#xA;for B to apply, and A applies, furthermore B does not apply.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the alternating stress rule of part 7 bleeds itself. In the SPE theory, we order A before B, but it is not possible for a rule to interact with itself in this way -- instead, the special parenthesis star notation is used. In monostratal phonology, rule B is transparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A rule A *is counterbled by* a rule B when the application of B would make it impossible&#xA;for A to apply, yet A and B both apply.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, above in part 6, rule 2 is counterbled by rule 3.  In SPE, we order A before B.  In monostratal phonology, rule A is opaque. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T11:00:23.677" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T11:00:23.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15155" CreationDate="2015-12-01T18:06:57.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured it out. I'm sure this seems not very automatic, but it's good for if you want to only measure specific things. Here's the code if this will help anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;##################################&#xA;#   Input sound file name here   #&#xA;##################################&#xA;&#xA;.sound$ = &quot;*INSERT SOUND NAME HERE*&quot;&#xA;&#xA;select Sound '.sound$'&#xA;&#xA;#################################################&#xA;#   Select correct formant values based on sex  #&#xA;#################################################&#xA;&#xA;# for men&#xA;# To Formant (burg)... 0 5 4500 0.025 50&#xA;# for women&#xA;To Formant (burg)... 0 5 5500 0.025 50&#xA;&#xA;#######################&#xA;#   Input times here  #&#xA;#######################&#xA;&#xA;begin_vowel = *INSERT START TIME OF SEGMENT*&#xA;end_vowel = *INSERT END TIME OF SEGMENT*&#xA;&#xA;duration_vowel = end_vowel - begin_vowel&#xA;&#xA;midway = begin_vowel + duration_vowel/2&#xA;ninetynine = begin_vowel + 0.99 * duration_vowel&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;select Formant '.sound$'&#xA;f2_mid = Get value at time... 2 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_mid = Get value at time... 3 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;f2_end = Get value at time... 2 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_end = Get value at time... 3 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;# creates csv text file&#xA;appendFileLine: &quot;formants.txt&quot;, &quot;'f2_mid', 'f3_mid', 'f2_end', 'f3_end'&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: You can also do this for multiple things using a procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ############################################&#xA;    #   Input vowel, sound file name, start time, end time, formant values, number of formants  #&#xA;    ############################################    &#xA;@instance: &quot;ae&quot;, &quot;sbc006_1441_88_1443_71&quot;, 1.185, 1.251820, 5500, 5&#xA;&#xA;    procedure instance: .vowel$, .sound$, .start, .end, .hertz, .num&#xA;&#xA;select Sound '.sound$'&#xA;&#xA;#################################################&#xA;#   Select correct formant values based on sex  #&#xA;#################################################&#xA;&#xA;To Formant (burg)... 0 .num .hertz 0.025 50&#xA;&#xA;begin_vowel = .start&#xA;end_vowel = .end&#xA;&#xA;duration_vowel = end_vowel - begin_vowel&#xA;&#xA;midway = begin_vowel + duration_vowel/2&#xA;ninetynine = begin_vowel + 0.99 * duration_vowel&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;select Formant '.sound$'&#xA;f2_mid = Get value at time... 2 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_mid = Get value at time... 3 midway Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;f2_end = Get value at time... 2 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;f3_end = Get value at time... 3 ninetynine Hertz Linear&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;# creates tab delimited text file&#xA;appendFileLine: &quot;sbc006formants.txt&quot;, &quot;'.sound$' 'tab$' '.vowel$' 'tab$' 'f2_mid' 'tab$' 'f3_mid' 'tab$' 'f2_end' 'tab$' 'f3_end'&quot;&#xA;&#xA;endproc&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;writeInfoLine: &quot;Finished!&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastEditorUserId="10997" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T22:36:33.053" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T22:36:33.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-01T23:59:26.927" Score="0" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for pre-trained, downloadable English language models. Where can I find some good ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T09:55:41.973" Title="Pre-trained English language models" Tags="&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T00:16:52.927" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Rhyming Slang&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One example is replacing the word &quot;stairs&quot; with the rhyming phrase &quot;apples and pears&quot;. Following the pattern of omission, &quot;and pears&quot; is dropped, thus the spoken phrase &quot;I'm going up the apples&quot; means &quot;I'm going up the stairs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the first person says &quot;apples and pears&quot;, how do people know what &quot;pears&quot; is supposed to rhyme with? Does someone say it with clear context like &quot;let me just run up the apples and pears here&quot;, and use it like that until everyone knows the expression? And then do people start dropping the &quot;and pears&quot; until &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; becomes well known? Is there any study of how this works in practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2491" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T22:06:39.207" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T22:06:39.207" Title="How do people know the meaning of new rhyming slang?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;slang&gt;&lt;rhyming&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15154" CreationDate="2015-12-02T05:37:33.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand your question, there are four different tasks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for a word in a TextGrid tier&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find its last vowel&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for the interval labelled with that vowel in the segment tier&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Measure something on that interval&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and the third seem to me to be on-topic for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. Find a label in a tier&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty straightforward. The most naive way to do this would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;n = Get number of intervals: word_tier&#xA;for i to n&#xA;  label$ = Get label of interval: word_tier, i&#xA;  if label$ == target$&#xA;    index = i &#xA;    i += n ; break from the loop&#xA;  endif&#xA;endfor&#xA;appendInfoLine: &quot;My label is on interval &quot;, index&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you could use the commands provided in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cpran.net/plugins/tgutils&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tgutils&lt;/a&gt;&quot; plugin distributed through CPrAN (full disclaimer: I wrote it). With it, you can include the procedures in &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/cpran/plugin_tgutils/blob/master/procedures/find_label.proc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;find_labels.proc&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or just copy the contents of that file into your script) and write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;selected(&quot;TextGrid&quot;)&#xA;@findLabel: word_tier, target$&#xA;word_index = findLabel.return&#xA;appendInfoLine: &quot;My word is on interval &quot;, word_index&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. Finding the vowel interval&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd then have to do the same but looking only among the intervals that fall within the boundaries of that word for the one that is labelled like the vowel you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this, you can once again use the procedures from the &quot;tgutils&quot; plugin to look backwards for the first interval labelled with that vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Find the interval number in the segment tier at the end&#xA;# of the matching word in the word tier&#xA;word_end = Get end point: word_tier, word_index&#xA;last_segment = Get low interval at time: segment_tier, word_end&#xA;&#xA;@findLabelBehind: segment_tier, last_vowel$, last_segment&#xA;segment_index = findLabelBehind.return&#xA;appendInfoLine: &quot;My segment is on interval &quot;, segment_index&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The other tasks&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding the last vowel, and running your analyses, are not within the scope of this question, based on your title. Feel free to create new questions to cover those, or to rephrase the scope of this one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T01:57:18.743" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T01:57:18.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15150" CreationDate="2015-12-02T10:01:31.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon you are talking about is studied under the label &lt;strong&gt;language attrition&lt;/strong&gt;. Searching for this term with your favourite search engine will bring up a good wealth of references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T10:01:31.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15172" CreationDate="2015-12-02T11:52:55.620" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know about languages that make use of most number of phonemes and make use of most of the phonetic principles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11000" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T20:38:27.950" Title="Which language is best to study phonetics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-12-05T17:34:49.300" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15166" CreationDate="2015-12-02T13:12:12.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find some information about phoneme inventories (separated by consonants and vowels) in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS survey&lt;/a&gt;. WALS has also surveys about some phoneme features, e.g., presence of unusual consonants in Chapter 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T13:12:12.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15150" CreationDate="2015-12-02T14:08:36.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joseph Conrad is said to have complained about losing facility in his native language, Polish, after speaking and writing in English for many years.  He, of course, had become a great master of English prose (though he always spoke English with a Polish accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T14:08:36.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T15:41:18.200" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about this for a while. In software you have bugs. From what I know this naming is used because someone had a problem once getting hardware to work due to an actual living bug in the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But where does the word &quot;Wizard&quot;come from in software context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt someone had an actual wizard install something on their system once and decided to call it that :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2056" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T15:41:18.200" Title="What's the origin of the word &quot;Wizard&quot; in software terms?" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-12-03T07:57:46.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T16:47:20.723" Score="5" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider these words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;reminder - remainder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are very similar in sound and letters. Yet they are far from each other in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In computational linguistics, do we have algorithms to measure the amount of similarity between words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="1750" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T06:13:53.460" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T06:13:53.460" Title="How do we measure the degree of similarity between words?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15170" CreationDate="2015-12-02T17:30:46.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first type of similarity, phonetic and lexical similarity, can be measured using an &lt;em&gt;edit distance&lt;/em&gt; metric, for instance the widely used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Levenshtein distance&lt;/a&gt;. This basically uses an algorithm to determine the number of deletions and insertions of characters one has to make to get from the first word to the second word. The more similar the words, the smaller the edit distance. This is usually considered a quite simple and straight-forward thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic similarity is a different beast. Now we are no longer interested in how a word looks on the surface, but what information a word brings to the table, and even more important, how to quantify this difference. This is a very active research area called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributional_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Distributional Semantics&lt;/a&gt; that has been looked into in the computational linguistic community for at least two decades. Recently, this has also become popularized through the deep learning community, but now called word embeddings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea is that you can represent a word as a vector in a vector space, and having words of similar meaning to be close to each other in this space. The words get their place in the vector space by having an algorithm reading large corpora and taking note of the context of each word. For instance, we can expect &lt;em&gt;tea&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;coffee&lt;/em&gt; both having the word &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt; as a common neighbor and therefore this makes the distributional semantic model place them close to each other in the vector space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works well for some words using some algorithms some of the time, but there is still a lot of work to be done here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T17:30:46.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15166" CreationDate="2015-12-02T17:31:16.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can also get a list of languages and sounds from UPSID, which has a web interface &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. However, it is best to select a language with a number of speakers available to you. !Xoon may be nice and exotic, but it is not trivial to find speakers of the language. You need to have a reasonable number of speakers providing data, so that you have a basis for claiming that what you've found is a property of the language and not just a quirk of the individual speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also should decide why you are doing this, and what kind of information you need going into the study. One reason to study Icelandic or Finnish is that the phonetics and especially phonology of those languages has been reasonably well worked out, which is not quite the case with Ket, Oromo or Somali. If your goal is to develop a Somali speech-recognition package, you would have to undertake a lot of primary descriptive research on the language in order to be able to know what phonetic data to get. Similarly, there probably would not be enough consumer demand for a Mazateco synthesizer to justify the cost. On the other hand, if you're just interested in an academic study, Mazateco would be a fine language to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a potential tradeoff between number of phonemes and degree of contextual variation. When a language has relatively few phonemes, it is communicatively less important to produce a sound in one specific way as opposed to something similar, so a languages with fewer phonemes may have more phonetic processes leading to allophonic variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A concrete example is Hindi. There are plenty of speakers, and there is also a decent amount of phonological and phonetic literature so that you wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, axle, and saw. I use Google translate synthesis as a crude metric of the state of the art in phonetic NLP for a language, and Hindi seems to be in good shape. Tamil, on the other hand, is in quite sad shape by that metric, and the remaining languages of India are in no shape at all. The state of the art in phonological and phonetic description for Tamil is, at the same time, significantly below that for Hindi. Overall, the best approach, when one is first learning how to do programming on languages, is to pick a language that you know reasonably well. This allows you to catch errors much quicker, when you have some ability to judge that an output is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T20:38:27.950" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T20:38:27.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-02T19:52:26.053" Score="-1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently received a book, does anyone know what language/ what this book is?&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hSxzF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hSxzF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11004" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T18:04:11.923" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T18:04:11.923" Title="I recently received a book, does anyone know what language/ what this book is?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-08T16:07:28.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15173" CreationDate="2015-12-02T22:00:06.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the last page of a Qur'an in Arabic, printed in Berlin in 1968.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T22:00:06.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15162" CreationDate="2015-12-02T23:13:06.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the research here, but my guess is that people simply memorize the rhyming slang, just as you would memorize any other idiom. Those that are sufficiently frequent hat everyone in the community knows them could then get shortened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good way to test the last bit would be to collect a corpus of rhyming slang and see if it's the most frequent items that are most likely to be shortened. To others more familiar with dialect research in England, has anyone done corpus work on rhyming slang?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10889" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T23:13:06.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T02:56:58.613" Score="1" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;how is this question ambiguous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Bill say that John was fired?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to me it has one meaning. it asks about the reason for which bill said that john was fired! if it has another meaning that I cant see. please explain it to me! how can one structure have two meanings!!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T20:09:08.937" Title="an ambiguous wh-question with embedded clause" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-12-04T23:35:26.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15179" CreationDate="2015-12-03T04:33:51.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why did Bill say that John was fired?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has, besides the meanings mentioned by @bytebuster in a comment, two quite different senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; asks for a reason, and in this sentence that reason can be  &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the reason why Bill said the sentence &quot;John was fired&quot; (say, Bill wanted me to know),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the reason why John was fired (say, John lit a firecracker under Bill's desk).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule of &lt;em&gt;Wh&lt;/em&gt;-Question Formation is not a cyclic rule, limited in its effects to constituents in the neighborhood of a single clause, and therefore &lt;em&gt;Wh&lt;/em&gt;-Question Formation can move a &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word from anywhere in the question to the beginning. &#xA;In this case, it has a choice of moving one from the main clause or one from a subordinate clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T14:15:40.613" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:15:40.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-03T07:04:03.163" Score="4" ViewCount="7111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seriously. There are words of Anglo-Saxon origin for all other organs and activities that used to be taboo (some still are) dating back to pre-Conquest days. But nothing for &quot;penis&quot;. I find it hard to believe that the author of the &quot;country matters&quot; pun, or his commoner contemporaries, or their forefathers, would use a Latin term for something of such momentous importance (in every sense of the word). For a while I thought that the word &quot;dick&quot; was of old Germanic origin until I discovered that it's a slang word that first appeared in the late 19th Century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please elucidate this for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Euphemisms and figures of speech do not apply. No, it does not have to mean the same thing in modern English. It doesn't even have to exist in modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10795" LastEditorUserId="10795" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T22:04:15.450" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T22:04:15.450" Title="What is the oldest known English word that means &quot;penis&quot;?" Tags="&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2015-12-05T17:32:52.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2015-12-03T11:09:09.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=887&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Italian Syntactic Semantic Treebank&lt;/a&gt; available from ELRA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T11:09:09.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2015-12-03T11:13:01.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoken Japanese&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TueBa-J/S (created within the Verbmobil project) available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/en/ascl/ressourcen/corpora/tueba-js.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tübingen University&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T11:13:01.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2015-12-03T11:15:52.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basque&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/17098&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GrAF version of the Basque Dependency Treebank&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T14:07:12.297" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T14:07:12.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2015-12-03T11:19:50.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta-answer: How did I find those doubly annotated treebanks?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I visitied the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; and entered the following words in the search slit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;treebank dependency constituency&#xA;treebank dependency constituent&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides me with a short list of treebanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T11:19:50.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15184" CreationDate="2015-12-03T11:58:46.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about the oldest word, but the OED has early references for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pintle (Old English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pillicok from about 1328 onwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;prick from about 1558 onwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pillo(c)k from 1568 onwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cock from 1618 onwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this from Urquhart’s famous translation of Rabelais from 1653: “My pusher, dresser, pouting stick, my horny pipe, my pretty pillicock, linkie pinkie…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T12:27:15.540" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T12:27:15.540" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15179" CreationDate="2015-12-03T20:09:08.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;thank you all for the explanation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T20:09:08.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2015-12-04T04:27:11.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tagalog, maaari is a fairly common word used to mean &quot;can&quot; or &quot;able to&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11011" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T04:27:11.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15161" CreationDate="2015-12-04T09:55:41.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one from the LINDAT/CLARIN repository (for a specialised domain, but Open Data):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11858/00-097C-0000-000D-EC92-F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ATCC: Pronunciation lexicon and n-gram counts for ASR module&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T09:55:41.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12130" CreationDate="2015-12-04T10:37:24.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prefix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;entre-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;entreprendre&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enteri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;between, inside&quot;, from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯en&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;in&quot;, the prefix &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;under-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;undertaking&lt;/em&gt; comes from PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ndheri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;under&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T10:37:24.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T13:03:56.840" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like Feature Geometry doesn't make reference to Archiphonemes - only Underspecified Segments. Is there a theoretically-motivated reason for this, if it is true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T20:42:00.063" Title="Are underspecified segments and archiphonemes represented identically in Feature Geometry?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15166" CreationDate="2015-12-04T17:49:36.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you start with your native language. Once you are familiar with such rules you can then apply them to other languages easily&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10894" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T17:49:36.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12130" CreationDate="2015-12-04T19:24:45.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not wrong; German &lt;em&gt;unter&lt;/em&gt; and Latin &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt; are actually related.  See for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/under&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiktionary PGm entry for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt;. From a merger of two originally distinct suffixes as a result of&#xA;  Verner's law: Proto-Indo-European &lt;b&gt;*n̥tér&lt;/b&gt; ‎(“inside”), &lt;strong&gt;from which also&#xA;  Latin &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and Proto-Indo-European &lt;b&gt;*n̥dʰér&lt;/b&gt; ‎(“under”), from which&#xA;  Latin īnfrā, Sanskrit अध ‎(adha, “below”) and Ossetian дæлæ ‎(dælæ,&#xA;  “below”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains why in OE, &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; had both the meaning of &quot;beneath&quot; and that of &quot;amongst/between&quot;.  Only the former acceptation subsists today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside note regarding the latter meaning of &quot;between&quot;, you can have a look at de Vaan 2008 &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt; (many cognates meaning &quot;entrails&quot; in many languages - gory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prefix &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt;take is to compare to &lt;em&gt;unter&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;unter&lt;/em&gt;nehmen (&quot;undertake&quot; in Present Day German) - since &quot;nehmen&quot; means &quot;to take&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a matter of fact, before switching to &quot;undertaken&quot; in Middle English, Old English had &lt;em&gt;undernimen&lt;/em&gt;.  But then, during Middle English, &lt;em&gt;taken&lt;/em&gt; displaced OE &lt;em&gt;niman&lt;/em&gt; - IMO under the influence of Old Norse. &lt;em&gt;Undernimen&lt;/em&gt; was therefore logically replaced by &lt;em&gt;undertaken&lt;/em&gt;.  Also note that, in its other meaning of &quot;understand&quot;, &lt;em&gt;undernimen&lt;/em&gt; also disappeared and only &lt;em&gt;understandan&lt;/em&gt; remained as PDE &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;entre&lt;/em&gt; is, as you well know, a direct descendent of Latin &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romance languages use &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Italian has both &lt;em&gt;imprendere&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;intrapendere&lt;/em&gt; - as you know &lt;em&gt;prendere&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;to take&lt;/em&gt;.  Also Spanish has &lt;em&gt;emprender&lt;/em&gt;; Portuguese has &lt;em&gt;interprender&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a similar phenomenon with &lt;em&gt;underwritan&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;underwrite&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;unterschreiben&lt;/em&gt;).  But this time, German takes &lt;em&gt;schreiben&lt;/em&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;scribo&lt;/em&gt; and English sticks with  PGm *writana.  See &lt;em&gt;subscribe&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth mentioning is &lt;em&gt;entertain&lt;/em&gt; (cognate with French &lt;em&gt;entre-tenir&lt;/em&gt; etc); to compare with German &lt;em&gt;unterhalten&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;halten&lt;/em&gt; = to hold/tenir).  This time there was no OE equivalent for &lt;em&gt;entertain&lt;/em&gt;, so a Romance loan word was imported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarise, PDE &lt;em&gt;undertake&lt;/em&gt; does not come from Anglo-Norman &lt;em&gt;entreprendre&lt;/em&gt; (mostly &quot;to attack&quot;) or even Late Latin &lt;em&gt;imprehendere&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;interprehendere&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to assault by surprise&quot;, &quot;undertake&quot;).  However they do have common traceable PIE roots and there is, as you suggest, a correspondence between &lt;em&gt;entre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; in a number of cases.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;(1) Ernout Meillet have an interesting conjecture why Latin uses both &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T19:24:45.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15197" CreationDate="2015-12-04T20:42:00.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trubetzkoy's archiphoneme theory had no reference to underspecified features, since it was proposed in a day before feature theory existed.  The interpretation of archiphonemes as being underspecified segments is ahistorical.  Most of Trubetzkoy's case studies of archiphonemes can reasonably be interpreted as involving underspecified segments, but there is no theoretical guarantee that they all can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe FG people want to make clear that their theory is more constrained than Trubetzkoy's (which I think would be correct).  Or maybe they are just being fastidious and do not want to attribute to Trubetzkoy something he didn't actually propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T20:42:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T22:08:06.620" Score="-3" ViewCount="1099" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WvDfb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WvDfb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Please help identify what this means in English. I cannot read this language and cannot determine what language it is.  &quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help identify what this means in English. I cannot read this language and cannot determine what language it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11015" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T02:40:11.970" Title="What language is this and what does it mean in English?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-10-03T06:19:52.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15202" CreationDate="2015-12-04T22:26:27.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks very much like Tengwar to me, one of the writing systems developed as part of Tolkien's alternative universe. I think it's probably English, something close to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/bi ihart si not kwhol, for jou hold a jart be fore mer/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are tons of different conventions for writing English in Tengwar, and without a large sample of text or knowing the precise convention used it's difficult to know exactly what was written. Also, it looks like the person based it partially on transliteration, when it is traditionally used more phonemically. Have a look on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Omniglot's page on Tengwar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10419" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T22:26:27.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15202" CreationDate="2015-12-04T22:28:52.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's English written in Tolkien's Tengwar, and the text is written with lots of mistakes and discrepancies, still it's obvious it is intended to be read as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My heart is not whole, for you hold a part of me forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2015-12-04T22:57:25.000" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T22:57:25.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14830" CreationDate="2015-12-04T23:22:21.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually there are scripts which go top to bottom as well. This is the traditional writing direction in East Asia.  I have seen it claimed that when a right-handed person draws a face in profile they spontaneously draw it facing left, and that was the reason right-to-left was the usual writing direction for Egyptian script: the figures faced forwards in the writing direction, and the first, Semitic, alphabets inherited that convention.  When the Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians they also initially wrote right-to-left but after a while they started writing every second line left-to-right so that each line started just below where the previous line ended, and the letters on left-to-right lines were mirror images of those on right-to-left lines.  This zig-zag writing direction was called &lt;em&gt;boustrophedon&lt;/em&gt;, roughly 'plow-wise', and may have been helpful for unskilled readers.  Some generations later the Greeks gradually shifted to write all lines left-to-right.  The probable reason is that if you are right-handed writing left-to-right will allow you to hold your wrist in a more relaxed position without the hand covering or smudging what you have already written. Later western skripts like the Latin adopted the writing direction along with the alphabet itself.  Similar developments took place in south Asia, unless people there actually switched writing direction due to Greek influence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11016" LastEditorUserId="11016" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T19:26:32.557" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T19:26:32.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12797" CreationDate="2015-12-05T01:01:20.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most languages a syllable must consist of at least one vowel and zero or more consonants. While you can &lt;em&gt;pronounce&lt;/em&gt; a consonant in isolation most languages require &lt;em&gt;syllables&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; to contain vowels. Syllabic sonorants like in &lt;em&gt;bottle&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;button&lt;/em&gt; aren't really counterexamples, because sonorants are, well, sonorous enough to function as syllable nuclei, but very few languages permit syllables consisting entirely of obstruents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11016" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T01:01:20.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15217" CreationDate="2015-12-05T05:08:20.370" Score="10" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very interested in linguistics and cultures/societies, however, I cannot, at this time, go to college. I'm fairly good with teaching myself things, however, and would like to know what methods (ie. Sites, books, etc.) are good for Self educating myself on linguistics. I am seeking specifics including address / title / author and a description of why and what makes it a good resource. If this is off topic, please let me know nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11017" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T18:47:24.470" Title="Method for Self Teaching" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T10:15:49.290" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;for a little project in University my group would like to have a look at how emojies or smileys are used in order to support or express irony, sarcasm or similiar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently we are trying to find a prepared corpus where we can research exactly that, but I am not able to find anything useful. &#xA;I tried to use Tworpus to generate a twitter corpus, but I only get an .xml file which needs to be POS-Tagged and Tokenized (and all that really is too much work for a 15-Minute presentation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am fairly sure that no free corpus exists, which includes emojies, I have high hopes that a corpus, based on the world-wide-web, at least includes some smileys with which we can work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone got a tip? I tried the GlowBe Corpus but it seems like e.g. :) is not allowed as a word (syntax is wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11018" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T10:15:49.290" Title="Corpus which includes smileys or even emojies" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15212" CreationDate="2015-12-05T10:43:48.380" Score="1" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to include null complementizers if they exist as well as any mission NP covert subjects.&#xA;This is my sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i've been struggling so much with it i would appreciate it if i had the tree diagram &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11019" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T11:50:49.547" Title="I'm having trouble with my syntax tree and wanted some help for a project!" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-12-07T09:25:20.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11649" CreationDate="2015-12-05T11:23:56.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not have to do much if you are going to make an &lt;code&gt;Extractive summarization&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do stop-word Removal&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do stemming (optional)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Count all words occurrences&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extract sentence(s) that contains the word with most frequency in the text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the basic of text summarization which suits for emails very well, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11020" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T11:23:56.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15209" CreationDate="2015-12-05T11:50:49.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CAZx8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CAZx8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Always a menace&quot; would be analysed as a reduced relative clause postmodifying &quot;the woods&quot;. The adverbial &quot;even in the past&quot; being a FocP can be disputed though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T11:50:49.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2015-12-05T16:18:05.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic (classical) ʼam is exclusive, ʼaw is (generally) inclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T16:18:05.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T16:25:58.547" Score="1" ViewCount="4625" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is common experience that some letters are hard to understand when spelling a word in a telephone conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the reason for this and is there any research as to which letters this concerns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently this phenomenon was discovered early on when radio telecommunications became common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the reason why spelling alphabets were invented. The British Army began using a spelling alphabet in 1898:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;British Army signallers began using a partial spelling alphabet in the&#xA;  late 19th century. Recorded in the 1898 &quot;Signalling Instruction&quot;&#xA;  issued by the War Office and followed by the 1904 Signalling&#xA;  Regulations this system differentiated only the letters most&#xA;  frequently misunderstood: &lt;strong&gt;Ack&lt;/strong&gt; (originally &quot;Ak&quot;) &lt;strong&gt;Beer&lt;/strong&gt; (or Bar) C D E F&#xA;  G H I J K L &lt;strong&gt;eMma&lt;/strong&gt; N O &lt;strong&gt;Pip&lt;/strong&gt; Q R &lt;strong&gt;eSses&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Toc&lt;/strong&gt; U &lt;strong&gt;Vic&lt;/strong&gt; W X Y Z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the following English letters are listed as &quot;most frequently misunderstood&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; (?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; (probably in contrast to P)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;M&lt;/strong&gt; (probably in contrast to &lt;strong&gt;N&lt;/strong&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; (probably in contrast to B, listed above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; (probably in contrast to &lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;? - but this is just a guess)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt; (probably in contrast to &lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;V&lt;/strong&gt; (probably to distinguish from &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following source gives an example of six letters which are hard to distinguish because they are articulated in a more or less similar manner, but doesn't give a clear explanation for the reason behind the phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;letters with a similar manner of articulation can be virtually&#xA;  indistinguishable, for example, nasal consonants like &lt;strong&gt;“m”&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;“n”&lt;/strong&gt;;&#xA;  fricative consonants like &lt;strong&gt;“f”&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;“s”&lt;/strong&gt;; stop consonants like &lt;strong&gt;“t”&lt;/strong&gt; or&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;“d”&lt;/strong&gt;. Vowels, on the other hand, carry through relatively clearly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ljbsecuritytraining.com/ct-security-license-alphabet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems, however, that the phenomenon is mainly concerned with consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to yet another source, the pass band of telephones is limited to frequencies ranging from 300 to 4000 Hz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pass band of telephones is typically about 300 to 4000 Hz, so the&#xA;  fundamental is usually absent or much attenuated. The loss of&#xA;  information carried by frequencies above 4000 Hz (e.g. the confusion&#xA;  of &lt;strong&gt;‘f’&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;‘s’&lt;/strong&gt; when spelling a name) is noticed in telephone&#xA;  conversation, but the loss of low frequencies is much less important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/voice.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might explain why some sounds are hard to understand, because they are virtually cut off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sickkids.ca/images/Communication%20Disorders/36047-fsaudiogram.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hdhearing.com/images/gifs/audiospeech.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; audiogram show that &lt;strong&gt;&quot;f&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;s&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; actually are above 4000 Hz -- on the other hand, it shows that &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; just like &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt; are well between 375 and 4000 Hz, so this still doesn't answer the question why those consonants are hard to distinguish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10976" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-05T18:35:25.713" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T18:35:25.713" Title="Why are the names of some letters hard to understand on the telephone?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15214" CreationDate="2015-12-05T17:01:55.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language is always excessive, that is, it helps to understand the speech in several ways at the same time ­- there are other words that create the context, there is the grammar an the syntax of the sentence that help us understand the exact meaning of the words we hear and not to mix them up with their homonyms, also many languages, like English, have lots of dissimilative spellings that, again, help us to see which homonym is used, e. g. &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hole&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;rite&lt;/em&gt;, etc. And when people speak, we can read the lips of the speaker which also greatly helps in understanding, since many consonants sound really very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine, when the radio appeared, you could now hear a person without seeing him or her, and when the words were spelled letter-after-letter, almost all that excessive features were gone, not to say about the quality of the sound on the radio (and even very often on the modern phones), so that 1898 spelling alphabet was created so as to add more excessiness to the names of the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's such thing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;McGurk effect&lt;/a&gt; that shows how little is needed to make us hear a sound absolutely different from the one that was pronounced. Here's a great BBC video (3 minutes) that demonstrates the McGurk effect, watch it and you will see what I mean: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T17:01:55.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-05T20:34:30.653" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used P2FA to insert all of these boundaries. For some reason, there is an invisible boundary. You can see this is part of the selection. I would like to hand-correct the interval labelled B (on tier 1), but I'm unable to do so. I tried dragging the left boundary of B to the left, but it doesn't let me. I think it has something to do with this invisible boundary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks. I hope this makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dl1oS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dl1oS.png&quot; alt=&quot;There seems to be an invisible boundary that I can&amp;#39;t delete. What&amp;#39;s going on?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T20:34:30.653" Title="Invisible boundaries on PRAAT?" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15207" CreationDate="2015-12-05T23:32:48.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a few suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a MOOC being offered through Coursera: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/course/humanlanguage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.coursera.org/course/humanlanguage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The virtual linguistics campus has some good content and is well taught but might be difficult to navigate for a new student. It's good if you have a topic in mind: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaMpov1PPVXGcKYgwHjXB3g&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaMpov1PPVXGcKYgwHjXB3g&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ling space gives a lot of quick high-level explanations of important lingustic phenomena--I've even found it useful in my own classes&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/user/thelingspace&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/user/thelingspace&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to drill down into grammar and x-bar theory, I'd recommend this series of calming and zen-like videos by Caroline Heycock &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmvBzEBJFiOUfmMR4ew9TFwO&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmvBzEBJFiOUfmMR4ew9TFwO&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Study of Language by George Yule is a great introduction to linguistics, and is written in a way that's very accessible to newcomers. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/ca/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/english-language-and-linguistics-general-interest/study-language-5th-edition?format=PB&amp;amp;isbn=9781107658172&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cambridge.org/ca/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/english-language-and-linguistics-general-interest/study-language-5th-edition?format=PB&amp;amp;isbn=9781107658172&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All Things Linguistic is an awesome blog by Gretchen McCulloch, and has a lot of resources and advice for students in addition to delving into some interesting linguistic topics &lt;a href=&quot;http://allthingslinguistic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://allthingslinguistic.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T23:32:48.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15219" CreationDate="2015-12-06T00:33:51.417" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for words such as &lt;code&gt;very&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;extremely&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;likely&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;super&lt;/code&gt; , which modify the intensity of something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously these are all adverbs, but &lt;code&gt;yesterday&lt;/code&gt; is also an adverb, and that does not change the intensity of something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9512" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T17:51:28.957" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T17:51:28.957" Title="Is there a term for words that modify the intensity of something" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15218" CreationDate="2015-12-06T01:21:00.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;intensifiers&lt;/a&gt;. This term is pretty widespread, and I couldn't think of another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T13:56:37.430" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T13:56:37.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T10:10:00.217" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in English we can use &amp;quot;-ness&amp;quot; to make abstract nouns from adjectives, and it would mean &amp;quot;the state of being(the adjective)&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;the quality of being(the adjective)&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;the measure of being(the adjective).&amp;quot; However, those definitions seem unclear. Are they saying something like &amp;quot;tallness&amp;quot; is the same as &amp;quot;being tall&amp;quot;? We can say things like &amp;quot;the act of smoking&amp;quot; where the act is smoking, and we can also say &amp;quot;his best quality is being kind&amp;quot; where &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; is the same as &amp;quot;being kind.&amp;quot; Thus, it would be plausible to state that &amp;quot;the quality of being(the adjective)&amp;quot; is the same as &amp;quot;being(the adjective)&amp;quot; in the same way &amp;quot;the act of smoking&amp;quot; is the same as &amp;quot;smoking.&amp;quot; However, this way of thinking doesn't seem to work in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turned down the brightness. (correct)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turned down the being bright. (sounds wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have kindness. (correct)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have being kind. (sounds wrong)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies to other abstract nouns that are related to adjectives such as bravery and honesty. If abstract nouns such as &amp;quot;-ness&amp;quot; do not mean &amp;quot;being(the adjective)&amp;quot; then what do they mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9953" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T10:10:00.217" Title="Are abstract nouns formed from adjectives the same as being the adjective?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15222" CreationDate="2015-12-06T11:30:36.263" Score="2" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is voicing considered lenition under phonological criteria? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me voiced consonants seem stronger in articulation, therefore voicing should be considered fortification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T02:48:25.897" Title="Voicing as lenition" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15221" CreationDate="2015-12-06T12:25:05.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not based so much in what &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; stronger, but on the overall patterns of sound changes.  There is a tendency for voiceless consonants to become voiced, and voiced consonants to become continuants or approximants.  Sometimes these changes are found in succession; for example, as late Latin developed into Spanish, the voiceless plosives p, t and k were first voiced (b, d, g) and later fricativized (β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞) (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition#Diachronic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;These changes can all be seen as increases in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sonorization&lt;/a&gt;. Voiceless plosives have the least amount of voicing, and are thus the least &quot;vowel-like&quot; of consonants.  As we go from voiced plosives to fricatives, then approximants and finally vowels, each type is more vowel-like.  We interpret vowels as weak, so any sound change to moving closer to vowels is interpreted this way, and called lenition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T17:53:09.830" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T17:53:09.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3514" CreationDate="2015-12-06T12:54:52.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Buhari lost his &quot; site&quot; or &quot; sight. &#xA;   this is an ambiguous statement, because it may be buhar lost site ,means the piece of land &#xA;or buhsri loose his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11026" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T12:54:52.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15221" CreationDate="2015-12-06T13:54:54.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A change that responds to contrasts among neighboring sounds and reduces those contrasts is a lenition.  Assimilations are lenitions, while dissimilations are fortitions.  Assimilatory voicing of consonants between voiced vowels lessens the constrast between the vowel preceding the consonant and the consonant, and also that between the consonant and the following vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of intervocalic voicing of obstruents, it may be that the assimilation winds up taking more articulatory energy, since the natural tendency of obstruents to devoice has to be overcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T14:04:44.640" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T14:04:44.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T15:10:29.670" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;On thesaurus.com, you can filter synonyms by their &quot;complexity.&quot; Does anyone know the criteria they use to determine a word's complexity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T01:57:03.217" Title="How is &quot;complexity&quot; calculated on thesaurus.com?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15207" CreationDate="2015-12-06T18:39:17.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thegreatcourses.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Great Courses&lt;/a&gt; have some college-level &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thegreatcourses.com/category/literature-language/linguistics.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;courses in linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't watched it myself, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/literature-language/linguistics/understanding-linguistics-the-science-of-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language&lt;/a&gt; looks like a good starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the discounts are very frequent, so if there are none for the course you want, I recommend waiting a bit, or finding a discounted course set rather than buying it for the full price. You may also check if the courses you want are available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Great Courses Plus&lt;/a&gt;, and see which site provides a better option for you. The &quot;Plus&quot; version is subscription-based, and gives you access to all the courses for a limited period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the books, I recommend finding a linguistics programme at a respectable university and looking at the websites of individual courses. They will usually contain the syllabus, and you'll be able to see what you can add to your reading list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2015-12-06T18:47:24.470" LastActivityDate="2015-12-06T18:47:24.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-06T18:57:05.130" Score="8" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Familiar cases of metathesis involve segments changing places, but metathesis can also operate at the subsegmental level, affecting individual features. I'm specifically interested in metathesis of POA features, like the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;finster&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dark, gloomy&quot; &amp;lt; * &lt;em&gt;θimster&lt;/em&gt; (edit: this is doubtful as a case of feature metathesis, see jknappen's comments)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Colloquial Hebrew &lt;em&gt;maʃaz&lt;/em&gt; &quot;massage&quot; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;masaʒ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some other examples of this process? It's difficult to find data as this type of metathesis seems to be rare and not much studied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any studies that deal specifically with POA feature metathesis -- e.g. examining its typology, which features do and don't undergo metathesis under which kinds of circumstances, etc.?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a bonus question, are there any attested cases of voicing metathesis (e.g. &lt;em&gt;tab&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;dap&lt;/em&gt;)? I'm aware that this shows up in child language acquisition errors, but beyond that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T20:51:52.060" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T11:59:43.040" Title="Place feature metathesis" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2015-12-06T21:26:32.913" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One good example is what happened to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/GreekPIEreflexes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PIE labiovelars in Greek&lt;/a&gt;. At some point, Greek lost its labiovelar consonants as such. Classical Greek has three consonant series&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek labials  Π, Β, Φ (from PIE *p, *b, *bʰ, respectively)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek dentals  Τ, Δ, Θ (from PIE *t, *d, *dʰ)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek velars  Κ, Γ, Χ  (from PIE *k, *ɡ, *ɡʰ)   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But PIE had a labiovelar series as well.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE labiovelars *kʷ, *ɡʷ, *ɡʰʷ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These labiovelar consonants wound up in Greek smeared all across the mouth as labials, dentals, or velars. &#xA;Occasionally, as with the reflexes of *&lt;em&gt;kʷel-&lt;/em&gt; 'wheel', one can find all three: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;πολος&lt;/em&gt; 'axis', &lt;em&gt;τελος&lt;/em&gt; 'end of cycle', and &lt;em&gt;κυκλος&lt;/em&gt; 'circle' all come from PIE *&lt;em&gt;kʷel-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T00:54:45.457" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T00:54:45.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2015-12-07T16:06:15.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest &lt;a href=&quot;http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED091937.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ultan's typological study&lt;/a&gt; for an overview, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://metathesisinlanguage.osu.edu/database.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the metathesis database&lt;/a&gt; for a few examples. I'm extremely skeptical about the prospects for finding a general case where just place features are moved but not voicing and manner, but place is certainly relevant as a conditioning factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T16:06:15.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2015-12-07T17:18:34.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Greek declensions there are a couple examples of metathesis quantitatis which is simply vowel length swapping. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the second declension we have the Attic declension which consists of nouns like νεώς or λεώς. Originally these forms had long stem vowel and a typical short thematic vowel. Due to a regular sound change the lengths of the vowels changed places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;νηός &gt; νεώς &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ληός &gt; λεώς&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is seen throughout the whole paradigm. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_grammar_(tables)#Attic_second_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_grammar_(tables)#Attic_second_declension&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is quantitative metathesis happening also in the third declension, in the genetive of nouns like βασιλεύς or πόλις.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard Attic genetive is  βασιλέως and  πόλεως whilst the Homeric Greek yields βασιλῆος and πόληος.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_metathesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_metathesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Greek Grammar for Colleges&lt;/em&gt;, Herbert Weir Smyth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gramatyka grecka,&lt;/em&gt; Marian Auerbach, Marian Golias&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T17:18:34.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T01:22:36.773" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know any good metrical analysis software for ancient Greek? Which are the best ones and which are the most user friendly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11033" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T01:22:36.773" Title="metrical analysis software for ancient greek" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T04:27:47.600" Score="11" ViewCount="2261" Body="&lt;p&gt;References tell me that the term 'verb' originally means 'word'. This is easily understood by usages such as 'verbal abuse', 'verbal agreement', 'he's very verbal', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, of all the various parts of speech, the term 'verb' is reserved only for a single part of speech. Technically, other parts of speech such as 'noun', 'adjective', 'preposition' are all 'words', are they not? Then, why would you use this term 'verb' (originally meaning 'word') only for this particular part of speech that we now call 'verb'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was just wondering if there has been any meaningful discussion about this issue in the linguistics community, and if so, could someone tell me the outcome of any such discussion and/or point me to any relevant literature? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T14:15:14.357" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:58:30.143" Title="The origin of the term 'verb'" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-08T09:23:04.490" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a corpus I could use in my research?, for any language, where each sentence is translated correctly into English. In particular, the corpus should contain primarily everyday spoken speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example for Swedish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Var är du? = Where are you?&#xA;Gjörde du det? = Did you do it?&#xA;Ge mig det! = Give me it!&#xA;Det är dax att åka nu! It is time to go now!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be of interest to me if the language in question comes with a good Text-to-Speech synthesis system. For example, the Irish language has a good synthesiser:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abair.tcd.ie/?page=background&amp;amp;lang=eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.abair.tcd.ie/?page=background&amp;amp;lang=eng&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't found an Irish-English corpus for everyday spoken speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11037" LastEditorUserId="11037" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T10:19:22.060" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T10:19:22.060" Title="Corpus with sentences translated to English" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15242" CreationDate="2015-12-08T10:19:48.563" Score="4" ViewCount="7770" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused about how to classify the sound &quot;w&quot; in English. In some books I find that it's a bilabial and in some others that it is a velar! &#xA;What is right? Can it be both? &#xA;In fact yes the place of articulation involves both the lips and the velum! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T17:36:36.507" Title="Is the sound &quot;w&quot; a velar or a bilabial consonant?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15448" CreationDate="2015-12-08T12:49:46.497" Score="4" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tough&lt;/em&gt;-movement was said to involve object-to-subject movement back in the day. The object of the embedded clause is raised to the matrix clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary1 is tough to please t1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, the analysis of &lt;em&gt;tough&lt;/em&gt;-movement was revised in G&amp;amp;B. It no longer involved object-to-subject movement but the movement of an operator to SpecCP and the generation of PRO in SpecIP of the infinitival clause (control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary is tough Op1 PRO to please t1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made linguists rethink the analysis of &lt;em&gt;tough&lt;/em&gt;-movement? Was object-to-subject movement inadequate for some reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T16:46:58.777" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T17:51:05.970" Title="On the Analysis of Tough-Movement" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15233" CreationDate="2015-12-08T13:38:10.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our English grammatical terminology is taken from Latin, where in turn it is calqued on Greek. Noun = nomen = onoma literally means “name”; the idea is that a noun is the name of a particular person or thing. A verb is not a “name”, but merely a “word” = verbum = rhēma that is predicated to a name/noun. Sometimes the Greeks used rhēma also in a broader sense to mean a predicate adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.66:2:87.LSJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.66:2:87.LSJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T17:00:10.293" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T17:00:10.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15239" CreationDate="2015-12-08T14:28:14.437" Score="2" ViewCount="2058" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am taking an introduction course about linguistics. &#xA;When my teacher was trying to explain the difference between phonetics and phonology she said something like: &#xA;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;PHONETICS&lt;/strong&gt; is study of physical reality of sound,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;PHONOLOGY&lt;/strong&gt; is study of psychological reality of sound&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That´s totally not explanatory for me. What does it mean that a sound has a psychological reality? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T15:05:48.450" Title="What does &quot;psychological reality of sound&quot; mean ?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15238" CreationDate="2015-12-08T15:02:47.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, Sapir's classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1mqkkpbsgHYC&amp;amp;pg=PA46&amp;amp;lpg=PA46&amp;amp;dq=psychological%20reality%20phoneme&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=chfe44axfm&amp;amp;sig=X9dLUopdqwOcakAcO27KoivSk-c&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjIzfCmvszJAhUB1GMKHRZcA40Q6AEIQTAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=psychological%20reality%20phoneme&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Psychological Reality of Phonemes&lt;/a&gt; is available on line for free.  I'm sure you'll find it interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think your teacher's characterization of phonology is very good.  While many phonologists would probably agree with Sapir's contention that phonemes are psychologically real, on the other hand, they would be chagrined to learn that they are not studying physical reality.  It's probably the idea of some phoneticians that anything mental is not physically real, but few others would subscribe to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T15:02:47.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15238" CreationDate="2015-12-08T15:05:48.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That kind of sound bite is common in the profession, but is also wrong. Phonology is about a particular cognitive process where language sounds are studied as units which are made up of yes-no categories. For example, in forming the 3rd person present of a verb in English, the suffix /z/ is added, but it is changed to &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; when the preceding sound is &lt;em&gt;f,θ,p,t,k&lt;/em&gt;; and the vowel &lt;em&gt;ɨ&lt;/em&gt; is inserted when the preceding sound is &lt;em&gt;s,z,ʃ,ʒ&lt;/em&gt;. Phonology studies these rules. Phonetics studies the a number of things about how we produce such sounds (acoustics, articulation), but it is also involved in the psychology of articulation and perception. So it is wrong to deny that phonetics studies sound from a psychological perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T15:05:48.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2015-12-08T16:13:25.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you've answered your question correctly. Keep it up.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On a consonant chart &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;[w]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would occur in &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the labial column &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the velar column.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That makes it a &lt;strong&gt;labiovelar&lt;/strong&gt; (hyphenation optional) consonant, like Latin &lt;strong&gt;QU&lt;/strong&gt; and Lushootseed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;k̉ʷ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lat &lt;em&gt;quinque&lt;/em&gt; '5' ['kʷinkʷe]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lu &lt;em&gt;ck̉ʷaqid&lt;/em&gt; 'always' ['tsk̉ʷaqed]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Labiovelars are produced by simultaneous articulation, using different articulators.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Labialization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the phonetic process of rounding the lips while articulating a consonant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This happens quite frequently to consonants; American English /r/ is rounded, for instance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's particularly easy to labialize a velar, because the simultaneous articulators are so far apart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So labiovelars occur widely; labiovelar stops were prominent in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/GreekPIEreflexes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T16:13:25.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15235" CreationDate="2015-12-08T17:36:36.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a narrow phonetic perspective, [w] in English involves raising and backing the tongue while protruding the lips, so from that point of view, &quot;labiovelar&quot; would be the best description, as Ivan Kapitonov said. However, we also like to reduce linguistic descriptions to less stuff. Thus one can also refer to that glide phonologically as a labial glide, a velar (or back) glide, or a bilabial glide (though adding &quot;bi-&quot; would be less than minimal, compared to simply &quot;labial&quot;). Some languages, such as French, have an additional glide type, labio-palatal ([ɥ] as in &lt;em&gt;huite&lt;/em&gt;), which means that &quot;labial&quot; alone is insufficient for describing [w] in such languages. In English, we have fewer glides so we have more choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages can differ in how [w] behaves phonologically, even when there are only the glides [w, j]. In Chukchi for example, [w] behaves like a labial glide so that /ŋ/ becomes [m] before [w] and other labials. But in Sotho, nasal assimilation gives a velar nasal [ŋ] before [w]. A third possibility would be that [w] is treated distinctly from /p b m/ and /k g ŋ/, and could be treated like the labio-velar stops /kp gb ŋm/, which predicts the possibility of there being a language where nasals become [ŋm] before [w] (as well as /kp gb/). There don't seem to be any such cases, but labio-velar nasals are rare anyhow and languages with such sounds are not well studied. There isn't really much evidence telling us which analysis of [w] is best for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T17:36:36.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15236" CreationDate="2015-12-08T18:23:57.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite familiar with the details but back then, I suppose, it had to do with theta-role assignment. That is, if you assume the movement of Mary from the  object position of the embedded clause to the subject position of the matrix clause, it means Mary (DP) is already assigned a patient theta-role and it can't be assigned more by T (is) after movement, because it  would violate the &quot;one role per DP&quot; principle. Again, I'm not very sure because it would mean there's something wrong with the usual movement too. There's a bunch of accounts for this in MP, but I guess it's not the purpose of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T18:23:57.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15259" CreationDate="2015-12-08T22:12:48.327" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tetralemma system of logic ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;evaluates each proposition into four possible values which are true ,false ,neither true or false and both true and false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages which explicitly have words specific to  the above?       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I mean words specific to the evaluation of propositions and particularly the last two values -- since true and false must already be there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2015-12-09T09:54:26.890" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T09:08:58.100" Title="The tetralemma based languages" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15233" CreationDate="2015-12-09T01:30:02.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the late 14th century the term &quot;verbe&quot;, adopted into English from Old French, was being used to mean &quot;word; part of speech that expresses action or being&quot;. The Old French verbe itself came from the latin word verbum meaning &quot;word&quot;, which was an incarnation of the Proto-Indo-European root *were- (to speak). So here we can observe the change in meaning over time from PIE, to Latin, to Old French and into modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we look at the origins of the names for the other parts of speech, we find that Noun comes from the latin Nomen (meaning name as in the name for a thing i.e. tree, river, or Jack), Adjective creeps in from the Old French Adjectif and the before that the Latin adjectivum (to throw or place something near to). The word preposition shares the usual history of Latin (praeponere) to Old French to English and dissected means prae &quot;before&quot; ponere &quot;put&quot;, or &quot;to put some before&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think we are observing here, is the way in which authors of grammar books chose their naming conventions based on how the words behaved in sentences. Also worth noting is that these authors were almost always translating from Greek / Latin into English and had to create words that did not exist in the English of the times. For instance, &quot;adverb&quot; was coined by Flavius Sosipater Charisius as a translation for the Greek epirrhema &quot;adverb,&quot; from epi- &quot;upon, on&quot; + rhema &quot;verb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the words for the parts of speech are &quot;scientific terms&quot; translated from the original Latin or Greek terminology. The choices made are those translators choices and generally reflect their best intentions to transfer the meanings they observed in the corresponding Latin or Greek texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;references: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.etymonline.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11044" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T01:30:02.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15225" CreationDate="2015-12-09T01:57:03.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a little bit of testing I've noticed a couple things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most complex words seem not to be labeled as common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number of words making up a synonym increase as complexity increases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word length increases as complexity increases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like its a weighted combination of those 3 factors. You'd have to try it out against a set of words and their corresponding complexity level sets to get at the exact algorithm, and you might find out there is another factor or two involved (such as number of synonyms available, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11044" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T01:57:03.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15221" CreationDate="2015-12-09T02:48:25.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction &quot;lenis&quot; vs. &quot;fortis&quot; was introduced into linguistics in the mid 19th century, to refer to the &quot;air influx&quot; of consonants, where German &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;hard&quot; (&lt;em&gt;harte&lt;/em&gt;) and German &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;soft&quot; (&lt;em&gt;weiche&lt;/em&gt;: von Raumer 1858 &quot;Die sprachgeschichtliche Umwandlung und die naturgeschichtliche Bestimmung der Laute&quot;, who saw &quot;aspiration&quot; as being an important feature in describing Indo-European consonants). The Latin terms subsequently took over in linguistics, whence &quot;lenition&quot; and &quot;fortition&quot;. The voiceless consonants of German happen to be aspirated, and it was common to describe them as having a forceful (strong) rush of air, which was lacking in the voiced consonants, which explains the feeling that voiceless stops are &quot;strong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more generalized concept of &quot;lenition&quot; that prevails in contemporary linguistics is based on air pressure buildup differences associated with various manners of articulation, not on articulatory strength. Stops lead to greater air pressure differences than do fricatives, so stops are &quot;harder&quot; (more fortis) than fricatives. Geminate stop degemination (for example Finnish gradation) is also classified as a kind of lenition, and this is as you would expect based on the fact that a reduction in the closure duration will decrease the build-up of oral air pressure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T02:48:25.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15249" CreationDate="2015-12-09T07:23:48.877" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do loanwords tend to be more polite, formal, technical, etc. than native words? I've noticed that native words in my language, especially those that refer to body waste and genitals, tend to be more informal, and even more vulgar than loanwords. The same goes with English: d__k and c_ck are vulgar, excrement is acceptable, feces is formal; lip is common and labia is technical. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T08:47:48.087" Title="Why do loanwords tend to be more polite, formal, technical, etc. than native words?" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15248" CreationDate="2015-12-09T08:47:48.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various reasons, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scholarship is often done in other languages before it's done in local languages.  In Western Europe, for many centuries scholars exchanged technical knowledge in Latin, so it was natural to borrow words from Latin for technical senses when they started talking about these topics in their own language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even though not many people learn Latin anymore, the habit has been formed, and we tend to think of Latin / Greek words as more technical than Anglo-Saxon words.&#xA;This was the same case in Korea and Japan, which used Chinese as the language of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When words are borrowed, their &quot;raw&quot; meaning and all of its associations are less prominent.  Once a word has vulgar connotations, it's hard to remove these connotations, and so people often seek a &quot;nicer&quot; alternative. &#xA;Words recently borrowed haven't had the time to build up the vulgar connotations, and the meaning is less vivid, too.&#xA;So a loanword tends to be used in more formal or polite situations, when the native word is felt to be too vulgar.  This formality is reinforced by its use - we hear a word like &quot;feces&quot; used only in formal situations, so we think of it as formal, and it gains that connotation, which may make it more resistant to gaining vulgar connotations later.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T08:47:48.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-09T16:09:19.813" Score="2" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the speaker intends something like &quot;and similar&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen this usage in several languages, e.g. Turkish, Slovakian, Russian, Polish. But i have not heard it in English, German or French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples can be found e.g. in Restaurant names like:&#xA;Pizza Mizza.&#xA;pasta masta.&#xA;Sushi Mushi&#xA;Kebap Mebap (or Döner Möner)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this concept called, and where does it originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9597" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T00:47:43.787" Title="Linguistic term for repeating a noun and replacing the first consonant with M" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15250" CreationDate="2015-12-09T17:12:53.450" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, we use &quot;shm-&quot;.  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/209796/Metalinguistic_shmetalinguistic_The_phonology_of_shm-reduplication&quot;&gt;The phonology of shm-reduplication&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T17:12:53.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15250" CreationDate="2015-12-09T18:11:39.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a type of reduplication. As noted above, English has a similar process, replacing the first onset with &lt;em&gt;schm-&lt;/em&gt;. A language that has this in spades is Thai, with several types of reduplication with internal changes (usually to the vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10889" LastActivityDate="2015-12-09T18:11:39.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T03:54:40.407" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that Mandarin has a very simple inventory of sounds and set of possible combinations, whereas some of the languages I'm familiar with which permit more consonant clusters and other complexities tend to not be tonal languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, could you take any language, say Russian, and speak it with tones? (Not that you would; just as a thought experiment. I'm trying to imagine a cross between tones like in Mandarin and pronunciation like in Russian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11055" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T18:47:39.697" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T18:47:39.697" Title="Can you put tone on any syllable?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15256" CreationDate="2015-12-10T06:20:28.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tone is not, per se, an absolute phonetic property – it is the phonological exploitation of a number of related phonetic properties that mostly pertain to the larynx, though also involving duration. The most generally-noticeable realization of tone is the distinctive use of F0. It would be possible for someone skilled in speech synthesis to manipulate the pitch of individual syllables of Russian to give it properties like Chinese (perhaps our colleague in Ithaca could even provide an example). To some extent, Russian and Chinese are not comparable because syllable duration is much longer in Chinese than it is in Russian, and syllable duration significantly affects perceptability of tone. However, one could try for a Yoruba-like tone system superimposed on Russian syllables (since Yoruba has fewer tonal distinctions). So in principle, you could assign random tones from the set H, M, L to Russian syllables, and synthesize pitch contours based on Yoruba tonal phonetics. You could likewise plug in information about tonal phonetics from a number of different languages such as Thai, Zulu or Punjabi, though getting a satisfactory description of tonal phonetics in Zulu or Punjabi might take a bit of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the only sensible way to do this would be to synthesize the outputs. There may be a couple of skilled phoneticians who can speak Russian but add on Yoruba-like or Zulu-like pitch perturbations, but I would not count on their services. Anyway, synthesis would allow you to play around with the details of pitch realization to give a continuum between Zulu and Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T06:20:28.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15260" CreationDate="2015-12-10T07:11:19.890" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having some trouble understanding how lambda-calculus works for gapping. How do you create a representation for &quot;John bought and Bill cooked the turkey&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT-- I realize this was RNR. For a gapping expression such as &quot;She ran a mile and he a marathon&quot;, what would the lambda expression look like? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11057" LastEditorUserId="11057" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T08:03:57.863" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T10:16:49.280" Title="Gapping in Lambda Expressions?" Tags="&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15244" CreationDate="2015-12-10T09:08:58.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I don't know everything about truth in 6000+ languages of the world, I doubt that there exists any language with a tetralemmatic truth system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the meaning of &quot;true&quot; and &quot;false&quot; in natural spoken English does not match its logical interpretation; the logicians' use is kind of a specialised terminology one has to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T09:08:58.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15258" CreationDate="2015-12-10T10:06:48.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose you mean something like (1b) and (2b), for (1a) and (2a),&#xA;respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a. John bought and Bill cooked the turkey.&#xA;    b. [λx . ⟦bought⟧(x)(⟦John⟧) ∧ ⟦cooked⟧(x)⟦Bill⟧](⟦the turkey⟧)&#xA;    c. ⟦bought⟧(⟦the turkey⟧)(⟦John⟧) ∧ ⟦cooked⟧(⟦the turkey⟧)(⟦Bill⟧)&#xA;&#xA;(2) a. John bought the turkey and Bill the wine.&#xA;    b. [λP . P(⟦the turkey⟧)(⟦John⟧) ∧ P(⟦the wine⟧)(⟦Bill⟧)](⟦bought⟧)&#xA;    c. ⟦bought⟧(⟦the turkey⟧)(⟦John⟧) ∧ ⟦bought⟧(⟦the wine⟧)(⟦Bill⟧)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, (1b) and (2b) β-reduce to the usual (1c) and (2c), respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, we essentially just abstract over the elided thing: &quot;the turkey&quot;&#xA;in (1), hence &lt;code&gt;λx&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; of type &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; (individual), and &quot;bought&quot; in (2),&#xA;hence &lt;code&gt;λP&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; of type &lt;code&gt;et&lt;/code&gt; (predicate/set of individuals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remark: GregLee's answer requires some elaboration. He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[(lambda x)(John bought x) &amp;amp; (lambda x)(Bill cooked x)](the turkey)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the two &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;'s are bound by two different λ-operators. Thus, this is&#xA;fact equivalent (switching now to my notation above) to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[[λx . ⟦bought⟧(x)(⟦John⟧)] &amp;amp; [λy . ⟦cooked⟧(y)(⟦Bill⟧)]](⟦the turkey⟧)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have two different λ-terms being connected by &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt;. Importantly, &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; here&#xA;cannot be a boolean connective (∧ above), because the two λ-terms are of type&#xA;&lt;code&gt;et&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;. Thus, &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; is more like (a functional version of) set&#xA;intersection (∩):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[[λx . ⟦bought⟧(x)(⟦John⟧)] ∩ [λy . ⟦cooked⟧(y)(⟦Bill⟧)]](⟦the turkey⟧)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After β-conversion, this will of course be equivalent to my (1c) above, so in&#xA;that sense it's just as valid a meaning representation. However, the difference&#xA;is that in my version, we have just one instance of λ-abstraction; in this&#xA;version, there are two. Which one is more &quot;correct&quot; will depend on the&#xA;particular mapping from syntax to semantics, i.e. how abstraction arises&#xA;syntactically and whether we want one such instance or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another consideration is that, for (2), the analog of GregLee's answer would&#xA;be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[[λP . P(⟦the turkey⟧)(⟦John⟧)] &amp;amp; [λQ . Q(⟦the wine⟧)(⟦Bill⟧)]]([⟦bought⟧])&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; must be the functional version of set intersection, but in the&#xA;λ-calculus, this &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; would actually have a different type than the previous&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt;. The first would be of type &lt;code&gt;(et)((et)et)&lt;/code&gt; (intersection of two sets of&#xA;individuals), while the second would be of type &lt;code&gt;((et)t)(((et)t)(et)t)&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;(intersection of two predicates/two sets of sets of individuals). Now, this&#xA;maybe isn't a very big deal, since you could maybe just define a suitable&#xA;polymorphic operator, or a family of such operators. But the nice thing about&#xA;my version is that both cases rely on just one abstraction followed by normal&#xA;boolean conjunction (∧).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1567" LastEditorUserId="1567" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T10:16:49.280" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T10:16:49.280" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14830" CreationDate="2015-12-10T11:21:52.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Studies suggest that 70-90% of world population is right-handed. Assuming that this percentage would have been more or less the same when the writing systems were evolving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters immediately on the left, to the right hand are visible as they are being written. This keeps giving a visual feedback to the writer who in most cases will be right-handed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing from right to left keeps the letter formation on the left of the hand (right hand) giving the above advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For vertical writing hence the direction is from top to bottom; note a left-handed person has the same advantage here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other advantage which accrues in similar context is that the writing does not get rubbed off as stated by @yellowsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T23:52:12.293" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T23:52:12.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2015-12-10T11:35:15.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us understand the stryctre of XOR through boolean logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A XOR B is (A OR B) AND NOT (A AND B )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that inclusive OR appears in languages first... XOR could be obtained by applying a further condition to the OzR clause as is done by AND above...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This condition is imposed by &#xA;.   Either .in English.&#xA;.   'Ya'   . in Hindi interestingly inclusive OR is also Ya in Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is derived from Sanskrit  'Va'...  and as per Sanskrit grammer a repetition of this word suggests exclusion (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.learnsanskrit.org/start/uninflected/andornot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Learn Sanskrit Online: &quot;And,&quot; &quot;Or,&quot; and &quot;Not&quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the basic point is that the truth table for XOR can be realized by filtering out the truth table for OR and interestingly most languages make use of this mechanism instead of having a separate XOR operator (word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T12:49:33.623" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T12:49:33.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T13:58:46.617" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Middle Egyptian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology&lt;/a&gt;), the /s/ and /z/ merged into one sound, but the graphemes continued to be used interchangeably. &#xA;As one who is interested in historical linguistics (or should I say diacronic linguistics?) I was wondering in which way the phonological merger rule could be applied to make this clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I was unclear before :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11059" LastEditorUserId="11059" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T13:19:33.753" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T13:19:33.753" Title="Historical Linguistics: Merging consonants" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-12-14T09:14:11.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15263" CreationDate="2015-12-10T17:00:30.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have apparently taken a position on the phonetic value of the sound sometimes written as [z], that it is voiced. The alternative is that it is an &quot;emphatic&quot;, though that raises questions as to the phonetic nature of emphatics (i..e were they pharyngealized or were they ejective?). Given the assumption that the phoneme is phonetically realized as &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;, the rule would apply just to the &quot;voiced alveolar fricative&quot;. It is plausible that the other potential voiced fricatives &amp;lt;ꜣ,ꜥ&gt; were not fricatives but rather were approximants, i.e. sonorants, in which case one could just express the change as devoicing of fricatives (regardless of place of articulation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you instead adopt the emphatic interpretation of &quot;z&quot;, you would essentially have the same rule, replacing &quot;voiced&quot; with &quot;emphatic&quot; and &quot;voiceless&quot; with &quot;non-emphatic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T17:00:30.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T17:57:13.780" Score="5" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been studying Russian for years now, but the one thing that I can't seem to wrap my mind around is why would the sound е &lt;code&gt;je&lt;/code&gt; come to be pronounced like ё &lt;code&gt;jo&lt;/code&gt; in certain circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, these phonological processes are still active, because borrowings from other languages have their &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; sounds altered from &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;je&lt;/code&gt; to&lt;code&gt;jo&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have expected the following words to have been russified by just palatalizing the Latin e: &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, to a cyrillic е: &lt;code&gt;je&lt;/code&gt;. Instead, they seem to have skipped &lt;code&gt;je&lt;/code&gt; and gone straight to &lt;code&gt;jo&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;мушкетёр (musketeer) is pronounced &lt;code&gt;muskʲitʲór&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;фуникулёр (cable train from &lt;em&gt;Fr.&lt;/em&gt; funicular) is pronounced &lt;code&gt;funʲikulʲór&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;шофёр (chauffeur) is pronounced like &lt;code&gt;shɐfʲór&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard someone said that when the word шофёр was new it was indeed pronounced more like шофер&lt;code&gt;shófʲɐr&lt;/code&gt;, but as it became more Russified the &lt;code&gt;je&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;jo&lt;/code&gt;. However nobody can explain why this change happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even stranger to me yet, is the word: отель. It means 'hotel'. In the &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, there is no palatalization and it retains the frontness of the French &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, and it  is pronounced &lt;code&gt;ɐˈtɛlʲ&lt;/code&gt;, it is not pronounced &lt;code&gt;ɐtʲоlʲ&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;ɐtʲelʲ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aside from borrowings there are countless examples of е/ё altnernation based on flexion.&lt;/strong&gt; Here are a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;сестра́ (sister): сёстры/сестёр&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;о́зеро (lake): озёра&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ружьё (rifle): ружье́&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T23:24:20.933" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T23:24:20.933" Title="What phonological process changes е to ё in Russian?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15265" CreationDate="2015-12-11T02:19:37.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the old Slavic languages, the sound [o] could never follow the palatalized consonants (which in those times also included the hushing consonants Ш [ʃ], Ж [ʒ], Ч [tʃ], Щ [ʃtʲ], and also Ц [tsʲ]), since in the Proto-Slavic language [o] in this position had changed into [e].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 12th-16th centuries in the Russian language, the pronunciation  of the stressed vowel sound denoted by the letter E changed (consonants before E were palatalized): the stressed sound [e] changed into [o] when before non-palatalized consonants and at the end of a word. This Е underwent no change before Ц (at the time when this law was active, Ц was still a palatalized consonant), and before some consonant clusters (&lt;em&gt;первый&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;верх&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;женский&lt;/em&gt; - at the time when this law was active, the first consonant in those clusters was palatalized). Sometimes the sound [o] appeared between palatalized consonants, mostly by morphological analogy (&lt;em&gt;о клёне&lt;/em&gt; [ə 'klʲonʲe] - similar to &lt;em&gt;клён&lt;/em&gt; [klʲon], &lt;em&gt;клёна&lt;/em&gt; [klʲonə], etc.; the verbs ending &lt;em&gt;-ёте&lt;/em&gt; - similar to &lt;em&gt;-ёт&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ём&lt;/em&gt;, the Instrumental case ending &lt;em&gt;-ёю/-ёй&lt;/em&gt; - similar to &lt;em&gt;-ою/-ой&lt;/em&gt;). The Church Slavonic language and the Church Slavonic borrowings in Russian were not subjected to this law, &lt;em&gt;neither were the borrowings that came into the Russian language later&lt;/em&gt;. The sound represented by the letter &lt;em&gt;yat'&lt;/em&gt;, Ѣ, with rare exceptions, did not change into [o].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this new [o] after the palatalized consonants appeared, there were no orthographic means to write it and to indicate the palatalization of the previous consonant, it was usually spelled as IO, sometimes as ЬО. In the last decade of the 18th century, the letter Ё was introduced, but until​ now, until the 21st century, the usage of this letter is not obligatory, if you wish, you can write it, if you wish, you can write E instead. This spelling inconsistency affected the pronunciation of some words, mostly personal and geographic names, and also some borrowed common nouns. For example, the original name of Leo Tolstoy was &lt;em&gt;Лёв&lt;/em&gt; [lʲof], but since it almost always was written as &lt;em&gt;Лeв&lt;/em&gt;, its wrong pronunciation as ​[lʲef] gradually became the dominating one. The opposite also often happened: the words where E should be written and [ʲe] should be pronounced, are mistakingly read with [ʲo], as if Ё is there: some mistakingly pronounce &lt;em&gt;афёра&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;афера&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;гренадёр&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;гренадер&lt;/em&gt;. The same happened with &lt;em&gt;мушкетёр&lt;/em&gt; (from French 'mousquetier') and &lt;em&gt;фуникулёр&lt;/em&gt; (from French 'funiculaire'), but here the originally wrong pronunciation is now considered to be standard. In the case of &lt;em&gt;шофёр&lt;/em&gt;, the word comes from the French 'chauffeur' [ʃofœr], and the sounds [œ] and [ø] usually written as ö are often spelled as Ё in Russian, all the rules of using Ё in the foreign names and borrowings are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(Cyrillic)#Transcription_of_foreign_words&quot;&gt;very many and very complicated&lt;/a&gt; to enumerate them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T02:19:37.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-11T05:31:36.147" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone created an exposition detailing the phonotactics of English in a way which would be easy for a human to understand but also rigorous enough for it to be possible to program a piece of software with the information to look at any given word written in IPA and say whether it's &quot;allowed&quot; in English or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make sure I'm using this term correctly: For example, in English /fr/ is allowed, such as in &quot;friend&quot;. However, /vr/ is not allowed. The phonotactics of a language describe which sound sequences are allowed and which aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Such a description would differ between different dialects. Any such description, no matter the dialect, would be helpful for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11055" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T07:23:58.323" Title="Seeking a rigorous description of the phonotactics of English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15267" CreationDate="2015-12-11T06:15:56.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15123/how-many-of-all-possible-english-words-are-actually-in-use-have-meaning/15131#15131&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt; for relevant discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has not been done, and there is ample reason to hold that in principle it cannot be done. The premise underlying the question is that there is a crisp cognitive mechanism that tells us that a certain string &quot;is allowed&quot; or &quot;is disallowed&quot;, but there is no reason to believe in such a function. The strongest case for some kind of template function that can be made is for defining what a &quot;syllable&quot; is in English, which means what a possible onset, nucleus and coda are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not much serious doubt that it is a systematic fact of English grammar that clusters of obstruent plus oral sonorant are possible in English onsets and that oral sonorant plus obstruent are not possible, thus &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt; is a word, and &lt;em&gt;lpay&lt;/em&gt; could not be one. Within that class of &quot;allowed&quot; clusters, some of the predicted sequences don't appear at the expected rate, so voiced fricatives plus liquid are almost non-existent. Examples such as &quot;zloty&quot; all come from foreign languages, though English speakers can pronounce them with no problem, if they happen to know the words. See G.N. Clements &amp;amp; S.J. Keyser &lt;em&gt;CV Phonology&lt;/em&gt; and E. Selkirk &quot;The syllable&quot; for accounts of sequencing principles within the syllable. The Clements &amp;amp; Keyser model distinguishes between positive conditions and negative filters, and while positive conditions absolutely must be obeyed, negative filters might admit of exceptions and tend to generate weaker speaker reactions. So for example, labial+labial onsets are very rare, and there are no Germanic words in English with onset *pw, but there are some Spanish-derived words (pueblo, Puerto Rico for those who don't pronounce the latter Porto Rico). There are only 2 words with onset [zw] and most people don't known either word (&lt;em&gt;zwieback, Zwicky&lt;/em&gt;). The problem is, there is no way to tell if the described sequences simply don't happen to exist, or are actually explicitly excluded. If your theory of phonotactics says that &quot;doesn't exist&quot; is the same thing as &quot;isn't allowed&quot;, then [flænt] would be disallowed for everybody, and [marʌm] is disallowed for everybody except those people acquainted with the word. Since there is no valid test of &quot;is allowed&quot; for words, there isn't a possible list of strings that are cleanly &quot;in&quot; vs. &quot;out&quot;. You can probably devise an operational test such as a certain minimum score on a 5-point Likert scale for speaker reactions, but that will not actually give you a precise partitioning of strings of English phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T06:15:56.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15267" CreationDate="2015-12-11T07:23:58.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed a description of the possible English monosyllables in 1940 -- the paper is in &lt;strong&gt;Language, Thought, and Reality&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Morris Halle gave an elegant (though probably wrong) theory based on his &quot;simplicity metric&quot;.  That was in his paper &quot;Phonology in Generative Grammar&quot;.  In order to economize on the feature specifications in the lexicon, we formulate Morpheme Structure Rules (MSRs) that let us abbreviate lexical entries by filling in omitted specifications.  We must stop writing new MSRs when the feature specs in all the MSRs come to equal the saved features in lexical entries; that is the point of diminishing returns.  Then the admissible morphemes are those morphemes which would not be altered by the application of any MSR.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;David Stampe's Natural Phonology makes the admissible words those which would not be changed by any of the universal processes that remain unsuppressed in adult speech.  (Processes are suppressed during the course of language acquisition when their application would prevent children from pronouncing adult forms accurately.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My idea about admissibility is that it cannot be connected directly with the words actually in the lexicon of a language, because it is perfectly normal for those to include many recently borrowed words which do not fit the phonemic pattern of the language at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these proposals are programmatic, and none meets your criteria that they be programmable and comprehensible. Except perhaps Whorf's (but it's only for monosyllabic words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T07:23:58.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15263" CreationDate="2015-12-11T08:55:17.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will tackle the question &quot;How to show this as a sound change&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several methods available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Study borrowings from Egypt to other languages (Especially the names of rulers and other important persons). When the other language has a contrast between s/z, but doesn't apply it to Egyptian loan words we can interpret this as a hint of a sound change in Egyptian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Study borrowings from other languages to Egypt. When there is a confusion around s/z from other languages we can interpret this as a hint that Egyptian does not maintain the distinction any longer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Internal evidence. Watch the development of Egypt spelling. When the formerly distinct letter for s and z are confounded, we see this as evidence that their distinction is no longer maintained in the spoken language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Observations from ancient grammaticians. When we are lucky we have surviving old texts describing the language change. We are in this situation for the sound change of Ancient Greek eta to ita, I don't know about Egyptian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T08:55:17.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-11T17:53:08.813" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know whethere there are any standards that would allow a non-tonal (or tonal) spoken language like English to be augmented with diacritics to denote how the tone varies, as the entire sentence is pronounced, or in particular places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T18:04:13.423" Title="Non-tonal (and tonal) languages and inflection" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15272" CreationDate="2015-12-11T18:04:13.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard used for English by phoneticians these days is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToBI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TOBI&lt;/a&gt;. It is language-specific enough that if you want to apply it to French, you'd have to use TODI, TOBI etc. as models for developing FTOBI, since it requires language-specific categorization decisions. It doesn't actually use tone mark diacritics like acute, circumflex etc. as are conventional in phonological tone systems, instead it used letters H, L, %, +, -, *, !.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T18:04:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-12T02:14:31.243" Score="1" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize this question has been done to death in other contexts, but I have already exhausted the possibilities covered in similar threads all across the web. I am a fluent (I hold the Certificate of Proficiency in English from Cambridge University) non-native speaker of English. I have no problems expressing myself either in writing or speaking, save for one aspect - my accent. I have already done several accent-reduction courses in addition to persistently practicing shadowing. As a result, my accent did improve considerably, but native speakers I converse with still take me for a foreigner 95% of the time. Are there any other techniques I could try to finally acquire that crisp, neutral accent or am I doomed to answering the tedious question of where am I from forever? Any hints would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11065" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T14:25:25.357" Title="Losing a non-native accent of English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-12-15T15:52:10.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-12T10:17:45.197" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that in most languages, front vowels are unrounded and back vowels are rounded. This helps make them more distinct from each other so as to be easier to hear in speech. However, different languages make their phonemes distinct in different ways, and apparently some languages contrast unrounded and rounded versions of the same vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is whether there are any languages which 'glide' between these vowels. Imagine making a consonant sound, say [p], and then moving first to unrounded [a] and then rounded [a]. Does this sort of thing happen in a consistent way in any known natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11055" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T14:19:54.657" Title="Gliding from Unrounded to Rounded Vowels (or Vice Versa)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15275" CreationDate="2015-12-12T13:14:05.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think before making the assumption that you need to completely lose your foreign accent, there are a couple things to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you're able to express yourself freely in both speaking and writing, and at least your one post gives some evidence of this.  There's one other important thing - that people can comprehend you.  If your accent isn't strong enough to impede communication, then it isn't something you truly have to worry about.  If people do have trouble understanding you, then you will want to identify what aspects of your pronunciation are hard to follow, and work on those aspects.  Over time, you'll learn how to make people understand, even if you're accent remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you need to decide whether you really want a native-sounding accent.  Many people choose to maintain a little bit of their accent when they learn English, in order to maintain their identity.  That is your choice to make, not anyone else's.  If you want to sound American or British, make the effort.  But if you'd like to maintain a little accent, then do that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to erase all traces of your accent, you have to first accept that it may not be possible.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Critical period hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;perfect&quot; language acquisition is very difficult past the teenage years, and accent is an area that has proven very difficult to change past the critical period.  You didn't give your age, but if you're an adult, it will be much harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're determined to have an accent that doesn't sound foreign, it may be best to consider what kind of accent you do want.  There isn't really a &quot;neutral accent&quot;, and you may have more success if you're aiming for a particular accent, whether it be English, Australian, Southern U.S., or whatever.  Beyond that, keep monitoring your accent, so your pronunciation is less likely to fossilize. Try doing things that force you to enunciate more exactly, like singing or acting. And if you can identify the aspects of your accent that are most obvious, you can focus on changing those aspects first.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T13:14:05.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15277" CreationDate="2015-12-12T14:19:54.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. To give a modern example, French often has a sequence or diphthong (depending on how you analyse it) [ɥi] (which is equivalent to [y̯i]), as in the word &lt;em&gt;nuit&lt;/em&gt; /nɥi/ &quot;night.&quot; This goes from a front high rounded glide to a front high unrounded vowel. Old English dialects are theorized to have had a whole set of &quot;height-harmonic&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_phonology#Diphthongs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diphthongs&lt;/a&gt;, one of which may have been realized as [i͡y].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, any language with /ɥ/ and /i/ as phonemes will possibly also have the sequence /ɥi/; I don't know if that counts for you. Same for /j/ and /y/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T14:19:54.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15275" CreationDate="2015-12-12T14:25:25.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've been offered a part playing an Australian stevedore, but you have to pick up the accent in just two weeks.  It's only a few lines you have to get right.  Concentrate on the sounds and the rhythm -- forget what the lines mean.  After that, maybe there's an drunken Italian pastry chef role for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, it's not a matter of getting rid of your old accent, but learning new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T14:25:25.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-12T18:36:52.853" Score="2" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a phonetician and a phonologist?  I've seen these two terms somewhere on this site but can't figure out the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T19:56:47.183" Title="Phoneticians versus phonologists" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15282" CreationDate="2015-12-12T19:56:47.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference resides in the subject matter that they investigate. They have in common the fact that they investigate language sound systems. Phonology specifically looks at sound from the perspective of computations involving discrete units (including sets of individual units), such as [p] or [p,b,m], and phonetics involves the mapping between symbolic sound and physical sound. So while phonology would describe [p] as e.g. a &quot;bilabial voiceless stop&quot; or [+anterior,-coronal,-voice] depending on your theoretical framework, phonetics would describe the sound in terms of a particular pattern of duration in milliseconds, formant transitions, amplitudes, as well as articulatory movements; also, phonetics would study how incoming continuous sound waves are interpreted as discrete sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a high degree of interdependency between these disciplines, so a phonological analysis is based on prior phonetic work that allows us to make a rough mapping between continuous sound and individual segments like [p]. Likewise, a phonetic analysis generally looks at properties of classes of discrete sounds, for example the way that formant transitions differ between [p,b,m] versus [t,d,n], where you need a prior phonological analysis of a language to decide that a certain part of the speech stream is a &quot;p&quot; or a &quot;t&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T19:56:47.183" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T02:59:41.217" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two glyphs representing one phoneme is a &quot;digraph,&quot; but what is it called when one glyph represent two phonemes? For example, the Greek letter ξ (represents the two grouped phonemes, /ks/) or ψ (represents the two grouped phonemes, /ps/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1920" LastEditorUserId="1920" LastEditDate="2015-12-13T18:40:17.483" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T18:40:17.483" Title="If two glyphs representing one phoneme is a &quot;digraph,&quot; what is one glyph representing two phonemes called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T09:27:26.990" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accent of (most of) the American state of Georgia, as far as I know, lacks the drawl of most other Southern American accents. Instead, it is quicker and clipped. Does anyone know why? Does the accent have any influences (such as, from part/s of England, or other part/s of the British Isles) that other Southern accents don't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10635" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T09:27:26.990" Title="Influences on the accent of Georgia (the American state)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15288" CreationDate="2015-12-13T17:01:36.297" Score="1" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I know the difference between generative phonology and segmental phonology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10850" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T14:41:59.640" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T14:41:59.640" Title="Generative phonology and segmental phonology" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15287" CreationDate="2015-12-13T17:19:29.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generative phonology is a meta-theory of phonology (i.e. the application of generative grammar to the study of phonology), but segmental phonology is the study of a specific area, namely segments, as opposed to prosody (such as syllables and tone). Thus one can study segmental phonology generatively or non-generatively, and one can study prosody generatively or non-generatively. While there is a rather hard distinction between generative and non-generative approaches to language, the segmental / suprasegmental distinction is more a matter of personal interest. Indeed, especially since the advent of autosegmental phonology (e.g. Goldsmith dissertation &lt;em&gt;Autosegmental phonology&lt;/em&gt;), the distinction between segmental and suprasegmental aspects of representation has been blurred, so that only moras, syllables and feet are resolutely suprasegmental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T17:19:29.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4838" CreationDate="2015-12-14T15:55:00.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the suffixes may be translated with a relative clause, they are participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the difference is not only the subjectivity but also the concurrency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present participle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I saw the girl, who was reading a book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the moment i saw her, she was reading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) I saw the house, from whose chimney the smog was coming out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Past participle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I saw the book, which the girl had read (some time before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) I saw the house from whose chimney the smog came out (some time before)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9597" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T15:55:00.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7129" CreationDate="2015-12-14T16:20:18.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you speaking about spelling or pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dialects of Arabic differ a lot in pronunciation. (e.g. most common example the definite article is sometimes transliterated as al and sometimes as el in Latin script)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Persian pronunciation of Arabic words is also quite different from Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the words from Arabic traveled to Turkish not directly but via Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally the Turkish alphabet reform made the different pronunciation visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9597" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T16:20:18.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15256" CreationDate="2015-12-14T17:49:52.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heartily agree with all of the theoretical points made by @user6726 (+1). This is a great question (+1) because it illustrates a common misconception about what lexical tone is and how it functions in language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WHAT LEXICAL TONE IS NOT &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone is not intonation&lt;/strong&gt;; that is, the function of tone in a language like Mandarin is not to convey information about whether the sentence is a question or a statement, or to provide &quot;paralinguistic&quot; information about the state of mind of the speaker. Tone is not a means of providing &quot;color&quot; to the speaker's speech. &lt;strong&gt;Tone is also not predictable.&lt;/strong&gt; In a tone language, there's no way to determine what tone a syllable or word should have based on other phonological properties of the syllable/word, such as its segmental (vowel and consonant) makeup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WHAT LEXICAL TONE IS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone is a phonological feature on words and syllables&lt;/strong&gt; that is as integral to the meanings and grammatical functions of those words and syllables as the segments (vowels and consonants) that make up the words and syllables. &lt;strong&gt;The lexical tonal pattern for a word or a morpheme must be learned and memorized as part of the mental dictionary entry for that word/morpheme.&lt;/strong&gt; And since it is part of the dictionary entry, &lt;strong&gt;tone is language-specific.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you internalize the concepts above, you should start to see why it doesn't make sense to think of imposing the lexical tonal system of one language onto a different language that doesn't have a lexical tone system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's delve a little deeper into your thought experiment with Russian and Mandarin. Tone in Mandarin is assigned at the level of the syllable, and syllables in Mandarin roughly correspond to morphemes (units of meaning). For a given syllable in Russian, how would you decide what tone that syllable should be assigned? Would you try to do it by meaning? You wouldn't get very far trying to find the equivalent Mandarin morpheme for every Russian morpheme, because there would be many untranslatable morphemes, many morphemes with multiple possible translations, and many polysyllabic morphemes. On the other hand, you couldn't do it by sound, either, since Mandarin is filled with sets of syllables that have the same segmental makeup but different tones. Not to mention that Russian has many syllables that have no straightforward phonetic equivalents in Mandarin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be tempting to draw parallels between what you're describing and speaking one language with the &quot;accent&quot; from another language--as in speaking English with a French accent. But there's a crucial distinction that renders such an analogy specious: speaking English with a French accent involves making substitutions of one segment for another--mapping the French vowel space onto the English vowel space, substituting [z] for [ð], replacing the intonational contours of English with those of French. But Russian has no lexical tonal system, so there's nothing there to substitute with Mandarin tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK. So what &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You could invent a tonal system for Russian from scratch.&lt;/strong&gt; This is what @guifa and @user6726 seem to be suggesting. You'd have to decide to what unit the lexical tonal patterns would apply in Russian, and &lt;strong&gt;you'd have to assign a pattern to every single word in the Russian dictionary.&lt;/strong&gt; I agree with @user6726 that the normal speaking rhythm of Russian doesn't lend itself to a Mandarin-style system, so I'd go for something more along the lines of the systems found in languages like Yoruba or Japanese, where many words are polysyllabic and thus the tonal pattern, made up of a series of relative high and low pitches, is assigned to the word. &lt;strong&gt;One of the most complicated aspects of the tonal system that would need addressing is how the lexical tones in this new version of Russian would interact with the already existing intonational system of the language&lt;/strong&gt;, since both tone and intonation would dictate the pitch patterns present in the complete utterance. Tone-intonation interactions are completely language-specific and unpredictable, so you'd have to decide, for example, how the tone on a given word is produced when the word is part of a yes-no question versus when it is part of a declarative statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You could manipulate Russian utterances such that the syllables in them were characterized by durations and pitch contours typical in Mandarin.&lt;/strong&gt; I can't stress enough, however, how much this &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;speaking Russian with Mandarin tone&quot;. This would basically just be like singing in Russian--imposing melodies and rhythms on the words and phrases--and the melodic contours would not be contributing anything lexical or grammatical to those utterances. There would be several ways to achieve this effect. For my money the most straightforward way would be to find a native Russian speaker who is fluent enough in Mandarin to take a crack at it. I know they're out there, because when I took Mandarin in grad school there was a Russian student who was learning Mandarin in order to be able to speak the native language of his future wife, who was Chinese! If I were to try to use speech technology to generate such utterances myself, I wouldn't use outright speech synthesis; rather I'd take recordings of carefully articulated Russian and use Praat's manipulation functions to alter the durations and fundamental frequency contours of all of the syllables. For both the Russian human and for me, the decisions about what contour to give to each syllable would be completely arbitrary (other than, perhaps, avoiding too many strings of the same contour in a row and also avoiding sequences that don't generally occur in Mandarin).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You could forget the Mandarin-Russian example and focus instead on two languages that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; have lexical tone.&lt;/strong&gt; In this way, you could bring the task more in line with the English-with-a-French-accent analogy. Ideally you'd want two languages that have similar tone-bearing units, like the syllable in both or the word in both. You could then come up with a straightforward substitution rubric--for Tone 1 in Language A replaces Tone 3 in Language B, Tone 2 in Language A replaces both Tone 1 and Tone 5 in Language B, etc. In such a scenario, you'd also have to decide what to do about that pesky tone-intonation interaction. The easiest thing to do would be to adopt the intonation of Language A along with its tones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T18:12:41.437" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T18:12:41.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-14T19:43:00.777" Score="4" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: yes, it is a bit of a discussion, but a very good one. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would like to create a program that can randomly generate languges, for video games, television or just for fun. I'm already a decent programmer, but I need help with understanding all the possible different ways languages can be structured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start be taking a randomly generated alphabet(I've already taken notes on this, but feel free to comment), and then start assigning sounds to each letter based on the average &quot;openness&quot; and depth requested for the language. I'm using the IPA as a basis for sounds. then I'd start assigning both used and unused sounds to groups of letters. I'd proceed to &quot;translate&quot; the entirety of greek and latin roots, by sound, then assigning the letters or groups of them, checking to make sure there are no conflictions. After this monstrous task is done, &quot;average&quot; words that don't stem from roots would be generated. Finally, language syntax would be generated, this is what I need help with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there possibly a list somewhere, or could somebody give me a basis to start on, of the many possible combinations language syntax could be done. I'm an English speaker, but I know a tiny bit of Danish. Any help understanding how context is held in a sentence(at a very low level) without little to no ambiguities, and how they (can or can't) vary will be greatly appreciated. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Some people seem to get the impression that it's to either select a random language or that it would be human. It is to generate a language randomly from the ground up on a computer, and 95% of the time, it probably would not be human. It's specifically going to be used in a game where you're exploring the galaxy, but it could be used anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11081" LastEditorUserId="11081" LastEditDate="2015-12-15T12:31:18.030" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T12:31:18.030" Title="Randomly Generated Languages" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-14T20:33:09.373" Score="5" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest mention of the term &quot;rewrite rule&quot; that I am able to find - in the context of phrase structure grammars - is in Chomsky's &quot;Syntactic Structures&quot; (1957).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he originate the term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T00:51:32.137" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T00:51:32.137" Title="Did Chomsky originate the term &quot;rewrite rule&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15296" CreationDate="2015-12-14T21:36:34.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that you have the horse and the cart inverted, that you need to start by deciding how utterances are structured syntactically and semantically, and at the end of the process figure out the sounds and letters that this maps to. You also need to sort out how general and flexible you want this program to be. If you were aiming to randomly select human-like languages, you'd want to identify N properties with, say, two values (could be any number, of course) and use those settings to design the language. A toy example would be the following property list (in descending order of value):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Subject precedes verb&#xA;Verb precedes object&#xA;Subject precedes object&#xA;Subject has case marking&#xA;Object has case marking&#xA;Verb agrees with subject&#xA;Verb agrees with object&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English would be &quot;language 114&quot; given this list and Danish would be &quot;language 112&quot;. Then you'd need a really big property list, with at least 32,000 properties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas there is no such list out there, so you'd need to do a lot of creating. A good starting point would be to try to specify all of the elements of a sentence, then ask how pairs (or triples) of words might be ordered. You'd need more than just subject, object and verb: what about &quot;location&quot;, &quot;instrument&quot;, &quot;beneficiary&quot; and various other functional relations? Subjects (objects, and so on) aren't just single words, they are entire phrases centered around a noun, embellished with... adjectives? articles? numerals? possessives? A verb in a language could just be a verb, but in many languages you have to say whether it is past, present or future tense (and maybe past and present are the same; maybe present and future are the same). When you decide that you want a language with verbs indicating past, present and future tense, then you have to make a decision about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; that is indicated, for example you could mark present with one prefix and future with a different prefix; or they could both be suffixes; or one could be a prefix and the other a suffix. Suppose you decide that the present is marked with a prefix /kan/: then you have to decide if there are any rules of pronunciation where /kan-plaf/ is changed to [kamplaf] or [kanblaf] or [kamblaf]... that list is enormous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question essentially reduces to the field-worker's training problem: what kind of questions do you need to ask when you're attempting to describe any random language. There are a number of guides out there, which tend to spend time on issues that are not relevant to your concern (ethics, how to record and organize data, how to evaluate informant responses) but will also include some typological overview (so that you aren't freaked out when you learn that in some languages, the verb can actually precede the subject and even stranger, the object can precede the subject). Knowing what the dimensions of variation between known human languages is a first step. A starter list of readings would include Bowern &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide&lt;/em&gt;, Crowley &lt;em&gt;Field Linguistics: A Beginner's Guide&lt;/em&gt;, Vaux &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Field Methods&lt;/em&gt;, Whaley &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language&lt;/em&gt;, Vellupillai &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt;, Comrie &lt;em&gt;Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology&lt;/em&gt;, Payne &lt;em&gt;Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Exploring Language Structure: A Student's Guide&lt;/em&gt;, Merrifield &lt;em&gt;Laboratory Manual for Morphology and Syntax&lt;/em&gt;, Bickford &lt;em&gt;Morphology and Syntax: Tools for Analyzing the World's Languages&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe if you want just one book, get Comrie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T21:36:34.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15304" CreationDate="2015-12-14T21:58:36.043" Score="-4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;TL;DR&lt;/code&gt;: What is the semantic field or the big picture behind the English 'of'?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I seek an explanation like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/24102/50720&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which exposes the underlying semantic field of ‘tally’.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Addendum:&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt;  (as a Functional Morpheme) is too polysemous for me to query each individual meaning. Does the Semantic Field derive from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=of&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its etymology&lt;/a&gt;: &#xA;PIE etymon  is &lt;em&gt;*apo&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;off, away&quot;;  Proto-Germanic is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/ab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;*af&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; = 'away from'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: After my long tiresome enervated search, Google discovered a book that addresses my question briefly: pp 209-212, 235-236 of &lt;em&gt;The Semantics of English Prepositions; Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition&lt;/em&gt; (Reprint ed, 2007) by Andrea Tyler, Vyvyan Evans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:53:26.093" Title="What is the underlying meaning of the English 'of'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-12-15T16:07:30.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15296" CreationDate="2015-12-14T21:58:58.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that you don't want to generate &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; languages that one can learn and communicate in so much as things that &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt; to be such languages. If so, then I would keep it relatively simple. A model of a language that may well be already too sophisticated for the purpose is determined by the following information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A relatively small (2-3 digits) number of parts of speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some parts of speech represent entire sentences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each part of speech a small number of context-free transformations that say, e.g., every &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; can be replaced by &lt;em&gt;BCD&lt;/em&gt;. In general, instead of &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; there may be any single part of speech (to keep it simple), and instead of &lt;em&gt;BCD&lt;/em&gt; there may be any sequence of more than one part of speech. For each part of speech &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;, the various transformations have probabilities. And with a certain probability (not too small!) no transformation will be applied at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each part of speech a number of words each of which represents it. (Some words may represent more than one part of speech.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By varying the probabilities slightly you can easily create different registers of the same language (spoke, advertising, bureaucratic, literary, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An even simpler model would be just using n-grams on the word level. And to create the words, you could use n-grams on the letter level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more sophisticated approach would combine the first (grammar) and second (n-grams) approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may be interested in sentences for actual communication situations that may actually repeat, so that in case of normal human languages a 'consumer' of your languages might actually learn them. Dealing with this perfectly is much harder. If you can do that, don't waste your time on toy languages - make a lot of money by the first translation software that really works well! (In other words: this task is probably too hard.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4938" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T21:58:58.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15296" CreationDate="2015-12-14T23:49:16.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposing you want something that &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to be a human language (as Hans Adler supposes in his answer), I think it would be feasible to invent a &quot;secret language&quot;, like Pig Latin, which is a way of disguising a real language so that those who don't know the method of concealment will not understand its relation to the real language that it's derived from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, you could write English using the Mycenaean Linear B writing system, and perhaps apply some other simple transformations, until it was no longer recognizable as English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with designing a new language from the bottom up is that you don't know how, no one can tell you, and it would be too hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T23:49:16.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-15T01:02:02.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/slavic-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Slavic&lt;/a&gt; (Slavonic; ISO 639-5: sla) is a sub-branch of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family. Slavic languages are spoken in Southern, Eastern, parts of Central Europe and in the north of Asia (the territory of Russia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sub-branches of the Slavic family are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;East (e.g. Belorusan, Russian, Ukrainian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South (e.g. Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;West (e.g. Czech, Polish, Slovak, Sorbian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common ancestor is the controversial (because of apparently rapid dialectal differentiation) reconstructed Proto-Slavic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T03:32:50.277" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T03:32:50.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-15T01:02:02.407" Score="0" Body="Sub-branch of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family. Slavic languages are spoken in Eastern and Southern Europe, and include Czech, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian and many others. Use for questions about any Slavic languages, together with the particular language tag (if asking about specific languages rather than the whole family)." OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T03:33:06.723" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T03:33:06.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2015-12-15T03:52:09.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really isn't a great deal of &quot;big picture&quot; left. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is just a shadow of its former lexical self.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, it came from the dual facts of separation -- &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; off &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; -- and relation -- &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Middle English, final /f/ and /v/ weren't distinguished, so the word had two meanings.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But the voiced  &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; /əv/ reduced the vowel to shwa, while the voiceless &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; /ɔf/ retained its vowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; sounds exactly like the &lt;em&gt;-'ve&lt;/em&gt; contraction of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;should've&lt;/em&gt;, which leads to &lt;em&gt;should of&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And like  &lt;em&gt;-'ve&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; is now just a piece of the machinery, bleached of its semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; has been reduced to just a connector with two ends&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one end is attached to the object NP, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one end is attached to the NP or VP that &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; modifies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus: &lt;em&gt;the walls of the room&lt;/em&gt; 'there is a relation between &lt;em&gt;the walls&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the room&lt;/em&gt;' &lt;code&gt;walls&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;⇔&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;room&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The precise nature of the relation is unspecified and unclear except in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; -- rather like &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; in Romance languages -- isn't really a lexical item any more,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and has lost what little semantics it started with. Which wasn't much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T03:52:09.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2015-12-15T05:14:35.890" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English &quot;of&quot; is used to mark Genitive semantic case (though English lacks Genitive morphological case). There is nothing more to it. So, the one-word answer: Genitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T05:14:35.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10018" CreationDate="2015-12-16T00:04:48.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_acquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Order of acquisition&lt;/a&gt; - the idea that there is a fixed order in which learners acquire different aspects of grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one article in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://org.uib.no/smi/nsm/meec.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;journal&lt;/a&gt;; an unedited version can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://org.uib.no/smi/paj/Nielsen.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T00:04:48.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2226" CreationDate="2015-12-16T00:36:27.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess one could make a list of the n most common words in a language (from a body of texts, news articles can be one source). The number of shared words (ignoring small spelling differences) in the other language, weighted by the commonness of the word, could create a measure of similarity. Similarity of grammatical rules could also be factored in somehow. This could perhaps be accomplished automatically by using google translate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality though, peoples exposure to other languages make a huge difference. The three main Scandinavian languages are asymmetric intelligible due to differences in exposure to the others from early childhood through TV/media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11084" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T00:36:27.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T14:15:25.887" Score="0" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the speaker relevant to the conversation in these situations (as per the title, I'm investigating the relevant maxim in these situations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Situation 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BARBARA: I. I guess I'm just sort of not prepared to talk about your stuff.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VIOLET: Suit yourself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  STEVE: The food is just spectacular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Situation 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VIOLET: I haven't tried much of it, yet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  BARBARA: Johnna cooked this whole meal by herself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VIOLET: It’s what she's paid for. You all did know she's getting paid, right?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  CHARLIE: Jean, so I'm curious, when you say you don't eat meat, you mean you don’t eat meat of any kind?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Situation 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BILL: Let’s eat.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VIOLET: Barb, have any use for that sideboard?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  BARBARA: Hm  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Situation 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jean: When you eat meat, you ingest an animal's fear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  VIOLET: Ingest what? It's fur?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  JEAN: Fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11072" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T19:57:27.143" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T20:21:07.923" Title="Investigating the relevance maxim" Tags="&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-12-17T17:29:15.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15311" CreationDate="2015-12-16T20:07:32.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; mean to refer to Grice's Maxim of Relevance, and the examples suggest you do, then you must understand that, unlike other maxims, it's impossible to violate the Relevance Maxim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because Relevance is under the control of the &lt;strong&gt;addressee&lt;/strong&gt;, not the speaker.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No matter what the speaker may intend, the relevance of an utterance to a discourse is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;determined by the addressee who hears it in context and is the sole judge of its relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker may try ever so hard to &quot;say&quot; one thing, but if the addressee &quot;hears&quot; another, that's just the way it is. And humans are &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; looking for contextual cues for interpreting relevance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying truth that motivates &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;amp;q=relevance%20theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Relevance Theory&lt;/a&gt; is that you can't get away from relevance;  everything else conversational depends on it, and it's not under the speaker's control.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T20:21:07.923" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T20:21:07.923" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T03:45:45.367" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merge takes two elements and combines them into a set. Say it takes a DP &quot;Luke&quot; and a V &quot;run&quot;. We can then define a VP by going merge(DP,V) = {DP,V} &quot;Luke run&quot;. But since sets are un-ordered, {DP,V} = {V,DP}. So what's determining the fact that {V,DP} = &quot;Luke run&quot; and not &quot;run Luke&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note: assuming the vp-internal subject hypothesis, and that this will be merged with TP later on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T14:35:57.373" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T10:11:38.230" Title="How can merge produce grammatical strings if mathematical sets do not have an order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T03:59:59.697" Score="-2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Events are widely defined as things that happen. Actions can take place, but objects cannot, so it would be natural to assume that all events are actions. However, there are many things that we call events that we do not call actions. For example, tournaments, festivals, and circuses are called events but not actions, while racing and battling are events and actions. They are also used differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to the party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to the partying.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it that separates tournaments and festivals from gerunds like racing and battling? I have considered that tournaments and festivals might better be described as situations where actions take place, but that would make them abstract objects, not events. I have tried looking into a dictionary, but it was not very helpful. For example, storms are events but not actions, but dictionaries make them seem like actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/storm?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;storm&lt;/a&gt; - a disturbance of the normal condition of the atmosphere, manifesting itself by winds of unusual force or direction, often accompanied by rain, snow, hail, thunder, and lightning, or flying sand or dust.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disturbance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disturbance&lt;/a&gt; - the act of disturbing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the usages are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An act of betrayal is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An act of storm is bad.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Storms, festivals, tournaments, running and partying are all events, but the first three have different usages than the latter two. If you can go to festivals and tournaments but not running and partying, wouldn't that make them abstract objects instead since their definitions would be closer to &amp;quot;situations where things happen&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9953" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T08:35:05.770" Title="What separates events such as festivals and tournaments from other events such as running and partying?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-12-17T17:28:06.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15314" CreationDate="2015-12-17T04:17:31.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An action is an event with an actor.  Events don't have to have actors.  If I explode a bomb, then I'm the actor in the explosion event.  But if the bomb goes off by itself, there's no actor, though the explosion is still an event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T04:17:31.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T04:59:53.090" Score="1" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to emend this if I have not described my question cogently. Though knowing little of Latin, I have exemplified with it because I have encountered it more than Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Latin, in addition to their (usual) meanings  as prepositions, many common prefixes &lt;em&gt;ad-, com-, de-, ex-, re-&lt;/em&gt;, etc... serve as intensive prefixes, but for a given verb, what motivated or induced the prefix used? Was a prefix chosen randomly?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does each intensive prefix uniquely connote or imply an especial, particular intensification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T07:51:01.623" Title="Do each intensive prefix intensify a verb uniquely and differently from other intensive prefixes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T05:48:53.570" Score="-1" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;The list of logical connectives might be subject to debate, but what do you think is the most complete one? For English language and computational logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to implement a semantical analysis program and I need it to identify sentences structured &quot;around&quot; logical connectives and quantifiers such as &quot;and&quot;, &quot;or&quot;, &quot;any&quot;, &quot;each&quot;, &quot;all&quot;. I'm looking for a listing that's complete enough to allow for the &quot;classifications&quot; of parts of sentences according to how they are &quot;connected&quot; or how they have been related to other parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example sentence is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A] fish is [any] [member of] a paraphyletic [group of] organism[s] that [consist of] [all] gill- bearing aquatic craniate animal[s] that lack limb[s] [with] digit[s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where those parts in brackets [ ] are examples of connectives or quantifiers that I'd like to be able to spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11088" LastEditorUserId="11088" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T08:07:09.597" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:40:22.467" Title="Complete definition of logical connectives and quantifiers?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15316" CreationDate="2015-12-17T05:52:59.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not in the least random. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Capio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = 'I take,' becomes -cipio and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teneo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; becomes -tineo; both have some tidy parallels with English in verb phrases and 'intensives.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-cipio  //to take on (a new task)  &gt;begin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Re-cipio // to take back from (someone's hand)  &gt;receive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Con-cipio // &gt;conceive. (con- ?within)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;De-cipio  // &gt;deceive (de- ?away from reality) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retineo // hold back from &gt; retain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Contineo  // &gt;contain (con- ?within)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Detineo detentum // &gt;detain (de- ?away from others)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adverb becomes intensive when it concurs with the action of the verb. So accipio (ad-cipio) accept, is an intensification because it means to take towards oneself (ad=towards) and in-undation (inundatio) is a deluge on top of (in-) a wave (unda); in-undare to overflow, to flood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being unable to keep up with neologisms and metasemy the only &lt;strong&gt;intensisifying&lt;/strong&gt; prefix I can think of instantly is &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;cucurri,&lt;/strong&gt; reduplicated perfect tense of curro, -ere; implying &quot;I ran and ran.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastEditorUserId="9923" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T07:51:01.623" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T07:51:01.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15313" CreationDate="2015-12-17T17:08:27.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been several syntactic theories based on unordered constituents, among them Relational Grammar (with Arc Pair Grammar) and GPSG.  The idea is that tree sisters are fundamentally without any intrinsic order, but that eventually, at a superficial level, for certain languages and certain constituents, the order gets fixed.  I think that Gerald Sanders was the first to suggest such an explanation for the generalization in Ross's &lt;em&gt;Gapping and the Order of Constituents&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know beans about &quot;merge&quot;, but maybe it is that old idea about separating ordering principles from constituency principles cropping up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T17:08:27.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15313" CreationDate="2015-12-17T17:40:58.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merge does not directly produce surface utterances. Fixing linear order can be treated as phonological (a terrible misinterpretation of phonology in my opinion), and there is also Move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T17:40:58.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T20:01:14.760" Score="1" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only open corpus of personal names of which I am aware is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/nlp/corpora/names/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Names Corpus&lt;/a&gt; by Mark Kantrowitz and Bill Ross (which can also be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/nltk_data/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;found&lt;/a&gt; in the Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is much better than nothing, but it is fairly small, fairly old (last updated in 1994), and seems mostly to contain English or Western names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other open corpora of personal names that are currently used or suitable for use in computational linguistics? Preferably tagged by language or region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11091" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T01:45:27.877" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T09:39:50.017" Title="Open corpora of personal names" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15313" CreationDate="2015-12-18T00:00:52.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because there is structural asymmetry of some sort in the resulting structure. I don't think you ever get to linearize just the {V, DP}. Instead, be it phase-size or complete CP structure, the linearization is sensitive to the resulting hierarchical structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few accounts, probably the most abstract (and famous) being Richie Kayne's &lt;em&gt;Antisymmetry&lt;/em&gt; (1994). It states that a node higher in the structure will linearly precede the one lower in the structure (Linear Correspondence Axiom). It is X-bar style, and basically gives you spec-head-complement order (but it's not dependent on X-bar schema really, i.e. can be carried over to MP style bare structure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T00:00:52.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T02:57:20.853" Score="2" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that range of BLEU is 0 to 1.(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLEU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;BLEU&quot; page on wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But i found some paper says like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;we achieve a significant gain of &lt;strong&gt;5.0 BLEU points&lt;/strong&gt; over&#xA;  non-attentional systems that already incorporate known techniques such&#xA;  as dropout&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;5.0 BLEU points&quot; mean 0.5 BLEU?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or BLEU range is not 0 to 1 and actually exceed 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11093" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T15:04:51.373" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T23:29:38.990" Title="Question about Range of BLEU" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;evaluation-metrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T04:08:19.957" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;A contrived example, but: if I said something like &quot;The Penguin Wars&quot; (Yes, it's a silly example but this is a serious question I promise), such a phrase (bare of any conventional denotations) could mean any number of things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The war in which penguins fought humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The war between two groups of penguins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The war in which two human nations used penguins as ammunition against each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The war in which two human nations fought each other over penguins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The war to liberate penguins, etc. (This is still a serious question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that there seems to be a great deal of work required on the part of the interpreter in order to make sense of even something as simple as an adjectival phrase. I imagine this issue doesn't surface much in daily conversation because usually one meaning seems more likely/sane than others. So if I say &quot;The Vietnam War‎&quot;, even someone unfamiliar with the historical event can safely infer this phrase refers to a war fought against/on the soil of Vietnam. But it's silly examples like &quot;Penguin Wars&quot; that reveal that there a sort of &quot;semantic glue&quot; holding together the noun and the adjective, connecting them in a way that creates meaningful utterance out of what is, really, just a sequence of words: &quot;Penguin&quot; &quot;Wars&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this sort of &quot;semantic glue&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11094" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T04:49:25.317" Title="Is there a name for the concept describing the particular way in which adjectives and nouns interact together to create meaning" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15324" CreationDate="2015-12-18T04:49:25.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you give aren't really cases of adjectives modifying noun, but cases of nouns modifying nouns.  In the case of &quot;The Penguin Wars&quot;, &quot;Penguin&quot; is called an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/attributive_noun&quot;&gt;attributive noun&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct&quot;&gt;noun adjunct&lt;/a&gt;.  Whereas the meaning of adjectives modifying nouns is usually more transparent (e.g. the meaning of blue in &quot;the blue penguin&quot; is pretty obvious), attributive nouns are more ambiguous.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In fact, the function of attributive nouns is about as broad as the genitive, which has many functions which only context can disambiguate.  Note that &quot;The Penguin Wars&quot; might also be called &quot;The War of the Penguins&quot;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genitive_case&quot;&gt;The wikipedia article for the genitive case&lt;/a&gt; lists many functions of the genitive, and several of these can also be expressed with attributive nouns, as these examples show:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possession&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;government&lt;/em&gt; property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Composition / Partitive&lt;/strong&gt;: a &lt;em&gt;marble&lt;/em&gt; statue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Participation in an action&lt;/strong&gt;: a &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt; wash&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;blood&lt;/em&gt; pressure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Canada&lt;/em&gt; goose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T04:49:25.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T05:58:20.850" Score="1" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Latin letter &quot;c&quot; was adopted in Gaul to represent both the Latin sound &quot;k&quot; and the Gallic dialectical sound &quot;tsh&quot;, but later &quot;ch&quot; was used to represent &quot;tsh&quot; to eliminate the ambiguity and it evolved this way in Old French. What &quot;dialect&quot; was it that was featuring this &quot;tsh&quot; sound? Where did it come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously some of the candidates are Bretons, Tuetonic Gallic tribes (like Allobroges, etc), the Belgae, then there were the later barbarian invaders like the Burgundians and the Franks. Can we pin down the origin of the &quot;tsh&quot; sound to one of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T22:12:49.863" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T22:12:49.863" Title="Where did the &quot;ch&quot; (tsh) sound come from in Old French" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;old-french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15326" CreationDate="2015-12-18T06:52:47.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Picard, I guess (but not before /a/).  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joret_line&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Joret line&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picard_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Picard language&lt;/a&gt;. But maybe you're asking about earlier history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T07:51:36.603" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T07:51:36.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15321" CreationDate="2015-12-18T09:39:50.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest getting all the persons from Wikipedia. You can use a wikipedia dump and the category system to extract the person names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the German Wikipedia, there is a tool and an interface to browse person names here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tools.wmflabs.org/persondata/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tools.wmflabs.org/persondata/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T09:39:50.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T12:11:21.740" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fragment answers may convey a complete thought, hence being complete sentences on their own. They've been analysed to involve either sluicing or the elision of a copular construction (pseudosluicing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What did Mary eat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cake&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strike&gt;Mary ate t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cake&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strike&gt;it was t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An imperative may convey a complete thought and is regarded as a complete sentence even if it is only a VP, because it actually is underlyingly a complete sentence - the subject is omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;You&lt;/strike&gt; stop!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone ever regarded isolated NPs like the ones below as complete sentences and extended the pseudosluice analysis to such isolated NPs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look! A bird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What a pretty flower!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem that pseudosluicing is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A bird]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strike&gt;it is t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[What a pretty flower]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strike&gt;it is&#xA;  t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be supported by data from Japanese where such phrases are ended with the copula だ(da)/です(desu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;見て！ 鳥   だ.&#xA;Mite! Tori da.&#xA;Look! Bird COP&#xA;Look! It's a bird.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;なんて きれい-な 花      だ!&#xA;Nante kirei-na hana   da!&#xA;EMPH  pretty   flower COP&#xA;What a pretty flower it is.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T02:36:43.187" Title="Pseudosluicing and Isolated NPs" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15326" CreationDate="2015-12-18T13:36:31.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This effect is called &lt;em&gt;palatalization&lt;/em&gt; and affected not just the transformation of C to CH, but other involved other sound changes such as G to J.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Greg Lee says the Joret line is important, the palatalization occurring south of the line. Though Franks were located in this area, it seems unlikely the Franks were the origin of the palatalization because their Germanic language featured hard consonants, so it would seem to be a change adopted by the Franks, not originated by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many studies on palatalization have been done and these have identified the time of the change as occurring between 800 to 1000 A.D., the viking period, but the vikings cannot be responsible because the palatalization is not found in their languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more interesting idea is that the transformation originated with the Veneti. The reason for thinking this is that the variant of Breton spoken by the Veneti, called Vannetai, strongly features palatalization, much more so than other dialects of Breton. Also, the Veneti are found elsewhere, such as in the Veneto area of Italy (northeast), and it likewise features palatalization in those areas. Thus, there is the possibility that the Veneti influenced somehow this sound change in southern Normandy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gvozdanović, Jadranka. &quot;On the linguistic classification of Venetic.&quot; Journal of Language Relationship• Вопросы языкового родства 7 (2012): 33-46.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gvozdanović, Jadranka. &quot;Evaluating prehistoric and early historic linguistic contact.&quot; Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5-9 August 2013. Vol. 334. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T16:57:58.037" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T16:57:58.037" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15333" CreationDate="2015-12-18T16:22:56.837" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contrast between velars and labials in Element Theory is represented either as, respectively, | | vs |U|, or |U| vs |U_| (headed |U|).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if a language contrast plain velars and labials with labialised velars and labials, postalveolars and palatalised velars/palatals: /b bʷ d dʒ gʲ g gʷ/? How could these contrasts in Place of Articulation be represented in Element Theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T17:29:33.153" Title="How to represent labialised velars and labials in Element Theory" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15332" CreationDate="2015-12-18T17:29:33.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a distinction between head and dependent which is exploited, with C dominating head elements and adjoined V dominating dependent ones within the segment. See p. 10 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://files.webklik.nl/user_files/2009_10/72522/Papers/Jeroen%20van%20de%20Weijer%20-%20Secondary%20and%20Double%20Articulation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;van de Weijer&lt;/a&gt;: replace &quot;t&quot; with &quot;U&quot; and you'd have a labialized labial. There is some variation in the theory as to representations e.g. whether velars are placeless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T17:29:33.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15339" CreationDate="2015-12-18T18:37:50.617" Score="14" ViewCount="1760" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bulgarian. My language has a double negation form and I do not understand why and how can people talk like that and how it came to be in first place. Everyone just seem to accept it and no one actually questions it. Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: Don't you ever speak to me again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official bulgarian: Don't you &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; speak to me again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was taught that way in school but now I find it a bizarre way of expressing my thoughts. Even official documents use this form. My language do allow for logically correct sentences but I've never seen a single person using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know what is the driving force behind this (...madness) and how it came to be? How can people talk like that and do not take a notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some more examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: No one has spoken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official bulgarian: No one hasn't spoken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unused bulgarian: There wasn't a single person to speak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: I've never seem him do that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official bulgarian: I haven't never seem him do that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unused bulgarian: There has not been a time during which I have seen him do that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: One can never know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official bulgarian: One can't never know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unused bulgarian: There is no way one can know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My theory is that bulgarians do not form the complete sentence in their heads before they speak it and when they are speaking they are trying to make a point so badly that they negate one more time some words. It's like trying to put too much emotion into a sentence which leads to a double negation. I know that my language is not the only one that has this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11099" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T20:13:26.050" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T23:35:34.887" Title="What is the reason for the double negation found in some languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15233" CreationDate="2015-12-18T19:42:18.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest answer is that the English &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; doesn't come from the English &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both have a common root in the Latin &lt;em&gt;verbum&lt;/em&gt;, word, but came to English via different routes, and took on slightly different meanings in the process. And the Latin &lt;em&gt;verbum&lt;/em&gt; means both word and verb, thanks to Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Verb&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, the first-known example of &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; is from around 1397 in the prologue to the Old Testament in Wycliffe's' &lt;em&gt;Bible&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sumtyme it mai wel be resoluid into a &lt;strong&gt;verbe&lt;/strong&gt; of the same tens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its etymology is fairly straightforward: English &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; comes from either Old French &lt;em&gt;verbe&lt;/em&gt; or Latin &lt;em&gt;verbum&lt;/em&gt;, meaning both word and verb (more on this later!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Verbal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first-known use of &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; is in Caxton's 1483 translation of Chartier's &lt;em&gt;Le Curial&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We be &lt;strong&gt;verbal&lt;/strong&gt;, or ful of wordes, and desyre more the wordes than the thynges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verbal&lt;/em&gt; means dealing with words, and this example also illustrates how it, according to the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, especially refers to people who deal in mere words rather than things or realities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; also comes from Old French or Latin; either &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;verbālis&lt;/em&gt;: consisting of words, pertaining to verbs. This comes from the shared root &lt;em&gt;verbum&lt;/em&gt;, word and verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Greek&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason why we have &lt;em&gt;verb&lt;/em&gt; for action words and &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; for words is because the Latin &lt;em&gt;verbum&lt;/em&gt; means word in general, but also the subcategory of words expressing action, as opposed to those expressing names, &lt;em&gt;nomen&lt;/em&gt;, name or noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dichotomy is derived from Greek &lt;em&gt;rhēma&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;saying, utterance, word, verb&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;onoma&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;naming&quot;). In the &lt;em&gt;Sophist&lt;/em&gt;, Plato defined verbs (&lt;em&gt;rhemata&lt;/em&gt;) as applied to actions, whilst names (&lt;em&gt;onomata&lt;/em&gt;) are applied to those which perform those actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More meanings?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, 500 and 600-year-old words don't survive for so long with a single meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verb&lt;/em&gt; has also referred to &quot;the most-important thing&quot; and to &quot;word&quot;, although these are obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verbal&lt;/em&gt; is more productive. The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; has seven senses as an adjective (with 18 sub-definitions), and five as a noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an adjective, it refers to talkative people and people interested in the mere words of a composition; of things composed of words, and of the nature of a word; to detailed reports; to things only affecting words, or only expressed in words, or only consisting in words or speech; and expressed in speech rather than writing, or people using spoken words; and word-for-word; and things derived from a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a noun &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; can refer to nouns derived form a verb; a collection of words, a dictionary; words performing the role of a verb; a damaging verbal statement; and abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; adjectives are more wordy whilst the nouns are more verby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="702" LastEditorUserId="702" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T19:58:30.143" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T19:58:30.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15337" CreationDate="2015-12-18T19:47:58.803" Score="4" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I already know that language does not necessarily follows mathematical logic (which of course is a man made system of rules - it's not absolute) I want to know if there are languages with triple or quadruple negation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the question may sound very childish but I'm trying to grasp the concept in my mind about talking in general and I want to know how far a language can go. I'm going to post a different question about that (about the extremes in speaking)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Single negation: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Don't you ever talk like that to me again&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Double negation: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Don't you never talk like that to me again&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Triple negation: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Don't you never silence like that to me again&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;Don't you never talk like that to me never&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quadruple negation: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Don't you never silence like that to me never&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11099" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T06:02:23.873" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T06:02:23.873" Title="Are there languages with triple or quadruple negation?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15336" CreationDate="2015-12-18T20:31:01.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Double negation in languages follows math rules just fine, the better question is what set of math rules get followed, and that depends on the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Negative concord: -(x + y + z) = -x - y - z&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No negative concord: -(x · y · z) = -x · y · z; &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; -x · -y · z = x · y · z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard English doesn't have negative concord, so having two negatives cancels things out.  But Asturian (like many dialects of English) does, and so there is no cancelation.  There's nothing wrong in Asturian saying, for instance (bold words in negative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Naide nunca nun&lt;/strong&gt; fai &lt;strong&gt;denguna&lt;/strong&gt; cosa (or &lt;strong&gt;nada&lt;/strong&gt;) con &lt;strong&gt;naide&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;No one ever does anything with anyone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Lit: No one never doesn't do not a thing (or nothing) with no one&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While many people use the term &lt;em&gt;double negative&lt;/em&gt; to describe languages that require multiple words to be negative without canceling the meaning, really, double negative just describes the presence of two negative words which can happen in both types of languages.   The better term to use is &lt;em&gt;negative concord&lt;/em&gt; to describe agreement amongst certain words to all be negative or not because that describes what's going on under the surface.  Once you have negative concord, you can have a wide number of elements that are negative without changing the meaning and thus getting even tredecuple negation, just like gender agreement in most languages: change one noun and all the adjectives go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastEditorUserId="5202" LastEditDate="2015-12-20T20:19:29.240" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T20:19:29.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15334" CreationDate="2015-12-18T20:33:03.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Double negation is an extremely common linguistic feature for languages in general and almost universally serves not as a logical predicate but rather to emphasize the negation of the general idea being conveyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the phrase &quot;They don't NEVER skip school&quot;, the double negative does not mean (they (not (not (skip school))) i.e. they skip school, but instead NOT (they skip school) i.e. it is not the case that they skip school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may not be a prescribed feature of Standard English as taught to second language learners or in primary school grammar class, but it is certainly a feature of the English spoken in many dialects and regions of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are for example some phrases you would be likely to hear in Southern American English and African American Vernacular English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You aint never gonna get there on time.&quot; or  &quot;He don't know nothing.&quot; or even &quot;We don't need no education&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of double negation was also very common in Standard English during Chaucer's time and even into Shakespear's as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where did all these &quot;logical rules&quot; for English negation come from? Well, back in the 18th century a bunch of logicians decided the language should be more logical and started writing grammars that discouraged the usage of double negation constructs and over time it sort of stuck, even though like I said in many English dialects you would sound wierd if you didn't perform double negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;references: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/02/grammar-myths-3/&quot;&gt;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/02/grammar-myths-3/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11044" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T20:33:03.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15334" CreationDate="2015-12-18T20:43:14.063" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @user6726 said in their comment, double negation is a fairly common feature of many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering, &quot;What is the reason?&quot;, there are two aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What is the reason?&quot; in meaning, &quot;why does it present in Bulgarian, but is absent in some other languages?&quot; — because modern Bulgarian is on a different Phase of &lt;strong&gt;Jespersen's Cycle&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What is the reason?&quot; in meaning of &quot;how it is used?&quot; — in languages with double-negation, single-negation also has meaning, but a different one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his work, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/stream/cu31924026632947#page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Negation in English and Other Languages&lt;/a&gt; (1917), Otto Jespersen has discovered a pattern that describes how linguistic &lt;strong&gt;negation&lt;/strong&gt; shifts between several Phases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negation is expressed by a single negative marker (&lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negation is expressed by &lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; in a combination with a negative adverb or noun phrase (&lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt; takes on the function of expressing negation by itself; &lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; becomes optional;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEG1&lt;/strong&gt; becomes extinct and &lt;strong&gt;NEG2&lt;/strong&gt; expresses negation on its own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Bulgarian is on a Phase 2 of &lt;strong&gt;Jespersen's Cycle&lt;/strong&gt;, while, for example, English is in Phase 4 (thanks @StoneyB for correction). It is well possible that in some distant future Bulgarian &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2565/jespersens-cycle-why-is-it-defined-cycle&quot;&gt;shifts&lt;/a&gt; to Phase 1 or Phase 3, we don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter VII &quot;Double Negation&quot; (page 62 in the referenced document) reviews many examples of double negation in various languages, including those belonging to Slavonic family. One of the nice ideas stated there is that even in a language with double negation, single-negation phrases are valid, and they convey a meaning, different to double-negation ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a hint (a bit stretched because it is English), think for a difference between &lt;em&gt;&quot;nobody has spoken&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;everyone has not spoken&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;somebody has not spoken&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or yet another example, &lt;em&gt;&quot;I didn't go nowhere&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (a normal double negation) vs. &lt;em&gt;&quot;I didn't go somewhere&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (I'm not willing to discuss where specifically I was planning to go).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T23:35:34.887" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T23:35:34.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15366" CreationDate="2015-12-18T23:22:22.260" Score="1" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most of the literature I have encountered thus far, the terms &quot;constituency grammar&quot; and &quot;phrase structure grammar&quot; seem to be used interchangeably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is either one of the two more acceptable or preferable than the other? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T06:18:22.037" Title="Constituency grammar or Phrase Structure Grammar?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15323" CreationDate="2015-12-19T01:27:10.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BLEU score is between 0 and 1, but is sometime expressed as a percentage, i.e. ranging from 0 to 100%. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statmt.org/moses/?n=Moses.SupportTools#ntoc5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.statmt.org/moses/?n=Moses.SupportTools#ntoc5&lt;/a&gt; returns a score between 0 and 100 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/moses-smt/mosesdecoder/blob/master/scripts/generic/multi-bleu.perl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Misc:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Original BLEU paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P02-1040.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P02-1040.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some technical issues in BLEU: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/1268&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/1268&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-01-26T23:29:38.990" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T23:29:38.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T16:20:30.550" Score="2" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would I represent 'for' in &quot;Are you here for a conference?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conference could be represented as &lt;code&gt;lam x.conference(x)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a conference could be represented as &lt;code&gt;lam Q x.(conference(x) &amp;amp; Q(x))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that I know the meaning of &lt;code&gt;for&lt;/code&gt; in this context. (Prepositions are polysemous)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="666" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T18:29:40.463" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T01:47:09.160" Title="Representing prepositions in lambda calculus/logic notation" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T20:40:25.140" Score="0" ViewCount="1750" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is the wrong stackexchange site for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm studying for a final for my english linguistics class and going through example sentences that we should be able to draw syntax trees for. This sentence: &quot;He looked at the dog with one eye&quot; was marked as ambiguous. The rules we were given for a generative English grammar are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence [S] -&gt; Noun Phrase (Auxiliary) Verb Phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb Phrase [VP] -&gt; (Adverb) Verb (Prepositional Phrase) (Noun Phrase)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun Phrase [NP] -&gt; (Determiner/Noun Phrase) (Adjective) Noun (Prepositional Phrase)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prepositional Phrase [PP] -&gt; Preposition Noun Phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X Phrase -&gt; X Phrase Conjunction X Phrase (X being a placeholder for V, N or P)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X -&gt; X Conjunction X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this grammar, variables in parenthesis are optional for the phrase. So for the example sentence I have the tree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/ShMtNEy.png&quot; alt=&quot;syntax tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(made with &lt;a href=&quot;http://mshang.ca/syntree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mshang.ca/syntree/&lt;/a&gt; if you find it helpful)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm having a hard time working out another tree. The phrase &quot;with one eye&quot; could refer to either be attached to &quot;the dog&quot; or directly to the verb phrase (and thus mean that 'He' only has one eye).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that in order to represent the second meaning in a syntax tree, VP -&gt; V (PP) (PP) would have to be a rule in the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11107" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T20:58:40.427" Title="Help with an ambiguous English syntax tree (studying for a final)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15343" CreationDate="2015-12-20T01:12:08.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just from this example it would seem that the type of &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;((e,t),t), ((e,t),(e,t))&lt;/code&gt; -- because it combines with a DP to make up an adjunct to the VP. Thus, it could have a semantics like the following (I'm just making it up) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) [[for]] = λP&lt;sub&gt;et,t&lt;/sub&gt;λQ&lt;sub&gt;et&lt;/sub&gt;λx&lt;sub&gt;e&lt;/sub&gt;(Q(x) for(P))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed I should sit down and think if it makes any sense :-) But I hope this helps -- I'll be interested to hear what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3328" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-12-20T01:47:09.160" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T01:47:09.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3073" CreationDate="2015-12-20T21:32:03.843" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not create relative clauses without a phrase/Objekt/Noun etc. Because you need an object to describe it again.Actually relative clauses are side clauses(supporting clauses) that you describe the subject in main clause.&#xA;So lets 's split your sample sentence into two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bu bir kitap.(This is book.) - Ben bu kitabi okudum.(I've read this book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With relative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bu benim okuduğum kitap.(This is the book that I've read.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see you build relative clauses to make main clauses more explicit,more comprehensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Bu bir Kitap&quot; as you suppose &lt;em&gt;Kitap&lt;/em&gt; is not subject or object, however it's a noun predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in &quot;Ben bu kitabi okudum.&quot; the word &lt;em&gt;Kitap&lt;/em&gt; is an accusative object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short there is already  no subject - object agreement in your example sentence. Because you don't re-describe &lt;em&gt;I(ben)&lt;/em&gt;, you describe just &lt;em&gt;Kitap(book)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've answered your question as a native Turkish speaker from Turkey. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11114" LastEditorUserId="11114" LastEditDate="2015-12-20T21:52:25.977" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T21:52:25.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T14:20:20.410" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the grammar rule i have learned up to now, in Arabic people use the feminine form of adjective to describe plural noun (more than two).For instance,دفاتر كشيرة（many books),here we use feminine adjective  كشيرة to describe plural noun دفاتر.But recently i also find another sentence &quot;طالبات جديدات”(many new female students),why not say &quot;طالبات جديدة'??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11121" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T18:49:20.113" Title="Could anyone explain this grammar question for me?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-13T10:16:28.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T14:42:28.860" Score="0" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you provide me with the general rule of both metathesis and epenthesis? I can write the rules regarding specific case in metathesis and epenthesis but I couldn't find out the general rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10850" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T19:10:25.507" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T21:33:56.900" Title="The phonological rules of metathesis and epenthesis" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15351" CreationDate="2015-12-21T17:12:10.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You use plural adjectives (masculine or feminine) with plural nouns designating people, but feminine singular adjectives with nouns designating things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-12-21T18:49:20.113" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T18:49:20.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T23:21:47.863" Score="0" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;znƷæbil /Ʒnzæbil/   Ginger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/znƷæbil/   /Ʒnzæbil/ &#xA;/nærƷin/    /ræanƷin/ &#xA;/fænilæh/   /fælinæh/ &#xA; /Ʒenzir/   /znƷir/ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is the data could you plz help me? &#xA;can you help me to write the metathesis rule for this data? &#xA;I thought that this rule is right &#xA;/VC/----[CV] / three consecutive Cs &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10850" LastEditorUserId="10850" LastEditDate="2015-12-26T18:20:18.403" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T18:20:18.403" Title="metathesis linguistic notation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T14:43:46.663" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a large list of n-grams for spoken Spanish. I wish to establish for each n-grams whether or not it represents something idiomatic (phrasal verb, idiom etc.) or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, these are idiomatic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;tomar el pelo” -&amp;gt; &quot;pulling one's leg&quot; (literarily &quot;take the hair&quot;)&#xA;&quot;darse prisa&quot; -&amp;gt; &quot;hurry up&quot; (literarily &quot;give hurry&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while these are not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;bola roja&quot; -&amp;gt; &quot;red ball&quot;&#xA;&quot;el primero&quot; -&amp;gt; &quot;the first&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to know what the English translation(s) is for those n-grams which are idiomatic in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can program so perhaps a solution might involve me searching a Spanish-English dictionary in the form of a database file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="1835" LastEditDate="2015-12-26T00:50:03.307" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T00:50:03.307" Title="N-gram translations from Spanish to English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T15:48:57.533" Score="1" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any Sanskrit-Greek-Latin-English dictionary [including online] available? I am so much interested in etymological study. I will be grateful for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11126" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2015-12-23T05:54:32.230" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T05:54:32.230" Title="Is there any Sanskrit-Greek-Latin-English dictionary available?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15356" CreationDate="2015-12-22T16:46:52.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a single dictionary, but you could get the effect by chaining together resources. I suggest starting with Bopp's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/&quot;&gt;Glossarium Sanscritum&lt;/a&gt; which is a Sanskrit-Latin Glossary. After a few pages of that, you will probably be convinced that for etymological study, you don't want a Sanskrit-X dictionary, you probably want a dictionary of Sanskrit with etymological notes, or an etymological dictionary with a Sanskrit index. U Texas has an online adaptation of Pokorny's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html&quot;&gt;Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch&lt;/a&gt;, and through the language index you can get at a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/Skt.html&quot;&gt;Sanskrit words&lt;/a&gt;. There you can find various Sanskrit words, e.g. &lt;em&gt;yákr̥t&lt;/em&gt; which has a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P0777.html#Skt&quot;&gt;i̯ē̆ku̯-r̥(t-)&lt;/a&gt;, where you'll learn that the Sanskrit word is related to Hometic Greek &lt;em&gt;ἧπαρ&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;liver&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;hepaticus&lt;/em&gt;, Hittite &lt;em&gt;lissa&lt;/em&gt;, Armenian &lt;em&gt;leard&lt;/em&gt; and Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;yãknos&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/&quot;&gt;Köln Sanskrit dictionaries page&lt;/a&gt; will take care of many of your Sanskrit needs. The Perseus Project provides &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform&quot;&gt;Greek, Latin and Old Norse&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T16:46:52.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T17:56:28.820" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have developed a small dependency treebank and now i want to run maltparser on it.i am working on urdu which is written in right-to-left (RTL) form. when i try to train parser it gives following error &#xA;&quot;The input file 'train_data.conll' contains a column where the value is an empty string. Please check your input file.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what i understant is &quot; the parser reads from left to right. when it compares the format in xml file and conll file it doesn't matches. that's why it gives this error. am i getting it right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also i tried to change xml file and then run the command to train the parser. but xml file automatically changes back to it's orignal form. how to remove this error? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9836" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T17:56:28.820" Title="how to train parser using maltparser?" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4503" CreationDate="2015-12-23T10:50:27.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Name : Buthina Mohammed Ahmed Alkamel. &lt;strong&gt;Deixis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of deixis: is referring noun using to refer or pointing for proximal terms  and distal terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pointing is called a dectic expression, the dectic expression sometimes is    called as indexicals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He put that here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want this now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example uses &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; deixis, the first one is pronoun &quot;he&quot; which refers person, the second is demonstrative pronoun &quot;that&quot; which refers to something  is distant from the speaker, and the last deixis is &quot;here&quot; which refers to place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example uses &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; deixis, the first one is pronoun &quot;I&quot; which refers to the speaker, the second is demonstrative pronoun &quot;this&quot; refer to something be near of speaker, the last deixis is &quot;now&quot; which refers to the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE DEIXIS DIVIDED TO TWO KINDS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proximal term: something is near or close of the speaker, such as (this,here,now).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;situated nearest to point of attachment or origin&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distal term: is  the opposite of proximal, something is far of the speaker. Such as (that,there,then).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;situated farthest from point of attachment or origin, as of a limb or bone&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11131" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2015-12-26T07:42:37.520" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T07:42:37.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-23T13:36:50.943" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any english version [online, PDF] of the following?: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mayhofer, Etymologisches    Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had downloaded one but unfortunately it was in German language which is beyond my reach. I will be so much thankful for every help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11127" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T13:53:06.603" Title="Is there any english version [online, PDF] of the following?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15340" CreationDate="2015-12-24T06:18:22.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For most dependency grammarians, the terms &lt;em&gt;phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;constituency grammar&lt;/em&gt; are synonymous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those constituency grammarians who do not pay attention to dependency grammar, the two terms &lt;em&gt;phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;constituency grammar&lt;/em&gt; are not synonymous, however. The term &lt;em&gt;phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt; denotes a non-transformational approach to syntax along the lines of GPSG or HPSG. These frameworks do not acknowledge movement in the sense of traditional Chomskyan syntax. They intentionally use the term &lt;em&gt;phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt; to mean 'non-transformational grammar'. For an example, see Borsley (1991: 8). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borsley, Robert. 1991: Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach. London: Edward Arnold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPSG/HPSG crowd is likely to use the term &lt;em&gt;constituency grammar&lt;/em&gt; as an umbrella term to denote all constituency-based approaches to syntax, be these approaches transformational or non-transformational. In this regard, &lt;em&gt;constituency grammar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dependency grammar&lt;/em&gt; are opposites in the relevant sense, whereas the term &lt;em&gt;phrase structure grammar&lt;/em&gt; denotes a subtype of constituency grammar, a non-transformational one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2247" LastActivityDate="2015-12-24T06:18:22.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-24T22:14:12.680" Score="0" ViewCount="2786" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a list of the most frequent syllables of all languages spoken on earth, sorted by frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found such lists for english and for german, but I want to get a list across all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you can count every syllable that is spoken on earth within 24 hours. Syllables from languages with many speakers like Chinese (Mandarin), English or Hindi are more often used then syllables from rare languages like Esperanto or Klingon and so are ranked higher in the list. And within one language there are syllables that are more often used then others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, what I want will be hard to realize. So I also would be happy with separate lists of the languages with many speakers, lets say with the top-200 syllables. (I'm not interested in rare syllables, my focus is on common syllables. For the same reason I'm not interested in rare languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I really want spoken syllables, not written di- and tri-graphs (&quot;&lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;&quot; is a trigraph, not a syllable. It can be the written representation of the syllable &lt;code&gt;/ðə/&lt;/code&gt; but also part of &lt;code&gt;/ðɛn/&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the lists that I've found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;German:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/projects/treatmentlab/assets/Silbenfrequenzen_TreatmentLab.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/projects/treatmentlab/assets/Silbenfrequenzen_TreatmentLab.pdf&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Columns from left to right:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ranging position.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The syllable.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This number tells you how often this syllable can be heard when one million words are spoken (which means, that frequent words are repeated many times and therefore theirs syllables are counted more often)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a dictionary of all German words, where flexions of the same lexeme are distinct words (&lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;runs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ran&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; would be listed as four different words). Count how often the syllable appears in this dictionary (the dictionary itself contains 365.530 different German words.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list is sorted by the 3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; column, and this is exactly what I want. This column answers this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you listen to Germans speaking one million words, how often can you hear which syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not interested in the 4&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; column.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@rosson/high-frequency-syllables-in-english-ab75159618a0#.jaee1pxhq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://medium.com/@rosson/high-frequency-syllables-in-english-ab75159618a0#.jaee1pxhq&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list has only 3 columns, where #1 and #2 are identical with the first two columns of the German list. Columns #3 is the same as the German col#3, but in the German list you have counts per million, in the english you have percent, which is just another representation of the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How would I use those lists to create an all-language-list?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the english list I would convert the numbers in column 3 into counts per million like in the German list. Then I need the number of native speakers per language. Such a list can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see, English had 360 million native speakers in 2010, and German had 89 million native speakers in the same year. So I multiply the (converted) english numbers by 360, and multiply the numbers in columns #3 of the German list with 89, and then merge both lists. If there are syllables used in english as well as in German (like [ɪn]), I add both wighted numbers. Then I sort this list again by those numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is a list of the most frequent syllables of the German and English spoken part of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because I am interested in the &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; frequent syllables, it is safe to ignore rare languages, among which you will find all languages, that not have been studied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to give you an example what I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking for: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sttmedia.com/syllablefrequency-english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sttmedia.com/syllablefrequency-english&lt;/a&gt; There you find numbers of digrams and trigrams, but this are not phonetic syllables!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Addendum 2 (March 2018)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I better tell you the context. (What do I want to do with this list?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a fantasy story. There was a small group of aliens traveling through space, and they got lost. They had technical problems and they stranded on a planet that turned out to be our planet earth. This happened thousands of years ago, and all humans on earth are descendants form this small group, and all languages spoken on earth today derived form the language of this small group of invaders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to construct a language, that could be the proto-language of the first humans on earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second goal is to make this language as easy to be pronounced by everybody on this planet, as possible. I want that people from China find it as easy to pronounce as people from Saudi Arabia, from Russia, from the USA, from Namibia, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that i don't need a set of common phonemes to combine, but a set of very common syllables, because even wide spread phonemes can be hard to be pronounced, when you use unusual combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to try to build an artlang that is made of common syllables, and this is why I am looking for the most frequent spoken syllables on earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;btw:&#xA;When two syllables are similar, I want to count them as identical. For example the english words &lt;em&gt;&quot;I, eye, ay, aye&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the German &lt;em&gt;&quot;Ei&quot;&lt;/em&gt; are all the same syllable (/aɪ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3573" LastEditorUserId="3573" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T14:17:01.627" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T07:42:57.980" Title="most frequent syllables" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15368" CreationDate="2015-12-25T18:24:39.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The token frequency data you need is vanishingly rare. I think you could add Dutch, and perhaps you can add in a couple more languages like French and Spanish (although you could get pilot estimates for various languages, where a study reports frequency data for one or two non-random texts written in a language). The biggest effect that you would need to control for is the under-studied language problem. The top dozen world languages, population-wise, are in descending order Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Wu, Javanese and Korean. Together, 47% of the world's population speaks one of these languages, and the remaining 53% speak one of the other 6,772 languages. (This is based on population and language information that I acquired from SIL 15 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest weighting the contributions of each language according to the number of speakers, so if you do get Dutch data, it contributes very little to the total count. Since Mandarin and Spanish have the highest weight in the global syllable-frequency competition (approaching 20%), it would be most important to cover those languages and assure that data from those languages are accurate / representative. I found a character-frequency table for Chinese &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which reports that the most common character is 的, which apparently has 3 pronunciations, although that is in Mandarin, and there is no way to know whether a given Chinese writer speaks Mandarin vs. Wu vs. Yue. But you could probably take the top 200 characters, research their phonetic values in the main Chinese languages and arrive at a weighted contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: in light of the revised motivation for this question, the desideratum should not be finding the &quot;most frequent&quot; syllables. The underlying question is &quot;which things exist in most languages&quot;, not &quot;which thing occur most frequently&quot;. The goal should be to construct, first, sets of syllables that exist in all human languages, and subsequently, sets of syllables that exist in all but 1 language (all but 2, and so on). That way, you would not select syllables that are highly frequent in Chinese just because Chinese syllables are uttered very frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has to do with grammatical systems and not corpus studies of token frequency. The basic answer is, for the most part all CV, where C is a universal consonant and V is a universal vowel. The problem is that there are no truly universal consonants or vowels, just high frequency ones. If you select [a,i] as the vowels, [t k n] as the vowels, then there are 6 candidates, though [ki] is going to be a problem. Actually [ti] is also a problem, just less so. There is no repository of syllables in all languages, nor is there a respository of all vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question invokes the notion of a &quot;rare language&quot;, which only makes sense as being about languages having few speakers. There are thousands of rare languages and only hundreds of common languages. You could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/13/top100.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;, or some subset of it, to find the language basis for the syllable compilation. Then all you would need is a list of the existing syllables of that top set of languages. &#xA;The English syllable frequency list has a bit of a defect in that the underlying database (the CMU dictionary) does not assume syllable structure, so the author computed syllables in a manner that comports with other computational practices. We have no idea how that relates to speakers of English. Inspection of the list does reveal a number of putative syllables that fail the basic speaker test of syllable-hood (can speakers say it?): examples [æ, æmk, ɑfsk, ɑh, bæ, bɔj distinct from bɔɪ, bɛ, bɪ... θs (!?)]. So there is no syllable list for English. You might get such a list for Chinese languages (well, Mandarin and Yue), and Japanese should be pretty simple to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T16:24:11.467" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T16:24:11.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15387" CreationDate="2015-12-25T19:48:42.413" Score="5" ViewCount="1252" Body="&lt;p&gt;More specifically, what are the most historically entrenched westernmost and easternmost Indo-European languages? For my purposes, this excludes the spread of English, Spanish etc. through relatively modern colonization efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the context helps, it's for part of a talk I'm planning on doing where I want to give a sense of scale of how exactly large the Indo-European language family is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial guess would be Icelandic or Danish in the West (depending on how long ago lasting Norse settlement began in earnest in Greenland) and possibly Assamese or Bengali in the East.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this approximately correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11141" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T03:03:45.477" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T18:10:56.253" Title="What were the westernmost and easternmost Indo-European languages in c. 1350 CE?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15381" CreationDate="2015-12-25T21:02:25.483" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;At some point in the Archer series, Lana starts saying very emphatic &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQkxJ4WcXjA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yup!&lt;/a&gt;s. I was recently wondering about triphthongs and whether they occur in English, and found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphthong#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; had only a few examples, in the British Received Pronunciation and Cockney, which led me to believe they don't occur so often in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are Lana's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQkxJ4WcXjA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yup!&lt;/a&gt;s examples of triphthongs (&lt;strong&gt;i - u - a&lt;/strong&gt; - P)? Particularly the one around 0:05, when she's in the car with Cyril, where it even sounds like a quadthong (&lt;strong&gt;i - u - o - a&lt;/strong&gt; - P)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11142" LastEditorUserId="11142" LastEditDate="2015-12-25T21:11:44.597" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T14:45:40.143" Title="Are Lana's &quot;Yup!&quot;s triphthongs?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-26T13:16:28.293" Score="4" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;What is your name&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Isme shoma chi e&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two sentences - same content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the way to measure information content in a language.  How do we do this? Because quite evidently count of the number of words would be different for different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly are there metrics for the amount of such information a speaker conveys in unit time for a particular language? This can be based on a benchmark which uses a standard piece/pieces of information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T01:15:43.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T01:15:43.710" Title="The expressive power of languages : Information content in a sentence : How do we measure it" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15363" CreationDate="2015-12-26T13:26:23.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mayrhofer's first edition (KEWA) has definitions in both German and English. The much improved second edition (EWAia) is in German only. If you are serious about historical linguistics you need to know German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both books are protected by copyright, but I suppose that you can find pirated electronic versions on some shady website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2015-12-26T13:40:14.457" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T13:40:14.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2380" CreationDate="2015-12-26T13:31:54.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Freudian slip&quot;&#xA;e.g&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jimmy Kimmels 'clip slip'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or one which can be reproduced here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan. We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex... uh... setbacks.&quot; -A Freudian slip by President George H.W. Bush&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also called parapraxis and includes both slip of tongue and of the pen. The latter being termed lapsus calami.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source may be psychological but is not limited to it...in your example naturally you feel that sheilds will be useless and it is the bearers who will bear the brunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2015-12-27T21:22:52.870" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T21:22:52.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4008" CreationDate="2015-12-26T14:00:35.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Urdu and possibly Arabic...&#xA;There are markers in a sentence which make the sentence addressed to the second person also directed to the Silent Observer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This device is conveniently used to address the absent second person...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'AE duniya ke logon...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'O the people of the world...'.  a generic example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Ya Khuda...'&#xA;'O God....'.  God is only assumed to be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T07:32:54.593" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T07:32:54.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-26T16:23:25.787" Score="2" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/mr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus&lt;/a&gt;, which label(s) correspond to the &lt;em&gt;Filler&lt;/em&gt; class? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read a couple of article (e.g. (1)) saying there exist a widely applied classmap that maps the dialog acts onto 5 distinct classes: statements (S), questions (Q), backchannels (B), fillers (F) and disruptions (D). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the data set official manual (2) and paper (3), I fail to see which label(s) should be regarded as fillers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZvt4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AZvt4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(1) Verbree, Daan, Rutger Rienks, and Dirk Heylen. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2215828925874010278&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dialogue-act tagging using smart feature selection; results on multiple corpora.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2006. IEEE. IEEE, 2006.&#xA;APA &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(2) Dhillon, Rajdip, et al. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14701314755480463137&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting recorder project: Dialog act labeling guide&lt;/a&gt;. No. ICSI-TR-04-002. INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INST BERKELEY CA, 2004.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(3) Shriberg, E., et al., “&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5772938544285889197&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act&#xA;(MRDA) Corpus&lt;/a&gt;” Proc. SIGDIAL, Cambridge, MA, April-May 2004. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:58:22.177" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:58:22.177" Title="What are the fillers in the ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;&lt;filler&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15372" CreationDate="2015-12-28T14:27:10.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not always trivial to decide whether to call a vowel a monophthong, a diphthong, or a triphthong. In the end, the answer usually depends on who's asking, who's answering, and why the question is being asked. It's almost never useful just to ask this question in a vacuum (like asking if some person is white or if a tomato is a vegetable or if time exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a triphthong? It depends. The Wikipedia article is confusing, because it appears to conflate the notion of a phone (a phonetic unit) with the notion of a phoneme (a phonological unit). The initial definition given implies that a triphthong is a phonetic thing--a given pronunciation of the nucleus of a monosyllable (not that deciding what constitutes a monosyllable is always trivial) that &quot;has three targets&quot;. But even within that definition lies a rub: the word &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; implies some state that is aimed for. It implies that the speaker (or at least the speaker's tongue) is &quot;attempting&quot; to hit three articulatory configurations during the course of the syllable. If we look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;spectrogram&lt;/a&gt; of a carefully pronounced rendition of the word &lt;em&gt;hire&lt;/em&gt; produced by a British RP speaker, we will likely see that the formants start at one set of values, hit an inflection point, then end on a third set of values. But that same word, produced by the same speaker at a higher speaking rate in the context of continuous speech, may very well be produced with no inflection point--just initial formant values gliding to final formant values--or even just with more or less a single, unchanging set of formant values. Do we say that that speaker's &lt;em&gt;hire&lt;/em&gt; contains a triphthong sometimes, a diphthong sometimes, and a monophthong sometimes? We could. But isn't the tongue &quot;aiming&quot; for the same set of targets every time? Or do we only only count targets that are actually &quot;hit&quot;? How do we decide if they are hit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another conundrum: What if that speaker's rendition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/hire_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is indistinguishable from her rendition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/higher_1?q=higher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;higher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? If you ask the speaker how many syllables each word has, she'll probably tell you that &lt;em&gt;hire&lt;/em&gt; has one and &lt;em&gt;higher&lt;/em&gt; has two. That might lead us to conclude that the former contains a triphthong while the latter contains a diphthong followed by a monophthong. But if the two sound and look (in spectrograms) identical, does it really make sense to give them two different labels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize I'm not answering your question but rather asking more questions; hopefully it's becoming apparent to you why your question is not a straightforward one to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the vowels in Lana's &lt;em&gt;yup&lt;/em&gt;s, I (as a native speaker of a dialect of American English) hear some of them as containing a single &quot;vowel quality&quot; and others as containing two. As implied in my comment, it would be more standard in English to consider the initial &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; of the word to be a consonant, and I don't hear the [u] you transcribed in the one instance. As a phonetician, I go back and forth as to whether to call a vowel that clearly glides from one set of values to another a diphthong or just a &quot;gliding&quot; monophthong. Almost no vowels in American English are truly monophthongal all the time--that is, most vowels, when pronounced slowly and carefully, display formants that glide from one set of values at the beginning to a different set of values at the end. This is even true for [a], which Wikipedia calls a monophthong. So where do we draw the line? Do we just arbitrarily impose some threshold in Hertz beyond which formants can no longer be considered steady-state? Unclear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T14:45:40.143" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T14:45:40.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11953" CreationDate="2015-12-28T18:56:31.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sketched out a conservative approach to the interface among syntax, morphology, and phonology in another answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which depends essentially on parallel processing and does not distinguish in principle between syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules.  I know it doesn't answer the question you asked, but it's related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T18:56:31.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-28T23:29:35.760" Score="2" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble differentiating the uvular trill, uvular, and preüvular fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand that the preüvular variant is more fronted, it sounds to me like many acclaimed uvular fricatives are actually raised, nonsonorant trills, [ʀ̝, ʀ̥˔]. That's at least what I've gathered from the speakers on &lt;em&gt;Rosetta Stone German&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Articulatory IPA&lt;/em&gt; YouTube Channel (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIFtLdajfKA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voiced&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0DaaB9RDUc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voiceless&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any validity to my guess? Could someone please provide audio files of the three, so I could hear the difference? If the fricatives are audibly different, are the approximants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can make the voiced uvular trill, velar fricatives, and prevelar fricatives. It's only the uvular fricatives I'm having trouble distinguishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11156" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T01:44:31.443" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T01:44:31.443" Title="Uvular Fricative Trill vs Uvular Fricative vs Preüvular Fricative" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2015-12-29T03:10:35.710" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Xinjiang region of NW China is farthest eastern Indo-European Language according to &quot;The History of English Podcast&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2013/08/04/episode-3-the-indo-european-family-tree-4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2013/08/04/episode-3-the-indo-european-family-tree-4/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11159" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T03:10:35.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2015-12-29T07:54:17.603" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easternmost Indo-European language is Assamese, spoken in the extreme east of India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The now extinct Tocharian language (sc. Turfanian) was spoken around Turfan on the north-east side of the Tarim Basin, at around 89º E, as can be seen in this map from WP which shows the major linguistic groupings in the 3rd Century CE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ia2Z6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ia2Z6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Satellite view of Tarim Basin showing main ethnic groups as of the 3rd Century CE&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assamese however extends as far east as the Indian town of Tinsukia, around 95º E, placing it to the east of Turfanian. The locations of the major easternmost Indo-Aryan languages, including Assamese, are shown in this map from WP (the languages in yellow):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i4JYp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i4JYp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Map showing locations of major Indo-Aryan languages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not shown in the graphic there are two IE languages spoken in Burma's Rakine State, Chakma and Rohingya, but these do not extend as far east as Assamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The westernmost IE language is Icelandic, extending up to 24º W. If Iceland were excluded due to being a relatively 'recent' settlement (~847 CE) then the westernmost IE language is Gaeilge, the Celtic language of Ireland, at 10.5º W, just marginally further west than Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2015-12-29T22:37:47.133" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T22:37:47.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-29T10:21:36.583" Score="0" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, to me, the verb &quot;to turn&quot; has a literal meaning along the lines of &quot;to change physical orientation along some particular axis&quot;. You can also say &quot;X turned [adj.]&quot;, &quot;X turned up (as in to appear)&quot;, etc. but these feel non-literal to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do native speakers of a language determine this distinction? My guess is literal meanings are usually directly describe physical movement or action, whereas the secondary meanings are more abstract or indirect. It also seems a little peculiar that such a distinction exists, after all, word meaning for native speakers is determined solely by usage. Why then do I feel that words have an innate literal meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11161" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T09:04:54.083" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T09:04:54.083" Title="How do native speakers determine a word's literal/basic meaning?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15388" CreationDate="2015-12-29T11:07:58.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think speakers do determine this, or need to. A word has (usually) a number of meanings, and we learn these in context (and sometimes a new meaning appears). It is only lexicographers and other analysts who have any need to identify which of the meanings are literal or basic and which are not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T11:07:58.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-29T18:16:36.423" Score="0" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an alphabet, with each letter we have a minimum number of dots/ pixels required to represent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For convenience one takes such a value for the whole alphabet but actually in addition to this it varies for each letter rg number of dots required to denote an 'I' is lesser than 'X' .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing letters of different alphabets 'X' certainly has lesser requirement of dots to be recognisable than 'ध' ( 'gha' ) in devnagari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the angular resolution of the pixel as subtended to the eye remains the same... The metric is agnostic of letter size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Question: Using which alphabet can Hamlet / Dhammapada  be transliterated so that the book has least number of dots/pixels ( and yet is readable) **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T10:52:09.280" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T10:52:09.280" Title="Effectiveness of a script" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-12-31T18:31:18.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15391" CreationDate="2015-12-29T18:47:39.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you require the letters to be read with the eyes, and you're assuming normal, uncorrected vision. And I assume you mean &quot;fewest pixels per letter&quot;. You have to specify pixel diameter, which isn't a design feature of writing systems. Braille, which actually does use dots, is pixel-sparse (6), and though it is not designed to be read with eyes, it nevertheless can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-29T18:47:39.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15597" CreationDate="2015-12-30T10:09:57.817" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people can distinguish whether a person is inhaling or exhaling only by audio, even when the tongue and the lip position (=formants) is the same. That must mean there is a difference in the acoustics of it. I wonder what differences are there between the sound of inhaling and that of exhaling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11167" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T22:38:07.780" Title="Acoustic difference in breathing in and breathing out" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-30T15:46:51.020" Score="1" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following data (taken from Adger's Core Syntax) show that certain forms cause mismatching agreement. The dual, in Hopi, triggers both singular and plural agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Puma  ta?taq-t wari &#xA;Those man-PL   ran-SG&#xA;&quot;Those two men ran&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical Greek, neuter plural nouns trigger singular agreement on a verb, but plural agreement on an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kala         en         ta  sphagia&#xA;Good-NEUT.PL be-PAST.SG the sacrifice-NEUT.PL&#xA;&quot;The sacrifices were good&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know whether inclusive and exclusive pronouns also trigger mismatch agreement? Data would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T02:01:33.883" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T02:01:33.883" Title="Inclusive/Exclusive Pronouns and Agreement Mismatch" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15388" CreationDate="2015-12-30T18:37:49.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your use of the word &quot;innate&quot; at the end of the question itself looks to me like an example. When speaking literally, &quot;innate&quot; means that is something that a person is born with, and not something that they learn. Linguists are pretty familiar with the term thanks to Chomsky's proposal that humans are genetically endowed, prior to experience, with specific knowledge of the nature of languages. I assume that you recognise that your use of &quot;innate&quot; in saying that &quot;words have an innate literal meaning&quot; would mean that humans already know words and meanings for (all) human languages at birth. Since you surely don't believe that, then you would be using the word &quot;innate&quot; with a different meaning. Some people occasionally use &quot;innate&quot; to mean simply &quot;deep-seated; automatic&quot;. It is not hard to see how such figurative usage arises: if some cognitive faculty is actually innate, then it will probably be deep-seated and automatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the historical development of a language, a word such as &quot;innate&quot; which is frequently used figuratively in a particular way becomes polysemous. An example of that change is the word &quot;cow&quot;, which historically refers to female &lt;em&gt;Bos taurus&lt;/em&gt;, but is now applied to female camels, bison, alligators, komodo dragons, dolphins, eland, elephants among others. Another more recent example is the word &quot;virus&quot;, which used to refer only to a specific tiny kind of pathogen, but a few years ago was figuratively extended to a kind of computer program. This extension has been so thorough that I'm betting that in 20 more years, almost nobody will know that the term used to refer just to biological viruses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is extremely difficult to know whether the meanings associated with a particular word are literal or figurative, because &quot;meaning&quot; is understood to be both a social construct and a fact of individual psychology. You learn social facts about meaning the same way you learn any other social facts -- you observe it as used by others, and you decide (somehow, the how being a big mystery) what the essential defining characteristic of that fact is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Colin Fine's apparent assessment of the importance of literal meaning as being useful to just a select few people. Any person who enters into a legally binding agreement, or is subject to any laws, will need to be able to discern literal meanings, if in that society laws and agreements are interpreted according to meaning. These days, that is pretty much everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T18:37:49.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-31T03:30:40.853" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me take the consonant ب for example      1. بَ بِ بُ, these three combinations in Persian pronounciaiton are ba(a in apple), be (e in bed), bo ( o in spott).But in arabic pronounciation they are pronounced like ba ( a in apple）,bi ( like i in ‘it'), bu ( u in put).       2 .Their long vowel combinations are almost same. با بی بو ,they are pronounced baa, bii,buu both in arabic and persian       3. iinna, if written in arabic system is َیینَ ,but in persian system is َاین,  am i right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:52:37.340" Title="I have a question about Arabic and Persian language?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-02-01T18:44:42.097" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-31T13:14:25.217" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to determine which book of the Bible is the least dense, lexically speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/autonomoid/wordsworth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an app called Wordsworth that can determine lexical density for a single text&lt;/a&gt;, I thought there might already be a source which has measured the relative density for each text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, so I am not sure if I am using these terms correctly, but I'm curious which book of the Bible uses the simplest language/smallest vocabulary.  I recognize that this could vary for various translations, so I'd be happy with results from any translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11174" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T13:14:25.217" Title="What book of the Bible has the smallest lexical density?" Tags="&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15403" CreationDate="2015-12-31T13:31:00.690" Score="0" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching the anime &lt;code&gt;Black Butler&lt;/code&gt; the other day when a song was played. I looked up the song to see what the lyrics were. I came across several sources that read the same and was sung in Latin. From the song &lt;code&gt;Si deus me relinquit&lt;/code&gt;, all the sources I've come across has used the word &lt;code&gt;terribilissimo&lt;/code&gt;. The full song is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Si deus me relinquit,&#xA;Ego deum relinquo.&#xA;Solus oppressus nigram clavem habere potest,&#xA;Omnias ianuas praecludo&#xA;Sic omnias precationes obsigno.&#xA;Sed&#xA;qui me defendet?&#xA;Ab me terribilissimo ipse.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem I have is that I cannot find anything to reference &lt;code&gt;terribilissimo&lt;/code&gt; in Latin. I'm aware that in Italian it means &lt;code&gt;most terrible&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it's a misheard lyric and it's really &lt;code&gt;terribile sim&lt;/code&gt;, but to not be corrected at least once?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me how one would get that word in Latin, if it exists, from &lt;code&gt;terribilis&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11173" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T06:53:26.803" Title="The use of the word terribilissimo in Latin?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15402" CreationDate="2015-12-31T15:38:26.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Terribilis -e&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;adj,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Smith) [terreo] frightful, dreadful, terrible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Ainsworth) dreadful,&#xA;  terrible, to be feared; awful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Smith and Ainsworth give examples of the comparative &quot;more terrible&quot; to describe a) the Roman people,&lt;em&gt;terribilior,&lt;/em&gt; b) events, &lt;em&gt;terribiliora&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Terribilissimus&lt;/em&gt; is a regularly formed superlative, &quot;most/ very terrible&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;terribilissimo&lt;/em&gt; could be either Dative or Ablative sing m. or n.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here after &lt;em&gt;a,ab&lt;/em&gt; =&quot;by&quot; it is ablative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   qui me defendet?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ab me terribilissimo ipse.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But&lt;br&gt;&#xA; who will defend me ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Myself from most terrifying me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pronunciation &amp;amp; Stress&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from Thompson and Penn 1963 Jnr Latin Course 1963:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Words of more than two syllables are accented on the last syllable&#xA;  but one if that syllable is long, e.g. &lt;em&gt;soro'res,&lt;/em&gt; sisters; but&#xA;  otherwise on the last syllable but two, e.g. &lt;em&gt;do'minus;&lt;/em&gt; lord; &lt;em&gt;fami'lia.&lt;/em&gt; family;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[so the stress would fall on -iss- as in &lt;em&gt;Italian&lt;/em&gt; 'bravissimo'] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Exceptions:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;In medieval verse  some multisyllabic words are given a second, and even a third, (light) stress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abelard (dactyls): [Penguin: &lt;em&gt;Latin Verse,&lt;/em&gt; p195] &lt;em&gt;O Quanta Qualia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'llic ex sa'bbato su'ccedet sa'bbatum,//&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pe'rpes laeti'tia &lt;strong&gt;sa&lt;/strong&gt;'bati&lt;strong&gt;za'n&lt;/strong&gt;ti-um, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Archpoet (trochaics) [Penguin: &lt;em&gt;Latin Verse,&lt;/em&gt; p206]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prae'sul di'screti'ssime, / ve'ni-a'm te pre'cor//&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mo'rte bo'na&#xA;  mo'ri-or, / du'lce ne'ce ne'cor.// ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Re's est a'rdu-i'ssima / vi'ncere' natu'ram//...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Libre Vermeille,&lt;/em&gt; (trochaics) in '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYBMO0PsFcQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cu'ncti si'mus co'ncane'ntes&lt;/a&gt;,'  &lt;em&gt;concanentes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;karissime,&lt;/em&gt; both tetra-syllabic, are stressed first and third. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastEditorUserId="9923" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T06:53:26.803" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T06:53:26.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-31T21:40:59.807" Score="-1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/936/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this xkcd comic&lt;/a&gt;, I'm trying to write a computer program that can generate random sentences to be used as pass phrases. However, I think that the pass phrases might be easier to remember if I stick to grammatically correct sentences instead of just using random sets of words. My plan so far is to stick to a simple &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;noun&amp;gt;-&amp;lt;adjective&amp;gt;-&amp;lt;verb&amp;gt;-&amp;lt;noun&amp;gt;-&amp;lt;adjective&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; format and my back-of-the-napkin calculations suggests that this should provide enough variety to make cracking the passwords by brute force infeasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty I am facing now is that to make sure that the sentences I generate are grammatically correct &lt;strong&gt;I need a dictionary that has the singular and plural forms of every noun as well as all all the tenses for every verb&lt;/strong&gt;. Is there anywhere I can find this kind of database? Bonus points if there is data for many languages!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first considered using some open-source spellcheck dictionaries (hunspell and  aspell) because they are available for many languages and contain all the different inflections of the words. However, these spellchecking dictionaries didn't classify the words as noun/verb/adjective or mark what nouns were singular/plural and what was the tense of each verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also tried downloading some dictionaries out of Project Gutenberg but those dictionaries focus on providing definitions (which I do not need) and don't explicitly list all the variations for every word. I would also have to hunt down a different dictionary for each language and write specialized code to parse each of them, which would be a lot of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11168" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T08:55:43.897" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T18:59:25.157" Title="Where can I find free dictionaries for various languages?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-01-05T16:38:09.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15398" CreationDate="2015-12-31T21:45:04.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both in Arabic and Persian the sequence /īna/ is written اينـ initially and ـينـ non-initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T21:45:04.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15404" CreationDate="2016-01-01T18:59:25.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Comm. Wiki because it's not an answer but a wordy comment, sorry)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're trying to do is called &lt;code&gt;sentence generator&lt;/code&gt;. Googling for this phrase shows up quite a few ready-made services on the Internet. Some of them are &lt;strong&gt;open-source&lt;/strong&gt;, developed on a variety of platforms, programming languages, and libraries; some are using freeware word corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of re-inventing a wheel, I suggest you to review the existing solutions to see what dictionaries, grammar libraries, and tools they are using. Or you maybe even want to &lt;strong&gt;join an existing project team&lt;/strong&gt;. Then you may add a relatively small piece of code to make the &lt;strong&gt;existing&lt;/strong&gt; project do what you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, we are unable to suggest a dictionary with unknown characteristics, especially considering that you need not only a dictionary, but also some set of grammar rules of conjugation, verb governance, phrase structures, and this is multiplied by a requirement of supporting  different languages. We simply can't develop the entire (!) architecture of your software, hence we can't answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are started with some architecture and come back with more narrow questions, we will be happy to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T18:59:25.157" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-01-01T18:59:25.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-01T19:31:02.560" Score="1" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the meaning of &quot;suf-&quot; in &quot;suffix&quot;,&quot;pre-&quot; in &quot;prefix&quot; but what actually means &quot;kon-&quot; in &quot;konfix&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I was studying german linguistic,so I mean &quot;confix&quot; with &quot;Konfix&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11182" LastEditorUserId="11182" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T21:08:05.890" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T03:13:21.157" Title="What does kon- in &quot;konfix&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-01T07:52:25.813" Score="2" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page on &lt;em&gt;Japanese grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Head finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the&#xA;  building of sentences using other sentences. In sentences that have&#xA;  other sentences as constituents, the subordinated sentences (relative&#xA;  clauses, for example), always &lt;em&gt;precede&lt;/em&gt; what they refer to, since they&#xA;  are modifiers and what they modify has the syntactic status of phrasal&#xA;  head. Translating the phrase &lt;em&gt;the man who was walking down the street&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  into Japanese, word order would be &lt;em&gt;street down was walking man&lt;/em&gt;. (Note&#xA;  that Japanese has no articles, &lt;strong&gt;and the different word order obviates&#xA;  any need for the relative pronoun &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the different word order obviate the need for a relative pronoun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22266" OwnerDisplayName="Tomislav Ostojich" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T19:21:58.440" Title="How does Japanese word order obviate the need for relative pronouns?" Tags="&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15408" CreationDate="2016-01-01T20:50:48.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a view that I've heard before, and never questioned; but I think you're right to question it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Snailboat points out in a comment, with a participial clause we don't need a relative pronoun in English: &lt;em&gt;The man walking down the street&lt;/em&gt; - and the clause follows the head even though English is generally head-final. In German, an equivalent participial phrase can precede its head, and the result is very like the Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the difference in Japanese is that there isn't a distinct participial form that is required in this construction, but an ordinary finite verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T20:50:48.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15407" CreationDate="2016-01-01T20:59:41.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word (which I have never heard before, and appears to be used only by German linguists, not in English), is said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Konfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; to be derived from Latin 'confingere' &quot; zusammenfügen, zugrunde&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T20:59:41.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15407" CreationDate="2016-01-02T00:27:11.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual with terminology, what the term &lt;em&gt;confix&lt;/em&gt; means depends on your theory of morphology. Some linguists used it in the sense of what we now call &quot;circumfix.&quot; However, Igor Mel'cuk uses it in the sense of &quot;an affix which neither divides the root not it is divided.&quot; In his theory of morphology, there are four types: confix, circumfix, infix, and transfix, see the screenshot below from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027278111-09mug&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mugdan 1990&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0h1wN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0h1wN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the term itself was coined by a soviet Arabist &lt;a href=&quot;http://ru.wikipedia.org/?oldid=72142168&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;N.V. Yushmanov&lt;/a&gt; in his 1928 grammar of Arabic. He used it the sense of a circumfix, from Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confixus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confixum&lt;/a&gt; &quot;fastened &lt;strong&gt;together&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I︠U︡shmanov, N. V. 1928. &lt;em&gt;Grammatika literaturnogo arabskogo iazyka&lt;/em&gt;. Pod red. i s predisl. I.Iu. Krachkovskogo. Leningrad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110375732/9783110375732-001/9783110375732-001.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eins 2015&lt;/a&gt; writes that &lt;strong&gt;in French linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;confixe&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;strong&gt;a bound root&lt;/strong&gt; (referring to Martinet) and then it was introduced to &lt;strong&gt;German linguistics&lt;/strong&gt; (Konfix) in the same sense. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Konfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; in Glottopedia confirms this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cf. &quot;Konfixe sind gebundene lexikalische Morpheme, die also nie als freie Morpheme vorkommen.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T03:13:21.157" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T03:13:21.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15408" CreationDate="2016-01-02T04:04:28.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, since Japanese is a head-final language and since the verb comes at the end of a clause, a sentence-final noun would be enough to indicate that the clause is a pre-modifier of the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the relative clause post-modifies its head noun and, even though a relative pronoun can be optional at times, there are certain clauses that require its use. For example, subordinate participial and subordinate passive clauses may be reduced. Relative pronouns are also optional in relative clauses in which the modified noun is coindexed with the object. The contiguous noun phrases could serve as an indicator of there being a relative clause, hence the optionality of the relative pronoun. However, subordinate clauses in the simple tenses require the use of a relative pronoun, if the noun being modified is coindexed with the subject of the relative clause, to explicitly indicate that what follows the noun is a post-modifying relative clause, not a simplex main clause in which the noun is the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present participle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cow (that is) eating the grass&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grass (that is) eaten by the cow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause where head noun is coindexed with object of RC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The grass]&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; (that) the cow eats ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The grass]&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; (that) the cow ate ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause where head noun is coindexed with subject of RC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The cow]&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; *(that) ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; eats the grass&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The cow]&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; *(that) ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; ate the grass&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that subordinate clauses in the simple tenses where the head noun is coindexed with the subject of the relative clause require a relative pronoun is that without it, the head noun could potentially be parsed as being part of a simplex clause, not the head noun of a relative clause if the relative pronoun is omitted. Participial and passive clauses, regardless of coindexation, can be reduced due to the fact that native speakers intuitively know that there is no way a participial or passive clause can be a simplex clause without its auxiliary 'be', so there is no other alternative but to compute the clause as being a relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grass eaten by the cow (never a simplex clause, so it must be a complex NP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cow eating the grass (never a simplex clause, so it must be a complex NP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, on the other hand, whether the head noun is coindexed with the subject or the object does not matter and there is no need for relative pronouns as there is no structural ambiguity whatsoever, since nouns never come after the verb in simplex clauses; when a noun does come after the verb, the clause preceding the noun is most certainly a relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;牛   が  ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; 食べ-た   草&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ushi ga  ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; tabe-ta  kusa&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cow  NOM ∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; eat-PAST grass&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grass that the cow ate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; 草      を   食べ-た  牛&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; kusa  wo  tabe-ta  ushi&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;∅&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt; Grass ACC eat-PAST cow&lt;SUP&gt;1&lt;/SUP&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cow that ate the grass&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, however, just my opinion. Whether there is any psycholinguistic evidence for such parsing complexities is not known by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T04:04:28.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15408" CreationDate="2016-01-02T19:21:58.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;need&quot; here is a bit strong. Imbabura Quechua is head-final like Japanese, but verbs in relative clauses still have special nominalization marking (&lt;em&gt;wambra-ca runa-ta ricu-rca-mi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;The child saw the man&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;wambra ricu-&lt;strong&gt;shca&lt;/strong&gt; runa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the man who the child saw&quot;, &lt;em&gt;runa&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;man&quot;). Special morphology on the verb of the relative clause is not &quot;needed&quot; and &lt;em&gt;wambra ricu-rca runa&lt;/em&gt; would be perfectly interpretable, except that it's a fact of Quechua (and not Japanese) that relative clauses have special marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a split in Bantu between languages which require an initial head-marking complementizer for subject relative clauses, and those that don't. In those that don't there is the potential for ambiguity between &quot;a man who bought a cow&quot; and &quot;a man bought a cow&quot; – but ambiguity is avoided because (using Shona as an example) the tone of subject agreements in the two clause types tells you whether you have a relative clause vs. a main clause (thus &lt;em&gt;munhu &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;káténgá n'ómbe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;a man who bought a cow&quot; vs &lt;em&gt;munhu &lt;strong&gt;á&lt;/strong&gt;katéngá n'ómbe&lt;/em&gt;). Kerewe is a language that requires special head-marking on the verb which in fact differs between subject relatives and non-subject relatives: and furthermore subject relatives and object relatives have different tone patterns, thus &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;-yábwééne&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he who saw&quot; vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;owó&lt;/strong&gt; yabwééné&lt;/em&gt; &quot;whom he saw&quot; (head markers are in bold). Distinct tone patterns are not needed when there are distinct head-marking prefixes; distinct head-marking prefixes are not needed when tone patterns distinguish subject vs. object relative clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that &quot;need&quot; is not an informative concept for understanding how relative clauses are structured. The direction that one should be looking is for languages that systematically do not mark relative clauses in any manner, and where there is no way to distinguish between &quot;the man bought the cow&quot; and &quot;the man who bought the cow&quot;. If there are none, and this isn't just an attestation gap, then perhaps a case for &quot;need&quot; can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T19:21:58.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6668" CreationDate="2016-01-02T20:57:58.803" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good day!&#xA;My name is Nikolai.&#xA;To a question about the key to the Voynich manuscript.&#xA;           Today, I have to add on this matter following.&#xA;  The manuscript was written no letters, and signs for the letters of the alphabet of one of the ancient languages. Moreover, in the text there are 2 more levels of encryption to virtually eliminate the possibility of computer-assisted translation, even after replacing the signs letters.&#xA;I pick up the key by which the first section I was able to read the following words: hemp, hemp clothing; food, food (sheet of 20 numbering on the Internet); cleaned (intestines), knowledge may wish to drink a sugary drink (nectar), maturation (maturity), to consider, to think (sheet 107); drink; six; flourishing; growing; rich; peas; sweet drink nectar and others. It is only a short word, mark 2-3. To translate words consisting of more than 2.3 characters is necessary to know this ancient language.&#xA;     If you are interested, I am ready to send more detailed information, including scans of pages indicating the translated words.&#xA;Sincerely, Nicholas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11191" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T20:57:58.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15417" CreationDate="2016-01-02T23:25:18.243" Score="0" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an essay I am writing I have to discuss Control relations, such as clause constructions and control verbs of embedded clauses in sentences and I need to discuss in more detail lexically determined relations. Although my lecturers notes on equi and raising predicates are a bit vague on definitions and examples. If anyone would be able to give me definitions of these two relations, maybe a few examples and/or explain the basics of their theory it would be a great help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11192" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:31:43.830" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:31:43.830" Title="What is the difference between Equi and Raising predicates?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;control&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T00:33:38.550" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/mr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus&lt;/a&gt;, what is the interlabeler agreement in the ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus, when using the 6-class tagset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 6-class tagset I am referring to is mentioned in (1), which indicates there exist a widely applied classmap that maps the dialog acts onto 6 distinct classes: statements (S), questions (Q), backchannels (B), fillers (F) and disruptions (D), and (Z) unlabeled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) gives the interlabeler agreement, but for all classes used in the original annotations. The provided data set seems to come with the consensus annotations, i.e. it doesn't comes with the annotations of each labeler, so I couldn't find a way to compute the interlabeler agreement myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(1) Verbree, Daan, Rutger Rienks, and Dirk Heylen. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2215828925874010278&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dialogue-act tagging using smart feature selection; results on multiple corpora.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Spoken Language Technology Workshop, 2006. IEEE. IEEE, 2006.&#xA;APA &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(2) Shriberg, E., et al., “&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5772938544285889197&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act&#xA;(MRDA) Corpus&lt;/a&gt;” Proc. SIGDIAL, Cambridge, MA, April-May 2004. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T00:33:38.550" Title="What is the interlabeler agreement in the ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus, when using the 6-class tagset?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15415" CreationDate="2016-01-03T01:51:11.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference is that Raising predicates occur in Raising constructions, and Equi predicates occur in Equi constructions.  Being precise about the relationship between the predicates and the constructions was the subject of George Lakoff's dissertation &lt;strong&gt;Irregularity in Syntax&lt;/strong&gt;.  (And it is discussed in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;SPHE&lt;/strong&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T01:51:11.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T12:41:27.623" Score="0" ViewCount="2196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is grammar the way words are formed and the way &quot;correct English&quot; is achieved and syntax just sentence types? &#xA;And does grammar rule over syntax i.e. do we need correct grammar to create a sentence type (or syntax) &#xA;They seem quite similar to me. &#xA;On my English Language specification, word classes, sentences, and phrases all fall under grammar therefore has confused me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11196" LastEditorUserId="11196" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T12:57:54.017" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T21:35:03.843" Title="Difference between grammar and syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-01-04T11:12:03.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15418" CreationDate="2016-01-03T18:18:03.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no general agreement about how or whether to distinguish these terms.  In some discussions, I use them interchangeably.  My preference is to make a distinction between &quot;grammar&quot; and &quot;syntax&quot; parallel to logicians' terms &quot;morphology&quot; and &quot;logical syntax&quot;, where grammar tells you what sentences are in a language and syntax tells you about the relations among those sentences (such as paraphrase).  This is my understanding of the way McCawley uses the terms in &lt;strong&gt;TSPE&lt;/strong&gt; (and he disparages the study of &quot;grammar&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the agent forms, &quot;grammarian&quot; tends to be reserved for amateurs who have come to regard themselves as arbiters of some sort on style and usage, while &quot;syntactician&quot; refers to professional descriptive linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T18:18:03.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T19:58:17.853" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was born in Korea and so Korean was the first language I learned. However, I moved to the US when I was one years old, and after I entered the school system, I quickly learned English. Now, I am much more comfortable with English, and my Korean is somewhat lacking, although I can still speak it. What is my first language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T11:33:47.723" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T11:33:47.723" Title="What is my first language: the one I'm more familiar with, or the one I learned first?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15418" CreationDate="2016-01-03T21:35:03.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;'Grammar'&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within linguistics this term has several specific usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be used to refer to the knowledge within the human brain that enables the production and comprehension of a particular language, so we talk about children acquiring the grammar of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can refer to the total set of ‘rules’ that have been described for any particular language, so includes phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. When linguists try to document this set of rules (usually based on a collection of utterances in the target language, from which these rules are inferred) they are said to be describing the grammar of a language. Based on this, 'grammar' is often used to refer to a text (typically a book) that presents (a substantial subset of) these ‘rules’ for a particular language.[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'grammar' is often used by non-linguists to refer very generally to the rules of a language, often thought of in prescriptive terms as 'good' and 'bad' grammar, and also often including the writing system, punctuation, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;'Syntax'&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This term is used within linguistics to refer to the structure of linguistic utterances, in particular the sequencing or ordering of elements. In relatively isolating languages such as Chinese the syntax is a large part of the grammar but in relatively non-isolating languages (eg Australian languages) syntax is far less important, with morphology playing a larger role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So syntax is a subset of grammar, at least as those terms are used by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in comments, WP has reasonable explanations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grammar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Eg ‘A grammar of Awa Pit’, ‘A short grammar of East Circassian’, ‘Yulparija sketch grammar’, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T21:35:03.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15421" CreationDate="2016-01-04T01:41:30.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;first language&quot; was first used under the assumption that most people learn one dominant language during their childhood which remains their dominant language throughout their life, and that all subsequent &quot;second&quot; languages are learned to a less proficient level.  So the term can cause some confusion when that assumption breaks down.&#xA;I think in your case, it would be natural to call English your first language, because it was learned at a very young age, and it was learned to the &quot;native&quot; level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could call you Korean your &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cradle%20Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;cradle language&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  It is the first language you heard, and the first one that you began to acquire, but it was superseded by English at a young age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T01:41:30.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21260" CreationDate="2016-01-04T13:43:49.817" Score="2" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to compare two sets of keywords. After searching I understood that  &lt;code&gt;Jiang-Conrath&lt;/code&gt; Similarity is closer correlating with human judgement. I read this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jiang-Conrath Similarity Return a score denoting how similar two word senses are, based on the Information Content (IC) of the Least Common Subsumer (most specific ancestor node) and that of the two input Synsets. The relationship is given by the equation 1 / (IC(s1) + IC(s2) - 2 * IC(lcs)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my question is that how I can choose a threshold to say that two words are simililar with &lt;code&gt;Jiang-Conrath&lt;/code&gt; measurement. For example, similarity of cat and dog is only 0.4 with &lt;code&gt;Brown-ic&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11209" LastEditorUserId="11209" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T14:21:46.150" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T17:40:40.707" Title="how to choose a threshold for Jiang-Conrath Similarity?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6967" CreationDate="2016-01-04T19:01:09.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind about this particular pair (probably you already know); present-day Turkish is transformed a lot, most Persian/Arabic suffixes merged with the word itself to form a new Turkish word. On the other hand if you had a chance to see Turkish before 1940-1980 period, you would see more matches of oriental languages, due to the fact that back at those times Turkish was a new-born descendant of Ottoman Turkish, which is heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic. Remnant vocabulary from old Turkish (I guess &amp;lt;1000AD) still could be observed (rarely though) even today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T19:01:09.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15430" CreationDate="2016-01-05T02:44:08.067" Score="-2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams. I already read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12708/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 578:] &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; = The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word, e.g., &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; from un + system + atic + ally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 581:] &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; = The base to which one or more affixes are attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word; see &lt;strong&gt;root, affix&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 597:] &lt;strong&gt;base&lt;/strong&gt; = any root or stem to which an affix is attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Zq9uCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA43&amp;amp;ots=eDP9cyJcAF&amp;amp;dq=%22any%20root%20or%20stem%20to%20which%22&amp;amp;pg=PA43#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22any%20root%20or%20stem%20to%20which%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p 43:&lt;/a&gt;] In the preceding example [at the bottom of p 42], &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; [...] are bases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Ancient Greek etymon of 'system'&lt;/a&gt; comprises two morphemes, but which the authors never revealed and so to which  the authors are not referring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the definition above imply that the English noun 'system' is a base?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'system' has no affix attached!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T05:42:46.360" Title="How is the English noun 'system' a 'base'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15429" CreationDate="2016-01-05T03:08:14.003" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question concerns only p 48: what does &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; mean? Its use does not appear to match any of the definitions of 'grammar' below. I know of the distinctions between Descriptive, Prescriptive, and Teaching Grammar, but which do not appear relevant here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sorry for the surfeit of quotes. I thought to include more than less, but  please tell me if I should remove any.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams&lt;/sub&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 48:] The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; relation of a noun in a sentence is called the &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;case&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  of the &#xA;  noun. When case is marked by inflectional morphemes, the process is referred &#xA;  to as &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;case morphology&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 558:] &lt;strong&gt;case&lt;/strong&gt; A characteristic of nouns and pronouns, and in some languages articles and &#xA;  adjectives, determined by their function in the sentence, and generally indicated &#xA;  by the morphological form of the word [...]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 8:] [...] what does it mean to know a language? It means knowing the sounds and &#xA;  meanings of many, if not all, of the words of the language, and the rules for &#xA;  their combination—the grammar, which generates infinitely many possible &#xA;  sentences. We will have more to say about these rules of grammar in later chapters.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 25:] Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite &#xA;  set of possible sentences. These rules are part of the &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; of a language, which develops when &#xA;  you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;), the &#xA;  structure and properties of words (the &lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;lexicon&lt;/strong&gt;), how words &#xA;  may be combined into phrases and sentences (the &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt;), and the ways in &#xA;  which sounds and meanings are related (the &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[p 566:] &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; = The mental representation of a speaker's linguistic competence; what a &#xA;  speaker knows about a language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, &#xA;  semantics, and lexicon. A linguistic description of a speaker's mental grammar.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T03:31:51.750" Title="In the context of 'case', what does 'grammatical' mean in 'grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15428" CreationDate="2016-01-05T03:31:51.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;strong&gt;grammatical&lt;/strong&gt; is used in contrast with &lt;strong&gt;lexical&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Whereas &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; refers to all parts of language that have some meaning outside of the sentence, grammatical is used to describe the relationship between parts of sentences.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some of the common grammatical relations are those between the verb and subject, and between the verb and object.  There are also spatial relationships, and cases like the locative case can include these relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T03:31:51.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15427" CreationDate="2016-01-05T03:36:20.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my interpretation of the relevant passage: The noun &quot;system&quot; is not a base in any general sense. The &quot;base&quot; is merely the complementary part to the &quot;affix.&quot; To put it as a math equation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;stem - affix = base&#xA;&lt;br&gt;base + affix = stem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A base may be a root or a stem, and that root or stem may or may not be able to function as an independent word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 42, we have the following words that are composed of bases and affixes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;systematic (composed of the base &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; + the affix &lt;em&gt;-atic&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unsystematic (composed of the base &lt;em&gt;systematic&lt;/em&gt; + the affix &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unsystematical (composed of the base &lt;em&gt;unsystematic&lt;/em&gt; + the affix &lt;em&gt;-al&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unsystematically (composed of the base &lt;em&gt;unsystematical&lt;/em&gt; + the affix &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the authors are saying that &quot;system&quot; is a base specifically in the context of analyzing the word &quot;systematic,&quot; which does have a suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-01-05T03:44:32.613" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T03:44:32.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15427" CreationDate="2016-01-05T05:42:46.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reply to &quot;How is the English noun 'system' a 'base'?&quot; is that it isn't a base.  The noun &quot;system&quot; is derived from the base &quot;system-&quot; by adding a zero suffix for the nominative singular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;system-&quot; base + &quot;-0&quot; suffix = &quot;system&quot; noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that confusing?  Yes.  But to make sense of the account in your text, I think you have to distinguish between the base &quot;system-&quot;, which occurs in many derived forms, including the nominative form &quot;system&quot;, and the nominative form itself, even though there happens to be no actual affix in this case, in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing it this way is more useful in other languages with more interesting morphological systems than English's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T05:42:46.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T05:50:44.140" Score="9" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular sound change that would explain changing a word-initial [ʒu] (or alternatively [dʒu]) to [iʒ] before a stressed syllable? Or might this be best explained as dropping the [u] by syncope and adding a [i] by prothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this in a couple words of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Verdean_Creole#Barlavento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the São Vicente dialect of Cape Verdean Creole&lt;/a&gt;, which is related to both Portuguese and other dialects of Cape Verdean Creole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| Portuguese        | Sotavento Creoles | São Vicente |&#xA;|-------------------|-------------------|-------------|&#xA;| jogar   [ʒug'aɾ]  | ['dʒugɐ]          | [iʒ'ga]     |&#xA;| ajudar [ɐʒudˈaɾ]  | ['dʒudɐ]          | [iʒ'da]     |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dialect often elides unstressed [i] and [u] sounds in words, compared to other dialects or languages. So a change from [ʒu-] → [ʒ-] (or [dʒu-] → [ʒu-] → [ʒ-]) would make some sense. In other languages I'm familiar with, [ʒda] or [ʒga] would be seen as &quot;unpronounceable&quot;, so adding an initial vowel could make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this particular dialect elided many (most?) of the initial unstressed vowels present in Portuguese. Many words start with [ʃt-], [ʃk-], [ʃp-], etc. The dialect seems very comfortable with consonant clusters at the start of words: commonly-used words include [tʃga], [pʰta], [fka], and [zbi]. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; other cases of vowel prothesis, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another sound change I should be looking at for a possible explanation? Or is ([dʒu-] →) [ʒu-] → [ʒ-] → [iʒ-] the best bet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I started to wonder more about this when I heard a speaker of this dialect pronounce a name [iʃ'sɛ] instead of the standard [ʒu'zɛ]. This speaker has both speech and hearing disorders, so isn't representative of all speakers, but the sound change was so similar that I wondered if this is a pattern seen in other languages.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple notes about other prothetic vowels from @KennyLau's questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words that come from Portuguese words starting with &quot;es&quot; plus a consonant generally have no initial vowel (as is common in Portugal), across the dialects of Cape Verdean Creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| Portuguese | Sotavento Creoles | São Vicente |&#xA;|------------|-------------------|-------------|&#xA;| escola     | ['skɔlɐ]          | ['ʃkɔlɐ]    |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of vowel prothesis in the São Vicente dialect is the addition of an initial /a/ in certain words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| European Portuguese | Sotavento Creoles | São Vicente |&#xA;|---------------------|-------------------|-------------|&#xA;| mulher [muʎˈɛɾ]     | [mu'dʒɛɾ]         | [am'dʒɛʀ]   |&#xA;| melhor [mɘʎˈɔɾ]     | [mi'dʒoɾ]         | [am'dʒoʀ]   |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this might not be consistent for all speakers of the São Vicente dialect, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Verdean_Creole#Barlavento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; seems to say that these start with a syllabic m, instead of [am].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5514" LastEditorUserId="5514" LastEditDate="2016-04-16T16:07:00.123" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T20:19:57.413" Title="What sound change(s) underlie [iʒ-] in São Vicente?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T17:27:32.857" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning German and a big hurdle I am facing is word placement. For example, the last half of a sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…], aber ich werde es nicht verstehen.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (but I would not understand it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the verb gets kicked to the end; that can be remembered, no problem. My issue is with the thought process behind it.&#xA;As an English speaker I keep having issues accepting that the word order in German makes sense to Germans, because I try to get into the mindset of a native because it helps with my learning. But am limited to an English point of view.&#xA;I asked around to a couple of my native pals and they basically said that it just feels correct, and any other order would feel wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a linguistic term to describe this barrier of understanding?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you explain this further for me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As I continue to learn the language, will I reach a point where I will “feel” that this the right way, like my friends tell me, or will I not be ever able to because of the fact that it is not my mother tongue?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11218" LastEditorUserId="1822" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T14:04:51.043" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T19:07:46.873" Title="The barrier of intuitively using a second language’s word order" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15445" CreationDate="2016-01-06T04:05:36.180" Score="0" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 86:] For example, determiners &lt;code&gt;specify&lt;/code&gt; whether a noun is indefi- &#xA;  nite or definite (&lt;em&gt;a boy&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;the boy&lt;/em&gt;), or the proximity of the person or object &#xA;  to the context (&lt;em&gt;this boy&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;that boy&lt;/em&gt;). Tense provides the verb with a time &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 563:] determiner (Det)   &#xA;  The syntactic category, also functional category, of words and expres-&#xA;  sions, which when combined with a noun form a noun phrase. Includes the articles &#xA;  the&#xA;  and &#xA;  a&#xA;  , &#xA;  demonstratives &#xA;  such as &#xA;  this&#xA;   and &#xA;  that&#xA;  , quantifiers such as &#xA;  each&#xA;   and &#xA;  every&#xA;  ,&#xA;  etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=determine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;determine (v.)&lt;/a&gt;   &quot;to come to an end,&quot; also &quot;to settle, decide&quot; (late 14c.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2253/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and understand the definitions above. Hereafter, I am using the definition of 'determine' as quoted above, but please tell me if the Root 'determine' in 'determiner' (hereafter DET) means something else or has changed semantically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not comprehend how DET can be interpreted to 'determine'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;p 86 above states that DET &lt;code&gt;specify&lt;/code&gt; (ie: determine) something about the noun, but this appears false because context determines the DET used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T22:01:57.073" Title="What do Determiners determine?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-01-07T08:55:11.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-06T06:19:49.730" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages where the &quot;copula&quot; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invariant morphologically but may be phonologically conditioned (not inflected for any features like tense, number, etc. like English &quot;is/was/were&quot;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identical on all types of predication (verbal and non-verbal), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;required on all sentences (not only on compound verbs like English &quot;is/was/were&quot; + verb + &quot;-ing&quot; or no zero copula like in Russian)? (EDIT: required even with finite verbs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;copula&quot; in this case merely serves as a marker of predication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The word copula is quoted as it normally refers to non-verbal predication, and auxiliary verb to verbal predication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T14:58:43.260" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T14:58:43.260" Title="Is there any language where the &quot;copula&quot; is also identical with and function as an &quot;auxiliary verb&quot;?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14980" CreationDate="2016-01-06T07:34:54.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no linguistic difference between the language called Tagalog or the Tagalog-based Filipino. The use of either term is merely for political reasons. Tagalogs prefer to call it Filipino to give it legitimacy since the Constitution only recognizes Filipino as one of the national language, and not Tagalog. Non-Tagalogs, especially those with strong regional loyalties, resent that Filipino has not incorporated other language features apart from a few vocabularies which is against the spirit/intent of the framers of the Constitution, so prefers calling it Tagalog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistic circle, it is called Tagalog and not Filipino.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T07:34:54.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15438" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-01-06T10:50:07.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Voynich Manuscript&lt;/a&gt; is an early modern manuscript written in an unknown script and language. Hypotheses on its content are various but unproven, it could be plain text in an unidentified language, a ciphertext, or simply a hoax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T12:30:08.707" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T12:30:08.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15439" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-01-06T10:50:07.913" Score="0" Body="The language(s) and linguistic properties of the famous Voynich Manuscript." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T12:30:23.577" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T12:30:23.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15598" CreationDate="2016-01-06T12:01:38.343" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, recursion is a synonym of nesting, and it's distinctive when a child clause is center-embedded in the parent clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe below is an example of recursion:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The beautiful bird, singing in the cage, is mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example above, &quot;singing in the cage&quot; is the child clause, and &quot;The beautiful bird is min&quot; is the parent clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't know is whether a sentence like this is considered to have a recursion: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;The beautiful bird is mine, and it's singing in the cage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a recursive sentence, this kind of structure can be extended endlessly, but I don't think it has a parent-child relationship between the clauses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11221" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T20:56:29.393" Title="Is a simple chain of independent sentences with conjunctions considered as a form of recursion?" Tags="&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2016-01-06T19:39:46.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually a dialect CAN become a language as has been seen in France and in Spain. By decree of their then ruling class, the ruling class´particular dialect was enforced as the national language. As someone once said: a language is just a dialect with an army to make it stick.&#xA;But, to address the original question: Moldavan and Romanian are basically the same language, divided by state borders, difference in script and former Soviet policy of autonomous member states in the Union. In modern day, either side of the border considers the other country to speak just a dialect of Romanian. So, here the distinction between language and dialect is merely political/nationalistic. As has already been pointed out above,many languages are just continua within a language family&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11224" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T19:39:46.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15435" CreationDate="2016-01-06T21:40:07.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Ionin et al (2008). I think this explains it nicely (if the formalness doesn't scare you off):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distinction between 'the' and 'a' is one of definiteness. We adopt here a standard view of definites [e.g., 'the'] as presuppositional and indefinites&#xA;  [e.g., 'a'] as quantificational expressions, as shown in (1) (for more discussion&#xA;  of different views of definiteness, see Heim, 1991).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a.&#xA;  Definiteness (Fregean analysis)&#xA;  [the z] j expresses that proposition which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;true at index i, if there is exactly one z at i, and it is j at i,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;false at an index i, if there is exactly one z at i, and it is not j at i,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;truth-valueless at an index i, if there isn’t exactly one z at i. (Heim, 1991:9)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. Indefinites (quantificational analysis): A sentence of the form [a z] j expresses that proposition which is true if there is at least one individual which is both z and j, and false otherwise.&#xA;  (Heim, 1991:26)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ionin, Tania, Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, and Salvador Bautista Maldonado. &quot;Sources of linguistic knowledge in the second language acquisition of English articles.&quot; Lingua 118.4 (2008): 554-576.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T21:40:07.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15435" CreationDate="2016-01-06T22:01:57.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A determiner determines reference.  Although in traditional grammar, nouns are spoken of as though they have reference, really they don't.  Nouns predicate, but do not refer.  Instead, noun phrases refer.  That's why linguists insist on making subjects and other sentence arguments noun phrases, rather than nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a noun phrase that refers from a noun, which predicates, you combine the noun with a determiner, and now you have something which can refer, a noun phrase.  The fact that determiners may have no phonetic shape obscures what is going on and may make it seem sometimes that a noun can refer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that noun phrases with determiners do necessarily refer.  But sometimes they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T22:01:57.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15432" CreationDate="2016-01-07T10:00:25.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without historical data on the dialect, I'd think that the second hypothesis (Or might this be best explained as dropping the [u] by syncope and adding a [i] by prothesis?) sounds natural and plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe, you can dig up historical records shedding more light on the evolution of the São Vicente dialect of Cape Verdean Creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T10:00:25.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-07T18:15:06.353" Score="5" ViewCount="3772" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a friend, a native English speaker from Boston, MA, USA (I believe he is mostly Irish American), who is absolutely adamant that the first sound in &quot;thank you&quot; is voiced, rather than voiceless. Moreover, one of his college English professors (also a native English speaker, but not sure where from) agrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend acknowledges that all the dictionaries seem to say that the sound is voiceless; moreover, I was able to produce numerous examples from YouTube where a native speaker clearly uses the voiceless &quot;th&quot; (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD2cVhC-63I#t=1m23s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew McConaughey&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb5dS_Ei1QE#t=1m45s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viola Davis&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And still he---and his professor---insist that, in their daily lives, they have never heard the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thank you&quot; pronounced as anything other than voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is the voiced &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thank you&quot; something that is well-known and documented as a regional variant? Or is there something else going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I also posed this question on the Linguist List, &lt;a href=&quot;http://askaling.linguistlist.org/question/734/voiced-th-in-thank-you/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;... no answers yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alex B. pointed out that there indeed exists some published research: The Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962-71) recorded &quot;a number of instances of the voicing of all four fricatives in word-initial (Anlaut) position in the South and the South-West Midlands&quot; (Fisiak 1988); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110848137/9783110848137.565/9783110848137.565.xml?format=EBOK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voitl 1988&lt;/a&gt; (also &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ptAb7J1DUZAC&amp;amp;lpg=PA565&amp;amp;ots=A9kr9JyWxi&amp;amp;dq=%22The%20history%20of%20voicing%20of%20initial%20fricatives%20in%20Southern%20England%22&amp;amp;pg=PA565#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22The%20history%20of%20voicing%20of%20initial%20fricatives%20in%20Southern%20England%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Related research includes that by Martyn Wakelin, esp. Wakelin and Barry (1968).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the comments by musicallinguist, it seems that sometimes even among siblings raised in the same household there can be a difference in the voicing of the initial &quot;th,&quot; which persists into adulthood.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have discovered that, several months prior to my original posting of the present question, essentially &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/236848/pronunciation-of-thank-using-%C3%B0-voiced-th-instead-of-%CE%B8-unvoiced-th/&quot;&gt;the same question&lt;/a&gt; had been posted to the English stackexchange. The original asker was motivated by the observation described in 2. above, in her own family (though it is unclear what are the ages of her siblings who pronounce the &quot;th&quot; as voiced). One contributor there stated that the voiced &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thank&quot; can be found &quot;[i]n parts of New England,&quot; but, as of yet, no one has provided published references for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, let me refine my question a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Is there any published research on the situations where even among native speakers who were born and raised (and live) in the same area, or even the same household, there are some who pronounce the &quot;th&quot; as voiceless, and some who pronounce it as voiced? Are those with the minority pronunciation usually aware that they are in the minority, or are they usually not really aware of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. Also helpful would be examples of (research on) other kinds of within-group linguistic differences---those that are in some relevant sense 'similar' to the difference in the voicing. As far as what exactly should count as 'similar,' well, that is itself kind of a part of the question. Here is one proposal for what it may mean: the differences in some linguistic feature such that 1. one would &lt;em&gt;not expect&lt;/em&gt; this feature to vary within such a (linguistically close) group of people; 2. the group members exhibiting this feature are clearly in the minority, but, at the same time, they are also clearly a &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt; and not just a couple of isolated cases; 3. there is no relevant pathology (e.g. impaired hearing or speech processing or speech production) that could explain the existence of the subgroup with the minority feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. Further references on regional variation with respect to the voicing of the initial &quot;th&quot; would also be very much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T05:09:47.320" Title="Voiced &quot;th&quot; in &quot;thank you&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15236" CreationDate="2016-01-07T21:13:16.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lasnik &amp;amp; Fiengo (1974) &quot;Complement Object Deletion&quot; (section 2) argue against Tough Movement, and Chomsky (1977) &quot;On WH-Movement&quot; p. 102 adopts the base-generated analysis and accepts the correctness of that approach without comment. L&amp;amp;F begin by presenting arguments against arguments against tough-deletion. For instance, an earlier argument for TM was based on the grammaticality of &quot;Headway is easy to make on problems like these&quot;, where the noun &lt;em&gt;headway&lt;/em&gt; – which it was assumed only exists as the object of &quot;make headway&quot; is raised. L&amp;amp;F raise an objection to the datum, and then counter with the ungrammaticality of parallel idiom-objects raisings like &quot;*Tabs were easy to keep on Mary&quot;, &quot;*Heed is important to pay to such warnings&quot;, which under the raising analysis should be grammatical. There is also an amusing argument based on tough movement and nominalization, centering around the assumed ungrammaticality of &quot;John's easiness to please&quot;, which in fact is ungrammatical for some people and grammatical for others, and as a person who finds this grammatical I find the assertion that this is ungrammatical to be as incomprehensible as others find the assertion that this is grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their section 2.3 presents a series of empirical arguments against TM; for instance, &quot;John is being easy to please&quot; would have to come from &quot;*To please John is being easy&quot;. (Their arguments are this &quot;progressive&quot; argument, the &quot;try&quot; argument, the indefinite NP argument, the intentionality argument, and the modal argument&quot;). Overall the argument does not &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt; to be theory-driven, i.e. they aren't arguing that we have to get rid of TM because it violates some valuable grammatical principle, it just that raising doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On re-reading and recollecting, I think there actually is an underlying theoretical principle, the Specified Subject Condition, which TM violates. While L&amp;amp;F do not structure the argument to make SSC be the driving force, they do take advantage of the opportunity to point to mention that SSC would be runned afoul of in certain TM cases. I think the operator and control analysis is from Chomsky (1977).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T17:51:05.970" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T17:51:05.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15456" CreationDate="2016-01-07T21:49:15.240" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently doing a research on the ToBI system (a system for transcribing prosody). The ToBI system is a phonological based system and does not show the variance in speech. for instance an L+H% transcribing two sentences in ToBI system, may be dramatically different since in one sentence the frequency change might be higher than the other. Having said that, I would like to know if there has been any solutions or any endeavors for solving the weakness of ToBI in showing the frequency variance in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. I'm aware of systems like IViE (Grabe, 1998) and INTSINT (Hirst, 1998) but I would like to work on the ToBI system in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS2. I want to know why don't we show frequency variance in speech in ToBI system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;I will add two sample pitch tracks for two separate recordings.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TCEJZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TCEJZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;pitch track number 1 shows an utterance. the boundary tone is an H+L%&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pitch track number 1 shows an utterance. the boundary tone is an H+L%&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nuuo1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nuuo1.png&quot; alt=&quot;pitch track number 2 shows an utterance. the boundary tone is an H+L%&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;pitch track number 2 shows an utterance. the boundary tone is an H+L%&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this two pitch tracks are for giving intuition only they may not be exactly the same but I hope you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T21:39:54.520" Title="Is there a solution for the ToBI's weakness in showing speech variance?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17002" CreationDate="2016-01-07T22:50:14.130" Score="1" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across the idea of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;null morpheme&lt;/a&gt;. There are languages with determiners that are case particles. Since a morpheme can be a particle, I would assume there might be languages with null determiners that are case particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language with such a property, where all noun phrases have case particles, one of which is interpreted as a null case particle and is part of its case paradigm (similar to a morphological case declension table)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language in question can have case particles that are either post-positions or pre-positions, and of course the number of cases in the case paradigm can be any number above 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.aichi-edu.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10424/4401/1/kenjin618191.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;zero particle&lt;/a&gt; or particle dropping in Colloquial Japanese doesn't qualify since it has stylistic/pragmatic usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2:&#xA;The null case particle must mean only one case relation (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, etc.), and must participate in a case paradigm, where it must contrast with other overt/non-null case particles that signal different case relations. The presence or absence of the null case particle changes the case relation of the NP, and not just for differential subject/object marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastEditorUserId="1601" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T03:11:12.263" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T18:01:13.223" Title="Is there a language with a null case particle that signal a single, distinct case relation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15450" CreationDate="2016-01-08T00:58:58.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okinawan, a Japonic language related to Japanese, only marks nominative case with an overt marker (either &lt;code&gt;=ga&lt;/code&gt; for animate referents or &lt;code&gt;=nu&lt;/code&gt; for inanimate referents). Accusative case has a zero marker. This is what is called a marked nominative language, and there are several like it, most found in Africa (see Köning 2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I would argue that differential subject and object marking in languages like Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages is more than just stylistic; it has pretty clear semantic implications. A dropped nominative case particle in Japanese, for instance, implies a less specific subject than a marked subject (see Fujii and Ono 2000 and Minashima 2001, among others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastEditorUserId="1832" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T01:13:02.680" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T01:13:02.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-08T13:29:30.170" Score="6" ViewCount="690" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verner's Law says that voiceless fricatives, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing.&#xA;The Germanic prefix 'ge-' as in German '&lt;strong&gt;ge&lt;/strong&gt;nug' or English '&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;nough' is generally derived from PIE *kom-.&#xA;As this prefix is always word-initial, and there are plenty of examples of word-initial voiceless fricatives that stay as voiceless fricatives, how is this derivation possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T02:12:40.460" Title="Verner's Law and 'ge-'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15452" CreationDate="2016-01-08T15:21:29.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_leveling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Morphological levelling&lt;/a&gt; is the force working against Verner's law in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that many forms with the ge- prefix may be created after Verner's law was active; there is a modern trend to date the activity of Verner's law even before Grimm's law was active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T15:21:29.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15465" CreationDate="2016-01-08T15:25:00.060" Score="0" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;When naming some number of objects, there's only one plural form in English (2 dogs, 3 dogs, 10 dogs). But in Slavic languages like Polish the form changes depending on the number (2 psy, 4 psy, 5 psów, 12 psów, 22 psy, 100 psów).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the form vary in Turkish? If so, what are the rules behind that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11235" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T00:53:11.190" Title="Plural form declension with numbers in Turkish" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11714" CreationDate="2016-01-08T19:27:10.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I haven't worked with an oscilloscope directly but I presume both are the same.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VU3EY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VU3EY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;sine wave in oscilloscope&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sine wave in oscilloscope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MnE2t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MnE2t.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;sine wave in Praat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sine wave in Praat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T19:27:10.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15449" CreationDate="2016-01-08T21:39:54.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an outline of what one would need to do to set up a ToBI system for some Kurdish language. I will make up somewhat hypothetical examples to make the point clearer. You first have to establish what the lexical contrasts are. You might find that there are two distinct words like [hɑɫo] &quot;eagle&quot; and [haɫu] &quot;plum&quot;, which show that the vowels [o] and [u] &quot;contrast&quot; in the language. These are systematically different words, and this feature of pronunciation is how the difference is signalled. You may also find differences in pronunciation which are the result of a rule, for example there are different vowel qualities in [kæʃ] &quot;mountain&quot; and [bɑ:ʃ] &quot;good&quot;: looking at many examples you discover that [æ] is always short, so there is a rule that allows you to predict when you get [ɑ] versus [æ] – these particular vowels do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; contrast in the language, even though both are used in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ToBI being about intonation, you would move on to determining what the lexical contrasts are, if any, for word stress. You may find words like [raˈma] &quot;he ran&quot; versus [ˈbramæj] &quot;run!&quot;, or [ˈgo:ʃe] &quot;ears&quot; versus [sɛˈre] &quot;heads&quot;, which suggest the possibility that stress position is also contrastive, and isn't just the result of a general rule of pronunciation. This is like the English difference between the noun &lt;em&gt;ˈpermit&lt;/em&gt; and the verb &lt;em&gt;perˈmit&lt;/em&gt;. For the sake of discussion, I will assume that the position of stress in the word can't be predicted by a general rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you record many words and separate them into groups according to which syllable has the stress, you will find that even within a group with the same stress position, even looking at two different recordings of the same word, there will be differences in the pitch profile. These would be non-contrastive differences, and they don't go into a system of phonological transcription. Instead, you would describe the differences quantitatively, by saying for instance that the pitch peak is delayed by 30% of the syllable duration, or the pitch reaches only 50% of its target value, or something like that -- a difference in amount. However, the kind of difference difference reflected in [raˈma] vs. [ˈbramæj] is one of category: &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; syllable has the stress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now turning to what ToBI is for... The implicit claim of that kind of analysis is that there are meaning-type distinctions (pragmatically distinct classes of utterances) where different pragmatic categories are signalled by picking different intonational patterns. Although it's usual to give longer utterances, you can find different pragmatic categories just looking at the pronunciation of a single word. A common place to find such a difference is pairing statements and questions, especially if the language doesn't change word order in questions. Then you might find a systematic difference between declarative [maħa:sɨl e:&lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;] &quot;they are students&quot; and interrogative [maħa:sɨl e:&lt;strong&gt;ne&lt;/strong&gt;] &quot;are they students?&quot;, where the difference is that in the question, the final pitch is higher (which I indicated with bold versus italic). You might even get differences like [ʒæ&lt;em&gt;ne:&lt;/em&gt;] &quot;women&quot; and [ʒæ&lt;strong&gt;ne:&lt;/strong&gt;] &quot;women?&quot;, with a difference in pitch in the question form. In this case, we have a systematic difference, but it doesn't signal different words as in the case of &quot;eagle&quot; and &quot;plum&quot;. It's a difference in pragmatic category. The analysis could be (I emphasize, &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be, you would have to work out a system) that the interrogative function is marked by a H boundary tone and the declarative function is marked by a L boundary tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be an example of the kind of contrastive categories that ToBI is designed to capture. If you find that a dozen interrogative utterances have a dozen different pitch profiles, that is beyond what ToBI is designed to capture. You can use a ToBI analysis to group together a set of utterances that have the same analysis (e.g. H boundary tone) and pragmatic function (interrogatives), but if there are still phonetic differences within your corpus, you would have to find a different way to describe the difference, other than with discrete ToBI transcriptional differences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing your specific pitch traces (and assuming you're looking at the difference at the very end), I would not assume that those two utterances have the same boundary tones. I might say, for example, that your first exclamative example has HL boundary tones and the interrogative has just L. But the explanation could also be something more lexical, which is why you have to work out a system of rules to predict where word stress is. A better example would be something like &quot;How big the man is!&quot; vs. &quot;The man is big&quot;, assuming you can convey that difference just with intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T21:39:54.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6967" CreationDate="2016-01-08T22:35:18.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible that Turkish -im and Persian -am are ultimately related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the Turkish and Persian are Eurasiatic languages (a groupping higher than Indo-European and Altaic) and for Proto-Eurasiatic first person singular personal pronoun reconstructed as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning &quot;I&quot;). So it is natural that possessive adjectives meaning &quot;mine&quot; would use a suffix derived from this root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T22:35:18.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15452" CreationDate="2016-01-08T23:32:08.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems irregular to me as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://fachtagung.ku.dk/Konferencebog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt; that mentions this exact matter on page 43, in the abstract for &lt;em&gt;Germanic&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;*ga(-) revisited. Some&#xA;thoughts on etymology, phonology&#xA;and inherited word formations&lt;/em&gt; by Christiane Gante: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are quite a lot of papers on [the issue of the etymology and&#xA;  phonology of the &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; prefix]. But it is still somewhat ambiguous&#xA;  whether Germanic &lt;em&gt;*ga&lt;/em&gt;(-) can be smoothly linked to the semantically&#xA;  equivalent Latin &lt;em&gt;co&lt;/em&gt;(&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;)-/&lt;em&gt;cum&lt;/em&gt;, because of the initial&#xA;  consonant's shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a downloadable PDF I found of the notes that go with the presentation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi8u6fntZvKAhVE3GMKHXtbAy8QFggfMAA&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uni-goettingen.de%2Fde%2Fdocument%2Fdownload%2F8b8accbb38578c6be7791cfe41e0eb13.pdf%2Fcgante_EEL_handout.pdf&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNF9jePoeMDc1PMg2cPPWC9qv_NgXA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Germanic ga revisited&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I read through it, and disappointingly, all it says is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Common opinion is, that indeed PGmc. *ga- equals Lat. cum, co(m/n)-,&#xA;  OIr. co n, com- etc. and thus can be traced back to PIE *kom. But&#xA;  there is still no consensus on why, in this morpheme, PIE *k is&#xA;  represented by PGmc. *g in (almost) all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it does state that this has been extensively discussed and has&#xA;some citations to these previous papers, so I'll look through those next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found several sources that treat this etymology as speculative; for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I take the &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; prefix to have been the default SCS prefix in&#xA;  Proto-Germanic. It presents certain problems that the other prefixes&#xA;  do not. It's etymology is unclear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;–&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-eDgdTBywNkC&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;lpg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=German%20prefix%20ge%20etymology&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=zKTH1HPSS5&amp;amp;sig=7EuwcZV4u5XvBAO4XkbGq6iVI64&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjbh8TGrJvKAhUO4mMKHVy7DQ84ChDoAQgbMAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=German%20prefix%20ge%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lexical Template Morphology: Change of State and the Verbal Prefixes in German&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by B. Roger Maylor, from 2002&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found the following exchange on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix_talk:Proto-Germanic/ga-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;talk page&lt;/a&gt; of the Wiktionary article for the Proto-Germanic equivalent &lt;em&gt;ga-&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the ‘g‘ in ga- derive from *kom / *ḱóm? I thought Verner's&#xA;  law only applied to consonants &lt;em&gt;following&lt;/em&gt; an unstressed syllable,&#xA;  this is not the case for ga-. 79.194.73.173 16:40, 5 November 2014&#xA;  (UTC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Preverbs seem to have been treated strangely in Pre- and&#xA;  Proto-Germanic, being unstressed and not wholly bound to the verb; for&#xA;  example, clitics could intervene between preverbs and verbs. I'm not&#xA;  really certain about the specifics, but you can see the same&#xA;  development in &lt;em&gt;*bi(-&amp;#8288;)&lt;/em&gt;, originally &lt;em&gt;*h₁pi,&lt;/em&gt; from PIE &lt;em&gt;*h₁epi.&lt;/em&gt; Anglom&#xA;  (talk) 23:34, 17 October 2015 (UTC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from Wiktionary, I found a claim that Gothic at least allowed stacking of pre-verbs in such a way as to place them word-internally (and this seems to be backed up by other sources such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=fS4L3ge1K8gC&amp;amp;pg=PA169&amp;amp;lpg=PA169&amp;amp;dq=germanic%20preverbs%20Proto-Indo-European%20etymology&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=zcsgbhrYNG&amp;amp;sig=yM7QyJN_r2BHtUax_-vlkdWDza0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj5rtP1sZvKAhVB22MKHeY1DokQ6AEIPjAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=germanic%20preverbs%20Proto-Indo-European%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Stefan Thim):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As in other Indo-European languages, a verb in Proto-Germanic could&#xA;  have a preverb attached to it, modifying its meaning (cf. e.g.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;*fra-werþaną&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to perish&quot;, derived from &lt;em&gt;*werþaną&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to become&quot;). In Proto-Germanic, the preverb was still a clitic that could be separated&#xA;  from the verb (as also in Gothic, as shown by the behavior of&#xA;  second-position clitics, e.g. &lt;em&gt;diz-uh-þan-sat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and then he seized&quot;,&#xA;  with clitics &lt;em&gt;uh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and&quot; and &lt;em&gt;þan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;then&quot; interpolated into &lt;em&gt;dis-sat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he&#xA;  seized&quot;) rather than a bound morpheme that is permanently attached to&#xA;  the verb (as in all other Germanic languages). At least in Gothic,&#xA;  preverbs could also be stacked one on top of the other (similar to&#xA;  Sanskrit, different from Latin), e.g. &lt;em&gt;ga-ga-waírþjan&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to reconcile&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;–the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_grammar#Verbs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Proto-Germanic grammar&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on Wiktionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll update this answer once I find more discussion in scholarly journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-01-09T00:09:49.813" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T00:09:49.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15454" CreationDate="2016-01-09T00:56:53.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar#Number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;If a numeral is used with a noun, then the plural suffix is usually not used&quot;. (Unreferenced, unfortunately, but it agrees with my memory from when I studied Turkish.) So, no, neither the case &lt;em&gt;nor the number&lt;/em&gt; of nouns changes with different numerals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the use of the genitive singular for (numbers ending in) 2, 3 or 4, as opposed to the genitive plural for larger numbers in Slavonic languages is generally regarded as a &lt;em&gt;paucal&lt;/em&gt; form, a generalisation of the &lt;em&gt;dual&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T00:56:53.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7168" CreationDate="2016-01-09T01:12:18.990" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of empirical diachronic data off the top of my head, but some people have investigated the evolution of color lexicons with simulations. See these papers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loreto, Vittorio; Mukherjee, Animesh; Tria, Francesca&#xA;On the origin of the hierarchy of color names (Article)&#xA;PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (PNAS), 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baronchelli, Andrea; Gong, Tao; Puglisi, Andrea; Loreto, Vittorio&#xA;Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns (Article)&#xA;PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (PNAS), 107 pp. 2403–2407, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Commenter below is right that I should say a little something about these papers. I'm just pulling key points from their abstracts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loreto et al:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We found that the time needed for a [simulated] population to reach consensus on a color name depends on the region of the visible color spectrum. If color spectrum regions are ranked according to this criterion, a hierarchy with [red, (magenta)-red], [violet], [green/yellow], [blue], [orange], and [cyan], appearing in this order, is recovered, featuring an excellent quantitative agreement with the empirical observations of the [World Color Survey].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baronchelli et al:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We find that a simple perceptual constraint shared by all humans, namely the human Just Noticeable Difference (JND), is sufficient to trigger the emergence of universal patterns that unconstrained cultural interaction fails to produce. We test the results of our experiment against real data by performing the same statistical analysis proposed to quantify the universal tendencies shown in the WCS [Kay P &amp;amp; Regier T. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100: 9085-9089], and obtain an excellent quantitative agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastEditorUserId="2896" LastEditDate="2016-01-14T03:16:19.723" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T03:16:19.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-09T03:25:11.363" Score="0" ViewCount="1139" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 94, &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information about the complement types selected by particular verbs&#xA;and other lexical items is called &lt;strong&gt;C-selection&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;subcategorization&lt;/strong&gt;, and is in&#xA;cluded in the lexical entries of the items in our mental lexicons. (C stands for&#xA;&amp;quot;categorial.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious why &lt;strong&gt;subcategorization&lt;/strong&gt; (with its prefix 'sub-') was selected, while C-selection uses only the stem  &amp;quot;categorial&amp;quot; in referring to Grammatical/Syntactic Categories (not Subcategories).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/192493#eid20034634&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The OED&lt;/a&gt; does not disambiguate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T04:56:09.997" Title="Why is C-selection called 'subcategorisation' and not only 'categorisation'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15461" CreationDate="2016-01-09T04:56:09.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with the term &quot;C-selection&quot;.  Taking categories to be NP, V, P, ..., when these categories are divided up (as they must be) into, e.g., singular and plural NPs (NPpl, NPsg), and transitive and intransitive verbs (Vtr, Vin), that is referred to as subcategorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no grammatical theory, so far as I know, that provides any basis for a distinction between the two sorts of terminological splits.  It's just a matter of what is convenient and what is usual and customary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Aspects of the theory of syntax&lt;/strong&gt;, Chomsky used the term &quot;strict subcategorization&quot; to refer to the subdividing of major categories like N or V, into subcategories according to what tree sisters (also with parents NP or VP, resp.)  they could cooccur with, e.g. Vtr or Vin. The restriction to tree sisters was intended to have theoretical significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T04:56:09.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3393" CreationDate="2016-01-09T08:11:05.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of words can be easily found if we agree on which dictionary to use for counting.&#xA;A much more complex task is to compare languages with respect to “polysemy”.&#xA;It is important first of all to avoid the confusion of considering  polysemy to mean number of meanings or concepts covered by a language which is almost impossible to quantify. A more useful but still hard to quantify is the meaning of “polysemy”as a generalization of lexical ambiguity .which strictly means that a word has two meanings (from “ambi” possibly originating from the Greek  “αμφι”) but it is occasionally used as a synonym of polysemy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering three examples of English words namely move , mount and make we find in the Collins Pocket Greek-English/English-Greek dictionary the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Move  translates to  11  Greek words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mount translates to 12 Greek words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make translates to 25 Greek words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By picking one of the Greek words that to my mind  (a rather arbitrary and unscientific criterion) are closest to to the main meaning of each of the above English words we get from the same dictionary the following results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Move= Κινώ  translates to 1 English word and some synonyms &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mount=Ανεβάζω translates to 3 English words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make=Φτιά(χ)νω translates to 4 English words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above results indicate that English is more polysemous than Greek in the sense that it is more ambiguous and hence harder to translate  by a computer program.&#xA;I must emphasize however that this miniscule experiment can by no means decide the matter.&#xA;A much more complex study is needed before a sound scientific conclusion is reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally I would be very grateful if someone could provide  the full text of some publication of the  results of the work  mentioned above of Professor’s Charalambakis’ team. Until then I avoid commenting on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Kontos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emeritus Professor of Artificial intelligence of the University of Athens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11239" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T08:11:05.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-09T15:26:52.900" Score="-1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you tell me what the difference nominal  WH clause and  nominal relative clause is ? For example, nominal WH clause : no one knows what caused  the accident.  Nominal Relative clause:  You call him whatever you want.  How can I distinguish between the two.&#xA;Another thing is the function of this sentence : [What I need most is a good rest] S. So , does the whole sentence function as a subject. That's what I have read. Thank you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11223" LastEditorUserId="11223" LastEditDate="2016-01-09T19:35:54.910" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T20:12:37.830" Title="Asking for analysis of sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-13T10:15:47.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15454" CreationDate="2016-01-09T19:26:40.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish, a plural declension is not needed if the noun is modified by a numeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If it is used, it is emphatic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it is not needed with any modifier that already implies plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (friend)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;arkadaşlar&lt;/em&gt; (friends)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;bir arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (one friend)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;iki arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (two friends)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;birçok arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (many friends, a lot of friends)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;çok fazla arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (too many friends)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;sayıda arkadaş&lt;/em&gt; (numerous friends)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note all the situations in which &lt;em&gt;-lar&lt;/em&gt; is not required.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true of Turkic languages generally, and of neighbouring languages, like Persian, Armenian and Georgian, from other language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-01-10T08:54:17.917" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T08:54:17.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15464" CreationDate="2016-01-09T20:12:37.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;You call him whatever you want&quot; the &quot;whatever you want&quot; is a noun phrase consisting of a relative clause -- there is no noun head.  Similarly, in &quot;What I need most is a good rest&quot; the subject noun phrase &quot;what I need most&quot; is a relative clause with no head noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &quot;No one knows what caused the accident&quot;, there is no relative clause.  Instead, &quot;what caused the accident&quot; is an indirect question.  &quot;What caused the accident?  Nobody knows.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T20:12:37.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15468" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-01-09T20:28:46.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-01-09T20:28:46.003" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T20:28:46.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15469" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-01-09T20:28:46.003" Score="0" Body="Praat (the Dutch word for &quot;talk&quot; or &quot;speak&quot;) is a free scientific computer software package for the analysis of speech in phonetics" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-01-13T10:15:10.103" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T10:15:10.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15454" CreationDate="2016-01-09T20:47:04.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only one plural form in Turkish* but it's usage is quite different from English or the Slavic examples you give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dog = köpek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dogs = köpekler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far so good. That's the only plural form there is, but the trick is you only ever use it when you need a stand alone noun. Any time you precede the noun with a number or any other indication of quantity you actually use the singular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a dog in the street. = Sokakta köpek var.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are two dogs in the street. = Sokakta iki köpek var.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are lots of dogs in the street. = Sokakta çok köpek var.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are dogs in the street. = Sokakta köpekler var.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note only in the last example is the plural form used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;sub&gt;The actual suffix could be -lar or -ler depending on vowel harmony rules but either way it's the same form.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T20:47:04.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15474" CreationDate="2016-01-09T21:30:10.060" Score="1" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the instructions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rdn0hOnJNcOBWEZgipdDfSyjJdnv_sinuAUSDSpiQns/edit?hl=en#heading=h.gw1o0ekhnwty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GermaNLTK&lt;/a&gt; I tried to install the german NLTK in Python. (I want to use the synsets for semantic-taging.)&#xA;But I couldn't find the files &lt;em&gt;germanet.py&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;GermanetDBBuilder.py&lt;/em&gt; to download as the Introduction indicates in step 6 of the manual-section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance! dia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11243" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T11:25:33.367" Title="GermaNLTK: not finding files [python]" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15452" CreationDate="2016-01-10T06:13:44.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really old problem and a lot of research has been written on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several ways to tackle it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reject PIE*kom &gt; PGm *ga. However, as far as I can see, communis opinio is the opposite (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brill.com/gothic-etymological-dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lehmann 1986&lt;/a&gt;), cf. the following suggested cognates: Proto-Italic *kom (e.g. Latin perfectivizing  co- and preposition cum), Proto-Celtic *kom, Slavic ** sъ-, and Hittite =kkan (encl. locatival sentence particle) ‘?’ &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionaries.brillonline.com/hittite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kloekhorst 2007&lt;/a&gt; writes it was &lt;strong&gt;Sturtevant 1927&lt;/strong&gt; who first suggested this etymology. The reconstructed PIE form is * ḱom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reinterpret the conditioning factors of Verner's Law.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrase stress: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783111549040/9783111549040.99/9783111549040.99.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bennett 1972&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1040820700000688&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quinlin 1991&lt;/a&gt; (and also his 1989 dissertation), Hoptman 2002. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://antonzimmerling.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/verner2007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tsimmerling 2007&lt;/a&gt; finds this analysis irrefutable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The low tone (in the initial pretonic position): &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=4&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj-pae0i6PKAhUI5GMKHdZJCDoQFggvMAM&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pies.ucla.edu%2FIESV%2F1%2FVVI_Gothic_syntax.pdf&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNGLSPDxjttdVgVADmIaXCI_3-i7yg&amp;amp;sig2=YiF3iz50eN31wu5soF46Lg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ivanov 1999&lt;/a&gt; (and earlier). He suggests that &quot;the Indo-European particle/adverbial element *kom could&#xA;be used both as an enclitic or as a proclitic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems no one is willing to abandon the ban on the Anlaut position though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of very important notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, gone is the time of the notorious Neogrammarian motto &quot;sound laws have no exceptions.&quot; See Hoptman 2002 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://antonzimmerling.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/verner2007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tsimmerling 2007&lt;/a&gt; for more exceptions to Verner's law; &lt;a href=&quot;http://uni.hi.is/haraldr/en/rannsoknir/verners-law-in-gothic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bernhardsson 2001&lt;/a&gt; for a possible explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, we don't really know for sure when Verner's law started to function (in Proto-Germanic? Before or after Grimm's law?) and how long it functioned. Also, there have been several attempts to merge Grimm's and Verner's laws into one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, finally, the most importing thing to remember is that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Any &quot;sound law&quot; is NOT simply an algebraic comparison of a protolanguage with a descendant, but a real sound change (or, in cases like GL, possibly a sequence of sound changes) that occurred in a real speaking population in real time&quot; (Donald Ringe, p.c.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those inlaut (and possibly Auslaut) fricatives didn't get all voiced in all words overnight nor did stress in Proto-Germanic shift within a week. Verner's Law didn't stop functioning on the winter solstice. These processes took a long time, they overlapped, not all words got affected (due to various reasons) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly what we can see with a lot of Gothic preverbs (including ga-) that have not been fully grammaticalized, could have been followed by other enclitics etc. See Arkadiev 2015: 209-210, &lt;a href=&quot;http://purl.galileo.usg.edu/uga_etd/bucsko_john_m_200808_phd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Buscko 2008&lt;/a&gt;, Sizova 1978 and Sizova 2007 for further details. This is a natural, living language in its development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T02:12:40.460" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T02:12:40.460" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14926" CreationDate="2016-01-10T09:09:52.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05742&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Survey of Available Corpora For Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05742v2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;), recently published by researchers at the Université de Montréal and McGill, has a good overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PG9Uf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PG9Uf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant section &lt;em&gt;Human-Human Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; gives overviews and links to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Switchboard dataset&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- British National Corpus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- CALLHOME American English Speech Corpus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Corpus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Bergen Corpus of London Teenager Language&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Longman Spoken American Corpus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't list them all here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further down you will find &lt;em&gt;Constrained Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; (domain-specific) and &lt;em&gt;Scripted Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; (films).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T09:09:52.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15471" CreationDate="2016-01-10T11:06:20.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main issue with GermaNet is that it is not an open ressource. You have to licence it (free of cost for noncommetcial academic research, but you need to sign a licence agreement) from Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. Licensing details can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/GermaNet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GermaNet home page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives to GermaNet can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open multilingual wordnet&lt;/a&gt; or within &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelnet.org/download&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;babelnet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-10T11:25:33.367" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T11:25:33.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7168" CreationDate="2016-01-10T11:20:35.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least for Romance and Germanic languages, the colour terms seem to be less stable than other parts of the core vocabulary. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;flavius&lt;/em&gt; and english &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; are cognates, but &lt;em&gt;flavius&lt;/em&gt; means yellow. Speculation: This particular semantic shift may be explained by the chemical details of dying blue with woad or indigo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern Romance languages have replaced the original Latin words for blue with newer borrowings (French &lt;em&gt;bleu&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;azzurro&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Likewise, the old Latin term &lt;em&gt;albus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;white&quot; was replaced by loans in most modern Romance languages (&lt;em&gt;bianco&lt;/em&gt; in Italian, &lt;em&gt;blanc/blanche&lt;/em&gt; in French)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually, the English word &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; is cognate to &lt;em&gt;blanche/blanc&lt;/em&gt;. German uses &lt;em&gt;schwarz&lt;/em&gt; &quot;black&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(EDIT) The German cognate of &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; is not a colour term at all, it is &lt;em&gt;blank&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pure, sheer&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-02-04T10:55:36.707" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T10:55:36.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-10T16:13:08.600" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm doing a grammar for my conlang (constructed language). My conlang is a very verb-heavy/polysynthetic language. E.g. subordinate clauses are marked on the verb. To create a conditional clause &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is suffixed to the verb, so that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sautnuni&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would mean &lt;em&gt;If I give it to you&lt;/em&gt;. It's somewhat like using &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; verbs adverbially, but with much more variation. E.g. &lt;em&gt;Going to you, I saw a bird flying&lt;/em&gt; is nothing more than &lt;em&gt;When I went to you, I saw a bird flying&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, how should I organize my grammar? I mean where should I describe my different subordinate clauses, e.g. how they exactly work? In the Verb chapter or in the Syntax chapter? Other than most European languages, subordinate clauses (or at least the 'marker' for it) are more a part of the verb, as they are an inflectional feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how should I organize it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: This are also called converbs IIRC. My converbs are finite though (have person marking and so on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11246" LastEditorUserId="3328" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T13:52:25.700" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T13:52:25.700" Title="How should I organize my grammar?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15479" CreationDate="2016-01-10T18:42:25.330" Score="1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on NLP project, I saw during processing of large number of documents that there is always a noun either before or after a verb and both are strongly related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just need to verify my observation, are there situations where we can use verbs in English without using nouns at all ? if so how is that frequent, statistically speaking ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11248" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T08:22:39.440" Title="Can we form a statement in english with verb without noun" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15476" CreationDate="2016-01-10T19:29:38.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should describe it everywhere that is relevant. In the phonology chapter, you would describe vowel-harmony and denasalization pronunciation variants. In the morphology chapter, you would describe the position of that suffix relative to various other suffixes on verbs, and also how an alternative suffix &lt;em&gt;-bɨlaʔ&lt;/em&gt; is used in future negative clauses. There would be discussion of the special syntactic properties of verbal clauses with that suffix in a chapter on verbal syntax, and most likely it would be discussed when you talk about &quot;verb tense&quot; in a broad sense. I assume you would also have separate chapters on the semantic properties of clauses containing this and related suffixes where you'd talk about counterfactuals, irrealis clauses, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I think it is a mistake to try to pack all of the information that touches on a suffix in one place. Divide the desription into coherent sub-parts. Ones about use, and ones about form; some of the use questions are syntactic, some are literal semantic, and some are pragmatic. Likewise, form questions can be about pronunciation, or they can be about the choice of morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T19:29:38.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15477" CreationDate="2016-01-10T23:37:39.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean strictly nouns, then there are lots of counterexamples with pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That smells!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She doesn't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are lumping pronouns in with nouns (not usual, but I can see you might) then examples are rarer, but they exist. Besides the imperatives that jknappen mentions, in informal conversation you hear things like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haven't been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are clearly formed from &amp;quot;It depends&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Do you think so?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I haven't been&amp;quot;, but while they may not be formal English they definitely occur and any practical grammar of English needs to account for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, from your description, it sounds as if you are regarding a sentence as a string of words (when you say &amp;quot;either before or after a verb&amp;quot;) That approach to NLP simply doesn't work: you need to consider structures, not just the surface string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T23:37:39.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T00:58:03.520" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem: reading textbooks / nonfiction takes too much time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't read. Obviously flawed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Learn speed reading. Retention rate will go down, which is undesirable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Design and implement new language with speed in mind. Translate the book to this new language (automatically).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the third solution work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD: Justification: If marketers optimize their products for human psychology (neuromarketing), why languages can't be optimized for a faster communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11249" LastEditorUserId="11249" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T06:59:51.270" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T09:43:02.000" Title="Is it possible to create a new language for faster communication?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T02:38:45.307" Score="0" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the difference/relationship between the concepts &quot;allophone&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphoneme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;diaphoneme&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article for allophone&lt;/a&gt; says this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the &lt;strong&gt;phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; /p/ in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the &quot;phoneme&quot; in bold refer to &quot;diaphoneme&quot; in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a diaphoneme the representation of each allophones that are all conceived as the same sound by native speakers (except those who are serious about pronunciation)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="11229" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T04:01:07.900" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T05:45:06.680" Title="The difference/realtionship between allophones and diaphonemes" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T04:28:06.740" Score="-2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do both phonetics and phonology deal with diacritics? Or is studying phonology is necessary for phoneticians and vice versa in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that phonetics focuses more on phones, which are the realization of phonemes whereas phonology focuses more on phonemes, which are the abstraction of phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T06:10:19.730" Title="Do both phonetics and phonology deal with diacritics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-13T10:15:27.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T05:07:38.853" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;To suggest either/both readability or efficiency in typing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is less [is there a term to fill in here?] than Japanese: compared to English alphabets, the number of letters in hiragana + katakana + kanji set are much larger and each of them is more distinctive (the bigger size of each letter allows more strokes to make it more distinctive from other letters). This makes words shorter and of more readability while harder to type since you have to convert alphabets into kanji etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is more [the same term used in the blank above] than some hypothetical language where you spell every word using only &amp;quot;p&amp;quot;s and &amp;quot;q&amp;quot;s (thus the words tend to be longer with less readability; probably easier to type since you have to use only two keys).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T14:02:48.563" Title="Is there a word for variety of letters used in a language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15481" CreationDate="2016-01-11T05:27:45.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Diaphonemes&quot; are related to dialects, as you mentioned. Diaphonemes form a system that allows you to describe all of the phonemic contrasts in whatever set of dialects you are concerned with, even if no one dialect makes all the contrasts. A well-known example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set#Wells_Standard_Lexical_Sets_for_UK_and_US_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;John Well's lexical sets&lt;/a&gt; for British RP and General American: in RP, there is a split between TRAP and BATH, and a merger of BATH, PALM, and START; in General American, TRAP and BATH are the same, but there is a merger of LOT and PALM. Neither dialect distinguishes all sets from each other. But if we use a diaphonemic system, we can represent the pronunciation in both dialects using one set of symbols. Here's an ad-hoc example: /træp/, /baˑθ/, /pɑːm/, /stɑrt/, /lɒt/. Here, I used the allophonic notation /aˑ/ to represent a sound that corresponds to /æ/ in one dialect and /ɑː/ in another. (I haven't seen anyone actually use this notation for English in real life.) The &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; in RP could be written as /træp/, /bɑːθ/, /pɑːm/, /stɑːt/, /lɒt/ and those in GA could be written as /træp/, /bæθ/, /pɑm/, /stɑrt/, /lɑt/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that &quot;[pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones&quot; in English doesn't really have much to do with diaphonemes. It's just about regular allophony, and as far as I can tell, the statement is mainly based on the spelling and historical development of these sounds, rather than dialect comparisons. The sounds are in complementary distribution (if we discount possible devoicing of /b/ to [p] when adjacent to voiceless sounds) which is a common condition given for describing a pair of sounds as allophonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T05:45:06.680" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T05:45:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11624" CreationDate="2016-01-11T05:52:01.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_property&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; says words do have a property called ambiguity.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article on ambiguity&lt;/a&gt; gives this example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One could say &quot;I bought herbs from the apothecary&quot;. This could mean&#xA;  one actually spoke to the apothecary (pharmacist) or went to the&#xA;  apothecary (pharmacy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident which of &gt; the meanings is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pharmacist&quot; or &quot;pharmacy&quot; have obviously more distinct meaning compared to &quot;apothecary.&quot; Contexts might alleviate the ambiguity of each word, but it won't change the fact that there's word-level ambiguity. So words should &quot;have&quot; properties like ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the article, there's a word &lt;strong&gt;lexical ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt; to refer to the word-level ambiguity of meaning in contrast to &lt;strong&gt;syntactic ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;semantic ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt;. And there's a word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;polysemy&lt;/a&gt; to describe a word being lexically ambiguous. There's also a word &lt;strong&gt;polyseme&lt;/strong&gt; to refer to such words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identifying which sense of a word is used in a sentence is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;word-sense disambiguation (WSD)&lt;/a&gt; in computational linguistics. This term is used like &quot;The human brain is quite proficient at word-sense disambiguation. &quot; in the article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="11229" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T13:21:23.963" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T13:21:23.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15482" CreationDate="2016-01-11T06:10:19.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody has to deal with diacritics, be they phoneticians, syntacticians, or politicians, as long as the language involved is one of the majority of languages that uses diacritics. Diacritics are simply little marks put somewhere near a bigger letter which happens to also be useable without the diacritic. For example, the letter  usually refers to the sound in English &quot;&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;og&quot;; whereas &amp;lt;đ&gt; with a diacritic refers to some kind of palatal-ish affricate in some South Slavic languages, a dental fricative in Saami, and [ɗ] in Vietnamese. So diacritics are basically ways of writing speech without inventing a totally new symbol for each sound that isn't found in Latin (at least written Latin, since length in Latin has to be written with a diacritic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're really asking 3 questions: the function of diacritics; the logical relationship between phonetics and phonology; plus, you're assuming a specific theory of what phonetics vs. phonology without technically asking whether your characterization is correct (I would say it is not, although it's only yards off, not miles off). I kinda think this question needs to be tightened up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T06:10:19.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15480" CreationDate="2016-01-11T09:43:02.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, someone already implemented this idea. It is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutton_Speedwords&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dutton Speedwords&lt;/a&gt; and there was even a &quot;teach yourself&quot; book for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T09:43:02.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T09:40:26.390" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to confirm something that I read long ago in a since-forgotten source. I'm not sure if it was an accepted theory, fact or just a marginalized idea. But, essentially, the story goes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a single European language.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language divided into&#xA;two groups: one that spoke in regular verbs, another in irregular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The groups eventually re-joined and blended the two types of verbs into a&#xA;new language. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From there, all European languages evolved with a&#xA;combination of regular and irregular verbs.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That is why the same verbs tend to be irregular in various European languages, although they've taken on completely different forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any truth to that idea? If so, would those original languages have been Proto-Indo-European or something else? Geographical location? Causes of the division and reunion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11260" OwnerDisplayName="Matt" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T09:59:26.087" Title="Did all regular/irregular verbs arise from the same two sources?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15483" CreationDate="2016-01-11T09:49:34.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &lt;strong&gt;encoding density&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;information&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;entropy&lt;/strong&gt; circumscribe the property you are aiming at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you replace your p's and q's with zeroes and ones you are at the bits computer science deals with. Computing the entropy of the English writing system is a typical exercise in theoretical computer science (Note that not only the number of character but also their frequency counts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T09:49:34.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15488" CreationDate="2016-01-11T10:12:30.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not a generally accepted idea. Either you've misremembered, or the source you were reading was indeed marginal (the field of etymology, sad to say, sees a lot of cranks.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of a &quot;regular&quot; verb is not very exact. As time changes, some verbs that were once regular become irregular due to sound changes, and some verbs that were once irregular become regular due to analogy. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hydan#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ancestor of the verb &quot;hide&quot; in Old English&lt;/a&gt; was regular, but it is irregular in modern English due to a process of vowel shortening. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/seo%C3%BEan#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ancestor of the verb &quot;seethe&quot;&lt;/a&gt; had a relatively &quot;irregular&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatischer_Wechsel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;consonant alternation&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;sodden&quot; comes from the old past participle) but it is regular in modern English because new past forms were made using the present form as the basis. Occasionally, we even see regular verbs become &quot;irregular&quot; due to analogy, as with &lt;em&gt;dive&lt;/em&gt; developing the past form &lt;em&gt;dove&lt;/em&gt; based on &lt;em&gt;drive&lt;/em&gt; and the like, or &lt;em&gt;sneak&lt;/em&gt; developing the past tense &lt;em&gt;snuck&lt;/em&gt;. Generally, irregular verbs are disproportionately common in a language, because the uncommon verbs become regularized more quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which verbs are regular and which are irregular is not actually consistent even across related languages, although there are some shared irregular words that are extremely common, and shared regular words that are less common (which might give this impression at first glance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's unclear what you mean by &quot;the same words&quot; in different languages. Due to changes in meaning, semantically equivalent verbs in different Indo-European languages are often not etymologically related to each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples comparing English to French (since that's the language I know best after English): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irregular in both languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;be&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;. In both languages, this verb is &quot;suppletive,&quot; which means not all of its forms come from the same source. Half of the irregularity is due to this, and actually, the pattern of suppletion is different in each language. Some parts of them are historically related, though (like English &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; and French &lt;em&gt;est&lt;/em&gt; for the third person present singular form).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;have&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;. BUT note that these words are not descended from the same source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;go&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;aller&lt;/em&gt;. BUT note that these words are not descended from the same source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;know&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;savoir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;connaître&lt;/em&gt;. English &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; is related to the middle part of &lt;em&gt;connaître&lt;/em&gt;. The &quot;irregularities&quot; are mainly of unrelated origin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irregular in English, regular in French: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;speak&quot;  = French &lt;em&gt;parler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fall&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;tomber&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;leave (let alone)&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;laisser&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;sing&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;chanter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;give&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;donner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;find&quot; = French &lt;em&gt;trouver&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular in English, irregular in French: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;live&quot; = &lt;em&gt;vivre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;die&quot; = &lt;em&gt;mourir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;want&quot; = &lt;em&gt;vouloir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;please&quot; = &lt;em&gt;plaire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;follow&quot; = &lt;em&gt;suivre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put the claims you mention in perspective, it might also help to compare irregular verbs in English and other Indo-European languages to those in Basque and Hungarian (which are not related to Indo-European languages (or to each other) within a timeframe that we know of). Wikipedia says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_verbs#Defective_or_anomalous_verb_stems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt; has irregular verbs meaning things like &quot;be,&quot; &quot;have,&quot; and &quot;say,&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_verbs#Irregular_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hungarian&lt;/a&gt; has irregular verbs meaning &quot;to be&quot;, &quot;to come&quot; and &quot;to go.&quot; Even though they're not related, it shouldn't be surprising that the irregular verbs have similar meanings in Indo-European languages, Basque, and Hungarian, for two reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verbs meaning things like &quot;be&quot; or &quot;have&quot; are usually among the most commonly used verbs in a language, and therefore more likely to be irregular for the reason I mentioned earlier&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;languages near each other can influence each other, even if they don't share a common source. For example, even though the &quot;have&quot; verb in Germanic languages and the &quot;avoir&quot; verb in Romance languages are not originally related, they are thought to have influenced each other in usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing I can think of: In English, many &quot;irregular&quot; verbs are the remnant of Germanic &quot;strong verbs,&quot; (which generally descend from Proto-Indo-European verbal roots) while English regular verb morphology is based on Germanic &quot;weak verbs,&quot; which was the class for verbs derived from non-verbal Proto-Indo-European roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T09:59:26.087" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T09:59:26.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15493" CreationDate="2016-01-11T15:54:38.570" Score="0" ViewCount="539" Body="&lt;p&gt;what is the IPA phonetic transcription of the female name Jenna? Is it ['dʒɛ nə], with stress on first syllable? I usually tend to use online dictionaries for pronunciation of words, but I couldn't find this one on any site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9490" LastEditorUserId="9490" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T16:29:41.820" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:14:41.460" Title="What is the phonetic transcription of the name Jenna?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-12T22:27:38.957" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2016-01-11T18:34:38.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the answers above you might as well take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libraryofbabel.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://libraryofbabel.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors’ minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I’ll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T18:34:38.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15491" CreationDate="2016-01-11T19:48:01.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CEPD-18 gives [ˈdʒen.ə], LPD-3 doesn't have this name. Naturalally, it depends on your dialect, especially with vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T23:14:41.460" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T23:14:41.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T21:02:34.780" Score="0" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 163:] The NP arguments in the VP, which include the subject and any objects, are &#xA;  semantically related in various ways to the verb. The relations depend on the &#xA;  meaning of the palticular verb. For example, the NP &lt;em&gt;the boy&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The boy rolled a red ball.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  agent       theme &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is the &quot;doer&quot; of the rolling action, also called the &lt;strong&gt;agent&lt;/strong&gt;. The NP &lt;em&gt;a red ball&lt;/em&gt; is the &#xA;  theme or the &quot;undergoer&quot; of the rolling action. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 582:] &lt;strong&gt;theme&lt;/strong&gt;   The thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent undergoes the action of &#xA;  the verb:          &#xA;  e.g., &lt;em&gt;Martha&lt;/em&gt; in George hugged &lt;em&gt;Martha&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am confused why the definition of Theme covers only the NP in the predicate: why not the entire VP? What is wrong if I interpret Theme for sentences 1 and 2 as their entire predicates, as follows? The Theme of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 is the roll of the red ball&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 is the hug received by Martha.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;2  suggests differences between the ordinary English meaning of 'theme' and the Linguistics meaning. Am I correct? If so, then what motivated Linguistics's selection of this term? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T05:42:18.623" Title="What motivated the definition of Theme in Semantics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15447" CreationDate="2016-01-12T03:46:53.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both my brother and I substitute a voiced dental fricative (ð) at the beginning of words where most American English speakers would have a voiceless dental fricative (θ).  This is often accompanied by a change to the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus &quot;thanks&quot; (θænks) becomes &quot;thenks&quot; (ðɛnks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are from northeastern Ohio if that is of any use to you.  I have not been able to find an official name for this variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastEditorUserId="4810" LastEditDate="2016-01-13T16:37:35.643" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T16:37:35.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15498" CreationDate="2016-01-12T05:11:10.663" Score="0" ViewCount="745" Body="&lt;p&gt;what is the scope of quantifier and What is the &lt;strong&gt;scopal&lt;/strong&gt; relation of negation and quantifier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T19:44:54.130" Title="Scope of Negation and Quantifier" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15499" CreationDate="2016-01-12T06:15:42.140" Score="11" ViewCount="1360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to transcribe my cat's noises into IPA. For example, her wanting to be petted is like [njæː] or [njaː]. But purring doesn't seem to fit any existing notation, except maybe [ʜ]. Has anyone ever mapped a cat's phonetic inventory? Their vocal tracts don't seem to be much different than ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4943" LastEditorUserId="4943" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T08:17:38.313" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T12:12:59.773" Title="Is it feasible to create an IPA adaptation for cats?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15496" CreationDate="2016-01-12T07:11:07.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In logic, the scope of negation is everything in the sentence that is formed by combining negation with another sentence.  Similarly, the scope of a quantifier is everything in the sentence that is formed by combining the quantifier with a sentence. In the syntax of a human language sentence, the scopes are as they would be in the corresponding logical form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scopal relation of negation and quantifier concerns which is in the scope of the other (if either is):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negation in scope of quantifier: &quot;Mary didn't see someone.&quot; (Ex)(not(Mary saw x))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quantifier in scope of negation: &quot;Mary didn't see anyone.&quot; not((Ex)(Mary saw x))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neither in the scope of the other: &quot;Someone left, but Mary didn't.&quot; ((Ex)(x left)) and (not(Mary left))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negation and quantifier in the scope of each other: not possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T19:44:54.130" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T19:44:54.130" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15497" CreationDate="2016-01-12T18:16:30.660" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, why not? The main problem you will run into is establishing contrastiveness. I strongly recommend reading ch. 4 of the Handbook of the IPA. You can hear two different cats purring at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purr&quot;&gt;wiki page&lt;/a&gt;, so the question is whether those are two different purr phonemes (technically known as &quot;purreme&quot;) or one with a big variation in realization? You could transcribe it as [ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆ʔ̆ɨ̥̃̆], though you might have to explain that the breve implies a duration of about 5 msc. Apart from the inconvenience of writing all this junk, there is a deeper scientific question of whether it's wrong to imply that a purr is really made up of lots of tiny segments. So this is where, in dealing with language, somebody would propose a new symbol for this newly discovered sound. You could then propose [ﮛ] to represent this sound, but I doubt it would get approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With real language, the IPA symbol [a] represents a wide range of physical sounds, not a precise single physical sound (that doesn't even mean anything). At a certain point, an apparent &quot;a&quot; is far enough back that it sounds like the range of sounds represented as [ɑ], and then you can argue that writing &quot;a&quot; is an error and instead &quot;ɑ&quot; should be used. But that's only possible because there are languages that contrast [a] and [ɑ], so we know that [a] and [ɑ] are different things. The [a] of Arabic and the [a] of English (not US English) are different, but that doesn't motivate inventing new vowel letters: because, IPA is not a system for reducing arbitrary acoustic waveforms to combinations of letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T18:16:30.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T00:06:44.973" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I asked the meaning of some phrases in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transfer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on predicate transer&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299284/what-does-i-am-parked-out-back-mean-in-this-paragraph?&quot;&gt;English language and usage&lt;/a&gt;, assuming that I didn't understand the article because of those phrases. I got some comments answering on a phrase I didn't understand, but then one commenter mentioned that the article itself is confusing. So I decided to ask if I understand this concept right here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this count as another example of predicate transfer?: &quot;I still don't get that joke.&quot; The object of the sentence rules out the other meanings of &quot;get&quot; and we're left with only one meaning &quot;understand&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article is pretty short: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, predicate transfer&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transfer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; is the reassignment of a&#xA;  property to an object which would not otherwise inherently have that&#xA;  property. Thus, the expression &quot;I am parked out back&quot; conveys the&#xA;  meaning of &quot;parked&quot; from &quot;car&quot; to the property of &quot;I possess a car&quot;.&#xA;  This avoids incorrect polysemous interpretations of &quot;parked&quot;: that&#xA;  &quot;people can be parked&quot;, or that &quot;I am pretending to be a car&quot;, or that&#xA;  &quot;I am something which can be parked&quot;. This is supported by the&#xA;  morphology: &quot;We are parked out back&quot; does not mean that there are&#xA;  multiple cars; rather, that there are multiple passengers (having the&#xA;  property of being in possession of a car).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T02:34:17.867" Title="Does this count as predicate transfer?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-11T00:07:10.080" Score="2" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am given a vowel system (for example, 'i', 'upside down and then flipped  e', 'a' and 'u'). How do I figure out the tendencies and universals manifested in the vowel system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding, there are two types of universals: Absolute (structural traits that occur in all languages) and implicational (presence of one trait implies the presence of another). Tendencies are the same as universals except tendencies apply to most languages, not all (tendencies also have universal and implicational).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of absolute tendencies are: - most commonly occuring vowel phoneme is 'a'. - Front vowel phonemes are generally unrounded, while non-low back vowel phonemes are generally rounded. - Low vowels are generally rounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of implicational universals: - If a language has contrastive nasal vowels, it will also have constrastive oral vowels. - If a language has contrasting long vowels, then it will also have contrasting short vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, I do not know all the tendencies and universals (I only have the examples stated above). I'm just a student learning lingustics right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, given the vowel system above (or any vowel system), how do I figure out the tendencies and universals manifested in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2719875" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-13T16:40:44.457" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T18:36:24.780" Title="Given a vowel system, how do I find the tendencies and universals that are manifested with it?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T14:22:18.570" Score="4" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a formal test determining whether a verb is stative? For example, the following predicate looks stative, but it's not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's Valentine's Day. I have the chocolate, but &lt;strong&gt;I'm still missing&lt;/strong&gt; the flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You either are missing the flowers, or you're not. Also, there is no action involved. There is no degree to which you can be missing the flowers. Does not that imply that the verb is stative? How does one account for such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9580" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T01:48:26.307" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T04:22:44.773" Title="Formal test determining whether a verb is stative" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;&lt;statives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15502" CreationDate="2016-01-13T14:41:04.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/stative-verbs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The simplest way&lt;/a&gt; to determine whether a verb is stative is to see if you can use that verb in a Continuous (aka Progressive) tense. If you cannot, then it is a stative verb. Since in your sentence the verb &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in the Present Continous tense, the verb &lt;em&gt;to miss&lt;/em&gt; is not stative, it is dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T14:41:04.603" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15497" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:34:00.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from @user6726's answer this is my personal view:&#xA;Phonetic transcription is based on human's articulation (as human's produce for this case you can say for example the /k/ sound is palatal but do cats use hard palate to produce sounds?!) Imagine a hypothetical creature that makes a sound like modem's &lt;code&gt;(actually old dial-up modems)&lt;/code&gt; sound. we would transcribe that sound in a way that our mind hears it like it's language. for better understanding you can have this in mind that in languages like Persian the cat's meow is transcribed as &lt;code&gt;/miu:/&lt;/code&gt; (not sure if I transcribed it correctly but it's long /u/) having said that you first have to see how the cat articulates this sound (you could use MRI or cameras) then you have to see how the cat produces it and then you can assign a symbol for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt; there is another assumption in question: Can we use IPA for transcribing cat's sounds? YES. but it might and will cause a lot of confusions. Do cat's use the same manner of articulation as humans do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further Reading:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remmers, J.E. and H. Gautier. Neural and mechanical mechanisms of feline purring. Respiration Physiology, v. 16, December 1972: 351- 361.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holub, Joan. Why do cats meow? New York, Dial Books for Young Readers, c2001. 46 p. (juvenile).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frazer-Sissom, Dawn E., D.A. Rice, and G. Peters. How cats purr. Journal of zoology: proceedings Zoological Society of London, v. 223, January 1991: 67-78..&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;De Lanerolle, Nihal C. and Frederick F. Lang. Functional neural pathways for vocalization in the domestic cat. In Physiological control of mammalian vocalization. Edited by John D. Newman. Plenum Press, New York, London, c1988: 21-41&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T15:34:00.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15512" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:52:56.977" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we know the ToBI system is designed to transcribe prosody and within it you can transcribe only High and Low prosody changes. The question is here &lt;code&gt;Why don't we implement frequency change and/or duration in ToBI system?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance we can add numerical value (like 50H%) to show that the H in this utterance is +50 Hz. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it plausible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any use in doing so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T18:50:53.560" Title="Why don't we use frequency change in ToBI?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15502" CreationDate="2016-01-13T16:20:29.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;MISS&lt;/em&gt; is one of those verbs Yellow Sky alludes to which changes its sense in the progressive: in other casts it ordinarily means &lt;em&gt;regret the absence of&lt;/em&gt;, but in the progressive it takes the sense &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; (or in the intransitive &lt;em&gt;be lacking&lt;/em&gt;). The progressive might better be understood as copular &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; + adjective &lt;em&gt;missing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a number of tests for stativity. Some have been questioned as really involving agency, not stativity, but here are a couple of fairly robust ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When employed in a main clause modified by a perfective &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; clause, events are understood to follow what is described in the &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; clause; states are understood to start before and continue during what is described in the &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; clause.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;When I met John he bought the flowers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;When I met John he was missing the flowers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Events can serve as the complement in &lt;i&gt;Wh-&lt;/i&gt; cleft constructions; statives cannot.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;What John did was buy the flowers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;∗ &lt;/sup&gt;What John did was be missing the flowers.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T16:20:29.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15501" CreationDate="2016-01-13T17:29:31.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look here, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/1978phd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;On the natural phonology of vowels&lt;/a&gt;, for a comprehensive answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer: a vowel system is governed by those universal context-free vowel processes which did not have to be suppressed in order for children to learn to pronounce the language accurately (and the stages of acquisition track these process suppressions).  These processes correspond to implicational universals: if A becomes B, then A implies B.  If foreign words are borrowed into the language, they are subjected to these unsuppressed processes in the nativization of those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T17:29:31.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15502" CreationDate="2016-01-13T17:51:56.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example is ambiguous.  &quot;I'm still missing the flowers&quot; has a literal reading, &quot;My heart still yearns for the flowers of yesteryear&quot;, and an idiomatic reading, &quot;In rechecking the inventory of items supposed to be present, I find that the flowers are still absent.&quot;  I doubt that &quot;missing&quot; in the idiomatic reading is really a progressive form -- it has the sense of the adjective &quot;missing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literal reading is non-stative.  It refers to what could be a long process: I miss more and more those flowers I used to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T17:51:56.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15497" CreationDate="2016-01-13T18:24:42.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to transcribe how we perceive cat language (as opposed to how cats do), you might be interested in the corresponding problem for bird song, which has at least some literature.  I found a reference to an LSA talk from 1977 by Donegan and Stampe, &quot;Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T18:24:42.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15501" CreationDate="2016-01-13T18:36:24.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to contain a number of false presuppositions which could be repaired by rewording. One is the distinction between absolute tendencies and implicational universals – the problem is the concept of an absolute tendency (&quot;tendency&quot; means that both outcomes happen, and one is more frequent, which contradicts the assumption of being absolute). The second is that properties can be manifested in a particular arrangement of vowel letters. Properties can be manifested in a &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, and a language can have a particular collection of vowels, but tendencies are only &lt;em&gt;latent&lt;/em&gt; in abstract vowel systems, so not all languages with the vowel system /a e o i u/ manifest the same properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do with the vowel system of a language that makes sense is ask whether there is any reason for that vowel system as opposed to come other vowel system. For example, if you have /i u a/, you could ask why the language doesn't instead have /i u a ə/. The typical answer is that the vowels [a] and [ə] are acoustically too similar, and it is hard to tell them apart. That in a nutshell is the prevailing explanatory force behind most questions about vowel systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these supposed tendencies turn out to be tendencies about linguists, not languages. The real reason why there are no languages where all vowels are long is that length is not an absolute property, so however long a vowel is, a linguist will always call it a short vowel unless there is a contrasting vowel type that can be called long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main approaches to handling phonetic tendencies in language. One is the approach of Optimality Theory, which says that people are genetically encoded with specific prohibitions, for example there is a tendency that forbids nasal vowels, symbolized as *Ṽ, and language with no nasal vowels obey that constraint. Languages like French which have nasal vowels ignore the constraint. The set of constraints is universally predetermined, and by stipulating that there is no constraint forbidding oral vowels (in all contexts -- there is one forbidding oral vowels next to nasal consonants), OT can express the generalization that no language has only nasal vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative approach is the historical-evolutionary approach, where attention is paid to the phonetic structure of languages and inventory tendencies are attributed to different probabilities of people learning a given distinction, in the usual sub-optimal context where language is actually learned. For instance, you don't usually find vowel systems where all the vowels are significantly clustered around the center of the vowel space, instead they tend to maximize perceptual distinctness (Liljencrantz &amp;amp; Lindblom 1972 and much literature since). Nasalization in vowels does that sub-optimal thing -- it makes vowels acoustically closer to each other. Languages &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; tolerate vowel systems like /i e u o a ĩ ẽ ũ õ ã/ since ultimately people do have a remarkable ability to perceive subtle distinctions. But people also give in to perceptual expediency, and you often find that the number of nasal vowels is reduced relative to the oral set, because nasal vowels are the ones at a perceptual disadvantage. There would never be an advantage to having a set of vowels that are all nasal, hence ordinary linguistic evolutionary tendencies converge on the result that vowel systems are not all-nasal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T18:36:24.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15505" CreationDate="2016-01-13T18:50:53.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic idea of ToBI comes from the work of English intonationalist in the 70's, especially Liberman and Pierrehumbert, operating within an autosegmental phonological framework. The stipulation that you have only H and L in Tobi is for the most part an arbitrary stipulation, and there is nothing wrong with positing M as a tonal element (as Liberman did). The strongest reason for not including &quot;M&quot; is that it is not necessary. And I should point out that ToBI is more an &quot;approach&quot; than a formal theory, so there is no specific principle prohibiting the addition of other categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the nature of ToBI is that it is a system for talking about &lt;em&gt;categories&lt;/em&gt;, and not continua. Thus expanding ToBI to have numeric operators in the representation would totally change what ToBI is. You could do that, but then it would not be ToBI, it would be a new system. Similarly, ToBI is about pitch, and it isn't a general theory of all of prosody. Again, you could construct a new system that is intended to express durational properties, but then you should call it something else -- perhaps DuBI (Du for &quot;duration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T18:50:53.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T23:30:46.943" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32691/why-not-allow-spaces-in-a-password#comment196835_32692&quot;&gt;this exchange on Information Security Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, regarding whether a passphrase consisting of 4 English words might be easier or harder to crack than a password of 8 random characters, including symbols:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Meaningful sentences have a lot of structure which drastically reduces the actual entropy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many possible combinations of 4 or fewer English words will produce a sensible, meaningful, and complete phrase?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a computer program with a dictionary of the 250,000 most common English words, and it will produce a list of all possible combinations of 4 or fewer words (250,000&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; + 250,000&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; + 250,000&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; + 250,000 total combinations), to be used for a brute-force attack. For this example, we'll ignore capitalization and likewise assume that punctuation can be added in order to allow the phrase to qualify - so the phrase &lt;code&gt;house is on&lt;/code&gt; might not qualify, because it implies another word needed after &lt;code&gt;on&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;&quot;House&quot; is on&lt;/code&gt; turns &lt;code&gt;house&lt;/code&gt; into the title of a TV show, making it a complete thought. But &lt;code&gt;a and and the&lt;/code&gt; cannot be turned into a meaningful phrase through any change of capitalization and punctuation, nor can &lt;code&gt;correct horse battery staple&lt;/code&gt; become sensible - while changing it to &lt;code&gt;Correct! Horse: &quot;Battery staple.&quot;&lt;/code&gt; might arguably make it meaningful (someone is accurate in their assertion that a horse uttered &quot;battery staple&quot;), it's still nonsensical (horses can't talk, and if they could, they'd still have no reason to say &quot;battery staple&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how many of these 3.9 sextillion combinations qualify as &quot;meaningful phrases&quot; and are therefore worth putting into our brute force attack on the &quot;4-word max passphrase&quot; website so that we can crack all the passphrases that were chosen by humans? We don't want to spend the much longer amount of time necessary to crack the passphrases of the users that used a &quot;random 4-word passphrase generator&quot;, because we know that most people are too lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While my above examples used sentences, this isn't necessary - &lt;code&gt;my car&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;the quick brown fox&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;piece of cake&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;in the past&lt;/code&gt; would all qualify as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't expect an exact number, as there's sure to be some degree of subjectivity with some particular combinations. But I'm thinking that there must be a way to tackle this question by starting with the possible valid arrangements of parts of speech, e.g. &lt;code&gt;noun preposition noun&lt;/code&gt; is going to tend to be valid, while &lt;code&gt;adjective verb adjective verb&lt;/code&gt; pretty clearly won't, and then by knowing how many English words can be used as adjectives, we should be able to arrive at a reasonable estimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - while I gave as an example a 250,000 word dictionary, feel free to use a different dictionary size, for example based on your choice of reference material, but if you do so, please indicate your dictionary size for comparative purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11266" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T13:14:47.813" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T23:30:46.943" Title="How many meaningful English phrases can be created using 4 or fewer words?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T03:20:31.687" Score="-2" ViewCount="921" Body="&lt;p&gt;mænɪdʒ                                      tʃaɪld&lt;br&gt;&#xA;rɪzʌlt                                      pælɪs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;sku:l                                       prəvaɪd&#xA;detə                                        sʒ:fɪs&#xA;kənfʒ: m                                    j u:ʒl&#xA;eɪnʃənt                                     dʒʒ: nl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what are their English text in represent of IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11268" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T19:37:20.590" Title="IPA convert to English text" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-14T21:09:33.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7168" CreationDate="2016-01-14T05:00:45.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, medium. Taking for instance, Indo-European family, there are a lot of color words that changed meaning and also a lot of invented words, but some words are surprisingly stable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English, Russian, Greek, Italian, all have a word for at least a dye of red color inherited from the same PIE word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯roudhros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;red&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English, Russian, Italian(possibly from Germanic), Greek, Persian all have the word for yellow or green inherited from the same PIE word, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ĝhelo̯u̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;yellow-green&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English, Russian (borrowed from Indo-Iranian), Italian (borrowed from Germanic), Greek, Persian all have the word for brown originated from PIE &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bhrunos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;brown&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the words for blue or grey are not shared at all. This may indicate that the proto-language simply had no word for these colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-01-15T11:00:41.800" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T11:00:41.800" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T14:28:46.787" Score="2" ViewCount="1641" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for resources, either print or online, which compile lists of examples of linguistic phenomena, be they phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic.  (My main purpose for these would be for teaching linguistic principles and theories, and designing exercises.)  I suppose the canonical example of such a resource would be the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.89/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source Book for Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by William Cowan and Jaromira Rakušan, which tabulates examples from many different languages and dialects.  Can anyone point me to any similar books or online resources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9370" LastEditorUserId="9370" LastEditDate="2016-01-14T14:34:39.417" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T18:55:11.930" Title="Where to find lists of examples of linguistic phenomena" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15519" CreationDate="2016-01-14T15:38:39.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your linguistic viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For typology, a good wealth of examples can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T15:38:39.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-14T17:18:37.673" Score="0" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a question about English accent comparison. &#xA;It's about the differences in &lt;strong&gt;phonemic inventory&lt;/strong&gt; of Irish Supraregional compared to RP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the Irish English vowel in the lexical set FACE /e:/ a difference in &lt;strong&gt;phonemic inventory&lt;/strong&gt; (compared to RP's diphthong in the same lexical set) or is this just a different realisation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Compared to e.g. RP's diphthongs /ɪə, eə, ʊə/ vs. GA in ‘beard’ /bɪrd/, ‘fare’ /fer/, ‘dour’ /dʊr/ which &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; said to be differences in phonemic inventory)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as GA is &quot;lacking&quot; in RP's diphthongs, can't the same be applied for Irish Supraregional vowel in the FACE set, i.e. it's lacking the /eɪ/ diphthong ? (or RP lacking the /e/ in such ph. environment - as far as I'm concerned, /e/ can only appear in RP in the diphthong /eɪ/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, anyone who can clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11271" LastEditorUserId="11271" LastEditDate="2016-01-15T06:41:45.977" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T06:41:45.977" Title="Phonemic inventory of Supraregional Irish English vs. RP - vowel in FACE" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;irish&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15519" CreationDate="2016-01-14T18:55:11.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you want data that would be suitable for problem sets, you could start with Gleason's &lt;em&gt;Workbook in descriptive linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, and Ronald Langacker's textbook &lt;em&gt;Fundamentals of linguistic analysis&lt;/em&gt;, still available at the original price. There is a textbook &lt;em&gt;Laboratory manual for morphology and syntax&lt;/em&gt; in various editions, published by SIL and usually (currently) with William Merrifield as author -- there is or was a version available online from them though I can't tell you where (it may also be in Spanish). Most phonology textbooks have problem sets, though they are usually too difficult for absolute first level classes, or they require the student to have memorised particular ideas of likelihood in order to get the right answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to look through journal articles in journals that specialize in language areas, such as &lt;em&gt;Studies in African linguistics&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Oceanic linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. They often publish descriptive articles that lay out some simple phonological problem in Margyi, pronouns and transitivity in Lushootseed, or Kwara'e tense paradigms. Usually you can skim quickly to see if there are any paradigm-rich papers in an issue. Likewise, you can get problems from &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; grammars, though often grammar just leave you to figure out what the rules are on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T18:55:11.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15515" CreationDate="2016-01-14T19:37:20.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably copied your IPA symbols wrong. &#xA;If you want a good answer, edit your question with the correct version of your symbols - e.g. you're merging 2 sounds, your representation of the central vowel (schwa) is /ʒ/, that's wrong, it should be /ə/ - but not in all positions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was able to &quot;decode&quot; most of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;manage child&#xA;result palace&#xA;school provide debtor surface confirm usual (?) ancient jurnal &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11271" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T19:37:20.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6887" CreationDate="2016-01-15T17:28:50.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasoning is correct, except that parsers' accuracy is never measured in the percentage of correct parse trees for entire sentences. Parsers are evaluated by Labeled Attachment Score (LAS), Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS), or F1 score, all over individual arcs. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6895/100&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T17:28:50.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-15T20:26:42.353" Score="7" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;While most French/Spanish noun cognates share the same gender (both descending from the same vulgar latin root), there are many exceptions having opposing genders (e.g. &lt;em&gt;la couleur / el color;  la douleur / el dolor&lt;/em&gt;). What explains this divergence?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Do-all-romance-languages-have-the-same-gender-for-the-same-words/answer/Dan-Lenski?shared=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Quora answer&lt;/a&gt;, Dan Lenski &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/profile/Dan-Lenski&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(BA Linguistics; PhD Physics)&lt;/a&gt; lists but also explains one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ352571&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Genders of French and Spanish Noun Cognates: Some Statistics and a List.&lt;/a&gt;, Teschner, Richard V.,&#xA;Canadian Modern Language Review, v43 n2 p256-66 Jan 1987.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/spanish-portuguese-italian-french-cognates-with-different-genders.295953/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordreference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T12:43:03.057" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T12:43:03.057" Title="Why do many French and Spanish noun cognates have opposing grammatical gender?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15530" CreationDate="2016-01-16T05:05:03.867" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to phonetics and confused about something when I to listen to recordings of IPA consonantal phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the sound for &lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt; ... &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_bilabial_plosive.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_bilabial_plosive.ogg&lt;/a&gt; .... In the recording, the narrator says like &quot;pah &lt;strong&gt;ahhh&lt;/strong&gt; pah&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, what is the function of the &lt;strong&gt;ahhh&lt;/strong&gt; part that is found in the middle of the pronunciation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11281" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T06:02:11.050" Title="IPA: What is the significance of the &quot;aah&quot; after pause in pronunciations" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15529" CreationDate="2016-01-16T06:02:11.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point is to utter the sound in two contexts, one (&quot;pah&quot;) is what you could call the most basic context, where the consonant is supported just by a vowel that allows you to hear the release of the consonant, and the second (&quot;ahh pah&quot;) puts the same vowel before the consonant, so that you can experience formant transitions into the consonant as well as out of the consonant. The recordings posted on Wiki are basically imitations of the IPA performances by Peter Ladefoged in his textbook recordings (online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/consonants1.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), where you can click on the left and right sides of consonants, and hear [pa], [aˈpa] as separate recordings. The gentleman who composed the Wiki recordings simply merged the two into one utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T06:02:11.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15570" CreationDate="2016-01-16T14:10:32.733" Score="2" ViewCount="1565" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm facing a difficulty in understanding what exactly is a dialect. I've read many definitions, but I need an example in order to understand them. Can we say that British English and American English are dialects of the English language? &#xA;And if they aren't, could you provide an example of two dialects of the English language?&#xA;I'm not English, so I get confused when I read about all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dialects of English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T15:01:55.687" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T08:08:28.623" Title="Are British and American English two different dialects?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-16T14:33:31.693" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a electric dictionary in which the phonetic symbol are descirbed in the weird form.&#xA;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;afar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  / E5fB:(r); E`fBr/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which kind of phonetic symbol is it? Is there a full mapping list to normal phonetic symbol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11284" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T07:01:07.553" Title="which kind of phonetic symbol is it?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2016-01-16T17:14:26.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching for the text, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.cshu.org/s/a/95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Web page&lt;/a&gt;. Here's a screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zjPuG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zjPuG.png&quot; alt=&quot;afar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The document refers OED, and here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/afar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED's page for &lt;em&gt;afar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;afar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pronunciation: /əˈfɑː/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it just seems that cshu.org has incorrectly imported phonetic representation from electronic version of OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case closed. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T17:14:26.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-16T19:31:55.850" Score="3" ViewCount="2632" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a way to identify words (single or in a sequence) that are audibly confusable (but not the same).&#xA;So I'm looking for what could be described as &quot;near heterographs&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it helps, think of cases when words have to be spelt out using a phonetic alphabet to avoid confusion.  Those are the types of words/sequences I'm trying to identify.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought of using the IPA symbols, but I have no idea which ones sound similar (and I think that accent/dialect may influence it to a degree as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single words : &#xA;(Mints / Mince)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* Several plants of a particular species (or several flavoured sweets)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* A term used to describe meat that has been ground (at least in the UK, &quot;beef mince&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Single word and Sequence of words (or multi-word expression) :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Example / Egg sample)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* An instance or display&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* A portion of an egg for testing  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequence of words (or multi-word expression) :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Frog spawn / Frogs pawn / Frogs porn)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* Something that occurs after frogs have had intercourse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* A piece on the chess board when playing against a frog&lt;br&gt;&#xA;* A type of film/photography showing frogs having intercourse  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched and read and seen minimal-pairs.  But not all of them sound &quot;similar&quot;.  Words/phrases that rhyme seem to come up a fair bit, but not all rhyming words suit either.  There seems to be some relation to puns and malapropisms as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this LSE Q&amp;amp;A, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14431/which-ipa-sounds-are-similar&quot;&gt;Which IPA sounds are similar?&lt;/a&gt;, and the linked to Confusion Matrices - but admit to not quite grasping it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have also found this, &lt;a href=&quot;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/minimal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/minimal.html&lt;/a&gt; by John Higgins.  But as with the confusion matrices, I'm not sure I'm quite grasping it (though if you click on numbers, it takes you to text files with lots of examples, and many seem to be what I'm after).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a sub-set of Minimal pairs, or a particular label for certain rhyming words that would help me?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there a list of phones/phonemes that indicates similarity?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there even a word/phrase that applies to such a description/concept?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your time and any help you may give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11285" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T19:31:55.850" Title="Similar sounds - phonemes, words and word-sequences" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-16T19:52:58.953" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my research, i am looking for the oldest known examples of written Latvian. According to Wikipedia it's the translation of a Latvian hymn made by Nikolaus Ramm (1530) with no more info provided, no details, no resources. I assumed that it should be found somewhere. I Googled for it, with no success. I would really appreciate if you could find it for me, or at least provide a confirmation about whether it still exists or has been lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11290" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T19:52:58.953" Title="The oldest known examples of written Latvian" Tags="&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15539" CreationDate="2016-01-16T20:14:52.600" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am learning the IPA. I am familiar with most of the manners and places thus far. However, I am not sure which consonant chart to reference. The 2 charts I am considering seem quite different, albeit I haven't gone over them with a fine comb to spot any overlap. Here they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-charts/ipa-symbols-chart-complete/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-charts/ipa-symbols-chart-complete/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I intend to make flash cards of the IPA phonemes. Which chart would be most useful? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11281" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T20:41:45.720" Title="Wikipedia and official IPA symbol chart appear quite different" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2016-01-16T20:36:25.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get the actually official charts from the IPA &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/full-ipa-chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There is no reason to use unofficial and potentially error-ridden charts when you can use the real thing. The IPA is not just a list of letters, it is a system of symbols and terms. There are no stops in IPA -- they are called plosives. The Wiki page is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T20:41:45.720" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T20:41:45.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-16T21:26:40.403" Score="0" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways a word can be expressed, or things a word is:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With textual characters and a dictionary spelling, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With phonetic symbols and a phonetic spelling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With sound, a recording of the word being spoken&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With muscle memory, only you can read this expression but it does exist somewhere in your brain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only really need to know one of these.&#xA;If you take the textual spelling for example, it has a lot of redundancy however. In other words, our words could be much shorter. Given all the ways a word can be expressed, and compressing down to only the ways a word differs from other words, how much do you need to remember? What would be the most efficient characters and spellings for the English vocabulary, and do people who already know English have something like this in their heads? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11293" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T23:31:50.460" Title="What is the most efficient way to compress &quot;words&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;information-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-18T08:30:41.513" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15540" CreationDate="2016-01-16T23:31:50.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would first have to decide what it is that you want to do, and what costs you are going to be concerned with. For example, you can express numerals in many different ways, for example &quot;twelve&quot;, &quot;12&quot;, &quot;1100&quot; (binary), &quot;c&quot; (hex), &quot;14&quot; (octal). Binary uses fewer things; hex is shorter; decimal is easier to understand and work with (e.g. adding a column of numbers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to exactly represent a specific pronunciation of a word, a recording is the most efficient (indeed, the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; possible way to represent the specific pronunciation exactly). A narrow transcription can get you in the ballpark for pronunciation, and spelling comes in last place. You can get different result if the goal is to identify a specific word. A recording or transcription of [sajt] will still leave you in the dark as to the choice of &lt;em&gt;sight, site&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt;. There are some cases where spelling is not distinct and pronunciation is (&quot;lead&quot; -- verb or metal). However, I think that spelling is a better predictor of intended word, especially in context (where the verb vs. noun usage of &quot;house&quot; can be inferred).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people do not know the pronunciation of English words, and some do not know the spelling of English words. All you need, to know a word, is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; representation that you can tie to the concept in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could make words shorter, but that doesn't increase efficiency, since processing time would go up. A way to do this is replace each spelled word with its rank in an authoritative frequency list. So &quot;the&quot; becomes &quot;1&quot;, &quot;be&quot; becomes &quot;2&quot;, &quot;because&quot; becomes &quot;94&quot;. If you code this in base 36, the numbers could be really short. The only problem is that it would take forever to encode and decode messages, but if processing time is not a concern, you could really save a lot of space this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T23:31:50.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T02:18:46.903" Score="2" ViewCount="1480" Body="&lt;p&gt;In those languages I'm a bit familiar with, the verb for drinking is very often understood as drinking alcohol, especially if its meaning &quot;the oral intake of any fluid&quot;, wouldn't make sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;I don't drink.&quot;, &quot;Ich trinke nicht.&quot; (German), &quot;No tomo.&quot; (Spanish) and「飲みません。」(Japanese) seem to be usual expressions to confess one's teetotalism. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would find it very surprising if this phenomenon would be somehow universal among languages because of the long drinking culture in the respective culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages in which the generic word for drinking can not convey the meaning of drinking alcohol by itself, so that the direct translation of the above sentence could only be understood as the renunciation of any kind of beverage and would therefore irritate the listeners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect this to be the case in languages where alcohol consumption isn't socially accepted in the respective society (e. g. in languages with mostly islamic speakers) or in languages whose speakers have only been exposed to alcohol for a comparatively short time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide further information, especially on those languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastEditorUserId="11155" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T02:54:12.217" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T03:06:28.963" Title="Does &quot;I don't drink.&quot; mean &quot;I don't drink alcohol.&quot; in all languages?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-18T08:29:23.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15543" CreationDate="2016-01-17T02:33:00.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know, a human cannot survive without drinking water for 3 days, that's why everybody drinks water every day, so if one says &quot;I don't drink&quot; it means the person drinks water but doesn't drink something else. What else? Do you know people that abstain from drinking milk, tea, or juice? I think no, if somebody refuses to drink, the beverage is usually alcohol. That's mere logic, there's no linguistics in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T02:33:00.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15549" CreationDate="2016-01-17T11:41:32.720" Score="4" ViewCount="6309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am transcribing an oral text into IPA in order to compare it with the &quot;correct&quot; pronunciation of words (e.g. according to the dictionary).&#xA;I am using slashes for both versions, but it feels incorrect.&#xA;Example:&#xA; (actual written text); /hɛː san was/ (text as pronounced by the speaker); /hə(r) sʌn wəz/ (text according to dictionary).&#xA;Should I use square brackets for the transcription of the actual pronunciation?&#xA;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11297" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T16:20:47.313" Title="Should I use square brackets or slashes when transcribing an oral text in IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2016-01-17T14:55:36.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Afrikaans language does not conjugate verbs. Even converting into past participles results in very very few irregular ones, which are no foreign to us. e.g.: Ek is, Ek was (I am, I was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is probably you will never find a book called &quot;501 fully conjugated verbs in Afrikaans&quot; coz the verbs do not change at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11300" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T14:55:36.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15547" CreationDate="2016-01-17T15:41:11.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: use slashes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slashes are used for phonemic transcriptions or for very approximate phonetic transcriptions, and brackets are used for phonetic transcriptions.  A phonemic transcription has only enough information about the pronunciation to identify which words are being said, for someone who knows this language and dialect.  A phonetic transcription has additional details about the pronunciation, which would be enough information for a knowledgeable person to make himself understood, even if he is not familiar with the language being spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic transcriptions are language independent, at least in principle, though practically speaking, they will often omit some important information (for instance information about pitch and stress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemic transcriptions are language dependent, and they omit information which a person who knows the language would not need in order to understand what is transcribed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, I don't see a lot of phonetic detail -- the vowel of &quot;son&quot; is not written with a tilde indicating nasalization, for instance, even though the vowel probably is nasalized.  So I'm guessing that you are only trying to capture phonetic information that you think is relevant to what is being said.  That's why I recommend slashes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T15:41:11.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1380" CreationDate="2016-01-17T16:17:40.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existential copula in Malay &quot;ada&quot; remains unchanged in all sentences because of the analytical nature of the language, as well as the lack of agreement and morphological tense in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ada seekor burung           Ada 3 ekor burung&#xA;COP one.CL    bird          COP 3 CL   bird&#xA;There is a bird             There are 3 birds&#xA;&#xA;Ada seekor burung semalam   Ada seekor burung esok&#xA;COP one.CL bird   yesterday COP one.CL bird   tomorrow&#xA;There was a bird yesterday  There will be a bird tomorrow&#xA;&#xA;Ada seorang perempuan       Ada seorang lelaki&#xA;COP one.CL  girl            COP one.CL  boy&#xA;There is a girl             There is a boy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the use of the existential verb &quot;terdapat&quot; in place of &quot;ada&quot;. It's used mostly for the purpose of formality as &quot;ada&quot; is regarded as being less formal. &quot;Terdapat&quot; doesn't have the copular properties of &quot;ada&quot; and is comprised of the non-volitional suffix 'ter-' and the deontic modal/verb &quot;dapat&quot; (can/to get). &quot;Terdapat&quot; can only be used as an existential verb with the non-volitional suffix. Without it, it would mean &quot;to get&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dapat seekor burung!        Dapat tangkap seekor burung!&#xA;Get   one.CL bird           Could catch   one.CL bird&#xA;(I) got a bird!             (I) could/got to catch a bird!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Terdapat&quot; also remains unchanged in all of the sentences above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T16:17:40.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15554" CreationDate="2016-01-17T17:02:10.483" Score="-2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130549?rskey=hiUfdJ&amp;amp;result=3&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[OED:]&lt;/a&gt; The primary sense was ‘away’, ‘away from’, a sense now obsolete, except in so far as it is retained under the spelling &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; (see off adv., prep., n.1, and adj.). All the existing uses of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are derivative; many so remote as to retain no trace of the original sense, and so weakened as to be in themselves the expression of relatively indefinable syntactic relationships. [...]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already read OED's entire entry of 'Etymology' on OED. Where can I find more information, resources, or studies of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? How might &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have been chosen for these  derivative and so remote uses which retain no trace of the original sense? Surely not randomly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See  p 381, &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams: 'As we have shown, linguistic&#xA;changes do not happen suddenly. Speakers of English did not wake up one morning and&#xA;decide to use the word &lt;em&gt;beef&lt;/em&gt; for “ox meat,&quot; nor do all the children of one particular generation grow up to adopt a new word.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;PS: I have tried to refine my question per &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1667/5306&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;; please advise if it can still be ameliorated. I ask the above here because the OED asserts the influence of Latin's &lt;em&gt;ab-, de-, ex-&lt;/em&gt; and French's &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T19:29:35.553" Title="How did 'of' absorb so many meanings?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T17:28:12.057" Score="1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my book said that syntax is grammar outside the word but i don't understand why can you explain me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11302" LastEditorUserId="11302" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T13:11:08.763" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T13:11:08.763" Title="Why is syntax called &quot;grammar outside the word &quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-18T12:01:28.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15552" CreationDate="2016-01-17T18:09:01.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take that to mean that morphology, grammar inside the word, and syntax, grammar outside the word, share the same concerns, methods, and assumptions, with the only difference being that the first deals with how morphemes go together to make words, and the second deals with how words go together to make phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is any truth to this at all.  Language morphology has a primitive system and concerns mostly memorized facts, while syntax has a sophisticated system and concerns mostly innovation.  The person who you quote probably knows very little about syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T18:09:01.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15551" CreationDate="2016-01-17T19:29:35.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a difficult question. Semantic bleaching is a common process in grammaticalization, which it appears 'of' has undergone. But why certain changes are initiated (here, why one word undergoes a change and not another) is the so-called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bjoseph/Viewable611/Lx611BasicIssues.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;actuation problem&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. It's an ongoing question of historical linguistics. Sorry I don't have a better answer or something more specific to say about 'of'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T19:29:35.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15527" CreationDate="2016-01-17T19:41:38.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly realise that within languages with gender, there are inconsistencies and regional differences.  That is, the process is happening even today.  Especially given that the Romance languages in question are part of a geographically unbroken dialectical continuum, examining that process will give you insight on how it unfolded in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, one way to look at this question is across all Latin languages, including Latin itself, and certainly the languages like Catalan, Occitan, Franco-Provençal and Italian which share some features of Spanish and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It may also worth considering the influence of other languages, like Basque, Gaelic, Germanic and Arabic, and the prescriptions based on Latin that lasted long after Latin was hardly spoken.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resource I would suggest would be Wiktionary.  Consider &lt;em&gt;dolor&lt;/em&gt;: it was masculine in Latin but that varied a great deal among its descendants, including within the Iberian peninsula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T21:22:29.157" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T21:22:29.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15558" CreationDate="2016-01-17T21:10:37.607" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering how the lexical ambiguity is addressed in phrase-based statistical machine translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11303" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T08:32:07.940" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T08:32:07.940" Title="How lexical ambiguity addressed in phrase-based SMT" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15556" CreationDate="2016-01-18T01:33:41.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, a word like 'bank' that is ambiguous between 'financial institution' and 'side of a river' will often be disambiguated by context. So, the first sense is talked about near words like 'money', while the second sense is talked about near words like 'water'. An SMT model will pick up on this regularity, and when it sees something like &quot;money....bank&quot;, it'll translate &quot;bank&quot; into &quot;banco&quot; (if we're translating into Spanish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastEditorUserId="2896" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T02:04:54.057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T02:04:54.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T10:40:18.487" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker so my grammar isn't perfect. I make some of mistakes especially when I'm speaking fast.  I would like my child to have the cognitive advantage that comes from being bilingual so her father and I decided we would speak different languages to our child - I would speak in English, while he speaks in our mother tongue (an indian language which has a completely different grammatical structure to English). If I'm using incorrect grammar, will my daughter also learn incorrect English? Or will her brain automatically fix the mistakes as she is in the critical period of language development? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11304" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T21:49:36.720" Title="Will my child learn incorrect grammar from me?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T15:05:12.663" Score="1" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to   Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, by John Lyons (Chapter 1), a symbol is a sign whose form is arbitrarily or conventionally associated with its meaning. Also, linguistic signs, namely morphemes, are of symbolic nature.&#xA;Do symbols, which are signs themselves, include only linguistic signs,morphemes?&#xA;What I mean is, can symbols be only linguistic units?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="10918" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T07:21:02.227" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T07:21:02.227" Title="Do symbols include only morphemes?" Tags="&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-18T15:23:38.570" Score="0" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the exact meaning of &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following sentence, what is the scopal relation of negation and quantifier? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how could I know if there is a wide or narrow scope between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;She does not focus on some points&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T10:55:13.417" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T18:49:45.460" Title="Scopal relation of negation and quantifier" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;scope&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15561" CreationDate="2016-01-18T17:05:26.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope. A thumbs up is a symbol, but is not a word or a properly linguistic unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also Rene Magritte's famous painting &quot;The Treachery of Images&quot;. This painting makes salient the fact that a drawing of a pipe is not a pipe itself, but rather symbolic of the pipe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T17:05:26.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15559" CreationDate="2016-01-18T17:10:02.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately for your family, kids will typically 'fix' inconsistent language input of their elders! The most famous case of this is a Deaf child named Simon, who almost exclusively learned ASL from his parents who were late learners of ASL themselves, and hence didn't quite have native command of the language. While his parents inconsistently used ASL morphology, Simon regularized this input, which is to say he correctly used the ASL morphology at levels equal to children exposed to native signers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people../newport/pdf/Singleton_Newport.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people../newport/pdf/Singleton_Newport.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T17:10:02.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15547" CreationDate="2016-01-18T18:34:36.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your stated goal is to compare someone's actual pronunciation with some standard pronunciation, you should use square brackets, to indicate that you are talking about actually pronounced sounds. It does not matter whether the level of detail is narrow or broad; square brackets are for &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;, slash brackets are for &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use slash brackets, you are asserting that what you write is a phonemic representation of speech, which should represent all (and only) the sounds that you believe to be contrastive sound categories in the talker's or listener's mental representation of the language (phonemes are abstract constructs, and are never spoken or heard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use your example, if you write &lt;code&gt;/hɛː san was/&lt;/code&gt; then you are asserting that the vowels in the second and third words are identical in the speaker's mental representation. That may or may not be the case; e.g., they could be different phonemes that have a partially overlapping distribution for this speaker, such that in this particular sentence they came out sounding very similar to you. Or, they could be totally non-overlapping distributions, but each of their sounds happens to overlap with different parts of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; distribution for the phoneme you represent as &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;, so you classify them as the same sound, even though the speaker thinks they are producing two different sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2016-01-18T22:37:11.443" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T22:37:11.443" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15561" CreationDate="2016-01-18T20:03:59.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, regarding the question as you frame it in the title, not all symbols are morphemes. Some symbols (linguistic ones) are sounds (which can be &quot;phones&quot; or &quot;phonemes&quot;, if you believe in the distinction). Others are structural categories, such as &quot;S&quot;, &quot;Determiner&quot;, &quot;Stem&quot;, &quot;Place&quot;. Second, a symbol is conventionally associated to its referent, not its meaning. Saying that a sign is associated with its meaning is an example of homunculus-theorizing (Cartesian representationalism), which adds an extra step in relating symbols and the real world. Rather than saying that &quot;dog&quot; is associated with the meaning DOG and the meaning DOG is associated with the mental concept of dogs, you can simply say that &quot;dog&quot; is associated with a particular mental concept (which in English is realized as &quot;dog&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages (for example Ancient Greek), roots are not words – inflectional material is required to form a word. Roots &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; morphemes; roots &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; symbols. Therefore, it is not the case that all symbols are words (thus &quot;no&quot; to &quot;can symbols be only words?&quot;). Symbols do not include just morphemes, they also include phonemes such as the three phonemes (symbols) in /dɔg/. Numerous symbols, such as &quot;stem&quot;, are composed of multiple morphemes, so if you're asking whether a symbol is coextensive with the morpheme, it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T20:03:59.593" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15559" CreationDate="2016-01-18T21:49:36.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends. Your child can only learn what she gets from the input. So, if you consistently say 'goed' instead of 'went' or drop the third person singular endings on verbs ('she run'), that's what your daughter will learn to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no input is perfect (even from native speakers), so if you make some 'errors', your daughter is likely to make the correct generalizations anyway. But there are aspects of English usage/grammar - e.g. tenses or articles - where non-native input may result in acquiring non-standard usage patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you are also unlikely to limit her input to just your speech. From very early on (18 months or so), it would make sense to start showing her English-language videos for children, so she should get sufficient input there, even if she's not exposed to other speakers in person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you should also be aware that this approach is not always successful. See this recent blog post looking at research on the topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201504/one-person-one-language-and-bilingual-children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201504/one-person-one-language-and-bilingual-children&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T21:49:36.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15532" CreationDate="2016-01-19T08:08:28.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no precise definition of dialect (or language for that matter). All you need to know is that there are systematic differences in pronunciation, morphology, syntax and lexicon between the English used in the United States and United Kingdom. Further, there are regional and contextual differences within each of these regions. So a New Yorker will speak differently from somebody from Minnesota. But both will speak differently if their job is to be a TV commentator. The same happens within the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The regional differences are often called dialects and the contextual differences are called registers but it's rarely clear what the boundaries are. All you need to know is that there are differences along these two axes and know what they are. The labels don't add anything to that knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your last question. We can say that British and American English are two different dialects when it comes to the standard (the sort of language heard by the news readers). But when it comes to the way people speak in the streets, there are no British English and American English but rather many dialects of English spoken within the US and the UK. For instance, some dialects spoken in the US may be closer to some dialects spoken in the UK than the US standard in some aspects of their pronunciation or grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T08:08:28.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-19T08:44:47.963" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a colloquial English corpus that has time expressions marked in it. I don't need the time expressions to be coded in any special way, just that they be marked so I can find them. All of the corpora &lt;a href=&quot;http://timexportal.wikidot.com/corpora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;I've found&lt;/a&gt; are from news or broadcasting, and there's a big difference between the two for time expressions. I'm look for more complicated time expressions like &quot;we meet every other Tuesday&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T15:08:03.373" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T15:08:03.373" Title="colloquial English corpus with time expressions" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15562" CreationDate="2016-01-19T20:05:04.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To take the questions in order, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scope&lt;/em&gt; comes originally from a Greek word &lt;em&gt;skopoi&lt;/em&gt;, 'a target to aim at'. The Greek root &lt;em&gt;skop-&lt;/em&gt; is an ablaut variant of the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CE%AD%CF%80%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B9#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;σκέπτομαι &lt;em&gt;skeptomai&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; '(I) look at/examine/consider/think' (that's where both &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;skeptic&lt;/em&gt; come from). &#xA;The earliest senses of &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; in the OED have that same meaning -- a mark or target to aim at.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;logic&lt;/a&gt;, semantics, and syntax, however, &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; has no exact meaning, except in a&lt;br&gt;&#xA;formal system in which such matters can be stated precisely, like Lambda Calculus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That is to say, &#xA;logical &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Metaphors.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;, and a visual metaphor at that. The question is which operator can &quot;see&quot; the other one. Generally the metaphor talks about one Operator (&lt;code&gt;Modal, Neg,&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Quantifier&lt;/code&gt;) being &quot;outside the scope&quot; of another, or of one being &quot;higher&quot; than the other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that whichever operator is &quot;higher&quot; or &quot;outside&quot; can &quot;see&quot; the &quot;lower&quot; or &quot;inside&quot; one,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;so linear logical notation is suitable for describing the inevitable ambiguity of multiple operators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;She does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; focus on &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; points&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;as between&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;¬&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;(∃x: Point (x)) Focus (She, x)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'There are no points that she focusses on'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(∃x: Point (x))&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;¬&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;(Focus (She, x)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'There are points that she doesn't focus on'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/CELS-Negation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;negative operator &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the quantificational operator &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; have two possible scopal relationships. &#xA;That is to say, the sentence can have either meaning. It's called a scope ambiguity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it happens because, while it's always possible to be unambiguous, the rules of syntax&lt;br&gt;&#xA;aren't the same as the rules of logic, so the &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;Neg&lt;/code&gt; don't always wind up in the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;right order, because of syntax. In speech, intonation would &#xA;disambiguate them;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but in writing, there's no intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the only way you (i.e, an addressee) can tell whether &lt;code&gt;Q-Neg&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Neg-Q&lt;/code&gt; order is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;intended in a sentence like the example is to figure it out in context. Because it's ambiguous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T20:10:13.257" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T20:10:13.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-19T21:08:12.860" Score="2" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a writing system that mainly uses anything other than space as the word boundary? Except languages with practically no word boundaries (e.g. Japanese) and programming languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to look into a language where I can write something like &quot;Once.upon.a.time&quot; almost for a whole book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T10:56:55.820" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T10:56:55.820" Title="Is there a writing system whose word boundary is a non-space character?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-19T21:21:41.387" Score="1" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know what are some extremes. My mother tongue is Japanese, and it's quite less tense-sensitive compared to English since it doesn't have the past-perfect. But I wonder what some even less tense-sensitive languages are like. And I'm also curious what kind of other tenses does some languages that are even more tense-sensitive than the English ones.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="11229" LastEditDate="2016-01-19T22:51:32.910" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T22:51:32.910" Title="What are some languages that are least/most tense-sensitive?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-21T09:15:16.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2016-01-19T21:49:02.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ge'ez script (used for Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre and Ge'ez) there is a word separator that looks like a colon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T21:49:02.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15575" CreationDate="2016-01-19T22:48:22.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English only has two tenses, not unlike Japanese; but definitely unlike Japanese, it is only now in the process of developing an aspect system from  idioms and auxiliary constructions. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Japanese verbal morphology&lt;/a&gt; is largely a matter of aspects, and English doesn't have an aspectual system anywhere near as neatly-organized as Japanese does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese is SOV, English is SVO; both are inflected, but not too much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another kind of language with no tenses but a very full aspect system is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Lushootseed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt;, which is polysynthetic and verb-initial. But it's not VSO, because it doesn't allow full noun NPs of both Subject and Direct Object in the same sentence. If both are referenced, one must be a pronoun,  usually expressed by inflecting the root.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T22:48:22.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-20T07:55:34.853" Score="1" ViewCount="2652" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/linguistic%20unit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocabulary.com&lt;/a&gt; a linguistic unit is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;one of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can a linguistic unit be a letter, a syllable, a word or a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is the linguistic message something concrete, for example a text, or is it something conceptual, that is a meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T12:58:40.270" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T12:58:40.270" Title="Is a letter a linguistic unit?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15574" CreationDate="2016-01-20T08:52:35.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Runic inscription we find a special word separator looking like ⁝&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T08:52:35.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-20T11:44:38.260" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for artificial language except programming languages? Non-natural languages for human-to-human communication? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T05:31:35.810" Title="Is there a word for artificial language except programming languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15547" CreationDate="2016-01-20T15:38:23.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Original Poster is going to have a massive problem here, brackets or no brackets. When we use slanty brackets, we use language-specific symbols to represent different phonemes. For example, the convention for transcribing the STRUT vowel in RP English is to use the upturned 'v': /ʌ/. This symbol does not relate in any meaningful way to the position of the notional sound on the vowel quadrilateral used on the international IPA chart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Poster feels that a particular word produced uses a different sound from the one we would expect from the dictionary transcription, then, if they use slanty brackets, they are going to have to choose a different English-specific IPA symbol to represent that sound. It is highly unlikely that the sound produced by the speaker will neatly fit into the same slot as a different English phoneme. So for example, if they are saying /bed/ but with a very open /e/, the poster might decide to use an /æ/ instead. But of course, this sound is very unlikely to actually be more like a typical /æ/ than an /e/. So using an /æ/ here is not really appropriate. Apart from anything else the speaker clearly &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be using their own allophone of /e/, not /æ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that would seem to suggest that we need to use square brackets so that we can use an appropriate symbol from the international IPA set to describe the sound. But then the problem is that we can no longer use the remaining set of symbols chosen specifically for the transciption of English. The reason for this is that the strut vowel will no longer be able to be transcribed using /ʌ/, because the proper symbol for this when using the international set of symbols is going to be [ɐ], not [ʌ]. Similarly nearly all the other vowel symbols are going to have to change or have some diacritic added. This means that it will be very difficult to compare the output with what is given by the dictionary. Apart from this  we can never be certain what target sound the dictionary transcription is intending anyway - because their transcription was from the set of English specific symbols relating to phonemes, not necessarily a clearly identified sound on the IPA vowel quadrilateral!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this second method might be better, it will take a lot more time and thought on the part of the Original Poster, and will necessarily be flawed to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T16:20:47.313" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T16:20:47.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-20T16:28:28.910" Score="4" ViewCount="830" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we perceive something, we tend to categorize it. For example, when we hear the word puppy, we think of the concept of dogs and then the conceptual category of animals. Is it acceptable to claim that linguistic units are organized in conceptual categories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:30:42.237" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:30:42.237" Title="Are linguistic units organized in conceptual categories?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15613" CreationDate="2016-01-20T16:58:36.533" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm doing an assignment on the semantics of the word 'over'. Everyone in our semantics class was asked by the lecturer to pick a piece of paper out of a hat, he then said that we were required to write a 2500 word essay on the semantics of the word we had received. As such everyone in the class has received different words and no ones sources would benefit each other as there might be little to no relevance in the semantic or syntactic determination of eithers word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping someone on this site might be able to point me in the right direction of where I could find decent sources to aid me in this assignment. Any relevant material would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I have started the essay and at the moment I am mainly discussing the lexical ambiguity of 'over' and how that depending on what part of speech it falls under, determines its semantic e.g. noun, preposition, adverb etc... although I'd prefer to have some reference material that would further better my essay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11192" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T07:12:23.990" Title="References and sources to help me explain the semantics of the word 'over'" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15587" CreationDate="2016-01-20T17:32:00.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Over' is a preposition meaning that the thing (or event) is above the referent.  It can be used adverbially, as in 'go over the bridge', and it can have idiomatic nuance, as in 'look over the paper' (which means to look at the paper, while your head is over it), or 'turn the paper over' (which means to lift the paper and place its obverse side above the place where the paper was).  It is 'overloaded' (loaded with more than one use) for non-spacial uses:  In math, it means that a number is greater than another, (although it still has a spacial meaning with writing one number above another in a fraction).  With time, 'over' (without a referent) means 'ended'.  In betting, the noun 'over' means [the thing that is] greater than (a math usage again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T20:21:55.320" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T20:21:55.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15586" CreationDate="2016-01-20T17:39:54.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that memory is more 'semantic' than 'linguistic', but, yes, we store these categories.  The larger sets are 'hypernyms' of the subsets (which are 'hyponyms' of the larger sets).  ex: Fido is a puppy.  Every puppy is a dog.  Every dog is a mammal.  Every mammal is an animal.  Every mammal is a living thing. (Therefore, Fido is a living thing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T17:39:54.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15586" CreationDate="2016-01-20T17:49:56.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. But this sort of mentalism is more empty and useless than it is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I try to explain the meaning of your question by saying it consists of the concept of &quot;when&quot;, combined with the concept of &quot;we&quot;, combined with the concept of &quot;perceive&quot;, and so on, no one will be the wiser about what you've said.  Such an account is useless.  As to whether it's correct, well, who knows?  Who cares?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you give such an account supplemented with an explicit version of &quot;combine with&quot;, so that you can tell exactly when concepts can combine to give a sensible result, you get the sort of &quot;semantic&quot; theory called Montague Grammar, or Montague Semantics (after Richard Montague who pioneered such theories), and then opinions will differ about whether you're accomplishing anything beyond giving a syntax.  I doubt it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T17:49:56.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15580" CreationDate="2016-01-20T17:59:51.167" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A unit of voice is an 'allophone' (a sound distinct from other allophones).  A unit of linguistics is a 'phoneme' (a signal to the muscles, distinct from other phonemes).  Written language evolved to convey the spoken language without sound, but that does not require that the two are correlated (look at Chinese).  Languages like English do have correlation between letters and phonemes, but it is not one-to-one (especially for vowels).  Because we have things like silent 'e' that affect other vowel groups, it is hard to imagine 'units' unless you paraphrase each syllable into a consonantal onset and a vowel [+ consonant] rime. (ex: site = 's'+'i_e'+'t')   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T17:59:51.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15586" CreationDate="2016-01-20T18:15:19.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that it is wrong to say that when we hear the word puppy, we think of the concept of dogs and then we think of the concept animal. That suggests a simple stimulus-response model of word recognition which I would say is wrong. Let's suppose that we have successfully heard &quot;puppy&quot; (not &quot;guppy&quot;, &quot;puffy&quot;, &quot;putty&quot;), then we can access whatever / wherever the mental concept &quot;puppy&quot; is, that is, we will have identified an intended concept. We may or not may not &quot;think of&quot; a specific puppy. Perhaps when you say &quot;think of&quot;, you mean &quot;access&quot;. We may or may not &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; access hierarchically related concepts like &quot;dog&quot;, &quot;mammal&quot;, &quot;animal&quot;, &quot;happiness&quot;, &quot;paper towel&quot; and so on. With this concept accessed, we have access to whatever other facts we know are also true of the referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that linguistic units are organized in conceptual categories implies that the categories exist independent of their symbolic labels, thus the categories &quot;green&quot;, &quot;blue&quot; and &quot;grue&quot; (which is the unification of &quot;green&quot; and &quot;blue&quot;) exist, even if your language does not have any of these categories. Presumably you see the problem with that. It would, however, be correct to say that when a concept is formed, it needs some (linguistic) label so that you can use the concept. From the standpoint of acquisition, it is most likely that a person will first learn a word and then learn what it refers to, but adults especially can know of real-world things without knowing what they are called (for example &quot;soffit&quot;). In that intermediate period, you can have an awareness that there are these things on / in houses, but you don't know the word &quot;soffit&quot;. In that case, I would conclude that you have an incomplete concept, lacking the label that allows you to exploit the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the other sides of the coin is the question whether each linguistic unit does represent a conceptual category. It is easy to see that that is not always so, for example with &quot;dog&quot;. That refers to at least three distinct concepts. One is a concept of action, of &quot;pestering&quot;. One refers to a species of canid; and one refers to a thing that blocks movement (e.g. &quot;feed dogs&quot; on a sewing machine).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T18:15:19.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15586" CreationDate="2016-01-20T18:18:12.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, there are &lt;strong&gt;many patterns of conceptual organization evident in language&lt;/strong&gt;.It shows up in all sorts of psycholinguistic effects such as priming as well as in the way language structures are related to one another. One such pattern is represented in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; dictionary relating synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms in what they call synsets. There is also a pattern of conceptual organization evident in grammar - for instance verbs and nouns differentiate between thing-like and action/state-like concepts. Cases often are used in related areas - e.g. in Czech accusative denotes directionality when not used as direct object. Passive constructions are related to active constructions through the concept of agent-patient, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key thing here is that we're &lt;strong&gt;not dealing with a single hierarchical structure&lt;/strong&gt; (something like a Linnean taxonomy). Parts of language are related in all sorts of different ways. That's why grammars are so hard to write - you have to choose one pattern of organization. And it's also why it's more efficient to organize a dictionary alphabetically rather than following some sort of conceptual pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem I've hinted at is with &lt;strong&gt;what you consider a unit&lt;/strong&gt;. Construction grammar will think of both 'rules' and 'words' as constructions and consider them as conceptual units whereas more traditional approaches may only think of 'words' as 'units' to which conceptual relationship can be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also many &lt;strong&gt;patterns of regularity in language that are clearly not conceptual&lt;/strong&gt; (or not primarily conceptual). For instance, apart from some subtle symbolism, most phonological relationships are not conceptual. Nor are some things like patterns you only find by analyzing corpora (such as most collocations). Of course, many seeming regularities in language may just be epiphenomenal or their conceptual underpinnings may not present the same way in all speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you also have to be a bit careful about &lt;strong&gt;what you mean by conceptual&lt;/strong&gt;. In the above, I was drawing on ideas I think were best articulated in Lakoff's 'Women, Fire and Dangerous Things', Langacker's 'Cognitive Grammar' and Talmy's 'Cognitive Semantics'. Conceptual in this context means related to or embedded in our broader cognitive system described outside traditional approaches (Lakoff made that argument most cogently in the first 5-6 chapters of his book - the rest is just filling in the gaps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastEditorUserId="2121" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T18:23:25.377" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T18:23:25.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15580" CreationDate="2016-01-20T18:52:28.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;unit&quot; is not a term of linguistics, so you have to draw on an independent epistemology and not specifically linguistics to understand what a &quot;unit&quot; is. I understand a &quot;unit&quot; to be a mental abstraction, abstracted from things that it is like but distinct from. The crow on my porch is an example, one which happens to be constant regardless of label (whether or not I call it &quot;crow&quot;, &quot;corbeau&quot;, &quot;kråke&quot; or &quot;garja&quot;). A linguistic unit is a specific kind of unit, one that has to do with language. Syllables, words, phonemes, letters, sentences are all units which are about language, thus linguistic units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is congruent with the vocabulary definition you give. But linguistic units are not all &quot;messages&quot; – that definition commits the fallacy of &quot;the primacy of messages&quot;. You can use language to transmit messages, just as you can use paint to convey emotions, but the elements of paint (dirt of various types, lipids, etc.) are not units that emotions can be analyzed into. A &quot;message&quot; is not something concrete, indeed it is so open-ended that linguists can never be sure what others mean by &quot;message&quot;. It is sometimes seen as being &quot;communicative intent&quot;, but that suggests that the intent is always to communicate and never to obfuscate. Indeed, a person can use linguistic units without have any awareness or &quot;intent&quot;, when their mental capacity is suitably diminished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T18:52:28.723" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15502" CreationDate="2016-01-20T19:05:59.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If 'stative' is a binary term, then the only stative verb is 'to be'.  Lack of progression has nothing to do with it (states are not required to be permanent).  Verbs like 'seem' are control verbs (He seems [to be] odd.)  If you want to differentiate events with obvious action (He kissed her) from events with hidden action (He loved her; [the network in his brain formed the pattern that expressed love]), then 'stative' is a weak term for the latter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T19:05:59.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15441" CreationDate="2016-01-20T19:29:32.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is recursive in that the topic of the adverbial ('singing in the cage') is {technically} the verb 'be' ('is mine'), rather than the main topic (1 bird [that is beautiful]). 'in the cage' is also adverbial to 'singing', although the bird has to be at the same location.  The depths would be: 0: one bird; 1: be beautiful; 1: be mine; 2: [be] singing; 3: in one cage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T19:29:32.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15393" CreationDate="2016-01-20T20:37:47.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any elastic parts of the vocal apparatus that are not symmetrically perpendicular to the airflow will vibrate differently when they point upstream than when they point downstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T20:37:47.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15441" CreationDate="2016-01-20T20:41:06.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a simple chain of independent sentences is recursion. An interesting case of nesting recursion which seems not add to complexity is &quot;This is the cat that chased the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recursion is not really a property of syntactic constructions, but rather of grammars.  The simple chaining construction you're asking about would commonly be called &quot;recursive&quot; because in a phrase structure grammar it would be described with a recursive rule.  However, there is another device in common use, the regular expression, that can describe that pattern with an asterisk operator instead of using recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-01-20T20:56:29.393" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T20:56:29.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15352" CreationDate="2016-01-20T20:51:22.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'general rule' might be that certain phonemes are difficult to say in sequence, so one either swaps them (metathesis) or inserts another (typically a vowel, epenthesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T20:51:22.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15604" CreationDate="2016-01-20T21:20:14.187" Score="1" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Preface: I question this here because the author is a full-time linguist.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://brianbuccola.com/the-semantics-of-unless/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The semantics of &quot;unless&quot;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://brianbuccola.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian Buccola&lt;/a&gt; BA (Classics, Mathematics) PhD (Linguistics)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bonus question: If “unless” is semantically equivalent to logical “or”, then is the added inference associated with “unless”, which turns it into exclusive “or”, derived in the same way as the inference that, under normal circumstances, makes “or” be interpreted exclusively? Or is it just a coincidence that these two expressions, which both share a truth table with ∨ but differ in that one is a subordinator and the other a coordinator, both happen to be regularly strengthened into an exclusive interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12238/5306&quot;&gt;Still trying to intuit 'unless'&lt;/a&gt;, I pursue the answer to the question. My following example motivates me to conjecture that 'unless' means only the exclusive 'or'. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a rebellious child's refusal to drink anything forces his parents to admonish him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless you hydrate, you die.      Then:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟺ 2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/296675/50720&quot;&gt;On a less or lower condition that&lt;/a&gt; you hydrate, you die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟺ 3. If you do not hydrate, you die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟹ 4. You hydrate or&lt;sub&gt;EXCLUSIVE&lt;/sub&gt; you die. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 4, I omit 'either' for brevity, and the 'or' must be interpreted exclusively; because if 'or' were interpreted inclusively, then 4 misrepresents the parent's Speech Act as informing the child of the  conjunction (that humans can hydrate and die) which is a trivial fact (all hydrated humans are mortal and so must die).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T22:27:58.610" Title="Is 'unless' semantically equivalent to the (English conjunction) exclusive 'or'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15329" CreationDate="2016-01-20T21:22:51.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of language is to move memories from one brain to another.  To be efficient, nothing that is already known by both brains should be transmitted.  Besides entire (redundant) clauses, individual words may be elided if the result is not ambiguous (if there is only one part-of-speech that makes sense and that part has an agreed-on null component for that part).  Fragmentary questions are appended to the previous statement ([Mary did eat], when)  Fragmentary answers replace the query pronoun in the question ([Mary did eat] cake), fragmentary statements are demonstrative (A bird [is there]), and all imperatives are fragmentary predicates ([You shall] stop). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T21:22:51.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15317" CreationDate="2016-01-20T22:00:51.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Determiners:: Logical quantifiers: some, few, more, most, many, much, each, every, any, all.  Cardinal quantifiers: 0(no), 1(a[n]), 2 ...  Indexical determiners: the, both, [n]either, next, previous, prior, last.  Ordinals: 1st, 2nd ...  You also bracketed the plural 's', which quantifies 'any', 'some' and 'the'. Your other brackets mark coordinating conjunctions: and, [n]or, but.  You should then consider subordinate conjunctions: if, as, because, so, before, after, when, while, unless ...; but that opens the door to many adverbials: where, how, during ...  I think you go too far now with bracketing associative prepositions (with, of ...), collection related nouns (group, member ...) and collection related verbs (consist, [have]...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:00:51.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15601" CreationDate="2016-01-20T22:38:20.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example #4 does NOT actually have an exclusive or.  That would mean that it was impossible that you could both hydrate and die.  #4 has the same truth table as #1 and #3, which contain a 'logical or' (~p v q) {watch out for ~~, since p = ~hydrate}.  English 'or' is only exclusive when only one premise is possible:  'You hydrate or you don't hydrate.' or 'I saw a bird or a bat [which is a non-bird].'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2016-01-27T22:27:58.610" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T22:27:58.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15317" CreationDate="2016-01-20T22:40:22.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't exactly know what your experience with data structures and programming is, but logical connectives as you know them are probably what you know as binary operators in logic and mathematics. As the name implies, you need two elements and some operation or relation can be shown by connectives/symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I think you can find useful information in for example Chapter 10 of the book &quot;Semantics&quot; by John Saeed. It is the book I had for my Semantics 1 course. I trust there are more books out there that discuss the same problems, but currently I do not know many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are trying is not exactly an attempt at something new and the branch that deals with these problems is, amongst others, predicate logic (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhodKMPwShc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhodKMPwShc&lt;/a&gt; : &quot;SEM122 - Predicate Logic I&quot;). However, there are numerous problems with your example sentence. There is for example not a connective for &quot;a&quot;. In predicate logic this is dealt with by stating sets and assigning predicates to constants (entities) within models. For example in some model M: &quot;there is an x and x is a fish and x is a paraphyletic entity&quot;, etc. As you can see, this can only be done by a very dynamic program, because at any point you will have to denote new sets. It is very strong, but a very heinous job as well. And this is only for declarative sentences such as your example sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you were looking for was a list of connectives and I shortly discussed why there is no such list. I am not trying to discourage you, but it is not an easy task. Above is just a suggestion for an approach to solve the problem you needed the list for in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11321" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:40:22.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15108" CreationDate="2016-01-20T22:50:04.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;They probably want i: voiced (negative onset time), ii: tenuis (voiceless unaspirated, or no  onset time), iii: aspirated (voiceless aspirated, or positive onset time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T22:50:04.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-21T04:14:52.393" Score="4" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to consider a POS category of a word as semantic aspect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume we have unknown word. &#xA;But when we know part-of-speech it can give us a  hint about semantic meaning. Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:00:33.670" Title="Can syntax be part of semantics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-21T05:50:55.787" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natural languages necessarily have certain inherent ambiguity. If there were a natural language without inherent ambiguity, then one could have easily adopted such a natural language and used it as a programming language, which would have obviated the need for having to invent a programming language and learning it -- at least for those people who speak the ambiguity-free language. But I've never heard that any ethnic group used their own natural language as a programming language. Which proves the proposition set forth at the outset of this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'd like to focus on inherent &lt;strong&gt;syntactic&lt;/strong&gt; ambiguity in natural languages. I was wondering if there is a grammar of syntax that embraces this inherent syntactic ambiguity as an integral part of the grammar. Two most famous grammars that I know of are Constituency Grammar and Dependency Grammar. As far as I know, however, neither of these grammars systematically describes inherent syntactic ambiguity in a natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &quot;I have a bad feeling about this&quot;, &quot;about this&quot; can be viewed as a complement of either &quot;have&quot; or &quot;feeling&quot;. Semantically, it doesn't really matter how it is viewed. But syntactically it has to be determined either way. Otherwise, you wouldn't even be able to draw a definite tree diagram out of this sentence, whether according to Constituency Grammar or Dependency Grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm no linguist, so I'm not aware of how either of these grammars deals with such syntactic ambiguity or indeterminacy, or even whether either actually does deal with it. So, anyone well aware of these grammars could enlighten me on the 'how' and/or the 'whether' question(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If neither deals with such syntactic ambiguity, is there any new approach out there that embraces such syntactic ambiguity and allows you to draw a single tree diagram out of a sentence having syntactic ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel the need to clarify what I mean by &quot;inherent syntactic ambiguity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;inherent syntactic ambiguity&quot; I mean the kind of ambiguity that has a single unambiguous interpretation in terms of semantics and pragmatics that still has ambiguity in terms of syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, a sentence with &quot;inherent syntactic ambiguity&quot; necessarily leads to two or more different tree diagrams under either Constituency or Dependency scheme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, such ambiguity is &quot;inherent&quot; in the sense that no additional context could possibly disambiguate the syntactic ambiguity, as shown in the above &quot;I have a bad feeling about this&quot; example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2016-01-22T00:51:15.453" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T00:51:15.453" Title="Is there a grammar of syntax that takes into account inherent syntactic ambiguity in natural languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15587" CreationDate="2016-01-21T15:21:34.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Claudia Brugman, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=yIFJAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=editions:ISBN0824051777&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Story of&lt;/em&gt; Over&lt;/a&gt;. Very comprehensive, but unfortunately hard to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Over&lt;/em&gt; is extremely ambiguous lexically, and it doesn't point at any one simple &quot;meaning&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The gate is over the hill.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The helicopter is over the hill.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The cop pulled the driver over.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The cop pulled the chair over.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The cop pushed the chair over.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T15:21:34.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-21T18:05:48.447" Score="6" ViewCount="1673" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are sound changes regular now or not? I mean it seems to me that it's accepted that sound change is pretty regular, because of how sound changes are treated in etymology/historical linguistics. I even read that some argued that a certain reconstructed word isn't the ancestor of another certain word, because a certain sound can't be explained through the known/accepted sound changes. I don't know which word though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However at the same time it seems that some English words have rather irregular sound changes. E.g. 'flood', 'blood' vs 'good', 'hood', 'foot', 'book' vs 'door', 'floor' vs 'food', 'loose'. All of them had a /o:/ as the vowel, IIRC, but now they have /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /ɔ(:)/ and /u(:)/, respectively. There are also example like 'steak', 'break' vs 'bread', 'dead', though I don't know whether their original vowels were the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be explained, and why are sound changes so important in historical linguistics if they can be somewhat irregular? I mean the difference between the expected and the already existing reconstructed form were rather minimal, IIRC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The 'now' in the first sentence can be ignored. I just used it as kind of intensifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11246" LastEditorUserId="2896" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T21:51:41.347" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T23:56:16.780" Title="Are sound changes regular?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="964" CreationDate="2016-01-21T18:58:05.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The UG proposed by Chomsky has to be one that is consistent with transformational grammar, because Chomsky proposed TG.  Chomsky does not like to be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But TG is wrong -- there are no transformations.  Once we give up on transformations, we can see that the answer is at hand.  There is a UG, which was originally proposed by Chomsky himself, and that is CFG (context free phrase structure grammar).  The basic problem with Chomsky's latter day attempts to find a satisfactory UG theory is that he is looking for one that is consistent with some form of TG.  Such a UG theory will never be found, not because the UG hypothesis is wrong, but because there are no transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, then, if the UG problem was solved over 50 years ago, why are we still suffering over whether there is a UG theory?  It's because there are some problems with CFG to get past.  I think they're all soluble, but it takes some work.  Here's a list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Describing constructions by appealing to movement of constituents is part of traditional grammar.  How can there not be movement?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems evident that sometimes word choice is not independent of context, so CFG is doomed from the outset, because it is context free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In his profoundly influential classic &lt;strong&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/strong&gt;, Chomsky introduced CFG only to knock it down.  He offered there several empirical arguments that natural languages cannot be described by CFGs.  Other such evidence has been found since, notably the cross-serial constructions investigated by Stuart Shieber.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once Gerald Gazdar had shown how it was possible to get past the difficulty of describing apparent movement in a CFG, the descriptive grammar of English that emerged from applying the theory, GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar), had too many rules and categories.  It seemed obvious that mere humans could not cope with the tremendous complexity of detail that seemed necessary to describe a natural language within the confines of CFG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T18:58:05.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15609" CreationDate="2016-01-21T19:52:39.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;strong&gt;cognitive and construction grammars&lt;/strong&gt; do take ambiguity into account. However, they have to give up a lot of the formal properties of traditional constituency and dependency grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It resolves the particular ambiguities you mention by not having a notion of things like constituents, dependents or complements. It simply treats all surface constructions as units that can be blended together and it is that blending that resolves ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I say, 'She hit the man with a bottle.' I have certain presuppositional knowledge as well as context to disambiguate (all part of the blend). This means that the context sets up certain mental spaces that will disambiguate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She was bothered by a man in a bar. So she hit the man with a bottle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two men were approaching threateningly each holding a potential blunt instrument. The one holding a plate looked less dangerous. So she hit the man with a bottle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no notion of semantics vs. pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this does not solve the problems of something like machine translation where you still have to find a way of 'understanding' the context. But you can build a semantic model, that makes this approach perfectly plausible. However, it won't look very much like the sort of formal grammars you have in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, constituency and dependency are not 'grammars' per se but rather approaches to syntax. They each cover many 'grammars' that use specific notation and make specific assumptions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth pointing out that conversation analysis has identified a number of patterns in language used to disambiguate - so called &lt;strong&gt;conversation repair&lt;/strong&gt;. Ultimately, context is not always enough. So you may get something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hold on, she hit the guy holding a bottle, or she took a bottle and hit a guy with it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T19:52:39.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2016-01-21T20:05:48.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer would be, &lt;strong&gt;Definitely, Yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire science of Etymology and Historical Linguistics is based on this very principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some linguists even consider the principle of regular changes to be a key, &lt;strong&gt;fundamental discovery&lt;/strong&gt; of 19th century's Historical Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take a modern word and you need to know its origin, you always trace an &lt;em&gt;regular, unbreakable chain of transitions&lt;/em&gt; this word underwent. But you can scientifically prove these transitions only if &lt;strong&gt;the whole set of words&lt;/strong&gt; having a certain sound &lt;strong&gt;underwent exactly the same change&lt;/strong&gt;, not only this single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each phoneme transition is considered uniform (regular) &lt;em&gt;in a certain language on a certain period of time&lt;/em&gt;. These changes, being combined, can drive you straight to the etymological origin of a certain word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, you are curious to know how Latin &lt;code&gt;[faktum]&lt;/code&gt; became modern French &lt;code&gt;[fɛ]&lt;/code&gt;. You then build the following chain of transitions. Note, each transition has occurred not just in &lt;code&gt;[faktum]&lt;/code&gt;, but in entire set of words having corresponding phonemes (or combinations of phonemes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[faktum]&lt;/code&gt; — original word;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[faktu]&lt;/code&gt; — losing trailing &lt;code&gt;[m]&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fak'tu]&lt;/code&gt; — in French territories of Latin, &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; weakens (almost palatalized, but not yet);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fajtu]&lt;/code&gt; — yet further palatalization;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fa͡itu]&lt;/code&gt; — &lt;code&gt;[aj]&lt;/code&gt; transition into a diphthong &lt;code&gt;[a͡i]&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fa͡it]&lt;/code&gt; — fall of trailing vowel (probably, due to being unstressed/weakening);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fɛt]&lt;/code&gt; — simplification of a diphthong into a simple vowel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fɛ]&lt;/code&gt; — losing trailing &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt;, modern French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, all changes happened not with &lt;code&gt;[faktum]&lt;/code&gt; only, but with entire set of words having corresponding changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using these fundamental laws, we can trace etymology of words that don't look similar at all. For instance, the word, &lt;em&gt;&quot;two&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in Ukrainian is &lt;code&gt;[dva]&lt;/code&gt;, while in Armenian it is &lt;code&gt;[erku]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Paradoxically, these two words are phonetically equivalent&lt;/strong&gt;, to within a set of regular transitions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For both of them, we are able to trace them &lt;em&gt;step-by-step&lt;/em&gt; back to same PIE root, because every single transition in both languages happened not with this single word, but with entire sets of words per each transition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change#Principles_of_sound_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Sound Change&lt;/a&gt; defines several core principles of these changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sound change is exceptionless&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, it is &lt;strong&gt;regular&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sound change has no memory&lt;/em&gt; — just like in your examples, if words obtained &lt;code&gt;[u:]&lt;/code&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;good&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;book&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, they will undergo &lt;strong&gt;further changes&lt;/strong&gt; together, even if their history was completely different;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sound change ignores grammar&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, grammar follows them. This is why we see many words with &lt;strong&gt;irregular grammar&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;&quot;blood&quot;&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;&quot;book&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in English, weak double consonants in Ukrainian, and so forth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, back to the question. To see why exactly &lt;em&gt;&quot;blood&quot;&lt;/em&gt; became different to &lt;em&gt;&quot;book&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, trace the chains of sound transitions for both words. Sooner or later you'll find a fundamental difference that caused these words to have different phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T20:05:48.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15608" CreationDate="2016-01-21T20:06:00.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of parts of speech is an uneasy mixture of semantic and formal properties. So nouns and verbs can be identified largely semantically with some important reference to formal properties whereas things like prepositions are defined purely formally. That's why they are not a very good foundational category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you cannot just say something like 'nouns' are things and 'verbs' are actions, but it's actually not a bad place to start. They also have different formal properties (more in some languages than others) but when you try to look at a language to see which formal properties map to which part of speech, you start with the semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I have a pattern like 'X(N) Verbed a Y(N) with a Z(N)', I can make certain assumptions about the meanings of the blanks knowing what part of speech they are as well as how they are typically used in a pattern like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps. It would be useful if you could clarify a bit more what you're trying to achieve by your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T20:06:00.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2016-01-21T21:46:29.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that phonemic sound changes are completely regular; but the sense in which they are regular has to be carefully described.  Individual words (or, I should probably say &quot;morphemes&quot;) can always be exceptional, just because we humans have enough phonetic facility to say specific words in lots of ways, as we choose.  An everyday example is /bax/, the German composers, as distinct from /bak/, the type of beer.  Even though /x/ is not a phoneme of English, lots of monolingual English speakers can say [bax], consistently, without assimilating it to [bak].  It's not that hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally, in a phonological account, we can assign the [x] -&gt; [k] rule, which governs the English phoneme system, to those rules that obey Kiparsky's &quot;derived environments&quot; constraint.  Such rules apply only in derived environements -- that is, when they become applicable by either the concatenation of lexical items or by the application of some phonological rule.  In my view, this is not exceptional behavior, because all phonemic rules are like this.  In order to pronounce a form that does not conform to the phoneme system of your language, all you have to do is to memorize that special pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the only way a native word can fail to undergo a phonemic sound change is when the old style pronunciation is memorized ad hoc by some speakers, and each new generation of language learners has an opportunity to nativize the form before they have learned the archaic pronunciation from their parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T21:46:29.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2016-01-22T05:30:32.077" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only an amateur in historical linguistics, so my viewpoint is fairly naïve. I'd say: not always, but often enough to make regularity the most important consideration in reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern mainstream historical linguistics, there are several examples where irregular sound changes are accepted. The ones you outlined in English are good attested examples. Some of the least controversial reconstructed examples are found in the Indo-European number systems; the English word &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; and its Germanic cognates are pretty obviously related to words like Latin &lt;em&gt;quattuor&lt;/em&gt;, despite the irregular correspondence of the first consonants; they are reconstructed as deriving from something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/k%CA%B7etw%C3%B3res&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;*kʷetwóres&lt;/a&gt; in Proto-Indo-European. The usual explanation for this irregular &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; is analogy with the &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt; word (In the ancestor of Latin, an opposite, but in this case apparently regular, change of p to kʷ occurred in the word for &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analogy causes &quot;irregular&quot; sound changes in many more places than numeral systems. The most common is probably inflectional paradigms, especially verbal ones. Paradigmatic leveling is a very important factor in reconstructing Germanic verbs, as early alternations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatischer_Wechsel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatischer Wechsel&lt;/a&gt; have been mostly leveled out in the verbs of present-day Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, slightly less clear case is the prefix &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; in Germanic languages; see this question for more information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/15452/5581&quot;&gt;Verner&amp;#39;s Law and &amp;#39;ge-&amp;#39;&lt;/a&gt;. While there is apparently disagreement about the origins of this prefix, note that descent from *kom is not automatically dismissed because of the irregularity (in fact, it appears to be the most common viewpoint). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why it is so important: I don't think I've studied etymology enough to explain this, but having a derivation through regular sound changes is just one (strong) piece of evidence for an etymological connection. Other factors are also important, and have to be weighed against this and each other. If someone dismisses a certain irregular reconstruction, I'd think it means that that the other evidence isn't strong enough to convince that person on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the following posts about regular and irregular sound change useful, from the blog &lt;em&gt;Language Evolution&lt;/em&gt; by the actual historical linguist Piotr Gąsiorowski:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/01/fellow-travellers-regularity-of-sound.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flocking Behaviour: The Regularity of Sound Change&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-little-lambs-whove-gone-astray.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Little Lambs Who Lost Their Way: Lexical Exceptions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T08:09:09.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15624" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15625" CreationDate="2016-01-22T07:07:48.137" Score="-1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;The semantics of ‘empty prepositions’ in French&lt;/em&gt; (1996) by Kemmer and Shyldkrot, as part of &lt;em&gt;Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; edited by Eugene H. Casad.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 359:] Talmy (1974, 1983 and elsewhere) describes the semantics of spatial configurations using the notions of figure and ground.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The figure &#xA;  is an object whose location is being described, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the ground is a &#xA;  second object or location with reference to which the figure is located. &#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 361:] Some examples of clearly meaningful uses of de are given in (5):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]    h. la maison  de [Charlot]          '[Charlie Chaplin]'s house'    [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, it seems that most of the senses of &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; in French are actually static. Specifically, the part/whole relation exemplified in (5f) and &#xA;  g, in which the ground is a whole entity and the figure is some part Of &#xA;  that entity, seems to be central in that almost all of the other senses are &#xA;  relatable to it. [...] With &lt;strong&gt;alienable possession&lt;/strong&gt; as in (5h), the idea of control is generalized &#xA;  to sociophysical control in the form of rights sanctioned by a community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is (5h) &lt;strong&gt;alienable possession&lt;/strong&gt;? What does this mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T09:14:38.453" Title="How does the French preposition 'de' connect to alienable possession?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-24T14:54:24.070" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15624" CreationDate="2016-01-22T09:14:38.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A house is alienable because it does not obligatorily need to be possessed (not by a supernatural entity, if that's what you're thinking), i.e. it can be a house that is not owned by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inalienable possession is the opposite in that an inalienable possession is inherently possessed by someone. For example, an arm is always someone's arm even if it is disembodied or severed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_possession&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_possession&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T09:14:38.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-22T14:48:49.270" Score="3" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of pronounciation, the general French accent is very different from the Italian, Spanish or Romanian ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: many conventional sounds in Romance langauges (i.e. /r/ or /j/) are often absent or used differently in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly differentiates the French accent from other Romance accents, and how has it become so distinct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11334" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T14:48:49.270" Title="Why is the French accent so different from other Romance accents?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-01-23T08:48:48.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-22T17:19:28.087" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: pp 367-368, &lt;em&gt;The semantics of ‘empty prepositions’ in French&lt;/em&gt; (1996) by Kemmer and Shyldkrot, as part of &lt;em&gt;Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; edited by Eugene H. Casad.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.] Although infinitive constructions always &lt;code&gt;involve an intrinisic relation&lt;/code&gt; between the action of the main verb and the action coded by the &#xA;  infinitive, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[2.] only &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; explicitly makes reference to that relationship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, the semantics of &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; make it appropriate to occur in the infinitive &#xA;  construction. However, it will only occur there where some more &#xA;  specific relationship, such as that coded by à, is lacking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[3.] &lt;em&gt;De&lt;/em&gt;, in contrast to à, has a &lt;strong&gt;much more abstract or semantically &quot;bare-bones&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning; it refers solely to an &lt;code&gt;intrinsic relationship&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;of an unspecified type&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;À&lt;/em&gt; makes no overt reference to this relation; its semantic specifications are simply different. Of all the French prepositions, &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;  have semantic specifications that are most compatible with the relation &#xA;  between a main verb and an infinitive; this is why these two are the &#xA;  principal prepositions occurring in this construction, and are syn- &#xA;  chronically and diachronically in competition. We discuss this competition further in Section 5. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To me, 2 and 3 contradict each other.  How (per 2) can &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; explicitly refer to a relationship,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;if (per 3) the &lt;code&gt;intrinsic relationship&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;of an unspecified type&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What special relationship or reference does &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; reveal? I am confused; 2 appears to distinguish &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; from 1's general statement that all infinitive constructions already &lt;code&gt;involve an intrinisic relation&lt;/code&gt;; but then 3 appears to evade specifying semantically this distinction, with vague modifiers such as '&lt;strong&gt;much more abstract or semantically &quot;bare-bones&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;'. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-01-22T17:33:50.630" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T17:33:50.630" Title="What special relationship does 'de' reveal between a main verb and the infinitive?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15630" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15633" CreationDate="2016-01-22T20:20:50.837" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 175, &lt;em&gt;French prepositions à and de&#xA;in infinitival complements, &#xA;A pragma-semantic analysis&lt;/em&gt; (2008) by Lidia Fraczak, as part of &lt;em&gt;Adpositions ; Pragmatic, semantic and syntactic perspectives&lt;/em&gt;  (2008) edited by D Kurzon, S Adler&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Concerning the verbs considered as “presupposing” by Adamczewski (1991), it&#xA;  may be observed that what is presupposed by V1 is not always V2 itself but some&#xA;  stage preceding the one represented by V1. Thus, the verb commencer (“to start”)&#xA;  presupposes the stage “to envisage”, “to plan”; the verb continuer (“to continue”)&#xA;  presupposes the stage “to start”; the verb finir (“to finish”) presupposes the stages&#xA;  “to start” and “to continue”; and the verb oublier (“to forget”) presupposes the&#xA;  stage “to think of ”. This kind of presupposition can be called “lexical” and it may&#xA;  be distinguished from “situational” presupposition, where the use of some V1&#xA;  requires that the fact expressed by V2 be presupposed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some verbs seem to be&#xA;  related to both types of presupposition: for example, oublier in “oublier de + V2”&#xA;  (“to forget to + V2”), on one hand, presupposes the stage “to think of ” and, on the&#xA;  other hand, it will be used in a context where the fact expressed by V2 is presupposed&#xA;  as well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Other verbs, however, while containing “lexical” presupposition, do&#xA;  not require “situational” presupposition. It is the case, for example, with the verb&#xA;  essayer (“to try”) (considered as “presupposing” by Adamczewski), which does&#xA;  presuppose some previous step or stage (“to think of ” or “to plan”) but whose use&#xA;  is not necessarily determined by a presupposition about the fact expressed by V2.&#xA;  Statements like the one below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) &lt;em&gt;Un prisonnier a essayé de s’évader cette nuit de la prison X.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘A prisoner tried to escape from prison X last night.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;do not allow us to consider that the piece of information related to V2 (“to escape...”&#xA;  in this case) is necessarily presupposed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand the (bolded) last sentence above. How does &lt;em&gt;essayer de&lt;/em&gt; NOT presuppose the prisoner's escape? The prisoner must have presupposed the possibility of escape before trying it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T20:48:36.753" Title="« essayé de s’évader » : How does « essayer de » not presuppose « s'evader »?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-01-24T14:54:38.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15632" CreationDate="2016-01-22T20:30:37.957" Score="-2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 177, &lt;em&gt;French prepositions à and de&#xA;in infinitival complements, &#xA;A pragma-semantic analysis&lt;/em&gt; (2008) by Lidia Fraczak, as part of &lt;em&gt;Adpositions ; Pragmatic, semantic and syntactic perspectives&lt;/em&gt;  (2008) edited by D Kurzon, S Adler&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;The use of &lt;em&gt;envisager de&lt;/em&gt; (“to consider”) does not seem, as with &lt;em&gt;essayer de&lt;/em&gt; (“to&#xA;  try”), to be conditioned by a situational presupposition&lt;/strong&gt; either, in spite of the presence&#xA;  of the preposition &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;. In the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) &lt;em&gt;Paul envisage de déménager.&lt;/em&gt;    &#xA;  ‘Paul is considering moving out.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the speaker informs the addressee about Paul’s (possible) plan, without calling on&#xA;  any presupposed information about it, whereas such a presupposition might be&#xA;  necessary with the use of &lt;em&gt;hésiter à&lt;/em&gt; (“to hesitate”):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) &lt;em&gt;Paul hésite à déménager&lt;/em&gt;.    &#xA;  ‘Paul is hesitating about moving out.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand the (bolded) first sentence above. How does &lt;em&gt;envisager de&lt;/em&gt; presuppose nothing situational? Surely, it must presuppose the (mental) ability to envisagement? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T20:47:05.643" Title="How does 'envisager de' presuppose nothing situational, but 'hésiter à' does?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15631" CreationDate="2016-01-22T20:47:05.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take it to mean that (7) implies that the fact that Paul has been thinking about moving out is not new information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T20:47:05.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15630" CreationDate="2016-01-22T20:48:36.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with the previous question, &lt;em&gt;presupposition&lt;/em&gt; (as this writer is using it, but I think it's fairly general) is about what the participants in the conversation know, not about what the participants in the narrative know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T20:48:36.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-23T03:09:26.313" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a beginner in linguistics and don't know many details about the field of study in general, but, for a beginner, is there anything that shows how english and spanish are related through those laws in general? I looked online but found only general charts that largely detailed PIE to english or to early germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T03:09:26.313" Title="How to practically apply Grimm and Verner's law to english and Spanish" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15601" CreationDate="2016-01-23T08:59:39.677" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not XOR as brought out above but logical inclusive OR as I suggest below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Unless A -B.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not (A) implies B.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Not(Not(A)) Or B.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A Or B&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ie hydration Or Death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both can not be false ... It cant be that I don't hydrate and I don't die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ill love to see an example where Unless is strengthened to have an exclusive interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per Oxford online; the word itself means except if.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T10:51:15.497" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T10:51:15.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-23T12:09:02.530" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there available resources that classify the common words (used in daily life for communications) in the form of a hierarchy according to their underlying concepts (possibly also w.r.p.t. synonyms/antonyms), analogous to classification of the special words used in many scientific fields, e.g. in medicine where the diverse illnesses are classified into a hierarchy (that is reflected at a higher level in the courses taught in the universites and in the structures of the hospitals)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4724" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T10:27:49.600" Title="Are there resources that classify the common words according to their underlying concepts?" Tags="&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15637" CreationDate="2016-01-23T20:51:57.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me how fine-grained the resource should be, but for a starter there is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Princeton Wordnet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For specialised domains several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ontologies&lt;/a&gt; exsts (some free, some to be licenced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-25T10:27:49.600" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T10:27:49.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-24T03:42:26.887" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing some software that will need to do a bit of phonetic analysis. Are there any programs, libraries, or software packages that I can extend to my program which are commonly used for real-time phonetic analysis? I'm aware of software like Praat and WaveSurfer, but to my knowledge I don't think I can send/receive data from them in real time. Asides from those, other NLP tool-kits seem to output on the lexical/phrasal level, which is not the level of analysis I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T12:22:28.587" Title="Any suggestions for real-time phonetic analysis packages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15637" CreationDate="2016-01-24T16:29:31.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://babelnet.org/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Babelnet&lt;/a&gt; is has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_sense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;word senses&lt;/a&gt; for words in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelnet.org/search?word=get&amp;amp;lang=EN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[get]&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;GET&lt;/em&gt; the HTTP method  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; n - divorce document&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; n - male's offspring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; v - meaning &lt;em&gt;to understand&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; v - meaning &lt;em&gt;to obtain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes data from Wiktionary, Princeton WordNet et altri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T16:29:31.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20852" CreationDate="2016-01-24T20:38:01.123" Score="5" ViewCount="1872" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Split-INFL hypothesis, the subject of a sentence moves from the specifier of the predicate to SpecTP to satisfy the EPP and lastly to SpecAgrSP to obtain NOM case. Is there any reason to think that an adverbial intervening TP and AgrSP would cause ungrammaticality according to any theory or framework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O1mSm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O1mSm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm formulating an analysis of S-adverbs without positing that they adjoin to X' projections. S-adverbs such as &lt;em&gt;probably, possibly, certainly&lt;/em&gt;, etc. may come immediately after the subject of a sentence, which means that they also precede items that are known to be generated in HeadIP/HeadTP such as auxiliaries, modals, aspectual markers, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He probably did try escargot.&#xA;He possibly will try escargot.&#xA;He certainly must try escargot.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without assuming the Split-INFL hypothesis, the adverb will have to be adjoined to I'. With the Split-INFL hypothesis, things can be kept consistent in terms of where adverbs adjoin to—only maximal XP projections, not X' projections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T09:48:15.727" Title="Split-INFL Hypothesis and X-Bar Theory" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2016-01-25T01:08:47.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about dialectal remerging?  In Dialect A, [Uu] remains [Uu]; in Dialect B, [Uu] goes to [U].  Perhaps the change in Dialect B might be 100% (ie, &quot;regular&quot;).  But later (perhaps generations later), for non-linguistic reasons (economics, social unrest, etc.), massive migration between Dialect A and Dialect B occurs.  This results in a hybrid A/B dialect.  In this hybrid A/B dialect, we wind up with some [Uu]s and some [U]s.  Now, there is no regularity; some of the original [Uu]s are still [Uu]; some of the original [Uu]s are now [U], and there's no &lt;em&gt;phonological&lt;/em&gt; reason for it; rather, sociolinguist forces have chosen here [Uu]; here [U].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am using [U] for a high back, lax, unrounded vowel; and [u] for a high back, tense, rounded vowel; I am glossing the vowel in &quot;food&quot; as [Uu], and the vowel in &quot;foot&quot; as [U].  With this gloss, I imply that &quot;foot&quot; has undergone a loss of the off-glide [u].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T01:08:47.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T17:07:15.710" Score="2" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word in Old Norse vocabulary for Balts (Baltic people)? &#xA;How about regions of nowadays Latvia, particularly for Courland? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T21:13:41.257" Title="Old Norse name for Balts (Baltic people)?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-26T05:28:52.683" Score="1" ViewCount="686" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both Dependency Grammar (DG) and Constituency Grammar (CG) are a tool to describe the syntax of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; natural language in general. The language whose syntax is to be described in DG or CG doesn't have to be a specific language such as English or German or French or Japanese. That means that DG or CG doesn't incorporate a complete set of syntax rules for a particular language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in order to present a theory of English syntax, whether you use DG or CG to describe the syntax, you need to be able to determine a finite number of English syntax rules -- the fewer rules, the better -- that can generate an infinite number of grammatical English sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there such English syntax theories out there? If so, what are they called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to show the difference between &quot;explaining&quot; and &quot;describing&quot; English.&#xA;If you have a plurality of unrelated rules, each dictating how a particular English construction works, such unrelated rules are merely &quot;describing&quot; English. For example, in order to form a declarative in English, the subject comes first in a canonical construction, whereas, in order to form an interrogative, an auxiliary verb (e.g., do, is, can, have, etc.) needs to be fronted before the subject in a canonical construction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, these are two &quot;unrelated rules&quot; for describing a canonical declarative construction and a canonical interrogative construction, respectively. There is no underlying principle whatsoever that explains why these different rules are applied to these different constructions.  And if there is such a principle that can subsume the two apparently unrelated rules, that principle will be &quot;explaining&quot; English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T02:50:26.623" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T19:45:22.890" Title="What are the state-of-the-art English syntax theories there are that can explain all the English syntax phenomena?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15652" CreationDate="2016-01-26T18:02:15.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;word-star&quot; grammar describes all the sentences of every human language with a single rule: S -&gt; word*.  The rule says that a sentence is a string of words.  Of course, you need a lexicon, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-26T18:02:15.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-26T23:04:50.723" Score="1" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me major differences between rhetoric and sociolinguistics? And what theoretical commonalities they share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a rhetoric student, and I'm looking to go to grad school, but I'm not sure whether I should shift to sociolinguistics. My reason for possibly changing is because I read a lot of material on identity, semantics, and discourse, and it seems that all the writers and editors of such material happen to be professors in sociolinguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is sociolinguistics the new rhetoric?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11366" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-27T11:26:25.360" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T17:48:34.593" Title="Sociolinguistics VS Rhetoric" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-27T02:53:21.867" Score="3" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Constituency Grammar (CG), I guess that you would consider &quot;Me&quot; the subject and &quot;too&quot; the predicate. Hence, no problem drawing a tree diagram out of &quot;Me too&quot; in CG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Dependency Grammar (DG) assumes that there's at least a verb, with which it starts the parsing process. Then, how do you draw a DG tree diagram out of a verbless clause such as &quot;Me too&quot; when there's no verb to start the process with? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess a more general question would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most important difference between CG and DG is that CG first divides the sentence into the subject and the predicate, where the latter may or may not contain a verb. So not having a verb is not a problem in CG. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, DG starts with a verb. So, if the sentence lacks the verb, where does DG starts its parsing process with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T06:24:27.970" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T06:24:27.970" Title="How do you draw a Dependency tree diagram of a verbless clause such as &quot;Me too&quot;?" Tags="&lt;constituency&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15655" CreationDate="2016-01-27T06:42:11.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honestly, because you are asking at such a high level--just &quot;dependency grammar&quot; or &quot;constituency grammar&quot;, rather than a specific grammatical theory, this question is likely not really answerable. That being said, I think you have some assumptions in your question which have lead to your confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually assumed that this specific type of structure is a kind of ellipsis, where a portion of the sentence has been omitted. Different syntactic theories will take different approaches to answering the questions of what is omitted, and how we end up with what we see. Just saying &quot;dependency grammar&quot; or &quot;constituency grammar&quot; is not specific enough, as there are many dependency grammars, and many constituency grammars, many of which offer possible theories on what form this particular sentence takes, and thus how to draw a tree of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is helpful here to work backwards. Consider the general context where a sentence like &lt;em&gt;Me too&lt;/em&gt; occurs. It is an addition to an answer to a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you want cake?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Me too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers like (2) are themselves usually assumed to be elliptical structures as well, paraphrasing the question they are responding to. For instance, (2) could be interchanged with (4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I do want cake.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, (3) could be interchanged with (5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I do want cake too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, we could say that there are a number of possible ellipses that could occur, which we might diagram like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I ((((do) want) cake) too).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With each set of brackets enclosing more and more of what can be ellipsed, all the way from the full, un-ellipsed sentence &lt;em&gt;I do want cake too&lt;/em&gt; to the fully ellipsed sentence &lt;em&gt;Me&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think part of the issue where you're running into problems is that the predicate here &lt;em&gt;do want cake&lt;/em&gt; (or whatever it is in context) is simply not there. There is a long body of literature from a variety of approaches on how to deal with this, but it will entirely depend on &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; specific dependency or constituency grammatical theory you are operating in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T06:42:11.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15668" CreationDate="2016-01-27T07:57:52.593" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scripts or character sets that have lower and upper case versions on letters are called bicameral (Roman, Greek and Cyrillic) and other scripts where there is no such casing are called unicameral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there scripts that distinguish upper vs. lower case on characters apart from letters, say punctuation marks, digits on numbers or other symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1601" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T10:40:40.470" Title="Any script or character set that has upper vs. lower distinction on characters other than letters?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9296" CreationDate="2016-01-27T11:17:42.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always try the Potsdam Sentence Corpus which is a collection of sentences (n=144) with every word cloze rated with a number of other predictors as well such as frequency etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11371" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T11:17:42.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15658" CreationDate="2016-01-27T12:59:42.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to python, not in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UTF-16&lt;/a&gt; (UCS-2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import sys&#xA;for i in range(0, sys.maxunicode): # 0x10000&#xA;    c = unichr(i)&#xA;    if (not c.isalpha()) and (c.islower() or c.isupper()):&#xA;        print c.encode('utf-8')&#xA;# This code prints nothing&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one could reasonably disagree with the Unicode Consortium's view that a combined glyph Roman numeral &lt;code&gt;u'Ⅺ'&lt;/code&gt; (8554) is not uppercase and &lt;code&gt;u'ⅺ'&lt;/code&gt; (8570) is not lowercase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Roman letters I, X, M and and Greek letters Stigma and Digamma, Qoppa, and Sanpi and so on are technically letters.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koppa_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koppa_(letter)&lt;/a&gt; etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; u'ϟ'.isalpha() and u'ϙ'.isalpha() and u'ϡ'.isalpha()&#xA;True&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedilla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the cedilla&lt;/a&gt; (0327), there are cases where it takes different forms based on the casing of the letter it graces:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;u'Ģ'&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;u'ģ'&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T10:40:40.470" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T10:40:40.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15652" CreationDate="2016-01-27T18:31:13.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no theory of English syntax which contains all of the rules generating the class of English sentences, where the theory both explains why the rules are what they are, and uses just a few core principles. Such a thing is impossible in principle, since the thing that you're looking for isn't well-defined. The empirical domain is not well-defined for a number of reasons. First, &quot;English&quot; is too broad, so no well-defined system can simultaneously include and exclude sentences like &quot;I might should go&quot;, which fyi is perfectly normal in some parts of the US. Other non-geographical examples are the variable acceptability of &quot;I can has seconds?&quot; as a question, and &quot;If I was hungry, I would have eaten something&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also not clear from your question what you mean by &quot;syntax&quot;, especially the extent to which you specifically exclude lexicon, morphology and phonology from consideration. As I understand it, minimalist syntax has relatively little by way of rules of syntax, and much of the work is shifted to the lexicon (also a feature of HPSG). Supposing we agree that *&quot;I need&quot; is ungrammatical, is that a fact represented in the syntax, or in the lexicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat finally, your concept of &quot;explanation&quot; needs to be clarified. The notion of &quot;explanation&quot; is notoriously elusive yet often-invoked in science. There is an equation in theoretical physics &lt;em&gt;E=hf&lt;/em&gt; which states that the energy of a photon is the product of its frequency and Planck's constant. This does not &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; why this particular thing should be the rule. I could assume that you are referring to Chomsky's third desideratum of theory (from &lt;em&gt;Current issues in linguistic theory&lt;/em&gt;), namely &quot;explanatory adequacy&quot;. This principle basically says that an explanatory metatheory allows a single grammar that generates a particular language. Explanatory adequacy can only be a requirement of a metatheory of language, not the syntax of a specific language. Since you are just asking for a grammar of English, then it is meaningless to require explanatory adequacy. And therefore, you must have in mind something completely different when you invoke the desideratum of explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is reasonable to conclude that we do indeed have a plurality of unrelated rules in English. For example, we have a passive rule (“The cat ate the mouse” → “The mouse was eaten by the cat”) and a raising rule (“The people believe that Tom is a thief” → “The people believe Tom to be a thief”). There are also rules for placing negation in a sentence. Unless you go with Greg Lee’s general purpose rule “a sentence is any number of words”, you are going to have a plurality of unrelated rules. What is in the syntax / lexicon dichotomy for us is that this kind of scheme might work, if you have a very rich lexicon that states in great detail in what context you can insert “mouse” – that is, you put pretty much all of the syntax into the lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest taking the Aspects model seriously, as implemented in Burt’s red book &lt;em&gt;From Deep to Surface Structure&lt;/em&gt;, since it is an actual set of rules in a concrete framework, even though it has a ton of problems. It at least gives you a concrete target to shoot at. There are separate rules of Passive, Dative, Agent Deletion, Tag Formation and so on. Objecting that these are all separate unrelated rules and thus mere descriptions lacking explanatory form holds linguistics to an unrealistically high standard of idealization – not even physics as managed to reduce all laws to a single statement. If you can show us an example of a “more explanatory” theory that actually has a single rule that subsumes Passive, Dative, Agent Deletion, Tag Formation into one rule, or declarative-formation and interrogative-formation in one rule, then we might be able to address your desideratum of explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your explanation of your concept “explanation” seems to depend crucially on the validity of “construction” as a fact of grammar: that suggests then that you’re actually looking for an implementation of English syntax in Construction Grammar, or perhaps Relational Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T19:45:22.890" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T19:45:22.890" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15652" CreationDate="2016-01-27T20:05:31.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some way, this question just underscores the fundamental problem with 'syntax' theory. It takes an idealized notion of 'a correct sentence in a language' and tries to come up with formal rules for generating all possible sequences of lexemes in such a way that all correct possible sequences are generated by those rules and no incorrect possible sequences are. The notions of dependency and constituency are just ways of arranging those rules with respect to putative relationships among the words within a correct sentence. But even if they were successful in that (which they aren't) they wouldn't get around the fundamental problem of the consequence of the initial idealization. If you assume the fundamental unit of syntax to be sentence (or even clause), you are mostly limited to written language for your universe of sentences. But even then you have all those 'imperfectly' formed sentences or varying judgements on acceptability among native speakers as to the acceptability of those sentences. In spontaneous speech, you don't even have sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your next step is to posit an arbitrary distinction between competence and performance and ignore all the aspects of performance. But you then get the problem of bootstrapping your target set of sentences from this imperfect 'real' set of performed sentences, then rejecting them, and defining language only through the rules. Therefore, in a formal (constraint-based) theory of syntax, you can never account for the totality of the syntactic phenomena you encounter in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construction grammar framework was explicitly designed to deal with this issue. But it thinks of syntax very differently, so you cannot think of it as a third alternative to dependency or constituency. It simply does not think of sentence or clause structure in terms of heads but rather abstract schemas into which words can fit. So instead of S --&gt; NP VP you get something like The ___ Verbed ____ into a _____. These constructions are considered to be part of an inventory alongside traditional lexemes. This means that you have a lot of 'rules' that are difficult to abstract away into structures (like trees) that are directly translatable into algorithms. Instead, you have to model them as they are. You get a lot more linguistic and cognitive plausibility this way but not a 'grammar' framework that can be evaluated on the same criteria - ie. positing of just the right constraints to produce only acceptable strings (sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T20:05:31.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15644" CreationDate="2016-01-27T22:09:07.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;+'ly' adverbs, or any adverbial (marked with commas if needed), can be inserted ANYWHERE in a clause, except inside a NounPhrase or a PrepPhrase. [note: all NPs could be considered PPs, with null prepositions [by] and [of], since English has strict case ordering.]  Adverbials can even split a modal aux from its verb, or an infinitive marker ('to') from its verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-01-27T22:09:07.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15652" CreationDate="2016-01-28T06:31:58.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that the question has been edited to clarify that it is really explanation you're interested in, I find that I have something to add to my previous answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's an explanation?  It tells you why something happens the way it does, when you didn't know that before you heard the explanation.  Obviously, there is no known theory which explains all known syntactic phenomena.  In fact, it's tough to find a syntactic theory that explains anything at all.  But not impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the constraints on movement described by John Ross -- in particular the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) and the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC).  There is a theoretical explanation for these constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, stop me if you've heard this one.  I said an explanation tells you why something happens, when you didn't previously know why.  So, do you know why there is a CSC or a CNPC?  Does your syntactic theory, DG, CG, Minimalism, or whatever, tell you why?  If so, read no further, because I can tell you nothing you didn't know already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for these two constraints (and others) is that there are no transformations.  Note that although I've couched the matter rather theoretically, this is a factual matter.  Speaker-hearers, by and large, find sentences that violate the Ross constraints to be unacceptable, and it's not obvious why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We generally have a choice between describing movement constructions directly with phrase structure rules or appealing to a movement transformation.  Gerald Gazdar exploited a notation from Categorial Grammar to show how we can describe constructions that seem to involve movement: we append to a phrase structure grammar a finite number of &quot;slash categories&quot;, which represent constituents out of which something has been moved, and a finite number of phrase structure rules to describe the composition of such categories.  The numbers of categories and phrase structure rules have to be finite, because this is a fundamental restriction on phrase structure grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CNPC.&#xA;Suppose there were no CNPC, then to describe a relative clause construction, we'd need a category S/NP, sentence missing a NP, to describe the relative clause, and if the missing NP was inside another relative clause, the main relative clause would have to be of a new category S/NP/NP, and further, if the missing NP of the relative clause inside a relative clause was inside another relative clause, the main relative clause would have to be a S/NP/NP/NP (a sentence missing three NPs), and so on, ad infinitum.  Thus, if there were no CNPC, there would have to be constructions which are impossible in phrase structure grammar (which can have only a finite number of categories). So the CNPC is shown to follow from general principles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CSC. There is an independently motivated constraint on coordinate structures that requires the constituents coordinated to be of the same category.  But if there are no transformations, a constituent from which nothing has been extracted is never of the same category as the corresponding constituent from which something has been extracted.  So, there must (appear to be) a CSC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The across-the-board exception to the CSC.  Two constituents which are otherwise the same but from which the same things have been extracted are of the same category.  So it should be possible to remove something from both conjuncts of a coordinate construction, as it is.  This part of the CSC is utterly mysterious in transformational grammar, but makes perfect sense in the corresponding account without transformations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T06:31:58.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15658" CreationDate="2016-01-28T08:26:19.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably the closest thing coming to your question are the Greek Numeral signs Stigma and Digamma (6), Qoppa (90), and Sanpi (900) that aren't used as letters anymore, but have uppercase and lowercase forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also uppercase and lowercase Roman Numerals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that bicameral scripts are rare (compared to the number of writing systems), there are only three fully bicameral scripts (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic), and one that once was bicameral (Georgian). [I don't know how bicameral Glagolitic is, at least it has both cases in Unicode.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T09:47:44.327" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T09:47:44.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T17:29:48.790" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that languages change over time and they also diverge, which should decrease mutual intelligibility, but usually they do so in the way that keeps bunch of languages more or less together, while distancing them from their common ancestor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to find facts like &quot;bilingual dialog is generally possible in Scandinavian countries&quot; and you can even get some precise numbers like &quot;Italian has 89% similarity to French&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But its there a way to compare or test mutual intelligibility, to say, Italian and Latin (I know Italians generally can't read Latin, but they possibly also can't understand French)?&#xA;Or can we say which language is closer to English, German or P. Germanic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Actually, there was said &quot;89% &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; similarity to French&quot;, I'm not sure what's the precise meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastEditorUserId="11375" LastEditDate="2016-01-29T21:20:07.943" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T21:20:07.943" Title="Degree of difference between language ans its ancestor" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15114" CreationDate="2016-01-28T17:56:11.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to this related question is the best I'm likely to get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6562/annotation-tool-to-work-with-xml-schema?rq=1&quot;&gt;annotation tool to work with XML Schema&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10970" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T17:56:11.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15669" CreationDate="2016-01-28T22:37:11.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is perhaps not so much a straight answer as a suggestion in the right direction, but I hope it may prove useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost I would say that mutual intelligibility is not a property of languages, but a property of scripts and/or speech (which is why is seriously doubt that one can boldly say that Italian has 89% similarity to French, because who knows what properties that is based on). Languages that may be subject to very similar phonological processes, can be subject to very different morphological/syntactic processes. Languages therefore can be similar in either speech or script. I think there are not that many languages that are very similar when it comes to speech AND script. I would say this is not even very remarkable, because if a language is really similar in both speech and script one language would probably fade out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when it comes to mutual intelligibility (keeping in mind the difference in speech and literature), I think there may be several measures possible for each. For speech phonological processes (deletion, assimilation, usage of reduction, voicing and devoicing at certain points, stress, etc.) and pragmatics (how to respond in certain situations, methods of deixis, figurative use of language, etc.) can be of help. When it comes to script, syntactic processes (have a look at X-bar theory, usage of Parts Of Speech, distribution within and outside POS) and morphological processes (reduplication, affixation, modification of stems in certain environments, etc.) will probably give you heaps of information to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11321" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T22:37:11.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15675" CreationDate="2016-01-29T01:53:03.137" Score="1" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I said in the title above seems to be roughly true in the European languages that I have checked, so my question is: Could ancient Indo-European, or a precursor of it, used a suffix that meant &quot;add one&quot; after the root words for 2, 4 and 6 to denote 3, 5, and 7 respectively? I mean, maybe three was &quot;two and one more&quot;, five was &quot;four and one more&quot;, seven was &quot;six and one more&quot;. This could explain the similarity in initial letters for these numbers. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5523" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T22:45:26.733" Title="Two and Three; Four and Five; Six and Seven are paired by their first letters T, F, S" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15674" CreationDate="2016-01-29T02:22:11.323" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words show no signs of sharing a common suffix, let alone one that we can identify as meaning &quot;add one.&quot; Actually, there is another explanation often used for this kind of thing: sound changes by analogy that cause counting numbers next to each other to change their first sound to be more similar. This is thought to be the reason why &quot;four&quot; starts with &quot;f&quot; in Germanic languages. (discussed in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2C25_9m7U-AC&amp;amp;pg=PA76&amp;amp;lpg=PA76&amp;amp;dq=analogy%20sound%20change%20counting%20numerals&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=I6hX4QWr-P&amp;amp;sig=85X-todma9TQLj_QeMGAFC_6-0U&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjNtqWq-83KAhVP_mMKHeRSBdAQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=analogy%20sound%20change%20counting%20numerals&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Historical and Comparative Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Raimo Anttila) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, some think this may also be the source of &quot;s&quot; in the &quot;six&quot; word: the reflexes in Indo-European languages point variously to original *w (Armenian), *sw (Celtic), or *s (Italic, Germanic); one idea is that it started out with *w, and then later an &quot;s&quot; was added at the start by analogy with the &quot;seven&quot; word, and the cluster *sw was then simplified to just *s in some branches. (discussed in the &quot;Italic&quot; chapter, by Robert Coleman, of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=HmbWRnaridAC&amp;amp;pg=PA395&amp;amp;lpg=PA395&amp;amp;dq=*swekuro&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=JB76Ct7xVl&amp;amp;sig=B7-taB-1asX9xwOCqcv5dz989ac&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiDzKv1-O7KAhUJeCYKHS76DXIQ6AEIKTAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=*swekuro&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European Numerals&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; edited by Jadranka Gvozdanovic) However, another etymology of Armenian վեց &lt;em&gt;vec'&lt;/em&gt; derives it from the cluster *sw via an intermediate step *hw. (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/101667/A_Linguistica_48-2000-1_2.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European 'Six'&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Václav Blažek) The internal structure of the PIE word and the history of how it came to mean &quot;six&quot; are also unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;two&quot; and &quot;three&quot; are just coincidence as far as I know. In fact, &quot;two&quot; and &quot;three&quot; only start with the same letter in English by coincidence; the sound is not the same, and in other Indo-European languages like German or Spanish the spelling reflects this more: (&lt;em&gt;zwei, drei&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dos, tres&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T16:47:17.883" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T16:47:17.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T09:14:10.637" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a French pronunciation dictionary on the web like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CMU&lt;/a&gt; English dictionary?&#xA;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2640" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-01-29T16:01:16.007" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T21:48:44.447" Title="French Pronunciation Dictionary" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T10:56:24.297" Score="4" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt;, and have come up rather suddenly against a stumbling block. On page 133, he uses without explanation some notation that's unfamiliar to me. I've included an image because I couldn't figure out how to format the superscript &amp;amp; multiple subscripts together. I'm willing to do the work to understand this: I don't need someone to spell it out for me. I've figured out that ∈ and ⊂ are from set theory, and I've begun doing some reading on set theory. (The meaning of those two symbols, specifically, is easy enough, &amp;amp; it doesn't seem like I need much set theory to understand what he's saying here.) But I can't figure out what's going on with the italic, non-cursive capital C with both the superscript and subscript letters. How do I figure out the relationship between n and nᵢ? What should I be reading? I'm assuming that the lowercase and capital n/N have some standard relationship. What should I be looking into to understand that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mg4tU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of a segment of p 133 of LSLT&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, I'm very willing to do the reading myself. I've been Googling things like (Chomsky &quot;set theory&quot; symbols) and (Chomsky logic &quot;set theory&quot;), but no dice, as yet. I just need to be set in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much thanks for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11381" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T19:52:12.523" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T19:52:12.523" Title="Understanding Symbols in Chomsky's *Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory*" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T14:06:04.660" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a special class of noun phrases in English that have the ability to function as adverbial modifiers, unaccompanied by a preposition or any other indicator of adjunct status. These are the so-called bare-NP adverbs. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) I saw John [that day].&#xA;(2) I saw John [someplace you'd never guess].&#xA;(3) John was headed [that way].&#xA;(4) Max pronounced my name [every way imaginable].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I was wondering if there is similar phenomenon in German, a sentence came to my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(5) Eines Tages geht er auf der Straße spazieren.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &quot;Eines Tages&quot; here be regarded as a bare-NP adverb? Are there other similar examples in German? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10606" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T14:06:04.660" Title="Bare-NP Adverbs in German" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15669" CreationDate="2016-01-29T14:35:24.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you want to test mutual intelligibility you need to do experiments with test persons. Note, that the mutual intelligibility is not a symmetric relation, in general there is a difference in the intelligibility of language A to native speakers of language B vs. the intelligibility of language B to native speakers of language A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tanja Augustinova has done a lot of research on mutual intelligibility of Slavonic languages, her publication list can be found here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~tania/publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~tania/publications.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T14:35:24.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T15:38:06.117" Score="-4" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between an adjunct and disjunct?  How can I distinguish between the two?  Please, I will be very thankful if you give me some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11223" LastEditorUserId="11223" LastEditDate="2016-01-29T18:57:44.207" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T19:57:29.167" Title="Adjunct vs disjunct" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-01-30T20:15:48.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15682" CreationDate="2016-01-29T19:57:29.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As is, your question has no answer&lt;/strong&gt;, since you haven't mentioned what theory or whose classification you were interested in. Here's what Hilde Hasselgård writes on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A striking feature of descriptions of adverbials is that there are hardly any two grammars that use the same classification scheme and/or terminology&quot; (Hasselgård 2010: 21).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details on how different linguists classify adverbs, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/grammar-and-syntax/adjunct-adverbials-english?format=HB&amp;amp;isbn=9780521515566&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hasselgård 2010&lt;/a&gt;, especially &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511676253.003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Part I.2. The classification of adverbials.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T19:57:29.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-29T20:43:32.260" Score="6" ViewCount="2291" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian and English (and as far as I know Chinese) it's customary for kids to use honorific &quot;uncle&quot; when addressing elders by name (as a kid, you'd rather call an adult &quot;uncle John&quot; than &quot;John&quot;, even if he's not your uncle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, kids would also refer to a male stranger as &quot;uncle&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is is common across the languages of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side question, is it ever used in languages which don't have a generic word for &quot;uncle&quot; (as opposed to &quot;father's brother&quot; and &quot;mother's brother&quot;)? If yes, which &quot;uncle&quot; would they use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify, I'm not expecting a hundred of answers for each language separately. An ideal answer for me would be a reference to something like Greenberg's book which would already have aggregated the world's data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1207" LastEditorUserId="1207" LastEditDate="2016-01-31T09:50:42.000" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T15:20:05.353" Title="Is honorific &quot;uncle&quot; common across the languages of the world?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2016-01-29T23:09:45.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thai, calling people as they were your relatives, is a linguistic norm. Here are some details first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;two distinct words&lt;/strong&gt; for &quot;brother/sister&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;พี่ &lt;code&gt;[pʰîː]&lt;/code&gt; — elder brother/sister;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;น้อง &lt;code&gt;[nɔ́ːŋ]&lt;/code&gt; — younger brother/sister;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can also use ชาย or สาว suffix to clarify &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;sister&lt;/em&gt;, e.g., น้องชาย = &quot;younger brother&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;four distinct words&lt;/strong&gt; for uncle/aunt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ลุง &lt;code&gt;[luŋ]&lt;/code&gt; — elder brother of either your mother or father;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ป้า &lt;code&gt;[pâː]&lt;/code&gt; — elder sister of your mother/father;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;อา &lt;code&gt;[ʔaː]&lt;/code&gt; — younger brother/sister of your mother;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;น้า &lt;code&gt;[náː]&lt;/code&gt; — younger brother/sister of your father;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;strong&gt;four distinct words&lt;/strong&gt; for paternal/maternal grandmother/grandfather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ปู่ &lt;code&gt;[pùː]&lt;/code&gt; — paternal grandfather;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ย่า &lt;code&gt;[jâː]&lt;/code&gt; — paternal grandmother;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ตา &lt;code&gt;[taː]&lt;/code&gt; — maternal grandfather;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ยาย &lt;code&gt;[jaːj]&lt;/code&gt; — maternal grandmother;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, using family member pronouns is very common in modern Thai. It is also considered pretty much polite (politeness is an important aspect of the language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a stranger's age and social status looks like he/she could be your elder brother/sister, call them พี่ &lt;code&gt;[pʰîː]&lt;/code&gt;. If their age is equal to yours, use the same word for politeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note, however, that in Russian, calling a stranger &quot;brother&quot; is somewhat excessively vulgar. Unlike in Thai, where people effectively use &quot;brother/sister&quot; instead the word &quot;friend&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a stranger is certainly younger than you, use น้อง &lt;code&gt;[nɔ́ːŋ]&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they are in the age of your parents, use ลุง &lt;code&gt;[luŋ]&lt;/code&gt; for males and ป้า &lt;code&gt;[pâː]&lt;/code&gt; for females.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes, people use constructs like คุณลุง &lt;code&gt;[kʰun luŋ]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;mister uncle&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same applies if you are talking to an official (e.g., a police officer). It is polite to call them &quot;Mr. Name&quot; or &quot;Mr. officer&quot;, not &quot;brother&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can also use แม่ &lt;code&gt;[mɛ̂ː]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;mother&quot; or พ่อ &lt;code&gt;[pʰɔ̂ː]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;father&quot; to show some warmness if your friendship lasts longer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they are in the age of your grandparents, yet again, they use paternal word for &quot;grandfather&quot; ปู่ &lt;code&gt;[pùː]&lt;/code&gt; and maternal word for &quot;grandmother&quot; ยาย &lt;code&gt;[jaːj]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Addressing someone who is in age of your children in not an exception, either. Use ลูก &lt;code&gt;[lûːk]&lt;/code&gt; &quot;child&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further details, I would recommend this great lesson by Stuart Jay Raj: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/LIp2CFQuUzA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Not Just You and Me - Getting past Khun คุณ Phom ผม and ดิฉัน DiChan in Thai&lt;/a&gt; (Youtube)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other languages&lt;/strong&gt;. There are many dialects of Thai, and all they have dialectal forms of family member pronouns. And they do use them just the way I described above. So I suppose that many languages from Asian/Pacific region take similar approach for addressing strangers. I haven't checked specifically, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-01-29T23:35:50.623" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T23:35:50.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15687" CreationDate="2016-01-30T01:13:19.683" Score="2" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if linguistics is the right place to ask about writing systems (and if not please let me know where to look) but here's the question.  When reading something, I often find that when I finish a line and go to the next that I end up picking the wrong line to start reading which slows me down/breaks my concentration.  I was wondering if there's a language that doesn't read from left to right or right to left, but reads both ways; switching orientation each line so you can read in one continuous block without having to jump around the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11384" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T02:17:18.990" Title="Wraparound writing system?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15686" CreationDate="2016-01-30T02:11:29.127" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Boustrophedon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a kind of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the individual characters are reversed, or mirrored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DkNyJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DkNyJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Boustrophedon&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;(image courtesy of Wikipedia)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Egyptian hieroglyphs&lt;/a&gt; are also known to be read in LTR or RTL directions, but I think, no document contained both directions at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All modern writing systems have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; order in which the symbols are aligned. However, there are systems where each symbol carries a &quot;bigger&quot; or &quot;smaller&quot; unit of information. Compare letter-based Latin script to ideographic writing systems like Chinese and Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, albeit you can't completely eliminate losing track of symbols, the probability that you &lt;strong&gt;trackback within the same row&lt;/strong&gt; can be higher or lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question also seems to be related to &lt;strong&gt;Rapid Reading&lt;/strong&gt; techniques (RR). If you take classes of RR, you will be taught to overcome several factors that commonly reduce your reading performance. Here are some of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replacing a sequential word-by-word reading to &lt;strong&gt;seeing a whole page at once&lt;/strong&gt; (or, actually, square blocks of text).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Avoiding linear reading&lt;/strong&gt;. Alphabetic writing systems imply the words aligned horizontally. Your eyes follow a word and it requires training to follow several lines at once.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/2005/752&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; at Chinese.SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideographic writing systems can also be written right-to-left and left-to-right. Here's a nice proof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Su Hui, a first century Chinese poet, wrote a poem in the form of a 29 by 29 character grid. Her poem can be read forwards, backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, allowing for 2,848 different readings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CFLtu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CFLtu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;poem&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:48:05.870" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T02:17:18.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2016-01-30T11:06:08.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has more to do with particular communities and less with languages as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In certain socio-economic strata within certain communities a 'child' may use a word for a blood relative for an otherwise unrelated elder; but not for someone outside the class( conditioning, loss of innocence?) eg The child may not call a  household help uncle but may adress a shopkeeper this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be different relations used for different people eg the taxi driver may be called brother in some communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language used may vary eg uncle relationship may be expressed as 'uncle' in English. But brother in native dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer then yes it is not only uncle ( which could be expressed in multiple indian languages ) but specifically 'Uncle' (english) which is used within a specific class ( I can vouch for the so called middle income group) in Pakistan and Sri Lanka and India. subject to above constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T16:43:42.473" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T16:43:42.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2016-01-31T06:40:49.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Turkish&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the same thing in Turkish as well. We have separate words for paternal and maternal uncle. In this context, children use the word &quot;amca&quot; which stands for paternal uncle. For example, &quot;Uncle John&quot; means &quot;John amca&quot;. Just like in Russian, the word &quot;amca&quot; can be used alone when children address strangers. Sometimes, the word &quot;amca&quot; is also used by adults to address elder people. Also, the word &quot;dayı&quot; which stands for maternal uncle is occasionally used by some adults to address elder people even though these two words are not accepted forms of address in formal situations. For addressing ladies, children likewise use the word &quot;teyze&quot; which means &quot;maternal aunt&quot;. Its usage is in the same way as that of &quot;amca&quot;. Likewise, adults can also use the word &quot;teyze&quot; in rather informal situations just like when they use the word &quot;amca&quot;. One can sometimes even hear some adults using the words &quot;anne&quot; or &quot;ana&quot;, both meaning &quot;mother&quot;, for addressing elder ladies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Turkish does not have a honorific alternative for these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11394" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T06:40:49.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-31T14:07:56.840" Score="0" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking to create a language that has no more than 20 words. What 20 words can I use that, when combined with each other, can be used to say basic things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a word for small + a word for person = child&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11399" LastEditorUserId="11399" LastEditDate="2016-01-31T15:28:04.767" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T01:22:05.487" Title="What is the most expressive language you can make using 20 words?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-02T12:59:06.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2016-01-31T16:16:15.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Semantic Primes&lt;/a&gt;, you'd need about 60 to say everything.  Is that too many?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T16:16:15.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15694" CreationDate="2016-01-31T17:25:04.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &quot;small person&quot; doesn't mean &quot;child&quot;, this indicates that you're willing to put up with phrasal idioms, like &quot;kick the bucket&quot;, where the meaning of the phrase has to be learned separate from the meaning of the individual words. In that case, it does not matter what the meaning of the 20 words is. The words can therefore be &lt;em&gt;ta, ti, te, to, tu&lt;/em&gt; and so on. The word &quot;pu&quot; uniquely means &quot;end of phrasal idiom&quot;. Then, &quot;ta pi ko pu&quot; is an idiomatic phrase meaning &quot;cow&quot;, &quot;pi pi su pu&quot; is an idiomatic phrase meaning &quot;grass&quot;, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to impose a requirement of strict semantic compositionality at the phrasal level (a draconian requirement not obeyed by any actual language), then you wouldn't be describing a human language, since human languages don't have vocabularies of only 20 words. I don't know how the concept of &quot;expressiveness&quot; could apply at all to such a system. There's no metric of expressiveness, anyhow, other than &quot;unbounded; infinite&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T01:22:05.487" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T01:22:05.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15674" CreationDate="2016-01-31T17:40:10.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;du̯oe̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = two&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;trei̯es&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = three&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;q̆etu̯ores&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = four (derived from q̆et- &quot;fit together&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;penq̆e&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - five&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯ecstis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = six&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;septm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = seven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-01-31T19:59:57.323" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T19:59:57.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15703" CreationDate="2016-02-01T00:37:42.377" Score="4" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I learned Latin we were taught classical pronunciation. When it came to the letter &quot;v&quot; we were taught to pronounce it as /w/. It was also explained that many people (my parents, for example) had learned the ecclesiastical pronunciation in which the letter &quot;v&quot; is pronounced /v/ the same as it is in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would probably helped if in all the texts we used did not use both characters ''u&quot; and &quot;v&quot; to represent the same classical character. I never understood that there was no voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in classical Latin. I was always confused as to why Roman engravings always used &quot;v&quot; in place of &quot;u.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I later came to the realization that both English characters represented one Latin character I wondered why &quot;Veni. Vidi. Vici.&quot; was not spelled &quot;Ueni. Uidi. Uici.&quot; in the textbook as it should have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point the double &quot;v&quot; came to be used to differentiate between the consonant form of the Latin &quot;v&quot; and its vowel form. The consonant form, the voiced labiovelar approximant /w/ and the vowel form, the close back rounded vowel /u/ seem like similar enough phonemes to my ears that I can understand why they are the same character in Latin. The &quot;u&quot; is used for the /w/ sound often in English (especially following &quot;q&quot;) and in Spanish. I also can see how the pointed form of the character, &quot;v&quot; could evolve into the rounded form, &quot;u&quot; in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where my confusion comes in is how the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ came to be assigned to the pointed &quot;v.&quot; This caused centuries of scholars to basically mis-pronounce Latin. The same sound is represented by the pointed form, &quot;v&quot; in English. And even more confusing is how the double &quot;v,&quot; which was created to differentiate /w/ from /u/, came to represent the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in German. The /v/ sounds to my ears like a completely different phoneme unrelated to /u/ or /w/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10387" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T01:42:04.420" Title="How did the letter &quot;v&quot; come to represent the voiced labio dental fricative?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15702" CreationDate="2016-02-01T01:42:04.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phoneme /w/ in Latin underwent a phonetic change around the second half of the 1st century AD, though this was a low prestige sound change, becoming pronounced [β] and later [v]. Hence the letter  is usually pronounced [v] because that it how it was pronounced in later Latin. This is similar to the situation with the fricative pronunciation of Greek &amp;lt;φ θ χ&gt;: classical pronunciation changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T01:42:04.420" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3903" CreationDate="2016-02-01T04:40:22.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the differences already pointed out, as a Tuscan I am corrected by non-Tuscans when I say &quot;sgraffio&quot; instead of &quot;graffio&quot; or something like &quot; a me mi piace&quot; instead of &quot;a me piace&quot;.  Or when we call our fathers &quot;babbo&quot; instead of padre or papa'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11404" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T04:40:22.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T12:38:57.533" Score="2" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Persian langauge there are two letters which have same pronounciation when spelled with vowels, they are غ andق, in Arabic there is aslo a 'ق', i want to know do the two 'ق' have the same or similar way of pronounciation as a consonant in Arabic and Persian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11405" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-01T15:11:17.787" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T15:43:04.017" Title="Is this letter ق pronounced almost same in Arabic and Persian?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-03T19:45:25.850" Score="1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is not about translation, but about &lt;em&gt;linguistic paleography&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these letters of text written &lt;em&gt;in red ink&lt;/em&gt; and what is their meaning? I can't find these first two letters shape in arabic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a title. The text is an excerpt from a medieval manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pyiy8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pyiy8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Arabic text.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11419" LastEditorUserId="11419" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T14:58:52.217" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T14:58:52.217" Title="What are these letters in medieval arabic script?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-02-04T10:10:17.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T00:10:52.197" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some languages that have largest set of letters (like alphabet or kanji) aside from Chinese and Japanese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="11229" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T12:01:50.983" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T12:01:50.983" Title="What are some languages that have largest set of characters?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T04:13:04.787" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen diacritics corresponding to tones (in tonal languages), but asides from that I haven't come across a system for transcribing prosody in my studies. Is there a popular convention people use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T09:50:32.463" Title="Is there a common method of transcribing prosody?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T06:40:35.047" Score="2" ViewCount="1523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the speakers with the General American accent occasionally weaken the &quot;h&quot; sound in words like &quot;had&quot; e.g. &quot;You had this and that.&quot; becomes kind of like &quot;You ad this and that.&quot; (I can't tell whether it's a drop or just a weakening.) Does this phenomenon have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T07:38:11.307" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T03:45:17.150" Title="The drop/weakening of &quot;h&quot; sound in General American English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15740" CreationDate="2016-02-04T06:48:11.960" Score="4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some proposals for IPrA (International Prosodic Alphabet, similar to IPA but for prosody).&#xA;The meeting for IPrA (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/ipra_workshop/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link to UCLA webpage on the topic&lt;/a&gt;) is planning to be held in BU in mid 2016. How will these meetings change our way of transcribing prosody? and in general will it work properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T09:51:57.050" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T19:57:07.487" Title="How is IPrA going to change the way we transcribe prosody?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T10:01:01.507" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;for my dissertation I am looking for sms corpora. I am mainly interested in automatic sms notifications that are sent to users when they buy things online or pay using credit cards (confirmation messages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested in the following countries:&#xA;Danish&#xA;Dutch&#xA;English&#xA;Finnish&#xA;French&#xA;German&#xA;Italian&#xA;Norwegian&#xA;Spanish&#xA;Swedish&#xA;Turkish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you tell me if there are any sms corpora available for sale or free of charge that would fit these requirements? Or do you know if there are any such sms notifications sent to users in countries that speak the languages I mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11425" LastEditorUserId="11425" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T13:39:25.013" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T13:39:25.013" Title="I am looking for Danish/Dutch/English/Finnish/French/German/Italian/Norwegian/Spanish/Swedish/Turkish sms corpora" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T13:42:22.153" Score="1" ViewCount="9704" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are two NPs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;their incredible story &lt;strong&gt;of the trip in space&lt;/strong&gt; (complement)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the noisy yellow airplanes &lt;strong&gt;that scared the children in the yard&lt;/strong&gt; (post modifier)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that certain nouns takes modifiers and others complements? In this case what's the difference between the nouns &lt;strong&gt;story&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;airplanes&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11427" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T18:32:37.393" Title="Syntax - difference between modifiers and complements in NPs?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15713" CreationDate="2016-02-04T15:25:31.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a firm grasp of the distinction you're asking about, but I can give you an outline of my understanding of McCawley's account in &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  It is based on a relation between the structure of NPs and the structure of sentences, as we can observe it in the process of nominalization.  N' (N-bar) in a NP corresponds to V' (V-bar) in nominalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An N' is either built from another N', or consists of a N with possible complements, as a V' is either built from another V', or consists of a V with possible complements. One common V complement that we're familiar with is the direct object.  The corresponding argument in a NP is the &quot;of&quot;-complement of a N. Occasionally, we can find a direct correspondence between sentential and nominal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Henry fathered Louis.&quot; (the V' &quot;fathered Louis&quot; has the V complement &quot;Louis&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Henry is the father of Louis.&quot; (the N' &quot;father of Louis&quot; has the N complement &quot;of Louis&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sentence structure, V' modifiers are adverbs, which correspond in NP structure to adjectives and other N' modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Henry [V' [V' fathered Louis] enthusiastically].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Henry was [NP the [N' enthusiastic [N' father of Louis] ] ].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, nouns with complements correspond to transitive verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T15:25:31.127" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15713" CreationDate="2016-02-04T16:31:31.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you post a question next time, please mention what theory it is based on. Do not assume that the terms (and implicit assumptions) are necessarily shared and/or easily recognized by everyone. Your OP is a good case in point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like your question is based on Cognitive Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Cognitive Grammar,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a complement&lt;/strong&gt; is understood as &amp;quot;a conceptually autonomous component structure that elaborates the profile determinant, which is conceptually dependent&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a modifier&lt;/strong&gt; is &amp;quot;a conceptually dependent component structure that is elaborated by the profile determinant, which is conceptually autonomous&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748618323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evans and Green 2006: 587&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the key word &amp;quot;conceptual,&amp;quot; because this is very different from other formal syntax theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, from the point of view of generative syntax, in both of your examples, we can see complements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;their incredible story of the trip in space&lt;/em&gt;, [of the trip in space] is complement;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the noisy yellow airplanes that scared the children in the yard&lt;/em&gt;, [that scared the children in the yard] is a complement clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't think the term &amp;quot;modifier&amp;quot; is very common in generative syntax and is used as an umbrella term for anything attached to the head, the more common opposition being &lt;em&gt;complement-specifier-adjunct&lt;/em&gt; (all of those are different types of modifiers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other syntactic theories, the difference between a complement (sometimes also called an argument) and a modifier is that &lt;strong&gt;complements are obligatory&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. *their incredible story of) whereas &lt;strong&gt;modifiers are optional&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;their incredible story&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Putting theoretical differences aside, I am afraid you didn't quite understand your professor or textbook very well.&lt;/strong&gt; For instance, you ask us, &amp;quot;Why is it that certain nouns takes modifiers and others complements?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that &lt;strong&gt;all English nouns can take (select) complements and what you call &amp;quot;modifiers&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;their story that scared me a lot&lt;/em&gt; (complement clause; your &amp;quot;post-modifier&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;their story of the trip in space&lt;/em&gt; (complement; your &amp;quot;complement&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;their incredible story&lt;/em&gt; (specifier; your &amp;quot;modifier&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T18:32:37.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15709" CreationDate="2016-02-04T17:38:27.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American English, this is often thought to be a generalization of (de)aspiration as in &lt;em&gt;pit, spit&lt;/em&gt;. We typically analyze stop aspiration as addition of aspiration foot-initially, but depending on your theory of how rules can be written, you can state that as deaspirating stops which are not foot-initial. /h/ is also deletable when intervocalic followed by a stressless vowel, i.e. when /h/ is foot-medial (it's always syllable-initial), thus there is a standard alternation in &lt;em&gt;prohíbit, Prò(h)i[ə]bítion&lt;/em&gt;. In the nominalization &lt;em&gt;prohibition&lt;/em&gt;, where /ɪ/ is not reduced to schwa, /h/ is also not always deleted, though in my dialect the pronunciation with &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ɪ&lt;/em&gt; is an unnatural spelling pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to find words that lend themselves to &lt;em&gt;h ~ Ø&lt;/em&gt; alternations, so you've found the main source of examples (h-initial pronouns being the other). It also plays a role in people figuring out how to pronounce non-English names based on spelling. The Arabic name &lt;em&gt;Fahim&lt;/em&gt; could in principle have stress on either syllable (people vacillate randomly between [hǽmɪd] and [həmíd] for &lt;em&gt;Hamid&lt;/em&gt;); but initial stress is out because [fǽhɪm] would put &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; in foot-medial position, which is a no-no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have no problem pronouncing [wǽhɪb], [rǽhæt], but it's completely impossible for me to say [átʰa]: the aspirate allophones absolutely cannot be foot-medial. So while h-deletion and aspiration are surely related, they don't literally reduce to one rule. As far as I know, &quot;h-dropping&quot; is applied to context-free deletion of &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;. I think the Wiki entry is in error in implying that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; dialects of English delete &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; sentence initially, such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;H&lt;/em&gt;er mother said 'no'&quot;. Of course, you can always define &quot;H-dropping&quot; any way you want, but as far as I know, that term is used for context-free deletion of &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T17:38:27.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15709" CreationDate="2016-02-05T03:25:39.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe what you are describing is called &lt;strong&gt;reduction&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;elision&lt;/strong&gt;) and in case of h, it is usually known as &lt;strong&gt;h-dropping&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;h-deletion&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/products/9780582291324&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Knowles 1987&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631230793.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shockey 2003&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens is that in connected, fast speech function words get unaccented and &quot;show reductions of the length of sounds, centralization of vowels toward /ə,ɪ,ʊ/ and the elision of vowels and consonants&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/products/9781444183092&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cruttenden 2014: 273&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for function words that start with h, the following words get affected: &lt;em&gt;had, has, have, he, her, herself, him, himself, his&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/products/9781444183092&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cruttenden 2014: 274&lt;/a&gt;). In their &lt;strong&gt;weak forms&lt;/strong&gt;, they may all lose h.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of the relevant section from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/shockey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/shockey/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FhAgQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FhAgQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is &lt;strong&gt;not unique&lt;/strong&gt; to General American. It happens in British dialects as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T03:45:17.150" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T03:45:17.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15708" CreationDate="2016-02-05T09:50:32.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge as of now there is no united way of transcribing prosodic features of language; however the need for one is critical and therefore there are several meetings being held for designing IPrA (internation prosodic alphabet) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/ipra_workshop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(ucla page for the description of the meetings)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This proposal is going to transcribe prosodic events at the &quot;categorical phonetic&quot; level of AM. For more details you can visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BU page for the meetings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you can see my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15710/how-is-ipra-going-to-change-how-we-transcribe-prosody&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T09:50:32.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-05T16:47:22.240" Score="0" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was perusing the page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/WordOrder/WordOrder.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;you can find it here&lt;/a&gt;), I came across the paragraph &quot;That said, word order is a complex aspect of language, never wholly mastered by non-native speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the idea behind this? Does that mean that as a Native English speaker I have mastered concepts that foreign speakers will not master? What would some examples of this be? And is reverse true, as I am learning German no matter what level of proficiancy I obtain a native will understand better than I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11218" LastActivityDate="2016-02-05T16:47:22.240" Title="Can someone explain this sentence from Dartmouth's German page?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11649" CreationDate="2016-02-06T00:18:00.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could get your summaries by using an API. It's easy to integrate in almost any app. I use this and it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://market.mashape.com/textanalysis/text-summarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://market.mashape.com/textanalysis/text-summarization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You send the text and the number of sentences you want returned. You can even try it to see if it works for you. Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://textsummarization.net/text-summarizer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;address&lt;/a&gt; where you can evaluate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11441" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T00:18:00.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2016-02-06T01:10:49.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same holds for Brazilian Portuguese. We often use &quot;uncle/aunt&quot; generically for some older family members and their friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11442" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T01:10:49.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14584" CreationDate="2016-02-06T16:45:08.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some (all?) datasets from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/past-projects/ace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Program&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn.edu/files/english-entities-guidelines-v5.6.6.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic Data Consortium. &quot;ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English annotation guidelines for entities.&quot; (2005).&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lJ4GP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lJ4GP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/14358/2680&quot;&gt;not available free of charge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T16:45:08.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15727" CreationDate="2016-02-06T17:15:38.960" Score="1" ViewCount="1383" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a lot of information about sign languages spoken around the world and references them as being spoken by deaf people. What I don't understand is, why wouldn't such languages also be used by mute people (people who are unable to produce verbal sounded speech)? (if such were the case, Wikipedia would clearly state such languages would be also spoken by mute people, so what am I missing?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T17:35:40.103" Title="sign languages and mute people" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15726" CreationDate="2016-02-06T17:35:40.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess, you simply misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using spoken language naturally requires &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; abilities, hearing and talking. Therefore, a person who has difficulty with any of these abilities (or both) is forced to use sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the medical standpoint, hearing impairment at birth leads to inability to learn how to talk, so such people, even though their vocal tract is fully functional, may have difficulty to reproduce sounds of speech. However, there are modern training techniques simplifying the process of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T17:35:40.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T00:26:09.980" Score="0" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to find the second to last segment in a segment tier (1) within a word on the word tier (3). So far, I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Find the word in the word tier&#xA;n = Get number of intervals: 3&#xA;for i to n&#xA;  label$ = Get label of interval: 3, i&#xA;  if label$ == ‘.word$’&#xA;    index = i&#xA;    i += n&#xA;  endif&#xA;endfor&#xA;&#xA;# get the start and end point of that word&#xA;startingpoint = Get starting point... 3 index&#xA;endpoint = Get end point... 3 index&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then I'm not sure how to limit the search to just the word I found previously. The easiest way to approach this, I think, is if there was some way to count the intervals on tier 1 &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the word boundary get the information from the total number of intervals - 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T00:19:58.657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T00:23:50.443" Title="Finding segments in Praat textgrids" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-07T05:24:02.460" Score="-1" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok see the following IPA vowel chart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iMcvH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iMcvH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let say to make the long &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; sound then the front of the tongue need to be as front as possible in the mouth and as close as possible to the roof of the mouth. The mouth is almost closed when making &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. See the following picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Swp78.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Swp78.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, let ask you this question, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CAN YOU MAKE OTHER SOUND such as &lt;code&gt;/e/, /u/, /æ/, etc&lt;/code&gt; WHILE YOUR TONGUE &amp;amp; MOUTH IS IN &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; position?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried and I felt that the sound is a bit different but generally it sound like &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, I think that if we fix our mouth &amp;amp; tongue in a particular position then we can make ONE  &amp;amp; ONLY ONE distinct vowel sound right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And 1 mouth-tongue specific position can not make 2 or more distinct vowel sounds right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10630" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T06:19:08.113" Title="So, if we fix our mouth &amp; tongue in a particular position then we can make ONE &amp; ONLY ONE distinct vowel sound right?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15731" CreationDate="2016-02-07T06:19:08.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can divide the properties governing phonemicizable vowel differences into two sets, which we can call &quot;place&quot; and &quot;other stuff&quot;. &quot;Place&quot; would include the geometry of the lips (i.e. &quot;mouth&quot; position) and position of the tongue, relative to the mandible. Anything else would be &quot;other stuff&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of &quot;other stuff&quot; include: position of the velo-pharyngeal port, which controls whether air flows through the nose (yielding the difference between oral and nasal vowels); tension on the vocal folds, which in various ways yields tonal differences in vowels; degree of constriction of the vocal folds, which yields breathy vs. modal vs. laryngealized vowel differences; constriction of the lower pharyngeal walls, which yields pharyngealized vowels; lowering of the epiglottis, which yields epiglottalized vowels. In addition, the duration of a vowel can be manipulated without messing with &quot;place&quot; properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the things I described under &quot;other stuff&quot; forms the physical basis for vowel distinctions in some language. So, given a single tongue and lip configuration, you can still produce quite a range of potentially distinctive sounds. Of course, no language realizes that full potential, and many languages don't realise any of that potential (i.e. there are no tone, nasalization, pharyngealization... contrasts). The chart of IPA vowels above doesn't give all of the vowel distinctions, it only gives the vowel distinctions based on &quot;place&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T06:19:08.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19407" CreationDate="2016-02-07T18:11:30.360" Score="3" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer : this thread is perhaps off-topic. I thank you for your indulgence since I couldn't ask such a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Chronicle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglo-Saxon Chronicle&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/anthology.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the famous extract&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynewulf_of_Wessex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cynewulf&lt;/a&gt; and Cyneheard (year 755) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Ond se Cynewulf oft miċlum ġefeohtum feaht uuiþ Bretwālum, ond ymb&#xA;.xxxi. wintra þæs þe hē rīċe hæfde hē wolde ādrǣfan ānne æþeling [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my translation)&#xA;And Cynewulf fought great fights with the British and after 31 winters within which he had the kingdom he wanted to exile a nobleman [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question : how was &amp;quot;ymb .xxxi. wintra&amp;quot; expressed ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;.xxxi. wintra&amp;quot; being a masculine genitive plural (ymb + genitive), what's the masculine genitive plural of &amp;quot;ān and þrītiġ&amp;quot; (=31) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My guess : ānum and þrītiġ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Guide To Old English&lt;/em&gt; (Mitchell &amp;amp; Robinson; sixth edition) I read (§ 83) that &amp;quot;declined strong, &lt;em&gt;ān&lt;/em&gt; means 'one'; when declined weak &lt;em&gt;āna&lt;/em&gt;, it usually means 'alone'. So, I guess that &lt;em&gt;ān&lt;/em&gt; will follow the strong declension. But what's the genitive plural of such a form ? Is it &lt;strong&gt;ānum&lt;/strong&gt;, as expected if I follow the usual declension of the strong adjectives  ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Guide To Old English&lt;/em&gt; (Mitchell &amp;amp; Robinson; sixth edition) I read (§ 194) that &amp;quot;the cardinal numbers can be used as adjectives agreeing with a noun, e.g. [...] &lt;em&gt;mid XXXgum cyningum&lt;/em&gt; 'with thirty kings'.&amp;quot; Since &amp;quot;.xxxi.&amp;quot; isn't followed by any ending, I assume that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;þrītiġ&lt;/em&gt; is the expected word&lt;/strong&gt; (not þrītigum). Is it correct ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T10:22:10.183" Title="declining numerals in Old English" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15729" CreationDate="2016-02-08T00:23:50.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I have found a way to do what I want by adding this to the above script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; # get the last_segment interval number&#xA; last_segment = Get low interval at time: 1, endpoint&#xA; penult_segment = last_segment - 1&#xA;&#xA; # get vowel label and start and end&#xA; vowellabel$ = Get label of interval: 1, penult_segment&#xA;&#xA; # get the start time and end time of the interval&#xA; vowelstart = Get starting point... 1 penult_segment&#xA; vowelend = Get end point... 1 penult_segment&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T00:23:50.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14669" CreationDate="2016-02-08T00:55:51.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions, answers, criticisms, complaints and elaborations, as coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech, or turns-at-talk, as well as linguistic phenomena &quot;beyond the sentence boundary&quot; are studied in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Discourse Analysis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_Structure_Theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rhetorical Structure Theory&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11450" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T00:55:51.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15710" CreationDate="2016-02-08T17:31:53.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the available information, the answer is, it depends on who &quot;we&quot; are and what you mean by &quot;prosody&quot;. It appears that the idea is to extend ToBI style transcription to include non-pitch features of intonation, mainly lengthening but also laryngeal features if there are comparable effects. If you define &quot;prosody&quot; to refer just to intonation, then this will be a relatively significant change, since there isn't a system for notating final lengthening &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; intoneme. If you take the broader view (including long and short consonants and vowels in Finnish, stress marks in Russian, tones in Chinese, breathiness in Gujarati), then the change will be smaller in magnitude since most of prosody in the wider sense would not be affected. But, it could lead to an improvement in quality of transcriptions, in the same way that separating intonational F0 properties from grammatical and lexical tone properties has eliminated some potentially confusing representational claims about data. For example, a number of tone languages have intonational pitch modifications like final rise, which interact with phonemic tones to create a complex plethora of F0 patterns. Using the ToBI technique, it isn't necessary to switch to pitch integers or to add supper-high and mid tone marks to describe the ends of phrases, you just use the standard accents that you would use for lexical tone, and also add appropriate &quot;boundary tones&quot; and &quot;pitch accent&quot; letters, to describe whatever distinction is being signalled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people working on non-intonational features of language, there will be no change in how you transcribe e.g. breathiness, length or nasalization, which is phonemic in many languages, and people will continue to use standard IPA resources. On those occasions where lexical and intonational properties intersect in a language, the analyst will have an additional transcriptional resource available to notate intonational prolongation vs. phonemic length. Even if as field-workers we don't work out a ToBI-plus analysis of intonation that encapsulates prolongation or shortening features, we will know that these properties &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be described, without complicating the phonemic transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course for people working on intonation, this will be all good, since (theoretically) it will allow one to notate problematic properties such as &quot;saying a word faster&quot; (associated with imperatives in a number of languages), which does not reduce well to a sequence of segmental breve marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T17:31:53.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17456" CreationDate="2016-02-08T20:39:52.240" Score="2" ViewCount="1057" Body="&lt;p&gt;i just started self-studying arabic and i'm having trouble producing some of the sounds, specifically ض (ḍad), ظ (ẓa), ص (ṣad) and ط (ṭa). all four are pharyngealized fricatives/plosives and although i've looked up videos, i'm still unsure about how to produce them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does anyone have any tips or resources on how to produce pharyngealized sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10226" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T23:29:01.537" Title="how to produce pharyngeal sounds?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2016-02-08T23:31:59.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that suggestions on where to put your tongue or the like are going to be very useful. You need to listen to how Arabic speakers produce them and try to imitate it. Start with the dark l in الله and move on from there. If you want to get a good classical pronunciation listen to the Qur’an recitation on sites like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quranexplorer.com/Quran/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.quranexplorer.com/Quran/&lt;/a&gt; and pick the slowest styles of recitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T23:31:59.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-09T08:17:46.990" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the term for the use of &quot;this&quot; in &quot;there's this guy called John, who...&quot;? Here, the &quot;this&quot; is used like an &quot;a&quot;, not literally &quot;this&quot;. I'm not sure if there's a term for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T23:13:41.093" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T07:17:07.580" Title="What's the term for the use of &quot;this&quot; in &quot;there's this guy called John, who...&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15744" CreationDate="2016-02-09T18:04:52.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My intuition about that is the speaker is about to tell a story in which the person referred to plays a prominent role.  If he played a subsidiary role, &quot;that guy&quot; would have been used.  If you're just looking for a term, you could call it &quot;proximal&quot;, since that is pretty vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T18:04:52.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15747" CreationDate="2016-02-09T18:11:17.737" Score="-2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine got an arabic tatoo or something, and I want to surprise her that I know what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please tell me &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0dXsV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0dXsV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11460" LastEditorUserId="11460" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T19:13:33.523" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T22:03:11.540" Title="What does this mean in arabic? (picture)" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-09T23:13:08.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15746" CreationDate="2016-02-09T22:03:11.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By anu chance, is your friend from morocco or is she related to the country somehow. Cause that's probably written Marakash. Arabic name of Morocco &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11463" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T22:03:11.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T12:30:31.113" Score="3" ViewCount="1385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what are the distinctive sounds of Upper Silesian Polish. Not the dialects, but the regular official language spoken by an upper silesian person with his regional accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they pronounce some sounds or some words in a distinctive fashion, as opposed to someone from any other region of Poland? Do they have a different vocabulary for some commonly used words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T10:08:14.843" Title="What is the difference between Silesian Polish and neutral/standard Polish?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15748" CreationDate="2016-02-10T14:00:21.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Difficult question (and probably politically loaded) because upper Silesian people regard their dialect as a language, see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on the Silesian language&lt;/a&gt; and references therin. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlesisch_%28polnischer_Dialekt%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists a few phonological differences to standard Polish that are not really big. The lexical differences are more significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T14:00:21.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15744" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:48:10.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting observation, and it demonstrates how the boundaries between demonstratives, definite articles and indefinite articles are quite fluid. Through history, then, you might observe how words can cross these boundaries. My former teacher referred to this usage of &quot;this&quot; to show that it isn't that strange that the old demonstrative &quot;this&quot; became the Old Irish definite article &quot;the&quot;. Just think about utterances such as &quot;And then I was walking down this street, and then I saw this guy, and he had these weird clothes on, and then he fell and hit this rock, and then this woman came up ...&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:48:10.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15759" CreationDate="2016-02-10T21:10:40.077" Score="12" ViewCount="5255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ipa.typeit.org/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;virtual IPA keyboard on TypeIt&lt;/a&gt;, but it takes forever. Is there an easy way to type IPA? I've found this list of Unicode keyboards on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=uniipakeyboard#dee994f5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL.org&lt;/a&gt; but I'm not too sure how to evaluate their efficacy. I'm running off Windows if that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T17:08:26.123" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T17:08:26.123" Title="Is there an easy way to type IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-02-10T22:02:55.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no good way.  See the answer and comments to my complaint here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1662/feature-request-let-us-easily-write-in-ipa-and-tree-diagrams&quot;&gt;&#xA;feature request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T22:02:55.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-10T23:41:56.207" Score="1" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently enrolled in an introductory linguistics course at my school, and I am having a hard time pinning down what phonemes are. My text defines phonemes as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;A distinctive structural element in the sound system of a language. A phoneme is an abstract element that can have alternative manifestations in different phonological environments.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I studied the chapter, and formulated my own definition so that I could check my understanding by asking my professor. Mine read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;A set of phonetically similar sounds that can be used interchangeably within a language without affecting meaning; a set of allophones.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that I am mistaken. According to her, I am equating the phoneme with the allophones, and that phonemes are the 'idea' of the sound we are saying. However, there is no 'idea horse'or 'idea garment' that is not derived from concrete examples, and I do not understand how that can be the case for a sound. Furthermore, how can we say that phonemes &quot;have&quot; allophones, if a phoneme is not a set of allophones? Or that [p] is an allophone of /p/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't misunderstand. I am not intentionally arguing with my instructor, and I suspect that I am really mistaken. However, I would very much like to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; I am mistaken, as well as learn to understand what a phoneme &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11470" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T08:56:27.440" Title="What, precisely, is a phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-16T06:14:48.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15753" CreationDate="2016-02-11T01:12:38.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a conflict among linguists since, well, forever, about whether phonemes are analytic devices created by linguists, or whether phonemes actually exist, in some sense, and are discovered by linguists.  Whichever side you choose, you'll be in good company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I take the realistic side, which I take it is the side argued by Edward Sapir in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1mqkkpbsgHYC&amp;amp;pg=PA46&amp;amp;lpg=PA46&amp;amp;dq=sapir%20psychological%20reality%20of%20the%20phoneme&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=chga017ybj&amp;amp;sig=-zUL26wLpVtuEYwbtnoYDHTKITs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiisM2awe7KAhVNx2MKHYC6BdAQ6AEILzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=sapir%20psychological%20reality%20of%20the%20phoneme&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Psychological Reality of Phonemes&lt;/a&gt;. A version of that view is that of David Stampe, in various publications, and in the unpublished paper &quot;Yes, Virginia ...&quot; (... there is a phoneme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your idea about it appears to be a version of the analytic view, similar to that of Daniel Jones'.  And if you take the opposing psychological view, it is indeed an error.  But some would agree with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The division of opinion in linguistics is reminiscent of the controversy in mathematics on whether mathematical objects are created by mathematicians or discovered by them. The latter position is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Platonism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T08:56:27.440" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T08:56:27.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15753" CreationDate="2016-02-11T01:15:58.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of those questions that has no right answer, because it depends on how you define the concept. So one way to look at it is that your instructor is right, by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You answer closely approximates the most rigorous definition of the concept, employed by taxonomic structuralists (who, b.t.w. fell into disfavor in the 60's). That is, they viewed a phoneme as being the union of a set of phones (in saying specifically &quot;of a single phoneme&quot;, we call them &quot;allophones&quot;). They viewed phonemes, morphophonemes, morphemes and so on as concepts for organizing the facts. There are a number of principles at play in deciding how to organize phones into phonemes. The basic idea is that two phones cannot be subsumed under the same phoneme unless the contexts where they appear is complementary. Given the words [pʰɪt] and [bɪt], since these are distinct words, we know that [pʰ] and [b] cannot be members of a single phoneme (they are members of different phonemes). Given words like [pʰɪt] and [spɪt], it is possible that [pʰ] and [p] are members of the same phoneme (allophones of a single phoneme). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under that view, or honestly any view, &quot;changes meaning&quot; is not the right way of looking at the &lt;em&gt;pit/bit&lt;/em&gt; difference. It's not that changing &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; changes meaning, since then you'd expect there to be some change in meaning if you replace &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, you don't get a word at all. Different words are made up of strings of phonemes, so by selecting a different phoneme, it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that you will identify a different word. And different words tend to have different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other views of the popular relationship &quot;phoneme&quot;, some of which depend on having the &quot;phoneme&quot; and the &quot;allophone&quot; be made of the same &quot;stuff&quot;, typically some kind of definition in terms of phonetic features. This view is wide-spread amongst practicioners of generative phonology (not exclusive to them, though). Thus the &quot;phoneme&quot; /p/ would be a voiceless unaspirated bilabial stop, and its two main allophones are a voiceless unaspirated bilabial stop [p] and a voiceless aspirated bilabial stop [pʰ] -- note the the phoneme and one of the allophones are the same thing. In that view, the aspirated allophone is the result of applying a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to focus on this &quot;idea of a sound&quot; matter. In the structuralist view, allophones are not physical sounds, indeed they had no way of dealing with physical sound, other than to listen and transcribe, assuming some reference sounds. Structuralist phones are abstractions, although they are not &quot;ideas&quot; since they were behaviorists. They refer to classes of behavior – in fact, the behavior of the linguist who is exposed to language stimulus and responds with transcriptions. Though they tended to think of themselves as outside the equation, thus ideally they are mindless automata that transcribe the language behavior of speakers. In the generative view, segments (phones / allophones) are not physical sounds, they are mental representations of sounds. (Specifically, they are the conjunction of a set of features, which are the &quot;intent&quot; to articulate in a particular way). This view is a consequence of the rationalist philosophy adopted by generative grammar: we are supposedly modeling mental states that cause speaker behavior, not modeling the behavior itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I hope to have shown you (superficially and incompletely), the ontology of &quot;phoneme&quot; is very complex (historically) and generally is not at all well handled at the introductory level. Generally, we are happy if students can grind out marginally correct answers to questions like &quot;are &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; allophones in English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T01:15:58.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-02-11T06:38:11.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been preying on my mind, and I have the beginnings of a design proposal for how to type in IPA.  The basic idea is that you type in a phonetic character by typing an ordinary lower case character followed by zero or more uppercase characters. This capitalizes (so to speak) on the fact that it is rare in ordinary spelling that you would want to have a literal interpretation of &quot;tI&quot;, for example, so it is feasible to treat this as a palatalized &quot;t&quot;.  And &quot;tH&quot; is an aspirated &quot;t&quot;, &quot;aN&quot; is a nasalized &quot;a&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're typing things in interactively, you don't necessarily have to know everything about the system of interpretation, because you can see whether the result of your typing is giving you the phonetic script that you intended.  And if it isn't what you want, you can backspace over what you typed and try something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There should be a fallback that lets you type in a character with no obvious interpretation but which you can footnote to say what you want about the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T06:38:11.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-02-11T15:52:19.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you think about it, easily typing the entirety of IPA is a tall order. Just look for example at the IPA vowel diagram, and try to write down yourself which sequences of keys should give which output, or do the same for all of the diacritics.&#xA;On the other hand, I'd think that most people need most of IPA very rarely, but use a subset of it constantly. For example if you are writing a paper on English phonology, you'll need &amp;lt;ɪ&gt; to be easily typable, but you can just copy-paste &amp;lt;ɤ&gt; if you need it. (Of course,  if your paper is on, say, Estonian, you'll want exactly the opposite.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A working solution for this kind of problem is to create your own custom keyboard layout via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft's free keyboard layout creator&lt;/a&gt;. The program is quite powerful, and very easy to use, and making something appropriate in it won't take long, depending on how much of IPA you want available on key press. Of course, &quot;do it yourself&quot; is not the easiest solution, but the plus is that it will be tailored exactly to your needs, and you can change it whenever you want. And as I said, considering how different the needs of different IPA users are, a single solution won't be able to satisfy everyone's needs.&#xA;Another advantage of a custom keyboard layout is that you can use it in any text editor: it doesn't require using a special program or a specific webpage, and you can easily switch between different keyboard layouts by hotkeys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9811" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T15:52:19.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15771" CreationDate="2016-02-11T16:22:03.373" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have come into contact with different languages in life I began to wonder whether some languages are more geared toward science, efficiency, literature or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like certain countries are consistently good at certain things such as science, math, literature, innovation, creativity.  It may be based on stereotype, but let's accept that in general the 'stereotypical' view is based on fairly accurate data.  For instance, English certainly seems more limited in it's descriptive ability than Spanish - bad for English literature.  Conversely, English seems more succinct than Spanish - good for giving instructions/commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll stop there because I am not interested in specific anecdotal instances but whether there are any studies or research on this general concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11475" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T18:41:07.600" Title="Do languages affect the focus of a society/civilization?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-02-16T06:16:06.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-02-11T17:10:00.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/uniipakeyboard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL keyboards&lt;/a&gt; that you linked to are indeed the best of breed. Like any input method for typing outside of ASCII, it takes an investment of time to learn the keystroke sequences, but in my opinion it is far more efficient than websites with soft keyboards when you need to enter a lot of IPA. I have used them on both Linux and Windows. To the operating system, it looks like any other IME for entering Chinese characters, Devanagari script, etc., so you access it through the &quot;language bar&quot; on Windows and corresponding language-switcher-type interfaces on other platforms. On Linux at least, there are a few applications where the keyboard doesn't work (e.g., Atom text editor; I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the problem is with Atom and not the IPA keyboard but I haven't tried to debug the issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want a better web-based soft keyboard, I think &lt;a href=&quot;http://r12a.github.io/pickers/ipa/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Ishida's&lt;/a&gt; is amazing, others I work with prefer &lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weston Ruter's&lt;/a&gt; because it resembles the official IPA chart. There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hoardingsinc.phoneticskeyboard&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an Android app&lt;/a&gt; though it is described as a &quot;proof of concept&quot; and I haven't personally tested it very thoroughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T17:10:00.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T18:17:30.887" Score="5" ViewCount="1167" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about speakers without the cot-caught merger (so, speakers who pronounce words such as “lot,” “cot,” “swat&quot; with a distinct vowel from words such as “thought,” “caught,” “water.”) I’ll use broad phonemic transcriptions of the British vowel in “lot” as /ɒ/, the American vowel in “lot” as /ɑ/, and the vowel in “thought” for any speaker as /ɔ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the British phoneme /ɒ/ corresponds to the American phoneme /ɑ/; this is the definition of the “LOT” lexical set. There are known patterns of exceptions where the American phoneme may be /ɔ/ instead, such as before /r/ (where Americans have /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ depending on the word, with some variation also by dialect) and before the phonemes /f/, /θ/, /s/, /ŋ/, /ɡ/, and a few unpatterned exceptions for some speakers such as “chocolate,” “on” and “gone.” Generally, these words are called the “CLOTH” lexical set. I read about this sound change in the following places: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Lot.E2.80.93cloth_split&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological history of English low back vowels: Lot–cloth split&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia), &lt;a href=&quot;http://dialectblog.com/2011/07/18/the-cloth-set/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cloth Set&lt;/a&gt; (Dialect Blog, by Ben Trawick-Smith)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other words such as “salt,&quot; &quot;Australia,&quot; &quot;sausage,&quot; &quot;laurel&quot; and &quot;cauliflower,&quot; which originally had /ɔ/, have /ɒ/ in current British English (which dictionaries mark as either being in variation with /ɔ/, or invariable) due to vowel shortening that is apparently attested as far back as 1800. Most of these words originally had /ɔl/ or /ɔs/ before a consonant. For these words, dictionaries seem to only record American pronunciations with /ɔ/; I don't know if this should be considered a retention (lack of the shortening change /ɔ/ &gt; /ɒ/), a restoration (possibly based on the spelling and/or due to CLOTH lengthening), or some mix of both. I read about this sound change at the following places: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/scolding-water.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scolding water&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (John Wells’s phonetic blog), and the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/1504190/The_History_of_%C9%94%CB%90_Is_There_Regular_Orthographically_Conditioned_Sound_Change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of [ɔː]: Is There Regular Orthographically Conditioned Sound Change?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by Piotr Gąsiorowski&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are at least two other environments where British /ɒ/ may correspond to American /ɔ/ (I say &quot;may&quot; because dictionaries generally also list /ɑl/ as an option in the American pronunciation of the following words):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words that originally had /ɒl/ at the end of a word or before a consonant (such words are somewhat rare, since most inherited words that would have this pattern seem to have shifted to /oʊl/). For example, “alcohol,” “golf,” “solve,” “dolphin,&quot; &quot;doll.&quot; For the standard accents transcribed in dictionaries, the normal reflex of intervocalic /ɒl/ in American English is /ɑl/ (in words like &quot;anabolic&quot;) but a few words may be pronounced with intervocalic /ɔl/ by some speakers due to analogy, such as &quot;&quot;alcoholic&quot; (which is related to &quot;alcohol&quot;) and &quot;workaholic&quot; (which is based on &quot;alcoholic&quot;). However, I did find a very interesting forum post by one speaker who describes having /ɔ/ (phonetically [ɒ]) in THOUGHT words, CLOTH words, and any words where the vowel is followed by &quot;l&quot; (including intervocalically), but [ɑ~a] in LOT words. The speaker says:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a CALLER-COLLAR merger, but COT-CAUGHT, HOCK-HAWK, and DON-DAWN&#xA;  are all unmerged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CALLER-COLLAR has [Q].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  COT, HOCK, and DON have [a].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  CAUGHT, HAWK, and DAWN have [Q].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;–a more original name, on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t13827-15.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antimoon Forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words that in Britain have /ɒʃ/, such as “wash,” “swash,” “squash,”  “quash,” “slosh.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the above forum post, I haven't read about this sound change anywhere; I've had to infer it from entries that transcribe non-cot-caught-merged American pronunciation in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, and Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. The pronunciations these dictionaries record do not suggest a conditional merger or complete loss of distinction in this context (like the COLLAR-COLLER speaker above, or like the DON–DAWN merger that is described in the Wikipedia article) since some words with the same phonetic environment are transcribed differently (&quot;alcohol&quot; is mainly transcribed with /ɔl/, while &quot;loll&quot; is only transcribed with /ɑl/; both /ɑl/ and /ɔl/ are listed for &quot;golf,&quot; while only /ɑl/ and /oʊl/ are listed for &quot;olfaction&quot;). If this is accurate, it suggests to me that the change is somewhat well-established and no longer automatic for all speakers, although maybe the opposite is true, that it is still in progress and in the process of diffusing to all words with the relevant environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/courses/phonetics/lexical_sets.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; I found, taken from John Wells' &lt;em&gt;Accents of English&lt;/em&gt;: Introduction Chapter 2, that mentions that &quot;wash&quot; is in the CLOTH lexical set. But I haven’t found any description of CLOTH that mentions words like &quot;doll&quot; and &quot;solve,&quot; even though they appear to be in the CLOTH set for enough speakers to get transcribed in dictionaries. (In fact, that list explicitly says that &quot;doll&quot; and &quot;solve&quot; are in the LOT set.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a good resource that gives a more complete description of the CLOTH lexical set, including all of the possible conditioning environments (such as the ones above, and perhaps more that I am unaware of) and its development over time? I would like to read it. Obviously it is more convenient for me if it is online and free to access, but if an offline or for-pay text provides a better description, I'd prefer that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I asked a similar question earlier on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303766/alcoh%C3%B4lic-vs-melanch%C5%8Flic-s%C3%B4lvent-vs-s%C5%8Flute-what-source-describes-thi&quot;&gt;English Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and received many helpful comments that allowed me to clarify my thought process, but no citations or pointers to existing descriptions of this change that have been published by linguists. It was suggested that I might have better luck here. I hope that's all right; I have completely re-written the question and hopefully it's clear what I want to learn, and how this relates to linguistics. You can look at that question though if you want to see a more complete list of affected words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T11:31:53.230" Title="&quot;Cloth&quot; lexical set: Is there a complete description of the possible conditioning environments?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2016-02-12T03:17:09.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't direct evidence, but this paper mentions several proposed etymologies that make use of feature metathesis: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/6375253/Feature_metathesis_and_the_change_of_PIE_du_to_Classical_Armenian_-rk_Diachronica_2013_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Feature metathesis and the change of PIE *du̯ to Classical Armenian -rk (Diachronica 2013)&lt;/a&gt;, by Jessica DeLisi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only example of possible &lt;em&gt;place&lt;/em&gt; feature metathesis mentioned is on page 481, and the evidence is ambiguous between that and a simple segmental metathesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are some interesting examples in it of &quot;aspiration anticipation,&quot; which could be regarded as a kind of metathesis, where an aspirated consonant or the segment /h/ is lost in the middle of a word, but the start of the word receives compensatory aspiration. Here's one of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE *h&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;eu̯s “to burn” became Greek &lt;em&gt;heúō&lt;/em&gt; “to burn, scorch” with unexpected rough breathing compared to Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;oṣati&lt;/em&gt; “burns”. Aspiration&#xA;  anticipation is quite common in Greek in words with internal *-s- &gt;&#xA;  Pre-Homeric *-h-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T03:17:09.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2016-02-12T11:13:47.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the following two examples from German count ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sybille /zy:bɪlə/, a given name coming from the classical name Sibylle /zi:bʏlə/. The rounding is swapped between the first and second vowel while other features (like length and tenseness) are kept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Popular mispronounciation of Libyen as &quot;Lübien&quot;. Again a vowel rounding swap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T11:59:43.040" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T11:59:43.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15764" CreationDate="2016-02-12T22:27:53.950" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the following passages from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ewan.website/egg-course-2/readings/spe.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by &#xA;Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Convention 1:&lt;/em&gt; : Every segment of a lexical matrix is automatically marked [+&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;] for every rule &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;. [...]&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Convention 2&lt;/em&gt; : Every segment of a lexical matrix μ is marked [αK] for each category [αK] to which μ belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, in particular, if a formative belongs to the lexical category [-&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;], each of its segments will be marked [-&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;] by Convention 2, after having automatically been marked [+&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;] by Convention 1. Thus every time a formative is an exception to a rule, there is a certain &quot;cost&quot; associated with this fact, namely, a certain category assigment must be given the lexical entry. But an item that does undergo a rule need not be specially marked. Thus only exceptions to a rule contribute to the complexity of the grammar in this connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(page 173—it's page 93 of the PDF I linked to)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alongside of the partially systematic class of exceptions to rule (6),&#xA;  we also find purely idiosyncratic exceptions. For example, consider&#xA;  the rule that makes vowels non-tense before certain affixes (e.g.&#xA;  compare &lt;em&gt;serene&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;serenity, obscene&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;obscenity&lt;/em&gt;). There are&#xA;  exceptions to this rule (e.g. &lt;em&gt;obese-obesity,&lt;/em&gt; in most dialects) which&#xA;  simply must be categorized as such in the lexicon, these lexical&#xA;  features becoming segmental features by Convention 2. Each such&#xA;  example contributes to the complexity of the grammar, but there is&#xA;  obviously no question of rejecting the rule. Doing so would amount to&#xA;  treating &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; item as an exception, in the manner of&#xA;  item-and-arrangement grammars (see Chapter Three, Section 16), and&#xA;  there is surely no point to such a decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(page 174/page 94 in the PDF)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 3 section 16 compares such situations to regular and irregular verbs; irregular verbs are exceptions, but the fact that exceptions exist doesn’t negate the rules that apply to regular cases. It outlines three ways of dealing with phonological irregularities: 1) abandoning general rules and lexically specifying the irregular feature for each particular item; 2) classifying words as (+) regular and (-) regular; 3) reinterpreting the underlying form to make the rule apply (page 147/page 80 in the PDF). (This last option is the one Chomsky and Halle prefer; this discussion is a leadup to their analysis of forms like “ellipse” as having underlying segmental “e” at the end.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I guess I don’t understand the motivation for the analysis made in the quoted material. In what sense should we consider words like “obesity” an exception? Obviously, it is one in terms of frequency (there are more items in the lexicon that alternate than ones that don’t). But Chomsky and Halle seem to be saying that it is mentally classified as an exception by native speakers. If this is the case, I don’t understand why this extra complexity in the lexical representation of the word originated historically (the word used to be pronounced with /ɛ/, and over time came to be pronounced with /i/). My default intuition would be to consider the words with historical phonological alternations as marked, in the sense that they're harder to process psychologically (for example, I have to consciously think to apply them sometimes, and avoid saying stuff like /səˈriːnɪti/), and the non-alternating forms like &quot;obesity&quot; as unmarked. I would not reject the rule entirely, but I don't understand why the rule is taken to be the default situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Chomsky and Halle's viewpoint current in phonology, or do most people now have a different interpretation? I know there are other approaches to phonology, such as Optimality Theory, but I am only an amateur and not familar with them in any depth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T04:47:23.330" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:47:23.330" Title="Does lack of a common (morpho-)phonological alternation make a word a lexical exception?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15763" CreationDate="2016-02-12T23:15:25.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In their analysis, there is a rule of Trisyllabic Laxing which &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; apply to &lt;em&gt;obesity&lt;/em&gt;, but does not. It is therefore a lexical exception. There are various other things that could be said about their theory of exceptions, but that's really all there is to it. Frequency isn't what determines exceptionality in their theory. I think the issue is that you understand &quot;exception&quot; to mean something else, maybe &quot;not the most frequent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretical practicioners of generative phonology generally hold to that meaning of &quot;exception&quot;, though the formal interpretation varies (e.g. how do you have exceptions to constraints -- what does that mean?). Other phonologists (functionalists for example) may have other viewpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a technical distinction between an exception and a diacritic. An exception is where a morpheme is marked [-rule n], but morphemes are ordinarily marked [+rule n]. In this situation, that analysis expresses the generalization that most words undergo the rule, but a few don't, and the latter are representationally more complex due to bearing the marked value of the rule feature. However, there can be instances where only a few words undergo a rule, meaning that most words in the language are apparently exceptions. In that case, an alternative device is available, the diacritic, where a rule only applies to segments that are [+D], and only select morphemes bear the marked specification [+D]. So the theory can express both notions, it just uses different mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that rules are rules, period. So if every rule requires that the formatives that undergo the rule be specially marked, then a huge number of formatives of English must be specially marked to undergo aspiration and flapping. It would be a kind of absurd result to say that all words in English have the special permission feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the specific case of Trisyllabic Laxing and &quot;obesity&quot;, the vast majority of phonologists would reject the SPE analysis. So while we agree on what it means to be an exception, most phonologists would now reject the earlier assumption that &lt;em&gt;serene&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;serenity&lt;/em&gt; are derivationally related via the root /serēn/ and the specific TSL rule given in SPE. Lexical Phonology ameliorated the problem with TSL a little bit, but it really comes down to questions of what kind of evidence would force us to derive the supposed TSL-related word pairs in a synchronic grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T02:48:04.903" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T02:48:04.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-12T23:25:22.577" Score="1" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen it used sometimes, what was its purpose? Was it used to make adjectives describing relations to nouns as in Latin (where it transformed into -ālis, which works that way), or was it different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11478" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T23:25:22.577" Title="What's the function of the PIE suffix *-lo-?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15763" CreationDate="2016-02-13T04:35:18.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't claim to understand the passages you quote from SPE.  However, I do think I have enough sympathy with their approach to help you decide whether you want to go to the effort of treading their thicket of formalisms.  (I don't think you want to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you capture the overall structure of the argument very well in this part of your question about how to describe exceptional forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) abandoning general rules and lexically specifying the irregular feature for each particular item; 2) classifying words as (+) regular and (-) regular; 3) reinterpreting the underlying form to make the rule apply.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using your numbering, I'll restate what I take to be the C&amp;amp;H argument but (for clarity) in a rather biased way:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We understand that the abstract lexical forms we propose for &quot;ellipse&quot;, &quot;giraffe&quot;, and so on, seem absurd.  But we will show that a generative description must adopt one of the alternatives 1, 2, or 3, and though 3 is absurd, 1 and 2 are even worse.  Therefore, we must adopt 3.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here are some notes intended to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Since a generative grammar is supposed to capture the underlying regularities of a language, and since the words under discussion are admittedly exceptional, why bother with them at all? one might ask.  Well, the &quot;generative&quot; in &quot;generative grammar&quot; means explicit.  We must be entirely explicit about every last detail, or else we're just not doing generative grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. In what sense are 1 and 2 &quot;worse&quot; than 3?  They are worse because they require more symbols to write out in fully explicit form.  This is how alternative proposals about grammar are compared.  You write them out, you count the symbols in each, and the proposal with fewest symbols wins.  In SPE, this is called &quot;the evaluation measure&quot;; it is a minor modification of Halle's earlier &quot;simplicity metric&quot; (see &quot;Phonology in Generative Grammar&quot; from 1962).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. Why can't 1 and 2 be formulated in a more compact fashion, marking entire words or (at least) entire morphemes as to whether they are exceptional to some phonological rule?  There are arguments due to Stephen Anderson that individual segments must be marked for exceptionality to Turkish Backness Harmony.  (I don't find those arguments persuasive, personally, but anyway ...)  And if it's good for Turkish, it's good for English, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T04:44:27.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T04:44:27.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2016-02-13T18:24:17.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are not able to produce the pharyngeals by themselves, I would start there. This may sound frivolous, but I tell my students that in order to get a feel for these sounds, pretend that you are trying to cough up a piece of popcorn stuck in your throat! Once you get a feel for it, then try to sustain the sound for a short time. It's like an /h/ but higher. Since these are fricatives, you should be able to maintain them. Next, holding that same articulation, try voicing at the same time: sort of like &quot;humming&quot; the pharyngeal &quot;h&quot;. Once you master that, try holding the pharyngeal while simultaneously making a /t/, /d/, or /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T18:24:17.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2016-02-13T20:00:23.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I don't know Arabic, but this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVLfdRxdeI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Youtube video&lt;/a&gt; video sounds good, to me. Except, I suspect there may be some confusion in the articulatory explanation given.  What the speaker is describing is an articulation produced by retracting the root of the tongue, which I think is better described as uvularization than pharyngealization.  Both of these are ways to narrow the pharynx, but retracting the tongue root does not necessarily use the pharyngeal muscles in the throat, which are used in swallowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For uvularization, the &quot;deepening&quot; of the tone, and the association with lip rounding, can be explained as being due to enlarging the cavity of the mouth.  When the tongue is retracted, its front portion occupies less room in the oral cavity, and the larger cavity produces a lower pitched resonance.  Lip rounding also produces a lower pitched resonance, but in a different way, since the oral cavity is in effect lengthened in front of the lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't see why contracting the pharyngeal muscles should have this &quot;deepening&quot; effect on tonality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T20:00:23.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11673" CreationDate="2016-02-13T22:28:12.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some arabic sounds that don't exist in English. We use numbers to express those sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: In English, you use two characters together for expressing a specific sound such as &quot;sh&quot;. But In arabic, we don't use two characters together. we use numbers instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about the pronunciation of these characters and sounds you can watch this video:&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPOA0sGx9Zo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPOA0sGx9Zo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11482" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T22:28:12.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15758" CreationDate="2016-02-14T04:08:20.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is most likely &quot;no.&quot;    It may seem reasonable at first blush to imagine that the differences among languages' grammatical features reflect the differences among the cognitive styles of the populations that speak the languages.   However, this is simply not the case.   Take a look at John McWhorter's fine book, &quot;The Language Hoax&quot; for further information.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T04:08:20.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T11:46:57.593" Score="1" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from countries where English is taught as a second language only to immigrants and indigenous peoples (e.g. Australia), where is American English not chosen as the dialect taught when teaching English as a second language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a suspicion that in former British colonies like India, British English would be taught instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T03:33:56.353" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T03:33:56.353" Title="Where is American English not chosen as the dialect of English taught as a second language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-15T09:48:41.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15772" CreationDate="2016-02-14T13:06:29.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know what kind of English we were taught in Russia. It had American-style vowels, but no rotacism. I also think the spelling was British-like, but this could depend on a textbook (official and Soviet-style textbooks would use British rules definitely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So people who went to British-speaking countries said &quot;we were fooled in schools, they pronounce the vowels more like they are spelt than we were taught&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T20:05:22.827" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T20:05:22.827" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15772" CreationDate="2016-02-14T13:24:11.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taught BrE at school in the Czech Republic. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more common in Europe, simply because of geographical closeness and history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T13:24:11.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15780" CreationDate="2016-02-14T15:12:03.103" Score="1" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed, perhaps naively, that the representation of amplitude on the y-axis of a waveform is somewhat paradoxical. Although the space between each value on the y-axis is identical, the units of amplitude are a logarithmic representation of the intensity of the sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no acoustician, so maybe this is just &quot;how it's done&quot;, but doesn't this influence perhaps in ways we just take for granted how we analyze a waveform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T18:02:44.470" Title="Amplitude as the y-axis on a waveform" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T16:07:03.507" Score="1" ViewCount="841" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading over my class notes, I see that you can consider a spectrogram is being comprised of many &quot;slices&quot; (static spectra? Whatever that means) horizontally, making it so &quot;time appears continuous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds very strange to me, and I can't get my brains around it. I don't think I understand what &quot;slices&quot; are or what it means for &quot;time to seem continuous&quot; in the spectrogram itself. Can someone help me come to terms with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:22:31.207" Title="What are &quot;Slices&quot; of a spectrogram?" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T16:37:13.470" Score="4" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Latin have lower-case letters and a full stop at the end of sentences in the 1st century AD? Googling doesn't seem to yield a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11486" LastEditorUserId="1832" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T22:27:59.187" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T22:27:59.187" Title="Did Latin have lower-case letters and a full stop at the end of sentences in the 1st century AD?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2016-02-14T17:34:38.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything about sound in the digital world presents discrete (not continuous) values which represent &quot;what is happening in this (physically continuous) time span out there&quot;. It is impossible to compute amplitude at a given frequency and a single instant in time (for one, there is no such thing as an absolute &quot;instant&quot;). When you decompose a waveform into a graph of frequency and amplitude, you have to select a specific continuous chunk of the waveform, in order to ferret patterns of frequent amplitude changes, versus infrequent amplitude changes. A Fourier spectrum uses the concept of a &quot;window&quot; and throws away any information about when in time a given component occurred; instead, it gives you the amplitude at a given frequency, for the entire signal between time &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; and time &lt;em&gt;n+j&lt;/em&gt;. This can be displayed, and gives you a very accurate representation of frequency and amplitude within that window. This is a spectral &quot;slice&quot; -- the frequency and amplitude values derived from the Fourier transform of the signal at some (small) interval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A spectrogram is created by computing a frequency-and-amplitude display (which has no time component) for very many adjacent (partially overlapping) windows of time, and until we get 3-D view screens, amplitude information has to be degraded by translating it into scales of grey, so that you are effectively looking at a single spectrum edge-on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T17:34:38.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2016-02-14T17:34:59.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three parts to this answer: why slice, how to slice, and ‘what does it mean for time to seem continuous’. You can also review first (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) if it’s easier.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we may want to slice because a spectrogram (e.g., in Praat) is a 3D figure on a 2D display. Humans aren’t great at reading 3D figures. If you slice that 3D figure (intensity by frequency by time), you get a 2D figure. For a spectral slice, that’s (intensity by frequency); slicing lets us set aside time for the moment, and focus on the intensity-frequency distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, this kind of slice is made by ‘cutting’ the spectrogram at a particular point in time (i.e., on the x-axis). The metaphor may be clearer if you think of the spectrogram as a real 3D object, like little plastic mountain range. If you use a knife to cut a perfectly vertical slice of that mountain range, you can see the silhouette by looking at the end. That outline is the spectral slice: a simple plot of intensity (y-axis) vs. frequency (x-axis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, why even talk about time being continuous or not? The answer is that a spectrogram really is a big stack of slices put together. Mathematically, that’s where you get it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fourier transform&lt;/a&gt;). In order to convert a single complex sound into a spectral representation, you’re forced to cut time into discontinuous pieces and analyze each little slice. The length of this slice in time is the window length (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_2__Configuring_the_spectrogram.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat manual&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T17:45:49.610" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T17:45:49.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15775" CreationDate="2016-02-14T17:42:08.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s not practical or reasonable to scale sound intensity linearly. It’s impractical because the resulting visuals would be unreadable, and it’s unreasonable because (simplifying a little) humans perceive loudness on a logarithmic scale. To crib a common example, imagine you’re listening to a single violin. To double that loudness, you’d need 10 violins, not 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2016-02-15T18:02:44.470" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T18:02:44.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-14T19:04:48.717" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am 81 and have embraced vocal fry as the new modern speech. But now&#xA;I hear a lot of females on the media who sound like ten-year-old&#xA;girls, ---or the sound-track of a cartoon chipmunk. Chirpy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's up with this? Where can I read about this curious phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Gross&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11487" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:17:51.067" Title="Chirpy, 10-year-old-girl vocalization on the media" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15777" CreationDate="2016-02-14T21:15:15.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bicameral script, the mixing of upper and lower case, was not used in Latin in the 1st century CE. Rather, Latin was written in two styles: majuscule (also called Latin square capitals) and miniscule (also called Latin cursive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Majuscule script was used primarily on inscriptions, but also occasionally in handwriting. A good contemporary example of this would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan&amp;#39;s_Column#Inscription&quot;&gt;the inscription on Trajan's Column&lt;/a&gt;. On monuments, often dots were used on inscriptions to separate words from one another, bu this was not entirely consistent. We also see &lt;em&gt;titulus&lt;/em&gt;, bars over Roman numerals to indicate that these are supposed to be read as numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miniscule script was what was primarily used in handwriting. A good contemporary example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/4DLink2/4DACTION/WebRequestQuery?searchTerm=291&amp;amp;searchType=number&amp;amp;searchField=TVII&quot;&gt;the 291st Vindalonda tablet&lt;/a&gt;, a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina. We can see from this particular example that full stops were occasionally used, but not consistently even in the same text, and appear to have been typically omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T21:15:15.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15772" CreationDate="2016-02-14T21:45:52.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is generally no single policy across different countries as to what English is taught across the board. Countries in Europe and Asia default to British English - the most popular textbooks (Headway, Matters, etc.) are based on British English. I imagine this may be different in Latin American countries - but I have no data on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very common scenario around the world is American teachers teaching using British English materials. Students are also exposed to more American English through global media. Many teachers are only tangentially aware of the range of differences between the two Englishes leading to frequent confusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2121" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T21:45:52.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16968" CreationDate="2016-02-15T09:18:49.763" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a grad student who wants to compare the prosody of two of my classmates from different regions who speak different dialects of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious tool to use is ToBI, of course because it annotates pitch accent and boundary tone.  But it looks like it requires a steep learning curve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the key advantages to using ToBI over just &quot;standard&quot; f0 analysis in Praat? I wonder if the calculation of pitch is different in Praat vs ToBI, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the advice, y'all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T15:46:59.610" Title="What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T10:58:55.997" Score="4" ViewCount="2089" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the Persian language family has three branches: Persian, Dari and Tajik-Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the Persian of Iran mutually intelligible with Tajik?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how does the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet differ from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12490" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T13:32:41.817" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T12:28:25.110" Title="Are Tajik and Persian mutually intelligible?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16783" CreationDate="2016-02-15T12:01:22.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s true that there is a learning curve, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. What does ‘f0 analysis’ mean here? How can you interpret changes in pitch, intensity, duration without an interpretive framework?&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The point of ToBI is to assign meaning to the physical observations (e.g., pitch, duration), which otherwise do not have meaning. To do this, pitch contours are interpreted within an abstract framework that says ‘this pattern means this’. I say that it is an abstract framework because it reduces the complexity of the signal by removing variability that is not meaningful in order to more clearly focus on the variability that is meaningful and contrastive for the language variety in question.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;For example, we notice the final fall/final rise pitch distinction between statements and questions in English. For this contrast, (and speaking a little simplistically) it doesn’t really matter what the absolute f0 is, how loud the sound is, or what’s the duration of the contour; the relative change leads us to categorize the boundary as Low or High for this contrast. In order to have any confidence in our conclusions, we have to have a broad understanding of what prosodic patterns are typical and possible for the specific language variety, how actual speakers interpret those patterns, and a model that takes into account the interactions of all these patterns. This is the same as e.g. segmental phonology (‘why have phonemes when I have a spectrogram?’) or syntax (‘why have a grammar when I have words?’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T12:01:22.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15775" CreationDate="2016-02-15T16:13:27.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In recording and audio editing, waveforms are always (in my experience) represented linearly. It is simply time vs. amplitude, both linear. In meters, however, i.e. the green/yellow/red lights that jump up and down on stereos, it is usually represented logarithmically, in order to fit it into the range of a few lights. In what context have you seen waveforms represented logarithmically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12493" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:13:27.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15781" CreationDate="2016-02-15T16:17:51.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found these two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A scientific article: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jvoice.org/article/S0892-1997(11)00070-1/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.jvoice.org/article/S0892-1997(11)00070-1/abstract&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A TV News article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqVgtLQ7qM&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqVgtLQ7qM&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:17:51.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15776" CreationDate="2016-02-15T16:22:31.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good answers!&#xA;A simpler way to look at it might be that frequencies only exist over time, never in an instant. So, if you analyze a waveform for frequencies, you have to decide over what period of time to analyze it. If you choose 10 milliseconds, you'll get an average strength for the various frequencies as they appear in those 10 milliseconds, but you don't know how strong each frequency component is for each millisecond. If you use 1 millisecond, you get much more accuracy timewise, but you will know fewer frequency components. Crazy to think that the human brain isolates frequencies in sound all the time, albeit not always accurately!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12493" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T16:22:31.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T16:33:51.030" Score="9" ViewCount="1877" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize if this has been asked. I'm a little surprised if not. I don't have much experience with non-European languages, but regardless, I see that &quot;No&quot; is almost always with &quot;N&quot;, but &quot;Yes&quot; is very different from one language to another.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Si - No&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Oui - Non&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes - No&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Da - Net&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Da - Nu&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Igen - Nem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ja - Nein&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't know anything about other languages, but even if this is not universal, why are the words for &quot;No&quot; so much more similar than the words for &quot;Yes&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12493" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T12:07:09.233" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T19:29:55.053" Title="Why is &quot;No&quot; more universal than &quot;Yes&quot;?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T16:46:53.420" Score="3" ViewCount="15912" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek has two words that are translated as life in English: &lt;em&gt;zōē&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bios&lt;/em&gt;. What is the difference between them? What are their cognates in other Indo-European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5284" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:36:49.533" Title="What is the difference between Greek zōē and bios?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15758" CreationDate="2016-02-15T18:41:07.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is definitely &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. However, not everyone agrees. You can read Keith Chen's article on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132145&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;subject&lt;/a&gt;. He basically claims that the way languages use or not use future markers affects the way they deal with money. But also see the replies &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://dlc.hypotheses.org/360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T18:41:07.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-02-15T19:18:43.803" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed Clear Alphabet to be able to type words phonetically (as groups of sounds) while using the normal Roman alphabet. It works pretty well and students find it easy to learn. You can download the free Clear Alphabet Dictionary here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://englishbanana.com/free-books/english-pronunciation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://englishbanana.com/free-books/english-pronunciation/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12496" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T19:18:43.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16790" CreationDate="2016-02-15T19:36:24.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two words are actually cognate with each other; they show the differing reflexes in Greek of labiovelar consonants. &#xA;In the noun ζωή &lt;em&gt;zōē&lt;/em&gt; and the corresponding adjective ζωός &lt;em&gt;zōos,&lt;/em&gt; the initial ζ developed from a cluster with the semivowel y; the noun βίος &lt;em&gt;bios&lt;/em&gt; shows the normal development of PIE *gʷ before the full vowel /i/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Online Etymology Dictionary's entry for the (English) prefix &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=bio-&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bio-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; also lists an assortment of cognates in other branches of Indo-European:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;jivah&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alive, living;&quot; Old Persian &lt;em&gt;*jivaka-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alive,&quot; Middle&#xA;  Persian &lt;em&gt;zhiwak&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alive;&quot; Old English &lt;em&gt;cwic, cwicu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;living, alive;&quot; Latin&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;vivus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;living, alive,&quot; &lt;em&gt;vita&lt;/em&gt; &quot;life;&quot; Old Church Slavonic &lt;em&gt;zivo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to&#xA;  live;&quot; Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;gyvas&lt;/em&gt; &quot;living, alive,&quot; &lt;em&gt;gyvata&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(eternal) life;&quot; Old&#xA;  Irish &lt;em&gt;bethu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;life,&quot; bith &quot;age;&quot; Welsh &lt;em&gt;byd&lt;/em&gt; &quot;world&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has the following note on the meaning: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The correct usage is that in biography, but in modern science it has&#xA;  been extended to mean &quot;organic life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is supported by the definition of βίος in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott's &lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon,&lt;/em&gt; edited by Sir Henry Stuart Jones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;life, i. e. not animal life (ζωή), but mode of life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(accessed from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dbi%2Fos1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perseus Digital Library&lt;/a&gt; on 15 February 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary describes the noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B6%CF%89%CE%AE#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ζωή&lt;/a&gt; as a derivative of the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B6%CE%AC%CF%89#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ζάω, ζώω&lt;/a&gt; (meaning &quot;to live&quot;), and gives the verb's etymology as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Hellenic *ǰṓw-ō, from *gʷyṓw-ō, from Proto-Indo-European&#xA;  *gʷíh&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;w-oh&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Attic Greek inherited /w/ was lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piotr Gąsiorowski explains in the comments &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagehat.com/the-indo-european-controversy-an-interview/#comment-2260370&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; how βίος and ζωός developed from the same Proto-Indo-European root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*gʷih₃w-ó- ‘living’ and *gʷíh₃w-e/o- ‘to live’. The change *-ih₃- &gt; *-jō is an inner Greek development (parallelled by similar changes in Tocharian and Armenian). It’s known as Francis–Normier’s law, or&#xA;  laryngeal breaking. Not everybody accepts it, but they really should.&#xA;  The ‘life’ root alone would be evidence enough for it. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Greek development of the inherited labiovelars is complex and&#xA;  differs from dialect to dialect, but the normal (expected) Attic&#xA;  reflex of *gʷ before *i and *ī is b, not d (though *gʷj yields z).&#xA;  Therefore, both βίος and ζωός are regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T04:02:47.403" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T04:02:47.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T01:12:44.230" Score="0" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen [+constricted glottis] described as encapsulating ejectives and implosives, but the feature matrix according to Hayes (2009) (that I pulled from his personal website over here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/120a/features.xls&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/120a/features.xls&lt;/a&gt;) only lists the glottal stop as being [+c.g.]. Is there disagreement here? Or an error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T02:29:46.707" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T02:29:46.707" Title="+constricted glottis includes ejectives and implosives, but Hayes only lists [ʔ] as [+cg] on his feature matrix. Why is that?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2016-02-16T01:27:08.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese has words sounding like Spanish, but with different meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aqui / Cá / Aquém — near from speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ali / Acolá — medium distance from speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lá / Além — far from speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aí — near to listener&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5146" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T01:27:08.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15313" CreationDate="2016-02-16T10:11:38.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most versions of minimalism assume linearization constraints that are independent of the structure building operation. This becomes obvious when you see that different languages have different V S O orders. Linearization is usually taken to be a more language specific thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T10:11:38.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16789" CreationDate="2016-02-16T10:16:06.523" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about the Japanese 'No' which is 'iie', or Tagalog which is 'hindi', or Lao, which is 'bomi'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T10:16:06.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16789" CreationDate="2016-02-16T11:12:30.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not the case outside of indo-european languages, as has been pointed out to you. The most likely candidate for the origin of the &lt;em&gt;nV&lt;/em&gt; forms is the PIE form &lt;em&gt;*ne&lt;/em&gt;, which was a negation. But it could also be coincidence that different families converged there. I do not think there is a good explanation as to &quot;why&quot; the current situation came to be like it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T11:12:30.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16789" CreationDate="2016-02-16T12:10:58.047" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Indo-European there was the word for not, it was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. So affirmation would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ne e̯esti tod&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The affirmation would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯esti tod&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-02-16T12:16:04.207" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T12:16:04.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1873" CreationDate="2016-02-16T14:47:03.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recall metric is ignored when evaluating syntactic trees because all tokens are being labeled in one way or another. There are 5 most common metrics for the evaluation of syntactic dependency parsing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Head Attachment Score (percent of nodes which are correctly attached to their parent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Label Precision (percent of nodes whose dependency labeled is predicted correctly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Labeled Attachment Score (percent of node for which both of the above are true)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Branch Precision (percent of the Paths (from root to leaf) that are being classified correctly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Correct trees precision (percent of the sentences from the eval corpus which have been parsed flawlessly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12501" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T14:47:03.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T15:27:44.220" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know a cover-term for &quot;declarative&quot;, &quot;negative&quot;, and &quot;emphatic&quot;?  One of my ESL-students asked me, and I cannot remember a term for this (tho' I've been teaching ESL for over 20 years).  We were dealing with aux. &quot;do&quot; in English, and practicing declarative, negative, emphatic, y/n-questions, topicalized syntax (eg, &quot;Seldom do I go&quot;), and the use of &quot;do&quot; as a pro-verb as in &quot;Mary doesn't smoke, but John does.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T15:27:44.220" Title="Cover-term for &quot;declarative&quot;, &quot;negative&quot;, &quot;emphatic&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16789" CreationDate="2016-02-16T19:29:55.053" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible hypothesis is that words for &quot;yes&quot; tend to undergo replacement faster than words for &quot;no&quot;. Think of the various near-synonyms for &quot;yes&quot; in contemporary English: &quot;sure&quot;, &quot;definitely&quot;, &quot;absolutely&quot;, etc. If one of these were to become so common that it takes over from &quot;yes&quot;, then the English for &quot;yes&quot; would no longer look like (for example) German &lt;em&gt;ja&lt;/em&gt;. On the other hand, synonyms for &quot;no&quot; tend either to be phonetic variants of &quot;no&quot; (&quot;nope&quot;, &quot;naw&quot;) or to contain &quot;no&quot; (&quot;not really&quot;), so if one of those became the standard word for &quot;no&quot;, it would still look related to &lt;em&gt;nein&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T19:29:55.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-16T20:41:48.393" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, a common way of expressing when an action is happening relative to another action is to use an ablative absolute, consisting of an ablative noun and an ablative participle. As an example, &lt;code&gt;servo laborante&lt;/code&gt; could be translated as 'with the slave working'. In the English translation, we use the word 'with' to show the ablative, which makes it seem as if we are dealing with an ablative instrument. But nobody is physically using the slave as an instrument to do something, so this does not make sense. It seems almost like an ablative agent, because we are trying to say that the slave is working, or that work is being done &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; the slave. But this doesn't quite make sense either, as we have no main passive verb as is typical of sentences using the ablative agent. So my question is this: how exactly is the ablative being used in an ablative absolute? Is it a unique use of the ablative case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12502" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T20:41:48.393" Title="In a Latin ablative absolute, how is the ablative case being used?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15760" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:35:48.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In England there is a broad Northern / Southern variation in some words amongst educated people - I stress educated because normally in England non-RP dialects are considered uneducated (that doesn't follow for the rest of Britain).&#xA;Thus in Educated Northern English the same short vowel is used in 'cat' and 'staff' and a different long one one in 'cart' and 'father'. In Educated Southern English (aka BBC English) the same long vowel is used in 'staff', 'cart' and 'father'.&#xA;With words like 'cloth' there is a different isogloss,&#xA;In both Educated Southern and Northern English one long vowel is used in 'caught' and 'court' (which are therefore homonyms) whilst a different short vowel is used in 'cot' and 'cloth'.&#xA;In very high status Southern English (aka Queen's English) one short vowel is used in 'cot' and a second long one is used in 'cloth', 'caught' and 'court'.&#xA;If you're a comedian and wish to mimic an aristocrat you would say 'clawth'.&#xA;You're right that words like 'australia' fit in the 'cloth' group.&#xA;I haven't given the IPA because these will vary however it is worth noting that in Educated Northern English the difference is often purely in length whilst in the South it is also in position and opening.&#xA;I believe the Northern position is the original and that the southern position was a development in Early Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:35:48.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15760" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:45:36.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;ps sorry I haven't really answered your question - the best resource might be a standard English dictionary such as OED or Chambers (but note the online versions are often slanted towards Americans). John Wells (who taught me phonetics at UCL) is quite right - golf is in the 'cloth' set and 'doll' and 'solve' are in the 'cot' set (in England). Interestingly 'gas' is in the 'cat' set not the 'staff' set. The development is very idiosyncratic owing to words being borrowed at differing times after the change and some 'such' as 'golf' being used as social markers. It was probably originally a phonetic change lengthening vowels before fricatives in Southern English which then became phonemic after the loss of preconsonantal 'r'. In understanding a word like 'golf' you should be aware that in many southern accents the 'l' in the word is a vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:45:36.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16810" CreationDate="2016-02-17T21:01:44.423" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/u8xL5NqfOHo?t=48s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; clip where Karl Pilkington visits a Vanuatu tribe, in which it is said that every word of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninde_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ninde&lt;/a&gt; language begins with the letter 'n'. I soon called BS, and as the wiki-page I linked to confirms, it was. My reason for doing so is that I'd think that if there was a language where every word began with an 'n', the speakers wouldn't be able to infer any information from it, and it would surely be dropped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is whether or not this gut feeling is actually true: Has there ever been observed a (natural) language where some rule that in principle carried no information was still used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12512" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:29:31.860" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:29:31.860" Title="Isn't a language where a rule is applied everywhere always overly redundant?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16809" CreationDate="2016-02-17T21:59:25.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer has to be no, not from the perspective of observed facts of language, but from problems with the idea of &quot;carrying information&quot;. Here's an example from (American) English. There is a rule of pronunciation that /t/ (for /k/ for some people) is pre-glottalized at the end of the syllable. So you could say that this rule &quot;carries no information&quot;. Except: it informs you, when you encounter a glottalized &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, that it is at the end of the syllable. It's not the same kind of information that adding the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; carries, in English verbs, but it is information. The concept of &quot;rule&quot; implies &quot;information&quot;, since rules apply in some context, and the fact of applying a rule informs you that the item is in that context and not some other context. If there is absolutely no context, then you don't have a rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T21:59:25.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-17T23:42:39.467" Score="1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of information about the evolution of English vocabulary since Anglo-Saxon times, but I am looking for examples of how English sentence construction has changed over time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12515" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T07:28:13.847" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T00:11:51.830" Title="What's a good source of information about how the structure of english sentences has evolved over time?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15447" CreationDate="2016-02-18T00:57:39.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My own personal experience (US English) has been only hearing &quot;thanks&quot; said with voiced dental fricative from young adult speakers less than 25 years of age (2010-2015 time range). It doesn't seem to be uniform within that age group, and is usually only apparent when the word &quot;thanks&quot; or &quot;thank&quot; is the first word in the sentence. The pronunciation variant doesn't seem to extend to conventionally voiceless dental fricatives like &quot;thought&quot; or &quot;thin&quot;. Just my own anecdotal observations. I don't have any hard data to present about it, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12517" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T00:57:39.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T03:52:01.007" Score="1" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many or most Indic languages possess voiceless aspirated stops. Cross-linguistically, such stops often turn into fricatives: e.g., in Indo-European, this happened in Greek, in Iranian, and probably in the prehistory of Latin. There are dozens or perhaps hundreds of Indic languages, and they've possessed voiceless aspirates for millennia, so you'd think many of them should have undergone this sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have any Indic languages changed their voiceless aspirates into fricatives?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What might explain the non-occurrence (or at any rate rarity) of this change in Indic, when it seems to be common elsewhere?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T07:30:51.890" Title="Has any Indic language spirantized its voiceless aspirates? If not, why not?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16814" CreationDate="2016-02-18T04:27:17.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Edit: At first, I completely misread this question as asking about &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt; aspirates. Sorry about that!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes. Gujarati is the first example I was able to find. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Intervocalically and with murmuring of vowels, the voiced aspirated&#xA;  stops /ɡʱ, d̪ʱ, bʱ/ have voiced spirant allophones [ɣ, ð, β].&#xA;  Spirantization of non-palatal voiceless aspirates has been reported as&#xA;  well, including /pʰ/ being usually realized as [f] in the standard&#xA;  dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also says spirantization of [kʰ] to [x~ʜ] and and [pʰ] to [ɸ~f] is found in some varieties of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_phonology#Fricatives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bengali&lt;/a&gt;. One parallel to this pattern outside of the Indic languages might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt;, which has a current inventory containing /f tʰ x~kʰ/ that are all thought to derive from earlier aspirated plosives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would guess it's just an areal feature within the Indic languages, but I don't know very well. Dravidic languages generally don't distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated series of consonants in their native vocabulary (although they may in vocabulary taken from Indic languages), so it seems unlikely to me to have arisen from Dravidic influence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T07:30:51.890" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T07:30:51.890" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16809" CreationDate="2016-02-18T08:30:55.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about the word final stress in modern French? It carries no information except for marking word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T08:30:55.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16784" CreationDate="2016-02-18T14:19:25.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the &lt;strong&gt;standard&lt;/strong&gt; forms of the Persian of Iran, Afghan Persian, and Tajiki are mutually understandable. They are about as different as British and American English. But this does not mean that all &lt;strong&gt;dialects&lt;/strong&gt; are likely to be understood in the other countries, or even in different regions of the same country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T14:19:25.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16818" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:58:35.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T17:58:35.967" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T17:58:35.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16819" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-02-18T17:58:35.967" Score="0" Body="Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as entity identification, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify elements in text into pre-defined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc." OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T06:22:34.073" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T06:22:34.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16814" CreationDate="2016-02-18T23:44:45.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert on Indic, but one possible answer to #2 is that, if a language already has fricatives from other sources, this may discourage the spirantization process that would turn aspirated stops into fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I know that Indic already has back-fricatives such as [h]: e.g. the Hindi word for &quot;hand&quot; is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;aath&lt;/em&gt;, cognate with Greek &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kh&lt;/strong&gt;eîr&lt;/em&gt;, Armenian &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dz&lt;/strong&gt;erk&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hand&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[f] may have entered the Indic languages via the influence of Persian and Arabic vocabulary; it seems to be listed as a phoneme for Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the dental fricative [Θ], it seems fairly rare even in languages that have spirantized their voiceless stops. Despite its prominence in English, [Θ] seems to have a tendency to become other sounds, whether through reversion to [t] (as in mainland Scandinavian), voicing/hardening to [d] (German, Dutch), fronting to [f] (dialectal English), retraction to [h] (Gaelic), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T23:44:45.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-19T01:45:34.113" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certain words seem to come from gluing or aggregating other extant words; what is the technical name given for phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit: &lt;em&gt;pratyaksanamanagamah&lt;/em&gt;; where &lt;em&gt;pratyaksa&lt;/em&gt; is percept, &lt;em&gt;anumana&lt;/em&gt; is inference, and &lt;em&gt;agamah&lt;/em&gt; is testimony&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Being-in-the-World&lt;/em&gt;, where the words are hyphenated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;SchifffartskanalaufsichtsbevollmachtIfer&lt;/em&gt;; where &lt;em&gt;schifft&lt;/em&gt; is ship, &lt;em&gt;fahrt&lt;/em&gt; sailing, &lt;em&gt;Kanal&lt;/em&gt; is canal, &lt;em&gt;aufsicht&lt;/em&gt; is supervising, and &lt;em&gt;bevollmachtiger&lt;/em&gt; is supervise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T08:23:32.657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T08:23:32.657" Title="What term describes the production of new words by 'aggregating them'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16821" CreationDate="2016-02-19T02:16:46.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;compounding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might add that compounds are not usually made up of full-inflected words with case and number, they are generally based on the stems that get inflection. Hence &lt;em&gt;pratyakṣa&lt;/em&gt; in that compound does not have a case marker, as self-standing words of Sanskrit do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T02:23:36.637" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T02:23:36.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16827" CreationDate="2016-02-19T21:21:15.347" Score="-1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reread &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12752/5306&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; (which this does NOT duplicate) and the OED, and can infer that 'semantics' is a hyponym of 'meaning'; but still unable to disambiguate 'meaning' and 'semantics' in certain contexts, I am trying to conquer deficiencies in my comprehension by trying to substitute one for the other and then verifying the substitution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for each of the following, can &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt; correctly replace &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;? Why or why not? Please aid me by diagnosing why they appear interchangeable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams.  I, and not the book, bolded.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p xiii:] Lexical semantics takes&#xA;  up various approaches to word &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, including the concepts of reference&#xA;  and sense, semantic features, argument structure, and thematic roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 3:] Beyond that we know that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or &lt;strong&gt;meanings&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 4:] This conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds)&#xA;  and &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; (concept) of a word is also true in sign languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 8:] Returning to the question we posed at the beginning of this chapter—&#xA;  what does it mean to know a language? It means knowing the sounds and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;meanings&lt;/strong&gt; of many, if not all, of the words of the language, and the rules for&#xA;  their combination—&#xA;  the grammar, which generates infinitely many possible&#xA;  sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 80:] &lt;em&gt;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&lt;/em&gt;. This is a very interesting sentence, because it shows&#xA;  that syntax can be separated from &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;—that form can be separated from &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/~lasnik/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HOWARD LASNIK&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Human Language: Part One&lt;/em&gt;, 1995&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 140:] Language without &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;less.&#xA;  ROMAN JAKOBSON&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 361:] The third kind of &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; change that a lexical item may undergo is a shift in &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T19:22:12.557" Title="Can 'semantics' replace 'meaning' in these 7 sentences? Why or why not?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" ClosedDate="2016-02-21T19:37:59.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15329" CreationDate="2016-02-20T02:36:43.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy enough to go from the sluiced construction to the one word question.  Instead of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John and someone were dancing; guess who.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we'll use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John and someone were dancing.  Who?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we say then that &quot;Who?&quot; is a reduced form of a full form sentence with all its parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Who is it that John and were dancing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can it be?  If it were, the &quot;Who&quot; form would be ungrammatical, because the full version breaks the Coordinate Structure Constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The importance of John Ross's paper on sluicing, &quot;Guess who&quot;, is that it gives evidence &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt; deriving the small form sentences from the full forms.  Not &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt;.  Someone seems to have missed the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T02:36:43.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16825" CreationDate="2016-02-20T03:06:07.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meaning&lt;/em&gt; is one of the words of which one may say that they have odd jobs in our language ... What causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are tempted to describe the use of important 'odd-job' words as though they were words with regular functions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - Wittgenstein, &lt;em&gt;Blue Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e, you're never going to get a universal answer to your question, because meaning can't be used to define itself; meaning must be experienced, and that makes it less formal, because a human being must be in the circuit in order to have any meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T03:06:07.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3344" CreationDate="2016-02-20T05:24:33.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I think you should prefer things written by people who have actually done some linguistics over the work of people who are sure they know what it's all about, even though they've never actually done it.  Because maybe those people don't actually know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a somewhat offbeat recommendation -- a book I used as a text for a beginning linguistics course for several years, and I think it worked very well.  It's especially good for people approaching linguistics from ground zero. Don't know what a paradigm is?  Never saw a declension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be for you.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Decipherment_of_Linear_B.html?id=TD8YAlh_XHwC&amp;amp;source=kp_cover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Decipherment of Linear B&lt;/a&gt;, by John Chadwick.  It's a short little book.  It's a detective story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T05:24:33.223" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-02-20T05:24:33.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12752" CreationDate="2016-02-20T12:06:30.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this really boils down to level of analysis. (Formal) semantics asks: are there atomic units of meaning, and if so, how do they combine to form linguistic meaning? Of course, this is not a full explanation of linguistic meaning, as not all meaning in a sentence can be explained by reducing it to its atomic units. There are other studies of meaning, such as pragmatics that aim to address dimensions of meaning that is non-compositional. So you can consider &quot;semantics&quot; to be a disciplinary term within linguistics, and &quot;meaning&quot; to refer to the broad phenomena of meaningfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T12:06:30.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T15:33:32.437" Score="-4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams. I, and not the book, bolded.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[p 7:] A person who knows a language has mastered&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; a system of rules that assigns sound and&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    NOAM CHOMSKY, &lt;em&gt;Language and Mind&lt;/em&gt;, 1968&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 9:] The way we are using the word grammar differs from most common usages.&#xA;  In our sense, the grammar is the knowledge speakers have about the units&#xA;  and rules of their language—rules for combining sounds into words (called&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt;), rules of word formation (called &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt;), rules for combining&#xA;  words into phrases and phrases into sentences (called &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;), as well as &lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; the&#xA;  rules for assigning meaning (called &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to conquer my failure to disambiguate 'meaning' and 'semantics' by asking whether one can substitute for the other in certain sentences and then by verifying the substitution. So can 'semantics' can be used to rewrite [p 7.]?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, is my [3.] correct; does [3.] mean the same thing as [1.]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[3.]&lt;/strong&gt; A person who knows a language has mastered&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;s&gt;a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning&lt;/s&gt; [phonology and semantics] in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T02:37:34.760" Title="Can 'a system of rules that assigns [...] meaning in a definite way' be replaced with 'semantics'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T18:13:13.663" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a few days of pondering I came to the conclusion (which is only my opinion) that the division of the simple and progressive forms in Modern English is akin to the use-mention distinction in analytic philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple is used to assert something, while the progressive is used to point to this assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example to partially support my hypothesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I say) &lt;em&gt;I refuse to go.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The listener says) &lt;em&gt;Oh, so you're refusing to go?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is yet another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Someone says) &lt;em&gt;I think guns kill people, not people.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I say) &lt;em&gt;Are you saying that we should ban bearing guns?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the two examples above have the &amp;quot;happening at the moment&amp;quot; reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I on the right track here? If I am, where can I read more about this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12494" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T16:51:32.880" Title="Simple/progressive as use/mention" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16832" CreationDate="2016-02-20T18:25:47.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think you're on the right track.  I agree partly with your example, but I think what is going on there has a different explanation.  The listener could say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, so you refuse to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but he could be accused of obviousness, or tautology.  Because the refusal has been made.  What matters more is whether my refusal to go is on-going.  Did I not only refuse to go, but do I continue to refuse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, asking whether there is a process of refusal, which continues, using the progressive, is probably more to the point in the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll find anything about this use of the progressive in the literature on speech acts, but that is the best I can do for a reference.  Your example, if I'm right, depends on the fact that &quot;I refuse to go&quot; is not simply a descriptive statement, but is actually a refusal.  It can't be false, since in saying it, you have refused.  An important reference on speech acts is J. L. Austin's &lt;em&gt;How to do things with words&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see you've added an example.  It seems similar, since the person who says &quot;I think guns kill people&quot; is not trying to describe a thought he finds running through his head, but rather is performing the speech act of offering an opinion.  And you can't properly deny that he has that opinion, so if you are to disagree, you have to comment on what might have prompted him to hold that opinion or on some consequence of his position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-02-21T16:51:32.880" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T16:51:32.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16831" CreationDate="2016-02-20T18:47:08.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Here is some examples. &quot;A system of rules that assigns […] meaning in a definite way is known as 'semantics'&quot; cannot be changed to &quot;Semantics is known as 'semantics'&quot;. Also, anybody who says &quot;I'm trying to discover a system of rules that assigns […] meaning in a definite way&quot; would not say &quot;I'm trying to discover semantics&quot;. I don't understand the value of &quot;[...]&quot; in your question. Semantics does not do phonology, in case that is what you are asking. Or are you asking if Chomsky &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; at the time that semantics does phonology (analogous to the current apparent belief that word order is determined by phonology)? It's not exactly clear what your question is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that historical context, your 3 is not a correct restatement of 1, since you failed to include syntax, which at the time (and as far as I know, still) has not been subsumed under phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T18:47:08.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11085" CreationDate="2016-02-20T19:18:38.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that the paucal form stems from proto-Slavic dual form which is distinct from plural, and is still present, in some form, in Slovenian language nowadays. The paucal form is not specific to BCS but to all Slavic languages with grammatical cases (this excludes Macedonian and Bulgarian). The paucal form includes numbers 2,3,4, whereas number 5 utilizes plural form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your question &quot;Where does the seemingly arbitrary limit of four come from?&quot; I would say that it's related to the fact that humans can recognize amounts of up to 4-5 without even counting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10006" LastEditorUserId="10006" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T01:32:34.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T01:32:34.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-20T20:43:22.040" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to compare two corpora, one consisting of Wikipedia articles and one made up of articles in printed encyclopedias. The corpus is thematically comparable because I always chose the same entry and I respected the disciplines defining subcorpora for geography, chemistry and so on.&#xA;Now I would like to compare the two subcopora (Wikipedia vs. printed encyclopedia) and the word frequencies which are in. I compared relative frequencies but I ask myself if I could apply any statistical measure to proove that my results are not random.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for answers!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12527" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T20:43:22.040" Title="Significance Testing in corpus linguistics for corpus comparison" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16831" CreationDate="2016-02-21T02:37:34.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chomsky (in this passage) defines universal grammar as &quot;a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences.&quot; He writes that it (=universal grammar) consists of three components: syntactic, semantic, and phonological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He understands the syntactic component as the one defining an infinite class of possible sentences. The semantic and phonological components, he argues, are &quot;purely interpretive&quot; (p.111).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to your specific question. The problem is that &lt;strong&gt;you misunderstand the relationship of synonymy and substitution&lt;/strong&gt;. Also, quite often the particular word choice is determined by stylistic or syntactic considerations. Just because you can't insert the word semantics in a particular sentence doesn't say much about the actual meaning of the term semantics. You clearly say that you're trying to understand the difference between two English words, meaning and semantics. That being said, &lt;strong&gt;your extremely crude approach is wrong&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;can they be substituted in sentences?&lt;/em&gt;). There are so many factors that affect word choice (morphosynstactic properties, register, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As is, your question is misinformed because it is based on false assumptions and thus has no answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T02:37:34.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9843" CreationDate="2016-02-21T13:14:37.913" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of this mistranslation series was identified by Japanese internet users as parallel corpus data contaminated by a Japanese TV reality show program &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainori&quot;&gt;あいのり&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Ainori&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://open.mixi.jp/user/604810/diary/1935914212&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, a number of &quot;episodes&quot; other than &quot;78&quot; were observed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;トナカイさんの贈り物　→　Episode 167&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  星の印　→ Episode 58&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  砂漠の決断　→ Episode 60&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  恋する勇気　→ Episode 50&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  愛の泉　→ Episode 57&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  飛べない蝶　→ Episode 65&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  涙の記念日　→ Episode 66&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  心の鍵　→ Episode 82&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  無添加な恋　→ Episode 112&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all of them coincided with &lt;a href=&quot;http://otn.fujitv.co.jp/b_hp/100000005l.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ainori&lt;/em&gt;'s episode titles list&lt;/a&gt;, with disturbed episode numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6743" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T13:14:37.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T17:07:41.393" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;we usually say voiceless stops are produced with vocal folds not vibrating. but when we introduce the idea of VOT, we say VOT is a specific feature for stop consonants that measures the amount of time between the release of obstruction and the onset of voicing (i.e. vocal folds vibration); and voiceless stops have a longer lag - onset of voicing comes after the release. isn't this contradictory? when we talk about the onset of 'voicing' for voiceless stops, do we mean 'voicing' of the subsequent vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12540" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T20:58:35.520" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T20:58:35.520" Title="do the vocal folds vibrate when producing oral stops of zero VOT?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16841" CreationDate="2016-02-22T18:11:33.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are numerous fine-grained problems with identifying the boundary between a consonant and a vowel, but setting that aside, yes, we generally define the consonant / vowel boundary in terms of the release of the consonant's constriction (the vowel is what follows), in which case VOT is a measure of the time until the vocal folds vibrate during the following vowel. If VOT is zero, the vowel is fully voiced, and if it is positive, the vowel is devoiced on some initial portion. The apparent contradiction stems from thinking that all of the properties of one segment get realized before any of the properties of the next segment: in reality, there is a lot of overlap (for example CV formant transitions where the tongue and lip configuration of the consonant persist for some time after the release of the constriction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;voiceless&quot; stop can have a range of VOT values, from (small) negative to large positive, so characterizing voiceless stops as having &quot;longer lag&quot; isn't exactly true, since there may not be any lag. In North Saami, voicing at a very low amplitude precedes release by about 10 msc, in Thai voicing follows release by something less that 10 msc, and then you can find unaspirated stops with quite a range of VOT values (so the unaspirated stops of Navaho have a longer VOT than the aspirated stops of Thai). What counts is that voiceless unaspirated stops have a smaller VOT than do voiceless aspirated stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T18:11:33.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2016-02-23T00:57:24.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always thought that English lost its cases as a result of Viking settlement. Although the root words were quite often the same, the inflections were different. However, it was found that if the Danes and the English used prepositions instead of inflections, the two tongues became mutually intelligible. There are a number of papers available on this subject, free on the internet. Also, I remember reading that if one examined charters, it is possible to see a steady progression of this process from Northumbria southwards and that it took more than a hundred years to complete. I have never done this research myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12543" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T00:57:24.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T12:44:52.793" Score="1" ViewCount="1047" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to save the process of your project (not a result of it) in PRAAT programme so that you can change smth later etc and do not do the same things over again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12549" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T13:20:50.863" Title="How to save the process of your work in PRAAT?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T13:36:00.727" Score="2" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the first Greek grammars or even older sources, there is a traditional and apparently arbitrary order used for cases in most if not all living European languages, e.g. in declension tables. It often starts like this (NGDA):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nominative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accusative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other cases usually follow if they’re used, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ablative (abbreviated ‘B’ below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instrumental&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepositional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern language teaching, it seems to become more common to group the cases by morphologic similarity to aid memorization. This results in NADG instead of NGDA for German. I’ve seen NAGD for Old English, though. Latin should probably use NVABDG, Russian maybe NAGPDI because Acc forms agree with either Nom or Gen depending on animacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much does similarity of case morphemes differ by language? &#xA;Is there a logical canonical order of (nominal) cases across (Indo-)European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:56:10.177" Title="Order of cases in Indo-European languages by morphologic similarity" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-23T13:56:46.627" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of a discussion/definition of multi word expressions by Chomsky? As there exist plethora of &quot;synonyms&quot; (to keep it easy lets state they are synonyms) including compounds, frozen expressions and collocations (to mention just a few) it is hard to find out by just using a search engine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6717" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T16:25:47.437" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T16:25:47.437" Title="Did Chomsky adress Multiword Expressions?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16846" CreationDate="2016-02-23T17:22:08.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Is there a logical canonical order of (nominal) cases across (Indo-)European languages?” I would say that the answer to this part of your question is “no”. The Nom Gen Dat Acc Voc order is traditional in Greek and Latin grammar since antiquity and it is imitated in modern languages like German and Russian. It is traditional, if you like “canonical”, but not “logical”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit, on the other hand, the traditional order of the cases is Nom Voc Acc Instr Dat Abl Gen Loc. This order does have a logic: in the singular at least the Nom has typically long-grade ablaut, Voc Acc and Instr have full-grade ablaut and the others have zero-grade ablaut. So the “fuller” forms are grouped together at the beginning of the paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T17:22:08.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2016-02-23T18:50:26.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; coördinates &lt;em&gt;gaudens&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aemula&lt;/em&gt;: She flees [rejoicing in x and imitating y]. Both words should be seen as adjectives here: participles are always in a way adjectives, and &lt;em&gt;aemulus&lt;/em&gt; is an ordinary adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes it slightly unusual (though not for poetry) is that the word order is different from what it would probably be in prose: &lt;em&gt;innuptaeque aemula Phoebes&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;aemulaque innuptae Phoebes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-02-23T20:07:34.263" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T20:07:34.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16874" CreationDate="2016-02-23T20:47:35.583" Score="0" ViewCount="724" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese uses a high number of diacritics. Are there any languages that are even higher, in terms of either the maximum or the mean of the number of diacritics added to letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T07:39:20.820" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T13:29:38.437" Title="Language with the highest ratio of diacritics to letters in typical text" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;writing&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16811" CreationDate="2016-02-24T02:26:35.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ian Roberts's 1993 book &lt;em&gt;Verbs and Diachronic Syntax&lt;/em&gt; has a good amount of (comparative) information on the history of English (and French) sentential structure. It's couched in late-GB terms, but I don't remember it being too over-the-top theory-heavy. I used it in a Historical Syntax class and remember liking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T02:26:35.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16852" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Multiword expression&quot;. Occasionally &quot;multiword entity&quot;. A concept used in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16853" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" Score="0" Body="&quot;Multiword expression&quot;. Occasionally &quot;multiword entity&quot;. A concept used in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing." OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T05:17:33.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12323" CreationDate="2016-02-24T08:23:25.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Westbury labs provides a ~1 billion word Wikipedia dump of all articles with greater than 1000 words from 2010:  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/westburylab.wikicorp.download.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/westburylab.wikicorp.download.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BYU has a larger dump (1.9 bn) from 2014, but it's not available for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12555" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T08:23:25.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-24T14:29:30.403" Score="9" ViewCount="940" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first asked this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155&quot;&gt;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the Spanish community has not found any answer yet and the phenomenon is observable in many Romance languages. I am wondering it anyone here in the Linguistics community will come with a plausible explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nativlang.com/romance-languages/grammar/verbs-mood.php?e=0,9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comparative Grammar of the Romance Languages&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To form the subjunctive, verbs normally switch their thematic vowel (a becomes e/i and e/i turns into a)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Spanish the present &lt;strong&gt;subjunctive&lt;/strong&gt; is formed by a kind of &lt;strong&gt;swapping&lt;/strong&gt; the indicative endings between the verb declension classes: the 1st class (-a-) takes the indicative endings from the 2nd class (-e), and the 2nd and 3rd class (-i-) take the indicative endings from the 1st class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OlaxR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OlaxR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt;: Is it only coincidental, or is there something deeper behind it? Something like &quot;as the subjunctive often expresses uncertainty, let's make the verbs sound weird by deliberately using a wrong set of endings to emphasize that we are not sure&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any theory about the origin of this particular switch? I &lt;strong&gt;am&lt;/strong&gt; aware that this is inherited from Latin. The question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about how the Romance languages inherited it. By &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt; I mean rather an &lt;em&gt;idea behind&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a bonus question: is anything like this (swapping thematic vowel between tenses/moods) in non-Romance languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I received a plausible answer at same question to the Spanish Stack Exchange site, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155&quot;&gt;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/15929/11155&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T00:39:34.227" Title="Is there something deeper behind the “verb classes swapping” of the subjunctive endings in Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16858" CreationDate="2016-02-24T14:38:42.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This trait is directly inherited from Latin. A verb like laudare has subjunctive forms with an e: &lt;em&gt;laudem, laudes, laudet, lauemus, laudetis, laudent&lt;/em&gt; while other verbs form their subjunctive with an a, e.g. vivere has: &lt;em&gt;vivas, vivas, vivat, vivamus, vivatis, vivant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T14:38:42.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-24T14:57:18.533" Score="7" ViewCount="4574" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages where nouns are invariable? As I have read such languages simply use a numeral in front of the unchanged noun.&#xA;They don't say &quot;five cats&quot;, but &quot;five cat&quot; or &quot;five tail cat&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to have more information. Which South-East Asian languages use such a system. Examples would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: Now I have some information about Indonesian: English two cakes is Indonesian two cake. If there is no numeral before the noun the plural is expressed simply by saying cake two times: cakes is cake-cake.&#xA;Source:&lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst143558_Writing.aspx?find=unread&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst143558_Writing.aspx?find=unread&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Priscilla, an Indonesian woman, talking about numerus in her language. Read her fourth answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T06:44:05.517" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T08:49:51.047" Title="Languages without plural markings" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2016-02-24T18:32:24.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Māori is, with the exception of 8 words, a language like this. Nouns have the same form in singular and plural and are distinguished by the article used: &lt;em&gt;te&lt;/em&gt; for singular and &lt;em&gt;ngā&lt;/em&gt; for plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;te ngeru :: the cat &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ngā ngeru :: the cats &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he ngeru :: a cat &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ētahi ngeru :: some cats&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that the form of the noun itself doesn't change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions to this are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tangata ~ tāngata :: person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;matua ~ mātua :: parent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wahine ~ wāhine :: woman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tipuna ~ tīpuna :: ancestor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tuahine ~ tuāhine :: sister (of a man)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tuakana ~ tuākana :: elder sibling (of the same sex)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;teina / taina ~ tēina / tāina :: younger sibling (of same sex)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tamaiti ~ tamariki :: child&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5552" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T18:32:24.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16867" CreationDate="2016-02-24T19:11:42.323" Score="-3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Language&lt;/em&gt; (10 ed, 2014) by V Fromkin, R Rodman, N Hyams. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/12752/5306&quot;&gt;question on 'meaning' vs 'semantics'&lt;/a&gt; is more general, and so does not answer or duplicate the following.  &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 48:] &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CD71i.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book uses 'meaning change' only in the above (from Chapter 2 on Morphology); elsewhere and oftener it uses 'semantic change' (uses of which please tell me if you need me to quote; I am trying to keep my posts short). &#xA;So do they differ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:29:11.783" Title="Does 'meaning change' differ from 'semantic change'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-25T08:57:00.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16858" CreationDate="2016-02-24T20:06:13.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From 280 of Benjamin W. Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Italic subjunctive is not a continuation f the Proto-Indo-European subjunctive, which became a future. There are at least three subjunctive morphemes found in Italic, of which one continues the PIE athematic optative and the other two are of unknown origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the details of how the distribution went you will have to consult various works. The question as to whether this pattern (the Romance pattern) appears elsewhere among I-E languages is answered by this shifting of functions of various morphemes, e.g. subjunctive to future, optative to subjunctive, and so forth. Deep stuff. The upshot is that &amp;quot;swapping&amp;quot; does not properly describe a process that occurred through a long and complex evolution among the I-E languages, although it does make it easier to teach the subjunctive to learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12562" LastEditorUserId="3475" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T00:39:34.227" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T00:39:34.227" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16880" CreationDate="2016-02-24T21:12:50.360" Score="1" ViewCount="501" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about measurement units in languages written in right-to-left (RTL) scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Malay, Farsi, etc. and their country-specific variants (for example, Arabic has quite a lot of national variants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would tend to think that there's a widely accepted practice in, say, Modern Standard Arabic, but I believe that not all countries have the same style regarding LTR text blocks when they include measurements (I've been told that some countries try to mimic English in this regard while others do not). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that numbers themselves flow from left to right, but there are two more things here: an optional -/+ sign and the measurement unit (e.g. celsius degrees, in this case: °C or ℃). In English we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-10°C&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there are quite a few possibilities, I would need to have some feedback. So, the question is: &lt;strong&gt;What is the expected style in the different RTL language variants of the world?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the possibilities I can think of for the LTR text block containing the +/- sign, the figure and the measurement unit that would be preceded and/or followed by RTL text: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-10°C&#xA;10°C-&#xA;-°C10&#xA;°C10-&#xA;-C°10&#xA;C°10-&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would only need the units (with prefixes and suffixes) as I did above, without any Arabic text to avoid display issues. If possible, a reference (to some recognized style guide or something like that) would be great. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2922" LastEditorUserId="2922" LastEditDate="2016-02-29T23:52:45.223" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T05:27:04.313" Title="Order of components within measurement units in RTL languages" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16863" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:29:11.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Meaning change&quot; in this usage is a pedagogical expression (befitting the fact that this comes from an elementary introductory text), referring to the relative semantic differences in two pairs of words. For example, the difference in meaning between &quot;think&quot; and &quot;thinks&quot; is small, compared to the difference in meaning between &quot;commit&quot; and &quot;committal&quot;. You could call that a difference in meaning, or a semantic difference. Calling it a change is questionable, although that is often how people talk about it at an elementary level, because &quot;change&quot; implies that it had one property earlier and then came to have a different property. That is valid for historical change, but they are discussing synchronic analysis. It is quite wrong-headed to think that in a synchronic derivation, you first compute the form and meaning of &quot;think&quot; and then you add a suffix which causes you to re-compute the meaning of &quot;thinks&quot;, which is what is implied by saying that the meaning &lt;em&gt;changes&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, most analysts (when not in 101 mode) would talk about differences in meaning, or semantic differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:29:11.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16871" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:37:38.807" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively new to praat, and I have written a praat script that segments a larger file into smaller files based on a procedure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;@instance: &quot;sbc001&quot;, 756.00, 758.70&#xA;procedure instance: .sound$, .start, .end&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, praat is removing final zeros. For example, if my start time is &lt;code&gt;756.00&lt;/code&gt; and my end time is &lt;code&gt;758.70&lt;/code&gt; it will name the file &lt;code&gt;sbc001_756_758_7&lt;/code&gt; instead of naming it &lt;code&gt;sbc001_756_00_758_70&lt;/code&gt;. Is there some way to force praat to include these zeros?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be able to modify my perl code to return 758 and 70 so that I could put them together as a decimal in praat, but I'm not sure how to do that while getting praat to read it as a number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T15:59:49.960" Title="Stop praat from removing zeros" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2016-02-25T13:18:39.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Malay and Indonesian, like many Austronesian languages, use reduplication to mark plurality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kucing        - cat&#xA;Kucing-kucing - cats&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, however, possible to denote plurality without changing the form of the noun, as does reduplication. The use of cardinals with (optional) classifiers doesn't change the form of the noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1/se- (ekor) kucing       5 (ekor) kucing       328 (ekor) kucing&#xA;One   (CL)   cat          5 (CL)   cat          328 (CL)   cat&#xA;One cat                   5 cats                328 cats&#xA;&#xA;1/se- (buah) buku         5 (buah) buku         328 (buah) buku&#xA;One   (CL)   book         5 (CL)   book         328 (CL)   book&#xA;One book                  5 books               328 books&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cardinals + classifiers don't seem grammatical when used with reduplicated nouns. Perhaps reduplication is only compatible with indefinite plurals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*5 ekor kucing-kucing     *5 buah buku-buku&#xA;*5 CL   cats              *5 CL   books&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some nouns have different meanings when duplicated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Orang       - person / people&#xA;Orang-orang - scarecrow(s)&#xA;&#xA;Mata        - eye(s)&#xA;Mata-mata   - spy(ies)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T08:49:51.047" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T08:49:51.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T15:17:34.623" Score="0" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) Is it a tone?&#xA;2) How do you pronounce it? How it would look like in the intonogram?&#xA;3) Is it the same thing as Divided (Extended) Fall-Rise? Are there any differences?&#xA;4) Is this tone used for a word or for a sense-group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12570" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T10:35:58.130" Title="What is Fall-plus-Rise (phonetics)?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16868" CreationDate="2016-02-25T15:59:49.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not currently working with Praat, but I assume you’re calling something like string$() for the filename at some point. (Or, it’s being called implicitly to coerce your numerics into strings.) Can you use this function instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;fixed$ (number, precision)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Formulas_5__String_functions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat Manual&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;formats a number as a string with precision digits after the decimal point. Thus, fixed$ (72.65687, 3) becomes the string 72.657, and fixed$ (72.65001, 3) becomes the string 72.650. In these examples, we see that the result can be rounded up and that trailing zeroes are kept. At least one digit of precision is always given, e.g. fixed$ (0.0000157, 3) becomes the string 0.00002. The number 0 always becomes the string 0.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T15:59:49.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16870" CreationDate="2016-02-25T17:06:56.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It refers to either a tone or an intoneme, where F0 starts high, decreases, then increases (sometimes known as a convex tone). We would have to wait for the invention of the intonogram to see what it looks like there, but you can see one on the pitch trace of any waveform display device or program that displays F0. It can in principle be used for all sorts of tings, ranging from intonation (as in English) to lexical tone specification as in languages of Africa and Asia. It is used in English an an intonational feature to signal disappointed disapproval, e.g. &quot;LA-a-a-r-r-y-Y-Y!&quot;; it is the normal word-pitch profile of words in North Saami; it arises in Lomongo from the syllabic merger of falling and high tones; that is one interpretation of the Mandarin 3rd tone (hence it is a lexical property); it exists in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec as a surface-contrastive unit not derived from vowel merger (one would have to undertake a study of the deep tonology of the language to know if it always arises from combining floating grammatical tones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T17:06:56.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-26T00:22:18.403" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a really interesting thought the other day:&#xA;Is oral language dominant/superior in some way to written language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bring this up because every time I need to correct or edit my written words (I see this with other people, too), I say the words out loud. This has become exceedingly apparent ever since I became an English teacher abroad. I always have teachers coming to me and asking, &quot;Does this &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; right? Is this correct?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it sounds funny when I say the words out loud, I change it. If it sounds right, I keep it. It's as if saying the words confirms/rejects the accuracy or correctness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this is because we learn how to speak before we learn how to read?&#xA;...Or that we trust what we hear more than what we read? Is it a social thing? Do we like hearing voices more than reading words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a sub-category in psycholinguistics (or maybe sociolinguistics) for this phenomenon? I've been trying to pinpoint it but I can't seem to find anything on the interwebs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12573" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T00:22:18.403" Title="Saying words aloud to confirm/disprove accuracy of written language" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16850" CreationDate="2016-02-26T01:49:39.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are speaking of current official spelling systems, I believe that Vietnamese wins the prize. Potential competitors would most likely be a language with a rich vowel system than included independent tone, phonation and nasalization contrast, which points to Ju|'hoansi and !Xóõ, which would have a higher maximum and probably a higher text frequency – &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; these languages were transcribed in IPA. However, Ju|'hoansi has been undergoing a progressive reduction in diacritics to the point that the 1994 orthography is diacritic-free (tone isn't marked). !Xóõ orthography likewise trades in diacritics for VC digraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T01:49:39.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-26T02:14:46.093" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conjunctions in the Arabic language can be inflected be adding an affix that indicates the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the conjunction 'because' is لِأَن (li'ann), and 'because you' yields لِأَنك (li'annak).&#xA;This is an example sentence: 'You are sick, &lt;strong&gt;because you&lt;/strong&gt; didn't were a scarf'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a grammatical term that labels this class of conjunctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5477" LastEditorUserId="5477" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T11:26:57.763" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T18:17:09.063" Title="Grammatical term for inflectable conjunctions as used in the Arabic language(s)" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16878" CreationDate="2016-02-26T10:39:07.083" Score="3" ViewCount="1279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can draw a combination of a Sound and a TextGrid, and the combination of a Pitch and a TextGrid, but I cannot draw the combination of all three, like it appears in the editor window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a weakness in Praat, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-02-29T09:35:54.633" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T13:55:48.653" Title="Is there any way to draw a pitch track, sound wave, and annotation in Praat?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16877" CreationDate="2016-02-26T10:47:43.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to do that either, and I think the most convenient way to do so is to take a screenshot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T11:04:52.397" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T11:04:52.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9413" CreationDate="2016-02-26T10:52:39.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can either downmix it to mono, or delete one channel. choosing one over the other depends on your situation. if your channels are identical you can delete one, if your channels are not identical you can downmix them in one channel so that you will not lose any data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To downmix your audio in Praat go to &lt;code&gt;Convert - Convert to mono&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To extract one channel, and obviously delete the other one go to &lt;code&gt;Convert - Extract one channel&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T10:52:39.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16865" CreationDate="2016-02-26T11:12:34.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even in RTL languages you are still writing numbers and numbers are LTR so when writing numbers we should treat them as LTR so &lt;code&gt;-10°C&lt;/code&gt; is the correct way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following example from Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;هوا نزدیک 10- بود&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The temperature was nearly minus 10 degrees&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;most of the mathematical abbreviations are written exactly as they are written in Latin languages. &#xA;for instance: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFHhC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SFHhC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;pic1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The speed of the car was 20 kilometers per hour&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or we can use both method like writing half of the abbreviation in Latin and the other half in Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yY6sg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yY6sg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hv0EC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hv0EC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T05:27:04.313" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T05:27:04.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16845" CreationDate="2016-02-26T11:25:43.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by process you mean your transcription the answer is yes you can save your textgrids and load them back. about other works such as saving the sound selection you had like the picture below I must say No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fzqat.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fzqat.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;praat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T11:25:43.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16875" CreationDate="2016-02-26T12:05:22.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic grammar this is called &quot;'inna and its sisters&quot;. These encompass a set of particles that are followed by a noun in the accusative case, or by the accusative forms of suffixed pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T17:46:40.907" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T17:46:40.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16845" CreationDate="2016-02-26T13:20:50.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saved my work as a text grid, but how to put it into praat again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By work, I mean the process, the constituents of the text grid or whatever the hell it is: the pitch, the divisions that I made, the names that I put etc!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12577" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T13:20:50.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16888" CreationDate="2016-02-26T20:09:28.490" Score="3" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading prosodic phonology, and wondering if there is any re-syllabification process happening in Mandarin Chinese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12534" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T00:09:23.457" Title="Is there re-syllabification in Chinese?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16886" CreationDate="2016-02-26T22:49:26.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cholin 2010 (&quot;Do syllables exist&quot;), Chen, Chen &amp;amp; Dell (2002) (&quot;Word-form encoding in Mandarin Chinese as assessed by the implicit priming task&quot;) claim there is not. Duanmu (1992: dissertation) claims that onsets are obligatory, so C#V resyllabification would not arise. However, he notes p. 18 that there are &quot;weak interjection syllables&quot; which allow C-V linking, viz. &lt;em&gt;tian-a&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Heavens!&quot;. This is consistent with the view that there is no resyllabification, as long as you don't initially syllabify this as .tian. + .a. which he accomplishes by claiming that the domain of syllabification is the word plus any weak suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[EDIT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes what has become the standard theory of what resyllabification means: where a syllable is formed, then a morpheme is added or segments are deleted or inserted, and then syllable structure is re-assigned. Since there is no relevant epenthesis or deletion in Mandarin, only concatenation of words would count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T23:12:23.847" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T23:12:23.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16886" CreationDate="2016-02-26T22:53:04.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;note: this answer is not complete, I am not a linguist and I have no personal knowledge of Chinese. I hope it is still of some use despite this.&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found several sources that say that resyllabification does not occur in Mandarin Chinese. However, it is possible that they are just making general statements, and not mentioning some rare examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;syllables in Chinese are not re-syllabified in connected speech, for&#xA;  instance, 西安 (/xi1.an1/, capital of Shanxi Province in China) (a dot&#xA;  indicates a syllable boundary and the number indicates tone) cannot be&#xA;  falsely identified or pronounced as/xian1/(e.g., 鲜, fresh). In&#xA;  contrast, the syllable boundaries of a phonological word in Dutch or&#xA;  English differ from a lexical word’s canonical syllabification. For&#xA;  instance, for the word “predict” (pre.dict), different contexts&#xA;  require a different re-syllabification, such as “predicted”&#xA;  (pre.dic.ted) when using the past tense and “predict it” (pre.dic.tit)&#xA;  when producing the cliticization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0046595&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Masked Syllable Priming Effects in Word and Picture Naming in Chinese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Wenping You, Qingfang Zhang, Rinus G. Verdonschot)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mandarin has a limited inventory of syllables; syllables have a very&#xA;  simple structure and re-syllabification is absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3640013/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot, Mariko Nakayama, Qingfang Zhang, Katsuo Tamaoka, and Niels Olaf Schiller)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I also found this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yin (1986) proposes that the retroflexed rime in Beijing Mandarin is&#xA;  the result of re-syllabification of the stem and the retroflex suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/454-0801/454-0801-QIUWU-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mandarin Retroflex Suffixation: An OT Account&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by Ma Qiuwu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referenced paper is cited as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yin, Yun-Mei. 1986. An Autosegmental Approach to Retroflex Suffixation and Reduplication in Chinese. Taipei:&#xA;The Crane Publishing Co.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I haven't been able to access this book yet, but I may be able to request it from my library. It seems in addition to the retroflex suffix, it also discusses reduplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T22:58:43.617" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T22:58:43.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T05:54:50.440" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 48, &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The following is NOT a homework question as I am not studying Linguistics but I have endeavoured to evidence my &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/314/5306&quot;&gt;effort&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In section 1 of this chapter, it was claimed that we needed parts of speech&#xA;  to help us determine where in the sentence a word appeared. So for&#xA;  example, we know that verbs and adjectives in English don’t function as&#xA;  the subjects of sentences. Above we have given one test for part of speech&#xA;  category in terms of the word’s distribution in the sentence. Here’s&#xA;  something to think about. Have we created a circular argument: &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; category&#xA;  determines position in the sentence and &lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; the position in the sentence&#xA;  determines category? Is this really circular? Does it matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 47 states:] The part of speech of a word is determined by its place in the sentence [ie: Position]&#xA;  and by its morphology, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; by its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2.] is true if only position, and NOT morphology, determines Syntactic Category.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So [2.] is false in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1.] is false because Syntactic Distributions of different Syntactic Categories can overlap&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (q.v. third paragraph, p 50). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because a false premise implies anything, 1 ⇒ 2 and 2 ⇒ 1 are valid (but NOT sound) arguments. Ergo the argument above is circular. QED. &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Am I correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T09:24:30.373" Title="Does Syntactic Category determines Position in the sentence and the Position in the sentence determines Category?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16893" CreationDate="2016-02-27T09:24:30.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're talking about section 1, not the complete set of all reality. This is called context. Presumably, the book goes on to explain why this rhetorical point is false. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T09:24:30.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16784" CreationDate="2016-02-27T10:14:45.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern standard Tajiki, Dari and Iranian Persian are mutually intelligible.  All three descend from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Persian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle Persian&lt;/a&gt;.  In some cases the Tajiki variant is actually truer to older or more formal Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences in language names and alphabets are largely political.  The variants do differ in phonology, grammar and vocabulary, especially in informal speech.  Notably, each name covers dialects that also differ significantly.  (For example, Tajik in China is better grouped among Pamiri languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajik_alphabet#Cyrillic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tajik Cyrillic alphabet&lt;/a&gt; is still the current standard &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; alphabet in Tajikistan and other post-Soviet Republics where Tajiki Persian is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JH3ZP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JH3ZP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are now 5 letters not found in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RzuUb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RzuUb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a few letters found in Russian Cyrillic &lt;em&gt;not used&lt;/em&gt; in Tajik Cyrillic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Necessarily, the precise pronunciation of all the letters differs from Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past there were other versions of the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet, and Tajik has also been written in Latin, Perso-Arabic and Hebrew script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T10:14:45.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16927" CreationDate="2016-02-27T14:24:34.227" Score="2" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am completely naive and new to NLP. I am following a course on NLP on coursera. As I was studying about parse tree, I came across following sentence to parse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Because the CD had an effective yield of 13.4 % when it was issued in 1984 , and interest rates in general had declined sharply since then , part of the price Dr. Blumenfeld paid was a premium -- an additional amount on top of the CD 's base value plus accrued interest that represented the CD 's increased market value .&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And partial parse tree to this sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S&#xA; (SBAR-PRP&#xA;   (IN Because)&#xA;    (S&#xA;      (S&#xA;        (NP-SBJ (DT the) (NNP CD))&#xA;        (VP&#xA;            (VBD had) (NP&#xA;            (NP (DT an) (JJ effective) (NN yield))&#xA;            (PP (IN of) (NP (CD 13.4) (NN %))))&#xA;                (SBAR-TMP&#xA;                (WHADVP-4 (WRB when))&#xA;                (S&#xA;                  (NP-SBJ-1 (PRP it))&#xA;                  (VP&#xA;                     (VBD was) (VP&#xA;                     (VBN issued)&#xA;                     (NP (-NONE- *-1))&#xA;                     (PP-TMP (IN in) (NP (CD 1984)))&#xA;                     (ADVP-TMP (-NONE- *T*-4))))))))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able to get meaning of &lt;strong&gt;-NONE- &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt;-4&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;-NONE- *-1&lt;/strong&gt;. Anyone can help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12586" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T23:08:47.113" Title="Unable to understand meaning of tag NONE *-1 in Penn Treebank example" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T17:11:35.563" Score="0" ViewCount="1980" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know which natural languages are grammatically the most regular and irregular. There are several titbit articles on the web but none are definitive or explanatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By regular, I want to mean that the are well-defined rules to derive words from root, and to make plurals, gender plays no role or has the well-defined way to determine gender, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.,   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German is highly irregular in terms of pluralization than English. &lt;em&gt;Kind&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kinder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Vater&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Väter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;das Mädchen&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;die Mädchen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender is a headache in German, Spanish, Hindi etc. but not in English because except from changing &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, there is no role of gender in forming sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English, although less than German, is fairly irregular in word formation such as &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;goes&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;eats&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard Turkish is somewhat regular, but I have no knowledge about how. I also don't know if there are many languages more regular than Turkish or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please elaborate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12588" LastEditorUserId="12588" LastEditDate="2016-02-28T04:15:43.673" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T04:15:43.673" Title="Most regular and irregular languages" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16899" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-02-27T17:49:37.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T17:49:37.920" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T17:49:37.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16900" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-02-27T17:49:37.920" Score="0" Body="Persian is an Indo-European, Western-Iranian language spoken mostly in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. &quot;Persian&quot; is used synonymously to &quot;Farsi&quot;." OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:30:49.120" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:30:49.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16898" CreationDate="2016-02-27T18:07:32.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have no quantitative metric of irregularity so the best you can hope for are ballpark figures. Also, your conception of regularity (which includes complexity) doesn't exactly match the concept of regularity used in linguistics – Classical Arabic verb conjugation is very complex, but not very irregular in the technical sense. In constructing a word in any language, the typical linguistic analysis is to discern a &quot;base form&quot; for the involved morphemes, which allows you to write rules generating all of the related word forms. That base form is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; always some actual word of the language, thus the base form for the verb &quot;be&quot; in Classical Arabic is /kwn/, and &lt;em&gt;kwn&lt;/em&gt; is not a possible word of Arabic. There are many regular but complex rules involved in getting a particular word form in Arabic. Given the linguist's viewpoint on regularity, having many rules does not create irregularity: rather, you have irregularity when formatives have to be arbitrarily (lexically) flagged as triggering or not triggering some process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again assuming the standard linguistic understanding of regularity / lexicality and the derivation of morphologically complex forms, it would be right to say that gender (be it animacy, sex, or noun-class type) constitutes a kind of irregularity. However, from the popular perspective &quot;learn a word, and heuristically generate related forms based on that&quot;, gender is a headache in Germanic but not Spanish, since in learning the citation form of the noun, you can discern the gender most of the time (the real irregularities aren't enough to cause a headache). In some Bantu languages, the difference on this front between linguist's irregularity and popular irregularity is even more striking, since there are over a half-dozen pattern-classes that you just have to learn – but, when you learn the singular (e.g. in Kikuyu) the gender of the noun becomes obvious, since like with Spanish, the basic form of the word that you learn includes the arbitrary gender morpheme that you just have to memorize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Vietnamese would come in on the most-regular end of the scale, since there are apparently no irregularities or changes in form, whereas there are some idiosyncratic consonant insertions / deletions in Turkish inflection. Dinka comes in on the least-regular end of the scale. Formation of noun plurals is extremely chaotic and arbitrary, and you effectively have to learn singular and plurals. Apparently, outside of a certain core of vocabulary, speakers don't widely agree on singular and plural forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T18:07:32.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16925" CreationDate="2016-02-27T18:46:35.317" Score="0" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to study Sanskrit. I am right now reading the following article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://sa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9B%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF_%E0%A4%B6%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Shivaji&lt;/a&gt; in Sanskrit. There is a sentence &lt;code&gt;सर्वस्याऽपि दोषिणः योग्यं दण्डं विदधाति।&lt;/code&gt; I get what it means, roughly that every violator is given the right kind of punishment. However, I want to analyse each word. The term &lt;code&gt;सर्वस्याऽपि&lt;/code&gt; has stymied me. I don't know how to split it. Can anybody help me split it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11176" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T03:00:43.413" Title="Components of सर्वस्याऽपि" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2016-02-27T19:34:21.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying Audio visual communication, so we discussed the differences between signifier, signified and referrent.&#xA;What I got was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;signifier: is the object in front of you like: A man and a woman, flowers and cups of tea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;signified: They love each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;referrent: they look like me and my fiancee last week. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it was just an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12589" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T19:34:21.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2016-02-28T04:58:24.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Assamese and Bengali&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not SE Asian, these are two languages where nouns are &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; invariable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For Example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Assamese] মেকুৰী &lt;em&gt;/mekuri/&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Bengali] বিড়াল &lt;em&gt;/biral/&lt;/em&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cats (Indefinite, as in &lt;em&gt;I have 5 cats&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[As] ৫ টা মেকুৰী &lt;em&gt;/panch ta mekuri/&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Bn] ৫ টি বিড়াল &lt;em&gt;/panch ti biral/&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here, &lt;em&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ti&lt;/em&gt; marks indefinite plural in &lt;em&gt;As&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bn&lt;/em&gt; respectively.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some cats&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[As] কেইটামান মেকুৰী &lt;em&gt;/keitaman mekuri/&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Bn] কয়েকটি বিড়াল &lt;em&gt;/koyekti biral/&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many cats&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[As] বহুতকেইটা মেকুৰী &lt;em&gt;/bohutkeita mekuri/&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Bn] অনেকটি বিড়াল &lt;em&gt;/onekti biral/&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Exception&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cats (definite, as in &lt;em&gt;for the cats / the cats are sleeping&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[As] মেকুৰীকেইটা &lt;em&gt;/mekuri keita/&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Bn] বিড়ালগুলো &lt;em&gt;/biral gulo/&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12588" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T04:58:24.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-28T06:16:33.513" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in atherogenesis which is the initiating process for atherosclerosis which in turn, can lead to ischaemic/ischemic stroke.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a recognised process/algorithm - ideally using a software application - to identify synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I require the synonyms to enable a reverse lookup on a large corpus, to identify papers which refer - however minimally or obliquely to stroke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have conducted an informal, unstructured trawl of the journal 'Medical Hypotheses' and identified:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- stroke&#xA;- cerebrovascular&#xA;- CVA&#xA;- arterial&#xA;- vascular&#xA;- vein&#xA;- venous&#xA;- hardening&#xA;- accident&#xA;- occlusion&#xA;- disease&#xA;- pathology&#xA;- disfunction&#xA;- plaque&#xA;- lesion&#xA;- induration)&#xA;- venous&#xA;- lesions &#xA;- 'unstable' angine&#xA;- 'vulnerable' plaque&#xA;- ischaemia&#xA;- ischemia&#xA;- ischaemic&#xA;- ischemic&#xA;- angina&#xA;- prinzmetal’s &#xA;- pectoris&#xA;- vasospastic&#xA;- athero&#xA;- sclerosis&#xA;- sclerotic&#xA;- atherosclerotic&#xA;- atherosclerosis&#xA;- atherogenesis&#xA;- atherogenic&#xA;- atherogenicity&#xA;- atheroma&#xA;- plaque&#xA;- vascular disease&#xA;- vascular diseases&#xA;- pathogenesis&#xA;- pathogenic&#xA;- pathology&#xA;- pathologic&#xA;- pathological&#xA;- disfunction&#xA;- disfunctional&#xA;- genesis&#xA;- genic&#xA;- atheroprotective&#xA;- atheroprotection&#xA;- hypothesis&#xA;- hypotheses&#xA;- hypothetical&#xA;- possible&#xA;- possibility&#xA;- probable&#xA;- probability&#xA;- potential&#xA;- potentiality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12592" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2016-02-29T09:36:15.247" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T09:36:15.247" Title="how may I identify informal synonyms and abbreviations in a corpus?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16908" CreationDate="2016-02-28T07:57:35.297" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume that if your tongue tip is free while you're articulating a consonant, you can make a secondary narrowing with your tongue tip towards the alveolar ridge to produce a double-articulated sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, do we have, or has there been a notation to mark it in IPA or other (proposed) phonetic transcriptions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6743" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T17:57:06.150" Title="Can we have &quot;rhoticized consonant&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2016-02-28T11:42:24.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese also lacks plural marking for most nouns - for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;猫 (neko) - Cat,&#xA;猫 (neko) - Cats&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in order to show plurality it has many many many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;counters&lt;/a&gt;, for instance 名 (mei) which is a polite counter for people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, 日 (nichi), the counter for days:- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;二十日　- Literally 20 (day counter).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12593" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T11:42:24.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16906" CreationDate="2016-02-28T16:32:13.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[p˞abəbli], if we ever encountered such a thing, we would call it a sequence of consonant plus &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. However, IPA does have the rhotic hook which could be pressed into service to notate such a thing, if one could argue that you had found a single consonant and not a sequence. Osama Fujimura's CD model does in fact have a richer set of consonants in English, including &quot;rhotic labial&quot; for &amp;#x3c;pr&amp;#x3e;. There are no good cases for such a sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-04-28T17:57:06.150" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T17:57:06.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16911" CreationDate="2016-02-28T17:54:03.943" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying Sanskrit. I encountered a sentence in verse 19 of chapter 1 of the Bhagavad gita - as it is. The sloka is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;स घोषो धार्तराष्ट्राणां हृदयानि व्यदारयत्।&#xA;नभश्च पृथिवीं चैव तुमुलोऽभ्यननुदयन्।।&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the translation in the book, the verse means as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The hearts of the sons of Dhritarashtra were shattered as the &#xA;tumultuous sound reverberated throughout the sky and on the land.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter line नभः is in the first case whereas पृथिवीं is in the second case? How is this possible? Isn't the पृथिवी also the subject? Shouldn't it be just पृथिवी as per the declension rules of पृथिवी?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11176" LastEditorDisplayName="user11176" LastEditDate="2016-02-28T17:59:23.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T18:39:19.713" Title="Grammatical mistake in the Gita" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16877" CreationDate="2016-02-28T18:06:55.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;out-of-the-box&quot; way of drawing the combination of a Sound, Pitch, and TextGrid object, to form something similar to what you see in the TextGrid editor. However, this does not mean that it cannot be done. You can script this command, making use of one of Praat's &lt;em&gt;strengths&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;do not put screenshots on your papers&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save the following script somewhere you can find it and then execute it with a Sound and TextGrid object selected. You can also select a Pitch object to draw, but if you don't select one, one will be generated with the values you've provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options for the command work in exactly the same way as the equivalent options for the corresponding commands (the Sound options are the same as for the Sound's &lt;code&gt;Draw...&lt;/code&gt; command, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting graph should have the same style as that of the rest of Praat's commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHGMP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHGMP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Combination of a Sound, TextGrid and Pitch objects&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Combine the draw commands for Sound,&#xA;# Pitch and TextGrid objects&#xA;&#xA;form Draw annotated Sound and Pitch...&#xA;  real left_Time_range_(s)        0&#xA;  real right_Time_range_(s)       0 (= all)&#xA;  real left_Vertical_range        0&#xA;  real right_Vertical_range       0 (= auto)&#xA;  real left_Frequency_range_(Hz)  0&#xA;  real right_Frequency_range_(Hz) 500&#xA;  optionmenu Sound_drawing_method: 1&#xA;    option Curve&#xA;    option Bars&#xA;    option Poles&#xA;    option Speckles&#xA;  boolean Show_boundaries yes&#xA;  boolean Use_text_styles yes&#xA;  boolean Garnish yes&#xA;  comment What proportion of the graph should be used for the Sound?&#xA;  positive Figure_ratio 0.5&#xA;endform&#xA;&#xA;# Get information on current picture&#xA;info$ = Picture info&#xA;original_colour.r$ = extractWord$(info$,  &quot;Red:&quot;)&#xA;original_colour.g$ = extractWord$(info$,  &quot;Green:&quot;)&#xA;original_colour.b$ = extractWord$(info$,  &quot;Blue:&quot;)&#xA;picture.line_width = extractNumber(info$, &quot;Line width:&quot;)&#xA;picture.left       = extractNumber(info$, &quot;Inner viewport left:&quot;)&#xA;picture.right      = extractNumber(info$, &quot;Inner viewport right:&quot;)&#xA;picture.top        = extractNumber(info$, &quot;Inner viewport top:&quot;)&#xA;picture.bottom     = extractNumber(info$, &quot;Inner viewport bottom:&quot;)&#xA;picture.height     = picture.bottom - picture.top&#xA;&#xA;# Sound options&#xA;sound.start   = left_Time_range&#xA;sound.end     = right_Time_range&#xA;sound.min     = left_Vertical_range&#xA;sound.max     = right_Vertical_range&#xA;sound.method$ = sound_drawing_method$&#xA;&#xA;# Pitch options&#xA;pitch.min     = left_Frequency_range&#xA;pitch.max     = right_Frequency_range&#xA;pitch.created = 0&#xA;&#xA;# Draw options&#xA;fzero.colour$      = &quot;Cyan&quot;&#xA;fzero.width        = 2&#xA;fzero.border       = 1&#xA;fzero.border_width = 2&#xA;point.marker_size  = 0.1&#xA;precision          = 3&#xA;&#xA;# Identify objects&#xA;# If no Pitch object is selected, generate one&#xA;sound = selected(&quot;Sound&quot;)&#xA;textgrid = selected(&quot;TextGrid&quot;)&#xA;if numberOfSelected(&quot;Pitch&quot;)&#xA;  pitch = selected(&quot;Pitch&quot;)&#xA;else&#xA;  selectObject: sound&#xA;  pitch = To Pitch: 0,&#xA;    ... if !pitch.min then 75  else pitch.min fi,&#xA;    ... if !pitch.max then 600 else pitch.max fi&#xA;  pitch.created = 1&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Identify ranges for sound&#xA;selectObject: sound&#xA;if !sound.start and !sound.end&#xA;  sound.start = Get start time&#xA;  sound.end = Get end time&#xA;endif&#xA;sound.duration = sound.end - sound.start&#xA;if !sound.min and !sound.max&#xA;  sound.min = Get minimum: sound.start, sound.end, &quot;None&quot;&#xA;  sound.max = Get maximum: sound.start, sound.end, &quot;None&quot;&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Select top of figure, for Sound and Pitch data&#xA;Select inner viewport:&#xA;  ... picture.left,&#xA;  ... picture.right,&#xA;  ... picture.top,&#xA;  ... picture.top + (picture.height * figure_ratio)&#xA;&#xA;# Draw sound&#xA;selectObject: sound&#xA;Draw: sound.start, sound.end, sound.min, sound.max, &quot;no&quot;, sound.method$&#xA;&#xA;# Garnish sound&#xA;if garnish&#xA;  Draw line: sound.start, sound.min, sound.end, sound.min&#xA;  if sound.min &amp;lt; 0 and sound.max &amp;gt; 0&#xA;    One mark left: 0, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;&quot;&#xA;  endif&#xA;  One mark left: sound.min, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, fixed$(sound.min, precision)&#xA;  One mark left: sound.max, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, fixed$(sound.max, precision)&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Extract range from TextGrid object&#xA;selectObject: textgrid&#xA;textgrid_part = Extract part: sound.start, sound.end, &quot;yes&quot;&#xA;total_tiers = Get number of tiers&#xA;tier.height = 1 / total_tiers&#xA;&#xA;# Draw boundaries (on Sound and Pitch)&#xA;if show_boundaries&#xA;  for tier to total_tiers&#xA;    interval_tier = Is interval tier: tier&#xA;    item$ = if interval_tier then &quot;interval&quot; else &quot;point&quot; fi&#xA;    total_items = do(&quot;Get number of &quot; + item$ + &quot;s...&quot;, tier)&#xA;    for item to total_items&#xA;      if interval_tier&#xA;        time = Get end point: tier, item&#xA;      else&#xA;        time = Get time of point: tier, item&#xA;      endif&#xA;      One mark bottom: time, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;&quot;&#xA;  endfor&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Draw pitch, above boundaries&#xA;selectObject: pitch&#xA;if fzero.border&#xA;  Line width: fzero.width + fzero.border_width&#xA;  White&#xA;  Draw: sound.start, sound.end, pitch.min, pitch.max, &quot;no&quot;&#xA;endif&#xA;Line width: fzero.width&#xA;Colour: fzero.colour$&#xA;Draw: sound.start, sound.end, pitch.min, pitch.max, &quot;no&quot;&#xA;Line width: 1&#xA;&#xA;# Garnish pitch&#xA;if garnish&#xA;  One mark right: pitch.min, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;&quot;&#xA;  One mark right: pitch.max, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, fixed$(pitch.max, 0)&#xA;  Text right: &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;Pitch (Hz)&quot;&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Return to original colour&#xA;Colour: &quot;{&quot; +&#xA;  ... original_colour.r$ + &quot;,&quot; +&#xA;  ... original_colour.g$ + &quot;,&quot; +&#xA;  ... original_colour.b$ + &quot;}&quot;&#xA;&#xA;if 1 - figure_ratio&#xA;  # Select bottom of figure, for TextGrid data&#xA;  Select inner viewport:&#xA;    ... picture.left,&#xA;    ... picture.right,&#xA;    ... picture.top + (picture.height * figure_ratio),&#xA;    ... picture.bottom&#xA;&#xA;  # Adjust vertical axis&#xA;  Axes: sound.start, sound.end, 1, 0&#xA;&#xA;  # Draw TextGrid&#xA;  # A custom draw method is needed to ensure that the TextGrid is&#xA;  # drawn using only the part of the figure specified by the user&#xA;  selectObject: textgrid_part&#xA;  for tier to total_tiers&#xA;    tier.bottom = tier * tier.height&#xA;    tier.top = tier.bottom - tier.height&#xA;    tier.middle = tier.top + (tier.height / 2)&#xA;    if garnish and tier &amp;lt; total_tiers&#xA;      Draw line: sound.start, tier.bottom, sound.end, tier.bottom&#xA;    endif&#xA;&#xA;    interval_tier = Is interval tier: tier&#xA;    item$ = if interval_tier then &quot;interval&quot; else &quot;point&quot; fi&#xA;    total_items = do(&quot;Get number of &quot; + item$ + &quot;s...&quot;, tier)&#xA;      for item to total_items&#xA;        if interval_tier&#xA;          time = Get end point: tier, item&#xA;          start = Get starting point: tier, item&#xA;          midpoint = start + ((time - start) / 2)&#xA;          if garnish&#xA;            Draw line: time, tier.bottom, time, tier.top&#xA;          endif&#xA;        else&#xA;          time = Get time of point: tier, item&#xA;          midpoint = time&#xA;          if garnish&#xA;            Draw line: time, tier.top, time, tier.top + tier.height * point.marker_size&#xA;            Draw line: time, tier.bottom, time, tier.bottom - tier.height * point.marker_size&#xA;          endif&#xA;        endif&#xA;&#xA;        label$ = do$(&quot;Get label of &quot; + item$ + &quot;...&quot;, tier, item)&#xA;        if !use_text_styles&#xA;          label$ = replace$(label$, &quot;\&quot;, &quot;\bs&quot;, 0)&#xA;          label$ = replace_regex$(label$, &quot;([%#^_])&quot;, &quot;\\\1 &quot;, 0)&#xA;        endif&#xA;        Text: midpoint, &quot;Centre&quot;, tier.middle, &quot;Half&quot;, label$&#xA;      endfor&#xA;  endfor&#xA;endif&#xA;removeObject: textgrid_part&#xA;&#xA;# Select the full viewport&#xA;Select inner viewport:&#xA;  ... picture.left,&#xA;  ... picture.right,&#xA;  ... picture.top,&#xA;  ... picture.bottom&#xA;&#xA;# Finish garnish&#xA;if garnish&#xA;  Draw inner box&#xA;  One mark bottom: sound.start, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, fixed$(sound.start, precision)&#xA;  One mark bottom: sound.end,   &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, fixed$(sound.end,   precision)&#xA;  Text bottom: &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;Time (s)&quot;&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;# Re-select original objects&#xA;selectObject: sound, textgrid&#xA;&#xA;# Remove Pitch object if it was created by us&#xA;# or add it to selection&#xA;if pitch.created&#xA;  nocheck removeObject: pitch&#xA;else&#xA;  plusObject: pitch&#xA;endif&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T00:07:58.800" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T00:07:58.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16909" CreationDate="2016-02-28T18:39:19.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;नभः is accusative (second case), like पृथिवीं. The subject is तुमुलो. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T18:39:19.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12953" CreationDate="2016-02-28T20:45:20.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer only from my personal experience: As a Brazilian, and so a Portuguese speaker, I know it's very common when tourists from Argentina and Uruguay come here, or when we go to these and other neighboring countries, that we both speak our own languages and, although we don't always know how to speak the interlocutor's language, we pretty much understand them and they pretty much understand us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, today I speak a considerable amount of Spanish, picked up in the time since my first contact with them when I was 10 years old and we moved to the state where I live and I met a lot of Argentinians on the beach. It's pretty natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes things don't work perfectly, and there are some words we must be careful with (e.g. innocent Portuguese words that are similar to dirty Spanish ones), sometimes one person must repeat what was said or say it again in another way, explain, etc. But it's usually possible to communicate without having to learn the other's language. Sometimes I understand a Spanish speaker better than I understand Portuguese speakers from other regions of Brazil, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, coming back to your question's focus, I know I used as an example two closely related Romance languages, that are easily understandable to each other, and I also know that it wouldn't work, for instance, between English and Portuguese, German and Spanish, or Chinese and French. But maybe, if we all could learn one &quot;sample language&quot; from each family, plus develop some non-verbal abilities (as communication isn't just verbal), it looks like something reasonably possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12597" LastEditorUserId="10433" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T05:39:02.570" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T05:39:02.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-29T23:02:14.383" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we known, foot is a stress-related unit. But in Mandarin, the existence of stress remains controversial, so I would like to know the formation of foot in Mandarin Chinese. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12533" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T02:58:20.863" Title="How do we define foot in Mandarin Chinese?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16916" CreationDate="2016-03-01T00:01:30.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duanmu (2007) &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Standard Chinese&lt;/em&gt; has an extensive analysis of Mandarin foot structure. The only way to fully answer your question is to cut and paste everything into a post, but in a nutshell, feet are trochaic, and he posits simultaneous syllabic and moraic feet, with no sub-minimal feet, and stressed syllables are obligatorily heavy. It also seems that he has &quot;stress&quot; as an independent property which interacts with foot formation (that is, he posits principles dictating that certain things must have stress – not that they must be the head of a foot – and then foot structure must somehow be built to satisfy stress / foot related conditions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T02:58:20.863" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T02:58:20.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T03:49:28.483" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker. I have recently come to the conclusion that the main obstacle in my learning of foreign languages is always the study of the lexicon, which is vast and largely 'arbitrary', 'accidental', or 'unnatural' at least in comparison with the largely rule-based nature of the grammar etc. My goal (like any other idealist learner's) is to 'rapidly' learn a language, and so for me it will be necessary to innovate a bit regarding the study of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had some success with more 'traditional' means of studying vocabulary, including direct means such as listing vocabulary in a 'gloss' (in a variety of contexts, eg whether during study of a text, or a small notebook carried to record new words) and indirect means like the study/reading of a text itself (more generally, words in context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am convinced that, for me, it would be very effective to be able to represent lexical semantic relations (that is, between individual, isolated words, phrases, or even idioms, whatever the 'semantic unit' happens to be) in a 'geometric' or 'visual' fashion, so as to exploit the capacity of the mind to learn in this fashion. This isn't a new technique of course since the capacity to learn visually has always been exploited in a variety of contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example for this context, the 'syngraph' mentioned in the title would be a 'graph', by which I mean a collection of isolated points and arrows between them, where the points are the indivudal words and the arrows perhaps indicate a synonym relationship. Or any other number of possible variations. &#xA;But more generally, the key for me would be the relationships encoded by how near the given words are to each other, and most importantly, the fact that the group of words somehow lies within a given 'class' of words, whether that class is a category like 'Words you use at the supermarket', or 'Japanese Kanji which use this particular radical', or something as specific as 'Words/phrases expressing surprise', etc. The depiction isn't necessarily restricted to arrows etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the main difficulty is that creating these representations is time-consuming, especially for someone whose time is scarce. Leaving the general case aside, I would therefore be interested in a way to programmatically generate 'synonym graph' depictions as outlined above, for a foreign language, which could then be tweaked for specific cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to do this from scratch, I would basically take subgraphs from WordNet (whether for synonym relationship or otherwise, I don't remember all the relations), then 'lift' the graph into an item-wise translation automatically using something like Google Translate (though this would not be the most reliable way to do it, especially for some more difficult languages), then pipe it through some graph-creation software like Sigma.js. (Ideally, we would have programmatic access to Google's synonym graph that is made available on the Translator web interface, but I don't think this will happen). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone ever done something like this and want to share their methods, advice, or even code? Are there existing tools that do this, or something like it? There may be important variations on the method I described that I have left out, I have not thought about it too extensively and I have not proofread the above. I am particularly interested in the following languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French&#xA;Japanese&#xA;Korean&#xA;Russian&#xA;Portuguese&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2194" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T03:49:28.483" Title="On the programmatic creation of non-English 'syngraphs' for the purpose of lexicon study" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16921" CreationDate="2016-03-01T11:14:37.393" Score="1" ViewCount="2121" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a side thought to my current efforts looking at types of minimal-pairs, the similarity between sounds across other languages has occurred to me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After some searching, I failed to find an answer to how similar phonemes of other languages are - but I have found some resources;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English : &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php?function=detail&amp;amp;languageid=18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php?function=detail&amp;amp;languageid=18&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French : &lt;a href=&quot;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php?function=detail&amp;amp;languageid=21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php?function=detail&amp;amp;languageid=21&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;IPA : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to those pages, there are many phonemes shared between English and French, (such as both have plosive//bilabial /p/ and /b/, and both have fricative//post-alveolar /ʃ/ and /ʒ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that accent will hold influence (as would age/gender etc.).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm also aware of allophonic variance/range.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes, 'context' may also change the sounding (based upon presence/lack of stress, preceding/following phonemes etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm left with a question - in fact, two parts of a question;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) How similar are the sounds of phonemes that are shared across languages?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) Of the phonemes that are not shared, how many are 'close' to sounds that do exist in other languages (English has the Fricative//Dental /θ/ - is there a sound in French that is similar)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any insights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11285" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T09:10:16.633" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T10:27:31.890" Title="How similar are phonemes across different languages?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16919" CreationDate="2016-03-01T12:42:27.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some issues first, and then I’ll hazard an answer.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I think you need definitions for what ‘how similar’ and ‘how close’ mean. For /p/ and /b/, if you’re going by the kinds of phonemic features that IPA broadly uses (plosive, bilabial), then they’re the same. Phonetically, there are major differences (e.g., voice onset time). Analogous issues apply for ‘close’ with non-shared phonemes: is a (voiceless) dental fricative similar to a voiced alveolar fricative? Answering these questions is probably best tackled through experimental research (e.g., confusability) with real French and English speakers.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Given those concerns, ‘matching’ phonemes between these two languages generally are ‘similar’, though often not ‘the same’. Lay persons can recognize that some of these phonemes are equivalent; for example, an English speaker is likely to say that ‘baguette’ contains phonemes they recognize from English: /b/, /g/, etc. This is kind of cheating in answer to your question, though: the reason ‘shared’ phonemes are similar is because we’ve defined them as shared... because of their similarity. In other language matchups, speakers might have very different ideas about which sounds are similar to each other (i.e., different schema for featural closeness, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T12:42:27.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16919" CreationDate="2016-03-01T17:33:17.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;phoneme&quot; is used in a lot of ways. Most often, people use it to refer to the distribution of &quot;phones&quot; in a given language, where a &quot;phone&quot; is a set of sounds that can be (reliably) auditorily discerned and transcribed using IPA letters. This allows you to maintain a distinction between oral vowel and nasal vowel, or unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stop, but does not encompass &quot;left-side nasalized&quot; vs. &quot;right-side nasalized&quot;, or &quot;somewhat aspirated&quot;, &quot;aspirated&quot; and &quot;massively aspirated&quot;, essentially because this is beyond the scope of what the IPA can handle. These &quot;phones&quot; are what is most closely related to absolute / universal perceptual similarity in sound. One would then find that there are both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stop phones in English, Korean, Thai, Navaho and Apache. At level of what a trained listener can hear, even though there are only two IPA phone categories available to us (aspirated and unaspirated), it is clear that the aspirated phones of Korean are very different from the aspirated phones of English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; from the aspirated phones of Navaho; the unaspirated phones of Thai are likewise perceptually distinct from the unaspirated phones of Navaho. In other words, narrow symbolic transcription of sound properties via IPA yields an intermediate level of granularity, which doesn't even encompass what is audible without using special technology. If you use special technology (e.g. acoustic measurements), there is no limit to the number of distinctions that can be made – acoustic measurements are continuous, whereas categorial judgments are (by definition) discrete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will use the term &quot;phoneme&quot; to refer to categorial analysis of sounds as &quot;phones&quot;, namely discrete perceived categories of limited granularity. A different (and historically terminologically correct) view is that &quot;phonemes&quot; are a set of phones that potentially &quot;contrast&quot; in a language. On those grounds, aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops of English are not distinct phonemes (ignoring problematic pairs like &lt;em&gt;capitalistic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;militaristic&lt;/em&gt;). Under either understanding of &quot;phoneme&quot;, you can still compare across languages and you can say that Korean and Hindi are similar in both having a voiceless aspirated alveolar stop phoneme [tʰ], even though there will still be some measurable differences in the acoustic properties of these sounds. Unfortunately, there isn't much data available allowing us to compare acoustic similarity of nominally identical phones across languages. (My standard for a &quot;much&quot; comparison is the amount of non-quantitative transcriptional information available on the languages of the world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a special problem in talking about the similarity of phonemes in the contrastive sense, which is that the properties of an abstract contrastive phoneme abstract away from properties that are not universal amongst the allophones. So in English, the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ is realized with aspirated phones and unaspirated phones -- but what are the properties of the phoneme? Is it aspirated, unaspirated, or not specified? There are many ideologies surrounding this question, for example there is an economy ideology that holds that underlying forms should minimize the number of properties available (which forces an analysis where /p/ is unspecified for aspiration). A competing ideology is based on rule-economy, holding that whatever system yields the simplest rules is the correct analysis, and this forces the analysis that /p/ is underlying unaspirated because stating the distribution of aspiration is formally simpler than stating the distribution of non-aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question, then, you would have to make an ideological decision about the properties of phonemes – do they constitute a special class of &quot;unspecified&quot; elements, or is their substance the same as that of phones? If you assume the latter approach, there is a fairly simple basis for comparing sounds in languages. In English, we have the phone(me)s &lt;em&gt;s,θ&lt;/em&gt;; in Serbo-Croatian, French, Chinese and Makua there is &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and no &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;. These languages have sounds that are similar to &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;, for example they have both &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;; they also have &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; which is somewhat similar, but less similar. By simply comparing the categorial properties of these phonemes, you could then arrive at a set of sounds that are &quot;equally similar&quot; to English /θ/. Makua is special in these languages in also having phonemes /t̪, t̪ʰ/, which is more similar to /θ/ than /t/ is (thus for Makua, the sounds that are &quot;most similar&quot; to English /θ/ would be /s/ and one of /t̪, t̪ʰ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact, there is a computable answer to your question, provided you make the requisite assumptions about the standard of comparison, and provided that you get reliable information about the properties of the sounds in languages that you want to compare. There is an alternative approach of cross-linguistic experimental perceptual comparison, where you present speakers of language A with a sound X of language B and ask (indirectly) what sound X is most like. This would involve trillions of trillions of comparisons, and hasn't been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T21:06:54.957" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T21:06:54.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T02:41:28.030" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I don't know if this is the right place to ask this; if it's not please let me know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to name something with an acronym, and I found a very good word for it, but there is a word (in the meaning of the acronym) that starts with &quot;n&quot; and in my acronym the corresponding letter is &quot;u&quot;. My idea is that the &quot;u&quot; is an &quot;n&quot; upside down (lowercase). I would like to use an acronym that is easy to pronounce and remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be complicated to describe my actual acronym, but as an example: let us suppose the meaning is &quot;chocolate, oats and milk&quot; (I am not feeling very creative at the moment) and I want to use the acronym &quot;Cow&quot; instead of &quot;Com&quot;, using a &quot;w&quot; as if it was an &quot;m&quot; upside down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is this acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Are there other examples of &quot;inexact&quot; acronyms like mine? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Does this practice have a name? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12612" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T02:41:28.030" Title="Is it acceptable to make an acronym with a 'false' letter?" Tags="&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-06T15:40:39.707" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16902" CreationDate="2016-03-02T03:00:43.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The avagraha ऽ is used to denote सन्धिः between two vowels. As @zwiebel noted, this convention is not strictly followed in print. &#xA;For e.g &#xA;&lt;code&gt;रामस्य अलङ्कारः&lt;/code&gt; can be written in two different ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामस्यालङ्कारः&lt;/code&gt; - sandhi without ऽ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामस्याऽलङ्कारः&lt;/code&gt; - the single ऽ denotes that a short अ has been replaced with आ due to सन्धिः &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामस्य आलयः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामालयः&lt;/code&gt; = सन्धिः sandhi without ऽ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;रामाऽऽलयः&lt;/code&gt; - सन्धिः the two ऽऽ denote that आ in the latter word has been replaced due to सन्धिः &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T03:00:43.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12953" CreationDate="2016-03-02T11:48:59.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rationale for the Star Wars model was that different species had different vocal apparatus, so, for instance Chewbacca and Han Solo literally could not speak each other's language however well they understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless a situation in which most people can passively understand a foreign language fairly well while speaking it badly is feasible here on Earth. As Greg Lee's comment said, that's what actually happens with liturgical language. It is also commonplace between grandparents and grandchildren in communities descended from immigrants. The grandparent speaks the language of the Old Country to the grandchildren while the grandchildren reply in the language of their new home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in situations where mistakes could be very costly, a rule is often followed wherein each person must speak the other person's language. By forcing people to talk in the language they know least well, this rule brings potential misunderstandings into the open and avoids people thinking they have understood when they haven't. There is a brief reference to this being the rule in the test Apollo-Soyuz docking &lt;a href=&quot;https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8644/what-language-is-most-commonly-spoken-on-the-iss&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, although the same link says that daily conversation in the less stressful situation of daily life in mixed Russian-American space missions is carried out in a mixture of Russian, English and &quot;Runglish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pairs of languages are not always symmetrical with respect to ease of speaking versus ease of understanding. Personally I can understand and speak Italian equally badly but speak French much better than I understand it, quite a common situation for English speakers.  Pairs of languages are also not necessarily symmetrical with respect to passive understanding. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/05/the-lopsided-mutual-intelligibility-of-spanish-and-portuguese/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link about the lopsided mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:58:56.003" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T11:48:59.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16897" CreationDate="2016-03-02T13:18:08.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After going through a number of examples, I think I got meaning of &lt;strong&gt;*NONE*&lt;/strong&gt; in parse tree output. Let's take an example, suppose we have to parse following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ricky is a boy and likes fruits.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In above sentence two sentences are joined with coordinating conjunction &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sentence 1: Ricky is a boy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sentence 2: likes fruits.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In first sentence subject is clearly given which is Ricky but in second sentence it is not explicitly written (although it's clear we are talking about Ricky in second sentence too.). So when we parse such sentences, in the parse tree we get &lt;strong&gt;*NONE*&lt;/strong&gt; for the &lt;strong&gt;NP (Noun Phrase)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12586" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T13:18:08.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9535" CreationDate="2016-03-02T13:30:05.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This link Might Help you: &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/6.863/www/PennTreebankTags.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Penn TreeBank II Tags&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;PS: As I don't have enough reputation to add this link as a comment, so I am posting link as a answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12586" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T13:30:05.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16930" CreationDate="2016-03-02T14:19:38.423" Score="7" ViewCount="1763" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title pretty much sums up my question, but to elaborate, how do allophones of phonemes become their own distinct phonemes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: in Old English, /θ/ became /ð/ between vowels, but in Modern English, /ð/ is a separate phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this probably varies from language to language, or even from sound to sound. So to simply this, is there a common way that allophones separate from their respective phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10799" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T15:19:48.247" Title="How do allophones become distinct phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16929" CreationDate="2016-03-02T17:33:17.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;allophone&quot; refers to two different things. One is an actual physical realization in a given context. For example, in English the lips start to continuously protrude on consonants in anticipation of a following round vowel in the syllable, for example in &quot;scoot&quot; as opposed to &quot;skate&quot;. Or, the velum starts to lower about half-way into a vowel before a nasal, and goes from open to closed about a third of the way into the vowel after a nasal. The exact degree and time course of such effects is language-specific and part of what you learn when you learn the pronunciation of a language. We can call these &quot;physical allophones&quot;: the crucial thing about them is that they don't involve crisp categories, they involve continuous functions. The second use of &quot;allophone&quot; pertains to actual categorial changes, but changes of a special type, namely where there is no &quot;contrast&quot; involving the choice of sounds (aspiration in English would be a classic example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All cases of &quot;sound change&quot; start as some continuous-detail change in pronunciation, and at some point the changes become sufficiently large that they are re-analyzed as changes in discrete symbolic sound, rather than &quot;amount&quot; parameters in the physical realization of sounds. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough is known about the perceptual mechanisms for getting from continuous physical sound to a symbolic representation as discrete segments, and the production mechanisms for getting from the intent to produce a segmental output like [pʰlʊwm] &quot;plume&quot;, to the actual production. This is the &quot;and then a miracle happens&quot; part waiting to be filled in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allophones in the second sense (i.e. as specific different segments derived from a single underlying source, according to some rule of distribution), especially the contextually-derived member(s) such as the flap or aspirated stops in English, have the property that they come &lt;em&gt;exclusively&lt;/em&gt; from a given segment, so there is complete inter-translatability between output allophones and underlying phonemes – the allophone [pʰ] always derives from /p/ in foot-initial position, and /p/ in foot-initial position always becomes [pʰ]. Learning such relations is trivial, However, it is easy to obscure such relations, for example, all you have to do is add some rule that re-arranges syllable or foot structure, and you could end up with aspirated stops that are not foot-initial in the final output (hypothetical [ə.pʰə.ˈlaɪ] from &lt;em&gt;ə.pʰˈlaɪ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;apply&quot;), or unaspirated stops (from original syllable-final stops) that become syllable- and foot-initial. In that case, inter-translatability between phoneme and allophone exists at a derived stage, but not at the surface. And by definition, &quot;allophone&quot; is a relationship that holds between underlying and surface forms. Notice that aspiration in American English is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; completely surface-regular, since you have different aspiration facts in &quot;militaristic&quot; versus &quot;capitalistic&quot;, even though the stress and syllabification patterns of the words are the same. The reason for the difference is that the source words, &quot;military&quot; vs. &quot;capital&quot;, have different stress patterns, and aspiration reflects the &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; stress, not the surface stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of voiced / voiceless fricatives in English, there are quite a number of factors involved. One is the loss of short final vowels, which leads to voicing of original &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in the verb &quot;house&quot; ([haʊz]) but not the noun [haʊs]. Deletion of vowels made it impossible to predict on the surface whether a fricative would be voiced or voiceless – the voicing rule became &quot;opaque&quot; (see Kiparsky 1968 &quot;Historical Linguistics&quot;, Dingwall ed., and zillions of subsequent publications). The second major cause of the allophone-to-phoneme shift is loan words, either from French or from other dialects of English (not all dialects of English had exactly the same allophonic rule). In French, /s,z; f,v/ are completely autonomous phonemes, and via the introduction of many loanwords from French, the idea that [v,z] were predictable variants of /s, f/ became untenable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2016-03-02T18:55:45.787" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T18:55:45.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T18:43:28.827" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may know, quite some of the IE languages know preverbs, who may modify the meaning of a verbal root. I would like to know more about the interrelation of the various preverbs found in these languages, especially the connection between the ones existing in Sanskrit (called &lt;em&gt;upasarga&lt;/em&gt; there) and the ones that still exist in modern German (rather called Präfix, Halbpräfix or Präfixoid there). Is anyone aware of and could supply sources that either directly compare these descendants of PIE preverbs or single publications that give information on the ancestors of the Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;upasarga&lt;/em&gt;s and the German prefixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T08:04:30.377" Title="History of Preverbs in Indo-European" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16947" CreationDate="2016-03-02T22:15:18.190" Score="3" ViewCount="6655" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, we had a conference on multidomination and I firstly saw an &lt;code&gt;andP&lt;/code&gt; there. The solution was to simply abandon the conditions of well-formed phrase markers below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Single Mother Condition (if I remember correctly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nontangling Condition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is a brand new hypothesis in syntax, an &lt;code&gt;andP&lt;/code&gt; merged two sentences having a structure as below (I made it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6WFYo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6WFYo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I wanted to ask, is there any solution or description to structures as above without violating &lt;code&gt;Nontangling Condition&lt;/code&gt;, because this tree structure seems rather odd to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Brief Explanation Why I've Found This Structure Odd&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know trees are just a way of description of syntactic structure in the cognition, however I do not know the limits of this approach. Like [created] just chooses DP dominated by VP2 out of blue, or are there boundaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I wanted to know if there are any analyzing of structures like those without abandoning &lt;code&gt;Nontangling Condition&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Limitations (New)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description I need should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not abandon &lt;code&gt;nontangling condition&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use &lt;code&gt;Principles and Parameters&lt;/code&gt; as a theory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="3687" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T12:00:48.387" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T22:59:55.037" Title="How to Handle Conjunctions in Generative Syntax Tree without Abandoning Nontangling Condition" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-02T22:37:00.137" Score="2" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could anyone explain how does the maltparser convert the dependency trees from a CONLL file to a series of transitions in order to train its classifier ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T13:40:38.110" Title="How to derive training data for maltparser classifier from conll file" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16933" CreationDate="2016-03-03T02:05:58.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example is an RNR construction (short for &quot;right node raising&quot;, which was Paul Postal's term).  There is a good Wikipedia article on it, and a good discussion in &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt; by James McCawley, who argues for a structure similar to yours, in that it requires unusual tree structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another &quot;solution&quot;?  That really depends on what it is supposed to &quot;solve&quot;.  You'd have to be more explicit.  I have a theory about RNR that depends on an unusual definition of &quot;category&quot;, but I haven't found a good way to describe RNR'd verb phrases, as in &quot;John was, but Mary wasn't, eating caviar.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T02:05:58.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T04:06:26.183" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2571/what-divides-semantics-from-pragmatics&quot;&gt;the question about the semantics/pragmatics divide&lt;/a&gt;, but I have a more specific interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of two different ways of conceiving of the way statements come to have a range of admissible interpretations within a context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semantics generates an abundance of possible interpretations and pragmatics serves to cut down this stock to those interpretations admissible in the context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semantics generates a stock of admissible interpretations and pragmatics adds &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of conversational implicature, for example, I could see either view as plausible. For instance, take the Gricean example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a&#xA;  philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr. X's&#xA;  command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has&#xA;  been regular. Yours, etc.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that Mr. X is a rather poor philosopher, and this can be explained by appeal to Grice's Principle of Quantity (i.e., &quot;If the speaker uttered F, F is optimally informative within a class (to be defined) of alternative utterances.&quot;; this formulation is taken from this &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002545/current.pdf?_s=7xJCgNdJg0V-1NhL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phillipe Schlenker survey article on the pragmatics/semantics interface&lt;/a&gt;). I could see this reading as either being already generated by the semantics and made salient by the context, or as being unavailable outside of a range of similar contexts (e.g., writing recommendation letters) where the context serves to introduce the implicated claim to the meaning of the sentence. These correspond to (1) and (2), respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the semantics/pragmatics distinction is a very thorny one, but is there reason to favor one of these views over the other? Does my thinking here even make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:46:32.527" Title="Does pragmatics cut down or add to the stock of interpretations generated by the semantics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16943" CreationDate="2016-03-03T05:36:27.560" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Icelandic &lt;em&gt;maður&lt;/em&gt; is from Old Icelandic &lt;em&gt;maðr&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To relate the latter to the former, I would say &quot;Old Icelandic &lt;em&gt;maðr&lt;/em&gt; is the ___ of Modern Icelandic &lt;em&gt;maður&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; What linguistic term goes in the blank?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another term for a meaning the other way round, i.e., that fits the blank in this sentence: &quot;Modern Icelandic &lt;em&gt;maður&lt;/em&gt; is the ___ of &lt;em&gt;maðr&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about &lt;em&gt;ancestor&lt;/em&gt; for the first blank and &lt;em&gt;descendant&lt;/em&gt; for the second, but I am not sure if this is correct linguistic terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T19:06:43.710" Title="Word for a word that was the ancestor for another word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2016-03-03T06:06:23.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You prejudice the question in your second sentence when you append &quot;... within a context&quot;.  Implicatures tell you something about what the context is -- it must be such as to make a conversational sentence meaningful.  Taking this into account, pragmatics adds to the information conveyed.  If the context were taken as fixed in advanced, pragmatics couldn't tell you anything about it, so context could only limit the possible interpretations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T06:06:23.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16931" CreationDate="2016-03-03T08:25:27.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prefixes are indeed related (e.g., Sanskrit pra- Latin pro- German vor-) and they are intensively studied. I once read a comprehensive comparative list of verbal prefixes, but I forgot where (the reference I thought it was doesn't have this list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T08:04:30.377" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T08:04:30.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16929" CreationDate="2016-03-03T08:43:39.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from German and its dialects to see the process in action. High German has two distinct allophones of a phoneme written as &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;, the so-called &lt;em&gt;Ich-Laut&lt;/em&gt; [ç] and the &lt;em&gt;Ach-Laut&lt;/em&gt; [x]. The realisation of &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; in High German is completely determined by the preceding sound; it is &lt;em&gt;Ich-Laut&lt;/em&gt; initally and after &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt;, and consonants and &lt;em&gt;Ach-Laut&lt;/em&gt; after &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have in High German the two words &lt;em&gt;Leiche&lt;/em&gt; [laɪçə] 'corpse' and &lt;em&gt;Lache&lt;/em&gt; [laːxə] 'puddle, pool'. Now there are some German dialects, where the diphthong /aɪ/ developed to /aː/. In those dialects, the outcome of the two words is something like [laːçə] for &lt;em&gt;Leiche&lt;/em&gt; and [laːxə] for &lt;em&gt;Lache&lt;/em&gt; creating a minimal pair for [ç] and [x] and boosting them to phoneme status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T15:19:48.247" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T15:19:48.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16931" CreationDate="2016-03-03T11:39:51.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mayrhofer’s little Sanskrit-Grammatik §140 there is a list of Sanskrit preverbs with their Greek equivalent, e.g. apa : apo; api : epi; pari : peri; pra : pro; prati : proti; upa : hypo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T11:39:51.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16938" CreationDate="2016-03-03T11:45:54.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ancestor&quot; and &quot;descendant&quot; are indeed the correct terms if there is a direct line of descent. Otherwise you would say that they are cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T11:45:54.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16948" CreationDate="2016-03-03T15:17:15.327" Score="3" ViewCount="2686" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Concepts, Ontologies, and Knowledge Representation&lt;/em&gt;, the author makes a distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic semantic relations. That's clear enough - but then he raises a third kind of semantic relation called &lt;em&gt;attributes&lt;/em&gt; (see attachment). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Class attributes are assigned values that are attached to the concept&#xA;  and will therefore be the same for all instances of a concept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;instance attributes can be assigned different values for each instance (extension) of a concept. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Local attributes are same-name attributes attached to different concepts. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Global attributes can be applied to all concepts in a particular conceptual structure, for example, in an ontology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how to compare these three kinds of semantic relations. Attribute relations seem so unlike the paradigmatic/syntagmatic distinction. Furthermore, I also learned that semantic relations have an &lt;em&gt;arity&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the number of concepts a semantic relation can associate. But this doesn't connect to any of the aforementioned three semantic relations, or does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHCzD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHCzD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;excerpt&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2016-03-03T15:33:07.500" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T17:58:30.723" Title="What's a good illustration of the difference between syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and attribute semantic relations?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-03T16:16:33.580" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The neuter noun &lt;em&gt;kné&lt;/em&gt; follows &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stem declension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it comes from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*knewą&lt;/em&gt;. This seems to be a &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt;-stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then why does it follow &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stem declension? Did Scandinavians force it to, even though it was &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt;-stem noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T16:16:33.580" Title="Old Norse kné: a- stem or wa- stem?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16933" CreationDate="2016-03-03T17:41:56.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will go on to mention Gazdar's theory of RNR constructions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/gaz81.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unbounded Dependencies and Coordinate Structure&lt;/a&gt;, since this is the only account I know of that is in some sense a solution.  Gazdar shows how to construct a phrase structure grammar which generates the RNR constructions with rules that will be required in any case for other constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example, here is a simplified account of how it works.  A finite number of rules are added to describe structures that are missing a constituent.  Gazdar uses a slash notation inherited from Categorial Grammar: a sentence missing a noun phrase, for instance, is an S/NP, and a PP missing a NP is a PP/NP. These new categories behave like normal categories in coordinate structures -- you can coordinate two like categories to create a coordinate node of that same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example, we'd do something like the following.  Supposing that for the full versions of &quot;Alex created the DAT file on the disk&quot; and the other sentence, we have these PSRs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V NP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Alex, Max&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; the DAT file on the disk&#xA;V -&amp;gt; created, copied&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and for coordination of the full sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; S and S&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then append rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; S/NP NP&#xA;S/NP -&amp;gt; S/NP and S/NP&#xA;S/NP -&amp;gt; NP VP/NP&#xA;VP/NP -&amp;gt; V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no appeal to transformations or mysterious things going on in &quot;PF&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T17:41:56.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16945" CreationDate="2016-03-03T17:58:30.723" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fLrHs.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fLrHs.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of these relations as a system for choosing, like choosing what to wear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntagmatic&lt;/strong&gt;: Which things should I wear above my waist and which below? Blouses and skirts are in a syntagmatic relation to one another, because they occupy different slots in the structure, above and below waist on the human body.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paradigmatic&lt;/strong&gt;: Now I want to decide what to wear above, whether a blouse or a T-shirt. Blouses and T-shirts are in a paradigmatic relation to one another because they occupy the same slot in the structure, above waist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attributive&lt;/strong&gt;: I've settled for a T-shirt. Now which colour should I wear today, red or blue? Red and blue are in attributive relation to one another, because they may distinguish elements of the same type. Note that an attribute is independent of syntagm or paradigm. A blouse goes above the waist and a skirt below (syntagmatic relation); both can have the attribute colour = blue. A blouse and a T-shirt go above the waist (paradigmatic relation); both can have the attribute colour = red.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image above was extracted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://admuisawthesign.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/paradigm-and-syntagm.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;, which I really recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T17:58:30.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6171" CreationDate="2016-03-03T18:08:20.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are 3 steps in doing this task:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identifying the languages in webpages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Building a crawler that downloads the web page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doing linguistics analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;since my primary NLP language is python and there are a lot of NLP libraries written for Python we use Python here.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For identifying the language you can use some great language identifiers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi/langdetect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (based on Google's language-detection) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi/guess-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (Based on guesslanguage.cpp by Jacob R Rideout).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second step is rather tricky. It's actually called &lt;code&gt;Web Scraping&lt;/code&gt;, you can read some great tutorials on web scraping &lt;a href=&quot;https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter11/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://scrapy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (Scrapy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last step you use different snippets for concordances based on NLTK at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/adelra/PyConcordancer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Other things like word frequency etc. can be used easily via NLTK library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-05T15:26:55.317" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T15:26:55.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6171" CreationDate="2016-03-04T08:10:36.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although you are asking for a tool to do it yourself, you should not neglect the existence of corpora in many languages on the web, e.g., the Leipzig Wortschatz project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/&lt;/a&gt; that features 219 languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T08:10:36.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12660" CreationDate="2016-03-04T09:00:05.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number you get in &lt;code&gt;Query ---&amp;gt; Get Intensity...&lt;/code&gt; is the mean intensity of the sound which for the sound file I have is &lt;code&gt;81.49346601915424 dB&lt;/code&gt; when I open the sound file in &lt;code&gt;View and edit&lt;/code&gt; and select the whole sound file I will approximately get the same number:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x5WVP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x5WVP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The windows showing spectrum analysis :&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ecbwp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ecbwp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative you can also select &lt;code&gt;Spectrum ---&amp;gt; View Spectral Slice (Ctrl + L)&lt;/code&gt; to open a windows showing the intensity in dB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39obj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39obj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why are they different?! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Image number 2 shows the intensity of the sound in dB which the quietest is &lt;code&gt;0&lt;/code&gt; and the loudest (in our recording is 63)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Image number 3 shows the relative amount of noise in your recording so for example the loudest noise in your recording will be marked as &lt;code&gt;0&lt;/code&gt; and the lowest, obviously, will be negative. You can read more about A-Weighting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly about the image number one. I really cannot understand what it is (by looking at it) but I presume it's some sort of scaling dB. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;There was a mathematical review of the Praat's functions which I cannot find it right now. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In general if you want to report the SNR in a research it's safer to report it in A-Weighting (Image number 3) it's more natural to grasp and easier to understand &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; if you are going to report the sound intensity in particular (for example you want to report that speakers of a certain language like Arabic speak louder than other speakers of let's say French) you can use dB. In the end it's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T09:35:24.300" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T09:35:24.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16955" CreationDate="2016-03-04T10:20:51.167" Score="3" ViewCount="1999" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read popular text books on this topic and watched several lectures but still I don't understand what are Locutionary and Illocutionary act (and verbs). In general how do you identify this verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia page on the topic: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics and the philosophy of mind, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous &quot;How To Do Things With Words&quot;, a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T12:54:01.850" Title="Speech acts theory: (il)Locutionary acts" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15639" CreationDate="2016-03-04T12:22:28.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doing phonetics analysis is broad term, you should first mention what type of phonetics analysis you are looking for and how is your level of programming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first question we will go into FFT only since it's an algorithm that is fundamental (you can manually check the formants, frequency etc.). If you are not familiar with FFT the simplest definition is that it converts sound waves to frequency-time patterns (you can read more at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phys.nsu.ru/cherk/fft.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). There are numerous FFT packages written for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.scipy.org%2Fdoc%2Fnumpy%2Freference%2Fgenerated%2Fnumpy.fft.fft.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Python&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zaphire/Monocle-Engine/blob/master/Core/Audio/fft.cpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C++&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some great tutorials on realtime signal processing at &lt;a href=&quot;http://bastibe.de/2012-11-02-real-time-signal-processing-in-python.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-audio-signal-processing-library-for-Python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T12:22:28.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16953" CreationDate="2016-03-04T12:32:36.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Locutionary and illocutionary verbs are not a thing, as far as I know. Locutionary and illocutionary acts on the other hand are well known to me and to others as well. I think an example will help you here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my Semantics course a third speech act facet was presented as well, though. It is called perlocution and refers to the effect of an utterance on the listener, i.e. whether or not the utterance leads to the desired result by the speaker. This needs not necessarily be applicable to all cases, so that is possibly why you have not heard of them or read much about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ex.: &quot;I am cold.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Locutionary act&lt;/em&gt;: the grammatical properties of the utterance and the declarative nature of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Illocutionary act&lt;/em&gt;: The actual nature of the utterance that is meant by the speaker, i.e. a request if the hearer is able to do something about the speaker being cold. Depending on the context, this can be a request to close the window or to start a fire in the hearth (or perhaps a little less ancient: the central heating).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perlocutionary act&lt;/em&gt;: The effect the utterance has on the hearer, i.e. (not) closing the window or (not) providing a heat source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another quote to strengthen your understanding is as follows. From &quot;Semantics&quot; (3rd ed.) by John Saeed. Chapter 8, paragraph 2, subparagraph 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Austin proposed that communicating a speech act consists of three elements: the speaker says something, the speaker signals an associated speech act, and the speech act causes an effect on her listeners or the participants. The first element he called the locutionary act, by which he meant the act of saying something that makes sense in a language, i.e. follows the rules of pronunciation and grammar. The second, the action intended by the speaker, he termed the illocutionary act. This is what Austin and his successors have mainly been concerned with: the uses to which language can be put in society. In fact the term speech acts is often used with just this meaning of illocutionary acts. The third element, called the perlocutionary act, is concerned with what follows an utterance: the effect or ‘take-up’ of an illocutionary act. Austin gave the example of sentences like &quot;Shoot her!&quot;. In appropriate circumstances this can have the illocutionary force of ordering, urging or advising the addressee to shoot her, but the perlocutionary force of persuading, forcing, frightening, etc. the addressee into shooting her. Perlocutionary effects are less conventionally tied to linguistic forms and so have been of less interest to linguists. We know for example that people can recognize orders without obeying them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11321" LastEditorUserId="11321" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T12:54:01.850" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T12:54:01.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2756" CreationDate="2016-03-04T18:20:35.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your question, you use the word &quot;need&quot;. To that, I suppose the answer is, no. However, I am of the strong opinion that knowledge of such theories makes for a better teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a teacher has a good understanding of how people learn, she can make well informed decisions about how to approach the teaching–learning process. It can help a teacher pick the most appropriate materials and activities and can help ensure an effective response to students' poor assessment results / slow progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the higher level, I would say that knowledge of such theories is absolutely necessary for anyone who is assessing teachers, creating materials or designing curricula. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if the question is &quot;can someone be an effective teacher without this knowledge&quot;, then I suppose yes, it is certainly possible. I know many teachers who do at least a decent job of teaching EFL classes without a deep understanding of CLA or learning theory, though I would have to say that they are definitely limited to &quot;Conversation Classes&quot;, &quot;Exam Prep&quot; and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12636" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T18:20:35.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16958" CreationDate="2016-03-04T18:29:44.913" Score="0" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, a colleague at an institution I used to work at gave a presentation to the faculty on using corpora queries. She used [I think a website, though it could have been a software] where you could do searches similar to those you can perform on Google Ngrams but with more complex queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on Google Ngrams, you can search for all of the instances in print of the phrase &quot;most notably&quot; but in her programme, you could search for all of the instances of &quot;'most' followed by an adverb&quot; (I don't know the proper language for these searches).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know what that website/software might have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12636" LastEditorUserId="12636" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T18:34:59.637" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T20:43:21.403" Title="Related to Corpa Query software" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16957" CreationDate="2016-03-04T20:43:21.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Google Ngram, here’s the example you mention: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=most%20*_ADV&amp;amp;year_start=1950&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(most _ADV)&lt;/a&gt;. More help is given on the info page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/info#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Ngram syntax guide&lt;/a&gt;. For more serious work and various corpora, I’d start with the BYU COCA site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/help/syntax_e.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BYU syntax guide&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T20:43:21.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16897" CreationDate="2016-03-04T23:08:47.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every leaf of the syntactic tree gets a Part-of-Speech (POS) label. When the leaf is an actual word, it is assigned a POS tag such as &quot;N&quot;, &quot;V&quot;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some leaves are not actual words but instead trace elements. Traces represent placeholders in the syntax. All trace placeholders have &quot;*&quot; plus optional material. See treebank documentation for explanation of the types of traces. The &quot;-4&quot; above indicates the index for coreference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the trace is assigned Part-of-Speech of &quot;NONE&quot; because it wouldn't make sense to assign a POS tag to a non-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6803" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T23:08:47.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T08:20:06.940" Score="4" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;is the suffix -ed verbal or adjectival in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was excited about my new job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the answer be different if the sentence was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was excited &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; my new job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; indicates that excited is a verb and -ed is a derivational,verbal suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T20:33:17.307" Title="verbal or adjectival suffix -ed in the word &quot;excited&quot;" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16969" CreationDate="2016-03-05T09:03:22.233" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are we transcribing prosody? and what is the philosophy behind it? In general what is the purpose of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12641" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T17:46:49.063" Title="What is the philosophy of prosodic transcription?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16962" CreationDate="2016-03-05T09:41:04.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We study prosody because we observe that it is a meaningful, functional component of language. We transcribe it with the goal of abstractly understanding the contrastive elements that speakers seem to be perceiving and producing (and the system of interaction for those elements). This is analogous to other aspects of linguistics; e.g., we could roughly say that (segmental) phonology seeks to understand the system of sound elements in human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2016-03-05T09:46:34.883" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T09:46:34.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15710" CreationDate="2016-03-05T10:34:00.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally believe that transcribing intonation within the level of phonetics is going to work because phonologically speaking our understanding of intonation is close to none and systems like ToBI aren't sufficient for complex systems like intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12641" LastEditorUserId="12641" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T19:57:07.487" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T19:57:07.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2016-03-05T11:07:18.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is interesting question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm sorry to post here, but I'd like to share my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do speak three languages fluently, and those three are from different language categories; Japanese, Indonesian, and English. I also understand Hawaiian, but not as fluent as other three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, grammatical mistakes are more based on the educational background on the language, but are not caused by multilingualism.  Most monolingual people make more grammartical mistakes than I do, in my experience.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, English is my third language, but because I have had the most intensive training on English grammars, I'm confident when I write/read/speak in English more than other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, most people never care about how correct the grammar is, when they are just chatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12644" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T11:07:18.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T11:37:36.537" Score="1" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;When did the colloquial phrase &lt;strong&gt;&quot;up north&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;down south&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; begin to be used? I am trying to find more information for a book I am working on that takes place around 1830 and am not sure if this was in use around that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12645" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T12:47:04.200" Title="When did the colloquial term &quot;up north&quot; and &quot;down south&quot; begin?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16966" CreationDate="2016-03-05T12:47:04.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corpus of Historical American English&lt;/a&gt; includes American texts from 1810, and sorted by decade.  Searching for the phrases with &quot;up|down north|south&quot; gives the following results for the 1830s (out of 13,773,987 words):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UP NORTH 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DOWN SOUTH 13&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DOWN NORTH 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UP SOUTH 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the one instance of the phrase &quot;down North&quot; in the 1830s comes from this phrase: &quot;the boundary line is uniformly laid down North of the river St. John&quot;; it doesn't really provide a counterexample, as the two words aren't being used together as a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, all instances of &quot;up North&quot; and &quot;down South&quot; from the 1830s are being used as a phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Some of our folks down South say, if the Bank is put down, we shall all be split up...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I was thinking to get' em to go up north a piece.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other decades in the 19th century give similar results: &quot;down south&quot; and &quot;up north&quot; are much more common than the other two.  There are very few instances before the 1830s, but that may be because the size of the subcorpora before the 1830s are much smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems these phrases were at least in use by the 1830s, and possibly earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T12:47:04.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16783" CreationDate="2016-03-05T15:46:59.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't use the &lt;code&gt;standard f0 analysis&lt;/code&gt;. There's no such thing as standard. You need a framework e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Autosegmental-meterical Phonology (AM)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;supposing you are going to work in the phonological category&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again this is when you are going to do a scientific study for a non-scientific observation you can take guess by looking at the pitch track but it's not scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About prosodic transcription systems:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Actually ToBI is not the only system for transcribing prosody. There numerous systems within different frameworks available: INTSINT (Hirst, 1998), IViE (Grabe, 1998), Tilt (Paul Taylor, 1998), RFC (Paul Taylor, 1994)...&#xA;&lt;code&gt;ToBI is one of them&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantages of ToBI over other systems like INTSINT are as follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ToBI is easy to learn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can easily learn ToBI you don't need special guides. only two letters &lt;code&gt;H&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;L&lt;/code&gt; which if you happened to be familiar with AM Phonology you have seen them in other systems (in INTSINT). Some special characters like &lt;code&gt;%&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; need to be interpreted before using and that's easy supposing you have an understanding of AM phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ToBI is easy to use&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use ToBI right away, no need for special calcuations, no need for usage of other formulae. It's straight.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ToBI is easy to read&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your first time looking at a ToBI transcription you can easily guess what are the transcriptions and you can read them easily.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The disadvantages of the ToBI system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you can't always say that the easiest method is the best one. We still don't know what parts of prosody do we need so that we can throw away the others. ToBI is a system which neglects tremendous amount of prosodic data and that's not right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end it's up to you to choose whatever works for you. But when talking about prosodic data, you have to be careful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T15:46:59.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16962" CreationDate="2016-03-05T17:46:49.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is way more efficient than the alternative. The alternative is to compute some acoustic measure over a chunk of speech in question, an analysis which takes a long time to set up and to perform. Auditory transcription on the other hand is remarkably quick, once the system has been set up. An implication behind any transcription is that there are a small number of discrete categories of the property, for example length might be reduceable to two or three distinctions (so that a plot of duration values would show two or three regions of high population, not uniform grey). There is also the presumption that the phonetic categories will turn out to correlate with some other cognitive state (generally, something pragmatic like sarcasm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some counterindicating factors which indicate that the categoriality assumption is not completely true. This is where phonetic iconicity comes in. For example it is very common to find prolongation used on distal demonstratives (though it would be strange in English). If &quot;there&quot; is the ordinary word for a location away from you and me, prolongated &quot;the-ere&quot; would indicate &quot;further away, &quot;the-e-ere&quot; would be &quot;even further away&quot;, with the only limit on the number of distinctions being the non-linguistic ability to distinguish two durational patterns. Iconicity would be a kind of limiting noise on prosodic transcriptions, meaning that if an acoustic property signals &quot;surprise&quot; (which implies a categorial analysis &quot;surprise is signalled with H&quot;), there could still be continuous ranges of pitch raising signalling greater degrees of surprise. But you would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; find for instance that &quot;beyond 500 msc of added duration, prolongation signals shock rather than happiness&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T17:46:49.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12641" CreationDate="2016-03-06T15:19:40.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a book named: &lt;code&gt;BASIC MALTESE GRAMMAR&lt;/code&gt; by &lt;code&gt;Grazio Falzon&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I don't know if I'm allowed to put the link here. The version I have doesn't seem to have any publication name or copyrght signs. maybe moderators can help me through this.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another book, freely available, is &lt;code&gt;TEACH YOURSELF MALTESE&lt;/code&gt; A course of maltese for beginners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TEACH YOURSELF MALTESE. A COMPLETE COURSE FOR BEGINNERS. JOSEPH&#xA;  AQUILINA. MALTESE, WRITTEN WITH A MODIFIED LATIN ALPHABET, IS AN&#xA;  INTERESTING AND UNIQUE LANGUAGE WITH AN ARABIC MORPHOLOGY AND A VERY&#xA;  MIXED VOCABULARY OF ARABIC AND LATIN WORDS, MOSTLY FROM ITALIAN. THE&#xA;  COURSE IS PRESENTED IN FOUR PARTS, 1. ALPHABET AND PRONUNTIATION, 2.&#xA;  GRAMMAR [ MORPHOLOGY], 3. THE MALTESE VERB, 4. KEY TO THE EXERCISES.&#xA;  240 PAGES. DAVID MACKAY, USA, 1965.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Available &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/TeachYourselfMalteseJosephAquilina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (From Archive.org)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T15:19:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12144" CreationDate="2016-03-06T16:47:45.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use Clark, an XML based corpous annotation tool, for annotating your corpora. The link is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bultreebank.org/clark/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other tools are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gate.ac.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GATE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GATE is a modular system for the linguistic processing of texts. It comprises an architecture, library framework and graphical development environment. Plugins can be used to build an application for a particular annotation task. GATE is freely available under GNU Library General Public License (LGPL 2.0) and can be downloaded after a registration. It is implemented in Java, and thus available for all major platforms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://%20Alembic%20Workbench%20Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Alembic Workbench Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tool for manual and automatic annotation of text corpora. Automatic annotation is achieved by a mixed approach: heuristics for information extraction can be manually composed or automatically inducted. Available free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/projects/PALinkA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PALinkA: A Discourse Annotation Tool&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An annotation program which allows a wide range of annotations. At present it has been used to annotate texts for anaphora resolution, centering, summarisation and marking certain features in texts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://An%20annotation%20program%20which%20allows%20a%20wide%20range%20of%20annotations.%20At%20present%20it%20has%20been%20used%20to%20annotate%20texts%20for%20anaphora%20resolution,%20centering,%20summarisation%20and%20marking%20certain%20features%20in%20texts.&quot;&gt;Annotate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Annotate is a tool for efficient semi-automatic annotation of corpus data. It facilitates the generation of context-free structures and additionally allows crossing edges.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mmax.eml-research.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MMAX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tool for multi-modal annotation in XML&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also read about corpus annotation below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] : &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/~adamp/Papers/2009-ltc-tei/ltc-030-przepiorkowski.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/~adamp/Papers/2009-ltc-tei/ltc-030-przepiorkowski.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/corpus/conference-archives/2007/187Paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-artslaw/corpus/conference-archives/2007/187Paper.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T16:47:45.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-06T20:57:32.450" Score="0" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a system to extract tags from text (English) and currently I have no dataset to test the system and evaluate, could someone point me to a source (preferably a free one)&#xA;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO I Managed To Find What I was looking For On Github&#xA;IF anyone is struggling with similar issue here is the link&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/snkim/AutomaticKeyphraseExtraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/snkim/AutomaticKeyphraseExtraction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12657" LastEditorUserId="12657" LastEditDate="2016-04-12T17:17:04.133" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T17:17:04.133" Title="Corpus of tagged text (English newspapers or any tagged text)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12144" CreationDate="2016-03-07T09:06:34.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The task you are looking for is called &lt;em&gt;Alignment&lt;/em&gt; and the most popular tool for it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mokk.bme.hu/resources/hunalign/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hunalign&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T09:06:34.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4237" CreationDate="2016-03-07T12:52:41.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a list of vocabulary and the output from testing the snowball algorithm available at the Snowball Github page, though it is not precisely human tested but it's good for testing you stemmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It supports the following languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;arabic  &#xA;danish&#xA;dutch&#xA;english&#xA;finnish&#xA;french  &#xA;german  &#xA;hungarian   &#xA;italian     &#xA;kraaij_pohlmann     &#xA;lovins&#xA;norwegian&#xA;portuguese &#xA;romanian &#xA;russian &#xA;spanish &#xA;swedish&#xA;tamil&#xA;turkish&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find this dataset at: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/snowballstem/snowball-data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/snowballstem/snowball-data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T12:52:41.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-07T16:13:49.633" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard people say that the reason English is such a great language is that it's enriched itself by stealing so promiscuously from other languages. The image I get of English is that she's like the kind of old and very distinguished madam that you'd see running a storied whorehouse in New Orleans. We have &quot;beef&quot; from French and &quot;cow&quot; for the living animal, we have &quot;automobile&quot; formed from the miscegenation of Greek and Latin. We have drug czars and pajamas and canyons and chow mein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this story of English exceptionalism really true, or is it an urban folktale like the number of Eskimo words for snow? It does seem that certain languages such as French and Katharevousa Greek have been much more concerned with maintaining their purity. Are there other languages that could contend with English for the title of Most Thieving Language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally asked this on english.SE, but folks there suggested it would be more appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12663" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T17:51:25.497" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T17:51:25.497" Title="Other languages that borrow as promiscuously as English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16981" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:48:34.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, English (or any language) does not steal from other languages. Although we acquired &quot;beef&quot; from French, unlike actual theft, we did not deprive French of that word, and even today speakers of French use the word &quot;boeuf&quot;. Nor do we &quot;borrow&quot;, which implies an intent to repay, although there has been some payback in the form of originally-English words now employed in French (&quot;OK&quot;, &quot;weekend&quot;, &quot;sandwich&quot; and so on). We don't know who is responsible for the aforementioned self-loathing characterization of the history of English, but it wasn't a linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This behavior is found in very many languages of the world, and English is not special in the percentage of its words that are nor strictly descended through the West Germanic line of Indo-European (suitable restated to identify the borrowed vocabulary of French, Norwegian, Persian and so on). There can be special impediments to borrowing, such as Korean's resistance to borrowing verbs. It is possible, though, that English may top the charts in terms of the number of different languages borrowed from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T17:48:34.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16981" CreationDate="2016-03-07T17:49:38.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are other languages with heavy borrowing. In Europe, Romanian comes to my mind (basic vocabulary and grammar inherited from Latin with lots of mostly Slavonic vocabulary borrowed (language purists replaced some of those borrowings with borrowings from Italian and French later on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example might be Suaheli: A Bantu language in grammar with a heavy load of borrowings (mostly from Arabic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't have quantitative data on either language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T17:49:38.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8844" CreationDate="2016-03-08T11:55:33.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this page after hearing same in one of Dan Winter's videos. As much as I've enjoyed his material, it's clear there is fabrication therein. There are  several Freemasonic texts which set the record straight. The English alphabet of 26 letters is a better system, in the esoteric sense, to work with. You will also find much in perusing Marty Leeds' material on Pi. Pi, according to many sources including Freemasonry, is the conceptual Substrate to the modern English alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be case closed for me but for the amazing work by Stan Tenen. So I'm not sure what the heck is really going on. Seems to be two wholly exclusive systems (Hebrew/English). There's a chance it could be a comparison of say Runes to Hebrew. Meaning a celestial as to terrestrial or more earthy symbol array.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet consider the ado made about Hebrew's 22 letters corresponding to the features of a cube; with the so called Cube of Space. I had Hulse' book on this and took it for granted. I however, only recently, took a cube and counted faces, points and lines... and guess what, it comes out to 26. This, I am sure, evidences what those Freemasonic texts were alluding to. I am not a Freemason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is diversion when it comes to the exclusiveness, the high and mightiness, of the Hebrew row. It's not the case.... and likely why we have to endure false claims about spectrograms etc.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12670" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T11:55:33.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-08T12:09:52.790" Score="2" ViewCount="1201" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process in which &lt;code&gt;one sound becomes more like a nearby sound&lt;/code&gt; is called assimilation. In assimilation mostly one sound changes but what is the process in which two sounds are changed? Consider the following example from Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;masjed- مسجد&lt;/code&gt; changes to &lt;code&gt;masĉed&lt;/code&gt; and then changes to &lt;code&gt;maĉĉed - مچد&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning: &lt;code&gt;Mosque&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process, I presume, is called &lt;code&gt;همگونی دوسویه&lt;/code&gt; which loosely translates into &lt;code&gt;bidirectional assimilation&lt;/code&gt;. &#xA;In general when does it happen? And how should we detect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T10:25:48.053" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T10:25:48.053" Title="Assimilation: What is the process in which both phonemes change?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2016-03-08T13:52:19.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the view that makes sense to me, although I'm not sure if it's the standard: Semantics provides us with a meaning (say for example, truth-conditions), which is typically relatively weak, i.e., there are many different circumstances which would make the sentence true. Take the (Gricean) example of disjunction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) Jeff is at the cinema, or eating ice cream with Shirley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the semantics gives us classical (inclusive) disjunction, (i) is true in any circumstance except for one in which Jeff is neither at the cinema nor eating ice cream. Plausibly, the pragmatics strengthens these truth-conditions to exclusive disjunction, via a scalar implicature (with &quot;and&quot; as the relevant alternative). The consequence is that pragmatics strengthens meanings - it takes a meaning compatible with many different circumstances, and cuts down the number of circumstances it is compatible with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T13:52:19.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16989" CreationDate="2016-03-08T15:47:15.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bidirectional assimilation&quot; is an unlikely name for that kind of case, which constitutes &quot;gemination&quot; or &quot;geminate formation&quot;. &quot;Bidirectional assimilation&quot; is generally used for the assimilation of a property which both affects a segment on the left and a segment on the right. ATR and nasal harmonies are the canonical examples, where e.g. /wemao/ → [w̃ẽmãõ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the result of combining two distinct adjacent segments is a single long segment, we usually refer to the process as merger or fusion, possibly adding a form of the word &quot;geminate&quot; to indicate that the result is a geminate consonant (for instance, /hy/ → [ʃʃ]). In the specific example you give, no feature is contributed by /s/, and /tʃ/ doesn't become in any way &quot;more like&quot; the deleted /s/. You might encounter a case that could be called &lt;em&gt;reciprocal&lt;/em&gt; assimilation, where in a sequence of segments /AB/, A takes some property from B and B takes some property from A, and the result is surface DE (not a geminate). The most common case of that kind involves progressive post-nasal voicing, and regressive place assimilation, whereby /mk/ → [ŋg]. However, this is not &quot;a bidirectional assimilation&quot;, it is two assimilations, one regressive and the other progressive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T15:47:15.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16989" CreationDate="2016-03-08T15:54:46.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a standard term.  I'd refer to it as mutual assimilation.  The change in Sanskrit of ai to ee = e: is an example.  So far as I know, there's nothing special about it, as compared with other assimilations, except that it's, well, mutual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T15:54:46.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16875" CreationDate="2016-03-08T18:17:09.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The character &lt;strong&gt;ل&lt;/strong&gt;  can be used as a preposition. The preposition means &quot;for&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;أن&lt;/strong&gt; means &quot;that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you combine the preposition &lt;strong&gt;ل&lt;/strong&gt;  and the word &lt;strong&gt;أن&lt;/strong&gt; together, It becomes the word &lt;strong&gt;لأن&lt;/strong&gt;. The preposition and the word are connected together because the preposition &lt;strong&gt;ل&lt;/strong&gt; is always connected to the next word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the word &lt;strong&gt;لأن&lt;/strong&gt;  is &quot;for that&quot; but the actual meaning is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, There are two ways to say &quot;because you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You means &lt;strong&gt;انت&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, (Because you) = &lt;strong&gt;لأن انت&lt;/strong&gt;  (it is understandable but it is not commonly used)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way is to use connectivity of pronouns in semitic languages. I mean pronouns are able to be connected (embedded or compressed) to a word. In this case, The pronoun will take the form of an object pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about object pronouns you can watch this video. I've made it myself: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiypiNzmc80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiypiNzmc80&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11482" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T18:17:09.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16994" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16996" CreationDate="2016-03-09T03:01:28.200" Score="3" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently had a text translated into Icelandic.  When I machine translate that human translation back to English, it came out as quite awkward English.  However, when I machine translate the machine translation back to English, it came out sounding perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that just because it has high fidelity going both ways, even though it is wrong?  Or should I suspect the human translator's version is wrong and he does not actually speak Icelandic well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original English text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I felt it was a reasonable assumption that the developers would know&#xA;  about this method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The human translation into Icelandic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mér fannst eðlilegt að ganga út frá því að leikjahöfundarnir þekktu&#xA;  til aðferðarinnar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The machine translation into Icelandic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ég fann að það var sanngjarnt forsendu að verktaki myndi vita um þessa&#xA;  aðferð.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I used Google Translate for the machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T16:45:48.860" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T17:03:20.097" Title="How good is a round-trip translation as a machine translation quality evaluation technique?" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-09T08:04:25.717" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an open source computational linguistics project, and I need Old and Middle English corpora that I can distribute along with the software. Most of the corpora that I've been able to find are all under license, and even the Middle English Compendium seems to only be accessible through their web interface. Are there any resources out there that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12678" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T05:41:22.170" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T05:41:22.170" Title="Middle and Old English Corpora Distributable Under Open Source License" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16994" CreationDate="2016-03-09T11:47:53.663" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A so-called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-trip_translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;round-trip translation&lt;/a&gt; is not a reliable signal&lt;/strong&gt; that the translation worked well, for a few reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noisy parallel corpora are bi-directional.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine translation systems train on parallel corpora, which are often &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text#Noise_in_corpora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;noisy&lt;/a&gt;.  For example, suppose the following noise occurs in the training data:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;en: &quot;This is a rare sentence.&quot;  is: &quot;Rænðöm rænðöm gíbberish.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is no sense of directionality here; the English-Icelandic system learns:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;en: &quot;This is a rare sentence.&quot; -&amp;gt; is: &quot;Rænðöm rænðöm gíbberish.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the Iceland-English system learns:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;is: &quot;Rænðöm rænðöm gíbberish.&quot; -&amp;gt; en: &quot;This is a rare sentence.&quot; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this simplified example, the output of the round-trip translation - &lt;em&gt;trans('is', 'en', trans('en', 'is', x))&lt;/em&gt; - will likely be &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;.  The two mistakes cancel each other out.  This happens more often than it would if translation mistakes were simply random.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Even good translation is lossy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A translation, and even a language itself, is lossy.  Distinctions of meaning, gender, &lt;em&gt;tu/vous&lt;/em&gt;, tense and aspect are not represented equivalently or at all in all languages.  Ambiguities are also not necessarily represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us consider an example, with English as the intermediate language to make it clear:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;es: &quot;La profesora Le está esperando.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can legitimately translate this into English as:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;en: &quot;The teacher is waiting for you.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: We lose the gender of the teacher, whether it is a schoolteacher or university professor, and the formality of &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, and any choices about word order.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now we translate back into Spanish:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;es: &quot;Te espera el maestro.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That round-trip translation very different than the original, although the translation in both steps was correct.  This dynamic applies to both human and machine translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Machine translation is not perfect.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The lack of readability of the machine translation of Icelandic text written by a human is possibly a signal that the human did not use that machine translation system but did, in fact, translate by hand in some way.  In fact, good idiomatic translations are more difficult for machine or human translators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last dynamic applies to evaluating a human translation by machine translating it into some language you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T17:03:20.097" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T17:03:20.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2016-03-09T13:37:09.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a type designer I consider Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) to have four cases:&#xA;1 Uppercase 2 Small Caps 3 Petite Caps 4 Lowercase.&#xA;All four cases may exist in all weights (Light, Bold) and also in Italic.&#xA;Small caps are supposed to be higher than the lowercase x-height and are often used in abbreviations and subheadings, Petite Caps have exactly the height of the lowercase x, and are used in Phonetic extensions, e.g. u0262 u026A u0274 u0276 u0280 u0299 u029B u029C u029F but also in rich typography. Luc(as) de Groot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12679" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T13:37:09.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16938" CreationDate="2016-03-09T18:36:40.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For ancestor, &quot;reflex&quot; is also used, i.e. Icelandic madur is the reflex of Old Norse madr. Also, derivative works: madur derives from madr. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source or origin and the prefix proto- as in proto-form, proto-sound might work for the madr is the source of madur or the proto-form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12562" LastEditorUserId="12562" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T19:06:43.710" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T19:06:43.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-09T19:49:11.067" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing Latent Semantic Analysis on news. I have a few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the most suitable kind of distance &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; for similarity measurement in semantic space: cosine, Euclidean, Manhattan or other Minkowski distance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Next for news categorization I am going to use weights &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt; of words which are function of distance to a given point in semantic space. What is the most suitable function &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;) ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T19:49:11.067" Title="Distances and weights in semantic space" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15450" CreationDate="2016-03-10T06:54:43.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All nouns in Aymara inflect for Case with suffixes. There are two (quase-) exceptions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nominative case is &quot;unmarked&quot; (or 0-marked, depending on the analysis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accusative case is marked by the &lt;em&gt;deletion&lt;/em&gt; of the preceding vowel, as an earlier comment indicated. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The null case particle must mean only one case relation (nominative,&#xA;  accusative, dative, genitive, etc.), and must participate in a case&#xA;  paradigm, where it must contrast with other overt/non-null case&#xA;  particles that signal different case relations. The presence or&#xA;  absence of the null case particle changes the case relation of the NP,&#xA;  and not just for differential subject/object marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above criteria is met for both the nominative and accusative suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12684" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T06:54:43.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-10T10:46:03.920" Score="7" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading a bit about the decipherment of ancient scripts gave me the impression that those scripts which remain mostly undeciphered as of today have such a small and restricted corpus (I'm thinking of Linear A and the Indus script) that decipherment seams pretty hopeless unless some kind of archeological miracle occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'm wondering whether there are languages where decipherment is generally believed to be feasible and where there are ongoing efforts on the decipherment which are considered prospective by a large part of the experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T11:22:42.690" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T11:22:42.690" Title="Current prospective efforts in the decipherment of ancient scripts" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;&lt;indus-script&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-10T19:04:55.250" Score="0" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have run my model on sample data. Now I need user text messages to perform analysis on actual data. Can anybody help me with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12691" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T19:42:50.377" Title="I am working on a sentiment analysis project. I am looking for user text messages on which I would be doing my analysis" Tags="&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17544" CreationDate="2016-03-10T23:01:11.883" Score="3" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know of any simple (form filling) dialogue state tracking systems with a graphical model based dialogue state representation?&#xA;I'm looking for one to get familiar with the overall model and especially data driven learning/inference procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4979" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T03:04:29.163" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T23:39:32.163" Title="Open source probabilistic dialogue state tracker" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14952" CreationDate="2016-03-11T06:07:45.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend looking at systemic functional linguistics. SFL can offer a few different perspectives. At the syntax level, which SFL calls lexicogrammar, it would be useful to look at the use of the nominal group structure. At another level, which SFL calls discourse semantics, it would be useful to look at the system of reference e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9BqCtpYdeiwC&amp;amp;pg=PA34&amp;amp;lpg=PA34&amp;amp;dq=Systemic+Functional+Linguistics+tracking+definite+articles&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2tfAH-_agz&amp;amp;sig=eIwNIcTpHcOqVgLegUT8bA1KvuI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj3263w-rfLAhVXwWMKHRE6B9QQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Systemic%20Functional%20Linguistics%20tracking%20definite%20articles&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9BqCtpYdeiwC&amp;amp;pg=PA34&amp;amp;lpg=PA34&amp;amp;dq=Systemic+Functional+Linguistics+tracking+definite+articles&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2tfAH-_agz&amp;amp;sig=eIwNIcTpHcOqVgLegUT8bA1KvuI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj3263w-rfLAhVXwWMKHRE6B9QQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Systemic%20Functional%20Linguistics%20tracking%20definite%20articles&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12696" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T06:07:45.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-11T10:12:13.787" Score="2" ViewCount="1360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Complex words contain whether a bound and a free morpheme (eg unhappy) or two bound morphemes (eg intervene).&#xA;In the first case (eg unhappy) the complex word is polymorphemic because it includes a free,lexical morpheme (eg &quot;happy&quot;).&#xA;But when the complex word consists of bound morphemes, is it polymorhemic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-11T15:38:31.660" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T21:28:35.193" Title="Are all complex words polymorphemic?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17036" CreationDate="2016-03-11T14:20:07.063" Score="1" ViewCount="1581" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5J51h.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5J51h.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Hello,I used X-bar theory to analyze this sentence ( The big brown dog with fleas watched the birds beside the hunter) &#xA;The subject of the sentence is NP of pre-modifier,head and post-modifier. I think the modifiers before the head should be branched from a single node, thus the analysis for NP will be ternary. Is it possible with X- bar theory to analyze tree diagram into ternary branching?.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12681" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T18:44:34.073" Title="Does this sentence analyzed correctly through Tree Diagram?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-03-27T01:19:36.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-11T22:11:48.113" Score="1" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post here.&#xA;My name is Bruno and I'm a native (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker.&#xA;Besides Portuguese, I only have a rough knowledge of American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spite of that, I am trying to learn something of another languages,&#xA;but one of the most difficult things for me is how to pronounce&#xA;sounds that don't exist in Portuguese. In my opinion , this is even&#xA;more difficult than learning to read/write and recognize characters&#xA;other than the familiar 'a'-to-'z' letters (e.g. Russian, Greek or&#xA;even Georgian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use Finnish as an example, because it is a language that&#xA;sounds and looks (with all those double vowels) alien to me,&#xA;and that have an interesting phonology as well: a rather small&#xA;number of vowels and consonants but many of them nonexistent&#xA;in my mother language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, excuse me if I use 'phonology' and other linguistic jargon&#xA;wrongly - I'm no linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to Finnish, I learned that it has both a near open front&#xA;unrounded vowel [æ] and a (near)open back [ɑ] vowel.&#xA;Portuguese has an [a] that is open front (or central).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is how to learn to spell those vowels.&#xA;I try the following (e.g. for [æ]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1  I begin speaking eeeee... ([ɛ],open mid) gradually changing,&#xA;without interruption, to aaaaa... ([a],open front) and at the same&#xA;time trying to identify and further repeat the sound in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2  To pronounce ea [ɛa] in a fast way trying to merge the e and&#xA;the a in one sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3  Trying to imitate foreign words that contains this sound&#xA;after hearing a native speaker spelling it.&#xA;This is the obvious way but is not always easy because for&#xA;certain languages it is difficult to find even recorded&#xA;materials let alone a native speaker (and I am an introvert).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4  Reading about how these sounds are pronounced, trying&#xA;to comprehend how the sounds in the IPA chart are produced,&#xA;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I can pronounce what I think is the correct sound,&#xA;but how to do it fast, in the same effortless, relaxed way&#xA;a native speaker do? After enough time and practice just &#xA;like anything one want to master, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the question is: do you have another tips and&#xA;suggestions to share? comments anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12700" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T22:11:48.113" Title="Tips for pronouncing sounds that does not exist in the student's mother thongue" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-14T09:10:12.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-12T18:34:36.073" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BuchowskiParadox.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wolfram Math World&lt;/a&gt;, Buchowski's paradox concerns the use of comparative adjectives in apparently paradoxical statements such as &quot;My younger brother is older than me&quot; (possible if the speaker has two older brothers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Buchowski? Has the paradox been discussed in any depth in a publication, or was it just an offhand observation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6809" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T18:34:36.073" Title="Origin of Buchowski's paradox" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T01:35:34.600" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about pairs of contrasting words such as these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; (to) vs &lt;strong&gt;come&lt;/strong&gt; (from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;give&lt;/strong&gt; (to) vs &lt;strong&gt;receive&lt;/strong&gt; (from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lend&lt;/strong&gt; (to) vs &lt;strong&gt;borrow&lt;/strong&gt; (from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;take&lt;/strong&gt; (to) vs &lt;strong&gt;bring&lt;/strong&gt; (from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term in linguistics for such pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there terms for the type on the left vs the type on the right of each pair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm not sure if other pairs would fall into the same category or not. Such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;teach&lt;/strong&gt; (to) vs &lt;strong&gt;learn&lt;/strong&gt; (from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T03:23:03.397" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:42:20.793" Title="Are there terms for this class of word pair, or terms for the contrasting members of the pairs?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T06:59:20.323" Score="1" ViewCount="859" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that in particular germanic languages have similar base words to english of which many times the only difference is that of the vowels. This would make sense seing as to how they are descended from the same language, but really what I'm wanting to know is whether or not there is a discernable pattern between english and one of these germanic languages. I have looked mainly at icelandic words and have found there to be a bit of a pattern or at least some basic rules which it seems to follow. For example, in from an icelandic to english compairison, A, O, E, and U will sometimes &quot;turn into&quot; an A in english, but only an E, or I will continue to be or turn into an I in english. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only checked some of the most common icelandic words, and some of the compairisons are a bit of a stretch as to how well they can be, in essence, transliterated. For example, the icelandic word, &quot;með,&quot; meaning with, was a word I used to count as an exapmle of the icelandic E turning into an I. Additionally, since icelandic doesnt descend from english and vice versa, I don't know how well they can be compared since they have evolved differently and share less in common than english would with german or even another germanic language such as dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What really I am asking is whether there is a pattern between certain words based off of their phonology or morphology that once can better use with germanic languages to be able to &quot;predict&quot; better what a word might have derived from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T10:27:54.650" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:27:54.650" Title="Sound correspondences in Germanic languages" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17025" CreationDate="2016-03-13T12:07:13.037" Score="13" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages which have gender-like classifications for nouns, like French and Russian, how often do nouns change gender over time? Have any studies been done to get statistics on how many words have changed gender in various languages over the past, say, 1000 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12711" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T13:15:41.447" Title="How stable are grammatical genders?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17018" CreationDate="2016-03-13T13:23:05.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Germanic languages descend from a single Proto-Germanic parent language, and sound change (neogrammarian, exceptionless) is responsible for a giant part of the language change, there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be regular and systematic sound correspondences between Germanic languages, albeit they can be often obscured by analogical changes and borrowings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as it was noticed in the comment, for these correspondeces to work, one have to compare words that are truly cognates, i.e. they developed from a single word. Examples of such cognates would be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;hound&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;hund&lt;/em&gt;, Swedish &lt;em&gt;hund&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;hundur&lt;/em&gt;, Dutch &lt;em&gt;hond&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel correspondence set derived from this cognate set (written in each language's own ortography) might not be proper to all the &lt;em&gt;ou, o&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; 's in these languages. As I stated before, one still has to consider such things as analogy, borrowings and conditioned sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To notice true and regular correspondences, whole language's systems have to be carefully examined and compared. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be often slightly easier to notice when it comes to consonants. &#xA;In early Medieval times a consonant chain sound change occured in the Old High German dialects, that ,among others, involved spirantization of stops. What it left is a nice image of some consonant correspondences that can be seen, especially between Modern High German and English. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ma&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;en : ma&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;schla&lt;strong&gt;fen&lt;/strong&gt; : slee&lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;da&lt;strong&gt;ss&lt;/strong&gt; : tha&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T09:02:36.247" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T09:02:36.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-13T18:49:55.077" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know how to pronounce Ypres in both French and English, but what about the pronounciations in Flemish, Belgian, Dutch and German? How is it pronounced all six ways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastActivityDate="2016-03-13T18:49:55.077" Title="Prounciation of Ypres... in all six languages?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T06:52:36.760" Score="7" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested in asking people about their understanding of the term register and what this signifies for them. This would be a discussion about a specialised term and I'm sure there are multiple interpretations out there, depending on your education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that there are multiple definitions of register. Simplified definitions focus on &quot;informal&quot; and &quot;formal&quot; registers, however, these fail to formally identify what linguistic features realise the register variables. As an ESL teacher, I find many textbooks over-simplify this issue, resulting in students learning lists of &quot;informal&quot; and &quot;formal&quot; words e.g. get = receive, buy = purchase, and = furthermore etc. Although there may be some contexts where this is possible, this is simply not the case. Because of this, I'm trying to work out a better way to explain this and engage with people through shared understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a student of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the term &quot;register&quot; is further technicalised to include notions of what's going on (the field of discourse), who's involved (the tenor) and how these are textually linked together (the mode). However, even within SFL, there is still much discussion about what this actually means and there are different camps with different definitions. One camp believes there are registers for domains of use e.g instructional, regulatory, representational, etc. Another camp believes that register relates to the context of situation e.g. medical, legal, educational etc. The reason I bring this is up is that just last night I was discussing differences between Halliday and Martin's understanding of register (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halliday sees register as a stage on the cline of instantiation, i.e. between the potential system and a given instance of text or language, similar to Saussure's notions of langue and parole. This means that the entire of the potential grammatical choices in a system will not occur in any particular instances of language in a given context. As such, the potential meaning (semantics) in any text will be mediated through register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been schooled in Martin's view of register and understand it to be a complex interplay between the field, tenor and mode, each of which can be related to semantic systems, which in turn can be related to lexico-grammatical systems. E.g. Field can be related to whether the meanings are more common or specialised/technicalised (e.g. dog - canine), tenor can be related to whether the relationship between interactants is more close or distant (e.g friends and strangers) and whether the power relations are more equal or unequal (e.g. student - teacher), and mode can be related to whether the message is more spoken or written (remembering that written language can be spoken!). From this I understand &quot;formal&quot; to be a combination of more specialised/technical vocabulary (field), greater distance and power differential between interactants (tenor), and tends to be more written language (mode). &quot;Informal&quot; can be seen as a combination of more common/everyday vocabulary, closer distance and more equal power relations, and tends be more spoken. As such, jargon may be classified as a form of specialised language, which may in turn suggest a particular register, but the relations between the language and the context must be made explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this is a lot of linguistic theory but strongly believe this is relevant to the discussions about meaning and language that take place here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12697" LastEditorUserId="12697" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T11:01:26.840" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T22:37:11.877" Title="What are the differences between theoretical perspectives of the uses of the term &quot;register&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17017" CreationDate="2016-03-14T10:42:20.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These pairs are &lt;strong&gt;antonyms&lt;/strong&gt; that happen to be verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to infer too much from 4.5 examples, but they are all possibly &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposite_(semantics)#Relational_antonyms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relational antonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_(semantics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;converses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  (However &lt;em&gt;go/come&lt;/em&gt; does not necessarily involve an animate relation, but it can.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This set happens to include only verbs, and specifically only verbs that can take an indirect object or prepositional object.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be no good label for either column, because it is not necessarily clear which word in an antonym pair is somehow positive or primary.  (For example, why are &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bring&lt;/em&gt; in opposing columns?  Can you define a rule that would work on a larger set or cross-lingual set of relational antonyms?)  So the pairs are orderless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:42:20.793" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2016-03-14T10:46:32.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;when studying linguistics I enjoyed looking at syntax, semantics and pragmatics. However, the more I learnt, the more difficult it was for me to see these as separate areas of study. After all, they are all connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me that you might be interested in engaging with a functional perspective. In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is a social semiotic, i.e. it is used to create meaning, and it has developed an elaborate and robust explanation of text in context. At the level of language, it can be stratified into three levels: phonology, lexicogrammar (so called because lexis and grammar are two ends of the spectrum) and discourse semantics. Each of the strata is said to &quot;realise&quot; and &quot;be realised&quot; strata both above and below. This means that language 'realises' meaning (semantics), and that meaning can only be understood as it is realised by context (roughly pragmatics). This is not something that can be rather complex to explain and I encourage people to look at some references - See &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=Q_kQBs1nfs4C&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA3&amp;amp;dq=JR+Martin+SFL&amp;amp;ots=csPShDhWtH&amp;amp;sig=02L-wYJ8Z-kFr4QD9bzRQUtvBzs#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=JR%20Martin%20SFL&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=Q_kQBs1nfs4C&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA3&amp;amp;dq=JR+Martin+SFL&amp;amp;ots=csPShDhWtH&amp;amp;sig=02L-wYJ8Z-kFr4QD9bzRQUtvBzs#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=JR%20Martin%20SFL&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt; Or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your question, perhaps semantics can be seen as a bottom-up perspective, from language to meaning, while pragmatics can be seen as a top-down perspective, i.e. from context to meaning. They cannot be separated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12697" LastActivityDate="2016-03-14T10:46:32.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17019" CreationDate="2016-03-14T15:43:49.407" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with gender - less than half* - the gender of specific words often varies not just by time but by dialect.  Likewise it varies across languages in a language family, for example the Romance languages.  (And specifically for cognates, not just for loanwords and neologisms.)  Using the modern Romance languages and Latin as a well-documented example, you can start to build a model for that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end: in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15527/what-resources-explain-the-oppositions-in-grammatical-gender-between-french-and&quot;&gt;another question here on Linguistics SE&lt;/a&gt;, user @LePressentiment referenced &lt;a href=&quot;http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ352571&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Genders of French and Spanish Noun Cognates: Some Statistics and a List&lt;/a&gt; by Teschner, Richard V., Canadian Modern Language Review, v43 n2 p256-66 Jan 1987.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Change For One Noun&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a major language you can track competing variants over a relatively short time:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IazzB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IazzB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Note that they often have different senses - arguably distinct words.  (In Romance, feminine often implies an abstract or poetic meaning.)  This method has too many problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Change Across Languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can examine a word like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dolor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dolor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was masculine in Latin, and in Middle French, but is now feminine in French and Ladino, and both masculine and feminine in Occitan and Catalan, but still masculine in other major Romance languages.  We also know the approximate dates of when these languages split from each other and from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise you can examine Proto-Indo-European &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/d%E1%B9%93m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dṓm&lt;/a&gt;, which was feminine originally and in Latin, but masculine in Slavic, vulgar Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and neuter in Germanic and none in Armenian, because Armenian and Persian lost the gender feature.  See below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Change of the Noun Class Definitions Themselves&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One major assumption is that the concepts of gender will still exist in a language in 1000 years.  Gender itself is not stable over 1000 years: the Romance languages, English, Dutch and Scandinavian languages all went through some sort of genus shift over the past 1000 years, in some languages still unclear or ongoing:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Loss_of_neuter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Loss_of_neuter&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar#Overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar#Overview&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_grammar#Gender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_grammar#Gender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And though we may tend to think of gender, ie two or three noun classes, some (non-Indo-European) languages have more than a dozen classes.  In those languages the classes tend to be more regular.  In any case there is not always a clear line between a class like gender and a declension pattern, but here is one global count:*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39uIh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/39uIh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Note that it is often an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;areal feature&lt;/a&gt;, ie potentially unstable upon contact with unrelated languages:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmczG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmczG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would not expect a language where the class is obvious given the word to change like one like German where the gender of many words is opaque and necessarily memorised, or Hebrew which was suddenly revived after a thousand years, or English which has very limited grammatical gender beyond pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Realistic Model&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, we cannot possibly speak of a universal constant rate of change of the gender feature, because there is no universal constant rate of language change in general.  Language change depends a great deal on societal upheaval, writing, foreign influence, politics, geography and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So perhaps you could arrive at a formula that - given many parameters - yields an estimated probability of gender stability for different scenarios (eg if literacy is maintained, if something like the internet comes along, if China unseats the US as the global superpower, if the Martians invade...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&#xA;Global counts of language features are problematic because there is no perfect definition of a language (vs dialect) or how to weight them.  Should Luxembourgish count the same as Urdu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T13:15:41.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T13:15:41.447" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14687" CreationDate="2016-03-14T17:55:39.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turns out there's at least one other suggested, but controversial, case of voicing by *h3, involving the &quot;Hoffmann suffix&quot; *-Hon- or *-h3on-. Piotr Gąsiorowski discusses it &lt;a href=&quot;http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/06/wild-waters.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The same suffix may be responsible for the voicing alternation in Latin pairs like &lt;em&gt;vertex, vertic-&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;vertigo&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know how far these ideas are currently accepted, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T00:19:20.510" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T00:19:20.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17037" CreationDate="2016-03-15T02:09:31.740" Score="-3" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hereafter abbreviate Adverbial Clauses to AC. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=a4EEh8_66FIC&amp;amp;lpg=PA63&amp;amp;ots=AMoipRY9Vj&amp;amp;dq=%22Complement%20clauses%22%20vs%20subordinate%20clause&amp;amp;pg=PA65#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Complement%20clauses%22%20vs%20subordinate%20clause&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Section 6.3.3&lt;/a&gt; (p 66, &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to English Syntax&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;By Jim Miller) states that AC may not always be adverbs. So was AC misnamed; if yes, why?   Or is it still a correct term in Linguistics in 2016? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt originates from p 93, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (4 ed, 2014) by Prof. Maggie Tallerman PhD in Linguistics &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/maggie.tallerman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(U. Hull)&lt;/a&gt;, who described AC as of 'traditional grammar'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T13:49:06.473" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T13:49:06.473" Title="Why are Adjuncts called 'Adverbial Clauses'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-16T16:48:36.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17030" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-15T14:12:40.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T14:12:40.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T14:12:40.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17031" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-15T14:12:40.913" Score="0" Body="Systemic-functional linguistics is a school of linguistics founded by M.A.K. Halliday." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T20:53:00.493" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T20:53:00.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T14:16:17.973" Score="0" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have learned to understand that a nominalisation is called a &lt;em&gt;grammatical metaphor&lt;/em&gt; in systemic functional linguistics. What is the motivation behind this terminology? Are there other kinds of grammatical metaphors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T08:13:50.643" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T08:13:50.643" Title="Why is a nominalisation called &quot;grammatical metaphor&quot; in SFL" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17032" CreationDate="2016-03-15T18:09:38.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Grammatical metaphor&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt; way of explaining a certain kind of linguistic phenomena while &quot;nominalisation&quot; is an &lt;em&gt;non-functional&lt;/em&gt; way of explaining a subset of them. I'll try to make it simple with an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a systemic functional perspective, we learn language by noticing how people &lt;strong&gt;call&lt;/strong&gt; phenomena that we can &lt;strong&gt;perceive&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, if we recall the time we went to school, we can remember that a student usually learns that &quot;a bean tree grows slowly&quot; by watching a bean become a tree. When the school teacher says &quot;your bean tree is growing&quot;, students attach that indicative clause to a series of perceptions of a bean tree growing and what they saw becomes the meaning of that indicative clause. The direction of token-value attachment in &lt;strong&gt;calling&lt;/strong&gt; is called &quot;encoding&quot;. Afterwards, when students say &quot;my bean tree grew&quot;, they are &lt;strong&gt;telling&lt;/strong&gt; others what they saw. The direction of token-value attachment in &lt;strong&gt;telling&lt;/strong&gt; is called &quot;decoding&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During that experiment with bean trees, students may take daily notes of the sizes of their bean trees. If they do this, after the experiment, they can compare their notes on &quot;the growths&quot; of their bean trees. While doing this comparison, they may learn to say clauses such as &quot;the growth of my bean tree was slower than typical&quot;. In this case, students are not representing their direct perception of a tree growing. Instead, they are attributing a quality to a thing they can hold, which is the record of their plant's growth. In this sense, the representation &quot;the growth of my bean tree was slower than typical&quot; is &quot;less congruent&quot; to the student's perception of a plant growing than &quot;my plant grew very slowly&quot; if we consider that, for such a statement to occur, students need more note-keeping and a more sophisticated measuring method than mere naked eye observation of a single plant growing. Such a clause can be said to be &quot;metaphorical&quot; in the sense that it is better understood as a verbal representation of other representations (in this case, the notes) of bean trees growing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In parallel to that, another way to explain why the same &quot;concepts&quot; can be meant by both &quot;verbs&quot; as in &quot;my bean tree &lt;strong&gt;grew&lt;/strong&gt; slowly&quot; and &quot;nouns&quot; as in &quot;the &lt;strong&gt;growth&lt;/strong&gt; of the bean tree is slow&quot; is that there is a derivational process whereby verbs get transformed into nouns by the addition of suffixes such as &quot;th&quot;. In this case, the verb stem &quot;grow&quot; is transformed into the noun stem &quot;growth&quot; by the addition of the suffix &quot;th&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notice:&lt;/strong&gt; When we explain such phenomena in terms of &quot;grammatical metaphor&quot;, we assume that there is a directionality of derivation from more congruent representations to more metaphorical ones. This means that not only nominalisations are covered, but also other phenomena that are not typically understood as being derivations. For instance, if we assume that &quot;my tree grew &lt;strong&gt;slowly&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is more congruent than &quot;the growth of my tree was &lt;strong&gt;slow&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, we must conclude that the adverbial stem &quot;slowly&quot; is transformed into the adjective stem &quot;slow&quot; by the removal of the suffix &quot;ly&quot; and not the other way round. In that case, if we want to explain this directed transformation in terms of derivations, we would need to describe a &quot;nominalisation&quot; of a verb and a &quot;adjectivisation&quot; of an adverb, which is absolutely atypical in non-functional approaches to linguistic phenomena. In non-functional approaches, researchers tend to describe derivations as transformations from a short stem to a larger one, always by adding suffixes and never by dropping them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12727" LastEditorUserId="12727" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T01:18:44.673" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T01:18:44.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17041" CreationDate="2016-03-07T07:22:03.937" Score="1" ViewCount="12692" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested in asking people about their understanding of the term &lt;strong&gt;register&lt;/strong&gt; and what this signifies for them. This would be a discussion about a specialised term and I'm sure there are multiple interpretations out there, depending on your education. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that there are multiple definitions of register. Simplified definitions focus on &quot;informal&quot; and &quot;formal&quot; registers, however, these fail to formally identify what linguistic features realise the register variables. As an ESL teacher, I find many textbooks over-simplify this issue, resulting in students learning lists of &quot;informal&quot; and &quot;formal&quot; words e.g. get = receive, buy = purchase, and = furthermore etc. Although there may be some contexts where this is possible, this is simply not the case. Because of this, I'm trying to work out a better way to explain this and engage with people through shared understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a student of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the term &quot;register&quot; is further technicalised to include notions of what's going on (the field of discourse), who's involved (the tenor) and how these are textually linked together (the mode). However, even within SFL, there is still much discussion about what this actually means and there are different camps with different definitions. One camp believes there are registers for domains of use e.g instructional, regulatory, representational, etc. Another camp believes that register relates to the context of situation e.g. medical, legal, educational etc. The reason I bring this is up is that just last night I was discussing differences between Halliday and Martin's understanding of register (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2196-419X-1-3&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halliday sees register as a stage on the cline of instantiation, i.e. between the potential system and a given instance of text or language, similar to Saussure's notions of langue and parole. This means that the entire of the potential grammatical choices in a system will not occur in any particular instances of language in a given context. As such, the potential meaning (semantics) in any text will be mediated through register. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been schooled in Martin's view of register and understand it to be a complex interplay between the field, tenor and mode, each of which can be related to semantic systems, which in turn can be related to lexico-grammatical systems. E.g. Field can be related to whether the meanings are more common or specialised/technicalised (e.g. dog - canine), tenor can be related to whether the relationship between interactants is more close or distant (e.g friends and strangers) and whether the power relations are more equal or unequal (e.g. student - teacher), and mode can be related to whether the message is more spoken or written (remembering that written language can be spoken!). From this I understand &quot;formal&quot; to be a combination of more specialised/technical vocabulary (field), greater distance and power differential between interactants (tenor), and tends to be more written language (mode). &quot;Informal&quot; can be seen as a combination of more common/everyday vocabulary, closer distance and more equal power relations, and tends be more spoken. As such, jargon may be classified as a form of specialised language, which may in turn suggest a particular register, but the relations between the language and the context must be made explicit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this is a lot of linguistic theory but strongly believe this is relevant to the discussions about meaning and language that take place here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome any discussion &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12697" OwnerDisplayName="Daniel O'Sullivan" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T07:31:44.667" Title="What do you understand by the term 'register'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ClosedDate="2016-03-18T18:38:26.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17019" CreationDate="2016-03-15T20:43:28.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian the gender is defined by the form of the word. A word ending with -a or -я is usually feminine, a word ending with -e or -o is usually neuter. There are also words that end in -ь which can be either feminine or masculine, but I do not know a single word that changed a gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T20:43:28.183" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17013" CreationDate="2016-03-16T00:04:05.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so let's start with &lt;code&gt;DP hypothesis&lt;/code&gt;. DP hypothesis simply suggests that &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; is a dependency of a &lt;code&gt;determiner&lt;/code&gt; in lexicon, which means [the dog] is DP, not an NP. You can test this on such structures having &lt;code&gt;Adj&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; at the same time. If you keep assuming the &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; is complement of &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; (and an &lt;code&gt;AdjP&lt;/code&gt; will always be adjunct of &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt;), the structure below would be grammatically valid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*yellow the car&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pkJ9E.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pkJ9E.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is not. So let's try this on DP hypothesis, saying that &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; is complement of &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; terminal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;the yellow car&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hibhO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hibhO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it seems okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to your tree, you must correct the &lt;code&gt;I-spec&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;P-comp&lt;/code&gt; according to this hypothesis and you are good to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dlAIO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dlAIO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm assuming you are taking a syntax class, which means this is the visible part of iceberg. You have still lack of knowledge of &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;, the roles on &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; (I mean the usual movement from v-spec to I-spec, but it depends on situation) etc. I mean I gave a tree, but it is not still valid for current generative grammar, I made it because it is based on your givings above, it is valid to your current state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get an information on DP hypothesis &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/detv_sli.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for now. However, I recommend Radford's syntax books as a reference, those are great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Valid Tree of Late Government and Binding Theory (Phases Not Included)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UAvQL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UAvQL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="3687" LastEditDate="2016-03-18T18:44:34.073" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T18:44:34.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17027" CreationDate="2016-03-16T00:12:47.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a beginner, but I recently read about this is in &lt;em&gt;Languages Files&lt;/em&gt; (2011), an introductory textbox. They discuss at least four types of adjuncts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;VP -&amp;gt; VP Adv&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; VP PP    &#xA;N -&amp;gt; Adj N&#xA;N -&amp;gt; N PP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that what makes these expressions adjuncts is that one of the syntactic category names occur both left and right of the arrow. Or put another way, the syntactic categories that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; appear on both sides are optional &amp;ndash; they don't change the syntactic distribution of the expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above entries, we see that both adverbs and prepositional phrases may be adjuncts to verb phrases. And both adjectives and prepositional phrases may be adjuncts to nouns. And this is only what applies in English, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9607" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T00:12:47.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17013" CreationDate="2016-03-16T02:22:20.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of whether some version of X-bar theory permits a ternary branching structure for the subject in your example is beside the point for the example, because the example doesn't have a ternary structure.  X-bar theory doesn't have anything to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can test for where the N' constituents are by constructing examples with parts of the subject taken as antecedents for the pro-form &quot;one&quot;, since only an N' can be such an antecedent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The big brown dog with fleas watched the birds beside the hunter, and the small blue one with worms ran away in terror. [&quot;dog&quot; is N']&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   The big brown dog with fleas watched the birds beside the hunter, and the small blue one ran away in terror.  [&quot;dog with fleas&quot; is N']&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   The big brown dog with fleas watched the birds beside the hunter, and the small one ran away in terror. [&quot;brown dog with fleas&quot; is N']&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   The big brown dog with fleas watched the birds beside the hunter, and the same one ran away in terror. [&quot;big brown dog with fleas&quot; is N']  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;brown dog&quot; and &quot;big brown dog&quot; could also be N'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T02:29:22.467" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T02:29:22.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T03:30:33.863" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard terms like &lt;em&gt;grammatical category&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;grammatical feature&lt;/em&gt; being used for inflectional properties such as number, person, tense, mood, and so on. Gender is commonly included in this list too, but I see a distinct difference with it. Gender describes the lexeme, while the others describe inflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an established term for what I'm calling lexeme-describing grammatical features? Is &lt;em&gt;noun class&lt;/em&gt; the term I'm looking for? Does this term really cover all bases, as it refers specifically to nouns? If you take all languages into account, don't you find examples of lexeme-describing grammatical features that describe other words than nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9607" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T08:06:02.117" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T11:07:03.007" Title="Is there a term for &quot;lexeme-describing grammatical feature&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11757" CreationDate="2016-03-16T04:19:17.647" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Left connotes the feminine, the Right masculine. In our ancient pagan religions, especially ones the worshipped the Earth Goddess or Gaia, women were led, or were part of, and joined the men in the priest(ess)hood. The ancient greeks also believed that semen from the left testes would make a female, the right, a male. Mutatis mutandis an embryo on the left side of the womb and the right side as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once Emperor Constantine's mixing of his sun worship with christianity came along, even before the Council of Nicea, women had been excluded from officiating as religious celebrants in religion, and in christianity, which became the major religion of Europe. The misery of christianity ensued, women were blamed for Original Sin, the source of evil, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence anything that is left, or feminine, is seen as weak. To be &quot;gauche&quot; in EN is to be tactless and lacking in manner, whereas to be right, is to so much more than only that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12731" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T04:19:17.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17034" CreationDate="2016-03-16T07:31:44.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A register is the same as a style or (more specifically) a lect.  This term &quot;lect&quot; had some currency for a time, and refers to a variety of speech with internal coherence, but which is ordinarily only one of many styles of speech controlled by a language speaker.  The idea is that a dialect is a collection of lects, a &quot;dialect continuum&quot;, or &quot;creole continuum&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model stems from the work of Stan Tsuzaki at the University of Hawaii, who studied the local English of Hawaii, which he thought comprised a variety of styles, from those closer to the creole that developed from Hawaiian Plantation Pidgin and those closer to the standard English of the mainland US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory was taken up and developed by Derek Bickerton, William Labov, and my advisee Richard Day, among a number of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T07:31:44.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17048" CreationDate="2016-03-16T07:32:20.753" Score="2" ViewCount="4723" Body="&lt;p&gt;On what aspects Tonal languages differ from Intonation languages when analyzing them acoustically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On intonation and tone&lt;/strong&gt;: Jones (1960) - &amp;quot;the variations which take place in the pitch of the voice in connected speech, i.e. the variations in the pitch of the musical note produced by vibration of the vocal cords.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike lexical tone (as in tone languages), changing intonation does not change the lexical identity/meaning of individual words, though it may alter the meaning of the sentence as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pitch accent languages (e.g. Japanese, Swedish) used to be regarded as an intermediate case: superficially like lexical tone languages, but phonologically pitch functions like stress in these languages. In most stress-accent languages, pitch is an important correlate of stress, so the dividing lines between tone, stress and pitch-accent are fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/intonation.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/intonation.htm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal note for further info: I guess that in tonal languages you don't see any gradual pitch change when analyzing different sentence types, is that true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T17:09:19.877" Title="How are Tone and Intonation languages different acoustically?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T08:42:15.123" Score="1" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a test and train corpus for my project containing anaphora. It should atleast have 100 sentences. please help asap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12735" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T12:04:20.897" Title="Corpus for anaphora resolution" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-03-20T20:30:11.200" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T09:37:17.487" Score="3" ViewCount="7918" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found two sites that claim to do this, neither of them work. I need a translator, not a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-workers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bablefishfx.com/english-to-coptic-translator/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bablefish Online Translator &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a lot of spam...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure whether this was on-topic, but I couldn't see a stack that was a better fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: despite ancient tag, I'm aware Coptic is a living language.  I used the tag because I'm teaching about ancient Egypt in primary school, and I want to get them to talk a short piece in the ancient Egyptian language. I know this isn't the same as Coptic, but it is the ancestor of Coptic and Coptic is as close as I'm likely to get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9709" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T08:27:14.530" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T04:38:18.803" Title="Is there an English to Coptic translator online?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17063" CreationDate="2016-03-16T12:43:21.343" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have virtually zero knowledge on arabic. Different sites have the following sequence of letters of verse 2:201&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quran.com/2/201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quran.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yzHMm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yzHMm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quranx.com/2.201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quranx.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wCN1G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wCN1G.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tanzil.net/#2:201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tanzil.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EYSV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1EYSV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these highlighted words same or different ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12588" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T23:01:10.020" Title="Are these spellings the same?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-20T20:29:27.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17045" CreationDate="2016-03-16T12:47:30.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are all the same word. The first two use the old Qur'anic orthography, the third one follows the modern spelling conventions. The pronunciation is the same: /'aatinaa/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older way to write initial /ʼaa/ is with ʼalif preceded by the diacritic hamza (ءا). In modern Arabic orthography this combination of sounds is written with ʼalif topped by the diacritic madda (آ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T13:56:49.350" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T13:56:49.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T16:35:03.257" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to wrap my head around this but I couldn't find a clear answer, is there a difference between N-grams and N-gram models? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, N-grams are &lt;strong&gt;strictly&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; splitting a sentence by N-1 number of previous words with each word in the sentence and &lt;strong&gt;does not&lt;/strong&gt; have anything to do with probabilities. So I would have something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The boxer loves Mary. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unigram = &quot;The&quot;,&quot;boxer&quot;,&quot;loves&quot;,&quot;Mary&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bigrams = &quot;The boxer&quot;, &quot;boxer loves&quot;,&quot;loves Mary&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trigrams, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm confused with is that I see N-grams closely used with probabilities (aka N-gram models) and people use them interchangeably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know, thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10753" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T16:35:03.257" Title="Difference of N-grams and probabilities" Tags="&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17042" CreationDate="2016-03-16T16:46:44.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no dichotomy between tone languages and intonation languages. The available evidence indicates that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; languages have intonational systems. Some languages have lexical stress, some have lexical tone, and some appear to have no form of word &quot;prominence&quot; (Ethiopic Semitic, for example). Pitch-accent is a dubious category, which has largely been replaced with the concept of restricted-tone language (where only one syllable per word has a distinctive mark). You do find &quot;gradual tone changes&quot; at the sentence level in tone languages. The impression that you're getting probably arises from the practice of taking Mandarin Chinese to be typical of tone languages. Most of the time, the expression &quot;tone languages, like ___&quot; is usually completed with &quot;Chinese&quot; and not &quot;Luganda&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most relevant properties that realize systems of intonation and tone are F0, duration, amplitude, phonation, and formant values (listed in order from most-robust and common to least so). Formant values are generally not direct manifestations of a category contrast, but rather result from duration differences (target-undershoot in shorter vowels). The bottom-line form of formant differences is vowel change depending on the tone or stress property of a syllable, such as reduction of some unstressed vowels of English to schwa, or the vowel quality changes in the Min Chinese tone system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonatory differences usually are parasitic off of F0 differences, with higher F0 correlating with creaky voice and lower F0 correlating with breathy voice, and these are usually garden-variety allophonic concomitants of stress (H tone) vs. unstressed (L tone). However, they can be phonologized and made independent, and especially in Southeast Asian languages tone like Vietnamese, they become part of the defining essence of a particular tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amplitude is not an independently controllable property at the segment / syllable level, but differences can be observed which correlate with duration and F0. Amplitude is potentially exploitable as an aspect of intonation, where you can &quot;breathe harder&quot; thus talk louder when exclaming &quot;I told you to bring the &lt;strong&gt;metallurgical&lt;/strong&gt; kit&quot;, though there will be F0 differences as well. The F0 / amplitude correlation exists in tone and non-tone languages alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three properties are not particularly robust as correlates of lexical stress versus tone across languages. One gains more traction with duration and F0. F0 differences are probably the most common specific correlate of the stressed / unstressed difference and of course are the quintessence of tonal contrast, and duration differences also often are associated with the stressed / unstressed contrast – but not generally with tone. Looking at phonological processes,  this is common-enough that we have names for it: the Weight-to-Stress principle where stress is assigned to heavy syllables, and the Stress-to-Weight principle, where stressed syllables get lengthened. There is a weak tonal correlate of the former, where tone is sometimes attracted to heavy syllables, there does not seem to be an active Tone-to-Weight principle where syllables bearing a H tone, for example, get lengthened. (Confusion often arises over the fact that tone languages often impose a phonological limit on the number of tones allowed on short syllables, so that contours are only possible on bimoraic syllables, but that is a separate phenomenon). From the phonological POV, it is interesting that stress can induce lengthening, but tone apparently cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty much impossible to identify a language as tonal versus non-tonal just based on acoustic properties. Theoretically, you might be able to identify outliers based on a large-corpus acoustic study of certain languages. The variability of F0 over time in Cantonese is rather high, and you could use that to determine that Cantonese is probably a tone language, whereas the F0 variability of Tigre is low and you could thus suspect that it is not a tone language. The search for the Holy Grail of finding necessary or sufficient acoustic diagnostics of tone vs. stress has been called off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T16:46:44.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T22:20:39.033" Score="6" ViewCount="829" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do languages have gendered nouns? What are the problems that are solved by having gendered nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12665" LastEditorUserId="12665" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T16:19:17.543" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T05:56:14.750" Title="Why do languages have gendered nouns?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17049" CreationDate="2016-03-16T23:10:14.380" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Properties of individual languages don't necessarily solve problems. Spanish children learn gender of nouns because it would be wrong to say &quot;el aguo&quot;, and they learn what their parents say, who in turn learned what &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; parents said, an so on back to Latin and before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Gender&quot; is just one version of noun class systems. It's not clear whether you mean &quot;gender&quot; in the narrow sense (masculine, feminine, neuter; or animate, inanimate), or in the broader sense that also includes for example Athabaskan shape, Niger-Congo classes which cover various semantic properties including. Gender systems seem to have developed historically (over millenia) from systems where the gender distinctions signaled some useful fact such as &quot;is male&quot;, &quot;is small&quot;, &quot;is alive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T23:10:14.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17052" CreationDate="2016-03-17T04:26:14.067" Score="2" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arpabet page on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and note some entries like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Arpabet | IPA | Word Examples&#xA;  ER    |  ɝ  | her (HH ER0); bird (B ER1 D); hurt (HH ER1 T), nurse (N ER1 S)&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm trying to convert this Arpabet &quot;ER&quot; into X-SAMPA.  But, I don't see ɝ anywhere in the X-SAMPA specification.  Instead, my reading leads me to see that character ɝ (and some others, like ɚ) are &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;R-colored vowels&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; means they can be decomposed into two separate characters instead of written in one digraph character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, in short, is: are these equivalent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;ɝ =&gt; ɜr&#xA;ɚ =&gt; ər&#xA;ɑ˞ =&gt; ɑr&#xA;ɔ˞ =&gt; ɔr&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12740" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T08:49:52.410" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T08:49:52.410" Title="How to Transcribe R-colored Vowels (ɝ, ɚ, ɑ˞,ɔ˞) in X-SAMPA?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;sampa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17051" CreationDate="2016-03-17T05:22:34.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That isn't the claim behind the rhotic-hook diacritic. It means that the vowel has the characteristics of the main vowel symbol, but with some kind of r-like raising of the tongue during its production. The sequence [ɑr] means &quot;low back vowel followed by alveolar trill&quot;. Apart from the difference in timing (simultaneous vs. sequence) there is a substantial difference in the nature of the r-ishness. If you use the sequences [ɑɹ] etc, they would be more similar (r-coloring is superimposition of &quot;ɹ&quot; quality, not &quot;r&quot;). What might confuse matters is that in English, so-called r-colored vowels are derivable from a sequence of vowel plus consonant &lt;em&gt;ɹ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T05:22:34.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17022" CreationDate="2016-03-17T05:31:27.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered this in the other place this question was put, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17034/what-do-you-understand-by-the-term-register&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, by referring to the work on &quot;variationist&quot; models, which described a dialect as a collection of speech styles called &quot;lects&quot;.  I have another answer, which I might as well put here, for variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In generative phonology, variation in pronunciation has usually been described by making certain phonological rules optional, meaning that as the system of phonological rules apply in order, one by one, to produce a pronunciation from an underlying form, a rule designated as optional needn't apply.  Then for each applicable phonological rule which is optional, there are potentially two surface pronunciations produced, one in whose derivation the rule applies and one in whose derivation it does not apply (even though applicable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory of variation in pronunciation was attacked as inadequate by Labov and C.-J. Bailey (sorry I have no references at hand), but I'm not concerned with those criticisms here.  Instead, I have a suggestion to make about using the general model of a dialect as a set of lects to repair a conceptual defect in the account of variation given in generative phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with optional rules in generative phonology is that optionality is bound up with the assumption of linear ordering of phonological rules, proposed by Morris Halle, attacked by many (e.g., Stephen Anderson), and defended by no one other than Halle himself.  I will assume here that the linear order of phonological rules is an incorrect assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, without the assumption of linear order of phonological rules, here is the problem with rule optionality.  With linear order, one can imagine constructing a phonological derivation in a kind of pseudo-time, where each optional rule has a time to apply, and then one has a choice whether to apply it or not.  But without the linear order assumption, when is a rule's &quot;time to apply&quot;?  The notion of optionality no longer has any clear sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set-of-lects model of a dialect comes to the rescue.  It provides a reasonable way of interpreting the notion of optionality that is independent of what assumptions are made about rule order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us say that a phonological lect is a variety of speech with no variation induced by application of phonological rules, and a variable rule is a phonological rule which applies (obligatorily) in the phonological systems of some lects, but not others.  A phonological dialect is a set of lects differing only by what variable rules apply in each lect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the special case in which a variable phonological rule applies in a lect independently of the application of other variable rules, we'll characterize the rule as &quot;optional&quot;.  It is an empirical issue as to whether all variable rules are optional, as conventional generative phonology assumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case where all variable rules are optional is interesting, because this part of generative phonology works well, descriptively (in my opinion, of course), and the set-of-lects model makes available a formally simple way to characterize it.  When the applicability of a variable rule in a dialect is independent of whether any other variable rule is applicable in a dialect, the phonologies of the lects correspond to the power set of the variable rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the case where optional phonological rules simplify articulation, we can relate any two lects in complexity of articulation according to whether the set of variable rules of one is included in the set of variable rules of the other, and the dialect as a whole is partially ordered by this relation of complexity.  That is to say, a dialect is a poset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have used variable phonological rules which simplify articulation to describe this approach to optionality, the account can easily be generalized to any variable language trait.  Instead of the presence of a phonological rule in a lect, just substitute a word choice, a particular syntactic construction, or any other language trait of interest for phonological rule in the preceding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T18:05:03.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17054" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-17T08:56:30.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is an ASCII-based phonetic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_Assessment_Methods_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SAMPA&lt;/a&gt; covers a restricted subset of IPA sufficient to transcribe the major Eurpean langauges, Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;X-SAMPA&lt;/a&gt; attempts to cover the whole IPA range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T21:42:08.473" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T21:42:08.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17055" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-17T08:56:30.473" Score="0" Body="For question about the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) and its dialects (like X-SAMPA)" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-17T21:42:03.537" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T21:42:03.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T14:09:53.690" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;i wonder if the present tense (a tense denoting the present and only the present) is a universal in languages that have tense. Or do some languages have a present tense that extends into the recent future and/or past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are such languages, does this tense have other effects on the tense paradigm? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T14:09:53.690" Title="Do any language lack a present tense different from that used in Indoeuropean languages?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-17T14:24:46.980" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;have in view&quot; also exists in two other languages that I know, in Russian and in Armenian: иметь в виду, ի նկատի ունենալ. This means it could have a common origin, perhaps Latin. My knowledge of Latin is very limited; I tried to find an equivalent phrase in Latin dictionaries but perhaps I didn't search under correct terms, so I didn't find what I needed. Can you help me find the origin of this phrase? Also, can you tell me if there are other languages too that have this same phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11476" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T08:13:44.950" Title="&quot;Have in view&quot; - origin" Tags="&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17049" CreationDate="2016-03-17T18:25:41.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When human language first evolved, perhaps people had not yet discovered the notion of integer, which allows you to generalize a single way of counting things of various sorts.  Consequently, each sort of thing that had to be counted was classified as a separate gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T18:25:41.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-16T20:04:29.283" Score="11" ViewCount="15649" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the show &quot;The 100&quot;, the Grounders speak a language called &quot;Trigedasleng&quot;. This language is intended to be a descendant of modern English, and we are to understand that it arose through natural linguistic drift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the course of 97 years (between a nuclear apocalypse and the beginning of the series' run), Trigedasleng has evolved into a language with a lexicon and grammar that varies so much from modern English as to sound unintelligible to modern English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How realistic is it that the Grounders would have developed their own, distinctive language within such a timescale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="The Giant of Lannister" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-29T14:41:37.667" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T15:04:18.070" Title="Is it realistic for the Grounders' language as depicted in &quot;The 100&quot; to have developed within 97 years?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17059" CreationDate="2016-03-16T20:19:37.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems plausible. According to the Wikia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://the100.wikia.com/wiki/Trigedasleng_(language)&quot;&gt;Trigedasleng&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trigedasleng is desended from a &lt;strong&gt;heavily-accented dialect&lt;/strong&gt; of American English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trigedasleng developed partially due to natural linguistic drift, but also because there was a pressure for the Grounders to develop &lt;strong&gt;code-terms and euphemisms&lt;/strong&gt; that their enemies, particularly the Mountain Men of Mount Weather, could not readily understand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trigedasleng underwent &lt;strong&gt;extreme phonological simplification&lt;/strong&gt; during its descent from English, resulting in numerous homonyms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined with the relative isolation, it's quite plausible that the language would have changed as it did. Imagine that you started with a group of people who speak African Vernacular (Ebonics) who develop additional slang terms to hide meaning from others and also start to blur together the phonetics of similar words such that they knew from context both others from outside might not. Isolate them for a hundred years and it's very plausible that, after that time, it's very likely we'd have some trouble. Just look at how unintelligible some of the slang of the 50s is to people of today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Peterson, the linguist who created the language, speaks more at length about it &lt;a href=&quot;http://dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/104195916604/im-confused-about-the-grounder-language-in-the&quot;&gt;in his blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="FuzzyBoots" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T02:54:46.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17059" CreationDate="2016-03-17T08:04:38.490" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be a real-world example on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-an-isolated-group-of-people-to-develop-what-would-be-considered-their-own-language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; from Don Grushkin, Professor of Deaf Studies (Ph.D. in Language, Reading and Culture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've added the bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure anybody's ever conducted any research on rate of linguistic drift. As Joachim Pense notes, languages can be created in one or two generations.  But you're talking about linguistic change from one form, say, &amp;quot;Old English&amp;quot; to a newer form, say &amp;quot;New English&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example that we can look at to see linguistic drift occurring is in the case of American Sign Language.  ASL was created in 1817, with the establishment of the American School for the Deaf, where French Sign Language was imported and likely blended with Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, and possibly some American Indian Signs, or some local Deaf community signs (there were a few Deaf communities emerging in the early NorthEastern United States).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1880, the use of signed language was officially banned within Deaf educational settings, and the language started to go underground, to some degree.  In 1913, the National Association of the Deaf, fearing the death of signed language, commissioned a series of films (around 6 or 7 films) in order to preserve the history and the language.  Most of these films survived today.  You can watch one of these films here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To modern signers of ASL, it is difficult to understand the signs (I can, but only because I've seen a translation and have watched the film many times).  Our difficulty shows that the language has undergone a significant drift in about 100 years, or about 5 generations.  This drift might have been accelerated by other factors such as invented signed systems, the banning of ASL in education (causing some areas to invent their own sign language or variation of ASL), and the lack of a written form of ASL.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a small, isolated community after a catastrophe, I think it is quite plausible to find a new, unintelligible language evolving in that short a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12748" OwnerDisplayName="rosesunhill" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T08:04:38.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15018" CreationDate="2016-03-17T21:52:03.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two other datasets for sequential short text classification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus. [Jurafsky et al.1997]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MRDA: ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act Corpus&#xA;(Janin et al., 2003; Shriberg et al., 2004)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of size, here is an overview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfZGBm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cfZGBm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case anyone is interested, we presented an overview of the state-of-the art results on these three datasets in &lt;em&gt;Ji Young Lee, Franck Dernoncourt, &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03827&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sequential Short-Text Classification with Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks&lt;/a&gt;. NAACL 2016.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We found a few more interesting data sets for sequential short text classification mentioned in the literature, but we could not access it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other data sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ParakweetLabs/EmailIntentDataSet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ParakweetLabs/EmailIntentDataSet&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170309221930/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25330079/where-can-i-get-training-data-of-part-of-speech-tagger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mirror&lt;/a&gt;): Labeled training and test data for email intent machine learning (for sentence-level speech acts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Jurafsky et al.1997] Dan Jurafsky, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Debra Biasca. 1997. Switchboard SWBDDAMSL shallow-discourse-function annotation coders manual. Institute of Cognitive Science. Technical Report, pages 97–102.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Janin et al.2003] Adam Janin, Don Baron, Jane Edwards,&#xA;Dan Ellis, David Gelbart, Nelson Morgan, Barbara Peskin,&#xA;Thilo Pfau, Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke,&#xA;et al. 2003. The ICSI meeting corpus. In Acoustics,&#xA;Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings.(ICASSP’03).&#xA;2003 IEEE International Conference on, volume 1, pages I–364. IEEE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Shriberg et al.2004] Elizabeth Shriberg, Raj Dhillon,&#xA;Sonali Bhagat, Jeremy Ang, and Hannah Carvey. 2004. The ICSI meeting recorder dialog act (MRDA) corpus. Technical report, DTIC Document.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T22:21:15.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17045" CreationDate="2016-03-17T23:01:10.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first and the second one are old scripts, and consequently orthography and spelling, and therefore has the /hamza/ the third one is the simpler one (and in the tanzil website under &lt;code&gt;Quran&lt;/code&gt; tab you can select the type of text and as you will see it has been set to &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older text of Quran from the above is probably Medina Mushaf (if I'm not mistaken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Medina Mushaf (officially: Mushaf al-Madinah an-Nabawiyyah, Arabic: مصحف المدينة النبوية) is an authentic copy of the holy quran printed by King Fahad Complex for Printing of the Holy Quran [1]. The Complex publishes the holy quran according to three famous narration, i.e., Hafs, Warsh, and Ad-Duriyy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tanzil.net/wiki/Medina_Mushaf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://tanzil.net/wiki/Medina_Mushaf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tanzil details on Quran scripts are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple: Quran text in Imlaaei script (this is the default text).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple Plain: Simple text without special demonstration of Ikhfas and Idghams.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple Minimal: Simple text with minimal number of diacritics and symbols.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple clean: Simple text with no diacritics or symbols.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uthmani: Uthmani text, according to Medina Mushaf.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uthmani Minimal: Uthmani text with minimal number of diacritics and&#xA;symbols.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-03-17T23:01:10.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T13:41:32.473" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am talking about 'th' that represents /θ/ sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary states, that the word 'arithmetic' is borrowed at some stage from French 'arsmetike'. I can imagine that at some moment the word came to be spelled more like Latin 'arithmetica' under the Latin influence as science lingua franca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, neither French nor Latin word was pronounced with /θ/ sound. Should I assume this pronunciation emerged lately as spelling-influenced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the question holds for every word with 'th' borrowed from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastActivityDate="2016-03-18T13:41:32.473" Title="How did 'arithmetic' come to current pronunciation (or spelling)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-18T14:41:15.380" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working my way through a book on syntax by Andrew Carnie, and I've come up against something that isn't entirely clear to me. In a chapter about syntactic categories, Carnie writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to mark subcategories is through the use of features. Consider the case of Tense Categories of English (&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;). To distinguish between the subcategories we can appeal to the features [+/-modal] and [+/-non-finite]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auxiliary: &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;[-modal, -nonfinite]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modal:     &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;[+modal, -nonfinite]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To: &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;[+modal, +nonfinite]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this at all, and it's not really explained any further. Could some please explain this in different words perhaps, or elaborate upon this in some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12750" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T04:05:19.283" Title="How do distinctive features work?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17066" CreationDate="2016-03-18T21:25:30.097" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many details of syntactic constructions and of pronunciation can be described by classifying constituents, for syntax, and phones/phonemes, for phonology, by whether they have some property or other.  For instance, vowels may be either nasal or not, and noun phrases may be either plural or not.  A non-nasal vowel is &quot;oral&quot;; a non-plural noun phrase (in English) is &quot;singular&quot; -- there are just two possibilities for the property.  Such a classification is called &quot;privative&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N. S. Trubetzkoy, part of the so-called Prague School of analysis, developed these ideas in phonology, then another member of the Prague School, Roman Jakobson, with other linguists (Fant, Halle) proposed a version of this method of analysis called the &quot;distinctive features&quot;, which treated such privative classifications as features with binary values, plus or minus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are theoretical ideas associated with it, using binary features is a notation, not a theory.  For a vowel that is nasal, I write [+vocalic,+nasal], which just means a sound segment that is vocalic rather than non-vocalic and nasal rather than oral.  Phonologists very often use this notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accompany the notation with the assumption that all phonologically significant information about sounds can be represented with such binary (privative) features, this becomes a theory.  But the notation can perfectly well be used without accepting such a theoretical idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gerald Gazdar used feature notation in describing his theory Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), but the notation can also be used atheoretically, simply as a descriptive device.  If you want to describe &quot;the man&quot; as being a constituent which is singular rather than plural and masculine rather than feminine, for instance, you could call it [-plural,+masculine], or, if you like, [+singular,-feminine].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In GPSG, this sort of description is used notationally, because it is a convenient and familiar way of writing cross-cutting classifications, like (in the above example) the gender and number of a noun phrase.  Since the feature notation is not a theory -- anyone is free to use it -- using it doesn't mean you accept the theory of GPSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the reason it is convenient to use it in GPSG is that GPSG is based on context free phrase structure grammar, which allows any finite set of &quot;non-terminal symbols&quot; in describing grammatical categories, and there is no rule that you have to use symbols that are given names spelled alphabetically, like NP, S, Adj.  Instead, if you like, you can use sets of features or feature specifications as the names of nonterminal symbols.  It's simply a notation, though it is associated with GPSG the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving a feature outside the brackets that enclose a list of features, as is done in the example you gave from Carnie, is also a GPSG convention.  So instead of [NP,+masculine,-plural], you can write NP[+masculine,-plural].  I don't recall that this has any significance -- it's just an informal way of indicating that you think of one feature as more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen Carnie's book, but I'd guess the use of features here is an example of pointless jargon that is used to produce the impression of an esoteric and impressively technical theory.  Students who have learned their linguistics under the influence of the MIT school of generative grammar often have a problem distinguishing notation from theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T03:34:55.600" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T03:34:55.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-19T09:42:08.877" Score="5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes a verb stative in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking for various stativity tests, as these do not guarantee the verb really is stative. For example, no stativity test I have come across can account for the following data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) This table is missing a leg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Look at this mess! You're wasting space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) This shelf is taking up too much space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) The problem is waiting for a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) The smartphone is lying on the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What linguistic theory explains these discrepancies and provides a clear-cut distinction between dynamic, stative and mixed verbs in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12753" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T01:22:47.477" Title="What does it mean for a verb to be stative, really?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;progressive&gt;&lt;statives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17069" CreationDate="2016-03-19T10:38:18.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;With English verbs the notion of lexical aspect is only useful up to a point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a handy device for explaining things like why some verbs are rarely cast in the progressive construction, or why some verbs imply temporal embedding while others imply temporal envelopment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the awkward fact is that many verbs have evolved senses which recategorize their 'core' lexical aspects, and in theory any verb may do so. &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, is a paradigmatic stative verb, yet it may be cast in the progressive with the sense &quot;behave like&quot;: &lt;em&gt;John is being a jerk about this.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is that there is no &quot;clear-cut distinction between dynamic, stative and mixed verbs in English&quot;; there are only distinctions between eventive and dynamic &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt;. Stativity, dynamicity, activity and the like may be constrained by the lexical sense of verbs, but in the end they are properties not of verbs but of specific utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T10:38:18.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17043" CreationDate="2016-03-19T12:04:20.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can take a look at this corpus at Linguistic data consortium: &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2013T22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2013T22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ARRAU (Anaphora Resolution and Underspecification) Corpus of Anaphoric Information was developed by the University of Essex and the University of Trento. It contains annotations of multi-genre English texts for anaphoric relations with information about agreement and explicit representation of multiple antecedents for ambiguous anaphoric expressions and discourse antecedents for expressions which refer to abstract entities such as events, actions and plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source texts in this release include task-oriented dialogues from the TRAINS-91 and TRAINS-93 corpora (the latter released through LDC, TRAINS Spoken Dialog Corpus LDC95S25), narratives from the English Pear Stories (a collection of narratives by subjects who watched a film and then recounted its contents), articles from the Wall Street Journal portions of the Penn Treebank (Treebank-2 LDC95T7) and the RST Discourse Treebank LDC2002T07, and the Vieira/Poesio Corpus which consists of training and test files from Treebank-2 and RST Discourse Treebank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LDC Catalog No.:  LDC2013T22&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also take a look at this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/jair/pub/volume18/peral03a-html/node12.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/jair/pub/volume18/peral03a-html/node12.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T12:04:20.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-19T15:33:53.523" Score="3" ViewCount="2626" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ferdinan De Sassure has proposed Langue and Parole long before Chomsky proposed his Competence and Performance system of linguistic knowledge? I know that they are different but how? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12641" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T00:47:32.267" Title="How was De Saussure's Langue and Parole different from Chomsky's Competence and Performance?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17076" CreationDate="2016-03-19T19:37:05.347" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://spokensanskrit.de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;spokensanskrit.de&lt;/a&gt;, there are words that are marked as ind. and indecl.&#xA;For example, indecl. stands for indeclinable words in Sanskrit such as तावत्.&#xA;The same word is also marked ind. Could anybody tell me what this means and how is it different from indecl.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11176" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2016-03-20T07:31:33.327" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T07:31:33.327" Title="what is the difference between ind. and indecl. in Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17075" CreationDate="2016-03-19T22:50:13.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They both mean the same: &lt;code&gt;ind.&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;indecl.&lt;/code&gt; are both short forms of &lt;code&gt;indeclinables&lt;/code&gt; - a class of words in sanskrit called &lt;code&gt;अव्ययम्&lt;/code&gt; There's a verse about these &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;सदृशं त्रिषु लिङ्गेषु सर्वासु च विभक्तिषु । &#xA;वचनेषु च सर्वेषु यन्न व्येति तदव्ययम् ।।&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the same in all genders, case-endings and sentences. That which never changes is called &lt;strong&gt;अव्ययम्&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T22:50:13.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T01:34:07.483" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I trying to write a few verses and knowing the gender might change the  meaning. A good source to Sanskrit grammar would also be accepted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10627" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T18:38:59.877" Title="What's a good source to say if a word is masculine or feminine in Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17079" CreationDate="2016-03-20T12:11:59.127" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know whether there are combined unicode characters for vowels with tilde below?  I could only find them for ḛ (U+1E1B), ḭ (U+1E2D), and ṵ (U+1E75) but not for any other vowels. I'm not looking for the combining diacritic (which puts a tilde below any character) but was wondering whether there are other characters (a, o, y, etc.) that have unique code points with the tilde below (used in IPA for creaky voice). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12759" LastEditorUserId="12759" LastEditDate="2016-03-20T23:34:46.633" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T23:34:46.633" Title="creaky voice unicode character tilde below with vowels" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17078" CreationDate="2016-03-20T12:28:33.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page on the Unicode website&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;tilde below&quot; confirms that the three characters you have found are all the characters with tilde below in the Unicode standard. For others, you have two resorts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the combining tilde below (as you already noted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the private use area for them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proposals for their addition to Unicode will be turned down as the Unicode consortium currently does not consider more precomposed characters for inclusion in the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T12:28:33.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T13:31:43.603" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a lightweight open source framework for lexicographical experiments: building vocabularies, converting from one type to another, merging, dealing with multilingual issues, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;google and github didn't show anything :). &#xA;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s. As I understand WordNet, FrameNet and UNL are systems with prebuilt architecture and phylosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12535" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T13:31:43.603" Title="an open source lexicographical framework" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T14:58:36.310" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some linguists claim that English doesn't have a future tense, and some do for German as well. This opinion was voiced out here as well,as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2593/what-is-the-present-tense-expressing-future/2597&quot;&gt;What is the present tense expressing future?&lt;/a&gt;. I cannot determine whether this view is common or disputed, and if, to what extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we are to assume that English doesn't have a future tense, there are arguments to support that point of view. But if it can be said that English doesn't have a future tense, one should also be able to define criteria for English (or any language) to actually have one. To rule out most obvious one - &quot;if it is synthetic&quot; - I'll make my question more specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What criteria - and why - would a syntactical construction with auxiliary verb have to meet in order to be regarded beyond (reasonable) doubt as real future tense for English? Essentially I'm asking about refutability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5446" LastEditorUserId="5446" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T10:09:35.170" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T10:09:35.170" Title="If we disregard future tense for English, under which circumstances we could not?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17083" CreationDate="2016-03-20T15:27:44.343" Score="4" ViewCount="1453" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;bound morpheme is a morpheme that appears only as part of a larger word; a free morpheme or unbound morpheme is one that can stand alone or can appear with other lexemes&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;given that the articles though not 'attached' to the base word, are still constrained to always preceed a noun in the speech stream('word' is not really well-defined in linguistics). So are articles bound morphemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11301" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T11:57:16.727" Title="Are Articles('a','an','the') bound morphemes?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17082" CreationDate="2016-03-20T18:19:59.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not say that they have to precede a noun, since that implies that *&quot;The should give you money&quot;, because &quot;the&quot; precedes a noun. Articles have to be followed by &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; in the NP, and what immediately follows could be all sorts of things (&quot;the &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; cow&quot;, &quot;the &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; dogs&quot;, &quot;the &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; the hill gang&quot;). Articles are not strictly &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; found before another word in the NP, though the contexts where they aren't is quite restricted. You can say &quot;I said 'You can have &lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; cookies, not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;. Leave &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; ones alone&quot;. I'm sure some people will feel that these are unnatural, and they are clearly uncommon, but they are possible. In contrast, if you want to contrast bound-morpheme selection, you can't say &quot;I didn't say [s]&quot;, or anything like it, meaning &quot;I didn't say &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt; (I said &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt;)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the assumption that a bound morpheme is definitionally &quot;a morpheme that is always a subpart of a word&quot;, then setting aside isolation meta-linguistic uses of articles, they still are not part of the following word – unless you definitionally declare that they are. It is plausible to say that they are clitics, and there is a theory of clitics that they are syntactically separate words which are morphologically or phonologically part of some other word. See work by Phillip Miller from the 90s on the notion of &quot;edge inflection&quot;, and his treatment of genitive &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one theory would simply be that articles have a specific left edge location in the NP so that they can't be preceded by anything (at the NP level), and the rest of the NP has to contain something. Or, articles could be the realization of an abstract feature that is assigned to the left edge of the NP and is realized as a prefix morpheme on whatever is &quot;really&quot; the leftmost word in the NP. Under the latter construal, you could say that articles are bound morphemes. IMO it depends on your theory of clitics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, one never really knows how many NPs an NP contains. There are quantifying expressions that come before articles, like &quot;some of the people&quot;, &quot;three of the cars&quot;, &quot;all of the dog&quot; and the latter can be reduced to &quot;all the dogs&quot;. How you dispose of such cases is rather theory-dependent. They could be NP inside NP, or they could be special things that come at the left of the nounish-phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-03-20T21:14:36.857" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T21:14:36.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17117" CreationDate="2016-03-20T21:34:04.940" Score="5" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if training both a POS tagger and a parser (be it constituency or dependency) at the same time improve the results of parsing in a deep architecture since deep learning can take advantage of its depth to learn multiple levels of representation. What would be a good architecture for such a task ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T13:41:50.873" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T02:09:38.277" Title="Can training a Part-of-Speech tagger and parser at the same time improve parsing results?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17089" CreationDate="2016-03-20T22:25:05.407" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my syntax classes, I learnt that v-spec is specific for &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt; role. The thing is, I came across a structure in the resource below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Radford, A. (2004). Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was analyzing the structure of sentence below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Where is it thought that he will go?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at first, he gave a structure as below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YZCC5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YZCC5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since vP is intransitive (by virtue of the fact that the light verb has no external argument), vP is not a phase, and Transfer cannot apply at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean? I learned that an &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;must always be&lt;/em&gt; at v-spec and &lt;code&gt;he&lt;/code&gt; is really and &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt; there. I -at first- thought that &lt;code&gt;go&lt;/code&gt; does not have any accusative argument, so &lt;code&gt;he&lt;/code&gt; is at V-spec, but that did not make any sense at all. So, from this point, it went through this way below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RY1s2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RY1s2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there really any reference that an &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt; occurs in another place rather than v-spec?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is possible to see &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt;s in another place, does that apply to all verbs not having an accusative argument but only a &lt;code&gt;PP&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;agent&lt;/code&gt; is specific to &lt;code&gt;v-spec&lt;/code&gt;, then how do we describe the given example above? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Limitations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phase Theory must be applied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T15:17:45.013" Title="Is v-spec Specific for agent? If so, How to Solve This Problem?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-20T23:10:45.700" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a playwright/performer and need help with writing a &quot;broken&quot; English version from a native Russian speaker of the following. Please note the show I am doing is in the Ridiculous Theatrical comedic vein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar is intentionally misused. Influence: My father came from Hungary and his English was rich with the following &quot;isms.&quot; I approach this with an affection, not mocking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title with Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public &amp;amp; Private Health Lecture Demonstration of Dr Svetlana&#xA;(Открытое и частное медицинское Лекция Демонстрация доктора Светланы)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native of Dykistan, faculty member of Guam Online Medical School, Dr. Svetlana Titania Boom de Eva present Leon Trotsky lecture demonstration. Undauntness by charges of practicing medicine without license, I emerge from safe house at 10th and B St. with ferocity reminiscing of Great October Socialists Revolution. Comrade Bernie Sanders unconfirmed surprise guest. @drsvetlanafrg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12763" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T23:10:45.700" Title="Russian &quot;crude&quot; translation into English for Theatre Purpose" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-21T22:08:33.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2016-03-21T03:32:52.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Korean not fluent in English, but I will try to answer. &#xA;I am not a linguist or social scientist, but I think the main reason is not political or cultural. &#xA;It's due to the capability, nature of Hangul and Korean language. &#xA;Koreans were able to remove kanji because;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hangul can make so many different looking blocks of consonant(s) and vowel(s) combinations in its hangul only sentences that it makes good visibility and discrimination at a glance, far easier to grasp meaning of each syllables or combinations of syllables than the case of kana only Japanese, no matter they are representing native or Chinese borrowed words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean language has much more sounds, consonants and vowels stock than Japanese . Like English, phonetic hangul only Korean can manage to avoid excessive homonyms or monotonous looking or sounding words like kana only Japanese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both Korean and Japanese borrowed many Chinese words from ancient times. Old Chinese has more sounds and final consonants like some southern dialects of Chinese spoken these days. The sounds of Sino-Korean words represent these old Chinese sounds fairly well, though tones are gone and sounds were adjusted to Korean phonetics. That's why hangul only sentences with Sino-Korean words in it still makes fairly good discrimination in most of the cases. &#xA;On the contrast, Japanese language tend to reduce its already relatively smaller phonetic stock historically. So many Chinese borrowed words with originally different sounds became homonyms in Japan and as time went on, such tendency progressed further resulting in tons of homonyms in its dictionary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people say about 70% of Korean vocabulary is Chines origin, but its not true or half true. Many Chinese origin words in Korean dictionary are very rarely used or never used, dead words. &#xA;In daily conversation it's well below 50% or much more less. Native words are essential and core words like the case of English. So in most cases, Koreans do communicate well without kanji in their written forms without serious misunderstanding. Homonyms can be rendered per the context almost like in the case of English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And not like Japanese, Koreans read Chinese borrowed words only by its sound(read Chinese characters phonetically), not by its meaning(rendering Chinese characters into Korean native words). And 99% of the cases, one Chinese letter has only one syllable of Korean sound and it is represented by only one hangul block. It's very efficient and space economic transcription than the case of kana rendering. It's same space as Chinese and simpler looking. So it's easier to pronounce to read hangul only sentences than Chinese mixed hangul sentences. &#xA;Meanwhile, kana only sentence usually becomes longer, not easy to identify core words and grasp meaning quickly. If it allows space between words like hangul, readability will be improved a little, but it will need more page space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned above, like English, hangul writing has space between words promoting readability. And its block making method of writing per syllable reduces more writing space compared to linear, European writing system, though we accept its complexity in handwriting and some demerit in spelling regulations. One of the merit of this block writing is that, like Chinese, we can write it either horizontally or vertically, easy to install for example shop signs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think Korean culture retreated because they do not use kanji any more. Instead, I think hangul only writing helped a lot in making Korean miracle economically and culturally. &#xA;It made actually 100% literacy among Koreans in short time and promoted Korean culture in every aspects. And it is quite apt to encounter new computer era. Hangul is quite suitable in digital generations. Hangul only writing in public use is irreversible in both Koreas. &#xA;It's not because of political or cultural reasons. They are incidental, minor ones. Even its uniqueness is a minor reason. Hangul itself is the major reason. It's due to its efficiency and practicality.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kanji is, like Latin in Europe, necessary among scholars or among persons in Korea interested in deeper studies of history, literature, linguistics or whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12765" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T03:32:52.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17086" CreationDate="2016-03-21T05:14:42.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew Radford (Radford 2004) discusses it on p. 351.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go is an unaccusative verb, which means, under &lt;strong&gt;Radford&lt;/strong&gt;'s analysis, that &lt;strong&gt;the subject originates in spec-VP&lt;/strong&gt;, unlike in the case of transitive (unergative) verbs, where the subject originates in spec-vP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what Radford proposed. However, it doesn't mean that everyone has the same interpretation of the syntactic behavior of intransitive (unaccusative) verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David &lt;strong&gt;Adger&lt;/strong&gt; (Adger 2003, Core Syntax) argues that &lt;strong&gt;the argument&lt;/strong&gt; of an unaccusative verb (THEME) is always &lt;strong&gt;base-generated in comp,VP&lt;/strong&gt; - so, at least his analysis is better in this regard because it doesn't violate UTAH. The argument then moves to spec,TP (to satisfy EPP on T).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-03-21T15:17:45.013" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T15:17:45.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-21T21:14:50.200" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to current corpora and other tools used by language researchers, does the current vocabulary of Japanese already contain as many words borrowed/derived from English as the number of English words derived from French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12768" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T21:14:50.200" Title="Does Japanese have as many English-derived words as English has French-derived words?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17140" CreationDate="2016-03-22T07:36:50.863" Score="1" ViewCount="13471" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several occasions, while reading, it has happened to me that when re-reading a sentence, I find out I read it wrong the first time; every time it is only one letter the one that I get wrong, but I always notice the mistake after reading once again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has just happened to me some minutes ago while taking a Japanese hiragana quiz; I read the &quot;の&quot; (in &quot;みせのなまえ&quot;) as &quot;い&quot; instead, but the second time I saw the correct character; both characters look a bit alike. I don't remember other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem doesn't seem to fit any symptoms of dyslexia (at least the ones listed here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dyslexia.com/library/information.htm#Reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dyslexia.com/library/information.htm#Reading&lt;/a&gt;), and I haven't identified other problems with my reading, writing or spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some search results (like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-do-I-read-words-wrong-sometimes-frequently&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Why-do-I-read-words-wrong-sometimes-frequently&lt;/a&gt;) say it's simply reading too fast, but I was wondering if any of you knew something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these mistakes common? Does the phenomenon have a name? What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12770" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T03:06:23.610" Title="Reading a word wrong, but reading it correctly after trying again" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17098" CreationDate="2016-03-22T12:59:18.007" Score="2" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has many heterographs: words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same. Examples include &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;they're&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hear&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;led&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English also has heteronyms: words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. Examples include &lt;em&gt;wind&lt;/em&gt; (blow/rotate), &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; (tie/bend), &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; (manage/metal), &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it rare for a language to have both of these concepts? Does English have more examples than other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12771" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T22:01:12.133" Title="Is it rare for a language to contain both heterographs and heteronyms?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17093" CreationDate="2016-03-22T14:30:46.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heterographs, as you call them, are pretty common. German uses spelling to differentiate word pars like Lerche/Lärche, Lied/Lid, fiel/viel, mehr/Meer, Mohr/Moor, mahlen/malen; French differentiates a/à, ou/où, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heteronyms, as you call them, also occur in other languages, German has the nice doublet Montage (Mondays/assembly, installation, mounting). German also has some ambiguous compounds like Wachstube (Wach-Stube or Wachs-Tube) or Staubecken (Stau-Becken or Staub-Ecken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think specially heteronyms are more frequent in English than in any other language I know. This has to do with the age of the established orthography and the on-going evolution of the spoken language leading to a gulf between spoken and written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T14:30:46.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-22T14:31:37.120" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different types of verbs in languages. I am interested in formal name of these types. I want to distinguish between verbs that don't have  antonyms and synonyms simultaneously, like 'see', 'hear'. and verbs that do have antonyms and synonyms, like 'accept', antonym: 'reject', synonym: 'agree'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether these two groups have formal definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12773" LastEditorUserId="12773" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T16:13:58.040" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T16:13:58.040" Title="Different types of verbs" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-03-27T01:17:56.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17101" CreationDate="2016-03-22T20:47:22.473" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember an fMRI study that came out sometime around last year (maybe even 2014) that showed a correspondence between distinctive features and neuronal activation. I can't for the life of me find it. I can't remember the researchers or the university. Any suggestions? (I hope this this kind of question is appropriate for stackexchange!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T11:27:33.957" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T17:21:19.167" Title="Paper request: study that correlates distinctive features with neuronal activation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17093" CreationDate="2016-03-22T22:01:12.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on how we define the terms, I think heteronyms are quite commonly present in writing systems. Heterographs are also often present to some degree. So I would say no, it is not rare at all for a writing system to have both. (This is really a feature of a specific writing system for a language, not of a language by itself). These phenomena may occur less frequently in most other languages compared to English, but they are usually present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In non-alphabetic writing systems&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many non-alphabetic writing systems, such as those of Chinese and Japanese, heterographs are quite common. These languages also have heteronyms (here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/1jekci/does_anyone_have_a_good_list_of_mandarin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reddit post with a list of some Mandarin Chinese heteronyms&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Heteronyms in alphabetic writing systems&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm using the term &quot;alphabetic&quot; broadly to include consonant-oriented systems like those used for most Semitic languages, or syllable-oriented systems like those used for most Indic languages.) I think the most common source of heteronyms is a systematic under-specification of some contrast in the language's sound system. For example, for many languages, stress and tone patterns are not written, but may be contrastive between otherwise identical different words. I would consider words like this heteronyms, but some people might disagree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, another common area of underspecification is the representation of vowels. In languages like German and English, vowel &quot;length&quot; (which has changed around a bit in English) is only marked indirectly, so there are some ambiguous cases (like &lt;em&gt;wind&lt;/em&gt; in English). Contrastive vowel length is often not marked when writing Latin (although it is possible to do so with diacritics), leading to heteronyms like &lt;em&gt;malum&lt;/em&gt; (with a long a, &quot;apple&quot;; with a short a, &quot;an evil thing&quot;). According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Notations_in_other_writing_systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, contrastive vowel length was also not marked in some contexts in Ancient Greek writing and Korean Hangul, so there may have been heteronyms relating to length in these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel quality may also be underspecified. It seems to me that this is fairly common in African languages, some of which have large vowel inventories. For example, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotho_orthography#Limitations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;writing system&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotho_phonology#Stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sotho language&lt;/a&gt; (Sesotho), the letter &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; represents three distinct vowel qualities, /ɪ/, /e/, and /ɛ/, and &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; represents /ʊ/, /o/, and /ɔ/. Tone is also contrastive, and not written, and according to Wikipedia there is at least one minimal pair for stress: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the adverb &lt;em&gt;fela&lt;/em&gt; ('only') [ˈfɛlɑ] has regular stress, while the&#xA;  conjunctive &lt;em&gt;fela&lt;/em&gt; ('but') [fɛˈlɑ] (like many other conjunctives) has&#xA;  stress on the final syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can see some degree of heteronymy is commonly present in writing systems from the very beginning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Heterographs in alphabetic writing systems&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, someone designing (consciously or just through use) a new alphabetic writing system does not plan on including heterographs. However, there are a few processes that naturally cause them to arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound changes: That's one of the main causes in English. If two sounds merge in some context, you're likely to get heterographs (such as &lt;em&gt;you're, your, yore&lt;/em&gt;). Generally, these accumulate over time, so an older writing system will have more of them. In some cases, heterographs are present from the beginning for some speakers due to variation between different accents of the language (some accents may have a merger that doesn't exist in others, and the writing system is based on the un-merged accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loanwords: It's possible for all loanwords to be re-spelled according to the borrowing language's writing system. However, there are many languages like English that tend to preserve the original spelling. This may cause heterographs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T22:01:12.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17129" CreationDate="2016-03-22T22:31:19.540" Score="2" ViewCount="1609" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the general concept behind natural classes but what is the philosophy for some classes like syllabic? and are there any relationship between any two classes (like being sonorant and being syllabic)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I suspect the question &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be marked as too broad, I must add that I'm not looking broad explanation of the charts and tables it is easily reachable by searching in the internet. But what is the relationship between these binary forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-22T22:44:40.447" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T07:13:43.597" Title="what are natural classes and how are they classified?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12764" CreationDate="2016-03-22T22:49:22.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;first of all take a look at this question might be helpful: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6768/software-to-measure-f-score-formality-in-english&quot;&gt;Software to measure F-Score (formality) in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you can read papers below to get a catch of the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heylighen, F. and Dewaele, J.M., 1999. Formality of language: definition, measurement and behavioral determinants. Interner Bericht, Center “Leo Apostel”, Vrije Universiteit Brüssel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upshur, J.A., 1968. Four Experiments On The Relation Between Foreign Language Teaching And Learning*. Language Learning, 18(1‐2), pp.111-124.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T22:49:22.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17097" CreationDate="2016-03-22T23:09:24.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this, but it wasn't fMRI. It's direct cortical recording!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/29/science.1245994.abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/29/science.1245994.abstract&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2896" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T23:09:24.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17419" CreationDate="2016-03-23T00:34:30.383" Score="9" ViewCount="2367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking to make anything really special looking, I'd just like to make basic branches going down to draw a family tree. I tried Paint but that's difficult to edit, and Word wouldn't be easy to make into an image.&#xA;I'm hoping to find out what those in linguistics who make historical trees normally use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EoVjV.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EoVjV.gif&quot; alt=&quot;semitic language tree&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oocities.org/dtmcbride/reference/classification/images/semitic_lang_tree.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oocities.org&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8104" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T05:46:27.243" Title="What program can I use to make a tree of a language family?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17104" CreationDate="2016-03-23T05:22:48.277" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally belong to Computer Vision world. Recently I worked on Scene Understanding. There, I accept an image and generate a sentence explaining the contents of the scene. Now, my professor wants me to generate an essay for a scene. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per my literature survey, this is not a very easy task to do. So I am completely confused with what should be the approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across Automatic Essay Grading systems, which break down essay using Latent Semantic Analysis. I am thinking of generating reverse approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a set of keywords (bag-of-words), form a &quot;random&quot; Entropy Matrix&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generate a training set to have a Entropy_Matrix: Essay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Train a system (may be Neural_Net)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not sure what would be representation of essay? I mean how would I generate a training set's output entity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So please help me find the answers to following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; Is my approach correct in targeting the problem? If yes, how may I further create a concrete plan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; What other parallel approaches could be taken into consideration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My professor thinks this can be achieved in couple of weeks time, for a constrained &quot;context&quot;.(Essay is supposed to have a context, let's say &quot;nature&quot; and &quot;beach&quot; are only two contexts to start with) I strongly disagree with him. If you could share written evidences of your view, it would further help me in coming up with a time-frame. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your help is already appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12778" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T08:41:41.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T08:41:41.380" Title="Generating Essay (Set of correlated sentenses) from a set of keywords" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17103" CreationDate="2016-03-23T07:00:43.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first let's review your method: You are going to generate an essay based on semantically related words, that's not enough for an essay to be coherent. It would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;context-free grammar&lt;/a&gt;. Within the scope of CFG: Yes, you can and as your professor mentioned it only takes several weeks (if you need to prepare noun list, programming issues etc.). A well known example of this method is &lt;a href=&quot;http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SCIgen&lt;/a&gt; By Jeremy Stribling  et al. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you specifically mentioned &lt;code&gt;...for a constrained &quot;context&quot;&lt;/code&gt; which I presume you want an essay to be meaningful not just gibberish generated by algorithms then you should consider other methods like &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.1996.540322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;N-gram based text generation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Neural network&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, to answer question (a) I must say what is your definition of &quot;correct&quot;? by all means it's a working method but is it the best-working method? or the most efficient? You can't say, currently there are some better methods for generating meaningful textual data; For CFG this is an approach that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a general plan regarding CFG you must first choose your subject, Nature or beach; what are specific vocabulary related to these essays? Simple analyze those specific essays by programs like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AntConc&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordsmith&lt;/a&gt; add them to a list (By the way you can use the data in SCIgen's Github page at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/strib/scigen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). write the code in a language you're familiar with. There you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For [deep] Neural-network or N-gram models you need a large corpus of essays (specially for DNN and NN you need very large corpora) and analyze them by code like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ymiao/pdnntk.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which is python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T07:07:49.350" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T07:07:49.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5915" CreationDate="2016-03-23T07:05:45.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is, but you have to have contact with spoken english every day during many years (2 or more) depends on what's your mother tongue(your brain have to get used with sound patterns of the language), in order to read properly you have to know how it's sounds, so i think that read while listen to the audiobook may be a good option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if there is some mistakes i apologize, english is not my mother tongue, in fact is not my second yet, i am on the acquisition process(9 months of listening and reading).&#xA;I really belive in the natural process(comprehensible input) so i am not worried about speaking and pronunciation yet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12779" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T07:05:45.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17102" CreationDate="2016-03-23T07:34:22.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your want a user-friendly program to use on the go you can check &lt;a href=&quot;http://cmap.ihmc.us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cmaptool&lt;/a&gt; from good people at the Florida Institute for Human &amp;amp; Machine Cognition (IHMC) it's really easy to use straight forward and you can export your data to variety of extensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ak2zp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ak2zp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you TeX you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/advice/latex/qtree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qTree&lt;/a&gt; package from CTAN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\Tree[.IP [.NP [.Det \textit{the} ]&#xA;           [.N\1 [.N \textit{package} ]]]&#xA;      [.I\1 [.I \textsc{3sg.Pres} ]&#xA;            [.VP [.V\1 [.V \textit{is} ]&#xA;                       [.AP [.Deg \textit{really} ]&#xA;                            [.A\1 [.A \textit{simple} ]&#xA;                                  \qroof{\textit{to use}}.CP ]]]]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above code (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5447/how-can-i-draw-simple-trees-in-latex&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) will produce the below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Although it is used to make syntax trees but still you could use it for Language family trees)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ad0kP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ad0kP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:36:12.520" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T07:34:22.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17148" CreationDate="2016-03-23T07:54:58.170" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading Sudharma and I have encountered a new type of words such as &lt;code&gt;प्रकटयमास&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;प्रकटयमासुः&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;समादिदिशुः&lt;/code&gt;. I know what the roots mean. What I don't know is what type of conjugation is followed here? I have tried scouring through sanskrit.iniria.fr but to no avail. Which situations are these words to be used in? Could anybody shed more light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11176" LastEditorDisplayName="user11176" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T09:33:50.370" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T20:32:39.860" Title="Conjugation of the word प्रकटयमास" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-03-27T20:50:52.033" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34774" CreationDate="2016-03-23T09:12:19.763" Score="4" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an etymology on the Sanskrit word jāla 'web'. What is the origin of it? I am trying to find a parallel in other Indo-European languages but no luck so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T12:32:45.640" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T04:23:01.153" Title="The etymology of Sanskrit jāla 'web'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17109" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-23T11:29:55.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For requests of linguistic resources (like corpora, training data, wordnets, ontologies). When looking for published references, use the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/reference-request&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;reference-request&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;reference-request&lt;/a&gt; tag instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T06:18:00.620" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T06:18:00.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17110" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-23T11:29:55.890" Score="0" Body="For requests of linguistic resources (like corpora, training data, wordnets, ontologies). When looking for published references, use the [reference-request] tag instead." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T06:17:55.547" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T06:17:55.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-23T11:38:10.753" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;My colleagues and I differ on what the subject is in the following sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;About 500 cm3 of the Herschelite was hydrated at 80% RH.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;500 cm3&quot; is the subject of the sentence that governs the verb &quot;was&quot;; my colleagues who are linguists say it is &quot;Herschelite&quot;. My reasoning is that &quot;Herschelite&quot; is the object of the preposition and a point of reference for &quot;500 cm3&quot;. So it cannot be the subject. Could someone throw some light on this situation? Are there any theoretical linguistic principles applicable to this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9819" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T11:38:10.753" Title="What is the subject of the sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17084" CreationDate="2016-03-23T13:30:12.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Assumption: by &quot;at the same time&quot; I assume you mean &quot;in one operation&quot;.  If this is not what you mean, this may not apply.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since parsers rely on the POS tags, and normally occur later in the NLP pipeline, combining them into ONE operation &lt;strong&gt;would likely prove to be more work than the benefit.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm considering this problem.  I'm tempted to split my tokenizing, POS tagging and dependency parsing into several smaller pieces and interleave them, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tokenizer&#xA;Pretag (using lexicon of special &quot;hard&quot; words)&#xA;POS tagging&#xA;Dep parse (only Subj)&#xA;Re-tokenize where no Subj found (probably with grammars)&#xA;POS tagging&#xA;Dep parse (only Pred)&#xA;Lexical analysis&#xA;etc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would not constitute tagging and parsing &quot;at the same time&quot;. It also would not be a gargantuan effort that might prove futile.  Since I'm not in a purely research field, results are my aim, not novelty or publication.  So while this approach is admittedly mundane, it's likely to provide some benefit without a high cost. At least that's what I hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11372" LastEditorUserId="11372" LastEditDate="2016-03-23T13:35:13.350" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T13:35:13.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14426" CreationDate="2016-03-23T13:34:06.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian analog of English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;так&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It can be used almost everywhere where you use &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think so = Я думаю так&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to do so = Я хочу сделать так&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They are so many = Их так много&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is so smart = Он такой умный.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, no = Так что, нет.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-03-23T13:34:06.137" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-23T23:56:19.927" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any reference document(s) that give a comprehensive list of NER labeling schemes (e.g., IOB1, IOB2, or IOBES) along with their pros/cons, and ideally some pointers to publications? I am mostly interested in how the choice of the labeling schemes impacts machine learning algorithms' performances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T01:05:00.547" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T04:29:44.693" Title="Comprehensive list of NER labeling schemes with pros/cons" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17084" CreationDate="2016-03-24T00:02:46.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't recall any paper learning a POS tagger and a parser jointly off the top of my head, but the following paper might be of interest to you as they explored multi-task learning (MTL) for parsing, translation, and image caption generation, so the architecture they used (nothing fancy, typical RNNs just plugged and unplugged for MTL) might be of interest to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Luong, Minh-Thang, Quoc V. Le, Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Lukasz Kaiser. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6045967109711129604&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0,22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Multi-task Sequence to Sequence Learning.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06114 (2015).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sequence to sequence learning has recently emerged as a new paradigm in supervised learning. To date, most of its applications focused on only one task and not much work explored this framework for multiple tasks. This paper examines three multi-task learning (MTL) settings for sequence to sequence models: (a) the one-to-many setting - where the encoder is shared between several tasks such as machine translation and syntactic parsing, (b) the many-to-one setting - useful when only the decoder can be shared, as in the case of translation and image caption generation, and (c) the many-to-many setting - where multiple encoders and decoders are shared, which is the case with unsupervised objectives and translation. Our results show that training on a small amount of parsing and image caption data can improve the translation quality between English and German by up to 1.5 BLEU points over strong single-task baselines on the WMT benchmarks. Furthermore, we have established a new state-of-the-art result in constituent parsing with 93.0 F1. Lastly, we reveal interesting properties of the two unsupervised learning objectives, autoencoder and skip-thought, in the MTL context: autoencoder helps less in terms of perplexities but more on BLEU scores compared to skip-thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T00:02:46.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17114" CreationDate="2016-03-24T01:28:59.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;About the BIO or BIESO scheme, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/RatinovRo09.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/RatinovRo09.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4840" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T01:28:59.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17084" CreationDate="2016-03-24T01:42:12.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are talking about joint POS tagging and parsing. If you do not limit yourself to the neural network framework. The following paper can help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;graph-based parser:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joint models for Chinese POS tagging and dependency parsing: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ir.hit.edu.cn/~car/papers/emnlp11.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ir.hit.edu.cn/~car/papers/emnlp11.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;transition-based parser:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Incremental Joint POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing in Chinese: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I/I11/I11-1136.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I/I11/I11-1136.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Transition-Based System for Joint Part-of-Speech Tagging and Labeled Non-Projective Dependency Parsing: &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.261.4221&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.261.4221&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Porting the &quot;old school&quot; method to the neural network, a straight-forward way can be introducing a joint parsing and tagging action &quot;SHIFT-POS&quot; to Chen and Manning (2014) or Chris et al (2015). What's more, multi-task learning can also be a fancy staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4840" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T01:42:12.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17010" CreationDate="2016-03-24T03:08:36.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnslu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Theano tutorial&lt;/a&gt; provide a dialogue state tracking systems (slot filling) with a graphical model based (recurrent neural networks) dialogue state representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably need a decently large training set though: on the Fourth Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC4) last year, we (and other teams) unsuccessfully tried some neural networks but in the end a simple classifier with decent features beats them. (more details: &lt;em&gt;Franck Dernoncourt, Ji Young Lee, Trung H. Bui, and Hung H. Bui. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02130&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Robust Dialog State Tracking for Large Ontologies&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems. 2016.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T23:39:32.163" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T23:39:32.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-24T05:39:03.337" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper written by De Cock, Bodenhofer, and Kerre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link to the paper: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bioinf.jku.at/people/bodenhofer/private/publications/pdf/DeCockBodenhoferKerre00.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Modelling Linguistic Expressions Using Fuzzy Relations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12788" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T05:39:03.337" Title="How are the ideas from the paper &quot;Modelling Linguistic Expressions Using Fuzzy Relations&quot; currently used in Computational Linguistics/NLP?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-24T09:42:44.147" Score="5" ViewCount="3680" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the notes I kept during a lecture on Morphology, morphemes are meaningful themselves and they can also differentiate meaning.&#xA;Are all morphemes considered to be meaningful?&#xA;For example {-ize} is a morpheme and it can differentiate the meaning of the morpheme {author}. (author and authorize are two meaningful distinct words).&#xA;But is the morpheme {-ize} meaningful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T13:42:33.523" Title="Are all morphemes meaningful?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17121" CreationDate="2016-03-24T15:25:34.670" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is possible that every morpheme &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; has a meaning.  In &quot;personalize&quot;, the &quot;-ize&quot; means &quot;cause/make&quot;.  But I can't find a meaning for &quot;-ize&quot; in your example &quot;authorize&quot;, though etymologically it could have once had a meaning.  Yet in both these examples, &quot;-ize&quot; is a morpheme, since removing it gives a word, and it has a secondary stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Of&quot; sometimes has the meaning of possession, but in the nominalization of a transitive verb, it is appended just to satisfy the grammatical requirement that a noun may not take a direct object.  &quot;The eating of horse liver is not allowed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A&quot; expresses indefiniteness, except before a predicate noun, it seems to be there just to help locate the noun phrase.  &quot;She is a mailman.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T15:25:34.670" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17413" CreationDate="2016-03-24T15:49:17.647" Score="0" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, we know how to translate the hieroglyphics because of the Rosetta Stone. I'm aware that Old English is far more similar to known languages than the hieroglyphics, but looking at the original text of &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; I still don't see a single word I can make sense of. How did they learn to translate Old English accurately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1647" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T19:11:32.270" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T16:31:12.003" Title="How do they know how to translate Old English?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17077" CreationDate="2016-03-25T01:13:39.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apte's dictionary (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/apte/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/apte/&lt;/a&gt;) is also a great resource for learning the लिङ्गम् of words. However, the most authoritative source would be a कोषः such as अमरकोषः, मेदिनी etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The अमरकोषः has words arranged in categories (for e.g names of Gods, plants, etc.) and is in verse form. Where applicable, the verse also indicates the gender of words. For e.g here's one verse that gives synonyms for the word &lt;code&gt;direction&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिशस्तु ककुभः काष्ठा आशाश्च हरितश्च ताः ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;ताः&lt;/code&gt; at the end signifies that each of the words in this verse are all in स्त्रीलिङ्गः (feminine) only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;दिशः&#xA;ककुभः&#xA;काष्ठाः &#xA;आशाः &#xA;हरितः&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some words appear in all three genders, and these are also marked appropriately by the usage of special words in verses. I've seen &lt;code&gt;ना&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;पुम्&lt;/code&gt; to denote &lt;code&gt;पुँल्लिङ्गः&lt;/code&gt; (masculine), &lt;code&gt;क्लिबम्&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;neuter&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;स्त्री&lt;/code&gt; for feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example that enumerates synonyms of &lt;code&gt;heaven&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;सुरलोको द्योदिवौ द्वे स्त्रियां क्लीबे त्रिविष्टपम्&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;सुरलोकः&lt;/code&gt; is obviously in पुँल्लिङ्गः but the next two words (i.e nominal stems) &lt;code&gt;द्यो&lt;/code&gt; (प्रथमा-विभक्तिः forms are &lt;code&gt;द्यौः द्यावौ द्यावः&lt;/code&gt;)and &lt;code&gt;दिव्&lt;/code&gt;(प्रथमा-विभक्तिः forms are &lt;code&gt;द्यौः दिवौ दिवः&lt;/code&gt;) are in स्त्रीलिङ्गः Finally त्रिविष्टपम् is in नपुंसकलिङ्गः&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a commentary on &lt;code&gt;अमरकोषः&lt;/code&gt; written by Bhanuji Dikshit and published by Chowkhamba. It contains all verses and a brief commentary to each verse where the derivations of some words is demonstrated with Panini's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit grammar is an ocean and takes several years to learn. The best way to get started is to find a teacher/scholar in this subject. If you have some foothold in the basics, you can view recordings of Siddhanta Kaumudi here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ggss-lessons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ggss-lessons.org/&lt;/a&gt; or from youtube &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp5mvCwXR-drTRyzNUUjdZg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp5mvCwXR-drTRyzNUUjdZg/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://avg-sanskrit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://avg-sanskrit.org/&lt;/a&gt; has enough material to keep one busy for a few years - the daily examples show how to use Panini's rules to derive words. Video recordings of select portions of Ramayanam, Raghuvamsam, Introduction to Sanskrit and Panini's rules are also available: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYDCfgWlp6dlFr_vVTEVJrQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYDCfgWlp6dlFr_vVTEVJrQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T18:38:59.877" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T18:38:59.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-25T01:19:34.967" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for studies which looks at understanding and preference of incomplete sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is there a higher workload for (in)complete sentences or even though the sentence might be fully understandable with the key information people might still prefer the complete sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in this question for an verbal context but a written context would be great as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12797" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-03-25T10:28:22.513" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T10:28:22.513" Title="Incomplete sentences" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17099" CreationDate="2016-03-25T04:51:18.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The philosophy behind all features is simple: rules apply to classes of segments, and features are the basis for defining those classes. We observe empirically that the behavioral sets of segments in languages are not in a strict hierarchy, for example besides the set {p,t,k} vs. {b,d,g,m,n,ŋ,f,s,i,u,o,e,a} we also find the sets {p,b,m,f} vs. all else, and {p,t,k,s,f} vs. all else. The theory of segments is that every segment is uniquely identifiable by the conjunction of some set of feature specifications, and sets of segments are identified in a rule by referring to some conjunction of features (including things that the members of the set have in common, excluding things that are not uniform within the set).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main ontological approaches to features, one where features are phonetic descriptions (this is the most common view and almost certainly reflects what you’ve seen), and the substance-free theory where features don’t have invariant phonetic definitions, but rather they are the product of analyzing how segments group together in a particular language. The answer to the question about Labial vs. Continuant in the substance-assuming theory is that these features define different phonetic facts about sounds of languages, and if you have enough of these kinds of facts, you can uniquely identify any sound as distinct from any other sound, in any language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Numerous relationships between features have been observed, which leads some people to impose grouping structure on certain features, for example [voice], [spread glottis] and [constricted glottis] are often grouped together under the label “Laryngeal”, and there are claims about the possibility of operating on multiple features just in case they are together in such a group. Other such groupings that have been proposed are “vowel height”, “vowel place”, and these in turn may be grouped into a set “place”. These groupings allow for certain kinds of simultaneous change (i.e. change in multiple features by one rule), so that [back] and [round] could change at the same time by a rule, but not [back] and [nasal].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other kinds of relations that have been observed, for example we know that voiced uvular stops are very rare, i.e. [+voice] does not frequently combine with [+back,-hi]. Or, there is a frequently observed relationship in vowels between the features for height and the feature nasal, but no significant relationship between frontness and nasality. There have been various attempts to make such correlations be part of the theory of phonological features, but I have to say that they have not been particularly successful, especially since the problems are not about impossible or unattested patterns, just less-common ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T04:51:18.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17099" CreationDate="2016-03-25T07:01:05.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonological rules and sound changes are changes to articulation.  The changes are blind to phonemes or other specific sound segments -- they see only articulations and change only articulations.  This characterization is rather idiosyncratic; I don't know that any other linguist would agree with it.  But that's my idea about the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the study of phonological changes, the only reason to be concerned with individual sounds is methodological.  We don't observe the changes directly, but we see the effects of a change on individual sounds.  We then make a theory about the articulations involved: what articulations are changed?  What articulations are required of neighboring parts of a pronunciation in order for the change to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the theory of phonological changes and the facts we can observe to find out about the changes are different.  The theory concerns articulations; the facts are usually changes to individual sounds.  We have to be concerned about the relationship between these two things.  All of the individual sounds that share an articulation make up a natural class.  In Generative Phonology, this is commonly annotated by describing an articulation as a conjunction of feature specifications, but that is just a notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we observe phonological changes through their effects on individual sounds, we expect to see all natural classes, since the changes are articulatory, and the set of sounds sharing an articulation is a natural class of sounds.  If it appears that one of the sets of sounds involved is not a natural class, then that's a problem.  The observation must be wrong, or the theory is wrong.  Phonologists are usually especially interested in such problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some phonologists think that perceptual factors, as well as articulations, play a role in phonological changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difference between the account I have just given and the standard in Generative Phonology concerns describing articulations using disjunctions of features, which is countenanced in Generative Phonology.  However, disjunctions of features in phonological rules make no sense, to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a feature is required to describe the class of sounds that undergo some phonological change, or the sounds in the environment that condition the change, that is evidence for including the feature in the feature system.  The feature [syllabic] that you ask about was introduced in &lt;strong&gt;SPE&lt;/strong&gt; with the justification that it is required to formulate a phonological change discussed by C.-J. Bailey.  I'm afraid I've forgotten the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-03-25T07:13:43.597" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T07:13:43.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17121" CreationDate="2016-03-25T09:56:09.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there are a small class of morphemes called &lt;strong&gt;interfixes&lt;/strong&gt; which are needed for phonological reasons, but are not considered to carry any semantic content. One example is the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;humaniform&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T09:56:09.240" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17147" CreationDate="2016-03-25T12:58:40.980" Score="3" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about a constructed language called &quot;Toki Pona&quot; that is touted to have only 120 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know are there any examples of any natural languages notable for their simplicity or relative lack of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12798" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:28:21.380" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:28:21.380" Title="Examples of small, minimalistic natural languages?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17135" CreationDate="2016-03-25T20:00:17.933" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a source which gives the PIE origin: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1589.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/X/P1589.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But it only lists Slavic reflexes. Are there related words in Persian or Sanskrit? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia claims the name of the Indian goddess Radha is related &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha#Etymology&lt;/a&gt;, but gives no source for this claim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12799" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T23:24:47.277" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T23:24:47.277" Title="Does the Slavic word rā́dъ have cognates in Indo-iranian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17133" CreationDate="2016-03-25T20:23:43.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology of Slavic root is also unclear. Vasmer writes that Greek sources give the following versions of the names of Slavic princes: ᾽Αρδάγαστος, ᾽Αρδαμέρι, which are evidently the versions of Slavic names Radogostь &quot;happy with guests&quot; and Radoměrь respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hints the root had something before the r-. Some link it to Greek root ἔρως &quot;love&quot; which in turn also has obscure etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this theory wrong, then possible cognates (according to Vasmer) are Anglo-Saxon rǿtu &quot;joy&quot; and Old Islandic rǿtask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note by the way, that PIE prohibited roots starting with r- altogether, a rule about which Vasmer (and Pokorny) could not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-03-25T20:40:24.697" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T20:40:24.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17133" CreationDate="2016-03-26T01:17:24.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As so often, Wikipedia is completely wrong about this. The Sanskrit name Rādhā cannot possibly be related to Persian rād “generous”. Indo-Iranian post-vocalic dh becomes y in Persian, not d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T01:17:24.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T05:28:35.513" Score="-2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 178  &lt;em&gt;Understanding Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (4 ed, 2014) by Prof. Maggie Tallerman PhD in Linguistics &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/maggie.tallerman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(U. Hull)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The author is using (84) and (85) to introduce Bar Notation. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In (84), &lt;em&gt;admired&lt;/em&gt; has a slightly different direct object. Here, I bracket the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; object NP, but without specifying its internal structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(84) I admired [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; the director’s treatment of the issues and sensitivity to the&#xA;  problems].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inside the full NP, two smaller strings of words are conjoined. Unlike in (83),&#xA;  however, the conjoined strings in (84) are not full NPs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The conjuncts are &lt;em&gt;treatment of the issues&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sensitivity to the problems&lt;/em&gt;. If you didn’t&#xA;  get this, think about what (84) means; the specifier (Section 4.1.8) &lt;em&gt;the director’s&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  applies to both conjuncts: it’s both the director’s treatment of the issues and her&#xA;  sensitivity that you admire. So within the direct object NP we have two conjoined&#xA;  strings as shown in bold in (85):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(85) I admired     [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; the director’s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[1.] treatment of the issues&lt;/strong&gt;] and [&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[2.] sensitivity to&#xA;  the problems&lt;/strong&gt;] &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If co-ordination is a reliable test for constituency, we must conclude that both of&#xA;  these sequences in bold are constituents. However, they’re not members of any category we’ve seen before, which is why I indicate the category with subscript&#xA;  question marks instead of the real category labels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author then states that 1 and 2 are N' (N-bar). But why cannot 1 and 2 be classified as (shorter) Noun Phrases, within the larger Noun Phrase in (85)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T05:48:15.353" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T06:15:26.133" Title="'treatment of the issues' and 'sensitivity to the problems': Why cannot these be Noun Phrases?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17136" CreationDate="2016-03-26T06:53:06.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one thing, you can't combine a Det with a NP in order to create a NP.  *&quot;[NP the [NP the director] ]&quot;. So since the Det &quot;the director's&quot; combines with 1 &quot;[?? treatment of the issues]&quot; to make the NP &quot;[NP the director's treatment of the issues]&quot;, you know that 1 can't be a NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T06:53:06.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T07:25:11.077" Score="1" ViewCount="1086" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read about MCE in Yule’s &lt;em&gt;The Study of Language&lt;/em&gt; and it raised my curiosity on how different MCE is from ASL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12641" LastEditorUserId="113" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T15:19:42.263" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T15:19:42.263" Title="How is Manually Coded English (MCE) different from American Sign Language (ASL)?" Tags="&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17138" CreationDate="2016-03-26T08:20:09.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language, like all sign languages, is a fully fledged natural human language. It is not some form of American English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manually Coded English uses the signs from ASL to communicate the English language. It could be considered a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relexification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;relexification&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a pidgin. In practice it has as much similarity to ASL as if someone replaced every English word with one from Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T08:20:09.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17092" CreationDate="2016-03-26T12:38:36.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the phenomenon have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's called regression or regressive fixation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are these mistakes common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very. Even skilled readers make them all the time, typically when an unexpected word breaks their flow. It's one of the key parameters studied in eye-tracking experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond stating the obvious, there are subtle reasons why the reading process suffers from intermittent failures and corrections. These corrections can be used to understand 1. how a beginner approaches a new language, 2. what kinds of sentence structures impede comprehension, 3. what kinds of fonts are best for various kinds of text, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an arbitrary list of papers, if you want to explore the topic further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4089416/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hc08_v2_paper4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An Eye Tracking Study of How Font Size and Type&#xA;Influence Online Reading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindawi.com/journals/joph/2014/120528/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Using Eye Tracking to Assess Reading Performance in Patients with Glaucoma: A Within-Person Study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3075059/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Eye movements, the perceptual span, and reading speed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T12:38:36.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17143" CreationDate="2016-03-26T14:12:51.613" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd love to find a machine-readable list of language families that use the three-letter ISO language codes. It would be like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic: eng, enm, deu, dut, ...&#xA;Romance: fra, ita, spa, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a thing exist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T14:35:22.760" Title="Is there a structured list of language families using ISO language codes?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17142" CreationDate="2016-03-26T15:02:40.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there isn't a crisp distinction between &quot;language family&quot; and other levels of relatedness, there cannot be one, in principle. However, Glottolog provides relatedness information for all languages whereby one can select the subset of languages that are under sub-group X, be it &quot;Western Romance&quot;, &quot;Romance&quot; or &quot;Indo-European&quot;. They subsume all such concepts under the term &quot;languoid&quot;. You can read about it &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/glottologinformation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. They have everything posted, and you would want glottolog-languoid.csv.zip. The conceptual key is to find the specific group (higher-level &quot;languoid&quot;) that you're interested in, and then select the languages that trace back to that particular level. Of course, if you disagree with their subgroupings, well, that's pretty common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T15:02:40.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T16:39:03.197" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I. Are any simple algorithms which attempt to &quot;learn&quot; the grammar of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: I feed into the program a few thousand books worth of English, and want a program which could analyse the text and group together words which have a similar function. Ie it could group words into distinct groups based on similar usage - ie it could figure out how to group words that are used similarly (e.g. into verbs and nouns, etc). Are there any good resources which deal with this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. Are there any other good ways of &quot;training&quot; a program with lots of example sentences and then trying to generate new sentences which fit the grammar?  (Apart from Markov chains.)  If grammar induction isn't too difficult, then you could potentially use that to generate new sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if my question isn't clear, I haven't too much experience in machine learning/linguistics but do any of you have any resources or places to point me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12807" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T23:53:28.440" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T08:09:00.337" Title="How difficult is grammar induction/sentence generation?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-06T10:52:44.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17145" CreationDate="2016-03-26T17:10:33.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has some discussion of &lt;em&gt;learnability&lt;/em&gt; along with relevant references: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_identification_in_the_limit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Language identification in the limit&lt;/a&gt;. And here is an interesting paper by Geoff Pullum: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kornai.com/MatLing/learn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Learnability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-03-26T17:38:28.913" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T17:38:28.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17132" CreationDate="2016-03-26T18:54:41.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one single ritual language that comes quite close with a vocabulary of only some 150 words (having quite broad senses like the Toki Pona ones), namely the aboriginal language Damin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12809" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T18:54:41.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17107" CreationDate="2016-03-26T19:13:39.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per Apte's dictionary (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.3:1:4913.apte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.3:1:4913.apte&lt;/a&gt;), the word &lt;code&gt;प्रकट&lt;/code&gt; means &#xA;&lt;code&gt;Evident, plain, clear, apparent, manifest&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit, we can form a verb out of a noun by adding special prefixes against it. (Similarly a noun can be created by adding a suffix to a verb). The rules for making such transformations are given by Panini's rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going into too much detail, there's a गणसूत्रम् &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;तत्करोति तदाचष्टे&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It mandates adding the प्रत्ययः णिच् to any noun to generate a verb that means &quot;he does the action denoted by this noun&quot;. &#xA;Here, we can add the suffix &lt;code&gt;णिच्&lt;/code&gt; against the nouns &lt;code&gt;प्रकट&lt;/code&gt; and explain the formation of a new verb as&#xA;&lt;code&gt;प्रकटं करोति&lt;/code&gt; (he makes evident) = प्रकटयति&#xA;The derivation of the verbal root would be as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकट + णिच्&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;resulting in the word प्रकटि&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This word will not get the संज्ञा (name) धातुः by &lt;code&gt;3-1-32 सनाद्यन्ता धातवः&lt;/code&gt; Once it is a verb, you can generate verbal forms for it in all the 10 tenses (moods inclusive). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the लिँट् लकारः (used for past tense, where the event wasn't witnessed), the प्रक्रिया (method of derivation) is as below. It may be overwhelming to someone who hasn't studied Panini, but I'm giving it here for completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटि + लिँट् &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटि + आम् लिँट् । &lt;code&gt;कास्यनेकाच आम् वक्यव्यः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटय् आम् लिँट् । &lt;code&gt;6-4-55 अयामन्ताल्वाय्येत्न्विष्णुषु&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् । &lt;code&gt;2-4-81 आमः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अस् लिँट् । &lt;code&gt;3-1-40 कृञ् चानुप्रयुज्यते लिटि&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अस् तिप् । &lt;code&gt;3-4-78&#xA;  तिप्तस्झिसिप्थस्थमिब्वस्मस्तातांझथासाथांध्वमिड्वहिमहिङ्&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अस् णल्  । &lt;code&gt;3-4-82 परस्मैपदानां णलतुसुस्थलथुसणल्वमाः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अस् अ ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अस् अस् अ । &lt;code&gt;6-1-8 लिटि धातोरनभ्यासस्य&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् अ अस् अ । &lt;code&gt;7-4-60 हलादिः शेषः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् आ अस् अ । &lt;code&gt;7-4-70 अत आदेः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् आ अास् अ । &lt;code&gt;7-2-116 अत उपधायाः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयाम् आस् अ । &lt;code&gt;6-1-101 अकः सवर्णे दीर्घः&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;प्रकटयामास&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;code&gt;समादिदिशुः&lt;/code&gt; is also third-person plular of, लिँट्-लकारः, literally meaning &quot;they taught&quot;. I can post the derivation if your are interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivation of आदिदिशुः is done thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश अतिसर्जने + लिँट् &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश् लिँट् । &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश् झि ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश् उस्  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश् उस् । &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिश् दिश् उस् ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दि दिश् उस् । &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;दिदिशुः ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;उपसर्गाः&lt;/code&gt; (prefixes) &lt;code&gt;सम्&lt;/code&gt; (well) and &lt;code&gt;आङ्&lt;/code&gt; (completely) can potentially give a different meaning to verbal form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever possible, we should try to derive verbal forms directly from verbal roots by adding suffixes. &lt;code&gt;प्रकटयामास&lt;/code&gt; is an exception to this rule since meanings of the verb &lt;code&gt;कटे वर्षावरणयोः&lt;/code&gt; are different from what the word (i.e &lt;code&gt;प्रकटयामास&lt;/code&gt;) means. We could still use the weight of &lt;code&gt;उपसर्गः&lt;/code&gt; (i.e &lt;code&gt;प्र&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;धातूनाम् अनेकार्थत्तवम्&lt;/code&gt; (verbs have different meanings) to derive &lt;code&gt;प्रकटयामास&lt;/code&gt; directly from the verb. This is the vast flexibility available in the language, making it unique!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dictionary only helps in giving meanings to verbal roots and nouns/adjectives. Since there are 10 tenses in sanskrit, and each tense can have up to 18 forms (3 for each person in singular, dual and plural and sometimes आत्मनेपदम् and परस्मैपदम्) a dictionary can never enumerate such words. You will have better luck referring to other books such as Brihad-dhatu-rupavali or Dhatu-rupa-manjari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T20:32:39.860" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T20:32:39.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17145" CreationDate="2016-03-26T20:09:12.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you seek a &lt;strong&gt;syntactic language model&lt;/strong&gt; (as opposed to a basic lexical (n-gram) language model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that you need text data that has been annotated with the syntactic trees, or a parser (which was trained on such text data, and will give some good - but imperfect - annotations on your data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could then generate random (lexically improbable and semantically nonsensical) grammatical text from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note though that &lt;a href=&quot;http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical and even character-level models with no concept of grammar work well enough for many purposes&lt;/a&gt;, especially for a language like English without much agreement and even less long-distance agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could read more about parsing at &lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/blog/how-spacy-works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spacy.io/blog/how-spacy-works&lt;/a&gt;.  Note that good parsers like spaCy do infer the function of a made-up word from context, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=This%20xexample%20is%20breanking%20the%20rools.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dTuq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dTuq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-03-27T07:38:32.637" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T07:38:32.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T20:39:27.493" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;What dictionary does WordNet use for the various senses it lists for each word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12812" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T21:22:02.263" Title="Dictionary used by WordNet for word senses" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2016-03-26T20:48:18.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently in the process of learning the kanji with Heisigs &quot;Remembering the kanji&quot;. &#xA;Im at 1530 kanjis now. Im learning the kanji parallel to learning japanese with the Minna no nihongo books.&#xA;Im not learning the kanji with the minna books, im solely relying on heisig here. &#xA;I also have the second book here that teaches the readings, and I will proceed to it once Ive successfully finished book 1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not qualified to say anything about the necessity of kanji.&#xA;But I feel qualified enough to say something about their disadvantages. &#xA;It takes ridiculous amounts of time and effort to learn this writing system. &#xA;For Foreigners trying to learn the language during adulthood, its very difficult because without the kanji, you cant practice japanese outside your exercise books except for oral communication (with a native speaker at best). &#xA;Concerning japanese folks living in japan, well they have it just as hard as anyone else. &#xA;10-12 years of kanji education speak for themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its not like I &quot;hate&quot; Kanji. I find them funny. But its a very costly hobby to learn them. Its paid in gigantic amounts of time. &#xA;Sticking to them of course is a question of &quot;personal&quot; choice (if you can speak of a personal choice in such a context). Because there is no objective pro-argument big enough to justify sticking to such a horribly complicated writing system. &#xA;The only major point I see is the cultural disconnect once you abolish the system. Although it would be possible to invest into transcribing the texts deemed most valuable into kana, so they remain readable after the shift as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kanji are stylish, they are funny and they are impressive (for having lasted so long). But they are utterly useless from a pragmatic perspective. &#xA;And I must contradict those claiming that the kanji make the intake of information easier. I can speedread texts in my own language at least as fast as someone speedreading with kanji. Skimming through an average article in a newspaper takes me between 5-30 seconds, depending on how much details I want to extract. &#xA;I'm not used enough to kanji yet, so I might err, but in my opinion the kanji might even slow you down, because sometimes the details making for a semantical difference are very small and therefore hard to decipher. &#xA;But in any case, I would take any bet that I can read and comprehend just as fast as any user of kanji. &#xA;The only difference between me and him would be that it took me about 12 months to learn reading any native word in my language, while it took him 12 years to achieve that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T20:48:18.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17151" CreationDate="2016-03-26T21:22:02.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK none, the original Wordnet was built up by hand from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2016-03-26T21:22:02.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4478" CreationDate="2016-03-27T03:56:22.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to make the distinction is that:&#xA; - 'ong' should be rendered as either [awŋm] or [oŋm].&#xA; - 'oong' should be rendered as either [awŋ] or [oŋ]. &#xA;So the difference is in fact the bilabial nasal. The same phenomenon appears in the following pair 'ông' vs dialectal 'ôông'   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12818" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T03:56:22.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17192" CreationDate="2016-03-27T06:27:32.203" Score="1" ViewCount="1737" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on designing a piece of software that must support multiple languages. There is a design scheme in English at the moment that displays weekdays using a single character (ie: &quot;S M T W T F S&quot;). I know something similar can be done in french. I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I need to know if this cannot be done in any of these languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simplified Chinese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Traditional Chinese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Norwegian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Czech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovenian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Portuguese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hungarian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romanian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovak&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turkish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that Japanese and Chinese have 3 character names for the week days which basically tranlate to &quot;Star period 1&quot;, &quot;Star period 2&quot; etc. and the characters for &quot;Star period&quot; repeat and then the character for the number changes. My question is could you label a column in a table &quot;Star period&quot; and put the character numbers as values in the different rows? Would chinese/japanese people understand this design scheme? Or do all three characters need to be together all the time?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12819" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:00:16.427" Title="Weekday Abbreviations in multiple languages" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:46:08.553" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-27T10:11:28.787" Score="0" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for an allomorph of a morpheme to have another allomorph that is a free form? Could you give an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T13:51:22.613" Title="About allomorphs of morphemes" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-29T02:09:08.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17159" CreationDate="2016-03-27T13:51:22.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is by definition meaningless (contains a false presupposition). A morpheme is an abstraction ranging over a particular set of surface strings having certain properties of form and meaning. An allomorph is one of those concrete contextually determined realizations of a morpheme. Assume a morpheme A which has the realizations {b,c,d,e}. If /A/ is realised as [b] in a context, then it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; realized as [c], [d] or [e]. Even if you believe that in some context you first get &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and then that &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;, [c] is an allomorph of /A/, not of /B/. &quot;Allomorph of allomorph&quot; is a conceptual contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-27T13:51:22.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-28T15:12:47.083" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is, are there certain conceptual primitives, such as object, action, structure, property, logic, event, quantity, partial, paradox, system, concept, etc, or connectives/judgements, such as for all, in which, or, false, there exists, such that, true, and, etc that rather than being merely tools to discuss concrete matters of logic and mathematics are themselves invariant and as such matters of study in their own right, and admissible to a concrete semantic model (or set thereof)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10027" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T02:07:58.243" Title="Could there be such a thing as a universal logical language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2016-03-28T16:09:18.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;the Georgian letter ყ is difficult for most Westerners to pronounce. It is similar to the Arabic &quot;qaf&quot; (ﻕ)&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak Arabic and Georgian (elementary). some have said &quot;ﻕ&quot; have the same sound as 'q&quot; whereas &quot;ყ&quot; has the sound of &quot; q' &quot;. &#xA;but that is incorrect, since the sound of &quot;ﻕ&quot; has no equivalent in English or any Indo-European languages, and that goes for the Georgian Versions. To be precise, &quot;ﻕ&quot; and &quot;ყ&quot; share the same sounds in certain cases, coming from the back of throat with a little stop/change. however, the problem with &quot;ﻕ&quot;  as every Arabic alphabet, the change that occurs depending on the word, will change the sound produced, whether it becomes harsher or softer than the original sound. whereas in dialects such as Saudi version it is pronounced as &quot;ga&quot;, egyptian is silent, sudanese as &quot;k&quot; , and Yemeni as &quot;q&quot; ... BUT the original, proper read Arabic &quot;&quot;ﻕ&quot; has a distinct sound not found in English and most languages other than Georgia and possible Farsi and Urdu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12831" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T16:09:18.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17163" CreationDate="2016-03-28T16:10:22.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question in the title asks about a language, but the body of the question asks about semantic concepts, which are not the same thing, so I don't know what you're really asking about. So I will assume that you're asking about relations between natural languages (including hypothetical ones) and semantic concepts. &quot;Paradox&quot;, for example, is not a primitive, it is a higher-level concept derived from &quot;proposition&quot;, &quot;truth&quot;, &quot;denial&quot; and &quot;existence&quot; among other things. Being &quot;primitive&quot; is different from &quot;being an extremely convenient concept&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these concepts, for example &quot;object&quot; (by which I assume you mean &quot;thing&quot;) and &quot;action&quot; are indeed essential to human cognition, and a model of the mind or of a language which did not have analogous concepts would not be tenable. Some of your proposals are probably not universal, for example &quot;system&quot; is a rather advanced abstraction that is unlikely to exist in some languages. There probably is no word that replicates &quot;system&quot; in the Taa languages. That doesn't mean that speakers are incapable of grasping such a concept including taking the word &quot;system&quot; into their language as a way of expressing the concept, it simply means that there is probably no such pre-existing concept in the language. So then it could be of some interest to theories of epistemology, cognition and language to identify any truly universally-present concepts vs. those that might be missing in some language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All connectives express some kind of concept, and are typically logical-jargon ways of succinctly verbalizing notations that are often used in logical formalism. They generally are not used as such in natural language. I would say that separating judgments from concepts is a mistake: judgments like &quot;all&quot;, &quot;true&quot; are not really different from &quot;tall&quot;, &quot;fish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T16:10:22.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-28T16:28:48.297" Score="1" ViewCount="3442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a class today in an introductory linguistics course and some of the concepts are not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, what is the difference between semantics and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;A: &quot;Did you have a good time yesterday&quot;&#xA;B: &quot;I fell of the stairs and had to leave the party too early&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between semantical analysis of this conversation to pragmatical analysis of this conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second: In Frege's theory of sense and reference. What is the the meaning of reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a statement like:&#xA;&quot;God is nature and Nature is God&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are two senses in this statement. One is &quot;God&quot; and one is &quot;Nature&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, is there a reference here at all? I mean, some people will not agree that God is nature. Some people will not agree that God exists at all.&#xA;So, can the two senses &quot;God&quot; and &quot;Nature&quot; point to the same object if not everyone agrees that this object exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12832" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T09:27:32.097" Title="What is the difference between Semantics and Pragmatics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-29T09:46:08.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17166" CreationDate="2016-03-28T17:34:56.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we raise issues concerning the people who are communicating, that's doing pragmatics.  If we don't need to raise such issues, we can stick to discussing semantics.  In your example, if I were to ask if the &quot;you&quot; in what A says actually referred to person B, I would be raising a pragmatic concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference concerns individuals, while sense goes beyond that concern to consider how we figure out things about individuals. If I tell you I saw a unicorn nibbling at some lettuce in my garden this morning, you might be inclined on a referential semantic analysis to say that was false, but if you want to take into account that in some imaginary worlds, such things might happen, you might explore the sense of the term &quot;unicorn&quot; for me.  Did it have a single horn, and so on?  Perhaps I am commencing a story for you about a world where unicorns do exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility that various worlds can be populated by various individuals prompts some semanticians to describe the senses of terms, i.e. concepts, as being functions telling you for various worlds what individuals the terms refer to in those worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T17:34:56.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17163" CreationDate="2016-03-28T18:01:07.867" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, there could be.  There is. Predicate logic is a logical language, and it is universal among those humans who know it, inconsequential notational variations aside.  I hesitate to say for sure whether it is the same for the entities on Arcturus IV, but it is hard for me to imagine that it will prove to be any different, out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T18:01:07.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16934" CreationDate="2016-03-28T19:36:36.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use a converter, such as the ClearNLP &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/clearnlp/wikis/C2DConvert.wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;C2DConvert&lt;/a&gt; for this, which takes PTB trees (&lt;em&gt;constituency parses&lt;/em&gt;) and converts to &lt;em&gt;dependency parses&lt;/em&gt; in CLEAR style, or ConLL (TSV), format, which Malt and ClearNLP and other parsers use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will convert this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;((S (NP-SBJ (NP (NNP Pierre)&#xA;                (NNP Vinken))&#xA;            (, ,)&#xA;            (ADJP (NML (CD 61)&#xA;                       (NNS years))&#xA;                  (JJ old))&#xA;            (, ,))&#xA;    (VP (MD will)&#xA;        (VP (VB join)&#xA;            (NP (DT the)&#xA;                (NN board))&#xA;            (PP-CLR (IN as)&#xA;                    (NP (DT a)&#xA;                        (JJ nonexecutive)&#xA;                        (NN director)))&#xA;            (NP-TMP (NNP Nov.)&#xA;                    (CD 29))))&#xA;    (. .)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1       Pierre  pierre  NNP     _       2       nn      _&#xA;2       Vinken  vinken  NNP     _       9       nsubj   _&#xA;3       ,       ,       ,       _       2       punct   _&#xA;4       61      0       CD      _       5       num     _&#xA;5       years   year    NNS     _       6       npadvmod        _&#xA;6       old     old     JJ      _       2       amod    _&#xA;7       ,       ,       ,       _       2       punct   _&#xA;8       will    will    MD      _       9       aux     _&#xA;9       join    join    VB      _       0       root    _&#xA;10      the     the     DT      _       11      det     _&#xA;11      board   board   NN      _       9       dobj    _&#xA;12      as      as      IN      syn=CLR 9       prep    _&#xA;13      a       a       DT      _       15      det     _&#xA;14      nonexecutive    nonexecutive    JJ      _       15      amod    _&#xA;15      director        director        NN      _       12      pobj    _&#xA;16      Nov.    nov.    NNP     sem=TMP 9       npadvmod        _&#xA;17      29      0       CD      _       16      num     _&#xA;18      .       .       .       _       9       punct   _&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11372" LastEditorUserId="11372" LastEditDate="2016-03-28T20:56:38.380" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T20:56:38.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14578" CreationDate="2016-03-28T22:40:18.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deep Linguistic Analysis for Topic-level Analysis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bitext’s API uses Deep Linguistic Analysis based on grammars, which allows for opinion analysis not only at the sentence level, but also at the phrase level within the sentence. This is possible because the syntactic analysis identifies the different phrases (noun phrases, adjective phrases, verb phrases etc) and their dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentiment analysis service is not limited to extracting a single opinion per sentence. It can actually detect as many opinions as the sentence contains. For example in the sentence “This phone is awesome, but it was much too expensive and the screen is not big enough”, three opinions will be extracted: “phone” + “awesome”, “phone” + “much too expensive” and “screen” + “not big enough”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The service can therefore perform topic detection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an entity (brand/person/product/place…)&#xA;a concept (like “global warming”, “public policies” or “financial crisis”).&#xA;and detect exactly which features or attributes of the topic are being discussed.&#xA;Deep Linguistic Analysis accurately handles complex structures like negation: “their new camera is really not bad at all”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentiment analysis service handles complex language structures which play a major role in sentiment analysis, such as negation or comparative sentences. Deep Linguistic Analysis automatically handles these structures and can capture the difference between opinions like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This phone is much better than my old phone.” – Positive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This phone is not much better than my old phone.” – Negative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bitext.com/text-analysis-technology/text-analysis-cloud-services-api/sentiment-analysis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.bitext.com/text-analysis-technology/text-analysis-cloud-services-api/sentiment-analysis/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AlchemyAPI helps developers and businesses build cognitive applications through text analysis and deep learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mashape.com/alchemyapi/alchemyapi-1#!documentation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.mashape.com/alchemyapi/alchemyapi-1#!documentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-03-28T22:40:18.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2016-03-29T06:24:27.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make it explicit, Consider the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hey, How you doin'?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Semantics the sentence just asks about how the other person is doing, Or how he/she feels etc. But pragmatics says that if a guy (joey!) tells this sentence to a female, it means that he might be hitting on her. In another view Semantics is affected by the meaning of the sentence in whole but Pragmatics is more or less affected by the socio-cultural variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-29T06:25:13.113" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T06:25:13.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17166" CreationDate="2016-03-29T09:27:32.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To ask about Nature and God is like talking about Unicorns: already a mistake. Semantically, we should reject such talk, for it is illogical (= wor(d/th)less); pragmatically, however, we do answer, and cannot but. The question asks itself and will not go away however I might. I tried to point at things but reference wouldn't do. When you take a bicycle apart none of the parts seem to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3634" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T09:27:32.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16934" CreationDate="2016-03-29T13:40:38.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will need an oracle finding algorithm. Basically, given the gold standard dependency tree, the oracle finding algorithm tells you what is the next optimal action on a certain state. From the beginning state, you repeatedly apply the optimal action to your state and you can achieve the final state at last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different transition systems have different oracle finding algorithms. For the arc-standard system, see Figure 3 in &lt;code&gt;Nivre (2008), Algorithms for deterministic incremental dependency parsing&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli.07-056-R1-07-027&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli.07-056-R1-07-027&lt;/a&gt;. In this figure, the precondition rows actually say if your current state satisfy the condition, you can do LEFT-ARC, RIGHT-ARC, or SHIFT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the arc-eager system, see Figure 5 in the same paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4840" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T13:40:38.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T14:25:48.947" Score="6" ViewCount="4089" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the {-ing} of a gerund a verbal inflectional suffix or a nominal derivational one?&#xA;For instance, in the sentence &lt;code&gt;Swimming is a great hobby.&lt;/code&gt; , &lt;code&gt;swimming&lt;/code&gt; is a gerund and it has the syntactical role of the subject of the verb. If we divided the gerund into morphemes, what would we say that {-ing} is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T17:39:40.160" Title="Is the {-ing} of the gerund a verbal inflectional suffix?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17142" CreationDate="2016-03-29T14:35:22.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ISO codes were directly taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;. This work also contains a language classification, e.g., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ayta, Ambala&#xA;A language of the Philippines&#xA;&#xA;Classification Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Philippine, Central Luzon, Sambalic&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information should be automatically extractable. Note that &quot;The Ethnologue&quot; presents one point of view concerning the classification, other authors might disagree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T14:35:22.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17175" CreationDate="2016-03-29T17:17:11.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The -ing ending of the English gerund is inflectional, since suffixing it does not change the part of speech, and this is generally taken as distinguishing English inflection from derivation.  Adding a derivational suffix does change the part of speech, but adding -ing to a verb to get a gerund leaves you with the same part of speech, since a gerund is a verb (contrary to what StoneyB says above in a comment) and not a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the ways to tell a noun from a verb are (1) see if it takes an article (nouns do; verbs don't), (2) see if it can be modified by an adjective (nouns can be; verbs can't be), (3) see if it can be modified by an adverb (verbs can be; nouns can't be), or (4) see if it can take a direct object (transitive verbs can; nouns can't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example &quot;Swimming is a great hobby&quot; is a little tricky, though, because there is nothing there in the subject to tell us unequivocally that &quot;swimming&quot; is a verb and not a noun, and because there is a derivational ending -ing that can sometimes be used to derive nouns (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; gerunds) from verbs.  If I add a direct object of &quot;swim&quot;, though, I get something which can only be a gerund, i.e. a verb form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swimming the Atlantic is a great hobby.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this example should show what is wrong with your statement that a gerund has the syntactic role of subject.  It doesn't.  In the above example, &quot;swimming the Atlantic&quot; is the subject, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;swimming&quot;.  In your example, it is the noun phrase made up of the gerund &quot;swimming&quot; which is the subject, not the gerund.  Verbs can't be subjects.  But this is not obvious when you consider just simple one word subjects, because then you can't see the difference between the noun phrase subject and the contents of that noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T17:17:11.047" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T17:31:25.363" Score="-9" ViewCount="700" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me clarify what I mean by &quot;harsh&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; with an example: Suppose that you've just arrived in a strange planet and an alien is approaching you repeating just one vowel! Your feelings will certainly differ if the vowel is /ʏ/ or /aː/. In the first case it sounds somewhat more hostile (or at least more unfriendly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T05:45:10.553" Title="Why Germanic languages are not generally as soft as other Indo-European languages?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-03-30T00:11:02.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17179" CreationDate="2016-03-29T19:44:44.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is due to the cold winter temperatures of Scandinavia, where Germanic languages originated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tlgK0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tlgK0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harsh vowels heat the throat, but, as you note, they are also a factor in wartime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, speakers with &quot;softer&quot; vowels like /aː/ either succumbed to evolution or moved South and joined the Romans (giving birth to French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian, which is a Slavic language, did not undergo the same change because vodka also heats the throat.  The Sami and Inuit are naturally evolved to the cold temperatures, so they have no need for heating vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably guessed by now, languages in very hot regions experienced the opposite effect.  So although some people consider Arabic ﻉ to be harsh, linguistically it cannot possibly be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most aliens tend to land in New Mexico, where both English and Spanish are common, we assume they have returned to their home planet with mixed reports about the &quot;harshness&quot; of earth's inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T05:45:10.553" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T05:45:10.553" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-29T21:11:24.050" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether there exists some general reference on corpus annotation schemes. I looked at two of the main NLP textbooks [1-2], but they don't seem to have any chapter focusing on it. Yet, the annotation scheme can be critical during the annotation phase or downstream when using the annotations for NLP systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] Manning, Christopher D., and Hinrich Schütze. Foundations of statistical natural language processing. Vol. 999. Cambridge: MIT press, 1999.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] Martin, James H., and Daniel Jurafsky. &quot;Speech and language processing.&quot; International Edition (2000).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T06:12:27.113" Title="Reference on corpus annotation schemes" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17181" CreationDate="2016-03-30T10:28:33.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is somewhat layer dependent. For part of speech tagging there are some de facto standard tagsets (e.g., STTS for German or Penn Treebank for English) and there are attempts to create universal tagsets (for an overview see this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12777/a-list-of-parts-of-speech/12994#12994&quot;&gt;A list of parts of speech&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are also pretty standardised tagsets for named entities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other layers (like lemma) have open tagsets: Every word of the language can occur as a lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For syntactic annotation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/ressourcen/werkzeuge/TIGERSearch/doc/html/TigerXML.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiger XML&lt;/a&gt; is widely used and there are attempts to make it an ISO standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, new tagsets for new research questions are devised every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T11:22:07.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2016-03-30T11:58:51.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There certainly appears to be a common root between the words Sabbath and seven as they both speak of rest and completion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew word Seven is made up of the three root letters – &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sin , bet , ayin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is pronounced Sheva.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It speaks of completion , rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why it is the hebrew root for the word -  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SATISFIED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12846" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T11:58:51.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T13:07:34.177" Score="1" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to do some language analysis on the opening paragraph of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, specifically looking at phrasal constituents. The first sentence is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a pretty good idea of what the phrasal constituents are, but I'm a bit unsure as to how to draw the tree, as it seems like the tree should be split into two distinct branches, splitting at the comma after twelve. I've uploaded an image of my tree, but I'm not sure if it's correct or not. Any help would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/caPmQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/caPmQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12847" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T19:01:08.583" Title="Drawing a phrasal constituent tree for a specific sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15114" CreationDate="2016-03-30T13:11:12.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering manual annotation, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webanno/webanno&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WebAnno&lt;/a&gt;, a very flexible annotation tool that allows you to define your own annotation layers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a web user interface and allows for collaborative annotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T13:11:12.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17184" CreationDate="2016-03-30T14:50:24.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To tell whether your tree is correct, you need to find some way to connect the tree to facts of language, and then to actually look at those relevant facts.  So far, it seems, you don't have a clue about how to do that.  I can help, by telling you a way to do that.  It's not a way you will perhaps agree with, or that any other linguist in this wide world agrees with, but it may give you a starting point in figuring out how to do grammatical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By facts of language, I mean the actual occurrence of an expression in speech or writing, or a judgement from a native speaker about whether an expression is acceptable in his language, or about what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is what you do.  It's some trouble, but conceptually it is very straightforward.  I'll be more specific below, but in outline, you (1) find a context free phrase structure grammar (PSG) that generates your tree, (2) determine what other trees this PSG generates, (3) find out whether the expressions these other trees describe are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It there are no other expressions to evaluate, your theory is trivial, and it doesn't really matter whether it's correct.  If the other expressions are acceptable in English, you've got a correct tree.  If the other expressions are unacceptable, your tree is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, to generate a tree, a PSG has a rule for each mother node in the tree that has certain daughter nodes, where the rule permits that mother to have those daughters.  That's it.  There are few simpler theories.  (There have to be a finite number of different rules, different mothers, and different daughters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T14:50:24.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T16:13:01.783" Score="1" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having difficulty figuring out how to draw a syntax tree for the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bill reported that a student asked whether the eclipse would occur.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im confused on which word is the complementiser (that, whether or would?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12849" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T16:43:59.040" Title="Complex Sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17187" CreationDate="2016-03-30T16:43:59.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A complementizer converts some phrase (usually an S) into a complement.  In the form of a phrase structure rule,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Complement -&gt; Complementizer S&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, the complementizer &quot;that&quot; converts the S &quot;a student asked whether the eclipse would occur&quot; into the complement &quot;that a student asked whether the eclipse would occur&quot;, and the complementizer &quot;whether&quot; converts the S &quot;the eclipse would occur&quot; into the complement &quot;whether the eclipse would occur&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T16:43:59.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-30T21:52:31.407" Score="1" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions on this topic. The firstmay be too general, but basically, I am curious as to how tenses evolve and whether tenses between languages can be used to help find out whether languages are related to eachother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My other question is more specific.  I am wondering whether the english plubperfect tense came from the french, past composite tense since both languages use the verb, &quot;to have&quot; to indicate the tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T23:29:07.800" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T00:09:53.190" Title="How verb tenses evolve" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17189" CreationDate="2016-03-30T23:19:28.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;English and French pluperfect constructions are not descended from a common ancestor&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English pluperfect tense (along with all the other composite tenses made with &quot;have&quot;) is not what is called &quot;genetically&quot; related to the French past composite tense (or any of the other composite tenses made with &quot;avoir&quot;). The use of &quot;genetically&quot; in the preceding sentence might be confusing; if it is, here is an explanation. It doesn't have anything to do with genes. In historical linguistics and etymology, words or structures in different languages are said to have a &quot;genetic&quot; relationship, or just to be &quot;related,&quot; only under very specific circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the two languages must descend from a common ancestral language. This is true for English and French: they have a common ancestor that is reconstructed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the words (or structures) that we are comparing must come from a common source word (or structure) in that ancestor. This is not true for &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;avoir.&lt;/em&gt; If we look these words up on Wiktionary, it says &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/have&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is descended from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*keh₂p-,&lt;/em&gt; while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avoir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is descended from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*gʰh₁bʰ-.&lt;/em&gt; These are completely different roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a third requirement: the words must have been continuously present in each language since the common ancestor. Pairs where one language has borrowed the word, such as English &lt;em&gt;infant&lt;/em&gt; and French &lt;em&gt;enfant,&lt;/em&gt; do not count as &quot;related&quot; for the purpose of historical linguistics. This is kind of an unintuitive use of the word &quot;related,&quot; so be aware that etymologists generally use the word differently from the normal, broader definition. Another term that generally means &quot;genetically related&quot; is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4667&quot;&gt;cognate&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But the languages are believed to have influenced each other in this area&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that that's said: although &quot;have&quot; and &quot;avoir&quot; are not etymologically related, it is generally believed that the use of the cognates of &quot;have&quot; in the Germanic languages influenced the use of the cognates of &quot;avoir&quot; in the Romance languages (and vice versa). If you look at this map on the World Atlas of Language Structures, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/68A#2/25.5/148.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Perfect&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; you can see that perfects formed with the verb &quot;have&quot; are generally rare (these are the languages coded as &quot;From possessive&quot;). But there's a relatively large amount of languages with this construction clustered near each other in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't know the details of how and when this construction developed, and which language group could be considered the origin of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while this similarity does not in the end show that French and English are related to each other, it does provide some evidence that they developed in the same area and influenced each other historically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T00:09:53.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17189" CreationDate="2016-03-30T23:26:25.707" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English doesn't have a &quot;pluperfect tense&quot;, so it couldn't have come from anything. English has two tenses: past and non-past. It has a progressive aspect marker (-ing) and a perfect construction (have). The various &quot;tenses&quot; like the &quot;pluperfect&quot; just arise naturally from the various combinations of those elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the origin of the English perfect construction is, but in general, it is definitely true that grammatical features including tense change. For example, you can look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's summary of Old English verbs&lt;/a&gt;, which had distinct morphological forms for infinitives, subjunctives and imperatives, none of which exist now in Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T23:26:25.707" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17157" CreationDate="2016-03-31T05:29:33.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was trying to implement a scheme like what's in the Android Clock app when choosing which days to fire an alarm off. I when through all the languages in Android and confirmed that it was possible. Basically, every one of those language has a single character scheme except for Hungarian (Magyar) which has the following scheme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V H K Sz Cs P Sz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it still fits inside the circles so design wise it didn't break anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a screenshot of the app:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a1B0f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a1B0f.png&quot; alt=&quot;Android Clock schedule&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12819" LastEditorDisplayName="user8053" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T17:44:36.130" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T17:44:36.130" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-31T09:14:24.077" Score="0" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can be sentence with unaccusative verb describing some state change on the subject changed to sentence (with different verb of course) which contains cause of that event on the subject position (like this can be done for anticausative verbs) ? I'm specially interested in the inanimate cause, like some natural force, time, fire etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John &lt;em&gt;died&lt;/em&gt;. (because he was old) =&gt; *Old age &lt;em&gt;killed&lt;/em&gt; John. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;fell&lt;/em&gt;.  =&gt; Gravity force &lt;em&gt;pulled down&lt;/em&gt; the book. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The house &lt;em&gt;burns&lt;/em&gt;. =&gt; *The fire &lt;em&gt;destroyed&lt;/em&gt; the house ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statue decay. =&gt; *The time &lt;em&gt;destroyed&lt;/em&gt; the statue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the alternatives sentences correct, only they sounds strange/silly ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastEditorUserId="5137" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T11:26:30.370" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T11:26:30.370" Title="Anticausative/unaccusative verbs - a way to express causer of the event" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-31T12:08:21.173" Score="1" ViewCount="2720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at the function of prepositional phrases within a sentence, and particularly in this example as a part of a verb phrase. The example I have is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the &lt;em&gt;first verb phrase&lt;/em&gt;, there is no prepositional phrase, the &lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt; is the direct object of the verb phrase. &lt;em&gt;I remember&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;the precise moment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;second verb phrase&lt;/em&gt;, I think the &lt;strong&gt;prepositional phrase&lt;/strong&gt; is acting as an adverb, as it describes the location of the verb. &lt;em&gt;crouching&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;behind a crumbling mud wall&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;third verb phrase&lt;/em&gt;, I'm not sure how the &lt;strong&gt;prepositional phrase&lt;/strong&gt; functions. The preposition into is confusing me. It seems like the verb is &quot;to peek into&quot; and therefore the noun phrase is the direct object of the verb. I know there are such things as verb particles but I don't think this example is one of those, as it can't be restated with the preposition at the end. My other thought is that it's a phrasal verb, but I'm not sure if that's correct and if so, how to describe the preposition. As a verb phrase complement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really confused by this, any help would be greatly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12847" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-03-31T15:16:28.977" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T16:19:24.833" Title="The function of prepositional phrases" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17184" CreationDate="2016-03-31T12:44:40.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an example to illustrate what I said about how to tell whether a tree structure is correct: find the PSG, evaluate other sentences generated by this PSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shorter version of your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I became what I am today.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSG that generates the top part of the tree you gave: (the format for a rule is [mother list-of-daughters])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S NP VP]&#xA;[NP N]&#xA;[N I]&#xA;[VP V NP]&#xA;[V became]&#xA;[NP N NP]&#xA;[N what]&#xA;[NP N VP]&#xA;[V am]&#xA;[N today]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules also generate other trees, an infinite number of them, and here is a sampling of the sentences corresponding to these trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Today am what&quot;&#xA;&quot;What I am today am I&quot;&#xA;&quot;What what what I what today became today&quot;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will notice that many, many of these additional predicted sentences are actually not acceptable.  So, by this test, your tree is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T12:44:40.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17193" CreationDate="2016-03-31T13:59:48.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not unless you think that everything that happens has a cause and that you can determine that cause (which is a religious rather than a grammatical thesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T13:59:48.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-03-31T15:24:14.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-03-31T15:24:14.633" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T15:24:14.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-03-31T15:24:14.633" Score="0" Body="American Sign Language (ASL), the predominant sign language of the USA and Canada" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-02T16:04:23.190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T16:04:23.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17175" CreationDate="2016-03-31T15:50:43.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As usual in linguistics, a lot depends on your theory of language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone has gerunds in their theory (actually most modern syntacticians don't). There are some researchers who understand &lt;em&gt;gerunds&lt;/em&gt; differently. There are linguists who are agnostic about the inflectional/derivational opposition; others have a continuum with inflection and derivation being at either end etc. There's even &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Separation_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Separation Hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; (proposed by Beard) that basically makes the criterion of word class change irrelevant to derivation/inflection etc.  - see ten Hacken 2014, who mentions Bloch-Trojnar 2006 split proposal for Irish verbal nouns (four uses are inflectional and two derivational).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;imho, your example, 'Swimming is a great hobby' (as is), is &lt;strong&gt;ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here's what CGEL actually says - by the way, imho it is one of the most sound grammatical descriptions of English that is still not terribly dated (nomina sunt odiosa) or overloaded with unnecessary, obscure, (intentionally?) ill-defined conceptual apparatus (nomina sunt odiosa again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ing- form can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. a gerundial noun:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had witnessed the &lt;em&gt;killing&lt;/em&gt; of the birds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such gerundial nouns &lt;strong&gt;can take PP complements&lt;/strong&gt; and crucially they cannot have NP complements (unlike verbs). Gerundial nouns &lt;strong&gt;can be modified by adjective&lt;/strong&gt;s (the wanton killing of the birds), as opposed to verbs, which are usually modified by adverbs (expelled for wantonly killing the birds). &lt;strong&gt;Determiners&lt;/strong&gt; are possible only with nouns (not verbs), note &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; killing of the birds&lt;/em&gt; above. Finally, nouns &lt;strong&gt;can be pluralized&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;These killings must stop.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. a participial adjective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The show was &lt;em&gt;entertaining&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. a gerund-participle form of the verb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was expelled for &lt;em&gt;killing&lt;/em&gt; the birds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;em&gt;entertaining&lt;/em&gt; the prime minister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most syntacticians would agree with (1) and (2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What HP actually proposed is (3), that &lt;strong&gt;from a purely syntactic point of view no viable distinction between what is known in traditional grammar as the gerund and present participle can be maintained.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, HP argue that sentences of the type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kim had been talking about writing&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;are ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;, unlike&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Kim hates &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; thank-you letters' (verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Kim hadn't been involved in the &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; of the letter' (noun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-03-31T16:52:48.977" LastActivityDate="2016-03-31T16:52:48.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2016-03-31T21:02:15.393" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a theory:  Original languages had few lexical words, so it made sense to have irregular versions for different grammatical functions.  Storage could simply link to the appropriate form.  As the lexicon grew, these linkages (axons) would be strained to find the right form.  If morphemes could be moved to the relation (the neuron body), then the lexical density would remain manageable.  (a tradeoff of more dendrites but shorter axons)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory can only be tested indirectly.  Its major assumption is that the brain stores 'data' in highly organized tree-like structures (as opposed to the messy structures that better handle 'processes').&#xA;The theory applies only to relations (typically verbs).  The case structure of languages does not affect the storage paradigm; it merely increases the efficiency of communication when strict ordering allows the elision of some case marking morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T22:09:37.523" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T22:09:37.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17206" CreationDate="2016-04-01T02:21:06.870" Score="2" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides Spanish where you have &lt;em&gt;comerla&lt;/em&gt; (feminine, eat her) or &lt;em&gt;comerlo&lt;/em&gt; (masculine, eat him), but only works for certain verb conjugations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other language where the gender of objects/subjects is marked in the verb conjugation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12857" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T09:07:54.173" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T05:56:27.347" Title="Is there any language in which the gender of the subject/object is marked in every verb conjugation?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T02:27:02.467" Score="-1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a translator link to change romanized or english texted sanskrit (as in bollywood and other Indian songs and chants) into actual english so that I can understand what the song means in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I am trying to translate something like this: &quot;aao huzoor tumko, sitaron mein le chaloo&quot; into (actual english words like the, love, man, woman, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12859" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T23:51:19.713" Title="Where can I find a translation for romanized (english texted) sanskrit into english?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17201" CreationDate="2016-04-01T05:23:49.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Semitic languages I know about, gender is marked on subject and object verbal markers in the 2nd and 3rd person singular (when/if there is an object marker). Berber and various Chadic languages such as Somali do likewise, so it might be generally true of Afroasiatic. Khoekhoe also somewhat marks subject gender on the verb, though this is connected to movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T05:23:49.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17201" CreationDate="2016-04-01T11:05:15.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Northeast Caucasian languages, nouns are divided into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;classes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, that category is analogous to the Indo-European and Semitic genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archi&lt;/a&gt;, a Northeast Caucasian language. It has 4 noun classes: I. male, II. female, III. inanimate objects and adult animals, IV. abstract nouns and baby animals. Since Archi is an ergative language, the very idea of subject/object is different in it, all the verbs in Archi are marked for class – for the class of the &amp;quot;subject&amp;quot; with the intransitive verbs and for the class of the &amp;quot;direct object&amp;quot; with the transitive verbs. The same happens in all the languages of this language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. &lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;assar - [a man] shivers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;assar - [a woman] shivers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III. &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;assar - [a cow] shivers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IV. &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ssar - [a calf] shivers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Bantu languages, like Swahili, there are also noun classes, but they are more numerous than in Archi (14 of them in Swahili), and the Swahili verbs are marked for the class of the subject, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T11:05:15.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17218" CreationDate="2016-04-01T14:53:31.493" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was doing research into the use of axes in Japanese martial arts. I discovered that the common name for this tool os &quot;ono.&quot; I then discovered that is has another name, &quot;masa-kari.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to mispronounce this word in English, it would be very close to sounding like massacre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I looked up the etymology for massacre. It seems to come from French, and they seem to have gotten it from Latin (around the 1500's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1575-85; (noun) &amp;lt; Middle French massacre, noun derivative of&#xA;  massacrer, Old French maçacrer, macecler, probably &amp;lt; Vulgar Latin&#xA;  *matteūcculāre, verbal derivative of *matteūca mallet (see mashie, mace1); (v.) &amp;lt; Middle French massacrer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There appears to be no link between massacre and masa-kari. Though I would expect one. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the similarities between maces and axes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can accept they are not related etymologically. What I am curious about is, are there words that appear in multiple languages, that appear related, but have no connection to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this phenomena? Yes, I get statistics, and random chance. I'm not asserting magic, or divine intervention. I'm trying to asses this using scientific method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything I have stated is inaccurate, I apologize please correct me. I am no expert in this field, and I do not claim any expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12861" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-02T02:13:31.743" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T03:08:31.997" Title="Is there a term for words which falsely appear to be related etymologically?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T16:08:12.327" Score="2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I've taken a look on some Finnic conjugation and it just seems VERY similar to Indo-European languages.&#xA;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A4hd%C3%A4#Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A4hd%C3%A4#Finnish&lt;/a&gt; .&#xA;One notices immediately 1st and 2nd person plural endings. They seem to be alike but 'm' changes for 't'. Then there is 'n' for 1st person singular and a bit more strange 't' for 2nd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just couldn't be as similar to languages I'm familiar with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin (not only, of course, there is a whole bunch of languages like that) you take 'mus', change 'm' for 't' and get 'tus', which is gibberish, but you can imagine 'tis' instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'n' (but not 'm', which is also nasal) in 1st singular is more strange, but  still can be akin, as 'n' in 'bin' in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarities also holds for Hungarian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A9z#Hungarian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A9z#Hungarian&lt;/a&gt; .The 'm' and 'n' in 1st person got swapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is, can you see it too, or I am just hallucinating? If it is the second case, it's kinda distressing as I've learned couple of grammars using these hallucinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T22:46:53.577" Title="Just a stupid question about possible connection between Finno-Ugric and European languages" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17247" CreationDate="2016-04-01T17:38:00.150" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;My goal is to bolster a database with charge type categories and decipher between, criminals, victims, interested parties, and suspects. I have searched for a corpora of text that may already have been classified regarding crimes, charges, victims, and other criminal activity. I have started building a set but this will be quite small compared to any available corpus. Basically, is there a corpus / are there corpora related to criminal activity and direct charge types such as murder, homicide, and drugs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10410" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T10:02:33.760" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T10:02:33.760" Title="Criminal Text Corpora" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17209" CreationDate="2016-04-01T18:57:46.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly what you mean by &quot;related to criminal activity&quot;. There are huge corpora of judicial decisions that relate to criminal activity, and recently you can even get recordings of arguments and questions from SCOTUS. Such data &quot;relates&quot;, rather remotely. Trial transcripts are not a good source from a research-useful perspective (I'm assuming you don't have infinitely deep pockets and infinite time to figure out what cases you care about). A trial transcript only contains a minute piece of existing evidence (such as the perpetrator saying &quot;I took care of that&quot;, but not the entirety of what was recorded). Some amount of that data exists as recordings (assuming that conversations of criminal activity was recorded), but was mostly not transcribed (and almost none of that data is out in the wild).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another version of &quot;related to criminal activity&quot; would have to do with police arresting and interrogating suspects. Again, there are not publicly available transcripts of such interactions generally, though snippets can appear in court transcripts and thus appeals. With the increase in police body-cam recordings you might expect more such data to make its way out into the wild, but again there is the countervaling privacy concern, so I would not count on there ever being any such source of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger Shuy's publications are probably the best source of such data. If you want examples of particular kinds of data, it might be possible to find an example, but all such data is extremely opportunistic and the antithesis of a random sample, which is often a desideratum for linguistic databases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T18:57:46.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17212" CreationDate="2016-04-01T19:44:50.883" Score="5" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked myself this seemingly simple question, but could not find any answers on my own.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are there any natural (or constructed) languages that capitalize (depending on their alphabet of course) in a different way than English, German and the like? So, instead of  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;his is my friend &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;ob.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they might do something like  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;thi&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; is my friend bo&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you ask, no, I'm not asking for &lt;code&gt;ltr&lt;/code&gt;-languages that capitalize the beginning of their words. I'm asking for any language (with a capitalization possible) where names, proper nouns or whatever else gets capitalized not at the beginning, but at the ending or even the middle of their words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I'm aware of some hyphenated words that have a kind of camel case, especially in German. I'm not looking for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12863" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-02T02:12:19.023" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T23:44:28.720" Title="Languages with capitalization inside or at the end of certain words" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17211" CreationDate="2016-04-01T22:15:18.293" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_language&quot;&gt;Zulu language&lt;/a&gt; does not capitalise noun class markers but capitalises the proper noun itself, as in the name of the language &lt;em&gt;isiZulu&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;isi-&lt;/em&gt; is the singular noun class 7 marker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in Irish Gaelic orthography, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations&quot;&gt;mutations&lt;/a&gt; of capitalised nouns are not capitalised, for instance &lt;em&gt;nGaillimh&lt;/em&gt;, the nasal mutation of &lt;em&gt;Gaillimh&lt;/em&gt; 'Galway'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(As Colin Fine points out in a comment, Klingon perhaps, although the capitals in romanisation can distinguish different sounds, and unlike Gaelic and Zulu orthography, are nothing to do with the uppercasing convention for proper nouns :)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T23:31:12.297" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T23:31:12.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17211" CreationDate="2016-04-01T22:38:19.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Javanese has 8 letters that are used instead of ordinary letters in all positions (initial, medial, final) in certain proper names. They are called “aksara murda” or “huruf kapital”. You can find them here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksara_Murda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksara_Murda&lt;/a&gt; (in Indonesian only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T22:58:46.017" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T22:58:46.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17208" CreationDate="2016-04-01T22:46:53.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is widely believed that proto-Uralic and proto-Indo-European were at some stage in contact with each other and that there were borrowings at least in one direction, if not in both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T22:46:53.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T00:04:32.917" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not mean &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; Rome, however. I am asking what Celtic Languages existed or were created during the early years of Rome, if any existed at the time. This is for story writing purposes, specifically in creating a fictional language, but I felt it more linguistically oriented than world building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if many Celtic Languages existed, which would be considered the most prevalent of them at the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I believe the celtic languages are Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Breton.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12864" LastEditorUserId="12864" LastEditDate="2016-04-02T19:43:07.103" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:56:55.213" Title="Were there any Celtic Languages being spoken in the early years of Rome?" Tags="&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17215" CreationDate="2016-04-02T01:09:07.603" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&quot;&gt;Proto-Celtic&lt;/a&gt; was spoken well before the foundation of Rome in 753BC; it is heavily associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture&quot;&gt;Hallstatt culture&lt;/a&gt; which was developed by 800BC.  Proto-Celtic branched out to several distinct languages early on, including Gaulish in France / Belgium (as early as 600BC) and Celtiberian in Spain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Celts spread throughout Europe in the days of the early Roman empire; they even reached modern day Turkey in the area known as Galatia.  This &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Celts_in_Europe.png&quot;&gt;map&lt;/a&gt; gives a pretty good picture of the expansion of the Celts in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T01:09:07.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17207" CreationDate="2016-04-02T03:08:31.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wanted to clarify things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False cognates are words that exhibit chance similarity (or chance resemblance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phenomenon is known as chance similarity, or chance resemblance. Words exhibiting this phenomenon are known as false cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748610037&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trask 2000&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQRVB.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQRVB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T03:08:31.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20171" CreationDate="2016-04-02T04:07:59.523" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of any studies done that show the effectiveness of using linguistics as a means of identifying trade between civilizations. I'll provide this example for what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been told that there are trace amounts of tobacco and cocaine in some Egyptian mummies. Let's assume for a moment that the Egyptians were able to get ahold of tobacco and cocaine through trade routes. As it is something that only grows in the Americas, wouldn't they have to be able to ask for these products. Wouldn't they have to use a name that the growers recognize? Doesn't it make sense that the Egyptians would use the name provided, instead of create a new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they use that name, shouldn't we find it in Egyptian records, somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit to being more of a &quot;fan&quot; of Linguistics than anything, so if my question is rudimentary, I apologize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12861" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T01:56:38.060" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T01:56:38.060" Title="How effective is linguistics at tracking trade routes?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T15:11:13.493" Score="10" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic&quot;&gt;Old Church Slavonic&lt;/a&gt; edited by Constantine and Methodius? And what modified more: The Old Church Slavonic when people in Bohemia started to write with it, or the slavic dialect they used before? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2016-04-03T06:40:08.867" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T20:53:49.390" Title="Can Old Church Slavonic be considered an artificial language?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T15:40:49.053" Score="4" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's pretty clear how such differences as &lt;em&gt;high way&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;parking lot&lt;/em&gt; evolved, since these terms refer to the technology that didn't exist at the age of colonization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how, do the present linguists explain the origin of the differences in the pronunciation of the basic words like &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;? Shouldn't the differences in pronunciation disperse in the spectrum of small pronunciation differences of the first Americans?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T16:54:19.673" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T16:54:19.673" Title="What is the cause of difference between British and American pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17223" CreationDate="2016-04-02T22:05:45.667" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) was an artificial language, but just in a way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, in the 9th century, when Cyrill and Methodius devised the OCS, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the Slavic languages and dialects were so close, that they were closer to one another than the modern English dialects inside England. Secondly, Cyrill and Methodius did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; create any new phonological system, they used their native Pannonian one, with all its tendencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Cyrill and Methodius added to their contemporary Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect spoken in Thessaloniki was the Greek-Bible-style syntax and the Greek-style lexicon (lots of Greek words were borrowed, lots of Greek words were calqued). That's all, the job of Cyrill and Methodius was just to shape the Slavic lexicon and syntax to fit the Christian literature standards, nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And naturally, OCS had nothing to do with the then dialects of Bohemia or Moravia which were Western Slavic dialects, OSC has always been a South Slavic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T20:53:49.390" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T20:53:49.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-03T04:41:18.577" Score="0" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 195, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (4 ed, 2014) by Prof. Maggie Tallerman PhD in Linguistics &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/maggie.tallerman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(U. Hull)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ERGATIVE is the case of A – the subject of transitive verbs. ABSOLUTIVE is the case of both S and O, the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the definitions above, but what motivated linguists to choose these terms to describe the above cases for this Morphosyntactic Alignment? I am conjecturing the word choice not to be random, and know that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=ergative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'ergative'&lt;/a&gt; originates from Greek and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=absolute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'absolutive'&lt;/a&gt; from the Latin &lt;em&gt;absolvere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-04T03:48:29.913" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T03:48:29.913" Title="What motivated the terms 'ergative' and 'absolutive'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17229" CreationDate="2016-04-03T13:42:35.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated in the Intro Syntax textbook, the statement is biased; or, if you prefer, it's a category error.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a case system that uses &lt;em&gt;Ergative&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Absolutive&lt;/em&gt; case names, there is no such thing as a &quot;subject&quot; or &quot;object&quot;. It's precisely equivalent to the statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OBJECT is the case of A – the absolutive of transitive verbs. SUBJECT is the case of both A and E, the absolutive of intransitive verbs and the ergative of transitive verbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, ergative/absolutive systems don't normally have a category &quot;subject&quot;, just as&lt;br&gt;&#xA;nominative/accusative systems don't normally have a useful category &quot;absolutive&quot;. Every clause has a subject in one system, and every clause has an absolutive in the other; and in both systems there are specialized cases that occur only with transitive verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the etymologies, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ergative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comes from the same Greek root as &lt;em&gt;energy&lt;/em&gt;; with transitive verbs, the ergative is normally the agent (prototypically human), and in many languages this is generalized to a mark of agency or volitionality with various verb classes and constructions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Absolutive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, is a generalized replacement for many other  earlier names, including &lt;em&gt;nominative&lt;/em&gt;, for the most common, default case in an ergative/absolutive system, which, besides being theoretically &quot;the unmarked case&quot;, is often actually unmarked.  Some preferred &lt;em&gt;nominative&lt;/em&gt; because in split-ergative systems like most Pama-Nyungan languages, where the nouns use an ergative/absolutive system while the pronouns use a nominative/accusative one, the same morpheme often shows up as both absolutive with nouns and nominative with pronouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-04-03T17:57:53.977" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T17:57:53.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2016-04-03T16:19:26.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language that has eight case endings seems more complex than a language that has only two or none. But that is a wrong view. Case endings don`t fall from heaven as a present of God.They are personal pronouns as &quot;him, to him, of him&quot; or prepostions as &quot;from to down etc&quot;. These markers were added after the word and, of course, they were shortened and tended to become irregular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new and simpler system was to place personal pronouns and prepositions before nouns with the advantage that they don´t become irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for verb endings. They are logical particles added after the verbstem. The tendency to shortening and irregularity is much stronger as with nouns. And it is much more difficult to show how such things were constructed in detail. We can offer only hypotheses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T16:19:26.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17245" CreationDate="2016-04-03T16:41:27.627" Score="12" ViewCount="1564" Body="&lt;p&gt;ISO 639-3 has many language codes for Arabic, but only one for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an Arab who is familiar with multiple Arabic dialects. We do not call it anything but &quot;لهجات&quot; which is translated to &quot;dialects&quot;.&#xA;We also call it &quot;عامية&quot; which is translated to &quot;slang&quot;. I've never heard an Arabic man call its region's dialect a language. Yet the ISO classification for Arabic contain more languages than Arabic countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic with over 30 language:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;English with just one:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=eng&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are many difference between the American and British English. And there are differences between the South African, Canadian, North Ireland, Scottish and the Australian English. There is also the old Shakespeare period English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still just one English language under the ISO 639-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; AFAIK No official reorganization for any dialect from any Arabic country. Arab countries teach only the main Standard Arabic language in schools and it's used in official documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the official language in the highest Arabic body, the [Arab League](language of the Arab &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also except for some variations in North Africa Arabs understand each other very clearly similar to different speaker of English (like English in India - English in Scotland).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12873" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T15:53:44.457" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T02:33:03.520" Title="Why does ISO 639-3 have many language codes for Arabic but only one for English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7217" CreationDate="2016-04-03T17:05:40.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a copy of a post about present/past/future tense in Indonesian. Priscilla 86, the poster, is Indonesian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our verbs don't change whether an action takes place in the past, present, or future. We simply have to insert time-qualifying words somewhere in our sentences (usually in the beginning). Also, we don't differentiate between singular and plural or male and female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present: She eat the cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present continuous: She now eat cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Past: Yesterday she eat the cake / she already eat the cake / she just eat the cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future*: Tomorrow she eat the cake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlined words are the time-qualifying words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We do have some sort of future tense. We have a word that means 'will' that we can add to a sentence. Sentence #4 can also be written: Tomorrow she will eat the cake but it will sound formal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In daily conversation, saying 'Tomorrow she eat the cake' will suffice as you have already qualified the time by saying tomorrow, so you don't really need to add will to the sentence as it is implied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst143558_Writing.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst143558_Writing.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot more Asian languages which express tenses in this simple way. And their concept of past/present/future time is as clear as ours. You could call such languages &quot;languages without conjugation&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2016-04-03T17:13:04.150" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T17:13:04.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-03T17:25:55.770" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know what tokenization scheme was used to tokenize the conll-X arabic corpus which was used for the 2006 shared task on dependency parsing ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T17:25:55.770" Title="What tokenization scheme was used for the conll-X arabic corpus?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17232" CreationDate="2016-04-03T18:51:36.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not able to give you an authoritative answer, but here is my attempt at one. See &quot;Macrolanguage&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639_macrolanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp#M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SIL&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between a language and a dialect is mostly a political or social question, not a linguistic one. Thus Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian were universally regarded as one language (Serbo-Croat) until the breakup of Yugoslavia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, mutual intelligibility is often taken as an important indicator. Although there have been British (especially Scottish) films that have been subtitled for US audiences, nearly all English dialects are mostly comprehensible to speakers of other dialects. This does not appear to be the case for Arabic: according to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there has never been a strong move anywhere in the Anglosphere to treat different varieties of English as different languages: I don't know whether or not there has been in the Arabic world; but the people who assigned ISO639-3 codes (members of SIL) seem to have regarded the different varieties of Arabic as different enough to require them to be listed separately within a macrolanguage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T18:51:36.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-03T19:42:01.310" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Related:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4596/does-linguistics-have-a-concept-of-set-phrase-with-a-meaning-differing-from-i/4597#4597&quot;&gt;Does linguistics have a concept of &amp;quot;set phrase&amp;quot; with a meaning differing from &amp;quot;idiom&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/22039/in-the-gospels-can-day-of-the-passover-be-interpreted-idiomatically&quot;&gt;In the Gospels, Can “Day of:” the Passover - be Interpreted Idiomatically?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. Question, Reference Request: Research Methodology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the proper methodology to validate - or refute - whether an expression is an Idiom?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the Evidences and Criteria that would substantiate those conclusions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; The question here &lt;strong&gt;is not to identify if a specific phrase is idiomatic&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;but rather:&lt;/strong&gt; to identify the correct methodologies to use.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any recommended / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;published guidelines&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;example studies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. Context, Validating or Refuting Chrysostom's Idiom Claim&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chrysostom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrysostom, (349-407 CE)&lt;/a&gt; claimed that an expression was idiomatic - but in order to validate or refute his claim - a valid and systematic methodology would have to be used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200181.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homilies on Matthew (Chrysostom) &gt; Homily 81:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - &quot;Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;by the word came, meaning this, it was near, it was at the doors&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Current Working Methodology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exhaustive Samples:&lt;/strong&gt; Examples from contemporaneous texts, (Example searching Greek Literature: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lemma:ἔρχομαι OR lemma:γίνομαι AND lemma:ἡμέρα&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Literal Uses&lt;/strong&gt; - Where the plain meaning can be inferred, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in those contexts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, (or not).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figurative Uses:&lt;/strong&gt; If the implied meaning is certainly not its literal meaning;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contradictions Imposed:&lt;/strong&gt; In cases of ambiguity - where a contradiction would be imposed onto the text whether either the literal or figurative meaning are assumed;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contemporaneous Identification:&lt;/strong&gt; Whether contemporaneous authorities also identified the expression as idiomatic or not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc ... ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is missing here? What is the &quot;actual criteria&quot; normally expected in order to validate or refute such a claim?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T16:51:17.880" Title="The Correct Research Methodology To Substantiate If an Expression is an Idiom?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;&lt;philology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17012" CreationDate="2016-04-03T21:28:35.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume you are talking about Complex vs Compound words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A complex word consists of a stem and an affix which the affix does not have any meanings alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compound word on the other hand has an affix which has a meaning standing alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poly-morphemic, as the name suggests, is a word which has either a suffix or prefix. and yes all the complex words are polymorphemic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T21:28:35.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T04:18:14.153" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of entailment? Does A entail B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. None of Bob's friends have visited Africa. &#xA;B. None of Bob's friends have visited Kenya. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But B seems to survive of A is negated: &#xA;A'. Some of B's friends have visited Africa, but none have visited Kenya. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem like a contradiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone shed some light on this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12876" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T06:39:02.533" Title="Entailment relationship?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17240" CreationDate="2016-04-04T06:39:02.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First we negate both sentences to see which one entails the other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of Bob's friends have visited Kenya &lt;b&gt;Therefore&lt;/b&gt; Some of them&#xA;  have visited Africa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; This shows that B entails A. Let's see if it is true the other way around&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of Bob's friends have visited Africa &lt;b&gt;Therefore&lt;/b&gt; They may or&#xA;  may not have visited Kenya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T06:39:02.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T08:27:17.123" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to write a python program that can 1) tag a text using TreeTagger, and 2) identify certain syntactic combinations within the tagged text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got TreeTagger up and running in python; it tags texts just fine. However, I have no idea how to get my program to identify instances of, say, a 'DT' (determiner) that is followed by an 'NN' (noun), for example. I am NOT looking for a specific string; I am simply looking to identify certain syntactic combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12877" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T08:27:17.123" Title="Finding specific syntactic combinations in a tagged text (Python, TreeTagger)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17248" CreationDate="2016-04-04T08:55:58.927" Score="1" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated in the title. I aware that some languages have some remnants of dual grammtical numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T00:37:56.617" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T00:37:56.617" Title="Which modern languages have more than two grammatical categories for numbers?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17243" CreationDate="2016-04-04T09:27:49.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a language with a large speaker base, Arabic has the dual. You can easily find more examples here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T09:27:49.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17232" CreationDate="2016-04-04T09:35:05.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;ISO639-3 is derived from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;. The author of this work have  a certain point of view on the definition of &quot;language&quot; (vs. &quot;dialect&quot;) with a strong tendency to split languages into smaller units. Note that the authors of the Ethnologue have a open agenda that is different from doing science. Divide and Conquer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T09:35:05.570" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17209" CreationDate="2016-04-04T10:01:38.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For historical data on crime, I suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Old Bailey Corpus&lt;/a&gt; (comprising the time from 1674 to 1913). It exhibits courtroom language and is as close to spoken language as we can get for this time period. It has also a great detail of annotation of the different speakers (role, class, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T10:01:38.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17243" CreationDate="2016-04-04T12:27:53.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are also languages that have more than singular, dual, plural. A good overview is provided by Corbett 2000, which is an really good overview over the category of Number in general. Here are some examples he gives (§ 2.2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages with the &lt;strong&gt;trial&lt;/strong&gt; (for “three”): Larike (Central Moluccan), Ngan’gityemerri (Daly), Marrithiyel (Daly), Anindilyakwa (the language of Groote Eyland)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages with &lt;strong&gt;paucal&lt;/strong&gt; (for “small numbers”): Bayso, Yimas, Boumaa Fijian, Paamese, Manam, Ambrym&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a controversial question if there is a true &lt;em&gt;quadral&lt;/em&gt; (for “four) -- and some languages also have special encoding for “large numbers” though there is a lot of variation going on. The wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammatical number&lt;/a&gt; is also quite good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Literature&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corbett, Greville G. 2000. &lt;em&gt;Number.&lt;/em&gt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T12:27:53.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5971" CreationDate="2016-04-04T12:54:14.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mechanism of Agree(ment) has been redefined since Chomsky 1995. Since Chomsky 2000, 2001, it does not rely on Spec-Head agreement anymore. Regarding the relation between the subject and V, if suggest to have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Pesetsky_Torrego_Agree_paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pesetsky &amp;amp; Torrego 2007&lt;/a&gt;, who give important references and develop a slightly different, but influential departure from Chomsky's 2000, 2001 definition. Adger 2003 is a good book, but note that his version of agreement is non-standard (as it work up- and downwards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Literature&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky, Noam (2000): “Minimalist inquiries:  e framework”. In: Roger Martin &amp;amp; David Michaels &amp;amp; Juan Uriagereka, eds.: Step by Step. Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 89–156.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky, Noam (2001): “Derivation by phase”. In: Michael Kenstowicz, ed.: Ken Hale, a life in language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adger, David (2003): Core Syntax. A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pesetsky, David &amp;amp; Esther Torrego (2007): “Thee syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features”. In: Simin Karimi &amp;amp; Vida Samiian &amp;amp; Wendy K. Wilkins, eds.: Syntactic derivation and interpretation. In honor of Joseph E. Emonds. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 262–294. doi: 10.1075/la.101.14pes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T12:54:14.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9928" CreationDate="2016-04-04T13:10:09.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really depends on what you are after. Here is a list of my favorite text books, together with some short annotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer 1998&lt;/strong&gt;: one of the best intro to semantics if you are interested in the interface between syntax and semantics and working a generative grammar background for syntax. Intentionally a bit light on the logical background, but formal enough to read a great percentage of current work in formal semantics if you mastered this. (It does not cover intensions though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gamut 1991&lt;/strong&gt;: (as mentioned in the comments) a great 2 volume book which leans more towards the logical side of semantics not so much on the syntax. Brings you all the way to Montague grammar and also contains chapters on more “recent” dynamic theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carpenter 1997&lt;/strong&gt;: Great and detailed intro to semantics using a categorial grammar background. If you want to go into the more computational / AI / math direction, this is a great one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Zimmermann &amp;amp; Sternefeld 2013&lt;/strong&gt;: Can be viewed as an updated version of Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer with a bit less syntax, but more other stuff like presuppositions, common ground etc. I used this recently in one of my classes and it was pretty good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Full references:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carpenter, Bob (1997): Type-Logical Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.&#xA;Gamut, L.T.F. (1991a): Logic, Language, and Meaning. Vol. 1: Introduction to Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamut, L.T.F. (1991b): Logic, Language, and Meaning. Vol. 2: Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heim, Irene &amp;amp; Angelika Kratzer (1998): Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zimmermann,  omas Ede &amp;amp; Wolfgang Sternefeld (2013): Introduction to Semantics. An&#xA;Essential Guide to the Composition of Meaning. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T13:10:09.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17260" CreationDate="2016-04-04T14:17:12.123" Score="5" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Apologies if this is off-topic for Linguistics.)  I'm trying to properly internationalize a web site.  I have a sentence like, &quot;You've earned badges A and B.&quot;  Because the number of badges can vary, it can appear as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You've earned badge A.&#xA;You've earned badges A and B.&#xA;You've earned badges A, B, and C.&#xA;You've earned badges A, B, C, and D.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to deal with the full generality, so I'm wondering about other languages, and how they form lists like these.  (For the purposes of this question, let's overlook the Oxford comma issue, and the pluralization of &quot;badges&quot;, which I'm familiar with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6791&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; shows that Chinese uses a different comma here than for other purposes, for example.  What other possibilities do I have to take into account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12881" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T13:58:58.453" Title="How do languages other than English form lists of words?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-05T10:00:27.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17251" CreationDate="2016-04-04T15:05:19.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For french:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vous avez obtenu le badge A.&#xA;Vous avez obtenu les badges A et B. &#xA;Vous avez obtenu les badges A, B et C. &#xA;Vous avez obtenu les badges A, B, C et D. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12883" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T15:05:19.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17251" CreationDate="2016-04-04T15:15:38.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian it will be like in English but without Oxford comma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Вы заработали медаль А.&#xA;Вы заработали медали А и B.&#xA;Вы заработали медали А, B и С.&#xA;Вы заработали медали А, B, C и D.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12882" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T15:15:38.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17251" CreationDate="2016-04-04T17:44:37.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Turkish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A rozetini kazandın.&#xA;A ve B rozetlerini kazandın.&#xA;A, B ve C rozetlerini kazandın.&#xA;A, B, C ve D rozetlerini kazandın.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12677" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T17:44:37.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T17:58:56.943" Score="1" ViewCount="1582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sort of know that syntagmatic axis is how phonemes arrange in a language, is it true? What is it in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T10:24:38.480" Title="What is syntagmatic axis?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3232" CreationDate="2016-04-04T18:41:24.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of what happens with a proposition in case of a failed presuppositions is still not settled. There is a huge pile of literature on this matter, so let me just quickly sketch the three main positions, using the classic case of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;The present king of France is bald&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to Russell, (1) is just false, if the presupposition that there is a present king of France is false. This is still a position that sometimes is maintained (especially for definite description as in (1)), but one must note that this does not really treat the inference that there is a present king of France as a presupposition. Instead it is treated as an entailment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to Strawson, a presupposition failure deprives a sentence of it ability to have a truth value. That is, if there is no King of France, (1) is neither true nor false. This often is modeled using a trivalent logic (e.g Beaver &amp;amp; Krahmer 2001), with the values 1 (true), 0 (false), and * (undefined).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the “dynamic” view (Stalnaker 1978), a failed preuspposition prevents a sentence from updating the so-called common ground (= the shared belief system of the interlocutors) and may lead to a failed state. That is, if I utter (1) in a conversation, the shared belief system should contain the proposition (or imply it; depending on the formal elaboration) that there is a king of France. If it does, the common ground is updated with the new information that the king of France is bald. If it does not contain the proposition that there is a king of France, (1) will either be unable to update the common ground or it will, but the result will be failed state.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still the best overview over the historical development of the (technical) of presupposition is provided in the first part of Beaver 2001, which you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jU1MDVmZ/book-2001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;access here&lt;/a&gt;. A more concise overview (by Beaver &amp;amp; Geurts) can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presupposition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;. The Ohio State University also hosts an extensive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~stoia/BeaverBibYab.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bibliography on presuppositions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some important references&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beaver, David I. (2001): &lt;em&gt;Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics&lt;/em&gt;. Stanford: CSLI. &lt;a href=&quot;http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jU1MDVmZ/book-2001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jU1MDVmZ/book-2001.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beaver, David I. &amp;amp; Emiel Krahmer (2001): “A partial account of presupposition pro- jection”. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10.2, 147–182. doi: 10.1023/a: 1008371413822.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beaver, David I. and Bart Geurts (2011): “Presupposition”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2014. &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/presupposition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/presupposition/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis, David (1979): “Scorekeeping in a language game”. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8, 339–359.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russell, Bertrand (1905): “On denoting”. Mind 14.56, 479–493. url: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor&lt;/a&gt;. org.ubproxy.ub.uni- frankfurt.de/stable/2248381.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;van der Sandt, Rob (1992): “Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution”. Journal of Semanticsition projection as anaphora resolution 9.4, 333–377. doi: 10.1093/jos/9. 4.333.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strawson, Peter F. (1950): “On referring”. Mind 59, 320–44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stalnaker, Robert (1978): “Assertion”. In: Peter Cole, ed.: Pragmatics. Syntax and Seman- tics 9. New York: Academic Press, 315–332.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T18:41:24.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T19:09:22.477" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonetics we use below symbols to talk about phones' length. My question is that how do we measure it? In other words, since these terms (long, half-long extra-short) are relative, how do we measure each one and assign itphone to a vowel/consonant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iaCtk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iaCtk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ipa&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T12:50:25.543" Title="How do they separate phones' length?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17257" CreationDate="2016-04-04T20:39:54.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an even richer transcriptional tradition used in Finno-Ugric studies which allows up to 8 length distinctions. You can either get trained in transcribing durational distinctions auditorily, or you can use Praat to determine durations from recordings, assuming you have a theory of landmarks (e.g. what do do with aspiration, how to make decisions about vowel-glide transitions). The method of auditory transcription calls for a comparison set, analogous to Jone performances of cardinal vowels. Owing to interesting phonetic properties of Finno-Ugric languages, there are a number of rather consistent and audible sub-phonemic distinctions, and there is no problem in principle with focusing on a particular duration range which may not be minimally contrastive in the language – but it is still audible. Unfortunately, that seems to be a dying art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you had a language with only two reliable and detectable surface durational patterns (whether or not it is phonemic). Using just the above &quot;long / half-long / (regular=short) / extra-short&quot; distinction, people generally assign names depending on their own experiences and their implicit phonological analysis. If the distinction is robust and phonemic, without any other complications, then the difference will probably be called &quot;long / short&quot;. If the distinction is non-contrastive and you get only a subset of vowels that are the shortest, they will probably be called &quot;regular&quot; versus &quot;extra-short&quot;. There can also be cross-linguistic expectations, where based on other languages you know that short vowels are not usually 50 msc long, so if in the language in question you have a series of vowels that are about 50 msc long, you would be likely to call then &quot;extra-short&quot; (for instance, Chuvash has two extra-short vowels, and it would be odd to say that all vowels in the language besides [e,a] are long). If the longer vowels are not strikingly longer, then you might call them half-long. In other words, the most common terminology is &quot;long&quot; vs. &quot;short&quot;, and picking one of the other terms would usually indicate that there is something special about the marked term (either phonetically or phonologically). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T20:39:54.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17255" CreationDate="2016-04-04T20:53:50.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is theory-specific, and makes sense only where there is a clear distinction between different &quot;things&quot;. The strings [abcdef] and [bacdef] have a syntagmatic relationship made up of 6 distinct things in a particular order. The strings [abcdef] and [abcdex] have a paradigmatic relationship, where one unit is replaced by another in the pair. The problem is that in most theories of phonology, what look like nominally different &quot;things&quot; like [d] vs [t] are not completely unrelated, [d] is just [t] combined with something more (that is, they are syntagmatically related).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T20:53:50.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17251" CreationDate="2016-04-04T21:17:21.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath (2007) surveys coordination structures in the world's languages. He lists the following as logical possibilities for binary coordination. The examples are also taken from Haspelmath 2007. &lt;em&gt;co&lt;/em&gt; here indicates the coordinator/conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A B (widespread, e.g. Sarcee (Athapaskan; Canada), Maricopa (Yuman; Arizona), Kayardild (Tangkic; northern Australia))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A co-B (English, Lango (Nilotic; Uganda))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A-co B (Classical Tibetan)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A B-co (Latin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;co-A B &lt;em&gt;unattested&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;co-A co-B (Yoruba (Kwa; Nigeria))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A-co B-co (Martuthunira (Pama-Nyungan; western Australia))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A-co co-B (Homeric Greek)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;co-A B-co (Latin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of NLP, the distinction between &quot;A-co B&quot; and &quot;A co-B&quot; might be important for reasons of punctuation. For example in Arabic, the conjunction و &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt; is prefixed to the following word, without a space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Haspelmath 2007, who cites Stassen 2001 as the authority, of the last four strategies, only &quot;A-co B-co&quot; seems to ever be used as a default, but it is widely-attested. &quot;co-A co-B&quot; is used only to contrast with &quot;A co-B&quot;. The last two strategies are &quot;extremely rare&quot; (Haspelmath 2007) and the languages displaying them almost certainly have other strategies for coordination. For example, Latin has &quot;A &lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt; B&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving to multiple coordination, Haspelmath 2007 provides the following useful chart of major patterns of correspondence between binary and multiple coordination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1RuwS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1RuwS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Table 1 from Haspelmath 2007&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, the pattern of coordinator omission &quot;A-co B C D&quot;, though rare, is attested in Classical Tibetan and Amharic. It is also possible to omit &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; coordinators, leaving &quot;A B C D&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of NLP, then, to really handle all the possibilities, you would need to be able to specify what separators occur in the following positions, where A...Z are the nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;▓▓▓ A ▓▓▓ B ... M ███ N ... Y ███ Z ███&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A couple of notes: I've made the first two blocks lighter ▓▓▓ to show that supporting these is likely to yield marginal returns, as most (all?) languages would support alternate strategies for coordination. Also, this would not handle the Oxford comma, which treats lists of length 2 and &gt;2 differently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath, Martin (2007). Coordination. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.) &lt;em&gt;Language typology and linguistic description&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stassen, Leon (2001). Some universal characteristics of noun phrase conjunction. In Plank, Frans (ed.)  Noun phrase structure in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12886" LastEditorUserId="12886" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T13:58:58.453" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T13:58:58.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-04T23:49:48.537" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;How we could create a context-free grammar that generates sentences of arbitrary length like: &#xA;the cat died.&#xA;the cat the dog chased died.&#xA;the cat the dog the rat bit chased died.&#xA;the cat the dog the rat the elephant admired bit chased died.&#xA; this is what I think but not sure&#xA;s-NP VP&#xA;NP- det Nom&#xA;Nom- N&#xA;VP- V&#xA;Det- the&#xA;N- cat, dog,rat, elephant&#xA;v- died, admired, bit, chased&#xA;is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T19:57:56.667" Title="context-free grammar" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T04:53:54.620" Score="0" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dependency and/or Constituency Grammar, I think you get the same tree diagram for Sentence 1 comprising Subject - Verb - Object (&lt;em&gt;I hit him.&lt;/em&gt;) and Sentence 2 comprising Subject - Verb - Predicative Complement (&lt;em&gt;I am angry.&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how come you end up with the same diagram for two different structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of tree diagrams in Dependency Grammar and Constituency Grammar, here's an image borrowed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y3m5n.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y3m5n.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tree diagram examples&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T06:39:25.087" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T14:17:00.897" Title="Why not structurally distinguish a predicative complement from an object in a tree diagram?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17261" CreationDate="2016-04-05T05:17:54.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you need additional rules.  Here are your rules (I rewrote them so I could read them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Det Nom&#xA;Nom -&amp;gt; N&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V&#xA;Det -&amp;gt; the&#xA;N -&amp;gt; cat, dog, rat, elephant&#xA;V -&amp;gt; died, admired, bit, chased&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And below, I've started to make a tree for &quot;the cat the dog chased died&quot;, but your rules give me no way to get &quot;the dog chased&quot; into its place as a modifier of &quot;cat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S NP VP]&#xA;[S NP [VP V]]&#xA;[S NP [VP [V died]]]&#xA;[S [NP Det Nom] [VP [V died]]]&#xA;[S [NP [Det the] Nom] [VP [V died]]]&#xA;[S [NP [Det the] [Nom N]] [VP [V died]]]&#xA;[S [NP [Det the] [Nom [N cat]]] [VP [V died]]]&#xA;...&#xA;[S [NP [Det the] [Nom [N cat] ?? the dog chased ?? ]] [VP [V died]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T05:17:54.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17273" CreationDate="2016-04-05T05:56:27.733" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the explanatory value of &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibermanPrince1977.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metrical trees&lt;/a&gt; used to account for prominence relations or syllable stress? At first reflection, it seems to me like rules should be sufficient (indeed, rules and trees coexist in most accounts) - or are there some particular phonological phenomena that the trees are very good at modeling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T16:46:47.183" Title="What's the explanatory value of Metrical Trees?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17264" CreationDate="2016-04-05T10:16:46.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a specialist in phonology, so take the following with a grain of salt. But my recollection of metrical trees is that just assuming rules on the liner order of syllables is not enough, because the hierarchical structure of languages does matter for stress assignment as well. And, as L&amp;amp;P show, the metrical structure seems to parallel the syntactic (or morphological structure) quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as L&amp;amp;P point out (if I remember correctly, maybe that was later), their system predicts the systematic ambiguity between broad and narrow focus. So, if you have two expressions a and a, you have two stress pattern: W-S and S-W (i.e. aB and Ab). However, there are three focus configurations: focus on a, focus on a and focus on ab. So one pattern has to be used for both a narrow and a broad focus (for instance, aB).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T10:16:46.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17255" CreationDate="2016-04-05T10:24:38.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic idea is that the syntagmatic axis concern the way linguistic units (e.g. phonemes or words) are put together with other units. In phonology, for instance, you can study assimilation processes etc. Or, in syntax, you can say that the noun and the determiner agree in number features. All this are syntagmatic aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the paradigmatic axis concerns the relation between a linguistic unit and other units that could have been used in the same slot, so to speak (“the constitute a paradigm”). For instance, you can study the paradigm of modal auxiliaries in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, in (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;           should&#xA;(1) Peter { can } bring out the trash.&#xA;            must&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can study the paradigm of {should, can, must, …} on the paradigmatic axis and you can study the relationship between, say, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; and the verb it selects (that it cannot have tense, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12879" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T10:24:38.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T12:09:57.687" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use two corpora,the BNC and COCA to ascertain the difference in instances of single and plural verb agreement between American and British English. I have some interesting ideas for variables to study but very little idea how to use the query syntax required to create searches in the two corpora. Can anyone shed some light on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to search for instances of collective nouns (the two most frequently occurring in both languages) and their concord with verbs (I want to narrow my search to 'to be' and 'to have')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be greatly appreciated, I would love to have a discussion with more qualified linguists than I!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More info:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to search, using Simple Query Syntax, through the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English for instances of collective nouns (the two most frequently occurring collective nouns in spoken English from each dialect, BrE and AmE) and how frequently they occur with either singular or plural, third person, present tense verb agreement (looking only at the verbs 'to be' - singular [is] or plural [are], and 'to have' - singular has)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12896" LastEditorUserId="10057" LastEditDate="2016-04-10T00:18:25.033" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T00:18:25.033" Title="Differences in collective nouns and agreement between Ame and BrE" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17262" CreationDate="2016-04-05T14:17:00.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will try to answer the question from the phrase structure/constituency grammar perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you are asking: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a structural difference between sentences like 1. and 2.? &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'I am angry.' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'I hit him.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specifically, is there a difference between predicates like 'angry' and direct objects like 'him', in sentences like those?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is currently believed to be yes. Broad stroke derivations below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're familiar with bracket notation, 1. starts out as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;VP: [hit him]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and proceeds as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;vP: [I [hit him]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas 2. starts out as:&#xA;XP: [I angry]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and proceeds as:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;VP: [BE [I angry]]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Finally:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;TP: [I [am [t angry]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although your two sentences look similar &quot;on the surface&quot;, they're not structurally similar in the parts you seem to be interested in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The category of the predicate vs. the direct object,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The properties of the inflected verb,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The configuration between subject and predicate, and subject and direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article by Lohndahl (2006) could be helpful:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lohndal.com/wp-content/uploads/copula06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lohndal.com/wp-content/uploads/copula06.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7975" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T14:17:00.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T15:30:14.077" Score="-1" ViewCount="1168" Body="&lt;p&gt;PSG (phrase structure grammar) describes the horizontal dimension of sentence structure with strings, sequences of sentence parts, in a way we are all familiar with.  We know that nominal expressions, at least, also have a vertical dimension, described traditionally with declensions, showing nominative at the top, and other cases declining, below that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been various ideas about describing this vertical dimension of nominals, Case Grammar and its &quot;subject choice hierarchy&quot; (Fillmore), Relational Grammar and its 1/2/3 grammatical relations (Postal &amp;amp; Perlmutter), for instance, but they have been under-general, since other things besides nominals also have a vertical dimension, e.g. auxiliary verbs (modal/perfect/progressive/passive) and adverbs (sentential/moral/manner/degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it might be interesting to design a sort of phrase structure grammar that can provide a vertical dimension for describing the vertical parts of sentence structure we can observe.  I have some ideas about that, which I will give below as answers to this question.  Please chime in.  If it seems there is no particular interest in this, I probably won't get very far in elaborating the ideas I have worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T11:05:02.480" Title="How can PSG describe the vertical dimension of sentence structure?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2016-06-01T10:18:06.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17261" CreationDate="2016-04-05T16:06:35.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Altho' it looks like a homework question, here are some useful rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt;  ε&#xA;S -&amp;gt; NP S VP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Det N&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V&#xA;Det -&amp;gt; the&#xA;N -&amp;gt; cat&#xA;N -&amp;gt; dog&#xA;V -&amp;gt; chased&#xA;V -&amp;gt; died&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add more rules for other terminals (bit, admired, rat, elephant, ...). I didn't care for generating initial capitalisation or interpunctuation (you can add this if you care).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T16:06:35.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17264" CreationDate="2016-04-05T16:46:47.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary problem that metrical trees are intended to solve is the representational problem of what the rule system actually produces. Prior to L&amp;amp;P 77 and as exemplified by the SPE analysis of stress, stress was a feature with scalar values theoretically ranging from 0 to infinity, though in practice values were capped at 5 because of this embarassment of riches. The SPE system also had a general convention that when a rule adds 1 stress to some vowel, all other stress numbers in that cyclic domain are reduced by 1. This system with stress numbers stuck out as a formal oddity, allowing way more possible types of representations than could be empirically motivated in language. There is no segmental analog to the stress-reduction convention, for instance you do not find that making one segment [+coronal] causes all other coronals to become one degree less coronal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metrical trees limit the kinds of distinctions that can be made, which from a theoretical perspective is a good thing. The main insight of metrical systems is that language only needs a two-way distinction between &quot;strong&quot; and &quot;weak&quot; (or you may fill in the blank with &quot;prominent&quot;, or &quot;stress&quot;). That distinction was combined with a theory of phonological constituency and a theory of locality (which effectively restricted how far you could look up to compute distinctions -- thus &quot;4 stress&quot; was not accessible information). Then you have a classic overgeneration argument: &quot;SPE theory allows you to have all of those classes of rules and representations yet there is only evidence for class A; Metrical theory only allow you to have class A; therefore metrical theory is the superior theory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line-drawing aspect of metrical trees is of course just a graphical means of representing certain formal properties, and the subsequence real question was, exactly what claimed properties are justified. The most robust distinction is the prominent / non-prominent distinction, which can be applied at all sorts of levels (i.e. within the syllable; between pairs of syllables; between pairs of pair of syllables...). The second is the concept of &quot;constituency&quot;, where in fact there has been significant retreat in the amount of structure postulated (typically just syllable, foot and word). Earlier metrical theory tended to rigorously follow the principle of binary branching to the point that you had to break a string of 8 syllables up into a 4-deep tree grouping of syllables, whereas the facts on the ground never necessitated saying anything more than &quot;syllables group into feet this way&quot; and &quot;this foot is the most prominent in the word&quot; (I will remain officially neutral about the questionable construct &quot;colon&quot; between foot and word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPE stress theory heavily exploited the assumption that &quot;phrasal stress&quot; and &quot;word stress&quot; are the same thing. With word stress vastly simplified under metrical theory, the next step, initiated by Liberman and subsequent work by Pierrehumbert, was to account for supposed stress differences at the sentence level, which was done by analyzing the facts in terms of tones in an intonational system. L&amp;amp;P77 does extend metrical representations to phrases by exploiting some of the power of metrical grouping, but when recursive constituency is eliminated as it was, the question arose as to how to deal with what such structures did -- and there is vast literature answering that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, prominence and some theory of constituency are implicit in metrical theory, and are well motivated, but recursive constituency which is also part of classical metrical theory is not well motivated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T16:46:47.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17271" CreationDate="2016-04-05T17:57:18.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Substitution versus Replacement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hans Reichenbach in his classic &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ditext.com/reichenbach/logic/logic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Elements of Symbolic Logic&lt;/a&gt; distinguishes between substitution for a variable and replacement of an expression.  Substitution is uniform, in the sense that the same value must be substituted for each instance of a variable in a formula, while replacement is not uniform.  When a symbol that occurs at several places in a formula is replaced, each instance can be replaced by something different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the classic theory of PSG (by which I mean context free phrase structure grammar), the abstract symbols are replaced, not substituted.  In my own adaptation of PSG, however, substitution rather than replacement is used. In the formal systems we're all most familiar with, for instance high-school algebra, substitution rules, as we proceed step by step to prove results in the system.  The rule of substitution is connected with our notion of a variable representing some particular value.  We can substitute various values for the variable that appears at one or more places in a formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears, at first glance, that in phrase structure grammar, it is replacement that we need, rather than substitution.  For instance, suppose we begin with a phrase structure rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP gives NP NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to describe the structure of a sentence &quot;John gives Mary the book&quot;.  If we used substitution to derived the particular NPs in the example, we could get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;John gives John John&#xA;The book gives the book the book&#xA;Mary gives Mary Mary&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is of course not what we want.  Instead, in PSG, we use a rule of replacement, so we can replace the symbol NP with three different values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But wait!  Isn't that hasty?  In the general formula for an indirect object sentence, there aren't really three NPs, since the arguments of &quot;gives&quot; differ along the vertical dimension.  Really, the general form here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP1 gives NP3 NP2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using 1, 2, 3, in roughly the way they are used in Relational Grammar.  (I should mention that the canonical treatment in RG actually treats the NP3 in my example as a 2 which has been advanced from an original 3.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I propose that PSG is an algebraic system of the familiar sort with constants (in place of the terminal symbols of ordinary PSG) and variables (in place of the non-terminal symbols of ordinary PSG).  It looks at first like a different sort of system with &quot;rewrite rules&quot; only when we neglect the vertical dimension which distinguishes variables bearing different grammatical relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because natural languages appear not to have any constructions like the hypothetical *&quot;John gives John John&quot; mentioned above, I also adopt as a general principle the Stratal Uniqueness Law (hereafter SUL) of Relational Grammar, which, in my version, does not permit multiple instances of the same variable with the same grammatical relation to occur at the same level of analysis (in the same &quot;stratum&quot;, that is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weak Generative Capacity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The weak generative capacity of a grammatical theory is the set of strings it characterizes as sentences of the language the theory purports to describe.    Not everyone thinks this is a matter of any importance, but nonetheless, that is what I am concerned with, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language which is generated by a PSG (i.e., a context free phrase structure grammar) is, by definition, a context free language.  Whether natural languages are context free languages is controversial, but I think they are.  The variety of generative grammar with a vertical dimension that I will describe below generates only context free languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it were not for the SUL (stratal uniqueness law), this would not be so.  A grammar with variables, constants, and assignments of strings to variables, can generate languages that are not context free.  Below is a simple example.  To distinguish assignments of string values to variables from phrase structure rules, I use an arrow &quot;-&gt;&quot; for a phrase structure rule (or &quot;production&quot;) and an equals sign &quot;=&quot; for a string assignment rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grammar,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. S = AA&#xA;2. A = a&#xA;3. A = aA&#xA;4. A = b&#xA;5. A = bA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;generates the &quot;copy language&quot;, each of whose sentences is some string of a's and b's followed by a copy of that string: {abab, bbabbbab, aaaabaaaab, ...}.  The sentences generated are the strings assigned to the variable S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, from rule 3, using the equality in rule 4, I deduce that A = ab, then using this in rule 1, I can substitute ab for A to get S = abab.  It works like a very primitive algebraic system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copy language is known not to be context free -- it cannot be generated by any PSG.  (This fact is the basis of Shieber's famous demonstration that the Swiss-German dialect he studied has a non-context free construction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if the theory is to be context free, in the sense that only context free languages can be generated, grammars like the above example must be disallowed.  The SUL does this, since it prohibits rule 1 of the above example.  A rule of the grammar may not have multiple instances of the same variable, to conform to the SUL, so the two instances of variable A in rule 1 are not legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vertical Levels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of pieces to this theory, and it's hard to figure out what should come first, but I think it is time now to give an informal description of the various levels, before trying to be precise about formal aspects of the grammar.  I begin by giving a name to this variation of phrase structure grammar, &quot;2psg&quot;, which is short for 2 dimensional phrase structure grammar.  The first dimension is the ordinary left-to-right, or earlier-to-later, ordering of symbols described by concatenation.  The second dimension is the vertical dimension given in tree structures, with least embedded parts of a structure coming near the top of a tree and most embedded parts coming down closer to the leaves at the bottom of a tree diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every grammatical phrase type -- S, NP, Aux, Adv, PP, ... -- has five different flavors, which are associated with varying heights in a tree diagram.  The flavors are 0, 1, 2, 3, Cho, where 0 is highest, 3 is lowest, and Cho (for the chomeur of Relational Grammar) has variable height.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lawful relationship between the height of a variable and the string assigned to that variable: in ordinary constructions not involving raising, a variable cannot have as value a string containing variables with a greater height.  For instance, an S2 (an infinitive or POSS-ing nominalization) cannot have as value (or &quot;contain&quot;) a NP1 (a subject).  I will defer formalizing this requirement, but I mention it here because it may be intuitively helpful in interpreting the following informal remarks about variable heights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here are notes about what I've worked out about the variables in this theory, for English grammar only, so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NP0&lt;/strong&gt; -- a vocative.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;NP1&lt;/strong&gt; -- a subject.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;NP2&lt;/strong&gt; -- a direct object.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;NP3&lt;/strong&gt; -- an indirect object.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt; -- a chomeur (unclear, but perhaps the displaced original NP2 in a double object construction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S0&lt;/strong&gt; -- a root sentence, in the sense of Emonds.  Does not like to be embedded.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S1&lt;/strong&gt; -- an ordinary finite declarative clause.  (Cannot contain NP0, Aux0, ...)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S2&lt;/strong&gt; -- an infinitive or gerund nominalized clause.  (Cannot contain NP1, ...)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S3&lt;/strong&gt; -- a derived nominalization. (Cannot contain NP2, NP1, ...)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt; -- an S chomeur?? Not known.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv0&lt;/strong&gt; -- a performative adverb, referring to the speaker's act.  (E.g. the adverb in &quot;Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv1&lt;/strong&gt; -- a &quot;sentential&quot; adverb, such as &quot;probably/necessarily/...&quot; that qualifies the truth of a sentence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv2&lt;/strong&gt; -- a moral adverb (Vendler's term), which expresses a judgment, approval, or assigns responsibility&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv2&lt;/strong&gt; -- a manner adverb, which describes the way something happens&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv3&lt;/strong&gt; -- a degree adverb, such as &quot;completely&quot;, &quot;almost&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Adv&lt;/strong&gt; -- not known&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Aux0&lt;/strong&gt; -- inverted auxiliary verb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Aux1&lt;/strong&gt; -- uninverted finite auxiliary (includes modal auxiliaries)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Aux2&lt;/strong&gt; -- nonfinite progressive &quot;be/been&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Aux3&lt;/strong&gt; -- nonfinite passive &quot;be/been&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Aux&lt;/strong&gt; --nonfinite perfect auxiliary &quot;have&quot;  (chomeur displaced from past tense)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;PPx&lt;/strong&gt; -- It's not clear to me how to describe time and place PPs, so I'll skip these, except for the PP passive by-phrase chomeur, which works out especially nicely in this theory.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Derived Phrase Structure Rules&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As PSG was classically presented, a demonstration that a sentence (or some other category) is generated consists in giving a sequence of strings the first of which is S (or some other initial symbol), and in which each other string in the sequence is derived from the preceding by using a phrase structure rule to replace some non-terminal on the left of the rule with the string on the right part of the rule.  This is not very convenient for stating the part the vertical dimension plays in 2psg (my name for 2 dimensional PSG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, suppose we allow phrase structure rules derived those already in the grammar to shorten phrase structure derivations.  Here is the rule for deriving a new phrase structure rule: from a rule with a non-terminal symbol A in the string on its right side and another rule A -&gt; x, replace A in the first rule with x to get the new rule (where x is a string of terminal and non-terminal symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a simple little example to illustrate.  Given the PSG&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP  &#xA;NP -&amp;gt; John, Mary&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V NP  &#xA;V -&amp;gt; loves  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we can derive new phrase structure rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;VP -&amp;gt; loves NP  &#xA;VP -&amp;gt; loves Mary&#xA;S -&amp;gt; NP loves Mary&#xA;S -&amp;gt; John loves Mary  &#xA;... and so on.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a more interesting example, an infinity of new phrase structure rules will be derived.  If we want to know whether a sentence is generated by this grammar, we need only look among the phrase structure rules to see whether the sentence is on the right side of a phrase structure rule with S on its left side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we no longer need the mechanism of a phrase structure derivation to describe how a PSG generates a sentence, given that we can derive new phrase structure rules.  With this preliminary out of the way, I can state the condition which ensures in 2psg that constituents which are lower along the vertical direction are more deeply embedded in a constituent tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Derived Assignments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the preceding example PSG given to illustrate derived phrase structure rules, but made into a 2psg by using assignments of string values to variables, deriving new assignments by substituting values previously assigned to variables for those variables, and by making some other minor changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Basis (lexicon):&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. S0 = S1  &#xA;2. S1 = NP1 loves NP2  &#xA;3. NP1 = John  &#xA;4. NP2 = Mary  &#xA;5. NP1 = Mary  &#xA;6. NP2 = John  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;some other assignments derived by substituting values of variables:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;7. S1 = NP1 loves Mary (using the value assigned in 4 to substitute in 2)  &#xA;8. S1 = John loves Mary (using the value assigned in 3 to substitute in 7)  &#xA;9. S0 = John loves Mary (using the value assigned in 8 to substitute in 1)  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, the constants in this example are phonemes, but since phonology is not part of this discussion, for the time-being, I have not written out the phonemic forms of the English words in the example, because it doesn't matter.  Please take the words and phrases in conventional orthography in this and other examples as standing for the appropriate strings of phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, I gave as my goal, the formulation of a revision to PSG which describes the vertical dimension of natural language.  So far, I'm on track.  Corresponding to the above example of a 2psg, there is a PSG which generates the same language, which illustrates that 2psg is also a context free theory.  I can find a PSG which describes the same set of sentences (well, there are only 4) by replacing the &quot;=&quot; sign in the string assignments with arrows, refer to the variables as non-terminal symbols, refer to the constants (the phonemes) as terminal symbols, and treat the derivation in 7.-9. as giving derived phrase structure rules, of the sort that were given earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other requirements of PSG carry over here, making terminological adjustments.  The numbers of basic assignments, of variables, and of constants, are all finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have  several revisions to make, yet, before arriving at a characterization of 2psg, but I shall try to preserve this property of the theory.  It is essentially a variety of PSG, that is, context free phrase structure grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(to be continued)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Categorial Functions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Categorial Grammar (CG), popular among logicians interested in natural language, the structures of language expressions are given as pronunciations (or spellings) together with their categories, and a tree is built by combining the pronunciations of daughter nodes somehow, perhaps by concatenation, to get the pronunciation of the mother node, and applying the category of one daughter, considered as a function, to the category of the other daughter, considered to be an argument of that function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am now just a heartbeat away from a version of this CG theory, which I need to formulate the notion of a constituent structure tree which has a vertical dimension corresponding to the height of variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the example of the previous section, I begin by writing assignment statements as small trees, annotated as labeled bracketings with the variable to which a value is assigned as the mother node and written immediately after the left bracket.  I call these &quot;forms&quot;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Basis (lexicon):&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. [S0 S1]  &#xA;2. [S1 NP1 loves NP2]  &#xA;3. [NP1 John]  &#xA;4. [NP2 Mary]  &#xA;5. [NP1 Mary]  &#xA;6. [NP2 John]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now I want to think of the derivation of new assignnments, now called forms, as done by applying a function (the form in which the substitution is made) to an argument form which says what string will be substituted for what variable.  Using the usual &quot;function(argument)&quot; notation for the application of a function to an argument, the derivation of the earlier example now looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;7. [S1 NP1 loves Mary] = [S1 NP1 loves NP2]([NP2 Mary])  &#xA;8. [S1 John loves Mary] = [S1 NP1 loves Mary]([NP1 John])  &#xA;9. [S0 John loves Mary] = [S0 S1]([S1 John loves Mary])  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting the derivation in 7.-9. into tree form gives my approximation to a constituent structure tree of the usual sort:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   [S0 John loves Mary]  &#xA;      /            \  &#xA;9. [S0 S1]       [S1 John loves Mary]  &#xA;                    /              \  &#xA;8.         [S1 NP1 loves Mary]  [NP1 John]  &#xA;                  /         \   &#xA;7.      [S1 NP1 loves NP2]  [NP2 Mary]    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In CG, the category of a form is written separately from the pronunciation part, and while there is no apparent need to do that here, for the sake of comparing theories, I make the definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation part of a form (that is, the constants, which are phonemes) is a &lt;strong&gt;constituent&lt;/strong&gt;, and the remainder of the form (the variable part) is the &lt;strong&gt;category&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the case where the constant part of a form is a continuous string of phonemes (in general, it need not be), I use the notation [var ... __ ...] for a category, where the underline stands for the constituent.  For instance, in the above example, for the form [S1 NP1 loves NP2], the category is [S1 NP1 __ NP2], abstracting away the constituent &quot;loves&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cyclic Conditions on Substitution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A variable of a form is not subject to substitution when the form has some other variable of lesser height (or, that is, with greater obliqueness).  This condition is needed to make the connection between the height of a variable (0, 1, 2, 3) and the height of a constituent in the derivation tree.  The condition corresponds to the requirement in transformational grammar that processing starts at the bottom of a constituent structure tree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A form to which any rules such as substitution are applicable may not be an argument of a substitution function.  This condition corresponds to the requirement in transformational grammar that cyclic transformations start applying at the bottom of the constituent structure tree.  It is required in 2psg to prevent violations of the SUL (stratal uniqueness law) from arising through the substitution of string values for variables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Coordination&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most ordinary two-part coordinations can be described by this rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Constituents can be derived by putting &quot;and&quot; between two constituents of the same category, and the category of the new coordinate constituents is the same as each of the two original constituents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In PSG, this is usually taken to characterize a schema of phrase structure rules, such as V -&gt; V and V, for example.  However, it is not possible to carry over such an account into 2psg, since, for one thing, a form [V V and V] would break the SUL, since there is more than one instance of the same variable in the form, and for another thing, there is no grammatical type V (nor is there a VP. V-bar, N, or N-bar), and for yet another thing, that phrase structure rule is wrong, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase structure rule is wrong, because we cannot coordinate verbs with different valences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John wiped the window.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John disappeared into the mist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*John wiped and disappeared the window.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I take the above rule for coordination as a basic rule of 2psg (not a form), so that we can describe the coordination of verbs of the same valence, for instance, making use of the previously given definitions of &quot;constituent&quot; and &quot;category&quot; as respectively the constant and variable parts of a form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given forms [S1 NP1 wiped NP2] and [S1 NP1 broke NP2], since these have the same category [S1 NP1 __ NP2], we can&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;form a constituent &quot;wiped and broke&quot; of this same category, [S1 NP1 __ NP2],&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which is the form [S1 NP1 wiped and broke NP2],&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and substituting in this using [NP2 the window] then [NP1 John], gives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;John wiped and broke the window&quot; of category [S1 __].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eversion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a finite clause, an S1, becomes oblique, S2 or S3, what happens to arguments it contains of lesser obliqueness?  In Raising to subject constructions, we would have a form containing an argument of less obliqueness than the form itself.  For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S2 NP1 to explode]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the cyclic conditions on substitution I gave above prohibit substituting for the variable NP1, since the form has a more oblique variable, S2.  When this form is made an argument of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S1 seemed S2]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the movement of the NP1 up into the higher S1, giving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S1 NP1 seemed [S2 to explode]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be thought of as a solution to this difficulty, since now the original subject of &quot;explode&quot; has found a home in the higher clause where it can be legally substituted for -- it resides in an S1, a finite clause, which is no more oblique than NP1, a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer to such a change when part of a form must move outside it as &quot;eversion&quot; -- the form is turned partially inside out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Topicalization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several questions about why topicalization works the way it does can be answered in 2psg.  I begin with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why topics are raised&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A topic gives what a sentence is about, and this concerns the performance of a speech act, so we expect topics to have a grammatical relation 0, like vocatives and performative adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S1 NP1 ate NP2 on Sundays] becomes by topicalization of the object of &quot;ate&quot;:  &#xA;[S1 NP1 ate NP0 on Sundays] and by applying to the argument [NP1 we]:  &#xA;[S1 we ate NP0 on Sundays]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;however this does not give a pronounceable form, because the variable NP0 is less oblique than the variable S1.  The form can be an argument of the function [S0 S1], however,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S0 we ate NP0 on Sundays] = [S0 S1]([S1 we ate NP0 on Sundays]) by substitution  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and now, since NP0 is no less oblique than S0, it can be substituted for by, say, [NP0 beans].  This gives a constituent structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  [S0 we ate beans on Sundays]  &#xA;            |                \&#xA;[S0 we ate NP0 on Sundays]  [NP0 beans]  &#xA;    /           \&#xA;[S0 S1]   [S1 we ate NP0 on Sundays]  &#xA;                 |                  \&#xA;     [S1 NP1 ate NP0 on Sundays]     [NP1 we]  &#xA;                 |  by topicalization  &#xA;     [S1 NP1 ate NP2 on Sundays]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, &quot;on Sundays&quot; is really an argument, but I suppressed some detail to simplify the example.  Also, before substituting for NP0, the constituent &quot;we ate ... on Sundays&quot; is a discontinuous constituent, but I am not sure that is actually possible -- it may be that the NP0 has to be moved to the end or to the beginning, to make the remainder a continuous constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We ate on Sundays, beans.   &#xA;Beans, we ate on Sundays.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, the natural place for performative constituents in English is at the beginning of a clause, so at least the latter is an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, topics are dependencies that can only be satisfied in root sentences, S0, and when an embedded argument becomes a topic, the topic has to be &quot;everted&quot; -- moved out of its embedded position in the sentence structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T11:05:02.480" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T11:05:02.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T21:47:54.127" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=lose&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this etymology&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;lose&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English &lt;em&gt;losian&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be lost, perish,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;los&lt;/em&gt; &quot;destruction, loss,&quot; from Proto-Germanic * &lt;em&gt;lausa-&lt;/em&gt; (cognates: Old Norse los &quot;the breaking up of an army;&quot; [...] ), from PIE root * &lt;em&gt;leu-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to loosen, divide, cut apart, untie, separate&quot; (cognates: Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;lunati&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cuts, cuts off,&quot; lavitram &quot;sickle;&quot; Greek lyein &quot;to loosen, untie, slacken,&quot; lysus &quot;a loosening;&quot; Latin luere &quot;to loose, release, atone for, expiate&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among other things, this etymology claims that Sanskrit &quot;lunati&quot; and Proto-Germanic &quot;* &lt;em&gt;lausa&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are cognate. Now, maybe it's the case that there are regular sound changes that could account for the fact that the words are &lt;em&gt;phonetically different&lt;/em&gt;, but what bothers me is that &quot;to cut off&quot; is so distant from &quot;to destroy, to lose&quot; that I don't see why you would call these cognate at all, and any sound correspondences built partly on the assumption that they are would seem doubtful to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How semantically distant can words be and still be considered cognate, and what evidence is used to support the conclusion in such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12711" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:39:04.413" Title="How can we support that two words with different meanings are cognate?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17257" CreationDate="2016-04-06T14:56:46.713" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetics works with a lot of electronic devices that show graphs of the pronunciation of a word on their screens. By means of such devices the length of a vowel can be seen and measured. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lib.chdu.edu.ua/pdf/pidruchnuku/18/90.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastEditorUserId="3504" LastEditDate="2016-04-06T15:03:04.683" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T15:03:04.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12278" CreationDate="2016-04-06T20:10:30.697" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I Start saying I'm Italian, so I tell you things that can make a good Italian.&#xA;So, In Italian often there isn't the subject as Io (I), Tu (you), Lui (he) etc.&#xA;You can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ci    vado.&#xA;&#xA;Voglio andarci.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last thing, In Italian there = li/là, So, you can also say;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Io vado li/là.&#xA;&#xA;Io voglio andare li/là.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12906" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T20:10:30.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-06T20:31:31.960" Score="2" ViewCount="868" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any software alternatives to Flex and Bison that are well documented and easy to install for Windows? I would like to exemplify some cases to my students, but I do not want to install a virtual machine to run these two tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12907" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T05:16:50.290" Title="alternatives to flex and bison" Tags="&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-04-18T16:44:35.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17281" CreationDate="2016-04-06T20:55:59.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what you want is to teach them about lexing and parsing, how about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swi-prolog.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;SWI-prolog&quot;&gt;SWI-prolog&lt;/a&gt;? It even has a limited online version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, showing off lexing and parsing with prolog might ruin them for other solutions... Been there, despaired that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="119" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T20:55:59.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17281" CreationDate="2016-04-06T21:13:29.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would you need a virtual machine?  Here's a flex for Windows (I haven't used it, myself): &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;winflex&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-04-06T21:18:34.993" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T21:18:34.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-06T21:38:35.287" Score="0" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we have a sentential negation with the quantifier &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt;, that would cause an ambiguity. is there any resolution to avoid that scope ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2016-04-15T02:53:39.757" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T02:53:39.757" Title="Scope ambiguity resolution" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-11T15:05:02.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17284" CreationDate="2016-04-06T22:21:42.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;every&quot; and &quot;not&quot; are sentence modifiers.  That is, each is added to an S to make another larger S.  The S that is created is the scope of the modifier.  For the example &quot;Every kid did not eat pizza&quot;, there are two possible structures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;not&quot; modifies &quot;kid did eat pizza&quot;, giving &quot;(not(kid did eat pizza))&quot;, which is the scope of &quot;not&quot;, then this S is modified by &quot;every&quot;, giving &quot;(every(not(kid did eat pizza)))&quot;, which is the scope of &quot;every&quot;.  As you can see, &quot;not&quot; is in the scope of &quot;every&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;every&quot; modifies &quot;kid did eat pizza&quot;, giving &quot;(every(kid did eat pizza))&quot;, which is the scope of &quot;every&quot;, then this S is modified by &quot;not&quot;, giving &quot;(not(every(kid did eat pizza))&quot;, which is the scope of &quot;not&quot;.  As you can see, &quot;every&quot; is in the scope of &quot;not&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether both interpretations are possible and there is an actual ambiguity, that will depend on dialect.  English speakers differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T22:21:42.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17181" CreationDate="2016-04-07T06:12:27.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you looking for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;guidelines about annotating,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a general technical annotation schema, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a special technical schema targeting a certain purpose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (1) see e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pustejovsky, James, and Amber Stubbs. Natural language annotation for machine learning. &quot; O'Reilly Media, Inc.&quot;, 2012.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wilcock, Graham. &quot;Introduction to linguistic annotation and text analytics.&quot; Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 2.1, 2009&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Papers on linguistic annotation - e.g. found by &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=Linguistic%20Annotation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (2) see e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Text Encoding Initiative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10399" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T06:12:27.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-07T11:49:17.990" Score="0" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does palatalisation only occur at the beginning of a given word? All textbook examples (muse, beauty...) are at the beginning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could somebody also explain syllabification? (Lecturer hardly covered it and internet searches are often untrustworthy) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10699" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T17:05:09.250" Title="Help with palatalisation and syllabification" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17288" CreationDate="2016-04-07T13:59:25.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the mid part of the tongue comes to approach the palate in the articulation of a consonant, this is called palatalization. It is usually caused by a regressive assimilation to a following palatal, i.e. front, vowel.  The term can also refer to various consequences of this articulatory change.  An interesting account is to be found, of all places, in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;, which goes into some detail about the secondary ramifications of this articulatory change, especially in Slavic, due to one of the SPE authors, Halle, being a Slavicist.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the SPE theory, the palatalization of velars shifts the tongue body forward in the mouth, creating front velar articulations, then these become palato-alveolars, which may then affricate or spirantize.  The details of this chain of effects are built into the universal interpretive rules proposed in Chapter 9 of SPE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T13:59:25.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17237" CreationDate="2016-04-07T14:51:55.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider an expression an idiom when I find I wouldn't express the idea in this way in English or in my mother tongue. But if you want a scientic method to ascertain whether an expression is an idiom or not you will get into a quagmire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T14:51:55.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17288" CreationDate="2016-04-07T16:00:21.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The type of palatalization which you refer to, as in &lt;em&gt;muse, beauty&lt;/em&gt;, is found syllable-initially throughout the word, so add to your list &lt;em&gt;acumen, accuse, argue, Caligula, amulet, fibula, tabular, habitual, insinuate, annual, quotient, volume, continue&lt;/em&gt;. The analysis of this pattern is controversial, part of the controversy being whether the element of palatality in such examples is an autonomous glide vs. a diphthong [ɪ̆u] -- the other main issue being whether that element is inserted by rule. (In light of words like &quot;moose&quot; vs. &quot;muse&quot;, &quot;coot&quot; vs. &quot;cute&quot;, one would have to engage in some rather abstract analysis to derive the distinction, if the palatal element is always inserted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;palatalization&quot; simply refers to some approximation between the tongue and the hard palate during the production of a consonant. There are two subclasses of phenomena called &quot;palatalization&quot;. One refers to any vocalic fronting and raising, a secondary articulation as found in Irish and various Slavic and Uralic languages, notated with the letter &amp;lt;ʲ&gt; e.g. [mʲasa]. It may also be combined with labialization, in which case the letter used to indicate that is &amp;lt;ᶣ&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second use refers to a process changing a sound from one primary place of articulation to one of number of lingually-produced other primary places of articulation. This also happened and happens extensively in Slavic languages. Depending on language and context, you can find /t/ → [tʃ, ts, tç, tɕ, tʂ] or non-affricated versions thereof. In principle, any consonant can be so changed, but it is rather rare for labials to undergo this kind of change of primary place (though it happens as a dissimilative change in some Southern Bantu languages such as Zulu). Whether or not anyone is going to refer to [ʃ] as &quot;palatal&quot; would depend on their knowledge of the history of the language and commitment to speaking of sounds in primarily historical terms. When you have active alternations in consonants as you do in Russian ([pla&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;-atʲ, pla&lt;em&gt;tʃ&lt;/em&gt;-u]), it is likely that you would call that &quot;palatalization&quot;. In the case of English [lɪɾətʃɹ̩] &quot;literature&quot;, I would just say that you have an alveopalatal consonant, and we have alveopalatal consonants in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T16:00:21.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17288" CreationDate="2016-04-07T17:05:09.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syllabification refers to a phonological process in which a consonant becomes a vowel, or at least more like a vowel.  Languages favor a syllable structure alternating between non-syllabics (consonants) and syllabic sounds (vowels): CVCVCV...  Consequently, when a vowel stands next to another vowel, it sometimes becomes more consonant like, and when a consonant does not stand next to a vowel, it sometimes becomes more vowel like, or that is, it syllabifies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the changes in syllable structure produced by Indo-European ablaut, syllabification can cause a /v/ next to a vowel in Sanskrit to become /u/ when it is not next to a vowel, for instance.  This was noticed and called samprasāraṇa by Indian grammarians.  Another famous instance of syllabification is the development of the syllabified nasal in the first syllable of centum &quot;hundred&quot; to /a/ in the satem IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T17:05:09.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17232" CreationDate="2016-04-08T06:00:04.283" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the languages spoken in various Arabian countries actually mutually intelligible? If no then it makes more sense to regard them as separate languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In China the government likes to officially categorize various Chinese languages as &quot;dialects&quot;, but the reality is that the difference is really huge between some of them, e.g. comparing Mandarin and Cantonese is more like comparing Italian with Spanish than American English with British English. Most Mandarin speakers don't understand nor speak Cantonese at all. Therefore there are many language codes for various Chinese languages as well and it makes sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether the situation is similar in Arabic: If you can't even understand some of the Northern African Arabic then how can you claim they're the &quot;same language&quot;? Some people might try to do so politically but linguistically it would be far-fetched. The situation is just fundamentally different from American vs. British English I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T06:00:04.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2016-04-08T17:20:11.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110305258/9783110305258.507/9783110305258.507.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This work&lt;/a&gt; (H. Wettig et al., Information-theoretic modeling of etymological sound change) presents a measure of language distance based on the amount of sound changes between cognates in the languages compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It produces nice results, altho' it does not account for vocabulary replacement rates. (Maybe one can assume that sound changes and vocabulary replacement are proportional in a first approximation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-08T17:20:11.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17302" CreationDate="2016-04-09T09:13:06.070" Score="6" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages have homonyms which are semantically equivalent to homonyms in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples of this phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Morgen&quot; in German and &quot;утре&quot; in Bulgarian can mean either &quot;tomorrow&quot; or &quot;morning&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Schloss&quot; in German and &quot;замок&quot; in Russian can mean either &quot;lock&quot; or &quot;castle&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12918" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T12:07:45.760" Title="Where did the homonyms which retain meaning among languages come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17194" CreationDate="2016-04-09T11:40:05.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking about both &lt;em&gt;constituency&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dependency&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Constituency&lt;/strong&gt;: Is &quot;peek into&quot; a phrasal verb or verb+preposition? So do we have [[peeking into][the alley]] or [peeking[into[the alley]]]? You did the right test to deduce &quot;peek into&quot; is not a phrasal verb. Also, no dictionary states &quot;peek into&quot; is a phrasal verb. This leave us with only the second option, where &quot;into the alley&quot; is a PP inside the VP where &quot;peeking&quot; is the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dependency&lt;/strong&gt;: When you ask about the &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; of the PP &quot;into the alley&quot;, you're asking what constituent it depends on and what the nature (relationship) of this dependency is. &quot;Peek&quot; is probably analogous to &quot;talk&quot;: it can appear without extra information (e.g. &quot;he is talking&quot;, &quot;he is peeking&quot;) or with extra info (&quot;he is talking to her&quot;, &quot;he is peeking over the wall&quot;). This tells us that the PP &quot;into the alley&quot; is extra information  and therefore an &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;peeking&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9995/what-is-the-difference-between-a-complement-and-adjuncts&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; for the difference between arguments (or complements) and adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T13:27:11.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17300" CreationDate="2016-04-09T12:07:45.760" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homonyms originate in basically one of two ways.  Either they have different origins, and sound the same simply by coincidence - either a sound change resulted in two previously distinct words sounding the same, or a foreign word was borrowed that happened to sound like an existing word - or else the two words began as variant meanings of the same word (also known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy&quot;&gt;polysemy&lt;/a&gt;) that diverged enough that their original similarity was lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case that two languages share similar pairs of homonyms like the ones you mentioned, it is possible that the similarity is a complete coincidence, but very unlikely.  It is more likely that they originate in polysemy.  I can see two ways for this to happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They originate independently, but with similar logic.  For example, it is quite logical to connect &quot;morning&quot; and &quot;tomorrow&quot; - one might begin by saying &quot;next morning&quot;, then abbreviating to just &quot;morning&quot;, then broadening the meaning to the entire day.  I'm not sure if &quot;morgen&quot; and &quot;утре&quot; originated independently,  but it's very plausible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The connection originates in one language, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot;&gt;calqued&lt;/a&gt; into another language.  Calquing occurs through exposure between two languages, when a phrase or compound is borrowed through literal translation.  This appears to be the case for Schloss and замок. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BA&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Borrowing from Polish zamek, which is a calque via Czech zámek of Middle High German sloz ‎(“lock, keep”), which, in turn, is a calque of Latin clūsa ‎(“lock, fort, fortification”). Attested from the 17th century. Related to замыкать ‎(zamykatʹ) (замкнуть ‎(zamknut)) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T12:07:45.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17281" CreationDate="2016-04-10T05:16:50.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are familiar with Python an alternative for Flex would be NLTK's tokenizer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; from nltk.tokenize import TweetTokenizer&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; tknzr = TweetTokenizer()&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; s0 = &quot;This is a cooool #dummysmiley: :-) :-P &amp;lt;3 and some arrows &amp;lt; &amp;gt; -&amp;gt; &amp;lt;--&quot;&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; tknzr.tokenize(s0)&#xA;['This', 'is', 'a', 'cooool', '#dummysmiley', ':', ':-)', ':-P', '&amp;lt;3', 'and', 'some', 'arrows', '&amp;lt;', '&amp;gt;', '-&amp;gt;', '&amp;lt;--']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also for Windows version of Bison you could use &lt;code&gt;Bison for Windows&lt;/code&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/bison.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/bison.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt; in the end there are better alternatives, &lt;B&gt;Win flex-Bison&lt;/b&gt; is a package that combines Flex and Bison for windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Win flex-bison is a windows port the Flex (the fast lexical analyser) and Bison (GNU parser generator). win_flex based on Flex version 2.5.37 source code and win_bison based on Bison version 2.7 and they depend on system libraries only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can download it from here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T05:16:50.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17312" CreationDate="2016-04-10T05:22:22.403" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a language learning app and am interested in sources/publications which offer statistics on retention rate of languages over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have data that my product taught students &quot;basic introductions&quot; in an hour. What can I compare this to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The demographic is 12 - 18 year old students, but I am open to any statistics on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something similar to how Rosetta Stone and Duolingo are able to quantify that their products achieve the same retention as &quot;a semester of college&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found articles, such as this, that provide some details. But I am unsure of their credibility: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagesurfer.com/2014/08/12/how-many-vocabulary-words-a-day-should-you-learn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.languagesurfer.com/2014/08/12/how-many-vocabulary-words-a-day-should-you-learn/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12922" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T13:03:29.193" Title="Sources on average retention rate of language based on time" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-04-26T15:54:46.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17257" CreationDate="2016-04-10T10:00:40.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lengths of phones cannot be measured in absolute terms. It is always the relative lengths of phonemes that is decisive. One possibility is comparing the lengths of different vowels in the same phonetic context. Another possibility is comparing the lengths of adjacent sequences of vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6758" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T10:00:40.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8942" CreationDate="2016-04-10T10:47:55.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit late as a response - I've just stumbled on this. But I believe SPAD-T was released as the open-source DTM-VIC available here &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dtmvic.com/05_SoftwareE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dtmvic.com/05_SoftwareE.html&lt;/a&gt; (10 April 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12924" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T10:47:55.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17257" CreationDate="2016-04-10T12:50:25.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard system of transcription used widely by phoneticians and phonologists (IPA) is useful and convenient but not perfect. And it is certainly not universal. How could it be either? The speech signal is continuous, but IPA is an attempt at breaking down that continuous signal into discrete acoustic &quot;events&quot;. And speech is gradient along most of the dimensions codified by IPA into categorical contrasts. An example: in English, a small amount of weak aspiration often follows the (phonologically) voiced velar onset stops in stressed syllables, but when that occurs it is usually not transcribed as [kʰ] or [gʰ] but rather just [g]. Phoneticians have agreed that aspiration is worth transcribing in English when it shows up with enough intensity and duration to meet a certain threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going in the other direction, the same symbol may be used to transcribe many different sounds or acoustic events, as long as a majority of phoneticians agree that those variations are similar enough to be grouped into a single category. The bounds of these categories are different from language to language, so if you are working with a language for the first time, you have to learn where other phoneticians working on that language have agreed those bounds lie. Example: a vowel that you might transcribe as [e] in one language, based on its formant values, may be transcribed as [ɪ] (or even [ɪː]) in the context of a different language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this lack of universality in the transcription system and the non-absolute nature of acoustic manifestations of phonemic contrasts, knowing when to use one label vs. another is a learned skill, as implied by user6726's suggestion of getting trained in making the distinctions auditorily. But I would argue that even making the distinctions visually by analyzing the spectrogram also requires training. As mach suggests, so many things can effect the absolute duration of a vowel, even within a single language. Below is a none-exhaustive list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosodic factors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;its position in the utterance (medial vs. final) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;its position in other prosodic units (phrase, word, etc.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the prosodic properties of the syllable/mora it is in (stressed vs.&#xA;unstressed, accented vs. unaccented, lexical tonal category, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Segmental factors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the identity of the vowel (some vowels are inherently longer than others)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the segmental context (e.g., before voiced vs. before voiceless coda consonants)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Paralinguistic&quot; factors (which can affect overall speech rate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the speaker's mood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the social register of the discourse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the baseline personality of the speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the recording methodology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is practically impossible to make a &quot;comparison set&quot; (again, even for a single language) that controls for all of these factors and can be used  with data from different speakers and different recording sessions. But even if you had one, you'd have to know when the tokens you were looking at were &quot;close enough&quot; in duration to the respectively relevant example vowels in the comparison set to be given the same respective labels. And that, in turn, would require training and experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T12:50:25.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17306" CreationDate="2016-04-11T13:03:29.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;ACTFL has a detailed list of language learning goals/outcomes and offers a comparative scale of achievement in relation to classroom hours.  They correlate various levels of language skill comparing scales used in the US and Europe so that all concerned can interpret what a score on a competency test is worth compared to commonly used certificates, eg A a Level, B Level etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this isn't exactly what you're looking for. I'm not a programmer, but I'm wondering if you're hoping for a very valuable set of learner data probably no one would give you for free.  The data isn't my area, but I know language acquisition and curriculum for that age group... And I'm doubting you will find this easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a difficult problem to approach without deep knowledge of the target language, instructional experience with that learner population, with that native language, with that target language and with that content in that part of the instructional sequence using that method for that duration of time... etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't a teacher or are not partnering with one, this might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10007" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T13:03:29.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17194" CreationDate="2016-04-11T13:07:42.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if we can really exclude &quot;peek into&quot; from being a phrasal.  The particle &quot;into&quot; does change the meaning after all.  I'm just curious why you think it can't be a phrasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10007" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T13:07:42.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:01:08.757" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt; on pp. 1316-1317, we find a discussion of two different uses of &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[70] i b. &lt;em&gt;[Abstraction] [as well as impressionism] &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; Russian&#xA;  inventions.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;br&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;ii a. &lt;em&gt;[Beauty]&#xA;  [as well as love] &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; redemptive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The emphasis in boldface is mine.) The analysis goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In [i] &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; behaves like the coordinator &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;. ...In [ib] the&#xA;  form &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the subject NP is plural, just like &lt;em&gt;abstraction and impressionism&lt;/em&gt;. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In [70ii], by contrast, &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; behaves markedly differently from&#xA;  a coordinator. In  [iia] the 3rd person singular verb-form &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  indicates that this time the subject is singular: &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; agrees with&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;beauty&lt;/em&gt;, so that &lt;em&gt;as well as love&lt;/em&gt; is treated syntactically as an adjunct, not a coordinate. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We must conclude that idiomatic &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; can be construed&#xA;  syntactically in two  ways, introducing an element that is either&#xA;  coordinate (as in [70i]) or subordinate (as in [ii]). In the former&#xA;  case, we take it to have been reanalysed as a compound coordinator. In&#xA;  the latter case there has been no such syntactic reanalysis, and here&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; does not form a constituent. This is evident from the fact that &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; can occur  on its own: compare &lt;em&gt;Beauty is&#xA;  redemptive and love is as well&lt;/em&gt;. In [iia], then, the second &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; is a&#xA;  preposition taking the NP &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; as its complement, and the whole PP&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;as love&lt;/em&gt; is an indirect complement in the AdvP &lt;em&gt;as well as love&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question concerns how this argument makes use of the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[B] &lt;em&gt;Beauty is redemptive and love is as well.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a nontrivial rewriting of [70iia]. What justification do we have for the claim that the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [70iia] and the one in [B] are 'the same' &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'data' show just this: that the idiomatic &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; seems to function in at least two different ways, and the way it functions in [70iia] is one in which it is not equivalent to a coordinator.  CGEL says that the difference between the occurrences of &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; in [70ib] and [70iia] is that &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent in [70ib] but not in [70iia]. And CGEL's evidence for this assertion is that &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; appears alone in [B]. Thus, CGEL's argument &lt;strong&gt;assumes&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than &lt;strong&gt;proves&lt;/strong&gt;, that the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [70ib] is the same as the one in [B]. So: how do we know that this assumption of CGEL's is true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To repeat, all we know is that the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [70ib] is not like the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [70iia]; but why does this imply that therefore the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [70ib] must be like the &lt;em&gt;as well&lt;/em&gt; in [B]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="11228" LastEditDate="2016-04-14T21:55:23.263" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T21:55:23.263" Title="CGEL's argument on the constituent structure of certain sentences that involve 'as well as'" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17316" CreationDate="2016-04-11T19:58:40.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the argument based on [B] is bogus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my doubts that &lt;em&gt;Beauty as well as love is redemptive&lt;/em&gt; really has a subordinate construction.  Suppose we elaborate the example, &lt;em&gt;Beauty of form as well as love of form is redemptive&lt;/em&gt; and see what happens when we try to extract &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What do we seek the beauty of as well as the love of?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not too bad, huh?  And since the prepositional object gets extracted from both constituents connected by &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt;, this suggests that the construction is coordinate, rather than subordinate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very interesting discussion of all this in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt; starting on page 298.  At least some of that is on line &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;pg=PA309&amp;amp;lpg=PA309&amp;amp;dq=McCawley%20phenomena%20%22as%20well%20as%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=uOiv6J6vOg&amp;amp;sig=2q2fdcLyxrm647F5tzyAmLLn66Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiQ6ZeepofMAhWFKCYKHRB4D_0Q6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=McCawley%20phenomena%20%22as%20well%20as%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T19:58:40.293" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7213" CreationDate="2016-04-11T22:32:47.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accadian verbs had 4 types of vowel patterns of which only  one type, the a-u-class, had apophony of significance. The other 3 patterns mostly used stable vowels a, i and u. If this is an old situation or an innovation in Accadian, I do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, ancient Egyptian, seems to have had the same type of non-concatenative morphology as Semitic, and that seems to indicate that this type of morphology is rather old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origine of such a morphology could simply have been umlauts due to influence of neighbouring affixes, possibly combined with vowel reductions due to stress patterns. If the language in the first place had only a few vowels, like a, e, u, i, this could easily result in a situation where the flectional forms or derivative processes totally determined the vowels of the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T22:32:47.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17194" CreationDate="2016-04-12T16:19:24.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;to peek - into the alley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to look - into the mirror&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to go - into the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to fall - into the pit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such structures are verb + preposition group (a where-to indication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you analyze the structure as &quot;go into - the house&quot; and take &quot;the house&quot; as a direct object, then this is the wrong view. A direct object never answers the question where to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3504" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T16:19:24.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T04:09:58.657" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 137, &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;xxix) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oblique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: any NP/PP in the sentence that is not a subject, direct&#xA;  object of a preposition, direct object, or indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the definition above, but what motivated the choice of this term?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am conjecturing the word choice not to be random. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T09:14:09.880" Title="What motivated the term 'oblique'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T08:05:33.027" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to generate vowels on MATLAB by using source-filter model. In case of monophthongs I'm using Rosenberg pulse as my source signal and then this source signal is convoluted with sounds generated from formants. Basically I'm using the approach used in the following project &lt;a href=&quot;http://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/45449-vowel-synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/45449-vowel-synthesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm trying to do synthesis of diphthongs which are basically generated by gliding from one monophthong to another. I've tried weighted-average but it's not working. So how can I model this transitioning from formants of one monophthong to other to generate the IPA diphthongs ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12940" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T08:05:33.027" Title="Computational production of diphthongs" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T16:34:34.027" Score="2" ViewCount="1135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are modal verbs, such as &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, considered lexical or grammatical categories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:52:39.293" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:52:39.293" Title="Are modal verbs lexical or grammatical categories?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17324" CreationDate="2016-04-13T18:38:48.990" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lexicon contains unpredictable information about words, and since there is no way to tell by examining the pronunciations of &quot;will&quot;, &quot;may&quot;, and so on that they are modal auxiliaries, then this information must be lexical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T18:38:48.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17324" CreationDate="2016-04-13T23:40:34.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I must be interpreting the question differently from Greg Lee, because my answer is that (at least in English) they must be a grammatical category, because they are different in syntax from other verbs. Of course the individual modals are defined lexically, but what allows us to use a collective term like &quot;modal verb&quot; is grammatical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-04-13T23:40:34.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17322" CreationDate="2016-04-14T07:46:37.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Casus rectus and Casus obliquus are calques on πτῶσις ὀρθή (“upright fall”) and πτῶσις πλαγία (“sideways fall”) respectively. It has been suggested that these were originally technical terms in a game of dice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-04-14T09:14:09.880" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T09:14:09.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T13:39:38.260" Score="1" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a Python lib that calculates HTER - Human-targeted Translation Error Rate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally it would expose a function that takes as parameters 1) at least one golden translation and 2) the translation in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T13:39:38.260" Title="Is there a Python lib to calculate HTER?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17324" CreationDate="2016-04-14T13:43:53.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, the typical modals form a grammatical category known as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A4teritopr%C3%A4sens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;in German&quot;&gt;Präteritopräsentia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: They have past tense form, but present tense meaning. Even in Modern English the lack of an -s ending in the third person singular is a remainder of this inheritance. The verb &quot;will&quot; is historically in a category of its own, but joined the other modals in the Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T13:43:53.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T15:43:46.360" Score="-2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a unique name as my personal, yet it's spelling is very unclear to me. The pronunciation is &quot;E m ai l&quot; As in- E-end, M-me, AI-lie, L-live. Emphasized as word &quot;agile&quot;. Is it correct to write it as &quot;Emile&quot;? There are plenty of variations of that name due to it's origins, but this pronunciation has no cultural background as it originated in an accident. Is it allowed to write it as &quot;Emile&quot;, or some other spelling is necessary due to rules of English language. Such as Emael, Emeyel, Emil, Emyle etc. Is there any reason why a spelling could be incorrect and is there proof that other is correct? &#xA;Am sorry my English knowledge is rather narrow in these things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12947" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T11:37:23.783" Title="Does this name's pronunciation match the spelling?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-04-18T16:54:47.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12430" CreationDate="2016-04-14T18:45:52.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;i don't know anyone who says âets or hâ, it is more or less always pronounced hy when reciting the alphabet and such. i'm not sure where you got the hâ idea from, but âets is most likely borrowed from english&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12948" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T18:45:52.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-14T20:42:22.917" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned that &lt;code&gt;poison&lt;/code&gt; in English translates to &lt;code&gt;gift&lt;/code&gt; in German.  Is there a term for such pairings where the translated word is also a valid word (with unrelated meaning) in the source language?  Any other interesting examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12949" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-15T00:38:53.057" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T16:14:28.877" Title="Words that translate to valid words in the source language" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17324" CreationDate="2016-04-15T00:42:04.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words themselves are of course not categories. They are however commonly considered to be the conventional grammaticalised means of conveying those categories. Many of them however have multiple senses, and they do not all convey modality in every sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T00:42:04.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17341" CreationDate="2016-04-15T00:48:09.973" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm including some PIE examples in my Latex-formatted thesis. What font package or predefined symbols will help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10970" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T09:47:28.093" Title="Is there a LaTeX package for Proto-Indo-European laryngeals?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latex&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17337" CreationDate="2016-04-15T02:16:35.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In text mode, you can simply use the &lt;code&gt;\textsubscript{}&lt;/code&gt; command to format some text as a subscript. So h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;, for instance, can be made with &lt;code&gt;h\textsubscript{3}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More problematic might be symbols like the palatal stops, *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵʰ, or accented long vowels, like *ā́, *ḗ, and *ṓ. There aren't, to the best of my knowledge, pre-composed glyphs of these, so you'll almost certainly want to be using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ctan.org/pkg/xetex?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;XeTeX&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ctan.org/pkg/fontspec?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;fontspec&lt;/code&gt; package&lt;/a&gt; (and a font containing the appropriate glyphs) to write these characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1832" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T02:16:35.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17343" CreationDate="2016-04-15T07:24:25.173" Score="5" ViewCount="1320" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, letters (or more accurately phonemes) are categroised into two categories: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters&quot;&gt;Sun letter and Moon letter&lt;/a&gt; in regard to what happen if we add Al (the) to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moon letters don't cause any change to the word's pronunciation. For example, Al-Qamar (the moon) is actually pronounced how it is written. However, in the case of a word like Al-Shams (the sun) the l is not pronounced and the consonant sh becomes a doubled consonant (pronounced twice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about the phonetic reason for that phenomenon. What makes a native speaker of Arabic do this? Are some letters faster to pronounce twice rather than pronouncing an L before them instead? Or is that due to another reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12952" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T21:40:06.040" Title="What is the phonetic reason for the occurence Sun and Moon letters in Arabic?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17339" CreationDate="2016-04-15T09:43:00.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general phonologic process behind that phenomenon is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_%28phonology%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;assimilation&lt;/a&gt;. Ease of pronunciation is the usual explanation of this process, but note that assimilation is always language dependent and not predictable (e.g., latin &lt;em&gt;octo&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;otto&lt;/em&gt; in Italian, but not in the other Romance languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T09:43:00.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17337" CreationDate="2016-04-15T09:47:28.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org/pkg/tipa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tipa&lt;/a&gt; package, a general package for typesetting phonetic transcriptions. It has all the stuff you need including the multiple accents. It works with all flavours of LaTeX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it comes with a really excellent documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T09:47:28.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17335" CreationDate="2016-04-15T09:55:15.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colin Fine noted in a comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;false friend&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some lists of false friends for English available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:False_cognates_and_false_friends&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:False_cognates_and_false_friends&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For German, there is a list of false friends to many other languages here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_falscher_Freunde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_falscher_Freunde&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T16:14:28.877" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T16:14:28.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17339" CreationDate="2016-04-15T10:13:58.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sun letters in Arabic are (or at least were in early Arabic) coronal consonants: t, d, ṭ, s, z etc., pronounced with the front part of the tongue touching the teeth or the roof of the mouth. In many styles of modern Arabic ج is also a coronal [dʒ], but in ancient Arabic it was probably more like [gʸ]; hence it is not a sun letter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To describe this phenomenon as “assimilation” is not entirely correct, as it affects only the article. For example, you say at-tīn (with apparent assimilation of /lt/ &gt; /tt/), but you also say iltizām, without assimilation of the same cluster. So it is not a purely phonological thing, but one that is morphologically conditioned. In other words: /lt/ is assimilated if /l/ is part of the article, but not assimilated if the /t/ is part of the reflexive infix in verbal morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there is no assimilation if the /l/ and the following letter if both are part of the root. E.g., you say as-sana (“the year”), but ʼalsina (plural of lisān “tongue”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-04-16T21:40:06.040" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T21:40:06.040" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17339" CreationDate="2016-04-15T10:39:45.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a assimilation process. When pronouncing words like : al-nar &lt;code&gt;النار&lt;/code&gt; pronouncing it as /al nâr/ would be hard and thus  they will pronounce it as /an nar/ these set of words are called coronal consonants meaning they are pronounced with the flexible front part of the tongue. In short it is done because it's easier to pronounce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More on assimilation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_%28phonology%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_%28phonology%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ohala, J. J. (1990). The phonetics and phonology of aspects of assimilation. Papers in laboratory phonology, 1, 258-275.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More on arabic phonology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Al-Ani, S. H. (1970). Arabic phonology: An acoustical and physiological investigation (Vol. 61). Walter de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brame, M. K. (1970). Arabic phonology: implications for phonological theory and historical Semitic (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Arabic Phonology and Script: An Introduction:&#xA;University of Virginia, Oriental Languages, 1984 Writing, Arabic - 130 pages&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T10:39:45.123" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17333" CreationDate="2016-04-15T11:37:23.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry I didn't hit my head into my keyboard! This was a real name given to a child in Sweden it is actually pronounced as &quot;Albin&quot;. Having said that you can write your name however you like but if the phonological constraints force people to pronounce it in any other way I must say yes. As we have other words like /dâvid/ or even my name /âdæl/ it's, to some extent, personal (depends on the other people's culture and first language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T11:37:23.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20538" CreationDate="2016-04-15T19:17:12.940" Score="2" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to build a dependency parser and I want it to construct only projective trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any tool that converts Non-projective trees (CONLL-U format) to projective ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12936" LastEditorUserId="2247" LastEditDate="2020-03-23T03:39:35.833" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T03:39:35.833" Title="Convert a non projective dependency tree to a projective one" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-15T20:36:09.290" Score="3" ViewCount="473" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read somewhere that there are different types of signs like: natural signs (smoke as a sign of fire), arbitrary signs (language signs) etc. Could someone provide me with a complete list and explain them concisely? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(there aren't plenty of them, therefore don't mark the question as too broad please)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12576" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-04-16T21:11:01.050" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T21:11:01.050" Title="What are different types of signs?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-04-26T15:55:44.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17348" CreationDate="2016-04-15T21:26:28.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are the creation of &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Charles Sanders Peirce&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an encyclopedia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Peirce's Theory of Signs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By 1903, for reasons related to his work on phenomenology, Peirce thought the central features of sign-vehicles could be divided into three broad areas, and consequently, that signs could be classified accordingly. This division depends upon whether sign-vehicles signify in virtue of qualities, existential facts, or conventions and laws. Further, signs with these sign-vehicles are classified as qualisigns, sinsigns, and legisigns respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples of signs whose sign-vehicle relies upon a quality are difficult to imagine, but a particularly clear example, used by David Savan, is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[…] I use a color chip to identify the color of some paint I want to buy.  The color chip is perhaps made of cardboard, rectangular, resting on a wooden table etc., etc. But it is only the color of the chip that is essential to it as a sign of the color of the paint. (Savan 1988, 20)&#xA;    There are many elements to the colored chip as a sign, but it is only its color that matters to its ability to signify. Any sign whose sign-vehicle relies, as with this example, on simple abstracted qualities is called a qualisign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An example of a sign whose sign-vehicle uses existential facts is smoke as a sign for fire; the causal relation between the fire and smoke allows the smoke to act as a signifier. Other cases are the molehill example used earlier, and temperature as a sign for a fever. Any sign whose sign-vehicle relies upon existential connections with its object is named, by Peirce, a sinsign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And finally, the third kind of sign is one whose crucial signifying element is primarily due to convention, habit or law. Typical examples would be traffic lights as sign of priority, and the signifying capability of words; these sign-vehicles signify in virtue of the conventions surrounding their use. Peirce calls signs whose sign-vehicles function in this way legisigns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T21:26:28.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17157" CreationDate="2016-04-16T14:52:05.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Chinese and Japanese:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chinese:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, Monday to Saturday are from 星期一 to 星期六, which basically just mean &amp;quot;weekday 1&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;weekday 6&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sunday is an exception, being called &amp;quot;星期天&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;星期日&amp;quot;, which mean &amp;quot;weekday (of the) heaven&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;weekday (of the) sun&amp;quot; respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In calendars, they are abbreviated as 日一二三四五六 (sun, one, two, three, four, five, six) for Sunday to Saturday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Japanese:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, each weekday is assigned one heavenly body (there are seven: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn). They translate respectively to 日月火水木金土 (abbreviated forms). The full forms are made by adding the abbreviated form and 曜日. For example, the full form of sunday would be 日曜日.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Extra information:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;星期 literally means &amp;quot;star period&amp;quot;, as the OP suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;日月火水木金土 literally translate to sun, moon, fire, water, wood, gold, earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mars is the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of fire; Mercury is the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of water; Jupiter is the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of wood; Venus is the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of gold; Saturn is the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the English names also derived from the same origin, using the gods governing those planets instead. Sunday = sun + day; Monday = moon + day; Tuesday = Tyr's day, where Tyr is the germanic equivalent of the Roman god Mars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-16T14:52:05.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17355" CreationDate="2016-04-16T19:09:57.383" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Propose two analyses for given data: an abstract analysis, with abstract underlying segments and a concrete analysis with exception features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[sen't-amos]   we sit  /           ['sjent-o] I sit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[kon't-amos]   we count / ['kwent-o] I count&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ben'd-amos]    we sell / ['bend-o] I sell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[mon'tamos] we mount / ['mont-o] I mount&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[alje'n-amos]  we alienate / [a'ljen-o]I alienate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[frekwen't-amos] we frequent  / [fre'kwent-o] I frequent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have these things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;surface alteration         /                     underlying form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;non-alternation [e] or [o]                   /            [e] or [o]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;non-alternation [je] or [we]                 /             [je] or [we]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[e] or [o] alternating with [je] or [we]/                 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we have these alternations under the stress situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have a question are these analyses correct? what are abstract underlying segments? how about concrete analysis with exception features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastEditorUserId="12889" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T03:07:24.840" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T12:39:29.363" Title="Abstract analysis" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-19T03:26:13.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-17T02:08:45.610" Score="2" ViewCount="1659" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to &amp;lt;ea&amp;gt; as in &quot;m&lt;strong&gt;ea&lt;/strong&gt;t&quot; and &amp;lt;ee&amp;gt; as in &quot;m&lt;strong&gt;ee&lt;/strong&gt;t&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, &amp;lt;ea&amp;gt; comes from Middle English [ɛ] and &amp;lt;ee&amp;gt; comes from Middle English [e], which come from Old English short and long /e/ respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all along they have been spelt &quot;e&quot;, in Middle English and Old English alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, where then do the spellings come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T14:19:05.733" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T19:29:10.290" Title="Where does the spelling &lt;ea&gt; and &lt;ee&gt; in English come from?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17352" CreationDate="2016-04-17T12:24:42.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope I am answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Spanish was evolving very early (600AD plus or minus 400 years), a process called &quot;vowel breaking&quot; occured, which basically turned &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; [o] into [we], and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; [e] into [je], when they are stressed. The evolution is something like as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Latin: computáre, cómputo (accent for stress)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kombu'tare], ['kombuto]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[komb'tar], ['kombto]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kom'tar], ['kwemto]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kon'tar], ['kwento]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Modern Spanish: contar, cuento&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it happened too early, modern speakers would not have &lt;code&gt;['konto]&lt;/code&gt; as the underlying form of &lt;code&gt;['kwento]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you had to impose an underlying form, it would be &lt;code&gt;['konto]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;stressed&lt;/strong&gt; positions change to &lt;code&gt;[je]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[we]&lt;/code&gt; respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;abstract analysis (my attempt)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt; change to &lt;code&gt;[je]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[we]&lt;/code&gt; when stressed. Some don't change when stressed. Some are &lt;code&gt;[je]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[we]&lt;/code&gt; overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt; that change must have a different underlying representation than those that do not change. Perhaps those that change are lower than others, i.e. &lt;code&gt;[ɛ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɔ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, those &lt;code&gt;[je]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[we]&lt;/code&gt; can keep those as their underlying representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Underlying representation | surface form&#xA;[sɛn't-amos]              | [sen't-amos]&#xA;['sɛnt-o]                 | ['sjent-o]&#xA;[kɔn't-amos]              | [kon't-amos]&#xA;['kɔnt-o]                 | ['kwent-o]&#xA;[ben'd-amos]              | [ben'd-amos]&#xA;['bend-o]                 | ['bend-o]&#xA;[mon'tamos]               | [mon'tamos]&#xA;['mont-o]                 | ['mont-o]&#xA;[alje'n-amos]             | [alje'n-amos]&#xA;[a'ljen-o]                | [a'ljen-o]&#xA;[frekwen't-amos]          | [frekwen't-amos]&#xA;[fre'kwent-o]             | [fre'kwent-o]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;concrete analysis (my attempt)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt; when stressed becomes &lt;code&gt;[je]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[we]&lt;/code&gt; except &lt;code&gt;monto&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;vendo&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="12958" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T12:39:29.363" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T12:39:29.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19690" CreationDate="2016-04-17T22:01:17.383" Score="6" ViewCount="755" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hiragana and katakana contain the same sounds (morae I think), but are typically used in different words. In particular, most European loan words use katakana (a few don't), and a large proportion of katakana involves European loan words (though it is used for other purposes as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has upper case and lowercase, and also can have print versus cursive, but specific words aren't strongly associated with case or whether or not it is cursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any other languages have an equivalent to hiragana and katakana?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T16:27:34.463" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T15:18:10.567" Title="Do any other languages have an equivalent to the hiragana and katakana alphabets?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17356" CreationDate="2016-04-17T23:54:31.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if that would fit in your requirement, but Yiddish is a very good example of how two different writing systems can coexist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Yiddish is in general written more or less &lt;strong&gt;phonetically&lt;/strong&gt;, at least with a full set of vowel symbols, much like other European languages. Nevertheless, somewhat between 5 and 15% of the Yiddish lexicon is of Hebrew or Aramaic (HA) origin (including Yiddish Semitic neologisms), and these words are written the &quot;traditional&quot; way, as written in the Torah or Rabbinical literature, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;consonantally&lt;/strong&gt; with occasional use of matres lectionis. Besides that, although both systems utilize the same alphabet and are normally typed in the same font, some letters appear to have different phonetic roles in them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ב is consistently [b], but in HA words also [v]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;being generally a full consonant, [h], ה in Semitic words is more often used as one of the matres lectionis and is normally reduced to [ə] when used as such&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;letters ח and ת in modern orthographies are used only for the HA vocabulary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;כ always denotes phoneme [x] in the general writing, but in words of Semitic origin it can also correspond to [k]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ע is generally a vowel sign with a value of [ɛ], [ə] or [ej] (~ context/dialect), but in HA words it serves as a no-longer pronounced consonant symbol and is vocalized with different vowels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ף/פ and פּ can appear anywhere in a word of non-HA origin, yet you wouldn't meet a HA-word with פ in the beginning or with פּ in the end&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ש is generally [ʃ], but in some rare HA words also [s]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In some orthographies some of the above distinctions are even specially marked with extra diacritical marks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are spheres in which both systems interdigitate: for example, the vast majority of affixes are written phonetically even when attached to words of HA origin. The systems are sometimes separated when they meet in the same written word, with the symbol ׳, e.g.: אונטער׳גנב׳ענען זיך&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples (HA-words in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ריינע &lt;strong&gt;כשר&lt;/strong&gt;ע &lt;strong&gt;נשמות&lt;/strong&gt; פליען אַרויף אויפן הימל, רוען אין ליכטיגן &lt;strong&gt;גן⸗עדן&lt;/strong&gt;... (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://yi.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9F_%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%95%D7%99%D7%99_%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A2%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%9F_(%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%A8_%D7%93%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A7)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Dybbuk&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;איין &lt;strong&gt;מלאך&lt;/strong&gt; טוט ניט קיין צוויי &lt;strong&gt;שליחות&lt;/strong&gt;, און ניט צוויי &lt;strong&gt;מלאכים&lt;/strong&gt; איין &lt;strong&gt;שליחות&lt;/strong&gt;. (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://yi.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%93%D7%99_%D7%99%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A2_%D7%90%D7%92%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%91%D7%90%D6%B7%D7%A0%D7%93_4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Di Idishe Agodes&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally the writing systems swap over:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;female agentive suffix ׳טע (originally from Aramaic ׳תא) is written phonetically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;אַ(ר)־, one of the most productive prefixes, has polyphyletic origin and is nearly always written phonetically even when of HA origin: אַכלל, אַפילו&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;such originally Semitic-origin words as שעכטן, מעקן, קאַטאָוועס, sometimes באַלעבאָס are exceptionally written phonetically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many hypocoristic personal names of Semitic origin lost their connection to the source and are written phonetically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many words (including personal names) of Greek origin entered Yiddish through Aramaic or Rabbinic Hebrew and are naturally written consonantally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in very rare cases even non-Greek words are written consonantally: חוזק (of German stock), קונדס (&amp;lt; Polish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2016-04-20T07:38:52.920" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T07:38:52.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17362" CreationDate="2016-04-18T08:00:02.960" Score="0" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exactly as stated in the title. I wonder if it always been that way or it is some modern concept to enforce gender equality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T10:44:39.510" Title="Does Swedish always had common and neuter genders?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17356" CreationDate="2016-04-18T09:21:06.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional (now virtually extinct) system of writing Vietnamese was to write the Chinese loanwords with Chinese characters (chữ nho), and the native words with specially invented Vietnamese characters (chữ nôm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T09:21:06.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-18T09:48:52.923" Score="1" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using regular expressions, I'm trying to detect conditional clauses in sentences. In cases where the sentences starts with the conditional clause and the comma is correctly present (e.g., &quot;If I see a snake, I run.&quot;), this is reasonably straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have problems in cases there the conditional clause is in the end. For example, I can rewrite the previous example as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I run if I see a snake&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where there is not comma. Now, there are also sentences such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I wonder if I passed the test&#xA;I'm not sure if I passed the test&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a straightforward way to tell using (simple) rules that the second sentence  does not contain a conditional clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, if I can replace &lt;code&gt;if&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;whether&lt;/code&gt;, then it's not a conditional clause. But how could I tell that an algorithm that the new sentence is still correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it helps: I have for each word the Part-of-Speech tag, and should be able to get the tense of each verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12968" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T09:48:52.923" Title="Conditional IF vs. non-conditional IF" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17358" CreationDate="2016-04-18T10:04:50.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously not: Swedish is a Germanic language and proto-Germanic was a trigendered language (masculine, feminine, and neuter) as modern German still is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know when the masculine and feminine gender fused to the common gender in Swedish—in Old Norse in the medieval times the trigender system was still intact. Also, modern Swedish and Danish dialects differ in the number of genders they have (everything from 1 to 3 occurs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is definitely not a planned language change to enforce gender equality. It developed naturally (the previously distinct endings of the definite forms fell together in one form for masculine and feminine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The introduction of a common (gender-neutral or epicence) pronoun into Swedish in indeed a modern innovation and can be seen as an act of language planning. For details, see the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_%28pronoun%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hen (pronoun)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-04-21T10:31:12.970" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T10:31:12.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-18T17:50:38.217" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Steven Pinker's book &lt;em&gt;The Stuff of Thought,&lt;/em&gt; he critiques Radical Pragmatics (ch 3).  In one instance, on pages 121-122, he describes a computer simulation of Radical Pragmatics by James McClelland and Alan Kawamoto that &quot;models the resolution of polysemous words in context.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He notes that the simulation fails because the program, when given &quot;The bat broke the window,&quot; returns &quot;A bat [the animal] broke the window using a baseball bat - the one interpretation that people don't make.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear why people don't make this interpretation - rather than typical polysemy, or a double entendre, this interpretation uses bat to mean two things &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, my question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this concept of a single morpheme meaning two different things at the same time, resulting in an intelligible sentence?  Do any languages have this concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12606" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T20:48:01.240" Title="&quot;The bat broke the window&quot; - double meaning in The Stuff of Thought" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-18T20:11:20.253" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;In MP, constituents move as a last resort in order to get certain features checked. For example, subjects in English move from within the predicate of a sentence to SpecIP in order to get its strong EPP feature checked (Adger). What about focus-moved constituents? What feature causes them to move? A strong contrastive focus feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that features are created on an ad hoc basis to account for movement as a last resort such that someone could easily whip up some feature nobody has ever heard of to explain an instance of movement. Is there any restriction on the type and number of features there can be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T20:11:20.253" Title="The Minimalist Program and Features" Tags="&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-18T21:56:48.577" Score="1" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading introductory phonology by Bruce Hayes, in chapter 12 he proposed an abstract analysis for English stress.Based on his proposed a word like cassette has been through a process like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/kəssɛttɛ/ →        Underlying forms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kəˈssɛttɛ →           Stress Assignment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kəˈsɛtɛ  →             Degemination&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kəˈsɛt →                /ɛ/ Drop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[kəˈsɛt] →             Surface forms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can these rules work for words such as &quot;baton&quot; and &quot;Dupont&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T18:25:08.250" Title="English stress, abstract analysis" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17369" CreationDate="2016-04-18T22:09:11.160" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, but I was reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; on Grimm's law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, this explains a certain evolution of the sounds for in the Germanic languages. Which was obtained while comparing German with other languages sharing the same sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, Jacob Grimm devised some chains about how those sounds evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether this law was extensible to other languages? And specifically whether is it supposed to follow the same path? Or does each language family have its own path?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10566" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T13:54:27.407" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T13:54:27.407" Title="Generalisation of Grimm's Law?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17356" CreationDate="2016-04-18T22:09:12.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_mixed_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Korean&lt;/a&gt; writers have used two scripts alongside each other: a phonemic alphabet arranged in syllabic blocks (&lt;em&gt;hangŭl&lt;/em&gt;) and sinographic characters (漢字, called &lt;em&gt;hanja&lt;/em&gt; in Korean). Hanja are not really parallel to katakana, though. They are more the equivalent of Japanese kanji, but much less commonly used (although students may still study them in school, the use of hanja in actual written Korean texts has greatly declined over time). Apparently, hanja are not used at all in North Korea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T23:06:14.613" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T23:06:14.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17366" CreationDate="2016-04-18T22:18:46.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say each language family has its own path. If you look at the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt;, it actually calls Grimm's Law one of the defining features of the Germanic languages. So, it is not shared with any other languages. It's likely similar changes have occurred in some other languages, but if so, this wouldn't be called an extension of Grimm's Law. It would be considered an independent sound law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T22:18:46.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17366" CreationDate="2016-04-18T23:37:47.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This set of historical changes define the development of Germanic from Indo-European. The same set of rules could somewhat-accidentally also exist in some other language family -- in fact, the same processes applied historically to two different sub-branches of Bantu, the Sotho-Tswana languages and the Luhya languages. They talk about the change as the &quot;Luhya Law&quot;, and the similarity to Grimm's Law has been commented on. These are completely different historical events, separated in time by millenia and in space by over 3,000 miles. It is not clear what caused these changes to take place, so we can't really say whether they have the same underlying cause. It is not even established that Grimm's Law is one single change, rather than being two (or more) separate changes that happened to coincide in Germanic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T23:37:47.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-19T00:36:08.897" Score="0" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The man entertained by the doves his sandwich munched.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the explanation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12972" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T05:54:44.670" Title="Why is the following sentence ungrammatical?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-20T17:57:30.707" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17363" CreationDate="2016-04-19T20:48:01.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Since it never happens, why would any language have a concept for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T20:48:01.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17370" CreationDate="2016-04-20T05:54:44.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The man munched his sandwich. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SVO order is pretty critical in English unless you are writing poetry, as &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man (, who was) entertained by the doves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;missing link words...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO finally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man (, who was) entertained by the doves, munched his sandwich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12974" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T05:54:44.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17376" CreationDate="2016-04-20T08:25:02.157" Score="2" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned the the flap [ɾ] letter is part of both the /t/ and /d/ phonemes. A common example is writer /ˈraɪtər/ and rider /ˈraɪdər/. If they're both pronounced [raɪɾər], then shouldn't the two phonemic transcriptions be the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12983" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-20T08:55:19.207" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T20:53:09.977" Title="Phonemic Transcription Ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17374" CreationDate="2016-04-20T08:57:13.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. All it shows is that the two phonemes /d/ and /t/ have overlapping allophones. Minimal pairs such as /dip/ and /tip/ show that they are still distinct phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T08:57:13.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17374" CreationDate="2016-04-20T09:55:58.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the language you transcribe? Assuming Standard (American or British) English, writer /ˈraɪtər/ and rider /ˈraɪdər/ are different and the transcription is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you do a &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; transcription of some dialect (or even a phonemic one after determining the phonemes of that dialect) you'll use the flap [ɾ] letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T09:55:58.143" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T12:34:42.660" Score="3" ViewCount="4216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples of words that literally mean &quot;washbear&quot; can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B4%97%E7%86%8A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This is apparently due to the fact that raccoons just love to wash things so much. But is it just a coincidence that many languages call them &quot;washbears&quot;. They don't resemble bears much in my opinions; and the fact that many languages call them &quot;washbears&quot; but not &quot;washdogs&quot; or &quot;washcats&quot; (except for French which uses &quot;washrat&quot;) makes me wonder if there's an ultimate etymology, and if there's a calque process going on across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, why is it &quot;bear&quot; in so many languages? Is that a mere coincidence, or is it because of an ultimate common etymology? Is there calque across languages? If so, what is that ultimate source (from Latin or maybe German?)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastEditorUserId="9822" LastEditDate="2016-04-21T01:56:34.693" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T21:52:46.403" Title="Why are raccoons called &quot;washbears&quot; in many languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17365" CreationDate="2016-04-20T14:17:43.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Greg Lee. What Hayes is getting at here is that in English, the final syllable in nouns is invisible to stress: it is extrametrical. kə.sɛt.(tɛ), bə.tɑn.(nɛ), du.pon.(tɛ). Furthermore, for the middle syllable to receive stress, it must be heavy, e.g. CVC; otherwise, you would get ˈkə.sɛ.(tɛ). This chapter is on Abstractness (a controversial idea), so that's why these weird underlying forms are proposed, without any apparent motivation (it would be better if there were some plausible explanation to justify them). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T14:17:43.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14765" CreationDate="2016-04-20T16:45:46.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;simultaneously&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, no. Not in the same sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/cliffs-equi-raising.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these exercises&lt;/a&gt; makes clear, it &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; happen that a particular English verb, like &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;governs Equi (aka &quot;Equivalent Noun Phrase Deletion&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;Control&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) in one context,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill wants ___to leave.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Bill wants to be examined by the doctor.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;≠ &lt;em&gt;The doctor wants to examine Bill.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Raising (aka &quot;Subject-Raising&quot;) in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bill wants Max to leave&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Bill wants [it to rain/there to be a party].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Bill wants Max to be examined by the doctor.&#xA;= Bill wants the doctor to examine Max.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; does not passivize Raised objects:&#xA;*&lt;em&gt;Max is wanted to leave by Bill&lt;/em&gt;. ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, English &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; governs A-Equi when it meets the conditions&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; (coreferential subjects of both &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; and its complement clause)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but governs B-Raising when it &lt;strong&gt;doesn't&lt;/strong&gt; meet the conditions for A-Equi&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; (complement subject not coreferential to the subject of &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the classification of &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;, the syntax lab reports from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/cliffs-equi-raising.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these same exercises&lt;/a&gt; list &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2-place with B-Raising (mental predicate, experiencer subject, propositional object).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp; [NB: &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; may also passivize Raised objects on the next cycle up, producing a rule sandwich:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; e.g, &lt;em&gt;The men are believed to have been seen by the women&lt;/em&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Ivan has pointed out, if a verb selects a particular type of subject, that is not the same as,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and makes no prediction about, whether that verb governs Equivalent Noun Phrase Deletion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, this is not a question about syntax so much it is about &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; syntax --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;be aware that things can work very differently in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-04-20T16:57:18.670" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T16:57:18.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17365" CreationDate="2016-04-20T17:16:34.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The abstract analysis is not actually Hayes' own analysis, but was proposed by Chomsky and Halle in &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  The number of phonologists who actually accept this analysis surely hovers around zero. I don't know about Hayes, but when this analysis is discussed, it's generally understood that the analysis is wrong, and the reason for even mentioning it is to make some methodological point about why we should reject such a silly proposal.  I'm not even sure that Chomsky and Halle themselves didn't have their tongues in their cheeks when they proposed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in SPE, the analysis is not proposed as a way to describe ordinary English forms, but only for certain exceptional English forms.  C&amp;amp;H compare several ways of describing forms that are irregular in the sense that they do not conform to the rules that C&amp;amp;H have developed for describing the great majority of English words, and conclude that the abstract representations are the most economical way of describing such irregular forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, the SPE analysis of English proposes that at the deepest level -- the lexical level, I suppose -- English words have no stresses marked, and all stresses are assigned by phonological rules.  This is mistaken, but it is a reasonable idea, since there are regularities in the English stress system, and in a theory that describes phonological regularities with phonological rules, it seems to follow that stresses should be assigned by phonological rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it doesn't follow.  We can have some stresses assigned lexically, and others assigned by rules.  In general, morphophonemic rules affect parts of pronunciation that are lexically assigned (a reasonably clear case is the Backness Harmony rule of Turkish), and English stress is phonologically morphophonemic.  Stress is phonemic, but it can also be assigned (or perhaps changed) by phonological rules of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a complication in English that makes this difficult to see, which is that English stress assignment is dissimilatory, like the stress in other alternating stress systems.  I discussed this briefly earlier, in another answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception/15193#15193&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (see answer #7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in my view, the difference between English &quot;baron&quot; with regular stress on the first syllable and &quot;baton&quot;, with irregular stress on the second syllable, is appropriately described by assigning phonemic forms with the stresses as observed.  The SPE Main Stress Rule is dissimilatory, so that it cannot assign the main stress to a syllable which is followed by a stressed syllable, and that's why it can't apply to the first syllable of &quot;baton&quot;.  The stress of &quot;baton&quot; is irregular, because if the stress were not known to an English speaker, the Main Stress Rule would make the first syllable stressed, rather than the second syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T17:16:34.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17374" CreationDate="2016-04-20T18:14:24.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the phonemic transcriptions should be the same.  But they're not the same, so this is a problem for phonemic analysis.  It has been much discussed.  Generative phonologists give up phonemics entirely, other linguists have attempted to weaken the principles of phonemics somehow, to accommodate such difficult cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T18:14:24.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17374" CreationDate="2016-04-20T22:05:37.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In standard US English intervocalic /t/ merges with intervocalic /d/. &quot;Writer&quot; is thus pronounced identically with &quot;rider&quot;. From a strictly US-English point of view there is no justification in distinguishing between the two at a phonological level. The OED writes: &quot;Brit. /ˈrʌɪtə/, U.S. /ˈraɪdər/&quot;. Please note the slashes: this is phonology not phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-04-22T11:42:37.220" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T11:42:37.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17374" CreationDate="2016-04-21T00:29:13.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update: So I asked my teacher, and he explained it well enough that I think I finally understand it (though correct me if I'm wrong :/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, he said that phonemes not only capture phonetics, but they also take into account root words and meaning. So while &quot;writer&quot; and &quot;rider&quot; both have the same phonetic transcription, this is only because the &quot;-er&quot; suffix and the flap rule cause neutralization. However, with the &quot;-es&quot; suffix we get &quot;writes&quot; [raɪts] and &quot;rides&quot; [raɪdz], which now have different transcriptions. This distinction comes from the difference in phoneme bases, &quot;write&quot; /raɪt/ and &quot;ride&quot; /raɪd/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess the idea is that phonemic transcription doesn't just look at phonetics, but also factors in similar words and root words (in both meaning and phonetics) to determine the phonemic breakdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12983" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T00:29:13.513" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17377" CreationDate="2016-04-21T01:16:04.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd venture this guess: both &quot;wash&quot; and &quot;bear&quot; stem from the same observation. Bears are part-time bipeds who occasionally use their forepaws as &quot;arms&quot;; raccoons appear similarly humanlike when engaged in their washing behaviour. A similarity in body shape and fur colour reinforced the association, but probably wasn't its starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T01:16:04.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3669" CreationDate="2016-04-21T07:37:13.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could consider acquiring vocabulary without translation. That is, neither L1-&gt;L2 nor L2-&gt;L1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very good way to learn a language (all of its components, from vocabulary to grammar, from oral to written language) is to get comprehensible and interesting (or compelling) input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning stages, access to comprehensible material is a problem for obvious reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose you the following techniques to cope with those limits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Watch cartoons for children. Very young children. The images and movements will explain the language that is spoken. The vocabulary is limited and the grammatical constructions are relatively simple compared to other types of speech and text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can read simple texts, begin reading material that is at least 98% comprehensible (i.e. 98% of the words are known). You will begin to learn the rest of the words from context. Comic books and children books are perfect for this stage. Again, if you cannot find suitable reading material at this stage, go back you watching massive amounts of videos, beginning with cartoons and then TV series, movies, etc &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation is not an optimal way to learn a language because a lot gets lost in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must attach to each new foreign word new experiences, new concepts and not just the word you think is equivalent in your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information please read “MIFS - THE MENTAL IMAGE FLASH”  by David Long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from the above article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This same thing is also true with children as they acquire their native language.  Through everyday life, they gain experiences, and thereby build their understanding.  This creates in their minds, the mifs necessary to produce their language.  The mifs includes such things as grammar, syntax, and vocabulary without the child even being aware that these things exist!  Once an adequate amount of mifs are collected, children begin to speak.  Practice is not even remotely involved!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article can be found in the following web page:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://algworld.com/archives.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://algworld.com/archives.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12986" LastEditorUserId="12986" LastEditDate="2016-04-21T14:49:10.367" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T14:49:10.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-21T10:06:49.410" Score="0" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1575866323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This book&lt;/a&gt; suggests the cancellability test for distinguishing the logical consequence from &lt;em&gt;conversational implicature&lt;/em&gt; of an assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1a. You can have either soup or salad. &#xA;1b. You cannot have both.&#xA;1c. You can have either soup or salad, and you can have both, if you want.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book says 1b is an &lt;em&gt;implicature&lt;/em&gt; of 1a, because the meaning of 1b would be cancelled without contradiction by furthur elaboration like 1c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the assertion of a sentence carries with it a suggestion that could be cancelled (without contradiction) by further elaboration by the speaker, then the suggestion is a conversational implicature, not part of the content of the original claim. (The same book, p.191)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, with the cancellability test it's still elusive for me to tell implicature in the examples below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;2a. It was much colder than today.&#xA;2b. It was much colder than today last week.&#xA;2c. It was much colder than today, and the last week was not colder than today. (say, it = yesterday)&#xA;&#xA;3a. This table is as wide as that table is.&#xA;3b. This table is as wide as that table is wide.&#xA;3c. This table is as wide as that table is tall, and this table isn't as wide as that table is wide.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so my question is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are examples 2b and 3b implicatures of 2a and 3a?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we say the cancellation test of 2c and 3c is legitimate? since 2c &quot;It was much colder than today&quot; isn't necessariliy the right interpretation of 2a. Because of deictic influence, the right interpretation of 2a could be 2b, then the elaboration of 2c would be no longer effective. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the difference between ambiguity and implicature? I'm suspecting I'm confused of these two concepts. Is it just because ambiguity where the interpretation of 2b and 3b comes from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12820" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T18:44:20.700" Title="Conversational Implicature vs. Ambiguity" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17387" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17389" CreationDate="2016-04-21T13:27:21.360" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, Semantically 'his' and 'John' come to refer to the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, both &quot;his&quot; and &quot;John&quot; are co-indexed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,Principle C states that an R-expression like &quot;John&quot; needs to be free and not bound to an antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11301" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T17:21:09.260" Title="Is the sentence &quot;His only sibing is John's brother &quot; violating Principle C of Binding Theory?" Tags="&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-21T16:32:05.620" Score="6" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading about rare or antique languages I often came across statements like &quot;the most widespread / widely accepted theory is that it is an isolated language&quot;. You can read that for example in wikipedia for Basque, Korean or maybe Albanian. The reasons given are often like: &quot;there are no clear evidences for the contrary&quot; My question is, if it is really a valid zero-hypotheses to assume a language isolate? To me it seems that such a reasoning is rather subject to scientific &quot;fashions&quot; and that at the moment its quite fashionable to claim isolates, rather then relation. Any educated opinion on that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12990" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-04-22T00:22:05.950" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T10:04:26.723" Title="Isolated language as null hypotheses?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;language-isolates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17387" CreationDate="2016-04-21T17:21:09.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, either that or, more likely, an account that makes &quot;John&quot; bound is mistaken.  It is pretty obvious that &quot;John&quot; in the example is not a bound variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is parallelism here between &quot;command&quot; and &quot;C-command&quot;.  Backwards pronominalization within the same sentence is okay when antecedent does not command the pro-form and neither does the pro-form command the antecedent.  E.g., &quot;The man who first saw her (= Mary) took charge of the donkey Mary was riding.&quot;  In your example backwards pronominalization in the same sentence is okay when the antecedent does not C-command the pro-form, and neither does the pro-form C-command the antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Backwards pronominalization is also sometimes okay when the antecedent does command or C-command the pro-form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;The man who first saw her followed Mary closely.&quot;  &#xA;&quot;His mother always loved John best.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T17:21:09.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17386" CreationDate="2016-04-21T17:37:25.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no point to quarreling over definitions.  If you want to take cancellability as criterial for what you will call &quot;conversational implicature&quot;, then go ahead and do that.  Or, if you don't, then don't.  One can ask for clarity, but there seems to be no empirical issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find your examples obscure.  What is &quot;it&quot; in 2b?  It can't mean &quot;yesterday&quot;, because *&quot;Yesterday was much colder than today last week&quot; is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T17:37:25.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17388" CreationDate="2016-04-21T18:47:36.540" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not at all clear what the term &quot;language isolate&quot; means: one could think it means that the language is not related to any other known language. People mistakenly say &quot;not related&quot; when they mean &quot;I can't show that it is related&quot;, in other words people sometimes confuse lack of evidence and knowledge of non-relationship. As long as you understand &quot;language isolate&quot; to mean &quot;insufficient evidence to justify a claim of relatedness&quot;, then it's obviously the only valid null hypothesis, until one gains evidence to support a claim of relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T18:47:36.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2016-04-21T21:14:01.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I usually study within the Humanities faculty, I am in Computational Linguistics class right now, and can recommend &lt;em&gt;Speech and Language Processing&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd Edition, 2009, by Jurafsky &amp;amp; Martin. There is another book I've tried, &lt;em&gt;Language Processing with Perl and Prolog&lt;/em&gt; by Nugues &amp;amp; Pierre, but I found that it was much more difficult to get into for me, though perhaps handy if you are able to keep up with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting familiar with a few research papers on human language processing (dealing with ambiguities, etc.) was helpful in understanding the textbooks and relating it to NLP as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T21:14:01.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-22T04:04:22.977" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I go to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is understood to mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is true that I go to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to succinctly express&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I am indifferent to whether it is true or false that I go to the&#xA;  store.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I do not know whether it is true or false that I go to the store.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would one say this in English? Are there other languages whose verbs are truth-neutral or truth-indifferent instead of truth-committed as in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;cf. this English Language Learners StackExchange question: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/31342&quot;&gt;Help pinpoint the usage of 'could' in these examples&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T13:14:23.463" Title="Truth-neutral, truth-indifferent, &amp; truth-committed verbs?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;truth-value&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29021" CreationDate="2016-04-22T06:32:00.720" Score="12" ViewCount="17652" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that Malayalam originates from Middle Tamil. This leads me to ask whether Tamil and Malayalam are mutually intelligible. Or perhaps just partly, or asymmetrically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer either answers with a source, or from people who can speak and understand either language and thus speak from their own experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T14:27:03.870" Title="Are Tamil and Malayalam mutually intelligible?" Tags="&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;tamil&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9880" CreationDate="2016-04-22T07:37:22.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could first start by &lt;code&gt;Yule, G., 2014. The study of language. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/code&gt; A more refined and specific introduction to linguistics would be &lt;code&gt;Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. and Hyams, N., 2013. An introduction to language. Cengage Learning.&lt;/code&gt; also if you have hard time understanding linguistic terms you could take a look at the book &lt;code&gt;Trask, R.L., 2013. A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. Routledge.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end if you have enough time to read 500+ pages you could read &lt;code&gt;O'grady, O.W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M. and Rees-Miller, J., 1989. Contemporary linguistics: An introduction.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T07:37:22.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2016-04-22T08:17:46.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a look at this book &lt;code&gt;Grishman, R., 1986. Computational linguistics: an introduction. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And also this book &lt;code&gt;Clark, A., Fox, C. and Lappin, S. eds., 2013. The handbook of computational linguistics and natural language processing. John Wiley &amp;amp; Sons.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can also download this free ebook: &lt;code&gt;Bolshakov, I.A. and Gelbukh, A., 2004. Computational Linguistics Models, Resources, Applications. CIENCIA DE LA COMPUTACIÓN.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gelbukh.com/clbook/Computational-Linguistics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Computational Linguistics: Models, Resources, Applications.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T13:08:30.607" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T13:08:30.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="835" CreationDate="2016-04-22T09:05:59.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;Stanford NLP Software for .NET&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Stanford NLP Group makes parts of Natural Language Processing software available to everyone. These are statistical NLP toolkits for various major computational linguistics problems. They can be incorporated into applications with human language technology needs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sergey-tihon/Stanford.NLP.NET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/sergey-tihon/Stanford.NLP.NET&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sergey-tihon.github.io/Stanford.NLP.NET/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://sergey-tihon.github.io/Stanford.NLP.NET/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T09:05:59.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17388" CreationDate="2016-04-22T10:04:26.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A more complete argument would read: We compared Basque to the Indogermanic, Semitic, Finno-Ugric, and the Caucasian language families as well as to the Etrucsan language and found no provable connections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;famous&quot; language like Basque was probably also compared to Dravidian, Athabascan, Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene (with no provable connection), but somewhere comparison always stops. Usually, &quot;isolated&quot; languages are compared to the geographically plausible neighbours, not to all known language families and isolate languages of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T10:04:26.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-22T15:09:05.273" Score="2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hhesp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hhesp.png&quot; alt=&quot;BNC Interface&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for filler words used in academia. Since fillers are mainly used in spoken discourse, I need to look for &lt;strong&gt;academic spoken&lt;/strong&gt; 'texts'. Anyone knows how to do this using BNC? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Explanation: If I go to Section 1 and select &lt;em&gt;Academic&lt;/em&gt;, then the results include both written and spoken. If I choose in Section 2--&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spoken&lt;/em&gt;, then the results show two tables in order to compare them. I need both these two features in one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your help would be much appreciated. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12998" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T15:09:05.273" Title="How to get data for ACADEMIC + SPOKEN (Academic speech) simultaneously using BNC?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19484" CreationDate="2016-04-22T17:11:02.937" Score="17" ViewCount="13236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came upon an excellent graphical representation of the linguistic distance between a number of European languages. I'm looking for a similar &lt;em&gt;worldwide&lt;/em&gt; map of currently spoken languages. Or at least the raw data. Even if it's not truly worldwide, but just wider than the one presented here, I'd still be interested in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwyPg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwyPg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T16:53:07.503" Title="Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17400" CreationDate="2016-04-22T18:56:13.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noticed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3007/1009&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, Prof. Tyshchenko's work primarily targeted languages spoken in Europe, hence, most of them belong to the Indo-European family (except, probably, only Basque). Even Celtic languages form a mini-group of four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oCZAo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oCZAo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Linguistic Distances measured&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/how-much-does-language-change-when-it-travels/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image courtesy of&lt;/a&gt;. I apologize the's no English version of the map with numbers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I didn't find any direct mention why it does not cover other language families (LF), I think, we may assume that Linguistic Distances (LD) of languages belonging to different LF may be too hard to measure. This is probably caused by too different linguistic tools (mind the vowels, consonants, lexical tones, intonation patterns, and also a whole set of syntactic tools).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you check the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#List_of_mutually_intelligible_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mutually intelligible languages&lt;/a&gt;, you may notice that most language pairs having short LD do belong the same LF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that Prof. Tyshchenko's work &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguist.univ.kiev.ua/museum/book/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(link; sorry for it's in Ukrainian only)&lt;/a&gt; is not an independent research. Instead, it's rather a result of long hard work of a big group of linguists who elaborated various methodologies of how to measure the LD. And it resulted only &lt;a href=&quot;https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/how-much-does-language-change-when-it-travels/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list of measured LD&lt;/a&gt; between the languages spoken in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that the suggested methodology can't be automatically applied to all world's languages, hence there's probably no &lt;em&gt;worldwide&lt;/em&gt; map you're asking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T19:23:22.630" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9070" CreationDate="2016-04-22T22:26:29.247" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do Hindi and Urdu actually differ? Is the relationship between the&#xA;  (spoken) languages more like the relationship between Glaswegian&#xA;  English and American English or Spanish and Portuguese?&#xA;  Are their grammatical forms exactly the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sentence structure of Urdu and Hindi is completely the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they differ in terms of pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not much. A few sounds like ز or ض are pronounced in Urdu as Z but in Hindi its more close to J. but over all its more or less the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they differ in terms of vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Urdu speakers tend to use more loan words from Arabic origin while Hindi speakers tend to use more loan words from Sanskrit. but the street language in both case is the same (as it doesnt rely on loan words much) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I hire a Hindi teacher, would a Pakistani be able to tell I was&#xA;  learning Hindi? Would I be able to make myself understood if I were&#xA;  talking to my (urdu speaking) grandparents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They would have no trouble understanding other there very few words here and there (vocabulary difference). They might guess the difference in accent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Bollywood's Hindi, its more a neutral version of Hindi+Urdu (less Arabic or Sanskrit words) so as to capture a wider audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also for Urdu vs Hindi, Hindi has advantage of better internet presence then Urdu. On the other hand instead of learning a new Devanagari script from scratch, using Urdu's Arabic-based script would be more easier for you. Even if you choose Hindi, and you are already able to read Urdu, then you are learning both languages at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with younger people using roman letters instead of Urdu or hindi's native scripts, and the tendency to freely use English words freely in Urdu/Hindi sentences, the difference between the two languages is growing less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a native Urdu speaker with no trouble communicating with Hindi-speaking friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12999" LastEditorUserId="12999" LastEditDate="2016-04-22T22:34:18.303" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T22:34:18.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15674" CreationDate="2016-04-22T22:45:26.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani have no such pairings: &#xA;Aik&#xA;Du&#xA;Teen&#xA;Char&#xA;Panch&#xA;Chay&#xA;Sath&#xA;Aath&#xA;Nau&#xA;Dass&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English names of these numbers just happen to have same starting alphabet but the pronunciation is clearly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: Sorry would have posted this as a comment but cant do so at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12999" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T22:45:26.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-22T23:44:19.493" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do people still study Frame Semantics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an elective, many year ago, I took one course in a topic called Semantics.  I remember my professor saying that dictionaries are problematic since they try to tell you one particular meaning of a word is better than another.  So she does not like this at all: Webester's Dictionary, Roget's Thesauraus -- forget it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead she suggested we look at word relationships and frames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; is a website where one can look up words and find various senses and related words.  A &lt;strong&gt;house&lt;/strong&gt; can be&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a place where someone lives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an aristocratic family line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a casino (e.g. &quot;the house always wins&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FrameNet&lt;/a&gt;  I understood frames less, but it's sort of like each word comes with a &quot;frame&quot; describing how it is used:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Milton &lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Taking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TOOK&lt;/a&gt; the can of beer out of the refrigerator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Agent removes a Theme from a Source so that the it is in the Agent's possession. &#xA;Milton TOOK the can of beer out of the refrigerator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Getting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GOT&lt;/a&gt; two whistles from John.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Recipient starts off without the Theme in their possession, and then comes to possess it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not hard to find resources on Google (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://prezi.com/fhr4t9jeko48/fillmores-scenes-and-frames-semantics-and-their-use-in-translation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) but I am not a linguist and I can't tell one way or the other.  Does this theory still exist?  Does it get applied outside of very specialized settings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5497" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T23:54:40.050" Title="Do people still study Frame Semantics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17405" CreationDate="2016-04-22T23:54:40.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It certainly still exists, and FrameNet in particular is an active project; I know a couple of people who work on it. Not quite sure what you mean about whether it gets applied outside of specialized settings. Semantics is a relatively small subfield of linguistics (in terms of people who work on it, I mean, as compared with e.g. phonology or syntax), but frame semantics is definitely among the theories that semanticists work with these days, in the US anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T23:54:40.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T00:47:33.873" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the sentence &quot;time flies like an arrow&quot; could have lots of meaning and there is an ambiguity but I draw a tree and I got confused that which meaning is more suitable for this tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S→ NP VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP→ NN NN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VP→ V NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP→ Det NN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NN→ time, flies, arrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;det→ an&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;v→ like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning 1)there exists a particular arrow x such that every time flies (a kind of insect) likes x.( many flies one arrow)&#xA;meaning 2) for every every &quot;time flies&quot;(a kind of insect)y, there is an arrow x such that y likes x (many flies , one arrow per fly) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T17:39:25.633" Title="Ambiguity, PCFG grammar" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T02:47:36.523" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;The East Asian languages do not distinguish r and l. The PIE had r/l alternation in suffixes: -tlom/-trom, -dhlom/-dhrom, -ter/-tel, -ros/-los.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be said in this context about Afro-Asiatic branch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:50:26.013" Title="How strong was the r/l distinction in Proto-Afro-Asiatic?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17430" CreationDate="2016-04-23T08:18:03.010" Score="6" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance?noredirect=1#comment40845_17400&quot;&gt;arose in the comments here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T12:59:40.860" Title="What is the difference between &quot;Linguistic distance&quot; and &quot;Lexical distance&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T09:55:45.647" Score="4" ViewCount="8969" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about pragmatics what is the difference between implicature and entailment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;PS. The book I was reading was Pragmatics by George Yule&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12641" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2016-04-24T02:31:33.630" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T02:31:33.630" Title="What is the difference between implicature and entailment?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17410" CreationDate="2016-04-23T13:26:32.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;entailment&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;necessary&lt;/strong&gt; implication: an inference from an utterance  which must be true if the utterance is true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;implicature&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;cancellable&lt;/strong&gt; implication: an inference from an utterance which we take the utterance to imply on its face, by 'default', but which may in the context of other information nonetheless not be true even if the utterance is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for instance the utterance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John's been in Paris for three years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This utterance &lt;strong&gt;entails&lt;/strong&gt; the inference that John was in Paris at some point in the past: if John has never been in Paris, then the utterance itself is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The utterance &lt;strong&gt;implicates&lt;/strong&gt; the inference that John is still in Paris at the time of utterance: under ordinary circumstances an ordinary English hearer will understand this to be a continuative perfect. But that inference is not necessarily true; under some circumstances it may be that the utterance should be understood as an existential or resultative perfect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John's been in Paris for three years. He's also been in London for five years, and in Vienna for two.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  John's been in Paris for three years, if you need some pointers on how they do business there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T13:26:32.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17407" CreationDate="2016-04-23T15:18:29.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean 'time flies' as you would mean 'fruit flies', then wouldn't 'time flies' have to be one NN, or 'time' to be a modifier? With your current phrase structure rules or lexicon you do not allow this interpretation. You'll have to add rules that either license a construction allowing 'time' to act as a modifier of 'flies', or change the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T15:18:29.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17123" CreationDate="2016-04-23T15:38:38.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Loads of Anglo-Saxon documents survive, such as The &lt;em&gt;Anglo-Saxon Chronicle&lt;/em&gt;. Coupled with the fact that Old English is a West Germanic language sharing many cognates with other languages in Europe, translation is fairly easy and affords one the luxury of speculating about the pronunciation as well. One can also look to irregularities in modern English for clues as to how Old English was structured, as seen for example in the irregular plural form of loaf --&gt; loaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to reading &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;, knowing a modern Germanic language would help you greatly, such as Dutch. Alternatively, try reading the text out loud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastEditorUserId="3620" LastEditDate="2016-06-21T16:31:12.003" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T16:31:12.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8862" CreationDate="2016-04-23T16:56:16.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there cases where other languages are simply much more efficient to speak about a subject matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I read among the line of your question &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do other languages have better grained vocabulary to be more efficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even &lt;em&gt;poorer&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary can give your language more efficiency in expressing an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;em&gt;genderless languages&lt;/em&gt;, such as Finnish or Hungarian. They do not have different word for &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, but one single pronoun only which means either of it. So in these languages you are much more efficient if you want to express &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He/she&lt;/em&gt; is coming from the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;missing&lt;/em&gt; vocabulary paradoxically &lt;em&gt;increases&lt;/em&gt; your expressing efficiency. While in English you have to find totally artificial mechanism, like using plural (&lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;), in Finnish you just use the very natural way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastEditorUserId="3475" LastEditDate="2016-04-23T17:58:25.443" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T17:58:25.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17417" CreationDate="2016-04-23T17:05:02.913" Score="2" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages with declension and conjugation usually have multiple declension and conjugation classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to invent a language with declension or conjugation, one would probably introduce only one single set of endings. However, the natural evolution of languages has ended up in producing languages with multiple classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of such a distinction? Does the evolution of languages go in the direction of higher distinction (from one class to multiple ones), or to lesser distinction (from many classes to just a few classes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T17:51:08.627" Title="What is the origin of declension/conjugation classes?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17416" CreationDate="2016-04-23T17:51:08.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The development of arbitrary morphological classification results from innumerable factors that obscure the relationship between form and function. For example, there may be a sound change that developed in the language that raises word-final mid vowels. Roots might arbitrarily end with /i/ vs. /e/, and there could be a rule of palatalization where /k/ → [č] / __ i. With the addition of the final vowel raising rule, you can get new sequences like [muki] which don't undergo that rule (because originally they were [muke]). Inflectional classes of this type then result from the impossibility of knowing (without doing the historical reconstruction) which words had /e/ and which had /i/, and thus which behave one way vs. another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are non-phonological causes as well, where an inflectional affix only combines with a certain semantically-defined class of verbs (e.g. a perfective affix only combines with stative verbs). New stative verbs may be added to the language, and yet don't allow that affix (perhaps because they are basaed on a noun) -- thus you have verb classes where you have to sort roots as to allowing vs. not allowing this affix -- conjugation classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the basic reason is that the relationship between form and function is not always self-evident, and therefore it may be easier or necessary to treat the relation as a somewhat arbitrary list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T17:51:08.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17102" CreationDate="2016-04-23T20:09:32.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd also recommend qTree - if you've ever sat in a syntax class or had to work with natural language parsers, it will be very easy to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/tex/graphics/pgf/contrib/tikz-qtree/tikz-qtree-manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/tex/graphics/pgf/contrib/tikz-qtree/tikz-qtree-manual.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T20:09:32.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T20:15:17.043" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on the blow Finnish data. As far as I understand there are 3 alternatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) K -&gt; 0 ( in &quot;fault&quot; group) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) kk-&gt; k (in &quot;firplace&quot; and &quot;dot&quot; group)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) k-&gt; k ( in &quot;sledgehammer&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nominatives are the basic form of the noun. -n is a Genetive marker, -lla is an adessive marker, -ni means &quot;my&quot;, -a is a partitive marker , and -ko is a question particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Fireplace group, we have Tukka as the nominative, which I think its syllabus boundary is Tuk.ka, when we add -n(genitive marker) the second syllabus become closed then we have Consonant gradation. -lla is the adessive marker, can we say the syllabification for takalla is ta.kal.la and because we have closed syllabus then we have degemination? or we cannot separate the adessive marker? Can we say the syllabification for takkaa is tak.kaa and because we have open syllabus we have gemination? Also Tak.kaa.ko?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that &quot;sledgehammer&quot; group is the Resistance cluster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about &quot;fault&quot; group, can we have the same strategy that we had for &quot;fireplace&quot; group? vi.ka( open syllabus) vi.an( closed syllabus then consonant gradation) vi.al.la, vi.al.la.ni, vi.kaa( open syllabus)vi.kaa.ko. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have the abstract analysis for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my data&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V23WG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/V23WG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Finnish data&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastEditorUserId="12889" LastEditDate="2016-04-23T20:28:37.590" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T20:28:37.590" Title="Finnish data, Consonant Gradatition" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T20:18:06.817" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curruntly trying to improve the results of my dependency parser (arc-standard) when I found this article: that uses a dynamic oracle. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Q/Q13/Q13-1033.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Q/Q13/Q13-1033.pdf&lt;/a&gt; The authors say that this technique can improve results by 2% but still I dont know how to integrate this to my neural network. I'm using Theanets ( 1 layer neural network) as inputs to the training I generated gold actions (shift, left-arc or right-arc) from conll-u data (many contextes[3 top words of the stack, 3 top words on the buffer and their pos tags ... etc]) and each context have a gold action that leads to the gold tree, as output I have the predicted action. Can anyone help me with this issue please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12936" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T20:18:06.817" Title="How to build a neural network dependency parser with a dynamic oracle?" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-23T22:01:56.327" Score="0" ViewCount="832" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a beginner with linguistics and I'm wondering if some of the syntax trees I've made are correct. Also, how would one make trees for posessive noun phrases such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larry’s exciting trip to Portugal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My friend’s brother’s dog’s bed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your long-lost uncle’s boat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the trees:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPsRd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XPsRd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all. The trees aren't fully labeled but I just would like to know if the main structure is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10986" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T16:57:53.447" Title="Could anyone tell me if these syntax trees are correct?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-04-25T08:18:50.180" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17423" CreationDate="2016-04-24T12:13:36.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but I'll just concentrate on the first one. I would also recommend that you use a ruler or graph paper or whatever, until you can draw well aligned, neat trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first problem is that you are not expanding the nodes properly. While 'the kids' is one NP, it is made up of two elements: a determiner and a noun. You need to show this in your tree. Similarly, even if a constituent has just one element, you still need to expand it. So 'VP--&gt;coming' should really be 'VP--&gt;V--&gt;coming'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you mean to skip a few steps, please use a triangle to show that you did intend to condense the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T12:13:36.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T15:22:39.860" Score="3" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking forward to learn a new language. In the two languages I know, I see problems where one word can mean multiple meanings and can be of multiple types and it gives me a hard time understanding what someone is talking about. E.g. make me a sandwich means transform me into a sandwich and make a sandwich for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that there are languages that have inflections and that's what I like. Most of them have fusions which I call confusions. That is where in, for example, Croatian, accusative and genitive cases are the same for female gender while the male gender unalive in accusative has the same declension as the nominative case which creates a confusion for me what is a subject and what is an object. Declensing Zdenko and Zdenka into instrumental both give Zdenkom which is really a pain for me. Vito in accusative is Vitu which is the same as if it were Vita. That's not just a confusion, but a pain in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which language has less of these complications? I prefer that declensions NEVER cut-off the last vowel and never replace it with a grammatic morpheme, but rather just concatenate it like in Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I know Esperanto too, but Esperanto is not a really much spoken language like German, Italian, Russian, etc.. At least not around people who I know in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13008" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T01:12:07.570" Title="What is the inflexive Indo-European language that has least fusions?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17423" CreationDate="2016-04-24T16:57:53.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trees are messy.  The most obvious mistake is that the first two examples should not begin with complementizers (C) and should not be diagrammed as complementizer phrases (CP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the example &quot;my friend’s brother’s dog’s bed&quot;, you should make sure that each of the possessors (other than &quot;my&quot;) is a NP.  The possessors are &quot;my friend's brother's dog&quot;, &quot;my friend's brother&quot;, &quot;my friend&quot;.  Since the entire example is also a NP, there should be 4 NP nodes in your diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T16:57:53.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17429" CreationDate="2016-04-25T03:39:36.207" Score="6" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies on language acquisition for illiterate French people? Are they aware of the spelling of French words on a subconscious level to be able to pronounce them correctly in different sentences or do they split the words into two or more pronunciations based on sound alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. « c'est » is /sɛ/ before a consonant or an aspirated H, and /sɛt/ before a vowel or a mute H.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe another way of thinking about it is: do illiterate French people consider /sɛ/ and /sɛt/ to be the same word or two different words with the same meaning (ignoring all other possible homophones)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there are currently many French people who are illiterate so this question might be hard to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T18:12:31.027" Title="How do illiterate French people learn which pronunciation to use in different sentences?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3303" CreationDate="2016-04-25T03:58:04.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English many rules have been advocated by language purists. They don't like a certain construction, so they invent a rule prohibiting it. Examples: Thou shalt not use &quot;they&quot; in the singular. Thou shalt not end a sentence in a preposition. This is despite the fact that there are numerous examples of well respected authors doing this for hundreds of years, e.g. Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My parents used to avoid the use of &quot;for free&quot;, stating that &quot;'free' means 'for nothing', so 'for free' means 'for for nothing'&quot;, which they considered made it ungrammatical. I don't know if they still do this. I still prefer to use &quot;free&quot; instead of &quot;for free&quot; although there may be times when I use &quot;for free&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T03:58:04.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17427" CreationDate="2016-04-25T05:36:33.773" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question of &quot;are these two words, or one word with two forms&quot; is particularly interesting linguistically, at least, not if you're basing the answer on the intuitions of illiterate people. If they're illiterate, they might not even have a well-defined concept of &quot;what is a word&quot; (even linguists don't agree entirely). To give an example from English, it seems like asking if illiterate people consider &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; the same word. I may be misunderstanding what you mean here. In any case, I think the interesting part is how people actually use forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may not be a single answer here, since &quot;liaison&quot; in French covers various phenomena that don't all behave in exactly the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the liaison pronunciation of &quot;c'est&quot; as /sɛt/ before a vowel-initial word, even though traditionally described as &quot;obligatory,&quot; is often not truly obligatory even in adult speech. View the following page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.projet-pfc.net/le-francais-explique/la-liaison/types-de-liaisons.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.projet-pfc.net/le-francais-explique/la-liaison/types-de-liaisons.html&lt;/a&gt; I don't know of a detailed account of its acquisition and use. A somewhat contrasting case is liaisons between determiners and vowel-initial nouns, which are acquired relatively early and are robustly obligatory in adult speech (aside from production errors), so I will talk about them a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Liaisons  between determiners and vowel-initial nouns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a paper that describes some data and theoretical models of their acquisition by French-speaking children: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00718002/document&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction&#xA;in French: A usage based account&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Celine Dugua, and Michel Fayol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper supports a viewpoint that I have also seen in other literature on this subject (such as this &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/papers/BybeeLiaison.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper by Bybee&lt;/a&gt;, whom the authors cite): rather than treating the liaison consonant as simply a word-final consonant, it argues for a &quot;construction&quot;-based model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how this works: a phrase like &lt;em&gt;des filles&lt;/em&gt; /defij/ is considered to have a mental representation of &quot;determiner + X&quot; (/de/ + /fij/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, a phrase like &quot;des amis&quot; /dezami/ is not just &quot;determiner + X&quot; with a different word as the determiner (/dez/ + /ami/). Instead, the  mental representation is postulated to be &quot;determiner + zX&quot; (/de/ + /zami/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper terms this the &quot;exemplar-based&quot; model, because the hypothesis is that children first acquire the concrete forms of a noun that are prefixed by a liaison consonant (the lexical representation of a noun like &lt;em&gt;ours&lt;/em&gt; would include /urs/ /nurs/ /zurs/ /turs/) and then learn the appropriate contexts where these are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model that it argues against is the &quot;autosegmental model&quot; where liaisons are modeled as floating consonants attached to the preceding word (i.e. children learn underlying forms like /de.z/ for &lt;em&gt;des&lt;/em&gt; and then combine them with vowel-initial lexical representations such as /urs/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen anyone advance a model where forms like /de/ and /dez/ are represented as two separate words, even for illiterate children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Liaisons between masculine singular adjectives and vowel-initial nouns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4zjsubp8jPMC&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;lpg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=french%20adjectives%20nasal%20vowel%20liaison&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=yYdm4-osq3&amp;amp;sig=IxGoogufsKwESZciT8HRF_xSC_I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi7xM3r9KrMAhWsn4MKHaSXD_AQ6AEIUjAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=is%20a%20suppletive%20form%20on%20par&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Concreteness in Generative Phonology: Evidence from French&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Bernard Tranel 1981 (a book with some nice discussion of liaison and other elements of French phonology) it is proposed that at least some linking forms of masculine adjectives used before vowels are suppletive. The specific examples given are &lt;em&gt;bon&lt;/em&gt; /bɔn/ (normally &lt;em&gt;bon&lt;/em&gt; /bɔ̃/) and &lt;em&gt;bel&lt;/em&gt; /bɛl/ (normally &lt;em&gt;beau&lt;/em&gt; /bo/). So in this case, they would be stored in the lexicon as separate forms. But this is not the same thing as being separate words, any more than the masculine and feminine forms of adjectives are separate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other liaisons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native French speakers (even adults) sometimes make &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/12119/what-are-cuir-and-velours-liaisons&quot;&gt;errors&lt;/a&gt; where they insert a liaison consonant that is not etymologically warranted. (Omitting to make an optional liaison is not considered a mistake.) I don't see how these could be due to literacy, since the consonant is not actually present in the standard written language. In addition, these erroneous liaisons are rare, so it's unlikely the speaker learned these particular erroneous forms by hearing and repeating them. The existence of these errors provides evidence that native French speakers do not just learn liaison consonants word-by-word; they learn general rules that they can extend to create innovative, non-standard forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following examples are taken from Tranel, p. 228:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ce règlement devra être révisé&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;br&gt;[sərɛgləmãdəvratɛtrərevize] &lt;br&gt;'this regulation will have to be revised'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;en dépit d'une circulation que chacun continue à trouver fluide&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;br&gt;[ãdepidynsirkylasjɔ̃kəšakɛ̃kɔ̃tinytatruveflɥid] &lt;br&gt; 'despite a&#xA;  traffic that everybody continues to find fluid'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;le nouveau commence à remonter&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;br&gt;[lənuvokɔmãstarəmɔ̃te] &lt;br&gt;'the new one is beginning to come back'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T19:28:23.040" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T19:28:23.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17409" CreationDate="2016-04-25T08:41:59.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistic distance&lt;/em&gt; is not a really well-defined term. When you consider a tree model of language evolution (this assumption is contested, e.g., by wave models of mutual influence) you can define linguistic distance as the time since the split from the last common predecessor. You can imagine different methods to measure or aestimate this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lexical distance&lt;/em&gt; is one of these methods. It assumes a more or less constant replacement rate for core lexical items over all languages (Again, a contestable hypothesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative method to Lexical distance measures the amount of sound changes in cognate words (see my &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3006/is-there-a-list-of-mutually-intelligible-languages/17298#17298&quot;&gt;answer here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with a tree model based linguistic distance is that it cannot measure linguistic convergence (e.g., the formation of a &lt;em&gt;Sprachbund&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T14:57:11.777" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T14:57:11.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-25T10:32:56.627" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very interested in the old Brythonic languages and their survival in northern England into the second millenium AD. &#xA;Up until the last century you still saw a few word snippets in common use, for instance in sheep counting.&#xA;Unfortunately I'm not a Welsh speaker which hinders my curiosity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question I've had in my head for sometime is with the meaning of the name of a certain village in Cumbria- Tallentire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia tells me that this means world's end but I'm not sure how this could come to pass. Words like peninsula have no connection. And even assuming a much further east historic coastline it seems unlikely this village was on the coast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that tallentire is an anglicisation of the spelling and that in the original Cumbric Ys were more prominent.  Tallentyre at the least. The final e and double ls also seem anglicisations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tal yn tyr seems a fairly logical breakdown. Tall of something.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can conclude with the tyr is that this is the Cumbrian version  of the Welsh twr.  That the name means Hightower - a name which would seem fairly sensible for a village in such a historically rural and lawless land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering though. If anyone out there is less of an amateur than I. Is this w-y evolution at all possible or logical? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately I'm trying to understand the name of this village (which also happens to be my mother's maiden name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13012" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T14:49:06.850" Title="Brythonic w-y? Place name etymology" Tags="&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20959" CreationDate="2016-04-25T19:38:57.777" Score="1" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;One standard assumption is that the subject of a clause originates from the specifier of its predicate, following the predicate internal subject hypothesis. For example, the subject of a simple transitive sentence would originate from [Spec, VP] (or [Spec, vP]) and the subject of a copular sentence with an adjectival predicate would originate from [Spec, AP].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question arises when DP predicates are involved. In a sentence such as &quot;this is Mary's watch&quot;, the specifier of the DP is occupied by &quot;Mary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZyJOC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZyJOC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject is, therefore, unable to be base-generated in [Spec, DP]. Where is it base-generated then? How does the hypothesis account for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T15:29:36.957" Title="On the Predicate Internal Subject Hypothesis and DP Predicates" Tags="&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-25T21:23:52.683" Score="0" ViewCount="1619" Body="&lt;p&gt;I (think that I) understand that sonorants are sonorous because airflow is continuous, non-turbulent, and so resonate at such a frequency that the vocal tract acoustic filter amplifies them. And I understand the voiceless obstruents are not sonorous, because the occlusion in the vocal tract impedes airflow/makes it turbulence, with noise being made by air pressure fluctuations rather than resonance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is how voicing works with obstruents. They involve trilling action at the vocal folds, yes? But the occlusion in the vocal tract means they aren't sonorous. So would the waveform of a voiced obstruent be (quasi)periodic, or aperiodic? Do they have a frequency, and do they resonate? Where does the majority of the noise come from: the build up of air pressure, or the vibration of the vocal folds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm probably wrong on much of the above, so if someone could set me straight on the whole thing, it would be much appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13017" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T23:17:44.247" Title="Voiced obstruents (and sonority in general)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17433" CreationDate="2016-04-25T23:17:44.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three linguistic terms which have a common Latin origin, &lt;em&gt;sonor&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;sonorant&quot;, &quot;sonority&quot; and &quot;sonorous&quot;. A sonorant is a sound produced with a vocal tract cavity configuration where spontaneous voicing is possible: see Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle 1968 &lt;em&gt;The sound pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; p. 300-301 for discussion of the latter concept. Thus vowels, glides (including [h,ʔ], liquids and nasals are [+sonorant], anything else is [-sonorant]. &quot;Sonority&quot; is a less-well defined concept, but is approximately equal to the inverse of resistance to airflow – as such, it is not a binary property but sub-classifies sounds along a scale of at least 5 points (probably not a continuous scale). A [+sonorant] sound need not have vocal fold vibrations, because that is controlled by separate features governing the approximation of the vocal folds. Sounds that have high sonority likewise are not necessarily voiced, for the same reason. So, one can spread the vocal folds when producing a bilabial nasal, and [m̥] satisfies the criteria for being [+sonorant]. Without such active spreading, there would be vocal fold vibration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking [z] as one example of a voiced obstruent, because of the lingual construction, spontaneous voicing is not possible, but voicing is (see SPE p. 300-1). There are a number of accommodations possible with a voiced fricative, such as lowering the larynx, raising the velum, slightly opening the velum, moving the constriction forward. This does become a zero sum game with stop, which can sustain voicing only for a short time until supraglottal pressure rises to the point that voicing stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What allows voicing is trans-glottal pressure drop; a trans-glottal pressure drop requires a sufficiently open vocal tract that oral air pressure does not become too high. Turbulence is kind of orthogonal, though it's hard to have turbulence with a really open vocal tract. Now: you use the term &quot;sonorous&quot;, but unfortunately that is only marginally a term in linguistics. It might be used to refer to RMS amplitude, or it might be used to refer to &quot;having higher sonority&quot; but that requires a standard of comparison to be meaningful. Because sonority is inversely related to resistance to airflow, resistance to airflow is what leads to oral pressure buildup, oral pressure buildup reduces trans-glottal pressure drop, and a trans-glottal pressure drop is a requirement for voicing... there is some relationship between sonority and voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is quasi-periodic vocal fold vibration during production of voiced obstruents (though for some dialects in some positions in English, phonologically voiced stops are actually not produced with vocal fold vibration); you can verify this with an electroglottograph. Anything that vibrates quasi-periodically has a computable frequency, and it's not hard to compute in Praat, if you set the analysis parameters right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W.r.t. &quot;the noise&quot;, I assume you're speaking of the acoustic energy during the production of a voiced stop. Whether you mean &quot;per msc.&quot; or &quot;summed up&quot;, the laryngeal component contributes almost all of the acoustic energy. Unlike voiceless stops, there is very little pressure buildup during a voiced stop, so very little if any release burst. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T23:17:44.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17431" CreationDate="2016-04-25T23:45:12.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the choice of 'i' or 'y' is not necessarily significant: spelling was more fluid in earlier eras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, there are indeed contexts in Modern Welsh where 'y' and 'w' can alternate. For example the equative of 'trwm' (&quot;heavy&quot;) is 'trymach'  (&quot;as heavy&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not relevant here, because &quot;tir&quot; is a word meaning &quot;land&quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://cy.wiktionary.org/wiki/tir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;). There is no need to bring in &quot;tŵr&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T23:45:12.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T09:41:24.643" Score="-1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard about an Indian woman (possibly Hindu) with a given name of Sati the other day. Checking the internet, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sheknows.com/baby-names/name/sati&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; confirmed that Sati is an Indian female name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the name &quot;Sati&quot; related to the name of the Hindu goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(goddess)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sati&lt;/a&gt; who self-immolated, or is it just a coincidence (the name's only two syllables long, so it seems plausible)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="421" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T11:09:35.793" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T18:50:03.530" Title="Is the Indian female name &quot;Sati&quot; the same as the self-immolating Hindu goddess?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-05-16T01:46:18.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T10:24:46.923" Score="2" ViewCount="1622" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly does the term &lt;em&gt;nucleus&lt;/em&gt; refer to in syntax? (I'm not asking about the term in relation to phonetics or phonology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example when syntacticians write about left dislocations and so forth they talk about &lt;em&gt;the nucleus&lt;/em&gt; of the clause. Similarly in some grammars when talking about free relatives or fused relative constructions people sometime refer to the &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; word as the &lt;em&gt;prenucleus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst I have a vague intuitive understanding of this term, I don't actually know what it means and haven't been able to find out from the web. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know, for example, whether in English sentences with fronted negative adverbials, whether the negative word is occurring before the nucleus of the sentence. For example in the sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never before have I been so embarrassed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never have I been so embarrassed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the items &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;never before&lt;/em&gt; occur before the nucleus of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T10:41:51.357" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T10:41:51.357" Title="What is a &quot;nucleus&quot; in syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17437" CreationDate="2016-04-26T18:50:03.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In India it is commonplace to give children the name of a god or a goddess. The  answer to your question is yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T18:50:03.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T00:43:55.027" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 34, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Interjections and exclamations can be used as complete utterances. Other &#xA;  expressives such as &lt;em&gt;hopefully&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;(un)fortunately&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;thank God&lt;/em&gt; can be inserted into &#xA;  a sentence in order to add a personal attitude to the situation expressed. These &#xA;  additions do not contribute to the proposition, as the following examples &#xA;  illustrate:     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(11) &lt;em&gt;a. Fortunately, Bob will arrive tonight. — Really?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;b. I'm glad Bob will arrive tonight. — Really?&lt;/em&gt;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The questioning reply 'Really?' is always directed at a proposition asserted before. &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; In (11a), the remark can only be related to the proposition that Bob will arrive that &#xA;  night ('Will Bob really arrive tonight'), not to the speaker's attitude expressed by &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;fortunately&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is 1 true?  I ask not about what is prescriptively idiomatic. For example, what if in uttering 'Really?', a speaker means &gt;Really? How is this fortunate?&amp;lt; but without uttering the second question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T16:22:22.920" Title="How can a remark not refer to the speaker's attitude?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T06:33:38.960" Score="3" ViewCount="5196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm often curious about how the meanings of English words have evolved over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a copy the 1913 Webster's, and it's very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ideally I would like to have a copy for each decade, or even each year. And It would be nice to have it further back in time than 1913, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would, of course, be possible to contact a large number of antique bookshops and then buy dozens of old dictionary books from different years, but that sounds, mildly speaking, inconvenient. Obviously having everything digitally would be easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this available at all? How can get a hold of such a resource?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T01:01:26.663" Title="Where can I find old dictionaries?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17443" CreationDate="2016-04-27T08:42:53.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For old dictionaries, you can go to the Gutenberg Project and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=dictionary&amp;amp;sort_order=downloads&amp;amp;go=Go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;search for dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;.  There are some old ones there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative to using dictionaries for investigating meaning change over time is to look at actual examples of how words are used over time.  For this, a good tool is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It is a corpus of 400 million words, sampled by decade between 1810-2009.  If you search for a word, it will give you the number of times the word was used in the texts for each decade.  If you click on the number, you can see the actual text samples with the word from that decade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T08:42:53.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17432" CreationDate="2016-04-27T12:21:47.990" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subject of the sentence is &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; in IP,spec.&#xA;In the DP &lt;em&gt;Mary's watch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; specifies the whole DP, ergo she's kinda the subject of this complex DP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T12:21:47.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13038" CreationDate="2016-04-27T12:41:07.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Otherwise: none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, grammatikalisch/grammatisch is also being used arbitrarily by some, and distinctively by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I use it just like the word system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;systemic = regarding the system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;systematic = regarding being part to the system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatic = regarding grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grammatical = regarding some item's part in a grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a grammar is grammatic, and a set of rules (as part of a grammar) may also be grammatic. But data on the other hand, like a sentence &quot;John went(s).&quot;, may only be (un)grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T12:41:07.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T12:45:40.137" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should't it be &quot;monodirectionality hypothesis&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, this is about the one-way that material/structure can be added to a sentence-while-generated, but never deleted. (Harley 2013 cites, next to this Monotonicity H. of Koontz-Garboden, Emonds' Structure Preserving Hypothesis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2016-04-27T16:13:20.697" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T16:13:20.697" Title="Why &quot;Monotonicity&quot; Hypothesis? (Koontz-Garboden)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13208" CreationDate="2016-04-27T13:40:51.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/weblichtwiki/index.php/Tools_in_Detail#Syntax_-_Parsers_and_Chunkers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Weblicht&lt;/a&gt; offers such a service for German and English to the academic community. In order to use it, you need an Academic Account for Fedarated login in a participating European country or you need to be enrolled in the CLARIN IdP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the tools behind the service are often free tools and can be downloaded from their respective URLs (Search for Stanford Parser, Stuttgart Parser, or Berkeley Parser) and used from the command line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T13:40:51.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17454" CreationDate="2016-04-27T23:49:00.200" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a corpus of half a million text documents. I'd like to identify phrases in each document that are the most descriptive with which to build tag clouds. Let's say that I identify the most frequently occurring unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams in each document and apply TF/IDF or some other algorithm that ranks phrases more highly if they occur frequently in one document but not very frequently in the entire corpus. That will give me a set of candidate phrases but, in my experience, that approach gives me a fair number of phrases that are not really meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm wondering what strategies I might want to consider that include considering parts of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/page/demo_view/pos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/page/demo_view/pos&lt;/a&gt; has a demo of parts-of-speech tagging. If I use their demo text and click &quot;submit&quot; I get this as the first paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NNPS/Helicopters MD/will NN/patrol DT/the  JJ/temporary JJ/no-fly&#xA;  NN/zone  IN/around NNP/New NNP/Jersey POS/'s NNP/MetLife NNP/Stadium&#xA;  NNP/Sunday , /, IN/with NNP/F-16s VBN/based IN/in NNP/Atlantic&#xA;  NNP/City JJ/ready TO/to  VB/be VBN/scrambled IN/if DT/an&#xA;  JJ/unauthorized NN/aircraft VBZ/does VB/ enter DT/the VBN/restricted&#xA;  NN/airspace ./.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I pull out nouns, optionally preceded by adjectives, I get these phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Helicopters&#xA;patrol (not a noun in this context but I'm just blindly pulling out phrases as a piece of code would)&#xA;no-fly zone&#xA;New Jersey&#xA;MetLife Stadium Sunday&#xA;F-16s&#xA;unauthorized aircraft&#xA;airspace&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a bad start but I'm wondering how I could tighten up the algorithm? And, I'd love references to research on this approach to relevant phrase extraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13027" LastEditorUserId="13027" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T18:56:23.833" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T18:56:23.833" Title="Parts-of-speech tagging and finding relevant phrases in documents" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17451" CreationDate="2016-04-28T12:18:41.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[ If I understand, you ideally want all meaningful phrases even where the head is not a noun, eg &quot;save the day&quot;, &quot;ready for action&quot;, &quot;fantastically&quot; or &quot;supercalifragilisticexpialidocious&quot;. ]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must break down the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;0. Sentence Segmentation and Tokenisation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm assuming this is already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Find named entities&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You need a first pass to find entities. (So &lt;code&gt;New Jersey&lt;/code&gt; is basically represented as &lt;code&gt;New_Jersey&lt;/code&gt; and has nothing to do with &lt;code&gt;Jersey&lt;/code&gt;.)  This is different than &lt;code&gt;unauthorized aircraft&lt;/code&gt; (which does have something to do with aircraft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Canonical forms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Use a lemmatiser like &lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;spaCy&lt;/a&gt; to turn &lt;code&gt;helicopters&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;helicopter-n&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;is dancing&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;dance-v&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;(You could do stemming to get &lt;code&gt;fantasy&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;fantastic&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;fantastically&lt;/code&gt;, but this is often too aggressive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Improve the selection algorithm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Allow overlapping windows.  If the set of tags for a document includes &lt;code&gt;UK immigration&lt;/code&gt;, it should also include &lt;code&gt;UK&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Immigration&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Synonymisation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is almost the opposite of canonicalisation.  If the set of tags for a document includes &lt;code&gt;UK&lt;/code&gt;, it should also include &lt;code&gt;United Kingdom&lt;/code&gt;, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to experiment to determine the optimal behaviour and order of the steps for your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And each of the steps introduces some risk: improve x% of cases but with false positives that corrupt y% of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T15:16:00.293" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T15:16:00.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17425" CreationDate="2016-04-28T19:06:17.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no language where these fusions are absent altogether. But you have sensibly picked a Slavic language where the diversity of different cases is sort of maximized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a Czech speaker, not a Serbo-Croatian one, and I couldn't find a clear proof that your declension of Zdenka is incorrect on a page of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Serbo-Croatian grammar&lt;/a&gt;. But the claim that the feminime Zdenka has the instrumental &quot;Zdenkom&quot; as well sounds highly surprising to me if I don't say implausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They organize their declension classes very differently than Czech but at the end, their words sound &quot;reasonable&quot; to our ears. And &quot;Zdenkom&quot; simply sounds masculine and it is hard to imagine that they use the same form for a feminime name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Czech declension&lt;/a&gt;, this particular problem surely doesn't arise. We have the masculine and feminime names Zdeněk and Zdeňka (nominatives), respectively. (A grandmother and her late husband from my broader family had these twin names.) The instrumentals are Zdeňkem and Zdeňkou, respectively (templates: pán [masculine animate, Sir], žena [female, woman]). I would expect the feminime suffix in Croatian to be &quot;-ju&quot; or something like that. Perhaps Zdenkoju? But you must be right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A name similar to Vito is Vít (or Vítězslav), informally Víťa, the accusative is Víta, Vítězslava (template: pán again for both), Víťu (template: předseda [masculine animate, chairman]). A feminime name doesn't exist but it could be Víta but the accusative would be Vítu, not quite the same as any of the previous ones. It's usually guaranteed that the masculine and feminime names aren't the same – and if they sound the same, it's often &quot;deliberate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the Serbo-Croatian ones, Czech nouns recognize declension in 7 cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental – which is unusually close to our Latin roots (there is a difference; among the 7 cases in both languages, the Latin ablative is replaced by the Czech – and similarly Polish – instrumental). Vocative (a special case used while calling someone) is alive in Czech and only a few other languages in the world. We call: Baracku! Obamo! Havle! Francisi! Fiorino! And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our children don't learn the Latin names of the cases. Instead, we call them &quot;Who/what&quot;, &quot;From whom/what&quot;, &quot;To whom/what&quot;, &quot;whom/what&quot;, &quot;we're calling, we're screaming&quot;, &quot;about whom/what&quot;, &quot;with whom/what&quot;. These translations sound better in Czech because pronouns such as &quot;whom/what&quot; undergo declension, too. At any rate, prepositions are linked with cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all the 7 cases are always different, but that's a part of the design because certain cases can't be confused too easily. Quite generally, the genitive and accusative are the same rather often; and the dative and locative are the same often, too. The vocative may coincide with the nominative if no natural variation exists (and for many truly exotic names – but as I have mentioned, we do use inequivalent vocatives even for foreign names; and we also create the feminime versions of the names, so for example, a presidential candidate is named Hillary Clintonová).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German declension&lt;/a&gt; only has four cases. The original &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;seven ones in Latin&lt;/a&gt; have been largely &quot;unified&quot; along similar lines as the similarities discussed in the previous paragraphs suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite generally, we almost never face any confusions of this sort in Czech. But that doesn't mean that all the cases are different. The accusative of a masculine word may often be the same as the dative of a feminime word, and so on. For example, the feminime nominative name Zdeňka is also the accusative and genitive of Zdeněk while the nominativ masculine Zdeněk is also the form of the plural genitive feminime, (several/několik) Zdeněk. But it's very difficult to construct sentences where it could lead to confusions. With this declension system, the order of the world becomes rather arbitrary – although different orders do try to convey slightly different meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the last word may often be what we emphasize. I made the sandwich for you (Udělal jsem ti sandvič). In Czech, one may say it in this way, and &quot;for you&quot; is the main message – it is you who was happy to be made this sandwich. Or: Made the sandwich for you I. (It is me who should be celebrated for preparing the sandwich.) Or: Made for you the sandwich. (Out of the things that I could do for you, I chose the sandwich.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the declension removes &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; prepositions relatively to English. Give something &quot;to someone&quot; is expressed as a simple dative of &quot;someone&quot;, without any &quot;to&quot;, and the instrumental may similarly represent the English words &quot;by someone&quot; while the genitive is also used as &quot;someone's&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, many prepositions still survive and they're unavoidable (it's clear that nontrivial if not very complex prepositions meaning &quot;through&quot; and &quot;across&quot; and &quot;underneath&quot; and many others can't be modeled by simple cases in the declension system, we would need dozens of cases in that case). So for example, &quot;make me a sandwich&quot; is &quot;udělej mi/mně sandvič&quot; (or &quot;udělej sandvič pro mě&quot;, pro=for) while you need to say &quot;udělej ze mě sandvič&quot; if you want the sandwich to be made out of you (&quot;z/ze&quot; is &quot;out&quot; or &quot;from&quot;). The preposition guarantees that confusions are avoided here. But even without it, there could be no confusion in the written form of &quot;mě&quot; and &quot;mně&quot; because it's spelled differently (genitive=accusative and dative=locative of &quot;I&quot;, &quot;já&quot;, respectively). But &quot;mě&quot; and &quot;mně&quot; is actually pronounced exactly the same (this is a true exception that two differently spelled words are pronounced the same – if we don't count the example where -d and -t is pronounced the same etc.). But again, it's largely the prepositions that guarantee the absence of real confusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the dogma that the last vowel is never cutoff and modified in the declension rule is absolutely unrealistic in natural languages, and if that's a rule obeyed by Esperanto, it's a way to see that it's an artificial language. Declension naturally &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; supposed to change the ending. The other cases aside from the nominative are supposed to be pretty much equally long as the nominative. The word &quot;declension&quot; and its Czech counterparts mean something like &quot;bending&quot;, &quot;tilting&quot; – so the length should be the same, just the &quot;direction&quot; (chosen vowel at the end etc.) should vary depending on the case. If there is a general rule saying that all the other cases are longer, there is almost no advantage of this system in comparison with a proposition (or some post-position) for everything instead of the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastEditorUserId="9284" LastEditDate="2016-04-28T19:28:56.013" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T19:28:56.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2016-04-28T21:18:15.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning from a native speaker is obviously the best way, but unfortunately there are no native speakers of classical Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe it or not, the best sources of instruction here are the ancient ones, al-Farahidi and Sibawayhi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, all four are double stops.  Both the back and the front of the tongue constrict the air flow.  Saud, tta, and zha air fairly easy.  Daud is a whole 'nother story - there's a reason they called it the language of Daud, it's a little unusual.  When you make a Daud, you drive air on the &lt;em&gt;sides&lt;/em&gt; of your tongue, while making a double stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the trick is to drive air on both sides of the tongue.   To see (feel) what this means, play around with English /l/.  It ain't easy but try to make the air flow on the left side, then the right side, then both sides of your tongue.  Once you can do that, you can do Daud- and I promise the locals will be awed (pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T21:18:15.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2016-04-28T23:29:01.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to have is good recorded materials, made by a native speaker (which nixes that YouTube vid). Qur'anic and Classical Arabic have no first-language speakers, but there are good Qur'an recitations (quite a number) as fdb mentions. The downside is that Qur'anic recitation is not natural speech, plus the room acoustics are not ideal for language learning. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/written-arabic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Foreign Service Institute materials for Written Arabic&lt;/a&gt; are available online, which includes recordings: they also have Saudi and Levantine materials (also not ideal recordings, but more useful). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Search.aspx?doBasicSearch=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA Language Materials&lt;/a&gt; page also links to various sources for Arabic, which largely reduce to the Georgetown materials, The &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA phonetic archive&lt;/a&gt; has recordings of speakers of different dialects (not MSA, since there are no first language speakers of MSA). The transcriptions in the latter can be a bit idiosyncratic (I'm being nice -- one would need to re-transcribe some of the data), but the recordings are of some value in being acoustically reasonable-quality and covering a range of dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation of ظ is particularly variable, and one can encounter both [ðˤ] and [zˤ], but also it may be pronounced the same as  ض which may be as [dˤ] or [zˤ] when produced by a native speaker of a dialect that historically merged those two phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T23:29:01.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17442" CreationDate="2016-04-29T03:42:22.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct: that is possible. But it is far less likely. What the text should have said is: &amp;quot;Really?&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;normally and by default&lt;/strong&gt; directed at a proposition (=excluding commonly used adjuncts) that was asserted before. Consider this example, when there isn't any specific context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Fortunately, Bob will arrive tonight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: Really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now how would A respond?: &amp;quot;yes, he specifically told me so&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;yes, I think it's fortunate that he will arrive tonight&amp;quot;. The former seems far more likely. That is what A would say, except if she already suspected that B thought it might not be fortunate that Bob should arrive tonight. So by default &lt;em&gt;Really?&lt;/em&gt; refers to a proposition rather than a mere adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the separation between proposition and adjunct is not strict, and I think that is why the interprettaion you suggest is possible. I suspect the author said &amp;quot;always&amp;quot; because he disregarded this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T03:42:22.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17465" CreationDate="2016-04-29T04:35:36.930" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;What underlying notions explain this same semantic shift from 'less' to 'not' (ie: negation)? It appears in all 4 languages below, as evidenced by the Spanish and Portuguese synonymy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that in English, 'less than' can euphemise 'not'. E.g, from &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;,     Act 1, Scene 2, Page 3, Scene 5, Line 65:, in uttering (as an aside) that Claudius is 'less than kind', Hamlet really means Claudius is NOT 'generous' (and that Hamlet is not really Claudius's child, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/202511/50720&quot;&gt;because Shakespeare was punning bilingually with English and German&lt;/a&gt;). But are there any other explanations? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology for 'unless' reveals the etymon of 'un' as 'on', which then suggests 'un ← on'  to mean the same as &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=unless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unless (conj.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mid-15c., earlier &lt;em&gt;onlesse&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;(not) on lesse (than)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(not) on a less compelling condition (than);&quot; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=less&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;less&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;The first syllable originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=on&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but the negative connotation and the lack of stress changed it to &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0_moins_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;à moins que&lt;/a&gt; = sauf si.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_menos_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a menos que&lt;/a&gt;, a synonym of which is respectively:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_no_ser_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a no ser que&lt;/a&gt; (in Spanish)    and    &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_n%C3%A3o_ser_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a não ser que&lt;/a&gt; (in Portuguese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T15:09:26.453" Title="What underlying semantic notions connect 'less' to 'not'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-05-03T05:04:56.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14356" CreationDate="2016-04-29T06:30:37.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might help you to take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws7tags.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLAWS7 pos-tagger key&lt;/a&gt;.  It is a part-of-speech tagging machine with 137 different parts of speech!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From CLAWS, there are four part-of-speeches containing the word &quot;adjective&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;JJ  general adjective&#xA;JJR general comparative adjective (e.g. older, better, stronger)&#xA;JJT general superlative adjective (e.g. oldest, best, strongest)&#xA;JK  catenative adjective (able in be able to, willing in be willing to) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also add &lt;em&gt;possessive pronouns&lt;/em&gt; to the list, along with &lt;em&gt;past participles&lt;/em&gt; that occur after a linking verb. For example, &quot;he was tired.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the tags from CLAWS7, you might classify pronouns in English like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;subjective personal pronoun (he)&#xA;objective personal pronoun (him)&#xA;reflexive personal pronoun (himself)&#xA;subjective wh- pronoun (who)&#xA;objective wh- pronoun (whom) 'not commonly spoken&#xA;nominal possessive personal pronoun (mine, yours)&#xA;indefinite pronoun (anyone, everyone)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English there are also &quot;determiners&quot; which are closely related to pronouns and adjectives too. For example, &quot;that&quot; is a determiner which can function as either an adjective or pronoun based on the particular situation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's hard to create these lists because in English there are so many words that can apply to many different parts of speech. Perhaps an ESL teacher would be of more help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13030" LastEditorUserId="13030" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T06:47:35.847" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T06:47:35.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-29T06:55:23.197" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: &quot;Please turn on kitchen lights&quot;. it should generate all possible and alternative sentence such as,&#xA;1. turn on lights.&#xA;2. switch off lights.&#xA;3. switch on kitchen lights.&#xA;4. please turn off kitchen lights&#xA;5. etc..,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13038" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T06:55:23.197" Title="Is there any alternative sentence/questions generator tools available for input pharse/keyword" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-29T11:34:44.073" Score="3" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know English was heavily influenced by French. But were there any other instances during which a Germanic language obtained Romance qualities or a Romance language with Germanic qualities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-04-29T13:47:21.233" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T08:05:22.587" Title="Do Germanic words have Romance qualities and vice-versa?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17462" CreationDate="2016-04-29T13:53:45.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mutual influence between Germanic and Romance languages was huge. Some words crossed the language boundaries several times, e.g. the English word &lt;em&gt;guard&lt;/em&gt; was originally Germanic (*ward), but English borrowed it from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also mutual grammatical influence; the passé composé of French and its Italian counterpart were modelled after the periphrastic perfect tense in German. On the other hand, Germanic languages completed their tense system after the Romance (Latin) model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T13:53:45.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17408" CreationDate="2016-04-29T14:12:53.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the possible exception of Ancient Egyptian where no grapheme for &quot;l&quot; existed, the r/l distinction seems to be well-maintained in the Afroasiatic languages. It exists in Semitic, Berber, Chadic, and Cushitic. Also the Coptic language has it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T16:50:26.013" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:50:26.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17459" CreationDate="2016-04-29T16:05:22.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; is usually parsed as &lt;code&gt;If Not&lt;/code&gt;, introducing a negated conditional clause;  i.e, &lt;em&gt;unless he forgets&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;if he doesn't forget&lt;/em&gt;. Logically, it's the &lt;code&gt;¬P&lt;/code&gt; of a proposition &lt;code&gt;¬P ⊃ Q&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexically, &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; is the diminutive (negative) comparative, contrasting with the augmentative &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;(Note that the diminutive &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; has no alternative suffix like &lt;em&gt;more/-er&lt;/em&gt; ; it's completely periphrastic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphologically, &lt;em&gt;-less&lt;/em&gt; is an idiomatic privative (and therefore negative) suffix denoting absence:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;formless, gormless, shiftless, childless, reckless, timeless,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/valueworthpricecost.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;worthless, valueless, priceless&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all the negativity around, it's not surprising that a prepositional prefix gets interpreted as a negative prefix. Negation always has a focus and therefore has a field, like a magnetic pole.  Anything in an utterance falling inside that negative field (called a negative's 'scope' in the trade) can pick up secondary negation, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/06/caring-less/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;negation by association&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Like &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; in French &lt;em&gt;ne ... pas&lt;/em&gt;, which is now a negative all by itself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;although it originally meant 'step'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T15:09:26.453" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T15:09:26.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2016-04-29T17:28:10.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Georgian and didn't get the part about ხალხი.   We pronounce it &quot;khalkhi&quot; and didn't get the whole Turkish or Armenian part xD.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13046" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2016-05-01T17:18:37.870" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T17:18:37.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17443" CreationDate="2016-04-29T19:49:40.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary contains copious information on the history of every word.  It's available online and has awesome search capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can make it to Tokyo there's a little bookshop (or was, 10+ years ago) that sells nothing but dictionaries and grammars.  piles and piles of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T19:49:40.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17470" CreationDate="2016-04-30T15:19:04.437" Score="12" ViewCount="2764" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;em&gt;angst,&lt;/em&gt; taken from German &lt;em&gt;Angst,&lt;/em&gt; seems to ultimately originate from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*angustiz&lt;/em&gt;. This word has descendants in many Germanic languages, including, but not limited to, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German and Dutch. The English word &lt;em&gt;anger&lt;/em&gt; is also related to this group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word &lt;em&gt;anxiety&lt;/em&gt; has a similar meaning and seems to derive from Latin &lt;em&gt;anxietās&lt;/em&gt;. This word has cognates all over the Romance languages, including, but not limited to, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two groups of cognates mean similar things. If we go even further back, is there a link between the two groups, for example in Proto Indo European?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer if answers included a source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastEditorUserId="12996" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T20:19:03.000" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T20:19:03.000" Title="Do the words &quot;angst&quot; and &quot;anxiety&quot; share a common root?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17468" CreationDate="2016-04-30T15:47:41.077" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Germanic &lt;em&gt;angst&lt;/em&gt; and Latin &lt;em&gt;anxiety&lt;/em&gt; are derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root, which was something like &lt;em&gt;*h₂enǵʰ-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;constrict, narrow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philippa (2003-2009) confirm that they are cognates: under &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/angst1&quot;&gt;angst&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; they say, &quot;see &lt;em&gt;eng&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; under &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/eng1&quot;&gt;eng&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; they say that the word is related to Latin &lt;em&gt;ango&lt;/em&gt; and they give the Proto-Indo-European root as above. Also related is &lt;em&gt;angina&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Vaan (2008) says &lt;em&gt;anxius&lt;/em&gt; is derived from &lt;em&gt;ango&lt;/em&gt; as expected, and mentions the same root as Philippa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idle speculation: the root may be onomatopoeic, because an emphatic sound /ŋ/ resembles the sound one makes when one's throat is blocked or constricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T15:47:41.077" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-30T16:21:23.423" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Carnie's English Syntax and I'm having some doubts regarding the syntactic trees of some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what I've understood about my doubt, it has to be with the definitions of constituents and dominance, but I still can't figure out why sometimes the syntactic tree starts with a root node CP with 2 nodes and sometimes with 1 nodes. The same way in some sentences the first VP has 2 nodes, sometimes it has 1 node under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched on the Internet and I copy pasted the first links I found out regarding my doubts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling550/9one-fell-swoop.GIF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling550/9one-fell-swoop.GIF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example has only 1 CP with 2 nodes DP and C' under it and VP has 2 nodes too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;a href=&quot;http://amyrey.web.unc.edu/files/2011/10/Rel-Tree-1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://amyrey.web.unc.edu/files/2011/10/Rel-Tree-1.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example CP has only one node C' under it, the same way VP dominates a one node V' who later has 2 nodes V and NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13050" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T16:21:23.423" Title="Syntax trees: Why CP and VP sometimes have only 1 node and sometimes 2 under them?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6776" CreationDate="2016-04-30T20:39:39.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A determiner does not stand alone.  It is a place in a sentence.  Just as there are subjects and predicates in every sentence (or it is not a sentence) they are made up of nouns, pronouns (of all kinds) and verbs.  In this way a determiner can be the demonstrative pronoun &quot;that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13057" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T20:39:39.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-30T23:36:25.423" Score="2" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remembering a Czech song I once learnt I remembered a short Czech crash course I had and the teacher who said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Czech, stress is always on the first syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me thinking and I remembered Russian, also a slavic language, which is well known for its unpredictable stress pattern and where stress could appear anywhere in a word (to the best of my knowledge). And then I remembered something else, looked it up, and yes, Wikipedia tells me that in Polish, stress is typically on the penultimate syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These languages are all related to each other, i.e. stem from a common ancestor, yet seem to have distinctly different stress patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, French typically stresses a words final syllable, Italian usually the penultimate although the final, third-last and fourth-last syllable may be stressed and Spanish seems to follow the same rule as Italian (again the latter according to Wikipedia). This all seems to indicate that their common ancestor (Latin) had stress towards the end of a word. However, the connection is based on the assumption that stress evolves similarly to phonology, i.e. small changes are fine but significant differences would need to be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it generally accepted that stress co-evolves with words or are the romance languages more the exception than the rule?&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to the first question is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, how is the seemingly tremendous divergence of the slavic languages explained?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Since there have been a few questions on what I mean by &lt;em&gt;co-evolution of words and stress,&lt;/em&gt; here is my rationale:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Words can be thought to evolve, e.g. a common precursor &lt;em&gt;*ph₂tḗr&lt;/em&gt; evolved into Latin &lt;em&gt;pater&lt;/em&gt;, Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;पितृ&lt;/em&gt; ‎(&lt;em&gt;pitṛ&lt;/em&gt;) and Germanic &lt;em&gt;*fadēr&lt;/em&gt;; the first further evolved into French &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt; and Spanish/Italian &lt;em&gt;padre&lt;/em&gt; while the last further evolved into German &lt;em&gt;Vater&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;faðir&lt;/em&gt; and others. For a series of phonologically related words, the evolution is typically similar, as with ÜIE &lt;em&gt;*p-&lt;/em&gt; that evolved into Germanic &lt;em&gt;*f-&lt;/em&gt;. I can imagine stress following a similar set of evolutionary rules, e.g. to invent an example the stress of a two-syllable word ending in &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; moving from the second to the first syllable. Co-evolution would assume that the stress evolution was influenced by a phonological evolution (e.g. the final &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; syllable being reduced to shwa) and vice-versa in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastEditorUserId="10467" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T09:05:48.870" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T05:52:14.417" Title="What can be said about the evolution of syllable stress in related languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17473" CreationDate="2016-05-01T00:17:00.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what it means for stress or words to co-evolve. Most languages have relatively regular rule-governed stress systems, but Indo-European languages have more than their share of lexicalized systems such as found in English and Russian. The accent system of Proto-Indo European was rather messy, with morphological alternations and lexical classes as one finds in Lithuanian and Russian (some people even think it was a tone language of sorts). Various sub-groups regularized the system, hence Latin developed a regular right-end oriented system, and late Germanic developed initial accent. English then messed with that system to create the messier system that we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Romance languages tend towards a word-final position of stress because they derive from Latin and Latin had such a stress system. The Latin stress system was easy to learn, thus is was largely preserved in Romance, though the loss of vowel length distinctions and other factors resulted in some irregularity. The Indo-European system was hard to learn, and tended to get regularized in favor of a more transparent rule-based system, as it did in West Slavic. This is an instance of a general trend in historical change: lexically and grammatically arbitrary rules are harder to learn than regular phonological rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T00:17:00.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17494" CreationDate="2016-05-01T10:00:28.640" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am attending a class on English Linguistics and right now we are discussing the cohesion device of reference, which means that one item in text points to another element for its interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Endophoric reference consist of &lt;em&gt;anaphora&lt;/em&gt; (refers backwords) and &lt;em&gt;cataphora&lt;/em&gt; (refers forward).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these ideas, is it correct to say that this is an example of &lt;strong&gt;anaphora&lt;/strong&gt;, given that it is also an example of sustitution (=auxiliary verb used to avoid repetition and hold the text together)? (=the pronoun or pro-form follows the reference word): &#xA;&quot;I should have &lt;em&gt;bought a present&lt;/em&gt;. Susie &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Did&quot; is in this example the item referring backwords to &quot;bought a present&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastEditorUserId="10944" LastEditDate="2016-05-01T10:05:38.650" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T13:20:46.883" Title="&quot;I should have bought a present. Susie did&quot;: is this an example of anaphora?" Tags="&lt;references&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8517" CreationDate="2016-05-01T13:04:16.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the title line you speak of &quot;intervocalic g&quot;, while you actually mean &quot;g followed by u&quot;, which is different. Only the latter case bears a similarity to &quot;w&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all languages I know, speakers make a difference between &lt;i&gt;careful speech&lt;/i&gt; and casual speech, and this I believe is the case hier: &quot;aɣwa&quot; is careful speech and &quot;awa&quot; is easygoing speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also keep in mind that for millions of people in Peru and Bolivia Spanish is just a second language, so I would not expect everybody's pronunciation to be fully academic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13064" LastEditorUserId="13064" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T11:36:40.180" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T11:36:40.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-01T15:18:43.280" Score="2" ViewCount="784" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in what knowledge we have regarding the process by which a young  child acquiring French as a first language learns to choose correctly between the masculine and feminine forms of adjectives when describing themselves. If, for instance, a young girl grows up in a French-speaking household where everyone else is male, is her learning to describe herself using feminine forms delayed for lack of examples of female self-descriptive speech to copy and learn from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subsidiary questions that come under the same umbrella:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do children learn to make this m/f distinction sooner or later if the masculine and feminine forms sound very different (e.g. &quot;beau&quot; and &quot;belle&quot;) compared to more similar sounding forms such as &quot;blond&quot; and &quot;blonde&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and when do children learn that m/f forms that sound very different from each other (again taking the example of beau/belle) are forms of the same adjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is how and when children learn to make this distinction to describe themselves closely related - or unrelated - to how and when they learn to use the appropriate masculine or feminine forms of articles, adjectives and so on when speaking about common nouns? Are grammatical gender and natural gender often confused with each other by children as they learn to speak French as a first language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and when is learning to use the correct forms of adjectives to describe themselves related to the process by which children learn to use the appropriate masculine or feminine pronoun to refer to themselves? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, indeed, the process by which children learn to identify themselves as male or female?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do other languages with distinct female and male forms of speech compare to French in this regard? (While I am aware that English comes into this category for some pronouns and other words, I am primarily interested in languages that make as much or more use of gender-specific forms as French does.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10433" LastEditorUserId="10433" LastEditDate="2016-05-01T16:00:03.790" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T08:35:27.153" Title="How and when do French children learn to select between masculine and feminine forms of words when referring to themselves?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17480" CreationDate="2016-05-01T19:02:37.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning the correct gender (and number) for referring to oneself is a very minute and relatively easy part of learning genders or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;noun classes&lt;/a&gt; (and number) generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it follows the same process, for French, English and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;every other language with genders or noun classes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why easy?  Generally the first and second person are among the nouns referenced &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; in daily spoken language.  That's part of why we have pronouns for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then becomes: how do children learn noun classes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A trickier question: how did people teach their children to refer to them (the parents) with &lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt;, even though the parents referred to the children and each other with &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;?  It was common in the old days.  I assume that was done with some explicit conditioning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-05-03T08:35:27.153" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T08:35:27.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-01T19:38:33.287" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;What category are the two nouns for the following phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) The play by Bill Roberts&#xA;B) A chicken soup bowl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;according to distributional criteria &quot;Roberts&quot; and &quot;soup&quot; are adjectives, but should they be labeled as such? as heads of an AdjP? if not how can you have two NPs together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13067" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T15:07:47.843" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T15:07:47.843" Title="Noun adjuncts (attributive nouns) in the x-bar scheme" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-02T19:13:21.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-01T23:26:27.290" Score="5" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really interested in Biblical studies, so I've often wondered this about the languages in the Bible. Namely, Greek (Koine), Hebrew, and Aramaic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried looking into it, but I've never really been given a satisfactory answer. Usually, people will explain to me how we can determine the certain meaning of a word, using the modern form of the language, and languages of the same language family, but this does not explain how we came to figure out the grammar and syntax of a language, when many of its parts have no modern analogue. How did we figure out how μι verbs worked in Ancient Greek, for example? Or, how did we figure that א and  ע were once pronounced? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we go about reconstructing the grammar and syntax of a dead language (mainly, I'm wondering how this was specifically done for the languages in the Bible, but an answer for how this is generally done for any dead language, or a focus on only one of them will be fine as well)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any research that I could read about the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13069" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T05:16:39.353" Title="How are dead languages reconstructed?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17486" CreationDate="2016-05-02T05:16:39.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference between dead languages and living languages in this respect is that it's possible with a living language to resolve an empirical question by interrogating a speaker of the language, and this is not possible with a dead language. Therefore is you want to know how the N. Saami word &lt;em&gt;guossi&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced, you can ask a speaker to say it, and if you want to know if &lt;em&gt;Ich habe gesagt das&lt;/em&gt; is grammatical in German, you can ask a speaker. If you want to know how Ancient Greek γλῶττα was pronounced or whether &lt;em&gt;ʔəshaydxʷ ti stubš ci sɬaday&lt;/em&gt; is grammatical in Lushootseed, you'll have to use secondary sources since there are no native speakers of these languages. In dealing with dead languages, we analogize from what is known to a conclusion about the unknown, based on similarities. In fact, we usually do that with living languages, though we are not supposed to invent &quot;data&quot; by analogy to directly-elicited data. If there is a very large corpus of a dead language, there is a reasonable chance that a particular desired form in a paradigm is actually available and if not, there is probably a reasonable basis for conjecture based on what is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: there can easily be severe limits on knowledge especially when it comes to matters of pronunciation. With very rare exceptions (most notably Sanskrit, and to a considerable extent Biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic), one cannot call on trained phonetic descriptions of ancient languages, whereas one &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; call on numerous trained phonetic descriptions of recently extinguished languages such as Tonkawa, and for Lushootseed there are recordings of native speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T05:16:39.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-02T06:09:57.750" Score="0" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;recursion is the ability to place one component inside another component, so is it only for the same kind such as NP with NP, PP with PP, and etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13071" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T14:53:50.910" Title="Is there any rule in recursion?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T04:20:37.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4613" CreationDate="2016-05-02T10:36:38.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Category, is a more generic term, but when it comes natural language process or Finite state automata, &lt;em&gt;non-terminal&lt;/em&gt; node is the correct term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13073" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T10:36:38.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17488" CreationDate="2016-05-02T14:53:50.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recursive phrase structure rule is one with the same symbol occurring in the string on the right hand side of the arrow and on the left of the arrow.  For instance &quot;N -&gt; N and N&quot;.  A recursive set of phrase structure rules is one which permits a phrase structure derivation in which a symbol can be rewritten as a string containing that same symbol.  For instance &quot;NP -&gt; Det N, Det -&gt; NP 's&quot;, which permits the psg derivation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;NP  &#xA;Det N  &#xA;NP 's N  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whose last line has &quot;NP&quot; recurring in the string &quot;NP 's N&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to generate an infinite number of sentences, a psg has to be a recursive set of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tree which has a symbol dominating itself could only be generated by a recursive psg.  However, trees are often cited which are supposed to have some source other than a psg, so just because you see a tree with a recursive symbol, that doesn't necessarily have any interesting grammatical consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T14:53:50.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4630" CreationDate="2016-05-02T18:25:23.920" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest level of Proto-indo-european had such morphology, but it was somewhat simpler with two consonants or consonant groups and one vowel between. The strong verbs in Germanic languages is a rest of this state. There are evidence indicating that the Semitic type evolved from this type, and this again is used as a support for the Nostratic hyotesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T18:25:23.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17477" CreationDate="2016-05-02T21:02:19.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great question that has never occurred to me.  Obviously depends on how we want to define anaphora, which we can do however we please, so I won't go there.  But there is a critical  distinction to be made.  &quot;I forgot to buy Suzy a present.  She's pissed.&quot;  Here &quot;Suzy&quot; and &quot;she&quot; are co-referential.  But in your example, &quot;bought a present&quot; and &quot;did&quot; are not.  They may not even refer, depending on your philosophical perspective.  &quot;Did&quot; does not, &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; corefer; you could gloss &quot;Suzy did&quot; as either &quot;Suzy bought a present&quot; or more likely &quot;Suzy did buy a present.&quot;  Which are not really the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible test: ask &quot;who or &quot;what&quot;, etc.  The answer to &quot;She who?&quot; would be &quot;Suzy&quot;, same as in &quot;I forgot to buy Suzy a present.&quot;  But &quot;Did what?&quot; would get &quot;buy a present&quot; rather than &quot;bought a present&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would be inclined to say that the meaning of &quot;did&quot; etc. in examples like yours depends on more than just back (co)reference, and so should be distinguished from the canonical cases of nominal anaphora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-05-02T22:44:21.317" LastActivityDate="2016-05-02T22:44:21.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17477" CreationDate="2016-05-03T00:09:59.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's anaphora, but it isn't referential anaphora.  Following George Lakoff, most now distinguish identity of meaning anaphora (here the deleted V' is interpreted to mean the same as its antecedent V', &quot;buy a present&quot;) from identity of reference anaphora.  An example of the latter would be &quot;I would have bought a present, but Suzie bought it first.&quot;  The meaning of a V' can be reasonably represented by its form (here &quot;buy a present&quot;), but coreferential anaphora works quite differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-05-03T13:20:46.883" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T13:20:46.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17495" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17498" CreationDate="2016-05-03T04:07:21.230" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/edoow.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/edoow.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed the swastika-like images along the sides and at first thought it was either Nordic or Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13080" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-05-03T09:30:54.560" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T09:30:54.560" Title="I need help identifying this language" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T04:20:10.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-03T07:50:07.393" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the process to form nouns from Phoenician verbs?  I would like to find a nominal form of the Phoenician verb &quot;&quot; (nun-tsade-resh, spelled left-to-right) (&quot;NṠR&quot;/&quot;naṡar&quot;) (corresponding to the English verb &quot;triumph&quot;, with the nominal form corresponding in English to &quot;[a] triumphing, triumph, victory&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13081" LastEditorUserId="13081" LastEditDate="2016-05-06T02:21:11.277" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T02:21:11.277" Title="What is the process to form nouns from Phoenician verbs?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17495" CreationDate="2016-05-03T07:52:20.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a Brahmic script, though I am not sure which one.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13081" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T07:52:20.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17495" CreationDate="2016-05-03T08:13:04.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like Gujarati to me. You can check by looking at the table of the Gujarati alphabet at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gujarati.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gujarati.htm&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13083" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T08:13:04.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2016-05-03T15:05:41.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just so you know, Camille is a gender-neutral name. It's French, and actually it's the most famous gender-neutral name in France. Nowadays, about 70% of Camille are females. However, during the 19th century it was the contrary: you had more guys named Camille than girls. So famous painters, writers, fictional characters from this period are mainly guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13087" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T15:05:41.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-03T17:39:43.340" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to have an experience on how language evolved, from a rigorous point of view. I searched for books; there are many books, most of them in popular domain, which I don't aim at, as the density of novelty and research information is too low, and would not prove to be efficient in use of time for me. I came to know that Chomsky is the leading linguist, so, I searched for his books, which are immense too; even in this sub-filtering, I am confused.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be of great help, if a rigorous book, mainly on the philosophy of language, which uses history to see the patterns to explain the evolution, is mentioned.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: As jlawer mentions, we can't have hard historical evidence to describe evolution, then if there is any &quot;guess&quot; which is widely known to fit better of all other guesses, I will be given a quick boost in my progression of articulating a mathematical no-analogy/semi-analogy language. Though the word rigorous book, can be taken to mean a book which is not intended for layman.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13088" LastEditorUserId="13088" LastEditDate="2016-05-04T02:39:16.733" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T19:09:53.503" Title="Which book is rigorous in explaining the evolution of language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-03T17:43:35.903" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for hints where to find a (&quot;standard&quot;) analysis of something like this english dative construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Look me in the eye&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the &quot;the&quot; in this phrase is semantically scoped BY the me (read: &quot;the&quot; eye of whoever me denotes). So I wonder if this 3sg may somehow have been raised from inside &quot;in&quot;'s scope, where also the &quot;the&quot; sits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T17:43:35.903" Title="What is some standard analysis for &quot;Look me in the eye&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14772" CreationDate="2016-05-03T20:05:20.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common pronunciation would be something along the lines of /e:ɔd̪ˠa:n̪ˠ/ amongst all the Irish speakers I've ever heard or spoken with &quot;as Gaeilge&quot;, both Gaelgóirí and second language speakers. I don't know why the séimhiú (lenition) on the letter d is ignored in pronunciation, but I can't recall ever having heard it spoken. I tried to find an example recording but the online dictionaries failed me as they don't usually cover names. The best I found was this video from TG4 of Paisean Faisean which has a lad named Aodhán on it. His name is spoken several times after 1:28.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/6vID2PFOcDY?t=1m28s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/6vID2PFOcDY?t=1m28s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13090" LastActivityDate="2016-05-03T20:05:20.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2016-05-03T22:12:25.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may not be a grammatical characteristic of English, but Spelling-bees are unique to English speaking countries. A testament to the crazy spelling of English words.&#xA;Also according to the article entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English is not normal&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;There is exactly one language [English] on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s &quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13092" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T15:39:07.897" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T15:39:07.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17547" CreationDate="2016-05-04T02:53:16.440" Score="0" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was advised to repost my &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/311577/did-the-in-the-which-mean-anything#comment735714_311577&quot;&gt;original ELU question&lt;/a&gt; here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did 'the' mean anything in &lt;strong&gt;the which&lt;/strong&gt;, compared with the relative pronoun &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt;? OED's entries for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/228284?redirectedFrom=the+which#eid14745204&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the which&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; only redirect to definitions of 'which'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure because cognates of &lt;strong&gt;the which&lt;/strong&gt; remain in Romance languages and do  differ from 'which'. For instance, 'que' differs from: (all in one word in French) « le(s)/la + quel(le)(s)», and (as two words in Spanish)  « el/lo/los/la/las/lo + que ».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter two are really cognates by Grimm's Law; the 'q' in Latin (phoneme [kʷ]) turned into 't' in Germanic languages like English (phoneme [xʷ]).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What factors or reasons might have caused  'the which' to vanish?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T21:21:09.073" Title="Did 'the' in 'the which' mean anything?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-04T08:09:22.430" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, DPs need to move to certain positions or configurations in order to check for case features (among other things) and allow spell-out. For example, raising predicates raise the subject of an embedded non-finite clause to [Spec, IP] of the matrix clause to check for NOM case, which the embedded clause is unable to assign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary seems to be sick&#xA;*It seems Mary to be sick&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so far, this is true of phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any cases of heads (e.g. verbs, auxiliaries, modals, etc.)&#xA;  in any languages that require movement to a certain position or&#xA;  configuration (e.g. [Head, IP]) in order to be spelt-out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm coming up with an analysis of Malay copulas that goes along the lines of the question above based on the observation that they are nonverbal, cannot occur in non-finite clauses, are non-overt when there are aspectual markers, negators and/or modal verbs in the same clause, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is any literature on the topic, please send me the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2016-05-04T09:29:26.287" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T09:29:26.287" Title="Movement and Spell-Out of Heads" Tags="&lt;copula&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17462" CreationDate="2016-05-04T08:43:23.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year I watched on TV here (England) a Flemish drama series sub-titled in English - I was amazed how many French words were used in conversational Flemish - the characters even said 'oui' for 'yes'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T08:43:23.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17501" CreationDate="2016-05-04T19:09:53.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I assume you mean to refer to the emergence of language or linguistic behavior in the natural history of the species, rather than the evolution of languages (e.g. French from Latin).  But both topics are fascinating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many decades this was a taboo subject, and was famously banned in the 19th century in some famous linguistic society whose name I forget.  But things are different now; we have the kind of scientific data bearing on language evolution that was unavailable back in the day, from many different fields - not just linguistics, but developmental psychology, primate studies, etc.  So now there are very interesting and genuinely scientific theories about the emergence of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend [How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Human Evolution] by David McNeill &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/evolution-language/how-language-began-gesture-and-speech-human-evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;  McNeill has also written a couple of books about gesture and its relation to mind and language - he makes a strong case that language emerged from gesture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a rigorous philosophical treatment of language evolution you're probably out of luck; philosophers do philosophy, not history.  But you can find a rigorous treatment of the structural properties that must be satisfied by any set of practices in order to be counted as contentful (i.e. &quot;linguistic&quot;) in Robert Brandom's work.  As he says, philosophers are interested in what counts as conceptual rather than how creatures come to have abilities that display conceptually contentful behaviors.  See his essay &quot;How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science&quot; in [Reason In Philosophy].&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674725836&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-05-04T19:09:53.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17515" CreationDate="2016-05-06T02:22:01.233" Score="5" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mikhail Sholokov novel &quot;Тихий Дон&quot; (Quiet Don) is translated &quot;And quiet flows the Don&quot;. In this title, is the word &quot;quiet&quot; an adjective or adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an adverb modifying the verb &quot;flows&quot;, why doesn't it take the normal adverb form &quot;quietly&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to say it is a predicate adjective, and &quot;flows&quot; is a copular verb? If so, are there other cases loke this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12973" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T10:19:04.670" Title="What part of speech is &quot;quiet&quot; in &quot;And quiet flows the Don&quot;?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-05-09T04:21:13.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-06T03:02:26.170" Score="1" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a chatbot and I need corpora to train them. I need corpora that is used as general chatting. I would be happy if anyone would help me with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13111" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-05-06T10:16:36.530" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T03:25:53.397" Title="I am building a chatbot and I need corpora" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17513" CreationDate="2016-05-06T10:19:04.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would describe it as a adjective functioning as complement, rather than as predicate (I don't think you can really call &quot;flows&quot; copular, even if it has been inserted by the translator). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rather poetic construction, which leads me to  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Green grow the rushes O!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't thought of any other examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T10:19:04.670" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-06T16:00:21.130" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can “to” ever be a Prep or a Particle before “be”?  If so can anyone think of an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13115" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T17:39:18.337" Title="Can “to” ever be a Prep or a Particle before “be”" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17516" CreationDate="2016-05-06T16:38:35.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Can where he went to be revealed?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q (where he went to can be revealed)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Q (someone can reveal Q (he went to where))  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schematically, we start with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;... can reveal ... [PP to where]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is converted to the passive,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;... [PP to where] ... can be revealed  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;where&quot; moves out of the way between &quot;to&quot; and &quot;be&quot; because the question word has to be at the beginning of the embedded question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;... [PP to] can be revealed  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and finally &quot;can&quot; moves out of the way because it has to be inverted with the subject of the upstairs Q,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;... [PP to] be ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-05-06T17:39:18.337" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T17:39:18.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2016-05-06T20:36:37.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adjuncts and complements are different. An adjunct is not necessary, and adds extra information. A complement is necessary in order to complete the meaning:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [S]He [V]put [O]some salt [C]in the soup.&#xA;The verb put must have a complement saying where something is put. Without the complement (in the soup), the clause would not be complete. We cannot just say He put some salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13120" LastActivityDate="2016-05-06T20:36:37.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-07T03:47:41.673" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages which have a tense or voice that shows whether something is finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this example only I will indicate in the present tense that something is finitely true by adding an &amp;quot;-n&amp;quot; to the end of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am hungryn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chose to say that being hungry was finitely true because, once I eat, I will no longer be hungry and the sentence no longer will be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this next example, I will just add an &amp;quot;-r&amp;quot; to the end of the verb to indicate that what is being said by my clause as a whole will always be true and is therefore infinitely true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gravity causes objects to becomer attracted to eachother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chose the infinitely true conjugation for this because what I had said in the sentence will always be true- if there is the existance of gravity, that is the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I am wondering if other languages have something that funtions like this or is similar to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T03:47:41.673" Title="Tenses/Voices that show whether something is finite or not" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17237" CreationDate="2016-05-07T16:31:50.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In another answer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure/17351#17351&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I introduced the notion of a derived phrase structure rule, as an alternative to phrase structure derivation.  In effect, every constituent, together with its grammatical category, becomes a phrase structure rule, and any finite subset of these which is a basis for the language can be considered a lexicon for the grammar.  This handles the case of idioms which are constituents, without any apparatus other than the parsing and look up needed for the language anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T16:31:50.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-07T19:26:10.327" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a language that does not have overt morphological tense and any tense distinctions (e.g. Malay), how is it possible to discern whether a clause is finite or non-finite? Is it possible to use aspectual markers as a diagnostic for finiteness and say that a clause that does not permit aspectual markers is non-finite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Saya biar dia  (*akan) makan&#xA;1.SG let  3.SG (*PROS) eat&#xA;&#xA;Saya mahu (*akan) makan&#xA;1.SG want (*PROS) eat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are subjunctive and imperative clauses finite? In English, the verb form used in subjunctives is unconjugated, so it's tempting to say that at least subjunctives are non-finite. It's less clear for imperatives though, because of the 2nd person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples below do not permit prospective aspect marker 'will'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I recommend that he (*will) choose this option.&#xA;&#xA;(*Will) choose this option!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T05:12:03.580" Title="Diagnostic for Finiteness" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17514" CreationDate="2016-05-07T21:42:33.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Project Gutenberg has some of the largest free open-source corpora available (in multiple languages).  You can download as much or as little as you wish in a variety of formats.  A clever chatbot can quote back lines from Shakespeare or Dickens perhaps.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gutenberg.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13081" LastEditorUserId="13081" LastEditDate="2016-05-08T02:29:22.710" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T02:29:22.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17522" CreationDate="2016-05-07T22:18:12.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of finite/infinite verb forms is definitely irrelevant for Malay since the Malay verbs have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; forms at all. As for English, if a verb form can be a predicate and it can be the only verb form inside the clause, then it is a finite verb form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T22:18:12.197" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2016-05-07T22:56:46.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure this phenomenon has a coined term. In syntax, based on distributional criteria, all words have the possibility of functioning as a different category than the most frequently used one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13067" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T22:56:46.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17514" CreationDate="2016-05-08T03:25:53.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a dataset of IRC chats: &lt;a href=&quot;http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/&lt;/a&gt;. This is probably what you need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13124" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T03:25:53.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-08T11:47:49.400" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a list of &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; words that are &lt;strong&gt;morphologically similar&lt;/strong&gt;, but when it comes to &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, they should be &lt;strong&gt;completely different&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12895" LastEditorUserId="12895" LastEditDate="2016-05-08T12:52:56.873" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T13:51:07.137" Title="Looking for a list of English words that are morphologically similar, semantically different?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-05-10T16:17:38.223" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17527" CreationDate="2016-05-08T13:51:07.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Appendix A and Appendix B of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01690960050119689&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, Tyler (2000)&lt;/a&gt;, there are listings of the stimuli used. You want the '-M-S+O’ condition (i.e., not related morphological or semantically, but similar orthographically). There are 48, I think, so maybe that will be helpful. They sometimes differ by more than 2 characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T13:51:07.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-09T04:47:52.407" Score="4" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always wondered, what makes some languages survive for a long time in a form that is similar to the one from its origin, while others didn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, French in Canada, while being there for many years (almost same time as the Dutch in South Africa) and away from France and with absence of media at that time, it still survived in a form that is similar to the one in France, basically you can safely say it is the same language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others, weren't so lucky, for example Arabic in Malta and Dutch in South Africa. They have turned into new languages with different grammar and words, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the factors that preserve a language in that way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13134" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-23T14:10:16.660" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T03:07:00.653" Title="Why did French survive in Canada while being far from France, while other languages didn't (Arabic in Malta, Dutch in South Africa)" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-09T10:06:35.440" Score="1" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing clause analysis for a corpus and am not sure how to determine the clauses for the following type of sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of woman that makes people remember Marylin Monroe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it should read like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(she is) the kind of woman that makes people remember Marylin Monroe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do I analyze the sentence as if 'she is' weren't ellipted? I am also pretty lost on the causative 'make someone do something' (in terms of clause breakdown).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any and all help, thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13137" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:00:02.197" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:00:02.197" Title="Clause analysis for causative verbs" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-09T10:08:39.313" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just used &lt;a href=&quot;https://opennlp.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;OpenNLP&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for a small program where I was supposed to segment a paragraph into sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I was able to complete the task after reading some documentation and going through their test cases, I couldn't help but notice that I still have to train for all the abbreviations (example Yahoo!), even when I created a custom abbreviation dictionary, passed it to &lt;code&gt;SentenceDetectorFactory&lt;/code&gt; and used it to train &lt;code&gt;SentenceDetectorME&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using similar approach as used in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/opennlp/tags/opennlp-1.5.3-rc3/opennlp-tools/src/test/java/opennlp/tools/sentdetect/SentenceDetectorFactoryTest.java?view=markup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;test case&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find this behaviour in their documentation nor I could find any explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I am missing or is it required to train the model on abbreviations as well? If it is required to train the model on abbreviations then why specify them separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am using version &lt;code&gt;1.5.3-rc3&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13136" LastEditorUserId="13136" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T17:36:18.110" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T17:36:18.110" Title="OpenNLP - Is training still required for abbreviation even with abbreviation dictionary?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17529" CreationDate="2016-05-09T15:36:06.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason for differing degrees of linguistic change over time is language contact, where it matters what the degree of contact is and how different the contact language is. The Saami languages are fairly similar, because they have had relatively little contact with structurally-different languages. Bantu languages in certain areas tend to be fairly similar even with a lot of contact because the contact languages are similar Bantu languages, though in a zone where a Bantu language is in contact with a substantially different Bantu language, divergence is often greater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Maltese, one has to start with the question of what the pre-Arabic language was (if there was a single substrate language), what kind of Arabic was introduced (a Maghribi dialect), how much influence there has been from Romance and English (to the point that Semitic vocabulary is a minority), and what kind of reinforcement there has been (i.e. contact with the wider Arab speaking world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Afrikaans, there is a hypothesis (M. Valkhoff 1966, &lt;em&gt;Studies in Portuguese and Creole&lt;/em&gt;) that the language has in fact been under subtle contact influence from Portuguese Creole and Khoisan, where the influence is on children and their acquisition of the Germanic language, while being cared for by non-Germanic speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T16:10:22.570" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T16:10:22.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17530" CreationDate="2016-05-09T20:20:07.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The kind of woman that makes people remember Marilyn Monroe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a sentence; it's a noun phrase. As Tom Robbins once put it, &lt;em&gt;This sentence no verb.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it occurs in a corpus, its context will tell you what's been deleted, if anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the basic rule for clauses is that every non-auxiliary verb defines a clause. Thus,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;if there are two verbs in an utterance, as here, there are two clauses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Neither one is a main clause, because this utterance is not a sentence.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bracketing would be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; [np&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; [np &lt;em&gt;the kind of woman&lt;/em&gt; np]&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; [s [np &lt;em&gt;that/who&lt;/em&gt; np] [vp &lt;em&gt;makes&lt;/em&gt; [np&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; [s [np &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; np] [vp &lt;em&gt;remember&lt;/em&gt; [np &lt;em&gt;Marilyn Monroe&lt;/em&gt; np]  vp] s]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; np]&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; vp]&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; s]&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; np]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T20:20:07.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17536" CreationDate="2016-05-09T21:56:47.117" Score="7" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, there are a set of 17 verbs lovingly called the Vandertramps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;evenir (to become)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;evenir (to come back)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;M&lt;/strong&gt;onter (to climb)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;entrer (to reenter)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;ortir (to exit)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;V&lt;/strong&gt;enir (to come)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;ller (to go)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;N&lt;/strong&gt;aître (to be born)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;escendre (to descend)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;ntrer (to enter)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;etourner (to return)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;omber (to fall)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;ester (to stay)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;rriver (to arrive)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;M&lt;/strong&gt;ourir (to die)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;artir (to leave)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;b&gt;(P)&lt;/b&gt;asser par (to pass by)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these verbs (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Verbes_en_fran%C3%A7ais_%C3%A0_auxiliaire_%C3%AAtre&quot;&gt;French Wiktionary has a more complete list&lt;/a&gt;) are conjugated differently in the compound past tense than all other verbs: they use the verb &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; rather than the verb &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; as the auxiliary for compound past tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of anything that using a different auxiliary for only 17 verbs would accomplish. Is there a linguistic reason to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13052" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T23:12:34.213" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T23:37:14.333" Title="Why does French use “be” as the auxiliary for a few verbs?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-05-15T17:20:36.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17534" CreationDate="2016-05-09T22:46:08.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaccusative_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unaccusative verbs&lt;/a&gt; (ones where the subject may be seen as an experiencer rather than an active causer of something). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T22:46:08.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17534" CreationDate="2016-05-09T23:13:27.273" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual in language evolution, having two auxiliaries wasn't a goal, things just happened this way (and in fact the long-term evolution is towards a single auxiliary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an article in &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_compos%C3%A9#Histoire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; that explains how the compound past tenses evolved in French (and to various extents in other Romance languages). My answer here is mostly a summary of this article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin (the ancestor language of French), past tenses do not use an auxiliary (except in the passive voice). All the past tenses are formed by adding suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; (“have”) was not an auxiliary in classical Latin. However it it was sometimes used in combination with past participles. For example, “&lt;em&gt;meam fidem est cognitam&lt;/em&gt;” (“my loyalty is known”) can also be said “&lt;em&gt;meam fidem habent cognitam&lt;/em&gt;” (lit. “they know my loyalty”). This kind of phrasing was initially used with expressions meaning &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;, etc. and was gradually generalized to more verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; was also used in constructs like “&lt;em&gt;habeo literas scriptas&lt;/em&gt;” (lit. “I have a written letter”), which gradually came to be used to mean “I have written a letter”. The letter is a direct complement of the verb; this explains how &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; gradually became an auxiliary for transitive verbs. This meaning had become generalized in late Latin, while some of the single-word past tenses disappeared. This formation didn't make sense for intransitive verbs. Italian still uses the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; for compound past tenses. In French, the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; became generalized not only to all transitive verbs but also for most intransitive verbs as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some simple past tenses were disappearing, expressing a motion or state change came to use the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt;. For example, “&lt;em&gt;venitus sum&lt;/em&gt;” literally means “I am in the state of having come” — that's essentially equivalent to &lt;em&gt;veni&lt;/em&gt; (“I came”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This formation converged with another reason to use the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;: Latin had deponent verbs, with only passive forms. In the passive mood, Latin did have some compound tenses, using the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt;. For example &lt;em&gt;patior&lt;/em&gt; (“I suffer”), &lt;em&gt;passus sum&lt;/em&gt; (“I have suffered”). The concept of deponent verbs disappeared as the endings got simplified and merged with active voice endings; this left verbs with compound tenses formed with the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;. In Italian, all intransitive verbs use the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt; for compound tenses. This was also the case in medieval French, but over time more and more verbs came to use &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;. In modern French, only about a dozen verbs (and their derivatives) still use &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evolution of French may have been influenced by German, which also uses either &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; (“have”) or &lt;em&gt;sein&lt;/em&gt; (“be”) to form compound past tenses, with &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; being the most common and &lt;em&gt;sein&lt;/em&gt; being used with verbs expressing a movement (&lt;em&gt;ich bin gegangen&lt;/em&gt;: I have gone), a change of state (&lt;em&gt;ich bin geschwollen&lt;/em&gt;: I have swelled), or sometimes a lasting state (&lt;em&gt;ich bin gelieben&lt;/em&gt;: I have stayed). The French verbs that use &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; also fit in those categories, though in French many verbs that express movement or state use &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2016-05-09T23:25:40.513" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T23:25:40.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17072" CreationDate="2016-05-09T23:55:49.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference is probably that Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;competence&lt;/em&gt; is a purely individual notion: it's the linguistic knowledge of a single speaker-hearer. Saussure's &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;, by contrast, is not a property of any one individual but exists only at the level of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T23:55:49.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16811" CreationDate="2016-05-10T00:11:51.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-a-historical-syntax-of-english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;textbook by Bettelou Los&lt;/a&gt; which deals with exactly this topic. Not too pricey, either, by academic book standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T00:11:51.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="240" CreationDate="2016-05-10T11:04:49.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;it is not an easy thing to state something is universal. However, there are trends of languages that have a phenomenon like 'final rising' to denote &quot;Polar Questions&quot;. There are about 6000 languages around the world. We haven't gone deep on each and every language (i.e. we haven't intensively studied each portion of each component of the linguistic components of these languages.) One thing i am sure of is that, according to the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;theory of Iconicity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;introduced by (Bolinger 1972)&quot; -check the reference- that rising motion of anything denotes continuity, while falling movement of anything denotes finality. This is mention***ed in many papers and articles like Gussenhoven's*** &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonology of Intonation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Free online) or his book: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonology of tone and Intonation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, also a book like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Suprasegmentals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Ilse Lehiste talks about prosodic features in general and describes Bolinger's Theory for unfinished business and the finality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13146" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T11:04:49.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11798" CreationDate="2016-05-10T13:48:35.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unaccusativity&lt;/em&gt; is a syntactic notion: a predicate has a single argument position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inchoativity&lt;/em&gt; is a semantic notion: a predicate denotes the beginning of an event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs are inchoative and unaccusative (e.g., &lt;em&gt;the sauce thickened&lt;/em&gt;), but this is a coincidence, not a significant fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T13:48:35.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17534" CreationDate="2016-05-10T13:59:01.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not unique to the French language and not really caused by the Latin origins of the language. German and Dutch have the same thing. They use &quot;have&quot; as auxiliary verb for most verbs and &quot;are&quot; as auxiliary verb for some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated before, there is some logic behind it. Verbs that describe something that you actively do use &quot;have&quot;. Verbs that describe a status you're in or change of status (like leaving, coming, going, falling, etc.) use &quot;are&quot;. But this is never 100% consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these languages use &quot;do&quot; as auxiliary verb in questions as English does. Dutch and German say &quot;Know you?&quot; rather than &quot;Do you know?&quot; French has 3 options. 1) Use the intonation to change &quot;You know?&quot; from an expression to a question. 2) Do the same as Dutch and German and reverse the order of the words to become &quot;Know you?&quot;. 3) Add &quot;Is it that&quot; at the beginning of the sentence &quot;Is it that you know?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13147" LastEditorUserId="13052" LastEditDate="2016-05-10T23:37:14.333" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T23:37:14.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2016-05-10T14:03:27.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Freeze's excellent 1992 article &quot;Existentials and other locatives&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 68, 553-595) points out that &quot;the English existential is unique even among the truly exceptional existentials of its sister languages&quot; (p. 575). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T14:03:27.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17010" CreationDate="2016-05-10T15:45:03.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are some examples I've found myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jeremyfix/dstc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jeremyfix/dstc&lt;/a&gt; (rule-based, advanced visualization)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CallumMain/DNN-DST&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/CallumMain/DNN-DST&lt;/a&gt; (Deep Neural Net-based)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/UFAL-DSG/xtrack2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/UFAL-DSG/xtrack2&lt;/a&gt; (Recurrent Neural Net-based)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/UFAL-DSG/alex/blob/master/alex/components/dm/dstc_tracker.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/UFAL-DSG/alex/blob/master/alex/components/dm/dstc_tracker.py&lt;/a&gt; (Bayesian Discriminative tracking)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all are built around the &lt;a href=&quot;http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dialog State Tracking Challenge&lt;/a&gt;, and while most of them are not exactly PGM-based, they do track dialogue progress along with turn-wise slot filling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4979" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T15:45:03.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-10T19:14:12.550" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just beginning to study automatic grammar correction, and was wondering what good methods are for this problem.  I have a system that will select spelling candidates for each term, individually, and was considering the following approach for automatic correction: given a window of one, two, or three, leading and trailing terms to each term, select the spelling candidate which maximizes the probability of the terms appearing together.  Move this window over each term in the original document, and copy the results to a new buffer, then update the original document's buffer with the new one and run this algorithm over it.  Finally, repeat the process to convergence or until I surpass some iteration threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a good approach?  If there are better methods, what are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T13:35:34.223" Title="What are good (state of the art?) methods for automatic grammar correction?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15748" CreationDate="2016-05-10T19:51:04.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time has passed, but I can share my point of view. I'm not a professor of linguistics and I have no theoretical knowledge about Silesian, but Polish is my mother language and I can just tell you how I feel it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most differences between Silesian and Polish come from their germanised vocabulary. They use words that mean nothing in Polish (e.g. &lt;em&gt;fater&lt;/em&gt; - ger. &lt;em&gt;der Vater&lt;/em&gt; for father, pol. &lt;em&gt;ojciec&lt;/em&gt;) and often change suffixes (e.g. Polish &lt;em&gt;'Ja myślę'&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; - they say as &lt;em&gt;'Jo myśla'&lt;/em&gt;), but it's a minor thing and does not block the understanding in most cases. There are no major pronounciation or grammatical differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion as a 'regular' Polish speaker it's not a problem to communicate and understand Silesian people, but you can hear that you're talking with them after a first/second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's anything more you want to know please ask, I will always at least &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; to answer :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13150" LastEditorUserId="13150" LastEditDate="2016-05-10T20:46:05.923" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T20:46:05.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17505" CreationDate="2016-05-10T20:46:07.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The which&lt;/em&gt; is simply an alternate construction of the relative pronoun &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; (probably only introducing nonrestrictive relative clauses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the which&lt;/em&gt;: (archaic) a longer form of &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;, often used as a sentence connector&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/the-which&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/the-which&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construction has fallen out of habit -- Harper Collins marks it &amp;quot;(archaic)&amp;quot; -- and it appears now only in old writing, or in new writing that's trying to sound old. The reason why &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;the which&lt;/em&gt; fell out of favor is probably because &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; there adds nothing to the sentence but a certain fustian elegance. Non-restrictive relative clauses are already presupposed, hence definite; nothing is served by adding a definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the question, Latin &lt;em&gt;qui, quae, quod, quis, quid,&lt;/em&gt; and all their descendants still spelled with &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; in Romance languages are historically cognate with &lt;em&gt;what, why, which,&lt;/em&gt; etc. via Grimm's Law. Where Romance languages have &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt;-words in their grammars, English has &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interestingly, also via Grimm's Law, where Latin  had demonstrative &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;-words like &lt;em&gt;tantum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;talis&lt;/em&gt; matching interrogative &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt;-words like like &lt;em&gt;quantum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;qualis&lt;/em&gt;, English has demonstrative &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;-words like &lt;em&gt;that, then, there, thither, thence&lt;/em&gt; matching interrogative &lt;em&gt;what, when, where, whither, whence&lt;/em&gt;. Just as PIE labiovelar *&lt;em&gt;kʷ&lt;/em&gt; became labiovelar stop &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt;- (originally pronounced [kʷ]) in Latin (and most other IE languages)  and labiovelar fricative &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;- originally pronounced [xʷ]) in English (and other Germanic languages), PIE dental *&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; became dental stop &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;- in Latin and dental fricative &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;- in English. Those are two of the 12 systematic consonant changes that make up Grimm's Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T21:21:09.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17572" CreationDate="2016-05-10T21:26:24.080" Score="6" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;English, conditional protases [ read &quot;antecedents&quot; ] bear  a close resemblance to interrogative clauses. For example, they are often identical to subordinate closed interrogative clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If Bertha accepted that offer&lt;/strong&gt;, she's crazy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know &lt;strong&gt;if Bertha accepted that offer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be identical to main clause interrogatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should you see Bob&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should you see Bob&lt;/strong&gt;, tell him to phone me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Had she asked them&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Had she asked them&lt;/strong&gt;, they'd have been happy to give her the elephant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be very similar to and sometimes the same as main clause or subordinate clause open interrogatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whoever would agree to that&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whoever would agree to that&lt;/strong&gt;, Bob won't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any non-European or non-Indo-European languages that use conditional protases that correspond to any or all of the three types of interrogative clauses listed above? I'm extremely interested in all three, but extra-specially interested in protases corresponding to closed interrogatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T21:09:53.890" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T21:09:53.890" Title="&quot;I don't know if they escaped&quot; / &quot;If they escaped, they're long gone&quot; - Conditional protases and interrogative clauses" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;conditionals&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-10T23:29:39.663" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm wondering, is there any language that has recently (say, ~1000 years) developed complex grammar  not present in its ancestor language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking for recent changes because I can imagine that mass media (I can even imagine mass media in 1016 AD) somehow prevent this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar a bit with a history of Indo-European languages and they all start with overwhelmingly complex grammar (I am talking about all that inflection of PIE) and then they get rid of it. For instance, English, but also both German and Russian have way less complex grammar than that of Latin, and Latin was there like 2000 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not precisely related observation is that if someone tells you there is a language with 70+ consonants, you can be sure that the language is from Africa or Polynesian islands or suchlike, and the fact is that the language has been probably only recently exposed to civilization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to get a notion that languages tend to become simpler (say, simpler to learn) with time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T01:02:12.520" Title="Developing complex grammar out of simple" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17550" CreationDate="2016-05-11T01:02:12.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A canonical example of complication in the sense that you're talking about exists in hundreds of Bantu languages. The proto-language had a relatively simple verbal inflectional system with under a dozen verb tenses (&quot;tense&quot; in the traditional paradigmatic sense). In many of the eastern and southern languages, this has expanded to 50+ tenses (e.g. Kuria, Haya, Shona). This came about primarily by grammaticalizing periphrastic constructions, where &quot;go + build&quot; becomes a future tense. Another mild example is English: we're developing negative inflections (which people talk about as &quot;contraction&quot; but it isn't phonological). The problem is that there isn't any objective metric of total complexity. However, if you mean &quot;increasing the combinatorics of the inflectional system&quot;, it happens, and has a name (&quot;grammaticalization&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, some of the largest consonant inventories are found in Caucasian languages, such as Abkhaz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T01:02:12.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2016-05-11T02:13:00.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Modern Hebrew, embedded questions are introduced by &lt;em&gt;im&lt;/em&gt; 'if', which also introduces conditional protases. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Im hu ba-bayt, daber ito.&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;If he is at home, speak to him.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ani lo yodea im hu ba-bayt.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I don't know if he is at home.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Modern Hebrew syntax is very heavily affected by European languages, so it arguably doesn't count as a &amp;quot;non-European language&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that many European languages have this double function of &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; is, I think, due to areal diffusion rather than inheritance: Latin doesn't have this feature, but its Romance daughters do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T17:23:18.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2016-05-11T11:05:57.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conditional sentences in Farsi (Persian) can be classified into two categories, depending on whether they do or not have a &lt;em&gt;conditional word&lt;/em&gt; (a conjunction, a fused relative type of thing, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the conditional words (اگر، چنان‌چه، هر گاه، چندان‌که، چون، هر کس، ...) would go in interrogative clauses, as far as my struggles to fit them went.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the other type of conditionals have a special verb form (التزامی), which, again, don't normally go in interrogative clauses.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But good news is that we can find &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; special interrogative clauses featuring this type of verb form that can act as conditional clauses too. Here's an example pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clause in bold acting as a conditional:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether she's here or not&lt;/strong&gt; I can't see her.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Translation: &quot;&lt;em&gt;.&lt;strong&gt;این‌جا باشد یا نه&lt;/strong&gt;، نمی‌توانم ببینمش&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Romanization: &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;inja bashad ya na&lt;/strong&gt;, nemitavanam bebinamash.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the same clause, in bold, acting as an interrogative:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;I don't know &lt;strong&gt;whether she's here or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Translation: &quot;&lt;em&gt;.نمي‌دانم &lt;strong&gt;این‌جا باشد یا نه&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Romanization: &quot;&lt;em&gt;nemidanam &lt;strong&gt;inja bashad ya na&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this construction, many other example pairs can be made. There might also be other pairs with different constructions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But please know that these examples do not suggest a general rule that conditional clauses are similar to interrogative clauses in Farsi, because they are usually not similar, and I managed to contrive something only after pondering for a while.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13156" LastEditorUserId="13156" LastEditDate="2016-05-12T00:01:44.853" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T00:01:44.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T15:10:58.257" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if the trees regarding the two different readings of the sentence &quot;The doctor visited the patient drunk&quot; were drawn correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) [VP [^NP The doctor] [V' [V visited] [NP [D the] [N'[N patient] [AdjP[Adj'[Adj drunk]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patient drunk, was visited by the doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) [VP [^NP The doctor] [VP [V' [V visited] [^NP the patient]] [AdvP drunk]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doctor, drunk, visited the patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &quot;ambiguity&quot; is understood by the fact that &quot;drunk&quot; in one sentence is an adjunct and in the other sentence is not, but I don't know if it drawn correctly to show that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13050" LastEditorUserId="13050" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T15:50:22.050" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T15:50:22.050" Title="Ambiguity tree: The doctor visited the patient drunk" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-17T08:42:39.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15334" CreationDate="2016-05-11T16:41:40.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My language do allow for logically correct sentences (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like Bulgarian is a 'misty' case where you can and cannot use double negation. English does not allow that and Polish requires that. But where does it come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can watch a great mini-lecture (unfortunately in Polish) which has a part about double/multiple negation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovTZK2EL_pk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovTZK2EL_pk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the arguments for the double negation is &lt;em&gt;purely meaning&lt;/em&gt; of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is nobody here.&lt;/em&gt; -- Since it's &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt;, then how can it &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have nothing.&lt;/em&gt; -- Since it's &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; then how can you even &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't you feel (in Bulgarian) that you actually can't &lt;em&gt;have nothing&lt;/em&gt;? Isn't it more sensible? ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Bulgarian, although it's allowed, it still may sound weird to some people, but in Polish (my mother tongue) we can (and we actually have to) use multiple negations. An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nikt nigdy nic nie powiedział.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which translates to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nobody hasn't never told nothing.&lt;/em&gt; - roughly word by word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nobody has ever told.&lt;/em&gt; - a correct version I think ;-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might look horribly wrong to you, however you simply &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; express the same thought in other way. When you negate in Polish you need to negate every 'logical' part of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; - since the action of talking had no 'owner' (actor)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hasn't&lt;/em&gt; - since the action of talking didn't happen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; - since the action didn't happen in any time in the past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; - since the action had no content (nothing was told)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the only correct way of negating :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13150" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T16:41:40.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T17:12:28.043" Score="2" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is mainly aimed at native English speakers. Does the position of negation in a sentence matter? Does it have a &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt; attached to it? Here is my point of view and an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have no expectations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't have any expectations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me first sentence is somehow humiliating or offensive - &quot;you are so weak, that I have &lt;strong&gt;no expectations&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, where the second one is a kind way of saying &quot;I know you are unexperienced, so you may not succeed now and it's OK&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit, proper question: Does the position of negation in a sentence matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13150" LastEditorUserId="13150" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T17:49:00.947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T17:49:00.947" Title="Position of negation in an english sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-05-17T08:41:41.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T17:20:33.387" Score="0" ViewCount="1078" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently looking at an old past paper which asks why it would be impossible for a human vocal tract to produce a pharyngeal nasal and a uvular click. Could anyone help me out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13159" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T00:19:11.377" Title="Human Vocal Tract: possibilities and impossibilities" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17558" CreationDate="2016-05-11T18:39:59.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reflect on the meaning of the terms.  A click is produced by making a velar closure simultaneously with a closure in the front of the mouth, then creating ingressive air by retracting the tongue body.  But uvulars are behind velars, so a uvular click is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a problem with a pharyngeal nasal, though, so long as you don't try to make a uvular click at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T18:39:59.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17558" CreationDate="2016-05-11T22:32:27.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of a &quot;pharyngeal nasal&quot;, it depends on what you mean by &quot;a nasal&quot; and what you mean by &quot;pharyngeal&quot;. In the case of [m] for example, there is a complete constriction at the lips and the velum is lowered [m] is a &quot;nasal stop&quot;. There are also nasal non-stops. There is a lot of equivocation over what is &quot;pharyngeal&quot;, since most &quot;pharyngeals&quot; are actually epiglottals. There do not appear to be any purely pharyngeal pure stops (for whatever reason), and if a &quot;nasal&quot; is necessarily a stop, there can't be a &quot;pharyngeal stop&quot;. On the other hand, if you use &quot;nasal&quot; to include approximants and fricatives, and don't care strictly about pharyngeal vs. epiglottal, then the articulation can be made. I don't think we can compute whether such an articulation would have detectable acoustic consequences upon which a contrast could be founded, but there's a good chance that such a sound would be be acoustically distinct enough to be phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicks require a constriction somewhere at the back of the mouth, plus some further forward constriction. The back constriction could be anywhere between on the soft palate back to the uvular region. Some of the Khoisan languages (esp. !Xóõ, Jo !'hoansi and N|uu) have uvular clicks, the latter language having been the subject of ultrasound studies by Miller. In fact, the back constriction on Zulu clicks moves from velar to uvular, and there is mounting evidence suggesting that the back constriction is clicks is commonly uvular. See Miller &quot;The representation of clicks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T22:32:27.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17563" CreationDate="2016-05-12T00:43:36.643" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to draw a derivation for &quot;Didn't the cat eat the mouse?&quot;  But I'm confused as to what the deep structure would be.  &quot;The cat did not eat the mouse&quot; seems incorrect, since it is stating that the action did not occur, while the question implies that the action did occur.  Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13164" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T04:54:15.633" Title="DS for a question starting with &quot;Didn't&quot;?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;&lt;questions&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17561" CreationDate="2016-05-12T02:26:37.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the theory underlying Burt's red book, the deep structure would be &quot;Neg the Tense cat eat the mouse&quot;. If that's not the theory you're using, you need to identify the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T02:26:37.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17561" CreationDate="2016-05-12T04:54:15.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the very early days of transformational grammar, it was supposed that transformations could change meaning, and so your two examples could be given the same deep structure.  The fact that they mean different things could be ascribed to a question transformation that applies in the derivation of one but not the other.  In 1964, Katz and Postal published their very influential &lt;strong&gt;Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions&lt;/strong&gt;, which argued that the instances in which meaning-changing transformations had been proposed could be shown to be misanalyses, including the meaning-changing question transformation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Katz and Postal proposed that the deep structures of yes-no questions differ from their indicative counterparts by being introduced with &quot;whether&quot;, which appears explicitly only when the questions are complement sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many transformational grammarians adopted the Katz-Postal hypothesis that transformations don't change meaning, but seem to have taken it more as a convenient assumption than an empirical hypothesis (as Katz and Postal had proposed).  In place of &quot;whether&quot;, one often sees an abstract &quot;Q&quot; element assumed, as for example in McCawley's &lt;strong&gt;SPHE&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T04:54:15.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17565" CreationDate="2016-05-12T05:20:26.617" Score="1" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Icelandic's other unique letter, the thorn, is obviously Runic (and near the front of the Futhark). Eth was not defined in the &quot;First Grammatical Treatise&quot; of 1140-1180. It seems like both the Runic and the Latin orthographies for Norse were considered complete without a symbol for its sound. Wikipedia says the eth &quot;originated in Irish writing&quot; but does not explain how it might have been transmitted into or out of Anglo-Saxon, nor how Icelandic came to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did the eth come from, and how and when was it chosen for use in Icelandic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13167" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T05:58:57.940" Title="What is the origin of the Icelandic Ð, ð, eth?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17564" CreationDate="2016-05-12T05:53:29.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_orthography#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The modern Icelandic alphabet was introduced by Danish linguist Rasmus Rask&lt;/a&gt; – and perhaps a few colleagues – in the 19th century. He was trying to respect the 12th century text &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Grammatical_Treatise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The First Grammatical Treatise&lt;/a&gt; about Old Norse as much as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &quot;eth&quot; was not used for a few centuries before Rask (which is why Rask's reform had a big impact on the practical life in the 19th century) but it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; used in Old Norse around the 12th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's historically misleading to say that &quot;eth&quot; is Anglo-Saxon: when one gets further to the past, to the true origins, it's a North Germanic (Old Norse) letter. At the very beginning, the first usage of the letter was in Irish (meaning the Celtic language) but there always existed some cultural exchange between the &quot;adjacent&quot; islands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastEditorUserId="9284" LastEditDate="2016-05-12T05:58:57.940" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T05:58:57.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2016-05-12T13:45:57.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of common phenomena like appearing of /n/ in many negative particles devised by many languages is not a clear cut. Etymology, Philology and Historical Linguistics all seek to understand the diacronic evolution of languages and aim at describing and understanding why such phenomena might take place in historically unrelated languages. Consider the word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Cave&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, for instance, that is in English. In Arabic, which is a sematic language, totally unrelated, it is /kaehf/ the vowel is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;digraph a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (referred to as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ash&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in some textbooks). In French, it is caverne/cavity but also in French it can be Grotto/ pothole (totally unrelated pronunciation), although English and french are quite related historically and developmentally. In Chinese (simplified), however, it is 洞 which is pronounced as /dòng/. A slightly careful inspection of the pronounced version, one can see that /d/ and /k/ are both stops just like grotto which begins with /g/ (&lt;strong&gt;voiced velar stop&lt;/strong&gt;). Similarities and differences of these kinds would need a careful, intensive, cross-linguistic studies to understand the nature of language and how it develops. My own point of view is that the word 'no' is like a safe word that works in many different contexts to stop a danger or to imply negativity. A word like that must take short time to be produced, must be easy to produce, and must be easily discriminated from any other productions. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is comprised of two phonemes (i.e. short in length), /n/ is an Alveolar sound which, due to its ease of production, it is a phonetic universal (i.e. no language known to us does not have a /n/ in its phonemic chart), and using a nasal, which is very sonorous in acoustic nature, makes it catchy for the ears. However, this is merely my speculation, although it is a logical one. For more on nature of sounds, you can return to &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elements of acoustic phonetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; by Peter Ladefoged or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introducing phonology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; by David Odden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13146" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T13:45:57.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-12T16:03:30.957" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a special L sound in Swedish, I've tried to find what consonant/vowel it is for a long time, but eventually I decided to ask here  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two videos with the sound in it:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQx3ACpbXhk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Video 1, at 3:19, the word &quot;filen&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRWc0Tk_M0Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Video 2, 0:57~0:58, 1:07~1:08, and many others&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13171" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T20:48:52.730" Title="What is this sound that can be heard in Swedish?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-12T17:09:22.083" Score="4" ViewCount="1560" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in development paths of Russian and English sound systems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present the situation is as follows: according to WALS, the consonant inventory of modern Russian is classed as &quot;moderately large&quot;, while that of Modern English is considered &quot;average&quot;. Russian palatalization has a lot to do with it but not only. There is an even bigger difference in vowel inventories (5/6 Rus.: about 21 Engl.), though WALS does not consider vowel lengths and diphthongs as the study is based on vowel qualities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to go back to the start (i.e. to PIE) and pinpoint when and how (or possibly why) these differences occurred. Following my research I have already established that Proto-Germanic (which later evolved into Old English) is thought to have had nearly twice as many vowels as Proto-Slavic (which eventually gave life to Old Russian) but that number still is nearly a half of what Modern English has (if one counts diphthongs and trip thongs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment I am trying to find out how many vowels and consonants PIE language is thought to have had. PIE is not my specialism and I feel a bit lost as there are different opinions of various linguistic schools as well as a considerable number of small nuances. What I am trying to get is a very general idea of PIE sound inventory, sort of PIE phonology in a nutshell. I appreciate that PIE is a re-constructed language and different linguist proposed different theories about how it worked but has anybody ever come out with an approximate number for its possible vowels and consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13161" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T13:04:19.220" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T13:04:19.220" Title="How many vowels and how many consonants did the Proto-Indo-European Language have?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17557" CreationDate="2016-05-12T21:24:49.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Original Poster's examples don't imply anything very different from each other. However, the general question of whether or why it matters where we put the negation in a sentence is quite interesting—especially in relation to certain verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a fact known to millions of hardworking English language students all over the world that native English speakers strongly prefer negating the verbs &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;believe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;want&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, amongst others, to negating the complement clauses that they license. So, for instance, all other things being equal, we prefer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1).  &lt;em&gt;I don’t believe that the Yeti exists&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2).  &lt;em&gt;I believe that the Yeti doesn’t exist&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also would tend to prefer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don’t think I’m going to find it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think I’m not going to find it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there is absolutely no doubt that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't want to go&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is far more customary than the rather stilted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to not go&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that what is implied by (1) is the same as what is literally encoded in (2). However, (1) does not in fact strictly semantically encode the same information as (2) at all. If we made no further pragmatic assumptions about what the speaker of (1) intended to convey, then the maximum we should be entitled to decode is that the speaker does not possess a positive creedal attitude about the existence of Yetis. It is entirely possible that the speaker may have no definite opinion about the existence or non-existence of Yetis, in which case they would not be able to truthfully commit to either a belief or disbelief in them. This might be due to an agnostic state of mind, or it may be merely because the speaker has never even thought about it. To commit the speaker of (1) to a belief in (2) is potentially doing them a great disservice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be that as it may, most listeners would understand (1) as conveying the same as (2), and they are indeed entitled to, because most speakers - unless they were wishing to be very explicitly technical about it - would prefer the former to the latter to convey the very same information. What is interesting here is that speakers are modifying the verb denoting the action of belief in order to manipulate the listener’s understanding of the object of the belief - the information in the complement clause. More specifically they are negating the verb denoting the believing, but implying a negation of the complement clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is often referred to as &lt;em&gt;SUBORDINATE NEGATION IMPLICATION&lt;/em&gt;. Verbs that tend to generate such implicatures seem to be verbs that denote states of intention, epistemic stance or opinion, or those which can be used performatively for advice. Dynamic verbs which denote actions, changes of mental states and so forth do not tend to generate these implicatures.  Compare the following sentences with the dynamic verb &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;say&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He didn't say that she danced&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He said that she didn't dance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the two sentences do not convey the same information at all. We are not likely to infer the information in the second sentence when we read the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more factor comes into play here. Verbs that generate subordinate negation implicatures, tend to be what are described in the &lt;em&gt;CaGEL&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;medium strength&lt;/em&gt; verbs. They contrast for example 'stronger' &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; with 'medium strength' &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;believe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The reason that these verbs tend to generate such implicatures is merely that, pragmatically, it does not seem very informative to tell somebody that you don't have a medium strength stance about something. We tacitly infer, on this basis, the more informative proposition that the speaker has a stance about a negative idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, with so-called stronger verbs, on the other hand, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; informative to convey that your confidence in a stance is not 100%, or contrastingly with weak verbs to convey that that not even the slightest positive attitude is given to the proposition in the complement clause. The strong and weak usages of the following verbs do not, therefore, generate subordinate negation implication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't know that she went&lt;/em&gt;. ≠ &lt;em&gt;I know that she didn't go&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't suspect her of stealing.&lt;/em&gt; ≠ &lt;em&gt;I suspect her of not stealing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why speakers actually prefer to negate verbs such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;want&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;believe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; rather than to negate their complement clauses, I do not believe that anybody knows (- by which I want you to infer that I believe that nobody knows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T21:24:49.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2016-05-13T05:32:53.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though I'm not quite sure about the exact definition of &quot;conditional protases&quot; (or &quot;antecedents&quot;), especially in the first language of my own (Thai), I believe it's safe enough to make these points based on your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing in Thai that is equivalent to the use of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in subordinate closed interrogative clauses. Thai has two main words for &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., ถ้า (&quot;tha&quot;) and หาก (&quot;hak&quot;). To express the same idea as English &lt;em&gt;I don't know if Bertha accepted that offer&lt;/em&gt; in Thai, we would use หรือไม่/หรือเปล่า (&quot;rue-mai&quot;/&quot;rue-plao&quot;), which roughly means &lt;em&gt;or not&lt;/em&gt;, e.g., (lit.) &lt;em&gt;I don't know Bertha accepted that offer &lt;strong&gt;or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai doesn't use inversions like English, so an inversion in a main clause interrogative such as &lt;em&gt;Should you see Bob, tell him to phone me&lt;/em&gt; does not exist in Thai. To express the same idea, we always express it with ถ้า (&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;), e.g., (lit.) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you see Bob, tell him to phone me.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of main clause open interrogatives (&lt;em&gt;Whoever would agree to that, Bob won't.&lt;/em&gt;) is quite interesting. As a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pro-drop language&lt;/a&gt;, Thai seems to allow main clause open interrogatives to be used as subordinate closed interrogative clauses almost freely, if not always. This can roughly be categorized into two main groups, i.e., yes-no questions (which works quite like English &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; when it's embedded in a subordinate clause), and &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-questions (which works quite like English &lt;em&gt;wh-ever&lt;/em&gt; words in subordinate clauses). Here are a couple examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;yes-no questions&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thai: ชอบหรือไม่ชอบ คุณก็ต้องทำ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Romanization: &quot;chop rue mai chop, khun ko tong tham&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Literal translation: &lt;em&gt;Like or not like, you must do (it).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Standard English: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whether&lt;/strong&gt; you like it or not, you have to do it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Gloss: ชอบ-chop=&lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; หรือ-rue=&lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; ไม่-mai=&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ชอบ-chop=&lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; คุณ-khun-&lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; ก็-ko=PARTICLE ต้อง-tong=&lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; ทำ-tham=&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-questions&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thai: ใครอยากไป เจไม่อยาก&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Romanization: &quot;khrai yak pai, je mai yak&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Literal translation: &lt;em&gt;Who wants (to) go, Jay (does) not want.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Standard English: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whoever&lt;/strong&gt; wants to go, Jay doesn't want to.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Gloss: ใคร-khrai=&lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; อยาก-yak=&lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; ไป-pai=&lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; เจ-je=&lt;em&gt;Jay&lt;/em&gt; ไม่-mai=&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; อยาก-yak=&lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;ชอบหรือไม่ชอบ (lit.) &lt;em&gt;Like or not like?&lt;/em&gt; is a question. It has basically the same meaning as ชอบหรือไม่/ชอบหรือเปล่า (lit.) &lt;em&gt;Like or not?&lt;/em&gt;. After careful consideration (and much thought!), I believe that all alternatives could be used, but the duplication of the verb (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Like or not like&lt;/em&gt;) seems to be more common in subordinate clauses that are equivalent to &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt;-clauses in English. On the other hand, the other alternative (i.e., &lt;em&gt;Like or not&lt;/em&gt;) is more common in reported questions where we can use either &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; in English (e.g., &lt;em&gt;She asked if/whether I like it or not&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;The sense of &lt;em&gt;&quot;ever&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is implied. To be explicit about this sense, we could use บ้าง (&quot;bang&quot;), e.g., &lt;em&gt;Who wants to go บ้าง&lt;/em&gt;. ใครอยากไป(บ้าง) (lit.) &lt;em&gt;Who wants to go (บ้าง)?&lt;/em&gt; is a question. When we have more than one &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word, we use only a single บ้าง, e.g., ใครจะทำอะไรที่ไหนเมื่อไหร่กับใคร(บ้าง) ผมไม่ทราบ (lit.) &lt;em&gt;Who(ever) do what(ever) where(ever) when(ever) with whom(ever), I don't know.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;All romanized transcriptions follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_General_System_of_Transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1482" LastEditorUserId="1482" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T11:19:38.130" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T11:19:38.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-13T07:53:11.047" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a Question and Answer system in the Dutch language. In order to get an answer from the system I send a query to DBPedia which either returns me answer or does not. Sentences like: &quot;What is the X from Y&quot; are perfectly accepted since I can query for example &quot;height&quot; immediately from the DBPedia page in the sentence &quot;What is the length of Roger Federer&quot;. However if I want to query the system with the question: &quot;How tall is Roger Federer&quot;, the system is not able to convert the word &quot;tall&quot; to &quot;height. One should note that properties like &quot;length&quot; or &quot;height&quot; are directly found on DBPedia, but words like &quot;tall&quot; are not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to generate such pairs, or does someone already have such a file? I don't mind if the file is in English. Any ideas are appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T07:53:11.047" Title="Finding the corresponding noun given an adjective" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17568" CreationDate="2016-05-13T09:56:06.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am answering the part of your question referring to vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reconstructed Indo-European is essentially a set of quasi-algebraic symbols for the purpose of establishing regular sound correspondences between the attested languages. No one knows how proto-Indo-European was actually pronounced. The currently fashionable doctrine is that PIE had only two real vowels, namely /e/ and /o/. The vowels /i/ and /u/ are explained as syllabic variants of the semivowels, and the long vowels and /a/ are explained as the result of laryngeals. But this means only that to account for the forms occurring in the attested languages the assumption of two vowels is sufficient. This does not necessarily have any consequences for the real pronunciation of PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T09:56:06.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17545" CreationDate="2016-05-13T13:35:34.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best method for grammar correction would be statistical method. You give your grammar correction engine sources to crawl in the web and use the natural English there. by the occurrence the grammar correction engine would choose &quot;He sits&quot; instead of &quot;He sit&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at these papers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ru.is/~hrafn/students/MasterThesis_HenrichReuter.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ru.is/~hrafn/students/MasterThesis_HenrichReuter.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.panl10n.net/english/final%20reports/pdf%20files/Bangladesh/BAN21.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.panl10n.net/english/final%20reports/pdf%20files/Bangladesh/BAN21.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://david.wardpowers.info/Research/AI/papers/199608-sub-SGC.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://david.wardpowers.info/Research/AI/papers/199608-sub-SGC.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other options like deep learning for grammar, You can take a look at : &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.deepgrammar.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.deepgrammar.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10057" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T13:35:34.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2016-05-14T08:32:30.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start with subordinate closed interrogative clauses, since I think in Vietnamese, they work pretty much the same way as in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If Bertha accepted that offer&lt;/strong&gt;, she's crazy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nếu Bertha đồng ý lời đề nghị đó&lt;/strong&gt;, cô ấy thật là điên rồ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funny thing is, as you can see, you can translate the English sentence above into Vietnamese word-by-word, and the word order still stays the same.&#xA;Note that I'm not using the particle &quot;&lt;em&gt;đã&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (which is sometimes used to indicate past tense) before &quot;đồng ý&quot;, since it sounds really awkward in this context (in fact, most of the time, if not almost always we wouldn't use it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know &lt;strong&gt;if Bertha accepted that offer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tôi không biết &lt;strong&gt;Bertha có chấp nhận lời đề nghị đó hay không/chưa.&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Vietnamese, if you put the conditional clause (that is &quot;if Bertha accepted that offer&quot; in this case) behind the main clause (I don't know/I'm not sure/I don't care, etc.), you will need to remove &quot;&lt;strong&gt;nếu&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (which means &quot;&lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in English). And then you have to add &quot;hay không&quot; or &quot;hay chưa&quot; (which is literally translated as &quot;or not&quot; in English) at the end of the sentence, because without them, it would sound really odd and more likely nobody would understand what you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese, there are no inversions used in conditional sentences, so we don't use something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;Should you see Bob, tell him to phone me&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and such... like in English. &lt;strong&gt;Only &quot;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt;&quot; works&lt;/strong&gt;! -&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;If you see Bob, tell him to phone me&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's move on to main clause open interrogatives!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whoever would agree to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ai mà đồng ý với điều đó?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to express the idea of &quot;&lt;em&gt;Whoever would agree to that, Bob won't.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. You can NOT just copy-paste the translation above and make it like: &quot;Ai mà đồng ý với điều đó, Bob thì không đâu&quot; NO! You should use this instead: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ai đồng ý thì đồng ý&lt;/strong&gt;, Bob thì không đâu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13158" LastEditorUserId="13158" LastEditDate="2016-05-14T09:33:12.310" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T09:33:12.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17568" CreationDate="2016-05-14T11:31:31.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the vowels.&#xA;There are couple of approaches. The reductionist approach (embraced for example by the Leiden school) curtails the reconstruction to just 2 phonological vowels, /e/ and /o/, alternating in morphonological system called ablaut. The remaining vowels that can be reconstructed on the basis of daughter languages data, that is low central /a/, two high /i/ and /u/ and long variants of all these are assumed to develop by changes connected with syllabicity of glides /y/ and /w/ and loss of laryngeals. On the other hand the American tradition for example assumes a full system of /i, e, a, o, u/ with long /e,o/ variants. If one would have to derive a consensus concerning the IE vowel system: it is commonly accepted that /i/ and /u/ emerged from syllabic allophones of glides /y/ and /w/. Majority of scholars also accepts the notion of lengthened vowels developing from various compensatory lengthening-like changes. Reconstruction of true vowel /a/ remains the biggest point of dispute. Leiden tries to explain every evidence for it using laryngeal coloring of /e/ whilst the Americans accept it as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These debates however mostly regard to reconstruction of very early PIE system (especially the reductionist approach). The late PIE vowel system, after the laryngeal coloring and loss and the phonologization of syllabic high vowels would consist of approximately 7-9 vowels, depending on the number of lengthened vowels one would reconstruct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The view of consonant system is far more clear, with minor variations among scholars, usually concerning the phonetic character of certain phonemes, not the whole structure of phonological system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five sets of stops are reconstructed, each with a voiceless, voiced and breathy voiced variant: labial, dental, palatovelar, velar and labiovelar. There is one dental sybilant /s/, three laryngeals, two glides /y,w/, two nasals /m,n/ and two resonants /r,l/. All in all it gives a total system of 25 consonant phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2016-05-14T11:43:29.670" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T11:43:29.670" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17580" CreationDate="2016-05-14T11:51:56.873" Score="2" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the disadvantages of Element Theory in phonology? In other words, why is the theory of binary features still commonly held, even though aspects of it, such as its binarity, are untenable? Are they untenable??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13106" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T00:06:10.950" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T00:06:10.950" Title="Phonology - elements and features" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17579" CreationDate="2016-05-14T15:27:26.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Element theory differs from SPE theory (including autosegmental versions prior to Clements 1985) in two fundamental ways. Elements are in a way more abstract w.r.t. phonetic definitions, and they are privative. Additionally, the claim is that any single element is a well-formed segment and can be pronounced as such. Subsequent to Clements 1985, the difference between the theories has largely disappeared. Privativity was introduced partially via the node / feature distinction in geometric theories (nodes are labels with no features), and partly in response to radical underspecification (the ternary theory with +, - and 0). Following the logic of Lombardi (dissertation), it was realized that [+X] can be represented as X dominated by Y (dominated by Z) and [-X] can be represented as terminal Y dominated by Z: spreading of [-X] simply requires spreading Y, which wipes out any subordinate specification of X. There being no factual issue at stake, it has become more a matter of style or deeper-seated theoretical principles (such as a requirement to minimize the number of dominating nodes allowed in the theory). Since there are no clear and compelling arguments for or against either theory, we have reached a stalemate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classical example of the move towards more abstract features is seen in the adoption of &quot;labial&quot; which encompasses bilabial and labiodental in consonants, and rounding in vowels and glides. SPE theory required [round] for round segments, and [+anterior,-coronal] for labial consonants – Post-Sagian feature geometry, especially Unified Features theory, requires just Labial. The Parallel Structures Model (PSM) is even more abstract, in positing very few features which have only minimal phonetic content, and is just a step away from Radical Substance Free Phonology which does not assume phonetic feature definitions at all. Element theory started with just a very few elements and they employed relational combinations to derive the same phonetic outputs: that is, feature theory converged on ET.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest theory pair that I can see is Element Theory and PSM. They differ in what the primitives are, and I think they differ in some minor bit inter-translatable formal ways, but the one main difference between PSM and ET is that in PSM, you sill need a language-specific interpretation device that tells you what a segment with a single feature is. In ET, |A| is [a]: that theory retains a predefined universal phonetic core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the motivations for ET is it's program of reifying crosslinguistic probability distribution in representations: uncommon vowels are structurally more complex. Since PSM and RSFP are strictly theories of computation, probability distribution is a non-issue. So to put the matter somewhat differently, if you want your theory of grammar to encode Markedness Theory, then you would like ET. If you want a simpler theory which shifts the burden of explanation to grammar-external factors (various phonetic factors shaping the primary data that are the inductive base for grammar-learning), PSM / RSFP would be more appealing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T15:27:26.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17567" CreationDate="2016-05-14T19:54:41.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first video, the sound is simply /l/, spelled  in Swedish. This is the same as L in German or French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timecodes in the second video all lack L so I'm assuming you mean R. In this case I'm analyzing it as /&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_and_postalveolar_approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ɹ&lt;/a&gt;/ but it's most commonly analyzed as /&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_flaps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ɾ&lt;/a&gt;/. Depending on the dialect or person, it can also be pronounced /r/ or /ʀ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Luboš mentioned in the comments, L in some dialects is also /ɽ/. This is however not the case in either of these videos as they are both in Central Standard Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13185" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T19:54:41.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-14T21:48:51.757" Score="7" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fK01E.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fK01E.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;pictured a &amp;#39;Saray&amp;#39;, Turkish for palace &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much like (eng.) &lt;em&gt;saray&lt;/em&gt;, the words derive themselves from Ottoman Turkish latinized: &lt;em&gt;saray&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;palace&quot;, &quot;mansion&quot;, &quot;castle&quot;), which itself is derived from Persian سرای (&quot;hall&quot;, &quot;dwelling&quot;, &quot;mansion&quot;, &quot;palace&quot;, &quot;seraglio&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words don't deviate much from one another, generally referring to an Ottoman Turkish palace or a seraglio in the context harem of palaces. The city of Sarajevo derives itself from this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Croatian: ((HJP - &quot;Croatian Language Portal&quot; - hjp.znanje.hr))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noun:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;saraj&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;m. inan.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every grand palace, a court for Sultans, Viziers, and other high officials.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harem ((seraglio))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;((Metonymy)) Things belonging to a Sultan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we take a look at the Russian definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian ((en.wiktionary)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rnFd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rnFd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;picture of a shed&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Noun:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;сара́й&lt;/strong&gt; (saráj) &lt;em&gt;m. inan.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shed, storage building (small wooden construction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncomfortable, untidy room, pigsty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's almost as if it were an intentional and ironic mistranslation of the original word. Completely polarized meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and when did this change occur? Was it politically motivated during Russo-Turkish conflicts? Or maybe a pidgin word that Russian-based merchants picked up from Middle Eastern trade? Though, would be interesting to see how that came about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13184" LastEditorUserId="13184" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T06:51:04.997" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:58:59.483" Title="The semantical change of сарай - &quot;saráj&quot; (rus., ukr.) vs. sister and donor languages: pl. 'seraj', srb-cro. 'saraj'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T02:09:58.427" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;What sounds did س and ش‎ make in (early) Classical Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that maybe they were not [s] and [ʃ]. Is that a widely accepted truth? If that's true, what is the evidence for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T02:09:58.427" Title="Arabic sin and shin sounds in Classical times" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T03:46:05.250" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 137:] The &lt;strong&gt;antipassive&lt;/strong&gt; in English consists of demoting the direct object argument by omitting it. It removes the THEME/PATIENT argument from the set of core arguments. English does not mark the antipassive by a different form of the verb, but there are languages that do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 138:] The &lt;strong&gt;anticausative&lt;/strong&gt; is a diathesis that removes a causer AGENT from the set of core arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please aid me to infer the connection with the Passive and Causative diatheses, implied by the use of the prefix 'anti-'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T18:06:44.893" Title="Why was the prefix 'anti-' chosen for the terms 'antipassive' and 'anticausative'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T04:05:38.170" Score="1" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 123, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n9kcU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n9kcU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the Description and Examples for Thematic/Semantics Roles appear 100% interchangeable: so what are the differences? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T04:05:38.170" Title="How does 'Theme/Patient' differ from 'Experiencer'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T04:56:51.267" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ &lt;a href=&quot;http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/96571453242/whats-the-difference-between-perfect-and&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; ] At this point I’ve established that the perfect and the perfective are two separate concepts. However, there’s a conceptual relationship between these two even if there’s not an intrinsic formal one. It’s intuitive that if you’re trying to convey that something in the past is relevant in the present, you’re likely going to refer to that past situation as an undifferentiated whole rather than describing its internal structure. The point you’re making when you’re using the perfect is probably really about the present rather than the past – you’re &lt;code&gt;invoking the past to describe the present&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; the perfective lends itself to that kind of description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; “Perfect” and “perfective” share a stem for historical reasons; the reflex of English “perfect” once meant “complete”. Both terms are essentially metaphors that unfortunately use the same imagery for different concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, and so ask not about, 2; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=perfect&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the French and Latin etymons&lt;/a&gt; did mean 'complete'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand 1. How does the perfective 'lend itself to' &lt;code&gt;invoking the past to describe the present&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Besides 1 and 2, what else do these two Aspects share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T04:56:51.267" Title="What do the 'Perfect' and 'Perfective' Aspects share or have in common?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T11:37:01.653" Score="4" ViewCount="3198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi I've been reading a lot about overt and covert prestige from Labov's experiments in the department stores and convergence and divergence from Howard Giles' Communication Accommodation Theory and was just wondering if someone could explain the main difference between the two as they seem very similar.  And if you could point out which situations it would be more appropriate to use one as an explanation over the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13193" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T19:02:01.453" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T14:33:36.853" Title="Overt prestige and covert prestige vs convergence and divergence" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T16:37:03.970" Score="-1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word Formation Rules are responsible for the existence of well formed words. Are simple words (single, free morphemes) the result of word formation rules? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T00:34:48.093" Title="Do Word Formation Rules have to do only with polymorphemic words?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-27T12:15:15.120" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17592" CreationDate="2016-05-15T17:27:35.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once proposed that English verbs do not allow two or more contiguous unstressed syllables, with the exception of denominal verbs, which have the same pronunciation as the noun they are derived from.  For instance, &quot;antagonize&quot;, ANTAGonIZE, has only unstressed syllable, but if it were a noun, two contiguous unstressed syllables would be possible: *ANtagoNIZE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But verbs referring to use of a device of the same name must be excepted from the general rule.  MImeoGRAPH as a verb means to use a MImeoGRAPH, which has two contiguous unstressed syllables.  To CALendar an event is to note it on one's CALendar.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the rule of denominal verb formation does not change the number of morphemes or the stress of a word, and if you start with a single morpheme noun, you'll wind up with a single morpheme verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T17:27:35.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T19:42:49.127" Score="2" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German number system has the peculiarity that the ones are read out before the tens. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;634542 = Sechshundertvierunddreißigtausendfünfhundertvzweiundvierzig&#xA;       = &quot;six hundred four-and-thirty thousand five hundred two-and-fourty&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other languages I am familiar with read out numbers by starting at the highest digit (with respect to the underlying number system) and then proceding linearly to the lowest one. I think it's the other way round in Sanskrit (i. e. from least to most significant digit) but I'm not aware of any language where the digits get jumbled up in a fashion similar to German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there examples of other languages where numbers are not necessarily read out in a linear fashion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, a lot of languages use composite words for certain (especially two-digit) numbers like &quot;thirteen&quot; or &quot;duodecim&quot;, where the order of the composits defies the otherwise strict order, but I'm looking for languages where the rules themselves of forming arbitrary numbers from the fixed expressions proceed nonlinearly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-05-16T22:50:57.583" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T15:00:46.253" Title="Languages where numbers are read out in a mixed-up fashion" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26559" CreationDate="2016-05-15T21:09:48.100" Score="4" ViewCount="1174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a smartphone app or computer program that will listen to me pronouncing a vowel and will tell me where exactly the vowel is located in the IPA vowel chart. Does anyone know of apps or programs that do this? If so, which ones would you recommend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, from a programming perspective this would be a matter of computing a spectrogram, extracting the first two formants, and performing a transformation on these to map them to the chart (which from what I understand uses tongue position rather than formants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some nice-haves in terms of other features to detect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rounded or unrounded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;r-coloring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nasalization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The pitch of the vowel, as well as any contour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocal register&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whispered or not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13197" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T01:15:41.483" Title="Where can I find a vowel analyzer app or program?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17595" CreationDate="2016-05-15T21:32:27.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic:  1984 could be read as &quot;one thousand and nine hundred and four and eighty&quot; (the modern reading) or &quot;four and eighty and nine hundred and one thousand&quot; (traditional).  I have heard the latter on the radio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you could probably get away with &quot;four and eighty and one thousand and nine hundred&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.  On a related note: it is often claimed, even by &quot;experts&quot; (like the Unicode folks) that Arabic numbers are written left to right, and since the language is written RTL, Arabic (and other RTL languages) are &quot;bidirectional&quot;.   This is total hogwash.  You can read and read numerals in whatever order you like.  The semantic rule is simply &quot;base 10, least significant digit first&quot;, in contrast to (most) LTR languages, which go most significant digit first.  The myth of bidirectionality is 100% fabricated by the tech industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-05-16T19:29:41.570" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T19:29:41.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17592" CreationDate="2016-05-16T00:34:48.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word-formation rules are generally assumed to combine an existing element with something. The initial element in a derivation is inserted by a lexical insertion rule. However, nothing important follows from distinguishing &quot;word-formation&quot; and &quot;lexical-insertion&quot;, so they can be subsumed under one general rule concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T00:34:48.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1239" CreationDate="2016-05-16T10:54:59.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, indeed there is – and it's a very short one, please follow this link&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/25121020/The_Laryngeal_Theory_has_no_Theory_Incompatibility_with_the_Anatolian_Data_excludes_a_Viable_Model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.academia.edu/25121020/The_Laryngeal_Theory_has_no_Theory_Incompatibility_with_the_Anatolian_Data_excludes_a_Viable_Model&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;or alternatively this one:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librairie-epona.fr/nouveautes/wekwos-2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.librairie-epona.fr/nouveautes/wekwos-2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr Jouna Pyysalo&#xA;Indo-European Studies&#xA;University of Helsinki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13201" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T10:54:59.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-16T13:06:39.437" Score="4" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean has an interesting feature, in that mimetic words and colours can be altered by changing their vowels from one vowel harmony grouping to the other.&#xA;The two groupings are called yin vowels and yang vowels, and in mimetic words, the yin vowels (ㅓ[ʌ], ㅜ[u], etc.) carry semantic shades of &quot;dark/impure/big&quot;, while yang vowels carry shades of &quot;bright/clean/small&quot;.  By switching from one to another, you can change the meaning slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;꿀꺽&quot; (ggulggeok) and &quot;꼴깍&quot; (ggolggak) both mean &quot;the sound of gulping&quot; (they are mimetic adverbs), but the first indicates larger gulping than the second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other languages where vowel harmony can be used semantically like this, rather than just phonologically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I should note that vowel harmony isn't restricted to this in Korean; it is also used in the usual way, with some suffixes harmonizing with the vowel of the last syllable of the root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T21:45:14.763" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T21:45:14.763" Title="Are there any languages besides Korean where vowel harmony is used semantically?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-16T13:38:33.980" Score="1" ViewCount="875" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could say &lt;code&gt;aɪ&lt;/code&gt; is the diphthong made up of the open front unrounded vowel and the near-close near-front unrounded vowel. Is there a shorter name for that diphthong and other similar diphthongs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T08:02:01.880" Title="Are there names for the individual diphthongs?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17601" CreationDate="2016-05-16T15:03:40.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;similar&quot;. Diphthongs like &lt;em&gt;ai, au, ey, øi&lt;/em&gt; can be called &quot;falling&quot; diphthongs and ones like &lt;em&gt;uo, ea, yæ&lt;/em&gt; can be called &quot;rising&quot; diphthongs. That refers to change in assumed sonority where &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is said to be more sonorous that &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T15:03:40.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17600" CreationDate="2016-05-16T19:45:48.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to find modern sources on it but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language#Vowel_harmony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Manchu language&lt;/a&gt; of the Qing Dynasty had elements of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13185" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T19:45:48.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13039" CreationDate="2016-05-17T04:45:54.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simultaneity just means producing two or three signs simultaneously. It is common in British Sign Language, of which I have a very incomplete knowledge. All you have to do is pick two one-handed signs and add a facial expression (many facial expressions are signs in themselves), and you can easily produce three signs simultaneously, which is like saying three words simultaneously in a spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: raise your left index finger: that can represent a person. Hold it there while pointing at it with your horizontal right index finger. At the same time look at it with a puzzled expression on your face. Literal translation: &quot;Person there puzzling&quot;; natural translation: &quot;That person is puzzling/strange.&quot; The left hand, the right hand and the facial expression are three independent signs - independent because each can be done on its own without altering its meaning; and the left hand and the facial expression can both be replaced by a different sign, such as a horizontal flat left hand to denote a car and a facial expression of amazement. Literal translation: &quot;Car there amazing&quot;; natural translation: &quot;That car is amazing!&quot; Simultaneity doesn't happen all the time, but I think it does happen a lot, especially in the form of a facial expression plus one manual sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simultaneity is not mysterious or difficult, but it makes a startling contrast with oral languages that are limited to producing one phoneme at a time in a linear fashion. Hence sign linguists often contrast the &lt;strong&gt;simultaneity&lt;/strong&gt; that comes so easily to sign languages, with the strict &lt;strong&gt;linearity&lt;/strong&gt; of oral languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T04:45:54.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2016-05-17T16:40:26.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for the grammatical kinship between antecedents and questions is that they play corresponding roles in human reasoning.  Questions are the conversational counterparts to antecedents.  Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;statement: &quot;If John left early, then he didn't see Joyce.&quot;  &#xA;conversation: &quot;Did John leave early?  Then he didn't see Joyce.&quot;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two most popular ways of presenting a logical system are the axiomatic method and the natural deduction method.  As the name suggests, most people find the natural deduction method easiest to comprehend.  In a natural deduction system, suppositions are made, and consequences are drawn from those suppositions, where the suppositions correspond to questions in actual conversations.  The system gives a systematic way of going back and forth from the conversational forms of deduction (entailments) to the statement forms (implications). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T16:40:26.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-18T06:28:07.293" Score="1" ViewCount="1550" Body="&lt;p&gt;A phoneme may be pronounced in different ways, depending on its position in the utterance, and still remain the same phoneme. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13211" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T07:38:57.550" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T17:27:52.163" Title="Why are there many different ways to pronounce a phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2016-05-18T08:14:42.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;People don't produce &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Instead, they produce &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A listener then maps phone to phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if two speakers produce two phones, but both map to a single phoneme, an average listener would say these represent the same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, this mapping is language-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/3636/1009&quot;&gt;What languages have a three-way vowel distinction with backness?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T08:14:42.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13039" CreationDate="2016-05-18T09:02:35.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that your argument about the simultaneity of articulatory gestures in speech is mostly irrelevant, because the hearer does not perceive these various gestures, but the (single) resulting auditory stream. It is true that in general each such gesture will have an effect on the stream (though in some cases barely detectable) but there is no reason to posit that the hearer reconstructs the articulatory gestures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sign language, on the other hand, the simultaneous gestures are directly perceivable, and decomposable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that vocal speech does not in practice consist of a linear string of independent signals, but that the phones are spread along the speech stream and both overlap in time, and alter one another. It is true also that suprasegmental features can be independent of segmental ones, and thus give a limited degree of parallellism in vocal speech. But this seems very different from the immediately visible (multiple) parallellism and decomposability that is possible with sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T09:02:35.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2016-05-18T16:57:46.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since phonemes differ from one another in many ways, and because listeners usually have a good idea in advance what sort of thing will be said to them, speakers don't need to pronounce a phoneme is in exactly the same way each time, in order for listeners to figure out which phoneme is intended.  So speakers are free to substitute a sound which, in context, is easier to say or will be heard more readily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T01:55:33.297" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T01:55:33.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17595" CreationDate="2016-05-18T22:12:57.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Irish numbers are famously messy, putting the three counting systems aside to focus on the system for non-people/inanimate objects to address the question, numbers can be read in two ways, base ten and base twenty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are counting things you have to name the thing you are counting, or at least use a placeholder like &quot;ceann&quot; (lit. Head, means thing in this case). In the base ten example twenty three things would be &quot;trí chinn is fiche&quot; &quot;Three things and twenty&quot; and fifty three things would be &quot;trí chinn is caoga&quot; &quot;Three things and fifty&quot;. Above 100 the counting switches to a MSD to LSD system as in English, &quot;dhá céad fiche is a trí chinn&quot; &quot;two hundred twenty and three things&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the base twenty system. In this system, which is going out of fashion quite rapidly twenty three is still &quot;trí chinn is fiche&quot; but fifty three is &quot;trí chinn déag is dá fichead&quot; or &quot;three things teen and two twenty&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13090" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T22:12:57.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-19T04:51:09.640" Score="-1" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HAOwv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HAOwv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 217, Definition 9:] A set of expressions is a &lt;strong&gt;taxonomy&lt;/strong&gt; if and only if:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (i) they form a conceptual hierarchy in terms of hyponymy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   (ii) hyponyms denote sub-kinds of what their hyperonyms denote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hierarchy of the three sibling terms &lt;em&gt;sibling, sister&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  in Figure 7.3, however, is not a taxonomy: &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; brothers and sisters are not &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  of siblings. &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Referents of co-hyponyms in taxonomies differ in many properties. Referents of co-hyponyms of small, often binary, hierarchies&#xA;  such as sibling/sister/brother differ only in one property, e.g. in sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition, a sibling must be a brother or&lt;sub&gt;EXCLUSIVE&lt;/sub&gt; sister. So I do not understand 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:31:18.753" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:31:18.753" Title="How are brothers and sisters not KINDS of siblings?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-19T05:22:41.490" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to extract entities from upper case text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use - &lt;a href=&quot;http://corenlp.run/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://corenlp.run/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with test data - I KNOW TOM LIVES IN LONDON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LONDON - Location&#xA;TOM - not identified&#xA;relation not identified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with test data - I know Tom lives in London.&#xA;Tom - Person&#xA;London - Location&#xA;relation correctly identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to improve this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13107" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T09:45:28.587" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:59:40.250" Title="Named Entity Recognition on Upper Case Text" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17620" CreationDate="2016-05-19T06:11:06.010" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a dataset of noun phrases that are special in a particular way. I'm not able to pinpoint the key features of these noun phrases that distinguish them from other ones, however. Here are some examples of what I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Big Apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;machine learning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nuclear waste&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pillow talk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blue whale&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;red apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fast car&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dark night&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a recognized name for the type of thing I'm looking for? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an available dataset containing these constructions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a relatively straightforward approach to making such a dataset myself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13218" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T23:40:44.977" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T23:40:44.977" Title="Dataset of special noun phrases" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;study-of-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17616" CreationDate="2016-05-19T09:43:30.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your examples it looks like you are looking for &lt;strong&gt;terms&lt;/strong&gt; (as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Terminology&lt;/a&gt;). You can use several tools for &lt;strong&gt;term extraction&lt;/strong&gt; to find terms in a corpus, or you can look around for terminology databases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T09:43:30.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17600" CreationDate="2016-05-19T09:51:57.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some sound symbolism in the German language (e.g., small bells make &quot;ding&quot;, large bells &quot;dong&quot;; little clocks make &quot;tick&quot; and larger ones &quot;tack&quot;) but this is not used systematically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T09:51:57.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2016-05-19T19:57:27.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because the notion of a phoneme is a theoretical abstraction over actual speech production.  Nobody ever pronounces Eg /b/ in &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same way twice.  But we still (somehow) manage to recognize [b] when we hear it, in all its many guises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phoneme concept has been offered by some at least as the the one undeniably scientific deliverance of modern &quot;scientific&quot; linguistics.  Unfortunately there is no empirical evidence for it.  It's undeniably a useful fiction, but it is a fiction, which is closely tied to literacy (would we even imagine a [b] if it were not represented in our written language)?  For more on this search on Robert Port   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/pubs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/pubs.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T19:57:27.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17616" CreationDate="2016-05-19T21:42:44.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you're looking for is &quot;multi-word expressions.&quot; There are tons of datasets for this. One of the newest and most comprehensive is STREUSLE. Check out the page here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ark/LexSem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ark/LexSem/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another goog resource for multi-word expressions is SIGLEX-MWE: &lt;a href=&quot;http://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of straightforwardness: &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the &quot;fun&quot; part about them, because the definition of each single word does not compose into the definition of the entire phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T21:42:44.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-19T21:50:09.003" Score="0" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that it fundamental frequency is usually considered to be normally distributed, and that females have a higher variance in their distribution than males. What is the variance of the fundamental frequency across gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about a within subject design? For a given person, how much can I expect the fundamental frequency to vary? Based on the population results, I would expect the variance to be higher for a given female than for a male...correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: My population is expected to be adult males and females of north american english. I am looking for the standard deviation within steady-state vowels during normal conversational speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13227" LastEditorUserId="13227" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T18:17:43.013" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T18:17:43.013" Title="Standard Deviation Of Fundamental Frequency Of Males and Females" Tags="&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;variation&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-05-21T11:05:04.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17621" CreationDate="2016-05-19T22:39:56.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of things have to be clarified in your question. First, you need to say what the theoretical population of fundamental frequencies is – do you mean &quot;in all instances of speech&quot; (excluding musical and other non-speech uses of phonation)? You also need to specify age range, since infant speech has kind of high F0. You need to specify language: pitch range is a linguistic variable. By &quot;language&quot; I really mean dialect, so apart from the Cantonese vs. English issue, there are geographical and social lects of English (and other languages) that systematically select high pitch range. There is a significant correlation between pitch range and personality type, so that needs to be controlled for (also, as I'm sure you know, you have to be more precise that just stipulating &quot;male&quot; vs. &quot;female&quot;). You might try normalizing speakers by having them produce the lowest-possible pitch and highest-possible pitch on a steady-state vowel, which would give you a basis for guessing their physically-possible pitch range (then you'd need to collect data on the singer / non-singer distinction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T22:39:56.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T04:10:54.447" Score="7" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking about the origin of grammatical gender. I am asking where is the earliest example of the term &quot;gender&quot; used to describe classes of nouns. I'm wondering who first decided to name grammatical classes of nouns (and their treatment) as &quot;gender&quot; as opposed, say, to &quot;class 1 nouns&quot; and &quot;class 2 nouns,&quot; or something otherwise neutral. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13228" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T11:31:26.520" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T11:22:14.330" Title="Who was the first to call noun classes &quot;genders&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17624" CreationDate="2016-05-20T04:48:51.060" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on whether you mean strictly English (since &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; is an English word) or do you include the historical antecedents in other languages. The origin of the concept and term is Aristotle in &lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt; (though Aristotle attributes the idea to Protagoras), and the Greek term is &lt;em&gt;genos&lt;/em&gt;, which simply means &quot;kind&quot;. It worked its way into French as &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt;, hence &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; in English, attested since 1390 (the non-grammatical sense is attested about 100 years later). Aristotle distinguished grammatical gender and sex gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T04:48:51.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T15:03:21.563" Score="3" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thus far I have the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which uses a custom set of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonemes represented in ASCII text&lt;/a&gt;. Just the words and pronunciations is nice, but it would be great to have actual IPA pronunciations as well as definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any good places to start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13236" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T19:53:56.190" Title="Is there a programmatically accessible/structured (JSON, XML, etc) dictionary that includes IPA" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17615" CreationDate="2016-05-20T16:38:39.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could try doing &lt;em&gt;truecasing&lt;/em&gt; first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are various libs for that.  You will probably need to add a few domain-specific fixes for your data too.  And you should try smashing all case before truecasing.  It's not a completely solved problem either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, breaking the problem down is the best approach.  Most of the components perform poorly when they are expected to do spelling correction and transliteration and truecasing and fix punctuation and ... Named-entity recognition is no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples where the caseless version is ambiguous.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He helped Jack off the horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you tune it and set the threshold will depend on your application.  (Do you prefer false positives to false negatives?)  Ideally the truecaser gives you a probability or other indication of ambiguity, but to do it perfectly requires full AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T17:59:40.250" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:59:40.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T17:38:58.473" Score="3" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try to ask this question in a way it doesn't look like a homework assignment, which is not, because previous message was classified off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Carnie's book, and he just introduced VP internal subject hyphotesis where the subject, the DP, is generated under the VP, and later there is a DP movement to TP,Spec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, this new tree, I don't seem to understand the V∅ active it has under this VP branch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand why the need for the V∅ active, and so I know when to use it. So far it has been said in passive trees there's no need for it, only in declarative sentences, but since it is null the voice in active declarative that's why the V∅ active, but in following sentences sometimes it doesn't show the V∅ active and sometimes it does, so I don't know when to use it at all the V∅ active.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks and sorry for the previous inconveniences!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13050" LastEditorUserId="13050" LastEditDate="2016-05-20T18:18:10.777" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T19:15:46.610" Title="Syntax: VP subject internal null V head from Carnie's book" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17626" CreationDate="2016-05-20T19:53:56.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it turns out one can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ#Downloading_Wiktionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;download Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; and that has SQL database dumps. That has all the information I want (including IPA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13236" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T19:53:56.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17595" CreationDate="2016-05-21T07:54:24.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, numbers in Dutch are organized the same way as in German. For example, 634542 written out becomes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;zeshonderd vierendertig duizend vijfhonderd tweeënveertig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13239" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T07:54:24.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2016-05-22T03:07:45.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered if gendered nouns might have nothing at all to do with gender, but rather that there developed different classes of nouns in usage, and that only when grammarians first started to parse language (i.e., the Greeks) did some ancient thinker decide that one class of nouns might be considered &quot;masculine,&quot; and the second class &quot;feminine) and then when Greek -- and mainly Latin -- grammar was overlain on other languages did the terms &quot;masculine&quot; and &quot;feminine&quot; become common, and a third class of nouns (as in German) would then naturally be &quot;neuter.&quot; There must be some other language in which there are four classes or more of noun. Is there any record of the terms masculine and feminine being used for nouns before Aristotle? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13228" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T03:07:45.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-21T16:09:18.073" Score="0" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not speak any logographic language, contemporary or otherwise, but I have students whose original languages are written logographically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to imagine summarizing, rewriting and paraphrasing an original or secondary source in such a language.  I supposed that there would be a limited vocabulary, and that syntactical rules might also be quite restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, I find it easy to cite the information in some source while using an extremely different phrasing.  But would a logographic language afford the same flexibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you have an academic paper in front of you as your primary source written in a logographic language.  If you're writing in the same language, do you even have vocabulary and grammatical alternatives to the phrasing in your source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this differ among logographically-written languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can Western definitions of plagiarism be applied fairly to academic environments in languages that use logographic writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With students for whom logographics are their native written language, do we in the Western academic environments have to train them in the sort or originality we expect of native Western students?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13243" OwnerDisplayName="Andrew Wolfe" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T14:26:57.703" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T14:26:57.703" Title="Is it harder for a student to express himself/herself originally in a logographic language?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17633" CreationDate="2016-05-22T07:13:42.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no &quot;logographic languages&quot; in the sense that you seem to be thinking of (systems of pictures that represent ideas directly). As you seem to be aware, such a system would be very limited in its expressivity—it would not really be &quot;writing&quot; or &quot;language&quot; at all (or not human language as we know it), but some kind of cartoon or diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written Chinese, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian etc. are in fact written forms of spoken languages. These scripts are often inaccurately described as logographic, but in fact none of these writing systems (nor any known) are purely logographic. All of them have significant phonetic components, and morphological components (a &quot;morpheme&quot; is a linguistic unit of meaning, but it is not an idea—for example, the English morpheme &quot;pseudo-&quot; is distinct from the morpheme &quot;fake&quot; and the morpheme &quot;ersatz&quot; even though they all mean approximately the same thing. You can think of a morpheme as being a &quot;word root&quot;). In written Japanese, there are actually two approximately phonetic scripts that are used alongside the more morpheme-oriented characters. In written Chinese, there is almost always a one-to-one correspondence between a spoken syllable and a written character. So these scripts very closely represent specific sequences of words in the spoken languages. And all spoken languages have synonyms and alternative grammatical structures that can be used to re-word an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different definitions of plagiarism exist for cultural reasons, and are not necessitated by the nature of any particular scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-05-22T07:18:46.927" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T07:18:46.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17633" CreationDate="2016-05-22T10:06:49.093" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting fact is that I find it is much more difficult to reformulate a meaning in different words and especially with slightly different tone (for instance, indicating the author's relation to the issue) in English compared to Russian. In some sense the Orwell's newspeak is the idea of English language taken to the extreme, but actual English language is not too far from it. A good side of it, it is very hard to make very emotional hate speech or good sarcasm in English compared to Russian or German. In English you have to explicitly write &quot;I hate it&quot;, in Russian you can express hate directly using appropriate words and inflections, without needing any clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say, English is similar to Chinese in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T10:06:49.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17582" CreationDate="2016-05-22T14:24:11.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both South Slavic and East Slavic borrowed this Persian word via Turkic languages, but separately - ie long after the Slavic languages branched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is only in East Slavic that the Russian meaning occurs - not in Iranic, not in Turkic nor in South Slavic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can observe a tendency in Russian borrowings from Turkic, I would ascribe it less to conflict - there were Russian conflicts with the French and Germans too, and the South Slavs had plenty of conflict with the Ottomans - than to Russia's colonial relationship with the Caucasus and Asia generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Происходит от перс. sarāi, sarā «дворец». Перс. слово восходит к др.-ир. *srāða-, которое родственно готск. hrōt «крыша». К тому же источнику через посредство франц. sérail следует возводить и сера́й, сера́ль. Русск. слово заимств. через тюркск.; ср.: тур., кыпч., уйг., тат. sаrаi «дом; дворец; каравансарай; комната для жилья; стойло; тележный сарай». Сюда же Сара́й — город на нижней Волге (Лаврентьевск. летоп. под 1261 г.), ср.-греч. Σαράγιον (ХIV--ХV в.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_terms_derived_from_Turkic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_terms_derived_from_Turkic_languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T09:32:35.563" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T09:32:35.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-22T17:07:21.027" Score="7" ViewCount="1120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the lexicon of Ancient Greek contain words believed to be of Sumerian origin? If so, can some estimate of their number be provided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9224" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T14:21:57.923" Title="Are There Ancient Greek Words Descended From Sumerian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17601" CreationDate="2016-05-22T18:21:22.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer can be quite straightforward: no, the individual diphthongs do not have their own names. However, you can indeed (as user6726 answered), put a shorter label on the gliding process itself, instead of completely defining both vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13249" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T18:21:22.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-22T18:37:50.190" Score="10" ViewCount="1867" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that it was used to distinguish aspiration (as opposed to 't' in words of Latin/ Old French origin, which was not aspirated?). I'm pretty sure German lost its dental fricative to d pretty early on, so I know that's probably not it.&#xA;Examples: thun, Thal, Thier etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify, I do not mean words of Greek/English origin with 'th' (like ethisch, Thema or Thron).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13250" LastEditorUserId="13250" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T09:38:09.293" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T00:14:00.827" Title="Why do some German words have 'th' instead of 't' in their older spelling?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17614" CreationDate="2016-05-22T19:22:08.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Siblingness is a relational property.  You cannot be a brother unless you are a brother &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; somebody else.  But you can be a cat without being a cat of something.  Youre still a mamnal and not a dog. So a cat is a kind of mammal, but a brother is not a kind of sibling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IOW, siblingness has nothing to do with sex.  A brother is a sibling who happens to be male.  (Let's leave gender out of it, for simplicity' sake.)  A species with only one sex could still have siblings.  Amoebae for example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T19:22:08.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17637" CreationDate="2016-05-23T09:46:25.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I remember right, the word βοῦς &quot;cow&quot; is traced back to Sumerian (it is believed to be a Sumerian loan into Proto-Indogermanic, the reconstructed form is *gʷṓws).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such beasts are rare and I doubt that there are many more of them, because Ancient Greek and Sumerian weren't in direct contact (temporarily and geographically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here's another candidate: κύανος ‘dark blue glaze; enamel’, from Hittite &lt;em&gt;kuwannan-&lt;/em&gt; ‘copper ore; azurite’ (ultimately from Sumerian &lt;em&gt;kù-an&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T14:21:57.923" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T14:21:57.923" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-23T10:44:22.720" Score="3" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking (for a statistics project) to the Lexical Distance between languages and I came across this post&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance&quot;&gt;Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is any &quot;numerical table&quot; of these distances, in order to do myself some analysis!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13256" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T20:54:00.507" Title="Lexical Distance, is there a table?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-23T12:55:08.197" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a grammar formalism be something that's neither a dependency grammar nor a constituency grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2464" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T13:49:21.073" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T20:17:39.843" Title="Are all grammar formalisms either dependency or constituency grammars?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17637" CreationDate="2016-05-23T14:14:36.770" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a few: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Greek_terms_derived_from_Sumerian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Greek_terms_derived_from_Sumerian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were mostly borrowed via Akkadian, and into other major classical languages of the Eastern Mediterranean  beside Ancient Greek - Aramaic, Armenian, Persian, Hebrew...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;cane&lt;/em&gt; would seem to share such an etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another wave of ultimately Sumerian words came to Southeastern Europe later via Ottoman Turkish, eg &lt;em&gt;kireç&lt;/em&gt;.  They are not found in literary Greek, but they are found in neighbouring South Slavic and Albanian, so surely they have been spoken in some Greek dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T10:25:11.267" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T10:25:11.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17644" CreationDate="2016-05-23T15:10:02.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not in a convenient format at all, but if you look at the SI (supporting information) tab for the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/112/41/12752.abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment&lt;/a&gt; there are .svg files with very large phylogenetic trees with edges labelled with similarity between languages. You could contact the author for something a bit more directly useful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T15:10:02.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2016-05-23T17:26:55.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're referring to the concept of allophones. Any difference in pronunciation of an orthographic phoneme should be notated in its IPA transcription. A phoneme can have a variety of allophones, all of which would be represented differently in IPA but would not differ from their shared underlying allophone in lexical meaning. So, for example, [b] and [p] in English are NOT allophones because &quot;&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;ut&quot; has a different meaning than &quot;&lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;ut,&quot; however /pʰ/ is an allophone of /p/, because I'm not able to provide you with a minimal pair like I did for [b] &amp;amp; [p]. Lexically, there is no difference between /p/ and /pʰ/-- and the two may likely be represented identically orthographically-- but there is a difference in their pronunciation and, thus, their IPA transcription. I hope this cleared things up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13208" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T17:26:55.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17645" CreationDate="2016-05-23T17:34:04.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a manner of speaking, yes.  The analysis of phrases into immediate constituents is not really a matter of theory, but more a matter of fact, which any grammatical theory must provide for.  So, in this sense, every grammar formalism must tell you about constituency (even dependency grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, by constituency grammar you mean a grammatical theory with constituents at its most primitive level, which is probably what you do mean, then context free phrase structure grammar (psg) is a constituency grammar, because production rules, aka phrase structure rules, are primitives of the theory, and we can equate the right hand sides of productions with constituents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surveying an appropriate dependency diagram for a particular phrase, you will not see all the constituents of the phrase given explicitly, though you can probably deduce them, so dependency grammar is probably not to be counted as a constituency grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, finally, to your question.  Arc Pair Grammar (with Relational Grammar) gives graphs to describe the structure of phrases, and, as with dependency grammar, looking at an arc pair diagram, you don't see the constituents given explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own theory of grammar, 2psg (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;How ... vertical dimension ...?&lt;/a&gt;) is another example of a theory in which constituents are not primitives.  In 2psg, phrases are built up from &quot;forms&quot;, which incorporate both constituency information (the pronunciation) and valency information (the category of a constituent).  Discontinuous constituents have a straightforward and natural account in 2psg (though they do not in psg).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T17:34:04.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5983" CreationDate="2016-05-23T18:40:31.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is 2 years old, but I thought this might help someone else with a similar struggle!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S-structure with triangles for &quot;Which fat pig did the small sheet bite behind the barn?&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwsOg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwsOg.png&quot; alt=&quot;S-structure&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for reference, here's the D-structure (without triangles):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MPCwq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MPCwq.png&quot; alt=&quot;D-structure&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13208" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T18:40:31.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-24T02:33:11.677" Score="1" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, we contract things like &quot;They are&quot; to &quot;They're.&quot; As far as I know, for indicative moods, this is only done for present and future tense verbs. Why is it not done for past tense (I know there are things like &quot;they've&quot;, but we still do not contract, for example, &quot;He was.&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13069" LastEditorUserId="13069" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T03:17:33.473" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T03:17:33.473" Title="Why doesn't English have contracted forms for past tense verbs?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-24T13:24:02.353" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a technical mailing list where I participate, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/programming/2016-May/045157.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;someone asked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A famous linguist once said that &quot;to understand a new language, that you&#xA;  should &lt;strong&gt;focus on the verbs first&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;  Who said that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One participant linked to the linguist David Crystal, who starts &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.davidcrystal.com/?id=3182&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a blog post&lt;/a&gt; thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are all kinds of bits and pieces in a sentence, but &lt;strong&gt;I doubt if there’s anything more important than the verb&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is this a popular sentiment among linguists? Is &lt;em&gt;focus on verbs&lt;/em&gt; [when studying a new language], or something similar, a well-known aphorism in linguistics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, where did it originate, who popularized it, and what does it mean (in the sense of why should one focus on verbs instead, of, say, nouns)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Just to clarify&lt;/strong&gt;: this question is unrelated to learning a new language, or language pedagogy as a discipline. The question is concerned only with linguistics, and the study of languages &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; languages.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5609" LastEditorUserId="5609" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T15:00:57.353" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T20:29:22.287" Title="Is &quot;focus on verbs&quot; a well-known aphorism in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-24T19:21:31.803" Score="0" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UagBO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UagBO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was having a chat with someone and I was wondering whether this text (that seems to regard the White Ship incident) were written in some form of English, or possibly in Latin or French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the ignorance, and thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13267" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T11:53:08.150" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T11:53:08.150" Title="In what language was this following scripture written? What does it mean?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-03T08:53:48.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17657" CreationDate="2016-05-24T20:32:05.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed Latin, and it does seem to to depict the White Ship. It seems to be a genealogy of sorts too. I'm still working on the transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Henrici nati pelago pereunt adaquanti  &lt;em&gt;&quot;The sons of Henry perish in the water-bringing sea&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Filia que remanet imperiale tenet  &lt;em&gt;&quot;His daughter who remains holds the imperial&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below Henry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Henricus Rex filius conquestoris genuit  *&quot;King Henry, son of the Conqueror, sired:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Willelmum  &lt;em&gt;&quot;William&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;qui periit  &lt;em&gt;&quot;who perished&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in mari  &lt;em&gt;&quot;at sea&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ricardum  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Richard&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;qui periit  &lt;em&gt;&quot;who perished&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in mari  &lt;em&gt;&quot;at sea&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[centre]&lt;/em&gt; matildem Imperatricem  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Empress Matildis&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;matrem  &lt;em&gt;&quot;mother&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[left]&lt;/em&gt; Ricardi filii imperatricis qui abiit  &lt;em&gt;&quot;of Richard, son of the Empress, who went away&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;matrem  &lt;em&gt;&quot;mother&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[right]&lt;/em&gt; Regis Henrici secundi  &lt;em&gt;&quot;of King Henry the Second&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Henric. primus regn. xxxv ann. iii mensibus et iacet Rading  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Henry the First reigned 35 years and 3 months and lies at Reading&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T20:46:21.573" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T20:46:21.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T17:28:29.997" Score="2" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in title. Lets say we have uhm anything (hollywood):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/hɑˈliwʊˌd/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now how to make algorithm that will find all syllables in this IPA transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/hɑˈliwʊˌd/ =&amp;gt; /hɑ.li.wʊd/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can do this, because we have brains and ears and mouths too. But computer has just processor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C is for Consonant,&#xA;V is for Vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;CVCVCVC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now lets begin from left to right. We know that every syllable must have one vowel and not more, plus zero or more consonants. How to decide which consonant belongs to which vowel? Based on CVCVCVC it could be more than one shape:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;CVC.VC.VC&#xA;CV.CVC.VC&#xA;CV.CV.CVC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so how to decide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13269" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T18:58:01.447" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T04:37:26.213" Title="How to learn computer syllabification of IPA?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T18:48:36.393" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is kind of the opposite of &lt;em&gt;tonogenesis&lt;/em&gt;. All languages with stress use a combination of pitch, force and duration to represent a stressed syllable. Some use only (or primarily) pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sources or papers deal with the introduction of force to a previously pitch-only accent? It occurs in the transition from Attic to Koine' Greek, and several other periods and languages. But has anyone got ideas on what causes this prosodic shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10970" LastEditorUserId="10970" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T10:19:18.773" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T10:19:18.773" Title="Pitch-Accent languages like Ancient Greek sometimes acquire a dynamic component. Any papers on this change?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17659" CreationDate="2016-05-25T18:56:47.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question at StackOverflow seems to have several nice answers about the strictly formal algorithms of English syllabification: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/405161/974789&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Detecting syllables in a word&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, including some open source ones. Admittedly, not all of these contain some plain-text explanation (I guess, this is what you primarily need), so it may require programmer's experience to understand the logic behind the program code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in their essay, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Evaluating Automatic Syllabification Algorithms for English&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/264285/1/MarchandAdsettDamper_ISCA07.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;), Yannick Marchand et.al. compare one rule set based on expert knowledge and three data-driven methods based on automatic inference from a corpus of already-syllabified words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Googling for &lt;em&gt;syllabification algorithm&lt;/em&gt; is also a great start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T18:56:47.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17663" CreationDate="2016-05-25T19:54:28.600" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine spotted this while waking around Amsterdam. I don't recognize the script and can't make sense of it so I thought I'd ask for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/eTCnpgA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's that text between XXXVII and ANNO? What script is it in? What year is this timestamp referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13271" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T20:16:17.780" Title="What does the text on this building say?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-05-31T10:29:57.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17662" CreationDate="2016-05-25T20:16:17.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is the Westertoren Tower in Amsterdam, the Nederlands. The numbers are regular Roman numerals, but written in a fancy way. The first one is what looks like &lt;code&gt;c|ɔ&lt;/code&gt;, but that is how &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;, 1000, is written, &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; with a tall middle mast. The second one is &lt;code&gt;|ɔ&lt;/code&gt;, but that is actually &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt;, 500, again, with a tall mast. Then go the usual Roman &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, 100, and &lt;code&gt;XXXVII&lt;/code&gt;, 37, which should all be summed up, making 1000 + 500 + 100 + 37 = &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westertoren_(Amsterdam)#Romeinse_cijfers&quot;&gt;1637, and that is the year&lt;/a&gt; written on the Westertoren Tower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T20:16:17.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17659" CreationDate="2016-05-25T22:03:09.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the particular IPA transcription, that is, the level of detail provided. Also accuracy -- if you give it  it should crash as being ill-formed (plus, it stresses the wrong syllable), though it should accept &amp;lt;ˈhɑliˌwʊd&gt; as well as &amp;lt;ˈhɑliwʊd&gt;. It also depends on your theory of syllabification. For example, &lt;em&gt;hammer&lt;/em&gt; can be syllabified in three ways: [ˈhæ.mɹ̩], [ˈhæm.ɹ̩], and [ˈhæṃɹ̩] where the syllable break is internal to . There is also an option of turning  i.e. ambisyllabic C into two Cs, so [ˈhæm.mɹ̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer really depends on the nature of your IPA data. Because stress marks are supposed to go at the beginning of a stressed syllable, that gives you a tremendous advantage (assuming that your data is stress marked). There are many clues that you can use to go from an IPA transcription to syllabification. For example, aspiration can only appear syllable initially, so any character followed by &amp;lt;ʰ&gt; should be preceded by a syllable break; [ɾ] only appears at the beginning of a syllable. If a transcription doesn't include aspiration, you can't use that evidence. You can start by focusing on &quot;vowels&quot;, but there is a lot of variation in whether people write &amp;lt;ən&gt; vs , or &amp;lt;ɚ&gt; vs. &amp;lt;ɹ̩&gt;, which would complicate your algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T04:37:26.213" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T04:37:26.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17659" CreationDate="2016-05-26T00:48:40.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Donald Knuth gives a very compact algorithm in the TeXbook (or else in the source for TeX itself) for determining hyphenation points while line-breaking during justification of text.  It is from an MA thesis written by one of his students, as I recall.  I once used his method in a text formatting program I wrote, but the algorithm itself is quite opaque in the form it has in the TeX source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knuth also has a good discussion in the TeXbook of what one wants in such an algorithm -- it has to avoid inaccuracies, because human readers will pick up on bad hyphenations quite readily.  He mentions the classic case of &quot;record&quot;, which as a verb should be re-cord, but as a noun should be rec-ord.  Correspondingly, theories of English syllabification will tell you that a single medial C is pushed out of the following syllable when the preceding vowel is stressed and the following vowel is unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the case of print formatting, in the case of &quot;record&quot;, you want the algorithm to tell you not to attempt hyphenation, unless of course you have a transcription with stresses (or syllabification) marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we have some information about how mistakes in syllabification are to be detected (for print formatting there are hyphenation dictionaries), I don't see how to really answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T00:48:40.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-26T05:27:14.660" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 283, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/17666/5306&quot;&gt;[Continued]&lt;/a&gt; Likewise, the category VASE is&#xA;  defined by the feature that vases are for putting cut flowers in. Thus, the&#xA;  impression of a continuum of membership degrees between different&#xA;  categories such as CUP and VASE is an artefact of an experiment that emphasized&#xA;  the derivative feature of shape rather than the primary feature of&#xA;  function. The test design also suggested that the categories tested should&#xA;  be mutually exclusive. In fact, the same object can be used both for&#xA;  drinking coffee and putting flowers in (a fact that was confirmed by&#xA;  Labov’s results). When it is used for coffee, it is a cup, when it hosts a&#xA;  bunch of flowers, it is a vase. Thus what the experiments really show is&#xA;  that &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; categorization is flexible and context-dependent  &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt; because it is, for&#xA;  things like cups, not primarily a matter of physical features; but &lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; they do not&#xA;  prove that category boundaries are fuzzy &lt;strong&gt;[End of 2.]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please aid me to comprehend the distinctions and nuances between 1 and 2.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To me, 1 implies 2; so I am certainly neglecting something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T13:17:05.877" Title="How does flexible and context-dependent Categorisation not imply fuzzy Category Boundaries?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;prototype-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17671" CreationDate="2016-05-26T17:31:25.677" Score="5" ViewCount="6219" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sound like the &lt;code&gt;voiceless retroflex stop&lt;/code&gt; get's sometimes called a &lt;code&gt;stop&lt;/code&gt; and sometimes a &lt;code&gt;plosive&lt;/code&gt;. Are the terms completely synonymous or do they have a slightly different meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T00:55:51.023" Title="Is there a difference between the terms `plosive` and `stop`?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17670" CreationDate="2016-05-26T17:39:31.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're often used interchangeably but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant#Terminology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguists sometimes distinguish them&lt;/a&gt;. When they do, they usually use &quot;stop&quot; for the part of the sound when the air is prevented from flowing, while &quot;plosive&quot; is the later part of the sound when the following vowel bursts. So a &quot;stop&quot; may exist without a &quot;plosive&quot;; in that case, it's sometimes referred to as &quot;applosive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less frequently, &quot;stop&quot; and &quot;plosive&quot; are used for the glottal and non-glottal stop, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T17:39:31.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-26T18:45:29.077" Score="0" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;If so, are they antonyms or did one undergo a lexical shift to become the other? Also, is the /es-/ prefix used as a negator in any other English words, or is this case an exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13208" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T07:34:56.910" Title="Do &quot;shew&quot; and &quot;eschew&quot; come from the same root?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17670" CreationDate="2016-05-26T20:33:13.753" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonology, &quot;stop&quot; is ordinarily taken to mean non-continuant, where a continuant is a sound allowing continuous flow of air through the mouth.  This makes the nasal consonants m/n/ŋ stops, because airflow through the mouth is stopped, though outside phonology, these common nasal consonants are frequently not considered stops and are called continuants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for phonologists' usage is, I guess, partly to be consistent with &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;, and partly because it is often convenient in formulating rules or sound changes to have a way of specifying this class of sounds which interrupt airflow through the mouth, i.e. stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in casual speech English pronunciation, commonly the alveolar stops assimilate regressively in place of articulation to following stops, and this happens to [n] as well as [t,d] and before [m,n] as well as before [p,t,k,b,d,g], though fricatives and liquids neither trigger nor undergo the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T00:55:51.023" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T00:55:51.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17672" CreationDate="2016-05-27T07:34:56.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the two words are not related. There is neither a direct relation nor a negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Shew&quot; is an old version of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=show&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;show&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which comes from proto-Germanic &quot;skauwojan&quot;, i.e. choose, look at, and other verbs. Even in Proto-Indo-European, there is &quot;skeue&quot;, pay attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=eschew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;eschew&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is from proto-Germanic &quot;skeukhwaz&quot;, i.e. escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T07:34:56.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-27T07:46:47.147" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need some corpora that contain &lt;strong&gt;sentences with misspelled word(s)&lt;/strong&gt; in order to evaluate the performance of my own spell checking approach. So, the corpora should define &lt;strong&gt;the right word alongside the misspelled one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12895" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T12:14:18.160" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T12:14:18.160" Title="Are there any publicly available spell checking corpora?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-27T08:10:36.867" Score="0" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that in principle the Schwa sound can be both rounded and unrounded. Can it be both in English, or does English always does one or the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2549" LastEditDate="2016-05-27T09:03:34.670" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T09:03:34.670" Title="Is the Schwa in English rounded or unrounded?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17679" CreationDate="2016-05-27T09:03:19.480" Score="3" ViewCount="1421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there minimal pairs between vowels of normal length such as &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; and vowels of long length such as &lt;code&gt;aː&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-05-27T12:02:57.070" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T17:08:24.683" Title="Are there minimal pairs between normal length and long vowels in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2016-05-27T10:02:24.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, though it depends on the variety. For example in Scottish English, vowel length does not have minimal pairs since it is determined by &quot;Aitken's law&quot;. &#xA;In Standard Southern British English (SSBE) however there are minimal pairs for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For /ɪ/ vs. /iː/: &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;beat&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;lick&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;leek&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;hit&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;heat&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For /æ/ vs. /ɑː/: &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;cart&lt;/em&gt; (though this wouldn't hold up in rhotic accents)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note the qualitative difference in the short and long vowels, it's not just a vowel length difference, so some might argue that it's not actually vowel length which forms the minimal pair but the quality of the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13283" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2016-05-27T12:52:04.357" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T12:52:04.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2016-05-27T11:56:36.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Australian English has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel_length&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;true phonemic length distinctions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ferry&lt;/em&gt; /feɹi/ vs &lt;em&gt;fairy&lt;/em&gt; /feːɹi/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Manning&lt;/em&gt; (name) /mænɪŋ/ vs &lt;em&gt;manning&lt;/em&gt; /mæːnɪŋ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T11:56:36.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:30:38.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A classic example is that virtually all dialects distinguish [bid] &quot;bid&quot; and [bi:d] &quot;bead&quot;. Also, dialects often distinguish [bit] &quot;bit&quot; and [bi:t] &quot;bid&quot;. A &quot;minimal pair&quot; is a pair of words whose phonetic valued differ &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in the presence of A vs. B in the phonetic output. To rephrase, &quot;minimal pair&quot; is a property of phonetic outputs, not underlying phonological analysis. It is a well-known problem with the concept of &quot;minimal pair&quot; that the minimality of the pair is crucially determined by the granularity of the transcription, so while [bid] vs. [bi:d] is &quot;okay&quot; as a phonetic transcription, [bɪd] / [bi:d] is even better (and also not minimal w.r.t. length), and [bɪˑt] / [bɪˑjt] is best (though perhaps dialect dependent). Then we have the contrast [bɪˑt] &quot;bid&quot;, [bɪt] &quot;bit&quot;, [bɪˑjt] &quot;bead&quot; and [bɪjt] &quot;beat/beet&quot;. The underlying contrast in the vowels is length, which is realized phonetically via diphthongization. The underlying consonant contrast is voicing, realized phonetically as lengthening  of the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &quot;informants&quot; of Australian English had a vowel quality contrast to go with their length contrast. The Wiki article says &quot;some speakers&quot; and the data are notated with a &quot;citation needed&quot; flag indicating that there is a diphthongization difference to go with the assumed length difference. This can only be resolved with some concrete acoustic evidence. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.assta.org/sst/SST-94-Vol-ll/cache/SST-94-VOL2-Chapter10-p8.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fletcher et al&lt;/a&gt;. look into the &quot;hud / hard&quot; difference, unfortunately their measurements only give a single generic formant value of &quot;the vowel&quot;. They do show that there is a large correlation between vowel choice and duration, and a small and speaker-dependent difference in formant value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my west coast dialect, there are minimal pairs like &quot;whore&quot; [hɔɹ] and &quot;horror&quot; [hɔ:ɹ], &quot;tear&quot; [tɛɹ] and [tɛ:ɹ]. To validate the claims about transcription, we'd have to have an independent way to establish how much of the speech signal is [ɹ] and how much is vowel. If the rhotic is longer in the orthographically bisyllabic forms, thus we really have [hɔɹ] vs. [hɔ:ɹˑ], then this would not be a minimal pair, it would be like the case of &quot;beat&quot; and &quot;bit&quot;, with length and quality co-dependent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-05-27T19:18:06.177" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T19:18:06.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:38:42.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming minimal pair means contrasting phonetic forms, here is one from my midwestern American dialect: [tʰæ̃j̃k] &quot;tank&quot; versus [tʰæ̃:j̃k] &quot;tannic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T16:38:42.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2016-05-28T02:26:17.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That English may have borrowed this from Old French's use (before 17th Century) of the gerondif, e.g. est parlant, after being influenced by Celtic, only to have modern French in the 17th Century discard it by the authoritative grammarian Malherbe's ruling it to be 'rustique' could explain both English's having the progressive based on tense forms of the copula 'to be' + imperfect participle (present participle) and French's now having lost it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13290" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T02:26:17.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-28T05:46:25.103" Score="-4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 333:] In the following, the Individual Variables are: &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The 1-place Predicate Constant is: &lt;strong&gt;fox&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;  The 2-place Predicate Constant is: &lt;strong&gt;dislike&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[pp 335-336:] It is important to note that free variables are interpreted on a par with&#xA;  individual constants. They stand for a particular individual, functioning&#xA;  roughly like ‘the x’. Existentially bound variables, however, achieve the&#xA;  reading of ‘some x’. Therefore, steps 4 and 5 are interpreted as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bKDBU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bKDBU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph above asserts that in 14a,  the blue cannot replace the red.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But why not? Why cannot [14.1] be rewritten as [14.4] below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[14.4] the x dislikes the fox named &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T04:04:31.120" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T04:04:31.120" Title="Why does not 'the x dislikes the y and the y is a fox' = 'the x dislikes the fox'?" Tags="&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-28T06:04:16.187" Score="-2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 348, &lt;em&gt;Understanding Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2013) by Sebastian Löbner&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We can now see why employment of an existential quantifier makes a big&#xA;  difference. Compare (31a) with the ‘naked’ (31b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(31) a. ∃x ( &lt;strong&gt;fox(&lt;/strong&gt; x &lt;strong&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt; Λ &lt;strong&gt;wicked(&lt;/strong&gt; x &lt;strong&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt; )&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. &lt;strong&gt;fox(&lt;/strong&gt; x &lt;strong&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt; Λ &lt;strong&gt;wicked(&lt;/strong&gt; x &lt;strong&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The quantifier-free formula in (27b) is just about a single case, namely &#xA;  about the individual we happened to fix as the interpretation of the &#xA;  variable x in case it is used as a free variable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In our model, (27b) thus &#xA;  happens to be false because&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt;  [x] is defined as Ken [by this author on p 343], and Ken is neither a &#xA;  fox nor wicked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   If (27b) were true, it would be a coincidence.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; The use of &#xA;  a quantifier with a certain variable cancels the value assignment for the &#xA;  bound variable. &lt;strong&gt;[End of 2.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is why the distinction between free and bound &#xA;  variables is so important: free variables are simply terms denoting a &#xA;  certain individual specified in the model as the value of the variable; &#xA;  bound variables, however, are 'real' variables that stand for all &#xA;  Individuals in the universe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose  1 false: now [x] is not defined by Ken, but [x] means any arbitrary individual. Then:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how does (31a) compare with (31b)? Do they still differ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;would 2 change? Would no value assignment be cancelled? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T04:22:20.467" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T04:22:20.467" Title="For arbitrary x: 'Predicate Constant'(x) vs ∃x ( 'Predicate Constant'(x) )" Tags="&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17722" CreationDate="2016-05-28T09:33:55.897" Score="2" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;German orthography is now much simpler than ever and there are now far less redundancies than there ever was. One thing that has drawn my attention lately is the fact that never after an 'ie' in a word comes a double consonant (e. g. 'ff' 'ck' 'tt' etc.), in fact, whenever I see that (in surnames or town names) it seems pretty archaic to me. A single consonant after an 'i' is almost always interpreted as long (except for prepositions like 'in', 'bis', 'mit'). So that suggests we could remove the 'e' and still be able to read and pronounce everything correctly  (for example 'Schiff', 'schif' instead of 'Schiff', 'schief'). The same is true to a less extent for vowels followed by an 'h' ('Ban' could be pronounced like 'Bahn' without problem). Note that I'm not talking about the word endings (those should pretty much stay the same in case a plural or conjugations depend on them like 'Kuh' 'Kühe'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there ever been a debate on this topic? What where the reasons to keep it? Are they considering anything about it?&#xA;I'm not asking why we aren't changing it right now. That's a whole other discussion, which involves far more issues than a simple 'ie'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13250" LastEditorUserId="13250" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T18:20:38.097" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T12:11:25.613" Title="Why did the 'ie' survive through the many German orthography reforms?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17696" CreationDate="2016-05-28T09:55:46.913" Score="1" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that for wh-movement out of a non-root CP successive cyclic movement is needed, so moving to spec-CP of the lower CP and then from there to the root-CP, but what's the specific restriction on wh-movement which leads to this requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13283" LastEditorUserId="13283" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T13:54:21.137" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T22:00:25.860" Title="Restrictions on Wh-movement" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2016-05-28T09:56:49.400" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Artificial intelligence (computer science) has a lot of borrowing from linguistics, and the unpleasant effect happens to be sometimes that the borrowing becomes mistaken for the real thing. Linguistics is about natural language and computers do not have cognizance, therefore, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– computers do not have real syntax; all they can have is parsing routines; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– computers do not have real semantics; all they can have is designate sets;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– and computers do not have phonology; all they can have is programmed spectra of sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human grammar has syntax, semantics, and phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntax is mostly the way we put words together. We put words together in relation to the way we view time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantics tells about word sense. Collocations emerge in association between syntax and semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonology tells about the sound of language. Speech sounds matter when we phrase, not only for poetry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three, syntax, semantics, and phonology, are related. The relation comes to exist in human cognizance, as grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastEditorUserId="13231" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T05:37:40.017" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T05:37:40.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-28T10:44:01.943" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the traditional Gricean view is that anything that can't be expressed in truth-conditions is pragmatics rather than semantics. I also know that there's the view excluding conventional implicature from pragmatics and grouping it with semantics, since conventional implicature and semantic meaning can't be distinguished except by the fact that conventional implicature can't be expressed truth conditionally.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What are other views on implicatures specifically? Both in how they are subdivided and how they are split between semantics and pragmatics and are there any good citations for this (I'm preparing for a semantics pragmatics exam on Monday and wanted to flesh out my arguments on the distinction a bit more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13283" LastEditorUserId="13283" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T14:00:48.057" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T20:15:42.870" Title="Subdivision of Implicatures and Distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-06-03T08:55:09.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17624" CreationDate="2016-05-28T10:58:26.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wycliffe was definitely prominent in introducing the use into everyday language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But here may men betere sey in Latein pe sotilte of pis matere, for articlis wi], case, &lt;strong&gt;gendre&lt;/strong&gt;, and noumbre helpen here for to speke.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1474/0743-03_Bk.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1474/0743-03_Bk.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T10:58:26.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17685" CreationDate="2016-05-28T13:01:36.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The complex sentence without quantifiers cannot be replaced by &quot;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; dislikes the fox&quot; because the article &quot;the&quot; (and the logic of the short sentence) would implicitly say that there only exists a single particular &quot;fox&quot;. But that isn't necessarily the case. &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; was a free variable and it must be possible to incorporate it in many ways; while &quot;the fox&quot; is a name for a particular entity, so it can't be embedded in sentences with quantifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you may add both &quot;for every &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;there exists some &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in front of the sentence &quot;the &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; dislikes &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a fox&quot; – but not in front of &quot;the &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; dislikes the fox&quot;. Only with the existential quantifier, you may simplify &quot;there exists &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; is a fox and...&quot; by &quot;there exists a fox that...&quot;, other propositions cannot be simplified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T13:01:36.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17688" CreationDate="2016-05-28T13:11:03.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sounds &quot;i&quot; and &quot;ie&quot; are not the same; &quot;ie&quot; is basically a long &quot;i&quot;. The German spelling remembers the pronunciation. The digraph &quot;ie&quot; plays exactly the same role as the long (acuted) &quot;í&quot; or &quot;ý&quot; in Czech language (or other Baltic and Slavic languages using the Czech diacritics and the Latin alphabet) whose pronunciation differs from the simple &quot;i&quot; or &quot;y&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To replace &quot;ie&quot; by &quot;i&quot; would mean that the pronunciation in German is no longer determined by the spelling – a huge sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely analogously, the German digraphs &quot;ah&quot; and &quot;eh&quot; create the long &quot;á&quot;, &quot;é&quot; different from the simple short &quot;a&quot;, &quot;e&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a reform should take place, German should use &quot;á,é,í,ú,č,š,f,v&quot; instead of &quot;ah,eh,ie,uh,tsch,sch,v,w&quot;, and there are a few other replacements that would simplify the German spelling. I have actually written down some more detailed plans for this reform. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T13:11:03.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17689" CreationDate="2016-05-28T22:00:25.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Successive cyclic wh-movement is motivated by theoretical principles of minimal computation, as well as empirical data. There's nothing inherently wrong with the 'one fell swoop' analysis, but cyclic wh-movement is preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Minimal computation&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any point in the derivation, the range of visible syntactic objects available for computations (e.g. Agreement) is restricted. Remember, SMT assumes that derivations form interface-interpretable objects as efficiently and lazily as possible. Thus, we assume visibility is restricted to phase (CP and vP) edges, which rules out one fell swoop movement. This is known as the Phase Impenetrability Condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Data&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following data comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/w06/readings/mccloskey00.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McCloskey 2000&lt;/a&gt;. In a dialect of English spoken in Ulster, the quantifier &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; can attach to wh-pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where all&lt;/strong&gt; did you go yesterday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who all&lt;/strong&gt; did you invite to the party?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What all&lt;/strong&gt; did you eat for breakfast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; can be stranded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did you go &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; yesterday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who did you invite &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; to the party?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did you eat &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; for breakfast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would seem that after [DP where/who/what all] merges in its theta position, wh-extraction can target only the wh-pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to long-distance wh-extraction, the following are all grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who did he say that he met &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who did he say &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; that he met?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; did he say that he met?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it is possible to strand the quantifier in intermediate Spec, CP. This lends support to the cyclicity of wh-movement shown here. Angled brackets indicate lower copies. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vKpPt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vKpPt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/32SxV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/32SxV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0znRe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0znRe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the copy theory of movement, cyclic wh-movement is further supported by languages in which multiple wh-copies are pronounced. Consider the following Afrikaans data from &lt;a href=&quot;http://babel.ucsc.edu/%7Ehank/113/squibs/afrikaans_wh_mvt.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;du Plessis 1977&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Met wie&lt;/strong&gt; het jy nou weer gesê &lt;strong&gt;met wie&lt;/strong&gt; het Sarie gedog &lt;strong&gt;met wie&lt;/strong&gt; gaan Jaan trou?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with who have you now again said with who did Sarie thought with who go Jan marry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Whom did you say again that Sarie think Jan is going to marry?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T22:00:25.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17432" CreationDate="2016-05-29T09:53:08.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two solutions that I can see are:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A) That such complex DPs have another phrasal constituent which contains them and has a null head. Though this seems a little far-fetched. Or...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B) That the subject originating in spec-AP only applies when it is indeed an AP and not to existentials with a DP. Thus it would presumably be generated in spec-VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies for a fairly weak answer but I thought I should contribute as I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13283" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T09:53:08.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17700" CreationDate="2016-05-29T13:13:09.613" Score="3" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumed premise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indo-European language classification is broad. We can always find two languages of this family which are grammatically so different, and also the languages grammatically similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of the study of this language family is based on comparative vocabulary and its cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the south Indian Dravidian languages have many Sanskrit words in them from times immemorial(it's not clear). For example Telugu vocabulary is mostly Sanskrit words that a Telugu person cannot(might not) give you a pure Telugu equivalent(Dravidian equivalent? of most of the words. It also attained morphological features and grammar features like Sandhi. Strangely enough now the trend is English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it still is not classified under(not even in a partial sense) Sanskrit. The reason given is the language is not its words but its grammar. But the Indo European languages are classified mostly due to similarity in their words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this may be due to the fact that the Sanskrit words in Telugu, no matter when they might have been added, are loan words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this respect, I'm wondering what's the clear line between using grammar vs words in classifying world languages. Is it consistent across all languages? Or some language families have different peculiarities for their languages that made them under same language family?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example for Dravidian languages, is it their grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also could it be possible that a language got influenced by other languages so much in many respects that it got classified in different language family than it should be? (Of course this might be ambiguous)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13293" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T19:34:00.773" Title="What decides the language family of a language the most structure/grammar or the vocabulary?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17698" CreationDate="2016-05-29T16:20:22.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basis of the traditional classification of IE, since the 19th century, has been neither shared grammar nor shared vocabulary, but rather shared sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T16:20:22.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17698" CreationDate="2016-05-29T19:34:00.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question isn't entirely clear, and Greg Lee has implicitly answered one version, namely how do we determine the subgrouping of languages that we know to be related, for example how do we know that Hindi and Farsi are more closely related that Hindi and English – shared grammatical innovations. Typically there are more innovations in the form of phonological rules, but subgrouping can be based on morphological or syntactic innovations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this starts from the assumption that the languages in question &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; related: then the question is, how do we know whether two language &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in fact related. As you point out with the case of Telugu, there is a lot of similarity (of a type) between Telugu and Sanskrit, so one could hypothesize that the languages descend from some common ancestor. This is where the role of grammar becomes especially important. There is actually very little grammatical similarity between Telugu and Sanskrit. If you compare Sanskrit, Avestan, Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic and so on, you find massive similarity in the actual case suffixes and verb inflections, to the point that we can reconstruct grammatical morphemes for the proto-language and we can see that regular sound changes apply in the development of these case suffixes. Comparing the case suffixes of Sanskrit and Telugu, well, Sanskrit has them, Telugu doesn't, and the Telugu postpositions don't at all resemble the Sanskrit case suffixes. (The existence of sandhi is not particularly probative since many languages have rules of sentence phonology; there is little similarity between the languages in the actual rules of sandhi -- although, the Sanskrit sandhi system has been taken wholesale as part of compounding, so this is actually an area where aspects of grammar can be borrowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying premise, which has been a standard assumption in linguistics for centuries, is that it is easy to borrow words, and hard (though not impossible) to borrow grammar. English now has a bunch of words borrowed from Hindi and various Dravidian languages, and has not borrowed a single item of grammar. One of the most important early works on reconstruction of Indo-European by Franz Bopp was his 1816 &lt;em&gt;On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic&lt;/em&gt;, which preceded his work on sound laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that historically speaking, the idea of language-relatedness is often based on lexical similarity and the ancient idea of there being a connection between Greek and Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, Saami and Hungarian was based on word similarity. Nevertheless, it is well-recognized that similarity on lexicon can be quasi-accidental (specifically, due to borrowing of words rather than genetic relationship), and it is a standard methodological principle that only via a comparison of aspects of grammar, rather that just lexicon, can genetic relatedness be established. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T19:34:00.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-30T08:23:55.983" Score="0" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I added diphthongs like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24074479&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aɪ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24206668&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ɪə&lt;/a&gt; to Wikidata. I added them to groups of whether they are closing or centering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to add them to group based on whether they are wide or narrow as I read that this is an additional property in which they differ. I however can't find a good list that defines which diphthongs are wide and which are narrow. Can someone point me to a good resource or give himself a list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T10:54:35.607" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T14:01:40.263" Title="Is there a list of which of the diphthongs in the English language are wide and which are narrow available?" Tags="&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17705" CreationDate="2016-05-30T09:42:29.957" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious to ask if the suffix &lt;em&gt;-tī&lt;/em&gt; for the infinitive in Balto-Slavic is related to the PIE third person, singular, present suffix &lt;em&gt;-ti&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there is no reason (from a functional point of reasoning) to suppose such a relation, I recently learnt that the only &quot;dialect&quot; of Balto-Slavic that has undergone a transition to analyticity, namely Bulgaro-Macedonian, has lost both the infinitive and the ending &lt;em&gt;-ti&lt;/em&gt; in 3rd p, sg verb conjugation, so morphologically there is some point in conjecturing some relation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13298" LastEditorUserId="13298" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T10:03:52.713" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T12:06:39.827" Title="Balto-Slavic Infinitive and PIE 3rd p., sg, present endings" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17704" CreationDate="2016-05-30T12:06:39.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Infinitive suffix &quot;-ти&quot; and 3rd person singular present &quot;-тъ&quot; are essentially different.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They could reduce independently in Slavonic languages, but if they are &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; reduced, this seems to be just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his &quot;Slavonic Grammar with Correct Syntax&quot; (1619), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meletius_Smotrytsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meletius Smotrytsky&lt;/a&gt; marks 3rd person singular present suffix &lt;code&gt;-тъ&lt;/code&gt; (pronounced with short &lt;code&gt;[ɔ]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the verb &lt;em&gt;to read&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;читати&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕɨ-ta-ti]&lt;/code&gt; conjugates to &quot;чтєтъ&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕtɛ-tɔ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the scan of Smotrytsky's work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ZoC0.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ZoC0.gif&quot; alt=&quot;conjugation of the verb &amp;quot;to read&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links: &lt;a href=&quot;http://izbornyk.org.ua/smotrgram/sm126.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exact page&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://izbornyk.org.ua/smotrgram/sm.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern Slavonic languages, indeed, these suffixed often reduce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ukrainian&lt;/strong&gt; (my native language): the infinitive suffix remains the same, while the 3rd person singular present suffix reduces: &quot;читати&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕɨ-ta-tɨ]&lt;/code&gt; → &quot;читає&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕɨ-ta-ʲe]&lt;/code&gt; or even &quot;чита&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕɨ-ta]&lt;/code&gt; in Western dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, the modern &lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; reduced suffix in the infinitive form while it retains 3rd person singular present suffix: &quot;читать&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕi-tatʲ]&lt;/code&gt; → &quot;читает&quot; &lt;code&gt;[t͡ɕi-ta-ʲet]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as we can see, the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian suggests that &lt;strong&gt;both suffixes may retract independently&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T12:06:39.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17710" CreationDate="2016-05-30T13:33:58.410" Score="1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the conjugated (that is used in smikhut) form of the word &quot;maim&quot; (water)? Is it &quot;maim&quot; or &quot;mai&quot;? (I'm asking about ancient biblical Hebrew, but I am almost sure it is the same as in modern Hebrew.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13300" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T19:47:15.397" Title="Declension of the word &quot;water&quot; (maim) in Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-06-02T23:12:08.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17709" CreationDate="2016-05-30T14:17:56.447" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is PIEL participle of &quot;empty&quot; (that is 2-wav or 2-yud) verbs in (ancient) Hebrew? Do such particles have wav or yud or only two letters of the root after mem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems for me, that this topic was missing in my biblical Hebrew studybook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13300" LastEditorUserId="13300" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T17:55:30.790" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T18:42:44.293" Title="Participle of empty verbs in ancient Hebrew" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17706" CreationDate="2016-05-30T14:24:05.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The form is &lt;em&gt;mey&lt;/em&gt; מֵי, e.g. &lt;em&gt;mey-hayam&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the water of the sea&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: As Colin Fine mentions below, there is also a longer alternate form &lt;em&gt;meymey&lt;/em&gt; מֵימֵי.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T19:47:15.397" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T19:47:15.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17707" CreationDate="2016-05-30T18:30:30.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Van der Merve, Naudé and Kroeze (&lt;em&gt;A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;) say (s. 18.8) that &quot;Instead of the Piel, Pual and Hithpael stem formations, the II waw and II yod verbs have a Polel, Polal and Hithpolel stem formation, respectively. It is clear from the names of these stem formations that the final stem consonant is repeated. The conjugation of verbs in these stem formations is otherwise regular&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Piel participle of קומ, for example, is given as מְקוֹמֵם.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T18:42:44.293" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T18:42:44.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17706" CreationDate="2016-05-30T18:41:55.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Van der Merve, Naudé and Kroeze (&lt;em&gt;A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;) give the incomprehensible מֵימֵיוֹמֵי as the construct for מַיִם; but looking at other entries in the table, I believe this is meant to say מֵימֵי וֹ מֵי, i.e. &quot;meymey or mey&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T18:41:55.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17714" CreationDate="2016-05-30T19:35:15.137" Score="3" ViewCount="1153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any standard system of romanization for the Thai alphabet (including consonants, vowels, tones, numbers, and their combinations), or is any such romanization system quite arbitrary? Can someone please apply the complete list? Also, are the names of (eg. chicken for the first consonant) etc... given next to the sound of each letter combination pretty standard as part of the way the Thai alphabet is taught? Thank you for your explanation, and sorry if I'm just a day zero beginner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T16:01:25.777" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:01:25.777" Title="Thai alphabet romanizations?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17713" CreationDate="2016-05-30T21:20:30.027" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to know that there are two primary writing system lineages. Brahmic and Phonecian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know that Indus script is not yet deciphered. I'm wondering if we at least know the lineage of Indus script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13293" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T11:16:52.413" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T11:16:52.413" Title="Is the writing system lineage of Indus script known?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;indus-script&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17712" CreationDate="2016-05-30T21:27:00.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer seems to be no. Asko Parpola, in his chapter on the Indus script in Daniels and Bright's &lt;em&gt;The World's Writing Systems&lt;/em&gt; (1996), says: &quot;it has no obvious genetic affinity with any other known script... There is no connection whatsoever with the earliest scripts of historical South Asia, Brahmi and Kharoshthi, which were created on the basis of Semitic and Greek alphabets&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the last sentence implies that the &quot;two primary lineages&quot; you mention are really one lineage, though the question of the exact relationship between them, if any, is still debated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-05-30T22:16:21.680" LastActivityDate="2016-05-30T22:16:21.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17711" CreationDate="2016-05-31T00:18:39.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official system of Romanization of the Thai languiage is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_General_System_of_Transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Royal Thai General System of Transcription&lt;/a&gt; (RTGS). All road signs, landmarks, and so on are to be transcribed according to RTGS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RTGS has certain &lt;strong&gt;pro's&lt;/strong&gt;, likewise it uses a plain Latin alphabet, no tone marks, no vowel length marks, etc. And these are also &lt;strong&gt;con's&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. you can't read it properly when you need).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of unofficial systems. For example, one of the prominent resources for Thai language learners, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/default.aspx?nav=control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thai-Language.com&lt;/a&gt;, has several systems of Romanization:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dhEUa.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dhEUa.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Romanization systems of Thai&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; as you see, I prefer IPA over RTGS as it provides with complete information over the tones, vowel lengths, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yet another note:&lt;/strong&gt; Paiboon is a publishing agency that has published a famous book for Thai language learners, so it takes its own place within the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A personal note&lt;/strong&gt;: ISO 11940 is a horrible thing, Google Translate uses it, so stay way from it. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the list of consonants and the meanings of the words, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet#Alphabetic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; seems to be a good source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lpSOl.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lpSOl.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Thai consonants&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T00:23:46.707" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T00:23:46.707" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17716" CreationDate="2016-05-31T03:48:48.860" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between IPA ‘ and ʰ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen /kʰ/ also written as /k’/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any fundamental difference between letter‘ and letterʰ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T22:53:34.030" Title="Is there any difference between IPA ‘ and ʰ?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17715" CreationDate="2016-05-31T05:07:55.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter &amp;lt;’&gt; is used in IPA to indicate an ejective consonant, which is quite distinct from &amp;lt;ʰ&gt; which represents aspiration. The use of &amp;lt;’&gt; to mark aspiration is not IPA usage  (please note that IPA is just one of many traditions for phonetic transcription). Presumably you are looking at an older source, or a more language-specific source that isn't aimed at phoneticians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter12/quechua.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vowels and Consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; provides sound files for Quechua, which John Lawler mentioned. Zulu and Xhosa also have aspirates vs. ejectives, but the ejectives are much weaker. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/ZUL/zul.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA archive of Zulu&lt;/a&gt; has some examples, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/ZUL/zul_word-list_1964_01.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;second wordlist&lt;/a&gt;, starting around 2:30 of this &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/ZUL/zul_word-list_1964_01.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sound file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T22:53:34.030" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T22:53:34.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T08:06:33.733" Score="2" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find a set of IPA symbols for Thai language pronunciation and its rules? I know IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) was mainly created to represent the differences in sounds of words spoken in European and other English-speaking countries, but was wondering whether seeing wan IPA chat our something similar for Thai pronunciation could prove useful when learning Thai, and where to find such information.Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'm looking for a page where I can actually hear the sound of these symbols so that I can hear and not just read them. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="10020" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T08:25:10.437" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T08:25:10.437" Title="Thai pronunciation symbols and rules on IPA" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17719" CreationDate="2016-05-31T10:21:09.707" Score="1" ViewCount="2226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the following partial hiragana chart on t he internet. I was wondering, in IPA, how does ji (じ) differ from dji and zu (ず) differ from dzu? Technically, how are these pronounced? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with a Japanese input keyboard for Android, how do I enter the latter characters (those prefixed with a 'd' in the picture)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWfxL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWfxL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;partial hiragana chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T11:09:44.823" Title="Japanese ji versus dji and zu versus dzu (pronunciation and keyboard input issue)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17718" CreationDate="2016-05-31T11:09:44.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between these four is the topic of the article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsugana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;yotsugana (四つ仮名)&lt;/a&gt;. In south Shikoku, they appear to be all different. However, in standard Tokyo Japanese, じ = ぢ and ず = づ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual diachronic change of [dz] to [z] is variable in standard Japanese. According to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Hos-XSzQ87AC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Sounds of Japanese&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, the affricate [dz] occurs at the beginning of a word or immediately following a syllable-final consonant, and the fricative [z] occurs in the middle immediately following a vowel. This isn't affected by which kana is used to transcribe it. The kana じ and ず are more common anyway since the gendai kanazukai (現代仮名遣い) post-WW2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Rōmaji input, I've always used t + u / s + i with dakuten. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T11:09:44.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17721" CreationDate="2016-05-31T11:27:37.007" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my learning tool project I need a free English word list with the usage sample of each word and/or its definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/word/ Apple&#xA;/phrase/ This apples are big and red.&#xA;/definition/ Apple is a fruit of the apple tree.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please tell me, where can I get this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13302" LastEditorUserId="13302" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T12:11:42.647" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T12:11:42.647" Title="List of English words with usage samples" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17720" CreationDate="2016-05-31T11:55:04.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest the English wiktionary (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org&lt;/a&gt;) as a free resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T11:55:04.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17688" CreationDate="2016-05-31T12:11:25.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some principles when you ever attempt a spelling reform—one of them is keeping the tradition of reading and writing intact (in German, the term &lt;em&gt;behutsam&lt;/em&gt; was used when the latest spelling reforms starting in 1998 were introduced). There was lots of outrage and resistance against those reforms much underestimated by the politicians driving it forwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well-established spellings cannot be arbitrarily normalised or even be recreated from first principles in an already literate society. This is the reason why the German orthography sticks to the &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; spelling (which denoted a diphthong in Middle High German that is preserved in the Bavarian dialect where &quot;lieb&quot; is still pronounced &lt;em&gt;liab&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T12:11:25.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2016-05-31T14:13:52.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tamil also has this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nāṅkaḷ&lt;/strong&gt; kāṭṭil-ukku pōkiṟōm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, (not including the person being adressed) are going to the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Namma&lt;/strong&gt; kāṭṭil-ukku pōkiṟōm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We, (including the person being adressed) are going to the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastEditorUserId="12996" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T16:27:48.093" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T16:27:48.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-31T21:29:23.333" Score="3" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have visited &lt;a href=&quot;http://ccs.dlsu.edu.ph:8086/Palito/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ccs.dlsu.edu.ph:8086/Palito/&lt;/a&gt;, but it is no longer online. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sealang.net/tagalog/corpus.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SEAlang&lt;/a&gt; has the same content, I think, but it isn't downloadable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it still available for download online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7939" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T13:21:26.243" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T16:45:59.397" Title="Is the Philippine corpus known as Palito still available for download online?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17729" CreationDate="2016-05-31T21:48:54.697" Score="3" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;When IPA can incorporate most of the sounds with Roman like symbols. Why do we need &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do we need yet another standard for representing Indic scripts/sounds? If non phone-city of Roman alphabet is the reason. Is it not sufficient to use IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13293" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T09:40:36.303" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T19:50:19.793" Title="Why does IAST exist when IPA is there?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;iast&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17725" CreationDate="2016-05-31T22:43:10.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's mostly a matter of historical convention. The two transcription systems are roughly the same age, both from the late 19C, and IAST (I believe) is based on earlier, similar systems which preceded the IPA. The IPA itself only became something approaching a universal standard (though it still isn't quite that) sometime in the mid-20C, by which time IAST was firmly entrenched among Sanskrit scholars. Most Sanskritists aren't linguists and see no reason to change their transcription system, which would be a costly and confusing enterprise. Also, before the advent of computerized fonts it was easier to print IAST, which uses only Roman characters plus a small set of diacritics, than the IPA with its specialized characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T22:43:10.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17727" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:45:20.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration&lt;/a&gt; (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows a lossless romanization of Indic scripts like Devanagari. It is used to romanize Sanskrit, Pāḷi, Prākṛta, Apabhraṁśa and other languages. It is based on the notation used by Monier Monier-Williams in his 1899 dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T16:45:15.327" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T16:45:15.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17728" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:45:20.390" Score="0" Body="For questions about the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST)" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T16:45:25.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T16:45:25.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17725" CreationDate="2016-06-01T15:15:25.400" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA and IAST serve different purposes, as their respective names already suggest. IPA is an alphabet for &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; rendering of speech (in the broad sense). To use it on Sanskrit we would have to agree first on how Sanskrit is pronounced &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt; or have different renderings depending on traditions of pronounciation (Is, for example, भ् an aspirated stop or breathy voice? Is &lt;em&gt;Visarga&lt;/em&gt; ः pronounced as kind of an echo of the preceding vowel with h inserted or as a velar fricative?). Also, for example, the letter &lt;em&gt;Anusvāra&lt;/em&gt; would be represented by different symbols depending on its pronounciation which again depends on the surrounding letters. Furthermore, we would not be able, to distinguish different spellings if they are (supposedly) pronounced the same, as संधि vs. सन्धि. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being stated, doesn't it (at least for most indological purposes) seem much easier to use IAST, which as the name suggests is a system for &lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt; of Sanskrit? That means, we have a one-to-one correspondence of symbols in Devanagari and IAST, which does neither add nor remove any information that is preserved in the original text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3432" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T15:15:25.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-01T19:48:55.400" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there was no platform on StackExchange for translation or translators, so I thought asking here is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in title, is there a way to create a termbase and adding to it without creating a project in MemoQ 2015?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3687" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T21:20:18.967" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T21:20:18.967" Title="How to Create A Termbase without Creating Project in MemoQ?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;study-of-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7328" CreationDate="2016-06-01T21:26:17.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out the word I was trying to remember back then was &quot;kadigan&quot;. Of course, babou's answers also apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3695" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T21:26:17.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19083" CreationDate="2016-06-02T04:28:16.137" Score="7" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not terribly familiar with the syntax of PPs, but I've noticed that a handful of them do not seem to satisfy any constituency tests, particularly 'than'. 'Than' is listed in dictionaries as both 'preposition' and 'conjunction'. The former is likely referring to cases where 'than' precedes - and, supposedly, governs - an NP. For example：&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Than the ant, the elephant is larger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the elephant larger than? ?Than the ant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Than what is the elephant larger?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*It is than the ant that the elephant is larger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't think of any word that can substitute 'than + NP'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, 'than' may precede clauses as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's better than you think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've eaten more salt than you've eaten rice. (OK, this is a joke translation of a Cantonese phrase.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That raises the question of whether it constitutes a coordinating conjunction or a subordinating conjunction (which, depending on the conjunction, are subsumed under prepositions and complementisers in modern times). Since '*Than you think, he's better.' is not grammatical, the prepositional analysis seems unlikely (compare &lt;em&gt;as long as&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;). While this doesn't undermine its preposition status when preceding NPs, it seems to make it even less likely now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coordinating conjunction actually seems possible. We say 'He is tired but happy' and 'He is more tired than happy'. We say 'He looks confident and you think he is (confident)', and likewise we can say 'He looks more confident than you think he is (confident)'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other alternative is that 'than' is a complementiser, but that cannot capture the cases where 'than' precedes an NP. Besides, that would imply constituency, which again seems not to be satisfied (e.g. *than I have, John has eaten more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any good way to defend the constituent status of than-phrases?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, have there been any alternative accounts in the literature? Could 'than' be a coordinator?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T12:53:44.553" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T21:17:14.403" Title="Syntactic status of 'than'" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-02T05:32:38.917" Score="12" ViewCount="5188" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading on the etymology of the turkey, I found that the Malays and Indonesians called the animal &lt;em&gt;ayam belanda&lt;/em&gt; (Dutch chicken). I was then reminded of the proboscis monkey, which is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscis_monkey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;monyet belanda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Dutch monkey) due to its nose and abdomen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the term &quot;belanda&quot; doesn't match phonetically to any known pronunciation of &quot;Dutch&quot;, &quot;Holland&quot;, &quot;Netherlands&quot;, or any other term for the country that I can think of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the etymology for the word &lt;em&gt;belanda&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T07:28:44.730" Title="Why are the Dutch called &quot;belanda&quot; in Malay and Indonesian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-02T06:34:31.853" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the term for the grammatical case expressing provenience or origin, roughly corresponding to the English prepositions &quot;of, from, out of, made from&quot; as for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; Sweden.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The table is &lt;strong&gt;out of&lt;/strong&gt; wood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not ablative case as there is not really directionality implied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT:&lt;/em&gt; To be a little more specific:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm looking for a potential functional gloss for the Guaraní clitic &quot;=gua&quot; – none of the Guaraní scholars that I have read so far have been able to figure out how to call it, some use &quot;of&quot;, others use &quot;from&quot;, but afaik no one has figured out a good general term.  =gua is often contrasted with =gui which approximates the ablative case (and which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; imply directionality, &quot;coming from somewhere&quot;, vs. =gua &quot;being from somewhere&quot;). So I thought I'd give it a try here, maybe someone has found a similar category in some other language that might be helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12759" LastEditorUserId="12759" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T18:36:53.427" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T12:49:14.850" Title="Grammatical case for provenience" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17733" CreationDate="2016-06-02T07:40:41.267" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to pin-point the exact source because there don't seem to be any etymological dictionaries of Malay just yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is purely speculative, but the word for 'Dutch' in Portuguese is 'holanda', whose pronunciation is nearly the same as 'Belanda'. The Malays could've borrowed the word from the Portuguese during the struggle between Malacca, the Portuguese and the Dutch in the mid-17th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another speculation is that the proboscis monkey could've been likened to the Dutch who conquered Malacca (perhaps their hair colour, their pot bellies and their big noses). The proboscis monkey is found in Borneo, which makes it unlikely that the Malays in Malacca came up with the term. Maybe the term was coined when there was interaction between the Dutch and the people of Borneo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last speculation is that, since the turkey is not a species native to the region, 'ayam Belanda' could've just been brought to Malacca by the Dutch, hence [ayam belanda = Dutch chicken/chicken of the Dutch].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T07:40:41.267" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17734" CreationDate="2016-06-02T09:26:38.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some cases that might apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Elative&lt;/strong&gt; expresses direction out of something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ablative&lt;/strong&gt; direction from some point&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find a case for the second example (The table is out of [=made from] wood.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A nice, but yet incomplete list of cases can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/u/feat/Case.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://universaldependencies.org/u/feat/Case.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: While I am still unable to find a natural language with cases as described in the question, the constructed language Ithkuil with an impressive case system has two cases that cover the Gaurani clitic &lt;em&gt;-gua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The case for &quot;made out of&quot; is  called &lt;strong&gt;compositive case&lt;/strong&gt;, see §4.5.3 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ithkuil.net/04_case.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ithkuil grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The case for the country or region of origin is called &lt;strong&gt;originative case&lt;/strong&gt;, see §4.4.7 in the Ithkuil grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you might call the case function of Guarani &lt;em&gt;-gua&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;originative-compositive&lt;/strong&gt; when you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T12:49:14.850" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T12:49:14.850" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17692" CreationDate="2016-06-02T20:15:42.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantic entailments cannot be cancelled when you add more premises/information to an argument (i.e. a set of statements from which the conclusion is supposedly derived using the rules of deduction or proof admitted in the underlying logic). Pragmatic implicatures can be cancelled when you add more information to the premises. For instance, if it is the case that Jane has three children, then it is a semantic entailment that she also has two children, for it is impossible for her to have three children and not have two (or one). But saying that Jane has two children in a situation where you know that she has three, is somewhat misleading, for you violate the maxim (pragmatic 'rule' of inference) that you should give as much information as you know to be true in the situation (the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth). You can continue later by saying that in fact you think she has three children, after you claimed that she had two, without contradicting yourself, but pragmatically speaking you are 'correcting' yourself, i.e. adhering better to the maxim of maximally true information. Of course, self-correction is a very human and perhaps even 'normal' thing to do, self-contradiction is a pretty bad thing in the morals of logic, as a theory of valid reasoning. In a dynamic theory of reasoning such correction is never contradictory, but a theory of correction is far from clear and our notion of consistency is static.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T20:15:42.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15608" CreationDate="2016-06-02T20:24:54.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntax (form) determines semantics (meaning), and not the other way around!&#xA;So if you know what part of speech your expression belongs to then you know in principle what sort of interpretation to give it. But an ambiguous word ('bank', 'trade', 'love') may be of one and the same category syntactically, yet have more than one interpretation (i.e. be true of different kinds of things). That is why semantic disambiguation of excludes lexical disambiguation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T20:24:54.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3668" CreationDate="2016-06-02T20:46:35.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Everyone in the room knows at least two languages&quot; is a sentence that is true in two quite different situations, one where everyone knows two languages, say English and French, and the other where for anyone you take you get two, possibly quite different languages, so for Jane you get French and Dutch, for John you get Dutch and German, for Peter you get Swahili and Malay and for Didi you get Greek and Arabic... This is sorted out in linguistic theory by disambiguating the phrase quoted in the beginning syntactically, so that for the first situation the DP &quot; at least two languages&quot; precedes and commands the subject DP &quot;everyone&quot; and for the other reading, the two DPs are in the order in which they appear at surface. Syntax must hence disambiguate scope before semantic interpretation can get started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T20:46:35.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17685" CreationDate="2016-06-02T20:57:41.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I entirely got the point (I find it weird to say that the &lt;em&gt;variable&lt;/em&gt; can be eliminated in natural language, because 1. you don't explicitly use variables in natural language anyway and 2. &quot;there is some fox...&quot; is not a variable, so I find that wording misleading), but I think it's important for you to have the the basic definitions in mind (sorry for the rudimentary formatting and sloppy wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[[P(x)]]^g is true iff g(x) is in the denotation of P&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[[ExP(x)]]^g is true iff there is an x-alternative g' of g such that g'(x) is in the denotation of P&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where g is an assignment function mapping from variables to individuals in the domain, and an x-alternative of g is a variable assignment that is just like g except for possibly the value it assigns to x.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that &quot;fox(y)&quot; without a quantifier is true only if the current variable assignment happens to assign to y an individual which is in the denotation of the predicate &quot;fox&quot; in the current model, i.e. if THAT VERY y stands for an individual which is a fox (and is disliked by x). Since we stick to one particular variable assignment and don't quantify over other possible variable assingments, the free variable y behaves just like an individual constant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, with the existential quantifier, the formlula is true if there is SOME individual in the domain which is able to fulfill the fox predicate, i.e. if there is some way of mapping the variable y to some element of the actual world which is also a fox in the actual world, i.e. if there is at least one fox (and that fox is disliked by x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think the paragprah wants to say is that you don't need to explicitly spell out the quantifier in natural language (i.e. not necessarily &quot;There is some y that is a fox and x dislikes it&quot; but rather &quot;x dislikes a fox&quot;), while you can't eliminate the constant (you need to say &quot;x dislikes THE FOX&quot;, where &quot;the fox&quot; is referring to the denotation of g(y), the sentence behaves just like &quot;x dislikes John&quot;, where &quot;John&quot; also refers to an individual constant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why in the first example (without the quantifier), you have the definite article &quot;the&quot;, because it refers to a single individual, while the second example (with the quantifier) ranges over possibly several individuals where you need to use the indefinte article &quot;a&quot; (which obvisoulsy in natural language usually has the meaning of &quot;only one&quot;, which with the existential quantifier would have to be stated explicitly though; and of course, the set of foxes disliked by x might happen to be a singleton, but the logical type is still a different one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your comment:&#xA;&quot;the fox named y&quot; doesn't make sense anyway. y is not the name of the fox, but a variable we use in the formalisation of the sentence in order to represent the logical entities involved and map placeholders for individuals to their &quot;real-life counterparts&quot; of our domain. &quot;y&quot; behaves somewhat like a name in the formalisation of a sentence in referring to a certain individual, but it is certainly not the name of the actual fox in the extension the sentence the notes. You need to be carful with mixing up different language levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this at least in some aspect an answer to your question; as I said, I'm not sure I got the point of it without more context and am little confused by the wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: My answer is closely related to that in your other thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17744/13238&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17744/13238&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T23:15:56.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3668" CreationDate="2016-06-02T21:10:29.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find &quot;semantics is the input to syntax&quot; to be rather obscure in meaning, but perhaps it means that everything about the syntax of a phrase can be predicted from the semantics of that phrase.  If so, all you need to do to show the thesis is false is to give some fact about the syntax of a phrase which is due to its meaning rather than tradition.  That sounds pretty easy.  Can you you predict whether a language has prepositions or postpositions from the meaning of pre-/post-positional phrases, for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T21:10:29.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17686" CreationDate="2016-06-02T21:26:04.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;x&quot; will never refer to any arbitrary individual, but to exactly that individual that the current variable assignment maps it. So there is no real answer to your question 5, because your supposition just doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why in the first sentence, the current variable assignment is &quot;cancelled&quot; is because as soon as we use a quantifier, we abstract away from the current assignment function (let's call this g), and take a look at all the possible other functions to assign to x (x is an individual of the domain) while the assignments for all the other variables remain the same (usually those functions are called the x-alternatives of g).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this obviously requires the particular assignment functions to uniquely map between variables and elements of the domain. This is the crucial feature of a function: For any given argument, there we always be exactly one (or, if the function is not defined for that argument, no) value for that argument. This definition of the function means that you can't just suppose that x &quot;referred to any arbitrary individual&quot;, because this is not what a function does. You need to stick to one mapping and if the individual denoted in that way happened to be a wicked fox, everything is fine; but you can't start ranging over other possible mappings if you don't properly define the meaning of a single assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, 5 is not really answerable because your pre-assumption just doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For question 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case the constants in your 31b happen to denote a wicked fox, and in case (if 31a is fulfilled, 31b necessarily is) the existential quantifier in 31a &quot;finds&quot; a variable assignment which refers to a wicked fox, then indeed the extensions of the two sentences are the same, namely true.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same holds if there is just no wicked fox in the actual world, in that case both sentences will come out as false.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, it might happen that in fact there is an individual which is both a fox and a wicked one, but that x in the second example just doesn't refer to that fox, but, as in the example, e.g. to Ken. In that case, the two sentences do differ: 31a will still be true if there is just some individual which is both a fox and wicked, but 31b will fail if we choose a variable assignment which assigns x an individual which is not a fox, but Ken - or maybe a fox, but not a wicked one, or vice versa; that may as well happen (due to the truth conditions of the conjunction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, even if the extensions of the whole sentences are equivalent, so are not the extensions of the individuals it involves:&#xA;31a, employing a quantifier, will always involve a set of individuals - no matter if that set is empty (because there is no such thing in our domain that is a fox and wicked), a singleton set (because there is exactly one wicked fox) or in the most extreme case even containing every individual there is.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;31b however makes use of a free variable, which behaves like a constant, and always refers to one particular individual.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e., even there happens to be only one fox in our actual world that makes the sentence true, the logical types within the formulas still differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: My answer is closely related to that in your other thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17742/13238&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17742/13238&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T03:50:46.267" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17686" CreationDate="2016-06-02T22:59:59.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making usual assumptions about how the symbols are interpreted, your 31a (with the existential quantifier) is a proposition, which can be true or false, but 31b (without any quantifier for &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;) is a propositional function, which is a function from individuals to truth values.  It does not have a unique truth value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't find the parts you quoted from your authority to be terribly clear, but I think perhaps the &quot;x&quot; of 31b is intended to be a &quot;parameter&quot; in the sense Richmond Thomason uses that term in his textbook &lt;strong&gt;Symbolic Logic: An Introduction&lt;/strong&gt;.  A parameter can refer to an individual with the understanding that the choice of which individual it does refer to is arbitrary (or the choice could be subject to assumptions about what predicates hold true of that individual).  Thomason uses a different set of symbols to represent parameters, &lt;em&gt;u, v, ...&lt;/em&gt;, to keep them apart from variables, &lt;em&gt;x, y, ...&lt;/em&gt; and constants, &lt;em&gt;a, b, ...&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T22:59:59.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-02T23:35:23.870" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the nonsyllabic voiceless schwa (ə̯̊ ) occurs in any natural language, but are there any recordings of it being said out there, nonetheless? I would like to learn how to say it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's &quot;hiding&quot; in an English or Spanish (the two languages I speak) word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying myself, but not sure if I'm doing it right!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13314" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T23:48:44.280" Title="Recording of nonsyllabic voiceless schwa?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17747" CreationDate="2016-06-02T23:48:44.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonetic transcriptions, [h] is used for a non-syllabic voiceless vowel with quality the same as the neighboring vowel in the same syllable.  (Sometimes this convention is extended from vowels to liquids and glides, as in [hwat] for &quot;what&quot;.)  Consequently, the first sound in an ordinary American English pronunciation of &quot;Hawaii&quot; with the unstressed vowel of the first syllable reduced to schwa is what you seek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T23:48:44.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17670" CreationDate="2016-06-03T11:38:39.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clark &amp;amp; Yallop (1995: 44) write:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;A &lt;strong&gt;stop&lt;/strong&gt; is produced by the formation and rapid relaese of a complete colsure at any point in the vocal tract from the glottis to the lips. The velum is raised to prevent airflow through the nasal cavity, and the oral airflow is thus interrupted. [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Egressive pulmonic stops are by far the most common type of stop and are sometimes identified by the label '&lt;strong&gt;plosive&lt;/strong&gt;'.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to them, stops are all kinds of building up pressure and then releasing the air, while plosives are a special instance of stops which are egressive pulmonic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Clark J. and Yallop, C. 1995. An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T13:15:05.100" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T13:15:05.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17754" CreationDate="2016-06-04T01:20:45.403" Score="5" ViewCount="727" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I know there are certain consonants in the IPA that have vowel-like properties, and can therefor be used as vowels, such as [n], [m], and [l]. Examples include [pnt], or [ʒlf]. So, in the loosest possible sense, can a vowel ever be treated as a consonant? I realize that this is kind of a weird question, and the obvious answer is &lt;em&gt;probably not&lt;/em&gt;, but surely, &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; language might have &lt;strong&gt;certain&lt;/strong&gt; words that &lt;strong&gt;sometimes&lt;/strong&gt; have a vowel in place of a consonant. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13328" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:22:55.720" Title="Can a vowel be a consonant?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17751" CreationDate="2016-06-04T05:18:06.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vowels can't be consonants. Consonants can't be vowels. However, consonants can do things that are more commonly observed with vowels, and vice versa. &quot;Vowel&quot; is specifically a description of the vocal tract constriction of the segment combined with the prosodic property of being a syllable peak (&quot;syllabic&quot;). When a vocalic (vowel-like) segment is not syllabic (thus is more like a consonant, since consonants are typically non-syllabic), it is termed a glide (or semivowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T05:18:06.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17751" CreationDate="2016-06-04T07:01:21.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A vowel has two closely related but inequivalent definitions. One of them looks what's happening in the mouth etc. Vowel is a sound in which the tongue doesn't touch anything and there's no build of pressure anywhere. That's why the sound may last uniformly and that's why it has the potential to be the peak of a syllable. The sound that allows a syllable to exist is the other definition of a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonants you mention – for example, in Czech, most famously, &quot;L&quot; and &quot;R&quot; – may form syllables, so they satisfy the syllabic definition of a vowel (my last name is &quot;Motl&quot; with an &quot;L&quot; and has two syllables; similarly &quot;prcek&quot; with &quot;R&quot;). However, they don't satisfy the tongue-and-pressure-based definition of a vowel so &quot;L&quot; and &quot;R&quot; are still considered consonants (although they are &quot;syllabic nuclei&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, vowels (by their sound) may fail to be the bulk of a syllable and they may be treated as consonants. These sounds are called &quot;semivowels&quot; and in English, &quot;y&quot; (in &quot;yes&quot;) and &quot;w&quot; (in &quot;west&quot;) are examples of such semivowels. By the essence of their sound, &quot;y&quot; and &quot;w&quot; are vowels. After all, &quot;y&quot; is a relative of &quot;i&quot; and &quot;w&quot; is the &quot;double u&quot;. But because they're not the most important or long-lasting part of English syllables, they behave as consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T07:01:21.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11752" CreationDate="2016-06-04T07:45:40.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to explore a school of linguistics which is founded on a semantic basis, and claims that there are indeed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;universals of meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, look at Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory at a site at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can find evidence of solid &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;empirical research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and a resultant table of semantic primes (or &lt;strong&gt;semantic elements&lt;/strong&gt;) which are thought to be found in most (if not &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;languages&lt;/strong&gt;. A cross sample of English exponents of these proposed semantic elements are: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, THINK, KNOW, WANT, DON'T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR, NOT, CAN, BECAUSE, IF, MAYBE, WORDS, TRUE, SAY, TIME~WHEN, PLACE~WHERE, A LONG TIME, FAR, NOW, HERE. The most recent edition of the table now claims 65 elements and it is thought to be nearly complete. By way of contrast it is important to realise that possibly most of the vocabulary of any language &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be glossed word for word to any other language. These primary elements provide the key for &lt;strong&gt;clear explanation of meanings&lt;/strong&gt; to accompany translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the above site you will find downloadable pages giving the exponents of these proposed 65 semantic elements in a sample of languages spread across a diverse range of families. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the site offers translations of its content in Arabic, Russian and Chinese. I mention this because I am guessing that the questioner reads Chinese as a first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/2555/curiousdannii&quot;&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/a&gt; has already drawn attention to NSM in connection with this question. Dominik Lukes (above) also has referenced Anna Wierzbicka who is the originator of NSM theory as it now stands. She in turn acknowledges a former teacher of hers, Andrzej Bogusławski who has also worked with her to develop the theory. The intellectual roots of the ideas go back a long way. Seventeenth century thinkers like Gottlieb Leibniz and John Locke had significant philosophical input into the background of the theory. Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard are leading proponents now, having put together the table of virtually all of the proposed semantic primes between them, so I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13329" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T07:05:48.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-04T08:31:51.130" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a restriction on the use of &quot;unless&quot; which was difficult to explain to my students (advanced ESL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The student's sentence was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would have had to go to the bank unless you had lent me the money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several others produced similar sentences.&#xA;How can we explain the difference in acceptability between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They'll kill her unless she gives them the money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*They would have killed her unless she gave them the money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They wouldn't have robbed her unless they were really poor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13330" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T08:31:51.130" Title="What are the restrictions on the use of &quot;unless&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-06-27T14:45:20.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18762" CreationDate="2016-06-04T11:51:55.997" Score="1" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the only difference between Filipino and Tagalog the alphabet used to transcribe the various associated words?-Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T02:32:12.810" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T02:32:12.810" Title="Filipino versus Tagalog" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-04T11:52:25.560" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word going can have different meanings. Two of them are as a synonym for walking, e.g. &quot;I'm going to the mall&quot;, and in the idiom &quot;how's it going&quot; as a synonym for &quot;How are you?&quot;.&#xA;I've noticed that both uses are also valid in french (&quot;Je va a la supermarche&quot;, &quot;ca va?&quot;) and german (&quot;Ich gehe zum Supermarkt&quot;, &quot;Wie geht es dir?&quot;). Is there an explanation why? The usage of &quot;How's it going&quot; as a synonym for &quot;How are you&quot; doesn't seem very natural to me, so I'm curious why it's used in 3 (and probably more) more or less independent languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13332" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T13:31:54.280" Title="Different meanings of going" Tags="&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17758" CreationDate="2016-06-04T12:59:40.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/tagalog-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; states Tagalog as consisting of two branches, Filipino (fil) and Tagalog (tgl).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So &quot;Tagalog&quot; seems to be ambiguous (or rather underspecified), referring to both the more general and the more specific branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T12:59:40.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17759" CreationDate="2016-06-04T13:05:51.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that the use of the verb &quot;go&quot; for this kidn of expression doesn't mainly have to do with an actual semantic assocition but simply because &quot;to go&quot; is such an extremely frequent word that has such a large range of usage in complex terms, idioms or even grammatical constructions (&quot;I am going to...&quot; vs. &quot;Je vais...&quot;) that the fact that it is used for expressing well-being is simply due to the verb itself being as general and frequent as the question itself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which doesn't exclude the possibility of course that the choice of the verb might have developed at an early stage where the languages involved were closer to each other or, due to massive cultural exchange, the usage in one language has jumped over to the others.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But I don't think that a verb like &quot;go&quot; is such an unlikely choice for an expression that often used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T13:05:51.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2016-06-05T00:12:34.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; (syntax and morphology) &lt;strong&gt;is an avenue for expressing meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, and it works in parallel with the explicitly semantic content of the words. We can use all kinds of very technical linguistic jargon to discuss both grammar and semantics, but &lt;strong&gt;in the end&lt;/strong&gt; we have to explain to ourselves and to each other what it all means in very clear and simple everyday terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar I think boils down to the fact that we have to express words in sequence one at a time. The options are necessarily further constrained by the language that we speak, just as our vocabulary is. (The constraints are necessary and understood for mutual comprehension.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we focus on the meanings of all of the words in our working vocabulary (including words - and parts of words - that serve a &lt;em&gt;grammatical function&lt;/em&gt;), and think about dictionaries, an interesting paradox arises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If we use words to explicate the meaning of other words then we can easily end up going in circles - sooner or later - usually sooner!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a council of despair however. Philosophers like John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz thought deeply about this problem. The conclusion that Leibniz drew was that we have a fundamental vocabulary that can be used to explicate the meanings of all of the rest of our vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I seem to have walked away from answering the original question it is because I think that &lt;strong&gt;grammar is subservient to semantics&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard are two of quite a few modern day proponents of this fundamental aspect of languages and linguistics. Wierzbicka's &lt;em&gt;The Semantics of Grammar&lt;/em&gt; addresses this question in much greater depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13329" LastEditorUserId="13329" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T07:12:28.363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T07:12:28.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17758" CreationDate="2016-06-05T02:30:36.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Filipino&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;standardized&lt;/a&gt; register/dialect of Tagalog language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist other, non-standard, dialects of Tagalog. Each of those have differences to each other (e.g., if they were absolutely matching, they would be not considered different ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on Tagalog lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_language#Dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;several important differences&lt;/a&gt; between the dialects of Tagalog language, including differences to the standard register (Filipino). This includes phonology (glottal stops and consonants), morphology (suffixes), and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T02:30:36.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14915" CreationDate="2016-06-05T05:37:03.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your list of words &lt;em&gt;resonates&lt;/em&gt; with me. I have no answer to your question about whether they are treated as a group in any linguistics discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; the NSM theory of semantics (and the perspective on grammar that flows from that semantics) suggests a list of indefinable semantic elements, which include the following: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NOT, SOME, ALL, SOMEONE, SOMETHING~THING, WHERE~PLACE, WHEN~TIME, LIKE~AS~WAY&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than be concerned with grammar and grammatical terminology I'm rather inspired to draw a direct line from these semantic elements to your list of &lt;strong&gt;obviously related words&lt;/strong&gt;. Incidentally I connect LIKE~AS~WAY with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is technically a comment. I know that you are aware of this theory, so I apologise if I am breaking the rules here. I am new to this site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13329" LastEditorUserId="13329" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T05:52:59.060" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T05:52:59.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17759" CreationDate="2016-06-05T12:59:02.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly true for Russian; we never say “Kak idet?&quot; (How is it going?) but rather &quot;Kak idut dela?&quot; (How are the things going?). &quot;Kak idet?&quot; sounds pretty weird and unnatural to me. Well, I suppose, this is because you imply, when asking the question, that things are actually moving in some direction, changing in time. That is also true for Belarusian.&#xA;What's even more interesting, in Polish we ask &quot;Jak leci?&quot;, which literally means &quot;How is it FLYING?&quot; :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13331" LastEditorUserId="13331" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T13:31:54.280" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T13:31:54.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T15:47:28.347" Score="0" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, the ditransitive verb &quot;to ask&quot; takes two accusatives in German (fragen), and the verb &quot;to give&quot; takes one dative and one accusative in many languages.&#xA;Is there a language in which the verb &quot;to ask&quot; can be followed by a dative case (assuming that the language has a distinct dative case)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-06T10:56:24.010" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T02:42:35.123" Title="Is there a language in which the verb &quot;to ask&quot; can be followed by a dative case?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T16:52:39.787" Score="0" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently busy with a project that involves production rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my years in Latin at college, I learned about the six basic ones. But if I am not confused, ablative could represent several cases such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by, by whom, with, from, in, on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for examples of a language that would include more cases than the ones mentioned above as I am considering using declensions as terminal symbols to be appended to some lemma as base for the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is this path (declensions) the most ergonomic in terms of programming / parsing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is my first question here, maybe someone can hint at another forum if not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13341" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-06T10:55:49.387" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T12:11:40.070" Title="Are there languages with more cases than Latin?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18765" CreationDate="2016-06-05T17:07:33.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, [по]просить, 'to ask', can be followed by the Dative case object, then the meaning is 'to ask for somebody', like it is often used in prayers to saints when you ask a saint that she ask God to give you something, e.g. &quot;Попроси мне и моим близким здоровья&quot;, 'Ask for health for me and my family'. Here &quot;мне&quot; 'for me' and &quot;моим близким&quot; 'for my family' are both in Dative, and &quot;здоровья&quot; 'for health' is in Genitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T17:07:33.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18766" CreationDate="2016-06-05T17:38:13.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understood what you want to know:  Whether there are languages with more than six cases, or languages where ablative is used for more than &quot;by, by whom, with, from, in, on&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There definitely are languages with a richer case system, usually agglutinative languages. E.g. Finnish has 15 cases, Hungarian about 18 (for Hungarian it's a little harder to decide what counts as a case and what is merely a postposition that has been attached to the word over time; some linguists argue there are only 5 cases, some even talk about 40).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about what ablative can be used for, things are not that clear, as the prepositions you mentioned often are vague in meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For those languages that do have ablative in the first place, the basic semantics should obviously the same when choosing the same term; what exactly ablative is used for will also heavily depend on what other cases the language offers. For example in Finnish, which has ablative too, the partitive case is used for a large range of meanings where Latin would rather use ablative (or something different).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But the basic meaning, namely ablative expressing something like movement away from something, isn't that much different from the use of ablative in Latin or in other languages that have ablative case as well, otherwise you wouldn't call the case like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-09T12:11:40.070" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T12:11:40.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-05T20:55:40.360" Score="3" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make a comprehensive phylogenetic tree of Germanic languages, with dates of divergence, and I have been unable to find details on West Germanic languages and how they diverged. I have found terms such as Ingvaeonic, Istvaeonic, and Irminonic, but's it's been difficult to determine how exactly West Germanic languages developed into the plethora of languages and dialects that exist today (as well as extinct languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically interested in the time periods of the changes. I'm looking for something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but with more exact dates. I've seen trees like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum.uit.no/a/svenonius/lingua/history/Image2.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but many of them seem to have some key differences, like how exactly Dutch is related to English. I think a lot of this stems from simplifications, and I'm looking for the most comprehensive diagram possible that can show how West Germanic languages are related to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13345" LastEditorUserId="13345" LastEditDate="2016-06-06T02:26:43.913" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T02:26:43.913" Title="How did West Germanic languages evolve?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T13:03:50.213" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the answer will be yes in most cases, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/82435/gradu04955.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one thesis&lt;/a&gt; cast doubt on this. The author provided an example taken from BNC:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My mother helped [PRO] to cater for the funeral tea, which were community affairs with everyone helping. (BN6 1505)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?isbn=082046399X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another treatise&lt;/a&gt; provided some examples which seemed more convinicing (you can google them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She motioned to be quiet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She signalled to open the gates and let them in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I doubt if this rule works in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T13:03:50.213" Title="Must subjectless infinitives exhibit subject control when used as complements(traditionally direct objects) of other verbs?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18777" CreationDate="2016-06-06T13:11:21.987" Score="1" ViewCount="878" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a corpus (even purchase it) of French language that has these characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should has a frequency list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List of words (not just lemmas) which are POS tagged&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Preferably taken from diverse fields&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;COCA in English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course searching through Google can give many links. But none has them all. And besides, my French is not that good to understand website contents. I truly appreciate any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T16:47:22.070" Title="French corpus with frequency list of POS tagged words (not lemmas)" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18776" CreationDate="2016-06-06T13:34:20.520" Score="4" ViewCount="645" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA arbitrarily borrows and derives graphemes from the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic. The graphemes do not display basic features (i.e. place and manner of articulation) shared between phones like featural alphabets do (e.g. Hangul, Visible Speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This bias is most obvious in that voiced and voiceless consonants have unique, arbitrarily chosen graphemes but aspirated consonants are indicated by a superscript &quot;h&quot; after the voiceless consonant.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastEditorUserId="13348" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T13:29:23.593" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T20:27:37.230" Title="Is there a featural equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18775" CreationDate="2016-06-06T15:20:20.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before such an alphabet could be created, there would have to be agreement as to what the features are, and there is no such agreement. An additional problem is that the resulting system would generate a superset of the IPA, thus would not be the equivalent of the IPA, since the content of the IPA is essentially arbitrary in not including symbols for all articulatory configurations (e.g. there is no symbol for a bilabial flap). Moreover, IPA is not just a collection of letters, it is letters organized according to an articulatory classification. There would be no logical problem in creating a general feature-based alphabet (assuming you can decide on a theory of features), which would require about 2 dozen combinable graphic elements. The problem would be coming up with a system that could be visually parsed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T15:20:20.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18774" CreationDate="2016-06-06T15:38:22.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a high Google result that I’ve come across before, though I have not used it myself. It seems to satisfy your requirements: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexique.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lexique&lt;/a&gt;, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/artfl-frantext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FRANTEXT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T15:38:22.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18774" CreationDate="2016-06-06T16:47:22.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Entering the query string &lt;code&gt;french corpus pos&lt;/code&gt; into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/search?1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt; gives you some choices, including &lt;em&gt;PAROLE&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Corpus arborée du français&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-06-06T16:47:22.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-06T18:57:02.940" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone were to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were between twenty and ten people at the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will be there from the fifth to the second of July.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that person would sound strange indeed, because in English the convention is for a range to start with the lower/smaller/earlier datum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language where constructions such as the above are acceptable or the norm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13350" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T12:20:32.347" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T12:20:32.347" Title="Is there a language that begins range expressions with the higher/later datum?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T00:18:44.250" Score="3" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi I was wondering if and if so which theta roles are being discharged to the DPs/NPs in sentences such as &quot;these are French men&quot;. Also I was asking myself what kind of structure one would give to these VPs and their arguments (?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3201" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T00:18:44.250" Title="Copulas and theta roles" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17522" CreationDate="2016-06-07T00:39:47.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look to see if it has a subject.  Clauses with subjects are finite; those without subjects are nonfinite.  This criterion was once proposed by my friend Stan Starosta.  Works for me, for English, though I think he intended it more generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T00:39:47.857" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18801" CreationDate="2016-06-07T02:34:16.540" Score="2" ViewCount="1871" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has the words &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sister&lt;/em&gt;, but then we also have the word &lt;em&gt;sibling&lt;/em&gt; as a gender-neutral version. We have the words &lt;em&gt;aunt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uncle&lt;/em&gt; as well, but no gender-neutral version. What languages have such a word? Are there any that have such a word and &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have gender-specific options at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13355" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T12:22:28.910" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:32:10.123" Title="Languages with only a gender-neutral word for aunt/uncle" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17522" CreationDate="2016-06-07T05:12:03.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your first question, many grammarians agree that the idea of finite/infinite verb forms is not applicable when the language lacks enough verb inflections (usually an analytic language). However, some grammars argue that aspectual markers can help to distinguish finite verbs from non-finite verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question has been discussed in A COMPHRENSIVE GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WPmSi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WPmSi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QRYQR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QRYQR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; 1. List item&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T05:12:03.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T09:24:09.013" Score="2" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the highlighted nouns below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Empire&lt;/strong&gt; is not always a good thing.  (The burden of &lt;strong&gt;empire&lt;/strong&gt;, like its benefit, was not equitably shared.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some great apes have &lt;strong&gt;theory&lt;/strong&gt; of mind.  (&lt;strong&gt;Theory&lt;/strong&gt; may tell us one thing, but practice teaches us another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;strong&gt;force&lt;/strong&gt; to chastize one's own ally is not &lt;strong&gt;war&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Man&lt;/strong&gt; is the measure of all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We lost &lt;strong&gt;an empire&lt;/strong&gt;, but won a market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Darwin proposed &lt;strong&gt;a theory&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;a war&lt;/strong&gt; of attrition, you need &lt;strong&gt;a force&lt;/strong&gt; equal to those of your foe and the &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; noncombatants combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;strong&gt;a man&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the top line, please also add this from &lt;em&gt;Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai&lt;/em&gt; by Robert Bickers (emphasis added).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one thing which does strike one is that Maurice Tinkler took &lt;strong&gt;empire&lt;/strong&gt; too seriously.  In &lt;em&gt;The Road to Wigan Pier&lt;/em&gt;, former imperial policeman George Orwell wrote about the fact that every imperialist knew that the rhetoric of &lt;strong&gt;empire&lt;/strong&gt; was all airy fluff at heart, and that &lt;strong&gt;empire&lt;/strong&gt; was the brute fact of power. . . .  For Tinkler, it wasn't merely that &lt;strong&gt;empire&lt;/strong&gt; was the geopolitical status quo. . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term in grammar or linguistics for the type of &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; nouns (those without an article) shown in the first two sentences (i.e. &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a term unique to English grammar or applicable to the phenomenon in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is perfectly clear, you don't have to read this background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What I mean by the &amp;quot;phenomenon&amp;quot;:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; are different from &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt;, they seem to have two established usages, countable and uncountable.  As a result, saying, &amp;quot;Using force to chastize one's own ally is not war,&amp;quot; may not amount to a special adaptation.  (If you are wondering, the sentiment is from the Peloponnesian War.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;, it seems perhaps the countable use is better established, and the &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; instances may therefore look like a special adaptation.  (Theory of mind here means one ape's attribution of mind to another ape as in:  &amp;quot;Oh, he doesn't know the panther is coming.  I should warn him.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway I'm not insisting that my characterization is accurate.  I am only trying to bring out the difference a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; I don't know where that comes from.  We don't say, &amp;quot;Lion is a mammal.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What I'd like to know:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a standard term for cases like &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;, that's what I'd like to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, terms to include some broader range of &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; nouns would also help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, I would appreciate pointers (e.g. Internet links) to standard treatments of the phenomenon, again whether for English or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a grammarian or linguist and proceed to give an account of it right here, deny that it exists (i.e. &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; are no different from &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt;), etc. that too would be appreciated.  But in that case, please tell me your qualifications (degree, teaching post, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;empire&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;war&lt;/em&gt; are all doing the same thing, I would still like to know the standard terms of discourse.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have supplied other examples for top two lines (those in parentheses and the long quote) in response to comments received.  I hope at least some of them may be grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10711" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T04:40:01.243" Title="Nouns without an article as in e.g. &quot;Empire is not always a good thing&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T13:03:41.520" Score="1" ViewCount="2546" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern times, there are countless ways of learning foreign languages, for example, through the Internet. But those languages are mostly well studied and understood, and a guideline on how to learn it has already been established. When I learn English, I work with dictionaries, textbooks, audio CD, etc. that are available everywhere.&#xA;I wonder how the Portuguese missionaries learned Japanese without knowing anything about it beforehand; they didn't know Japanese, and they didn't have such things as textbooks or dictionaries to learn Japanese with; if anything they would have been the first people to write such textbooks and dictionaries; how did they take in totally strange words, especially those abstract concepts such as &quot;intelligence&quot; or &quot;virtues&quot;?&#xA;In other words, how is an completely strange language is first learned and studied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T18:06:28.807" Title="How do people learn a totally foreign language that has not been studied at all?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-06-07T23:00:15.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T14:08:48.103" Score="15" ViewCount="2209" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a complete layman's question. Online etymology dictionary says about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Kaaba&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;kaaba&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1734, Caaba, cube-shaped building in the Great Mosque of Mecca, containing the Black Stone, the most sacred site of Islam, from Arabic ka'bah &quot;square house,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;ka'b&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;cube.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of cube is traced to ancient Greek in the same dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1550s, from Middle French cube (13c.) and directly from Latin cubus, from Greek &lt;strong&gt;kybos&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;a six-sided die,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any training in linguistics. But I know that Greek is an Indo-European language while Arabic is a semitic one and the similarity of the word for cube is striking. Is it just a coincidence, or did one language borrow from the other? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13358" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-08T12:26:52.440" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T20:32:40.520" Title="Is there a relationship between Arabic ka'b and Greek kybos?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18785" CreationDate="2016-06-07T14:12:17.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a demonstration of a rather analytical approach to this learning about a completely foreign language when there is no common language to guide one.  It is by Dan Everett, a student of Kenneth Pike, who was a master of the technique.  Pike taught many students at the SIL, one of whose interests is translating the Bible into &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introducer, Sally Thomason, has been editor of &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; for a number of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Daniel Everett's monolingual demonstration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T14:12:17.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T14:22:17.450" Score="3" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, generally speaking, an idea of conditional is expressed by a sentence with a dependent clause (and usually with the conjunction &quot;if&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependent clause can be a non-finite clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weather permitting, we will go there on foot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, being expressed by a relative clause is also possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone who should do that would be laughed at.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we use several independent clauses to express an idea of conditional? YES. However, we may face much limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give him an inch and he will take a mile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the first independent clause conveys the meaning of imperative. If the first independent clause does not convey the meaning of imperative, the whole sentence may be unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sound in body, sound in mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence conveys the meaning of conditional paratactically. However, forms like this may only appear in idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&#xA;Can we use several independent clauses to express an idea of conditional without too much limitation? (in certain languages, not limted to English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T17:35:15.533" Title="Can we use several independent clauses to express an idea of conditional without too much limitation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;conditionals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18788" CreationDate="2016-06-07T16:10:44.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an actual answer to your question, just noting that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone who should do that would be laughed at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a regular conditional! Those &quot;would&quot; or &quot;might&quot; constructions are called counterfactuals, and are semantically not identical to material implication (as it would be the case with &quot;if&quot; sentences or the other kinds that you stated), but - at least in the theories I am aware of - rather have to be analysed with respect to possible worlds (roughly, could we imagine a world hopefully close to ours and in which the consequent is implied by the antecedent if it were true, since (as the name already tells) the antecedents usually are not true in the actual world we are talking about), or possibly by adding some more propositions to the antecedent until the consequent eveutally logically follows from the resulting set of propositions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the end, the analysis of &quot;would&quot; will directly or indirectly involve material implication to be interpreted as &quot;if... then&quot;, but still, I'd like to have pointed out that this construction is semantically not of the same type as a classical if-statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T10:05:09.567" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T10:05:09.567" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18785" CreationDate="2016-06-07T16:48:07.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Second language acquisition is closely connected to first language acquistion, so let me go a little back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, acquiring a language without explicit instruction is the natrual way to learn a language. &lt;strong&gt;When kids aquire their first language, no one would hand them grammar books or a dictionary either&lt;/strong&gt; - they just learn it by constantly being exposed to spoken natural language and active interaction with their environment, &lt;strong&gt;and still they do pretty well&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although this seems such a normal thing to us, it is still amazing how well children do at this enormously complexe task (there are periods in childhood with rapid growth of vocabulary, sometimes several new words each day, as well comparatively fast acquisition of rather complex syntactic constructions, and only at a very late stage, usually not until they are 5 years old, they will begin to understand pragmatic issues such as irony).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since the mere situation of being to exposed to rather unstructered and often even false input can not satisfactorily explain how children accomplish to learn languages that well without any explicit instruction (this is also called the &quot;poverty of the stimulus argument&quot;), one can, I think, see some point in Chomsky's proposal of a &quot;universal grammar&quot; that was supposed to be interior to every human and already include all of the linguistic structure, where the individual then only has to set certain parameters in order to fully acquire a language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then there were theories which stated more or less the exact opposite of Chomsky's assumption, mostly behaviourism, which essentialy claimed that there is no such thing as linguistic intuition at all, but that language is just behaviour and all human behaviour is acquired by simple imitation of what the environment (for children, most importantly the parents) do.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Recent theories of language acquisition usually don't accept neither of those view in their most radical interpretation and assume both that not all grammar is already in our heads and we simply have to find out how to use it in a specific language, but that there most be some more to learning a language, but at the same time not that using language is just mimicry of what other people do too; rather, &lt;strong&gt;most researches assume that humans are born with some intuitive understanding of natural language which makes it possible to acquire a language without being explicitly told the rules&lt;/strong&gt;, but that it might, to some extend, help or even be crucial to also have some active knowledge of how a language works - it must be a bit of both.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there are quite some differences between children acquiring a languages and adults learning a second langauge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Amongst others, children will be introuced to language in a more step-by-step way, e.g. parents teaching them simple words rather than talking to them about politics, the latter of which is more likely to happen to adults who come to a foreign country without haveing learned the language beforehand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Additionally, there are some biological conditions which promote the ability to acquire a language in early childhood way havilier than is possible in adulthood.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, humans will, and in this point children and adults are not very different, learn a language in an order that is relatively universal and to some extend even very predictable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, they will both start out with simple words and phrases, mostly concrete (such as &quot;ball&quot;, &quot;table&quot;, &quot;go&quot;, &quot;hungry&quot;) or very frequent ones (&quot;Hello&quot;, &quot;stop it&quot;), which they than use in one-, two-, three-word sentences, building up slightly complex syntactic constructions, expanding their knowledge (which is, at the beginning, highly erroneous) to more difficult grammatical structures, more fine-grained semantic differences and eventually pragmatic, often culturally influenced subtleties.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The most apparent reason for this is simplicity: It is easier to get the connection between &quot;ball&quot; and someone kicking a round object than it is to fully coping with the more advanced concepts of e.g. wh-movement or passive contructions, so the former will be learned at an earlier stage than the latter.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What adds to this are practical factors: Having expert knowledge in what a language can theoretically distinguish between by making subtle changes to a sentence won't get you very far if you don't know how to use those feature because you can not even deal with the most basic vocabularly or how to form simple declarative sentences. On the other hand, people will roughly understand you if you are at least able to from three-word sentences with a vocabulary of maybe 200-1000 words, even if those sentences lack perfect grammaticality or the most powerful lexical distinctions. And you will, after some time, certainly be able to pick out some buzzwords that are frequently used and important for everyday life (&quot;I&quot;, &quot;you&quot;, &quot;go&quot;, &quot;money&quot;, &quot;toilet&quot;), even if you might not understand yet why the word was inflected in that very way or what that preposition expresses excactly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is why it is possible for humans to learn how to speak a language even if it is in total a highly complex system of lexical items, grammatic rules and pragmatic usage conditions: &lt;strong&gt;because they start out with the most simple and essential features and continuously expand their knowledge to more sophisticated expressions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the enormous complexity of this task, acquiring a language just by being exposed to it IS possible, this is what children do all the time, and acutally learning a language by explicitly making oneself aware of grammatical rules or meanings of words is the unnatural way to do it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is even a recent tendency in second language teaching design towards making second language learning more inutitive, i.e. focussing less on instruction and more on intuitive learning by hearing and using the language as it naturally occurs in everyday life, some even approach to completely do away with any explicit &lt;strong&gt;learning&lt;/strong&gt; and rely solely on intuitive &lt;strong&gt;acquisition&lt;/strong&gt;, as some researches argue that this is even more effective than reading grammar books and studying vocabularly lists. &#xA;Fore the reasons mentioned above, this is by far not as simple for adults as it is for children, and personally I doubt I could learn a foreign language easilier by just being exposed to it; if you don't acquire it under the conditions you are in as a child learning their first language, it makes things way simpler to have some explicit knowledge about the language works, rather than having to find it out all by yourself with some vague intuition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This doesn't prevent the general human ability though, and if you are being exposed to sufficient and qualitatively appropriate input while also being attentive to the structures it might be involved and the meanings that certain expressions might denote, then it is indeed possible to acquire a langueage (rather than actively learning it) just by hearing and using it, even if you have never known those constructions before; simply because the human brain is made to understand language without actively being aware of specific grammar rules or word-meaning relations - &lt;strong&gt;in fact, this is even the more normal way to do it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T18:06:28.807" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T18:06:28.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18784" CreationDate="2016-06-07T20:05:52.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hm, the closet terms I could think of are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;generic interpretation&lt;/strong&gt; (as oppsed to &quot;accidental interpretation&quot;, at least I guess that is what you would call the opposite), which rather seems to apply to concrete and countable nouns though: &lt;em&gt;She bakes bread&lt;/em&gt; (in general, e.g. as a profession, vs. a specific cake in a concrete situation: &lt;em&gt;She bakes the bread&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;non-discrete nouns&lt;/strong&gt; (Haegman &amp;amp; Guéron, p. 55), which don't allow for pluralisation (like * &lt;em&gt;hatreds&lt;/em&gt;, * &lt;em&gt;justices&lt;/em&gt; as compared to &lt;em&gt;the loves&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;several charities&lt;/em&gt;, which are also abstract but still to some extend countable  in an appropriate context) - but obviously, &lt;em&gt;wars&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;theories&lt;/em&gt; is grammatically acceptable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haegeman &amp;amp; Guéron (p. 67) also, like you, use the term &lt;strong&gt;bare noun&lt;/strong&gt; in combination with &lt;strong&gt;non-overt determiners&lt;/strong&gt;; but their examples rather seem to apply for non-abstract entities used as an NP with an empty determiner (like in &lt;em&gt;Women are ambitious&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter two are taken from: Haegeman, L. &amp;amp; Guéron, Jacqueline (1999). &lt;em&gt;English Grammar. A generative perspective.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe the words you mentioned are something like nouns which can act as both discrete and non-discrete abstract nouns, or receive both an accidental (?) or a generic interpretation, but still, I'm not sure this fits your example too well and also don't know of a unique term for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting question though, I'd be curious if there is any deeper research on precisely that difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T20:05:52.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T12:59:17.937" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages permit an independent clause to lack an explicit subject (known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;null-subject languages&lt;/a&gt;). Consider the following sentences taken from Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tú eres mi amiga. (You are my friend). [with explicit subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eres mi amiga. (literally,&quot;are my friend&quot;) [with implicit subject]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Verbs in these two sentences are not morphologically distinct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we find a language in which there exists morphological distinction between independent clauses with implicit subjects and independent clauses with explicit subjects? These languages(if they do exist) would be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NP (explicit subject) VP &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(NP) (dropped subject) VP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two verb phrases are morphologically distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T00:17:35.960" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T10:02:06.573" Title="Languages that have morphological distinction between independent clauses with implicit subjects and independent clauses with explicit subjects?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T13:40:59.087" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Liaison (French pronunciation: ​[ljɛ.zɔ̃]) is the pronunciation of a latent word-final consonant immediately before a following vowel sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scandinavian languages like Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish tend to drop final consonant sounds in speech, but do they experience liaisons when spoken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in Swedish: &lt;em&gt;Jag&lt;/em&gt; is typically pronounced as &lt;em&gt;Ja&lt;/em&gt;, but would &lt;em&gt;Jag är&lt;/em&gt; be pronounced as &lt;em&gt;Ja gär&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this happen in all Scandinavian languages? Is there any literature regarding this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13364" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T21:27:03.463" Title="Do Scandinavian languages have liaisons?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18794" CreationDate="2016-06-08T14:15:20.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So you are asking whether something else in the sentence, e.g. the verb, would morphologically be realised differenlty depending on whether the subject is spelled out or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is. Isn't the point of pro-drop that you can express the excat same thing despite leaving the subject out, mostly because the person feature is sufficiently marked by conjugation other other contextual information, without needing to impose any further grammatical effects on the verb?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Usually, in languages that do allow pro-drop, the only semantic effect on spelling the facultative subject out explicitly is that it is usually put some more into focus then (&quot;TÚ eres mi amiga&quot;, i.e. not Maria or whoever else); some languages might have restrictions on which subjects can be dropped (e.g. in Finnish, in general all personal pronouns can be dropped, but if you do this for 3SG, it receives the meaning of &quot;one&quot;/&quot;you&quot; (German &quot;man&quot;), so in case you want to refer to &quot;he&quot;/&quot;she&quot;/..., you can not drop the pronoun) - but I don't think this should have an effect on any of the other lexical itmes in the sentence, since pro-drop simply permits facultativeness of an overt subject, not any grammatical distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-08T14:36:23.577" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T14:36:23.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18799" CreationDate="2016-06-08T14:24:33.070" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, very quick questions about phonology in GAE.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GAE have the [ʍ] (the 'hua') sound?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What about the (non-clustered) [x], [ʒ], or [o]?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13328" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T15:49:25.697" Title="Lots of quick phonetic questions for General American English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18797" CreationDate="2016-06-08T15:49:25.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since GAE is a cluster of dialects with yuuuge variation, both &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; are correct, depending on who you are. As far as I know everybody has [ʒ] in [plɛʒr̩] &quot;pleasure&quot;, though there is some variation with the affricate in [gərɑʒ] &quot;garage&quot;.&#xA;For some people (myself) there are contrasts like [wɛɪls] &quot;Wales&quot; / [ʍɛɪls] &quot;Wales&quot;; [wɪtʃ] &quot;witch&quot; / [ʍɪtʃ] &quot;which&quot;. Some people don't have the contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a phonetic tendency to pronounce /k/ as [x] in intervocalic position after a stressed vowel (e.g. [stɪxr̩] &quot;sticker&quot;), but this is not a categorial change of sounds, it's a continuous weakening of the occlusion. This is probably widespread but not high frequency, so it isn't noticed much. There are a few words where I have [x] phonemically – [lɔx] &quot;loch&quot; (but not in &quot;Loch Ness&quot;) and [bax] &quot;Bach&quot;. That is, this only happens when a foreign pronuciation of a foreign word is imported into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for [o], that depends on what you mean by &quot;[o]&quot;. The only dialects that I know of with [o] are spoken in northern Minnesota. Elsewhere, the vowel in &quot;goat&quot; is a diphthong with the core [ɔ] as in [gɔʊt]. But some people transcribe it as [got].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T15:49:25.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18795" CreationDate="2016-06-08T16:01:41.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the unpronounced citation consonants of  are not ever recovered phrasally before a vowel. There is the puzzle of knowing which orthographic consonants are unpronounced (Norwegian [rø] &quot;red&quot;, Swedish [rød], but note that even before a vowel suffix, the  is gone in Norwegian ([røeste] &quot;reddest&quot;). I cannot parse Danish consonants, and I'd suggest consulting Basbøl's book if you want to know how that stuff is pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:01:41.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18782" CreationDate="2016-06-08T16:32:10.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll offer that in &lt;strong&gt;Khmer&lt;/strong&gt; there is only a gender-neutral term for &lt;em&gt;older&lt;/em&gt; siblings of your parents, អ៊ុំ /ʔom/. The terms for younger siblings of your parents are gender-specific, មីង /miːŋ/ for females and ពូ /puː/ for males.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15684/is-honorific-uncle-common-across-the-languages-of-the-world?lq=1&quot;&gt;Thai example&lt;/a&gt; cited in the comments, these are honorific terms not restricted to family, however unlike Thai, there is no general distinction between paternal and maternal aunts and uncles. For more information on Khmer honorifics, here is a decent &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.banyanblog.com/home/hierarchy-in-khmer-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:32:10.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T16:35:59.940" Score="3" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was trying to explain that I had (mis?)interpreted a Portuguese way of writing laughter, &quot;kkkkkk&quot;, as the kind of sound Ernie from Sesame Street makes when he laughs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf8nPDGuvdM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here's a video with some examples.&lt;/a&gt; (I've been told this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the general understanding of &quot;kkkkk&quot; among Portuguese speakers. But I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; heard people in real life laugh like this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had been hoping to explain it in terms of phonetics, partly because in my head it &quot;made sense&quot; for that sound to be related to the consonant [k], and partly because I had forgotten about the Ernie example. It seems to me like some kind of a voiceless fricative, made near the back of the throat. To make it myself, my lips are in a similar position as they are for [i]. But searching around Wikipedia's pages on various consonantal sounds made near where [k] is, like [x χ], I wasn't able to find anything that sounded quite like it to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a phonetic classification for this kind of laughter? Or is this just not a sound used in any human languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5514" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T16:17:04.033" Title="Can Ernie's laughter be classified phonetically?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18788" CreationDate="2016-06-08T16:36:51.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, certainly. A paratactic vestige from Classical Chinese, it appears in many stock phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Dao gao  yi  chi,  mo    gao  yi  zhang.&#xA;    dao tall one chi,  devil tall one zhang. (chi and zhang are a traditional Chinese units)&#xA;    If (those with the) dao grows taller by a chi, the evil will grow taller by a zhang.&#xA;(2) Mei you  Gongchan  Dang,  mei you  Xin Zhongguo.&#xA;    Not have Communist Party, not have New China.&#xA;    If there were no Communist Party, there would be no New China.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These would sound more natural and less literary in normal speech if we add markers like &lt;em&gt;dehua&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;jiu&lt;/em&gt; ('then'), but they are perfectly acceptable and normal in Classical Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T16:36:51.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18805" CreationDate="2016-06-08T17:31:49.387" Score="3" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an omission in pronouncing the word &quot;good&quot; when it happens with words starting with /p/ /b/? I mean, is it pronounced as /gu poınt/ in good point or like /gud poınt/? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is, is it due to elision in linguistics or another rule? Or maybe because /d/ is a voiced stop and /p/ is a voicless stop, it's easier to pronouce it that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched in some linguistics books like Fulk, Fromkin, and yule's books, but no clues I found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13320" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T00:16:52.643" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T08:21:53.093" Title="Elision in &quot;Good point&quot; --&gt; / gʊ pɔɪnt/ or not?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18804" CreationDate="2016-06-08T17:53:11.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In careful speech, it's pronounced [gʊd pɔɪnt] in American English. In maximally casual speech it's generally pronounced [gʊ Xpɔɪnt], where &quot;X&quot; means that there may be some elongation of /p/. However, that could simply be an automatic timing adjustment of an intervocalic consonant at a foot-juncture: you don't get [ʊ ɪ ɛ] foot-finally and there is evidence that a following consonant gets attached to the preceding syllable, keeping those vowels out of final position. Between those speech styles there are various kinds of phonetic overlap in articulators where there is lingual raising but it is mostly acoustically masked by the following labial closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens, so it depends on what you mean by &quot;rule&quot;. If your universe of things includes rules of phonetic implementation (some people deny that they exist) then yes, this is due to a rule, specifically one of phonetic implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-08T17:53:11.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18804" CreationDate="2016-06-08T22:11:06.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The alveolar consonant /d/, like the alveolar consonants /t/ and /n/, is highly unstable in English. It will tend to change its place of articulation according to the sound coming afterwards (it will assimilate its place of articulation). In the phrase &lt;em&gt;good point&lt;/em&gt; the sound after the /d/ is a /p/. The phoneme /p/ is made with the lips&amp;mdash;we say that it is &lt;em&gt;bilabial&lt;/em&gt;. For this reason the /d/ may also become bilabial. It will remain a lenis ('voiced') consonant, and it will still be a plosive. This means that it will have become a /b/. So what you will actually hear in that case is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gʊb pɔɪnt/ (goob point)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can also happen if the /d/ occurs before a /b/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gʊb bʊk/ (goob book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will occasionally happen when a /d/ occurs before /w/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/reb waɪn/ (reb wine)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the /d/ occurs before a /k/ or a /g/, it may become a /g/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gʊg kɔ:l/ (goog call)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/gʊg gri:f/ (goog grief)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is often referred to as dealveolar assimilation, because the consonant is moving away from its normal alveolar position, to effectively become a different consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Original poster's question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will be no elision of the /d/ in this environemt. However we are likely to get dealveolar assimilation. Because this consonant will now be homorganic (made with the same parts of the mouth) with the following /p/, it will not be released and may be less easy to hear. There will also be some devoicing of the /d/ because of the following voiceless /p/, and so it may appear more /p/-like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I've used the British English transcription system used by John Wells in LPD for this post.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T08:21:53.093" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T08:21:53.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18804" CreationDate="2016-06-09T00:01:24.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The [d] in &quot;good point&quot; is lost by a most curious mechanism.  A familiar fact about midwestern (and other) English is that [t] in the offset of a syllable, when a consonant follows, can change to a glottalized [t'] or a glottal stop [?].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why, one might wonder, does the voicelessness of the [t] help trigger this change?  Why doesn't the same thing happen to [d] as happens to [t]?  Well, it does.  Except a glottalized [d'] is difficult, and it is even harder when the oral alveolar closure is lost, because then what is left is a voiced glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voiced glottal stop, though, is not possible, since it requires the glottis to be both closed and partially open.  This sound segment self-destructs, and we hear nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T00:01:24.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-09T04:09:35.750" Score="3" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I teach ESL at the adult level.  I am trying to analyze &quot;used to&quot; for past habitual, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My car used to malfunction a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;used to&quot; an adverb-phrase meaning something like 'for a long time in the past'?  Or is it a finite verb?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's an adverb-phrase, it's worth noting that we don't have a past-tense main verb, as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My car used to malfunctioned(sic) a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that's evidence that &quot;used to&quot; is actually a finite verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I may have read somewhere that &quot;used to&quot; evolved from &quot;was/were used to&quot; (meaning 'was/were accustomed to'); however, if this be the case, then I would expect a gerund instead of a base infinitive, as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My car used to malfunctioning(sic) a lot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll appreciate any insights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T09:33:14.887" Title="&quot;used to&quot; for past habitual: analysis" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17462" CreationDate="2016-06-09T08:05:22.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bavarian is a Germanic language, but it was heavily influenced by Romance languages. It's population started out as a mix of Romanized Celts, Germanics and partially Romans. This makes it unclear to which extend this early form of Bavarian was Germanic, but I think it's likely that it had many Latin words.&#xA;Later on it was influenced especially by French (notably in the Napoleon era).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many words like &quot;semme&quot; (from Latin, originally meaning &quot;wheat flour&quot;, now meaning &quot;bun&quot;), &quot;servus&quot; (from Latin for &quot;slave&quot; or perhaps short for something like &quot;at your service&quot;), &quot;parasol&quot; (from French, meaning, well, &quot;parasol&quot;), &quot;laggl&quot; (insult, coming from the French general &quot;Ezéchiel de Mélac&quot;) or &quot;maroni&quot; (from Italian, describing edible chestnut). We also have some words like &quot;mare&quot; (compare to Italian &quot;mare&quot;, German &quot;meer&quot; for &quot;sea&quot;), which I'm unsure about if they come from Romance languages or were simply a re-evolution of that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, sadly, today most of these words get replaced by German words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T08:05:22.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-09T08:37:22.570" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the English &quot;always&quot; comes literally from &quot;all ways&quot;. the Bavarian &quot;oivai&quot; sounds almost the same, means the same, but doesn't seem to be as straight forward. While &quot;oi&quot; means &quot;all&quot; and &quot;oiss&quot; means &quot;everything&quot;, &quot;vai&quot; has no meaning (well, it means &quot;woman&quot; or &quot;wife&quot;, but I don't think that's related). The modern Bavarian word for &quot;way&quot; is &quot;veeg&quot;, which could possibly be a recent adaption from the German &quot;Weg&quot;. This seems to be unlikely though if you compare similar words to &quot;-vai&quot; such as Bavarian &quot;mai&quot; and German &quot;maul&quot; (Meaning &quot;mouth&quot; in English, but is offensive in German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One interesting theory I read (I don't remember where) is that it comes from the Latin &quot;aliubei&quot; (meaning &quot;sometimes&quot;), which could make sense, but it would be a huge coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Some alternative ways to write &quot;oivai&quot; are &quot;o-i/ll-[a]-v/w-a/e-i-[s]&quot;. I just took the one that is closest to being phonetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="13363" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T08:53:12.230" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T20:11:13.290" Title="Are &quot;oivai &quot; and &quot;always&quot; related?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2380" CreationDate="2016-06-09T10:52:05.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A term I know from psycholinguistics is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;phonologically based lexical selection error&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That means, when looking up the words you need in your mental lexicon, you already have the almost appropriate phonetic form in mind, but then accidently choose a word instead that is phonetically very similar (i.e. differing in one sound, as in your example), but semantically misplaced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other examples would be &lt;em&gt;He has a new commuter&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;The noun comes after the proposition&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lexical selection error in general is when you erroneously pick a wrong word, which is, however, a valid word in your language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other sub-types of such lexical selection errors beyond phonologically based ones are semantically based lexical selection errors (one prominent error is choosing the exact antonym of what you mean, e.g. &lt;em&gt;It's every cold - err, hot&lt;/em&gt;) or errors involving morpohological stranding (e.g. &lt;em&gt;They are Turking talkish&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Interestingly, many lexical selection errors still come along with correct grammaticality, as in the example I just mentioned: Although the lexical items themselves are misplaced, the inflection (i.e. &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ish&lt;/em&gt;) is syntactically still at the right place - which is an indicator for mental lexical retrievement being a different process than building up the grammatical structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such lexical selection errors are different from pure phonological errors, in that they involve words that are still part of the lexicon (just semantically misplaced), where you already pick the wrong word for your sentence before starting to pronounce it. Pure phonological errors would mostly be something like &lt;em&gt;he gave the goy a book&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;the boy&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;lunder and thightening&lt;/em&gt; (instead of &lt;em&gt;thunder and lightening&lt;/em&gt;), were you realise certain phonemes the wrong way but without that resulting in a phonetically similar, but semantically different word which is not a valid word of the language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So the place where this goes wrong is a different one; it is not during the process of retrieving the words from your mental lexicon, but rather during the pronouncitation process, after you have already chosen your words and built up the grammatical structure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarise, I guess what you mean is a speech error named phonologically based lexical selection error, where you don't just mispronounce things but rather make an error in getting the right words from your lexicon, by choosing a phonetically similar one that you then pronounce, often even inflect correctly, but that is just semantically not any meaningful in the context you want to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A comment on amls answer (I would have commented, but don't have enough reputation):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I agree with you that there goes something wrong during monitoring which might be called &quot;momentary aphasia&quot;, however I think this is not adressing the problem exactly: What OP wanted to know is type of speech error this is, i.e. what goes wrong in the first place to even produce such a sentence - not primarily why this might in some situations not be monitored and repaired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T11:08:05.340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T11:08:05.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18809" CreationDate="2016-06-09T11:23:37.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why this should be an adverb phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the construction is highly conventionalised, probably even lexicalised and no longer productive (you probably couldn't say &lt;em&gt;My car uses to malfuction a lot&lt;/em&gt;), but syntactically, this is a perfectly valid past tense verb which takes a verb in bare infinitive as an argument (this is why * &lt;em&gt;used to malfunctioned&lt;/em&gt; or * &lt;em&gt;used to malfunctioning&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it were an adverb phrase, what would be the finite verb in the sentence then? There needs to be one, and certainly this is &lt;em&gt;used (to)&lt;/em&gt;, due to its inflection, due to its syntactic position which is the usual default position for finite verbs and due to there not being any other possibilty to find a finite verb in the sentence, without which it would definitely be ungrammatical.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would your arguments in favour of it being an &lt;em&gt;adverb phrase&lt;/em&gt; be? I don't see any similarity with an AP here; &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; isn't anything that modifies a averb, but is a verb itself; also, I know of no case where an AP could take a verb complex in bare infinitive as an argument (which &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; does), in general adjunctions can not have any arguments (that &lt;em&gt;malfunction&lt;/em&gt; is an obligatory argument of &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; gets clear when we remove it and get an ungrammatical sentence: * &lt;em&gt;My car used to&lt;/em&gt;); and most importantly, an adverb phrase would be merged into the syntax tree by adjunction, i.e. it would be an optional constituent which just modifies some other constituent (in case of adverbs, this is mostly the verbal phrase) but can easily be left out without this changing the grammaticality of the sentence (&lt;em&gt;My car used to malfunction&lt;/em&gt; vs. * &lt;em&gt;My car malfuction a lot&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This may hold true for &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;, but in the use of &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt;, this is definitely not the case, this is not just some adjunction that merely modifies its core constituents, but an a core contituent itself, namely the VP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I really don't think &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; could in any way be analysed as an adverb phrase, and I don't see the problem of it being analysed as a finite verb, only because its use is in some way restricted and more or less lexicalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I must revise my claim that &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; is not productive: &lt;em&gt;I use to play tennis on modays&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly fine, and the fact that the full inflection paradigm is possible and regular (&lt;em&gt;I use to, you use to, he uses to, ..., I used to, you used to, ...&lt;/em&gt;) I would see as another argument that &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; is a totally normal finite verb, just in this context to some degree lexicalised/conventionalised and usually used in past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The native speakers here have convinced me that my grammaticality judgement about present tense is probably wrong ;) So this doesn't seem to count as an argument for &lt;em&gt;used to&lt;/em&gt; being a fully productive verb; but still, the other factors I mentioned are sufficient evidence in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-10T14:00:24.297" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T14:00:24.297" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-09T15:38:09.910" Score="1" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is &quot;Gegeben hat Hans dem Lehrer das Buch&quot;&#xA;In order to have this sentence, I have to remove &quot;dem Lehrer das Buch&quot; to become adjunctions to Verb Phrase (VP) &#xA;This is done because they are placed after the Subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Verb Phrase goes above to spec CP&#xA;What happens to the adjunctions &quot;dem Lehrer das Buch&quot; ?  Do they remain adjunctions to an empty VP ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;proposed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SGesc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SGesc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13379" LastEditorUserId="13379" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T17:41:25.560" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T20:01:51.317" Title="Topicalization of a VP in German" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18815" CreationDate="2016-06-09T15:53:34.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, this is a tricky one, because it involves topicalisation. It is very unusual to say it like this, unless you want to put a strong focus on &lt;em&gt;gegeben&lt;/em&gt; (and a secondary focus on &lt;em&gt;das Buch&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unmarked syntactic order for a V2 sentence would be &lt;em&gt;Hans hat dem Lehrer das Buch gegeben&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The underlying structure (V-final) is &lt;em&gt;Hans dem Lehrer das Buch gegeben hat&lt;/em&gt;. So you move &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; into C position and &lt;em&gt;gegeben&lt;/em&gt; into SpecC. The other constituents stay where they are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't understand what you mean by &quot;I have to remove &quot;dem Lehrer das Buch&quot; to become adjunctions to Verb Phrase (VP)&quot; Where do you remove them from? I also think they should not be adjuncts, but arguments, since &lt;em&gt;geben&lt;/em&gt; is a three-place verb and the direct and the indirect objects are obligatory (if you left them out, the sentence would be ungrammatical), so you shouldn't merge them with the VP by adjunction; rather, they should be included in the VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analysis of the sentence would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KhRrl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KhRrl.png&quot; alt=&quot; &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know, ternary branching is an ugly thing to do, but I don't want to start blowing up the tree with little v or anything to make it nice and binary.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And yes, I know, if you want to make THE univeral syntax theory you can include a lot more empty categories and stuff (like I or T or whatever you may call it, for which there is no evidence they need to be assumed to exist for German).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But there is no satisfying univeral theory of syntax anyway so let's just keep things simple, I think it should be clear what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we need to move the whole VP instead of just the V, in order to be able to analyse the sentence &lt;em&gt;Dem Lehrer das Buch gegeben hat Hans&lt;/em&gt;, we would probably have someting like this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hDuXi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hDuXi.png&quot; alt=&quot; &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The end of the arrow and the index are meant to belong to the VP, not to &quot;gegeben&quot;. I couldn't figure out yet how to do this for non-terminal nodes in tikz-qtree, so just imagine the movement goes to the VP and not to V.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we then wanted to move only the verb, maybe adjunction is really still the best solution, so:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RmCxM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RmCxM.png&quot; alt=&quot; &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, trace and end of arrow are meant to refer to VP.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So we would end up with an adjunct-like structure, just as you said. This looks really unsatisfying to me, but this is still the best I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read up on the problem in Wolfgang Sternefeld's &quot;Syntax&quot; (2008) which probably comes the closest to the standard German syntax book if there is such a standard, and on p. 337 I found a parargraph about topicalisation of VPs which essentially says:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Traditionally it is assumed that there must only be maximal projections in specifier positions, but there are sentences like &lt;em&gt;Gemietet_i hat_j [.VP er das Haus nicht t_i t_j]&lt;/em&gt; where it seems to be possible to have a V head in SpecC.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So here it is assumed that my first solution would be okay.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the evidence for why it can't be a VP that is moved into SpecC is provided by the example * &lt;em&gt;[.VP er das Haus nicht gemietet] hat&lt;/em&gt;, which is obviously ungrammatical, but as far as I see only because &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; (corresponding to our &lt;em&gt;Hans&lt;/em&gt;) is moved as well, i.e. the VP under C' instead of the one under V' as in my solution, while if we moved only the latter one, we would get &lt;em&gt;[.VP das Haus nicht gemietet] hat er t_i t_j&lt;/em&gt; which seems okay to me, or at least just as marked as the other sentenes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I'm not sure that's a definite argument for allowing non-maximal projections (i.e., a V head) to be moved into SpecC and therefore for accepting my first solution.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Edit: A page later, on the other hand, it is also noted that phrasality has a differnt status in classical X-bar theory than in minimalist one; since phrasality in minimalism is not an inherent property to constituents but only defined relatively, the item in SpecC is, being a non-head, automatically &quot;locally phrasal&quot;, which would again support allowing  V to stand alone in SpecC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T20:01:51.317" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T20:01:51.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17184" CreationDate="2016-06-09T19:01:08.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your main error (as Greg Lee tried to point out) is with the relative clause &quot;what I am&quot;, which you identified using [NP N VP] {a noun phrase can consist of a clause! - that is wrong}.  A relative pronoun needs its own syntax (it is closer to being a conjunction than a pronoun).  The meaning is something like &quot;I became [the thing] that (I am [trace: the thing]).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You then have several adverbial phrases, but are they adverbial to the main verb 'became' or to the subordinate verb 'am'?  The comma is too weak of a punctuation to disambiguate the nesting.  As given, the sentence could be saying that the author was twelve when he wrote about what happened in 1975 (which would be before his birth if he was published in a timely manner!)  I think the comma should be after 'today'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that 'today' is a temporal [pro]noun, which allows it to be adverbial whereas other nouns (like 'kite') would not be.  Your parser will need a finer breakdown of syntax (such as pronoun, proper noun, class noun instead of just noun). {This is still context free parsing} &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T19:01:08.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18794" CreationDate="2016-06-10T00:56:01.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably an unsatisfactory answer, but in the Western Desert Language (Pama-nyungan, Australia) subjects can be represented by either an independent pronoun or by an enclitic pronoun. This clitic occurs clause-finally which, as clause order is SOV, means it's often bound to the verb, eg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ngayulu ya -nu&#xA;1sg go -PAST&#xA;'I went'&#xA;&#xA;ya -nu -rna&#xA;go -PAST -1sg&#xA;'I went'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is still a pronoun there it's just that it's not independent, so I don't know whether you'd want to call the subject 'implicit' or not. But in the Spanish example given by the OP the subject is actually present as well, being encoded in the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T00:56:01.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18824" CreationDate="2016-06-10T07:44:15.877" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of the rule that describes why some words are written together (e.g. &quot;strawberry&quot;) and others apart (e.g. &quot;street name&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-10T12:46:12.347" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T16:14:10.090" Title="Name of rule for whether compounds should be written with a space or not" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18822" CreationDate="2016-06-10T07:57:57.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;After long search I found it, it's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Compound&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T07:57:57.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18822" CreationDate="2016-06-10T07:59:27.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an orthography rule, not a grammar rule. Orthography isn't really a concern for linguistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that this is rather arbitrary for English. In German (or a other fusional or agglutinative languages) it's quite simple: Everything which belongs together is written together; English makes things more complicated by basically allowing three variants (written as as one word, separated by dash and written as two words, although it has a strong tendency for preferring the last one, probably reflecting its mostly isolating morphology).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion would be that compounds which receive a more idiomatic-like meaning are written together, while compounds which can be straightforwardly interpreted by decomposing it into its parts are written separately.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, &lt;em&gt;street name&lt;/em&gt; is really just the name of a street, but for &lt;em&gt;strawberry&lt;/em&gt; this is not that obvious; you might in hindsight imagine it has something to do with growing on a straw-filled underground or so, but if you have not heard the word before you can not directly infer the meaning of &lt;em&gt;strawberry&lt;/em&gt; by decomposing it into &lt;em&gt;straw&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;berry&lt;/em&gt;. The meaning the compound gets is more conventionally assigned than in e.g. &lt;em&gt;street name&lt;/em&gt;, and you would probably assume that &lt;em&gt;strawberry&lt;/em&gt; has an own lexicon entry (by &quot;lexicon entry&quot; referring to the mental lexicon, not a concrete dictionary), while &lt;em&gt;street name&lt;/em&gt; is spontaneously formed and interpreted by rules of composition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is why, I would suggested, such words are spelled as one while other (or most) as two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T16:14:10.090" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T16:14:10.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18925" CreationDate="2016-06-10T08:01:55.387" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a tokenizer for a small NLP project. After the first attempt (basically splitting at white spaces) didn't lead to good results at all, I am now starting from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to be able to detect names like &quot;San Francisco&quot; or &quot;New York&quot; as one token. My best guess is that I would need a list to check against for that? Does such a list exist somewhere on the internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13383" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T13:00:23.257" Title="List of Spaced Named Entities for English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6835" CreationDate="2016-06-10T10:01:02.050" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that we will ever be able to answer this question for sure. Recently I had the same idea as you. These &quot;hard sounds&quot; probably came from native Europeans, which were not completely replaced by Indo-Europeans, but merged. Another very likely thing is simple language evolution. We have some records of Bavarian (which is a Germanic language) of about 500 years ago. In those scripts you will usually read a lot of hard consonants, even more so than in other Germanic languages at that time. Modern Bavarian almost lost all these hard sounds. Perhaps this is because of Italian influence, but perhaps it's simply a random occurrence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you have to consider is the needs of a people. People who live in mountainous terrain tend to develop sounds in their language that travel further. Cultures that based their societies on logic and reason may adopt more softer sounds over time (to sound smarter) and cultures that base their societies on the strongest might develop harder sounds (to sound more imposing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is wild speculation of a non-professional though, but it might give you an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T10:01:02.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18869" CreationDate="2016-06-10T11:49:28.100" Score="1" ViewCount="928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been noticing recently (last few years), née/nee being used a lot more commonly both in general media (newspapers, internet, even TV), but more so on information/encyclopaedial websites such as Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally it jumped out at me on Wikipedia articles where you might find a... feminist.. &quot;connection&quot;, where one would surmise ones maiden name is of more specific import with feminists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I have been googling a lot but unable to find anyone else who has noticed/posted about &quot;this&quot;, and it stirs my interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a) what is the etymology specifically for English speaking countries (ie USA UK Australia) of the words née/nee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And b) (Perhaps this is should go on Philosophy?) Can someone speculate as to the reason for the perceived rise in use of née/nee on informational/encyclopaedial sites/resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13387" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T22:01:36.113" Title="Origin of née in English speaking countries and the rise in usage of it" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-07-03T19:51:54.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8385" CreationDate="2016-06-10T12:11:17.997" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that  Hindi gẽd descending from Skt. genduka- has a common origin with Parthian or Persian gund (avest. gunda &quot;ball of dough&quot;, pers. gondeh &quot;a lump of dough&quot;) which has been borrowed in Armenian in the forme of gunt and gentak &quot;ball&quot;&#xA;In my opinion, the phonological and semantic similarities are strong enough to rule out the alleged dravidian origin of Skt. genduka-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the references : EDP 146, POK 394, HRN 209&#xA;See : &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/AnEtymologicalDictionaryOfPersianEnglishAndOtherIndo-europeanLanguages/EtymologicalDictionary-persian-english#page/n11/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/stream/AnEtymologicalDictionaryOfPersianEnglishAndOtherIndo-europeanLanguages/EtymologicalDictionary-persian-english#page/n11/mode/1up&lt;/a&gt;​&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13388" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T12:11:17.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-10T17:40:29.873" Score="0" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have thought there would be some, but I'd love some examples. So are there any languages in which the translation of 'knowledge'is not a mass noun? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13389" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-10T23:17:21.150" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T19:28:19.940" Title="Are there any languages in which 'knowledge' is not a mass noun?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-10T20:22:16.397" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite recently I have noticed that most Bavarian verbs can become theoretical epistemic modal. What I mean by that is that you can take any verb, e.g. &quot;[i] ko&quot; - &quot;[I] can&quot;, and turn it into it's theoretical form &quot;[i] kand&quot; - &quot;[I] could&quot;. The special thing about Bavarian though is that you can make it even more theoretical and turn it into &quot;[i] kandad&quot; which could be translated to &quot;[I] could (in theory)&quot;. Another example is &quot;[i] muas&quot; - &quot;[I] must/need to&quot; turning to &quot;[i] miassd&quot; - &quot;[I] would need to&quot; and finally &quot;[i] miassad&quot; - &quot;[I] would need to (in theory)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there other languages that have this &quot;two tier system&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm especially interested in other Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if I misused any technical term. I just got into studying them, so if they are misused, please tell so I can fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:51:46.393" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:51:46.393" Title="&quot;Two tier&quot; theoretical epistemic modality" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;&lt;evidentiality&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18829" CreationDate="2016-06-10T20:46:03.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can in fact be plural in most European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian et altri there are &lt;em&gt;connaissances&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conoscenze&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Kenntnisse&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conocimientos&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;знания&lt;/em&gt;... which are typically plural and translated into English as &lt;em&gt;knowledge&lt;/em&gt; in many contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that most Germanic and Latin languages have a distinction between &lt;em&gt;connaitre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;savoir&lt;/em&gt;.  These words all share a root with the former, distinct from the root of &lt;em&gt;wisdom&lt;/em&gt;, cognates and translations of which can also be countable in some of these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T19:28:19.940" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T19:28:19.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-11T20:04:25.193" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really broad question, but can someone explain the difference between the following phenomena: topicalization, dislocation, shifting, inversion, discontinuity, and scrambling. Wikipedia says scrambling doesn't occur in English, so translated examples from other languages would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I understand very well the phenomena on their own and their definitions and examples of them and so forth, but I want to understand the relationship among them and their categorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5284" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T00:10:32.617" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T00:10:32.617" Title="Difference between dislocation, shifting, inversion, discontinuity, topicalization, scrambling" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18836" CreationDate="2016-06-12T09:42:38.600" Score="3" ViewCount="2864" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Question:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;video recordings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of Native South Americans, (Andeans), pronouncing &quot;Quinoa&quot;? - to hopefully preserve some of the cultural history behind Quinoa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa#History_and_culture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia on Quinoa&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quinoa was first domesticated &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;by Andean peoples&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. It has been an important staple in the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Andean cultures&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; where the plant is indigenous but relatively obscure in the rest of the world. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Incas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, who held the crop to be sacred, referred to it as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;chisaya mama&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &quot;mother of all grains&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" OwnerDisplayName="elika kohen" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-21T15:54:10.483" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T15:54:10.483" Title="How Do Native South Americans Pronounce Quinoa?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-12T15:40:58.753" Score="4" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;A mood in grammar is a verb form that depends on how its containing clause relates to the speaker’s or writer’s wish, intent, or assertion about reality. Mood is distinctive from tense (how a verb's intent relates to its location in time) and aspect (how a verb's intent relates to the flow of time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are considered to be three different categories of 'mood': realis (how a verb's intent is to display a fact or declaration about reality), irrealis (how a verb's intent is to indicate an action not known to have happened for a fact), and interrogative mood (considered by some to be an irrealis mood, this is a mood used to indicate a question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;irrealis moods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which language has been found to contain the most irrealis moods? How about, which language contains the least amount of irrealis moods? Or, which language most commonly uses irrealis moods in day to day conversation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13398" LastEditorDisplayName="user13398" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T22:47:17.890" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:41:17.020" Title="Which language has the most types of irrealis moods?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18833" CreationDate="2016-06-13T00:25:45.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here's a video on youtube of an inhabitant of Cusco, Peru, talking about quinoa.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L218_jZspY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;'Quinoa from a native speaker'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the speaker does not say what their language is, I think it's fair to assume their pronunciation reflects the local Quechua pronunciation. You'll note they pronounce 'quinoa' with three syllables s something like: [ˈkinəˌwa:].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The first video also notes the two syllable pronunciation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Origin of Quinoa, (Folktale), &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/7dmjOjoog4A?t=211&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Youtube Video @ 3:31&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documental: Quinua y Kiwicha, Cultivos con historia (Amaranto), &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/r-AXHXp5eT4?t=342&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Youtube Video @ 5:42&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there's no reason why everyone should be trying to say it the same as in Quechua!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="9853" LastEditDate="2016-06-21T05:07:06.537" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T05:07:06.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18834" CreationDate="2016-06-13T01:10:15.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In attempting to answer this question I think it's useful to distinguish between the terms 'mood' and 'modality':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'Modality' is the category of semantic notions relating to a speakers expression of possibility, necessity, desirability, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'Mood' refers to the grammatical devices used to signal a particular 'modality'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language has a lexicon along with grammatical structures of one kind or another which enable its speakers to express every modality that humans wish to express. But languages differ greatly in their formal moods, the number of grammatical structures dedicated to specific modalities (the meanings). While many languages only have a few grammatical expressions of mood, some have many — it's not clear what the upper limit is but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this WP page&lt;/a&gt; says that Uralic Samoyedic languages have numerous moods, with Nenets having 16, listed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/sketch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Of these 16 there are perhaps 10 that could be considered &quot;irrealis&quot;, depending on the definition used. But however they are counted, it is likely that Nenets is an extreme outlier with an unusually large set of irrealis moods and so is a possible answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the other extreme, languages with the fewest irrealis moods, it has &lt;a href=&quot;http://static1.squarespace.com/static/546276c2e4b06e0eecab0253/t/5498925de4b0efb497eb6723/1419285085139/Irrealis+in+English-Subjunctive+Mood+and+Modality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;been claimed&lt;/a&gt; that English has only one, the subjunctive, which is being gradually replaced by the modal verbs. If this eventuates then the number of irrealis moods (in the strict sense) in English will be zero, surely the lowest number possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T20:41:17.020" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:41:17.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18833" CreationDate="2016-06-13T01:11:22.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized that the simplest thing to do is look for the Quinoa wiki entry -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://qu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinwa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in Quechua&lt;/a&gt;. They give &amp;lt; kinuwa, kinwa, kiwina, kiwna &gt; to which one should add &amp;lt; kiwña &gt; from Cusihuaman's dictionary. So there are no wrong pronunciations, it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T01:18:29.807" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T01:18:29.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T03:53:16.253" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the head movement constraint of Travis (1984), and the relativized minimality of Rizzi (1990)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13402" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T23:42:58.050" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T23:42:58.050" Title="What is the difference between Travis' head movement constraint and Rizzi's relativized minimality?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T05:28:42.143" Score="1" ViewCount="1097" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the song &quot;Jorden är ett litet rum,&quot; Eva Dahlgren sings &quot;kvinnan som lever sitt liv i Stockholm...&quot; Would it be correct to say &quot;kvinnan &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; lever sitt liv i Stockholm&quot;? I ask in part because the equivalent in English -- people using &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in instances when they could use &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; -- drives me nuts. For example, one hears people in the U.S. say things like &quot;man &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; just walked down the street,&quot; instead of &quot;man &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; just walked down the street.&quot; Would &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; have been a more accurate, or altogether incorrect, choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13400" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T07:26:18.480" Title="Question about usage of Swedish words &quot;som&quot; and &quot;vem&quot;" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-06-25T00:35:26.037" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18809" CreationDate="2016-06-13T09:33:14.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preliminary point: The verb-form is the single word &quot;used&quot;, not *&quot;used to&quot;. Take your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;My car used [to malfunction a lot].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bracketed sequence is a non-finite clause acting as complement to &quot;used&quot;. &quot;To&quot; belongs in the complement clause; it's simply a marker, a subordinator whose function is to mark &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-infinitival clauses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it’s not an adverb phrase. The 'main' verb is the auxiliary verb &quot;used&quot;; it’s a tensed verb-form, more specifically a past tense form. Auxiliaries are primary (tensed) verb-forms, for example “might”, “could” and “should” are respectively the past tense forms of the present tense forms “may”, “can” and “shall”. Note, incidentally, that although “use” is an auxiliary, it is semantically quite distinct from the modal auxiliaries; the meaning it expresses is aspectual, not modal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Use” is highly defective; it has no present tense, only infinitival and past forms, so although the form “use” appears to be a present tense form, it is in fact the infinitival form which is only used in negatives and with inversion: &lt;em&gt;He didn’t use to smoke&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Did he use to smoke&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the added complication that “use” can be a lexical verb or an auxiliary one, though the books tell us that many speakers treat it as a lexical verb. I suspect that’s due to the unacceptability for many people of the auxiliary use found in %&lt;em&gt;Smoking usedn’t to be allowed&lt;/em&gt; and %&lt;em&gt;Used he to smoke?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexical Use&lt;/strong&gt; (infinitival verb-form + do-support required in negatives and questions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He used to smoke&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;He didn’t use to smoke&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Did he use to smoke?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auxiliary Use&lt;/strong&gt; (past tense verb-form, no do-support required) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He used to smoke&lt;/em&gt;. %&lt;em&gt;He usedn’t to smoke&lt;/em&gt;. %&lt;em&gt;Used he to smoke&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(% = acceptable in some dialects only)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T09:33:14.887" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T16:48:18.647" Score="0" ViewCount="842" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a phonology for a conlang. Many languages distinguish aspirated and unaspirated stops as different phonemes e.g. /p/ vs /p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/. Are there any languages, however, which lack an unaspirated realisation of the stop phoneme? As in, all realisations of that phoneme &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; contain aspiration - so /p^h/ cannot be realised as [p], for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know how realistic it would be to make aspiration required in certain stops, and whether this constraint is found in any natural languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="3340" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T17:31:14.057" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T20:19:35.577" Title="Are there languages which require aspiration for some stops?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18843" CreationDate="2016-06-13T17:38:04.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, unvoiced consonants are frequently, if not always aspirated, and the aspirated and non-aspirated consonants are allophones which do not make a difference in meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In fact, spakers of German often find it hard to even tell a difference between aspirated and non-aspirated unvoiced consonants; and similarly, speakers of German who are not used to languages which do NOT aspirate their consonsants (or in wich aspiration makes a difference in meaning) also tend to perceive a completely unapsirated unvoiced consonant as voiced, e.g. /p/ would be perceived as /b/ when pronounced without any aspiration.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So the tendency goes towards the unaspirated unvoiced consonants diverging into the more distinct counterparts, i.e. /b/ and /p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ in the case of /p/, and one might claim that a pure, fully unaspirated unvoiced consonant does not even actually exist in German, but I don't know about any phonetics studies that would confirm that the /p/ is definitely always aspirated, probably the pure /p/ without any aspirations still exists.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, I'm not sure one could claim that German does not have unaspirated consonants at all, but at least it is a language in which /p/ and /p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ are not &lt;em&gt;disgintuished&lt;/em&gt; in the sense that they can be used completely interchangeably or /p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ is not even perceived as something other than /p/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T17:38:04.693" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18840" CreationDate="2016-06-14T06:47:40.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it would be utterly incorrect to use &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; in this case. The default pronoun to use as subject or object in a relative clause in Swedish is &lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the Nordic languages, &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; ‘who(m)’ is used in three ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;as an interrogative pronoun ‘who(m)?’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By far the most common usage; one might say almost the only usage in practical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;as the object of a preposition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only when immediately following the preposition (‘with whom’, ‘to whom’). Unlike in English, this construction is highly formal and stilted; all the Nordic languages vastly prefer &lt;em&gt;that… with&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;som… med&lt;/em&gt;) to &lt;em&gt;with whom&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;med vem&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; and this usage must be categorised as reasonably rare, especially in the spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;as a pseudo-relative pronoun that includes its own antecedent&lt;/em&gt; (archaic)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That is, meaning ‘(s)he who/they who’ or ‘whoever’. In this use, the old, otherwise entirely defunct nominative &lt;em&gt;eho&lt;/em&gt; (Danish and Norwegian &lt;em&gt;hvo&lt;/em&gt;) is sometimes used, but the whole construction is &lt;em&gt;exceedingly&lt;/em&gt; rare, archaic, and stilted. The only example I can think of that has any currency at all is the Danish (and Norwegian, I think?) fixed phrase &lt;em&gt;hvo intet vover, intet vinder&lt;/em&gt; ‘he who dares nothing, wins nothing’ or more idiomatically, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. But this expression doesn’t exist in Swedish at all, and I very much doubt anyone would use &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;eho&lt;/em&gt; in this way in modern Swedish in any context at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is no use at all of &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; as a simple relative pronoun ‘that/who(m)’ in that list. There are some interrogative pronouns, like &lt;em&gt;var&lt;/em&gt; ‘where’ and &lt;em&gt;vilket&lt;/em&gt; ‘which’, that do also function as relative pronouns, but &lt;em&gt;vem&lt;/em&gt; is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that &lt;em&gt;vilket&lt;/em&gt;, which does function as a simple relative pronoun, is not used like ‘which’ in English: its antecedent is invariably a clause or some type of more or less clearly defined notion, never a simple noun phrase. This is somewhat similar to (but still distinct from) the difference in English between restrictive and non-restrictive usages of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; words (see StoneyB’s comment above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why only &lt;em&gt;vilket&lt;/em&gt; (neuter) is used relatively: the commune &lt;em&gt;vilken&lt;/em&gt; would not make sense with reference to an abstract notion. In cases where &lt;em&gt;vilket&lt;/em&gt; is used, the simpler relative pronouns may not be used, just like the corresponding cases in English can only take &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;, never &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. Or to put it in different terms: cases where English can use either ‘that’ or ‘which’&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; can only take &lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt; in Swedish, while cases where English ‘that’ would be ungrammatical must take &lt;em&gt;vilket&lt;/em&gt; in Swedish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The necklace &lt;strong&gt;that/which&lt;/strong&gt; I bought for her birthday turned out to be a fake, &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(*that)&lt;/em&gt; is a shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Halsbandet &lt;strong&gt;som&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/i&gt;(*vilket)&lt;i&gt; jag köpte till hennes födelsedag, visade sig vara falskt, &lt;strong&gt;vilket&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/i&gt;(*som)&lt;i&gt; var synd.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It is perhaps worth noting as an aside that where Swedish and Norwegian have only one relative pronoun, &lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt;, Danish has two, distinguishing between &lt;em&gt;der&lt;/em&gt; (lit. ‘there’) used only as a subject, and &lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt; used as either subject or any other constituent.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; As in English, the default relative pronoun &lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt; ‘that’ cannot be used directly following a preposition: &lt;em&gt;*med som&lt;/em&gt; ‘*with that’ is as ungrammatical and nonsensical in Swedish as it is in English.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; I am counting the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive as belonging to the same case type here; so even if one may sometimes be preferable to the other because of the level of restriction inherent in the relative clause, they are still nominally interchangeable.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T07:26:18.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T10:30:32.517" Score="1" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Then&lt;/em&gt; is mentioned as deictic in many papers but I couldn't find a sufficient explanation for that. Every example I could think of involves &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; acting as anaphora, but how decctic? If I say:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am going to eat at 1pm, I’ll see you then,&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; is the anaphora and &lt;em&gt;at 1 pm&lt;/em&gt; is the deictic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would like to see a reference too, if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12789" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T10:35:41.390" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T10:35:41.390" Title="Why is &quot;then&quot; deictic?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;deixis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T15:35:18.137" Score="1" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a publicly available dataset of spoken language for L2 acquisition? I would prefer children learning an L2, but any age range is fine. It would be great, but not necessary, to have speaking samples for each speaker in their L1 as well as L2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T09:33:40.957" Title="Spoken Language Dataset of L2 Acquisition" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T17:09:13.697" Score="4" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anybody tell me if &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.babelfish.com/success/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BabelFish translator&lt;/a&gt; is rule-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to stress that &amp;quot;Babelfish translator&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Yahoo!Babelfish&amp;quot; are not the same thing. In fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yahoo!Babelfish&amp;quot; is owned by Yahoo! In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator, to which queries were redirected. So, Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/translator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bing Microsoft Translator&lt;/a&gt;. Plus, it is rule-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Babelfish translator&amp;quot; is owned by the Babel Fish Corporation (Ottawa, Canada) and apparently it's impossible to find out if it's rule-based, statistical or hybrid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13415" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T07:41:02.727" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T19:31:18.753" Title="Is www.babelfish.com/success/ a rule-based engine?" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T17:23:29.743" Score="0" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there are any living languages without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the following: /ɬ/ or /ɮ/, postaveolars and palatals&amp;mdash;with the exception of /j/? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, a list of the excluded consonants are-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These alveolars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ɬ/ /ɮ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postalveolars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ʃ/ /ʒ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Palatals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/c/ /ɟ/ /ɲ/ /ç/ /ʝ/ /ʎ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13416" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-06-16T01:25:34.817" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T01:25:34.817" Title="Any languages without the following list of consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18849" CreationDate="2016-06-14T18:07:22.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/access/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CHILDES Transcripts and Media&lt;/a&gt; is a database for records of children acquiring languages, including both transcripts and audio/video files.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm not sure though if there is something on second language acquisition, at least they have media for bilingual children. Maybe that helps too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T20:31:26.183" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T20:31:26.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18843" CreationDate="2016-06-14T19:02:53.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/sales/software.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database&lt;/a&gt; lists these languages as having /p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ but not /p/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADZERA&#xA;AKAN&#xA;ALAMBLAK&#xA;BOBO-FING&#xA;EWE&#xA;FARSI&#xA;GA&#xA;JACALTEC&#xA;KHALKHA&#xA;KOHUMONO&#xA;KOTA&#xA;NORWEGIAN&#xA;SELEPET&#xA;TUNICA&#xA;WAPISHANA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my doubts about some (all?) of these languages, but at least it gives you a place to start looking!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5575" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T19:02:53.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-11T12:53:42.383" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any relationship (either one implies the other, for example) between the usage of characters and analytic grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By analytic grammar I mostly refer to the lack of conjugations, and hence the lack of irregular conjugations, which makes many other languages a pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the use of an alphabet (e.g. pinyin) ruin the analytic grammar of Chinese in the long-term? For example by spreading erhua into the written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="foobar" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T19:41:42.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T22:01:42.683" Title="Analytic grammar and characters in Chinese" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18843" CreationDate="2016-06-14T20:19:35.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that if all consonants are the same thing, what are they? Aspiration is generally understood to refer to voice onset time, with larger values being &quot;aspirated&quot;. But there is no threshold for deeming a sound &quot;aspirated&quot; as opposed to &quot;unaspirated&quot; if all consonants are the same. You might take the VOT values of unaspirated stops in languages with an aspiration contrast to define that difference, which is to say that you ask &quot;Are the stops of this language like the unaspirated stops of Thai, or like the aspirated stops of Thai&quot;. On those grounds, one can conclude that the voiceless stops of Spanish or Tamil are unaspirated. On those same grounds, you can conclude that the voiceless stops of Ga, Ewe, Norwegian, Khalkha (ones I know of personally: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/18853/6726&quot;&gt;malouf&lt;/a&gt; gives a longer list from UPSID), and almost all Bantu languages, are aspirated. These are languages without any unaspirated allophone. I would be willing to make a money bet that languages like Spanish with VOT in the 10 msc range are less numerous than those with VOT in the 40 msc range (it's a safe bet since we don't have measurement data on more than a fraction of extant languages). The proposal to have a conlang with all stops being aspirated is perfectly natural and well-attested, though obscured by the fact that we don't write annoying phonetic detail unless it's really necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T20:19:35.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18851" CreationDate="2016-06-14T20:38:27.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are vast numbers of languages without /ɬ/ or /ɮ/: English for example. /ɮ/ doesn't exist in any Indo-European language, and exists in maybe a dozen languages. It's easier to list the languages that have these than to list the ones that don't. Khoekhoe (Nama) has no palatals of any kind (nor does it have hlaterals); nor do Pirahã, Rotokas, Hawaiian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T20:38:27.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T21:27:15.657" Score="1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Leo Rosten's book, The Joys of Yiddish, he defines the Yiddish word for people from the Hungarian/Polish region of Galicia, as &lt;em&gt;&quot;Galitzianers&quot;&lt;/em&gt;(McGraw Hill, 1968), pp. 122-23. In singular masculine form, one would refer to the person as a &quot;Galitz.&quot;  See, e.g., Mickey Katz' recording of &quot;Sound Off,&quot; on the album &quot;Borscht Riders in the Sky.&quot;  He explains that in the Jewish world, Galitzianers were known for putting on airs.  From my experience, that means crystal chandeliers in the front foyer and the dining room, elaborate silver collection, elaborate satin robes and fur streimels (hats) for Hasidic men from that region. Moreover, their baked noodle puddings (&quot;kugels&quot;) were sweet and moist, in stark contrast to Russians and &quot;Litvaks&quot; (Lithuanian) Jews who preferred a plan potato kugel for the Sabbath meal and formal, but less dressy clothing and furnishings.  When my contemporary, who studied at the Mir Yeshiva branch in New York, was going on blind dates with girls from Galitzianer heritage, his roommate would ask, &quot;seen any good chandeliers?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've wondered if the word &quot;glitz&quot; or &quot;glitzy&quot; has any linguistic connection to &quot;Galitz&quot; because, after all, if a Galitz owned anything, it had to be glitzy.  My 1964 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary doesn't have either word.  Dictionary.com says it is slang of relatively recent vintage, ca. 1970-1975 (a surprise to me -- I thought it was older), and its source may be a combination of &quot;glitter&quot; and &quot;Ritz.&quot;  It also points to the word &quot;glitzy&quot; as its source, that word having come into use during the 1960s and likely a Yiddish variation of the German word &quot;glitzen&quot; (meaning &quot;glitter&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard for me to believe that, at least in Yiddish, the word &quot;glitzy&quot; was invented within my lifetime.  Admittedly, it does not appear in Rosten's 1968 edition of Joys of Yiddish, and I haven't checked is 21st century update.  To me, &quot;glitzy&quot; and &quot;Galitz&quot; are a natural pair.  Does any authority recognize a legitimate linguistic connection between these words, other than coincidence?  Can somebody point me to the first recorded use of the word &quot;glitzy&quot; in either the Yiddish or English vernacular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13418" LastEditorUserId="13418" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T16:23:10.537" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T16:23:10.537" Title="Derivation of &quot;glitzy&quot; -- does it have Yiddish roots?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-07-03T19:52:22.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18862" CreationDate="2016-06-14T22:00:37.390" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I saw an experiment on a documentary which a simple artificial language (just a set of ten words or something like that) was artificially created by a recurring process of memorizing errors of the previous person on remembering the given language (which was initially just randomly created) and the result of each iteration was passed to next person, which after some iterations, the result was a language that was easy to memorize and also some incidental rules could be extracted from it. What method is called that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13419" LastEditorUserId="13419" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T11:42:34.337" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T11:42:34.337" Title="Experiment of creating an artificial language by cycles of memorizing errors" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18854" CreationDate="2016-06-14T22:01:42.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is very little relationship between the structure and grammar of languages and how they are written. Bear in mind that most languages that have ever existed were unwritten, that some languages have been written in more than one writing system, and that native speakers of a language almost invariably learn to speak before they learn to read and write. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever might be their view for or against Chomsky's Universal Grammar, virtually all linguists agree that language &quot;happened naturally&quot; in some sense, whereas writing was an invented technology, that came along only in the last few thousand years. It is conceivable that the writing system of a language could have been devised with reference to the grammatical structure of a language, but I'm not aware of any examples. (Sanskrit is the only example we have, as far as I am aware, of a pre-literate tradition of grammatical analysis; and while the Devanagari script is ordered on phonetic principles - unlike the arbitrary arrangement of European alphabets - I don't believe there is anything particular to Sanskrit grammar in its construction and use). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T22:01:42.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18794" CreationDate="2016-06-14T22:29:39.673" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you’ll accept non-natural languages, one such case would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;J.R.R. Tolkien’s conlang Quenya&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general system of conjugation in Quenya is that the ‘verbal endings’ that show person and number are really just clitic and optionally shortened forms of the personal pronouns. They are thus not really verbal endings at all—they can also be added to other things, like prepositions. They have standalone forms (with optional lengthening of the vowel when stressed) and clitic forms (long and short); nominative/accusative is not distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a few pronouns to work with (listing &lt;em&gt;standalone, stressed standalone, long clitic, short clitic&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1sg.:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ní&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-nyë&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; ‘I/me’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2sg. informal:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;lyë&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lyé&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-lyë&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-l&lt;/em&gt; ‘thou/thee’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3pl. (animate/inanimate):&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;te/tai&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;té/tai&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ltë/-ntë&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-lt/-nt&lt;/em&gt; ‘they’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standalone forms act as nouns and can take cases, while the clitic forms can be suffixed to words like verbs and prepositions, but take no clitics themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; (dative) → &lt;em&gt;nin&lt;/em&gt; ‘to me’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;mi&lt;/em&gt; ‘in’ (prep.) + &lt;em&gt;-nyë&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;minyë&lt;/em&gt; ‘in me’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tul-i-&lt;/em&gt; ‘come’ (vb., aorist stem) + &lt;em&gt;-n(yë)&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;tulin&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tulinyë&lt;/em&gt; ‘I come’ (aorist)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a standalone pronoun is used as the subject of a verb, however, the verb takes no personal ending of its own: the pronoun is only expressed once. Instead, a simpler, endingless form of the verb is used, which only distinguishes number (the singular and plural forms are known; the dual form is not known). The singular is the bare inflectional stem, and the plural is formed by adding &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ní&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tul-i-&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ní tulë&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;té&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tul-i-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;té tulir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quenya also has specifically emphatic pronouns that presumably &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; emphasise the subject. These are made up of the stem &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; with the (non-shortened) clitic form of the pronoun suffixed; so the 1sg. form is &lt;em&gt;enyë&lt;/em&gt;. These are also used with the endingless verb form, as can be seen in this direct quote from the song &lt;em&gt;Namárië&lt;/em&gt; (‘Farewell’) from &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, which uses the 2sg. future (&lt;em&gt;-uva-&lt;/em&gt;) of the verb &lt;em&gt;hir-&lt;/em&gt; ‘find’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Namárië! Nai &lt;strong&gt;hiruvalyë&lt;/strong&gt; Valimar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nai &lt;strong&gt;elyë hiruva&lt;/strong&gt;. Namárië!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Farewell! Perhaps thou shalt find Valimar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Perhaps even thou shalt find it. Farewell!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are not many examples of verbs with actual third-person subject endings, but there are many with explicit subjects, and these all have the endingless forms as well: &lt;em&gt;[laurië] &lt;strong&gt;lantar&lt;/strong&gt; lassi&lt;/em&gt; (‘[like gold] &lt;em&gt;fall&lt;/em&gt; the leaves’, aorist of &lt;em&gt;lanta-&lt;/em&gt; ‘fall’), &lt;em&gt;mornië &lt;strong&gt;utúlië&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (‘darkness &lt;em&gt;has come&lt;/em&gt;’, perfect of &lt;em&gt;tul-&lt;/em&gt; ‘come’), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though I haven’t been able to find any sources that say this in so many words, I think it’s safe to say that the system of only adding personal pronoun clitics to the verb when there is no explicit subject holds when the subject is a noun phrase rather than a pronoun, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This endingless form is also used when negating verbs. Generally, Quenya is loosely based on Finnish, of which Tolkien was a great fan, and this is no exception: as in Finnish, negating a verb involves conjugating a ‘negative verb’ and leaving the main verb in an impersonal form that only distinguishes number (in some tenses); for example Finnish &lt;em&gt;ole-n&lt;/em&gt; ‘I am’ vs. &lt;em&gt;e-n ole&lt;/em&gt; ‘I am not’ and Quenya &lt;em&gt;cára-n(yë)&lt;/em&gt; ‘I make’ vs. &lt;em&gt;ua-n(yë) cára&lt;/em&gt; ‘I do not make’. In Finnish, however, an explicit subject does not cause the verb to be in the endingless form, so it is &lt;em&gt;minä olen&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;*minä ole&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Final &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; regularly yields &lt;em&gt;-ë&lt;/em&gt; in Quenya, so &lt;em&gt;tulë&lt;/em&gt; is the expected outcome of &lt;em&gt;*tuli&lt;/em&gt;. This historical sound change is also taken piecemeal from Finnish.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T22:29:39.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18859" CreationDate="2016-06-14T23:05:12.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like one of the series of papers by Kirby and/or Smith; e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/106454603322694825&quot;&gt;Smith, Kirby, Brighton 2003&lt;/a&gt;. They just call it 'iterated learning'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T23:05:12.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18827" CreationDate="2016-06-15T00:08:58.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You asked for its origin: It means 'born' in French, and it's feminine by virtue of the added &quot;-e&quot;.  &quot;Née&quot; is used in English when stating a married woman's maiden-name.  &quot;Né&quot; would be masculine, but it isn't traditional for a man to change his last name upon marriage, so that explains its absence.  (Compare the woman's name &quot;Renée&quot;, which means 'born again' in the Christian sense, and the man's name &quot;René&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have always seen it (in the USA), in both contemporary and historical (especially genealogical) sources, and hadn't perceived an increase in its frequency.  I propose it could be simply that Wikipedia has exploded with biographical details over recent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T00:08:58.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T07:44:40.783" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing research on pure Chinese and I need a auditory recording made between 1930-1970. I searched for subject of anthropology in Hong Kong local library and found nothing material in auditory type. Are there any other ways? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13406" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T09:17:38.633" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T09:17:38.633" Title="Where can I find auditory records of Chinese Mandarin within 1930-1970?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18858" CreationDate="2016-06-15T09:23:28.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;glitz&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;glitzy&lt;/em&gt; entered English via Yiddish, but has nothing to do with Galicia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like much of the Yiddish lexicon they have close cousins in standard German and German dialects and more distant cousins in modern English.  (English cognates are &lt;em&gt;glitter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;glisten&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-06-16T21:25:56.657" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T21:25:56.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18849" CreationDate="2016-06-15T09:33:40.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enter &lt;code&gt;learners corpus&lt;/code&gt; into the search slit of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual language observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt; and you will find a plethora of resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T09:33:40.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T14:30:55.437" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name for the phenomenon or process by which the brain knows what &quot;it&quot; in a sentence refers to ? &#xA;For example : I left my book on the table but when I came back, IT wasn't there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13428" OwnerDisplayName="Prunelle" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T12:02:29.097" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T12:02:29.097" Title="What is the name for the phenomenon or process by which the brain knows what &quot;it&quot; in a sentence refers to?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18867" CreationDate="2016-06-13T15:35:08.440" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within some branches of linguistics, it may be referred to as any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reference resolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronoun resolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronoun reference resolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anaphora resolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that reference resolution is a more general term which includes pronoun resolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" OwnerDisplayName="Araucaria" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T15:35:08.440" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18827" CreationDate="2016-06-15T15:05:34.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question (a)&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; is the female past participle of the French word &lt;em&gt;naître&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;to be born*. English has borrowed the word from French with the meaning &quot;born with the name&quot;. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, &lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; in this sense is attested since at least 1758, and &lt;em&gt;nee&lt;/em&gt; (without the accent) since the late 19th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All attestations in the OED are from  them from British English speakers, and I have no information available on the etymology of the word in American or Australian English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question (b)&lt;/strong&gt;: If I was to speculate on the reasons for the perceived rise of the word's frequency, my guess would be confirmation bias: for whatever reason, the word came to your attention at one point, and since then, you have started noticing it in other places, thus giving you the impression that it's being used more often everywhere even though you only perceive it more often now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not unlikely that the starting point was, indeed, Wikipedia. The portal encourages the use of the word in its guidelines for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_about_women&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles about women&lt;/a&gt; when referring to the maiden name of women who have changed their last name after marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13421" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T22:01:36.113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T22:01:36.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T16:14:09.070" Score="2" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language in which the present tense exactly expresses present time reference? English may use present tense to express past events(known as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;historical present&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) and future events(especially in some dependent clauses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2593/what-is-the-present-tense-expressing-future&quot;&gt;a post&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Indo-European languages generally have two tenses: past and non-past. The non-past (what you call the present) can be used for the future, though depending on the language other means might be preferable when speaking about the future.&quot; Therefore, I guess most Indo-European languages can use present tense to express future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical present is found in English, Latin, French, Russian, and other languages. I think it is a rhetorical device rather than a grammatical phenomenon. Even Japanese has historical present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, in a conditional sentence, English and French may use present tense for future reference in the dependent clause, while Italian uses future tense. However, in a clause introduced by &quot;as soon as&quot;(obviously not a conditional clause), we can still use present tense for future reference. Therefore, the provided information is still insufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Sentences that express general truths or aphorisms are not considered here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T14:22:54.843" Title="Is there a language in which the present tense expresses only present time reference?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;present&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T16:59:49.767" Score="8" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how has the field of linguistics was changed (altered? untouched?) by Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories in &lt;em&gt;Tractatus&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Philosophical Investigations&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All Wittgenstein's work deals with language as a center. I know he is not specifically speaking of a particular language (I am not sure if it actually needs to be a spoken language as well). But in general, did any of his work have any consequences in the way linguists approach their work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2408" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T23:38:41.243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T23:38:41.243" Title="What are the practical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories in the field of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18876" CreationDate="2016-06-15T20:25:37.427" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the start of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/under-lamp-jerry-hanifin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; for learning British Sign Language, there is a sign which I don't recognise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VgITv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VgITv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Man pulling eyebrow with index finger of non-dominant hand&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the index finger of the non-dominant hand, the signer is pulling their eyebrow down while quirking the other eyebrow up. The signer immediately follows with the sign for &quot;who?&quot; - namely the rotating upward-pointed index finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caption at this point is &quot;Who is it?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't identify what the sign means in isolation, and I can't find it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this sign mean? My best guess at its meaning is as a question indicator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, is there a way I'm missing of searching the Internet for the meaning of unknown signs? (I've tried describing the sign, but I don't even get anything relevant for &lt;code&gt;british sign language eyebrow&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13423" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T10:53:22.600" Title="British Sign Language symbol identification" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-06-22T17:52:20.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8966" CreationDate="2016-06-15T22:57:11.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corbett's 2007 paper attributes the term &quot;overlapping suppletion&quot; to Juge (1999).&#xA;Juge, Matthew L. 1999. On the rise of suppletion in verbal paradigms. &lt;em&gt;Berkeley Linguistics Society&lt;/em&gt; 25.183–94. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13424" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T22:57:11.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18874" CreationDate="2016-06-16T10:53:22.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The man in the picture you posted wiggles his eyebrows in imitation of the man on the screen. This is not (a morphemic) part of the sign he is producing. Also, the sign you are asking about is not (syntactically) part of the sentence &quot;Who is it?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He puts his index finger to his eyebrow. That sign means &lt;code&gt;consider&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;ponder&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;think&lt;/code&gt;. In the Dictionary of British Sign Language/English, that may be found under entry 313. This sign may be produced with a slightly different handshape (with bent knuckles) and movement (the hand may make small clockwise motions) which might be why you didn't recognise it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why this word is used here, I would translate it as &lt;code&gt;Hmmm&lt;/code&gt;. So a more literal translation of the first few words might be something like &lt;code&gt;Hmmm, who is that? Why, it's ...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T10:53:22.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8966" CreationDate="2016-06-16T17:09:13.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another example in another language (English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &quot;go&quot; and &quot;wend&quot; share the same past, although Dictionary.com &amp;amp; Amer. Heritage say the past of &quot;wend&quot; is now &quot;wended&quot;, and &quot;went&quot; is archaic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went;&#xA;(thou wentest);&#xA;he/she/it went;&#xA;we went;&#xA;you went;&#xA;they went&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T17:09:13.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T18:30:34.953" Score="2" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word sibling comes from sib + ling.  According to the OED the etymology of sib is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology: Old English sib(b , = Old Frisian (and Frisian) sib ,&#xA;  Middle Dutch sib(be , zibbe , Old High German sippi (Middle High&#xA;  German sippe ), Gothic (un)sibjis . With the noun uses compare Old&#xA;  Frisian sibba , sibbe , Middle Dutch sibbe , etc., Old Saxon sibbio&#xA;  (Middle Low German sibbe ), Old High German sippo (German sippe , sipp&#xA;  ) kinsman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there another other equivalents of the word sibling in other European languages which come from the same root?  The German word &quot;geschwister&quot; for example seems to come from  Middle High German geswister, from Old High German giswestar which is a different root as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact I am not even sure which other European languages have a word for sibling. It seems that French does not but Danish has &quot;søskende&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13431" LastEditorUserId="13431" LastEditDate="2016-06-16T19:11:22.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T14:58:27.973" Title="Sibling in other European languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6863" CreationDate="2016-06-16T20:13:55.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just adding to Franck's answer:&#xA;-Recall is not really used in dependency parsing evaluation, because every word is &quot;recalled&quot;. Only if you were to measure the precision of a single label, it would make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important metric for evaluating dependency parsing is the &quot;branch precision&quot;. This metric measures the number of paths from root to nodes which contain only correctly annotated nodes. If the Root is identified incorrectly, the entire sentence is wrong. It considers the nodes closer to the root, in the dependency tree, more important, because they drive the logical structure of the sentence, the trunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12501" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T20:13:55.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T20:36:17.690" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a linguistic student and I'm looking for a reliable source (Scientific paper, dictionary or even reliable internet website) which lists time adverbs &amp;amp; frequency adverbs in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can think of something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9857" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T18:00:16.093" Title="Looking for time adverbs &amp; frequency adverbs lists in english" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18883" CreationDate="2016-06-17T05:22:07.307" Score="-1" ViewCount="1214" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice question is below. I am having trouble understanding what assimilation means in this context. Also, I don't understand why &lt;em&gt;unbelievable&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced &lt;em&gt;umbelievable&lt;/em&gt; when spoken fast via linguistic rules but not the other two give - &lt;em&gt;ungrateful&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;undeniable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An assimilation rule applies for many speakers of “English” when speaking fast. They pronounce certain “n”s as “m”s. For example:&#xA;  “uNbelievable” is pronounced as “uMbelievable”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, certain “n” s are pronounced as the “ng”-(engma) sound, e.g.&#xA;  “uNgrateful” is pronounced            “uNGgrateful” (“NG” is a single phoneme/gesture/articulation,  namely ENGMA---I just can’t type it!))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, in other environments the n remains an n, as in for example.&#xA;   uNdeniable which is pronounced  uNdeniable &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using distinctive feature analysis, explain what’s going on here. Use Underspecification of the feature values on the underlying, stored, nasal phoneme of the prefix  “UN—“. What is the assimilation rule that applies in these cases? Do your best to use formal notation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13434" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T19:01:23.710" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T21:53:55.310" Title="Assimilation Help" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18882" CreationDate="2016-06-17T06:47:27.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did you make sure you have understood what assimilation means in general, not only, as you said, &quot;in this context&quot;? I think this task is pretty straightforward if you stick close to the definitions and go through them step by step.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Basic definition&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;assimilation&lt;/strong&gt; is a phonological process by which a sound segment is made more similar to one of its neighbouring sounds with respect to at least one feature.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Assimilation mostly occurs to make pronounciation easier - however, this is not part of the definition, this observation is perceptually-driven, as @user6726 points out.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For consonants, those features are:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place of articulation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;manner of articulation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voicing  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Assimilation in this example&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solve the exercise, you now just need to check those conditions step by step:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place of articulation:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the original [n] is alveolar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the neighbouring [b] is bilabial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the resulting [m] is bilabial  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point you are actually already done: You can see that &lt;strong&gt;the [n] is made more similar to [b] with respect to place of articulation&lt;/strong&gt;, namely that [m] is a bilabial sound which [b] is as well. This is why the change from /n/ to [m] is an instance of assimilation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This makes sense, intuitively: It is easier to pronounce the sequence [mb] where you lips and tongue are already in the right place rather than [nb] where you first have to move your tongue and then close your lips to produce both sounds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could of course also check for other features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;manner of articulation:  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[n] is a nasal  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[b] is a plosive  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[m] is a nasal  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;=&gt; the manner of articulation is not assimilated to [b]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;voicing:  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[n] is voiced  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[b] is voiced  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[m] is voiced  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;=&gt; voicing is not assimilated either because [n] and [m] already are both voiced&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(This is only the case for this particular instance; of course, voicing might look different in sound clusters like /N-p/ or /N-k/. But since voicing is in general a feature set with respect to which consonants can be classified and compared, I thought it to make the reasoning steps more complete.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can now also see why the assimilations are different in the other examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the case of &quot;ungrateful&quot;, we have a neighbouring [n] and [g], where [n] is alveolar, [g] is velar and the reulting [ŋ] is velar =&gt; [n] is again assimilated to [g] w.r.t. place of articulation; this time not bilabial but velar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Obiously, it wouldn't make sense to turn the [n] into a [m] here when the next sound you want to pronounce is [g]; correspondingly, it wouldn't help either to make [n] a [ŋ] when you then want to pronounce a [b], in fact a [ŋ] would be even worse as its place of articulation is even further away.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the case of &quot;undeniable&quot;, [n] and [d] are both already alveolar - assimilation is applied, but vacuously, i.e. without it making a visible change to the previous version.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Again, in this word [n] is not made a [m] because this wouldn't make it easier to pronounce the sequence [nd].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Other instances of assimilation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example uses only place of articulation as a feature for assimilation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are of course other types, where e.g. unvoiced consonants become voiced between vowels.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, assimilation can not only apply to consonants but also to vowels: Vowel harmony, which occurs e.g. in Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish, makes vowels more similar with respect to horizontal tongue position, i.e. within a word there should only occur either only front or only back vowels, and when appending an affix (all of those three languages are agglutinative languages), there is usually two variants of them, one with a front and one with a back vowel where the one which more similarity (front/back) to the other vowels in the word is chosen, or if you want to use underspecification, there is one underspecified underlying affix which may be realised in a different way if the context requires so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Underspecification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying, underspecified phoneme is /N/ (note the capitalisation, reflecting its underspecified status) which is, by the use of a phonological assimilation rule, realised as the sound [m] in a context where it is followed by a [b].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Using undrespecification of the prefix, one could take &quot;uN-&quot; (/ʌN/) as the underspecified prefix, which then, by a phonological assimilation rule, gets realised as either [ʌn], [ʌm] or [ʌŋ] depending on the phonetic context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Rule notation&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rule notation, you could start out as follows:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/n/ -&gt; [m] / _[b]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the rule a more formal and generative one, you should now try and abstract away from the concrete phoneme lables ([n m b]) by using distinctive features instead (such as [+cons], [LAB] etc.), but I hope you will be able to do this by yourself from what I wrote.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this answers your question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Again, I really think it would help to take a look at the definition of assimilation again and then just apply the feature checks step by steps, the difference between the examples becomes very clear then.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: To quickly type phonetic symbols (since one unfortunately can't TeX in the editor here...), you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA typeit&lt;/a&gt; and then simply copy-paste the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T21:53:55.310" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T21:53:55.310" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18878" CreationDate="2016-06-17T09:35:27.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;German has the word &lt;em&gt;Sippe&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;tribe&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;kinfolk&lt;/em&gt; (in a broader sense), nowadays probably mostly used as a deprecative word for someone's family, which has the same root as English &lt;em&gt;sibling&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sippe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Old High German &lt;em&gt;sibba&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sippa&lt;/em&gt;, from Proto-Germanic * &lt;em&gt;sibjō&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Cognate to English &lt;em&gt;sib&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T09:35:27.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T10:02:06.660" Score="1" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know hebrew and I was reading a transliteration of the following phrase,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;חכו ממתקים וכלו מחמדים זה דודי וזה רעי בנות ירושלם׃&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the word &quot;מחמדים&quot; referring to a person name or an adjective ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13435" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T15:20:54.770" Title="Is the word the name of a person or an adjective?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-25T00:29:40.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2016-06-17T10:47:46.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the question has been marked as answered, but I'm not entirely happy with what was said so far, so I'd like to add my understanding of the terms:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with @Dominik Lukes' explanation on the signifier/signified part, but I think &quot;a case where 1 signified has more than 1 signifier&quot; is not quite not what Frege had in mind with his distinction between sense and denotation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This explanation sounds to me rather like a description of a polyseme or, even worse, a homonym (this would rather correspond to the case of one signifier having two different signified).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also I wouldn't say &quot;yet another signifier/sense&quot; using &quot;signifier&quot; and &quot;sense&quot; next to each other as if they could be used interchangeably.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I think the explanations currently given do not quite match what sense and denotation is about, at least in the way I understood them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, the terms can roughly be translated to the more recent semantic notions of &lt;strong&gt;intension&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;extension&lt;/strong&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;intension&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit hard to grasp; it is meant to stand for all the content an expression could possibly have, abstracting away from its denotation in a specific situation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, the intension of a proposition can be viewed as the set of all possible worlds in which that proposition is true (sometimes the term &quot;proposition&quot; itself is used to refer to the intension of a proposition).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To make this a bit more intuitive, I'd like to mention that Frege said something like &quot;knowing what a sentence means is knowing what must be the case for it to become true&quot;, i.e. if you take the sense of a proposition like &quot;The sun is shining&quot;, you have an imagination of all possible worlds/situations/cases in which the sun shines, and the essence about exactly that set of possible worlds is what makes your understanding of what it means in general that &quot;The sun is shining&quot;, without evaluating this knowledge with respect to a certain situation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The intension of a predicate would, seen set-theoretically, map from possible worlds to the concrete sets of individuals in the actual world, so you get the sense of &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt; that is not directly dependant on who is sleeping in our world at the moment but rather on the general concept of &quot;sleep&quot;, which can again be imagined as a collection of how sleeping looks like in any possible world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The intension of an individual could, a bit more philosophically, be seen as an accumulation of all properties that individual has (not to cunfuse with a quantificational account of indivudals, where individuals are treated like quantified expressions being sets of predicates that contain the individual), i.e. everything that the individual is all about in all the possible worlds, and the intension/the sense of an indidual isn't actually the reference to that particular individual in the actual world, but rather the imagination of what that individual could be in all possible cases.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;extension&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, is the denotation of the intension with respect to one particular situation. The extension can be seen as equivalent to the reference of an expression.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In truth-conditional semantics, the extension/the denotation of a proposition is simply its truth value: Taking a sentence like &quot;The sun is shining&quot;, the extension of that sentence in a particular situation is true/1 if and only the sun is shining in our situation, and false/0 if it is not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The extension of an individual is the reference to exactly that individual; this is why I would agree with @Greg Lee on the assertion that signified and deontation actually amount to the same thing, at least I'm not aware of any difference (both can be explained using terms such as &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt;). Feel free to corret me if I'm wrong.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would set the &lt;strong&gt;sense&lt;/strong&gt; of an expression equivalent to the &lt;em&gt;intension&lt;/em&gt; of an expression, the &quot;idea&quot; of that sentence, knowing its meaning in all possible cases, without evaluating that idea w.r.t. a particular situation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Correspondingly, I would set the &lt;strong&gt;denotation&lt;/strong&gt; of an expression equivalent to the &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt; and possibly also the &lt;em&gt;signified&lt;/em&gt; of an expression, which is the reference of that expression to the actual individual/truth value/set/... it denotes in a particular situation we are talking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some further information that is related to the problem:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.433.3881&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Moschovakis (1994)&lt;/a&gt; (full reference see below) chooses quite an interesting approach to make the terms a little clearer: He tries to account for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Sense and denotation as algorithm and value&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Basically, he suggestes that the sense of an expression can be regarded as an algorithm to compute the meaning of an expression, while the denotation is the value we get by applying the algorithm with respect to a specific situation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &quot;algorithm&quot; corresponds to what our interior concept of the meaning of a certain expression is and the &quot;value&quot; to the judgement we make about that meaning applied to a specific situation, so we compute the meaning (in the sense of reference) to the actual world an expression has by applying our generic algorithm steps related to that concept and evaluating its value against what is the case in the world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you want to do it a bit more formal, the intension of an expression can be viewed as a function mapping from possible worlds to extensions (depending on the type of expression, this extension is a truth value, a set, an individual, ...), which you apply to a possible world (the argument) and get the extension of the expression in that world you just computed the value for.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So if the intension of a proposition is a function taking possible worlds as arguments and giving as an output the truth value of the proposition in that possible world, then the value of that term (i.e. f(w) ) is 1 or 0 depending on whether the proposition is true in w.  And the algorithm, i.e. the sense or the intension of the proposition is precisely this f - which fits to the approaches made in other theories that the intension of an expression always be a function from possible worlds to whathever that expression denotes, and according to Moschovakis, it is that function which represents the algorithm of a meaning.&#xA;The intension of a predicate then is a function which is, again, applied to a possible world and returns as value the set of individuals that fulfill the predicate in that very world.&#xA;You could theoretically do the same for individuals, but assuming that proper names be rigid designators (i.e. that a name will always refer to the same indivudal in any world or situation; although one could argue against this) this maybe seems not as intuitive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Altough there was no actual definition of an algorithm at the time of Frege yet, his writings suggest that he did have an idea of what an algorithm is, and that this might correspond to what he had in mind with his sense and denotation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I find the idea of the sense of an expression being an algorithm you have in your mind which allows us to derive the specific denotation/value in any situation is a really elegant way to capture the two notions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Another (subjective) comment on Dominik Lukes' answer:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say that both of the distinctions produce more prolbems than they solve.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is crucial to distinguish the expression (the signifier) from its denotation (the signified) - in fact, without that distniction, you wouldn't really be able to do any semantics, if you can't compare a term with its meaning because you assume that they are actually the same.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And the notion of intensionality (&lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;Bedeutung&lt;/em&gt;) has had a huge impact on semantic theory, most of which I find not too implausible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, how would you account for propositional attitudes like &quot;John knows that grass is green&quot; if you are not able to distinguish between the general sense of an expression and its reference in a specific situation? You clearly can not just restrict yourself to extension, because then, as long as John knows something that is true, everything with the same extension would automatically be in the set of things he knows - and clearly, John won't know everything that is true just because he knows one thing that is true, but this is exactly what you would get if you assumed that there is nothing more of a meaning to an expression than its denotation in the actual world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And how would you do modal logic, if you can not talk about possible worlds? There would be no way to account for notions like &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;necessity&lt;/em&gt;, which I think is not unimportant to talk about in both linguistics and related fields like philosophy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, you can also not just restrict yourself to just the sense of an expression - knowing what must in general be the case for it to become true or to have an idea of what properties apply to it doesn't help much if you aren't able to compute its meaning (its denotation) in an actual world; you woldn't be able to make simple judgements as &quot;It is true that the sun is shining&quot; in a close to systematic way if you have no way to account for the actual meaning  in a given situation of something that was said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would claim that &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;denotation&lt;/em&gt; can indeed been told apart to a certain degree, and when there are two different concepts, there should be two different names.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So although such notions are of course always hard to capture, I really wouldn't say that the distinction brings more disadvantages than benefits.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But probably this is something one can have a lot of different opinions about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My explanations presuppose a highly truth-functional approach to natural language semantics; I am aware that one could try to account for the two concepts in a completely different way, e.g. by cognitive semantics making use of more psychological evidence, and that there is a lot of criticism one could impose against such a bare truth-functional/set-theoretical/formal-logical account of meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I still think that they are not too useless especially when it comes to the actual meaning of very vague terminology; sticking to rather strictly defnied entities like functions, sets and truth values often helps to disambiguate between notions that are hard to capture concisely.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sidenote&lt;/strong&gt; on the correct translation of &lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bedeutung&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is true that the translation of the terms &lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bedeutung&lt;/em&gt; is not as easy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Actually, I would argue that the English set of terms is a more suitable one: &lt;em&gt;Bedeutung&lt;/em&gt; is, in ordinary language use, mostly understood as something more intensional, while &lt;em&gt;denotation&lt;/em&gt; makes it clear that we refer to a particular instance of that meaning in an actual world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Sense&lt;/em&gt; is a direct translation of &lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt;, and probably more staightforward to interpret, although &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; is probably not something you would find a lot in the terminology of more recent semantic research.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper I referred to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Moschovakis, Y. N. (1994). Sense and denotation as algorithm and value. &lt;em&gt;Lecture notes in logic&lt;/em&gt;, 2, 210-249.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T14:28:47.967" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T14:28:47.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18878" CreationDate="2016-06-17T10:54:09.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English &lt;em&gt;sibling&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=Sibling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ultimately derived&lt;/a&gt; from the Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*s(w)e-bh(o)&lt;/em&gt;, an enlargement of the root &lt;em&gt;*swe-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;self&quot; and is related to the second element in the English word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gossip&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;gossip&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages have words which are also derived from the PIE &lt;em&gt;*s(w)e-bh(o)&lt;/em&gt;, for example, Russian has the root &lt;em&gt;seb-&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;себ-&quot;) also meaning &quot;self&quot; (для себя - 'dlya sebya' - &quot;for oneself&quot;). There is also an adjective &lt;em&gt;sobstvenny&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;собственный&quot;) - '(one's) own' formed from another variant of the root, &lt;em&gt;*sob-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T10:54:09.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T11:58:03.673" Score="3" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize in advance for the explicit words, the question is anyway purely linguistical. Feel free to censore the words if appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that the American slang expression &quot;Do not break my balls!&quot; was brought to America by the Italian mafia, literally translating the very common Italian expression &quot;Non rompermi le palle!&quot;, a vulgar way of saying &quot;Stop bothering me!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, is this true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: I have heard that in Colombian Spanish slang, especially among outlaws, the expression &quot;Que gonorrea!&quot; is used analogously to the English &quot;What a pain in the ass!&quot;. &#xA;In Sicilian dialect there exists an expression, &quot;Che camurria!&quot;, which means the same both literally and in use.&#xA;Could this expression be brought to Colombia by the Italians outlaws? Or is there a Latin common origin? (To the best of my knowledge, nowhere else is an analogous expression used.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other examples of words (maybe) spread to other languages by the crime?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5563" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T14:16:17.693" Title="Expressions derived from Italian mafia" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18788" CreationDate="2016-06-17T13:52:58.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we can. Here is an example from English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you been in an accident? Call our team now on 07123 45678.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That second sentence is only meant to apply if you have been in an accident. Questions and conditionals are related in many interesting ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T17:35:15.533" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T17:35:15.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18903" CreationDate="2016-06-17T14:50:16.980" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a beginner of nlp.&#xA;I'm wondering who is annotator of corpus usually ?&#xA;Who does actually do works of annotating ? Researchers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13436" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T13:17:38.930" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T17:16:12.853" Title="Who is corpus annotator" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18885" CreationDate="2016-06-17T15:20:54.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/text/songs/5-16.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Song of Solomon 5:16&lt;/a&gt; and the word means &quot;most sweet&quot;, so it is not a name. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/songs/5-16.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;New International Version&lt;/a&gt; of the Bible translates it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, this is my friend, daughters of Jerusalem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9284" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T15:20:54.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-17T22:21:26.313" Score="2" ViewCount="2729" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is said that donkey may have been from &quot;dun&quot;   /ˈdʌn/  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/donkey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/donkey&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that were true, I was wondering why donkey's pronunciation has changed from /ˈdʌŋki/ to /ˈdɒŋki/ while monkey is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a few hypotheses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of 'donkey' was affected by 'don'/dɒn/.&#xA;But why hasn't 'monkey' been affected by 'mon' /mɔːn/, which is also a word.&#xA;Maybe word frequency matters?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distinctive features-- somehow [d] makes [ɒ] a better choice for the following vowel while [m] prefers [ʌ]. &#xA;However, I can't find a reasonable explanation along this route. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's just random. Like Ghoti.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone has any thoughts? Preferably the distinctive feature method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13438" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T09:42:59.673" Title="Donkey and Monkey: why has the pronunciation of donkey changed? (Distinctive features?)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18892" CreationDate="2016-06-18T04:26:54.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the etymology from &quot;dun&quot; is true, I would guess the current pronunciation is either random or a spelling pronunciation, not a regular sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some evidence that some people think of the pronunciation &quot;dunkey&quot; as sounding uneducated due to the apparent mismatch between the spelling and the pronunciation: &lt;a href=&quot;http://deepsouthmag.com/2013/04/25/not-our-kind-of-folks-southern-soundscapes-in-to-kill-a-mockingbird/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://deepsouthmag.com/2013/04/25/not-our-kind-of-folks-southern-soundscapes-in-to-kill-a-mockingbird/&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=516740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=516740&lt;/a&gt; This perception could provide social pressure towards changing the pronunciation from /ˈdʌŋki/ to /ˈdɒŋki/ even though there was no general phonological reason for the vowel to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why similar pressures did not cause &quot;monkey&quot; to be pronounced with /ɒ/. One thing I notice is that the word &quot;monkey&quot; is older and so it may have had more time to get an established upper-class pronunciation that people were widely aware of. In contrast, &quot;donkey&quot; is more recent, and seems to have started out as a slang or lower-class word (the formal term used to be &quot;ass&quot;) so when it started to be more widely used, it may have been easy to assume that the pronunciation with /ʌ/ was just some kind of lazy pronunciation or lower-class corruption of /ɒ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideas that spelling should indicate proper pronunciation, or that there are such things as &quot;corrupt&quot; or &quot;lazy&quot; pronunciations (that people of lower social classes or lower educational levels are particularly prone to use), are meaningless from an objective linguistic viewpoint, but nevertheless common. The existence of these ideas in literate societies means that spelling can have very real effects on spoken language, despite the common insistence among linguists that spoken language is the &quot;real&quot; thing and writing just an unimportant side-effect that allows us to record spoken language. (In fact, I think the idea that &quot;real language = spoken language&quot; is pushed so hard by some linguists because they're trying to combat the erroneous idea floating around in many cultures that the written word is primary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T04:53:39.767" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T04:53:39.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18895" CreationDate="2016-06-18T11:26:22.907" Score="3" ViewCount="3843" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguapress.com/grammar/word-stress.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rule No. 4 in this link&lt;/a&gt;, the suffix &quot;-ist&quot; does not affect the stress of a word. Hence the stress assignment rule &lt;code&gt;σ → [+stress] / ___ ((˘) σ) ]word&lt;/code&gt; should apply to both words. What makes them different from each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10606" LastEditorUserId="10606" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T13:08:34.197" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T00:27:48.443" Title="Why are &quot;economics&quot; and &quot;economist&quot; stressed on different syllables while both of them have the same number of syllables?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18894" CreationDate="2016-06-18T11:37:25.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt; into account as well, I think the problem doesn't come from the economist, but from economics:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt; has stress on the second syllable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;economist&lt;/em&gt; has stress on the second syllable too - hence, adding the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; doesn't change stress, like the site suggests.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt; has stress on the third (second-to-last) syllable and is thus different. I assume this comes from the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ics&lt;/em&gt;; this suffix is not listed on the site, but &lt;em&gt;-ic&lt;/em&gt; is and my guess would be that &lt;em&gt;-ics&lt;/em&gt; behaves just the same, changing stress from the the second syllable to syllable before the suffix (i.e. &lt;em&gt;-no-&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the difference in stress between &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;economist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt; arises regularly due to the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ics&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;econonomist&lt;/em&gt; preservers stress and is thereby equally stressed as &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reasoning obviously presupposes &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt; as the underlying form from which we judge changes in stress. If we took e.g. &lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt; as underlying, then things would indeed look different. But it seems just more reasonable to me to assume the semantically more &quot;basic&quot; &lt;em&gt;economy&lt;/em&gt; as underlying and the other forms as derived.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Actually, to be precise, we should anyway start from the root (as &lt;em&gt;econom-y&lt;/em&gt; has already undergone derivation and we can not just add a suffix, but most remove &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; and then replace it by &lt;em&gt;-ist&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ics&lt;/em&gt;), and in the root &lt;em&gt;econom-&lt;/em&gt; (if this is pronouncable at all - I assume you would find it nowhere free, I think this morpheme has the morphological status of a &lt;strong&gt;confix&lt;/strong&gt; - a lexical morpheme which does not occur free but does not serve as an affix but clearly as a root, also e.g. &lt;em&gt;fanat-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;fanat-ic&lt;/em&gt;, so one can probably only judge the &quot;standard&quot; pronounciation intuitively and not from an underived form as such an underived form doesn't occur freely for such confix morphemes), stress should be on the second syllable as well - so neither &lt;em&gt;econom-y&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;econom-ist&lt;/em&gt; differ in stress from the root, like we would expect, while &lt;em&gt;econom-ics&lt;/em&gt; does, like we would expect as well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Under this assumption the stress behaviour fits well with the site's claims.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-18T11:53:58.477" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T11:53:58.477" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18888" CreationDate="2016-06-18T14:16:17.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the following sourse, the expression &amp;quot;break/bust my balls&amp;quot; comes from the old practice of cattle castration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether it’s busting or breaking, balls or stones,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  this expression has long been used by young men (and not a few women) to express a wide range of emotions brought about by the words or actions of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although the phrase usually accompanies laughter, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it arose out of a truly painful, yet common practice among beef cattle operators where they bust the bull’s balls as a method of castration.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/12/expression-bust-balls-comes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Today I found out&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T14:16:17.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18871" CreationDate="2016-06-19T13:10:30.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a tough question considering the number of languages in the world ;-) &#xA;According to V.A.Plungyan &quot;Why languages are so different?&quot; (popular linguistics) a language with the quality described by OP is NOT known to the modern science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side comment (from the same book): .... for example, Japanese and Finish only distinguish (by means of tense) past and &quot;non-past&quot; (i.e. present+future). ...&#xA;While there is only one known language that distiguishes future and &quot;non-future&quot; - Takel'ma, language of north-american indians, state of Oregon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastEditorUserId="13386" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T14:22:54.843" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T14:22:54.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-19T19:40:41.317" Score="4" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for sound files that illustrate the distinction between the two pitch contours of long vowels and diphthongs in Lithuanian, e.g. &lt;em&gt;kóšė&lt;/em&gt; (falling pitch) vs. &lt;em&gt;kõšė&lt;/em&gt; (rising pitch). Does anyone know of available recordings of such minimal pairs? I'm especially interested in those &quot;diphthongs&quot; that consist of sequences of short vowel plus sonorant, e.g. &lt;em&gt;káltas&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;kal̃tas&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T12:24:24.760" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T12:24:24.760" Title="Sound files for Lithuanian pitch accent distinctions?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;&lt;lithuanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18995" CreationDate="2016-06-19T21:09:21.583" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope some people here are firm with computational linguistics, since I couldn't find any question here about this topic yet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title says, I'm trying to give an equivalent grammar without useless symbols to this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G = &amp;lt;{S,A,B,C,D,E,F}, {a,b,c,d,e,f},P,S&amp;gt; with&#xA;P = {S -&amp;gt; AB|CD, A -&amp;gt; aE|aA, B -&amp;gt; bB|bC, C -&amp;gt; c|Cc, D -&amp;gt; d, E -&amp;gt; Ee|AF, F -&amp;gt; f}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As much as I understood, my solution would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;P = {S -&amp;gt; CD, C -&amp;gt; c|Cc, D -&amp;gt; d}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for deleting the ε-productions in the Grammar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G = &amp;lt;{S,A,B}, {a,b,c}, {S -&amp;gt; AB|aAa, A -&amp;gt; ε|bA, B -&amp;gt; c|Ac},S&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my solution would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G = &amp;lt;{S,B}, {c}, {S -&amp;gt; B, B -&amp;gt; c},S&amp;gt;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm sure this isn't the correct answer, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13446" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-06-20T10:51:26.570" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T16:12:02.690" Title="Giving grammar without useless symbols / ε-productions" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18899" CreationDate="2016-06-19T21:55:52.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are recordings of Lithuanian at the UCLA &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/LIT/lit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonetics archive&lt;/a&gt;, though you would have to do some work to determine what accent type a given word is (probably involves nothing more than a dictionary). The 1972 recording is lousy quality so not worth listening to. The last two (speaker from Kaunas) is probably not worth messing with because of uncontrolled list intonation that screws up pitch. There is some of that with the Illinois and Panevežys speakers especially with minimal pairs, but in just plain readings of words there seems to be a pitch distinction preserved. This is a good object lesson n how not to record data in a language with pitch distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a substantial body of Lithuanian samples on &lt;a href=&quot;http://forvo.com/languages-pronunciations/lt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt; where again with some work you might find what you want, but at least you are getting pronunciations where the speaker just says the word and isn't doing it in a rise-fall alternating word-comparison fashion. Unfortunately, there is no FSI Lithuanian course. You could try this paper on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/4958937/An_Acoustic_Description_of_Lithuanian_Pitch_Accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;acoustics of Lithuanian&lt;/a&gt;, which has 3 speaker icons implying recordings, though often PPT sound files get left behind or rendered unplayable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T21:55:52.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18894" CreationDate="2016-06-20T00:27:48.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peter Roach's fourth edition of &lt;em&gt;English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical course&lt;/em&gt; (2009) has a more detailed list of rules and explanations than your link, if you're interested (Chapter 11: Complex Word Stress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T00:27:48.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18890" CreationDate="2016-06-20T00:30:48.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's often linguistics students who are working towards their PhD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T00:30:48.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18880" CreationDate="2016-06-20T00:37:22.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if Beth Levin's &lt;em&gt;English Verb Classes and Alternations&lt;/em&gt; (1993)would have something in its bibliography that you can use? I found the book hard to find but a copy is floating around online somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T00:37:22.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20156" CreationDate="2016-06-21T10:54:46.050" Score="5" ViewCount="876" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is something I can't get about the -DIK participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we use it to form a relative clause and make one sentence out of two sentences, the object may be originally in any case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accusative: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Köpeği&lt;/strong&gt; gezdirdim. O uyuyor.&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Gezdirdiğim köpek uyuyor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dative: &lt;em&gt;Bir &lt;strong&gt;köye&lt;/strong&gt; gittim. Orası güzel.&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Gittiğim köy güzel.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ablative: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rüzgârdan&lt;/strong&gt; ürktüm. O tuhaf tuhaf uluyordu.&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Ürktüğüm rüzgâr tuhaf tuhaf uluyordu.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locative: &lt;em&gt;Bu &lt;strong&gt;evde&lt;/strong&gt; yaşıyorum. O üç katlı.&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Yaşadığım ev üç katlı.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instrumental: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Komşumla&lt;/strong&gt; konuştum. O gelecek.&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Konuştuğum komşum gelecek.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what bothers me is that there is no trace of the original case endings in the resulting sentences. The information carried by the case endings seems to be lost. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;the village I came to&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;the village I came from&lt;/strong&gt; both seem to be translated as &lt;strong&gt;geldiğim köy&lt;/strong&gt;, which doesn't make sense to me as those are kind of opposite things. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5089" LastEditorUserId="5089" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T16:54:52.727" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T17:15:01.913" Title="Turkish: the -DIK participles and an information loss" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-21T18:24:54.293" Score="0" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJFG7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OJFG7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't describe, label on a box, don't even know which way is up.  Need language of this label, so I can get it translated, and translate image/language inside box, to figure out if contents are worth anything.  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13456" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T13:14:47.910" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T13:14:47.910" Title="what language Chinese or Japanese?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-06-22T15:16:19.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-21T19:19:20.623" Score="5" ViewCount="7630" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one show the difference of an upward entailment between that of a downward entailment? I have tried doing examples where the negative polarity item is moved from the verb phrase to the noun phrase but I still don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13454" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T07:42:47.093" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T14:46:52.570" Title="the difference between upward and downward entailment" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18908" CreationDate="2016-06-21T21:34:43.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Upward entailment&lt;/strong&gt; means that if a relation holds for some set X, then the relation will hold for a superset of X.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Downward entailment&lt;/strong&gt; means that if a relation holds for some X, then the relation will hold for a subset of X.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;X is a &lt;strong&gt;subset&lt;/strong&gt; of Y and  conversely Y is a &lt;strong&gt;superset&lt;/strong&gt; of X iff all elements (members) of X are also elements of Y, i.e. Y &quot;includes&quot; X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Entailment&lt;/strong&gt; (P entails Q, written as P ⊨ Q) means that whenever P is true, Q will be true too, i.e. there will be no case (logically speaking: no assignment) under which P is true and Q is not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monotonicity&lt;/strong&gt; in general means that once we've established an entailment, adding more assumptions won't break the validity of the conclusion: If we can logically infer a conclusion Q from a set of premises P1, P2, ..., Pn (written: P1, ... Pn ⊨ Q), then this inference still holds if we add more assumptions to our existing premises (e.g. P1, ..., Pn, R ⊨ Q, where R is a new assumption). For example, if from the assumptions &quot;If it rains, then the streets get wet&quot; and &quot;It rains&quot; we can infer the conclusion that &quot;The streets are wet&quot;, then adding the addional premise &quot;Pigs are pink&quot; will still keep up the inferene that the streets are wet, as long as the two other presmises are still there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Monotonicity holds in classical logic, while it is problematic to assume for certain aspects of natural language use, but let's forget about that here. For our purpose, &quot;monotonicity&quot; means that I can always go higher and higher or lower and lower in my hierarchy of sub- and supersets and the pattern never breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1) Generalized quantifiers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before going into the various forms of entailment and monotonicity, I should breiefly establish some terminology:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;most&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;many&lt;/code&gt;, ... are so-called &lt;strong&gt;generalized quantifiers&lt;/strong&gt;. Generalized quantifiers express relations between sets. For example, &lt;code&gt;No X are Y&lt;/code&gt; means roughly that the sets &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; have an empty intersection, i.e. no members in common.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Most generalized quantifiers you'll see talk about a relation between two sets, where the first/left one is called &lt;strong&gt;restriction&lt;/strong&gt; and the second/right one is called the &lt;strong&gt;body&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;nuclear scope&lt;/strong&gt; (I'll use the shorter term &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt; throughout my answer):&#xA;In the quantification &lt;code&gt;Some pigs snore&lt;/code&gt;, the set &lt;code&gt;pig&lt;/code&gt; is the restriction and the set &lt;code&gt;snore&lt;/code&gt; (= the set of individuals which snore) is the body/nuclear scope of the quantifier &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt;. In the quantification &lt;code&gt;All happy children laugh&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;happy children&lt;/code&gt; is the restriction and &lt;code&gt;laugh&lt;/code&gt; the body of the quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;. Linguistically speaking, the restriction is normally the subject NP (without the quantifier) and the body is the VP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2) Upward and downard entailment/monotonicity&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2.1) Basic idea&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women sang loudly |= All women sang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All women sang |= All women made some sound  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see that in each of the inferences above, the sets that constitute the body of the quantification in the premise of the entailment relation (&lt;code&gt;sang loudly&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;sang&lt;/code&gt;, respectively) are a subset of the sets of the body in the conclusion sentence (&lt;code&gt;sang&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;made some sound&lt;/code&gt;, respectively): The loudly singing individuals are a subset of the singing individuals, because everyone who sings loudly is also someone who sings; the singing individuals are a subset of the sound-making individuals, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The entailment relation holds from the subset to the superset in the body/second/right-hand argument of the quantifier (the restriction/first/left-hand argument would be &lt;code&gt;women&lt;/code&gt; in all cases), so the quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;upward entailing in the body&lt;/strong&gt; or (synonymously) &lt;strong&gt;right monotone increasing&lt;/strong&gt;: We can always go from a smaller set in the body of the quantifier up to a larger set and the conclusion still holds. We can go from the smaller, more specific set of loud singers to the larger set of just singers, and again from the set of singers to the even larger set of sound-makers and can still infer that the &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;-quantification holds. This is upward entailment, or monotonicity. (The same works, by the way, for quantifiers like &lt;code&gt;both&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;more than half of&lt;/code&gt; - try it out.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can express this behavior formally as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;right monotone increasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; B ⊆ B' ==&amp;gt; Q(A)(B')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning &quot;If the quantifier Q (here: &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;) holds between a pair of sets A and B, and there is a set B' which is a superset of B, then the quantifier also holds between A and that larger set B'.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In our example, we chose A to be the set of women and the sets B and B' the set of loudly singing and singing individuals, respectively, but &lt;strong&gt;the point about monotonicity is that we could insert &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; such triples of pairs A, B, B' and would always get that inference pattern for this particular quantifier.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2.2) Other kinds of entailment&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's see what happens if we change our focus from the body to the restriction of the quantification (from the right/second to the let/first set), i.e. if we look at the NP &lt;code&gt;women&lt;/code&gt; instead of the VP &lt;code&gt;sing&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A superset of &lt;code&gt;woman&lt;/code&gt; would be &lt;code&gt;people&lt;/code&gt; (all those who are women are also people). So can we still make the inference? We immediately see that this does not work (I'll use &lt;em&gt;|/=&lt;/em&gt; to indicate &quot;does not entail&quot;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women sang |/= All people sang  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because all women sang doesn't mean we can infer that necessarily all people sang; it might well be that there were some men who didn't sing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So the quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; is not upward entailing in the &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt;, or not &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt; monotone increasing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the other direction works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women sang |= All young women sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of young women is a subset of the set of women/The set of women is a superset of the set of young women, because all young women are also women. So in the left argument of the quantification (the subject NP), we can go downwards: The quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;ward entailing&lt;/strong&gt; in the body, or &lt;strong&gt;left monotone &lt;em&gt;decreasing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The inference stays valid when we go down in/decrease the set to the left of the quantification.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;left monotone decreasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; A' ⊆ A ==&amp;gt; Q(A')(B)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If a quantifier holds betwee a pair of sets A, B and there is a set A' which is a subset of A (notice that the subset relation is the other way round than above!), then the quantifying relation also holds between that smaller set A' and B.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we have established that the quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; is upward-entailing in the body, and downward entailing in the restriction, i.e. right monotone increasing and left monotone decreasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the other possibilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quantifier &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; is also downward entailing in the restriction, i.e. left monotone decreasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No women sang |= No young women sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no women sang at all, we know for sure that there wasn't any young woman who sang.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the body, i.e. on the right side of the quantification, we can not go up as with all:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No woman sang loudly |/= No woman sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because no woman sang loudly, it doesn't mean that no woman sang at all - maybe some woman sang quietly, possibly even all of them. We can not infer from the subset &lt;code&gt;sang loudly&lt;/code&gt; to the superset &lt;code&gt;sang&lt;/code&gt;. So the quantifier &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; is not upward entailing/monotone increasing on the right.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we can go in the other direction:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No woman sang |= No woman sang loudly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no woman sang at all, then it logically follows that there can be no woman who did so loudly. We can go from the superset &lt;code&gt;sang&lt;/code&gt; down to the subset &lt;code&gt;sang loudly&lt;/code&gt; in the body. So &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;downward entailing in the body&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;right monotone decreasing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formal notation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;right monotone decreasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; B' ⊆ B ==&amp;gt; Q(A)(B')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final possibility is left:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quantifier &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt;, like &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;, is also upward entailing in the body, i.e. right monotone increasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some women sang loudly |= Some women sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the restriction, i.e. on the left, we can not go down, as with &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some women sang |/= Some young women sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because we know some women sang doesn't mean we can tell that there was any &lt;em&gt;young&lt;/em&gt; woman singing, might be that it was just old women. So &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt; is not downward entailing/decreasing on the left. Instead, the other direction works again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some women sang |= Some people sang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some young woman sang |= Some women sang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the singing happend for some women, then there certainly where people involved, and the same holds for the subset/superset pair &lt;em&gt;young women&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;women&lt;/em&gt;. We can go up in our sets on the left-hand side and the inference stays valid. So the quantifier &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;upward entailing in the restriction&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;left monotone increasing&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;left monotone increasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; A ⊆ A' ==&amp;gt; Q(A')(B)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the quantifier &lt;code&gt;not every&lt;/code&gt;, you will find that it is upward entailing in the restriction (left monotone increasing) and downward entailing in the body (right monotone decreasing).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2.3) Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, here are the formal definitions of the notions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;upward entailing in the restriction/left monotone increasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; A ⊆ A' ==&amp;gt; Q(A')(B)&#xA;&#xA;downward entailing in the restriction/left monotone decreasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; A' ⊆ A ==&amp;gt; Q(A')(B)&#xA;&#xA;upward entailing in the body/right monotone increasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; B ⊆ B' ==&amp;gt; Q(A)(B')&#xA;&#xA;downward entailing in the body/right monotone decreasing:&#xA;Q(A)(B) &amp;amp; B' ⊆ B ==&amp;gt; Q(A)(B')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can summmarize our many observations as follows, and find a nice pattern betwen the quantifiers &quot;all&quot;/&quot;some&quot; and their negations (logically, &quot;no&quot; = &quot;not some&quot;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;--------------------------------------------------------&#xA;quantifier | restriction/left     | body/right&#xA;--------------------------------------------------------&#xA;all        | downwward/decreasing | upward/increasing&#xA;no         | downwward/decreasing | downwward/decreasing&#xA;some       | upward/increasing    | upward/increasing&#xA;not all    | upward/increasing    | downwward/decreasing&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can now test the behavior of other quantifiers like &lt;code&gt;at least two&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;at most five&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;exactly two&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;both&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;most&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;many&lt;/code&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3) Negation of the VP&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand completely what you mean by &quot;where the negative polarity item is moved from the VP to the NP&quot; (especially saying that the &lt;em&gt;NPI&lt;/em&gt; (words like &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt;) is moved - are you sure you didn't mean the negation?) - probably something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; sing &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; all women sang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No woman &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; sing --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Not&lt;/em&gt; no woman sang]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these examples, you see that for both right monotone increasing and decreasing quantifiers, the entailment relation perseveres when moving the negation from the VP to the NP (in every case where all women didn't sing it will be true that not all women sang, and in every case where no woman didn't sing (= all women sang) it will be true that not no woman sang (= at least one woman sang)).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But note that the propositions with the negated quantifiers as opposed to the negated VPs are weaker: We could imagine situations where the right-hand side is true, but the left-hand side not necssarily - e.g. when some women sang, then &lt;em&gt;Not all women sang&lt;/em&gt; is true but &lt;em&gt;All women didn't sing&lt;/em&gt; isn't, also &lt;em&gt;Not no woman sang&lt;/em&gt; is true but &lt;em&gt;No woman didn't sing&lt;/em&gt; isn't.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the entailment relations between the sentences with negated VPs turn around:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entailment relations that held before can't be claimed to be true any more now - we no longer have right upward monotonicity for &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women didn't sing |/= All women didn't make a sound&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some women didn't sing loudly |/= Some women didn't sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, right dowward monotonicity fails for &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;not every&lt;/code&gt; when the VP (the body) is negated:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No woman didn't make any sound |/= No woman didn't sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not every woman didn't sing |/= Not every woman didn't sing loudly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the entailment relations that didn't hold before do hold now:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All women didn't sing |= All women didn't sing loudly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some women didn't make any sound |= Some women didn't sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The supersets &lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;make some sound&lt;/em&gt; now entail the subsets &lt;em&gt;sing loudly&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt;, so the bodys of &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;some&lt;/code&gt; are now a downard entailing environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No woman didn't sing |= No woman didn't make any sound&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not every woman didn't sing loudly |= Not every woman didn't sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subsets &lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;sing loudly&lt;/em&gt; now entail the supersets &lt;em&gt;make some sound&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;sing&lt;/em&gt;, so the bodys of &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;not every&lt;/code&gt; are now an upward entailing environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could summarize this observation as follows: Negation of the VP, i.e. negation in the body &lt;strong&gt;revers&lt;/strong&gt; the direction of entailment: Upward entailment becomes downward entailment, and downward entailment becomes upward entailment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Logically seen this should work analogously for negation in the restriction/subject NP, however I find it hard to imagine linguistic examples of negating subjects that don't sound completely made up and unnatural, so I'll leave it like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;4) Negative polarity items #&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's now briefly return to your mentioning of the negative polarity items (NPIs):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can assert that NPIs are licensed in the context of downward entailing environments (remember that &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; is downward entailing in both the restriction and the body):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No woman sang --&gt; No [woman] [sang &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No woman sang --&gt; Not [&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; woman] [sang]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but they seem gramatically/pragmatically weird (that's what the # sign means) in an upward entailing environment (remember that &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; are upward entailing in the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All woman sang --&gt; # All [women] [sang &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some woman sang --&gt; # Some [woman] [&lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; sang]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(BTW, can someone tell me why &lt;em&gt;sang ever&lt;/em&gt; seems more marked than the reversed word order &lt;em&gt;ever sang&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;anything sang&lt;/em&gt; sound wrong? Or is my non-native speaker judgement wrong?)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much it: Negative polarity items like &lt;code&gt;any&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ever&lt;/code&gt; work fine in downward entailing contexts, but are weird and hard to license in upward entailing environments.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Footnote&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that this setence is actually ambiguous, because English syntax basically allows for two interpretations (thanks to @jlawler for the hint):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All women didn't sing&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) linear interpretation of the negation (negation at the verb ≙ negation of the predicate):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;For every woman it holds that she didn't sing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ⇔ (∀x : Woman (x)) ¬Sing (x)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) shifted interpretation of the negation (negation at the verb ≙ negation of the quantifier):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;It does not hold for every woman that she sang&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ⇔ ¬(∀x : Woman (x)) Sing (x)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two interpretations obviously yield different truth conditions, but this discrepancy is a characteristics of English (and, with respect to similar issues, in general natural langauges') syntax and in speech usually resolved by contextual information and, most importantly, intonation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One could even argue that due to the latter, the sentence is not actually ambiguous in the way that there would be two possible logical forms assigned to one phonetic form, since phonetic form does in fact distinguish between the two readings, namely in terms of intonation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Anyway, this is only variation based on idiosyncratic behaviour of natural languages that should not affect the logic of upward and downward entailment in general; the patterns described will hold for any language that has semantic relations like hypernymy and hyponymy (and there is no way around having such relations in a language), regardless of whether there might be specific &quot;semantax&quot; side effects in one or the other context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T14:46:52.570" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T14:46:52.570" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2016-06-21T23:03:50.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well wind instruments are about the only instruments where you are required to close all holes closer to the ground when the sound is low. With a cello it is the opposite. With a keyboard low is left and high is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the metaphor is constructed because of our body's tacit understanding of the gravitational impact of the perceived weight or mass of lower sounds where we can hear most overtones above it compared to higher sounds, which, even when loud, resonate in a different part of our body (the upper body). And they have a different quality because we don't hear all the overtones above them some of which are out of our hearing range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And someone mentioned that you feel low sounds in a lower part of the body than high sounds. I think we have an implicit knowledge of that. Even if you try creating a low sound you can feel the vibrations lower in your stomach, whereas you don't with higher sounds so much unless they're really loud. That's probably because of the frequency of low sounds as much as the mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13458" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T00:06:26.273" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T00:06:26.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-22T00:09:26.440" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to give the stress degrees for each component in &quot;compressed air powered fence post driver&quot;. If I want to argue that &quot;compressed air powered fence post driver&quot; is a compound, what are the stress degrees for each component?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a compound, and can it be analyzed in two parts, like &quot;compressed air powered&quot; and &quot;fence post driver&quot;? As in Plag's binary structure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to prove with stress degrees that it is a compound. &#xA;Even if it is not a compound at the end, I'd still like to know the stress degrees. &#xA;Should there be only one primary stress in the whole phrase? Where and why? What about secondary stress and unstressed elements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13459" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T08:15:15.717" Title="Having trouble with assigning stress degrees to a long compound" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-22T00:18:11.783" Score="4" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's the adessive case, which can be used to specify something is &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; a noun, but is there an opposite? Is there a case specifying a far distance from a noun? I'm including this case in my conlang whether there's a name for it or not, but it'd be nice to know what it's called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:29:13.777" Title="What would you call a case specifying something is far away from a noun?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18915" CreationDate="2016-06-22T00:55:59.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a nice table drawn in the Wikipedia's page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_locative_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Finnish locative system&lt;/a&gt;. You may find it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| System || Entering              | Residing      | Exiting                  |&#xA;+--------++-----------------------+---------------+--------------------------+&#xA;| Inner  || &quot;into&quot; illative       | &quot;in&quot; inessive | &quot;from in&quot; elative        |&#xA;| Outer  || &quot;onto&quot; allative       | &quot;on&quot; adessive | &quot;from at/on&quot; ablative    |&#xA;| State  || &quot;into as&quot; translative | &quot;as&quot; essive   | &quot;from being as&quot; exessive |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is not precisely what you need, your conlang may employ &lt;em&gt;ablative&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;elative&lt;/em&gt; for this purpose (if you don't worry that &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm away from home+ABL&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would clash with &lt;em&gt;&quot;I'm leaving home+ABL&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T03:38:38.270" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T03:38:38.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18907" CreationDate="2016-06-22T02:32:54.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is in a script known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Seal Script&lt;/a&gt;. The four characters are, in Chinese readings,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jin 金 - Gold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be honest I'm not quite sure, but it looks like Simplified Chinese for gui 龜 (龟) - turtle. You can clearly see the traditional character for 'turtle' in the red stamp.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fa 發 - Multi-purpose verb, meaning something along the lines of 'get a lot of' here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cai 財 - money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Fa cai' means getting rich. As for 'golden turtle', that could mean an actual gold turtle (everything from gold mooncakes to gold Mickey Mouses exist out there, so you shouldn't be surprised), or it could be a beetle - the Chinese word for &lt;em&gt;beetle&lt;/em&gt; is 金龜子 &lt;em&gt;jinguizi&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T03:01:58.137" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T03:01:58.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18915" CreationDate="2016-06-22T07:02:59.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;List of cases&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia is complete, then there is no name (yet) for a case which expresses location far away from something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Probably there is just no language that would express this by case (but by use of pre- or postpositions instead); location near by something or movement away from something is a more frequent thing to say.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could abuse the movement cases (if so, most suitably I'd say ablative or elative), this would then correspond to what @bytebuster suggested, but I'm still not too happy with that, because those cases are used for motion and not for location, so it wouldn't reflect the meaning properly and would, as bytebuster said, possibly clash with other cases that express actual movement away from something.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's only about terminology, why don't you just think of your own case name? I think &quot;Distantive&quot;, &quot;Remotative&quot; or &quot;Procultative&quot; would sound not too bad ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T07:29:13.777" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T07:29:13.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18914" CreationDate="2016-06-22T07:26:37.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first sight, an analysis as a (binary composed) compound seems to be possible:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UK5YH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UK5YH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You could start arguing about the precise labels; for reason of simplicity I just assumed that the suffix &quot;-ed&quot; makes words an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning stress, I would say (I use ˈ for primary and ˌ for secondary stress, the rest is unstressed):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the first part: &lt;em&gt;compressed ˈair ˌpowered&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the second part: &lt;em&gt;ˈfence post ˌdriver&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the combination: &lt;em&gt;compressed ˌair powered ˈfence post driver&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since primary stress is put on the second word group when combining the two parts, this would be an argument for me for the complex &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to be analysed as a compound:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In compound nouns, stress would usually be on the first part: &lt;em&gt;CAN opener&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;FOOTball&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;BUS stop&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;MATH teacher&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since this is not the case here, I think that &quot;compressed air powered&quot; behaves just like an adjective to the noun:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;green SOCKS&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;scrambled EGGS&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;out-dated PHONE&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;powered TOY CAR&lt;/em&gt;, ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging from stress, and from the typical adjective ending &quot;-ed&quot;, I think the word complex as a whole should be analysed as a simple adj + noun combination, not as a compound. But of course, the individual parts (&lt;em&gt;compressed air powered&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fence post driver&lt;/em&gt;) can certainly be regarded as compounds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you like trees:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Tv8o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Tv8o.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T08:15:15.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T08:15:15.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-22T14:08:48.047" Score="0" ViewCount="789" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you call a pair of words which specifically are either written our sounded out either the same or very similarly across two different languages and have different meanings (perhaps even different technologies) in such languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T17:24:31.337" Title="Similar words in different languages with different meanings" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-06-23T12:55:29.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18920" CreationDate="2016-06-22T14:52:28.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally (independently of different languages) you could use those terms:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A word with the same phonetic form (i.e. with the same pronounciation) and a different, completely unrelated meaning is called a &lt;strong&gt;homophone&lt;/strong&gt; - such as &lt;em&gt;bank&lt;/em&gt; (financial isntitute) and &lt;em&gt;bank&lt;/em&gt; (river bank).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they are spelled the same, they are called &lt;strong&gt;homographs&lt;/strong&gt; - for example &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; (weapon) and &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; (to bend), which are spelled the same, but are different in meaning and in this example also in pronounciation.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of such pairs are both homphones and homographs, i.e. both pronounced and spelled the same - the degree of overlap depends on the writhing system and orthography.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sometimes, such pairs which have both the same phonetic and the same graphemic form are called &lt;strong&gt;homonyms&lt;/strong&gt;, but often this term used synonymously to &quot;homophones&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Linguists usually prefer to speak of homonyms or homophones, as orthography is not really investing to linguistics in the more narrow sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally don't know about a special term for homophones or homographs across different languages as opposed to homonyms within one language, possibly there just is no offical terminological distinction for that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colloquially, a word that looks or sounds the same in a different language but has a completely different meaning is called a &lt;strong&gt;false friend&lt;/strong&gt; (this was decided to be the most suitable answer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17335/words-that-translate-to-valid-words-in-the-source-language&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt;), but this is not really a scientific term.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information you may find helpful within this field of terminology:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If two words are etymologically unrelated, but have a similar form and meaning, they are called &lt;strong&gt;false cognates&lt;/strong&gt;, but this is only for related meanings.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If two words have the same form and different, but clearly related meanings, they are called &lt;strong&gt;polysemes&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;parliament&lt;/em&gt; (institution) and &lt;em&gt;parliament&lt;/em&gt; (building).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T17:24:31.337" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17529" CreationDate="2016-06-22T17:30:29.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer for language retention is &lt;strong&gt;Religion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The francophone settlers of Quebec were Roman Catholics, but the later anglophone rulers were Anglicans. So they were separated by a religious barrier keeping the two communities apart from each other and hindering assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar effect can be observed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pf%C3%A4lzische_Sprachinsel_am_Niederrhein&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Palatinate dialect island in the Low Rhine Region (link in German)&lt;/a&gt;. Here protestant settler in a Roman Catholic region kept their different dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the language is &lt;strong&gt;still the same&lt;/strong&gt; as in its motherland is actually a question of definition: Canadian French has significant differences to &quot;Hexagonal&quot; French, but they count as the same language, the same holds for Brazilian and Portuguese. And it is a matter of definition to call Afrikaans a language and not a dialect of Dutch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only for Maltese the time of separate development (cut off from Arabic) is much longer such that it is fully differentiated from its parent language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T09:03:54.363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T09:03:54.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18825" CreationDate="2016-06-23T13:00:23.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a list of places that you can use for NER, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geonames.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Geonames&lt;/a&gt; is a good resource. The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13475" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T13:00:23.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-23T18:36:17.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="1215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially in east geography (middle east, middle asia, asia) the words starting with Kha, ka, cha means like a leader or a king or a lord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Khaalesi (game of thrones character who living in east of the game of thrones map)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Khan (old Turkic-Mongolian word e.g. Genghis Khan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kaan (old Turkish leaders e.g. Bumin Kaan/Kağan, Kağan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this sound meaning anything like leader or lord ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13479" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T13:16:23.503" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T13:16:23.503" Title="The sound &quot;ka&quot; or &quot;cha&quot; or &quot;kha&quot; means what ? e.g Khaalesi,Khan,Chan,Kaan" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18928" CreationDate="2016-06-23T20:01:49.710" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in knowing if there is a specific term for the phenomenon (in English) where a word with a positive connotation can be modified to create a word or phrase with a negative connotation (or, perhaps, vice versa). I can think of two examples to illustrate: namely, preceding a word with &quot;not&quot; or prefixing it with &quot;un.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kind -&amp;gt; unkind&#xA;intelligent -&amp;gt; unintelligent&#xA;pretty -&amp;gt; not pretty&#xA;happy -&amp;gt; not happy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It seems easier to think of positive-to-negative examples, and I'm guessing this may be more common in English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific term to indicate this transformation? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13480" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T01:19:18.823" Title="Term for modifying a word to create its opposite connotation" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18927" CreationDate="2016-06-23T20:30:18.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Change in connotation&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's about &lt;em&gt;connotation&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A word receiving a more negative connotation is called &lt;strong&gt;pejoration&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A word receiving a more positive connotation is called &lt;strong&gt;melioration&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, those two terms are perhaps not perfectly suitable, at least I'm not aware of an alternative terminology that would express more precisely what you mean:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pejoration and melioration is more about a single word undergoing a change in meaning over time; e.g. &lt;em&gt;silly&lt;/em&gt; used to mean something like &lt;em&gt;happy, unworried&lt;/em&gt; in Middle English and over time received the meaning of &lt;em&gt;stupid&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ridiculous&lt;/em&gt;, so the word itself changed its meaning or, if you want to call it like this, connotation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the examples that you gave, one could not really speak of such a semantic change, since you modify the expression (by adding &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;) so as to express something different, while the orignial word itself retains its meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So there might be the need of a different terminology here, depending on how narrow you set the definition of pejoration and melioration, but I doubt there is an actual term that expresses modification with respect to &lt;em&gt;connotation&lt;/em&gt; for the following reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to comment that &quot;connotation&quot; is a term that is not so easy to define and probably not that often used in semantics, rather maybe in pragmatics (some may even say it's outdated; I recently read a comment to some question here on Ling.SE (don't remember who it was though) saying that &lt;em&gt;connotation&lt;/em&gt; is more of a rhetorical term that was already used by the Ancient Greeks and not something that you could use as a neutral scientific term nowadays).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This, and the choice of the clearly negating morphemes &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;, is why I'd go with a simpler description:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Negation&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not about the rather vague notions like &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; but simply negating its meaning&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; by using &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; like in the examples you gave, this can semantically be captured conciselier, e.g. by truth conditions, and is then simply called &lt;strong&gt;negation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The linguistic means that are used to express negation can be negation affixes (such as &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;), negation particles (such as &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;) or, less common across the languages of the world, e.g. a negation verb (such as &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt; in Finnish and Estonian).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About the distribution of positive and negative adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your observation that positive --&gt; negative seems to b a more common thing to do than the other way round:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is indeed so; languages tend to have the more &quot;positive&quot; term (although it is now of course very hard to define again what &quot;posivitve&quot; should be, but see my paragraph below) in their vocabulary and derive the negative word from the positive one (by use of the various negation tools I mentioned), much less frequently the other way round:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;positive&quot; now explicitely not primarily referring to connotation, but positive in the sense of presence of a property - someone is either pretty or you can not assign him the property of being especially pretty, physically there is no actual coldness but only the absence of heat, something is loud or less loud but you wouldn't perceive this as different intensity of quietness, and so on; you can do this for maybe not all&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, but many adjectives, at least the ones that have meaningful alternatives&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; or a scalar meaning space, and there are some studies investigating what those &quot;default&quot; concepts are across the languages of the world and what is more or less universal in human perception of standards/positives of such properties.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You'll see this especially in languages with smaller vocabulary, most noteably perhaps constructed languages, and among those especially ones that try to be very minimalist (like Toki Pona, which has a basic vocabularly of just slightly over 100 words!) or logical (like Loglan/Lojban, aUI and others). Of course, conlangs can not be granted the same status as natlangs when it comes to linguistic universals, but I'd say that someone explicitely thinking about how to build up a language's lexicon gives even more significant evidence of what humans consider to be the basic notions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footnotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This may sometimes correspond to the opposite, but especially for words like &lt;em&gt;pretty&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;hot&lt;/em&gt; which are &lt;strong&gt;scalar&lt;/strong&gt; adjectives you won't necessarily receive the exact opposite like &lt;em&gt;ugly&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cold&lt;/em&gt;, but rather &lt;em&gt;not pretty, but not exactly ugly&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;not hot, but not actually cold either&lt;/em&gt; - see my comment under the question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The phenomenon for example doesn't apply for adjectives like &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt;, you can not be &quot;deader&quot; or so, although something could certainly be taller, heavier, older, ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also you couldn't really make judgements about adjectives like &lt;em&gt;alleged&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John is an alleged murderer&lt;/em&gt;, being alleged is not a property that applies or doesn't apply to an individual.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are some more examples; just saying that the concept of something like positive values for adjectives has its restrictions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; By &quot;meaningful alternatives&quot;, I mean alternatives that form a kind of natural class - you can certainly assume that the set of small [-tall] things forming something like a natural class, but it is implausibel to assume that there are any common features among the things that are not glued apart from not being glued, so adjectives like &lt;em&gt;glued&lt;/em&gt; could i.m.o. be regareded as a more &lt;strong&gt;privative&lt;/strong&gt; feature whose absence does not result in the formation of a natural class of meaningful alternatives.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Just like in phonology, where it is perfectly fine to have a class of voiced [+voice] and a class of unvoiced [-voice] sounds, while on the other hand, you could form a class of all sounds that carry the feature [PHARYNGEAL], but it makes no sense to speak of the class of all sounds that are not pharyngeal because they don't have anything in common appart from being not pharyngeal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think the distinction of privative features as opposed to, e.g., binary features roughly captures what I mean by an adjective not having &quot;meaningful alternatives&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But certainly, not every adjective can be regareded as a binary feature either, in fact I think that a strict partition throughout the whole domain between two meaningful alternatives [+property]/[-property] without any values additionally or in between is a very uncommon, if not impossible meaning for adjectives to carry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the long post, it got longer that I had originally planned and probably not every detail is immediately important to the question. I just like giving some advanced information, felt that my original three-sentence answer didn't address the question in enough accuracy and hopefully visually distinguished the side information sufficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T01:19:18.823" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T01:19:18.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-24T05:30:24.227" Score="5" ViewCount="22354" Body="&lt;p&gt;always&#xA;never&#xA;&quot;all the time&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They aren't 'expletives', but they express a non-expiry. What word would describe this type of word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context&lt;/strong&gt; : he never brings me flowers; he's always late; you criticise me 'all the time'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13481" LastEditorUserId="13481" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T07:21:19.983" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T20:49:21.103" Title="always | never | &quot;all the time&quot; - what kind of words are these?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18936" CreationDate="2016-06-24T06:22:46.090" Score="-2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Recursion' is defined on pp 90 and 107 in &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (2012 3 ed) by Andrew Carnie. Does the meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=recursion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;its Latin etymon&lt;/a&gt; ('running back, return'),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;influence the meaning of 'Recursion' in syntax? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T15:02:03.663" Title="What motivated the term 'Recursion'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-07-03T19:51:20.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18926" CreationDate="2016-06-24T07:55:02.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sounds have no meaning per se.&lt;/strong&gt;  Besides a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ideophones&lt;/a&gt;, human language is arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;duality of patterning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_(title)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;khan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a bastardisation of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khagan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;khagan/kağan/қаған/خاقان‎‎/可汗&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouran_Khaganate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ultimate origin&lt;/a&gt; of which is likely Mongolic.  There are many such cognates floating around Asia, beginning about 1500 years ago, and in Europe, beginning about 1000 years ago.  There is a tendency to mythologise these things, but it is not much more interesting nor older nor more widespread today than &lt;em&gt;sir&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sire&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;senior&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;señor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;signore&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/s%C3%A9nos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sénos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;... or &lt;em&gt;ustâ&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ოსტატი&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;استاد&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;استا&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;остаз&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%AF#Persian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;استاد&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Names of fictional characters are of course just that - names of fictional characters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T10:28:49.187" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T10:28:49.187" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18930" CreationDate="2016-06-24T14:55:43.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;strong&gt;recursion&lt;/strong&gt; is the process by which a rule gets applied to its own output.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain this in the context of syntax:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have a (very) simple transformation grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V NP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; V (C) S&#xA;&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; Mary&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; John&#xA;V -&amp;gt; sleep&#xA;V -&amp;gt; love&#xA;V -&amp;gt; say&#xA;C -&amp;gt; that&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible sentences we can build from this grammar are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary sleeps&#xA;John sleeps&#xA;Mary loves John&#xA;John loves Mary&#xA;Mary loves Mary&#xA;...&#xA;Mary says that John sleeps&#xA;Mary says John sleeps&#xA;Mary says that John loves John&#xA;Mary says that John says Mary sleeps&#xA;Mary says that John says that Mary says that John says...&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last group of sentences is the interesting one: We first apply the &lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&lt;/code&gt; rule, fill out the NP, and then go for the VP rule &lt;code&gt;VP -&amp;gt; V (C) S&lt;/code&gt;. We fill out the verb &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt;, optionally a complementizer &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, and then we have to expand &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; to get the embedded sentence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And to generate that embedded sentence, we again aply the &lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&lt;/code&gt; rule - just the one that we already used to get to our VP. We &lt;strong&gt;run back&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;return&lt;/strong&gt; to the very &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; rule that generated the output (the VP) from which we now apply the same rule again, and this is exactly what makes the recursion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We can go on even further; when we now apply the &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; rule a second time, we can again end up with the &lt;code&gt;VP -&amp;gt; V (C) S&lt;/code&gt; rule that goes to another sentence &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt;, so by using &lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&lt;/code&gt; we get to a result (VP) from which we again &lt;em&gt;go back&lt;/em&gt; to the &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; rule, which can again produce an output that &lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&lt;/code&gt; gets appllied to and so on; we could theoretically do this forever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it become clear now? By stating syntactic rules as transformations, we can see recursion as &lt;em&gt;returning&lt;/em&gt; to the rule that gave us the output from which we are calling the rule, and this is exactly the reason why it makes totally sense to derive the term from the latin root &lt;em&gt;recursionem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-24T15:02:03.663" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T15:02:03.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2016-06-24T21:35:29.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines are blurry, but there are some good reasons to see these as distinct suffixes and not inflections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;etymology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the suffixes evolved from previously separate words like determiners and pronouns like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ille#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ille&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/t%D1%8A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tъ&lt;/a&gt;.  In fact, in Romanian the suffix itself is declined and can also occur separately for emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;grammar&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Macedonian, Bulgarian and Balkan Romance, the suffix is or can be appended not to the noun but to the adjective if there is one, again revealing its origin as a separate word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;morphology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These languages have or had case, so there as a separate established notion of what qualifies as noun inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;regularity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike with declensions, there really are no internal nor unpredictable changes to the words, occasionally the final portion changes due to elision but that happens in languages where articles precede the noun too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;European tradition&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious analogy to the linguists who first worked on this and to the educated speakers of these languages is to definite articles as in Western European and Semitic languages.  (The neighbouring Turkic languages and Iranic languages have no definite articles.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, it is common to simply avoid the question by referring to the &lt;em&gt;definite forms&lt;/em&gt; of a noun for these languages.  (That's how Wiktonary declension tables refer to them for Albanian, Armenian and Bulgarian.  For Romanian they say &lt;em&gt;definite articulation&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although no writing system is phonetic, that is often a local ideal, so where &lt;em&gt;-ë + -a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ă + &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-a#Romanian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced as &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; would be, the tendency is to write &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T16:18:49.157" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:18:49.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17529" CreationDate="2016-06-25T03:01:27.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is the history. When the British conquered the rest of New France in 1760, they had to deal with more than 65,000 people (near the St. Lawrence valley) who were distinct in language, culture and regime. The authorities have wanted to assimilate the French and eliminate this barrier, but that never worked. The authorities had to tolerate the French culture in the colony (with the hope of assimilation in the future). Still, the barrier remained, and so there was not much mix between the two nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intercultural contacts are very important factors in the influence of a language. Politics help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T03:07:00.653" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T03:07:00.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-25T12:36:24.377" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a dependency treebank including 100 sentences, which I divide into a training set and a test set. I extract some rules ((DS,PS) pairs) to convert the treebank to phrase structures. When I extract such rules from the training set, I can measure the percentage of rules (DS patterns) that cover the test set, suppose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10, 24%), (20, 34%), (30,40%), (40,44%), (50, 55%),(60, 58%), (70, 61%)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you see as I increase the size of the training set, the coverage of extracted patterns increases! however its not linear!, I want to see how many data I need to reach 100% coverage?&#xA;I guess I can use a regression, but which regression? logarithmic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this related to 'learning curve'? if yes how can I use regression for a learning curve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5241" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T12:36:24.377" Title="Estimating the size of training data for grammer extraction" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18929" CreationDate="2016-06-25T14:59:44.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say those are &lt;strong&gt;temporal adverbs&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be precise, &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt; can not be an adverb since &quot;adverb&quot; is a word class but this phrase is not a single word. And you asked about the &quot;kinds of words&quot; (i.e. word classes), but you can not assign a word class to a phrase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Syntactically, this phrase, just like &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; (which are syntactically single-word phrases), functions as an &lt;strong&gt;adverbial&lt;/strong&gt;, a phrase which modifies a verb or clause - but here we are at a different level, because this is a grammatical function, not a word class.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said, they are not expletives, because they are an inherent part of the sentence's meaning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: You mentioned &lt;em&gt;non-expiry&lt;/em&gt; - I don't know of any specific term for that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The classification among temporal adverbs is rather between time point/span - duration - frequency, possibly others, but apparently not whether the adverb expresses expiry, non-expiry, having expired (i.e. past events) or whatever.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I assume the reason is that such a classification wouldn't be very meaningful, as there are types of temporal adverbs such as those expressing frequency that could not at all be classified w.r.t expiry - take the word &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt;; this is neither something that expires, nor something that doesn't expire nor something that has already expired. So I don't think there is an actual terminological classification w.r.t. expiry because this would only be applicable to a rather small set of adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T17:05:17.453" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T17:05:17.453" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18964" CreationDate="2016-06-26T02:34:46.810" Score="13" ViewCount="4105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fiction is &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThirdPersonPerson&quot;&gt;rife&lt;/a&gt; with characters who always speak in third person. Often, such characters are portrayed as having a native language or culture that lacks the concept of a first person, and hence they are supposedly unable to grasp the first person when speaking English (or whatever fictional language is being rendered as English). Often such characters don't seem to have problems understanding other English speakers who do freely use the first or second person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of this in real life? Are there any cultures, whose members are known to have difficulty mastering the grammatical first person when they learn English, even once they learn English at an advanced level? Are there any known pathologies that produce such an effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are examples of people who at one time spoke about themselves in the third person, for various reasons. However, to my knowledge these are always either out of choice (ie. the person &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; speak in the first person, but chooses not to for some reason, such as dramatic effect or politeness) or a trivial lack of competence (ie. the person otherwise understands the first person, and can use when speaking other languages, but happens to have a very rudimentary knowledge of English and avoids first person due to not being familiar with the grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="791" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T14:57:47.340" Title="Are there languages with no first person?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18943" CreationDate="2016-06-26T16:55:19.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found the question interesting and re-read a couple of books today searching for the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books are full of similar examples - languages with only 2 tenses, languages &quot;with no grammar&quot;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were NO mentioning of a language without first person. In fact, the closest fact (to the topic) that I've found there was about the Korean, where there are only two persons: the first and non-first (i.e. they don't distinguish second &amp;amp; third).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: As pointed out by @jogloran in the comments, the above statement is probably false. There is some misunderstanding regarding the Korean honorific suffix &quot;si&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T14:57:47.340" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T14:57:47.340" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18943" CreationDate="2016-06-26T21:39:57.170" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/schools-departments/natural-semantic-metalanguage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semantic Primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;. Though NSM researchers have not considered every language in existence, they have studied languages from every large family (and if a language truly did not have this prime it would be one of the more obvious ones,) so I'd consider this decent evidence that this is something every language will have. Note that the primes may be represented by affixes or phrases rather than just single words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T22:10:47.727" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T22:10:47.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-26T23:10:21.663" Score="5" ViewCount="1318" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a child was born in for example India and moved to America around age 5, but still spoke their native language at home what age would they lose their accent? And then maybe when they are 12 they move back to India and are only speaking their native tongue would they gain their accent back at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13494" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-07-29T01:41:03.160" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T14:16:30.973" Title="How fast do people lose their accents and regain them?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-26T23:44:02.210" Score="0" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known that morphology influences phonology to a certain extent. This can be seen with how vowels that should shift do not shift when the words are affixed by certain morphemes. Some affixes seem to inhibit vowel shift, whilst some don't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Finite)&#xA;Before shift: finiːtə&#xA;After shift: faɪnaɪt&#xA;faɪnaɪtli&#xA;ɪnfɪnɪt (negative prefix 'in-')&#xA;&#xA;(Decide)&#xA;Before shift: desiːdə&#xA;After shift: dɪsaɪd&#xA;dɪsaɪsɪv&#xA;dɪsɪʒ(ə)n (nominalising suffix '-ion')&#xA;&#xA;(Eat)&#xA;Before shift: ɛːt&#xA;After shift: iːt&#xA;iːtəri&#xA;ɛdɪb(ə)l (adjectival suffix '-able')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some affixes affect only some words, not all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Touch)&#xA;&#xA;Before shift: tʊtʃ&#xA;After shift: tʌtʃ&#xA;tʌtʃəb(ə)l (adjectival suffix '-able' does not inhibit vowel shift)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Why do such affixes do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Is there a fixed set of affixes that does this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T05:17:41.800" Title="Vowel Shift and Affixes" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18948" CreationDate="2016-06-27T05:17:41.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are assuming that &quot;eat&quot; and &quot;edible&quot;, for example, share a common synchronic morpheme, which is a hallmark of the SPE analysis of English. There are innumerable problems with that analysis, which are a result of having pretty low standards for synchronic relatedness. An alternative, which has worked out pretty well for phonology, is simply to say that these words, along with pairs like &quot;father&quot; and &quot;paternal&quot;, are semantically related (there is some connection in meaning) and historically related (they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; derive fromt he same Indo-European root), but within the confines of a grammar, they are not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of devices employed in the SPE analysis to account for irregular phonological alternations. For example (see p. 201) the vowel alternation of &lt;em&gt;sit ~ sat&lt;/em&gt; is subsumed under general vowel shift (which otherwise only affects tense vowels) because some verbs have the diacritic [+F] assigned in the past tense, and they expand the rule to include the context &quot;[___,+F]&quot; (i.e. &quot;when a vowel is marked [+F]&quot;). See chapter 4 in general for segmental analysis. The indices of SPE are very helpful for understanding this: there are word and affix indices, so if you want to know the SPE treatment of &lt;em&gt;-ion&lt;/em&gt;, it's in the index and you can see the 9 citations of that affix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between phonologically-neutral affixes (&lt;em&gt;-ness, -able&lt;/em&gt;) and those that cause changes (&lt;em&gt;-ity, -ous&lt;/em&gt;) is the foundation on which level-ordered phonology and morphology (a.k.a. &quot;Lexical Phonology&quot;) is built. It has something to do with generality and productiveness – these changes are not productive or, it is often argued, only marginally part of synchronic English phonlogy, and marginal affixes have marginal phonological processes, because those processes were phonological rules many hundreds of years ago, and the results of those sound changes along with the conditioning affixation was long ago stuffed and mounted in the museum of sound change that is the lexicon of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T05:17:41.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-27T20:56:44.747" Score="-1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know anything about the distribution of the modal &quot;ought&quot; without &quot;to&quot; (in other words, &quot;ought&quot; taking the base infinitive).  Eg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They ought to go home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They ought go home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;ought&quot; without &quot;to&quot; an occasional variant?  Is it archaic?  Is it regional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I want to know is b/c I teach ESL, and would like to tell my students accurate information.  Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T21:57:38.923" Title="&quot;Ought&quot; omission of &quot;to&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-06-30T00:25:03.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18953" CreationDate="2016-06-27T21:23:15.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have changed my answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To understand 'ought', I will coin a word class called 'control verbal'.&#xA;A control verbal has an event as its direct object.  The subject of this sub-event will be 'raised to object', or it will be omitted (raised to subject) if it matches the calling subject.  The verb of the sub-event will be cast to infinitive (possibly bare) or cast to participle.  A 'pure' modal (like 'should') always controls by 'raising to subject' and 'bare infinitive'.  The 'impure' modal 'ought' differs in that the infinitive may be marked (by 'to').  A control verb (like 'need') is a control verbal that has its own 'action', as well as controlling a sub-event.  The infinitive marker may be deleted when the control is negated, making it parse like a modal: &quot;He needs to drink, but he need not eat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old answer:&#xA;'Ought' does not really become modal when the infinitive marker 'to' is elided.  Rather, 'ought' is still a 'control verb', but the controlled verb '[to] go' is reduced to a bare infinitive.  This is also true of control verbs like 'need' and 'dare'.  Because it works with so few verbs, I would call it archaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T21:57:38.923" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T21:57:38.923" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18953" CreationDate="2016-06-27T21:44:49.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In present-day English &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; may behave like a 'modal' verb, taking an unmarked infinitive, only in negatives and questions, not in ordinary declaratives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ought I take that seriously?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You ought not take that seriously. &lt;em&gt;BUT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You ought &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; take that seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even in negatives and questions the unmarked infinitive is not always required; for many speakers a marked infinitive is acceptable, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ought I to take that seriously?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You ought not to take that seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED: &#xA;Even more likely in US speech is the &quot;melded&quot; form &lt;em&gt;oughta&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oughta we take that seriously?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You oughta not take that seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this tolerates what looks like lexicalization but is probably better understood as modal stacking:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we oughta take that seriously?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You didn't oughta take that seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is a question of declining importance: use of &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; has decreased markedly in the last couple of generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T09:14:10.217" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T09:14:10.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9232" CreationDate="2016-06-27T22:08:09.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions of legal interpretation can be asked on Law SE. Since this won't get migrated, I'll give the answer I'd give there. First, jurisdiction matters: permission is required under EU law, though non-commercial text mining for research purposes is legal in the UK. In the US, one must do more guessing. Following &lt;a href=&quot;http://torrent-defenders.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Authors-Guild-v.-Google-Books-05-cv-8136-Summary-Judgment-Granted-for-Google-Books.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Authors Guild v. Google&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;fair use&quot; is a conceivable defense. (That means, rights holders can sue you and during the trial you can argue that it falls under &quot;fair use&quot;). The problem is that it's hard to predict when &quot;fair use&quot; will work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/7683/in-the-us-when-is-fair-use-a-defense-to-copyright-infringement/7684#7684&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a summary of the fair use defense. Factors that would rule against a fair use defense are extent (copying a bit vs. copying everything), effect on market (what would the rights-holder have lost?), and purpose (education vs. commercial exploitation). In fact, as far as I know, in the US there has never been a finding of infringement when the use is purely research (no royalties for articles). It would also be important to respect opt-out meta-tags, which expressly deny permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't clearly settled law regarding the legality of mechanised copying involved in text-mining, where a bot scrapes text off the interwebs and performs a statistical analysis on that text. Any re-distribution of such copied text (i.e. giving examples of a construction) needs to be quite limited. Any putative escape hatch like &quot;a couple of words every 200 words removed&quot; is total nonsense, as is the &quot;change a few words and you're okay&quot; myth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:26.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T22:08:09.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18947" CreationDate="2016-06-28T07:12:12.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any studies on this topic, probably because it is highly based on the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually when a child is brought up with multiple languages, then it has no foreign accent in any of them. The older that child gets before it studies a new language, the more likely it is to have an accent. I cannot back this up with my own experience, but I know a lot of people who can (e.g. look @A.Toumentsev's comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason why it's hard to give a direct answer is because some languages sound more similar to others and are thus easier to learn without having an accent. My fiancee is Colombian, but the first time she spoke Bavarian sounded almost perfect. This is true for most Spanish and Italian speakers. On the other side, even though Bavarian is a Germanic language, if a German speaks Bavarian it just sounds horrible and you can hear a very thick accent. It takes a long time of practice before it sounds good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determination is also a reason. Some people only care about learning a language so they are understood, while others want to sound like a native. That means that some people are never accent free and others sound almost like natives only after a few months. I know plenty of people who learn a language just to be understood, without trying to adopt a native accent (though I don't find that objectionable). I for one tried to get an American accent when I started to learn English and I came pretty close (it probably used to be better than it is now), up to a point where Spaniards told me that I have an English accent in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it all depends on the amount you speak and listen to natives. If you only ever talk a language with others who are foreign to the language or if you are only ever writing that language, then the time required to loose your accent will increase even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think one should make an effort to learn somebody else's language well, but keep a slight accent, it makes you likable ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T07:12:12.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18977" CreationDate="2016-06-28T08:23:30.080" Score="15" ViewCount="13988" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now and then I am faced with claims that language A is better than B, because of some grammar rules or words or ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there really a standard or &lt;strong&gt;a method to analyse a language from different perspectives and then rank it&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly: (suggestions and not real questions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language is result of social consensus, so could we say less popular dialects or languages are inferior?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could we rank languages by the average amount of times learners spend to be fluent in it? Ranking them harder and easier?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could we from linguistics point of view decide on Semantics and grammar, etc; ranking languages on ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or simply compare languages based on their culture and historical background or any other possible measurement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/article/449938/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The average information rate conveyed during speech&lt;/a&gt; or written communication?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally if any such method exists will that be a partial comparison or will it be able to rank Language A as superior to B which will result in the best(or most efficient language) in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastEditorUserId="12613" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T06:11:00.020" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T11:15:04.953" Title="Could we rank languages, saying one is superior to the other?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-28T08:49:48.483" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Language is not something that can be &quot;better&quot; or &quot;worse&quot; or in any way objectively be &quot;ranked&quot;. This would scientifically be totally untrustworthy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going through each of your points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Language is result of social consensus, so could we say less popular dialects or languages are inferior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popularity of a dialect or language depends on so many factors, most of which are purely cultural ones that are only allegedly in any way related to a language. Such prejudices arise from complicated social factors accumulating, but just because you hate a nation and like to make fun of their language because they sound different or &quot;stupid&quot; doesn't make the language a bad one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could we rank languages by the average amount of times learners spend to be fluent in it? Ranking them harder and easier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not either. Even if it were possible to objectively rate learnability of a language (which isn't so easily possible, because it depends highly on the individual speaker and also at which point you assume that a language is fully, halfway, ... acquired), the size of the lexicon or set of grammar rules doesn't make a language qualitatively better or less good. Both can have advantages or disadvantages - learning lots of grammar rules may seem difficult first, but it might help you expressing things way more precisely than with rather simple and widely applied grammatical constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could we from linguistics point of view decide on semantics and&#xA;  grammar, etc; ranking languages on ambiguity, vagueness, illogic,&#xA;  redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still seems the most reasonable linguistic approach to me, but I am convinced that every language is equally powerful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, there are languages which have evidentiality affixes (so you indicate directly at the verb whether you know what you are saying by having seen it yourself, concluded it by logical reasoning, only from hearsay, ...) so you might think those langauges are more powerful, but still it is totally well possible to express the same in English by means of constructions like &quot;The children &lt;em&gt;must be&lt;/em&gt; awake, I hear them talking&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;They say&lt;/em&gt; she broke up with her boyfriend&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, there is always a trade-off between economy of the language's inventory and economy of the way things are expressed - a small vocabulary and simple grammar may be economic in the way the langauge is less bloated, but at the same time you then need more complicated ways to use it if you want to express the same thing (like English having no evidentiality affixes and making use of syntactic means instead). Conversely, if a language permits expressing a lot of slight meaning differences by explicit linguistic means, this is again uneconomic with respect to the size of the inventory the language needs to have then.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What would you define perfect balance on, what is the optimal ratio of language complexity and expression complexity?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or simply compare languages based on their culture and historical background or any other possible measurement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you mean by that? Japanese is a worthless language as opposed to Latin because the Romans had a huge empire two thousand years ago? Finnish is superior to English because American metal music sucks? This is totally absurd.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or based on the average information rate conveyed during speech or written communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relates to what I wrote about the third point: This would still come closest to a linguistically sensible way to measure a langauge &quot;quality&quot; based on efficiency, but since there is always a trade-off between complexity of the language's lexical and grammatical inventory and complexity of the language's expressions to express the same amount of information, there is no objective way to determine the &quot;ideal language&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking up with what @A. Toumantsev commented (thanks for the amendment):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; indeed possible to measure single parameters like estimated size of the lexicon, complexity of inflectional paradigms for certain classes of words or text length in relation to the amount of information conveyed as the paper you mentioned did, and it is as well possible to compare these reults between selected languages.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; possible to derive any sort of objective &quot;ranking&quot; from such comparisons; there is no linguistically motivatable judgement about something like superiority or inferiority of a natural language, neither based on features that are actually measurable and even less on solely socially motivated and therefore linguistically completely irrelevant individual or cultural preferences.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can not just &quot;rate&quot; a language. You can rate something according to to which amount it suits the purpose it was designed for, possibly also with which efficiency it does so. But language wasn't designed by anyone, language evolved over thousands of years from humans simply using the language, and the purpose which language is meant to fulfill is communication - which does work, in any language, regardless of whether you like the sound of nasals in French or consider a country culturally surperior to another because it has managed to kill more people in the past. (Not presuming this is what you think! Just exaggerating to show why I think this is so absurd.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Such individual emotions have nothing to do with serious linguistic science, and I encourage you to distrust anyone who makes assertions like &quot;This language is so primitive, just like the people who speak it&quot; or &quot;See, I've been learning that language for two years now and I still keep making mistakes, this language is complicated and useless&quot; or &quot;Well, I think we all agree that Swiss German sounds just ridiculous, &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; German is so much better&quot; or &quot;Oh no, English grammar is so complicated, who even &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt; those rules, it is so obvious that my mother tongue does it the way that makes way more sense, any linguist will tell you so&quot;. No, just.. no ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T13:28:22.013" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T13:28:22.013" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T10:06:21.650" Score="6" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some speakers who use a non-standard accent or dialect of a language, occasionally desire to &quot;adjust&quot; their speech to the standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in knowing if there is a word for when this fails based on an inference error. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example (or so I've heard) of this would be some communities in New York who have dropped the &quot;r&quot; at the end of words -- maya (mayor), heata (heater), etc (avoiding IPA here). When these speakers decide to use the &quot;standard&quot; pronunciation, they realize they &quot;have to put the Rs back&quot;. The mistaken inference I'm referring to would cause a word like Brenda to be pronouced &quot;Brender&quot; as it could (incorrectly) sound like its &quot;r&quot; had been dropped. A famous example of this is the Billy Joel song, Scenes From an Italian Restaurant, a story about Brender and Eddie. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I've been studying Mandarin in Taipei, one of my teachers is occasionally making a similar adjustment that has caused me to learn not just a non-standard pronunciation, but to actually pronounce it in way that no one would say, except for someone making this inference error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent example is learning to pronounce &quot;always - zǒng&quot; as &quot;zhǒng&quot;. The issue is that some Mandarin speaking communities often pronounce the &quot;zh&quot; as &quot;z&quot;, and since she pronounced in &quot;zǒng&quot; in this case, she mistakenly thought she was pronoucning it wrong (an incorrect inference in this case), and reversed the &quot;error&quot;, and taught me &quot;zhǒng&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to deal with my frustration, at least I can know if this has a name in the linguistics world. If it doesn't we could name it after her :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13504" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T11:55:00.170" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T11:55:00.170" Title="What do you call a failed attempt to use the &quot;standard&quot; speech?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T11:03:26.100" Score="4" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that verbs are sometimes called &quot;transitive&quot; and I think that means the can take a direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm learning Mandarin and there seems to be some verbs that can only take other verbs. For example start/stop 開始／停止.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot start a book, you must start TO READ the book, and you cannot start a meal, you must start TO EAT the meal. In English we can start/stop both NP and VP (stop what you're doing / stop doing that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this kind of verb? It seems modal or auxiliary verbs must take other verbs, but these verbs in question don't feel very modal-like to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in others' knowledge on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13504" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T12:09:20.437" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:05:33.387" Title="What do you call a verb that requires another verb?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="28" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T11:34:57.863" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you recommend a publicly accessible study/article that quantitatively compares languages by their complexity or irregularity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in spoken languages only. Not writing/spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number of inflected word forms and number of irregularly inflected words for the most popular languages would be good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13507" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T19:32:45.400" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T19:32:45.400" Title="comparative study of spoken language complexity or irregularity" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;irregularity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18960" CreationDate="2016-06-28T11:37:22.553" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest term to what you need is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is sometimes called &lt;em&gt;hyperurbanism&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or a usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes that the form is correct through misunderstanding of these rules, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article I gave a link to has examples of hypercorrection from different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T11:37:22.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18943" CreationDate="2016-06-28T12:16:46.687" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages that have no category of person, like Manju or Malay, there are dozens of politeness-specific words meaning &quot;I&quot; and &quot;you&quot;, most of them being actually nouns. In such languages the same word can mean both &quot;I&quot; and &quot;you&quot; depending on who says it to whom, e.g. in Manju, when you talk to the Emperor, the word you must use for &quot;you&quot; is &lt;em&gt;han&lt;/em&gt; (noun, meaning 'khan'), and when the Emperor addresses you, the word he uses for &quot;I&quot; is also &lt;em&gt;han&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Malay, when you write a letter to your grandma or grandpa, you use &lt;em&gt;cucunda&lt;/em&gt; (noun, meaning 'grandchild') for &quot;I&quot; and &lt;em&gt;nenda&lt;/em&gt; (noun, meaning 'grandparent') for &quot;you&quot;. But when your grandma writes an answer letter to you, she uses the same 2 words, but with their meaning reversed, &lt;em&gt;nenda&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;I&quot; and &lt;em&gt;cucunda&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things can, naturally, be interpreted in different ways, but I think that languages that have the same words for &quot;I&quot; and &quot;you&quot; have a very vague idea of the 1st person pronoun, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T14:31:04.510" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T14:31:04.510" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18929" CreationDate="2016-06-28T14:57:31.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Always&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; are adverbs of frequency. The phrase &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt; is a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use all three of these items as (temporal) adjuncts, a term which refers to their syntactic function, in other words what job they are doing in the sentence rather than what word or phrase category they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of semantics and their being 'non-expiry' terms, I think one term that is sometimes used to denote this is that they represent &lt;em&gt;unbounded&lt;/em&gt; periods of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T12:02:10.537" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T12:02:10.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-28T16:58:55.047" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/18959&quot;&gt;already said by lemontree&lt;/a&gt;, most of these points are just totally subjective criteria that you can't possibly rate impartially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only points where one could see some chance to come up with an objective rating are the 3 and 5: ambiguity and conciseness. Indeed, as the paper you've linked shows, it is possible to &lt;em&gt;empirically&lt;/em&gt; compare information content by comparing, for certain sample texts, how much information they pack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trouble is that's there's not really a reliable way to tell what &lt;em&gt;information content&lt;/em&gt; even means&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;. You can in any language express a given information in many different ways. Finding the most concise way is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uncomputable problem&lt;/a&gt;, even for rigidly specified programming languages (this is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kolmogorov complexity&lt;/a&gt;). It's even more hopeless for natural languages, where it's often not even possible to say whether two samples express the same information. Hence you also can't judge whether language &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; has more ambiguity than language &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, or just more subtle nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligatory XKCD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/1155/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kolmogorov_directions.png&quot; alt=&quot;XKCD comic on Kolmogorov complexity in natural language&quot; title=&quot;People get really grumpy when they realize you&amp;#39;re giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shannon_entropy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is possible&lt;/a&gt; to measure the total information content of a binary data stream, of of a physical signal channel. But this has little relation to the actual information content in languages, except by giving an absolute upper bound to what amount of information can theoretically be contained in printed text. Actual language gets nowhere close to that bound.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13513" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T17:04:41.310" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-28T20:19:04.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting subjectivity aside, a comparison of different languages can be made empirically. Though it is impossible to say that one language is superior to another, it is easy to point out--&#xA;--some languages have a larger vocabulary than others&#xA;--some languages' writing systems are more efficient than others&#xA;--neologisms are more easily created in some languages than in others&#xA;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13515" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T20:19:04.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-28T21:26:03.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;@azerafati The answer to the question: &quot;is there really a standard or a method to analyse a language from different perspectives and then rank it?&quot; cannot get universal consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/ A language is both spoken and written. Some speakers will it find easy to pronounce the hard 'a' 'ayin' (eye in Arabic or Hebrew) and may find it hard to utter the exact tone for each word in Mandarin as it carries four tones. Ditto for all tonal languages, which may include more that four tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what weight will you put on pronunciation in the process of ranking a language? [and you must enter evaluator's language as parameter in the process of determining this weight]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other part is twofold: how can you compare a language using the same set of characters to generate all possible syllables in a language [alphabets, abugidas] with a language for which each concept is visually different, such as Mandarin - well, sort of, as many words in Mandarin are a juxtaposition of other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On which criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2/ If ink costs a lot, a you may take the savings in ink into account! In this case, Mandarin is more ergonomic and costs less if written using a pen, not a brush!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the last point: French carries tons of verb aspects, I recently learned that Finnish and Hungarian have lots of declensions, will you evaluate the language on the basis that it uses very few words to represent the same semantics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then is easier to learn by demanding less efforts in memorizing, a shortcut to quickly being able to communicate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case again, Chinese is the winner. Few verb aspects, no junction between words for accusative case, same construct as English for past and future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Thai, for some root, a set of affixes helps derive concepts. For instance, as Nam means water/liquid, a prefix makes a verb as in ab-nam (take a shower), sut-nam (swim), whereas a suffix produces a noun, as in nam-an (oil).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well, is there any method to take into account how elegant a language can be, letting one immediately categorize from some root (as in Thai above - which I personally found elegant although not generalized/extended to the whole language)/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Food for thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13341" LastEditorUserId="13341" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T21:32:38.887" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T21:32:38.887" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-28T23:02:31.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to break the trend a little bit and argue for Yes. Lets start with a single language and then make a stupid change to deliberately make it worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Original language: Hello my name is Ed&#xA;Modified language: Hello my name name is Ed&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single change is that every time you use the word 'name' you have to include it twice. This is quiet clearly ridiculous and redundant. Given that this is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; change, I think it can be concluded that the original language is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the fact that a single change can make a language better or worse shows that extensive changes can make a language better or worse and thus one language &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be objectively better than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could probably rank languages by different aspects. Written conciseness for example: When instructions are printed in multiple languages, some translations are shorter than other. Take many samples and compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you then took the language that scored the highest average rank, you could label it as the 'best' language but I don't think this would cut it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everyone in the world suddenly knew every language fluently then the language they ended up communicating in could be considered 'best'. It would likely be a mix of the best ideas from all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;------- Semi-related Point Below (a bit prescriptivist beware) -------&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter Q (or at least its usage) is an example of redundancy in the English language. In the vast majority of its usage in everyday language it is followed by a U. In all other cases I know of it can be pronounced as a K. In the latter case the Q could be replaced by a K and QU could be replaced by just Q (or even better KW). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters S, C and K do not all need to exist in the English language. The soft C can be replaced by S and the hard C can be replaced by K.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ignore this &amp;lt;)&#xA;Finally the letter H is just the worst. It's not a proper consonant. It should be a accent. All other consonants can be put after a vowel and make a proper sound (ab, eb, ib, ob, ub). H is a Horrible exception.&#xA;(&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;------- The bit where I changed my mind -------&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that although languages are a great and wonderful thing, they evolve just as animals do (when was this my point?!). In that evolution they get random mutations that can be helpful or can be harmful or can have no effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huh okay. I just changed my mind. Like animals languages evolve to fit their surroundings (think how Eskimos apparently have x number of words for snow), this may be best for them but would be redundant for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my opinion there can be no 'best' language. Although languages can be 'best' for a purpose and can be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13518" LastEditorUserId="13518" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T16:27:05.733" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T16:27:05.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-29T01:49:06.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are just too many things (good and bad) language can/should do, and ways they do them. Early on, my primary purpose in using language was to get laid. It didn't work well by itself. Then I discovered other things (e.g., money) could render the linguistic approach moot. But those times are long past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There MIGHT be useful ways to compare languages in terms of number of speakers, size of vocabulary, ease/difficulty of learning, ability to attain precision (and/or persuasion, see above), and then there are the speaking/writing and hearing/reading nexuses. Even these metric-seeming milieux get rather squishy pretty fast, so the idea of any sort of omnibus comparison utterly defies my imagination. But I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; heard people claim to have made them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always dismissed such claims, usually rashly made, out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13521" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T01:49:06.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-29T02:37:05.530" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The number of people who speak English &lt;em&gt;as their native&lt;/em&gt; language will decline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what part of speech is &lt;em&gt;as their native&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13524" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-07-06T06:40:59.050" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T09:13:07.203" Title="What part of speech is &quot;as their native&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18972" CreationDate="2016-06-29T07:14:22.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @user6726 already said, you can not assign the phrase a POS, because &quot;part of speech&quot; refers to single words which &lt;em&gt;as their native language&lt;/em&gt; isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in the syntactic category, you could say it is a &lt;strong&gt;prepositional phrase&lt;/strong&gt;, because the head of the phrase is &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; which is a preposition&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfpUt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfpUt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;preposition&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; functions as a determiner (its POS would be a possessive &lt;strong&gt;pronoun&lt;/strong&gt;), &lt;em&gt;native&lt;/em&gt; is an &lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; a simple &lt;strong&gt;noun&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can however &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; assign a category to &lt;em&gt;as their native&lt;/em&gt; like you wrote, because this is not a constituent: You can not separatedly group the words together like this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W.r.t. the tree this means that there is no node which dominates&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) all these terminals&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) and nothing else but these terminals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't find this so intuitive, you could also think about grouping all words that somehow belong together into brackets:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ [as] [ [their] [ [native] [language] ] ] ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the words could be &quot;groups&quot; on their own, &lt;em&gt;their native language&lt;/em&gt; forms a group next to &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;native language&lt;/em&gt; is a group and the whole phrase is one as well, but you will find no pair of brackets that contains exactly &lt;em&gt;as their native&lt;/em&gt;: It is not a constituent, this combination of words is not a separable phrase. You'd need to include the noun &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; as well or narrow it down, saying e.g. that &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Footnotes&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; can also be used as an adverb, as in &lt;em&gt;My house is not AS big as yours&lt;/em&gt;; however, as @PaulM and @Araucaria pointed out, adverbs don't take (NP) complements, so the use here must be prepositional.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thanks for correcting me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-06T09:13:07.203" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T09:13:07.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18972" CreationDate="2016-06-29T09:15:50.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The number of people who speak English &lt;strong&gt;as their native&lt;/strong&gt; language will decline.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The string &lt;em&gt;as their native&lt;/em&gt; comprises three separate items: the preposition &quot;as&quot;, the genitive pronoun &quot;their&quot; and the adjective &quot;native&quot;. &#xA;It is not itself a constituent, but part of the preposition phrase &lt;em&gt;as their native language&lt;/em&gt; headed by the preposition &quot;as&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13404" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T09:15:50.840" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3710" CreationDate="2016-06-29T09:22:21.710" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has apparently never been great need to investigate this phenomenon with such rigid precision. No significant interest. No equivalent of &quot;phases of sleep&quot;, or anything similar has thus surfaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people proficient in more than one language experience something for which &quot;thinking in a language&quot; seems an apt description, and have no reason to believe others' experience is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first language is Polish, but most of my work and entertainment is in English - and so are about 80% of my private thoughts - the concepts, phrases, etc that I picked up feeling more easily accessible, more familiar that way. I often must slow down to translate when speaking to someone in Polish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When learning German, I attempted to void my thoughts of other languages, and go from vague intention to speech using only things I had picked up in contact with German. I believe that qualifies, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to address it from the angle you describe, I'd treat &quot;thinking in a language&quot; as an instance / manifestation of a more general psychological phenomenon, like preparing a dish the way you were taught, or being used to a specific model of car - you can drive others, but for a while it does not come as easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13529" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T09:22:21.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-29T12:45:23.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OPs Original question was:&#xA;But is there really a standard or a method to analyse a language from different perspectives and then rank it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criteria for this questions seems to be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has a standard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This standard uses a method and analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a ranking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ranking is by a specific perspective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this I have to answer a resounding &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISO 639 not only identifies what a language is, but sets language codes to each of them.  From this we see there is an international standard for analyzing a language, if for no other reason than to identify it as a language distinct from another.  At question was, for instance, German is different from English.  They have a very similar origin.  This may seem obvious to us but when you ask whether Mandarin Chinese is different from Cantonese or Taiwanese, the question becomes more blurred. (As a side note, for the purposes of the standard, they are not different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISO 3166 identifies regional areas in the world and their &quot;Administrative Language(s)&quot;, ranking primary and secondary languages by usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this we meet all four criteria asked by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ISO 639 and ISO 3166&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Methods are spelled out in the standards&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ranking of the language is done in ISO 3166&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this case, the ranking is by usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13531" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T12:45:23.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-29T12:52:35.040" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be similar to asking &quot;which is the best animal?&quot; and &quot;can we rank animals?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking this way highlights to me that we run into two (related) problems in ranking languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the definition of &quot;best&quot; and &quot;superiority&quot; can be measured along many axes, and any general statement of superiority would mean ranking and scoring those qualities (eg is &quot;ease of learning&quot; more important than &quot;succinctness&quot; etc)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you have to factor in the environment - it depends what you want the language for: legal precision? shouting across fields? After all, honey badgers rank pretty high on lots of measures, but that doesn't mean I'm in a hurry to get one as a pet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One concept that might be handy here is that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency&quot;&gt;Pareto Efficiency&lt;/a&gt;, which is important in understanding competing systems which have different solutions to their engineering compromises. It's possible that real languages will generally score well on some criteria, but are hard to improve without weakening them in another way. On the other hand, the &quot;name name&quot; example given by @EdwardKotarski weakens the language without much gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: yes, we could evaluate languages according to the criteria you describe, and more - just like we can find the fastest fish. But extending that to a more general concept of &quot;best&quot; means selecting and weighting the criteria, and that's completely subjective: if you prioritize &quot;good for communicating with Italians&quot;, then Italian will probably come out somewhere near the top. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13532" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T12:52:35.040" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-29T14:08:53.923" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a freely available and downloadable corpus recorded English language dialogues available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally such a corpus would include transcripts and time-markers for each speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found this list: &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05742&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05742&lt;/a&gt;. However none of the options are available for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13533" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T14:36:46.573" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T07:17:10.927" Title="Freely available corpus of recorded dialogues" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2016-06-29T16:23:46.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can do this without taking into account the context in which the language evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one language has a lot of synonyms for a particular word, it means they were useful and needed in one particular context: for example, I don't think there are a lot of ways to say &quot;snow&quot; in hot countries, while in cold countries you could have a lot of ways to say it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not just about ranking a language, it's about ranking how people evolved in a particular context, and how they managed to overcome the problems they encountered in their living environment by communicating with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language also shows how people think, because we don't have the same path of ideas from one language to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say there is too much to define before even trying to rank it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one criteria could be: how did the language, during its evolution, help people to overcome the problems they encountered?&#xA;Was the way of thinking implied by the construction of the language efficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can measure that efficiency, I think you could have the beginning of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more precise on the last 2 paragraphs:&#xA;There are some places where we can have time to talk about things that aren't directly associated to an action, such as &quot;how did my neighbors react at the village reunion yesterday....&quot;, and some places where you have to concentrate on the things to do now, because if you don't you don't live (search some wood to burn because it's too cold, get some water because it's really hot....).&#xA;These things have an influence on the way you build your thoughts, and by extension, the way you talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this can be measured, but I think each language addresses that kind of needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13537" LastEditorUserId="13537" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T07:48:04.240" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T07:48:04.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18999" CreationDate="2016-06-30T01:14:18.247" Score="0" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone challenged me to translate the phrase &quot;You must not fear&quot; into my conlang, and I was stumped, because I couldn't pin down the modality of the phrase. I came up with a phrase meaning &quot;You are obligated not to fear&quot;, but it clearly doesn't mean that. It's not a command in the traditional sense, nor specifying an obligation; it's more like a reassurance... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What modality does this phrase have? Are there any crosslinguistic parallels that would help me to understand this construction? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: the passage is from &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I must not fear&lt;/strong&gt;. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Dune by Frank Herbert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:52:17.827" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:52:17.827" Title="What type of modality is &quot;You must not fear&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18987" CreationDate="2016-06-30T03:59:09.247" Score="1" ViewCount="1125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 78, &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though I am only on Chapter 4 at the time of this post, I cannot wait until Chapter 6 to understand the following.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jos5h.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jos5h.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a common mistake to avoid: Notice that the AdvP rule specifies that its modifier is another AdvP: AdvP  ⟶ (AdvP) Adv. The rule does NOT say *AdvP  ⟶ (Adv) Adv, so you will never get trees of the form shown in (28) [see above]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  You might find the tree in (27) a little confusing. There are two Advs and two AdvPs. In order to understand that tree a little better, let’s introduce a new concept: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;heads&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. We’ll spend much more time on heads in chapters 6 and 7, but here’s a first pass: The head of a phrase is the word that gives the phrase its category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reread pp 78-79, but still do not understand why 28 is wrong and only 27 is correct.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is the main idea here? How does the concept of Heads resolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:05:09.157" Title="Why must an AdvP have at least one AdvP as a Daughter Node?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T04:12:15.300" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: pp 106-107, &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[6.] iv) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Phrase Structure Rules&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a) CP ⟶ (C) TP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b) TP ⟶ {NP/CP} (T) VP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c) VP ⟶ (AdvP+) V (NP) ({NP/CP}) (AdvP+) (PP+) (AdvP+)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  d) NP ⟶ (D) (AdjP+) N (PP+) (CP)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  e) PP ⟶ P (NP)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  f) AdjP ⟶ (AdvP) Adj&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  g) AdvP ⟶ (AdvP) Adv&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  h) XP ⟶ XP conj XP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i) X ⟶ X conj X   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, per (d), why can an NP (= Noun Phrase) Immediately Dominate D (= Determiner)? Why is there no Phrasal Category DP (= Determiner Phrase) that intervenes between NP and D?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T09:49:49.680" Title="Why are some Word Classes not Immediately Dominated by a Phrasal Category?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18985" CreationDate="2016-06-30T04:55:24.663" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 130, &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU63o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SU63o.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this tree, A governs B. It c-commands B, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; there is no node that&#xA;  c-commands B that A also c-commands. &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (You should note that A also&#xA;  governs N under this definition, A c-commands N, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   there is no node that N c-commands that also c-commands A.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The reverse is also true: N&#xA;  governs A because the relationship between A and N is symmetric&#xA;  c-command. B does not govern A, because B does not c-command A.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is 1 true? Why is not N this node? A c-commands N, and N c-commands B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T14:16:10.270" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T14:16:10.270" Title="How is there 'no node that c-commands B that A also c-commands'?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T05:25:36.933" Score="5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nNpXzP8z040C&amp;amp;pg=SL1-PA462&amp;amp;lpg=SL1-PA462&amp;amp;dq=%22iminutive%22%20yiddish&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=6QHqkWH4Di&amp;amp;sig=mZdjlETvBVayA8hycjc87I2KpGc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiPhavSgM_NAhWn24MKHULNBf0Q6AEIKTAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22iminutive%22%20yiddish&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;iminutive&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is used in Yiddish, and, apparently, Bavarian grammar to refer to the second diminutive (i.e., of nouns). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of &quot;diminutive&quot; is clear. As for the provenance of the term &quot;iminutive&quot;--I have a sneaking suspicion that there was no term until one fine day it was divined that the concept of double-diminuition could be illustrated by example (i.e., diminishing a &quot;diminutive&quot; word), collaterally producing--what else but a brand new name for the concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When was the term first used? Who deserves credit for this oh-so-clever novellum? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13542" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T15:11:36.827" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T15:11:36.827" Title="Origin of the term &quot;iminutive&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;diminutive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18983" CreationDate="2016-06-30T05:49:38.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already in other questions you had, I would recommend you just having a look at the definition again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X &lt;strong&gt;c-commands&lt;/strong&gt; Y if X's sister either&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) is Y or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) contains Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that nodes can only c-command their sisters and &quot;nieces&quot; (i.e. the daughters of their sisters, and daughters af these nieces and so on), NEVER their own daughters or &quot;granddaughters&quot;, i.e. never something that they immediately or indirectly dominate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, in this example, N and B don't satisfy the definition of c-command: B is neither a sister of N nor is it contained in a sister of N, but it is immediately dominated by N. So why do you think N c-commands B? This can NEVER be the case if N is the mother or &quot;grandmother&quot;, &quot;great-gramdmother&quot;... of B, so there is no reason why N and B should stand in a c-command relation by this definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T13:33:01.973" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T13:33:01.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18982" CreationDate="2016-06-30T06:00:17.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really get your question. &quot;Why are some word classes not immediately dominated by a phrasal category&quot; - any word is dominated by some phrasal category. Your question is probably rather about why some words are dominated by a phrase that doesn't have the same category as this word (e.g. D is not dominated by DP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A node is always immediately dominated by the category that the &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt; of this phrase determines. So the nodes in an NP will be dominated by NP because the head of the NP is an N, the nodes in a VP will be dominated by VP because the head of the VP is a V, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like in this syntax theory, NPs can also contain (optional) determiners, but whatever else there may be, whether there is also a D, a PP, ..., the head of the phrase is still N, and this is what determines the category of the NP.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I haven't read that book myself; either there is also the notion of DPs that is not shown here or (more probably) all DPs are considered NPs - this is an eternal dispute among syntax theories, some argue that it is more reasonable to assume D is the head of a phrase like &quot;the cat&quot; because, amongst others, the choice of the determiner influences the inflection of the N so one can assume that NP is more like a complement to D that gets selected by it and so on, some prefer to go with the more traditional assumption that the head of such a phrase is still an N and that determiners are additional (if you stick to the assumption that all NPs must eventually go into DPs, you must assume an empty determiner head in a phrase like &quot;I like [ø cats]&quot;) so the phrasal category is an NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &quot;for example, per (d) ...&quot;. What else do you mean? I don't see anything more that looks weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T09:49:49.680" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T09:49:49.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18981" CreationDate="2016-06-30T06:05:09.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If AdvP immediately dominated two Advs, what would the head of the phrase be? There must be one distinct head, and in 28) this could be either of the Advs, there would be no way to clearly decide which node is the head of the phrase. Therefore, you specify which adverb should be the head of the AdvP (here it is &lt;em&gt;quickly&lt;/em&gt;, because this is the &quot;main&quot; adverb that is again modified by another adverb) and the issue is resolved, since the AdvP containing the adverb &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; can in no way be the head of the adverb phrae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:05:09.157" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18961" CreationDate="2016-06-30T06:05:33.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Catena&quot; is a good start, but a more specific term for this--since &quot;catena,&quot; as far as I am aware, can refer to all sorts of strings, not just of verbs--is  &lt;strong&gt;serial verb construction&lt;/strong&gt;.  (&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Verb serialization&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;verb stacking&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; are other names for this phenomenon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction#Contrast_with_compound_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on serial verb constructions specifically cites Mandarin as a language in which they are to be found. It adds this note: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Chinese, however, there is often no clear distinction between&#xA;  serial verb phrases and prepositional phrases. The first three &quot;verbs&quot;&#xA;  in the above sentence &lt;em&gt;(&quot;wǒ zuò fēijī cóng Shànghǎi dào Běijīng qù&quot;/&#xA;  &quot;I sit aircraft depart Shanghai arrive Beijing travel&quot;/&#xA;  &quot;I travel from Shanghai to Beijing by aircraft&quot;)&lt;/em&gt; may alternatively be regarded as prepositions&#xA;  (this applies particularly to words like cóng which do not normally&#xA;  appear as independent verbs). Words used in that way in Chinese and in&#xA;  some other languages are commonly referred to as &lt;strong&gt;coverbs&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of whether they exist in English, Wikipedia has this to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain expressions resembling serial verb construction are found in&#xA;  English (surviving from Early Modern English), such as let's go eat&#xA;  and come live with me.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; In such constructions, the second verb would&#xA;  normally be regarded as a bare infinitive (and can generally be&#xA;  replaced by a &quot;full&quot; infinitive by the insertion of to before it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;compound verb/complex predicate&lt;/a&gt;, a related-but-different idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13542" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:05:33.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18960" CreationDate="2016-06-30T06:15:22.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your &quot;Brender&quot; is not an example of hypercorrection but of the standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-rhoticity&lt;/a&gt; in Billy Joel's (Bronx?) dialect. This is a very interesting phenomenon with lots of related concepts, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking/&quot;intrusive&quot; R&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sandhi&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't comment on the Chinese question, except to tell you it is almost certainly an example of something different--probably something closer to &quot;hyper-correction&quot;--than this. So it doesn't make sense to yoke these two examples together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13542" LastEditorUserId="13542" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T15:30:47.080" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T15:30:47.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2016-06-30T06:17:26.477" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably you might be looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Agglutinative languages&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13545" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T06:17:26.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18978" CreationDate="2016-06-30T07:17:10.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concretely I would suggest film subtitles or telephone data, depending on your exact application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05742&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Survey of Available Corpora For Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05742v2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;), published by researchers at the Université de Montréal and McGill, has a good overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PG9Uf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PG9Uf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant section &lt;em&gt;Human-Human Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; gives overviews and links to:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Switchboard dataset&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- British National Corpus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further down you will find &lt;em&gt;Constrained Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; (domain-specific) and &lt;em&gt;Scripted Spoken Corpora&lt;/em&gt; (films).  &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensubtitles.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensubtitles.org&lt;/a&gt; is also widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T07:17:10.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18984" CreationDate="2016-06-30T08:44:14.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that it started as a kind of joke: Diminish the word &quot;diminutive&quot; by taking away one letter and you get something smaller—the iminutive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, stacking diminutive endings is not uncommon in colloquial German, you can have up to four of them in an ending like &quot;-ileinelchen&quot; composed of &quot;-i&quot;, &quot;-lein&quot;, &quot;-el&quot;, and &quot;-chen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T08:44:14.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T14:44:12.917" Score="6" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the retroflex d and t are present in some Germanic languages but not in most Romance, Slavic, and other IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it occurs in IE languages of Asia, like Sanskrit, Pashto, and north Indian languages, (but not Persian), which could be explained as contact with people having these sounds in their language, but my focus is specifically on Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there been any explanation given why it occurs in Germanic but not others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I am a rank amateur in linguistics, so I have used &quot;some&quot; and 'most' just to be on safer side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &#xA;I am a bit embarrassed that I mistook the alveolar stops t and d to be the retroflex ones; to me they sounded the same. It appears that only Norwegian and Swedish have them, as opposed to English, German and Dutch that I had listed in the original question. However, this information won't affect my interest in the topic. I have updated the question accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastEditorUserId="13546" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T18:02:03.570" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T00:08:50.907" Title="How and when did some European languages acquire retroflex d and t?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18993" CreationDate="2016-06-30T15:45:57.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only Germanic languages with retroflex consonants are Norwegian and Swedish (where it is a dialect feature -- not found in e.g. Bergen Norwegian where &amp;#x3c;r&gt; is uvular). The origin appears to be &amp;#x3c;r&gt;, reflected in the spelling, where [kɑʈʈ] &quot;map&quot; is spelled &amp;#x3c;kart&gt; and [kɑtt] &quot;cat&quot; is spelled &amp;#x3c;katt&gt;. Assuming the facts on Kristofferson's &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Norwegian&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ɽ&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;more phonemic&quot;, and can be traced back in some contexts to earlier &lt;em&gt;rd&lt;/em&gt; clusters in Old Norse that were simplified to [ɽ]. The retroflex flap also appears (depending on dialect) as a variant of /l/ after back vowels. There is a poorly-understood connection in a number of languages between preceding vowel backness and the &lt;em&gt;r, l&lt;/em&gt; distinction (though one can either find the pattern [il, ur] or [ir, ul]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some dialects of American English, there is a coarticulatory process where  in an onset cluster with &amp;#x3c;t,d&gt; causes some retraction of the stop, which many people think sounds like [tʃ]. The actual quality of &amp;#x3c;r&gt; in American English is fairly variable, but under a liberal interpretation of what &quot;retroflex&quot; means, one could say that &amp;#x3c;r&gt; is a retroflex glide, in which case one could also say that /t,d/ also become phonetically retroflex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, many people say that Russian /ʃ, ʒ/ is retroflex and Polish has them too. Retroflex consonants are said to exist in dialects of Italian. All in all, these are probably natural phonetic developments that just happened to make it on the map of linguistic documentation in these languages. Basque and (dialects of) peninsular Spanish have what are usually termed apico-alveolars, which could be lumped together with retroflex consonants. It turns out that &quot;retroflex&quot; is not such a unified phonetic thing, so Indic and Dravidian languages differ in the values of the &quot;retroflex&quot; consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T18:04:52.930" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T18:04:52.930" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18900" CreationDate="2016-06-30T16:12:02.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As much as I know now, I got a solution which looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1) P = {S -&amp;gt; CD,C -&amp;gt; c | Cc,D -&amp;gt; d, F -&amp;gt; f}&#xA;&#xA;2) {S -&amp;gt; AB|B|aa|aAa, A -&amp;gt; b|bA, B -&amp;gt; c|Ac}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13446" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T16:12:02.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T16:15:26.123" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to note that I'm well aware as to the difference between the perfect and perfective aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until recently I though that the Perfect aspect can denote (in addition to its perfect aspect meaning) also either a perfective or an imperfective aspect meaning (depending on the context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, lately I've stumbled upon these claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/topics/show/63&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;: It's said that the &lt;strong&gt;Perfect tenses in Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; denote a &lt;strong&gt;perfective meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, while the &lt;strong&gt;Conditional and Future&lt;/strong&gt; denote &lt;strong&gt;imperfective meaning&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pret%C3%A9rito_perfecto_compuesto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;: It's said that the &lt;strong&gt;Present Perfect in Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; denotes a &lt;strong&gt;perfective meaning&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the non-progressive &lt;strong&gt;Present Perfect (Perfecto), Past Perfect (Pluscuamperfecto), Preterite Anterior (Pretérito Anterior) in Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; necessarily denote &lt;em&gt;perfective meaning&lt;/em&gt; or can they also denote &lt;em&gt;imperfective meaning&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the non-progressive &lt;strong&gt;Perfect in English&lt;/strong&gt; necessarily denotes &lt;em&gt;perfective meaning&lt;/em&gt; or can it also denote &lt;em&gt;imperfective meaning&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;strong&gt;Future (in English and Spanish)&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Conditional (in Spanish)&lt;/strong&gt; necessarily denote &lt;em&gt;imperfective meaning&lt;/em&gt; or can they also denote &lt;em&gt;perfective meaning&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What about &lt;strong&gt;Future Perfect and Conditional Perfect&lt;/strong&gt; which are a combination of 1,2 and 3 above?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13548" LastEditorUserId="13548" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T16:41:41.503" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T18:57:26.673" Title="Does the Perfect in addition to its perfect meaning also denotes perfective / imperfective / either meaning (in English and Spanish)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;&lt;imperfect&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T16:55:09.860" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question on NER?&#xA;Suppose I have set of documents and do manual tagging for all the names in that document. Now based on those tagged words I train my model (using CRF), i.e. add the tagged words to the feature set.&#xA;Note here by name i mean either one of the following - person name or medicine name or disease name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is , if i want to add more tagged data to train model , how will following approach effect model generation&#xA;1) I follow the same process, i.e. tag the names in documents and add new document to list of already present documents.&#xA;2) instead of tagging i manually extract the names and skip POS tagging step and directly add the names to feature set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption is 2) will yield bad model because CRF is probabilistic model and hence context is necessary.&#xA;Thoughts??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13107" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T16:55:09.860" Title="NER model training question" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18980" CreationDate="2016-06-30T19:32:02.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the word I was looking for was the &lt;strong&gt;hortative modality&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a set of modalities where the speaker strongly encourages or exhorts someone to do something. Specifically, I think it's either the dehortative or inhortative modality, where the speaker &lt;em&gt;dis&lt;/em&gt;courages an action, as in &quot;You must not fear.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; has useful information to this effect; props to @GregLee who prompted me to search &quot;exhortative&quot; as a mood on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:32:02.777" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18996" CreationDate="2016-07-01T01:06:35.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I have practically no knowledge of Spanish, I can answer only the English part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the English Perfect is not an aspect. The two English aspects are Continuous (progressive) and Non-Continuous (non-progressive). A verb form cannot have two aspects at the same time, but English has several Perfect Continuous tenses and several Perfect Non-Continuous ones, that is, English can combine Continuous/Non-Continuous aspect with Perfect/Non-Perfect, and that is evidence that Perfect/Non-Perfect is not an aspect, look at it as just another category, perfectness, which is not an aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2. &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Some English verbs like sense perception ('see', 'hear', etc.) or likes/dislikes verbs ('love', 'hate', etc.) cannot be put into Continuous (progressive), so their Perfect forms can denote actions that are still in progress, e. g. 'I've loved you so much' which would correspond to the imperfective aspect, but at the same time that very sentence can denote an action/state that has already finished, and in this case it would correspond to the perfective aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 3. If by &lt;strong&gt;Future&lt;/strong&gt; you mean Future Indefinite aka Future Simple, the answer is also &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; Have a look, 'Will you come to me?' in some situations can imply just one visit (tonight) which corresponds to the perfective aspect, but in some other situations it can imply multiple visits (every day) which corresponds to the imperfective aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 4. Again &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; That follows from the answers to questions 2 and 3, and also from the fact that &lt;em&gt;the very idea of the perfective and imperfective aspects is totally irrelevant for the English grammar and it absolutely does not correlate with the English verb category of perfect/non-perfect&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T01:06:35.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19002" CreationDate="2016-07-01T03:00:13.277" Score="4" ViewCount="4278" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages (unlike English) if translated literally, you would have people saying &quot;the masculine case X,&quot; &quot;the feminine case that,&quot; or &quot;the neuter case this other.&quot; To make things even more confusing, some languages give feminine cases to things that should be masculine and visa versa (for instance genitalia). Some languages have even more gender cases than the set three I just mentioned. In most languages that have these divisions, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as far as why something is whatever gender-specific case it is. And if you use the neuter case (in essence eliminating gender cases), you'd probably get some strange looks, have people not know what you're talking about or be corrected (even if there was no gender cases to begin with they should know/ extrapolate your meaning). Yet, it seems even English isn't immune, we have people calling a car, boat, or plane a &quot;her.&quot; On the other hand, when translating into English, none of the sense of the gendered-ness of the word is kept. Why?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(BTW, I know there are similar questions, but what I'm asking is slightly different and between the lines of some of the questions that have been asked before, and not been explicitly stated, and may bring some interesting conversation, so I ask it remain open)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13549" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T08:33:11.660" Title="Why do most languages have multiple genders? Also, how do languages determine what gender to give things?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19001" CreationDate="2016-07-01T05:27:41.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, to answer the titular question, most languages don't have multiple genders. You could get away with saying that &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; languages have multiple genders, as long as you take 2 to be the lower bound on &quot;multiple&quot; (which in a certain sense, follows from what &quot;multiple&quot; means). A language can't have only one gender: the logic of gender &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; that nouns have to be split into kinds. If there aren't at least two, you don't have kinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two kinds of kinds: natural, and arbitrary. The former refers to systems where nouns are classified according to some meaning property, and the latter is the situation where nouns are divided arbitrarily. It appears, from a historical analysis of gender systems, that arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems which have gotten sufficiently complicated that nobody can figure out the natural system anymore, so instead you just memorize things. There are not any attested absolutely arbitrary gender systems, but western European languages come pretty close. So whether most languages with gender fall into the &quot;more or less arbitrary&quot; subset depends on how you draw the dividing line between &quot;mostly arbitrary&quot; vs. &quot;kind of arbitrary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages have gender (which isn't just about sex) because it has (had) been useful to say things about the nature of objects. The most common and natural division is animate / inanimate (not masculine / feminine). And yet, there seems to be something attractive to having a male / female distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has almost freed itself of gender distinctions, but we do still have differences in pronouns. Some Kurdish dialects likewise have eliminated noun gender except that it is sort of possible to distinguish male and female human 3rd person pronouns. Indicating male / female on 3rd person pronouns is the most functionally useful way of exploiting gender marking (it provides the most discourse-relevant information), as opposed to arbitrarily deeming &quot;glass&quot; to be masculine and &quot;cup&quot; to be feminine. We're moving towards getting rid of the pronoun distinction, so just be patient and in a few more centuries it will be gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some confusion over arbitrariness. In the architypical natural gender system, gender actually is assigned by rules that refer to semantic property. Since arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems, there are often statistical traces of that rule system. With a sufficiently rich coding system and statistical software, you can always eke out some correlation between e.g. gender and real world properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-07-01T18:55:04.287" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T18:55:04.287" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2016-07-01T06:07:35.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am no linguist but I would like to add my perspective on this question as an English speaker learning Japanese&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study you referenced described information rates of different languages, and specifically mentioned English as the fastest and Japanese as the slowest, however I feel there are many ways a study like this could go very wrong.  In English, formal speech tends not to lengthen the words nearly as much as in Japanese where an informal and formal sentence meaning the same thing could be a difference between 4 syllables and 14 syllables (assuming all syllables can be said the same speed, syllables can then be used as a measure of speed). In this way English is more consistent with information flow, whereas in formal sense Japanese is very slow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in an informal environment Japanese can be bounds faster than English, cutting out references in conversations and allowing for fragments and simple one word responses that could translate into full English sentences.  In this way Japanese can also be very fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no linguist and haven't done any distinctive research, but from my experience I feel that any study like this would be hard pressed to find a specific information rate for any language due to the fluctuations in information rate during differing social situations and moreover just a difficulty in pinpointing what if even means to have a &quot;information rate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an intriguing question but in all honesty I believe it would be a very large scale project just to come up with a way to define information literacy and how to collect data on it and define what is language.  honestly comparing languages is very difficult because they are so multifaceted and flexible, focusing and allowing speed in some situations while being weak in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &#xA;if 1 is low information rate and 10 is high information rate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in formal setting:&#xA;English : ~5&#xA;Japanese : ~2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in informal setting:&#xA;English : ~6&#xA;Japanese: ~9&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese fluctuates in information rate more than English.&#xA;Comparing them would require a ridiculously large scale research project and may even then have holes or resolve inconclusively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13551" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T06:07:35.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19009" CreationDate="2016-07-01T15:58:58.890" Score="3" ViewCount="11299" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I draw the syntactic tree of a sentence with &quot;not&quot;, what kind of component would the &quot;not&quot; be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jane did not go to school&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13553" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T17:01:34.593" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T17:01:34.593" Title="Analyzing negation with a syntactic tree" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-07-03T19:51:43.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19006" CreationDate="2016-07-01T16:10:03.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is the head of a NegP in English. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch6.html#do-support&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ch. 6 of Beatrice Santorini's syntax textbook&lt;/a&gt; for the history and reasons for why &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is understood as a NegP in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13554" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T16:10:03.293" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19006" CreationDate="2016-07-01T18:31:47.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logically, &quot;not&quot; is a sentential adverb.  Grammatically, in English, it is an auxiliary verb suffix.  The disparity between its logic and its grammar explains why it is so difficult to classify, especially for those grammarians who cannot distinguish logic from grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A grammatical modifier is an element which when added to something of a certain grammatical category gives a new element of that same category.  In logic, negation and the modal operators are treated as being added to sentences (or, that is, propositions) to create new sentences.  If p is a sentence, then ~p is also a sentence.  Although logicians don't use this terminology (they generally call ~, Nec, etc. &quot;operators&quot;), this makes negation a grammatical modifier.  Grammarians generally call modifiers of nouns &quot;adjectives&quot; and other modifiers &quot;adverbs&quot;, so it is reasonable (though vague) to call &quot;not&quot; an adverb, judging from its logic, since it modifies something other than a noun (viz., a sentence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English grammar, though negative &quot;never&quot; can reasonably be classified as sentential adverb, comparable to &quot;possibly&quot; or &quot;maybe&quot;, &quot;not&quot; itself is not at all a grammatical adverb.  Instead, it is suffixed to a finite auxiliary verb like &quot;is&quot;, &quot;can&quot;, &quot;does&quot;, to create a new finite auxiliary verb (&quot;isn't&quot;, &quot;cannot&quot;, &quot;doesn't&quot;, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T18:31:47.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19006" CreationDate="2016-07-01T18:31:54.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Totally depends on your syntax theory.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some prefer to do it with a NegP, as suggested bei @eijen:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HhX3F.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HhX3F.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others assume the negation to be in I:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q87pw.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q87pw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then again you could see negation as an adverb modifying the VP, as suggested by @BillJ:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ALXoh.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ALXoh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter preformatted text here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There really isn't a uniform answer, because that depends so much on your syntax theory (already whether you assume that there is something like TP and little v, go with I instead, maybe something even different, ...), so you'd need to specify what framework you are in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T18:31:54.713" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19012" CreationDate="2016-07-01T20:34:25.837" Score="-6" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us consider the following English sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I set the table if you take out the trash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One doesn't have to set a comma between &quot;table&quot; and &quot;if&quot; – in contrast to the German rules for comma usage: In German, one &lt;em&gt;has to&lt;/em&gt; set a comma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich decke den Tisch&lt;b&gt;,&lt;/b&gt; wenn du den Müll wegbringst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this &lt;em&gt;obligatory&lt;/em&gt; comma disturbs the reading flow. In general, I have the feeling that German requires too many commas which disturb the reading flow. One might argue that in this special case, the comma indicates an intended little pause. But look at this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A function is called &lt;em&gt;bijective&lt;/em&gt; if it is both injective and surjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eine Funktion heißt &lt;em&gt;bijektiv&lt;/em&gt;, wenn sie sowohl injektiv als auch surjektiv ist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, one usually doesn't make a little pause before &quot;wenn&quot;. That's why in this example, the &lt;em&gt;obligatory&lt;/em&gt; comma is really useless and disturbs the reading flow. My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why does the German language, in contrast to the English language, requires so many useless commas which disturb the reading flow?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13556" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-03-11T19:08:47.197" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T13:33:14.440" Title="Why does German require extra commas that may be considered useless by speakers of other languages?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19011" CreationDate="2016-07-01T21:14:25.127" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question has a presupposition that is already wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not the language, and even less a language's grammar that makes orthography rules.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orthography is a set of prescriptive, more or less static and sometimes seemingly arbibitrary rules that are about how to transform language into graphemes, but not an inherent part of a language itself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is why it doesn't even really make much sense to ask a linguist that question, because linguistics doesn't care about commas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To still make an attempt to answer your question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Orthography rules aren't totally useless - how would you use a dictionary or make a Google search if there was absolutely no consensus how to write a word? - and when it comes to arbitrariness and unpredictability, English can be claimed to be significantly worse than German!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The main point is probably that English word order is much more restricted, while German allows for more variance in word order especially between main clauses and subordinate clauses. In speech this can be disambiguated by intonation, while this is obivously not available in written langauge, which is why you make use of punctuation instead.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The rule is that in general, German subordinate clauses need to be separated by a comma, while this doesn't hold true for English. In German it is often more complicated to determine the word order and relationships especially in main clauses because you don't always strictly have SVO (or SOV, which would be the default word order in subordinate clauses) there, and that's one of the reasons German orthography makes more use of commas.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And if the general rule is that every subordinate clause needs to be separated by a comma, then this is in fact &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; than making a large list of exceptions for those cases where it seems a little bit more &quot;useless&quot;. Everything which is a subordinate clause is put a comma in front of, and this is why this rule totally regularly applies in your example.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In that way, the rule is not as nonsensual.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, orthography is not really a concern for linguistics. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/18824/13238&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for some more comments as to why orthography is not an inherent part of natural language itself and therefore not what linguistics traditionally deals with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T13:33:14.440" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T13:33:14.440" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19011" CreationDate="2016-07-02T08:01:15.823" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will compare German, English and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English has no inflection but strict word order&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Russian has rich inflection but free word order.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;German has free word order but poor inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that in English you use word order to convey some information, in Russian you use inflection, and in German you use punctuation. Russian also does not need a comma here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T08:01:15.823" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19001" CreationDate="2016-07-02T08:33:11.660" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in Russian I think there is some correlation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Masculine things tend to be straight and stiff. Feminine tend to be round, soft and tricky. Neuter tend to be formless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is masculine:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MO6r8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MO6r8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while this is feminine:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2srk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N2srk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is masculine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBUj8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tBUj8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while this is feminine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rccP7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rccP7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is masculine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SLiEi.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SLiEi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while this is feminine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zBfZp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zBfZp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T08:33:11.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-02T11:51:34.410" Score="4" ViewCount="2136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulty finding a good frequency list for the Italian language (lemmas, not including inflected word forms). Anyone know if there's some research or website or institute where I could find a somewhat authoritative one? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T13:20:51.880" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T14:18:25.277" Title="Italian: is there an authoritative word frequency list?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2016-07-02T12:01:33.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Huffman has the best approximations when attempting to describe how khmer words are pronounced, but they aren't more than approximations, as the khmer language is very lenient with vowel pronunciations. This means the spoken language is completely idiosyncratic and cannot be accurately represented using the written vowel symbols. I.e. the same written vowel will be pronounced differently in different spoken words. There are a couple written vowels that are always pronounced the same, but the majority have several different idiosyncratic pronunciations in real life. Even the vowel lengths are often not pronounced as they are written. You really have to learn each word individually to get the right pronunciation. Right now the best resource out there is kheng.info, which has numerous recordings of word pronunciations. You can copy paste their frequency list into the large box on the starting page. There is absolutely no way to learn proper pronunciation without hearing a native speaker say each word individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9324" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T12:01:33.183" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-07-02T12:01:33.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19015" CreationDate="2016-07-02T15:00:08.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For many languages, SUBTLEX is considered a good source for realistic frequencies. There is an Italian version, SUBTLEX-IT, available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-it/&lt;/a&gt;; (Crepaldi, Keuleers, Mandera, &amp;amp; Brysbaert, 2013).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T15:00:08.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19022" CreationDate="2016-07-02T18:11:58.767" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Outside things like contractions (can't, won't) and word combinations (smoke + fog = smog), which take out letters wholesale, I'm looking for the phrase like an Orange, that seems to have started off as the Spanish: una naranja, and with a bit of change, where the &quot;n&quot; seems to have migrated from it to the beginning of the word to the &quot;a&quot; to make the English phrase &quot;an aranja,&quot; which has been bastardized to make our spelling of orange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other examples of this type of thing?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13549" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T20:23:07.017" Title="do migrating letters happen often in languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19019" CreationDate="2016-07-02T20:12:12.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many of these in English, in both directions: adder, apron were once 'nadder' and 'napron'. More examples and explanation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; on 'Rebracketing', under 'Examples of false splitting' ('In English'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T20:23:07.017" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T20:23:07.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-03T01:48:34.920" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder, in Spanish we have to different words for to be (location) and to be (description) from my point of view, as a natural Spanish speaker tho I've spoken English all my life, just not as much, they are different meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if William Shakespeare was pointing this metaphysical duality/ambiguity. Is there comparative studies or material done about this? does anyone think is there any ground for this ? also I dont know if this is a philological or philosophical question so I might have put it in the wrong place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13566" LastEditorUserId="13566" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T02:12:59.557" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T02:29:43.090" Title="To be or not to be - you got to be somewhere to be something or you are where you are?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-07-03T19:52:12.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19025" CreationDate="2016-07-03T02:29:43.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; is a framework which attempts to identify the basic semantic building blocks of human language, which they call &quot;semantic primes.&quot; These words (sometimes affixes or phrases) are the base level semantic concepts on which everything else is built, and are argued to be present in every natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NSM researches have identified several distinct predicators. Although they all use &lt;em&gt;is/be&lt;/em&gt; in English, in other languages they are conveyed with different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;THERE IS X&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BE (SOMEWHERE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BE (SOMEONE'S)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Shakespeare wasn't writing about different kinds of being: Hamlet was considering whether it is better to live or die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T02:29:43.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-03T15:57:10.763" Score="8" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, one capitalizes the nouns in a sentence. In the video &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Dtt5uzLB590?t=4m2s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Life in Germany - Ep. 42: English vs. German&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an American claims that capitalizing the nouns makes it easier to understand a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one justify the claim that this is true &lt;em&gt;scientifically&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13570" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T14:50:08.550" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T14:50:08.550" Title="Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19027" CreationDate="2016-07-03T16:33:58.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read any empirical studies myself, but Wikipedia refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fschreibung#cite_note-9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three resources&lt;/a&gt; that seem to support this claim, so you might want to consult those studies if you are interested in the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a theoretical point of view, I find it not implausibel that capitalisation, as long as it happens in a systematic way, improves readability in introducing a graphemic distinction of certain syntactic elements.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As I wrote in response to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19012/13238&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;, in German, at least compared to English (there might be more extreme examples), word order and syntactic relations are sometimes not as easy to determine especially in subordinate clauses, because German syntax doesn't strictly require SVO there. In speech this can be disambiguated by the use of intonation, which is obvisouly not available in written language, so you need to make use of other features such as punctuation or capitalisation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Moreover, German's derivational system allows for relatively unrestricted nominalisation of other word categories, like &lt;em&gt;die schöne&lt;/em&gt; (adj) &lt;em&gt;Frau&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;die Schöne&lt;/em&gt; (noun) or &lt;em&gt;reiten&lt;/em&gt; (verb) -&gt; &lt;em&gt;das Reiten&lt;/em&gt; (noun), and as you can see, the derived words are in their phonetic form sometimes undistinguishable from their roots, so capitalisation might help emphasising the difference in their syntactic status.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ahtough this is of course not scientific evidence, I'd like to add that especially in chat messages, where capitalisation is frequently omitted, I find it often harder to parse the sentence at the first try - although, of course, other factors such as inconsistent or missing punctuation and more tolerance for typos also play a role.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to add that one should be careful about the results of such readability studies, because it might be that the difference in ease of reading is mainly or to some part due to the fact that speakers are simply used to the capitalised orthography convention, and struggle with non-capitalised nouns because they are &lt;em&gt;unexpected&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, unexpectedness, manifesting itself amongst others in eye movement which one of the studies mentioned made use of, is what psycholinguistic studies frequently exploit to provide evidence about whatever linguistically motivated observations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It might (!) be different if readers were used to non-capitalisated writing and the question would then be if capitalisation &lt;em&gt;improved&lt;/em&gt; readability on the log-run despite it being unexpected first - but this is of course hard to test because those effects depend on the properties of the individual language so you can neither base those reults on evidence by speakers of languages which have by default no nominal capitalisation nor can you find speakers that are used to a different writing system of the same language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not claiming the studies did wrong, as I said, I haven't read them myself, you'd need to go into this more deeply on your own, just pointing out that measuring readability effects is not as easy as it might first seem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside of such a further orthographical distinction is obviously that it makes spelling rules more complex, and there are people arguing for for the abolition of noun capitalisation in German.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I think that the largest recent orthography reform of German has &lt;em&gt;eased&lt;/em&gt; this issue (and many other issues in my view, despite this apparently being an unpopular opinion) in systematising capitalisation to a point where I would claim that everything which would syntactically be analysed as something nominal is consistently written capitalised with almost no exceptions, so that capitalisation or non-capitalisation could indeed serve as a helpful distinction to improve readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T20:07:41.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19019" CreationDate="2016-07-03T19:46:48.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some examples in different languages in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Rebracketing&lt;/a&gt; in Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this has absolutely nothing to do with &quot;letters&quot;. It happened, in probably every case, in the spoken language, and quite likely among people who were illiterate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T19:46:48.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-03T20:39:17.117" Score="0" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is the word ‹only› analyzed in English? It seems unusually flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following few sentences, each of which use the word ‹only›.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only students read yellow books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students are the only readers of yellow books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students read only yellow books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students only read yellow books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences (1) and (2) mean the same thing as do (3) and (4). Only appears to function as a determiner phrase in (1) and (3), as an adjective in (2), and as an adverb of some sort in (4). (4) is a bit odd since ‹only› can be interpreted as modifying just the verb rather than the whole predicate in other contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students only read yellow books; they don't write them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Students read only yellow books; they don't write them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T14:02:05.713" Title="What parts of speech can ‹only› be in English?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19030" CreationDate="2016-07-04T13:53:46.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Only students read yellow books.  - adverb&#xA;Students are the only readers of yellow books. - adjective&#xA;Students read only yellow books. - adverb&#xA;Students only read yellow books. - adverb&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T13:53:46.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18993" CreationDate="2016-07-04T15:17:09.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two different things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contrast&lt;/strong&gt; between dental and retroflex d's and t's: Such a contrast has developped in the Indic subbranch of the Indoarian languages, probably due to contact with Dravidian (or Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan or other  [e.g., Burushaski]) languages. It also occurs in the Sicilian dialect and in Norwegian and Swedish (in both cases due to internal development of the respective languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quality&lt;/strong&gt; of the d's and t's: Speakers of Indic languages hear the English d's and t's as retroflex and borrow them into loanwords as such. Portuguese d's and t's are borrowed as dental sounds in loanwords. I don't know the reason for this phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:55:18.660" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:55:18.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19039" CreationDate="2016-07-04T15:31:25.990" Score="4" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the &quot;shortcuts&quot; that are used nowadays (emoticons, internet abbreviations, email formatting, memes, social media sharing [Pinterest, Facebook, Google Plus, &quot;tweets&quot; and the like) as a base, can we use these as predictive tools to say what comes next?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13549" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-04T16:14:16.617" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T23:57:08.713" Title="Can we predict written language's evolution due to technological advances?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19034" CreationDate="2016-07-04T15:52:35.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, evolution is still unpredictable. In retrospect we can say, this and that phenomenon on social media was an early attestation of a language change, but we cannot predict from present day data which changes will prevail and which ones will vanish again after a short appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T15:52:35.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-04T16:37:04.923" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here I am building on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3641/how-to-calculate-the-co-occurrence-between-two-words-in-a-window-of-text&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, adding the possibility that a term has been inserted within the window of another term of the same type.  Here, I have inserted an &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; as the third character, from the original example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;txt &amp;lt;- &quot;A D A C E A D F E B A C E D&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;producing a window size 2 (+/- 2 terms) context co-occurrence matrix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;        features&#xA;contexts A B C D E F&#xA;       A 2 1 3 3 4 1&#xA;       B 1 0 1 0 1 1&#xA;       C 3 1 0 2 2 0&#xA;       D 3 0 2 0 3 1&#xA;       E 4 1 2 3 0 1&#xA;       F 1 1 0 1 1 0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is this the correct way to compute the co-occurrence of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; with itself?  And should the first A be considered within the window of itself twice, once counting the second A (index position 3, counting from 1) in the context window of the first A (position 1), and once counting the first A in the context window of the second A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T16:37:04.923" Title="Calculating a matrix of term co-occurrences, including with themselves, within a window" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15677" CreationDate="2016-07-04T20:48:21.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionnaire:Page_d%E2%80%99accueil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; is for most major languages pretty well equipped in terms of pronounciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T20:48:21.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19034" CreationDate="2016-07-04T23:57:08.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might find this paper interesting: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/16/introduction.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/16/introduction.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Empirical research on language is limited to the analysis of linguistic usage in the present and in the past. The unavailability of future linguistic performance makes it impossible to draw any certain conclusions regarding developments which lie ahead in time. It remains to be seen, however, whether all predictions are necessarily purely speculative: a growing body of empirical research on language variation and in statistics seems to suggest that linguistic change is subject to certain regularities, e.g. regarding the typical S-shaped growth curve observed in processes of change. At the same time, a multitude of disruptive factors may lead to unpredictable developments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This introduction gives an overview of the current state of discussions on this issue and points out the main questions which are addressed in the various contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer would seem to be: maybe somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13583" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T23:57:08.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19053" CreationDate="2016-07-05T16:56:38.590" Score="3" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or the concept of the word is what's being communicated through signs, but not the word itself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13549" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T06:54:20.450" Title="Do different languages use different sign language?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19040" CreationDate="2016-07-05T17:14:30.113" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, and no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many different sign lanuages in the world, and they have a tree of descent just as spoken languages do. But there is very little connection between the sign language and the spoken languages of a particular area&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, ASL (American Sign Language) is said to be derived from French Sign Language: both are utterly different from BSL (British Sign Language), both in vocabulary and grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T17:14:30.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-05T18:52:24.760" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any publication venue for natural language processing focusing on reproducing results from other papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T18:52:24.760" Title="Publication venues focusing on reproducing results" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18972" CreationDate="2016-07-05T19:57:20.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the example &quot;The number of people who speak English as their native language will decline&quot;, &quot;as their native language&quot; is a manner adverb, which makes it a V-bar modifier, following the analysis in McCawley's &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;.  The V-bar modified is &quot;speak English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntacticians generally identify syntactic categories, or parts of speech, by checking out &quot;privileges of occurrence&quot;.  We compare other phrases with similar senses that could be substituted.  Here, we could substitute for &quot;as their native language&quot; such phrases as &quot;natively&quot;, &quot;fluently&quot;, &quot;in a fluent manner&quot;, and so on.  This makes it evident that it is a manner adverb.  For describing manner adverbs as V-bar modifiers, please see McCawley's discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that we use &quot;part of speech&quot; only to classify single words and not also phrases, expressed by several other commenters, might have been true long ago, for the ancient Greeks, but is no longer so.  Times change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T19:57:20.237" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T04:38:09.217" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the semantic/thematic/theta role of the object in a sentence like &quot;John told Mary to go home.&quot;? Is it EXPERIENCER? Or is that only for sentences like &quot;Mary heard what John said.&quot;? Is it GOAL? Because it would certainly seem like GOAL or maybe RECIPIENT in a sentence like &quot;John spoke to Mary.&quot; But I think different verbs can assign different roles to each element even when they are describing the same scene? I guess if nothing else then Mary is simply a PATIENT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T04:38:09.217" Title="Semantic roles of &quot;tell&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8933" CreationDate="2016-07-06T05:01:26.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that theta roles have to be considered universal or else they are a useless concept. By definition they have to do with the underlying meanings and relations in a statement. When it comes to general word definitions it is very difficult to find one-to-one correspondence between languages because ordinary words tend to be polysemous and can have nuanced meanings with various connotations and histories in a language. But when talking about theta roles, or semantic roles as I would call them, we are talking about a purported underlying system in language that is necessary for any language to function at all. Basic concepts like SOURCE, PATH, and GOAL which do seem to be present in all languages (to my knowledge.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, that is not to say that &quot;when two sentence are about the same&quot; that the semantic roles in each language will match up perfectly. I don't have any example off hand, because I don't know any second language well enough, but I feel like I can almost think of an example where an expression is translated into another language and in the process the semantic roles have to change. Like the patient in L1 may be expressed as a recipient or something in L2, even though you are translating as directly as possible. Does that make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an example but it can give an idea of how languages can &quot;think&quot; differently about the same concepts. Some languages like Finnish have no verb for &quot;have&quot; so they instead speak about things as being &lt;em&gt;on someone&lt;/em&gt;. Like &quot;minulla on koira&quot; -- literally &quot;on me is a dog&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1045/thematic-roles-in-some-languages?rq=1&quot;&gt;Thematic roles in some languages&lt;/a&gt; seems relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T05:01:26.157" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T08:04:53.113" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phonological system of proto-Indo-European (and of any other proto-language without written records) is reconstructed via the comparative method, which inevitably leaves some questions open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such open question is the stops' manner of articulation problem. There are currently the two competing viewpoints concerning this problem - the traditional theory (which claims that stops were pronounced as &lt;em&gt;voiced, voiceless, or murmorred&lt;/em&gt;) and the glottalic theory (which proposes that stops were pronounced in an &lt;em&gt;ejective, plain, or (breathy) voiced&lt;/em&gt; manner). It should be mentioned, though,  that in all other aspects the two theories agree i.e. given the available data, pIE had exactly 3 distinct rows of stops; there were 5 places of articulation - &lt;em&gt;labial, dental, palatal, velar, labio-velar&lt;/em&gt;; roots couldn't contain a sequence of traditional &quot;plain voiced&quot; stops or a combination of a traditional &quot;voiceless&quot; and a &quot;breathy voiced&quot; stop...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fully aware that as of today nobody can give an unambiguous answer to the manner-of-articulation dilemma, however, I was wondering how confident we can be regarding the remaining assumptions? In particular, what is the proof the pIE didn't have &lt;em&gt;retroflex&lt;/em&gt; stops? Or that it lacked affricates? In general, can we be sure that there are no major gaps in the pIE phonological system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remark: One particular peculiarity of pIE that incited me to ask the above question is that it had 3 varieties of velar stops (palatal, plain, and labio-velar), while the coronal and the labial stops had just one. If, for example, there were retroflex coronal stops, then the picture would have been more &quot;balanced&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-07-06T09:01:03.463" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:31:15.720" Title="Potential gaps in the pIE phonological system?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19048" CreationDate="2016-07-06T09:10:52.573" Score="3" ViewCount="573" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/18993/how-and-when-did-some-european-languages-acquire-retroflex-d-and-t&quot;&gt;How and when did some European languages acquire retroflex d and t?&lt;/a&gt; makes me curious: Are there any languages that have three different kinds of d's (or t's or n's or s's) exhibiting a place of articulation contrast dental–alveolar–retroflex?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T07:28:58.390" Title="Are there languages with the three-fold articulation place contrast dental–alveolar–retroflex?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19047" CreationDate="2016-07-06T09:58:37.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly. There are many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages#Phonetics_and_phonology&quot;&gt;Australian languages&lt;/a&gt; with a lot of coronal POAs for stops; dental, alveolar, and retroflex stops are generally differentiated, in addition to a palatal/alveolo-palatal series. This was apparently historically true of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language#Consonants&quot;&gt;Tamil&lt;/a&gt;, although not so much for the modern language. I believe it also occurs in other Dravidian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Australian languages rarely have sibilants (and those that do don't seem to contrast many POAs for them). I don't know of any languages with a straight-up dental–alveolar–retroflex contrast for sibilants. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language#Consonants&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt; contrasts lamino-dental sibilants, apico-alveolar sibilants, and palatal/postalveolar sibilants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T09:58:37.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T12:42:05.290" Score="6" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usage of the abbreviations &quot;e.g.&quot; and &quot;i.e.&quot; is very common in English, but not so much in other language. In Dutch they are used sometimes, but they are recent imports due to a lot of exposure to English. While I am not particularly fluent in these languages, the same seems to hold for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.druide.com/enquetes/deux-latino-anglicismes-ie-et-eg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.wikihow.com/Verwendung-von-i.e.-und-e.g.-im-Englischen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://es.wikihow.com/saber-cu%C3%A1ndo-usar-i.e.-y-cu%C3%A1ndo-usar-e.g.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://it.wikihow.com/Utilizzare-%22i.e.%22-ed-%22e.g.%22-nella-Lingua-Inglese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find etymological information for these phrases beyond &quot;they are Latin.&quot; How and why were they imported into English, and why specifically into English, and not into Continental languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13591" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T02:40:21.833" Title="Why did &quot;exempli gratia&quot; (e.g.) and &quot;id est&quot; (i.e.) become widespread in English, but not in other languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19040" CreationDate="2016-07-06T15:02:52.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the Original Poster might be of the widely held belief that sign language translates 'actual' spoken language into signs. For example, one could envisage a system where the sentence &lt;em&gt;she is at home&lt;/em&gt; would have four signs, one meaning &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; one meaning &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, one meaning &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; and one meaning &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt;. This would be a system similar to &lt;em&gt;signed English&lt;/em&gt; for example, where the language being signed basically &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; English in a manually coded form. This could be thought of as a system similar to morse code. However, this is not what sign languages are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sign languages have their own distinct syntax and morphology and are full languages in their own right. British sign language for example is perhaps best characterised as an OSV language, where as American Sign Language is often described as an SVO language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to the Original Poster's question is that spoken languages do not &quot;have&quot; sign languages. Rather people in different areas speak different sign languages that are distinct from each other as well as being  distinct from the oral languages spoken in those areas (although, like other languages, sign languages borrow from other languages, including oral languages such as English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T06:54:20.450" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T06:54:20.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T17:55:53.040" Score="5" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the phenomenon in which a phrase consisting of several words is mentally parsed as a word?  Two examples are when General Patton used as the plural of &quot;son of a bitch&quot; the phrase &quot;son of a bitches&quot; or when Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton was &quot;one of the worst secretary of states&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trick question: &quot;Do they have a fourth of July in England?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer, obviously, is &quot;no&quot; when &quot;fourth of July&quot; is parsed as a word rather than as a three-word phrase, and Americans usually parse it mentally as a word.  (The etymology is that that word is derived from the three words &quot;fourth&quot; and &quot;of&quot; and &quot;July&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that when dogs follow instructions given as a complete sentence, the dog understands the sentence as a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="2602" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T17:07:19.650" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T03:24:22.253" Title="Parsing a frequently used phrase as a word: Is there a name for that?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19046" CreationDate="2016-07-07T01:13:18.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's any number of possible sounds in human languages that have not been reconstructed for PIE, because no one's seen any reason to reconstruct them. There's no specific argument for reconstructing retroflex stops, so no one has reconstructed retroflex stops. The fact that a language has more than one dorsal series doesn't imply that it should also have multiple series in other place-of-articulation categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we can never be 100% sure we're not missing something, but the PIE sound system as currently reconstructed works pretty well -- i.e., in combination with posited rules of sound change, it predicts the attested reflexes with high accuracy. It doesn't look like something major is missing, and most Indo-Europeanists would be very surprised if it turned out there was a whole additional series of stops, or anything of that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T01:13:18.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19046" CreationDate="2016-07-07T03:53:49.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is misconceived, albeit not an embarrassing error (it unfortunately reflects a widespread view). The question really reduces to asking &quot;How certain should we be that a claim lacking any evidence is false?&quot;. Actually we should simply never entertain any hypotheses for which no evidence has been advanced. This is the fundamental distinction between the imaginable (which science fiction deals with) and the possible (which science deals with). The possible is something for which there is some evidence; the imaginable is, as the word suggests, something that you can imagine – which depends on what limits you have on your imagination. Until some evidence is set forth suggesting that there were retroflex consonants, there is no reason to say that there were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T03:53:49.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-07T06:37:47.403" Score="0" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I.e.: What are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Linguistic Distances&lt;/a&gt; of Ancient Greek compared to 2000s English, French, and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that each Indo-European language belongs to its own Language Family: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt; to Hellenic, English to Germanic, and French to Italic ⊃ Romance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T16:43:17.410" Title="How close is Ancient Greek to English or French or Spanish?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15608" CreationDate="2016-07-07T09:04:26.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, in some cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I may hearken back to an introductory lecture on Language Theory and Processing:&#xA;According to the principle of compositionally (as first coined by Gottlob Frege) the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. &#xA;So, structural relations (syntax) give rise to semantics. Here specifically meaning compositional semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is very important to note that this once popular theory seems to get tied-up with predicate logic and rather dated theories on computational linguistics and AI language processing, and Generative Grammar as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T09:04:26.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-07T12:38:02.860" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently examining how differing levels of genderisation across languages (French, Finnish, and Norwegian) affects self-perception and the social perception of others through the utilisation of cognitive experiments. As a part of this, I would like to examine how individualistic markers impact on the main effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As fully gendered languages (and semi-gendered languages to a lesser degree) utilise gendered forms (normally the masculine) for generic role descriptors I thought it would be prudent to attempt to measure linguistic conservatism to examine the level to which, for example, an individual who was found to believe that men are better suited to generic roles referred to in the masculine form than women was influenced more strongly by linguistic conservativism stating that the masculine form should refer to men compared to the influence of explicit or implicit sexism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been attempting to find such a measure but have had no success thus far; all the scales I have seen for examining linguistic conservativism seem to be designed for literature analysis, and so are not able to be utilised in my research. I am considering utilising specific items from the Instrument to measure Attitudes Towards Sexist/Nonsexist Lanugage that could be considered to indicate linguistic conservativism (e.g. 'we should not change the way that [language] has traditionally been written and spoken'), but was wondering whether there were any specific tools that have been designed for this purpose, or whether anyone knew of any other scales from which items can be selected that suit this purpose more closely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13412" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T12:38:02.860" Title="Are there any good individualistic measures of linguistic conservatism?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1320" CreationDate="2016-07-07T15:51:54.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question was posted four years ago, but in case anyone has the same question and comes across here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a general introduction to the field of computational linguistics, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Language-Computers-Markus-Dickinson-ebook/dp/B00B9ISW9S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1467905850&amp;amp;sr=8-2&amp;amp;keywords=languages+and+computers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Languages and Computers&lt;/a&gt; is a great book to start with.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It gives a well-understandable overview to the problems and solution concepts of most basic areas that computational linguistics deals with, such as encoding, machine translation, searching, dialog systems, spell checking and language tutoring systems.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The texts are more focussed on the general theory behind the various applications and not so much on the implementation of actual algorithms, it is really more an introduction than a programming book, but definitely a good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the quetsion is more specifically about NLP, parsing is also discussed, however not in that much detail; the references to further reading provided might be helpful then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T15:58:31.353" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T15:58:31.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20515" CreationDate="2016-07-07T16:36:19.860" Score="7" ViewCount="812" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be striking typological similarities between Dravidian and Australian languages (see, e.g., the answers to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19047/are-there-languages-with-the-three-fold-articulation-place-contrast-dental-alveo&quot;&gt;Are there languages with the three-fold articulation place contrast dental–alveolar–retroflex?&lt;/a&gt;). There are also genetic studies suggesting an Indian migration to Australia 4000 years ago (see&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21016700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21016700&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an attested historical linguistic link between languages of India and Australian languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T18:49:29.650" Title="Has a Dravido-Australic superfamily been proposed?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19057" CreationDate="2016-07-07T16:43:17.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no single agreed definition of &quot;linguistic distance&quot; or method of calculating it, so it depends what you mean by that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an intuitive sense of &quot;linguistic distance&quot; which negatively correlates with similarity and mutual intelligibility, the difference between Ancient Greek and these modern languages is pretty close to maximal. Their structures are extremely different and there is zero mutual intelligibility. Even though there are numerous cognates between Greek and these languages, those words have changed so much in both sound and meaning as to be unrecognizable for the most part except to specialists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking for a lexicostatistical measure of difference, which only asks how many cognates the languages have in common, then the difference would be smaller. I don't have a number for you, but searching for &quot;Indo-European lexicostatistics&quot; could get you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T16:43:17.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19050" CreationDate="2016-07-08T02:13:47.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian has a calque:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;id est (Latin) =&gt; to est (то есть) (Russian), can be abbreviated to &quot;т.е.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a calque for &quot;et cetra&quot;, also can be abbreviated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For post-scriptum &quot;P.S.&quot; there is a calque as well, it even uses the same sounding initial letters: &quot;prodolzhenie sleduet&quot; (&quot;continuation follows&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T02:19:33.740" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T02:19:33.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19067" CreationDate="2016-07-08T09:22:55.000" Score="2" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Geoff Pullum's recent post &lt;a href=&quot;http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/07/07/being-an-auxiliary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Being an Auxiliary&lt;/a&gt; on the Lingua Franca blog, he states that the sense of &quot;have&quot; as an auxiliary (forming the perfect tense) evolved from the possession sense, &quot;but the speciation that separated them took place half a millennium ago&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This struck me as much too recent, given that an almost identical perfect construction exists not only in most (all?) other Germanic languages, but also in the Romance languages (with the exception of Portuguese?). But, sure enough, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/84705&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; says that this evolution &quot;to some extent parallels developments in other Germanic and Romance languages, but appears at least partly to reflect development within English&quot;. (On the other hand, it also says &quot;This development appears to have largely taken place before the written record.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that it indeed happened within the last half millennium or so, how can this kind of fundamental language change occur in parallel between a dozen or so languages dispersed over a continent (from Iceland to Romania)? Did the innovation occur in one region and then spread between languages (like a new vocabulary item might), or is it better to think of it as a natural development that came about independently in multiple language communities (like simplification of noun inflection)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13601" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T07:04:15.117" Title="History of &quot;have&quot;, &quot;avoir&quot;, &quot;haben&quot;, etc. as auxiliary" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-08T10:37:36.763" Score="1" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to find a conditional probability of a word given its previous set of words. I plan to use &lt;code&gt;Google N-grams&lt;/code&gt; for the same. However, being such a huge resource as it is, I don't think it is computationally possible to do on my PC. ( To process all N-grams, to train a language model). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there any way I can train a language model using Google Ngrams? (Even &lt;code&gt;python NLTK&lt;/code&gt; library does not support &lt;code&gt;ngram&lt;/code&gt; language model anymore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is there any other way I can find a conditional probability of a word given the previous set of words ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13413" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:27:54.220" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:27:54.220" Title="train a language model with google ngrams" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-16T09:12:22.897" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19065" CreationDate="2016-07-08T11:03:06.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Areal features&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; develop when languages from different groups or branches are in contact with each other.  There are a few main mechanisms - common substrate, common superstrate, parallel development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the feature in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; etc as an auxiliary for the past tense is an example of an areal feature.  The areas where languages use this auxiliary correspond roughly to former Celtic-speaking areas and to those where language was heavily influenced by Vulgar Latin, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund#Analytic_perfect_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deep in the Balkans&lt;/a&gt;.  I will not speculate on the ultimate source and exact mechanism here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Danish, Dutch, French, German and Italian represent a transitional zone, where &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; is the auxiliary for intransitive verbs, and &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt; for others.  Old Spanish and Middle English had this distinction too, which is to say this feature's area was still evolving in recent centuries - across language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not common unbroken Indo-European legacy - Latin &lt;em&gt;habere&lt;/em&gt; and Germanic &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; are not actually cognates, and classical Latin and Greek made little use of auxiliaries anyway.  Many Indo-European languages outside of Western Europe - Armenian, Iranian languages, Slavic languages beside Macedonian - use the copula as an auxiliary, but most do not use any translation or cognate of &lt;em&gt;habere&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; as an auxiliary for the past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWGFG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWGFG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Pardon the seeming equation of languages with current political entities]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T07:04:15.117" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T07:04:15.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19074" CreationDate="2016-07-08T14:20:58.647" Score="4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do we say &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; six o'clock, &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; Monday, &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; 1996? Is there a deeper logic here than simply &quot;that's how the English language works?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11094" LastEditorUserId="11094" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T15:00:51.670" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T16:42:11.047" Title="Why does English use different prepositions for different units of time?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19075" CreationDate="2016-07-08T19:02:16.520" Score="3" ViewCount="3968" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came to my attention that the English &quot;J&quot; sound ( jet, joy, jump ) does not seem to exist in German, French, Spanish, or Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &quot;ch&quot; sound exists in many of these languages, the &quot;j&quot; sound, which seems to be a vocalized version of ch, does not appear to be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I mistaken?   Is this consonant rare among languages?  Or common and I just don't know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13604" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T05:28:01.827" Title="How unusual is the English J sound?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19070" CreationDate="2016-07-08T22:26:45.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is normal consonant, as you mentioned, it is the voiced version of &quot;ch&quot;. Besides voicity it (like &quot;ch&quot;) can exist in soft and hard variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For hard version of it Serbian and Macedonian use Џ џ letter, Tajik uses Ҷ ҷ letter, Azeri Cyrillic uses Ҹ ҹ (Azeri Latin uses &quot;c&quot; in some positions), Khakassian uses Ӌ ӌ, Gagauz and Moldovan (Romanian Cyrillic) use Ӂ ӂ, Udmurt uses Ӝ ӝ, Kalmyk and Turkmen use Җ җ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For soft version of it, Serbian uses Ђ ђ (Đ đ in Serbo-Croatian Latin), Altai uses Ҹ ҹ, Tatar uses Җ җ, Macedonian uses Ѓ ѓ (in Macedonian it is an allophone of another consonant though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T22:44:35.873" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T22:44:35.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19070" CreationDate="2016-07-08T22:48:41.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This Article&lt;/a&gt; gives a (non-exhaustive) list of languages that have that sound. As you can see, it is present in a large number of languages both in Europe and outside of it, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://menzerath.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/S/S0395.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; can offer a rough* estimate on how frequent it actually is, appearing in about a fourth of languages in the database. &lt;a href=&quot;http://menzerath.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/S/S0827.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The voiceless version&lt;/a&gt; (the English 〈ch〉 sound), is significantly more frequent, but that is to be expected, since many languages don't distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants at all (Finnish is almost an example), and those that do often limit this distinction to stops only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Just to be clear, there are several issues one should keep in mind when evaluating the correctness of these numbers: the extensiveness of the database, how representative its sample is, and the editorial decisions made while compiling it (which phonemes fall into which IPA bin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9811" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T22:48:41.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19070" CreationDate="2016-07-08T23:21:59.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;UPSID is the best basis for guessing such relations, and [dʒ] appears in 26.6% of languages (if we include aspiration variants). [tʃ] no the other hand appears in 46% of languages and [dz] variants appear in 11% of languages. Types of [d] appear in about 53% of languages. The voiced uvular plosive [G] appears in only 3% of languages, and I would say that counts as &quot;rare&quot;. If you have affricates (which are less common) then it will almost always be a post-alveolar; voiced stops are less common than voiceless stops. So what you see is the product of two lower-frequency facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T23:21:59.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19068" CreationDate="2016-07-09T03:11:56.360" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the metaphors are all coherent, so there is a logic to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Colin explained in his comment, and as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/92116/15299&quot;&gt;in this post&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Months and larger measures are Containers -- &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;-Dimensional: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; 1949, &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; June, &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; this century&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Days are Surfaces -- &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;-Dimensional: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; Thursday, &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; Thanksgiving, &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; this occasion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smaller measures are Points on a &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;-Dimensional line: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;at&lt;/strong&gt; noon, &lt;strong&gt;at&lt;/strong&gt; 12:03:45, &lt;strong&gt;at&lt;/strong&gt; the moment&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The smaller the unit of time, the fewer dimensions. Just a map location - &lt;em&gt;at Exit 37, at 2:33 pm&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The bigger it is, the more experience it represents. A day is a page of events -- it's flat, whence &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;Anything bigger than one day has to be able to stack the day pages, so it's a volume, whence &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphors always have an internal logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T16:42:11.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19070" CreationDate="2016-07-09T03:40:46.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English &quot;j&quot; sound is a voiced postalveolar affricate, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dʒ/. It is indeed the voiced counterpart to the voiceless &quot;ch&quot; sound /tʃ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phones [dʒ] and [tʃ] are both fairly common, as far as affricates go. Voiced obstruents are generally less common than voiceless ones, and [dʒ] is less common than [tʃ]. I found the following article that describes some phonetic reasons for this tendency for sibilant affricates in particular: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1715.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonetic explanations for the infrequency&#xA;of voiced sibilant affricates across languages&lt;/a&gt;. Nonetheless, [dʒ] is still not really rare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it may even exist in several of the languages you mentioned, depending on the variety spoken, and how you define what you mean by &quot;the English j sound.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology#Loanwords&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/ do not occur in native German words but are common in a&#xA;  number of French and English loan words. Many speakers replace them&#xA;  with /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/ respectively (especially in Southern Germany,&#xA;  Austria and Switzerland), so that Dschungel (from English jungle) can&#xA;  be pronounced [ˈd͡ʒʊŋl̩] or [ˈt͡ʃʊŋl̩]. Some speakers in Northern and&#xA;  Western Germany merge /ʒ/ with /d͡ʒ/, so that Journalist (phonemically&#xA;  /d͡ʒʊʁnaˈlɪst ~ ʒʊʁnaˈlɪst/) can be pronounced [ʒʊɐ̯naˈlɪst],&#xA;  [d͡ʒʊɐ̯naˈlɪst] or [ʃʊɐ̯naˈlɪst]. The realization of /ʒ/ as [t͡ʃ],&#xA;  however, is uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So [dʒ] does exist for some speakers of German, although it sounds like it can be considered marginal. (I don't know if this is a perfect analogy, since I don't speak German, but you might compare its status to /x/ in English words like &lt;em&gt;loch&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bach&lt;/em&gt;.) The voiceless sound [tʃ] (usually written &lt;em&gt;tsch&lt;/em&gt;) has a more stable pronunciation and is more common, but I've read that even [tʃ] is rare in German compared to other sounds such as [ts].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt;, [dʒ] and [tʃ] can equally be said to exist or not exist.&#xA;Normal native French words do not have either of these affricates, since historically they were simplified to the fricatives [ʒ] (usually spelled &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;) and [ʃ] (usually spelled &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;). However, due to the influence of foreign languages, phonetic affricates [dʒ] (spelled &lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/em&gt;) and [tʃ] (spelled &lt;em&gt;tch&lt;/em&gt;) do exist in some modern French words, names and expressions, such as &lt;em&gt;djaïn&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Jain&quot; and &lt;em&gt;tchao&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bye.&quot; It's possible that phonologically these can be considered consonant clusters composed of a plosive phoneme and a fricative phoneme, like /ps/ in &lt;em&gt;psychologie&lt;/em&gt; or /gz/ in &lt;em&gt;xylophone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;Spanish&lt;/strong&gt;, the phoneme /ʝ/ often sounds similar to English /dʒ/. Wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish phonology&lt;/a&gt; says that in standard Castillian, this phoneme is realized as an affricate [ɟʝ] after a pause or after a nasal or lateral consonant. This is very similar phonetically to [dʒ], and I believe some Spanish dialects do just use [dʒ] (in others, [dʒ] has been changed by lenition to [ʒ], which may then be devoiced to [ʃ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-07-09T05:28:01.827" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T05:28:01.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19077" CreationDate="2016-07-09T07:19:10.373" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do students from countries that teach native languages considered to be quite difficult (e.g. Japanese) generally take longer to master that language? Or does the power of being surrounded by a particular language at home and in society overcome the difficulty of said language? Are there simply too many factors that influence how well one student learns their native language compared to others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing: Is the 'difficulty' of a certain language considered completely relative to whatever languages someone already knows, or are some languages universally more difficult? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13605" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T10:16:21.370" Title="Do difficult native languages slow down early education?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19076" CreationDate="2016-07-09T10:16:21.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All native speakers possess knowledge of at least spoken form of the language. But of course there can be difficult areas especially in written form. In Russian for instance, native speakers often experience problems with punctuation: where should or should not be placed a comma. This is quite difficult topic even for the well educated. Another difficult (but less difficult than punctuation) area is single vs. double &quot;н&quot; in spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T10:16:21.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4791" CreationDate="2016-07-09T13:06:45.483" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Turkish father is Baba, but rest of other Turkic languages is Ata. Well, according to your logic a word for dad is father. Lol, so c'mon guy. In every Turkic language Dad is usefull, even we Turkic peoples have ancient saga called &quot;Dədə Qorqud&quot; means Dad Gorgud. As well as in Azerbaijani Nənə for Nan/Grandma, in middle Turkic using Bitik for Book, Beyin for brain, Söyle(mek) for To Say, Yer for Earth, Ertä for Early, Boɣ/Boɣča for Box, But (in Altai Turkic) for Foot, Kuday/Kut for God/Got, Dön/Tön for Turn and etc. etc. Do you wanna more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13607" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T13:06:45.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-09T13:24:49.090" Score="4" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_consonant?oldformat=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on retroflex consonant&lt;/a&gt;, but isn't this wrong? I assume that Mandarin zh, ch, sh, and r sound should be pronounced with your tongue curled up, rather than &quot;flat?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Laminal post-alveolar, with a flat tongue. These occur, for example,&#xA;  in Polish cz, sz, ż (rz), dż and Mandarin zh, ch, sh, r.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11229" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-02T05:52:00.990" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T12:27:38.047" Title="zh sound with a flat tongue?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19085" CreationDate="2016-07-09T18:25:34.977" Score="2" ViewCount="1103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies in advance for any ignorance, I'm a non-linguist hoping to better understand the methods in the field (if any) to answer a question I have. In particular, I want to know when a word first appeared in a language tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if we take the word &quot;iron,&quot; I see that the earliest version in the Wiktionary (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iron#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iron#Etymology&lt;/a&gt;) is from Proto-Celtic, derived from the PIE for &quot;blood.&quot; So, perhaps I could naively date the word to around 1000 BC, the rough age of Proto-Celtic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what the most proper and formal way to do this is for a large number of words and languages. Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be looking at etymological dictionaries / estimated origin dates for languages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking at some computational model conducted at the word level?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give up because we don't know enough to know these sorts of things? Of course, I don't need to know the word appeared on January 12th, 1427 BC. The question is, is there any method that improves beyond naive guesses?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appreciate very much the help in this area--thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13608" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T22:26:02.567" Title="Determining the Age of a Word" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19080" CreationDate="2016-07-09T19:35:44.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you already sketched out, it is a difficult question. Usually (e.g., in the OED) the age of a word in a certain language is defined by its first attestation. This works well for the large part of vocabulary that was introduced rather recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only for the core words of the language that are inherited from ancient times, different methods are needed: Reconstructions of proto-languages, time estimates when those proto-languages were presumably spoken, evidence from archaelogical findings (e.g., what technologies, domesticated plants and animals were available at what time) all play a role for dating those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T19:35:44.050" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17732" CreationDate="2016-07-09T20:39:37.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with your tests is that the &lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt;-phrase is a complement. The PPs that you compare them with are adjuncts (read adverbials). We expect to freely front adverbials, but we don't expect to readily be able to front complements, which usually occur to the right of the word(s) that license them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems very unlikely that &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; could be a coordinator, because no words seem to take a single coordinate as a complement!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T20:39:37.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17732" CreationDate="2016-07-09T21:17:14.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answer to your first question, acting as antecedent or deletee in anaphoric deletion is sometimes taken as evidence for being a constituent.  And &quot;than NP&quot; does that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I like cookies better than cake, but Moira likes pie better (0 = than cake).&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T21:17:14.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19080" CreationDate="2016-07-09T22:26:02.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before trying to figure out how to date a word, you need to first decide how to detect a specific word. Taking the example of &quot;iron&quot;, first we have to decide whether to believe the Wiktionary story, versus Calvert Watkins' story (is-(e)ro &quot;powerful, holy&quot;). Either way, it's pretty clear that the word hasn't always meant &quot;iron&quot;, so then you have to decide whether you set the birth of the word at the time when the sound-sequence took on the meaning &quot;iron&quot;, or do you focus on the sound sequence and discard subtleties of meaning change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a stricter semantic relationship, i.e. you want to pin it down to the point where the word &quot;iron&quot; took on the meaning &lt;em&gt;ferrum&lt;/em&gt;, then words will have a much later &quot;origin&quot;. You will also need to sharpen up the theory of meaning-sameness, because the word &quot;chicken&quot; has gone through a number of subtle meaning-changes starting with &quot;young fowl&quot;, then specifically &quot;young chicken&quot; and finally &quot;any chicken&quot;. Except that &quot;chicken&quot; also includes the meaning &quot;cowardly&quot;, thus you need to be clear on whether you are looking for all of the current meanings, or just some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side of the equation is the possibility of tracing a word-qua-pronunciation back in time, so Modern &quot;iron&quot;, Old English &lt;em&gt;iren&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;isærn&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;isarnan&lt;/em&gt; back to 9perhaps &lt;em&gt;is-(e)ro&lt;/em&gt;. The problem is that most words ultimately originate from a language for which there are no records and we generally can't say much about when it was spoken, though we can at least know that Proto Indo-European was spoken further in the past than 4,000 years ago. That doesn't mean that the origin of the word is whenever PIE was spoken, it means that the origin of the word was &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; that far back, and possibly much further back, it's just that we can't point to specific evidence proving that it had to be older than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the two approaches, the more semantically-restricted approach is &quot;more practical&quot; because then there is at least a potential empirical question. It makes sense to ask when the word &quot;dog&quot; came to mean dog (a general term, not a specific breed if that is what it used to mean), or when the meaning of &quot;meat&quot; changed to its current &quot;flesh&quot; meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T22:26:02.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1870" CreationDate="2016-07-10T09:55:29.093" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &quot;dad&quot; comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;teutos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;elder relative, grandfather&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this root comes Russian &quot;ded&quot; &quot;grandfather&quot;, German name for Germany &quot;Deutschland&quot; and many other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T09:55:29.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19094" CreationDate="2016-07-10T11:30:57.213" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sag and Fodor (1995) claim that &quot;Bresnan's [1971] proposal was made prior to the introduction of empty constituents into syntactic theory.&quot; So when were empty constituents introduced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sag, Ivan A &amp;amp; Janet Dean Fodor. 1995. Extraction without traces. &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the 13th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. 365–384.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T18:09:52.740" Title="When were empty constituents introduced into linguistics?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19093" CreationDate="2016-07-10T18:09:52.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that Sag and Fodor are referring to traces in generative syntax. I don't know the definitive first proposal (it was probably in some samizdat paper or another), but can suggest some leads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start by looking at Chomsky and Lasnik's (1977) &lt;em&gt;Filters and Control&lt;/em&gt; in Linguistic Inquiry 8(3) 425--504 for a detailed discussion on trace theory, as well as the subsequent criticism by Postal and Pullum in issue 9(1) of the same journal, as well as rejoinders and counter-criticism in subsequent issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky and Lasnik mention several papers where trace theory or its antecedents are developed, including Fiengo's (1974) dissertation, Chomsky's (1973) &quot;Conditions on transformation&quot;, and (1977) &quot;On Wh-movement.&quot; Bresnan's (1971) paper is also cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user483" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T18:09:52.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19097" CreationDate="2016-07-10T20:45:41.353" Score="4" ViewCount="3747" Body="&lt;p&gt;As asking language-ID-questions on this site seems off-topic I'd like to know whether there is a resource on the internet which can help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a the curious snippet attached to a balloon which has landed in a forest nearby my parents home in Berlin/Germany. I think I could start to translate it, once knowing which language it is and thus the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one line of the text - I don't want to post all of it as I'm not sure whether the author would want that. It is also to be noted that the snippet is signed with two names written in latin characters and using the word &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5nRy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5nRy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13617" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T22:20:47.073" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T10:58:08.907" Title="How to identify a foreign language from handwriting?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19095" CreationDate="2016-07-10T23:48:37.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it were printed, I would suggest &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Omniglot&lt;/a&gt;, which is the best resource for alphabet-identification. Handwritten text is more of a problem: the first time I saw cursive Hebrew, I didn't know what language it was. And there's always the possibility that it isn't a language, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/7LmArHo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T23:48:37.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19095" CreationDate="2016-07-11T01:58:00.180" Score="20" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Problem 1. Identify the language&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://habrahabr.ru/post/147838/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this diagram&lt;/a&gt; (in Russian). It seems to be pretty simple, and it amazingly covers a vast majority of world's languages. I took my liberty to adjust it slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ed1Co.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ed1Co.png&quot; alt=&quot;Identifying Language diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; this diagram does not pretend to be scientific at all. Its only goal is to let a beginner to quickly identify the script and, possibly, a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Problem 2. Identify the characters&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have recognized the language/script, you would probably need to &lt;strong&gt;identify the characters&lt;/strong&gt; within the text. Some characters can be difficult to recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Thai language (your text is in Thai; see below), the characters &lt;code&gt;ง&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ว&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;า&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;อ&lt;/code&gt;, being hand-written, may be hard to tell apart since they differ drastically from their canonical forms.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in your example, &lt;code&gt;ง&lt;/code&gt; looks like a mirrored &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, while &lt;code&gt;อ&lt;/code&gt; looks like &lt;code&gt;O&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doug Cooper has written an interesting article called &lt;strong&gt;&quot;How do Thais Tell Letters Apart?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://sealang.net/sala/archives/pdf4/cooper1996how.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/3068/1009&quot;&gt;Deciphering a handwritten script&lt;/a&gt; also has a great answer by a person whose profession is reading manuscripts; in their answer, they describe some practical techniques for recognizing symbols in a handwritten text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Further reading&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language recognition chart&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you speak Russian, there's a great book, „World language identification by script“ (1961) written by Gilyarevsky et al (Гиляревский, Гривнин — «Определитель языков мира по письменностям») available online (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.binetti.ru/collectio/philologia/opredelitel.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;landing page&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Your sample is in Thai, and the inscription says, อย่างนี้ตลอดไป รักเสมอ, &quot;{wish it to be} forever this way, an eternal love&quot;. Also, it's a pretty common tradition in Thailand to attach one's dreams and wishes to a ballon or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Krathong&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;floating basket&lt;/a&gt; and let it fly/float.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. Language identification question by itself are offtopic, since they do not help further visitors. However, questions on &lt;strong&gt;methodology&lt;/strong&gt; of language identification seem to be quite on topic. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1690/1009&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T05:54:48.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T17:05:10.923" Score="0" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for analyses of the word stock of English which look at which word formation process accounts for what percentage of the word stock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &quot;word formation,&quot; I would include here borrowing or conversion or even semantic change, basically anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone know of any such studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll accept even things that use a very small sample size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, any period of English is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13626" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T20:57:23.740" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T20:57:23.740" Title="Analyses of English word formation processes?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T19:24:21.453" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native German speaker and one year ago i wrote a mathematical text and gave it to a friend who knows nothing about maths to look for typos. I often used the following or similar formulations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sei X ein Y.&quot;&#xA;&quot;Sei V ein Vektorraum.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this is good mathematical style but my friend said this is not good German. Thinking about it i had to agree and changed this formulation in my text and i still try to avoid it. I think if you use this Konjunktiv, one should keep on using the Konjunktiv also in the arguments and proofs following the definition but that seems weird to me. But it's used so obviously in German math text and i can't believe all the people make grammatical &quot;mistakes&quot; all the time. Can you explain me the validity of this formulation please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13628" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T19:24:21.453" Title="&quot;Sei&quot; in German mathematical texts" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-07-17T20:32:16.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T20:45:52.333" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone pronounces &quot;pizza&quot; as /piːzə/ instead of /pitsə/, we'd surely raise an eyebrow at them. But few people (that I know personally) mind when we pronounce &quot;tagliatelle&quot; with a hard G (I wasn't even aware that this was 'incorrect' until recently.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: are there consistent and observable processes that happen when we borrow loanwords into another language? Or is the process of change seemingly arbitrary? I imagine there must be some cultural differences involved, seeing as Americans often use a more native pronunciation of words like &quot;fillet&quot; /fɪleɪ/ whereas Brits say /fɪlɪt/. But other than that, I don't know why it is we keep some features of the native pronunciation (like the /ts/ in pizza) and lose others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:55:56.317" Title="What factors influence the way we adapt loanwords into English?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19102" CreationDate="2016-07-12T00:57:27.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, sure, there are consistent and observable processes in borrowing, and it is mostly a complicated and obvious matter.  What does a borrower know about the original pronunciation of a word?  He can't carry over into his own pronunciation features he doesn't even know about.  Has he ever heard the original pronunciation?  Does the word have an alphabetic spelling, and has the borrower seen it?  Does he know anything about the original language (perhaps he's bilingual).  Does he care whether his own pronunciation resembles the original in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only specifically linguistic ideas that seem relevant are those based on Roman Jakobson's theory of implicational universals presented in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=i2gUutbrJLkC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals&lt;/a&gt;.  A naive English speaker hearing the German pronunciation of &quot;Bach&quot;, [bax], may be expected to pronounce it as [bak], because changing [x] to [k] is a natural way of adapting the pronunciation to English, since English does have /k/ but does not have /x/ in its phoneme system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T00:57:27.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T05:51:14.950" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 167. &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We need these “intermediate” N' (pronounced “en-bar”) categories to&#xA;  explain the items that are conjoined in these sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 6, the book does not appear to explain why these Intermediate Categories cannot be XP again. Why are X' necessary? Why not simply reuse XP?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cannot each X' be replaced by XP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T18:35:22.807" Title="Why cannot the Intermediate Structure be again XP, instead of X'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-12T06:41:39.773" Score="6" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Swedish third person plural pronoun has the nominative case form &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;, which is pronounced /dɔm/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this situation come about? My guess is that the nominative merged with the accusative but somehow maintained its old orthographic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T07:08:01.337" Title="In Swedish, how did the third person plural pronoun de come to be pronounced /dɔm/?" Tags="&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19105" CreationDate="2016-07-12T18:22:11.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The three projections of X'-bar theory namely X, X', and XP exist to establish the Head-Complement, Specifer-Head, and Adjunct relations. If intermediate projections were also XPs, then there would be no way to distinguish adjuncts from (multiple) specifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9616" LastEditorUserId="9616" LastEditDate="2016-07-12T18:35:22.807" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T18:35:22.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19112" CreationDate="2016-07-13T20:22:47.897" Score="5" ViewCount="950" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to look at the phrase &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/goodnight.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Good night!&quot; in the various languages&lt;/a&gt; of different language groups. The phrase is usually recognizable across related languages. (It's similar when looking at the Germanic languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that occurs to me when looking at the Romance languages is is that the syntax of Romanian stands out from the rest. They say &quot;Night good!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Italian:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Buona notte!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish:&lt;/strong&gt;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Buenas noches!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Catalan:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Bona nit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French:&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Bonne nuit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin:&lt;/strong&gt;   &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;   Bonam noctem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portugese:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Boa noite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Romanian:&lt;/strong&gt;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Noapte bună!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? I suppose that most of the Romance languages share a certain amount of common syntax structures. (Just like the Germanic languages.)  Does Romanian generally have a significantly different syntax from the rest of the Romance languages? If yes, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know anything about this particular example described here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastEditorUserId="12996" LastEditDate="2016-07-13T22:36:31.240" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T17:01:33.693" Title="Why is the Romanian syntax for &quot;Good night!&quot; opposite to all the other Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19111" CreationDate="2016-07-14T06:21:48.150" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The greeting/parting distinction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In many languages there is a distinction between the greeting upon meeting eg &lt;em&gt;Good day!&lt;/em&gt; and the farewell upon parting &lt;em&gt;Have a good day!&lt;/em&gt;  The comparison table in the question mixes those two distinct senses, and also mixes evening and night.  In Italian there is &lt;em&gt;Buon giorno!&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Buona sera!&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;Buona giornata!&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Buona serata!&lt;/em&gt;  Spanish &lt;em&gt;¡Buenas noches!&lt;/em&gt; can in fact be used upon meeting, rather like English &lt;em&gt;Good evening!&lt;/em&gt; as Iberian has no cognate to &lt;em&gt;sera&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Romanian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Romanian the greeting/parting distinction seems to be provided by word order, hence the greeting &lt;em&gt;Bună ziua!&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bună seara!&lt;/em&gt; but the parting &lt;em&gt;O zi bună!&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Noapte bună!&lt;/em&gt;  It is not clear if it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;productive feature&lt;/a&gt;.  Note also some subtleties around the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Definite_article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definite article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neighbouring languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Outside Romance we could look to Greek or Albanian as their predecessors had influence on early Balkan Romance.  Armenian - which like Romanian has many structural features of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balkan sprachbund&lt;/a&gt; - inverts order in the answer - &lt;em&gt;Lujs bari!&lt;/em&gt; - to &lt;em&gt;Bari lujs!&lt;/em&gt;  The surrounding South Slavic languages do not use the order &lt;em&gt;noun + adj&lt;/em&gt; except in a few archaisms, and in general Slavic and Hungarian contributions to Romanian were lexical not syntactic.  Turkish has yet another paradigm: distinct farewell phrases for the person departing and the person staying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="91" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T17:01:33.693" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T17:01:33.693" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-14T14:08:13.570" Score="2" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a corpus of modern English, with part-of-speech tags, in order to train language models, specifically a part-of-speech tagger. The domain I am doing this in is the Hansard, the transcript of speeches in British Parliament. I have tried training using corpora of American English, with unimpressive results. Are there any open-access coropora for this domain that I could use, or at least corpora of modern educated British English? I am aware of the existence of the &lt;em&gt;Hansard Corpus&lt;/em&gt;, and several other similar corpora, but I would like to download the corpus for use with the Python &lt;em&gt;NLTK&lt;/em&gt; library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13648" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T11:17:49.877" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T11:17:49.877" Title="Open corpora for modern English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19117" CreationDate="2016-07-14T14:23:26.427" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to include some examples of spectrograms in a paper I am writing. What are some of the ways to get a picture to include? I thought it might be the &quot;draw&quot; feature in Praat but it doesn't seem to work for spectrograms. Using a screen shot also does not seem to be the most elegant solution. Is there another way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T17:00:44.903" Title="How to add a spectrogram to a paper" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-14T14:28:24.723" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us consider two languages that are clearly related to each other, and one of them is older than the other. &lt;strong&gt;How would an academic linguist determine if the older language is an/the ancestor of the newer language or the older language is an older variety of the newer language in the past?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose branching is the key. If there is no branching, it would be reasonable to conclude that it is a historical older variety (I further assume that if the time gap exceeds a dozen or so generations of speakers, a search for lost sibling languages is in order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, my question is in the scenario when the newer language has siblings, and all siblings have good amount of mutual intelligibility. Further, all siblings are considered bona fide languages and not dialects.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a scenario, any of the siblings (ts speakers rather) can claim that the older language is an older version of itself, thus appropriating all the prestige and legacy of the older language. What are the criteria to resolve this appropriately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there will still be 'proper older version' of every sibling after it branched. But what if there isn't clear evidence of that, or a consensus about that? Would a linguist have to peg each sibling to an arbitrary period and call it 'Old X'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am aware of politics of nationalism that play a role here (I am aware of the quip about language and dialect, and army and navy). I am looking for purely academic response. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I use the words &lt;code&gt;old&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;new&lt;/code&gt; in the normal sense they are used, meaning, a language X as observed in 1500 AD is newer to one observed in 800 AD. I use the word &lt;code&gt;ancestor&lt;/code&gt; to mean a language, that certainly existed and was not constructed by linguists, that transformed into X and its siblings. It could be taken to mean lowest common ancestor in the language tree. Further, once a language X has its name attached by its speakers, and then on is referred to as X by its speakers, X as it was two centuries back is old X and not ancestor of X of later times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastEditorUserId="13546" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T06:48:22.170" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T06:48:22.170" Title="Given two languages, one older than the other, what are the criteria to decide if the older one is an ancestor or an older variety of the other?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19120" CreationDate="2016-07-14T16:36:32.300" Score="1" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, there are verbs that have two valid past participles. An example for such a verb would be &lt;em&gt;sow&lt;/em&gt; which has the two forms &lt;em&gt;sowed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sown&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there English verbs that have more than one valid past tenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3451" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T17:08:06.277" Title="English verbs with more than one past tense" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-07-17T20:29:48.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19114" CreationDate="2016-07-14T17:00:44.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You just need the correct Praat command: &quot;Paint visible spectrogram...&quot;. Here is the relevant manual page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_4__Printing_the_spectrogram.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_4__Printing_the_spectrogram.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T17:00:44.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2016-07-14T17:21:02.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Argots are closely related to the term registers. they are secrets language scientifically employed by interest groups who have anti-social tendencies. for instance robbers, cultists, prisoners etc. they use argots to pursue their evil activities apart from their everyday communications.&#xA;Argots also serve as symbols of loyalty among its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13649" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T17:21:02.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19115" CreationDate="2016-07-14T17:22:16.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages don't actually have ages, and they aren't discrete things like people are. So we'll have to first interpret what you mean by &quot;older language&quot; versus &quot;younger language&quot;. It's even harder to understand what the difference would be between X being an ancestor of Y versus X being an older variety of Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take &quot;American English as currently spoken in the Pacific Northwest&quot; (&quot;Y&quot;) to be the younger language, and &quot;English spoken in the British Isles in 1600&quot; (&quot;X&quot;) to be the older language. It would be reasonable to say that X is an ancestor of Y, in the same way that one can say that Knudt Knudtsen is an ancestor of me. We would not say that I am a newer variety of Knudt Knudtsen, because Knudt Knudtsen is a discrete entity who clearly died. X is not a discrete entity which clearly died at some point in the past. What an academic linguist would conclude is that there isn't a difference between the possibilities that you describe -- they refer to the same fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same problem afflicts appeal to linguistic &quot;sibling&quot;, which would probably be taken to be &quot;a closely related language descended from a single earlier language&quot;. Well, it turns out that &quot;American English as currently spoken in the Pacific Northwest&quot; (&quot;Y&quot;) isn't entirely uniform – there are documented dialect differences (east of Cascades / west of Cascades being prominent; there is an Enumclaw dialect). No two people speak the exact same language (i.e. have the exact same grammar and lexicon, even setting aside cases where one person knows a word that the other person doesn't know). The significance of that is that there is no clearly-defined boundary between language and dialect. There seems to be a feeling that Scots is not a dialect of English, and certainly I can't understand it at least the bit of it that I've heard. So by the mutual intelligibility test, most people would say that Scots is a distinct language from English. I don't think there is much support for thinking that [Geordie][1] is held to be a separate language, but it is completely unintelligible to me. Indeed, a number UK dialects are unintelligible to me, and some US dialects are too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with using popular opinion as the adjudicator of the dialect / language distinction is that people mostly don't have opinions except about their own language, and then their opinions are shaped by completely unscientific and non-linguistic criteria. Whether or not the various Kurdish languages and Saami languages are considered to be separate languages or dialects depends on non-linguistic ideology and political matters. (My grasp of the situation is that Kurds downplay dialect differences in favor of a single Kurdish ethnicity, because there is an ongoing struggle for independence that relies on the unity of the Kurds as a nation; whereas the Saami enjoy basic rights and a fair degree of political autonomy so recognition of linguistic differences is not a threat to their future. More could be said, but won't be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Edit]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think using &quot;referred to as X by its speakers and outsiders&quot; will get anywhere, since people's name for their own language is frequently different from what outsiders call them (the general scheme is that the language-internal name translates as something like &quot;language of the people&quot; and the outsider name translates as something like &quot;language of the barbarians&quot;). Eskimo, Sioux, Berber, Hottentot and Lappish are all etymologically insulting exonyms, likewise the Russian word for &quot;German&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you discard outsider names and stick with self-names like Suomi (Finnish), Deutsch (German), ελληνικά (Greek), or Italian(o), then there might be a legitimate question of cultural identity. Perhaps we could say that &quot;English&quot; first existed when those Germanic tribes called themselves &quot;English&quot; rather than &quot;Saxon&quot; or &quot;Jute&quot; (or historical equivalents -- &quot;English&quot; is a modern word). Note that Irish (Gaeilge) and Scots Gaelic (Gàidhlig) are different languages, but the names of the languages reflect a continuous use of the indigenous name for the language. A historical change in the name of a language probably reflects a major cultural change more than anything else, although actual change in language can be a part of cultural change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, the way &quot;ancestor&quot; language is used in linguistics, it refers to what preceded historically, without care for the language / dialect division, though we tend to reserve the word for predecessors that are at least some number of hundreds of years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-07-14T23:42:25.790" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T23:42:25.790" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19116" CreationDate="2016-07-14T19:00:52.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;kneeled / knelt, chided / chid. Irregular verbs that became regularized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T19:00:52.233" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18794" CreationDate="2016-07-15T09:10:47.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In classical Arabic in a verbal sentence (a sentence beginning with a verb) with implicit agent the verb will agree with this implicit agent in person, number and gender. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yaδhabūna ʼilā l-madīnati&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“they go (3rd plural masc.) to the town”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is an explicit agent the verb will agree with the agent in person and gender only; that is: it can only be in the 3rd person singular masculine or feminine. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yaδhabu l-ʼawlādu ʼilā l-madīnati&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally: “he goes (3rd singular masc.) the boys to the town”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The boys are going to the town”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T10:02:06.573" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T10:02:06.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-15T11:13:22.377" Score="2" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;The weekdays in my native language (Bavarian) are very inconsistent and two of them apparently came to us from the Goths, who in turn have adopted them from Greek.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The two days in question are &quot;Iada&quot; (Day of Ares; Tuesday) and &quot;Bfinsda&quot; (Fifth Day; Thursday).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What bothers me especially about that is why one comes from the old Greek system (using god names) and one from the new system (using numbers). Quite a while ago I read that the Greeks (among others) adopted the number system because they did not want their weekday names to originate from heathen gods. Sadly I cannot find the source anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So my basic question is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why did we adopt these two different styles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that this question may not have a factual answer, so here some alternative questions that could shed some light on it:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there records of the Gothic weekday names and if so, what are they?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When did the change of the weekday style occur in Greek?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please not that the Bavarian names vary. I took my local variant. More can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bairische-sprache.at/Index/Remaraweng%20Boarisch%20-%20Lehren/Mahda%20bis%20Sunda%20.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;www.bairische-sprache.at&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="13363" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T13:17:06.353" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T13:51:14.927" Title="Greek-Gothic Weekday Names in Bavarian" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19123" CreationDate="2016-07-15T13:03:50.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The names of seven days of the week exist in two forms, both attested from shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. One is the (originally) Roman planetary week, where each day is associated with one of the seven planets, which in turn have their names from seven Roman gods; this form is first alluded to by the Roman poet Tibullus in the first century BC. The other is the Jewish numbered week, with six days numbered from one to six, and the Sabbath on the seventh day; this is attested in Jewish writings from about the 2nd century BC onwards. It is thus not correct to say that the planetary week is older than the numbered week. In later Christian uses the two forms of the week are often combined. For example: Italian has giovedì “Jupiter’s day” (Thursday), but sabato “Sabbath” (Saturday). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally accepted that at least some of the day names in West Germanic languages derive from Gothic. The main basis for this is that the word for “Saturday, Sabbath” is sambaʒtag in Old High German, Samstag in modern (Southern) German, etc., with dissimilation of -bb- to -mb-. This dissimilation occurs also in the word for &quot;Sabbath&quot; in Mediaeval Greek and in Slavic languages; it is thus assumed that Gothic borrowed the dissimilated form from Greek and then passed it on to West Germanic. There is a slight difficulty here, namely that the word for “Sabbath” in the Gothic Bible is in fact sabbato, not *sambato, but scholars have got around this by assuming that a popular form *sambato existed alongside the “learned” sabbato. A good synopsis of the standard theory is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwds.de/?view=1&amp;amp;qu=Samstag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dwds.de/?view=1&amp;amp;qu=Samstag&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the Bavarian names are concerned, I think the page linked by you gives a very good account of these. erchtag, iarta, iada etc. come from Ares, the Greek planetary name for the third day (Latin Mars), and pfinzda etc. come from Greek pempte, “fifth”. It is just that I would have written not “durch gotische Vermittlung” but “wahrscheinlich durch gotische Vermittlung”, as the name for Thursday is not in fact attested in our meagre corpus of Gothic texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a recent discussion of the origin of the seven-day week here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/calendars-ancient-medieval-project/2015/07/08/the-origins-of-the-seven-day-week/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/calendars-ancient-medieval-project/2015/07/08/the-origins-of-the-seven-day-week/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T13:51:14.927" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T13:51:14.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19126" CreationDate="2016-07-15T13:36:47.160" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the term for concepts that got translated from one language or another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard this term in a conversation about Czech Anglicisms such like: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mějte hezký den.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - the literal version of the English phrase &quot;Have a nice day.&quot;* which wasn't really used in Czechia in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may include just randomly shared concepts as well. For example &lt;em&gt;a bit&lt;/em&gt; – a small amount &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;originally meant&lt;/a&gt; a &quot;piece bitten off&quot;. I guess the same applies for Czech &lt;em&gt;kus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T14:39:07.140" Title="Name of the act of borrowing linguistic concepts from different languages" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19125" CreationDate="2016-07-15T14:39:07.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A concept is actually pairing of &quot;what it refers to&quot; (meaning) and a word, so &quot;cow&quot; refers to, well, you know what, and &quot;gabba&quot; (a word of North Saami) refers to &quot;white reindeer&quot;, where we use a phrase since we have no reason to have specifically identifies a concept &quot;Whitereindeer&quot;. A better way of putting it is in terms of &quot;expressions&quot;, i.e. some phrase in one language is used for some purpose, like &quot;you're welcome&quot;. Your example is an example of a &quot;calque&quot;, which is a word for word loan translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T14:39:07.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19129" CreationDate="2016-07-15T19:17:11.340" Score="8" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;French historically has caused the presence of several unique sounds in English that would not have been present otherwise. For example the &quot;dʒ&quot; sound in &quot;garage&quot;. Similarly, I believe I've read Japanese gained the &quot;n&quot; sound as a result of influence from Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to English's widespread influence in the modern age, has it caused any languages to develop new sound features, or grammar features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm not talking about a creole or pidgin which may have been formed from a mix of English, and is more of a newly formed language, but a long standing language that has undergone influence from the English language. Japanese has adopted a large amount of English loanwords, but I don't think it's adopted any sound change, only adopted the words to the current phonological constraints of Japanese. (Or maybe it has? One sentence on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for Japanese phonology&lt;/a&gt; indicates that it may have but has no citation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read some sounds in Quebec are present due to the influence of English but other sources I've read indicate these are actually just holdovers from older French that were lost in Parisian French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13652" LastEditorUserId="13652" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T21:07:14.170" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T13:33:35.733" Title="Has English caused any Languages to undergo Sound Change or Grammar Change?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19127" CreationDate="2016-07-15T22:11:55.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, English has influenced at least one language's phonology (and probably many more). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese did not distinguish the phonemes /ɸ/ and /h/ before English loanwords. You can read a description of the current situation in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.askalinguist.org/uploads/2/3/8/5/23859882/an_acoustic_study_of_the_japanese_voiceless_bilabial_fricative-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;An acoustic study of the Japanese voiceless bilabial fricative&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Scott&#xA;Ruddell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In native Japanese words, this sound etymologically derives from lenition of the bilabial stop /p/, and there is evidence (such as Portuguese transcriptions that use &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;) that at one point it was pronounced as [ɸ] (a bilabial voiceless fricative) before all vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later on the sound &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debuccalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;debuccalized&lt;/a&gt; to [h] (at least in Standard Japanese) in all contexts except for before the vowel /u/. Before /u/, the sound change is still in progress, and some speakers have [ɸ] while others have something more like [h]. A common synchronic analysis of this situation is that there is a single phoneme /h/ with a conditional allophone [ɸ] that is possible before /u/. I don't know of any synchronic alternations between these sounds in modern Japanese within inflectional paradigms or due to derivation (which I think would be the strongest evidence of allophony, if such alternations were shown to be productive with neologisms and nonce-words) but they do behave similarly in the context of the (somewhat phonologically productive) process of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=16&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj3_7Xzh-DPAhUmzIMKHVDFAoA4ChAWCCswBQ&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fling.auf.net%2Flingbuzz%2F002142%2Fcurrent.pdf&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNF8ssYGRW5e_Mwjk-WXVneUv5vaRA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rendaku&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: both become /b/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are a number of reasons (common etymological origin, complementary distribution, phonetic similarity, similar phonological behavior) for considering [ɸ] to be a mere allophone of /h/... until the introduction of English loanwords. The presence of the phone [ɸ] in native Japanese words meant that Japanese speakers had a sound close to English [f] available to use in the pronunciation of loanwords. In English, /f/ can occur before any vowel, so the use of [ɸ] in Japanese to represent /f/ in English loanwords introduced a lot of words into standard Japanese that have [ɸ] before vowels other than /u/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruddell gives the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ɸan/ “fan” &lt;br&gt;/ɸirumu/ “film” &lt;br&gt;/ɸeruto/ “felt” &lt;br&gt;/ɸorio/&#xA;  “forio”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequences /ɸa/ /ɸi/ /ɸe/ /ɸo/ contrast with /ha/ /hi/ /he/ /ho/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T20:08:13.557" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T20:08:13.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19133" CreationDate="2016-07-16T12:43:10.010" Score="12" ViewCount="803" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned of connections between linguistics and category theory when I'm learning the application of category theory in quantum field theory. Being aware that axiomatic set theory (logics) is utilized in linguistic research, I want to know more mathematical tools in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13653" LastEditorUserId="13653" LastEditDate="2016-07-16T17:03:05.673" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T18:32:58.257" Title="Besides logics, what mathematical tools are used in the study of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17394" CreationDate="2016-07-16T13:52:10.317" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had both Malayalam and Tamil speaking colleagues and we often discussed languages. As a non speaker of either, they sounded exactly the same but with different accents, so I often asked a lot of questions. My answer is from what I have observed, not from a research paper of an Indologist (neither am I a linguist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are to a large extent, having more mutual intelligibility than other (major) South Indian languages. They even have quite similar phonology that sounds odd to other South Indians(mainly usage of voiced and unvoiced consonants). Linguists believe that Malayalam evolved from Tamil fairly late, between 800 AD and 1300 AD, though not all Malayalam speakers agree with that - some claim it is much more ancient than that and some even go to the extent of claiming that Tamil Sangam literature was written in Old Malayalam, not Old Tamil. It isn't uncommon for Malayalam speakers and Tamil speakers to speak in their respective languages and have a conversation if one of them doesn't know English. However, a few factors hinder such a conversation from being smooth and flawless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malayalam speakers are notorious for their accent - they are perceived to speak faster than others - so it is hard to decipher them. Some words are unique to each language, and a few common words have quite different meanings (e.g. 'patti' (t - retroflex, a,i -short, p - unaspirated) means dog in Malayalam but village in Tamil). Malayalam has more Sanskrit loanwords than Tamil, and has borrowed with little morphological change compared to Tamil (other language speakers who have no clue of Malayalam can easily get gist of what is being said by their knowledge of Sanskrit owing to their own borrowings, if they can decipher the accent that is). This might cause a problem in picking up words. Further, although Sanakrit loanwords are found in all Indian languages (except probably north eastern ones which aren't Indo-European or Dravidian, except Assamese and Bengali), not all borrowed words have same meanings. The change ranges from subtle variation in meaning to downright opposite or contradictory(e.g. 'garva' in Hindi means pride in a positive sense but in Kannada means pride with severe negative connotations - its one of the trigger words in Kannada). So a Sanskrit origin word needn't always mean the same, and it is often best to ask when a word seems out of place in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer has been getting quite a bit of attention every now and then, and I thought of adding some reference to demonstrate the mutual intelligibility. In this video &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidya_Balan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vidya Balan&lt;/a&gt;, a popular actress in India, is interviewed in Malayalam but she responds in Tamil, yet the interview goes on smoothly. At 11:28 they talk about her command of Malayalam, or lack there of. At 12:20 they both acknowledge Vidya has been speaking in a dialect of Tamil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I don't know if this was for a TV channel and if subtitles were used, which I seriously doubt. The interviewer might have been bilingual too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8aJpq9j4ms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8aJpq9j4ms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastEditorUserId="13546" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T14:27:03.870" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T14:27:03.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19131" CreationDate="2016-07-16T16:04:34.233" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nice question, I think this is good to ask for linguistic theory in general, because people who are not so familiar with linguistic research often find this hard to imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;strong&gt;logic&lt;/strong&gt; in general is essential in formal semantics. Using propositional logic, predicate logic, set theory and tools like lambda calculus, functions and type theory, formal natural language semantics tries to account for meaning in a mathematical way: formalizing natural language statements (using first-order logic, lambda expressions or set-theoretical notation), assigning general meaning patterns to certain types of expressions (this is where semantics interfaces with syntax), representing ambiguity (such as scope ambiguity in expressions involving quantifiers or structural ambiguity arising from operators), making claims about logical inferences (such as implication and entailment), or discussing the concept of intensionality and modality making use of possible worlds - all under the assumption that meaning can (to some extend) be accounted for by logical statements and truth values.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you didn't already subsume this under logic, &lt;strong&gt;set theory&lt;/strong&gt; is very important for formal semantics as well, where it is used to describe the nature of certain types of expresions and how they interact with each other. (As an example, the idea of so-called generalized quantifiers is that quantified expressions like &quot;all women&quot;, &quot;some children&quot;, &quot;no man&quot; are sets of sets of entities that then combine in specific patterns with with other types of elements in a sentence; additionally for a lot of purposes you want to make use of sets of propositions or sets of possible worlds, ... and some more things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides logic, the most important field of mathematics that is used in linguistics is probably &lt;strong&gt;statistics&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is especially important in a wide range of applications in computational linguistics, such as statistical NLP (parsing, POS tagging, ..) and machine learning, but also non-computational areas like quantitative approaches to linguistics (e.g. determining word frequency distributions).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Statistical methods are also crucial for evaluating results of studies (e.g. psycholinguistic experiments, or quantitative typological research).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are uses in purely theoretically directed research too: For example, there is a trend towards using probabilistic models and Bayesian inference to address problems in pragmatics, sociolinguistics or historical linguistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In being related to &lt;strong&gt;computer science&lt;/strong&gt;, computational linguistics requires mathematical models of issues like computability and algorithm complexity in basic discussions about programming.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Of course, there is also some underlying math in the computers and programming languages themselves, sometimes less obvious at the surface, sometimes more, like in so-called logic programming languages such as Prolog which is sometimes used for various applications of natural language processing (most prominently parsing).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For phonetics, mathematical components such as Fourier and related analyses (as mentioned by user6726) in &lt;strong&gt;physics&lt;/strong&gt; concerning sound waves, frequency spectrums and related measurable phenomena of interest also come into play.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Fourier analysis and various statistical methods also play an important role for the analysis of EEGs as used in &lt;strong&gt;psycho- and neurolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &lt;strong&gt;functions&lt;/strong&gt; being mathematical concepts as well, this has applications in very many fields, like - again - formal semantics, pretty much anything in computational linguistics (both in theoretical computational linguistics, programming and of course statistics), and also plays more marginal, but still indispensable roles in related fields of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking about which, certain theories that originally have their roots in mathematics are occassionally exploited in linguistics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An example I can think of is that &lt;strong&gt;game theory&lt;/strong&gt;, which was mostly developed by mathematicians and has applications also in completely different areas like economics, can be used to neatly model natural-language phenomena in pragmatics or language evolution.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Simple &lt;strong&gt;algebra&lt;/strong&gt; is found almost everywhere when e.g. talking about the combinatorial possibilities of inflectional paradigms given certain morphological patterns.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since this was mentioned in the question, &lt;strong&gt;category theory&lt;/strong&gt; has connections to linguistics as well, more on that in the next paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also talk about mathematical influences when it comes to &lt;strong&gt;formal representations&lt;/strong&gt; in certain fields of linguistic, like syntax, grammar and parsing: Precise definitions of grammar formalisms, formal statements about trees, derivations and inference rules, etc. (This is where category theory comes into play: A syntactic analysis is represented by a graph with objects (constituents) and relations between these objects, syntactic categories and functions, terminal and non-terminal nodes and interactions between constituents that can be described as mathematically definable operations, e.g. with lambda calculus.) Formal representations are also made when accurately capturing grammatical rules such as phonological ones, building models for all kinds of things (most of them already mentioned above, e.g. language evolution or cognitive processes), and of course again formal semantics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Apart from more complex models, you will frequently find a little math (with quantifiers, set relations and similar basic concepts) in &lt;strong&gt;formal definitions&lt;/strong&gt; within the scope of pretty much any linguistic subdiscipline that is in need of precise definitions, like theoretical syntax, formal pragmatics or algorithms in computational linguistics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is obviously closely connected to &lt;strong&gt;logic&lt;/strong&gt; and general &lt;strong&gt;combinatorics&lt;/strong&gt;, since you want to create sound and provable (and, from a scientific point of view just as important, &lt;em&gt;dis&lt;/em&gt;provable) theories and give as precise as possible descriptions, definitions, models with all their objects and relations, logical axioms and inferences about the linguistic entities and phenomena you want to explain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you point out, mathematics and especially logic are indeed essential in linguistics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Of course, there are areas in linguistics where you don't need that much maths, and &quot;real&quot; mathematicians might laugh at what linguists call mathematics - I remember a passage in Daniel Kehlmann's novel &lt;em&gt;Measuring the world&lt;/em&gt; (full reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-salzburg.at/fileadmin/oracle_file_imports/1119267.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; where I took the literal translation from) where the fictional Gauss says something like &quot;Linguistics? This is something for people with the pedantry, but not the intelligence, for mathematics. People who invent their own scanty logics.&quot; ;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But in fact many people involved in academic linguistic research have some background in mathematics or philosophy which I think is not a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T18:32:58.257" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T18:32:58.257" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25856" CreationDate="2016-07-16T17:12:28.897" Score="6" ViewCount="1597" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning monoidal category applied in quantum information and quantum field theory, and several references say that monoidal category is somehow related to linguistics via Hopf algebra of quantum groups. Can someone illustrate more on this connection? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is there other applications of category theory (either abstract or concrete) in linguistics besides monoidal category? In my &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19131/besides-logics-what-mathematical-tools-are-used-in-the-study-of-linguistics&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/13238/lemontree&quot;&gt;lemontree&lt;/a&gt; mentioned abstract category in &lt;strong&gt;formal representations&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13653" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T13:03:47.993" Title="How is category theory applied in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T06:12:48.130" Score="1" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;[e] and [ε] are pronounced almost the same in English. But there is obvious difference between them in french , french [e] sounds like ‘ay’ in english ‘bay’, really close to the first English letter “A”—-[ei]. Why french [e] and english [e] are pronounced differently? Dont western languages share the same International Phonetic Alphabet ??  Or they share the same IPA but their pronounciation are different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13657" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-17T09:55:19.537" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T11:53:47.160" Title="Do English and French share the same international phonetic symbol?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19135" CreationDate="2016-07-17T08:25:39.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused by these questions. [e] and [ε] are not pronounced almost the same in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hate /heɪt/ &#xA;bet /bɛt/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you're referring to letters, not sounds. When you use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA#Brackets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;brackets []&lt;/a&gt;, it's is supposed to be referring to sounds, not letters, so if the phonetic transcription is accurate, there shouldn't ideally be much difference between [e] in different languages. That's the whole purpose of IPS is to talk about sounds no what letters represent different sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be misunderstanding your question, however. If you have the experience of french linguists using [e] and anglophone linguists using [e] and they ACTUALLY sound different, then I imagine this is either an error, or the result of some kind of academic siloing. It's quite hard to capture all sounds with symbols, and sometimes a language's sound is not quite &quot;exact&quot; for a specific IPA symbol. But they shouldn't be so different as to clearly represent different phonemes, especially one that there is already an IPA symbol for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13504" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T08:25:39.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19135" CreationDate="2016-07-17T11:53:47.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is in principle international and universal. However, no phonetic transcription ever reflects all the phonetic niceties of any language. Instead, IPA aims to represent the most salient features of a given language; this is true of phonetic transcription and all the more so of phonological transcription. For example, French “tête” and English “tit” will both be transcribed with twice /t/ (in phonological transcription) and with twice [t] in phonetic transcription, although the sounds are very different in the two languages: French [t] is an unaspirated dental, while English [t] is an aspirated alveolar. But as there is no phonological distinction between dentals and alveolars in either of these languages this difference is generally ignored even in a relatively close phonetic transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T11:53:47.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T12:41:28.067" Score="1" ViewCount="1939" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Goldberg's &lt;em&gt;Constructions&lt;/em&gt; and find her employing the symbol 'OBL' to represent a category of syntactic constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SUBJ OBL OBJ  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it that 'OBL' is read 'oblique' in some sense; but I am puzzled to understand exactly what sense, since it seems to embrace both preposition phrases and adjective phrases (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; 'OBL&lt;sub&gt;PP/AP&lt;/sub&gt;'), standing in for what I would categorize as adjectival and locative predicate complements. I have found no instance where 'OBL' is realized as a nominal, and it's not the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; of a preposition, so it doesn't appear to be an &lt;em&gt;oblique object&lt;/em&gt; in either of the senses I'm familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide a name and definition for this symbol? And for lagniappe, can anyone tell me how folks who use this symbol represent a nominal predicate complement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T12:22:42.887" Title="What is this 'OBL'?" Tags="&lt;notation&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19127" CreationDate="2016-07-17T14:07:56.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When French borrowed English words that contain [ŋ] (e.g. &lt;em&gt;camping&lt;/em&gt;), French kept the [ŋ] sound, which thus became an addition to French phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T14:07:56.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19116" CreationDate="2016-07-17T17:08:06.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the trend seems to be towards the regularization of verbs, some have gone the other way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preterite of &lt;strong&gt;dig&lt;/strong&gt; was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.gt/books?id=7QqzTicz7MAC&amp;amp;dq=%22digged%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;digged&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; until the 1600s, when it began to change to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dug&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.gt/books?id=nrZzAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT65&amp;amp;dq=%22digged%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22digged%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;irregular verbs references&lt;/a&gt; still retain both forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, in some American dialects, we now have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;snuck&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (for sneaked) and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dove&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (for dived). Personally, they make me shudder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13659" LastActivityDate="2016-07-17T17:08:06.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T18:26:40.250" Score="0" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is follow up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/73723/gods-name-combinaiton-of-words-looking-for-verifiables-sources-or-gramatic-su/73724?noredirect=1#comment215527_73724&quot;&gt;a question I posed in Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was investigating the source of the belief that God's name is &quot;a combination of the words 'Will be, is, was' (יהיה Yihiyeh, Hoveh הווה, haya היה)&quot; and looking into how these words might have morphed into the Divine name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew that the vav is used in Hebrew as a conjunction (translated &quot;and&quot;); it thus seemed logical grammatically, that the name is an acronym:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yihiyeh --He will be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hoveh --He is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  V --and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Haya --He was  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made sense, since Rambam forbid it to be pronounced according to these letters (from which I gather that the letters themselves were believed not to procure or contain the proper pronunciation of the name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was suggested that the name is more likely a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;portmanteau&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A] portmanteau word is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words, or their phones (sounds), and their meanings are combined into a new word... A portmanteau word fuses both the sounds and the meanings of its components, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By circumstance, a related discussion emerged revealing a tendency at least later Jewish culture, to combine words to form a shorter name in discourse:&#xA;Ramban--Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman&#xA;Rambam--Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was explained to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those names are just acronyms, rather than a portmanteau. R'abbi&#xA;  M'oshe b'en N'achman, but then with vowels assigned [by]&#xA;  convention, based on usual yet rules of phonology. One must pronounce&#xA;  these names in speech, and a patach sound is a simple choice. If a yud&#xA;  appeared in an acronym, it would likely become a chirik. If an aleph&#xA;  at the end of a word, it would be a kametz. And then these became&#xA;  regularized. - josh waxman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder, If based on usual rules of phonology, could the same have occurred with the name of God?       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We would need to know what vowels in Divine name to explain precisely&#xA;  what got mushed where...  One is an acronym. The other is explaining&#xA;  how the mush happened according to this particular explanation. The&#xA;  idea is that Hebrew has a nonconcatenative morphology, where the vowel&#xA;  patterns dictate the tense. So the mushing would be taking some vowels&#xA;  from each. But maybe could say that applied to the consonants without&#xA;  regard for that. I don't think that is the theory though, rather that&#xA;  vowels are part of the mushing. – josh waxman &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I further inquired:      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Rambam's name was originally four words: Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, and the vowels of those words morphed into Rambam. if God's existence was expressed originally with three words and a conjuctive, Yiheheh Hoveh, v'Haya, How would the usual rules of phonology take those vowels and use them to form one name. Only in Hebrew, from right to left.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does anyone actually talk about how such a portmanteau would be formed from the words that combine to form his name? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't know. But acronyms like Rambam were created at a very different&#xA;  period in history. – josh waxman &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another member suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The resultant name might have been formed in a way which looks like&#xA;  an acronym but because its goal would be to import elements of meaning&#xA;  from the constituent words, it would be a portmanteau. Vowel&#xA;  assignation (if it operated like an English portmanteau) would be&#xA;  imported with the letters to remind us, aurally, of the source word&#xA;  (but I don't know how Hebrew language portmanteaus work and that&#xA;  question is out of scope). If the letters are simply acronymic then&#xA;  the vowels follow the rules of vowels in the new construct. – Danno 6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I personally think that the 4 letters are a unique verb form so they&#xA;  share letters with other forms of the verb but are distinct in the&#xA;  final structure. – Danno &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That pressed the conversation outside of the Mi Yodeya scope.  Now that I have confirmed that it is a commonly held understanding in Jewish tradition that the name was a combination of  Yihiyeh יהיה, Hoveh הווה, haya היה &#xA;I am wondering if the Hebrew Linguists might have some light to shed on How these words were combined to form יהוה that has come to represent His name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1774" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:05.260" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T01:47:04.927" Title="How a portmanteau of God's name would be formed" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-05T23:58:35.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-17T20:55:33.933" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &lt;code&gt;absolutely new single word&lt;/code&gt; I mean a word that didn't exist in the language and was made up using the correct phonology of the language (I am using the qualifier &quot;correct&quot; because I am assuming that in today's world every language has an idea of what sounds are native and what aren't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;code&gt;around pre existing words&lt;/code&gt; I mean coining words via contraction, compounding, portmanteau etc where words could be native or loanwords. A word like &quot;computer&quot; also belongs to this category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that getting a loanword doesn't belong to either category and I am not interested in that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure many words in many languages that appear single and absolutely new could be shown to be compounds of some kind that morphed into the form at hand. However, some words were indeed absolutely new, and they had to have been. In English, a modern absolutely new word that comes to mind instantly is &quot;grok&quot; (I am not sure if this belongs to the second category, in which case kindly ignore this example) though this is mostly slang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, do languages still coin absolutely new single words? If yes, are such words typically slang, or do some of them get added into formal register?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Are there proper linguistic terminology that could replace the ones that I made up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was originally looking for absolutely new single words that weren't slang, but I've lowered my expectation and have removed that restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To stress, lest people mistake, I am not focusing on English language - I used English just to give some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastEditorUserId="13546" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T07:02:34.530" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T09:44:03.560" Title="Do languages still invent absolutely new single words, or is coining done around pre existing words?" Tags="&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19141" CreationDate="2016-07-18T01:47:04.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no reason to think that יהוה is an acronym (or a portmanteau, though that part of the question isn't clear to me), given that (1) his name presumably predates the Semitic alphabet, (2) it certainly predates by millennia the widespread use of acronyms in Jewish tradition, and (3) the supposed components of the acronym don't make sense in terms of Biblical Hebrew grammar, which &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblicalhebrew.org/hebrew-tenses.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;did not have a threefold present/past/future tense distinction&lt;/a&gt; like Modern Hebrew does, but only distinguished &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;verbal aspect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T01:47:04.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19138" CreationDate="2016-07-18T01:55:30.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arguments that are neither subject nor object nor adjunct are obliques. For example, indirect objects and causees are obliques. They are usually indexed by θ roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T12:22:42.887" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T12:22:42.887" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-18T06:23:09.370" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the meaning of words is determined by those who use them, but is there a specific number of people who have to agree on the definition of a word in order for it to appear in the dictionary?  I ask because I'm having an online debate about the difference between atheism and agnosticism with several other people and I'm trying to explain to some of them that it's important that people have the same understanding of what those terms mean before engaging in a debate.  When I pointed out to one guy that he didn't get to decide what all the words in the English language mean, I was accused of an ad hominem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13664" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T16:11:18.533" Title="How are the meanings of words determined?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19161" CreationDate="2016-07-18T13:51:08.923" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about empty category PRO. I'd like to know if PRO is always bearing the same case as its controller, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any lingusitics laws that clames such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Thanks for all answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5490" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T13:10:30.037" Title="Is case of PRO always the same as its controller?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19176" CreationDate="2016-07-18T14:07:02.913" Score="0" ViewCount="4802" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a list of expressions, some of which are a single word and some of which multi-word expressions. How do you call such a collection? actually mathematically speaking I mean the case of a set, not a list with possibly repeating expressions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you call it a dictionary? I assume not.&#xA;A lexicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="2547" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T05:42:25.123" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T05:42:25.123" Title="What is the proper term for a set of words and expressions?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-07-23T01:03:19.950" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19146" CreationDate="2016-07-18T14:12:35.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, the meanings of the words are determined (by a lexicographer) by examining a corpus of text (usually some mixture of news, novels, and non-fictional texts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;strong&gt;humanities&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;some fields of science&lt;/strong&gt; things are different: There is often a specific meaning of a certain word assigned to it by a single author (and other others assign a different meaning to the same word), and one has to cross-check that one uses the word in the same meaning as the author one refers to uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T14:12:35.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19127" CreationDate="2016-07-18T14:18:38.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;German acquired the /eɪ/ diphthong from English, e.g., in the word &quot;Spray&quot; that is pronounced /ʃpreɪ/ (note the initial /ʃp/—it is not just a foreign word in its original pronunciation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T14:18:38.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-18T16:01:56.270" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very new to NLP and I'm sure this question is a rookie one. In NLP for English language, how do we tell if a word is commonly used, from one that is not commonly used? What is the simplest measure? e.g., in a NLP application for children's bedtime story the need is to avoid uncommon words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks. BTW, this is my first question in this forum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13671" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T16:01:56.270" Title="The usage frequency of individual English words" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19146" CreationDate="2016-07-18T16:11:18.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary source of dictionary definitions is authoritative dictionary definitions. The first cut would be between (online) lexical-redistribution systems which just take definitions from dictionaries and put them online, leaving information content unchanged. I ignore those. There are dictionaries that do some work on definitions; of these, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary have a substantial research underpinning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general strategy is to not reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, so that definitions tend to be very similar across editions. There does not appear to be any automatic rule regarding what kind of attestation is sufficient vs. insufficient to warrant a change – furthermore, the driving goals of dictionaries are not constant (OED and Webster's both aspire to being descriptive rather than prescriptive, which leads to a volley of denunciations when an evil new word is added, such as &quot;ain't&quot;). The tendency is to base modifications in meaning to those motivated by &quot;upper-echelon&quot; sources. There is no attempt to sample usage by the masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading definitions in the OED (full version) is particularly informative, since they are quite happy to list all of the senses of a word and gives ample historical attestations, for which reason OED is my go-to authoritative dictionary. Almost no dictionary, though, gives really current definitions. The exception is Urbandictionary, but the problem there is that you get whatever (mis)understanding of a word a user feels like submitting, and I think there is a certain amount of vandalism (esp. lexicalized phrases that refer to shocking or repulsive situations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will not find any source that gives an exhaustive listing of all of the definitions of a word &quot;out there&quot;, because there are too many hundreds of millions of people to survey. The approach that good dictionaries take is to focus on respectable sources, and in that sense they do not reflect contemporary usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T16:11:18.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-18T18:04:50.427" Score="1" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm measuring the vowels in a whole boatload of recordings of the same item (e.g. 100 recordings of different people saying &quot;my dog&quot;) in Praat. I am not very experienced in Praat, but figured out how to use this &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/scripts/vowel_capture_aug09.praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;vowel extraction script&lt;/a&gt; by Tyler Kendall. This script requires me to label the vowel in a Textgrid before measuring and I am now trying to be a bit more efficient. What I would like to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for each batch, create one Textgrid / text file with the relevant vowel transcription (e.g. &lt;em&gt;&quot;o&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then read this Textgrid into Praat as my Textgrid with every single wav file of &quot;dog&quot; I open&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and only adjust the size of the interval containing &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; according to its place in the actual recording (ie. drag it over the right interval, hit &lt;em&gt;Enter&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;save the Textgrid with the same name as the sound file or at least reset it to its original state (see below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So 1-3 work well one time: For the first file, I can just adapt the length of the interval. However, for the next file, the interval from the first recording is now in the Textgrid file and whatever I do is just added to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, what I write in 4.: Is there an easy way (faster than &lt;em&gt;Save as&lt;/em&gt;) to save the Text-grid file, or to revert it to its initial state after measuring, or what would be the best approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working in Praat 5.3 on a Mac OS X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13485" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T18:04:50.427" Title="Matching Textgrid transcript to sound in Praat" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-18T22:20:21.367" Score="2" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it accurate to make this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogy of the difference between phonetics and phonology can be made with music.  Phonetics would be the study of the vocals and sounds made by instruments whereas phonology would be the study of the abstract concepts that led to the music, like reading sheet music or learning musical patterns.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13673" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T22:20:21.367" Title="An analogy to understand phonetics and phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2016-07-19T00:47:18.797" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ancient Germanic peoples and perhaps their predecessors measured just about everything in terms of tides.  According to wikipedia (I know that is a less than ideal source) they used eight tides to measure day and night - not sure if this is at all helpful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_(time)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_(time)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13673" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T00:47:18.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19147" CreationDate="2016-07-19T13:10:30.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My dissertation of the loss of infinitival complementation in Greek deals with this issue; in Greek syntax there is a process called case attraction. Case attraction also occurs in Icelandic, Hindi, Korean... so I mention these in the discussion. I examined Government-Binding (obviously for PRO) as well as Lexical-Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, looking at how well they could explain the synchronic variability and the diachronic patterns related to the variations. So I agree with Professor Lawler's comments that the theory really makes a difference here; in my dissertation, all of the theories had to explain how PRO became pro in Greek.&#xA;Carole Chaski &#xA;Syntactic Theories and Models of Syntactic Change: A Study of Greek Infinitival Complementation.&#xA;Brown University PhD '87&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13676" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T13:10:30.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19163" CreationDate="2016-07-19T14:30:15.483" Score="0" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any rules regarding the pronunciation of &quot;se&quot; or &quot;s&quot; in the ending&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[long vowel] + &quot;se&quot; or &quot;s&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/z/: tease, browse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/s/: lease, house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English pronunciation pod in the reference just lists some exceptional words which end with &quot;se&quot; and the &quot;se&quot; pronounced as /z/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.englishpronunciationpod.com/podcast_44.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.englishpronunciationpod.com/podcast_44.html&lt;/a&gt;, Oxford dictionary, and Cambridge dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13678" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-23T11:45:30.733" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T11:45:30.733" Title="/s/ or /z/ in ending of [long vowel] + &quot;se&quot; or &quot;s&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-07-23T01:02:31.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19162" CreationDate="2016-07-19T18:04:48.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, consonants at the end of a word remained voiceless, while those between vowels became voiced. Thus the singular noun “house” comes from Old English hus, the verb “to house” from OE husian. The other examples mentioned by Colin Fine are of the same nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T18:04:48.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-19T18:14:34.183" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can NLP tell the word &quot;stool&quot; is closely related to the word &quot;dirty?&quot; When the word relationship is based on a corpus, most likely the word &quot;stool&quot; is related to some medical terms such as &quot;bloody&quot; &quot;pale&quot; &quot;solid,&quot; etc. But the defining character should be &quot;dirty&quot; in people's mind. I wonder how NLP handles that? i.e., given the word &quot;stool,&quot; return a high score of relatedness to the word &quot;dirty.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13671" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T09:27:34.460" Title="word relatedness, defining character of a word" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-19T18:42:04.087" Score="3" ViewCount="1840" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew religious texts there are several different ways to refer to God (capital G). Some of these words, such as Elohim or Adonai are plural forms although it is clear that Judaism is monotheistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do some languages associated with monotheistic religions use a plural form? Do such languages use a plural form to refer to a god (lower case)? Do these words even have a singular form? &#xA;Is this for the same reason in some languages second person pronouns are used for formal address and first person for familiar? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10387" LastEditorUserId="10387" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T18:02:00.733" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T18:02:00.733" Title="Why is the word &quot;God&quot; plural in some languages?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19165" CreationDate="2016-07-19T20:59:18.127" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of confusion here. Hebrew Elohim is morphologically plural but syntactically singular: it governs a verb in the 3rd person singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adonai is likewise syntactically singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dios is from Latin deus. It is singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Some languages&quot; boils down to at most one language (Hebrew).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-19T21:34:27.703" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T21:34:27.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T03:25:40.167" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a non-native English speaker at a California university absolutely fascinated by the variety of English accents I encounter in my day-to-day life. I have a co-worker with a Singaporean accent, for example, and hearing it in both her Chinese and English is just really cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have some formal linguistics training and can hypothesize certain phonological rules governing my peers' accents, I was wondering if there exists any kind of encyclopedia or authoritative resource regarding the formal elements of the accents of non-native English speakers, or regional English accents. I'd like to have a more structured understanding of the accents around me, so that I might, for example, more precisely think about and describe my Mandarin speaking coworker's &quot;abrupt&quot; English, or the pitch structure in the sentences of my Vietnamese coworker, and be able to reproduce these accents myself (as an exercise, and to blend into certain communities when appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see plenty of anecdotal examples in introductory phonology texts, e.g., metathesis in AAVE, glottal stops in the L2 English of native Vietnamese speakers, etc., but is there a resource that compiles this information, such that I could search a particular language and it would provide phonological information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13681" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T09:47:56.513" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T11:04:24.067" Title="Best phonetic/ phonology resource for learning accents?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T03:55:42.570" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;how the word &quot;car&quot; is related with the word &quot;driver?&quot; I was looking through the list of relationship terms like hyponym, hypernym, part-of, consist-of. But this is a relationship that one is operating on the other. I figured that there may exist a precise technical term for such relationship. And more importantly, by using NLP software, how can I find a list of words such relationship. e.g., given the word &quot;car,&quot; how can I use the NLP to get a list words like &quot;driver&quot; &quot;gas&quot; &quot;parking lot&quot; &quot;traffic&quot; &quot;speeding&quot; &quot;crash&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance. I'm new to NLP so my question sounds silly. Will work hard on that :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13671" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:30:11.283" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:30:11.283" Title="how the word &quot;car&quot; is related with the word &quot;driver&quot;" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T08:19:24.283" Score="3" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the most languages have either complicated morphology or very strict word order. Are there languages with simple morphology and free word order (for instance, indicating relationships of words mostly with prepositions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T10:08:57.890" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T14:04:45.350" Title="Are there languages with simple morphology and free word order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19170" CreationDate="2016-07-20T09:26:27.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinook Jargon is such a language. It is a pidgin with elements from English, French, Athabaskan and other Native American languages. But the morphology is isolating, like Chinese. The word order may be SOV with prepositions, just like English, or it may be head final like other languages, depending on speaker's preference and background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T09:26:27.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-20T09:35:53.497" Score="4" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the complete root etymology of the Latin word &quot;adventus?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13684" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T11:22:00.107" Title="What is the etymology of &quot;adventus?&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-08-06T00:01:20.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19172" CreationDate="2016-07-20T09:44:53.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It comes is from PIE forms &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;to&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ğemtus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &quot;act of coming&quot; (root ğem-, it is also the source for English word &quot;come&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T11:22:00.107" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T11:22:00.107" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19168" CreationDate="2016-07-20T09:55:33.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ice-corpora.net/ice/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ICE corpora&lt;/a&gt; that contain both spoken and written regional variants of English. Many of them are freely usable for noncommercial academic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T09:55:33.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19172" CreationDate="2016-07-20T10:29:02.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is from the preverb ad and the stem of the verb venio, namely ven-, Indo-European *gʷm-. Actually, adventus is two different words: the perfect passive participle adventus (genitive adventi), from *gʷm-to-, like Sanskrit gata-, and the noun adventus (genitive adventūs), from *gʷem-tu-, like Skt gantu-. The two forms coalesce in Latin in the nominative singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T11:12:13.357" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T11:12:13.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19148" CreationDate="2016-07-20T10:36:29.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic unit of meaning in a language, whether a single word or a multi-word expression with some fixed meaning, is &lt;em&gt;lexeme&lt;/em&gt;. A language's stock of &lt;em&gt;lexemes&lt;/em&gt; is, indeed, its &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme?wprov=sfsi1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on &lt;em&gt;lexemes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;lexeme&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;unit of lexical meaning that exists regardless of&lt;/strong&gt; the number of inflectional endings it may have or &lt;strong&gt;the number of words it may contain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; consists of &lt;em&gt;lexemes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And following that link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon?wprov=sfsi1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;corresponding article on lexicons&lt;/a&gt;, we learn that not only does a lexicon &quot;consist of&quot; lexemes but stronger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, a &lt;em&gt;lexicon&lt;/em&gt; is a language's &lt;em&gt;inventory of lexemes&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though whether a lexicon necessarily includes set phrases appears to vary with the specific linguistic discipline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: &lt;strong&gt;a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock);&lt;/strong&gt; and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in re the relationship between dictionaries (concrete representations) and lexicons (abstract inventory):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabetical order, the lexicon of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, short story, the word you're looking for, the complete set of unique (non-repeating) lexemes (words or multi-word expressions) of a language (or any other collection) is &lt;em&gt;lexicon&lt;/em&gt; (or sometimes &lt;em&gt;wordstock&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5609" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T10:36:29.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19170" CreationDate="2016-07-20T13:06:58.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are. Head-marking languages generally allow for free word order in case the language is caseless. Macedonian pops to mind, a language without cases on nouns but with free word order. Grammatical relations are indicated by clitics attached to the verb. Likewise, Northwest Caucasian languages have free word order and little morphology. In Circassian, only specific NPs are marked for case; Abkhaz lacks cases altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T13:06:58.307" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19181" CreationDate="2016-07-21T17:45:41.173" Score="-1" ViewCount="24585" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many writing systems make a distinction between &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; phonemes represented by the same grapheme or an accented version thereof. What writing systems make this distinction and what are the consonants so distinguished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastEditorUserId="13348" LastEditDate="2016-07-22T14:37:37.950" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T14:37:37.950" Title="What are &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; consonants?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19180" CreationDate="2016-07-21T18:27:25.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably the most widely-used non-technical non-literal terms employed to refer to a technical concept. As a general term it most often refers to palatalized consonants in Slavic (soft) versus not-palatalized (hard). This underlies English usage where &quot;soft&quot; &lt;em&gt;c,g&lt;/em&gt; refer to sibilant versions (cent, gentleman) as opposed to velar stop versions (car, gut). It is also used to refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dutchgrammar.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voicing&lt;/a&gt; in Dutch (hard is unvoiced), oral obstruent vs. nasal in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Tamil_Language/Letters#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tamil&lt;/a&gt; but with a third category for oral sonorants. It has been used to refer to emphatic (pharyngealized) consonants in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arabic/Arabic_sounds#Letters_that_come_in_hard_and_soft_varieties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;. The adjective is applied to vowels (hard is back) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/pronunciation/vowels-hs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in Spanish&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.transparent.com/swedish/swedish-pronunciation-hard-and-soft-vowels/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Swedish&lt;/a&gt;; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dinka&lt;/a&gt;, it refers to creaky phonation (also termed &quot;harsh&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-07-22T04:29:59.167" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T04:29:59.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19183" CreationDate="2016-07-22T04:08:43.203" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically I mean, for activities one consistently performs, is there a special name or category for those verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&#xA;He &lt;strong&gt;runs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I &lt;strong&gt;play&lt;/strong&gt; table tennis &#xA;She &lt;strong&gt;surfs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;They &lt;strong&gt;study&lt;/strong&gt; linguistics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how each of these words describe something one often does, but not necessary what they're currently doing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13605" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T04:35:57.963" Title="Is there a name for verbs that describe regular activities?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19182" CreationDate="2016-07-22T04:35:57.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a property of the verb, in the sense &quot;verb root&quot;, it's a property of the form (&quot;tense&quot;). You can construct huge numbers of parallel forms &quot;I verb X&quot; / &quot;I am verbing X&quot; with this same property -- insert sing, eat, carry, hammer, etc. Aiming for terminology that is consistent across languages, &quot;I eat/sell/make cheese&quot; exemplifies the habitual, and &quot;I am eating/selling/making cheese&quot; exemplifies the present progressive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T04:35:57.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T05:22:17.057" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a researcher in Computational Linguistics. Recently, my research interests led me towards the analysis derivative nouns, specifically nouns derived from other nouns. For example, &lt;code&gt;India to Indian, Grammar to grammarian&lt;/code&gt; but not &lt;code&gt;drive to driver&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got to read literature that suggests the relationship between affixes and semantic senses that leads to derivation of derivative nouns. A sense can have multiple affixes (American, Delhite etc.) . Also an affix can cater to multiple senses (Grammarian, Orwelian, Australian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in finding ways where I can find pair of words which follow such relations and filter them from the &lt;code&gt;False cognate&lt;/code&gt;. But in order to do this I would require &lt;strong&gt;resources that tells me possible pairs of those words and if possible the list of affixes that can be used&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I can be pointed to any digital resource regarding the word etymology of derivative nouns&lt;/strong&gt; then I can formulate the problem. Kindly pardon me, If I am not following the community guidelines as I am not familiar with the community as such. I am looking for resources in English , French or German.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13696" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-22T11:12:06.610" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T11:12:06.610" Title="collection of derivative nouns" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19186" CreationDate="2016-07-22T07:34:13.987" Score="4" ViewCount="1174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have noticed that some languages have a sound which is somewhere between the &quot;traditional&quot; &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;. An example of this is the name &quot;Rober&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;o&quot;, pronounced by a Spanish or Italian speaking person. It doesn't sound like the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; in &quot;tower&quot;, nor does it sound like the &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; in &quot;donkey&quot;. It is somewhere between the two, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this sound have a name? What is it's name? Which languages have it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T10:22:15.757" Title="The soft Spanish &quot;t&quot; (other languages are available)" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19185" CreationDate="2016-07-22T07:48:10.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're just hearing the lack of aspiration; English and German &quot;t&quot; is generally aspirated at the start of a syllable, while Spanish and Italian generally lack aspiration on voiceless plosives (but their voiced plosives start their voicing earlier). (For a more detailed comparison of English and Spanish plosives, see &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FUCRR4c-KuMC&amp;amp;pg=PA149&amp;amp;lpg=PA149&amp;amp;dq=pronunciation%20english%20plosive%20unaspirated%20in%20spanish&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=IUZB6CPGbO&amp;amp;sig=x-Fz2ZuanCjarIflKA3lujZ7D84&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj62aOFy4bOAhVY92MKHUxRBKY4ChDoAQg4MAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=pronunciation%20english%20plosive%20unaspirated%20in%20spanish&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Sounds of Spanish&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;by José Ignacio Hualde.) These differences are related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-onset_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voice onset time&lt;/a&gt;. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, we can indicate aspiration with a superscript ʰ after the letter for a regular voiceless consonant, so the sound at the start of  English &quot;ten&quot; can be writen as [tʰ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unaspirated (also called tenuis) voiceless stops are quite common and found in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages, such as Hindi and Ancient Greek, contrast &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Phonemic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voiceless aspirated plosive phonemes&lt;/a&gt; ([pʰ], like in English &quot;pin&quot;), voiceless tenuis plosive phonemes ([p], like in English &quot;spin&quot; or Spanish &quot;pollo&quot;), and voiced plosive phonemes ([b], like in Spanish &quot;bello&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I used the example of &quot;p&quot; rather than &quot;t&quot; because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hindi&lt;/a&gt; actually has two types of &quot;t/d&quot; sound, dental and retroflex. In fact, Hindi also has one more type of phonation: the &quot;voiced aspirate&quot; or &quot;murmured&quot; plosives, represented by appending ʱ to a voiced plosive symbol.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-07-22T10:22:15.757" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T10:22:15.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T11:36:06.993" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working through Heim and Kratzer textbook 'Semantics in generative grammar' and there is a question in it that keeps puzzling me (pp.220); &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they give an example of a sentence which is supposed to demonstrate that we should allow quantifiers to adjoin a verb phrase even when flexible types are available (even when we are allowed to type shift the interpretation of quantifiers) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their sample sentence is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al did not return every clock to its owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that 'every clock' should be raised to a node which is high enough to dominate the pronoun 'its' and its own trace, but it is lower than 'not' ('every clock' has the narrower scope than 'not' according to one reading), hence it should adjoin the verb phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They state in a comment that the similar argument can be made in case of sentences which involve two quantifiers in a VP, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Al gave something to everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I understand why this would be the case. The only thing that seems to matter in this other case is the order of quantifiers and if that is the case - why would not we be allowed to do raise one quantifier to the IP node and then create another IP node above it and adjoin the second quantifier to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I am sorry if this was confusing - I am really new to this website and not sure how to include phrase structure tree into my questions]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13699" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-22T11:53:54.290" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T11:53:54.290" Title="quantifiers adjoining a verb phrase?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2016-07-22T11:53:35.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No they aren't different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between written and spoken language is generally termed &lt;strong&gt;modality&lt;/strong&gt; and there are lots of studies published studying systematic differences due to modality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that modality is overlayed by other dimensions like formality, register, jargon, dialect, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T11:53:35.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T17:53:33.060" Score="7" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far back as the mid 1700s, William Ward considered the following phrase in &lt;em&gt;An Essay on Grammar applied to the English Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;the flowers which a lady sitting on the seat in a garden views with attention&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ward noted that the example clearly shows how words like &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; “remove from the place of the word of the original sentence in order to stand as close as possible to that word considered as the antecedent to the relative when the sentence is turned into a relative clause depending on such antecedent.” Whether he conceives of this as a procedure that we undertake or simply as a useful description is unclear. Either way, he speaks about movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this kind of explanation used in other grammars, perhaps as far back as Panini, or early Greek or Latin grammars? What's the earliest example of this kind of thinking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:04:46.007" Title="When did the concept of constituent movement arise?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-23T07:41:31.393" Score="2" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 305. &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put some teeth to this claim then, we might propose that external arguments in actives are in fact generated in &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; the specifier of a null active V head low in the tree &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHChu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rHChu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is a passive, nothing is generated in &lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt; the specifier of this VP. &lt;strong&gt;[End of 2.]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly which nodes do 1 and 2 above mean?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know that 1 and 2 refer to different ones, because 1 refers to 'V head' but 2 'VP'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:04:20.420" Title="Which nodes are meant by 'the specifier of a null active V' and 'this VP'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-23T08:45:05.983" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Danish orthography often has &quot;nd&quot; and &quot;ld&quot; instead of &quot;nn&quot; and &quot;ll&quot;, often in cases where it is not etymologically justified. Does anybody know more about this, like when this kind of spelling started appearing? Tak!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13706" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T08:45:05.983" Title="History of Danish &quot;nd&quot; and &quot;ld&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-23T13:06:40.680" Score="4" ViewCount="1705" Body="&lt;p&gt;English and Spanish (castellano) are the official languages in several countries. Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Costa Rica speak spanish (albeit with some differences, people from these countries can communicate with each other). United States, England, Ireland, South Africa speak English. Languages such as Korean and Finnish are not spoken in countries outside of their place of origin (at least, not by a sizable majority). Is there a terminology for languages such that aren't widely spoken outside their place of origin? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13707" LastEditorUserId="314" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T14:40:34.203" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T14:40:34.203" Title="What are languages spoken in only one country called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8422" CreationDate="2016-07-23T16:06:33.470" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;of course. compound is just [lexicalised] phrase written jointly, so, if language itself has both types of morphemes, with head-initial, and head-final position, it is going to have thess both types in compounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T16:06:33.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2016-07-23T16:33:48.347" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;i agree with Richard Nilsen's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i want to answer with my words, adding some details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i think, gender is side-effect of fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i think, indo european languages were agglutinative, and have developed into being fusional, and, so, the fusional morphemes has started to modify root morpheme, and they had to modify different root endings differently. for example, if there are words &quot;abo&quot; and &quot;aba&quot;, a morpheme &quot;i&quot; better should not make them both &quot;abi&quot;, but, for example, &quot;abe&quot; and &quot;abi&quot;. so, people have acquired an extra noun categorisation , which has no meaning, but only for technical purposes, and they decided to use that categorisation also for meaning. then, they decided to use one type of root ending as masculine, another as feminine, or another way (for example by count) but not all objects in world are divided by this categorisation, so, as side-effect, they have become &quot;non-natural genders&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T16:33:48.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2016-07-23T17:25:17.690" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;for example see what i have written about tatar language: &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/apertium/mailman/message/32515613/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://sourceforge.net/p/apertium/mailman/message/32515613/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is even hardedr in tatar language, because it is not inflectional, but agglutinative language, but even in it, they can be divided into &quot;cases&quot; and &quot;pospositions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but as i remember i tend to think that they should not be divided in tirkic languages, though i agree that there are several types of them , some are like case, some are like preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i think, most easy distinction in tatar is that there maybe several &quot;cases&quot; which behave like cases with prepositions, for example, genitive case is used with many prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in fusional inflection languages &quot;cases&quot; can be also divided because of being fusional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i have checked 11 parameters in tatar language, you can see a table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and tatar language has traditional grammar, and i very dislike it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T17:25:17.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19192" CreationDate="2016-07-23T18:50:23.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the pair of terms &lt;strong&gt;monocentric&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;pluricentric&lt;/strong&gt; describing the situation whether only one cultural or economical centre is responsible for the definition of a standardised language or &lt;em&gt;Hochsprache&lt;/em&gt;, or whether there are several centres (e.g. in the case of High German Germany (Berlin), Austria (Vienna) and Switzerland (Bern)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not necessarily matches political boundaries, A language still may be monocentric and be spoken in several countries, or one country may host more than one centre of langauge standardisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe one can borrow the term &lt;strong&gt;endemic&lt;/strong&gt; for a language only occuring in one country from biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T13:04:30.873" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T13:04:30.873" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19190" CreationDate="2016-07-24T19:28:20.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only VP specifier in the tree is the DP &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, since that one is a sister to V', of which a &quot;null active V&quot; is the head, and also the DP machtes the requirement of being an &quot;external argument in actives&quot;, because that one is the subject and therefore the external argument of the active VP.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second VP doesn't have a specifier.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first sentence refers to &quot;the specifier of a null active V&quot;, which must be &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; since the null V is the head of the VP you numbered as 1 of which the specifier is &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second sentence says &lt;em&gt;&gt;this&amp;lt; VP&lt;/em&gt;, which sounds like it refers to the same VP as the sentence before.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Therefore, I can't think of any other possibility than both 1 and 2 referring to the DP &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; as the specifier of the VP you numbered as 1, with the null V as the head.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They don't need to refer to different ones just because 1 says it's the specifier of the &lt;em&gt;V HEAD&lt;/em&gt; and the other of the &lt;em&gt;V PHRASE&lt;/em&gt; - specifiers always relate to phrases, so it doesn't make a difference whether you call it the speifier of the phrase (which is syntactically a bit more accurate) or the specifier of the head (which might make it clearer what exact phrase is meant, since here you can make use of the terminal node's names, like in this example where you can disambiguate between VP 1 and VP 2 by referring to either the empty head or the &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; head), but I see no possibility of this (admittedly confusing) wording being meant as referring to the - non-existing - specifier of the VP 2, and both sentences do refer to some V-related specifier, so it can only be the DP &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T19:34:35.037" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T19:34:35.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19202" CreationDate="2016-07-24T20:04:05.343" Score="2" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;In constituent analysis, we break down sentences into their main parts of speech (Det., N, Adj, V, etc.). English sentences have recursive syntactic patterns. For example, a simple sentence in English has several syntactic combinations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The students finished their homework. [NP+V+NP]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She is beautiful [Sub. Pron. + V + Adj.] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing apply to all other types of English sentences. I am looking for a comprehensive list of all the possible syntactic combinations of English sentences. Is there any reference that contains these rules? I am sure that such a resource exists somewhere because these rules were used in primitive Natural Language Processing applications under the name of symbolic approach or rule-based approach (as opposed to statistical approach). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13712" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-24T20:42:08.073" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T05:00:39.917" Title="Is there any comprehensive list of all the possible syntactic combinations of English sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19201" CreationDate="2016-07-25T05:00:39.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Atamiri says, a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; list is likely to be impossible. You are right in observing that most work in NLP is no longer based on hand-crafted rules but on statistics obtained from large amounts of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, projects which attempt to create hand-built broad-coverage grammars still exist: see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/erg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LinGO project&lt;/a&gt; by Dan Flickinger for an example of a broad-coverage English grammar. The term &lt;em&gt;broad-coverage&lt;/em&gt; means that the grammar aims to include production rules that assign an analysis to as much English text as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://moin.delph-in.net/ErgRules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of production rules&lt;/a&gt; for this particular grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is to extract production rules automatically from something like Penn Treebank. Those production rules, however, are quite sparse, since the Penn Treebank doesn't conform strictly to X-bar principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T05:00:39.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-25T10:51:56.220" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an English sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry was displeased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– &lt;em&gt;displeased&lt;/em&gt; is a state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry was benevolent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– &lt;em&gt;benevolent&lt;/em&gt; is a trait&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given an adjective, how can I distinguish between a trait and a state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more precise and unambiguous the method, the better - as I want to apply this in a computer program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12569" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T11:27:17.697" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T11:27:17.697" Title="How do I distinguish between traits and states using NLP?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-25T23:03:47.063" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please advise me if there are better research methods; I only searched for Related Articles on Google Scholar to the only 2 recent papers that I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oe=utf-8&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;um=1&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;cites=18424126486931447452&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cited Articles&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00437956.2005.11432551&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;French gender assignment revisited&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2005) by Don Nelson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=40&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=2005&amp;amp;sciodt=0,5&amp;amp;cites=3193462087085624954&amp;amp;scipsc=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Cited Articles&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00437956.2005.11432551&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2005) by Roy Lyster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Lyster analysed only 'A corpus&#xA;of 9,961&#xA;nouns  appearing  in&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Le  Robert  Junior  Illustré&lt;/em&gt;', I hope that analysing a broader corpus (if anyone has done one) would ameliorate the results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T23:07:17.257" LastActivityDate="2016-07-25T23:07:17.257" Title="As of July 2016, is there any new improved research on predicting French grammatical gender?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19208" CreationDate="2016-07-26T02:39:43.213" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be best to illustrate by examples instead of by words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an + other → another → a + nother → a whole nother&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;myn + Edward → my Ned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;les enfants /le.zɑ̃.fɑ̃/ (French) → les *zenfants → zenfant (Mauritian Creole)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T02:45:54.190" Title="Name of phenomenon of wrong segmentation" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19207" CreationDate="2016-07-26T02:45:54.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be called ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rebracketing&lt;/a&gt;’; the linked page also suggests &quot;juncture loss, junctural metanalysis, false splitting, false separation, faulty separation, misdivision, or refactorization.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is closely related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19019/do-migrating-letters-happen-often-in-languages&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, in case it’s useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T02:45:54.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15644" CreationDate="2016-07-26T05:27:01.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within the system you are describing, the only way to ensure that AgrSP and TP are invariably adjacent is by defining Agr as the kind of head that takes TP as its complement. This is plausible, but to answer your question, I can't see what exactly would go wrong if Agr selected some MysteryP that in turn selected TP. As per the theory of movement your question presupposes, subject raising from SpecTP to SpecAgrSP ought to be possible so long as no other DP needing NOM intervenes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[side note 1: this tree is kind of old-fashioned. These days, you'll have trouble finding people seriously accepting that English has an AgrSP separate from TP ---see, e.g., Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998, &quot;Two heads aren't always better than one&quot;, Syntax 1:37-73]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[side note 2: independently of the narrow issue of your question, adverbs are known to have placement restrictions that don't follow from the kind of X-bar theory you are assuming! Check out Bobaljik 1999, &quot;Adverbs: the hierarchy paradox&quot;, GLOT International 4:27-28.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T05:27:01.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T06:25:12.557" Score="-1" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why linguistically the word of the city of Puyallup is difficult for non Seattleites to pronounce? It only contains sounds found in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10272" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T18:04:49.743" Title="Why is the word &quot;Puyallup&quot; difficult for most English speakers to pronounce?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:39:35.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19211" CreationDate="2016-07-26T11:42:47.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean hard to pronounce &lt;em&gt;after hearing how it's pronounced&lt;/em&gt; or after just seeing it written?  If the latter, I must say as a Brit who's never seen that name before, I wonder how to break the word up. Do I say the 'uy' as in Spanish 'muy' or as in English 'buy', for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5650" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T11:42:47.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19220" CreationDate="2016-07-26T13:50:06.060" Score="13" ViewCount="2691" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the probably most quoted sentence in a polysynthetic langauge (from Yupik):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tuntu-    ssur- qatar- ni-  ksaite- ngqiggte- uq  &#xA;reindeer- hunt- FUT-   say- NEG-    again-    3SG.IND  &#xA;&quot;He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you distinguish that from an, for example, isolating language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tuntu ssur qatar ni ksaite ngqiggte uq&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to phrase this question is to ask &quot;when is a word a word or multiple words&quot;? In German, it is an &quot;Automotor&quot; while in English there are two words for the same thing &quot;car engine&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not a linguist, I am just a 16 year old guy that has interesting questions, please bear with me if this is a naive question in any way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13719" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T05:10:30.853" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T14:57:59.507" Title="How to distinguish a polysynthetic language from other languages? When is something a word?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;&lt;polysynthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T13:58:31.000" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computational linguist and work on event extraction. One of the subtasks is very similar to finding predicate-argument relations, e.g. the agent and patient of a predicate. I want to build a system that heavily relies on syntactic dependencies for this subtask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some papers I read conclude that predicate-argument relations cannot be reliable accessed via syntax because, e.g., the agent is not always the subject and the patient not always the object. Unfortunately, these papers only scrape the surface of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are syntactic dependencies the best way to look for predicate-argument relations? Are there any books or papers dedicate to the interaction of predicate-argument relations and syntax, maybe investigating interactions of verb semantics and syntax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13720" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T15:52:56.803" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T15:52:56.803" Title="Semantic predicate-argument relations reflected in syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19214" CreationDate="2016-07-26T15:01:20.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In affixal polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut, Yupik and Greenlandic the criterion is pretty simple, a word is composed of exactly one lexical stem and a number of bound morphemes. Cross-linguistically, words have one (primary) stress which helps reveal boundaries between them - with the exception of clitics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In compositional polysynthetic languages an otherwise freely occurring stem is considered incorporated if it can't be moved out of its position within a compound word. Typically, nonspecific objects tend to be incorporated whilst specific objects tend to be adjuncts, though on this point languages differ quite a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastEditorUserId="2451" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T17:02:45.390" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T17:02:45.390" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19215" CreationDate="2016-07-26T15:28:54.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To achieve this you need dependencies at deep structure (stripped of all the function words) and lexical mapping. You need a good parser and a valency lexicon with mapping to semantic/θ roles, which is sufficient to produce argument structures and semantic representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T15:28:54.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19211" CreationDate="2016-07-26T15:49:11.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is locally pronounced as [pjʊˈæləp]. I don't actually know how it's mispronounced: I use [ˈpjʊwjəlʊwp] as a joking mispronunciation. Wiki says that an alternative pronunciation is [pjʊˈɔləp], which I could imagine but I've never heard. There is a certain element of randomness to orthographic vowel pronunciation, especially with native names which are for 99.99% of pastəds meaningless string of letters. Unless you're native, you stand a good chance of mispronouncing Yakima (should be [ˈjækəˌmɑ]). The sequence &amp;#x3c;all&gt; is usually pronounced [ɔl], so it is predictable that it would be so pronounced by people who don't know better – the standard pronunication with [æ] is what's hard to explain (I suspect that spelling with &amp;#x3c;ll&gt; rather than &amp;#x3c;l&gt; is responsible). As Sumelic notes, orthographic &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; is usually [æl] when morpheme-medial (&lt;em&gt;wallow&lt;/em&gt; being a minority pattern), and a spelling &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; would encourage the worse pronunciation [ɛ] (as in &quot;Chehalis&quot; [ʃəhɛjləs]). [ɔl] is still possible, if you ignore the morpheme-position influence on how &amp;#x3c;all&gt; is pronounced.&#xA;Interestingly, [ɔ] &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; closer to the vowel of Spuy&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ləpabš Lushootseed. (Wiki is just wrong about the etymology: it means &quot;people of the bend&quot;, referring to the bends in the river).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The loss of &amp;#x3c;y&gt; in the middle doesn't correspond to any general rule, so when people see a consonant in the spelling, they want to pronounce it. The dissimilative loss of [j] is one of those rare cases where difficulty of prounciation actually plays a rule on language change. It is articulatorily challenging to form, deform, and re-form [j] within less that 100 msc so the palatal gesture for the second [j] got attenuated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initial stress is possible, just not right for this word. There is is actual variation in pronouncing Swinomish (1st or second syllable), and you find second-syllable stress in non-native pronunciations of Yakima.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T18:04:49.743" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T18:04:49.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T16:23:21.850" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me give the caveat that I have never taken a linguistics class, nor read a linguistics book. I am coming from a degree in math. Please give your answers at a level I can understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's this thought experiment I've come up with which I am sure has been considered before. I am looking for a name or references to this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you have a dictionary for a language that you know nothing about. And suppose you find a sentence in that language that you want to understand, like, &quot;Roses are red.&quot; You might look up in the dictionary &quot;roses&quot; and then get a string of words you don't understand. For instance, you might get something like, &quot;Rose: n a prickly bush or shrub...&quot; and then feel the need to look up &quot;prickly&quot; to understand prickly. But then you won't understand that definition and then need to look up even more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can't go on forever, and at some point, you'll end up at some word you've looked up before. That is, you'll reach some sort of circular definition of a word. Explicitly, you can find this on dictionary.com with the definition for the word &quot;higher&quot;, which refers to the word &quot;upward&quot;, and &quot;upward&quot;, which refers to the word &quot;higher&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows that basically, at some point you need someone to point to a rose bush and say, &quot;roses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, once you know a set of words, you can define other words without needing to point to the object and sound out the word. So for instance, if you understand what flowers and bushes and the color red are, you can explain that roses are red flowers that grow on bushes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that the more quickly or easily, which I don't have precisely defined, the word self-referentially is defined by itself within a dictionary, the more basic or fundamental the word, and the less abstract it is. So for instance, because we have the short cycle higher -&gt; upward -&gt; higher, it suggests that higher and upward are very basic and fundamental words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I would expect a word like equanimity, as a more abstract word, not to have any such tight circular definitions loops. So my feeling is that there is some way to measure the abstractness of a word with this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this idea? Can anyone give me references?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13721" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T17:05:34.527" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T10:25:48.943" Title="Is there a name for this idea relating to word abstractness/complexity based on dictionary definition self-reference?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19214" CreationDate="2016-07-26T16:48:23.013" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The important feature is that in a polysynthetic language, a single word may contain more than one &lt;strong&gt;lexical root&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that e.g., to choose the most frequent example, a complex verb may not only contain the verbal root, but also an incorporated noun, which (as opposed to compounding) remains &lt;strong&gt;referentially autonomous&lt;/strong&gt; (In compounds, transparency often gets lost, like &lt;em&gt;straw&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;strawberry&lt;/em&gt;, while incorporated items keep their referential meaning more clearly.) and &lt;strong&gt;satisfies the verb's argument positions&lt;/strong&gt; (When the verb requires an object, it will be satisfied by the noun that was incorporated so there are not any more words in the sentence that the verb would take to fill out one of its argument positions.).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The incorporated items are contained in the word complex in such a way that they may be surrounded by further morphemes (like prefixes, tense affixes or person inflection in verbs) which are an inherent part of the verb as well, so you can no longer regard the incorporated parts as separate words. They are actually an inherent part of the verb complex itself and cannot simply be detached without changing the word's meaning.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Velupillai (2012:109) illustrates the difference by the following example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vH9gUl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vH9gUl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yxPFKl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yxPFKl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The crucial difference between synthetic and polysynthetic words is&#xA;  that the latter involve more than one lexeme. While the Turkish&#xA;  example in (49) is very long and involves a great deal of segments,&#xA;  there is only one lexeme, &lt;em&gt;tan&lt;/em&gt; ‘know’. Polysynthetic words, however,&#xA;  may contain more than one lexeme: [...] The Alutor word contains three&#xA;  different lexemes, &lt;em&gt;akka&lt;/em&gt; ‘son’, &lt;em&gt;nalgə&lt;/em&gt; ‘skin’ and &lt;em&gt;kuww&lt;/em&gt; ‘dry’.&quot;&#xA;  Therefore, while both words are equally long, &quot;the Turkish word is&#xA;  synthetic while the Alutor word is polysynthetic.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As for the question of what a word is, this is a bit more difficult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, a &lt;strong&gt;word&lt;/strong&gt; is a lexical unit that can stand on its own, so &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt; is a word, &lt;em&gt;engine&lt;/em&gt; is a word, &lt;em&gt;blue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;scream&lt;/em&gt; are too, but &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ation&lt;/em&gt; are not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This mostly boils down to the distinction between &lt;strong&gt;free and bound morphemes&lt;/strong&gt;, with some borderline cases like confixes (&lt;em&gt;fanat-&lt;/em&gt;) or so-called cranberry morphemes (&lt;em&gt;cran-berry&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now since both &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;engine&lt;/em&gt; can stand alone, the question is whether they are actually one or two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not always as easy, but there are certain properties of words which help to determine a word complexes status (partially relying on Velupillai (2012:117):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phonology: a word is pronounced as one &lt;strong&gt;phonological unit&lt;/strong&gt;; this having&#xA;consequences on, e.g., &lt;strong&gt;stress&lt;/strong&gt;, as mentioned by @Atamari: There is&#xA;a difference between &lt;em&gt;mEtalworker&lt;/em&gt; (a person who works with metal)&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;metal wOrker&lt;/em&gt; (a worker made of metal, e.g. a robot) --&gt; when&#xA;stress is changed, a new word was formed; and you would assume the&#xA;former to be one word and the latter two, because one could regard&#xA;&lt;em&gt;metalworker&lt;/em&gt; as an independent lexeme with a rather fixed meaning and possibly an own lexicon entry, while &lt;em&gt;metal&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;metal worker&lt;/em&gt; is&#xA;rather a modification that describes further properties of &lt;em&gt;worker&lt;/em&gt;, but is not an inherent part of its meaning.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inflection: Compound words are typically &lt;strong&gt;inflected as one&lt;/strong&gt; (by their head), rather then the invidual morphemes being inflected individually: &lt;em&gt;footballs&lt;/em&gt; (not * &lt;em&gt;feetballs&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;car engines&lt;/em&gt; (not * &lt;em&gt;cars engines&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;coherence: Words that behave as one unit &lt;strong&gt;can not get broken up&lt;/strong&gt; by other words that, for example, modify them: &lt;em&gt;new football&lt;/em&gt; (not * &lt;em&gt;footnewball&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;broken car engine&lt;/em&gt; (not * &lt;em&gt;car broken engine&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semantics: This makes use of the assumption that a word is the smallest unit in a sentence in which &lt;strong&gt;meaning is preserved&lt;/strong&gt;; you could for example ask yourself whether a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; (= &quot;alone bringing-up&quot; mother is still a single mother when she moves in with another single mother, i.e. whether &lt;em&gt;single mother&lt;/em&gt; is one conventionalised word (usually meaning that the father is missing, not necessarily that the mother lives all alone) that preserves its meaning throughout different contexts, or whether &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; is barely a compositionally derived modification of &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; that doesn't make sense to use compositionally in a different context.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a difference between a &lt;strong&gt;morpho-syntactic word&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;phonological word&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. the single phonological word &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; (no pause in between, and in this case also morphological mering) consists of two morpho-syntactic words &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;n't&lt;/em&gt;, which have certain morphological properties and are correspondingly represented in syntactic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally would actually argue that English &lt;em&gt;car engine&lt;/em&gt; is just as much a compound as German &lt;em&gt;Automotor&lt;/em&gt; is and thus to be seen as one word, due to the stress behaviour and due to its lexical status (One might assume that &lt;em&gt;car engine&lt;/em&gt; has to some exted a conventionalised meaning and possibly even an own lexicon entry. Intuitively I'd say there is some difference in straightforward interpretability or meaning predictability when changing the word to &lt;em&gt;racing car motor&lt;/em&gt;.), where idiosyncratic spelling rules should not influence linguistic categorisation too much.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/18822/name-of-rule-for-whether-compounds-should-be-written-with-a-space-or-not/18824#18824&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for an attempt to describe when English compounds are separated by a space and when not (note that this question already presupposes that English compounds are indeed to be regarded as a word, the terminology would not make much sense otherwise, since compounding is by definition a word formation process). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. &lt;em&gt;An introduction to linguistic typology&lt;/em&gt;. John Benjamins Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T14:57:59.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19214" CreationDate="2016-07-26T16:51:31.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you recognize, you have two distinct questions, one about word status and one about polysynthesis. The &quot;one word or two&quot; question is notoriously difficult to answer, and has no general solution (so people apply ad hoc criteria in deciding for a given language). The polysynthesis question depends on distinguishing word sequences from morphologically complex single words, so obvious the word question is most important. For example, people have used word stress as a criterion, and that may work in some cases, but there are plenty of languages with no identifiable &quot;stress&quot;, or alternatively &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; stresses allowed in a word. The level of confusion on the &quot;word&quot; matter is so high that many people conclude that it is not an actually answerable question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple test is the use of spaces: if you put a space in the middle, it's two words, if not, it's one word. Linguists don't generally like relying on spelling as a means of diagnosing linguistic (grammatical) analysis – but if &quot;word&quot; isn't a technical grammatical construct, then we don't care. The upshot of a half-century of generative grammatical research is that there isn't actually any reason to posit a technical concept &quot;word&quot;. The distinction between &quot;word&quot; and &quot;morpheme&quot; is especially blurry in Minimalist theories of morphosyntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One direction that people have tried to go is to define &quot;word&quot; as being about &quot;the minimum that you can utter&quot;. For example &quot;permit&quot; is typically analysed as a prefix and a suffix, but you can't utter the component parts, you can only utter the word. Well, you can utter [pr̩] (cats do it) and [mɪt] (catchers wear them), but those are semantically unrelated – so some concepts of semantic relatedness are usually also imposed on word analysis. However, &quot;Automotor&quot; is a word and yet it is not minimal. For this any many other reasons, technical grammarians have basically abandoned the concept &quot;word&quot; as an important construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we focus on the properties of various units, which contribute something or nothing to meaning and utterance formation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T16:51:31.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19328" CreationDate="2016-07-26T18:43:46.200" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently started learning Natural Language Processing and while reading research papers I came across terms like &quot;Latent Dirichlet Allocation&quot;, &quot;Latent Semantic Analysis&quot;, &quot;Gaussian Distribution&quot;, etc. and I am unable to understand these topics from Wikipedia and other sources. So can you suggest me some good books for the same, i.e. semantic analysis in NLP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also here is some of the topics I am interested in.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xySIn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xySIn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13413" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T21:14:22.743" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:12:48.690" Title="What are some good books/MOOCs in field of computational semantic analysis?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9928" CreationDate="2016-07-26T19:38:37.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I warmly recommend &lt;strong&gt;Coppock &amp;amp; Champollion (2020)&lt;/strong&gt;. It's free, very accessibly written and essentially a formally precise version of Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer's style. It also comes with a computer program students can use to get feedback on their solutions to exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a rather concise introduction, &lt;strong&gt;Winter (2016)&lt;/strong&gt; might be worth taking a look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Heim &amp;amp; Kratzer (1998)&lt;/strong&gt; is a classic on the syntax-semantics interface, but I'm not a huge fan of it, because they use a kind of semi-formal notation without ever actually defining or even explaining such elementary concepts as lambda conversion, which I think is a bad thing to do in an introductory textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gamut (1991)&lt;/strong&gt; is pretty good, the first volume provides an introduction to logic and the second volume is about intensional logic. It's perhaps a bit more technical than other introductions but doesn't fall short on detailed explanations. If you're specifically interested in intensional logic, type theory and Montague semantics and not so much a broader coverage of semantic topics, that one could be the first place to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for Montague grammar, &lt;strong&gt;Dowty, Wall &amp;amp; Peters (1981)&lt;/strong&gt; could be said to be the standard reference. In order to make good use of it, it probably makes sense to have had some prior introduction to logic and formal semantics first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get an overview of the various topics semantics deals with, &lt;strong&gt;Kearns (2011)&lt;/strong&gt; is a good place to start; if you're new to linguistic semantics it could be worth to start with the first chapter there before diving into the formal stuff, but for the latter other books are more suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coppock, Elizabeth &amp;amp; Champollion, Lucas (2020). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://eecoppock.info/bootcamp/semantics-boot-camp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Invitation to formal semantics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Manuscript, 20 August 2020 edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dowty, David R., Wall, Robert &amp;amp; Peters, Stanley (1981). &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Montague semantics&lt;/em&gt;. Springer Science &amp;amp; Business Media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamut, LTF (1991). &lt;em&gt;Logic, language, and meaning, Volume 1: Introduction to logic&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamut, LTF (1991). &lt;em&gt;Logic, language and meaning, Volume 2: Intensional logic and logical grammar&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heim, Irene &amp;amp; Kratzer, Angelika (1998). &lt;em&gt;Semantics in generative grammar&lt;/em&gt;. Blackwell Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kearns, Kate (2011). &lt;em&gt;Semantics&lt;/em&gt;. Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winter, Yoad (2016). &lt;em&gt;Elements of formal semantics: An introduction to the mathematical theory of meaning in natural language&lt;/em&gt;. Edinburgh University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2021-01-24T11:07:28.103" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T11:07:28.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-26T23:22:02.600" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are native speakers (of any given language, say English) with average IQs at a relatively young age (say, under 10 years old) without exposure to dictionaries, encyclopedias, formal education and other kinds of education know that in the case of, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Jovian&lt;/em&gt; is an adjectival form of &lt;em&gt;Jupiter&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just one example off the top of my head - there are plenty of other similar examples when one form of a word sounds radically different from another word form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12494" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T01:16:52.927" Title="Are native speakers familiar with such things from young age?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19224" CreationDate="2016-07-27T00:46:21.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Know&quot; has two meanings: be consciously aware, and have some account of that fact in your cognitive apparatus. And then, &quot;things like that&quot; really needs another thing like that plus a third thing that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like that. I'll supply some examples for you – &quot;boil&quot; and &quot;bullion&quot; (also like), and &quot;dog&quot; / &quot;dogs&quot; (not the same kind of thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Jupiter&quot; might be known to a reasonable number of under-10 children, clearly not a majority, and all would be educated. Probably only a handful know &quot;Jovian&quot;. So virtually none of the set you're interested in know that relationship. Likewise with &quot;boil&quot; and &quot;bullion&quot;, where &quot;boil&quot; is probably known to most English speaking children between ages 4 and 10 (but not &quot;bullion&quot;). Virtually all children know &quot;dog&quot; and &quot;dogs&quot;, and connect them instantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very few children would understand the technical terms, so you can't ask if Jovian is the adjectival form of Jupiter or probably even if &quot;dogs&quot; is the plural of &quot;dog&quot;. Most people don't talk about &quot;adjectival forms&quot;, &quot;plurals&quot;, so uneducated English speaking children at age 10 probably have no idea what a plural is. Even educated ones struggle, since grammar isn't taught so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this is part of one's subconscious linguistic ability is hard to tell in the cases that you're interested in. There is a classical test, the wug test, that shows that children have in fact internalized regular plural formation. As far as I know, nobody has even attempted to do the same test with words like &quot;Jovian&quot; and &quot;sangiovese&quot; or &quot;Jupiter&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T00:46:21.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19224" CreationDate="2016-07-27T01:16:52.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at your question widely, it can be re-phrased like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are native speakers with average IQs at a relatively young age without exposure to dictionaries, encyclopedias, formal education and other kinds of education know &lt;strong&gt;exceptions to linguistic rules&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language has a certain set of rules. For example, in English morphology, the regular way to build the &lt;em&gt;plural number&lt;/em&gt; is by adding &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; to the noun: &lt;em&gt;cat → cat&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, there are numerous &lt;strong&gt;exceptions&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;mouse → &lt;strong&gt;mice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ask yourself, did you learn this word as a kid? The answer would be, &lt;strong&gt;definitely yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same would apply various &lt;em&gt;noun → adjective&lt;/em&gt; patterns, like &lt;em&gt;-'s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ian&lt;/em&gt; suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the above depends on how common the word is. If the word is not used commonly, even a highly-educated person would have problem with its morphology. Frankly, I don't know for sure how to build a possessive/adjectival form of &lt;em&gt;Jupiter&lt;/em&gt; in my native language; I've simply never used it in my life. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the word is widely used, but a certain possible form is rare, it can be a problem as well!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/137593/26446&quot;&gt;Is “fish's” correct to use when referring to something that the fish owns?&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T01:16:52.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-27T03:32:14.573" Score="6" ViewCount="926" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why were words for the four cardinal directions (east, west, north, south) in Romance languages borrowed from Old English? They could have used their own words derived from Latin because these words seem to belong to the basic vocabulary, and if anything, the Saxons wouldn't have been the dominant force over the &lt;strong&gt;French-speaking authorities (Normans/French)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastEditorUserId="9822" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T11:25:12.860" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T11:25:12.860" Title="Why were words for the four cardinal directions in Romance languages borrowed from Old English?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19287" CreationDate="2016-07-27T07:31:57.437" Score="4" ViewCount="1182" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are questions that are self consistent in the sense that they can be understood without a context. In other words, the sentence itself provide a clear information. An example of such a sentence would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation&#xA;  of more than sixty Russian sentences into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are sentences that do not make much sense without a context. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generally, this task is much more difficult than supervised learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is it easy (possible) to separate the questions of first type from the questions of the second type programmatically?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I though that use of definite article &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; (as well as words like &lt;code&gt;these&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;such&lt;/code&gt;) would be an indicator, that we have a sentence of the second type (since it use entities that have been defined earlier). However, I found examples where it does not work (the cases where the definition is in the same sentence). Is there any rule that would reliable classify any given sentence into one of the two earlier described categories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13723" LastEditorUserId="13723" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T07:45:09.953" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T14:13:05.607" Title="How to identify context independent (self-consistent) sentences?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2016-07-27T08:37:59.070" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;i think, probably position of pre/post-positions related to phrase with what they govern, was one of classification criteria when classifying some languages as indoeuropean. if so, for that, the requested language, strongly as defined in the question, cannot be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;indirect answer&quot;, &quot;flexible answering&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;maybe, indoeuropean languages are chosen as indoeuropean languages not only because of lexicon like swadesh list, but for common grammar (prefixes, cases, their positions), in that case, if they rechose the languages only by &quot;simple lexicon&quot;, who knows, maybe uralic languages should be accounted as indoeuropean languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;uralic languages are not indo-european, but have many common roots, but have agglutinative grammatic morphemes like in altaic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;uralic languages are accounted as relative language (what is proper term for it?) for indo-european, see this tree: &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalfloss.com/article/59665/feast-your-eyes-beautiful-linguistic-family-tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mentalfloss.com/article/59665/feast-your-eyes-beautiful-linguistic-family-tree&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i have copy-pasted second part of answer with small changes from my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3652/is-there-any-agglutinative-indo-european-language/19195#19195&quot;&gt;Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T07:16:15.747" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19228" CreationDate="2016-07-27T08:45:54.620" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French words for the cardinal points (nord, sud, est, ouest) are definitely borrowed from some Germanic language, presumably in connection with seafaring in the North Sea. (This answers the &quot;why&quot; part of your question).&#xA;The supposition that they were borrowed specifically from Old English (and not, for example, from the Normans) is supported by the observation that French est has an /e/ vowel, like English and Frisian, while all the other Germanic languages have /o/ or /u/. The vowel in English “east” is explained by the assumption of a contamination with suffixed words like “easter”, with Germanic umlaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a phonological point of view, nord, sud, ouest could theoretically derive from Nordic or any other Germanic language, but there is an argument for thinking that all four terms were borrowed from a common source all at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forms in other Romance languages are borrowed from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: Oxford English Dictionary articles “east” and “easter”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T09:09:12.723" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T09:09:12.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17601" CreationDate="2016-07-27T14:41:14.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading and writing is taught at German schools, the diphthongs are learned as single units. They are named like the vowel letters A E I O U Ä Ö Ü: Their pronounced sound is identical to the name for AU, EI, and EU. The variants AI, ÄU, AY, and EY are named by spelling them out: A-I, Ä-U, A-Ypsilon, and E-Ypsilon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older and now obsolete convention used names like *weiches ei&quot; (EI) vs. &quot;hartes ei&quot; (AI) and &quot;fremdes weiches ei&quot; (EY) or &quot;fremdes hartes ei&quot; (AY). Don't expect that the people in Germany now will understand the distinction &quot;hartes&quot; vs. &quot;weiches&quot; ei correctly any longer. They will think of eggs and just wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T14:41:14.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-28T10:58:25.020" Score="2" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an application to teach Quran. I need some textual/lingual analysis based on a common and general corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know about King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) Arabic corpus, yet I can't find a place to download it. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kacstac.org.sa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;original website&lt;/a&gt; seems to be down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone guide me to a general purpose Arabic Corpus that can be downloaded (free or paid)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T06:23:28.993" Title="Where to find/purchase an offline (downloadable) Arabic corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18947" CreationDate="2016-07-28T13:03:57.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accent, by definition, is a set of habits.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other words, a person can be comfortable with a certain set of language-related habits and, when they need to speak in another language, they naturally bring their existing habits to how they speak the second language. &lt;strong&gt;This is what accent actually is&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, phonetically, if one continuously exercise &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; rolling &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; and postalveolar approximant &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; (like in Hindi and English, correspondingly) or &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/v/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; (the latter is rare in Hindi), they have much greater chance of accent-less speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however, the accent is not only a phonetic phenomenon; it can also be in how the speaker constructs phrase, uses conjugations, etc. Yet another important factor is using language-specific &lt;em&gt;idiomatic expressions&lt;/em&gt; as a result of cultural exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The factor of age works just like for any other habit, allowing the person to grasp knowledge/habits faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T13:03:57.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19234" CreationDate="2016-07-28T15:04:46.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most convienient way to search for corpora is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt;, a service by the European CLARIN project. Enter &quot;Arabic corpus&quot; in the search slit and you'll get (at the moment of this answer writing) 1863 hits, among them the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Al-Hayat corpus: &lt;a href=&quot;http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=632&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=632&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank &lt;a href=&quot;http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/padt/PADT_1.0/docs/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/padt/PADT_1.0/docs/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic Learner Corpus &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2015S10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2015S10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T15:04:46.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-28T20:32:06.653" Score="6" ViewCount="926" Body="&lt;p&gt;A morpheme is the most smallest meaningful unit of language. A syllable is the smallest piece of pronunciation that has a vowel in it. Definitions are taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://classroom.synonym.com/morpheme-synonymous-syllable-3974.html&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why, but can we prove that mathematically or logically a morpheme would always have one or more syllables, but no syllable exist that contains more than one morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T06:13:26.040" Title="Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19239" CreationDate="2016-07-28T20:42:55.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can prove existentially that the shortest morpheme is a single consonant, Examples from Levantine Arabic: &lt;em&gt;-ʃ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;verbal negation&quot;; &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; &quot;1sg perfective&quot;. In Gurage, single phonological features are morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T20:42:55.413" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19239" CreationDate="2016-07-28T20:59:50.897" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, one counterexample is the very common '-ed’ (often /d/) ending: ‘filled’ is 1 syllable, and the morphemes are ‘fill’ + ‘-ed’ (/d/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T20:59:50.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-29T06:28:24.713" Score="0" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;my goal is to know all the sounds of other languages and compare if there are similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only found the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/english/english_main.swf&#xA;&#xA;http://www.stuff.co.uk/movies/ipachart.swf&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/spanish/spanish.html&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/german/german.html&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10685" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T16:17:15.177" Title="How many phonetic symbols are in total languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2016-07-29T07:49:47.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all Indonesian names are gender-specific. Usually, you can tell their gender by endings. Names that end in -a, -Vti/-Nti (preceded by a vowel or nasal), -e, -iN, and -ah are usually feminine. Names that end in -o, -u, -di, -C (consonants; except -h), and -CCi (except -rni, -tri, etc.) are usually masculine. Exceptions are Yoga, Dirga, Rama, Fitrah, and Sakti (all are masculine); and Lulu, Betik, and Daniar (all are feminine).&#xA;Some are genderless though, such as Riski, Andika, Aditya, etc. But you can determine their gender by their nicknames. A Riski is usually a male if it is called Iki, but it is usually a female if it is called Kiki. Andika can be male (Dika, Andi) or female (Ika). Aditya can also be male (Adit) or female (Tia or Tya).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Indonesia, you can find some names that is one masculine in a part but feminine in another part, or vice versa. Or one gender in a part but genderless in another part. Nana is usually male in Sunda (mainly in West Java), but female elsewhere. Nur is genderless in Java, but feminine elsewhere (also in Maluku Nur- part is almost always not separated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13735" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T07:49:47.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19242" CreationDate="2016-07-29T10:11:52.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit difficult to talk about &quot;phonetic symbols in total languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is sensible (and well researched) are the phonemic inventories of the languages all across the world, the results of this research are nicely summarised in the first chapters of &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS survey&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that it is even possible to construct a kind of phoneme inventory of all languages of the world by accounting to all possible contrasts made in at least one language. Some the the so-constructed phonemes would be just undistinguishable to any listener and the set would be too large—I am thinking of the special way a ventriloquist or &lt;em&gt;Bauchredner&lt;/em&gt; speaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T10:11:52.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2016-07-29T13:08:56.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can hardly improve on this observation from the English Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_and_postposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preposition and postposition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right-branching), while postpositional phrases are head-final (or left-branching).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency for languages that feature postpositions also to have other head-final features, such as verbs that follow their objects; and for languages that feature prepositions to have other head-initial features, such as verbs that precede their objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin, which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Branching direction&lt;/a&gt; itself is likewise just an inconsistent tendency with multiple dimensions - variant, emphasis and of course time in history, as these features evolve.  Left-branching approaching consistency is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;areal feature&lt;/a&gt; found mostly in South, Central and East Asia or languages like Turkish that migrated from there relatively recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus this has little to do with SVO/SOV directly or Indo-European languages specifically.  Plenty of IE languages use or used postpositions or both pre- and postpositions, and plenty of IE languages have or had left-branching or just relatively free word order, and some major neighbouring non-IE languages like Arabic and Hebrew use mostly prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T20:12:37.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19239" CreationDate="2016-07-29T14:46:37.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, the word &quot;era&quot; (was) can take no syllables, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adorarte para mi era obsesión&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part &quot;mi era obsesión&quot;, when transcribed in IPA, would become /mi̯&lt;strong&gt;e.ɾa&lt;/strong&gt;o̯b.se.sjon/, wherein the &quot;era&quot; /e.ɾa/ doesn't increase the syllable-count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T14:46:37.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19242" CreationDate="2016-07-29T16:17:15.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest starting with &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt;, which is a collection of sounds from 451 languages of the world, listing 919 segments. There are various queries that you can perform, such as finding the shared segments in the inventories of two languages, or find out what languages have a particular segment (or class). The database is available for your own manipulation, if you want to construct your own queries. The original DOS program is still available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/sales/software.htm#upsid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA&lt;/a&gt;. UPSID presents what appear to be phonemes (that is, the authors did not do a rigorous phonological analysis of all of the languages, but it is not just a list of all of the surface phones reported in a source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also supplement that list with Ladefoged and Maddieson's book &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;, which gives you a property-focused survey of the range of variation in languages. It does not give you complete inventories, but for example if you want to know if there is a difference between an epiglottal and a pharyngeal consonant, you can read about that in the book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T16:17:15.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2016-07-29T23:47:34.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet every modern Indo-European language I know of uses prepositions&#xA;  primarily (one or two have postpositions as well, but in such&#xA;  languages prepositions are a clear majority)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are focusing too much on European IE languages here: if you look at the more eastern branches (Armenian, Indic, Iranian), postpositions are quite common, and may even predominate over prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Armenian, the basic way to say &quot;in&quot;, &quot;for&quot;, &quot;upon&quot;, etc. involves an oblique case-form of the noun followed by a postposition. Although Farsi (Persian) prefers prepositions, most other Iranian languages don't, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preference for prepositions in European languages may simply be an old areal feature, to which there are still many exceptions (cf. German &lt;em&gt;Schau mich an!&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Look at me!&quot;, literally &quot;look me at&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T23:47:34.660" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-30T08:40:48.993" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have many times looked up on the internet, &quot;How to think in a language,&quot; or other such pretaining terms, but that often comes up with ways to &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; think in a language in terms of language proficiency. What I'm more interested in is seeing how a language can make people think differently. I'm not just referring to stuff like the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, but also in how a language works semantically, grammatically, and logically. In essence, I would like to know how a language affects someone's perspective and their logic, as well as being able to use linguistic grammar to understand a language's pretaining culture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories, methods, or other such ways in which one can learn to &quot;think&quot; in another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T13:21:39.107" Title="How to figure out how a language may force one to think" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:40:48.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17473" CreationDate="2016-07-30T20:08:33.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pronunciation, including intonation, including stress, is a prime example of a potentially &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areal_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;areal feature&lt;/a&gt;, rather than a feature that is losslessly passed down via language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You gave the example of Czech stress.  Regular initial stress is a tendency in Europe in a contiguous area spanning Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Vojvodina.  (As you know, Hungarian is not a Slavic nor even an Indo-European language.)  In Southern Serbia there is a transitional zone to Macedonian and Bulgarian, which are on the same dialect continuum but do not have initial stress.  Similar is true in Eastern Slovakia and somewhere between Czech and Polish areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So stress pattern borders and the language and language family borders are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why or how did it happen?  There are two main mechanisms: substrate and superstrate.  There are more recent and obvious examples of substrate effects on intonation: Mexican Spanish, Irish English, Indian English and West Indian English.  I will not speculate here on the forces at play in Central Europe and among Slavic languages but, given the borders in question, reasonable cases can be made for both substrate and superstrate effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-08-01T05:52:14.417" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T05:52:14.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20815" CreationDate="2016-07-31T05:58:06.290" Score="0" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: p 335. &lt;em&gt;Syntax, A Generative Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Take the active sentence in (ii):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii) Wilma considers [Fredrick to be foolish].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, &lt;em&gt;Wilma&lt;/em&gt; is the experiencer of &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; is the&#xA;external theta role of the predicate &lt;em&gt;is foolish&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt;. When &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; is made into a&#xA;passive, the subject of the lower clause raises to become the subject of the&#xA;main clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii) Fredrick is considered &lt;em&gt;t&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to be foolish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[2.]&lt;/strong&gt;  Notice that Fredrick is never theta-marked by the verb &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;[End of 2.]&lt;/strong&gt;. As such&#xA;there is no way to make it the external argument like in (i). Because of&#xA;cases like (iii), the movement account is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand 1 and 2. Why cannot 'Frederick' be the Theme of the transitive verb 'consider'? If so, then Frederick would be theta-marked, contrary to 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T22:46:38.543" Title="Why cannot the verb 'consider' theta-mark 'Frederick' as the Theme?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19250" CreationDate="2016-07-31T10:28:15.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend John McWhorter's book &quot;The Language Hoax — Why the world looks the same in any language&quot;. Here's a short article making the point: &lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/117521/different-languages-dont-create-different-worldviews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://newrepublic.com/article/117521/different-languages-dont-create-different-worldviews&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T10:28:15.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19250" CreationDate="2016-07-31T14:12:13.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One aspect of how people think is what they focus on and don't downplay. An example would be whether you have direct versus indirect knowledge of a fact; or certain relationships between speech events and events that we talk about (I'm referring to tense and aspect). These are properties that are overtly encoded in some languages so that &quot;personal knowledge&quot; or &quot;completed&quot; may be something that you &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; include in your communication in one language, though could express in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that nobody has devised a way of testing &quot;how we think&quot;, which is a fairly unscientific albeit intuitive notion. Therefore, we can't actually &lt;em&gt;test&lt;/em&gt; how a speaker of Quechua thinks, as opposed to how a speaker of Spanish thinks. If we could, then we might be able to see if Quechua-Spanish bilinguals &quot;think&quot; differently that Quechua monolinguals or Spanish monolinguals. It has been a long-standing observation that culture significantly shapes how people think (to the extent that &quot;how one thinks&quot; means anything), and language is obviously embedded in a culture. So it would actually be impossible in principle to test whether a difference in thought was because of language vs. culture. Quechua-Spanish monolinguals have a somewhat different culture from Quechua monolinguals -- how do you think they got to be bilingual? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T14:12:13.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-31T19:05:03.420" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/language/cmn/19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ethnologue's page regarding &quot;Chinese, Mandarin&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the population of speakers of Standard Chinese is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;889,000,000 in China (2013), increasing. 70% of Chinese language users speak a Mandarin dialect as L1. L2 users: 178,000,000 in China. Total users in all countries: 1,090,951,810 (as L1: 897,071,810; as L2: 193,880,000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;other comments&quot; section, it notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are Mandarin speakers in all 56 official nationalities of China, but the majority in China are classified under Han, Manchu and Hui nationalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary questions here would be: &lt;strong&gt;who proposed that there were 889 million L1 speakers in 2013&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;how did they arrive at that figure&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13752" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T19:05:03.420" Title="Where does the reported number of native speakers in Ethnologue come from?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;languages-of-china&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-01T07:02:02.210" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed this phenomenon in quite a few Romance languages, that the verb &quot;to mean&quot; can also be conveyed by the phrase &quot;to want to say&quot;, regardless of the origin of the verb &quot;to want&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Language): (verb meaning &quot;to mean&quot;) | (phrase meaning &quot;to want to say&quot;)&#xA;French:                    signifier | vouloir dire&#xA;Spanish:                  significar | querer decir&#xA;Portuguese:               significar | querer dizer&#xA;Catalan:                  significar | voler dir    (credits to fedorqui)&#xA;Italian:                 significare | voler dire&#xA;Northern Sardinian:      significare | quérrer narrare/nàrrere&#xA;Southern Sardinian:       significai | bòllir nài&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As shown above, &quot;querer&quot; comes from the Latin verb &quot;QVAERERE&quot; while &quot;vouloir&quot; comes from the Latin verb &quot;VELLE&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct to deduce then, that this phenomenon does not have a Latin origin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers stating more cognates are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="12958" LastEditDate="2016-08-01T13:01:43.190" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T03:27:44.740" Title="Romance languages - &quot;to mean&quot; as &quot;to want to say&quot;" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19453" CreationDate="2016-08-01T07:29:17.587" Score="4" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;All forms of the Latin verb &quot;FACERE&quot; that went to French had a &quot;c&quot;, but it has disappeared in all forms of the French verb &quot;faire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In FACIS &gt; fais, the &quot;c&quot; completely disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In FACIUNT &gt; font, the &quot;c&quot; also disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In FACIAM &gt; fasse, the &quot;c&quot; became &quot;ss&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some of the instances of &quot;c&quot; in the Latin forms are followed by a yod. Perhaps this is the cause of the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &quot;c&quot; in FACIUNT is also followed by a yod, and it also disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am seeking an explanation of the evolution of these forms, and I would also prefer to have a step by step evolution of those three selected forms above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T21:16:26.867" Title="Latin to French - evolution of certain forms of &quot;FACERE &gt; faire&quot;" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11990" CreationDate="2016-08-01T11:11:09.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Aspirated h&lt;/a&gt; on en.wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name of the now-silent h refers not to aspiration but to its former pronunciation as the voiceless glottal fricative [h] in Old French and in Middle French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest that at one time [h] was pronounced, for example, in haïr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also explains why liaison was not done on these words, because /ʒə.he/ would not contract to */ʒe/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later the [h] became silent, but the non-contracted form passed on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T11:11:09.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-01T13:16:02.840" Score="4" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Background (skip if you know French)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, to generate the past tense, you use the past participle of the verb, attaching in front a conjugated form of &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;J'ai mangé&lt;/em&gt;. (I ate) (&lt;em&gt;ai&lt;/em&gt; is a conjugated form of &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mangé&lt;/em&gt; is the past participle of the verb to eat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Je suis venu&lt;/em&gt;. (I came) (&lt;em&gt;suis&lt;/em&gt; is a conjugated form of &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;venu&lt;/em&gt; is the past participle of the verb to come)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those with &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;, the past participle agrees in gender and number with the subject. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Il est venu&lt;/em&gt;. (He came)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elle est venu&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (She came)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ils sont venu&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (They (male) came)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elles sont venu&lt;strong&gt;es&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (They (female) came)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those with &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt;, the past participle does not agree in gender or number with the subject. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Il a mangé&lt;/em&gt;. (He ate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elle a mangé&lt;/em&gt;. (She ate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ils ont mangé&lt;/em&gt;. (They (male) ate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elles ont mangé&lt;/em&gt;. (They (female) ate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above phenomenon is also found in other Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian, with their own versions of &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what seems to be unique to French is that the participles that take &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; agree in gender and number with the object when the object is placed in front of the verb. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;J'ai acheté cette voiture&lt;/em&gt;. (I bought this car) The participle is acheté in its uninflected form (masculine singular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;C'est la voiture que j'ai acheté&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. (This is the car which I bought) The participle is inflected to agree with the subject (la voiture) which is feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Main problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, past participles that take &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; are not inflected to agree with the object in gender and number, except when the object is placed in front of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this phenomenon found in other Romance languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this phenomenon originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the agreement of the participle in Old French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Old_French_verbs#Agreement_of_the_past_participle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; seems to have some clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this phenomenon in Spanish and Italian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T14:59:06.647" Title="Past participle agreement in French" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19250" CreationDate="2016-08-01T13:21:39.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fundamental language differences are rare. Considering the existence of plural maybe allows over-generalisations, hence ethnic prejudices. That would be a bit far-fetched argument. W.r.t. normal variation of speech: non-objective monikers like terrorist / rebel / freedom fighter, that far more influence our mental state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless for speculations enjoy a bit of science-fiction classics: Null-A from A.E. van Vogt, and The Languages of Pao of J. Vance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a regular number-forming systen is said to help in arithmetic: short / single syllable digits, regular &lt;code&gt;dek tri / sep-dek&lt;/code&gt; (10+3 / 7x10, Esperanto) as opposed to thirteen / seventy. I doubt there is a measurable effect for adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T13:21:39.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19229" CreationDate="2016-08-01T20:49:05.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither of your example sentences are entirely context-free.  An AI might comment for each: 1) &quot;I don't recall the experiment.&quot;  2) &quot;I don't recall the task.&quot;  Once you write a program that can identify which phrases have antecedents, and test whether those antecedents are in the same sentence, then it would be relatively simple to extend the program to handle multiple sentences (the 'context'), thus making the goal of the program obsolete -- you would have a context-sensitive program, so testing for context-free sentences wouldn't be necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-08-01T20:49:05.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-02T04:12:04.357" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little background first. My parents were debating whether lemon in bengali was pronounced nebu or lebu. So, I decided to do some research into this and found that in many South Asian languages words that begin with the &quot;L&quot; sound have alternate pronunciations beginning with the &quot;N&quot; sound. For example, lemon can be pronounced as nimbu and limb in Hindi. How did this sort of duality develop historically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, sounds that are interchanged like this are very closely related. For example, fish in English is related to the the Latin piscus. &quot;F&quot; is closely related to &quot;P&quot;. How is &quot;N&quot; closely related to &quot;L&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13760" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T15:05:13.310" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T15:05:13.310" Title="N vs L in South Asian Languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19263" CreationDate="2016-08-02T04:54:04.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an acoustic similarity between &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, which have anti-resonances; this makes the consonants sound similar. This is a reasonable common sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T04:54:04.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19079" CreationDate="2016-08-02T04:59:54.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms on laminal consonants, the &quot;flat&quot; part specifically refers to the part of the tongue which contacts the roof of the mouth. So the body of the tongue &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; curled up, and the blade of the tongue is flat against the roof of the mouth. In practice, there is very little surface area actually in contact, but the point of contact sets the position of the whole tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="958" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T04:59:54.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19269" CreationDate="2016-08-02T10:15:08.100" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are all the ways a group of people can start to pronounce or say things differently? And what are the factors that can affect those &quot;mutations&quot; apart from a random shift in pronunciation of the population that could randomly spread?&#xA;Surely it's a wide question so I will get by with a wide answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T03:51:53.633" Title="How do language differences develop?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-03T15:37:24.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19219" CreationDate="2016-08-02T10:25:48.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really not a linguist but I think Natural Semantic Metalanguage is trying for something similar. It concentrates on the minimal set of words appearing in every existing language used to describe anything. And as it is connected to the basic human sensations, it works with the simple cognitive psychology idea that everything you can describe is based on the sensations you've expierenced in the past and can be seperated into a set of elementary neural signals that can naturally expierence every healthy person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T10:25:48.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19266" CreationDate="2016-08-03T08:37:47.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll go by examples for each question so you get the idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are all the ways a group of people can start to pronounce or say things differently?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;All&quot; would probably take up a few hundred pages, you could take, say:&#xA;Palatalization: palatal consonant followed by front vowels do their magic. This happens every day, this is why you pronounce nation the way you do. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this also happens today when people speak a little faster than usual, or teenagers make things sound cool. So one day you get &quot;gotcha&quot;. And it gets picked up by a small group. While they will still know it is underlyingly got you, their children and their children's children will not have that knowledge, for them, gotcha is a word on its own right. And this goes on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine this on the scale of hundreds of phonetic changes taking place within every single tiny community of speakers: family, sports-team, school... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And what are the factors that can affect those &quot;mutations&quot; apart from a random shift in pronunciation of the population that could randomly spread?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major misunderstanding needs to be corrected here. The changes are not random. They are just about as rule governed as artificial / computer languages. The change is automatic. What is unpredictable is which change will take place among the available set of possible changes for a given phonetic constellation. See Centum vs Satem languages - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum_and_satem_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum_and_satem_languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is also unpredictable is which change of the time will be adopted by many enough speakers so its influence is permanent. Fashion, power, rebellion, coolness - all a little fuzzy for linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Surely it's a wide question so I will get by with a wide answer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is. One major force of change, phonetic and language in general, is actual speech. The more frequently words appear in a person's speech, the more they get glued together. Hence, tell hem becomes tell'em. Rock and roll becomes rockenroll, and break fast become breakfast. And there comes a point when they cease to be two independent words, they become one and the powers of phonetic changes begin to work on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other force I had already alluded to is the new generations of language learners. For them a mouse is a computer accessory not a rodent, google is not a number but a transitive regular verb and y'all is the plural of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastEditorUserId="13761" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T03:51:53.633" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T03:51:53.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T08:38:22.273" Score="6" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a two-part question about the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;hygiene&lt;/em&gt; in English.  The usual pronunciation, as shown by a variety of online dictionaries accessible from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onelook.com/?w=hygiene&amp;amp;ls=a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OneLook Dictionary Search&lt;/a&gt;, is /ˈhaɪdʒiːn/ (Merriam-Webster also lists /haɪˈdʒiːn/). This is interesting because I know of no other English word of Greek origin where &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; represents /iː/ (setting aside plurals ending in &lt;em&gt;-ies&lt;/em&gt; for people with happy-tensing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what really surprised me was finding that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/90139?redirectedFrom=hygiene#eid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; lists another, more regular-looking pronunciation where the &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; represents two vowels in hiatus: /ˈhɪdʒɪiːn/. (You'll need a subscription, either personal or through an institution like a library, to access  the preceding link.) After some searching, I found another source that lists a similar pronunciation, with the &quot;ie&quot; in hiatus but the &quot;y&quot; apparently long (/ˈhaɪdʒɪiːn/): &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JjZAAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA545&amp;amp;dq=%22hygeia%22%20dictionary&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiBhJrN8qTOAhUGMGMKHQt6DJ0Q6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22hygeia%22%20dictionary&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by John Ogilvie, 1883. (Unfortunately, due to the low quality of the Google Books scan, I'm not entirely sure if the first &quot;I&quot; in the transcription has a macron (which would indicate the pronunciation /ˈhaɪdʒɪiːn/) or just a tittle (which would indicate /ˈhɪdʒɪiːn/, the same as the OED).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question A: does anyone know of any other sources that describe the pronunciation with a hiatus? I've never heard anybody use it and I wasn't able to find it listed in any other dictionaries, past or present. The earliest dictionary I found that lists the pronunciation of this word is from 1874, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1K8tAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=hygiene%20dictionary&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjHqLLpz6TOAhUK0GMKHbhbBEoQ6AEIPjAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=hygiene&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Medical Science&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Robley Dunglison (p 519), and it seems to just give the usual modern pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hygiène&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (F.), generally Anglicized &lt;em&gt;Hygiene,&lt;/em&gt; and pronounced &lt;em&gt;hy´geen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quotation and the OED entry both seem to agree that the word in its modern form entered English from French. The OED also gives the following indications of the timing of this loan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; French &lt;em&gt;hygiène&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Dict. Acad.&lt;/em&gt; 1762, in 16th cent. &lt;em&gt;hygiaine&lt;/em&gt; Paré),  in modern Latin &lt;em&gt;hygieina&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Greek &lt;em&gt;ὑγιεινή&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;τέχνη&lt;/em&gt; art) [...]  Formerly used in Latin or Greek form. [...]&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;1799 R. Southey &lt;em&gt;Lett. from Spain&lt;/em&gt; (ed. 2) 470 : The second&#xA;  [Professorship] shall be of Physiology and &lt;em&gt;Higiene.&lt;/em&gt; [...]&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;1811 R. Hooper &lt;em&gt;Lexicon-medicum&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;Hygiene,&lt;/em&gt; modern physicians have applied&#xA;  this term to that division of therapia which treats of the diet of the&#xA;  sick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All earlier citations in the OED are for Latin forms such as “Hygiena,&quot; Hygieina&quot; and “Hygieine&quot; that I assume would have been pronounced something like /hɪdʒɪˈiːnə/, /ˈhɪdʒɪˈaɪːnə/ and /hɪdʒɪˈaɪːni/ respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question B: How did the usual modern pronunciation originate? I can imagine at least three possibilities: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the pronunciation with /ɪiː/ listed in the OED is older, and it was simplified to /iː/ over time, as in the word &lt;em&gt;medi(a)eval&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;caries.&lt;/em&gt; This seems unlikely to me, since /ˈhɪdʒɪiːn/ &gt; /ˈhɪdʒiːn/ requires another step to change the /ɪ/ in the first syllable to /aɪ/ before we get the modern pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the pronunciation with /iː/ was a direct anglicization of the French pronunciation by analogy with the vowels used in word pairs like English &lt;em&gt;piece&lt;/em&gt; /piːs/–French &lt;em&gt;pièce&lt;/em&gt; /pjɛs(ə)/ or English &lt;em&gt;relief&lt;/em&gt; /rəˈliːf/–French &lt;em&gt;relief&lt;/em&gt; /rəljɛf/. The /aɪ/ in the first syllable is based purely on the spelling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the pronunciation with /iː/ was a direct anglicization based purely on the French spelling (by analogy with the use of the digraph &quot;ie&quot; to represent /iː/ in various English words, not only French-derived ones like &lt;em&gt;piece&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;relief&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;field, yield&lt;/em&gt; etc.) The /aɪ/ in the first syllable is based purely on the spelling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the last two are fairly similar, and probably hard to distinguish based on evidence. In fact, if I had to guess, I would say the modern pronunciation most likely originates from a mixture of 2 &amp;amp; 3. However, I'm just an amateur. I'd love to know if any professional etymologists or linguists have said anything about the development of this word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T10:20:33.147" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T02:04:50.803" Title="Historical development of English pronunciation(s) of &quot;hygiene&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19270" CreationDate="2016-08-03T09:14:58.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fowler, &quot;Modern English Usage&quot;, 1st edition (1926) prescribes the three-syllable pronunciation of hy-gi-ene and the four-syllable pronunciation of hy-gi-en-ic.The latter is still the standard pronunciation, at least in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T09:14:58.837" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2016-08-03T09:39:39.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for as I inferred, pragmatic focuses on impliticit meaning that z being conveyed with reference to specific context.. While discourse analysis focuses on communicative aspects..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13762" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T09:39:39.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19239" CreationDate="2016-08-03T10:35:23.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly possible to have three morphemes in one syllable. Consider the word &lt;em&gt;sixths&lt;/em&gt; which is comprised of the morphemes /sɪks/,  /θ/, and  /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So  we can easily prove that many syllables exist that contain more than one morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-10-17T20:59:01.153" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T20:59:01.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3898" CreationDate="2016-08-03T22:52:53.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this may not be an answer to your question exactly your question is one I've asked myself before.  But this is what I settled on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The curious and beautiful anomaly of Hangul.  Korean didn't have a unified writing system at first.  But in the 13th century a writing system was devised.  The beauty of it is that the symbols themselves show how to pronounce the sounds.  Even the stacking system follows the same pattern if I recall correctly.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong.  To me this seems to be a beautiful blend of art and science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there have been bits of this repeated.  Klingon and Vulcan were created in a collective way.  Vulcan has an especially &lt;a href=&quot;http://korsaya.org/vulcan-calligraphy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;beautiful calligraphy&lt;/a&gt;.  But a lot of the sounds are reported to be the creation of James Doohan by his mere observation of the actors speaking their parts in English.  It was only later &quot;beefed up&quot; by the linguist Marc Okrand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I feel the terms Constructed Languages/Artificial Languages are a misnomer.  All languages were developed at some point. We might have more &quot;universal&quot; sounds for some biological functions otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never found an answer myself but rather chose to just accept that all language is art and virus. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13766" LastEditorUserId="13766" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T10:35:53.230" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T10:35:53.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19270" CreationDate="2016-08-04T01:25:29.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fowler-3 (i.e. Burchfield 1996/2004) clarifies the confusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The (first) &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; was fully pronounced and the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; was often pronounced as /ɪ/ when the relevant section of the OED appeared in 1889; thus /ˈhɪdʒɪiːn/ with three syllables and /hɪdʒɪˈiːnɪk/ with four.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, this entry hasn't been included in Fowler-4 (Butterfield 2015).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. Michaelis and Jones 1913 or Jones 1917 give one variant only, with [aɪ]. For some reason, it's missing in Walker 1859.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chambers 1861 lists hygiene, with other variants hygieina, hygieine (all with [aɪ]?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T02:04:50.803" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T02:04:50.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T03:27:16.097" Score="7" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which the, largely Indo-European/PIE, and more compartmentalized parts-of-speech system don't work very well? In particular,  I am wondering if there are any languages in which the relationship between a verb and noun to other words in a sentence are largely the same? This then, would make the purpose of a verb and noun largely the same, -or at least their distinction more vague-. The reason I ask is because I am curious as to how, if this exists, it may affect communication within sentences and how it changes the way a sentence may need to be formed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T23:04:29.817" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T20:54:37.797" Title="Are there any languages with minimal distinctions between the noun and verb categories?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T07:35:18.823" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am seeking an explanation for the development of the forms of Spanish &quot;seguir&quot; from Latin &quot;SEQVI&quot; (Vulgar Latin: *sequire), especially the irregular forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially, why did the &quot;e&quot; become &quot;i&quot; in the first syllable in some forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read that it is because of the yod that follows it, causing the vowel &quot;e&quot; to be raised to &quot;i&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in *sequivit &gt; siguió (pretérito tercera persona/preterite third-person):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*sequivit [ˈsɛkᶣiwit] &gt; /ˈsɛgiwt/ &gt; /sɛˈgiwt/ &gt; /sɛˈgiut/ &gt; /sɛˈgjut/ &gt; /siˈgjot/ (yod-raising) &gt; [siˈɣjo] siguió&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some of the forms did not have the yod, e.g. VL. *sequis &gt; Sp. sigues. What is it that caused the raising of those forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="12958" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T17:23:22.053" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T17:23:22.053" Title="Etymological development of forms of Spanish &quot;seguir&quot; from Latin &quot;SEQVI&quot; (*sequire)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22589" CreationDate="2016-08-04T17:35:44.117" Score="2" ViewCount="695" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Sentiment-Analysis/Opinion-Mining of Tweets, focused on Finance related tweets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest issue I am facing is the unability of my algorithm to detect equivalent entities (Definition in B.Liu 2012: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.uic.edu/%7Eliub/FBS/SentimentAnalysis-and-OpinionMining.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Bing Liu 2012&quot;&gt;Page 18-19&lt;/a&gt;) when Financial slang is used. For example, for those familiar with it I would like the following entities to be detected as equivalent after lemmatization :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Govies = Government-Bonds = Sovereign-Debt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cash = Monetary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stocks = Equities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FX = Forex = Currency-exchange = Foreign-Exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bund = German-Bonds = Bundesbank 10y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T-Notes = US10 = Treasury-Notes = US-Govies = American-Sovereign-Debt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my two questions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was thinking about using some supervised learning (Naive-Bayesian-Classification) for such task, but can't find any classified set of data for training. Do you know if such dataset exists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have any alternative idea regarding how to perform such task?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T11:39:21.410" Title="Financial Slang and NLP for Sentiment Analysis" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-04T19:50:27.233" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first language is NOT english. Currently I am preparing for IELTS exam at the moment. Today I saw a youtube video about IELTS writing task. In this video, the teacher gave an example of &lt;strong&gt;complex sentence&lt;/strong&gt; which is:---&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The amount of people from an English town deciding to start a&#xA;  vegetarian diet increased steadily by approximately 125 from about 75&#xA;  to 200 between 2004 and 2007. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another video, the teacher gave some more examples of complex sentences:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Between 2004 and 2007, the number of people increased steadily from&#xA;  about 75 to 200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was a steady increase in the number of people from about 75 to&#xA;  200 between 2004 and 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The number of people becoming vegetarian experienced a steady increase&#xA;  from about 75 to 200 between 2004 and 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; see any subordinate clause or dependent clause in the &lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt; sentences. I do Not know why are they considered as &lt;strong&gt;Complex sentences&lt;/strong&gt;. Can anyone help me asap please? My IELTS exam is very near :(.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13774" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T19:50:27.233" Title="Is it possible to write complex sentence without subordinate (or dependent) clause?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:42:52.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19164" CreationDate="2016-08-05T09:27:34.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest answer to your question I can think of would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Word2Vec&lt;/a&gt;. The language models produced by it tend to capture semantic relationships between words very well. They can answer questions such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt; is to &lt;em&gt;queen&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; is to &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or calculate the &quot;semantic distance&quot; (whatever that means exactly) between two words. Among others, there are implementations in C and Python. The latter is introduced &lt;a href=&quot;http://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/word2vec.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3451" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T09:27:34.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19284" CreationDate="2016-08-05T13:31:32.277" Score="0" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to use nps_chat corpora provided by nltk library. I follow the example given &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/book/ch02.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, I can reproduce this results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; from nltk.corpus import nps_chat&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; chatroom = nps_chat.posts('10-19-20s_706posts.xml')&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; chatroom[123]&#xA;['i', 'do', &quot;n't&quot;, 'want', 'hot', 'pics', 'of', 'a', 'female', ',',&#xA;'I', 'can', 'look', 'in', 'a', 'mirror', '.']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I cannot figure out who says what. I mean, I do see posts (messages) but I do not know who is the author. Is it possible to determine the author? Of course I do understand that the real author cannot be given but is there anonymized authorship? If it is the case, can I find somewhere dialog corpora with authorship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13723" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T22:07:46.210" Title="How to determine who is the author of a message in the nps_chat corpora?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19286" CreationDate="2016-08-05T14:32:15.930" Score="4" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example, the Hebrew word for &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; can be written in the English alphabet as &lt;code&gt;’im&lt;/code&gt;.  What does the apostrophe represent here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13778" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-05T14:57:45.600" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T03:20:44.830" Title="When transliterating into the Latin alphabet, what does an apostrophe mean?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:40:38.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19282" CreationDate="2016-08-05T15:48:41.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.nps.edu/cmartell/NPSChat.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the corpus is a bunch of XML files in which the authors are encoded as an attribute value to a post element:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZX71L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZX71L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To view the individual XML files in an editor (because this will help you understanding their strcture), just go to the directory where it is stored (default directories are given &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nltk/nltk/wiki/Adding-a-Corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use it in Python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;nps_chat.posts('10-19-20s_706posts.xml')&lt;/code&gt; seems to be a function provided by the corpus reader that returns a list of posts (which are again lists of words) and extracts only the inner elements, ignoring attributes in the XML elements.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The documentation together with the source code for the reader can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.corpus.reader.html#nltk.corpus.reader.nps_chat.NPSChatCorpusReader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm too lazy now to go through it in all deatil, but it should be easy to find out whether there is an already implemented function that enables you to return the author of a post.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to process the author within your code (because you could otherwise just look at the raw XML) and the reader doesn't provide such a function already, you probably need to write one on your own.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It shouldn't be too hard actually, there are good libraries to process some XML files - more precisely, the reader makes use of a special &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.corpus.reader.html#nltk.corpus.reader.xmldocs.XMLCorpusReeader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XML Corpus Reader&lt;/a&gt; - and while writing, you can cheat by looking at the already provided fuctions. Actually you'd just need to check what the &lt;code&gt;posts&lt;/code&gt; function exactly does and modify it so as to return not just the inner elements of a post but also the value that is stored in the &lt;code&gt;user&lt;/code&gt; attribute (you'd need to consider then how to bring the return type together with the word list, because you can not return both the word list and the user name in one element, so you'd need e.g. an additional function returning only the user, or one combining both somehow), but that should be doable, as soon as you have managed to access an individual post with an XML parser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-05T22:07:46.210" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T22:07:46.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19283" CreationDate="2016-08-05T20:17:53.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transliteration conventions are numerous, so there are many possible meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often apostrophe semi-formally represents some character that does not exist in the Latin alphabet.  In some such cases apostrophe itself is an ASCII substitute for a transalphabetic character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the following uses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Cyrillic: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_sign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;soft sign&lt;/a&gt; ь&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Armenian, Georgian, Indic etc: aspiration of the preceding consonants p, t or k&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Semitic scripts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ayn&lt;/a&gt;, glottal stop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Across a few alphabets as in the Latin one, it is used to represent a preceding acute or grave accent or stress mark, and of course elision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-08-06T03:20:44.830" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T03:20:44.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19229" CreationDate="2016-08-05T21:57:09.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the problem mostly narrows down to the reference of NPs, since verbs, adjectives, adverbs and all kinds of function words, but also indefinite or quantified NPs like &lt;em&gt;a car&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;all humans&lt;/em&gt; should be unproblematic&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't give a complete algorithm, but some indicators (some of them already mentioned) would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Demonstrative pronouns and determiners&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;such&lt;/em&gt; etc., both in pronominal (&lt;em&gt;This is a serious issue&lt;/em&gt;) and in a determiner (&lt;em&gt;this task&lt;/em&gt;) use are certain candidates for context dependence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With a decent parser, you will be able to dereference (find the antecedent of) such items, but taking sentences in isolation, unless the reference relation is between several clauses of one sentences, such pronouns or determiners are highly context-dependent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same applies for &lt;strong&gt;personal and possessive pronouns&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt;, ...) - unless referring to an entity in the same sentence, they will not be understandable without context.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Depending on whether the reader knows the text's spaker and addressee, first and second person pronouns (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; etc.) might be less problematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proper individual names&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Ms. Smith&lt;/em&gt;, but also *insert some pseudonym* usually don't have context-independent references either.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You need to decide on your own whether &lt;em&gt;Mary Smith&lt;/em&gt; can be understood without context or not; you probably would want to make exceptions for persons that are assumed to be known to everyone, like &lt;em&gt;Mr. Obama&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Mozart&lt;/em&gt;; for this kind of world knowledge, you'd need more advanced tools (first thought: look-up in an encyclopedia?) to find out to what degree the meaning of such names are assumed to be part of a regular speaker's knowledge or not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Proper names of places (&lt;em&gt;China&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Los Angeles&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hudson River&lt;/em&gt;) or major events (&lt;em&gt;World War II&lt;/em&gt;) can probably be assumed to behave similarly to known persons, i.e. rather context-independent - again, dependent on how much world knowledge you 1) assume in the speaker and 2) are able to feed your system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should consider making &lt;strong&gt;exceptions for NPs involving genitive or adjective attributes, or in combination with a PP, gerund VP or relative clause&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;the murderer&lt;/em&gt; is context-dependent, but &lt;em&gt;the murderer of Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is not (PP), &lt;em&gt;the requirements&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;the requirements for EU membership&lt;/em&gt; (PP), &lt;em&gt;the fountain&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;the fountain in front of the Eiffel tower&lt;/em&gt; (PP), &lt;em&gt;the engineers&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;the engineers designing NASA's Mars robot&lt;/em&gt; (gerund VP), &lt;em&gt;the mother&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;Albert Einstein's mother&lt;/em&gt; (genitive attribute), &lt;em&gt;the president&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;the French president&lt;/em&gt; (adjective attribute), &lt;em&gt;the woman&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;the woman who discovered radium&lt;/em&gt; (relative clause), ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You might need to elaborate more on this, e.g. it is also important that the references within the NP are clear (&lt;em&gt;of Ceasar&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;of him&lt;/em&gt;), but in general I would say that adjuctions usually help disambiguating the referene of a definite NP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would need to test these heuristics out, might be that the restrictions are either to hard or too strong, but it would be a a first approach.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Your success will also depend on what other features your algorithm can make use of (pronoun resolution, world knowledge), what the reader might know about the text in advance (e.g. who wrote that text and thus who could be meant by context-dependent pronouns like &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;), what the reader might know in general (esp. the reference of names like well-known persons, geographic names or historical events) and of course what exactly you consider to be context-dependent or independent - this will always be a rather vague notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I admit that this is not always as simple, e.g. &lt;em&gt;a participant&lt;/em&gt; is not clear without context (a participant in what?) despite it being indefinite, or &lt;em&gt;all cookies&lt;/em&gt; (all cookies in the world or all cookies in the box on the table?) despite it being univerally quantified.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Note the difference between the semantically empty (and thus unproblematic) &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; in constructions like &lt;em&gt;It isn't clear whether...&lt;/em&gt; vs. pronominal use (&lt;em&gt;It has brown fur&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; I think, however, that relative clauses work only to a very restricted extend; my example with &lt;em&gt;The woman who discovered radium&lt;/em&gt; seems to work fine, but &lt;em&gt;The woman who signed&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The woman who washed clothes&lt;/em&gt; not so much. It seems to me that predicates without an object (no matter if the verb is by default intransitive, transitive or ditransitive; more objects always give more information) are always more context-dependent than ones with an object (&lt;em&gt;The woman who signed&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;The woman who signed the contract between...&lt;/em&gt;), but even with that, it might not be clear who the referent is, as long as it is not a singleton set (there is only one woman who discovered radium, but many more who at some point washed clothes). Similarly, &lt;em&gt;the president of the US&lt;/em&gt; is clear (there is only one), but &lt;em&gt;the minister of the US&lt;/em&gt; is not (there is more than one minister and you need context to determine which one is meant), so even among very similar constructions, the degree of context-dependence might differ substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T14:13:05.607" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T14:13:05.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15705" CreationDate="2016-08-06T08:19:08.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi In Persian(Farsi) they have exact same pronunciation, but in Arabic they have different pronunciation, &quot;ق&quot; will be pronounced same as it is in Persian, but the other one which is &quot;غ&quot;  is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These links may help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for &quot;ق&quot;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUBpOJb7_uQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUBpOJb7_uQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for &quot;غ&quot;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKsXaj2DbBk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKsXaj2DbBk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13781" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T08:19:08.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-06T10:28:37.610" Score="2" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that in English the adjective is usually before the noun, why is that? In French it's in one way or the other depending on the case (as far as I know it's not to make things clearer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;'Give me that &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt; cup' vs 'Give me that cup &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there might be other things that might be given, pointing out that it's the cup that you need makes more sense and only then you narrow it down to the big cup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason languages are like this or is it just historical how rules evolved and got stuck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13783" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T14:09:00.677" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T14:09:00.677" Title="Why is the adjective usually before the noun?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-06T10:33:16.307" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone study the sign language of people that can actually speak/pronounce/utter words? What would you call such study and what would you call such subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, if a person can use both their mouth and gestures or move their body to communicate than how do you resolve discrepancies and conflicts between body language and words and how does this relate to language and culture and vary from person to person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T19:40:32.577" Title="Sign languages of non-mute people" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;body-language&gt;&lt;interdisciplinary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19289" CreationDate="2016-08-06T13:26:20.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, in English this is certainly the case but it varies from language to language. I believe it is just linguistic convention. In Spanish, the adjective generally comes after the noun: &lt;em&gt;El carro &lt;strong&gt;rojo&lt;/strong&gt;, las hojas &lt;strong&gt;secas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (the red car, the dry leaves). In French, the adjective generally comes after the noun with certain exceptions outlined by the acronym BANGS (Beauty, age, number, goodness, size): &lt;em&gt;Le chat &lt;strong&gt;noir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (the black cat), but &lt;em&gt;le &lt;strong&gt;petit&lt;/strong&gt; cheval&lt;/em&gt; (the little horse). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13784" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T13:26:20.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19289" CreationDate="2016-08-06T20:39:05.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;it's historical. Obviously there are only two choices.  some languages evolved one way, some the other way, and in some languages like latin word order is (mostly) free.  It's related to whether your language has case endings,but there could also be other factors, like gender.  human languages are incredibly diverse.  it has nothing to do with logic or rationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T20:39:05.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19295" CreationDate="2016-08-07T00:05:51.353" Score="7" ViewCount="761" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which modern day dialect of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language#History&quot;&gt;Aramaic&lt;/a&gt; is the closest one to the dialect that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus&quot;&gt;Jesus of Nazareth&lt;/a&gt; spoke in Palestine some 2000 years ago? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this video, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1449362/uiconf_id/14292362/entry_id/1_em6krbta/embed/auto?&quot;&gt;The Modern Aramaic dialects of the Christians and Jews of Iraq and Iran&lt;/a&gt; with Geoffrey Khan, he explains that there are some 150 dialects of Aramaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking which modern dialect resembles the Aramaic language that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus&quot;&gt;spoken in Palestine at the time of Jesus&lt;/a&gt;, if at all possible to know with some degree of certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13786" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T01:00:25.490" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:50:15.133" Title="Which modern day dialect of Aramaic is the closest one to the dialect that Jesus of Nazareth spoke in Palestine some 2000 years ago?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-07T00:25:40.540" Score="3" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, imagine the name of our language was &quot;Englishlanguage&quot;, and we had to always say &quot;I speak Englishlanguage&quot; or &quot;She's a native Englishlanguage speaker&quot;. The closest I can think of is 日本語 &quot;nihon-go&quot; or the name for Japanese, where the &quot;go&quot; means &quot;word&quot;, but this isn't exactly what I mean. I'm wondering if there is any language that contains the word for &quot;language&quot; or &quot;tongue&quot; or similar, in the native name for the language. For example, are there any cultures who name their language after themselves (e.g. &quot;I speak LanguageoftheAngles but she speaks LanguageoftheFranks&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T12:19:47.543" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T15:50:05.700" Title="What are languages whose name contains the word for &quot;language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19293" CreationDate="2016-08-07T00:40:18.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Galilean Aramaic is a Western Aramaic language. The only surviving Western Aramaic language is Western Neo-Aramaic, spoken in the villages of Ma'loula, Jubb'adin and Bakh'a n Syria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T00:40:18.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2016-08-07T01:00:03.807" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (Equadorian) Quechua name for the language is &lt;em&gt;Runa Shimi&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;Language of the People&quot;. All of the Saami terms for the languages (e.g. North Saami, Lule Saami etc) include the word &quot;language&quot;, such as &lt;em&gt;Davvisáme&lt;strong&gt;giella&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;The Lushootseed name for the language, dxʷləšucid, means &quot;language of the south&quot; and contains a suffix -&lt;em&gt;ucid&lt;/em&gt; which means &quot;language&quot; and &quot;mouth&quot; (there isn't really a separate word &quot;language&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T01:00:03.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-07T02:39:57.100" Score="1" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a corpus of Asian American accents so that I might parse them and determine what phonetic/ phonological differences differentiate them from other American accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By Asian-American accents, I'm thinking something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1I3hWOxsy8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, wherein the speaker is a US-born native English speaker with little to no proficiency in Chinese or another East/ Southeast Asian language, but whose parents speak the given East/ Southeast Asian language heavily in the home and whose L2 English itself is accented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The male speaker at 0:22 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJDn-rLv53E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; would be a good example for a male Asian American accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an oddly specific request, but I can provide more examples if there's difficulty determining what accent I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13681" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T02:39:57.100" Title="Corpus for Asian American Accents?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11045" CreationDate="2016-08-07T03:47:51.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that the final syllable is from the Khmer word for to walk. It makes sense based on how the Khmer word for stairs is spelled. At least I cannot find any other good explanation as I do not know where the Thai syllable ได should come from besides Khmer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ដើរ /daə/ to walk, to go, to move, to operate; to be working, to be operating (e.g. machinery).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ជណ្ដើរ /cʊəndaə/ ladder, stairs, staircase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about the first syllable of the Khmer word for ladder, but it &#xA;might be from: &#xA;ជាន់ /coan/ floor, story, level, stage, class, status&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might also explain why the final syllable is sometimes written ໃ and not ໄ since if ໃ was previously pronounced differently, it might better reflect the Khmer vowel aə which is not present in Thai/Lao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13787" LastEditorUserId="13787" LastEditDate="2016-08-07T08:10:32.550" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T08:10:32.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-07T03:50:47.277" Score="7" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;學 was /hæwk/ according to Baxter-Sagart transcription of Qieyun, and according to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese_finals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, -æwk became /Jye/ in modern Mandarin, where J is a palatalized initial consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm curious is the series of intermediate sound changes that went through this word step by step, from EMC to the modern form. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Or, if you could point me to some resources, that would be great too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11167" LastEditorUserId="11167" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T07:27:40.737" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T07:27:40.737" Title="Phonological development of Middle Chinese 學 /hæwk/ to Mandarin xue /ɕye/" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-08-08T03:12:14.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to believe the SIL keyboard is the best thing out there.  Although I don't use Windows much, it has a feature where you can hold Alt and type the Unicode number on the keypad.  I heard you have to do it in octal, though, which is stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Unicode Hex Input on Mac which is similar.  I just have an IPA chart nearby with all the Unicode numbers.  The ones I've done several times I no longer have to look up anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA Palette (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blugs.com/IPA/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.blugs.com/IPA/&lt;/a&gt;) is also pretty easy to use.  I find it hard to believe someone hasn't done something similar for the Windows world.  If not, go to his site, download his GPL source, and port it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For IOS (iPhone/iPad), you can add keyboards.  One of them takes advantage of the IOS hold/drag to make it easy to pick characters from similar ones in the Latin alphabet.  I suspect Android has something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I've tried the SIL &quot;IPA Unicode 6.2(v1.5) MAC&quot; and it's &lt;strong&gt;definitely&lt;/strong&gt; harder to use than either of the above.  (Not to mention that it hijacks some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13794" LastEditorUserId="13794" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T19:58:10.050" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T19:58:10.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2016-08-08T03:40:31.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Lithuanian, the name of a language is the genitve plural of its speaker + the word &quot;language&quot;: eg. &lt;em&gt;lietuvių kalba&lt;/em&gt; 'Lithuanian language(lit. language of the lithuanians)', &lt;em&gt;anglų kalba&lt;/em&gt; 'English language', &lt;em&gt;kinų kalba&lt;/em&gt; 'Chinese language'. However, the word &quot;kalba&quot; &lt;strong&gt;maybe omitted&lt;/strong&gt; if the context allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sentences like &quot;I speak XXX language&quot;, the forms above are not used, they use an adverb instead. For instance, &lt;em&gt;Aš kalbu lietuviškai&lt;/em&gt; 'I speak Lithuanian(lit. I speak in the lithuanians' way)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11165" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T03:40:31.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T09:31:57.613" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an alternative system to writing Pinyin that resembles it but uses a single middle our final letter which incorporates information about the pronunciation tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming up with enough letters to do this is beyond my capability but I am certain that if it existed, people learning Chinese would never forget the pronunciation of the tone marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for looking into this or for considering my idea. I think it could be an interesting one? Let me know your thoughts on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T17:41:24.723" Title="Diacriticless Pinyin (for Chinese or other languages)" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2016-08-08T10:19:52.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is difficult way and a quick and easy way to use the website mentioned by the Original Poster in their question, IPA TYPEIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ipa.typeit.org/full/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the cursor to manually click on the letters on the on-screen keyboard, it takes ages and is mentally exhausting as well as morally tedious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you look at the page that the link takes you to, you will see that the on-screen keyboard is broken into sections. On the left of each section there is a symbol in orange that relates very simply and intuitively to a symbol on your physical keyboard. In order to get any of the IPA symbols from that section,  instead of moving the cursor to the correct symbol on the screen, just use your manual keyboard. Press ALT and then keep tapping the key shown in the orange circle until the desired IPA symbol pops up. Once you get used to this, it really is quite fast and I find it much easier than any of the other methods that I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T12:26:31.657" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T12:26:31.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2016-08-08T12:28:39.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are even endonyms like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fala_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fala&lt;/a&gt; that simply mean &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;speech&lt;/em&gt; with no further qualification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tok Pisin, Papiamento, Lingua Franca etc are other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Tok&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Tok Pisin&lt;/em&gt; is from English &lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;em&gt;Papia&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Papiamento&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;papear&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to chat&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;em&gt;lingua&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Lingua Franca&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;lingua&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tongue&lt;/em&gt;).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the Turkic suffix &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ce#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-ce/-ca/-çe/-ça&lt;/a&gt;, which is used explicitly for languages but cannot stand alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Affectionately Yiddish is often referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%90%D6%B7%D7%9E%D7%A2%D6%BE%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%9F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;מאַמע־לשון&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mother tongue&lt;/em&gt;), if you search you can also find German dialects and languages referred to with &lt;em&gt;Muttersprache&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mottersproch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Muddasprach&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Muttersprak&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T15:50:05.700" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T15:50:05.700" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19302" CreationDate="2016-08-08T13:27:45.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes Pinyin is written with a number after the syllable, instead of the diacritic mark. Something like &lt;code&gt;Wo3 xue3xi1 zhong1wen2&lt;/code&gt;. I don't know if this is has a name, but the Wikipedia describes this usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T13:27:45.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T14:48:58.803" Score="3" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alphabets and alphasyllabaries seem functionally equivalent, but I am confused about the terminology. The coining of &quot;abugida&quot; including inherent vowels as part of the definition, but some alphasyllabaries lack inherent vowels (e.g. Akson Lao, Thaana) and some alphabets have inherent vowels (e.g. Fraser script/Old Lisu, Meroitic, Old Persian Cuneiform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are inherent vowels part of what defines alphasyllabaries, in comparison to alphabets, or an independent spelling rule that may be applied to either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;abugida&quot; a subset of alphasyllabary defined by inherent vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T14:48:58.803" Title="Does an abugida without inherent vowels qualify as an alphabet or an alphasyllabary?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19302" CreationDate="2016-08-08T17:28:58.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tonal spelling is a feature of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gwoyeu Romatzyh&lt;/a&gt; spelling, although the correspondences are rather complicated. This is not used nowadays. There are also romanization systems for other languages that represent tone with final letters such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanized_Popular_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Romanized Popular Alphabet of Hmong&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Hmoob&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinyin without diacritics may be inconvenient for a second language learner, but native speakers generally have no problem understanding such texts (otherwise, they would write using tone marks more often!) especially when syllables are grouped into words. Writing systems often leave off some information about pronunciation; tone in Mandarin is one example, but another is stress in English or in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T17:41:24.723" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T17:41:24.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19276" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:46:15.313" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes: Arabic.  This was analyzed in considerable detail very early in the Arabic tradition.. Whether some word counts as a verb or a noun is not due to any inherent or essential nature of the word, but to how it is used.  And I'm not talking about homonyms etc. but about really the same word.  The canonical examples are the so-called &quot;verbal nouns&quot; and &quot;participles&quot;.  These western terms are miscategorizations.  E.g. &quot;Zaydun Daaribu Amrin&quot; v. &quot;Zaydun Daaribun Amran&quot;.  here the suffixes -u, -un, -in, -an are case endings.  The former would normally be translated &quot;Zayd  (is the) striker of Amr&quot; (noun); the latter, either that or &quot;Zayd (is, or was, or will be) striking Amr&quot; (verb).  But it depends entirely on context; the best translation in either case could be either an English verb or a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral of the story: categories like &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot; are neither universal nor scientific.   They are Western cultural artifacts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T20:46:15.313" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:49:42.153" Score="4" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages which use different cases of numbers for different uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T15:05:27.800" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:22:35.457" Title="Are there any languages where numbers have cases?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19311" CreationDate="2016-08-08T20:59:24.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit all numbers are inflected for case. Similarly in Arabic. Greek inflects some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T21:54:07.477" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T21:54:07.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19311" CreationDate="2016-08-08T21:50:04.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish is one of such languages and especially interesting in that in complex numbers, all individual numerals are declined:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Matkust-i-n     kolme-en   maa-han.&#xA;travel-IPF-1SG  three-ILL  country-ILL&#xA;&quot;I travelled to three countries.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;Hän      tarvitse-e  kahdeksa-a-tuhat-ta-kolme-a-kymmen-tä-kuut-ta  euro-a.&#xA;he/she   need-3SG    eight-PAR-thousand-three-PAR-ten-PAR-six-PAR   euro-PAR&#xA;&quot;He/She needs eight thousand and thirty-six euro.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;elo+kuu-n      kahde-nte-na-kymmene-nte-nä-viide-nte-nä  päivä-nä&#xA;life+moon-GEN  two-th-ESS-ten-th-ESS-five-th-ESS         day-ESS&#xA;&quot;on twenty-fifth of August&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;1SG&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;3SG&lt;/code&gt; = first/third person singular&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;IPF&lt;/code&gt; = imperfect tense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;ILL&lt;/code&gt; = illative case (for movement towards something)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;PAR&lt;/code&gt; = partitive case (here: to be imagined as &quot;to take some part of all euros there are&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;GEN&lt;/code&gt; = genitive case (for posssession; here: case for the month that the specified day relates to)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;ESS&lt;/code&gt; = essive case (for being in a state; here: case for date specification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T22:39:21.953" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T22:39:21.953" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19311" CreationDate="2016-08-08T22:05:47.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Slavonic languages have complex declension of numerals, both cardinal and ordinal ones. For example, Ukrainian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Add     lessons      to your        fourty-    two     daily        tasks&#xA;Додай   уроки        до своїх       сорока     двох    щоденних     справ&#xA;add+IMP lessons+ACC  to your+PL+GEN fourty+DAT two+DAT daily+PL+GEN task+PL+GEN&#xA;&#xA;IMP = imperative mood&#xA;PL = plural&#xA;GEN = Genitive case&#xA;DAT = Dative case&#xA;ACC = Accusative case&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;fourty-two&lt;/em&gt; even declines into the different case (Dative) than the linked NP (&lt;em&gt;daily tasks&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T22:05:47.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T23:38:02.107" Score="2" ViewCount="914" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've learned to an intermediate reading level Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Classical Arabic. As a foreign language teacher, I'm well aware of current SLA research and the focus on communication and authentic, real-world applications. But these just don't come up, really, with languages that we have only in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, even after several years with these languages, I still have to use a dictionary and think explicitly about grammar when I read a &quot;difficult&quot; author like, say, Tacitus. By comparison, I can read without a dictionary and without explicitly thinking about grammar in Spanish or German, neither of which are my native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me to my question: How fluent is it possible to get (and how can we measure this properly) in reading-only languages like Latin and Greek? Do, and how do, graduate students and informal experts in the languages gain a fluency such that they do not have to use a dictionary very often and do not stop to puzzle out grammar explicitly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13642" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T09:42:08.153" Title="How &quot;fluent&quot; do professional classicists get in reading Latin and Greek? How do they do it?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12856" CreationDate="2016-08-09T00:03:19.417" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;try &lt;a href=&quot;http://lex.sibawayhi.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lex.sibawayhi.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's a little rough but it contains the full text of both Lane and Lisaan al-Arab, in parallel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not designed as a dictionary, i.e. something where you just look up a &quot;word&quot;.  It's a tool for exploring the lexicon.  it only understands roots, and will show you all permutations for a root, so you can examine Eg all words that start with &quot;kt&quot; and ponder whether they share a common semantic kernel - a very old theory in Arabic lexicology.  you need to read the help screen carefully and experiment.  E.g. Lane and the Lisaan pick different roots for some words that have &quot;weak&quot; letters, and I have not yet unified them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T21:04:01.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T21:04:01.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T00:22:01.637" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there research in SLA by graduate students and others who &quot;acquire&quot; a rudimentary understanding of a language primarily for the purpose of reading original academic research and sources in that language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about research in language acquisition for academic-professional purposes, when the goal is not oral or written fluency but solely reading. Any starting point or general reference is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13642" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T00:22:01.637" Title="Research on SLA for &quot;Reading Only&quot;" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T05:25:52.827" Score="1" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the most common differences listed about Pacific Northwest English are phonological in nature, the &lt;em&gt;Mary-merry-marry&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cot-caught&lt;/em&gt; mergers, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious if there are morphological or syntactic differences between PNWE and General American. Specifically, I'm looking for peer-reviewed research describing any, but I'm finding it hard to find articles on PNE that aren't about phonology or are attitude surveys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="10309" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T16:51:06.397" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T20:47:37.467" Title="What is different about Pacific Northwest English, other than vowels?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19316" CreationDate="2016-08-09T09:36:40.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Until fairly recently, pupils in elite schools in European countries began learning Latin and Greek at a very early age, and gained a high level of fluency before going on to university; this included the ability to translate into Latin and Greek (“composition”). At university a large portion of students enrolled for Classics, and a small number of these went on to become professors of Greek and Latin. By this stage they were very fluent indeed. Nowadays this is fairly rare, though I think that the current professors of Classics in places like Cambridge and Oxford still have this kind of background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T09:36:40.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T18:20:05.743" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to plot points on the &quot;Consonants&quot; and &quot;Vowels&quot; charts, as seen in the image below. I will extract each one separately, so they are individual images. Is there a way to make a coordinate system that will align to the image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &quot;Consonants&quot; chart would be a 9x8 graph, and I could draw a point in &quot;n&quot; using (3,7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be best to do this in R, but I am open to other solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u9RF4.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u9RF4.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T18:20:05.743" Title="Plotting Points on an IPA Chart" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19323" CreationDate="2016-08-09T18:35:20.303" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/1970/does-this-language-still-exist-or-is-it-extinct?&quot;&gt;Original post on Language Learning SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out if a language called Thaqovelith still exists or not. It is referenced in a book called &quot;A descriptive phonology of Thaqovelith&quot; published in 1980, so I believe it was not extinct then. I believe it may be a berber language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:50.663" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T03:43:36.603" Title="Thaqovelith: Is this language extinct?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19322" CreationDate="2016-08-09T19:03:43.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is alive enough that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://kab.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqbaylit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt;. It is a dialect of Kabyle Berber indigenously called Taqbaylit ([ˈθɐqβæjlɪθ] if Wiki is to be believed). Shaltz doesn't get more specific than say &quot;Northeast zone&quot; and doesn't name the specific village. (The mapping from speling to pronunciation they give conforms to what I know of Berber phonology; ta-...-t is feminine noun inflection so the root &lt;em&gt;qbayl&lt;/em&gt; is basically the same as the root Kabyle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T19:34:50.027" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T19:34:50.027" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19290" CreationDate="2016-08-09T19:40:32.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Makaton (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makaton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Makaton Language Programme&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.makaton.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Makaton Charity&lt;/a&gt;) combines spoken language with gestures, i.e. the signs or symbols do not replace but supplement spoken language. It was not designed for deaf people but for people who cannot communicate effectively using only speech. (You can find short tutorials and examples on YouTube.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The signs come from or are based on the sign language of the country where Makaton is used, so there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.makaton-deutschland.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;German Makaton&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.makaton.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;French Makaton&lt;/a&gt;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Makaton Charity on the UK has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.makaton.org/aboutMakaton/research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;webpage about relevant research&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more technical note: while many sign languages used by deaf communities have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ISO 639-3 language codes&lt;/a&gt; for use in computing, the Makaton sign languages do not yet have such codes. When I contacted the Makaton Charity in the UK about this in 2014, they were not interested in registering such codes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T19:40:32.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19319" CreationDate="2016-08-09T20:47:37.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally found some information along the lines of what I'm looking for in &lt;a href=&quot;http://gradworks.umi.com/33/70/3370619.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;A corpus-based regional dialect survey of grammatical variation in written Standard American English,&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Jack Grieve's PhD dissertation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grieve used spatial autocorrelation over text corpora from 200 American cities to identify dialectical features. For all findings below, other regions either showed no preference or a preference in the opposite direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a summary of some of his findings relevant to the Northwest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have not contraction&lt;/strong&gt; is relatively common in the Northwest, especially, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not contraction&lt;/strong&gt; is relatively common in the Northwest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pronoun have contraction&lt;/strong&gt; is relatively common in the Northwest, especially Oregon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No large clusters of &lt;strong&gt;pronoun modal contraction&lt;/strong&gt; were found, however &quot;relatively high values&quot; were found in the Northwest (as well as Texas).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Infinitival to&lt;/strong&gt; contraction is relatively common (to a &quot;lesser extent&quot;) in the Northwest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where/in which alternation:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; is more common in the Northwest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Temporal adverbs&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are more likely to be found sentence-initial in the Northwest than embedded in the sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following features were found to cluster in the PNW, but were not globally autocorrelated across the country:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will/shall alternation:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; is relatively more common in the PNW, especially Idaho.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Until/till alternation:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; is relatively common in the PNW, especially Oregon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Auxiliary&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;infinitive splitting&lt;/strong&gt; is more common in the PNW.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers of PNWE are significantly more likely to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use contractions in some situations (but not all); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place temporal adverbs and &lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt; in sentence initial position than within the sentence;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;split auxiliaries and infinitive with adverbs;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and to prefer &quot;where&quot; to &quot;in which,&quot; &quot;will&quot; to &quot;shall,&quot; and &quot;until&quot; to &quot;till.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T20:47:37.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19222" CreationDate="2016-08-10T07:05:56.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some. Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Hobbs, J. R. and Shieber, S. M. (1987). An algorithm for generating quantifier scopings. Computational Linguistics,13(1), 47–55.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Main, M.G. and Benson, D. B. (1983). Denotational semantics for natural language question-answering programs. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 9(1), 11-21.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Simmons, R. F. (1983). Computations from the English. Prentice Hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Schubert, L. K. and Pelletier, F. J. (1982). From English to logic: Context-free computation of ‘conventional’ logical translation. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 8(1), 27–44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13809" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T07:19:29.653" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T07:19:29.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19222" CreationDate="2016-08-10T09:12:48.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Checkout the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ACL&lt;/a&gt; their papers are (nearly?) all available online. Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; to figure out which are the important ones ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9740" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:12:48.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19293" CreationDate="2016-08-10T09:50:15.133" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of “closeness” is actually rather problematic in linguistics. English and French are “close” in the sense that they share a large amount of common vocabulary, but in the sense of genetic relationship the Germanic language English and the Romance language French are only very distantly related, namely through proto-Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Aramaic languages are traditionally divided (from about the 6th century BC onwards) into Eastern and Western Aramaic. Galilean Aramaic belongs to the Western branch and is thus genetically closest to the modern Western Aramaic languages still spoken (we hope, despite all the things that are happening in Syria) in just three villages: Maʿlūla, Baxʿa, and Jubbʿadīn. On the other hand, these modern Western Aramaic languages have been very heavily influenced by Arabic (with regards to vocabulary, but also phonology), unlike the language spoken in Galilee in the first century, which in terms of vocabulary is perhaps closer to less strongly arabicised languages like the Eastern Aramaic of Ṭūr ʿAbdīn in Southern Turkey. So, as I said, it all really depends on what you mean with “close”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:50:15.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-10T16:56:51.070" Score="8" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;One well-known division of Indo-European languages is Centum - Satem. However, my wikipedia-induced understanding is that due to the existence of Tocharian it is at best unclear whether it corresponds to an actual evolution of PIE into two dialects/languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I'm wrong and many serious linguists do consider the Centum - Satem division as corresponding to dialects of PIE? For example on the (striking but maybe naive?) basis of the similarity of the word &quot;five&quot; in Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other binary divisions of Indo-European languages which are considered by serious linguists to correspond to an evolution of PIE into two branches? I'm particularly interested whether anyone serious considers Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian to have had evolved together for a while, perhaps together with other families, but in separation from Centum languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastEditorUserId="13812" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T18:25:51.953" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T16:00:13.877" Title="Proposed binary divisions of Proto-Indo-European" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19334" CreationDate="2016-08-10T20:15:47.297" Score="0" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out what is this in Roman Alphabet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ʔə ʤoʷk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ʔə ˈmɛ ɹə ˌkʰɪn):        seʲ, wʌʦ jɹ̩ ʤɐːb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ˈʔɪ̃ŋ gɫɪʃ mə̃n):            ʔɐ̃͡ɪ mə kʰlaːk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ʔə ˈmɛ ɹə ˌkʰɪn):        jə mĩʲn jə goʷ tʰɪk-tʰɐk ʔɔɫ deʲ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ɐ̃͡ɪ mə kʰlaːk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13815" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T20:54:06.283" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T21:03:08.090" Title="transliterate from IPA to Roman alphabet" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-11T08:40:03.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19333" CreationDate="2016-08-10T20:51:58.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A joke  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(American) Say, what's your job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Englishman) I'm a clerk (&quot;clock&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(American) You mean you go 'tick-tock' all day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Englishman) I'm a clerk (&quot;clock&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The joke about it is that UK &lt;em&gt;clerk&lt;/em&gt; sounds like US &lt;em&gt;clock&lt;/em&gt; (= kʰlaːk), that's probably why it's written in IPA because the joke doesn't work with Roman letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T21:03:08.090" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T21:03:08.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19332" CreationDate="2016-08-10T21:01:30.983" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the centum-satem distinction, nowadays indoeuropeanists usually don't think of it as a &lt;strong&gt;west-east&lt;/strong&gt; dialect division but they rather view the satem palatalisation as an innovation which took place in &lt;strong&gt;central&lt;/strong&gt; IE dialects in opposition to the &lt;strong&gt;peripheral&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;outside&lt;/strong&gt; IE dialects which did not undergo that change. In such a scenario, following the principles of grouping dialects on the basis of &lt;strong&gt;common innovations&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;not common retentions&lt;/strong&gt;, one could only posit an existence of a Central PIE dialect, leaving the outside ones out of the equation.  A binary oppposition of centum-satem, in this shape, is well embraced by modern scholars. It turns out that the central-peripheral version is more flexible and allows to take into account such peculiarities as weird centum lexemes in Slavic, and the great distance between for example Tocharian and Celtic, which in the older view should have belonged to the same dialect.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately one can point multitude of other isoglosses, involving other language changes, which do not necessarilly overlap. This is a thing that proves a task to confidently divide PIE into two dialects very difficult if not impossible. Needless to say one also has to deal with time depth and a fact that division of PIE was not a instant event, that some groups of people left Common PIE speaking communities earlier and some later.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T11:12:13.853" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T11:12:13.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5910" CreationDate="2016-08-11T01:25:22.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may late responding, but I think you were looking for the &quot;Explanatory Style&quot;... Which basically is a category for the sub categories : Optimist, Pessimist or Realist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Positive Polly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Debbie Downer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realistic Rita&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13817" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T05:27:58.693" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T05:27:58.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T05:43:46.713" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine the f0 of two subsequent syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first rises from 200Hz to 300Hz and the second from 300Hz to 400Hz&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other words,  rises are both 100 Hz.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it the case that the first has more perceptual salience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T18:26:15.433" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T18:26:15.433" Title="Perceptual salience of two consecutive syllables" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T05:47:56.427" Score="3" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English speaker and thus, am not sure whether 'erudite language' is putting it right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, a friend of mine stated that he thinks that lots of people, including himself, do not participate in elections, or generally follow the stream of politics-related news because they don't feel capable of understanding the things uttered by politicians and likewise due to unnecessary complex speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He holds the opinion that those who hold positions of power and the media should put things as simple as possible in order to make sure that everyone, including the most uneducated, can follow the current events, understand political decision making and involve themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, just to show how far this is going, said friend didn't know the meaning of the word 'consensus' and declared it unnecessary complex, proposing something like 'agreement' after I told him what consensus means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I tried finding arguments for why we need a broad diversity of words in our language, and why everyone should invest time to educate themselves in that field. Only thing was, I couldn't come up with more than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finding substitutes for 'complex' words might work, yet it would lead to less sophisticated arguments because a substitute is a mere workaround to convey a more profound meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pruning our language will lead to less knowledge, lesser ways to express ourselves and thus, to cultural decline.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet my friend argued that not everyone is smart enough to understand (or learn) erudite language and that in a democracy, everyone should have the opportunity to understand what political decisions are made, and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the political stuff aside, what are better reasons for a broad, complex language? Why don't we circumcise our language until everyone is able to understand everything? Or, to put it in another way, how can I make my friend understand that if he doesn't know a word, it is worth the time to go and fetch a dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13820" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T12:48:27.490" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:09:41.963" Title="Why do we need erudite langage?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19337" CreationDate="2016-08-11T08:46:35.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We hear proportions of frequencies, not absolute differences. In the first case, the proportion 300Hz/200Hz = 1.5; in the second case the proportion 400Hz/300Hz = 1.33. In musical terms, the first proportion is a perfect fifth or quint and the second proportion is a perfect fourth or quart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T16:33:44.223" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T16:33:44.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-11T09:25:31.770" Score="-2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an alternative to the classical &quot;romaji&quot; Pinyin with diacritics, that has the following features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each symbol can be rotated about the square representing its centre, and the rotation/orientation of the character is used to represent tone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not, sure, if this is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was just wondering if anyone has invented a font whose pronunciation and/or tone varies according to some orientation inside some mathematical group theoretical done deal group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your interest, curiosity, knowledge contributions, and answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Not sure if the graphic design stack exchange would be a better place to post this question].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T16:33:31.720" Title="Looking for an alternative non-tonal &quot;wholistic&quot; original Pinyin font" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19340" CreationDate="2016-08-11T16:24:29.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A historical approach to phonetic alphabets, Alexander Bell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Visible Speech&lt;/a&gt;, used rotations systematically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Canadian Aboriginal syllabics&lt;/a&gt; (mentioned in Sumelic's comment) is an example for a script systematically using rotations in practical use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can't do it in an alphabet based on the Latin alphabet, because of pairs of letters like (n, u) or (b, q). The letter &quot;o&quot; is invariant under rotation and not usable in such a font. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA created new letters by rotation, but this is done arbitrarily and without systematic meaning of rotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T16:33:31.720" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T16:33:31.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19347" CreationDate="2016-08-11T17:36:42.410" Score="3" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Thai vocabulary consists of a lot of Pali and Sanskrit words. Their spelling is preserved, but not their pronunciation (so that for example, originally dental and retroflex stops except those both voiced and unaspirated become [tʰ] in Thai). However, in a school-level Thai language class, spelling is sometimes taught based on the lost distinction so that students understand consonant combination and redundancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember being taught that, in a Pali or Sanskrit word, a succession of two stops with the same articulation is either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;geminated unaspirated stops (eg [pp] and [tt]), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an unaspirated stop followed by an aspirated counterpart (eg [ppʰ] and [ttʰ]) like in 'buddha' (enlightened) and 'yuddha' (war), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but never&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;geminated aspirated stops (eg [pʰpʰ] and [tʰtʰ]), nor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an aspirated stop followed by an unaspirated counterpart (eg [pʰp] and [tʰt])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has come up in a discussion between my friend and I, both of whom are native Thai and remember being taught the same thing. And then we question it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How true is that in Pali and Sanskrit? Are there counterexamples? Could you please point us to an authoritative source regarding this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1968" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T20:36:06.543" Title="Gemination in Sanskrit and Pali" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19401" CreationDate="2016-08-11T17:43:41.643" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly many apologies if this question is not appropriate for this forum; I am a mathematician and a mathematics education researcher. However, I am posting on this forum because I am doing research into the nature of written mathematics and good a grasp school students have of it. What I am looking to do is compare a sample of students' writing to the standards of professional formal mathematical writing. I was wondering whether anyone can help me identify a linguistic research methodology that accomplish this. I am aware that there indeed a method called the comparative method in linguistics but from what I could see this was to compare two different languages. I was hoping that someone could suggest something (possibly a variant of the comparative method) that I can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks for your help in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13825" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T16:47:19.893" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:47:19.893" Title="Comparative Methodology" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2016-08-11T19:20:44.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern Sanskrit and Hindi &quot;khand&quot; (the &quot;and&quot; is pronounced as the &quot;und&quot; of hundred) means a part or a division. In India the names of  many regions (both contemporary as well as ancient), have the word &quot;khand&quot; as a suffix, eg Uttara_khand is a state in India..(lit meaning northern division) . In India Khand is rarely seen in the name of a city or village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Khan&quot; (the &quot;an&quot; is pronounced as the &quot;an&quot; in want) in modern Hindi means a mine (like a coal-mine).. so there is an association with digging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know if the words Khand and Khan come from a  common older root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13826" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T19:20:44.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19343" CreationDate="2016-08-11T20:36:06.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is most likely true. Voicing and aspiration does not contrast before an obstruent (they are written with the same voicing as the following C, and are written as unaspirated). It's most likely that &lt;em&gt;Buddha&lt;/em&gt; etc did not have two releases, but we can't tell about breathy vocal fold abduction during the closure of the first consonant, since that requires physiological investigation. Sanskrit is described in Whitney's &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit grammar&lt;/em&gt; which is considered authoritative. Actually authoratative information would come from the Shikshas, especially the Pratishakhyas (composed when the language was still spoken), but it isn't trivial to interpret ancient phonetic descriptions. However, the rules of sandhi promulgated by the ancient grammarians are consistent with the standard spelling (e.g. &lt;em&gt;buddha&lt;/em&gt;), evaluated as phonemic statements. For Pali, I think the standard work is Charles Duroiselle's &lt;em&gt;A Practical Grammar of the Pāli Language&lt;/em&gt;: there does not appear to be a comparable ancient indigenous source of phonetic description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few counterexamples in the texts, and Whitney mentions Rg Vedic &lt;em&gt;akhkhalī, jajhjhatī&lt;/em&gt;. The generalization that you offer is correct as far as it goes but for Sanskrit insufficient, since one can also not find aspirates before any obstruent, so *&lt;em&gt;akhṣa&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;doghdhum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T20:36:06.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19351" CreationDate="2016-08-11T23:08:16.857" Score="0" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;strong&gt;ypologistís&lt;/strong&gt; (Greek for computer) derived from, or related to, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;apologeisthai &quot;to speak in one's defense,&quot; from apologos &quot;an account,&#xA;  story,&quot; &#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=a&amp;amp;p=36&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etomonline&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have now been informed by Janus Bahs Jacquet that the Ancient Greek word was &lt;strong&gt;hypologistēs&lt;/strong&gt;.  A bit of searching gave me the meaning of logistes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;auditor or accountant who scrutinizes the accounts of other officials&#xA;  who have authority over public funds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6iQSDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA175&amp;amp;dq=logist%C4%93s&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjW5L7AzrrOAhUlL8AKHYTlDKQQ6AEILzAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=logist%C4%93s&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics&#xA;By Fred Dycus Miller&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what was the &lt;strong&gt;hypologistes&lt;/strong&gt;?  An underling of the logistes, a clerk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does it derive from logike and ultimately from logos?  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=l&amp;amp;p=26&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Etomonline&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9732" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T14:54:11.297" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T14:54:11.297" Title="What is the etymology of ypologistís (Greek, computer)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14772" CreationDate="2016-08-12T00:42:21.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling Aodhán reflects the Classical Irish pronunciation of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[e:ðˠɑ:nˠ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This evolved into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[i:ɑ:nˠ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in northern dialects and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[e:gˠɑ:nˠ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in southern dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical Irish the digraph &quot;dh&quot; conveyed [ð], however this sound was lost in everyday speech by the 14th century (although still taught to Bards in their seven year training so they could preserve the meter of older poems). In the vast majority of cases &quot;dh&quot; merged with &quot;gh&quot;, that is [ð] was replaced with [ɣ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were some words however where this was not the case, such as Aodhán, Cródha and Díoghras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13828" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T00:42:21.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2016-08-12T07:05:38.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example from an Australian Aboriginal language is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murrinh-patha_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Murriny-patha&lt;/a&gt;, which might be glossed as &lt;em&gt;language good&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also referring to language families but not languages, we have examples like &lt;em&gt;Langue d'oc&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;Langue d'oïl&lt;/em&gt; (referring to the language groups' respective words for &quot;yes&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T07:05:38.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19348" CreationDate="2016-08-12T07:52:42.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Modern Greek word was formed from Classical ὑπολογίζομαι &quot;to take something into account&quot;, which of course comes from λόγος.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.77:4:77.LSJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.77:4:77.LSJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T08:01:45.227" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T08:01:45.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19348" CreationDate="2016-08-12T12:50:50.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;счёт = counting, account&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;подсчёт = (under + counting) calculation, final summation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is natural that final calculation has the &quot;under-&quot; prefix because when you sum up things, you write the result under the summed up data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T12:50:50.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T14:27:29.350" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask me if It's possible become fluent in a language without study it. When You are 1/2  years old, you learn a languages without studying it. You need just to listen and listen.  So, Is it possible learn a language without study it and just read and listening it?&#xA;Examples, I'm 13 and I'm studying English for 4 years. I started to learn it watching cartoon, Anyway I studied it in school and I had some basics (like verb to have, to be, subject and a few things). &#xA;Anyway, Is it possible learn a language without study it when you don't know anything in it? How to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13830" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T14:27:29.350" Title="Become fluent in a language without study it" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-18T04:39:05.143" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-13T05:01:38.007" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are all pro-forms the same in that they have to have antecedents and postcedents in the conversation to have any meaning? For example, the word &quot;it&quot; derives its meaning from a noun located either just before or just after the pronoun &quot;it&quot;. Also, the word &quot;Yes&quot; is a pro-sentence, and it derives its meaning from a statement just said, for example, &quot;Pizza is delicious.&quot; and then someone says &quot;Yeah.&quot;. Would the person's &quot;Yeah.&quot; mean &quot;Yeah, pizza is delicious.&quot;, or is the meaning of a pro-form derived from something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13843" OwnerDisplayName="GFD1998" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T00:08:04.100" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T04:04:37.753" Title="Do all pro-forms need to have antecedents?" Tags="&lt;deixis&gt;&lt;pro-forms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19338" CreationDate="2016-08-13T12:20:57.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both you and your friend are framing in terms of &quot;simplicity&quot; vs. &quot;complexity&quot; what's really a slightly different issue, etymological transparency vs. etymological opacity. Or, in the most basic terms, native vs. borrowed. Most people speak a language that has a layer of &quot;erudite&quot; vocabulary borrowed from the language of a more influential, and usually &quot;older&quot;, culture: depending on where you are in the world, it's usually one of Latin, Chinese, or Arabic. This means there are certain lexemes, and sometimes a certain amount of grammar, that you have to learn from scratch on top of your native language if you are to understand this &quot;erudite&quot; layer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, most speakers of English can break down the word &quot;independence&quot; as far as &quot;depend&quot;, which is still a borrowed &quot;erudite&quot; word; speakers of Romance languages have it easier, since the Latin root &lt;code&gt;-pend-&lt;/code&gt; is still transparent to them as meaning &quot;hang&quot;, in the most everyday sense, and so &lt;em&gt;indépendance&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;indipendenza&lt;/em&gt; still discernibly contain the metaphor of no longer &quot;hanging off&quot; of something (over a presumed cliff).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the solution — if you choose to think of this as a problem — is not in &quot;pruning&quot; the language, but in nativising its vocabulary. It's already been done in a lot of languages; the German &lt;em&gt;Unabhängigkeit&lt;/em&gt;, or the Russian &lt;em&gt;nezavisimost'&lt;/em&gt;, are exact translations, or &quot;calques&quot;, of the Latin &lt;em&gt;independentia&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;non-off-hang-ing-ness&quot;. That said, both Russian and German still contain a lot of Latin vocabulary, although much less that English. Very few languages have gone the way of near-complete nativisation, Icelandic being one famous example. It's hard to tell whether it did or did not lead to any greater political awareness, but it clearly involved no &quot;pruning&quot; of the language — if anything, it was the opposite, a massive infusion of new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point must also be raised: political vocabulary is essentially jargon, no different in principle from the jargon of seafaring or video gaming. By which I mean, it developed as a form of communication between people with specific shared experiences, trading transparency of meaning for speed, efficiency, and not the least, the ability to identify with the group. The reason we have Latinate political terms such as &quot;consensus&quot; was that, a long time ago, it was part of a jargon shared by people who (1) knew Latin and (2) had political phenomena as part of their everyday experience; then it was handed down generations to people who didn't necessarily know Latin anymore, but for whom a certain amount of Latin vocabulary came with the job requirements (as well as general social status). It's understandable that they weren't in any way motivated to abandon this vocabulary in favour of something more transparent to the less educated populace — unless they were of a specific type of political creed, nationalist or &quot;national revivalist&quot;. Movements of that sort in several different countries have in fact affected many languages, and in a generally positive way at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they were dedicated movements. By default, it's still up to the individual speaker whether they feel it necessary to expand their vocabulary with Latinate (or, say, Arabesque) political jargon. Not everyone has equal opportunities here, as regards time investment and the availability of knowledge (though that's less of an issue now that we have the internet). So your friend has a point. &quot;Complex&quot; speech isn't necessarily always inherenty valuable; often it exists just because a relatively small circle of people has found it convenient. However, you can't just decree a sweeping language reform, or manufacture the political will and popular support for it out of thin air. It's still mere reality of life that if you want to understand politicians, you might have to take time to learn new words. I'm not sure, however, that this is one of the &quot;better&quot; reasons, or that such better reasons even exist, beyond the most basic &quot;knowing more is better than knowing less&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T12:20:57.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-13T17:58:35.147" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computer scientist using Stanford NLP for extracting a Semantic Graph from plain text.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Through this tool I am already getting the &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/u/dep/all.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;universal dependencies&lt;/a&gt; but now I want to get all the possible types of indirect objects through the &lt;code&gt;nmod&lt;/code&gt; relation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian we distinguish if the indirect complement is either &lt;strong&gt;motion towards a place&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. I am going &lt;em&gt;to Paris&lt;/em&gt;), a &lt;strong&gt;“term” complement&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. I gave the book &lt;em&gt;to Mary&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;placement&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. It was held &lt;em&gt;in Rome&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;time&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. It was held &lt;em&gt;in 1999&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;motion from a place&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. I am coming &lt;em&gt;from Switzerland&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;mean complement&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. travelling &lt;em&gt;by bike&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;Agent Object&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. It was caused &lt;em&gt;by a tornado&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an automatic tool through which I can distinguish such elements programmatically (e.g. via Java / Stanford NLP) by using only the verb alongside with the preposition and some information from the object?   Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13839" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T18:13:32.710" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T18:13:32.710" Title="Using (e.g.) Stanford NLP for retrieving specific “indirect” objects" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19367" CreationDate="2016-08-13T20:00:16.230" Score="-3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the English language, or any other language for that matter provide the flexibility to add or remove new alphabets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13842" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T12:34:20.717" Title="Can a new alphabet be created and added to the English language?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-08-14T21:13:49.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2016-08-13T20:00:24.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bahasa Melayu (Malay); Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T20:00:24.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19358" CreationDate="2016-08-13T20:09:04.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no necessary connection between languages and the technology (called 'writing') which is used to represent them. Some languages have conventionally been written in several different scripts: any language &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be written in any script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T22:18:27.920" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T22:18:27.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19322" CreationDate="2016-08-13T20:52:25.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/kab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;According to Ethnolgue&lt;/a&gt;, the language called Thaqovelith is also known as Kabyle, and has around 5,586,000 speakers worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12996" LastEditorUserId="12996" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T00:29:43.437" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:29:43.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19354" CreationDate="2016-08-13T23:24:09.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;yes and no. a proform by definition must refer to something else, but that &quot;something else&quot; need not be linguistic.  For example, Joe says something crazy.  I point my index finger to my temple and swirl it (meaning,  that's nutty).  Sally points at me and says &quot;he's right&quot; or &quot;that's right&quot; or similar.  I haven't &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt; anything, but everybody understands Sally's point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T23:24:09.737" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19354" CreationDate="2016-08-14T00:15:53.240" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most pro-forms will denote things which are more explicitly discussed in the conversation, but some do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is the English word &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, which (IMO) &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/298405/59258&quot;&gt;should be analysed as a pro-preposition&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; stands in for a temporal phrase, such as &lt;em&gt;at this moment in time&lt;/em&gt;, but only rarely would a speaker also refer to that moment with a full prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:15:53.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-14T06:12:57.097" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that Spanish phonology is quite similar to that of Japanese and that their syllable structures are both relatively simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say--for instance, that one were to write a Spanish passage with Japanese characters in the best way possible and the passage were read aloud by a native Japanese speaker unaware of the Spanish language. How well could this be understood by a native Spanish speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13845" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T07:01:17.913" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T07:01:17.913" Title="To what extent can Japanese Kana be adapted to the Spanish language and be intelligible?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-14T08:05:36.323" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does the grammar and phonology of a language affect poetry in this language? Can it encourage using particular rhyming schemes and meters while making other rhyming schemes and meters impossible? It would be nice to see some real examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13846" LastEditorUserId="13846" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T10:47:19.780" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T10:47:19.780" Title="How does the grammar and phonology of a language affect poetry in this language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-15T07:39:56.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19394" CreationDate="2016-08-14T11:48:12.093" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in the US, many, maybe most, native English speakers spell &quot;a lot&quot; as one word until taught otherwise. Why is this such a common phenomenon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several pieces of (non-written based) evidence that it should be analyzed as two words, including most significantly that it can be interrupted by &quot;whole,&quot; or, less commonly, &quot;great, (n) awful.&quot; The same phenomenon doesn't seem to happen for parallel constructions, e.g. nobody seems to analyze &quot;abunch, afew&quot; as single words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T21:50:17.973" Title="Why do native English speakers analyze &quot;a lot&quot; as one word?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19358" CreationDate="2016-08-14T12:34:20.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, yes, in practice no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user base of written English is so large and dispersed that any changes to the English writing system (including even minor spelling reforms without touching the alphabet) are almost impossible to implement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have always been tris to change the basis of English writing, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Shavian alphabet&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the International Teaching Alphabet (ITA)&lt;/a&gt;, but none of them are going to take off at a larger scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T12:34:20.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19369" CreationDate="2016-08-15T06:07:48.673" Score="3" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess this is really a difference of stress (though I confess, as a non-native, I barely perceive it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obama lives in the White House (&lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt; has primary stress?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I live in the white house on this street. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whitehouse is the Chief Surgeon here. (Same as white house in sentence two?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T14:17:04.427" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T23:53:00.257" Title="What is the phonetic difference between &quot;White House&quot; and &quot;white house&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19368" CreationDate="2016-08-15T11:06:49.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right to say that the difference between these is one of stress. &quot;White House&quot; has a single stress on the first syllable, &quot;white house&quot; has an equal stress on both syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistically the difference is that &quot;White House&quot; is a compound, while &quot;white house&quot; is an adjective-plus-noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T11:06:49.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19368" CreationDate="2016-08-15T23:53:00.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a difference in stress, adjective 2white 1house versus compound 1white3house, but it's also a difference in rhythm.  The adjective 2 1 construction is 2 measures versus the 1 measure of the compound 1 3 noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;o BA ma | LIVES in the | WHITEhouse  (3 measures for the compound)  &#xA;o BA ma | LIVES in the | WHITE | HOUSE (4 measures for the adjective)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T23:53:00.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T08:35:00.570" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand Silverstein approach to ideological change. To my understanding he claims speakers are aware of the social and power relations reflected in the language usage and structure, and alter it according to ideological changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When speaker change his language usage due to ideological change, does that mean he necessarily has to be consciously aware of the power relations reflected by the previous usage, or his new ideologies can alter the language usage in a more 'subconscious' level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9857" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T08:35:00.570" Title="Question about Michael Silverstein and Linguistics Ideology" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19378" CreationDate="2016-08-16T09:28:16.557" Score="-1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a tool I could use, like a macro or something, that changes a Cyrillic orthography to IPA (and vice-versa) according to my specifications? (it's for a non-Slavic minority language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a programmer, but this strikes me as a simple thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2016-08-16T13:08:53.707" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T14:53:29.340" Title="Resources to switch between alphabets" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T10:17:58.807" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I know that F0 need not be present for pitch to perceived  (at least for men!) because the telephone filters out frequencies &amp;lt;300Hz (at least in the 90s, maybe there have been innovations in the filtering technique).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how is F0 expressed over the phone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:35:36.073" Title="How can listeners perceive male f0 on the telephone" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19375" CreationDate="2016-08-16T11:35:36.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental forms the basis for the harmonic series: if F0 is 100 Hz, then harmonics are present at 200, 300, and so on. Humans can 'recover' (perhaps 'hallucinate') the original fundamental from the presence of these higher-frequency harmonics. This is also true for non-voice sounds. Here is a related &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T11:35:36.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19374" CreationDate="2016-08-16T13:03:05.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As said by the commenters, the task is not that straightforward because there is no 1:1 correspondence between Cyrillic and the IPA symbols depicting the corresponding sounds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This holds both for the usage of Cyrillic as a writing system for various language and even the translation of Cyrillic to IPA within one language, because most, if not all alphabetical systems are not fully phonetic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And even within IPA itself there are problems, such as phonological varieties or the IPA inventar not being perfectly applicable for the Russian language (see comments), you'd have to decide on your own whether IPA suits your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a little effort, you could either build a converter based on phonological rules (but then specific to a language, not to an alphabet) - this would be linguistically better motivated and fully productive, thus stable against rare words and forms - or one that retrieves the IPA transcription from an external resource, e.g. Wiktionary (this would be easier to implement without linguistic knowledge, but is dependent on the Wiki coverage for the language you are concerned about, which might cause difficulties with compunds, inflected forms or rare words, although I find it in general a great resource).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Both, however, requires some programming skills. You could check whether there is something similar or at least parts of it floating around on the internet - I am sure there is at least someone who has attempted to crawl and process Wiktionary, maybe there is even something for the language you are interested in that might point in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T13:03:05.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19374" CreationDate="2016-08-16T13:33:39.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your additional comments I see that you want to have some LaTeX input that can be rendered in two ways: Cyrillic orthography and IPA. I suggest the following approach: Design some LaTeX macros, one Macro for each possible pair (Cyrillic letter(s), IPA representation). There will be easy cases and complicated ones. Then use some switches to the macros to render them in the fashion you want to have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more in-depth advice on designing the LaTeX macros, ask a question of the TeX stackexchange &lt;a href=&quot;http://tex.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://tex.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T14:53:29.340" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T14:53:29.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-16T13:45:57.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt; it is an arealic feature: Common in the South and Centre, but virtually unknown in the North. For survey maps on contemporary colloquial German, see these pages in &lt;em&gt;Atlas der Detuschen Alltagssprache&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/artikelvorname/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Atlas  zur  deutschen  Alltagssprache&lt;/a&gt; (articles and first names)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/artikelnachname/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Atlas  zur  deutschen  Alltagssprache&lt;/a&gt; (articles and last names)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T09:54:08.477" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T09:54:08.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T14:10:08.597" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;As each language can be said to have an &quot;inventory&quot; of pitch movements which are felicitous (?) or anyway possible, I wonder what sequences of pitch movements characterize English (but not e.g. French or vice-versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T15:44:20.133" Title="Pitch movements in English" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T21:51:36.123" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm training my american bunched  r sound and I'd really need someone to help me solve my linguistic issues.&#xA;1) should I feel every part of my tongue tight or just the back sides are enough?&#xA;2) If I have to feel my tongue tight everywhere should my tongue tip keep low or I can slightly raise it? It is pretty tough for me to keep my tongue tip tight without raising it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13860" LastEditorUserId="13860" LastEditDate="2016-08-16T23:56:36.613" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T23:56:36.613" Title="Tongue position issues in the American bunched r sound" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19384" CreationDate="2016-08-16T23:53:13.453" Score="2" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having some practice with American English sounds and I don't understand why some native speakers seem to add a schwa after vowel sounds. For example the word &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/user-772841178/9-the-american-english-short-vowel-sounds-ae-e-v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; lesson on &lt;a href=&quot;http://pronuncian.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pronuncian.com&lt;/a&gt;(about short vowel sounds) as /kæət/ and &lt;em&gt;tip&lt;/em&gt; as /tɪəp/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's another issue: while describing the different sounds they pronounce the æ sound as /æə/ and so it sounds pretty like a dipthong. Could someone help me make everything clear please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13860" LastEditorUserId="13860" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T07:34:44.593" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T07:34:44.593" Title="ə after vowels and dipthongs and pronunciation of æ" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19382" CreationDate="2016-08-17T00:50:40.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the difference in tongue position between the  /æ/ of &quot;cat&quot; and the following /t/.  The /t/ phoneme of English has neutral vowel color -- it's not palatalized, velarized, or rounded.  In pronunciation, how do you get from the palatal vowel /æ/ to the neutral /t/, at the end of very same syllable?  You have to (1) neutralize the /æ/ to a nonpalatal vowel, (2) palatalize the /t/, or (3) insert a glide reflecting the change in tongue position going from palatal to nonpalatal position.  It's just mechanical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various languages or dialects of English make different choices among (1)-(3).  You're hearing (3).  I think other English dialects choose (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T00:50:40.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19382" CreationDate="2016-08-17T04:19:16.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a dialect feature which is becoming more general in American English. You probably won't find it as much in Minnesota and North Dakota, compared to the South, and it's more frequent with younger speakers. It is probably related to general vocalic bulking-up, where &quot;long&quot; vowels are all phonetically diphthong (&quot;seat&quot; [sɪjt], &quot;slake&quot; [slɛjk].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her pronunciations of citation vowels, &quot;ɪ&quot; etc, the diphthongization is very noticeable. This is because the only monophthong in final position is [ə] and possible [ɑ] for some speakers – it takes a trained phonetician to say [ɪ] and not [ɪə]. I also think that she hyperarticulates a bit when she says e.g. &quot;cat&quot; as an example, which makes diphthongization more pronounced (compared to her pronunciation of words in connected speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T04:19:16.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19387" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19389" CreationDate="2016-08-17T09:25:15.853" Score="2" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for the difference between German &lt;em&gt;dass&lt;/em&gt;-Sätze (which are in the indicative mood) and French &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;-sentences (which are in the subjunctive mood)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My German understanding is far better than the French one. As far as I understand, it is usual in French to put a verb in subjunctive mood after &lt;em&gt;que.&lt;/em&gt; In German it will be the same in case we have indirect speech, but in other cases the &lt;strong&gt;tense&lt;/strong&gt; comes before the &lt;strong&gt;mood&lt;/strong&gt;. For example (correct me if I am wrong) we have in German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich denke dass du da bist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In french the &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; verb should be in subjunctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I know that there are some fundamental differences between the subjunctive mood in these languages. For example in French we have a separate conditional conjugation, whereas in German we use “Konjunktiv II”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13863" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T15:35:35.787" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T08:56:27.933" Title="About Subjunctive/Konjunctive" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19387" CreationDate="2016-08-17T09:43:34.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the reason for the difference […]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the subjunctive for indirect speech in German is dying out. Conservative grammar books will probably still require that the subjunctive be used for all indirect speech (“Ich denke, dass du da &lt;strong&gt;seist&lt;/strong&gt;.”), while modern ones loosen the criteria in cases where the indirect speech is introduced with a &lt;em&gt;dass&lt;/em&gt; or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will still find the subjunctive be used for indirect speech in newspapers and similar, but in spoken language it is almost extinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T09:43:34.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19387" CreationDate="2016-08-17T15:22:43.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;French &lt;strong&gt;subjunctive&lt;/strong&gt; is usually triggered by certain kinds of verbs that require their complement to be in subjunctive but also by certain conjunctions; one could establish four classes of triggers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;verbes de &lt;strong&gt;volonté&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;: verbs expressing wishes, e.g. (&lt;em&gt;Je veux que tu m'ENTENDES&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I want you to LISTEN to me&lt;/em&gt;))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;verbes des &lt;strong&gt;sentiments&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;: verbs expressing subjective thoughts, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Il est une tragédie qu'il PARTE&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;It is a tragedy that he LEAVES&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Je suis content que tu SOIS mon fils&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I am glad that you ARE my son&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;verbes de la &lt;strong&gt;balance&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;: verbs like &lt;em&gt;penser&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;to think&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;être sur&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;to be sure&lt;/em&gt;) etc., depending on how likely you consider the proposition to be true: &lt;em&gt;Je ne pense pas qu'elle AIT un chien, mais je ne suis pas sur&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I don't think that she HAS a dog, but I am not sure&lt;/em&gt;), but &lt;em&gt;Mon père ne croit pas qu'elle a A un chien parce qu'il ne l'a jamais vu&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;My father doesn't believe that she HAS a dog because he has never seen it&lt;/em&gt;, indicative instead of subjunctive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;certain &lt;strong&gt;conjunctions&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Mon frère regarde la télé avant qu'il AILLE au lit&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;My brother watches TV before he GOES to bed&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Ma copine travaille quoiqu'elle SOIT en congé&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;My friend works although she IS in vacation&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;strong&gt;indirect speech&lt;/strong&gt; works similar as in English: For present tense, &lt;strong&gt;imperfective&lt;/strong&gt; is used; if the speech event is in the past, &lt;strong&gt;time shift&lt;/strong&gt; occurs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This results in the state that the mood used for indirect speech depends on the verb in the main clause; if it is one of the subjunctive triggers (like &lt;em&gt;Il pense que...&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He says that...&lt;/em&gt;) it will be in subjunctive, but for all others (like &lt;em&gt;Il dit que...&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He says that...&lt;/em&gt;)) imperfective mood, i.e. no special indication of indirect speech (with the exception of time shift).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;strong&gt;Konjunktiv 1&lt;/strong&gt; (not to be confused with Konjunktiv 2, see below) is only&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; used for &lt;strong&gt;indirect speech&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. reports of what someone said (or wrote): &lt;em&gt;Er sagt, er SEI der neue Nachbar&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He says that he IS the new neighbour&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Sie fragte, ob das ein Problem SEI&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;She asked whether this WAS a problem&lt;/em&gt;)).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning &lt;strong&gt;tense&lt;/strong&gt;, you can't really say that &quot;tense comes before mood&quot; because the Konj1 mood also knows different tenses (however only compound tenses: &lt;em&gt;Der Pfarrer sagt, er HABE darauf GEHOFFT&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;The priest says he HAD HOPED for it&lt;/em&gt;)), so the mood will not be supressed by tense if this is what you meant by &quot;tense comes before mood&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @ˈvʀ̩ʦl̩ˌpʀm̩ft said, Konjunktiv 1 occurs &lt;strong&gt;rarely in spoken language&lt;/strong&gt;, there it is usually replaced by Konjunktiv 2 with &lt;em&gt;würde&lt;/em&gt; (see below) or, most of the time, simply indicative (&lt;em&gt;Peter sagt, dass er uns HILFT&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Peter sagt, dass er uns HELFE&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;Peter says that he helps us&lt;/em&gt;), but in written language (especially newspapers), it is good style to do it to emphasise that what is reported is not the speaker's/writer's belief but only what was said and there is no judgement made about whether this is actually true or not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are contexts where this emphasising doesn't make that much sense, as in your example sentence &lt;em&gt;Ich denke, dass du da bist&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I think that you are there&lt;/em&gt;) where it is automatically clear that this is what you believe (because this is what the sentences explicitely says) so it would be weird to indicate this is just what someone else thinks but not your own thought, because obviously you do believe that the addressee is there so it is more natural to just use indicative.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you were to say &lt;em&gt;Ich sagte, dass er da SEI&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I said that he WAS there&lt;/em&gt;) however, Konj1 is somewhat more normal because this is now again just a report of what was said and it might for example be that you lied, i.e. that you don't necessarily believe the complement to be true. So you might want to use Konj1 instead of indicative here to indicate this is just what you said, but then again (esp. in colloquial speech) this could be interpreted like the complement was actually not true (because if it was, it would have been clearer by you to express this truth by using indicative, and Konj1 often sounds a bit like you didn't believe the claim to be true) - it's a little difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb I would say that more formal, written language requires Konj1 for all uses of indirect speech, and this is what you actually find in newspapers (especially there), so the form does have a regular use for indirect speech. But there are exceptions to its usage (esp. in the case of &lt;em&gt;denken&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;to think&lt;/em&gt;), indicative or Konj2 often fits better), and in colloquial speech, Konj1 is almost extinct or at least weird to say and replaced by indicative or Konj2 with &lt;em&gt;würde&lt;/em&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;strong&gt;Konjunktiv 2&lt;/strong&gt; is used for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;irrealis&lt;/strong&gt; in&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;conditionals, both in the antecedent and in the consequent (&lt;em&gt;Wenn Robert das SÄHE, WÄRE er stolz auf dich&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;If Robert SAW this, he WOULD BE proud of you&lt;/em&gt;))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;improbable or irreal consequences (&lt;em&gt;Er fuhr so schnell, dass er fast einen Unfall gebaut HÄTTE&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He drove so fast he almost MADE an accident&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;Wir haben zu spät bestellt, als dass das Paket noch rechtzeitig ANKÄME&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;We ordered to late for the package TO ARRIVE in time&lt;/em&gt;))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;irreal comparisons (&lt;em&gt;Es fühlt sich an, als HÄTTE ich das alles schonmal erlebt&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;It feels like I HAD already experienced all this before&lt;/em&gt;))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;propositions that you are unsure about (&lt;em&gt;Es könnte sein, dass er schon gegangen ist&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;It MIGHT BE that he already left&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;WÜRDE das denn funktionieren?&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;Would that even work?&lt;/em&gt;))  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;politeness&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Ich HÄTTE gern ein Glas Wasser&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I WOULD LIKE to have a glass of water&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;KÖNNTEN Sie mir bitte helfen&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;WOULD you please help me&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Der Bericht WÄRE jetzt fertig&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;The report is complete now&lt;/em&gt;, you might hear this for example a submissive secretary not wanting to disturb the boss))  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;replacing Konjunktiv 1&lt;/strong&gt; when&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the latter is identical to indicative (&lt;em&gt;Sie sagen, sie HABEN keine Angst&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;They say that they HAVE no fear&lt;/em&gt;, could be both indicative or Konj1)) to make clear again it is only a report and not a necessary truth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or when you express your doubt in what was said (&lt;em&gt;Sie behauptet, das GINGE nicht, aber ich glaube ihr nicht so recht&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;She claims that this DOESN'T work, but I don't really believe her&lt;/em&gt;))  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that regular Konj2 is often replaced by the forms with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;würde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;er KÄME&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;er WÜRDE KOMMEN&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;he CAME&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;he WOULD COME&lt;/em&gt;) especially in colloqial speech&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, but also when Konj2 is identical to preterite (*Wenn das STIMMTE (= &lt;em&gt;If it WERE true&lt;/em&gt; (Konj2) or = &lt;em&gt;If it WAS true&lt;/em&gt; (past tense))).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly as with Konj1, if you want to use Konj2 in past, you need the &lt;strong&gt;compound forms&lt;/strong&gt;, here with &lt;em&gt;würde&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hätte&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Wenn ich genug Geld BESÄßE, FLÖGE ich nach Mallorca&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;If I OWNED enough money, I WOULD FLY to Mallorca&lt;/em&gt;) vs. &lt;em&gt;Wenn ich genug Geld BESESESN HÄTTE, WÄRE ich nach Mallorca GEFLOGEN&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;If I HAD OWNED enough money, I WOULD HAVE FLOWN to Mallorca&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Meine Freundin dachte, es LIEFE gut&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;My friend thought it WORKED well&lt;/em&gt;) vs. &lt;em&gt;Meine Freundin dachte, es WÄRE gut GELAUFEN&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;My friend thought it HAD WORKED well&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But again, I wouldn't say that &quot;tense comes before mood&quot; because a different tense doesn't make the conjunctive disappear. (I'm still not sure if this is what you meant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;comparison&lt;/strong&gt;, this means that there is some overlap, but the distribution is a bit different:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French uses subjunctive in the context of certain triggers, often verbs expressing personal thoughts, wishes, etc., but also certain conjunctions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French uses (analogously to English) indicative (with time shift for speech events in the past) to express indirect speech, as long as the sentence does not already require subjunctive, which means that some indirect speech uses (usually when something was said) go with indicicative and some (usually when personal thoughts, feelings etc. are the context) with subjunctive.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German has a partition between Konjunitv 1 for indirect speech (both reports of what someone said and reports of what someone believes or hopes etc., but not for personal opinions like &lt;em&gt;I regret that...&lt;/em&gt;) and Konjunktiv 2 for irrealis or similar meanings, with some exceptions when forms are morphologically ambiguous in tense/mood or when indirect speech and irrealis mix up (e.g. when a proposition that is reported to have been said is believed to be false by the reporter such as in &lt;em&gt;They think that... but I don't think they are right&lt;/em&gt;, Konj2 can be used instead of Konj1). However, indicative often takes over the meaning of Konj1 especially in colloquial speech.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French subjunctive and German indicative have similar meaning when a context where French requires subjunctive and German does not requie conjunctive (e.g. &lt;em&gt;I regret that...&lt;/em&gt;) and when indirect speech is expreseed by subjuncitve in French (given that there is a trigger verb) and German indivative is used instead of Konj1 (mostly in colloquial speech).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French subjunctive and German Konj1 can have similar meaning in indirect speech involving subjective thoughts (like &lt;em&gt;He thinks that it was unfair&lt;/em&gt;), but French subjuncitve is used where German Konj1 would not be used (e.g. when reporting subjective feelings) and German Konj1 is used where French would use indicative (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;He says that...&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French subjunctive and German Konj2 can have similar meaning when expressing irreal statements (like &lt;em&gt;He thought that it would be a good idea but it really wasn't&lt;/em&gt;), but French subjunctive is not always translateable with Konj2 (especially where French subjunctive is required due to conjunctions, which are never triggers of conjunctive in German) and on the other hand Konj2 is used for more kinds of meanings (especially around irrealis) than French subjunctive is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footnotes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; apart from a few special and usually conventionalised, unproductive uses for wishes (&lt;em&gt;Lang lebe der König&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;Long live the king&lt;/em&gt;)) or ancient-sounding recipes (&lt;em&gt;Man nehme drei Eier&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;= Take three eggs&lt;/em&gt;))  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &quot;Real&quot; Konj2 is in spoken language even rarer than preterite, which is also as good as extinct in spoken language, but for preterite there are at least some words where pretierite is still perferred over (or equally preferred as) perfect tense, such as &lt;em&gt;Ich dachte&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Ich habe gedacht&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I thought&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Ich meinte&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Ich habe gemeint&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;I meant&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;Es ging nicht&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Es ist nicht gegangen&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;It didn't  work&lt;/em&gt;), but in spoken language you wouldn't use the Konj2 forms &lt;em&gt;Er dächte&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He would think&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Er meinte&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He would mean&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;Er ginge&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;He would go&lt;/em&gt;), but the compound forms &lt;em&gt;Er würde denken&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Er würde meinen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Er würde gehen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases of usage mostly taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjonctif_(franz%C3%B6sisch)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konjunktiv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; comparison, example sentences and additional comments by my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T08:56:27.933" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T08:56:27.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19380" CreationDate="2016-08-17T15:44:20.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pitch movements&quot; presupposes a phonemicization of F0 into discrete elements. You can compute F0 at a specific short window, but &quot;movement&quot; implies abstraction from the short window to a longer window, perhaps corresponding to a syllable, foot or word. ToBI is one way of doing that, but you're asking for something that's independent of ToBI. The presupposition seems to be that there is an independent, self-evident phonemicization of the intermediate-size window of F0 patterning, akin to the &quot;phones&quot; of a narrow segmental phonetic transcription. But there isn't. ToBI is one method of reducing physical; Trager and Smith have another, likewise Bollinger; there is the British school of Halliday / Wells / Roach / Crystal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have to start by identifying the theory of data-reduction that you want to assume, because a question about &quot;patterns of movement&quot; requires that you abstract away from F0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T15:44:20.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-17T18:02:01.107" Score="1" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a top list of the most frequent collocations in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desirable size of the list is more than 1000 items.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best that I found so far is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishclub.com/ref/Collocations/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this collocations list by EnglishClub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is a good list with descriptions, however, it is sorted by alphabet, not by frequency of usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, advise where I can find such a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13866" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-17T12:26:26.000" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T12:26:26.000" Title="Collocations frequency dictionary of English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19391" CreationDate="2016-08-17T18:47:21.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one that looks well-researched (starting on p. 214 with the appendix): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/8563631/The_high_frequency_collocations_of_spoken_and_written_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The high frequency collocations of spoken and written English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is only for spoken English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240584201_Beyond_single_words_The_most_frequent_collocations_in_spoken_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Beyond single words - The most frequent collocations in spoken English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T18:47:21.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-17T20:12:10.497" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;homonym&lt;/em&gt; is a word which shares the same pronunciation as another word or words, but has a different spelling, e.g. &quot;to&quot;, &quot;too&quot;, &quot;two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why languages have homonyms in the first place. What is the use of them, from an evolution of language standpoint? Surely a word with a unique spelling and pronunciation would engender less confusion when heard than a homonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13867" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T23:14:18.790" Title="From an evolutionary (language) standpoint, of what use are homonyms?" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19366" CreationDate="2016-08-17T20:49:22.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem starts not with the noun phrase &quot;a lot of ...&quot;, but with the adverbial phrase &quot;a lot [of the time]&quot; (meaning 'often').  It is unusual for an adverbial phrase to begin with a determiner (article), so the learner assumes that 'a lot' is one word ('alot'), since the temporal cue 'of the time' is often elided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T20:49:22.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19393" CreationDate="2016-08-17T21:42:45.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could imagine that many homonyms start off as polysemes but can synchronically no longer be recognised as such, so originally the n:1 relation was unproblematic because there was a clear relation between the different shades of meaning, but over time (and in contact with other languages, new words, the need for new terminology, ...) that connection got lost and from a nowadays standpoint it seems implausible why &quot;the language&quot; didn't invent a seperate word for an apperently totally unrelated concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T21:42:45.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19393" CreationDate="2016-08-17T23:14:18.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first place, what are called &lt;em&gt;homonyms&lt;/em&gt; often aren't. For (your) example, &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is only homonymous with &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; when it's unnaturally stressed&amp;mdash; ordinarily it's /tə/, not /tu/. Others are homonymous only in certain dialects: &lt;em&gt;merry&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;marry&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; are often cited as homonyms, but they have distinct pronunciations in my native speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, there are few homonyms which cannot be distinguished &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in context&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Many belong to different word classes. Again, your example lists a preposition, a quantifier and an adverb; they're going to play entirely distinct syntactic roles. And even homonyms which belong to the same word class will usually be used in contrasting semantic or pragmatic domains&amp;mdash;how likely are you to encounter an utterance in which &lt;em&gt;balled&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bawled&lt;/em&gt; could possibly be confused? Such contextual distinctiveness is far more important than mere phonic similarity; in Real Life, as opposed to dictionaries and taxonomies, phonic phenomena only phenomenate in discourse contexts. In evolutionary terms, these synonyms inhabit different ecological niches, so they do not compete for lexical resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T23:14:18.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T01:05:37.533" Score="0" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would just like to know if this is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have this text, I'm having a hard time trying to figure out this; mark primary stress (and secondary, if appropriate) on the correct syllables using IPA stress markings,and off-glides, also mark syllabic consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will teach you in my verse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˈˈaɪ wəl tˈiːtʃ jˈuː ɪn mˈaɪ versevˈɜrs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sˈæʊndz lˈaɪk kˈɔrps kˈɔr hˈɔrs ənd wˈɜrs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will keep you, Suzy, busy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ˈaɪwəl kˈiːp jˈuː sˈuːziː bˈɪziː&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make your head with heat grow dizzy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mˈeɪk jˈɔr hˈed wɪð hˈiːt grˈoʊ dˈɪziː.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13815" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T10:46:26.803" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T10:46:26.803" Title="How is stress marked in IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19344" CreationDate="2016-08-18T04:51:29.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're looking for a statistical stylistic analysis. In linguistics, students frequently haven't learned the subtle stylistic rules that professionals have inductively formed from reading numerous articles. Our prescription for students is usually to read journal articles (in the hope that they will pick up the rules). At a simple level, you could compare the probability of word X after word Y in student writing versus a corpus of professional articles. At a higher level of analysis, one could likewise discern professional usage patterns w.r.t. more abstract construction properties, such as passives, parentheticals, nominalized sentential clauses as opposed to finite ones. This kind of analysis is sometimes used to prove specific authorship in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T04:51:29.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19403" CreationDate="2016-08-18T06:55:21.123" Score="1" ViewCount="1184" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was researching IPA a bit and tried to map the sounds of my native language to it. What I encountered was that our typical &quot;i&quot; is between the &quot;i&quot; and &quot;y&quot; on this chart on Wikipedia: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;or the official one: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Kiel_2015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Kiel_2015.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there no symbol for that sound in IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T15:15:17.457" Title="Sound between &quot;i&quot; and &quot;y&quot; in IPA Vowel chart" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19399" CreationDate="2016-08-18T09:38:18.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such symbol because it is not needed (generally). IPA is already large enough and it has means to add more information &quot;between the symbols&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, IPA is used to write phonemes, i.e., it gives enough information on the distinctive phonetic features in a language. A lot of articulatory detail is usually omitted and left to annotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want, you can add diacritics and other marks to give a much more precise phonetic information, and IPA has means to achieve this. So you can add markers for centralisiation and other features that describe the sound more precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the highest level of precision, linguists will always resort to sound recordings or even videos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T09:38:18.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19344" CreationDate="2016-08-18T09:44:44.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not looking for &quot;comparative method&quot; (this one belongs to historical linguistics) but for &lt;strong&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. The mathematical writings of your more or less experienced students and of professionals constitute a corpus. You can &lt;strong&gt;annotate&lt;/strong&gt; it with all kinds of information (e.g., human judgements of the quality of writing, stylistic errors, linguistic information like part-of-speech (POS) tags, etc.) and then start some statistical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T09:44:44.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T13:45:19.680" Score="5" ViewCount="5372" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would seem that much ease of use must have been lost when a lot of French letters came to be silent - I never fail to be amazed that &quot;il parle&quot; and &quot;ils parlent&quot; are homophones, and it's very easy to conjure realistic sentences where this homophony would cause a problem that required extra periphrastic or other disambiguation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around when, and why, did French stop pronouncing final plural-marking s, the -ent ending and so many other sounds that are meaningful? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does anyone know of any contemporary French commentary around this time? Along the lines of &quot;the kids are no longer pronouncing the -ent at the end of plural verbs, and the language is going to the dogs...&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T08:57:36.450" Title="How and why did so many French letters become silent?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19399" CreationDate="2016-08-18T15:15:17.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really more a comment on Jknappen's answer, but it's too long. A premise of the IPA is that each symbol is a sound that is a contrastive phoneme is some language. The letter &quot;i&quot; represents a general area of the vowel space, which overlaps the space of adjacent vowel somewhat (especially &quot;ɪ&quot;). If you look at a range of IPA illustrations, you will note that the vowel positions vary within the vowel frame depending on language. The position of the vowel in the vowel frame is more informative than the letter used, but that spacing obviously can't be included in a transcription. Ideally, this positioning would be based on measured mean formant values, but typically they are based on subjective evaluation. &lt;em&gt;Usually&lt;/em&gt;, the convention is to select the IPA letter that is closest to the perceived location of the given language's instance of the vowel, but you can pick a different symbol either for phonological reasons ('it acts like a front vowel') or typographical reasons ('why not just use &quot;a&quot;? How do you even type &quot;ɐ&quot;?').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to reduce all phonetic vowel differences to single letters, an enormous set of distinct symbols would be necessary, since there are dozens of known kinds of &quot;i&quot;, likewise &quot;ɪ&quot;, &quot;e&quot;, &quot;ɛ&quot; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T15:15:17.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19366" CreationDate="2016-08-18T21:50:17.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'lot' is a common noun and the plural is 'lots' - both are commonly used in auctions, but also to refer to indeterminate quantities of something. Similar to &#xA;'a bunch of flowers', 'a gaggle of geese' or 'a cup of tea'. Spelling is arbitrary say the knowing linguists!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-08-18T21:50:17.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-18T23:36:44.423" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an ineffable feeling that there is a pragmatic difference between &quot;each N&quot; and &quot;every N&quot;, which has to do with evaluating the individuals denoted by &quot;each N&quot; one at a time, vs. evaluating them en masse with &quot;every N&quot;. This may be an illusion, however. My question is whether there is any clear semantic / pragmatic difference between &quot;each&quot; and &quot;every&quot; as NP modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are obscure syntactic differences between &quot;each&quot; and &quot;every&quot; as NP modifiers, such as the fact that you can say &quot;almost every linguist&quot; but not *&quot;almost each linguist&quot;, with an adverb preceding the modifier: got that, not considering that context. I'm kicking out plural NPs (&quot;{every / each} 4 days&quot;; &quot;{every / each} 4 books&quot;) as outside the realm of investigation. Bare &quot;each&quot; and &quot;every&quot; are clearly different: only looking at these as NP modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to develop an operational test to distinguish between two words in another language that are translated (consistently by speakers, who have a reasonable command of British-based English) as &quot;each&quot; vs. &quot;every&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T23:45:14.587" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T23:45:14.587" Title="Is there a meaning difference between &quot;each&quot; and &quot;every&quot; as NP modifier?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15734" CreationDate="2016-08-19T08:22:21.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quote from &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Old English&lt;/em&gt; by George Leslie Brook, page 51:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§132 The cardinal numerals from 4 to 19 generally remain uninflected when they stand before a noun; when they follow a noun and when they are used as nouns they are declined like the plurals of nouns of the i-declension; nom. and acc. m. and f. &lt;strong&gt;-e&lt;/strong&gt;, n. &lt;strong&gt;-u&lt;/strong&gt;; gen. &lt;strong&gt;-a&lt;/strong&gt;, dat. &lt;strong&gt;-um&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§133 The ending &lt;strong&gt;-tig&lt;/strong&gt; of the numerals from 20 to 120 was originally a noun; the Old English numerals in &lt;strong&gt;-tig&lt;/strong&gt; could be used either as nouns or as adjectives. When they are used as nouns the genitive ends in &lt;strong&gt;-es&lt;/strong&gt;; when used as adjectives they are either uninflected or declined like &lt;strong&gt;manig&lt;/strong&gt;. Since they were originally nouns, numerals in &lt;strong&gt;-tig&lt;/strong&gt;, like &lt;strong&gt;hund&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;þūsend&lt;/strong&gt;, may be followed by a noun in the partitive genitive. Examples are &lt;strong&gt;fiftiges elna lang&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fifty ells long&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;twentig scēapa&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;twenty sheep&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Hund&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hundred&lt;/em&gt;, is generally uninflected, but it occasionally has dative forms in &lt;strong&gt;-e&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;-um&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;þūsend&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;thousand&lt;/em&gt;, is sometimes uninflected but is more often declined as a neuter noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the above quoted rules, the numeral in &lt;em&gt;ymb .xxxi. wintra&lt;/em&gt; would most often remain uninflected, but it could also be declined like &lt;em&gt;manig&lt;/em&gt;, many, that is like the strong adjectives. As &lt;em&gt;ān&lt;/em&gt;, one is part of the number thirty-one it also would not be declined separately. So, I think the correct and most usual pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;ymb .xxxi. wintra&lt;/em&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;ymb an and þrittig wintra&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12872" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T10:22:10.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T09:15:23.860" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;My intuition is that onomatopoeia is quite rare and that the letters and sounds of most words are meaningless (e.g. if &quot;chicken&quot; and &quot;fish&quot; were switched all along, no one would think &quot;That word doesn't sound like it tastes&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I want to know the frequency of onomatopoeic words (or is that a spectrum rather than binary?) both (1) as a proportion of a reference vocabulary, such as a dictionary (e.g. &quot;10% of all words are onomatopoeic&quot;), and (2) as a proportion in spoken or written usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a corpus annotated with the property &quot;this word is onomatopoeic&quot; exist and what are those frequencies (if they are public I can calculate that myself also)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9920" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T09:15:23.860" Title="How common is onomatopoeia in English?" Tags="&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T11:43:18.217" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He makes you want to leave early today to get more space for himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of having NP as argument to the predicate &quot;makes&quot;, we get an entire verb phrase &quot;want to leave early today&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we end up with a parse tree of VP := Verb + Object + Verb Phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the terminology for this phenomenon?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, what will be the name for the Verb Phrase &lt;strong&gt;want to leave early today&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In all, what will be the correct parse tree for this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9382" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T14:06:36.033" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T22:32:38.010" Title="What is the name for the phenomenon of verb phrase being an argument of a predicate" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T18:20:55.263" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;What methods &amp;amp; resources are available to support one's process of time-efficiently acquiring a deep understanding of transformational grammar? My technical background is that of a computational linguist who had a basic linguistic education but whose education in general was more oriented towards the &lt;em&gt;computational&lt;/em&gt; element, i.e. programming, theoretical computer science and mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3451" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T23:46:25.220" Title="Approaching the topic of transformational grammar" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T19:34:55.763" Score="2" ViewCount="1413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a task which involves information extraction, for which I require splitting a complex sentence into a bunch of simple sentences. For instance,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In optics a ray is an idealized model of light, obtained by choosing a&#xA;  line that is perpendicular to the wavefronts of the actual light, and&#xA;  that points in the direction of energy flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may be split as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ray is an idealized model of light.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ray is obtained by choosing a line that is perpendicular to wavefronts of actual light.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ray points in the direction of energy flow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only condition being, each simple form must in SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) format. For example for sentence &lt;code&gt;ray is an idealized model of light&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Subject - ray&#xA;Verb - is&#xA;Object - idealized model of light&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What approach should I take? I am using NLTK and python 2.7. Can &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp#sample&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dependency parsing&lt;/a&gt; be of any help? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13413" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T07:02:10.253" Title="Split a sentence using nltk and python" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19409" CreationDate="2016-08-19T22:32:38.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Elements of Symbolic Logic&lt;/strong&gt;, Hans Reichenbach gives this example of a predicate which is a quantified argument of another predicate: &quot;Napoleon had all the qualities of a great general.&quot;  This wording should make Reichenbach's point clear: (For all P)(if P is predicated of a great general then P is predicated of Napoleon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reichenbach calls the analysis of such propositions part of &quot;the higher calculus of functions&quot;.  Or, I think one could term it &quot;second order predicate logic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T22:32:38.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19410" CreationDate="2016-08-19T23:46:25.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given your background, I'd suggest starting with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chomsky hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;, keeping in mind the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gpenn/csc2517/peters-ritchie73.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Peters-Richie result&lt;/a&gt;. Also relevant is the demonstration that the classical transformational grammar of English can be reconstructed within context free phrase structure grammar -- see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPSG&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T23:46:25.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T03:32:15.977" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do both the lexical change(invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, etc) and derivation belong to word-formation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13872" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T03:32:15.977" Title="What's the relationship between lexical change and word-formation?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T03:47:20.553" Score="0" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Latin evolved to French, the vowel /u/ fronted to become /y/... except in Latin &quot;VRSVS&quot; /ur.sus/ &gt; French &quot;ours&quot; /uʁs/, in which the vowel /u/ was kept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that the /rs/ environment kept the /u/, because we can see Latin &quot;DVRVS&quot; /du.rus/ &gt; Old French &quot;durs&quot; /dyrs/, where the &quot;u&quot; is changed anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, front vowels tend to be unrounded and back vowels tend to be rounded, but this sound change seems to have violated this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that probably there is no answer as to what exactly caused the fronting and the &quot;VRSVS&quot; exception, but mere guesses would be fine for me, as such sound change violates the rule that front vowels tend to be unrounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:52:59.920" Title="Fronting of /u/ from Latin to French" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19416" CreationDate="2016-08-20T04:57:55.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question does not accurately summarize the relevant sound changes. Latin &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; /u/ was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; fronted to /y/. Only Latin long /uː/, as in &lt;em&gt;dūrus&lt;/em&gt; /duːrus/, regularly developed to /y/ in French. (Of course, in learned words such as &lt;em&gt;dubitatif&lt;/em&gt;, Latin U corresponds to /y/ regardless of its original length, but this does not represent a regular phonetic development.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, Latin short /u/ (as in &lt;em&gt;ŭrsus&lt;/em&gt;) merged with the reflex of Latin long /oː/ in French. The distinction between the reflexes of Latin /u/ and /uː/, with a merger of the reflexes of Latin /u/ and /oː/, is a common feature of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Italo-Western_vs._Eastern_vs._Sardinian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italo-Western&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Romance languages. For comparison, Italian &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/duro#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;duro&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orso#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;orso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; also have different vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these reflexes, we can reconstruct a &quot;Proto-Italo-Western-Romance&quot; (PIWR) vowel system that distinguished vowel height but not length and had Latin /uː/ &gt; PIWR *u and Latin  /u/, /oː/ &gt; PIWR *o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PIWR *u became fronted to /y/ in the Old French period, and &quot;u&quot; /y/ is the usual reflex in Modern French. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PIWR *o developed differently; in Modern French the reflex is either &quot;eu&quot; (/ø/, /œ/) or “ou” (/u/). In Old French, it seems /u/ could be spelled as &quot;o,&quot; &quot;u&quot; or &quot;ou&quot;. In general, we get &quot;eu&quot; in stressed syllables that were open (during some particular stage of the language), and “ou” elsewhere, but there are other factors that make the distribution more complicated such as paradigmatic leveling and dialect mixing. We definitely would not expect &lt;em&gt;ours&lt;/em&gt; to have /y/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#Table_of_vowel_outcomes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological history of French&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that may not be entirely accurate but that presents a general overview of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why/how the fronting occurred: I don't have any answer, sorry. All I can offer is some similar changes in other languages, such as Greek (where ancient /u/ became Classical Greek /y/) and modern English (where /u/ is often fronted more or less, depending in part on the phonetic environment). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit of Googling turned up the following paper: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://homepages.uconn.edu/~anc02008/Papers/The%20feature%20[ATR]%20and%20Vowel%20fronting%20in%20Romance.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Feature [Advanced Tongue Root] and Vowel Fronting in Romance&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; by Andrea Calabrese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calabrese says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Previous explanations of this change [that is: /u/ &gt; [y]], based on substratum theory&#xA;  (Ascoli 1881) and structural pressure due to independent sound&#xA;  changes, besides being outdated, are quite unsatisfactory. There is no&#xA;  generative study of this change, and it is usually considered to be an&#xA;  'unnatural' sound change that defies explanation (cf. Dressler&#xA;  (1974)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guessed that it was connected to the sound change /o/ &gt; /u/, but the first sentence says that is not likely to be relevant. Calabrese goes on to propose an explanation based on the feature [advanced tongue root], which is illustrated by examples of a similar sound change in the southern Italian dialect of Altamura; I don't fully understand it so I won't copy it here, but you can look in the paper at section 4, page 84 to see what she says about Old French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T06:52:14.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T06:52:14.147" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T08:02:24.363" Score="3" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;One would think that as long as one of the two vowels are closed, then a diphthong could be formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if a diphthong consists of two closed vowels with the same roundness, like the following 8 diphthongs, then they rarely occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɥu/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/uɥ/, which does appear in Cantonese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/wy/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/yw/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɰi/, which does appear in Korean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/iɰ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/jɯ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɯj/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it about these diphthongs that make them rare, in terms of acoustics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even diphthongs consisting of the same vowel are not rare, such as /ji/ (Cantonese, Mandarin), /ij/ (some dialects of English), /wu/ (Cantonese, Mandarin), /uw/ (some dialects of English), /ɥy/ (Cantonese, Mandarin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="12958" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T09:36:38.210" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T16:21:11.147" Title="Rare diphthongs" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2016-08-20T09:53:39.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pat's answer works well and explains a lot, but I'd like to add something: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logically, the most suitable HTML element for interlinear glosses is the not-very-well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/grouping-content.html#the-dl-element&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DL element&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;description list&quot;): The DL element wraps a list of definitions or descriptions, each consisting of one DT element (&quot;description term&quot;) which defines a term that should be explained, and one or more DD elements (&quot;description definition&quot;) which provide that explanation. Applied to an interlinear gloss, the DT element corresponds to the word in the target language, and the various DD elements correspond to various levels of glossing, e.g. morpheme breakdown, morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, word-by-word translation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this logic, I have been using the following structure for interlinear glosses in a HTML environment for several years (Lezgian example from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;Gila&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;gila&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;now&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;aburun&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;abur-u-n&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;they-OBL-GEN&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;ferma&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;ferma&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;farm&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;hamišaluǧ&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;hamišaluǧ&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;forever&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;güǧüna&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;güǧüna&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;behind&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;dl class=&quot;gloss&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dt&amp;gt;amuq’dač.&amp;lt;/dt&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;amuq’-da-č&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;dd&amp;gt;stay-FUT-NEG&amp;lt;/dd&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dl&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;div class=&quot;glend&quot;&amp;gt;Now their farm will not stay behind forever.&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final DIV.glend element contains a free translation of the whole sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding CSS code looks something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;dl.gloss {&#xA;  display:inline-block;&#xA;  margin:0 0.5em 0 0;&#xA;}&#xA;dl.gloss dt {&#xA;  font-weight:bold;&#xA;}&#xA;dl.gloss dd {&#xA;  margin-left:0 !important;&#xA;  font-size:smaller;&#xA;}&#xA;.glend {&#xA;  margin-bottom:.75em;&#xA;  font-style:italic;&#xA;} &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13873" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T09:53:39.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4255" CreationDate="2016-08-20T10:11:56.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/63_fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PhD dissertation&lt;/a&gt; by Marika Butskhrikidze where this issue was tested (see pp. 123-132 [137-146 in the PDF]). Basically, her results are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Most harmonic clusters are in fact produced with two releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Based on a perception experiment, &quot;harmonic Cc clusters behave as single consonants in terms of hit rate, but as a sequence of two unrelated consonants in terms of detection time&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13873" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T10:11:56.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19418" CreationDate="2016-08-20T14:26:27.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic phonetic property explaining this rareness is that the sounds are too similar. You can add to the list things like [iɪ], [ɛe] and so on, where there is also just a subtle shift in F1 or F2 frequency. Essentially, you have to be paying a lot more attention to detect the small and relatively brief shift in formants in such diphthongs, which means that they are less likely to develop historically. They do get started (assuming we're at the historical state where such diphthings are first coming into existence in a language), and if they are aren't further distinguished by other some development (uw → ɨw) then whatever is causing diphthongization in the first place is likely to be suppressed in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Two closed vowels with the same roundness&quot; means that these are purely backness -changing diphthongs, which means that the components are acoustically almost the same. The primary acoustic correlate of backness is F2, which is also the primary correlate of rounding (which is why back vowels tend to be round and front vowels tend to be non-round). Backness-shifting diphthongs will therefore have only a very subtle shift in formants that requires bringing in higher formants to tease out the contribution of rounding vs. backing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of roundness dissimilation (in a height diphthong) is that general North Saami &lt;em&gt;uo&lt;/em&gt; e.g. &lt;em&gt;guokta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;2&quot; becomes &lt;em&gt;ue&lt;/em&gt; i.e. &lt;em&gt;guekta&lt;/em&gt; in the Kárášjohka dialect. Various dialects of English have this as well, so that /u:/ which is generally pronounced as [ʊw] in the US is often further shifted to [ɪw] (California speech and younger speakers are two high points of this trend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analyzing diphthongs with the completely same vocoid features is tricky, since analysis is often smuggled into the transcription. The specific issue is whether one has a glide plus vowel sequence as implied by transcribing , versus a two-vowel (one-syllable) sequence as implied by . There certainly are languages that have &quot;wu&quot; and &quot;wu&quot; can even contrast with [u:], and that is a context where it is certainly appropriate to transcribe the &quot;diphthong&quot; as a glide plus vowel sequence. In onset position, the glides [w,j] are much more constricted and it is easier to parse the glide as a separate phoneme. It is typical to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; analyse &quot;wu&quot; and the like as a diphthong, and in every language that I know of with &quot;diphthongs&quot; so transcribed, they behave as CV... syllables, not as VV... syllables. Phonologically speaking, I don't know of any reason in Mandarin or Korean to treat initial glides as elements of a diphthong (I have no opinion of Cantonese). Although I would not be shocked to learn of a language with a contrast [wu] vs [uu], the obvious question to ask is why one is claiming that there is a diphthong [uu] as opposed to a long vowel [u:] (that is an answerable question, but it's a question that has to be raised).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same-element diphthongs with the &quot;glide&quot; portion on the right are usually alternatively treatable as long vowels. This brings us to the question of where diphthongs come from in the first place: most often they come from long vowels, so /u:/ → &lt;em&gt;uʊ&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;uo, uɨ...&lt;/em&gt;. I would say that [uu] and [ii] are the absolutely least likely diphthongs, because there would be no phonetic fact and hardly any phonological fact that could support such an analysis over a treatment of the nucleus as having a long vowel [u:, i:].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try not to make predictions about the future of languages that I know nothing about. However, since you ask, I predict that [uy] is most vulnerable and would change to [ui]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T15:46:29.903" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T15:46:29.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-20T15:05:22.847" Score="3" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native English speaker, and as far as I know, my language has no words that end in a stressed h sound. So, I'm creating a conlang, and I thought about putting one at the end of a word, but I have no clue how to pronounce it without a vowel following it (in other words, not &quot;ha&quot;, just &quot;h&quot;). Any advice?&#xA;PS: In case it helps, this h would follow the IPA sound ӡ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13875" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T20:42:54.483" Title="Ending a word in a stressed &quot;h&quot;" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19422" CreationDate="2016-08-20T16:02:08.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Stress&quot; is a property of syllables, not consonants, so you could drop the restriction &quot;stressed&quot;. In fact, no words in English end in [h], leaving out spelling where it is an orthographic device to indicate something else. There are some languages with final &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; (Sundanese, Arabic, Somali and North Saami in one interpretation), but it isn't common across languages. Having words like [mæʒh] would be particularly challenging to pronounce, and if final [h] appeared &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; after [ʒ] then that smacks of misanalysis (like, why not just say it's a pronunciation feature of final /ʒ/?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic being a relatively widely-taught language, it might be best to &quot;get the hang&quot; of final &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; by practicing it in Arabic, and then transfer the skills to the conlang. The downside is that online teaching materials usually require you to read the script. Perhaps fdb knows of a pedagogical list of online final-h words with recordings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T16:02:08.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19422" CreationDate="2016-08-20T20:42:54.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical approach to pronouncing final consonants is adding a short &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Schwa&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ə]&lt;/code&gt; after it and then practicing with gradual shortening the vowel to the minimal possible length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no academic books on this topic, but I have personal experience teaching my Thai friends how to pronounce English final consonants. In Thai language, a considerable amount of consonant sounds can't be final in the syllable, so average people have difficulty even with seemingly easy final &lt;code&gt;[l]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;, or even voiced plosives &lt;code&gt;[b/d/g]&lt;/code&gt; — while, obviously, having no problem with these consonants as initial ones in the syllable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This technique has helped me a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T20:42:54.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19427" CreationDate="2016-08-21T08:34:42.347" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a random tribe in an isolated geographical setting. What kind of factors will determine the tribe's language in the sense of morphological typology? What are the underlying covariates of an ancient language becoming analytic, isolating, fusional (synthetic) or agglutinative (synthetic) language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this procedure depend on geography/climate, culture/religion and social structure? Or is it totally accidental? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit rookie at the topic, however, I'm fascinated by this idea. Could you recommend me any interesting papers available on this, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13877" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T09:38:06.723" Title="What kind of factors will determine the random tribe's language in the sense of morphological typology?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T08:58:38.383" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic term for the type of sentence whose predicate is a complete sentence with a subject and a verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who stole money from the company — we will fire them; those who revealed the crime — we will reward them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know these sentences can be inverted to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will fire those who stole money from the company and we will reward those who revealed the crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I want to know the linguistic term for the type of sentence I am asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1400" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T15:39:06.823" Title="What is the linguistic term for the type of sentence whose predicate is a complete sentence with a subject and a verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19425" CreationDate="2016-08-21T09:38:06.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammar of a language (that is phonology or morphosyntax) does not depend on on geography/climate and mostly also on culture/religion. You can see that easily in Europe where you have all sorts of languages within more or less comparable area (highly synthetic Ancient Greek, Latin and Czech, analytic Romance languages or German, agglutinative languages like Basque or Turkish, isolating languages like English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore most of these languages have the same origin, i.e. most of them are Indo-European, and current reconstructions indicate this was a highly inflected language, yet we have very wide variety of language types originating from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geographically, the only influence that you can find is the one of language contact but you ruled it out by postulating &quot;isolated geographical setting&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Culture/religion&lt;/strong&gt; can have influence on language structure but typically on higher levels than grammar, i.e. semantics, pragmatics and vocabulary (and vice versa - the language has an influence on the culture). Generally speaking, we can say culture represents the way we see the world, therefore it includes the mental constructs we use to interpret it, which are typically reflected in a language somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The influences in grammar or usually much less frequent but if there is some super important cultural feature, it might be somehow reflected. E.g. in Japan, there used to be (and still partially is) very important element of politeness and social stratification. This is reflected in Japanese language, where you have many honorific pronouns (compared to typical European that has typically 2 levels in singular: 2nd person singular pronoun for relations of acquaintance and more, 2nd person plural pronoun for politeness; and no distinction in plural) and even some honorific verbs, maybe there are even some different morphological structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting example is spatial and temporal metaphors - in European languages, the timeflow metaphor is based on you moving through the world, i.e. you move forward and therefore what was (the past) is behind you, whereas what is going to be (the future) is in front of you. In certain Native American languages (Quechua, Aymara,...), it is the time that moves around you, not you in it, and it moves the opposite direction - you can see/remember what was (the past), therefore it lies in front of you, whereas what is going to come (the future) remains to be seen and therefore it lies behind you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not go as far as to say this example is purely accidental since there might be some hidden factors making more likely for a culture to develop the metaphor one way or the other but you can certainly look at it as accidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I do believe that has an indirect influence, is the... let's say, state of civilisation. If you have a large and interconnected civilisation with lots of people who can write (say the Roman Empire), it is likely that the development of the linguistic/phonological structures is delayed significantly (even for centuries) because it is much more difficult for a change to prevail. When the civilisation breaks down into smaller, isolated units and the writing is limited to the elites, the evolution kicks off and the languages mutate wildly and become mutually uncomprehensible (say spoken Romance languages before Latin relexification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding the literature&lt;/strong&gt;, I would start with something from Sapir &amp;amp; Whorf, the linguists that are considered the fathers of linguistic typology. However I do not know any serious sources that would link linguistic structures to particular extra-linguistic phenomena (there were some attempts in Soviet linguistics but they were as short-lived as their authors and very bad science). Concerning the evolution, this is a rather new outlook so there is not that much, but you can actually look into evolutionary biology where some linguists like to look for inspiration (e.g. Flegr: Frozen Evolution gives the maths for development of a genetic feature based on the size of the population).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T09:38:06.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2016-08-21T10:04:36.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As indicated by Anschel Schaffer-Cohen, certain changes in Romance languages can be considered as gaining new inflections. Spanish is a very nice example but Portuguese is even better because there is actually some phonetic merger that makes the words even more difficult to separate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fazer+os = fazê-los (to do them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, where the structure of a phrase is quite rigid, you can separate the subject and the verb basically only by grammatical morphemes and from a certain perspective, the subject pronoun can be considered a conjugational prefix of a verb and considering it a separate word is just a matter of linguistic/orthographic tradition (it is separated with a space).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are counter arguments, e.g. in 3rd person, the pronoun may be replaced by a noun, so it is not strictly obligatory, but still you have phrases like &quot;Éric, il travaille&quot;, where the noun is highlighted and thus the pronoun needs to be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In certain pidgins of French, this evolution actually goes further - in French there is a phenomenon called liaison, basically a consonant that used to be pronounced at the end of the word and disappeared is still preserved and resurfaces in certain contest (il&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; parlent /il parl/ - &lt;em&gt;they talk&lt;/em&gt; vs il&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; aiment /il &lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;em/ - &lt;em&gt;they love&lt;/em&gt;), and the pidgins reinterpreted the resurfacing /z/ phoneme is an initial marker of plural (qui &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;-aiment ils? /ki &lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;em il/ - &lt;em&gt;who do they like?&lt;/em&gt;) and you can find this tendency emerging in spoken French too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T10:04:36.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T11:05:44.257" Score="3" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a long &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/20225819/Genesis_of_the_Proto-Indo-European_Roots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;paper&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with many cognates of PIE roots, some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*weid- &quot;to see&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;*s&lt;/strong&gt;ueid- &quot;to shine&quot; &amp;lt; *weid-&lt;strong&gt;es&lt;/strong&gt;-weid-,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*h₂ǵ- &quot;to drive&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;*s&lt;/strong&gt;h₂ǵ- &quot;to seek&quot; &amp;lt; *h₂ǵ-&lt;strong&gt;es&lt;/strong&gt;-h₂ǵ-,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where *-s- is an &lt;strong&gt;interformant&lt;/strong&gt; in both examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to my lack of knowledge of judging or proving PIE cognates, I would like to find out whether these cognates are true or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T06:00:57.477" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T07:07:47.500" Title="Are the cognates of PIE roots in this paper reliable?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19426" CreationDate="2016-08-21T13:41:41.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sentence is a good example of what is commonly called “topicalisation”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T13:41:41.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T14:57:42.763" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am conducting research on spoken data, to collect the data and analyze it syntactically like to see the null constitutes etc. The question is, what could be the suitable model or framework for it &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13882" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T16:28:00.813" Title="Syntactic Analysis of Spoken data," Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19431" CreationDate="2016-08-21T16:28:00.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few options. I'd recommend either LFG or a parser for Universal Dependencies. Syntactic dependencies (and null arguments) can be directly extracted from both of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T16:28:00.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19436" CreationDate="2016-08-21T17:25:49.670" Score="0" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some curiosities about Classic Latin like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V standing for modern V, U, and W altogether, and sounding like U and W, not today's Romance V&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I standing for I, Y, and the modern Romance J (yota)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C standing for C and G, and G invented by adding a crook to C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;letter E diverging into E or I in different Romance languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this because the language had less consonants in older times, and writing was entrenched and lagging behind the real speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13880" LastEditorUserId="13880" LastEditDate="2016-08-21T17:51:56.627" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T18:29:06.023" Title="Why were some letters missing in Latin?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19435" CreationDate="2016-08-21T18:05:54.690" Score="0" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing information on Latin, there are many diphtongs, and less consonants, or at least less letters for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays among Romance languages, only Portuguese has a bit complex vowel system (like &lt;code&gt;bacana&lt;/code&gt; sounding like &lt;code&gt;/ba.ˈkɐ.nɐ/&lt;/code&gt;, 2 very different vowels). Italian and Spanish have just plain vowels, and diphtongs simply have &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; in them (es:puerta, it:uomo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave French (phonetics of which, as a commenter pointed out, underwent long and complex transformations) and Romanian (which I'm not competent in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Latin have a relatively rich vowel system? Are these languages now having richer consonant assortment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13880" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T18:17:53.317" Title="Have Latin and Romance languages evolved from vowel to consonant variety?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19434" CreationDate="2016-08-21T18:17:53.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin had a pretty standard vowel set:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two high vowels - front /i/ and back /u/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two mid vowels - front /e/ and back /o/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one low vowel - central /a/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each vowel had a long and short version. Long vowels tended to have been articulated slighty higher, long /i/ was higher than short /i/ and so on. (Such a tendency is deduced from orthography. In epigraphy we find confusion in spelling concerning short /i/ and long /e/ or short /u/ and long /o/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all it gives 10 vowel phonemes.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T18:17:53.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19433" CreationDate="2016-08-21T18:29:06.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer mostly has to do with the specific history of how the Romans acquired and adapted their alphabet, rather than with any particular features of Latin itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Roman alphabet was derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which in turn was derived from the Greek alphabet (which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, but we don't really need to go that far back for our purposes). The answers to your first three questions all have to do with sounds which the Greek and/or Etruscan languages happened to lack, and which therefore weren't written in those alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V stood for both the consonant [w] and the vowel [u]. Certain dialects of Greek had both those sounds and used different letters for them, Ϝ and Υ; Etruscan did the same. But when the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used Ϝ for the sound [f], and therefore had to use the other symbol (which they wrote as V) for both [w] and [u].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I stood for both the consonant [j] and the vowel [i]. This goes back to the fact that Greek did not have the consonant [j], so when the Etruscans and later the Romans adopted the alphabet, they had to use the same symbol I for both sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C originally stood for both [k] and [g]. This is because Etruscan did not distinguish voiced from voiceless stops: it only had one velar stop, so only needed one letter. The Romans, who had two, eventually developed a new letter G so that they could make this distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your last question is a different issue, about sound changes in later Romance languages rather than about Latin itself. Most or all Latin vowels, not just E, underwent various changes in the various daughter languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T18:29:06.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19506" CreationDate="2016-08-21T21:46:40.663" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm somehow into this question. My speculation is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An English-speaking child would first learn the word &quot;learn&quot; before kindergarten. He would probably learn it from his parents or playmates when they try to teach him a trick or game or life skill. Once he shows mastery in that trick/game/skill, the parent/playmate would say: &quot;Now you learned it!&quot; Then he got to know the past tense form &quot;learned&quot; implies success in learning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he goes to elementary school. At the end of the first class in school, the teacher may say: &quot;Today we studied [a subject matter]. Did you all learn it, children?&quot; At this time, the child began to know that &quot;studied&quot; doesn't necessarily mean &quot;learned&quot; (otherwise the teacher wouldn't ask if the children all learned it) -- &quot;studied&quot; lacks a &quot;success&quot; component. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with the above speculation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13884" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T01:01:31.647" Title="How does an English-speaking child learn that &quot;learned&quot; implies success while &quot;studied&quot; doesn't?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T09:11:00.653" Score="3" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a scientific/historic explanation for the reversed word order for numbers in some languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, while we have for 32:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in English: thirty two (tens units), Hebrew: shloshim weshtaim (tens units), the same in Russian, Spanish, Bulgarian (I am a native speaker), Italian, Turkish, French, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on the other hand, we have in German: zwei und dreißig (units tens) and in Arabic: athnan wethlathun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that structure exists in other languages too, but I am aware of these two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that this is due to some local dialects which then evolved in the national language. But it would be interesting if someone knows how this evolved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13863" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-22T11:43:30.477" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T18:07:06.400" Title="What is the reason for some languages have non-linear word order for numbers?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T10:19:19.277" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ladd, D. R., &amp;amp; Morton, R. (1997), the authors write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is customary to think of an intonation contour as having a&#xA;  linguistically distinctive shape or pattern and an independently&#xA;  variable pitch range. In a one-word English utterance, we may have any&#xA;  one of a handful of distinctive contour shapes— signalling that the&#xA;  contour is, for example, a question or a statement—and any of these&#xA;  shapes may be realized with more or less any pitch range or ‘‘vertical&#xA;  scale’’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, they clarify what they mean by &quot;vertical scale&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But even in the case of pitch range effects that convey some kind of&#xA;  linguistic meaning, such as different degrees of emphasis, it still&#xA;  seems appropriate to distinguish them from the shape of the contour,&#xA;  and to treat them as orthogonal (as the ‘‘vertical scale’’ metaphor&#xA;  suggests).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what am I to understand by &quot;vertical scale&quot;, exactly? The f0 height with which an intonation contour is realized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CITED&#xA; 1. Ladd, D. R., &amp;amp; Morton, R. (1997). The perception of intonational emphasis: continuous or categorical? Journal of Phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-22T15:59:50.887" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T19:20:29.160" Title="What is a &quot;vertical scale&quot; in a discussion of intonation contours?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2016-08-22T10:32:38.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Splitters&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are actually splitters. In the Cantonese language (my native language), there was a historical splitter around a century ago, in which the high flat tone was split into two tones (53 and 55), with unpredictable rules. This caused some homophones to lose their status as homophones and helped to distinguish the meanings. The splitter has re-merged in Hong Kong Cantonese (my dialect) so I do not even know which words were pronounced 53 and which words 55.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Adding extra information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do languages deal with the increase in number of homophones? In Chinese, many thousand years ago, most morphemes consisted of a single syllable. However, as the language evolves, homophones arise, and the Chinese formed compound words from the monosyllabic words, solving the problem of homophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, which evolved from Latin, the word for &quot;heart&quot; is &quot;corazón&quot; while that of Latin is &quot;cor&quot;. Such a simple word is lengthened in Proto-Romance already, by adding &quot;-tione&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cor -&gt; *coratione -&gt; corazón&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T10:32:38.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2016-08-22T10:40:05.150" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While pragmatics looks at meaning at the sentential level, Discourse Analysis observes wider stretches of expression beyond the sentence and paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13889" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T10:40:05.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19426" CreationDate="2016-08-22T15:39:06.823" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sorry that this question got bogged down by a debate about the terminology of modern linguistics. In my view it is very unfortunate to refer to the Arabic jumla ʼismiyya as “left dislocation”, not least because “left” and “right” have a different meaning in languages that are written right to left. In this type of sentence nothing has been “dislocated”; what has happened is that a part of the sentence has been “placed at the beginning” (mubtadaʼ). “Dislocation” would imply that the VSO order is the default and that any other order is a departure from the default. The traditional Arabic analysis regards the verbal sentence and the nominal sentence as two fundamentally different types of sentence, both equally normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T15:39:06.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19440" CreationDate="2016-08-22T19:20:29.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An 'intonation contour' graphs f0 vs time (and ignores power).  The relation of avg f0 in an utterance, compared to the speakers avg f0 over a longer interval, gives information about emphasis or emotion.  The relative changes in f0 during the utterance give information about syntax (question, etc).  Since the relative changes are independent of avg f0, they may be considered as a separate graph, (orthogonal to the absolute f0 graph,) with the base and range 'normalized'.  Only the normalized 'shape' of the contour affects syntax.&#xA;'Vertical scale' is meaningful only with the absolute graph -- with the relative contour it is arbitrary (normalized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T19:20:29.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T22:44:37.017" Score="5" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a definition of &quot;sentence&quot; that is applicable to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="2602" LastEditDate="2016-09-01T15:53:10.767" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T15:53:10.767" Title="Is there a definition of &quot;sentence&quot; that applies to all languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19446" CreationDate="2016-08-22T23:05:39.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A word or set of grammatically linked words expressing a complete&#xA;  thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Expressing a complete thought&quot; is context-dependent: &quot;Sure&quot; might or might not be a sentence. It is as an answer to, &quot;Care for some coffee?&quot; but not as part of &quot;Don't be so sure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context needn't be conversational: &quot;INT. DAY&quot; is a sentence, in the context of a movie script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1136" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T23:05:39.977" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3079" CreationDate="2016-08-23T04:10:23.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no exhaustive list as such. For a list of catalogued items:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Historical Phonology of English (Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language - Advanced) – by Donka Minkova &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For probably the best account of how languages change: Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics) - by Jean Aitchison &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an exhaustive list of processes: The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics) -&#xA;by J.K. Chambers (Editor), Peter Trudgill (Editor), Natalie Schilling-Estes (Editor)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One minor correction, I'd propose a change in the question. Maybe reword the part about spelling because it is completely arbitrary and has nothing whatsoever to do with language change. It is more a social - cultural - political phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ona major correction: &quot;Also English words tend to lack consistency in terms of pronunciation.&quot; - This is simply not true. These are all rule governed. The fact that the rules are no longer used, or are masked by time, or that multiple rules are at work does not make pronunciation inconsistent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T04:10:23.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2016-08-23T11:56:41.623" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;May be that will help you. Pl let me know, if you need more information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYobj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYobj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Altaic-Turkic etymology of the word kan or ken-o&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13891" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T11:56:41.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2016-08-23T12:06:30.650" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;kot&quot; and &quot;kan&quot; are enough evidence to think that the word &quot;kand&quot; is Altaic origine. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uKZwL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uKZwL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Another possible Altaic-Turkic word for village or settlement. &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13891" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T12:06:30.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3920" CreationDate="2016-08-23T15:32:42.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider two phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialectal differences emerge in isolation. The more isolated a community is, from a linguistic perspective, the more likely it is that its dialect will differ from those of its neighbours. Children do not learn their dialect from their parents, but from the reference groups in their childhood, most likely peers, nannies, preschool teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking these two into account, if a part of the linguistic peer pressure comes from say television that uses a different dialect from that of the kid's parents, and local community, as a result, the child will use a slightly mixed dialect. So in a physical sense, telecommunications does break down some of the boundaries conducive to dialectal differentiation. But... as communities will still need to strengthen their cohesion, they will isolate along different, non-physical boundaries. To name a few: age (various layers of teenage groups will use markedly different vocabularies for instance), sports(tennis players mingling with say beach-ballers), class (you are free to use the previous example to point out working class vs leisurely classes), hobbies (gamers vs surfers)...   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting article on contemporary changes influenced by television: &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521669/summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521669/summary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes a slightly different view, arguing that television may actually play a role if the adoption of dialectal variants. I am not sure if this counts as &quot;slow[ing] down dialect differentiation&quot; as you put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T15:32:42.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19257" CreationDate="2016-08-24T00:37:42.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't actually know much about the history of this, but I think the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19257/latin-to-french-evolution-of-certain-forms-of-facere-faire?rq=1#comment43299_19257&quot;&gt;Laure&lt;/a&gt; found &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://monsu.desiderio.free.fr/curiosites/faire.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le verbe faire&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has some useful information that ought to be put in an answer. The translations from the French are by me, with help from Laure and TKR (there may still remain some errors I've made that they haven't caught).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Faz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En ancien français, les désinences des verbes en &lt;em&gt;-kio&lt;/em&gt; et en &lt;em&gt;-tio&lt;/em&gt; se&#xA;  palatalisent en une affriquée ts, par l'étape gy, ty. Elle se réduit&#xA;  ensuite en z ou s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In Old French, the endings of the verbs in -&lt;em&gt;kio&lt;/em&gt; and -&lt;em&gt;tio&lt;/em&gt; were palatalized, yielding an affricate ts, by the stage gy, ty. This then reduced to z or s.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are various examples of this sound change in other contexts, such as the noun &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/face&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;face&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which CNRTL says is from V. Latin *&lt;em&gt;facia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fais, fait&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Contrairement à ce que l'on pourrait s'imaginer, ces deux formes sont&#xA;  déjà analogiques en ancien français. On aurait dû obtenir *&lt;em&gt;faiz&lt;/em&gt; et&#xA;  *&lt;em&gt;faist.&lt;/em&gt; Le problème est identique à celui de &lt;em&gt;dire&lt;/em&gt; et de &lt;em&gt;duire.&lt;/em&gt; Les formes du pluriel seraient elles aussi analogiques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Contrary to what one might imagine, these two forms are already analogical in Old French. We should have gotten &lt;em&gt;*faiz&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*faist.&lt;/em&gt; The problem is the same as that of &lt;em&gt;dire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;duire.&lt;/em&gt; The plural forms must also be analogical.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Font&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;La formation en ancien français repose sur l'effacement de k&#xA;  intervocalique devant u. &lt;strong&gt;Il faut supposer la forme vulgaire *&lt;em&gt;facunt&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  pour &lt;em&gt;faciunt,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; contrairement aux personnes précédentes. De *&lt;em&gt;facunt&lt;/em&gt; on&#xA;  passe à *&lt;em&gt;faunt&lt;/em&gt; avec accentuation sur a qui forme une diphtongue au,&#xA;  laquelle se simplifie en o à date prélittéraire, puis se nasalise&#xA;  avant le XIIe s. L'évolution est similaire à celle de *&lt;em&gt;vadunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;vont,&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  *&lt;em&gt;habunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ont.&lt;/em&gt; Mais elle n'est pas comparable à celle de &lt;em&gt;sunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;sont.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The formation in Old French is based on the erasure of intervocalic k before u. &lt;strong&gt;We must suppose the vulgar form *&lt;em&gt;facunt&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;faciunt,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; contrary to the forms for the preceding grammatical persons. From *&lt;em&gt;facunt&lt;/em&gt; we pass to *&lt;em&gt;faunt&lt;/em&gt; with accentuation on the a which forms a diphthong au, which simplifies to o at a pre-literary period, then nasalizes before the twelfth century. The evolution is similar to that of *&lt;em&gt;vadunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;vont,&lt;/em&gt; *&lt;em&gt;habunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ont.&lt;/em&gt; But it is not comparable to that of &lt;em&gt;sunt&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;sont.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;font&quot; is not thought to come directly from Latin &lt;em&gt;faciunt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T21:16:26.867" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-30T21:16:26.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T09:02:34.750" Score="7" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does musical notation in languages that use right-to-left writing direction (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Yiddish) look like? Is it right-to-left too? If not (i.e. if they use the same European left-to-right notation), how do they manage to write the song lyrics under the staff to specify which syllable to sing on which note?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13846" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:19:06.703" Title="Musical notation in languages with right-to-left writing" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19454" CreationDate="2016-08-24T09:57:29.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the standard international musical notation is used for songs in these languages as well. The words are broken up into syllables and written syllable for syllable below the staff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T09:57:29.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T11:54:55.660" Score="6" ViewCount="4200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard that Polish and Slovenian are both Slavic languages so how similar are they to each other? When I listen to both languages it sounds similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13898" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-08-24T13:37:05.483" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T01:20:16.570" Title="How similar are Polish and Slovenian?" Tags="&lt;polish&gt;&lt;slovenian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19456" CreationDate="2016-08-24T12:32:39.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are similar but not mutually intelligible. Polish is west Slavic whereas Slovenian is south Slavic. The difference is maybe like that between Spanish and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T12:32:39.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T13:20:27.417" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to process language corpus written in Greek and like to split words to syllables. I wonder if there is a programmatical way to do that with a strict set of rules, that can be followed to split words to syllables. I'm applying this to ancient greek, koine texts, if that affects to anything...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did try hyphenator.js library few days ago, with poor results, but it turned out, that maxwordlength peroperty should be changed to minimum. After that it worked out much better. Discussed on forum: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39115034/greek-syllabification-library-for-javascript&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39115034/greek-syllabification-library-for-javascript&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:45:01.577" Title="Is there a strict set of rules retrieving syllables from Greek text?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19461" CreationDate="2016-08-24T14:20:45.497" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the right side of the image below, it is implied that constituents up to the level of the word are considered &quot;postlexical&quot; and those below it are &quot;lexical&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aXzbU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aXzbU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine that the prosodic word and the elements of which it is comprised are lexical, insofar as words are part of a lexicon. But what is meant by post-lexical, i.e. &quot;after-lexical&quot;.  I'm not sure I understand precisely what Nespor &amp;amp; Vogel are getting at with this division. Presumably something about speech processing/production...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-24T14:30:28.820" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:55:24.793" Title="Why is the utterance and intonational phrase &quot;post-lexical&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19458" CreationDate="2016-08-24T14:54:10.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that, likewise for any language, rule-based syllabification would give no more than 95% accuracy; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/264285/1/MarchandAdsettDamper_ISCA07.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marchand et al., „Evaluating Automatic Syllabification Algorithms for English“&lt;/a&gt;. To make it more accurate, one would need some sort of dictionary corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://billmounce.com/greekalphabet/greek-punctuation-syllabification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; lists some pretty simple and straightforward syllabification algorithm, not much different to English: basically, there are six major steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compound words → split;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diphthong &lt;code&gt;VV&lt;/code&gt; → merge;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consonant cluster &lt;code&gt;CC&lt;/code&gt; → merge;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Double consonant &lt;code&gt;CC&lt;/code&gt; → split;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One vowel per syllable;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In ambiguous case e.g. &lt;code&gt;?VCV?&lt;/code&gt;, where the rules above do not apply, split at &lt;code&gt;?V|CV?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16886258/hyphenator-js-or-hypher&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; at StackOverflow mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mnater/hyphenator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyphenator.js&lt;/a&gt;. It &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mnater/Hyphenator/blob/wiki/en_AddNewLanguage.md#what-we-have-now&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claims support&lt;/a&gt; a large set of languages, including &quot;Greek, monoton, polyton and ancient&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it mentions another project, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bramstein/hypher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hypher&lt;/a&gt;, which has a similar feature set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:54:10.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19459" CreationDate="2016-08-24T14:55:24.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is terminology from the theory of Lexical Phonology, which was popular at the time. In that theory, morphology and some parts of phonology are bundled together into a module called &quot;Lexicon&quot;, which is responsible for creating words (stringing together morphemes and sorting out their pronunciation). Syntax happens later, and that is where words are assembled into utterances. After that, the phonology gets another pass at applying, where that last round of rule application is called &quot;post-lexical phonology&quot;. Anything that applied between words was necessarily &quot;post-lexical&quot;, because it was assumed that syntax come after the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T14:55:24.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19456" CreationDate="2016-08-25T00:05:06.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polish and Slovenian are quite close but definitely not mutually-intelligible. Polish is a west Slavic language while Slovenian is a south Slavic language in the south-west group of languages. This means that they are far more similar to languages in each respective Slavic language sub group i.e. Polish to (Czech &amp;amp; Slovakian) and Slovenian to (south-west Slavic such as Bosnian ,Croatian ,Serbian and south-east Slavic Macedonian and Bulgarian). However, from my knowledge (I'm a Polish speaker), Polish  is far more closer to Slovakian than Czech and by reading some Slovenian it reminds me a little of Slovakian so there is some better understanding when compared to Croatian or Bulgarian for instance. However, the grammar and vocabulary at times is far different. From my knowledge historically before the West Slavic and South Slavic language groups were split by the Austrian and Hungarian territories, mutual intelligibility would have been much higher. However, since this split these languages haven't had much contact as they have been without a common border for centuries and dialect continuum's have been formed, particularly between South Slavic languages and to a lesser extent in west Slavic, apart from Czech and Slovak. To sum it up, Polish is pretty close to Slovenian when compared to east Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) in my opinion. There is a harder accent and the grammar and some vocabulary is quite similar. So in my opinion Polish is much closer to south-west Slavic languages more so Slovenian and even to Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian with me being able to understand about 50% mostly in writing. But Polish and Slovenian are definitely not mutually intelligible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13906" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T00:05:06.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19469" CreationDate="2016-08-25T10:56:07.073" Score="0" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Approximately how many writing systems do we know, that succeeded in being systematically used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to qualify as such, an established writing system should have some basic properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) It should be complete, that is, able to model sentences and tales, and not just dates and appointments (like quechua kipus) or names and fortunes (like germanic runes?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) There should be a relevant number of native speakers that used it and traded it to their children. Folk-tale records or Bible distributions made by non-native linguists do not qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) There must be a (de facto) consensus on how an spoken utterance is correctly written and what is wrong. Dialect speech, written &quot;on the fly&quot;, does not qualify as a system, even if done by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a writing system should not be confused with an alphabet: different languages, if written, do usually define &lt;i&gt;different&lt;/i&gt; writing systems (like English and Spanish, or Arabic and Farsi, or Yiddish and Hebrew). Even in the case where a significant language change or alphabet change lead to &lt;i&gt;widely&lt;/i&gt; different orthography rules (as of middle high German shifting to present day German, or the case of Turkish in 1928), such a change would define different writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13064" LastEditorUserId="13064" LastEditDate="2016-08-25T14:04:57.910" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T14:56:45.633" Title="How many established writing systems existed through history?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-25T13:06:28.260" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a wake up word for a digital product that would be easily detected with a voice recognition engine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This calls for a word that has a rare combination of phonemes so the product is not accidentally activated. At the same time it has to be a good name for the product and it has to a word in proper English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &quot;orange&quot; has a rare combination of phonemes in English, so what I am looking for is a list of such words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13910" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-25T13:16:48.020" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T13:16:48.020" Title="Where can I find a list of English words that contain a rare combination of phonemes" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="127" CreationDate="2016-08-25T18:39:46.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One well-known example is the emerging &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case#Neo-vocative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Russian neo-vocative&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In modern colloquial Russian given names and a small family of terms&#xA;  often take a special &quot;shortened&quot; form that some linguists consider a&#xA;  reemerging vocative case.[4] This form is applied only to given names&#xA;  and nouns that end in -a and -я, which are optionally dropped in the&#xA;  vocative form: &quot;Лен, где ты?&quot; (&quot;Lena, where are you?&quot;). This is&#xA;  basically equivalent to &quot;Лена, где ты?&quot;, the only difference being&#xA;  that the former version suggests a positive personal, emotional bond&#xA;  between the speaker and the person being addressed. Names that end in&#xA;  -я acquire a soft sign in this case: &quot;Оль!&quot; = &quot;Оля!&quot; (&quot;Olga!&quot;). In addition to given names, this form is often used with words like&#xA;  &quot;мама&quot; (mama, mom) and &quot;папа&quot; (papa, dad), which would be respectively&#xA;  &quot;shortened&quot; to &quot;мам&quot; (mam) and &quot;пап&quot; (pap). In plural this form is&#xA;  used with words such as &quot;ребят&quot;, &quot;девчат&quot; (nominative: &quot;ребята&quot;&#xA;  &quot;девчата&quot;, guys gals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such usage differs from historical vocative (which would be &quot;Лено&quot; in&#xA;  the example above) and is not related to such historical usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no native speaker but my sense is that for now it is used more with some words than with others, and rarely with words that already have a diminutive ending (eg &quot;Ленка&quot;, &quot;бабушка&quot;, &quot;бабуля&quot;, &quot;секретарша&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-08-25T18:49:58.737" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T18:49:58.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19446" CreationDate="2016-08-25T20:18:13.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it may not be clear to everyone what makes a thought complete, the best notion to 'define' what makes a phrase a sentence is to say what it takes to evaluate it as true or false ( or neither). Meaning defines form - not everyone will like that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T20:18:13.290" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-25T20:18:13.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-25T21:52:20.197" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist but I want to know if there are any parsing tools in existence that can help me do the following kind of thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a sentence like the one below I would like to generate many possible grammatical sentences via mechanism like (but not necessarily restricted to) wh movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wh movement could generate sentences like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;When were the Rolling Stones formed?&quot;&#xA;&quot;Where were the Rolling Stones formed?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So take a sentence and be able to produce a number of questions which need not be the proper question. E.g in this case the proper question is when not where. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing there are ways of taking a question and using wh movement to generate the form of possible answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general I'm interested in producing from a sentence many other sentences that are grammatical and with syntactic variety but maintaining something of the core sense of the original sentence. I realize that's vague but it doesn't have to be perfect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13912" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T15:31:08.780" Title="Automated wh movement for turning an answer into the form of a question" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19464" CreationDate="2016-08-25T22:29:19.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prospects for a definitive answer are bleak, because the qualifications for distinct established writing system are not entirely clear. Re: consensus on correctness, if taken literally this is an impossible requirement to actually satisfy. Suppose that &quot;American English&quot; is a language with an established writing system, is different from the British English writing system (see well-known spelling differences like theater, color, the suffix -&lt;em&gt;ize&lt;/em&gt;). There is no way to determine the consensus spelling of &lt;em&gt;accommodate, reference, until&lt;/em&gt;. There aren't any practical but scientifically valid survey methods that would tell you what most people think is the correct spelling. Psychology tests will sample only current undergraduates in universities enrolled in courses where they are compelled to be experimental subjects, which is not a valid basis for extrapolating to the population (which anyhow first needs to be defined, since 7 year olds do not have valid opinions). Sampling from written samples likewise gives you a highly skewed sample. There are normative answers contained in pedagogical spelling materials and dictionaries, but appeal to authority is quite anti-consensus. I'm not arguing for a populist approach to spelling, I'm arguing that the issue of standards needs to be sharpened up. I would say that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a standard for American English spelling (so, yes, I am arguing for appeal to authoritative sources), but it is not rigorously respected, to the point that &quot;nite&quot; is not generally considered a misspelling anymore. Question: do you could &quot;nite, brite, lite&quot; spelling as defining a distinct writing system, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the sphere of American English, you would almost certainly have to recognize a number of dialect variants. Some people pronounce &quot;thing&quot; as [θæŋ], and some people pronounce &quot;with&quot; as [wɪf]. While we don't find large-scale adaptation of &quot;thang&quot; and &quot;wif&quot; in writing, a number of authors writing (partially or wholely) in those dialects do employ alternative dialect spellings. Should we recognise this as a different standard (insofar as it is reasonably standard within the context of writing those dialects)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desideratum that &quot;There should be a relevant number of native speakers that used it and traded it to their children&quot; seems reasonable, since probably all languages with at least a dozen speakers have some written materials created by a linguist, but there hasn't been uptake on all of those efforts. The idea that native speaker parents teach their children how to write is maybe a bit over-optimistic (I learned how to write in school, my parents didn't teach me, and actually one of my teachers was not a native speaker though she know how to read, write and teach English). If we substitute the desideratum &quot;is adopted by native speakers&quot;, and stipulate that the system should be used by at least one person not professionally engaged in promulgating the writing system, then we may have a suitable filter. If you want a larger set of professionally-disinterested writers (e.g. &quot;at least 100 individuals&quot;), this would filter out very many languages, over 10% of current languages, which have too few speakers, and probably much more than that because minor languages tend to have literacy problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages whose writing systems are newly developed, especially in African languages, the phonemic system is rich and the orthography often includes many distinctions that are unattractive to speakers – symbols like ɪ ʊ ə ʃ š ŋ plus diacritics as in á à ̋a ǎ. There is an observed tendency to omit such diacritics, which would lead to distinct writing systems (the officially sanctioned system, versus the system used by people). Hence official Kikuyu distinguishes [i ĩ u ũ] and ordinary writing omits the diacritic -- does this count as two writing systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how these issues are resolved, the ballpark would be on the order of 10,000 systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the up-tick relative to the number of Ethnologue-listed languages is because of the aforementioned factors. For instance, Lule Saami has different writing systems for Norway and Sweden but it's one language. Surprisingly, English is a single language (but multiple writing systems). I'm also including increases for historical changes in spelling. North Saami has had at least 4 spelling systems over about 400 years; languages spoken in the Russian sphere of influence (esp. the southern zone) have changed between Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic and other bases for writing within the past 150 years; many African languages have gone through two or three spelling systems just within 100 years. There are also quite a number of writing systems in India, for instance Punjabi which has two (Indian and Pakistani), Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada... Each of these has a distinct script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement &quot;different languages, if written, do usually define different writing systems (like English and Spanish)&quot; is a bit unclear. English does not use &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ñ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or any accents, which Spanish does. Maybe you mean that because of those different letters, English and Spanish have different writing systems. Shona and Swahili are completely different languages, but they happen to use the same letters from the Latin alphabet, so you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; say that they have the same writing system (even though there are combinations in one that aren't possible in the other: &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sv, tsv, bh, n'&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in Shona, &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gh, ng'&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in Swahili.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to restrict the set of &quot;established writing systems&quot;, I would suggest (1) being lax about &quot;sameness&quot; whereby &quot;color&quot; and &quot;colour&quot; don't reflect different writing systems, they reflect different spellings and (2) raise the bar on what it takes to be &quot;established&quot;: government recognition might be what you're after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T14:56:45.633" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T14:56:45.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19468" CreationDate="2016-08-26T15:12:32.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you look at the account of English wh-expressions given in &lt;em&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/em&gt; by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum and Sag.  It's very thorough going and explicit.  It takes the approach of classifying those expressions containing a wh-word that can be moved (or rather, those which correspond to declarative counterparts, since GPSG doesn't have movement transformations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for instance how the initial wh-expression in this example is built up: &quot;In the opinion of which politicians is paying down the national debt important?&quot;.  The property of being a wh-expression that can be fronted in a question starts with &quot;which&quot; (though the Left Branch Condition prevents moving this alone) then is inherited by containing expressions, working up step by step up the tree structure: to &quot;which politicians&quot;, then to &quot;of which politicians&quot;, then to the N' &quot;opinion of which politicians&quot; (which again can't be moved), then to the NP &quot;the opinion of which politicians&quot;, then to the PP &quot;in the opinion of which politicians&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This classificatory approach to a complex phenomenon in English is very powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-08-26T15:31:08.780" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T15:31:08.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19473" CreationDate="2016-08-26T15:56:23.217" Score="8" ViewCount="1391" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I whisper, none of my consonants is voiced. But I can tell the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants. How is that possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13918" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:32:29.880" Title="How are voiced and voiceless consonants distinguished while whispering?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-26T17:14:05.713" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17004/current-prospective-efforts-in-the-decipherment-of-ancient-scripts&quot;&gt;Current prospective efforts in the decipherment of ancient scripts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any active attempts at coding and indexing all available examples of Linear A in a manner that would support review and attempts at deciphering using a distributed architecture similar to that in use at Berkeley for &lt;a href=&quot;http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SETI@home&lt;/a&gt; and at Stanford for &lt;a href=&quot;http://folding.stanford.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folding@home&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, are there insurmountable challenges that would prevent this type of brute-force deciphering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T17:14:05.713" Title="Attempts at distributed deciphering of Linear A" Tags="&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;&lt;philology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19471" CreationDate="2016-08-26T17:51:06.427" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whispering involves a low-amplitude non-periodic noise source at the glottis. This is harder to hear than modal phonation, but is enough to allow phoneme discrimination. In English, voicing is encoded in a number of ways, sometimes with vocal fold vibration, but also with duration, aspirations, and constriction size. Probably the most salient feature is aspiration, and this actually gives some evidence in support of the claim that voiceless fricatives are aspirated in English, since &quot;sue&quot; and &quot;zoo&quot; are still distinguishable (as long as the room is quiet). Also, there are a number of allophonic differences that are still applied, such as vowel raising before voiceless (&lt;em&gt;rapid&lt;/em&gt; has a higher, shorter vowel; &lt;em&gt;rabid&lt;/em&gt; has a longer, lower vowel, and this is maintained under whispering). It would be interesting to see how whispering plays out in in tone languages, and in languages with a contrast between voiced stops vs. voiceless stops with negligible voice lag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T17:51:06.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9924" CreationDate="2016-08-26T20:26:54.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I understand the question, but the following example from Genji expresses grammatically the relationship between listener/referent in the speaker's mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/25232/how-does-a-single-verb-construct-work-when-it-has-both-honorific-and-humble-auxi&quot;&gt;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/25232/how-does-a-single-verb-construct-work-when-it-has-both-honorific-and-humble-auxi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;（僧都が尼君に）「この世にののしり給ふ光源氏、かかるついでに見たてまつり給はむや」 （源氏物語）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referent (Genji) is socially higher than the listener, and this is explicit in the  たてまつる .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be easy to find similar examples in modern Jp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13923" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:26:54.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19446" CreationDate="2016-08-26T22:14:33.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take a sentence to be declarative, hence questions are not sentences, but, if you like, interrogative phrases, and imperatives are similarly not sentences either, but, if you like, commanding phrases.  The standard semantics for questions and imperatives are based on truth-coditional models, but the original question I attempted to address was not about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T22:14:33.540" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-08-26T22:14:33.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-26T23:25:26.880" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the notions of the native, native-like, near native... speakers in linguistics. I have encountered several non-equivalent definitions/characterizations of these concepts. Right now, I'm reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davies, Alan 2003 The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality Clevedon: Multilingual Matters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paikeday, Thomas M. 1985 The Native Speaker is Dead! Toronto and New York: Paikeday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other, (modern,) important contributions to this discussion? I am especially interested to axiomatize &quot;nativeness&quot; in the context of second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis. For example we have a native speaker of a certain language and an exceptionally talented, native-like speaker, who learned the same language as his second, third... language after finishing his critical period. Both speakers have approximately the same total rate of errors/mistakes in all aspects of their discourse routine. Can one identify the native speaker by the quality of errors/mistakes? Are there any studies in this direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13925" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T23:25:26.880" Title="Analysing the notion of the native speaker" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;critical-period&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3333" CreationDate="2016-08-27T19:06:52.153" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A native English speaker will typically have a vocabulary of 6-10,000 words. Maybe more, depending upon how highly educated they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13929" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T19:06:52.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19489" CreationDate="2016-08-27T19:40:31.523" Score="11" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my education, I've learned about a lot of languages whose case systems have atrophied, especially from PIE.&#xA; Wikipedia had a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239507846_The_Evolution_of_Case_Systems_for_Marking_Event_Structure&quot;&gt;The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure&lt;/a&gt;, but that was focused on language games (abstract below):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Case has fascinated linguists for centuries without however revealing its most important secrets. This paper offers operational explanations for case through language game experiments in which autonomous agents describe real-world events to each other. The experiments demonstrate (a) why a language may develop a case system, (b) how a population can self-organize a case system, and (c) why and how an existing case system may take on new functions in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, has any modern language &lt;em&gt;added&lt;/em&gt; a case?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm most curious if, for example, the grandparent generation lacks a case the current generation has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-27T23:59:42.197" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T13:08:45.603" Title="Do languages ever get new cases?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17400" CreationDate="2016-08-27T23:09:31.673" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Fiksdal, I am the author of this of &lt;a href=&quot;http://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/34/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this version&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eadW8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eadW8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is based off of Tyschenko's work, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/how-much-does-language-change-when-it-travels/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since translating Tyschenko's map, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the original list was made. Not much of Tyschenkos work is online and the best content is in Ukrainian or Russian. I also tried reaching out to the University in Kiev and Linguistics Department there, with no success. And I have limited access to any paper copies of his research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think I have a pretty good idea of how the data was obtained.  These maps basically show the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Levenshtein distances&lt;/a&gt; lexical distance or something similar for a list of common words.  Now this list could be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Swadesh № 100&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;№ 207 list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with counting duplicate letter shifts in different words as one LD, or it could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolgopolsky_list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dolgopolsky № 15 list&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;strong&gt;Swadesh–Yakhontov № 35 list&lt;/strong&gt; and just brutally counting Levenshtein LDs on those lists.  Or Tyschenko's could have his own list of words and methods to calculate the lexical distance.  In one paper a master matrix is described with all of the lexical distance calculations and that each where calculated, but which exact method and a list of which words is not included.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I experimented with a couple of lists and methods my self and I come fairly close to the original matrix. Working on programming it automatically (if you have same word list from different languages) so it gives you a matrix over several languages and this is a test on Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|En|Sc|Du|Af|Ls|Li|Wf|Sf|Nf|Lu|Ge|Yi|Da|Sw|Fa|Ic|Nb|Nn|Sr&#xA;|00|13|29|30|30|28|26|26|32|40|33|34|39|37|38|42|38|36|37 English&#xA;|13|00|33|31|34|31|26|30|33|40|36|39|42|37|42|44|41|42|36 Scotts&#xA;|29|33|00|07|15|15|28|26|25|35|29|33|38|33|37|37|39|37|41 Dutch&#xA;|30|31|07|00|17|19|30|25|23|34|31|34|34|31|36|37|35|33|40 Afrikaans&#xA;|30|34|15|17|00|22|30|24|21|36|24|30|38|34|37|37|37|32|40 Low Saxon&#xA;|28|31|15|19|22|00|28|31|30|33|28|34|37|34|40|39|38|38|44 Limburgs&#xA;|26|26|28|30|30|28|00|26|27|39|33|38|42|37|39|43|42|41|40 West Frisian&#xA;|26|30|26|25|24|31|26|00|29|41|32|32|40|37|43|45|39|36|43 Saterland Frisian&#xA;|32|33|25|23|21|30|27|29|00|41|36|37|37|36|38|37|37|34|39 North Frisian&#xA;|40|40|35|34|36|33|39|41|41|00|27|40|45|42|50|51|45|45|51 Luxembourgish&#xA;|33|36|29|31|24|28|33|32|36|27|00|30|39|34|42|40|38|37|45 German&#xA;|34|39|33|34|30|34|38|32|37|40|30|00|38|34|36|36|36|36|42 Yiddish&#xA;|39|42|38|34|38|37|42|40|37|45|39|38|00|19|24|27|04|18|42 Danish&#xA;|37|37|33|31|34|34|37|37|36|42|34|34|19|00|28|28|20|19|39 Swedish&#xA;|38|42|37|36|37|40|39|43|38|50|42|36|24|28|00|10|21|20|44 Faroese&#xA;|42|44|37|37|37|39|43|45|37|51|40|36|27|28|10|00|25|20|43 Icelandic&#xA;|38|41|39|35|37|38|42|39|37|45|38|36|04|20|21|25|00|15|41 Norwegian (bokmål)&#xA;|36|42|37|33|32|38|41|36|34|45|37|36|18|19|20|20|15|00|38 Norwegian (nynorsk)&#xA;|37|36|41|40|40|44|40|43|39|51|45|42|42|39|44|43|41|38|00 Sranan&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just to compare Swedish, I get 19 (Tyschenko got 21) to Danish, 28 (26) to Icelandic, 19 (16) to Norwegian (bokmål)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by German I get, 33 (49) to English, 29 (25) to Dutch, 30 (41) to Danish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My method and list does not match up to Tyschenko's but at times I am pretty close. So, yeah a &lt;em&gt;worldwide&lt;/em&gt; version of this is possible, have to have the &lt;em&gt;raw data&lt;/em&gt; from the languages (word lists) and I have to define a method and work on a program that could analyse the lists (and then go through the results to check them manually)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-27T23:58:39.220" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T23:58:39.220" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-28T10:13:58.567" Score="3" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/no_interface.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt; Ohala 1990&lt;/a&gt;, Halle (1954) and a few other very notable scholars have suggested that phonetics and phonology should be unified, denying an interface between the two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I naively imagine there are three logical possibilities for such a view, and if I understand Ohala correctly, I suppose he argues for (2):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All phonetic phenomena is actually phonological&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All phonological phenomena is actually phonetic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All phonetic and phonological phenomena would best be described as something else altogether&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, I wonder if linguists who promote such views share the same/similar vision as to what scientific subdiscipline the two disciplines should be unified as?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T15:47:37.007" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:46:44.077" Title="Merging phonetics and phonology" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19493" CreationDate="2016-08-28T13:49:22.097" Score="2" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;My surname is &lt;em&gt;Cuch&lt;/em&gt;. Though I don't know much about Polish, I assume that this derives from the Polish word for chain, &lt;em&gt;łańcuch&lt;/em&gt;. I pronounce my name as I've been briefly told by relatives: /tsux/ in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Polish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA for Polish&lt;/a&gt;. However, online I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative#Occurrence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;many sentiments&lt;/a&gt; to the effect that [x] is &quot;also (in great majority of dialects) represented by ⟨h⟩&quot;, which would yield a great difference in pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only need to go to the IPA for Polish Wikipedia page to be told a bunch of perfectly valid information but which makes no sense to a beginner like me, such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All voiced obstruents /b, d, ɡ, v, z, ʐ, ʑ, dʐ, dʑ/ are devoiced (so /d/ becomes [t], etc.) at the ends of words and in clusters ending in any unvoiced obstruents...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much Polish vocab, but I've heard my father speak a lot to other relatives and in words like &lt;em&gt;chleb&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;łańcuch&lt;/em&gt; his pronunciation seems to reflect [x] more than ⟨h⟩. However, perhaps modern Polish leans more towards ⟨h⟩. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father's side of the family on the whole do not like to discuss the specifics of Polish or Poland much due to having seen a lot during the war. Hopefully posting here will give me a better idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="13933" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T09:17:35.177" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T09:17:35.177" Title="What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;velar&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19485" CreationDate="2016-08-28T15:02:55.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to provide a reference to &quot;Hale (1954)&quot;: it is virtually a certainty that the year is wrong, since this would have been an entirely different issue in 1954. There is, however, Morris Halle, who has written many things on the topic. The idea of having unified phonetics and phonology is, in fact, the theoretical starting point of pre-generative phonology Praguian and became a fundamental assumption of generative phonology as represented by Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle 1968, Postal 1968. We can contrast Ohala's view with that of Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle. Both deny that there are separate components of grammar: actually, it is most probable that Ohala does not have a concept of &quot;grammar&quot;, in the sense that generative linguistics uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The C&amp;amp;H view is that all language-specific sound rules are implemented by a set of phonological rules, which operate on a universal set of features that can have integer coefficients (though which on can say that a stop in French is &quot;more voiced&quot; that a stop in Swahili). These rules produce a set of instructions to the articulators, and the production of physical sound procedes thereafter in a non-linguistic way. That is, languages do not differ in how nasality is produced in [ana], once the specific integer values of these phonemes are set by rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ohala on the other hand does not accomodate sound-system processes that aren't part of what have been called &quot;postlexical phonology&quot;, thus there are no phonological rules of palatalization in Polish, there is no vowel alternation within the root in &quot;dream ~ dreamt&quot;, Classical Arabic does not have rules deleting intervocalic glides. It is entirely unclear what his theory of language production is, since it appears that he holds that speakers have learned all of the words of their language and do not generate them from parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic dichotomy between Ohala and Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle is that for Ohala, everything is historical change, and for Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle, everything is synchronic grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T16:46:44.077" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:46:44.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19483" CreationDate="2016-08-28T15:52:19.783" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  One well-known example of a case emerging as we write is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case#Neo-vocative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian neo-vocative&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern colloquial Russian given names and a small family of terms&#xA;often take a special &amp;quot;shortened&amp;quot; form that some linguists consider a&#xA;reemerging vocative case.[4] This form is applied only to given names&#xA;and nouns that end in -a and -я, which are optionally dropped in the&#xA;vocative form: &amp;quot;Лен, где ты?&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Lena, where are you?&amp;quot;). This is&#xA;basically equivalent to &amp;quot;Лена, где ты?&amp;quot;, the only difference being&#xA;that the former version suggests a positive personal, emotional bond&#xA;between the speaker and the person being addressed. Names that end in&#xA;-я acquire a soft sign in this case: &amp;quot;Оль!&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;Оля!&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Olga!&amp;quot;). In addition to given names, this form is often used with words like&#xA;&amp;quot;мама&amp;quot; (mama, mom) and &amp;quot;папа&amp;quot; (papa, dad), which would be respectively&#xA;&amp;quot;shortened&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;мам&amp;quot; (mam) and &amp;quot;пап&amp;quot; (pap). In plural this form is&#xA;used with words such as &amp;quot;ребят&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;девчат&amp;quot; (nominative: &amp;quot;ребята&amp;quot;&#xA;&amp;quot;девчата&amp;quot;, guys gals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such usage differs from historical vocative&#xA;(which would be &amp;quot;Лено&amp;quot; in the example above) and is not related to&#xA;such historical usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, of course, the parent does not have the case, but the historic language by coincidence did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older but very complete example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetian_language#Cases&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ossetian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ossetic has also entirely lost its original IE case paradigm system,&#xA;in which suffixes combined number and case in a single affix. Ossetic&#xA;has instead innovated an almost entirely new system with a discrete&#xA;number suffix followed by one of nine case suffixes (again, mostly&#xA;unknown in IE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the recent more general question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/127/languages-that-are-gaining-morphological-distinctions&quot;&gt;Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T13:08:45.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19485" CreationDate="2016-08-28T16:32:19.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO O'Hala's problem is that splitting the disciplines introduces a too limited view onto the whole matter. The option (2) is maybe too strong, I would reformulate it that vast majority of phonological phenomena can be better understood or even explained through using phonetics, while phonological outlook is necessary to preserve the connection to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, my background is in historical linguistics, which is dominated by phonology, but with the caveat that very soon you will reach a point where you work with just a very abstract structure of the language without any tangible values behind it and when you use e.g. &quot;*d&quot;, it means nothing else than &quot;a reconstructed phoneme based, which evolved later mostly into something working like /d/ but in reality could have been anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has two major disadvantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) even people with a linguistic background may find it difficult to detach themselves from the notation and stop realising that *d actually might not have any d-like qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) you do not have any control of your reconstruction, i.e. whether the system you are reconstructing is plausible/possible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it can be useful sometimes to distinguish between phonetic and phonological approaches, most of the times they are and always have been intrinsically interconnected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:32:19.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19446" CreationDate="2016-08-28T16:53:22.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the comments - it would help if you narrowed down the perspective from which you look on the topic. My primary approach would be actually top-down definition, i.e. sentence as a constitutive element of an utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Utterance&lt;/strong&gt; - a unit of speech typically with silence on the part of a speaker as boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sentence&lt;/strong&gt; - a unit constituting an utterance and intended to correspond to a meaningful complex structuring an idea, determined on many different levels requiring to structure one's speech into finite units due to our physiological and cognitive limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntactic clause/phrase&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Speech clause&lt;/strong&gt; - depending further on perspective assumed a constitutive unit of sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T16:53:22.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19487" CreationDate="2016-08-28T17:10:52.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Polish, most (if not all) words containing letter ⟨h⟩ are actually loanwords as there was no [h]/[ɦ] sound in Polish (as opposed to Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian, where [ɦ] evolved from Slavic [g]). As the voiced [ɦ] is a pretty rare sound, most languages including Latin used unvoiced [h], which was quite naturally adopted into Polish as [x], with which it is typically completely homophonous (AFAIK the Polish kids have to learn the differences in written Polish at school and confusing ⟨h⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ is a fairly common mistake in Polish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the [x] is an obstruent (belongs to the class of consonants whose main constituent is noise), so it undergoes voicing if followed by another voiced obstruent, and in these situations it is pronounced [ɣ] (if you are after correct pronunciation, you probably do not need to be overly concerned about this though because it will come quite naturally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no knowledge of Polish dialects but it is entirely possible that somewhere the [x] sound might be drifting towards unvoiced [h] (again for both ⟨h⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ as graphical representations) and there may be even regions where ⟨g⟩ is pronounced like [ɣ] or even [ɦ], so some small confusion may arise in positions where voicing is neutered (i.e. before an obstruent or at the end of the speech clause, because Polish obstruents lose their voicing at the end of the speech clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:10:52.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19311" CreationDate="2016-08-28T17:22:35.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Numerals were declined in Proto-indoeuropean heavily. The declensions are preserved very well in Sanskrit and to a certain measure in Ancient Greek as well as most contemporary Slavic languages or Lithuanian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. numeral &quot;five&quot; in Sanskrit, Czech and Lithuanian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nom.: pañca - pět - penki&#xA;gen.: pañcānām - pěti - penkių&#xA;dat.: pañcabhyaḥ - pěti - penkiems&#xA;etc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many IE languages still preserve some remains of declensions of the most basic numerals like one,two or three (e.g. in Romance languages, they still distinguish gender if not case itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:22:35.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19471" CreationDate="2016-08-28T17:32:29.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human speech is built in a very, very robust way to ensure mutual comprehension and thus it is quite rare that only one feature expresses some value. Typically there are other features that coincide with it in some way and if the original feature is absent, their presence indicates that it is intended to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With voiced/voiceless consonants, it is typically tense/lax category, where voiceless tend to be more tense, in English actually to the point of aspiration (in Germanic languages, this is so important that actually phonologists typically do not even use the voiced/voiceless classification but actually go for the tense/lax or aspirated/non-aspirated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important thing is that we typically underestimate the extra-linguistic factors in comprehension - when two people talk, there is actually a surprising amount of lip reading (to the point that in films or video games, people are heavily bothered by bad lip sync), which further helps to identify the sounds and again the tense/lax can have strong visual clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:32:29.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19458" CreationDate="2016-08-28T17:45:01.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syllable is defined typically by its head or apex (i.e. usually some vowel) and for languages with permissive phonotactics (like most Indo-European languages), you will find it easy to count the syllables but quite difficult to find their exact boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Czech word &quot;sestra&quot; (sister) can be syllabified as &quot;se-stra&quot;, &quot;ses-tra&quot; &quot;sest-ra&quot;. The middle option seems most natural to me but the other two do not form any forbidden consonant clusters either. All in all, it is a matter of potentiality and if you do a research among the speakers, their leaning will be probably something like 15/50/35 (i.e. with some more or less clear majority, but nothing like 3/90/7, which would be just deviations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difficulty is posed by strong morphological boundaries (e.g. prefixes) that can be perceived even by otherwise language unconscious speakers and shift their perception of syllable even further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would not trust poetry in the least as the rules postulated by the poets are likely to be based on their arbitrary notions of esthetics or reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:45:01.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19456" CreationDate="2016-08-28T17:58:53.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As indicated, Slovenian and Polish are from different subgroups of Slavic languages (South Slavic and West Slavic respectively). As such they are not mutually intelligible (actually spoken Czech and Polish are not very mutually intelligible, yet they are in the same group).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;, Slovenian has less consonant distinctions (they mostly got rid of palatalised consonants while Polish evolved ternary system in sibilants) but more vowels distinctions (afaik they distinguished mid-close and mid-open vowels). Slovenian also lost all nasal vowels while in Polish they are preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt;, both languages share the Slavic structural features - they both decline nouns and adjectives heavily, they conjugate verbs in similar ways and their tenses are formed from similar bases. Polish is further in development of synthetic past tense while most other Slavic languages still cling to the analytical forming with the verb &quot;to be&quot; (Slovenian actually is the last Slavic lanhuage to lose the aorist, i.e. the original synthetic past tense though). Slovenian also preserves the dual number for both declension and conjugation, a feature that is only very residual in all other Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt;, I would say the languages are pretty much the same - SVO word order where subject can be left unexpressed as it is pointed to by the verbal suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The largest difference will be in &lt;strong&gt;lexicon&lt;/strong&gt; - the problem is not that there are words that are different, but that there are words that actually sound very similar but have a wildly different meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, Slovenian is much closer to Czech or Slovak than Polish, but again that applies to Polish too (being closer to Czech and Slovak than to Slovenian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T17:58:53.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19439" CreationDate="2016-08-28T18:07:06.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that it has something to do with rhythm. When you have a couple or a triplet of words on the same level (&quot;X and Y&quot; or &quot;X, Y and Z&quot;), there is a tendency in Indo-European languages to put in the longest of the two/three at the end (this is actually very well attested in poetry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 10s numerals tend to be longer (as they are originally compound words or even univerbised phrases) than numbers from 1-10, this could lead to the words being switched if they are perceived to be on the same level somehow and not one dependent on the other (&quot;40 and 5&quot; and not &quot;40 being the H and 5 being the D&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T18:07:06.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19402" CreationDate="2016-08-28T18:27:17.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, the &lt;strong&gt;letters did not become silent&lt;/strong&gt; as letters are not linguistic units and the orthography of a language is quite arbitrary. In fact in French, there was a time when linguistists (or precursors thereof) were tracing Latin origins of the words and in order to make French closer to Latin, they renewed letters for phonemes that were lost long ago, like Latin &quot;tempus&quot; (time), which gave French &quot;tens&quot; (today just [tã] and reflected in the English word &quot;tense&quot; as in &quot;grammatic tense&quot;) but was later changed by the grammarians to &quot;temps&quot; (this was sometimes done incorrectly, e.g. French &quot;pois&quot; - a &quot;weigh&quot; came from Latin &quot;pensum&quot;, but grammarians traced it to Latin &quot;podus&quot; and add the letter D into the word, resulting into today's &quot;poids&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we modify your question &lt;strong&gt;why so many original latin phonemes disappeared&lt;/strong&gt;, the answer is fairly simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient French, probably under the influence of Germanic invaders, developed a &lt;strong&gt;strong dynamic accent&lt;/strong&gt; (compared to Latin melodic). This led to the same effect as in today's English, where accented vowels are reinforced (often diphthongised) while non-accented vowels are reduced (typically to schwa). In French, this led to loss of all post-accent syllables, which combined with the general Romance tendency to drop final consonants or consonant clusters led to what the French looks like today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However since there were &lt;strong&gt;contexts where some of the consonants were still pronounced&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. before a vowel of a following word - today's liaison), they were kept in writing mostly (&quot;il finit&quot; &gt; &quot;finit-il?&quot; also compare with &quot;il parle&quot; &gt; &quot;parle-t-il?&quot;, which is the same phenomenon, just the original Latin T for 3SG was dropped for the verb class entirely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2016-09-04T08:57:36.450" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T08:57:36.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19487" CreationDate="2016-08-28T18:52:39.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Polish and I can assure you that nowadays &quot;ch&quot; and &quot;h&quot; are pronounced exactly the same. Only elderly people (really few), especially in Eastern Poland, still keep the sound [h]. By the way, this is one of the reasons why so many Poles struggle with spelling: they confuse &quot;ch&quot; with &quot;h&quot;, the same happens with &quot;u&quot; and &quot;ó&quot; (both pronounced as [u]) or &quot;ż&quot; and &quot;rz&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13939" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T18:52:39.757" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19504" CreationDate="2016-08-28T20:47:46.803" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you call a specific tuple formed by selecting grammatical categories? I mean for instance the combination of &quot;present tense, imperfect, indicative, plural, 3rd person, subjunctive passive voice&quot;. Please consider my example regardless of whether it makes sense in English itself, I merely need a term for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I am looking for a generalization of the concept of TAV (Tense-Aspect-Mood) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense-aspect-mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense-aspect-mood&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy of what I mean precisely, consider that you have a restaurant with three &lt;strong&gt;courses&lt;/strong&gt;, my particular selection of Soup + Stew + Ice Cream would constitute my &lt;strong&gt;order&lt;/strong&gt;. Similarly, if I (say) select among Tense, Number and Person with a selection of Present + Plural + Third, that selection would be my ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13941" LastEditorUserId="13941" LastEditDate="2016-08-28T21:03:36.243" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T21:16:00.990" Title="What do you call a specific combination of grammatical categories?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19502" CreationDate="2016-08-28T20:53:58.980" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Parsing&quot; is the term that is used for this sort of analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T20:53:58.980" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19502" CreationDate="2016-08-28T21:16:00.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;David Adger (&lt;em&gt;Core Syntax&lt;/em&gt;, 2003) calls it (partial or total) &lt;strong&gt;feature specification&lt;/strong&gt;. I would go with that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-08-28T21:16:00.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19438" CreationDate="2016-08-29T01:01:31.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is fascinating question about learning word semantics. Word meanings, the connection between the utterance and the mental concept, are related in many ways. A lot of this learning comes from the pragmatic side. One of these is methods is learning from negative evidence (you didn't say this other word but instead this word, so you maybe mean something different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing is definite or immediate; little things happen one by one and need reinforcement. Even if it seems as though an immediate inference is made, that's is probably after the accumulation of many small instances and the last one clinches it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your explanation does seem reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T01:01:31.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19522" CreationDate="2016-08-29T07:50:48.267" Score="4" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading up on this topic on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, I am left in confusion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Before I started to read the article I thought that &quot;German&quot; usually refers to standard German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is actually defined like that, then why are languages such as Bavarian listed under &quot;German dialects&quot;? Bavarian is definitely not a dialect of standard German since the former is much older. Other than that, Bavarian (amongst others) are not below &quot;German&quot; in the language family tree. German is sometimes listed right below &quot;High German&quot; and on other places below &quot;High German -&gt; Central German -&gt; East Central German&quot;, whereas Bavarian is listed under &quot;High German -&gt; Upper German&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it describes the High German language group, then why are there two articles on the same topic and why is &quot;German&quot; listed below &quot;High German&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it seems that this article handles two different topics. On one hand standard German and on the other hand the High and Low German language groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just like to know wether this article is wrong, there is no good universally accepted definition or if I simply don't understand it right.&#xA;I hope somebody can clear my confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Related Links:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages#Family_tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;High German languages - Family tree (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bavarian language (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T05:50:50.250" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T12:59:34.607" Title="What exactly is the &quot;German Language&quot;" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19508" CreationDate="2016-08-29T10:03:23.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a few major reasons for this perceived inconsistency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a schprach is a dialekt mit an armej un flot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Standard High German functions as a Dachsprache.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;normal semantic change or ambiguity thanks to generalisation/specialisation of meaning&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that allows its users to edit almost any article.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;:-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T10:03:23.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19487" CreationDate="2016-08-29T14:49:13.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some confusion of phonetic transcription with Polish spelling here. To clear things up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The digraph &quot;ch&quot; and the letter &quot;h&quot; (when not preceded by &quot;c&quot;) are pronounced in exactly the same way in modern standard Polish: as the voiceless velar fricative /x/. The sounds /h/ and /ɦ/ are absent in Polish. In fact, many Polish speakers can't pronounce /h/ and when they say, for example, the English word &quot;hen&quot;, it sounds like /xɛn/ instead of /hɛn/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be some dialectal variation, but I wouldn't be concerned about it too much. Unlike in languages such as German or Norwegian, there is very little difference in pronunciation among Poles. I, for one, can barely hear any difference in pronunciation between me and people from cities on the other side of Poland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-08-29T15:03:28.440" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T15:03:28.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19508" CreationDate="2016-08-29T19:30:18.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;old joke: a language is a dialect with an army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;terms like &quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; German language&quot; are practically useful; they help us to communicate, which is to say, to help us coordinate our actions.  But in reality there are no such things.  What counts as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; German (or French, Chinese, etc) language is always driven by norms established by a dominant social group.  Real people speak whatever they speak, which is always unique to the individual: an idiolect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;once you have a community of speakers whose idiolects enable successful joint action (communication), then you can start talking about dialects, languages, etc.  but in all cases what counts as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; language is a matter of norms, not any kind of objective rule or grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find German perplexing, try Chinese or Arabic.  Both of those terms are very broad, umbrella terms that cover enormous variation.  It's useful to have them so we can say, e.g. &quot;he speaks Arabic&quot;, but in fact nobody speaks &quot;Arabic&quot;, since there is no such thing.  What he speaks is one of millions of idiolects that enable people in a broad community to communicate. so terms like &quot;the German language&quot; are really more sociological than linguistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS.  I don't have the citations handy, but there is good reason to think of dictionaries and grammars a indoctrination devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-08-29T19:35:21.113" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T19:35:21.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-29T20:35:54.823" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen some scenarios where someone says a sentence like, &quot;I'm sorry&quot; to some of his/her co-workers and then after three or four seconds he/she says, &quot;That you guys are idiots&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For a slightly differnent setting, let's just say that the person who spoke was in the beginning going to really only say &quot;I'm sorry&quot;, but then after a few seconds re-decided to add the second utterance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the utterance &quot;That you guys are idiots&quot; part of the utterance &quot;I'm sorry&quot;, or are they both separate sentences because of the three or four seconds in between the two utterances?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13843" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-29T21:04:34.160" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T12:51:39.800" Title="Does it belong to the same or a separate sentence when adding some more words after the sentence was actually finished?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-29T22:23:06.603" Score="3" ViewCount="943" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does English have the [ inchoative aspect  ] ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first passage quoted below says NO, but the second says YES.  . . .  So I guess it depends on the definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is English generally/usually said to (or considered to) have the [ inchoative aspect  ] ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoative_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoative_aspect&lt;/a&gt; -- &#xA;  The English language can approximate the inchoative aspect through the verbs &quot;to become&quot; or &quot;to get&quot; combined with an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stative_verb#Difference_from_inchoative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stative_verb#Difference_from_inchoative&lt;/a&gt; --&#xA;  In English, a verb that expresses a state can also express the entrance into a state. This is called inchoative aspect. The simple past is sometimes inchoative. For example, the present-tense verb in the sentence &quot;He understands his friend&quot; is stative, while the past-tense verb in the sentence &quot;Suddenly he understood what she said&quot; is inchoative, because it means &quot;He understood henceforth&quot;. On the other hand, the past-tense verb in &quot;At one time, he understood her&quot; is stative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13923" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T22:39:14.000" Title="Does English have [ inchoative aspect ]?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;statives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19513" CreationDate="2016-08-29T23:11:25.030" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a case where we have to distinguish between the ability to express something in a language and the presence or absence of a grammatical structure dedicated to expressing that something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not have a grammatical structure dedicated to expressing the inchoative aspect. But it is still possible to express inchoativity by using the verbs ''become'' or ''get'', or some other means (some of which are outlined in the WP articles referenced by the question). Inchoativity is something that I'm sure all human languages can express, but many do not have a specific grammatical structure dedicated to this usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the two passages you quote, they both say the same thing: that English has a variety of grammatical constructions that can be used to indicate inchoative aspect, but there is no particular grammatical construction which can be said to be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; 'inchoative aspect'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This amounts to a terminological issue as ''aspect'' can refer to either the meaning expressed or grammatical equipment used to express the meaning. By contrast, in the related domain of modality we have two terms: ''mood'' refers to the distinctive grammatical form/s, while ''modality'' refers to the meaning/s being expressed. Again, all human languages can express all the modalities that humans want to express, but languages vary in how many grammatical moods they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-11-12T22:39:14.000" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T22:39:14.000" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19516" CreationDate="2016-08-30T04:52:27.010" Score="2" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was specifically thinking of whether the voiceless velar fricative [x] as in Polish could be represented in Japanese, but [x] would be the same or very similar in every language which contains it, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, just wondering. Off the top of my head I can't think of a way, nor find one by perusing the IPA for Japanese article or online books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="13933" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T09:16:09.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T09:16:09.797" Title="Can the voiceless velar fricative, [x], be represented in Japanese?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;velar&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19515" CreationDate="2016-08-30T05:19:26.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will assume that by &quot;translate&quot; you mean which syllables in words loaned by Japanese correspond to [x] in their source language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is that words containing [x] which come directly from languages with that phoneme are sometimes rendered ッハ &lt;em&gt;hha&lt;/em&gt;. The most common examples would be Bach バッハ &lt;em&gt;Bahha&lt;/em&gt; and Mach マッハ &lt;em&gt;Mahha&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other times, it is simply rendered ハ (cf &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B6%E3%83%8F%E3%83%AD%E3%83%95&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zakharov&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Zaharofu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8F%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Halacha&lt;/a&gt; ハラーハー), or particularly word-finally, フ (cf &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AC%E3%83%95%E3%83%BB%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lech Wałęsa&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Refu Vawensa&lt;/em&gt;). Note that while ending not in /x/ but /h/, the Arabic name for God is sometimes transcribed as アッラーフ &lt;em&gt;Arrafu&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words of Greek origin beginning in Greek with χ, however, tend to have that sound represented instead with syllables from the か行 (&lt;em&gt;k-&lt;/em&gt; syllables), in line with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another subtlety is that the German orthographic &lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt; which before high vowels is a palatal fricative [ç] and not a velar [x] is almost universally transcribed as ッヒ &lt;em&gt;hhi&lt;/em&gt;, as in アルベリッヒ &lt;em&gt;Aruberihhi&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;Alberich&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T05:30:23.530" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T05:30:23.530" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19526" CreationDate="2016-08-30T06:50:33.483" Score="8" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many French words have lost etymological /l/. I have read that this occured due to a process of l-vocalization around the 10th-12th centuries which turned pre-consonantal &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; after any vowel aside from &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; (Manz).&#xA;It seems that in general, &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; developed to the triphthong &lt;em&gt;eau&lt;/em&gt; (which in Modern French has become /o/) as in &lt;em&gt;beau&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;bellus,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;chateau&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;castellum,&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;couteau&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;cultellus,&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;veau&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;vitellus.&lt;/em&gt; The use of &lt;em&gt;-eau&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;-el&lt;/em&gt; in the singular of words like this is said to be a back-formation from plural forms ending in &lt;em&gt;-eaus/-eaux&lt;/em&gt; (Manz, Ricard). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in some cases, &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; apparently became the diphthong &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt; (Modern French /ø/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks to me like &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt; might have been conditioned by a preceding glide /j/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/vieux&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vieux&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;vetulus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/pieu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pieu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; OF &lt;em&gt;pels&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;palus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/cayeu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cayeu&lt;/a&gt;/caïeu&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;catellus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's also present in the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/cheveu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cheveu&lt;/a&gt;(x)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hair(s),&quot; from Latin &lt;em&gt;capillus.&lt;/em&gt; At first, I wondered if it might relate to the etymological vowel quality, since from what I understand Latin /i/ corresponds to Proto-Romance /e/, which was distinguished from /ɛ/ in stressed syllables. But the word &lt;em&gt;sceau&lt;/em&gt; is from Latin &lt;em&gt;sigillum,&lt;/em&gt; and it still has &lt;em&gt;eau,&lt;/em&gt; so I'm not sure if that's relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate any explanation of how  &lt;em&gt;cheveu(x)&lt;/em&gt; developed phonetically. Perhaps the use of &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;eau&lt;/em&gt; here just reflects earlier or dialectal variation that was mostly leveled  out in standard French, but that in itself would be an interesting answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manz, Kathryn. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.swarthmore.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documents/linguistics/2001_manz_kathryn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The effacement and vocalization of pre-consonantal l in Old French&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rickard, Peter. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=AapiVL8qDTcC&amp;amp;pg=PA468&amp;amp;lpg=PA468&amp;amp;dq=French%20eau%20eu%20etymology%20el&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=D3OaTtpiFA&amp;amp;sig=Sv72fe1LCENuY0wM2ssAM-dYNbw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiEp4mvz7vOAhVE32MKHTXbAd8Q6AEIPDAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=French%20eau%20eu%20etymology%20el&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The French Language in the Seventeenth Century: Contemporary Opinion in France&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T07:26:19.903" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T11:10:16.827" Title="Why does French &quot;cheveu(x)&quot; have &quot;eu&quot; and not &quot;eau&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;old-french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T07:23:13.817" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In NLP, we have two directions. One is NLU (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;natural language understanding&lt;/a&gt;) which deals with a given text to analyze it, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;language detection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;normalization and text cleaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tokenization and segmentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphological analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stemming&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part of speech tagging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we have another direction called NLG (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_generation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;natural language generation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an application in which I need to find all of the possible morphological extractions of a given word. For example in English, if I give &lt;strong&gt;eat&lt;/strong&gt; as an input, I'm interested to get &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eaten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eating&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eats&lt;/em&gt; and every other possible word that can be formed with the word &lt;strong&gt;eat&lt;/strong&gt; as the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a known process? Do we have a name for it? And do we have algorithms or tools that can help us in this regard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact what I'm looking for is the reverse process of finding lemma of a given word and create all words that can made with a given lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T07:44:17.260" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T07:44:17.260" Title="What do we call the process of creating all of the possible morphological extractions of a given word?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T07:41:06.133" Score="-1" ViewCount="1774" Body="&lt;p&gt;how similar are Serbian and Polish? They are both Slavic languages so how similar are they? When i listen to them it sounds pretty similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13898" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T11:20:32.533" Title="how similar are Serbian and Polish?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19519" CreationDate="2016-08-30T09:25:37.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though no expert, I'm Polish–Serbian by descent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure you're aware how different the alphabets are, but the phonetics &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; very similar, like you said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of individual soundalike digraphs are &lt;em&gt;ш&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sz&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;ж&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rz&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Perhaps the IPA representations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Serbo-Croatian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbo-Croatian&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Polish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polish&lt;/a&gt; can be compared for greater detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference in pronunciation I can think of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Voiceless_velar_fricative.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Polish, for which I am unsure of a Serbian equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't think that there are feminine or plural surname conventions in Serbian like there are in Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure whether sounds change depending on which letter precedes or succeeds them in Serbian as in Polish (the reversal of voicing or devoicing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, a lot of the vocabulary only slightly differs. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;баба and Babcia (grandma)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;жена and żona (wife)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;пиво and piwo (beer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T09:25:37.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19512" CreationDate="2016-08-30T11:16:20.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is ambiguous. Spoken language is a lot looser than well formed written sentences thus there is no way for us to even tentatively say yay or nay. Intonation, stress, non-verbal sings would point in a direction, but even then, there is no way to ascertain the speakers intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following scenarios.&#xA;Jack: My mother passed away yesterday.&#xA;Jill: I'm sorry&#xA;...&#xA;Jill: That you guys are idiots ... is an understatement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jill: I'm sorry&#xA;...&#xA;Jill: That you guys are idiots ... but it is something I'll need to learn to live with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final thought on this: Interpreting isolated utterances does not make much sense from a linguistic point of view. Interpreting their written transcription makes even less sense. For a successful attempt, you need context, and very often more than just the transcription of the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T11:16:20.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19508" CreationDate="2016-08-30T11:56:36.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything that is designated with the word &lt;em&gt;German&lt;/em&gt; somehow concerns the continental Germanic dialect continuum. This designates a region from southern Denmark in the North to South Tyrol (&lt;em&gt;Alto Adige&lt;/em&gt;) in the South and from the Belgian coast in the West to somewhere around the Neiße river in the East where ‘descendents of the continental Germic language(s)’ are spoken natively. (The eastern borders were shifted westwards after World War Two.) This dialect continuum is characterised as any dialect continuum is by continuous mutual intellegibility between close variants while there is decreasing intellegibility when comparing variants further apart.&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; Anything inside this continuum can technically be called ‘German’ — but, as always, restrictions apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already in the Middle ages, these dialects could be grouped together into three groups: High German, Middle German and Low German, depending on how strongly they participated in the High German consonant shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1648, after the 30 years war ended, the Netherlands became independent from what was then Germany (the Holy Roman Empire). From then on, the language evolution started diverging into Dutch on one side and German on the other side of that border. With Belgium also becoming independent after the Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1806 and being united with the Netherlands after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the language spoken there was also heavily influenced by the Dutch standard rather than the German one. This explains why the Germanic languages spoken in Belgium and the Netherlands (except for the German spoken in the Eupen-Malmedy region of Belgium) are not considered German but Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, even though Switzerland also gained independence in 1648, there was less of a desire to separate themselves from German influence. But we’ll get back to that in a second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standardisation of German was a long-lasting progress that never reached completion. Most opinions say it started with Martin Luther’s translation of the bible in the 16&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century. Luther at the time wrote in a variant that was close to his Middle German dialect. But there was already a shift going on at the time: many cities that belonged to the Low German dialect region had begun adopting what they perceived as ‘the better’ German — a Middle or High German variant. This was a movement initiated by the upper classes to separate themselves from the peasants of the surrounding countryside that would continue to speak their Low German dialects. And since these people had little contact to actual speakers of the Middle or High German dialects, a slightly artificial variant evolved which would mix some northern influences in especially concerning pronunciation. This change was already happening when Luther translated the bible, hence why he may have chosen more southern varieties when in doubt (although he is often quotes with ‘dem Volk aufs Maul schauen’ — listening exactly to what the people say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again over time, the standard set down by Luther and others would evolve onwards into what was finally perceived as a common standard German language. But after the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist in 1806, the different states that belonged to it began taking different paths. Most notably, a successful reunification movement initiated by Prussia culminating in the war with France in 1870/1 made sure that Prussia would be the dominating member of the new Germany by excluding Austria — the only other country of similar size and influence. Switzerland, having been independent from the Holy Roman Empire (and neutral) since 1648, also did not take part in reunification and neither did (whether accidentally or purposely I do not know) Luxemburg. (Including Liechtenstein, sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland would not have made sense and would have caused more problems than benefits, especially due to its minute size.) So henceforth, there were three major countries in which German was spoken: Germany (+Luxemburg), Austria and Switzerland (+Liechtenstein).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This triade meant that the languages in all three countries would evolve somewhat separately. Especially the Swiss variant, which had enjoyed a longer period of separation, became somewhat distinct from the other two variants, both in the fact that the standardised variant is less commonly spoken when compared to dialectal variants and in the different preferred words and somewhat different meanings of words. But even between Austria and Germany there are more differences than some people expect. Therefore, when speaking about &lt;em&gt;German&lt;/em&gt;, one needs to recognise that the language is polycentric — much like English — and should be categorised into &lt;strong&gt;German German, Swiss German&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Austrian German.&lt;/strong&gt; To add to the confusion, the standard variants are called &lt;em&gt;High German&lt;/em&gt; in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the historic overview, let’s focus on understanding and intellegibility. It is true that Dutch nowadays is only mutually intellegible to Germans who live very close to the border, and even they will not understand Dutch people from the far West. Contrary to that, even though they have different standards, a Swiss from the very southern corners of German-speaking Switzerland, an Austrian from the very South-East of Austria and a German from the northernmost point of Germany will understand each other if they use their respective standard variants (Swiss standard German, Austrian standard German and German standard German) — even though these standard variants will still have some local colouring. Thus, the distinction between Dutch and German as two languages makes sense while distinguishing between the other three makes less sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, even though well within the dialect continuum, the understanding of nearby local dialects can be very difficult even for locals. The Lech river in western Bavaria is one such example: the Bavarian dialects spoken East of it and the Swabian dialects (in the Allgäu variant) spoken West of it are very different and hard to understand for those from the other side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, after this long explanation, we see that &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, the dialects are typically older than the standard language. But that is no feature inherent of German, other languages’ dialects also predate their respective languages’ standardisation. It also makes sense to subsume those dialects spoken in the German dialect continuum under a common &lt;em&gt;German&lt;/em&gt; label, since the difference between them are often smaller than those between German and Dutch or said dialect and Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that &lt;strong&gt;High German has two meanings.&lt;/strong&gt; It can be used to refer to the group of &lt;strong&gt;High German dialects&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(high&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;altitude)&lt;/em&gt; which took part in the High German consonant shift to a strong extent (only a few dialects took part in it completely). It can also be used to refer to &lt;strong&gt;standard German&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(high&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;elite)&lt;/em&gt; in any of the three polycentric variants. To avoid confusion, it is better to use &lt;em&gt;standard German&lt;/em&gt; for this meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking this into account, &lt;em&gt;yes,&lt;/em&gt; Bavarian is a High German (or Upper German) dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Standard German&lt;/em&gt; remains a slightly artificial concept. I, a German from the South, will use different words, different grammatical constructions and different sentence structures from somebody from the North even in writing — this is most obvious in salutations and valedictions, though. Compare this to English where anybody from the UK will more or less use the same or very similar words, grammatical constructions and sentence structures in a certain setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Yes, this &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; include the Netherlands and Belgium. The differences between the German dialects on the East side of the Dutch–German border and the Dutch ones one the West side are small enough to allow understanding and communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T11:56:36.237" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19524" CreationDate="2016-08-30T13:30:20.527" Score="2" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read that the division between suprasegments and segments is not black and white. I take this claim to have two logical entailments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are prosodic features that are segmental. For example, lexical tone in Chinese is only on the single vowel of the syllable. Therefore, tone is always prosodic but not always suprasegmental.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are non-prosodic features which are suprasegmental. &lt;strong&gt;I'm not sure about this, but maybe for example vowel harmony is an example of non-prosodic suprasegmental feature&lt;/strong&gt; (or, conversely, is harmony prosodic?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my simplistic understanding accurate or am I going down the wrong route? Any insight is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T13:35:57.340" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T20:04:55.640" Title="Is vowel harmony prosodic, suprasegmental, or both?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19523" CreationDate="2016-08-30T15:35:28.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Prosody&quot; derives from προσῳδία, which you can read all about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=prosw%7Cdi%2Fa&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=prosw%7Cdi%2Fa0#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: it roughly is about pitch being superimposed on speech. In Latin this was extended to poetic meter. Modern linguistics (in the past 70 or so years) has extended that to pretty much all properties. It is not a technical concept, so it doesn't have a precise definition and it doesn't sharply contrast with something else. The essence of &quot;prosody&quot; is that it is any sound property of speech that can extend over more than one segment. It is equivalent to &quot;autosegment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Segment&quot; on the other hand is a much crisper concept, although there are unresolved debates of the &quot;one segment or two?&quot; variety, e.g. &quot;Is [tʃ] one segment or two?&quot; – typically the answer is deferred to some higher-level a priori postulate such as objecting that [tʃ] can't be a cluster because in the language there aren't any other obstruent clusters in the onset. In feature-geometric theories the answer is trivial: something is suprasegmental iff the thing dominates the root node (mother node of all segments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The London School of Phonology spearheaded by Firth would give a &quot;prosodic&quot; analysis to whatever it could, and that use of &quot;prosodic&quot; is very similar to &quot;autosegmental&quot;. In essence, vowel harmony would be said to be prosodic just in case it marks off a continuous span of speech. By inspecting the history of vowel harmony in autosegmental phonology, one can clearly see that &quot;suprasegmental&quot; vs. &quot;segmental&quot; is completely orthogonal to dominance relations. In early work on harmony, harmonizing features such as front/back, round, ATR (see Clements' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/featgeom/Clements-76-80.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Vowel harmony in nonlinear generative phonology&lt;/a&gt;) were &quot;suprasegmentalized&quot; just in case they spread. However since the first hierarchical model of features in Clements 1985, it was understood that sub-segmental features can spread just as well as suprasegmental features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is completely controversial where tone features in Chinese (any Chinese language) attach -- subsegmentally or suprasegmentally. Sticking to the most-Greek understanding of &quot;prosody&quot;, only tone would be prosody, so everything else would be non-prosodic: therefore, Chinese at least &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been analyzed as a segmental prosodic feature, and Turkish (in Clements' analysis) has been analyzed as suprasegmental non-prosody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: that is all just a terminology game. There is no utility to the term &quot;prosody&quot;, which has largely been coopted by people working on intonation. The distinction &quot;subsegmental&quot; vs &quot;suprasegmental&quot; refers to something well-defined which is not easily detectable (that is, we know what the terms mean, and we don't have tools that easily identify whether is it one versus the other), for which reason &quot;suprasegmental&quot; is a fairly useless term as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T15:35:28.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-30T16:06:56.357" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with dysphonic speech and Praat's automated pulse detection algorithm is inadequate, so I manually correct the placement of pulses using .Manipulation files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ultimate goal is to measure CPP: I know how to obtain this measure from an original unmodified Sound file. However, when I try to resynthesize (either with overlap-add or LPC) the modified .Manipulation file, the resulting Sound file doesn't exhibit the same pulses as my manually corrected .Manipulation file does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried reading the Praat documentation, but couldn't find an answer there or from web searches, nor could I find any previous StackExchange questions addressing this questions, so I hope somebody can advise me on what I may be missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13951" LastEditorUserId="13951" LastEditDate="2016-08-30T16:44:30.690" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T16:44:30.690" Title="Praat: CPP from modified .Manipulation file" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19517" CreationDate="2016-08-30T16:29:23.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;L /kasˈtɛl.lʊm/ &amp;gt; VL /kasˈtɛl.lũ/ &amp;gt; OF /t͡ʃahˈtɛl/ &amp;gt; MF   /ʃaˈtɛau/&amp;gt; F /ʃaˈto/&#xA;L /ˈwɛ.tʊ.lʊm/  &amp;gt; VL /ˈβɛ.lũ/ &amp;gt; /ˈvjɛ.lu/ &amp;gt; OF /vjɛl/ &amp;gt; MF /vjɛu/ &amp;gt; F   /vjø/&#xA;L /kaˈpɪl.lʊm/  &amp;gt; VL /kaˈβel.lũ/  &amp;gt; OF /t͡ʃəˈvel/  &amp;gt; MF   /ʃəˈvɛu/ &amp;gt; F /ʃəˈvø/&#xA;L /sɪˈɡɪl.lʊm/  &amp;gt; VL /se.ɣɛl.lũ/  &amp;gt; OF /səˈɛl/    &amp;gt; MF     /sɛau/ &amp;gt; F    /so/&#xA;&#xA;L - Latin, VL - Vulgar Latin, OF - Old French, MF - Middle French, F - French&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for my formatting. It is hard to do this in a neat style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had included every step, the 4 sound change chains above would take a whole page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In words&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; has detailed the causes quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed /ɛl/ becomes /o/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Late-closed /ɛl/ becomes /jɛl/ (because of vowel-breaking /ɛ/ &gt; /jɛ/) &gt; /jø/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/el/ becomes /ø/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Late-closed refers to those syllables (not vowels) that are open in Vulgar Latin and then became close. Usually they only have one &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt;, so the syllable was open until the final vowel was lost, causing &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; to be shifted to the now final syllable (second chain, &lt;code&gt;/ˈvjɛ.lu/ &amp;gt; OF /vjɛl/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;capillum &gt; cheveux&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short i &lt;code&gt;/ɪ/&lt;/code&gt; in Latin becomes &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; in Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only long i &lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt; is preserved as &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; in Vulgar Latin (the lengthening is basically gone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;code&gt;L /ɡenˈtiː.lem/ &amp;gt; VL /genˈti.lẽ/ &amp;gt; F /ʒɑ̃ˈti(j)/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the answer to your question is, quoting you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; corresponds to Proto-Romance &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;, which was distinguished from &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; in stressed syllables.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;sigillum &gt; sceau ?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a strange case. The &quot;eau&quot; can only be explained by that the /i/ has shifted to /ɛ/ in VL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This word is even stranger. In almost all descendants that kept the &quot;g&quot;, the first vowel is &quot;u&quot; instead of &quot;i&quot; (e.g. Italian &quot;suggello&quot;), for which I have two explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That the first sound has become the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciation#Sonus_medius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonus medius&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That it is a regularization of &quot;sigillum&quot; based on the prefix &quot;sub-&quot; (&quot;sug-&quot; before another &quot;g&quot;). It may have been entirely analogically constructed from &quot;suggetto&quot; (which can also explain /i/ &gt; /e/). But, this is irrelevant to the French word &quot;sceau&quot; (since the French word is &quot;sujet&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(work in progress)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am far from an expert at this. Please do notify me if I made any mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="13200" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T11:10:16.827" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T11:10:16.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19517" CreationDate="2016-08-30T17:36:25.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(this is meant to be a comment but it's too long so I posted it as an answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zink (1986/2013) in his &quot;Phonétique historique du français&quot; gives the following reconstruction - I preserved &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; notation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kapillus &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; s. ẹ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IV&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; kabẹllus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; s. k̬aβ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tšẹvẹllos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VII&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; s. tšẹvẹɫs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XI&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; s. tševeus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XII&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; œ́us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; œ́s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XIII&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; s. ševœ́(s) (afr. cheveus)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T15:20:23.680" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T15:20:23.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19523" CreationDate="2016-08-30T20:04:55.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would use the term &quot;suprasegmental&quot;, as in &quot;going above the level of a single segment/phoneme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some linguists claim everything above the level of segment into prosody, I find it more useful to put into prosody the features that &quot;inherently&quot; go over the level of a segment (pitch, pace, accent,...) even though they may be occasionally reduced to a single segment, while vowel harmony seems to be more of a distant/inconcatenative assimilation (generally, we do not consider assimilation of place between /n/ and /k/ in the word &quot;bank&quot; to be a prosodic phenomenon, do we).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T20:04:55.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12274" CreationDate="2016-08-30T20:31:39.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason that where adjectives have gender it agrees with the gender of their noun is typically that the gendered adjectival form is made by merging the adjectival stem with a gendered demonstrative pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gender is a typical category for nouns, not adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can refer to &lt;strong&gt;Lakoff&lt;/strong&gt; (Fire, women and dangerous things) with regards how gender-like categories develop in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to &lt;strong&gt;gender in adjectives&lt;/strong&gt;, the function is typically to indicate the dependent-head relation towards the noun and the gender typically evolves by merging with some sort of clitic pronoun, pointing to the noun/head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. in Indo-European languages (particularly the old ones), adjectives typically have the same declensions as the demonstrative pronouns. In Russian, you can see this process happening again - &quot;krasivaja ženščina&quot; (beautiful woman) comes from &quot;krasiva+ja&quot;(beautiful-F + this-F). In most other Slavic languages, this secondary suffix merged into the previous word fully (e.g. in Czech you have &quot;krásná&quot; from original *&quot;krásna-ja&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can potentially find counter examples, this is the explanation why in majority of the cases it is the noun that carries the gender category, while the adjective that has to agree with it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="9713" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T19:01:30.467" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T19:01:30.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2016-08-30T22:14:35.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A universal methodology &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used to put together vowels and consonants and indeed you will find this occasionally, mostly in phonetics though - e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/The_International_Phonetic_Alphabet_%28revised_to_2015%29.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt; can be, in a way, considered one such methodology with totally closed occlusives through nasals, fricatives up to the approximants with highest degree of aperture at the very bottom. This is follow by a vowel chart typically placed beneath the consonants, again with the most closed vowels (following directly the approximants) at the top and the most open vowels at the bottom (it is rather ingenious, really). Another method is accoustic description (formants in vowels and approximants/liquids, noise formants in fricatives and formant loci in occlusives).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is there will be &lt;strong&gt;almost no overlaps between the two&lt;/strong&gt; (except the /i/ and /j/, /u/ and /w/ and several other examples) &lt;strong&gt;in phonology&lt;/strong&gt; because they are articulated in a wildly different manner and have wildly different position with the phonological system (e.g. with regards to combinatorics) due to their phonetic properties. Thus you will get just one large/wide table/tree instead of two smaller but equally descriptive. It is simply not useful to treat vowels and consonants in a single system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T22:14:35.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2016-08-30T22:49:17.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several indications this was not just combination of *k+*w.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;Morphology&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Semi-vowels were vocalised in zero grade verbs but this does not happen for *kʷ. To the contrary, there are cases where there is *ḱ followed by /w/ that can vocalise to /u/ (&quot;dog&quot; - a.gr.: kyón, gen.: kynos, skrt.: śván, gen. śunah) which would be fairly peculiar if it did not happen for regular /k/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;Alphabetic representation&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Some pre-classical Greek dialects use letter &quot;koppa&quot; where *kʷ is reconstructed (which is actually the source of Roman letter Q). There is little reason to assume they would record one particular combination of phonemes as a single phoneme (not that it would be unprecedented in Greek, just the coincidence seems unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;strong&gt;Contrast type&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;It seems certain that PIE *ḱ corresponded to some sort of mildly palatal form of [k] as in the so-called satem languages, it developed quite indiscriminately to sibilants. Therefore if you have a palatal version of [k], and another version of [k], it is likely the contrast will be somewhat reinforced by distancing the places of articulation from each other, the latter being moved more to the post-velar regions of the mouth (as in [q] in IPA), which tends to produced effect not entirely dissimilar to labialisation (same as back vowels tend to be rounded too). I believe it is not difficult to find supporting evidence in linguistic typology for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;strong&gt;Satemisation&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;When IE languages changed the spawn of *ḱ into something else (either by satemisation or frequent palatalisation), the spawn of *kʷ tended to lose the labial element, as if it were no longer needed to distinguish a contrast because the contrast ceased to exist due to one part of it changing almost entirely to something wildly different. Also it makes sense with regards to (3) - the contrast might have been lost due to it being reinforced too much one way or the other. Again, this is not ubiquitous and does not constitute a proof but it points out in this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T19:06:30.433" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T19:06:30.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18980" CreationDate="2016-08-30T23:21:20.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Modality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modals&lt;/a&gt; -- and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/276408/15299&quot;&gt;English modals in particular&lt;/a&gt; -- have several different varieties of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Must&lt;/em&gt; has two senses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;Deontic&lt;/strong&gt; sense, which is social and deals with obligation and limitation of actions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He must be back home by midnight.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You must not panic when she appears.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;Epistemic&lt;/strong&gt; sense, which is logical and deals with judgements about probability&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;This must be the place.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;She must not have heard the news yet.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a modal isn't making sense one way, try another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T23:21:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19537" CreationDate="2016-08-31T05:36:57.847" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the literature I see three different theoretical constructs used to account for prosodic phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prosodic phonology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Metrical phonology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Autosegmental phonology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likely there are a few others, but these three show up in most of my informal lit review. Although I'm somewhat familiar with these three approaches, I wonder if there's any consensus in the linguistic community about which has the broadest explanatory power. Does the use of any one of these somehow negate the relevancy of another or are they all complementary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any &lt;strong&gt;heuristics you may have to help me differentiate the use of one theory for another with regards to accounting for suprasegmental phenomena&lt;/strong&gt; would be just tremendous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I read in my intro to phono coursebook that one of the central tenants of prosodic phono is that phono phenomena are not isomoprhic to morph/syntactic domains. &lt;strong&gt;But isn't this also a tenant in e.g. metrical phono?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T08:39:30.480" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T22:44:22.907" Title="Prosodic vs Metrical vs Autosegmental accounts of suprasegmental phenomena" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-31T09:50:50.550" Score="14" ViewCount="4052" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we ignore the political distinction &quot;theories of those who generally agree with Chomsky&quot; vs &quot;theories of those who generally disagree with him&quot; (which is better described by &quot;Chomskian&quot; vs &quot;non-Chomskian/post-Chomskian&quot;), can &quot;generative&quot; be defined in any useful way? Can a non-generative theory exist at all? It is clear that speakers can produce sentences they've never heard before, so they need to generate them in some way, based on what they know. Isn't this is something that both minimalist syntacticians and, say, construction/cognitive grammarians agree on? Or does the word &quot;generative&quot; have any more specific meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T12:04:04.080" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:59:24.830" Title="What does &quot;generative&quot; mean? Can a linguistic theory be non-generative?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2016-08-31T10:09:46.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All these arguments are legitimate. But you could also ask whether there is any real human language (not reconstructed) that has a phonological contrast between /kʷ/ and /kw/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T10:09:46.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19534" CreationDate="2016-08-31T14:18:45.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of non-&quot;generative&quot; linguistic theories (or rather approaches/disciplines). E.g. linguistic typology is not interested in the way language is produced on its way from neural pathways towards the utterance but on co-occurences of linguistic features, their dependencies and mutual conditions. Historical linguistics strives to understand the grammar of reconstructed languages but I would argue that the core of the discipline lies in the act of reconstruction itself, not generating grammatically correct sentences in the proto-language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore the term &quot;generative&quot; (broadly speaking, not concentrated on Chomskians) implies just one dimension of language, i.e. its production, while the other dimension - reception and understanding - is conveniently overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T14:18:45.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19533" CreationDate="2016-08-31T16:24:38.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Prosodic phonology&quot; is ambiguous, since it is used to refer to a specific generative theory of structural relations, as well as numerous often non-generative accounts of non-segmental phonology (as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19523/is-vowel-harmony-prosodic-suprasegmental-or-both&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Setting aside the non-specific version of &quot;prosody&quot;, &quot;prosodic phonology&quot; refers to the hypothesis that there is a strict hierarchy of structural constituents above the segment. They can be divided into two subsets, as exemplified &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19459/why-is-the-utterance-and-intonational-phrase-post-lexical&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with certain additions (mora at the bottom, possibly but probably not sub-syllabic constituents like &quot;onset&quot;, &quot;rhyme&quot; etc. in the middle, also possibly &quot;Clitic group&quot; immediately above the Prosodic Word. Prosodic Phonology (PP) is a specific claim, that these structures exist, they are ordered in a specific way, and the hierarchy is strict (IP always and only immediately dominates PhoP, etc): though, some people give up on that requirement. The primary purpose of PP is to provide a mean of handling syntactic-grouping influences on phonological rules, for which purpose PhWd and higher were invented. Structure below the word exists for entirely different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metrical phonology comes in two main flavors. In the earliest manifestations e.g. &quot;Fragment of a draft&quot;, it is a formalism that competes with autosegmental theory, as a means of handling all of phonology. Autosegmental phonology did not attempt to handle stress, and metrical phonology was initially born to account for stress and rhythm. The formalism metrical phonology was later generalized so that it could handle feature spreading (via the notion of &quot;projection&quot;). Leben's paper &quot;Metrical or autosegmental&quot; pointed out that there wasn't an empirical issue, and the extensions of metrical phonology that allowed MetPho to handle all of phonology were withdrawn. At that point, MetPho became a more restricted theory of grouping, with syllables, feet and P-words (plus occasionally-postulated binary groups of feet). The theory was mostly &quot;about&quot; stress, and has attempted to express the notion &quot;is more prominent&quot; in some way. There is considerable overlap between the lower half of the ProPho tree and MetPho&quot; syllables group into feet which can group into a word-size chunk (so that one can say that the word has main stress on a particular foot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Autosegmental phonology on the other hand is a theory of features and their relationship to segments. Thus it has minimal overlap with metrical phonology. However: autosegmental phonology can refer to metrical or higher structures, if e.g. a tone spreading rule is sensitive to foot structure or syntactic structure (translated into PhoPhr structure). The three theories are not competitors, they are about different things (just as botany, zoology and geology are about different things, and it makes no sense to wonder if botany is more explanatory than geology). Prosodic Phonology is really about one specific claim, that phonological rules cannot refer to non-phonological properties, and the phrasal machinery (and more) is what was thought necessary to handle the facts. Some version of Metrical Phonology is how people handle stress and foot structure, and some version of Autosegmental Phonology (and its more specific descendant Feature Geometry) is how people handle things that aren't stress and foot structure. Metrical phonology is about grouping sequences of segments into higher units, and Autosegmental Phonology is about what you do with features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;not isomorphic&quot; claim is really a red herring promulgated by proponents of translation theories of syntax-phonology relations. The claim is that substrings of sentences where phonological rules apply are not syntactic constituents. This is a red herring because people who advocate the Direct Reference theory never claimed that rules only apply to the entirety of a syntactic constituent: the claim is that rules &lt;em&gt;refer to&lt;/em&gt; syntactic relations, such as c-command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T16:24:38.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19534" CreationDate="2016-08-31T18:15:54.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many definitions of &quot;generative (grammar)&quot;, so there can be no single answer. A separate and interesting question would be to document usage of the term &quot;generative&quot; in publications of formal syntacticians of any version, separated into Chomskian vs. opposing theories such as LFG, RG, HPSG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core concept is &quot;mathematically explicit&quot;, and there are and have been many theories that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mathematically explicit, such as virtually all functional and typological schools. Indeed, after a spike in mathematical activity in the 50's and 60's, most formal linguistic theories have taken mathematical foundations for granted, even while repudiating some of the earlier mathematical foundations. The level of mathematization in 50's Chomskian linguistics is vastly higher than one encounters in any work in Minimalism. HPSG and descendants are the &quot;most mathematical&quot; extant theories of syntax, but practicioners of those theories are not particularly comfortable with being called generativists, because &quot;generative&quot; is usually understood to mean &quot;Chomskian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Generate&quot; technically does not mean &quot;produce in chronological steps&quot;, it means &quot;provide a bidirectional chain of logical inference from one representation to another&quot;, but most theories of syntax seem to be expressed in a production-friendly manner rather than a parsing-friendly manner. Minimalism superficially breaks with this trend by basing everything on the fundamental parsing operation Merge, but it does not start with the actually-produced surface sentence. All generative theories maintain that they provide a logical account of relations between structures, and no theories claim to be prodcedural accounts of how e.g. S is converted into NP plus VP, thus the idea that rules are about real-time production-orientation is not a feature of the theory, it's a feature of how people have misunderstood the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T18:15:54.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19534" CreationDate="2016-08-31T18:47:33.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Generative&quot; has been understood in two quite different ways in the Chomskian era: A. explicit versus B. speaker oriented.  We might refer to these as &quot;official&quot; or &quot;standard&quot; for A, since this is the sense proposed by Chomsky himself in his 1964 &lt;strong&gt;Aspects of the theory of syntax&lt;/strong&gt;, versus &quot;non-standard&quot;, &quot;informal&quot;, &quot;hearer oriented&quot;, or &quot;interpretive&quot;  for B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Aspects&lt;/strong&gt;, Chomsky gave the analogy of the way an algebraic function &quot;generates&quot; a set of points to the way a grammar &quot;generates&quot; sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fred Householder published a paper in which he proposed sense B for the term &quot;generative&quot;, but Chomsky and Halle published a rejoinder repeating Chomsky's original position that generative grammar was &quot;neutral between speaker and hearer&quot;.  [See &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&amp;amp;aid=2716592&amp;amp;fileId=S0022226700000992&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some recent claims in phonological theory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://Chomsky,%20Noam;%20Halle,%20Morris%20(Oct%201965).%20%22Some%20Controversial%20Questions%20in%20Phonological%20Theory%22.%20Journal%20of%20Linguistics.%201%20(2):%2097%E2%80%93138&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some controversial claims in phonological theory&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite Chomsky's historical position on the matter, sense B of &quot;generative&quot; has proved very popular among linguists.  The matter seems relatively clear-cut in phonology, where in the standard view, the conditions on the application of a phonological rule must be met in the &quot;input&quot; to the rule, not the &quot;output&quot;.  It seems pretty clear that this is a speaker-oriented interpretation and not at all &quot;neutral between speaker and hearer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself proposed a version of generative phonology that was truly neutral between speaker and hearer, inasmuch as there were rules in a phonological system of both sorts -- speaker-oriented rules (like the rules in standard generative phonology) and hearer-oriented rules.  That was a paper &quot;Interpretive and productive phonological rules&quot; in the U. Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics; it was inspired by Kiparsky's distinction between opaque and transparent rules.  And much more recently, I wrote up a more recent version &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T01:01:47.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19534" CreationDate="2016-08-31T19:08:47.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a short version, I'll cite my proposed tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/generative-grammar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;generative-grammar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;generative-grammar&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A theory usually associated with Noam Chomsky that &lt;strong&gt;accounts for a&#xA;  language's grammar by a system of rules that are able to generate all&#xA;  the possible grammatical expressions in that language&lt;/strong&gt;. In its original&#xA;  sense, &quot;generative&quot; does not neccessarily mean &quot;production-focussed&quot;,&#xA;  although it has often been understood as such. Generativists study&#xA;  mostly syntax, but also other aspects of linguistic structure such&#xA;  as morphology, phonology and semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think the question is a good one and admit I can't give a ready-to-go definition of what &quot;generative grammar&quot; subsumes, but I have a feeling there is some on-going misconception about what &quot;generative&quot; means which I want to clarify because I think this is the most important part of understanding the problem:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original sense, &quot;generative&quot; doesn't mean that one is interested in generating particular instances of grammatical sentences of a certain language, or in how human language is generated &quot;from neutral pathways towards the utterance&quot;. The OP already made a good insight by saying &quot;Typical Chomskian approaches aren't generative in this sense [of &quot;concentrated on production, not on understanding&quot;] - they are very often based on grammaticality judgements&quot;. Rather, generative grammar wants to establish a grammatical theory that is able to account for any expression a language MAY generate, rather than just describing, without making any generalisations and predictive explanations, what is already there. It is the explanatory power and the aim to account for linguistic phenonemna univerally that is the essential characteristics of generative grammar, and not an aim to restrict yourself to a certain aspect of language. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Generative&quot; does not neccessarily mean &lt;em&gt;production-focussed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Generative theory wants to be - apart from being explanatory, this is one of the core goals - independent of purpose, it doesn't want to just provide a way to analyse how humans produce sentences, but establish a theoretical framework which has the explanatory power of generalising what is already there and predicting how language would behave in terms of grammaticality when certain parameters are set in this or in that way. Basing your theory on a generative view on language doesn't mean you must focus on production.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Therefore, it is well possible to do research that isn't interested in production but rather in an analysis of existing structures, like typological research, with an approach of a theory that is motivated by the goal to be generative (a good linguistic theory, be it syntactic, semantic, phonological, ... should anyway be based on typologically widespread empirical research, so you actually do typological or historical research with generative theories in mind); basing your research on a generative theory doesn't mean you need to use it to produce sentences on your own or, even less, to account for how language is processed neurally or anything.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, @Greg Lee indicated that many people have indeed been using the term in the sense of &quot;production-focussed&quot;, so although I claim this is not what Chomsky orignially intended with this terminology, in order to not be prescriptivist I should admit that &quot;generative&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; also used for &quot;production-focussed&quot; in a second sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-12T14:49:16.487" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T14:49:16.487" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19551" CreationDate="2016-08-31T21:10:23.067" Score="2" ViewCount="857" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia explains how the Inflectional Phrase has a VP as its complement and an NP (the subject of the phrase) as its specifier. It is long ago that I studied this, but a quick look at &lt;code&gt;Sprachliches Wissen&lt;/code&gt; by &lt;code&gt;Grewendorf&lt;/code&gt; confirms it. And the analysis works alright for many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am unsure of how we can account for cases like the following Welsh sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Naeth a   dyn brynu car&#xA;did   the man buy   car&#xA;'The man bought a car'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out where the IP even is. Is &lt;code&gt;naeth&lt;/code&gt; the complement of the IP? Then why is it to the left of the subject? Or has &lt;code&gt;naeth&lt;/code&gt; somehow moved to the complementiser slot? Then why is it getting conjugated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, I would love to see some syntax trees of entire sentences for Welsh and maybe other VSO languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T12:18:58.140" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T12:18:58.140" Title="The Inflectional Phrase and Welsh" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2323" CreationDate="2016-09-01T09:30:24.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is built as a sturdy structure with many redundant and mutually supporting features because it is by its very nature abstract since it strives to use finite means to describe infinite variety and fluidness to the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said - you have phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which boy did the knight give the sword?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which dragon did the knight give the boy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which boy did the knight give the dragon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot really say what they mean with surety - for the first one you can infer from the prototypical meanings and usages that the boy is the recipient of a sword but for the latter two, you simply cannot since there are no dragons. As such, typical things with dragons differ whether you narrate a fairy tale (you give people to dragons as a nourishment/sacrifice) or in real world (you give dragons to kids as toys).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while quite often one can infer the meaning of a sentence just from the semantics of its constituents, the morphosyntax hugely facilitates understanding and communication by overtly expressing some of the relationships between the constituents. This also quite probably allows us to express more complicated and abstract thoughts where there is no appropriate prototypical usage e.g. because normal people just do not talk about such things (to put it bluntly, try reading Heidegger without the morphosyntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T09:30:24.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19542" CreationDate="2016-09-01T10:15:10.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I googled for Joan Bresnan which @Atamiri mentioned in the comment and think I've found the analysis that he/she was mentioning and should be what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/LFG2-1997/lfg97bresnan.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bresnan (1997)&lt;/a&gt;, just as Atamiri described, the finite auxiliary &lt;em&gt;naeth&lt;/em&gt; is in I, the head of IP, while the infinite VP &lt;em&gt;brynu car&lt;/em&gt; and the DP &lt;em&gt;a dyn&lt;/em&gt; combine to the complement of I, labelled S.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As far as I understood it from quickly skimming the article, this DP + VP constituent constitutes a so-called &lt;strong&gt;mixed category&lt;/strong&gt;, a &quot;construction in which a single word heads a phrase which is a syntactic hybrid of two different category types&quot; (Bresnan (1997: 2)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted from the example in (27), the phrase structure tree for your sentence should look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwuqT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JwuqT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blutner.de/Optimal/dat/bresnan_OTsyntax.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bresnan (1998: 13)&lt;/a&gt; further explains that &quot;S is univerally available as an &lt;strong&gt;exocentric category&lt;/strong&gt; having no fixed categorial head and projecting no higher category. [...] Configurational S consists of a subject constituent and an XP predicate. [...] A configurational 'internal-subject' language (e.g. Welsh [...]) would have S under IP, and VP under S.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Assuming additional X' levels for the XPs, but without specifiers, the tree would look like this, along the lines of Bresnan (1998), (11):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG1mr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG1mr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bresnan, J. (1997). Mixed categories as head sharing constructions. In &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference. CSLI Publications Online.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bresnan, J. (1998). Optimal Syntax1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T10:15:10.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19079" CreationDate="2016-09-01T12:20:18.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These consonants are traditionally described as &quot;retroflex&quot; (&quot;bent backwards&quot;), meaning the tongue tip curls back towards the throat.  However, Ladefoged &amp;amp; Wu (1984) (also discussed on Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (1996)) have carefully studied X-ray photographs of native Mandarin speakers, and showed conclusively that they're produced with a retracted tongue blade, either flat or a little bit convex, with no curling back of the tongue tip:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iR7I4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iR7I4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Speakers A, B, C pronounced the consonants represented in pinyin as &amp;#39;s&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;sh&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;x&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Top to bottom rows are equivalent to pinyin: &lt;em&gt;s, sh, x&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion (emphases mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Standard Chinese so-called retroflex ṣ  [=pinyin 'sh'] is shown in the middle row […] This gesture is plainly very different from that in the retroflex stops discussed in chapter 2. It &lt;strong&gt;does not involve the tip of the tongue being curled up&lt;/strong&gt; and backwards into the palatal region, as in the Dravidian sub-apical retroflex stops, nor does it have the apical post-alveolar shape that occurs in the Hindi retroflex stops shown in figure 2.11. In our Standard Chinese data, all three speakers produce the constriction for this sound with the upper surface of the tip of the tongue, making it a laminal rather than an apical post-alveolar. The constriction is at about the same place for all three speakers, further back than in s, so that it is nearer to the center of the alveolar ridge. Both the height and the width of the channel are greater than in &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, but the width varies considerably, from 18.5 mm for speaker A to 5 mm for speaker C. The location and width of the constriction are thus very comparable with those for English ʃ. &lt;strong&gt;The front of the tongue is fairly flat for speakers A and C, and slightly hollowed for speaker B&lt;/strong&gt;, rather than being slightly raised towards the hard palate as it is in ʃ. Because the part of the tongue immediately behind the constriction is not domed as it is for ʃ, &lt;strong&gt;we have termed this sound a flat post-alveolar&#xA;  sibilant&lt;/strong&gt;. A further point to note about this gesture is that no part of the tongue is touching the lower teeth, as occurs in the articulation of &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. Instead the tongue is drawn slightly back, so that there is a sublingual cavity. Perkell, Boyce and Stevens (1979) have shown that a cavity of this type has a significant acoustic effect, producing a comparatively low frequency spectral peak. &lt;strong&gt;Additional x-ray data&lt;/strong&gt; in other publications (Zhou and Wu 1963, Ohnesorg and Svarny 1955) &lt;strong&gt;all show substantially the same gesture, confirming the notion that Standard Chinese ṣ is a (laminal) flat post-alveolar sibilant&lt;/strong&gt;. The traditional description of this sound as a retroflex is inappropriate as a description of its articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the “retroflex” misnomer comes from early Orientalists who thought these consonants sounded similar to the Sanskrit retroflex series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ladefoged, Peter and Maddieson, Ian. &lt;em&gt;The Sounds of the World's Languages&lt;/em&gt;. 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ladefoged, Peter, and Wu, Zongji. Places of articulation: An investigation of Pekingese fricatives and affricates. &lt;em&gt;Journal of Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; 12.3, 1984.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2016-09-01T12:27:38.047" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T12:27:38.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19557" CreationDate="2016-09-01T15:20:10.930" Score="1" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;The voiceless velar fricative, [x], appears as ⟨ch⟩ in Polish. Apparently, [x] undergoes voicing and becomes [ɣ] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Polish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;under certain circumstances&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Voiceless obstruents are voiced (/x/ becoming [ɣ], etc.) in clusters ending in any voiced obstruent except /v, ʐ/, which are then themselves devoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would greatly appreciate it if someone could expand on this definition, my not being especially aware of the technicalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T15:56:30.233" Title="When does the voiceless velar fricative, [x], undergo voicing?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;velar&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19111" CreationDate="2016-09-01T15:48:16.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why is this?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; simple reason : in Romanian, unless one does not purposefully wish to sound either poetic or theatrical, the adjective follows the noun rather than preceding it. Therefore, &lt;em&gt;Noapte buna !&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ziua buna !&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;S(e)ara buna !&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;O dupa-amiaza placuta !&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Duminica placuta !&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;O saptamana frumoasa (sa aveti) !&lt;/em&gt; are actually quite standard. So a more logical question would be why do certain inverted expressions, such as &lt;em&gt;Buna ziua !&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Buna seara !&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;still&lt;/strong&gt; exist in the first place ? My hunch would be that it is precisely this type of common phrases which, by sheer virtue of being among the oldest in any language, are more likely to preserve antiquated features (such as obsolete word order, for instance). Just think of the famous English expression &lt;em&gt;Pop &lt;strong&gt;goes&lt;/strong&gt; the weasel !&lt;/em&gt;, which is phrased in this peculiar, almost poetic sounding way, because of an archaic characteristic of Proto-Germanic, now only preserved in Nordic languages, namely &lt;em&gt;verb second&lt;/em&gt; (commonly abbreviated as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;V2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does Romanian generally have a significantly different syntax from the rest of the Romance languages?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Yep&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If yes, why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I replied &lt;em&gt;yep&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, I am hereby exempt from answering this question. ;-) Joke aside, just take a good look at the map of Europe, and tell me what you notice, even at a superficial glance, regarding the geographic position of Romania vs. that of Western European Romance speaking countries ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T15:48:16.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19554" CreationDate="2016-09-01T15:56:30.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;⟨ch⟩ is pronounced [x] in Polish and as many other Polish sounds, it can undergo so called &quot;voice assimilation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assimilation&lt;/strong&gt; is a process during which a speech sound gets a feature from an adjacent or otherwise close speech sound. Typical example of the is the &lt;strong&gt;voice assimilation&lt;/strong&gt;, causing that the voicedness of a consonant depends typically on the consonant directly following it, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ha&lt;strong&gt;ve a&lt;/strong&gt; dog - [aj hæ&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;]&#xA;I ha&lt;strong&gt;ve t&lt;/strong&gt;o go - [aj hæ&lt;strong&gt;f tu&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most typically, this process is limited for a class of sounds called &lt;strong&gt;obstruents&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. sounds formed in a manner where the articulatory organs create an obbstruction (in case it is full, they are called occlusives, in case it is partial, they are called fricatives), through which the air is expulsed and creates a noise (non-harmonic sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the obstruents are sounds like [t,p,k,d,b,g,f,s,š,x,v,z,ž,ɣ,...] but not [m,n,l,r,...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Polish, this works in a very similar name - when a voiced obstruent follows an unvoiced one, such as [x], the unvoiced one is assimilated and becomes voiced, in this case [ɣ], even though otherwise there is no stand-alone [ɣ] in Polish. This does not happed in front of liquids (l, r) and in front of [v] (which behaves like an approximant in Slavic languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;śmie&lt;strong&gt;ch s&lt;/strong&gt;iostry (laughter of the sister) - [ɕmje&lt;strong&gt;x ɕ&lt;/strong&gt;ostry]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;śmie&lt;strong&gt;ch b&lt;/strong&gt;rata (laughter of the brother) - [ɕmje&lt;strong&gt;ɣ b&lt;/strong&gt;rata]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chl&lt;/strong&gt;eb (bread) - [&lt;strong&gt;xl&lt;/strong&gt;ep]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same rules should apply to [x] sound regardless the way it is written - be it ⟨ch⟩ or ⟨h⟩. The best strategy to pronounce this correctly is to pay no attention as the voice assimilation is very widespread process and most speakers do not even realise this is happening (especially since [ɣ] is not a phoneme in Polish, i.e. it does not distinguish meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T15:56:30.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14831" CreationDate="2016-09-01T17:46:58.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO there is no specific term because you do not need it. If you want to speak about [p] and [b] without distinction of voicedness, you just speak about &quot;bilabial occlusives&quot;, which covers both the voiced and unvoiced variant. Should you really somehow need to coin an ad-hoc term, I guess &quot;voicing pairs&quot; would be understandable in the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T17:46:58.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-01T19:51:15.210" Score="2" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;What types of NLP problems are best suited to machine learning and which are best solved by more classical approaches (e.g. syntactic and semantic analysis?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13027" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T15:29:17.677" Title="What are the main differences between machine learning and classic approaches to natural language processing problems?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19559" CreationDate="2016-09-02T09:26:25.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The major dichotomy in NLP is that of &lt;strong&gt;rules-based&lt;/strong&gt; approaches &lt;strong&gt;vs&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;statistical&lt;/strong&gt; approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Machine learning is used in some statistical approaches.  Given the timeframe of the development of the field, the earliest statistical approaches, for example those of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SMT&lt;/a&gt; pioneers, surely can or will be seen as classical.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rules-based&lt;/strong&gt; approaches are basically the obvious or naive approach - hand-tweaked heuristics.  They require linguist experts for every language launched, they are hard to bring to full coverage, and as coverage increases so does complexity.  They are inherently static (which is a drawback in a world where the probability of the parse of the photo caption &lt;em&gt;Nice truck attack&lt;/em&gt; changes in real time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Statistical approaches&lt;/strong&gt; are better suited to open-ended problems, but they require initial investment and plenty of data, and people who understand the principles of linguistics and statistics (and software).  They can update as the data update or with humans in the loop.  But as they always produce results they can produce surprising results, for one they trained on imperfect data, and not all machine learning systems make explainable or even deterministic decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attractiveness of statistical approaches has followed the steady growth in problems, data, CPU and connectivity.  In practice today's production systems use a (often messy) &lt;strong&gt;hybrid&lt;/strong&gt; of rules-based and statistical approaches.  For example a search feature may be use rules-based filtering, but statistical ranking, with ad hoc boosts and blacklists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the decision of which approach to use is only partly a function of the problem type.  Just as important are the goals, scope, data and so on.  At another extreme there is even the &lt;strong&gt;human-backed approach&lt;/strong&gt; - a human pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human - which has high accuracy, high latency and high cash burn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T15:29:17.677" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T15:29:17.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19559" CreationDate="2016-09-02T10:20:22.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machine learning tends to produce results, that look impressive but cannot be tracked by humans. A statistical machine learning algorithm may have really good scores at some classification task, but when you analyse how it comes to its conclusion, it uses a% of feature_1, b% of feature_2 and so on to base its decision on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical approaches select features humans can recognise and describe easily, and base their decision on only one or a few of them. Machines use several dozens of features that are easy to compute (e.g. frequency counts, a hard task for a human) and base their decisions on many of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T10:20:22.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T10:59:50.130" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, it recently came to my attention that Chinese tone is not necessary a suprasegmental feature like I assumed. It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/amphonology/article/view/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; claim it can be analyzed as being subsegmental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am interested in studying tone as a suprasegmental feature, is there a more paradigmatic tonal language where tone is uncontroversially supersegmental? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T15:45:32.890" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T15:45:32.890" Title="In what tonal language is tone uncontroversially suprasegmental and not segmental?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-02T19:30:29.333" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any program or website that is able to transcribe Old and Middle Persian text (or transliteration of them) to an orthographic or phonetic transcription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T19:32:40.843" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T10:39:41.253" Title="Program or website for transcribing Old and Middle Persian" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19569" CreationDate="2016-09-02T20:49:17.457" Score="2" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am one of those native English speakers who always had a very difficult time learning how to roll r's when learning other languages as a child. Now that I'm an adult, I'm trying to learn Thai, and I decided that it's time I learned how to roll my r's once and for all. To my surprise, I learned that there are many ways to roll an r. In fact, the term 'rolling' seems to only refer to a subset of all the possible ways to pronounce an 'r', and many people (myself included) err in using the term 'rolling' to refer to all these pronunciations together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From watching this video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9eN2B7Wj68&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9eN2B7Wj68&lt;/a&gt; I see that the different ways of pronunciation are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alveolar approximant&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Alveolar flap&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Alveolar trill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Retroflex approximant&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Retroflex flap&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Uvular trill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Voiced retroflex fricative&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Voiced uvular fricative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the video, the 'rolled r' that shows up in Latin/Spanish/Italian is the Alveolar trill. I'm wondering what type of 'rolled r' shows up in Thai. Is it the same one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13971" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T11:45:03.883" Title="What type of trilled R shows up in Thai?" Tags="&lt;thai&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6191" CreationDate="2016-09-03T00:03:50.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue for the possible connection with word &quot;baron&quot; actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;baron&quot; itself comes from Old French, which at the time preserved still some forms of declension and &quot;baron&quot; was the accusative/object/indirect case, while nominative/subject/direct was &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ber&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, which itself had Germanic/Frankish origin in &lt;strong&gt;baro&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;freeman&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T00:03:50.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18872" CreationDate="2016-09-03T00:25:56.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would highlight Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblances, which served as a basis for a very productive field in semantics (specificaly prototype theory). This basically postulates that words and their meanings do not work in binary categories but are organised in a field-like manner, where at the centre of the semantic field you have the prototypes (the most typical exemplars of something) while towards the edges, you have the less clear exemplars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.: semantic field of furniture - table is a prototypical example of furniture, a lamp is a solid one too, a TV is not a superb one but still passable, computer not so much, alarm clock is a bad example of furniture, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes very far and basically gets rid of almost any defining features that would trivialise the category to a binary choice - e.g. &quot;adoptive mother&quot; is still a kind of a &quot;mother&quot;, much more so than for example a &quot;vacuum cleaner&quot; even though the term specifically denies the biological relationship in the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T00:25:56.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19566" CreationDate="2016-09-03T02:20:21.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know any Thai whatsoever.  But we can look at the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Thai phonology&lt;/a&gt;.  In the section &quot;Consonants&quot;, it says the trill is [r]—the IPA symbol for the alveolar one, with the tip of the tongue vibrating next to the upper front teeth (if you're American, this is a lot like the 't' in &quot;better&quot;—IPA [ɾ]—but you have to touch the tongue tip against the roof of the mouth several times, vibrating it with air).  Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_trills&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page for [r]&lt;/a&gt; (found via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the IPA table&lt;/a&gt;), we confirm that it is, indeed, the same one as in Latin, Spanish, Italian, Scottish English, Yakuza Japanese etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've consulted Comrie's &lt;em&gt;The World's Major Languages&lt;/em&gt;, which confirms this.  However, it also includes this note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phonemic state of /l/ and /r/ in Thai appears to be in a state of flux; however, all phonemic descriptions of Thai still list the two sounds as separate phonemes.  The writing system, moreover, has separate symbols for each of them.  Most Thai, especially the educated, claim to distinguish between the two.  This seems to be the case for slow and highly conscious speech.  In fast speech, however, /r/ freely alternates with /l/, although certain forms occur more often with /l/ than with /r/.  Many speakers regard these alternating forms as indicative of ‘less correct’ or ‘substandard’ speech.  Linguistic hypotheses suggest that this lack of stable contrast may signal a sound change in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, expect some variation between /l/ and /r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T02:26:22.257" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T02:26:22.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2016-09-03T07:35:44.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you have become sceptical about the Chomskian syntax, you may be interested in constructionist approaches to grammar. Two books I can recommend are &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0198700334&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cognitive Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John R. Taylor and &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199268525&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Constructions at work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Adele Goldberg. William Croft's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B002EVOT78&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Radical Construction Grammar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is another important work on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that different books use different terminology, what Goldberg calls a &lt;em&gt;construction&lt;/em&gt; is more or less an equivalent of Cognitive Grammar's &lt;em&gt;symbolic unit&lt;/em&gt;. But all in all they are very similar; there is a bit of discussion of the differences between constructionist approaches at the end of Goldberg's book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T07:35:44.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T11:10:15.973" Score="7" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;The major agglutinative languages like Turkish and Japanese are also notable for being almost strictly left-branching, much more so than, say, English is right-branching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a coincidence, or is there a relationship or correlation between agglutination and branching directionality (head directionality)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some examples of mostly right-branching agglutinative languages, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am specifically interested in a language that uses prefixes and prepositions for agglutination, rather than suffixes and postpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T16:05:31.137" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T16:05:31.137" Title="Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19566" CreationDate="2016-09-03T11:32:44.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be not a very scientific answer, but from experience, native Thai speakers use all types of approximants, flaps, and trills for ร &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;. The approximant may be reduced to a very short duration which can be hard to detect altogether. Quite often, they also interchange (mix up) &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt;, in both directions. It differs a bit for people of different social status, or when people speak official/polite language versus the &quot;street slang&quot;, but don't take it as an ultimate rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, using the &quot;correct&quot; version of alveolar trill may be perceived as overperfection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, alveolar trill also exists in my native language (Ukrainian), so it makes no problem for me to produce this sound. However, when I use it, like in the word ครับ &lt;code&gt;[kʰráp]&lt;/code&gt; (a male polite particle that ends almost every sentence), someone may repeat it after me indicating that they have noticed the &quot;overly perfect&quot; trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarizing&lt;/strong&gt; the above, a language learner should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be aware that a native speaker may use virtually any type of approximant, flap, or trill for both &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt; or skip it completely;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for yourself, try producing &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; as close as possible to the &quot;perfect&quot; alveolar trill because your accent introduces many other imperfections that you don't yet notice. Don't add there yet another imperfection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T11:45:03.883" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T11:45:03.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T12:29:47.207" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fairly new to support vector machines and I was thinking about whether or not I could use them to tackle a specific research question in linguistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal would be to find the probabilities for the position of the main stress in a given set of words. I would use a training set which has stress and frequencs information of several thousand words. This would be the learning set for the SVM. In a next step I would like to check what probabilities for the stress position the SVM would return for a given set of test words. Class probabilities are preferred since there are more than two options for the location of the main stress in a given word, i.e. the binary case would not work and a multi-class SVM is needed.&#xA;However, SVMs usually only use numerical values as input, my training set would consist of strings (the words in the dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have an idea if there is a way to use a SVM for my research question? I tried to use the string kernel from the ksvm() function in R but this kernel seems to be no longer supported. If anyone has ever worked with SVMs and strings as input data, I would be very happy to hear about your experiences and recommendations. Moreover, I am also interested in other machine learning approaches that could be used in order to make stress prediction for a set of test words based on a training set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13976" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T12:29:47.207" Title="Support vector machines for stress prediction" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T13:03:07.677" Score="6" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language that is proved to descend from a creole/pidgin language that existed many centuries ago? If yes, in what aspects is its creole origin visible now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13846" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T12:10:59.187" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T13:04:19.260" Title="A language that was a creole/pidgin long ago" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19573" CreationDate="2016-09-03T15:05:54.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elamite is agglutinative and (mainly) right-branching, though quotative phrases are left branching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/TheElamiteLanguage1969/Reiner1969TheElamiteLanguagetext#page/n15/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/stream/TheElamiteLanguage1969/Reiner1969TheElamiteLanguagetext#page/n15/mode/2up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T15:05:54.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15371" CreationDate="2016-09-03T18:10:56.253" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the westernmost language is Old Norse, due to their colonies in Canada (Vinland) around the year 1000 CE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13978" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T18:10:56.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T20:07:30.307" Score="5" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a program that can convert a scan/image of IPA into any digital encoding?  UTF-8 Unicode preferred, and low-cost preferred (open source would be especially nice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13794" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T23:32:05.523" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T23:32:05.523" Title="OCR program for IPA?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-03T22:49:48.150" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could call them non-sound-symbolic, but this isn't quite true since you could argue that all words have some degree of sound symbolism. Is there a term that determines the set of words that excludes &quot;primarily sound symbolic&quot; words like &quot;boom&quot;, &quot;ugh&quot;, and &quot;kira-kira&quot; (Japanese, to shine/glitter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T22:49:48.150" Title="Is there a term for the class of words that are not onomatopoeia / sound symbolic" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19573" CreationDate="2016-09-04T01:17:22.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure by what we even mean by &quot;mainly&quot; or &quot;mostly&quot; right- or left-branching in a comparative context.  I mean, sure, I can see how Japanese is mainly left-branching; but if by &quot;left-branching&quot; we mean OV + postpositions, and &quot;right-branching&quot; is VO + prepositions, then &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS would like to remind us&lt;/a&gt; that some languages have OV + prepositions (including &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/95A#2/14.9/152.8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Persian, Kurdish, Tuvaluan and at least 13 known others&lt;/a&gt;); and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/95A#2/14.9/152.8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some languages have VO + postpositions&lt;/a&gt; (including Guaraní, Finnish and 40 others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all combinations of adposition and verbal argument order occur, although some are rarer than others.  We could compare the two directionality variables (verb-object order, and adposition order) with an &quot;agglutinative&quot; parameter.  But &quot;agglutinative&quot; is a category that mixes up several different things, and (to my knowledge) there's no easy way to define it in WALS.  I tried to approximate it as a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;exclusively concatenative&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;case, and time-aspect-mood monoexponential&lt;/a&gt;. Under this definition, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/95A_20A_21A_21B#2/25.5/151.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt; allows you to compare the parameters in all possible combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the following languages are listed as VO, prepositioned, and basically &quot;agglutinative&quot; (concatenative, monoexponential case and TAM): Squamish, Malagasy. The following have prepositions, VO, no morphological case, and may be more or less &quot;agglutinative&quot; depending on how you define it—it ends up including English!:      Warembori, Hatam, Abipón, Cayuvava, Arapesh (Mountain), Luvale, Maung, Mixtec (Chalcatongo), Jakaltek, Zulu, Swahili, and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2016-09-04T23:35:12.610" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T23:35:12.610" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-04T11:52:48.757" Score="1" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little unclear on what autosegmental phonology is vis-a-vis suprasegmentals. Although I understand the nuts-and-bolts of autosegmental phonology, it is not clear to me if it negates a division between segmentals and suprasegmentals. So far as I read, autosegmental phonological descriptions do not make reference to suprasegmentals... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T16:40:38.730" Title="Is it accurate to claim that autosegmental phonology is a theory of suprasegmental prosodic phenomena?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19582" CreationDate="2016-09-04T14:12:10.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, negating the difference between segmental and suprasegmental is what autosegmental phonology is all about (see Goldsmith 1976 and similar publications of the era). The premise of &quot;suprasegmental phonology&quot; &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; approach is that we have segments, and things above the segment. Autosegmental phonology does not take the segment to be the representational primary, it takes the feature to be primary (each feature is &quot;it's own segment&quot;), thus each feature has full autonomy in the way that tone classically is autonomous from the segment. In &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;segmental phonology there is limited separation of properties and the notion of &quot;above&quot; the segment makes sense, but in autosegmental phonology there is no clear up and down. On paper you have to represent things in an &quot;up/down&quot; fashion, but the logic is simply that every property is on a tier of its own and the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;th element of the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;th tier can associate with the &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;th element of the &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;th tier, and there is no special ordering of the tiers. &quot;Property&quot; is a more appropriate term, since some of the classical suprasegmental &quot;things&quot; are not considered to be features with valus, for example &quot;syllable&quot; is not a feature, nor is &quot;mora&quot; / &quot;timing slot&quot;, likewise &quot;stress&quot;; &quot;property&quot; generalizes over &quot;feature&quot; and &quot;structural node&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;goal&quot; of complete dissolution of representations into a gestural score is laid out in the last chapter: however, it wasn't long before people were uncomfortable with this no-segment approach, and McCarthy's (dissertation) introduction of &quot;C&quot; and &quot;V&quot; elements as morphological stabilizing elements with a special affinity for the major class features led to CV phonology, which effectively reintroduced the &quot;segment&quot; as a coherent unit of representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T16:40:38.730" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T16:40:38.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19562" CreationDate="2016-09-04T20:03:14.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this question, I take &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19582/is-it-accurate-to-claim-that-autosegmental-phonology-is-a-theory-of-suprasegment&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; as a background assumption. Informally speaking, a &quot;segmental&quot; theory of tone is one where tonal features are dominated by the root node (or functional equivalent) and where tone features and place of articulation features are structurally analogous. Within the class of suprasegmental tone theories, you find that tones are said to be immediately dominated by skeletal positions, moras, syllables, rhymes, words and feet; within subsegmental theories, tones are immediately dominated by the root (rarely) or Laryngeal nodes (the latter being immediately dominated by the root node).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority view is that tone features are suprasegmental in that sense. Clark 1989 in contrast claims that tonal features are dominated by the laryngeal node (similar claims have been made before &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; they were usually made before or in ignorance of the above-mentioned represenational possibilities, so Clark's work is important in explicitly embracing the segmental theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bao Zhiming (1999) analyzes tone Chinese suprasegmentally, specifically with tone being immediately dominated by the Rhyme. Duanmu (1990) on the other hand adopts a subsegmental model of Chinese with tone features under the laryngeal node. It is actually very difficult to find explicit commitments to particular representational theories, when dealing with Chinese (or other languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are relatively few analyses where tone is claimed to be subsegmental (it is impossible to categorize the Shih &amp;amp; Inkelas approach since we have no idea what their metatheory of representation is). So essentially, almost all analyses of tone since 1980 (and most from before) are in fact suprasegmental. For a brief survey of tonology, you might look at the last chapter of &lt;em&gt;Introducing phonology&lt;/em&gt; to see kinds of phenomena and languages that motivate the suprasegmental approach. There are two kinds of facts which have been invokes to at least point to a segmental alterative: &quot;unit contours&quot; (Chinese figures prominently there), and consonant-tone interaction (see Bradshaw 1999 for analysis, in a suprasegmental approach).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T20:03:14.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4073" CreationDate="2016-09-04T20:40:29.893" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In mathematics, the word &quot;lemma&quot; has a completely different meaning. It refers to a preliminary result, not necessarily of interest in itself, which is then used to prove the main result, which is usually called a &quot;theorem.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13985" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T20:40:29.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-05T00:50:04.513" Score="5" ViewCount="790" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm running into a bit of trouble constructing a tree for the following Lakota sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Wičháša ki  hokšíla ki  hená  mathó wã wãyákapi ki    slolyé &#xA;man     the boy     the those bear  a  see      COMP  know&#xA;'The man knows that the boys saw a bear.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment I've split it with NP (the man) VP (everything else)&#xA;and then within the VP have a &lt;em&gt;V slolyé&lt;/em&gt; and everything else as a CP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just not sure where to go from here - are NP or DP better to define such constituents as &lt;em&gt;hokšíla ki hená&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13988" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T11:24:15.783" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T17:40:56.963" Title="X Bar Phrase Structure Question" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-05T09:07:07.760" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously language changes, which is the reason why numbers have many different names in languages. Comparing the German &quot;einundzwanzig&quot; (one-and-twenty) with the English &quot;twenty one&quot; shows what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about changes that happened naturally and without influence of another language. I got curious in this because, if math is offered in a public school, then a child gets to know the numbers by the name of their language. It gets ingrained into them and thus it doesn't make sense for an adult to suddenly change the word for a number and even less sense for a school to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any language which has undergone such a change since the introduction of public schools?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If there are indeed such languages, how could they undergo such a change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T18:28:54.873" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T18:28:54.873" Title="Have words for numbers changed since the introduction of public schools?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19589" CreationDate="2016-09-05T15:12:04.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norwegian language, the way of counting was changed recently (1951 by declaration of the Norwegian parliament) from a German-style system to an English-style system. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegische_Sprache#Zahlw.C3.B6rter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zahlwörter (Wikipedia).&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in Germany, there are some vocal advocates for a similar planned language change, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwanzigeins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zwanzigeins&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T12:44:31.580" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:44:31.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-05T19:49:16.153" Score="0" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do pro-forms get their meaning? For example, does the word 'he' in the sentences &quot;Harry got a toy. He was happy.&quot; get it's meaning from the context, or what the speaker meant by &quot;he&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13843" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T19:01:12.347" Title="Proform Function" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;pro-forms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19589" CreationDate="2016-09-05T20:03:00.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many Bantu languages of Kenya and Tanzania, numbers are now changing, especially those above 10. For instance, the traditional number for &quot;20&quot; in Logoori is &lt;em&gt;makʊmi gavɪrɪ&lt;/em&gt; (lit. 'two tens'), but that is being replaces with &lt;em&gt;ishiriini&lt;/em&gt;, which historically derives from Swahili. The cause is the widespread expansion of Swahili and the main instrument of that expansion is via the public schools, where Swahili has become the medium of instruction very early on (policy and reality vary by time and location, but let's say after the first couple of years at most).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there has been significant infiltration of Swahili vocabulary into local languages, higher numbers are especially vulnerable (it should be noted that the higher Swahili numerals themselves derived from Arabic). One of the reasons is that use of numbers above 10 has not been particularly common in day-to-day life, but they are essential to business and technological contexts. Since addition tables are taught in Swahili, it is predictable that one would tend to use Swahili numbers when calling on addition tables to add up the tab at a store. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T20:03:00.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14946" CreationDate="2016-09-05T20:33:09.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't answer this directly but rather give resources that I think can answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WALS (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt;) has three chapters and accompanying maps on inflection types, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;20&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;21&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;22&lt;/a&gt;. They have a broad inventory of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not use the same terminology as the classes agglutinative, isolating, etc. but do start from analytic and synthetic and refine it from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from those maps you can tell frequency almost directly; they give the number of languages in their inventory with each particular feature, with all the limitations of such an inventory (selection bias, essentialism (lack of vagueness), your favorite may not be in there, etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll notice there there is no single map for SVO permutations either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T20:33:09.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-05T21:50:51.500" Score="5" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages making a &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; distinction between abstract and concrete nouns?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I suppose this should boil down to the question about the existence of languages having a &lt;em&gt;morpheme&lt;/em&gt; signalling an abstract or concrete noun but you never know (maybe there are some crazy ones making the distinction with word order, phonology...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-06T13:00:37.040" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T23:57:13.773" Title="Languages with a grammatical distinction between abstract and concrete nouns" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T05:22:39.337" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if Standard Chinese has been transliterated (either officially or unofficially) into writing systems other than the Latin (Pinyin, Wade-Giles), Arabic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Xiao'erjing&lt;/a&gt;) or Cyrillic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillization_of_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dungan Dialect&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of writing systems such as Japanese Kana, Devnagri, Thai, Burmese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Greek, and Latin with Romance pronounciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, please provide examples. How do these systems denote phonemic aspects such as dipthongs, endings and tone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13845" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T06:40:47.883" Title="Transcriptions of Mandarin Chinese into writing systems other than Latin, Arabic and Cyrillic?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19597" CreationDate="2016-09-06T06:40:47.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a paper from 2002 (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.teu.ac.jp/kougi/hp037/paper/conf_paper/EAFTerm02.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;j-pinyin&lt;/em&gt;: A New Systematic Approach to the Japanese Transcription of Chinese Syllables&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; by Jin-Hua SHE, Shumei CHEN, Sumio OHNO and Hiroyuki KAMEDA) that says that at that time, there was no general standard for transcribing modern Chinese into Japanese; it proposes the titular system which you can see described in the paper. I don't know if it's caught on at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't look like it transcribes tone. Diphthongs are just transcribed by using multiple kana. Apparently, in j-pinyin the difference between the coda consonants &quot;n&quot; and &quot;ng&quot; is represented by using a long vowel mark (ー) before the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T06:40:47.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-06T13:30:38.330" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to tag a sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jones was unemployed at some time before he graduated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/docs/u/dep/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UD tags&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure how to tag &lt;em&gt;at some time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford parser&lt;/a&gt; suggests the reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;case (time-6, at-4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;det (time-6, some-5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nmod (unemployed-3, time-6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm a bit suspicious because it looks like it could be analysed as a &lt;strong&gt;compound&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;mwe&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Did ask uncle google but he couldn't help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T13:36:57.973" Title="How should &quot;at some time&quot; be tagged in Universal Dependencies framework?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17121" CreationDate="2016-09-06T20:11:17.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well it depends on how you define &quot;morpheme&quot;. Usually, it's defined as a sign, i.e. a form-meaning correspondence. In this case, the answer is &quot;yes&quot; by definition (and the &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;humaniform&lt;/em&gt; is not a morpheme but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;sandhi&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T20:11:17.550" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-07T11:40:50.577" Score="4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/328272/change-the-case-of-datetime2-month-return&quot;&gt;TeX.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; I am looking for generally used languages that use different cases for their month and day names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on Czech and Slovak languages I can imagine two cases useful for automatic typesetting of such names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nominative case: report for &lt;em&gt;January&lt;/em&gt; 2016 - zpráva za &lt;em&gt;Leden&lt;/em&gt; 2016;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genitive case: &lt;em&gt;January&lt;/em&gt; 5th, 2016 - 5. &lt;em&gt;Ledna&lt;/em&gt;, 2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locative case: report written in &lt;em&gt;January&lt;/em&gt; - zpráva napsaná v &lt;em&gt;Lednu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other cases (14 in total with plural forms) doesn't seem useful for automated typesetting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning for this question is: Is it worth embedding this &quot;case sensitivity&quot; to the core package or change in language variants will be sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14011" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:36:12.520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T11:12:13.030" Title="Month names variants" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-07T16:58:43.510" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;As everyone (who is familiar with proto-Indo-European) knows, it is an inflectional language with several cases, a few accent-ablaut patterns, and a number of (thematic/athematic) declination classes. For example, &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt; were r-stem nouns; &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wolf&lt;/em&gt; were o-stem; &lt;em&gt;gift&lt;/em&gt; was i-stem; &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt; was u-stem; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these types come with a special deverbative suffix, which bears a specific meaning - e.g. the r-stem indicated an actor/doer; the i-stem appeared mainly in nouns, formed from a verb root with the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ti-&lt;/em&gt;, which had denoted an act, state, object, or tool; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if the other declination types had some general (broad) meaning, like the two given examples, or they didn't specify anything besides that the word is a noun? In particular, was there any semantic difference between the o-stem and e-stem nouns or they were just &quot;allophones&quot; of each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS If I've used somewhere wrong terminology, please feel free to correct me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="10568" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T17:30:36.543" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T23:43:40.287" Title="What were the broad meanings of the various (nominal) declination classes in proto-IE?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19603" CreationDate="2016-09-07T18:54:28.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ios/-i̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; nouns/adjectives usually meant the origin or belonging of the thing, for instance, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nea̯ui̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;of a ship&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;smğelbhi̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;of the same womb, uterine&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯oini̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wife's sister's husband&quot; (from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯oinia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;wife's sister&quot;), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯esri̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;sister's son&quot;. This possibly developed from Locative case whose ending was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;su̯esri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would mean &quot;at the sister&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;nea̯ui&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would mean &quot;on a/the ship&quot;. Also used as comparative as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;seni̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;older&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; nouns meant agents. Those whose job, work, or design was to do some function. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;censter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;speaker&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;doma̯ter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;tamer&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peq̆ter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;cook&quot;. This suffix also was used for the terms for relatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-tor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix also created the agent noun but it meant somebody who did the action irrespective of whether it was his usual occupation. Thus, if &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peq̆ter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;cook&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;peq̆tor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would mean the one who cooked (a thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-teros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix meant roughly the same as -ward suffix in English or comparative. The one of a pair who has the quality manifested the most. Such as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;decsteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;the one more to the right&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯eiteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;the more far one&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯enteros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;the inner one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-istos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix meant superlative. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ğra̯uistos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;heaviest&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dlonghistos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;longest&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ristos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;of the best sort&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another superlative suffix was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mmos/-immos/-ismmos/-tmmos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eĝhstmmos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;outermost&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-trom, -dhrom, -tlom, -dhlom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffixes meant instruments and tools. Thus &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯ero̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;plow&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;seddhlom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;saddle&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;see̯tlom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;sieve&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ia̯/-a̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffixes meant collective number, abstract things and feminine gender. Thus &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preu̯ia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;mistress&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;neptia̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;female nephew&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-r/-n&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; alternating stems belonged to the very ancient nouns, such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯odr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;water&quot; (gen. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯edns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, adj &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯odnos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;u̯esr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;spring&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix meant neuter(non-animate) nouns, having certain properties. Such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯eĝmn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;train&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯neo̯mn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;name&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ĝneo̯mn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;sign&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;see̯mn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;seed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-kos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix indicated material composition or origin. Such as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;leukos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;bright&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯i̯uenkos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;young&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ikos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix meant &quot;having to do with...&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-iskos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix indicated affiliation or place of origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was the default adjectival suffix as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯rĝros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;shining&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-tos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix formed possessive adjectives (having X).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix produced action and event nouns such as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ğhermos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;warmth, heat&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sreumos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;stream&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-los&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was used for creating deminutives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-u̯ents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; suffix meant &quot;rich in&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were other suffixes as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T23:43:40.287" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T23:43:40.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-07T18:56:29.237" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us think of a hypothetical situation where I need to identify a set of verbs, where the set can represent all possible actions that can be performed. For example, run can be tuned as a variation of move (or go) quickly.  I can use as much adverbs or nouns to clarify the meaning. But I should be using the minimum set of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there studies in this direction, especially in infant or child vocabulary growth or hierarchy in human cognition. If there are resources where hierarchical arrangement if verbs is done, that's precisely what I am looking for. I am aware of verbnet, but it is not exactly hierarchy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if I am not able put things more cohesively, as I am also looking for better ways of framing my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13696" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T11:58:08.803" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T17:30:55.677" Title="What will form a minimum yet complete set of verbs that can define any action?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19605" CreationDate="2016-09-07T20:13:54.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only one: do. to run = do running/do run (run as a noun) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T20:50:21.223" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T20:50:21.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19596" CreationDate="2016-09-07T23:57:13.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some verbs in Russian, like iskat', search for, uses the accusative case for specific objects like &quot;I'm looking for a book&quot; and the genitive case for abstract objects like &quot;I'm looking for peace and quiet&quot;. Ya ishchu knigu vs Ya ishchu mira I tishiny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12562" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T23:57:13.773" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19612" CreationDate="2016-09-08T00:35:09.017" Score="3" ViewCount="4689" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say word set 1 = {[kæt], [bæt]}, and word set 2 = {[sænd],[bænd]} and word set 3 = {[xʔxʔ],[a]}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an common index or method to characterize how phonetically similar these tokens are within a set and between sets? For example [kæt] is different from [bæt] by one phone, but different from [sænd] by 3 phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T23:09:33.667" Title="How do you determine phonetic similarity between sets of words?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19576" CreationDate="2016-09-08T00:53:34.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a lot of John McWhorter's many books on this very topic. It is controversial, e.g. Latin, according to Stephane Goyette, simplified as it spread over the peninsula, not at the point Latin diverged into the Romance languages. So was this stage a pidgin, a creole, or a simplification or &quot;mixed language&quot;? Some say a pidgin stage must precede a creole stage, others say a creole can arise without that initial stage. For some reason (I know one), these issues create a great deal of heat with fist fights a possibility. Are Afrikaans and Swahili linguae francae or creoles? If so, was there ever a pidgin stage for either? And so on. Read McWhorter's Defining Creole for a good introduction to these issues. Language Interrupted is a great survey of major modern languages like Arabic, Mandarin, and Farsi which show signs of creolization early on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12562" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T00:53:34.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8385" CreationDate="2016-09-08T03:39:55.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another language with a similar word is Hungarian, my native language. The word is &quot;gömb&quot; (&quot;ö&quot; is pronounced roughly similar to the &quot;e&quot; in &quot;the&quot;) and it means sphere. It, too, is similar to the first half of the Armenian word գմբեթ (gmbeth) which has a somewhat similar meaning (dome). BTW, there are surprisingly many similarities (stronger ones than the two I just mentioned) between Armenian and Hungarian language the reason of which I don't know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14016" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T03:42:06.513" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T03:42:06.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19608" CreationDate="2016-09-08T04:41:01.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two approaches to this problem: phonological comparison with phonetic assumptions, and computing acoustic similarity. I will only gloss over the latter approach. For the former, you need a standard decomposition of segments into phonetic properties, such as the SPE feature system. Then the difference between &quot;cat&quot; and &quot;cad&quot; is 1 because there is a single feature difference between the words; &quot;cat&quot; and &quot;cab&quot; are different by 2 (2 features), and so on. This is more fine-grained than your all-or-nothing phone comparison. It probably does not match &quot;perceptual similarity&quot; ideally, because &quot;cat&quot; would be equidistant from &quot;cap&quot; and &quot;cad&quot; whereas &quot;cat&quot; is probably closer to &quot;cad&quot; than it is to &quot;cap&quot;. This can be remedied by assigning particular feature differences, so that place feature differences would increase distance. The only problem is that we don't actually have particularly good evidence about relative perceptual similarity. This has been a major problem for similarity-based theories of phonological change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acoustic similarity approach would have you compute least RMS difference between two waveforms (suitable trimmed), but you need somewhat normalize the data for overall performance differences (amplitude, noise, speech rate) while not obliterating real differences in amplitude between [a] and [u], duration of long and short segments (plus number of segments), and the greater noisiness of fricatives compared to sonorants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T04:41:01.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T05:58:29.330" Score="0" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look, I understand the basics of phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is a physical science and phonology is a psychological science, sort of. Nonetheless, they both treat the same object: linguistic sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to illustrate this interface to a naive and dimwitted undergrad?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T08:46:10.043" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T21:50:45.323" Title="Looking for a graphic illustration of the phonetic and phonology interface" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2016-09-12T18:17:15.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19631" CreationDate="2016-09-08T08:19:28.493" Score="0" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the real world,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The sun melts the ice. (the sun is causing the change)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the same event can be described as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ice melts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both sentences describing the process, or is sentence 1 describing the action and sentence 2 is describing the process ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T10:25:14.660" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T13:19:59.880" Title="Process or action?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19627" CreationDate="2016-09-08T09:08:34.503" Score="1" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some casual reading of the literature shows that noun phrases in languages such as Afrikaans, English, Swedish, German etc. are more head-final than head-initial. While it is easy to show that non of these languages contain head-initial noun phrases, the case for being purely head-final is unclear, since their noun phrases permit modifiers to the right of the head, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cat &lt;em&gt;that sits on the mat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A cook &lt;em&gt;kneading dough in the kitchen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a generally accepted classification of the &quot;headedness&quot; of Germanic noun phrases? (Some sources use the term head medial&quot;.) Are there works on the matter that is considered authoritative and generally accepted by the linguistics community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T16:42:31.840" Title="What is the &quot;headedness&quot; of Germanic noun phrases?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2571" CreationDate="2016-09-08T12:02:50.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not an elaborate answer, but putting it in a nutshell pretty well IMO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Could you given an example sentence to illustrate the difference between semantics and pragmatics?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - &quot;Yes, I could.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:02:50.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7241" CreationDate="2016-09-08T16:43:45.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, I was making a list of languages that use the 'less-or-more' form, after first noticing it in Paul-Wexler's lecture, before his lecture, I assumed &quot;less or more&quot; is the more common form, as I'm fluent in Hebrew (where it's &quot;less or more&quot;) and English (where's it's &quot;more or less&quot;), but I also spoke (not fluently) at the time two other languages where it happens to be &quot;less or more&quot; (Polish and Dutch), only after hearing Wexler - I've checked and seen &quot;more or less&quot; - is &quot;more common&quot;.&#xA;Wexler claimed the &quot;less or more&quot; version is a &quot;Persian calque&quot; and mentioned Sorbian and Polish do it too, maybe it's true through older records. Since then - I've found that - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serbo-Croatian - accepts &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; (manje-više / više-manje) ; (where as in other languages inverting the order sounds very awkward...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Albanian, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Polish,  Sorbian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, Basque  - say &quot;less or more&quot; (correct me if I'm wrong about any of these)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All sounds &quot;kindof chinese&quot; in a way. (Mandarin way to phrasing adjectives), Wexler in his lecture - mentioned a lot of Silk-Road related borrowing for such expressions, since they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; used a lot in trade.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1605" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T16:43:45.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17121" CreationDate="2016-09-08T17:22:00.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the traditional definition, morphemes are &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Based on the disussion, I had to retract my statement about uncontroversiality. Yet, so far I haven't seen any non-circular definition of morpheme that doesn't relate it to meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noted, &lt;em&gt;-ize&lt;/em&gt; can be used to differentiate meanings. This makes me think of Saussure, whose ideas have been very influential on modern linguistics. The cornerstone of his structural approach to language is the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(semiotics)#Saussure.27s_Value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;value&lt;/a&gt;. To put it simply, linguistic signs (such as words or morphemes) don't exist in isolation and their values are determined by the oppositions to other signs in the language. From this perspective, if &lt;em&gt;-ize&lt;/em&gt; can be used to differentiate meanings, then it's meaningful by definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to take a look at the chapters about morphology in &lt;em&gt;Cognitive Grammar&lt;/em&gt; by John R. Taylor. The author analyses a few interesting edge cases of morphemes, such as &lt;em&gt;n-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt;. He also argues why &lt;em&gt;h-&lt;/em&gt; can't be a morpheme, even though there are semantically related words &lt;em&gt;hear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ear&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T13:42:33.523" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T13:42:33.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17121" CreationDate="2016-09-08T18:28:33.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, a morpheme is defined as &lt;strong&gt;the minimal meaningful unit of language&lt;/strong&gt;. Under this assumption, every morpheme is meaningful by defnition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not always that simple.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The definition works well for most of both free and bound morphemes - definitely, free morphemes such as &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; are meaningful, affxies like &lt;em&gt;-ize&lt;/em&gt; (verbalisation), &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; (past tense marker), &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; (opposite marker) can claimed to have a clearly identifiable meaning and even morphemes that have a status somewhere in between free and bound, such as confixes (like &lt;em&gt;fanat-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;fanat-ic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;polit-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;polit-ics&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;polit-ical&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;polit-ician&lt;/em&gt;, which never occur freely but can combine to standalone-words together with affixes, which affixes among each other can not) do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then there are special cases like the so-called &lt;strong&gt;cranberry morphemes&lt;/strong&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;cran-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;cranberry&lt;/em&gt; never occurs alone but is not a classical affix either, yet it does create a unique meaning in combination with &lt;em&gt;berry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is the morpheme &lt;em&gt;cran-&lt;/em&gt; now meaningful itself, when it only ever creates a meaning with one particular morpheme in combination?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would say yes, because it contributes to the menaning of the newly formed word in a systematic way, but this is not as clear as for the usual free and bound morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problematic kind of morpheme are &lt;strong&gt;circumfixes&lt;/strong&gt;. German computes the past participle form of most verbs with the circumfix &lt;em&gt;ge-STEM-t&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;tanzen&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;tanz-&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;ge-tanz-t&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In combination, &lt;em&gt;ge-X-t&lt;/em&gt; certainly is meaningful - but what about the single moprhemes &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt;, are they really meaningful individually? Or are they not morphemes at all?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would bluff it out by saying that only &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; taken together are a morpheme and &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; in isolation simply isn't one, but that is probably not the most elegant way to put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case I find one the most interesting in this respect are the so-called &lt;strong&gt;interfixes&lt;/strong&gt; (not to be confused with infixes) already mentioned in curiousdannii's answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An English example would be &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; in words such as &lt;em&gt;speed-o-meter&lt;/em&gt;, or the already mentioned &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;human-i-form&lt;/em&gt;. In German (where they are usually called &quot;Fugenmorpheme&quot;), such interfixes frequently occur between two morphemes in compounds and derivates such as &lt;em&gt;Jäger-s-mann&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;huntsman&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;Arbeit-s-platz&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;workplace&lt;/em&gt;) and it is very difficult to tell what it actually is.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is definitely NOT an inflectional morpheme (like a genitive or plural marker), as is often assumed, because &lt;em&gt;Arbeits-&lt;/em&gt; nowhere occurs in the inflectional paradigm of &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But it does not seem to have any identifiable meaning either, you could as well leave it away and would not change the meaning of the word (just that it would sound weird because the word is simply in the lexicon like this); it is assumed that it is mostly there for phonotactic reasons (like easier pronounciation or better contrast between similarly sounding phonemes).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Due to the latter, one might even claim that it is not a morpheme at all, but what is it then? Morphological analysis should be able to segmentize a word into all of its immediate constituents, &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Platz&lt;/em&gt; clearly are the smallest meaningful units and it is very unpleasent to have something in between that is merely a phoneme but morphologically not identifiable at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one might want to give up the above definition and go with a more carful, but also less explanatory one like &lt;strong&gt;the minimal unit relevant to morphological and syntactic analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. This does not make any claims about meaningfulness, but then again it is kind of circular, because morphological analysis needs to rely on what a morpheme is (which we now defined as what is treated by morphological analysis), so there is no much gain in choosing such a rather loose definiton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I would claim that the vast majority morphemes are meaningful, and not only free morphemes, but also bound ones (like &lt;em&gt;-ize&lt;/em&gt;) or rarer cases like confixes or cranberry morphemes, because they do contribute to the meaning of a word in a systematic, i.e. compositional and predictable way.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, at least for the presumably merely phonologically originated Fugenmorpheme and possibly also some other special cases, it seems like some morphemes indeed do not have any inherent meaning at all, neither in isolation nor in combination with other morphemes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My answer to the question would thus be &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, not all morphemes are meaningful, knowing that this impairs the classical and actually intuitive definition of a morpheme as &quot;the minimal meaningful unit of language&quot; heavily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T17:16:28.313" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T17:16:28.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T19:15:29.653" Score="-1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;if I give examples in german french and turkish in terms of wals Info values 125 / 126/ 127/128 , can someone explain why they are balanced, deranked, or both? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13958" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T09:34:39.723" Title="wals info values 125 126 127 128" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-09-10T16:11:22.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19613" CreationDate="2016-09-08T21:50:45.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have decided that phonology is all about the mind and phonetics is all about the body, then all you need is a drawing of a person, dichotomized into the mind versus the body, and you can label the parts. Good luck with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I disagree with your initial premise (though I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; recognize that that is the standard undergrad edu sound bite). In fact, phonology is about mental manipulation of sound &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; symbol, and phonetics is about how those symbols are realized / perceived. Before you get to actual neural impulses and movement of air and muscles, there is a lot of pre-physical planning. Some of this is quasi-scalar, so for example &quot;voicing&quot; during obstruent stops is not uniform across languages (and I mean even excluding situations like English where [g] is for some people voiceless unaspirated), voicing can be strong (higher amplitude, less prone to decay) vs. weak. The path of coarticulation from vowel to consonant is not uniform across languages (e.g. Marshallese vs. English vs. Turkish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is, why would you want to explain this difference? The simplest solution is to say that it's very complicated and controversial, but here are a few approaches (and then explain some of them). Or, if there is a real point that motivates you (such as that phonology does not deal in continuous functions or numeric values and that is has rules / operations of a particular type), then define the difference that way. The graphic should be trivial and really unnecessary, once the concept is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T21:50:45.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19591" CreationDate="2016-09-09T00:10:19.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;easy-peasy: context.  what you meant is completely irrelevant once you utter your sentence.  you could have meant -in your mind - anybody when you said &quot;he&quot;.  since your interlocutor cannot read your mind, all she has to go on is context - which includes conventions like &quot;he&quot; refers to the most recent &quot;thing&quot; mentioned to which &quot;he&quot; could reasonably apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited per comment from @user6726: touche!  proforms do not &quot;get&quot; or &quot;have&quot; a &quot;meaning&quot;.  But they do have significance, or if you prefer a functional role.  strictly speaking they do not &quot;get&quot; their significance from &quot;context&quot;, either - they get it from the norms of linguistic practice, which in turn always involve an interaction with the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T19:01:12.347" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T19:01:12.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19591" CreationDate="2016-09-09T03:35:27.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can't answer the question without knowing the intonation of the spoken form.  If we know only the written form, we just have to guess how it would be said.  Using numbers to indicate pitch and stress in the fashion of &lt;strong&gt;SPE&lt;/strong&gt;, with 1 highest, 2 next highest, and so on, and unmarked meaning lowest pitch and stress, my first reactions to the following examples are given below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A. &quot;2Harry 3got a 1toy. 2He was 1happy.&quot;  &#xA;B. &quot;2Harry 3got a 1toy. He was 1happy.&quot;  &#xA;C. &quot;2Harry 3got a 1toy. 1He was happy.&quot;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For A., the two sentences do not make a coherent discourse, and &quot;he&quot; refers to some other person.  In B., &quot;he&quot; refers back to Harry.  C. has contrastive stress, and &quot;he&quot; refers back to Harry, but the implication is that although Harry was happy, he was the only one, and others concerned who did not get toys were not happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;D. &quot;2Harry 3got a 1toy. The silly little boy was 1happy.&quot;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no pronoun in D, but the low pitch and stress of &quot;the silly little boy&quot; tells us that it is (what has been called) a pseudo-pronoun, and refers back to Harry, as in example B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T03:35:27.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19576" CreationDate="2016-09-09T08:47:29.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surinaams, or Sranantongo, is the language preferred by the majority of black people living in Suriname, a smaller country bordering the Atlantic Ocean on the north shores of South America. Some may consider it a creole language, but it has matured considerably and is widely accepted as the second language of the country, the official language still being Dutch. There is no common understanding between Dutch and Surinaams speakers in any case.&#xA;Surinaams developed from English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and some West-African languages. Immigrants from Suriname in other countries keep it as their mother tongue and prefer it over English.&#xA;For more information call 00 31 23 711 9000 or E-mail: info@sinarcinta.nl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T08:47:29.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19608" CreationDate="2016-09-09T09:11:58.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest the following article (Nerbonne, 2010) for an applied example using a phonological approach as described in user6726's post; the link is a DOI, so it should be stable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0048&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0048&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10323" LastEditorUserId="10323" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T11:03:01.747" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T11:03:01.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19620" CreationDate="2016-09-09T09:34:39.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the assumption that the corresponding WALS articles have been read, I'll give a short explanation for why the German value is 'both' for feature 125, which can be easily carried over to the other values as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purposive clauses in German can (i.a.) be formed with the '&lt;em&gt;zu&lt;/em&gt; infintive', as in (1), or with a finite clause introduced by the preposition &lt;em&gt;damit&lt;/em&gt; ('such that'), as in (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Du  lernst um  froh  zu sein.&#xA;    you learn  for happy to be&#xA;   `You learn in order to be happy.'&#xA;&#xA;(2) Du lernst, damit     du  froh  bist.&#xA;    you learn  such-that you happy are&#xA;   `You learn, such that you are happy.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in (1), the deranked (because infinite) form is used to form a purposive clause whereas in (2) a balanced (because finite) form is used. You can see from the translations why English also has the 'both' value for feature 125. In Turkish, on the other hand, there are no finite purposive clauses (most likely converbial constructions will be used in Turkish). In French, you only have the &lt;em&gt;pour V-INF&lt;/em&gt; construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can just look at these values through the finite/non-finite lense to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T09:34:39.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19615" CreationDate="2016-09-09T09:54:15.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NPs of all Germanic languages are head-initial. Headedness is determined on the basis of the distribution of complements, not modifiers; the distribution of modifiers only correlates with the distribution of complements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;destroy&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;the city&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;the destruction&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;of the city&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complement obligatorily follows the head. The contrast can be seen more nicely in German, where VP is head-final (3) while NP is head-initial (4), such that the position of the complement changes on behalf of the category of the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;strong&gt;die Stadt&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;zerstören&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  the city destroy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) &lt;em&gt;die Zerstörung&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;der Stadt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; the destruction of-the city&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further discussion I'd suggest looking into Haider (2004) on the matter. He's far from uncontroversial in general, but pages 782ff. illustrate a nice further contrast between German NPs and VPs which was previously discussed as the 'head-final filter': ungrammatical: &lt;em&gt;die schneller(e) als Bolt Frau&lt;/em&gt; ('the faster than Bolt woman') vs grammatical: &lt;em&gt;schneller als Bolt rennen&lt;/em&gt; ('faster than Bolt run'). These examples the English translations are supposed to show that the head-initial phrases do not allow, that the head of a modifying phrase is non-adjacent to the modified head. That is, it is not a general property of German to allow for non-head-adjacent modifying phrases, but it a property of its head-final phrases (VP and AP) only. This is just to illustrate one further putative difference between these phrases. Here's the doi-link, so it should be stable:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00051-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Haider (2004)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from Haider being controversial, I'm not aware of any researcher who claims that the German NP is head-final. Also note that the head-initiality of the majority of phrases among the languages of Europe was surely one of the main reasons for Kayne (1994) to claim that every phrase is basically head-initial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10323" LastEditorUserId="10323" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T16:42:31.840" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T16:42:31.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-09T11:27:25.597" Score="5" ViewCount="1316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask about the syntactic analysis of adverbs as what is called &quot;peripheral noun modifiers&quot; in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p436, which is illustrated in the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possibly the best actress&lt;/strong&gt; in the world will take the role of Emma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the authors, the adverb &quot;possibly&quot; in the above sentence in one of the interpretations is to be understood as having scope over the noun phrase &quot;best actress&quot; - The person who is possibly the best actress in the world will take the role of Emma. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble understanding this, as semantically the adverb &quot;possibly&quot; clearly serves to hedge the qualification of the actress as the best in the world, not the entire phrase &quot;best actress&quot; - The actress is possibly the best in the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few random examples I picked from Google Books would receive the same interpretation - the modal and temporal adverbs in these examples would be interpreted as modifying the following adjective within the noun phrase rather than the entire meaning of the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a nice neighbourhood. Nice homes, nice gardens, &lt;strong&gt;probably nice&#xA;  people&lt;/strong&gt; who would give you the time of day if you asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Freud can be a very annoying person, with his ideas about women, and&#xA;  his &lt;strong&gt;sometimes rigid symbol interpretation of dreams&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has made his Pop elements into a subtle, profound, delicate and &lt;strong&gt;at&#xA;  moments very touching and very funny instrument for analysis of a&#xA;  national trauma&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5492" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T05:02:35.303" Title="Adverbs as NP pre-modifiers" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19614" CreationDate="2016-09-09T14:12:52.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Greg points out (above), both describe processes, but 2 omits the agent/actor. This is a well known behaviour of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ergative verbs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T14:12:52.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19628" CreationDate="2016-09-09T14:43:46.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I support your remarks about the interpretation of &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; as a supposed NP modifier, &lt;strong&gt;CGEL&lt;/strong&gt; might still be right about the syntax.  Following McCawley's analysis of &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; as a syntactic modifier which has a semantic focus somewhere within the constituent it modifies, it seems we must distinguish between the syntax and the semantics of such modifiers.  Perhaps here &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a syntactic modifier of a NP, but which has the interpretation of modifying some smaller part of that NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider what &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; goes with in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Only the best actress in the world would attempt the role of Emma.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that McCawley would put &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; as a syntactic modifier of the NP &lt;em&gt;the best actress in the world&lt;/em&gt; but with a semantic focus of just a part of tha NP, perhaps &lt;em&gt;best ... in the world&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now try&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Possibly only the best actress in the world would attempt the role of Emma.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interpretation, &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; is limited in scope to the focused part of the NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T14:43:46.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19628" CreationDate="2016-09-09T15:36:26.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a similar analysis of adverbs functioning as noun modifiers in this document here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/310409/2/VandeVelde_2011_ELL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/310409/2/VandeVelde_2011_ELL.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author says that the syntactic analysis is supported by the semantics of the phrases he offered as an illustration, as in this example he took from BNC:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The main concern of this chapter is to complete the description of          intonational form,including analysis of &lt;strong&gt;perhaps the most difficult&#xA;  aspect&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt from the document:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover, in many syntactic contexts, the peripheral modifier can be&#xA;  analysed as a sentence-level modifier rather than as a part of the NP.&#xA;  This can be illustrated by examples like (28), which are open to the&#xA;  two analyses in (29) and (30). (28) Body language is probably the most&#xA;  important visual cue. (BNC) (29) [ NP Pm       [D [...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [N]]]]&#xA;           probably the most important visual clue (30) [ AdvP Adv    ] . .. [ NP D [...                 [N]]]&#xA;            probably             the most important visual clue Still, an analysis along the lines of (30) is not always an option. In&#xA;  (31)–(32), the peripheral modifier follows a preposition. This&#xA;  suggests that the adverb perhaps is part of the NP that is the&#xA;  complement of the PP. &lt;strong&gt;The idea that in this construction the adverb&#xA;  syntactically belongs to the NP is supported by the semantics: in the&#xA;  examples (31)–(32) perhaps only has semantic scope over the NP inside&#xA;  the PP. In (31), perhaps is used to express doubt about whether the&#xA;  referent is indeed ‘the most difficult aspect’, rather than the&#xA;  analysis or the inclusion of an analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. In (32), perhaps is used to&#xA;  question the felicity of the description ‘extravagance’ for what is&#xA;  going on. The rest of the clause is fully asserted. (31) The main&#xA;  concern of this chapter is to complete the description of intonational&#xA;  form,including analysis of &lt;strong&gt;perhaps the most difficult aspect&lt;/strong&gt; .. .&#xA;  (BNC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm having difficulty understanding the semantic interpretation of the adverb &quot;perhaps&quot; as &quot;..expressing doubt about whether the referent is indeed &quot;the most difficult aspect&quot;. &#xA;I'd rather read &quot;perhaps&quot; as a softener of the otherwise assertive &quot;most difficult&quot; qualification of the aspect in question, which would in turn obviously affect the syntactic analysis of the phrase. I don't see how &quot;perhaps&quot; raises any sort of doubt regarding &quot;aspect&quot; itself, but it does hedge its qualification as being &quot;the most difficult&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add to this dilemma I have, examples with adverbs modifying noun phrases which are not pre-modified with adjectives are also common in language, as is the case with partitives like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a province of Central China and subsequently subjugated all other&#xA;  petty kingdoms and thus became the emperors of &lt;strong&gt;perhaps the one of&#xA;  the largest empires of the world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5492" LastEditorDisplayName="user5492" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T16:05:41.223" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T16:05:41.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19276" CreationDate="2016-09-09T20:01:21.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well yes, since there are languages that are (by various authors) claimed to lack the N/V distinction altogether (e.g. several Wakashan, Salishan, Munda and Malayo-Polynesian languages -- just search the internet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T20:01:21.690" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19628" CreationDate="2016-09-09T21:47:05.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without the PP, 'possibly' becomes a normal adverb[ial]: &quot;Possibly[,] the best actress will take the role.&quot;  The phrase comes from something like &quot;She is[,] possibly[,] the best actress in the world&quot; and gets transferred (whole cloth).  Your sentence could work with the nuance of spoken form, but as written it is ambiguous ('possibly best' vs 'possibly take').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T21:47:05.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8517" CreationDate="2016-09-10T06:12:32.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of ɣ and w are similar anatomically, as the rear part of the mouth rises, so agua [aɣwa] tends to become [awwa] by assimilation, and in loose speech this becomes [awa].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14029" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T06:12:32.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19645" CreationDate="2016-09-10T07:49:33.307" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;What were the explanatory shortcomings in Autosegmental Phonology which motivated McCarthy to re-introduce  the segment as a unit of representation in CV Phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T16:23:53.547" Title="Why did McCarthy reintroduce the segment as a unit of analysis in CV phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-10T08:49:07.540" Score="16" ViewCount="1977" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language, in which the word for &quot;coffee&quot; does not contain the sounds k/q and f/h/v, i.e. the word has a different root? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13863" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T12:09:39.047" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T10:30:04.337" Title="Are there languages in which &quot;coffee&quot; is not a cognate of a root containing k/q and f/h/w?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-10T10:39:05.973" Score="3" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently developed a new language with a perfect script, grammar and vocabulary. I even prepared a dictionary for it. Now, I would like to type my language on my laptop in its native script. For this, I have to create new characters on the computer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried PCE but it is not working the way I want. For example, my script uses diacritics to represent vowels, much like Indic scripts. In PCE, I have to create new glyphs for each character with diacritics. I can't do that hard work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So I have to use Devanagari to type my language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other software to create new characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14030" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T11:47:38.727" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T21:23:11.740" Title="Creating Unicode Characters for new language" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19640" CreationDate="2016-09-10T11:46:07.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are essentially two option you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skim through the existing Unicode characters and select a subset of them suitable for your conlang&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go forth and create a conscript (constructed writing system) for your conlang. Don't expect the Unicode consortium to add your conscript to the Unicode standard soon—they have some rather strong criteria for characters to be included into the standard. You can register your conscript at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Conscript Unicode Registry&lt;/a&gt; (they assign Private Use Area code points for conscripts).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For combinations of Latin letters with arbitrary diacritics, Unicode provides &lt;em&gt;combining diacritics&lt;/em&gt;, so every base letter–accent combination is already included in Unicode.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What software is concerned: You need to create a font for your conscript, e.g. with METAFONT, and use some typesetter, e.g., TeX or LaTeX, to produce some texts on the computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T21:23:11.740" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T21:23:11.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19639" CreationDate="2016-09-10T12:09:06.067" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armenian: սուրճ &lt;code&gt;[surch]&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%BD%D5%B8%D6%82%D6%80%D5%B3#Etymology&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: java (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Java#Etymology&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the 17th century, the Dutch colonized the island of Java, which is now part of Indonesia. They planted lots of coffee there and began exporting it to the rest of the world. It was successful enough to have become a generic word for coffee.&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-a-cup-of-java&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T12:09:06.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19639" CreationDate="2016-09-10T12:16:17.173" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the word for &quot;coffee&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the language doesn't have &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; word for coffee, and there are several words to express it? For example, in Somali, coffee can be called both &lt;a href=&quot;https://so.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bun&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://so.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaxwe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;qaxwe&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does not contain the sounds k/q and f/h/v&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Navajo, the word for &quot;coffee&quot; doesn't contain k/q: &lt;a href=&quot;https://nv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahw%C3%A9%C3%A9h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ahwééh&lt;/a&gt;. Yet, it looks like a loanword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the word has a different root&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Oromo it is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://om.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buna&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;buna&lt;/a&gt; and very likely has a different root. But I don't know if it's the only word for &quot;coffee&quot; in this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1ssms5/are_there_any_languages_where_the_name_for_coffee/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Reddit thread&lt;/a&gt;, there are quite a few more languages mentioned there: Amharic, Ojibwe, Cheyenne, Tibetan, South Sami, Kichwa, Lakota...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-09-10T16:38:13.550" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T16:38:13.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19639" CreationDate="2016-09-10T15:21:41.107" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I would like to say that these words are not cognates; they are loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coffee plant is indigenous in the highlands of Ethiopia. It was transplanted to the Yemen in the 14th century (which is fairly recent), where the drink coffee became popular among Sufi circles, and was soon after exported to Istanbul, and hence to Europe. For a long time coffee was produced only in the Yemen and the Horn of Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “coffee” word comes from Arabic qahwa, originally the name for a sort of wine, but which the Yemeni coffee-drinkers transferred to their favourite tipple. It has been claimed, but never proved, that it has antecedents in one or the other of the languages of Ethiopia, but until proven otherwise, it is more likely that the Ethiopian names are borrowed from Arabic. Arabic qahwa was borrowed into Turkish as kahve, and from Turkish to Dutch koffie, French café etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The native Ethiopian word for “coffee” (the plant and the drink) is būn. In most Arabic dialects bunn is the berry and qahwa is the drink, but in the Yemen bunn is used both for the berry and the drink. The Dutch traders identified, by folk-etymology, Arabic bunn with Dutch boon “bean”, and it is for this reason that in English too we wrongly refer to “coffee beans”. Coffee is not made from beans but from the dried seeds of coffee berries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages that have invented new words for &quot;coffee&quot;, but in virtually all languages in the world the principal word for coffee derives from one or the other of the mentioned Arabic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an excellent scholarly discussion of the whole complex:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/kahwa-COM_0418?s.num=0&amp;amp;s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&amp;amp;s.q=kahwa&quot;&gt;http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/kahwa-COM_0418?s.num=0&amp;amp;s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&amp;amp;s.q=kahwa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T10:30:04.337" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T10:30:04.337" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19638" CreationDate="2016-09-10T16:23:53.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A more accurate characterization of the history is that McCarthy did not adopt Goldsmith's radical desegmentalization, so from M's POV this was maintenance of the status quo. M does not address the question, so one can only speculate. There are a few prominent reasons that I believe most explain this. First, G's idea was rather speculative and rationalist, and the details implementation of radical desegmentalization remained to be worked out, so that it wasn't practical to actually adopt the proposal right out of the box. Second, recall that M is a strong proponent of the OCP &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; universal constraint, which prohibits adjacent identical segments – but not features (G on the other hand rejects the OCP). The OCP facts (especially the *&lt;em&gt;ssm&lt;/em&gt; fact of Arabic) necessitate a robust notion of &quot;segment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, M had available to him the now expired additional theoretical construct &quot;projection&quot; which gives the appearance of featural autonomy without denying the segment. Forth, M's concern is fundamentally about syllable structure, which is maximally remote from the kind of feature concerns that inspired G. Segment lengthening and shortening, which are at the center of his concerns, are most problematic for a radical desegmentalized theory, lacking a unified thing that you can have two of. Related to this is the fact that most of the time, a segment can have only one specification of a feature (tone are major exceptions), and without a hardcore segment, this fact is hard to encode in the theory. Finally, M introduces a competing theory that each morpheme defines a separate tier, which if crossed with featural decomposition, would make the head explode (though he does not explicitly reject feature decomposition, still his focus directed is away from feature autonomy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T16:23:53.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19639" CreationDate="2016-09-10T17:50:19.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; indexes a number of slang terms for 'coffee'. Two of them are clearly derived from &lt;em&gt;coffee&lt;/em&gt;, so I'd consider them scratched for your purposes — Everton toffee (rhyming slang), joe (alliterative slang). But there are five others that probably pass muster: Java, mud, ninny-broth, syrup of soot, Turkey gruel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14032" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T17:50:19.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19659" CreationDate="2016-09-11T08:10:46.750" Score="6" ViewCount="762" Body="&lt;p&gt;Introductions to Construction Grammar's &quot;construct-i-con&quot; model often include  explicit arguments against the &quot;lexicon and rules&quot; model on the grounds that the latter is less equipped to deal with things like &quot;the X-er, the Y-er&quot; or &quot;She sneezed the foam off her cappuccino&quot; (to name two commonly used examples). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in reading rebuttals of these arguments, and/or arguments against Construction Grammar for other reasons, from a lexicon-and-rules perspective. That is, articles that specifically say &quot;Construction Grammar cannot account for phenomenon X, but lexicon-and-rules can&quot; or &quot;Construction Grammarians say that lexicon-and-rules can't handle phenomenon Y, but this is a misunderstanding and actually it can quite easily, as follows...&quot; References to fully developed articles/essays/blog posts/books would be great if possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T09:47:46.393" Title="What are the standard/best arguments against Construction Grammar?" Tags="&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2016-09-11T10:05:31.907" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think anybody who is fluent in English, it means that about 50 percent of work has been done for learning French. Anybody who is fluent in French, it means that 75 percent of work has been done for learning Spanish.Aliazm Mohammadbeigy &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14038" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T10:05:31.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2016-09-11T10:10:35.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I could address the Semitic part of your question: the Arabic past tense (al-māḍī; please note that this word actually does mean “past”) is used in principal clauses for actions in the past time, but is also used with the particle “law” in unreal conditions. So at least in your first two sentences you would say “law kuntu” and “law kunta”. So this is not a purely Indo-European thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T10:10:35.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19652" CreationDate="2016-09-11T12:52:57.193" Score="3" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the first three digit words for most Austronesian languages are awfully close to P.I.E. I speak Tagalog and at first, I had thought that the words for one two and three had been taken from Spanish, (Isa, Dalawa, Tatlo) but when I went to look at the Austronesian Languages page on Wikipedia, I was baffled to see that they had been so close to P.I.E. Why is this so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14040" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T15:20:21.510" Title="Why are the first three digits in Austronesian languages so close to P.I.E.?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19650" CreationDate="2016-09-11T15:20:21.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for &quot;two&quot; is dua in Malay/Indonesian and duo in Latin. This is a classic example of how words in two unrelated languages turn out looking the same, by pure coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T15:20:21.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19605" CreationDate="2016-09-11T17:30:55.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear what you are asking or presupposing, especially whether you are looking for theoretical possibilities in imaginary languages, or actual counts based on English (or some other language). &quot;Teach&quot; is most verb-like and &quot;teacher&quot; is less verb-like, with &quot;teaching&quot; standing between the two (and potentially divisible into the forms in &quot;I am teaching&quot; versus &quot;Teaching is irritating&quot;). Is &quot;teaching&quot; a verb or is it &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a verb? In other words, it's not clear what you mean by &quot;verb&quot;. You have a couple answers that imply that you just need one dummy verb: actually you wouldn't need any overt thing that you'd label a verb. You wouldn't even need a verb to distinguish stative and active predicates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All actions involve relations between things (&quot;thing&quot; being a non-technical term meaning &quot;anything you want to talk about&quot;). In English, in order to describe the act of cooking porridge, you need one verb (cook) and a noun that says what you cook. In Logoori, you need just one verb &lt;em&gt;ruga&lt;/em&gt; and no object, because the object of the verb is implicit in selecting that particular lexical item (if you want to cook beans or leaves, you would &lt;em&gt;deeka&lt;/em&gt; them). The English verbal lexicon is thus somewhat less more compact in not including the &quot;cook+porridge&quot; relationship as a distinct lexical item. So it appears that you're looking for a minimal list of lexical &quot;verbs&quot;, shifting the burden to compositional semantics (thus all forms of cooking are &quot;cook + object&quot;). &quot;Fry&quot; would be e.g. &quot;cook with oil&quot;, &quot;simmer&quot; would be &quot;cook slowly&quot;, &quot;blanch&quot; would be &quot;cook quickly in water&quot; and so on. &quot;Cook&quot; would itself be decomposed into a longer description involving some verbal action plus the nouns &quot;heat&quot; and &quot;food&quot;, which in many languages are simply nominalizations of verbs &quot;eat&quot;, &quot;be warm&quot;. If you count such potential V-to-N nominalizations as not verbs, then you could theoretically eliminate &quot;cook&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it depends on how you dispose of V-to-N derivations, and on whether you're asking for actual language facts or merely an imaginable scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T17:30:55.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-11T19:29:29.953" Score="5" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already found some programs that can transcribe text automatically but they don't comply with my requirements. I need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A software that transcribes written text to IPA, SAMPA or some other phonetic representation (command line usable, so that I can use the output)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A software that is free or, even better, open source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not a website but an actual downloadable software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be able to split the tanscription into syllables&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be able to deal with words that are not in a dictionary, by approximating a good transcription of the unknown word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No limitation to the number of words that are transcribed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nice to have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;POS-Tagging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A combination of tools to achieve the requirements would also be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14046" LastEditorUserId="14046" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T18:42:28.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T18:42:28.447" Title="Transcribing German written text to computer readable phonetic alphabet" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-11T22:06:16.130" Score="4" ViewCount="4491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a little trouble understanding the actual difference between these sets of sounds.  What would be the difference in pronunciation between /hau nau braun kau/ and /haw naw brawn kaw/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13808" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:15:51.240" Title="Difference between [i] and [j] or [u] and [w]" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19655" CreationDate="2016-09-12T00:37:39.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no difference that is intrinsic to these transcriptions. IPA letter do not represent exact pronunciations of a Platonic linguistic metalanguage, they snad for ranges of pronunciations in actual languages -- but each pronunciation is in a specific language. Languages can differ substantially in how &amp;#x3c;hau&gt; is pronounced. The meaningful difference is not in the pronounciation of the string of letters, it is in the phonological analysis. The letters &amp;#x3c;w,j&gt; are conventionally consonants and &amp;#x3c;u,i&gt; are vowels, so writing &amp;#x3c;hau&gt; implies that there are two vowels, and writing &amp;#x3c;haw&gt; implies that the word ends in a consonant. There aren't particularly strong arguments for one analysis over the other in English. In some languages, there are good tests that distinguish between CVV and CVC, but the high postvocalic vocoid of English has been analyzed both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T17:53:02.343" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T17:53:02.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T01:16:49.233" Score="1" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a praat script that creates text grids, zooms in to a specific time, and then pauses to allow me to annotate the text grid. However, there are multiple instances in each sound file that need annotation. When I save the text grid, it only saves the last annotation, and not all of the annotations. How do I get praat to save all annotations in each text grid? Here is my script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@instance: &quot;s0101b&quot;, 23.295323, &quot;file path&quot;&#xA;@instance: &quot;s0101b&quot;, 40.343423, &quot;file path&quot;&#xA;@instance: &quot;s0101c&quot;, 80.295323, &quot;file path&quot;&#xA;@instance: &quot;s0101c&quot;, 90.343423, &quot;file path&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;procedure instance: .file_name$, start_time, .dir_name$&#xA;&#xA;# create a list of wav files&#xA;&#xA;    strings = Create Strings as file list: &quot;list&quot;, .dir_name$ + &quot;/*.wav&quot;&#xA;        numberOfFiles = Get number of strings&#xA;        for ifile to numberOfFiles&#xA;            selectObject: strings&#xA;            fileName$ = Get string: ifile&#xA;            Read from file: .dir_name$ + &quot;/&quot; + fileName$&#xA;        endfor&#xA;    selectObject:strings&#xA;    Remove&#xA;&#xA;windowstart = start_time - 0.05&#xA;windowend = start_time + 0.50&#xA;&#xA;selectObject: &quot;Sound '.file_name$'&quot;&#xA;To TextGrid: &quot;annotation&quot;, &quot;bell&quot;&#xA;&#xA;select TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;plus Sound '.file_name$'&#xA;View &amp;amp; Edit&#xA;editor TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;&#xA;    Select... 'windowstart' 'windowend'&#xA;    Zoom to selection&#xA;    pause Add boundaries, and record&#xA;    Close&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;endeditor&#xA;select TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;Write to text file... file path/'.file_name$'_editedtext.TextGrid&#xA;&#xA;endproc&#xA;&#xA;writeInfoLine: &quot;Finished!&quot;&#xA;select all&#xA;Remove&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T22:43:52.950" Title="Saving edited text grids with Praat script" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19657" CreationDate="2016-09-12T02:53:22.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I think I see where the problem is, but I'm not completely sure about my answer. I'll give it a shot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like everything from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;selectObject: &quot;Sound '.file_name$’” &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and down is the part where it zooms in on a sound and stuff happens, right? And the for loop before it with the strings object is just getting the list of files and whatnot, yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where is .file_name$ coming from? It looks like that variable is storing the name of the file in every iteration of the strings for loop. Well, once the code has moved past the for loop, the variable is still there but only the file name in the last iteration is stored there. Basically, there’s a scope issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a solution to the problem would be to move everything before endproc into the strings for loop, just after the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Read from file: .dir_name$ + &quot;/&quot; + fileName$ &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;line. I don’t know Praat scripting well enough to know what’ll happen if you do that, and it very well might blow up the program. But I know the solution to the problem would be to do all the editor stuff inside of at least some for loop that cycles through all the filenames. Perhaps something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;strings = Create Strings as file list: &quot;list&quot;, .dir_name$ + &quot;/*.wav&quot;&#xA;    numberOfFiles = Get number of strings&#xA;    for ifile to numberOfFiles&#xA;        selectObject: strings&#xA;        fileName$ = Get string: ifile&#xA;        Read from file: .dir_name$ + &quot;/&quot; + fileName$&#xA;&#xA;        windowstart = start_time - 0.05&#xA;        windowend = start_time + 0.50&#xA;&#xA;        selectObject: &quot;Sound '.file_name$'&quot;&#xA;        To TextGrid: &quot;annotation&quot;, &quot;bell&quot;&#xA;&#xA;        select TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;        plus Sound '.file_name$'&#xA;        View &amp;amp; Edit&#xA;        editor TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;&#xA;            Select... 'windowstart' 'windowend'&#xA;            Zoom to selection&#xA;            pause Add boundaries, and record&#xA;            Close&#xA;&#xA;        endeditor&#xA;        select TextGrid '.file_name$'&#xA;        Write to text file... file path/'.file_name$'_editedtext.TextGrid&#xA;&#xA;    endfor&#xA;selectObject:strings&#xA;Remove&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11046" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T02:53:22.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19647" CreationDate="2016-09-12T08:38:31.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Charles Yang has argued against Tomasello's usage-based approach that underlies Construction Grammar. He explicitly pits item-based learning against rule-based learning in language acquisition. The argument is technical and based on quantitative evidence. The relevant papers are on his homepage: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14051" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T08:38:31.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19662" CreationDate="2016-09-12T09:04:04.623" Score="2" ViewCount="1353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to start an online Polish course, but I am still confused about the Polish sound system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is (I am still not so good in phonology):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is the difference between the following pairs of sounds:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ć and cz, ź and rz, dź and dż, and between ś and sz ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13863" LastEditorUserId="95" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T13:45:13.307" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T13:45:13.307" Title="What is the difference between sibilant sounds in Polish? (ć,ś,dź,ź vs cz,sz,dż,ż,rz)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19647" CreationDate="2016-09-12T09:47:46.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a series of replies between David Adger and Adele Goldberg at lingbuzz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001633&quot;&gt;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001633&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001675&quot;&gt;http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001675&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up two points of Adger's criticism: first, CxG admits hundreds of innate capabilities, such as innate capabilities for vision and social interaction (Tomasello), but there's such a hassle about that one tiny bit of possible innate language capabilities. So, why are all of those other innate capabilities acknowlegded so easily, why is language such an exception in being an ability that depends entirely on other innately dispositioned capabilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, CxG claims, that what appears as grammatical rules are abstractions over constructions. This view is problematic for cases that do not occur as part of the input. Here, Adger cites Yang (see answer from Mr. Hilbert), and he mentions the phenomenon of parasitic gaps: speakers of English have no problems in distinguishing between the grammatical and ungrammatical cases of parasitic gaps &lt;em&gt;even though&lt;/em&gt; these kinds of structure are more or less non-existent in corpora. These structures can be captured by a a rules-type grammar, but how would a CxG-type analysis of parasitic gaps look like? From which kind of schemata are parasitic gaps abstractions? How can there be shemata for constructions that are not represented in the input?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So first, there is a problem in the premises, and second, there is a problem in descriptive adequacy or weak explanatory adequacy. The second problem could simply be addressed by just proposing how a CxG analysis of parasitic gaps would look like, but in her replies, Goldberg does not address the issue of how to analyse parasitic gaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10323" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T09:47:46.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19660" CreationDate="2016-09-12T10:14:04.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;em&gt;ć&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ź&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dź&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ś&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;alveolo-palatal&lt;/strong&gt; consonants, all articulated with the tongue raised towards the alveolar ridge (located just behind the upper teeth) and the palate (the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dljjkm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dljjkm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tongue position in alveolo-palatal sounds. Source: Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;cz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ż&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dż&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sz&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;retroflex&lt;/strong&gt; consonants, all articulated with the tip of the tongue pointed upwards or even bent back (hence the name): &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qOQ1R.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qOQ1R.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tongue position in retroflex sounds. Source: Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that English &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; (as in &quot;plea&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;ure&quot;), &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sh&lt;/em&gt; are similar to the sounds in question, but are palato-alveolar. It means that English &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; is articulated somewhere in between Polish &lt;em&gt;cz&lt;/em&gt; and Polish &lt;em&gt;ć&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are familiar with sounds of Serbo-Croatian, it may be helpful to note that Polish &lt;em&gt;ć&lt;/em&gt; is basically the same as Croatian &lt;em&gt;ć&lt;/em&gt;, and Polish &lt;em&gt;cz&lt;/em&gt; is similar to Croatian &lt;em&gt;č&lt;/em&gt; (I'm not quite sure if the latter is retroflex or palato-alveolar). Similarly, Polish &lt;em&gt;dź&lt;/em&gt; is the same as Croatian &lt;em&gt;đ&lt;/em&gt;, and Polish &lt;em&gt;dż&lt;/em&gt; is similar to Croatian &lt;em&gt;dž&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be easier to tell &lt;em&gt;sz&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;ś&lt;/em&gt; if you know some Russian: Polish &lt;em&gt;sz&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced the same as &lt;em&gt;ш&lt;/em&gt; in Russian &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ш&lt;/strong&gt;ут&quot;, and Polish &lt;em&gt;ś&lt;/em&gt; is similar to &lt;em&gt;сч&lt;/em&gt; in Russian &quot;&lt;strong&gt;сч&lt;/strong&gt;астье&quot; (but somewhat shorter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, take a look at the transcription of these consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It may be useful if you want to look them up in Wikipedia or find them in pronunciation charts to learn more about how they sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ć  [t͡ɕ]   cz [t͡ʂ]  &#xA;dź [d͡ʑ]   dż [d͡ʐ]  &#xA;ś  [ɕ]    sz [ʂ]  &#xA;ź  [ʑ]    ż  [ʐ]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T14:26:09.070" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T14:26:09.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T10:46:59.760" Score="9" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I came across a short text on &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000169.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt; briefly discussing a phenomenon which seems to affect certain languages. The author noticed that loss or heavy weakening of inflection during language's histories tend to be concomitant with certain political or social contexts. As for example in the case of English - the language of Germanic invaders of Britain or Persian - for a long time a regional lingua franca. In both circumstances the language in question was a language that was adopted by adults (either by direct force or social pressure, or willingly), natively speaking in a different language (the invaded Celtic and maybe other unknown non IE population in Britain or later incoming Old Norse speaking people for Old English and merchants or travellers for Persian). This population would then acquire the language imperfectly (being a L2 for them), for example by losing or contaminating certain language features (the inflectional endings in this case), and being such a large part of the new community of that language's users, it would permanently change it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That scenario would oppose a situation of for example West and East Slavic languages which, without a history of intensive conquests etc., preserved the complex both noun and verbal inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What in my opinion is crucial in these cases is that the cause of loss of a certain feature is not the lack of this feature in the L1 of the acquisitor (Old Celtic or Old Norse languages, morphologically speaking, were not any simpler than Old English) but the sheer fact of acquisition of the language in question as a L2.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is a counterexample that came to my mind, namely, Koine Greek that despite being a common lingua franca on a vast area for quite a long time did not considerably simplify its inflection (of course, comparing it to the Classical Greek it was simpler, but on a scale uncomparable to the case of Old English and Modern or Early Modern English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does anybody have any more information on that topic, some publications, projects or their own work or ideas?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These scenarios, would be different from just creolisation, since as far as I know creolisation involves merging of features of two languages or assimilating one to another, while the cases that I am writing about involve, just as I wrote before, changing by imperfect, unnatural acquisition.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastEditorUserId="10265" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T10:07:06.477" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T03:34:53.780" Title="L2 acquisition as a factor in loss of &quot;complex&quot; grammatical features" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19667" CreationDate="2016-09-12T13:45:25.820" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did Goldsmith account for the OCP using Autosegmental Phonology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose he couldn't accept it because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OCP prohibits identical segments (which don't exist, as such in Autosegmental Phonology), but not features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relatedly, OCP makes reference to segments (which don't exist, as such in Autosegmental Phonology)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how does Autosegmental Phono account for OCP phenomena?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T17:03:29.630" Title="How did Goldsmith account for phenomena otherwise explicable with the OCP?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19666" CreationDate="2016-09-12T17:03:29.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;OCP behavior&quot; as a presumptive fact was actually invented much later than Goldsmith's work, peaking around the time of the rise of OT. There is a difference between Goldsmith and Leben, centering around this OCP thing, which is remotely connected to what we now term OCP behavior, which I'll explicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leben's theory (his 1973 MIT dissertation) sets forth the precursor of autosegmental theory, whereby in some languages there were two feature matrices, the segmental and the tonal: each was a standard SPE feature matrix, and the matrices were only indirectly connected, by being a fact of a given morpheme. (That is, vowels didn't have tone, tones were not on vowels). Complex rules of &quot;mapping&quot; would, in the derivation, assign the &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;th tonal feature to the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;th segment. Tone melodies were essentially the same as word-class diacritics. The concept which morphed into OCP emerges in L's dissertation in 2.3 with his analysis of Mende noun tone, and the now infamous melody analysis whereby nouns (mostly) select one of the patterns H, L, HL, LH, LHL. He asserts that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;because contours such as HHL and HLL have the same &quot;melody&quot;, which is&#xA;  represented suprasegmentally as HL, it follows that a language in&#xA;  which tone is suprasegmental ln underlying forms will not be able to&#xA;  have distinct contours HHL and HLL in underlying representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that this &quot;is the same melody&quot; claim is asserted and not proven. What this buys you in Mende is that it gives you a mechanism to account for the presumed combinatorial limits on tone (the problem nouns are somewhat exceptional, so he's not discarding masses of data, and the &quot;exceptions&quot; are generally set aside). This is the original seed of the OCP, but was not named by Leben and was not claimed to be a universal representational stipulation. (I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that he saw it as a consequence of the kind of abstraction from surface forms that would lead to positing that a given language represents tone suprasegmentally). Overall, his analyses eliminated the need for underlying multiple instances of H or L within morphemes, since he found that they could all be derived by a rule which basically repeats the last tone in the tonal matrix. The crucial characteristic of Leben's system is that it has no underlying information on where a tone is linked, and he marks tone melody as a diacritic feature on whole morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where Leben's theory invoked a &quot;tone pattern diacritic&quot; plus underspecification of tone features (filled in by copying rules, assigning tone into the segmental matrix by reference to the tonal matrix), Goldsmith posited full and equal partnership between tones and segments. It emerged that the most straightforward account of languages that he dealt with would necessarily generate &quot;OCP violations&quot;, for example his derivation of Lomongo in sect 3 ch. 1 assigns two adjacent H tones to the first syllable of a H verb root plus H suffix. The OCP is explicitly identified in ch 1 sect 4.2 where G states &quot;the inclusion of Leben's principle (which I shall call the Obligatory Contour principle) leads to unnecessary complications&quot;. The specific wording proposed by G is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the melodic level of the grammar, any two adjacent tonemes must be&#xA;  distinct. Thus HHL is not a possible melodic pattern; it automatically&#xA;  simplifies to HL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intended to represent Leben's beliefs, with the condition that for Leben this would be a fact about underlying forms but derived representations. While L does not explicitly say this, it is observationally consistent with what L does, and L has not to my knowledge objected to this as a mischaracterization of his views at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G's argument against the OCP is a straightforward necessity argument: in order to account for certain of Tiv's inflectional tone patterns, it was necessary to posit HH as a morpheme-internal sequence. Underlying melodies with OCP violations are also necessitated for Etung, which contrasts the pattern LLH and LH, or HHL and HL, the problem being to say where the first tone is associated. G has available the mechanism of &quot;accent&quot; whereby a given vowel could be &quot;accented&quot; and this the initial locus of tone association. G is not satisfied with the conclusion that Etung is an &quot;accent&quot; language, thus OCP violation is taken to be necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G posits that &quot;structure&quot; is more highly valued than &quot;substance&quot;, so given a representational ambiguity between treating [bákí] as two H tones vs one H linked to two vowels, the latter representation is preferable (simpler), though language facts could prove that two Hs are necessary – both are possible representations, but OCP-obedience within a morpheme would be the acquisitional default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: (1) OCP, at the time, had very little explanatory force and was not clearly articulated as a strong principle of universal grammar until later (by McCarthy), and in tonology was there only to explain pattern restrictions – the reasons to assume the OCP were very weak to start with; (2) such pattern restrictions were found to not be universal even in the set of &quot;suprasegmental&quot; languages. The true rise of the OCP as a social phenomenon is McCarthy's analysis of Arabic root patterning, in his dissertation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T17:03:29.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T21:50:48.453" Score="-1" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is your best one or two sentence explanation of computational linguistics? I have been doing it for a few years, but find myself stammering for a quick, layperson explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I was at the checkout counter at the grocery store, and the cashier asked what I do. How would you explain it to her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2016-09-12T23:05:12.887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T17:17:06.790" Title="Good 10 second explanation of computational linguistics" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-09-14T02:28:48.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19669" CreationDate="2016-09-12T21:58:21.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Computational linguistics is the modelling and processing of natural language with computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: If you have another ten seconds of time, it will help to add examples of applications:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Computational lingustics can be used for automatic translation, communication between humans and computers (such as Siri or talking to your navigation system), autocorrect or language learning programs, but it is also used to improve search engines, spam filters, automatic summarisation and tagging tools, or even to help deteting criminals (don't forget that last one, probably less than 1% of linguists actually do that but it sounds pretty cool ;) ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T17:17:06.790" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T17:17:06.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19657" CreationDate="2016-09-12T22:43:52.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of problems in the design of your script, but the fundamental problem is that your procedure is doing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open file &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Save as &lt;code&gt;A-edited&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you run that procedure more than once, you are always editing the same (unmodified) file and always saving it to the same location (every time with a single change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better way to do this would be to separate the editing from the reading and writing of files, so you do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edit file (as many times as you need, as a Praat object, not saving to disk)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Save file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to next file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should also be more efficient, as you are reducing the number of times you are writing to disk, which is slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shameless plug&lt;/strong&gt;: it might be overkill, but you might want to take a look at some of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cpran.net/plugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CPrAN plugins&lt;/a&gt;, some of which were written to make it easier to do this sort of thing. In particular, you might want to look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://cpran.net/plugins/vieweach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;vieweach&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;http://pinguinorodriguez.cl/2015/09/11/smarter-looping-in-praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; I wrote with an example use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T22:43:52.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19669" CreationDate="2016-09-13T00:17:28.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Computational linguistics is trying to teach computers to understand ordinary language&quot; would probably make sense to most laypeople.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, of course, is that if you tell &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; something they actually understand, they may respond &quot;Oh, wow! &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;How do you do that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&amp;mdash;and you're back where you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T00:17:28.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7124" CreationDate="2016-09-13T06:00:26.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can develop a Classifier using Stanford Column Data Classifier to solve this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/classify/ColumnDataClassifier.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/classify/ColumnDataClassifier.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Develop a Dataset which contains two types of sentences, &quot;questions&quot; and &quot;information&quot; according to the training file format of Stanford Column Classifier. Next, train the Classifier. Then, use the trained classifier to interrogate on arbitrary sentence you would like to determine as a Question or Information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14054" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T06:00:26.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19655" CreationDate="2016-09-13T12:15:51.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an answerable question.  There is no general understanding among phonologists about such notational differences -- you have to know the theory or the intent behind the use of the notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You use square brackets in part of your question, which are generally used for phonetic transcription, and slashes, often reserved for phonemes, in another part of the question.  That's confusing. I'm going to assume you mean to be asking about phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonologist might have noticed a difference in place of articulation between syllable onset [i], as in &quot;yacht&quot;, which is similar to the vowel [i], and syllable offset [i], as in &quot;tie&quot;, which is more like a barred-i.  A reasonable use to put the alphabetic distinction between vowel and consonant would be to use [i] for the offset sound in &quot;tie&quot; and [j] for the onset sound in &quot;yacht&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C.-J. Bailey (in &lt;em&gt;Southern States English&lt;/em&gt;) once gave a minimal pair for the onset and offset sounds in &quot;Maya&quot; (as in &quot;Angelou&quot;) versus &quot;Maya&quot; the mesoamerican indians, which following the above could be written [maia] versus [maja].  However, Bailey's idea was to distinguish the two by where the syllable boundary comes: [maj.a] versus [ma.ja].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another idea, due to Ilse Lehiste and probably other phoneticians, is to classify such sounds as vowels when they have a prolonged steady state, during which the articulation remains constant; otherwise, as glides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another plausible use of the notational difference [i/j] is according to syllabicity.  In casual speech, intervocalic syllable offset alveolar stops can be flapped in some English dialects, and even lost entirely in faster speech, giving rise to two syllable pronunciations for a word like &quot;toddy&quot;, [tai], which is still distinct from single syllable &quot;tie&quot;, [taj].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:15:51.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-13T13:07:51.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently been taking French and am having a bit of a hard time understanding the word order of certain sentences or phrases when I'm forming them in my mind. I tend to do the word-by-word translation thing directly from english and it's quite apparent in my writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am wondering is whether there has been any research on the benefits of reading a book's direct translation from another language. What I mean by this is that, say, for the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What does that mean?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would translate that as, &amp;quot;Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A direct translation would be more like this though: &amp;quot;What is it that that wants to say?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a bit confusing for an english speaker to read, but, were an entire book translated like this, I imagine that one would get used to reading in this way and would be able to apply that to french. I know that it wouldn't be able to work with all parts of a language (Japanese particles and the German declension would probably be hard to convey), but has this been done before? Is it beneficial, or just a waste of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T10:10:27.747" Title="The benefits of studying a second language with word-by-word translations in one's mother tongue" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-09-14T15:40:37.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19676" CreationDate="2016-09-13T14:26:45.207" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of actual research, but from my personal experience:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that word-by-word translations will on the one hand lack features that are not available in the target language and on the other hand introduce features that are not present in the source language, which is why &lt;strong&gt;I wouldn't rely too much on such strict word-by-word translations either&lt;/strong&gt;. They are an approximation, but it is only to a very limited extend possible to depict in a completely different natural language how a particular other natural lanugage conveys the meaning in terms of the grammatical and semantic subtleties.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I always found very helpful in second language learning were &lt;strong&gt;interlinear glosses&lt;/strong&gt; with detailled morphological annotation (for the grammatical features) and morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence (for the semantic structure), and then in the third line the natural translation in the target language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To pick up your example, it would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Qu'  est-ce       que  ça   veut     dire?&#xA;what be.3SG-this  that that want.3SG say.INF&#xA;&quot;What does this mean&quot;?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Pour-quoi est-ce      qu'  il n'  y     a        pas des  crayon-s rouge-s?&#xA;for-what  be.3SG-this that he NEG there have.3SG not a.PL pen-PL   red-PL&#xA;&quot;Why are there no red pens?&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(BTW, if anyone has a better suggestion how to gloss &lt;em&gt;ne ... pas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;des&lt;/em&gt;, or how to differentiate between &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; as a pronoun and as a conjunction while preserving maximal informativity in the interlinear gloss, feel free to edit - I didn't find an official guideline for French. The same holds of course if I made any mistakes in the translation.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, I am able to get both a thorough understanding of how the source language is structured &lt;strong&gt;grammatically AND semantically&lt;/strong&gt; (by the interlinear gloss) and what it is supposed to mean (by a rather free, but maximally meaning-depicting translation in how I would express it in my mother tongue), but at the same time didn't face the problems with a word-to-word translation into a sentence that ought to be possibly close to the source language but still grammatical in the target language which is often simply not possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An informative morphological glossing requires some lingustic knowledge though (even my annotation is probably not perfect), and also takes some time to do throroughly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you want to take a look at it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt; are some generic guidelines for linguistic glossing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd like to emphasize again, this is just subjective experience and not scientific, generally applicable or proven research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T10:10:27.747" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T10:10:27.747" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19678" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T16:22:41.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing systems (also known as scripts) include ideographic writing systems, sylabaries, abugidas (only consonants are written by default) and alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well known writing systems are the Chinese script, the Indic scripts, the Arabic script, and the Greek, Cyrillic and Latin Script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:30:56.213" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:30:56.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19679" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T16:22:41.577" Score="0" Body="A writing system is a system to record spoken language visible on a permanent medium." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:30:09.857" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:30:09.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19680" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:33:39.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T17:33:39.260" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T17:33:39.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19681" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:33:39.260" Score="0" Body="A theory usually associated with Noam Chomsky that accounts for a language's grammar by a system of rules that are able to generate all the possible grammatical expressions in that language. In its original sense, &quot;generative&quot; does not necessarily mean &quot;production-focussed&quot;, although it has often been understood as such. Generativists study mostly syntax, but also other aspects of linguistic structure such as morphology, phonology and semantics. " OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T12:43:49.143" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:43:49.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19682" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:39:45.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; is an Indoeuropean language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch. It was spoken from 2000 BCE to 600 BCE and standardised by the Indian grammarian Panini ca. 400 BCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a classical language used in Hindu religion and in education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are attempts to revive Sanskrit as a spoken language in India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T12:04:49.110" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T12:04:49.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19683" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:39:45.290" Score="0" Body="For questions about Sanskrit, the Ancient Classical language of Northern India." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T10:42:07.887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T10:42:07.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19684" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:44:38.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the difference between numerals, numbers and digits see &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1659/13238&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T10:41:29.623" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T10:41:29.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19685" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:44:38.667" Score="0" Body="Symbols or words that depict a number. Examples are &quot;4&quot;, &quot;15&quot; or &quot;three hundred twenty-one&quot;. A numeral may consist of one or more digits. Numerals are the symbolic or linguistic representations of abstract mathematical objects called &quot;numbers&quot;." OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T21:31:48.493" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T21:31:48.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19686" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:49:03.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the difference between numbers, numerals and digits see &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/599/how-do-numbers-differ-from-numerals/1659#1659&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should not be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/grammatical-number&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;grammatical-number&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;grammatical-number&lt;/a&gt; that is about the grammatical category including singular and plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T12:07:19.530" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T12:07:19.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19687" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:49:03.690" Score="0" Body="An abstract mathematical object that represents a quantity, such as the concept of &quot;2&quot; or the meaning behind &quot;2π&quot;. Numbers are represented by symbols called &quot;numerals&quot;." OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:13:22.833" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:13:22.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19688" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:57:23.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T17:57:23.020" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T17:57:23.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19689" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-13T17:57:23.020" Score="0" Body="Negation is an operation to deny the truth of a proposition, such as &quot;John is NOT tall&quot;. Negation results sometimes, but not always in the opposite meaning." OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T02:26:26.250" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T02:26:26.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17356" CreationDate="2016-09-13T18:52:33.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, arguably most non-Latin scripts do use a separate alphabet for specific purposes, namely Latin for many foreign words from languages that use the Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, in a block of non-Latin-script text one can find words like &lt;em&gt;YouTube&lt;/em&gt;.  Some language standards have prescriptions against it, for example in Serbian one should write &lt;em&gt;Jutub&lt;/em&gt; even in Latin, but in the real world it is happening in practically every language to some degree.  It is most common for company names and product names, whereas person names and place names are nearly always transliterated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgL55.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PgL55.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I count &lt;em&gt;iOS&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;WADA&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Huffington Post&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In contrast, &lt;em&gt;Le Monde&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; will never ever use a Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese character for a company name.  Arguably most non-Latin scripts do use Latin in this way, that is, they would throw in a word like &lt;em&gt;YouTube&lt;/em&gt; whereas the NYTimes will never ever ever use a Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese character.  Nil passive knowledge of other alphabets is assumed in any context, they are strictly esoteric.  The exception would be the Greek letters for maths.  Generally even identifying other alphabets is not required, and plenty of Cyrillic is even pseudo-Cyrillic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover product codes, URLs, hashtags, email adresses, computer code, keypads, for example building door codes, units, licence plates, stock market tickers are in Latin and rarely in, say, Georgian.  The IPA is also in Latin.  The larger languages, like Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, can shield some of their speakers from this a bit more, but not completely.  As a consequence, standards for how to say the letters of the Latin alphabet have often evolved in each language, for example 'y' in the Russophone world is &lt;em&gt;ígrek&lt;/em&gt;, from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth mentioning that many languages have multiple scripts and historically there were other combinations.  Georgian has three, one is used more now, but one of the others can be used for titles, a bit like uppercasing or italics.  A large portion of German was previously written in Fraktur, and before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antiqua-Fraktur dispute&lt;/a&gt; Antiqua was often used for a few bits, eg Latin titles and Roman numerals, Antiqua being associated with Latin culture and Catholicism, in works that were otherwise in Fraktur.  Today Fraktur is still used internationally in mathematics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-09-16T15:18:10.567" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T15:18:10.567" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19706" CreationDate="2016-09-14T04:55:00.963" Score="4" ViewCount="2084" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for a &quot;language community,&quot; especially a minority language embedded with in a larger one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, speakers of Catalán, Irish Gaelic, or perhaps immigrant groups that form communities such as Little Italy or Chinatown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mind always reaches for &quot;sprachbund,&quot; but that's not correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T12:40:33.927" Title="Is there a term for &quot;language community&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19692" CreationDate="2016-09-14T09:48:20.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may consider the term &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/enclave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enclave&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any small, distinct area or group enclosed or isolated within a larger one:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;a Chinese-speaking enclave in London&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Dictionary.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T09:48:20.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12087" CreationDate="2016-09-14T09:56:20.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Etymonline the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kitsch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;kitsch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a German word which entered the English language in the '20s: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1926, from German kitsch, literally &quot;gaudy, trash,&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;from dialectal kitschen &quot;to smear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; Earlier as a German word in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;What we English people call ugliness in German art is simply the furious reaction against what Germans call süsses Kitsch, the art of the picture postcard, and of what corresponds to the royalty ballad. It has for years been their constant reproach against us that England is the great country of Kitsch. Many years ago a German who loved England only too well said to me, 'I like your English word plain; it is a word for which we have no equivalent in German, because all German women are plain.' He might well have balanced it by saying that English has no equivalent for the word Kitsch. [Edward J. Dent, &quot;The Music of Arnold Schönberg,&quot; &quot;The Living Age,&quot; July 9, 1921]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T09:56:20.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-14T10:28:12.197" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to study the ding dong vs the pooh pooh theories of the origin of language. I would like to make a poll with questions like &quot;What emotions do you associate with the word &quot;ka:men&quot;?&quot; and compare whether these answers are closer to the true representation of the word rather than answers to the questions like &quot;Which of these objects would you guess &quot;ka:men&quot; to represent?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you recommend any reading on this topic about studies done previously? And could you please give me any tips or advice about any potential mistakes I could possibly make when analyzing the data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to reformulate the question if it doesn't sound clear to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar research: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160912161010.htm?utm_source=feedburner&amp;amp;utm_medium=email&amp;amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+Science+News%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160912161010.htm?utm_source=feedburner&amp;amp;utm_medium=email&amp;amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+Science+News%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2016-11-18T18:25:21.380" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T16:36:46.053" Title="Is it possible to detect onomatopoeic basis in indigenous languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19696" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:22:44.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language resources can be written, audio (spoken or sung), video (gestures, sign language), or in other formats (e.g., X-Ray images or EEG signals)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a search engine for language resource, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; run by the European CLARIN project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:18:10.603" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:18:10.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19697" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:22:44.647" Score="0" Body="For questions asking for or about language resources (like corpora or treebanks)." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:17:46.710" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:46.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19698" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:29:58.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples for prepositions are the English words &quot;from&quot;, &quot;to&quot;, &quot;of&quot;, &quot;by&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more general term (releasing the requirement that a preposition precedes the modified noun phrase) is adposition (see &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/adpositions&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adpositions&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adpositions&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:18:38.430" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:18:38.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19699" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:29:58.260" Score="0" Body="A class of words denoting temporal or spatial relations or other semantic roles. They are placed before the noun phrase they modify." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:18:17.237" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:18:17.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19700" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:33:13.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T12:33:13.080" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T12:33:13.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19701" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:33:13.080" Score="0" Body="A modality of language, contrasted with written language, whistled language or sign language." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:16:32.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:16:32.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19702" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-14T13:45:10.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dravidian languages&lt;/a&gt; are spoken in mainly in Central and Southern India and in Sri Lanka. Brahui spoken in Pakistan is a geographical outlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dravidian languages with most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:17:56.023" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:56.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19703" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-14T13:45:10.437" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Dravidian language family and their members." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:17:52.503" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:17:52.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19704" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-14T13:56:18.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Uralic language family is formed of the Finno-Ugric languages and the Samoyedic languages. Its members are spoken in mainly in Northern Europe and Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable members of the Uralic language family are Finnish, Estonian, Sami, and Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:18:05.960" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:18:05.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19705" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-14T13:56:18.920" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Uralic language family and its member languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-19T13:32:45.623" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T13:32:45.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19692" CreationDate="2016-09-14T15:06:17.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The normal term is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_community&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;speech community&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the advantage over &amp;quot;language community&amp;quot; in that it can be used for communities for which the common factor isn't that they all speak some language, but also for communities which speak a particular dialect, or even some minor language variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is used to focus on identifiable communities of people with shared behaviours. In a context where two languages are in contact, many speakers will be L1 speakers of one language and L2 speakers of the other. Categorising people by the languages they know and speak is not likely to be very productive because of the overlaps. Instead distinct speech communities can be identified based on the languages its members speak at home, in school, in the workplace, the languages they hear on TV etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T12:40:33.927" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T12:40:33.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-14T15:51:55.113" Score="0" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Men, women and children are people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the term for the combination of nouns and conjunctions found in the subject position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Compound noun&quot; doesn't quite seem to fit the bill here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T02:18:17.607" Title="Term for nouns strung together by conjunctions" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19707" CreationDate="2016-09-14T16:24:28.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Men, women and children&lt;/em&gt; is not a word, but a phrase (a noun phrase = NP &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; ), so you can not apply morphological terminology like &lt;em&gt;compounding&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't think there's a special name for NP formation via conjunction other than exactly that - NP formation by conjunction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Depending on theory, replace NP by DP (determiner phrase), assuming additional empty determiners for each noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:29:14.037" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:29:14.037" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2016-09-14T16:43:46.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the origin of the two expressions you cite (ouch and ow) it does not appear that there is  a clear and common development pattern (onomatopoeia for instance) for  pain expressions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ouch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ouch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a relatively recently expression imported from the German language into AmE in the first part of the 18th century: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1837, from Pennsylvania German outch, cry of pain, from German autsch. The Japanese word is itai. Latin used au, hau. (Etymonline)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ow&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is much older, but its usage as a pain expression is more recent than ouch: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;14c. as an exclamation of surprise; 1919 as an expression of sudden pain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="3356" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T16:49:15.090" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T16:49:15.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19746" CreationDate="2016-09-14T21:30:51.243" Score="3" ViewCount="6381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the definition (more than one, actually) but I'm not sure I understand what isomorphism is exactly. I'd be grateful for a simple explanation or some suggestions for a recommended reading on that topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14012" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T20:15:56.893" Title="Examples of isomorphism in linguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19707" CreationDate="2016-09-15T02:12:46.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example &lt;em&gt;Men, women and children are people&lt;/em&gt; could have a compound noun &lt;em&gt;men, women, and children&lt;/em&gt;, but it would be unwise to refer to it that way, using the term &quot;compound noun&quot;, because of confusion with another quite different construction, also a &quot;compound noun&quot;, which is morphological rather than syntactic and does not use a conjunction.  For instance, &lt;em&gt;woman child&lt;/em&gt; is a compound noun, stressed on the first part of the compound, which refers to a person who is both a woman and a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, although in the example, &lt;em&gt;men, women, and children&lt;/em&gt; might be a compound noun, it shouldn't be called that, because it would be confusing.  I'll refer to it as a &lt;em&gt;conjoined noun&lt;/em&gt; instead, to avoid that confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice in other comments that &lt;em&gt;men, women, and children&lt;/em&gt; is referred to as a conjunction of three noun phrases (or DPs, or subjects), rather than three nouns.  That's misleading, though it could be true.  The general rule in English is that several constituents of the same category can be conjoined, and since a NP (noun phrase) can be absent any overt determiner, in the example, we could be dealing with either a conjunction of three nouns or a conjunction of three NPs.  If we add a determiner or an adjective to the example, the situation becomes clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The men, women, and children are hungry.  &#xA;The men, the women, and the children are hungry.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first has a conjunction of three nouns; the second has a conjunction of three NPs.  A standard example of structural ambiguity is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;old men and women&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can have either the conjunction of nouns &lt;em&gt;men and women&lt;/em&gt; modified by the adjective &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt;, or else the conjunction of the two NPs &lt;em&gt;old men&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;women&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original example, with neither determiner nor adjective to disambiguate, the two possible structures have the same sense, so far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T02:18:17.607" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T02:18:17.607" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T05:49:34.027" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick question, and perhaps a natural extension of some of my previous questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the girl speaking &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9h81jfiwic&amp;amp;t=1m9s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here at 1:09&lt;/a&gt;, what phonetic and phonological characteristics of her accent, and how do they give it away that she is Chinese American?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While she definitely has LA area intonation patterns, I don't think solely that comprises her accent, as I can certainly imagine caucasian speakers from LA speaking with that intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel, vaguely, there's something about her pitch being different on average, and perhaps something about her formants being broader(?), almost post-pubescent, if that makes any sense at all? If not, please just disregard this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13681" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T05:49:34.027" Title="Phonetic/ phonological description of 2nd gen Chinese accent" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19723" CreationDate="2016-09-15T05:59:21.543" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I read in a a thoughtful answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19666/how-did-goldsmith-account-for-phenomena-otherwise-explicable-with-the-ocp&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;,  Leben's theory, as a precursor to Autosegmental Phono, posited a so-called &quot;tone pattern diacritic&quot; plus underspecification of tone features. Accordingly, tone was assigned into the segmental matrix &quot;through&quot; the tonal matrix.  This approach contrasts with that of Goldsmith's Autosegmental Phono, which implies a &quot;full and equal partnership between tones and segments&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder what kind of &quot;unit&quot; segmental and feature matrices are. So far as I understand (and please tell me if I am wrong), Leben's theory denied the segment and suprasegment, apparently opting for matrices. &lt;strong&gt;But how is the identity of a segment as a unit distinct from the identity of a matrix as a unit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T23:57:15.923" Title="In what respect are feature matrices distinct from segments?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17356" CreationDate="2016-09-15T06:09:07.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example may be the combination of Chinese characters with &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15644&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pinyin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3147&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zhùyīn fúhào&lt;/a&gt; 注音符號 alphabet/syllabary, respectively -- although it is not completely symmetrical to hiragana and katakana&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T06:09:07.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T07:38:50.333" Score="2" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a strong correlation between geminate consonants and initial-syllable stress, or stress in the earlier syllables of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A survey of European languages suggests that there might be such a correlation. For example, in Italian, where antepenultimate stress is common, geminate consonants are ubiquitous (&lt;em&gt;fatto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;done&quot;, &lt;em&gt;troppo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;too much&quot;, etc.). By contrast, geminates seem rare-to-absent in standard Spanish/Portuguese (which have more thoroughgoing penultimate/final stress) and French (which has mainly final stress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, most Germanic languages had geminates at some point in their history (although many are no longer true phonetic geminates due to sound change), and initial-syllable stress was historically the norm in Germanic. Cf. English &lt;em&gt;tap&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Old Eng. &lt;em&gt;tæppa&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;tappi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cork, peg&quot;, German &lt;em&gt;Zapfen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;peg, pin&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any further insight into this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T09:27:49.543" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:23:39.783" Title="Consonant gemination and stress patterns" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T07:47:59.413" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do some languages in their written form tend to follow the spoken language (e.g. Italian, Spanish) keeping the orthography &quot;synchronized&quot; with the phonetic evolution of the language, while other languages (e.g. English, Tibetan) are much more conservative in their written form, while the phonetics of the spoken language evolves in time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14070" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:42:57.167" Title="Orthography in different languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19716" CreationDate="2016-09-15T11:01:58.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us stick with Italian and Spanish. Both of these have retained (broadly speaking) the position of the Latin accent. Italian has also retained Latin geminate consonants, as well as creating new geminates through the simplification of clusters (type: factum &gt; fatto). Spanish, on the other hand, has lost all Latin geminates except for -rr-. So the two languages agree (mainly) with regards to the accent, but diverge with regards to geminates. This speaks loudly against the notion of a correlation between accent and gemination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T11:01:58.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19717" CreationDate="2016-09-15T12:59:57.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has to do in large extent with the measure how the language community is productive with regards to writing stuff. If you have lots of literature and written communication in general, you will be more conservative in changing the orthography because you decrease the ability to read the old records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I do not find the comparison with Italian or Spanish particularly appropriate as their orthography did not exactly change all that much either because of the nature of phonetic changes  - e.g. Latin [j] changed to [dž], then to [ž], then to [š] and finally to [x] in Spanish. But it evolved this way in all contexts, so orthographically it could be represented in all periods by the same grapheme. There can actually be confusion, because the grapheme  can be pronounced the same in certain contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difference between Spanish/Italian and English is because in English the phonetic changes were much more context dependent, resulting in phonemes splitting into two (just like Latin /g/, which split into /g/ and /x/ in Spanish, where the latter merged with the product of latin /j/ - this was much more frequent in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T12:59:57.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19714" CreationDate="2016-09-15T16:03:05.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In working out a theory of monostratal phonology (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception/15156#15156&quot;&gt;Eliminating intermediary forms ...&lt;/a&gt;), I had to confront the problem of &quot;hyperreduced&quot; pronunciations, in which speech has become just a mutter, with whole syllables missing.  In conventional generative phonology, one can append extra rule applications onto the end of ordinary derivations, with the segments that don't show up in the surface pronunciation eliminated by various phonological rules of assimilation and deletion. But this requires assuming additional intermediate derivational forms.  In a monostratal theory, which does not tolerate intermediate derivational forms, another way must be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worked out a phonetic representation, which I call a &quot;change matrix&quot;, which gives only a sequence of changes of state for each significant articulatory organ.  This is a feature matrix in which neighboring columns of feature specifications must be distinct.  There are no alphabetic segments at all, but vertical columns of the matrix correspond to what would be written as segments in alphabetic phonetic representations.  In this theory, it is impossible to distinguish between what would be segment deletions and complete assimilations in ordinary alphabetic phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably very similar to the &quot;asegmental&quot; idea in Natural Phonology, which is referred to in the following quote from Donegan and Stampe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Donegan and Stampe (1978, 1979 and subsequent talks) have claimed that if each &#xA;  process operates over rhythmically delimited strings which include both the causal and &#xA;  the affected elements and which are defined solely &#xA;  in terms of the phonetic features of &#xA;  that string, then direct reference to phonemes or even segments per se can be avoided – &#xA;  without such superstructures as “autosegmental tiers” (Goldsmith 1990), “long components” (Harris 1944), “prosodies” (Firth 1948), or &#xA;  “gestures” (Browman and Goldstein 1986). In an asegmental phonology like that which we have proposed, every feature is &#xA;  its own “tier” or “autosegment”. Successive segments are differentiated from each other &#xA;  only by some feature difference or, as in the case &#xA;  of geminates or long vowels, by syllable positions or prosodic associations. (This accounts automatically for much of what &#xA;  the Obligatory Contour Principle (Goldsmith 1979) has been used to explain.)  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/2009hypotheses.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hypotheses of Natural Phonology&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:03:05.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19716" CreationDate="2016-09-15T16:23:39.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a well-known indirect correlation between stress and gemination, because (1) heavy syllables tend to attract stress and (2) geminate consonants tend to make syllables heavy. The former correlation is frequently referred to as the Weight-to-Stress principle. The correlation between stress and syllable weight is so strong that it is used presumptively to establish the subtypology of syllable weight, where long vowels always make a syllable heavy, and coda consonants may. In moraic theory, it is generally held that autonomous coda consonants (part of a two-consonant cluster) may have an additional mora (long vowels always do), but the first half of a geminate always does. The pattern where geminates attract stress, while other CC clusters do not, turns out to be rather rare, appearing in Cahuilla, San`ani Yemeni Arabic, some dialects of Hindi and Pattani Malay (the latter, though, is quite bizarre since usually onset geminates do not cause syllables to behave as though they are heavy). Post-hoc analysis of the possibilities for stress and syllable weight correlation, in light of these factors that influence stress, actually reveals that geminate consonants tend to be treated exactly the same as autonomous CC clusters, so that geminates are not usually special, although there are a few languages where they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:23:39.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19717" CreationDate="2016-09-15T16:42:57.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are  referring to the different levels  of phonemic orthography among languages: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;A phonemic orthography&lt;/a&gt; is an orthography  (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, the Italian and Finnish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the reasons for the different levels of  phonomeic orthography may vary among  different languages, as far as the  English language is concerned it appears that the Great Vowel Shift has something to do with it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;English orthography is highly non-phonemic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  As with many languages spoken over a wide area, it would in any case be hard to construct an orthography that reflected all of the main dialects of English, because of differences in phonological systems (such as between standard British and American English, and between these and Australian English with its bad–lad split, or even between adjacent counties of Britain). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The irregularity of English spelling arises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;partly because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and partly because the regularisation of the spelling (moving away from the situation in which many different spellings were acceptable for the same word) happened arbitrarily over a period without any central plan. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and several of these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:42:57.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19714" CreationDate="2016-09-15T18:29:30.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;segment&quot; and &quot;matrix&quot; overlapped in linguistics for a brief period, up to the late 70's when the &quot;matrix&quot; was buried by autosegmental phonology. The current state of the art is that &quot;matrix&quot; plays no role at all, and a &quot;segment&quot; has no formal role, though there is a way of reconstructing the concept (a &quot;segment&quot; is whatever is dominated by a root node). Affricates, consonant+glide sequences, and NC sequences among other things have caused all sorts of qualms about &quot;segment&quot; in phonology. In the historical transition to where we are, Leben's dissertation is an important first step is deconstructing the &quot;matrix&quot; a.k.a. segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In generative phonology, the &quot;feature matrix&quot; was taken to be what a &quot;segment&quot; is, mathematically speaking. In &lt;em&gt;The sound pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;, ch. 8 section 2, Chomsky and Halle give their explication of segments, which &quot;consist of feature columns&quot;, and which are graphically represented as a stack of features enclosed in brackets, i.e. a matrix. The main claim is that a segment &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a combination of phonetic features, and they are not atomic units. In the appendix on formalism p. 391, they define &quot;unit&quot;, &quot;matrix&quot; and &quot;rule&quot;, though if you read that appendix you will understand why nobody cites it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various terms have been used to refer to the collection of features defining a segment: feature complex, feature bundle (originally from Bloomfield, I believe), feature matrix. In pre-autosegmental days there were two interpretations of the &quot;matrix&quot; in an utterance with multiple segments, such as &quot;Buy hotdog buns&quot;. One is that there is an ordered sequence matrices, one for each segment; the other is that there is one big matrix containing an ordered series of feature-specification columns (see Clements 1985 p 226 for a small example, and Leben's dissertation sect 1.4.1). Given the full-specification assumption (that every segment has some value for every feature), these two modes of representation are interchangeable. The most popular convention was that each segment is a feature matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two related questions about features in connection with matrices in pre-autosegmental generative phonology: are the featural elements of a segment ordered, and are they value-attribute pairs, or just values? The way matrices are typically presented in papers suggests that within the segment, there is no ordering to the features, thus [+cons,-son,-cont] is not distinct from [+cons,-cont,-son] or any of the other permutations: features are &quot;simultaneous&quot; within the segment; this also implies that features are pairings of name and specification. An alternative interpretation of the representation is that a segment is an &lt;em&gt;ordered&lt;/em&gt; collection of values only, e.g. [+,-,-,+...] where value 1 refers to &quot;consonantal&quot;, value 2 refers to &quot;sonorant&quot; and so on. The &quot;matrix of unordered value-attribute pairs&quot; can be easily translated into a &quot;matrix of ordered values&quot; – provided that the set of features is part of universal grammar. This was the claims for the &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; features of SPE, but there are also diacritic features, and it was noted in SPE (fn 1 p. 390) that there is an unlimited set of diacritic features. In light of the fact that the total set of features is not fixed and varies between languages, a segment has to be interpreted as being composed of a collection of value-attribute pairs, in which case the feature specifications would be unordered (ordering would be superfluous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Segments are obviously ordered: [æsk] is distinct from [sæk]. Under the theory where a segment is a feature matrix (unordered set of value-attribute pairs), there is ordering between matrices. It would be appropriate to mention here that there is a bit of divergence between general mathematical conventions and linguistic concepts. A segment &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like a column vector (m x 1 matrix), but the elements of a column vector are ordered. Note, though, that if diacritic features are expelled from the theory and segments are composed of a universal set of features (people basically ignored non-phonetic features), then there is considerable freedom to re-interpret representations, in terms of content and structure. A string like [æsk] could be an ordered sequence of three matrices of value-attribute pairs (the most common representation), or it could be an ordered sequence of values of the 23 features, with segments being computed from a sequence of plus and minus values in the same way that a sequence of 1s and 0s can be interpreted as a sequence of numbers in computer memory. Because the completely unstructured representation is difficult for people to parse, it was not a popular option, and graphic metaphors tend to determine theoretical interpretation -- an utterance is a sequence of matrices, where each matrix is a segment, and the content of each matrix is an unordered set of value-attribute pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to Leben. Leben retained most of the SPE formal system, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; he added a division into two kinds of matrices. His starting point is the observation from SPE that every morpheme &quot;falls into many categories&quot;, such as &quot;noun&quot;... and that &quot;nasality&quot; etc. is just another kind of category, where the word &quot;inn&quot; is a member of the categories &quot;initial non-tense vowel&quot;, &quot;noun&quot; (I will interject that the former claim, that &quot;initial non-tense vowel&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a category, is based on a bizarre epistemology). SPE did not actually have two matrices, one for morphemic features and one for segmental features, and they were unclear as to the lexical locus of non-phonetic features (e.g. are nons specified [+Noun] on every segment, the first segment, the last, can it contrast?), and indeed they had a convention spreading morphemic features to ever segment within a morpheme. Leben created the two-matrix representational theory so that &quot;Noun, Past&quot; etc were in &quot;matrix two&quot; which is one of the elements of a morpheme – and then he placed tone features in M2, for some languages. So Leben did not actually deny the segment, he factored out tone (and nasality, in Guarani) and made it be a morphemic feature, which was nevertheless converted into a semi-standard SPE segmental matrix representation. (His theory of surface contour tones was totally non-orthodox, however).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T23:57:15.923" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T23:57:15.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19725" CreationDate="2016-09-15T21:26:17.883" Score="5" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to several well documented linguistic studies, a few languages like Mapudungun make a phonemic difference between interdental n, l, (let us spell it nd, ld), and a so called &quot;alveolar n, l&quot;. Although I have no problem in producing those sounds, I am unable to hear the difference between them, so I wonder whether there are alternative explanations for that distinction, like (1) the sounds called 'alveolar' are rather retroflex, or (2) hearers &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the difference by looking at the speakers face instead of &lt;em&gt;hearing&lt;/em&gt; it. But if at least a few adults are able to hear the difference, I suppose that every child that is systematically exposed to such a distiction will surely hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the human ear capable of perceiving or learning to perceive a phonetic difference between an interdental and an alveolar articulation of n and l?  And, since there might be no studies of that matter, do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; hear any difference between an interdental and an alveolar articulation of n and l?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Those sounds appear in almost all contexts, word-initially, either before or after one of the vowels e,a,o, i,ɘ,u, and word-finally)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13064" LastEditorUserId="13064" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T17:32:27.577" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T17:32:27.577" Title="Can one tell interdental n, l, from alveolar n, l, by hearing?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="21" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19724" CreationDate="2016-09-15T22:31:50.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can hear the difference, and it's not based on seeing. The basic training method involves listening to minimal and near-minimal pairs, preferably using multiple speakers, multiple languages, and multiple words (the standard one speaker, one language, one pair is terrible for gaining the necessary experience). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;UCLA phonetics archive&lt;/a&gt; will probably have a number of examples that you can listen to, to get the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="3620" LastEditDate="2016-09-19T08:43:33.440" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T08:43:33.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19747" CreationDate="2016-09-16T05:18:14.923" Score="2" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do auxiliary verbs always serve to express a mood or aspect that is different from simple indicative (or a tense)? Or are there cases where a sentence is in simple-indicative-present with the presence of an auxiliary verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13941" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T13:18:44.370" Title="Do auxiliary verbs always express different aspect/mood/tense?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19726" CreationDate="2016-09-16T05:50:37.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, auxiliary verbs don't always express something other than simple indicative.  Yes, there are cases where a sentence with an auxiliary verb is in the simple indicative.  For instance, &quot;Hal is a fisherman.&quot;  The &quot;is&quot; is an auxiliary verb, since it inverts with the subject in the corresponding yes-no question &quot;Is Hal a fisherman?&quot;, and it is a simple indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T05:50:37.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19726" CreationDate="2016-09-16T08:48:35.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A German counter-example is &lt;em&gt;Er wird geschlagen&lt;/em&gt; where the auxilliary &lt;em&gt;werden&lt;/em&gt; expresses the passive voice, but is clearly simple-indicative-present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:48:35.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19726" CreationDate="2016-09-16T09:32:11.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, e.g. in Czech, the past tense is expressed by the copula verb &quot;být&quot; (to be) and the past participle of the main verb. It is the main verb that expresses the aspect (perfective/imperfective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dělal jsem&lt;/strong&gt; - I did / I was doing (imperfective aspect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Udělal jsem&lt;/strong&gt; - I did / I have done (perfective aspect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the mood is expressed on the auxiliary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dělal jsem&lt;/strong&gt; - I did&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Býval bych dělal&lt;/strong&gt; - I would have done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is language dependent and structure dependent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Czech it is currently impossible for the verb &quot;být&quot; to take over the aspectual function in the past tense as this is one of the few verbs that do not distinguish perfective/imperfective aspects. On the other hand in the future tense, the imperfective verbs form future with synthetic future tense of &quot;být&quot; + infinitive of the main verb, while for perfective verbs, the future is expressed merely by their &quot;morphological present&quot;, since there is nothing like perfective present tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dělám&lt;/strong&gt; - I do / I am doing (imperfective aspect, present tense)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Udělám&lt;/strong&gt; - I will do / I am going to do (perfective aspect, future tense expressed by &quot;morphological present&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Budu dělat&lt;/strong&gt; - I will do / I will be doing (imperfective aspect, future tense)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here, the aspect is kind of expressed by the presence of the auxiliary (if not on the auxiliary, again the copula verb does not distinguish the aspect) - this can be seen with verbs that normally do not distinguish aspect (typically verbs of latin origin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Informuji&lt;/strong&gt; - I inform / I am informing (imperfective, present)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Informuji&lt;/strong&gt; - I will inform (perfective, future - expressed by &quot;morphological present)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Budu informovat&lt;/strong&gt; - I will inform / I will be informing (imperfective, future)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T09:32:11.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19724" CreationDate="2016-09-16T11:38:44.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you said, several well-documented studies say it's a phonemic distinction in some languages. It answers your question: some people can tell them apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see why you're looking for alternative explanations. I often hear from native English speakers that alveolo-palatal and retroflex consonants in my native Polish sound identical, while none of 40 mln Polish speakers have any problem in telling them apart (as long as they are not hard of hearing). On the other hand, I've been learning Mandarin for 10 years and I'm told that I pronounce tone distinctions reasonably well, but still have a problem with identifying the tone of an unknown word, even if it's pronounced clearly, but without emphasis. Again, for 1 bln Chinese speakers it is not a problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-09-16T11:45:58.720" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T11:45:58.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15562" CreationDate="2016-09-16T18:49:45.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence formed by combining an element with others is the scope of that element. (Sometimes the element which is said to have a scope is itself excluded from that scope, but including it comes closer to the original account given in Hans Reichenbach's &lt;strong&gt;Elements of Symbolic Logic&lt;/strong&gt;.  It doesn't generally matter which policy one follows,)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in sentence logic, when negation is combined with a sentence to form a negated sentence, the scope of the negation is everything within that negated sentence.  Similarly, when a quantifier is combined with a sentence containing a free variable to form a closed sentence, everything within that closed sentence is said to be in the scope of that quantifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;scope&quot; is often handy in discussing the logic of language expressions, but it does not have an exclusively logical sense.  Really, it just gives a convenient way of discussing the sentence structure of a complex expression.  For example, in &quot;((If ((John leaves early) or (Mary stays late))), then (Henry will be angry))&quot;, where I've parenthesized the sentences, &quot;or&quot; is in the scope of &quot;if ... then&quot;, but not vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statements about &quot;command&quot; relations (in Langacker's sense) can be formulated using the term &quot;scope&quot;, and vice versa.  An element A is said to &quot;command&quot; an element B when the smallest sentence containing A also contains B, or equivalently, B is in the scope of A.  For instance, a condition on the reflexivization of a pronoun with antecedent NP could be given as either that the pronoun and the NP must command each other or that the pronoun and the NP must be in each other's scope. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T18:49:45.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19724" CreationDate="2016-09-17T04:53:08.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a near minimal pair for dental versus alveolar t in my midwestern American English.  The difference is clearly audible to me -- perhaps if your speech is like mine in this respect, this might be helpful.  The pair is &quot;tent&quot; versus &quot;tenth&quot;, i.e. [tʰɛ̃nt] versus [tʰɛ̃n̪t̪].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has happened here is that the rather difficult cluster /nθ/ has been simplified by assimilating continuant [θ] to the preceding non-continuant [n], then the [n] assimilates regressively in position to the following dental stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T04:53:08.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-17T11:23:45.770" Score="-5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyqKWROjrq4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;scene of Game of Thrones&lt;/a&gt; is about Khal Drogo's speech. While watching this video, I feel a very deep connection to the character as a leader, and I'm impressed by him, ready to rise and obey him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's just me. Yet when I saw more videos of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothraki_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dothraki language&lt;/a&gt;, I found out that a lot of people are actually impressed by how glorious and awesome this language is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought maybe there are some objective rules based on cognitive knowledge of our brain and language, that makes a language impress us more than other language. Can it be true? Are there objective facts and sounds that make people perceive a language as awesome and glorious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2016-09-18T04:59:32.657" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T04:59:32.657" Title="Are there objectively measurable features which make humans perceive a language, by itself, as awe-inspiring and worth of renown?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2016-09-17T22:19:41.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19739" CreationDate="2016-09-17T12:04:05.663" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;@user6726 has a great explanation of feature matrices in which s/he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two related questions about features in connection with&#xA;  matrices in pre-autosegmental generative phonology: are the featural&#xA;  elements of a segment ordered, and are they value-attribute pairs, or&#xA;  just values? The way matrices are typically presented in papers&#xA;  suggests that within the segment, there is no ordering to the&#xA;  features, thus [+cons,-son,-cont] is not distinct from&#xA;  [+cons,-cont,-son] or any of the other permutations: features are&#xA;  &quot;simultaneous&quot; within the segment; this also implies that features are&#xA;  pairings of name and specification. An alternative interpretation of&#xA;  the representation is that a segment is an ordered collection of&#xA;  values only, e.g. [+,-,-,+...] where value 1 refers to &quot;consonantal&quot;,&#xA;  value 2 refers to &quot;sonorant&quot; and so on. The &quot;matrix of unordered&#xA;  value-attribute pairs&quot; can be easily translated into a &quot;matrix of&#xA;  ordered values&quot; – provided that the set of features is part of&#xA;  universal grammar. This was the claims for the phonetic features of&#xA;  SPE, but there are also diacritic features, and it was noted in SPE&#xA;  (fn 1 p. 390) that there is an unlimited set of diacritic features. In&#xA;  light of the fact that the total set of features is not fixed and&#xA;  varies between languages, &lt;strong&gt;a segment has to be interpreted as being&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;composed of a collection of value-attribute pairs, in which case the&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;feature specifications would be unordered (ordering would be&#xA;  superfluous).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a tremendous explanation of questions which were, at the time, crucial to understanding feature matrices, I have trouble understanding the logical reasoning that lead to the conclusion &lt;strong&gt;in bold&lt;/strong&gt; at the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it the case, that in this framework, a segment must be interpreted as a collection of value-attribute pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T16:51:18.150" Title="Value-attribute pairs in feature matrices: Why are they a logical necessity (Within this approach)?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19734" CreationDate="2016-09-17T13:34:02.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is &quot;most likely not&quot;. Whatever effect the sounds may have on people's perception (if any; read on &quot;sound symbolism&quot; for more info) seems to be a subtle effect, and easily overridden by cultural stereotypes. For example, the  &quot;guttural R&quot; sound [R] is considered by many to be aggressive and barbaric in German (or Tolkien's Black Speech), but exactly the same sound is often considered beautiful and romantic in French (as in &lt;em&gt;l'amour&lt;/em&gt;). The same kind of agglutination (gluing together of words) which lead some to consider German &quot;logical&quot;, an &quot;engineer's language&quot;, was once considered by many to be a telltale sign of &quot;primitive minds&quot; in tribal languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very likely, people find the Dothraki language awesome and glorious because they find &lt;em&gt;the Dothraki&lt;/em&gt; awesome and glorious. Khal Drogo's speech and Momoa's delivery (&lt;em&gt;cof&lt;/em&gt; and body &lt;em&gt;cof&lt;/em&gt;) would give me the chills in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one sense that Dothraki may be, I think, said to be &quot;awesome&quot; in a concrete way: Dothraki's not a natural language like English, developed collectively through time, but a consciously created &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;constructed language&lt;/a&gt;. As such, its construction can be evaluated and criticized as a work of art. And in this sense Dothraki is certainly impressive: from the phonology (the set of sounds and how they combine and change) to the morphology (the word-pieces and how they combine and change) to the lexicon (the database of words) and syntax (how they fit together) and pragmatics (how the culture makes use of it), everything at every level is carefully designed and fit together convincingly and life-like, all without ever losing sight of George Martin's aesthetic purpose in the narrative. In this artistic, subjective sense, David J Peterson may be said to be an awesome languagemaker, and Dothraki (and High Valyrian etc.) awesome fictional languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2016-09-17T17:21:33.283" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T17:21:33.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19735" CreationDate="2016-09-17T16:51:18.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue is what / how much information is necessary to characterize a segment. The background assumption is the Jakobsonian one that every segment is defined in terms of a collection of features = descriptive attributes and values associated with the attributes (we usually say the values are &quot;plus and minus&quot; but in fact values have included plus, minus, &quot;plus-and-minus&quot;, 0, &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; as well as numbers). The answer to the &quot;what structure&quot; question then depends on the nature of the feature set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a fixed set of features for language where all and only those features are present in all languages, then a segment can be defined as a set of pairs &quot;value, attribute&quot;, without ordering of those features. They can also be defined as an ordered list of values (without attributes), where the attribute can be projected from the order -- e.g. the first attribute is interpreted as &quot;consonantal&quot;, the second as &quot;sonorant&quot; and so on. Thus [æ] could be simply (-,+,+,-,+....), and the interpretation &quot;the third segment is [+low]&quot; would derive from a modular arithmetic computation based on the 57th value in an utterance being &quot;+&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility would be to have ordered value-attribute pairs i.e. (-cons,+son,+syl...): however, having both ordering and attributes is redundant – one can be supplied on the basis of the other, so there is no reason to use both (therefore, one doesn't -- it's either ordering, or value-attribute pairs). This is a classical application of Occam's Razor, that there is no evidence (given the assumption that features are value, attribute pairs) that the grammatical faculty &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; includes ordering of features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The foregoing assumes, however, that the set of features is universally fixed. That assumption was made in SPE phonology for the set of phonetic features, but it was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; assumed for the remaining features. There is an unlimited supply of arbitrary non-phonetic features, including both letter diacritics (X,Y,D...) and rule features ([rule37]). This thwarts the modular arithmetic computation, because the 57th value might be a phonetic feature of the second segment in one language, or a rule feature of the first segment in another language, and so on. Given the conclusion that the set of features is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; universally predetermined, then the ordering of the features also cannot be predetermined, so there can be no universal scheme for interpreting a list of bare values. In that case: the only alternative is that features are value, attribute pairs (and furthermore ordering of features would be redundant, since the attribute part provides the necessary information that allows a feature matrix to be physically interpreted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T16:51:18.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19734" CreationDate="2016-09-17T19:02:39.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There might be a fraction of an answerable question here, which I will set forth, but no realistic prospects for answering it. The question would be &quot;What aspects of pronunciation in an unfamiliar language are most strongly associated by listeners with the evaluation 'awesome and glorious'?&quot; One part of the research would involve constructing conlang samples with various phonetic properties (I'm also assuming, unreasonably, a huge supply of trained bodies to actually produce the speech; or, next-gen Klatt synthesis that doesn't sound like Dennis Klatt). The second part is framing the question: you need at least two choices (e.g. &quot;awesome&quot; and &quot;whimpy&quot;, or whatever). Don't think that the choice &quot;awesome&quot; actually means that people think it's awesome, it's just the only alternative to &quot;whimpy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually framing the question is an insurmountable impossibility, in its interaction with the final issue in framing the question: identifying the population. Awesome according to &lt;em&gt;whose&lt;/em&gt; standards? Without any qualifications, you'd need to sample young American boys, old American women, old Norwegian musicians, middle-aged Egyptian (Arab) engineers, and so on. I'm betting that the strongest determinant of the &quot;awesomeness&quot; judgement is the native language of the subject. The second strongest determinant would be personal ideological matters that you simply would not code for in the demography survey (how many people out there think Elvish is &quot;awesome&quot;? Anybody?). The population is huge and a valid sample is simply impossible. But wait: what is the Mongolian word for &quot;awesome&quot;, and what is the Hmong word for &quot;awesome&quot;. You can't ask a Mongolian monolingual speaker if Dothraki is &quot;awesome&quot; – he's just say &quot;Юу мэдмээр байна. Яагаад би энд байгаа вэ?&quot; or something like that. Also, in California speak, &quot;awesome&quot; means &quot;uh-huh&quot;, unlike in my dialect where it means &quot;wonderous, awe-inspiring&quot;. The premise that words like &quot;awesome&quot; identify an objective emotional reality is just so false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the question cannot be answered. If you want to narrow down the population to e.g. &quot;undergrads taking a psychology survey class in the UCal system between 2016 and 2020&quot;, you might generate some numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-17T19:02:39.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-17T23:43:24.863" Score="0" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relational nouns, like &lt;code&gt;brother&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mother&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;capital&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;advisor&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;leader&lt;/code&gt; are different from sortal words like &lt;code&gt;cup&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;person&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;woman&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They differ in the sense that, one cannot decide if &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; is a &lt;code&gt;brother&lt;/code&gt; unto itself, but rather must consider whether &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; is a &lt;code&gt;brother&lt;/code&gt; in relation to some &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt;.  On the other hand, one can decide whether &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; is a &lt;code&gt;person&lt;/code&gt; just by looking at &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; -- one need not look at other objects and their relationship to &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a resource listing relational nouns for english?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-09-18T09:19:39.863" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T09:31:53.797" Title="Is there a resource for English relational nouns" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19743" CreationDate="2016-09-19T09:31:53.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a wordnet (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Princeton Wordnet&lt;/a&gt;) can be used to extract some relevant nouns. The only disadvantage of the existing wordnets is their rather low coverage of the full lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given a starting set, you can try some techniques from machine learning to find more of them in a huge corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-09-19T09:31:53.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19710" CreationDate="2016-09-19T12:51:14.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll reject the mentioned Kurylowicz definition as a rather specific interpretation and make the definition a more general one as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;having the same structure&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that in linguistics, the term &lt;em&gt;isomorphism&lt;/em&gt; is used in quite different ways, I'll make an attempt to account for each of them:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;1)&#xA;Isomorphism can exist between &lt;strong&gt;different levels of linguistic analysis&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the notion of allophones (sounds that have a different form, possibly different occurrence contexts, but make no difference in meaning) is similar to the one of lexical synonyms (two words that hava a different form but the same meaning, even though they may belong to e.g. different registers) and the one of syntactic paraphrases (two expressions that have a different form but the same meaning, not excluding the possibility that one may be preferred over the other, as long as they contribute to the same meaning).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or the difference between a phone (a sound in terms of its physical properties, e.g. [ʁ] or [z]) and a phoneme (an abstraction over phones which occur in the same contexts, e.g. /ʁ/ with allophones [ʁ], [ʀ] and [r] in German) is similar to the difference between a word form (like &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sleeps&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;slept&lt;/em&gt;) and its lemma (an abstraction over all forma a word may take, &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt;), and possibly even the semantic notion of extension (the referential meaning of an expression with respect to a certain utterance situation) vs. intension (an abstraction over all references an expression may denote, the &quot;idea&quot; that is behind an expression rather than its look in a concrete use).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or the distinction between predicates (&lt;em&gt;love(x,y)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;red(x)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;man(x)&lt;/em&gt;) and operators (∧, → , ∃, ...) in semantics corresponds (sometimes) to the difference between lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and functional categories (D, C, I, ...) in syntax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or, to quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Isomorphism+of+Linguistic+Levels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The free dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:  &quot;for example, the hierarchical sequence of such types of phonic units as the distinctive feature, the phoneme, the syllable, and the phonological word is structurally analogous to the sequence of such semantic units as the seme, the sememe, the onomateme, and the sentence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;2)&#xA;Isomorphism can exist between the &lt;strong&gt;syntactic and the semantic structure&lt;/strong&gt; of expressions. (Note that &quot;syntactic&quot; can also mean &quot;morphological&quot; here, possibly even &quot;phonological&quot; when it comes to the structural hierarchy of a word).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the phrase &lt;em&gt;old men and women&lt;/em&gt; is structurally ambiguous between two readings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;old [men and women]  &#xA;[old men] and [women]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is with the scope of the modifier &quot;old&quot;, which can either have scope over the whole NP &lt;em&gt;men and women&lt;/em&gt; or only over &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;. The surface syntactic structure corresponds directly to the semantic structure: Depending on the grammartical hierarchy between the constituents, the phrase receives a corresponding meaning interpretation. A syntax tree (with NP, AP, ...) would be hiearched the same as a &quot;semantics tree&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works not only on the sentence-syntactic, but also the morphological level:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lley6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lley6.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XUPI0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XUPI0.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;masquerade ball for vampires&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;ball with vampire masquerades&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the syntactic structure is isomorphic to the semantic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the following ambiguity is not isomorphic between syntactic and semantic structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every child sings a song  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1)&#xA;  For every child it holds that it sings a song (not necessarily the same one)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &lt;code&gt;∀x(child(x) → ∃y(song(x) ∧ sing(x,y)))&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2)&#xA;  There is a song which every child sings (and this is the one and the same song)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;∃y(song(x) ∧ ∀y(child(y) → sing(y,x)))&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the two readings have two different logical forms or semantic structures.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, on the surface syntactic level, both sentences are structured the same way - in both interpretations, the grammatical subject stays the subject and the object the object:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9NE8T.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9NE8T.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One grammatical structure corresponds to two semantic interpretations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The syntax and the semantics are not isomorphic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)&#xA;Isomorphism as a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;biunique mapping between form and meaning&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, to come back to Kurylowicz, taking the definition form &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=fKPPAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA18&amp;amp;lpg=PA18&amp;amp;dq=Kurylowicz+isomorphism&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=FFXsg0TSGD&amp;amp;sig=NJ4q0YPFrTwJFkJ3LKeNepB7n0w&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjE7-DStZvPAhUlC8AKHfwzAMoQ6AEIJzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Kurylowicz%20isomorphism&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2: p. 18&lt;/sup&gt;. &quot;Form&quot; is here to be understood as &quot;phonic aspects&quot; and &quot;meaning&quot; as &quot;semantic aspects&quot;, to use the wording from the comment.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isomoprhism in this sense would mean a 1:1 correlation between form and meaning and is, for example, violated by homonymy (one form, several meanings) and synonymy (several forms, one meaning) on the lexical level as well as structural ambiguity (one surface form, several possible interpretations) and paraphrase (different surface forms, one meaning) on the syntactic level.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4)&#xA;Isomorphism between (phonological, morphological, syntactic, ...) &lt;strong&gt;linguistic forms across languages&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partee et. al. (2012: 203) &quot;Japanese and Korean are sometimes said to be isomorphic with respect to syntactic structure, a claim which would be true if the two languages differed in their morphemes but sentence could be put into morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence preserving syntactic configutations and permitting the same syntactic operations.&quot;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Japanese and Korean to go into detail about this statement, but I think the idea should be clear.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same page provides another nice, though non-linguistic example which may help you understand the meaning better: &quot;For example, a paper pattern for a dress may be said to be isomorphic to the cut-out cloth with respect to the size and shape; they differ only in their material.&quot;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the definition of &quot;isomorphism&quot; is too general to not have very different possible interpretations in linguistics, but I hope I caputured the four major ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Isomorphism of Linguistic Levels. (n.d.) &lt;em&gt;The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition&lt;/em&gt;. (1970-1979). Retrieved September 19 2016 from &lt;a href=&quot;http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Isomorphism+of+Linguistic+Levels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Isomorphism+of+Linguistic+Levels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Rainer, F., Dressler, W.U., Gardani, F. &amp;amp; Luschützki, H.C. 2014. Morphology and meaning: an overview. In: &lt;em&gt;Morphology and Meaning: selected papers from the 15th international morphology meeting, Vienna, February 2012&lt;/em&gt;. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins B.V.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Partee, B. B., ter Meulen, A. G., &amp;amp; Wall, R. (2012). Mathematical methods in linguistics (Vol. 30). Springer Science &amp;amp; Business Media&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T20:15:56.893" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T20:15:56.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19726" CreationDate="2016-09-19T19:04:24.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the use of auxiliaries is not directly linked to aspect, mood or tense in the first place. This may be so in some or many cases by coincidence when morphological or syntactic marking is not available, but the link between auxiliary verbs and TAM is not a logical necessity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there are (even in English) cases where the use of auxiliaries does not change aspect/mood/tense:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;They charged him --&gt; He WAS charged&lt;/em&gt; (change to passive voice, but not indicative or tense)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You realize --&gt; You DOn't realize&lt;/em&gt; (negation, same tense and mood)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He responds --&gt; DOES he respond?&lt;/em&gt; (qustion formation, grammatical change but not about mood, tense or aspect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think --&gt; I DO think&lt;/em&gt; (enforcement, no kind of grammatical change)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are numerous cases where TAM is expressed other than by an auxiliary verb:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I play --&gt; I playED&lt;/em&gt; (morphological marking of tense)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You wash the dishes --&gt; Wash the dishes&lt;/em&gt; (imperative mood by syntactic marking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: &lt;em&gt;Tu pars --&gt; Je veux que tu PARTES&lt;/em&gt; (subjunctive mood)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;langauges with evidentiality, apectual, ... affixes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are even cases where an auxiliary is used for indicative present, namely present progressive (if you take this as the &quot;normal&quot; present) in English:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mary IS cooking&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, auxiliaries do not always express TAM differing from &quot;simple indicative present&quot;, not even necessarily grammatical features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T09:50:57.287" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T09:50:57.287" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19750" CreationDate="2016-09-20T09:08:19.280" Score="2" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking for a good explanation on the origin of the turkish word bakır, but I can't find much on it. Is it a loan or is it really a Turkic word for copper? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T20:08:51.307" Title="Etymology of the Turkish word for copper (bakır)" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19726" CreationDate="2016-09-20T11:50:24.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese, there are at least two different kinds of auxiliary verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there are syntactical auxiliaries, that change grammatical features of the main verb. Those are &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; (to go), &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; (to be), &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; (to be, too, but the meaning is quite different from &quot;ser&quot;), &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; (to have), and &lt;em&gt;haver&lt;/em&gt; (to have, but in different contexts - and, no, it is not a cognate of &quot;have&quot;; their similarity is a mere coincidence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ser&lt;/em&gt; is used for changing voice, not tense or aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Joana processou José&lt;/em&gt;. - Jane sued Joseph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;José foi processado por Joana&lt;/em&gt;. - Joseph was sued by Jane. (&lt;em&gt;foi&lt;/em&gt; is the past simple of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The others are used for tense/aspect modification. &lt;em&gt;Ir&lt;/em&gt; + infinitive of the main verb indicates future or conditional, &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; + gerundive of the main verb expresses &quot;imperfect&quot; (or continuous) aspect, &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;haver&lt;/em&gt; + past participle of the main verb express perfect aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu vou dormir&lt;/em&gt;. - I am going to sleep. (&lt;em&gt;Vou&lt;/em&gt; is the indicative present of &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu ia dormir&lt;/em&gt;. - I was going to sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu estou brincando&lt;/em&gt;. - I am joking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu havia dormido&lt;/em&gt;. - I had slept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu tenho dormido&lt;/em&gt;. - I have been sleeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those verbs can also be used as main verbs on their own, with perhaps the exception of &lt;em&gt;haver&lt;/em&gt;, whose present indicative, &lt;em&gt;há&lt;/em&gt;, seems to be evolving into some kind of particle - to the point that there is generalised confusion with the homophone preposition &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there are &quot;modal&quot; auxiliaries that change the semantics of sentences, such as &lt;em&gt;querer&lt;/em&gt; (to want), &lt;em&gt;poder&lt;/em&gt; (can), &lt;em&gt;precisar&lt;/em&gt; (to need), &lt;em&gt;parecer&lt;/em&gt; (to seem), without messing with tense or aspect (unless they are themselves flexed for tense/aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T13:18:44.370" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T13:18:44.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19748" CreationDate="2016-09-20T12:43:16.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that &lt;em&gt;bakır&lt;/em&gt; comes from any other living language family, and cognates of it are present in many other Turkic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h1btF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h1btF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yakut uses the Turkic root for gold, many major Turkic languages use the Iranic word &lt;em&gt;مس&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;) and a few others &lt;em&gt;жез&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;джез&lt;/em&gt; ‎(compare Mongolian &lt;em&gt;зэс&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;bakır&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed into Balkan languages from Ottoman Turkish.  In any case, although the etymology is opaque, it has been in Turkic for a very long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the city now known by some as &lt;em&gt;Diyarbakır&lt;/em&gt; had nothing to do with &lt;em&gt;bakır&lt;/em&gt;.  It was explicitly renamed to as part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_name_changes_in_Turkey#/media/File:Renamed_place_names_in_Turkey.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;20th century Turkification policies&lt;/a&gt;, from Ottoman &lt;em&gt;Diyâr-ı Bekr&lt;/em&gt; itself from Arabic &lt;em&gt;Diyaru Bakr&lt;/em&gt;, after the occupying &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Bakr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bakr tribe&lt;/a&gt;.  The actual Aramaic and Greek name is &lt;em&gt;Amida&lt;/em&gt;, Kurdish &lt;em&gt;Amed&lt;/em&gt;, in Armenian &lt;em&gt;Tigranakert&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T20:08:51.307" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T20:08:51.307" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2016-09-20T18:35:22.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish and French are similar in syntax and close in vocabulary due to their latin origin, but they are very different in sound because standard French has a celtic substrat and a germanic superstrat. Since Spanish has a fairly conservative sound system and French has a very conservative orthography, that means that written Spanish is somewhat similar to &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; French, the grammar will look familiar to you. However, &lt;em&gt;spoken&lt;/em&gt; French is incomprehensible to somebody who only speaks Spanish, since the French sound system is totally alien to Spanish and much more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13064" LastEditorUserId="13064" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T20:24:38.207" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T20:24:38.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2016-09-20T19:18:36.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by others, &quot;similarity&quot; of two languages is a difficult thing to define. How do we start? Using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;theoretical linguistics&lt;/a&gt; as discrete components to compare might be a good place: Syntax, Phonology, Phonetics, Morphology, and Semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's pretend for now I am just comparing two made up languages, &lt;code&gt;Language A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Language B&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Syntax&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;generativist&lt;/a&gt; model with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Context-Free Grammars&lt;/a&gt; which are usually the ones taught in University (at least in North-America), we can look at Categorical heads and see how many have the &quot;same configuration&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Are Noun-Phrases `NP`s head first or head last?&#xA;Are Adjectival-Phrases `AP`s head first or head last?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is dependent on the categorical models you use and how they are defined, but each time they are the &quot;same configuration&quot;, we can tally it up and save the results (say 10/30 categories have the same configuration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phonetics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple phonetic sounds such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;allophones&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonemes&lt;/a&gt; could be compared by existence alone. If each language shares one, we tally them up and save the results (say 30/65 sounds exist in both languages compared)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phonology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;triphones&lt;/a&gt; in some preexisting speech corpus and make a set of them. We can then tally up how many are shared in each language (let's say 763/900)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Morphology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could use just the phonological example I gave and say that the triphones capture similar sound sequences. Otherwise we can just count the times certain affixes exist in both languages and tally them up (let's just say 25/55 for this one)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Semantics&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is probably a very difficult one, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_similarity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;semantic similarity&lt;/a&gt; can be defined in many ways. It usually entails using corpora and counts of contexts, or using a specialized &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; for capturing semantic concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also just say, well, both languages have the ability to explain the same ideas so they are basically the same and their difference is negligible (i.e. tallied up similarities would be the same amount). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Results&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After we figure out how to get the similarities, we can just average the results for our made up languages &lt;code&gt;Language A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Language B&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So using the examples I gave:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntax: 10/30 = 33%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetics: 30/65 = 46%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonology: 763/900 = 85%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphology: 25/55 = 45%&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantics: 100/100 = 100% Same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Average similarity between made up languages &lt;code&gt;Language A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Language B&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(33+46+85+45+100)/5 = 61% the same&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we would have to do the same thing for Spanish and French. We have lot's of data on the languages to we might be able to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we only care about one area, it might be easier, such as sounds (phonology, phonetics, morphology) or grammar (syntax)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This questions can be really subjective too so, depending on how people pick &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt; features to compare. Also &quot;same configuration&quot; could be different for different people who study different aspect of Linguistics (physcholinguistics, syntacticians, phoneticians, computational linguists :) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9416" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T19:18:36.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19781" CreationDate="2016-09-21T00:17:01.083" Score="0" ViewCount="1731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed this form being used by English speakers from India.  In standard English the infinitive form of &quot;to be&quot; is not normally combined with verbs modified with &quot;-ing&quot; (normally used for present continuous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this represent a particular tense? And if so is there a widely recognised term within linguists for this tense? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious as to where this grammatical form comes from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14093" LastEditorUserId="14093" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T04:47:05.123" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T18:46:28.613" Title="&quot;Please to be &lt;VERB&gt;ing&quot; in Indian english" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19760" CreationDate="2016-09-21T09:26:50.340" Score="3" ViewCount="7697" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in a list of sounds that humans make with their mouths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speech sounds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sounds that take a non-average skill (such as beatboxing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sounds that cannot be made with the mouth alone, but require fingers, tools etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context: I've written &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a software tool&lt;/a&gt; that automatically creates mouth animation for animated cartoons and computer games, based on audio recordings. I'd like to make sure that it covers all special cases besides normal dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I've come up with so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;breathing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;smacking one's lips/clicking one's tongue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;coughing/clearing one's throat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blowing a raspberry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gagging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;burping&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whistling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;humming (&quot;Mmm hm hmmm...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;giggling/laughter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;crying&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inarticulate screaming (like &quot;Aaah!&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy about individual additions to the list; I'd also appreciate references to existing collections or to freely available audio corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14095" LastEditorUserId="14095" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T14:49:32.980" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T15:45:52.067" Title="Sounds that humans make with their mouths" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19761" CreationDate="2016-09-21T09:39:02.467" Score="1" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ashantiproverbs00chrigoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ashanti Proverbs (The Primitive Ethics Of A Savage People)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Robert Sutherland Rattray, 1916, uses the following notation :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vRtCN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vRtCN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;excerpt of the book&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that Ashanti people speak Twi, yet the Twi alphabet &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/twi.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not seem&lt;/a&gt; to have such diacritics as the ones used in the sentence above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this alphabet obsolete (the book is one century old, and it writes Twi with a caron on the 'w'), and if so how would one write this sentence nowadays ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to user6726's answer and further investigation, I believe the modern spelling must be close to &lt;code&gt;ɔketew nwe mako na fifiri mfi atwerorɔ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I found a few Twi/Akan-English dictionaries online, which proved helpful : &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/adictonaryengli00lochgoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J.G. Christaller's very old one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ak.kasahorow.org/app/d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kasahorow.org&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twi.bb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twi.bb&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://twi_english.enacademic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enacademic.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;nwe&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mfi&lt;/code&gt; don't appear directly in dictionaries because the &lt;code&gt;n-&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;m-&lt;/code&gt; are negation prefixes : entries are for &lt;code&gt;we&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;chew&quot;) and &lt;code&gt;fi&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;from&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;atwerorɔ&lt;/code&gt; does not appear either, I guess because it's a rare (or extinguished ?) word : the original source mentions it's a kind of frog, not the common word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14096" LastEditorUserId="14096" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T13:06:47.537" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:06:47.537" Title="Diacritics and Ashanti/Twi alphabet?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19755" CreationDate="2016-09-21T11:49:20.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this sound children make when playing with toy trucks (to simulate the sound of the motor). It sounds similar to &lt;em&gt;brrrrrrr&lt;/em&gt;, but the thrilling part is made by vibrating the upper lip - like a labial /r/. It is like &quot;blowing raspberries&quot;, but without involving the tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sighing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spitting (the purpose is not to make a sound, but there is a sound as a subproduct)? Similarly, the sounds produced when gulping a liquid or chewing a solid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is moaning included in screaming or crying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do making sounds with the mouth aided by instruments count? Playing the flute, the trombone, whistling with the help of fingers or a leaf, blowing into water to make bubbles? Or the other way round, inflating your cheeks and using them as a drum? (I see that you exclude sounds that require an especial skill, but to me simple whistling is already a skill; many people are unable to do it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Involuntary sounds like often happens when drinking, when air inadvertently enters the mouth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T11:49:20.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:37:34.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I mean that if I have mastered one of them, how much easier will it be&#xA;  for me to learn another one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, knowing two languages instead of only one already makes it easy to learn a third one. At the very least, you won't take the quirks and irregularities of your first language for granted, and will be prepared to expect something different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, learning a language of a given linguistic family definitely makes it easier to learn a further language of that family. This effect is incremental: if you know &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; languages of a given family, it is even more easier to learn a third one. You will be acquainted to at least part of the lexical entries one needs to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, specifically, no, French and Castillian are not particularly similar. If you master Castillian, you will probably be able to read a text in Portuguese or Catalan and understand most of it; but this is not true of French. However, English has borrowed so much lexical entries from French, that a person whose first language is English, and learns Spanish, will probably be in a better position to extract a basic comprehension from a French text than a person whose first language is another one, even another Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in short, learning one of them won't preclude the need of specialised classes to learn the other. Those classes will be somewhat easier, especially if you learn Spanish before French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of the relation between both like the relation of English to German. There is a similarity, but the languages are far from mutually intelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:37:34.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17582" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:31:22.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is roughly similar to the case of the borrowing of the French word &lt;em&gt;château&lt;/em&gt; into Brazilian Portuguese. In French, &lt;em&gt;château&lt;/em&gt; means castle; in Portuguese, &lt;em&gt;chatô&lt;/em&gt; means humble residence - more like a bachelor's little flat than like the picture you posted, but still the irony is perceptible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I think, there are two factors that made possible for the import semantically shift in such way: first, Portuguese already had a word for castle, &lt;em&gt;castelo&lt;/em&gt;; second, castles are not a part of the Brazilian landscape. So there would be no need to import a word for something that, 1. already had a name; and 2. wasn't that important to really need a new name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there are similar issues considering these words in Russian and Serbo-Croat; perhaps the palace culture in the Balkans coincided with Ottoman domination, while Russia developed palaces of its own, or in the context of German or French influence, and so coined a local word for palace, or imported it from Western Europe, so when &quot;saraj&quot; was imported, the semantic slot for &quot;palace&quot; was already occupied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:31:22.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19755" CreationDate="2016-09-21T15:18:41.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find some useful ideas in the following list: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;burp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also belch. To expel gas noisily from the stomach through the mouth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The baby burped after being fed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cough&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To push air from the lungs in a quick, noisy explosion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He started to cough once he had a cold .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To make a sound from the vocal chords without pronouncing any real&#xA;  words, with one's lips closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were humming happily along with the music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hiccup&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The involuntary sound resulting from a spasm of the diaphragm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He got the hiccups as soon as he started eating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;groan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A low, mournful sound uttered in pain or grief or uttered in&#xA;  frustration or disapproval&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She groaned when her mother asked her to do the shopping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;giggle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To laugh gently or in a high-pitched voice; to laugh in a silly or&#xA;  giddy way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The jokes had them giggling like little girls all evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;laugh&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To express mirth, satisfaction, or derision, by peculiar movement of&#xA;  the muscles of the mouth, usually accompanied by the emission of&#xA;  explosive or chuckling sounds from the chest and throat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were told a joke and were laughing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pant&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A quick breathing; a catching of the breath; a gasp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he arrived, he was panting because he ran all the way to school.&#xA;  puff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sharp exhalation of a small amount of breath through the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;scream&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A loud, emphatic, exclamation of extreme emotion, usually horror,&#xA;  fear, excitement...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She screamed when she saw the mouse in the kitchen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sniff&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To make a short, audible inhalation, through the nose, as if to smell&#xA;  something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dog sniffed around the park, searching for a nice scent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sneeze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To expel air as a reflex induced by an irritation in the nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you sneeze people say: &quot;God bless you!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;snore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To breathe during sleep with harsh, snorting noises caused by&#xA;  vibration of the soft palate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sometimes snores and when he snores you can' stand the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sigh&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A deep and prolonged audible inspiration or respiration of air, as&#xA;  when fatigued, frustrated, grieved, or relieved; the act of sighing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She sighed when she finally found her keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;slurp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A loud sucking noise made in eating or drinking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yawn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To open the mouth widely and take a long, rather deep breath, often&#xA;  because one is tired and sometimes accompanied by pandiculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could see my students yawning, so I knew the lesson was boring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;whisper&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The act of speaking in a quiet voice, especially, without vibration of&#xA;  the vocal cords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were whispering when the professor started his lecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.myenglishpages.com/site_php_files/vocabulary-lesson-sounds-human.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;myenglishpages.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="9590" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T11:05:44.827" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:05:44.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19756" CreationDate="2016-09-21T15:53:32.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That text uses the old (obsolete) orthography developed by J.G. Christaller about 150 years ago. &lt;em&gt;(t)w̌&lt;/em&gt; represents labio-palatalization, IPA [tɕɥ], which is now simply &lt;em&gt;tw&lt;/em&gt; (it's predictable, but was in the old spelling because it's phonetically noteworthy). Akan vowels are a bit challenging since it sounds like they have 3 kinds of mid vowels (&lt;em&gt;ɛ e ɪ&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;ɪ&lt;/em&gt; sounds like &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, but not the same as &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;). Underscore on &lt;em&gt;e,o&lt;/em&gt; means [ɛ ɔ], and dots under a vowel means &quot;+ATR&quot;. N-dot is [ŋ], and acute accent indicates tone. Diacritics were employed sporadically in the old days (and diacritics are eschewed in the modern world). Can't help with modern spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T15:53:32.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19755" CreationDate="2016-09-21T16:12:18.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, there are few sounds that people can make with &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; their mouths (to be more precise, the oral cavity). Clicks, yes, but not breathing, because breathing also involves the lungs. Let's suppose that you mean &quot;the body parts used for speech&quot;, but not necessarily in the way that they are used in speech. (Ingressive lung air uses the anatomy, but in a non-speech like fashion). In other words, sounds produce in and by the vocal tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When applied to language, the unscientific concept &quot;sound&quot; gives way to a more scientific concept &quot;phoneme&quot;, the reason being that English (for example) has a linguistically significant constant unit /p/, and there are zillions of actual distinct sounds (acoustic waveforms) corresponding to productions of /p/. As part of a linguistic system, it makes sense to say that these various instances are &quot;the same thing&quot;. There is no conventional sameness to the set of non-linguistic vocal tract sounds. To take an example, put your tongue in position for [s], but sharply inhale rather than blow. People make this sound all the time. And they may round the lips to varying degrees. Each of those productions is &quot;a sound&quot;. It only makes sense to talk about counting and possibilities when you have a fixed correlate, e.g. associating the sound to something meaningful like a snake or a block of ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there can be no &quot;list&quot; because the set is infinite. All you can do is explore your anatomy and see what new sounds you can come up with. This question would be best asked at the Comedians SE, if it existed, because many of them make their money discovering new face sounds. There are thousands of general possibilities, leaving aside subtle nuances contributes by narrowing a passage by a couple of millimeters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T16:12:18.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13075" CreationDate="2016-09-21T16:47:22.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The service &lt;a href=&quot;http://clarin.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/BASWebServices/#/services/Grapheme2Phoneme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Grapheme2Phoneme&lt;/a&gt; at Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale (BAS), a CLARIN-D centre, provides this kind of conversion for a bunch of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T16:47:22.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:10:57.920" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that native language identification is a current research topic in natural language processing. I have an English text whose author clearly is not a native English speaker (I am not, either), and I feel that the author may be Russian. I would like to find some evidence for this feeling without sharing this text with others, if possible. Can I do this using freely available (online) tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14098" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T18:13:44.160" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T18:13:44.160" Title="Are there any freely available tools for English Native Language Identification?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:59:07.327" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath, Sims. &lt;em&gt;Understanding Morphology&lt;/em&gt; (2010 2 ed).  p 214 Bottom - 215 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Automatic alternations are the &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; synchronic &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt; consequence of phonetically-motivated&#xA;  diachronic sound changes. Sound change is motivated by&#xA;  phonetics in the sense that it occurs because phonetic production is made &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[p 215:]     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;easier by the change. For example, pronouncing an alveolar or velar&#xA;  consonant before [i] is relatively more difficult than pronouncing a palatal&#xA;  (or palatalized) consonant, and this explains why the diachronic change of&#xA;  palatalization before front vowels is so common in the world’s languages&#xA;  (e.g. (10.1d)). Final devoicing helps pronunciation because maintaining the&#xA;  vibration of the vocal chords (which is made difficult by the oral obstruction of&#xA;  obstruents anyway) is particularly difficult in the final position (e.g. (10.1a)).&#xA;  Neutralization of unstressed vowels occurs for perceptual reasons: when a&#xA;  vowel is not stressed, it is less loud and thus differences between vowels are&#xA;  harder to perceive (e.g. (10.1c)). As in German Umlaut, morphophonological&#xA;  alternations often result when the phonetic motivation for some&#xA;  automatic alternation is subsequently obscured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 326:] &lt;strong&gt;diachronic:&lt;/strong&gt; having to do with language change over time (Section 6.1) (cf. &lt;em&gt;synchronic&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p 343:] &lt;strong&gt;synchronic:&lt;/strong&gt; having to do with language at &lt;code&gt;a given point in time&lt;/code&gt; (Section 6.1) (cf. &lt;em&gt;diachronic&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand 1. Oughtn't 'synchronic' be 'diachronic'? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'a given point in time`  means a short time period like a day. Am I correct? If not, what time period did the authors envisage? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if the authors intended 'a given point in time' to mean a year or decade, how can automatic alternations be synchronic? One year or decade isn't long enough to spur phonological changes. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T05:24:41.303" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T05:24:41.303" Title="How are Automatic Alternations the synchronic, not diachronic, consequence of phonetically-motivated diachronic sound changes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19765" CreationDate="2016-09-21T19:44:42.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sound change happening during the past (i.e. diachronically) results in a certain stage of phonological patterns today (i.e. synchronic). The alternation system that currently exists with the properties that it has at this stage of development is observable and describable now, at a given point of time, and not only in view of its development over centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T19:44:42.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19765" CreationDate="2016-09-21T20:54:18.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will just add a bit to lemontree's answer, which I agree with. The problem stems from the fact that the authors do not entirely accept the basis for the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. When you speak a language, you have internalized a set of rules (a grammar) by which you can generate forms in the language. There is a huge ontological difference between &quot;what is in a particular grammar&quot; and &quot;what events took place in time between stage 1 and stage 2&quot;. Additionally, they are employing a misleading notion of &quot;sound change&quot;, where &quot;sound change&quot; is different from &quot;changes in grammar affecting sound systems&quot;, so it is tautological that &quot;Sound change is motivated by phonetics&quot;. Most sound change, in the more general sense, is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about phonetics. It's a bit shocking that they also claim that the initiation of sound change is driven by &lt;em&gt;production&lt;/em&gt;, when they know that the initiation of sound change is largely driven by perception. Ease-of-production changes like devoicing are not the general pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T20:54:18.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19102" CreationDate="2016-09-21T21:41:17.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two reasons, I think, why English speakers respect the Italian pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt;(1) but mangle that of &lt;em&gt;tagliatelle&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as it has been mentioned, all the phonemes, and combinations of phonemes, in &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt; exist in English. But the phoneme that Italian graphs as &quot;gl&quot; (/ʎ/) doesn't exist in English, or exists as a mere alophone of /l/, as in some pronunciatioms of &quot;million&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this, by itself, shouldn't have precluded a closer aproximation of the Italian pronounce of &lt;em&gt;tagliatelle&lt;/em&gt;, such as pronouncing the &quot;gl&quot; as /l/ or /j/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, second, there are words that are borrowed in an oral context, and words that are borrowed in a literary context. The former tend to emulate the pronounce of the word in its original language, as close as the phonetic system of the borrowing language permits. The later tend to be pronunciated as required by the ortographic rules of the borrowing language. It seems to me that &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt; has been imported into English from its spoken form, while &lt;em&gt;tagliatelle&lt;/em&gt; has been imported in its written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Mostly; the Italian pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;pizza&lt;/em&gt;, if I am not mistaken, is /'pit.sa/ rather than /'pit.sə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T11:55:56.317" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T11:55:56.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19753" CreationDate="2016-09-22T04:38:00.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this isn't best analyzed as a combination of two factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Different evolution of &quot;please&quot; construction -- Standard English has worn it down from something like &quot;may it please you to {infinitive}&quot; to just &quot;please {infinitive}&quot;; in some varieties of IE (and/or in certain contexts) that &quot;to&quot; may still be hanging on, or may even have been reintroduced to cover up the bare infinitive that follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) More widespread use of progressive than in Standard English (this is a commonly cited and easily observed characteristic of IE - &quot;I am knowing&quot;, etc. (see Sailaja, &lt;em&gt;Indian English&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of &quot;[please] [wait]&quot;, you end up with &quot;[please to] [be waiting]&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T04:38:00.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T06:14:29.450" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is it possible that human beings are capable of remembering tens of thousands of words (later in life even being able to spell most of them correctly and increasing their vocabulary) and what these words refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me like such an interesting question to ask, but googling returns zero results, which amazes and saddens me at the same time. Aren't people interested in this salient characteristic of our linguistic abilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: what &quot;tools&quot; does the brain use  to remember a fairly massive portion of the vocabulary of a language at a very young age?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; I would like to make it clear that the only language I am familiar with is English, so I'm a bit worried that my question may be English-centric. I would again be amazed if other languages used different set of &quot;tools&quot;. If there is some general theory (or theories) of how this phenomenon comes about not only in English, but in other world languages as well, I would greatly appreciate it if you could outline it (or them). &lt;em&gt;And I beg you, please try to answer in as simple terms as possible as I am just a curious layman.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12494" LastEditorUserId="12494" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T07:30:04.070" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T07:30:04.070" Title="How can a human have such brilliant memory for vocabulary?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19770" CreationDate="2016-09-22T12:21:23.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a so-called anti-lexicalist view of our knowledge of words. The idea is that while it is still impressive that we hold thousands of morphemes in our long-term memory, the size of our lexicon might be much smaller than we thought. For example, there is simply no need to hold past tense forms of verbs in memory because most of them can be derived by attaching -ed to a stem. So instead of having, say, 1000 verb roots and 1000 corresponding past-tense forms in your memory, you only have 1000 verb roots and one &quot;reusable&quot; -ed morpheme. Apply this to many other multimorphemic words and you get a severe decrease in size of lexicon. I also have a feeling that not all of the words we &quot;know&quot; are equally easily extractable - in fact, we do not use more than just 1000 distinct words in everyday life. So, I will be not surprised if thousands of words are not even stored in our memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T12:21:23.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T12:33:21.493" Score="1" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there are any good online courses in advanced syntax (within GG framework). By advanced I mean beyond introductory level like Carnie's Syntax or Radford's Minimalist Syntax books. There is MIT online course but they only have PDF handouts that are pretty hard to follow without teacher's comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastEditorUserId="10323" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T19:59:18.953" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T19:59:18.953" Title="Course in advanced syntax (generative grammar)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19780" CreationDate="2016-09-22T20:18:39.290" Score="9" ViewCount="5905" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polish spells /v/ as &quot;w&quot;, and the &quot;v&quot; letter does not exist in the language. The other slavic languages using the latin alphabet are in a reverse situation, &quot;v&quot; is used exclusively and &quot;w&quot; does not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What accounts for Polish's differentiation from all other Slavic languages written in the Latin alphabet as regards the spelling of this sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13918" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T19:11:10.230" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T19:11:10.230" Title="Why does Polish use &quot;w&quot; instead of &quot;v&quot;?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-23T09:59:29.073" Score="1" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to transcript some text from Egyptian Arabic to IPA, but I can't seem to find an Egyptian Arabic dictionary with IPA transcription, an automatic transcriptor, or even comprehensive conversion tables online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a ressource available somewhere ?  A GNU/Linux compatible program would also do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14096" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T09:59:29.073" Title="Egyptian Arabic to IPA conversion?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2016-09-23T14:00:45.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Esperanto there are some words of this kind, e.g., &lt;em&gt;malina&lt;/em&gt; &quot;male&quot; composed of &lt;em&gt;mal-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;negation, opposite of&quot; and &lt;em&gt;-ina&lt;/em&gt; &quot;feminine&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More examples can be found in this answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/407/7&quot;&gt;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/407/7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:42.857" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T07:38:05.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19775" CreationDate="2016-09-23T17:54:10.000" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wasn't always written this way: in the earliest records of written Polish (such as the Bull of Gniezno), the letters &quot;u&quot; and &quot;v&quot; were used for this sound as well. There was no official &quot;standard&quot; for Polish orthography (or, for that matter, the Polish language) until the 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the letter &quot;w&quot; had already come to mean /v/ in German, due to a 17th-century phonological change ([w] → [β] → [v]). This is the same change which happened much earlier in Latin to separate &quot;v&quot; from &quot;u&quot; in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when written Polish was finally standardized, many writers were using &quot;w&quot; for the /v/ sound due to influence from German. And it thus became part of the official orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T18:38:54.163" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T18:38:54.163" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19753" CreationDate="2016-09-23T18:31:15.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indian English is English as spoken by people whose first language is an Indian language (mostly Indo-Aryan or Dravidian). The English of India is strongly influenced by Indo-Aryan phonology, morphology and syntax. In this particular case I think we have to see a calque on the Indo-Aryan use of the infinitive as a semi-polite (or politeness-neutral) imperative; e.g. as in Hindi &lt;em&gt;bacnā&lt;/em&gt; “look out!”, which is formally an infinitive (“to look, to be looking”), but is used here as a command form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I add that “to be + VERB +-ing” is a perfectly “normal” (to use your word) present continuous infinitive in English (“It is time to be looking for a new job.”) What is not normal in standard English is its use as a command form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See R.S. McGregor, &lt;em&gt;Outline of Hindi Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd edition, p. 41.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-09-23T18:46:28.613" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T18:46:28.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-24T11:18:02.570" Score="-1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone point me to some open source NLP or machine learning library that can be used (possibly with some additional processing) to extract an adjective phrase from a sentence? I.e, given the following sentence:&#xA;&quot;There was a very nice weather during our holiday&quot;&#xA;I'd like to extract &quot;very nice weather&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14119" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T15:03:15.670" Title="Extracting adjective phrase from a sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-24T14:58:10.717" Score="0" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am familiar to the concept of Part of Speech changing from one grammatical category to another grammatical category. However, my question is, why would I need to change an existing word from one grammatical category to another??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why changing words from nouns to verbs are important? Why changing nouns into adjectives etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14121" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:39:11.613" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:39:11.613" Title="Part of Speech in English" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19784" CreationDate="2016-09-24T15:03:15.670" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three such python package suites worth to mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PythonXY &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Enthought Enthought Python Distribution&#xA;Anaconda from Continuum: Python Visualization and Data Exploration&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14121" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T15:03:15.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19786" CreationDate="2016-09-24T18:12:33.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming you're talking about derivational morphology: adding prefixes and suffixes to words to change their part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is: because it gives you more words! Take the word &quot;dependency&quot; for example. This is a noun derived from the adjective &quot;dependent&quot;, which is derived from the verb &quot;depend&quot;. So learning the one word &quot;depend&quot; and its meaning, lets you create several other related words as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For another example, let's say I'd never seen the word &quot;judgmentally&quot; before. But I know the verb &quot;judge&quot;, and I know that &quot;-ment&quot; turns a verb into a noun (the result of _____ing), and that &quot;-al&quot; turns a noun into an adjective (pertaining to _____), and that &quot;-ly&quot; turns an adjective into an adverb (in a _____ manner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, derivational morphology lets you say more things, without memorizing too many more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interpretation: if you're talking about &quot;verbing&quot;, where a word is treated as a different part of speech without changing its appearance at all, that's interesting morphologically because it changes the other morphemes you can use with that word. You wouldn't expect to be putting &quot;-ing&quot; on nouns, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T18:12:33.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14946" CreationDate="2016-09-24T18:46:13.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally polysynthesis only meant that an average word had a high content of morphems or meaning elements, without any clear definition how high it should be to call a language polysynthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on one tends to call languages that are head marking for at least subject and object as polysynthetic, and one will often add the criterium of noun incorporation. But even if a language has these traits, it does not necessarily have a high content of elements in an average word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would define a polysynthetic language as one with both these traits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remark that a headmarking language can be dependentmarking at the same time, also called doublemarking, and of cource still be polysynthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agglutination or fusing of elements have nothing to do wuth the definition, exept that a polysynthetic language must at least be halfly agglutinating to be learnable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very difficult to answar how common this language type is, because many languages have structures that are not so easily classified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian, French and Spanish, for example have a higly templatic verbal group consisting of the main verb, auxiliary verbs, object clitics and adverbial clitics, and these languages are partially headmarking. And these clitics behave more like affixes than just clitics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these languages are at least very near to be polysynthetic, and the same holds for modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a bias against calling traditional culture languages, like Hungarian, Georgian, Romance languages and Modern Greek polysynthetid, because that would be the same as classifying them togeather with the languages of peoples tagged as primitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastEditorUserId="2085" LastEditDate="2016-09-24T18:51:20.493" LastActivityDate="2016-09-24T18:51:20.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3920" CreationDate="2016-09-25T12:26:23.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. There is ample empirical evidence for it; the diversity of American English is not bigger than the diversity of British English, never mind the difference in size between the US and the UK. The same goes, probably with even greater intensity, for Brazilian Portuguese &lt;em&gt;versus&lt;/em&gt; European Portuguese. And the phenomenon isn't even greately affected by lack of political unity, as it can be seen in the case of New World Spanish compared to European Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite certainly cause by the fact that the American versions of these languages were established at a time when communications were much better than at the time when their European counterparts evolved. And this was merely the difference between press and manuscript, and between fast and relatively safe sail ships with compasses and old galleys. Telecommunications certainly will increase this effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T12:26:23.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-25T12:38:03.053" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples of the separators can be seen in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oracle number formatting chart&lt;/a&gt;. It appears that the Anglophone countries use &lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; as the thousands separator and &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; as the decimal separator, but other countries have completely different conventions. For example, Germany has the opposite convention to English (&lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; as thousands separator, &lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; as decimal separator). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this convention come about from a historical and linguistic perspective? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T12:38:03.053" Title="Why do languages use different symbols (. or ,) as the thousands separator?" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3757" CreationDate="2016-09-25T12:40:03.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. It is possible for an affix to become a root, as in the mentioned case of &lt;em&gt;super&lt;/em&gt;, and then to derive new words by attaching prefixes and/or suffixes to it, but that's a different case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T12:40:03.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9924" CreationDate="2016-09-26T01:21:16.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, I think for most relevant situations in which this question could be tested, the answer is no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I was on the judo team at a Japanese high school, and there were very clear status rankings among the coaches (sensei), senior team members (sempai), and junior team members (kouhai). If a kouhai were talking to or about a sempai, the kouhai would be expected to use a respectful register. But if a sensei were talking &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; a kouhai &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; one of that kouhai's sempai, the register would not be as respectful, so the sempai-kouhai (i.e., referent-listener) relationship would not be encoded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak to how things work in Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T01:21:16.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19799" CreationDate="2016-09-26T12:22:13.850" Score="7" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any resources which, given a Latin or Greek word, reference modern English words derived from the word?&lt;/strong&gt; I find it much easier to remember a root when I know a word derived from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a specific &lt;strong&gt;example&lt;/strong&gt;, I would like to remember that &quot;Casus belli&quot; means &quot;a case of war&quot;. The root &lt;code&gt;Casus -&amp;gt; Cause&lt;/code&gt; is easy to remember, but how shall I remember the meaning of &quot;belli&quot;? Are there any modern English words derived from &quot;belli&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I specifically ask about English, resources to other languages would be welcome in the lack of an English resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T12:58:52.137" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T11:59:53.610" Title="Reverse-etymology resources" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19798" CreationDate="2016-09-26T12:55:00.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; is a great free resource for inflection, meaning, pronounciation, etymology and other information on a large amount of words from many languages, and provides a &quot;Descendants&quot; section containing exactly what you are looking for:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YXhcB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YXhcB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o0JlX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o0JlX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T19:28:38.880" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T19:28:38.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-26T20:01:13.570" Score="3" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Context&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two economics students are attempting to describe a concept of language, but do not know of any formally-recognized terms or research that explain this concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They believe there is an underlying &quot;law&quot; that dictates and allows a researcher to predict what someone is going to say (or extremely unlikely to say) before they say it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trevor Handy Sowens and an associate were discussing a concept that Trevor has labelled &lt;code&gt;The law of Symbolic Leverage&lt;/code&gt;, and Trevor no longer wishes to use his own custom term-of-art to describe this concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Details&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trevor has noted that there is an innate behavioral trait in the way people communicate ideas. He discussed it with a close associate and the associate agrees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The behavioral trait goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1) Suppose Alice has eaten five apples over the course of one day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2) Bob asks Alice to describe what she has eaten, not knowing anything about Alice's day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3) It is reasonable to expect Alice to say:&lt;code&gt;Today I ate five apples.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4) However, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reasonable to expect Alice to say: &lt;code&gt;Today I ate an apple, and then I ate an apple, and then I ate an apple, and then I ate an apple, and then I ate an apple.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4a) The only circumstance to expect Alice to say 4) instead of 3) would be if Alice has some ulterior gain that can be realized if she uses the longer-form expression (e.g., Alice is working on a job where she gets paid more money if she spends more time talking. She gets paid per-word spoken per-day.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5) Trevor refers to the above circumstance as &lt;code&gt;The law of Symbolic Leverage&lt;/code&gt; ... which states that people will use the least amount of symbols necessary to communicate some idea, unless the use of the symbols &lt;em&gt;themselves&lt;/em&gt; carries an ulterior purpose, above and beyond simple communication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can this hypothesis of Trevor be substantiated or repudiated, according to the knowledge of a trained Linguist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what preexisting prior term of art or concept would a linguist use to describe this observation made by Trevor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14139" LastEditorUserId="14139" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T20:59:29.200" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T18:31:23.947" Title="How would a trained linguist describe this hypothesis of Symbolic Leverage" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19800" CreationDate="2016-09-26T20:29:29.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Be brief&quot; is the 3rd Gricean manner maxim of conversation.  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Gricean_maxims&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gricean maxims&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T20:35:10.963" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T20:35:10.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19775" CreationDate="2016-09-26T21:28:28.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original sound in Western Slavic dialects in place of today's /v/ was bilabial /w/. I can't find a good reference, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sproghistorie.dk/files/olander-copenhagen07presentation01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; the corresponding consonant is definitely stated as bilabial. It is possible, that they didn't want to use the same symbol which was used for V in Latin because the sound was different. In Czech the situation was similar, the sound change /w/ -&gt; /v/ happened in the 14. century. That is after the Bull of Gniezdno mentioned in the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Czech the orthography switched to V from W only in the 19th century in a wave of several simplifications and modernizations. Until that time it used W in the same way as Polish does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastEditorUserId="9466" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T13:04:19.110" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T13:04:19.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19800" CreationDate="2016-09-26T21:30:45.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computational linguistics, language modelling and perplexity measures are used to evaluate the likelihood of phrases (and continuations given a certain start of phrase) as well as the amount of information actually transmitted by an utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems relevant to your question is research on typical information density of various languages; I won't go digging for citations now but IIRC a conclusion was that while different languages have significantly different densities of bits per letter, word or spoken syllable, the spoken languages tend to have more or less equal amount of bits per second - if a particular language requires more syllables to say the same thing, it simply gets spoken more rapidly on average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there is a certain amount of redundancy in natural language, enabling listeners to correct for some amount of errors and noise; and as languages evolve, this amount seems to get preserved (to some optimal value?) - loss of syllables carrying grammatical information implies moving towards a more strict word order; when longish phrases start to get more frequently used, they get replaced by contractions to eliminate that excess redundancy; etc - your example is a sign of excess redundancy, but the observed trends show that even if it was accepted part of language, it's not stable, language users will shed such redundancy in a few generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3285" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T21:30:45.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19798" CreationDate="2016-09-27T11:59:53.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch&lt;/em&gt; by Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke contains the Romance descendants of Vulgar Latin words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not include direct borrowings from Latin (such as Spanish &lt;em&gt;causa&lt;/em&gt; in the entry for &lt;em&gt;causa&lt;/em&gt;), but it is very comprehensive. It includes terms in little known languages, such as Dalmatian, and has entries for some Germanic, Gaulish, Arabic, etc. words that have many descendants in Romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T11:59:53.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19587" CreationDate="2016-09-27T15:11:21.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my best attempt (with intermediate levels collapsed).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5lHf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5lHf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some parts are likely to be wrong, since I don't speak Lakota. For example, I treated &lt;em&gt;ki hená&lt;/em&gt; as two separate determiners, but if &lt;em&gt;hená&lt;/em&gt; can only be used after &lt;em&gt;ki&lt;/em&gt; you could instead treat them as a single D. I also don't know enough about inflection in Lakota to label the I's properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T15:11:21.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19800" CreationDate="2016-09-27T18:31:23.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good cogsci-based/&quot;linguistics-adjacent&quot; place to look into is work by Florian Jaeger, Harry Tily, and Tal Linzen (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;, all building from work by John Hale and Roger Levy from about a decade ago) on communicative efficiency and the role of preservation/minimization of entropy (and other information theoretic measures) changes in language processing (both in production and comprehension).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of potentially promising papers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://acl2014.org/acl2014/W14-20/pdf/W14-2002.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://acl2014.org/acl2014/W14-20/pdf/W14-2002.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hlp.rochester.edu/resources/workshop_materials/EVELIN12/JaegerTily11-offprint-DOI=10.1002_wcs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.hlp.rochester.edu/resources/workshop_materials/EVELIN12/JaegerTily11-offprint-DOI=10.1002_wcs.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T18:31:23.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19811" CreationDate="2016-09-27T19:52:32.200" Score="2" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a physics student so forgive me if I'm not very precise with the language. I am currently taking an English course, and my teacher is specialized in teaching pronunciation. I am interested in checking if the students are objectively improving. I am interested in the vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;æ, ɑ, ʌ, ə, a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because as a Spanish speaker, they all sound very similar. I decided to create a sort of voice-recognition tool (actually it would be vowel-recognition). For this I am using the soundwave of those vowels pronounced by English people. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Oxford Corpus&lt;/a&gt; with many hours recorded. Here the speakers read some paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I would spend many hours trimming the audio files in order to extract just the part in which they say the specific vowels I need. I want to ask if any of you knows another Corpus just with vowels, as that would ease my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14147" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T20:01:48.343" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T20:20:48.670" Title="Phonetics - English Pronunciation of Vowels Corpus" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19810" CreationDate="2016-09-27T20:01:30.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For corpora in general, you can take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt;. Just search for &quot;English vowels&quot; or something and see if you make a find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative suggestion: There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.praatvocaltoolkit.com/extract-vowels.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plugin&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; (the quasi-standard for phonetic analysis among linguists) that provides a script which &quot;extracts the vowels of every selected Sound object and joins them into a new Sound object&quot;. I haven't used it  myself so don't know how well it works, but you could give it a try. That way, you could continue to work with your existing corpus - read out full paragraphs seem like a more naturalistic, thus more promising resource than recordings of isolated vowels (if there exists such a corpus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T20:20:48.670" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T20:20:48.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19813" CreationDate="2016-09-27T21:18:21.137" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on some linguistic software. The whole functionality is already there, the only thing that is missing is a good vocabulary to test it with. &#xA;Of course there is no way to create a decent vocabulary manually, so I want to enlarge it automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I need is a list of German nouns with their articles (or let's say list of nouns &quot;annotated&quot; with gender), preferably the most frequent ones, or grouped by topics. Yet it's not a must.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I am only interested in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be really thankful for any tips or ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14148" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T21:41:54.307" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T22:39:47.683" Title="Where can I find a list of German nouns with their articles?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19812" CreationDate="2016-09-27T21:39:53.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/q/7386&quot;&gt;a similar question on the German language SE&lt;/a&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.byki.com/lists/german/greg%27s-german-nouns-part-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Greg's German&#xA;nouns&quot;&lt;/a&gt; - a list of 1000 German nouns including articles and translations to English. You can just copy the HTML table into an excel table by&#xA;holding &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; while selecting. The format &quot;der Gebrauch, e&quot;&#xA;requires some editing to extract only the noun and their article, but&#xA;that is easily doable in a few seconds via regular expressions find&#xA;and replace or something similar. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZonFtimNPQM0sI4rAwwHSG9tQHv2z-NET-Zkw69VtFY/edit#gid=1994324564&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A nicer version of the&#xA;above&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;by SE user Tinjo. I think it's the same as the same set of words, but&#xA;the copying into a table is already done.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The download link &lt;a href=&quot;https://germanwordlist.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/1000-german-nouns6.xlsx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;1000 German&#xA;Nouns&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;on the Wordpress site&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://germanwordlist.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;germanwordlist&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It's a list of 1286 words in a similar format as the above links; again, the format requires some simple editing to remove the additional information on the plural forms, but the words themselves should serve your purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T22:39:47.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2016-09-27T22:55:39.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As deaf people say, they think and have all people in their dreams speaking sign language. Another possibility would be to think in text mode, but I never heard about such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T22:55:39.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19815" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-28T03:33:05.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T03:33:05.920" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T03:33:05.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19816" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-28T03:33:05.920" Score="0" Body="Lexical relations include antonyms, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, etc." OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T06:32:22.583" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T06:32:22.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19823" CreationDate="2016-09-28T05:30:13.100" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Altho a feature can be modeled as &lt;em&gt;unordered&lt;/em&gt; value-attribute pairs (+cons, -syll, etc.), The matrices in which the features are attested must be ordered, correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, The three matrices that comprise the word &quot;sick&quot; [sIk] are the same three matrices that comprise the word &quot;kiss&quot; [kIs]. Just the ordering is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is accurate to reason as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Feature matrices are comprised of features, which are &lt;em&gt;unordered&lt;/em&gt; value-attribute pairs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the features are unordered, the matrices in which they are attested are ordered relative to each other in the formation of a word/morpheme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:59:23.720" Title="Are feature matrices ordered within a word?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T05:51:18.757" Score="2" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do sign languages have their own idioms, or do they just have direct translations of idioms from spoken languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give some examples of idioms in sign language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14151" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T21:38:13.783" Title="Idioms in Sign Languages" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19821" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-28T13:24:23.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples of grammatical mood include indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T15:36:26.807" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:36:26.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19822" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-28T13:24:23.960" Score="0" Body="For questions about grammatical mood, such as the subjunctive, optative, imperative etc. To ask about realis/irrealis, epistemic, or deontic modality, use the &quot;modality&quot; tag." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T15:01:10.373" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T15:01:10.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19817" CreationDate="2016-09-28T15:59:23.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;SPE-era phonologists used the term &quot;matrix&quot; for features, primarily because that is a term used by Chomsky and Halle, but users were generally unaware of the mathematical properties of matrices, as the term is used in mathematics (that elements are strictly ordered). Essentially, all that people were committed to was the graphic presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were two ways of presenting a phonological string: as an ordered set of column vectors (each called a &quot;matrix&quot;), or as one nxm matrix of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; segments. The latter representation was not particularly common, and the brackets were generally taken to specifically represent &quot;segment&quot;. In rule formalism, you never encounter an nxm matrix, instead you encounter an ordered sequence of columnar &quot;matrices&quot;. But as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/19714/6726&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, ordering of features within a segment is redundant (and the number of value-attribute pairs in any segment is not predictable by convention, so features must be &quot;labeled&quot;), so since there is no reason to additionally impose order on features within a segment, &quot;matrix&quot; is not really an appropriate term describing a segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be appropriate to say that a phonological string is a row vector of sets of features: elements in each set (segment) are not ordered, but each set (segment) is ordered w.r.t. other segments. Which is exactly the situation that you described. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T15:59:23.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19818" CreationDate="2016-09-28T19:10:49.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idioms_in_American_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extract&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; explains what an idiom is in Sign Languages and makes a few interesting examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language (ASL) is the main language of members of the Deaf community in the United States. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One component of their language is the use of idioms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The validity of these idioms have often been questioned or confused with metaphorical language. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is important to first define the term idiom as, &amp;quot;A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Idiom, 2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following examples are written in ASL glossing. These idioms further validate ASL as a language unique and independent of English. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idioms in ASL bond people in the Deaf community because they are expressions that only in-group members can understand.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;TRAIN GO SORRY&amp;quot; is one of the most widely used idioms and is similar to the English idiom You missed the boat (Cohen, 1995). Another variation of this idiom is &amp;quot;CIGARETTE-GONE&amp;quot; (Vicars, 2005).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;COW-IT&amp;quot; is roughly translated into I don't care for [something] (Schmidt, 2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T19:10:49.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T20:04:52.677" Score="-3" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/39551/16344&quot;&gt;Japanese: Revised edition&lt;/a&gt; by Shoichi Iwasaki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English, noun phrases within a relative clause cannot be further relativized, but this is allowed in some cases in Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is  such a rule for English, it must hold for many other Western languages.  (I thought nesting was straightforward.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the rule? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be related to Accessibility.  See&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause#Accessibility_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause#Accessibility_hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13923" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:48.587" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T21:35:32.063" Title="In English, noun phrases within a relative clause cannot be further relativized, but this is allowed in some cases in Japanese" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19818" CreationDate="2016-09-28T21:38:13.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a non-ASL example as requested: I don't know the Brazilian sign language (Libras) at all, but it was easy to find articles claiming that &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, they have idioms distinct from Brazilian Portuguese.  One example is &quot;expensive eye&quot; = attentive onlooker vs. &quot;cheap eye&quot; = distracted person; another is &quot;to squeeze your belly&quot; = to laugh a lot.  In other cases, idioms are direct calques from Brazilian Portuguese, like &quot;wood face&quot; = shameless, brazen.[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albres et al. [2] have a short quantitative study where they classified 243 metaphors and idioms, and compared them between the two languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;121 items were shared in form and meaning;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;26 were non-literal forms with different meanings (&quot;crown&quot; is &quot;old woman&quot; in Brazilian Portuguese, &quot;knowledgeable person&quot; in Libras);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;14 are classified by them as something like translations with different morphemes (Portuguese &quot;I've caught you in the &lt;em&gt;flagra&lt;/em&gt; [= in a flagrant act; red-handed]&quot; ~= Libras &quot;saw-hour&quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;82 metaphors and idioms were specific to Libras.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;dying&lt;/em&gt; to see the full list, but couldn't locate it online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Sandra P. F. Nascimento and Cristiane B. Nascimento. &lt;em&gt;Introdução aos estudos linguísticos: Língua de Sinais Brasileira e Língua Portuguesa em foco.&lt;/em&gt;  2010.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[2] Neiva de Aquino ALBRES. &lt;em&gt;Tenha “OLHO CARO”: a interpretação de expressões idiomáticas da Língua de Sinais Brasileira&lt;/em&gt;. 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T21:38:13.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19827" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-29T00:58:30.897" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T00:58:30.897" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T00:58:30.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19828" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-29T00:58:30.897" Score="0" Body="Questions on modal verbs (such as the English verbs can, might, must, should, etc.)" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T11:51:57.810" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T11:51:57.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19829" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19830" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T01:01:08.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19846" CreationDate="2016-09-29T05:33:02.203" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that according to some analyses, there are two &quot;kinds&quot; of feature matrices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &quot;standard feature matrix&quot; with phonetic features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;another feature matrix with diacritic features (which identify word classes among other things).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Leben suggests still another kind of feature matrix, which had features for e.g. Noun/Verb, and Past/Fut and other prosodic stuff (tone etc.) and godknowswhatelse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Leben's feature matrix distinct from the second kind of feature matrix above? To me they sound to be basically the same or anyway very similar. I'm not sure why he posited it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T16:16:52.227" Title="What's the difference (if any) between Leben's feature matrix and the feature matrices comprised of &quot;diacritic features&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19825" CreationDate="2016-09-29T11:34:54.607" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Iwasaki's formulation is unclear.  What he means is that besides the one NP in a relative clause that is made into a relative pronoun (or ortherwise marked as being relativized), you cannot relativize a second NP in the same relative clause.  For instance, relativizing &quot;the book&quot; in &quot;John gave the book to the girl&quot; gives the relative clause &quot;which John gave to the girl&quot;.  If you then try to relativize &quot;the girl&quot; in this relative clause, you get the unacceptable *&quot;who(m) ... which John gave to&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, *&quot;the girl who(m) I read the book which John gave to&quot; has had two relative pronouns removed from the clause &quot;John gave [] to []&quot;.  Evidently this is prohibited.  John Ross in &lt;strong&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; studied such cases, compared the English examples with Japanese examples, and concluded that the Complex NP Constraint, as he dubbed it, applies only to &quot;chopping rules&quot; and not to &quot;copying rules&quot;.  With chopping rules, nothing is left in the original position of a relative pronoun, while something may be left behind by a copying rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T21:35:32.063" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T21:35:32.063" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-15T14:00:50.803" Score="11" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/11/tom-wolfe-v-noah-chomsky-roots-of-language&quot;&gt;report in Sunday's &lt;em&gt;Observer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; concerning the dispute between Tom Wolfe (author &lt;em&gt;Kingdom of Speech&lt;/em&gt;) and Noam Chomsky (professor emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology) over their divergent views on the origins of human speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst Chomsky maintains that people are born with a &quot;universal grammar&quot; which explains why children are able to speak so early, Wolfe takes issue with this claiming that language was &quot;not the product of evolution, but a tool that man created&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article dwells to a large extent on the personal quarrel that has arisen between Wolfe and Chomsky and it is difficult to discern from it the rudiments of the debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a linguistics professional on the site who could perhaps outline, succinctly, in a few words, the two separate arguments? What does it all boil down to?&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="WS2" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:48:36.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T06:44:17.080" Title="What is the essence of the dispute between Wolfe and Chomsky?" Tags="&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19833" CreationDate="2016-09-15T16:41:27.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's argument for the Universal Grammar: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Children pick up language quickly because of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition_device&quot;&gt;Language Acquisition Device&lt;/a&gt; (LAD).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the LAD is hypothetical, Chomsky believes it to be innate and a part of the human brain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are journal articles about evidence for the LAD, such as this article in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/417657&quot;&gt;Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there were an LAD, then one would expect to see certain patterns in all human languages. These patterns would show up as universals in grammar. (That is, almost all natural human languages would display certain characteristics and be generated by a similar set of rules.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chomsky believes in the Universal Grammar (UG) as evidenced by regular rules  in many languages. See this &lt;a href=&quot;http://pkdas.in/JNU/typo/lu.pdf&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;. The first rule stated: &quot;Universal 1. In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with Wolfe's contention. However, here is an important Wolfe quote from the article you provided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“My contention is that language is not the result of evolution but essentially a verbal trick that was invented by human beings. It’s a memory aid – a mnemonic – that enables human beings to store away a piece of information and compare it to a new piece of information and draw conclusions.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use a crude computer analogy, Chomsky would say you were born with certain hardware that ran built-in software. The software had an initial set of conditions that were toggled based on the language you heard (a database of rules, if you will). In contrast, Wolfe would say that you downloaded a software tool and started using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the essential difference would be that Chomsky thinks that you were born with the capacity to learn language, while Wolfe thinks that you picked up a trick or tool from those older than you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" OwnerDisplayName="rajah9" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T16:41:27.010" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19833" CreationDate="2016-09-21T19:17:17.603" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's complex at first but there's very little controversy to be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noam Chomsky&lt;/a&gt; is a linguist and political activist famous for revolutionizing the study of all areas of linguistics via structuralist methods. He also has a second life as a political critic, bringing scientific methods to journalism, measuring coverage of topics to show the bias of news organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Wolfe&lt;/a&gt; is an author famous for the New Journalism movement in the 60's, writing a number of well-received novelistic non-fiction books about American culture. His most famous book is The Right Stuff about the American space program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolfe recently wrote a book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Speech&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Kingdom of Speech&lt;/a&gt; critiquing two things, Darwin's theories of evolution and Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar. To oversimplify considerably, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;the ability to learn grammar is hardwired into the [human] brain&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It is an overarching abstract theory, which also has a lot of very particular falsifiable details. Although there are academic alternatives to the big picture and to the details, it sets the program to explain the commonalities of human language (especially grammar). And there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;controversies over some of the details&lt;/a&gt; e.g. possible lack of recursion (Everett/Pirahã), unfalsifiability (there are universals to language by definition of a word 'language' (but then there certainly are language specific areas of the brain)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolfe's critique seems to boil down to 1) the single Pirahã questionable counterexample, 2) &quot;language is not the result of evolution but essentially a verbal trick that was invented by human beings&quot;, and 3) &quot;It's a memory aid – a mnemonic – that enables human beings to store away a piece of information and compare it to a new piece of information and draw conclusions.&quot; The first is a reasonable scientific critique, but has been judged by linguists not to be sufficient. The second is a broad nature vs nurture claim, which is an understandable but false dichotomy to make; it is obvious that there are components to be learned and also that there are parts where biology is necessary, and much interaction between. The third seems to treat language as simple vocabulary, and as such really hardly addresses any of the concerns actual scientists have about UG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolfe also seems to compare externalities: theoretical linguists tend to pasty-skinned sunless armchair theorizing, Everett is the dashing revolutionary storming the barricades of the ossified ivory tower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's no actual dispute between Wolfe and Chomsky, in the sense that there's little to no dialog between them. Wolfe has criticized some implications of Chomsky's theories and Chomsky has only made comments about the book saying the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Chomsky-Puzzle-Piecing/237558&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;errors are so extraordinary it would take an essay to review them&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Wolfe makes for very entertaining intellectual reading but is not a good or even relevant source of the substance of the UG controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" OwnerDisplayName="Mitch" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T19:17:17.603" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19833" CreationDate="2016-09-29T17:26:31.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my summary (drawn from reviews of Wolfe's book -- I didn't read it).  A correct view of this question about the nature of language would have to emerge from exposure to facts in the field.  When you go out into the field, you get a good tan.  This guy Everett is tanned and healthy, while Chomsky and those who follow him are pale and unhealthy looking.  Accordingly, Wolfe concludes that Chomsky's theories must be wrong.  Like Darwin, who spent so much time aboard The Beagle in an enclosed little room, sketching, analyzing morphology, thinking, the Chomskyans spend too much time indoors.  Bad practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-linguists reading about this controversy about the language organ might get the impression that investigating the language organ, or looking for it, is something linguists do.  It's not so.  No one cares about the language organ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T17:26:31.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-29T20:01:51.050" Score="10" ViewCount="2804" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excuse my ignorance. I'm writing a work of fiction wherein an archeologist finds a tomb that contains not only the bodies of an unknown/unstudied society, but also samples of writing in that society's language. My question is how would that language and the text samples begin to be deciphered. if you could include answers that deal with both the theory and the application of doing so. I have been researching this on my own for some time but in my research I keep hitting a wall when it comes to certain things, and generally I've been going down rabbit holes each time I think I might be close to answering my question. (A definition of a study or a theory leads me to another definition, and another, and another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing I learned was the near impossibility of decoding a language when one has no related source (&lt;em&gt;i.e. the Rosetta stone for hieroglyphics&lt;/em&gt;) so would it be easier if say the original writer of the ancient text first began writing in Latin or some other well known language before re-writing the text in their own language? This is where the &quot;theory&quot; comes in. The idea is that the ancient writer is the first and only person to ever &lt;strong&gt;write down&lt;/strong&gt; this language, so it would be basically be the origin and sole source of that written language. Would it be easier if they used the Greek alphabet or had part of the sample written in another known language like with the Rosetta stone? I've loved this website and many of the questions/answers are very helpful, but nothing quite gives me all the answers I'm searching for when it comes to theory and application . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any help or direction!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14157" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T12:21:53.123" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T21:05:04.233" Title="How would someone begin translating an unknown language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2016-09-29T21:19:51.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you can revise your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there clues as to how old the language is?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the language use a known alphabet (or have any hints of parentage)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are their contextual samples (signs or labels on identifiable objects)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the writing is phonetic (like English) then word length and embedded morphemes are clues to function, and so is position once you determine the grammar settings.  If it is pictographic (like Chinese) then the base symbols will often be literal pictures.  A Rosetta document would increase the number of languages for comparison (if not make the solution trivial) - we have examples on modern packaging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T21:19:51.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2016-09-29T21:45:02.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is closely related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bootstrapping&lt;/a&gt;, a process in which children initiate the language acquisition. Therefore, in addition to knowledge how &lt;em&gt;scientists&lt;/em&gt; decipher the unknown language, please also consider checking researches about how &lt;em&gt;children&lt;/em&gt; do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Ted Chiang's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;„Story of Your Life“&lt;/a&gt; may be relevant. It's a science fiction novel about the scientists who are struggling to decipher an alien language that has pretty unusual properties.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The author, Ted Chiang, has several interesting publications and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-were-phonetic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;interviews&lt;/a&gt; about the scientific background he needed to research when he was writing the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize that my answer is not very scientific, but it only serves the purpose of showing the initial direction for your research. Hopefully, when the plot of your story gradually grows, we can answer some more specific questions that may arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T00:09:50.863" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T00:09:50.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2016-09-29T23:14:23.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at John Chadwick's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/384070.The_Decipherment_of_Linear_B&quot;&gt;The Decipherment of Linear B&lt;/a&gt;.  It does include some relevant theory -- I've used it as a text in an elementary linguistics course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T23:14:23.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19512" CreationDate="2016-09-30T12:51:39.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not part of the same sentence, and you can tell that by the intonation of a spoken version.  If it's all one sentence, we get an intonation like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm 2sorry that you 3guys are 1idiots.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I've written the highest pitch as &quot;1&quot;, next highest as &quot;2&quot;, and so on.  If a period of silence after &quot;sorry&quot; were simply an inserted  hiatus, not affecting the syntactic structure, it ought not to affect the intonation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;?? I'm 2sorry ... that you 3guys are 1idiots.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But instead, a more natural pronunciation is with a low level pitch throughout the second part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm 1sorry ... That you 4guys are 4idiots.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the intonation we find in anaphoric constructions, where the latter part said in a low constant pitch refers back to what was said previously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T12:51:39.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19831" CreationDate="2016-09-30T16:43:17.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle 1968 theory is not very clear, in that they predominantly talk of a single matrix containing all features, but there are some anomalous statements that suggest thinking about having two parallel matrices. One of those statements is p. 297 that &quot;the phonetic representation can be thought of formally as a two-dimensional matrix in which the columns stand for consecutive units and the rows stand for individual phonetic features&quot;. In light of the fact that diacritics, rules-exceptions and morphosyntactic properties are also features, this segregation of phonetic features at least at the phonetic level suggests that somehow nonphonetic features eventually fall out of the picture, encouraging one to think that they are separate. Same page, they also say &quot;In the case of the phonological matrices...&quot;, which would only make sense if there are nonphonological matrices that the phonological matrices are distinguished from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reveal anything about their ideas about matrices is the use of square brackets. As they said above, the phonetic representation is &quot;a two-dimensional matrix in which the columns stand for consecutive units and the rows stand for individual phonetic features&quot;. They do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say that the phonetic representation is a vector containing segments and that a segment is a vector containing features. Thus &quot;matrix&quot; in their view is not the same as segment (or boundary). However: in rule-writing, it is standard that [a,b,c] represents a single segment and [a,b,c][d,e,f] is a sequence of two segments, that is, the graphic object square brackets &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; represent a segment. In light of that, it is impossible to infer anything about the &quot;matrix&quot; status of nonphonological features by inspecting the form of a rule referring to the two kinds of features such as p. 355 (71) [-αsyl,αcons] → φ / __ # [-αsyl,+foreign]: the brackets simply mean &quot;that segment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 7 of ch. 8 addresses nonphonetic features. On p. 374 they postulate a convention that &quot;all nonphonological features of a given lexical item are distributed to every unit of this item&quot; (&quot;item&quot; = morpheme, &quot;unit&quot; = boundary, segment). Then continuing, &quot;if a given lexical item is a human noun in the kth declensional class which is an exception to rule &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, then the feature specifications [+noun], [+human], [+kth declensional class], [-rule &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;], &lt;strong&gt;now reinterpreted&lt;/strong&gt; as on a par with phonological features, are assigned to each unit in this lexical item. The problem is understanding the expression &quot;now reinterpreted&quot;, which suggests a derivational change, for example &quot;two matrices merge into one&quot; (but unmerge so that nonphonological features aren't present in phonetic representations??). This (merging) is what I think underlies Leben's theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line for SPE is that they are not explicit about the 1 vs 2 matrix question, so we really have no idea what they were thinking (nor do we particularly care about their private thoughts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leben in his dissertation (sect 1.0.2) embraces the idea of multiple matrices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most phonological features appear to be capable of only one type of&#xA;  representation; for example, features like [continuant] or [strident]&#xA;  are almost universally maintained to be features only on segments,&#xA;  while features like [+Past] or [+First Conjugation] are represented as&#xA;  features on morphemes or larger units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His notion of representing grammatical features &quot;on&quot; morphemes resolves the mystery in SPE as to which segment(s) underlyingly bear a diacritic feature – that is, if &lt;em&gt;-akwo-&lt;/em&gt; is [+past], which segments &lt;em&gt;underlyingly&lt;/em&gt; bear that specification? Although there is a convention that would distribute such a feature to all segments in the morpheme, nothing prevents underlying forms from having nonphonetic features contrastively located on segments within a morpheme. Leben's theory, with matrices &quot;on&quot; different things, resolves this matter: each morpheme has a single matrix of nonphonetic features (also tone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Leben's theory &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the second kind of matrix that you ask about. SPE may have thought of having such a thing, but Leben embraced it, and planted the seeds of autosegmental phonology in that soil. Nothing in principle would preclude creating a number of different kinds of matrices and associated units, for example &quot;word&quot; or &quot;syllable&quot;, and since morphemic phonetic features (tone) can migrate into the segmental matrix (via what he calls &quot;tone mapping&quot;), and since this can be language specific, then the floodgates are opened somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that understanding the history of these concepts is extremely difficult (was agonizing at the time) because of the unclarity of the original authors. This gave rise to many different interpretations, where I think Leben saw his analysis as being consistent with the SPE account and he only added a little change. The status of &quot;matrices&quot; and &quot;segments&quot; in SPE phonology is quite unclear, and became &quot;clear&quot; only subsequently, often made clear by critics. What is clearly understood is that in SPE phonology, there exists a &quot;unit&quot; (segment or boundary), and the phonetic features contained in that unit have no further structure -- there are as many instances of a feature as there are units. The term &quot;matrix&quot; is typically used to refer to &quot;a unit&quot;, but the original canon (SPE) is quite murky. The appendix on formalism defines the objects for writing rules, but there is no corresponding formal definition of the objects that rules act on. The gesture in the direction of 2 special symbols (→, φ) and 3 classes of things (features, specifications, categories) as the primitives of rule theory, and it is completely unclear how parsing elements (brackets) fit into their theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T16:16:52.227" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T16:16:52.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14707" CreationDate="2016-09-30T17:45:57.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an Albanian speaker native to Tirana Albania you are not hearing things.  The retroflex is softer than the North American variant. However it does not appear in most dialects. It is specifically a result of the congruence of Tosk Albanian and that of the southern Ghegh dialect spoken natively in Tirana. I dont think I have encountered it in Kosovars whom I've met or southern Tosks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="587" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T17:45:57.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19111" CreationDate="2016-09-30T17:57:11.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Albanian it's Natën e mirë - Night good ,  which is the original order of Name Adjective order of IndoEuropean languages, rather than the inverted order found in most western languages. So even though Romanian is a Romance language, it's a Romance language as spoken by Balkan people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="587" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T17:57:11.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-30T22:33:41.490" Score="1" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working through an exercise where, given a set of corpora, I will implement a simple model on a test corpus to determine the most likely corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say the corpora with which I want to learn are the following (could be anything but I'm just using these&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;THIS CORPUS IS ALL CAPS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this corpus is all lowercase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This Corpus Capitalized The First Letters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thiS corpuS cApitaLIzes leTTErs at RANDOM&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I would break apart each corpus into bigram pairs, e.g (first):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{&quot; T&quot;, &quot;HI&quot;,...,&quot;PS&quot;,&quot;S &quot;}&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would find the counts of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each letter bigram&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each letter unigram&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would then gather the probabilities, where &quot;HI&quot; would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; P(I | H) = Count(HI)/Count(H)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would then take a testing sentence and break it apart into bigram as above. I would then check the probability of each bigram vs the probabilities of the corpora, adding each up and normalizing. The one with the highest probability would be a predicted corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this looks very simple. It seems too simple to me. I just want to make sure it would do what I think it would. Does anybody have any criticisms or critiques of my methodology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I eventually would like to try this out in python as a means of learning that language as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14171" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T22:33:41.490" Title="Simple bigram letter model" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-01T09:03:59.853" Score="25" ViewCount="5267" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What case can be made for considering whether [ə] and [ʌ] are different phonemes or not in American English?&lt;/strong&gt; Please note the focus is on standard American English. EDIT: i.e.: on &lt;em&gt;General American&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many dictionaries use /ʌ/ in stressed position and /ə/ in unstressed positions. So we get transcriptions such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DUST  &lt;code&gt;/dʌst/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LOVE  &lt;code&gt;/lʌv/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BACKUP  &lt;code&gt;/ˈbækˌʌp/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KETCHUP  &lt;code&gt;/ˈkɛtʃ.əp/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CUSTOM  &lt;code&gt;/ˈkʌs·təm/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;if these truly constitute two different phonemes, then we should be able to come up with minimal pairs&lt;/strong&gt; to illustrate the contrast between both sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot think of a single minimal pair to contrast /ə/ and /ʌ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMU Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, the pronouncing dictionary of American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CMU Dictionary uses &lt;code&gt;AH&lt;/code&gt; for both sounds. So we get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DUST  &lt;code&gt;D AH1 S T&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LOVE  &lt;code&gt;L AH1 V&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BACKUP  &lt;code&gt;B AE1 K AH2 P&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KETCHUP  &lt;code&gt;K EH1 CH AH0 P&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CUSTOM  &lt;code&gt;K AH1 S T AH0 M&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(0 = unstressed, 1 = primary stress, 2 = secondary stress)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, provided the stressed syllables are pronounced longer and with more energy, saying BACKUP, KETCHUP and CUSTOM as &lt;code&gt;[ˈbækˌəp]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[ˈkətʃ.əp]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ˈkəs·təm]&lt;/code&gt; would not hinder comprehension in the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, there's &lt;strong&gt;only one phoneme here, which happens to be realized [ʌ] in stressed position and as a schwa [ə] in unstressed positions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem 1 :&lt;/strong&gt; if /ə/ and /ʌ/ are different phonemes, what are some examples of minimal pairs between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem 2 :&lt;/strong&gt; if they are allophones, which notation should be used for the phoneme? I assume /ə/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm asking is because I'm teaching American English with a lot of phonemic transcriptions – why teach two phonemes when there's only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, where would professional linguists locate those sounds on the following chart (again, from an American point of view)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4JQaJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4JQaJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Phoneme-allophone-determination-chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The only discussion of the topic I found online so far is &lt;a href=&quot;http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=161660.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on this forum&lt;/a&gt;. There's also, to some extent, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arpabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talk section about the ARPAbet article&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (DEC 2018): FYI, I was asking the question in the context of designing an &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanipachart.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA chart for American English&lt;/a&gt; (General American), to teach phonetics and ESL, which implies deciding just which phones to teach -- and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastEditorUserId="3548" LastEditDate="2019-12-24T22:36:30.000" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:42:19.733" Title="American English : are [ə] and [ʌ] different phonemes? (schwa vs. chevron)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2016-10-01T09:16:04.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a minimal pair to contrast /ə/ and /ʌ/, how about: &quot;subversion&quot; meaning an act of subverting, and &quot;subversion&quot; as in version 1 subversion 1.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastEditorUserId="13643" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T11:00:41.730" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T11:00:41.730" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2016-10-01T13:14:23.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stress is phonemic in English, so of course [ə] and [ʌ] are different phonemes, since only the latter is stressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T14:51:08.423" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T14:51:08.423" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2016-10-01T14:16:21.193" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a well-written argument, but I think it's mistaken to conclude that they are the same phoneme; or, more to the point, I think this is a case that highlights a limit of phoneme/allophone analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the same argument can also be used to show that /ə/ and /ʊ/ are allophones of the same phoneme: there cannot be a minimal pair because of the restriction of the stress patterns on the syllables they occur in. But then there is a problem, since there are plenty of minimal pairs distinguishing /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ (e.g. put/putt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One possible solution to this problem, rather than introducing /ə/ as a phoneme, would be to argue that /ə/ is perceptually closer to /ʌ/ than to /ʊ/, which does not match my personal intuition but seems closer to what other native English speakers tend to think.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2898" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T14:16:21.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19859" CreationDate="2016-10-01T15:14:56.913" Score="7" ViewCount="1036" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to learning all of this and had a couple of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tone languages use pitch to distinguish words. For example, in Thai&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nā with a &lt;em&gt;mid-tone&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;rice paddy&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nǎ with a &lt;em&gt;rising tone&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;thick&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intonation languages do not make such distinctions. Intonation is only used to distinguish the meaning of sentences in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“David got a new car” is a statement with falling intonation, but a question with rising intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: In tonal languages how do they distinguish meaning within their sentences or do they? I am also really curious to know if in the music of tonal languages; do they preserve the tones? If they do, is the beat in the background ignored? Or, do they not preserve the tones; then I have to wonder how the words are distinguished in the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14176" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T15:58:35.043" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T06:48:55.360" Title="Tone Languages and distinguishing meaning" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2016-10-01T15:38:39.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;[ə] and [ʌ] are allophones of a single phoneme. Schwa appears in an unstressed syllable and wedge appears in a stressed syllable. Because of this complementarity, it is not possible to find minimal pairs distinguishing the vowel. However, the analysis has to be performed on phonetic transcriptions and not an assumed phonemic reduction of the phonetics, thus the pair [ˌsʌbˈvɹ̩ʒn̩] (sub-version) and [səbˈvɹ̩ʒn̩] (subversion) is not a minimal pair, because the initial syllables differ in stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative would be to claim that stress is phonetically predictable, but is sensitive to whether or not the vowel in question is schwa (schwa cannot be stressed). Minimal pairs like the noun / verb contrast &quot;pervert&quot; [ˈpɹ̩vɹ̩t] / [pɹ̩ˈvɹ̩t] establish that stress is not phonetically predictable in English (a point that is well-known).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logic of phonemic analysis alone does not dictate that schwa and wedge &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be reduced to a single phoneme, it says that they &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;. This is a classic problem of phonemic analysis discussed in the classic paper &quot;The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems&quot; by Y.R. Chao. If you add to the theory an Occam's Razor compulsion to minimize the size of the phonemic inventory (which was also done), then you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; reduce these two phones to one phoneme. Since in phonemic analysis, phonemes are classifications of diverse sets of phones, it is a category error to think that phonemes have phonetic properties. It is however reasonable to wonder what would be a convenient way to write that phoneme: I personally like schwa, but there is nothing wrong with wedge as a letter. More languages use schwa as an official letter that use wedge, if that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your logic chart does replicate the flow of thought used in popular accounts of the concept phoneme. Phoneme choice does not &quot;change meaning&quot; (if you think about what &quot;change&quot; means, that should be clear), and failure to &quot;change meaning&quot; does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that the sounds are in free variation. The minimal pair test is an absolute test for phonemic status: if [a] and [b] appear in the same phonetic substitution frame ([bɪp] &quot;horse&quot; vs [bɪb] &quot;arrow&quot;) then the sounds are instantly proven to be distinct phonemes. If there are no such pairs, it is still possible that they can be reduced to a single underlying phoneme. The crucial question is whether some set of rules can be posited to derive the phonetic outputs: if not, then the two sounds cannot be distinguished purely by rule, and there must be two phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free variation, on the other hand, refers to the situation where the same word can be pronounced in two different ways, and there is no linguistic distinction between the pronunciations (one &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; find social distinctions, such as whether the pronunciation [ð] is in a more informal register compared to [d] (in Palauan). The key is that free variation is defined in terms of &quot;same word&quot;, not &quot;changing meaning&quot;. Different words, of course, often have different meanings, but not always (sofa, couch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T15:38:39.673" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19855" CreationDate="2016-10-01T15:53:17.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meaning of different sentences &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; frequently signaled only by tonal differences, in tone languages. An example is the contrast in Shona between &lt;em&gt;munhu akáríma&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the person who plowed&quot;, &lt;em&gt;munhu akarima&lt;/em&gt; &quot;then the person plowed&quot;, &lt;em&gt;munhu ákáríma&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the person plowed&quot; and &lt;em&gt;munhu ákárimá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the person, having plowed...&quot;. As a further example, yes-no questions can be formed in Shona by lowering a final H tone, so &lt;em&gt;ánoóná bhizá&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;He saw a horse&quot; and &lt;em&gt;ánoóná bhiza&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;Did he see a horse?&quot;. (There are also particles that can be used, and you can raise your pitch level while still maintaining the tonal contrasts of the language). This process is a tone-rule version of what some languages do with intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;how&quot;, it basically means that speakers pay attention to pitch more than they do in e.g. English, and this isn't any different from the matter of learning to control aspiration in [p] vs [pʰ]. For SE Asian languages like Thai and especially Vietnamese, there are vowel-quality (phonatory) differences that also have to be paid attention to, so it's not all pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are accommodations in the production of tone in musical performances; the details are not well-researched. Since about a third of the languages of the world are tonal, you can expect huge variation in the phonetic implementation of tone in music. Perhaps our colleague from Ithaca can contribute on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T21:48:48.467" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T21:48:48.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19855" CreationDate="2016-10-01T18:50:21.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't cite examples from tonal languages, but for a general understanding, meaning that is in some languages conveyed by intonation can alternatively expressed by lexical means or syntactic means instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;strong&gt;lexical means&lt;/strong&gt;, Alenanno already gave an example with question particles in Mandarin, which also occur in other, sometimes non-tonal languages (e.g. Finnish with the question cliticon &lt;em&gt;-ko/-kö&lt;/em&gt; which is attached to the finite verb or the constituent in question, barely making an intonational distinction between declarative and question sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example for &lt;strong&gt;syntactic means&lt;/strong&gt;, I'd like to note that apart from sentence type distinction (declarative sentence, question, command, ...), there are some more features which are expressed by intonation in English but by other means in other languages, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information structure&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English introduces focus mostly by accent, which is an intonational device:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;What did Andrea bake?  &#xA;- Andrea baked A BREAD.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Who baked a bread?  &#xA;- ANDREA baked a bread.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Hungarian uses preverbal position as a focus marker, i.e. the constituent that precedes the verb is focussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Andrea kenyer-et süt-ött&#xA;Andrea bread-ACC bake-PAST&#xA;'Andrea baked a BREAD'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;bread&lt;/em&gt; in  preverbal position and therefore in focus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Andrea süt-ött   kenyer-et&#xA;Andrea bake-PAST bread-ACC  &#xA;'ANDREA baked a bread'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;Andrea&lt;/em&gt; in preverbal position and therfore in focus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that such syntactic information structure marking is to some degree also available in English (it-cleft constructions (&lt;em&gt;It was a bread that she baked&lt;/em&gt;) for focus marking and topicalisation (&lt;em&gt;The bread she didn't bake, but the cake&lt;/em&gt;) for topic marking), but it is less prominent than marking by accent, while other languages rarely use intonation for this kind of semantic/pragmatic information but frequently or even exclusively make use of particles or syntactic devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone knows an example form a tonal language, please complement my post (or otherweise contradict it if it can't be applied to tonal languages so easily), this was just for a general explanation of what other means language can employ to differentiate semantic or pragmatic meaning if not by intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T00:03:18.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-01T19:06:16.233" Score="-3" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term [further relativized] appears in an academic monograph.  See: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19839/13923&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19839/13923&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to be a generally-used term, but I'll use it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the malt [ that lay in the house [ that Jack built]].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This is the house that Jack built.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This is the dog that the boy loved.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The dog [ that the boy loved ] died.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if the noun phrases within the relative clauses (above) can be   [further relativized] .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the dog [ that the boy loved]. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  --&gt; the boy who loved the dog, which this is. -- (Is this correct?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above relativization is correct, then so is the following one :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dog [ that the boy loved ] died. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  --&gt; the boy who loved the dog, which died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; ( But the most basic premise of the recent related thread was that this NP &quot;the boy&quot; in the latter example can not be  [further relativized]. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19839/13923&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19839/13923&lt;/a&gt; ) &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that NONE of the noun phrases within the relative clauses (in that list up top) can be   [further relativized].  Is this correct ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A hit B.&quot;  --&gt; A [that hit B].  Here the NP within the RC can be&#xA;relativized (or  [further relativized] ), yielding B [that A hit].  --&gt; (and so on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A gave X to B.&quot;  --&gt; A [that gave X to B].  X [that A gave to B].  B&#xA;[that A gave X to] &#xA;Here the NPs within the RCs can be relativized (or [further relativized] ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for such degenerate or base cases,  it seems that&#xA; NPs within  RCs can't be  [further relativized].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other simple patterns which allow such further-relativizations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; (  When i saw  the &quot;answer&quot; (the 1st version, which was worded in a  much less insulting way), my 1st reaction was -- [ This appears to be interesting and informative . . . Did i write or bring up interesting stuff to deserve this?  Maybe it's mostly thanks to leoboiko's glosses. ] )  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I made any predictions, but one could say I made 2 speculations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences in the &quot;answer&quot; seem so happy to declare / condemn  my &quot;predictions&quot; as &quot;not correct&quot;, but my 2 speculations seem to be in agreement with what is in the &quot;answer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone confirm that my 2 speculations are in agreement with what is in the &quot;answer&quot; ?  (just a comment &quot;Re: 2 spec.s, Agreement  and Agreement&quot; will do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speculation 1.  So it seems that NONE of the noun phrases within the relative clauses (in that list up top) can be  [further relativized].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speculation 2.  Except for such degenerate or base cases, it seems that NPs within RCs can't be  [further relativized].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, more importantly -- &#xA;Could someone confirm that my 2 speculations are (or seem to be) correct ? -- (just a comment &quot;[Re: 2 spec.s, Correct  and  Correct]&quot; will do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13923" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T21:19:15.223" Title="Which noun phrases within relative clauses can be [further relativized]?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19860" CreationDate="2016-10-01T20:32:51.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19825/in-english-noun-phrases-within-a-relative-clause-cannot-be-further-relativized&quot;&gt;your recent related question&lt;/a&gt;, I'll elaborate some more on Greg Lee's answer (which I think already brings the main issue of the problem quite well to the point), hoping that this should clarify your question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called Ross Constraints (&quot;Constrains on reordering transformations&quot;) are a set of constraints from around 1967 trying to capture which syntactic transformations are allowed within sentences and which not. To mention the most relevant ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The complex NP constraint (CNPC)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No element contained in a sentence dominated by a noun phrase with a lexical head noun may be moved out of that noun phrase by a transformation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically means that you can't relativise an NP (noun phrase) that is itself a relativisation of an NP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1)  a. [the man] who I saw [] yesterday  &#xA;    b. * [the man] who I believe [the rumours that [] is a murderer]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1a. is grammatical, but 1b. isn't, because &lt;code&gt;the man&lt;/code&gt; was moved out of another noun phrase (&lt;code&gt;the rumours ...&lt;/code&gt;) which is not permissible in English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The coordinate structure constraint (CSC)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a coordinate structure, no conjunct may be moved nor may any element contained in a conjunct be moved out of that conjunct.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Coordinate structures&quot; are constructions where several constituents are conjoined by words like &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;or&lt;/code&gt;, etc.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;2)  a. [the tree house] that [Mary had built [] for her son and her daugther]  &#xA;    b. [her daughter] that [Mary had built a tree house for [] ]  &#xA;    c. * [her daugther] that [Mary had built a tree house for [her son and [] ]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a-b. are okay, but 2c. isn't because the NP &lt;code&gt;her daugther&lt;/code&gt; was moved out a coordination between to NPs (&lt;code&gt;her son and her daughter&lt;/code&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The sentential subject constraint (SSC)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No element dominated by an S node may be moved out of that S if that node S is dominated by an NP which itself is immediately dominated by an S.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds a bit complicated, but is actually quite straightforward.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;3)  a. [the neighbour] who [that John played loud music] bothered []  &#xA;    b. * [the music] which [that John played loud []] bothered the neighbour  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a. is okay (though weird to say, but I don't think its ungrammatical), while 3b. is not: The NP &lt;code&gt;the music&lt;/code&gt; has been moved out of the &lt;code&gt;play&lt;/code&gt;-sentence (&quot;an S-node&quot;) which is the sentential subject (&lt;code&gt;XY bothered the neighbour&lt;/code&gt;) of the &lt;code&gt;bother&lt;/code&gt;-sentence (&quot;an NP which is itself immediately dominated by an S&quot;), which is not allowed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, even for English there are restrictions to the applicability of such constraints:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4)  a. * [Ms. Smith], [that [] lost her son]] is a tragedy  &#xA;    b.   [Ms. Smith], [that [she] lost her son]] is a tragedy    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While 4a. is ungrammatical according to the SSC (&lt;code&gt;Ms. Smith&lt;/code&gt; has been moved out of the &lt;code&gt;lost&lt;/code&gt;-sentence which is the sentential subject of the &lt;code&gt;tragedy&lt;/code&gt;-sentence), 4b. is not due to the so-called resumptive pronoun (&lt;code&gt;she&lt;/code&gt;), a pronoun which was left in place when dislocating &lt;code&gt;Ms. Smith&lt;/code&gt; to the left side of the sentence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is where the terminology that Greg Lee also mentioned, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;copying transormations&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (where a &quot;copy&quot; in shape of a resumptive pronoun is left) vs. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;chopping transformations&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (where the NP is simply &quot;cut out&quot; of the sentence), comes into play.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;These constraints were supposed to be universals, but in fact are not: According to my understanding, the sentences 1) and 3) (I don't know about 2)) are, though not in English, allowed in Japanese.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are a lot more problems to these constraints and over the years the formulations have been heavily revised (after all the constraints in their original are half a century old), but for the sake of your question as far as the differences between English and Japanese are concerned, one could narrow it down to saying that these are the cases where relativisation is not permitted, while in most other environments it is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To come back to your question: No, your predictions are not correct.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;5)  a. [[The dog]ᵢ [that the boy loved []ᵢ ]] died      &#xA;    b. This is [[the dog]ᵢ [that the boy loved []ᵢ ]]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases (the dog as a subject or as an object to the sentence) there is no problem with relativising &lt;code&gt;the dog&lt;/code&gt;, and there is no problem either with further attaching relative clauses inside the relativisation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;6)  a. [[The dog]ᵢ [that the boy [that lives next to my house] loved []ᵢ ]] died  &#xA;    b. This is [[the dog]ᵢ [that the boy [that lives next to my house] loved []ᵢ ]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relativisaiton in the sense of recursively embedding relative clauses in another relative clause is not restricted in any way, you could do this forever:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    c. [[The dog]ᵢ [that the boy [that lives next to my house [that I've inherited from my father [who I admired]]] loved []ᵢ ]] died  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is, however, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; permitted, is moving these elements out of their relative clauses and make them the main relativised element (the head of the complex construction) themselves:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;7)  a. * [They boy]ⱼ that [[the dog]ᵢ [that []ⱼ ... loved []ᵢ] died]  &#xA;    b. * This is [my house]ⱼ [that [[the dog]ᵢ [that the boy [that lives next to []ⱼ ] loved []ᵢ ] died]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problematic elements (&lt;code&gt;[the boy]ⱼ&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;[my house]ⱼ&lt;/code&gt;) are moved to the front by relativisation, leaving a gap (&lt;code&gt;[]ⱼ&lt;/code&gt;) that is embedded in a construction that already relativised another element (&lt;code&gt;[the dog]ᵢ&lt;/code&gt;), which is not allowed.        &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understood the cited passage in your other quesiton correctly, this is what makes the difference to Japanese.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two wrap up the main point of my answer again:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As I understand it (and as I suppose Greg Lee understood it), the wording in the paragraph you cited is imprecise and probably be the source of the problem. NPs within RCs &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be relativized, in fact infinetlely so, as demonstrated by sentences 6). The only thing that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; possible is movement of the embedded relativized element to the beginning of the sentence to make them the head of the whole construction, as shown in sentences 7).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That &quot;NPs within RCs can't be relativized&quot; is not true, and not what the paragraph wanted to say. What the paragraph wanted to say instead (and expressed very ambiguously, I admit), is that movement of the embedded relativized constituents to the front of the sentence is not possible under some conditions, namely the ones described by the mentioned constraints.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My answer is that I think the issue results from a misinterpretation of an ambiguously written statement, and that what the paragraph actually was meant to say is what I described with the constraints (which are the answer to the question &quot;Which NPs within RCs can be relativized&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T14:02:53.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19866" CreationDate="2016-10-02T10:37:24.837" Score="3" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a quest to understand the tenants of phonology, I've been reading up on autosegmental phonology. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.452.9696&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; article, Browman &amp;amp; Goldstein write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus. we represent linguistic structures in terms of coordinated&#xA;  articulatory movements. called gestures. that are themselves organized&#xA;  into a gestural score that resembles an autosegmental representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also provide a symbolic representation of a hypothetical gestural score for the world &quot;palm&quot;, where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the gestures in the gestural score are organized into articulatory tiers. where &gt; the tiers are defined using the notion of articulatory independence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fSLH1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fSLH1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't understand the explanatory value of this &quot;gestural score&quot;. How does it support the claims of autosegmental phonology (or deny the segment)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be grateful for any insight on this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T19:08:44.527" Title="What is meant by &quot;gestural score&quot; in Autosegmental Phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2016-10-02T14:11:05.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;complementary distribution mean that the allophones of a particular phoneme occur in different phonetic environment , the phonetic environment determines which of the allophones is used in pronouncing a word . For example ,the two allophones of the phoneme  /p/, namely , [pH] and [p-]are in complementary distribution the first occurs at the end of the word,as in Pat and Pot, the second may occur at the end of the ward   , as in help. the fact of their complementary distribution means that these allophones  do not occur in minimal pairs in English.             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14182" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-02T14:21:35.603" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T14:21:35.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-02T16:35:41.747" Score="3" ViewCount="4192" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recording and English translation attached bellow.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 3 months ago, my Vietnamese friend shocked many people when she suddenly spoke to them in an unknown language after a normal night sleep. It sounded like a mixture of Korean and Japanese but certainly not of any common language. From the unique phonetic nature of this language, I found Pali to the closest match yet not quite the exact case. I also noticed the translations are usually much longer then the source text, even from a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone thought it was a joke only to then realize how impossible it is to speak out random chunks of verbal texts with inherent structure and vocabulary. We tried asking her to translate a long sentence with a hidden &quot;keyword&quot; in it like &quot;&lt;em&gt;Let's eat something and go to &lt;strong&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; to check the consistency of the words she were using, then waited a day and asked her to do another one with the same word but different sentence. She got it right all the times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is completely &lt;strong&gt;fluent&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;confident&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;responsive&lt;/strong&gt; while speaking. Her face gestures and eye contact are much more &lt;strong&gt;vibrant&lt;/strong&gt; compared to her normal Vietnamese. She also becomes much more emotional to profound scenes in certain movies. She can translate any body of text into this language but sometimes struggles with translation of single word or phrase, especially when purposely asked to do so for the sake of curiosity of the listeners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She stated that the words &quot;flow&quot; in her head, so verbalization is completely unconscious and effortless. She has &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; experience with any phonetically related language (like the above mentioned Pali).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from this, she's completely normal. Her Vietnamese and English (which is her second language) are kept intact. She's 20.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the recordings when I told her to speak out a series of normal words and sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;House | Today is a great day | Black cat | He was born in 1824 | What&#xA;  is the meaning of life | I love you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1340882/Work/B/Recording.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Recording&lt;/a&gt; (single file for all words, separated by a short pause, please note that each individual has rather long and complex translation with multiple syllables from a single short word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: I asked her to do 2 more voice recordings, one excerpt from Stephen Covey's &lt;strong&gt;The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People&lt;/strong&gt; and the other is simply a random speech (about the rain and jogging in the morning, from what she said).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1340882/Work/B/Inside%20out.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Excerpt&lt;/a&gt;  | &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1340882/Work/B/Recording%202.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Random speech&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In more than 25 years of working with people in business, university,&#xA;  and marriage and family settings, I have come in contact with many&#xA;  individuals who have achieved an incredible degree of outward success,&#xA;  but have found themselves struggling with an inner hunger, a deep need&#xA;  for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy, growing&#xA;  relationships with other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14183" LastEditorUserId="14183" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T03:27:30.500" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T17:05:37.217" Title="My friend suddenly speaks an unknown language after sleep. Need help with recognition" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19862" CreationDate="2016-10-02T19:08:44.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim is not that Articulatory Phonology &quot;supports&quot; Autosegmental Phonology, rather, it is a factual recognition that ArtPho has a certain resemblance to AutoPho. The graphic representation is introduced in Goldsmith's dissertation in (2) of ch. 1, where he gives the &quot;score for the orchestration of 'pin'&quot;, contrasting the standard segmental view with a physical &quot;score&quot;. Chapter 4 then talks about &quot;laryngeal gestures&quot;. B&amp;amp;G pick up from that perspective, and try to say in detail how this kind of graph can be related to actual physical measurements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Goldsmith points out (ch. 4), without autosegmental phonology, the linguistic existence of segments is axiomatic, but with autosegmental phonology, it becomes an empirical hypothesis. The reason is that Goldsmith's gestural score is also a conceivable physical output, so the obvious question to ask is whether something else (other than sheer logical necessity, the need to have a way to talk about what is produced) motivates having segments. Phonologists generally hold that there is something – grammatical computations – that do motivate segments. The ArtPhon program has been to subsume as much of phonology as possible under the kind of &quot;gesture-sliding&quot; analysis that they give in that and other papers. (For example reanalyzing apparent category-changing assimilations of /t/ to [p] before [p] not as change of thing, but an earlier initiation of labial closure which obscures the lingual gesture). There is, not entirely incidentally, a de-linguistification, of phonology in ArtPho, where the goal is to reduce at least phonetic implementation to a general motor control system, similar to walking or chewing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T19:08:44.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19865" CreationDate="2016-10-03T05:11:34.037" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, this is mostly not a direct answer to your question. (Skip to the end for the more answer-y part.) I'm posting this as an answer since it's too long for the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking a previously unknown language is called “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoglossy&quot;&gt;xenoglossy&lt;/a&gt;.” As that Wikipedia article states, there is no scientic evidence that this actually happens. Wikipedia cites a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thomason/papers/xenogl.pdf&quot;&gt;paper by the linguist Sarah Thomason&lt;/a&gt; that discusses cases of apparent xenoglossy like you have reported (i.e. cases where to certain non-linguist observers, it &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; that a person is speaking in a foreign language); in particular, ones that have been reported by Ian Stevenson. Thomason found that &lt;strong&gt;none of the subjects actually showed the kind of linguistic knowledge that we would expect if they really could speak another language.&lt;/strong&gt; In general, the person is actually nowhere near fluent and has extremely limited vocabulary. In many cases, there were plausible ways for the subjects to have prior exposure to the language or to related languages, picking up a few words or a general idea of the sound of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, I don't believe your friend is actually &quot;completely fluent&quot; and &quot;can translate any body of text into this language.&quot; It may seem this way to you, but this really doesn't seem to be something that happens, and there's no plausible explanation for how it could happen. You should consider alternative interpretations for the sounds you’ve observed your friend making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Bron's comment brought up the idea that she is &quot;faking&quot; it and you replied that you don't think this is true. Even if you think you can rule out this possibility, it doesn't mean that she can actually do what she thinks she can do (speak in another language). Thomason does not conclude that the subjects she discusses were all frauds. Stevenson apparently went to great lengths to show that this was implausible in most of the cases he presents, and Thomason mainly agrees with him about this. Your friend may not intend to deceive you; it's possible that this behavior is due to a mental condition that she doesn’t understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a case like this where it’s not even apparent what the language is, it seems quite likely that at least some of it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia&quot;&gt;glossolalia&lt;/a&gt; where there is no actual structure or meaning. You say you’ve checked for the presence of “key words,” but even if you’ve found these, it doesn’t show that all or even most of what she says is meaningful. Another thing that seems to me indicative of glossolalia is that you say her “translations” are generally much longer than the source text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My advice for attempts at recognition&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how much this is glossolalia, there may be nothing at all to recognize. (The only evidence you have that it isn't all glossolalia are these &quot;consistency&quot; tests you say you've carried out.) If your friend has no prior exposure to Pali, I wouldn't bother trying to investigate that, as it's likely a dead end. You refer to Korean and Japanese: are these languages that she is aware of? I don't mean to ask if she's studied them or anything: Thomason mentions in her paper the possibility that people identify certain distinctive sounds and vocabulary items just by passive exposure to certain foreign languages (for example, I've probably heard enough Japanese to do a vaguely convincing imitation to someone who doesn't speak it). In particular, you and user6726 both mentioned that the recordings seem somewhat similar to Korean, so if she's had any exposure to that, it's possible that it influenced her current vocalizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really see any advantage to further investigating this possibility, though: at worst, I have an idea it might encourage delusional behavior or something like that. It doesn't sound like this phenomenon has been, or is likely to be, of any benefit to your friend. But I don't know your friend, and I'm not a psychologist, and you haven't asked for my advice in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T05:24:38.043" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T05:24:38.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19874" CreationDate="2016-10-03T08:05:55.460" Score="2" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Praat and tryingt to get the selected region in Praat script using the the amplitude values i.e. when amplitude gets larger than a threshold then I should start capturing the region and stop when it falls down. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gw0jQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gw0jQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I know&lt;/strong&gt; is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is something called Shimmer (amplitude perturbation) which measures the difference in amplitude from cycle to cycle. Once again, this is a useful measure in speech pathology, as pathological voices will often have a higher shimmer than healthy voices (although again, both healthy and unhealthy voices will have some shimmer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Voice_3__Shimmer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; link but couldn't get anything to measure the shimmer in praat script.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Someone please guide me in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastEditorUserId="13819" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T05:06:08.373" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T16:31:44.123" Title="How to find amplitude values on each time unit in a sound file" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19030" CreationDate="2016-10-03T12:37:19.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to agree with Anixx; &quot;only&quot; is an adjective in 2., and an adverb in all other sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next question would then be, &quot;but are adverbs actually a part of speech, or do we lump several different parts of speech into the category of 'adverb', making it incongruent?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T12:37:19.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19939" CreationDate="2016-10-03T15:09:32.187" Score="2" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use the algorithm in Qiu et al., 2011, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/coli_a_00034&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Opinion Word Expansion and Target Extraction through Double Propagation&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for my research. However, in the paper, they use Minipar for dependency parsing and I would prefer to use Stanford Parser.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I found the description of the dependencies &lt;a href=&quot;https://gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/splitch18.html#sec:parsers:minipar:GR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;from Minipar&lt;/a&gt; but I find them very vague. For Stanford Parser, I am referring to &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/en/dep/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the list here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am not a linguist, I am having trouble finding the mapping myself. The list of the dependencies that I need to map and my best guesses for the matching dependencies is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mod: probably amod, also nummod?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pnmod: possibly nmod, also nmod:npmod? nmod:poss? nmod:tmod?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;subj: probably nsubj, could also include nsubjpass, csubj and csubjpass&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;s: no idea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obj: probably dobj&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obj2: iobj?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;desc: Not even mentioned in the GATE list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14193" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-03T15:24:30.230" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:34:47.867" Title="Mapping Minipar dependencies to Stanford Parser dependencies" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19870" CreationDate="2016-10-03T20:55:15.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The variations shimmer refers to are much smaller than what it looks like you are after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you seem to want is most easily achieved with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__To_TextGrid__silences____.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;To TextGrid (silences)...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; command for Sound objects. You'll have to adjust the intensity thresholds, but it should do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-10-04T13:37:44.933" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T13:37:44.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-04T09:41:21.570" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking to know about the distribution of word senses, of a particular word in a corpus. How often a word sense will occur out of all the occurrences of that word with any meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf&amp;#39;s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Zipf's law&lt;/a&gt; applied we would have a rule relating how often each word sense occurs, that says something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The most frequent sense of some given word (generally) occur roughly twice as often as the second most frequent word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not in particular looking for Zipf Distribution, though, any distribution will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general impression of sense counts in Semcor/WordNet suggest that suggests that the most common sense hugely dominates. I have not run and proper regressions to check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a paper I can cite to back up statements about incredibly rare, the rare word senses are compared to the common ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10014" LastEditorUserId="10014" LastEditDate="2016-10-05T10:40:04.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:40:04.693" Title="Distribution of the set of meanings of a given word, in a corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19855" CreationDate="2016-10-04T22:05:04.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many good points have been made in other answers and comments, but I think we need to unpack some of the assumptions (implicit and explicit) made in your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ASSUMPTION 1: The world's languages can be divided into the binary categories of &quot;tone languages&quot; and &quot;intonational languages&quot;. This is false. All languages have intonation. A subset of those languages employ lexical tone--defined broadly as the use of pitch at an abstract level to encode lexical contrasts (i.e., meanings of words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ASSUMPTION 2: Pitch is not used in non-tone languages to distinguish word meaning. Also false. Languages like English, which has lexical stress, use pitch acoustically to signal stress, which in turn can distinguish otherwise homophonous words with different meanings. For example, &lt;em&gt;ivy&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;I.V.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;intravenous device&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ASSUMPTION 3: Pitch is the only thing that encodes utterance type (like question vs. statement) in non-tone languages like English. False. Most questions in English are actually NOT cued by pitch. Wh-questions--those starting with words like &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;, etc., generally have an intonation that is similar to declarative statements. In such questions, it is the presence of the wh-word at the beginning and the inversion of the word order that signals the question. Yes-no questions most often also include changes like the inclusion of DO and the inflection for tense on DO (&quot;Did you go to the store&quot;), and while their intonation is often rising and distinct from that of statements, it doesn't have to be--I can say &quot;Did you go to the store&quot; with a pitch contour that goes down at the end if I'm being somewhat insistent and confrontational. The only type of question that is consistently cued solely by pitch is the intonational question--&quot;You went to the store?&quot;--which can be echoing a statement someone else just made or expressing disbelief or surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ASSUMPTION 4: Pitch can only cue one thing in an utterance at a time. Again, false. Even in non-tone languages like English, pitch encodes many things in an utterance simultaneously. For example, take the utterance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You returned Maria's IVY to the store?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind of a weird utterance, but the pitch contour on the word &lt;em&gt;ivy&lt;/em&gt; is simultaneously encoding three things. One, it's signaling that the stress of the word is on the first syllable, thus distinguishing it from the word &lt;em&gt;I.V.&lt;/em&gt; and effectively encoding lexical information. Two, it's signaling that the sentence is a question (if it were a statement, we'd get a high pitch point on the &quot;I&quot;, but instead we get a low pitch point there because it's a question). Three, it's putting focus on the word &lt;em&gt;ivy&lt;/em&gt;, letting the listener know that the speaker is asking about the item that was returned and not, say, where it was returned or whose item it was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, all that said, the question remains--if all languages have intonation, and if some of those languages also have lexical tone, then how is pitch used in those languages with lexical tone to encode intonational functions? That is a good question, and not one that can be answered with any generalization--in other words, it depends on the language.&lt;/strong&gt; My response to ASSUMPTION 4 above gives you some clues as to what some of the logical possibilities are, and @user6726 provides some good points and examples in this regard. Different languages reconcile tonal and intonational pitch cues differently. Please see my responses to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4242/how-do-sentence-intonation-and-syllable-based-tone-interact-in-tone-languages&quot;&gt;How do sentence intonation and (syllable-based) tone interact in tone languages?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/7151/are-there-tonal-languages-which-use-a-rising-intonation-for-questions&quot;&gt;Are there tonal languages which use a rising intonation for questions?&lt;/a&gt;, respectively, for more on that issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your questions about singing in tone languages, that's been covered elsewhere, as @fdb and I note in the comments above. But here's a hint: if lexical meaning hinged entirely on pitch in tone languages, how could speakers of those language ever communicate with whispered speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T22:10:11.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-04T23:43:39.637" Score="0" ViewCount="1389" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing an exercise where I am determining the most likely corpus from a number of corpora when given a test sentence. I am trying to test an and-1 (laplace) smoothing model for this exercise.  I generally think I have the algorithm down, but my results are very skewed. I am aware that and-1 is not optimal (to say the least), but I just want to be certain my results are from the and-1 methodology itself and not my attempt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the And-1/Laplace smoothing technique seeks to avoid 0 probabilities by, essentially, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Therefore, a bigram that is found to have a zero probability becomes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1/V, V=the number of types &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the probability of every other bigram becomes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; P(B|A) = Count(W[i-1][W[i])/(Count(W[i-1])+V) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would then take a sentence to test and break each into bigrams and test them against the probabilities (doing the above for 0 probabilities), then multiply them all together to get the final probability of the sentence occurring. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am implementing this in Python. My code looks like this, all function calls are verified to work: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; #return is a counter of tuples containing ngrams: {('A','B'):C} &#xA; #this means ('A','B') means (B|A) in probabilistic terms &#xA; bigrams[0]=getBigrams(corpus[0]) &#xA; ... &#xA; bigrams[n]=getBigrams(corpus[n]) &#xA;&#xA; #return is a dictionary of the form P['A']=C &#xA; unigrams[0]=getUnigrams(corpus[0]) &#xA; ... &#xA; unigrams[N]=getUnigrams(corpus[n]) &#xA;&#xA; #generate bigram probabilities, return is P('A','B')=p, add one is done &#xA; prob[0]=getAddOneProb(unigrams[0],bigrams[0]) &#xA; ... &#xA; prob(n)=getAddOneProb(unigrams[n],bigrams[n]) &#xA;&#xA; for sentence in test: &#xA;      bi=getBigrams(sentence) &#xA;      uni=getUnigrams(sentence) &#xA;      P[0]=...=P[n]=1 #set to 1 &#xA;      for b in bi: &#xA;           tup=b &#xA;           try: &#xA;                P[0]*=prob[tup] &#xA;           except KeyError: &#xA;                P[0]=(1/len(unigrams[0]) &#xA;           #do this for all corpora &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the then I would compare all corpora, P[0] through P[n] and find the one with the highest probability &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My results aren't that great but I am trying to understand if this is a function of poor coding, incorrect implementation, or inherent and-1 problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14171" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T08:04:28.017" Title="Add-1 laplace smoothing for bigram implementation8" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19855" CreationDate="2016-10-05T06:48:55.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spoke randomly chosen sentences in Cantonese but with a monotone to a Chinese friend, and she understood easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14029" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T06:48:55.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T08:04:16.203" Score="-2" ViewCount="942" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know, besides Modern Standard Arabic as spoken in Egypt, how many distinct Arabic alphabets (I assume each Arabic-speaking country will have its own Arabic alphabet, with a lot of overlap, and a few extra phonological symbols, such as, say, a thaa with four dots above instead of two, or a baa with three dots below to make a p sound) exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please provide me with a list of all such countries (I realize some countries will have a total overlap, whereas others, such as several close to India, perhaps, will have a partial overlap). I would like to have a list of all such countries with their extra symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I would like to know how the Unicode standard accounts for these differences (as far as Arabic is concerned). A list of codes next to the symbols, listed by country though, would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T08:57:26.787" Title="How many Arabic(-derived) alphabets exist?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19882" CreationDate="2016-10-05T08:57:26.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, “Modern Standard Arabic” is not &quot;spoken in Egypt&quot;, or indeed in any country. It is used only for writing and for reading aloud from a written text. The spoken language in every Arab country is the local dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your question: There is only one Arabic alphabet, but there are diacritics to indicate the non-Arabic sounds occurring in languages like Persian, Pashto, Urdu and other languages written with Arabic script. Occasionally these are also used to write Arabic dialects. But the basic battery of bare letters is the same in all Arabic-based writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T08:57:26.787" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19885" CreationDate="2016-10-05T09:41:30.240" Score="0" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the final alif maksura of &lt;a href=&quot;http://Habibullaah%20Kalakaani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Habibullaah Kalakaani &lt;/a&gt; read as a ya? If so, then why doesn't it have two dots beneath, or is the transcription wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:10:55.530" Title="Why is the Arabic alif maksura sometimes read as a ya" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19884" CreationDate="2016-10-05T10:10:55.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Arab countries (e.g. Egypt) final ى is written without any dots, regardless of whether it is pronounced /ī/ or /ā/. This is also the spelling convention for Persian and Urdu. But in some Arab countries (e.g. Syria and Lebanon) it is usual to write ي if it is pronounced /ī/ and ى if it is pronounced /ā/. Usage is not standardised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:10:55.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19931" CreationDate="2016-10-05T10:24:25.127" Score="2" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know, besides Arabic itself, how many other separate languages (not including dialects) share the same letters with Arabic? I would like to have a complete list of all such languages (as I can seem to choose some of these from my keyboard's language settings, but I guess the list I have would be incomplete). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious as to how these would work: I guess all of them would have no short vowels transcribed (with only long vowels appearing), feature glottal stops, etc. So, they should sound and be written similarly, despite featuring different vocabularies? What about the grammar they share, would it be similar (eg. Verb-Subject-Object structures)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these languages in question have close to zero word overlap? Do they have any overlap at all with Arabic, and if so, what percentage would each of these have in common? If Arabic is the &quot;Latin&quot; of these separate languages (and this claim may also be false, sorry for my ignorance), then what percentage of words are borrowed from Arabic (as &quot;loan words&quot;?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in these &quot;language demographics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT: I am asking how many contemporary languages use the Arabic-script (with any of a small number of variations) as an official (or pseudo-official) writing system, and what is the list.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2020-02-22T04:02:13.473" LastActivityDate="2020-02-22T04:02:13.473" Title="How many languages are there which use the Arabic Script, besides Arabic?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T11:00:14.047" Score="0" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;In view of the fact that Arabic omits the diacritics for short vowels and the like, does this pose an extra challenge for text to speech systems for the  Arabic language? How easy is it to resolve these challenges?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-10-05T12:21:52.263" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T08:02:47.263" Title="Text to Speech Systems for Arabic" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19887" CreationDate="2016-10-05T17:20:16.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, lack of vowels or diacritic vowel marks is not a particular problem for text-to-speech systems, which usually make use of a dictionary of phonetic transcriptions anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very few languages have a so tight mapping between writing and speech that correct pronounciation can be deduced by its written representation alone. Without a phonetic transcription dictionary, even English would be nearly impossible to pronounce. Just compare words like earth, hear, heart and break and then try to find a rule for how 'ea' is supposed to be pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5165" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T17:20:16.417" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T19:29:37.890" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard of proof in linguistics like there is in other sciences? How do linguists determine if something is true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because grammarians disagree on a lot of things. It's to the point where I've stopped asking questions. No two people say the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14127" LastEditorUserId="14196" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T06:33:47.230" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T22:05:01.407" Title="Can linguistics be proven?" Tags="&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T21:46:46.257" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a reliable test that can distinguish complements from adjuncts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14127" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T21:46:46.257" Title="How do you distinguish complements/adjuncts?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-10-09T04:09:54.397" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19289" CreationDate="2016-10-06T02:03:15.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to argue that even in English adjectives come after the noun. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blue car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The car my aunt bought yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The car for handicapped drivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in English, phrasal adjectives come after nouns. If we take generative grammar as a valid model, then either the adjectives are fronted when they are single words, or they are postponed when they are phrases. As there are far more languages where both kinds of adjectives come after nouns than languages where both come before names (Japanese, I'm told, is one), it is quite probable that the first hypothesis is closer to the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And I am curious if there is any language out there where single-word adjectives come after nouns, but phrasal adjectives precede them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T02:26:57.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-06T03:37:39.130" Score="0" ViewCount="542" Body="&lt;p&gt;In just about every respect r behaves like the two glides: w and j. So Why exactly is it not classed as a glide? It is particularly its intrusive behaviour that makes me wonder why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastEditorUserId="13761" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T09:25:07.260" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T16:04:36.530" Title="Why is r not a glide?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19894" CreationDate="2016-10-06T10:06:39.107" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does it matter?  If we start calling it a glide, does that predict it can be intrusive?  How?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, in &lt;strong&gt;Preliminaries to Speech Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;, IIRC, an acoustic account was given for classifying r/l as both consonantal and vocalic, as compared to the glides, which have neither property.  Something about having zeros in the spectrum and having periodic properties.  I don't believe in acoustic features, so I have a hard time caring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T10:06:39.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19890" CreationDate="2016-10-06T11:04:23.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To tell whether a theory is true, you compare its predictions with the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, TG predicts that a constituent can be extracted from just a single conjunct, but not from both conjuncts of a coordinate construction, which as Ross showed is wrong.  GPSG, describes extraction by distinguishing (with slash) the syntactic category of constituents with extractions, which correctly predicts both Ross's Coordinate Structure Constraint and his across-the-board condition (since only constituents of the same category can be coordinated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, my monostratal phonological (MP) theory (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception/15156#15156&quot;&gt;eliminating intermediary forms&lt;/a&gt;) correctly predicts that phonological rules are transitively ordered, while the standard theory of Generative Phonology makes no such prediction (though it assumes transitive ordering).  The proof is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use Kiparsky's classification to define the &quot;before&quot; relation for rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A rule &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is before a rule &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; iff &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; feeds &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; bleeds &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is counterfed by &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is counterbled by &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In MP, rules are either input conditioned or output conditioned.  Only output conditioned rules are fed or bled.  Input conditioned rules are counterfed or counterbled.  This implies that &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is before &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, as just defined, when either &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is not output conditioned or &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; is output conditioned, which in turn is to say that &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; is output conditioned materially implies that &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; is output conditioned.  The material implication relation of logic is a transitive relation.  QED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T11:04:23.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19890" CreationDate="2016-10-06T12:31:06.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proven? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sense of a mathematical proof: Definitely not. There are no axioms and definitions to build linguistics as a part of mathematics. And even if there were some axiomatisations of subsystems of linguistics: How do they relate to natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is linguistics a science in the sense of Karl Popper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e., does it consist of hypotheses that can be falsified but observations on natural languages?—I'd say, partly. There is a branch of linguistics, sometimes called Language Science, that can be considered a science in this sense. But there are other parts of linguistics, that are more like Humanities. And than there is a large part of Linguistics that is simply descriptive (think of all the field workers documenting lesser known or completely unresourced languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T12:31:06.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19289" CreationDate="2016-10-06T14:05:11.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of word order AN vs. NA is a well researched topic in typology. The result may surprise you: English is in the minority position of being an AN language, NA languages are far more frequent. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WALS survey&lt;/a&gt; the proportion AN:NA = 878:373 (with 110 cases of no dominant order and 5 cases of no adjectives modifying nouns at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T14:05:11.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19894" CreationDate="2016-10-06T16:04:36.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the language (note that there are many kinds of &quot;r&quot; and IPA has a wealth of r-like letters to indicate some of those differences). In very many languages, [r] or [ɾ] (etc.) is not treated as a glide, because it acts differently from glides. For example, onset clusters in Chinese can include glides, but not &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. There is a common syllabification rule that syllables can end with glide plus consonant, but not liquid or nasal plus consonant, and &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; acts like a linquid rather than a glide. However English [ɹ] is rather different. In terms of features, &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is usually [+consonantal] (which has to do with there being a constriction in the vocal tract smaller than a certain size), but English [ɹ] is very unconstricted and it is [-consonantal]. So it does in fact act like a glide, and &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; treated as a glide. The moral of the story is that not all &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;s are the same, and not all treatments of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; are the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T16:04:36.530" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-06T16:54:55.767" Score="3" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the difference between them?&#xA;I've seen people say that prepositions connect words and conjunctions connect syntagms and clauses. Is this definition accurate?&#xA;Is there any linguist who carefully explain this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13086" LastEditorUserId="13086" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T18:26:19.570" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T18:26:19.570" Title="What is the difference between a conjunction and a preposition?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19900" CreationDate="2016-10-06T18:00:10.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conjuctions&lt;/strong&gt;, as you say, connect sentences and clauses, but also phrases and single words. Examples are &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;or&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;because&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;neither ... nor&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;rather ... than&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Single-word conjunctions are usually placed inbetween the two parts they combine, such as in &lt;code&gt;[the man] *and* [the woman]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[Mary is not at home] or [she is already asleep]&lt;/code&gt;, multi-word conjunctions with the first part in front of the first conjunct and the second part in front of the second one (such as in &lt;code&gt;neither [do I want to talk] nor [do I have the time])&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Conjunctions coordinate elements of the same type and of more or less equal imporatance, such as two sentences, two noun phrases, etc, where the conjoined phrase is of the same type as before (&lt;code&gt;[the man] and [the woman]&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; two noun phrases combine to a new noun phrase), &lt;code&gt;[Either we get some food] or [we go home]&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; two sentences combine to a new sentence).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prepositions&lt;/strong&gt; express relations, mostly w.r.t. time (&lt;code&gt;before&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;after&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;in&lt;/code&gt;, ...) and place (&lt;code&gt;over&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;behind&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;into&lt;/code&gt; etc.), but also other semantic roles (such as &lt;code&gt;of&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;to&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;for&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Prepositions always combine with noun phrases (i.e. simple nouns, complex nouns and pronouns, such as &lt;code&gt;a house&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;the first half of the year&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;him&lt;/code&gt;), which are called their complements.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pre-positions occur by definition in front of their complement; a more general term is &lt;code&gt;adposition&lt;/code&gt; (including both prepositions and postpositions, an example of the latter would be &lt;code&gt;ago&lt;/code&gt;, however the vast majority of adpositions in English are prepositions). A prepositional phrase will therefore always have the form &lt;code&gt;Prep + noun phrase&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Prepositional phrases add additional, usually optional information to a noun phrase or verb phrase, such as &lt;code&gt;the candles [on the table]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;a gift [for him]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;she left [before noon]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some words may be able to function both as conjunctions and as prepositions, such as in Alex B.'s example &lt;code&gt;He left just before [sunrise]&lt;/code&gt; (preposition) vs. &lt;code&gt;[He had left the house] before [I arrived]&lt;/code&gt; (conjunction).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conjunctions connect sentences, clauses, phrase, single words of the same type and equal importance, where the conjoined phrase is of &#xA;the same type as the individual parts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepositions express relations, mostly w.r.t time and place, and always occur in front of a noun phrase. Prepositional phrases&#xA;usually add optional information to an action or object.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T15:08:16.170" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T15:08:16.170" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19904" CreationDate="2016-10-06T21:09:56.373" Score="4" ViewCount="577" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European sound change known as Brugmann's Law states that PIE *o became &lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt; in an open syllable in Indo-Iranian. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brugmann%27s_law&quot;&gt;Wiki page&lt;/a&gt; calls the law &quot;controversial&quot; and says that &quot;Brugmann's Law has few supporters nowadays&quot;. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that, on the contrary, Brugmann's Law is widely accepted among Indo-Europeanists. For example, Fortson's &lt;em&gt;Indo-European Language and Culture&lt;/em&gt; and Weiss's &lt;em&gt;Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin&lt;/em&gt; both mention it as a fact, without any reference to a possible controversy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how controversial is Brugmann's Law? Does it have &quot;few supporters&quot; as per Wiki, or is there a (near-)consensus on it as I've always assumed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T21:35:27.153" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:02:21.197" Title="Is Brugmann's Law controversial?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19902" CreationDate="2016-10-06T22:09:43.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my professional field (Indo-Iranian studies) Brugmann's law is universally accepted as a basic sound law. The exceptions (all laws have exceptions) can mostly be explained by paradigmatic leveling. See for example: Hoffmann/Forssman, &lt;em&gt;Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre&lt;/em&gt;, p. 61. Who wrote the wikipedia article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T23:01:57.317" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T23:01:57.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19902" CreationDate="2016-10-06T23:50:25.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has always been rather controversial; &quot;&lt;em&gt;long disputed and now refuted&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, as the famous Dutch Indologist Jan Gonda (Gonda 1971) sarcastically noted (cited as in Collinge 1985: 16). It seems though it is much less controversial now, at least among IE linguists. But the jury is still out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kurylowicz, Meillet, and Szemerenyi rejected it (not a bad company?). Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/indo.1913.32.issue-s1/if-1913-0116/if-1913-0116.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brugmann himself&lt;/a&gt; eventually gave up on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Kiparsky&lt;/a&gt; (Stanford) argues BL is a morphophonological process, not a phonetic law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lubotsky (1997) summarized its history quite succinctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;From the very beginning, however, BL was the subject of passionate debates.&lt;/strong&gt; Whereas such scholars as de Saussure, Streitberg and Osthoff&#xA;  accepted BL [...], &lt;strong&gt;the resistance was growing&lt;/strong&gt;. More and more counter-examples were found so that Hermann &lt;strong&gt;Hirt (1913)&lt;/strong&gt; was eventually able to present a list of 67 items. The large amount of exceptions and the severe criticism of his colleagues forced Brugmann to withdraw his Law. &lt;strong&gt;In 1921, Hirt wrote: &quot;Das Gesetz ist tot&lt;/strong&gt;, und es hat jedenfalls nicht zum Vorteil der Wissenschaft&#xA;  gelebt, denn wir sind dadurch verhindert worden, eine ganze Reihe von Problemen in Angriff zu nehmen&quot; (19).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kurylowicz was able to give another life to BL in &lt;a href=&quot;http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/OXVU1:LSCOP_OX:oxfaleph012393813&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his 1927 article&lt;/a&gt; - even though he changed his mind about it twenty years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027286383-07bru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collinge 1985&lt;/a&gt; notes that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yet, despite the author's own renunciation, &lt;strong&gt;fighters on the law's side [...] continued to emerge - and still so continue&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (p. 14);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, to paraphrase Mayrhofer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40847740?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mayrhofer 1951&lt;/a&gt;), &quot;the mummy has been brought into the light.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. &quot;So bedarf es einer Rechtfertigung [...] die Mumie des &quot;toten&quot; Gesetzes noch einmal ans Licht zu ziehen&quot; (Mayrhofer 1951: 9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Collinge 1985 for more details and a good laugh (I enjoyed his unusually candid style of writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keydana.de/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Götz Keydana&lt;/a&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keydana.de/download.php?id=Keydana_Brugmann_SIE_2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keydana 2011&lt;/a&gt;) writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhINg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhINg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is &quot;the most adequate and most widely accepted version&quot; of BL (p. 2) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his 2011 paper, he argues that by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;assuming BL as a sound law of PIIr. seems to be the best and least costly&#xA;  way to deal with Vedic and Old Iranian /a/ from */o/..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://philpapers.org/rec/KIPCVP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kiparsky 2010&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; who, on the other hand, writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;With Kuryłowicz, I believe &lt;strong&gt;it is not a sound change, but a morphophonological process&lt;/strong&gt; that has been added to the inherited ablaut system within Indo-Iranian.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2016-10-08T00:02:21.197" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:02:21.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19907" CreationDate="2016-10-07T22:59:23.820" Score="0" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm uncertain how stress works with two vowels in a row,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;so I used a regex to grab some words out of a small learner's-dictionary,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and then make the two possible stress-patterns after each entry,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;marking them &quot;1&quot; and &quot;2&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I separated things into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- &quot;long&quot; verbs [I think]&#xA;- &quot;long&quot; non-verbs&#xA;- &quot;short&quot; verbs&#xA;- &quot;short&quot; non-verbs&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &quot;long&quot; words,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; stress should always be pattern &quot;1&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &quot;short&quot; words,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; stress should always be pattern &quot;1&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Because they're two syllables still, right? Not one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; any exceptions,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;are they isolated one-offs that the learner should just memorize?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or are there any, like, secondary rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is stress ever affected by adding prefixes?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Any verb/non-verb differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;what would be the difference between word-pairs like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;endelea&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs (hypothetical):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;endeleya&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bomoa&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs (hypothetical):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bomowa&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;word-list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# &quot;long&quot; verbs                                      &#xA;                    -ambia                              to tell to&#xA;                                    a-MBI-a         1&#xA;                                    A-mbia          2&#xA;                    -amkia                              to greet&#xA;                                    a-MKI-a         1&#xA;                                    A-mkia          2&#xA;                    -andaa                              to prepare&#xA;                                    a-NDA-a         1&#xA;                                    A-ndaa          2&#xA;                    -angalia                            to look at/pay attention; watch&#xA;                                    a-nga-LI-a      1&#xA;                                    a-NGA-lia       2&#xA;                    -bomoa                              to demolish&#xA;                                    bo-MO-a         1&#xA;                                    BO-moa          2&#xA;                    -chagua                             to choose&#xA;                                    cha-GU-a        1&#xA;                                    CHA-gua         2&#xA;                    -chukua                             to take&#xA;                                    chu-KU-a        1&#xA;                                    CHU-kua         2&#xA;                    -dharau                             to disdain; disregard&#xA;                                    dha-RA-u        1&#xA;                                    DHA-rau         2&#xA;                    -elezea                             to explain to sb.&#xA;                                    e-le-ZE-a       1&#xA;                                    e-LE-zea        2&#xA;                    -endelea                            to continue (state)/progress, develop (state), keep (doing)&#xA;                                    e-nde-LE-a      1&#xA;                                    e-NDE-lea       2&#xA;                    -enea                               to spread (state)/extend over (state)&#xA;                                    e-NE-a          1&#xA;                                    E-nea           2&#xA;                    -fungua                             to open&#xA;                                    fu-NGU-a        1&#xA;                                    FU-ngua         2&#xA;                    -ingia                              to enter&#xA;                                    i-NGI-a         1&#xA;                                    I-ngia          2&#xA;                    -jisikia                            to feel better&#xA;                                    ji-si-KI-a      1&#xA;                                    ji-SI-kia       2&#xA;                    -kataa                              to refuse&#xA;                                    ka-TA-a         1&#xA;                                    KA-taa          2&#xA;                    -kimbia                             to run/run away&#xA;                                    ki-MBI-a        1&#xA;                                    KI-mbia         2&#xA;                    -komboa                             to liberate&#xA;                                    ko-MBO-a        1&#xA;                                    KO-mboa         2&#xA;                    -letea                              to bring to someone&#xA;                                    le-TE-a         1&#xA;                                    LE-tea          2&#xA;                    -nunua                              to buy&#xA;                                    nu-NU-a         1&#xA;                                    NU-nua          2&#xA;                    -ongea                              to converse&#xA;                                    o-NGE-a         1&#xA;                                    O-ngea          2&#xA;                    -patia                              to give to/pass to sb.&#xA;                                    pa-TI-a         1&#xA;                                    PA-tia          2&#xA;                    -pindua                             to overturn sth.&#xA;                                    pi-NDU-a        1&#xA;                                    PI-ndua         2&#xA;                    -pungua                             to decrease (state)&#xA;                                    pu-NGU-a        1&#xA;                                    PU-ngua         2&#xA;                    -sahau                              to forget&#xA;                                    sa-HA-u         1&#xA;                                    SA-hau          2&#xA;                    -saidia                             to help&#xA;                                    sa-i-DI-a       1&#xA;                                    sa-I-dia        2&#xA;                    -salimia                            to greet&#xA;                                    sa-li-MI-a      1&#xA;                                    sa-LI-mia       2&#xA;                    -shangaa                            to be astonished&#xA;                                    sha-NGA-a       1&#xA;                                    SHA-ngaa        2&#xA;                    -shughulikia                        to look after/attend to&#xA;                                    shu-ghu-li-KI-a 1&#xA;                                    shu-ghu-LI-kia  2&#xA;                    -sikia                              to hear&#xA;                                    si-KI-a         1&#xA;                                    SI-kia          2&#xA;                    -sinzia                             to sleep/asleep ( fall/be –)&#xA;                                    si-NZI-a        1&#xA;                                    SI-nzia         2&#xA;                    -sumbua                             to annoy/bother&#xA;                                    su-MBU-a        1&#xA;                                    SU-mbua         2&#xA;                    -tegemea                            to rely on&#xA;                                    te-ge-ME-a      1&#xA;                                    te-GE-mea       2&#xA;                    -tembea                             to walk&#xA;                                    te-MBE-a        1&#xA;                                    TE-mbea         2&#xA;                    -tembelea                           to visit&#xA;                                    te-mbe-LE-a     1&#xA;                                    te-MBE-lea      2&#xA;                    -teua                               to designate/select&#xA;                                    te-U-a          1&#xA;                                    TE-ua           2&#xA;                    -tumia                              to use&#xA;                                    tu-MI-a         1&#xA;                                    TU-mia          2&#xA;                    -umia                               to suffer (be in pain)/hurt (be/get)&#xA;                                    u-MI-a          1&#xA;                                    U-mia           2&#xA;                    -vutia                              to attract&#xA;                                    vu-TI-a         1&#xA;                                    VU-tia          2&#xA;                    -zoea                               to get/be accustomed&#xA;                                    zo-E-a          1&#xA;                                    ZO-ea           2&#xA;                    -zuia                               to restrain&#xA;                                    zu-I-a          1&#xA;                                    ZU-ia           2&#xA;                    -pokea                              receive&#xA;                                    po-KE-a         1&#xA;                                    PO-kea          2&#xA;                    -potea                              lost (get/be)&#xA;                                    po-TE-a         1&#xA;                                    PO-tea          2&#xA;                    -tulia                              calm (be); calm down (state)&#xA;                                    tu-LI-a         1&#xA;                                    TU-lia          2&#xA;                    -ugua                               ill (be); sick (be)&#xA;                                    u-GU-a          1&#xA;                                    U-gua           2&#xA;# &quot;long&quot; non-verbs                                  &#xA;                    eneo                                region; area&#xA;                                    e-NE-o          1&#xA;                                    E-neo           2&#xA;                    kioo                                mirror&#xA;                                    ki-O-o          1&#xA;                                    KI-oo           2&#xA;                    uzio                                fence&#xA;                                    u-ZI-o          1&#xA;                                    U-zio           2&#xA;                    adui                                enemy&#xA;                                    a-DU-i          1&#xA;                                    A-dui           2&#xA;                    rais                                president&#xA;                                    ra-I-s          1&#xA;                                    RA-is           2&#xA;                    barua                               letter (message)&#xA;                                    ba-RU-a         1&#xA;                                    BA-rua          2&#xA;                    familia                             family&#xA;                                    fa-mi-LI-a      1&#xA;                                    fa-MI-lia       2&#xA;                    Ijumaa                              Friday&#xA;                                    I-ju-MA-a       1&#xA;                                    I-JU-maa        2&#xA;                    jamaa                               relative ( family)&#xA;                                    ja-MA-a         1&#xA;                                    JA-maa          2&#xA;                    kadhaa                              some; several&#xA;                                    ka-DHA-a        1&#xA;                                    KA-dhaa         2&#xA;                    kileo                               liquor&#xA;                                    ki-LE-o         1&#xA;                                    KI-leo          2&#xA;                    kituo                               station&#xA;                                    ki-TU-o         1&#xA;                                    KI-tuo          2&#xA;                    kofia                               hat&#xA;                                    ko-FI-a         1&#xA;                                    KO-fia          2&#xA;                    maendeleo                           progress&#xA;                                    ma-e-nde-LE-o   1&#xA;                                    ma-e-NDE-leo    2&#xA;                    pomboo                              dolphin&#xA;                                    po-MBO-o        1&#xA;                                    PO-mboo         2&#xA;                    redio                               radio&#xA;                                    re-DI-o         1&#xA;                                    RE-dio          2&#xA;                    shujaa                              hero&#xA;                                    shu-JA-a        1&#xA;                                    SHU-jaa         2&#xA;                    ubao                                board&#xA;                                    u-BA-o          1&#xA;                                    U-bao           2&#xA;                    ufunguo                             key&#xA;                                    u-fu-NGU-o      1&#xA;                                    u-FU-nguo       2&#xA;# &quot;short&quot; verbs                                     &#xA;                    -jua                                to know&#xA;                                    JU-a            1&#xA;                                    JUA             2&#xA;                    -kaa                                to sit/stay (loc.), live (loc.)&#xA;                                    KA-a            1&#xA;                                    KAA             2&#xA;                    -lea                                to raise (child)/rear&#xA;                                    LE-a            1&#xA;                                    LEA             2&#xA;                    -lia                                to cry&#xA;                                    LI-a            1&#xA;                                    LIA             2&#xA;                    -nyoa                               to cut hair&#xA;                                    NYO-a           1&#xA;                                    NYOA            2&#xA;                    -oa                                 to marry ( for men)&#xA;                                    O-a             1&#xA;                                    OA              2&#xA;                    -tia                                to put&#xA;                                    TI-a            1&#xA;                                    TIA             2&#xA;                    -tii                                to obey&#xA;                                    TI-i            1&#xA;                                    TII             2&#xA;                    -ua                                 to kill&#xA;                                    U-a             1&#xA;                                    UA              2&#xA;                    -vaa                                to wear&#xA;                                    VA-a            1&#xA;                                    VAA             2&#xA;                    -ao                                 their(s)&#xA;                                    A-o             1&#xA;                                    AO              2&#xA;                    -faa                                suitable (be –); beneficial (be –)&#xA;                                    FA-a            1&#xA;                                    FAA             2&#xA;                    -jaa                                full (become/be)&#xA;                                    JA-a            1&#xA;                                    JAA             2&#xA;                    -kuu                                main&#xA;                                    KU-u            1&#xA;                                    KUU             2&#xA;                    -zee                                old&#xA;                                    ZE-e            1&#xA;                                    ZEE             2&#xA;# &quot;short&quot; non-verbs                                 &#xA;                    chai                                tea&#xA;                                    CHA-i           1&#xA;                                    CHAI            2&#xA;                    ua                                  flower&#xA;                                    U-a             1&#xA;                                    UA              2&#xA;                    ua                                  fence&#xA;                                    U-a             1&#xA;                                    UA              2&#xA;                    bao                                 board game; goal (in game)&#xA;                                    BA-o            1&#xA;                                    BAO             2&#xA;                    yai                                 egg&#xA;                                    YA-i            1&#xA;                                    YAI             2&#xA;                    juu                                 over; up; on top&#xA;                                    JU-u            1&#xA;                                    JUU             2&#xA;                    jua                                 sun&#xA;                                    JU-a            1&#xA;                                    JUA             2&#xA;                    bei                                 price&#xA;                                    BE-i            1&#xA;                                    BEI             2&#xA;                    choo                                bathroom&#xA;                                    CHO-o           1&#xA;                                    CHOO            2&#xA;                    chuo                                college&#xA;                                    CHU-o           1&#xA;                                    CHUO            2&#xA;                    kiu                                 thirst&#xA;                                    KI-u            1&#xA;                                    KIU             2&#xA;                    leo                                 today&#xA;                                    LE-o            1&#xA;                                    LEO             2&#xA;                    mguu                                leg&#xA;                                    MGU-u           1&#xA;                                    MGUU            2&#xA;                    mia                                 hundred&#xA;                                    MI-a            1&#xA;                                    MIA             2&#xA;                    mzee                                elder&#xA;                                    MZE-e           1&#xA;                                    MZEE            2&#xA;                    nguo                                clothes&#xA;                                    NGU-o           1&#xA;                                    NGUO            2&#xA;                    njaa                                hunger&#xA;                                    NJA-a           1&#xA;                                    NJAA            2&#xA;                    njia                                way; pathway&#xA;                                    NJI-a           1&#xA;                                    NJIA            2&#xA;                    pia                                 also; too (also)&#xA;                                    PI-a            1&#xA;                                    PIA             2&#xA;                    pua                                 nose&#xA;                                    PU-a            1&#xA;                                    PUA             2&#xA;                    saa                                 watch (time); clock; hour&#xA;                                    SA-a            1&#xA;                                    SAA             2&#xA;                    taa                                 lamp&#xA;                                    TA-a            1&#xA;                                    TAA             2&#xA;                    wao                                 them&#xA;                                    WA-o            1&#xA;                                    WAO             2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2816" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:17:18.920" Title="Swahili stress with two vowels in a row, how does it work?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19906" CreationDate="2016-10-08T00:17:18.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From an orthographic POV, stress is on the second to last vowel of the word ([púa] &quot;nose&quot;, and if there is only a single orthographic vowel but there is an NC sequence before the vowel, the stress is on the nasal (which is syllabic&quot; [ḿbwa] &quot;dog&quot;, [ḿtu] &quot;person&quot;). So if I parsed your examples, pattern 1 is right, and you never get pattern 2. Glides would have no effect, so [bomówa] would be the same as [bomóa]. There are lexical exceptions like &lt;em&gt;barábara&lt;/em&gt; &quot;exactly&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;barabára&lt;/em&gt; &quot;highway&quot; although I can't say I've ever heard anyone say barábara, and &lt;em&gt;lázima&lt;/em&gt; &quot;necessary&quot; ((most?) often &lt;em&gt;lazíma&lt;/em&gt;. There are problematic words like &lt;em&gt;γáfla&lt;/em&gt; &quot;suddenly&quot; which can be pronounced as [{g,γ}á{f,Ø}la] i.e. with a stop or fricative and with or without an epenthetic vowel: I doubt that you ever get [gafúla]. You get somewhat different results depending on how Kisanifu you (your speaker) is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to know that the double vowel spelling of &lt;em&gt;ndoo, njoo&lt;/em&gt; etc. is an orthographic means of indicating that stress is not on the nasal, otherwise these would be *[ńdo, ńjo]. Stress can be on a prefix, e.g. &lt;em&gt;ní-pe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;give me&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kú-pa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to give&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kí-su&lt;/em&gt; &quot;knife&quot;. The language conspires to prevent inflectable monosyllables, so there can't be a paradigmatic alternation with stress on the root in one form and stress on a prefix in another form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T00:17:18.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19890" CreationDate="2016-10-08T12:58:16.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fear that this question is premised upon a naïve idealisation of science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science does not prove anything, except the falsety of its own theories. And no, this isn't a bug, nor it should not do anything different. What we call &quot;truth&quot; is always provisional, no one can be in direct contact with the Kantian &quot;thing in itself&quot;, everything is mediated by our perceptions, which are not the &quot;true thing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would linguistics be different from particle physics? Both languages and subatomic particles are part of &quot;reality&quot;, and can be discussed, labeled, theorised, spoken about. There is a scientific method - propose a theory, isolate variables, design an experiment, perform the experiment, compare the experiment's result with the theory's predictions. This is no different in linguistics than in any other science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If linguistic theories are in any sence worse than subatomic physics theories, this is a problem of the relative development of each science. Yes, physics as a whole is more developed than linguistics, due to both historical (scientific linguistic is newer than scientific physics) and structural (recursivity in linguistics is more immediate than in physics) factors. But then physics was a mess two centuries ago, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicists disagree on a lot of things too. Which is a good thing; how would physics ever progress if physicists adhered to previous results as dogma? We would still believe in epicycles, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T12:58:16.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2016-10-08T13:52:34.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about American English but in standard English there is a minimal pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Bacup' (a town in Lancashire) /beikəp/ and 'Bake up' /beik ʌp/, however the stress issue may still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T13:52:34.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19890" CreationDate="2016-10-08T17:02:57.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard Aristotelian understanding of &quot;true&quot;, of a proposition, is &quot;describes reality&quot; (and &quot;false&quot; is &quot;does not describe reality&quot;). &quot;Prove&quot; then means &quot;show to be true&quot;, which again in the standard Aristotelian approach means to show that there is a reason to judge the proposition to be true, and there is no reason to doubt the proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owing to the influence of Kant and more proximally Karl Popper, the classical understanding of the concepts &quot;prove&quot; and so on have been widely though not universally replaced, owing to his stipulation that a &quot;universal statement&quot; cannot be proven, but it can be refuted. Thus all statements are either conjectures, or false. The possibility of observational refutation is undermined by the fact that the logical connection between an ostensively refuting event and a predictive theory is itself an unproven conjecture. If a  theory W predicts a reaction temperature of X under conditions Q and the observed reaction temperature is Y, then at least one of W, Q or Y is false. It is conjectured that the device thought to measure temperature, which relies on physical theory Z, has value for establishing temperature, but that is at best an unfalsified conjecture. We may now actually have observational evidence that falsifies foundational theory Z. In other words, when something goes wrong, all you know is that something has gone wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the Aristotelian approach, the basic methodology of proof amounts to identifying reasons, which are observations or conclusions that are proven based on observations. The practical problem has been that the inference from observation to conclusion has not been automated, so people take invalid shortcuts. Statistical methods, for example, rely on the premise that a given sample is drawn at random from the population, and that is never actually the case in linguistic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why linguists cannot agree is fundamentally that there are vastly different epistemologies in the field: this Aristotelian / Popperian split is just one example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-10-08T22:05:01.407" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T22:05:01.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19916" CreationDate="2016-10-08T19:59:51.590" Score="1" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish, Arabic, Spanish for &quot;Germany&quot; are obviously cognate.  But not with &quot;Germany&quot; or Deutschland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least two of them must be borrowed.  Which, and what is the (commonly assumed) source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13794" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T12:46:01.687" Title="Alemaña/Almanya/ألمانيا etymology" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18765" CreationDate="2016-10-08T22:09:01.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the previous answer in Czech, the verb &quot;zeptat se&quot; is actually being used when you're referring to the object of asking with dativ (but can not be used in the described meaning)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2016-10-08T22:09:01.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-08T23:45:48.053" Score="4" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;We started learning about argument structure in my syntax class, and I am confused by implicit arguments, which our book hardly touches on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the argument for a verb having an implicit argument vs. being a member of a different subcategory that has fewer arguments? The distinction here seems arbitrary, or at least based on semantics, not syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically under discussion is using &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; with only two arguments, when &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; is the prototypical trivalent verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He gives blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He gives to charity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the implicit arguments are something like &amp;quot;to the blood bank&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;things.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; my exact homework question, but an underlying one I'm asking to understand my actual question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T15:06:49.793" Title="Understanding implicit arguments" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-09T10:39:33.347" Score="5" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often ask my American English native speaker friends this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When watching a movie in American English, do you turn the subtitles on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a lot of them say that they always do (&quot;in order to make sure not to miss any details&quot; is the most common justification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My native language is Russian, and in Russia it is literally unheard of to turn the subtitles on for Russian movies. Everything that is being said is always 100% crystal clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this phenomenon arise because of how diverse American English can be in its pronunciation and vocabulary in comparison to Russian's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: can this phenomenon be due to the fact that the connection between American English sounds and individual letters is much looser than it is for Russian sounds and individual letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14226" LastEditorUserId="14226" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T08:01:04.560" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:26:11.487" Title="American English speakers needing subtitles more often" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19912" CreationDate="2016-10-09T10:52:05.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish &lt;em&gt;Alemaña&lt;/em&gt; (as well as French &lt;em&gt;Allemagne&lt;/em&gt; and Portuguese &lt;em&gt;Alemanha&lt;/em&gt;) derives from Latin &lt;em&gt;Alemannia&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn comes from &lt;em&gt;Alemanni&lt;/em&gt;, which was a confederation of German tribes. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Alemanni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymological dictionary&lt;/a&gt; says this comes from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;Alamanniz&lt;/em&gt;, which possibly meant &quot;all men&quot; (which makes sence, since they were a confederation); an alternative would be &quot;other men&quot;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;alius&lt;/em&gt; and Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;manniz&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be that the Spanish word is a borrowing from French, as it was among the Franks that &lt;em&gt;Allemand&lt;/em&gt; first became a term for all &quot;Germans&quot;. In this case the etymology of the Spanish word would be more complicated: Proto-Germanic -&gt; Latin -&gt; Frankish -&gt; Old French -&gt; Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic word must have been borrowed from Spanish, and the Turkish word would then be a borrowing from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take into account the comments below, Spanish &lt;em&gt;Alemaña&lt;/em&gt; derives from Latin &lt;em&gt;Alemannia&lt;/em&gt;, either through Frankish -&gt; Old French -&gt; Spanish or through Frankish -&gt; Iberian Romance -&gt; Spanish. The Arabic word must be a borrowing from Iberian Romance or Spanish (because a literate borrowing from Latin would result in word similar to &lt;em&gt;Germania&lt;/em&gt;, which was the Classic Latin most common name for the region and its people), and the Turkish word must be a borrowing from Arabic (because if they acquired the word via Eastern Europe instead, they would most likely borrow from either German &lt;em&gt;Deustcheland&lt;/em&gt;, Greek Γερμανία, or some slavic language, in which case it would ressemble something like &lt;em&gt;Njemačka&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T12:46:01.687" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T12:46:01.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19915" CreationDate="2016-10-09T11:43:55.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that this is not a matter of the language, but rather of the sound quality.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Most films come with the original audio in (American) English where the actors speak right during the acting into the microphone placed somewhere in the background at the set. Synchronisations in other languages, however, are recorded in a studio where the synchronisers speak directly into a professional speech microphone. Additionally the speakers focus solely on pronounciation, often making numerous attempts until they reach perfection - as opposed to the actors who mainly need to pay attention to their acting, where crystal-clear speaking is only secondary. The combination of these aspects makes the speech quality in the synchronised audio noticeably better.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can actually hear the difference if you switch between different language tracks during a film. The speech in the original audio track is always of slightly lower quality than in the synchronised tracks.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It might be interesting to compare the perceived clearness in an originally Russian film with the English synchronisation - I wouldn't be surprised if the tables were turned then.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was not about the speech quality of the movie audio, but about the language itself, the apparent understanding difficulty should not be restricted to watching films but extend to everyday communication in American English, i.e. A.E. speakers would generally have more difficulty flawlessly understanding their native language than Russian speakers do. I don't think that this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-09T13:04:28.153" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T13:04:28.153" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-09T12:46:09.373" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to recognize the &lt;code&gt;consonants&lt;/code&gt; in a word i.e. if the word spoken is &lt;code&gt;tap&lt;/code&gt;, using different tools like &lt;code&gt;Praat&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;MATLAB&lt;/code&gt; etc. I want to implement a system to ensure that the first letter spoken was &lt;code&gt;\t\&lt;/code&gt;.  Someone please guide me about any pattern related to &lt;code&gt;\t\&lt;/code&gt; consonant which may use the intensity or formants etc. Once I get the pattern of the consonant, I can then assess the quality of the consonant &lt;code&gt;\t\&lt;/code&gt; i.e. whether its correctly spoken or something else was spoken instead of &lt;code&gt;\t\&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I Know:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Its impossible to recognize a consonant alone as there's &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; information in a consonant and it can only give information with the help of an adjacent vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In all the stop consonants, the difference between the formants f2 and f3 is decreased in the stop and then increased when the stop is released.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastEditorUserId="13819" LastEditDate="2016-10-09T19:03:44.720" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T19:03:44.720" Title="How to identify the English \t\ consonant in sound recordings?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;stops&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2016-10-09T15:09:58.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Professional phonologists need a notation that distinguishes a theory or a perception of pronunciation, for which they often use slashes, from actual facts about the pronunciations, for which they often used square brackets.  In part, this is because a phonologist will usually be aware of several different theories about a given interesting pronunciation.  Without a systematic way of distinguishing fact from theory, a phonologist's world would be even more confusing than it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T15:09:58.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19918" CreationDate="2016-10-09T17:26:59.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use &lt;em&gt;Acoustical characteristics of selected English consonants&lt;/em&gt;, by Ilse Lehiste, to determine what the formant transition patterns are, or the voicing patterns, that would be of interest to you. However, a simpler way to decide is to just listen. If for example a listener isn't fluent in English and has problems in certain contexts, distinguishing &quot;tea, key, pea&quot; then this might be useful. However, nothing much will help you if your underlying question is &quot;is this [t] or is it [t̪]?&quot;. A study acoustical properties of sounds in a language will mainly tell you what distinguishes sound &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and sound &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; within the language, but there is no resource for &quot;absolutely identifying&quot; what sound exists in a token, compared to the vast array of sound in all other languages. Absolute identification is impossible, but if you are trying to find a closest match assuming English, then Lehiste's book should help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T17:26:59.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19923" CreationDate="2016-10-09T20:13:11.100" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent journalistic article in the German weekly &quot;Die ZEIT&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeit.de/2016/38/sprachen-aussterben-erhaltung-linguistik-new-york/komplettansicht&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Die Wörterjäger&lt;/a&gt;) the journalist says (original quote in German): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ist eine Gruppe dagegen homogen, haben ihre Mitglieder weniger Probleme, die komplexen Regeln zu pflegen. Je kleiner eine Sprache, desto sperriger und komplexer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short summary: The smaller a speech community, the more complex the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this statement be confirmed or falsified by data from the world's languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T12:24:43.740" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T12:24:43.740" Title="Is there a negative correlation between the number of speakers of a language and its morphological richness?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19922" CreationDate="2016-10-09T23:37:18.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear that the idea can be rigorously tested, in part because &quot;complexity&quot; can refer to at least three different things, and in part because there's a big sampling problem in checking if there is such a correlation. The worst possible way to try to answer the question is via cherry-picked languages evaluated subjectively. Chinese is obviously really simply morphologicially and it has a huge number of speakers, and Lushootseed is really complex morphologically, and it has very few speakers (none, in fact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could start by generating a random sample of let's say 100 languages, and check the facts, but I've engaged in that game before and it turns out that the biggest problem is getting an answer for most of those languages – in my most recent 100-language sample, only 5 languages have over a million speakers (Xiang Chinese, Southern Azerbaijani, Western Farsi, Sylheti, Georgian), and probably less that 20% of them have sufficient descriptive material that you have a prospect of saying how complex the language's morphology is. Since there are huge numbers of tiny languages and many well-populated dialects of Chinese, it's not clear to me what an unbiased sample would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One kind of complexity is &quot;number of affixes&quot;, so if a language has just one affix slot and 200 affixes that could go there, that would be kind of complex, though mostly trivial. A second kind of complexity involves numbers of slots, so that most Indo-European languages would not be very complex since there are relatively few slots for affixes. The final and IMO best metric is in terms of the system of rules, for example if you get suppletive portmanteaux of slot1a+slot2d, or if there are morphological conditions on affixation (such as &quot;add X only on perfective verbs&quot;). While I think that gets at &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; complexity, I don't see how we can count (and if we can't count, we can't numerically correlate, and thus we're back to subjective judgments like &quot;Turkish is complex&quot; or &quot;Kalaallisut is complex&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I think it is probably true, based on subjective experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T23:37:18.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-10T09:36:27.910" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there's any term in linguistics when the word cannot be translated in just one/two words. I mean when it's really hard to explain the meaning, because there's no such thing in your language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14237" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T13:10:06.027" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T13:10:06.027" Title="What is the term for when a word can not be translated directly?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-10T14:30:03.680" Score="4" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to learn Dutch and I am struggling to produce the /s/ phoneme in the same way that some (most?) native speakers do. It seems that the usual pronunciation is such that it sounds closer to [ʃ] than to [s]. Actually, it sounds very close to the apical /s/ of Castillian Spanish, but not quite the same. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the Netherlands, /s/ and /z/ may have only mid-to-low pitched friction, and for many Netherlandic speakers, they are retracted. In Belgium, they are more similar to English /s z/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how retracted is it? How much should I retract my tongue? How does it compare to Castillian /s/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does “mid-to-low pitched friction” mean? How is the production different from that of regular pitched friction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which dialects and sociolects have this distinct pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it in a single question: &lt;strong&gt;how is /s/ produced in Dutch dialects?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T17:45:50.830" Title="Production and dialectology of Dutch /s/" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19870" CreationDate="2016-10-10T16:31:44.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest reading the Voice tutorial in Praat, which you will see a link to if you check help searching for &quot;pulses&quot;. There is a display, 'pulses', which marks &quot;voiced pulses&quot;. There are two kinds of things with &quot;big amplitude&quot;, voiced sounds, and noisy (voiceless) release bursts. If you were dealing with clicks, those bursts would be really loud, but they are fairly short, so you basically want quasi-period high amplitude sections, plus (good luck with that...) not 60 cycle hum. You should expect there to be a few problems if you're dealing with English and you want to identify [g], because [g] especially can be phonetically voiceless. Apart from that, a pulse listing sounds like what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T16:31:44.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19915" CreationDate="2016-10-10T18:34:35.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;your America friends are having fun with you.  Nobody does this, unless they have hearing problems, the soundtrack is muddy, or they're in a noisy environment like a bar.  native speakers of American English are just people, no different than native speakers of any lsnguage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as for spelling, it is complete irrelevant.  native speakers &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; need guidance from written language to disambiguate, in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T18:34:35.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19915" CreationDate="2016-10-10T21:57:33.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is due to any linguistic phenomena, just a cultural thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes turn on the subtitles if I'm watching something on my computer using Netflix, but not if I'm watching on the TV or on Youtube. I believe  I picked up this habit from one of my friends; her family often turns the subtitles on so that they can pay more attention to other things while watching the TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, nobody has subtitles when speaking to other people in real life or when listening to the radio, and American English speakers certainly do both of these things often without any trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subtitle's aren't really needed at all for disambiguating homophones, or even near homophones. Native speakers don't usually have any difficulty distinguishing different vowel sounds such as fit-feet, here-hair, bat-bet. I know these can be tough for non-native speakers, but to native speakers the differences are generally quite clear (barring drastic accent differences). The areas that I think are most likely to cause confusion or difficulty for native speakers listening to American English speech are vowel reduction and word division. Russian also has vowel reduction, and I believe word division is ambiguous in at least some cases in every spoken natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T21:57:33.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19886" CreationDate="2016-10-11T01:19:55.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;SIL has lists of two varieties of Arabic script and languages that use them: mostly &lt;a href=&quot;http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail&amp;amp;key=Arab&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, some &lt;a href=&quot;http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail_use&amp;amp;key=Aran&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This give about 250 languages, subject to the usual language-inflation that they engage in, and they list languages where some people do or used to use Arabic script (but it is not official).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T01:19:55.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19935" CreationDate="2016-10-11T11:56:33.167" Score="-1" ViewCount="3488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about learning Chinese for the future possibilities of the terrain work of linguistic anthropologist now. Don't you anyone have any views on the potential possibility of usage Chinese in thi manner? Or do the Chinese minorities take Chinese as a foreign language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T12:14:30.513" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T07:58:18.167" Title="Do Chinese minorities speak Chinese as a native language?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19938" CreationDate="2016-10-11T14:46:35.007" Score="8" ViewCount="7602" Body="&lt;p&gt;While listening to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/10/race-to-save-hawaii-sign-language&quot;&gt;this podcast&lt;/a&gt; about saving dying languages. A question came to my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a deaf person from France understand a deaf person from Russia or any other country?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14244" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T16:04:43.563" Title="Do two deaf persons from different countries understand each other?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-10-13T13:39:33.243" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19933" CreationDate="2016-10-11T15:30:39.317" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many sign languages that are mutually incomprehensible. It can even occur that the sign languages of countries with the same official language (e.g., English or Spanish) are mutually incomprehensible. This is the case for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;American Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Sign_Language&quot;&gt;British Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T15:30:39.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19932" CreationDate="2016-10-11T15:54:22.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that China has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fifty-something officially recognised ethnic minority groups&lt;/a&gt; and it's impossible to say anything about &quot;Chinese minorities in general&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me summarise my experiences from several months of travel in Zhejiang, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan and Xinjiang. I don't know how generalisable they are, but they should give you some idea about differences between groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hui&lt;/a&gt;. This is a minority group that doesn't have its own language, and a variety of Chinese is their native language. Most Hui people are Muslim, and therefore many of them learn Arabic to some degree, but it is clearly a foreign language for them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibe_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Xibo&lt;/a&gt;. A small minority group in Xinjiang, stemming from Manchurians. In the case of the Xibo man I met, Mandarin seemed to be his second native language, and he was fully proficient in it. He was also fully proficient in the Xibo language, which included reading and writing its Mongolian-based vertical script.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakhi_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Naxi&lt;/a&gt;. A minority group in Yunnan. As far as I could tell, they speak Mandarin very well, perhaps on a near-native level. Note that Naxi has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxi_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an interesting writing system&lt;/a&gt; but the Naxi people I met &lt;strong&gt;could not&lt;/strong&gt; read or write it, even though they spoke the Naxi language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uyghurs&lt;/a&gt;. Unlike Hui and Xibo, they don't speak Chinese as their native language. Most Uyghurs in Urumqi speak conversational Chinese, and some speak it extremely well. On the other hand, in Kashgar, a town with Uyghur majority, it's quite easy to find people who can't speak Chinese or can speak very little. In general, the greatest differences in Mandarin proficiency that I've met were among Uyghurs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyz_in_China&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kyrgyzs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongols_in_China&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mongols&lt;/a&gt;. All members of these minorities I met spoke Mandarin well, even though it was clear that they spoke it as a foreign language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajiks_of_Xinjiang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tajiks&lt;/a&gt;. Even Tajiks who lived in Tashkurgan, a remote town near the Pakistani border, spoke good Mandarin. Fun fact: Chinese Tajiks don't have their own writing system, and generally write Uyghur and/or Chinese. They are therefore often trilingual, and know three completely unrelated languages: Tajik (Indo-European language family), Uyghur (Turkic language family) and Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan langauge family).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tibetans&lt;/a&gt;. I met a Tibetan nomadic family on the Gansu/Sichuan border, and the mother didn't speak Chinese at all. Her 7-year-old son, however, spoke perfect Mandarin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Han Chinese&lt;/a&gt;. It's not a minority group, but it's worth noting that while the great majority of Han Chinese speak Mandarin as either first or second native language, there are some who only speak the local Chinese dialect and know little Mandarin. For example, in a small town in Zhejiang I again experienced the situation where the daughter spoke perfect Mandarin (she was, in fact, my Mandarin teacher), but I couldn't directly communicate with her mother, who only spoke &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wu&lt;/a&gt;. In PRC such situations seem to take place in smaller towns and villages, with people from older generations. In Hong Kong, however, there are many people from all social backgrounds and generations who can't speak much Mandarin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T07:58:18.167" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T07:58:18.167" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T16:04:41.787" Score="5" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Corpus Linguistics and I'm writing a paper about the English and Portuguese &quot;because noun&quot;, a type of construction such as &quot;I'm going home because GTA5&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I try to search this type of structure on corpora, I find mainly VPs, such as &quot;I'm going home because GTA5 is a great game&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to filter my search results with &lt;strong&gt;because + NP + punctuation mark&lt;/strong&gt; (period or exclamation mark)? This would avoid undesirable results containing whole VPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0PkU.png&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b0PkU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13086" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T11:39:22.807" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T13:40:32.867" Title="Corpus Linguistics: Is it possible to add a tag for &quot;sentence ending&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T16:07:23.750" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any reliable studies on simultaneous bilingualism effects. What effects does it have on children when they are only learning to read and write in one. More importantly how does it effect their acquisition of the L2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14245" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T17:26:57.077" Title="simultaneous bilingualism" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-10-13T04:21:09.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19933" CreationDate="2016-10-11T16:24:36.290" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Probably not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/rsl/&quot;&gt;Ethnologue entry for Russian Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reported historical connections to sign languages in Austria and France, but not obvious from extensive wordlist comparison (Bickford 2005).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implicitly suggests that they are not mutually intelligible (that is, that users of Russian Sign Language can't necessarily understand French Sign Language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/fsl/&quot;&gt;entry for French Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many sign languages have been derived from or influenced by LSF, but are not necessarily intelligible with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But before we stop here, I would like to talk a bit more about the logic behind this question. Perhaps your doubt is due to the following myth about sign languages: that the signs themselves have a direct connection to the referent. In other words, that signing is a form of mimicry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, sign languages behave in the same way as spoken languages: just like there is nothing in the word &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt; that necessarily connects it directly to the idea of horses, signs in sign languages do not necessarily have any connection to what they refer to. For this reason, there is a wide variety of sign languages as there is a variety of spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this mental exercise: If an American, a Briton and a Russian were asked to imitate the act of swimming through mimicry, it's likely that all of them would come up with their own way of doing it, but the mimicry would end up being similar because the act of swimming is the same for all of them. Now, if users of British Sign Language, American Sign Language and Russian Sign Language were asked translate &lt;em&gt;swimming&lt;/em&gt; into their sign language, there is &lt;strong&gt;no guarantee&lt;/strong&gt; that the sign for &lt;em&gt;swimming&lt;/em&gt; will be similar across these languages. What's more, they wouldn't be able to come up with their own way to express swimming, they would have to use the sign that is present in the vocabulary of their sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:24:36.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19872" CreationDate="2016-10-11T16:34:47.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI16/paper/view/11973/12051&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Improving Opinion Aspect Extraction Using Semantic Similarity and Aspect Associations&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Liu et al., 2016, where the authors use the algorithm by Qiu but with Stanford Dependencies, i.e., exactly how I want to do it. They use the dependencies &lt;em&gt;amod&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;prep&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nsubj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;csubj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;xsubj&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dobj&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;iobj&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;conj&lt;/em&gt;). I don't know the exact mapping (if it even exists) but it isn't important for my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14193" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T16:34:47.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19937" CreationDate="2016-10-11T17:26:57.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roy Major, who was a student of David Stampe at Ohio State, did a phonological analysis of Roy's child as it simultaneously learned English and Portuguese.  I think I read a version of his MA thesis, but it was a long time ago.  I know that David thought highly of Roy's work on this.  There is a list of Roy's publications here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/86150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Roy Major vita&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T17:26:57.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2016-10-11T17:52:52.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norwegian Sign Language distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive &quot;we&quot;. Apart from that it distinguishes between dual and plural, so there are different signs for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minetegn.no/Tegnordbok-HTML/video_/vi-to-1.mp4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;we (2 people, listener excluded)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minetegn.no/Tegnordbok-HTML/video_/vi-to-2.mp4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;we (2 people, listener included)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we (more than 2 people, listener excluded)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we (more than 2 people, listener included)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about other sign languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of distinction was common among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T17:52:52.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-11T18:38:50.990" Score="6" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many words where Latin and Germanic begin with s– but the Greek begins with an aspirate (h–). How does this shift come about? They do not seem to be formed in the same part of the mouth at all. (Welsh also often begins with h–!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14246" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T18:44:44.870" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T18:50:35.433" Title="s / h change in Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19942" CreationDate="2016-10-11T18:50:35.433" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common sound change. [h] has no constriction above the larynx, and involves spreading the glottis so that any noise generated is turbulence as the air flows through the glottis. Most of the hearable stuff of [h] is the low-level effect on surrounding sonorants. (On top of that, &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; might end up partially voiced). In producing [s] especially (other voiceless fricatives do this as well), the glottis needs to be likewise spread, so as to not produce [z], and voiceless fricatives tend to have a very open glottis, compared to stops (the fact of being a stop encourages voicelessness, by rapidly extinguishing any voicing that developed). So every [s] &quot;wants&quot; to become [h]; if the lingual constriction is not as narrow as it is in a proper hissy &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, you get an h-like sound, which easily becomes an actual /h/ after some years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T18:50:35.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19933" CreationDate="2016-10-12T05:27:58.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;British Sign Language and American Sign language were invented separately, and they evolved before video was invented so there wasn't a lot of signed communication between people in distant lands. They have completely different grammar and mostly different signs. BSL and ASL speakers can't understand each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auslan (from Australia) is a very distant cousin of Irish Sign Language, which in turn is related to British Sign Language. But an Auslan speaker and a BSL speaker would not easily understand each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even dying sign languages!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is spoken only by one slightly inbred Bedouin tribe who, thanks to a genetic accident, have an unusually high incidence of deafness. But now the deaf al-Sayyid children are being sent away to schools that teach in Hebrew Sign Language, and their own language is in danger of disappearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14255" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T05:27:58.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-12T05:47:13.637" Score="4" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=4&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwihxevhpdTPAhVE7RQKHeGKD84QFgg5MAM&amp;amp;url=%68%74%74%70%73%3A%2F%2F%62%6F%6F%6B%73%2E%67%6F%6F%67%6C%65%2E%63%6F%6D%2F%62%6F%6F%6B%73%2F%61%62%6F%75%74%2F%53%79%6E%74%61%78%2E%68%74%6D%6C%3F%69%64%3D%67%4B%66%35%64%35%70%56%65%6E%73%43&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHbEYErqOJqrXKNsCGKFBhu6vV_GA&amp;amp;bvm=bv.135475266,d.d24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Givon (2001, Chapter 6.4.3.2, p.303)&lt;/a&gt; directly for my question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6.4.3.2 The reference test for modality&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      One of the most sensitive cross-linguistic tests for modality involves the referential behavior of NPs under various modal scopes&#xA;  (see Ch. 10). For the purpose of applying this test, the four&#xA;  propositional modalities are grouped into two super-modalities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Fact: presupposition and Realis-assertion;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Non-fact: Irrealis-assertion and Neg-assertion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The general prediction that one can make then is (Givón 1973b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;(40) Reference and propositional modality&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Under the scope of non-fact, NPs can be interpreted as either referring or non-referring.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Under the scope of fact, NPs can only be interpreted as referring.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the three possible types of nominals that can appear in a&#xA;  predicate-nominal construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;A. Referring-definite (Ref-Def)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    (1) She’s the teacher I told you about yesterday.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;B. Referring-indefinite (Ref-Indef)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    (2) She’s a teacher I’d like you to meet.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;C. Non-referring (Non-Ref)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    (3) She’s a teacher. That’s what she does for a living.   &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The three types of nominal predicates in (1-3) are set in different&#xA;  discourse contexts, respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Ref-Def: The referent has already been identified.&#xA;b. Ref-Indef: The referent is being introduced for the first time.&#xA;c. Non-Ref: The nominal predicate is not used to refer to a particular individual (token), but rather to describe his/her/its inherent attributes (type).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the three example sentences (1-3) are corresponding to &lt;strong&gt;Fact&lt;/strong&gt; modality above. According to explanation of (40), those three example should only be interpreted as referring. However, the author says example (3) indicates &lt;strong&gt;non-referring&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it contradictory to the notion of (40. 2)? or does it mean example (3) isn't &lt;strong&gt;Fact&lt;/strong&gt; modality? I'm confused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Additional Contents&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givon (2001, p.441-442)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10.3.2 Reference and propositional modalities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Fact: Presupposition&#xA;         R-assertion (realis)&#xA;b. Non-fact: IRR-assertion (irrealis)&#xA;             NEG-assertion (negation)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since human discourse, most particularly everyday face-to-face communication, employ non-fact modalities much less&#xA;  frequently than fact modalities, it is possible to render (40) above&#xA;  more realistically as a markedness expression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(13) Nominals may be interpreted non-referentially only if they are under the scope of some non-fact modality. Otherwise they must be interpreted referentially.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10.3.2.2 Reference and lexically-inherent modality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(14) a. Fact-realis&#xA;        He has a dog&#xA;            (&amp;gt; a particular dog; Ref)&#xA;            (*&amp;gt; any dog; *Non-Ref)&#xA;    b. Irrealis&#xA;        He wants a dog&#xA;            (&amp;gt; a particular dog; Ref)&#xA;            (&amp;gt; any dog; Non-Ref)&#xA;    c. Negation&#xA;        He lacks a dog&#xA;            (&amp;gt; any dog; Non-Ref)&#xA;            (*a particular dog; *Ref)&#xA;&#xA;(15) a. Inherent irrealis verbs&#xA;         want, like, look for, dream of, think of, believe in&#xA;     b. Inherent negative verbs&#xA;         lack, refuse, decline, miss, fail&#xA;     c. Inherent presuppositional verbs&#xA;         know, forget, regret, be happy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12829" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T08:08:25.280" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T19:00:17.970" Title="Reference and modality - T. Givon (2001), Syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19915" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:26:11.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it to be a matter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonology&lt;/a&gt;. Regional dialects, accents and variations are very different in the English language. I think this problem occurs when one language covers different cultural regions (e.g. French and Spanish). I happen to notice the same complications in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14244" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:26:11.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11719" CreationDate="2016-10-12T15:09:41.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself had a fair bit of struggle with English dialects both regional and in terms of time. What I found most useful as a speaker and as a linguist is actually watching different interpretations of the same plays from Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue the following are the most influential reasons: &#xA;- Most actors receive extensive coaching on the pronunciation nuances, so it is just as good and as authentic as it can get.&#xA;- You have time to read it beforehand, as indeed you should, to prepare.&#xA;- The language is shown in context which makes the interpretation much easier.&#xA;- Watching, listening, processing it several times deepens the experience and opens up those nifty details that often escape us the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the opportunity, Shakespeare's Globe, live in London, is a marvelous experience. (Just sit on the side otherwise you  might end up baking in the sun for 3 hours.) If you cannot be there in person, they often televise live performances to cinemas and theatres globally to audiences abroad. It is also a moving experience, I can personally attest to it. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://onscreen.shakespearesglobe.com/find-a-venue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://onscreen.shakespearesglobe.com/find-a-venue/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popular Hollywood interpretations are also surprisingly good - definitely worth watching as one of several viewings (Take the 1993 version of Much Ado for one, for instance - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107616/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107616/&lt;/a&gt;). And the BBC has an incredible collection of Shakespeare (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/shop/item/63083-bbc-shakespeare-collection-bbc-dvd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.rsc.org.uk/shop/item/63083-bbc-shakespeare-collection-bbc-dvd/&lt;/a&gt;) available on Amazon as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, Jane Austen, a hundred years later would also be an excellent choice for such an endeavour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastEditorUserId="13761" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T13:16:07.717" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T13:16:07.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19933" CreationDate="2016-10-12T15:56:48.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add that there are even regional differences for one sign language. I know of someone who failed their BSL exam due to using some regional variations not native to the region she was taking the test in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reason as to why BSL is different to ASL is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1815, an American Protestant minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet,&#xA;travelled to Europe to research teaching of the deaf. He was rebuffed&#xA;by both the Braidwood schools who refused to teach him their methods.&#xA;Gallaudet then travelled to Paris and learned the educational methods&#xA;of the French Royal Institution for the Deaf, a combination of Old&#xA;French Sign Language and the signs developed by Abbé de l’Épée. As a&#xA;consequence American Sign Language today has a 60% similarity to&#xA;modern French Sign Language and is almost unintelligible to users of&#xA;British Sign Language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Sign_Language#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T16:04:43.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33655" CreationDate="2016-10-12T16:48:39.873" Score="8" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of some systems of sign writing (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting&quot;&gt;Sutton SignWriting&lt;/a&gt;). They are used in dictionaries, teaching materials, or scientific documentation. But did some Sign Language speech communities develop literature in sign writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T18:47:35.187" Title="Are there literate speech communities for Sign Languages?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;literacy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19962" CreationDate="2016-10-13T05:11:13.083" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, in some simplistic, &quot;common sense&quot; way, it is true that speech components are &quot;nested&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonemes comprise syllables,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syllables comprise words,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words comprise phrases,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrases comprise utterances&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But obviously this is a &quot;Linguistics 101&quot; sort of understanding. The situation is probably somewhat more complex (e.g. Stress, rhythm, intonation, melody, and so on). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But aside from the above-issues, is this an adequate and serious &quot;working understanding&quot; or does it miss some key points known best to linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T20:53:45.373" Title="Moving past a simplistic conceptualization of linguistic units" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T06:26:11.960" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sleep&amp;quot; is clearly monovalent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They slept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, is the colloquial usage of &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;had sex with&amp;quot; a divalent verb with a PP argument or is &amp;quot;sleep with&amp;quot; a phrasal verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard slept with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hesitant about calling it a phrasal verb because it can be reflexive without &amp;quot;with.&amp;quot; Is this even a deciding factor for testing for phrasal verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They slept together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, to take another phrasal verb, &amp;quot;passed for,&amp;quot; two twins would say (1), not (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We passed for each other yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*We passed each other yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T14:32:54.643" Title="Does &quot;slept&quot; as in &quot;had sex&quot; have a PP argument?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T09:41:29.060" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NEW QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;em&gt;production/generation&lt;/em&gt; perspective, one can say that a realization X is the result of a collection of features (attribute-value pairs) applied to the base form of a word. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) [base=eat, number=singular, person=3, tense=present, aspect=simple, voice=active, polarity=positive] → “eats”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) [base=eat, number=singular, person=3, tense=past, aspect=progressive, voice=active, polarity=negative] → “was not eating”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are there any theories that classify the above features (person, number, tense, etc.), &lt;em&gt;when applied to English verb groups&lt;/em&gt;, as &lt;strong&gt;syntactic&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;morphological&lt;/strong&gt;? And if there aren’t any, would it be because any such feature may cause both morphological and syntactical changes, so all such features are &lt;strong&gt;morphosyntactic&lt;/strong&gt; by nature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OLD QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt; (not SE-compatible, but I left here for folks to see what I'm trying to get at.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the boundary between syntax and morphology is, in general, fuzzy. Yet I wonder if, for &lt;strong&gt;production/generation&lt;/strong&gt; purposes, one can create 2 unambiguous lists of features for each, and 1 that combines both (morphosyntax). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I'm thinking exclusively about English verb groups (VGs), and a simplistic definition of syntax and morphology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphology: rules at and below word level.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntax: rules above word level.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, think of the realization &quot;eats&quot; defined by the following set of features (i.e. attribute-value pairs): &lt;code&gt;base=eat&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tense=present&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;person=3&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;number=singular&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;aspect=simple&lt;/code&gt;. If &lt;code&gt;number=plural&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;eats&quot; becomes &quot;eat&quot; (if all other features remain unchanged). All that happened was that a word changed, specifically its ending. With the above definition of morphology and syntax, one would classify &lt;code&gt;number&lt;/code&gt; as purely &lt;em&gt;morphological&lt;/em&gt;. Conversely, if &lt;code&gt;aspect=perfect&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;eats&quot; becomes &quot;has eaten&quot;. Now, not only the word &quot;eats&quot; has changed, but also another word (has) has been added, so one would classify &lt;code&gt;aspect&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;em&gt;morphosyntactic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above rationale, we would arrive at the following &lt;strong&gt;non-exhaustive&lt;/strong&gt; list of features for English VGs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphological: &lt;code&gt;number&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;person&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphosyntactic: &lt;code&gt;tense&lt;/code&gt; (because &lt;code&gt;future&lt;/code&gt; adds &quot;will&quot; to the VG and &lt;code&gt;past&lt;/code&gt; may change the head verb), &lt;code&gt;aspect&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;voice&lt;/code&gt; (because when &lt;code&gt;voice=passive&lt;/code&gt; &quot;be&quot; is added and the head verb changes to past participle).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntactic: &lt;code&gt;polarity&lt;/code&gt; (with values positive and negative, where negative adds &quot;not&quot; and positive does nothing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, in sum: &lt;strong&gt;Do you agree with the above classification, and, if not, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastEditorUserId="11474" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T13:10:32.657" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T13:10:32.657" Title="Syntactic vs Morphological features for generation of English VGs" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;production&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T14:01:27.130" Score="4" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to Praat and trying to read the spectrograms of different sound files using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-RVpvofhSY&amp;amp;list=PLRIMXVU7SGRJu1hMMfINC585iHd8iXJnv&amp;amp;index=2&amp;amp;spfreload=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; videos. I am learning to read the specrograms using the UI of Praat &lt;strong&gt;but I am unable to find any way through which I can read the slices using Praat script&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone please guide me about any way through which I read and analyse the spectrograms of sound files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T13:42:13.750" Title="How to read Spectrograms using Praat Script" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19954" CreationDate="2016-10-13T14:32:54.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;sleep with&quot; is not a phrasal verb.  If it were, one could say *&quot;He slept her with&quot;, and one could not move the &quot;with&quot; phrase as a unit, as in &quot;With whom has he slept?&quot;.  Compare the phrasal verb &quot;dust off&quot;: &quot;He dusted it off&quot;, *&quot;Off what did he dust?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, the &quot;with NP&quot; is a PP.  (And two race car drivers could say &quot;We passed each other repeatedly&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T14:32:54.643" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2016-10-13T17:00:31.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paul Postal once claimed that the two usages are related by a transformation &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Psych-movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Psych-movement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T17:00:31.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19956" CreationDate="2016-10-13T18:07:32.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your classification, but I also think it is trivial.  Two binary features always give 4 classes, and considering only things to which at least one of the features is applicable, you'll always get a three-way classification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T18:07:32.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-13T20:47:52.980" Score="3" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a defined way to order phonemes, phones, or other qualities of speech, such as those represented in the IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm listing the following sounds (and their descriptions, say, or links to wikipedia articles about them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;œ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d͡ʒ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should they be ordered? One might try to order &quot;alphabetically&quot;, but that seems completely arbitrary. Ordering by mouth position probably makes a lot more sense (i, y, ɨ, ʉ, ɯ, u, ɪ, ʏ, ...). But still there's a lot of room for interpretation here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I spend much time thinking about this, though, I thought I'd see if there's already a pre-defined sorting order for these concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="935" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T12:12:55.087" Title="Is there any standard way to sort phonemes?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19953" CreationDate="2016-10-13T20:53:45.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unclear what you are asking (not a plug for closing!), but I think I understand the issue you're pointing to. The last paragraph gives the answer if you don't need the buildup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get the impression that linguistic units are in a strict hierarchy where every lowest-level string groups its elements together into some number of next-higher level units, which are grouped into even-higher level units, until you get to the top. Under that view, if &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; are parsed as an L1 and (following) &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; are parsed as an adjacent L1, then &lt;em&gt;ab&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cd&lt;/em&gt; will always act as a unit and &lt;em&gt;bc&lt;/em&gt; never will. One reason why one might get that impression is that such an idealization has been widely assumed in the profession, so that is how we cook up our units. A second reason for getting that impression is that there is a cognitive reason why the assumption should be truish. We need to look at the formal properties of representations, to see what if any germ of truth there is to the idea. I will assume A Standard Theory in identifying those properties, and there can be substantial disagreements on those properties (I try to hint at those details: a complete deconstruction of all formal properties of all linguistic theories is plainly impossible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with the lowest accessible unit which is the feature, each feature is immediately dominated (IDd) by some mother node. One theory of mothers is that there is a unique mother(type) for each node (coronal has the mother Cplace); the better-supported theory is that each node has a finite set of possible mothers(type) (coronal has the mothers Cplace and Vplace). Representations are not recursive, which is obviously very different from syntax. Any node may have multiple mothers (features spread), and here syntax and phonology diverge massively. It has been claimed that immediately-preterminal mothers may ID multiple terminals (multiple values of &lt;em&gt;continuant&lt;/em&gt; for affricates), but the evidence for such representations is quite weak. Otherwise, below the root node, every mother has a single daughter. So segments, with Root at the top, are formally characterized in terms of limited-choice mothers, multiple mothers, and single daughters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two theories of what is next. One is &quot;skeletal slots&quot; and the alternative is &quot;other prosodic structure&quot;. Skeletal slots are basically CV elements or else generic X: the evidence for a type distinction is pretty much nil, and generic X theory seems to be The Standard Theory (if you have any skeletal slots). This is quite simple: every Root is IDd by a non-zero number of skeletal units (generally the choice is held to be 1 vs. 2), and each skeletal unit dominates at most one Root (with the same caveat about claims for affricates). In fact the only reason for having skeletal slots is to handle geminate consonants in inconvenient positions, such as onsets. If there are skeletal slots, there are &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; just a projection of Root (a 1-to-1 mapping between Root and X), except that there could also be a 1-to-2 mapping between Root and X. The multiple mother relationship that one finds between nodes below the root does not exist above the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a big fuzzy zone when it comes to prosodic structure. If you assume the syllable, which is the most popular prosodic constituent, there is a question of what things the syllable IDs (and what those things ID). For instance, is Onset a constituent of a syllable, likewise rhyme, nucleus, coda etc.? Where do moras, if they exist, fit in? Again going with &quot;most popular&quot; as The Standard Theory, syllables ID segments, and they ID moras which ID segments. A segment can be IDd by two morae, by a mora in σ1 plus by following σ2, and semi-theoretically by μ of σ1 and by σ1 itself, so that you may encounter drawings of [wu] being represented as &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; IDd by μ in a syllable and then an arc to the left from &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; to σ, meaning &quot;in the onset&quot;. But you can also find the same thing for [uw], with the arc going to the right of the straight line. This is, however, formally gibberish. So while the relational properties of syllable-level units are probably different from segment-level units, we still don't know what those properties are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above the syllable, it's a little simpler by stipulation: a foot is composed of one or two syllables, and only syllables; all syllables are in exactly one foot. If you have P-words, all feet are gathered into a P-word. The relationship of syllables to feet is the same as the relation of feet to P-words, except for the limit of feet to two (or actually three) syllables in the foot, which you don't find for foot-Pwd relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice now that the only thing that is actually common to all of these phonological layers of representation is that there is a notion of immediate dominance. That is pretty much a consequence of the metatheoretical decision to represent things as a combination of other things. I could say a but about how syntax is a bit different in certain ways, but I think the point should be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the common sense bottom line. In order to be able to handle long strings of information, it has to be divided up into a very small set of units. You can look at maybe 6 coins and see that there are 6 coins, but you can't look at 12 coins and see that there are 12 coins, you have to count them. A genus-species analysis of reality is how humans deal with the universe, and mentally organizing numerous articulatory and acoustic properties into &quot;segments&quot; and organizing strings of segments into &quot;syllables&quot; and eventually into &quot;words&quot; gives us a manageable way of grasping all of that information. I think what you are reacting to is the fact that information needs to be arranged hierarchically, in order to be practically processable. However, language is not a &lt;em&gt;strict&lt;/em&gt; [{(&amp;lt;&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;)(&amp;lt;&gt;)(&amp;lt;&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;)} {(&amp;lt;&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;)(&amp;lt;&gt;)} {(&amp;lt;&gt;)}{(&amp;lt;&gt;&amp;lt;&gt;)(&amp;lt;&gt;)(&amp;lt;&gt;)}] structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T20:53:45.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19957" CreationDate="2016-10-13T21:42:04.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand your goal (unassisted speech to text conversion, using Praat), this is not doable out of the box, but you might eventually develop the tools for doing this. An alternative interpretation is simply &quot;how do I find phonetic landmarks, using Praat and my ears?&quot;, which is actually quite doable, if you know basic phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you get to using Praat, you need to decide what the scope of your project is: any language, or a specific language? If you can't do it for a specific language (and then for 6 specific languages), you can't do it for all languages. If you know what the language is, then you can use that information to rule out possible interpretations of the signal. Within Praat, you have basically two problems, segmentation and identification (the latter assumes the former). The easiest case for segmentation in picking segments in a VCV sequence with voiceless stops, then fricatives, then voices stops, voiced fricatives, nasals, laterals, rhotics and glides. The reason why VtV is easiest is because a big change in the signal matches segment boundaries. The endpoint of the process is parsing similar vowel sequences such as [eɛ, ɨi], where it's impossible to find a crisp segment boundary (and the usual approach is to divide the contested zone in two parts). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T21:42:04.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19981" CreationDate="2016-10-14T02:44:13.060" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning syntactic theory from the book &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stiba-malang.ac.id/uploadbank/pustaka/MKLINGUISTIK/ENG%20SYNTAX%20BOOK.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;English Syntax and Argumentation&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; I got decent understanding of S, NP, VP, I. I do not use DP or TP because the textbook does not use it. However, I have problem understanding constituency for sentences where the sentence starts with an adjunct or the adjunct is at sentence level. Here are three examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By next October&lt;/strong&gt; he will have been serving as town clerk for thirty-two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After all those years&lt;/strong&gt;, he finally married the girl of his dreams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frankly&lt;/strong&gt;, this whole paragraph needs work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have problem with the parts in bold. Should they be considered as Adjuncts to the Verb Phrase or the sentence? If they are part of the Verb Phrase, how do I justify having them at the beginning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third one, &quot;Frankly&quot; applies to the whole sentence. I've seen it being called sentence level adjunct or disjunct. I haven't seen any three that has a part for a sentence level adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on @user6726 comment, I rephrased the question to be about constituency and not about drawing tree diagrams. Hope this clarifies the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14272" LastEditorUserId="14272" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T17:21:19.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T00:15:51.087" Title="Help with constituency?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19961" CreationDate="2016-10-14T08:13:32.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would sort them in the order of appearance on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Kiel_2015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IPA chart&lt;/a&gt;. They are roughly arranged by mouth position there, which is more useful than ordering them &quot;alphabetically&quot; or by Unicode code points. And in any case, the IPA chart is the official source of the phonetic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that on the main consonant chart the order by mouth position is from left to right, while on other consonant charts it's from top to bottom. On the vowel chart, again, it's from left to right. Approximants are towards the end of the consonant list, so I think it makes more sense to put vowels after consonants, not before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T11:54:11.467" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T11:54:11.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19936" CreationDate="2016-10-14T08:30:49.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say if you are trying to limit yourself to noun phrases, you are probably better off with &quot;because of NP&quot;. I'd suggest you use the following in the search bar, and limit yourself based on the resulting table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;because of [n*]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tagger, as pointed out above seems glitchy as it does not interpret the punctuation tag properly. This because of [n*][y*] fails badly, and I could not squeeze out a reasonable output with any variation at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PUNC would be the punctuation mark, but it does not seems to parse correctly: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DfoxD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DfoxD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T08:30:49.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19961" CreationDate="2016-10-14T12:12:55.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pullum and Ladusaw¹ sort all the phonetic symbols by their shapes. They group them by the basic latin letters from which the symbols are somehow derived and add a few symbols with no clear relations (derived from numerals or interpunctuation) after the letter z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix A of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~fkr/tipa/tipaman.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TIPA manual&lt;/a&gt; by Fukui Rei follows the same approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Pullum, Geoffrey K.; William A. Ladusaw (1986). Phonetic Symbol Guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-68532-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T12:12:55.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T17:50:53.487" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an English speaker uses a dental click [ǀ] to express shame or pity (or in Spanish as a sign of confusion), is that a word? What is the linguistic term for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I wondered about this after browsing through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wiki article on click consonants&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14279" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T18:18:07.860" Title="Is [ǀ], or ⟨tsk!⟩ a word in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19970" CreationDate="2016-10-14T18:18:07.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not by usual standards of what a &quot;word&quot; is. It is a communicative sign, but there are tons of sounds that you can make with the face or other body parts that convey something, and &quot;words&quot; are not simply &quot;communicative signs&quot;. A word is part of a rule-governed linguistic system of coding. Consider the difference between an actual imitation of a cow mooing, which I'll write as *MOO*, and the word &quot;moo&quot;. You can say &quot;The cow is mooing&quot;, but you can't say &quot;The cow is *MOO*ing&quot;. There are myriad created words that represent communicative sounds, such as &quot;brap&quot; for &quot;*BELCH*&quot;. Although they are marginal as words, there are words that stand for the clicky sound of disapproval, namely &quot;tisk&quot; and &quot;tut&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T18:18:07.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19965" CreationDate="2016-10-14T18:24:43.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a reply for your third example, &quot;Frankly, this whole paragraph needs work.&quot;  &quot;Frankly&quot; here is a manner adverb which modifies a root sentence (which is a non-embedded sentence, in the sense of Joseph Emonds, who introduced the category of root sentence into syntactic analysis).  Semantically, root sentences represent the performance of speech acts, so the sense here is that the speaker of the sentence is being frank with hearers of the sentence.  The very same word, in other positions and with different intonation, can be used to modify the VP of a non-root clause, as for example in &quot;He told us to always speak frankly.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have given a syntactic theory which gives explicit means for describing the grammar of root sentences and such adverbs as the performative &quot;frankly&quot;, which theory is based on an extension of Relational Grammar to a grammatical relation &quot;0&quot;, to supplement the grammatical relations &quot;1&quot;, &quot;2&quot;, &quot;3&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than my theory, I am not aware of any explicit syntactic theory which provides a way of describing performative adverbs, except for Arc Pair Grammar or Zeno Vendler's theory of adverbs.  My theory is outlined elsewhere here on SE, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;2psg SE post&lt;/a&gt; (which post has been closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T18:24:43.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T05:29:46.737" Score="2" ViewCount="983" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am trying to deduce what the essential function that all verbs have in common, they are defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see the issue that am having, let my compare the definition of the verb with the definition of a noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so a place and a person obviously aren't the same thing. However, they can be both &lt;strong&gt;identified&lt;/strong&gt;, infact any&lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; can be identified. So nouns a word that &lt;em&gt;identify things&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the heart of this problem is all about trying to fill in the missing blank in the sentence &lt;em&gt;'verbs are a type of word that [does this]'.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14280" OwnerDisplayName="user108262" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T11:02:06.213" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T19:35:28.537" Title="What does every verb have in common?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19973" CreationDate="2016-10-14T19:18:11.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a linguistic perspective, there is nothing semantic or functional that distinguishes verbs from other word classes. For example, &quot;tall&quot; is an adjective in English, but in many languages it is a verb which inflects for subject, has tenses and so on. A number of languages have affixation processes that allow words referring to entities to take on the meaning &quot;become X&quot;, whereby the word can serve as a predicate. Gerunds / infinitives like &quot;cooking&quot; function simultaneously as verbs and nouns. The most productive linguistic division is in terms of &quot;entities&quot; and &quot;predicates&quot;. Verbs tend to be in the &quot;predicate&quot; pile, but verbs refer to particular states and actions, which can be reified into abstract entities (which are nouny). In a particular language, there may be a parochial fact such as &quot;takes the affix &lt;em&gt;-ile&lt;/em&gt;&quot; that suffices to identify the intuitive class of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T19:18:11.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19973" CreationDate="2016-10-14T19:19:08.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise of the question seems to be that the part of speech of a word is somehow deducible from observable facts.  This general empiricist view was probably prevalent in American &quot;structuralist&quot; linguistics in the early part of the last century.  It is no longer prevalent, and many linguists (including me) do not subscribe to it.  &quot;Word&quot;, &quot;sentence&quot;, &quot;morpheme&quot;, POS are theoretical terms and not simply characterizations of observable facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T19:19:08.397" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19990" CreationDate="2016-10-14T19:44:32.817" Score="7" ViewCount="1043" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some alphabets, e.g. the Greek, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, have different forms for some letters when they appear at the end of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Greek, the letter sigma (σ) appears as a ς when used at the end of a word; in Hebrew, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;couple of letters&lt;/a&gt; have a special final form; for example the 'm': מ becomes ם when used at the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While separate forms for &lt;em&gt;capital&lt;/em&gt; letters has a definite advantage (marking the begin of a sentence, or indicating &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proper nouns&lt;/a&gt;) which increases the readability, I can't see any advantage of having a separate final form for certain letters. In fact, this makes an alphabet harder to learn for children/foreigners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any practical advantages to having final forms for certain letters, or is it just a 'stylistic' choice which survived throughout the ages (unlike the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'long s'&lt;/a&gt; in the Latin alphabet)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9716" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T19:55:28.767" Title="Why do some alphabets have special final forms for some letters?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2158" CreationDate="2016-10-14T21:20:13.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the late sixteenth century, there was a sporadic sound change in Portuguese which caused some stressed, word-final /i/s to become nasalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;em&gt;sim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;marfim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;assim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;metim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;morim&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older theory is that it was an influence of the nasalisation present in the antonym &lt;em&gt;não&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T21:20:13.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19965" CreationDate="2016-10-14T21:47:26.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are adjuncts, they are just topicalized. Alternative word order is orthogonal to what categories phrases have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T21:47:26.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T22:10:37.383" Score="3" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen in several places now, Arabic script, flowing not only from right to left, but also, simultaneously, from top to bottom, especially within the spelling of a single word, and especially when involving letters such as ج، ح، خ، and م.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone know what the technical term for this type of &quot;ligature&quot; is called (both in Arabic, but also in other languages, if it does take place in the writing of scripts from other languages as well)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These images for محمد are the closest to this stacking &quot;design phenomenon&quot; I am arresting in this post that I could find. (In particular, not how the م is stacked on top of the ح, which is in turn stacked ibn to of the م below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LaV3A.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LaV3A.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;محمد image I&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIUdK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xIUdK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;محمد image II&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="10020" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T10:24:54.943" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T10:24:54.943" Title="Technical term for &quot;stacked Arabic script&quot;?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19979" CreationDate="2016-10-14T22:22:36.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have a special name. It is the correct way to write Arabic. But if you are looking for a name, &quot;stacking&quot; is as good as any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T22:28:28.510" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T22:28:28.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19965" CreationDate="2016-10-15T00:15:51.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the comments and additional research I did, here is what I came up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trees are used for drawing sentences and there are different types of trees based on the grammar being used. Trees require that the lines/branches do not intersect. To explain what happens when phrases are moved there are different approach in linguistics. After @Atamiri's answer, on Wikipedia, I found out about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Discontinuity&lt;/a&gt; (in the English language: topicalization, wh-fronting, and extraposition); and about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dislocation_(syntax)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Dislocation&lt;/a&gt;. The first two sentences in my post are examples of Topicalization. The phrases &quot;By next October&quot; and &quot;After all those years&quot; are part of the Predicate that is the Verb Phrase but have been moved at the beginning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I am not sure is why are they not considered Dislocations but are treated as Discontinuity. It seems to me that Dislocations are more specific maybe noun phrases related to pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third sentence differs because it is a sentence level adjunct that applies to the whole sentence and expresses the authors attitude towards the sentence that follows. Based on @Greg Lee's answer, currently there is no syntactic theory that provides a way to incorporate disjuncts. @Greg Lee propose that a higher level then the sentence / main clause is introduced to accommodate this cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14272" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T00:15:51.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-15T01:00:37.857" Score="-1" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic we have three types of &quot;h&quot; sounds, as in the following list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ح&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;خ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ه&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know, which of these sounds is commonly transcribed as &quot;kh&quot; in English, and how are the other two &quot;h&quot; sounds transcribed, so as to avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="10020" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T02:57:23.973" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T14:24:43.583" Title="How are the three phonetically distinct Arabic h's transcribed in English?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19982" CreationDate="2016-10-15T01:33:02.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, we transcribe in IPA and we spell or transliterate in English, more or less. I assume you're asking about conventional letters and not phonetic symbols. &#xA;ح i.e. [ħ] suffers the most, being rendered as &amp;#x3c;ḥ&gt; except if a publisher can't handle such exotica (not such a problem these days). خ i.e. [χ] is spelled &amp;#x3c;kh&gt;, and ه i.e. [h] is spelled &amp;#x3c;h&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T01:49:25.537" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T01:49:25.537" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19973" CreationDate="2016-10-15T07:38:08.307" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I have an answer, feedback is very welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An action, like running, and a 'state of being', like hungry, do have something in common; Experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, 'hungry' isn't a single action, but it is a chain of events which arise the feeling of being hungry. There's a biochemical reaction taking place within the body all of which can be broken to a chain of actions one following another leading to the experience of hunger. Same with happiness, looking, feeling, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And actually, if you subtract living things out of the equation, the only verbs left our so called 'action verbs'. It's just that with animate beings, you have the extra complexity of experience, but it's really just a chain of events, a chain of actions, that we've dubbed 'states of being'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the thing that all verbs have in common, in my opinion, is experience. That's why the word 'running' in 'the man is running'  is a verb, and the same word in 'the man in thinking about running', is a noun, yet the word 'thinking' is now the verb, because it's an experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course,  my opinion isn't law, maybe am wrong. If anyone cares to refute my hypothesis by way of counter-example,  please don't hesitate. I say that with the most honest of intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14280" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T07:38:08.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="19989" CreationDate="2016-10-15T16:14:07.407" Score="-1" ViewCount="890" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in how to transcribe the following Arabic letters oh English. The letter &quot;families&quot; I Ann interested in are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ع&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;غ&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ر&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ك&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ق&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ء&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one of the first two would be a &quot;gh&quot;, but not sure about the other, while the third would be an &quot;r&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth might be a &quot;k&quot;, while one of the fifth and sixth a &quot;q&quot;, but not sure about the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10020" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T00:33:02.167" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T15:24:13.270" Title="How to transliterate the following Arabic letters in English" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-10-26T13:25:25.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19986" CreationDate="2016-10-15T16:36:48.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several transcription systems from Arabic into Latin letters. Wikipedia provides a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic&quot;&gt;comparison table of several transcription systems&lt;/a&gt; in one place. You need to decide yourself which system serves your purpose best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T16:36:48.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19986" CreationDate="2016-10-15T16:42:57.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The surplus of sounds of Arabic, relative to English, means that either some distinctions must be lost, or the standard supply of letters must be augmented. The standard (Arabist professional) conventions are that ع = [ʕ] is written as `, glottal stop (ء) is ´, ذ is dh, and so on. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; gives a convenient list. There is no conventional way to write the emphatics or long vowels without some supplementing of the alphabet, and pressing under-dot (emphatic or ħ) and macron (long vowel) into service has been deemed to be the appropriate augment. The digraph solution to the problem of ش غ ذ خ ث potentially has the problem of not distinguishing a two-consonant sequence with &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; as the second member (leaving out &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt; which is unambiguous), and one does find ش rendered as &lt;em&gt;š&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conventions have existed for over a hundred years, and they won't just change to avoid a diacritic. Theoretically you have some options for rendering these sounds, methods that I've seen exploited: emphatics are with capital letters, long vowels are doubled. There are aesthetic problems with that result, and social ones (nobody does that). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T16:42:57.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19986" CreationDate="2016-10-15T20:32:34.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Michau said, it depends on your use case. User6726 and Michau have provided a good overview of scholarly/lossless transcription systems. But since you mention specifically transcribing for English, there's another option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to have the word pronounced (something vaguely like) properly by English-speakers, or to use a name in an English work, then using common letters might be more important than being able to reconstruct the original Arabic from your transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you could use a &lt;em&gt;lossy&lt;/em&gt; transcription, merging similar letters together and using familiar English digraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, both د and ض are very close to English &quot;d&quot;, and it takes significant practice for English-speakers even to tell them apart. So for an English-speaking audience it can be easier just to write them both as &quot;d&quot; rather than introducing and explaining &quot;ḍ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go this route, I'd suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ع → [nothing]. /ʕ/ is unlike anything in English, and using a half-ring or &quot;3&quot; will just confuse most native English speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;غ → &quot;gh&quot;. This is fairly standard for the /ɣ/ sound, and as a bonus, the digraph is completely unambiguous in Arabic!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ر → &quot;r&quot;. Nice and simple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ك → &quot;k&quot;. Same sound as in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ق → &quot;q&quot;. Unless it's before a &quot;u&quot;, it should be clear that this is the &quot;foreign sound sort of like a k&quot; one, as in &quot;Iraq&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ء → [apostrophe]. Glottal stops are better known than /ʕ/, and the apostrophe is common when transcribing them in dialects (as well as in Hawai'ian and other languages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T20:32:34.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19976" CreationDate="2016-10-15T21:05:51.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the final forms weren't designed intentionally. They arose over time through, effectively, sloppy handwriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up through the mid-Hellenistic period, sigma's various forms (from the same root glyph as &quot;Ш&quot;, &quot;ש&quot;, and &quot;ش&quot;) evolved into standard Σ. This shape was used in inscriptions and important writings. But scribbling Σ over and over gets tiring, and the left side needed to be relatively flat to avoid confusion with Ε. So in quick, informal handwriting, it ended up looking more like a Ϲ, the &quot;lunate sigma&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cursive script, then, the shape would be connected to the letters on either side. If there was a letter immediately after it, the Ϲ was rounded off into a circle, with the top emphasized to keep it distinct from ο: thus, σ. If there was no letter immediately following it, the line just trailed off: ς.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then during the Renaissance, printers typesetting Greek text began imitating the conventions that had arisen for other languages: using uppercase and lowercase letters to break up words and sentences and make reading easier. For uppercase they used the classical inscription letters, and for lowercase they tried to imitate cursive handwriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gave us the three modern forms of sigma, Σ/σ/ς. There was no real reason to distinguish σ from ς any more, but at that point it was what readers were used to. Much like capitalizing the pronoun &quot;I&quot; in English, the reasons for it are long gone, but tradition and inertia keep it in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT: My information about Hebrew was incorrect, so I won't weigh in on that case.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T00:06:11.330" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T00:06:11.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19979" CreationDate="2016-10-15T21:25:29.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean the honorifics written in blocks, like these? &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT: OP does not.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://postimg.org/image/3tszk63zh/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s14.postimg.org/nof16aj75/Screenshot_from_2016_10_15_16_19_26.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Unicode they're called &quot;word ligatures&quot; or sometimes &quot;honorific ligatures&quot; (in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T04:21:01.790" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T04:21:01.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19982" CreationDate="2016-10-15T21:36:18.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English writing, often خ becomes &quot;kh&quot; and the others are combined into &quot;h&quot;. For example, محمد → Muhammad (with &quot;h&quot; meaning ح), الله → Allah (with &quot;h&quot; meaning ه).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lossless Arabic transcription, ح is usually written &quot;ħ&quot; (h with bar) or &quot;ḥ&quot; (h with under-dot) to separate it from ه. But this is rare except in textbooks and scholarly works; I've never seen a news article refer to *Muħammad or *Muḥammad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lossless transcription also needs to distinguish &quot;kh&quot; خ from &quot;kh&quot; كه . One approach is to spell كه as &quot;k'h&quot; (ALA-LC does this); another is to write خ as &quot;x&quot; (per ISO 233-2) or &quot;ḫ&quot; (h with under-breve). I personally prefer the second of these options. A handwritten apostrophe is too close to the symbols for ayn and hamza (ʿ and ʾ), while ḫ and ḥ tend to look very similar in print; writing the three as &quot;h&quot;, &quot;x&quot;, and &quot;ħ&quot; makes them much easier to tell apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In lossy transcription, of course, the distinction between the &quot;kh&quot;s can be ignored entirely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T16:48:05.290" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T16:48:05.290" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19976" CreationDate="2016-10-15T22:50:25.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic has no fewer than 4 forms: independent, initial, medial, and final. But in all cases there is a &quot;kernel&quot; form common among them all. One advantage of this design is that you do not need spaces to separate words – not a minor consideration if writing materials are expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: in Arabic, final forms are not always distinct. For example, a final Waw can look just like a medial, initial or independent Waw. But the system works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T01:09:35.080" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T01:09:35.080" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="19994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19982" CreationDate="2016-10-15T23:01:20.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;there are many transliteration schemes. if you want to be scholarly, follow the Encyclopedia of Islam scheme.  informally, I use H for your first example and h for the last. the middle one is not really an &quot;h&quot; sound, I usually go with &quot;kh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T23:01:20.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20002" CreationDate="2016-10-16T12:25:14.683" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is a prosodic word that dominates feet in a classic hierarchy -- but why do we need to refer to a prosodic word rather than just a word? I know they are different units, but what's the evidence that the &quot;prosodic word&quot; is something different than what we think of as a &quot;word&quot; (at least in European languages)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T19:35:57.813" Title="What explanatory value does a prosodic word have?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19995" CreationDate="2016-10-16T13:18:01.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A normal word is actually very hard to define. Do we write &quot;dog house&quot; or &quot;doghouse&quot;? (Or use a hyphen?) And of relevance to other languages more than English, do particles or clitics get written as separate words, or do they get joined together? Sometimes even affixes can be written as separate words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonological word has a clear and relatively uncontroversial definition. (Though edge cases in many languages will of course be debated.) None of these orthographic conventions, derived over the centuries when the words in question may not even have been pronounced the same, are relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And I think, though I'm not certain, that clitics, though they fit in between words and affixes from a morphosynactic perspective are just simple parts of phonological words.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T13:25:44.570" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T13:25:44.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-16T14:35:49.367" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;This structure is often used recently (I think since mid-2012) in a sarcastic or humorous way, or to indicate that the reasoning is not sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) “Ok, I really want to hang with her because FABULOUS.” (Twitter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) “Do you ever meet people who automatically inspire you to be a&#xA;  better person because wow” (Twitter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is grammaticalized because it's used in a new syntatic context, but is this enough to account for this process? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: I know &quot;fabulous&quot; and &quot;wow&quot; are not nouns. The name of the structure, however, is named like this by linguistics since it follows a noun phrase.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13086" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T01:50:15.777" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T01:50:15.777" Title="Is the English &quot;because (noun)&quot; an instance of grammaticalization?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19998" CreationDate="2016-10-16T14:46:53.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be a good example of an instance of grammaticalisation if it was perceived as a regular construction to say in English, but I would claim it isn't: The construction &lt;code&gt;because + NOUN&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;because + ADJECTIVE&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;because + INTERJECTION&lt;/code&gt;, in your example) is very, very marked, so I would say its use is too restricted to judge it as grammaticalised (yet).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Otherwise, i.e. if it was a grammaticalised and meanwhile &quot;normal&quot; construction in English, it wouldn't be possible to use &quot;in a sarcatsic or humorous way&quot;: The expression sounding wrong is the very reason for it to be funny.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A similar example would be something like &lt;a href=&quot;http://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly4hjacrMZ1r809t1o1_500.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Suddenly potatoes&lt;/a&gt;. I think it is incorrect to claim that this is a grammaticalised, thus umarked and &quot;normal&quot; expression in everyday English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T07:57:43.823" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T07:57:43.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-16T18:06:12.297" Score="6" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Ross's CNPC (Complex NP Constraint) describes the fact of English that after extracting one NP, corresponding to the relative pronoun from a relative clause, no other NP can be extracted from that clause.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English you can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I read the book which John gave to the girl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*&quot;the girl who(m) I read the book which John gave to&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter has had two relative pronouns removed from the clause &quot;John gave [the book] to [the girl]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it work this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, saying, well, it's the CNPC that's responsible is not an explanation.  That's like saying that the reason you can't extract something from a CNPC is that you can't extract anything from a CNPC. It doesn't tell you why English works that way -- it just tells you that it does work that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a rather narrow answer to propose for the question.  But first, I should clarify a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not every CNPC is a relative clause construction.  Ross's CNPC constraint also covers NPs with sentential complements to nouns, like &quot;[NP the fact [S that frogs hop] ]&quot;.  Thus *&quot;Frogs which the fact that __ hop surprises no one are menacing South Florida&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not just NPs which are prohibited from being extracted from a CNPC -- nothing can be: *&quot;the room in which the snake which we hid (the snake) (in the room)&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relative clauses can contain relative clause constructions -- in this case, a relative clause construction can contain both an extraction and a different relative clause from which something has also been extracted.  That is the &quot;This is the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese&quot; type of construction.  In this construction, no NP has been extracted from the relative clause construction &quot;the rat that ate the cheese&quot;, though a NP &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been extracted from the contained relative clause &quot;[S __ ate the cheese]&quot;.  (I know that's a little confusing -- I'm struggling to state it clearly. A relative clause is missing a constituent corresponding to a relative expression, but a relative clause construction, the entire NP, is not missing anything.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a note about Japanese.  I don't know Japanese, so I won't try to go into detail, but my understanding of Ross's account is this.  Unlike English, Japanese relative clauses do not involve extraction from the relative clause, so they are not constrained by the CNPC.  A relative clause in Japanese may be missing anything explicit corresponding to a relativized NP, but if so, this due to some other reason than extraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T19:14:23.183" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T19:14:23.183" Title="Why in English can't two NPs in a relative clause be relativized?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19995" CreationDate="2016-10-16T19:35:57.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &quot;the big question&quot;, whether (and why) to distinguish a Phonological Word = Prosodic Word (henceforth Pwd), from any other kind. Is it the same as a Morphological Word or a Syntactic Word? Indeed, is &quot;word&quot; the same in syntax and morphology? (Is syntax different from morphology?). Is the construct &quot;word&quot; actually necessary in syntax, morphology or phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The weakest (most unmotivated) of these distinctions is a difference between word in the morphological versus syntactic senses. In the old days, there were rewrite rules that turned N into &quot;cat, dog, cabbage&quot;, and ones that introduced affixes (&quot;→ have+en&quot;), and it was all about rules inserting things. Then some guy came up with the idea of generalized &quot;lexical insertion&quot; so that you don't have rules that rewrite N as &quot;cabbage&quot;, but you do have rules that introduce grammatical affixes. The main impediment to a clear understanding of morphology-syntax relations was the murkiness of the theory of morpho-syntactic features. Rather than assigning a syntactic terminal a feature-like property (such as &quot;subject marking&quot;) and letting a word-formation process cash that out as an affix, we had syntactic rules that actually manipulated affixes, which could hop. Focusing on theories of the 80's and 90's, the unresolved question is &quot;what the heck is a word, in syntax, and what about morphology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clitics played a major role in this debate. There are very many cases where some word, especially a verb, has an affix that seems to serve a syntactic function so it &quot;must&quot; be a syntactic unit of its own, and yet it seems clear that the stuff is part of some other word. Object pronouns are a classic example, where in a number of languages, verbs are inflected for object in some way, with stuff that is &quot;on&quot; the verb (example: Lushootseed &lt;em&gt;ɬušudxʷ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;will see&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ɬušudubicid&lt;/em&gt; &quot;will see you&quot;, where the pronoun object triggers inflectional allomorphy – I do not think that &quot;clitic&quot; is the right analysis here, but this is a good illustration of the kind of fact that leads to &quot;Pwd&quot;). English possessive &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is another example. The basic problem is that you have an affix whose distribution suggests (for some theories) that the thing is really a syntactic terminal, like an &quot;object&quot;, but by other standards (especially the &quot;subject to allomorphy&quot; test) it seems to act like a morpheme within something else (word, obviously, since morphology puts together words, not combinations of words)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proffered solution (mid 80's vintage) to the general problem is to say that there is a word in syntax, where you state the sentence-level distribution of &quot;words&quot;, and then sometimes two elements (especially clitics plus &quot;real&quot; words) are restructured into a phonological construct Pwd. The transition to this thinking does involve many more entities, so we had Pwds and Clitic Groups for a moment, but it was eventually concluded that we could dispose of some of that baggage, and simply have Pwds, which you get when &quot;other stuff&quot; like clitics are combined with real words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I pause to mention that there is a solution to the clitic problem in HPSG, promulgated by Phil Miller, which incorporates the notion of &quot;edge feature&quot;, whereby a feature goes down some edge of a constituent. English possessive &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is an example: is end up at the right edge of the relevant NP, and does not care what kind of word it is realized on, and that is why you have possessive marking on verbs in phrases like &quot;The man who I helped's house is burning&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In phonology, people got enamoured of the idea of building structure on top of phonemes, so we liked the idea of a representational thing that corresponds to &quot;word&quot;. It had to be a special phonological thing, given the (mistaken) axiom that phonology has no access to grammatical structure. Consequently, lots of kinds of structure was posited. Inkelas in her dissertation, for example, gives a representational reconstruction of Lexical Phonology level ordering, where the stuff that is &quot;Level 1&quot; is really stuff dominated by α, stuff that is &quot;Level 2&quot; is dominated by β, and so on. McCarthy &amp;amp; Prince in their account of Axininca Campa (&quot;Prosodic Morphology II&quot;) profitably exploit the idea of manipulating Pwd boundaries, and people soon realized that you can have all sorts of constituent breaks inside a &quot;word&quot; where the edges are nudged this way and that to satisfy some constraint. The literature on Bantu is replete with numerous named constituents, like the Stem, Macrostem, Derivational Stem, Inflectional Stem and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There grew to be an &quot;enough is enough&quot; feeling, there being a problem with so many constituents. Ito &amp;amp; Mester moved things in the right general direction, by basically getting rid of most of the structural distinctions, having just &quot;Word&quot; and &quot;Foot&quot; (and syllable and mora), but allowing these to be recursive – and in a laudible move, did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; posit a bar-level distinction (W0, W', Wmax) as a thing in the representation. Instead, rules / constraints might mention that the things are &quot;in the same minimal W&quot;, or that the W is &quot;a top W&quot; (kind of an A-over-A for phonology), and that's it. The evidence is pretty decent that you don't need a big inventory of structures, you just need recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We understand now that &quot;Phonological word&quot; is, simply, &quot;word&quot;, and there isn't some other sense of &quot;word&quot; out there. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a recognition that the syntactic relationship between word and what might influence the form of a word is complicated. The syntactic need for a special phonological concept of word as existed in the 80's has pretty much gone away, in the face of Minimalism now accepting the concept of features, with Derivation by Phase, and nano-syntactic analysis (to the extent that these are accepted). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, there isn't any need for the distinction anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T19:35:57.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20004" CreationDate="2016-10-16T19:40:55.750" Score="0" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People's opinions are not always the result of their experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;always&quot; constituent of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried movement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not always, people's opinions are the result of their experiences. - sounds grammatical to me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Always, people's opinions are not the result of their experiences. - sounds ungrammatical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The results of their experiences, people's opinions are not always. - sounds ungrammatical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Always the results of their experiences, people's opinions are not. -sounds grammatical to me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People's opinions might not always be the result of their experiences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People's opinions are sometimes the result of their experiences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused whether it is part of the NP &quot;the result of their experiences&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can give syntactic tests to show your arguments would be great. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences 5 and 6 were added after the question was asked and answered because I came up with additional examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14272" LastEditorUserId="14272" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T22:17:41.577" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T22:17:41.577" Title="What is &quot;always&quot; constituent of?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20003" CreationDate="2016-10-16T19:56:38.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first test is correct: The adverb &quot;always&quot; is - together with the negation &quot;not&quot; which modifies (negates) it - a constituent serving to modify the verb phrase (the being a result is modified w.r.t. time, namely that it is &quot;not always&quot; being one).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since the head of the constituent is the adverb &quot;always&quot;, most syntacticians would call this constituent an &lt;strong&gt;adverbial phrase&lt;/strong&gt; and locate it as an adjunction to the verb phrase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;4. sounds very weird to me; I'm not a native speaker though. Looks like the part starting with &quot;always&quot; was topicalised, i.e. moved to the front of the sentence to make it the sentence's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;topic&lt;/a&gt; (where the &quot;not&quot; is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;focus&lt;/a&gt;). Might be that this information structuring legitimates such a construction, but it is at least very marked I'd say, since the adverb (&quot;always&quot;) was detached from its negation (&quot;not&quot;), making it hard to reconstruct the constituent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T20:09:47.753" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T20:09:47.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20001" CreationDate="2016-10-16T20:17:27.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's compare three theories of the CNPC &quot;island&quot; constraint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TG&lt;/strong&gt;.  Ross's description is phrased in terms of Transformational Grammar.  In fact the original title of his dissertation, &lt;strong&gt;Contraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/strong&gt;, is an allusion to Chomsky's characterization of TG, since transformations are to be stated in terms of variables representing substrings of labeled bracketings.  It is a remarkable fact about Ross's famous dissertation that it proposes no constraints on transformational variables at all.  Presumably, that is because Ross was unable to find a satisfactory formulation.  So far as I know, no one else has been able to capture the Ross constraints as constraints on transformational variables, either.  I conclude that TG is unable even to describe the Ross constraints, including the CNPC, much less explain them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPSG&lt;/strong&gt;.  The GPSG theory of Gazdar and others, does offer an explanation of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, and it can describe (though not explain) the CNPC.  I will give a brief outline if how this works, below.  I will remark here that I am still very enthusiastic about GPSG, and I am not persuaded by Stuart Schieber's work on Swiss-German that human language is not context free.  Regardless, GPSG does not explain the CNPC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2PSG&lt;/strong&gt;.  This is my own theory, which is descriptively in a primitive state, but does offer an account of why no more than one NP can be extracted from a relative clause. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;my 2PSG post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPSG&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one point, Chomsky argued that CFG (context free phrase structure grammar) was insufficient to describe many constructions of natural language involving movement, including relative clauses.  I was convinced -- many linguists were.  All the same, Chomsky's arguments were evidently bogus, because Gerald Gazdar showed how to describe &quot;movement&quot; constructions without using transformations.  Once you've been told the technique, it's easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it works.  CFG allows you to create a very large number of phrase structure rules and grammatical categories, provided the numbers are finite.  So you can characterize movement constructions by creating new categories for constituents out of which something has been moved and constituents into which something has been moved.  This works because of the Ross island constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for instance, a relative clause is like an ordinary sentence except that it is missing a constituent corresponding to a relative pronoun (or expression containing one).  Using the slash notation for categories with missing parts, &quot;the food which he ate&quot; has a transitive VP which is missing its NP object, a VP/NP which is &quot;ate&quot;, and a sentence with subject &quot;he&quot; and this peculiar VP/NP, which is the relative clause &quot;he ate&quot;, a S/NP.  This relative clause combines with &quot;which&quot;, a NP, to make a complete clause, the relative sentence &quot;which he ate&quot;, of category S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that if it were not for the CNPC, this analysis in GPSG would not work, because in the absence of the CNPC, we'd need to describe relative clauses missing two NPs, of category S/NP/NP, and relative clauses missing three NPs, of category S/NP/NP/NP, and so on, ad infinitum.  But a CFG cannot have an infinite number of categories.  So, not only does the GPSG analysis manage to describe the CNPC, but it predicts that there must be a constraint on the number of relativized NPs in a relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, GPSG doesn't predict what exactly that constraint is.  It turns out that it is a maximum of one relativized NP.  But if, say, two NPs could be extracted from a relative clause, that could also be described using the GPSG technique.  Still, this is a huge advance over the earlier treatment using transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2PSG&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In traditional linguistic analysis, case systems are described with a vertical dimension. A declension describes the morphology of nouns as having the nominative form at the top and the other case forms as &quot;declining&quot; away from the &quot;upright&quot; nominative and becoming more &quot;oblique&quot; as you go lower in the declension.  Several contemporary theories incorporate some version of this morphological theory, but applied to phrases, rather than to words.  I'm thinking of Fillmore's Case Grammar, Gruber's thematic analysis, and Postal &amp;amp; Perlmutter's Relational Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2PSG is such a theory, and the &quot;2&quot; is a reference to the second, vertical dimension of traditional declensions.  The degree of obliqueness of a phrase is described with an integer suffix 0, 1, 2, or 3, where the 1, 2, 3 indexes are essentially the same as the like-named grammatical relations of Relational Grammar.  Grammatical relations are attributed to phrases (S, NP, PP, ...) rather than words, but there is a correspondence between 1/2/3 and the traditional description of words as having nominative/accusative/dative case forms.  (The 0 grammatical relation, which is not part of Relational Grammar, corresponds to the vocative case form.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A basic assumption of Relational Grammar is the &quot;Stratal Uniqueness Law&quot;, which prohibits more than one instance of the same grammatical relation from appearing at the same level of analysis.  2PSG adopts this assumption also.  I apologize for the &quot;stratal&quot; in the name of this principle, which I disagree with.  I keep the name just to identify the theory from which I stole the idea.  I think it is a deep truth about human language.  In 2PSG, the SUL has the form of prohibiting more than one instance of any grammatical type in a phrase structure rule (or, rather, the counterpart of a phrase structure rule in 2PSG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the structure of &quot;John gives Mary a book&quot; can be described as &quot;S1 -&gt; NP1 gives NP3 NP2&quot;, meaning that it is a declarative finite clause S1 with a subject NP1, a head &quot;gives&quot;, an indirect object NP3, and a direct object NP2.  The SUL prohibits multiple subjects, multiple direct objects, or any two instances of the same grammatical variable, as does the original SUL principle in Relational Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The indices 0/1/2/3 give the height in a phrase structure tree of variables such as S1, NP1, NP2, NP3, and S1 is the type of declarative finite clauses.  In the above illustration, no part of the sentence is any higher than the sentence as a whole, but this needn't always be the case.  Without any constraint to the contrary, we can also describe constituents containing parts less oblique than the containing constituent, such as S1 -&gt; NP1 gives NP3 NP0 (for &quot;John gives Mary what?&quot; for instance).  These are extraction constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So finally I can come to the point.  If we attempt to extract two NPs from a clause, in 2PSG they would have to be both NP0 in the clause structure, and this would violate the Stratal Uniqueness Law.  This is my account of why two NPs cannot be extracted from the same clause.  (For more detail of how the theory works, please see my earlier post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T17:52:30.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19127" CreationDate="2016-10-16T21:48:30.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English influenced Polish phonotactics in some very frequent words, such as &lt;em&gt;weekend&lt;/em&gt; (which currently is a perfectly Polish word for, well, a weekend). In general, &lt;code&gt;/wi/&lt;/code&gt; is not allowed in Polish and a natural adaptation of &quot;weekend&quot; to Polish phonology would be &lt;code&gt;/vikent/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/wɨkɛnt/&lt;/code&gt; (cf. Wikipedia &lt;code&gt;/vikipɛdja/&lt;/code&gt;). However, nobody pronounces &lt;em&gt;weekend&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;code&gt;/v/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt; - you may say &lt;code&gt;/wɨkɛnt/&lt;/code&gt;, but only if you intentionally want to sound slightly off. The correct pronunciation (from both &lt;a href=&quot;http://sjp.pwn.pl/szukaj/weekend.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prescriptive&lt;/a&gt; and descriptive points of view) is &lt;code&gt;/wikɛnt/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/wikɛnd/&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely enough, even though &lt;code&gt;/wi/&lt;/code&gt; doesn't sound odd to Polish ears anymore, the regular way of writing &lt;code&gt;/wikɛnd/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;łikend&lt;/em&gt;) does look strange for some reason, and therefore, the original English spelling is used instead (&lt;em&gt;weekend&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T13:33:35.733" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T13:33:35.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19608" CreationDate="2016-10-16T22:55:56.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Update here: I ended up using &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonologicalcorpustools.github.io/CorpusTools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonological corpus tools&lt;/a&gt; to calculate the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpustools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/string_similarity.html#phonological-edit-distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;phonological edit distance&lt;/a&gt; between sets of transcriptions. If interested my code is over &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dvdmrn/phonologicalEditDistance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="2831" LastEditDate="2016-10-23T23:09:33.667" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T23:09:33.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1280" CreationDate="2016-10-17T01:55:09.223" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to achieve good pronunciation of a foreign language by means of listening to recordings or native speakers. But it becomes possible, when a person begins to investigate their own vocal tract and to make new sounds. Anyone who wants to acquire a new accent should treat pronunciation like a motor skill. If he or she does it, he or she succeeds. I highly recommend that you read the book 'A Practical Introduction to Phonetics' and forget of the 'Evidence for age cutoff in foreign accent acquisition.' The 'Evidence for age cutoff in foreign accent acquisition' is absurd imho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14295" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T01:55:09.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="107" CreationDate="2016-10-17T12:24:02.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eye dialect&lt;/a&gt;—a kind of constructed accent in written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. See also this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14586/we-have-constructed-languages-but-are-there-constructed-accents&quot;&gt;We have constructed languages, but are there constructed accents?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T12:24:02.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2016-10-17T15:53:08.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dict.com/Anglicko-cesky/slovn%C3%ADk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;dict.com&lt;/a&gt;, probably one of the largest english-czech dictionary freely available online, reports gender of nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14302" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T15:53:08.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-18T05:59:52.400" Score="0" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to earlier questions (and some reading), I understand the basics of the phonological hierarchy &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Features &amp;lt; Root &amp;lt; Skeletal Slot &amp;lt; (mora / onset-rhyme-nucleus-coda) &amp;lt;&#xA;  Syllable &amp;lt; Foot &amp;lt; Word &amp;lt; Phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all seems coherent and probably has real scientific value. &#xA;But is this hierarchy capable of accounting for prosodic phenomena like stress, tone, intonation and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T07:55:27.997" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T16:53:09.670" Title="How are prosodic phenomena represented in the phonological hierarchy?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6287" CreationDate="2016-10-18T06:02:00.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Academy of Hebrew Language, Hebrew numeric ranges should be written right-to-left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hebrew-academy.org.il/topic/hahlatot/punctuation/#target-3447&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hebrew-academy.org.il/topic/hahlatot/punctuation/#target-3447&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ARkhJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ARkhJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14306" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T06:02:00.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19239" CreationDate="2016-10-18T06:13:26.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While many others have pointed out that there are many cases where multiple morphemes can exist in one syllable, it is also possible to have morphemes which in themselves do not constitute a syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copulative verbalizer in Aymara is indicated with elongation of the final vowel on the noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The accusative case in Aymara is indicated with the deletion of the final vowel of the noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several American languages, like Mixtec, have a &quot;floating nasal&quot; morpheme, others indicate differences in e.g. person inflection with tonal contrast.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All examples above are morphemes, but not syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12684" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T06:13:26.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20012" CreationDate="2016-10-18T11:41:25.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that there is such a hierarchy, with higher level units displaying special behavior which does not emerge from the lower level things they are made up of.  Take syllables, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a theory adapted from Saussure's idea that syllables are the paradigmatic counterpart to a syntagmatic difference between individual sounds that are explosive (with increasing aperture) and those that are implosive (with decreasing aperture).  The consonants at the beginning of a syllable are explosive and those at the end are implosive.  There are not two different things involved between the feature difference (as we would call it these days) explosive versus implosive and the grouping of sounds into syllables -- these are different perspectives on the same phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think Saussure's theory quite works, as he proposed it, because aperture doesn't always increase in the onset of a syllable and doesn't always decrease in syllable offset.  For instance, the &quot;s&quot; of &quot;stop&quot; has greater aperture than the &quot;t&quot; that follows.  (This is so obvious, one wonders what Saussure was thinking, when he discussed this in &lt;em&gt;Cours de linguistique general&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a little recognized fact about the &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; feature system that consonants can differ in stress, as well as vowels.  In my version of Saussure's theory, I use the stress feature instead of Saussure's explosive/implosive.  Syllables begin with stressed consonants and end with unstressed ones. Then when consonants change syllable membership, this can be alternatively described as a change in the stress of the consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T11:41:25.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19998" CreationDate="2016-10-18T16:03:46.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't grammaticalization, because grammaticalization is a process whereby a lexical word becomes a grammatical marker, a.k.a. a functional word (or morpheme). For example, the English future auxiliary &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; is a result of grammaticalization as it derives from the verb &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;want&quot;. In this case, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; is already a conjunction, so is already &quot;grammatical&quot;; what's changing is that it's starting to allow a new type of complement (arguably extending to be a preposition), but that has nothing to do with grammaticalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T16:03:46.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20012" CreationDate="2016-10-18T16:53:09.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem in this respect with the prosodic hierarchy (PH) is determining what it would mean for the hierarchy to account for prosodic phenomena like stress, tone, intonation and so on. There are two parts to the problem: identifying &quot;prosodic phenomena&quot;, and saying what you mean by the hierarchy &quot;accounting for&quot; those phenomena. To make life simpler, let's limit prosodic phenomena to sub-phonemic pitch and duration variation subsumed under the rubric &quot;intonation&quot; (because intonationologists make extensive use of the PH in their analyses). Something in the theory of the PH seems to be useful for such analysis. However, there is an awful lot about intonation that &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; accounted for by the PH. For example, the PH is pretty much useless in determining whether pitch goes up, down or stays the same; it doesn't tell you how much it goes up when it does; it doesn't tell you why it goes up when you're contrasting a choice of nouns (why doesn't it go down). If you move to tone, things get even worse because there are so many things that the PH doesn't explain. The reason is, the PH doesn't &lt;em&gt;purport&lt;/em&gt; to explain those things. PH is a theory of grouping: all of its claims are about the parts of phonological systems that say &quot;when these two (or more) things are in a particular relationship&quot;. That's all it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The utility of a theory (whose scope is now properly delimited) can't be judged in a vacuum, it only makes sense to evaluate the theory relative to an alternative. Fortunately, this has been done. Recall that the core concepts of the PH were promulgated in the mid 80's, and there were two competing theories of relations – direct reference, and indirect reference. Kaisse and Odden advocated the direct reference approach, Nespor, Vogel and Selkirk advocated the indirect reference approach. The central issue distinguishing these approaches is whether phonological rules can directly refer to properties of grammatical structure (e.g. can phonology know that two words are &quot;in the same NP&quot;). Or is there a pre-phonological interface component which groups words hierarchically into parts of the PH, subject to the standard conditions on hierarchical tree-building (Pi immediately dominates all and only Pi-1; every Pi-1 is immediately dominated by exactly one Pi; the inventory of elements is (U,I,P,W)). Neither side in this debate had much of a stake in specific claims about the kinds of non-phonological structural relations that could in fact enter directly into rules (in the DR account) or construction of prosodic units (for IR accounts), but the most popular understanding was that it was usually about &quot;c-command&quot;, or &quot;is the head of&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My evaluation of the matter is that the debate fizzled out, mostly because of the difficulty of identifying anything empirical that could distinguish the accounts. 80% of &quot;the facts&quot; boil down to a simple observation: languages can stipulate that &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; interact when &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; has a certain relationship to &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, and not otherwise, and that relationship is exemplified by pairs like &quot;noun,adjective&quot;, &quot;noun,determiner&quot; but not &quot;noun,adverb&quot; (it is more complicated that that, though). The mass of facts that the debate is about reduces to the concept that the head of a phrase 'groups together' with its modifiers, in a way that two words &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in that relationship don't do (like, subject and object in a V-final language). Both theories had machinery for getting that fact. Other facts exist that may cause problems, but they are part of the arcana of the topic where &quot;something else must be going on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, additionally, a question as to whether the PH is a single coherent thing, and most often people distinguish the &quot;postlexical&quot; hierarchy from the word-internal hierarchy (with Pwd at the top). The strongest claims of strict dominance relationship have been mostly rescinded (what survives is that Pi immediately dominates Pi-(0..n), that is, a node can dominate &lt;em&gt;itself or anything&lt;/em&gt; lower, but not anything higher). There are many specific questions about particular levels of the hierarchy, for example what principles explain why feet come in three main varieties: one-or-two syllable feet, two-syllable feet, and three-syllable feet, and there isn't a general analogous question for the entire PH (though there has been a related claim about the mora-syllable relation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you fold in features, there is nothing concrete and testable to the concept of &quot;hierarchy&quot;, apart from the non-linguistic fact that immediately perceptible facts have to be subsumed into higher abstractions, in order to retain the perceptible in memory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T16:53:09.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20021" CreationDate="2016-10-18T17:19:20.450" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the name for the elision of a consonant between two vowels? &#xA;Syncope is usually used for vowel elision (resulting in consonant clusters) but what about consonant elision?  I couldn't find any term for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12759" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T17:45:05.580" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T18:42:21.110" Title="Term for consonant elision" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20020" CreationDate="2016-10-18T18:42:21.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syncope is actually a particular kind of rhythmically-governed vowel elision. There is no general word that refers to intervocalic consonant deletion. The closest you can get is &quot;lenition&quot;, which often results in deletion, but is not restricted to &quot;intervocalic&quot;, and it has other outcomes (such as /k/ → [g]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T18:42:21.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2016-10-18T19:48:40.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do folks in all walks of life neglect Hawaii?  If you count the okina; a glottal stop, represented by a apostrophe, and the kahako (macron), and a few diphthongs, the Hawaiian language is highly phonetic.  Some say perfectly phonetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me ka ha'aha'a (with humility)&#xA;La'i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14312" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T19:48:40.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3428" CreationDate="2016-10-18T21:47:55.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a draft of Lawrence Trask’s &lt;em&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Basque&lt;/em&gt;, with abbreviations expanded by me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hiri&lt;/strong&gt; (Labourdin, Bas-Navarre), &lt;strong&gt;hí(r)i&lt;/strong&gt; (Souletin), &lt;strong&gt;iri&lt;/strong&gt; (Alta Navarra, Salazar, Roncalese), &lt;strong&gt;uri&lt;/strong&gt; (Vizcayan, Gipuzkoan) &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt; ‘town’. 1545 (but see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;*ili&lt;/em&gt;, of unknown origin, by rhotacism of /l/. Last form by Bizkaian /i/-backing. The Romans reported a town called &lt;em&gt;Iliberris&lt;/em&gt; in south-central Spain, and this name looks remarkably like a Basque formation meaning ‘new town’ (&lt;em&gt;berri&lt;/em&gt; ‘new’). But there is no other evidence for Basque speech so far south, and we must suppose either coincidence or an undocumented settlement in this area by Basque emigrants. A second &lt;em&gt;Iliberris&lt;/em&gt; (modern &lt;em&gt;Elna&lt;/em&gt;) is recorded in Rosselló (Pyrénées-Orientales) (Coromines 1995 s.v. Elna), [...] The form &lt;em&gt;(h)uri&lt;/em&gt; is well recorded from the 11th century onward in the toponymy of Alava and the Rioja, while &lt;em&gt;iri&lt;/em&gt; is equally well recorded from the 11th century in Navarra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're willing to consider outright speculation, it's worth mentioning Sorin Paliga’s &lt;em&gt;Urbian&lt;/em&gt; theory. According to this theory, there is a pre-Indo-European root &lt;em&gt;*ol-&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;*ul-&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;*or-&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;*ur-&lt;/em&gt;, connected with the concept of a town, present in this Basque word, Latin &lt;em&gt;urbs&lt;/em&gt;, the name of the Swiss city of Uri, the name of the Iraqi city of Erbil, Greek &lt;em&gt;labyrinthos&lt;/em&gt; and several other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T21:47:55.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-18T23:46:22.520" Score="-3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything that is for beginners would be appreciated. Something that introduces the subject to someone who is completely new&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14315" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T05:15:03.087" Title="Can anyone recommend me some book on semitic linguistics?" Tags="&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-11-04T05:05:25.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20024" CreationDate="2016-10-19T05:15:03.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Introduction to the Semitic Languages (Gotthelf Bergstrasser), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.semiticroots.net/downloads/Comparative%20Grammar%20of%20the%20Semitic%20Languages.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages&lt;/a&gt;, Comparative Semitic Linguistics (Patrick Bennett). The last of these is probably best, as an introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T05:15:03.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2016-10-19T06:52:49.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Hawaiʻian.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hawaiʻian language is known for its very small consonant inventory: there are only eight generally-accepted consonant phonemes, each with its own letter in the orthography (P, K, H, M, N, L, W, and ʻ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ten* vowels are also represented unambiguously in the orthography. Each short vowel (A, E, I, O, U) is given its own letter, while the long vowels are marked with macra (Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, each grapheme designates exactly one phoneme, and each phoneme is designated by exactly one grapheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip-side, this doesn't mean it's always clear how a word should be pronounced. One side effect of the small consonant inventory is a &lt;strong&gt;LOT&lt;/strong&gt; of free variation; free allophones of /k/ include [t], [s], [d], [z], [ts], [c], [tʃ], [ʃ], [g], and [x], for instance. So when place names and loanwords are borrowed into other languages, they tend to be written more phonetically than phonemically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;* (This number is not entirely agreed-upon. It comes down to whether or not diphthongs and geminated vowels are phonemes. Since diphthongs are still formed productively, some linguists consider there to be only five vowels in the underlying representation. Others count the long vowels as separate, giving ten. A third camp categorizes each diphthong as its own phoneme, for a total of 25. Luckily, these different interpretations agree that the orthography is phonemic; they disagree on whether or not digraphs are necessary.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T22:19:39.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2016-10-19T12:13:16.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Esperanto. Its writing system is phonemic in relation to the commonly used pronunciation, including the pronunciation used by native speakers. Moreover, for some speakers the script can be considered phonetic, as they try to avoid allophones and pronounce e.g. &lt;em&gt;banko&lt;/em&gt; as [banko] and not [baŋko], even though the latter form is not generally considered to be incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T12:13:16.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2016-10-19T13:20:21.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the closest thing you can get in natural languages the distinction between choice-aimed and simple alternative. Finnish and Basque have already been mentioned, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.no/books?id=GNYsbinINo8C&amp;amp;pg=PA286&amp;amp;lpg=PA286&amp;amp;dq=tai+vai+edo+ala+czy+lub&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=y-NzHGKW4O&amp;amp;sig=zxdsce5RvXEqh0bPTKajVEOZ-MI&amp;amp;hl=no&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj8iZ7p9-bPAhUmKpoKHVDwBnoQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=tai%20vai%20edo%20ala%20czy%20lub%20albo%20ci%20abo%20apo%20ose%20cy%20abo%20tu%20an%20ja%20wa-ja%20ahi&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here are some more&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are, however, 9 European languages that do not have any general marker for alternative, but show two distinct connectives for choice-aimed alternative and simple alternative relations. These languages are Polish (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;czy&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;lub/albo&lt;/em&gt;), Finnish (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;vai&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;tai&lt;/em&gt;), Belorussian (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;ci&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;abo&lt;/em&gt;), Albanian (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;apo&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;ose&lt;/em&gt;), Basque (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;ala&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;edo&lt;/em&gt;), Ukrainian (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;čy&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;abo&lt;/em&gt;), Georgian (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;), Lezgian (choice-based: &lt;em&gt;tax̂ajt'a&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;ja/wa-ja&lt;/em&gt;), Dargi (choice-aimed: &lt;em&gt;aħi&lt;/em&gt;, simple: &lt;em&gt;ya-ra&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction is also present in Mandarin Chinese: choice-aimed alternatives use 還是 &lt;em&gt;háishì&lt;/em&gt; and simple alternatives use 或者 &lt;em&gt;huòzhě&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Polish, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Albanian are all Indo-European, just like you wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T13:26:40.123" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T13:26:40.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2016-10-19T15:30:28.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very good question because it highlights the multiple terms used to describe what appears to be similar if not the same phenomena; However, as it has been pointed out above, there are contextual differences in the terms. As far as a clarification for the terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First language and L1 are the same. L1 is the abbreviated form of first language. And mother tongue and Native language are interchangeable. Essentially, these two terms are socio-cultural constructs. Meaning, the terms native and/or mother language are a way to conjure a transportation of a language from one culture and geography into another geography/culture. Their use trigger the counterpart, foreign. Thus, in addition to declaring the order of language acquisition, these two terms also reveal an immigration component to the language. In contrast, the term L1/First language are clinical terms to describe language acquisition in individuals who have acquired one or more languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the scenarios listed in the original post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would describe this scenario as a non dominant L1 individual, i.e. underscoring language acquisition and subsequent language shift. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L2 adquisition post Critical period. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This scenario needs to be further qualified because the critical period may include for some a wide time frame.  For example, I would call an individual acquiring a second language up to age 4 or 5 a sequential L2, and/or maybe depending on the input exposure opportunity in both languages, a simultaneous bilingual, known as 2L1.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14321" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T00:16:45.687" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T00:16:45.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20033" CreationDate="2016-10-20T00:24:33.477" Score="1" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They made him cry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both him and cry complements of the verb &quot;made&quot;. So far I have this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;They&lt;/em&gt; - subject&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;made&lt;/em&gt; - the main verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; - the direct object and it complements the verb made.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cry&lt;/em&gt; - I am not sure. I am thinking that is is a second complement to the verb made. Also is it a verb or a noun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14272" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T23:13:14.493" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T23:13:14.493" Title="They made him cry? Complement" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20032" CreationDate="2016-10-20T16:52:12.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They made him cry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have it right. This is a catenative construction where &quot;him&quot; is the raised object of &quot;made&quot;, and the subordinate non-finite clause &quot;cry&quot; is catenative complement of &quot;made&quot;. &quot;Him&quot; is called a raised object because the verb it relates to syntactically (i.e. &quot;made&quot;) is higher in the syntactic structure than the one it relates to semantically (i.e. &quot;cry&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T16:52:12.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20035" CreationDate="2016-10-21T09:48:08.357" Score="2" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case of some Indo-European languages it seems there is no visible verb in the sentence. This is specially visible in languages like Bangla, Hindi etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the sentence &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is most of the time said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who there? ( &quot;কে ওখানে?&quot; ) in Bangla.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although such sentences are small in number, these are extremely common. If I want to build a Question Answering System dependency parsing such sentences are extremely important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;বাংলাদেশের জাতীয় পাখির নাম কি?&quot;, which literally translates to (&quot;what the name of the national bird of Bangladesh?&quot;) but means (&quot;what is the the name of the national bird of Bangladesh?&quot;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there is no visible verb in the sentences. So how should one represent and parse sentences where the verb is invisible but carries the meaning anyway. And what this invisible verb phenomena is called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: Sorry I can not formulate my question any better as I don't know what this grammatical phenomenon is called. :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14333" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-21T12:56:53.410" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T12:56:53.410" Title="How to detect verb in a sentence where the verb is invisible in the sentence?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20034" CreationDate="2016-10-21T10:05:18.577" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula&quot;&gt;zero copula&lt;/a&gt;.  It especially common for third person present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you read on how this is handled in syntax parsers for Russian or Hindi.  It was also an issue for Irish, Hungarian, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic and many other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-10-21T11:14:31.323" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T11:14:31.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T10:51:51.753" Score="8" ViewCount="1024" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among many languages used in Southeast Asia (especially I want to talk about Malay, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Thai), is there any study about which pair of languages is close to each other in vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is a study about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity&quot;&gt;a lexical similarity in major Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt;. I would like to know, if any, these kind of studies. It would be better if the study includes English, Chinese, and/or Japanese, though I'm dubious Japanese have much influence on these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be still useful enough if you just compare it based on your experiences, but would be better to get any figure based on scientific research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-21T12:53:06.053" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T21:00:45.440" Title="Lexical similarity among languages used in Southeast Asia" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;malay&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19986" CreationDate="2016-10-21T15:24:13.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking at a spoken dialect, it's worth mentioning that it depends which dialect you're transliterating from. For example, in some Palestinian Arabic, &quot;ق&quot; is pronounced as an English K, but in some Saudi Arabic it can be a G-as in &quot;great&quot;-or Q-sort of a more guttural K, almost like if you tried to say the word &quot;gulf&quot; with a k in front like &quot;kulf.&quot; In some Egyptian Arabic, it's pronounced exactly the same as ء (a glottal stop). All the other major dialects subscribe to one of those 4 pronunciations, though the instance of use and quality of the sound differs a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're talking about MSA, Quranic Arabic, fusHa, or any other kind of &quot;formal&quot; Arabic, there is definitely a standardized pronunciation of those letters. In that case, I would recommend either using the transliteration table from wikipedia here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet&lt;/a&gt; or if you don't want to use special characters I would say:&#xA;ع - 'a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;غ - gh&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ر - r&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ك - k&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ق - q&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ء - '&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in &quot;arabeezy,&quot; I would say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ع - 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;غ - 3'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ر - r&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ك - k&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ق - q (or 2, g, or k depending on the dialect-but q is always safe) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ء - 2 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14334" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T15:24:13.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T20:12:02.573" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about languages that say &quot;this thing must be the second element in the sentence. For example, German says that in a statement, the finite verb &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be the second thing. If you front an adverb, then the subject gets put third. Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ich  ging  nach  Hause&#xA;I    went  to    house&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I went home&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;heute  ging  ich  nach  Hause&#xA;today  went  I    to    house&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Today I went home&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happens in Czech. In Czech, a reflexive pronoun (and some other things) have a strong preference to stay in the second position. Czech is also a pro-drop language (this term is apparently out-of-vogue; you are free to suggest a better one). pro-forms are often optional and may be reduced to nothing if their meaning is obvious from something like a verbal conjugation or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ty   se   osprchuješ&#xA;you  REFL shower.PERF.FUT.2PS&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You will have a shower&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;osprchuješ           se&#xA;shower.PERF.FUT.2PS  REFL&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You will have a shower&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do generative grammars typically deal with this phenomenon? How do they explain that &lt;code&gt;osprchuješ&lt;/code&gt; must move up the tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2016-11-18T07:56:51.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T14:37:36.620" Title="Pro-drop and V2" Tags="&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28582" CreationDate="2016-10-21T20:57:03.150" Score="4" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://howlearnspanish.com/2010/08/how-many-words-do-you-need-to-know/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;How Many Words Do You Need to Know in Spanish (or any other foreign language)? And WHICH Words Should You Be Learning?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I came upon the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Assume that a language learner is aiming for 90% coverage in each of the four parts of speech that represent open classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This 90% figure will be obtained by knowing about 2600 nouns, 230 verbs, 980 adjectives, and 50 adverbs, or a total of about 3800 total forms.” [refer to page 110 of the study for a detailed table that breaks down these four word types in much greater detail]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage above is referring to a study conducted by Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics and author of numerous publications including, &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/files/davies_ijcl_2014.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Making Google Books n-grams useful for a wide range of research on language change&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mfnco.com/e-library/books/A%20Frequency%20Dictionary%20of%20Spanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; among several others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime after reading this article, I decided to conduct my own study with various subsets of corpora and one of the things I'd like to add to this study is a comparison of parts of speech.  It may sound simple enough, but, there's actually a number of factors to consider that aren't so easy to iron out.  I'm willing to live with the fact that the survey I am in the process of conducting may not be a perfect scientific study using rigid and rigorous methods of determining how and which parts of speech should be assigned to each word across my categories of corpora.  However, one aspect of my study that I am grappling with how to account for relates to gerunds.  Though my earliest understanding of a gerund was its use as a noun, often times they are used in a verbal phrase.  In a sentence such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The teaching of a language doesn't have to be boring,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is easy to label the word &quot;teaching&quot; as a noun; &quot;boring,&quot; on the other hand, is being used as an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what about a sentence like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The police are asking for help in identifying the perpetrators.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;identifying&quot; clearly seems to be something that could be considered a noun, but the word &quot;asking&quot; is clearly part of a verbal phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dilemma is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When looking at a single word such as &quot;teaching,&quot; &quot;boring,&quot; &quot;asking,&quot; et cetera, you have no way of knowing which role such a word is fulfilling.  This is true for many words, so my solution around this is to simply assign the part of speech associated with the most common meaning for any particular word.  The size of my study is large enough that this should work.  And if I had no interest in comparing it to other studies, no problem would exist, but I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to compare it to other studies and not necessarily the one I quote above.  So, my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In studies that analyze the parts of speech in a set of corpora, are there standard linguistic practices that are adhered to in the assignation process, or does it really just depend on who is conducting the study, and therefore a careful reading of the researcher's methodology is required in order to know how such categories were assigned?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this more precisely, I'll use an excerpt from the quote I included at the beginning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This 90% figure will be obtained by knowing about 2600 nouns, 230 verbs, 980 adjectives, and 50 adverbs, or a total of about 3800 total forms.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these 2600 nouns include gerunds?  I've actually searched the study for any mention of how they are treated, but it does not appear to address it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial thought was to eliminate them, but not even halfway through the collection phase I see that they are quite prevalent.  I've already made some judgment calls on certain words to exclude, but to omit gerunds simply because I'm not sure how to classify them seems like a step too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of you might suggest I contact Professor Davies directly, and I may just do that, but in the meantime, I wanted to know if anybody in this community is aware of standard practices with regard to this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any insight or references you can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14217" LastEditorUserId="14217" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T19:16:13.253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:27:57.907" Title="When analyzing a set of corpora, are there any standard practices with regard to the classification of gerunds?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-21T21:35:12.133" Score="4" ViewCount="2016" Body="&lt;p&gt;In generative grammar, more specifically in GB and Minimalism, what are the possible types of adjuncts we can have and to which other categories can they be adjoined. E.g.: the man [next to him] many people would probably classify the bracketed string as a PP adjoined to the NP man. For me it is not entirely clear why one would exclude adjunction to the DP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3201" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T09:52:04.247" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T00:49:02.247" Title="Types of adjuncts - What can be adjoined to what and why?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-22T17:53:01.843" Score="1" ViewCount="717" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of research that indicates that the centering diphthongs in English are actually sets of monophthongs?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so I would be interested in reading some sources and be greatly appreciative for any advice where to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13680" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-10-22T19:07:19.447" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T20:13:52.097" Title="English centering diphthongs - a myth?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20042" CreationDate="2016-10-22T18:18:12.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Centering diphthongs are not a &quot;myth&quot; per se: they really exist/existed in some English accents. These accents are not universal, obviously: they are/were only used by certain groups of speakers in certain historical periods. It's true that many modern British English speakers use monophthongs, not centering diphthongs, in words like &lt;em&gt;care, beer, pure.&lt;/em&gt; You can find a description of this in Geoff Lindsey's blog post &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The British English vowel system&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; which tries to describe the phonetic differences between what he calls &quot;Standard Southern British&quot; and Received Pronunciation as transcribed by Gimson. In that post, he transcribes the vowel of &lt;em&gt;square&lt;/em&gt; as /ɛː/, the vowel of &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; as /ɪː/ or disyllabic /ɪjə/ = FLEECE followed by COMMA, and the vowel of &lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; as /ɵː/, /oː/, or disyllabic /ʉwə/ = GOOSE followed by COMMA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be aware of this already, but the use of e.g. /eə/ to transcribe the SQUARE phoneme does not necessarily mean that the transcriber intends to indicate a phonetically diphthongal pronunciation. For example, John Wells used /eə/ in his transcriptions for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary but he has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2012/02/i-tend-to-assume-that-my-readers-have.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; explaining that this is meant to  cover monophthongal pronunciations as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-10-22T18:34:11.967" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T18:34:11.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="66" CreationDate="2016-10-22T21:03:52.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of anything explained by OT that cannot be explained by rule-based phonology.  The reasoning in OT is generally circular.  A claim is made that there is a constraint of some sort in a certain language, it is argued that the constraint cannot be adequately described with rules of standard generative phonology, and the conclusion is drawn that this language has this constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me review that.  There is a constraint which is not describable in generative phonology, therefore this constraint exists.  It may be interesting that rule-based phonology does not correctly account for everything, and it's good to know about such cases.  Maybe we can find a better theory.  But how does it follow that OT is a better theory?  Or any theory at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a characteristic of scientific theories that they make predictions.  When we find something that generative phonology can't handle, that tells that (1) generative phonology did make a prediction, and (2) it's not correct.  When we find something that OT can't handle (if that is even possible), what do we do?  We add a new type of constraint to OT and claim to have made a theoretical advance.  Isn't that a little weird?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am completely in sympathy with OT's contention that surface constraints are relevant to phonological structure and that this cannot be appropriately described in the original form of generative phonology.  But this is not exactly news that was first brought to light in OT.  Phonologists have been looking at such cases for a while -- for instance, there is Kiparsky's description of rule and rule-interactional transparency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own theory about transparency is that a theoretical constraint of the original generative phonology, the restriction of conditions on rule application to the inputs of phonological rules was incorrect, and not even well thought out.  Generative phonology was supposed to be &quot;neutral between speaker and hearer&quot;, so what sense did it ever make to restrict conditions on rule application to rule inputs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave some detail about this in this forum in an earlier post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception/15156#15156&quot;&gt;eliminating intermediate forms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T21:03:52.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-23T02:06:05.590" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking a class in language acquisition called &quot;Nature vs Nurture&quot;. I'm not particularly fond of that framing, because the divide seems overly dichotomous. In addition, the N-vs-N debate has been used as a tool of oppression throughout history, namely in eugenics. So I'm wondering, &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any cases in linguistics of this debate being used for harm?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14345" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T06:34:48.317" Title="Can framing lang acquisition as nature vs nurture be harmful?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-11-04T05:04:52.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20045" CreationDate="2016-10-23T09:22:57.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The so-called &quot;nature vs nurture&quot; debate in linguistics is not as dichotomous as it may seem from the first sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everybody agrees that humans have innate abilities that enable them to learn language. (By &quot;everybody&quot; I mean Chomsky, Pinker, Jackendoff, Goldberg, Langacker, Lakoff, Evans, and basically any linguist from any possible camp.) It is obvious to everyone, as that's the only sensible explanation of why people learn language while other animals don't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everybody agrees that the development/acquisition of language requires right environment. There have been cases of people who weren't exposed to any language in their childhood and didn't learn any language. Again, that's something completely uncontroversial.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only real point of controversy (a relatively minor controversy, if you ask me) is whether the structures in our brains that enable us to learn language are language-specific or not. The generative grammar camp postulates that some of our language acquisition abilities are specific to language and not used for anything else. The cognitive linguistics camp tries to account for language learning based on our general, non-language-specific learning abilities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see how the controversy about language-specificity of our language learning abilities can be a source of any harm or oppression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-24T06:34:48.317" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T06:34:48.317" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20045" CreationDate="2016-10-23T11:07:39.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nurture vs nature have crisscrossed with discrimination basically by radicalising discrimination into attempts of extermination when the discriminating party believed that the traits they discriminated against were genetic, ie, based on nature, not nurture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly has been discrimination against languages along history, and there certainly were historical attempts to eradicate languages. But I don't think that there was any attempt to exterminate the speakers of a language, purely based on the fact that they spoke that language, and, that language being &quot;inferior&quot; or noxious, plus the speakers being somehow genetically bound to that language, they should or could be exterminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, the deliberate attempts to eradicate languages seem to have all been based on the notion that languages are learned - and were undertaken exactly by the method of teaching the preferred language to the discriminated language speakers, or to their children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Europe, the attempts to eradicate languages - Breton in France, Galician, Basque and Catalan in Spain, several dialects in Italy, perhaps Welsh in the UK - seemed much more based upon the idea of imposing linguistic uniformity upon the territory controlled by a State, not so much upon the idea that the targeted language was &quot;inferior&quot;. When Europeans did that abroad, the notion that native languages were &quot;inferior&quot; was much more publicised (just look at how those languages are pictured in Western comics, for instance the quite notorious &lt;em&gt;The Phantom&lt;/em&gt;), but even there the main effort seems to have been to teach the natives a European language, not to deliberately kill them for the sake of it (nevermind brutal exploitation - and political repression intended to support such exploitation - having quite genocidal effects during the colonial era).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, however, the &quot;nature vs nurture in languages&quot; debate seems to focus not on whether we are hardwired to a given language, but whether we are hardwired for language in general. It seems well established that all people can learn any language, and that their first language will be determined by the language spoken around them during their early childhood, not by any innate factor. It seems also well established, at least in an academic level, that languages are similarly complex in syntax, no thing such as a &quot;primitive&quot; language actually existing, and, regarding morphology, the correlation is inverse, ie, languages of more simple societies have a more, not less, complex morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within that frame, it would be difficult to effectively use the &quot;nature&quot; side of this debate to oppress or discriminate people. Linguistic prejudice, which is far from rare, usually takes for granted that &quot;bad&quot; language is the result of a defective education - and it is that defective education that is discriminated against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But then there is this quite extraordinary thing with the Pirahã language, which supposedly has no embedded clauses, and makes its first-language speakers unable to grasp the concept of numbers. If the Pirahã were millions of people, and effectively engaged in the process of production of commodities, instead of a few thousand hunter-gatherers - or, on the contrary, if they were somehow harming the prospects of economic exploitation of the region they live in - I would fear those notions could be used as a tool against them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T11:07:39.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-23T12:42:12.700" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand Stokoe notation, but I am not clear how to specify the location of a second contact, such as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://media.spreadthesign.com/video/mp4/13/4038.mp4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ASL sign “DEAF”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the general representation of that sign should be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ȜG&lt;sup&gt;xvŋx&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I would assume there would be a way to specify “∪” as the location of the second “×”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1517" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T12:42:12.700" Title="How is the second touch of “DEAF” written in Stokoe notation?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20050" CreationDate="2016-10-23T17:55:57.720" Score="1" ViewCount="1972" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese (Mandarin), there exists a word 可爱 that means &quot;pretty&quot; or &quot;cute&quot; in English. In Japanese, there is also a word 可愛い (adjective) that means the same thing in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that both words use the same characters, it is likely that one originated from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I wonder which is the original word and which is the borrowed one. In most cases, many words were exporeted from China to Japan, but I talked about this issue with my Chinese friend the other day, and she said she believe it is a borrowed word from Japan. Also, the frequency of the usage of the word is far more prevalent in Japanese, which makes me suspect that it is from Japan, not China, in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there any resource that proves it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T03:29:03.773" Title="Which of 可爱/可愛い was exported to the other between Chinese and Japanese?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20049" CreationDate="2016-10-23T18:30:05.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Japanese word &lt;code&gt;可愛い&lt;/code&gt; is a loan word from Chinese. In Mandarin we have several words beginning with &lt;code&gt;可&lt;/code&gt; because this morpheme means &lt;code&gt;-able&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;可愛&lt;/code&gt; therefore means &lt;code&gt;lovable&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;adorable&lt;/code&gt;. The Japanese word is not possible to break into derivational morphemes in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in more words derived from &lt;code&gt;可&lt;/code&gt;, but you can find more here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF#Compounds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF#Compounds&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2016-10-23T20:10:09.863" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T20:10:09.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2016-10-24T00:34:22.503" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key advance in the study of the history of languages was Rasmus Rask's suggestion in his 1818 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Rask#Prize_essay&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prize Essay&lt;/a&gt; that Danish, other Germanic languages, and Latin and Greek, were descended from a language which perhaps &lt;em&gt;no longer existed&lt;/em&gt;.  This explained why previous attempts to derive the various modern languages from Hebrew or some other known language had been fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with some comments here that the Hebrew-as-progenitor theory is inherently unscientific.  In its day, before the 19th century, it was a plausible theory to explain the resemblances among languages that people had begun to notice.  It was superceded when scholars realized, under the influence of the developing sciences of geology and Darwinian evolution, that large differences among contemporary languages could result, over long spans of time, from small changes of a sort that can still be observed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now tend to trace the historical development of language systems (sets of phonological rules and so on) rather than individual words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-10-24T22:44:40.713" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T22:44:40.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-24T12:11:08.563" Score="0" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among different languages used in Southeast Asia, which language has the most and least loanwords from English in lexicon? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In different languages, I assume Tagalog, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know all languages mentioned here have been affected by English more or less. But I don't know which is the most and least affected one, and the degree of the influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any study on this domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastEditorUserId="6854" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T13:58:43.287" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T19:09:21.217" Title="Which language among South East Asia has the most and least loanwords from English?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;malay&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2016-10-26T13:17:08.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2016-10-24T13:39:58.043" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason &quot;Edenics&quot; isn't taken seriously is that it isn't, by scientific standards, serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To establish a kinship between two languages, linguists need to have whole series of words that can be traced to a common origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we did not know Latin, we could reconstruct its lexic from French, Castillian, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the words for &quot;horse&quot; in those languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese: cavalo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: caballo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian: cavallo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumanian: cal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French: cheval&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catalan: cavall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here, how can we find the Latin word for horse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that it should start with either &quot;c&quot; or &quot;ch&quot;. But perhaps this is a coincidence? How can we know if it is not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we have lots of words that begin with &quot;c&quot; in Italian, Portuguese, Castillian, Rumanian, etc., and with &quot;ch&quot; in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portuguese - cabra, caminho, canção&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French - chèvre, chemin, chanson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which shows that there are regular transformations between French and Portuguese; some initial consonant in Latin morphed into &quot;c&quot; in Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Rumanian, but into &quot;ch&quot; in French (and if we look at a map, we see that Portuguese and Rumanian are placed, respectively, at the Western and Eastern extremes of the geographical extension of Romance languages, so it isn't likely that the same innovation happened to both of them; it looks like the Latin consonant was preserved in both - and transformed in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same reasoning helps us establishing that the first vowel of the Latin language should be an &quot;a&quot;, not an &quot;e&quot;. The second consonant is more difficult, because it went three different directions, morphing into &quot;b&quot; in Castillian, disappearing in Rumanian, and morphing into &quot;v&quot; in the remaining languages. But other considerations have led linguists to believe it was a &quot;b&quot; in Latin. And so on, so that we can reasonably guess that the Latin root for &quot;horse&quot; is something like &quot;caball-&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do know Latin, however, and we can see that the Latin word was &quot;caballus&quot; (OK; it wasn't; it was &quot;equus&quot; - which gave us the Portuguese, Castillian, Rumanian and Catalan word for &quot;mare&quot;. &quot;Caballus&quot; was Vulgar Latin, and comes from the Classic word for &quot;horse pack&quot;, which in turn is a borrowing from unknown origin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now compare this with the pair &quot;direct&quot;/&quot;d-r-k&quot;. Which other English words correspond to a Hebrew (or other Semitic) root filled with &quot;i&quot; and &quot;e&quot;? Or, the other way round, which other English words, stripped from its vowels, correspond to a Semitic three-consonantal root? Do we find that &quot;derelict&quot;, or &quot;derailed&quot;, &quot;deranged&quot;, &quot;correct&quot;, &quot;erect&quot;, &quot;ferret&quot;, correspond to Semitic roots &quot;d-r-k&quot;, &quot;d-r-l&quot;, &quot;d-r-g&quot;, &quot;c-r-c&quot;, &quot;r-c-t&quot;, &quot;f-r-t&quot;, etc.? I do not know Hebrew, but I bet you that none of these happens, with the possible exception of &quot;erect&quot;/&quot;eretz&quot;, where anyway the semantic relation is quite loose (upright vs great). And that is not random: it is a consequence of English and Hebrew not being related in any knowable way (they are possibly related, perhaps through a proto-language of both Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afro-Asiatic - but we do not have the means, as things are, to reconstruct such proto-language). However, we do know the origin of the English words I listed above; they are borrowings from Latin or Old French; and the obvious relation between &quot;direct&quot; and &quot;correct&quot; can only be explained by the fact that &quot;rect-&quot; is a Latin root, and &quot;di-&quot; and &quot;co-&quot; are Latin prefixes. (If &quot;direct&quot; was related to &quot;d-r-k&quot;, then &quot;correct&quot; is unexplainable, for in Semitic languages both words would be either unrelated or share the same three-consonant root - and then the English word for &quot;correct&quot; should be something like &quot;daruct&quot; or &quot;deroct&quot;, which evidently isn't the case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fewer words, bats are not related to nightingales, albeit the obvious fact that both can fly; on the contrary, nightingales are related to ostrichs, who don't. The flying is coincidental; the egg-laying vs breastfeeding is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T13:26:17.253" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T13:26:17.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13038" CreationDate="2016-10-25T00:02:14.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference seems to be how you frame the concept. From Hopper and Traugott's book, some linguists believe that grammaticalisation could be understood as 'entering the grammar of a language', i.e. 'becoming grammatical', which assumes that 'grammar' is an fixed entity which things can enter and leave. Grammaticisation, by contrast, focuses on the lexical item being grammaticalised itself - it's the process whereby this lexical item becomes more and more narrow in distribution and the phrases containing it become more and more formulaic, and eventually the item acts as a functional word rather than a lexical one. H&amp;amp;T do not commit to this distinction, but are merely explaining the viewpoints of linguists who do differentiate between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T00:02:14.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20058" CreationDate="2016-10-25T02:58:17.007" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one conjugates verbs and declines nouns, what is it called when an adjective is &quot;conjugated,&quot; as it is in French to agree in gender and plurality with the noun? (E.g. &quot;beau&quot; is masculine singular and &quot;belles&quot; is feminine plural.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T03:19:08.933" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T09:08:02.260" Title="What is it called when one &quot;conjugates&quot; adjectives?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20056" CreationDate="2016-10-25T03:17:59.177" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just &lt;strong&gt;inflection&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conjugate is a verb which means specifically inflecting verbs, and decline for nouns, but neither of those words are needed when you can just say inflect and inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T06:32:42.087" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T06:32:42.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20056" CreationDate="2016-10-25T04:08:15.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As curiousdannii said, it's a type of inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, adjectives were traditionally classified as nouns (&lt;em&gt;nomina&lt;/em&gt;; specifically &lt;em&gt;nomina adjectiva&lt;/em&gt;); the nouns that weren't adjectives were called &quot;substantives&quot; (&lt;em&gt;nomina substantiva&lt;/em&gt;). Latin adjectives and substantives are very similar morphologically, so it makes sense to group them together when talking about inflection. So  we say that  a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Adjectives&quot;&gt;Latin adjective&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;declined.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some other languages, such as German, adjectives are morphologically more distinct from substantives than in Latin, but the terminology of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declension#Attributive_adjectives&quot;&gt;declension&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is still used, probably due to the Latin tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that the word &quot;decline&quot; is not used as often when discussing languages without case, such as English and French. However, it's not incorrect to say that a French adjective is declined for gender and plurality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T04:13:26.160" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T04:13:26.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20056" CreationDate="2016-10-25T09:08:02.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how those things work in English, but in Portuguese we don't use &quot;conjugar&quot; or &quot;declinar&quot; like that; one does not usually conjugate a verb when using it in a flexed form in normal speech or writing. In this case, we rather use the substantive &quot;concordância&quot; and the related verb &quot;concordar&quot;: &quot;&lt;em&gt;o verbo concorda em número e pessoa com o sujeito&lt;/em&gt;&quot;: &quot;the verb &lt;em&gt;agrees/concords/matches&lt;/em&gt; with the subject in number and person*&quot;. The whole phenomena are respectively called &quot;concordância verbal&quot; and &quot;concordância nominal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T09:08:02.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19957" CreationDate="2016-10-25T10:05:58.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the comments I conclude that the CLARIN service &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/showcase/webmaus-automatic-segmentation-and-labelling-speech-signals-over-web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WebMAUS&lt;/a&gt; hosted by Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale, Munich, is what you want to use. This service takes a spectogram and a transcription as inputs and outpus a segmentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the linked website, you will also find tutorials on how to use WebMAUS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T10:05:58.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17724" CreationDate="2016-10-25T10:26:39.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are currently working to revive the said project. I'm not sure though if the content is still available on our local intranet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14358" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T10:26:39.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-25T11:40:24.957" Score="1" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched for a word &lt;code&gt;inviting&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;coca&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and I got about 50 thousand usage examples. That's a lot of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in, if there is some possibility to refine the search,&#xA;especially to search only certain meanings of the word (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=inviting&amp;amp;sub=Search+WordNet&amp;amp;o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;h=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;attractive&lt;/a&gt;) or at least refine it by part of speech. If there is not such a tool, could you refer some techniques I can use to refine search and possibly implement (if I have the search result data)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1111" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T15:08:29.097" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T15:08:29.097" Title="Searching the word occurance in coca (corpus of contemporary American English) including meaning" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20062" CreationDate="2016-10-25T12:08:22.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use part of speech tags from &lt;strong&gt;coca&lt;/strong&gt;, and there is a video explaining it on YouTube, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/resource/306/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Linguistic Teaching Resources Hub. &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of meaning annotation in coca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T12:47:52.810" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T12:47:52.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20065" CreationDate="2016-10-25T13:35:46.823" Score="0" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do Urdu Numerals belong to the Persian Script and does Urdu use the same Unicode characters as Persian Language apart from Western Arabic numerals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2640" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T10:23:21.223" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T15:57:16.350" Title="Do Urdu Numerals belong to the Persian Script?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;urdu&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20064" CreationDate="2016-10-25T13:59:47.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I understand what you are asking. Urdu, like Persian, is written with Arabic script, with a few extra letters. The numbers are written with the Eastern form of the Arabic (originally Indian) numerals. So yes, they do use the same unicode coding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T13:59:47.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2016-10-25T16:06:33.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernese_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bernese German&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[t͡siəu̯] 'goal'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[kfyəu̯] 'feeling'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʃtuə̯u̯] 'chair'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[myəi̯] 'effort,struggle'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since OP asked for regular features: The ones ending in [u̯] are all results of a sound change where coda-/l/ became [u̯] or [u]. So these are simply combinations of earlier diphthongs + /l/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[myəi̯] on the other hand is morphologically complex. The glide [i̯] is a non-syllabic realisation of the female nominaliser -i. It is usually syllabic, e.g. [hœːχ-i] 'height' or [tʏmː-i] 'stupidity'. Its occurrence after diphthongs seems fairly rare to me; then again it's not that common overall. Come to think of it, a similar behaviour can be found for the subjunctive 1 ending -ig, which can be realised as [i̯(g)], e.g. in [tːyə̯i̯(g)] 'was (SUBJ)'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah triphthongs arise due to somewhat recent diachronic processes and morphological combinations. They should in no case be considered part of the phonemic inventory, but at least phonologically, if not morphologically complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I should mention that the middle target can sometimes be elided (e.g. [myi̯]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14360" LastEditorUserId="14360" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T19:36:06.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T19:36:06.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20049" CreationDate="2016-10-25T16:31:16.557" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must be remembered that in the Japanese language system, the lexeme's sound and the lexeme's spelling are much less correlated with each other than even in Chinese; the phenomenon of 訓読み kun'yomi means that one lexeme can be written with several different spellings (even if the spellings overlap in meaning). The most well known example for beginners is あう = 会う or 合う or 遭う etc. which all have slightly different connotations on paper for &quot;to meet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although かわい​い has only one kanji spelling 可愛い, it is known to be an &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ateji&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; 当て字, i.e. neither 訓読み kun'yomi nor 音読み on'yomi. Hence the etymology of the かわい​い is probably derived from something else, despite the similarity of the 音読み on'yomi of 可 (か) and 愛 (あい​) to かわい​.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary has an alternative to the straightforward &quot;Classical Chinese to Japanese loan&quot; etymology, one that is borne out by 語源由来辞典 (Gogen Yurai Jiten)'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://gogen-allguide.com/ka/kawaii.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry&lt;/a&gt;. According to this, the original expression was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A1%94%E6%98%A0%E3%81%97&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;顔映ゆし&lt;/a&gt; (historical kana かほ &lt;em&gt;kaho&lt;/em&gt; + はゆし &lt;em&gt;hayushi&lt;/em&gt;), attested from the late Heian period, originally meaning &quot;face radiating&quot; in a negative sense, i.e. embarassed or shy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumed phonological development of 顔映ゆし goes as: &lt;em&gt;kahohayushi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;kawohayushi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;kawahayushi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;kawawayushi&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;kahahayushi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;kahayushi&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;kawayui&lt;/em&gt;, which is one possible reading of 可愛い. This regularly becomes かわい​い &lt;em&gt;kawaii&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of Wiktionary's quoted sources is the &lt;em&gt;Dictionarium sive thesauri linguae Iaponicae compendium&lt;/em&gt; compiled by the Spanish-born early 17th century Dominican missionary Diego Collado. Under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QCZHAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA81#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry for &quot;miserabilis&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. pitiful (emphasis mine): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miserabilis, e: cosa que causa lastima, &lt;strong&gt;cavaij&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence by 1632, the pronunciation had shifted to かわい​い although the meaning had only shifted a little, from embarassed to pitiful. From there, the shift to adorable and cute is quite straightforward but it is also something that has occurred in the last 400 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zdic.net/c/f/10a/287963.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;written collocation of 可愛&lt;/a&gt; has a much longer history in Chinese, dating back to the 書經 &lt;em&gt;Shūjīng&lt;/em&gt; / 尚書 &lt;em&gt;Shàngshū&lt;/em&gt; (the &quot;Classic of Documents&quot;), traditionally dated to the late Zhou, where it exists with a rather transparent original meaning in Chinese. In chapter 3, the 大禹謨 &lt;em&gt;Dà Yǔ mó&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Counsels of Great Yu&quot;, the following question is posed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;可愛非君？可畏非民？&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of all who are to be loved, is not the ruler the chief? Of all who are to be feared, are not the people the chief?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly not what we in the 21st century would call cute or adorable; again, in fact like in English, there has been a semantic shift of &quot;that which is to be adored and loved&quot; to &quot;cute&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if they share the characters, it is only the modern use that has become aligned; the roots of the words themselves are rather further removed from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T17:50:11.170" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T17:50:11.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20064" CreationDate="2016-10-25T20:39:32.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;About Numerals, yes! Since those numerals belongs to Persian language, they are the same and even the same with Arabic except that number 4 number in Arabic which is different. Each one of these three language are in addition to be a separate language -especially about Arabic which is completely from a different language family- In written part there are several completely different characters which don't exist in the other one. (and of course Persian is not written with Arabic script, instead, Arabic is written with Persian script, There are some documentation that illustrate why (it's another topic...) look at this examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Urdu: In Urdu in additional to Persian letters there are 4 characters that in Persian don't exist: ے , ں, ڑ, ڈ&#xA;  Persian: In Persian there are 4 characters that in Arabic don't exist: پ ، ژ ، گ، چ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's &lt;strong&gt;Urdu &gt; Persian &gt; Arabic&lt;/strong&gt;. And because even those similar Urdu characters often can't be understood either among Persian or Arabic people. you have to install each Unicode and language differently. &#xA;I'm native Persian and speak and understand mostly Arabic and Urdu because of my studies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastEditorUserId="10866" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T15:57:16.350" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T15:57:16.350" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20053" CreationDate="2016-10-25T20:53:45.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The languages with the most loanwords from English: There are several candidates, depending on how you define &quot;loanword&quot; (which is not quite clear in the case of creoles), &quot;language&quot; (as opposed to a dialect), and how you define &quot;South-East Asia&quot; (does Papua New Guinea belong to it?). In general, there are quite a few South East Asian countries where English is used a lot, but a good country to look for the language most influenced by English is Singapore. In most other countries, such as Malaysia and Philippines, the use of English is in decline. This is not the case in Singapore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Singlish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Colloquial Singapore English) is one of several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_languages#South_East_Asian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;South-East Asian English-based creoles&lt;/a&gt; and uses a huge number of English-derived words. Since it's a creole, some people may not agree to call them loanwords. Moreover, even though it is widely used, few people have it as their first language (but there are some). It is also possible to view Singlish as a dialect of English. This issue is very hard to resolve, as there is a whole continuum between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the basilect and the acrolect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tok Pisin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is without doubt a language, separate from English and with many native speakers. But it is an English-based creole, too, so we still have the problem with defining what a &quot;loanword&quot; is. There is definitely a very large number of English-derived words in Tok Pisin. The language is spoken in Papua New Guinea, so you need to consider how you define South-East Asia: some definitions may include New Guinea and some may not.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to exclude English-based creoles, it's still likely that the language we're looking for is from Singapore, due to the use and status of English there. A good candidate is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singdarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Singdarin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Colloquial Singaporean Mandarin), which is a language clearly separate from English, has a large number of English-derived words and there is no controversy that we can call them loanwords. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about the language with the fewest loanwords from English is much easier to answer. It is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sentinelese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, spoken on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;North Sentinel Island&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Andaman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Great Andaman archipelago&lt;/a&gt;. It is the language of the few remaining uncontacted tribes, and therefore, even though nobody outside the island knows the language, we can be quite sure that the number of loanwords from English is 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T19:09:21.217" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T19:09:21.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-25T22:05:45.783" Score="6" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of the Old English runic alphabet Fuþorc (or transliterated into Furthark or Furthorc) is, just like the word &lt;em&gt;alphabet&lt;/em&gt; formed by a portmanteau of its first few letters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Scandinavian variants [of Fuþorc] are also known as futhark or fuþark (derived from their first six letters of the alphabet: F, U, Þ, A, R, and K); the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc or fuþorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the names of those six letters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the first six runes in Fuþorc, it is formed from their collective characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ᛓ    ᚢ   ᚦ     ᚩ    ᚱ     ᚳ&#xA;&#xA;F    U  þ(th)  O    R    C&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anglosaxonrunes.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fuþark alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alphabet&lt;/strong&gt; comes from a portmanteau of the two first letters: &lt;em&gt;alpha&lt;/em&gt; (α) and &lt;em&gt;beta&lt;/em&gt; (β), forming alphabet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other languages use this to name their scripts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are they formed like this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I moved this from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/355185/184766&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt; due to it being judged off-topic&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T09:17:09.510" Title="Why are some scripts' names derived from their first few characters?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19927" CreationDate="2016-10-25T23:10:56.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer to the first question: The Dutch &quot;s&quot; is the same phoneme as English &quot;s&quot; just as &lt;strong&gt;Alveolar&lt;/strong&gt; type of pronunciation and also like Spanish &quot;s&quot; but not that much similar in south-american-Spanish &quot;s&quot;; and dutch &quot;s&quot; is a little bit voiceless which is not tangible often. I guess the sequence and combination of 'S' with another letter makes you a little confused. Just like German, if you have &quot;s&quot; followed by some consonants it will change to [ʃ] phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;German: Stark (ʃtark), spannen (ʃpannen), schlaf (ʃlaf)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or English &quot;Sh&quot; : shop, shiny , trash, mushroom &#xA;  (I mentioned pronunciation of &quot;s&quot; in these languages if you're more familiar with one of these languages than English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the &quot;s&quot; sequence in Dutch,in simpler way, it's only about sequence of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;sj&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; that makes it &lt;strong&gt;&quot;ʃ&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; or English &quot;Sh&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;sjaal&quot; = scarf &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about difference of &quot;s&quot; with &quot;z&quot;, only in Netherlands (such as the Amsterdam accent) and Frisian accent of Dutch, &quot;z&quot; phoneme can devoice and merge with &quot;s&quot; phoneme .In Frisian accents of Dutch, word-initial &quot;z&quot; phoneme is always realized as &quot;s&quot;.&#xA;And note that, &quot;ʃ&quot; is not native phoneme of Dutch and usually occur only in borrowed words, like &quot;show&quot; or &quot;machine&quot;. Depending on the speaker and the position in the word, it may or may not be distinct from the assimilated realisation of the cluster &quot;sj&quot; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastEditorUserId="10866" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T17:45:50.830" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T17:45:50.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20070" CreationDate="2016-10-26T01:34:43.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Chinese phonetic alphabet&quot; is know as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo#Name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bopomofo&lt;/a&gt;, which likewise derives from the first 4 syllables of the syllable table for Mandarin. It's remarkably hard to find information on the names of writing systems in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T01:34:43.390" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T02:52:11.263" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do diphthongs adopt all the features of their components? For example, ɔɪ consists of ɔ (sonorant, continuant, approximant, voice, round, back, syllabic) and ɪ (sonorant, continuant, approximant, voice, high, front, syllabic). So is ɔɪ &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of those (sonorant, continuant, approximant, voice, round, high, back, front, syllabic)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if this is the case, how are the features of diphthongs determined from their component phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9783" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T02:52:11.263" Title="What are the features of English diphthongs?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15016" CreationDate="2016-10-26T09:35:59.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, There are much more similarities either etymologically or grammatically in order to translate Dutch vocabulary into German (rather than into English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NL: Ik heb je/u niet verstaan. -&amp;gt; DE: Ich habe dich/Sie nicht verstanden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NL: De stad is weinig groen. -&amp;gt; DE: Die Stadt ist wenig grün. (But, in Modern German we often say: &amp;quot;Die Stadt ist nicht sehr grün&amp;quot; instead of using &amp;quot;wenig&amp;quot; this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NL: De stoel, die ik gekocht heb. -&amp;gt; DE: Der Stuhl den ich gekauft habe.&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using some similarities among verbs, it will be clear (the first verbs are German):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;backen=bakken; beginnen=beginnen; bewegen=bewegen; beten=bidden; bieten=bieden; beißen= bijten; bleiben=blijven; braten=braden; brechen=breken; denken=denken; tragen=dragen; essen=eten; genißen=geniten; gießen=gietn; hängen=hangen; haben=hebben;kaufen=kopen; lesen=lezen; liegen=liggen; nehmen=nemen; raten=raden; rufen=roepen; schenken=schenken; shießen=schieten; scheinen=schijnen; schreiben=schrijven; erschrecken=schrikken; schlafen=slapen; schnieden=snijden; sprechen=speken; springen=springen; stehen=staan; stehlen=stelen; sterben=sterven; treten=treden; treffen=treffen;fallen=vallen; fangen=vangen; fahren=varen; vergessen=vergeten; finden=vinden; fragen=vragen; werfen=werpen; werden=worden; sagen=zeggen; sein=zijn; suchen=zoeken; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, I would say in most cases you only need to change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Pf' letter to 'p' =&amp;gt; Pflicht to plicht, Pfond to fond;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'ei' to 'ij' =&amp;gt; frei to vrij, bei to bij, mein to mijn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'f' to 'v' =&amp;gt; schlaf to slap&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'au' to 'ui' =&amp;gt; Haut to huid, aus to uit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'z' to 't' =&amp;gt; Zunge to tong, zwei to twee, Zange to tang&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'b' to 'f' =&amp;gt; ob to of, lieb to lief, Staub to stof&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'sch' to 's' =&amp;gt; schmal to smal, schnell to snel, schlecht to slecht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'s','ss' to 't' =&amp;gt; wissen to weten, das to dat, lassen to laten&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'t' to 'd' =&amp;gt; Tag tp dag, Tod to dood, Tal to dal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'schw' to 'zw' =&amp;gt; Schwager to zwager, schwach to zwak, schwer to zwaar,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'ch' to 'k' =&amp;gt; brechen to breken, ik to ich, rechnen to rekenen, welche to welke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'b' to 'v' =&amp;gt; sterben to sterven, leben to leven, Silber to zilver&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'f' to 'v' =&amp;gt; fliegen to vliegen, fett to vet, finden to vinden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'u' to ' oe' =&amp;gt; Blume to bloen, Hut to hoed, Stuhl to stoel, gut to goed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'soft and smooth &amp;quot;S&amp;quot; ' to 'z' =&amp;gt; Sicht to zicht, sorgen to zorgen, so to zo, See to zee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this fact that we don't have 3 genders like in German, in dutch we only have 2 genders, and since 1940 there are &lt;strong&gt;no more noun cases such as &amp;quot;accusative&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;dative&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;genitive&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in standard dutch practically anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T08:04:22.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19565" CreationDate="2016-10-26T10:39:41.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://parsi.wiki/dehkhodaworddetail-08b73cdcf25247689c183b1eaeec389f-fa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; in Parsi.wiki website you can see transcribtion for specifically Old Persian, and for Middle Persian, just choose one of &quot;Dekhoda=دهخدا or Moien= معین&quot; dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T10:39:41.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2016-10-26T11:41:21.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese certainly has triphtongs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paraguai - /para'gwai/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;luau - /lwaw/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the former is an import from Tupi-Guarani via Castillian, I would assume that Castillian has triphtogs too (I would not assume that of Tupi-Guarani because the /gw/ probably originates in a glotal stop, /para'ʔajʔ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't &quot;why&quot; an example of a Standard English triphtong, /hwaj/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what we call &lt;em&gt;tritongos&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese is not the same as what you call triphtongs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T11:41:21.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20070" CreationDate="2016-10-26T13:00:20.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, one of the words for 'alphabet' is &lt;em&gt;азбука&lt;/em&gt; (azbuka) which derives from the original old names of the two first letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, &lt;em&gt;азъ&lt;/em&gt; for A and &lt;em&gt;букы&lt;/em&gt; for Б. Aparently, that's a calque on the Greek word 'alphabet.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T13:00:20.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20080" CreationDate="2016-10-26T15:44:38.667" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in WP's entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Persian alphabet&lt;/a&gt; that the &quot;ye&quot; final form is 'ﯽ', and its medial form is 'ﯿ'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logically, when typing &quot;می‌گفت&quot;, most software automagically write &quot;میگفت&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA%D9%86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, as well as first google results for &quot;میگفت&quot;, use the &quot;می‌گفت&quot; form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &quot;می‌گفت&quot; and &quot;میگفت&quot;, if any ?  And why is the final form used in the middle of this word (there is no space after) instead of the medial form for this particular word ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14096" LastEditorUserId="14096" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T15:50:11.050" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T00:43:19.380" Title="What is the difference between &quot;می‌گفت&quot; and &quot;میگفت&quot;?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20079" CreationDate="2016-10-26T15:54:53.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no difference. It is just a matter of spelling. You can write the particle مى as a separate word, or you can join it to the following verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T15:54:53.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20086" CreationDate="2016-10-26T17:02:41.250" Score="5" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've asked the same question over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/40298/how-would-one-go-about-romanizing-aynu-itak&quot;&gt;Japanese Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but I think that the focus on the Japanese language alone will net few results overall. What I'm looking for is a standardized orthography to reference when converting text in Itak's use of katakana to English characters to allow for easier access of the language to all my English-speaking friends. Even outside of that, the use of English characters I feel could go a long way in helping people learn even small bits of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ainu.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this guide&lt;/a&gt; on my own, but it's inconsistent in places and does not entirely meet my needs. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~oyama/boukenn-folder/bouken-ainugo-ziten.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; that I primarily use does not make use of the specialized katakana, and instead uses the standard characters, making it difficult to determine where a consonant keeps its vowel and where it loses it. I'd look for a different dictionary, but this is still by and far the best one I've found. The very few I've been able to find in English do not have much in the way of content, typically only providing very basics terms that may not even be all that useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've meant to join this site before for a fairly long time. Now that I have, I ask for any and all advice in regards to this matter, and I hope that I can gather some of the knowledge I've seen around here before. Thank you for reading and for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14364" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T08:01:25.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T08:01:25.730" Title="Are there any existing guidelines for romanizing Aynu Itak?" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20070" CreationDate="2016-10-26T22:42:58.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a reference for this answer, but I thought I might as well post it rather than putting it in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably sounds stupid or sarcastic, but: because it's shorter than saying the names of all the letters each time you want to talk about the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in English, people talk about children &quot;learning their ABCs&quot; to imply learning all the letters of the alphabet. Much quicker than saying &quot;learning their ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZs&quot;. For numbers, we have the parallel phrase &quot;123s.&quot; You'd be in trouble if you tried to list all of the numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other conceivable ways to refer to an alphabet, such as just using a word like &quot;letters,&quot; but giving examples to stand for a larger class of things is common in forming expressions. Another example: the expression &quot;(not) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one jot or one tittle&lt;/a&gt;&quot; comes via Latin from Greek, and is believed to refer to features of the Aramaic alphabet. It's used to refer to express a sense of completion by listing two examples of letters or writing features that will not be left out; other letters are implicitly included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yellow Sky's answer lists another reason that I thought I'd elaborate on here. It's possible that after the name &quot;alphabet&quot; became established in Greek, this influenced the naming of later writing systems. There are very few times when writing has been invented independently; in fact, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;alphabets&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in the narrow sense (scripts that systematically mark both consonant sounds and all types of vowel sounds) are pretty much all descended from or designed with knowledge of the Greek alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T22:42:58.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20070" CreationDate="2016-10-26T23:57:34.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely the answer is in how spelling/writing is taught. If you're in kindergarten (or whatever it's called in your language), the first thing you'll learn is the alphabet. And it's normal for the teaching to begin with the first letter and continue through to the end (perhaps with a song). (And, as is common for songs, the song's name is the first few &quot;words&quot; of the song.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that this pattern has existed since the Greeks, at least. So the Greek song/game for learning the alphabet was likely &quot;Alpha Beta&quot; or some such, while the Old English was whatever the first few runic letters were. The Old English term was supplanted by the Greek/Latin term because the runic alphabet was replaced by the Latin one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Copied from original question in English Stack Exchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14368" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T23:57:34.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20081" CreationDate="2016-10-27T04:32:13.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Annoyingly, while everyone seems to say the Latin orthography is standardized, none seem to provide a clear explanation of it. I came across an article[*] which seemed promising, but on this matter says only that &quot;all  three script options [katakana, hiragana, Latin] have been standardized over the past 100 years&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several resources cite &lt;em&gt;Kayano Shigeru no Ainugo jiten&lt;/em&gt; (Kayano Shigeru's Ainu Language Dictionary) regarding transcription, but my knowledge of Japanese is insufficient to make any use of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language#Basic_syllables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the most useful chart&lt;/a&gt; I've found so far, but that section cites no sources whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another site provides the same text in &lt;a href=&quot;http://lowlands-l.net/anniversary/aynu.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://lowlands-l.net/anniversary/aynu-kana.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kana&lt;/a&gt; (as well as Cyrillic and a screenshot of the kana for non-Unicode browsers), taken from the &lt;em&gt;Ainu Times&lt;/em&gt;. While not as useful as a proper explanation of the orthography, one would imagine the &lt;em&gt;Times&lt;/em&gt; to be about as standard as it gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preface to &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ainuenglishjapan00batcuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this dictionary&lt;/a&gt; mentions the Latin orthography being superior to Cyrillic, but provides details on neither. It's also from 1905.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[*] &quot;Re-vitalizing an indigenous language: Dictionaries of Ainu languages in Japan, 1625-2013.&quot; Hansen, Annette Skovsted. &lt;em&gt;Lexicographica&lt;/em&gt;. 2014, Vol. 30 Issue 1, p547-578. 32p (Database: Communication &amp;amp; Mass Media Complete)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T04:32:13.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20070" CreationDate="2016-10-27T09:17:09.510" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, what are the other options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose we could call it a &quot;letterlist&quot;, &quot;letterset&quot;, &quot;letrarium&quot;, because this is what an alphabet is. But those somehow miss an important feature of alphabets, ie, that they are not a mere collection of letters, but an organised one, that contains all letters in a fixed (&quot;alphabetic&quot;) order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could also give it a more poetical neologism, such as &quot;wisdomkey&quot; or &quot;knowledgedoor&quot;, but perhaps those feel too much as figurative language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other option is to do like we do, and use a word derived from Greek (or other ancient language of culture), such as &lt;em&gt;alphabet&lt;/em&gt;, nevermind the fact that we no longer have letters called &quot;alpha&quot; or &quot;beta&quot;. But that will have to fight for its space in colloquial language against &quot;ABC&quot; (in Portuguese, &lt;em&gt;abecedário&lt;/em&gt;), even if it reigns supreme in the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naming it for its first letters seems to be a good idea, because, besides giving it a name, it already helps to memorise the correct order. It is a name, and a mnemonic too, as a bonus. Others mentioned the way it is taught; it is an immensely repetitive process, probably only made tolerable by the use of songs. The repetition probably helps fixing the name; I can't help but imagining schoolkids whispering to each others, &quot;oh no! there comes the old ABC thing again!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a side note - we do not have a word for the ordered list of numerals - why not?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T09:17:09.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-27T09:34:53.030" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the status, endeavours and prospects for the use of universal/commonsense knowledge bases (KB) for the representation of the meaning of the natural languages in natural language processing / computational linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently distributional (statistical) semantics is very popular in natural language understanding but I think that KB are more rigorous and promising approach, because of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KB usually distinguish among concepts (or abstraction entities, classes) and objects (instances of classes). Therefore real world entity can be recognized and tied to the texts (e.g. city Paris, President Obama).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KB usually contains elaborate definitions of the concepts and instances, therefore it is more easily to reason about concepts and generate new concepts - definitions can be used in this process.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There already are more or less elaborated and formalized KBs like Cyc (OpenCyc), PrimeCog (OpenCog), ConceptNet and WordNet and they should be appropriate for the use in computational linguistics, aren't they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, the only obstacle to such development is the (time) complexity (and undecidability in some cases) of the reasoning/inference procedures over such KBs, is it so? But this can be solved by adopting approximate reasoning procedures that use limited inference depth (like humans do). What else prohibits adoption of KB and logical approach for NLP/computational linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:23:38.190" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:23:38.190" Title="Universal/commonsense knowledge bases (OpenCog, OpenCyc) for representation of meaning in natural language processing (computational linguistics)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18906" CreationDate="2016-10-27T11:42:09.387" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point is in Turkish, often they don't create participle form from that verb which means &amp;quot;come to&amp;quot; similar to the verb which gonna create a participle as &amp;quot;come from&amp;quot;, because in more common way, other verbs have the corresponding definition with &amp;quot;come to&amp;quot; such as &amp;quot;ulaşmak&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;gitmek&amp;quot; to be conjugated to participle; furthermore, even if we want to use the verb &amp;quot;gelmek&amp;quot; to create participle with the meaning of &amp;quot;come to&amp;quot; it necessarily must get used with describing suffixes after the complement; So, this would help us to distinguish that which participle means &amp;quot;come to&amp;quot; and which means &amp;quot;come from&amp;quot;!:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geldiğim köyü yeniden gördüm. -&amp;gt; I saw again the village i came to (before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geldiğim köyde her şeyi doğal buldum. -&amp;gt; I found anything natural in the village i came to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, participle of the verb &amp;quot;come from&amp;quot; doesn't necessarily need to be with describing suffix just after the complement (which is köy in these examples):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geldiğin köy harika bir köy müş? -&amp;gt; The village you came from was a fantastic village?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion and briefly, if you saw two the same participles of verb &amp;quot;gelmek&amp;quot; with different usage, the one you could eliminate suffix from the complement and still means would be the participle &amp;quot;...come from&amp;quot; and the one doesn't mean anymore would be &amp;quot;...come to&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T11:42:09.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-27T18:45:14.150" Score="1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never paid much attention to Dutch, but I've noticed in comparisons such as charts that Dutch does not have plurals formed with an umlaut.&#xA;Hence:&#xA;Feet—Füße—voeten&#xA;I thought it was odd, and when I checked my copy of Old English and its Closest Relatives, Old Low Franconian(although not the direct ancestor of Standard Dutch) does have at least one instance of umlaut in plurals:&#xA;Bock–buckin dat.pl.&#xA;My question is simply why. I'm asking in Linguistics because it's about the historical basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14376" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T18:45:14.150" Title="Lack of umlaut in Standard Dutch Plurals" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19587" CreationDate="2016-10-27T19:05:25.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To do this exercise, not knowing Lakota, I would assume that English and Lakota are almost exactly alike, except that the morphemes sound different and the order of parts in each constituent may differ from English.  That is, make a tree for the English sentence, replace each English morpheme by a Lakota morpheme that means the same, then shuffle the order of parts in each constituent as required to get the entire Lakota sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have to make some arbitrary adjustments to get this to work.  If you suspect that the English sentence has some idiosyncracies that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see turn up in another language, feel free to change those parts first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption of the exercise is that all human languages are pretty much the same except for the pronunciations of the morphemes and the order of constituents.  If that's not true, it might not be possible to do the exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T19:05:25.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12433" CreationDate="2016-10-28T18:35:09.177" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that French doesn't have grammatical cases anymore; rather it marks them differently than Latin. Latin primarily uses inflectional affixes to mark nominal cases (accusative, genitive, etc.), while modern French (like English) uses a more fixed word order and prepositions to mark many of the same cases. You can see the remnants of inflectional case marking in French pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Je te  vois&#xA;I  you see&#xA;'I see you'&#xA;&#xA;Tu  me vois&#xA;You me see&#xA;'You see me'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both 'je' and 'me' are first-person singular pronouns, but 'je' is nominative and 'me' is accusative (or oblique). The same with 'tu/te' -- 'tu' is nominative and 'te' is accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and why that process happens is a pretty big mystery. As jlawlor notes, grammaticalization is one model that's been proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14383" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T18:35:09.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-29T19:16:40.573" Score="1" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how to convert the Old Norse names from the &quot;Catalog of Dwarfs&quot; in the Völuspá into their feminine version? So that they look phonetically female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fíli &gt; Fíla&#xA;Kíli &gt; Kíla&#xA;Dori &gt; Dora&#xA;Óri &gt; Óra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the list of names - thanks for any help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Móðsognir&#xA;Durinn&#xA;Nýi&#xA;Niði&#xA;Norðri&#xA;Suðri,&#xA;Austri&#xA;Vestri&#xA;Alþjófr&#xA;Dvalinn&#xA;Nár&#xA;Náinn&#xA;Nípingr&#xA;Dáinn&#xA;Bívurr&#xA;Bávurr&#xA;Bömburr&#xA;Nóri&#xA;Ánn&#xA;Ánarr&#xA;Óinn&#xA;Mjöðvitnir&#xA;Veggr&#xA;Gandalfr&#xA;Vindalfr&#xA;Þorinn&#xA;Þrár&#xA;Þráinn&#xA;Þekkr&#xA;Litr&#xA;Vitr&#xA;Nýr&#xA;Nýráðr&#xA;Reginn&#xA;Ráðsviðr&#xA;Fíli&#xA;Kíli&#xA;Fundinn&#xA;Náli&#xA;Hefti&#xA;Víli&#xA;Hannar&#xA;Svíurr,&#xA;Billingr&#xA;Brúni&#xA;Bíldr&#xA;Buri&#xA;Frár&#xA;Hornbori&#xA;Frægr&#xA;Lóni&#xA;Aurvangr&#xA;Jari&#xA;Eikinskjaldi&#xA;Draupnir&#xA;Dolgþrasir&#xA;Hár&#xA;Haugspori&#xA;Hlévangr&#xA;Glóinn&#xA;Dóri&#xA;Óri&#xA;Dúfr&#xA;Andvari&#xA;Skirfir&#xA;Virfir&#xA;Skáfiðr&#xA;Ái&#xA;Alfr&#xA;Yngvi&#xA;Fjalarr&#xA;Frosti&#xA;Finnr&#xA;Ginnarr&#xA;Lofar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14388" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T21:51:36.467" Title="How to convert masculine Old Norse dwarf names to feminine markers?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12433" CreationDate="2016-10-29T19:32:23.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has to do mostly with sound change. French underwent two principal sound changes that effectively prevented it from keeping the case system from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Elision of any post-accentual vowels:&lt;/strong&gt; French, like other romance languages kept the accent on words on the same syllable as they were in Latin, however the nature of the accent in French changed somehow, probably from Latin pitch accent to something more dynamic (which might have been influence from the Germanic languages). Thus the stressed syllable was reinforced while any following vowels were elided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Loss of final consonants:&lt;/strong&gt; In line with development of other Romance languages, practically all syllable-final consonants disappeared (some actually remarkably late-hence French preserved the case system quite long).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Latin declension system being based mostly on one syllable suffixes, this proved deadly to any form of synthetic declension in nouns (not so in personal pronouns - cases are distinguished there still to a degree not dissimilar to English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing happened to verbs, however since the verbs typically had their accent moving because of the 1st and 2nd person plural having two-syllable suffix where ante-penultimate was long (&lt;em&gt;/'lau-do:/&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;/lau-'da:-mus/&lt;/em&gt;), the conjugation system did not disappear entirely but was restructured based on vowel-shifts and root consonant play in many verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;je peux /p&lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt;/ - nous pouvons /p&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;o~/ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tu peux /p&lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt;/ - vous pouvez /p&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;e/ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;il peut /p&lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt;/ - ils peuvent /p&lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T19:32:23.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2016-10-29T20:15:07.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language similarity (typically stemming from common origin) is a huge factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out, the first tier of languages is exclusively Romance and Germanic. English is originally a Germanic language which at certain points acquired a huge number of vocabulary of ultimately Latin origin. Thus it is similar in structure or in vocabulary to the languages in the first tier. Furthermore the languages are spoken in Western Europe (at least originally - Afrikaans comes from Dutch), so not only are they similar intra-lingually, but also they tend to capture the similar extra-lingual realities, which due to the long-term contact between the nations, they tend to do in a similar way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second tier contains some Slavic languages, which have very unrestrictive phonotactics of consonants and complex inflection of both verbs and nouns. So they are more difficult for English speaker to learn. My native language is Czech, so it is comparably easier to me to learn Russian or Serbian than to an English person (but it is still quite simple to learn English). There are even some comparably complex languages that a Czech person does not have to learn to understand, like Slovak (which is mutually understandable) and Polish (here you need to strive a little but you do not &quot;learn&quot; the language as much as you are &quot;getting used to it&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third tier is languages with different origin and wildly different grammar, also with little shared contact and many different realities. So they would be presumably equally difficult to learn for me as a Czech speaker as they would be for American English speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it is necessary to define a little what it means to learn a language. IMHO for the utterly pragmatic purposes, the most important thing is understanding as it is the most demanding part of communication (if you express yourself incorrectly, the native speaker is still likely to understand a lot by inferring). And the more similar the language, the easier the understanding - getting back to Czech and Slovak: most Czech people would be unable to &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; Slovak, but practically all of them understand it without effort or learning on their part. I imagine the similar goes for e.g. Portuguese and Spanish - due to the similarities it is easy for you to understand and then when you speak, however bad, the natives will most likely get the meaning somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-10-29T20:15:07.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20108" CreationDate="2016-10-30T10:40:56.803" Score="7" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;This banknote from Hyderabad (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabadi_rupee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyderabadi rupee&lt;/a&gt;) has five different numerals in the circles on the right and left sides. From the bottom they are Hindu-Arabic, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu. But what is the one in the top? I believe the rest of the text on the banknote with arabic letters is in Urdu, but Urdu normally uses other numerals. How/why does that correspond to the number 5?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3u48.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3u48.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Banknote from Hyderabad&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14390" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-10-30T18:48:45.703" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T18:48:45.703" Title="What numeral system is on this Hyderabad banknote?" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;urdu&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20106" CreationDate="2016-10-30T15:18:40.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question. The numbers at the top of the columns on this note, and the other three helpfully supplied by Yellow Sky, are heavily stylised Persian or Arabic words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Five” is Arabic خمس&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ten” is Arabic عشر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Hundred” is Arabic مائة&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Thousand” is Persian يك هزار&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that these forms come from some sort of commercial shorthand, but would be happy to hear from more knowledgeable members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T15:18:40.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20106" CreationDate="2016-10-30T17:23:37.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really an extremely interesting question that made me make a little investigation and with the help of @fdb I learned about the unique &lt;em&gt;Siyaq&lt;/em&gt; (Arabic سياق siyāq ‘order’) numerical system I had never heard of before. The system was originally developed by Arabs and later was used in official Ottoman and Indian documents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Siyaq notation is believed to have been developed during the Umayyid period in the 8th century CE and advanced by the Abbasid state, which ruled much of the Middle East and parts of north Africa from 750–1258. The earliest document containing Siyaq numbers is a list of expenses presented to the Abbasid ruler&#xA;  al-Muqtadir Bi’llah by his minister ’Ali ibn ’Isa, which is dated to 918–919. The notation system was adopted along with Abbasid accounting techniques by the Ilkhan dynasty, which ruled parts of the Middle East and Central Asia from 1258–1353. The system was continued by administrators of the Ottoman Empire from 1299–1924.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16017-arabic-siyaq.pdf&quot;&gt;Proposal to Encode Arabic Siyaq Numbers in Unicode&lt;/a&gt; (PDF) with charts of all the numerals and the description of the siyaq numerical system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Hyderabad banknotes use not the original Arabic Siyaq numerals, but their Indian variants which are in some ways different from the Arabic ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Similar to other Siyaq traditions, the Indic Siyaq Numbers are a specialized subset of the Arabic script that was used for accounting and in general for recording numbers. &lt;strong&gt;The basic Indic Siyaq Numbers are stylized monograms of the Arabic names for numbers&lt;/strong&gt;. The numbers for large decimal orders, however, are derived from words of Indic languages. The period during which Siyaq was introduced in India is difficult to determine, but the system was in common usage under the Mughals by the 17th century and it remained in usage into the middle of the 20th century.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15121r2-indic-siyaq.pdf&quot;&gt;Proposal to Encode Indic Siyaq Numbers in Unicode&lt;/a&gt; (PDF) with charts of all the numerals and a detailed description of the notation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T17:23:37.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20102" CreationDate="2016-10-30T21:51:36.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have picked up on the easiest pattern for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Weak masculine nouns end in &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, weak feminine nouns end in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weak nouns are easier because there's only one main pattern for each gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is less universal for proper names, but in general, a weak masculine will end in &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, and a weak feminine or neuter in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Nouns ending in &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt; are the same for both genders.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;-stems, almost exclusively words for family relations. Both masculine and feminine end in &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt;: for instance, &lt;em&gt;bróðir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;systir&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;brother&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sister&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Strong masculine nouns &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; end in &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, strong feminine nouns &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; don't.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other sub-classes of strong nouns (&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;ja&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;ó&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;jó&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;wo&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;-stems, &lt;em&gt;nd&lt;/em&gt;-stems, and consonant-stems), but if you only want the nominative singular, the details don't really matter. Almost all of these have a final &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt; in the masculine and no ending in the feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A final &lt;em&gt;-nn&lt;/em&gt; tends to come from a stem ending in &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;, plus the ending &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt;, by assimilation. So consider it to be &lt;em&gt;-nr&lt;/em&gt; for these purposes. Similarly, read &lt;em&gt;-ll&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;-lr&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;-mutation!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain front vowels in Proto-Norse caused umlaut of the other vowels in the word. This is hard to predict in Old Icelandic, unfortunately, since most of the sounds which triggered this effect disappeared. But in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A final &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt;, after a heavy syllable, &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have changed the preceding vowel.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The changes are quite regular...the only question is whether or not they happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ę&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ø&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ó&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;œ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ú&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ý&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;au&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;jú&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ý&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ǫ&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ø&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Table from Gordon's &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Old Norse&lt;/em&gt;, p34/251)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you change the ending, you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have to apply this change, or undo it. Unfortunately there is no reliable way of deciding this without knowing the etymology of the name. (It depends whether the ending contained an &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; or not in Proto-Norse.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;U&lt;/em&gt;-mutation!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As if one type of umlaut wasn't enough! Vowels before a &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; sound tended to shift as well. And worse yet, this &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; often disappeared entirely after messing up the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ǫ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ǫ´&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ø&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ę&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ø&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Same source, p40/253)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Examples.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best examples for this are adjectives, since they have masculine and feminine forms on the same stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong: M &lt;em&gt;langr&lt;/em&gt; F &lt;em&gt;lǫng&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Weak: M &lt;em&gt;langi&lt;/em&gt; F &lt;em&gt;langa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;-mutation on the strong feminine form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is, unlike the adjectives, there aren't certain etymologies or feminine forms for most of the dwarves' names. So you have some leeway in applying or ignoring the umlaut to make it sound better. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/11730/10559&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which feminizes &amp;quot;Mundilfęri&amp;quot; as either &amp;quot;Muldilfara&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Mundilfęra&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Mundilfǫr&amp;quot;. (I believe the &amp;quot;ä&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ö&amp;quot; in that answer are equivalent to normalized &lt;em&gt;ę&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ǫ&lt;/em&gt;—please correct me if I'm wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T21:51:36.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20089" CreationDate="2016-10-31T06:37:16.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have raised many questions here so I'm not sure which one is the best to answer first. Since there can be no universal ontology, the use of Cyc or some other KB depends its purpose. If, hypothetically, the purpose is to mimic natural language use in humans, then I think there is still a long way to go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, in no small part, because what you think about such innovations depends on your theory of language meaning. If you believe that meaning is &quot;in&quot; a word somehow, then ontology-based knowledge representations may soon fulfill their promise. However, most linguists don't take that perspective. For them, the meaning is a social construction embedded in discourse.  In that sense, no knowledge base comes close yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T06:37:16.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T03:20:10.163" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic term to describe such phrases as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Jackie stole John's heart.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;?  All things being equal, such pronouncements are rarely literal, and even with an emotional understanding in no way does it assert that John's emotional heart was stolen.  In fact, it doesn't assert the absence or theft of John's heart in any sense, but rather that John's heart has been acted upon in some extreme manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also interested in what phrases like these are called in the context of ancient scripture or (presumably) in the common vernacular of ancient peoples all the way through the vernacular of (English?) people up to about 1800 or so.  This because I'm guessing constructions like the one mentioned used to be a lot more common in our language &quot;back then&quot; than now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any hints would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14400" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T19:02:33.270" Title="Phrases such as &quot;Jackie stole John's heart&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-11-06T19:13:27.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20115" CreationDate="2016-11-01T04:47:24.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/idiom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;idiomatic expression&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Use of segmentally complex expressions whose semantic structure is not deducible jointly from their syntactic structure and the semantic structure of their components.&lt;/em&gt; — Weinreich (1972:89)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient scriptures are also full of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fixed expressions&lt;/a&gt;, so one may need to check this term, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T04:47:24.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20127" CreationDate="2016-11-01T06:08:43.493" Score="1" ViewCount="1528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a beginner of Praat and I need to apply the &lt;code&gt;Remove noise...&lt;/code&gt; filter on a file using the Praat script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Code:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;filePath$ = dirPath$+&quot;/&quot;+fileName$+&quot;.wav&quot;;&#xA;sound = Read from file... 'filePath$'&#xA;&#xA;selectObject: sound&#xA;&#xA;noise_reduction_method = Spectral subtraction&#xA;smoothing      = 40&#xA;&#xA;filtered = Remove noise: 0.0, 0.0, 0.025, 80, 1000, smoothing, noise_reduction_method&#xA;selectObject: filtered&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Error:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unknown symbol &amp;lt;&amp;lt; &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; Script line 16 not performed of completed &amp;lt;&amp;lt; &lt;code&gt;noise_reduction_method$ = 'Spectral subtraction'&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried a lot to find out the correct way of giving the last argument of this filter but couldn't succeed. Someone please guide me in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T12:53:53.327" Title="How to apply Remove Noise filter in Praat Script?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-01T17:40:45.827" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using Praat for the first time. When I try to annotate a Chinese speech segment, for some reason the Chinese characters I entered all get displayed as blocks in the corresponding tier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/110904311/Praat.png&quot; alt=&quot;Picture&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and the Praat version is 6.0.04. Strangely I couldn't find any result on Google and it seems that I'm the only one who's encountering this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2016-11-01T17:47:02.447" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T15:35:20.207" Title="Praat shows Chinese characters as blocks?" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20123" CreationDate="2016-11-01T19:18:34.137" Score="4" ViewCount="2159" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in title; I can't hear difference between /j/ and /ʎ/. I also cannot reliably pronounce /ʎ/. Can any of you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is not the right place to ask this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14405" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T23:46:14.987" Title="Can't hear difference between /j/ and /ʎ/" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20120" CreationDate="2016-11-01T20:54:32.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to locate (adequate) examples of [ʎ] in some language. Avoid made-up pronunciations by English-speaking linguists. It exists in Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and some dialects of Spanish and Hungarian, among the more widely-spoken languages, as well as some more obscure languages like Cuzco Quechua, Aymara, Saami. It also exists in a number of Slavic languages though it behaves there like a &quot;palatalized l&quot;. Then listen to examples that have [j] versus [ʎ] in comparable environments, until you get to the point that you can hear the difference. Forvo.com has lots of recordings for major languages (and 4,709 recordings of North Saami)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T20:54:32.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20119" CreationDate="2016-11-01T21:49:38.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try installing a more complete font, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/get/noto/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Noto&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://typekit.com/lists/source-han-sans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adobe Source&lt;/a&gt;. That &quot;tofu&quot; appears when the program can't find an appropriate font which contains the appropriate character; Noto in particular is designed to contain as many characters as possible, to avoid that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T21:49:38.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20120" CreationDate="2016-11-01T23:46:14.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the asker has clarified that the language in question is Spanish, the likely explanation is that they are hearing the pronunciation in a dialect that exhibits &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yeísmo&lt;/a&gt;, which causes /j/ and /ʎ/ to be pronounced the same (usually [ʝ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's not the case, what I recommend is finding some minimal pairs in languages that have these phones and listen to them until you can recognise the difference. My native language, Portuguese, does; here are the links to the pronunciations of the minimal pair &lt;a href=&quot;http://forvo.com/word/malha/#pt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;malha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (with /ʎ/) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://forvo.com/word/maia/#pt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;maia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (with /j/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T23:46:14.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20125" CreationDate="2016-11-02T08:21:51.197" Score="5" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where does the * sign of ungrammaticality come from?&#xA;Was there any reason for choosing exactly this sign?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T16:11:07.243" Title="Where does the * sign of ungrammaticality come from?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20124" CreationDate="2016-11-02T11:36:46.950" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Arnold Zwicky's Blog:&lt;a href=&quot;https://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/02/19/the-stigma-of-ungrammaticality/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The stigma of ungrammaticality&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Stanford linguistics newsletter site (the Sesquipedalian) yesterday, Arto Anttila asked who was the first person to use the asterisk to mean ungrammaticality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was brought up in the Foundations of Linguistic Theory class on Friday… I have been able to confirm that * was used to mean ungrammaticality as early as in 1963 by R. B. Lees and E. S. Klima in their article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/410759&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘Rules for English Pronominalization’&lt;/a&gt;, Language 39(1), 17-28. The relevant sentence is on p. 18:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) *I see himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example is followed by a long footnote where Lees and Klima patiently explain what * means. They cite no precedents. These facts together strongly suggest that one of them is the originator of the notation. But we may never know which. Lees passed away in 1996 and Klima in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… Thanks to Martin Kay for asking the question and to Paul Postal for suggesting the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beth Levin checked Lees’s The Grammar of English Nominalizations (1960) and found that it has asterisks of ungrammaticality in it, starting on p. 7, where an asterisked example is given without comment.&#xA;...&#xA;[skipped]&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T13:43:02.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20118" CreationDate="2016-11-02T11:56:19.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last argument to that command is a string, so the variable where you store it must be a string variable. This should work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;method$ = &quot;Spectral subtraction&quot;&#xA;smoothing = 40&#xA;filtered = Remove noise: 0.0, 0.0, 0.025, 80, 1000, smoothing, method$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bonus: What does the error mean?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code you posted does not raise the error you reported (so I guess that comes from a previous version of your script). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you run the code as it is, it will die saying that the &lt;code&gt;Spectral subtraction&lt;/code&gt; command does not exist. The upper-case &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; tells the interpreter that what follows is a command name, which in Praat can have spaces and any other number of odd characters (as in &lt;code&gt;Remove noise...&lt;/code&gt;). If it were a lower-case &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; the interpreter would expect a variable name, and also die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The error you got (about the unknown symbol) is raised if you surround &lt;code&gt;Spectral subtraction&lt;/code&gt; in single quotes (&lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt;), which tell the interpreter to interpolate the value of a variable. In this case, the &quot;unknown symbol&quot; is the &lt;code&gt;Spectral subtraction&lt;/code&gt; variable, which will remain unknown (= you won't be able to define it) because it is illegal (it starts with an upper-case character and has a space in it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-11-02T12:53:53.327" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T12:53:53.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20124" CreationDate="2016-11-02T15:25:22.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall seeing asterisk used to mean, approximately, &quot;hypothetical but non-occurring&quot; in Hendrik Poutsma's &lt;em&gt;A Grammar of Late Modern English&lt;/em&gt;, published early in the 20th century.  (It is one of the three great traditional grammars of English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poutsma does not explain his usage.  I gathered from the context that he is using asterisk in the way a modern grammarian would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-11-02T16:11:07.243" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T16:11:07.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-03T15:32:43.203" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is prompted by a word used in botanical nomenclature: &lt;em&gt;coggygria&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Liddell and Scott show κοκκυγρεα and κοκκυγρια, words used for the tree in question. Is there any evidence that the word κογγυγρια might have existed? &#xA;Also, were there such a word as κογγυγρια, in pronunciation would the first γ be treated as a nasal γ (and thus romanized as &lt;em&gt;congygria&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14419" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T20:25:52.523" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T13:37:51.430" Title="In old Greek did γγ ever replace κκ in the way Attic uses ττ for Ionic σσ?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-03T16:36:37.693" Score="2" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;For implementing the CYK algorithm for parsing, we need to have a grammar in CNF (Chomsky Normal Form) defined for a language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there any such CNF grammar readily available which covers all (or most of) the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14420" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T18:37:41.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T08:57:05.060" Title="Is there any CNF grammar available for English which can be downloaded directly?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20130" CreationDate="2016-11-03T16:57:51.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your second question first -- yes, in the combination γγ the first gamma is always pronounced as a nasal, e.g. ἄγγελος &lt;em&gt;angelos&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;aggelos&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the question in your title, no, there is no dialectal interchange of κκ~γγ, and I can't think of any Greek word that shows such variation. I have no explanation for the origin of the &lt;em&gt;gg&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;coggygria&lt;/em&gt;, but note that the form &lt;em&gt;coccygria&lt;/em&gt; also gets some Google hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T16:57:51.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20130" CreationDate="2016-11-03T18:20:23.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical Latin name for this plant is coccygia (it occurs once in Pliny); the Greek name is κοκκυγία (occurs once in a Byzantine dictionary) and *κοκκυγέα (an emendation in one passage in Theophrastes). None of these has an -r-. The Botanical name coggyrgia (sic, with -gg- and -r-) seems to have been coined by Scopoli in the 18th century. It is quite misguided to attempt to explain it as an ancient Greek dialect form. It is probably a mistake on the part of Scopoli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-11-03T18:20:23.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-04T12:05:34.757" Score="6" ViewCount="10681" Body="&lt;p&gt;ex·act·ly&#xA;iɡˈzak(t)lē/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the t is in brackets, does it mean that I don't have to pronounce it? I'm asking because I'm a native English speaker and I never pronounce the &quot;t&quot; in &quot;exactly&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastEditorUserId="14426" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T23:00:16.837" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:34:10.400" Title="What do (...) brackets mean in phonetic spelling?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20141" CreationDate="2016-11-04T15:55:49.027" Score="1" ViewCount="907" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of words in European and other languages come from Latin and Greek, if English (It's an example) words come from Latin and Greek, where Latin and Greek words come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14427" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T16:37:44.550" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T16:37:44.550" Title="Where do Latin and Greek words come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20135" CreationDate="2016-11-04T16:03:54.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin and Greek, just like English, are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt;: they're descended from an ancestor language called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; (PIE), which we know relatively little about because it was spoken before the invention of writing. Many Latin and Greek words can be traced back to PIE, though others cannot (sometimes because they're borrowings from other languages, sometimes because their etymology is unknown).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, your question can be taken a step further back -- where did Proto-Indo-European come from? The answer to that is that, although many people have speculated, no one really knows, because there isn't enough evidence to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Btw, many or most common English words do not come from Latin and Greek, but directly from Proto-Indo-European.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T20:29:38.773" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T20:29:38.773" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20115" CreationDate="2016-11-04T19:02:33.270" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, although i'm not a professional linguist, my recent reading on semantics(Katz-Fodor, 1963) tells(me at least) that semantics are notions that are applied by speakers within certain conditions, and both the composites(steal and heart) and their usages aren't literal all by themselves. one doesn't &lt;em&gt;steal&lt;/em&gt; a heart, nor is it &lt;em&gt;available&lt;/em&gt; for stealing, as you say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English speakers just &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; out of general usages that &quot;A stole B's heart&quot; means that B's got feelings for A. Now this is in the common-sensical usage(the conditions). One can sit and argue how stealing is, in a certain context, different from courting and so on, but that's not how an english speaker wonders about the sentence itself. Interpretations are subject to the conditions/contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one's &quot;stealing someone's thunder&quot;. ;)&#xA;though it's sort of complex(how exactly, i'm not sure) on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I'm making sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3231" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T19:02:33.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-05T00:35:00.543" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a definitive &lt;strong&gt;network&lt;/strong&gt; or database that maps the &lt;strong&gt;relationships between phonetic symbols?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to a word net, it would be a map representing the distance (or similarity) between phonetic symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A primitive example of a Phonetic Network is the Soundex.&lt;/strong&gt; It clusters sounds that are similar, and as such helps identify homophones or potential misspellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;soundex clusters example:&#xA;  [a,e,i,o,u,y,h,w,NIL][b,f,p,v][c,g,j,k,q,s,x,z][d,t][l][m,n][r]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Soundex were a network, we would have, e.g; edge distances [b,f]: 0, [b,m]: \infty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have linguists compiled a more definitive, higher resolution map that covers the entire IPA,&lt;/strong&gt; and where can I find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14431" LastEditorUserId="14431" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T15:59:13.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T02:48:56.043" Title="Network of Phonological Relationships" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;sampa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20134" CreationDate="2016-11-05T04:46:25.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I managed to find the example you gave, /iɡˈzak(t)lē/, on both google dictionary (googling &quot;define exactly&quot;) and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Google offers no explanation at all for its convention, and unforuntately &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/help/pronunciation-key&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster's pronounciation key&lt;/a&gt; only explains the sounds used, not all aspects of the notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's hard to say exactly what was intended by the parentheses since the source is unwilling to comment. However, all is not lost! A lot tends to be borrowed from the conventions of IPA (just more &quot;English-friendly&quot; symbols are used when the subject matter is all English), and we can look at the IPA for &quot;exactly&quot; to know precisely what we're dealing with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exactly#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ɪɡˈzæk(t)li/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you can see the familiar parentheses around 't' appear again. In fact, all the punctuation appears to be the same (stress has been marked with an apostrophe &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the stressed syllable and the word is encased in slashes) so that's a promising sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this transcription we can say exactly what each part means, since IPA is very standardized. &lt;strong&gt;Parentheses in IPA do not indicate that a sound is &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; per se, but rather that it's barely voiced.&lt;/strong&gt; In practice the result is similar, as with anything there is some variance between each speaker and for some &quot;barely&quot; may become &quot;not at all&quot; without the word sounding noticeably different. In fact, if you lost the sound entirely and merely moved your mouth &lt;em&gt;as if you were going to pronounce the t&lt;/em&gt; the IPA wouldn't change -- they use parentheses for silent mouthing when the transcription has been derived from lip-reading. The &quot;ghost&quot; of the sound, however, remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You yourself are a perfect example, as you say you never pronounce the 't' in exactly. I do, but subtly, and I certainly wouldn't notice if you said the word to me without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the prevalence of IPA, and the fact that it mirrors all the source's punctuation in &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; transcription (including the parentheses), it's most likely your original source meant the same thing by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find information on this and other &quot;punctuation marks&quot; in IPA under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Types_of_transcription&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcription section on their Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;. It's an interesting read and very helpful for understanding levels of precision in various IPA transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We needn't only compare to IPA, you can easily check the various other pronounciations available from free dictionaries online. It is, after all, just one word, and explanations which have the different sources agree with each other are most likely to be correct. None of them offer a pronunciation, optional or otherwise, in which the 't' is completely omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=define%20exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/iɡˈzak(t)lē/&lt;/a&gt; - This is the pronunciation in question and is ambiguous (also appears on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exactly#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ɪɡˈzæk(t)li/&lt;/a&gt; - The IPA pronunciation already discussed (also appears on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MacMillan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ɛɡˈzak(t)li/&lt;/a&gt; - An alternative IPA also found on Oxford, which offers different vowel sounds but no change on the 't'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ɪɡˈzækt·li/&lt;/a&gt; - This appears to be IPA as well, but has removed the parentheses entirely (also found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ig-&lt;strong&gt;zakt&lt;/strong&gt;-lee]&lt;/a&gt; - A non-IPA example with the 't' written just as any other letter is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/exactly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(ĭg-zăkt′lē)&lt;/a&gt; - Another with the 't' very clearly non-optional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14433" LastEditorUserId="14433" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T15:42:28.047" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T15:42:28.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20135" CreationDate="2016-11-05T12:28:44.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This graph gives you a decent picture of the evolution of Indo-European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/komTW.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/komTW.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Evolution of Indo-European Languages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line under Proto-Indo-European would benefit from a &quot;Proto-&quot; prefix, though (Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Hellenic, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivation and borrowing are two different phenomena. Kernel English words &lt;strong&gt;derive&lt;/strong&gt; from Proto-Indo-European, via Proto-Germanic, West-Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Old English and Middle English. Words that come from Latin and Greek (or French, Old Norse, Celtic, Arabic or Nahuatl) are &lt;strong&gt;borrowings&lt;/strong&gt;. You can spot the difference because the normal transformations that apply to derived words do not apply to borrowings. For instance, initial Latin /p/ corresponds to English initial /f/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;ater - &lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;ather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;isces - &lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;ish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But English &lt;em&gt;paternal&lt;/em&gt;, with an initial /p/ - which means it was borrowed from Latin, at a time when the transformation p-&gt;f was no longer taking place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T14:57:50.923" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T14:57:50.923" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20139" CreationDate="2016-11-05T18:13:33.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I have a bit better handle on what you're looking for. At a linguistic level, each segment is representable as an integer where the nth bit is the + or - specification of the nth feature. The difference between any two segments is thus computable as the number of bits difference between the segments, and the &quot;distance&quot; is the number of different bits. So [b] and [p] which differ in exactly one feature have a distance of 1; [b] and [φ] differ in two features so have a distance of two. From this, you could generate &quot;all the pairs that differ by 1; all the pairs that differ by 2&quot;. You can also compute differences in classes, for example [ptk] compared to [bdg] by masking off the bits that are not identical within each class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English spell-checking, this could be useless, but it might underlie the North Saami spell-checker, so ultimate utility depends on why you really care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Addendum]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going beyond just answering the question that was asked, here are answers to related questions that maybe the OP wished he had asked. One is whether there is a network of segment confusability relations, which addresses a perceptual question. You can approach the question generally or language specifically. The general form of the question is &quot;which two segments as pronounced in language X are most likely to be 'indistinguishable' for any human (with normal hearing)?&quot;. Thus you could inquire of speakers of all of the world's languages how hard it is to distinguish [l] and [l'] in Lushootseed. The language-specific form asks about indistinguishability where the subject pool is speakers of language Y (Y could = X). The most language-specific version, also the least fraught from an experimental perspective, is the case where Y=X – ask speakers of a language to distinguish sounds of their own language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raw form of the question has an invalid assumption, which can be eliminated, that it's just the segment that matters – in fact, the implied problem is related to the context that segments appear in. You need to control for contexts, so that you compare &quot;rip, rib; writ, rid&quot; and not &quot;rip, rib; tie, die&quot;. The standard way to do this is find word pairs differing in one sound, and fuzz the recordings with noise to obscure the segment in question – the test is whether speakers can correctly identify the spoken word. You need a big sample to cover the field of &quot;contexts&quot;. The result will be a table of segment pairs in a specific context, and you can decide what kind of theory of &quot;context&quot; you want to adopt. (Example: a linguistically-motivated distinction for consonants would be &quot;after a short vowel when at the end of a syllable&quot;, which might generalize to &quot;after a vowel when at the end of a syllable&quot; or maybe even &quot;after a sonorant when at the end of a syllable&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't carry over to perception of X by speakers of Y, or to any perception of Y, and it doesn't work very well for English unless you narrow the population to a specific variety. You can't come up with anything valid for all languages, but you could do a reasonable job for one language. I don't think this has been done even half-definitively for English, but it should in principle be doable in less than a lifetime.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T21:47:37.523" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T21:47:37.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20145" CreationDate="2016-11-05T18:25:39.617" Score="11" ViewCount="1294" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;rare languages&quot; is sometimes used in newspaper headings, blog posts, etc. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thebetterindia.com/62779/storyweaver-pratham-books-rare-languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Innovative Platform Ensures That Kids in India Have Access to Stories in Their Mother Tongue&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Better India&lt;/em&gt;, 26 Jul 2016 (examples: Sanskrit, Banjari, Lambadi, Kuruk, Oraon, Gondi, Mundari, Sadri, Santhali and Kora),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/15/preserving-rare-languages-multilingualism-benefits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preserve rare languages to spread benefits of multilingualism, says expert&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, 15 Feb 2016 (examples: Sardinian and Scottish Gaelic),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29037168&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Economic success 'drives language extinction'&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;BBC News&lt;/em&gt;, 3 Sep 2014 (examples: Upper Tanana, Ume Sami, Auvergnat, Bahing),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/07/26/333732206/for-rare-languages-social-media-provide-new-hope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;For Rare Languages, Social Media Provide New Hope&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;NPR&lt;/em&gt;, 26 Jul 2014 (examples: Aymara, Tongva, Anishinaabemowin),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pravdareport.com/science/earth/29-11-2007/101929-language-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About 2,000 rare languages may disappear on Earth in 100 years&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;PravdaReport&lt;/em&gt;, 29 Nov 2007 (examples: Siletz Dee-ni, which had only one speaker at the time),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.networklanguages.com/top-five-rarest-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Top Five Rarest Languages&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Network Languages Ltd&lt;/em&gt;, 10 Mar 2014 (Njerep, Chemehuevi, Kaixana or Caixana, Taushiro or Pinche, Liki).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you actually read the articles, they are usually about &lt;strong&gt;endangered languages&lt;/strong&gt;. So my question is: Do linguists use a definition of &lt;strong&gt;rare language&lt;/strong&gt; that is different from &quot;endangered language&quot;? (That is, if they actually use the term &quot;rare language&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: There appears to be no agreed-upon definition of endangered or threatened language. The abstract of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12748639&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; says that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) languages have been classified as threatened if the number of speakers is less than 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 100,000 (...). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/faq-on-endangered-languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UNESCO&lt;/a&gt; uses nine factors to determine whether a language is endangered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Not all &quot;rare&quot; languages are endangered. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/9lNjnE_-Log?t=4m1s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PBS documentary&lt;/a&gt;, the poet Bob Holman says that he visited one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulburn_Islands&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goulburn Islands&lt;/a&gt;, where there were 400 people and 10 different languages. In spite of a small number of speakers, some of the rare languages in Australia are stable because people don't find it a big deal to learn other languages, and learning the language of another people is a sign of respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T19:06:20.780" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T19:06:20.780" Title="What is the definition of &quot;rare language&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;endangered-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20143" CreationDate="2016-11-05T18:39:00.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Rare languages&quot; is not a term that is used by linguists, and it does not have any real meaning. It is a phrase that is often used by the writers of newspaper headlines, presumably because it is shorter than &quot;endangered languages&quot;, in the same way that they like to write &quot;poll&quot; when they mean &quot;election&quot;. &quot;Top Five Rarest Languages&quot;, if it means anything, should mean the five languages with the smallest number of speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T18:56:35.933" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T18:56:35.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20143" CreationDate="2016-11-05T18:58:57.330" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The articles you've linked to weren't written by linguists. I don't think &quot;rare language&quot; is an established term in linguistics. If it's used in a professional or academic context, it needs to be defined beforehand. For example, the National Register for Public Service Interpreters in the UK defines a &quot;rare language&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.scribd.com/document/327308470/Cecilia-Wadensjo-Birgitta-Englund-Dimitrova-Anna-Lena-Nilsson-The-Critical-Link-4-Professionalisation-of-interpreting-in-the-community-Benjamins-T&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as follows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recognition is given to the fact that there are so called ‘rare languages’ where the chance to establish assessment opportunities is outstripped by demand for the language. [...] Limited assessment and rare language categories deal with the practical realities of situations where a nationally recognised examination in a particular language is not yet available, or such an examination has not yet been taken or where the applicant has passed a test for working in, for example, immigration services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a &quot;rare language&quot; according to NRPSI is any language that doesn't have a nationally recognised exam. But this is just a definition that was useful for this particular institution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T19:17:34.373" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T19:17:34.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20134" CreationDate="2016-11-05T20:08:26.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The loss of t in &quot;exactly&quot; is a special case of a general rule that deletes an alveolar stop (t, d, n) in English between consonants.  At least, this general formulation works for my own speech, except perhaps when the preceding consonant is a liquid (r, l), nasal (m, n), or glide (w, y), so probably the preceding consonant must be an obstruent for the deletion to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens across word boundaries, by which I mean that the consonant following the t that is lost can be the first sound in the following word.  For instance, try saying phrases like &quot;exact same&quot;, &quot;act stupid&quot;, &quot;fact check&quot;, &quot;last call&quot; and see whether the t can be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting that you notice this loss of t, because it bears on whether the rule that deletes it is an allophonic rule or a morphophonemic rule.  Allophonic rules can produce non-phonemic results, but morphophonemic rules act on and produce phonemic forms.  We expect morphophonemic rules to produce results that are readily perceptible to native speakers (because phonemes are easy to hear), but we do not expect such rules to apply across word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently this rule of English does work on phonemic forms and produces phonemic results, and you have noticed it.  So it seems to be morphophonemic, yet it applies across word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T20:08:26.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-05T20:13:42.853" Score="1" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several speech files. In each file a vowel is annotated. I want to cut the half portion of this vowel and save it in another file. In order to do this, I am cutting the vowel in 4 parts. Then I am adding 1/4 to the starting time and then 3/4 to the starting time to get the middle portion. I came up with the following script based on other scripts I found online. However, I don't get anything in my output folder, so I am obviously doing something wrong. Any comments are welcome. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;form Files&#xA;    comment Insert the directory&#xA;    sentence InputDir  ./&#xA;endform&#xA;&#xA;createDirectory (&quot;output&quot;)&#xA;Create Strings as file list... fileList 'path$'*.wav&#xA;n_of_files = Get number of strings&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;for file to n_of_files&#xA;    select Strings fileList&#xA;    # Gets the name of the sound file to be worked out&#xA;    file$ = Get string... 'file'&#xA;    # Reads the sound file to the Objects list&#xA;    Read from file... 'path$''file$'&#xA;    # Appends the &quot;.TextGrid&quot; extension to the string file$ and reads&#xA;    # the matching TextGrid&#xA;    Read from file... 'path$''file$'.TextGrid&#xA;    select all&#xA;    minus Strings fileList&#xA;    # Labelled intervals are extracted from the original sound file and are&#xA;    # then listed in the Objects list &#xA;    Extract non-empty intervals... 'tier' yes&#xA;    # Remembers how many pieces of sound where extracted&#xA;    selected = numberOfSelected (&quot;Sound&quot;)&#xA;    # Cleaning up the unnecessary clutter&#xA;    select Sound 'file$'&#xA;    plus TextGrid 'file$'&#xA;    Remove&#xA;    for i to selected&#xA;        select all&#xA;        #gets the duration&#xA;        dur = Get total duration&#xA;        #gets one quarter of the vowel &#xA;        quart = dur/4&#xA;        #gets starting point of the vowel &#xA;        start = Get starting point... tier interval&#xA;        #gets the the starting point of the second quarter of the vowel &#xA;        cut = start +  quart&#xA;        #gets the ending point of the third quarter of the vowel&#xA;        cut2 = start + 3 * quart&#xA;    endfor&#xA;&#xA;    sound_name$ = selected$ (&quot;Sound&quot;)&#xA;&#xA;        select Sound 'sound_name$'&#xA;        Edit&#xA;        editor Sound 'sound_name$'&#xA;        Select... cut cut2&#xA;        Move start of selection to nearest zero crossing&#xA;        Move end of selection to nearest zero crossing&#xA;        Cut selected sound &#xA;        Write to WAV file... ./output/'file$'.wav&#xA;        endeditor&#xA;&#xA;    select all&#xA;    minus Strings fileList&#xA;    # Cleans up unnecessary clutter&#xA;    Remove&#xA;&#xA;endfor&#xA;&#xA;select all&#xA;Remove&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14438" LastEditorUserId="14438" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T20:26:38.780" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T00:59:58.150" Title="cut middle portion of the vowel using praat script" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20150" CreationDate="2016-11-06T00:44:32.400" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the Irish laws written in the Irish language these days?&#xA;Or was there any moment in history when the laws were written/translated in the Irish language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14439" LastEditorUserId="14439" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T04:28:56.087" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T04:28:56.087" Title="Are the Irish laws written in the Irish language?" Tags="&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-06T01:57:42.213" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope that this is the right SE site to ask my question (as opposed to philosophy.SE and english.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in and know some logic, so I talk often with philosopher of language, even though I don't really know philosophy, philosophy of language, or linguistics.  The other day, a logician/philosopher of language told me something along the line of this, if I remember correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Jokingly) Philosophers don't speak English.  They use the sentence &lt;em&gt;It is possible that my hair is green&lt;/em&gt; to discuss metaphysical possibility, but ordinary speakers of English would interpret the sentence as a statement about epistemological possibility.  The &quot;right&quot; English sentence that expresses metaphysical possibility is &lt;em&gt;My hair could have been green.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native speaker of the language, so I'm not sure if the view above is plausible.  What I find interesting is the use of pluperfect in the &quot;right&quot; version of the statement.  When I was taught English at school, I learned that English &quot;subjunctive&quot; pluperfect verbs stood for something unrealistic &lt;em&gt;in the past&lt;/em&gt;.  In contrast, the present tense is used in philosophers' version above.  Given these, I think (1) I learned something false at school, (2) I learned something that &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; true when English had rich usages of the subjunctive mood but not any more, or (3) there is an alternate &quot;right&quot; version of the statement, which is &lt;em&gt;My hair could be green&lt;/em&gt;.  But I doubt if the last sentence is idiomatic in English for metaphysical possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These come to a question: Is the view in the quote plausible?  How do people explain the usage of pluperfect in the second sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14440" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T18:54:36.887" Title="Usage of pluperfect in English to talk about metaphysical possibility in the present" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20148" CreationDate="2016-11-06T01:59:24.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.constitution.ie/Documents/Bhunreacht_na_hEireann_web.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Constitution&lt;/a&gt; is bilingual, and the Irish version take precedence in case of conflict. Some Acts such as the Adoption Act 2010 are passed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/acts/2010/a2110.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/acts/2010/a2110i.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish&lt;/a&gt;, but some are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/acts/2003/a12003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English only&lt;/a&gt;. Most are bilingual. I don't think any are passed only in Irish, but that's based on manual inspection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T01:59:24.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20149" CreationDate="2016-11-06T06:13:27.500" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Source: native speaker. So some of the following may be dialectal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, past-tense forms can be used to express hypotheticals, even when the hypothetical action would be in the present. (Specifically past subjunctives, though no verb except &amp;quot;be&amp;quot; distinguishes those any more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the general &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; still here, he &lt;em&gt;would tell&lt;/em&gt; you that the orders &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;s here are past subjunctive forms, even though there's nothing past-tense about the action: the general might have been here five minutes ago, but what's relevant is only that he isn't here now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This extends to other verbs as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the general &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; here, he would tell you that he &lt;em&gt;believed&lt;/em&gt; the lieutenant also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the past tense is the only option: *that he believes, *that he believe, *that he is believing all strike me as ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;So perfect and pluperfect forms don't always have a past-tense meaning in hypotheticals.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with the philosophical terms. But &amp;quot;it is possible that my hair is green&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;my hair could be green&amp;quot; do both seem like &amp;quot;epistemic&amp;quot; possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;em&gt;my hair could be green&lt;/em&gt;, since you can't see me right now to know otherwise. But I don't mean that there's any possibility from my perspective that my hair might actually be green. I can see it, and I know that it &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I said &lt;em&gt;my hair could have been green&lt;/em&gt;, however, there are two interpretations which both strike me as correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be past-tense &amp;quot;epistemic&amp;quot; possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before he had Skype, when I was talking to him long-distance, &lt;em&gt;my hair could have been green&lt;/em&gt; and he wouldn't have noticed. Though of course it &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it could also be your &amp;quot;metaphysical&amp;quot; possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an alternate universe, &lt;em&gt;my hair could have been green&lt;/em&gt;. But in this one, it clearly &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the hypothetical isn't really past-tense at all; if I had followed that statement with &amp;quot;in this one, it &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, that would be mixing verb tenses in an ungrammatical way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I understood properly the philosophical distinction in question. Please correct me if I did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T06:13:27.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-06T16:10:18.280" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got to do a proof to explain for any s, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[[former president with long hair]]&lt;sub&gt;s&lt;/sub&gt; = {x: there is an s’ before s such that x is a president with long hair in s’} &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when the structure is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[former [president with long hair]] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;based on the sentence &quot;Sally is a former president with long hair&quot;. I've done a certain bit so far, but not sure if it's right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14397" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-06T21:10:16.463" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T21:10:16.463" Title="Formal Semantics - Set theory/Proofing (Not sure how to go around it)" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20149" CreationDate="2016-11-06T18:32:28.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not tell much about the actual usage of this expression, but I will make an attempt to explain why it could be used that way. My answer is probably more a philosophical than a linguistic one.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;If you say you are familiar with logic and interested in philosophy, you might have made acquaintance with modal logic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;◻p means &quot;it is necessary that p&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ◇p means &quot;it is possible that p&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going into too much detail about the logical spell-out, one way to formalize these modal operators is the assumption of so-called possible worlds, which are our metaphysical space:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One can imagine a network of possible worlds, where each world is a very, very large situation, fully specified to every detail you could make an assertion about - there is our world of course, then there is one world which is almost identical to ours except for the fact that that bike standing out there is not red but black, then there is one world which would have been identical to ours except for the fact that Hitler never existed, leading to a completely different development of historical events, then there is one world which is completely different to ours w.r.t. the fact that not humans but giant ants have taken over world domination, ... - and as you can imagine, there are in theory infinetely many of such worlds, already due to the fact that our bike could stand one meter from the wall, 1.20 meters, 1.232323 meters, 1.23932545565463 meters, ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our universe is a network of many of such worlds, out of which some can see each other, others can't. For example, if our universe consisted of worlds w&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; to w&lt;sub&gt;10&lt;/sub&gt;, we could have the case that w1 sees itself, w2 and w4, w2 also sees w1, w3 and w10 but not itself, w3 sees w1 and w2 (so we have a reachability circle of w1, w2 and w3), but nothing else, w4 sees w8 and w10, and so on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that this model does not make any claim about the actual existence of such parallel universes. It is really only there to capture the notions of possibility and necessity in somewhat more graspable terms.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this network now, &quot;necessary p&quot; means that from our standpoint (i.e. the &quot;actual world&quot;), in every world we can see, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true. It might be that there are worlds in which it is not true, but these worlds are not reachable to us, so in our world, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is a necessity. For example &quot;It is necessary that when you drop a pen, it falls down&quot; - it might be that there is a world in which this is not the case, but at least this is in reach of our imagination.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;possible  p&quot;, on the other hand, means that there is at least one world of which &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true. For example &quot;It is possible that this winter will be a cold one&quot;. In our network of worlds, we can imaginally reach a world in which the approaching winter is cold, so it is possible that &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true, but we might also be able to imagine worlds in which this is not so, thus &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is not a necessity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that these &quot;alternative worlds&quot; can also include the actual world we live in, if our world is defined as being able to itself in the universe. It could be that &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true in none of our neighbouring worlds, but in our own one, and if the network states that our world can see itself, then &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is possible in our world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally, where &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; is the reachability relation between worlds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;⟦◻p⟧&lt;sub&gt;w&lt;/sub&gt; = 1 iff ∀w' : if wRw' then ⟦p⟧&lt;sub&gt;w'&lt;/sub&gt; = 1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&quot;It is necessary that &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is true of a world &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; if and only if in all worlds &lt;code&gt;w'&lt;/code&gt; which are reachable from &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ⟦◇p⟧&lt;sub&gt;w&lt;/sub&gt; = 1 iff ∃w' : wRw' and ⟦p⟧&lt;sub&gt;w'&lt;/sub&gt; = 1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&quot;It is possible that &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is true of a world &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; if and only if there is at least one world &lt;code&gt;w'&lt;/code&gt; which is reachable from &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt; in which &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is true)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what the &quot;philosopher's English&quot; expresses is exactly this: They can imagine a world in which the speaker's hair is green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why this might sound odd to  the ordinary English speaker's ear is that we don't usuaually talk about such metaphysical possibilites, but about the facts in our actual world. &#xA;The necessity and the and the possibility operator then relate to alternative worlds to our believe, i.e. our epistemic state. In the world which I am currently believing to be true, my hair is not green, but it could be that I am mistaken and the world in which I am living actually turns out to be one in which my hair is green. In my head, these are different states of affairs, but it still all is within the scope of our real world, and the evaluation of necessity and possibility only relate to the correctness of my believes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The philosophers, on the other hand, don't speak of epistemic, but rather about metaphysical states; the epistemic facts all hold true in our actual world, and the alternatives take place in worlds which are actually different from the one we are currently living in.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Now since the &quot;normal&quot; past is, in ordinary English, already occupied by the use for epistemic states, a different tense needs to take over the role of expressing metaphysical possibilities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is where the plupferfect comes into play: In normally expressing something even further in the past, it adds some distance to what is being said; instead of expressing that it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be the case (as a matter of fact in our actual world, if your epistemic state does not match the actual circumstances), you now express something even more remote, namely that it could have been the case &lt;strong&gt;if the world we live in wasn't ours&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., if we were situated in a metaphysically different state.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it easier for you to grasp the idea, just imagine the pluperfect proposition to be the consequent of an if-statement, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we had been born in a different world, my hair could have been green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hair is green&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&gt; This is a fact in the actual world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hair could be green &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&gt; This is a reachable possibility within my epistemic states, which still all revolve around or actual world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hair could have been green.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&gt; This is a reachable possibility on the metahpysical level, if the world we live in wasn't necessarily our current one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, could word this grammatical phenomenon as &quot;when you switch tense, you switch levels&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When you switch from present tense to simple past, you switch from one-world level to the level of different epistemic states in our actual world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When you then switch even further from present tense to pluperfect, you switch from little epistemic worlds within our actual world to the metaphysic level of different worlds out of which our actual state of affairs is only one world out of many possible worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that respect, I find the work distribution between English simple past and pluperfect quite clever, the temporally closer one expressing a possibility in terms of - mentally closer - epistemic states, the temporally more distant one expressing a possibility in terms of - mentally more remote - metaphysical states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really just a hypothesis, but the explanation works for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-06T18:52:45.990" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T18:52:45.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20153" CreationDate="2016-11-06T20:27:45.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging from your comments above, I'm guessing that your task is to show how the principle of compositionality applies to the interpretation of your example &quot;a former president with red hair&quot;.  If so, it was hard to figure that out, because you're using the terms &quot;proof&quot; and &quot;explain&quot; in an odd way.  I don't see how &quot;proof&quot; comes into it -- rather, you seem to want some appropriate observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle of compositionality, as I would express it, is that the interpretation of a complex expression is determined by the syntactic structure of the expression and is governed by the rule that the interpretation of the whole is determined by the interpretations of the parts, as those parts are given in the syntactic structure.  (A logician might use the term &quot;morphological&quot; where I have used &quot;syntactic&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words to figure out what an expression means, we find out its tree structure, then start at the bottom of the tree (the leaves, that is) and interpret the parts of the tree, working our way upwards, using previous results we got when we interpreted the lower, smaller parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example, then, the first step is to determine the syntactic structure.  Or more precisely, the syntactic structures, to allow for the possibility of ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does appear to be an ambiguity of syntactic structure involved here.  A noun phrase typically has a determiner followed by an N-bar (written N'), and an N' is either a noun or a modifier of some sort combined with an N'.  This is following McCawley's account in &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;a former president with red hair&quot; combines the determiner &quot;a&quot; with the N' &quot;former president with red hair&quot;, which in turn has two modifiers combined with the noun &quot;president&quot;.  But there are two ways to build up that N' by combining the modifiers with what they modify.  The structure could be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[N' former [N' [N' president] with red hair]]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[N' [N' former [N' president]] with red hair]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, correspondingly, there might be two different interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-06T20:27:45.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18906" CreationDate="2016-11-07T03:33:29.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your observation is correct and you're not missing anything. The original case information is simply lost with &lt;code&gt;-DIK&lt;/code&gt; (and &lt;code&gt;-(y)EcEK&lt;/code&gt;) participles. So is most of the original tense information by the way: &lt;code&gt;-DIK&lt;/code&gt; is for relative non-future and &lt;code&gt;-(y)EcEK&lt;/code&gt; is for relative future but finer distinctions are lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If context is not enough to recover the lost information one has to use more specific verbs or circumlocutions. For example, if the object is a person, one way to express the original case information is to use the reflexive pronoun &quot;kendi&quot; in that case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Komşum&lt;strong&gt;la&lt;/strong&gt; konuştum. O gelecek. → Kendisi&lt;strong&gt;yle&lt;/strong&gt; konuştuğum komşum gelecek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, &quot;geldiğim köy&quot; may mean &quot;the village I came to&quot; or &quot;the village I came from&quot;, but also &quot;the village I &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt; to&quot;, &quot;the village I had come from&quot; etc. Ambiguity is a fact of real languages, we just have to learn to live with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T17:15:01.913" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T17:15:01.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20143" CreationDate="2016-11-07T14:19:51.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;rare language&lt;/strong&gt; is not a linguistic term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several aspects that can make a language &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt; in some sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being &lt;strong&gt;endangered&lt;/strong&gt; (on the verge of extinction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having few speakers (which is not necessarily the same as the above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being &lt;strong&gt;under-resourced&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., having little available documentation and/or resources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, the aspects of rareness occur together, but this is not necessarily the case. A thriving language of Africa can still be under-resourced, and we have well-documented dead languages. A language with a few speakers in some part of the world may be not endangered, yet another one with more than a million speakers in another part of the world may be critically endangered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T14:19:51.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2440" CreationDate="2016-11-07T15:10:02.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;sociology and sociolinguistic work hand in hand .In sociolinguistic we are concerned with effects of language  in our society and in sociology is the effects of society in our language &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14452" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T15:10:02.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20160" CreationDate="2016-11-07T18:09:49.023" Score="2" ViewCount="949" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than once I've seem texts mentioning that the sounds /v/ and /w/ are similar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Esperanto and many east-european languages have the &quot;kv&quot; cluster in place of the latin &quot;qu&quot; (which sounds like /kw/) makes this even more likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my ears the distinction between /v/ and /w/ is very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14453" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:34:10.853" Title="Do the IPA consonants /v/ and /w/ sound similar?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20159" CreationDate="2016-11-07T18:34:10.853" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similarity is in the ear of the listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we acquire our first language, our ears and brains become trained in all the phonemic differences that are relevant for that language. When we than learn a new language (after the so-called &quot;critical period&quot; where those differences burn in) we hear all the sounds of the new language in terms of the sounds we already know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native speakers of languages with /v/ only (like Germans or Eastern Europeans) tend to hear the sound /w/ as a /v/ unless they are taught to watch the difference between the two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:34:10.853" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9924" CreationDate="2016-11-07T18:47:32.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regard to the modern Korean language, my answer would be &quot;not quite but sometimes&quot;. Rather, speaker-listener and speaker-referent relationships are encoded separately and combined in the verbal inflection. However, listener-referent relationship might have an influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard situation to test this is when the speaker is of higher social rank, the listener of lower social rank, and the referent is of intermediate social rank (e.g. the 선생님 &lt;em&gt;seonsaengnim&lt;/em&gt; speaking to a 후배 &lt;em&gt;hubae&lt;/em&gt; about a 선배 &lt;em&gt;seonbae&lt;/em&gt;, equivalent to musicallinguist's example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, depending on the closeness of the speaker-listener relationship, either polite informal 해요체 &lt;em&gt;haeyo-che&lt;/em&gt; or a rather usual mixture of non-polite informal 해라체 &lt;em&gt;haera-che&lt;/em&gt; (often called &quot;plain style&quot;) and 해체 &lt;em&gt;hae-che&lt;/em&gt; (often called &quot;intimate style&quot;), referred to as 반말 &lt;em&gt;banmal&lt;/em&gt;, would be used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The encoding of the speaker-referent relationship is generally done by the use of the -시- &lt;em&gt;-si-&lt;/em&gt; verbal infix. In this case, as the 선배 &lt;em&gt;seonbae&lt;/em&gt; is of lower status than the speaker, there is no use of this infix. Thus the listener-referent relationship, where the -시- infix would be used, is therefore lost. The resultant verbal form would be therefore indistinguishable from a case where the listener-referent relationship where the referent had lower social status, e.g. the 선생님 &lt;em&gt;seonsaengnim&lt;/em&gt; speaking to a 후배 &lt;em&gt;hubae&lt;/em&gt; about one of his/her 동생 &lt;em&gt;dongsaeng&lt;/em&gt; (a younger sibling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the reverse polarity may be influenced by the listener-referent relationship; the most common is dubbed 압존법 (Sino-Korean: 壓尊法) &lt;em&gt;abjonbeob&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;respect restriction&quot;. For example, if a person is talking to his grandfather about his father, the speaker-listener relationship would generally mean either the polite informal 해요체 &lt;em&gt;haeyo-che&lt;/em&gt; and/or the polite formal deferential style 합쇼체 &lt;em&gt;hapsyo-che&lt;/em&gt;.  Whilst the speaker-referent relationship would usually require use of the -시- &lt;em&gt;-si-&lt;/em&gt; infix, as the listener has higher social status than the referent, the listener-referent relationship traditionally overrules the speaker-listener one and the -시- &lt;em&gt;-si-&lt;/em&gt; infix is omitted. It is also noted that this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3fsyDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA102&amp;amp;lpg=PA102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dying out&lt;/a&gt; amongst &quot;younger speakers&quot;. There is a related question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://korean.stackexchange.com/questions/88/do-we-use-honorifics-when-talking-about-seniors-in-the-third-person?newreg=9c74c6ad27ca46348239799592419601&quot;&gt;Korean Language StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other phenomena, for example when parents talk to their own children in referring to relatives who would &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3fsyDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA102&amp;amp;lpg=PA102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;require honorifics from the children but not the parent&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;stance shifting&quot; in child-directed speech). The listener-referent relationship overrules the speaker-referent relationship and the parent uses the honorific infix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though my familiarity with Japanese is much lower, one could see the 内外 &lt;em&gt;uchi-soto&lt;/em&gt; distinction as an example of how listener-referent relationships can affect the speech levels used. I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uiUyBblkkLAC&amp;amp;pg=PT216&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;led to believe&lt;/a&gt; that the effect of 内外 &lt;em&gt;uchi-soto&lt;/em&gt; means listener-referent considerations are taken into account more often in Japanese than in Korean, and that this is reflected in a greater range and productivity of non-subject referent honorifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:00.990" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T18:47:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-08T08:47:33.040" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was born and raised in a non-English speaking country from the ages of 1-5 before moving to America to start kindergarten (in American English.) So while I didn't start learning English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;right after&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; birth, I was still exposed to the language early on. It is also the language I think in and know the best.&#xA;Would I be considered a native speaker of the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14458" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-08T16:14:56.897" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:14:56.897" Title="Would I be considered a native English speaker?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20182" CreationDate="2016-11-08T13:36:53.390" Score="9" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do sign languages have &quot;accents&quot; like verbal languages? If so, what would be some examples of those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T15:30:15.843" Title="Do sign languages have &quot;accents&quot; like verbal languages?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3385" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:13:58.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Otavio, I am afraid, you will not be spared the expense and the honour to come up with the full chart yourself. However, the following might be helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.hu/books?id=D6jU7q1Xkf0C&amp;amp;pg=PA86&amp;amp;lpg=PA86#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diachronic Studies in Romance Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; has a rudimentary outline for some changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00365006/PDF/vaissiere_1996_from_latin_to_modern_French.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Latin to Modern French: on diachronic changes and synchronic Variations&lt;/a&gt; meets some of your other criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:13:58.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20163" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:14:31.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most widely accepted definition of &quot;first language&quot; is the languages acquired within the the so-called critical period - a period in which children are highly sensible for the development of linguistic competences - in which one's mother tongue is usually acquired, or conversely, everything which is learned after one's first langauge is fully acquired is called a second language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since that critical period spans at least up to the fifth, some even say up to the 13th year of one's life, and you probably still were within your critical period (or your very first language was not fully complete yet) when you started to learn English, probably one could say that English is indeed a native language for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:14:31.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3915" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:30:49.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question implies that the English would contemplate what it would be like to have a regulatory body of sorts. The very fact that there is no such body means your question can probably be answered only inductively. You cannot investigate the impact of something that is not there. Rather figure out what impact regulatory bodies do have on languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good choice could be French &#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.hu/books?id=tNyiQuKWMwYC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.hu/books?id=tNyiQuKWMwYC&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/03/academie-francaise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/03/academie-francaise/&lt;/a&gt; (something a little lighthearted for your taste, I presume)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Re I expect the studies to particularly look at the influence in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-) the speed of evolution of the language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are treading on a slopy terrain. &#xA;What is evolution? How do you measure its speed? What do you compare it against?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-) the breadth of the English lexicon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I mentioned before, it is hard to argue for the impact of something that is not there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:30:49.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17639" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:53:43.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;German did lose its dental fricatives early on, but not quite early enough to avoid affecting the orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transition from /θ~ð/ to /t~d/ is usually considered part of the High German Consonant Shift. But this generalization can be misleading. This change did start in the same region as the other High German changes. But /θ/ shifted significantly later, around the 10th century, and spread significantly farther, affecting all of the West Germanic languages except English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this point, German had just begun to be written down. &quot;Th&quot; was chosen for /θ/, by analogy with Greek theta (transcribed as &quot;th&quot; in Latin, and now pronounced /θ/). So the cognate to English &quot;think&quot; was written &lt;em&gt;thenken&lt;/em&gt; (modern German &lt;em&gt;denken&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then /θ/ disappeared from the language. With the distinction between /θ/ and /t/ lost, it was no longer clear which German words should be written with &quot;th&quot; and which should have &quot;t&quot;. Thus &quot;th&quot; appeared in some words like &lt;em&gt;Thal&lt;/em&gt;, which originally had /d/ (compare English &quot;dale&quot;). A similar process in English created the &quot;th&quot; in &quot;Thomas&quot; and &quot;Thames&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually this use of &quot;th&quot; fossilized. Words like &lt;em&gt;Thal&lt;/em&gt; were permanently written with &quot;th&quot;, while words like &lt;em&gt;denken&lt;/em&gt; were permanently written with &quot;d&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1901 the orthography reform finally removed this distinction, replacing &lt;em&gt;Thal&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Tal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Thier&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Tier&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Th&quot; now survives only in proper names (&lt;em&gt;Goethe&lt;/em&gt;) and Greek-derived loanwords (&lt;em&gt;Thron&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: I've been using Duden Online and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oldhighgermanpri00wriguoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wright's Old High German Primer&lt;/a&gt;, which has good information on Old High German orthography and the consonant shift. However it was also published in 1888, so my information may be very out of date. Please correct me if so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T16:53:43.803" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-08T18:59:04.547" Score="0" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to scan a line from a fragment of Euripides Erechtheus (cannot figure out how to write Greek characters here!):&#xA;-    v -  -| -   -  v v  v|  v- v  v&#xA;os theon bomous patrida te rhuometha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the first foot be a trochee?  Is the episilon of theon to be scanned as long?  Or is theon counted as one long?  But is so how does the rest of the line fit?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14461" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T18:15:28.810" Title="scansion of iambic trimeter in fragment of Euripides" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17219" CreationDate="2016-11-08T20:16:46.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is yes. They are called loanwords, more specifically popular borrowing - where the word used by the other culture is adopted without translation. Unlike learned borrowings that are often influenced by schooling or science, popular borrowings, popular in the sense of adopted by the masses, have always been the means to name something that does not exist in the original culture. The Wikipedia entry has a few gems (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&lt;/a&gt;) for example. Though I am not aware of any studies that specifically set out to follow up on trade routes, the fact that these new words appear in a language clearly indicate that they were in need of a new term for a new thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T20:16:46.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20170" CreationDate="2016-11-08T20:36:55.067" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming your line looks like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὁς θεον βωμους πατριδα τε ῥυομεθα&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Accents omitted because I'm not skilled enough to place them correctly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understood you correctly, the first four syllables are long-short-long-long:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first syllable is long by position, because the short omicron is followed by two consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second syllable is short by nature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third syllable is long by position, because the short omicron is followed by two consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fourth syllable is long by nature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your transcription doesn't make it clear which &quot;o&quot;s are omicrons and which are omegas. But in this case it doesn't matter, since they're followed by multiple consonants anyway. (And *&lt;em&gt;βομους&lt;/em&gt; isn't a word, while &lt;em&gt;βωμους&lt;/em&gt; is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. You might also find &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Latin.SE&lt;/a&gt; helpful for future classics questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:09.290" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T20:36:55.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18996" CreationDate="2016-11-09T13:05:30.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perfecto&lt;/strong&gt; is usually perfective, but in some situations an imperfective reading is also possible. For example:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He vivido allí durante toda mi vida.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may (but does not have to) mean that you still live there. I think &lt;strong&gt;pluscuamperfecto&lt;/strong&gt; may have imperfective reading, too. I'm not sure about &lt;strong&gt;pretérito anterior&lt;/strong&gt;, a native Spanish speaker would need to comment on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Futuro simple&lt;/strong&gt; may have a perfective meaning. &lt;a href=&quot;http://gredos.usal.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10366/110664/DFM_Fidalgo_Enriquez_FJ_LaExpresion.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an example (p. 97):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aunque vendrá mañana no lo veré, moriré antes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;moriré&lt;/em&gt; is clearly perfective here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both aspects are possible in &lt;strong&gt;futuro perfecto&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.really-learn-english.com/examples-of-future-perfect-tense-es.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are some examples:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En septiembre habré vivido aquí durante ocho años.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sensible interpretation I can see is that the action of &quot;living here&quot; will still be ongoing as of September, so its aspect is imperfective. But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Habremos vuelto a casa antes de las cinco horas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The action of &quot;returning&quot; will be completed by five o'clock, so it has a perfective aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-11-09T18:57:26.673" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T18:57:26.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2016-11-09T14:00:07.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perfect&lt;/em&gt; can be either an aspect (sometimes analysed as a tense) or a verb form. &lt;em&gt;Imperfect&lt;/em&gt; is just a verb form. Aspects are (sort of) comparable across languages. Verb forms are language-specific, and an &quot;imperfect verb&quot; from one language may have nothing in common with an &quot;imperfect verb&quot; from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of a &quot;perfect aspect&quot; is ambiguous; it's better to talk about the &lt;em&gt;retrospective aspect&lt;/em&gt; (also called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_and_absolute_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;anterior tense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; referring to an event before the reference point) and/or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resultative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;resultative aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (referring to relevance of a past event). Note that perfect verb forms can sometimes express other aspects, e.g. the experiental aspect (&quot;I have been to China three times&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are perfective and imperfective aspects, but there is no such thing as an &quot;imperfect aspect&quot;. As far as I can tell, those who speak of an &quot;imperfect aspect&quot; either mean &quot;lack of a perfect aspect&quot; or &quot;an imperfective aspect&quot;, which are completely different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several aspects that can be said to be in some way &quot;opposite&quot; to the perfect (retrospective/resultative) aspect. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospective_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;prospective aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (also called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_and_absolute_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;posterior tense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) refers to an action after a reference point (&quot;He was about to fall&quot;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_(grammar)#.E2.80.98Anti-perfect.E2.80.99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;anti-perfect aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (also called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuous_past&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;discontinuous past tense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) refers to a past event disconnected from the reference point (&quot;He used to live here&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0013838042000339862?journalCode=nest20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;). Neither of these aspects is called &quot;imperfect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;em&gt;imperfect&lt;/em&gt; is commonly used in description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperfect#Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verb forms in Romance languages&lt;/a&gt;, which usually express the past tense with the imperfective aspect. I don't know of any sensible use of the name &lt;em&gt;imperfect&lt;/em&gt; for describing verb forms in non-Romance languages. If it's used, it doesn't tell us anything about the semantics. For example, the form sometimes called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterite#German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imperfekt&lt;/a&gt; in German doesn't show any distinctions in terms of the perfective/imperfective aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-11-11T18:31:46.200" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T18:31:46.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20170" CreationDate="2016-11-09T18:15:28.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0151:speech=1:section=100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The line is actually &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὡς θεῶν τε βωμοὺς πατρίδα τε ῥυώμεθα&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an iambic trimeter, with synezesis in θεῶν (i.e. it counts as a single long) and resolution in πατρίδα (i.e. its first two shorts are equivalent to a single long). The τε  counts long because of the following initial rho. The foot boundaries look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὡς θεῶν τε βω|μοὺς πατρίδα τε |ῥυώμεθα&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw, as Draconis points out, this question might be more appropriate on Latin SE, which has also been accepting Greek questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T18:15:28.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6017" CreationDate="2016-11-09T18:52:45.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though your exact research purposes are not quite clear, based on your specs, I believe the University College London English Usage Resources (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/resources/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/resources/index.htm&lt;/a&gt;) would be a good place to start with. (Though it is diacronic 1950's to 1990's, methinks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the Boston University Noun Phrase corpus also has a pretty decent search facility: &lt;a href=&quot;http://npcorpus.bu.edu/cgi-bin/search.pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://npcorpus.bu.edu/cgi-bin/search.pl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, probably in terms of breadth, Brigham Young University takes the lead with its incredible list of corpora: &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T18:52:45.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5963" CreationDate="2016-11-09T19:10:58.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At my previous company we used the Stanford sentiment algos - it was a mixed blessing, took a fair amount of tweaking and calibration: &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Twitter, it was surprisingly reliable as the short discourse limits ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, several machine learning algos are there for you to train. Burak Kanber has a pretty good blog around it - though he used JS for a naive Bayes classifier: &lt;a href=&quot;http://burakkanber.com/blog/machine-learning-naive-bayes-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://burakkanber.com/blog/machine-learning-naive-bayes-1/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limitations of machine based solutions: sarcasm, ambiguity, cynicism, metaphors and similar mythical beast are still beyond its capabilities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T19:10:58.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20165" CreationDate="2016-11-09T20:25:06.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we define 'accent' to mean a distinctive manner of expressing language characteristic of a particular group(s) then I would say that the answer to your question is yes. All that would be required for such a notion to be possible is a group of people stressing certain modes of their language in certain idiosyncratic ways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This much has been shown to actually exist within sign language communities. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3345846/Sign-language-accent-Linguists-discover-variation-signing-seen-Philadephia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguists&lt;/a&gt; researching the Philadelphia area have observed that a single meaning is represented by different mannerisms in Philadelphia compared to the rest of the United States. It is believed that the cause of this deviance is due to many deaf students in Philadelphia attending 'mainstream' schools, where the deaf students were less likely to be in the company of other deaf students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises an interesting, overarching observation that most differences between accents in sign language communities occur between those who are deaf and those who are not. It has been suggested that deaf sign language users can determine whether another sign language user is deaf or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be interesting to see more research come out on this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14465" LastEditorUserId="14465" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T15:30:15.843" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T15:30:15.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14374" CreationDate="2016-11-09T21:28:07.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach that linguists use is to train themselves in reverse chronological order. I'd suggest you do the same: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read a few hundred pages in each century, going backwards. Choose similar genres and topics if possible. This allows you to adjust to changes in vocabulary, grammar or simply fashion in phrasing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three things you may want to look out for: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#1 You may go back to the 1800's for your first read, but from there on, do not move on until you feel at ease reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#2 Plan out your journey beforehand. Make sure you know the final piece you want to arrive at, and choose the intermediate steps so they lead into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#3 Never just read a single author, and allow yourself some margin for error. Some books from the 1600's may simply just not cut it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastEditorUserId="13761" LastEditDate="2016-11-11T07:52:32.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T07:52:32.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20187" CreationDate="2016-11-10T14:45:52.337" Score="3" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for dates when the /θ/ phoneme (which once written &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;þ&lt;/em&gt; in English, and now by the &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; grapheme) inherited from Proto-Germanic died out in continental Germanic languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when was the sound shift from /θ to /d/ was completed on the European mainland, so not including Britain and Iceland?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: BTW, I am interested in dates for each of the major Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-11T11:14:31.837" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T11:14:31.837" Title="When did the /θ/ sound die out in the continental Germanic languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20185" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-11-10T14:54:11.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T14:54:11.290" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T14:54:11.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20186" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-11-10T14:54:11.290" Score="0" Body="For questions about the  &quot;th&quot; sounds (voiced th /ð/ and voiceless th /θ/)." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T18:25:59.343" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T18:25:59.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20184" CreationDate="2016-11-10T17:04:57.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift#.2F.CE.B8.2F_.3E_.2Fd.2F_.28phase_4.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swedish&lt;/a&gt; seems to be the last holdout, as attested in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Vasa_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gustav Vasa Bible&lt;/a&gt; published 1540-1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T17:04:57.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T22:07:56.743" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhyme (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alliterative verse (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metre - Poetry (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mechanisms such as these appear to help lower information corruption during long range communication, especially during pre-writing eras. It helps the reciter narrow down the possibilities of successive words/sentances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these generally recognized as forms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;error detection and correction&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any formal work in this area? Any analysis of linguistic and/or brain evolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems implied by in this section: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition#Transmission&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oral tradition (Transmission)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14470" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-11-12T16:24:28.477" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T16:20:43.213" Title="Are Rhyming, Alliterative Verse etc. forms of linguistic Error Detection/Correction Schemes?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-10T20:57:32.167" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for information about the linguists and/or researchers from before the 1970s who at the time believed that vocabulary and grammar should be taught as &lt;strong&gt;two completely separate entities&lt;/strong&gt;, that these two were not at all dependent on each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this belief started to change during the 1970s, but that’s all I know about the shift, so I would like to know more about the linguists who believed that vocabulary and grammar were unconnected so that I can better understand their point of view and then what happened to change prevailing opinion about this in the linguistic community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can tell me names of these linguists or references to their works that would account for them, that would be great, and I’ll go figure it out myself. If anybody knows the actual reasoning here and can provide that as a concrete answer, that would be even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Patter English" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-11T15:22:37.810" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T15:22:37.810" Title="Which linguists from the 1940s–1970s believed that language comprised two distinct parts, “lexis” and “grammar”?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20189" CreationDate="2016-11-11T09:14:26.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to understand your term &quot;lexis&quot; -- does it mean &quot;vocabulary&quot;, or &quot;morphology&quot;?  I don't know who could have ever thought that &quot;vocabulary and grammar were unconnected&quot;.  How could anyone say anything without both knowing some words and how to put them together to make grammatical phrases?  You can't have grammar without vocabulary, any more than you can have molecules without atoms, or portfolios without stocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a way to interpret a part of your question that interests me, so that's why I decided to attempt an answer.  In the traditional view of language structure, grammars and dictionaries look different.  Grammars describe phrases and dictionaries describe words.  It is not obvious that we need to distinguish &#xA;the kinds of items in a grammar from the kinds of items in a dictionary.  A context free grammar (CFG) as described by Chomsky back in the 50s can describe the patterns of phrases and the categories of words in a uniform way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the phrase structure rule &quot;S -&gt; NP-subj watches NP-obj&quot; describes both &quot;watches&quot; as a word that combines a subject on its left and an object on its right to create an S, and at the same time the rule describes a sentence type in English consisting of a subject followed by a specific word, then an object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not necessary to suppose that there are two books, one with an entry describing a transitive structure as a grammatical sentence type of English, and another book listing &quot;watches&quot; as one of the transitive verbs of English.  There's just one book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T09:14:26.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20195" CreationDate="2016-11-11T09:19:39.570" Score="1" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've spent some time solving &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/assets/problems/NACLO08f.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fakepapershelfmaker NACLO problem&lt;/a&gt;, and later at solution I've read that some japanese letters do not require replacement while compounding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese you should replace letters in the atomic words to give the compound word a specific meaning (for instance, initial &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, initial &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;, and so on). As I've understood, this is a trick in order to exclude ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/97YBU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/97YBU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://nacloweb.org/resources/problems/2008/naclo08r2_sol.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solution&lt;/a&gt; says that some letters do not require a replacement. I guess that it could lead to ambiguity of compound words. And my question is: do Japanese really has such letters? And, if yes, in which way the ambiguity in this case is excluded? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14467" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T16:49:16.723" Title="Replacement of the letters in Japanese while compounding words" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3654" CreationDate="2016-11-11T11:12:50.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't thinks this is an interference in the production process. There are rules at play here, as these forms are entirely predictable. Consider the following pairs for now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;invite (noun)   -   invitation &#xA;&#xA;refusal         -   refusation &#xA;&#xA;describal       -   description &#xA;&#xA;recital         -   recitation &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What actually is going on that the various rules are competing during the process of production, and if your lexicon fails you, your morphology helps you out. And the same goes on at the speech community level, hence some speakers may prefer to use a set lexical form: &lt;code&gt;description&lt;/code&gt;, others may consistently opt for morphological suffixation from the verb: &lt;code&gt;describal&lt;/code&gt;; while others feel that the most popular -[t/s/x]ion suffix is so universal that they no longer need to remember odd-ball forms, hence &lt;code&gt;recitation&lt;/code&gt;. Finally, there are those who say, in English if it's good for a verb, it's good for a noun with an initial word-stress, thus we end up with &lt;code&gt;invite&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add a few hundred years, and a few generations of language learners and you get a beautiful, healthy, vibrant grammatical faculty that enables both speech creation and comprehension for most of these word forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stekauer: English Word-formation: A History of Research, 1960-1995 has a nice detailed analysis of there here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.hu/books?id=79BV7ZOxI1AC&amp;amp;pg=PA118&amp;amp;lpg=PA118&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.hu/books?id=79BV7ZOxI1AC&amp;amp;pg=PA118&amp;amp;lpg=PA118&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like &lt;code&gt;medium / media / mediums / medias&lt;/code&gt; and the like are also highly similar, but cause too much havoc among descriptive and prescriptive linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T11:12:50.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12233" CreationDate="2016-11-11T12:43:21.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though there is no clear measure for linguistic independence, I'd be tempted to say no to your question: &quot;are words more independent from syntax in non-analytical languages?&quot;.&#xA;Analytical languages rely heavily on word order to convey a particular meaning whereas say agglutinating languages are a lot more generous so word or constituent orders. But there are still subtle differences in focus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mariska - nominal subject&#xA;kitette / tette ki - past tense verb with a locative adverbial particle&#xA;a - definite article&#xA;macskat - nominal object&#xA;&#xA;+-------------------------------+-------------------------------------------&#xA;|  Hungarian                    |   English&#xA;|  Mariska kitette a macskat.   |   Mary put out the cat.&#xA;|  Mariska a macskat tette ki.  |   It was the cat Mary put out.&#xA;|  A macskat Mariska tette ki.  |   It was Mary who put out the cat.&#xA;|  Mariska a macskat kitette.   |   Mary PUT OUT the cat &#xA;|                               |   (as opposed to some other action she could have done to the cat)&#xA;+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clearly the syntax plays a major role in differentiating in terms meaning even though the same morphological constituents are at play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T12:43:21.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20192" CreationDate="2016-11-11T16:49:16.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;em&gt;rendaku&lt;/em&gt;, or &quot;sequential voicing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many phonemes in Japanese occur in voiced/unvoiced pairs. In &lt;em&gt;kana&lt;/em&gt; writing, these are distinguished with a &lt;em&gt;dakuten&lt;/em&gt; &quot;voice mark&quot; over the voiced version: for instance, か /ka/, が /ga/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note: in a few cases this reflects historical rather than current pronunciation: /h/ voices to /b/ because it was originally /ɸ/, and /β/ isn't distinguished from /b/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rendaku&lt;/em&gt; means that the first sound in the second part of a compound becomes voiced...most of the time. In reality, it's not quite this simple. There are a few additional rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Branching constraints! This is what the NACLO problem is about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the sound is already voiced, nothing happens to it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lyman's Law: &lt;em&gt;rendaku&lt;/em&gt; doesn't happen if the second word contains any voiced obstruents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rendaku&lt;/em&gt; also doesn't happen in &quot;A and B&quot; compounds: so &lt;em&gt;yama&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mountain&quot; + &lt;em&gt;kawa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;river&quot; could become &lt;em&gt;yamakawa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mountain and river&quot; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;yamagawa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;river which is on a mountain&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as you can see, &lt;em&gt;rendaku&lt;/em&gt; isn't completely free from ambiguity. Already-voiced sounds such as /n/, /r/, /j/ aren't affected by it at all, which is what the footnote in the problem is pointing out. But there are also specific words which completely ignore &lt;em&gt;rendaku&lt;/em&gt;, or which cause it to happen inconsistently. A few roots become voiced when attached to nouns, but not to verbs. It doesn't help that this voicing isn't indicated at all in &lt;em&gt;kanji&lt;/em&gt; writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, the ambiguity has to be resolved the same way as in English: context, world-knowledge, and familiarity with the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-11-11T16:49:16.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20198" CreationDate="2016-11-12T17:43:13.713" Score="8" ViewCount="3925" Body="&lt;p&gt;In IPA chart, there is a column named &quot;palatal consonants&quot;, including consonants as ɲ, c, ɟ, ç, ʝ, ʎ for example.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is also a 'palatalization sign': ʲ, which can be applied to all consonants, used, for example, in Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between of consonants of the palatal columns, and there palatalized doubles nʲ, tʲ, dʲ, ʃʲ, ʒʲ, lʲ? Or it is just two writtens for the same sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14478" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-11-12T18:46:04.777" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T03:22:58.430" Title="What are the differences between palatal consonant and palatalized consonant?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20199" CreationDate="2016-11-12T18:28:21.263" Score="0" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;In diagramming sentences, I never seem to understand when it's permissible to add an additional X-bar (X') or XP segment to a tree. Is there a rule for knowing when an additional branch of the same X will be necessary and/or is permissible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T20:19:26.953" Title="How to determine when an additional X-bar or XP can be used" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20196" CreationDate="2016-11-12T18:58:44.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, there is a difference in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In IPA, the raised j symbol &amp;lt;ʲ&gt;, represents &quot;palatalization,&quot; or a &quot;palatal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;secondary articulation&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; The concept of a &quot;secondary articulation&quot; is itself somewhat vague. A palatal secondary articulation might occur simultaneously, slightly before, or slightly after the primary articulation of a consonant, or even be realized mostly as a modification of an adjacent vowel. There are general patterns that naturally occur, but the extent to which they occur varies between languages. So in some languages, the phoneme  /nʲ/ might be automatically realized before a vowel with a semivowel offglide (/nʲV/ = [nʲjV]). However, in other languages, such as Russian, sequences of /CʲV/, /CV/, /CʲjV/, and /CjV/ are all phonologically distinct. (Russian non-palatalized consonants are sometimes said to have velar secondary articulation, represented by the sign &amp;lt;ˠ&gt;, so that &quot;/CjV/&quot; in the previous sentence could also be written as /CˠjV/ I guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symbols /ɲ, c, ɟ, ç, ʝ, ʎ/ represent a consonant with a single place of articulation that is palatal (palatal &quot;primary&quot; articulation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symbols /nʲ, tʲ, dʲ, ʃʲ, ʒʲ, lʲ/ represent a consonant with a primary place of articulation that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coronal&lt;/a&gt; (there are various more specific classifications of coronal consonants such as dental, alveolar, laminal), and a secondary place of articulation that is palatal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, however, this is an area where people often use symbols approximately. There are a range of phonetic variants that can be symbolized in different ways. Phomemically, many languages do not distinguish between pure palatal consonants and palatalized coronal consonants (e.g. /nʲ/ vs. /ɲ/), but some do. However, if I'm understanding a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20196/what-are-the-differences-between-palatal-consonant-and-palatalized-consonant/20198?noredirect=1#comment45819_20198&quot;&gt;comment by User6726&lt;/a&gt; correctly, there may be theoretical reasons to suppose that no language has a contrast between pure palatal consonants and palatalized velar consonants (e.g. there is no language with distinct /ŋʲ/ and /ɲ/, apparently).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, the symbols for palatalized velars like &amp;lt;kʲ&gt; &amp;lt;gʲ&gt; are used in a fair number of transcription systems, perhaps to indicate that in the relevant language these sounds are phonologically related to plain or back velars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Fricatives: [ç, ʝ] vs. [ʃʲ, ʒʲ]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ç, ʝ] are canonically &quot;pure&quot; palatal sounds. These are pretty clearly different phonetically from [ʃʲ, ʒʲ], which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolo-palatal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolo-palatal&lt;/a&gt; (and equivalent to [ɕ, ʑ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese even has an arguably phonemic distinction between these sounds: ひゃ is typically transcribed as [ça] while しゃ is typically transcribed as [ɕa]. I have read that these sounds are merged or near-merged in some accents of Japanese, but the standard form of Japanese recorded in textbooks for foreign learners keeps them distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say &quot;arguably&quot; because there is a tradition of analyzing these examples as phonemically being /hja/ and /sja/ or respectively, which makes the  phonological contrast an opposition between the segments /h/ and /s/. This is certainly more-or-less valid as a historical and morpho-phonological analysis; however, I'm less sure of its validity as a synchronic description of the phonological representation for contemporary Japanese speakers. A paper I found that touches on the issue of phonological representation of &quot;yōon&quot; syllables in Japanese: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/480907/2004-L1-and-L2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acquisition of Yo-on (Japanese contracted sounds) in L1 and L2 phonology&lt;/a&gt;&quot;,&#xA;Chiharu TSURUTANI, describes the sounds as palatalized versions of /h/ and /s/ rather than consonant clusters; this could imply the phonological transcriptions /hʲa/ and /sʲa/ (although the version of the paper that I can see seems to use /hj/ and /sj/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Plosives: [c, ɟ] vs. [tʲ, dʲ]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, [c, ɟ] are defined as pure palatal plosives. These phones are not very common (unless you consider fronted allophones of phonemically velar /k, g/ in some languages to be front enough to qualify; e.g. /k/ in French &quot;qui&quot;). A place of articulation in between velar and palatal can be called &quot;post-palatal&quot; or &quot;pre-velar&quot;, and represented by [c̠, ɟ̠] or [k̟, ɡ̟]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[tʲ, dʲ] may represent alveolo-palatal plosives [t̠ʲ d̠ʲ], which apparently exist in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolo-palatal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean&lt;/a&gt;. According to Wikipedia's page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian phonology&lt;/a&gt;, Russian /tʲ, dʲ/ are phonetically &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laminal&lt;/a&gt; alveolar&quot; and affricated; Wikipedia uses the transcriptions [t̻ʲ&lt;sup&gt;sʲ&lt;/sup&gt;, d̻ʲ&lt;sup&gt;zʲ&lt;/sup&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some languages that make a two-way distinction between palatalized coronal plosives and palatal plosives, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish&lt;/a&gt;, which has /tʲ/ as the palatalized counterpart of /t/ and /c/ as the palatal counterpart of /k/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned earlier, in many languages velar phonemes are allophonically fronted when adjacent to front vowels or semivowels. But some languages have a phonemic distinction between fronted velars and other types of velars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sonorants/resonants: [ɲ, ʎ] vs. [nʲ, lʲ]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly clear theoretical distinction between the IPA phones [ɲ, ʎ], which are canonically defined as &quot;pure&quot; palatal sounds, and [nʲ, lʲ], which indicate alveolar or dental primary articulation with secondary palatal articulation (the most common variant is the &quot;alveolo-palatal&quot; articulation  [n̠ʲ, l̠ʲ], which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_nasal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says may also be represented as [ɲ̟, ʎ̟]). Another possible sound in this region is &quot;post-palatal&quot; or &quot;pre-velar&quot; which is between the canonical &quot;palatal&quot; and &quot;velar&quot; places of articulation; a post-palatal nasal could be narrowly transcribed as [ŋ̟].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In broad phonetic transcription or phonological transcription, however, /ɲ, ʎ/ are often used to represent anything from an aveolo-palatal, to a true palatal, to a post-palatal consonant. Most languages do not have a phonological contrast between these. There are some languages that make a two-way distinction, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish&lt;/a&gt;, which has /nʲ/ as the palalized counterpart of /n/ and /ɲ/ as the palatal counterpart of /ŋ/. Apparently, some dialects of Irish even make a three-way distinction in this area due to a phonemic distinction between &quot;fortis&quot; and &quot;lenis&quot; forms of /nʲ/; I don't know enough to understand how this distinction is realized phonetically in the various dialects that still maintain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish /ɲ/ is, according to Wikipedia, something like an alveolo-palatal, although as michau pointed out in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20196/what-are-the-differences-between-palatal-consonant-and-palatalized-consonant/20198#comment45818_20196&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; it is kept distinct from the alveolar nasal /n/ even before /i/ (where /n/ is somewhat palatalized), and before vowels other than /i/, /ɲ/ is distinguished from the sequence /ni̯/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T03:22:58.430" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T03:22:58.430" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20197" CreationDate="2016-11-12T20:19:26.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question, we'd need a theoretical understanding of &quot;bar&quot; and &quot;bar level&quot; (as opposed to a diagrammatic esthetic).  One idea is to connect &quot;bar&quot; with the addition of complements, then increasing &quot;bar-level&quot; would accompany adding more complements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The addition of adjuncts, unlike complements, does not increase bar-level.  For instance, the combination of a noun-modifier (a kind of adjunct) with a N' (N-bar that is) gives another N'.  Bar-level remains the same.  We can tell that, because we can keep on adding noun-modifiers (adjectives, for instance) -- when the category is changed by adding something, you can't generally add another thing of the same type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, adding an adverb to a V' produces another V' (not a V''), so you can add several adverbs to a V'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To test when bar-level changes, we need to look at ways of adding complements.  In McCawley's version of bar syntax, we get an N' from a N by adding a complement, as for example getting the N' &quot;father of the bride&quot; by adding to the N &quot;father&quot; the complement &quot;of the bride&quot;.  Correspondingly, we get the V' &quot;fathered the bride&quot; by combining the V &quot;fathered&quot; with the direct object complement &quot;the bride&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes S is written V'', because taking subjects to be complements of a V', you'd expect bar-level to be increased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we think that verbs can take several complements, then, this would be a place to look for additional bar-levels of V.  Perhaps double object verbs are examples, or verbs of movement which take both source and destination PP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in the other direction, up, a case could be made that addition of a vocative NP to a sentence produces a V'''.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been proposed that morphological parts of N and V, such as roots and stems, have negative bar-level.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-12T20:19:26.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-12T21:02:15.260" Score="0" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do apologize if this question has been asked before or has a better place on a different part of the StackExchange network, but I've run out of places to ask this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While playing through one of my most beloved video games in search for hidden clues about one of the game's most mysterious races, I happened to come across a somewhat legible snippet of text on one of the floting screens seen below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cDysh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cDysh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Original text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, I've done what I can to try to compile what I understand about this language and its people in an attempt to determine what it says. As some starter notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The people who use this alphabet speak in a hybrid of Japanese and&#xA;English &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, I have reason to believe that based on the game's&#xA;lore, the race using this awkward hybrid of languages originally&#xA;spoke English and adopted the Japanese language to fit into the society the &#xA;story takes place in&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Text on the screens float up, meaning that this race reads from the top down, like with English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Text is also written horizontally, like with English, but whether it's meant to be read from left to right or right to left is unknown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Individual characters appear to take strong influence from the Nazca line&#xA;pattern this race uses and Japanese katakana&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A large space separates the final two--or more likely, first two--characters in each line. Personally, I think the final two characters are some form of punctuation, but the space itself could signal the start of a new sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, below is the transcript of the three lines I was able to pull from the original image. It should also be noted that in the original image, these three lines repeat again and again, never to be broken by the introduction of a new phrase. (I apologize if the image is rather large; I wasn't sure how to scale it down without having to reupload it entirely)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ad9kW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ad9kW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;My transcript&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I plan to start trying to take this passage apart going on the assumption that it's an alternative English alphabet, especially since a character resembling ト appears the most often. However, if my current assumption turns out to be a dead end and I can't make any progress with my second--which is to try to match characters to the kana syllabary--I'll be fairly lost as to where to go from there. There's no written language for the Nazca culture, as far as I know, and while I've been told there's a possibility this alphabet has some Greek roots, that only gets me so far before I run out of ideas again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So finally, we arrive at my core question, which is this: How do you go about deciphering a language without any spoken basis, no native speakers to converse with, or another other leads to go on besides ones provided by context alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14364" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T02:47:41.177" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:28:00.107" Title="Where to start with deciphering this language?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-11-25T03:44:12.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-12T21:03:40.863" Score="4" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that path comes from Old English pæþ from Proto-Germanic paþaz.&#xA;The word is supposedly a cognate with Greek pátos as well as other Indo-European words beginning with the voiceless stop, and not the voiced stop.&#xA;Doesn't Grimm's Law mean that voiceless stops become voiceless fricatives and voiced stops become voiceless? Cause it seems as though this is neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14376" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T08:04:46.887" Title="Not affected by Grimm's Law?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;grimms-law&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20201" CreationDate="2016-11-12T21:08:47.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wiktionary entry for &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/path&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;path&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; does a terrible job of making this clear, but the reconstructed Germanic form *paþaz is generally thought to be a loanword taken from some other Indo-European language, not a word inherited within Germanic from PIE. In this case, &amp;quot;path&amp;quot; would be indirectly related to &amp;quot;πάτος&amp;quot;, but they wouldn't constitute a cognate set for the purposes of historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned on the separate Wiktionary entry for *&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/pa%C3%BEaz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paþaz&lt;/a&gt; itself, which suggests it was borrowed into Germanic from an Iranian language. I don't know what the consensus is among professional etymologists, but I don't think any of them would accept an etymology where &amp;quot;path&amp;quot; is supposed to have developed completely within Germanic from a PIE root starting with &amp;quot;p&amp;quot;, because there is no known mechanism that would explain such an exception to Grimm's Law. (Sometimes unexplainable exceptions to sound changes do occur, such as English &amp;quot;broad&amp;quot; being pronounced as /brɔːd/ rather than /broʊd/, but accepting these generally requires a large amount of additional evidence about the evolution of a word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a Language Hat blog post with comments that mention the etymology of this word: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagehat.com/paths/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paths&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grimm's Law is a process that was active at some point in the history of Germanic. It didn't stay active forever (as indicated by the fact that modern English speakers don't change /p/ in loanwords to /f/). So if a loanword with /p/ was borrowed into Germanic before Grimm's Law applied, we'd expect to see the reflex of Proto-Germanic /f/ in modern Germanic languages. But if a loanword with /p/ was borrowed into Germanic after Grimm's Law had already run to completion, we'd expect to see the reflex of Proto-Germanic /p/ in modern Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T19:53:45.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20226" CreationDate="2016-11-12T22:59:39.370" Score="5" ViewCount="784" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been wondering about the following close parallel between German (I'm not aware of any other Germanic language for which this would hold) and Czech in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;po&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;it ~ &lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;en (to place something)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;na&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;it ~ ein&lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;en (to adjust a setting)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;od&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;it ~ ab&lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;en (to put out of operation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vý&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;a ~ Aus&lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;ung (exhibition)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;před&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;a ~ Vor&lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;ung (image, vision)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;před&lt;strong&gt;stav&lt;/strong&gt;it ~ vor&lt;strong&gt;stell&lt;/strong&gt;en (to introduce)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a few others. In English these words don't have any part in common, as illustrated. The latter two examples show perhaps most strikingly that there must have been a direct influence in how these words formed. I checked some etymological sources but I have a very limited knowledge on where to find good ones, so I only found the obvious, decomposing the words into a prefix, root, and suffix, and explaining the origins of the root. The roots have departed already in their corresponding reconstructed Proto-Germanic (*&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/stallijan%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;stallijaną&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) and Proto-Balto-Slavic (*&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/staviti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;stāw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) forms so my question is whether the clearly corresponding prefixes could have survived longer than that or whether this was a more recent influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, was it German taking these forms from Slavic languages or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be surprised at both: to my best knowledge Slavic languages were never excessively influential outside their own family (I might be very wrong in this point), but if it was them taking the pattern from German, it would have spread as far as into Russian (пред&lt;strong&gt;став&lt;/strong&gt;ление, вы&lt;strong&gt;став&lt;/strong&gt;ка etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14481" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T11:16:25.910" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T12:54:04.190" Title="German (-stell-) and Slavic (-stav-) languages: who was first?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;calques&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20200" CreationDate="2016-11-13T02:09:03.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is a language (and it could be, lots of games have conlangs) step one is get lots more data, preferably some with known translations or at least known topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T02:09:03.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-13T05:04:54.697" Score="0" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;What commands do I need in a Praat script to draw labels for the minimum and maximum of a Sound object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14483" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T10:24:54.013" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T23:08:26.460" Title="Drawing labels on a Praat Sound plot" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-13T07:59:00.160" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking for multiple languages, and use grey colour to refer to the concepts denoted by the English words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abbreviate Necessary Condition to NC, Sufficient Condition to SC. I already know that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;If P, then Q&lt;/code&gt;. (In French: 'Si P, alors Q.' In German: 'Wenn P dann Q.')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;=  &lt;code&gt;P only if Q.&lt;/code&gt; ('P seulement si Q.'  In German: 'P nur wenn Q.')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;= &lt;code&gt;P is a SC for Q&lt;/code&gt;.    = &lt;code&gt;Q is a NC for P&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first two implications, &lt;code&gt;if&lt;/code&gt; precedes a SC, and &lt;code&gt;only if&lt;/code&gt; a NC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the adverb &lt;code&gt;only&lt;/code&gt; cause the logical difference between &lt;code&gt;if&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;only if&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, then how does &lt;code&gt;only&lt;/code&gt; cause this? Does &lt;code&gt;only&lt;/code&gt; cause &lt;code&gt;only if&lt;/code&gt; to incorporate more conditions than 'if'? I've tried to illustrate below that SC ⊆ NCC, where 'only' ∈ SC\NC.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gtVm4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gtVm4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="443" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T04:06:36.277" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T04:06:36.277" Title="Is the Logical meaning of 'only if' produced by 'only' (that widens 'if')?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20203" CreationDate="2016-11-13T12:20:11.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German &lt;em&gt;-stell-&lt;/em&gt; forms and Slavic &lt;em&gt;-stav-&lt;/em&gt; are neither related nor borrowed in one way or another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'clearly corresponding prefixes' may very well be just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic root * &lt;em&gt;stāw-&lt;/em&gt; is a continues Proto-Indo-European root * &lt;em&gt;steh₂&lt;/em&gt;- 'to stand, to stand up, to make sth stand' which is seen in such &lt;em&gt;Paradebeispiel&lt;/em&gt; as Gk. &lt;em&gt;ἵστημι&lt;/em&gt;, Skt. &lt;em&gt;tíṣṭhati&lt;/em&gt; or Lat. &lt;em&gt;sistō&lt;/em&gt;. It also has continuants in the Germanic branch, namely: Ger. &lt;em&gt;stehen&lt;/em&gt;, Dutch &lt;em&gt;staan&lt;/em&gt; Sw. &lt;em&gt;stå&lt;/em&gt; or Goth. &lt;em&gt;stōjan&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;-stell-&lt;/em&gt; forms ultimately come from Proto-Indo-European root * &lt;em&gt;stel-&lt;/em&gt; 'to put, to locate'. This root was not as productive as the aforementioned one but still it shows it self (beside the German forms you mentioned) in Eng. &lt;em&gt;stall&lt;/em&gt;, Gk. &lt;em&gt;στέλλω&lt;/em&gt;, and maybe Lat. &lt;em&gt;locus&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T12:20:11.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20203" CreationDate="2016-11-13T14:30:50.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with czypsu that the two roots are probably not identical (though there is a theory that Proto-Germanic *staljan is not cognate with Greek stellō, but derives from *st(e)h₂- with the suffix *-dhlo-, in which case the Germanic and Slavic roots would in fact be related). However this may be, the prefixed forms in Czech are evidently calqued on the corresponding prefixed verbs in German. This is a result of the widespread bilingualism in the Habsburg Kingdom of Bohemia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T15:17:00.840" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T15:17:00.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-13T18:14:03.803" Score="1" ViewCount="3277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm investigating why the letters 'N' and 'M' look so different – a friend wanted to know. I can trace back to connection to Etruscan but there the trail seems to go cold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back in time, the characters representing 'm' and 'n' maintain their similarity (compare the Etruscan &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/EtruscanN-01.svg/130px-EtruscanN-01.svg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'N'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/EtruscanM-01.svg/200px-EtruscanM-01.svg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'M'&lt;/a&gt;). According to the  Wikipedia articles on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'N'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'M'&lt;/a&gt; (neither citing sources) they both come from separate hieroglyphics - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_I10.png?9f0b0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'snake'&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_N35.png?fcc27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'water'&lt;/a&gt; respectively - but this claim has not been verified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do the two letters come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do the Etruscan characters look so similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13895" LastEditorUserId="13895" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T20:38:19.753" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T21:12:01.537" Title="Why do 'n' and 'm' look so similar?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20201" CreationDate="2016-11-13T18:26:27.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From memory (from reading some book in the past - i'm not that old) I believe  it was borrowed from Scythian after Grimm's law had happened and that it was the Scythian word for their royal roads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T18:26:27.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20200" CreationDate="2016-11-13T20:28:00.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;How do you go about deciphering a language without any spoken basis, no native speakers to converse with, or another other leads to go on besides ones provided by context alone?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no inroads such as you've mentioned, all you can do is play a game of decipherment; but basically any solution you find will be something you have invented: you have no way of checking your rendering against anything else. (See some of the wildly varying &quot;translations&quot; of Etruscan texts over the years - and that was a real language, with some context available for the inscriptions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T20:28:00.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20209" CreationDate="2016-11-13T21:12:01.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming for the sake of discussion that there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proto-Sinaitic writing&lt;/a&gt; system that had symbols representing a word for &quot;water&quot; whose first phoneme was &quot;m&quot; and the symbol something waterish like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-Canaanite_-_mem.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;; and likewise something snake-like looking like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proto-Canaanite_-_nun.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;; then the transition to Phoenician it pretty simple, and the distance from Egyptian hieroglyphs is also less: in the Proto-Sinaitic &quot;m&quot; is basically the same as Egyptian &quot;water&quot;, but with fewer zigs, and that's a reasonable simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not say that Latin &quot;M&quot; and &quot;N&quot; look particularly different. It doesn't seem to be controversial that  and  were used in various old Italic writing systems and the modern letters M N some from these. The classical Etruscan version with these flipped with the long leg on the right seems to be a minority development, not characteristic of &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Etruscan_alphabet.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archaic Etruscan or Western Greek&lt;/a&gt; scripts. Basically the characters are the same, and what differs is whether you write left-to-right or right-to-left (start with the stick). The Latin and Etruscan characters are similar because they are really similar to Western Greek and the Greek looks like Phoenician (just ignore the flipping of letters as we move between languages). Phoenician  and  look like the Proto-Sinaitic symbols, which themselves look like Egyptian hieroglyphs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, linguists have mad skills at finding similarities where normal people see differences. My main caveat is that I distrust symbolically-reduced representations of ancient letters: I'd want to see actual photographs or tracings of the inscriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T21:12:01.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-14T02:51:26.707" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's said that Gothic had no umlaut, but there would seem to be, although I'm sure it's not, signs of a-umlaut.&#xA;The digraph au in Gothic is thought to have represented three different sounds, one of which was a short o, as in Gothic waurd or Dauhtar. I've read that Proto-Germanic did not have a short o, and that in words like gold and horn, a short u was lowered by a following a.&#xA;Would the short o in Gothic be the result of something else, and if so, what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14376" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T13:05:16.860" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T04:02:37.273" Title="Umlaut in Gothic" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;gothic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20213" CreationDate="2016-11-14T03:49:57.443" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the result of lowering of /u/ before the consonants /h~x/, /hʷ~xʷ~ʍ/ and /r/. According to Winfred P. Lehmann in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=w-BcAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA23&amp;amp;lpg=PA23&amp;amp;dq=Gothic%20short%20o&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=X1GjQU_Fiy&amp;amp;sig=rDVq0fprkRBw7avri5wH9ak8qKQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjruPjKqafQAhXMy4MKHUq5DvgQ6AEIPTAK#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Gothic%20short%20o&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic and the Reconstruction of Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; short /o/ and /u/ (and short /e/ and /i/) were nearly in complementary distribution in Gothic, but further sound changes that occured after the process of lowering created some exceptions to this general pattern, such as &lt;em&gt;aíþþau&lt;/em&gt; &quot;or&quot; and &lt;em&gt;hiri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;here&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T03:49:57.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20201" CreationDate="2016-11-14T08:04:46.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=path&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; cites authors that believe it is not a cognate with Greek &lt;em&gt;pathos&lt;/em&gt;, but a borrowing from Iranian, probably via Scythian. But they seem skeptic of this, and say that the initial /p/ is &quot;a puzzle&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T08:04:46.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-14T10:30:07.023" Score="1" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to reverse a sound file using &lt;code&gt;Praat&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;I tried to figure out the way to do it and found that there's a shortcut Ctrl+R in the &lt;code&gt;Edit&lt;/code&gt; menu.&lt;/strong&gt; but I want to do the same thing using the script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone please guide me about &lt;strong&gt;how can we reverse a sound file in Praat script ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T16:34:51.707" Title="Praat Script: How to Reverse Selected Sound File?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20216" CreationDate="2016-11-14T16:34:51.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use the &lt;code&gt;Reverse&lt;/code&gt; command, under the &quot;Modify&quot; menu for &lt;code&gt;Sound&lt;/code&gt; objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also (although it would be of limited real-world use) write it yourself by accessing the individual samples, as illustrated in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Formulas_8__Data_in_objects.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manual&lt;/a&gt; (under &lt;em&gt;Object contents in a modification formula&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T16:34:51.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20147" CreationDate="2016-11-14T17:03:01.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your script doesn't work because it's not doing what you think it is doing. The main problem is that the &lt;code&gt;for&lt;/code&gt; loop in lines 31-43 doesn't actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything. It calculates the same values every time, stores those values in some variables, and then overwrites those variables the next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time the loop runs, it is actually measuring the same &lt;code&gt;Sound&lt;/code&gt; object, because each time you &lt;code&gt;select all&lt;/code&gt;, and then commands like &lt;code&gt;Get total duration&lt;/code&gt; work on the first selected appropriate object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in line 45 you have the same problem: the &lt;code&gt;sound_name$&lt;/code&gt; variable (which you never use) will &lt;em&gt;always be the same&lt;/em&gt;, because it is always the name of the first selected &lt;code&gt;Sound&lt;/code&gt; object ... after selecting them all. And the initial form stores the path in the &lt;code&gt;inputDir$&lt;/code&gt; variable, but then you want to use one called &lt;code&gt;path$&lt;/code&gt; (in line 7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's your corrected script (untested):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;form Files&#xA;  comment Insert the directory&#xA;  sentence Path ./&#xA;endform&#xA;&#xA;createDirectory (&quot;output&quot;)&#xA;list = Create Strings as file list: &quot;list&quot;, path$ + &quot;*.wav&quot;&#xA;n_of_files = Get number of strings&#xA;&#xA;for file to n_of_files&#xA;  # Read sound file&#xA;  selectObject: list&#xA;  file$ = Get string: file&#xA;  sound = Read from file: path$ + file$&#xA;&#xA;  # Read annotation file&#xA;  textgrid = Read from file: path$ + file$ - &quot;wav&quot; + &quot;TextGrid&quot;&#xA;&#xA;  # Extract relevant intervals&#xA;  selectObject: sound, textgrid&#xA;  Extract non-empty intervals: tier, &quot;yes&quot;&#xA;&#xA;  # Store the extracted intervals&#xA;  selected = numberOfSelected (&quot;Sound&quot;)&#xA;  for i to selected&#xA;    piece[i] = selected(&quot;Sound&quot;, i)&#xA;  endfor&#xA;&#xA;  # Sound and TextGrid no longer necessary&#xA;  removeObject: sound, textgrid&#xA;&#xA;  # Loop through each extracted interval&#xA;  for i to selected&#xA;    # Query sound timing&#xA;    selectObject: piece[i]&#xA;    dur = Get total duration&#xA;    quart = dur / 4&#xA;    start = Get starting point: tier, interval&#xA;    t1 = Get nearest zero-crossing: 1, start +  quart&#xA;    t2 = Get nearest zero-crossing: 1, start + (quart * 3)&#xA;&#xA;    # Extract center half&#xA;    part = Extract part: t1, t2, &quot;rectangular&quot;, 1, &quot;no&quot;&#xA;&#xA;    # Save to disk&#xA;    Write to WAV file: &quot;./output/&quot; + file$ + &quot;.wav&quot;&#xA;&#xA;    # Clean up unnecessary objects&#xA;    removeObject: part, piece[i]&#xA;  endfor&#xA;endfor&#xA;&#xA;# Remove list&#xA;removeObject: list&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some general pointers for the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use object IDs and select the objects you want each time (instead of the &lt;code&gt;select all&lt;/code&gt;-except-for-these-ones approach you are using).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid using the Editor window for tasks such as these that don't require ... editing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T17:03:01.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-14T21:44:44.867" Score="2" ViewCount="2781" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that these terms are used in different subfields of linguistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metonymy&lt;/a&gt; and metonyms are used in rhetorics and metaphor theory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meronymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meronymy&lt;/a&gt; and meronyms are used in lexical semantics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meronomy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meronomy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mereology&lt;/a&gt; and merons have to do with logic, ontologies and natural language processing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are related in names and meaning, so I hope somebody can explicitly contrast them with each other and describe their relations. Is mereology a study of meronomies, which are hierarchies of merons connected by the relation of meronymy? Are meronyms used as metonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T02:39:36.017" Title="What's the difference between metonymy, meronymy, meronomy and mereology?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-14T22:55:53.550" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone compare the distance between Modern French and Middle French to Modern English and Middle English. In general which of these languages has diverged more over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14494" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T22:55:53.550" Title="Relative Language Distances" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-11-25T03:36:26.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20205" CreationDate="2016-11-14T23:54:40.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at lines 99-100 in the script I posted in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/16910/10119&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt;, which combines the plotting of &lt;code&gt;Sound&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Pitch&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;TextGrid&lt;/code&gt; objects while reproducing the plotting scheme in the default Praat figures. I suspect the commands you want are in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/One_mark_left_right_top_bottom___.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;One mark left/right/top/bottom...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; family of Picture window commands. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound minimum and maximum, on the other hand, are calculated from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__Get_minimum___.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Get minimum...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__Get_maximum___.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Get maximum...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; commands for &lt;code&gt;Sound&lt;/code&gt; objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T00:08:56.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20230" CreationDate="2016-11-15T07:19:17.837" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course stress is manifest in a variety of ways, not just increased f0, and f0 indicates much more than just stress - but is it accurate that stress always entails at least increased f0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T17:18:22.670" Title="Can word stress always been seen in the signal as increased f0?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20203" CreationDate="2016-11-15T08:06:49.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your compound examples are mostly calques, usually from German into Slavic but in fact often ultimately from Latin or French or Italian into both German and Slavic, in the middle ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The calques use translated elements, not necessarily cognate elements, although in some cases it was mixed, for example &lt;em&gt;entreprendre&lt;/em&gt; become &lt;em&gt;unternehmen&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;interdire&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;untersagen&lt;/em&gt;.  Usually Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pono#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ponere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was calqued into German as &lt;em&gt;stellen&lt;/em&gt;, and into Slavic as &lt;em&gt;staviti&lt;/em&gt;.  (Czech &lt;em&gt;stavit&lt;/em&gt; is in fact cognate to German &lt;em&gt;stehen&lt;/em&gt;.  It may be that &lt;em&gt;stellen&lt;/em&gt; is also cognate with those, but in any case that was not a consideration at the time of calquing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see similarly haphazard interplay between German and Czech happening today with all the internationalisms and calques from English, like &lt;em&gt;Schadesoftware&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;škodlivý software&lt;/em&gt;, and the occasional use of a cognate even when the meaning is confused, &lt;em&gt;Seite&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stránka&lt;/em&gt; (to mean &lt;em&gt;page&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt;, even though both literally mean &lt;em&gt;page&lt;/em&gt;), and other cases where Czech went its own way, for example the translations of &lt;em&gt;download&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;upload&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past of course, German and Bohemian literate society were if anything more intertwined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T07:50:41.210" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T07:50:41.210" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T13:44:46.453" Score="3" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for nice examples of the influence of natural or political boundaries to dialect divergence for introductory purposes. Generally through some limitations on the ability of people to interact. I know there are many out there, but it would be nice if it was one that has been well described and illustratable with an image. Maybe Swiss dialect diversity or Rhineland vowel shift pockets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9774" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T01:33:10.777" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T08:16:55.057" Title="Interesting exemplary cases where natural/political boundaries have led to language divergence" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20203" CreationDate="2016-11-15T14:09:04.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more like a longish comment than an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the the German word &lt;em&gt;stellen&lt;/em&gt; is very vague specially in compounds. For the word in the example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nastavit ~ einstellen (to adjust a setting) &lt;em&gt;einstellen&lt;/em&gt; can mean besides that: to hire, to stop doing something (e.g., to smoke), to show up (sich einstellen). With the given technical meaning, the Czech word is probably a calque from German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;odstavit ~ abstellen (to put out of operation) Also &lt;em&gt;abstellen&lt;/em&gt; has other meanings; most common is to put down, to park (a car), to second someone (specially, soldiers). Again, with the given technical meaning, the Czech word is probably a calque from German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;výstava ~ Ausstellung (exhibition) German &lt;em&gt;Ausstellung&lt;/em&gt; is a calque from Latin &lt;em&gt;expositio&lt;/em&gt; (probably brought up by Goethe). The Czech is probably either calqued directly from Latin or from German.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;představit ~ vorstellen (to introduce) German &lt;em&gt;vorstellen&lt;/em&gt; is a calque from Latin &lt;em&gt;proponere&lt;/em&gt;, again the Czech word is probably a calque from German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some information was taken from DWB (Deutsches Wörterbuch by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GV15494&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;hitlist=&amp;amp;patternlist=&amp;amp;mainmode=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GV15494&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;hitlist=&amp;amp;patternlist=&amp;amp;mainmode=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T14:09:04.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T14:09:53.893" Score="10" ViewCount="1343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing something about the Celtic languages of northwestern Europe when the Saxons came to Britain, and described a &quot;continuous but loose-knit group of peoples in France and the British isles&quot;. A colleague reminds me of the Celtic peoples of Iberia. But I'm writing about the 6th century or so. Were there still Celtic-speakers in Iberia by then? Or is it fair that I describe the remaining Celts in that part of the world as confined to France and the British Isles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastEditorUserId="22" LastEditDate="2018-12-31T06:34:57.097" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T10:19:08.017" Title="When did the Celtic languages die out in Spain?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20225" CreationDate="2016-11-15T16:41:36.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, on numerous levels. On a token level, sometimes a stressed syllable doesn't have higher F0 and could have a lower F0. More systematically, in some dialects of English there are intonational pitch overlays on word stress whereby stressed syllables are actually lower than unstressed syllables. You might conjecture that looking just at the robust patterns of citation intonation, stressed syllables are never systematically lower in pitch than unstressed syllables in &quot;true stress&quot; languages (that is, excluding so-called pitch accent languages). The reason for the exclusion of &quot;pitch accent&quot; is that such languages tend to have pitch-peak shift that can move the F0 peak to the edges of a syllable (leading eventually to stress shift), and that can result in an adjacent syllable actually being higher in pitch that the stressed syllable. I am not aware of any language where stress is systematically realized with lower pitch. Finally, there are languages (Makonde, North Saami) where stress has no correlation with pitch, instead it correlates with duration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for relating the different manifestations of stress to a phonological representation, it naturally depends on what you take the representation to be. Ever since getting free of the ides of stress being a feature of a segment, people have assumed that stress is some kind of annotation on a syllable that says &quot;this syllable is special&quot;, for instance &quot;has more stars piled on it&quot; (is more prominent). Probably &lt;em&gt;because of&lt;/em&gt; the diversity of phonetic realizations of stress across languages, phonologists simply stopped at the point of saying &quot;now it's identified, something else spells exactly out how that is pronounced&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, one of the most common correlates of stress, syllable weight, is in fact quite phonological and potentially contrastive. Still, representations don't explain why stressed syllables tend to be longer rather than shorter. The observation is reified in various observations (stress-to-weight, weight-to-stress), but I think true explanation has to come from a better understanding of phonetic parsing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a second quasi-phonologized representation of stress diversity, indeed at the root of the metrical theory, namely Liberman's account of melodies, where he proposes that a connection between intonation and lexical stress via tonal melodies. In his system, most languages would turn out to be somewhat pitch-accenty, it's just that the melodic content is not grammatically or lexically determined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T17:18:22.670" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T17:18:22.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20229" CreationDate="2016-11-15T17:13:11.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the 6th century CE, the answer is a definite &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, there weren't any speakers of Celtic languages on the iberian peninsula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attested inscriptions in Celtiberic and Gallacean end in the 1st century BCE. There might be some speakers around after the last inscriptions, but six centuries later is a rather long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T17:13:11.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20234" CreationDate="2016-11-15T17:13:26.183" Score="7" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words like yesterday, today, and tomorrow are defined as adverbs. However, an adverb is a word modifying an adjective or verb (or another adverb). Words such as yesterday do not seem to modify anything of the sorts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading a book about grammar, a sentence is given as an example of the use of adverbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Yesterday the quite relieved soldier very quickly ran out of the woods when he saw his comrade frantically waving to him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll come back to the word 'yesterday'. Apart from that, the book identifies 'quite', 'very', 'quickly' and 'frantically' as adverbs. Let's make a table of the adverb and the thing it modifies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Adverb          Modifies&#xA;___________________________________&#xA;Quite       |   Relieved(adjective)&#xA;Very        |   Quickly(adverb)&#xA;Quickly     |   Ran(verb)&#xA;Frantically |   Waving (verb)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so back to yesterday (how poetic). Yesterday doesn't actually seem to modify anything. Apparently, it modifies the verb ran, and this is coming from the book. However, we need to note two things here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Extending the present logic, if it 'modifies' the verb ran, surely it modifies everything else since everything took place yesterday. If it modifies the action of running, then &lt;em&gt;surely&lt;/em&gt; it modifies the other action: waving. Perhaps it also modifies other adverbs, and adjectives, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to modify? Surely the way that an action is executed transcends time. I could run in an identical way to how I ran yesterday or will run tomorrow. Yet the action is supposedly modified depending upon the time it's executed. Well, extending this logic, why not place? And the agent executing the action? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it doesn't seem correct to say that time modifies adverbs. If anything, it seems more related to pronouns, since a pronoun is a word that stands in for someone else, in the same way 'yesterday' is a word that stands in for everything that happened within the span of 24 hours within the boundaries of our planet earth. So yeah, I don't really see the logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14280" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T01:30:10.910" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T18:24:18.617" Title="Why are there such things as 'time adverbs'?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20227" CreationDate="2016-11-15T17:23:35.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples for the German language (with links to maps!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-4/f02/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jause&lt;/a&gt; is an Austriacism and is rarely found outside the Austrian&#xA;borders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/9_01b/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Broiler&lt;/a&gt; still reflects the boundary between Eastern and Western Germany; note also the word Poulet being restricted to Switzerland, Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg on the same map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/quark/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Topfen&lt;/a&gt; is becoming more and more an Austriacism, loosing ground in Bavaria to &lt;em&gt;Quark&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lower level boundaries between different states of Germany can be seen in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f11a-b/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt;: Different states of Germany use different terminology for written school exams. Here, Bavaria is sticking out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T17:23:35.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20232" CreationDate="2016-11-15T18:41:38.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saying that temporal expressions modify verbs is characteristic of the traditional grammar, adapted from the work of the Greeks and Romans, which has dominated English pedagogy since the 18th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the hallmarks of traditional grammar is a &quot;dependency&quot; approach which grounds itself in part-of-speech and tends to describe syntax as chains of word-to-word links. In that context the most convenient word in a sentence to attach a temporal expression to is the verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemporary grammar is oriented more toward grouping words into chunks which can move around together called &quot;constituents&quot;; and contemporary constituency grammarians will say that what temporal expressions modify is not the verb but either the &quot;VP&quot; (or &quot;predicate&quot;), the group of words headed by the verb, or the entire clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's often difficult to pin down just what, if anything, a temporal &quot;modifies&quot; (and the grammarians I have read mostly acknowledge that difficulty). I myself am currently playing around with a dramatistic analysis (based on the work of Kenneth Burke) which categorizes the gnarlier temporals and locatives as &quot;scenic&quot; components of the clause; but so far that approach has its own difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:41:38.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20232" CreationDate="2016-11-15T19:22:42.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;James McCawley describes time and place adverbs as logical predicates of events or conditions which are grammatically expressed as sentences.  He gives some evidence that such adverbs can either modify the sentences that they predicate something of or, through a transformation he calls Raising, they can come to modify the V-bar constituents of those sentences.  This is my best recollection of the treatment in his book &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haj Ross has observed that multiple time or place adverbs can be, or perhaps must be, organized so as to describe the time or place of an event with increasing specificity or increasing generality.  For instance &quot;I eat meals in Honolulu in my cottage near the back in my kitchen at a table&quot;.  Other adverbs don't work this way.  I think he called such groups of related adverbs &quot;trajectories&quot;.  (I don't know whether Haj has written this down.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your question about modification, I'd say that is a grammatical idea about constituent structure, so it is not the sort of thing that has a meaning.  When a constituent of a certain category is part of a larger constituent of that same category, this is a modification structure, the smaller constituent is what is modified, and the modifier is what is outside the smaller constituent but within the larger one.  This roughly follows McCawley's treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &quot;yesterday&quot; is a sentence modifier in the structure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[S yesterday [S I ate]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;cautiously&quot; is a V-bar modifier in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I [V-bar cautiously [V-bar ate my fish]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &quot;completely&quot; is a V modifier in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I [V completely [V ate]] my fish &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T19:59:05.957" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T19:59:05.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20232" CreationDate="2016-11-15T20:27:37.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, these temporal words are [pro]nouns.  They are also called adverbs because any adverbial phrase that can be expressed in one word is called an adverb.  We know they are adverbial (we assume an elided preposition such as 'at') because they are temporal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your sentence, 'yesterday' modifies 'ran ...'.  The main verb is the only word that it needs to be associated with.  The other verbs are associated with it only indirectly (by nesting).  For example, if you change 'when' to 'after', then the waving may not have occurred yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T20:27:37.483" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20238" CreationDate="2016-11-15T20:48:16.273" Score="1" ViewCount="2961" Body="&lt;p&gt;i am the beginner in linguistics and i have little problem with understanding Chomsky hierarchy. So i have grammar like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;P = {K -&amp;gt; KL,aK-&amp;gt;abK,...}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is not third or second class because on the left side of -&gt; there is something more than one non-terminal. It can first or zero class. So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;K-&amp;gt; KL&lt;/code&gt; -- this can be first class&#xA;&lt;code&gt;aK -&amp;gt; abK&lt;/code&gt; -- this isn't first class because if &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; is transformed to &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; then &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; must be transformed to &lt;code&gt;ab&lt;/code&gt; which is not true. &lt;code&gt;\alpha X \beta -&amp;gt; \alpha \gamma \beta&lt;/code&gt; - is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;aXb -&amp;gt; cdb&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it of Type 0 or Type 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Type 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S -&gt; aA&#xA;A -&gt; baA | aA | ba |&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Type 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S -&gt; aS | bs | aA&#xA;A -&gt; aB | bB&#xA;B -&gt; \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) E -&gt; E + E | E * E | (E) | 2 (what is it and is that  unambiguous?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f) Type 0 because S is on the left side and S -&gt; \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S -&gt; Sa | Sb | \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;g) Again type 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S -&gt; SS | (S) | \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;h) aB -&gt; Ba&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if i look on rule of type 1, there is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;\alpha X \beta = \alpha \gamma \beta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;let say that alpha correspond to 'a' and X should correspond do B. So the rule is not true on the right side? Or is order irrelevant ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14502" LastEditorUserId="14502" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T10:37:08.967" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T10:37:08.967" Title="Difference between Type 0 and Type 1 in the Chomsky hierarchy" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20237" CreationDate="2016-11-15T21:40:14.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick recap*:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEufx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEufx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;where greek letters denote a (possibly empty) sequence of terminal and non-terminal symbols, capital roman letters denote non-terminal symbols and lower case roman letters denote terminal symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Just noticed that there is an error in the last row of the table; the rule type &lt;code&gt;A -&gt; a&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;A -&gt; ϵ&lt;/code&gt; is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type 0 grammars are completely unrestricted, whereas Type 1 grammars require all production rules to contain at least one non-terminal on the left-hand side (= LHS) of the rule which then expands to whatever sequence of non-terminal and terminal symbols on the right-hand side (= RHS), i.e. the LHS can not contain only terminal symbols. Type 2 allows only one non-terminal on the LHS; Type 3 additionally prohibits sequences other than one non-terminal and one terminal, or just one terminal on the RHS.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's take a look at your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;K -&amp;gt; KL&#xA;aK -&amp;gt; abK&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of such phrase structure grammars are of type 0, so that part is&#xA;clear.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now as for the question of whether it is also of type 1, you&#xA;have to check whether the requirement is met that there is at least&#xA;one non-terminal symbol on the LHS of the rule. This is the case for&#xA;all the rules you listed (one rule has &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt;, the other rule has &lt;code&gt;aK&lt;/code&gt;), and in case your grammar doesn't contain&#xA;other production rules which possibly do not match this format, you&#xA;can say that the grammar is indeed context-sensitive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Next for Type 2. This would mean that all LHSs need to consist of only one non-terminal symbol. But clearly, this requirement is violated: Since the rule &lt;code&gt;aK -&gt; abK&lt;/code&gt; has &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; as a part of its LHS, the condition for context-freenes is not met. The grammar is thus not of type 2, and hence also not of type 3, as you correctly predicted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is not third or second class because on the left side of -&gt; there is something more than one non-terminal. It can first or zero class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is correct, as explained in the previous paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;K-&gt; KL&lt;/code&gt; -- this can be first class &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. There is a non-terminal (&lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt;) on the LHS which transforms to some sequence of non-terminals (&lt;code&gt;KL&lt;/code&gt;) on the RHS, so it matches the rule format for Type 1 grammars.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;abK&lt;/code&gt; -- this isn't first class because if K is transformed to K then &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; must be transformed to ab which is not true&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not correct. Type 1 means that the LHS must contain one non-terminal symbol which on the RHS corresponds to some sequence of terminal or non-terminal symbols, &lt;code&gt;\gamma&lt;/code&gt;, and this requirement is met by &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; being part of the left-hand side. That &lt;code&gt;aK&lt;/code&gt; eventually tranforms to &lt;code&gt;abK&lt;/code&gt; (because &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\beta&lt;/code&gt; respectively denote the same string on both sides of the rule) is completely okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\alpha X \beta -&gt; \alpha \gamma \beta&lt;/code&gt; Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is right, but I think you misinterpreted this rule. Applied to your example, &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\beta&lt;/code&gt; is empty. On the RHS, &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; needs to be the same as the &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; on the left-hand-side, that is, &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\beta&lt;/code&gt; is again empty, and now &lt;code&gt;\gamma&lt;/code&gt; is the sequence bK. This is okay; as &lt;code&gt;\gamma&lt;/code&gt; can be any sequence of terminal or non-terminal symbols, it is okay for &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; to go to &lt;code&gt;aK&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to your final example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;aXb -&amp;gt; cdb&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any rule of the form &lt;code&gt;\alpha -&gt; \beta&lt;/code&gt; belongs to a grammar of Type 0, so this one does too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In order to also be of Type 1, you need to ensure that the LHS contains a non-terminal which then expands to whatever sequence of non-terminals and terminals on the RHS.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This requirement is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; met, since, although you have a non-terminal (&lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt;) on the LHS, the &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; left to the non-terminal &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; which is &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; disappears on the right, but &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; on the LHS and &lt;code&gt;\alpha&lt;/code&gt; on the RHS must denote the same string (which &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; and the empty string don't), so independently of what &lt;code&gt;Xb&lt;/code&gt; expands to, the rule doesn't fit the format of a Type 1 grammar. A grammar with such a production rule is thus only of Type 0 and nothing else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Type 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; aA A -&gt; baA | aA | ba |&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule &lt;code&gt;A -&gt; baA&lt;/code&gt; is not allowed in T3 grammars because you have one terminal too much on the right (it should only be one terminal + one non-terminal, or only one terminal), so this is not T3, only T2.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Type 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; aS | bs | aA A -&gt; aB | bB B -&gt; \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same here; with &lt;code&gt;S -&gt; bs&lt;/code&gt; you have two terminals on the RHS, this is ruled out by T3, so this grammar is only T2.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) E -&gt; E + E | E * E | (E) | 2 (what is it and is that unambiguous?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the symbols are intended to mean, but I could imagine this is a grammar describing algebraic terms (like 1+2, (3*4)+6 and so on). With a mixture of terminals and non-terminals on the RHS, but only one non-terminal on the LHS, this would be T2.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;f) Type 0 because S is on the left side and S -&gt; \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; Sa | Sb | \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;g) Again type 0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S -&gt; SS | (S) | \epsilon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T22:30:09.663" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T22:30:09.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20240" CreationDate="2016-11-15T22:18:45.383" Score="17" ViewCount="4395" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, along with some other Latinate languages, the word for our species as a whole is related specifically to that of the male sex: '&lt;em&gt;Latin humanus &quot;of man, human,&quot; – &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=Human&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymoline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, Etymonline says, could be related to Hebrew and the name &lt;em&gt;Adam&lt;/em&gt; which means man (hence Adam in the Bible). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which the word for human comes from the word for &lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If so, is there a specific cultural or etymological reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Here, I am discounting languages, such as English's &lt;em&gt;wo&lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in which woman comes from man&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13895" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T01:31:55.657" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T11:33:18.897" Title="Do any languages use {woman} as the root for human?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20239" CreationDate="2016-11-16T00:06:27.253" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic the word for “human being of either sex” is ʼinsān, from the same root as nisāʼ “women”. The usual word for “male human being” is rajul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T00:21:34.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T00:21:34.147" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20232" CreationDate="2016-11-16T00:51:55.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As StoneyB says, the idea that adverbs &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; verbs is characteristic of traditional grammar. More generally, traditional grammar tends to get syntax and semantics entangled, which doesn't really help in understanding what words in general - and adverbs in particular - do in the sentences they take part in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better, and more modern, approach would be to investigate the syntatic behaviour of words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yesterday&amp;quot;, as many other &amp;quot;adverbs&amp;quot;, behaves very differently from, for intance, &amp;quot;quite&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to see that &amp;quot;yesterday&amp;quot; can be placed in several different places within this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier, yesterday, ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier ran, yesterday, out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier ran out of the woods yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these sentences may imply different emphases, they are basically synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Quite&amp;quot;, on the other hand, seems firmly attached to the adjective it &amp;quot;modifies&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quite relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The relieved soldier, quite, ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The relieved soldier ran, quite, out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The relieved soldier ran out of the woods quite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we perhaps can say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier quite ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier ran quite out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it seems obvious to me that these sentences are not synonymous, either with the original sentence, or with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, adverbs like &amp;quot;luckily&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hopefully&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;understandably&amp;quot;, behave in a similar way to &amp;quot;yesterday&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily the relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier, luckily, ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier ran, luckily, out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relieved soldier ran out of the woods, luckily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, as in the last sentence of the example, they seem to have peculiar issues with commas - and with verbal tenses, as shown below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday the relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Yesterday the relieved soldier will run out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Hopefully the relieved soldier ran out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the relieved soldier will run out of the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, it would be possibly convenient to group these &amp;quot;adverbs&amp;quot; for their mobility, ie, for their syntactic behaviour, rather, or at least before, the conventional semi-semantic classification as &amp;quot;temporal&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;modal&amp;quot;, etc., adverbs. This would avoid the quite awkard grouping of &amp;quot;gladly&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;quickly&amp;quot; as similar words, which they most probably are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T09:26:40.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20239" CreationDate="2016-11-16T05:45:55.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Láadan uses female gender by default for many/most words, adding the masculine suffix &lt;em&gt;-id&lt;/em&gt; to specify male gender, including for the word for &quot;human/person&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Láadan's &lt;a href=&quot;http://laadanlanguage.org/node/6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;person, woman, adult ; to specify a male person, add the masculine suffix '-id'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Láadan is a constructed language but the question didn't specify the answer had to be a natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (so take with a grain of salt):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Old English sources, the word &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; was gender-neutral, with a meaning similar to the modern English usage of &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; as an indefinite pronoun. The words &lt;em&gt;wer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wyf&lt;/em&gt; were used to specify a man or woman where necessary, respectively. Combining them into &lt;em&gt;wer-man&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;wyf-man&lt;/em&gt; expressed the concept of &quot;any man&quot; or &quot;any woman&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;wer-&lt;/em&gt; root is still used for words like &lt;em&gt;werewolf&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;man-wolf&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14505" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T05:45:55.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20229" CreationDate="2016-11-16T10:51:49.950" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, there are good chances that a Celtic language was spoken in the 6th century in the Iberian Peninsula, not the ones you would expect but a Brittonic one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know for sure that a group of &lt;strong&gt;Britons&lt;/strong&gt; settled in &lt;strong&gt;Galicia&lt;/strong&gt; in the 6th century, when Galicia was the independent kingdom of the Suevi: a bishop of the Britons was present at the 2nd council of Braga held by king Miro in 572, and his name was the Celtic [Mailoc]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Martinus Bracarensis metropolitanae ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  Subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remisol Besensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lucetius Conimbrensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Adoric Egestanae ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sardinarius Lamicensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Viator Magnetensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Item ex synodo Lucensi.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nitigisius Lucensis metropolitanae ecclesiae&#xA;  episcopus his gestis subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Andreas Iriensis ecclesiae episcopus&#xA;  his gestis subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wittimer Auriensis ecclesiae episcopus his&#xA;  gestis subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Anila Tudensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Polemius Asturicensis ecclesiae episcopus his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Mailoc Britonensis ecclesiae episcopus&lt;/strong&gt; his gestis&#xA;  subscripsi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/martinbraga/concilium2.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Records of the Council&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another contemporary document, the &lt;em&gt;Parochiale Suevorum&lt;/em&gt; -an ecclesiastical/administrative division of the kingdom of Galicia preserved just in interpolated later 11th-12th c. copies-, states that the authority of the bishop of the Britons comprehended their own churches in Galicia and Asturias and the monastery Maximi:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ad sedem &lt;strong&gt;Britonorum&lt;/strong&gt; ecclesias que sunt intro &lt;strong&gt;Britones&lt;/strong&gt;+ una cum&#xA;  monasterio Maximi et que in Asturiis sunt. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/1393415.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download&#xA;  link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this Briton community was an ethnic community with churches in Galicia and Asturias and under the ecclesiastical direction of a bishop-abbot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Britons kept sending bishops to the Visigothic councils of the 7th centuries, but the See was discontinued either in the 8th century, after the Arab invasion, or either in 830 due to a Viking raid. Today there are several hamlets called &lt;strong&gt;Bretoña&lt;/strong&gt; in Galicia, and one called &lt;strong&gt;Bretios&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; Bretonos, but the town of Bretoña, in Pastoriza, near the city of Lugo, is thought to the be continuation of the old “capital” of the local Britons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further references at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britonia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for the native Celtic tongues, they probably became extinct during the fist centuries of our era (I don't have any positive evidence otherwise); but, some considerations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In his 5th century Chronicle, bishop &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydatius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hydatius&lt;/a&gt;, a native Galician, apparently distinguished among Romans, living for example in the city of Lugo; native Galicians living in rural areas and even in hillforts; and the newcomers, the Germanic Sueves, Vandals, and Goths. Now, since Galician have been Roman citizens for centuries, I guess that this mean that they preserved enough social and cultural specificity as to be accounted as a distinct subject (versus Romans), and in fact they apparently acted autonomously during their wars with the Sueves; but, well, Rome was falling apart.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the late 7th century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerio_of_Bierzo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valerio of Bierzo&lt;/a&gt; wrote about his life in the Bierzo region, next to Galicia. One of the few uninhabited places he mentioned was called Ebronanto, which is very probably a local evolution of *Eburonantu- 'yew-valley/stream'. This was not a mountain, a river, or an inhabited place, but a pagus, so its name was maybe not too old (assuming that uninhabited places change names much frequently than other places). He also records him and his companions destroying a pagan altar in the top of one hill and building a church in its place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Local Latin charters written during the high middle ages show the preservation of dozens of pre-Latin words in Galicia, Asturias, Northern Portugal, Cantabria and northern Castille. These words were mostly related to farming and land description (camba 'high valley', busto 'dairy', senara 'farmland', laria 'plot', cotto 'hill', lagena 'flagstone', gandara 'badland', brania 'moor', vaica 'river bank', combarro 'shed', corrego 'ravine', arrogio 'stream', vereda 'road', combona 'tidal trap for fishes'... ) and tree and plant names (carbalio 'oak tree', bitula 'birch tree', amenal 'copse of alder trees', togio 'gorse'...). Further readings and references in Josep Coromines' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diccionario_cr%C3%ADtico_etimol%C3%B3gico_castellano_e_hisp%C3%A1nico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/obras-linguisticas/lexico-hispanico-primitivo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Léxico Hispanico Primitivo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by several authors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14511" LastEditorUserId="25254" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T13:11:22.693" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T13:11:22.693" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20239" CreationDate="2016-11-16T13:42:44.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, the evolution, both in Latin/Romance and in Old/Modern English is contrarywise. The old masculine word (&lt;em&gt;wer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vir&lt;/em&gt;) went extinct or archaic or suffered a semantic shift (Portuguese &lt;em&gt;varão&lt;/em&gt;, male person, only used in literary register, but also &lt;em&gt;barão&lt;/em&gt;, baron; English &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;, male person, now extinct); the old neutral word (&lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;) shifted to mean just male person except, but even this is going obsolete, in an abstract sense, as the name of the species) and was replaced by the Latin (grammatically feminine) word (&lt;em&gt;personna&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; English &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;, Portuguese (still grammatically feminine) &lt;em&gt;pessoa&lt;/em&gt;), while the feminine word was kept (&lt;em&gt;wyfman&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt; or replaced by euphemisms, neologisms or, like in French, just by the word for female (It. &lt;em&gt;donna&lt;/em&gt;, Pt. &lt;em&gt;mulher&lt;/em&gt;, Fr. &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that this evolution is similar in English and Romance rather due to coincidence than out of some universal linguistic pattern, though my ignorance of anything beyond the already mentioned languages makes it impossible for me to demonstrate. But there are, or so I am told, languages completely devoid of gender, such as Japanese, Hungarian or Turkish, so it cannot be completely universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Romance languages, anyway, the whole masculine and neutral genders of Latin collapsed into what is called the masculine gender, but is perhaps closer to Latin's neutral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is some confusion between semantics and grammar almost always when speakers of English try to understand gender in other languages: a word can be grammatically of one gender, but semantically refer to something of the opposite sex - or with no sex at all. And such confusion tends to get politicised in English, with misguided attempts to root patriarchy into linguistic features of modern European languages, usually through anachronisms or false etymologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2016-11-21T17:20:15.283" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T17:20:15.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-16T16:05:21.570" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please I need your help ASAP,&#xA;I need to segment an audio corpus of 4 hours , and I need a tool or script to detect the steady part of vowels and place the boundaries .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14519" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T16:05:21.570" Title="How to (automatically ) detect the steady-part of vowels?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9995" CreationDate="2016-11-16T19:38:07.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This webpage offers another explanation. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/phfunc/compare.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/phfunc/compare.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Complements mostly immediately follow the head. They bear a much closer relation to the head than adjuncts&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fond [(Complement) of biscuits] [(Adjunct) with coffee]: correct&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;~*fond [(Adjunct) with coffee] [(Complement) of biscuits]: not sound&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjuncts are stackable. Complements not so. Although one exception is ditransitive verbs which take two complements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T19:38:07.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20248" CreationDate="2016-11-16T23:32:51.600" Score="1" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to count the occurrences of the English “wanna” structure diachronically, in order to create a frequency per century chart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first step was to use the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). I found 210 occurrences in the 19th century and 1590 in the 20th century. &#xA;However, I also want to count the data from the 21th century and for that I need to use another corpus, since COHA doesn’t have data from this century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine, so I went to another corpus (a synchronic one) and found 1274 occurrences. The result is shown in the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is: how can I quantify this data correctly? &#xA;I am only getting more results in the 20th century because of the size of the corpus (COHA has 400 million words and the synchronic current corpus has only 2 billion).&#xA;Is there any math calculation I may use in order to make such frequency index correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQgP8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQgP8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13086" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T01:42:19.077" Title="Corpus Linguistics: How do I compare date from two corpora correctly?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20247" CreationDate="2016-11-17T01:42:19.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could simply divide by the size, so you’re comparing relative frequency. You could also express the log relative frequency, given how small the resulting decimal number is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s common to express relative corpus frequencies using a standard denominator (per million, for example), as suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/courses/ling/corpus/blue/l05_3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. CELEX, for another example, provides both the per-million and the log frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T01:42:19.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7183" CreationDate="2016-11-17T09:49:44.077" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if the answer of fdb is correct, here just a quote from a book on إعراب القرآن I'rab al-Quran:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;الواو استئنافيّة (اضرب لهم مثل) مرّ إعرابها، (الحياة) مضاف إليه مجرور (الدنيا) نعت للحياة مجرور وعلامة الجرّ الكسرة المقدرة على الألف (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.al-eman.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%84%20%D9%81%D9%8A%20%D8%A5%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B1%D8%A2%D9%86/%D8%A5%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A2%D9%8A%D8%A9%20%D8%B1%D9%82%D9%85%20(45):/i410&amp;amp;d403602&amp;amp;c&amp;amp;p1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes it is indeed a na'at نعت which qualifies الحياة (the life or this life) as  دنيا &#xA;(related to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.almaany.com/ar/dict/ar-en/%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;دونية&lt;/a&gt;) with lesser value (inferior) so it's clearly an adjective! If you are interested in the 'Irab of اضرب لهم مثل -which in my quote is only quoted as a side note- you can refer to the 'irab of verse 32 in the same surah (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.al-eman.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%84%20%D9%81%D9%8A%20%D8%A5%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B1%D8%A2%D9%86/%D8%A5%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A2%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA%20(32-%2033):/i410&amp;amp;d403596&amp;amp;c&amp;amp;p1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue is that an alif الف at the end as in the case of (الدنيا) can't (physically) have a diacritic on it, which means that this sound is &quot;estimated&quot; and does not appear nor would be applied on the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further more the lecturer is wrong as an adjective (نعت) of a word/noun that is نكرة (not having ال at the beginning or indetermined) can't be معرفة (having ال at the beginning or determined) so by no means الدنيا can be for مَثَلَ. (See also on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B9%D8%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13032" LastEditorUserId="13032" LastEditDate="2020-02-11T13:23:43.500" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T13:23:43.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20232" CreationDate="2016-11-17T10:33:49.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are confusing category (part of speech) and function (subject, object, modifier, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditional grammar analyses items like &quot;yesterday&quot;, &quot;today&quot; &quot;tomorrow&quot; etc, as nouns in, for example, &quot;Today is the first day of my exams&quot; but adverbs in, for example, &quot;They arrived yesterday&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern grammars take them to be simply pronouns. They can’t be nouns because of their inability to take determiners, and they can’t be adverbs either for two reasons: consider “Their behaviour yesterday was unacceptable”, where “yesterday” is modifying the noun “behaviour”, which makes it unlike an adverb. And unlike adverbs, they have genitive forms, “today’s”, “yesterday’s” etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a number of functions, for example modifier (adjunct) as in “They arrive today”, and subject as in “Today is my birthday”. As adjuncts, they modify verb phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T18:24:18.617" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T18:24:18.617" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-17T17:54:50.707" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a speaker of a fairly standard North American English accent, I occasionally find it difficult to understand people who speak with a heavy accent. I've always been curious about what exactly makes accents difficult to understand, and it occurred to me that intelligibility could either be an absolute property (for example, driven by the brain's ability to distinguish phonemes) or relative (determined by the brain's ability to 'pattern match' to known phonemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were true that intelligibility is absolute, then I would expect that any listener would tend to have an easier time understanding speech in a &quot;clear&quot; or &quot;common&quot; accent, even if they natively speak with a heavier accent. On the other hand, intelligibility being relative would suggest that what is a &quot;clear&quot; accent to one person would be a &quot;heavy&quot; accent to another. Has this sort of experiment been done, and what does it tell us about intelligibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I realize that this could also possibly be different between first- and second-language speakers - presumably people growing up in a community naturally understand other speakers from that community clearly, but perhaps two speakers with the same native language who are conversing in a second language may struggle to understand each other more than they would a native speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14526" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T18:52:42.807" Title="Do speakers with heavy accents find it easier to understand their own accent than a more standard accent?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2016-11-17T18:12:09.090" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the name and the cult suggest a connection with the Sumerian god Dumuzi.&#xA;Another tradition that may be at the root of Demeter is that of Tiamat. This may also explain her link to Poseidon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14527" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T18:12:09.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20252" CreationDate="2016-11-17T18:52:42.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also speak Standard North American English, and encounter problems understanding and being understood. For instance, a &quot;root&quot; is a [rʊt] for me, and if I ask a Kenyan what their word for [rʊt] is, they will have no idea, but if I ask for a [ruwt] then they can tell me. People from outside my US zone sometimes giggle when I say [rʊt]. My dialect can be particularly hard to follow if you don't know the patterns of syllable reduction and glottalization that typify Our Language (&quot;tear&quot; and &quot;terror&quot; are a minimal pair for vowel length in my dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I witnessed a Kenyan guy pointing out a [reobad] in a tree, which a bunch of Californian passengers thought was a &quot;rail bird&quot;, and not a [lɛpɹ̩d]. My advantage was that I'm familiar with that dialect. I also found Newcastle-area English to be utterly incomprehensible for about a week, even though I knew all of the phonemes and had heard all of those sounds plus a lot more. It's just that I had never encountered that particular system before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;heaviness&quot; of an accent is really a measure of your subjective ability to map from what you hear to a particular meaning. It's actually not just pronunciation, quite often those other dialects have constructions that don't make immediate sense even if written down. There's a certain amount of quaint difference between US and posh UK English, but I have a hard time, sometimes, with non-posh UK especially working class lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intelligiblity is relative: relative to the complexity of mapping from one system to the other. The reason why RP is not so difficult for me to understand is that I've been exposed to bits of it most of my life, thanks to Monty Python and their ilk. So I would look to prior exposure as the factor that makes an accent easy vs. hard – it's not something intrinsic to the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T18:52:42.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2016-11-17T21:02:18.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just take myself for an example. It might be subjective though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a Cantonese living in Canton(or Guangzhou), China. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cantonese&lt;/strong&gt; is my mother tongue and first language. It's a local language in Guangzhou and Hong Kong SAR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mandarin&lt;/strong&gt; is my native language. It's the official language of China. So almost all kindergartens and primary schools in mainland China will teach Mandarin as compulsory. Accents and dialects appear in all different parts of the nation but Mandarin is the only one that used nationwide freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; is my 2nd language then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14529" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2016-11-17T22:35:57.237" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T22:35:57.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20227" CreationDate="2016-11-17T22:22:52.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_differences_in_the_Korean_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean&lt;/a&gt; is the prime example of this. South Korean is more open to loanwords, particularly from English, while North Korean was subject to changes stemming from the Juche ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T22:22:52.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9941" CreationDate="2016-11-17T22:43:48.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rule is actually very logical and to someone whose language has inflexion, it is very, very natural. The past participle is basically a deverbal adjective relating to the object, thus it makes a lot of sense that there is an agreement in the nominal categories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Czech, there is a similar construction being born (have st. + past participle) and the PPP agrees with the object in case (typically accusative), number and gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mám tu knih-u přečte-n-ou&#xA;I have the book-(ACC-SG-FEM) read-PPP-(ACC-SG-FEM)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mám ty knih-y přečte-n-é&#xA;I have the book-(ACC-PL-FEM) read-PPP-(ACC-PL-FEM)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in French, which also distinguishes grammatical number (in its own strange way) and gender, such a construction makes sense as well. This of course does not change the fact that this distinction disappeared due to the progressing grammaticalisation of the &lt;em&gt;passé composé&lt;/em&gt; and was only artificially reintroduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T22:43:48.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20038" CreationDate="2016-11-18T14:37:36.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to a proposal I tried to make here on SE, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;How can PSG describe the vertical dimension of sentence structure?&lt;/a&gt;, height in a constituent structure tree reflects the inherent obliqueness of the various subconstituents.  The more oblique a constituent is, the lower it goes in the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obliqueness is like the traditional notion in declensions that the lower case forms &quot;decline&quot; away from the nominative, except I apply it to phrases rather than words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, constituents move upward in a tree when they become less oblique. This is similar to the Relational Grammar description of English rules like passivization (2 changes to 1) and indirect object shift (3 changes to 2) as &quot;advancements&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't see how Relational Grammar, or my version of it, could handle your Czech example.  The problem is that verbs other than auxiliaries, do not differ in obliqueness in current versions of the theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T14:37:36.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T17:09:08.850" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in knowing of any studies of historical changes to verb plus PP constructions in contemporary English. An example is the rise of constructions like &quot;advocate for NP&quot;, e.g. &quot;He's advocating for an increase in taxes&quot;, which has become quite popular in the last 10 years or so. This is a change from the earlier pattern &quot;He's advocating an increase in taxes&quot;, prevalent let's say in the 70's. Has anyone undertaken a study of the rise of PP complements against earlier NP complements? My seat-of-the-pants analysis is that this is based on analogy to near-synonyms like &quot;argue for, campaigning for, lobbying for&quot;, but it might also be the result of some older regional construction that happened to gain popularity. Has the history of this change been studied (not limited to &quot;advocate&quot;, that's just an example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-18T18:42:41.437" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T18:42:41.437" Title="Is there a study of contemporary changes in V+preposition constructions" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19695" CreationDate="2016-11-18T20:31:49.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Max Müller started the tradition of giving such silly names to theories of language origin in his 1861 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32856/32856-pdf.pdf?session_id=48d28028ef16b0b22c541b5131606e76e2c9bfde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lectures on the Science of Language&lt;/a&gt;, which is available on line and which I recommend to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting case of the influence of onomatopoeia on a phonological system in Stanley Newman's description of the wiyi verbs in &lt;em&gt;The Yawelmani dialect of Yokuts&lt;/em&gt;.  Following Kuroda in &lt;em&gt;Yawelmani Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, in these verbs alone the process of lowering the underlying long high vowels /i:/ /u:/ fails to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T20:31:49.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-19T09:59:11.307" Score="1" ViewCount="1294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some dictionaries such as Cambridge Online Dictionary defines the word &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a word or a part of a word that has a grammatical purpose but often has little or no meaning: In the sentence &quot;I tidied &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; the room&quot;, the adverb &quot;up&quot; is a particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there could be some argument over what to call &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence, but what I don't understand is why &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; can't be classified as an adverb that means &quot;completely&quot; or something else listed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster's definition as an adverb&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some also might argue that up is a preposition, not a particle or an adverb. I am a native Korean speaker and fluent Japanese speaker and none of these languages uses the word &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; for a word like &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; in English. In Korean and Japanese, particle is a function word which is attached to a word or phrase to show grammatical relationship and help clarify the meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; in English? What's the difference between particle and adverb (or preposition)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11296" LastEditorUserId="11296" LastEditDate="2016-11-19T11:24:03.030" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T03:38:43.133" Title="Difference between particle and adverb in English" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-19T10:38:20.067" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;There exist certain fixed expressions which people use to convey quite specific meanings and (at least to me) always invoke a famous saying which is assumed to be common knowledge, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/sh163n1lJ4M?t=30s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am not a crook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (AFAIK primarily American English), denoting that the speaker has done something dubious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/AsXKS8Nyu8Q?t=9s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have a cunning plan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (AFAIK primarily British English), denoting the proposition of an absurd/risky/generally bad idea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems to me that these phrases are not typical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idioms&lt;/a&gt; because their meaning is at least partly compositional, unlike e.g. &lt;em&gt;kick the bucket&lt;/em&gt;: Nevertheless, they invoke a more nuanced meaning than the composition of the words themselves implies, and there even seems to be some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrast&lt;/a&gt; between these expressions and a pure generative usage of the above phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not a crook!&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; The speaker is not a crook (unmarked meaning)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(said in a stilted voice) &lt;em&gt;I am not a crook.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;rarr; The speaker has done something dubious &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any terminology commonly used for describing this specific phenomenon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14543" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T10:38:20.067" Title="Term for universally-used quote with additional, non-compositional meaning" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20262" CreationDate="2016-11-19T13:20:11.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things are called particles when they undergo the rule Particle Shift.  &quot;Particle&quot; is an ad hoc POS made up to fill the need for a notation to use to describe when the rule works.  It is not a happy event when a syntactician has to invent a new special category just to make his rules work, but what can one do?  Anyone with a better idea should bring it forth -- the world will beat a path to your doorstep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like your idea of making particles verb modifiers (if that is indeed a proposal).  In general, a modifier is added to a constituent of a given category to yield a new constituent of that category, so if &quot;up&quot; is added to the verb &quot;tidy&quot; to yield the verb &quot;tidy up&quot;, that makes &quot;up&quot; a verb modifier, and a verb modifier is an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, in McCawley's theory of English adverbs, &quot;completely&quot; and other degree adverbs are verb modifiers (as against V' or S modifiers).  So maybe the semantics works, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since writing the above, I looked online at McCawley's description of this construction in his book &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;. A tree structure for a particle construction is given on page 94, and you can find it by going to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;pg=PA308&amp;amp;lpg=PA308&amp;amp;dq=mccawley%20phenomena%20discontinuous&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=uOjE8N4BPl&amp;amp;sig=Si1Dic433ZM72x1klKs4wviWWXw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi26IHVm7fQAhVhsVQKHZdJCwMQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mccawley%20phenomena%20discontinuous&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discontinuous references&lt;/a&gt; and clicking on &quot;previous&quot; to get to the 2nd reference.  You will see that McCawley characterizes a shifted particle as a P (preposition) which modifies a preceding verb, and together with that verb makes up a discontinuous modified verb.  I believe this makes it an adverb, as well as being a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-11-26T03:38:43.133" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T03:38:43.133" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20262" CreationDate="2016-11-19T14:17:57.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s no difference, as you put it, since particles are mainly prepositions. &quot;Particle&quot; is not a distinct word category (part of speech) as such, but a term used for certain words that have the distinctive property of being able to be positioned between the verb and its direct object. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum describe particles as complements which can freely come between the verb and an NP object, adding that they are mainly short words (one or two syllables) that with just a few exceptions are all prepositions unaccompanied by any complement of their own (i.e. intransitive). Examples are &quot;off&quot;, &quot;up&quot; &quot;down&quot;, &quot;by&quot;, &quot;over&quot; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical example is &quot;She took the suitcase down&quot; where &quot;down&quot; can follow the object or occur between the verb and object, &quot;She took down the suitcase&quot;. And in your example &quot;up&quot; is a particle because it can occur between the verb and its object. The few exceptions to prepositions are some adjectives and verbs, though they are restricted to a small number of idioms e.g., &quot;He made clear his intentions&quot;, &quot;They cut short their holiday&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T14:17:57.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-19T19:19:19.283" Score="1" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &lt;em&gt;the most general and accurate&lt;/em&gt; linguistic observation on when native English speakers add /əs/ in the end when uttering a word already ending in /əs/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling has not helped me one bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt; I am referring to &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the plural and the possessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14226" LastEditorUserId="14226" LastEditDate="2016-11-19T20:29:06.680" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T20:59:00.317" Title="When do English speakers add /əs/ in the end of a word ending in /əs/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-11-21T09:33:43.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17644" CreationDate="2016-11-19T20:54:00.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe you already have finished your statistics project, but anyway here is a matrix of the available &lt;a href=&quot;https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/lexical-distance-matrix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical distances according to Tishchenko&lt;/a&gt;. It includes no lexical distances that I have calculated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you can share anything you come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T20:54:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20267" CreationDate="2016-11-19T20:59:00.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is framed the wrong way: it should be, when do they~we &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; add /z/? First, there are many /z/'s in English -- plural, possessive, reductions of auxiliaries &lt;em&gt;has, was, is&lt;/em&gt;. Only the possessive enjoys this treatment. Zooming in on the possessive, there are distinct facts of pronunciation and spelling. As for spelling, you'd need to check a current normative grammar of English writing, but I think that you write s-apostrophe in the possessive of a proper name ending in orthographic &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. However, that doesn't reflect the kind of pronunciation fact where the possessive of (plural) &lt;em&gt;cats&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced [kæts] and not *[kætsɨz], that is there is actual non-presence of the suffix (Whereas &quot;Jesus' name&quot; is pronounced [dʒɪjzəs̵ɨz]. So this /z+z/ → &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; effect is limited to plural+possessive. It also has to be the /z/ plural, not an irregular plural (&lt;em&gt;children's, moose's&lt;/em&gt; do not have this reduction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a semantactic condition, that the noun in question has to be the possessor, so &lt;em&gt;The cats' feet&lt;/em&gt; only has one /z/. Since the possessive affix is a phrasal affix and goes at the end of an NP, any kind of word can actually manifest the affix, thus &quot;The boy who threw those rocks&quot; can be a possessor, and it is normally &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subject to this reduction, i.e. &quot;I saw the boy who threw those rocks's [raksɨz] aunt yesterday&quot;. Admittedly this is bad writing so you should avoid the problem by using the &quot;N of N&quot; construction, but if you use the structure, do can get plural+possessive. The reason is that &quot;rocks&quot; is not the possessor of &quot;mother&quot;, it's the last word in a phrase that is the possessor. Semi-analogously, with conjunctions of nouns in the plural, e.g. &lt;em&gt;those lions and tigers&lt;/em&gt; plus &quot;'s eyes&quot;, I am 60/40 in favor of retaining the possessive (whereas in the above relative clause example, I'm 100% for retention). I don't know of a good experimental study that looks into the details of the variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T20:59:00.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20271" CreationDate="2016-11-20T09:30:48.277" Score="8" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can imagine a language where instead of &quot;what did you put a toy on?&quot; one says something like &quot;whon did you put a toy?&quot;. Do such languages exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-20T11:17:24.220" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T13:15:53.550" Title="Do there exist languages with wh-prepositions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2016-11-20T11:01:26.710" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;German does have something like this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(list of abbreviations see below)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Wo-r-auf     hast du  ein Spielzeug gelegt?&#xA;where-ITF-on have you a   toy       put.PSTPTCP&#xA;Where did you put a toy on?&#xA;&#xA;Wo-von   ernähren sich    Hasen?&#xA;where-of live.on  REFLPRN rabbits&#xA;What do rabbits live on?&#xA;&#xA;Wo-nach     riecht das?&#xA;where-after smells that&#xA;What does this smell like?&#xA;&#xA;Wo-durch      entsteht ein Tornado?&#xA;where-through develops a   tornado&#xA;Due to what does a tornado develop?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement#Pied-piping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pied piping&lt;/a&gt;: When wh-fronting an NP, you also have to move another element it goes with (like prepositions); this is often optional in English, but obligatory in German:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sie hat sich    [mit  XYZ] getroffen&#xA;she has REFLPRN [with XYZ] meet.PSTPTCP&#xA;She met [with XYZ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Mit  wem]     hat sie sich    __ getroffen?&#xA;[with who.DAT] has she REFLPRN __ meet.PSTPTCP&#xA;[With whom] did she meet __?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the preposition at its initial position after the NP it belongs to has moved to the front makes the sentence ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* [Wem    ] hat sie sich    mit  __ getroffen?&#xA;  [who.DAT] has she REFLPRN with __ meet.PSTPTCP&#xA;Who did she meet with?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preposition &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be moved to the front as well in order to make the wh-question grammatical. This is what is called pied piping.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the questioned NP is not a person (&quot;who&quot;/&quot;wer&quot;), but an object (&quot;what&quot;/&quot;was&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Die Schüler  haben [mit XYZ]  experimentiert.&#xA;the students have  [with XYZ] experiment.PSTPTCP&#xA;The students experimented [with XYZ].&#xA;&#xA;Du  hast ein Spielzeug [auf XYZ] gelegt.&#xA;you have a   toy       [on  XYZ] put.PSTPTCP&#xA;You put a toy [on XYZ].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you could colloquially say:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Mit  was]       haben die Schüler  __ experimentiert?&#xA;[with what.DAT]  have  the students __ experiment.PSTPTCP&#xA;[What] did the students experiment with __?&#xA;&#xA;[Auf was]  hast du  ein Spielzeug __ gelegt?  &#xA;[on  what] have you a   toy       __ put.PSTPTCP&#xA;[What] did you put a toy on __?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &quot;correct&quot; form is turning the question word &quot;was&quot; into &quot;wo&quot; (literally &quot;where&quot;, but it loses its local meaning and severes only as a basis to indicate the wh-word) and attaching the pied-piped preposition to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Wo-mit]     haben die Schüler  __ experimentiert?&#xA;[where-with] have the  students __ experiment.PSTPTCP&#xA;What did the students experiment with __?&#xA;&#xA;[Wo-r-auf]     hast du  ein Spielzeug __ gelegt?&#xA;[where-ITF-on] have you a   toy       __ put.PSTPTCP&#xA;What did you put a toy on __?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This results in a wh-word which is at the same time prepositional. It looks like &quot;where&quot; + preoposition, but as said, the &quot;wo&quot; has no local meaning in this context (that the &quot;toy&quot; example is about locality is only a coincidence; this is not indicated in the &quot;wo&quot; part), it behaves more like &quot;w&quot;+preposition where the &quot;o&quot; is only inserted for pronouncability, so I would guess this is exactly what you were looking for.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ITF&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interfix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;PSTPTCP&lt;/code&gt; past participle verb form&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;REFLPRN&lt;/code&gt; reflexive pronoun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;DAT&lt;/code&gt; dative case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T13:15:53.550" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T13:15:53.550" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-11-20T11:35:19.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-11-20T11:35:19.683" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T11:35:19.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-11-20T11:35:19.683" Score="0" Body="Wh-words are question words such as &quot;what&quot;, &quot;who&quot;, &quot;where&quot;, &quot;why&quot; etc, which are used to ask for objects, persons, place, time or similar circumstances. " OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-20T15:09:16.233" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T15:09:16.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2016-11-20T11:38:16.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preposition by definition means that it is a functional word put in front of another word (typically nominal in nature) that it modifies in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wh- type words are pronominal (or more precisely shifter-like) in their nature, thus they need to stand for full sense words, e.g. nouns (what/who) or adverbs (where/when/how).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to have a wh- type preposition is sort of contradictory (to be honest, when I read the title, I thought you meant something like &lt;em&gt;&quot;WH-prep table did you put the plate?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. asking in which position towards the table the plate was put - beneath it, on it, next to it,...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are referring to (Wh-on did you put the toy) would most likely not be analysed as preposition but just a simple contraction of two words/morphs that can exist apart but in this specific combination, they merge into a single unit. This obviously happens frequently with prepositions and pronouns, e.g. French &lt;em&gt;du, des, ès&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;de le, de les, en les&lt;/em&gt;, Czech &lt;em&gt;nač, proč, doň,...&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;na co, pro co, do něj,...&lt;/em&gt;, but the resulting unit is typically still just univerbised realisation of two otherwise separate words/morphs or it turns into an adverb by the process of grammaticalisation (the Czech case - &lt;em&gt;proč&lt;/em&gt; meant originally &lt;em&gt;what for&lt;/em&gt; and now it means &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; and most likely the case with the English adverbs as well, coming from some PIE &lt;em&gt;kʷo-&lt;/em&gt; and spatial expression of location, direction, origin etc. like &lt;em&gt;wh-ere, wh-ence, wh-ither,&lt;/em&gt;...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T11:38:16.490" CommentCount="34" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6042" CreationDate="2016-11-20T14:40:09.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is genetic. Prepositions in Indo-European languages come from adverb-like particles which themselves often come from some sort of noun in a specific case. This adverb could be mostly anywhere in the sentence given the relatively free word order of PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, many of these adverbs never fully transitioned into pure prepositions as they can stand on their own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The treasure is 2 meters &lt;strong&gt;below/above&lt;/strong&gt; the surface.&lt;/em&gt; (preposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The treasure is somewhere &lt;strong&gt;below/above&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; (adverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I came &lt;strong&gt;through&lt;/strong&gt; hell.&lt;/em&gt; (preposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I came &lt;strong&gt;through&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; (adverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fire &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; the hole&lt;/em&gt; (preposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The spy is &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; (adverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthemore, these adverb like particles not only became prepositions in the languages (i.e. noun modifiers), but they also became verbal prefixes. Again, in English the move to the verbal prefixes did not happen all too much (another example is German where there are still verbs with separable prefixes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibilities of development can be observed in ancient Greek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oreos bainó &lt;strong&gt;kata&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; - mountain-GEN go-1SG &lt;strong&gt;down&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kata&lt;/strong&gt; oreos bainó&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Down&lt;/strong&gt; mountain-GEN go-1SG&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oreos &lt;strong&gt;kata&lt;/strong&gt;bainó.&lt;/em&gt; - mountain-GEN &lt;strong&gt;down&lt;/strong&gt;-go-1SG&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, it can even combine the two, adverb became a verbal prefix, but the verb still requires a noun with the same preposition - e.g. in Czech you may have both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pře&lt;/strong&gt;jdu &lt;strong&gt;přes&lt;/strong&gt; řeku&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Over&lt;/strong&gt;-go-1SG &lt;strong&gt;over&lt;/strong&gt; river-ACC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pře&lt;/strong&gt;jdu řeku&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;Over&lt;/strong&gt;-go-1SG river-ACC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, I believe it is safe to say that it is mostly due to chance that in Germanic languages the grammaticalisation went more slowly (to the of not being finished in English) than in other IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T14:40:09.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-20T18:19:58.010" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing topic modeling with LDA. As input to LDA I'm using a tokenized corpus. I was wondering what's a good way to handle contractions and possessive apostrophes. Right now words like can't and John's are tokenized to [can, t] and [john, s]. Is there a better way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14553" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T09:41:08.260" Title="What is a good way to handle contractions and possessive apostrophes when doing topic modeling?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-20T18:57:13.570" Score="6" ViewCount="1014" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just one example: In the word &quot;father&quot;, there is the interdental voiced fricative. However, in Old English, the word is fæder with a voiced alveolar stop; it is also fader in Middle English. The German word is Vater which has the voiceless stop from the voiced stop, which makes sense if the original sound was a voiced stop, but the Gothic word fadar and the Old Norse word faðir both contain fricatives. And I've never read anything about the High German Consonant Shift affecting anything twice. There are also other words like that, such as the word &quot;word&quot;.&#xA;So is the voiced stop the original sound or was there some amount of th-stopping in Proto-West Germanic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14376" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-21T09:51:31.143" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T13:38:31.580" Title="West Germanic Th-Stopping" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20278" CreationDate="2016-11-20T19:36:14.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spelling with -th- (15c.) reflects widespread phonetic shift in Middle English that turned &lt;em&gt;-der&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;-ther&lt;/em&gt; in many words, perhaps reinforced in this case by Old Norse forms; spelling caught up to pronunciation in 1500s (compare mother (n.), weather (n.)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=father&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=father&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T19:36:14.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20278" CreationDate="2016-11-20T20:25:14.510" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Th-stopping of original Proto-Germanic voiced /d~ð/ to /d/ in all contexts is normal for Old English. It seems to be a common feature of West Germanic languages. The modern-day /ð/ in &quot;father&quot; is due to later changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a relevant ELU question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/141514&quot;&gt;/ð/ → /d/ shift in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When researching my answer to it, I found &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bsmith/SmithNEW8May.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dental fricatives and stops in Germanic: deriving diachronic processes from synchronic variation&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Bridget Smith 2007 which I think gives a good summary of the development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt; is reconstructed as having a series of voiceless plosive phonemes *p *t *k, a series of voiceless fricative phonemes *f *þ *h, and a series of voiced phonemes that neutralized the distinction between plosive and fricative (written sometimes as *b *d *g and sometimes as *ƀ *đ *ǥ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voiced series derived for the most part from the PIE breathy-voiced/aspirated voiced series, and from Verner's Law voicing of the PIE voiceless series (which in non-Verner environments became Proto-Germanic voiceless fricatives).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some uncertainly about whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner&amp;#39;s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verner's Law&lt;/a&gt; applied after Grimm's Law (voicing the fricatives [ɸ θ x] to [β ð ɣ] which then experienced fortition in some cases to [b d g]) or before (voicing the plosives [p t k] to [b d g], distinct in some way from the reflexes of PIE *b *d *g, which then experienced lenition in some cases to [β ð ɣ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reflexes of the voiced series in German are basically always plosives; voiced /b/ and /g/, and /t/ resulting from devoicing of earlier /d/. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reflexes of the voiced series in Old English are more dependent on the environment and the specific phoneme. As far as I know, *đ became /d/, realized as [d], unconditionally (e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heafod#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hēafod&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;hauƀuđą&lt;/em&gt;). *ƀ became /b/ word-initially, after nasals and when geminate, and merged with the reflex of *f elsewhere (intervocalically to the voiced allophone [v], and word-finally to the voiceless allophone [f]).  *ǥ stayed a single phoneme (ignoring the split of velars into palatal and non-palatal forms), but with allophonic variation between [g] and [ɣ], and possible word-final devoicing to /x/. (You can see a more complete summary of the sound changes from PIE up to English here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/131584/Books_2010_2019_072-2014-1_12.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/131584/Books_2010_2019_072-2014-1_12.pdf?sequence=1&lt;/a&gt;; be aware that it uses &quot;ʒ&quot; to represent [ɣ] for some reason)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Norse&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that Proto-Germanic *đ became [ð] intervocalically, but Wikipedia indicates that this should be considered an allophone of /d/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phone [ð] occured in Old English as an allophone of /þ/. In the development to modern English, there are a number of cases of substitution of [d] with [ð], especially before &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; (as Yellow Sky mentions). Smith says this is usually attributed to analogy or influence from Scandinavian languages. The reverse change of [ð] to [d] also occurred in some words, and there are a number of words ending in &lt;em&gt;-der&lt;/em&gt; that did not undergo this change and retain Old English /d/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll reproduce from the ELU post the list of affected words that I know of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE d [d] &gt; ModE th [ð]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE mōdor &gt;  mother&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE fæder &gt; father&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE gad(e)rian &gt; gather&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE tōgædere &gt; together&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE weder &gt; weather&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE hider, hwider, þæder/þider &gt; hither, whither, thither&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE þ [ð] &gt; ME d [d]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE spīþra &gt; spider&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE rōþor &gt; rudder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE morþer/morþor/morþur/morþre &gt; murder (this word may have been influenced by French forms)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE byrþen/berþen &gt; burden (unusually, this one does not end in *-er)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE d &gt; ModE d:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE hlǣd(d)er &gt; ladder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE blǣdre &gt; bladder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE nædre/næddre &gt; adder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE mædre/mæddre/mædere &gt; madder (the plant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE fōdor &gt; fodder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OE ūder &gt; udder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T13:38:31.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6042" CreationDate="2016-11-21T09:16:05.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured I'd give an answer with respect to the languages mentioned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to questions, Chinese is wh in situ, and consequently has no need for coverb stranding - contrast this with the translation (sorry if you hate this construction):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) 你在哪裡度假?&#xA;    Ni    zai nali  du-jia?&#xA;    You   at  where spend-holidays?&#xA;    Where did you spend you holidays at?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for RCs, Chinese already has another [+case] strategy, the resumptive pronoun, so by paradigmatic economy, coverb stranding is not needed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) 我用它搜尋網頁的工具&#xA;    Wo  yong ta  souxun wangye  de  gongju&#xA;    1sg use  3sg search webpage LIG tool&#xA;    the tool which I search for webpages with&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, English doesn't generally allow resumptive pronouns in simple RCs like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(3a) the tool which I search for webpages with (*it)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2016-11-23T19:31:08.593" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T19:31:08.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20277" CreationDate="2016-11-21T09:41:08.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can apply lemmatisation first and run the topic model on the lemmata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use a different tokenisation that tokenises &lt;em&gt;John's&lt;/em&gt; as [John] ['s] and add 's to the stopword list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can probably do more creative things, be sure to document what you have done to your corpus to make your results as reproducible as possible (note also that topic models aren't unique, you may want to try different random seeds and for a reproducible topic model you need to keep the random seed as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T09:41:08.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20339" CreationDate="2016-11-21T09:49:54.573" Score="-2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=unless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unless (conj.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mid-15c., earlier &lt;em&gt;onlesse&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;(not) on lesse (than)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(not) on a less compelling condition (than);&quot; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=less&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;less&lt;/a&gt;. The first syllable originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=on&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on&lt;/a&gt;, but the negative connotation and the lack of stress changed it to &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0_moins_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;à moins que&lt;/a&gt; = sauf si.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_menos_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a menos que&lt;/a&gt; means 'unless' in Spanish and Portuguese. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_meno_che&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a meno che&lt;/a&gt; means 'unless' in Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above substantiates the same semantic shift in at least 4 languages,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from  the  prepositional phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a/à/un ← on (preposition) +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;less (adverb)&lt;/strong&gt; +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;than (comparative preposition)   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that semantically shifted to mean '&lt;strong&gt;if not&lt;/strong&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What semantic notions underlie this semantic shift from &lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; to  &lt;strong&gt;if not&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T03:43:15.080" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T03:43:15.080" Title="How did 'less than' semantically shift to mean 'if not'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2016-11-21T17:21:05.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addittion to the vast majority of Fenno-Ugric languages already mentioned here (of which perhaps only Estonian with its &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tema&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was left unmentioned), Modern Standard Chinese does not distinguish animate / inanimate and/or masculine / feminine in the 3rd person singular, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, the word ta1 (first tone) is pronounced similar in every tone, but the actual meaning is to be guessed either by a context in oral speech or by the character for the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;它 = it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;他 = he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;她 = she&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every one of these free characters is pronounced alike (&lt;strong&gt;ta&lt;/strong&gt; in the first tone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T17:21:05.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-21T19:58:33.857" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using their list for a project that incorporates some techniques of authorship analysis.  I don't know what to do with &quot;it's&quot;, though.  I obviously cannot ignore the apostrophe and count it as &quot;its&quot;, nor should I simply tokenise the components because then I would be over-counting the ratio of &quot;it&quot; to &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, then, do I count &quot;'s&quot; as equivalent to &quot;is&quot;, or do I leave out all occurrences of &quot;it's&quot; altogether?  Of course, I know I could do either, but what would be the better choice in terms of preserving statistical distinctions amongst authors?  At the moment I'm inclined to count &quot;'s&quot; as equivalent to &quot;is&quot;, but I don't have good reasons for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T10:22:14.817" Title="How to deal with &quot;it's&quot; when using Miller Newman Friedman list in a corpus?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20308" CreationDate="2016-11-22T03:23:06.620" Score="6" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some words or phrases that are socially acceptable for some groups to say, but not others. A famous example in American culture is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nigger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;N-word&lt;/a&gt;, which is acceptable for blacks to say, but not other groups (sometimes this practice is referred to as &quot;N-word privileges&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A film example of this type of word is in &lt;em&gt;Gran Torino&lt;/em&gt; where two men uses racist slurs affectionately like &quot;Pollack&quot; and &quot;Italian prick&quot;, then when the Hmong teenager thinks they want him to repeat it, they are very offended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=GtSJOUOEJ8o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtube.com/watch?v=GtSJOUOEJ8o&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be ethnic either. There are some women who are comfortable using the term &quot;bitch&quot; to refer to themselves and homosexuals comfortable using &quot;fag&quot;, but they would not be acceptable things for others to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general, neutral term for this sort of word or phrase that is socially acceptable for some groups to use, but not others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14564" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-22T09:43:11.290" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T04:17:41.133" Title="Is there a general term for certain words or phrases that are socially acceptable for some groups to say, but not others?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-22T06:36:55.293" Score="2" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question/problem I have is related to the way recent generative approaches focus on the &lt;em&gt;Lexicon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Syntax&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if &lt;em&gt;Principles and Parameters&lt;/em&gt; can be considered a &lt;em&gt;projectionist&lt;/em&gt; frame, or if it is considered a broader frame which emcompasses both &lt;em&gt;projectionist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;neoconstructionist&lt;/em&gt; points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are neoconstructionist approaches against PyP?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is Minimalism a chomskian reaction against (neo)constructionism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14565" LastEditorUserId="14565" LastEditDate="2016-11-25T22:12:50.337" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T00:02:46.217" Title="Principles and Parameters: projectionist?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20370" CreationDate="2016-11-22T07:02:38.250" Score="0" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conceptually, I understand the difference between underlying (?phonological),  surface (?phonetic) and lexical (?) &quot;levels&quot;, but what &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; these levels? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they are just a heuristic, a sort of scientific shortcut on which all linguists agree, because they have explanatory value... but I'd like your expert input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:33:12.083" Title="What is a &quot;level&quot; of grammar?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20262" CreationDate="2016-11-22T08:19:52.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following illustrates my second answer to this question, which is that &quot;particles&quot; have no part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Earlier descriptions of subcategorization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that first generation of great young desriptivists from MIT, Robert Lees gave arbitrary and artificial category symbols to express restrictions that tree neighbors place on heads.  I'm not sure I've got the following example exactly right, and I suspect Lees wrote it tongue-in-cheek: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vt32 -&gt; &quot;give&quot;  (Robert Lees, &lt;em&gt;Grammar of English nominalization&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realizing that CFG places no restriction on the &lt;em&gt;names&lt;/em&gt; of non-terminal symbols (after all he invented CFG), Chomsky proposed a more natural notation to say within the names of the categories of heads what near neighbors could be present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V -&gt; CS (Chomsky, &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the theory of syntax&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means that the non-terminal &quot;V&quot; is replaced with a name made from a set of feature specifications saying what tree sisters could be present for the specific verb that replaced this non-terminal symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this proposal of Chomsky's has an odd property that makes it seem to me to be artificial.  A subcategorization restriction has to be said twice.  You wind up with trees having, for instance, a transitive verb dominated by a symbol whose name says it's transitive and, also, a following NP object. We shouldn't have to do it twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better way to simply not use special categories like &quot;V&quot;, &quot;N&quot;, &quot;P&quot; for heads.  There is no syntactic language evidence I know of for their existence (though there may be morphological evidence).  Their only purpose is to let us keep rules concerning words separate from rules that describe phrase structure.  I guess the reason for this is that dictionaries are customarily different books from grammars.  But this is not evidence from language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Categorial Grammar (CG) does not require category symbols for heads comparable to &quot;V&quot;, &quot;N&quot;, &quot;P&quot; and so on.  This lets us avoid the issue of how to handle the subcategorization of &quot;V&quot;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Illustration of Categorial Grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logicians concerned with the logic of natural language have a fondness for CG, invented by the logician Ajdukiewicz, because the grammatical structure of expressions corresponds in a straightforward way to their semantic structure.  Grammatical categories are structures built up with the slash connective, which gives the category of a syntactic function after the slash and the category of the function value before the slash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;I tidied up the room&quot;, S  &#xA;    /            \  &#xA;&quot;I&quot;, NP    &quot;tidied up the room&quot;, S/NP  &#xA;                    /               \  &#xA;         &quot;tidied up&quot;, (S/NP)/NP    &quot;the room&quot;, NP &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each node of the CG tree for a syntactic structure consists of a constituent and its category.  In place of a &quot;V&quot; for the category of &quot;tidied up&quot;, we get the category &quot;(S/NP)/NP&quot;, which can be read as meaning that this constituent has two NP dependencies which, when satisfied, will yield a constituent of category S.  There is no &quot;V&quot; or &quot;VP&quot;.  In defense of the CG version of grammatical structure, notice that it correctly predicts that &quot;and&quot; cannot be used to conjoin a transitive verb with category (S/NP)/NP with an intransitive verb, which would have a different category: S/NP, because only expressions of the same category can be conjoined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This illustration I have given does not get right the linear order of a grammatical function expression and its argument expression.  More careful formulations of CG can deal with that detail.  Emmon Bach proposed a special version of the slash operation, &quot;right wrap&quot;, that we could appeal to get the NP &quot;the room&quot; to the left of the the &quot;up&quot; when &quot;tidy up&quot; combines with &quot;the room&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the slash operators that are required to make CG work to be artificial, but there is a way to adapt CFG to get the advantages of CG.  Noticing some similarity between the information provided at each node of a CG tree and that provided in a rewrite rule of PSG, let us redo the CG tree above with PS rules at each node:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Categorial Grammar partially converted to PSG&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; &quot;I tidied up the room&quot;  &#xA;    /            \  &#xA;NP -&amp;gt; &quot;I&quot;    S -&amp;gt; NP &quot;tidied up the room&quot;  &#xA;                    /                \  &#xA;         S -&amp;gt; NP &quot;tidied up&quot; NP    NP -&amp;gt; &quot;the room&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this form, what would be a derivation in a CFG has been expressed in tree form, with each non-leaf node produced by applying one daughter rewrite rule to the other daughter rewrite rule. Since what were the constituent and category at each node in the CG tree are no longer in two separate parts, if we still wish to refer to constituent and category, we must define those to be the pronunciation part and the non-pronunciation part of a PS rule, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This revision is unlike a real CG derivation tree in two respects.  (1) There is no way to pick out which non-terminal in a PS rule represents the argument.  (2) The rewrite operation of CFG is not technically a function, since applying it can give ambiguous results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for (1), in an earlier post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;How can we describe the vertical dimension ...&lt;/a&gt;, I argued that the non-terminals of CFG do have a place along a height scale, and when information about grammatical relations is added, we can pick out the argument of a PS rule as being a lowest or most oblique non-terminal.  In the above illustration, we now have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S1 -&amp;gt; NP1 &quot;tidied up&quot; NP2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the NP2 is the lowest point and consequently the non-terminal representing the argument.  As for (2), in that post I also described how the rewrite operation of CFG can be reinterpreted as a substitution function.  So now we have a full reconstruction of CG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Representation of discontinuous constituents&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side benefit of this reworking of CG, it becomes possible to describe discontinuous constituents without making any special assumptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S1-&amp;gt; NP1 &quot;tidied&quot; NP2 &quot;up&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;up&quot; is given no category here.  There is no longer anything corresponding to the &quot;P&quot; of CFG, nor does &quot;up&quot; have any category in the above suggested sense of &quot;category&quot; as meaning the non-pronunciation part of a CFG rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T18:53:14.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20285" CreationDate="2016-11-22T09:47:01.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your research question (authorship attribution) it is obviously the best to treat &quot;it's&quot; as a word of its own or as two words &quot;it&quot; and &quot;'s&quot;. Whether a text has &quot;it's&quot; or &quot;it is&quot; may give you a clue who has authored it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T09:47:01.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20289" CreationDate="2016-11-22T10:07:44.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;level&lt;/em&gt; is a grammatical representation of a language expression. Sometimes &lt;em&gt;stratum&lt;/em&gt; is used to mean the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transformational grammar is multi-level, or multistratal, since in the transformational derivation of a language expression, each transformation that applies gives you a new level.  Many transformations are involved, so there are many levels for each expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are many levels, the levels are all the same types of thing -- trees.  There was a controversy between transformationalists and stratificationalists (like Sidney Lamb) who argued that there were several levels, only a few, but they were of disparate types.  This seems also to have been the view of the American structuralists, who complained that transformational theories were guilty of &quot;mixing levels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, GPSG, is a single-level or monostratal theory.  Any given language expression is described by a grammar with a single tree structure, not a sequence of trees as in TG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is conceptually possible to have a monostratal grammatical theory that includes phonology as well as syntax.  To my knowledge, I am the only one to have proposed such a theory, here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15148/eliminating-intermediary-forms-to-account-for-production-and-perception/15156#15156&quot;&gt;Eliminating intermediary forms ...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T19:18:42.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20298" CreationDate="2016-11-22T15:12:36.153" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about semantic selection and came to know about the difference between semantic selection and word sense disambiguation. The difference is that its aim is to find the most adequate translation, not the most adequate sense. Thus, it is not necessary to choose between a series of fine-grained senses if all these senses result in the same final translation. But can someone please explain this with help of an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12845" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-22T16:04:14.273" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T17:25:52.420" Title="Difference between semantic selection and WSD?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19695" CreationDate="2016-11-22T16:36:46.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Probably, by the looks of it, you are in for a lot of primary research, though, I'd suggest you consider flipping it upside down, for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to make a poll with questions like &quot;What emotions do you&#xA;  associate with the word &quot;ka:men&quot;?&quot; and compare whether these answers&#xA;  are closer to the true representation of the word rather than answers&#xA;  to the questions like &quot;Which of these objects would you guess &quot;ka:men&quot;&#xA;  to represent?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have a hard time collecting a sufficiently large number of responses to validate your analysis. However, you could turn this around and look at how various languages express certain primitive / instinctive emotions. This wiki entry: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias&lt;/a&gt; has a fair amount of reliable data both for emotions and for things that have characteristic sounds - these could serve as a reference point for both theories as well as a pretty solid ground for your research hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is by no means supposed to imply not to conduct your experiment, but it might be a lot more tricky to conduct than you think. A fascinating read that would also be appropriate for the second half of your questions would be: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.hu/books?id=oEO0BQAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.hu/books?id=oEO0BQAAQBAJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you do not have the time to read it cover to cover, its overview of language origin theories would be a solid background. The experiment design sections may also be beneficial for your own poll setup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T16:36:46.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20295" CreationDate="2016-11-22T16:39:05.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give an example:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English and French (as well as many other langugages) do not make a distinction between inclusive vs exclusive &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; (lexically at least, we can ignore obviously available hints like prosody for this purpose &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you eat fish &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; meat? - Fish. (exclusive or: choose one of the disjuncts)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you eat fish &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; meat? - Yes. (inclusive or: true if any of the disjuncts is true)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Est-ce que tu manges du poisson &lt;strong&gt;ou&lt;/strong&gt; de la viande? - Du poisson.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Est-ce que tu manges du poisson &lt;strong&gt;ou&lt;/strong&gt; de la viande? - Oui.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish, on the other hand, does make this distinction:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Syötkö kalaa &lt;strong&gt;vai&lt;/strong&gt; lihaa? - Kalaa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Syötkö kalaa &lt;strong&gt;tai&lt;/strong&gt; lihaa? - Syön. (&quot;syön&quot; = &quot;I eat&quot;; this is the Finnish way of giving a positive answer to a yes-no question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Now when disambiguating the English word &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;, we could make the following semantic disambiguation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclusive or  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inclusive or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When translating the English sentence to French, this distinction is irrelevant: Since French doesn't lexically realize the difference between inclusive vs. exclusive or either, we don't need to make the distinction in the first place, as both sense will result in the same translation (&lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when translating English to Finnish, the distinction does become relevant: Depending on whether &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; is used in the exclusive or the inclusive sense, the translation will result in either &lt;em&gt;vai&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tai&lt;/em&gt;, the two words having a different meaning in Finnish.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, for English -- French, we only need the most adequate translation (which will be &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; anyway) and can igonre the further difference between exclusive vs. inclusive &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt;, which corresponds to &lt;strong&gt;semantic selection&lt;/strong&gt;, while for English -- Finnish, we actually need the most adequate sense, so here a &lt;strong&gt;WSD&lt;/strong&gt; is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;1 and let's also ignore the rather unplausible third reading where we have a yes-no question but with an exclusive or, to which a valid answer would &quot;yes&quot; if the adressee eats either fish or meat, but not both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-22T17:25:52.420" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T17:25:52.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20301" CreationDate="2016-11-22T19:04:29.207" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a popular account somewhere that contended that 1 did not used to be considered a number, with common sentences like &quot;He has a number of friends in England.&quot; or some such as evidence. Is this true&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5523" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T20:01:30.657" Title="Was 1 considered a number under older meanings of number?" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20300" CreationDate="2016-11-22T19:42:05.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that “a number of friends” means “two or more friends”, though one could be pedantic and insist that “one” and “zero” are also numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, the bible of ancient and mediaeval mathematics, Euclid’s “Elements”, defines “number” in book VII, definition 2 with the words: “A number is the multitude composed of units” ( ̓Αριθμὸς δὲ τὸ ἐκ μονάδων συγκείμενον πλῆθος), which clearly means that the “unit” (one) is not a number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It remained thus for a long time in English too. The Oxford English Dictionary has this quotation from a 14th-century English translation of a Latin book: “Þe secounde odde noumbre [L. numerus impar], þat is, þe nombre of fyue”. In other words, the first odd number is not 1 but 3; the second odd number is thus 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern mathematics, beginning with Descartes, “number” has been redefined to include not only “one”, but also “zero”, and then eventually the negative numbers, fractions, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We discussed this also here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5326/why-did-the-ancient-greek-count-1-in-case-of-perfect-numbers-but-not-otherwise/5332#5332&quot;&gt;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5326/why-did-the-ancient-greek-count-1-in-case-of-perfect-numbers-but-not-otherwise/5332#5332&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:33.187" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T20:01:30.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="41" CreationDate="2016-11-23T14:29:07.103" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak Korean and am learning Japanese. Through those endeavors I have noticed a tremendous amount of overlap between the two languages--the kind of overlap that can't be coincidental in general. For this reason until proven otherwise I would start by assuming any overlap is the result of a shared history and even a shared geography (Japan was connected to Korea roughly 500 generations ago during the last ice age).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and direct answer to your question is Japanese and Koreans both use ~ga as subject markers but use them differently. It's too complicated to go into here but you can find guides about their usage like &lt;a href=&quot;http://jlptbootcamp.com/2012/10/jlpt-n5-grammar-japanese-particle-ga/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jlptbootcamp.com/2012/10/jlpt-n5-grammar-japanese-particle-ga/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean -ga was used similarly a number of generations ago and the usage is related? Knowing nothing more it's hard to say definitively. But you should also know that in general Japanese and Koreans use subject and object particles in identical manners and a few prepositions even overlap in meaning and pronunciation. Given all that and the 16th century onward usage in Korea, I also lean heavily toward borrowing rather than a cognate or coincidence to explain the overlap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14575" LastEditorUserId="14575" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T03:47:00.230" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T03:47:00.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T19:51:22.370" Score="5" ViewCount="1070" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the fact proper names are somewhat fixed in language (often not translated and also do not tend to change even in light of a change in attributes from which it gained its name), mean that it is no longer a question of linguistics? Rather confused by its status. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14578" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T10:13:46.880" Title="Is the study of proper names really a branch of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20304" CreationDate="2016-11-23T20:51:54.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proper names are created in many languages, often by taking an interpretable phrase and using it (e.g. the Shona names Chipo &quot;gift&quot;, Farai &quot;be happy (pl)!&quot;), the name of the Tanzanian author Kezilahabi &quot;came from a bad place&quot;). They frequently have special morphology (different inflectional affixes; only they take the &quot;honorific&quot; prefix; often wider use of and special forms of diminutive affixation) and syntax (especially obligatory vs. prohibited definiteness marking). Even the study of why people name their child &quot;death approaches&quot; is within the sphere of one form of linguistics, sociolinguistics. So I can't see what wouldn't be linguistic about the study of proper names .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T20:51:54.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20304" CreationDate="2016-11-23T21:54:39.647" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proper names are nouns, albeit with specific characteristics, so they play the roles other nouns play in syntax (subject, object, etc). They also partake in morphology; if a language has genders, it will distinguish between &lt;em&gt;Cláudio&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Cláudia&lt;/em&gt; just like it distinguishes between &lt;em&gt;gato&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gata&lt;/em&gt;; if a language has cases, it will have &lt;em&gt;Cladius&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Claudii&lt;/em&gt;. The etymology of proper names can be studied just like that of other words, and it is subject to the usual phonetic transformation (&lt;em&gt;Charles&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;Carlos&lt;/em&gt;); proper names can also be borrowed from language to language. They can even be productive in terms of derivation: Newtonian, Trotskyist, Spoonerism, Franco-Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess they are a quite proper object of Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T21:54:39.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20286" CreationDate="2016-11-24T03:54:49.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an outsider (White) in a Black family for over 50 years, I can think of some like &quot;that Negro&quot;, a put-down aimed at an African-American. But I would not use it myself because it is up to members of the group i.e. African-Americans, to decide the word is apt in a particular case. In contrast, the use of the word cat for a person, very common, is one I might use but it has no ethnic connotation to it, much like guy, and no judgment involved. I think asymmetry is a good word for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12562" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T03:54:49.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20286" CreationDate="2016-11-24T04:17:41.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;reappropriation&quot; or &quot;reclamation&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is the cultural process by which a social group reclaims terms that were used as a pejorative, one can call these words &quot;reappropriated&quot; or &quot;reclaimed&quot; words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Althoughts these terms are sociological rather than linguistical terms)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3574" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T04:17:41.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20304" CreationDate="2016-11-24T10:13:46.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namenforschung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Onomastics¹&lt;/a&gt; has a big overlap with linguistics, specially with historical linguistics (derivation and meaning of names, sound shifts, etc.). Some valuable historical linguistic information is only available by the study of proper names (several languages are otherwise completely undocumented). It is traditionally seen as a branch of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are non-linguistic aspects of onomastics: The study of historical professions (giving raise to modern surnames in Europe), cultural and religious practices reflected in proper names, taboos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The synthesis of all those fields makes onomastics a fascinating discipline, but there are very few posts for researchers in onomastics out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ I link to German language wikipedia because it is much more informative than the English version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T10:13:46.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-24T10:39:00.903" Score="2" ViewCount="1410" Body="&lt;p&gt;διαβάλλειν (dia-ballein)&#xA;&quot;Dia&quot; means through (by the way of; or from one end or side of something to the other (across); or between) and &quot;ballein&quot; means throwing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now online there are two descriptions that I found most often to describe the meaning of this word: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;throwing across; slander, accusing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to cast apart; to throw apart, or to scatter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the pure etymology of this word; how did the word dia-ballein transform from 'through throwing' into something accusatory or divided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14584" LastEditorUserId="790" LastEditDate="2016-11-25T03:27:09.723" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T08:38:57.117" Title="Where did the Greek word diaballein got it's meaning from accusing and divide from?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-12-08T17:19:34.143" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20313" CreationDate="2016-11-24T11:37:41.953" Score="0" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been given a script where the Persian scholar Ibn Rustah is referred to as &quot;Ibn&quot;. As I understand it, &quot;Ibn&quot; is part of the patronymic &lt;em&gt;nasab&lt;/em&gt; and shouldn't be used as if it were a first name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understanding it correctly, or is there any situation in which it could be used that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the interests of being able to supply the producers wi an alternative, what would be the proper way to refer to a respected authority? &quot;Ahmad&quot;, &quot;Ibn Rustah&quot;, some form of honorific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14586" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T14:51:55.560" Title="Use of &quot;Ibn&quot; in Arabic names" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-11-25T03:42:46.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20312" CreationDate="2016-11-24T14:46:15.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ibn&quot; means &quot;son of ...&quot; and is never used as a first name (ism) in Arabic. To address or refer to someone just as &quot;Ibn&quot; is a sign of gross ignorance. Ibn Rustah's close family would have called him by his first name Aḥmad. Otherwise his contemporaries would have addressed him as Abū ʽAlī, his kunyā.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T14:51:55.560" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T14:51:55.560" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20316" CreationDate="2016-11-24T21:31:11.590" Score="2" ViewCount="659" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this is a silly question, but: is there a standardised symbol or abbreviation that can be used in formal definitions to refer to particles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing &quot;PARTICLE&quot; or &quot;PART&quot; sounds...silly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T21:46:59.147" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T22:00:03.570" Title="Symbol or abbreviation for a particle?" Tags="&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20315" CreationDate="2016-11-24T21:35:16.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In interlinear glosses, I think &lt;code&gt;PTC&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;PTCL&lt;/code&gt; are most commonly used to abbreviate &quot;particle&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;PRT&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;PART&lt;/code&gt; are sometimes used too, but should rather be avoided due to confusion with &quot;preterite&quot; and &quot;participle&quot;, respectively.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But the name actually doesn't matter that much given that you provide a list of the abbreviations that you used with their intended meaning (which is always good practice to do because of the lack of a definite universal standardisation).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In formal definitions, I generally wouldn't use abbreviations but always terminology as precise as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reference:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt; – probably the most standard-like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/9783110311358/9783110311358.xxv/9783110311358.xxv.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Extension of the Leipzig Glossing rules&lt;/a&gt; (I didn't compare it in much detail, but the original Leipzig rules don't include an abbreviation for &quot;particle&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of glossing abbreviations on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T22:00:03.570" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T22:00:03.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T05:20:39.747" Score="0" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have scientific papers in pdf format and typically contain section. i wanted to know if an input term(s) appear in the introduction/ background or conclusion/ discussion section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how could this be done using NLP as in parsing techniques? Does machine learning play a role here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14592" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T05:20:39.747" Title="find if a terms appears in specific pdf sections" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T09:44:32.503" Score="7" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when a word is borrowed from one language to another, what is an inflected form in the source language becomes an uninflected form in the target language.  Examples of this are the Italian words &quot;salame&quot;, &quot;panino&quot;, and &quot;zucchino&quot;, whose plural forms &quot;salami&quot;, &quot;panini&quot;, and &quot;zucchini&quot; got borrowed into English as unmarked singular forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this kind of borrowing?  I'm tempted to call it a &quot;reanalytic borrowing&quot; but that term doesn't appear to be in general use, and besides which probably covers a greater range of phenomena than what I've described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9370" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T09:03:14.543" Title="Term for borrowing an inflected form as an uninflected form" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-25T10:59:18.170" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories out there that use X-bar theory but deny movement (like Dependency Syntax can)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14597" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T12:09:59.303" Title="X-bar theory without movement" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17442" CreationDate="2016-11-25T13:45:39.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Lobner's observation about (11a).  The &quot;Really?&quot; does not express doubt about whether Bob's prospective arrival is fortunate, but rather expresses doubt about whether it will actually take place.  In the part you've quoted, Lobner does not say anything explicitly about (11b), so let's forget (11b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not clear about what exactly you are asking. Are you asking us our opinions about whether Lobner's observation about (11a) is true?  Well, then I have answered your question.  It is simply a question of fact.  Others may disagree, and I wouldn't be surprised it they do.  If you disagree, well, since you're an English speaker, you're entitled to your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-25T13:45:39.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29469" CreationDate="2016-11-26T09:14:32.733" Score="6" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short&lt;/strong&gt; : what's the final &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;déḱm̥t&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Full details :&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; root for &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;/em&gt; is traditionally defined as &lt;em&gt;déḱm̥/déḱm̥t&lt;/em&gt;(ᵃ). The final &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; may be analyzed as a casual ending, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/d%C3%A9%E1%B8%B1m%CC%A5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as a &quot;collective form&quot;&lt;/a&gt;; Szemerényi describes déḱm̥ as derived from &lt;em&gt;déḱm̥t&lt;/em&gt;(ᵇ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; is required by various languages, like OCS &lt;em&gt;desętĭ&lt;/em&gt; and Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;dešimt&lt;/em&gt;(ᵃ). Likewise, according to Don Ringe, the Proto-Germanic form for &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;/em&gt; is derived from &lt;em&gt;déḱm̥t&lt;/em&gt;, surfaced as &lt;em&gt;déḱm̥d&lt;/em&gt;(ᶜ), hence &lt;em&gt;tekun&lt;/em&gt;(ᵈ) leading to Gothic &lt;em&gt;taíhun&lt;/em&gt;(ᵉ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt; : I would like to know the details behind this &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; : if it's a collective form (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de%C5%A1imt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;marking collective number (group of ten)&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), is there any other example of a PIE word using -t as a collective form? The only way I know to create collective PIE forms is (for direct cases) by adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_nominals#Grammatical_categories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ending &lt;em&gt;-h₂&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to the stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help, any reference would be appreciated !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/786/what-is-the-relationship-between-the-pie-roots-dek%E1%B9%83-and-k%E1%B9%83t%C3%B3m?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) See e.g. (Szemerényi) Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, 8.5.2 p.223&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) (Szemerényi) Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, 8.5.3 p.226&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/d%C3%A9%E1%B8%B1m%CC%A5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/déḱm̥ (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, 2.2.4(iv) p.20&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, 3.2.2(i) p.81 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e) Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, 3.2.2(ii) p.87 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T20:39:49.963" Title="(PIE) déḱm̥ vs déḱm̥t (ten)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-26T13:07:34.203" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20322/how-did-the-romans-pronounce-roman-numerals&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; shows that Roman numerals did not take advantage of the regularities that were present in Latin. &lt;em&gt;Quīnquāgintā&lt;/em&gt; (L) is clearly built from &lt;em&gt;quīnque&lt;/em&gt; (V), yet their Roman numerals aren't related. The numeral for &lt;em&gt;octōgintā&lt;/em&gt; (LXXX) is only structurally similar to &lt;em&gt;octō&lt;/em&gt; (VIII). I wonder why they didn't have a symbol representing the morpheme &lt;em&gt;gintā&lt;/em&gt; (say, G), and write, for example, &quot;VG&quot; for &lt;em&gt;quīnquāgintā&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;VIIIG&quot; for &lt;em&gt;octōgintā&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be an indication that the Roman numeric system was created by someone who spoke a language different from Latin? Or is it common that the numeric notation is less regular than the actual pronunciation of the numbers? In the case of Chinese, the number notation seems to match pretty clearly with the spoken language. Which case is more common, and do we have any explanations for the cases where the two don't match?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The answer given so far indicate that incomplete match between Roman numbers and Latin is not particularly strange. Note that I'm asking about the wider picture: is it more common for the systems of writing number to match the language (as in the case of Chinese), or do they usually evolve independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T03:57:13.967" Title="Are numeric notations independent of the languages spoken by their creators?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20325" CreationDate="2016-11-26T14:00:51.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The numeric notation in Latin is actually most likely pictorial. The I digit is a single finger, the V digit is a hand with 5 fingers, X digit is two hands with 10 fingers. Alternative hypothesis is that it was notches and the 5th and 10th element is different the same way when you count using 4 notches and the 5th notch comes with crossing the whole group. The higher digits have different origins, e.g. 1000 was typically written using Greek letter Φ (phi), which is the origin of D as 500 (half of the phi grapheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you look at it, the pictorial nature of the notation &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; reflect Latin language because it is still largely decimal, it just simply is not as analytic as we are used to. Furthermore Latin numerals 18 and 19 are expressed most typically as 2-from-20 and 1-from-twenty (undeviginti, duodeviginti), which actually is reflected quite well by IXX and (the less frequent) IIXX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T14:00:51.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="641" CreationDate="2016-11-26T14:10:19.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Czech seems to be developing some sort of definite/indefinite articles with definite ones being evolved from demonstrative pronoun &quot;ten&quot; (this), while indefinite ones from the undetermined pronominal adjective &quot;nějaký&quot; (some), which has no connection to the numeral &quot;one&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you this is far from fully grammaticalised form but even now the uses are very close to the typical one for artcicles (particularly the definite one seems to be on its path to becoming fairly obligatory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Je tam (&lt;em&gt;nějaký&lt;/em&gt;) chlap. - There is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; guy over there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) A co &lt;em&gt;ten&lt;/em&gt; chlap dělá? - And what does &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; guy do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first example, the emerging article can be easily omitted, in the second one, it would sound fairly strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T14:10:19.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17595" CreationDate="2016-11-26T15:00:46.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please be aware that this peculiarity in German (and other languages mentioned here) affects only the combinations of small order numbers, i.e. tens and units and their iterations when these are reused again due to the lack of higher order numbers (tens of thousands, tens of millions - if we had a separate word for this akin to Greek &quot;khillia&quot;, most likely this would not happen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your question mentions, there are lots of compound words for smaller numerals, particularly the ones between 10-20 - these operate on exactly the same principle but may be further on the univerbisation scale. &quot;fourteen&quot; also gives the order in reverse to the typical one, the I believe applies in German and definitely in Slavic languages (Czech &quot;třináct&quot; comes from &quot;tři-na-deset&quot; or &quot;three on ten&quot;, not so dissimilar from &quot;three-and-twenty&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T15:00:46.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2016-11-26T17:27:05.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sufformative is used in Hebrew to describe the portion of a verb before the suffix is added. In some cases this form will change this portion of the verb when a pronominal suffix is added&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14605" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T17:27:05.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20325" CreationDate="2016-11-26T17:47:49.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking why 'eight tens' is written as 'LXXX' instead of 'VIIIG', where 'G' means 'times ten'.  Instead of adding a character for 'times ten', they applied the operation 'times ten' to each character in 'VIII'.  They were already using the position of characters to indicate 'plus' (or 'minus').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T17:47:49.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-26T18:06:02.483" Score="2" ViewCount="3392" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy hit the ball out of the yard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we think of the words which make up the sentence, we realize that none of them have much inflectional possibility. The conjugation of &lt;em&gt;hit&lt;/em&gt; is so uniform that one wonders why the third person singular even varies from the rest. &lt;em&gt;(I hit, you hit, he hits, we hit, you all hit, they hit.)&lt;/em&gt; The nouns only inflect to show whether they are singular or plural. &lt;em&gt;(Boy, boys, ball, balls, yard, yards)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem that word order takes over all these functions. Word order shows us that &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt; is the subject, the one doing the hitting, not &lt;em&gt;ball&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt;. It also shows us that &lt;em&gt;ball&lt;/em&gt; is the object, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt;, and that &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt; is part of a prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the English language come to rely on word order instead of inflection? Are there any advantages to this system that enabled it to spread? Is it safe to say that Indo-European languages start out being more inflected, and then become less inflected over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I am asking two questions, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is English this way? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a trend of Indo-European languages becoming less inflected over time? If so, why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T15:40:51.900" Title="Why did English evolve to have so little inflection?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-11-29T21:09:15.070" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20332" CreationDate="2016-11-26T19:39:03.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a trend for languages, in general, to lose inflection of a certain type, and Indo-European languages manifest that trend. Particular facts of English have encouraged that development, and different facts of Indic or Greek encouraged similar developments. The main fact about Indo-European morphology (or, late versions if its morphology) that presages the doom of the inflectional system is its arbitrariness. Nominal gender, number and case affixes were not transparent, one form for one meaning; likewise verbal inflection. As more arbitrary differences accumulate and patterns become manifested over fewer and fewer forms whose unifying nature is harder to discern, it becomes more likely that former distinctions will no longer be maintained. Various phonological facts, especially vowel reductions, contribute to the specifics of why Modern English is so reduced, compared to Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T19:39:03.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3845" CreationDate="2016-11-27T02:09:25.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; comes from germanic * &lt;em&gt;hwó&lt;/em&gt;, which an instrumental case of * &lt;em&gt;hwaz&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;). This comes from PIE * &lt;em&gt;kʷod&lt;/em&gt; (the same meaning), composed of * &lt;em&gt;kʷ-&lt;/em&gt; (iterrogative/indeterminate morheme) and * &lt;em&gt;-o-d&lt;/em&gt;, ending for neuter pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Como/Come&lt;/em&gt; derives from Latin &lt;em&gt;quo modo&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;by which way/mode&lt;/em&gt;), where the first part &lt;em&gt;quo&lt;/em&gt; is ablative case of &lt;em&gt;quod&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt;), bringing us to the same exact origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T02:09:25.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20323" CreationDate="2016-11-27T11:26:20.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends if you're ready to believe it means 'two hands' in which case the 't' is the last letter of the root of *komtos &gt; PG *xamðaz &gt; NE 'hand'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T11:26:20.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2016-11-27T15:28:32.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aboculus&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;aveugle&lt;/strong&gt; is totally regular and not very complicated development (i.e. can be explained by three or four processes that do not intertwine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) lenition of obstruents intervocallically gives you &lt;strong&gt;b&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;k&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) post-accentual vowels being elided results for both &lt;strong&gt;u&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) in a closed syllable, short stressed &lt;strong&gt;o&gt;oe&lt;/strong&gt; (today spelt ; but this did not go through /u/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these changes occur in myriad other examples (sudor &gt; sueur; opera &gt; oeuvre, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rendition &lt;strong&gt;avugle&lt;/strong&gt; may be just freak of transcription or it might be dialectal (in some dialects, even accented short &lt;strong&gt;o&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;, which was typically reserved only for the unaccented one) and the  grapheme might represent /u/ sound, not /y/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T15:28:32.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20332" CreationDate="2016-11-27T15:40:51.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically there is only so much in the way grammar systems tend to simplify on their own and this usually does not lead into complete loss of entire categories on such a grand scale (typically there are only some regularisations by analogies etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why English lost most of its inflection actually has very little to do with grammar at all - it is caused by sound change. &lt;strong&gt;English heavily reduced all non-accented syllables, which, given the IE inflection being based on suffixes and endings, resulted in mergers and loss of most of these endings.&lt;/strong&gt; Note that when the inflection is stressed, it is typically also preserved, i.e. the shortest words like the various forms of verb to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; or the pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same process happened in French - all post-accentual vowels were eventually reduced and original word-end consonants followed the same fate. Again, given the way IE endings look like, this was not a particularly healthy environment and thus French lost all its declension and eventually large part of conjugations (until it developed its own based on alteration of stem vowels and consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the specific requirements to create new inflection, there is indeed a sort of a &quot;trend&quot; to lose inflection (given how unbelievably complex the PIE language was), however new inflections still arise, e.g. the Romance languages evolved a new synthetic future tense, Polish turned the Slavic analytical past tense into synthetic one, French can be considered developing prefix-based conjugation (but most traditional looks into analysing the language are not yet ready to accept it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T15:40:51.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-27T15:47:19.963" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ཁང་&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [Wylie: khang], the Tibetan word for 'building' used as a part in many everyday vocabulary items sounds strangely familiar to the word of the same meaning in Farsi, which is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;خانه&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [khåna].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tibetan vocabulary stock includes such samples as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;སྨན་ཁང་&lt;/strong&gt; [sman.khang], a hospital&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ཟ་ཁང་&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [za.khang], a restaurant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ཚོང་ཁང་&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [tshong.khang], a shop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ཆང་ཁང་&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [chang.khang], a bar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ཇ་ཁང་&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [ja.khang], a tea house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the historical and cultural connections between the Muslim and Tibetan cultures, is this word a loan from Farsi or is it of Sino-Tibetan stock?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what are the cognate words in other Sino-Tibetan languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T15:47:19.963" Title="What is the etymology of Tibetan ཁང་ [khang]?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20283" CreationDate="2016-11-27T15:56:30.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I’m leaving &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt; I get a pay rise.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm leaving &lt;strong&gt;on ye olde&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; lesse compelling condition than if&lt;/strong&gt; I get a payrise.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no native speaker but this sounds fairly synonymous to me - me getting a payrise is a condition for me to not leave and anything less than that means I am leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Sorry, just could not resist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-11-27T15:56:30.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4235" CreationDate="2016-11-27T16:37:50.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the Latin /g/ has anything to do with the French /d/, actually. French generally shows epenthetic /d/ between historic /n/ and /r/ (although there are some exceptions, such as &lt;em&gt;vinrent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tinrent,&lt;/em&gt; and some words such as &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt; that appear to be exceptions). Consider that &lt;em&gt;tenir,&lt;/em&gt; which never had a /g/, has the future stem &lt;em&gt;tiendr-&lt;/em&gt;. It's the same sort of sound change that gave us &quot;d&quot; in English &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2710/how-does-the-word-thunder-get-the-letter-d?rq=1&quot;&gt;thunder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from Old English  &lt;em&gt;þunor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know for sure, but based on the stem of this verb having /ɲ/ when it's not before &quot;r&quot;, I would guess the development from Latin was something like [piŋgɛrɛ] &gt; [peɲɟɛrɛ] &gt; [peɲɛrɛ] &gt; [peɲrɛ] &gt; [pejnrə] &gt; [pejndrə].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A change of Vulgar Latin /ŋɡʲ/ &gt; /nj/ &gt; /ɲ/ is listed on the Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#To_Proto-Gallo-Ibero-Romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological history of French&lt;/a&gt;&quot; under the section &quot;To Proto-Gallo-Ibero-Romance&quot;. A later change it lists under &quot;To Early Old French&quot; is &quot;Palatal /ɲ/ [is] depalatalized to /n/ [...] following [sic] a consonant. /ɲ/ &gt; /jn/ when depalatalising&quot;. I assume the author intended to write &quot;preceding a consonant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no general change of Latin &lt;em&gt;-ngr-&lt;/em&gt; to French &lt;em&gt;-ndr-.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;There are words that contain &quot;ngr&quot; in Modern French from Latin &quot;ngr&quot;, such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/palangre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palangre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which the CNRTL says is from Latin &lt;em&gt;*panangrum&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/congre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;congre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which it says is probably from Latin &lt;em&gt;congrus.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:30:43.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20386" CreationDate="2016-11-27T17:32:36.930" Score="7" ViewCount="738" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to study orthographical variants, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fire-fighter&lt;/em&gt; be considered orthographical variants (i.e. the difference in frequency in a corpus is not statistically significant), or should the one orthographical form be considered marked/irregular (i.e. the difference in frequency is statistically significant)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a corpus of 926,766,504 words, I get the following frequency counts (on lemmas):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; = 3,349 vs. &lt;em&gt;fire-fighter&lt;/em&gt; = 336 vs. &lt;em&gt;fire fighter&lt;/em&gt; = 1,338&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;fireplace&lt;/em&gt; = 12,133 vs. &lt;em&gt;fire-place&lt;/em&gt; = 95 vs. &lt;em&gt;fire place&lt;/em&gt; = 1,369&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What statistical measure(s) can I use to say, for example, that there is not a large enough difference between &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fire-fighter&lt;/em&gt; to consider the latter marked, but that the difference between &lt;em&gt;fireplace&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fire-place&lt;/em&gt; is significant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two specific sub-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I work with probabilities (e.g. &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; = 0,667; &lt;em&gt;fire-fighter&lt;/em&gt; = 0,067; &lt;em&gt;fire fighter&lt;/em&gt; = 0,266), is there a way to measure if the difference is significant? (Beyond just stating the obvious that the one occurs with a higher probability than the other.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm new to log-likelihood, so sorry for a stupid question: Can I calculate the log-likelihood and effect size of a word-form within the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; corpus? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online calculator&lt;/a&gt; of Paul Rayson seems to suggest that it needs to be from different corpora, but I would like to know if it can be within the same corpus as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13450" LastEditorUserId="12814" LastEditDate="2016-12-02T05:14:13.820" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T18:31:10.263" Title="How can I calculate if the difference between two word frequencies in one corpus is significant?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-27T18:37:36.520" Score="2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate if somebody could help me and provide a short explanation. The sentence is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The latest research on dieting always warns people about the dangers of too much cholesterol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The dangers of too much cholesterol&quot;&lt;/em&gt; should be a constituent, but I'm having trouble showing that while drawing the tree (using x-bar theory) as I'm unsure where to add the last PP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14612" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2016-11-27T23:32:50.193" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T04:46:56.110" Title="Where to attach 'of too much cholesterol' while drawing the syntax tree (x-bar theory)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20343" CreationDate="2016-11-27T19:02:58.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you're unsure as to whether it's a complement or an adjunct, standard tests can be applied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Optionality: #The latest research on dieting always warns people about the dangers. (Not possible except when the PP is elided)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compare&lt;/em&gt;: I tied my shoelaces (at noon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Restrictions on type: *The latest research on dieting always warns people about the dangers at sleeping late. ('Dangers' requires 'of', not 'at')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compare&lt;/em&gt;: I tied my shoelaces in the washroom/at school/during recess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Restrictions on number: *The latest research on dieting always warns people about the dangers of too much cholesterol of too little sleep. (Can't have more than one complement)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compare&lt;/em&gt;: I tied my shoelaces in the washroom at school during recess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Restrictions on position: *Of too little sleep, the latest research on dieting always warns people about the dangers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compare&lt;/em&gt;: At school, I tied my shoelaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these point to the PP being a complement, so it should be the daughter of N' and the sister of N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T04:46:56.110" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T04:46:56.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-28T00:45:21.963" Score="-1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;There exists many examples of this in English, for example 'there are 3 Carolines in my class' or 'there are several Aberdeens in Scotland' (not true of course..just for example!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there was the equivalent in French, particularly would you be able to apply plurality to given names as in my first example, or would this take on a different form in French? Would it have to be 'there are 3 people named Caroline..' in order to be grammatically correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14578" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T01:37:39.553" Title="In the context of proper nouns, are there any examples in French where they are used as appellatives?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-11-29T15:18:33.050" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20345" CreationDate="2016-11-28T01:30:04.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's possible in French too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il y a trois Caroline dans ma classe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, proper nouns never take a plural mark. The noun &lt;em&gt;Caroline&lt;/em&gt; in that sentence is plural, but it is invariable. (This may be a mistake that natives make in this case, but I don't think it's raised to the point of being considered acceptable even by most descriptivists.) Similarly, the equivalent of “I visited the Joneses yesterday” in French would be “&lt;em&gt;j'ai rendu visite aux Dupont hier&lt;/em&gt;”. “There are 18 Aberdeens in the United States” is “&lt;em&gt;Il y a 18 Aberdeen aux États-Unis&lt;/em&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few exceptions to this rule. If the proper noun is used to evoke an archetype, then it does take a plural mark, even if it remains spelled with a capital letter: contrast “&lt;em&gt;des Picassos&lt;/em&gt;” (some genius painters) with “&lt;em&gt;des Picasso&lt;/em&gt;” (some people in a family whose surname is Picasso) or “&lt;em&gt;des Picasso&lt;/em&gt;” (some paintings by Picasso). Also, a few historical surnames do take a plural mark (“&lt;em&gt;les Bourbons&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;les Horaces et le Curiaces&lt;/em&gt;”). See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/9048/accord-du-nom-de-famille&quot;&gt;Accord du nom de famille&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T01:37:39.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3073" CreationDate="2016-11-28T06:42:01.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not call this object-agreement because (to my knowledge) it also holds for non-object relative clauses, such as adverbial relative clauses (but not for subject-relative clauses, as I'm sure you're aware). It is simply an agreement marker that displays the person and number of the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: I don't know any other examples of other languages off the top of my head. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question 2: Regarding possible causes, I would frame the question in the following way: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses in Turkic languages can contain an agreement suffix. Different languages differ with respect to the placement of the agreement suffix: Turkish puts them on the verb, and most other Turkic languages including Kyrgyz put them on the head noun instead. (Additionally, there are relative clauses without this agreement suffix, and also their subject appears in nominative case instead of genitive.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a paper that discusses a possible analysis of why Turkic languages differ in this way. (PM me if you can't access it via your library.) &#xA;Disclaimer: It's formalized in generative syntax; if you're not familiar with this framework it might be difficult to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2008. “Subject case and Agr in two types of Turkic RCs”, in Proceedings of WAFL 4; S. Ulutaş &amp;amp; C. Boeckx (eds.); Cambridge, MA: MITWPL 56; 145-168.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1725" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T06:42:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20351" CreationDate="2016-11-28T07:22:08.827" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m studying feature geometry in my intro to phono course, and we’re looking at tone. One topic which I have trouble getting my head around is the “tonal motivation” for autosegmental phonology; namely, the requirement to distinguish between rising+falling tone and falling+rising tone in the same language.&#xA;I understand that feature matrices cannot account for this because the “members” of a matrix are unordered with respect to one another, so it’s not possible to have a +high, - high contour “/” contrast with a -high, +high contour “/“ in the same language. What language makes this distinction? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, probably stupid question but why not just postulate a feature “concave tone” and a feature “convex tone”?&#xA;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T18:17:34.810" Title="Representing tone in feature matrices" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2016-11-28T10:29:57.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only do many languages have &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-prepositions, English itself has at least two &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-prepositions. These are the words &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;, which, although classified as adverbs in traditional grammars, are recognised as prepositions by such grammars that allow for intransitive prepositions (for example, &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;, Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum, 2002). The words &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; pass all of the tests for preposition-hood in English and none of the tests for being an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I put the toy &lt;strong&gt;on the table&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... the preposition phrase &lt;em&gt;on the table&lt;/em&gt; may be replaced by the interrogative preposition &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt; did I put the toy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T10:44:59.373" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T10:44:59.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20379" CreationDate="2016-11-28T13:47:52.860" Score="6" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there references giving the speech rate measured in bit/sec?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I easily found references on speech rate giving measurement in phones/sec, syllables/sec or words/sec. Are there references giving the speech rate in bit/sec, i.e., answering the question how much information we get across while talking to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am both interested in average values for normal speech and peak values for fast speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Maybe the answer is &quot;There are no such references&quot;. I am also willing to accept a reasonably high level answer of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T13:50:11.230" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T12:06:32.990" Title="Speech rate measured in bit/sec" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;entropy&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20348" CreationDate="2016-11-28T18:17:34.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple existence of level or contoured tones in a language is not a problem for the SPE theory of representations, which is why when the focus was on just reducing tone contrasts to some minimal system of pluses and minuses, it was always possible to come up with an arrangement. You find rising and falling tones along with level tones in various &quot;dialects&quot; of Chinese, Vietnamese, Zapotec, Mande, Kru. A really simple reason why a large number of tones doesn't matter is that you can enumerate them Chinese-style (&quot;Tone 1, Tone 2...&quot;), and any number can be trivially translated into a system of plus and minus values, for example an 8-tone language requires only 3 features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of contours really stems from the need to group together subsets of tones into &quot;natural classes&quot;, because in rule systems, particular subsets of tones often act together. So just as [p t tʃ k] often act together in a way that [p t tʃ l] do not, you find recurrent groupings in tonology. The interesting thing is that the possible groupings looks completely unconstrained if you just look at the tone-pairings, but if you look at the pairings &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; their order relative to the trigger sets (and the composition of the set), tone groupings become very limited. An example is that H becomes F before L and R: but, H becomes R after L and F. L becomes R before H and H, but L becomes F after H and R. The various other &quot;level becomes contour&quot; possibilities that you predict from randomly grouping together two of the tones {H L R F} either before or after the target tone simply don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation for this is straightforward if you decompose R into &quot;L+H&quot; and F into &quot;H+L&quot;, so these processes reduce to H → H+L / _ {L,L+H}; H → L+H / {L,H+L} _; L → L+H / _ {H,H+L}; and L → H+L / {H,L+H} __. Which generalizes to &quot;attach the preceding/following tone to this tone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T18:17:34.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2016-11-28T19:17:58.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumption from Turkish is that agglutinative languages have this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oyuncağı &lt;strong&gt;nereye&lt;/strong&gt; koydun?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word by word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;TheToy &lt;strong&gt;whon&lt;/strong&gt; youput&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Turkish &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Ne&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; means &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt;, but also is used as &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Ne&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;rede&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;in Where&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Ne&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;den&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;for What&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastEditorUserId="14619" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T17:28:42.560" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:28:42.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-29T05:01:33.593" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't quite been able to find the answer to this question online. I'm writing a paper for my first linguistics class and I realized one of the sources that I've been using refers to vocabulary development, but our topic proposal refers and paper refers to lexical development. It is too late to change the topic proposal or the source. Essentially I'm asking if I should keep it as lexical development because it is close enough (or the same thing) or lose the unknown amount of points by not going by the chosen topic on our topic proposal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14622" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T15:17:40.950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T03:48:16.763" Title="Can &quot;lexical development&quot; and &quot;vocabulary development&quot; be used interchangeably?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20311" CreationDate="2016-11-29T08:38:57.117" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comes from { &lt;em&gt;di &gt; dy &gt; du&lt;/em&gt; } , meaning: &lt;em&gt;duo, two, 2&lt;/em&gt;, in contrast to  { bi &gt; by &gt; [b:u] } which are already (in some manner) split, but kept together in parallel. Therefore as a logismus one stands like something split in origin; in two, and the other: brought in parallel.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dia&lt;/strong&gt;gonal&lt;/em&gt;, would mean to take a route which splits some existing gamma or angle in two parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, dia depending on the notion it is applied to tends to signify a second hand, route, way; in contrast to a, common; straight; direct; ordinary, or conventional preexisting way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herein &lt;strong&gt;διαβάλλειν&lt;/strong&gt; would mean &quot;to throw over&quot; but that's only because of gravity and because while standing on the ground - you cannot, throw under. This expression is however capable of covering every parable-like throw, between two points which are invisibly connected by the shortest path between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T08:38:57.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20203" CreationDate="2016-11-29T10:06:06.637" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;VI-IX century Illyrian root cluster {s'T(a,o,u)} &gt; [st:]&#xA;It's the semantics of symbol T, which alone means 'ground': Something standing, something to stand upon, upon which the acquired s, (the launchpad of its seme) forms the initial cluster st*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very productive, because it's a logismus it can be used to describe everything from standing, firm, immovable, stuck, static, to stacking upon, setting on etc etc etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;therefore it can produce lots of words with minor modificators from the top of my head stay; stand; stop; stub; staple; stock; stuck; stack; static; station; state; stupid; stub;...    you name it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T10:06:06.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2016-11-29T10:35:28.837" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;veigle&quot; means tool : handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something you can handle as to make it a tool for a certain (personal) aim or purpose. Therefore &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{ in+veigle } yields a direct meaning of: to [ utilize something : someone ] in its original sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T10:35:28.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18786" CreationDate="2016-11-29T11:19:41.750" Score="-10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there is, the cubes were used in ancient Greece at holly sites long before Arabic came to be - and Arabic is a medieval coiné. Not even a real language. It's a conglomerate like Persian and other Mixtures which somehow became 'languages' and are erroneously being treated as such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore Ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;could not&lt;/strong&gt; and would not need to borrow such an expression from a language which came out after VII C. AD, or 12 centuries after it became a 'dead language'.  Only the opposite is and can be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastEditorUserId="14616" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T13:19:37.577" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T13:19:37.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3845" CreationDate="2016-11-29T12:11:56.700" Score="-11" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about it is a direct inverse contraction of { w'&lt;strong&gt;Ho&lt;/strong&gt; } to { &lt;strong&gt;Ho&lt;/strong&gt;'w }, a member of ( who, why, what ) family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14616" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T12:11:56.700" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20320" CreationDate="2016-11-29T19:09:00.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the canonical &quot;generative but non-derivational&quot; work is the stuff that Michael Brody did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look at his book &lt;em&gt;Lexico-Logical Form&lt;/em&gt;, which is a great and detailed exploration of an alternative approach to &quot;minimalism&quot;, and after that find his work on &quot;Mirror Syntax&quot; (I think it appeared in &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt; circa 2000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T19:09:00.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18786" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:17:59.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology of Greek &lt;em&gt;kubos&lt;/em&gt; is unknown, but it is thought to be a loanword. A word like &lt;em&gt;dice&lt;/em&gt; is of a kind that's easily borrowed, just like the game itself -- compare e.g. &lt;em&gt;chess&lt;/em&gt; and its similar-sounding equivalents in many languages. So it's plausible, though not provable, that there's a borrowing relationship between the Greek and Arabic words. That said, it's less likely that one language borrowed directly from the other than that they both borrowed the word from some other source: this looks like a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wanderwort&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T21:17:59.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-30T01:40:18.160" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come from a computer science perspective and am trying to understand dependency parsing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the formal (computational) model for dependency parsing? The computational model for constituency parsing is a CFG; anything that can be generated from the rules of the CFG (like NP -&gt; (Det) N (PP)) is a valid sentence/parse. How is the set of valid sentences/parses in dependency parsing described?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like dependency parses and constituency parses give different kinds of information and that in general a constituency parse gives more information than a dependency parse. Why is this the case? What are examples where a sentence where a dependency parse can correspond to multiple constituency parses, so has less information (or vice versa)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References are also appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14625" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T14:58:06.060" Title="Computational model of dependency parsing" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20365" CreationDate="2016-11-30T02:33:23.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you google search on &quot;dependency grammar vs constituency grammar&quot;, you'll get a number of discussions that may be relevant to your question.  Personally, I have not managed to understand dependency grammarians' views about this.  My impression has been that dependency grammar is a variety of CFG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T02:33:23.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20372" CreationDate="2016-11-30T14:02:57.970" Score="2" ViewCount="3672" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the opposite of a silent letter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's take the word &lt;em&gt;vehicle&lt;/em&gt;, which is typically pronounced one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ˈvi·ɪ·kəl] -- the letter h is silent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ˈvi·hɪ·kəl] -- the letter is not silent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would linguists call it when not silent, “sounded”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T14:18:55.070" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:37:44.443" Title="What is the opposite of a silent letter?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-30T14:25:21.557" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned (in this forum) that natural classes of tones are posited based on the tendency of members of those classes to act together (that is, I suppose, to have the same effect based on a rule).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way that [p, t, k, ch] act together in many languages, so too do some tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this means that Rising tones may pattern with High Tones (but not the opposite) and Falling tones may pattern with Low tones (but not the opposite), but I'm just grasping at straws here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learn best from examples in real languages, but  I have trouble finding a relatively easy example of natural classes of tones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me understand this a little better? I'm so close, but just struggle conceptualising. Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:25:21.557" Title="What's a simple example of natural classes of tone contours?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tone-sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20289" CreationDate="2016-11-30T17:33:12.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on your comments, I think your question is narrower than just &quot;what is a level&quot;, it's primarily about derivational levels in phonology. Greg Lee's answer correctly identifies the essential property of &quot;level&quot; as applied throughout grammatical theory, and in phonology we have added on a few more concepts. Your question (as applied to phonology) also points to two distinct concepts of &quot;level&quot; in our technical vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One sense of &quot;level&quot; is &quot;substring&quot;, in autosegmental thinking. Any utterance at any derivational stage has a number of &quot;levels&quot;, so that you can talk about the word, syllable, and featural levels of a representation. It is not a precise technical term, but people will say things like &quot;This consonant is final at the foot level&quot;, meaning that the consonant is the last segment in the foot, even though it is not final in the word. It corresponds to &quot;a node of type N&quot; in representations, given that there is said to be a set of node types that make up representations (Place, Vocalic, Root, Syllable, Foot, Tone...). This sense of level isn't generally applicable to SPE style phonology, excluding the bits that are not clear regarding morphemic features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other sense is derivational, which is orthogonal to the question &quot;what does a phonological representation look like&quot;. In classical generative phonology, a derivation is a chain of representations mapped to other representations, via the rules of a language. The initial representation is the underlying forms and the final representation is the surface form. We don't use the term &quot;deep structure&quot;, which was only used in syntax and I think the concept was officially renounced as part of the Minimalist Program (and in other streams of syntax earlier than that). In classical generative phonology, all representations are phonological and there is no such thing as a phonetic representation. There can be any number of &quot;levels&quot; between the input and the output, each corresponding to a string mapping (i.e. what a rule does). None of these levels are significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, people opted to say that there are some significant levels. The (historically) first of these was the addition of a &quot;phonetic&quot; level, which is based on the realization that phonological rules cannot actually handle phonetic implementation. This more or less corresponds to the distinction between regular phonological rules versus allophonic rules, with the caveat that a number of &quot;allophonic&quot; rules probably are phonological rules which create new phonemes. (Flapping is an example). The theory of lexical phonology then created the potential for many new significant levels, also called &quot;strata&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sharon Inkelas in her dissertation provides a straightforward method of reducing derivational level and representational level to just representational level. It's actually completely obvious: take a phonological string, with stratal bracketing (the derivational concept of &quot;level&quot;), and let each stratum be a node in a new tree structure (α,β,γ) so that Level 1 is &quot;anything under the same α&quot;, Level 2 is &quot;anything under the same β&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OT (via Candidate Chains) has essentially reduced the full concept of &quot;derivation&quot; to &quot;representation&quot;. In a classical derivation, you might have something like: /bunt/ → bund → bunid → [bunud], where the underlying form is /bunt/ and it is pronounced [bunud] by applying post-nasal voicing, epenthesis and vowel harmony. But this can be subsumed under the notion &quot;surface form&quot; where you have (bunt,bund,bunid,[bunud]) and the last item is what it pronounced (plus there are constraints on well-formed adjacent substrings within this &quot;candidate&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a much narrower question about &quot;levels&quot; that could also be investigated, namely the utility of the Lexical Phonology concept of &quot;stratum&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T17:33:12.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20368" CreationDate="2016-12-01T04:19:42.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics you can't really talk about &amp;quot;silent letters&amp;quot;. Orthography and phonetics follow separate evolutionary paths in most languages, and orthographic spellings rarely have one-to-one correspondences with phonetic sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/em&gt; The closest term that comes to mind would be &amp;quot;articulated&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually in phonology if you're talking about sounds not being produced, there's some phonological process involved in not producing them, and so the term used to describe them is usually a variation of the name of the process that causes them not to be articulated. E.g. in &amp;quot;vehicle&amp;quot; the /h/ is the result of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elision&lt;/a&gt;, so you could refer to the absence of this phone as &amp;quot;elided-h&amp;quot;. More specifically, the elision is caused by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lenition&lt;/a&gt; or weakening of the sound, so &amp;quot;lenited-h&amp;quot; would be a little more precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, a sound not represented in the orthographic form of a word can be heard when spoken aloud (e.g. the /p/ that is often heard in the pronunciation of &amp;quot;something&amp;quot;). In these cases—as with elision/lenition—the &amp;quot;articulated&amp;quot; sound is often referred to by the name of the process that causes it to occur. In the case of &amp;quot;something&amp;quot;, the /p/ is the result of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;excrescence (a type of epenthesis)&lt;/a&gt; and so would be called exrescent-p or epenthetic-p. But there aren't really terms for talking about why sounds are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other potentially relevant term here: when two different pronunciations are acceptable in the same speech community, as in your 'vehicle' example, it's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_variation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free variation&lt;/a&gt;. But this is not just restricted to pairs where a particular sound is omitted or articulated in some varieties but not others. /tə'meto/~/tə'mato/ is another example of free variation in which the difference between the two varieties is in the quality of one of the vowel sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12814" LastEditorUserId="12814" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T17:37:44.443" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:37:44.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20350" CreationDate="2016-12-01T04:40:37.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/bstj36-2-497#page/n1/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierce &amp;amp; Karlin 1957&lt;/a&gt; might be a good starting point. It came out almost a decade after the original &lt;a href=&quot;http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20Theory%20of%20Communication.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shannon (1948) entropy paper&lt;/a&gt; and a decade before &lt;a href=&quot;http://alexander.shen.free.fr/library/Kolmogorov65_Three-Approaches-to-Information.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kolmogorov's 1968 paper on quantifying information&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The limitation on the rate at which information can be transmitted over an ordinary telephone channel is a human one. In this study people read words as fast as they were able to; from these results some deductions are made about the capacity of a human being as an information channel. The discrepancy between human channel capacity measured thus (40-50 bits/sec) and telephone and television channel capacity (about 50,000 bits/sec and 50,000,000 bits/ sec respectively) is provocative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I feel like &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PyYDHEUAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Florian Jaeger&lt;/a&gt; has flirted with this unit of measurement when dealing with information density, but I can't remember an article name to save my life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12814" LastEditorUserId="12814" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T20:28:29.693" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T20:28:29.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20320" CreationDate="2016-12-01T12:09:59.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to have a look at LFG, they use X' Theory extended with an additional &quot;lexocentric&quot; category S to accommodate nonconfigurational phrase structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T12:09:59.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20365" CreationDate="2016-12-01T12:14:04.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependency parsing is constraint solving. I recommend you have a look at XDG, which is the only formally precise dependency grammar approach I'm aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T12:14:04.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20365" CreationDate="2016-12-01T14:58:06.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many actively researched aspects in the field of natural language parsing. Nearly all of this activity is on statistical parsers. Consequently, there is no &quot;standard&quot; computational model for dependency parsers -- there are many competing and collaborating methodologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The computational model for constituency parsing is a CFG...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was the case a long time ago, but now, mostly used as a stepping stone in pedagogy. The problem with bare CFG is that it produces an explosion in the number of valid parses (according to CFG) of typical sentences, whereas a human can easily discard most of these parses as meaningless. To overcome this limitation, broad-coverage parsers are based on statistical models. CFG may still be the grammar of such parsers, but the term &quot;computational model&quot; encompasses a lot more now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the field is vast, I'll point you to just one example of how a parser could work. Matthew Honnibal's blogpost, &lt;a href=&quot;https://explosion.ai/blog/parsing-english-in-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parsing English in 500 Lines of Python&lt;/a&gt;, is one of the best I've come across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T14:58:06.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20350" CreationDate="2016-12-01T16:31:37.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't pretend to really understand &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.icacommission.org/Proceedings/ICA1998Seattle/pdfs/vol_1/277_1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, but the authors have an algorithm for encoding speech at 800 bps (as they say, using split vector quantization). They have tested it using male and female voices and seem satisfied that the output is comparable to standard 2400 bps LPC-10 encoding, though the authors are electrical engineers, not psychologists, so there isn't a body of perceptual studies to go with the method. On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://uta-ir.tdl.org/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/209/umi-uta-1107.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this study&lt;/a&gt; does have a perceptual study to go with the technology, and an algorithmic tweak (based on a theory of auditory perception) results in improves perceptual quality for 2400 bps LPC coding. Chapter 2 of the book &lt;em&gt;Ultra Low Bit-Rate Speech Coding&lt;/em&gt; seems to be out there (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9781493913404-c1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). It appears (and I must emphasize &quot;appears&quot;) that one can reach 120 bps coding. It might be worth posting a related question to Signal Processing SE, to see especially to what extent these ridiculously low rates yield intelligible speech (esp. to get a technically-qualified evaluation of the state of the art).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=9&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjSpd-IhtnQAhVB1mMKHSEEDfoQFghFMAg&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fscholar.sun.ac.za%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10019.1%2F2078%2Fkritzinger_low_2006.pdf%3Fsequence%3D1&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNGaw1jwZDt7DgMS3UY3gC9FEEJdkQ&amp;amp;sig2=sl6clnCQV6EzfGD81oHTfA&amp;amp;cad=rja&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This thesis&lt;/a&gt; suggests 20 bits/sec, based on Shannon's estimate of 1 bit per character entropy in English text, 20 phonemes/second speech rate, and about 1 character/phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T22:32:16.397" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T22:32:16.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-01T18:42:48.240" Score="3" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would there be a theoretical way to distinguish between two related languages which diverged a long time ago, like tens of thousands years, and two totally unrelated languages, say, created independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say that I realize this question is still probably a big topic in research but I'm curious if there's any possible answers or else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, as lemontree suggested, my question should be interpreted as &quot;Up to how many thousands of years is reconstruction still possible?&quot; (cited from lemontree's comment) or &quot;Are there any features that are very persistent throughout language change and could give sound clues to relatedness?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14639" LastEditorDisplayName="user14639" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T19:40:40.917" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T20:31:24.750" Title="Difference between languages related a long time ago and unrelated ones" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2016-12-01T18:48:10.110" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes they do. Moreover, serious linguists dispute over definitions of noun and verb. Unsurprisingly, the two disputes are closely connected&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T18:48:10.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20384" CreationDate="2016-12-01T20:30:18.837" Score="7" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Declension&lt;/em&gt;, as far as I know, corresponds to the act of creating boxes where you can pile up nouns that follow the same rule when inflected (generally due to &lt;em&gt;cases&lt;/em&gt;). Classical Latin is often said to have five declensions; modern Greek and Russian, three; Finnish, possibly none, except for rules regarding harmony. It is quite clear, then, that the number of declensions does not depend on the number of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a problem with Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Polish has an unusual amount of genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, masculine/personal plural, non-masculine/personal plural. Regarding declensions related to plural formation, Polish is straightforward. With respect to the genitive singular of masculine nouns, not so much: it really depends on whether of not the noun describes something that &lt;em&gt;feels alive&lt;/em&gt;, somehow: &lt;code&gt;samochód -&amp;gt; samochodu&lt;/code&gt;(dead), &lt;code&gt;widok -&amp;gt; widoku&lt;/code&gt;(dead), &lt;code&gt;chleb -&amp;gt; chleba&lt;/code&gt;(alive), but &lt;code&gt;komputer -&amp;gt; komputera&lt;/code&gt;(alive). In the end, this &lt;em&gt;feels alive&lt;/em&gt; rule only refers to a certain (not large) fraction of masculine names, since bread and computer are alive, for Poles. Similar controversy is also present in the dative singular, locative singular and, sometimes, genitive plural of feminine nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Polish has a huge repertoire of morphophonetic variations: &lt;code&gt;widok -&amp;gt; w widoku&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;chleb -&amp;gt; w chlebie&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;samochód -&amp;gt; w samochodzie&lt;/code&gt;. This happens more often than not: &lt;code&gt;Praga -&amp;gt; w Pradze&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Marzec -&amp;gt; w Marcu&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;gazeta -&amp;gt; w gazecie&lt;/code&gt;. Being able to predict such changes is an integral part of learning Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question regards the following: most mainstream languages I've stumbled upon had some grammarian that divided nouns according to declension, but I've never seen that done to Polish. I have a friend that is a philologist and he said that possibly it is due to the high degree of irregularity present in the Polish language, and that maybe grouping nouns into declensions might generate so many declensions that the problem of categorisation would only get worse. I think that defining declension apart from morphophonetics is possible and feasible, but might be artificial and incomplete. Does anybody know of any reference that groups Polish nouns into declensions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14640" LastEditorUserId="14640" LastEditDate="2016-12-02T12:47:50.617" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T12:47:50.617" Title="Declensions in Polish" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;irregularity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11413" CreationDate="2016-12-01T21:16:37.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existence of the belief about the non-existence of verbs (among some scholars): true. Nothing strange if no universality of verbs. Despite the lack of verbs, no hindrance to the possibility of expression of any concept, even in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T21:16:37.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20382" CreationDate="2016-12-01T21:42:12.080" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can recommend this book: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ceneo.pl/2840780&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Słownik odmiany rzeczowników polskich&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Stanisław Mędrak. The good news is that it's exactly what you want: a dictionary that lists all the noun declension paradigms. The bad news is that there are over 500 such paradigms. Crazy, I know. But of course they have a lot in common, and they are grouped into six main classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 100: the &lt;strong&gt;feminine&lt;/strong&gt; gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 200-300: the &lt;strong&gt;masculine personal&lt;/strong&gt; gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 400: the &lt;strong&gt;masculine animate&lt;/strong&gt; gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 500-600: the &lt;strong&gt;masculine inanimate&lt;/strong&gt; gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 700: the &lt;strong&gt;neuter&lt;/strong&gt; gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;class 800: &lt;strong&gt;pluralia tantum&lt;/strong&gt; (nouns that do not appear in the singular)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an index of about 20,000 words, with information about the paradigms they belong to. Just for fun, I looked up the specific words you'd mentioned: &lt;code&gt;widok&lt;/code&gt; belongs to the paradigm 507, &lt;code&gt;chleb&lt;/code&gt; is 518b, &lt;code&gt;samochód&lt;/code&gt; is 550a, &lt;code&gt;Praga&lt;/code&gt; is 139, &lt;code&gt;marzec&lt;/code&gt; is 565a, &lt;code&gt;gazeta&lt;/code&gt; is 119. Oh my, only now did I realise how insane my mother tongue is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, what you write about “feeling dead”/“feeling alive” can be regarded at best as a rule of thumb for foreign language learners. That's probably a useful approximation (perhaps even the best one that's possible to make), but it's really not the case that some objects “feel alive” in Polish. I'm a native speaker of Polish and have never heard of that rule or anything similar. &lt;em&gt;Komputer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;chleb&lt;/em&gt; don't feel alive to me in any sense, and they surely don't feel any more alive than &lt;em&gt;samochód&lt;/em&gt;. I say &lt;em&gt;samochodu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;komputera&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;chleba&lt;/em&gt; simply because these are the forms I've learnt, and &lt;strike&gt;samochoda&lt;/strike&gt;, &lt;strike&gt;komputeru&lt;/strike&gt;, &lt;strike&gt;chlebu&lt;/strike&gt; sound incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the above, the masculine/feminine/neuter distinction of the nouns does have some influence on how Polish native speakers perceive things. On the one hand, we know that it's just a formal distinction, so even though &lt;em&gt;kot&lt;/em&gt; (‘cat’) is masculine (and needs to be used with the masculine forms of adjectives, etc.), it can refer to cats of either sex. When we want to be specific about the sex, we say either &lt;em&gt;kocur&lt;/em&gt; (‘tomcat’) or &lt;em&gt;kotka&lt;/em&gt; (‘female cat’). On the other hand, the gender of nouns does create some expectation about which sex is the default for a specific entity. For example, &lt;em&gt;myszka&lt;/em&gt; (‘mouse’) can refer either to a male mouse or a female mouse, but since it's a feminine noun, it does feel slightly strange for Polish speakers that &lt;em&gt;Myszka Miki&lt;/em&gt; (‘Mickey Mouse’) is a male.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last piece of advice: if you're interested in speaking Polish, as opposed to having theoretical knowledge about its grammar, forget about all I just said, find some Polish friends and talk a lot. I have a Norwegian friend who knows almost nothing about the Polish grammar, but speaks Polish fluently and gets maybe 80% of everything she says right. Theoretical knowledge about the grammar may perhaps be required to the cover the last 20%, but for the most part, you simply need to get the “feel” of the language and learn by experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2016-12-02T08:40:27.723" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T08:40:27.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20342" CreationDate="2016-12-01T23:19:32.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Diclaimer: I'm far from an expert in this area, but in my PhD coursework I took a computational linguistics course and a stats for linguistics course.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a case of a single categorical dependent variable. For this we used a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson&amp;#39;s_chi-squared_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pearson chi-squared test&lt;/a&gt; to see if distribution differs from what is expected. This requires you to have an expectation. If you don't have one to start out with, equal distribution (or null hypothesis) is a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hypothesis #1 - Equal distribution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's hypothesize that these three orthographic forms are in free variation and we have no reason to assume any of them is more likely than the other. So we expect each variant form to account for 1/3 of all occurrences. It's easy to calculate the significance in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R (with RStudio)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; FFs = c(3349, 336, 1338) # the observed distribution&#xA;&amp;gt; names(FFs)&amp;lt;-c(&quot;firefighter&quot;, &quot;fire-fighter&quot;, &quot;fire fighter&quot;) # add labels&#xA;&amp;gt; chisq.test(FFs, p=c(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)) # expecting equal distribution&#xA;&#xA;    Chi-squared test for given probabilities&#xA;&#xA;data:  FFs&#xA;X-squared = 2812.3, df = 2, p-value &amp;lt; 2.2e-16&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for &lt;em&gt;fireplace&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; FPs = c(12133, 95, 1369)&#xA;&amp;gt; names(FPs)&amp;lt;-c(&quot;fireplace&quot;, &quot;fire-place&quot;, &quot;fire place&quot;)&#xA;&amp;gt; chisq.test(FPs, p=c(1/3, 1/3, 1/3))&#xA;&#xA;    Chi-squared test for given probabilities&#xA;&#xA;data:  FPs&#xA;X-squared = 19298, df = 2, p-value &amp;lt; 2.2e-16&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are huge effects. This data has 2 degrees of freedom (df = the number of categories - 1) and so a chi-squared score above 4.605 has statistical significance. A score of 13.8 has a p-value of 0.001. So this is huge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this was a very simplified test, and to really get at this problem, you'd probably want to take a more nuanced approach. You could collect data on several compounds that have hyphenated and spaced variations and look at the overall distribution to get a more realistic set of expected values (the &lt;code&gt;p=c(x,y,z)&lt;/code&gt; argument in the function).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hypothesis #2 - Distributed similarly to &lt;em&gt;fireplace, fire-place, fire place&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a one-step-forward example, we could use the distribution of &lt;em&gt;fireplace&lt;/em&gt; terms as our expected distribution for &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; FFs.exp&amp;lt;-c(FPs/sum(FPs)) # this takes the count of each fireplace variant and divides it by the total number of occurrences&#xA;&amp;gt; chisq.test(FFs, p=FFs.exp)&#xA;&#xA;    Chi-squared test for given probabilities&#xA;&#xA;data:  FFs&#xA;X-squared = 4236.1, df = 2, p-value &amp;lt; 2.2e-16&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here too, the difference in distribution of the three variants is incredibly significant. What this test doesn't tell you is which form is marked. For that, you only need look at the raw frequencies compared to the expected frequencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; FFs&#xA; firefighter fire-fighter fire fighter &#xA;        3349          336         1338 &#xA;&amp;gt; c(sum(FFs)*FFs.exp)&#xA; fireplace fire-place fire place &#xA;4482.16952   35.09487  505.73560 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the hyphenated and spaced forms are more frequent than expected. So what this test is showing us is that the hyphenated and spaced forms are much less marked for &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; than comparable forms for &lt;em&gt;fireplace&lt;/em&gt; are.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note about R&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize this is a lot of code, and if you're not used to working with R, it's not the most intuitive programming language to read. But &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stgries.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stefan TH. Gries&lt;/a&gt; has two good books on linguistics with R if you're interested: &lt;strong&gt;Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Statistics for Linguistics with R&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of good Python resources out there too, if you'd like to work with a more human-readable programming language. But for statistics, R is really the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12814" LastEditorUserId="12814" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T18:31:10.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T18:31:10.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19748" CreationDate="2016-12-02T00:44:30.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The root is not known. But for etymology I would recommend &lt;em&gt;Misalli Büyük Türkçe Sözlük&lt;/em&gt; (It is online on &lt;a href=&quot;http://kubbealtilugati.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kubbealtilugati.com&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to it, &lt;em&gt;bakır&lt;/em&gt; has been used since the old Turkic, but there are some claims that it can be loan word from an Iranian Language (Sogdian maybe?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://kubbealtilugati.com/sonuclar.aspx?km=bak%C4%B1r&amp;amp;mi=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://kubbealtilugati.com/sonuclar.aspx?km=bak%C4%B1r&amp;amp;mi=0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastEditorUserId="14619" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T20:09:06.450" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T20:09:06.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15454" CreationDate="2016-12-02T00:53:11.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish has only one suffix for plural (* &lt;em&gt;ler&lt;/em&gt;) and with the number of objects It doesn't change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as it is written many times above, Turkish has tendency to drop the plurals in most cases. This feature can be observed through the many proposed Altaic languages (Japanese, Mongolian etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T00:53:11.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3429" CreationDate="2016-12-02T00:55:39.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example is that the famous Armenian Duduk, is a pure turkish word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T00:55:39.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3802" CreationDate="2016-12-02T00:59:27.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bin or min is Bıng (not with a &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;ı&lt;/em&gt;) in the old Turkic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dil is Tıl (not with a &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;ı&lt;/em&gt;) in the old Turkic. And its real meaning is tongue not language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T00:59:27.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20489" CreationDate="2016-12-02T06:25:13.277" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question piggybacks off of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3502/is-there-a-package-for-formatting-phonological-rules-in-latex?newreg=2ff4e6ce61b34f2cb83ccb8936ee24bd&quot;&gt;the question/answer here&lt;/a&gt;, where one answer mentions how to create a phonological rule using the &lt;code&gt;phonrule&lt;/code&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MWE here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass[a4paper,12pt,twoside,onecolumn]{memoir}&#xA;&#xA;\usepackage{phonrule}&#xA;&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;&#xA;\phon{x}{\oneof{&#xA;\envr{w}{z} \\&#xA;\envl{v}{\phonfeat{&#xA;+feature x \\&#xA;-feature y}}}}&#xA;&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Results in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hIY5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hIY5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that output and environments are centered.  Is there any way to un-center them and/or left-align them?  The centering that it does appears to be an intentional addition in v1.2.0 of &lt;code&gt;phonrule&lt;/code&gt;.  But there is nothing else in the documentation regarding alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need it to be the standard left-aligned version - that is, left-aligned output &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; left-aligned environment.  Something like this (exact spacing is flexible):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrGaL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JrGaL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to throw in any type of alignment generally breaks the &lt;code&gt;phonrule&lt;/code&gt; environment and it won't compile &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; it aligns the entire figure/example, rather than just the individual (output + environment) sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been using roughly the same as the other answer from the above question which utilizes &lt;code&gt;\mbox&lt;/code&gt;.  This is fine, but adding  additional outputs and environments is either messy or requires a new command based on the differences.  &lt;code&gt;phonrule&lt;/code&gt; generally does all this in a much cleaner and more expandable way, which is why I'm looking into being able to modify the alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14644" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T00:03:57.100" Title="Alignment in \oneof from the phonrule package" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latex&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20393" CreationDate="2016-12-02T12:29:16.470" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Clements structured features such that (forgive me if I  miss something in this simplification):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;root node -&gt; class node -&gt; CV tier&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the phonetic content of a segment is organized by feature + class tiers (root tier, lar. tier, supralar. tier, place tier, manner tier) + root tier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose his evidence for positing this representation was based on impressive typological familiarity and anatomic knowledge.  Was there any other special knowledge Clements had in positing this now widely-accepted and tremendously useful representation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T17:45:29.530" Title="On what evidence are structured feature representations posited?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20392" CreationDate="2016-12-02T17:45:29.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The arguments for Feature Geometry are set forth in Clements' 1985 paper 'The Geometry of Phonological Features'. By way of conceptual background, the question of how/whether features are organized was current in much work in autosegmental phonology, once it was realized that in principle every feature could exhibit &quot;autosegmental autonomy&quot;. A simple model (the 'bottlebrush model') had been contemplated, that all features link directly to the CV core. For the CV tier itself, see Clements &amp;amp; Keyser &lt;em&gt;CV phonology&lt;/em&gt; and references therein. The problem is that features often act as a class, hence we find &quot;place assimilation&quot; rules in languages. The formal theory did not treat simultaneous assimilation of [anterior, coronal, back, distributed] as any different from simultaneous assimilation of [anterior, voice, continuant, lateral], but while the former is well-known, the latter is completely unattested. The theory also makes it more complicated to perform total assimilation of place in a language that has many place contrasts (such as Malayalam) and simpler to write a rule that only partially (and depending on formulation, bizarrely) assimilates place features. The defects were identified in an unpublished paper by Mohanan ('The structure of the melody'), who identifies the fact that features group together functionally, and proposes the essential concept of &quot;class node&quot; which he calls &quot;feature block&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clements expands and refines on this in the 1985 paper, assembling a set of &quot;functional unity&quot; instances, for instance preaspiration in Icelandic, Klamath nasal-lateralization and debuccalization. By way of important prior results leading to the theory, it had been previously established in many papers that partially and fully assimilated consonant clusters exhibit a kind of special phonological integrity labeled integrity and inalterability, and there was a structural proposal (about crossing lines) which required having &quot;an association line&quot; between e.g. &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;mp&lt;/em&gt;, whereby an epenthetic vowel could not cross that line (thus /mp/ does not become [mip] via a general cluster-busting epenthesis rule). Feature Geometry thus provided the last logical stop in deriving the integrity / inalterability facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-02T17:45:29.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-03T08:39:50.630" Score="3" ViewCount="1277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a parser and I have run into a problem where I am unsure if the syntax tree that it is showing me is correct. The Noun Phrase is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;one of the lizards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My parser is telling me that &quot;one&quot; is the head noun in this NP, however, I feel that it could also be viewed as a pre-determiner, and the head noun could be &quot;lizards.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know which one is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14649" LastEditorUserId="14649" LastEditDate="2016-12-04T08:27:00.650" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T08:27:00.650" Title="Which one is head noun?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20394" CreationDate="2016-12-03T09:59:33.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know -- I think it is arguable.  It sounds rather peculiar with a plural-agreeing verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;??One of the lizards are ready to eat.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that might be because the subject, &quot;one of the lizards&quot; refers to just one thing.  English has both grammatical and semantic number agreement with verbs, so maybe in the above example, the peculiarity is due to the clash in semantic agreement, and &quot;one&quot;&quot; is not actually the grammatical head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at NPs with &quot;some&quot;, the verb seems to be agreeing with &quot;lizard(s)&quot;, so maybe &quot;some&quot; is not the head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Some of the lizard is ready to eat.  &#xA;Some of the lizards are ready to eat.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T09:59:33.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-03T13:13:14.457" Score="3" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that morae are used to determine stress and timing in some languages, so obviously there's some motivation to posit their existence in the syllable. But I am not sure I understand what kind of unit a mora is and what stress/timing have to do with light, heavy, superheavy (sounds like a Starbucks-inspired naming scheme: why not just light/medium/heavy?!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an example from Generative Phonology that explains this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes all this theoretical stuff confuses me. Maybe I overthink it. (But the discussion in this community is so helpful to me, btw!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T19:00:10.807" Title="What is the explanatory value of moras: why do we need syllable weight?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20762" CreationDate="2016-12-03T15:04:56.363" Score="3" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples of nonfinite adverbial clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Susan left me [without having said goodbye]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Being a trained boxer] Cathy always forces Mark to his knees with ease&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Green with envy] John asked the donkey for a carrot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and with regards to theta roles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Bound in leather] the book we gave him as a present was appreciated a lot by our grandpa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Bound in leather] grandpa really liked the book we gave him as a present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be true for me that nonfinite adverbial adjunct clauses always adopt their (silent) syntactical subject (vs. theta role!) from the verb that they are modifying.*  Please correct me if I got that wrong!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my statement turns out to be right, I wonder if syntax theory assumes a PRO element in the subject position of the adjunct clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Susan&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; left me&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt; [without PRO&lt;sub&gt;i/*j&lt;/sub&gt; having said goodbye]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since such a PRO element couldn´t possibly be correferential with anything other than the modified verb´s subject, speaking of a control relation between the subject of a verb and its adverbial clause would appear somewhat odd to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*English is not my mother tongue, so I´m not shure whether the expletive pronoun may be an exception to this. But actually I tend to believe that expressions like the following, where the adjunct relates to the main verb´s object, are not possible (though they might be acceptable?):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;?[Being an expert on syntactical analysis] it seems to me that he&#xA;  has some difficulties in building well-formed relative clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14648" LastEditorUserId="14648" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T18:51:00.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T18:51:00.020" Title="Do nonfinite (adverbial) adjunct clauses have to be controlled?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;control&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-03T17:43:50.850" Score="3" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English (and, apparently, most Indo-European languages, if not in all), a common trait can be noticed concerning the prepositions/adverbs of temporal reference: 'before' and (to a lesser extent in English) 'after' are also (or closely related to) spatial references to 'in front of' and 'at back of' respectively. In fact, the derivation of 'before' puts it in the same pattern as 'behind' (still recognised temporally) and 'beside'. The same, though the etymologies are not connected, happens in Latin &lt;em&gt;ante/post&lt;/em&gt;, A. Greek &lt;em&gt;πρό(ς)/μετά&lt;/em&gt;, OCS &lt;em&gt;predъ&lt;/em&gt; (the second pair is unconnected) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) How could such a (seemingly, 'reverse') metaphor, when the event 'in front of' us is treated as the 'previous' one, like we are watching along the axis of time &lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;? I was informed one possibility is a metaphor of a 'marching column of soldiers', when those who passed a fised spot 'before' are those who march 'in front'; is there any article or study on this topic which could confirm or refute this explanation and how else such a connection between spatial and temporal directions could arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) While it is common for languages to have these pairs totally unconnected (Uralic tongues, as far as I know, with all their specific system of essives ad latives, never mix them), but is it even possible for a language to have the (maybe, more intuitive to modern people) &lt;strong&gt;opposite&lt;/strong&gt; connection? One where 'before' of time is related to 'at back of' of space, while 'after' is the same as 'in front of'? If you know such examples, please share those; anyway, if you speak some (especially non-IE) language that either supports or contradicts the pattern mentioned in the first paragraph for English, share them with me as well, for from the (very limited) data I now possess, the connections 'before'='before' and 'after'='behind' seem almost language universals to me. Apparently, WALS never compiled a chart for this matter, while it bothers me a lot for quite some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T18:27:45.340" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:54:05.683" Title="'Before'/'after' as a spatial metaphor: is the opposite possible?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20398" CreationDate="2016-12-03T18:27:10.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We imagine the time flowing at us from our front to our back, so the future is in front of us and the past is behind us, for us the time flows from the future into the past. I don't know about all the languages, but for those who speak Aymara, a South American language, it is all vice versa, for them the time flows from behind, from the past and into the future, so the future is behind and the past is in front of them. In other words, we look into the future, they look into the past. And as far as I know, there are no prepositions in Aymara, spacial relations are expressed by noun cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Articles about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/FINALpblshd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One.&lt;/a&gt; With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1840943/component/escidoc:1840946/Hoemke_2013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two.&lt;/a&gt; Reversing the Direction of Time: Does the Visibility of Spatial Representations of Time Shape Temporal Focus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T18:27:10.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3783" CreationDate="2016-12-03T18:38:45.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I'll add my non-answer to the other two.  :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like such a tool myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that would make it harder than text-to-speech is that text-to-speech depends on context to better guess the right spelling of a word that can have many different sounds (depends on the speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions mention tools that do it for specific languages, but when the language is known, such tools have a much easier task.  (The phonemic inventory is already known.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what should make it easier is that although a particular IPA symbol can represent many different sounds, there is a fairly narrow range of certain metrics of the relationships between formants, i.e., all those possible sounds are very similar.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13794" LastEditorUserId="13794" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T21:39:11.833" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T21:39:11.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20396" CreationDate="2016-12-03T19:00:10.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main fact that has to be accounted for is that many languages have phonological processes that distinguish heavy from light syllables, for example in Mongolian, stress is assigned to the first &quot;heavy&quot; syllable; in Arabic (broadly speaking: much dialect divergence and fine-grained specifics differ), stress is within the last 3 syllables and the determination is based on whether a potentially skipped syllable is heavy or light. However, what defined &quot;heavy&quot; versus &quot;light&quot; varies by language. A pre-generative observation (from Jakobson as I recall) is that long vowels and diphthongs count for defining &quot;heavy&quot; if the distinction is made at all, and coda consonants &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; as well. In Arabic, coda consonants do; in Mongolian, they don't. Following the classical &quot;long vowels are equivalent to two vowels&quot; analysis, a mora is thus &quot;vowel&quot;, plus optionally &quot;one coda consonant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of problems that led to widespread adoption of moraic theory. The alternatives are the skeletal theories, CV theory (Clements &amp;amp; Keyser) and vanilla X-theory (Hyman and subsequent developments), where there is (approximately) one skeletal unit per segment, or two units for long segments. The problem with both of these theories is that they don't provide a representational means of picking out the things that are relevant for syllable-weight processes. Onset consonants get in the way of easily determining whether a syllable is &quot;heavy&quot; or &quot;light&quot;. although there were all sorts of ad hoc devices that allowed some of the facts to be accounted for (such as a &quot;projection&quot;, whereby you temporary render invisible certain elements). The fact of generally limiting syllables to a two-way distinction is also a bit problematic for skeletal theories: you need some means of neutralizing the difference between CVVCCCC, CVVC and CVC syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moraic theory tries to solve these and other problems by positing a thing &quot;mora&quot; notated μ where syllables always have one and maybe two moras, and where segmental length is derived from moraic structure (a geminate consonant is moraic; a long vowel has two moras). However, as with most proposals in phonological theory, there are inconvenient problems and arbitrary stipulations that mess up this picture. One is the distinction between light, heavy and super-heavy syllables. One approach is simply to say that a syllable can have three moras, not just two, but this proposal in controversial. Classical Arabic illustrates the problem, sorta, in that final long vowels and VC rhymes act like final short vowels, but elsewhere VV and VC rhymes define &quot;heavy&quot;. The conservative approach has been to exploit the separate concept of extraprosodicity on final material, so that a language can exclude one final consonant, or all final consonants, or half of a final long vowel (or a final short vowel) from the computation. The reason for this is that systematic and robust 'heavy vs. super-heavy' distinctions are pretty much limited to special treatments of final syllables. Vastly more has and can been said about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can sort of read &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3_Sp1g_QziwC&amp;amp;pg=PA465&amp;amp;lpg=PA465&amp;amp;dq=odden%20vowel%20length&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2Xmh5vUuz8&amp;amp;sig=JUc8TGC2ZeRSLH6sapyg_mDFN04&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiFkuy10tjQAhUK7mMKHVWeDE0Q6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=odden%20vowel%20length&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article on vowel length&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vanoostendorp.nl/pdf/051122.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; about moras, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.companiontophonology.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405184236_chunk_g978140518423639&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sorta this&lt;/a&gt; about geminates, and sorta this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.companiontophonology.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405184236_chunk_g978140518423659&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article by Draga Zec&lt;/a&gt; on   (&quot;sorta&quot; means that you may have to dig to get the actual articles): the mora article is in the wild, the others are in the Blackwell's Companion to Phonology. You might also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/phonology/article/an-analysis-of-north-saami-gradation/4928EECCEFB726D6A2AEAECB462EB5B3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, which is a kind of minimal-theory analysis of a dialect of Saami that has complex length distinctions that are well suited to a classical analysis in terms of syllables with one or two moras, but non-trivial alignment between moras and segments. I think the question of how moras connect to particular segments is the biggest unresolved issue in moraic phonology (that is, what do moras dominate?), and &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; those connections are made (the algorithmic content) is the second biggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T19:00:10.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3802" CreationDate="2016-12-03T19:44:52.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three reasons that words in different languages may sound similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Common origin;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loans; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common origin gives us series of related words. For instance, English &quot;father&quot; and Latin &quot;pater&quot; have a common origin. But then we have a whole series of words that have a similar fonetic structure in Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages, particularly featuring the peculiarity that what begins in &quot;f&quot; in Germanic languages begins in &quot;p&quot; in non-Germanic languages, and what sounds as &quot;th&quot; in English sounds as t in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;father (English) - Vater (German) - pater (Latin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mother (English) - mater (Latin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fish (English) - Fisch (German) - pisces (Latin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;foot (English) - Fuss (German) - podos (Greek)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;feather (English) - pteros (Greek)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we do not have those series, then a common origin cannot be established. In the particular case you cite, we do not have any consistent series of words in which Turkish initial /b/ corresponds to Latin initial /m/, nor Turkish final /n/ to Latin final /l/. This means that the similarity is very probably - quite certainly, indeed - not due to a common origin (or is rooted in a common origin so ancient that it has left no real trace in either language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with the hypotheses of 2. loans, and 3. coincidence. In the cases you bring into our attention, a loan is also quite unlikely. Words for &quot;language&quot; are quite central vocabulary in any language, which will not have much reason to borrow it. You borrow words like &quot;spaghetti&quot;, that denote objects that you didn't know previously to an inter-cultural contact; and if you borrow a word like &quot;language&quot;, it usually is an erudite borrowing, to establish a more refined/abstract connotation than the original &quot;tongue&quot;. Neither Latin nor Turkish seem to have any problems with /b/ or /m/, so if they had borrowed from each other, both words would start with /b/ or both words would start with /m/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the most likely is that this is a coincidence, that you notice because of the similarity in meaning. But similarity in meaning is elusive; in the examples above I cited &quot;feather&quot; and &quot;pteros&quot; as related words - which they are, albeit their meaning being quite different. If there isn't historic evidence of a borrowing, or comparable series of words that can establish a common origin, coincidence is by far the most likely explanation for such irregular similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2016-12-04T09:01:54.687" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T09:01:54.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20380" CreationDate="2016-12-03T20:31:24.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are methods for calculating the age of the split between two languages (which, conveniently, I do not rembember the details of). They rely on counting related material versus unrelated material, and making a proportion. Evidently, there is a point at which such proportion tends to zero. That is, two closely related languages that diverged a thousand years ago will have x% related words; two not so closely related languages that diverged two thousand years ago will have x/2% related words, and so on. But at some point there will be no difference between relational similarities and statistical noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once in a conlang forum two groups invented different vocabularies for two unrelated languages. I applied the usual method and concluded that the languages would have diverged 5,600 years ago. So it is possible to conclude that two completely unrelated languages are close enough that they have diverged five or six millenia ago; that probably is close to the point where the difference between signal and noise becomes untraceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T20:31:24.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T09:47:25.877" Score="0" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have run into a problem when I am trying to find the head noun for a NP in this sentence. I haven't been able to find any rules explaining why one of them would be head, or if they even belong in the same NP. The two words in &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; are the words that I am wondering about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oscar took the corn, so that &lt;em&gt;he himself&lt;/em&gt; could enjoy the corn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task that I am doing is trying to find each free-standing NP in a text, and analyze those NPs. This one is confusing me, and the parser that I am using (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nactem.ac.uk/enju/demo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enju 2.4 online demo&lt;/a&gt;) is not helping me me find the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am actually analyzing &lt;em&gt;Oscar himself&lt;/em&gt; (produced by a learner of English), however, this isn't really grammatically correct, so I've changed the wording here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be thankful for any of your thoughts, help, or ideas on this subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14649" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-12-04T13:10:38.313" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T16:20:51.263" Title="Find head noun, &quot;he himself&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T15:21:49.763" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about Reciprocal Pronouns (a part of the category anaphors). I can't seem to find the entire answer that I am looking for anywhere, so I'll ask here. I have tried to make my question as broad as possible so that anyone else looking for the same information about Reciprocal Pronouns will find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My task is to analyze the Noun Phrases in a text. I need to find the head noun, and consequently categorize all of the other words in the NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have run into this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they started to chase &lt;em&gt;each other&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having difficulty figuring out which of the words in this reciprocal pronoun is the head, and what the other word would be classified as. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instincts tell me to treat it as one word, since it acts like a single word. If I were to do this, then it would be a NP with a single noun, and no modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spent hours trying to find an answer to this, so your advice and/or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14649" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T15:21:49.763" Title="Reciprocal Pronouns (one another, each other) and Head Noun" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20414" CreationDate="2016-12-04T16:35:59.283" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the Germanic root &quot;mid/mit&quot; (e.g. middle, Mittel, Mitte), the Slavic root &quot;сред&quot; (e.g. средство, среда), and the Latin root &quot;medio&quot; (e.g. median, medios, mean, moyen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their derived terms in all three language families have both meanings of &quot;center, intermediate&quot; and &quot;method or course of action used to achieve some result&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it seems highly unlikely that three different roots in three different language families would have the same &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; meanings independently, I wondered whether only one of the two meanings is native to all three families, with the second meaning developing initially in one language family only and then spreading to the other two via calques (e.g. first developing in French, and then copied via calque by the English, Russians, and Germans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried checking etymological dictionaries (e.g. Wiktionary), but none compare the etymologies of related words in different languages so as to check for calques. Thus I don't know how to confirm or deny this hypothesis. Generalizing this specific situation leads to my overall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;. Does anyone know or can anyone suggest a standardized procedure for checking for calques obscuring a word's true etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14660" OwnerDisplayName="William" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T05:25:13.040" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T10:54:44.110" Title="How to correctly recognize a calque?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;calques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T00:13:51.920" Score="1" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;One presupposition trigger is the definite article. Can an indefinite article trigger a  presupposition? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14657" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T11:16:21.177" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T01:03:59.970" Title="Can an indefinite article trigger a presupposition?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;presupposition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T01:31:30.877" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at a set of data right and I'm a bit confused on how to tackle this. The data is showing a stem alternation of some verbs with [e] and [o] and no change in others. I know this is due to Latin and I've done some research on it but the answers I've found have left me confused. What rule makes a verb like &quot;poder&quot; conjugate with a stem change (puedo) but a similar verb such as &quot;rentar&quot; not (rento)? We're learning about abstract analysis right now and I'm quite sure that has something to do with it, but I don't know the steps to get there. Is there some sort of underlying vowel that never comes to surface that we can use in a rule? I've noticed that the dipthongization happens if the first syllable is stressed and has [e] or [o] but of course this doesn't apply everywhere, which is the problem. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10986" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T14:19:52.827" Title="Spanish Stem Change" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20411" CreationDate="2016-12-05T03:02:43.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there are three classes of behavior, when only two make sense under normal assumptions about what the underlying segments of the language are. One pattern is the diphthongizing patterns of &quot;be able&quot; /pod/, where when stressed you get [we] as in [pwéðo] &quot;I can&quot;. The second is the non-alternating pattern of &quot;eat&quot; /kom/ as in [kómo] &quot;I eat&quot;. So far so good, yuo have a distinction between underlying diphthongs and underlying monophthongs, and diphthongs monophthongize when unstressed. But that can't be totally true, because of &lt;em&gt;piedád&lt;/em&gt; &quot;piety&quot; where you do in fact have unstressed diphthongs. The abstract analysis &quot;solves&quot; the problem by saying that only specially-marked stressed vowels are diphthongized, so the unstressed diphthong of &lt;em&gt;piedád&lt;/em&gt; is not a problem since the rule is that stressed vowels diphthongize, not that unstressed diphthongs monophthongize. There are basically two specific proposals for that special marking. One is that the special vowels are tense or long; the other is that they have an arbitrary diacritic [+D] (which is abstract since you can't hear it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems to force some abstract analysis is this third class of vowels, exemplified by &lt;em&gt;piedád&lt;/em&gt;: if only we could deal with unstressed diphthongs, the matter would be very simple – /pwed/ versus /kom/. As far as I know, the class of unstressed diphthongs is circumspect. There are prefixed stems like &lt;em&gt;adiestrar, amueblar&lt;/em&gt;, and some nouns like &lt;em&gt;piedad&lt;/em&gt; (also &lt;em&gt;vienés)&lt;/em&gt;, but to the best of my knowledge, no verb roots like &lt;em&gt;puevár, pientér&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T03:02:43.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20409" CreationDate="2016-12-05T09:41:15.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in PIE we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mee̯dos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; measure, treatment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mee̯dodics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; who gives advice, medic ( &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dictis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = instruction )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mee̯dhi̯os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; middle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;me̯trom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lenghth, measure unit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T10:54:44.110" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T10:54:44.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20410" CreationDate="2016-12-05T10:51:37.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the definite article is assumed to exhibit both an existence and a uniqueness presupposition, combining to an &quot;exactly one&quot; presupposition:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw the bear yesterday&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → There is a bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → There is not more than one bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → = There is exactly one bear (in this situation, e.g. in a town)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this is generally not assumed for the indefinite article: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw a bear yesterday&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is a bear and not more than one.&lt;/strike&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several devices to test whether a presupposition holds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Negation test: If you negate the statement, the presupposition stays:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I didn't see the bear yesterday.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → There is a bear and not more than one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I didn't see a bear yesterday.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is a bear and not more than one.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hey wait a minute&quot; test: If you deny the truth of a presupposition, you must do so by saying something like &quot;Hey, wait a minute&quot;, because straightforwardly replying with &quot;No, this is not true&quot; would only negate the truth of the embedding statement:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw the bear yesterday.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  # No, this is not true. (This is only denying that you saw the bear)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ Hey wait a minute! What bear? There isn't a bear around here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ Hey wait a minute! &quot;The&quot; bear? There is more than one, which one do you mean?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw a bear yesterday.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ No, this is not true. (You are telling stories, there are no bears around here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Question test: If you turn the statement into a question, the presupposition stays.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did you see the bear on your trip?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → There is a bear and not more than one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did you see a bear on your trip?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is a bear and not more than one.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these tests suggest that the indefinite article doesn't have an existence or uniqueness presupposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the example from Greg Lee's comment seems to provide some counter evidence:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you pray to a god?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  # No. (weird to say if you want to deny that there is more than one and you only pray to &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; god)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ Hey wait a minute! There is not more than one god. I only pray to &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; God.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please keep in mind that this is example answers by fictional characters and certainly not what &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; believe ;) )  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, behaves differently than the definite article (or proper names in the case of an article-less, capitalized &quot;God&quot;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you pray to a god?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ No. Because I don't believe that there is one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you pray to (the) God?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  # No. (unlikely to say if you don't even believe in God, because this sounds like you assume there is one but just don't pray to him)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one could maybe say that while the definite article comes with an existence and a uniqueness presupposition, the indefinite article has something like a non-uniqueness presupposition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is now a little weird because &quot;more than one&quot; would automatically imply existence (which we don't want as a presupposition, otherwise the denial in the last-but-one example sentence would fail), so maybe one could word it to say that the indefinite article presupposes the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of there being more than one:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;✓ a bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ✓ a police officer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  # a current president of the US&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  # a god (if you believe in a monotheistic religion)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the indefinite article now doesn't come with an existence presupposition:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did you see a bear?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is a bear&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you pray to a god?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is a god&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it doesn't come with the necessity of there being more than one either:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did you see a bear?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is more than one bear&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you pray to a god?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strike&gt;→ There is more than one god&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it does come with a presupposition of the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of there being more than one:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did you see a bear?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → It is possible that there are several bears strolling around  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;# Are you content with a current US president?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  → It is possible that there are several current US presidents  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which makes sense assuming that &quot;a&quot; picks a subset out of a larger set (strictly semantically, &quot;I saw a bear&quot; is also true if you saw several bears, so it's a (possibly singleton) subset rather than an individual, as would be the case with the use of &quot;the&quot; which directly picks out a single individual), so there should be a set with more than one member to pick from. If you didn't assume the possibility of there being more than one, you would have been more informative by straight away saying &quot;the&quot;, thereby stating that there is only one anyway, so the mere use of &quot;a&quot; rather than &quot;the&quot; suggests that in some contexts, it is possible that there are several individuals in your set (although it might be that in one or the other context, there is only one member involved), which I think you could dub a lexically triggered presupposition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Such a weak presupposition (&lt;strong&gt;the &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt; of there being more than one&lt;/strong&gt;) would explain the example given by Greg Lee, but at the same time not exhibit the unwanted effect of an existence presupposition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my analysis at least; feel free to provide counter-evidence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T14:58:15.647" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T14:58:15.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20416" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-05T11:22:37.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T11:22:37.853" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T11:22:37.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20417" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-05T11:22:37.853" Score="0" Body="a proposition that must be true in order for another statement to make sense, or is taken for granted as a background assumption in another statement. E.g. the sentence &quot;I find it great that John propsed to Mary&quot; comes with the presupposition that &quot;John proposed to Mary&quot;." OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-06T17:53:00.797" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T17:53:00.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T11:55:08.140" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some dependency treebanks for Germanic languages, nouns in subject position are assigned the governors of their corresponding predicative adjectives, as opposed to the copular verb connecting the two. Is this compatible with what is currently accepted from a purely theoretical linguistic approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There seem to be a number of a-linguistic decisions taken in NLP applications - the Stanford Universal Dependencies handling of content words over function words come to mind. So I'm wondering whether this is one of them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T03:05:02.197" Title="Governors of adjectives in dependency grammars" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T12:20:30.957" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if you know a computational method to obtain the stem of any English word. By stem I mean the part of the word which is never affected by plurals, temporal forms, and so on. For example, stem(&quot;cars&quot;) = car; stem(&quot;children&quot;) = child; stem (&quot;tried&quot;) = try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14662" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T20:13:44.447" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T14:03:30.420" Title="Obtaining the stem of a word" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20419" CreationDate="2016-12-05T12:40:15.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you're trying to stem English words, the easiest approach would probably be to use one of the existing applications of the Porter algorithm. Try &lt;a href=&quot;http://snowballstem.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Snowball&lt;/a&gt; (it's also available as &lt;a href=&quot;https://gate.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GATE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; plugins) - it's well-known in the NLP community, so you'll be able to get help fairly quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is Krovetz stemming, of which a JAVA/C++ application is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/lemur/wiki/KrovetzStemmer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (personally I haven't used this before, so I can't comment on its effectiveness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T12:40:15.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20430" CreationDate="2016-12-05T13:12:25.920" Score="2" ViewCount="829" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293057412_Cross-modal_iconicity_A_cognitive_semiotic_approach_to_sound_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;encountered&lt;/a&gt; this term in the context of a study about sound symbolism, I suppose it is a factor that might play role in how are the new words being formed. What is meant by this factor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T21:01:58.870" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:14:14.457" Title="What is motivatedness?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T16:47:44.673" Score="2" ViewCount="2107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm a Latin student, and that being said, I understand how cases operate and what they do for a language, but I've never enjoyed learning/studying/keeping track of them. &lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; being said, I feel like my conlang needs at least a simple case system. &#xA;Question is: should I try and base it off of what I'm familiar with (English and Latin), or can I make my own (albeit extremely watered-down) system?&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Example: having one noun case that is its name in any instance (whether it's the subject, object, etc.), a case indicating possession: &quot;something of the noun&quot;, a vocative case, and maybe some other simple cases.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14665" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T11:51:42.797" Title="How should I form grammatical cases in my conlang?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20422" CreationDate="2016-12-05T16:52:20.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a conlang, you can essentially try out whatever you want. When you want to go for a naturalistic, but simple case system, there are are languages with just two cases termed nominative (for the subject of a sentence) and oblique (for everything else, including direct and indirect objects as well as nouns in prepositional phrases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T16:52:20.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T18:12:15.987" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Generative Approaches trying to explain Auxiliary Selection are mostly focused in Italian, because its a language which intransitive verbs respond pretty well  to unaccusativity diagnostics. It seems that other languages, like French, don't respond so clearly to the inacusative split. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if you can tell me about papers or theories that would focus in Auxiliary Selection in French, cause what I have found so far (appart from Legendre and Sorace) is mostly based in Italian and Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14565" LastEditorUserId="14565" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T21:45:28.033" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T21:45:28.033" Title="French Auxiliary Selection. Theoretical explanations?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20422" CreationDate="2016-12-05T18:28:40.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One personal example: my mother tongue has no case structure and most people I know do not speak a language that has a real, rough case system like Latin. After I learned some languages that had cases I felt the need to create a conlang with a very simple case structure in order to teach my friends what cases were. Now, most of them already spoke English, so I decided to make a conlang based on English. After thinking a little about colours and numbers, I created the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nominative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accusative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those were the easiest cases to explain. The numbers represent them. This means that we can translate a simple sentence like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Michael knows the place in which Olivia's apples were.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Michael-1 knows place-3 which-4 Olivia-2 apples-1 were.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the numbers can be translated to sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No sound&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;-'s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Michael knows placetow whichins Olivia's apples were.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I tried to emphasize word ordering is mostly secondary in case-rich languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14640" LastEditorUserId="14640" LastEditDate="2016-12-06T11:51:42.797" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T11:51:42.797" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20422" CreationDate="2016-12-05T19:27:38.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin's case system is fairly standard for Indo-European languages. But it's by no means the only option even within that language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;At most&lt;/em&gt;, English has nominative, accusative, genitive, and possessive. Only the pronouns still distinguish them: &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;theirs&lt;/em&gt;. (In general English has no noun cases at this point, except for arguably the &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; particle—but that's a separate debate.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German has nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative: &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to him&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian also has similar cases to Latin, but the ablative is split into the prepositional (object of some prepositions) and the instrumental (&quot;using ___&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at non-Indo-European languages there are even more possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mandarin Chinese has no cases at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish has fifteen, such as the elative (&quot;out of the house&quot;), the illative (&quot;into the house&quot;), the allative (&quot;to the house&quot;), the ablative (&quot;from the house&quot;), and the translative (&quot;turning into a house&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basque (sometimes) divides &lt;em&gt;ergative-absolutive&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;nominative-accusative&lt;/em&gt;: in other words, the subject of an intransitive verb looks like the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; of a transitive verb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese and Korean have two types of nominative, the &quot;subject nominative&quot; and the &quot;topic nominative&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In general&lt;/em&gt;, cases tend to &quot;appear&quot; in the following order, in that the later ones usually aren't found without the earlier ones. But there are lots and lots of exceptions to this; it's more of a general guideline than a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nominative/ergative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accusative/absolutive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genitive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepositional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ablative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Instrumental&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything else (looking at you, Finnish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T20:32:44.003" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T20:32:44.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T20:15:20.137" Score="6" ViewCount="914" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language that uses the &lt;em&gt;International Phonetic Alphabet&lt;/em&gt; as their official writing system?&#xA;Basically,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a language using [a less strict version of] IPA as their writing system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that language a &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;constructed&lt;/em&gt; language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many people speak it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastEditorUserId="14666" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T23:09:03.960" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T23:09:03.960" Title="Language that uses IPA" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20429" CreationDate="2016-12-05T21:15:01.160" Score="11" ViewCount="8069" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koreanic languages&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among extant languages, Korean is considered by most linguists to be a language isolate and by others as part of the widely rejected Altaic family or the Dravido-Korean languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Wikipedia article on [the Altaic family] states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ᵻk/) is a proposed language family of central Eurasia, now widely seen as discredited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet from my personal experience living in Japan, Japanese and Korean seem very close. Korean speakers tend to learn Japanese very quickly, and the usual explanations given are because they are very similar languages, or because they have similar grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I speak Japanese, and I usually recognize Korean when I hear it because I always think it is Japanese being spoken until I realize that I don't understand what is being said.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why aren't Japanese and Korean considered part of the same group? Why is the Altaic hypothesis dismissed? Why is Korean considered an Isolate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T08:45:34.870" Title="Why is Korean considered a language isolate?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20428" CreationDate="2016-12-05T21:45:57.870" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember &quot;isolate&quot; doesn't mean &quot;shown to be unrelated to any other language&quot;. It means &quot;not shown to be related to any other language&quot; (in a sufficiently convincing manner to establish a consensus). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Korean is considered a language isolate because modern linguists expect relatedness to be demonstrated by showing there is a significant amount of vocabulary (possibly including morphemes, not just entire words) in each language that can be derived from a common source via a regular set of sound changes for each language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figuring out these sound changes, and determining the form of the common vocabulary, is the process of reconstructing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Japanese and Korean, despite the superficial similarities, nobody has constructed a convincing proto-language. Wikipedia mentions some of the criticisms of proposed Altaic sound correspondences between languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are good reasons for requiring evidence of common vocabulary. Areal effects have a large influence on the pronunciation of languages, and they can also affect grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Basque language doesn't have any common ancestry with Spanish, as far as we can tell, and if it did they certainly must have diverged far earlier than Spanish and Romanian. However, Spanish pronunciation shares some features with Basque that it doesn't share with Romanian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish and some dialects of Basque have 5-vowel systems /a e i o u/. (Some Basque varieties have vowel systems more similar to French, with /y/ and nasal vowels. This is another example of areal effects.) Romanian has 7 main vowels /a e i o u ə ɨ/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish and Basque contrast a trilled rhotic /r/ and a tapped/flapped rhotic /ɾ/. Romanian has a single rhotic phoneme /r/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basque and some varieties of Spanish have the retracted sibilant [s̺].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of an areal grammar feature is the &quot;have&quot;-perfect in Western European languages. The verbs involved (reflexes of Germanic *&lt;em&gt;habjaną&lt;/em&gt; and Latin &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt;) are not cognates, so it's impossible for the structure to be inherited from a common ancestor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Midas points out, different people have different viewpoints, and &quot;dismissed&quot; probably has an overly strong connotation of a final judgement. It's appropriate for Wikipedia and any other source trying to be &quot;neutral&quot; or conservative to classify Korean as an isolate, since the mainstream view (apparently; I'm not an expert) is that it has not yet been shown to be related to any other language group with a high degree of certainty. But different linguists have different leanings toward &quot;splitting&quot; languages apart or &quot;lumping&quot; them together. It's possible and perfectly legitimate for someone to think the languages are likely to be related even though we can't definitively demonstrate it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T11:27:45.693" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T11:27:45.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20421" CreationDate="2016-12-05T23:14:14.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of sound-symbolism and indeed the semiotic theories that are discussed in the article, a sign (linguistic or otherwise) is said to be &lt;em&gt;motivated&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;iconic&lt;/em&gt; if its signifier has something in common with what the sign references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a picture of a yellow circle with lines around it is typically used to depict the sun. Because it has some visual properties in common with the sun, we can say it is motivated or iconic, whereas the word &lt;em&gt;sun&lt;/em&gt; itself has nothing in common with the sun and is therefore said to be &lt;em&gt;unmotivated&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;arbitrary&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saussure argued in his seminal &lt;em&gt;Cours de Linguistique Générale&lt;/em&gt; that linguistic signs were (mostly) arbitrary, with any apparent motivation the result of coincidences and irrelevant to linguistic theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, there has been much debate around this issue, with so called &lt;em&gt;ideophones&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phonaesthemes&lt;/em&gt; cited as counter-examples to Saussure's views, as well as the discovery of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bouba Kiki effect&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T23:14:14.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20410" CreationDate="2016-12-06T01:03:59.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think perhaps with an qualifying adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Are you a good mother?&quot; Presupposes that the referent of &quot;you&quot; is, in fact, a mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14672" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T01:03:59.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20427" CreationDate="2016-12-06T11:35:26.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No language (to my knowledge) uses pure IPA as its writing system. But there were orthographies devised for many Western African languages that heavily borrow IPA characters (like ŋ, ə, ɛ, ɔ, or ʃ). However, they have added the usual Capital/Lowercase distinction to their writing system, in this way deviating from IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T11:35:26.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20427" CreationDate="2016-12-06T12:48:40.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any language that strictly meets these criteria, certainly not any major language, but there are some almost-but-not-quite cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many African languages use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet&quot;&gt;African reference alphabet&lt;/a&gt;, which is based on IPA (see jknappen's answer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ad-hoc orthographies created by linguists when describing a language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Journal of the IPA (then known as Le Maître Phonétique) used to be published using almost solely IPA (some proper nouns were written in standard orthography). Example: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KWBNN.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KWBNN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T12:48:40.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20427" CreationDate="2016-12-06T13:27:34.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The constructed language &lt;a href=&quot;http://tokipona.net/tp/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toki Pona&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona#Writing_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;written with IPA symbols&lt;/a&gt;. This is a phonemic transcription that doesn't account for allophonic variation, but still, the letters can always be read according to their IPA values. According to Wikipedia, the language has over 100 speakers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/1706/591&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an estimate of relative differences of the number of speakers of several conlangs, including Toki Pona, based on LinkedIn profiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any natural language that is written with IPA without exceptions, but there are a few that come pretty close, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hawaiian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:42.857" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T18:06:47.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20438" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-06T19:11:05.927" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to prepare for my final exam in syntax and have a few questions while reflecting on previous work. I'm not sure what is meant when asking which is immediately contained. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14108" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T20:10:45.193" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T20:10:45.193" Title="What would be included when asked to point out which nodes are immediatly contained in a syntactic tree?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20438" CreationDate="2016-12-06T19:28:06.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Immediately contained = there are no nodes in between, e.g. in the (sub)tree &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KzmBcm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KzmBcm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt; are immediately contained in &lt;code&gt;VP&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; is not (because the node &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt; is standing between &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; are immediately contained in &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; is not immediately contained in &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt;, only mediately, because &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; is in between, and so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you prefer kinship terminology, reword &quot;X is contained in Y&quot; as &quot;X is a daughter or granddaughter or great grandaughter or great great ... granddaughter of Y&quot;, and &quot;immediately contained&quot; as &quot;X is a daughter, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a granddaughter or great great ... granddaughter of Y&quot; (i.e. there are no other mothers in the family line between X and Y).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Containedness is a relative term, i.e. you must always specify in which node something is (immediately) contained; w.r.t. to a whole syntax tree this notion can't apply, so the question &quot;Which nodes are immediatly contained &lt;em&gt;in a syntactic tree&lt;/em&gt;&quot; doesn't really make sense if you don't say what &lt;em&gt;nodes&lt;/em&gt; they are supposed to be immediately contained in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-06T20:39:57.740" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T20:39:57.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20441" CreationDate="2016-12-06T20:14:26.907" Score="-2" ViewCount="3281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an alphabet containing exactly 25 letters. As we all know, the standard Latin alphabet contains some more letters than 25. As I would like the alphabet to contain exactly 25 letters, it would not suit me to simply remove a handful of letters from the standard Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to this point, I have been attempting to find such an alphabet on my own using the list of writing systems available on Wikipedia, but to no luck. Therefore I am hoping there is a kind soul out there who could provide me with such a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind regards,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14680" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T01:45:33.710" Title="Is there an alphabet containing exactly 25 letters?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20440" CreationDate="2016-12-06T20:24:20.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ogham.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ogham alphabet&lt;/a&gt; contains 25 letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Number of letters: 25, which are grouped into five aicmí (sing. aicme = group, class). Each aicme is named after its first letter. Originally Ogham consisted of 20 letters or four aicmí; the fifth acime, or Forfeda, was added for use in manuscripts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T20:24:20.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20440" CreationDate="2016-12-06T22:12:38.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://omniglot.com/writing/runic.htm#medieval&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medieval (Latinised) Futhark&lt;/a&gt; had 25 letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://omniglot.com/writing/gothic.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic alphabet&lt;/a&gt; had 27 letters, but two of them had no phonetic value and were never used to write any words, they were used only as numbers. Every Gothic letter had a numeric value, that is why 27 letters were needed — 9 units, 9 tens, and 9 hundreds, 9×3=27. Still, only 25 of them were used to write words of the Gothic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T22:12:38.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-06T22:34:07.777" Score="3" ViewCount="1157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in understanding these structures work.  My question is: Why do some diagrams start with S, while others begin with TP, IP, etc... Is there a way to stick these all of these phrases under S?  Please use simple feedback, I haven't taken any linguistic courses in 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14682" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T20:21:01.360" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T18:30:18.710" Title="What should the root of a syntax tree be labelled with?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20443" CreationDate="2016-12-06T23:03:45.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: This answer focusses on mainstream generative grammar approaches which are heaily based on English (or Indo-European languages') syntax, assuming that this is what you are primarily interested in. However, as WavesWashSands pointed out in their comment, things might look completely differently for other languages where the assumption of something like a category I is of not much avail and S might indeed be approriate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S as the root of a sentence is a rather old assumption that is rejected my most modern linguists and is only used for simplification when a detailled analysis of what a sentence constitutes is not relevant (e.g. when explaining how phrase structure grammars work in general, or in very simple &quot;toy grammars&quot; to demonstrate parsing algorithms in computer science/NLP).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When not immediately related to natural language syntax, but for the description of formal languages (such as {a&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt;b&lt;sup&gt;n&lt;/sup&gt; : n ∈ ℕ}, i.e. the language consisting of all possible sequences of aaaaa...bbbbb... where there are just as many a's as there are b's) with phrase structure grammars, which has its use mostly in computer science and mathematics, S is still the convention for the root label, but usually thought of as an abbreviation for &quot;start symbol&quot; rather than &quot;sentence&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why S is not so nice is that it doesn't really give any information of what it is built from, and doesn't fit the general scheme of constituent trees.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In X-bar-theory, variants of which pretty much any major syntax theory is based on, you want to build up your trees systematically starting from lexical items (words) below and making constituents larger and larger, going over to phrases until everything is combined to one maximal structure, thereby assigning every node a combination of a category (such as nominal, verbal, prepositional, inflectional, ..) and a so-called projection level (roughly, it tells us how complete our tree is up to this point: is it a single word, a phrase (= a group of words which somehow belong together) or something in between) encoded in the label name.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Labelling the root of your syntax tree with an S doesn't fit into this scheme now, because you do have &quot;S&quot; as an abbreviation for &quot;sentence&quot; and thus a kind of category, but it doesn't tell us anything about the mentioned projection level and isn't build up of anything S-like either (a CP (= complementizer phrase) has a complementizer in it, an IP (= inflectional phrase) contains an inflection node, ...); for all the other constituents further below in your tree, you have a so-called head which determines the category of the phrase, dependents which complement the head and so on, but the S is just standing there as a single S-thing and branches into, e.g., some NP and VP which violates the assumption that sentence structures are built up in sysetmatic and preditable patterns.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;TP, IP, CP etc. are different here; they do fit the widely accepted X-bar scheme and give us the information we want, namely of what category a sentence is (something tensed/inflected/...) and the projection level (namely a complete phrase that can stand on its own). That's the reason why most modern syntax theories rely on these labels as the top nodes of sentences, because they don't break the general explanatory pattern of how constituent trees are built up.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Additionally, IP and TP are labelled so because they are headed by a category &quot;inflection&quot;/&quot;tense&quot; which makes sure that the sentence is properly inflected w.r.t. tense, subject-verb agreement and so on, and it is assumed that this happens at a stage higher up in the hierarchy after all verbs have started off as uninflected. If you don't include an I or T in your tree, but simply say that an NP and a VP combine to an S, the question is where the inflection comes from, because it must be reflected in the tree somewhere.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, no, you can't simply put everything under S without violating basic assumptions shared by major syntax trends. But you can, if you want, make the generalization for yourself that &quot;CP&quot;, &quot;IP&quot; etc. are more or less equivalent ot &quot;sentence&quot;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;old syntax theories or dummy grammars without a need for linguistic&#xA;adequacy --&gt; S  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more recent syntax theories that in some way make&#xA;use of X-bar theory and want to describe syntax in a more accurate and more generic way --&gt; TP/IP/CP/...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Two more comments:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You write in your title &quot;the head label of trees&quot;. The term &quot;head&quot; is not quite right in this context; it usually refers to the head of a phrase as assumed in X-bar theory, but apart from that it is not a term that is defined for trees as mathematical objects independently of a syntactic theory. What you mean is the &lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; of the tree.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you choose to label your root with IP or similar, you can of course not just go and replace S by IP, but as soon as you decide to stick to consitent X-bar labelling and an account for inflection (which would be the motiviations for chosing IP, or TP or whatever), this labelling must be licensed, i.e., the category I must occur in your tree as the head of the inflectional phrase, so you'd need to restructure your whole tree accordingly. A tree of the form &lt;code&gt;[IP [NP VP]]&lt;/code&gt; is not better (in fact even worse) than a tree &lt;code&gt;[S [NP VP]]&lt;/code&gt; if your IP isn't made up of anything that involves the category I, similarly with T and C; so you actually get different trees depending on the choice of the root label.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-10T20:40:00.633" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T20:40:00.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20440" CreationDate="2016-12-07T01:34:49.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern Greek alphabet contains only 24 distinct letters. But in lowercase there are 25 glyps: sigma is written ς at the end of a word and σ otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ ς τ υ φ χ ψ ω&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the Greek alphabet was standardized for political reasons in the fifth century BC, several regional variants also had 25 letters, including glyphs such as Aeolian digamma (Ϝ, pronounced /w/) or Ionian sampi (ϡ, probably pronounced /ts/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω Ϝ/ϡ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English alphabet has had 25 letters at some points in its history. J and V separated from I and U in the mid-1500s, but W was still considered a digraph (like TH) rather than its own letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X Y Z&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several languages also use a Latin alphabet with fewer than 26 letters. In Classical times* Latin itself had only 23 (lacking J, V, W), and two of those (K, Y) appeared only in foreign words. The 26-letter convention comes from English, since early computer encodings such as 7-bit ASCII were designed only for English usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*excluding the reign of Claudius, because nobody liked his new letters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T01:45:33.710" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T01:45:33.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20455" CreationDate="2016-12-07T08:01:24.483" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computational linguistics student, and I was thinking about defining a new framework, or a standard for translating or converting sentences into a conceptual or semantical intermediate language. Kind of like grabbing the essence or central idea or meaning of a sentence and then storing it in that intermediate language for later linguistics processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now is IL a technique that the professionals in this field use at all nowadays? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this even a good idea, I mean defining a standard for representing meaning of the sentences in simplified intermediate language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: This is different from the ILs that are mostly just syntactic and probably have the meaning distorted in their final output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10758" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:26:47.260" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:26:47.260" Title="Semantics Intermediate Language for processing concepts and/or semantics" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T08:06:01.637" Score="1" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike most Indo-European languages Turkish for example groups some words for taste under one word e.g. acı. Are there other languages lacking words for example sour, bitter, sweet, salty, hot/sharp etc? Are there languages that lack taste terminology or where taste is restricted to &quot;tasty&quot; / &quot;not tasty&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2016-12-10T08:07:57.957" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T01:13:45.987" Title="Languages lacking detailed words for taste" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20428" CreationDate="2016-12-07T09:54:20.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Altaic hypothesis is far from dismissed. There are publications out there regarding the Altaic family and there are still voices within major institutions (e.g. Brill) speaking of it. Wikipedia as a source for linguistic concensus has deteriorated over the past years. I am not for or pro the Altaic hypothesis, I am just stating that &quot;dismissed&quot; is largely exhagerated. You could say that the Altaic hypothesis containing Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic is far more accepted than the Macro-Altaic hypothesis including Japanese and Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T09:54:20.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T06:26:02.920" Score="4" ViewCount="3787" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between '&lt;strong&gt;actor&lt;/strong&gt;' and '&lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt;' in systemic functional grammar? Sometimes in a functional grammar, '&lt;strong&gt;actor&lt;/strong&gt;' has a different meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Aldhi Rengga Saputra" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T11:25:59.400" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T22:57:23.667" Title="What is the difference between 'actor' and 'subject' in systemic functional grammar?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20447" CreationDate="2016-12-07T13:38:29.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IL used in symbolic NLP is called first-order logic. There are various more or less differing notations but it all boils down to plain old FOL which can easily capture the meaning (literal or context-specific) of any well-formed sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T13:38:29.900" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T15:04:37.090" Score="-4" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CkZ87.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CkZ87.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can anyone provide me a short critique for the following analyses of the sentence. About their advantages and disadvantages and provide evidence if possible!!thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14688" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T19:50:37.100" Title="a question about grammar and syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2016-12-08T17:18:46.920" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20447" CreationDate="2016-12-07T15:40:11.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of a comprehensive, cross-language/language-independent set of meanings is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal#Semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguistic universals&lt;/a&gt;. The task of identifying these universals is such a hugely daunting one that few have tried, and many even think it is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One attempt I personally think is fairly successful is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage project&lt;/a&gt;, begun over four decades ago by Anna Wierzbicka, and now worked on by a small but sizeable group of linguists. They have identified around 64 'semantic primes', the smallest indivisible concepts encoded in human languages, but it is very much a work in progress, and primes are added or removed every few years. NSM proposes not just the list of primes, but also proposes a universal syntax for how they combine together (semantically). If you were to develop an Intermediate Language I would strongly recommend building on the work of NSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developing a NSM based computer format would probably not take too much work, but to develop a converter to take unparsed natural language and output an analysis in that format would be a multi-billion dollar project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T15:40:11.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20451" CreationDate="2016-12-07T17:38:54.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a clause is analysed for transitivity in different ways depending on the type of process the main verb represents. Let's consider the following clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] am [tall].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] own [this computer].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] am [in the office].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clauses above represent relations between two elements. Clause 1 represents the relation between a person and one of his or her qualities, the second between the person and his or her belongings, the third between the person and his or her current place. For this reason, the first element is said to play the role of attribute &lt;strong&gt;Carrier&lt;/strong&gt; and the second the role of &lt;strong&gt;Attribute&lt;/strong&gt;. The process is said to be of relational type because it relates two elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other clauses are said &quot;material&quot; in the sense that they represent a portion of matter changing through time. Examples can be seen below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] grew up {in California}.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] bought [this computer] {in Best Buy}.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] arrived [here] {today}.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Material processes have an &lt;strong&gt;Actor&lt;/strong&gt;, someone (or something) who does something either to him/herself or to something else. The first element of the three clauses above is always an actor. Notice that &lt;em&gt;in California&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in Best Buy&lt;/em&gt; are not attributes of the actor, but actually the place where something happened. Notice also that &lt;em&gt;this computer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; are not attributes of the actor while the process is going on. It is the change in attributes for a portion of matter that is being represented in those clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The function of &lt;strong&gt;Subject&lt;/strong&gt; does not belong to the transitive model of English. It belongs to the model of predication. The subject is the element (typically a person or a thing) that we are talking about. Let's consider the following two clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[I] bought [this computer] {in Best Buy}.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[This computer] was bought {in Best Buy}.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both clauses, we are talking about the first element. In Clause 7 the &lt;strong&gt;Subject&lt;/strong&gt; element is the speaker and in Clause 8 the &lt;strong&gt;Subject&lt;/strong&gt; element is the computer. However, the &lt;strong&gt;Actor&lt;/strong&gt; of buying is the speaker in Clause 7 while it is left unspecified in Clause 8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the difference between Actor and Subject. Actor is a function of an element in the transitive model of language and Subject is a function that one element of the clause has in predication (what is being revealed about what).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14689" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T17:38:54.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20454" CreationDate="2016-12-07T19:08:49.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simplified Tree Diagram - Catenative Construction Assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYkrX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYkrX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T19:16:20.353" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T19:16:20.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20454" CreationDate="2016-12-07T19:50:37.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to learn how to use diagnostics to tell you whether you have the right structure.  One such diagnostic is provided by &quot;and&quot;, which connects constituents of the same category.  In the tree you give, &quot;might have been watching television&quot; is not a constituent.  Yet we can form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He [[might have been watching television] and [has no idea what happened]].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tells us that &quot;might have been watching television&quot; is actually a constituent which has the same category as &quot;has no idea what happened&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T19:50:37.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20463" CreationDate="2016-12-07T22:34:49.693" Score="14" ViewCount="4862" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know both languages to a certain extent. By no means I am fluent; reading is still a challenge, especially in Chinese, thus I am not allowed to firmly stand by my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often ponder on the big loss the Vietnamese Language incurred with the replacement of the Chinese-based Chữ Nôm writing system with the latin based script (chữ Quốc ngữ) by missionaries and French colonizers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Vietnamese have no problems reading the latin-based script, and I raised a following questions many times to Chinese people I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could Chinese characters be totally abandoned and could children be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  taught to only use the pinyin(拼音) instead? Would they still be able&#xA;  to read efficiently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A standard Chinese answer to this hypothetical question is something like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;no, it's absolutely impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only &quot;proof&quot; I got until now is &lt;a href=&quot;http://bjornstar.com/post/1563092325/%E7%9F%B3%E5%AE%A4%E8%A9%A9%E5%A3%AB%E6%96%BD%E6%B0%8F%E5%97%9C%E7%8D%85-%E8%AA%93%E9%A3%9F%E5%8D%81%E7%8D%85-%E6%96%BD%E6%B0%8F%E6%99%82%E6%99%82%E9%81%A9%E5%B8%82%E8%A6%96%E7%8D%85%E5%8D%81%E6%99%82-%E9%81%A9%E5%8D%81%E7%8D%85%E9%81%A9%E5%B8%82-%E6%98%AF%E6%99%82%E9%81%A9%E6%96%BD%E6%B0%8F%E9%81%A9%E5%B8%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which underlines the abundance of homonyms in Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not much and I still think it's possible to switch to pinyin for Chinese. I'm basing my opinion on the similarity of Vietnamese/Chinese, but would love to hear some more down-to-earth proofs/references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edited]&#xA;Note that I am not into economics of such a hypothetical enterprise. I am strictly interested in the possibility of Chinese people to read in pinyin without being excessively exposed to ambiguity due to homonyms (pinyin is the same for many characters. Examples: 是 and 士).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T15:59:03.217" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T02:17:58.980" Title="Replacing Chinese characters with pinyin forever as Vietnamese did" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;&lt;readability&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T23:10:00.050" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am attempting to catogorize the different parts of this Noun Phrase produced by a child. I need to assign a head noun, as well as figure out what the dependants are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/em&gt; were fighting about corn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/em&gt; is the noun phrase that I need to understand. So far, I have read up on Reflexive Pronouns, Intensive Pronouns, as well as I have re-read the answers to my question about Reflexives (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20406/find-head-noun-he-himself&quot;&gt;Find head noun, &quot;he himself&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come to Indefinite pronouns now. What I have found out about indefinite pronouns is that &lt;em&gt;Both of them&lt;/em&gt; would be classified as an indefinite pronoun, with &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; being the head. Is this similar to my example, &lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am stuck now. They must be part of the same Noun Phrase. They are saying slightly different things. &lt;em&gt;They&lt;/em&gt; shows plurality, while &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; shows how many - two. Which one is a modifier of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14649" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T23:18:07.000" Title="Noun Phrase &quot;they both&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T23:17:29.550" Score="5" ViewCount="8119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I experienced many times how relatively easy it is to learn Chinese (its writing system excluded) for Vietnamese, comparing to Koreans or Japanese whose countries belong to the same zone of Chinese influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is that so? As far as I know, Chinese and Vietnamese do not belong to the same language family. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was Chinese presence much more imposing in Vietnam than it was in Korea and Japan?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If certain features like: tonality of both languages, influence this phenomenon, then why these languages from two different families are both tonal in the first place?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T18:11:38.767" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T13:58:09.817" Title="Why does Vietnamese language seem to be so similar to Mandarin Chinese" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7240" CreationDate="2016-12-07T23:57:44.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MarkDown is not very standardized, so you can always add &quot;yet another MarkDown dialect&quot;. Perhaps the easiest way to support a language such as you describe, is to write several regular expression rules to transform it straight to HTML+CSS. There are many MarkDown-to-HTML programs you could start from, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difficulty that arises in trying to design such a language, is that linguists want to make a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of distinctions, and there's only a little punctuation that's convenient to type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you mentioned using table markdown conventions for interlinear displays. That would be handy, but also introduces the problem of how to represent &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; tables, which you might very well want in the same document (so then you need a variation, or a way to switch, or &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, which complicates the system). The other problem is that table markdown isn't enough -- some interlinear layouts involve multiple levels of breaks; for example, in agglutinative languages you may have almost the complexity of a syntactic tree, buried in multiple layers of interlinear annotations. And third, a MarkDown table processor would need substantial rewriting to correctly wrap lines for interlinear displays (I did get some nice interlinears to work using HTML and the CSS &quot;display:inline-block&quot; property; but I never could make it work for left-to-write annotations on right-to-left text....).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can afford a zero-sum game (you give up one thing MarkDown typically uses punctuation for, for each thing you get with your new processor), then it could work nicely. But you may soon find you want asterisk for emphasis &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt;. Likewise for many of the other conventions. This commonly leads to creeping complexity, and people eventually switch to a metalanguage that provides (a) names rather than characters, (b) hierarchical state management, and (c) existing software for rendering, indexing, transforms, conversions to forms journal publishers will takes, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3002" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T23:57:44.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2016-12-08T00:27:20.583" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to read texts that are written only in pinyin. This is pretty trivial in one sense: pinyin spelling indicates all of the segmental phonemic distinctions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard &lt;em&gt;Putonghua&lt;/em&gt; Chinese&lt;/a&gt; (it was designed to) and when used with tone marks and correct word division and punctuation, it indicates some of the suprasegmental and intonational aspects of pronunciation as well. So someone with a pinyin text can read the sounds out loud fairly well, and if you can do that, you should be able to understand what's being said about as well as you can understand something that you hear that is not written down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another sense, it's obviously difficult for people who are used to one spelling system to read something in an unfamiliar spelling system. /fɔr ɪgˈzæmpəl, aɪm ˈraɪtɪŋ ðɪs ˈsɛntəns ɪn ði ɪntərˈnæʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəbɛt; ɪts ˈprɑbəbli ˈhɑrdər tə rid ðən ðə nɛkst ˈsɛntəns./ For example, this sentence is probably easier to read than the preceding sentence written using the International Phonetic Alphabet. But it is not impossible to read an IPA transcription of English; it just requires knowledge of the sound correspondences, and practice if you want to be able to read quickly. So this is a practical objection to replacing characters in pinyin; it doesn't mean writing comprehensible Chinese in pinyin is &quot;absolutely impossible&quot; in principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in another sense, a non-phonemic writing system allows you to get away with things that would be confusing, or even incomprehensible, in spoken language (like the &quot;shi&quot; poem). I found a tract calling for English spelling reform that gives the following English example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the words &quot;attend to &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; understanding&quot; might easily be read to&#xA;  convey the meaning &quot;attend to &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; understanding&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=PoUKAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA109&amp;amp;lpg=PA109&amp;amp;dq=english%20sentences%20that%20are%20confusing%20ambiguous%20if%20read%20aloud&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=XaGFblt0iu&amp;amp;sig=ZJ4bm5fSSuiDKIVZnVHOJCLSXPk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiHlba5qOPQAhVI-GMKHQeDDLQ4ChDoAQg9MAU#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=english%20sentences%20that%20are%20confusing%20ambiguous%20if%20read%20aloud&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A plea for phonetic spelling: or, The necessity of orthographic reform&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Alexander John Ellis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as Ellis points out, such sentences can simply be reworded to make them less ambiguous in their spoken form. Furthermore, this isn't something that's only possible in post-reform spelling systems. Many native English speakers are familiar with sentences such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that are technically grammatically &quot;correct&quot; but impossible to understand even when written down in the current English spelling system. This could be seen as a &quot;flaw&quot; of the current English spelling system, but in practice it is not a problem for English speakers because nobody needs to use sentences like this anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, no one actually needs to be able to write sentences or texts composed entirely of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;variations on the syllable &quot;shi&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in Chinese (I say &quot;variations&quot; because the syllables are not actually completely identical; there are different tones which can be indicated in Pinyin with tone diacritics or numbers). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;shi&quot; poem is an extreme example, of course, and doesn't represent the real issues that would arise with spelling reform.&#xA;The tendency to ignore the potential of confusing homophony when writing in characters may make it difficult to read some texts that were originally written in characters that are re-written in pinyin. (Furthermore, as michau points out, it means that some established specialized or technical terminology is currently disambiguated mainly by the spelling; something like a more extreme version of the distinctions in English between phonetically similar words like &quot;prescribe&quot; and &quot;proscribe&quot;, or &quot;alkanes&quot;, &quot;alkenes&quot; and &quot;alkynes&quot;, or &quot;hypothermia&quot; and &quot;hyperthermia&quot;.) This doesn't make it impossible to write texts in pinyin that are understandable. But, it does mean writing Chinese without characters may require some changes in word usage compared to writing Chinese with characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that language reformers in other places have made changes in word usage/vocabulary that are of comparable or greater magnitude. For example, in the transition from Ottoman Turkish (written in a form of the Arabic alphabet) to modern Turkish (written in a form of the Latin alphabet) many words of Arabic origin were more or less replaced with words built on Turkish roots. Likewise, it would not be impossible for Chinese writers to avoid overly ambiguous old vocabulary terms and devise some new standard replacements if it became necessary. Obviously, this kind of vocabulary replacement would have cultural impacts that I am not qualified to evaluate, but there is nothing inherently impossible about it from a linguistic point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguist Victor Mair has written a lot about pinyin and characters and how they are used in modern Chinese writing. Here is a blog post he made that mentions the memoirs of Chang Li-ching (his wife) that were published in pinyin: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27423&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27423&lt;/a&gt; The article and comments mention that many native Chinese speakers find it hard to read the text fluently, but it is evidently not literally &quot;impossible&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many of the other posts on this page have mentioned, the details of standardized writing systems are more strongly influenced by political and cultural considerations than by whether it is literally &quot;possible&quot; or &quot;impossible&quot; from a strictly linguistic perspective to use any particular system for any particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T03:21:47.007" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T03:21:47.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18765" CreationDate="2016-12-08T02:00:36.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, the recipient of &lt;em&gt;demander&lt;/em&gt; ('ask') is dative: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Je  lui   demande de répondre à  cette question.&#xA;    1sg 3.DAT ask     of respond  to this  question&#xA;    I ask him to respond to this question.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Late Archaic Chinese, 問 &lt;em&gt;wen&lt;/em&gt; ('ask') can subcategorise for a recipient, which is also dative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) 孔子    與   之    坐  而   問  焉&#xA;    Kongzi  yu  zhi   zuo er   wen yan&#xA;    Kongzi  COM 3.ACC sit CONJ ask 3.DAT&#xA;    Confucius sat with him and asked him.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the verb can also take an accusative object meaning what is being asked. In addition, the dative case only appears when the recipient is a pronoun; otherwise a prepositional phrase appears, respectively &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; in French and &lt;em&gt;yu&lt;/em&gt; in Late Archaic Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2016-12-08T02:42:35.123" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T02:42:35.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20466" CreationDate="2016-12-08T02:55:31.463" Score="-2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example in the sentence: &quot;I will say it loud enough so that it echoes&quot;&#xA;What part of speech is 'echoes'? Would it become a verb or an adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14692" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T03:56:08.773" Title="What part of speech is 'echoes' when not a noun plural?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-12-09T14:42:10.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20465" CreationDate="2016-12-08T03:00:36.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Echoes' is not plural here; it is a third-person singular verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An adverb cannot take a plural marker in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) *They go hastilies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, an adverb modifies an adjective, adverb or verb in English. In this sentence, 'echoes' is a predicate and is not modifying an adjective, adverb or verb, thus we should not consider it an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the verb is the only category in English which can head a predicate. It can also take the -s marker, which expresses the third person and singular number of the subject. This is a type of subject-verb agreement, which in turn is a kind of head-marking. It marks the grammatical relationship of 'subject' between the subject 'it' and the verb 'echo'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-12-08T03:56:08.773" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T03:56:08.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2016-12-08T11:16:45.943" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Yiddish can be considered a creole language: a mixture of German, Hebrew and numerous other languages and dialects. I see many similarities between Yiddish and Jamaican patois. There are certain codes within both to convey messages in secret from an oppressive host language. Also the tone of voice has a similar soft edge to it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14696" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T11:16:45.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20419" CreationDate="2016-12-08T14:03:30.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might actually need the &lt;em&gt;lemma&lt;/em&gt; of the word. &lt;em&gt;Stemming&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lemmatizing&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/stemming-and-lemmatization-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are very similar&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stemming&lt;/strong&gt; usually refers to a crude heuristic process that chops off the ends of words in the hope of achieving this goal correctly most of the time, and often includes the removal of derivational affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lemmatization&lt;/strong&gt; usually refers to doing things properly with the use of a vocabulary and morphological analysis of words, normally aiming to remove inflectional endings only and to return the base or dictionary form of a word, which is known as the lemma .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the most commonly used NLP tools which also contain both stemming and lemmatizing are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoreNLP&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T14:03:30.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20474" CreationDate="2016-12-08T16:07:58.210" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I begin with the following translations of the sentence &quot;This is my father&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Icelandic: &lt;code&gt;Þetta er faðir minn.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bokmål: &lt;code&gt;Dette er faren min&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Danish: &lt;code&gt;Det her er min far.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swedish: &lt;code&gt;Det här är min far.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages above descend from Old Norse, which is almost the same as modern Icelandic. No major grammar changes happened in either West Scandinavian languages (Faroese and Icelandic) regarding pronoun usage, so we may quite happily consider all other North Germanic languages to be the offspring of Icelandic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know almost nothing about Faroese, but I'm pretty sure the pronoun structure is the same as in Icelandic: the possessive pronoun comes &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the possession. Since they're both West Scandinavian, one might think this was a characteristic of this particular set of languages, but Bokmål has this feature too. I'm not sure if Bokmål is a West or East Scandinavian language (like Swedish and Danish), but I'd assume it to belong to the East branch, since it is so close to Swedish and has virtually no cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I'd really like to see an explanation for the fact that even though all those languages come from the same ancestor and are so geographically and historically correlated, the pronoun structure in the East branch has evolved to accommodate the possessives &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the possession. If Bokmål is really an East Scandinavian language, why didn't this happen to it¹? What mechanism could explain these possessive pronoun usages in languages that evolved from the same ancestor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹: This is really a secondary question, because I might be wrong assuming it belongs to the East branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14640" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T21:34:21.503" Title="Possessive pronoun position in north germanic languages" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;possession&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20428" CreationDate="2016-12-08T19:27:19.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My mother tongue is Chinese and I speak neither Japanese nor Korean yet I don't think they really sound close. I will definitely not mistake Japanese speakers as speaking Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy for &quot;close&quot; languages to borrow and share a lot of features. An example I remember quite well is the pronunciation of &quot;r&quot; in became quite similar in French and German over time (for a lot words at least), even though those languages fundamentally don't have much to do with each other, however that doesn't make them belong to one language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue in a large part is how do you separate features borrowed from neighboring, but essentially unrelated languages from features that stemmed from a common language family. It's true that Japanese and Korean share certain common features (e.g. grammar) between themselves and also with some other languages in the area, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manchu Language&lt;/a&gt;, but the sources of such similarities are debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Altaic hypothesis is largely based on the idea that a large portion of the ancestors of modern Korean and Japanese came from north/northeastern Asia (and then they mixed with the population coming from further south to form their respective races), which might be true to a large extent. However, even if that's true, since the geographical conditions of those two places were largely isolating (especially Japan), and also since there were another large portion of the population who came from completely different places (e.g. from Southeastern Asian islands in the case of Japan), they might well have developed a lot of their own features during the tens of thousands of years so that it would be hard to still classify them as belonging to the same language family. Apparently all human beings eventually came from the same place... So at what point of a language's evolution do you draw the line on language families is a somehow subjective issue actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T19:27:19.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20471" CreationDate="2016-12-08T21:34:21.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would check your assumptions of what the order is in the various languages. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://folk.uio.no/helgelo/possproun.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, which is not about history, but indicates that pre- and post-nominal order co-exists in Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic, as well as some Swedish dialects. I would attribute pre-nominal order in Norwegian to Danish influence (hence more common in formal and written registers). It's very complicated, from what I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T21:34:21.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20448" CreationDate="2016-12-08T22:08:45.910" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how did you get that idea. Lets examine your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sour:   &lt;em&gt;ekşi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bitter: &lt;em&gt;acımsı/acımtrak&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;salty: &lt;em&gt;tuzlu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;acı&lt;/em&gt; is used for hot, it is also a general name for lots of tastes. If your culture is not enough specialized in food culture to categorize them, it is your problem, not the Turkish language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing is that, same as the colours, different cultures have different differentiation for tastes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T22:08:45.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2016-12-09T04:24:14.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be possible to use pinyin even without the tone marks to write down Chinese and it will be correctly understood. Actually, a similar thing has been done in the Dungan language for decades already, the only difference is they use not the Latin, but Cyrillic alphabet, and absolutely no tone marks although thera are tones in the language. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungan&lt;/a&gt; is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese used by Muslims, this orthography functions in all spheres of life – at school, in books, newspapers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T05:11:44.310" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T05:11:44.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2016-12-09T11:56:51.770" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible only if you write in an informal way – the way you would say things out loud. The difference between formal and informal writing is quite large in Chinese, and the informal style may feel very awkward in many circumstances. With Pinyin it wouldn't be possible to write everything the way it is written now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of clearly distinct word pairs that have identical pronunciation and can appear in very similar contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chemistry&lt;/strong&gt;: Two chemical elements, selenium (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&amp;amp;wdrst=0&amp;amp;wdqb=%E7%A1%92&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;硒&lt;/a&gt;) and tin (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&amp;amp;wdrst=0&amp;amp;wdqb=c%3A%E9%94%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;锡&lt;/a&gt;) are both pronounced &lt;em&gt;xī&lt;/em&gt; in mainland China. Similarly, both sulphur (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.moedict.tw/%E7%A1%AB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;硫&lt;/a&gt;) and lutetium (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.moedict.tw/%E9%8E%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;鎦&lt;/a&gt;) are pronounced &lt;em&gt;liú&lt;/em&gt; in Taiwan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Biology&lt;/strong&gt;: The genus &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anser_(bird)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anser&lt;/a&gt; (grey geese) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%9B%81%E5%B1%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;雁屬&lt;/a&gt; and the genus &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirundo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hirundo&lt;/a&gt; (swallows) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E7%87%95%E5%B1%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;燕屬&lt;/a&gt;, both pronounced &lt;em&gt;yànshǔ&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, 鵲巢 &lt;em&gt;quècháo&lt;/em&gt; means ‘magpie's nest’, while 雀巢 &lt;em&gt;quècháo&lt;/em&gt; means ‘sparrow's nest’ (or the proper name &lt;em&gt;Nestlé&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Law and politics&lt;/strong&gt;: In mainland China, 检查机关 is a ‘censorship organ’ and 检察机关 is a ‘procuratorial organ’. Both are pronounced &lt;em&gt;jiǎnchá jīguān&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt;: 詞典 &lt;em&gt;cídiǎn&lt;/em&gt; means ‘dictionary of words’ and 辭典 &lt;em&gt;cídiǎn&lt;/em&gt; means ‘dictionary of phrases’. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/1497/3966&quot;&gt;The distinction is subtle, but clear&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paleography&lt;/strong&gt;: According to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/22448/3966&quot;&gt;important modern theory of classification of Chinese characters&lt;/a&gt;, 意符 &lt;em&gt;yìfú&lt;/em&gt; is a category of character components (‘semantic component’), and 義符 &lt;em&gt;yìfú&lt;/em&gt; (‘meaning component’) is one of subcategories of 意符 &lt;em&gt;yìfú&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Geography&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Mountains_of_China&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Five Great Mountains&lt;/a&gt; list includes 衡山 &lt;em&gt;Héng Shān&lt;/em&gt; and 恆山 &lt;em&gt;Héng Shān&lt;/em&gt;. Writers would have to find workarounds to distinguish them if they could only use Pinyin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Street names&lt;/strong&gt;: Harbin has two Lìjiāng Streets: 莅江路 and 丽江路, despite the identical pronunciation. If they were written identically, the problem would be much bigger. Nowadays, you can say 丽江路，美丽的丽 “Lìjiāng street, &lt;em&gt;Lì&lt;/em&gt; as in the word &lt;em&gt;mĕilì&lt;/em&gt; (beautiful)”. If Pinyin was used, it would make no sense, as every &lt;em&gt;lì&lt;/em&gt; would look the same.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt;: 巨變 means ‘great changes’, while 劇變 means ‘sudden/violent change’. Both are pronounced &lt;em&gt;jùbiàn&lt;/em&gt;. You can also take a look at a much longer &lt;a href=&quot;http://carlgene.com/blog/2011/11/most-common-%E5%90%8C%E9%9F%B3%E8%AF%8D-word-homophones-in-mandarin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of Chinese homophones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Puns&lt;/strong&gt;: 向钱看 ‘look for money’ is a play on the communist slogan 向前看 ‘look towards the future’. It wouldn't work in Pinyin without additional explanations, as both expressions are pronounced &lt;em&gt;xiàng qián kàn&lt;/em&gt;. And there are many more such puns, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baidu 10 mythical creatures&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_puns_in_Mandarin_Chinese#Joke_Names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;joke names&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, conversion into Pinyin might remove some crucial information. Precision in scientific and official texts is obviously much more important than in everyday speech. But it would also restrict the creativity found in modern informal and humorous writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, using Pinyin in writing would be possible only after making adjustments to the way people write. But then again, with enough adjustments you can make any language use any script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T04:43:03.313" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T04:43:03.313" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20482" CreationDate="2016-12-09T17:14:05.687" Score="1" ViewCount="618" Body="&lt;p&gt;When is a consonant simply followed by labliasing sound like /u/ or /w/ and when is the consonant itself considered palatised or labialised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, French &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt;, in IPA, /pwɛ̃/ and Croatian &lt;em&gt;pjevati&lt;/em&gt; /pjêʋati/. Contrast this with Polish &lt;em&gt;śpiewać&lt;/em&gt; which may have IPA /ɕpʲɛvat͡ɕ/ or /ɕpjɛvat͡ɕ/ or English &lt;em&gt;swoon&lt;/em&gt; may have IPA /sʷuːn/ or /swuːn/ but usually the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer, I would guess, is when the phonemic difference is contrastive. This is problematic because in many phonetic transcriptions of words which do mark consonants with a raised modifier (see Polish and English above), the sounds are not contrastive in the language described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/pʲ/ and /pj/&#xA;/sʷ/ and /sw/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these are not interchangeable, when should I use either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14706" LastEditorUserId="14706" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T18:49:29.440" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T22:47:21.350" Title="Labialisation and palatisation in IPA: one consonant or two phones?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20480" CreationDate="2016-12-09T17:40:32.030" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA was not designed for languages with palatalized consonants, so it uses different signs when dealing with different languages. For instance, in Russian, Irish and German the IPA notation is different. In Russian and Irish it is mostly denoted by the IPA on the consonant, in German - with the following vowel. Even for Russian some palatalized consonants get superscript j as indication of palatalization, while others have separate characters, in some cases the both ways are permitted. IPA is just a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking how to understand it based on IPA notation, the following &quot;j&quot; in IPA means that the following consonant is /j/, while palatalization should never be indicated this way. It is usually indicated either with superscript &quot;j&quot; or special character for the consonant or special character for the following vowel, depending on language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T17:45:44.140" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T17:45:44.140" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20480" CreationDate="2016-12-09T18:48:08.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deciding between a cluster analysis and a coarticulation analysis when the two do not phonemically contrast is always to some extent a matter of analytical choice, so there's no general answer to your question. Even in English &lt;a href=&quot;http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/Gasiorowski_Piotr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least one serious linguist&lt;/a&gt; has proposed that e.g. the initial cluster of a word like &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; should be considered a single phoneme. Here are some possible factors that could influence your choice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does [j] occur outside of these sequences? If not, it's unlikely to be a separate phoneme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does your language generally allow initial clusters? If not, this is a point in favor of the palatalization analysis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there evidence for a syllable boundary between (for example) the [p] and the [j]? If so, this points to the cluster analysis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can your sound occur in coda? If so, the sonority hierarchy would suggest it's a single phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In languages with distinctive palatalization, this generally affects whole series of consonants (e.g. all the velars, or even all the stops): is this true in your language?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How frequent are the sounds/sequences in question? If they're single phonemes, you should expect their frequency to be roughly comparable with that of other phonemes; if they're clusters, they're likely to be significantly less common than most phonemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T22:47:21.350" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T22:47:21.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20480" CreationDate="2016-12-09T18:55:25.867" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The application is that I'm trying to ascertain sound changes in the&#xA;  Nilotic Luo languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you that when I read professional linguistic literature, I usually face with ad-hoc transcription systems, without any proper description. The professional comparative linguists even when dealing with Russian that contrasts the two, often use &quot;j&quot; where there is no such sound! For instance, I often see things like &quot;bjelo&quot; when dealing with Russian, even though this field requires precision in depiction of phonemes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an excerpt from Fortson's &quot;Indo-European language and culture&quot;. All listed words are supposed to be Russian and used to analyze sound changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSky6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSky6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what??? How does he indicate palatalization? In multiple different ways!&#xA;At the end of the words he uses apostrophe, except the word &lt;em&gt;kakoj&lt;/em&gt; where he does not indicate it at all. In the middle of the words he either uses &quot;j&quot; in words that do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have this sound (&lt;em&gt;knjaz'&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;desjat'&lt;/em&gt;) or simply does not indicate palatalization at all (&lt;em&gt;čtenie&lt;/em&gt; has all 3 consonants palatalized, but it is not indicated by Fortson, &lt;em&gt;dennica&lt;/em&gt; has 2 palatalized consonants, d and n). In word &lt;em&gt;desjat'&lt;/em&gt; all 3 consonants are palatalized, but Fortson does not indicate palatalization at all in the first case, uses &quot;j&quot; in the second case and apostrophe in the third case. Three different methods in one word!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How one can arrive at precise reconstruction of an ancient language if he does not distinguish different consonants in a living, widespread language, where these differences are phonemic and etymologically determined?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T19:07:33.877" LastActivityDate="2016-12-09T19:07:33.877" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20499" CreationDate="2016-12-09T21:27:50.343" Score="2" ViewCount="1042" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do a little linguistics as a hobby while working of my own software development projects. I am wondering if there is a database or online api where I can easily establish the possible &quot;parts of speech&quot; for a given word from within my code. So for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;getPartOfSpeech(&quot;papa&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;returns &lt;code&gt;[&quot;noun&quot;]&lt;/code&gt;. And if a word has multiple parts of speech associated with it then multiple values are returned by the function with the most common association listed first. I program in python put can a number of other languages also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-09T23:31:14.993" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T21:13:16.010" Title="Get &quot;part of speech&quot; for a Spanish word" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-10T00:05:23.060" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for the process of a language splitting into two languages? For example, romance languages descend from Latin, is there a word for the splitting process that led to the languages? In biology, the formation of two species from one is called &quot;speciation&quot;. I am looking for the word for language &quot;speciation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14710" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-10T00:30:35.933" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T00:30:35.933" Title="Word for splitting of 1 language into 2?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2016-12-10T00:28:07.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have had some good answers to your question, but I would like to expand on what you say about Vietnamese writing traditions. The Chinese-based chữ nôm had a very marginal existence in Vietnam, being used almost exclusively for poetry and for “women’s literature” (basically translations - or imitations - of Chinese novels by and for women). The main written language in Vietnam until well into the colonial period was Chinese. The Portuguese-based chữ quốc ngữ writing system was also very much marginal, even among the Jesuits who invented it, who also did most of their writing in Chinese, until it was adopted by the nationalist movement in the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T00:28:07.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20443" CreationDate="2016-12-10T13:36:22.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one thing, modern grammar has been strongly influenced by the study of logic and the foundations of mathematics.  In the early 20th century, paradoxes were discovered, for which the most popular resolution was to prevent the paradoxical propositions from being expressed in a rigorous, logical language.  To resolve the paradoxes in this way requires an explicit and restrictive grammar to be devised which prohibits the expression of the troublesome paradoxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In logic and mathematics, linguistic interest is focused on theorems and other statements corresponding most closely in natural language, probably, to simple declarative statements.  For this type of language expression, linguists generally use &quot;S&quot;.  It corresponds to &quot;well formed formula&quot;, or wff, in some presentations of logic. There is not a great deal of uniformity among logicians, but sometimes this part of logic is called &quot;morphology&quot;, rather than the linguists' term &quot;grammar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is one place &quot;S&quot; comes from.  A related usage is in applications of CFG, context free phrase structure grammar, where by general convention, when a grammar has a single initial non-terminal symbol, one calls it &quot;S&quot;.  It's just a shorthand to avoid tedious explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the intent of a CFG or other form of generative grammar is to generate strings for language expressions other than simple declaratives, such as questions, imperatives, or other expression types recognized in traditional grammar, then the sense of &quot;S&quot; is usually extended to those other types.  Then &quot;S&quot; means, in effect, complete expression generated by a grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In CFG, the &lt;em&gt;names&lt;/em&gt; of the non-terminal symbols, including &quot;S&quot;, are of no intrinsic significance. This probably extends to transformational grammar and other theories, as well.  If for stylistic reasons, you prefer other names for initial symbols, you should feel free to use them.  What's in a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T13:36:22.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20591" CreationDate="2016-12-10T20:04:22.160" Score="4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first Wikipedia example of the Old Novgorod dialect &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect&lt;/a&gt; both little yus ѧ and the new я is used. Is it just a random spelling difference? Do I read them in the same way? And if yes, is it &quot;ja&quot; or &quot;ę&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T11:55:22.253" Title="Pronunciation of ѧ and я in Old Novgorodian" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20391" CreationDate="2016-12-11T00:03:57.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this can be found over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/342163/alignment-in-oneof-from-the-phonrule-package&quot;&gt;tex.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.  The accepted answer from egreg is repeated here, for future convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here's a complete reimplementation of &lt;code&gt;phonrule&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass{article}&#xA;&#xA;\providecommand*{\textrightarrow}{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}&#xA;\providecommand*{\textplus}{\ensuremath{+}}&#xA;\providecommand*{\textminus}{\ensuremath{-}}&#xA;&#xA;\newcommand*{\phold}{\rule[-1.5pt]{1.5ex}{.5pt}}&#xA;&#xA;\newcommand*{\phon}[2]{#1 \textrightarrow{} #2}&#xA;\newcommand*{\phonc}[3]{\phon{#1}{#2}~/~#3}&#xA;\newcommand*{\phonr}[3]{\phon{#1}{#2}~/~\phold#3}&#xA;\newcommand*{\phonl}[3]{\phon{#1}{#2}~/~#3\phold}&#xA;\newcommand*{\phonb}[4]{\phonl{#1}{#2}{#3}#4}&#xA;&#xA;\makeatletter&#xA;\newcommand*{\env}{\@ifstar{\@env{&amp;amp;}}{\@env{~}}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\@env}[3]{#2~/#1#3}&#xA;&#xA;\newcommand*{\envr}{\@ifstar{\@envr{&amp;amp;}}{\@envr{~}}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\@envr}[3]{\@env{#1}{#2}{\phold#3}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\envl}{\@ifstar{\@envl{&amp;amp;}}{\@envl{~}}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\@envl}[3]{\@env{#1}{#2}{#3\phold}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\envb}{\@ifstar{\@envb{&amp;amp;}}{\@envb{~}}}&#xA;\newcommand*{\@envb}[4]{\@env{#1}{#2}{#3\phold#4}}&#xA;&#xA;% set environment for feature matrix with square brackets&#xA;\newcommand*{\phonfeat}[1]{%&#xA;  \ensuremath{%&#xA;    \left[\begin{tabular}{c}#1\end{tabular}\right]%&#xA;  }%&#xA;}&#xA;\newcommand*{\oneof}[2][c]{%&#xA;  \ensuremath{%&#xA;    \left\{&#xA;    \begin{tabular}{#1#1}#2\end{tabular}&#xA;    \right.&#xA;  }%&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;\phon{x}{\oneof[l]{ \envr*{w}{z} \\&#xA;      \envl*{v}{\phonfeat{&#xA;      \textplus feature x \\&#xA;      \textminus feature y&#xA;}}}}&#xA;&#xA;\phon{x}{\oneof[l]{&#xA;   \envr{w}{z} \\&#xA;   \envl{v}{\phonfeat{&#xA;   \textplus feature x \\&#xA;   \textminus feature y&#xA;}}}}&#xA;&#xA;\phon{x}{\oneof{&#xA;   \envr{w}{z} \\&#xA;   \envl{v}{\phonfeat{&#xA;   \textplus feature x \\&#xA;   \textminus feature y&#xA;}}}}&#xA;&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The changes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;\oneof&lt;/code&gt; command accepts an optional argument for the inner alignment, default &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; like in the original; it can be &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The commands &lt;code&gt;\env&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\envl&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;\envr&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\envb&lt;/code&gt; have a *-form, which inserts an &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; after &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; instead of the default &lt;code&gt;~&lt;/code&gt;, so they can be used in the argument of &lt;code&gt;\oneof&lt;/code&gt; in order to get the alignment you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the code above I used all three possibilities; the first example is what you're looking for, the second one just has left alignment, the final one is like the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Rosm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Rosm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14644" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T00:03:57.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2016-12-11T11:05:29.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of pinyin or any other phonetic script replacing Chinese character writing is already more than a hundred years old. At the beginning of 20th century, when the Qing empire was collapsing, a lot of scholars came to the conclusion that it is because of China’s backwardness. They kept comparing China to the West and realized that in terms of technology, education and more, China was very far behind, therefore some of them insisted on reforms. Some of them regarded Chinese characters as a perfect example of what was holding China back and the idea of either simplifying or abandoning them was born (the famous writer Lu Xun wrote: “汉字不灭，中国必亡”, “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, China will inevitably die”). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, at a conference in 1986 it was decided that the Chinese writing will not be replaced by a phonetic script, but will remain simplified. At that point, pinyin was already an international romanization standard recognized by ISO, and had replaced all of the previous ones in Mainland China. However, it had never replaced the characters themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to what had already been said, I would like to point out that Chinese characters are some sort of cultural heritage for Chinese. They are something more than just writing. That is why even the idea of simplifying them outraged some scholars and numerous slogans opposing the reforms were created, such as 没有心如何爱？, “How to love without a heart?” (traditional character for ‘love’ is written 愛 with a ‘heart’ component in it). If Chinese characters were abandoned, Chinese calligraphy would not be the same and all of the character riddles and jokes would become meaningless (谜提：这字没人不会 （打一字），谜底：云）. All the other countries that abandoned Chinese characters need not worry about this, since characters were never originally theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14601" LastEditorUserId="9425" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T21:26:33.947" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T21:26:33.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-11T08:15:00.920" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about similarly-formed idiomatic  constructs like this cluster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' - (#1) to allow someone to reside, usually in an ad-hoc temporary manner &lt;em&gt;('He put up John and I put up Mike; it was just for one night.')&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' - (#2) to reluctantly tolerate &lt;em&gt;('We put up with the poor fuel consumption, it's a cheap car with the finance deal.')&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' - to kill by euthanasia &lt;em&gt;('Their pet was put down because she had cancer')&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' - to deploy additional resources/humanpower &lt;em&gt;('The army put in an extra battalion'; 'the staff put in extra hours to meet the deadline')&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Put &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' - to engage sexually &lt;em&gt;('he/she/they put out')&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm intrigued about this kind of phenomenon, where a single root + structure has acquired completely independent/unrelated diverse idiomatic meanings when used with similar modifiers. In this example, all five items are grammatically similar and formed as &lt;em&gt;'To put'&lt;/em&gt; + a direction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same phrases all continue to have their non-idiomatic meaning as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this in language studies? Are there other good examples? How does such variety arise historically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry about the inexact title, I don't know a better way to describe the question or even the best tags for it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14719" OwnerDisplayName="Stilez" LastEditorUserId="14719" LastEditDate="2016-12-11T14:53:40.503" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T14:53:40.503" Title="Idiomatic modifiers that have completely different impact on the same word" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-11T13:12:00.950" Score="3" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;After considerable search on the Internet, I found a free, good and extensive word list for English that IMHO contains all words (nouns and verbs with their endings as separate entries) one would ever need in common communications: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/wordlists/english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/wordlists/english/&lt;/a&gt;. It has a size of 109582. I like very much to know similar word lists for other languages, in particular for German and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4724" LastEditorUserId="4724" LastEditDate="2016-12-11T13:25:28.497" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T16:00:40.640" Title="Any free, good and extensive word lists for languages other than English?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20494" CreationDate="2016-12-11T13:57:46.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any general purpose dictionary will help, generally the ones that are published by the language associations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T13:57:46.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20497" CreationDate="2016-12-11T16:41:32.360" Score="3" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Polish preposition &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; roughly translates to Eng. &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, even though the distribution is different, as it is usual for prepositions. I'll give two examples of the use of said preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Narodowe muzeum morskie jest w Gdańsku.&#xA;    National museum marine  is   in Gdańsk.&#xA;&#xA;(2) Ja będę iść w czwartek.&#xA;    I will go on Thursday.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1) we have ['vgdaɲsku] for &lt;em&gt;w Gdańsku&lt;/em&gt; and in (2) ['ftʃfartɛk] for &lt;em&gt;w czwartek&lt;/em&gt;. This means that, like in many other cases in Polish, the last consonant of a word gets assimilated to the first consonant of the word which comes after it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the question: Should one consider &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; as a (pro)clitic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14445" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T19:50:50.937" Title="Is the Polish preposition w a clitic?" Tags="&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20496" CreationDate="2016-12-11T18:57:45.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &quot;w&quot; works as a clitic as it becomes part of the stress unit because it does not bear any accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even better example to demonstrate is Czech with its word initial accent - the proclitics that are syllabic actually take over the stress in the stress unit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;['vlak] - (a) train&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;['ve vlaku] - in (a) train&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;['porod] - (a) birth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;['po porodu] - after (a) birth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2016-12-11T19:50:50.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T19:50:50.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20494" CreationDate="2016-12-11T18:58:32.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you can use &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelnet.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BabelNet&lt;/a&gt;, which is (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BabelNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WikiPedia&lt;/a&gt;) &quot;multilingual lexicalized semantic network and ontology...  It was automatically created by linking Wikipedia, to the most popular computational lexicon of the English language, WordNet&quot;. By using their API, I think you can easily write a script to extract the words in their database from the languages they offer (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Russian, Spanish, ... )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T18:58:32.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20484" CreationDate="2016-12-11T20:25:24.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;POS-tagging is more complicated than giving it an input word - and get the POS tag as an output. This is because of the ambiguity of the language itself (for example, the word &quot;mine&quot; can be a verb, but also a noun). So, it depends from the context in which it appears within the sentence. The best way to do this, is to give a whole sentence as an input, and get the POS tags of each word as an output, and then get the tag you need from the sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a POS tagger, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford CoreNLP&lt;/a&gt; pipeline, which also includes a POS tagger (they have for Spanish as well). As far as I know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14732465/nltk-tagging-spanish-words-using-a-corpus&quot;&gt;NLTK also has Spanish support&lt;/a&gt;, so you might use that toolkit as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you can use is &lt;a href=&quot;http://babelnet.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BabelNet&lt;/a&gt; &quot;a multilingual lexicalized semantic network and ontology&quot;. By using their API, you can get a lot of information about a word (including the POS tag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:35:00.030" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T20:25:24.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30625" CreationDate="2016-12-11T21:39:38.993" Score="4" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;If given a text in Mongolian using the Cyrillic alphabet, I can read it out, albeit with a couple of pronunciation errors, even though I'd understand few if any words in it. It's almost the opposite of being illiterate, which would involve understanding the words, but being unable to read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for being able to read a language out but not be able to understand it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T15:20:02.240" Title="Is there a term for being able to say out loud a language but not understand it?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20448" CreationDate="2016-12-12T01:13:45.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logoori has two taste words, -&lt;em&gt;rur-u&lt;/em&gt; and -&lt;em&gt;nʊr-u&lt;/em&gt;. The former covers hot (spicy), bitter, sour and generally anything negative (it also means &quot;fierce&quot; when applied to animates), and the latter is &quot;sweet&quot;. Phrases can be constructed to convey whatever you'd like to say such as &quot;salty, meaty, mushroomy, vegetal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T01:13:45.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3794" CreationDate="2016-12-12T05:04:46.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vk.com/doc175908930_314563233?hash=2924bbb752e0e6dc5d&amp;amp;dl=3e34c3135f73ff9d2f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cyril Graham - The Avar Language (1873)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/28943698/Dependency_and_discourse-configurationality_A_study_of_Avar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dependency and discourse-configurationality: A study of Avar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not likely to find much else on Avar, which is still quite poorly described in English despite being the largest Dagestani language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently learning it (through Russian, though even here the materials are few and far between) and I can say the verb system is not terribly complex, especially when compared to Georgian. In fact there is not a lot in the grammar that is reminiscent of Georgian and the languages are not genetically related as far as we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might put together a short grammar &quot;cheat sheet&quot; if I get far enough in the language but for now I'm focused on the learning, which I am documenting on my blog: dirrakmuhruzdabugo.wordpress.com [3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14727" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T05:04:46.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-12T10:34:33.783" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying the Inside-Outside algorithm, which is a branch of EM algorithm. (As resources, I am referring &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mcollins/io.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mcollins/io.pdf&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/465/iobasics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/465/iobasics.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According the definition, given a tree structure, the Outside term  $\beta$ is the sum of probabilities for all outside trees given a node. The Inside term $\alpha(A, i, j)$ is the sum of potentials for all trees spanning&#xA;words xi . . . xj, rooted in the symbol A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I cannot understand why the base case of the Outside term $\beta(S, 1, n) = 1$ and $\beta(A, 1, n) = 0 $ for all $  A ∈ N$ such that $A \neq S$. Especially, $\beta(S, 1, n) = 1$ is a biggest headache.Here, S is a root node and A is a non-terminal node. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With $\beta(S, 1, n)$, the root S cannot have any outside trees, so I do not know how to make sense of why it is 1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give me some intuition/understanding please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14730" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T10:34:33.783" Title="Base case of the outside term of Inside-outside algorihm" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20494" CreationDate="2016-12-12T13:30:00.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; Filter the entries by category language to generate language specific word lists. Lots of additional information (POS, inflection, meanings, translations) are available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wortschatz (Uni Leipzig)&lt;/a&gt;, a CLARIN resource, provides corpora in 200 languages. You can download corpora for the language you are interested in and generate wordlists out of it. Good for getting at frequency information and collocations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T13:30:00.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3794" CreationDate="2016-12-12T15:32:38.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt;, a service by the European &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN&lt;/a&gt; project, has links to materials for &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20143/what-is-the-definition-of-rare-language&quot;&gt;rare languages&lt;/a&gt; like Avar. Just entering &quot;Avar&quot; in the search slit will give you about three dozen hits that can be further refined if wanted. It reveals (among other things) an electronic copy of the Avar grammar already mentioned by Gaston Ümlaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bookmark to the VLO query described above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/?q=avar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://vlo.clarin.eu/?q=avar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2016-12-12T15:32:38.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-12T21:19:30.357" Score="9" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I was trying to reconstruct some PIE roots by myself and I came across the word for '(to) know' in different indo-european languages. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eng.&lt;/strong&gt; (to) know&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It.&lt;/strong&gt; conoscere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lat.&lt;/strong&gt; (g)n&amp;omacr;sc&amp;omacr; (&lt;em&gt;I know&lt;/em&gt;); n&amp;omacr;tus (&lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gr.&lt;/strong&gt; γιγνώσκω gign&amp;omacr;sk&amp;omacr;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skr.&lt;/strong&gt; जानाति j&amp;amacr;n&amp;amacr;ti (&lt;em&gt;he knows&lt;/em&gt;); ज्ञात​ j&amp;ntilde;&amp;amacr;t&amp;aacute; (&lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt;); ज्ञातृ j&amp;ntilde;&amp;amacr;t&amp;#7771; (&lt;em&gt;someone who knows&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit PIE vowels &lt;i&gt;*a&lt;/i&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;i&gt;*h₂e&lt;/i&gt;), &lt;i&gt;*e&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;*o&lt;/i&gt; all merged into अ &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, nevertheless we could guess the original vowel quality looking at Greek. Since it has an ω &lt;em&gt;&amp;omacr;&lt;/em&gt; I thought that PIE could show an alternation of the kind &lt;i&gt;*ǵneh₃- &amp;#126; *ǵn̥h₃-&lt;/i&gt; and wikipedia seems to confirm my guess (cfr. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/%C7%B5neh%E2%82%83-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;root ǵneh₃-&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we read the reconstruction that wikipedia proposes, we can see that the Sanskrit forms are augmented with a nasal infix (in fact the verbal base belongs to the ninth class) resulting in &lt;i&gt;*ǵn̥-né-h₃-ti ~ *ǵn̥-n-h₃-énti&lt;/i&gt;. Now the root has the zero grade. I know that the resonant &lt;i&gt;*n̥&lt;/i&gt; evolves regularly in अ &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in Sanskrit, but why is it long in the verb जानाति &lt;em&gt;jānāti&lt;/em&gt;? The long &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; also appears in the past participle and in the nomen agentis formed upon the same root. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally Latin and Greek forms seem also quite strange to me. According to wikipedia's article, they are based on *&lt;i&gt;&lt;em&gt;ǵn̥h₃-sḱé-ti&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which is a kind of present with the durative-iterative suffix &lt;em&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;/em&gt;-sḱé&lt;/i&gt;. In Greek this verb shows a reduplication too. My doubt is one more time about the quantity of the radical vowel. Why is it long both in Latin and Greek? If the suffix &lt;i&gt;*-sḱé&lt;/i&gt; requires the zero grade, the laryngeal could develop a short &lt;i&gt;*e&lt;/i&gt; that is subsequently colored to &lt;i&gt;*o&lt;/i&gt; when the laryngeal is lost, but then this vowel should remain short. Only in the e-grade the laryngeal could color the preceding vowel and then lengthen it when lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some phonetic law that explains why these forms have a long vowel? Or it's just a case of analogy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14732" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-12-13T01:21:06.767" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T21:13:31.000" Title="Understanding the reflexes of PIE *ǵneh3- in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20507" CreationDate="2016-12-13T00:38:28.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Indo-Iranian both *eh₃ and *n̥h₃ become *ō, which then becomes ā. In Skt jānāti there is an infix *-ne- before the last consonant of the root, in this case the laryngeal. Thus the zero-grade root *ǵn̥h₃- forms the present *ǵn̥-ne-h₃-ti &gt; *janāti (cf. Avestan zanā-) &gt; jānāti (with ā in the first syllable by analogy to forms with *ǵn̥h₃- &gt; jā-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-12-13T11:27:22.317" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T11:27:22.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20511" CreationDate="2016-12-13T19:26:57.070" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some dialects of English, there seems to be a clear(er) difference between past tense verbs with the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; as in “I have eaten the pie”, and those without, as in “I ate the pie”. The only distinction that I know of (can discern for my dialect) regarding use of “have” vs. Ø (or “do” in relevant constructions) comes out in the contrast “I have eaten pie” meaning “I have, at some point in life, eaten pie”, vs. “I ate pie” which doesn’t have the connotation of non-specific time. “Have” is incompatible with a time expression in the same S that identifies a specific time (*“I have eaten pie yesterday/last Christmas”) though it is compatible with such an expression in the discourse (“I have eaten pie, in fact it was yesterday”). Apart from that, have+V seems to be interchangeable with bare V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any paper which lays out the semantics and pragmatics of bare verb vs. have+verb, especially in UK-derived dialects of English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-14T10:26:17.407" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T10:26:17.407" Title="What is the meaning difference between have+V versus bare V?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20510" CreationDate="2016-12-13T20:09:45.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's lots of work on the semantics of the English perfect constructions. A recentish (2002) paper by Kiparsky which could get you started is &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/semanticsfest.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T20:09:45.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20510" CreationDate="2016-12-13T20:10:30.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classic statement of the meanings of the perfect construction is McCawley, “Tense and time reference in English”, in Langendoen &amp;amp; Fillmore, Studies in linguistic semantics, 1971. (McCawley subsequently retracted one of the four meanings he described there, the &quot;Hot News&quot; perfect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that linguists struggled with the perfect&amp;mdash;is it monosemous? is it an aspect and/or a tense?, and particularly the &quot;Present Perfect Puzzle&quot;, the constraint on temporals with present perfect&amp;mdash; for a generation without getting much farther. But a couple of recent papers have to my mind pretty well settled what the perfect is about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michaelis, “Stative by Construction”, &lt;em&gt;Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 49-6 (2011), available online &lt;a href=&quot;http://spot.colorado.edu/~michaeli/Stative_by_Construction.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nishiyama and Koenig, “What is a perfect state?”, &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 86, 3 (2010), available through JSTOR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T20:10:30.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20536" CreationDate="2016-12-13T20:40:48.343" Score="5" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;In lexical semantics, a lot of meaning in individual words, the concept behind the utterance, is captured in ontological relations: is-like for synonymy, is-a for a hypernym hierarchy. But this doesn't capture a lot of the incidental nuances. Simply relating one word to another doesn't include all the non-word connotations; not every concept has a single word to label it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In analogy with phonology, the area of generative semantics sometimes uses semantic features, often binary, to label lexical items. For example, one might label 'bucket' and 'pail' as follows:&#xA;- 'bucket' - [+ receptacle] [+ wide open top] [+ big] [+ (opt) metal] &#xA;- 'pail' - [+ receptacle] [+ wide open top] [- big] [+ (opt) milk] [+ (opt) toy]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and one can see how a hypernym relation can be extracted from analyzing the containment of features)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most dictionaries attempt some connections, usually synonyms and antonyms.  But I haven't seen anything that is binary, except maybe if the word is very distinctive, a better dictionary might label the subculture it is specific too ('chemistry', 'vulgar', 'archaic').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any published dictionaries, print or online, that attempt to do a binary feature analysis beyond toy examples? Assuming none, is this method simply an old academic trend that dies out long ago out of fashion or out of impracticality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T11:23:47.733" Title="Dictionaries with binary semantic features" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20507" CreationDate="2016-12-13T21:13:31.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@fdb's answer addresses the Indo-Iranian forms, so this one will address the Greek and Latin ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek, there are two relevant sets of sound changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE *eH &gt; Gk V̄.  That is, *e followed by any laryngeal became a long vowel; which long vowel resulted depends on the specific laryngeal: *eh₁ &gt; ē, *eh₂ &gt; ā, *eh₃ &gt; ō. (In Attic-Ionic, most instances of ā later underwent a further sound change to merge with ē.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE *R̥H &gt; Gk RV̄. That is, any syllabic sonorant followed by a laryngeal turned into the non-syllabic version of that sonorant followed by a long vowel, again depending on the laryngeal. In this case, PIE *n̥h₃ &gt; Gk nō.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means for γιγνώσκω is that in theory, it could come from either an e-grade or a zero grade: both *n̥h₃ and *neh₃ would end up as Gk nō. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, rule 1 is the same, but rule 2 is simpler: PIE *R̥H &gt; Lat Rā. That is, whatever the specific laryngeal is, it gives Latin ā. (This rule is shared with Celtic.) This means that Latin &lt;em&gt;(g)nōscō&lt;/em&gt; cannot come from a zero grade, but only from an e-grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be generally true that the suffix *-sḱé prefers the zero grade, but there are some other Latin counterexamples: Weiss (&lt;em&gt;Comp. Hist. Gramm. Lat.&lt;/em&gt; 407) lists &lt;em&gt;pāscō, suēscō&lt;/em&gt; and OL &lt;em&gt;escit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;exits&quot; among these. &lt;em&gt;LIV&lt;/em&gt; thinks the e-grade of &lt;em&gt;(g)nōscō&lt;/em&gt; serves to avoid homophony with &lt;em&gt;nāscor&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T21:13:31.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19062" CreationDate="2016-12-14T04:39:56.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence of a linguistic link between Dravidian languages and Australian languages and I haven't heard of a proposal for 'Dravido-Australic' superfamily. Typologically the groups of languages are quite distinct although of course comparing two groups of languages is always going to generate lots of similarities between individual languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking Tamil as the canonical Dravidian language, it has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonology&lt;/a&gt; which is quite different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian languages&lt;/a&gt;, having numerous fricatives and affricates (famously absent from almost all Australian languages), and a large set of approximants. Tamil also has many more vowels than Australian languages, which typically have 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Tamil is superficially similar to Australian languages in grammar, both being agglutinative, it is much more so than Australian languages and can string together large sequences of suffixes to produce very large words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as commenter @TKR points out, the comparison of the present-day languages, whether of phonological inventories or the grammar, are not useful as evidence of ancient connections as they would have changed substantially since that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian languages&lt;/a&gt; fall into several quite distinct families. The largest one, Pama-Nyungan has had some reconstruction work and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pama%E2%80%93Nyungan_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt; do not look like Dravidian languages. As well, proto-Pama-Nyungan is usually given a time-depth of around 5,000 BP, so it is too old to be connected to Dravidian languages at 4,000 BP. And of course proto-Australian (if there ever was such a thing) has a much greater time-depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Indian connection of 4000 years ago, that was a finding in one genetic study, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)00078-6?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982216000786%3Fshowall%3Dtrue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;others&lt;/a&gt; have had different results, including a divergence between Australian and South Asian Y chomosomes of around 54,000BP. And of course Indians have been present in SE Asia for over 1,500 years, while over the last few centuries there has been regular contact between peoples of SE Asia (Macassans in particular) and Australia, so an Indian genetic link could have been brought to Australia that way. But even if an Indian genetic link was substantiated, evidence about a linguistic link is a quite separate matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise, a Dravido-Australic language superfamily has not been proposed because there is, at present, no evidence of such a connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T02:05:45.017" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T02:05:45.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T18:11:50.633" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a list of words that, albeit not being [obviously] morphologically  related, can be used in different contexts and they have the same meaning in those contexts across different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a word &lt;code&gt;vorstellen&lt;/code&gt; in German and &lt;code&gt;представлять&lt;/code&gt; in Russian.&#xA;Both mean &lt;code&gt;to introduce&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;to imagine&lt;/code&gt;, depending on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, &lt;code&gt;das Glied&lt;/code&gt; in German and &lt;code&gt;член&lt;/code&gt; in Russian. Again, both can mean &lt;code&gt;a member&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;a penis&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, none of these examples fall exactly into the category I described as the first pair must be related, for they are constructed in the same way in both languages: &lt;code&gt;vor&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;пред&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;stellen&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;ставить&lt;/code&gt;; and the second is too close of a leap from &lt;code&gt;a member&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;a limb&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;a penis&lt;/code&gt;. But I hope you got the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14746" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T11:17:15.293" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T11:17:15.293" Title="Words that are used in the same contexts across different languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;calques&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T22:17:52.907" Score="2" ViewCount="833" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't Hindi have simple words to describe modern things like ‘Computer’, ‘Laptop’, or ‘Ice Skating’, ‘Go Carting’, ‘Amusement Park’, ‘Nightclub’ etc. Americans often tell me that they can almost understand me when I chat with one of my Hindi speaking friends in Hindi because I use so many English words. It’s not like that with Chinese people. I know that Indians who speak Hindi and English do not or rather cannot speak in pure Hindi. I myself cannot do that. But, a lot of Hindi News anchors who speak very fluent Hindi (and refer to ministers and states as ‘Mantris’ and ‘Rajyas’ unlike me when I speak Hinglish) also cannot find Hindi substitutes for words such as the ones I mentioned in the beginning. I read that The Oxford English dictionary adds words to the English language each year. Why doesn’t Hindi evolve to suit the modern times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14750" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T23:25:01.697" Title="Why doesn't Hindi evolve to suit modern times?" Tags="&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20517" CreationDate="2016-12-15T00:00:40.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I don't know much about Hindi so I can't give a very good answer to your question. However, I would like to challenge the premises a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many languages that are not &quot;pure&quot;. It doesn't mean that they haven't evolved. Acquiring loanwords is a form of language evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, many English people think of the English language first. Words like &quot;computer&quot; and &quot;amusement&quot; actually are derived from Romance (Latin-based) roots, not native English (Germanic) roots. Some people are quite proud of the fact that English words derive from many languages, and will make extravagant claims related to it that I doubt are really true, like saying that it makes English have a richer vocabulary than other languages. Some other people get a strange idea that Germanic words are always better and more expressive; the more extreme version of this idea leads to things like the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglish&lt;/a&gt;&quot; movement where people try to write avoiding any Romance or Latin-derived words. This is quite difficult, so in a sense, you can say that native English speakers can't really speak in &quot;pure English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are many other examples of &quot;impure&quot; modern languages, such as Japanese, where much formal and technical vocabulary is derived from Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, I'm not familiar with the situation with Hindi, but do the fluent news anchors you mention really switch between Hindi and English when they speak, or are they just speaking entirely in Hindi while using some loanwords that originally came from English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T00:08:32.557" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T00:08:32.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20521" CreationDate="2016-12-15T06:16:21.440" Score="6" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is a question for this Stack Exchange or for the History Stack Exchange, but I would like to know when people first understood that the Romance languages were related. I have found a 13th century text from northwestern France that &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; testifies to an awareness that various languages spoken within Europe are related to one another, but I don't know if that's particularly early. (If it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; particularly early, it is also quite possible that I am misinterpreting this text.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is taken from a series of glosses to the Babylonian Talmud, known as Tosafot (&quot;additional [commentaries]&quot;), and for this particular tractate of the Talmud (Tractate Bava Qama) they are believed to have originated in the academy of Touques, which was headed in the 13th century by a certain Rabbi Eliezer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gloss in question is concerned with a talmudic passage that makes reference to a dialect of Aramaic called &lt;em&gt;sursi&lt;/em&gt; (סורסי). The gloss reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;נראה דלשון סורסי הוא לשון ארמי... והא דנקט הכא בארץ ישראל לשון סורסי ובבבל נקט לשון ארמי אור&quot;ת לפי שמעט משתנה כעין לשון לעז שמדברים אותו לשון צח במדינה אחת יותר מבאחרת&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would seem that &lt;em&gt;sursi&lt;/em&gt; is Aramaic... and the fact that it is called &lt;em&gt;sursi&lt;/em&gt; in the land of Israel but Aramaic in Babylon is, according to Rabbeinu Tam, because they were a little different from one another - just like the common tongue [today] is spoken in a purer form in one state than it is in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bava Qama 83a (s.v. לשון סורסי)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rabbeinu Tam (also known as Rabbi Yaakov ben Meir) was a 12th century scholar who is often quoted in these glosses. As with the sages of Touques, and many of the other tosafists as well, he was a French speaker. I would love it if he were referring to the relationship between mediaeval French and other Romance languages, but the word that I have translated as &quot;state&quot; could also mean &quot;province&quot;. As such, it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; (I know nothing of mediaeval France) that he is referring to different French-speaking regions instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is suitable to the Linguistic Stack Exchange, I would love it if somebody could let me know whether or not a recognition of the relationship between Romance languages was par for the course at this point in time! And if it is not, my apologies: I will migrate it over to the History Stack Exchange instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14753" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T11:48:06.933" Title="Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20520" CreationDate="2016-12-15T08:26:49.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classicists have never been ignorant of this. The knowledge of the relationship is as old as the languages themselves. Monasteries maintained vast collections of codices and manuscripts dating from the classical era to the 12th century. Many still survive. Philologists can trace the evolution of simplified Latin with little need for putative reconstructions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we would now describe as the Romance languages were simply regarded as vernacular lects of Latin at the time. The oldest attestation of what is described as Castilian, the Glosses of Emilianus, has Latin in the very same codex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even today, Western Romance languages are not divergent to the point of no intelligibility. No native could fail to miss the connection between French and Latin even if we assume zero exposure to the other's culture or history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Romance languages are defined by their genetic relationship to Latin. The family that best corresponds to the other branches of Indo-European (Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranic, etc.) are the Italic languages of which Romance is the last extant clade. Romance is a relatively young language family. It dates to the early first millennium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14706" LastEditorUserId="14706" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T11:48:06.933" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T11:48:06.933" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20522" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-15T11:22:35.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calque&lt;/a&gt; or loan translation is a word in a language, that was created after the a model from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include French &lt;em&gt;gratte-ciel&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sky scraper&quot; or German &lt;em&gt;Ausstellung&lt;/em&gt; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;expositio&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;exhibition&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:50:33.237" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:50:33.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20523" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-15T11:22:35.137" Score="0" Body="For questions about calques or loan translations." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T08:22:12.013" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T08:22:12.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20534" CreationDate="2016-12-15T15:39:24.690" Score="1" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.cz/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;url=http://www.lu.se/lup/publication/2154915&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwimur-ep_bQAhXDBSwKHetwCPQQFgggMAA&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNFp8BXOVd60_Ngfr_PTS5YkSkLxew&amp;amp;sig2=GrbxDvr6lMAnBBDaI6tFjg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; studies about sound symbolism and I'm still not sure whether I got an insight into the topic. I know that today's view of most of the linguists is skeptical towards sound symbolism to the extent that most of the words in the most of the world languages do not resemble the sound of the word but there are many antonyms that could resemble their meaning in the contrast of the neurological or the vocal human cognition system. Though, even though we could find resemblances between the words and their meaning in our studies, their interconnectedness still might be theoretically a result of the shared &quot;convention&quot;, an old trait of language perception shared among the earliest languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's say a study found a significant above-random correlation between words' meanings and the meanings guessed by people from two very distant language groups. Is there a non-negligible chance that this correct guess could be actually caused by the shared root of the proto-human language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T23:09:35.707" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T09:05:47.290" Title="Could the proto-human language still play a role in the interlingual communication?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;proto-world&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20528" CreationDate="2016-12-15T16:26:47.720" Score="1" ViewCount="1319" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man refused to send any letters to that place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I have so far from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mshang.ca/syntree/?i=%5BS%20%5BNP%20%5Bdet%5BThe%5D%5D%5BN%27%5BN%5Bman%5D%5D%5D%5D%20%5BVP%20%5BV%27%5BV%5Brefused%5D%5D%20%5BX%5Binf%5Bto%5D%5D%5BV%5Bsend%5D%5D%5BNP%5Bdet%5Bany%5D%5D%5BN%27%5BN%5Bletters%5D%5D%5BPP%5BP%27%5BP%5Bto%5D%5D%5D%5BNP%5Bdet%5Bthat%5D%5D%5BN%27%5BN%5Bplace%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%5D%20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntax Tree Generator.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should replace the X there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14756" LastEditorUserId="13786" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T08:22:25.620" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T17:20:52.187" Title="How are to-infinitive clauses treated in x-bar syntax trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20527" CreationDate="2016-12-15T17:19:04.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a fan of X-bar syntax, so I'll just offer a couple of remarks which might be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your tree does not show that &quot;send any letters to that place&quot; is a constituent, but clearly it is.  (1) It can undergo the rule of VP (or V') deletion: &quot;Henry told the man to send them, but he refused to (0=send them).&quot;  (2) it can be coordinated with a like constituent: &quot;The man refused to send them or destroy them.&quot; (3) It can be replaced by &quot;do so&quot; (see Lakoff and Ross &quot;Criterion for VP constituency&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The X constituent is a complement of &quot;refuse&quot;, but it doesn't seem to be nominal -- at least &quot;He refused it&quot; with &quot;it&quot; referring back to &quot;to send them&quot; sounds pretty bad to me, so that makes X some sort of S or verbal constituent.  I think McCawley would make it a V'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own theory &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;How can PSG describe the vertical dimension of sentence structure?&lt;/a&gt;, which has no bars but distinguishes 4 degrees of obliqueness of phrases, it's an S2, meaning that it cannot contain any constituent of obliqueness less than 2 (which precludes Tense, Subject, sentence -ly adverb like &quot;possibly&quot;, performative adverb, vocative, appositive). The grammatical relation &quot;2&quot; is like the same relation of Relational Grammar, and is the phrasal correspondent to a traditional accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T17:20:52.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20517" CreationDate="2016-12-15T18:51:03.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question was downvoted heavily because that's not how linguists approach languages and language change, as evidenced by the comments below your question. To someone who hasn't studied linguistics, I think it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a valid question, the problem is just that it's based on  false assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@sumelic has answered one aspect of the question, that of loanwords. I'll write about a different aspect, that of language registers. The Hindustani language has many dialects and two formal registers, &lt;em&gt;shuddha hindi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;zabān-i urdū-yi muʿallá&lt;/em&gt;. The prestige associated with these formal register is great enough to motivate news anchors to speak in a dialect that many of their viewers find hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a lot of Hindi News anchors who speak very fluent Hindi (and refer to ministers and states as ‘Mantris’ and ‘Rajyas’ unlike me when I speak Hinglish)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing here, but I think the most likely explanation is that either they were schooled entirely in Hindi medium schools, or they have a rather untypical interest in Hindi literature. And in contrast, I think you studied in an English medium school. These words don't readily come to your mind because Hindi speakers hardly ever speak to each other in a formal register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While @sumelic had good reason to write &quot;pure&quot; and &quot;impure&quot; in quotes, I'll add a note for non-Hindi speakers: Indian societies encourage people to think in such terms. After all, the formal register of Hindi is called &lt;em&gt;shuddha hindi&lt;/em&gt;, which translates to &quot;pure Hindi&quot;. People can't help but think that they speak impure Hindi. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T18:51:03.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20533" CreationDate="2016-12-15T21:26:02.837" Score="1" ViewCount="5115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a library that takes words broken down into phonemes and counts the number of syllables in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.code.sf.net/p/cmusphinx/code/trunk/cmudict/cmudict-0.7b.phones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonemes&lt;/a&gt; provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary&quot;&gt;the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; fall into eight types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fricative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Affricate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semivowel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stop&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aspirate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Liquid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nasal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is as the title: which of these types of phoneme 'create' syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;broken&lt;/em&gt; breaks down into &lt;code&gt;B R OW K AH N&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;K&lt;/code&gt; as stops separating the two syllables. Which other types of phoneme act like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14759" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T23:56:12.020" Title="Which types of phonemes mark syllable boundaries?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20530" CreationDate="2016-12-15T22:10:53.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a theory about that -- it is not generally accepted.  Consonants as well as vowels can occur either stressed or unstressed (this is allowed in SPE features).  Phonemic stress tells you where phonemic syllables are.  I notice that you don't include stress among your &quot;types of phonemes&quot;, but of course stress may be phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A syllable consists of a longest sequence of stressed nonsyllabics followed by a syllabic, followed by a longest sequence of unstressed nonsyllabics.  So if you know the stress and syllabicity of all segments, you can count the syllables and tell where each syllable begins and ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marking stress with a tic preceding the stressed segment, your example is /'B 'R 'OW 'K AH N/. The stress of consonants works something like other features; for instance here there is the possibility of regressive assimilation, where the stressed /'K/ assimilates in stress to the following unstressed vowel.  Then we get phonetic ['b'r'owkahn].  Unstressed (i.e. not syllable onset) [k] is subject in some dialects to lenition: ['b'r'owxahn], or, marking syllable boundaries with a dot and omitting predictable stress, we go from /.B R OW . K AH N./ to [.br'owx.ahn.].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more intuitive term for the stressed/unstressed distinction might be fortis/lenis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-12-15T23:56:12.020" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T23:56:12.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20530" CreationDate="2016-12-15T23:19:38.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you are using the CMU dictionary then each phoneme of type &quot;vowel&quot; indicates that there is a syllable. It won't tell you where the break is in a sequence of consonants, but it will (quickly) give you the count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T23:19:38.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20525" CreationDate="2016-12-16T01:55:50.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This part seems to have some presuppositions that need to be corrected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a non-negligible chance that this correct guess could be&#xA;  actually caused by the shared root of the proto-human language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it is possible that there was a single earlier language from which all current languages derive, but it is also possible that there is no single common ancestor to all human languages. Let's just assume that there was one proto-language, then what would it mean for a shared root to &quot;cause&quot; significant recognizability in words? We can take cases where having a &quot;shared root&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; affect guesses. Speakers of Germanic languages can guess the meaning of the word &quot;hand&quot; in another Germanic language because the words of Dutch, English, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic are derived from the same root of proto-Germanic. Likewise, speakers of Bantu languages can guess the meaning of the verb &quot;to cultivate&quot; in another Bantu language, because they nearly all have the same word pronounced [kʊrɪma] or something close to that. In such cases, you can say that ability to guess meaning correctly is caused by the shared root of Proto-Germanic or Proto-Bantu. But that implies something very weird: that speakers of English or Norwegian have some kind of mystical access to a fact of a language spoken millenia ago, which nobody alive now has ever heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What allows speakers of Germanic or Bantu to make these &quot;educated guesses&quot; is not the fact that the modern words historically come from a common root, it is the fact that the modern words look very similar (which itself is because they derive from a common foot, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; because the sound changes that affected these particular words happened to have not changed the shape of these roots all that much). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the modern words are not similar in shape, people are unlikely to correctly guess the meaning of a word in another language, thus speakers of Indo-European (who aren't bilingual and haven't studied Indo-European linguistics) will not guess that &lt;em&gt;koun, ci, hound, chien, šuõ, šun, sobaka&lt;/em&gt; all mean the same thing. The root *&lt;em&gt;gʷʰen&lt;/em&gt; is common enough in Indo-European languages, but people generally can't guess that because the contemporary manifestations are so diverse (&lt;em&gt;defense, gìnti, gon, gjanj, φόνος, ganem&lt;/em&gt;). Even if a pair of words does historically derive from a common source, that fact doesn't cause people to correctly guess the meaning of the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very small set of words whose meanings are cross-linguistically guessable at a somewhat significant rate, especially &quot;mother&quot;, &quot;father&quot;, &quot;dog&quot;, &quot;chicken&quot;. The problem is that these words also have a tendency to be irregular from the perspective of historical sound changes – they tend to resist regular changes, as though there is some sound-symbolic force that keeps them exceptionally close to the standard of &lt;em&gt;mama, dada/baba, bu, kuk&lt;/em&gt;, to the point that it would be impossible for such similarity to be preserved even if Proto-Human had these roots which were passed down to most modern languages. It's that sound-symbolic force, and not a common root in a language possibly spoken 100,000 years ago, that causes good-guessing behavior for these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T01:55:50.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-16T07:10:48.353" Score="2" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to view the spectral slice of a point using the &lt;code&gt;Praat Script&lt;/code&gt;. I have successfully generated the slice and moved the cursor to the required point &lt;strong&gt;but I don't know how to get the energy value at that point&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spectrum Slice:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bHbuN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bHbuN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Spectrum Slice generated by script&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have moved to the frequency point &lt;code&gt;3000&lt;/code&gt; but &lt;strong&gt;I want to get its y-axis value (plotted energy value in dB).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Code Till Now:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;filePath$ = dirPath$+&quot;/&quot;+fileName$+&quot;.wav&quot;;&#xA;sound = Read from file... 'filePath$'&#xA;selectObject: sound&#xA;&#xA;Edit&#xA;editor: sound&#xA;    Move cursor to: number(time_of_slice$)&#xA;    View spectral slice&#xA;Close&#xA;&#xA;slice$ = &quot;Spectrum &quot; + fileName$ + &quot;_&quot; + time_of_slice$&#xA;selectObject: slice$&#xA;editor: slice$&#xA;    Move cursor to: number(frequency$)&#xA;endeditor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone please guide me in this regard. Any kind of help will be highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13819" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T12:34:49.633" Title="How to read a value from the Spectrum Slice of Praat" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20513" CreationDate="2016-12-16T11:23:47.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you need is &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;. This is a huge lexical database and it contains a lot words which are related in many different ways: hyperonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, antonymy, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more on WordNet, you can visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their website&lt;/a&gt;, read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/citing-wordnet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;papers&lt;/a&gt;, or just use their &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online browser&lt;/a&gt; to get a better feeling of what it does and what can you get from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also plenty of free open-source APIs on different programming languages on the net about it, so you can easily use it for a lot of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T11:23:47.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20541" CreationDate="2016-12-16T15:00:07.437" Score="11" ViewCount="1210" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20520/earliest-recognition-that-romance-languages-are-related&quot;&gt;Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related&lt;/a&gt; asks for when in history it was first noted that individual Romance languages were recognized as ... similar/related/coming from Latin/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been answered there, it has always been obvious to anyone who knew two varieties. Between classical and vulgar latin, between medieval Latin and local patois, between the two most dissimilar, French and Romanian, there is just too much that is shared (even if for a full passage they are mutually unintelligible when spoken) not to be aware that something is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not the case for a comparison between Romance and Germanic. By years of scholarship, we know now that Romance and Germanic are two branches of Indo-European, including quite a few other far-flung (and not so far-flung) branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question here is when did that realization strike between Romance and Germanic? I expect that it was before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm&amp;#39;s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grimm made his sound-change laws in the early 1800's&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the Roman scholars recognize any similarities of Latin with the varieties of language spoken by the Germanic tribes they encountered? Did medieval monks, from all over Europe notice anything between Old High German and Northern French? When did people realize the connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T08:08:20.690" Title="Earliest recognition that Germanic and Romance languages are related" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17347" CreationDate="2016-12-16T16:51:56.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just seen your question, I don't know whether it's still relevant, but here you have a paper that describes how to projectivise a dependency tree. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P05-1013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P05-1013&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14764" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T16:51:56.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20537" CreationDate="2016-12-16T18:26:32.207" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question should probably be restated as something like &quot;When did people begin to believe that Romance and Germanic languages were related &lt;em&gt;with some scholarly basis for that belief&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The qualification is necessary because in the pre-modern West, the reigning idea about language diversity was that all languages were ultimately descended from Hebrew through the Tower of Babel story. So educated people would have believed that e.g. German and French were related (as were German and Chinese), but they would have believed it for the wrong reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Zuerius_van_Boxhorn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn&lt;/a&gt; is generally credited these days as being the first scholar to make a cogent case for what later became known as the Indo-European family of languages, including the relationship of the Germanic and Romance branches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that no one before him may have noticed similarities in basic lexicon between the branches (e.g. kinship terms) and theorized about the reasons for them, and maybe someone here can give a reference to such earlier theorizing, but van Boxhorn appears to have been the first to do so in a systematic way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2016-12-16T18:46:35.570" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T18:46:35.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-17T02:24:50.907" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adjective &quot;happy&quot; is a free morpheme. And at the same time, it is an adjective which is one of the lexical morphemes. So, can I say that &quot;happy&quot; is (a lexical free morpheme)?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the same way, can I say for example that the word &quot;the&quot; is (a functional free morpheme) or that the suffix &quot;-ed&quot; is (an inflectional bound morpheme)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T18:10:11.427" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T17:09:26.227" Title="Morphology - Detailed description" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20537" CreationDate="2016-12-17T08:08:20.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jephetic language theory was the antecedent to Indo-European theory. It was the product of the late Medieval standardisation and grammaticalisation of speech which allowed for the future systematic analysis of language. Jephetic language theory has its basis in Noachian genealogy from Genesis. Like TKR said, the first to exclude Semitic from Jephetic was Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, before then there was an assumption that there was a first order genetic relationship between the two super-groups. The language group van Boxhorn called &quot;Scynthan&quot; is an early formulation of Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarities between German and Latin were known to Gottfried Leibniz. Proper historical linguistics only comes with the advent of the comparative method. The impression has been there since the first modern grammars so it only took a few years for someone to apply scientific inductive methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14706" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T08:08:20.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20525" CreationDate="2016-12-17T09:05:47.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I offer another perspective although I like the first answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proto-Human language is not reconstructable. Two deep (and highly putative) language families that have been suggested by historical linguists are Niger-Saharan and Nostratic. Were these to be genuine, they would date to the early Holocene and Epipaleolithic respectively. Owing to great internal diversity, the Khoisan and Australian Aboriginal languages remain as strictly geographical superfamilies with no demonstrated genetic relationship between internal families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a consensus in lexiostatistics that there is a meantime to happen for semantic shift. After a predicable number of years, a semantic value will be replaced with a new word. The replaced word isn't always recoverable. The meantime to happen is contingent on phonology and the semantic value of the word. Even the more stable items on an ordered Swadesh list (we, two, I, eye, mouth, louse) can't survive indefinitely. After about 9,000 years, most of these conservative words will have been replaced. Eric W. Holman, Aharon Dolgopolsky and Sergei Starostin were the chief linguists of this discipline, glottochronology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to my examples, in Niger-Saharan (now completely abandoned) all that is reconstructable outside some typological features are the single phonemes of alleged noun classifiers. Nostratic is relatively better substantiated but not even that comes close to qualifying as as a language related to the proto-Human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as onomatopoeic words for mother, father and birds there are areal terms which travelled with prehistorical human technology. &quot;Pan-African&quot; glosses include */bVr/ for ashes and */um/ for nose. I former is most likely areal and the second onomatopoeic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14706" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T09:05:47.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-17T09:30:39.307" Score="2" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;A foreign accent is obviously influenced by the native language of the speaker. What I'm wondering is if there's been any research on common traits of foreign accents across languages, that one could find even when not being familiar with the phonology of the language being spoken nor the native language of the speaker, something that is common to not speaking your own language. I'm thinking something like hesitations or phonological inconsistencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The reason for this question, I must admit, is that hearing people speak languages other than their native language really annoys me. I wish it didn't, and I'm wondering if there's anything to it other than me being judgmental. Hearing a person first speak a foreign language and then switch to their native language I am often struck by how the way they speak their native language is so much more natural and immediate, even when their vocabulary and pronunciation of the foreign language are at near-native level. This is all of course very impressionistic, so it'd like to read what's been written about it, except I don't know how or where to look for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14769" LastEditorUserId="14769" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T19:24:41.850" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T19:24:41.850" Title="Are there common traits of foreign accents across languages?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-17T09:33:17.077" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is called in pragmatics an &lt;em&gt;utterance&lt;/em&gt;, and what is called a body gesture or a facial gesture, are all acts of communication. Is there any term in any context or discipline, that unites these different modalities of communication/expression under one umbrella term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T18:33:05.667" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:33:05.667" Title="Is there a term generalizing a pragmatics utterance and a body or facial gesture?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;body-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-17T16:52:00.380" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;My mother tongue is French so I would prefer one in this language but I'm also interested in English ones, especially if they can be &lt;em&gt;considered&lt;/em&gt; of much higher quality/completness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard of the Greek-French &amp;amp; French-Greek dictionaries written by Δημήτρης Παντελοδήμος. The first editions (1995) were published with the Kauffmann edition and the latest with the Τσιγαρίδα edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2002 Greek-French edition boasts 150,000 words while the newer mentions 140,000... so I wonder if the latest edition is the best and what happened to the 10 thousand words...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblionet.gr/author/24409/%CE%94%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AE%CF%84%CF%81%CE%B7%CF%82_%CE%A0%CE%B1%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B4%CE%AE%CE%BC%CE%BF%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.biblionet.gr/author/24409/Δημήτρης_Παντελοδήμος&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14770" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T18:23:39.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T04:15:23.613" Title="Which dictionaries can be considered as the most complete for Modern Greek?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20540" CreationDate="2016-12-17T18:05:59.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't really imagine a context where such a description would be useful, since normally you talk either about combinatorial behaviour (free vs bound vs something else) or semantic properties (lexical vs functional vs ...), and now you're kind of jumbling these two parameters up.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But it's not wrong either, so I guess it would be okay to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It's also partially redundant because e.g. derivational morphemes are always bound (except there are some very weird language where this isn't the case; in this case feel free to correct me).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe it would sound better if you switched the order and said &quot;bound inflectional morpheme&quot;, because the latter implies the former and putting the more specific thing first and as a second description what is already implied anyway (like &quot;inflectional bound&quot;) sounds a bit clumsy to my ears. But that's just hair-splitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T18:26:23.020" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T18:26:23.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4867" CreationDate="2016-12-17T22:11:22.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ethnologue actually provides an answer to this question, although it raises more questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ethnologue page &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How many languages in the world are unwritten&lt;/a&gt; says that as of the 19th edition (released 2016), there were 7,097 living languages and that of these there is data suggesting that 3,748 have a 'developed writing system'. This leaves 3,349 that are 'likely unwritten'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No explanation is given as to what is meant by a 'developed writing system' however we can make an informed guess that it refers to a writing system that has been developed in order to be of practical use to the speakers. This would typically rule out writing systems used in technical descriptive works (eg by linguists). It is also commonplace that such writing systems have been developed with the involvement of speakers of the language, quite possibly without a linguist or any other outsiders being involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ethnologue goes on to say that in most cases it is not known what level of usage these writing systems have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T22:11:22.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18880" CreationDate="2016-12-18T16:03:55.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can see Quirk et al. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0582517346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (General Grammar)&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Chapter 8 is &quot;The semantics and grammar of adverbials&quot;, and I believe this is one of the things you would need. One of the semantic roles of the adverbials is &quot;time&quot; (such as the adverb &quot;last&quot; in the adverbial &quot;last week&quot;). I think you will find what you are looking for in this book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more things within this book as well (it's almost 1800 pages!) and I highly recommend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T16:03:55.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20461" CreationDate="2016-12-18T17:03:39.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;By way of analogy, English speakers find it relatively easy to learn romance languages, or Germanic ones.  Much Middle English vocabulary was introduced by the Norman conquest, and much Old English vocabulary was derived from Germanic influences via the Saxons and Jutes.  Approximately 60% of Vietnamese vocabulary derives from common sources shared with Cantonese - particularly from the Bai Yue ethnolinguistic complex.  Simultaneously, Mandarin derived from the confluence of Cantonese antecedent dialects and the Manchurian language.   Common sources seem adequate to explain the bulk of the affinity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, phylogenetic purity is a characteristic of didactic simplifications, rather than of adequate explanations.  As in biology, so too in diachronic linguistics: The generative axioms of signification may derive, for example, from the major language group, while vocabulary is dominated by sources in geographic neighbors of another group entirely.  While I am not expert in Vietnamese historical etymology, it is my impression that Vietnamese may be an exemplar of this paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly it is true that the borders of the southern Chinese and the Vietnamese dynastic empires have fluctuated significantly over the centuries of the historical epoch.  In this regard, a closer Euro-centric analogy might be the Ukranian-Russian pair.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9731" LastEditorUserId="9731" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T06:53:59.093" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T06:53:59.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20447" CreationDate="2016-12-18T17:31:51.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other answers refer to the classical paradigms.  My answer will refer to a more recent, computation-centric paradigm.  Distributional semantics  may be taken as the observables sampled from a mixing process.  The inferential semantics of such a scheme derive from the latent model structure, which is accessible by Monte Carlo , spectral, or constraint-satisfying inference, but in any case  should be expressible as operator algebras over the space of factors underlying the conditional distributions of utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some application domains, e.g. machine translation, text generation, the Neural model has recently taken the stage by storm, demonstrating overwhelming out-performance on a preponderance of important benchmarks.  Responsible professionals, therefore, are in process of reorienting themselves to align to the &quot;deep learning&quot; paradigm, which is consonant with an essentially distributional+spectral representation and inference schema.  Rather than &quot;standardizing&quot; to an (imposed) crisp logical representation, such schemata let the  data derive a representation - one more generally adequate to the capture of inherent ambiguities and other semantic phenomena which are particularly intractable in FoL decorated with simply typed lambda calculus, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which paradigm is most productive?  Surely this will depend on application.  If early disambiguation contributes strongly to mitigating loses, a combinatorial logical semantics (q.v. the Groningen Meaning Bank) is a good bet.  If carrying ambiguities along through the chain of inference is helpful (even if only as a form of regularization), then a highly parametric vector space representation is likely to capture more of the underlying logical dynamics of agent linguistic processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9731" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T17:31:51.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20557" CreationDate="2016-12-18T18:09:15.467" Score="-1" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;In classical Arabic, declension is very useful to distinguish subject from object, example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ysmʕ allah-u =&gt; He.listens (V) God(S) (God listens)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ysmʕ allah-a =&gt; He.listens (V) God(O) (He listens to god)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yšmʕ al&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we know that ‘al’ (pronounced ‘el’) is the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same for this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ysra al&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is ‘al’ the subject or the object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14775" LastEditorUserId="14775" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T10:13:34.960" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T10:13:34.960" Title="Is there any declension in Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20543" CreationDate="2016-12-18T20:20:28.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of research, or whether the following is true, but phonological alternations might be due to phonological processes in the speech of native speakers, but due instead to phonological rules in the speech of nonnative speakers.  The distinction between rule and process is made in David Stampe's theory Natural Phonology.  Rules have to be learned, and it's an error not to apply them when a language has them; processes are due to the arrangement of articulatory organs in humans, so they do not have to be learned, and it's an error to apply them when a language forbids them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a hypothetical example.  Many languages devoice word final obstruents (oral stops and fricatives), e.g., German.  This is a natural process.  English forbids this -- we have to be able to say word final b/d/g/z/v in English. Japanese does not forbid this devoicing -- there is no reason to, since Japanese has no word final obstruents.  However, it's been observed that Japanese speakers learning English do often at first devoice English word final obstruents.  This error of devoicing where you shouldn't cannot be something Japanese speakers have learned about Japanese -- it is not language interference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't know what adult English speakers do when they learn German, but it seems plausible that they learn to devoice word final obstruents as a rule, since they must have suppressed the process of word final devoicing when they first learned English (though some children learning English do apply this process, for a time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, then, I'm guessing that a person speaking German who occasionally forgets to devoice a word final obstruent can be identified as a nonnative speaker of German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2016-12-27T16:09:21.840" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T16:09:21.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20556" CreationDate="2016-12-18T20:52:05.070" Score="2" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for 'good' in Anatolian IE languages looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hittite: &lt;em&gt;āššu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Luwian: &lt;em&gt;wāšu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Palaic: &lt;em&gt;wāšu&lt;/em&gt; 'goods'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lydian: &lt;em&gt;wiśśi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen so many questionmarks regarding it's Indo-European reconstruction, which make me wonder whether those words are Indo-European or inherited by a pre-IE substrate. I know Greek has ἐύς and Illyrian ves- (in PN Vescleves), but those are languages from the &quot;neighbourhood&quot;. My question is: Do we have other cognates within Indo-European or is my substrate hypothesis plausible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T08:48:34.297" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T08:48:34.297" Title="Anatolian 'good': Indo-European or not?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;anatolian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20555" CreationDate="2016-12-18T21:42:01.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IE *h1(e)su- accounts reasonably well for ἐύς m, ἐύ n., as well as for Skt. su- and for Hitt. āššu-. The final -ς of ἐύς is simply the case ending for the nom. s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Luvian etc. forms look more like Skt vasu-, Av. vohu- and their cognates, IE *uesu-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2016-12-18T22:25:09.473" LastActivityDate="2016-12-18T22:25:09.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20553" CreationDate="2016-12-19T01:00:13.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, Hebrew employs what is known as the Definite Direct Object Marker (or DDOM), which is the untranslatable את (&lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt;). So long as the object of the verb is a direct object and so long as it is definite, it should be preceded by this particle. Should, but isn't always. In poetry, for example, it is frequently omitted. Otherwise, the object is indicated through word order alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example that you gave of &lt;em&gt;yisrael&lt;/em&gt; is a tricky one. Proper nouns tend to become ossified, and often hark back to a time when the language actually was inflected for case. The biblical literature suggests an etymology for this word as being &quot;one who fights with God&quot;, but that is not necessarily what it originally meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples that you brought for Arabic may not be ambiguous in Hebrew, since the particle translated to the English &quot;to&quot; would usually comprise a distinct particle in Hebrew as well. Thus, &lt;em&gt;yishma el&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;God listens&quot; (consider the name &lt;em&gt;yishmael&lt;/em&gt; and its biblical etymology), while &quot;he listens &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; God&quot; would require a particle before God's name (confusingly, in this instance, the homophonous &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @fdb comments, there are some texts (such as Ecclesiastes 7:5) in which the particle is omitted. In such circumstances, correct identification of the subject and object needs be contextual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14753" LastEditorUserId="14753" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T02:03:29.677" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T02:03:29.677" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T11:17:17.793" Score="5" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to build a domain specific corpus. By this I mean a corpus from a specific knowledge area, for instance Law, Psychiatry, or Klingon language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently using a Wikipedia corpus, and therefore, I get results that are not very relevant for my domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14663" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T06:08:48.160" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T06:08:48.160" Title="Are there tools to build domain specific corpus?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-12-24T18:44:24.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20559" CreationDate="2016-12-19T11:32:44.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that this can be fully automated; you will always have to sift through your texts and decide whether they are meeting your criteria for topicality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try to scrape specialised sources (journals or websites only featuring the topic of your interest), but than you run into problems with intellectual property rights: You cannot share your corpus for reproducible research or some kind of contest without the consent of the rights' holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T11:32:44.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T12:15:16.037" Score="0" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Icelandic#Ancient_Scandinavian_or_Norse_.281050.E2.80.931350.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to wikipedia:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Between 1050 and 1350 Icelandic began to develop independently from other Scandinavian and Germanic languages;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did it stop being mutuality intelligible with the Continental languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably a different answer for Danish and Norwegian/Swedish, and maybe even for written vs spoken (I'm mainly interested in the spoken form). But is it possible to put approximate dates on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14781" LastEditorUserId="14781" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T12:27:43.423" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:12:33.243" Title="When did Icelandic stop being mutuality intelligible with Continental north Germanic languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T13:59:48.023" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if there is a library of regular expressions for mining patterns reflecting lexical semantic relations from a corpus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These patterns should cover a wide variety of aspects synonymy (&quot;A is a B&quot;, &quot;A a.k.a B&quot;, &quot;A sometimes called B&quot;, ...), hyponymy, and so on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This could be quite interesting for me, since instead of relying in the mere co-occurence of words in a corpus, I could rely in the existence of patterns assuring the accuracy of the semantic relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14663" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T19:38:23.073" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T19:38:23.073" Title="Library of regular expressions for lexical relations in a corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20561" CreationDate="2016-12-19T18:05:16.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the modern context, we can observe that Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish is not&lt;/a&gt;. Lacking the technology to do the experiment with historical speakers, the only way to figure this out is to see what writers of the time thought. A lot of the records are oral, and written down later, so there is a fair amount of plus-and-minus to such date calculations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It is said&lt;/a&gt; that in the Heimskringla, ca. 1230, there is evidence of significant dialect divergence: &lt;em&gt;stirt var honum norrœnt mál, ok kylfdi mᴊǫk til orðanna, ok hǫfðu margir menn þat mᴊǫk at spotti&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;the Norse language was hard for him, and he often fumbled for words, which amused people greatly&quot;). The Wiki opines that &quot;From the late 13th century, Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian started to diverge more&quot;; it also reports the Grágás (apparently written down around 1260) as saying that &quot;Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language&quot;. Finally, &quot;In the body of text that has come down to us from until c. 1300, Old West Norse had little dialect variation, and Old Icelandic does not diverge much more than the Old Norwegian dialects do from each other&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8U6FixTtOw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This video&lt;/a&gt; demonstrates perils of trying to make guesses about &quot;mutual intelligibility&quot; (a Danish and a Swedish speaker try to pronounce phrases in each other's languages, and the Danish speaker does much better than the Swedish speaker at getting the other language -- is that because of the languages, or the individuals?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T18:12:33.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:12:33.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3429" CreationDate="2016-12-19T18:25:34.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are a great many, especially in spoken language and in regional and archaic dialects.  On average, there are more Turkish terms in spoken Armenian than Armenian in Turkish, and many many more that came from Persian into both Armenian and Turkish and many other languages, including English.  Quite simply, Persian and Turkish were regional lingue franche in recent history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Armenian words in Oghuz Turkish are mostly for native plants and foods, especially in certain regions, and for technologies, for example in weaving, construction, architecture.  There are also a few Armenian words that entered Turkic languages long ago via the Silk Road, (for example, the word for &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt;), and words from other Turkic languages that entered Armenian from the North.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, literary Armenian - since the year 405 CE - has essentially no Turkisms, beyond those for specific cultural concepts like English has (&lt;em&gt;dolma&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pasha&lt;/em&gt;) - keeping in mind that &lt;em&gt;divan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sultan&lt;/em&gt; and so on are actually from Persian and Arabic.  The exception would be a few words like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%BF%D5%A1%D6%82%D5%A1%D6%80#Middle_Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;տաւար&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;cattle&lt;/em&gt;).  Interestingly, many Armenian family names have Turkic components too, especially those based on professions (&lt;em&gt;basturmaci, saatci, demirci&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also words like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B2%D8%BA%D8%B1#Ottoman_Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;zağar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;hound&lt;/em&gt;) that are common to the region but of unknown origin.  (Some of the ancient Anatolian words even made it into English, for example &lt;em&gt;chestnut&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cherry&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, an Armenian was the father of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Language_Association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish Language Association&lt;/a&gt;, which created modern literary Turkish and was responsible for cleansing it of many non-Turkic words, and an Armenian compiled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevan_Ni%C5%9Fanyan#Index_Anatolicus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the index of Turkish toponymic etymologies&lt;/a&gt; and a leading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevan_Ni%C5%9Fanyan#The_Etymological_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish etymological dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T19:06:25.470" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T19:06:25.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17275" CreationDate="2016-12-19T18:39:04.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is mainly the judgement of the compilers of such etymologies. When you read original work by great historical linguists, you will often find some hedging language when they are not sure, or even mentioning of seemingly related forms that they discard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example that you cite, the semantic shifts are rather small and uncontroversial. Both &quot;cut off&quot; and &quot;lose&quot; share the notion of breaking a tie to something. Also, the sheer amount of data points from many languages gives additional support for the reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T18:39:04.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-19T19:42:06.383" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often necessary to provide a translation that conveys the meaning and intent of the original while sacrificing certain details in order to sound natural in the target language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean the case of choosing a fixed expression like &quot;two peas in a pod&quot; in the target language that roughly corresponds to one in the source, but rather the more common case of a detail that is present and literally meaningful in the original but which usually doesn't make it into the target because it would feel unnecessary or awkward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an English verb that captures this? I find myself wanting to say that such-and-such a detail is &quot;glossed out&quot; of the translation, but it seems that the term &quot;gloss&quot; has a different meaning in linguistics (I understand that it means an explanatory note, not a translation). On the other hand, I have also seen translations within Japanese-English dictionaries referred to as glosses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background of the question is that I write about the Japanese language for English-speaking learners and frequently have to refer to this sort of thing. It feels natural to me to say things are &quot;glossed out&quot; of the translation, but I want to make sure I'm not misusing terms. Thank you in advance for any thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4954" LastEditorUserId="4954" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T19:53:04.007" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T14:29:15.623" Title="Is there a term that refers to eliminating a word from a text being translated in order to achieve dynamic equivalence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20559" CreationDate="2016-12-19T20:36:23.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are looking into implementing probably three strategic pillars for your corpus. Machine learning has given computational linguists great tools, and one that you are probably needing is a plain-vanilla bag-of-word algorithm (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Python is usually a popular choice. Take a look at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kaggle: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/details/part-1-for-beginners-bag-of-words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/details/part-1-for-beginners-bag-of-words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sci Kit: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/feature_extraction.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/feature_extraction.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you have semantic trees / databases - such as WordNet (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/&lt;/a&gt;) that help you extend your corpus based on data already mined for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, manual review. Lots of it. Your Bag of words will need to be trimmed seriously if it is to be truly useful. The right and wrong branches of semantic trees will also need to be pruned. In any case, this is labour intensive and may require serious expertise in certain fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that - you may be better of purchasing some of these corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T20:36:23.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20569" CreationDate="2016-12-19T20:53:41.453" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;betray&quot; sounds similar to the Swedish word &quot;bedra&quot;. The Swedish word means betray or commit a fraud. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;fraud&quot; sounds similar to the Swedish word &quot;förrådd&quot; which means betrayed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a coincident or did the words have common etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T14:23:23.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T14:23:23.553" Title="Are these similarities coincidental?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20568" CreationDate="2016-12-19T21:38:33.353" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is purely coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Betray&lt;/strong&gt; comes from French &lt;em&gt;trahir&lt;/em&gt; (prefixed with &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;), ultimately from Latin &lt;em&gt;trado,-ere&lt;/em&gt; (to give something over), itself being a derivation of &lt;em&gt;trans-&lt;/em&gt; (over) &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;do,dare&lt;/em&gt; (give).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bedra&lt;/strong&gt; comes from Germanic &lt;em&gt;dreugan&lt;/em&gt; (prefixed also with &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;), etymologised as PIE &lt;em&gt;dhrewgh-&lt;/em&gt; (mislead) which is also coincidentally the most probable stem, from which Latin &lt;strong&gt;fraus, fraudis&lt;/strong&gt; comes from! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Förrådda&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand, comes from Germanic &lt;em&gt;rédan&lt;/em&gt; (to advise; compare the prefixation with Czech &lt;em&gt;pro-radný&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T21:38:33.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-20T09:34:53.947" Score="2" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do we call single word conversation elements such as &quot;Yes!&quot;,  &quot;Yep&quot; and sounds of hesitation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14787" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T11:29:50.490" Title="What do we call small bits of speech" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20571" CreationDate="2016-12-20T09:38:18.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is AFAIK no common word for all of them. &lt;em&gt;Sounds of hesitation&lt;/em&gt; are often called &lt;strong&gt;fillers&lt;/strong&gt;, while short utterances like &lt;em&gt;Yes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Yep&lt;/em&gt; are called &lt;strong&gt;fragments&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T11:29:50.490" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T11:29:50.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20574" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-20T12:58:53.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Anatolian languages were spoken in antique times in Anatolia (today Turkey). They are known from inscriptions and form a branch of the Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Known Anatolian languages include Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T16:14:48.130" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:14:48.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20575" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-20T12:58:53.967" Score="0" Body="For question about the now extinct Anatolian languages, forming a branch of the Indo-European language family." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T16:14:37.403" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:14:37.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20571" CreationDate="2016-12-20T13:15:30.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of parts of speech, words like &quot;Yes&quot;, &quot;No&quot;, &quot;Hey&quot;, &quot;Umm&quot;, &quot;Oh&quot;, &quot;Well&quot;, &quot;Ouch&quot;,...  are called &lt;strong&gt;interjections&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T14:20:31.757" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T14:20:31.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20559" CreationDate="2016-12-20T16:45:41.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd stick to Wikipedia, and, for example, for the European Union, I'd  get all articles in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:European_Union&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:European_Union&lt;/a&gt; (recursing in sub-categories), though that may be too small a corpus for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have been considering doing exactly that, though haven't implemented it yet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5493" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:45:41.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20571" CreationDate="2016-12-20T16:47:57.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the term particle can be used in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;a word or a part of a word that has a grammatical purpose but often has little or no meaning&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14404" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T16:47:57.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20581" CreationDate="2016-12-20T17:30:42.550" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is known about the phonological constraints limiting the form of a Semitic (or even Afroasiatic) root? In other words, are there any limits to the possible sequences of radicals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, per &lt;em&gt;Daya, E., Roth, D., &amp;amp; Wintner, S. (2008). Identifying Semitic roots: Machine learning with linguistic constraints. Computational Linguistics, 34(3), 429-448&lt;/em&gt;, the coincidence of the first and second consonants is extremely rare compared to the similarity of 2nd and 3rd. Are there more patterns which allow to predict whether the given C-C-C form (or not threeconsonantal) can be a root, such as some hierarchy of sonority followed, or some sequences banned to avoid their possible contacts when there is no vowel in-between?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T18:55:04.063" Title="Semitic (Afroasiatic?) Root Constraints" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20580" CreationDate="2016-12-20T18:42:01.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classic original study is Joseph Greenberg 1950 &quot;The Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic&quot; (Word 5, 162–181). A later study with a larger lexicon was conducted by M. Mrayati 1987 &quot;Statistical studies of Arabic language roots&quot;. The OCP controversy features this pattern prominently. There are different degrees of strength to the particular effects, for example as far as I know, in a triconsonantal root there are no roots with &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; (either order) as C2 and C3. The overall picture is that if you just look at the frequency of certain phonemes in the lexicon of roots, you find that &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; occurs a certain number of times, likewise &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;... but when you looc at co-ocurrrence (&lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; plus &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; plus &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;), there is a decreased likelihood of finding &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; together in a root. The effect that has been of interest to theorists is the treatment of absolutely identical consonants (where the limits are extremely strong) and homorganic consonants. Greenberg spells out the facts in great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T18:55:04.063" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T18:55:04.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12843" CreationDate="2016-12-20T19:51:12.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are trying to reconcile the traditional high-mid-low/front-central-back classification of vowels, based on acoustics and perception, with an articulatory theory, based on tongue and jaw position.  It's difficult -- maybe not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the difference between the two approaches pretty clearly if you compare &lt;em&gt;Preliminaries to Speech Analysis&lt;/em&gt; by Jacobson, Fant, and Halle, with &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; by Chomsky and Halle.  Or, if you like, early Halle with late Halle.  Although some ritual bows to acoustics are made in SPE, the early acoustic theory has pretty much given way to a purely articulatory theory.  For instance, the SPE feature &quot;high&quot; does not have anything to do with low F1 and high F2, but instead means that the body of the tongue is raised above its speech neutral position.  There is some relationship, of course, between the articulations and their acoustic effects, but it is often not obvious.  And various articulations can have similar acoustic effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead of starting from the traditional F1 versus F2 classification, you might reasonably start from the SPE vowel classification, based on how we can manipulate the tongue body -- the SPE features high/low/back give an 8 way classification of vowels.  (Maybe less than 8 way if [+high,+low] is taken to be impossible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T19:51:12.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-20T19:58:34.980" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name for the process by which a word's meaning is trivialized or diminished in importance from its original meaning? For example, the standard English word &lt;em&gt;throne&lt;/em&gt; means a &lt;em&gt;toilet&lt;/em&gt; in English slang; &lt;em&gt;Saray&lt;/em&gt; in Persian means &lt;em&gt;palace&lt;/em&gt;, in Russian it means a &lt;em&gt;shed&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14404" LastEditorUserId="14404" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T13:52:36.973" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T13:52:36.973" Title="Is there a name for the process of triviliazation of a word's meaning?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-20T20:53:20.057" Score="7" ViewCount="3654" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20270/do-there-exist-languages-with-wh-prepositions&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;, I got entangled in a debate whether the word &quot;here&quot; (which I would classify readily as an adverb) is in reality a preposition. I am curious which modern analyses find syntactical similarities between &quot;here&quot; and words like &quot;in, at, on, for, to&quot; that they range them in the same category as well as the reasoning behind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am aware that many English prepositions are actually adverbs (i.e. they can stand on their own, without relation to a noun, and express for example a location on their own, e.g. &quot;I am in&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:19:55.023" Title="Is the word &quot;here&quot; a preposition?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T05:19:51.067" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if there is a decided term for the words that begin a new utterance. They often are written with a comma following them such as below:&#xA;&quot;Well, ...&quot; &quot;So, ...&quot; but the class of these words isn't restricted to single words or a particular set and can be expanded to include other parts of speech also for example: &quot;George, ...&quot; is there a name for these forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1679" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T18:43:50.683" Title="Term for words that introduce a new sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T09:01:16.000" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if you know how automatically obtain all the sub-concepts associated to a given concept. For example, given the concept car, I would like to automatically retrieve concepts such as: wheel, brake, window, seat belt, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the way to do that could be using a taxonomy. However, this method does not satisfy my needs since: the taxonomies that I know only cover small domains, they are not homogeneously formatted, and it is not always clear that a given taxon is a real subsumption of the parent concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a more general approach. Things that I have already tried:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computing embeddings of the concept. It does not work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mining a corpus in search of hyponymy patterns. It does not work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking for manually compiled theasurus which can offer this info. I could not find an appropriate one. Most of them offer: synonyms, antonyms, related words, but not real sub-concepts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14663" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T09:32:48.180" Title="Automatically retrieving all the sub-concepts associated to a given concept" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20588" CreationDate="2016-12-21T09:32:48.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you need is to look for Knowledge Bases (KBs). Among the most popular ones are &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.dbpedia.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DBPedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/databases-and-information-systems/research/yago-naga/yago/#c10444&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YAGO&lt;/a&gt;, which are free to use. Each concept of the KB is related with other concepts in the KB. For instance, on the YAGO web-site, there is this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ySq6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ySq6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see in the image, there are many concepts. The main concept investigated is Max Planck, which is a physicist, a physicist is a scientist, which is a person. Also, you have relation between the concept &quot;Max Planck&quot; and the concept &quot;Nobel Prize&quot;, and the relation is &lt;em&gt;hasWon&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that Max Planck has won a Nobel Prize. You can see there are many other concepts, like locations, temporal concepts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get a better feeling of how these things work, I would suggest you play around with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dbpedia.org/fct/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenLink faceted browser with DBpedia&lt;/a&gt;. If you look for a concept, for instance - &lt;a href=&quot;http://dbpedia.org/fct/facet.vsp?cmd=text&amp;amp;sid=2080&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;car&lt;/a&gt;, you can get all kinds of information about the concept and how it relates with other concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T09:32:48.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2016-12-21T10:07:39.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the dialect spoken in southern Pennsylvania, Indiana and northern Kentucky, speakers will use &quot;weuns&quot; to indicate inclusion in first person, and &quot;you-uns&quot; for second person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14787" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T10:07:39.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20488" CreationDate="2016-12-21T11:15:33.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the illustration shows (as well as the presentation at &lt;a href=&quot;http://gramoty.ru/?act=full&amp;amp;no=109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://gramoty.ru/?act=full&amp;amp;no=109&lt;/a&gt;), the symbol rendered as &quot;я&quot; is in this case actually an ordinary &quot;а&quot;. Per my knowledge, the loss of nasals was a general Eastern Slavic phenomenon of the first half of Xth century ([ę] &gt; [ä]), so any little yus shouldn't be treated as anything but the spelling of ä. The author's spelling choice of възѧлъ as възалъ I cannot shed light on; per &lt;a href=&quot;http://gramoty.ru/dnd/a14.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://gramoty.ru/dnd/a14.pdf&lt;/a&gt; p. 258, that is likely the author's misspelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note also the conclusion ibid. (p. 259) that the text 'shows no univocal phenomena of O. N. dialect proper; furthermore, several details (though not conclusive) might set it out of the mass of XI-XII cent. gramotas. Possibly, the author, Zhiznomir, was a native of Southwestern Rus'. Perhaps the example in Wikipedia should be replaced by a clearer one?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastEditorUserId="14652" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T11:55:22.253" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T11:55:22.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3638" CreationDate="2016-12-21T11:49:18.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entry for the language at Языки мира: Кавказские языки. - М., 1999 has the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;проницающий&quot; (apparently, the one under question, due to the identity of affixes described) case marks indirect objects or adverbials of verbs denoting the direct contact, penetration, several other verbs. It is marked by -x: &lt;em&gt;ас хене-х тIотI кхацIдинас&lt;/em&gt; 'I grabbed &lt;strong&gt;the tree&lt;/strong&gt; with a hand'; &lt;em&gt;о алзне-х дахь валъẽ&lt;/em&gt; 'He crossed to the other bank &lt;strong&gt;of Alazani&lt;/strong&gt;'; &lt;em&gt;окхус хене-х дикI дишдиẽ&lt;/em&gt; 'He struck &lt;strong&gt;a tree&lt;/strong&gt; with an axe'; &lt;em&gt;о со-х гIази-х ва&lt;/em&gt; 'He is better than me'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the whole set of cases described in the article is somewhat different from one on Wikipedia, so some deviations might be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T11:49:18.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T15:04:56.917" Score="2" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me to translate this morphophonemic rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V ⇒ ∅ / C ___ + V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowels become null in the environment ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;...&quot;, i.e., what is the environment translated into English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14802" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T15:40:52.993" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T20:13:35.410" Title="Morphophonemic rule formulation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20594" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-21T15:31:25.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Austronesian languages&lt;/a&gt; form a large language family with a large geographical spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Members of the Austronesian language family include &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/malay&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;malay&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;malay&lt;/a&gt;, Indonesian, Malagasy (spoken in Madagaskar), Tagalog, and the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/polynesian&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;polynesian&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;polynesian&lt;/a&gt; languages (e.g. Hawaiian and Maori)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T17:18:35.260" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T17:18:35.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20595" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-21T15:31:25.667" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Austronesian language family and its members." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T22:46:35.273" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T22:46:35.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19106" CreationDate="2016-12-21T18:01:17.850" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bouba/kiki effect&lt;/a&gt; has something to do with the explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm from Northern Sweden and briefly watched and listened to the video about the de/dem/dom etymology. I think that there was absolutely nothing about why and only observations how words evolved and changed and how people did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that the reason is the sound. It is easier and sounds softer to say /dɔm/. The sound has a psychological association with something round and soft, compared with the other sound (&quot;di/de(t)&quot;) that has a psychological association with something sharp and hard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare the sounds in a test, many people will make a connection between a soft sound (example &quot;Bouba&quot;) and a round and soft shape, and they will make a connection between a &quot;Kiki&quot; sound and something sharp. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first association (roundness) is associated with easygoing and the second association (sharpness) is associated with hard determinism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastEditorUserId="14779" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T07:08:01.337" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T07:08:01.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20586" CreationDate="2016-12-21T18:43:50.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a category of words called &lt;a href=&quot;https://msu.edu/~jdowell/135/transw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transition words&lt;/a&gt; which contains your examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T18:43:50.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8461" CreationDate="2016-12-21T18:54:48.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can also be a &lt;em&gt;contamination&lt;/em&gt; from the biblical name Zebadiah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zebadiah mixed up with Jedediah gives Jebediah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. (This is an answer to the question in comment: Is it a joke?) It is partly an elaborated joke indeed. The name Jebediah was popularised by the TV show &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simpsons&lt;/a&gt;. But Jebediah Smith (as founder of Springfield) is an anachronism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name is in use in the USA, as the SSA data show, since 1973.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This trend was caused by the figure Jebediah Nightlinger in the film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cowboys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cowboys (1972)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T22:15:32.547" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T22:15:32.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19106" CreationDate="2016-12-21T20:03:13.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MujjinGun has provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld9ieozJ-ws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this excellent video&lt;/a&gt; in a comment, but it's been long enough since it was posted that it deserves a proper answer. I've provided comparisons from English as well whenever possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, the Swedish third-person plural pronoun was &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; in the nominative and &lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt; in the accusative, pronounced just as spelled. At this point the spelling was standardized, and there was much rejoicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time the pronunciation shifted to /di/ and /dɔm/, but the spelling remained the same. (Compare the mess that is modern English vowels; the spelling used to make sense, but the pronunciation has changed and the orthography hasn't kept up with it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in northern and central Sweden, &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; slowly fell out of fashion in the spoken language. Instead, &lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt; was used for both the nominative and the accusative. (Compare how English &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; has been replaced almost entirely with &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was seen as vulgar, lower-class, and slang-y. So it happened exclusively in spoken language; in writing, and in more formal environments, the nominative would still be &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;. (Compare informal English contractions like &quot;gonna&quot;. I'd almost always say &quot;gonna&quot; out loud, but in writing I would put &quot;going to&quot; without even noticing the difference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &quot;incorrect&quot; pronunciation slowly spread. Once it was part of the Stockholm local dialect the vulgar/informal labels started to fade away, and by the mid-20th century /dɔm/ became the official standard pronunciation for both nominative and accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's where we are now, with the pronouns usually spelled &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt; but both pronounced /dɔm/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T20:03:13.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20593" CreationDate="2016-12-21T20:13:35.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first part is correct, but I'm going to go through the whole translation for completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V ⇒ ∅ / C ___ + V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaking this down into parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard shorthand for &amp;quot;any vowel&amp;quot;, or sometimes &amp;quot;any short vowel&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;⇒&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Becomes&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;∅&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Null&amp;quot;, that is, the sound disappears entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;in the following environment&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;C ___ + V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the environment in which the change happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;C&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard shorthand for &amp;quot;any consonant&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;___&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where the sound being modified appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the rarest symbol in this rule. &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; indicates a boundary between two morphemes, such as a stem and a suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all together, the translation would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vowel becomes null when it's preceded by a consonant, and followed by a morpheme break, and then a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T20:13:35.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20584" CreationDate="2016-12-21T20:34:40.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&amp;quot;Here&amp;quot; is not a preposition per se.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition, prepositions come before a noun phrase (or determiner phrase) to create prepositional phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was (in (the house)).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They saw him (with (a knife)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here&amp;quot; cannot do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*He was here the house.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*They saw him here a knife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here&amp;quot; does act quite a bit like a prepositional &lt;em&gt;phrase&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical way of testing where something lies in the syntax tree, is to apply a constituency test. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_(linguistics)#Constituency_tests&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia provides some examples.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common test is pro-substitution: if you can replace a sequence of words with a single pro-form, and get a grammatical result, then those words have the same category as the pro-form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repairman was &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt; earlier today.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The repairman was &lt;strong&gt;somewhere&lt;/strong&gt; earlier today.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The repairman was &lt;strong&gt;in the apartment&lt;/strong&gt; earlier today.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*The repairman was &lt;strong&gt;somewhere&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;the apartment&lt;/em&gt; earlier today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another test is coordination: if two phrases can be coordinated with &amp;quot;and&amp;quot;, they're (almost always) the same type of phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are dogs &lt;strong&gt;inside and outside&lt;/strong&gt; the house.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;*There are dogs &lt;strong&gt;inside and here&lt;/strong&gt; the house.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are dogs &lt;strong&gt;inside the house and outside the house&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are dogs &lt;strong&gt;inside the house and here&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tests point to treating &amp;quot;here&amp;quot; as its own prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T20:34:40.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20566" CreationDate="2016-12-22T14:29:15.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there's a term for the specific thing you're referring to, but the general concept, which also includes translating idioms like you mentioned, is called sense-for-sense translation. This includes more than removing meaningful details that cannot be translated pragmatically; it also includes adding new details that give the same sense as the original statement, even if there isn't a lexical or syntactical correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense-for-sense_translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense-for-sense_translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14806" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T14:29:15.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20604" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-22T15:08:45.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt; (Natural Language Toolkit) is a collection of libraries and programs written in the programming language Python for computational linguistic purposes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It includes various tools for working with corpora and lexical databases, processing raw text data, tokenization, POS tagging, information extraction and various other applications.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;NLTK also comes with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; providing a hands-on introduction to NLP with Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T22:06:26.020" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T22:06:26.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20605" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-22T15:08:45.143" Score="0" Body="for questions about the NLTK library used for computational linguistic programming" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T22:06:40.313" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T22:06:40.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20615" CreationDate="2016-12-23T05:07:52.303" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know which norms might have governed the spelling of some Russian names which were written down in Spanish around around 1750 - 1850. A number of formal standards exist today, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 9&lt;/a&gt;, but how would it have been done a couple of centuries ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13167" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T21:23:48.603" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T21:23:48.603" Title="Has Russian to Spanish transliteration changed much over the centuries?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5972" CreationDate="2016-12-23T10:28:23.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there is always a grey zone between suffixes and compound words. Arguably, all suffixes were independent words historically, but lost their independent meaning (in German &lt;em&gt;verblassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to bleach out&quot;). So we have at any time some things that are still recognisable as words, but half-way on becoming a true suffix. This things are called suffixoids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T10:28:23.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2016-12-23T13:16:30.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing is a relatively recent development.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although we acquire speech without conscious effort, learning to read and write is usually less spontaneous and less automatic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of us speak a great deal more than we write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thousands of speech communities rely solely on speech.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing is permanent while speech is instant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14811" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T19:42:12.243" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T19:42:12.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20612" CreationDate="2016-12-23T16:04:27.967" Score="7" ViewCount="2250" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important rule in English grammar is &quot;subject-verb agreement&quot;. It basically states that a verb must conform to the form of the noun (i.e. Singular/Plural). My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of this rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to play a huge role in semantics at all.&#xA;&quot;He drinks coffee&quot; and &quot;He drink coffee&quot; both make sense and the -s at the end doesn't seem to add to the meaning of the sentence at all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14813" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T07:15:35.903" Title="What is the purpose of Subject-Verb agreement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20611" CreationDate="2016-12-23T16:20:31.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammatical facts aren't volitional and purposive, they are conventional: you say &quot;He runs&quot;, &quot;I run&quot; because that's how your colleagues and your ancestors talk(ed). If you go far enough back in time you would also say &quot;you runst&quot; and &quot;we runneth&quot;. You can be understood if you say &quot;He run&quot;, and some people do that and we don't even notice. Eventually we might all end up saying &quot;he run&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T16:20:31.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20611" CreationDate="2016-12-23T18:39:18.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is for historical reasons, and it dates back millenia to those times when the ancient Indo-European languages were pro-drop, that is they tended not to use personal pronouns as subjects, many are still like that, for example Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from Latin: &lt;em&gt;te amo&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;I love you&quot; (lit. &quot;you I-love&quot;), but &lt;em&gt;te amamus&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;we love you&quot; (lit. &quot;you we-love&quot;). As you can see, there are no subject pronouns in those sentences, still the verb form clearly shows what is meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the modern Indo-European languages, including English, stem from a pro-drop ancient ancestor language, the use of personal pronouns as subjects is a later innovation, and some modern IE languages lost the subject-verb agreement completely, like Swedish or Afrikaans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T18:39:18.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-24T04:52:15.867" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German and Swedish we have typically the ending ...sig (själv) or ...sich (selbst) (in German) when doing something with yourself, for yourself or oneself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ändra sig (=&quot;change yourself/change oneself&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it called a reflexive object? Why is it so common in Swedish when it is not as common in English? In English you might just say &quot;He changed&quot; but in Swedish you must say either &quot;Han ändrade sig&quot; or &quot;Han förändrades.&quot; (The first means more like he changed his mind where the second expression is more like a general change.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly every Swedish verb can be used with &quot;sig&quot; if you do it with or for yourself. Are there different degrees of this grammar in different languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastEditorUserId="14779" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T05:08:47.093" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T13:51:30.917" Title="Is there a name for self-reference in verbs?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20607" CreationDate="2016-12-24T08:08:55.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, although I'm afraid to say that then, as today, healthy chaos reigned.  Transliteration conventions depend as much on other aspects of the context - the writer's familiarity with Russian, the intended audience, the keyboard or press available - as on the year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which conventions do correlate with year?  These days, we can find the English convention 'sh' being used more, and also the letter 'k' in places where 'c' would work, and 'y' in 'Krylov'.  We also see 'y' used in ways that correspond to Latin American pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Puchkin%2CPushkin%2CPuchquin%2CPuxkin%2C+Puxquin&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=21&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CPuchkin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CPushkin%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pushkin vs Puchkin&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5QQ0C.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5QQ0C.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some aspects are still open questions - hence Aseev/Aseyev/Aseiev, Yershov/Ershov - and it is likely that the precise balance has shifted over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can select from &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor%C3%ADa:Rusos_del_siglo_XVII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rusos del siglo XVII&lt;/a&gt; and search variants of their names in the Google Books n-gram viewer for Spanish books from 1800 on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we go back a few centuries further, then 'x' had yet another value, and English was even less dominant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transliteration aside, in the past names were more frequently simply translated, hence &lt;em&gt;Luis Adolfo Pedro de Sayn-Wittgenstein&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;José Stalin&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T08:14:00.707" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T08:14:00.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2016-12-24T14:22:14.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice is gaining among classical grammar academies in America. I teach grammar every week to 8th graders and we diagram sentences with every lesson. We use a curriculum by Robin Finley, called Analytical Grammar. It is the most comprehensive grammar program I've ever used. I've taught English for over twenty years. We started reviving the lost art of sentence diagrams about 15 years ago in our little school. I disagree with the earlier poster who lamented the notion that teachers who understand grammar is an idea that &quot;is never going to happen.&quot; It's happening. But it is not yet widespread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14817" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T14:22:14.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2016-12-24T14:46:44.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned Reed-Kellogg diagramming in high school, Ohio, in the late 50s.  In teaching the elements of linguistic syntax to students over the years, from 1968 to 2010, I've never encountered one that gave any indication of knowing about this method of diagramming. It's dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T14:46:44.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5972" CreationDate="2016-12-26T14:11:54.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suffixoids and prefixoids are words typically referring to some middle stage of grammaticalisation, i.e. when we do not consider the element a stand-alone word but it is not comparable yet to regular derivational morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a pretty apt analysis of both &lt;em&gt;-like&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt; in the examples above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;-like&lt;/em&gt;, this is something that has actually already happened in Germanic languages in the past and it is the source of the adverbial suffix -ly/-lich/-lik etc. You can argue that &lt;em&gt;-like&lt;/em&gt; serves as a derivational suffix because you can convert it further, e.g. to abstract noun (&lt;em&gt;catlikeness&lt;/em&gt; - I supposed this would not work as a derivation from a compound word... cat+likeness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;-man&lt;/em&gt;, you can actually even see that this form has been reduced phonetically - it lost accent and the mid-vowel changed to schwa. This is arguably being deconstructed lately by gender-conscious language as many people replace this element by &lt;em&gt;-woman&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-person&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2016-12-26T14:43:18.130" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T14:43:18.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4259" CreationDate="2016-12-26T15:48:20.890" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;s-mobile can be taken as a natural widespread environmental sound, therefore existing before human oral language came to life, and then used - or not used - 'also' to strengthen or underline the basic sounds of the &quot;sound-system&quot; which originated proto-language phonemes, in a time where no grammar and no word division could exist or play any major role ... see the word 'stone' as a 's-mobile' plus 'tone', whose initial consonant comes to underline the 'sound effect' of the word 'tone', being the whole mix the resulting effect of the reproduction of natural sounds (the object called 'stone' hitting something or someone).&#xA;Giuseppe Maiorano&#xA; -&gt; see academia-edu, g.maiorano, &quot;The voice ot things, etc.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14826" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T15:48:20.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20628" CreationDate="2016-12-27T07:41:44.877" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an overview of all the inflections (such as nominative, ablative, possesive) from all the world languages to get an insight into how the inflection works in language in general. For instance, I've noticed that the &quot;for-form&quot; and the &quot;object-from&quot; are often united even though their meaning in the sentence seems to be quite unlike, so I'd like to know how common this fusion is (and if it's just a matter of history or if there're deeper connection in the two inflection forms). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please link me such free material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T17:39:22.097" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T17:39:22.097" Title="Is there a document with all the inflection forms of all the world languages?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20627" CreationDate="2016-12-27T08:19:43.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no such document however the set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thematic relations&lt;/a&gt;, particularly in its instantiation as &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/vanvalin/rrg/vanvalin_papers/SemMRsRRG.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'semantic macroles'&lt;/a&gt;, may be something like what you're after, but the way that these map on to actual inflections in languages will vary greatly from one to another, rendering comprehensive comparison problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, There are comprehensive lists of the &lt;em&gt;terms&lt;/em&gt; used by linguists in describing the inflectional morphology of the world's languages, such as found in a good dictionary of linguistics, but there will still be gaps as there are so many languages and numerous approaches to describing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there was such a list it would not be very helpful for comparison as the same term will have different meanings in different languages. Thus Latin and Warlpiri both have an inflection called 'ablative' reflecting the fact that there is some core commonality between the two inflections, but there will also be substantial differences in the range of meanings/functions of the 'ablative' in each language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2016-12-27T08:34:40.647" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T08:34:40.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20543" CreationDate="2016-12-27T12:11:26.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, no, it is not possible to identify a foreign accent in a spoken utterance when you do not know the phonology of the language spoken nor the native language of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Greg Lee indicated in his answer, there are certain natural tendencies in languages of the world which are likely to emerge under such circumstances (like the final devoicing) but you have no way of telling whether they are part of the language in question or not because since they are natural, they are pretty likely to be a part of its phonology in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to the phonological rules of the native language (as an example - Spanish speakers tend to expend initial /sC-/ cluster to /esC-/) - again you have no way of telling from which language this comes from if you lack the knowledge of either. This is also fairly logical since you have languages from the same family where such a rule did not evolve (e.g. Italian), then you have languages where it did evolve and is still active (Spanish and Portuguese) and then you have language where it did evolve but stopped getting applied (French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, there might be some traits pointing out to the fact that what you hear is a non-native speaker with an accent, e.g. I imagine that the overall number of sounds distinguished by the speaker would be, in average, lower than in the spoken language but again, this is difficult to establish when we speak about sounds and not phonemes (remember, we do not know phonology) and furthermore it would not be more than an indication of the possibility, not a reliable identifier. Another feature that could be used for the same purpose is the speech pace, which would roughly correlate with the level of language skill and thus inevitably at the lower level with accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T12:11:26.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20614" CreationDate="2016-12-27T13:51:30.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are aiming at is probably &amp;quot;reflexive&amp;quot; verbs, however most verbs that permit this are not really reflexive verbs. To get closer understanding, we need to look at certain verb classes in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Intransitive verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;These verbs do not require/permit an object and exist typically only alongside a subject. Examples are: to run, to walk, etc. (of course they can have object when they assume a different sense, e.g. &lt;em&gt;to run a test&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to walk a dog&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Transitive verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;These verbs typically require one or more objects (direct or indirect) and the term itself means that the action somehow ties or goes from one participant (subject) to the other (object). Examples are: &lt;em&gt;to kill&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to see&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They permit various transformations like passivisation etc. Now we are getting somewhere in relation to you previous question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The verbs transitivity permits typically that &lt;strong&gt;the subject can be also the object of the verb at the same time&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;to wash oneself&amp;quot;, in which case the object is expressed by a personal or reflexive pronoun. In Romance languages, the reflexive pronoun exists only for 3rd person to distinguish reflexivity from another direct object, while in Slavic languages, the reflexive pronoun is used always if the subject and object are the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Je &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; lave.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1SG-SUBJ 1SG-OBJ wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wash myself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Il &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; lave.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3SG-SUBJ REFL-OBJ wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He washes himself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Il &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt; lave.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3SG-SUBJ 3SG-OBJ wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He washes him&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Czech&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Já &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; myju&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1SG-NOM REFL-ACC wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wash myself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; myje&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3SG-NOM REFL-ACC wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He washes himself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On &lt;em&gt;ho&lt;/em&gt; myje&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3SG-NOM 3SG-ACC wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He washes him&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) In European languages, the usage of reflexive pronouns can have other meanings as well. Another such meaning is &lt;strong&gt;reciprocity&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ils se lavent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3PL-SUBJ REFL-OBJ wash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They wash themselves&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;They wash each other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Third typical meaning of the reflexive construction is the &lt;strong&gt;passive&lt;/strong&gt; itself (typically with a nuance of custom or recommendation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nádobí &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt; myje teplou vodou&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dishes REFL-OBJ wash warm-SG-INST water-SG-INST&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dishes is / should be washed in warm water&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ça ne se dit pas ici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It NEG1 REFL-OBJ say NEG2 here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is not / should not be said around here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) Reflexive verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This is a special class of verbs that require the presence of the reflexive pronoun always and they do not generally appear without it (also non as &lt;em&gt;reflexiva tantum&lt;/em&gt;). They often do not convey any obvious reflexivity, reciprocity or passivity but are connected e.g. with some personal state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Czech we have e.g.: &lt;em&gt;bát se - to be afraid&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;smát se - to laugh&lt;/em&gt;, etc. Sometimes it is a little bit more difficult to distinguish, e.g. we have &lt;em&gt;měnit - to change (st.)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;měnit se - to undergo change&lt;/em&gt; and I would be very much inclined to classify the latter as reflexive verb, not a transitive verb with reflexive pronoun, because the subject here is not necessarily the source of the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, in old Indo-European languages like Latin, A.Greek and Sanskrit, this was typically expressed synthetically by something called medio-passive (or sometimes middle) voice, with pretty similar type of verbs, e.g. A.Greek &lt;em&gt;mainomai - I am crazy&lt;/em&gt;. The middle voice could be used for reflexivity in transitives but the verbs we classify as reflexiva tantum in Czech could, in Greek, be similarly restricted to the medio-passive form (as in: no active voice form for them - hence their Latin designation &lt;em&gt;verba deponentia&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T13:51:30.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3766" CreationDate="2016-12-27T18:19:59.013" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kazakh language belongs to turkish group  of languages, kipchak subgroup. Before using arabic script, ancient turkish tribes (still exist among kazakhs) were using ancient turk script, which is Orkhon-Enisei script. So, please, before making any statement, don't be lazy to make a small research at least in wikipedia. Arabic srcipt was used from 9th tp the early beginning of 20th century. Old turkish and uoghur script was used before 9th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14833" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T18:19:59.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11026" CreationDate="2016-12-27T21:07:26.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you turn it upside down it looks like a derivative of Arabic writing. Check out the various examples of adapted Arabic script here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14834" LastActivityDate="2016-12-27T21:07:26.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-28T00:05:11.007" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;for example in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morphology&lt;/a&gt; article of wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/) is the study of words,&#xA;  how they are formed, and their &lt;em&gt;relationship&lt;/em&gt; to other words in the same&#xA;  language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T00:15:27.030" Title="is &quot;relationship&quot; = &quot;grammatical relationship&quot; in linguistics articles?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20636" CreationDate="2016-12-28T00:15:27.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not in general. &quot;Relationship&quot; could also mean, e.g., &quot;semantic relationship&quot;, &quot;phonological relationship&quot;, &quot;genealogical relationship&quot;, ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Depends on context, usually it is clear from the scope of the article what kind of relationship is meant, but there certainly are many more kinds of relationships in linguistics apart from &quot;grammatical&quot; (which is already a very broad term).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the particular example, the given wording is rather vague, but it most probably does refer to some kind of grammatical (morpho-syntactic) relationship.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T00:15:27.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20639" CreationDate="2016-12-28T01:38:48.710" Score="10" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know something about both Chinese and philology, but not much, so please explain like I'm 20. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Sacred_Books_of_the_East_-_Volume_3.djvu/36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a text on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; dealing with &quot;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shû King&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. It refers to &quot;Mo-3ze&quot; (Mo-zi) and &quot;Hsün-3ze&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xun_Kuang&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xun-zi&lt;/a&gt;), and someone called &quot;3o &lt;i&gt;Kh&lt;/i&gt;iû-ming&quot; — where I'm using the ASCII letter &quot;3&quot; to represent the crazy, on-beyond-zebra letter that the typesetter actually used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ay0vI.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ay0vI.png&quot; alt=&quot;on beyond zebra&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lowercase it looks kind of like a cursive &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; or an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0292/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ezh&lt;/a&gt;, but in uppercase I have no idea what's going on: it's like a 3 with cleavage, plus a circumflex accent hanging off its &lt;em&gt;lower&lt;/em&gt; horn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this Romanization system also seems to use significant italics; e.g. &quot;&lt;i&gt;K&lt;/i&gt;ing&quot; is a different word from &quot;King&quot;. (And in both cases &quot;K&quot; denotes what we'd call &quot;J&quot; these days — as in &quot;Peking&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name and/or Unicode codepoint of this character? What sound is it supposed to represent? And whose Romanization system are we looking at here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T16:01:02.990" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:01:02.990" Title="Old Chinese romanization using a letter that looks like a &quot;3&quot;" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20638" CreationDate="2016-12-28T02:59:19.690" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legge_romanization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Legge Romanisation&lt;/a&gt;, as taken from the 1879 volume of &lt;em&gt;Sacred Books of the East&lt;/em&gt;. It is a transcription of the &quot;Mandarin&quot; speech of 19th-century Beijing, which is slightly different to both later transcriptions of standard Mandarin e.g. Wade-Giles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symbol under question bears most phonetic resemblance to the zemlja of the Cyrillic script, з, although it is probably just a z but &lt;a href=&quot;http://interglacial.com/~sburke/stuff/legge_yijing_transliterations.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;written in Fraktur&lt;/a&gt; as opposed to Italic script. It represents the sound of z- in Pinyin, the alveolar affricate, which had a wider distribution than in current standard Mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that k is different from &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2016-12-28T03:06:29.737" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T03:06:29.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-29T04:36:58.817" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering if there is any classification, academically established or researched, of verbs or sentence forms that introduce new referents, with the forms/verbs enumerated in the order of the degree of introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of '&lt;strong&gt;existential sentences&lt;/strong&gt;' that may function strongly/effectively in introduction of new referents. '&lt;strong&gt;This is X&lt;/strong&gt;' also works well in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any such groupings of sentence patterns or verbs (I know this is heavily context dependent ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg)&#xA;This is (new referent), Here is (new referent), I'll give you (new referent), I brought you (new referent), I'm going to introduce (new referent)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastEditorUserId="10826" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T07:31:36.567" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:48:14.510" Title="English sentence patterns or verbs in the order of the degree of introduction" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20648" CreationDate="2016-12-29T09:01:04.867" Score="1" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to anaphora, referring to a word that refers to itself, is there a phrase for a pair consisting of a word describing a person and an adjective that describes it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;To clarify: In the sentence, &quot;Harry is a gifted singer&quot;, I'm referring to the pair (Harry, gifted) specifically where Harry is the person, and gifted is the adjective, where gifted describes Harry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12569" LastEditorUserId="12569" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T09:20:36.417" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T19:38:54.410" Title="Is there a term that refers to a mapping between a person and the adjective that describes them?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20644" CreationDate="2016-12-29T10:52:41.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example &lt;em&gt;Harry is a gifted singer&lt;/em&gt;, the word &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; is just a general &lt;strong&gt;attribute/modifier&lt;/strong&gt; in an adjective phrase and there is no grammatical relation between &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt; because &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; modifies solely the noun &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; and is totally governed by it. I suspect that would be pretty much a universal case even in languages that employ verbs in place of adjectives and conjugate them (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;I am a gifted singer&lt;/em&gt;, the verb &lt;em&gt;to be gifted&lt;/em&gt; would be in 3SG and agree with &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I suspect you are aiming at is the term &lt;strong&gt;complement&lt;/strong&gt;, particularly &lt;strong&gt;subject complement&lt;/strong&gt;. This is typically a simple adjective predicate like &lt;em&gt;Harry is gifted&lt;/em&gt; but may be more interesting like &lt;em&gt;Harry got sick&lt;/em&gt;. The general idea behind it is that it is connected to the noun typically in subject, but not as a general modifier in adjective phrase but through a transitive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject complement is, of course, not restricted just to adjectives, e.g. in your example, the entire DP &lt;em&gt;a gifted singer&lt;/em&gt; is basically a subject complement in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are also &lt;strong&gt;object complements&lt;/strong&gt;, typically in some quasi-causative constructions like &lt;em&gt;This makes me sick&lt;/em&gt;. Here there is a similar relationship between the adjective &lt;em&gt;sick&lt;/em&gt; and the object &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;, established through the ditransitive verb &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T10:52:41.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17039" CreationDate="2016-12-29T11:07:03.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; is generally a &lt;em&gt;noun class&lt;/em&gt;. If you go outside common European languages, you will find that in languages of the world, there is a whole range of non-gender-based noun categories. Even in IE languages, this can shift from Masculine/Feminine/Neuter to Animate/Inanimate but more famous example is e.g. Japanese with its long thin objects category etc. or in linguistic circles even more famouse Dyirbal with classes for a) animate objects, men; b) women, water, fire, violence; c) edible fruit and vegetables; d) miscellaneous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your query about other &lt;em&gt;lexeme-describing grammatical features&lt;/em&gt; for other word classes, it is quite possible but it would help if you defined more specifically what you mean by this term you are trying to establish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T11:07:03.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20643" CreationDate="2016-12-29T16:37:42.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a popular idea in linguistics that organization in terms of new information and old information is important in language structure.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/1983rhythm.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is an especially interesting working out of that idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T16:37:42.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20644" CreationDate="2016-12-29T19:08:32.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main point of Eleshar's answer and BillJ's comment seems to be that there is no explicit terminology because &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; is a modifier of the predicate &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; rather than in direct interaction with &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is true syntactically:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0xxk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0xxk.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As expressed by the arrow labelled &quot;amod&quot; going from the NN &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; to the JJ &quot;gifted&quot;, &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; is an &lt;strong&gt;adjectival modifier&lt;/strong&gt; of the noun phrase &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt;, which is itself the &lt;strong&gt;subject complement&lt;/strong&gt; of the verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; which acts as a copula between &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt; and the noun phrase (&quot;nsubj&quot; = &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt; is the &quot;nominal subject&quot; of the NN &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The syntactic status of &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; is defined with respect to the predicate &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; which the adjective modifies, but it stands in no direct relation with &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt;, only indirectly via the &quot;nsub&quot; relation from &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is why it was said by others that there is no term for this kind of indirect relationship.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;However, &lt;em&gt;semantically&lt;/em&gt;, things might look differntly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In terms of meaning, &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; do indeed stand in a relation: If Harry is a gifted singer, then this should also mean that Harry is gifted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A classical FOL formalization would usually treat propositions of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;x is a ADJ NOUN  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADJ(x) ∧ NOUN(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which basically means that the predicate &lt;code&gt;ADJ&lt;/code&gt; applies to x and the predicate &lt;code&gt;NOUN&lt;/code&gt; applies to x.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Under this account, the adjective and the noun are treated equivalently as predications over an individual; the adjective is not a modification of &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt;, but the nominal complex &lt;em&gt;gifted singer&lt;/em&gt; is viewed as a conjunction (&lt;code&gt;∧&lt;/code&gt;) of two properties that apply to a certain individual &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This reasoning might be easier to understand with a sentence like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry is a purple zebra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;PURPLE(harry) ∧ ZEBRA(harry)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where it is clear that Harry being purple is just another property that applies directly to Harry, and Harry's being a zebra is another property.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Under this account, the adjective &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; is not a modifier of the subject complement &lt;em&gt;singer&lt;/em&gt;, but a direct predication of &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;You could thus say that &lt;em&gt;(Harry, gifted)&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;predication relation&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt; stands in relation with &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;gifted&lt;/em&gt; being a predicate over (= a property that applies to) &lt;em&gt;Harry&lt;/em&gt;. To make it more precise, you can say that it is an &lt;strong&gt;adjectival predication&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Image obtained from &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/corenlp/process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Stanford CoreNLP online dependency parser&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I am fully aware that this approach doesn't work for arbitrary sentences of this form; clearly, in a sentence like &lt;em&gt;Harry is an alleged murderer&lt;/em&gt;, it doesn't make sense to say that &lt;em&gt;alleged&lt;/em&gt; is a predicate that applies to Harry. In such a context, the adjective does act more like a modification of the property of being a murderer; in this respect, it behaves a bit like an adverb modifying the &quot;to be&quot; relation (&quot;&lt;em&gt;Harry is allegedly a murdrerer&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, i.e. the &quot;to be&quot; relation is modified in the sense that it is not necessarily true). However, in the example given, I think it's okay to say that being talented is a property that applies to Harry himself, so I'll stick to the simplistic conjunction approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T19:38:54.410" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T19:38:54.410" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20649" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-29T21:54:48.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T21:54:48.640" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T21:54:48.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20650" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-29T21:54:48.640" Score="0" Body="Questions related to rhyme or rhyming, i.e. the repetition of the same sound or similar sounds in two or more words." OwnerUserId="13805" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T06:27:45.833" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T06:27:45.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-30T04:59:20.033" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find modern work (more modern than Abney 1987) on the structure of a genitive phrase. Abney has a possessive phrase, like my dog, headed by a D head which assigns genitive case to &quot;my,&quot; which is in Spec,DP position. &quot;dog&quot; is an NP, a complement of D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have been some modern updates to this structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14850" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:29:34.720" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:29:34.720" Title="What is the modern conception of the syntactic structure of a possessive?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12377" CreationDate="2016-12-30T13:49:53.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;any other method&quot; include manual work? Then I recommend to train some students to annotate the &lt;em&gt;coreference chains&lt;/em&gt;. Take care that every text is annotated twice by different annotators, and compute the &lt;em&gt;inter-annotator agreement&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., by determining &lt;em&gt;Cohen's kappa&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:49:53.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20658" CreationDate="2016-12-30T17:24:19.620" Score="2" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a conlang and right now it is SVO. I want to make it more in line with an SOV language. Currently Nominatives are unmarked while only 1 Accusatives is marked in a group. So it reads &quot;Bob kicked Susan and Dan-ke&quot; rather than &quot;Bob kicked Susan-ke and Dan-ke&quot;. If I shift this to SOV it would be &quot;Bob Susan and Dan-ke Kicked&quot; which to me looks a little confusing... Another thing is that groups are not seperated by commas. They are all connected by &quot;and&quot; so if we add another name it would be &quot;Bob Greg and Susan and Dan-ke kicked&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at it here I can see that it's fairly obvious where the Object is, but it also seems like this would be confusing, especially as spoken. So do SOV languages tend to employ a Nominative marker or an Subject marker so that it'd read something like &quot;Bob blah Greg and Susan and Dan-ke kicked&quot;? Or is it just me overthinking this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14852" LastEditorUserId="14852" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T17:37:52.680" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T13:25:06.967" Title="how do SOV langues mark Subject?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;sov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-30T17:57:06.813" Score="1" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a new thought the other day regarding how language is conveyed and perceived. When a language is conveyed visually in English, it is conveyed in symbols (such as text or sign language). However when it is perceived aurally, it is perceived as a raw stream of acoustic frequencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any linguistic distinction between conveying ideas/language via discrete chunks (such as symbols/text) and conveying via a stream of data that must be intellectually parsed (such as a stream of acoustic frequencies)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very new to the field of linguistics, so if anyone can think of any more appropriate tags, please feel free to edit them in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I'm having trouble understanding exactly what I'm trying to distinguish in my mind. Is there an existing language or set of categories I could put this in? It seems like what I'm describing is a level of familiarity with neural input. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text or symbols are always coming in visually as a stream of raw frequencies of data which must be parsed by the mind to be understood to be chunks of recognized data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a visual language where conversation is visual only, but presented as animated waveform graphs of sound is not an already understood convention for my mind at least, so it is data that has no existing mental framework to fit in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, I'm confused about it. It's like there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;high level computer programming languages&lt;/a&gt; that use human words as code (like &quot;print&quot; or &quot;if x= 10 then print&quot;) and then &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_programming_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lower level programming languages&lt;/a&gt;, like machine code that use commands in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hexadecimal&lt;/a&gt; (like &quot;8B542408 83FA0077 06B80000 0000C383&quot;). High level languages are convenient for human conscious awareness to be involved with (we are familiar with the word &quot;print&quot;), but lower level languages like binary or machine code, using commands like &quot;8B542408&quot;, are something our waking state consciousness is not readily familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, letters of an alphabet are easy for our conscious minds to interact with, but the raw neural data stream of visual perception presented to the nervous system by the retina is something our conscious self is not easily involved with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there levels of language data like this for human languages? High level formats and lower level formats? If so, is that what I'm asking about when describing symbol-based communication and frequency-based communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14854" LastEditorUserId="14854" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T18:22:10.697" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T22:56:14.510" Title="Distinguishing between a symbol-based language and a frequency-based language?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20654" CreationDate="2016-12-30T18:31:42.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, spoken language is the linguist's primary object of study, although there are (imperfect) analogues of written language in linguists' conception of language. I think these are similar to what you have in mind when you mentioned levels of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, at the lowest level, we have &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, which studies the acoustic stream, how it's produced and how it's perceived. Abstracting away from phonetics, &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt; looks as sounds as discrete chunks, called phonemes, so e.g. the word 'happy' is made of four chunks (roughly h, a, p, i). It's more abstract than phonetics because sounds in complementary distribution are regarded as different realisations of the same sound. The classic example is the 't' in 'star' and the 't' in 'tea', which are pronounced differently but regarded as different realisations of the same /t/ phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above the phoneme layer, we have morphology, which looks at morphemes, the smallest meaningful unit. For example, there are two morphemes in the word 'lights': 'light' and 's'. Building meaningful units from meaningless sound segments is an important property of language known as &lt;em&gt;duality of patterning&lt;/em&gt;, one of the defining features of language. Morphemes are concatenated to form &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;, which combine to form phrases and sentences, which are the object of study of &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;, one layer above morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we have already looked at four different layers of language, and one could 'compile' a higher level of representation into a lower one. A sentence can be reduced to a string of morphemes, then to a string of phonemes, and finally an acoustic stream. That is (somewhat) analogous to, say, a database language compiling to C, then compiling to assembly, then finally turns into machine language (I'm no computer scientist; correct me if I'm wrong here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written language, which you've mentioned, conveys information roughly parallel to the phonology tier, though to a lesser extent in Chinese than in English and French, which in turn code phonology to a lesser extent than Korean and Spanish. But Korean and Spanish encode less morphology than English and French, which in turn encode less morphology than Chinese. So although you can easily tell between 'meet' and 'meat' in English, 'might' as a modal and 'might' as a noun are written in the same way, whereas in the Chinese writing system, which is nearly one symbol = one morpheme, homophones are usually written with characters that look different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your symbolic tier seems to map to two different 'levels' in linguists' conception of language: Morphology and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T18:31:42.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20657" CreationDate="2016-12-30T18:47:16.243" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/66270/how-expressive-is-a-color-based-language/66276#66276&quot;&gt;this question and answer&lt;/a&gt; about how cephalopods might develop a language, in this case a visual one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would linguistics term a language that is communicated visually as a cycling of colors? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcpzubpIhtI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; shows a cuttlefish using a rapid cycling of skin color to aid it in capturing it's prey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's say cuttlefish began to use their color changing ability to develop a language based on frequency of skin color change. What kind of language would that be? What would linguists call it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14854" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:23.733" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T19:23:27.583" Title="What do you call a visual language based on color frequency?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20656" CreationDate="2016-12-30T19:05:52.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;visuo-chromatic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (or perhaps &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;visuo-pigmental&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) would be the proper term. You can mostly hear about &lt;em&gt;audio-oral&lt;/em&gt; languages or forms of communication, occasionally also about &lt;em&gt;visuo-gestural&lt;/em&gt; ones (sign languages) or even &lt;em&gt;tactile&lt;/em&gt; ones (sign languages for deaf-blind people).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T19:23:27.583" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T19:23:27.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20653" CreationDate="2016-12-30T19:54:10.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zillions of possibilities here. If I understand correctly, you are mainly concerned about the possibility that there is no obvious boundary between the subject and object in case there is a multiple of one or the other. But I do not see that as a problem at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1) Minimal marking by word-order&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the language requires subject, then it is fairly clear the first word is a subject. Then you have a transitive verb that requires an object, so know that the stuff before the verb is object. &lt;em&gt;Bob Susan, John and Dan kicked&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly interpretable because the verb requires object, thus &lt;em&gt;Dan&lt;/em&gt; is part of the object, then its pair noun &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; too. Now you know &lt;em&gt;Bob&lt;/em&gt; is subject and you consider only whether &lt;em&gt;Susan&lt;/em&gt; is subject or object. It is clearly object because if rules of pairing with &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; are similar to English, the &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is always before the last element of the chain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that human mind does not favour long chains of elements on the same level (&lt;em&gt;John, Peter, Susan, George, Nathalia,.... went to school.&lt;/em&gt;), it is highly unlikely that even this minimal marking by the word order itself would pose significant problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2) Prosodic marking&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic units typically share also their own intonation/pitch contour. Thus it is likely that even with very minimal marking, the phrasing would be &lt;em&gt;Bob | Susan John and Dan | kicked&lt;/em&gt; thus clearly separating the subject from object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3) Syntactic restrictions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position between subject and object may work like the weak position in many Slavic languages and attract all the clitics, thus separating the subject from the object. Connected with some obligatory particles (say Japanese-like topicality markers), this could pretty much work in every single sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4) Overt morphological marking&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case endings, clitics, whatever your heart may please. Subject can have even zero-morpheme and it is the object that bears the marking (this is actually fairly typical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5) Covert morphological marking&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congruence between the verb and either the subject or the object. I.e. in &lt;em&gt;Bob Susan and John kicked&lt;/em&gt;, the verb would be conjugated for 3SG in case of congruence with the subject, thus clearly marking it is just the very first noun, or 3PL in case of congruence with the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6) Combo&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages tend to be fairly redundant in conveying information in order to make sure it goes through even in case of noise in the channel, thus more/all of the above possibilities are likely to go together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T19:54:10.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20654" CreationDate="2016-12-30T20:35:21.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is much agreement about the fundamental nature of human language communication.  IMO, it is a stream of articulations -- states of the human vocal apparatus.  For background, look at the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_theory_of_speech_perception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The motor theory of speech perception&lt;/a&gt;.  The bridge to symbolic communication that uses an alphabetic system is through the description of phonemes as combinations of states of the various human articulatory organs, as given in generative phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T20:35:21.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20654" CreationDate="2016-12-30T22:56:14.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise of a significant difference between auditory vs. visual perception in terms of &quot;raw streams&quot; vs. discrete symbols is questionable. There is no difference, and &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of language is, at the perceptual level, in terms of discrete symbols. The body operates on continuous visual or acoustic signals which are sensed and present the mind with discrete units for manipulation. The mind really can't handle continuous data streams, so to hold it in memory, it has to be somehow reduced to one thing (and then another thing... which will be organised hierarchically in some other way). I think you'd be better off not assuming that pre-perceptual processing involves a &quot;language&quot; of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe in terms of computer operation is still entirely symbolic, whether it involves a statement like &quot;print&quot;, or a sequence of assembler mnemonics, or even the hex data stream that corresponds to a &quot;print&quot; command. Even the stuff that seemed to be about voltages, which you might have read about in old Intel manuals, was really the symbolification of the continuous physical process behind a computation. Anything that involves &quot;data&quot; and &quot;levels&quot; is already in the domain of symbols, and not raw physical stimuli (e.g. continuous changes in voltage over time, as occur within a CPU). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many examples of how conceptual structure is imposed on language structure, in order to make it mentally manipulable. For example, you hear someone say something, where a waveform hits your ear, and what you get in your mind is a sequence of discrete phonemes [ˈsʌmθɪŋlɑikˈðɪs]. This long string of phoneme things can be organized into a shorter stream of syllable things, and those syllables can be arranged into even fewer feet. Ideas can be arranged into hierarchies that expand and contract, so you can either lump together &quot;cat&quot;, &quot;dog&quot;, &quot;cow&quot; etc into &quot;mammal&quot;, or you can subdivide &quot;dog&quot; into &quot;poodle&quot;, &quot;malemute&quot;, &quot;shepherd&quot; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T22:56:14.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20653" CreationDate="2016-12-31T13:25:06.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, in conlang you can do whatever you want. So you can have parsimonous inflection markers like in your question (maybe, they are just postpositions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natural languages with inflection work differently from your conlang: They tend to apply the inflection markers abundantly and use agreement and repetion to create cohesion and redundancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T13:25:06.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-31T15:23:00.083" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two verbal roots &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/b%CA%B0ewg-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*bʰewg- &quot;flee&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/b%CA%B0eg%CA%B7-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*bʰegʷ- &quot;flee&quot;&lt;/a&gt; share the same meaning and very similar forms, the only difference is their ending consonant.&#xA;I wonder whether they are from a same root or just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T05:02:21.443" Title="Are PIE *bʰewg- &quot;flee&quot; and PIE *bʰegʷ- &quot;flee&quot; cognate?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20665" CreationDate="2016-12-31T17:37:09.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reflexes in daughter languages support the reconstruction of separate roots (supported by the simultaneous existence of φεύγω and φόβος), but the semantic and phonological similarity is striking. It is probably coincidental, meaning that systematically deriving the two from a single root is beyond our technical capabilities. It's not uncommon to have multiple similar-looking roots with similar meanings, such as &lt;em&gt;bhlegʷ, bhlew, bhlei, bhrew&lt;/em&gt; with meanings &quot;bloat, swell&quot;: more examples &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T17:37:09.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-31T19:04:12.613" Score="9" ViewCount="3773" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not easy to grasp these concepts. I spent a lot of time perusing wikipedia articles but still can't really understand what makes a language: inflexed, isolating or agglutinative, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;These are languages that I know, and I would love the answer to post some examples in these languages :&#xA;- Polish&#xA;- English&#xA;- Spanish&#xA;- French&#xA;- Italian&#xA;- Russian&#xA;- Vietnamese&#xA;- Chinese&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand the first 6 are inflexed languages(with Russian and Polish highly inflexed), and the last two are highly isolating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Wikipedia says that an inflexed language uses inflectional morphemes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense, aspect, mood, person, or&#xA;  number, or a noun's, pronoun's or adjective's number, gender or case,&#xA;  without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).&#xA;  Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to&#xA;  the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't see a problem to appoint the Vietnamese &lt;em&gt;các/nhũng&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;đã&lt;/em&gt; as the equivalent morphemes for respective English &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ed&lt;/em&gt; from the Wikipedia's excerpt. Namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a dog dies&lt;/em&gt;  -&gt; con chố chết&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dog&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; di&lt;strong&gt;ed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;các&lt;/strong&gt; con chó &lt;strong&gt;đã&lt;/strong&gt; chết &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The only thing&quot; that I see differs supposedly inflexed and supposedly isolating languages is that languages like English, Polish have many versions of a same morpheme, like for example there are at least more than 5 morphemes to express the past tense in Polish and English, while Vietnamese has only one, namely &lt;strong&gt;đã&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polish to English to Vietnamese example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ja jem -&gt; I eat -&gt; tôi ăn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ja j&lt;strong&gt;adłem&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;ate&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; tôi &lt;strong&gt;đã&lt;/strong&gt; ăn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ja jadę -&gt; I go -&gt; tôi đi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ja j&lt;strong&gt;echałem&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;went&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; tôi &lt;strong&gt;đã&lt;/strong&gt; đi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then one could say that grammatical classifiers so abundant in Chinese and Vietnamese are morphemes that varies greatly depending on situation. Is it that linguistics was mainly developed in Europe and nowadays all world linguists try to look at other languages from the European standpoint? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unfortunately I can't give any example of an agglutinative language as I don't know a word in any such language. But I would love the answer to address the distinction inflexed-agglutinative and isolating-agglutinative too&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the problems with my reasoning with Polish English and Vietnamese?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T10:26:43.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T01:15:51.783" Title="difference between Isolating (analytics) vs inflected (fusional) vs agglutinative languages" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2016-12-31T19:55:06.907" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntax is the order ,the way i perceive the term personally syntax is word that aims the arrangement of the attention as a possibility as a dynamical semi active arrangement..while grammar sets the scene out of the raw order..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14858" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T19:55:06.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-31T19:59:28.840" Score="14" ViewCount="2439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a programmer who loves to learn online. Unfortunately, linguistics related materials are pretty scarce on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, could anyone point me to some good MOOCs or other free materials on (Computational) Linguistics?&#xA;These are great MOOCs that I found until now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/natural-language-processing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural language processing&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nacloweb.org/practice.php#previous_problems&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic olympiad problems&lt;/a&gt; - found in the course, great exercises with detailed answers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/bilingual&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The bilingual brain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edx.org/course/language-revival-securing-future-adelaidex-lang101x-0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Revival: Securing the Future of Endangered Languages&lt;/a&gt;(Thx to Gaston Ümlaut)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursera.org/learn/lexical-semantic-typology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Towards language universals through lexical semantics: introduction to lexical and semantic typology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T12:33:03.563" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T22:55:40.327" Title="Massive Open Online Courses on linguistics" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20667" CreationDate="2016-12-31T20:20:09.053" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, this classification comes from 19th century and it is based mostly on verb, occasionally nominal inflections as the primary criterion of comparing languages (and subsequently, also establishing which one is better, more evolved, more reflecting the overall more advanced national spirit of its speakers etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This corollary aside, the principle is that &lt;strong&gt;isolating languages have the morphemes typically as separate words&lt;/strong&gt;, sometimes mere clitics, sometimes full-fledged words but in any case pretty much separate. As a result of this, indeed there is typically just one way of expressing the grammatical meaning, because being a separate word, the morph does not undergo contextual changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in fusional languages, the morpheme is typically merged with the content morphemes it is related to to a rather high degree and it cannot be conceivably separated from them and the morphemes can carry more than one grammatical function at once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider sanskrit word for &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;. It declines as follows (sg./du./pl.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nom.: pitá / pitaráu / pitarah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;gen.: pituh / pitróh /pitrnám&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;dat.: pitré / pitrbhyám / pitrbhyah &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;acc.: pitaram / pitaráu / pitrn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;voc.: pitah / pitaráu / pitarah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;loc.: pitari / pitróh / pitršu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;instr.: pitrá / pitrbhyám / pitrbhih &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;abl.: pituh / pitrbhyám / pitrbhyah &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is not an irregular declension, it is a whole paradigm. Good luck with separating some of the forms into morphemes, let alone finding what constitues the case in the ending and what constitutes the number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are varying degrees of this and as indicated in the corollary at the top, in Indo-European languages the fusionality hits mostly case endings for declensions and person endings for verb conjugation. Otherwise the derivation and even most inflection is based on the same principle of one morpheme per one function and in this respect may be considered agglutinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agglutination is between these two extremes and you can argue that many of the endings are actually somewhat more clitics than parts of the word. E.g. when you decline an adjective phrase, the case endings are appended frequently just to the very last element of the sequence (ADV ADJ NOUN-nr-case) but if you rearrange the order, they are not bound to a specific word class (NOM ADV ADJ-case endings). The fusional languages often require that the grammatical functions are expressed on all the elements of the phrase (ADV ADJ-nr-case NOUN-nr-case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T20:20:09.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20667" CreationDate="2016-12-31T21:21:33.680" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Eleshar's answer sums it up very well: “Good luck with separating some of the forms into morphemes”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, there's one important difference that makes it impossible to draw a straight parallel between classifiers (of isolating languages) and morphemes of inflexed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because &lt;strong&gt;in fusional languages, the modifier morphemes conjugate as well!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the story.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis Carroll&lt;/a&gt; was traveling to Russia, he saw an interesting Russian word: &lt;code&gt;защищающихся&lt;/code&gt;. It means, &quot;people who defend themselves&quot;. He wrote this word in his diary according to the English phonology: &lt;code&gt;zаshchееshchауоushchееkhsуа&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, Carroll was marveled about the consonant &lt;code&gt;/shch/&lt;/code&gt; which sounds unusual to an English speaker; we, instead, will dig into this word's morphology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;защищающихся&#xA;  └─┘        щит            1. /shchit/  n. shield         &#xA;├───┘        защит[а]       2. /zashchita/ n. defence, lit. &quot;behind shield&quot;&#xA;├────┘       защища[ть]     3. /zashchishchat'/ v. defend&#xA;├──────┘     защищающи[й]   4. /zashchishchajushchij/ adj. one who defends&#xA;├───────┘ └┘ защищающи[й]ся 5. /zashchishchajushchijsya/&#xA;                                    adj. one who defends self&#xA;└──────────┘ защищающихся   6. /zashchishchajushchikhsya/&#xA;                                    adj. one who defends self +PL +GEN&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(in square brackets I put morphemes that do not exist in the final word)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While steps (2), (4), and (5) can be directly understood in terms &quot;morpheme → morphologic change&quot;, several steps can't be translated that easy. Look what happens here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At step (3), the root consonant shifts: &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/shch/&lt;/code&gt;; an impossible thing for isolating languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At step (6), the inflection particle inflects itself:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;-ий-&quot; &lt;code&gt;/ij/&lt;/code&gt; (SNG.NOM) → &quot;-их-&quot; &lt;code&gt;/ikh/&lt;/code&gt; (PL.GEN)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;even if&lt;/em&gt; a morpheme-to-morpheme parallel can be drawn between an arbitrary pair of isolating and fusional languages, there's still a considerable amount of cases where this parallel does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T12:30:47.577" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T12:30:47.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3484" CreationDate="2016-12-31T21:42:43.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of the internal structure of phrases and sentences, and the hierarchies, grammatical functions and relations between constituents.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;From my proposed tag wiki for &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/syntax&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;syntax&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The study of the internal structure of expressions, especially between words and phrases, and the principles and processes that determine it. This includes words order, but also the grammatical relations that hold between words, as well as structural ambiguity, binding, reference, and similar issues.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Common approaches are numerous phrase structure grammars (GPSG, HPSG, LFG, G&amp;amp;B, X-bar, Minimalism, ...) and, on the other hand, dependency grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions that syntax attempts to answer include:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How can we describe the structure of a sentence, i.e., how can we meaningfully group words into constituents and describe the hierarchical relations that hold between these consituents?&quot; This is very often done by the use of tree diagrams (commonly referred to as &quot;syntax trees&quot;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How can we explain the two readings in a sentence like &lt;em&gt;I saw the man with the telescope&lt;/em&gt; (1) &lt;em&gt;I saw the man by looking through a telescope&lt;/em&gt; vs. 2) &lt;em&gt;I saw the man who had a telescope with him&lt;/em&gt;)?&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why does the sentence &lt;em&gt;Myself shaved me&lt;/em&gt; not work?&quot; (It has something to do with reflexive binding.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why (in English) can we say &lt;em&gt;[the man] who I saw [] yesterday&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;[the man] who I believe [the rumours that [] is a murderer]&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; (It has something to do with the complexity in the structure of noun phrases and what you can extract for the formation of relative clauses).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How comes that in the sentence &lt;em&gt;Mary kissed him&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; is in accusative case, but in the sentence &lt;em&gt;He was kissed&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is still the one affected by the kissing and not the actor, the pronoun receives nominative case?&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt; is a very broad term that can roughly be described as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the implicit rules by which speakers intuitively judge which strings are&#xA;  well-formed in a given language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;syntax&lt;/strong&gt;: The structure of phrases and sentences - see above.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;morphology&lt;/strong&gt;: The internal structure of words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions include: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How can we sort out the word &lt;em&gt;antidenationalization&lt;/em&gt; into a meaningful structure?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What went wrong with the word &lt;em&gt;undeadable&lt;/em&gt;, while we can say &lt;em&gt;undead&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unbreakable&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why do we find &lt;em&gt;un-use-ful&lt;/em&gt; okay, but &lt;em&gt;un-ful&lt;/em&gt; not?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How come that it is &lt;em&gt;sing-er-s&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;sing-s-er&lt;/em&gt;? What is the difference between how a so-called derivational moprpheme &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; and an inflectional morpheme like &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; work?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;: The structure of sounds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Questions include:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why is it that we say &lt;em&gt;ships&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;fishs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;buss&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;fishes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;busses&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;How do we intuitively know, without ever having heard the word &lt;em&gt;imby-bimby&lt;/em&gt; before, that it should be &lt;em&gt;an imby-bimby&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;a imby-bimby&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; (It has something to do with vowels and consonants.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why can a word like &lt;em&gt;rgafmp&lt;/em&gt; not exist in English?&quot; &lt;strong&gt;Yes, this is actually &#xA;&lt;em&gt;ungrammatical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Grammar means more than &quot;It's &lt;em&gt;we swam&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;we swimmed&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes, &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. the study of meaning, is seen as a part of grammar:  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why can we read the sentence &lt;em&gt;Every child sings a song&lt;/em&gt; both as &lt;em&gt;For every child it holds that it sings some song (not necessarily the same one)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;There is (at least) one song which every child sings (this being one and the same song)&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Why can &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt; mean both &lt;em&gt;to lean forward&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a thing that you use with arrows to shoot&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;In the sentence &lt;em&gt;John seeks a book about Norway&lt;/em&gt;, how can we account for the two readings 1) &lt;em&gt;John is looking for a specific book about Norway he has seen the other day&lt;/em&gt; vs. 2) &lt;em&gt;John is looking for some book about Norway, but isn't sure that what he wants exists at all&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt; To summarize, syntax is basically a sub-discipline of grammar that deals with the structure of more complex expressions, while &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; is the cover-term for every aspect of the system of rules that tell our intuition which structures are well-formed and what they mean, including word-level (morphology) and sound-level (phonology), possibly also meaning-level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2016-12-31T22:24:02.240" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T22:24:02.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20675" CreationDate="2016-12-31T22:56:48.770" Score="1" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain what exactly the 'possessive perfect' is? The book I read gave the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Turiu          atsinešęs                     maisto.&#xA;have:PRS.1SG   bring:PTCP.PST.ACT.NOM.SG.M   food:GEN&#xA;‘I’ve brought some food with me.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14860" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T12:25:43.010" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T12:25:43.010" Title="Lithuanian possessive perfect" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;lithuanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20674" CreationDate="2017-01-01T11:15:29.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is basically pretty &lt;strong&gt;similar thing to English present perfect&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. the &lt;strong&gt;auxiliary  verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; + some sort of past or passive participle&lt;/strong&gt; of a content verb to express some sort of past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in many non-Western European languages, this has been just an emerging feature with stronger influences here and there (I believe this is something present in these languages for a few centuries but it may be reinforced by further contaminations from the many Western languages that have this construction). Normally, Lithuanian has just a synthetic past and Slavic languages form the past with auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;past participle&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, this relatively new construction is called &quot;possessive perfect&quot; since it uses the verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, which has not served as an auxiliary until now. Funny thing is that this construction also appears in Russian which is known for its lack of the possessive verb, so accordingly the possessive past uses their periphrastic possession &lt;em&gt;у меня (есть)&lt;/em&gt; + passive participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience (mainly based on Czech), the function of this is restricted to accomplishedness (which is something slightly different than perfectivity in Slavic languages) and sometimes announcing of new recent past event. In Czech, the verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; is also combinable with other adjectives indicating accomplishedness, e.g. &lt;em&gt;hotový&lt;/em&gt; (done, finished) even though they are not verbal participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Cursory search on the internet shows a nice study of this construction developping in Baltic and North Russian area: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://home.uni-leipzig.de/serzant/perfect_ACCEPTED.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seržant, I. &lt;em&gt;The so-called possessive perfect in North Russian and the Circum-Baltic&#xA;area. A diachronic and areal account&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-01-01T11:31:26.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T11:31:26.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20677" CreationDate="2017-01-02T00:07:53.837" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about languages with many phonemes and loose phonotactic rules (perhaps some Caucasian languages) versus those with only a few phonemes and strict phonotactics (like Hawaiian). I think the former would have a lot of sound combinations that are permissible, but aren't actual words in that language, while the later would be more likely to have random sound combinations correspond to actual words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies out there looking at the density of possible encodings (given available phones and phonotactic rules) between languages? Is there a name for this sub-field or this kind of analysis? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14865" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T00:47:22.487" Title="Density of possible encodings (given available phones and phonotactic rules)" Tags="&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20676" CreationDate="2017-01-02T00:47:22.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Phonotactics&quot; should probably be divided into syllable structure (and contact), plus syllable-count, since you would get different results if a language was Hawaiian with only 2 and 3 syllable words, versus Hawaiian with 2-12 syllable words. Looking at &quot;words&quot; is also somewhat problematic, since words may have a range of inflections, and so-called phonotactic restrictions might actually be broken by inflectional endings (as is the case with English monoconsonantal inflections). It would probably be more productive to look at phoneme combinatorics of stems rather than words, though &quot;stem&quot; is not a totally trouble-free concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hasn't been done systematically (so it isn't a named sub-field), but it might yield interesting results. There certainly has been a history of making claims about gaps in the lexicon, which rise to the level of being a possibly publishable result in case someone discovers an interesting pattern. The main problem is locating comprehensive electronic dictionaries with interpretable phonetic data in a decent range of languages. The runner-up impediment is lack of knowledge of combinatoric possibilities in an interesting range of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, you could do this right now, using the CMU English dictionary, as long as you can compute all of the possible 1-syllable, 2-syllable up to ??12-syllable words of English, and see how many and what type are actually attested in English. I don't know of any large-inventory (Taa) or small-inventory (Austronesian) languages for which there are comprehensive computer-friendly dictionaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T00:47:22.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20681" CreationDate="2017-01-02T10:38:33.997" Score="1" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did the Sanskrit gen./abl. singular of &lt;em&gt;pitr-/pitā́&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;father&quot;) came to be &lt;em&gt;pitur&lt;/em&gt; (and the genitive of the entire noun class as well, of course)? The evolution of all other forms (even &lt;em&gt;pitā́&lt;/em&gt;, which seems to be a regular result of &lt;em&gt;pitā́r&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;pitár-s&lt;/em&gt;) seems to be fairly transparent but this one has always eluded me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, the source should be &lt;em&gt;ph₂tr-és&lt;/em&gt; so I would expect it to yield something like &lt;em&gt;pitr-ás&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T12:20:17.527" Title="Origin of gen./abl. &quot;pitur&quot; genitive of &quot;pitā́&quot; (&quot;father&quot;) in Sanskrit" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20535" CreationDate="2017-01-02T10:53:28.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no straightforward way for extracting the power in db/Hz from a Spectrum, but you could use this workaround:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;form Get db/Hz from Spectrum slice&#xA;    comment Enter time in seconds:&#xA;    real time 0&#xA;    comment Directory of Spectrum list file&#xA;    word directory ~/Desktop&#xA;    comment List file name&#xA;    word file spectrum.txt&#xA;endform&#xA;&#xA;To Spectrogram: 0.005, 5000, 0.002, 20, &quot;Gaussian&quot;&#xA;To Spectrum (slice): time&#xA;list$ = List: &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;&#xA;writeFile: &quot;'directory$'/'file$'&quot;, list$&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The script assumes the sound object is selected&lt;/em&gt; (you can modify the code to loop through sounds and/or times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;time&lt;/code&gt; value you see in the form once you run the script in a Praat script window is the time at which you what the spectrum slice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output is a tab-delimited &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; file with columns &lt;code&gt;bin&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;freq(Hz)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;pow(db/Hz)&lt;/code&gt;. The value you are looking after is in the &lt;code&gt;pow(db/Hz)&lt;/code&gt; column. You can add code for reading the tab-delimited file back into PRAAT as a &lt;code&gt;Table&lt;/code&gt; object and then query that object to get the power value at the desired frequency (it needs a bit of hacking because frequency values are not integers, so, for example, you will probably not be able to find a frequency value of 3000 Hz).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you can use other programmes to get the value instead of reimporting the file into PRAAT, like AWK or R, but it's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T10:53:28.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20679" CreationDate="2017-01-02T11:53:08.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classic explanation is that *ṛš becomes ur in Old Indian. The ending of the gen. sing. of Indo-Iranian -r stems is sometimes *-as and sometimes *-s. pitur is like hotur (Avestan zaotarš, with full-grade stem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T12:09:20.167" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T12:09:20.167" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22943" CreationDate="2017-01-02T18:19:43.203" Score="3" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek compounds are usually made by combining the roots of two nouns and inserting a linking thematic vowel when it would result in a sequence of two consonants. The vowel is usually -o-, so we have e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;claustr-o-phob-ia, electr-o-magnet-ism, ec-o-nom-y, hor-o-scope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the second root starts with a vowel, the linking vowel &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; is not needed, so we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mis-o-gyn-y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mis-anthrop-y, mis-andr-y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is &quot;agoraphobia&quot; with an &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt;? It is made from &lt;em&gt;agora&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phobia&lt;/em&gt;, so one would expect &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*agor-o-phob-ia. (but this is not the case)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, are there more such words that use &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastEditorUserId="14808" LastEditDate="2017-01-03T10:58:34.487" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T02:55:53.960" Title="Why &quot;agoraphobia&quot; not &quot;agorophobia&quot;?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20683" CreationDate="2017-01-02T19:36:45.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the vowel used to link the two words depends on the first one. For example, claustrophobia uses an -o- because it comes from the Latin &quot;claustrum&quot;, same with electromagnetism, from Latin &quot;electrum&quot;. In the case of misogyny, the Greek word involved is &quot;misos&quot;, so an -o- is used, but since the root for agoraphobia is &quot;agora&quot;, the -a- is preserved. Another example is triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen, which comes from the Greek &quot;triskaideka&quot;, which ends in &quot;a&quot;. Basically, if it already ends in &quot;a&quot;, there's no reason to change it to an &quot;o&quot; when connecting it to another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14867" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T19:36:45.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20686" CreationDate="2017-01-02T22:42:12.247" Score="4" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italy is a country in the Southern Europe. Croatia is a country in the South-Eastern Europe (or Central, depending on interpretation). Because of the close geographical proximity, these two could have influenced each other's languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at some sentences in English, Croatian and Italian:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I drink - Ja pijem - Io bevo&lt;br&gt; You drink - Ti piješ - Tu bevi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Drink! - Pij! - Bevi!&lt;br&gt; He drinks - On pije - Lui beve&lt;br&gt; We drink&#xA;  - Mi pijemo - Noi beviamo&lt;br&gt; You all drink - Vi pijete - Voi bevete&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ja is similar to io. Ti is similar to tu. The ending -i is the same in imperative. Some verbs in 3rd person singular conjugation have the ending -e. Pijemo and beviamo has root+vowel+&quot;mo&quot;. Pijete and bevete end with -ete. Vi and voi are similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why this is so. I also wonder why all other Slavic languages have ja similar to Italian io. This is not only limited to Croatian, but all Slavic languages. How did this happen? Are these languages secretly in a mutual etymological branch, for the lack of terminology experience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forgot to add something.&lt;br&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Boy - Dečko - Ragazzo&lt;br&gt; Boys - Dečki&#xA;  - Ragazzi&lt;br&gt; Girl - Cura - Ragazza&lt;br&gt; Girls - Cure - Ragazze&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The endings of the nouns with gender and number completely match too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13008" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T17:24:16.463" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T23:25:48.203" Title="Why do Croatian and Italian contain the same grammatical endings for nouns and verbs?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20685" CreationDate="2017-01-03T00:17:16.883" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;These all derive from the original Proto-Indo-European inflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare Classical Latin present-tense verb endings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  sg     pl&#xA;1 amō    amāmus&#xA;2 amās   amātis&#xA;3 amat   amant&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Ancient Greek (Attic, transliterated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  sg     pl&#xA;1 lȳō    lȳomen&#xA;2 lȳeis  lȳete&#xA;3 lȳei   lȳousin&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Modern German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  sg     pl&#xA;1 liebe  lieben&#xA;2 liebst liebet&#xA;3 liebt  lieben&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The endings all look rather different, but the connections are clear under the surface. Note also the connection to₂ the &lt;em&gt;-mo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; endings you noticed: they derived along different paths, from the same source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Proto-Indo-European (thematic active present eventive) endings are reconstructed as something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  sg       pl&#xA;1 -mi/-oh₂ -mos&#xA;2 -si      -te&#xA;3 -ti      -nti&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first-person singular pronouns are also cognates, along with Latin and Greek &lt;em&gt;egō&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;ich&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;je&lt;/em&gt;, and so on: from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;eǵoH&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note: standard &quot;model verbs&quot; were chosen here, so more tables for them are easily found online.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T23:25:48.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T23:25:48.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T11:31:22.120" Score="5" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the feature of number agreement for simple cases of &quot;several nouns&quot; in various languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages featuring this agreement are e.g. English or Slavic languages (I don't know if it is featured in all Indo-European). I know it is the case also in Hebrew and Arabic (as before, I don't know if this is a feature of all Euro-Asiatic) languages. In these languages you say e.g. &quot;five apples&quot;. You use plural although the numeral already conveys the information about plurality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages like Georgian and some Ugro-Finnic languages, the plural form is not used if there is already a numeral that gives us the information about plurality. In Georgian you say &quot;ხუთი ვაშლი&quot;, not &quot;ხუთი ვაშლები&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How popular are these two types of languages around the world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any papers analyzing this feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some correlation between this feature and other features of languages (e.g. Kartvelian and Ugro-Finnic languages are also agglutinating languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13099" LastEditorUserId="13099" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T13:37:09.017" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T16:20:55.247" Title="Numeral-noun number agreement - how popular it is" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20712" CreationDate="2017-01-03T14:44:27.527" Score="4" ViewCount="2878" Body="&lt;p&gt;we started the topic &lt;strong&gt;ergative languages&lt;/strong&gt;. I am very confused how I could determine whether a language is an accusative or an ergative language. Is there some sort of analysis I could use to get evidence if a language is ergative or accusative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13446" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T21:18:32.003" Title="Accusative or ergative language?" Tags="&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-03T17:20:58.130" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m trying to write a large set of multiple-choice test questions that can easily be randomized by interchanging their subject phrases and predicate phrases. I’m having some difficulty finding verbs that have the identical singular and plural forms. I’ve noticed the following examples can be useful, but is there any broader class of verbs or strategy I could use to preserve subject-verb agreement when interchanging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: (Subject / Predicate, such that each Subject would be grammatically correct with each Predicate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to archiving performances, recordings / BECAME an&#xA;international publicity engine for artists.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The notion of an &quot;interface&quot; / CAN refer to any mechanism by which a&#xA;performer controls an instrument.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;John Cage / DIDN’T encourage inventors simply to create electronic&#xA;copies of traditional instruments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because it used precise and autonomous machines, electronic music /&#xA;naturally FIT dance music's need for long-lasting steady beats.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The earliest sampling synthesizers / INCLUDED the Hardy-Goldthwaithe&#xA;Organ and Singing Keyboard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve observed the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modal auxiliary verbs seem like skeleton keys to this structure, but most aren’t useful for test questions (e.g., may, should, will).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many past tense verbs are useful (e.g., performed, included, took inspiration, developed), especially ones that are identical to the singular or plural present tense (as above) or use words that could describe agency or categorization (e.g., included), but when I’m not discussing past events, I find myself relying on “can” too much, and it starts to make the whole thing feel uncomfortably subjunctive (i.e., “Hmm….COULD be….”), unsettling the test takers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that the interchanged versions of the sentences introduce some other problems, but I’d at least like to sweep those shortcomings into less noticeable areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give me any single or systematic tips to make interchangeable singular and plural subject and predicate phrases grammatically correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Greg commented that “would” would be useful here, and I agree. It also seems less &quot;iffy&quot; than &quot;can,&quot; for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anything more can be learned about “would” that could apply to other words? It could function as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;subjunctive, hypothetical, or epistemic mood(?), e.g., &quot;John Cage&#xA;would encourage…”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;potential mood(?), e.g., “The term ‘interface’ would refer to…”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;historical present(?), e.g., “Recordings would become a publicity engine…”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m really out of my comfort zone regarding moods, but hopefully this is enough to lead a more qualified individual toward elucidating a useful structure at work here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14871" LastEditorUserId="14871" LastEditDate="2017-01-03T20:08:32.390" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T20:08:32.390" Title="How can I write subject and predicate phrases so they can be interchanged for a multiple-choice test and still have subject-verb agreement?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20689" CreationDate="2017-01-03T20:10:13.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first step is finding some sort of case marking. In this language, do &quot;I like him&quot; and &quot;he likes me&quot; use the same words, just in a different order? Or are any of the words themselves changed, like in English (I → me, him → he)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've identified case marking, note what indicates the subject, and what indicates the object. In the English example, &quot;he&quot; is subject-only, and &quot;him&quot; is object-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now look at an intransitive sentence, like &quot;he left&quot;. When there's only one noun, is it marked like a subject, or like an object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's marked like a subject, you have a nominative-accusative language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it's marked like an object, you have an ergative-absolutive language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, &quot;he&quot; is the subject form. So English is nominative-accusative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: most languages with an ergative-absolutive distinction use it only in particular circumstances. For instance, Urdu is ergative-absolutive in some tenses, and nominative-accusative in others. So you may need to try several examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T20:10:13.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20688" CreationDate="2017-01-03T20:14:55.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages the word-form after a numeral can be considered a separate case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in English we say &quot;five million&quot; instead of &quot;five millions&quot;. In Russian the word for million would be plural in this case, but, say, the word for &quot;gram&quot; would be in singular form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;пуля весит девять грамм &quot;bullet weights nine gram&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;на этой шкале нет граммов &quot;this scale has no grams&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Russian linguists thus consider it a separate, &quot;Numerative&quot; case, which has special morphological forms for many units of measurement, soldier troop types, paired items and some vegetables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, in English this usage also can be considered a morphological case, even though English is usually considered not having morphological cases in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T10:20:33.043" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T10:20:33.043" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20694" CreationDate="2017-01-03T22:34:23.290" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was performing some Catford-style &quot;experiments&quot; with nasal consonants, and found that slight opening of the mouth or rounding/unrounding of the lips has no particular sonic effect on, for example, [n], [ɲ] or [ŋ]. That matches intuitively with my understanding of nasal consonants, since it doesn't seem possible for any changes in front of the point of articulation to have an effect on a sound with no air past the articulation point. However, whenever I try to produce [ɴ], rounding/unrounding and mouth movement have a relatively strong effect—one that sounds a lot like a shifting formant. I hear no fricative sounds, so I'm virtually certain that I'm not accidentally producing some sort of nasalized [ʁ]. I suppose that leaves the possibility that, depending on rounding, I'm accidentally producing a nasalized back vowel such as [o] or [ɤ] (apologies, I haven't figured out how to add the nasalization diacritic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at the section in Catford on uvular consonants, and although it does mention a certain &quot;messiness&quot; for the stops [q] and [ɢ] (which seems potentially significant to my problem), it describes the uvular nasal as unproblematic and easily found by producing [ŋ] and simply lowering and bringing back the tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is: is this just the nature of [ɴ], or should it be possible to produce it in a manner such that changes in the lips have no effect? Secondarily, if indeed an ideal [ɴ] is possible, do you have any advice on how to produce it properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T16:07:58.550" Title="Should secondary articulation in front of the uvular nasal have a sonic effect?" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20693" CreationDate="2017-01-03T23:32:02.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest recording and measuring your measurements (but be careful to not totally believe the numbers). I found that in all cases including [n] vs. [nʷ], there was &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; difference in formants, though hearing it in [n] vs. [nʷ] was very hard. The acoustic differences are subtle and hard to characterize except with [ɴ] vs. [ɴʷ] which is quite clear. Unfortunately, I can't compute the predicted resonances and anti-resonances from the assumed vocal tract, so all I can say is that tube length matters, and there are indeed striking quantal effects going from [ŋʷ] to [ɴʷ]. I don't know whether there is new tech or insight into the problem of nasal zeros and LPC analysis (LPC assumes an all-pole model); you can see the problem in the spectrogram, that there are formanty band in some of the nasals between the LPC-detected formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to mimic the IPA ideal is to practice with expert recording. The UCLA phonetic lab has an IPA table recorded by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Ladefoged&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Esling&lt;/a&gt; has one likewise. For recording and analyzing, I recommend a good head-mounted mic -- forget cell phone or laptop built-in mics. Also, MP3 compression (and LPC analysis) may defeat your efforts, so use WAV format. Praat is a free and good tool for inspecting sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T16:07:58.550" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T16:07:58.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20667" CreationDate="2017-01-04T02:14:25.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find that question interesting. I've noticed that in some (?) analytic languages a phrase which consists of -let's say- a preposition, an article and a noun can be just one phonological word. The string 'for the lake' is listed as one. If we followed different conventions these morphological words could have been written as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Modern Greek (which is fusional) the string 'ο άνθρωπος' ('definite article' in nominative and noun in nominative) is one phonological word /o'ɐn̪θropos/. The accusative with the article would be /ton'ɐn̪θropo/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess someone who reads that may consider that there's a prefix and a suffix for each case. But if we add an adjective the article would form a phonological word with the adjective and there are phonological changes too in that case. /tonkɐ'lon 'ɐnθropo/ → /to(ŋ)gɐ'lon 'ɐn̪θropo/. (n+k →  (ŋ)g)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist. Sorry for any wrong term used, although I think I was careful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14874" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T02:14:25.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20411" CreationDate="2017-01-04T05:28:53.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classical Latin had a system of ten native vowels + two foreign vowels + two important diphthongs, for a total of twelve (a, ā, e, ē, i, ī, o, ō, u, ū, y, ȳ, æ, œ). This is quite a lot of vowels to keep straight; for later Romance speakers, it was too many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the precursor to Spanish (aka &quot;Late Iberian Vulgar Latin&quot;, the Latin spoken in Spain right before it became not-Latin-any-more), this twelve-vowel system simplified to seven: a, e, i, o, u, ɛ, ɔ. (ɛ and ɔ are phonetic symbols; they were never actually written that way at the time. ɛ is the vowel in English &quot;met&quot;, ɔ the vowel in &quot;hot&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a ← a, ā&#xA;e ← ē, i, œ&#xA;ɛ ← e, æ&#xA;i ← ī, ȳ, y&#xA;o ← ō, u&#xA;ɔ ← o&#xA;u ← ū&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This change was nicely universal and predictable. Similar things happened in other vulgar Latin dialects, which would become the other Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the system simplified again. In unstressed syllables, or before syllable-final nasals, ɛ and ɔ turned into e and o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;e ← ɛ&#xA;o ← ɔ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any other places, they broke into diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;je ← ɛ (spelled &quot;ie&quot;)&#xA;we ← ɔ (spelled &quot;ue&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Latin &lt;em&gt;metus&lt;/em&gt; → Spanish &lt;em&gt;miedo&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt; → Spanish &lt;em&gt;fuego&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is the source of your mysteriously appearing diphthongs. When the first syllable is stressed, a historical /ɛ/ becomes /je/; when unstressed, it becomes /e/. Similarly, a historical /ɔ/ in a stressed syllable becomes /we/; in an unstressed syllable, /o/. But a historical /e/ or /o/ never changes its form, always remaining /e/ or /o/ regardless of stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately there's no good way to predict where these ɛs and ɔs are, except by knowing the vowel lengths in the Latin words. So the best option for analysis is to take them as separate underlying phonemes, even though only these few remnants are visible now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/vowels.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishlinguist.us/2013/05/how-latin-vowels-became-spanish/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See also guifa's comment on your question: what they call E² I call ɛ, and what they call O² I call ɔ. The &quot;weirder things&quot; they mention in the &lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt; conjugation come from a later process of vowel-raising, which I haven't gone into here; the first source link has some excellent information on that as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T05:28:53.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-04T11:40:24.943" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been basically a couple of years I struggle to understand the distinction between fusional, agglutinative and isolating languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized that I might miss the point of all the discussions and articles I read because I don't know what a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; means in linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried hard but nowhere I found a proper definition for the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone present it here? Examples are welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T16:16:41.603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T18:23:46.687" Title="Definition of word in a broad sense, taking into account all (or at least as many as possible) languages" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-01-04T21:23:23.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12308" CreationDate="2017-01-04T13:21:40.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My pick would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mallory, James P., and Douglas Q. Adams. &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-introduction-to-proto-indo-european-and-the-proto-indo-european-world-9780199296682?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a great lexical material inside, including sub-groupings of Indo-European e.g. Graeco-Aryan etc. The style of writing is literally 'easy reading'. I like the book a lot and so do people who bought it if you judge from the reviews. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T13:21:40.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20697" CreationDate="2017-01-04T17:34:51.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no such &quot;universal&quot; definition - and if there were one, it would be useless.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every linguist decides whether they need a word as a concept in their analysis and if they choose to have words, they decide what a word is in that particular language they work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a very readable, recent and succinct discussion of wordhood see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199641604&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Handbook of Word&lt;/a&gt; (2015), esp. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199641604-e-032&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wray 2015&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T18:23:46.687" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T18:23:46.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14314" CreationDate="2017-01-04T19:24:50.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abbreviare&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;abréger&lt;/em&gt; is a very regular sound change, it went something along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a.bbre.vi.a:.re] &gt; [a.bre.vja.re] &gt; [a.brɛ.vɟær] &gt; [a.brɛ.vɟʒier] &gt; [a.bre.dʒier] &gt; [a.bre.dʒie] &gt; [a.bre.ʒe]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the key is desyllabification of [i] to [j] and then its fortition and assibilation to [dʒ]. The [v] preceding a consonant is lost regularly. In the Middle Ages the change was in its middle (&lt;em&gt;abrégier&lt;/em&gt; with &amp;#x3c;g&gt; being pronounced [dʒ] as in Italian and contemporary Spanish). Around this time, the word penetrated to English, which did not have the distinction between closed and open [e]/[ɛ] and chose to interpret the former as a short [i]. The [dʒ] sound was then represented by   &amp;#x3c;dg&gt;, this might have been later and under the influence of the similar word &lt;em&gt;bridge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T20:17:11.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T20:17:11.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-04T20:59:37.893" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is  unique among the European languages in that it lacks V to T movement. My professor mentioned this loss occurred in Middle English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, we also acquired the auxiliary &quot;do&quot; around this same time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the acquisition of &quot;do&quot; and &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;-support into English related to the loss of V to T movement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10309" LastEditorUserId="10309" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T22:22:14.607" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T22:22:14.607" Title="Is the loss of English V to T movement connected to &quot;do&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20702" CreationDate="2017-01-04T22:08:47.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Auxiliary &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; has been around since at least the 10th century in a variety of uses, and one of those uses was the &quot;periphrastic&quot; (&lt;em&gt;O she doth teach the torches to burn bright&lt;/em&gt;), which I take it is what you mean by &quot;meaningless&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restriction of S/V inversion to auxiliaries in negations and questions came much later: it was still present throughout Early Modern English and only disappeared from the 'standard' language in the 18th century; it lingered in literary use down to the 20th. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it strikes me as likely that the restriction would would have taken considerably longer, if it had occurred at all, if the periphrastic &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; hadn't been available to act as the 'dummy' auxiliary. The loss of periphrastic &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; is indeed pretty much contemporary with the rise of &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T22:11:04.493" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T22:11:04.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20139" CreationDate="2017-01-05T02:48:56.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To preface: &quot;similarity&quot; depends on the listener, as well as on the sound itself. Categorical perception is a powerful force. To a native English speaker aspiration is almost imperceptible, while /s/ and /θ/ are clearly distinct; to a native Hindi speaker, the opposite would be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way I know of to objectively define phonetic difference is in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctive_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distinctive features&lt;/a&gt;. Every sound can be written as a combination of these features: for instance, /t/ is a &quot;voiceless alveolar plosive&quot;, meaning that it lacks the &quot;voice&quot; feature but has &quot;alveolar&quot; and &quot;plosive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some features are boolean, such as &quot;rounded&quot; for a vowel. It's there or it isn't. Others have multiple comparable values, such as &quot;place of articulation&quot;, where bilabial is closer to labiodental than it is to velar. Still others are generally incomparable, such as &quot;manner of articulation&quot; (is a click more like a fricative or an approximant?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't know of any definitive, established network of phonemes based on these principles. But a distance metric could be established based on your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here's my attempt at a simple distance algorithm, written in Python (representing phonemes as dictionaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def featural_distance(a, b):&#xA;    distance = 0&#xA;    for key in set().union(a.keys(), b.keys()):&#xA;        try:&#xA;            if key in a and key not in b:&#xA;                distance += int(a[key])&#xA;            elif key in b and key not in a:&#xA;                distance += int(b[key])&#xA;            elif a[key] != b[key]:&#xA;                distance += abs(int(a[key]) - int(b[key]))&#xA;        except ValueError: # This will happen if either of the two has a string value. In that case, assume they can't be directly compared.&#xA;            distance += 1&#xA;    return distance&#xA;&#xA;def parse_features(s):&#xA;    d = {}&#xA;    for word in s.split():&#xA;        w = word.strip().lower()&#xA;        d.update(features[w])&#xA;    return d&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an example feature set:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;features = {&#xA;    'voiced'        : {'voice' : 1},&#xA;    'voiceless'     : {'voice' : 0},&#xA;&#xA;    'bilabial'      : {'place' : 1},&#xA;    'labiodental'   : {'place' : 2},&#xA;    'dental'        : {'place' : 3},&#xA;    'alveolar'      : {'place' : 4},&#xA;    'retroflex'     : {'place' : 5},&#xA;    'palatoalveolar': {'place' : 6},&#xA;    'palatal'       : {'place' : 7},&#xA;    'velar'         : {'place' : 8},&#xA;    'uvular'        : {'place' : 9},&#xA;    'pharyngeal'    : {'place' : 10},&#xA;    'glottal'       : {'place' : 11},&#xA;&#xA;    'plosive'       : {'type' : 'p'},&#xA;    'tap'           : {'type' : 't'},&#xA;    'trill'         : {'type' : 'r'},&#xA;    'nasal'         : {'type' : 'n'},&#xA;    'fricative'     : {'type' : 'f'},&#xA;    'approximant'   : {'type' : 'l'},&#xA;    'vowel'         : {'type' : 'a'},&#xA;&#xA;    'lateral'       : {'lateral' : 1},&#xA;&#xA;    'high'          : {'height' : 1},&#xA;    'mid'           : {'height' : 2},&#xA;    'low'           : {'height' : 3},&#xA;&#xA;    'front'         : {'space' : 1},&#xA;    'center'        : {'space' : 2},&#xA;    'back'          : {'space' : 3},&#xA;&#xA;    'rounded'       : {'round' : 1},&#xA;    'unrounded'     : {'round' : 0},&#xA;&#xA;    'aspirated'     : {'aspir' : 1},&#xA;    'unaspirated'   : {'aspir' : 0},&#xA;&#xA;    'long'          : {'length' : 1},&#xA;    'short'         : {'length' : 0},&#xA;&#xA;    # Add features here&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the distance from &quot;voiced bilabial plosive&quot;  to &quot;voiceless bilabial plosive&quot; is 1, to &quot;voiceless bilabial fricative&quot; is 2, and to &quot;voiceless labiodental fricative&quot; is 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certainly has its flaws: /u/ and /w/ are significantly farther apart than they probably should be, for instance, due to vowel and consonant articulation places being stored separately. A better feature set might take that into account and give them a distance of 1 or 2; this is left as an exercise for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T02:48:56.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20707" CreationDate="2017-01-05T08:12:01.323" Score="5" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ancient Greek interrogative ἆρα is strikingly similar to modern Persian &lt;em&gt;āyā&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both words exclusively signal yes/no questions, and almost always begin the sentence. There is an accent on the first syllable in āyā, similar to the circumflex in ἆρα.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;āyā&lt;/em&gt; is at least as old as modern Persian itself: it occurs in the epic &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; (c. 1000 AD), with the same form and function. Quite possibly it comes from Middle/Old Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;api&lt;/em&gt; in Sanskrit seems to play the same role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these words cognates? Are there other Indo-European languages with a similar interrogative particle? (French uses &lt;em&gt;est-ce que&lt;/em&gt;, but that's an entire phrase.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, do ἆρα, &lt;em&gt;āyā&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;api&lt;/em&gt; share a PIE ancestor? Did it survive in any branch other than the Hellenic and Indo-Iranian? I would appreciate any clues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1000" LastEditorUserId="1000" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T08:17:26.707" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T16:16:38.680" Title="Etymology of Ancient Greek interrogative particle ἆρα" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-05T11:01:48.487" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Saussure ever consider intonation/melody as part of parole and/or langue? I cannot find any indication of prosody in the &quot;Course in General Linguistics&quot;, so maybe Saussure was concerned more with traditional segments  and less about tones, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any insight on how he would've understand prosody, as contributing to both parole and langue or ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T19:20:45.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T19:41:53.230" Title="How does Saussure understand prosodic aspects of language?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20705" CreationDate="2017-01-05T11:21:18.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;ἆρα is considered to be cognate with the interrogative particle in Baltic languages (Latvian ar, Lithuanian aȓ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Persian āyā does not have a known ancestor in Old or Middle Persian. In early New Persian it does occur, alongside ay اى with the same function. From the viewpoint of regular sound correspondence, any connection with ἆρα is quite out of the question. Persian -y- cannot derive from IE -*r-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T11:21:18.647" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20411" CreationDate="2017-01-05T14:19:52.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an aside to all that's been said already: traditional Spanish grammar divides all verbs into three conjugation classes based on their endings (-ar, -er, -ir), but I've read (the source escapes me) that it would be more sensible to add three more for the stem-changing verbs discussed here, since there are so many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aside: alternation of -e- and -i- based on the original Vulgar Latin vowel is of course not confined to Spanish. Italian has e → ie and o → uo, Romanian has e → e̯a and o → o̯a, etc. Neither French (which has fixed last-syllable stress) nor Portuguese have vowel alternation of this kind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T14:19:52.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20710" CreationDate="2017-01-05T17:02:46.787" Score="5" ViewCount="4354" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences in the active voice can be converted to the passive voice by - amongst other maneuvers - moving the direct object into the position originally occupied by the grammatical subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this make it the new grammatical subject of the sentence? If so, what is the original subject now called? If not, how are subject and object(s) classified after the conversion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T18:15:34.003" Title="What is the subject of a passive sentence?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20709" CreationDate="2017-01-05T18:27:05.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The former object becomes the new subject.  That is clear -- the new subject has all the properties one could reasonably associate with a subject.  Number agreement with the verb and subject raising from complement sentences, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens to the former subject is a more interesting question.  Here are 3 theoretical answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. It may not be represented overtly at all, in which case the original subject was an abstract thing called &quot;UNSPEC&quot; (short for unspecified).  This is argued by McCawley in &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. It may become part of a manner adverb with &quot;by&quot;.  This is argued by Chomsky in &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/em&gt;.  The reasoning here is that we need to explain the &quot;fact&quot; that only verbs that are subcategorized to co-occur with manner adverbs can be passivized.  Unfortunately for Chomsky's proposal, this is not so.  Cf. &quot;Ohio is bounded on the north by Lake Erie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;III. In Relational Grammar (by Postal and Perlmutter in various articles), the former subject is a chomeur, meaning it no longer bears any grammatical relation in the clause.  I like this theory, because of an interesting generalization discovered by McCawley (reported in the same reference as above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McCawley undertakes a detailed examination of the structure of passive sentences, and finds that the passive by-phrase can turn up in several different places -- in fact, anywhere it will fit into the derived passive structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for those theories that associate the internal structure of clauses with the order in which verb-functions apply to their arguments (like Categorial Grammar and HPSG) and further associate this order with grammatical relation (like HPSG and my theory, 2psg), McCawley's fact is predicted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a by-phrase chomeur bears no particular grammatical relation to the verb, the order in which the verb-function applies to this argument is arbitrary, so you should get a number of different derived structures in the passive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I am the first to have noticed this convergence between McCawley's theory and Relational Grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T17:26:22.363" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T17:26:22.363" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20706" CreationDate="2017-01-05T19:41:53.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd guess Saussure would count lexical tone as paradigmatic and intonation as syntagmatic (comparing his remarks about syllable structure).  I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that would make both part of langue, but personally, I have always found the langue/parole distinction difficult to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T19:41:53.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20689" CreationDate="2017-01-05T21:18:32.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simplifying things a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a sample of simple sentences where the verb is transitive, i. e. you can recognize a subject and an object. Note how the language marks which is the subject and which is the object (with case endings, with relative position, by person-number agreement with the verb, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now take a sample of sentences where the verb is clearly intransitive, i. e. it only has a subject. Again note how this subject is marked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compare the marking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the subject of the transitive verb is consistently marked in the same way as the subject of the intransitive verb, and the &quot;odd one out&quot; is the transitive object, then the language is nominative-accusative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt; of the transitive verb is marked in the same way as the intransitive subject, then the language is ergative-absolutive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality this is not nearly as neat, as there might be different alignments according to which tense-aspect-mood is in play (Georgian, Hindi) or there might be some intransitive verbs that take ergative subjects (Basque).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T21:18:32.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20669" CreationDate="2017-01-05T21:28:01.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also faced the exact same problem. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be that many online resources for this field, and the existing ones aren't really that good (e.g. the one by Leiden University, like many other MOOCs, is just way too superficial and brief).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is just to find good textbooks and read them. When there wasn't any MOOC online, programmers also learned a lot, by reading good materials. In fact I'd say they're likely to be more reliable than MOOCs in a lot of aspects, since top-quality MOOCs are really few, but you can pretty much guarantee that textbooks widely used and reviewed are written with care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two that I personally have used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, by Katamba, O'Grady, Archibald, Thomas: This is also used by the program at my current university to teach freshmen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language&lt;/em&gt;: Not really an introduction textbook, but presents all topics in linguistics concisely in all-color format. I found it generally easy-to-read and enjoyable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can surely find other books by searching online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you might argue that those resources aren't free. But I guess you have to realize that the current proliferation of free materials in programming is really not a norm yet in many other fields. And even in programming, to find really good materials you usually have to pay anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T21:28:01.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20669" CreationDate="2017-01-05T21:54:43.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/user/LinguisticsMarburg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtual Linguistics Campus&lt;/a&gt; from Marburg University with lots of linguistics teaching videos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T21:54:43.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20669" CreationDate="2017-01-06T00:14:28.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT's OpenCourseWare has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/#cat=humanities&amp;amp;subcat=linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;large number of linguistics courses&lt;/a&gt;. The are many on language theory and analysis (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) and some on NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T00:14:28.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-06T17:07:12.527" Score="2" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd really appreciate some help with my understanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main confusion sprouts from the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Obviously, this calls for a thorough examination of the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first problem is with phrasal verbs - how do we know whether &quot;calls for&quot; is (1) or (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) V + Particle&#xA;  (2) V + Prepositional Phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a 'test' for determining whether it is a phrasal verb?&#xA;I've been taught the 'particle movement' test, but does this always apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second problem is with the distinction of complements and adjuncts.&#xA;I believed previously that, if the constituent can be removed with the rest of the sentence still grammatical, then it is a adjunct. E.g. 'of the facts' must be a prepositional adjunct, because you can say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Obviously, this calls for a thorough examination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I was told that 'of the facts' can't be an adjunct, because the preposition is 'of'.&#xA;Is there a specific complement vs adjunct test? Is the preposition 'of' an exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologise if it seems like I've come asking questions before doing my own  research - but it's more that I have conflicting sources of information. Any clarification would be really great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14892" LastEditorUserId="14893" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T19:16:48.737" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T21:18:39.300" Title="Phrasal verb? Adjunct vs complement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6805" CreationDate="2017-01-06T20:31:02.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;there's also a similar phrase in german and south african. Americans use this a lot, too so I doubt it originated in Australia, but possibly has common origins before that. It might have been studied most in Australian English, but it's very prevalent in the U.S. also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14895" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T20:31:02.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2017-01-06T20:33:00.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology) entry points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt;: A search engine for language resources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeLeMaCo&lt;/a&gt;: Teaching and Learning Materials Collection, a collaborative portal to teaching and learning materials&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/weblichtwiki/index.php/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WebLicht&lt;/a&gt;: A web based chaining tools for language processing (needs a federated account for login; currently available languages are English and German)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T21:30:52.347" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T21:30:52.347" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-06T20:33:00.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2017-01-06T21:00:31.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemes are the minimal contrastive linguistic unit along the syntagmatic axis; think of a string of units listed sequentially.  Phonemes themselves are comprised of features, and this is within the paradigmatic axis; think of one position on the syntagmatic axis and see what it is like on the inside.  Sign language phonology has not yet availed itself of this distinction with regard to the sign language phoneme.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14897" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T21:00:31.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16960" CreationDate="2017-01-06T21:06:22.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;excited&quot; is definitely an adjective in the first sentence, and most likely an adjective in both sentences. It looks like some people have argued that it must be a verb in the second because of the phrase starting with &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;, but I think they're wrong. My viewpoint would be that it is technically &lt;strong&gt;indeterminate&lt;/strong&gt; in the second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Excited&quot; passes several adjective tests&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would base my judgment on the tests mentioned by BillJ in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/366957/77227&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the following ELU question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/366906&quot;&gt;Is “running” a gerund or a participial adjective?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First-off, the &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; test. &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; can't be used by itself as a pre-posed modifier of verbs (we can't say *&quot;This very excites me&quot;; we have to say something like &quot;This excites me very much&quot;) but it usually can be used as a pre-posed modifier of most adjectives (we can say &quot;I'm very happy&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I was very excited about my new job&quot; is clearly OK, so &quot;excited&quot; is acting like an adjective here, not like a verb. Strictly speaking, this doesn't prove that it's an adjective in &quot;I was excited about my new job&quot;, but my intuition is that these sentences have the same structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I was very excited by my new job.&quot; This construction is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=very%20excited%20by%2Cvery%20excited%20about%2C%20excited%20by%2C%20excited%20about&amp;amp;year_start=1985&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cvery%20excited%20by%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cvery%20excited%20about%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cexcited%20by%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cexcited%20about%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not as common, but people do say things like this&lt;/a&gt;, and it sounds grammatical to me. So I would say &quot;excited by _&quot; can also be an adjective phrase, although when not preceded by &quot;very&quot;, it could technically be a verbal form (passive voice) instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other tests BillJ mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;can it be the complement of complex-intransitive verbs like &quot;become&quot;: again, &quot;I became (very) excited about my new job&quot; passes with flying colors, and &quot;I became (very) excited by my new job&quot; seems fully grammatical to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;can it be the complement of complex-transitive verbs like &quot;feel&quot;: again, &quot;I felt excited about my new job&quot; is good, &quot;I felt excited by my new job&quot; is... kind of funny, actually. So maybe &quot;excited by ___&quot; is not so good as an adjective phrase after all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, &quot;excited about my new job&quot; is clearly an adjective phrase, while &quot;excited by my new job&quot; seems to only sometimes be treated as an adjective phrase (or only by some speakers). Of course, the other analysis of &quot;I was excited by my job&quot; is that it is a passive-voice version of &quot;My new job excited me&quot;, which is something that &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2WUoBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA110&amp;amp;lpg=PA110&amp;amp;dq=%22job%20excited%20me%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=oTADqhDu1T&amp;amp;sig=cbT_OCvo9JltKQyGCR8aj2dFHDs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwisyNiDta7RAhUE8IMKHWzRDiAQ6AEILzAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22job%20excited%20me%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be said in English&lt;/a&gt; (although it sounds a bit weird to me). That's why I said &quot;I was excited by my new job&quot; is technically indeterminate on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other viewpoints about the significance of &quot;by&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of trying to find the answer to the linked ELU question, I came across this web page from &quot;the Internet Grammar of English&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/adjectiv/particip.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Participial Adjectives&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This resource seems to be linguistically oriented, as it has connections to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCL Survey of English Usage&lt;/a&gt;, so I expected it to give a correct description of how to distinguish adjectives and participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is one part that seems questionable to me. It says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The presence of a &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-agent phrase (&lt;em&gt;by your behaviour, by my reaction&lt;/em&gt;) indicates that the &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; form is verbal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says this actually overrides the &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; test for adjective-hood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; can sometimes be supplied in both the adjectival and the verbal constructions:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Adjectival              Verbal&#xA;I was embarrassed       I was embarrassed by your behaviour        &#xA;I was very embarrassed  I was very embarrassed by your behavior&#xA;&#xA;She was surprised       She was surprised by my reaction&#xA;She was very surprised  She was very surprised by my reaction&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; forms followed by &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-agent phrases really are commonly accepted to be an exception to the &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reasons I doubt the by-rule&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems like all of these sentences have adjectival phrases. I don't see why a &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-agent phrase would be a certain indicator of a verb in this context, since it seems this type of &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-phrase can also occur after other parts of speech, for example after abstract nouns denoting actions as in &quot;the destruction of the library by Caesar&quot;. (It's true that in this case the object also seems to be required to be present in a phrase starting with &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, but I don't see why that would be relevant either way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;embarrassed by your behaviour&quot; doesn't seem to behave very much like a verb, as we can say things like &quot;She became embarrassed by your behaviour&quot;, &quot;She felt embarrassed by your behaviour&quot;, &quot;She stopped being embarrassed by your behavior.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Another reason to doubt that &quot;by&quot; is significant: the &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-rule&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The supposed &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-rule also seems to clash with another test for adjective-hood that I found in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b2ab/dca9f90cfda7244df68655ed22a0badab617.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another look at participles and adjectives in the English DP&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Tibor Laczkó, who cites unpublished work by Joan Bresnan that identifies &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-prefixation (excluding the separate verbal prefix &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;) as something that can only occur to adjectives. Obviously, we can say things like &quot;She was &lt;strong&gt;unsurprised by&lt;/strong&gt; my reaction&quot;, so this would also indicate that &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-agent phrases are not an infallible indicator of verbal forms. (It isn't proof that &lt;em&gt;surprised&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective in &quot;She was surprised by my reaction&quot;, but I think it's proof that a following &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-agent phrase doesn't make it impossible for &lt;em&gt;surprised&lt;/em&gt; to be an adjective.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if the &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;-test for adjective-hood is widely accepted; maybe some people would say that &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; can be prefixed to the participle forms of certain verbs. &lt;em&gt;Unfitting&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unbecoming&lt;/em&gt; can take direct objects (although this is rather archaic nowadays; both of them have alternative constructions with prepositions like &lt;em&gt;unfitting to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unbecoming of&lt;/em&gt;), but despite this, I think they are generally classified as adjectives rather than as participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A relevant article&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.727.4159&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adjectival participles revisited&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Artemis Alexiadou, Berit Gehrke and Florian Schäfer (2012):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;3.1 By-phrases and event-related modification in adjectival passives&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The standard claim for English is that adjectival passives are incompatible with &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-phrases, and to our knowledge there is little discussion on other event-related modifiers in English adjectival passives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The generality of this claim has been challenged recently for many languages, for which&#xA;  it has been shown that event-related modifiers are available [...]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English data from McIntyre (2011) and Bruening (2012):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(19) a. The dictator &lt;strong&gt;remained&lt;/strong&gt; unsupported/underestimated &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; the warlords.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;b. Former investigator says he &lt;strong&gt;remains&lt;/strong&gt; disturbed &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; what he saw at baby murder scene.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;c. No longer does Tim Thomas &lt;strong&gt;appear&lt;/strong&gt; trained &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; Tim Hortons.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;d. There are others who I would call saints more than theologians since they &lt;strong&gt;seem&lt;/strong&gt; taught &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; God more than by men.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;e. Once one monkey discovered a new food-washing method, very soon the whole tribe used the method, &lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;taught &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; the original simian.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;f. Steve Jobs’ birthday doesn’t go &lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;noticed &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; spammers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;➩ There exist adjectival passives with by-phrases also in English and German.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;➩ But these are restricted compared to by-phrases in the verbal passive, or compared to by-phrases in Greek adjectival passives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pp. 6-7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T20:33:17.307" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T20:33:17.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20901" CreationDate="2017-01-06T21:48:51.593" Score="5" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most &lt;strong&gt;Turkic languages&lt;/strong&gt; use the Arabic words for greeting, namely &lt;em&gt;salam&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;selam&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;merhaba&lt;/em&gt; etc. The exceptions are Tatar &lt;em&gt;isänmesez&lt;/em&gt; and Uighur &lt;em&gt;yakhshimusiz&lt;/em&gt;, the origin of which I do not know. Are they Turkic? What did &lt;strong&gt;Turkic&lt;/strong&gt; people say to greet each other before those Arabic words entered their vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T19:45:02.090" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T02:07:49.770" Title="What were the pre-Arabic Turkic words used for greeting?" Tags="&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20722" CreationDate="2017-01-07T11:51:59.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the (modern) Uyghur word is cognate with Old Turkish yakış, Turkey-Turkish yahşı “good, pretty”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T11:51:59.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20667" CreationDate="2017-01-08T00:09:41.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify matters a bit, the OQ seems to have a confusing presupposition, viz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isolating (analytic) vs inflecting (fusional) vs agglutinating languages&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (it's &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt;, btw, not &lt;em&gt;inflexed&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three are not on the same level of abstraction. Instead of a three-way opposition, there are &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; dyadic oppositions, with one subordinate to the other: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Analytic (isolating) are opposed to Synthetic (inflecting) grammars,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;or &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3486/482&quot;&gt;types of grammar&lt;/a&gt;. This is essentially the difference between &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/SyntaxTopics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syntax&lt;/a&gt; (which predominates in the grammar of analytic languages) and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflectional morphology&lt;/a&gt; (which predominates in the grammar of synthetic languages).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; and English are examples of Analytic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turkish and Latin are examples of Synthetic languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a subtype of Synthetic grammars, there are two distinct types of inflection.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fusion (or amalgamation).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Latin (and almost all other I-E languages) uses fusional inflection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the paradigms of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LatinVerbs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin verbs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LatinNouns.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin nouns&lt;/a&gt;; all are multidimensional, with one affix conveying case, gender, number, and root class for nouns, or person, number, tense, mood, voice, and root class for verbs. This results in a number of unique paradigms, each to be learned in context, but also in short inflections, with high information content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agglutination&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Turkish (and almost all other SOV languages) uses agglutinative inflection.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consider the verb forms in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/TurkishVerbForms.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Turkish puzzle&lt;/a&gt;, as described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/TurkishVerbSolution2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this schematic solution&lt;/a&gt;. Notice that there are a number of affixes attached to a root, and that their paradigms are all one-dimensional. I.e, there is just one column of choices, representing only one characteristic -- number, person, tense --- instead of several; very low information content. The result is that the morphology is simple, and very regular, because the paradigms have only one dimension. However, there are many affixes per inflected word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Executive summary:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 1. There is a cline between &lt;strong&gt;Analytic&lt;/strong&gt; (Isolating) and &lt;strong&gt;Synthetic&lt;/strong&gt; (Inflecting) grammars.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; 2. There is  a cline -- among synthetic grammars -- between &lt;strong&gt;Fusional&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Agglutinative&lt;/strong&gt; inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T01:15:51.783" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T01:15:51.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20730" CreationDate="2017-01-08T04:10:39.317" Score="2" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=lodge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lodge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (etymonline)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(n.) Middle English logge,&#xA;  mid-13c. in surnames and place names; late 13c. as &quot;small building or&#xA;  hut,&quot; from Old French &lt;strong&gt;loge&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;arbor, covered walk; hut, cabin,&#xA;  grandstand at a tournament&quot; (12c.), from Frankish &lt;strong&gt;*laubja&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;shelter&quot;&#xA;  (cognate with Old High German louba &quot;porch, gallery,&quot; German Laube&#xA;  &quot;bower, arbor&quot;), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*laubja-&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;shelter.&quot; On a&#xA;  widespread guess (backed by Watkins, OED) this likely originally meant&#xA;  &quot;shelter of foliage,&quot; or &quot;roof made from bark,&quot; and is from the same&#xA;  PIE root as leaf (n.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Modern spelling is from c. 1500. The specific sense &quot;hunter's cabin&quot;&#xA;  is first recorded late 14c. Sense of &quot;local branch of a society&quot; is&#xA;  first recorded 1680s, of Freemasons, from an earlier use of lodge as&#xA;  &quot;workshop of a group of masons&quot; (mid-14c.). In the New World the word&#xA;  was used of certain American Indian buildings (1805), hence lodge-pole&#xA;  (1805) and lodge-pole pine (1859).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lodge#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lodge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle English &lt;strong&gt;logge&lt;/strong&gt;, from Old French &lt;strong&gt;loge&lt;/strong&gt; ‎(“arbor, covered&#xA;  walk-way”), Medieval Latin &lt;strong&gt;lobia, laubia&lt;/strong&gt;, from Frankish &lt;strong&gt;*laubija&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  ‎(“shelter”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*laubijō&lt;/strong&gt; ‎(“arbour, protective roof,&#xA;  shelter made of foliage”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;strong&gt;*laubą&lt;/strong&gt; ‎(“leaf”), from&#xA;  Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*lōubh-&lt;/strong&gt; ‎(“the outer parts of a tree, bark,&#xA;  foliage”). Cognate with Old High German louba ‎(“porch, gallery”)&#xA;  (German Laube ‎(“bower, arbor”)), Old High German loub ‎(“leaf,&#xA;  foliage”), Old English lēaf ‎(“leaf, foliage”). Related to lobby,&#xA;  loggia, leaf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether this sound change -b- &gt; -g- happens regularly or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T08:39:51.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T09:15:39.960" Title="How does English 'lodge' come from Frankish *laubija by sound change?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20729" CreationDate="2017-01-08T09:15:39.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Palatalized labials become palatal affricates (/pʲ/ &gt; /tʃ/; /bʲ/ and /vʲ/ &gt; /dʒ/; /mʲ/ &gt; /ndʒ/) without emitting a preceding /j/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Early Old French from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#To_Early_Old_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#To_Early_Old_French&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T09:15:39.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2017-01-08T09:32:56.353" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will first answer to the title of the question, namely &lt;em&gt;&quot;What is the substrate of Romanian language&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romanian could have &lt;strong&gt;several substrate layers&lt;/strong&gt;. The most frequent one is the &lt;strong&gt;Dacian&lt;/strong&gt; layer, which was the language spoken in the region of Romania prior to the adoption of Latin. Dacian was an Indo-European language for which we have very limited material (place names, ethnonyms, plant names and various words attested by ancient authors). Dacian is considered to be related to Thracian and is sometimes bundled for convinience under a group called Thraco-Dacian. Our account for claiming a relationship between Dacian and Thracian is Strabo (7.3) who writes: &quot;the Dacians speak the same language as the Getae&quot;. Earlier in the same chapter he writes: &quot;The Greeks indeed considered the Getæ to be Thracians&quot;. So, Getæ = Thracians and then Dacian language = Getæ language, makes Dacian = some dialect of Thracian (?) according to the Greeks. That is the indication, but we cannot take it for granted, especially if we examine the Dacian toponymy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we turn to the substrate layer of Romanian, that is to say &lt;strong&gt;non-Latin words, that predate the latin adoption and that are not loans (Greek) nor an adstrate (Slavic, Greek)&lt;/strong&gt;, then we end up to what we suppose to be &lt;strong&gt;Dacian&lt;/strong&gt;. There is a long list of such words and suprisingly many of them have &lt;strong&gt;Albanian&lt;/strong&gt; cognates e.g. Rom abur ~ Alb. avull 'stream, vapour', Rom. burtă ~ Alb. bark 'belly', Rom. cetină Ãlb. cetinë 'pine tree', Rom. iască ~ Alb. eshkë 'fungus', Rom. măgură ~ Alb. gamule 'heap, mound', Rom. cătun ~ Alb. katund 'village', Rom. mal 'shore, bank' ~ Alb. mal 'mountain', Rom. mînz ~ Alb. mëz 'foal', Rom. murg 'brown' ~ Alb. murg 'black', Rom. negură ~ Alb. njegull 'fog, mist', Rom. pîrîu ~ Alb. përrua 'brook, riverbed', Rom. rață ~ Alb. rose 'duck', Rom. strungă ~ Alb. shtrungë 'enclosure for milking', Rom. tină ~ Alb. tinë 'slime, mid', Rom. vatră ~ Alb. vatër 'hearth', Rom. zgău ~ Alb. zgurdhe 'rectum'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like the above have lead some to assume that Albanian and Dacian share pre-history and that Albanian could be a result of a east-Balkanic migration towards Illyricum (Orel V., 2000). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except from Dacian, there are traces of Old European, Mediterranian and Celtic words. The OE and Mediterranian words can be somekind of a Pre-Indo-European substrate, but the Celtic words are either a post Dacian layer or words that were brought by Romanized Celts at the same time as Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Vlachs (mentioned in the body of the question) who speak Aromanian, the question is too broad. Their homeland is not pin-poined and they could be simply romanized wandering shepherds of different ethnic groups and languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further Reading&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ungureanu D., MC Vidal, R Weiss, The four layers of the Romanian substrate vocabulary, Department of Balkanic and South-Slavic Studies, 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ungureanu D., Common Lexic in Romanian and Albanian Substrate and Loanwords, Charles University, Prague, 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orel, Vladimir Ė. A concise historical grammar of the Albanian language: reconstruction of Proto-Albanian. Brill, 2000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maria Iliescu, Rumänisch-friaulische Substratworter, in Günter Holtus, Edgar Radtke eds. Rumänistik in der Diskussion, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 1986&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://palaeolexicon.com/Thracian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Thracians and their language&lt;/a&gt;, Contains information on Thracian and Dacian, inscriptions and their phonology PIE &gt; Thr.Dac., retreived 2017-01-08&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T11:46:04.030" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T11:46:04.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15447" CreationDate="2017-01-08T18:38:07.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the pastors at our church in suburban Chicago says &quot;thank&quot; and &quot;thanks&quot; with a voiced dental fricative. I had never heard it before and it took me a while to figure out why it sounded so strange.  I found this thread when I decided to research if it was a regional dialect.  He grew up in Kalamazoo, MI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14906" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T18:38:07.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7274" CreationDate="2017-01-08T19:00:43.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Babiniotis &quot;Ετυμολογικό Λεξικό τής Νέας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας&quot; is definetely a good source for personal and place names. The title refers to the modern Greek language, but includes etymologies on mythological names, ancient Greek names and placenames. Even biblical names are included. Here is a small sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3idNf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3idNf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4opsF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4opsF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's purpose is not to cover all Greek toponymy as that would require a gigantic volume. It is simply a huge etymological dictionary including place and personal names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For toponyms and their etymology there is a dedicated book which basically covers mainly the modern names. However, since so many places are called by their ancient name it might be of your interest. In some places he explains that place name A is of Slavic origin and then tells you what the ancient name was. It is a huge volume and a bit pricey. You can have a look here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://symeonidis.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Νεοελληνκά Οικωνύμια (Τοπωνύμια)&lt;/a&gt; and for a sample &lt;a href=&quot;https://symeonidis.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%B3%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/Languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;site&lt;/a&gt; where under the &quot;Other&quot; tab there is an index of &lt;strong&gt;Pre&lt;/strong&gt;-Greek place names. Of course Pre-Greek means no etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A collection of papers dedicated to personal names: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/proc/volumes/pba104.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possibly one of the best resources on Greek dialectology&lt;/strong&gt; has a searchable database of &lt;strong&gt;personal names&lt;/strong&gt; as well: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ancdialects.greeklanguage.gr/propernames?title=%CE%91&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ΘΕΤΙΜΑ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T21:42:30.803" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:42:30.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-08T20:07:06.893" Score="3" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;As is well known, the verbs &lt;em&gt;need, require, lack&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;, on the one hand, and &lt;em&gt;deserve&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;justify, merit, warrant&lt;/em&gt;..., on the other, can exceptionally take -ING complement clauses with ‘concealed’ passive interpretations whenever the verb of the –ING clause allows passivisation. Such ‘concealed passive’ gerunds (Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum's terminology) can, in fact, even be followed by agentive &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-phrases and/or adverbs, as in &lt;em&gt;Your hair needs cutting &lt;strong&gt;by a professional&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;This draft needs checking &lt;strong&gt;carefully&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;by the editor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, all of which seems coherent enough with the claim that they are, indeed, a) passive in meaning (although ‘active’ in form) and b) real verbs (rather than de-verbal ING-nouns), as the presence of &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; in the latter example shows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although such subordinate gerunds must allow passivisation and, therefore, be at least &lt;strong&gt;two-place&lt;/strong&gt;, it is clear that they need not be ‘transitive’ in the strict sense of taking direct objects, because dyadic verbs taking prepositional, instead of direct object complements (e.g., &lt;em&gt;look at x&lt;/em&gt;), can also receive passive interpretations after &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt;, etc. (cf.&lt;em&gt;The ignition needs looking at&lt;/em&gt;). The appropriate descriptive generalisation, then, seems to be that gerunds of ‘active’ (= non-stative) &lt;strong&gt;two-place&lt;/strong&gt; verbs can receive passive interpretations when they complement verbs like &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;deserve&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is rather less clear is whether (and, if so, why) such gerunds &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be &lt;strong&gt;two-place&lt;/strong&gt; predicates, as, obviously, many 'active' verbs that allow passivisation are &lt;strong&gt;not dyadic&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;polyadic&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., 'ditransitive'), and others are ‘complex transitive’, but still take &lt;em&gt;bona fide&lt;/em&gt; direct objects. Verbs like &lt;em&gt;appoint, call, compare, distinguish, give, make, offer, persuade, send&lt;/em&gt;, to name but a few, are either ‘complex transitive’ (cf. &lt;em&gt;appoint&lt;/em&gt; x + Predicative, &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; x + Predicative, &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; x + &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; y) or straightforward &lt;strong&gt;three-place&lt;/strong&gt; predicates (cf. &lt;em&gt;x compares y to z, x distinguishes y from z,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;x gives z y&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;x gives y to z&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;x offers z y/x offers y to z&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;x persuades y to do z&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;x sends y to z&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;x sends z y&lt;/em&gt;, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore recently asked in a very large English language forum whether the 'passive gerund' construction was possible with polyadic/multi-predicate gerunds like &lt;em&gt;appointing, comparing, giving, making, offering, persuading, sending&lt;/em&gt;, etc. in cases like (1-10) or not and the unanimous answer of all the British and American speakers who replied was &lt;strong&gt;'no'&lt;/strong&gt;, with the possible exception of example (7), which some - to their surprise - found more acceptable than the rest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) John deserves appointing __ Professor (=to be/being appointed ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Fauré deserves comparing __ to Prokofiev (= to be/being compared...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) This present deserves giving __ to somebody you really like (= to be/being given...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Bill deserves giving __ this present (= to be/being given ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) The children need making __ work harder (= to be/being made to ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) Tom deserves offering __ tenure (= to be/being offered...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) I need persuading __ to marry again (= to be/being persuaded...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(8) I need persuading __ of the truth of such a claim (...to be/being persuaded...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(9) She deserves sending __ an invitation (= to be/being sent...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(10) She deserves sending __ to prison (= to be/being sent...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Of course, the reason why some speakers found example (7) more acceptable than the others probably is that, in (7), the clause &lt;em&gt;to marry again&lt;/em&gt; need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be interpreted as the third argument of &lt;em&gt;persuade&lt;/em&gt;; it can also be understood as an adjunct of 'purpose', and, if so, &lt;em&gt;persuade&lt;/em&gt; remains a &lt;strong&gt;dyadic&lt;/strong&gt; predicate.] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, my guess is that dyadic active gerunds can be constructed as passive complements of &lt;em&gt;need, deserve&lt;/em&gt;, etc., but higher-adicity ones &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to this community, then, is &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt;? Can anybody here point me to a &lt;strong&gt;principled&lt;/strong&gt; explanation of this restriction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-08T20:20:42.893" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T21:37:44.753" Title="Why is the need+concealed passive gerund construction unavailable with polyadic gerunds?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20717" CreationDate="2017-01-08T20:33:13.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phrasal Verbs:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I’d advise you to drop the term 'phrasal verb'. It’s thoroughly misleading.  It’s not the whole expression &quot;call for&quot; that is a verb; it’s just the lexeme &quot;call&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example, &lt;em&gt;This calls for a thorough examination of the facts&lt;/em&gt; is analysed as verb - [prep + O]. It’s a verbal idiom headed by the prepositional verb “call”, where the preposition “for” is specified by the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particles are intransitive prepositions (plus a few adjectives and verbs) which can freely come between a transitive verb and its direct object. The distinctive property of particles is that they can precede the object but in general they don’t have to, so there is alternation between, say, &lt;em&gt;Ed took off his coat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ed took his coat off&lt;/em&gt;. Now compare that pair with your example &lt;em&gt;This calls for an examination&lt;/em&gt;” ~ * &lt;em&gt;This calls an examination for&lt;/em&gt;. Clearly &quot;for&quot; is not a particle on two counts: in that example, &quot;for&quot; is a transitive preposition and &quot;call&quot; is an intransitive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Complements vs adjuncts:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complements in NP structure are virtually restricted to PPs (usually headed by &quot;of&quot;) and subordinate clauses. In your example, the PP &quot;of the facts&quot; is complement of the noun &quot;examination&quot;. In NPs, dependents with the form of PPs qualify as complements when they are licensed by the particular head noun. In your example, the PP &quot;of the facts&quot; is licensed by &quot;examination&quot;. The clearest of cases have one or more of these properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The PP corresponds to object or subject NPs, compare &lt;em&gt;the facts examined&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;the examination of the facts&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The choice of preposition is specified by the head noun, as is the case with your example &quot;call for a thorough examination&quot;, where &quot;call&quot; specifies &quot;for&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) the PP is obligatory because the noun makes little sense without it: &quot;the advent of the steam engine&quot;, &quot;the feasibility of the proposal&quot;, &quot;a dearth of new ideas&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complements are a kind of dependent that must be licensed by the head of the phrase. By contrast, adjuncts require no such licensing; they function as modifiers in clause structure, or as  supplements.  Obligatory elements are always complements: they are needed to complete the verb phrase; optional elements may be either complements or adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews in &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; defines complement as “A syntactic element seen as completing the construction of another element”: the syntactic concept construction is preferable to the semantic concept meaning. He goes on to say, more specifically, that it applies to elements which are within the valency of a verb or other lexical unit. And his entry for &quot;valency&quot; is: “The range of syntactic elements either required or specifically permitted by a verb or other lexical unit&quot;– which is equivalent to licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T20:33:13.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20735" CreationDate="2017-01-08T21:37:44.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a great explanation, and it's conjectural, but here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that in the evolution of grammatical systems, new constructions are introduced only gradually, beginning with simpler constructions, then generalized step by step to more complicated constructions.  And, more specifically, we know that passive morphology was not at first used with the English progressive, so that in the 19th century, &quot;The house is building&quot; would be used where today, we'd say &quot;The house is being built.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe predicates with more arguments count as more complex than those with fewer, and Mother English simply hasn't gotten around to introducing passive morphology into higher-adic and so more complex constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should be patient and wait for English morphology to catch up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-01-08T21:37:44.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20318" CreationDate="2017-01-08T23:19:18.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowing plural nouns as singular nouns (as in the example) can be explained as the result of &lt;strong&gt;regularization by analogy&lt;/strong&gt; to the usual form of singular nouns. Even though English has a fair share of irregular plurals, the suffix &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt; is the default plural marker, and its abscence is therefore understood to mean the noun is either a mass noun or a countable noun in the singular. Only speakers familiar with the pluralization rules of Italian (in this example) would pause to assess whether the loanword in question is singular or plural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, where noun inflection is overwhelmingly regular, this regularization is even clearer. Spanish has singular &lt;em&gt;zucchini&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ñoqui&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;gnocchi&lt;/em&gt;) from Italian, as well as &lt;em&gt;bacteria&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;currícula&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;obra&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;opera&lt;/em&gt;) from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;reanalysis&lt;/em&gt; seems to be restricted to processes of folk etymology, that is, processes of internal breakdown and reassembly of morphemes or phrases within the language. This can happen with loanwords but then by that time it's not part of the borrowing itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14883" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T09:03:14.543" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T09:03:14.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15151" CreationDate="2017-01-09T00:18:27.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindi, he/she/it are a single pronoun, i.e. there is no distinction between inanimate and animate. The only distinction in pronouns is distance (near and far) and number (singular and plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronouns are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;यह - he/she/it (near)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;वह - he/she/it (far)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ये - they (near)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;वे - they (far)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T00:18:27.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20742" CreationDate="2017-01-09T05:49:28.143" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Preferably as specific a term as possible (i.e. not applying to other phonological rules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example how English words can't begin with &quot;ng&quot; or how Spanish words can't begin with &quot;st&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:05:39.480" Title="Term for the set of rules about where sounds can occur" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20748" CreationDate="2017-01-09T06:04:28.797" Score="7" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are occasionally one or two different origins for the same word, but for Germany there are at least six distinct roots found in languages of nearby countries. Why so for Germany but not France?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: Germany&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Spanish: Alemania&lt;br&gt;&#xA;German: Deutschland&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ukrainian: Німеччина (Nimechchina)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Czech: Německo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hungarian: Németország&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if northern Europe is relevant in this discussion, but here are more different roots:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Finnish: Saksa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Swedish: Tyskland&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Lithuanian: Vokietija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastEditorUserId="1379" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T14:56:28.463" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T14:56:28.463" Title="Why does the name for Germany vary so much between languages?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20740" CreationDate="2017-01-09T10:07:09.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you're looking for is &lt;em&gt;phonotactics&lt;/em&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;phōnḗ&lt;/em&gt;  &quot;voice, sound&quot; and &lt;em&gt;taktikós&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &quot;having to do with arranging&quot;) is a branch of phonology that deals&#xA;  with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of&#xA;  phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure,&#xA;  consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of &lt;em&gt;phonotactical&#xA;  constraints&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T10:07:09.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20746" CreationDate="2017-01-09T13:48:49.773" Score="-2" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%93_(%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%94)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;שד&lt;/a&gt; (pronounced &lt;em&gt;shade&lt;/em&gt;) is a demon or ghost, in Hebrew. In English, the word '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shade&lt;/a&gt;' is used to mean ghost or demon in some places. (I find it in fantasy novels a lot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any relation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9309" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T14:00:02.917" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T09:23:08.187" Title="Is there any relation between the Hebrew word שד for 'demon' and the English word 'shade' for ghost?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20740" CreationDate="2017-01-09T16:59:11.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Admissibility&quot;, according to Halle in &quot;Phonology in Generative Grammar&quot;.  Stampe has also used this term to refer to a theory of what words are permitted in the lexicon of a language with a given phonological system.  Halle's early theory was that forms are lexically admissible when their addition keeps the grammar as simple as possible by not forcing the repeal of any lexical redundancy rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In SPE, there is proposed a way to measure distance from the lexicon of a potential new lexical entry by counting the symbols in the phonological rules that would be required to change the new entry into some preexisting lexical form.  (I don't think this makes sense, because then the admissible forms, at distance zero, would be only those forms already in the lexicon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Stampe's natural phonology, the admissible forms are those to which no process which could apply to an underlying form is applicable, and foreign words are made admissible during borrowing by applying such applicable processes.  Processes which are prevented from applying directly to underlying forms by ordering constraints do not affect admissibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;phonotactics&quot; comes from older taxonomic phonemics, and is generally used to refer to an enumeration of facts about the phonemic forms allowed in a language, without involving anything about the rest of the phonological system or how borrowing new forms into a language works.  Generative phonology and Natural Phonology are in agreement that although linguists can invent &quot;phonotactic rules&quot;, of course, there are no such rules in phonological systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T17:05:39.480" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:05:39.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20743" CreationDate="2017-01-09T17:55:54.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably not.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of English &amp;quot;shade&amp;quot; (newest to oldest) is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern English &amp;quot;shade&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English &lt;em&gt;sċeadu&lt;/em&gt; (shadow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;skađwaz&lt;/em&gt; (shadow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Indo-European *&lt;em&gt;sk(e)h₃-tos&lt;/em&gt; (darkness)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's decent evidence for this being a native Indo-European root; while it was most productive in Germanic, it has descendants in different parts of the world as well (Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;σκότος&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;skótos&lt;/em&gt;, Irish &lt;em&gt;scáth&lt;/em&gt;, loaned into Finnish &lt;em&gt;katve&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main etymology of Hebrew &lt;em&gt;šed&lt;/em&gt; that I've found is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modern Hebrew &lt;em&gt;šed&lt;/em&gt; (spirit)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aramaic &lt;em&gt;šēḏā&lt;/em&gt; (demon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Akkadian &lt;em&gt;šēdu&lt;/em&gt; (a male &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamassu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lamassu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (protective zodiac deity))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Unknown preceding Proto-Semitic form - but see fdb's answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Transcribing all of these because my computer does not like changing text direction mid-line.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection between *&lt;em&gt;sk(e)h₃-tos&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;šēdu&lt;/em&gt;, in form or in meaning. This is more likely just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T01:15:51.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20741" CreationDate="2017-01-09T18:25:06.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can build a model for this if we consider many words or country names specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The respective names for certain concepts vary little, they spread very fast or through some bottleneck.  Country names generally are clustered near the low-variance end of the spectrum, near the words for potato and internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Germany, the specific factors leading to slightly greater variation are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Germany did not exist per se, so a smallerkingdom or tribe came to represent the later united country.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Germany is in the middle of Europe, so that process occurred independently in many directions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I would not discount randomness too much, and note that there are other countries, regions and cities with similarly varying names (eg Greece, the West Bank, Istanbul...), especially historically, and especially in neighbouring languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, number of autochtonous historically neighbouring languages is essentially the factor.  (Unsurprisingly, the word for &quot;Georgia&quot; is different in all directions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T18:30:09.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T18:30:09.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20741" CreationDate="2017-01-09T18:26:39.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary reason is because there were many Germanic tribes with which the other nations came into contact with directly. This may actually be because of the position in Central Europe - i.e. the contact happened on all sides so on each side the peoples devise their own name instead of adopting a loanword from their neighbours from which they heard about the Germans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Germany&lt;/em&gt; - refers to Germanic tribes in general&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish/French&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Alemania/Alemagne&lt;/em&gt; - refers to the Germanic tribe of Alamans (southern tribe, conquered by Franks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;German/Swedish&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Deutschland/Tyskland&lt;/em&gt; - comes from the Germanic word &lt;em&gt;Teuta&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;, the way they called themselves (hence also the word &lt;em&gt;Dutch&lt;/em&gt; or Italian &lt;em&gt;Tedesco&lt;/em&gt; for Germans; in other languages it may refer to the tribe of Teutons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Czech/Slavic languages&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Německo&lt;/em&gt; - EDIT: following the comment above from @jknappen, this one is actually tricky. The prevalent hypothesis is that the word comes from &lt;em&gt;němý&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;mute&quot; or &quot;dumb&quot;, i.e. not speaking the language of the Slavs and thus being foreign; however apparently there is another hypothesis, which seems to be more plausible, tracing the word to the Germanic tribe of Nemetes. This would be consistent with the way other languages acquired the word, furthermore I do not believe that Slavic languages have other demonyms derived in a similar way to &lt;em&gt;němý&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;Němec&lt;/em&gt;. On the other hand the tribe of Nemetes resided in Palatinate, so not exactly neighbours to Slavs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finnish&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Sakksa&lt;/em&gt; - comes from the Germanic tribe of Saxons (northern tribe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-01-10T17:32:10.217" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T17:32:10.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-09T19:01:46.953" Score="2" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have guessed that slang had a slightly obscene (or at least coarse) nature and colloquialism was more an &quot;informal convention of speech&quot; without the negative connotation, but I can't find anything to back that assumption up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5219" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-01-10T06:14:01.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T06:14:01.747" Title="Is there a linguistic difference between slang and colloquial speech?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-09T20:36:28.990" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term (or terms) in linguistics for speaking about those not immediately present? Something like Mental Time Travel (Chronesthesia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words people can speak of those not here right now, but animals cannot communicate in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the term for that ability? I thought I read about it somewhere but cannot remember it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13680" LastEditorUserId="13680" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T21:30:21.320" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:49:38.987" Title="linguistic term for those not immediatly present" Tags="&lt;present&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20741" CreationDate="2017-01-09T21:13:42.667" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge the Romans named everyone in that general direction Germans, even though most were Celts (originating from Austria). In the year 9 Hermann (Arminius) delivered a devastating blow to the Roman Empire - fascinating story. He became the first Germanic king and it has been theorized that his name played a role in naming them German (via Tacitus) but I don't believe that myself. The Spanish might also be a play on Hermann/Arminius/German, don't know for sure.&#xA;The English were Germans, you are reading a Germanic language now, that is why I find the language so easy. That name had already took hold by 400 AD. Hence English German. These people believed themselves to be Germanic until more recently before Deutschland became a country in 1871. That is named after the Teutonic peoples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shouldn't be surprising since their land is at the center of numerous peninsulas, islands etc. The only European country that borders more countries than Germany is Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:13:42.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20751" CreationDate="2017-01-09T21:49:38.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is usually known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;displacement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T21:49:38.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20750" CreationDate="2017-01-10T01:21:09.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Slang&lt;/em&gt; is generally very informal language used a specific segment of speakers of a language. An example of slang (that I just found on the internet) is the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bandini#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Bandini&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is supposedly a word meaning &quot;nonsense&quot; used in Los Angeles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Colloquial speech&lt;/em&gt; refers to everyday speech that people use informally. Colloquial speech can include a great deal of slang, or no slang at all. Colloquial speech is different from the standard of a language in that it has features like contractions (in English &quot;can't&quot; instead of &quot;cannot&quot;), more general words (&quot;thing&quot;, &quot;stuff&quot;, &quot;dude&quot;), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T01:21:09.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20800" CreationDate="2017-01-10T07:26:17.223" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if sign language would be &quot;parole&quot; according to Saussurian linguistics. After all, parole can be denied as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the &quot;concrete&quot; use of the language, the actual utterances. It&#xA;  is an external manifestation of langue. It is the usage of the system, but not the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a contradiction, but perhaps sign language is parole? (Even if sign language isn't as arbitrary as signs in language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T13:47:50.227" Title="Would Saussure consider sign language as &quot;parole&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19946" CreationDate="2017-01-10T12:51:43.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most important part is this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the most sensitive cross-linguistic tests for modality involves the referential behavior of NPs &lt;strong&gt;under various modal scopes&lt;/strong&gt; (see Ch. 10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical clause isn't construed as being under modal scopes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The unmarked clause-type in language - the main, declarative, affirmative clause - has, by default, a realis modal status. As we have seen above, several grammatical or lexical operators can cast an irrealis, negation or presupposition modal scope over a main clause...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the test therefore does not apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Givón also mentioned that verbs spread their modal scope over object NPs (p. 304). Since 'a teacher' is not an object, the test doesn't really look at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T19:00:17.970" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T19:00:17.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2017-01-10T13:20:02.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;List of resources&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phoible.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHOIBLE&lt;/a&gt; phonological database&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/databases/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Surrey Morphology Group&lt;/a&gt; databases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/browse.php?number=1&amp;amp;PHPSESSID=3h2agvob37fnemalfkqbnn18fjoq4jtm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Konstanz Universals Archive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lql.uni-trier.de/index.php/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia of Linguistic Laws and the Laws in Quantitative Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://glottolog.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glottolog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T05:33:48.473" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-10T13:20:02.983" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20397" CreationDate="2017-01-10T20:31:49.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in cases like Greg Lee's above, a non-finite clause introduced by the 'complementizers' &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; simply &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be controlled, because 'Control', as defined in GB, P&amp;amp;P and subsequent Chomskian metatheory, does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; apply to 'referential' NP/DPs like &lt;em&gt;the onlookers&lt;/em&gt;, which, by definition, must be &lt;strong&gt;autonomous&lt;/strong&gt; in reference (recall Principle C of Binding Theory), but, assuming you are interested only in non-finite predications containing PRO subjects, the answer is still &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, non-finite adverbial clauses &lt;strong&gt;do not have to be 'controlled'&lt;/strong&gt;, because their PRO subject can - if only in exceptional cases - be &lt;strong&gt;arbitrary in reference&lt;/strong&gt;, as in e.g. &lt;em&gt;PRO Talking about serious matters now, what do you think of Trump's attitude towards Russia and Putin?&lt;/em&gt; Of course, in all the examples you provide in your question (and you could have added predications apparently consisting only of PPs, NPs, etc.), PRO subjects are controlled, and they are controlled by the subject of the 'main clause', but there is no choice: such PROs cannot be controlled by NP/DPs in any other position, because 'control' requires c-command and no NP/DP can c-command a &lt;strong&gt;detached&lt;/strong&gt; adjunct from any lower position than that of subject. As to whether &lt;em&gt;Green with envy, Bound in leather&lt;/em&gt;, etc. &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; be analysed other than as bare (or 'small', 'reduced', 'verbless' etc.) 'clauses' (i.e.,'predications'), I agree with you that, from a Chomskian perspective, they cannot, but, even if, according to some other grammatical metatheory, they could be considered detached 'predicative' APs (PPs, NPs, etc.), instead of 'clauses', the fact would remain that &lt;em&gt;green, bound&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are 'open', &lt;strong&gt;one-place&lt;/strong&gt; 'predicates', and, unless a 'predicate' has a 'subject' argument, it is, by definition, 'unsaturated' and &lt;strong&gt;uninterpretable&lt;/strong&gt; (in the sense that any unvalued variable makes the value of the function undefinable). Hence, even if other grammatical metatheories are entitled to object to 'empty' categories like Chomsky's PRO, they still have to say somehow that the 'external' argument of &lt;em&gt;green&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bound&lt;/em&gt;, etc. (or its theta-role) is 'discharged' ('satisfied', 'saturated',... you name it) by the entity referred to by the subject of the main clause, which makes such alternative solutions and Chomsky's original one mere notational variants of each other at best! (i.e., provided the alternative solutions represent co-reference, c-command restrictions, and other principles of Control Theory in terms comparable in rigor and accuracy to Chomsky's own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-10T20:50:38.427" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T20:50:38.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20709" CreationDate="2017-01-11T17:14:16.820" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diagram here of &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/laRLs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Passive Version Of Ditransitive Active &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The diagram represents the passive version of the active ditransitive clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My aunt gave Ed a pair of shoes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passive, the direct and indirect object of the active clause are internal complements of the verb (i.e. are constituents of the VP), but “a pair of shoes” is not internalised because it is an internal complement within the VP in the corresponding active clause: its status remains the same, where “internalised” implies a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T17:29:05.110" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T17:29:05.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T18:42:28.740" Score="9" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the English Language Learners SE meta site, I'm &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/51467/2017/1/9&quot;&gt;involved in a conversation&lt;/a&gt; that I find somewhat bizarre. In the order in which they appear, here are the assertions (paraphrased with supporting quotes) made by the user with whom I started the conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The distinction between hyphens and dashes in English is not part of English or any other language:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;...dash style is [not] part of language use, whether English or any other. Of meeting some formal style prescriptions, okay, but not language qua language.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Capitalization is also not part of a language:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;...they're not part of language, they're just stylistic, like capitalisation.... 18th-c. writers in English capitalised nouns. The style changed...but the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; was unchanged.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The distinction between hyphens and dashes doesn't affect understanding: &quot; Because, like capitalisation, they don't affect understanding. They might affect us on a social level... but the reality is that our ability to communicate is unaffected.... which dash we use, or whether we use a dash at all, doesn't alter the meaning of what we're expressing...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The written word is not part of a language, but merely a &quot;representation&quot; of spoken (&quot;real&quot;) language:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;[The written word is] a representation of the language, but it's not the language. It's comparable to a map. Maps aren't the territory, they just represent it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's impossible to know a written language but not know the spoken language: &quot;Plenty people are illiterate in a language they know well, but you'll never find the opposite situation.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not only is written language not a part of the language as a whole, it's also not a separate language, so it's apparently not &quot;language&quot; at all:&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;...while you can &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; a written representation a separate language, you'll get little support from linguists (or polyglots).&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some punctuation marks &quot;have a role&quot; (?), but not hyphens and dashes, which cannot &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; affect understanding: &quot;Commas, periods, and semicolons have a role because their use can actually change interpretation. But an en dash vs a hyphen? No earthly way.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although written English (per the above) is not a separate language, it certainly &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; like one: &quot;I sympathise with your feeling that written English is a different language. Many non-native speakers suspect it comes from a different &lt;em&gt;planet&lt;/em&gt;. English spelling conventions are as bad as Gaidhlig's.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if written language is considered a &quot;dialect&quot; of the English language, the hyphen/dash distinction &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't count as part of the &quot;language&quot;, because it's &quot;essentially impossible&quot; (?) to distinguish between them when writing by hand: &quot;For one thing, it's essentially impossible to get the 'correct' length when writing by hand. Yet if text-mode English is to be called a separate dialect, then handwriting must be an example of it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impulse is to disagree with &lt;em&gt;every single one&lt;/em&gt; of these (except the point that written English has strange spelling conventions), but I have not formally studied linguistics. So while I can provide counter-examples of some of the claims that are easily analyzable (e.g. I've provided examples in the thread of statements that could cause confusion if dashes are replaced with hyphens), I don't really have the background to adequately address the more abstract or definitional claims with regard to how &quot;real linguists&quot; would view them. However, the user who made these claims also lacks the appropriate linguistics training to support them. (We've both admitted this ignorance in the thread.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can anyone here support or discredit these ideas, either by appealing to more rigorous and well-established definitions of the terminology involved, or by presenting some other evidence of how linguists approach these issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2041" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T12:57:56.413" Title="Are non-spoken elements, such as capitalization and punctuation mark usage, part of the English language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20768" CreationDate="2017-01-11T19:34:25.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being a linguist, I agree with all of them except for #5 (which is untrue).  Written language is a late-developing technological development -- through most of its evolution, language has been spoken only (or sung).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'll suggest to you that it doesn't matter, from a scientific perspective.  Scientific theories are generally taken to define their own subject matter.  If quantum mechanics is found to provide an explanation of the origin of galaxies, no one will object that galaxies are the proper domain of astronomy and not of physics.  The explanation comes first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if it should happen that the next big linguistic theory gives a central place to punctuation, linguists will have to change their minds and concede to writing a less peripheral place in the analysis of human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, if you look at the theories of human language currently under discussion, you'll see that there is no appeal to writing at all.  So far, there is no support for writing playing any essential role in human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T19:44:48.590" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T19:44:48.590" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20768" CreationDate="2017-01-11T19:59:58.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of hyphens and dashes could be considered part of a language's &lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt;, literally its &quot;correct writing&quot;. Orthography encompasses everything from the alphabet to spelling to capitalization to punctuation, and is certainly a part of language &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;. But whether it's an intrinsic part of the language itself is up for debate. Some languages have multiple orthographies, and spoken language can be transcribed in a phonetic notation without any reference to the orthography, but you might also plausibly be reading this English text with no knowledge of its spoken pronunciation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One idea about this is that there are multiple &quot;levels&quot; of language: there's the ideal Platonic representation of English in your mind (&lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;), and then at a different level it can be represented as written text or audible speech or Shavian transcription or... (&lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt;). This is a very clean and elegant analysis, but there's also evidence that spoken and written language are different levels: infants learn to speak (or sign) significantly before they learn to write, for one. So written and spoken language are not entirely equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Capitalization is also a part of orthography. German orthography for instance specifies that nouns must be capitalized, and also that the phoneme /x/ is written «ch», and that «ß» is a part of the alphabet, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between different types of dashes can sometimes be important, but people who are not typesetters usually don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a counterexample, written language can certainly affect spoken language, through phenomena like &lt;em&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/em&gt; (when something changes because people think it's wrong, even if it isn't). The «th» in &quot;clothes&quot;, the «l» in &quot;falcon&quot;, the «h» in &quot;forehead&quot;, the «k» in &quot;ski&quot;, and many others used to be silent in English. But due to the spelling, people now usually pronounce them. Using their metaphor, you wouldn't expect a misleading map to actually cause changes in the territory, with lakes appearing suddenly due to a blue spot on the map.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can read Ancient Greek, but my pronunciation is atrocious and I doubt I could find a toilet in ancient Athens. To a lesser extent, I can read the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants in Hindi far more easily than I can hear it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Usually written English isn't considered a separate language from spoken English, for instance. Whether or not the orthography is truly part of English can, again, be debated, but even if it's separate, it's not a language in and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most people wouldn't notice the difference, especially in the age of ASCII text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English orthography is indeed an enormous mess. Usually there are historical reasons for the weirdnesses, such as the Great Vowel Shift, but this is little help to a child trying to memorize irregular spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Handwritten text tends to be a bit sloppier than typewritten text in certain ways. The precise width of different dashes is one of them. I very much doubt they could be distinguished in my handwriting, or that of most people I know.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T19:59:58.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-11T20:06:41.863" Score="3" ViewCount="6358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't help but notice word pairs between Arabic and some European languages  that seem to be cognate, such as: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Sabah&lt;/em&gt; &quot;seven&quot;/ German &lt;em&gt;Sieben&lt;/em&gt; also &quot;seven&quot;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ktab&lt;/em&gt; &quot;book&quot;/ English &lt;em&gt;tablet&lt;/em&gt; (both something written on)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;hadith&lt;/em&gt; &quot;saying&quot;/ Italian &lt;em&gt;ditto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;say&quot;&#xA;and to me the most obvious&#xA;&lt;em&gt;kafir&lt;/em&gt; literally &quot;one who covers/English &lt;em&gt;cover&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;If the answer to my question is &quot;no&quot;, then how could these word pairs exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14921" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T19:16:57.597" Title="Are Semitic and Indo-European languages at all related?" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20768" CreationDate="2017-01-11T20:27:11.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you're already aware, in one sense, this could be said to be just as trivial as any other terminology issue. Some people use one definition, other people use another, and it doensn’t really matter as long as you know what definition each person uses. I think it's silly to argue that English language learners cannot benefit from questions and answers about orthography. The way linguists define language has to do with certain ideas about &quot;linguistics&quot; as a scientific discipline, and what its proper object of study should be; I don't think it's very relevant to people who aren't trying to study language scientifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think to linguists, the most important characteristic of &quot;language&quot; is its universality: in every known human culture, language exists and is universal among healthy adults. All healthy children successfully acquire language somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech is related to it: everyone agrees that speech is somehow related to “language”. Writing is obviously related to speech, and since I think “related to” is transitive, I think we can actually say for sure that writing is related to language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as you’ve noted, some people don’t like to say that writing “is” language. Why might this be? Well, for one thing, writing is very obviously not universal. Also, as far as I know no child acquires writing before acquiring language in some other modality. Obviously adults who already have acquired language can learn how to read or write some other, non-native tongue without learning how it sounds (although my impression is that empirical inquiry shows this to be a sub-par strategy for gaining competence), but that's irrelevant. Now, this doesn’t actually prove that writing can’t be part of language. But if language is universal and writing is not, it follows that the existence of language does not depend on the existence of writing, or come from it at the level of the individual. Pretty much all evidence also points to language being older than writing historically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for stressing the unimportance of writing to language might be to counter a misconception that I think is thought to be common among laypeople: the idea that speech is a debased or degraded derivative of writing, or that writing is closer to language than speech is. (If people do tend to have this idea, it might be because it’s common in literate societies for individuals to encounter words in their written form before ever hearing them spoken.) And one easy way of stressing that “language does not come from writing” is to say “writing isn’t language”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, so I said that it’s important that language is universal, but what is it? As far as I know, we don’t really know for sure (in an interesting way, beyond the obvious). We know bits and pieces, but not the whole thing. That's why there's such a diversity of theories. We can get data about language from both speech and writing. Some theoretical reasons for preferring speech over writing as a source of data about language is that speech is much more commonly used, on both a personal and a societal level, and it’s the first and most robust thing children acquire (and language acquisition is one of the important fields of study). Some theoretical reasons for preferring writing over speech as a data source is that it’s easier to collect written data than it is to collect spoken data, and writing generally has more examples of complicated structures than speech (some kinds of complicated structures basically never occur in spontaneous speech; although then again, there are also different viewpoints about the value of linguistic data from spontaneous sources vs. linguistic data that is consciously created).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study of punctuation &amp;amp;c is hardly the only thing that can be distinguished in this manner from the study of “real language”. There are also facts about spoken language that are likely to seem (theoretically) uninteresting to many linguists (= language scientists); which specific facts these are probably differ based on the linguist, but for example, there’s a remark Noam Chomsky made comparing sociolinguistics, which mainly deals with observations about variation in speech,  to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eDwaBQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA57&amp;amp;lpg=PA57&amp;amp;dq=noam%20chomsky%20%22collect%20butterflies%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=LFGjy2coBM&amp;amp;sig=aiX4QU7Y24ut-FKsXJdjFvo3MNg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwidmpm477rRAhVo6YMKHRAECAIQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22collect%20butterflies%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;butterfly-collecting&lt;/a&gt;; his point as I understand it is that natural science involves the description of important theoretical principles rather than the cataloguing of facts about the natural word (which Chomsky calls “natural history”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking through the linked comments a bit, a few more observations that I think might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;languages are nothing but social convention--every aspect of them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the idea that language can be meaningfully explained as just &quot;social convention&quot; is somethign that linguists (at least, those of certain schools) would tend to disagree with. Linguists like Chomsky are interested in the &quot;language faculty&quot; or &quot;language module&quot;, the thing that is behind the human capacity for language use; what exactly this &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; is still not pinned down but it is generally believed to have a lot to do with biology, neurology etc. Obviously it's related to society as well but that doesn't mean it can be entirely reduced to social elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T20:46:37.210" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T20:46:37.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2017-01-11T21:44:55.263" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Semitic_languages&quot;&gt;controversial hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; about a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Semitic languages. The Wikipedia article that deals with it concedes that it &quot;has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times&quot;. At the end it tries to salvage the hypothesis by moving the goalposts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Indo-Semitic hypothesis has thus undergone a paradigm shift. From&#xA;  Lepsius in 1836 through the mid-20th century, the question asked was&#xA;  whether Indo-European and Semitic are related or unrelated, and in&#xA;  attempting to answer this question Indo-European and Semitic were&#xA;  compared directly. This now appears naive, and the relevant units of&#xA;  comparison instead appear to be Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic, the&#xA;  immediate precursors of Indo-European (controversially) and Semitic&#xA;  (uncontroversially). This revised schema still has a long road to go&#xA;  if it is to win general acceptance from the linguistic community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in short: no, there's no generally accepted evidence of a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Semitic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the second question:  how could these word pairs exist? The thing is, unless the pairs can be shown to be phonetically related in a &lt;em&gt;systematic&lt;/em&gt; way, no amount of them can be used to infer a genetic relationship. In other words, they are just coincidences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look for them, in fact, you'll find that there are many more such word pairs, not only between English and Arabic but between any pair of languages, of whatever family you might choose. There's a very thorough article on this (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm&quot;&gt;How likely are chance resemblances between languages?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) in case you find it hard to believe. The trick is relaxing the rules for considering &lt;em&gt;word x&lt;/em&gt; cognate to &lt;em&gt;word y&lt;/em&gt; (or starting without rules altogether). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method_(linguistics)&quot;&gt;Comparative method&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_comparison&quot;&gt;Mass comparison&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T21:44:55.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20743" CreationDate="2017-01-12T00:29:57.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Akkadian šēdu is probably cognate with Arabic saʽd “happiness”. Aramaic šēδā and Hebrew šēδ are most probably borrowings from Akkadian, with reversal of the meaning (“good spirit” &gt; “pagan god” &gt; “evil spirit”).The proto-Semitic form would then be *s1aʽd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dukhrana.com/lexicon//lookup.php?p=748&amp;amp;l=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dukhrana.com/lexicon//lookup.php?p=748&amp;amp;l=0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T09:23:08.187" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T09:23:08.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19946" CreationDate="2017-01-12T01:51:50.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Givon does seem a little unclear here.  I think he needs to allow for the traditional predicate nominal.  In &quot;She is a teacher&quot;, &quot;is a teacher&quot; means &quot;teaches&quot; -- it's a predicate, not a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other cases of non-referentials he's concerned with, a nominal which would ordinarily refer fails to refer to something in our real world because it's in a special context, but a predicate nominal doesn't refer at all.  It predicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Now, don't ask me about the reference of &quot;it&quot; in &quot;She's a teacher, and it's a noble profession,&quot; or about &quot;who&quot; in &quot;She's a teacher who loves her work.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T02:07:13.787" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T02:07:13.787" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2017-01-12T09:44:24.420" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really want to pursue this line of enquiry you need to compare proto-Afro-Asiatic with proto-Indo-European. You cannot just compare Arabic with English or Italian. Taking the etymology even a small step further demolishes most of your examples. E.g. Italian detto (not “ditto”) comes from Latin dictum, which does not look at all like Arabic ḥadīϑ. The only one of your examples that is even debatable is the word for “seven”, where Semitic *šabʽ has been compared with Indo-European *septṃ, either as evidence for a “Nostratic” super-family or else for an ancient borrowing in one direction or the other. But even in this case, coincidence is the most likely explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T09:44:24.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-12T14:34:33.270" Score="5" ViewCount="1516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never heard about those (pre-)historical languages before hearing about them in the internet. For instance, proto-slavic would be the ancestor of all slavic languages, and proto-indo-european the ancestor of all indo-european languages (including proto-slavic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is there any evidences that such languages actually existed at some point in history, or are them just an unverified theory made up by linguists ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10173" LastEditorUserId="10173" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T15:24:32.393" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T05:12:25.890" Title="Is there evidence that &quot;proto-&quot; languages actually existed?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20781" CreationDate="2017-01-12T14:39:24.123" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a variation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/19324/12637&quot;&gt;this same question in the Spanish Language&lt;/a&gt; site, as I was told it was probably better suited here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was learning Japanese (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), my Japanese teacher told us that she had a hard time trying to tell apart the numbers &quot;seis&quot; and &quot;siete&quot; when she was learning Spanish, because both sounded quite similar to her. The whole class bursted in laughter (as that was her main purpose, to tell a funny story), and I do not know why I kept that anecdote in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time passed and now I am a father with a two-year-old son, and every time he tries to count to ten, he always skips &quot;siete&quot; and goes from &quot;seis&quot; to &quot;ocho&quot;, which reminded me what my Japanese teacher told us that day. Maybe he skips &quot;siete&quot; because of the phonetical similarity with the previous number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We (the Spanish speakers) are not aware of that (as far as I know), so I would like to ask: do &quot;seis&quot; and &quot;siete&quot; really have such a phonetical similarity as to pose a challenge to tell them apart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this question is not addressed to those who speak a similar language. English also has &quot;six&quot; and &quot;seven&quot; with the same potential similarity, as have other close languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14927" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:53:50.217" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T15:55:23.383" Title="Are the Spanish numbers “seis” and “siete” phonetically similar?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20778" CreationDate="2017-01-12T14:52:54.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Similarity&quot; depends on the listener (see also this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20159/do-the-ipa-consonants-v-and-w-sound-similar/20160#20160&quot;&gt;Do the IPA consonants /v/ and /w/ sound similar?&lt;/a&gt; and other answers to the question), a listener not used to some difference in their native language has difficulties with such a difference in a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is not true for a 2-years-old native learner. Counting up to 10 is quite a challenge for him and I am not surprised that he doesn't yet gets it right. I won't draw further conclusions from the evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T14:52:54.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-12T15:18:16.610" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;My father is a native Spanish speaker. He struggles with English pronunciation, and even though he has studied many English courses, he seems to be stuck. Once I talked with a phonetics teacher, with whom I don't have any contact now, and he told me that if an English learner learns to pronounce well in the early stages (or in any stage) of their learning process, then they would learn more rapidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that he told me, that if a person pronounces well a certain word, when someone else says the word, then the brain would recognize and understand the word much quicker than if the person would pronounce it wrongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had luck in finding papers that support this idea. Does anyone have any references to research on this topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS I write here and not in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ell.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;http://ell.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; because this site looks more scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T15:18:16.610" Title="Does a good pronunciation improve one's ability to learn a language?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20778" CreationDate="2017-01-12T15:55:23.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of Japanese, I find it strange that they would be perceived as very similar. I mean, of course they have a couple of things in common, namely /s/ and two vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while Japanese transcription of foreign words can be rather quirky, due to the very constrained phonotactics of the Japanese language (which is mostly restricted to a CV, i.e. consonant followed by vowel, structure, with exceptions), these two words would sound different when transposed into Japanese phonology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;seis → セイス (seisu)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;siete → シェテ (syete/shete) or less naturally セィエテ (siete)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your child, I guess that to someone who is just learning to count, the similarity in the initial sound may be enough to get confused and skip one. After all, the initial sound is the strongest intuitive indicator of similarity between words to our brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T15:55:23.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21366" CreationDate="2017-01-12T16:37:19.003" Score="6" ViewCount="1046" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/document/6591853/The-Wonder-That-is-Sanskrit-Excerpt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;claims&lt;/a&gt; that the sanskrit/devanagari pangram (with natural sanskrit phonetic alphabet order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;कः खगौघाङचिच्छौजा झाञ्ज्ञोऽटौठीडडण्ढणः।&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  तथोदधीन् पफर्बाभीर्मयोऽरिल्वाशिषां सहः॥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whose IAST transliteration is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kaḥ khagaughāṅacicchaujā jhāñjño'ṭauṭhīḍaḍaṇḍhaṇaḥ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  tathodadhīn papharbābhīrmayo'rilvāśiṣāṃ sahaḥ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has a meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who is he, the lover of birds, pure in intelligence,&#xA;  expert in stealing the strength of others,&#xA;  leader among the destroyers of the enemies,&#xA;  the steadfast, the fearless, the one who filled the ocean?&#xA;  He is the king Maya, the repository of the blessings&#xA;  that can destroy the foes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a simple verifiable proof/analysis for sanskrit agnostics, that it is true and not a joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(For comparison, this is how sanskrit consonant and semi-consonant order looks कखगघङचछजझञटठडढणतथदधनपफबभमयरलवशषसह, kk&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;gg&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;ṅcc&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;jj&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;ñṭṭ&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;ḍḍ&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;ṇtt&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;dd&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;npp&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;bb&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;myrlvśṣsh)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1332" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T09:13:18.710" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T08:37:04.230" Title="Sanskrit pangram joke?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;language-games&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20777" CreationDate="2017-01-12T16:50:15.783" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems confused. For one thing, you never define what you mean by “such languages”. A precise formulation of the concepts is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No reasonable linguist would support the idea that, e.g. the resemblance between English “brother” and Latin “frater” (and contemporary French “frère” etc.) is just due to chance. There are too many parallel cases of words with similar meaning in English and Latin that look very similar if you just apply some (relatively) simply formulated sound laws; we call these words &quot;cognates&quot;. (If you’re interested in historical linguistics, you need to familiarize yourself with the concepts of sound laws and cognacy if you haven’t already.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we’ve established these resemblances are not due to chance. The simplest remaining explanation is that these similar words originally come from one source. (There are other conceivable explanations for non-chance resemblances, e.g. “contact caused convergence of these words’ forms”, but that’s prima facie less likely and there’s no reason to suppose that is the explanation in general.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, how these words came to be in multiple extant languages from one original source is a complicated issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much everyone agrees that languages, in general, seem to change continuously. For example, there is a language called “English” today, that is a continuation of a language that existed 200 years ago that was also called “English” which was slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it doesn’t seem to be common for languages to just appear out of thin air (the only examples that I know of of this apparently happening are sign languages, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems reasonable to suppose that the spoken languages we see today did not originate &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; any time recently, but developed somehow from past languages, and probably they developed specifically by processes of continuous change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If English developed from past languages by continuous change, and Latin developed from past languages by continuous change, the simplest way of explaining a body of shared vocabulary is to say that if you go far enough back, the language that was going to develop into English was the same as the language that was going to develop into Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radically different hypotheses like “mass borrowing of the lexicon from one language to another distinct language” are more complicated and would have to be justified by some kind of evidence of this process occuring. But we don’t have evidence that indicates that English was aways a distinct language from Latin, or that the English words cognate to Latin words were borrowed into English at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously there are disputes about the details, like “tree models” vs. “wave models” but these should not be misunderstood as disputes about the existence of a relationship between languages in the same family; they are just different models of how the languages diverged and diversified over time. Just as how disputes in biology about the mechanisms of evolution don’t affect the consensus that it occured, disputes in linguistics about the mechanisms of language change don’t affect the consensus that Indo-European languages are all related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, linguists are extremely aware that reconstructions, e.g. forms like *bʰréh₂tēr for the common ancestor of &quot;brother&quot; and &quot;frère&quot;, don't give a perfect description of an actually existing past language. That is the point bytebuster is making in the comments; nobody maintains that our reconstruction actually existed as a real language at some point in prehistory. The reconstruction, if it is done correctly, represents &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; information about prehistoric spoken forms that has been preserved in extant languages. It's unfortunate that the &quot;Proto-X&quot; names are often used for both concepts; I believe the hypothesized actual spoken language/dialect group is sometimes distinguished with the name of &quot;Common X&quot; (e.g. &quot;Proto-Indo-European&quot; would be our reconstruction of &quot;Common Indo-European&quot;, which is whatever was actually spoken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess another related issue is how variable the common spoken source was e.g. is it more accurate to call Common Indo-European a &quot;language&quot; or a &quot;dialect continuum&quot;, but that's just dealing with a matter that is fuzzy even today: the distinction between &quot;language&quot; and &quot;dialect&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T19:07:04.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T19:07:04.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-12T17:57:49.887" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;hello could someone give an example to coda consonant in german language  referring to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS Chapter 16&lt;/a&gt; : here is what I did but it might be wrong : Value: Coda consonant. A coda is a post-vocalic consonant. In particular absence of a long vowel, coda consonants are used to add weight to a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: In German words like ‘Tor’ [tʰoːɐ̯] ('gate') or in ‘Würde’ [ˈvʏɐ̯də], the consonant /r/ sound takes up vowel form /ɐ̯/. So here, the /r/ sound is behaving like a coda consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what do you think let me know your opinions! either correct what I did or come up with something new please!!! thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-12T18:10:49.987" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T18:28:52.633" Title="an example to coda consonant in german language wals chapter 16" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;rhythm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20784" CreationDate="2017-01-12T18:15:40.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A coda consonant is just a consonant at the end of a syllable, not more and not less. So the English word &quot;less&quot; has a coda consonant /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The special development of syllable-final r in modern German has nothing to do with the definition of a coda consonant (and one might argue that the syllable does not end in a consonant at all in this case, but in a kind of diphthong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T18:15:40.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-12T18:46:26.040" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently doing research on the salience of &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; as an emphatic marker in Southern varieties of British English as illustrated in (1). I'm comparing this with the salience of &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; as a habitual marker especially prominent in Southwestern varieties of British English. These varieties use &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; as a marker of habitual aspect similar to &quot;used to&quot;, as illustrated in (2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &quot;Don't you think Peter ran very fast?&quot; - &quot;Yes, he did run very fast, indeed.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &quot;I used to go to school every day.&quot; ~ &quot;I did go to school every day.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm conducting this research with the help of FRED, the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects. (Here, have some corpus data: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fred.ub.uni-freiburg.de/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm doing statistical research, I'd like to know if there are any surveys out there indicating a percentage of how frequent emphatic and habitual &quot;did&quot; are?&#xA;I know the habitual use is much less common and regionally restricted, yet some numbers would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14928" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T18:46:26.040" Title="&quot;Did&quot; as a habitual / emphatic marker in Southern varieties of British English" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20789" CreationDate="2017-01-13T00:32:09.360" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems every language (that I know, at least) has a dialect that it considers more &quot;neutral&quot; than others. Like General American, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent are these dialects actually more neutral than others, and to what extent is it merely what we're used to hearing in the media? I'm sure there is some kind of scientific consensus on the matter, but I seem to be having trouble finding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T02:25:14.237" Title="Is there such a thing as a &quot;neutral dialect&quot;?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20788" CreationDate="2017-01-13T01:45:38.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Crikey, mate (pronounced &quot;moit&quot;), there's nothing neutral about General American! But let's say, within the US, there is a somewhat-identifiable dialect that people are and have been moving towards for a while, which we can call the prestige dialect, which is adopted by newscasters. There seems to be a similar situation in England. I'm not sure about Canadian dialects, except that US General English is not neutral there. Maybe a reasonable test of &quot;neutrality&quot; would be to ask people, listening to a particular dialect, whether that person &quot;talks like you&quot;; then the more people that are thought to &quot;talk like you&quot;, the more neutral that dialect is (if you can figure out how to devise the sample). General Canadian English would probably be more neutral to the US audience than the classical regional dialects (Southern, New York, Chicago, Boston). I don't know, though, whether General American would be judged as universally further away than, errh, Labrador English. I'm pretty sure that General American is as un-Australian to Australians as General Australian is to Americans. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one would be hard-pressed to say that there is a neutral dialect of Norwegian. There are the literary standards Nynorsk and Bokmål, but nobody actually speaks those languages (as far as I can tell), instead they speak whatever people in the area speak, and there isn't a huge social push for everyone to talk Oslo talk. Parisian French is favored in many parts of the world, and so on. Especially for very big national language, there tends to be a particular variant that is favored, though it may differ by country. (E.g. Swahili in Tanzania vs. Kenya; English in the US vs. GB; French in Canada vs. France).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right concept to attach to that language form is not &quot;neutrality&quot;, it is &quot;prestige&quot;. However, the idea of &quot;neutrality&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; enter into the discussion, because people usually think that the prestige dialect is how the language should be, i.e. it is purest, and hasn't got a bunch of other stuff added in that corrupts it from its natural, neutral state. This is clearest, to me, when you consider clashing notions of neutrality / prestige in different nations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T02:25:14.237" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T02:25:14.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1272" CreationDate="2017-01-13T01:53:47.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will probably find the reference you need in this paper by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&amp;amp;fp=jphil&amp;amp;id=jphil_1945_0042_0014_0383_0388&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Peirce's Sixty-Six Signs&quot;, &lt;em&gt;The Journal of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 42, Issue 14, July 1945 &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2019195&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOI&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The authors make a detailed presentation of various attempts made by Peirce to classify signs. The triadic approach was just one of them. All the relevant references to Peirce's &lt;em&gt;Collected Papers&lt;/em&gt; are provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T16:41:08.607" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T16:41:08.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-13T08:17:25.190" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17306/sources-on-average-retention-rate-of-language-based-on-time&quot;&gt;my earlier post&lt;/a&gt;, I'm going to be teaching foreign languages in some capacity and was advised by a board of education that I ought to understand and incorporate foreign language edu. standards into my curriculum. They only named ACTFL, but obviously there are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've recently gone through the ACTFL standards, and read through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Readiness Standards&lt;/a&gt; (WRS) document, along with the WRS for Chinese and Spanish specifically. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rosettastone.com/k12/education-standards&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rosetta Stone&lt;/a&gt; seems to adhere to 6 standards, both foreign and domestic. DuoLingo seems to measure against performance on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perpetualworks.com/webcape/overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WebCape Exam&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duolingo.com/comment/186923&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;), while they &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duolingo.com/comment/1980768&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loosely state that their users achieve Common Euro Framework A2 level&lt;/a&gt; after completing their learning tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm focused first on domestic US audience, should I still understand foreign standards like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/cadre1_en.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Euro Framework of Reference&lt;/a&gt;? Across the curricula I've seen (local edu. institutions and software alike), there doesn't seem to be a common standard adherence. If not, can I assume ACTFL is the de facto domestic standard to follow for K-12 students? I haven't seen any of these curricula adhere much to AP standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T08:17:25.190" Title="required standards for US domestic foreign language education" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20793" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-13T09:17:35.537" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T09:17:35.537" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T09:17:35.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20794" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-13T09:17:35.537" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning language games including word games (like pangrams or palindromes), constrained writing (like lipograms or spoonerism). " OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-14T23:21:37.290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T23:21:37.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20406" CreationDate="2017-01-13T10:06:01.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my view, there is a very simple argument you can deploy to justify the claim that in &lt;em&gt;He himself&lt;/em&gt; the head is &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; (assuming &lt;em&gt;he himself&lt;/em&gt; is a single NP/DP constituent, which is a possible analysis, but not necessarily the right or only one, since &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; need not appear next to &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;): if the contrary were true, the whole NP/DP would &lt;strong&gt;inherit&lt;/strong&gt; the grammatical properties of &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;, rather than those of &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; carry nominative Case, and therefore could not be a legitimate subject of a finite clause like &lt;em&gt;...he himself could enjoy the corn.&lt;/em&gt; Furthermore, if &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; were the head, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; would have to be an optional 'adjunct' (note that it cannot be a complement, since &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; is saturated), and, since optional adjuncts, by definition, need not be present, &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; could by himself act as a DP/NP in subject position. Apart from the case issue that would raise, it would follow that an anaphor need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have a binding antecedent c-commanding it in the smallest clause that contains the reflexive, which, of course, violates Principle A of Binding Theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there are at least &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; rather solid arguments in support of the standard view that only &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; can be the head of the construction &lt;em&gt;he himself&lt;/em&gt; (if it really is a 'construction' - a constituent, say at surface level - and has to be analysed as a single NP/DP). In case, however, you should remain skeptical and ask &quot;How do you know that &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; nominative?&quot;, the answer would be straightforward: if it were, * &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Himself&lt;/strong&gt; could enjoy the corn&lt;/em&gt; should be a mere violation of Principle A of Binding Theory and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Him&lt;/strong&gt; could enjoy the corn&lt;/em&gt; should be a possible English sentence, but, of course, it is not. Finally, if you were to ask me, &quot;How, come, can &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; carry accusative case at all if there is neither a preposition nor a verb governing it whether it follows &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; or appears clause finally?&quot;, I can contemplate two possible answers: a), perhaps the most plausible one, that there is a &lt;strong&gt;hidden&lt;/strong&gt; preposition (&lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;, or maybe &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;?) (cf. &lt;em&gt;He did it &lt;strong&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;He did it &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; himself&lt;/em&gt;), as there arguably is in cases like &lt;em&gt;I saw her &lt;strong&gt;Saturday/last weekend&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or b) that accusative is the 'elsewhere', or 'default', case (since nominative and genitive are assigned only in very specific contexts, subject of a finite verb or specifier of a Determiner or a noun, depending on your preferences concerning NP structure, respectively), an approach that the existence of 'absolute accusatives' in Latin and other languages could arguably endorse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T15:58:02.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T15:58:02.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-13T12:47:47.053" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very rare phenomenon I'm talking about is a part of a word that indicates that the word encompasses a number of hyponyms, which are arrived at by replacing that part. It is probably easier to understand by example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;veg*n&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning &quot;either a vegan or a vegetarian&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;foocubus&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning &quot;either a succubus or an incubus&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kosov@&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning &quot;either the spelling &lt;em&gt;Kosovo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Kosova&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish &lt;strong&gt;Chican@&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning &quot;either a Chicano or a Chicana)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the &quot;morpheme&quot; (if you can call it that) &lt;strong&gt;*&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;foo&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;@&lt;/strong&gt; in the examples above? Has this phenomenon ever been the topic of an academic study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T12:47:47.053" Title="Is there a name for the replaceable wildcard &quot;morpheme&quot;?" Tags="&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20757" CreationDate="2017-01-13T13:47:50.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1960’s, the linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Stokoe&lt;/a&gt; showed that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; is a full fledged language, and subsequent linguistic studies confirmed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sign languages&lt;/a&gt; share all the characteristics of oral languages (expect the obvious sign/sound difference), and there is no reason to consider them differently. So ASL is “langue”, and the concrete signs used fore example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/hu3cT1TKPtQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; are “parole”, in a way similar to the analogue situations in English or any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By sign languages, I mean of course the languages used by deaf communities. The common misunderstanding that they’re not true language, might come from the fact that it is common for people to express simple notions by gestures (finger-pointing, expressing you’re tired, etc.), but this kind of signs are not a sign language, they are at best the equivalents of utterance like  “Oh !” and “Yummy !” in English ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, sign languages can really express any notion an oral language can. I can’t personally speak any sign language, but, to give an example which impressed me, I have seen a live translation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; of a PhD defence on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophotonics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;biophotonics&lt;/a&gt;, where notions ranging from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;axon&lt;/a&gt; anatomy to optical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interfermometry&lt;/a&gt; were discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T13:47:50.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2017-01-13T15:27:26.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it was not linked in the other answer, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ielex.mpi.nl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IELex database&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/search?query=Swadesh&amp;amp;sort_by=search_api_relevance&amp;amp;sort_order=ASC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL.org&lt;/a&gt; also shares many Swadesh lists, some pdfs, xmls &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.panlex.org/db/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;panlex.org&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;171 languages in gdoc online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://kurdishdna.blogspot.co.at/2013/03/swadesh-list-of-indo-european-languages.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kurdishdna.blogspot.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many indigenous American languages &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/search.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ailla.utexas.org&lt;/a&gt;. Search for Wordlists. Mostly as mp3 or wav files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Flying did you ever get round to compiling those lists together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastEditorUserId="13931" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T11:47:12.577" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T11:47:12.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11037" CreationDate="2017-01-13T16:06:09.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt; has indexed a lot of Swadesh lists. Just enter &quot;Swadesh list&quot; in the search slit (or use this &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/search?q=swadesh%20list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookmarked query&lt;/a&gt;) to get (at the moment of the writing) 1339 search hits to many different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T16:06:09.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19973" CreationDate="2017-01-13T16:06:35.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Lee and user6726 have given excellent answers above. Though I think the OP's use of semantic criterion isn't completely wrong: The problem is, as Prof. Lee has pointed out above, that he assumes there must be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that allow us to deduce what a 'verb' is like, and such conditions don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But semantic criteria &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; helpful in identifying prototypical verbs in a language. When we start analysing a language, after all, we have no idea what morphosyntactic criteria there are for us to identify word classes with. Words with similar functional, morphological and syntactic behaviour as these prototypical verbs would then be classified as 'verbs'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givón (2001) gave this set of criteria for identifying prototype verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High temporal instability&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Great temporal compactness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Events involving concrete participant nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often great complexity in meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either agentive or about mental activity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So once we've identified a set of prototype verbs in a language - e.g. 'kill', 'stab', 'fight', 'realise', etc., we look at what distributional and morphosyntactic features they have. Unlike the structuralists, though, we don't treat them as necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, we treat them as violable rules. A verb will be like most other verbs in most ways - but there will always be outliers which lack one or two morphosyntactic features!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of these criteria (there are a plenty in the literature), verbs in English can be put in the syntactic frame 'They will _' (for intransitive verbs) and 'They will _ it' (for transitive verbs), they can inflect for past tense and for the third person singular in the present, they can take perfect and progressive forms, and they take on at least one argument except in imperatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs don't satisfy all of these criteria and are therefore less prototypical verbs. Often, these are verbs that have experienced a high degree of grammaticalisation, such as the auxiliary verbs 'can, should, may', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the American structuralist tradition (Bloomfield and his followers - Hockett, Bloch, etc.), meaning was not thought to be part of the language, and syntactic categories had to be uncovered through 'discovery procedures', and that means, according to their extreme empiricist views, that there must be a set of distributional criteria picking out all and only members of a particular word class. For them, as Prof. Lee mentioned, verbs must all have something in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is no longer believed to be the case in the linguistic community. There is nothing that all verbs have in common. As Donohue (2008) noted,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Word classes (syntactic categories, parts of speech) are aggregate patterns of morpho-syntactic behaviours corresponding in some way to semantic prototypes&#xA;  (with greater or lesser amounts of overlap between categories in different  languages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&#xA;Donohue, M. (2008). Covert word classes: Seeking your own syntax in Tukang Besi. &lt;em&gt;Studies in Language&lt;/em&gt;, 32(3), 590-609&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givón, T. (2001). &lt;em&gt;Syntax: an introduction&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 1). John Benjamins Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T06:53:09.800" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T06:53:09.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12079" CreationDate="2017-01-13T16:59:41.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some confusion in the use of the term &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; here. The idea that the lecturer is explaining goes back to Frege's notions of &lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bedeutung&lt;/em&gt;. The latter is better translated as 'reference', while the former is 'sense', rather than 'meaning'. English &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; has been historically used to translate both of Frege's terms, so that it became unsuitable for both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this proviso, we can better understand what the lecturer says: a phrase can be thought of as a mode of presenting some object. Different modes of presentation can be used with reference to the same real-world object. For example, &lt;em&gt;the winner of the 2016 presidential election&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the husband of Melania Knauss&lt;/em&gt;, though having different senses, refer to the same person: Donald Trump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T16:59:41.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19189" CreationDate="2017-01-13T17:22:53.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is different between English on the one hand, and such ancient Indo-European languages as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, is that the latter had a very free constituent order: not only the order of constituents within the sentence was free, but even the &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; order within a phrase was almost unrestrained. (Incidentally, this why reading Latin poetry can be often so tough.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a similar linguistic background it is clear why Ancient grammarians did not develop any notion of syntactic structure that could be comparable with the one developed by modern syntacticians who initially used mainly English as their only object-language. I personally would say that Greek and Sanskrit lacked syntactic constituents at all (but I imagine there are many who would object). What these languages obviously did not lack was the semantic dependencies between words (such as the dependency of the arguments from the verb). Indeed, Pāṇini developed a very refined theory of what the Generativism calls &quot;theta-roles&quot; and Charles Fillmore used to call &quot;deep cases&quot;. On the other hand, there is no mention of &lt;em&gt;syntactic&lt;/em&gt; constituency in Pāṇini at all, to my knowledge. Not to mention Greek and Latin grammarians who usually were not interested in anything else than morphology and semantics (and a bit of phonology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD: This &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.it/books?id=mydolrE-PPkC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=it#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book by Graffi&lt;/a&gt; could contain pertinent information concerning the period from the beginning of the XIX century onwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-01-13T19:40:38.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-13T19:40:38.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20807" CreationDate="2017-01-14T01:09:24.247" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; in Cape Verdean Creole look parallel to the Portuguese words &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lá&lt;/em&gt;. There's just one problem: &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; are opposites. &lt;em&gt;Li&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;here&quot;, while &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;there&quot;. There are differences between &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lá&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; being used to refer to locations near the person being spoken to, but it certainly doesn't mean &quot;here&quot;; Portuguese uses &lt;em&gt;aqui&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cá&lt;/em&gt; to express that, and Creole uses &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; to express &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; come from &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt;? If so, how did it come to mean the opposite? If not, what is its etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5514" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T01:23:47.647" Title="How did &quot;li&quot; come to mean &quot;here&quot; in Cape Verdean Creole?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20806" CreationDate="2017-01-14T01:23:47.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with these languages, so I can't give a complete answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to point out that &quot;opposites&quot; is a pretty strong term for two words with such similar meanings as &quot;here&quot; and &quot;there&quot;. They're both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonstrative#Distal_and_proximal_demonstratives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;demonstratives&lt;/a&gt;; it's relatively simple for demonstratives to change with regard to proximal/distal usage. E.g. the French word &quot;ici&quot; means &quot;here&quot;, and you'll usually see &quot;là&quot; defined as &quot;there&quot;, but in fact &quot;là&quot; is also commonly used to express the idea of &quot;here&quot;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/11982/why-use-l%C3%A0-instead-of-ici&quot;&gt;Why use là instead of ici?&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you say Portuguese has a three-way distinction between &lt;em&gt;aqui/cá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;here&quot; (proximal), &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; &quot;there&quot; (medial), and &lt;em&gt;lá&lt;/em&gt; (distal), while Cape Verdean Creole has a two-way system &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt; (proximal) vs. &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; (distal). It's very easy for this to develop from the Portuguese system by simply dropping the Portuguese proximal pronouns and shifting the remaining ones to fill their semantic space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T01:23:47.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20705" CreationDate="2017-01-14T11:57:55.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE *h2(e)r or *ar- 'thus, so' is the PIE root. Don't think though the Persian word derives from it. Phrygian has ἔρα which is a cognate to the Greek ἆρα.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T11:57:55.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T14:08:47.340" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for languages (as many as possible :P) &lt;strong&gt;outside the Mainland Southeast Asia region&lt;/strong&gt; in which there is a single morpheme performing two roles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Clausal nominalisation. I will define this as the process whereby a clause is turned into a nominal whose referrent is the event referred to by the head of the clause. An example is 'that' in 'that the enemy destroyed the city'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Subject/agent nominalisation. I will define this as the process whereby a clause is turned into a nominal whose referrent is the S or A argument of the original clause. An example is 'what' in 'what destroyed the city'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This single morpheme can be affixed to the verb, cliticised at the end of the clause, but it should have similar or identical formal behaviour in the two cases of nominalisation, and ideally, it should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allow object nominalisation. It. Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-14T16:51:30.803" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T16:51:30.803" Title="Which non-Asian languages use a single morpheme for clausal and subject/agent nominalisation?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20782" CreationDate="2017-01-14T15:51:14.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What follows is not the expected answer but a partial one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't read in details the two verses since the text is too difficult but I can claim that this extract from Sarasvatikanthabharana (2.109.263) has a regular prosodic structure. The two verses belong to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shloka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;श्लोक(śloka) type&lt;/a&gt; (following the pathyā form, the most usual).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;uu-- u--- ---- u-uu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;u-u- u--- u--- u-uu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I would be interesting in sharing my own grammatical analyze of such a beautiful piece of poetry with what has been found by other people. Please send me an e-mail if you want we work together on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T15:51:14.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15450" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:01:13.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages are full of this. The typical example of this is the genitive plural of female a-stems, which is a null morpheme. See Czech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;case: sg. / pl.&#xA;nom.: žen-a / žen-y&#xA;gen.: žen-y / žen-0&#xA;dat.: žen-ě / žen-á-m&#xA;acc.: žen-u / žen-y&#xA;voc.: žen-o / žen-y&#xA;loc.: žen-ě / žen-á-ch&#xA;ins.: žen-ou / žen-a-mi&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens elsewhere too, e.g. most masculine declensions have nominative singular as null morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In verbs, some paradigms have null morpheme meaning 2SG imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T18:01:13.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19189" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:04:46.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that the &lt;em&gt;Mashi Wentong&lt;/em&gt; (1898) discusses fronting. &quot;The “normal” subject is always called &lt;em&gt;qici&lt;/em&gt; , while the topic is called &lt;em&gt;zhuci&lt;/em&gt;, as can be seen in the analysis of sentence (4), where Zhuanyu is labeled &lt;em&gt;zhuci&lt;/em&gt;, while later, in the commentary on &lt;em&gt;shi&lt;/em&gt; 是, it is referred to as a “fronted &lt;em&gt;qici&lt;/em&gt;”&quot; (p. 66). Obviously, this is later than Ward, but perhaps worth noting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peverelli, P. (2015). The history of Modern Chinese grammar studies. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. &lt;a href=&quot;http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46504&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46504&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T19:04:46.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20822" CreationDate="2017-01-14T20:11:32.940" Score="3" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;p&gt;My name is Antonio, and I'm an undergraduate student at one of the many colleges that are focusing on language. I'm mainly studying the English language, and this is my first year of studying concepts of modern grammar. And I'm lost. I'm not looking for compassion, as my situation is not to be pitied, for I know I have to study more, read more, analyse more, I have, in fact, to work more toward understanding this rather sophisticated grammar. The problem is that I don't know where to start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm not very good with grammar, with traditional grammar. Perhaps my deficiences regarding transformational generative grammar are due my poor, shallow study of this very traditional grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to start building a base of knowledge, and from there to add more on as I'm moving through the study of grammar. Having said these, I'm bound to ask for some recommendations of books, or other publications, that could help a person that encounters generative grammar (in a sense Chomsky conceived it, for he's my main interest in my studies at college) for the first time. What texts would you recommend to start with? Some introductions, anything? &#xA;I've so far pored over ''Introduction to the Theory of Grammar'' by  Henk van Riemsdijk, a book from which I've learned about other books that can server as introductory ones, namely ''Modern Linguistics'' by Neil Smith, ''Linguistics'' by Adrian Akmajion'' and ''Introduction to Generative-transformational Syntax'' by C.L. Baker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have yet to read these books, which I will looking for, and I am curious what other sugestions might be? What are some fundamental readings? Some very good introduction studies that can initiate one for the study of generative grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much! This site is full of precious informatinons and I'm looking forward to activating on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T11:58:07.247" Title="Introduction in generative grammar" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19252" CreationDate="2017-01-14T21:05:07.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the kind of syntactic framework Carnie's textbook is written in, the NP/DP &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; can&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be an argument of (nor, consequently, receive a Theta role from) &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; reasons: 1) because that would leave the one-place predicate &lt;em&gt;foolish&lt;/em&gt; without the only (= subject) argument it &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; have, an obligatory Theta role of &lt;em&gt;foolish&lt;/em&gt; would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be assigned to/discharged by anything, and the &lt;strong&gt;Theta Criterion would be violated&lt;/strong&gt;, and 2) because that would also require &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; to be a &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt;-place predicate, whereas, of course, &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; take, and assign Theta roles to, &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; arguments, as 'arguments' are defined in both logic and P&amp;amp;P linguistics (note that the 'secondary predicate' or 'predicative' that alternative syntactic theories would claim to exist in &lt;em&gt;Wilma considers Fredrick &lt;strong&gt;foolish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would  &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be a third 'argument' of &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt;, but a 'predicate' of &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; become the subject of the passive clause (iii) &lt;em&gt;Frederick is considered t to be foolish&lt;/em&gt;, the reason is that, otherwise, &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; would receive &lt;strong&gt;no Case&lt;/strong&gt; and would &lt;strong&gt;violate the Case Filter&lt;/strong&gt;. That, in its turn, follows from the fact that passive participles like &lt;em&gt;considered&lt;/em&gt; can&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; assign accusative Case (nor any other Case) to their  complements. When the complement of &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; is a clause, as in (iii), the clause itself causes no Case Filter violation, as clauses do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; need Case, but an NP/DP object &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; need accusative Case. If &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; made passive, as in (ii), &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; can, indeed, receive accusative Case from it, no Case problem arises, and, therefore, &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;need not&lt;/strong&gt; move from its 'deep' position of subject of the infinitive &lt;em&gt;to be foolish&lt;/em&gt;. What's more, in such circumstances, &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; move &lt;strong&gt;at all&lt;/strong&gt; unless it is into a position in which no Case is assigned, e.g., the position of Topic, as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/strong&gt;, Wilma considers __ to be rather foolish&lt;/em&gt;. However, if &lt;em&gt;consider&lt;/em&gt; carries passive inflection, as in (iii), either &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt; moves into a position in which it can receive &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; Case from another Case-assigner (here: nominative, from the Tense inflection of the higher verb &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;) or the sentence violates the Case Filter and is doomed to fail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Case requirement for NP/DPs also explains why  * &lt;em&gt;Fredrick to be foolish is considered ___ (by Wilma)&lt;/em&gt; can&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be a sentence of English: if the whole infinitival clause is 'moved' and made the subject of &lt;em&gt;is considered by Wilma&lt;/em&gt;, the clause itself, of course, raises no Case problem, as explained, but its subject, &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;still remains Case-less&lt;/strong&gt; and violates the Case Filter, since a &lt;strong&gt;non&lt;/strong&gt;-finite Infl cannot assign Case to an &lt;strong&gt;overt&lt;/strong&gt; subject like &lt;em&gt;Fredrick&lt;/em&gt;. If the subject is phonetically null, i.e., PRO, of course, no such Case Filter violation arises - either because null subjects require/support no Case, which seems reasonable, or because non-finite Infl assigns Null Case to PRO, depending on the theory of Case each Chomskian linguist adopts - and the result is well-formed, as in &lt;em&gt;PRO to be foolish is considered __ by Wilma a fatal flaw&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T21:05:07.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T21:19:35.597" Score="7" ViewCount="747" Body="&lt;p&gt;It comes ultimately from Hebrew &quot;Yochannon&quot;, via Greek Ioannes, from which German &quot;Johannes&quot; and Spanish &quot;Juan&quot; are very clear natural derivatives of that, given Greek had an h which was later lost (though the German borrowing must have cone before that)  and Greek/Latin IPA j becomes IPA x in Spanish, and O to U stem-change is also quite common in Spanish. It seems to me though, that the Italian SHOULD have become &quot;Gioani&quot;, unless there is some pattern in Italian that I am unaware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14921" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T12:56:59.367" Title="Etymologically, why is there a v in &quot;Giovanni&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T21:52:39.187" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What exactly constitutes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pun&lt;/a&gt;? Do the words in the pun have to both be extant, or can one be a nonce/nonsense word?&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;mdash; Over the years, I've heard numerous usages of &quot;puns&quot; where one word in the pun is in fact not an extant word, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any topic not related to elephants is irrelephant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my understanding of what a pun is has only rarely matched what people do in actual real life, namely in that the sentence has to have multiple, non-metaphorical interpretations&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; which are nevertheless both gramatically correct and lexically appropriate. In the example above, there is usage a nonce word (&lt;em&gt;irrelephant&lt;/em&gt;) which seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blend&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;irrelevant&lt;/em&gt; used for humorous effect. However, this word would be unusable outside of the pun, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxfam&lt;/a&gt; is an irrelephant charity&lt;/em&gt; would not convey the meaning &quot;Oxfam is a charitable organization which does not focus on issues relevant to elephants&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast the previous example with &quot;true&quot; puns according to the criteria above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Gtlm9sJFVEk?t=1m59s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;So you're gluten-free? &amp;mdash; really going against the grain!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, you didn't like my Bavarian pretzels? &amp;mdash; Well, the wurst is yet to come!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In example 1, the contrast in meaning is due to an interpretation of &lt;em&gt;go against the grain&lt;/em&gt; as an idiom as opposed to a literal interpretation thereof. Likewise, in example 2, there is a contrast between the semantics of &lt;em&gt;wurst&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;worst&lt;/em&gt;, which nevertheless are homographs: The meanings of the two sentences are completely different but are equally acceptable in the given context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite me being able to suss out differences between puns using nonce blend words and those using only extant words, I seem to be the only person who makes a distinction between the two: For example, numerous usages of both types can be observed in BuzzFeed's &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Gtlm9sJFVEk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Defense of Puns&lt;/a&gt; video and &quot;blending puns&quot; in fact are used much more frequently than the &quot;true&quot; puns I discussed here. Are these both just called &quot;puns&quot;? &amp;mdash; Is there no finer-grained terminology for describing these literary devices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;According to my understanding, a seemingly innocous expression which can be interpreted entirely differently in a different &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;double entendre&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that one difference between a double entendre and a pun is that the former is context-dependent where the latter is not (e.g. Groucho Marx' &lt;em&gt;If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?&lt;/em&gt;); Is this a correct interpretation, or have I got this wrong as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14543" LastEditorUserId="14543" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T20:29:14.807" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T20:29:14.807" Title="Do puns necessarily involve referring to two (or more) extant words?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;neologism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20816" CreationDate="2017-01-14T22:08:49.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin Ioannes &gt; Giovanni is the exact counterpart of Latin Genoa &gt; Genova.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T22:08:49.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20816" CreationDate="2017-01-15T00:03:24.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed a pattern from Latin to Italian which explains this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/oːa/ &amp;gt; /oua/ &amp;gt; /owa/ &amp;gt; /oβa/ &amp;gt; /ova/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early Romance did not like having two different vowels next to each other with nothing in between (in linguistic terms, &quot;in hiatus&quot;). So a glide consonant was inserted between them. If the first vowel was /o/ or /u/, this glide tended to be a /w/ sound. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/459683&quot;&gt;This article has more information and examples in different Romance languages.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the /w/ phoneme evolved into /v/, probably through /β/. This is a well-documented process which produced most of the /v/'s in Italian, such as the initial sound in &lt;em&gt;vino&lt;/em&gt;; in Classical Latin, that initial consonant was a /w/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T02:16:32.547" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T02:16:32.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20816" CreationDate="2017-01-15T00:39:34.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Evan(s)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ivan&lt;/em&gt; also come from &lt;em&gt;Ioannes&lt;/em&gt;, so whatever happened did not happen only in Italian. (Forget about the &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;; most Greek dialects lost it early, and Latin also lost it, and the Romance languages that gained it by other processes also lost it. I don't know how it got there in German, but it's entirely possible that it was learned, i. e. copied from the Classical Latin rendering of the name, as was the case with the name of Christ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian got the name from Latin. During the long evolution of Latin, the sounds we see today rendered orthographically as &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; changed a lot. At times there was actually no &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; (as in English /v/); the leter V was used to indicate /u/ as well as /w/ (some people prefer to say those were just variants of a single sound /u/, but that's of no consequence here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at some point Latin /w/ changed into /β/ (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_bilabial_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voiced bilabial fricative&lt;/a&gt;) and then into /v/, in certain contexts. At this point I'm guessing that more or less the same process that gave Spanish &lt;em&gt;Juan&lt;/em&gt; its medial /u/ (phonetically [w]) and Welsh &lt;em&gt;Ifan&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;Evan&lt;/em&gt;) its /v/ also gave Italian &lt;em&gt;Giovanni&lt;/em&gt; its /v/. It looks like there was an insertion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;) of a glide [w] between /o/ and /a/. This is to be expected as Latin and Romance languages historically tend toward CV syllables and dislike hiatus (so adjacent vowels in different syllables tend to be simplified, turned into diphthongs or separated by a consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case it must also be taken into account that proper names often evolve (phonetically) in unpredictable ways. This is especially true of classical and biblical names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14883" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T12:56:59.367" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T12:56:59.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2017-01-15T09:53:29.970" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Amazon Web Services' Polly text-to-speech service supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and specifically its &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to create an AWS account, but you can then use the 'get started' demo to hear the speech of any (supported) SSML.  The demo is &lt;a href=&quot;https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I put in the IPA from the Wikipedia article for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binturong&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Binturong&lt;/a&gt; as this &lt;code&gt;/bɪnˈtuːrɒŋ/&lt;/code&gt; like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;ipa&quot; ph=&quot;/bɪnˈtuːrɒŋ/ &quot;&amp;gt;Binturong&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to work pretty well and you can choose from a wide selection of voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14949" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T09:53:29.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20814" CreationDate="2017-01-15T10:04:25.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your aim is to understand modern Chomskian syntax, in the sense of work produced between the original presentation of the 'minimalist programme' in 1992 and Chomsky's latest published technical work on the matter, dated about ten years ago, McCawley's book (or C.L. Baker's, or A. Akmajian's, or N. Smith's, all of which you refer to) will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; help you at all. They are all excellent textbooks on syntax and on the early development of TGG, but appeared long before the minimalist programme was conceived (and positively 'destroyed' much of the theoretical basis of previous transformational generative grammar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend you to, instead, read, first, Andrew Radford's &lt;em&gt;Syntactic theory and the structure of English&lt;/em&gt; (Cambridge UP, 1997) and the same author's &lt;em&gt;Minimalist Syntax. Exploring the structure of English&lt;/em&gt; (Cambridge UP, 2004), two excellent and detail-rich textbooks (with glossary and exercises), then a very different earlier book by Juan Uriagereka, &lt;em&gt;Rhyme and Reason. An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (MIT Press, 1998), which offers a comprehensive account of both the minimalist philosophy in the context of general science and most of its technical apparatus at the time, then, Howard Lasnik's &lt;em&gt;Minimalist Analysis&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell, 1999), Norbert Hornstein's &lt;em&gt;Move. A Minimalist Theory of Construal&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell, 2001), Liliane Haegeman's &lt;em&gt;Thinking Syntactically. A Guide to argumentation and analysis&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), and, in no particular order, Howard Lasnik &amp;amp; Cedric Boeckx's &lt;em&gt;A Course in Minimalist Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), Cedric Boeck's &lt;em&gt;Understanding Minimalist Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell Publishing 2008), and, to gain a wider perspective on 'biolinguistics' - apart from Uriagereka's already cited early &lt;em&gt;Rhyme and Reason&lt;/em&gt; - Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, J. Uriagereka &amp;amp; P. Salaburu's &lt;em&gt;Of Minds and Language. A Dialogue with Noam Chomsky&lt;/em&gt; and Chomsky's recent video lectures on YouTube. At that stage, you could perhaps go 'backwards' and read Chomsky's own technical papers in &lt;em&gt;The Minimalist Program&lt;/em&gt; (MIT Press, 1995, especially chapter 4), his papers on semantics and the philosophy of language in &lt;em&gt;New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind&lt;/em&gt; (Cambridge UP, 2000), and his last major technical papers, 'Minimalist Inquiries. The Framework' (&lt;em&gt;MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 15, 1998), 'Derivation by phase' (&lt;em&gt;MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, 18, 1999), 'Beyond explanatory adequacy' (&lt;em&gt;MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, 20, 2001),'Three factors in language design' (&lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt; 56.1 (2005):1-22) and his paper 'On Phases' (initially 2005). [All the latter papers - except the LI one - preliminarily published in &lt;em&gt;MITOPL&lt;/em&gt;, have since been republished as book chapters in later compilations, but, as far as I can tell, with no significant revision, so it's not worth your while to spend two hundred dollars or so to buy the 'definitive' versions]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading just that will give you a sound technical basis to tackle the thousands of broadly minimalist papers and monographs that have appeared in the last two and a half decades. &lt;strong&gt;As far as I know&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;no major theoretical breakthrough&lt;/strong&gt; has occurred in 'minimalist syntax' since about 2008. On the contrary - as I extensively argued elsewhere - with the adoption of 'just-recursion' and 'no tampering' as the core principles of the Language Faculty (as now understood), Chomsky's 'minimalist programme' has virtually reduced his initially ambitious and interesting view of the Human Language Faculty to near emptiness. The 'real action' from about 2008 onwards has been taking place, to my knowledge, in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, brain science,..., but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; really &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; Linguistics, something you should perhaps consider very carefully if you are about to start an academic career as a linguist.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T10:04:25.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-15T13:12:13.423" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an open data set (freely available, permissive license) of latin grammar available ? I am thinking about verbs and translations alongside verb forms in various tenses and cases etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose would be to implement a training-app / quiz-game etc. for learning latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I am interested in this kind of data for latin verbs: &lt;a href=&quot;http://latin.cactus2000.de/showverb.en.php?verb=facere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://latin.cactus2000.de/showverb.en.php?verb=facere&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the data should be in machine-readable format (e.g XML, CSV etc.) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14950" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T20:32:23.967" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T20:32:23.967" Title="Open Dataset Latin Verb Forms" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2017-01-15T13:29:32.820" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently using &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;espeak&lt;/a&gt;, an open-source software. Not so bad, even if the voices sound artificial. Details &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/commands.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. : (&lt;a href=&quot;http://thelatinlibrary.com/sen/seneca.ep1.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium, 1.1.1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;espeak -v eo --ipa -s120 -p60 -a20 &quot;[['ita'fak'mi:lu:'ki:li:]]&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. speak with an Esperanto voice (&lt;code&gt;-v eo&lt;/code&gt;), print the IPA on the console (&lt;code&gt;--ipa&lt;/code&gt;), set the speed at 120 words per minute (&lt;code&gt;-s120&lt;/code&gt;; range : 80-500, 260 recommended by the doc), set the pitch to 60 (&lt;code&gt;-p60&lt;/code&gt;; range : 0-99), and the amplitude to 20 (&lt;code&gt;-a20&lt;/code&gt;; range : 0-100).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-01-15T16:26:11.627" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T16:26:11.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20823" CreationDate="2017-01-15T16:17:54.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in inflected forms, you could take data from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Latin_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary's Latin section&lt;/a&gt;. Most verb entries have automatically-generated conjugation tables, and all of the content is CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in meanings, you can download data files for well-regarded dictionaries through &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Perseus Project&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis and Short&lt;/a&gt; is my go-to resource; click XML at the bottom of the page to download a machine-readable form. But L&amp;amp;S is written for human eyes, not automated systems, and assumes the reader can fill in all regular inflected forms from the principal parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T16:17:54.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-15T20:36:14.070" Score="1" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a 25 MB corpus (2.300.000 words) to annotate with a rule based system. What is the ideal size of a gold standard corpus that I should create in order to evaluate the tool?&#xA;Many thanks for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14947" LastEditorUserId="14947" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T16:55:57.520" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T08:18:33.723" Title="Gold standard corpus size?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;evaluation-metrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20828" CreationDate="2017-01-16T01:20:12.423" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my understanding (non-native English speaker) &quot;Is there ...?&quot; and &quot;Are there ...?&quot; are generally used for Yes/No question to ask for the existence of something; for example, &quot;Are there vegetarian options in Restaurant X?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this can always be done, but in many case I can rephrase the question like &quot;Does Restaurant X have vegetarian options?&quot; As far as I can tell, both formulations are not only grammatically correct but also &quot;semantically equal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, consider the question &quot;Are there many people at Restaurant X?&quot;. While one can also ask &quot;Does Restaurant X have many people?&quot;, this doesn't sound quite right, i.e., I would argue that most people wouldn't ask like this (although it's grammatically correct).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guts can tell me the difference between these to examples, but are there any more concrete reasons when &quot;Is there&quot; and &quot;Does ... have&quot; can be used interchangeably to ask for the existence of something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12968" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T01:57:33.960" Title="&quot;Is there ...?&quot; vs &quot;Does ... have ...?&quot; Yes/No questions" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20827" CreationDate="2017-01-16T01:53:36.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a mistake to try to understand these structures based on paraphrase relations in questions, and you'll make more headway in whatever you're ultimately after if you look at the declarative versions, and separately look at declarative ~ interrogative relations. So there is some meaning relationship between &quot;There are vegetarian options at Restaurant X&quot; and &quot;Restaurant X has vegetarian options&quot;; you can fold in sentences like &quot;Restaurant X features vegetarian options&quot; or &quot;One can find vegetarian options at Restaurant X&quot;. Sentences about how crowded Restaurant X is would go along the lines of &quot;There are a lot of people at Restaurant X&quot;, &quot;Restaurant X usually has many customers&quot;. Existentential sentences of the form &quot;There are X LOCATIVE Y&quot; may paraphrase as &quot;Y has X&quot;, for example &quot;There is an island in the lake&quot; = &quot;The lake has an island&quot;, or &quot;There is a problem with the plan&quot; = &quot;The plan has a problem&quot;, but that isn't a general rule. &quot;There is a dog on the floor&quot; isn't well paraphrased by &quot;The floor has a dog&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing your specific sentences, &quot;?Restaurant X has many people&quot; doesn't exactly paraphrase &quot;There are many people at Restaurant X&quot;, although &quot;Restaurant X has many dishes/customers&quot; does paraphrase &quot;There are many dishes/customers at Restaurant X&quot;. That's because restaurants don't have people. They have chairs, employees, dishes and customers. The problem is that &quot;?Restaurant X has many people&quot; is simply odd. I suggest that motivates a deeper look into what &quot;have&quot; means, which eventually would lead to a story about have and existential paraphrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T01:53:36.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20827" CreationDate="2017-01-16T01:57:33.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the relevance of questions.  There are declarative counterparts to all of your examples that are questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oddity of your example &quot;Does Restaurant X have many people?&quot; is duplicated by the oddity of &quot;Restaurant X has many people&quot;, so, again, the fact that it is a question is irrelevant.  The oddity itself is due to the absence of any coreferent to &quot;Restaurant X&quot; in the verb phrase.  Compare &quot;Restaurant X has many people in it,&quot; which sounds better, though it's colloquial and somewhat more specific in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement for a coreferent in this type of &quot;have&quot; sentence varies according to various factors, like whether &quot;have&quot; expresses inalienable possession.  I gave a paper about this at CLS 4 (4th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society) back in, uh, 1966, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T01:57:33.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20864" CreationDate="2017-01-16T08:49:46.460" Score="5" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I, myself, a russian native, but still can't tell what is the real difference between &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; even in my own language. Is there definite demarcation line between those grammatical concepts? I'm looking for traces, marks, indicators on the basis of which one can easily say that X means &quot;and&quot; or &quot;with&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is vexing me because I try to figure out and classify Chinese conjunctions, almost all of  which translated as &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s. As one of the commentators pointed out:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;John together with Mary&quot; is grammatically singular &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;John and Mary together&quot; is grammatically plural.&#xA;That's a good indicator with which you can differentiate between &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt;, but in chinese it's rather difficult, since words rarely have plural form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14954" LastEditorUserId="14954" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T08:08:43.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:58:32.173" Title="What is the difference between AND and WITH in general?" Tags="&lt;conjunctions&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20705" CreationDate="2017-01-16T16:16:38.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warning: I am not a linguist!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is essentially a long comment on French’s use of &lt;em&gt;est-ce que&lt;/em&gt; and your exclusion of it because “it’s a whole phrase”. I think &lt;em&gt;est-ce que&lt;/em&gt; in modern French is not a “whole phrase” anymore, at least in colloquial French, so &lt;em&gt;colloquial French&lt;/em&gt; is an example of Indo-European language with such an interrogative particle. (In the citation bellow, Rodney ball mentions the Polish &lt;em&gt;czy&lt;/em&gt;, which would be another example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between formal written French and spoken French are quite large, even in grammar. While &lt;em&gt;est-ce que&lt;/em&gt; is currently part of standard French, it doesn’t sound very formal to my native ears and is discouraged in formal writings. I believe it is a relatively recent development in French, but I clearly do not analyse it instinctively as a “whole phrase”. Rodney Ball, in his (excellent) &lt;em&gt;Colloquial French Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, section 2.2.1, says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In many ways, &lt;strong&gt;est-ce que&lt;/strong&gt; has come to resemble the interrogative markers&#xA;  which in a number of languages are placed before (or after) statements in&#xA;  order to turn them into questions: &lt;em&gt;czy&lt;/em&gt; in Polish, for example. If French&#xA;  lacked a writing system and was being analysed for the first time, est-ce que&#xA;  might well be treated as an indivisible unit: [ɛskə].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms my native instinct. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have needed a linguist to notice the redundancies of my natural way to say “What is this ?” : «Qu’est-ce que c’est», literally, *“what is it that it is”. For me, «Qu’est-ce que» is just a fancy orthography for a word [kɛskə] translating the English “what”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same question in 18&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century French would have been asked by «Qu’est-ce ?». But &lt;em&gt;est-ce&lt;/em&gt; without a following &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; is no longer used in spoken French, unless you want to sound archaic and/or formal.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, given the chronology of this development, there is no way &lt;em&gt;est-ce que&lt;/em&gt; could be cognate to similar interrogative words in any other language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T16:16:38.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-16T17:25:22.830" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there such a thing as a dataset that can be easily queried for combinations of POS tags and strings? As an example, I may want to search for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JJ &amp;quot;winter nights&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and have returned a series of sentences which include an adjective followed by the string 'winter nights', such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cold winter nights&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;long winter nights&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dark winter nights&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best tool for the job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14957" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T17:33:53.333" Title="Need a tool for searching POS tags AND strings" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20833" CreationDate="2017-01-16T17:33:53.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/files/CQP_Tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IMS Corpus Query Processor (CQP)&lt;/a&gt; has a query language that can do what you need. There exist other implementations of similar Corpus Query engines, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://poliqarp.sourceforge.net/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poliqarp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The query in cqp syntax looks like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[pos=&quot;JJ&quot;] [word=&quot;winter&quot;] [word=&quot;nights&quot;]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the cqp syntax allows for regular expressions (this makes it really powerful!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T17:33:53.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12583" CreationDate="2017-01-16T18:13:29.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real difficulty here is to create or acquire a representative corpus of &quot;English&quot;. There are many variables to control: American vs. British (or even other, what about Indian English or Hongkong English?) usage, spoken vs. written language, time (do you want a specific time slice, or should it comprise all the years since, say, 1800?), register and genre, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have a satisfactory representative corpus, the rest is easy: pick a sample of enough (but not too many) words at random, determine their etymology, and count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T18:13:29.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2017-01-16T18:37:35.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beyond other answers, I will add some examples of actual use of phonetic writing systems actually used for Chinese (or any Sinitic language, what is traditionally called Chinese dialects/topolects). These example show that it is linguistically possible to use a phonetic script to write Chinese; of course, doing so would be a major revolutionary change, rendering some poetic or technical texts totally unintelligible. Actually, any text which needs supplementary explanation of homophones when read alone would by definition pose problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all examples below, a phonetic system is (or was) actually used by a sizeable community of people as a writing system for several generations, ensuring its actual usefulness. For them (except maybe for the medieval 'Phags-pa case), it is the main writing system, since they don’t have access to the usual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese characters&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in discussions about phonetic writing of Chinese you can read &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25799&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post by Victor Mair at LanguageLog&lt;/a&gt; and the links therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Historic use of phonetic scripts in China&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, China has been in contact with various phonetic scripts (Mogolian, Tibetan, among others) and I think several have been used to write Chinese. Notably, Phags-Pa (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&amp;#39;Phags-pa_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; ; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Phags-pa/Overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;more details by Andrew West&lt;/a&gt;) was commissioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kublai_Khan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kublai Khan&lt;/a&gt; for this use, and was an official way to write Chinese (and other languages of the Mongol empire) during almost a century (from 1269 to 1351 or 1352). However this was not popular among Chinese scholar and disappeared with the Yuan dynasty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea about the balance of the political vs linguistic factors in this lack of popularity, but I think it illustrates well the difficulties a phonetic orthographic reform would face for Chinese. If a century of effort by a power as strong as the one of the Yuan dynasty didn’t manage to impose a phonetic spelling, in an era where only a minority of the population was literate, it seems unlikely to see such a reform ever happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic script has also been used to write Chinese&lt;/a&gt; by Muslim minorities, and seems to still be in use but declining, according to the linked Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chinese Braille&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, a phonetic script is the main script for many Chinese blinds: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_braille&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three different systems are used for Mandarin&lt;/a&gt; and (at lest) one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_Braille&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cantonese&lt;/a&gt;. I have no specific information about the actual use of this script, but I guess millions of Chinese read and write in it, and thousands of book are transcribed in it, with not much problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Dungan in Cyrillic&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_people&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dugans&lt;/a&gt; are essentially &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hui people&lt;/a&gt; who moved from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gansu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gansu&lt;/a&gt; to what is now Kyrgyzstan and Kasakhstan in late 19th century. Being form northwestern China, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their language&lt;/a&gt; is closely related to standard Chinese. However, due to the Soviet policy on minority languages, it is fully written in Cyrillic script since 1953, with a perfectly functional orthography used by a community of 50,000 people. The implication of this fact on a reform like the one you have in mind is the subject of a paper by the sinologist Victor H. Mair, written in 1990 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;html version&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp018_dungan_gyami.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned original pdf&lt;/a&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T17:50:34.207" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T17:50:34.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20842" CreationDate="2017-01-16T22:03:02.880" Score="7" ViewCount="3466" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's (generally) accepted that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) evolved into the subfamilies Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Iranian among others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English uses a Latin Writing system which evolved form a Greek writing system (which evolved from a Phoenician writing system, which &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; evolved from an Egyptian one). English shares many words, ideas, concepts and constructs as languages such as Spanish, French and Italian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish, French, Italian and other languages evolved from Proto-Italic are relatively easy for native English speakers to learn because the languages are similar. However, languages such as Russian that evolved from the Proto-Slavic family are generally harder to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming from such different regions as Italy and Northern Europe, How similar were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic, and why are their descendant languages so mutually easy to learn compared to other Proto-Indo-European descended languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14960" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T17:39:39.617" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T17:39:39.617" Title="How different were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;italic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20838" CreationDate="2017-01-16T23:11:22.230" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if these languages belong to the Indo-European family, &lt;strong&gt;there's a huge gap of time and space standing between Pre-Italic and Pre-Germanic languages.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A probable cladistic tree of the IE family&quot;(a) shows e.g. that the Italo-Celtic subfamily and the &quot;Central IE&quot; subfamily  (including Germanic) diverges long before Germanic and Indo-Iranian diverged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The last common ancestor of Germanic and Italo-Celtic was probably spoken at least 5,000 years ago&quot;.(c) &quot;We can [...] say [...] that PGmc was spoken [...] not earlier than about 500 BC&quot;(d)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, &quot;There are [...] four or five Latin inscriptions datable to before 600 BC&quot; and &quot;A number of [languages other than the Latin one] are known from Italy in the first millenium BC&quot;.(b)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The differences are consequently innumerable&lt;/strong&gt;; I will take only one consequence of such a huge gap between Germanic and Latin languages, described in (e). When these last two languages enter in contact, each one borrowed some words from the other one and applied to these words its own linguistical rules. E.g. Latin &quot;Caesar&quot; &gt; Proto-Gmc *kaisaraz .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) The Blackwell history of the Latin language, p.38&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 67&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 213&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e) Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 296&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T22:04:02.087" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T22:04:02.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20863" CreationDate="2017-01-17T04:19:40.907" Score="5" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been told that &quot;the word-final affricate dź in Polish should be devoiced to /t͡ɕ/&quot;. What are the linguistic precedents for this, and why is this devoicing not evident in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Pl-%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA-3.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="13933" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T04:48:13.563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T04:48:13.563" Title="Why is the Polish pronunciation of Łódź [wut͡ɕ] rather than [wudʑ]?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20540" CreationDate="2017-01-17T11:17:49.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with lemontree that it's mixing up formal and functional properties (which may not always be useful), and that usually, it's probably better to put it in the sequence lemontree mentioned. With that said, I think there is one context where one could possibly say 'free lexical morpheme': To contrast them with bound lexical morphemes, which are present in modern Mandarin as well as other varieties to a lesser extent. For example, the Chinese word for 'happy' contains a free lexical morpheme kuai4 ('fast') and a bound lexical morpheme le4 ('happy').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you should be very careful when calling 'the' a free morpheme. 'The' can only appear with an NP after it, and never in isolation. It is also phonologically unstressed and dependent on the NP. Though it appears to be free in our conservative writing system, in practice it's more like a clitic, and many modern writers prefer to call a spade a spade and refer to it as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T17:09:26.227" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T17:09:26.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20838" CreationDate="2017-01-17T11:58:00.760" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you noticed, there is something common between modern Romance and Germanic languages which is not shared by other Indo-European languages. It does not come from their ancestral languages (Latin and Proto-Germanic), but to the fact that they are part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sprachbund&lt;/a&gt;, called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Average European&lt;/a&gt; (SAE). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many characteristics of SAE are obviously absent from Latin, and this excludes a genetic origin. For example, define/indefinite articles (en:The/a ; fr: Le/un), of a perfect with &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; (en: &lt;em&gt;He has eaten&lt;/em&gt;, fr:&lt;em&gt;il a mangé&lt;/em&gt;). As anecdotal evidence, I’ve often seen Russian colleagues having difficulty to grasp the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; difference in English, while it is totally instinctive to Germans or Frenchs. Of course, if the first speak a IE language, it is not SAE, compared to the latter ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mutual influences allowing such a &lt;em&gt;sprachbund&lt;/em&gt; has likely started during the 1st millenium &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;migrations&lt;/a&gt;, and continued later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bibliography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Average European Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martin Haspelmath, &lt;em&gt;The European linguistic area: Standard Average European&lt;/em&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;Language Typology and Language Universals&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 2 pp. 1492–1510 (2001) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/seminar/abteilungen/sprachwissenschaft/ls_kortmann/Courses/Kortmann/Variation/index_html/2008-05-27.8724094854&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T20:56:14.933" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T20:56:14.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20855" CreationDate="2017-01-17T13:29:34.163" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question regards the highlighted words in this clause from Edward Gibbon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and Rome &lt;strong&gt;was saved&lt;/strong&gt;, if the wisdom of Belisarius had not been defeated by the misconduct of his officers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it in mood and tense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; is subjunctive in mood and present in tense (an equivalent of German &lt;em&gt;wäre&lt;/em&gt; except that German itself might have used a form of &lt;em&gt;werden&lt;/em&gt; for passivizing) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a poetic/rhetorical substitute for &lt;em&gt;had been&lt;/em&gt;, which would be subjunctive in mood and past in tense and the thing one should have expected (barring a conditional).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BACKGROUND&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, the relevant paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The foresight of Totila had raised obstacles worthy of such an antagonist. Ninety furlongs below the city, in the narrowest part of the river, he joined the two banks by strong and solid timbers in the form of a bridge, on which he erected two lofty towers, manned by the bravest of his Goths, and profusely stored with missile weapons and engines of offence. The approach of the bridge and towers was covered by a strong and massy chain of iron; and the chain, at either end, on the opposite sides of the Tyber, was defended by a numerous and chosen detachment of archers. But the enterprise of forcing these barriers, and relieving the capital, displays a shining example of the boldness and conduct of Belisarius. His cavalry advanced from the port along the public road, to awe the motions, and distract the attention of the enemy. His infantry and provisions were distributed in two hundred large boats; and each boat was shielded by a high rampart of thick planks, pierced with many small holes for the discharge of missile weapons. In the front, two large vessels were linked together to sustain a floating castle, which commanded the towers of the bridge, and contained a magazine of fire, sulphur, and bitumen. The whole fleet, which the general led in person, was laboriously moved against the current of the river. The chain yielded to their weight, and the enemies who guarded the banks were either slain or scattered. As soon as they touched the principal barrier, the fire- ship was instantly grappled to the bridge; one of the towers, with two hundred Goths, was consumed by the flames; the assailants shouted victory; &lt;strong&gt;and Rome was saved, if the wisdom of Belisarius had not been defeated by the misconduct of his officers&lt;/strong&gt;. He had previously sent orders to Bessas to second his operations by a timely sally from the town; and he had fixed his lieutenant, Isaac, by a peremptory command, to the station of the port. But avarice rendered Bessas immovable; while the youthful ardor of Isaac delivered him into the hands of a superior enemy. The exaggerated rumor of his defeat was hastily carried to the ears of Belisarius: he paused; betrayed in that single moment of his life some emotions of surprise and perplexity; and reluctantly sounded a retreat to save his wife Antonina, his treasures, and the only harbor which he possessed on the Tuscan coast. The vexation of his mind produced an ardent and almost mortal fever; and Rome was left without protection to the mercy or indignation of Totila. The continuance of hostilities had imbittered the national hatred: the Arian clergy was ignominiously driven from Rome; Pelagius, the archdeacon, returned without success from an embassy to the Gothic camp; and a Sicilian bishop, the envoy or nuncio of the pope, was deprived of both his hands, for daring to utter falsehoods in the service of the church and state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10711" LastEditorUserId="10711" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T13:38:09.370" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:53:03.387" Title="Mood and tense in (Gibbon's) &quot;Rome was saved, if the wisdom of Belisarius had not been defeated&quot;" Tags="&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-31T13:53:59.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20843" CreationDate="2017-01-17T17:59:34.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and Rome was saved&lt;/em&gt; is an ordinary declarative, the top of a climax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the fireship was instantly grappled to the bridge; one of the towers, with two hundred Goths, was consumed by the flames; the assailants shouted victory; and Rome was saved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's confusing you is Gibbon's following this with a protasis (&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; or condition clause), which you (quite reasonably) expect to be associated with a corresponding apodosis (&lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; or consequence clause). Gibbon, however, intends for you to read that protasis as a &lt;em&gt;supplement&lt;/em&gt; to what precedes it, contradicting the asserted salvation. A contemporary author would probably point it with a dash (and maybe a screamer, too!) rather than a comma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the fireship was instantly grappled to the bridge; one of the towers, with two hundred Goths, was consumed by the flames; the assailants shouted victory; and Rome was saved&lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;!&amp;mdash; if the wisdom of Belisarius had not been defeated by the misconduct of his officers&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:03:50.333" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:03:50.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-17T20:42:09.870" Score="2" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's time, double and even triple negatives could be used to strengthen a negative (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/352543/163363&quot;&gt;Is Shakespeare's Double Negative Grammatically Wrong?&lt;/a&gt; on English SE). In present-day Standard English, you should not use double negatives unless you want express a positive statement, or intensify the opposite of the negative statement. (An example of the latter would be 'You canNOT NOT go to your father's funeral', as mentioned in a comment by Sibutlasi.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The disappearance of negative concord in Standard English is sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;http://thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; to be a result of the work of prescriptive grammarians in the 18th century, for example Robert Lowth's book &lt;em&gt;A Short Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (1762). Negative concord has survived in dialects, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/negative-concord&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Negative Concord&lt;/a&gt; on the website of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if any language with a written record ever went into the opposite direction. Is there any language whose written records show that it acquired negative concord? (There may be languages that acquired it before they started being written down, but in that case, we would need to rely on descriptions of the oral language by users of other languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T19:13:56.247" Title="Written languages that acquired negative concord?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20848" CreationDate="2017-01-17T23:02:45.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the &lt;em&gt;ne...pas&lt;/em&gt; construction of French is post-Old French so that would be an example. Arabic (not all dialects) developed the negative concord element &lt;em&gt;-š&lt;/em&gt; subsequent to earlier written Classical Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T23:02:45.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20862" CreationDate="2017-01-18T02:10:52.723" Score="1" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;and also please guide me how to acquire such information from online linguistics resources (for example WALS.info).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T02:45:43.553" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T07:27:04.413" Title="Modern IE languages which do not permit consonant cluster at the begining of syllables" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T06:58:37.977" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phil.uu.nl/tst/2012/Werk/PROSTEM.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; description of intonation, the author claims that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pitch contours belonging to the same family are supposed to be manifestations of the same underlying “basic intonation pattern”.  In the grammar of intonation each basic intonation pattern can be defined as the &lt;strong&gt;family of generation paths&lt;/strong&gt; that go through the Root configurations that corresponds to that pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused by what is meant by a &quot;generation path&quot;. Does this have to do with articulation or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T06:58:37.977" Title="Considering basic intonation patterns, what is meant by &quot;generation paths&quot; in this excerpt?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15644" CreationDate="2017-01-18T14:16:48.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, in any P&amp;amp;PT/Minimalist work subsequent to Cinque's (1999) important hypothesis about the structure of adverbials, there is much more structure involved than you show in your diagramme. Epistemic adverbials like &lt;em&gt;certainly, probably&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt;, in particular, would have to be attached to the projection in &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; (surface) order (i.e., &lt;em&gt;certainly&lt;/em&gt; with scope over &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; with scope over &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt;) in appropriate specifiers of 'adverbial' functional heads intervening between the subject and the tensed auxiliary or between further (visible or invisible) 'modal' heads. Whether they can all be piled up within a single clause or not depends on their meaning and on the number of auxiliaries (say 'subclauses') the clause contains. However, none of those intervening adverbs can possibly interfere with processes like the subject's ascension to Spec TP (or the Spec of whatever head the subject is attracted to) or with the finite verb's own raising into the corresponding head. Intervening adverbs are simply invisible to such processes, because they are triggered - subject to 'minimality' or, nowadays, 'economy' ('shortest movement') - by specific features of DPs and verbs that adverbs just lack. Of course, if your question literally means 'Is there &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; adverb that can cause the clause to be ungrammatical if inserted in the split-Infl area?', the answer is &lt;strong&gt;YES&lt;/strong&gt;: there are many adverbs that will produce ungrammatical results if inserted in that higher segment of the projection. If you try to insert any of the 'low' adverbs of Cinque's hierarchy (e.g., a pure 'manner' adverb) in that 'high' area, it will get the wrong 'scope' and the sentence will be ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T07:42:58.343" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T07:42:58.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20857" CreationDate="2017-01-18T15:09:39.850" Score="4" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a common language learner question for English (both native and non-native speakers) to wonder what kind of subject-verb number agreement to have when a sentence is complex. For example, students always wonder which verb to have in the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My brothers, aunts, and my baby sister (is/are) going to the park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard rule in English is if the subject has more than one entity then it is plural and the agreeing verb should be plural. Often in practice, the rule is ignored and the verb agrees in plurality with the most recent noun, presumably out of performance issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, isn't this a language universal (for those languages with subject-verb number agreement)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, it seems like a logical (or rather cognitive) application of a rule rather than a purely grammatical one: the speaker is judging the plurality of the subject based on a cognitive assessment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Peanut butter and jelly are both very good flavors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;uses the plural because there are two individual items. But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Peanut butter and jelly is my favorite kind of sandwich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because a PB&amp;amp;J is cognitively a single entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering how language specific the pattern is or if most/all languages with subject/verb number agreement follow this same 'cognitive' pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:56:29.717" Title="Subject-verb number agreement with complex subject" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20840" CreationDate="2017-01-18T16:59:37.523" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many explanations for the properties of a given random sound file on the internet. Since Wiki provides virtually no metadata on recordings, one can only speculate as to the circumstances of a recording. That token certainly doesn't tell you anything about the structure of the language. One step in the direction of making the question be about the language and not the sound file is to get other examples. Wiki also provides this &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pl-%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA-2.ogg&quot;&gt;token&lt;/a&gt; which BTW is linked in the Polish page, where the stop is clearly devoiced. All of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%C5%82%C3%B3d%C5%BA/&quot;&gt;Forvo tokens&lt;/a&gt; have devoicing. Other Wiki entries with potential and actual devoicing are &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Pl-Tarn%C3%B3w.ogg&quot;&gt;Tarnów&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Pl-Grudz%C4%85dz.ogg&quot;&gt;Grudziądz&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Pl-Stargard_Szczeci%C5%84ski.ogg&quot;&gt;Stargard&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Pl-Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w.ogg&quot;&gt;Bełchatów&lt;/a&gt;. So by overwhelming majority rule of evidence, Polish does have final devoicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get the truth, you need more-controlled data, and you need to control for well-known artifacts. The most important is hyperarticulation, especially a problem with intelligent and multilingual speakers (you can interpret &quot;and&quot; as &quot;or&quot;), particularly a problem with literary languages. That is, the grammar of Polish does not prevent speakers of Polish from articulating things not generated by the grammar of Polish. People often have normative ideologies that control how they behave in guarded moments (like, making a recording). The other variable is phonetic context. In the offending file, you will notice that the right edge is prematurely clipped, which suggests that the recording was extracted from a longer utterance – it was not the pronunciation of the word in isolation, it was in a phrasal context. Since Polish has voicing assimilation at the phrase level, it is quite plausible that the token came from a voicing context. Thus you would need to get actual citation forms, not phrasal forms that were edited down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:20:05.860" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:20:05.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20843" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:53:03.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, the answer to your question is that &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; is a preterite indicative, because mood and tense are categories of verb form, not semantics. But you're right that this is an unusual use of the indicative: &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; seems to be intended as semantically counterfactual, equivalent to &lt;em&gt;would have been&lt;/em&gt;. I believe that Gibbon has calqued this usage from Latin and Greek, both of which can use the indicative in a similar way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, in both Latin and Greek the apodosis (&lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt;-clause) of a counterfactual condition is marked by something other than a plain indicative (subjunctive in Latin, counterfactual particle ἄν in Greek). But in both languages one occasionally finds a plain indicative instead, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iam tuta &lt;strong&gt;tenebam&lt;/strong&gt;, ni gens crudelis ferro invasisset&lt;/em&gt; (Vergil, &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; 6.358) &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;I was reaching&lt;/strong&gt; a place of safety, if the fierce people had not attacked&amp;quot;: meaning &amp;quot;I would have reached&amp;quot;, but &lt;em&gt;tenebam&lt;/em&gt; is indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ναὶ μὰ Δία &lt;strong&gt;ᾐσχυνόμην&lt;/strong&gt; μέντοι, εἱ ὑπὸ πολεμίου γε ὄντος ἑξηπατήθην &amp;quot;Yes, by Zeus, &lt;strong&gt;I was indeed ashamed&lt;/strong&gt;, if I had been deceived by an enemy&amp;quot; (Xenophon, &lt;em&gt;Anabasis&lt;/em&gt; 7.6.21): meaning &amp;quot;I would have been ashamed&amp;quot;, but again with a plain indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In neither language is this the normal construction for counterfactuals, but it's common enough in both that anyone with an eighteenth-century classical education would have been likely to encounter it, and it's odd enough to stick in one's memory as a neat rhetorical effect, so my guess is that Gibbon, whose style is highly classicizing, copied this usage from classical authors he was familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:53:03.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20853" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:02:43.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one thing, some languages apparently do not have a way to coordinate two noun phrases on an equal level (or at least, no documented way). See this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20830/what-is-the-difference-between-and-and-with-in-general&quot;&gt;What is the difference between AND and WITH in general?&lt;/a&gt; and the related WALS article  &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/63&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noun Phrase Conjunction&lt;/a&gt;, by Leon Stassen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stassen says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The basic distinction is between those languages which use a different marker for noun phrase conjunction and comitative phrases (so-called and-languages; Stassen 2000) and those languages in which the markers for noun phrase conjunction and comitative phrases are the same (with-languages). A clear example of an and-language is English. As the examples in (1) demonstrate, in this language the marker of noun phrase conjunction (&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;) is different from the marker of comitative phrases (&lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;). In contrast, the example in (2) shows that Nkore-Kiga (Bantu; Uganda) is a with-language: the item &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; can be translated as either 'and' or 'with'. An alternative way of stating this is to say that with-languages like Nkore-Kiga lack the structural option of noun phrase conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(1)&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;a. &lt;em&gt;John and Mary went to the movies.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;b. &lt;em&gt;John went to the movies with Mary.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(2) Nkore-Kiga (Taylor 1985: 58)&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;n-ka-za-yo na Mugasho&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;1sg-rec.pst-go-there and/with Mugasho&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;‘Mugasho and I went there./ I went there with Mugasho.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently, if you translate ‘Mugasho and I went there’ into Nkore-Kiga, you'd have to use a singular verb. It's unclear if this really satisfies the criterion of a &quot;complex subject&quot;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, languages that exclusively use this type of strategy are apparently uncommon and they seem to be prone to developing the option of using plural (or dual etc. as appropriate) agreement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although both for with-languages and for and-languages clear instances can be found, the typological status of these two types is probably not equally well established. In particular, there is a notable discrepancy in the stability of the types. In general, and-languages can be said to be stable diachronically and “pure” in their synchronic state: there is a sharp delineation between the two available strategies. On the other hand, “pure” instances of with-languages are relatively rare. For a considerable number of such languages, some process of “diachronic drift” of the comitative encoding can be attested. The general outcome of this process is to effectuate a shift from one-strategy to two-strategy status. [...] Among the possible “paths” involved in the shift, we encounter cases in which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ii) There is differentiation in person/number agreement (mainly between singular and dual/plural). An example is Tolai (Oceanic; New Britain, Papua New Guinea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(11) Tolai (Mosel 1984: 176)&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;a. &lt;em&gt;nam ra tutana &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; ga rovoi ma ra pap&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;        &lt;br&gt;DEM ART man &lt;strong&gt;3SG&lt;/strong&gt; PFV hunt with ART dog&#xA;        &lt;br&gt;‘That man went hunting with his dog.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;b. &lt;em&gt;Terengai &lt;strong&gt;dir&lt;/strong&gt; rovoi ma ra pap&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Terengai &lt;strong&gt;3DU&lt;/strong&gt; hunt and/with ART dog&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    ‘Terengai and his dog went hunting.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distinct from the and/with issue, some languages seem to use proximity agreement at least more frequently than English, even if they don't use it in all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/hml003/lorimor%20thesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conjunctions and Grammatical Agreeement&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Heidi Lorimor (2001), says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another type of flexibility observed with conjoined subjects is the&#xA;  option of single conjunct agreement, in which verbs and predicate&#xA;  adjectives agree with only one of the two conjuncts. The most famous&#xA;  case of single conjunct agreement is in Modern Standard Arabic, where&#xA;  agreement with the closest conjunct is obligatory when the verb&#xA;  precedes the subject (Aoun, Benmamoun, &amp;amp; Sportiche, 1994). (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in MSA verbs preceding their subjects are always singular, regardless of the number of the subject, so this proximity agreement never actually shows up in verbal number marking, only in verbal gender marking and pronominal gender and number marking (3). So MSA verb agreement does not seems to be a good example for your question, but the phenomenon it illustrates may show up in other languages that do have verbal number agreement in this position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is alternatively termed “Partial Agreement”, “Closest Conjunct&#xA;  Agreement”, or “First Conjunct Agreement”, because this type of&#xA;  agreement occurs most often when the verb precedes the subject, where the first conjunct is the closest conjunct (Corbett, 2006). To illustrate, if English had First Conjunct Agreement with postverbal subjects, as some have argued for “there” constructions (Munn, 1999), you would see a singular verb, followed by a conjoined subject (e.g., “There is a dog and a cat in the room”), if the first conjunct is singular. In a language with gender agreement, the verb would agree with the first (closest) conjunct in gender and number, as if the first conjunct were the full subject of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is most common with postverbal conjoined subjects, where agreement is with the first (closest) conjunct. It is, however, also documented with the closest (second) conjunct and with the furthest (first) conjunct for preverbal subjects in languages such as Latin and Slovene (Badecker, 2007). The pattern that has never been observed, however, is furthest (second) conjunct agreement with postverbal subjects (Corbett, 2006). (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do a Google search for &quot;single conjunct agreement&quot;, &quot;closest conjunct agreement&quot; or &quot;first conjunct agreement&quot;, there are a number of results that give more relevant examples, but my impression so far is that all of the examples seem to be from languages that also have some kind of plural agreement as an option in at least some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:56:29.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20865" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:17:17.717" Score="6" ViewCount="1117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in works that explore empirical evidence for linguistic relativism and/or discuss implications on the limitations of cognition within a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14969" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:31:38.540" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T18:54:37.243" Title="What are some good books/publications that discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sapir-whorf-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T07:23:48.687" Score="7" ViewCount="4161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is math a language? Is &quot;language&quot; a comprehensive description of mathematics? Maybe this is just a trivial description... or possibly there something about mathematics that is missed by describing it so... Certainly math is far more restricted than ordinary languages, but is math itself a proper language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a basis for what a constitutes a language, I refer to John Searle's article, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/whatislanguage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Is Language?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Also, my thinking about math is informed by Wittgenstein's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.pitt.edu/u/ulsmanuscripts/pdf/31735061817957.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foundations Of Mathematics&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and Russell's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://people.umass.edu/klement/imp/imp-ebk.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction To  Mathematical Philosophy&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously mathematics are not a language in the sense of an ordinary or commonly spoken and written language (whether colloquial, vernacular or something more formal). Inasmuch as language is a means of communication, however, it seems like &quot;a language&quot; is an accurate description of the abstract and formal means of dialogue and expressing ideas through intentionalistic utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searle writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The standard textbook accounts of language say that specific languages such as French or German consist of three components: a phonological component that determines how words and sentences are pronounced, a syntactical component that determines the arrangement of words and morphemes in sentences, and a semantic component that assigns a meaning or interpretation to words and sentences. More sophisticated accounts add that there must also be a pragmatic component that is not a component of specific languages; rather, it sets certain constraints on the use of language and is not internal to specific languages in the way that the syntax of French is internal to French and the syntax of German is internal to German. ... The relation of syntax to semantics is however crucial. Syntax organizes semantics according to three principles: discreteness, compositionality and generativity. Discreteness is that feature by which syntactical elements retain their identity under the various syntactical operations. ... Compositionality is both a syntactic and a semantic property. Syntactically, a complex element such as a sentence is built up out of simple elements, words and morphemes, according to the formation rules of the language. Semantically, the meaning of the whole sentence is determined by the meanings of the simple elements together with the syntactical structure of the sentence. ... Generativity, as I am using the term, implies that the syntactical operations of the language allow the speakers to generate an indefinite number of new sentences. There is, strictly speaking, no upper limit to the number of sentences in any natural human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though he notes that this is an incomplete picture of what constitutes a language, I think mathematics meet these criteria of phonology, syntax, semantics, as well discreteness, compositionality and generativity. Also, the deontological considerations he advances when considering the question &quot;what is language?&quot; I think are also met by mathematics (when you say &quot;2+2=4&quot; and mean it, you are committed to the utterance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galileo writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Philosophy is written in this grand book, which stands continually open before our eyes (I say the 'Universe'), but can not be understood without first learning to comprehend the language and know the characters as it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...I don't speak Italian, but in this translation &quot;mathematical&quot; is adjectival, possibly suggesting that mathematics are not necessarily a language, but sufficiently an aspect of (&quot;what can be done with&quot;?) language. Other translations say &quot;the language of mathematics&quot; and perhaps this is merely poetic license upon the translators part. For what it is worth, Galileo's &quot;Egli è scritto in lingua matematica&quot; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Assayer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is translated by Google Translate as the adjectival form. Not that interpreting Galileo is the final word on answering the question, but as a possible counter-example demonstrating that mathematics is instead a formal aspect or sub-set of the human capacity for language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3214/14972&quot;&gt;the answer here to the question &quot;what is a language?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; perhaps the mathematics lack &quot;biplanarità&quot;? (For what does three refer to except for the taxonomy of counting and measuring?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is math a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14972" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T21:55:52.723" Title="Is math a language?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20858" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:20:56.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a linguist in Michigan named Susan Goldin-Meadow who wrote a fascinating article contained in this book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought (MIT Press)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00LG92I2W&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com.mx/Language-Mind-Advances-Thought-English-ebook/dp/B00LG92I2W&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She makes a case &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt; the Whorf hypothesis using modern laser technology to track eye movement. This then shows that ergative thought remains even after a speaker routinely uses a non-ergative language for a long period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1786" LastEditorUserId="1786" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:19:37.700" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:19:37.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20858" CreationDate="2017-01-19T10:42:41.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everett, C. 2013a. Linguistic relativity: Evidence across languages and cognitive domains. De Gruyter Mouton. vii +298 pp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T10:42:41.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20850" CreationDate="2017-01-19T10:47:37.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Persian is known for this, hence &lt;code&gt;Isfahan&lt;/code&gt; from earlier &lt;code&gt;Spāhān&lt;/code&gt;, and I assume some other related Iranian languages share this phonotactic constraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western Romance languages have tendencies against initial &lt;code&gt;st-&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sp-&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sk-&lt;/code&gt;, similar to Persian (and Turkish).  Thus they have typically inserted &lt;code&gt;e-&lt;/code&gt; (and many even drop the &lt;code&gt;-s-&lt;/code&gt; in writing or speech, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schola#Descendants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the descendants of Latin &lt;code&gt;schola&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), Ladino, Walloon and Sardinian go both ways.  Some Eastern Romance dialects changed or change &lt;code&gt;s-&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;ʃ-&lt;/code&gt; before some consonants, similar to High German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should make a distinction between tendencies and real constraints, for example modern borrowings into French do preserve the clusters in words like &lt;code&gt;psychologie&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;xylophone&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sphère&lt;/code&gt; and so on.  Likewise the English rules for loans are a bit looser, whereas Spanish is stricter, but like English it breaks with the written form even in prescriptive use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language has some tendencies ie frequencies and it is hard to know all regional spoken variations, but Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Armenian, Celtic, Albanian, Hellenic are mostly happy with consonant clusters (although Greek has no &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt; and thus no &lt;code&gt;t͡ʃ&lt;/code&gt;, German has no &lt;code&gt;ʒ&lt;/code&gt; and thus no &lt;code&gt;d͡ʒ&lt;/code&gt; and so on, and of course German has &lt;code&gt;ʃt-&lt;/code&gt; but no &lt;code&gt;st-&lt;/code&gt; in native words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my sense is that simple binary categorisation is not possible, and the remaining candidates are other Indo-Iranian languages, or non-Romance creoles or mixed languages with strong influence from Western Romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One method to check initial patterns is to seek in the dictionary, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Scottish_Gaelic/s#st&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Scottish_Gaelic/s#st&lt;/a&gt;, being sure to check the IPA pronunciation as languages like English and Spanish do not necessarily pronounce these even when written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T07:27:04.413" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T07:27:04.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20840" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:28:33.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be precise, it is /wudʑ/ and in most contexts it will be pronounced [wut͡ɕ]. Phonologically there is phoneme /dʑ/ because when you decline the word, there is a vowel that follows, the phoneme stays sonorous, e.g. &quot;Łodzi&quot; [wodʑi]. But otherwise, the sonority is lost/neutralised at the end of the word, so unless the following word starts with voiced consonant, the final segment will stay devoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the recording in question, this may be dialectal or just an example of the word taken from the middle of an utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T13:33:32.050" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T13:33:32.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20830" CreationDate="2017-01-19T12:31:30.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what you are asking is 'What is the &lt;strong&gt;universal&lt;/strong&gt; difference between English &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (or their Russian equivalents, for that matter), the question is wrongly formulated, and unanswerable, because other languages need not, and in fact do not, have lexical items with &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the same syntactic and semantic properties English &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; have. Your question should, therefore, as a minimum, be reworded in terms of a hypothetical (?unique!) difference between a would-be universal ?'conjunction function' &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; and a would-be universal 'comitative/groupal function' &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; (in the broadest possible sense of 'conjunction' and 'comitative'). The former, at least, is a relatively safe bet, since no human language can work without &lt;strong&gt;something&lt;/strong&gt; (= obviously, not necessarily an &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;-like word!) that &lt;strong&gt;minimally&lt;/strong&gt; licenses the expression of 'molecular facts/propositions' like [p &amp;amp; q] (where p, q are propositions that name events or states of affairs). Whether a 'group-forming/comitative' function &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; is also universally necessary is much less obvious, in my view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even that radically abstractive step would not be enough if what motivates your question is the need to understand the situation in Mandarin, where the '?coordinators' we need to render as English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; really correspond, either in intrinsic meaning or in syntactic category, to English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; at all, and where, viceversa, our English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;s have to be rendered in Mandarin in terms of completely different things (?prepositions, sentence adverbs, particles, (correlative) verbs, [floating] quantifiers, or even 'zero', i.e.,'pragmatic' devices like sheer juxtaposition, with or without ellipsis for economy's sake, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious problem with English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (and its counterparts in other IE languages) - as opposed to our hypothetical function &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; - is that, even when it conjoins clauses, it is often far from being a 'pure' propositional conjunction function. A second, related, problem, of course, is that, at surface level at least, English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (like its nearest IE counterparts) can also 'conjoin' DPs/NPs, and, in general, XPs, X's and even Xs, and one of the  consequences is that when it 'conjoins' DPs/NPs, it &lt;strong&gt;sometimes&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;but not in all cases!&lt;/strong&gt;) is close in meaning to the preposition &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; (and to the would-be universal 'comitative/group-forming function' &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the former problem, we can approximate English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to a genuinely universal conjunction function &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; if we disregard the various 'adverbial' (e.g., temporal, causal, contrastive, etc.) implications that &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; may have and take into consideration only its truth-conditional contribution as a pure propositional function, which we can do by means of a careful choice of examples, cf. below. As to the second issue, of course, the only way to establish the real import of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; as a '?coordinator' of NPs/DPs, etc. is to distinguish between 'surface' and 'deep' coordination, which in its turn entails calculating the 'Logical Forms' of the constructions involved in each case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, the following English cases of 'surface' [NP &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; NP] coordination and their possible interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;John &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; Mary died&lt;/em&gt;. If we adhere to the abstractive strategy of counting only truth-conditional meaning, (1) has &lt;strong&gt;only one&lt;/strong&gt; interpretation: it claims the existence of &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; death events with one participant each (= John died, Mary died = Mary died, John died). No particular time sequence or 'groupal/comitative' implication between the two deaths can be legitimately deduced from (1), so &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; is a pure &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; function here, in spite of the fact that, at surface level, it conjoins &lt;strong&gt;two NPs&lt;/strong&gt; instead of two clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;John &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; Mary played the flute&lt;/em&gt;. Again, (2) has just &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; interpretation: it claims the existence of 2 flute-playing events (or sets of such events!) with &lt;strong&gt;one participant each&lt;/strong&gt; (= John played the flute, Mary played the flute = Mary played the flute, John played the flute). Again, no time sequence, nor 'groupal/comitative' nuance, is entailed by (2), so &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; remains a pure &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; function here, as well, in spite of being a (surface) NP-coordinator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;John &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; Mary played the piano&lt;/em&gt;. In this case, on the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; interpretations are possible. According to interpretation (3a), (3) says that there are &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; piano-playing events (or sets of such events) with &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; participant each (= John played the piano, Mary played the piano = Mary played the piano, John played the piano) but nothing follows from (3) as to the order in which each piano playing event occurred. According to interpretation (3b), on the contrary, (3) claims the existence of just &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; piano-playing event &lt;strong&gt;with two participants&lt;/strong&gt; (John and Mary playing together, four hands).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) &lt;em&gt;John &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; Mary married&lt;/em&gt;. Again, (4) has &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; possible interpretations. According to interpretation (4a), (4) claims the existence of &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; separate wedding events (with four participants = John plus somebody else different from Mary, and Mary plus somebody else different from John), and, again, nothing can be legitimately inferred from (4) as to the order in which the two weddings occurred. According to interpretation (4b), on the contrary, (4) claims the existence of just &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; wedding, with John and Mary as the main participants (= John married Mary = Mary married John).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) &lt;em&gt;John and Mary argued&lt;/em&gt;, finally, has only &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; interpretation: there has been just &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; discussion event (or, possibly, a set of repeated discussion events of exactly the same type) with John and Mary as participants (= John argued &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; Mary = Mary argued &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; John), &lt;strong&gt;not two&lt;/strong&gt; discussion events/sets of events with one participant each (John or Mary, respectively). In other words, the 'comitative' interpretation is the only one available here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as far as I know, the Mandarin (?preposition) &lt;em&gt;he2&lt;/em&gt; (alternatively: &lt;em&gt;yu3&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;gen1&lt;/em&gt;, with some regional variation, apparently) can translate the (broadly) 'groupal/comitative' reading of English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in sentence (5) and in sentences (3) and, possibly, (4) when they have the interpretations (3b) and (4b), respectively, but, to my knowledge, none of them can translate &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in sentences (1), (2), or even (3) when the latter has the interpretation (3a), that is, whenever &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; separate events are involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To replicate such English (surface!) [NP &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; NP] coordination cases, Mandarin must resort to &lt;strong&gt;other&lt;/strong&gt; devices which semantically approximate English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; (to the extent it reduces to universal &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt;), but clearly differ from English &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; - or from our hypothetical universal 'groupal/comitative' function &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, Mandarin can use the 'sentence adverb' &lt;em&gt;ye3&lt;/em&gt; (= also, as well) - assuming &lt;em&gt;ye3&lt;/em&gt; cannot be analysed as an intra-sentential conjunction - or, possibly, &lt;em&gt;you4….you4&lt;/em&gt; (= 'both … and…/not only… but also…', provided the surface 'coordinates' are phrasal, not clausal). All other choices, as far as I know, have &lt;strong&gt;non&lt;/strong&gt;-truth-functional (e.g., temporal, concessive, causal,...etc.) implications (e.g., &lt;em&gt;ránhòu&lt;/em&gt; = 'and then', &lt;em&gt;háishi&lt;/em&gt; = 'nevertheless', 'still', &lt;em&gt;suo3yi3&lt;/em&gt; = 'so', 'as a consequence', etc.), and, to that extent, they 'say' (and imply) &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; than English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;in the examples above&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my knowledge of Mandarin is only elementary, there may well be even gross factual inaccuracies in the discussion above, but they do not worry me too much, as I expect any factual errors of mine will be immediately corrected by the specialists in Mandarin in this forum. That quick, and necessarily selective, discussion was included here only as an example of the way you could yourself proceed to answer your own question in a systematic way: the real point I wished to make above is just that, provided you look not only at 'surface' syntax, but also to 'semantics'/'logical form', English &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;, as well as Mandarin &lt;em&gt;hé, yu3, gen1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ye3&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yòu...yòu&lt;/em&gt;, etc., or even a universal &lt;strong&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/strong&gt; function and a (possibly) universal &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; function &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt;, indeed, be easily distinguished. Typological distinctions between &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;-languages and &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;-languages in cases of [NP &amp;amp; NP] coordination, on the contrary, in spite of all the nice maps, etc., may &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; suffice for that purpose unless a 'deep' semantic/LF analysis of all the relevant examples has been carried out before positing such language types. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no typologist, though, and I do not know whether that has been the case or not, so please do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; interpret me as saying anything &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt; typological studies; on the contrary, they are &lt;strong&gt;the only way&lt;/strong&gt; to approach questions like yours, but they must include deep semantic (LF) analysis, not just inspection and comparison of 'surface' syntactic structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T12:58:32.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:58:32.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20858" CreationDate="2017-01-19T13:01:24.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This list includes both common recommendations and stuff I've actually read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deutscher, G. (2010). &lt;em&gt;Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages&lt;/em&gt;. Macmillan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gumperz, J. J., &amp;amp; Levinson, S. C. (1996). &lt;em&gt;Rethinking Linguistic Relativity: Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language.&lt;/em&gt; Cambridge: CUP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lakoff, G. (2008). &lt;em&gt;Women, fire, and dangerous things&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago press. (The chapter on Whorf and relativism)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. H. (2014). &lt;em&gt;The language hoax: Why the world looks the same in any language.&lt;/em&gt; USA: Oxford University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinker, S. (2007). &lt;em&gt;The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature&lt;/em&gt;. Penguin. (The chapter on '50,000 innate concepts')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whorf, B. L., Carroll, J. B., Levinson, S. C., &amp;amp; Lee, P. (2012). &lt;em&gt;Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T18:54:37.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T18:54:37.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20859" CreationDate="2017-01-19T13:54:16.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing is that a language, when you get to the core of it, is a system of communications. It is used a  means of communicating to talk to others about the world and so on. Math can be considered a language in the sense that it's a system with well-defined rules and that can convey some meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the range of concepts it can treat is very limited and you certainly cannot &quot;communicate&quot; with it, unless you assigned arbitrary meanings to numbers but then you'd be using a natural language with it. You could say A=1, B=2, and so on, but it wouldn't be just math anymore, it'd be &lt;code&gt;&quot;insert natural language&quot; + math&lt;/code&gt;. However English, as any other natural language, can be used by itself satisfactorily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you were to use the language of mathematics, as in adopting mathematical notation, you can only talk about math-related subjects or anything that can be discussed mathematically, and even then you'd still be using a natural language around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my answer is: It could be considered a language, using the broad definition, but not in the same way natural languages are considered languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T13:54:16.043" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:33:05.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; languages are related: there's a limited inventory of phonological, lexical, and syntactic features of which any particular language has a subset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's surely not what you're asking. I suppose you're asking if there is some common cultural chain from long in the past that connects the two, closer than other language groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A handful of pairs, some from different pairs of language, is a bit of cherry picking. You really need to show a systematic comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with much language history questions, we weren't there at the time so we have to use comparisons of current language to check. Phonology changes so much over the years that if two languages seem to share a small handful of words very closely it is most likely a matter of a recent borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even some very large over-arching parameters of a language, eg left vs right branching or pro-drop, can change between historically very near languages so that is not a good single measure of closeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is the vague idea based on vague commonalities like general word formation and general sentence structure (called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nostratic hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;) that seem to relate the European and 'Uralic' languages together (but not Bantu), and the Sino-Tibetan and American languages together. &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; vaguely. So there are some very vague commonalities between IE and Semitic that are not exactly done for the most part in other language groups. What those vagaries are... well, sometimes Afro-Asiatic (including Semitic) is included and sometimes not. In the end, the hypothesis is not considered crazy exactly, just that the evidence for it is not overwhelmingly convincing to most linguists. That is, it's pretty controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, there are a lot of latter day Semitic borrowings into IE languages via biblical scholarship on the one hand and the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora in Europe on the other. In English, check out the American Heritage Dictionary appendix on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/semitic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semitic Roots&lt;/a&gt; of English words. By 'a lot' is not even 1% of words, but the number is non-trivial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:33:05.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:53:04.830" Score="4" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in short :&lt;/strong&gt; is the equation ὄφις Πύθων == अहि बुध्न्य &lt;code&gt;ahi budʰnya&lt;/code&gt; widely accepted by scholars ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Python and Ahi Budhnya/Ahirbudhnya are both a famous serpent, the first one in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek mythology&lt;/a&gt;, the second one in the Veda(b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;full details&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions about Watkins' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Kill_a_Dragon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to kill a dragon&lt;/a&gt;, chapter 47 where I read the following statement, first equated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Toporov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vladimir Toporov&lt;/a&gt; in 1974(a) : the words Πύθων &lt;code&gt;pȳ́tʰon&lt;/code&gt; and बुध्न्य &lt;code&gt;budʰn-ya&lt;/code&gt; share the same IE origin, namely *bʰudʰ- with a &quot;perfectly regular&quot;(c) application of well-known phonological rules, including the &quot;Grassmann's aspiration dissimilation&quot;(c) law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* bʰudʰ- → (Greek) pʰutʰ- → putʰ-&#xA;* bʰudʰ- → (Vedic) bʰudʰ- → budʰ- &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vedic word बुध्न &lt;code&gt;budʰna&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?beginning=0%20&amp;amp;tinput=%20budhna&amp;amp;trans=Translate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;means &quot;the bottom&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (see e.g. the text (b)). Watkins considers that both words represent &quot;a relic&quot;(c) of an IE mythological monster, the &quot;*ogʰi- bʰudʰ-&quot;(d) one. Moreover, it's obviously true as Watking recalls it, that *ogʰi- (and similar forms) is the well-known root explaining at once ὄφις and अहि.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to this point there's nothing to say against these hypothesis. But I would like to discuss two details :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what about the IE root *bʰudʰn- ? Watkins describes it as a doublet, connected with another root *dʰubʰ- (Slavic dЪno, Russian dno, &quot;bottom&quot;). It's exactly what I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR008600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here, s.v. dheub&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;But except the Vedic word, is there any other relic of *bʰudʰn- ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the upsilon being long in Πύθων but &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt; in budʰnya, Watkins gives the following explanation : &quot;The long ū in Πύ̄θων, not mentioned by Toporov, is doubtless due to expressive lenghtening, like the ū in Greek κλῦθι 'hear!' (Ved. śrudhi), West Germanic *hlūd ('loud') Greek (κλυτός)&quot;(e).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not ? But one page further I read the following statement about another Greek word with whom a parallel is established, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typhōn&lt;/a&gt; : &quot;The quantity of the u varies: the etymological short in Typhaōn, Typhōeus, the expressively lengthened ū in Typhōn, Typhōs&quot;(f). &lt;strong&gt;Is there any other example of such a variation of vowel length within the relics of an IE root ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Toporov, 1974, ΠYΘΩΝ, Ahi Budhnya, Badjak i dr. Etimologija&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) &lt;a href=&quot;https://sa.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%A4%8B%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%A6:_%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%82_%E0%A5%AD.%E0%A5%A9%E0%A5%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RigVedia, 7.34.16 and 17&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;अब्जामुक्थैरहिं गृणीषे बुध्ने नदीनां रजस्सु षीदन् ॥१६॥&#xA;मा नोऽहिर्बुध्न्यो रिषे धान्मा यज्ञो अस्य स्रिधदृतायोः ॥१७॥&#xA;&#xA;abjāmukthairahiṃ gṛṇīṣe budhne nadīnāṃ rajassu ṣīdan ॥16॥&#xA;mā no'hirbudhnyo riṣe dhānmā yajño asya sridhadṛtāyoḥ ॥17॥&#xA;&#xA;Watkin's translations (How to kill a dragon, page 460) :&#xA;&#xA;With songs I praise the water-born serpent&#xA;sitting in darkness in the depths of the rivers.&#xA;May the Serpent of the Deep not bring us to harm;&#xA;may the worship of this (singer) who seeks truth not go wrong.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Waktins, How to kill a dragon, p.460&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) Waktins, How to kill a dragon, p.460&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(e) Waktins, How to kill a dragon, p.461&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(f) Waktins, How to kill a dragon, p.462&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T20:37:32.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T20:37:32.000" Title="what about ophis Python==ahi Budhnya?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T20:09:19.850" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe in recent years people are more likely to answer questions by repeating the verb than by just saying e.g. &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;yes I am&quot; For example &quot;Are you going out for lunch?&quot; &quot;I am.&quot; &#xA;In my memory , decades ago on the east coast (U.S.) we reserved this pattern for strong contradiction: &quot;How come you didn't eat your vegetables?&quot; &quot;I did!&quot; &#xA;To be honest I find it a bit irritating, like the person is putting on airs or trying to sound Irish. Or subtly mocking my question: &quot;Are you going home for the holidays?&quot; &quot;I am going home for the holidays.&quot; &#xA;Anyway I'm no linguist-I'm just curious as to whether anyone else has noticed a trend. All I can find online is that it's referred to as &quot;echo answering.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14978" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T20:09:19.850" Title="increasing frequency of &quot;echo answers&quot;?" Tags="&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:30:20.263" Score="1" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got myself in a controversial discussion on word classification. To my knowledge words can be classified as a) inherited from a parent language, b) inherited substrate words, c) a result of innovation and d) loan words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (a) we can consider the English word &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt; that comes from PIE *ghórdhos. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (b) the English &lt;em&gt;bard&lt;/em&gt; is an inherited word from a Celtic substrate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (c) the English word &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt; is an innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (d) the English &lt;em&gt;paradise&lt;/em&gt; is actually Iranic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now from those 4 categories, which words can be actually considered English in a strict context? Obviously (a) and (c) can be definitely labelled English, (b) cannot but substrate words can occasionally be labelled with the inheritors name (e.g. we consider &lt;em&gt;θάλασσα&lt;/em&gt; Greek word although it is a substrate word) and (d) cannot be labelled English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the statement above regarding the labeling correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there more word classifications?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can a word that passes into the English vocabulary rightfully called &lt;em&gt;'English'&lt;/em&gt; in a strict sense?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T22:13:51.040" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T00:29:52.910" Title="Word classification and labeling" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20870" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:39:30.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yard, bard, computer, paradise&lt;/em&gt; are all considered to be English words. You can find each of them listed in an English dictionary, non-italicized, with no usage note saying they are words in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrasing &amp;quot;inherited word from a Celtic substrate&amp;quot; is weird. &amp;quot;Bard&amp;quot; would just be called a borrowed word, not an inherited word. (Of course, Modern English has inherited the word from Middle English, but Middle English would not be said to have &amp;quot;inherited&amp;quot; this word from Celtic, because Middle English is not descended from Celtic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a substrate influence was far enough back, the word might have been in the language already at some reconstructed proto-language stage. In that case, we might consider a word to be e.g. &amp;quot;inherited&amp;quot; from Proto-Germanic, but &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot; since the language developed from Proto-Indo-European. A possible example like this is &amp;quot;path&amp;quot;, which has cognates in other major Germanic languages but is considered to have been borrowed into Proto-Germanic, not descended from PIE. This borrowing is not thought to be from a substrate (as far as I know, we don't know much about any substrates of the Germanic languages) but it's kind of comparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a discussion of Indo-European historical linguistics, the only word out of these four that would be classified as &amp;quot;inherited&amp;quot; (implied: inherited from Proto-Indo-European, or possibly just from Proto-Germanic) would be &amp;quot;yard&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T00:29:52.910" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T00:29:52.910" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20859" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:41:23.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;of course mathematics is not a language. but we do have a &quot;language&quot; of mathematics, that allows us to express mathematical ideas.  Or so it would seem.  Is there really such a thing?  Not really.  It looks like a formal language, but it isn't, it's just a tightly constrained variety of natural language.  Mathematicians do not write their papers in a formal language, generally.  Some of them even oppose doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we cannot (so far) even define &quot;language&quot;, although we can formally define very impoverished formal structures that we like to call languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;regarding the classic triumvirate of phonology, syntax, and semantics: its obvious that the language of mathematics does not have its own phonology, for example.  what is the phonology of the symbol used in differential equations? {\frac {\partial z}{\partial x}}?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T21:41:23.743" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:23:48.010" Score="3" ViewCount="1177" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the respondent's reply to your question is &quot;I don't know&quot; , then it implies that his/her understanding of the English language is enough to understand the question. Let's assume that the question is asked to a healthy native English speaker, and that he/she understands the question perfectly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to look at this question is:&#xA;All questions can be answered by saying &quot;I don't know&quot;. Are there any exceptions to this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14980" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:14:04.170" Title="Is there a question that can't be answered by &quot;I don't know&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-01-20T05:27:43.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20870" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:44:53.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either you need to lump things together, or you need to further split things up, or you need to give a reason to point to just these 4 distinctions. Making distinctions at all is arbitrary if it doesn't serve some function. For example, are you talking broadly about the entire history of a language, or are you talking about the status of words right now, in the minds of an actual speaker? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bard&quot; is a word of Modern English (defined as &quot;the language that I learned as a child&quot;), which was inherited from later pre-Modern English (defined as &quot;the language that my parents learned as children&quot;), and so on for generations and generations, until you get to the point where it is &quot;borrowed&quot; and is in your category (d). The same for &quot;dog&quot;, &quot;portal&quot;, &quot;count&quot;, &quot;egg&quot;, probably &quot;ax&quot;, and possibly &quot;cow&quot;. Your (c) is not exemplified by &quot;computer&quot;, which is based on French, but might be illustrated by the word &quot;Kodak&quot; which is reputed to be actually created out of thin air. Similar examples are &quot;spliff&quot; and &quot;flarn&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't presuppose that &quot;word of English&quot; is self-evident. For example, are &quot;tapas&quot;, &quot;pecorino&quot; and &quot;guanciale&quot; words of English? I am inclined to say they are, although they have come into English rather recently. Most people don't know what &quot;guanciale&quot; is; fewer people know what a &quot;tanbour&quot; is, but they are used in ordinary English conversations at least by people who talk about such things. The word &quot;x̌ax̌yaƛ'&quot; (borrowed, sort of, from Lushootseed) is not used by very many people at all – most people who make it don't seem to know the name – but has been used in monolingual conversations. I suspect that only one other SE user knows the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no technical definition of &quot;word of English&quot;. You don't want the notion to be defined in terms of &quot;majority of English speakers know&quot;, because that would exclude vast numbers of English words (&quot;spline, quark, panoply, masticate, obfuscation&quot;). The core of your problem lies in defining what is &quot;a word of English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T22:44:53.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20873" CreationDate="2017-01-19T23:27:16.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the criteria of a healthy speaker who perfectly understands the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you speak English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14672" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T23:27:16.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20859" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:21:30.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mathematics itself, just like biology, philosophy, linguistics, ... is not a language or a communication system at all, but simply a science. You may argue about the precise scope of mathematics, but roughly you might describe it as &quot;the study of such things as numbers, structures, and logical reasoning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in order for humans to talk about the subject of study, they require some kind of language or communication system.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You may ascribe literal conventions as used in mathematical notation some properties of language in that it is a system of rules on how to build expressions to convey a specific meaning, this encompassing both specialised symbols and a mathematical dialect of natural language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, there is a clear difference between ordinary English &quot;if&quot; (which is normally associated with some kind of causal other otherwise complex semantic relationship) and a mathematical &quot;if&quot; (which operates solely on truth values)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. There is also a certain amount of highly conventionalized expressions which are used in mathematical proofs and descriptions that have a very specific meaning in the scope of mathematics which differs from what it would mean if used in ordinary everyday English. &#xA;In that sense, you could indeed talk about some kind of &quot;mathematical English&quot; as a language in the sense of a set of expressions with a fixed meaning and usage that are a different variant of language than their equivalents in the &quot;ordinary English&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And of course, symbols or notational conventions like &lt;code&gt;f(x) = x²&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;∀&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;π&lt;/code&gt;, ... are strings that convey a specific information that doesn't have an equivalent in natural language at all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But the use of these tools (specialized symbols and a mathematical variant of English) in order to talk about the subject of study doesn't make the subject of study itself a language.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Mathematics is as much of a language as biology is - pretty much not at all: It is a science, and the science itself is not equivalent to the linguistic and symbolic tools that you make use of in order to talk about that science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; In a situation where the sun is not shining and no pig is green, the sentence &lt;em&gt;If the sun shines, then some pigs are green&lt;/em&gt; is a true statement in the mathematical sense. However, any speaker of English you'd ask about their intuition would tell you that this sentence is pretty much nonsense and probably even wrong. This is because a mathematical &quot;if&quot; actually has a different meaning than an ordinary English &quot;if&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T00:35:26.930" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T00:35:26.930" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20873" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:08:28.687" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules of the game don't require truthful answers: &quot;I don't know&quot; can always be uttered in response to any question. A strict epistemological nihilist (skeptic) must answer all questions with &quot;I don't know&quot;: the opposite of such an epistemological affliction, which doesn't have a conventional name but we could call him an omniscientist, can never truthfully reply &quot;I don't know&quot;. Similarly, which conjoined with an explanation of Aristotle's first principle of logic, the sentence that ends &quot;and do you agree that those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped&quot; can't be answered &quot;I don't know&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you have in mind that lying, being uncooperative, or being a skeptic, is proof that a person is unhealthy, so maybe you should first define &quot;healthy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:08:28.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20873" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:40:05.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you awake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you hear me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you able to speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14982" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T03:40:05.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20873" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:10:22.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you know everything?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they say they don't know, they are lying. Even if they argue that they don't know if they don't know that, that just moves the problem to that assertion. So the answer must be either yes or no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14983" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T05:10:22.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20868" CreationDate="2017-01-20T12:29:36.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not have the patience to type out all the Greek, but if you look in Beekes s.v. πυθμήν you will see that *bʰudʰ-men- has reflexes all across IE, including English “bottom”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T12:37:09.487" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T12:37:09.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20890" CreationDate="2017-01-20T18:43:06.420" Score="0" ViewCount="1311" Body="&lt;p&gt;A translation service is not being requested in the question since they provide word-to-word mappings instead of word-to-meaning explanations. The dictionary may optionally render the Greek word with the Roman alphabet but must include one or more definitions in English that explain the meaning. In particular, I am trying to find out why &quot;εκκλησάκι&quot; and &quot;παρεκκλήσι&quot; are translated the same into English and hoping to read a full explanation of how they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6721" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T09:51:10.403" Title="Can anyone recommend a good, free, and online Greek-to-English dictionary?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-02-01T21:25:51.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20887" CreationDate="2017-01-20T21:44:20.517" Score="6" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing personal research in Second Language Acquisition by reading a book on the subject (Understanding Second Language Acquisition -- by Lourdes Ortega) and I've become convinced that the L1 has a huge effect on the way an individual thinks and communicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a very young child I first spoke Russian at a low level, and then spoke Hebrew from the age of about 5 until 10, where I soon after lost Hebrew and English became my native language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now speak English at a native level with no apparent accent and am maintaining an intermediate level of Russian and am re-learning my Hebrew from ground up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions arise in my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that my thinking in general and communication in English is suffering because my L1 is still Hebrew, yet I lack the vocabulary to communicate?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Has my L1 become English at an age as late as 10-11?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now a question that can potentially be answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I were to re-learn Hebrew, how would I be able to determine whether my L1 is indeed English or in fact Hebrew, or perhaps even a mix of the two (three if you include Russian)? Is there some sort of analysis I could perform on myself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14987" LastEditorUserId="14987" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:49:56.413" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T20:02:53.650" Title="I don't know what my L1 is and want to find out" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T22:45:03.163" Score="4" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to search such a corpus to determine the commonality or in other terms the frequency of use of the word Quran القرآن in comparison to The Generous Quran القرآن الكريم. But the condition is that this use is by people directly, not embedded in quotes from the Quran itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to do is to find out how people refer to the religious text, do they mostly use the title on the cover? Or do they use the word القرآن only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14988" LastEditorUserId="14988" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T09:52:24.870" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T13:44:26.110" Title="Is there a corpus of Arabic text that doesn't include quotations of the Quran?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T22:53:57.467" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Fritz Mackensen painting titled Doodenbeer painted around 1900 has this unusual title. What does the title mean? I hear it might mean death beer, but this painting is about a funeral scenario and no beer is involved or seen in the painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14989" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T00:09:40.953" Title="Meaning of word/title &quot;Doodenbeer&quot;" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-28T01:46:05.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20885" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:24:27.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.akg-images.co.uk/archive/Doodenbeer-2UMDHUQZUE4T.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The title means&lt;/a&gt; &quot;A wake in the house of the deceased&quot;, &lt;em&gt;beer&lt;/em&gt; here means 'to bear, to support', and it's most probably the latter meaning which is relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T23:24:27.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20883" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:29:52.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to first determine how you are going to define &quot;L1&quot;, which isn't a scientific term in linguistics. It sort of stands for &quot;first language&quot;, in which case Russian is your L1. Though perhaps Hebrew is the first language you became fluent in, suggesting another definition. A third possibility is &quot;dominant&quot; (&quot;number one&quot;, not first), so from what you say it it would be English. It can't be a mix, since &quot;Hebrew and English&quot; isn't a language, it's two languages. But again, since L1 isn't a defined technical term, you can define it however you want and maybe &quot;Hebrew and English&quot; could be an answer. If you want, you could adopt the definition promulgated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (for &quot;first language&quot;), but please bear in mind that that article is mostly unsubstantiated opinions, not backed up by studies of usage in technical articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On LLSE they might have an informed opinion of how the term &quot;L1&quot; is used in language learning journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T23:29:52.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20885" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:48:57.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Doodenbeer” is North German dialect (Plattdeutsch). Literally it does indeed mean “death beer”. It is a drink taken after a funeral, then, in a broader sense, a funeral ceremony or wake itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the entries “Beer” and “Doodenbeer” here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/en/plattdeutsch/wb?buchstaben=B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/en/plattdeutsch/wb?buchstaben=B&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T00:09:40.953" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T00:09:40.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20884" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:02:56.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copticchurch.net/cgibin/bible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; text in Arabic almost certainly doesn't have any quotes from the Qur'an, also &lt;a href=&quot;http://folk.uio.no/amundbjo/grar/interpretatio/about.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If these don't satisfy your criteria, you might want to clarify what kind of corpus and what kind of Arabic you have in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:02:56.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20882" CreationDate="2017-01-21T09:51:10.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually use different dictionaries when I want to know the intricacies of a word, as I have not yet found a perfect one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first stop is usually on Wiktionary. The Greek one has much more entries than the English one (for Greek words) but a lot of them lacks definitions or are just declination of a lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll sometimes take a look at Wordreference.com, but I'm not sure if the entries are manually created by someone or if they are taken from another website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/lexica/triantafyllides/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Greek only dictionary&lt;/a&gt; which I find quite professional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/2498/dictionary-for-learners-of-modern-greek&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Language Learning SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what your level is but it will surely improve if you try to read definitions in Greek, even if you don't understand them very well at the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look at one of the most complete (if not the most) Ancient Greek-English dictionary, available online &lt;a href=&quot;http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1&amp;amp;context=lsj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This may help you understand etymologies of Modern Greek words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless someone has found the definite Greek-English dictionary, looking at the etymology of the word might help you greatly. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;εκκλησάκι literally means &amp;quot;small church&amp;quot;, from εκκλησία + -άκι (diminutive suffix)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;παρεκκλήσι, literally means &amp;quot;next to, near the church&amp;quot;, from παρα- + εκκλησία&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native speaker but my guess is that the first word can be used for any church that is small in size, while the second word is for a (small) church that belongs or depends from another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Greek only dictionary I mentioned above εκκλησάκι, εκκλησούλα and εκκλησίτσα are all listed as diminutives under the εκκλησία entry while παρεκκλήσι has its own definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;μικρή εκκλησία που ανήκει σε κάποιο ίδρυμα, σε κπ. ιδιώτη ή που εξαρτιέται από άλλη μεγαλύτερη&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;small church which belongs some institute or private individual, or that depends from another bigger one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(PS, I also have a written dictionary but it's not in English...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T09:51:10.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T10:51:53.750" Score="2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to look at an adjective + clause (adverbial, to-infinitival, -ing) combination in COCA and I'm happy with the KWIC results I got so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my further analysis, it would be useful to have a corpus of my results with specific parts of the KWIC lines only. Is there a way to extract only those? I would be grateful for any suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have so far looks like this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7xYo4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7xYo4.png&quot; alt=&quot;the concordance line I get from COCA&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to analyse my samples using AntConc - first create a corpus of all my samples and import it there. The problem is that a number of concordance lines overlap (e.g. when the sentence following the one with the bold parts would be &quot;It is good to see you, too&quot;: In the COCA-results, each of these is counted only once but in a sub-corpus consisting of all the concordance lines, there would be duplicates). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've tried using Excel to copy the relevant part into a new cell with a function. In Excel, I also tried to split the cell with the line into several columns, choose the relevant columns and combine those again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14991" LastEditorUserId="14991" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T12:33:03.703" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T13:01:54.073" Title="building a corpus from COCA KWIC" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20893" CreationDate="2017-01-21T12:14:18.127" Score="4" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the Turkish word &lt;strong&gt;kalem&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;'pen'&lt;/em&gt; is shown in etym. dictionaries to derive from Arabic &lt;em&gt;qalam&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn derives from Greek &lt;strong&gt;κάλαμος&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I noticed that Tocharian languages have the term &lt;strong&gt;kalām&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;'writing stylus'&lt;/em&gt; and I started thinking of the possibility that the Turkish word is through earlier Turkic-Tocharian contacts and not a later Turkish-Arabic contact. Has anyone considered the Tocharian kalām?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T23:04:10.127" Title="Turkish kalem: from Anc. Greek or Tocharian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;tocharian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20892" CreationDate="2017-01-21T12:26:12.250" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Greek word kalamos “reed, reed pen, stylus” has a good Indo-European etymology (cognate with, for example, German Halm “reed”). It was borrowed not only in Arabic, as qalam, but also into Sanskrit as kalama-. The Tocharian word is presumably borrowed from Sanskrit. The Turkish word is from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T12:26:12.250" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T18:05:19.773" Score="4" ViewCount="4963" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this question sounds a bit basic. I haven’t had a solid grounding in phonology/phonetics yet so I am a bit confused about these concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’re trying to build a model which studies certain properties of tonal languages. I understand that a vowel can be generally represented by four formant frequencies. However, I’m now trying to add tone into the representation, and I’m a bit confused by the relation between formant frequencies and pitch frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following picture from Praat which shows four tones of Chinese, it seems that the numbers in black on the left are for formant frequencies (represented with red lines), while the numbers in blue on the right are for pitch frequency (represented with blue lines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TT502.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TT502.png&quot; alt=&quot;Four tones of Chinese&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/s/cw14e2e8185fklu/deBoer%282000%29_self-organization_in_vowel_systems.pdf?dl=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper (de Boer 2000)&lt;/a&gt; which represents vowels with two dimensions: f1 frequency and a weighted result of f2-f4 frequencies. Now we're trying to add the tone property into a similar model. My main concern is, whether pitch frequency is completely independent of formant frequencies. If so, I might be able to just add it as extra one or two dimensions which are supposed to be independent of the already existing dimensions for formant frequencies (Though the scale of such dimensions would still be a concern). If not, then the task of adding tone into the model might be considerably more challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody has suggested that pitch is only related to the base frequency/base f0, and thus shouldn't interfere with the two dimensions already existing in de Boer's model. Does that make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T18:12:31.953" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T19:51:08.727" Title="What is the difference between formant frequencies and pitch frequency?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2017-01-21T18:29:13.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese has the same verbs, &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt;, as Spanish, with similar distinctions governing the use of either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; implies permanency, while &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; implies transitoriety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu sou doente&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; I have a health condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eu estou doente&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; I am sick at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such use roughly implies that &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; matches acceptions 1, 2 and 4 of bytebuster's list, while &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; matches acceptions 2 and 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be (an object x is a part of set X), e.g. &quot;this is an apple&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be (an object x has property of y), e.g. &quot;the box is red&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be (located at), e.g. &quot;I am at the office&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to mean, e.g. &quot;to live is to love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also allows speakers to make finer distinctions if they use &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; in acception 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eu não sou ministro, eu estou ministro. (literally, I am not a Minister, I am a Minister; meaning something like, &quot;I am not a Minister like I am a Black man; I am a Minister like I am suntanned&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is more complicated than that, with some weird exceptions (for instance, &lt;em&gt;ele &lt;strong&gt;está&lt;/strong&gt; morto&lt;/em&gt; - he is dead - with &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;, albeit one would wonder what could be more permanent than death[1]), and the fact that both verbs are also auxiliaries, and the difference in the use of either as an auxiliary is much bigger than their differences as main verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ser&lt;/em&gt; is the auxiliary used in the passive voice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Isto é fabricado no Canadá&lt;/em&gt; - This is manufactured in Canada.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Estar&lt;/em&gt; is an auxiliary used to modify tense/aspect, specifically to denote a continuous aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Estou comendo alface&lt;/em&gt; - I am eating lettuce; a present continuous, in opposition to the simple present &lt;em&gt;Eu como alface&lt;/em&gt; - I do eat lettuces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]Albeit the more formal &lt;em&gt;ele é falecido&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;he is dead&quot;, or more properly &quot;he is deceased&quot; takes &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;, as it should be, not &lt;em&gt;estar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ser&lt;/em&gt; is also highly irregular, taking forms from at least three different roots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ele será&lt;/em&gt; - He will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ele era&lt;/em&gt; - He used to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ele foi&lt;/em&gt; - He was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T18:35:26.970" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:35:26.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20894" CreationDate="2017-01-21T18:31:19.067" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, F0 (the &lt;strong&gt;fundamental frequency&lt;/strong&gt;) is the acoustic correlate of &lt;strong&gt;pitch&lt;/strong&gt; (which is a perceptual concept). The fundamental frequency F0 is also the &lt;strong&gt;first harmonic&lt;/strong&gt; H1 of the sound. If F0 is 100 Hz, the second harmonic H2 would be at 200 Hz, the third H3 at 300 Hz, the fourth H4 at 400 Hz, and so on. Vowel formants are located at different harmonics depending on the shape of the vocal tract (so F1 could be H3 in one vowel, but H4 in another). So, knowing the fundamental frequency F0 is not enough to know the formants of a vowel. If you want to know more about fundamental frequency and harmonics, I suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hayward, Katrina. 2013. &lt;em&gt;Experimental phonetics: An introduction&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:31:19.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20894" CreationDate="2017-01-21T19:51:08.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a limited sense in which F0 (which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the acoustic property perceived as pitch) and F1-F5 are not independent, which is that if you have a tiny larynx (high F0), given the nature of human anatomy you will not have a really long tube (which determines formant frequencies). Another dependency is that resonance frequency can always be meaningfully computed, but F0 cannot. You can calculate formants from fricatives and stop bursts and in general from any aperiodic sound, but computing fundamental frequency presupposes a semi-periodic source. Thus anything with pitch has a formant, but the converse is not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formants are derived from LPC analysis, which gives you the abstract resonance properties of the vocal tract, and coupled with an &quot;impulse&quot; (something like the &quot;pure glottal wave&quot;) can reconstruct the speech waveform. A formant frequency is independent of the fundamental to the point that a formant frequency can be between the multiples of the fundamental (e.g. can be at 500 Hz when the fundamental is 300 Hz). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you not only can add F0 as an independent dimension, you have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T19:51:08.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20883" CreationDate="2017-01-21T20:02:53.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is &quot;L1&quot; used in these texts you're reading? Is it &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a) about the influence of the L1 on the syntax and pronunciation of the L2? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b) is it just about the L2 label for a new adult learned language? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c) is it about cognitive development in children? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a and c it is complex and you are a very special case. For b, it's just about difficulties in learning an additional language as an adult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may very well have more than one L1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You state that you have no accent in English (most likely no accent because of when you started immersion, but have others confirmed that?). Do you have an no accent in Hebrew or Russian? Do you make grammar mistakes like natives in those? Then those are probably both L1's also. Whether you're labeled L1 for Hebrew or Russian or English just says what kind troubles you will have learning more of the language. If you're L1 then there's no accent, basic grammar is no problem, elementary vocab too, and you will learn more complicated grammar quickly. L2 you may never get a perfect accent, and native-like grammar (with mistakes like a native) will require lots of practice (but can be achieved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T20:02:53.650" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:55:05.927" Score="3" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Zipf mystery: In (presumably all from what I have read) natural languages, the number of times any specific word shows up in the language as a whole, or any particular piece is approximately proportionate to its rank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &quot;The&quot; in English is the #1 most frequently used work, and the word &quot;of&quot; is the second. The word &quot;of&quot; shows up approximately half as many times as the word &quot;the&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules apply to every word in English, and almost every other language. Are there any theories that make a good attempt to explain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14960" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T13:07:30.710" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T22:35:59.230" Title="Are there any good theories explaining the language aspect of the Zipf Mystery?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20722" CreationDate="2017-01-21T23:11:06.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you gave are indeed Turkish, but they are not greeting words. Instead they are questions basically &quot;How are you&quot;. You can say that in Turkish &quot;Nasılsınız?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root &lt;em&gt;Esen&lt;/em&gt; is used for greetings in old texts (Kutadgu Bilig, Divan-ı Lügati-t Türk), as more or less as it is used in modern Turkish &lt;em&gt;Esenlikler olsun&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T23:11:06.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T04:38:23.357" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for data sets that I could use to train and benchmark a system  that detects synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms in a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In statistics, logistic regression, or logit regression, is a regression model where the dependent variable (DV) is categorical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;logistic regression&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym of &lt;em&gt;logit regression&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;logistic regression&lt;/em&gt; is a hyponym of &lt;em&gt;regression model&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data set should contain texts annotated with entities and whether they are synonym/hyponyms/hypernym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T21:56:55.827" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T21:56:55.827" Title="Synonym/hyponyms/hypernym detection data set" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20443" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:38:02.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of the symbol  ‘S’, standing for ‘sentence’ -  originally, since Roman times, ‘a coherent phrase expressing a complete ‘thought’ or ‘proposition’’ - has largely been discontinued in technical accounts of syntactic structure written within Chomskian generative grammar because, at one point in its development, 'S', and its associated rule, stopped satisfying  the requirements of a new theory that Chomsky considered it necessary to adopt in order to explain, instead of merely describe, the syntactic constructions of English and Human Language in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long story is really long and complicated, but the gist thereof is about this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas early Chomskian analyses of S were trivially transparent 'symbolizations' of the long established view of the 'sentence' as a combination of a 'subject' and a 'predicate' (categorially: an NP and a VP, respectively), by the late 1960's Chomsky had realized that (context-free/sensitive) 'phrase structure rules' of the form X  &gt; Y (for Y = &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; non-null sequence of symbols) could describe, and therefore predicted the existence of, just about any sequence of syntactic elements. As that included infinite sequences never attested in any human language, such rules were obviously too powerful and failed to offer satisfactory explanations of what was or was not possible in human syntax, and Chomsky decided to first constrain their Y side and then replace them altogether with a set of simple principles meant to predict and formally explain what was actually found in the syntax of human languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, in 'Remarks on Nominalization' (1970) he proposed the 'X-Bar Theory' of syntax, a set of ‘principles’ (not called ‘rules’ anymore) according to which all syntactic constructions must be 'headed' (= 'endocentric', in Bloomfield's jargon), with additional constraints on what the non-head could and could not be and on how headed structures can recur inside other headed structures that we can ignore for current purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the X-Bar 'principles', then, any phrase of category XP is ultimately a (possibly recursive) 'expansion' of a head category X - where X ranges over the set of &lt;strong&gt;minimal&lt;/strong&gt; syntactic categories, which, at the time, largely reduced to the 'parts of speech' already established by traditional grammarians in the preceding two millennia, i.e., N, V, A, Adv, P, Art, etc. Thus, an NP was ultimately an 'expansion' of N, a VP an expansion of V, an AP an expansion of A, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘endocentricity’ idea, of course, was not new (Bloomfieldian doctrine aside, it is occasionally found much earlier, e.g. in the treatment of adjectival modification in John Wallis’ &lt;em&gt;Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1653), but X-Bar Theory as a whole and its ambitious intended scope were new, and very important insights bound to stay in Chomskian linguistics for more than thirty years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X-bar  theory worked reasonably well for core categories like NP/N, VP/V, or AP/A, but ran into serious obstacles with coordinate constructions, and, above all, with the syntactic structures &lt;em&gt;par excellence&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., 'sentences': obviously, under the early TGG analysis of 'S' expressed by the popular rule S &gt; NP + VP, S was non-headed ('exocentric'), and a flagrant exception to the XP = [...X...] pattern that X-Bar Theory predicted all syntactic constructions should comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if X-Bar Theory was to stand, as desired, it was necessary to find a way to reanalyse the 'sentence' as a 'headed' construction, and, since S consisted of only two 'immediate constituents', the NP (functioning as the 'subject') and the VP (functioning as the 'predicate'), only two possibilities seemed available: either S was an expansion of the NP (and ultimately of N, according to the X-Bar principles), or the head of S was the VP and S was an expansion thereof, and ultimately of the finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former view (although defended, in the 1920’s and 30’s by no less a grammarian than Jespersen) was considered absolutely untenable for many syntactic and semantic reasons I cannot review here. There, thus, remained the latter option, i.e., that S was simply an expansion of the VP (and, ultimately, of the finite verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of certain semantic obstacles (VP, the predicate, names a ‘function’ in Frege’s sense, whereas S, like NP, names an ‘object’ = 1/0, again in Frege’s terms), that the finite verb was the 'heart' of the sentence had been the preferred view in the preceding two and a half centuries of ‘traditional grammar’ and remained so among late 19th century German linguists and early 20th century pre-Chomskian European 'structuralist' and 'functionalist' grammarians like Guillaume, Tesniére, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, therefore, between 1970 and 1979, TG grammarians, too, seriously considered adopting the V-centered view of the sentence as the obvious way to make S comply with X-Bar Theory, and, as a matter of fact, one of the most important monographs on X-Bar Theory ever published, Jackendoff's &lt;em&gt;X' Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (MIT Press, 1977), did analyse S as an extended VP phrase (V''', in his notation). The fact that in many languages the subject seemed dispensable, whereas the finite verb was not, seemed to support that traditional view, and until about 1979 several other influential Chomskian linguists proposed similar, V-centered, analyses of the sentence. Or rather, of the ‘core sentence’ (= the 'predication'), since, as early as 1972, Joan Bresnan had already offered compelling reasons to analyze real speakers’ sentences as structures containing S preceded by a ‘complementizer’ category C lodging certain subordinators and expressing the sentence’s crucial ‘illocutionary’ properties (assertion, interrogation, command, etc.), a view that, under X-Bar theory, first suggested treating sentences, rather sloppily, as ‘S-bar’ phrases with the internal structure [Comp + S] (e.g., in Chomsky’s &lt;em&gt;Lectures on Government and Binding&lt;/em&gt; 1981), or as Comp + V’’’ structures (in Jackendoff’s earlier work), and eventually as &lt;strong&gt;CPs&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., as projections of the C category (e.g., in Chomsky’s later, and extremely influential book &lt;em&gt;Barriers&lt;/em&gt;, 1986). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the source of the sentential tree diagrams dominated by CP that figure in most introductory syntax textbooks even nowadays. However, as Comp is invisible in independent declarative sentences, and those are the obvious sentential structures to start explaining syntax with to beginners, such textbooks often omit representing the CP segment of the projection and offer informal sentence trees dominated by the old symbol S or by the categories that eventually replaced it under the pressure of the X-Bar principles, either an uncompromising IP, as in Chomsky’s &lt;em&gt;Barriers&lt;/em&gt;, or the more informative, and controversial, symbols (TP, AGR-P, etc.) that eventually replaced IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To justify the original IP idea a bit more, though, by 1980 the study of verbless predications in English and other languages had progressed enough to lead Chomsky to claim that, at the UG level, the grammatically key element of a 'predication' was neither the subject nor the predicate, but something more abstract connecting those two elements, a view that logicians and philosophers of language could not but sympathise with (due to the existence of the 'predication paradox', a problem we need not go into here). Interestingly, in the &lt;em&gt;Port Royal Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, that 'linking' element had been claimed to be the 'copula' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, but that ‘logicist’ analysis was arbitrary, at bottom, and never caught on in mainstream grammatical theory, so, for a long time, no alternatives were proposed. When the study of ‘universal grammar’ was seriously resumed by Chomsky and his disciples, though, the problem of the ‘linking’ category re-emerged, and in certain cross-linguistic TGG analyses published between 1979 and 1981, the possibility was seriously contemplated that the crucial element of 'predication' might be the abstract 'Aux' node that Chomsky himself had introduced in his earliest work on TGG (notably, in &lt;em&gt;Aspects&lt;/em&gt;, but, in a less structured way, already in his 1955 &lt;em&gt;LSLT&lt;/em&gt; thesis). As, within 'Aux', (English) auxiliaries all seemed optional, the key ‘linking’ component could only be 'tense' ('c', in Chomsky's earliest work), which, at the time, pointed to tense as a likely candidate to sentence-head status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That hypothesis, however, raised the obvious problem that many predications were non-finite (or even non-verbal) and could hardly be analysed as 'projections' of a syntactic element they did not have. The solution that Chomsky eventually adopted from his 1979 Pisa lectures (later &lt;em&gt;Lectures on Government and Binding&lt;/em&gt;, 1981) onwards within the framework of the then new 'GB' theory was to analyse sentences as 'projections' of an abstract 'functional' head INFL instantiated in different ways, i.e., mainly as a tense morpheme (in finite clauses) or as 'zero' or other 'verbal' inflections (in non-finite ones), but also as other 'functional' morphemes (e.g., certain preposition-like words, etc.) in other constructions attested in diverse languages. That much will hopefully suffice as to the origin of the IP analysis of the predicational core of sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysing S as a projection of Infl according to the 'rules' IP/I''&gt; NP + I' and I'&gt; I + VP (alternating with other 'predicates' like PP, AP, NP, etc.) solved the 'endocentricity' issue that sentential constructions had initially raised, kept and reinforced the X-Bar principles as one of the key 'modules' of the ensuing 'Principles and Parameters Theory' of the mid 1980's, and, at the same time, allowed for great flexibility in analysing predications, which is why many introductory textbooks of the 1980's and early 1990's adopted the IP analysis of the core sentence, if only as a pedagogical solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as P&amp;amp;P theory developed during the mid and late 1980's and the number of languages analysed within that framework increased, INFL inevitably revealed itself as a simplification, a cover term for an aggregate of different inflectional features, in particular, 'tense' (or lack thereof) and 'agreement', and, as such features could be neatly distinguished in 'phonetic form' in many languages, and could even appear separately in some, it soon became inevitable to insert them in syntactic trees under different category nodes. By 1988, largely due to Mark Baker’s influential work on the correspondence between verb morphology and syntactic projection, the Tense and AGR components of Infl were already distinct 'nodes' in all serious work on P&amp;amp;P syntax, and, to the extent that, in view of the morphological structure of verbs, AGR-S arguably is structurally higher than Tense, later P&amp;amp;P work by Chomsky and others between 1989 and 1991 started including analyses of the predicational core of the sentence as an AGR-sP(hrase), although eventually Chomsky himself retrenched into a simpler view that reduced IP to TP, for technical reasons that need not concern us here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was only the beginning of the ‘split-INFL’ analysis, though. At about the same time or soon afterwards, evidence was offered that certain languages had not only subject, but also object agreement, and, for parallel reasons, the Infl 'segment' of the sentential projection quickly gained an 'object-AGR(eement)' node. Also, from about 1989 on, the sheer internal logic of late P&amp;amp;P Theory gradually led to the establishment of many other such 'functional' heads inside the 'core sentence', both within the 'INFL'/AUX area (e.g., 'polarity' and several 'modality'-related heads) and above it, in the area traditionally associated with Joan Bresnan's (1972) Complementizer and the expression of a sentence's 'illocutionary' features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chomsky’s writings on GB and P&amp;amp;PT, e.g., in &lt;em&gt;Barriers&lt;/em&gt; (1986), Comp was still a single head projecting a CP than contained IP as a complement, but, in work by Rizzi, Cinque and others about a decade later, the original Comp node had itself split into a C in the strict sense, plus, perhaps, an additional Force head (with its specifier), a Topic ‘shell’ (= a Top head plus a suitable specifier), a Focus ‘shell’ (again, a Foc head with its own specifier), and, in Cinque’s influential monograph on &lt;em&gt;Adverbs and Functional Heads&lt;/em&gt; (1999), several attitudinal and epistemic adverbial heads and specifiers. [Parallel developments took place in the analysis of NP-structure starting with Abney’s (1987) influential 'DP Hypothesis' soon followed by very delicate DP internal structure developed in Cinque’s cartography programme, among others].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the late 1990’s, therefore, CP was clearly just a convenient cover term for a number of hierarchically ordered syntactic projections - including ForceP, TopP, FocusP, etc. - that syntax textbooks chose to specify or not depending on their pedagogical policies and on their authors' expository strategy in each textbook section, which explains why the syntax beginner may still easily encounter apparently conflicting analyses of ‘the sentence’ - and, of course, different symbols, like CP, ForceP, IP, TP, etc. - at the top of sentence trees even in contiguous sections of the same textbook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of the structure assumed for what we must now informally call 'the sentence' since the early 1990’s, in sum, is so complicated that it is virtually impossible to summarise, particularly in non-technical terms, but, in response to the OP's specific question, I would like to add, by way of summary and conclusion, that the increasingly detailed hierarchical structure that research has revealed within what we used to call the ‘sentence' has converted that term into an informal, pre-theoretical, label, useful enough to the extent it invokes the traditional idea of a ‘sententia’ (= a ‘complete’ and coherent expression that ‘makes sense’) and the layman’s common sense view thereof, but with no real significance in contemporary syntactic analysis of a non-pedagogical nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, of course, is a problem for beginning syntax students, who must remain alert to detect when their textbook is just omitting irrelevant structure its author accepts and assumes to be there, if hidden, and when it is opting for an alternative analysis that denies the existence of that extra structure, but, in case the OP feels she is being irresponsibly played with, let me quickly add that the possible uncertainties this state of affairs may induce are far from mere ‘collateral damages’ caused by a teacher’s or a textbook author’s pedagogical strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dire fact is that, at the time being, even professional syntacticians do not really agree as yet as to the fine details of ‘sentential’ structure, including such key aspects thereof as the number, labels, and hierarchical disposition of sub-sentential phrases, the syntactic and semantic properties associated to each of the by now innumerable heads and specifiers postulated, or crucial semantic issues like what level(s) within current ‘sentence’ structure are ‘propositional’ (the ‘saturated’ VP?, the higher vP node?, PolarityP?, TP?, Agr-S-P?, CP?...), to name but a few and avoid going into the movement-related issues that follow from such uncertainties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that a syntax textbook author is competent and well informed, in sum, what label he chooses to use at the root of a ‘sentential’ tree is often just a matter of pedagogical convenience and need not worry learners once they are aware of that trivial fact. What must trouble both learners and syntax teachers or professional syntacticians, but particularly the latter, is that too much of the highly articulated hierarchical structure currently assumed for sentential phrases has never yet been properly substantiated in either syntactic or semantic terms. That, of course, makes life very hard for those of us who teach the same students full-length courses (as opposed to mere lists of selected 'topics') in both syntax and semantics and like to start our teaching by promising them not to consider any structure or machinery that cannot be set in a transparent, compositional, relation with empirically testable aspects of the meaning of sentences and their parts. At present, such promissory notes are, to the best of my understanding, impossible to redeem unless one retreats into a much simpler view of sentence structure than is currently assumed in professional journals, and, to that extent, the decision of many textbook authors' to simplify things and analyse sentences in terms of just CPs and IPs, for example, is understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T18:30:18.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T18:30:18.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17215" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:56:55.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could also just use a Gaulish dictionary. It's the earliest continental Celtic language we actually know a lot about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest Xavier Delamarre's &quot;Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise&quot;. It's not online, but an actual book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14995" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:56:55.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2017-01-22T22:33:22.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi kind of has this feature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;किस (चीज़) पे खिलौना रखा?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;kis (cIz) pe khilonA rakhA?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    What did you put the toy on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;किसने किया?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;kisne kiyA?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Who did it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;किस is the oblique form of the word क्या (kyA) meaning &quot;what&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T20:16:08.787" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T20:16:08.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T03:46:27.400" Score="1" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dictionaries don't agree on whether savvy comes from French or Spanish, via creole/pidgin. Is it known which language is the origin and where the word specifically first entered English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15001" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T02:17:30.740" Title="Specific origin of savvy" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:04:30.260" Score="1" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;In (10) (i) of Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Strucures&lt;/em&gt; (1957), the set of sentences of a specific language is defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ab, aabb, aaabbb, ...,&lt;/em&gt; and in general, all sentences consisting of&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; occurrences of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; followed by &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; occurrences of &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and only these&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky then states that the non-finite-state nature of this language can be easily shown. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how, considering that he allows his finite state grammars to contain closed loops. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.at/books?id=05tuIekzBuIC&amp;amp;lpg=PA23&amp;amp;ots=C6bKHVocsP&amp;amp;dq=ian%20robinson%20finite%20state%20grammar&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;pg=PA18#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ian%20robinson%20finite%20state%20grammar&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ian Robinson doesn't understand it either and his is the only text I found addressing this.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing? Any help would be very appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15008" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T21:42:24.437" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T01:02:11.903" Title="Chomsky's Syntactic Structures: Why is {a^n b^n : n ∈ ℕ} not a finite state language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T22:02:11.107" Score="1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;My unabridged Liddell/Scott does not have any indication of what the name of the Greek Mount &quot;Kyllene&quot; means.  Robert Graves in &quot;The Greek Myths&quot; says it means &quot;Twisted Queen.&quot;  I have seen where he can be off in his interpretation of names, plus that just sounds like an odd name for the mountain.  Does someone have a reliable source for the meaning of &quot;Kyllene&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15004" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T22:00:55.123" Title="Etymology/meaning of (Mount) Kyllene" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T23:15:22.373" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically my question is what is the correct treatment of copular verbs in the following sentence: &quot;The car is red.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Google Natural Language API, the root is the verb &quot;is&quot; and the &quot;car&quot; is the nominal subject of &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Stanford CoreNLP dependency parser, the root of the phrase is &quot;red&quot; and &quot;car&quot; is the nominal subject of &quot;red&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jJh73.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jJh73.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Natural Language API dependency parse&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gXs8A.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gXs8A.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stanford CoreNLP dependency parse&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13375" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T23:15:22.373" Title="Treatment of copular verb in dependency parse of Google Natural Language API vs Stanford CoreNLP parser" Tags="&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20908" CreationDate="2017-01-23T23:15:59.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: in a proper finite-state language, you only need finite memory to determine whether an arbitrary pattern is valid or not. This language requires you to remember how many &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s have been encountered, and that number is unbounded.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very nice intuitive &quot;proof&quot; that this is not a finite-state language, which can be made rigorous through some additional work. In true mathematical fashion, this additional work is left as an exercise for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us say &lt;code&gt;{a^n b^n : n ∈ ℕ}&lt;/code&gt; is a finite state language. This means that we can construct a finite state machine which takes in a series of characters as input, and outputs &lt;code&gt;TRUE&lt;/code&gt; if that series of characters matches your language, or &lt;code&gt;FALSE&lt;/code&gt; if it does not. So if we feed the finite state machine &lt;code&gt;ab&lt;/code&gt; it will say &lt;code&gt;TRUE&lt;/code&gt;; if we feed it &lt;code&gt;aaabbb&lt;/code&gt; it will say &lt;code&gt;TRUE&lt;/code&gt;; if we feed it &lt;code&gt;aaabb&lt;/code&gt; it will say &lt;code&gt;FALSE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To match this language, our finite state machine needs to remember how many &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s it has seen, in order to make sure the number of &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;s is the same. And the only way a finite state machine can remember anything is through its state. So the machine needs a state for &quot;I have seen one &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; so far&quot;, another state for &quot;I have seen two &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s so far&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you're allowing &lt;em&gt;any natural number&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s. This would require the machine to have no fewer states than there are natural numbers, in order for it to remember accurately how many &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;s it's seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are an infinite quantity of natural numbers, we need an infinite quantity of states. But this contradicts the definition of a &lt;em&gt;finite&lt;/em&gt; state machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have a contradiction. There cannot be such a finite state machine, and thus your language is not a finite state language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T23:15:59.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:03:54.013" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Linguistics group adjectives by their nature to denote an absolute quantity, as opposed to those that denote a relative quantity? If so, are there terms for such adjectives pointing out this particular division?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By absolute I mean that they have an inherent reference, as in &quot;the distance from nothing&quot;, or &quot;from zero&quot;. These would be adjectives like &quot;large&quot;, &quot;fast&quot;, or &quot;high&quot;.&#xA;By relative I mean those without inherent reference, as in &quot;small&quot;, &quot;slow&quot;, or &quot;low&quot;. Using those requires a reference, either by outright naming it, or by having context provide it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I want to explain why combining a multiplier with a &quot;relative adjective&quot; is at best unreliable to truthfully convey the correct scale. Or in other words: Why something like &quot;three times smaller&quot; (or &quot;three times as small&quot;) is incomputable hogwash - for example, you couldn't plug &quot;one&quot; in instead of &quot;three&quot; and have this still make sense. It's either smaller or it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more background: To say something was small, you would have to have some sort of reference, a comparison, by which you could make that statement in the first place. Of course, you would also need that in &quot;something is large&quot;, but 'large' can also quantify the property of the reference (its absolute size), and can then be used to describe something else: &quot;B is 1 times larger than A&quot; (meaning B is two times the size of A).&#xA;This quality of 'large', the ability to be used as a placeholder for an absolute is missing in 'small'. You cannot say &quot;B is 1 times smaller than A&quot; and have the listener be able to infer the correct 'formula' behind this statement to reliably arrive at the correct size of B, because the 'smallness of A' is never quantified. (Note that this irk is about non-colloquial usage where accurate conveyance, even across languages, is mandatory.)&#xA;It is this difference in quality that this question seeks to find terminology for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15007" LastEditorUserId="15007" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T08:50:33.460" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T08:50:33.460" Title="Type of adjective, &quot;more&quot; vs. &quot;less&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-02-01T21:27:10.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20916" CreationDate="2017-01-24T13:33:53.717" Score="10" ViewCount="1870" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw that SAMPA was created to be machine-readable. &#xA;Does that mean that IPA isn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it isn't, why is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: By machine-readable, I meant that it could be directly interpreted by a parser/algorithm. More precisely, I wanted to know why I could not find an IPA text-to-speech web app (that would work for all languages), but there seemed to be some for SAMPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15009" LastEditorUserId="15009" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T10:26:14.063" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T10:26:14.063" Title="Is IPA machine-readable?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;sampa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20915" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:31:44.090" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is machine readable &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt;, because the IPA characters are all in Unicode, the standard character set of today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time when SAMPA was created, character sets were either 7 bit (ASCII) or 8 bit (Latin-1, Latin-2 and the like) or specific to East Asian Scripts. Those character sets didn't incorporate IPA, and in this sense IPA wasn't machine readable at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T14:31:44.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20915" CreationDate="2017-01-24T17:34:23.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will assume that &quot;machine readable&quot; means that you want a computer to be able to scan/photograph the text and read it with a high degree of accuracy and furthermore the information should be able to be passed around in text form between a wide variety of computer systems with minimal risk of mangling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SAMPA limits itself to ASCII. Pretty much all computer systems can process ascii characters unmolested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to print and scan it reliably there are specific fonts designed for the purpose of printing and scanning ASCII characters though there can be some compatibility issues on some of the weirder symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time SAMPA was created computer text handling was still pretty limited. Typically computers handled ASCII plus a set of up to 128 local characters and/or symbols. Support for larger character sets did exist but it was mostly limited to CJK languages. Passing IPA around in this environment would have been very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the modern world it is reasonable to pass IPA text in unicode around on computers but it still carries a higher risk of mangling than ASCII text does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for printing and scanning IPA has a large character set where some characters are scaled or inverted versions of others and on top of that makes heavy use of diacritics. I would expect this to make reliable OCR very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15011" LastEditorUserId="15011" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T17:57:35.300" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:57:35.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20920" CreationDate="2017-01-24T18:26:27.603" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike vowel formant frequencies, tones are trickier to determine, since the F0 of a TBU may depend on a lot of factors, such as the speaker's age, gender, mood, etc. Thus, it's quite often the case that accounts based on impressionistic transcription disagree on whether a tone is, say, 24 or 35. I know from looking at Praat that the same tone - even if it sounds perceptually similar to me - can produce completely different-looking F0 contours in Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any established experimental procedure to determine the pitch(es) of a tone, either in Chao's system (1 is lowest, 5 is highest) or the Central Americanist one (reverse)? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T18:45:03.550" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T02:59:36.847" Title="What kind of experimental procedures can be used to determine tone values (1-5)?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20939" CreationDate="2017-01-24T19:43:25.557" Score="7" ViewCount="1026" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at a sprachbund called Standard Average European, which seems to include Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages. I will not list all the features here since they can be found on Wikipedia, but I am interested in the group of features which features can be seen as dividing SAE languages into two major groupings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One the one hand we have group A, which includes English, Norwegian, German, Spanish, French, etc.&#xA;And then we have group B, including Latin, Russian, Czech, Latvian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;definite and indefinite articles&lt;/code&gt; exist in group A but not in group B&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle&lt;/code&gt;  exists in group A but not in group B&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;verb-initial order in yes/no questions&lt;/code&gt; exists in group A but not in group B&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;subject–verb–object&lt;/code&gt; is generally unmarked word order in group A but not in group B&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Group B languages generally have a much richer case system, which don't seem to syncretise prepositional and dative, and which seem to include other cases which are not found in Group A&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure we can find others. Do we have grounds for actually stipulating two separate sprachbunds here? Have linguists defined these and looked at this more closely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T15:02:40.883" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T15:02:40.883" Title="Subtypes of Standard Average European" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20918" CreationDate="2017-01-24T20:19:10.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no (implementable) experimental procedure for doing this, and the main reason is that the thing you want to do isn't well-defined (but I'll try to define it sort of, with the goal of making such an experiment be useful). There is a trivial way to get F0, so in that sense you can always come up with a numeric value. But what you want is a reduction of continuous pitch to certain ranges, let's say 5 intervals (it should be 6 for purposes of linguistic contrast, but whatever). One way to do this is to divide the possible range of human voices into 5 bands. However, it is a fact that in some languages, pitch range tends to be high and in other languages it tends to be low, so you could come to the absurd conclusion that all tones are 1 in Chinese and 5 in Bari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative would be to compute an observed range for a language (90% of all F0 values in a corpus fall within that range), and then divide into 5 bands. You still get the same absurd result that speaker A has only tone 1 and speaker B has only tone 5. You can continue to narrow the subject pool, so that you only look at one speaker and determine his/her range, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; mark individual words for that speaker in terms of their absolute pitch numbers (scaled down to 5). You might (should) also use a non-linear scale to map F0 to numbers, because a 10 Hz difference at around 100 Hz is perceptually much bigger than a 10 Hz difference at around 400 Hz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't tell you anything about tones, though – you'd need an independent determination of what the tones of the language are (tone is a phonological, contrastive concept). There are a lot of physical properties that go into tone: not just F0, but also movement of F0 and phonatory properties (especially in SE Asian languages). Still, you can set that aside, if the interest is just pitch. Mandarin is a good example of the ambiguity of tone counting: it has 4 holistic &quot;tones&quot;, and 3 levels. This is pretty common, that you have to specify the target points (H, L, M... what the numbers are about), and the transitions (rising, falling, level). The linguistic numbering systems do that by specifying e.g. &quot;52&quot; meaning starts at level 5 and ends at level 2. But you have to first do a phonological analysis, to determine if there is a &quot;52&quot; tone in a language that contrast with a &quot;51&quot; or &quot;42&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you have the analysis, and you know there is a H, L, M, and contours ML and LH. Now the goal is to turn those tone categories into something closer to physical, namely the pitch numbers that you got by dividing H0 into 5 bands. The more bands you have, the more accurate your tone-to-pitch mapping will be, but let's stick to 5. You have to parse the stream of pitch integers to tone-marked syllables so that you know for instance that the pitch of a given ML syllable is (using &quot;5 is highest&quot; numbering) &quot;4 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1&quot;. This comes from directly scaling F0 measurements as you get them from Praat, for instance (evenly spaced).&#xA;Now you need to compute the &quot;first&quot; and &quot;last&quot; pitch value, since the goal is to reduce the pitch trace even more, to just two specifications. There is a huge problem with figuring out a meaningful answer to the question &quot;what is the initial pitch&quot;. Do you adjust away from consonants to avoid pitch artifacts (lowering after voiced obstruents, raising after voiceless)? Do you just take the first and last points and assume that the bulk of points in between aren't actually essential? Do you divide the points evenly and compute the mean? (If the syllable has 3 tone points, get the mean in thirds; if it is level take the mean of all points)? I'd suggest the latter: divide the pitch points evenly according to how many phonological targets there are. Round the results. Then you can say that in the aforementioned syllable, there is a 31 tone, implementing the category ML.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this basically does is massively reduces the data which is a raw F0 trace, to something more symbolic. The next question would be, and what does this show you? It would be inferior to an actual pitch trace, in obscuring many important details of tone implementation (remedy: expand the range of tone integers to 10). It still requires you to know what the phonological tones of a language are, although it does solve the &quot;Chinese&quot; puzzle that a falling tone can be judged to be 53, 42, 52 and various other numbers (and: it is documented that different researchers into Chinese actually assign different numbers for the same dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an experiment related to understanding pitch perception, this could be extremely useful if done systematically and with sensitivity to the variation that exists in human languages. Or it could be used as a Chinese-specific calibration technique. AFAIK, the absolute-number approach used in Chinese studies does not exist in Meso-America, so if a language has 3 levels then only 1,2,3 are used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get to languages with upstep and downstep, the aforementioned system completely collapses since there is no upper bound on the number of &quot;categories&quot;. If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; decide to deal with upstep and downstep, you can take advantage of the fact that the range itself changes over time. Initially, the range might be between 200 and 150 Hz, but at a point (where there is a downstep), the range lowers to be between 175 and 125 (not the vast oversimplification here). If the size of the range is, say 50 Hz, and you're computing 5 pitch intervals, then the F0 to pitch-integer conversion is (f0-b)/5, where &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is the baseline value at the low end of the range, and downstep means &quot;reduce the baseline value&quot;. The problem is that you need to determine that reduction empirically (and it isn't likely to be a constant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T02:59:36.847" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T02:59:36.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20907" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:45:33.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/savvy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dictionary of American Slang, Fourth Edition by Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD. and Robert L. Chapman, Ph.D.&lt;/a&gt; it is from Spanish, modern use is influenced by French: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[fr West Indian pidgin fr Spanish sabe usted, ''do you know?''; modern use influenced by French savez, ''you know'']&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3356" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T23:45:33.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2017-01-25T11:19:34.090" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have not read the minimalist program, but i agree that all syntax is binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i show that your example is also binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Fred gave Bill a present.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Fred give ed Bill a present.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;(Fred give ed Bill (a present)).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;Fred give ed Bill (a present)&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( Fred give Bill (a present) ) ed&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( Fred ( give Bill (a present) ) ) ed&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;give Bill (a present)&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( give (a present) ) Bill&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&#xA;and, combined form of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( ( Fred ( ( give (a present) ) Bill ) ) ed ).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and i semantically sort it by &quot;heads&quot; and &quot;specifiers&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;.( ed ( ( ( give ( present a ) ) Bill ) Fred ) )&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( ( Fred ( Bill ( (a present) give ) ) ) ed ).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ok, i will try to write an answer to &quot;What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i show with your example: as far as i understand you say that (give Bill a present) consists of 3 elements: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;(give Bill (a present))&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and probably you think that &quot;give&quot; is main element here and Bill and (a present) are 2 equal not-main elements. but &quot;binarists&quot; say that that 2 not-main elements are never equal. proof for that: &lt;em&gt;2 different elements are never equal&lt;/em&gt;, because they are different. one of them is always more &quot;close&quot; to main element than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;grammatical relations can and should be shown by virtual morphemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;(Fred give ed Bill (a present)).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;((Fred (subject marker position)) give ed (Bill (some indirect object marker)) ((a present) (some direct object marker))).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;.( ed ( ( ( give ((direct object marker)( present a )) ) ((indirect object marker) Bill) ) ((subject marker) Fred) ) )&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;( ( (Fred (subject marker)) ( (Bill (indirect object marker)) ( ((a present) (direct object marker)) give ) ) ) ed ).&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastEditorUserId="13708" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T07:09:26.730" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T07:09:26.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28562" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:08:52.977" Score="6" ViewCount="2706" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are alternative glyphs for Devanagari numerals ५ (5), ८ (8) and ९ (9)&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;, that look like cursive &quot;y&quot;, ८ with upper horizontal bar, and mirrored &quot;3&quot;, respectively.&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; These are sometimes called &lt;em&gt;Hindi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[3]&lt;/sup&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Calcutta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[4]&lt;/sup&gt; forms, while the &quot;default&quot;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; ones called &lt;em&gt;Bombay&lt;/em&gt; forms; sometimes all the variants use the same glyph for &quot;9&quot;, and the &quot;mirrored 3&quot; form is considered &lt;em&gt;Nepali&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;[4]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VqIao.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VqIao.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of the different variants&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(via [2])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative glyphs are not resolved into different Unicode characters. So can they be considered an analogy to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A#Typographic_variants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#Typographic_variants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;g&lt;/a&gt;&quot; typographic variants? Or are some variants used and understood more preferably or exclusively in some (which) regions or contexts? Is there any good &quot;open access&quot; source explaining this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] note: &lt;em&gt;I assume the (default) glyphs in this text are those presented in common Unicode fonts, like Google Noto, i.e. &quot;Bombay&quot; forms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&amp;amp;uid=hvzj8v9yrg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scriptsource: Alternate digits in Devanagari&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://asi.nic.in/asi_books/3374.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. M. Lambert: Introduction To The Devanagari script&lt;/a&gt;, p.32  (PDF)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;http://mirrors.ctan.org/language/devanagari/velthuis/doc/manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari for TeX, version 2.17 (manual)&lt;/a&gt;, p.21  (PDF)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1332" LastEditorUserId="1332" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T14:18:51.407" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T18:18:15.840" Title="Devanagari digit variants" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;&lt;devanagari&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20945" CreationDate="2017-01-25T20:45:20.440" Score="4" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets assume that there is a language that has some relatively small set of meaning blocks, within 10-1000, so that any word can be composed from this meaning blocks. Each meaning block should have only one own meaning, not a set of them. By combining 2-5 of such meaning blocks we could achieve the same amount of options as exist in modern languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idea is to define this set of meaning blocks once and do not add them later, but use their combinations if a new word is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for such experimental language, or any similar works done about this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for now im not interested in grammar, words order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rules for composing words from this meaning blocks and the list of the blocks themselves is what i want)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upd1: NSM is a very close to what i was looking for. each word has only one wide meaning, but not a set of them. But probably there are too few meanings in NSM and i dont understand their logic in selecting 'above' but not 'in front' or 'left' for example. Or lack of color, noise, tactile feelings details. Also many prople are against this theory, whivh i didnt meet with toki pona, so probably there is something wrong about NSM that i do not see yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toki pona has a big community, but it meanings associated with words are unconnected. Each word has many separate meanings, and this is the biggest problem for me. Also some important meanings are not present and many of unimportant ones are present. like the meaning 'part' is abscent but 'insect' and 'non-cute-animal' are present. So again, i dont understand the logic in selecting this particular words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List of requirements(its personal, but im trying to be objective):&#xA;1) each word has connected, close set of meanings. So that each meaning is as close as synonym to any other meaning of the same word. NSM does fit, toki pona doesnt.&#xA;2) all important meanings are present, or logic in selecting existing meanings is explained (i didnt it find yet not for NSM, nor toki pona)&#xA;3) unimportant meanings are not present (toki pona does not fit, meanings like 'insect', 'non-cute-animal' and 'powder' can be composed from other meanings, but this is personal) NSM does fit&#xA;4) active community. Toki pona does fit well. But with NSM people do know about it but are actively agast it(i dont know why), so NSM does not fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So probably there is some other option apart from this two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15024" LastEditorUserId="15024" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T10:16:24.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T10:26:20.883" Title="Finite set of meaning blocks language" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-25T20:50:36.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;this may work as an example of such meaning blocks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15024" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T20:50:36.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2017-01-25T21:01:11.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe in binary branching, but not &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; binary branching.  In HPSG (and Categorial Grammar), constituents combine by the application of a function to a single argument.  Function and argument -- that's two, so it's binary.  The order of application is determined by the obliqueness of arguments.  The most oblique arguments are applied to first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is my interpretation of an HPSG-like theory.  I don't know what HPSG (Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar), the true theory itself, says about your example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, &quot;Fred gave Bill a present&quot;, the dative &quot;Bill&quot; is most oblique, the accusative &quot;a present&quot; is next most oblique, and the nominative &quot;Bill&quot; is least oblique.  The constituent structure is given by the applications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[gave](Bill) = [gave Bill]  &#xA;[gave Bill](a present) = [gave Bill a present]  &#xA;[gave Bill a present](Fred) = [Fred gave Bill a present]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The organization of constituents into applications of functions to arguments does not intrinsically enforce binary branching, since one could have functions with more than one argument.  But evidence from certain ambiguities of scope argues for application to single arguments only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an adverb occurs with a term argument of the same obliqueness, James McCawley discovered an ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;25% of voters probably voted for Trump.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could mean either (1) for each voter among 25% of voters, it is probable that that person voted for Trump, or (2) the proportion of Trump voters is probably 25%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the subject and the adverb arguments could be applied to in one step, there would be just one possible constituent structure for the example and therefore no ambiguity of structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T21:01:11.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-26T00:30:12.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona&quot;&gt;toki pona&lt;/a&gt; is a constructed language which is very close to what you're looking for, it has only 120 words and you cannot add any new ones, you can just combine the existing ones to get the meaning you need. Still the minimalism of toki pona is the point of that language, you're supposed &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to construct complex structures of the 120 words it has, but rather use them in their massively wide meanings, yes, unfortunately words in this language have &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; wide meaning. Anyhow, you can judge it yourself if it's what you mean, here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rowa.giso.de/languages/toki-pona/english/toki-pona-lessons_en.pdf&quot;&gt;official toki pona textbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T00:30:12.910" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-26T10:27:39.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such kind of language would be a &lt;em&gt;constructed language&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two different types of constructed languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Naturalistic languages&lt;/em&gt; (like Esperanto or Interlingua) that follow closely the features of natural languages and that are usually intended as means for international communication or serve a role in pieces of art (as the Elbian languages of Tolkien or as Klingon in Star Trek).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Philosophical languages&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a priori languages&lt;/em&gt; (Famous example: Solresol, also Leibniz tried to construct one) that are trying to create a system of communication from some kind of first principles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your experimental language would fall into the second category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="15024" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T14:43:58.050" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T14:43:58.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20936" CreationDate="2017-01-26T15:44:02.787" Score="4" ViewCount="2223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just started studying Phonology and I find a problem while dealing with Syllables. I read that nuclei are not only vowels, but they could be also liquids (l - r) or nasals (n - m - ng).&#xA;But what I already learned when I studied Articulatory Phonetics is that Nasals and Liquids are [ +Consonantal , - Syllabic ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please explain to me with examples how a liquid/nasal become a nucleus of a syllable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T10:52:29.857" Title="liquids and nasals as syllable nuclei!" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20931" CreationDate="2017-01-26T16:10:10.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Liquids and nasals can sometimes be syllabic as well. (In fact, in Berber, even stops can be syllabic sometimes.) The more precise IPA symbols for these &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabic consonants&lt;/a&gt; add a vertical dot underneath the letter, e.g. [sɪləbl̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how that happens, it's one of the strategies that a language can employ to syllabify stray consonants. I'll illustrate from a derivational perspective (as I assume you haven't gotten to optimality yet). English doesn't allow [bl] to be a coda, as it violates sonority. So when you try to syllabify /sɪləbl/, after the first pass you get sɪ.ləb.l with a stray [l]. So the English system tries to fix this by turning the [l] syllabic, into [l̩], and subsequently assigning a sigma to the newly syllabic consonant. Then the [b] gets re-assigned as the onset of the brand-new syllable, and eventually you end up with [sɪ.lə.bl̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can compare this with the French system, which has no problem with [tabl].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Your curriculum sounds slightly odd... distinctive features are a phonological theory rather than a phonetic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T10:52:29.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T10:52:29.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29429" CreationDate="2017-01-26T16:31:21.990" Score="12" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to all the usual phonology, grammar, and vocabulary one has to learn for a new language there is the social situation, among many things when is it appropriate to speak in one register or another. And every language/variety has its own particular social situation to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irish Gaelic in Ireland has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Irish_language&quot;&gt;an interesting past&lt;/a&gt;. It was once a classic learned language during the Middle Ages, but declined in use during English colonization and was literally marginalized (to the western edges of the island) by the early 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be nowadays two versions of the prevalence of Irish Gaelic in Ireland. One is that the daily users of Irish are still only in this Gaeltacht area (on the western coast). There has been nominal teaching of the subject in school since independence, but few (10%) use it in the home, and even fewer (1%) use it regularly outside the home. Almost everyone speaks English natively in Ireland (even the Gaeltacht Irish speakers), but few speak Irish natively. The default is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other impression is that school teaching over the last hundred years has revived the language, not to the extent of Hebrew in Israel, but to a useful language that many people use. Roads and signs over the country are bilingual, there are newspapers, radio, and television produced in Irish, and what's more telling is that the radio and TV interview national leaders and people on the street in Irish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't necessarily facts, just a compilation of what I think I've read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an outsider, it's hard to judge what's real. Are the TV people selecting the extremely small minority of Irish speakers to interview, are they all using dysfluent grade-school Irish, or are there lots and lots of fluent professionals and everyday people? Are the maps with Gaelic speakers only on the west coast out of date or labeled wrongly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better source to justify any a judgement than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language&quot;&gt;the wikipedia article on the Irish language&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T11:52:26.870" Title="The current status of Irish Gaelic in Ireland" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20931" CreationDate="2017-01-26T20:52:41.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is how to say d + l as one syllable.  First, say d + schwa + l, where the schwa is the syllabic sound of the syllable.  The tongue tip must leave the alveolar ridge for the schwa.  Now, say the same thing, but this time, keep the tongue tip in contact with the alveolar ridge.  That's it -- you've just said a syllabic l after the d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may doubt that there is a real phonological distinction between the version with schwa and without it.  Here is a phonological argument that there must be a distinction.  The typical American English pronunciation of &quot;little&quot; has a d for the &quot;tt&quot;.  This is because of the intervocalic flapping of t.  When the t flaps, it becomes sonorant, and sonorants are voiced in voiced surroundings, so the flap voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We only get flapping before vowels, so we know that t is not immediately followed by l when the process of flapping applies.  There must be a vowel (a schwa) between the t and l of &quot;little&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can we account for the pronunciation with d (rather than flap)?  A flap has only a brief contact with the alveolar ridge, so if the schwa after the t which made it possible to flap the t now disappears, the flap has to revert to the corresponding obstruent d.  This is a contact phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we begin with phonemic t + schwa + l, then we get flap + schwa + l, then after schwa is lost, we wind up with d + syllabic l.  There is no schwa between the d and the l.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, we know there is no schwa between glottal stop and n in a word like &quot;rotten&quot; with glottal stop for &quot;tt&quot;, because t does not change to glottal stop before a vowel in American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T20:52:41.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20931" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:18:00.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, phonetics is not about features, though often in introductory classes if you don't have separate courses on phonetics and phonology, phonetics gets lumped together with phonology. Second, it is simply wrong to say that liquids and nasals are [+cons,-syll]. The misstatement comes from confusing the most common properties of a system with the inherent properties of the system.&#xA;Liquids and nasals are [+cons,+son] and if you want to distinguish syllabic versus non-syllabic liquids / nasals (the latter are more common), you can employ [syllabic] to do that – syllabic liquids/nasals are [+cons,+son,+syl] and nonsyllabic liquids are [+cons,+son,-syl]. That assumes the classical SPE feature system, and in fact &lt;em&gt;syllabic&lt;/em&gt; was one of the first features to be disposed of in the 70's. Textbooks may use the SPE system because it does represent the last standard for representation, but there are many current theories of representation, and none of them employ a feature [syllabic]. There are many different accounts of the difference, virtually all of which rely on some prosodic object such as a mora, V-slot, or nuclearly prespecified X-slot (there is also a non-standard redefinition of [consonantal] where glides are [+consonantal] and corresponding vowels are [-consonantal], but as far as I know that has not been applied to the difference between syllabic and non-syllabic consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a somewhat open question how &quot;deeply&quot; a syllabic / non-syllabic distinction is needed. There has always been a strong urge to get rid of the distinction, because most of the time you can predict where things are syllabic. In fact, if you also have syllables (which we don't always have), then you can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; predict syllabicity. Problematic cases like the Swahili minimal pair &lt;em&gt;mbuni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ostrich&quot;, &lt;em&gt;m̩buni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;coffee tree&quot; become non-problematic if you include syllable structure – &lt;em&gt;mbu.ni&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;m̩.bu.ni&lt;/em&gt;. As it happens, the distinction in Swahili is more superficial and there is no need to admit an underlying contrast in syllabicity types for nasals – it can be predicted, once you have the rule system sorted out. For theories that posit moraicity as the bearer of the concept &quot;syllabic&quot;, there isn't much hope of predicting &quot;syllabicness&quot; because moraicity is a fairly fundamental phonemic property (since it is also how you express long versus short). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no general answer to the question of how liquids and nasals become syllabic: there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; answers, and it just depends on the facts of the language. In English, it mostly has to do with unstressed syllables having &lt;em&gt;əC&lt;/em&gt; where C is a sonorant. In many languages it has to do with extraneous consonants that can't be syllabified around a vowel but where there is a sonorant that can fill the bill (Sanskrit, for example). A number of languages of West Africa have CR̩V syllables with syllabic pre-vocalic consonants, and these often derive from disyllables (*pila) which lose a vowel (→ [pl̩a]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T22:28:48.987" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T22:28:48.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-27T13:35:26.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two related theories of lexical semantics that seem amenable to this kind of thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is feature semantics, where a word can be assigned a number of positive or negative features (by analogy with phonemes having phonological features). A word's semantics is defined by a selection of binary features so 'man' might be [+human][-female] and 'table' might be [+furniture][+flat top][+has legs]. If an item doesn't have a positive or negative version of a feature, then that feature is just not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another model is '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ontology&lt;/a&gt;'. This is not the philosophical ontology (metaphysics of being) but rather the specification of semantics by relation to other entities. You can think of any concept as a node and how it is related to other concepts by labeled arrows to other nodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(you can implement feature semantics in an ontology by having all male things point to a 'male' concept)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask if there is a finite set of things here from which the seemingly infinite set of all words or concepts can be derived. Mathematically, yes, this could be done. With a set of 100 features, there are 2^100 (way more than the number of &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; atoms in the universe). However I don't think this is possible usefully. Real life has so many possibilities to it, new things appear all the time. There might be a finite number of arrow labels ('is-a', 'has-a', 'is similar to', etc), but it seems reasonable to think that there are no terminal nodes (no outgoing arrows); there could easily be cycles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to mention quite an opposite direction, axiomatics in mathematical logic depends on treating axioms as the atoms for which there is no proof. All proofs bottom out at these axioms. Whether you consider them syntactic or semantic atoms is another discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T13:35:26.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20919" CreationDate="2017-01-27T18:14:02.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;1st, Latin is not part of Standard Average European (SAE): the sprachbund is thought to have emerged through language contacts during the early middle ages and later, at a time when (classical) Latin was long dead. Actually, the fact that Latin does not share the SAE characteristics is one strong argument to define SAE characteristics as coming from Sprachbund, and are not retained Indo-European features retained genetically in the Romance, Germanic (and to a lesser extent) Slavic families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since SAE is a Spachbund, it borders are a bit fuzzy, some language being at the core of the Sprachbund (French, German), and others at the periphery (Russian, Bulgarian, Magyar). For more details on groupings of SAE languages, you can read Martin Haspelmath paper &lt;em&gt;The European linguistic area: Standard Average European&lt;/em&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;Language Typology and Language Universals&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 2 pp. 1492–1510 (2001) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/seminar/abteilungen/sprachwissenschaft/ls_kortmann/Courses/Kortmann/Variation/index_html/2008-05-27.8724094854&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned pdf&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/14733499/The_European_linguistic_area_Standard_Average_European_2001_&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;better file on academia.edu&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this paper, map 107.13 looks at 9 features of SAE and groups European languages depending on how many feature they share. I advise you to look at the map and read the text around it, even if you don’t have the courage to read the whole paper. Converting this map to a list, the European language ordered according to their degree of membership in SAE are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9 features (nucleus of SAE)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French, German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;8 features (next layer)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Sardinian, Italian, Albanian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 features&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English, Romanian, Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 Features&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 features (the most peripheral languages of SAE, since there is no language with 3 or 4 criteria : this threshold define the boundary of SAE)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian/Croatian, Bulgarian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 features (Non SAE)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breton, Basque, Maltese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 feature&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Welsh, Georgian, Armenian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No feature at all&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irish, Finnish, Estonian, Nenets, Komi, Udmurt, Tatar, Lezgian Turkish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T14:45:53.987" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:45:53.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19190" CreationDate="2017-01-27T21:22:55.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the internal VP structure that Carnie presents in (28) corresponds to an early 1990's analysis of the 'event structure' of active VPs according to which such verbs contain an abstract ('do-like') 'active' component which is absent in the case of verbs describing non-agentive events (e.g., 'processes' like &lt;em&gt;rain&lt;/em&gt;, bare 'change of state' verbs like &lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt;, or non-active 'accomplishment' verbs like &lt;em&gt;reach&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;reach the summit&lt;/em&gt;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea is that the Agent of active verbs like &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; is projected as a specifier of that [ACT] V head (i.e., under VP1)  - instead of as a specifier of  &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; itself (under VP2) - or, more intuitively, that &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; is the surface manifestation of a complex predicate meaning 'do eat' or 'perform an eating act'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although that analysis immediately raises difficult theoretical questions like what, then, if anything, occupies the specifier of &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; under VP2, or, if &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is indeed first projected as the Spec of &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; under VP2, what kind of thematic role it receives from &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; and how can it subsequently raise into the specifier of the 'do-like' V under VP1 and receive a second? theta role (i.e., that of Agent) there, and why is that compatible with the Theta Criterion, etc., the fact is that there is some empirical evidence in support of that analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pairs like * &lt;em&gt;What you didn't was educate your son properly&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;What you did´t &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; was educate your son properly&lt;/em&gt; show that there is a &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; verb 'hidden' under active verbs that is different from the 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; auxiliary and shows up only in such contexts. The fact that non-agentive verbs like &lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt;, etc. cannot be used in that construction (cf. * &lt;em&gt;What he didn´t &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; was die/see the accident&lt;/em&gt;) suggests that they do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; 'contain' such a hidden 'active' &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; verb and therefore lends support to abstract analyses like Carnie's (initially due to Hale &amp;amp; Keyser, if I remember correctly, but very popular in the late 1990's; see e.g. Malka Rappaport Hovav &amp;amp; Beth Levin's influential 1998 paper 'Building Verb Meanings'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T21:22:55.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-27T21:23:49.007" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to express 'unlike, differing from', in an 'academic/professional' fashion using logic symbol(s) or mathematical operators. The descriptions of the corresponding Unicode block seem to show that there's not one symbol for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it is related with formal semantics/linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Unlike set B, set A contains X (or X belongs to A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2554" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T22:17:44.443" Title="logic symbol for 'unlike, differing from'" Tags="&lt;mathematical-language&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20941" CreationDate="2017-01-27T22:56:14.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Why is there still &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/509/use-of-latex-commands&quot;&gt;no MathJax support for this SE&lt;/a&gt;?! Googling and copy-pasting unicode symbols every time you want to talk about semantics is really annoying.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;What you want to say is basically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;¬φ(a) ∧ φ(b)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;The satement &lt;code&gt;φ&lt;/code&gt; involving &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; is not true, but it is true involving &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;&quot; = &quot;Unlike &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;, statement &lt;code&gt;φ&lt;/code&gt; applies to &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Note that my &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; corresponds to your set &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; and vice versa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note also that &lt;code&gt;φ(a)&lt;/code&gt; is not meant to denote a one-place predicate &lt;code&gt;φ&lt;/code&gt; applyig to some individual &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; - in this case, convention would be to use the letters &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt;, ... to denote such predicates, and you would not either use an individual constant &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; to denote a set - but simply an abbreviation for some term &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; occcuring somewhere in a formula &lt;code&gt;φ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Let's tackle the question with propositional logic first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a rarely used symbol &lt;code&gt;↚&lt;/code&gt; (an arrow from right to left with a strike-through, reflecting the negation of a backwards implication &lt;code&gt;→&lt;/code&gt;) expressing that relation. You could use that one; however, as expemlified by the two truth tables below, this very uncommon symbol can be reduced to simply &lt;code&gt;¬p ∧ q&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;p ↚ q  ¬p ∧ q&#xA;1 0 1  01 0 1&#xA;1 0 0  01 0 0&#xA;0 1 1  10 1 1&#xA;0 0 0  10 0 0&#xA;  *       *             &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applied to your example, &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; would denote &quot;the property applies to set B&quot;, while &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; would denote &quot;the porperty applies to set A&quot;. As you can see, the statement only gets true if &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; is false and &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; is true. (The colums with the star below contain the truth values of the final expression.) If you compare these two columns, it gets obvious that the two statements are equivalent (= have the same permutation of truth values, namely &lt;code&gt;0 0 1 0&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you could use &lt;code&gt;p ↚ q&lt;/code&gt; to abbreviate &quot;p is not true, but q is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to predicate logic, using this relation, you can express&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike set &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, set &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; contains &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;B∍x ↚ A∍x &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is equivalent to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; does not contain &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; does contain &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;¬(B∍x) ∧ A∍x&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to swap sides, you can use the reverse arrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; contains &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, unlike &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A∍x ↛ B∍x&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should do the job for you.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, it's way simpler to just write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A∍x ∧ ¬(B∍x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; contains &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt; doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T15:49:12.187" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T22:17:44.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20079" CreationDate="2017-01-28T00:43:19.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;می&lt;/code&gt; is the shortened form of &lt;code&gt;همی&lt;/code&gt; which used to be spelled separately in old Persian, therefore &lt;code&gt;می‌گفت&lt;/code&gt; is usually considered more correct by scholars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15041" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T00:43:19.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-28T00:53:01.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just drop a list of some philosophical languages dedicated to a strictly compositional system making use of such &quot;primitive meaning blocks&quot;, there have been many such attempts (there was a hype among philosophers around the 17th century):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frathwiki.com/Ars_signorum&quot;&gt;Args signorum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a language constructed by George Dalgano in 1661.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Quoting from the FrathWiki entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Words in Ars signorum are formed by derivation and compounding from a set of 1068 monosyllabic roots (&quot;Radicals&quot;). These roots denote generic concepts and are derived from a taxonomy of ideas. The classes indicated by the initial phoneme are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; being.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Η&lt;/em&gt; substance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;E&lt;/em&gt; accident.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; complete (concrete) being.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt; body.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Υ&lt;/em&gt; spirit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Example of root formation:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;neik&lt;/em&gt;     terrestrial animal  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nak&lt;/em&gt;   oviparous (e.g., lizard)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nηk&lt;/em&gt;   whole-footed (e.g., horse, elephant)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should come close to what you wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://auilanguage.org&quot;&gt;aUI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a (relatiely new, created in 1952 by the philologist and psychoanalyst Dr. John Weilgart) conlang intended to serve as a universal (not only world-wide, but universe-wide) lingua franca using a similar approach of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;semantic primes (the simplest building blocks of meaning, ideas that cannot be broken down any further).  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In creating combinations, we take the necessary and sufficient characteristics in a nutshell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check out their online presence, they have a nice introudction + bidirectional dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_towards_a_Real_Character_and_a_Philosophical_Language&quot;&gt;An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language&lt;/a&gt;, John Wilkins (1668) proposes a similar tree-like ontology (and actually uses symbols directly depicting relations in this tree structure system, which were later also assigned a phonetic system):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wilkin's &quot;Real Character&quot; is a constructed family of symbols, corresponding to a classification scheme developed by Wilkins and his colleagues. It was intended as a pasigraphy, in other words, &lt;em&gt;to provide elementary building blocks from which could be constructed the universe's every possible thing and notion&lt;/em&gt;. [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Later in the Essay Wilkins introduces his &quot;Philosophical Language,&quot; which assigns phonetic values to the Real Characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) In 1678, Gottfried Leibniz proposed &lt;strong&gt;lingua generalis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The basic idea was to assign every atomic property a prime number, and complex meanings are then computed as the arithmetic prodcut of these numbers. (Since prime numbers are chosen, any such product is uniquely identified by its atomic properties. However, this means that applying &quot;reverse engineering&quot; to identify the atomic factors boils down to integer factorization which is a rather complex mathematical operation and, as a consequence, not that well suited for practical applications...).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'm not sure, though, whether Leibniz actually computed such a list of atomic properties; I couldn't find any good reference online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blissymbolics.org/&quot;&gt;Blissymbolics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a semantic graphical language that is currently composed of more than 5000 authorized symbols [...]. It is a generative language that&#xA;  allows its users to create new Bliss-words as needed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, as the other examples, originially inteded as a univeral language aiding culture independent communication, it is nowadays&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;used by individuals with severe speech and physical impairments around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) Last but not least, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol&quot;&gt;Solresol&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a musical language employing a similar, though less strictly compositional way of composing meaning&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Solresol morphology, the longer words are divided into categories of meaning, based on their first syllable, or note. Words beginning with 'sol' have meanings related to arts and sciences, or, if they begin with 'solsol', sickness and medicine (e.g. solresol, &quot;language&quot;; solsolredo, &quot;migraine&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike for all of the other artificial languages, I know someone in my circle of acquaintances who is actually &quot;speaking&quot; this language to a certain extend; there seems to be a mildly active community that actually uses this conlang.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; What I find the most interesting feature about this language is that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;meanings are negated by reversing the syllables in words. For instance &lt;em&gt;fala&lt;/em&gt; means good or tasty, and &lt;em&gt;lafa&lt;/em&gt; means bad.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what we used to do as kids when we decided it was opposite day. To a question &quot;Do you like ice cream?&quot;, you were supposed to reply with &quot;No, of course not, there is nothing I hate more than sweets&quot;, however it was perfectly valid to say &quot;seY&quot; instead.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With all the weird stuff that happens in natural languages' phonology, I have never found a language that uses phonetic reversal this systematically - probably because it completely destroys the nice compoistionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T01:43:21.483" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T01:43:21.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20925" CreationDate="2017-01-28T10:26:20.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, some human languages are very close to this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;kanji, the japanese written language, sorted from fewer lines(simple) to a more lines (more compkex symbols) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aparently all symbol wriying systems, from egypt to japan do more-or-less fit into symbol=meaning category of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Altrough its a bit archaic and simple symbols represent what was popular long time ago, like animal types and weapons, and meanings may be disconnected, its still an interesting option to 'beef up' some artificial language by taking something from this writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15024" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T10:26:20.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-28T10:52:59.027" Score="4" ViewCount="56155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just try syntax trees and realize that I have a few problems. I have a problem especially with two examples because I am very unsure how to handle the cases.&#xA;In case 1, I do not know how to deal with fixed terms such as &quot;the church of England&quot;. And in case 2, I don't know how to deal with &quot;the girl who left us&quot; These are my solutions. Would someone kindly make me more understandable? I would be very grateful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RB1PT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RB1PT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Case 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/we4FF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/we4FF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Case 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13446" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T17:39:42.687" Title="Syntax Trees examples" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20948" CreationDate="2017-01-28T11:35:45.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two sentences are Nps&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;check this: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ke4qn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ke4qn.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it cant be a PP because it clearly starts with an NP&#xA;and &quot;Of&quot; cannot be separated from &quot;The church&quot; because both of them construct a PP (even in the meaning 'of' will be meaningless,and you will ask: of what?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the Church of England&quot; is an NP that contains a subordinate PP which is [Of England] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastEditorUserId="15031" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T11:44:49.073" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T11:44:49.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20948" CreationDate="2017-01-28T13:06:03.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although what is &quot;correct&quot; always depends on theory, there are various things that are definitely not quite right with your trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tree #1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the founder of the church of England&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing taken together is an NP (it starts with a definite article and can serve as the subject of a sentence, so it is something nominal, not prepositional), so the root of the tree should be labelled NP rather than PP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, an XP must always have an X as its head.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thus, when there is an NP, there must be an N as the head, and for a PP, there is a P head. This principle is not always follwed in your trees.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for NPs. Now I don't know what theory you are using, because there are basically two opposing approaches:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Make the whole thing an NP, i.e. a phrase with an N head to which the determiner is a specifier:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/95ksS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/95ksS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The head of the NP is the N &quot;church&quot;. The DP consisting of the D &quot;the&quot; is a specifier because it is the sister of N' and daughter of NP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Make the whole thing a DP, i.e. a phrase with a D head to which the noun phrase is a complement:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r2bXl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r2bXl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The head of the DP is the D &quot;the&quot;. The complement of this D head is an NP which consists of the single N head &quot;church&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not go into a discussion of the motivations of each approach (and neither into a discussion about whether you should leave redundant bar levels away), but you need to decide what your phrase and its head is supposed to be. Having an NP branching into a D and an N violates the X-bar scheme because a phrase must have an identifiable head and can not branch into two lexical items (D and N); one of them must be an X' or an XP. Either you make it an NP with an N head and the DP as a specifier, or you make it a DP with a D head and the NP as a complement.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Assuming that you want to have the whole as an NP, I'll continue with the first approach.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a first rudimentary picture of your tree looks like this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2CgP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2CgP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can now argue about whether the PP &quot;of the church of England&quot; is an adjunct rather than a complement, but in this case I find the latter approach more plausible. So within N', we have an N head &quot;founder&quot; and a PP complement &quot;of the church of England&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQDJM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQDJM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now about the PP. As said above, the head of the PP must be a P of which the complement is an NP, thus:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PnLsr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PnLsr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NP &quot;the church of England&quot; again branches into the determiner and the N' &quot;church of England&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s52by.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s52by.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within this N', &quot;church&quot; is the head and &quot;of England&quot; is a PP complement to the N head &quot;church&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F8y6I.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F8y6I.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you could also argue about making the PP &quot;of England&quot; an adjunction, but here too I find a complement more plausible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PP &quot;of England&quot; itself looks similar as the other PPs, with the difference that the NP &quot;England&quot; doesn't have a DP specifier:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yhqxn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yhqxn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now you are done with your tree.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The whole phrase is an NP, of which the head is the noun &quot;founder&quot; and the PP &quot;of the church of England&quot; is a complement with a P head &quot;of&quot;. The determiner &quot;the&quot; is located in specifier position to the NP. the PP &quot;of the church of England&quot; later branches into another PP &quot;of England&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tree #2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the brother of the girl who left us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll keep my explanation a bit briefer here.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly as above, you have an NP in which the N' consists of the N head &quot;brother&quot; and a PP complement &quot;of the girl who left us&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ffUeI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ffUeI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the PP, the complement NP &quot;the girl&quot; is modified by adjunction of the relative clause &quot;who left us&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HuQR8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HuQR8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to locate the relative clause as an adjunct to the N' &quot;girl&quot; rather than the whole NP &quot;the girl&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2eAu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2eAu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For reasons that are too complicated to discuss here, I will assume adjunction to the NP rather than N'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficult part now is how to handle the relative clause &quot;who left us&quot;. The assumption is the following:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Within the relative clause CP, the relative pronoun &quot;who&quot; is assumed to start in the subject position, i.e. in the specifier position of IP (SpecI), because the NP it refers to (&quot;the girl&quot;) is the subject of the sentence:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CPSbu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CPSbu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This NP pronoun is then moved to the specifier of CP (SpecC) to get into the position of a relative pronoun:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xtf7U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xtf7U.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moved pronoun leaves a trace (&lt;em&gt;t_i&lt;/em&gt;) and is now located in SpecC position, where it serves as a relataive pronoun referring to &quot;girl&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tree as a whole thus looks as follows:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f7NC0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f7NC0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, the whole expression is an NP, where the head N &quot;brother&quot; has a PP complement &quot;of the girl who ...&quot;, and within that PP complement, the NP &quot;the girl&quot; is modified by adjunction of a relative clause CP in which the NP &quot;who&quot; was moved from SpecI to SpecC to serve as a relative pronoun referring to &quot;the girl&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General remarks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My proposal is not the one and only gold standard solution; there can not be one. Details of what a tree looks like always depends on theory. In particular,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are opposing views on how to account for determiner + noun (making it an NP, as I did, or a DP, with consequences for their internal structure)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether to omit redundant bar levels (as I did),  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to label the relative clause (CP or S or ...) , &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where to attach the relative clause (as an adjunct to the NP &quot;the girl&quot; or as an adjunct to the N' &quot;girl&quot;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the PPs act as complements or as adjuncts to the NPs.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which solution is deemed correct depends on what theory you are using. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You really should take a look again into the basics of how phrase structure trees work. For example, having a VP with a P head, as you did in your second tree, makes absolutely no sense. It seems that there are some substantial assumptions about phrase structure trees that are not quite clear to you yet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You must always make sure that the labels of your (sub) trees are in accordance with what is in the tree: A PP consists of a P and an NP complement, if you have an NP, then this must have an N as its head, and an expression &quot;the brother of ...&quot; is certainly not a VP.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Once you gained a better understanding of how phrase structure trees work, what a phrase consists of an what relations hold between constutuents, it will get far more obivious to you how to assign a sentence a tree structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T17:20:11.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T17:20:11.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20958" CreationDate="2017-01-28T14:01:40.227" Score="3" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of words that have different meanings in different languages (for example, the word &quot;brat&quot; means &lt;em&gt;brother&lt;/em&gt; in many Slavic languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sentences made up from words of one language, that have meaning only in another language (for example, the sentences &quot;Come shall then well bload ?&#xA;Then well bload shell when blaight ! ...Blaight yatchman.&quot; are a meaningless mess of English words, but when read out loud in the Czech language it means &quot;Where did that camel go? That camel went outside to vomit! Vomit barley&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to take this even further. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible to construct phrases or sentences that have different meanings in different languages?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, does this phenomenon have a name? Could you provide some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a name in programming. Programs that are valid in more programming languages are called polygots. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)&lt;/a&gt; They don't need to have different outputs, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make things a bit more clear, I am looking for sentences that have reasonably understandable meaning. They don't need to be perfectly grammatically correct. It is even acceptable to use the &quot;read out loud&quot; technique, which can merge some words together or jumble some phonemes and thus give them a new meaning. For example in Slovak language phrase &quot;akom ucil&quot; can (depending on context) mean &quot;how he taught&quot;, but if read incorrectly as &quot;ako mucil&quot;, its meaning changes to &quot;how he tortured&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, by phrase or sentence I mean string of words with length &gt;= 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I am sorry, but I couldn't think of appropriate tags. I would appreciate if you could suggest some better tags than those I picked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15044" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T15:58:44.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T15:58:44.070" Title="Do valid sentences of phrases that have different meanings in different languages exist? How are they called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;language-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20948" CreationDate="2017-01-28T15:46:10.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;lemontree has given an excellent answer. I agree with her that you should take another look at the basics, and I think you'd benefit from a quick review of two major concepts: &lt;strong&gt;constituency&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;heads&lt;/strong&gt;. I'll give a quick summary of two concepts - please consider this a supplement to lemon's answer. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing &lt;strong&gt;constituency&lt;/strong&gt; is the main purpose of syntax trees. The subset of a tree which is dominated by a single node - such as 'of the Church of England', which is a PP in the final version of Tree #1 in lemon's answer - is known as a constituent because it acts as a unit in syntax. We can look for evidence for constituency in various ways, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topicalisation: [Of the Church of England] he is the founder; of the church of France he is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleft: It is [of the Church of England] that he is the founder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro-form substitution: I'm talking about the Church of England itself, not the founder [thereof].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conjunction (warning: less reliable test, must always be used with other tests): He is the founder [of the Church of England] and [of KFC].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you introduce a node in a syntax tree, you should ensure that the material it dominates form a constituent. In your tree, it's not at all clear that 'the founder of' is a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topicalisation: *[The founder of] he is the Church of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleft: *It is [the founder of] that he is the Church of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pro-form substitution: *I'm talking about the head of the Church, not [some pro-form] the Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conjunction: He is [the founder of] and [the head of] the Church. (See, I told you the conjunction test is less reliable :P)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why 'the founder of' is not a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other major concept that needs review is the &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt;. The head of a phrase doesn't have a precise, necessary-and-sufficient-conditions definition, but it does have a bundle of common properties that sometimes, though not always, coincide. In general, the  head is the only element that always appears the kind of phrase it heads (except in really special cases like ellipsis), it gets to 'choose' (subcategorise for) its dependents other than adjuncts, and it governs its dependents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, identifying the head isn't always straightforward, and that's why linguists disagree on whether NP dominates DP or DP dominates NP, or whether complement clauses are CPs or Ss, or whether sentences are IPs or TPs or Ss or something else. Zwicky (1985) lists five different 'head-like notions':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantic argument: In a phrase X+Y, if X+Y describes the kind of thing described by X, then X is the head. For example, in the NP 'the Church of England', the whole phrase describes a church, so 'Church' is the head.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The subcategorisand: In a phrase, the slot that must be listed in the lexicon and subcategorises for its sisters is the head. In the NP 'the Church of England', 'the' is a functional morpheme and 'of England' is a phrase; 'Church' is definitely listed in the lexicon and is thus the head. (Zwicky actually gives a different analysis here that favours the DP hypothesis, but let's not get into that....)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The morphosyntactic locus: The bit in constituent X that carries inflectional information about the grammatical relation between X and other constituents is the head. English being an isolating language, this isn't very obvious in your sentences, but it picks out e.g. the word 'is' in 'He is nice'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Government: The head governs its dependents: The depends get markers for appearing with the head. For example, in 'They are nice', the copula governs 'they', requiring a nominative form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concord: Dependents agree with the head: For example, in French 'le nez' (ART.DEF.M nose), 'le' agrees with 'nez' in being masculine, so 'nez' is the head.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, though linguists frequently disagree on which constituent in a phrase is the head, one thing is clear: In an endocentric constituent, it is always the head that determines the syntactic category of the phrase it heads, and thus a P cannot head a VP. (Note, however, that not all theories require all phrases to be endocentric.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:35:45.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3815" CreationDate="2017-01-28T16:43:40.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/tools/cuneify/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/tools/cuneify/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steve Tinney at UPENN has written a tool called “Cuneify” as part of the ATF* format for encoding cuneiform texts, itself in turn part of the ORACC project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oracc is a collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research. Created by Steve Tinney, Oracc is steered by Jamie Novotny, Eleanor Robson, Tinney, and Niek Veldhuis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuneify may be used via a web CGI interface, such as the one available here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/index.html#h_cuneify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/index.html#h_cuneify&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one enters the transliteration in that search box (taking care to note the all-ASCII orthography used in ATF: j for ĝ, etc), then a link like this one will be generated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cuneify?input=ki.en.jir&amp;amp;button=Cuneify&amp;amp;project=doc2%2Fvisitor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cuneify?input=ki.en.jir&amp;amp;button=Cuneify&amp;amp;project=doc2%2Fvisitor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following that link will return this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ki.en.jir&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately it appears that the source code to Cuneify itself is not open source; it’s only accessible via this web interface. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Despite the voluminous (and good) documentation for Tinney and company’s various and sundry projects, I have not found the expansion for the acronym “ATF”! Presumably “Assyriological Text Format” or something…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="136" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:43:40.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20964" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:20:35.260" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need some little help in connection with linguistics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question is: Is there any fast way to figure out grammar if I have sequence of symbols, or do I have to guess?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second question is: Given the following language, what is a phrase structure grammar that produces this language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;L = {x^(2^i) : i &amp;gt;= 0}  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This language contains the follwing sequences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x  &#xA;xx  &#xA;xxxx  &#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started with something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G = (V,T,P,S)&#xA;&#xA;V = {A, ... }&#xA;&#xA;T = {x}&#xA;&#xA;P = {&#xA;&#xA;   S -&amp;gt; A  &#xA;   ...&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody help with completing the grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the grammar for the language defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;`L2 = {x^i : i &amp;gt; 0}`&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;G = (V,T,P,S)&#xA;&#xA;V = {A}&#xA;&#xA;T = {x}&#xA;&#xA;P = { A -&amp;gt; x | xA }&#xA;&#xA;S = A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to figure out a similar set of production rules &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; for the language defined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14502" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T19:52:24.320" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:49:36.327" Title="What grammar generate this sequence" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="20" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20948" CreationDate="2017-01-28T19:36:43.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tree Diagrams with Function &amp;amp; Category labels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmMXx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qmMXx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31j1n.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31j1n.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:36:43.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-28T19:39:59.203" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;please tell me if in the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The tree is characterized by long, strong roots.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the enumeration generate two nested (recursion) sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. The tree is characterized by long roots.&#xA; 2. The tree is characterized by strong roots.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The tree is characterized by maroon or purple leaves, a dense, oval&#xA;    crown and colorful fall foliage.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, we have as many nested sentences as combinations are posed by enumerations and conjunctions? e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;3. The tree is characterized by maroon leaves.&#xA; 4. The tree is characterized by purple leaves.&#xA; 5. The tree is characterized by a dense crown.&#xA; 6. The tree is characterized by colorful fall foliage.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if this is a very simple question; I'm not a linguist. Please tell me how to analyze these cases and what linguistic theory I can see where some examples illustrates the same things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15045" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:39:59.203" Title="conjunctions or enumerations inside a sentence make multiple predicates" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-02-01T21:22:18.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20954" CreationDate="2017-01-28T22:22:09.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to your first question is that you have to guess.  I don't think there is a context-free answer to your second question, as lemontree suggests in a comment.  The language you are trying to generate is reminiscent of the &quot;copy language&quot;, each sentence of which is a string concatenated to a copy of that string, and which (I gather) is shown to non-context free in the standard text by Hopcraft and Ullman.  The &quot;copy language&quot; is supposedly the pattern of the cross serial constructions of Swiss German that Stuart Schieber uses in his argument that natural languages are not context free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For whatever interest it may have, however, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an answer to the second question in a system I invented, which is like phrase structure grammar, but has variables and constants rather than nonterminal and terminal symbols.  If S is a variable and x is a constant, then the rules {S = SS, S = x} generate the language {x, xx, xxxx, ...}.  This is because in ordinary algebraic systems, substitution for a variable must be uniform, in the sense that every occurrence of a variable in a formula must be substituted for in the same way.  Variables are thought of as standing in place of a constant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T22:38:59.137" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T22:38:59.137" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20951" CreationDate="2017-01-29T02:01:35.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be an accepted name for this type of bilingual punning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bilingual sentence&quot; might seem appropriate, but it would ambiguously describe both the phenomenon of sentences that have the same meaning in two languages, and the phenomenon of two sequences of sound (or graphemes) coincidentally being two unrelated valid sentences in different languages, which is the one you're interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A favorite example is the following : &#xA;I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is said to ambiguously be either a Latin sentence meaning &quot;Go, Vitellus, to the martial sound of the Roman's god&quot;, or an Italian sentence meaning &quot;The roman's calves are beautiful&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another Italian/Latin example is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CANE NERO MAGNA BELLA PERSICA!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sing, o Nero, the great Persian wars!&quot;, in Latin &#xA;&quot;The black dog eats a nice peach&quot;, in dialectical Italian. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archimedes-lab.org/latin.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translation taken from this page&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a bunch of exemples here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=DteHDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA31&amp;amp;ots=8z70mA9Vh5&amp;amp;dq=%22I%20VITELLI%20DEI%20ROMANI%20SONO%20BELLI%22%20bilingual%20sentence&amp;amp;hl=fr&amp;amp;pg=PA31#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22I%20VITELLI%20DEI%20ROMANI%20SONO%20BELLI%22%20bilingual%20sentence&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;And in here are two poems in Italian/Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, these examples can be somewhat contrived, as should be expected in wordplay, and they are easier to make up if the languages are closely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="2105" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T02:07:42.283" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T02:07:42.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17432" CreationDate="2017-01-29T15:29:36.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example, &lt;em&gt;Mary's watch&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a DP 'predicate', but &lt;strong&gt;the second argument&lt;/strong&gt; of an 'identificational' verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; that expresses &lt;strong&gt;identity&lt;/strong&gt; between its two arguments, not class-membership. Since 'identificational' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;two-place&lt;/strong&gt; predicate - not a copula linking a monadic nominal predicate to its subject - its two arguments can be initially projected, under X-bar assumptions, in its 'complement' and 'specifier' position, respectively, which means that the 'XP-internal subject hypothesis' can account for cases like this without the slightest difficulty. You should, instead, have used an example like &lt;em&gt;John is &lt;strong&gt;an engineer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; does express class-membership and &lt;em&gt;an engineer&lt;/em&gt; is, indeed, a nominal one-place 'predicate', but note that, in that case, the specifier of D (= &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;) is empty, and, again, there is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; problem whatsoever in initially projecting the eventual subject &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; in Spec D in case you should want to adopt that analysis. (You need not, though, because there are other, and arguably more attractive, possibilities, such as the 'predication hypothesis' that P Elliott refers to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T15:29:36.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T15:55:34.023" Score="13" ViewCount="1096" Body="&lt;p&gt;In programming languages, there is a concept of turing completeness - whenever a system reaches &quot;turing completeness&quot;, it is capable of emulating any programming language and, thus, as expressive as them. It is not hard to be turing-complete: very simple systems such as the turing-machine, the λ-calculus and cellular automata are turing-complete, meaning they're as expressive as any modern, fully featured programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if human languages have a similar phenomenon. Is there a small set of words which is enough to express everything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15052" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T11:27:55.733" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T11:27:55.733" Title="What is the minimal set of words that make a language &quot;complete&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T17:56:37.613" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the bad title description, but I find it difficult to summarize so here's a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Tell my wife that I love her&quot; -&gt; [To wife] &quot;I love you&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Remind me tomorrow that I have a doctor's appointment&quot; -&gt; [To me] &quot;You have a doctor's appointment&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Can you ask my son if he's dressed&quot; -&gt; [To son] &quot;Are you dressed?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Make sure my son is dressed&quot; -&gt; [To son] &quot;Are you dressed?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these imperative commands transforms the dependent clause from speaking about a third person into speaking towards said person, by mainly changing pronouns and in some cases changing the phrase to a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a formalism for how this works, or a name for this phenomenon that I can further read up on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1750" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T18:54:01.513" Title="Is there a name or formalism for transforming imperative commands to personalized phrases?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20960" CreationDate="2017-01-29T18:23:18.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is an interesting question, but immensely difficult to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, expressions are dependent on both meaning and structure in natural language. In other words: do you want to know a minimal number of structural operations? Or do you want to know a minimum number of lexical items? There is a clear trade-off between the two. If you increase the number of structural items or combinations, you need less lexical items and it works the same way around. The trick for natural language would be in finding a perfect equilibrium, but I admit that I have no way to straightforwardly approximate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked for words, so I will assume lexical items (but keep in mind this is not all there is to it). Lexical items can always be recombined to fit new phenomena, but this in principle is a social activity. Look at Mandarin, for example. Combining several semantically distinct characters can give a meaning for a completely unrelated concept. In principle, this means you can have a large amount of concepts covered with relatively little words. Again, this comes down to combining in a smart way. Let's assume the word A, B and C. That gives you at least 27 possibilities (3*3*3) of meanings (including the options A A A, B B B and C C C). This is just one way of doing it and probably very unnatural at some point (imagine saying &quot;cheese cheese cheese cheese&quot; and it means &quot;I went swimming yesterday&quot;). But it is possible. In Dutch, my first language, we also have the option of verbalizing nouns. We do it with everything and it works pretty well. So &quot;vis&quot;, meaning &quot;fish&quot;, becomes &quot;vis-(s)en&quot;, meaning &quot;to fish&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To end, I think we need to establish something else before asking your question. How many concepts are the minimal number of concepts needed? I think making the tool is less difficult than setting a goal, in this case. Perhaps someone else has a good suggestion to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11321" LastEditorUserId="11321" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T11:27:00.363" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T11:27:00.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20961" CreationDate="2017-01-29T18:43:36.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences on the left are known as &lt;strong&gt;indirect speech&lt;/strong&gt;, and the ones on the right are known as &lt;strong&gt;direct speech&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a more general phenomenon; the matrix clause need not be a command (as in your examples), but can also be - in fact, are more commonly - statements, as I'll illustrate in the examples below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary difference between the two lies in &lt;strong&gt;deixis&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a pragmatic concept. In direct and indirect speech, we 'point' to the same entities, but from different angles, and therefore need different deictics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subtypes of deixis include person (e.g. personal pronouns), spatial (e.g. NPs denoting places with reference to the point where the speaker is standing) and temporal (e.g. tense, time with reference to the present) deixis, and all three need to be changed when transforming from direct to indirect speech and vice versa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drop by &lt;strong&gt;tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt;! -&gt; I told him to drop by &lt;strong&gt;the next day&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; a shoe! -&gt; Mary said to find &lt;strong&gt;her&lt;/strong&gt; a shoe. Who is that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; mind writing &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; name &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;? -&gt; I asked him if &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; would mind writing &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; name &lt;strong&gt;there&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; to school by bus. -&gt; Susan said &lt;strong&gt;she&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;went&lt;/strong&gt; to school by bus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate the mechanism, take 'here' in the third example. 'Here' refers to a place which is near; when we remove ourselves from the speech act, that place is no longer near, so we use 'there' - point to a faraway place - instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note on terminology: the word 'imperative' is usually used to refer to the syntactic, often formal mood. So for the third sentence, just calling it a 'command' would avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T18:54:01.513" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T18:54:01.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20954" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:39:49.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found two answer, one in Hopcroft,Ullman's book there was set of productions contains 19 productions. Second solution i found on the internet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; ACxB&#xA;Cx -&amp;gt; xxC&#xA;CB -&amp;gt; DB&#xA;CB -&amp;gt; E&#xA;xD -&amp;gt; Dx&#xA;AD -&amp;gt; AC&#xA;xE -&amp;gt; Ex&#xA;AE -&amp;gt; \epsilon&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tryied with few examples and is seem to match but i'm not sure. Can you confirm if it is valid solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About topic: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is connected with subject: Linguistics and formal languages(it isn't computer science subject) and no this isnt my homework. I found similar questions,topics in books designed for student non-technical universities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14502" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T20:39:49.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20288" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:54:55.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;P&amp;amp;P is, indeed, &lt;strong&gt;primarily&lt;/strong&gt; a 'projectionist frame', in your terms, to the extent that in P&amp;amp;PT syntactic construction starts with, and proceeds 'bottom up' from, a choice of lexical items, by gradually 'satisfying' their complementation/selection features. (This applies to adjuncts, too). To the extent that functional heads like Aspect(s), Modaliti(es), Polarity, Tense, C, etc. are also considered lexical items (which is legitimate, since they ultimately reduce to sets of valued, or to-be-valued-during-a-successful-derivation, attribute-value pairs), P&amp;amp;P is an &lt;strong&gt;almost&lt;/strong&gt; 'pure' projectionist model. The only &lt;em&gt;caveat&lt;/em&gt; with respect to such a categorization follows from the fact that the &lt;strong&gt;order&lt;/strong&gt; in which &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; functional heads are 'projected' relative to each other does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; follow from their lexical properties (plus general principles like 'satisfaction') and, as a consequence, it has to be stipulated by means of &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; 'templates' of the form 'C1 must c-command/have scope over C2', .... 'Cn must c-command/have scope over Cm', etc. Such 'templates', of course, are construction-like and, to the extent P&amp;amp;P syntax would not at present work without them, P&amp;amp;P remains 'constructionist' to a certain degree (like Tagmemics, other 'structuralist' 'slot and filler grammars' of the 1950' and 1960's, or, in fact, early TGG), but that is so because P&amp;amp;P has not yet entirely succeeded in making the whole hierarchy of projections follow from lexical properties and general principles. Programmatically speaking, P&amp;amp;P aimed at becoming a pure 'projectionist' model of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your second question, obviously, '(neo)constructionist' approaches, like Tagmemics or structuralist 'slot and filler grammars' of the last century, reject the claim that syntax follows from the projection of lexical properties, rely on 'top-down' or mixed (up&amp;amp;down/parallelistic) generation strategies, and, on the contrary, have themselves largely emerged as a reaction against GB and P&amp;amp;P models of syntax, not the converse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the 'minimalist program' is by no means a reaction against 'neoconstructionism'. If anything, the MP can be described, for current purposes, as a reaction &lt;strong&gt;against previous 'projectionist' Chomskian&lt;/strong&gt; work along GB and P&amp;amp;P lines. Of course, under minimalist assumptions, syntactic derivations still start from a selection of lexical items (a 'numeration', in the earliest minimalist work, a 'lexical array' in later versions, or from parallel access to the Lexicon in some alternative versions), but Minimalist Syntax, especially in its mature formulations, is no longer 'projectionist' (at least not in its &lt;strong&gt;programmatic&lt;/strong&gt; statements) because the only syntactic operation it allows is (internal/external) 'Merge', and, &lt;strong&gt;in theory&lt;/strong&gt;, 'Merge' is just a recursive set-forming operation subject to 'No Tampering', a principle that claims that the internal features of lexical items cannot be modified by Merge in any way. Thus, in theory at least, minimalist syntactic construction is no longer a matter of 'projecting' and 'satisfying' the features of lexical items, be they 'descriptive' or 'functional'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether MG delivers what it aims at is a different matter, though. I wrote 'in theory' and 'programmatically' above because even MP cannot dispense with 'labels' (well, an attempt was made to get by without them a few years ago, but it was a sort of trick and did not catch on, to my knowledge), and the 'label' attached to a merger is 'inherited' from one of the syntactic objects (at first lexical, subsequently phrasal) that Merge operates on, which entails that at least that feature of one of the two objects merged must be searched for inside the object and 'copied'. It is true that, according to Chomsky,'copying' F is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; 'tampering' with F, or with the object that contains F, since the original object is not really modified, just duplicated. However, in cases of internal Merge, where the'checking' of a valued feature [F:v] or the 'valuation' of an unvalued one [F:?] is involved, the 'No Tampering' principle is untenable, in my view, because in such circumstances the internal structure of the corresponding categories &lt;strong&gt;is inevitably modified&lt;/strong&gt; by the checking/valuation process (which is why, once F is 'checked'or 'valued', it is 'deactivated' and cannot be 'checked/valued' again - a crucial condition for the correct behaviour of movement, agreement and other 'operations' currently considered aspects of Merge). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: in spite of the official programmatic statements to the contrary, even minimalist grammar remains 'projectionist' to some extent. What MG is not at all is a 'constructionist' model, and, needless to say, it did not arise as a reaction against 'neoconstructionist' approaches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T22:56:56.750" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T22:56:56.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20967" CreationDate="2017-01-29T23:36:53.717" Score="0" ViewCount="1022" Body="&lt;p&gt;In maltese :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-/ʕ/ and  /ɣ/ have merged into 'għ'. How is it pronounced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-/ḥ/ and  /χ/ have merged into 'ħ'. How is it pronounced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried multiple youtube videos and :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-'għ' sounded nothing like /ʕ/ or /ɣ/ but like an 'a'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-'ħ' sounded nothing like /ḥ/ and /χ/ but like an 'h'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Makes me think that those speaking in these videos are not native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14775" LastEditorUserId="14775" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T12:18:02.207" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T12:18:02.207" Title="What is the maltese pronounciation of 'għ' and 'ħ'?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20966" CreationDate="2017-01-30T00:10:26.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might try &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/languages-pronunciations/mt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt;.'ħ' is &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; Arabic 'ħ', but can be a bit different (but ħ is not really phonetically identical across all Arabic dialects). Likewise ħ (spelled x) in Somali is a bit different. Orthographic 'għ' is not standardly pronounced 'as such': this is the subject of a classic article by Mike Brame. Basically /ʕ/ behaves like &lt;em&gt;ʕ&lt;/em&gt; throughout much of the phonology of Maltese, but then is vocalized to [a], deleted, or turned into [ħ] depending on context. There is much variation in Maltese dialects, and there are reports of dialects where ʕ is retained (a few hundred years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T00:10:26.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20966" CreationDate="2017-01-30T00:13:45.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;ħ&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this sound is written /ħ/ (conveniently enough): a voiceless pharyngeal fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you mention ḥ, I'm guessing you've studied Arabic or a related language? It's like English /h/ but with a lowered larynx, or Arabic &lt;em&gt;ح&lt;/em&gt;. /ħ/ is usually written &lt;em&gt;ḥ&lt;/em&gt; when transcribing Arabic, though I personally prefer writing &lt;em&gt;ħ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;għ&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This letter has a few different pronunciations. At the end of a word or before &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, it's like &lt;em&gt;ħ&lt;/em&gt;, but longer. Before a vowel, it lengthens and pharyngealizes it. According to Wikipedia, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;għi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;għu&lt;/em&gt; are [aˤj] and [oˤw]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T00:13:45.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4165" CreationDate="2017-01-30T01:34:15.113" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with English today, is the fact, Phonetics does NOT teach the correct English sounds. Take the letter &quot;U&quot;, in English it has two sounds, it's name &quot;U&quot; pronounced just like the word &quot;YOU&quot;, and it's sound &quot;u&quot; like in the words Cup and Sun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Correct Proper English letter &quot;U&quot; does NOT have the Phonetic sound of &quot;oo&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the word TUNA, pronounced T YOU NA, in proper English! While with the French/American Phonetics it is pronounced TOONA! Which in fact is NOT English!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People being taught Phonetics will never be able to pronounce correct proper English words!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The whole problem comes from the irrelevant Phonetic being taught today!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Phonetics does NOT have paired letter sounds, or syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15053" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T02:46:58.957" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T02:46:58.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2017-01-30T01:51:50.607" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is not clear to me what should be considered as &quot;unique&quot; to a language, since all the languages are different, so also unique in many ways, but they also share many basic features and principles. One can rather look for some typological rarities in English. A typological rarity is a feature that goes against some commonly recognised linguistic universal. &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Universals Archive&lt;/a&gt; is a fascinating online database of such universals. It contains a special section with a small collection of &lt;a href=&quot;http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/intro/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rarities&lt;/a&gt;. If you search for results that are attested in English the databases finds 9 features (including one from &quot;Old English&quot;, one from an &quot;English-based creole&quot;, and one from &quot;Germanic languages other than English&quot;). These are exactly what you can consider true rarities specific of English (either mostly or exclusively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entries specific to modern English include the following. It is extremely rare for a language to have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verb inflection with non-zero exponent for 3rd person (subject or object agreement/cross-reference), but zero for all other persons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;independent personal pronouns for 1st and 3rd (animate) person inflecting for both number and case, but that for 2nd person inflecting for neither category (defectiveness of 2nd person pronouns in number alone being more common)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;endoclitics occurring not only inside morphologically complex words, but even within monomorphemic words, with the positioning of the clitic &#xA;(a) regulated by one general phonological rule,&#xA;(b) not regulated by a general phonological rule, although when endoclitic to simple verbs, the clitic always comes before the last segment of the verb stem (subject person-number markers are cliticized to constituents in focus, being always enclitic with arguments in focus, but en- or endo-clitic with verbs in focus) (e.g., &quot;un-fucking-believable&quot;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(finite) verb-second word order in main declarative clauses only if the first constituent is an adverbial with strong negative force (such as never before, hardly ever)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relative pronoun as the only target for agreement in animacy (human: who; non-human: which)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a definite article formally distinct from (one form or another of) any kind of pronoun – demonstrative, personal (free, clitic, or bound), possessive, relative, interrogative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T17:01:17.360" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T17:01:17.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T06:18:42.157" Score="2" ViewCount="1578" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a world where I'm tracking the languages and people throughout time. So I'm starting from a single point with a single language and then expanding that out as time progresses. My basic presumption based on what I've seen is that every x (in the case I'm working with it's 1500 years, but in the real world it seems to be 500 years) number of generations a language has diverged enough to become considered 2 different languages...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what is the physical distance between 2 languages that have diverged on average? Or how much difference should there be between band 0 (language standard group) and band 1 (group that has direct contact with standard group) and at what &quot;band&quot; does Language 1 become Language 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I know it has to do with interactions between groups, but I need to map it in physical space... As my map is set out now each band is roughly 12.5 km away from any other band&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14852" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T22:48:43.827" Title="Language Change over Distance" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20584" CreationDate="2017-01-30T13:44:57.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the popular &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; test that WavesWashSands refers to, evidence showing that &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition - and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an adverb - comes from the fact that it can &lt;strong&gt;post&lt;/strong&gt;modify nouns (cf. &lt;em&gt;The people &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt; do not like changes&lt;/em&gt;), whereas real adverbs cannot. If, on the other hand, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; were of some other category, say an adjective or a noun, it should be able to &lt;strong&gt;pre&lt;/strong&gt;modify other nouns, but, of course, it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. * &lt;em&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt; resources are insufficient&lt;/em&gt;). Since a V, a Det, a Q, a Deg, etc., it cannot be either, analysing it as an &lt;strong&gt;intransitive preposition&lt;/strong&gt; is virtually inevitable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Here&lt;/em&gt; cannot by itself &lt;strong&gt;in general&lt;/strong&gt; be analysed as a phrasal category (= PP), though, because it can be accompanied by its own dependents - not only &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;, but also PP's, as in &lt;em&gt;Here &lt;strong&gt;in London&lt;/strong&gt;, housing is terribly expensive __&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that, in such an example, &lt;em&gt;Here in London&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be 'extracted' ( ?topicalized) &lt;strong&gt;as a whole&lt;/strong&gt; from its VP/AP, but &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt; on its own cannot (cf. * &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In London&lt;/strong&gt;, housing is terribly expensive &lt;strong&gt;here__&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) constitutes further evidence that 1) &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; is a unitary constituent, and 2) that both &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt; are PP's, because, otherwise, the extraction of the PP complement &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt; would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; violate Ross's 'A over A constraint' (or: 'minimality', under later approaches to movement) and should be grammatical (as are other PP complements extracted from non-PP's above them), but of course it is not - which follows nicely from the 'A-over-A constraint'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, obviously, if &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; is a PP, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; must itself be a P, because it is the head of that phrase, as shown, and phrases are endocentric, according to the X-Bar principles. That is a desirable outcome, because, if &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is the head of the PP &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt;, its non-extractability from it (cf. * &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Here&lt;/strong&gt;, housing is terribly expensive __ &lt;strong&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) needs no explanation, as heads of PPs (contrary to those of, e.g., VP's or AuxP's) can &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; be extracted, cf. * &lt;em&gt;In, I have never felt at home _ Berlin&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, by itself, is fairly strong evidence, I think, that &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is, indeed, the head of the PP &lt;em&gt;here in Berlin&lt;/em&gt; and, according to the endocentricity principle, a preposition, a conclusion that reinforces the evidence already presented in paragraph 1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The only other alternative (i.e., that the head of &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; were the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;London&lt;/em&gt; - its 'internal' argument - in its complement position, and &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; somewhere else, either as an adjunct or as a specifier) would not change things much, as we know from the arguments above that &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; cannot be adverbial, adjectival, nominal, etc., and must be prepositional anyway, but, apart from that, that possibility can be safely discarded for  different reasons: PP adjuncts like &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; are 'predicates' whose 'external' argument must be 'discharged' by the 'e(vent)' variable associated with the VP/V' they modify, and, therefore, they &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; project their second argument in their specifier position, because, if they did, they would become 'saturated' and would no longer be able to 'take' the 'e(vent)' argument associated with the 'VP' they must modify. The specifier slot of such PP adjuncts, therefore, must be &lt;strong&gt;empty&lt;/strong&gt;, which excludes &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; from that hypothetical position. Hence, if the head of the PP &lt;em&gt;here in London&lt;/em&gt; were the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; could at best be an 'adjunct' of &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; (one under the scope of &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;, cf. &lt;em&gt;right here in London&lt;/em&gt; vs. * &lt;em&gt;here right in London&lt;/em&gt;), but, if so, it would also have to be a &lt;strong&gt;phrasal&lt;/strong&gt; category, i.e., a PP. PP pre-modifiers, however, are severely restricted in distribution; short of in (semi)-lexicalized expressions such as &lt;em&gt;an &lt;strong&gt;out-of-print&lt;/strong&gt; book&lt;/em&gt;), they practically never occur, and, in particular, locative PP's seem impossible to construe as modifiers of other locative P's like &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt;; in all the examples I can think of, the analysis must be different, in terms of &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; independent locative PP's]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: there is rather solid evidence, I believe, in support of the claim that &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; is, categorially speaking, an &lt;strong&gt;intransitive preposition&lt;/strong&gt;, and a 'head', although, of course, it will also function as a phrasal category whenever it occurs on its own (i.e., without the ?adjunct &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; or complements like &lt;em&gt;in London&lt;/em&gt;). [I deliberately leave aside here the question whether &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; should also be analysed as a P, instead of a 'nominal' (a DP) in postpositional expressions like &lt;em&gt;hereafter&lt;/em&gt;, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T14:19:55.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:19:55.023" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20960" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:47:07.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is of course highly debated, but some linguists would answer yes, there is a small set of words/concepts common to all natural human languages. The major theory currently representing this view is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;, which posits that there are around 66 core 'semantic primes' which are both irreducible and universal. These primes are usually words, but some will in some languages be expressed by affixes or set phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:47:07.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20971" CreationDate="2017-01-30T15:41:47.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many factors involving the rate of linguistic change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daniel Nettle argues in his paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222498102_Is_the_rate_of_linguistic_change_constant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is the rate of linguistic change constant&lt;/a&gt; that small speech communities have a higher rate of linguistic change than large ones (and for the purpose of the paper, 50 000 speakers is already large).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that physical distance is not the only thing that separates speech communities from each other, and that there may be many small speech communities with very different languages in some small area (notorious such areas are the Caucasus mountains and New Guinea). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geographical features like mountain ridges are very efficient obstacles promoting linguistic diversification. Rivers separate their banks, but connect their ends, so the shape of a language areal is not approximately a circle (or hexagon).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T15:41:47.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20979" CreationDate="2017-01-30T16:47:29.697" Score="0" ViewCount="1092" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any differences between vowel symbols and vowel sounds? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do i need to use / / when writing IPA symbols? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15059" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:39:00.933" Title="Vowel Symbols and Sounds" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-01-31T18:09:30.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20976" CreationDate="2017-01-30T18:05:08.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to use slashes for anything, unless you're making a claim or unless you are instructed to do so by someone else (e.g. an instructor or editor). Slashes conventionally mean &quot;underlying&quot;, but can also mean &quot;phonemic&quot;, so let context, intent and instructions be your guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;symbol&quot; is unfortunate since it can mean &quot;letter&quot;, or &quot;mental unit&quot;. There can be a physical waveform of the word &quot;cheese&quot;, but we don't have such things in our heads, what we have is something symbolic that stands for something else (the entire class of utterances 'cheese', for example). But it can also be used to refer to a letter, like &lt;em&gt;ö, ø, eu&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the system of writing you are using. In IPA, the letter &quot;ø&quot; is used to stand for a broad range of physical sounds encountered in Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, French, German and Cantonese (and other languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, rarely does anyone say &quot;He made the sound represented by the IPA letter 'ø'&quot;, instead we treat &quot;sound&quot;, &quot;letter&quot; and &quot;symbol&quot; as interchangeable, unless there is confusion and you need to specifically talk of &quot;letters&quot; and &quot;physical sounds&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding social conventions for presenting letters, you have to follow the style sheet of the publication that you are looking at. There is a general rule that you should not put linguistic data in a text paragraph without some demarcation, so you can't talk about ɪ just like that. You have to set it off somehow, so you might say &quot;the vowel [ɪ]&quot; or &quot;the vowel &lt;em&gt;ɪ&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;the vowel /ɪ/&quot; or &quot;the vowel &lt;strong&gt;ɪ&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. If you have a data display, bare data (letters) are okay and you see that all the time (although in some journals, e.g. NLLT, they still use bold for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; linguistic data and symbols. You can use italics so that &lt;em&gt;ʃæŋk&lt;/em&gt; is set off to look different from surrounding text (though nobody does that in displays).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brackets can be used, but should not be used misleadingly. The problem is that [] is supposed to be used only for phonetic transcriptions, i.e the symbolic representation of actual speech, but many people use [] incorrectly and you end up with absurdities like &quot;[nk] → [ŋk]&quot; ([] means &quot;is pronounced as&quot; and that means that how it &quot;is pronounced&quot; doesn't change to something else). Slash brackets are likewise used to refer to an underlying representation (there is only one, for a given word), but it also can refer to a derived representation, basically the surface pronounced form but specifically limiting the kind of information included (omitting allophonic facts, like aspiration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complicating the matter even more, there are people who make an ontological distinction between &quot;phonemes&quot; and &quot;allophones&quot;, so that the &quot;phoneme&quot; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;spit&quot; is a different thing from the &quot;allophone&quot; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;spit&quot;, and this is reflected in writing &quot;phoneme /p/&quot; and &quot;allophone [p]&quot;. But many people don't buy into that claim -- they are the same thing (although [p] vs. /p/ may indicate to the reader what kinds of facts about pronunciation you are leaving out). That is why you have to ask your instructor or editor what their rules are for use of brackets, slashes, not to mention italics and bold. There is still no conventional bracket for &quot;non-underlying intermediate form&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T21:39:00.933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:39:00.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T19:30:34.330" Score="0" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a direction, advice where to search information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to split sentences into separate words and phrases.&#xA;For example this sentence &quot;Tommy has a lot of job experience&quot; has the phrase &quot;a lot of&quot;, and it should be extracted as a phrase, not as separate words &quot;a&quot;, &quot;lot&quot;, &quot;of&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What tool/library/algorithm/technique can do such extraction or split? &#xA;I am complete newbie, and want to know where to dig. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I plan to do a language learning app, and to give a correct translation for a part of sentence I need to clear distinguish single word from a phrase, because translation will be different. May be this will give some hints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15061" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T10:18:32.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T10:18:32.337" Title="Split sentence into phrases and words" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20976" CreationDate="2017-01-30T19:50:33.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any differences between vowel symbols and vowel sounds? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, obviously there is a difference because the one is a symbol and the other is a sound, but as Colin Fine said in his comment, this is a bit too trivial so I'm not exactly sure what you mean.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The symbols (like IPA letters ʁ, ə, a, ...) are visual representations of the concept of a sound. When you write ə, then you use a visual symbol that refers to the class of all sounds that sound like the initial &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The sounds themselves are what you hear, or sometimes an abstraction over all of these sounds (meaning that by &quot;the sound&quot; you sometimes do not refer to one utterance of the sound, but rather to the mental image of a sound with those properties that all instances of that sound share).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I need to use / / when writing IPA symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When talking about &lt;strong&gt;the symbols themselves&lt;/strong&gt;, they are written &lt;strong&gt;in&#xA;isolation&lt;/strong&gt; without any brackets (like I did above when I listed&#xA;examples of IPA letters, thereby referring to the symbols themselves&#xA;rather to the sounds they denote).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When talking about &lt;strong&gt;phones&lt;/strong&gt;, the symbols are enclosed in &lt;strong&gt;square brackets [ ]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A phone is an actual speech sound on the more concrete, physical level, i.e. the sound that is pronounced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You use &lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; representation when transcribing real speech into phonetic script or describing how a word is actually pronounced.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When talking about &lt;strong&gt;phonemes&lt;/strong&gt;, the symbols are enclosed by &lt;strong&gt;slashes / /&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A phoneme is an abstraction of phones that are perceived as belonging to the same entity in a language, so it's the more linguistic and less physical aspect of the concept &quot;sound&quot;. Phonemes are often described as &quot;the smallest unit of language that makes a difference in meaning&quot;. For example, in English, /k/ and /t/ make a difference in meaning (as in &lt;em&gt;kite&lt;/em&gt; /kaɪt/ vs. &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt; /laɪt/) and a speaker would regard /t/ and /k/ as different sounds in their language, so /k/ and /t/ are different phonemes in English. On the other hand, for example in German, whether you pronounce an /ʁ/ as [r], [ʀ] or [ʁ] makes no difference in meaning and a speaker would perceive all of these sounds as an &quot;r&quot;, so [r], [ʀ], [ʁ] all belong to the same phoneme /ʁ/.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; representation is the abstract level which depicts more or less the mental image you have in your head rather than an actual pronounciation of these sounds. It's what you use when you e.g. describe the lexicon entry of a word with all of its properties (phnological form, lexical category, inflectional paradigm, ...)  or the input to a phonological rule.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, one may roughly say that phones/phonetic representation (-&gt; sqare brackets [ ]) is &quot;what comes out of your mouth&quot; and phonemes/phonological representation (-&gt; slashes / /)  is  &quot;what is in your head&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T20:38:03.850" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T20:38:03.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20971" CreationDate="2017-01-30T22:48:43.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends on how realistic you want your constructed world to be. Even if you choose a hex grid as the medium for your map, this needn't force you to map every aspect of the world following that pattern. That's worldbuilding advice, anyway. As for the linguistics part: there's no fixed distance or chronological separation (or any other simple-to-measure factor) that can predict that one language will split into two. There are, as explained in other answers, many factors that tend to make languages appear or disappear, and none is very easy to measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Small bands of humans distributed uniformly, at relatively short average distances from each other, and separated by nothing but flat terrain, will most probably speak the same language (if there aren't many) or a bunch of dialects of the same language, each of them intelligible to their immediate neighbours, or maybe dialects of two or three different, but closely related languages (if the extremes points of the map are far from each other). It's a matter of neverending discussion when a dialect turns into a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, is not a realistic setting, or even close to realistic. Unless there's a reason not to, I would (if I were you) throw in some mountain ridges, rivers and lakes, deserts, and other obstacles (or enablers) of human movement. Then you could stop thinking about exact distances or timeframes and use those geographic accidents, along with whatever fictional history you wanted to include in your world, to figure out where the splits between languages or dialects should occur. You could use the history of actual languages as a guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T22:48:43.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:16:05.893" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I represent the semantic content of a sentence or a word in a formal way? So far, I only know that you can use sets of features, but what are the alternative theories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15064" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:16:05.893" Title="How can meaning be represented?" Tags="&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-01-31T13:58:01.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20954" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:49:36.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The task you are talking about is called &lt;em&gt;grammar induction&lt;/em&gt; and is the topic of &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;q=grammar%20induction&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;as_sdt=1%2C5&amp;amp;as_sdtp=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;much research&lt;/a&gt; in NLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9740" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:49:36.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15398" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:52:37.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm sorry but apparently I misunderstood your question. I will leave my answer, however, in case someone finds it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical Arabic, The short vowels are /a/, /u/, and /i/, and the long vowels are their long counterparts (basically just a vowel length distinction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Classical Arabic (marked with diacritics that are usually omitted):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بَ : /ba/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بُ : /bu/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بِ : /bi/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the long vowels are (marked with letters that also represent semi-vowels, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mater lectionis&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بَا : /ba:/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بُو : /bu:/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بِي : /bi:/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe in most modern Arabic varieties nowadays, short vowels became their lax counterparts in some varieties of Arabic (essentially like the words you provided; the u in put (/ʊ/), the i in it /ɪ/, except the a, which I believe depends on the dialect. I believe some varieties have the a in apple (/æ/) as /a/ from CA, while others have /ɐ/ or perhaps something similar like the schwa or /ʌ/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Farsi Persian short vowels are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بَ : /bæ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بُ : /bo/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;بِ : /be/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your example words don't reflect the IPA pronunciation. The a in apple is /æ/, the o in IPA is heard in words like &quot;coal&quot; and &quot;code&quot; without the following /ʊ/. I never saw the word &quot;spott&quot; in English but I would assume the vowel there is actually /ɑ/ or /ɒ/ just like in the word &quot;spot&quot;. The vowel in the word &quot;bed&quot; is actually &quot;ɛ&quot;, while in Persian it's a really short /e/ (as in words like the e in words like &quot;ballet&quot;, &quot;buffet&quot;, and &quot;café&quot;, but without the following /ɪ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the long vowels are similar to Arabic, except for the ـا, which is more back and round /ɒ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to conclude, Arabic short vowels are in some modern Arabic varieties /æ/-/ɐ/, /ʊ/, /ɪ/. While the long vowels are /a:/, /u:/, and /i:/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farsi Persian short vowels are /æ/, /o/, and /e/, while the long vowels are /ɒ:/, /u:/, and /i:/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15069" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:52:37.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T05:42:01.203" Score="3" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classical Arabic (4th-9th century) short vowels are /a/, /u/, and /i/, and long vowels are /a:/, /u:/, and /i:/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New Persian (1000-1200 years old) short vowels are /æ/, /o/, and /e/, and long vowels are /ɒ:/, /u:/, and /i:/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orthographically speaking, /æ/ in Persian is written like /a/ in Arabic, /o/ like /u/, and /e/ like /i/. The same goes for the long vowels; /ɒ:/ for /a:/, /u:/ for /u:/, and /i:/ for /i:/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Arabic loanwords in Persian, like kitaab/ketaab (written exactly the same way in Arabic and Persian, even with diacritics), which is a loanword from Arabic, why is it pronounced as /ketɒ:b/ in Persian, when it would make more sense for it to be pronounced as /ki:tɒ:b/, since I would assume /i:/ is closer to /i/ than /e/? In other words, why was the Arabic /i/ transferred to Persian as /e/ instead of /i:/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar changes also apply to other words borrowed from Arabic. Few examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;imtiħaan/emtehaan &quot;test&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;istiʕmaar/esteʔmaar &quot;conquest/occupation&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sulħ/solh &quot;peace&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15069" LastEditorUserId="15069" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T07:05:04.517" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:32:01.133" Title="In Arabic loanwords, why does Persian change the short vowels with different vowels instead of matching them with long counterparts?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19429" CreationDate="2017-01-31T11:29:30.787" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;argument is not correct if not impossible, such word forming was never in proto-indo-european not even earlier, and proto-indo-european was a suffixional language, didn't have 'preformants&quot; &quot;interformants &quot;, and only had s- mobile as kind of prefix, hence this argument is not tenable. indo-european verbs existed as the main root and some kind of very old determinative postpositional consonantal extensions which may have been in pre-proto-indo-european with a particular meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15071" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T11:29:30.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T10:31:42.873" Score="2" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern English, certain (but not, or not &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt;, all) 'time-interval-in-which-event-occurs' adjuncts can be constructed &lt;strong&gt;apparently (1) without temporal  prepositions or case inflections&lt;/strong&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;I received the money &lt;strong&gt;this morning/yesterday/last Friday/this week/last month/this summer/this year&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, etc.). The same construction occurs, although not exactly in all the same cases, in modern Spanish, several other western IE languages, and Mandarin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common this construction is in Human Language, in general, I do not know, though. Could somebody here give me examples of languages - preferably IE ones, since I know virtually nothing about other language families - in which this 'bare NP adverbial' construction is also possible, and, especially, of languages, if any, in which it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;? (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Please note my &lt;strong&gt;'apparently'&lt;/strong&gt;: I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; saying that English or Spanish 'bare' NP time adjuncts are &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; 'bare' (i.e., lacking even 'covert' prepositions, phonetically null K(ase)-assigning functional heads,'inherent', lexically-conditioned Case-features, or whatever structural devices eventually account for their function and interpretation); all I meant to say is that at PF they &lt;strong&gt;seem&lt;/strong&gt; to be mere uninflected NP's/DP's, rather than PP's, K(ase)P's, or Case-inflected NP's/DP's, and what I wanted to know is which other languages have this surface property and which, if any, do not. I know, though, that the question might be undecidable (for reasons briefly explained in note (2) below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Needless to say, the construction will be trivially impossible, by definition, in any language in which &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; 'bare NP' time adjuncts &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; carry &lt;strong&gt;overt&lt;/strong&gt; case inflections (accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental,...), as might well be the case in German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish,...Latin (but I am not sure whether, in such languages, literally &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; 'bare NP' adjuncts must be overtly inflected; maybe some needn't be). [Note that, at bottom, this uncertainty may turn into a theoretical issue, instead of a factual one, because the possibility cannot be discarded that even apparently uninflected NP's should after all covertly carry 'abstract' Case (e.g., whichever the 'default' Case may be in the corresponding language, say 'objective', in English). What's more, of course &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; 'bare' (here: prepositionless &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; caseless) NP's will be &lt;strong&gt;impossible&lt;/strong&gt; on theoretical grounds if the 'Case Filter' is a correct principle of Human Language &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; applies to &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; NP's. However, even if it is, whether it must apply to &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; NP's, including (2nd. order) NP &lt;strong&gt;predicates&lt;/strong&gt;, instead of just to argument NP's is unclear to me]. Such issues might make my question unanswerable, and I am ready to delete it if so considered, but my original intention was to leave them aside and just find out what other languages have 'bare NP' time adjuncts that &lt;strong&gt;seem&lt;/strong&gt; caseless at 'surface structure/PF' and which, if any, prohibit them (possibly disregarding German, Polish, etc., if their 'bare NP' adverbials do, in fact, invariably require case-marked NP's, which, as I said, I do not know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T19:55:59.913" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T15:24:39.403" Title="How common, crosslinguistically speaking, are 'bare NP' temporal adverbials?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20988" CreationDate="2017-02-01T10:45:23.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is definitely possible in German, too, for some time intervals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ich war 1998 in Paris.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that years are in German in this category, the use of &quot;in 1998&quot; is considered an Anglicism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I ran some part-of-speech taggers (using the CLARIN-D service &lt;a href=&quot;https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/weblicht/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WebLicht&lt;/a&gt; on the following two sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Er war 1998 in Paris. Sie war zweitausendeins in Berlin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they all give &lt;code&gt;CARD&lt;/code&gt; (Cardinal number, numeral) as tag for &quot;1998&quot;. Majority vote is for &lt;code&gt;CARD&lt;/code&gt; on &quot;zweitausendeins&quot;, too, with one tagger opting for &lt;code&gt;ADV&lt;/code&gt; (Adverb) here, one for &lt;code&gt;NN&lt;/code&gt; (Noun) and another one opting for &lt;code&gt;NE&lt;/code&gt; (named entity). So the majority of taggers doesn't think it is a &quot;caseless noun&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T15:24:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T15:24:39.403" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20891" CreationDate="2017-02-01T12:25:29.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can select the lines that you want to export, for example by clicking the little box on the top right next to the question mark in this screenshot: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/InQbc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/InQbc.png&quot; alt=&quot;concordance screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the warning message says you can apparently only export 100 per day; is that too much of a restriction? Else I suppose you can come back every day to export the next pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15080" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T12:25:29.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4728" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:00:46.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't comment on Lao, but I know that the Thai word originally meant &quot;water skipper&quot; (insects of the family Gerridae). Nowadays these bugs can be called จิงโจ้น้ำ /ciŋ.côo náam/, according to my older Thai neighbor. Thai-language.com includes this now-secondary meaning from the Royal Institute 1982 dictionary (&lt;a href=&quot;http://thai-language.com/id/136374&quot;&gt;http://thai-language.com/id/136374&lt;/a&gt;). You can also hear the old meaning in this traditional Thai song: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUgGKmhTBI&amp;amp;index=7&amp;amp;list=PLLYDLIKdF24wF8Jn7TSMvxUUbe1XBmQDv&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwUgGKmhTBI&amp;amp;index=7&amp;amp;list=PLLYDLIKdF24wF8Jn7TSMvxUUbe1XBmQDv&lt;/a&gt;  (Trying to understand the lyrics to this song is what led me to this discovery.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my neighbor, the marsupial got called a จิงโจ้ because it jumped like a water skipper. So it's not a recent loanword for kangaroo, though the original word for water skipper might be an older loan from somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15082" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:00:46.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4690" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:04:52.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Lao friend says that in Luang Prabang they pronounce ໃ as /əə/, e.g. ໃຈ /cəə/ (he wrote it ເຈີ). Historically in both Thai and Lao, this grapheme was /aɯ/. So yes, they are still distinguished in the Luang Prabang dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15082" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:04:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20985" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:32:01.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see evidence that this is just some relatively modern shift in pronunciation in Persian in some accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; in the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;kitab&lt;/em&gt; is preserved in 1) the languages which inherited the word from earlier Persian (Turkish, Azeri, Kazakh, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi... and many more) and the 2) Persian outside Iran, eg Dari and Tajik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems it has nothing to do with Arabic-origin words specifically, as it happens in Persian words too, eg &lt;em&gt;emruz&lt;/em&gt; in standard Iranian Persian and Dari vs &lt;em&gt;imruz&lt;/em&gt; in Tajik and Urdu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a better explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vowel notation is simple but its history is complicated. Classical&#xA;  Arabic has a vowel length distinction; in writing, long vowels are&#xA;  normally written ambiguously by letters known as matres lectionis&#xA;  while short ones are normally omitted entirely (although certain&#xA;  diacritics are added to indicate them in special circumstances,&#xA;  notably in the Quran). Middle Persian also had vowel length, and noted&#xA;  ā with alif ا, ē and ī with yāʾ ی, and ō and ū with wāw و. Short&#xA;  vowels (a, e, i, o and u) were normally not written.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The length&#xA;  distinction of Middle Persian no longer exists in modern Persian. The&#xA;  results of its collapse vary between Western Persian, Dari, and&#xA;  Tajiki, with eight- or six-vowel inventories. However, the alphabet&#xA;  retains the original spellings of most words so that فارسي Fārsī&#xA;  &quot;Persian&quot; is pronounced in the Tehrani dialect fɒrsi and شير shēr&#xA;  &quot;lion&quot; and شیر shīr &quot;milk&quot; is ʃir, while in Dari, these same words&#xA;  appear as Persian pronunciation: [fɒrsi] but ʃer &quot;lion&quot;, ʃir &quot;milk&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the shift is to preserve a contrast given that collapse, but you will need to ask someone who really knows Persian to find a minimal pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, there is more variation in the pronunciation of Arabic words within Arabic dialects than variation in the pronunciation of Arabic words used across all of these other unrelated languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:32:01.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:56:34.937" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John McWhorter recently explained some&lt;/a&gt;. I'll add to that here. English has a number of features that, while not absolutely unique to English, just rare in the world, are unique to English as a collection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;th- (interdental fricative) is rare among world languages. Icelandic, Arabic, and some Northwest Indian languages have it. &lt;em&gt;Everybody&lt;/em&gt; has problems saying that when learning English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;spelling/orthography - English is special in having a particularly idiosyncratic spelling to pronunciation map, primarily produced by major sound changes (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;) after some solidification of spelling norms had happened, but then fluid spelling norms throughout time, and lots of foreign word influences. This is of course not necessarily about English (spelling is not language), but is strongly associated with English speaking culture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;do-support - that's a fancy way of saying that 'do' gets spliced in for negatives and questions. &quot;I know who that is&quot; -&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;Do&lt;/em&gt; you know who that is?&quot;, &quot;I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; not know who that is.&quot;. The only other languages in the world that does that is Welsh (and supposedly there was some influence one way or the other).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;prepositions isolated at the end (like in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phrasal verbs&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Let's call the meeting off&quot; &quot;You should think it over&quot;. These prepositions don't really introduce a prepositional phrase or indicate direction or anything we normally associate with prepositions except for some vague metaphorical direction (likely to be misdirected). They are 'idiomatic', they mean something much more with the verb than by themselves. Other Germanic languages have this but nowhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;genderlessness (in IE) - You know how French and Spanish have gender, a (grammatical) sex marker for each noun: 'la porte' (the door) but 'le mur' (the wall)? Most Indo-European languages have some sort of gender assignment. This is cheating a bit because in the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; world,  having gender is only &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/30A#2/25.5/148.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;roughly half and half&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;multiple layers of vocabulary - The British Isles are somewhat isolated, as islands tend to be, but somehow attracted multiple invasions over the centuries. Celts, Saxons, Norse, French, and scholars and engineers with a penchant for Latin and Greek. Most European languages share the latter (modern technical vocabulary) with English, but not all of the previous ones. Oh yeah, lots of words borrowed from indigenous colonialized people. English isn't special in having loan words: Swahili has lots of Arabic, and Mandarin lots of Manchu and Mongolian and so on. But English has multiple different sources.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given all this, there is one thing that English is not particularly unique in, and that is in being unique. What I mean to say is that though English is certainly special in having all the above rare particular idiosyncrasies all in one place, most languages have a number of similarly idiosyncratic facts about them that distinguish them from all other languages, just not the same ones listed above that are special to English. French has the rare nasal vowels (like Polish) and some adjectives that go before nouns and some after (like Spanish). So English is not unique in being unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T15:43:19.893" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T15:43:19.893" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="20995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20988" CreationDate="2017-02-02T10:19:14.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Mandarin so can't really comment on this, but according to Shi (2000:393) Mandarin has this feature, too:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/26tuA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/26tuA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shi, Dinxu. 2000. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/417661.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Topic and topic-comment constructions in Mandarin Chinese&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;, pp.383-408.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more on the analysis of bare NP adverbials, but primarily focussing on English:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larson, Richard K. 1985. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4178458.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bare-NP adverbs&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Linguistic inquiry&lt;/em&gt;, 16(4), pp.595-621.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larson, Richard K. 1987. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4178537.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Missing prepositions&quot; and the analysis of English free relative clauses&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Linguistic inquiry&lt;/em&gt;, 18(2), pp.239-266.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stroik, Thomas. 1992. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/tlir.1992.9.issue-3/tlir.1992.9.3.267/tlir.1992.9.3.267.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the distribution of temporal and locative NP adverbials&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Linguistic Review&lt;/em&gt;, 9(3), pp.267-284.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kobayashi, Keiichiro. 1999. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/elsj1984/16/2/16_2_353/_pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another Approach to Bare-NP Adverbials as Nominals&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;English Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, 16(2), pp.353-380.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T10:19:14.443" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20988" CreationDate="2017-02-02T13:36:49.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for Polish, the closest thing to what you're looking for are perhaps expressions indicating time intervals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Pracowałem       tam   dwa lata. &#xA; I worked (masc.) there two years&#xA; “I worked there for two years”&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to use the preposition &lt;em&gt;przez&lt;/em&gt; here, which in this context is equivalent to English &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Pracowałem       tam   przez dwa lata.&#xA;I worked (masc.) there for   two years&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, based on your comment, I need to conclude that the adverbial is actually inflected. It so happens that nominative and accusative often have the same form in Polish (both nominative and accusative of “two years” is &lt;em&gt;dwa lata&lt;/em&gt;) and that confused me a bit. But this example makes it clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Byłem  tam   (przez) jedną dobę.&#xA;I was  there  for    one   24-hour period of one day and one night&#xA;masc.                acc.  acc.&#xA;“I was there for one day and one night”&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;doba&lt;/em&gt; is feminine, and we can see that it is accusative (&lt;em&gt;jedną dobę&lt;/em&gt;) and not nominative (&lt;em&gt;jedna doba&lt;/em&gt;). “*Byłem tam jedna doba” is clearly ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my updated conclusion is that, as far as I can tell, Polish doesn't have the bare NP temporal adverbials you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1426" LastEditorUserId="1426" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T16:29:34.597" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:29:34.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:11:08.650" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the work of philologists, the particles 曰 *[ɢ]ʷat, 于 *ɢʷ(r)a, 云 *[ɢ]ʷə[r] were aspect markers in Early Archaic Chinese, marking the 'prospective', continuous and 'actualising' aspects respectively. They are different forms of the same word, and their phonological difference ultimately originates from TAM suffixes in Proto-Sino-Tibetan. (I suspect these markers may express properties of modality and not just aspect, but in any case, the bottom line is that they were markers of TAM at first.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you look at Late Archaic Chinese, pretty much all instances of 曰 *[ɢ]ʷat and 云 *[ɢ]ʷə[r] are either copulas or verbs introducing quotations. 曰 *[ɢ]ʷat can also function like a quotative, like the modern Chinese 道 &lt;em&gt;dao&lt;/em&gt;. 曰 *[ɢ]ʷat and 云 *[ɢ]ʷə[r] also occasionally take newly-grammaticalised aspect markers like 既 *[k]ə[t]-s  as well. So it seems that we have a case of functional morphemes gaining very lexical meaning and acting like other verbs. This use of 曰 *[ɢ]ʷat and 云 *[ɢ]ʷə[r] are extremely common, and the older TAM uses have seemingly vanished without trace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a change attested in any other language family? Should this be considered a counter-example to the unidirectionality hypothesis of grammaticalisation, or simply a case of lexicalisation? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T17:07:18.823" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T17:07:18.823" Title="Is the TAM -&gt; copula/'say'-word pathway attested elsewhere?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T18:11:16.673" Score="0" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that dropping h's pronouncing (th) as (f), or using a flapped  intervolic t/d are taken as signs of poor education, when it's, objectively, just as orthographically wrong? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15090" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T21:19:54.797" Title="Why is &quot;intrusive r&quot; not stigmatized like other &quot;mispronunciations&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20998" CreationDate="2017-02-02T20:32:02.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is widespread belief that there is single correct way to say things in a language, so if you say tom[ɛj]to and I say tom[ɑ]to then one of us has to be wrong, and furthermore it's you (unless I recognize that my pronunciation tom[ɑ]to is in fact wrong). It's also widely believed that people are taught their language; so if they don't pronounce a word according to an assumed norm, then the most generous interpretation is that they don't know better and that would be because their education was deficient. This applies to r-dropping, r-insertion, θ→f, coda-simplification, use of &quot;ain't&quot;, use of &quot;could of&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T20:32:02.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20998" CreationDate="2017-02-02T21:09:47.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pronunciation feature of a dialect is called a mispronunciation only when it is stigmatized.  When it applies to a regular feature of a dialect, like your two examples of r-insertion and flapping, that is simply what &quot;mispronunciation&quot; means -- saying things the wrong, i.e. stigmatized, way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if r-insertion and flapping are not stigmatized, they are not mispronunciations.  It is all a matter of terminology and social prejudice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your use of the phrase &quot;orthographically wrong&quot; suggests that you have a theory about &quot;correct&quot; pronunciation that all and only the letters used in the conventional spelling of an expression should be directly reflected in pronunciation.  That is an unusual idea, but if you have that prejudice, you do, and it's not the sort of thing that we can argue about.  I don't share it, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T21:19:54.797" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T21:19:54.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21010" CreationDate="2017-02-02T23:30:47.240" Score="4" ViewCount="884" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was studying (classical) Greek as an undergrad, we were told that φ θ χ, that is, the Greek aspirate consonants, have the following phonetic values: [f θ χ] and never it was told to us that they should actually be pronounced as [pʰ tʰ kʰ], respectively, which correspond the their phonemic forms /pʰ tʰ kʰ/. What really puts me off is the fact that all complex, idiosyncratic phonological rules that characterize Greek are easier to explain when we use the &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; forms instead of the other ones. Nevertheless, nobody ever spoke about the true forms. Does anybody know how to solve this (potentially historic) conundrum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14445" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T22:15:45.163" Title="How did the Greek aspirates become fricatives?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21001" CreationDate="2017-02-03T02:22:22.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally accepted nowadays that φ θ χ were pronounced as aspirates in Classical Attic. But this pronunciation didn't last long: as early as Aristophanes θ had become a fricative in some dialects (his stereotypical Spartan characters frequently substituted σ for θ, which was probably an attempt to transcribe a dental fricative using the closest available sound). And in some graffiti from Pompeii, φ was transcribed into Latin with &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the first few centuries CE, the transition to fricatives was complete, and has remained in Greek ever since. So until fairly recently, most scholars used the same sounds when talking about Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know about the historical aspirates now through a variety of means. But since English distinguishes fricatives and does not distinguish aspirates, Greek learners in America still tend to use this &quot;Erasmian pronunciation&quot;. Similarly ε/ει/η, ο/ου/ω are seldom given their reconstructed Attic sound values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T02:22:22.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13006" CreationDate="2017-02-03T04:18:47.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Measuring &quot;semantic complexity&quot; is a very vague notion. It would likely be very difficult to define what that means for every imaginable context it would arise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible strategy could break down &quot;semantic complexity&quot; into several, easier to define terms, and then find some way of quantifying and measuring them. Theoretically, this could lead to a workable algorithm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T04:18:47.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21001" CreationDate="2017-02-03T10:53:16.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spriantalisation of the Greek aspirated stops took place at different times in different dialects. “The telltale transcription of φ by Latin f instead of ph is not found until the 1st century AD, and is not usual until the 4th” (Sihler p. 142).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T10:53:16.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T12:07:09.210" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chomsky mentions an article that I have never taken a look at in his talk at the University of Arizona &quot;What is Special About Language?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &quot;Without Social Context?&quot; but I've never seen the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's described to be an article in the journal of Cognitive Science. &quot;More than One Method&quot;. Chomsky, &quot;Well we know that there is one method for acquiring language, namely, statistical analysis of data, but is there another method, or does that do everything?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky, &quot;He claims, rightly or wrongly if you look at it, that [this invented example] can be handled with statistical analysis and therefor there is only one method... statistical analysis.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15097" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T14:10:47.690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T14:10:47.690" Title="Where can I find the mentioned More than one Method article?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:01:44.007" Score="0" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Semitic language, one would expect the word dozen to be rooted in Aramaic (such as תריסר in Hebrew). This is obviously not the case, as the word appears similar to &quot;dozen&quot;, rooted in Latin.&#xA;Is this indeed true? And if so, how did the Latin roots reach Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15099" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:21:13.673" Title="What is the origin of the Arabic word دزينة (dazina)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21007" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:13:10.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dazzīna&lt;/em&gt; is a modern borrowing from Italian &lt;em&gt;dozzina&lt;/em&gt;. That said, there a few Latin loanwords in classical Arabic, almost all of them belonging to military vocabulary, for example the Qur’anic &lt;em&gt;ṣirāṭ&lt;/em&gt; from strata “road”. (Latin was the language of the Roman army, even in the East).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:13:10.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21007" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:21:13.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is from Italian &lt;em&gt;dozzina&lt;/em&gt;. It is borrowed to Turkish as &lt;em&gt;düzine&lt;/em&gt;, then to Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T17:21:13.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21001" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:40:58.653" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well this sound change took place at different times in different dialects/regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some claim that fricativisation already started in the late 6th/early 5th century BC, but that is controversial (see my reference below). In Laconia there is definite evidence for θ from the 4th century BC where ἀνέσηκε is attested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://epigraphy.packhum.org/text/30611?hs=111-120&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inscriptions&lt;/a&gt; instead of ἀνέθηκε and σιός instead of θεός. By the 1st century AD this sound change had spread everywhere. If you are interested in the chronology of the Greek sound changes as a whole, this sums it up nicely: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Greek language and its speakers&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fricative pronunciation of /pʰ/ is attested in Pamph. phíkati = wíkati ‘twenty’ (4th c. BCE). Spirantization of /tʰ/ also occurs quite early in Laconian: siós = theós ‘god’ (Laconia, 4th c. BCE; cf. Tsakoniansáti ‘daughter’ &amp;lt; Anc. Gk. thugátēr). Other evidence is controversial. p.n. Ephronís for Euphronís (Athens, Hell.) might reflect an assimilation of contiguous homorganic fricatives (/ɸpɸ/ &amp;gt; /ɸɸ/ with simplification to /ɸ/ before a consonant), but careless omission of &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; is more likely. The spelling of &amp;lt;ph&amp;gt; for &amp;lt;th&amp;gt; in worphaía = worthaía ‘(Artemis) Ortheia’ (Laconia, 6th c. BCE), pheôn = theôn ‘god (gen. pl.)’ (Dodona, Hell.) purportedly reflects spirantization of /tʰ/ and /pʰ/, since the fronting /θ/ &amp;gt; /f/ is more natural than /tʰ/ &amp;gt; /pʰ/ (Cockney three [friː]). But a confusion between &amp;lt;Θ&amp;gt; = th and &amp;lt;Φ&amp;gt; = ph may also be behind these examples (Threatte 1980:470-471). However, in Pompeian graffiti (1st c. CE) &amp;lt;f&amp;gt; for &amp;lt;ph&amp;gt; probably mirrors a fricative in the Greek words: Venus Fisica. Arguably, voiceless stops underwent spirantization and voicing in Macedonian: p.n. Boulomága /βuːlomáɣaː/ &amp;lt; /Φuːlomáxaː/ for Phulomákhē, month name Xandikós /ksanðikós/ &amp;lt; /ksanθikós/ for Xanthikós (Hatzopoulos 2007, Méndez Dosuna 2012). Furthermore, these spellings confirm the spirantization of voiced stops in the area. Spellings like gégrappha = gégrapha ‘I have written’ (Caria, 2nd c. BCE), metēllakkhótas = metēllakhótas ‘change (pf. ptc. act. acc. pl. masc.)’ (Caria, 2nd-1st c. BCE) are unlikely to attest to an affricate pronunciation prior to complete fricativization. Lack of spirantization of /tʰ/ and /kʰ/ after /s/ is confirmed by early spellings with &amp;lt;t&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;k&amp;gt; in NW Greece and elsewhere: heléstai = helésthai ‘seize (aor. inf. mid.)’ (Chaleion, 5th c. BCE), páskoi = páskhoi ‘suffer (3 sg. opt. pres.)’ (Olympia, 5th c. BCE). Apparently, /tʰ/ spirantized after /s/ in some areas (Méndez Dosuna 1985:364-366): apodóssai = apodósthai ‘give back (aor. inf. mid.)’ (Olympia, 4th c. BCE). The scantiness of &amp;lt;sp&amp;gt; for &amp;lt;sph&amp;gt;, e.g. aspalísai = asphalísai ‘secure (aor. inf.)’ (Egyptian papyrus, 1st c. CE), also indicates spirantization of /pʰ/ after /s/, which is confirmed by Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alcorac Alonso Déniz, “Spirantization”, in: Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, Managing Editors Online Edition: First Last. Consulted online on 04 February 2017 &lt;a href=&quot;http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2214-448X_eagll_SIM_00000536&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2214-448X_eagll_SIM_00000536&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;First published online: 2013&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T22:15:45.163" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21016" CreationDate="2017-02-03T18:46:21.353" Score="0" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a word that means 'only' or 'but,' but only in a specific context.  The sample sentence that I'm wanting to translate is &quot;I am only human&quot; in the sense that they are nothing more than human.  In modern German, they would phrase it as &quot;Ich bin nur ein Mensch.&quot; I was able to find all the Old English equivalents to the other words (something along the lines of Ic beo ______ (an) mennisc).  The problem is with &quot;only.&quot;  Only translated as &quot;anlic&quot; in Modern German would be &quot;allein&quot; I believe, and would give the meaning of &quot;I alone am human.&quot;  I'm not sure if the Old English version would have this meaning, and I've had no luck finding an Old English equivalent to the German &quot;nur.&quot;  I'm also not sure if I should be phrasing it as &quot;I am but human/a man&quot; or &quot;I am nought but human/a man.&quot;  Would anyone be willing to enlighten me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15100" LastEditorUserId="15100" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T17:45:59.293" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T17:45:59.293" Title="&quot;Only&quot; in Old English?" Tags="&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21011" CreationDate="2017-02-03T20:19:42.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where did you come up with ,,anlic?''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;,,Allein'' has a different meaning... translated to English it is closer to the meaning we place with &quot;I am alone&quot; vs &quot;I alone am human.&quot; If you are a native English speaker, the difference and inflection are evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you may search down the path of ,,bloss'' as that has an earlier origin than ,,nur'' and can often be used as a synonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15101" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T20:19:42.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T01:17:49.773" Score="1" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying Turkish, and regarding the locative, I've learned that it is implemented by adding the suffix -DA or -TA, the latter being used when the word starts with &quot;p, ç, t, k, f, h, s, and ş&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some examples from Duolingo are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Park means park and the locative used to say &quot;in/at the park&quot; is parkta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otel means hotel and the locative used to say &quot;in/at the hotel&quot; is otelde&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Banyo means bathroom and the locative used to say &quot;in/at the bathroom&quot; is banyoda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bakkal means store and the locative used to say &quot;in/at the store&quot; is bakkalda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Okul means school and the locative used to say &quot;in/at the school&quot; is okulda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is: sometimes the suffix is really -DA as in okulda, and sometimes the suffix is -DE as in otelde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one decide if it should be -da or -de? Is any other possibility for the locative other than -da, -de, -ta and -te?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, for each word what decides the form of the suffix to be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15066" LastEditorUserId="15066" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T15:37:23.137" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T01:01:33.560" Title="In Turkish, regarding the locative, how do we know which suffix (-de or -da) should be used?" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21013" CreationDate="2017-02-04T01:50:34.570" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish has a rule of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowel harmony&lt;/a&gt;: it depends on the vowel of the preceding syllable. You get [a] after &lt;em&gt;u ı o a&lt;/em&gt; and [e] after &lt;em&gt;ü i ö e&lt;/em&gt;. There are some complications about final consonants in loan words which can be treated as exceptions. The t vs d thing has to do with whether there is a previous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicelessness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voiceless&lt;/a&gt; consonant. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; might clarify things for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-04-26T01:01:33.560" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T01:01:33.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21011" CreationDate="2017-02-04T09:21:58.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about &quot;nothing... but...&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bosworthtoller.com/023449&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;náht&lt;/a&gt;... &lt;a href=&quot;http://bosworthtoller.com/005503&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;búton(bútan)&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://bosworthtoller.com/049919&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like in&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Gif hé ágylte, hé hit georne gebéte and syððan geswíce; &#xA;for ðí ne bið nán bót náht búton þǽr beó geswicenes (Hml. Th. i. 268, 22.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confer e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beowulf&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;878 þára þe gumena bearn      gearwe ne wiston  &#xA;    those things of which the childen of men      by no means knew,&#xA;879 faéhðe ond fyrena      búton Fitela mid hine,   &#xA;    feuds and feats of arms,      only Fitela with him,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T09:21:58.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T09:23:32.463" Score="6" ViewCount="2036" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between agglutination and omitting space? For example (from Wikipedia), the Turkish &lt;em&gt;Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to mean &quot;as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people&quot;. Why does it have to look like one word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it something like the English &lt;em&gt;don't you dare bring-me-my-damn-hat-as-soon-as-possible-and-make-sure-it's-at-least-marginally-drier-than-last-time,-you-retard me ever again&lt;/em&gt;? By the way, if this one's not called (a form of) agglutination then what is it called (other than verbing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15095" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T22:04:22.477" Title="What is the difference between agglutination and omitting space?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20270" CreationDate="2017-02-04T13:38:39.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If a language had a word like &lt;em&gt;whon?&lt;/em&gt; standing for &lt;em&gt;what on?&lt;/em&gt;, first, that word should, if anything, be described as a 'wh-&lt;strong&gt;post&lt;/strong&gt;position', &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; as a 'wh-preposition', and secondly, and above all, if such a word existed in any language, its &lt;em&gt;wh+Q&lt;/em&gt;-operator would have to 'question' &lt;strong&gt;just the preposition &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;not its complement&lt;/strong&gt;, and the result would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be a 'partial' &lt;em&gt;wh+Q&lt;/em&gt;-question, as in your &lt;em&gt;What did you put the toy on__?&lt;/em&gt;, but a &lt;strong&gt;polarity&lt;/strong&gt; (= a 'yes/no') question similar in meaning to what B replies to A in the following dialogue (say, between somebody who has arrived at his shop at 8 a.m., before his shop attendant, to find all the lights on and the shop attendant supposedly in charge of closing the shop and turning them all off on leaving the day before): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Do you know how you left the lights when you went home last night?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: &lt;strong&gt;On?&lt;/strong&gt; (= Did I leave them &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;? = a yes/no question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why presumably no human language has an interrogative word like &lt;em&gt;whon?&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;what-on&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;on what?&lt;/em&gt;, after 'P-stranding', a very rare feature of English) is that, as Katz &amp;amp; Postal in their (1964) book argued, a) the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; morpheme behaves as an interrogative &lt;strong&gt;determiner&lt;/strong&gt;, b) what &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; 'determines' is necessarily a &lt;strong&gt;(pro)nominal&lt;/strong&gt; element (i.e., it &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be a 'predicate', say a preposition - or a verb, for that matter), and c) what the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; operator correspondingly 'questions' is &lt;strong&gt;the identity&lt;/strong&gt; of a) a human individual, as in &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; (approximately analysable as the surface form of *wh+he), or b) a non-human individual or substance, as in &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; (approximately the surface form of *wh+it), or c) a time interval, as in &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; (the surface form of *wh+en), or d) a place, as in &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; wh+ere), or e) a way of doing things - as in &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; (roughly, &amp;lt; *wh+(s)o)), or,finally, f) a reason for doing things, as in &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; wh+y), basically. In sum: what can carry an interrogative &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; determiner is, at bottom, an NP/DP or an equivalent pro-form (which may happen to be a 'bound morpheme') denoting an 'entity' (an 'object' in Frege's sense), and, since a preposition does not denote an 'object', it &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; carry a &lt;em&gt;wh+Q&lt;/em&gt; operator. (In this, I fully agree with Eleshar's answer above). Note that the (informal) Logical Forms of &lt;em&gt;Who wrote Hamlet?, When was Shakespeare born? Where was Shakespeare born?&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are, respectively, Which x, x = a human being, Wrote (x, Hamlet), Which x, x = an interval of time, Was Born (Shakespeare, at/in x), and Which x, x = a place, Was Born (Shakespeare, in x)]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That classical analysis of interrogative &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-items has never really been challenged because several of the abstract bound morphemes on which it depends, particularly &lt;em&gt;-en, -ere, -ow,&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; occur elsewhere: in the corresponding &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;- 'deictics' &lt;em&gt;then, there, thus&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; *th + so &amp;lt; Middle English &lt;em&gt;swa&lt;/em&gt;), and in the Early Middle English instrumental &lt;em&gt;thy&lt;/em&gt; - roughly meaning 'for this' (note the contrast &lt;em&gt;wh + y&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;&gt; &lt;em&gt;th + y&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, I am sorry to have to say that neither German &lt;em&gt;wo+von, wor+auf, wo+mit&lt;/em&gt;, etc., nor English &lt;em&gt;where+to, where+abouts&lt;/em&gt;, etc. (nor their Dutch counterparts) are, in fact, examples of what the OP is interested in. To start with, because all of them would be &lt;strong&gt;post&lt;/strong&gt;-positional, &lt;strong&gt;not pre&lt;/strong&gt;positional expressions, but above all, because in &lt;strong&gt;none&lt;/strong&gt; of such cases is the preposition itself 'questioned' by the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; operator. Spanish &lt;em&gt;por qué&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;pourquoi&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;per che&lt;/em&gt;, etc. would at least be 'prepositional', but again, even in those cases, what the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; operator 'operates' on and 'questions' is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the preposition, but its '(pro)nominal' complement, whereas in the OP's hypothetical &lt;em&gt;wh+on&lt;/em&gt; example the preposition has &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; complement and the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q&lt;/em&gt;-operator would have to operate on the preposition itself (= a two-place 'predicate'), which, as far as I can tell, is impossible on conceptual grounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean that it is impossible for a predicate, in general, to be the &lt;strong&gt;apparent&lt;/strong&gt; focus of a question, of course. In a yes/no question like &lt;em&gt;Did he &lt;strong&gt;marry her&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; the VP &lt;em&gt;marry her&lt;/em&gt; certainly counts, informationally speaking, as the focus of the question, but what the Q-operator really 'binds' (informally: 'questions, focuses on') in that clause is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the VP itself, but &lt;strong&gt;the polarity variable&lt;/strong&gt; - ranging over the two t-type values {'true', 'false'} - associated with all clauses. Hence, the meaning of that question can be paraphrased as 'Is it true (or false) that he married her?', and, even more tellingly perhaps, the natural 'tag' that can be added to it is &lt;em&gt;didn't he&lt;/em&gt; (or just &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;), as in &lt;em&gt;Did he marry her &lt;strong&gt;or not/didn't he&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;, which clearly points to the clause's polarity value as the &lt;strong&gt;real&lt;/strong&gt; focus of the Q-operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in Old English, presuppositionally 'marked' yes/no questions could still be introduced by the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q&lt;/em&gt;-word &lt;em&gt;hw+aether&lt;/em&gt; (a direct ancestor of our present-day &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt;) that could be transparently analyzed as the &lt;em&gt;wh+Q-&lt;/em&gt; operator (spelt &lt;em&gt;hw-&lt;/em&gt; at the time) plus a &lt;strong&gt;determiner&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt;, that introduced a proposition with the canonical structure of a positive statement (as in E. Closs Traugott's example [&lt;em&gt;HES&lt;/em&gt;, p. 73] &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hwaether&lt;/strong&gt; ge nu secan gold on treowum?&lt;/em&gt; = 'Is it (really) true, or false (as I believe), that you now seek gold in trees?'), which made the logical structure of all OE questions, both polarity-focused and non-polarity-focused, look more uniform than it seems in Modern English (although, of course, we still have &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt;, possibly followed by &lt;em&gt;or not&lt;/em&gt;, introducing 'indirect' polarity questions with the syntactic SVX form of statements (= propositions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only case in which a predicate can be the &lt;strong&gt;real&lt;/strong&gt; focus of a Q operator, then, is in 'alternative questions' like &lt;em&gt;Did he &lt;strong&gt;marry her&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;leave her&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;, but note that those are &lt;strong&gt;neither&lt;/strong&gt; 'partial' &lt;strong&gt;nor&lt;/strong&gt; 'polarity questions': they resolve, though, into &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; coordinated (contraposed) &lt;strong&gt;polarity&lt;/strong&gt; questions, i.e., &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Did he marry her&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;did he leave her?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, in each of which a separate Q-operator 'binds' the polarity variable (not the VP!) of the respective coordinate clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T19:31:54.950" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T19:31:54.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T14:31:09.007" Score="7" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a problem to represent knowledge extracted from a paragraph and rank it to produce abstractive summaries. I have implemented dependency parsing using Stanford NLP, which gives &lt;code&gt;dot&lt;/code&gt; format graph as an output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependency-parsed output of the following two sentences are as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence 1 - John is a computer scientist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dot format - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;digraph G{&#xA;edge [dir=forward]&#xA;node [shape=plaintext]&#xA;&#xA;0 [label=&quot;0 (None)&quot;]&#xA;0 -&amp;gt; 5 [label=&quot;root&quot;]&#xA;1 [label=&quot;1 (John)&quot;]&#xA;2 [label=&quot;2 (is)&quot;]&#xA;3 [label=&quot;3 (a)&quot;]&#xA;4 [label=&quot;4 (computer)&quot;]&#xA;5 [label=&quot;5 (scientist)&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 2 [label=&quot;cop&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 4 [label=&quot;compound&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 3 [label=&quot;det&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 1 [label=&quot;nsubj&quot;]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graph -&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rcVwG.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rcVwG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence 2 - John has an elder sister named Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dot Format - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;digraph G{&#xA;edge [dir=forward]&#xA;node [shape=plaintext]&#xA;&#xA;0 [label=&quot;0 (None)&quot;]&#xA;0 -&amp;gt; 2 [label=&quot;root&quot;]&#xA;1 [label=&quot;1 (John)&quot;]&#xA;2 [label=&quot;2 (has)&quot;]&#xA;2 -&amp;gt; 5 [label=&quot;dobj&quot;]&#xA;2 -&amp;gt; 1 [label=&quot;nsubj&quot;]&#xA;3 [label=&quot;3 (an)&quot;]&#xA;4 [label=&quot;4 (elder)&quot;]&#xA;5 [label=&quot;5 (sister)&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 6 [label=&quot;acl&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 3 [label=&quot;det&quot;]&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 4 [label=&quot;amod&quot;]&#xA;6 [label=&quot;6 (named)&quot;]&#xA;6 -&amp;gt; 7 [label=&quot;dobj&quot;]&#xA;7 [label=&quot;7 (Mary)&quot;]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graph -&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2T3Z4.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2T3Z4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to merge this graph at a common node, &lt;code&gt;John&lt;/code&gt;. I am currently using graphviz to import &lt;code&gt;dot&lt;/code&gt; graph like this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from graphviz import Source&#xA;s = Source(dotGraph, filename=filepath, format=&quot;png&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there seems to be no functionality to merge graphs in &lt;code&gt;Graphviz&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;Networkx&lt;/code&gt;. So how can this be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13413" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T06:57:37.947" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T14:01:55.237" Title="Representing knowledge extracted from output of dependency parsing" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;python&gt;&lt;summarization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21017" CreationDate="2017-02-04T14:41:53.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because your english example is compound sentence. You just add different words to each other. But Turkish example is like this &lt;em&gt;Çekoslavakya-lı-laş...&lt;/em&gt;. If we inspect this, -lı and -laş are suffixes not words. -lı creates a new word which gives the meaning of Inclusiveness (like Czechoslovakia-n). -laş is a suffix that creates verb from a noun which gives the meaning of to become that noun. This is agglutination. It is common to have one word sentences in Turkish, you can express lots of things with suffixes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples similar to your English example. &lt;em&gt;Buzdolabı&lt;/em&gt; means fridge, literally &lt;em&gt;Ice+closet&lt;/em&gt;. In here 2 words are added together no suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T14:41:53.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3580" CreationDate="2017-02-04T14:46:05.963" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's basically for the sound. Without stem-changes, certain words would sound awkward would be harder to say in a sentence, and the sentence would not flow smoothly. I don't know about stress on vowels, though. Comer and Beber aren't conjugated is because they sound fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15108" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T14:46:05.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21013" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:17:53.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For locatives, the basic suffix is –de/da (&lt;em&gt;otelde, okulda&lt;/em&gt;) but after an unvoiced consonant (ç, f, h, k, p, s, ş or t)  the suffix appears as –te/ta (&lt;em&gt;otobüste&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;maçta&lt;/em&gt;). Now for the vowel harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a   is followed by a or ı&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e   is followed by e or i&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ı   is followed by ı or a &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i   is followed by i or e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;o   is followed by a or u&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ö   is followed by ü or e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u   is followed by u or a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ü   is followed by ü or e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will all become second nature once you practice it repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T20:23:04.847" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T20:23:04.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:50:54.207" Score="2" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that in Turkish adjectives always comes before the noun. So to say &quot;nice house&quot; we say &quot;güzel ev&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we also could say &quot;the house is nice&quot;, and in that case this becomes &quot;ev güzel&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is: both constructions seems to lead to the same meaning. If we say &quot;güzel ev&quot; or &quot;ev güzel&quot; we are saying that the house is nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that setting, in Turkish adjectives can come both before and after nouns? Or it is in the way I read and adjectives always comes before nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If adjectives comes just before nouns, what is the difference between these two sentences &quot;güzel ev&quot; and &quot;ev güzel&quot;? In the second one güzel is not an adjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15066" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T06:10:23.560" Title="Adjectives in Turkish always comes before the noun?" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21024" CreationDate="2017-02-04T20:54:40.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the house is nice&lt;/em&gt; is a sentence. Its equivalant is &lt;em&gt;Ev güzeldir&lt;/em&gt; which is a sentence too. For convinience people say &lt;em&gt;ev güzel&lt;/em&gt;. On the other hand &lt;em&gt;güzel ev&lt;/em&gt; is not a complete sentence. &lt;em&gt;Bu güzel evdir&lt;/em&gt; is a complete sentence. People can omit &lt;em&gt;-dır&lt;/em&gt; for convenience. I think this is why you are confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives come before nouns all the time except when it is used for profession or honorifics. &lt;em&gt;Ahmet Bey&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ayşe Öğretmen&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T20:54:40.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21024" CreationDate="2017-02-04T21:19:26.490" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish is a typical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;head-final language&lt;/a&gt; which means that nouns, which are the heads of noun phrases (NP) and verbs which are the heads of verb phrases (VP) always come at the end of those phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, the adjectives always come before the nouns they are attributes of, like in &quot;güzel ev&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this is an NP&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;(a) beautiful house&quot;, an adjective + a noun, it cannot function as a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;ev güzel&quot;, &quot;(The) house is beautiful, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this is a VP&lt;/a&gt;, here &quot;güzel&quot; is a verbal adjective &quot;is beautiful&quot;, the predicate of the VP, which in Turkish inflects for person, number and tense. This VP can function as a valid sentence, here &quot;güzel&quot; is a 3rd person singular present tense verbal adjective. The 3rd person present tense suffix &lt;em&gt;-tır/-tir/-dır/-dir/-tur/-tür/-dur/-dür&lt;/em&gt; can be omitted in such verbal adjective, still it is easily reconstructed, because here the adjective follows the noun, it cannot be an attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T21:27:40.617" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T21:27:40.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20460" CreationDate="2017-02-04T23:18:07.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are solid reasons to conclude that in DPs/NPs like &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; must be the 'head' and &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; must be an adjunct. This stands whether you adopt the (in generative linguistics) now standard analysis of NP's as DP's (i.e., projections of a Determiner) initially proposed in S. Abney's (1987) thesis, or prefer a more traditional analysis of NP's as just NP's (one that can also be easily defended, even within P&amp;amp;PT). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you adopt Abney's proposal, &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; must be a DP, its head must be a D, and the only problem is that, under Abney's assumptions, both &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; can arguably be considered 'determiners'. Thus, are there reasons to choose one of them as head of the whole DP in your example? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you opt for Abney's analysis, you must also adopt the rest of P&amp;amp;PT, and, in that case, the answer is 'yes, there are'. The most obvious one is that the P&amp;amp;PT of that period had already adopted the 'VP(/XP)-Internal Subject Hypothesis', according to which the subject of your sentence, &lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/em&gt;, must initially be attached and receive its Theta Role as the highest argument of the VP &lt;em&gt;fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt; in Spec VP. In other words, in PPT's 'underlying syntax' your sentence would start (with irrelevant structure omitted) as ...[ __ were [&lt;strong&gt;they both&lt;/strong&gt; [fighting [about corn]]]. Since &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; is inserted from the lexicon with a nominative Case feature activated, it must eventually land in a specifier in which it can license/check... that feature, and, in your sentence, the only position in which it can do so is the specifier of Tense, i.e., at the overt level of representation, the position immediately preceding the finite verb &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;. Hence, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; 'move' upwards from Spec VP into the specifier of Tense, it cannot remain in its initial position under VP (as Economy would otherwise dictate!) or it would violate Case Theory, cf. * &lt;em&gt;__ were they both fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt;; thus, your sentence will only be grammatical if at least &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; raises into Spec of Tense and gets its nominative Case feature licensed there, as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;They&lt;/strong&gt; were __both fighting for corn&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, the determiner (or pre-determiner, or adverbial-quantifier, but let's leave that aside) &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be assumed to have been inserted from the lexicon with either nominative or accusative Case, because, contrary to &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, it can represent either (cf. &lt;em&gt;I saw &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [Accus.] vs. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both&lt;/strong&gt; [Nom.] saw me&lt;/em&gt;). In such circumstances, a lexical item may be inserted with an unvalued Case-feature, and, as a consequence, &lt;strong&gt;need not&lt;/strong&gt; occupy a structural position in which any particular Case is licensed. Consequently, contrary to &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; independently move anywhere to satisfy Case Theory and can stay &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;They were __ &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt;. What's more, since &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;need not&lt;/strong&gt; check Case, granted Economy, it &lt;strong&gt;shouldn't&lt;/strong&gt; be able to move on its own anywhere, and, indeed, if it does move into the available Spec of Tense, the result (i.e., * &lt;em&gt;Both were they__ fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt;) becomes ungrammatical - on two scores, a) because the raising of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; would be gratuitous (and violate Economy, in current terms), and b) because it would also &lt;strong&gt;prevent&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;necessary&lt;/strong&gt; raising of &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; into Spec Tense in search of a legitimate nominative Case value, which will violate Case Theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, either &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; stays behind &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt; (as a so-called 'floating quantifier') and the result is &lt;em&gt;They were __ &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt;, or it accompanies &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; when it raises into Spec Tense and the result is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/strong&gt; were __ fighting about corn&lt;/em&gt;. If it does, &lt;em&gt;They both&lt;/em&gt; must have been a unitary constituent at underlying structure, or Move would not have been allowed to raise them together. If it does not, and only &lt;em&gt;They&lt;/em&gt; moves into Spec Tense, then &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; have been a unitary DP at underlying structure, because, if it had, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; (a D/DP) would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have been able to raise on its own out of a higher DP without violating the A-over-A Condition (aka 'minimality', aka 'shortest movement' and, ultimately, Economy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows that &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; must be analysable as a unitary DP &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; as two separate constituents DP + QP? depending on whether &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; raises as a unit or &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; raises on its own leaving &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; behind. That is why not all linguists accept Sportiche's Q-Float analysis, but we can ignore that detail now and concentrate on the former case, because, if &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a constituent, your problem (which of them is the head?) automatically dissolves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; is a 'deep' unitary DP and lands in Spec Tense, then, there remains the question whether the head of that DP is &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;, and why, i.e., what primarily motivated your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose the head is &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;. In that case, given the surface order, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; must be a specifier, but then its Case feature will remain unlicensed, because although Tense licenses the nominative Case feature of its DP specifier, if the head is &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;, that licensed Case feature will 'percolate' down into it, but &lt;strong&gt;not into its specifier&lt;/strong&gt;. On the contrary, if the head of &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, the nominative Case feature that Tense assigns to the whole DP will 'percolate' (cf. the Head Feature Convention of GPSG/HPSG) into its head, the Case feature of &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; will be licensed, and the sentence will be grammatical. The fact that it is, then, forces us to conclude that the head of &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt; cannot but be &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;.Q.E.D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If,instead of Abney's theory of the NP as a DP, you prefer the traditional NP analysis, a very similar reasoning leads to the same conclusion: if &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; is the head of &lt;em&gt;they both&lt;/em&gt;, the Case feature assigned/licensed on the whole NP in Spec Tense will 'percolate' down into its head, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; will satisfy Case Theory and the sentence will be grammatical. If, on the contrary, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; is not the head, but a specifier, it will violate Case Theory and the sentence will be out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to the extent you should entertain alternative analyses under which &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; is an adverbial quantifier attached to the VP but does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; form a unitary constituent with the subject &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, both &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; are heads of their respective phrases (DP, QP) and your problem disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T23:18:07.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-05T04:10:11.067" Score="3" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the same word is pronounced two distinct ways with one sound different, say &quot;tomato&quot; and &quot;to-mah-to&quot;, is the sound that differs a different phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15114" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T06:34:10.120" Title="Phoneme or allophone in two variations of same word?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21028" CreationDate="2017-02-05T06:28:57.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the same word can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be pronounced two distinct ways with sound X or sound Y, &quot;tomato&quot; and &quot;to-mah-to&quot;, that is known as free variation. If two distinct words are distinguished by a single difference in sound, then the pair of words is a minimal pair, and the two sounds are distinct phonemes. But &quot;tomato&quot; and &quot;to-mah-to&quot; are not distinct words, they are the same word, pronounced different ways. (Actually that's a terrible example because it's a song lyric, not a linguistic example, but there are analogous examples like the first syllable of &quot;economic&quot; which can, for many people, be either [ɛ] or [ɪj]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nuclei [ɛj] and [ɑ] are not in free variation in English, see for example &quot;date&quot; and &quot;dot&quot; or &quot;sate&quot;, &quot;sot&quot; and &quot;sought&quot; (the latter two because the vowel of &quot;tomahto&quot; is either the vowel of &quot;sot&quot; or that of &quot;sought&quot;, depending on how you neutralize the difference, if you do). Uncontroversially, [ɛj] and [ɑ] are distinct phonemes as established by minimals pairs. In fact &quot;tomato&quot; ~ &quot;tomahto&quot; is non-systematic and doesn't reflect a rule: they come from different linguistic systems. Likewise, &quot;pasta, Mazda&quot; are pronounced with [æ] north of the border and with [ɑ] south of the border, so these vowels are also not in free variation. There is no potato ~ potahto variation outside of humor. Such two-pronunciation cases generally reflect competing strategies for dealing with spelling when there are multiple possibilities for pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T06:34:10.120" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T06:34:10.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12417" CreationDate="2017-02-05T08:13:39.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Id also like to point out something that illustruous predecessors forgot to mention. In Latin its common (like in English and German!) to take a verbale root (puto, fero,...) and prepend prepositions which slightly alter the word: computo,  discuto, adputo, abputo (which probably evoluzione ed in amputation).. Like for the famous fero you have aufero, affero, infero,  obfero, infero, praefero,... &#xA;Italian and German have the same praefix meccanismo today, while English used detailed particles to do the same (get by, get on, get up,...). Being a single word make it easier to mutate in spectacular ways over the centuries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15116" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T08:13:39.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19914" CreationDate="2017-02-05T10:41:58.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to find out whether a verb appears in two homophonous forms, with and without an 'implicit argument', or, on the contrary, the two homophonous forms correspond to &lt;strong&gt;different lexemes&lt;/strong&gt; (= different homophonous verbs) and there are not any 'implicit arguments' involved, is to use the 'zeugma tests', and the easiest to apply in cases like the one you cite is (rightwards= R) 'R-gapping' [recall that leftwards 'gapping', L-gapping, is disallowed in SVO languages like English] subsequent to coordination - under the assumption that the R-gapped coordinate clause will only sound natural, rather than like a pun, when the omitted second verb is the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; verb that occurs as an antecedent in the first coordinate clause and thereby licenses 'R-gapping'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the verb(s) &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;, then, if you coordinate two clauses like &lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;gives&lt;/strong&gt; blood&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;His wife &lt;strong&gt;gives&lt;/strong&gt; to charity&lt;/em&gt; and try to 'R-gap' the second token of &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;, the result, &lt;em&gt;He gives blood and his wife __ to charity&lt;/em&gt;, is obviously zeugmatic (i.e., either unnatural, or interpretable only as a joke, with the structure [He [gives [blood and his wife](= DO) to charity]]), which suggests that the two tokens of &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; that appear in those two clauses belong to &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt; lexemes (= different homonymous verbs &lt;em&gt;give1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;give 2&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; that the first token of &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; is used with an 'implicit argument'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much the same happens with (dictionary)'verbs' like &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt; that can apparently be used either intransitively (= 'with an implicit argument?'), as in &lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;drinks&lt;/strong&gt; (daily/too much)&lt;/em&gt;, or transitively, as in &lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;drinks&lt;/strong&gt; only beer&lt;/em&gt;. In this case, the difference in meaning is more notorious, which points to the existence of two different lexemes (= two homophonous verbs &lt;em&gt;drink1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;drink2&lt;/em&gt;), but let's apply a couple of 'zeugma tests' anyway and see whether the results corroborate that intuition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we apply coordination followed by 'coordination reduction' (= CR), we get * &lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;drinks&lt;/strong&gt; daily/too much and __ ___ only beer&lt;/em&gt;, which is obviously zeugmatic (and plainly ungrammatical in this case). [Of course, we can save the construction by inserting a comma after the first coordinate, as in &lt;em&gt;He drinks too much &lt;strong&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; and only beer&lt;/em&gt;, but that is no longer the coordination + CR test we are talking about here, but the addition of a &lt;strong&gt;parenthetic&lt;/strong&gt; coordinate, which obeys rather different rules]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we, instead, choose two parallel clauses with different subjects (say &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/strong&gt; drinks daily/too much&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;His wife&lt;/strong&gt; drinks only beer&lt;/em&gt;) in order to be able to apply coordination followed by 'R-gapping', the result is * &lt;em&gt;He drinks daily/too much and his wife __ only beer&lt;/em&gt;, which, again, is ungrammatical. Thus, in the case of &lt;em&gt;drink&lt;/em&gt;, too, we should not say that the verb is used 'with an implicit argument' when intransitive; we must say that our lexicon contains at least &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt; homophonous lexemes, &lt;em&gt;drink1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;drink2&lt;/em&gt;, with considerable differences in meaning and syntactic behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are, perhaps, the simplest 'zeugma tests' lexicologists can use to determine whether any two tokens of a given 'form' are manifestations of the same lexeme or not, but there are other such tests, applicable to verbs as well as nouns (e.g., modification by adjuncts that may selectively apply to different 'facets' of a lexical concept represented by a unique phonetic-orthographic form). It would be too long to illustrate them all here, and it would lead us away from your question, but if you apply such tests in a systematic way, in principle you should always be able to decide whether an apparently unique 'verb' alternatively takes an argument explicitly and implicitly or, on the contrary, what happens is that the English lexicon contains two (or more) homophonous verbs with different adicity and more or less prominent differences in meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T15:06:49.793" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T15:06:49.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21036" CreationDate="2017-02-05T17:44:02.370" Score="5" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, what distinguishes the voiceless palatal fricative /ç/ from the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ/? (Likewise their voiced counterparts, /ʝ/ and /ʑ/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA doesn't have alveolo-palatal as a separate place of articulation; /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ are listed under “other symbols”. Jason Riggle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5956329/Riggle/PhonChart_v1212.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonological features chart&lt;/a&gt; likewise lists them simply under “more sounds”, with no features given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~oarnaou/distinctive.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olga Arnaudova&lt;/a&gt; has palatals as &lt;code&gt;-coronal&lt;/code&gt;, contra Riggle, and has palato-alveolars as &lt;code&gt;+coronal&lt;/code&gt;, but doesn't address the coronality of alveolo-palatals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pagines.uab.cat/danielrecasens/sites/pagines.uab.cat.danielrecasens/files/Alveolopalatals%20JIPA.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel Recasens&lt;/a&gt; argues from palatographic data that the IPA should recognize alveolo-palatal as a separate place of articulation, but doesn't present any featural analysis; and in fact in Recasens' scheme /ç/ is used for both alveolopalatal and palatal (since no language appears to distinguish these); /ɕ/, says Recasens, “is realized more often with a postalveolar articulation than with an alveolopalatal one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If palatal vs. alveolo-palatal is not a contrast in any language, does that mean there's no point in trying to find a feature that distinguishes the two? Is the choice of /ç/ or /ɕ/ to represent the phoneme in a given language simply a matter of use and practice (or of most common realization)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10838" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T23:03:16.690" Title="Is there a distinctive feature that separates alveolo-palatals from palatals?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21038" CreationDate="2017-02-05T17:45:35.260" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing research on the topic 'mother tongue influence on English pronunciation'. the speakers that I have selected belongs to a particular region of my country. their mother tongue is not English but they know the language to a fair amount because they have studied English as a second language in their schools and colleges. I am a bit confused as I don't know how many speakers' recordings should I collect as samples for analysing their speech pattern and pronunciation. up till now I have collected 15 recordings as samples. is this much enough or should I collect more? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15118" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T19:29:43.127" Title="how many samples do i need to collect for my research work in order to study mother tongue influence on English pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21033" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:36:55.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the most important question to address is in the last paragraph: &quot;If palatal vs. alveolo-palatal is not a contrast in any language, does that mean there's no point in trying to find a feature that distinguishes the two?&quot; More generally, what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the point of features? Because there is no agreement in the answer to that question, then you will get very many different answers the the issue of interest to you. The second most important question, which also doesn't have a particularly good answer, is what does the distinction &lt;em&gt;ɕ, ç&lt;/em&gt; even refer to? IPA does officially recognise those two symbols. But there is no official or defining set of recordings adopted by the IPA as setting the standards for these sounds. Thus it falls to the late Peter Ladefoged, who was arguably in the best position to speak to what an IPA symbol &quot;meant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On p. 150 of &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ɕ&lt;/em&gt; is discussed in connection with some speakers of Standard Chinese: the alveolo-palatal is referred to him as &quot;palatalized post-alveolar&quot; (which is parenthetically equated with alveolo-palatal). In other words, it is equivalent to &lt;em&gt;ʃʲ&lt;/em&gt;. Then you just have to settle on a theory of how to say (in features) &quot;palatalized post-alveolar&quot;. There was a standard set of features promulgated in Sound Pattern of English, where &lt;em&gt;ʃʲ = ɕ&lt;/em&gt; is [+coronal,-anterior,-back,+high] and [+high] is the essential feature distinguishing &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;ʃʲ&lt;/em&gt;. The palatal fricative &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, is [-coronal,-anterior,-back,+high]. Subsequently, many competing theories of features entered the marked, so really there is little hope for answering the question if you are looking for a consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In substance-free theories of features, there is in principle no way to answer the question except by reference to how the sounds are distinguished in a language. As far as we know, there is never any contrast, so little hope of answering the question. Still, there might be tiny bits of hope out there, based on phonological classes. Sanskrit has palatal consonants conventionally transcribed as &amp;#60;c j ś&gt; where the latter (श) is IPA (also Whitney's grammar) &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt;. There are no &quot;alveolo-palatal stops&quot; in IPA, so we know that &amp;#60;c, j&gt; &quot;have to&quot; be treated as true palatals, i.e. [-coronal,-back,+hi]. But phonologically speaking, &amp;#60;ś, श&gt; has the same place of articulation as &amp;#60;c,j&gt; with respect to consonant sandhi rules. Thus we can identify the features of this particular instance of &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt; based on behavior. Often, there is no such argument, for instance (dialects of) Norwegian has &amp;#60;kj&gt; which is pronounced [ç,ɕ], but for which there is no behavioral evidence telling you what is acts like. The substance-free analysis in this case is that there is no feature in Norwegian which say anything more specific (assuming a dialect with a 3-way contrast [ʃ ʂ ç] as opposed to the 1-fricative varieties).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T23:03:16.690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T23:03:16.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17628" CreationDate="2017-02-05T18:53:53.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not have the same edition of Carnie's textbook as you have, and mine has no tree featuring an 'active' V on its p. 305, but the distinction between the 'active' V and the 'normal' V(P) was introduced in late P&amp;amp;P and early Minimalist Theory as a means to represent &lt;strong&gt;in syntactic terms&lt;/strong&gt; the internal semantic structure of verbs expressing events involving actions/activities of an Agent. Of course, as there are many verbs that do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; describe events implying action or activity, the 'active' V head can be expected to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be represented in the syntactic trees corresponding to such non-agentive VPs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason underlying the postulation of an abstract 'active V' head was an attempt to make syntactic structure bi-uniquely correspond to the internal semantic components detectable in the meaning of different classes of verbs and is perhaps clearest in the case of homophonous lexemes like &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; that may alternatively describe a) a mere state of affairs (x is open), b) a change of state of x (into that state of 'openness'), c) a change of state of x caused by a non-intentional causer, and d) a change of state of x intentionally caused by an agent, as in &lt;em&gt;The door is open&lt;/em&gt; [state], &lt;em&gt;The door opened&lt;/em&gt; [change of state], &lt;em&gt;The wind opened the door&lt;/em&gt; [unintentionally caused change of state], and &lt;em&gt;I opened the door&lt;/em&gt; [change of state intentionally caused by the action of an agent], respectively. An active sentence like &lt;em&gt;I opened the door&lt;/em&gt;, in other words, describes an internally complex event in which the Agent (here = I) does something (= an action, the Causer) that causes the Theme (here = the door) to become (= a change of state) open (a resulting state of the door). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to transparently represent those covert 'semantic' components of &lt;em&gt;I opened the door&lt;/em&gt; in X-bar syntactic terms in late P&amp;amp;PT/Minimalist Theory was to assign to its VP an X-bar structure containing no less than &lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt; hierarchically ordered VP shells, each with its head, complement and specifier, i.e., .... [__ 'V-DO' [__ 'V-CAUSE' [__ 'V-BECOME' [__ V-OPEN the door]]]], where [__ V-OPEN the door] is the complement of V-BECOME, [ __ V-BECOME [__ V-OPEN the door]] is the complement of V-CAUSE, and [__ V-CAUSE [__ V-BECOME__V-OPEN the door]]] is the complement of V-DO (= your 'active V'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted that underlying 'shell' structure in the VP, the 'active' meaning of 'open' in that sentence is accounted for by making the lexical head &lt;em&gt;OPEN&lt;/em&gt; raise 'bottom up' from V head to V head (by 'head-movement') acquiring the successive meaning components (BECOME, CAUSE, DO) above it. On the other hand, the initially internal argument of OPEN (= 'the door') must successively raise into the Specs of 'V-OPEN' and  '__ V-BECOME+OPEN', the V-CAUSE+BECOME+OPEN head must acquire a specifier of its own with the thematic role of Causer, and, finally, the V-DO+CAUSE+BECOME+OPEN head (= your 'active V') must assign the AGENT role to its own specifier (here = I). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-agentive sentence like &lt;em&gt;The door opened&lt;/em&gt;, on the contrary, describes just a change of state (= 'The door became open') with no action or causation implied on the part of any Agent or Causer. Consequently, the 'upper' Action and Causation layers of event-structure projected in the case of the active sentence &lt;em&gt;I opened the door&lt;/em&gt; will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be projected for the VP of &lt;em&gt;The door opened&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the event had been 'causative', but not 'agentive', as in &lt;em&gt;The wind opened the door&lt;/em&gt;, the VP structure of that sentence would contain the CAUSE, BECOME and STATE 'shells', but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the ACTION shell at the top, nor an Agent argument, i.e., three, instead of four (or two) VP 'shells'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the VP of a sentence like &lt;em&gt;The door is open&lt;/em&gt;, which describes a mere state of affairs with no change of state, causation thereof, or intentional action on the part of an Agent implied, consists of only the lower 'stative' VP shell [__ V: open [the door]] and no head-movement (V to V) occurs. The only movement involved in that case is the raising of the internal argument of V-OPEN into Spec OPEN and then, successively, into higher specifiers until it lands in Spec Tense and checks its nominative Case feature there.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, 'active V' must be expected to be present in, or absent from, VP structures depending on the 'event structure' of the head verb projected in each case. In VP's that describe states, processes (e.g., &lt;em&gt;rain&lt;/em&gt;), changes of state, or unintentionally caused changes of state, 'active V' will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be projected; on the contrary, in VP structures describing actions or activities of an Agent, it will unless the sentence is 'passive' (= a 'state', usually expressed by the stative auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;). In that case, the passive VP will, of course, contain no 'action' tier and its implied Agent argument will be either entirely suppressed or demoted to the status of a by+NP adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T18:53:53.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21034" CreationDate="2017-02-05T19:04:53.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good rule of thumb is that you need 5 examples to make a particular point. So if you want to say something about about [i] pronounced by speaker AM, and how it is different from [e], then you need 5 examples of each vowel in a comparable context, thus 10 from AM. Let's say you are looking at F1 in vowels (a standard measure of phonetic quality). If you have one example of [i] with an F1 of 380, you can't say anything about &quot;similar&quot; and &quot;different&quot;. Suppose you have two examples of [i], and in the second, you have F1 of 401. Does that mean these are &quot;different vowels&quot;? No, it means that F1 can vary. So you have to have enough examples of [i] that you can say &quot;[i] is about here&quot; and enough examples of [e] that you can say that &quot;[e] is there: and those are different numbers&quot;. With 5 each, you might be able to say that those numbers are &quot;statistically different&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In dealing with multiple speakers, the sky's sort of the limit. Suppose that you have data from speakers originally from Fiji, Capetown and Uttara Pradesh, and you wonder if that influences pronunciation – then you would want 5 speakers from each dialect. Or maybe you think it's men versus women – 5 men, 5 women. Or maybe it's a complex interaction between location and gender – 30 speakers total. More could be better, and fewer could be acceptable, but for example if you have 1 male Fijian and 1 UP female speaker, you can't validly say anything beyond &quot;some speakers do one thing, others do something else&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a mindless answer that you can get online: 1067, regardless of the complexity of the question. What I'm telling you is about empirical reliability in linguistic research, not a theory of statistics (there is a stats SE for such questions, if you care). If you're generally fluent in statistics, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Cross Validated&lt;/a&gt; is for you. But otherwise, you may have communication problems: these can be minimized if you can state a specific hypothesis that you want to test (e.g. &quot;Male speakers of Hindi are closer to both male and female RP speakers in production of [i], than female speakers of Hindi are&quot;. Since you ask what F1 is, it's not at all clear what your question about Hindi speakers would be. (I mean that kindly: if you don't know what F1 is, then before asking &quot;how much data do I need&quot;, you need to clarify what question you are asking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:00.997" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T19:29:43.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20899" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:37:36.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One research group at our university is particularly interested in the statistical properties of language. One professor, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~mramscar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Ramscar&lt;/a&gt;, is teaching us some classes this semester on related topics. And basically the idea is that this kind of logarithmic/exponential distribution is considered optimal in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information theory&lt;/a&gt; point of view, since it ensures that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entropy&lt;/a&gt; of the whole probability distribution would be the lowest, ensuring the most effective communication in general. Some of these ideas can also be found at his blog, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://ramscar.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/sticks-and-stones-3-how-names-hurt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; about the distribution of names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: Actually he also made the argument that the &quot;Zipfian power law&quot; view is not entirely accurate while an &quot;logarithmic/exponential&quot; distribution might be a better description. He said that the shape of the curve under the Zipfian power law would be largely impacted by the sample size, while the shape of the curve under simple logarithmic/exponential distribution wouldn't, because it would only have one parameter, while the Zipfian power law distribution also gets a scaling factor besides the simple exponential factor. I'm not sure I completely got this point to be honest, but the point about entropy should still stand regardless, since I think Zipfian distribution is basically logarithmic/exponential as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T22:35:59.230" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T22:35:59.230" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21033" CreationDate="2017-02-05T22:09:08.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand the &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; theory, the palato-alveolars (a.k.a. alveo-palatals) are [+coronal], because the blade of the tongue (just behind the tip) participates in the articulation.  The palatals are [-coronal], because the blade is not involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem odd in a book about English phonology, but there is some detail in &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; about the description of various slavic palatalizations using phonetic features.  But of course Halle was a slavicist.  Some slavic dialect is said to have palato-alveolar non-affricate stops, but I don't recall which.  That might be a place to look for a phonemic distinction between palato-alveolar (+coronal) and palatal (-coronal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question of whether a feature is ever necessary to make a phonemic distinction has any importance in the &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; theory.  I once looked at all the references to &quot;distinctive feature&quot; in the index of &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; and failed to find any mention in the text of whether a feature was actually distinctive.  &quot;Distinctive features&quot; need not be distinctive (though this is my interpretation; &lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt; does not say this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, in English the [j] glide in syllable onset is [+coronal] but in syllable offset is [-coronal].  It is even possible to make a case for this difference being distinctive in some American English dialects.  C.-J. Bailey claimed that in the South, &quot;Maya&quot; the name of the Indians has syllable onset [j], while in &quot;Maya Angelou&quot; the poet's name, the [j] is in syllable offset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T22:09:08.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-05T23:22:53.143" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several European languages known to me have a verbal phrase idiom literally translatable as &quot;hold from&quot;, expressing various kinds of positive attitude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch &lt;em&gt;houden van&lt;/em&gt; &quot;love&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish &lt;em&gt;pitää -stA&lt;/em&gt; &quot;like&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew &lt;em&gt;hikhzik mi-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;respect, hold in high regard&quot;&#xA;(Hebrew isn't technically a European language, but it can be argued to be one in a broad sense)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems most likely that the remesblance is due to calquing. Three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is so, what is the origin of the calque?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other languages have comparable idioms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the semantic link between &quot;hold from&quot; and &quot;like&quot; etc.?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T05:01:30.273" Title="Origin of “hold from” as an idiom meaning “love, like, respect” in European languages" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21042" CreationDate="2017-02-05T23:50:06.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Lemontree has mentioned &quot;etwas von jemandem halten&quot; is a very common phrase in German. &quot;Was halten Sie davon?&quot; = &quot;What do you think of it?&quot;. &quot;Ich halte nichts davon&quot; = &quot;I have a low opinion of it&quot;. I think it is a quintessentially German idiom. Presumably is was calqued from German to Dutch, Finnish and Yiddish &gt; Modern Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T00:00:12.863" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T00:00:12.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21052" CreationDate="2017-02-05T23:52:16.553" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words come from a language known as Guene or Lenga di Luandu (Language of Luando) spoken by blacks on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. They were recorded in the early 20th century and are not Papiamentu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tsjacá = tiger&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  saú = goat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  bovi = lion  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an idea what African language(s) could possibly be at the origin of these words? Could this be Vili language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15123" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T01:51:15.907" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T03:15:15.310" Title="Help identifying words in unknown language from the Caribbean" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21044" CreationDate="2017-02-06T02:44:40.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ugent.be/en/research/research-ugent/trackrecord/fp7-erc/bostoen.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koen Bostoen&lt;/a&gt; would know the answer. The known resources on Vili are listed &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/vili1238&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Kongo &quot;goat&quot; would be along the lines of &lt;em&gt;nkombo&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;lion&quot; is &lt;em&gt;nkosi&lt;/em&gt;, but there are many forms of Kongo: these are from Manyanga. As for &quot;tiger&quot; (also lion) there are no tigers in Africa or Curaçao (ignoring modern zoos), and no lions in Curaçao, so the source and current gloss are probably pretty approximate. Nothing within Bantu springs to mind, assuming a Kongo language source. Maybe &lt;em&gt;tsjaca&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;cat&quot; (Bantu *&lt;em&gt;paka&lt;/em&gt;), though the Manyanga word for &quot;cat&quot; is &lt;em&gt;mbuuma&lt;/em&gt;. There is a word &lt;em&gt;bubi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;badness&quot; which could be the source of &lt;em&gt;bovi&lt;/em&gt;, though that's a stretch. Based on word length and known history, a Bantu source of the most likely source, but even then I would have expected more-recognizable words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most reasonable connection I can come up with is between &lt;em&gt;sau&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;goat&lt;/em&gt;, via Germanic. English &quot;sow&quot;, Dutch &quot;zeug&quot; and Norwegian &quot;sau&quot; have a common root, and interestingly Norwegian &lt;em&gt;sau&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;sheep&quot;. I doubt there was any Norwegian influence on the language, but Dutch is more plausible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a reference (as in, where in the world did you get the data) or additional examples of the language, that would be useful information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the data in the article linked by Yellow Sky, I would say it's not any form of Kongo. You might ask &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucd.ie/research/people/languagescultureslinguistics/professorbettinamigge/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: I don't find any matches on Gen, but that's not my area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T03:15:15.310" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T03:15:15.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21048" CreationDate="2017-02-06T11:00:37.717" Score="1" ViewCount="918" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would you call a &quot;small&quot; or &quot;medium&quot; language in regards to the number of speakers? I suppose a &quot;big&quot; language would be Mandarin, English, Spanish, Arabic. Small would be Greenlandic or Faroese. Would there be any convention on what a medium-sized language is? For instance, would you refer to Norwegian as a &quot;small&quot; language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T12:21:34.177" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T13:17:07.200" Title="What is a small language w.r.t. the number of speakers?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21047" CreationDate="2017-02-06T11:53:17.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/cloud/nor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compare&lt;/a&gt; it with all the languages spoken worldwide, Norwegian is a fairly large language:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9cF5Zl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9cF5Zl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/kal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greenlandic&lt;/a&gt; (~57,000 speakers) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/fao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Faroese&lt;/a&gt; (~ 69,000 speakers) would be somewhere in the middle, but tending towards large:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X419Sm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X419Sm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vhoG4m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vhoG4m.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small language would be something with &amp;lt;= 1000 speakers maybe, i.e. in the graph something below 10^3 on the y-axis, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/cloud/pop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pwapwâ&lt;/a&gt;, counting no more than 40 speakers according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/pop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcKcM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcKcM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Compared to that, Norwegian, being a national language with 4,741,780 speakers according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/nor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;, is huge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;medium-size&quot; language might be something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/cloud/qxa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chiquián Quechua&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/qxa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;~10,000 speakers&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6pzBy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6pzBy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally depends on context, though. Of course, compared to English, Mandarin or Spanish, something like Norwegian might seem small. On the other hand, when talking about severely endangered languages which are only spoken by a handful of people, i.e. less than 100 or so, a language with several 1000 speakers would be not be considered very small.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think you might draw the line at about the middle on the vertical scale in the graphs above; the languages in the rather dense area (around 10^4 speakers) would be considered medium-size compared world-wide, the ones above with several 10,000 speakers or more rather large, and the languages further below with less than ~1000 speakers would be considered small.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also shows when looking at the distribution in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;table&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWeH7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWeH7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As you can see, only 5% of langauges have a million speakers, only 1.3% have at least 10 million, and a mere 0.1% of languages worldwide has more than 100 million speakers. This is statistically nothing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The slightly-below-median, with 44.4% cumulative, is at 10,000 &amp;lt;= n &amp;lt; 100,000. The other slightly-more-than-half counts less then 10,000 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Greenlandic or Faroese seems tiny compred to something like English or Mandarin with several hundred Million speakers, but these 0.1% (!) can not be taken as a reference of measurement. The vast majority of the world's ~7000 languages counts significantly less speakers, as the above table shows, and relative values like &quot;small&quot; and &quot;large&quot; should be normalized by the total distribution of speakers across languages rather than exceptionally extreme values like Spanish or Standard Arabic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As a rule of thumb, if even a non-linguist knows about a language's existence (like Norwegian, Greenlandic or Faroese), it's probably relatively large ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T13:17:07.200" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T13:17:07.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T16:47:49.883" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't the compound 'machine learning' problematic, inasmuch as the non-head of the compound is the external argument of learning. This would make it an auspicious compound (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/compounds.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/compounds.pdf&lt;/a&gt;). How are we to understand the compound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastEditorUserId="8113" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T12:57:31.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T12:57:31.173" Title="Morphology: Machine-Learning" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19429" CreationDate="2017-02-06T23:45:32.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea is not whether PIE had preformants and interformants, but that the preformants are in fact suffixes and &quot;extensions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15134" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T23:45:32.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21044" CreationDate="2017-02-07T01:11:35.217" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help! Unfortunately Koen told me that he doesn't have any people in his team with expertise in Vili. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some more words:&#xA;genáu: in a hurry &#xA;saíta nora: shut up&#xA;avú babè: you are lying&#xA;Toro moro = I'm doing fine&#xA;Kanga = empty, poor &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some words from a song: Djowili ku Patangan, zan wego, zan wego, huemi. Ami Za zeila, ami Ze zeila, Ze Ze, helo, ami Ze zeila kanumbolo, mi Ze Ze helo, tmai boso mele; ami Ze zeila, ami Ze zeila. Le mai mundu eh leba no, ma limania go eh saino&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15123" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T01:11:35.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21057" CreationDate="2017-02-07T08:21:10.020" Score="1" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to specify what the name of the vowel &quot;I&quot; is in my dialect and it seems that the IPA table doesn't have it on it. Reading up on the definitions I believe that it should be called &quot;near-close front unrounded vowel&quot;, since it is much like the &quot;close front unrounded vowel, but the tongue and mouth are slightly more relaxed. I would say it is directly between the &quot;near-close front unrounded vowel&quot; and the &quot;close-mid front unrounded vowel&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It can be heard in this video: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/FAoR0xNGhxo?t=89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bairisch für Einsteiger&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Des &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;s...&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So am I right to call it &quot;near-close front unrounded vowel&quot; or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13363" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T16:08:03.173" Title="near-close front unrounded vowel" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21049" CreationDate="2017-02-07T12:52:51.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's one of many kinds of compounds, and is not even exocentric (its head is &quot;learning&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, it is exactly parallel to &quot;machine stitching&quot; (recorded in COHA in 1917) and &quot;book learning&quot; (in COHA from 1835). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T12:52:51.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21058" CreationDate="2017-02-07T14:22:43.560" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the working of an old computer speech synthesizer (SAM for the commodore64) which uses a series of rules to break English text into a string of phonemes.  The rules make some frequent tests for membership of the following letter sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//  0x04        [ D J L N ]&#xA;//  0x08        [ B D G J L M N R V W Z ]&#xA;//  0x10        [ C G J S X Z R S T Z ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone able to spot what traits the following sets may have and why they are significant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be correct in thinking the 0x10 set are fricatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15140" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T17:48:11.657" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T17:48:11.657" Title="Help understanding letter sets" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21054" CreationDate="2017-02-07T16:08:03.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA name for the letter [ɪ], number 319, is &quot;near-close near-front unrounded vowel&quot; (p. 168 of the handbook). Regular capital I is not a letter of the IPA, which is why you can't find it.  It's really not possible to take a single instance and give it an absolute characterization. However, the only plausible answers are [ɪ] and [i], at least as single letters. If there is no contrast between [ɪ] and [i], then the standard approach is to select the letter that the vowel most closely resembles, using standard IPA reference values (i.e. the values that IPA experts are trained on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T16:08:03.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21056" CreationDate="2017-02-07T17:43:39.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't get the full pattern, but there are some common properties:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; [d], &lt;code&gt;L&lt;/code&gt; [l], &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; [n] are all voiced &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;consonants; &lt;code&gt;J&lt;/code&gt;    (usually pronounced [dʒ]) is     &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postalveolar_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;postalveolar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ B D G J L M N R V W Z ]&lt;/code&gt; are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voiced&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;code&gt;[ J L M N R V W Z ]&lt;/code&gt; are also&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonorant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonorants&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;[ B D G ]&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;are not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;(when pronounced [s]), &lt;code&gt;G&lt;/code&gt; (when pronounced [dʒ]), &lt;code&gt;J&lt;/code&gt; ([dʒ]) &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; ([s] or [ʃ] in &quot;sh&quot;), &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; ([ks]) &lt;code&gt;Z&lt;/code&gt; ([z]) are&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibilant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sibilants&lt;/a&gt;; however &lt;code&gt;G&lt;/code&gt; when&#xA;pronounced [g], &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; when pronounced [k] and &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; ([ɹ], or [ɻ],),&#xA;&lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt; ([t]) don't quite fit in there and I don't know why &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Z&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;occur twice in the row.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are not all frictavices since [t] is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plosive&lt;/a&gt;, [dʒ] is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;affricacte&lt;/a&gt;, [ks] is a velar plosive + alveolar fricative, and [ɹ], [ɻ] are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approximants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T17:43:39.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T19:42:36.043" Score="4" ViewCount="10807" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Mississippi&quot; is often used in the United States as a filler in order to count seconds. Why is that particular word used and not another? What is its origin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15099" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T16:17:16.450" Title="What is the origin of counting &quot;Mississippis&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17725" CreationDate="2017-02-07T19:50:19.793" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IAST (modified) is readable, transliteratable  and suitable for print media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IPA Vs IAST(modified)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TS:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowledge is the wealth of nations, and language is the main social technology by which knowledge is communicated. An efficient orthography is therefore of great importance. English, as the principal international language of the early twenty‐first century, has much to offer the world, but its spelling is archaic and dysfunctional. Technically, the reform of English spelling would not be difficult, but there are very major political obstacles in the way. The benefits of spelling reform would greatly exceed the costs, and a ‘Big bang’ approach to reform is required. The present article outlines a technical solution and the way in which reform could be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Respell Spell-able:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naalaj iz dha welth av neishanz, aend laengwij iz dha mein soshal teknaalaji baai wich naalij iz kamyunakeitid. An ifishant awrthaagrafi iz dherfawr av greit impawrtans. Inglish, aez dha prinsapal intarnaeshanal laengwaj av dhi arli twenti‐farst senchari, haez mach tu awfar dha warld, bat its speling iz aarkeiik aend disfankshanal. Teknikali, dha rifawrm av Inglish speling wud naat bi difakalt, bat dher aar veri meijar palitakal aabstakalz in dha wei. Dha benafits av speling rifawrm wud greitli iksid dha kawsts, aend a 'Big Baeng' aproch tu rifawrm iz rikwaaird. Dha prezant aartikal aautlaainz a teknikal salushan aend dha wei in wich rifawrm kud bi implamentad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Respell Diacritic:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nälàj iz dhà welth àv neishànz, ănd lăngwij iz dhà mein soshàl teknälàji bäi wich nälij iz kàmyunàkeitid. àn ifishànt ŏrthägràfi iz dherfŏr àv greit impŏrtàns. Inglish, ăz dhà prinsàpàl intàrnăshànàl lăngwàj àv dhi àrli twenti‐fàrst senchàri, hăz màch tu ŏfàr dhà wàrld, bàt its speling iz ärkeïk ănd disfànxànàl. Teknikàli, dhà rifŏrm àv Inglish speling wud nät bi difàkàlt, bàt dher är veri meijàr pàlitàkàl äbstàkàlz in dhà wei. Dhà benàfits àv speling rifŏrm wud greitli ixid dhà kŏsts, ănd à 'Big Băng' àproch tu rifŏrm iz riqäird. dhà prezànt ärtikàl äutläinz à teknikàl sàlushàn ănd dhà wei in wich rifŏrm kud bi implàmentàd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Transliteration:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;નાલજ્ ઇઝ્ ધ વેલ્થ્ અવ્ નેઇશન્ઝ્, ઍન્ડ્ લૅન્ગ્વિજ્ ઇઝ્ ધ મેઇન્ સોશલ્ ટેક્નાલજિ બાઇ વિચ્ નાલિજ્ ઇઝ્ કમ્યુનકેઇટિડ્. અન્ ઇફિશન્ટ્ ઑર્થાગ્રફિ ઇઝ્ ધેર્ફૉર્ અવ્ ગ્રેઇટ્ ઇમ્પૉર્ટન્સ્. ઇન્ગ્લિશ્, ઍઝ્ ધ પ્રિન્સપલ્ ઇન્ટર્નૅશનલ્ લૅન્ગ્વજ્ અવ્ ધિ અર્લિ ટ્વેન્ટિ‐ફર્સ્ટ્ સેન્ચરિ, હૅઝ્ મચ્ ટુ ઑફર્ ધ વર્લ્ડ્, બટ્ ઇટ્સ્ સ્પેલિન્ગ્ ઇઝ્ આર્કેઈક્ ઍન્ડ્ ડિસ્ફન્ક્ષનલ્. ટેક્નિકલિ, ધ રિફૉર્મ્ અવ્ ઇન્ગ્લિશ્ સ્પેલિન્ગ્ વુડ્ નાટ્ બિ ડિફકલ્ટ્, બટ્ ધેર્ આર્ વેરિ મેઇજર્ પલિટકલ્ આબ્સ્ટકલ્ઝ્ ઇન્ ધ વેઇ. ધ બેનફિટ્સ્ અવ્ સ્પેલિન્ગ્ રિફૉર્મ્ વુડ્ ગ્રેઇટ્લિ ઇક્સિડ્ ધ કૉસ્ટ્સ્, ઍન્ડ્ અ બિગ્ બૅન્ગ્ અપ્રોચ્ ટુ રિફૉર્મ્ ઇઝ્ રિક્વાઇર્ડ્. ધ પ્રેઝન્ટ્ આર્ટિકલ્ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IPA:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ˈnɑləʤ ɪz ðə wɛlθ ʌv ˈneɪʃənz, ænd ˈlæŋgwɪʤ ɪz ðə meɪn ˈsoʊʃəl tɛkˈnɑləʤi baɪ wɪʧ ˈnɑlɪʤ ɪz kəmˈjunəˌkeɪtɪd. ən ɪˈfɪʃəntɔrˈθɑgrəfi ɪz ˈðɛrˌfɔr ʌv greɪt ɪmˈpɔrtəns. ˈɪŋglɪʃ, æz ðə ˈprɪnsəpəl ˌɪntərˈnæʃənəl ˈlæŋgwəʤ ʌv ði ˈɜrli ˈtwɛnti‐fɜrstˈsɛnʧəri, hæz mʌʧ tu ˈɔfər ðə wɜrld, bʌt ɪts ˈspɛlɪŋ ɪz ɑrˈkeɪɪk ænd dɪˈsfʌŋkʃənəl. ˈtɛknɪkəli, ðə riˈfɔrm ʌv ˈɪŋglɪʃ ˈspɛlɪŋ wʊdnɑt bi ˈdɪfəkəlt, bʌt ðɛr ɑr ˈvɛri ˈmeɪʤər pəˈlɪtəkəl ˈɑbstəkəlz ɪn ðə weɪ. ðə ˈbɛnəfɪts ʌv ˈspɛlɪŋ riˈfɔrm wʊd ˈgreɪtli ɪkˈsid ðəkɔsts, ænd ə bɪg bæŋ əˈproʊʧ tu riˈfɔrm ɪz riˈkwaɪrd. ðə ˈprɛzənt ˈɑrtɪkəl ˈaʊtˌlaɪnz ə ˈtɛknɪkəl səˈluʃən ænd ðə weɪ ɪn wɪʧriˈfɔrm kʊd bi ˈɪmpləˌmɛntəd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vowel scheme:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ɘ,ʌ,ɑ̈,ɪ,ɪ̈,ʊ,ʊ̈,æ,æʊ,ɑ̈ʊ,ɛ,ɑ̈ɪ,ɔ,o,ɝ,ɚ,ɒ/ɑ̈/ɔ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;à,á,ä,i,ï, u,ü,ă,aeu,äu,e,äi,ŏ,o,àr,àr,ɒ/ä or ŏ.......diacritic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.aa,ii,u,uu,ae,aeu,aau,e,aai,aw,o,ar,ar,ɒ/aa or aw......spell able&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15143" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T19:50:19.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14606" CreationDate="2017-02-07T20:57:35.320" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English words have been respelled in pronunciation key.One needs to standardize all dialects in to broadcast dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fleece meet meat feet thief suite team cream eat key speak idea urea diarrhea arboreal near&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA phonetic transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;flis mit mit fit θif swit tim krim it ki spik aɪˈdiə jəˈriə ˌdaɪəˈriə &#xA;ɑrˈbɔriəl nɪr ..................American&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fliːs miːt miːt fiːt θiːf swiːt tiːm kriːm iːt kiː spiːk aɪˈdɪə ˈjʊərɪə ˌdaɪəˈrɪə ɑːˈbɔːrɪəl nɪə ....British&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15143" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T20:57:35.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21104" CreationDate="2017-02-07T22:21:38.933" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a naive question : I can't decide what's the value of &quot;ġe&quot; in Old English :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;either it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digraph&lt;/a&gt; to be read [j]&lt;/strong&gt;, hence &quot;ġeong&quot; = [joŋɡ] (or [juŋɡ] ? as stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/geong#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Such digraphs exist in French (e.g. the first name &quot;Georges&quot;=[ʒɔʁʒ], &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; [geɔʁge]). It seems to me that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/beo.php?section=00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this record&lt;/a&gt; reads the line #13 &quot;ġeong in ġeardum...&quot; more or less this way : [joŋɡ in jardum], &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; [jeo̯ŋɡ in jæa̯rdum] as it would have to be said with the diphthongs &quot;eo&quot; and &quot;ea&quot;. But if &quot;ġe&quot; stands for [j], what about a word like ġēotan (&quot;to pour&quot;) ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;either it's simply &quot;ġ&quot; followed by the vowel [e]&lt;/strong&gt;, leading e.g. to read a diphthong in the word &quot;ġeong&quot; = [jeo̯ŋɡ]. This interpretation would fit with the following extract from Don Ringe's &lt;em&gt;The development of Old English&lt;/em&gt;, p.29 : &lt;code&gt;&quot;PGmc *jungaz 'young&quot; (Goth. juggs) &amp;gt; ON ungr, OE iung ~ ġeong&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, showing that both forms (without/with diphthongaison) existed. Did such a diphthongaison occur in the course of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the phonological history of English&lt;/a&gt; ? I can't find any evidence of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only book I have (&lt;em&gt;A guide to Old English&lt;/em&gt;, 6th edition, pp 14-15) only recalls that the diphthongs &quot;eo&quot; and &quot;ēo&quot; exist in Old English and that &quot;[b]efore e and i, [...] g is usually pronounced like [...] y in MnE 'yet'&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T22:37:06.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:50:24.173" Title="Is Old English ġe- a digraph representing [j]?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:59:33.310" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a metric exist that quantifies morphological richness in languages? Either a numerical score, or at least a ranking of languages would suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T10:36:36.550" Title="Metric For Morphological Richness Across Languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21064" CreationDate="2017-02-08T01:56:21.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but as contrasted with the related notion of morphological complexity, it seems at least a bit more possible to define and count it. When people say a language has a &quot;rich&quot; morphological system, that usually means that there are very many non-lexical morphemes. It might also mean that there is the possibility of combining affixes, but I don't think that is inherent in the notion of richness. If a language has 200 affixes (a reasonably rich morphology), it would be unusual if e.g. there were 200 cases or mood suffixes, and no other morphemes. Simple counting would be a good measure of &quot;richness&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complexity is much harder to define, since it necessarily involves rules of combination. For example, instead of just saying &quot;the past tense marker is -ile&quot;, you might have to say &quot;the past tense marker is -ita after the causative -ʃ and -ile otherwise&quot;, which makes the system more complex. The problem is that there is no scientific utility to having a metric of &quot;richness&quot;, that is, unlike water which boils when it reaches a specific temperature, languages don't have properties that depend on having a particular quantity of richness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T01:56:21.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-08T04:19:59.403" Score="4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Malayalam script there are two ways to kill implicit vowels. The most widely applicable is the chandrakkala diacritic, similar to the virama that appears in other Brahmic scripts. There are also chillaksharam, modified forms of a small subset of consonants. Interestingly enough, the current sounds of chillaksharam don't match the consonants they appear to represent, hinting that a phonetic shift occurred since their introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do these two ways of killing implicit vowels coexist? Do the chillaksharam have a Dravidian origin, or do they come from distinct attempts to adapt Dravidian scripts to accommodate Sanskrit vocabulary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15147" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T16:53:41.583" Title="Why does the Malayalam script have seemingly redundant ways to kill implicit vowels?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21087" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:11:10.700" Score="8" ViewCount="1072" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are different varieties of German (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; Bavarian and Low German) closer to each other than different Slav languages (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; Russian and Polish)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lexical distance map from &lt;a href=&quot;https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwyPg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HwyPg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The lexical distance map&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;seems relevant here, but doesn't cover different varieties of German. I'm also not sure this map is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T04:34:20.713" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:17:11.073" Title="Are different varieties of German closer to each other than different Slav languages?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21068" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:41:13.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You later edited in your question that you're not interested in whether speakers of the varieties can understand each other, but unfortunately that's exactly the definition that is predominantly used to draw the line between a language and a dialect, so I'll stick to my anwer as I had it before and leave it to other answerers to provide different approaches, like statistical analysis of lexical similarity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the German varieties are mostly considered dialects while the Slavic languages are languages already implies that the former are significantly closer to each other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if two Germans from different regions speak speak a very strong dialect (which is nowadays a marginal, mostly rural phenomenon), two Germans from different dialects would still understand each other to large extent, even more so when they try to be cooperative and both simply speak their &quot;Dachsprache&quot; which makes communication entirely unproblematic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The differences lie mostly in phonetics and phonology; lexicon is sporadically different (esp. food names), but almost entirely shared; grammar is essentially the same across dialects except for some individual deviations on special constructions, which are, however, still very compatible with what is perceived as Standard German.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can of course always make things unnecessary complicated by putting emphasis on the features that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; shared with the other dialects, but that's not what mutual intelligibility (the &lt;em&gt;ability&lt;/em&gt; to communicate with each other) is about. I would argue that even a Bavarian and a speaker of Low German can understand each other if they want, although of course this might not be as simple as, say, between a Swabian and a Badensian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so easy for, e.g., Russian and Polish, which have lexical and grammatical similarities but are not so easily mutually intelligible even if two speakers try to make themselves easily understandable to the other. Reading is probably easier because the differences in phonetics and phonology don't manifest themselves as heavily as in speech, but you would still consider them different languages because there are too major divergences in terms of grammar and lexicon, although there is some overlap.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find michau's comment &quot;If it's easier to speak an unrelated third language (e.g. English), it means that the languages aren't mutually intelligible&quot; quite a good approximation here - I've frequently heard Russians and Bulgarians, Polishs, ... talk English to each other because this was the easiest way to communicate for them, but it would be extremely unlikely that two speakers of German find their respective dialects so unintellegible they'd rather talk in English (even if they spoke English well) than in their native language to each other.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while there is a lot of political discussion to that issue that I really don't want to go into here, considering the above I would claim that German (not Germanic!) varieties are to be considered closer to each other than are Slavic varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T14:23:21.713" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T14:23:21.713" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21068" CreationDate="2017-02-08T15:46:19.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking just about my own personal experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only understand a little Russian because of the similarities I can find from two other Slavic languages I speak: Ukrainian and Polish. As someone who has never been exposed to Russian before, I feel that I would not be able to understand Russian with just one of the other Slavic languages. Therefore, I don't feel that I can agree with the notion of Russian/Polish understanding. In fact, I feel that this might even be a cultural misconception, as I've had quite a few experiences where Russian speakers insist on speaking Russian at me, convinced that I will 'magically' understand them. I've also noticed that non-Slavic speakers believe this as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;however, in the Czech Republic, speaking Polish will get me nowhere, but speaking Ukrainian will get me by quite well indeed. Again, I'd like to stress that is just personal experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T15:46:19.450" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6017" CreationDate="2017-02-08T15:49:55.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if openCyc has what you are looking for - but the documentations is diabolical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T15:49:55.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21074" CreationDate="2017-02-08T16:41:47.443" Score="-5" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to get the list of words in text format in all possible languages and make my deck for ankidriod by exporting alphabetically from Excel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that I will try to make a phonetic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T16:50:12.060" Title="Where to get lists of words in all languages in text format?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-02-08T23:38:06.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21073" CreationDate="2017-02-08T16:50:12.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know what all currently-existing languages are, and we know even less about all possible languages (I assume you mean human languages). We also do not have a list of all words in even one language, though for English you could get a pretty high percentage. Some languages have very rich and complex morphologies so a verb root could have zillions of inflected forms – some people only care about the lexical root, and not the full sayable word, hence you'd need to specify what you mean by &quot;word&quot;. So I am afraid that you are out of luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T16:50:12.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21090" CreationDate="2017-02-09T13:27:23.167" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if any hieroglyph-like orthographies use semantic radicals in a way comparable to how Mandarin Chinese does, or if the radical is unique to Chinese and other similar languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T15:57:10.050" Title="Can Egyptian hieroglyphs (or other hieroglyphs) be construed as having anything like Chinese radicals?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T00:08:59.977" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this a fair amount in Shakespeare, where he will use phrases that are perfectly ambiguous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example from Macbeth: &quot;there's husbandry in heaven, their candles are all out&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is good stewardship in the sky, the stars have all been lit&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's good stewardship in the sky, the stars have all been put out before bedtime&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15163" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T04:22:54.980" Title="Is there a term of art for a metaphor that means its own opposite?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T01:12:45.840" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lists here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ISO_639_codes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ISO_639_codes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seem to be woefully incomplete, because they lack the language codes OLV and OVD (And presumably many others) found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfdalian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfdalian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the markup codes in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{{lang|ovd|Övdalsk}}&#xA;{{lang|olv|Ulum Dalska}}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these language codes not included in ISO 639, and if not; what standard do they come from, and is there a more complete table that I can refer to when looking up language codes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15165" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T15:52:37.207" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T15:52:37.207" Title="Where can I find a language code list that includes &quot;OVD&quot; and &quot;OLV&quot;? Are they not included in ISO 639?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21106" CreationDate="2017-02-10T01:13:20.153" Score="-5" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Nenets people are Asian (Mongoloid), while most of the speakers of Finno-Ugric (Uralic) languages are European: Finns, Hungarians, Estonians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, at some point, their ancestors lived far away from each other, then they came into contact, and the ancestors of modern Nenets people gave up their language to speak a Finno-Ugric language, yet they managed to remain a separate people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That hasn't been too unusual since the age of empires, but I think it was very uncommon before that, which is why this seems interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: According to Wikipedia, Finno-Ugric is an acceptable synonym for Uralic:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term Finno-Ugric, which originally referred to the entire family,&#xA;  is sometimes used as a synonym for the term Uralic, which includes the&#xA;  Samoyedic languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T03:40:52.813" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T21:45:21.850" Title="How did the Nenets people (who are Asian) end up speaking a Finno-Ugric langauge?" Tags="&lt;uralic&gt;&lt;finno-ugric&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21078" CreationDate="2017-02-10T02:58:08.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/704/27&quot;&gt;Antagonym&lt;/a&gt;, sometimes called Auto-antonym, Contr&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;nym, or Contr&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;nym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, it is Contranym phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples in modern English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tell me about it!&lt;/em&gt; (= I don't want to hear anything because I know it better)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:12.427" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T04:22:54.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21079" CreationDate="2017-02-10T04:33:15.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page is just out of date. If you check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ISO_639:o&amp;amp;action=history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edit history&lt;/a&gt; you'll see the latest edit is from 2013, but the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ovd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ovd code was only created in 2015&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SIL have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an index&lt;/a&gt; which looks like it could be up to date. It has ovd, but not olv. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=olv+Uv%C3%A5siljan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google has no results for &quot;olv Uvåsiljan&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=olv+Ulum+Dalska&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;olv Ulum Dalska&quot;&lt;/a&gt; so my guess is that it's either a typo or someone made it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T04:38:44.113" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T04:38:44.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21080" CreationDate="2017-02-10T06:14:34.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you distinguish Finno-Ugric from Uralic, Samoyedic isn't Finno-Ugric, and is often considered a sister of Finno-Ugric. In referring to the Nenets as being Asian people, it's not clear if you're making a geographic statement or a racial one. The geographical interpretation is easy to dispose of. The Nenets live on both sides of the Ural mountains, the traditional defining line of Europe versus Asia, so your assumption is simply untrue. As a genetic claim, based on facial features, it's not a particular revealing diagnostic of historical events, since you find similar facial characteristics among the Saami, Mansi and Mari, among others. A more productive but non-linguistic approach would be to look at objective genetic facts such as haplogroup distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T06:14:34.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T07:32:32.897" Score="3" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 2 English text corpora. One is people talking about topic &quot;A&quot; while other is people talking about topic &quot;B&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a language point of view - the way people express themselves on topic &quot;A&quot; is different from topic &quot;B&quot;. I want to understand and analyze how is language of one corpus is &lt;em&gt;similar/disimilar&lt;/em&gt; from the language in the other corpus (both qualitatively and quantitatively). I am aware of only the following techniques:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of only - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;word frequency counts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KL divergence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sentiment analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What other techniques are there in the literature ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15167" LastEditorUserId="12878" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T09:38:25.267" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T07:36:19.997" Title="Compare 2 english text corpora" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T10:48:47.883" Score="9" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I should probably confess up front that I don't have a great deal of knowledge of foreign languages, but I have lately taken a strong interest in the structure and nature of language, and have spent a lot of time trying to learn about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I've noticed, from all the languages I've learnt about, is that it just seems to be taken for granted that tense is expressed by modifying the verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12604/is-there-any-language-where-time-is-grammaticalised-by-inflections-on-something&quot;&gt;Is there any language where time is grammaticalised by inflections on something other than its verbs?&lt;/a&gt; have lead me to believe that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; languages which frequently use other means to express tense, but the technique of modifying verbs to express tense still seems (at least as I understand it) to exist in some form in all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? Have I missed or misunderstood something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is true, I'm very curious about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this might be, and even if it isn't, I'm still curious about why it seems to be so rare. Is there a logical (or psychological) reason why verbs (as opposed to nouns, for example) should be the natural place to express tense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if it isn't true, I'd also be fascinated to learn more about the language or languages in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note that this question has been heavily edited, since in its original form it was almost a duplicate of the linked question).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15131" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T10:27:04.957" Title="Are there any known natural languages in which tense is never (or very rarely) expressed through the modification of verbs?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21085" CreationDate="2017-02-10T12:41:31.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese is the one. Like many asian-oceaninc languages, it is a modal rather than tense language. Verbs in chinese do not change according to time of the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14954" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:41:31.563" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21068" CreationDate="2017-02-10T12:42:31.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are different varieties of German (e.g. Bavarian and Low German)&#xA;  closer to each other than different Slav languages (e.g. Russian and&#xA;  Polish)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the most distant German dialects/languages closer to each other than &lt;em&gt;Russian&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Polish&lt;/em&gt;? Yes, all German dialect/languages are closer to each other than the difference between those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the most distant German dialect/language e.g. &lt;em&gt;Plattdüütsch&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Boarisch&lt;/em&gt; closer to each other than &lt;em&gt;Croatian&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Serbian&lt;/em&gt;? No, Serbian and Croatian are closer to each other than Plattdüütsch to Boarish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and Maybe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;Plattdüütsch&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Boarisch&lt;/em&gt; closer to each other than &lt;em&gt;Czech&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Slovak&lt;/em&gt;? Maybe, you would have to research it to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:42:31.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21075" CreationDate="2017-02-10T14:51:04.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out, Egyptian hieroglyphs employed certain symbols as semantic determinants, which though phonologically mute and often redundant would help the reader figure out which concept was intended. There seem to be plenty of available details online about this (Wikipedia, etc.) so I won't go into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other well-known &quot;hieroglyphic&quot; writing system, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maya script&lt;/a&gt;, is a mixture of logograms and syllabic characters. Apparently it was mostly the syllabic characters that were used to disambiguate or supplement the logographic (semantic) readings, and not the other way round. There were some semantic determinatives, though (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mesoweb.com/resources/handbook/WH2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, p. 19):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A semantic determinative is a sign that specifies the meaning of&#xA;  certain logograms that have more than one meaning. Semantic&#xA;  determinatives, however, are without phonetic value (cf. Zender 1999:&#xA;  14). The most oft-cited example of a semantic determinative in the&#xA;  Maya script are the cartouches and pedestals that frame so-called ‘day&#xA;  signs.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://davidmm.web.unc.edu/files/2010/08/fullphonetic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a comparative work&lt;/a&gt; Maya script is said to employ semantic determinatives in a particular way. After citing a trio of near-homophones which are spelled with the same glyphs, it says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... such spellings would have been ideal for disambiguation by means&#xA;  of a semantic determinative. However, in actuality there is no example&#xA;  where a semantic determinative is used with such spelling. T561.23&#xA;  CHAN-na could be used to spell any of these three lexemes, and so&#xA;  could T/AC6 CHAN ‘snake’, and T1010/SN4 or IV/004 CHAN ‘four’ (Houston&#xA;  1984; Lounsbury 1984). As shown below, &lt;strong&gt;semantic determinatives had a&#xA;  different function in Mayan; to distinguish between types of&#xA;  orthographic values&lt;/strong&gt;, such as between a logographic value and a&#xA;  syllabographic value, as with the case of SPHERULEST710/MZS CHOK ‘to&#xA;  throw down’ versus T710/MZR ye, &lt;strong&gt;or to distinguish between values of&#xA;  the same logogram with very different phonetic realizations&lt;/strong&gt;, such as&#xA;  between MOLEPC4 XIB’ ‘male’ versus T1008 WINIK ‘man, person’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are not many of these determinatives in Mayan writing (the work cited above says &quot;only a few&quot;), so they're not comparable, I think, to the profusion of semantic radicals found in Mandarin Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14883" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T15:57:10.050" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T15:57:10.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21124" CreationDate="2017-02-10T21:39:25.940" Score="6" ViewCount="648" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are their common characteristics? &#xA;I was reading about it on Wikipedia but didn't understand much since I have no background in linguistics. I would appreciate if someone could just name some basic common features (without too much rigor if possible) and give examples. Thank you!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T01:27:55.947" Title="How are Baltic and Slavic languages related?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21095" CreationDate="2017-02-10T21:51:43.727" Score="1" ViewCount="1189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swedish has the words &quot;bra&quot;, &quot;god&quot; and &quot;väl&quot; with similar meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bra&quot; is usually an adjective for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Han är en bra programmerare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;= He is a good programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;God&quot; means more like &quot;fair&quot; or &quot;just&quot; and has some moral into it maybe. Norwegian and German, our close related languages, have the words &quot;gut&quot; and &quot;god&quot; instead of &quot;bra&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swedish the word &quot;bra&quot; is also used as an adverb which sounds and looks strange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Han springer bra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;= &quot;He runs well.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any logic or history why we have the word &quot;bra&quot; so often instead of &quot;well/väl&quot; and instead of &quot;god/good&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not good at my native language's grammar so maybe I can learn that there is some logic behind it. To me it seems like the adjective &quot;bra&quot; is used as an adverb when it actually is an adjective that should only describe a noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English there is a similar difference sometimes between phrases such as &quot;Feeling well&quot; and &quot;Feeling good&quot; that I didn't fully understand. Why is the adjective used in one case and the adverb in the other case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastEditorUserId="14779" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T21:58:14.480" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T03:30:05.580" Title="Where does the Swedish word &quot;bra&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-02-11T10:55:44.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21059" CreationDate="2017-02-11T01:31:49.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This style of counting is often used when the one counting aloud is in an adversarial relationship to other listeners.  The addition of the &quot;filler&quot; word is, no doubt, at the request of the adversary to slow down the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine two children.  They both agree that one will close his eyes and &quot;count to 10&quot; or &quot;count for 10 seconds&quot; while the other hides.  However, the child counting will try to count &lt;em&gt;as quickly as possible&lt;/em&gt;.  The child attempting to hide will consider the rapid counting &lt;em&gt;unfair&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mississippi and alligator are both four syllable words that American children are exposed to while they are very young, so children are simply reusing a &quot;big&quot; word they already know.  Additionally, in an adversarial counting situation, these words have the benefit that even in rapid speech, it will take the speaker about a second (especially if this is the speaker's goal), or at least extend the counter's &quot;time limit&quot; to something considered fair by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mississippi is an appealing word for this because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;American children are already familiar with this word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's easy to pronounce for children (duplicated sounds and no consonant clusters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Its pronunciation approximates a second in rapid speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1581" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T01:31:49.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21092" CreationDate="2017-02-11T03:30:05.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wiktionary, it originates from the Italian &lt;em&gt;bravo&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swedish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology: Since at least 1621, from braf ‎(“good,&#xA;  brave”); from German brav; from French brave, borrowed from Italian&#xA;  bravo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bra#Etymology_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bra#Etymology_5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T03:30:05.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21085" CreationDate="2017-02-11T04:46:13.743" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolof_language#Notable_characteristics&quot;&gt;Wolof&lt;/a&gt;, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, the verbs never change their form, it is the pronouns that have the tense. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolof_language#Temporal_pronouns&quot;&gt;In Wolof&lt;/a&gt; there is I-which-is-now, I-that-will-be, I-that-was, and so on, each pronoun has the 5 Wolof tenses, each tense having 2 aspect variants, perfect and imperfect. In other words, you take a past tense pronoun and the unchangeable verb and you get a past tense verb phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T04:46:13.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12604" CreationDate="2017-02-11T04:52:57.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolof_language#Notable_characteristics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolof&lt;/a&gt;, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, the verbs never change their form, it is the pronouns that have the tense. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolof_language#Temporal_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Wolof&lt;/a&gt; there is I-which-is-now, I-that-will-be, I-that-was, and so on, each pronoun has the 5 Wolof tenses, each tense having 2 aspect variants, perfect and imperfect. In other words, you take a past tense pronoun and the unchangeable verb and you get a past tense verb phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T04:52:57.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2017-02-11T05:38:15.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try ekho if you want to synthesize Mandarin and other Chinese dialects. It's open-source and hosted on github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3671" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T05:38:15.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-11T10:34:48.870" Score="2" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve been trying to find C&amp;amp;C tools and Boxer online and found this link in many places (&lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://svn.ask.it.usyd.edu.au/trac/candc&lt;/a&gt;) but the link does not work for me. Is there another place to find these tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did see that you have the source code available here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/valeriobasile/learningbyreading/tree/master/ext/candc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/valeriobasile/learningbyreading/tree/master/ext/candc&lt;/a&gt;), and I tried to install it (on OS X 10.12) but it gave me an error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are there other wide-coverage semantic parsers out there that would be good alternatives? Or is this considered the state-of-the-art semantic parser? I’m hoping that I will be able to use these tools for my research project involving translation of laws to formal representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15172" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T06:52:30.930" Title="C&amp;C/Boxer Source Code" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21117" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:17:11.337" Score="0" ViewCount="906" Body="&lt;p&gt;A year ago, I went to Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. Since I'm interested in languages, I did some research, so I could understand the differences between Dutch from The Netherlands and Flemish. I noticed that adults to use French words or words influenced by French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ENGLISH: A bicycle&lt;br&gt;&#xA;FRENCH: Un vélo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;DUTCH: Een fiets&lt;br&gt;&#xA;FLEMISH: Ne vélo  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is the word 'why'. In French, you say 'pourquoi'. If you literally translate that, it means 'for what'. Well, in Dutch the word is 'waarom', but in Flemish they use 'voorwat', which is literally 'pourquoi' translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is remarkable, a Germanic language influenced by a Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is: Is Flemish mutual inteligibile for speakers in The Netherlands since it's influenced by French? And are many dialect words recognizable in French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15173" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:46:21.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T22:38:51.417" Title="Are most dialect in Flanders influenced by French?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21100" CreationDate="2017-02-11T12:57:49.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is remarkable, a Germanic language influenced by a Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is a well-known example of such a language, so I don't understand the surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, my question is: Is Flemish mutual inteligibile for speakers &#xA;  in The Netherlands since it's influenced by French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch and Flemish are officially the same language. The dialectal speech is mutually intelligible, but not always perfectly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:57:49.000" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-11T18:53:06.617" Score="8" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm mistaken,  it is the same  sound as the R in German, Yiddish, Danish,and Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15090" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:28:39.130" Title="Does the French R-sound come from Germanic influence?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21085" CreationDate="2017-02-11T20:49:48.630" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;whether or not &quot;tense&quot; is even meaningful in (Classical) Arabic is an open question.  Arabic verbs do not generally have tense, although they have aspect.  to give a definite future meaning to an imperfect like yadbribu you prefix the invariant &quot;sawfa&quot;, a separate word. but &quot;yadribu&quot; can have any &quot;tense&quot; depending on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;daraba&quot; is taught as past tense (he struck) and &quot;yadribu&quot; as present or future, but that's wrong. the main distinction is aspect not tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T20:56:36.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T20:56:36.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21063" CreationDate="2017-02-12T02:15:02.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Old English letter &amp;lt;­g&gt; (specifically not using the overdot as that is a much later convention) is a fickle beast: it pulled double duty as it represented both /g/ (as in &amp;lt;­græf&gt;) and /j/ (as in &amp;lt;­gist&gt;). Because English of the day had no grapheme like &amp;lt;­j&gt;, and since it used &amp;lt;­y&gt; only as a vowel (to mark the front-rounded vowel /y/), it had to adapt what letters it had to the phonetics of its words. Many Proto-Germanic words that had /*g-/ in them (like &amp;lt;*girnijaną&gt;) ended up undergoing palatalisation of that /*g-/ to a palatal sound in Old English, i.e. what we assume to be /j/ (as in &amp;lt;­giernan&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One must really differentiate between orthography and phonetics here: the way a word is spelled has little effect on how it's pronounced. The letter &amp;lt;­g&gt; in Old English was generally pronounced as /j/ when it was followed by a grapheme used for a front vowel, even if that vowel &lt;em&gt;wasn't actually pronounced&lt;/em&gt; (or even, wasn't ever even a thing) there. As such, you'll see a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of &amp;lt;­e&gt; inserted into Old English words in places where they didn't belong only because the Anglo-Saxons had no other way they could think of to represent /j/; this could lead one to confusion (as it has led you too!) and might make you believe &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; such &amp;lt;­ge&gt; were pronounced as a plain, vowelless /j/. This isn't the case, as the &amp;lt;­e&gt; in this &amp;lt;­ge&gt; could easily have come from a diphthong, as is the case in &amp;lt;­geard&gt; (whence your &amp;lt;­geardum&gt;) that had the short diphthong &amp;lt;­ea&gt;, or in verbs such as &amp;lt;­giefan&gt; /jiefan/ and &amp;lt;­gēotan&gt; /je:otan/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a bit of a sidenote, you'll also see that, due to this palatalisation of Germanic /*g-/, almost no native, directly inherited English word actually has an initial /g/ before a front vowel; words such as &amp;lt;­gift&gt; and &amp;lt;­give&gt; are usually loans from a language with /g/ in such a position (most commonly Old West Norse); the only exceptions to this are English words that underwent i-umlaut (&amp;lt;­geese&gt; is a good example) &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the g-palatalisation had already happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T02:50:24.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:50:24.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21102" CreationDate="2017-02-12T02:28:39.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a single R-sound in French. There are at least two rhotic sounds considered &quot;standard&quot;: [ʁ] and [χ] (voiced and voiceless uvular fricatives respectively), and not long ago the Paris dialect had a uvular trill [ʀ] instead (listen to Edith Piaf). But French is not only the educated standard or the Paris dialect; in Southern France older speakers still use an alveolar trill, as in Quebec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that uvular R is not originally Germanic, and there is no evidence that Germanic languages influenced French in this sense. Some believe that the reverse may have happened (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/wp/article/view/07-02&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that uvular R in German was borrowed from French&lt;/a&gt;) but this has also been contested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guttural pronunciations in French are attested only since the end of the 17th century, and only becomes common in the 18th. It's clearly possible that both French and the Germanic languages (as well as many others) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/When-did-the-trilled-r-fall-out-of-use-in-French-and-become-replaced-with-a-uvular-fricative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;evolved their uvular sounds independently&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the French SE post the question starts by saying that &quot;in every romance language, except French, the phoneme /R/ is an alveolar trill [r]&quot;, which is wrong, since Portuguese also has a variety of guttural (uvular and velar) realizations of R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:28:39.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21080" CreationDate="2017-02-12T02:55:21.443" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were definitely empires in the area where the ancestors of the speakers of the Uralic languages lived after the formation of the Uralic language family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such empires most likely facilitated the transfer of languages between different peoples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:55:21.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21108" CreationDate="2017-02-12T09:16:03.450" Score="1" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to learn German (not really) and I've come across the [x] sound. When I hear audio clips of it, it sounds really similar (almost identical) to [kʰ]. I have [kʰ] in my native language (Bengali). I've done a little research (not much because many places have too difficult of a wording for me) and seen that both the sounds are made around the same place. So, is it different or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15179" LastEditorUserId="15179" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T20:26:04.863" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T20:26:04.863" Title="Is [x] any different from [kʰ]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21107" CreationDate="2017-02-12T09:40:15.640" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are indeed articulated in the same place, namely the part of the palate called velum. These are, then, velar consonants. The difference lies in the manner of articulation. [kʰ] is an aspirated stop, whilst [x] is a fricative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T09:40:15.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21112" CreationDate="2017-02-12T09:40:26.327" Score="6" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is presented with the help of the sources from Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek diacritics were introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium, which became standard in the Middle Ages. My question is: Is the accent (tone) system of Ancient Greek which we are using now a result of linguistic reconstruction, or it is mainly based on historical references such as the descriptions of ancient grammarians or other sources? The characteristics of different tones might be described by natural language, but how about the position of these accents ? Are there fixed rules to accent words in ancient Greek ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15178" LastEditorUserId="15178" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T18:51:51.543" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:48:06.343" Title="The accentual (Tone) system of Ancient Greek" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21107" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:08:24.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that in some dialects of Bengali, especially that of Sylhet, orthographic খ /kʰ/ is in fact realised as [x]. In these dialects the difference to German [x] is slight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:08:24.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21099" CreationDate="2017-02-12T14:07:43.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The parser you linked to has been rewritten in Java and improved. The latest software can be downloaded from &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/stephenclark609/resources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Clark's C&amp;amp;C tools page&lt;/a&gt;. The old C++ version can be downloaded from there too, which comes with Boxer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for state-of-the-art tools, I can't recommend anything, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sigparse/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIGPARSE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sigsem.org/w/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIGSEM&lt;/a&gt;  are good starting points to find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:07:43.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21109" CreationDate="2017-02-12T18:05:35.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the last part of your question:&#xA;Ancient Greek indeed had some rules of accentuation, despite the fact that the position and type of it was not always possible to be determined on phonetic basis (as in e.g. Vedic Sanskrit and contrary to Latin).&#xA;Greek had some ground rules concerning accent placement, for example the stress was allowed to be placed only on one of the three last syllables, two syllables if the last vowel was long. There was a two-way accent contour constrast but only on long vowels.If the stressed vowel was long, an the following was short, then accent could be either rising or rising-falling. If the following vowel was also long, the the accent had to be rising. These are just some rules, and there some exceptions. The accentuation on finite verb forms was recessive, i.e. the stress went as far &quot;left&quot; as it could, so it was predictable. The accentuation of non finite verb forms and noun on the other hand was not predictable and lexically defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T18:05:35.843" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-12T19:49:36.920" Score="6" ViewCount="1380" Body="&lt;p&gt;My impression is that language families were established in the early XX century and, since then, there have been speculations how language families may be related but no new results, which are conclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean historical linguistics has reached its limits and there is just nothing further we can do with the available data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is reasonable to assume that known proto languages had close relatives at the time they were spoken but they have disappeared since. Does this mean that we will never have data for further reconstructions? What can we learn from the present lack of such related languages (e.g. If PIE has no present-living close relatives, does this mean that the PIE culture dominated its historical region and other people were assimilated?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will we ever be able to further advance our knowledge about languages of the past? Are there any alternative methods we can use to do that (e.g. genetics)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5639" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T10:19:53.467" Title="Is historical linguistics still producing new results?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21114" CreationDate="2017-02-12T20:48:38.863" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very many things remaining to do in historical linguistics. If you set aside certain language families which have been &quot;mostly figured out&quot;, there are still very many areas in the world where our knowledge of language relations and especially reconstruction is, shall we say, less than ideal, especially in the New World. Plus, even in a family that is pretty well worked out like Bantu, there are unresolved details – for example, what, if any, system of vowel harmony did it have; aside from knowing what the tonal phonemes were and what roots had what tones, we don't really know what the proto-language &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; with those tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also broader questions that are not just about reconstruction. For example, there are various sensible ideas about how sound changes like Grimm's Law come about, but the theory of sound change is pretty coarse-grained. Being able to substantiate and generalize these ideas will take quite a long time and will require an unprecedented level of observation. An example where the horse may be out of the barn is the development of the modal + &quot;of&quot; construction, from modal + &quot;have&quot;. The change is far enough along that there are now people for whom the construction is &quot;should of gone&quot;, which we can post-hoc rationalize as phonological reduction of &quot;should have&quot;. Did this happen simultaneously at hundreds of locations? Did it get started once and spread? How does this relate to the &quot;shoulda&quot; alternative (is &quot;should of&quot; based on &quot;shoulda&quot;, or vice versa, or are these independent changes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacteria-model language splitting is the dominant theory of language relations, but of course nobody has ever denied the relevance of language contact, and I think that as contact-induced language changes are studies in greater detail, fundamental concepts of language relatedness are bound to change, at least in some cases (in particular, when there is significant contact, as in West Africa, but not so much in Oceanic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T20:48:38.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21114" CreationDate="2017-02-12T22:08:24.267" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reminded of the famous story about how the young Max Planck was told by his professor to steer well clear of a career in physics, as there was nothing new to be discovered in that field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In historical linguistics, or specifically Indo-European studies, since the 1990s a whole new corpus of texts in a hitherto virtually unknown language were discovered, namely Bactrian. These have revolutionised our knowledge of ancient Iranian and Indo-European languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to add: none of this has filtered down to the holy of holies of internet wisdom (“Wikipedia”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T00:43:04.050" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T00:43:04.050" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21100" CreationDate="2017-02-12T22:38:51.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are surely right to say that Flemish is more strongly influenced by French than is the language of the Netherlands. This is the result of the situation until the 1960s, when Belgium was basically a bilingual country. This came to an end when the benighted citizens of Belgium decided to split their country in half, each half refusing to utter one word in the language of the other. Ironically, the number of French speakers in the Netherlands is probably now considerably higher than in the Flemish-speaking regions of Belgium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T22:38:51.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21114" CreationDate="2017-02-13T06:04:48.410" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most significant recent discoveries in historical linguistics is the first link between Eurasian and American language families: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages&quot;&gt;the Dené–Yeniseian languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A link between the Na-Dené and the Yeniseian families was first proposed in 1923, but the first peer reviewed publication proposing the Dené–Yeniseian language family was published in 1998. Research continued by multiple people. A 369 page collection of articles was published in 2010, and in 2012 a workshop was held on the proposed family. The current leading researcher Edward Vajda showed the results of his research, and since then the proposed family has been met with wide (though not total) acceptance. The evidence includes cognate lexemes and morphology, proposed phonological changes, and genetic evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T06:04:48.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21123" CreationDate="2017-02-13T08:53:44.030" Score="4" ViewCount="4518" Body="&lt;p&gt;How specifically does truth conditional semantics separate syntactically well formed sentences (wffs) with semantic meaning from syntactically well formed sentences without semantic meaning? An example of a grammatically non-well formed English sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) &quot;A a believe the into moon.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a syntactically well formed sentence that has no semantic meaning is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) &quot;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a semantically well founded sentence according to the truth conditional theory of meaning is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) &quot;The cat is on the mat.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) has semantic meaning because we understand what conditions are sufficient and necessary to give the sentence a &quot;true&quot; truth condition. &quot;The cat is on the mat,&quot; is true if and only if the cat is indeed on the mat. Truth conditional theories of meaning allow us to assign either a &quot;true&quot; or a &quot;false&quot; value to (3), but they assign meaning to the sentence because it is well formed to the extend that we understand what its necessary and sufficient conditions are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does truth conditional semantics treat (2)? Does it say that there are no possible conditions under which it has a &quot;true&quot; truth value? Meaning that in all possible interpretations (2) will be false and therefore it is a contradiction? Or does it say that there is no way that it could have any truth value, because it is nonsensical? Or does it say something entirely different? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) is nonsensical because it is not grammatically well structured but (2) is grammatically well structured. How does truth conditional semantics treat (2) in light of how it treats (1)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15190" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T16:08:41.240" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T18:31:08.293" Title="Truth conditional semantics and wffs" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="21" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21114" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:19:53.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are whole deserts covered with bazalt stones bearing incredible numbers of Semitic inscriptions, connected to the general idea of Pre-Islamic Old Arabic waiting to be deciphered, edited and published. And then comes the fun of inferring all kinds of linguistic Semitic data from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10265" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T10:19:53.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21119" CreationDate="2017-02-13T11:27:52.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theorems are wffs, but not all wffs are theorems.  Theorems are demonstrable, but other wffs are not.  The central notion in logic is implication, not truth.  It is possible to answer questions about implication without making any appeal to truth -- a logic constructed that way is a &quot;logical syntax&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is appeal to truth, in a &quot;logical semantics&quot;, it is always through implication.  If sentences you take to be true imply &quot;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&quot;, then the latter is true; if its negation is implied, then it's false.  That's all a truth functional logic can tell you about the truth of this example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T11:27:52.507" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12089" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:42:33.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cauldwell's paper (Functional Irrythmicality of English) argues that naturally occurring speech is not rhythmic, offering data to support this view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T14:42:33.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21119" CreationDate="2017-02-13T16:00:35.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the name already suggests, &lt;em&gt;truth&lt;/em&gt; conditional semantics is only interested in the truth of a statement, not so much in whether or not that statement makes sense pragmatically.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Form a truth-conditional perspective, the sentence &quot;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously&quot; is a syntactically well-formed sentence (not only a formula, but a sentence), and well-formed sentences by definition have a truth value as their extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we proceed, &lt;strong&gt;one should be careful about conflating the extension of an expression with its &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt; of a sentence is its truth value in a particular situation; but few speakers would intuitively agree the the meaning of &quot;The cat is on the mat&quot; is just &quot;1&quot; (or &quot;0&quot;). The &lt;em&gt;intension&lt;/em&gt; of a sentence is, under the classical formal semantic treatment, an abstraction over the sentence's possible truth values under different possible worlds, or equivalently, the set of all those possible scenarios in which the sentence becomes true. This idea comes closer to what is commonly understood as &quot;meaning&quot;, but since the intension of an expression builds up on its extensions, it ist still useful to continue the discussion about truth value extensions here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truth-conditionally seen, the sentence is not meaning-less, because &lt;strong&gt;it does a truth condition&lt;/strong&gt;: namely that it is true if and only if the situation it gets evaluated in fulfills the conditions that there is some x to which the predicate &quot;idea&quot; applies, and which is part of some sleeping event which takes place furiously, and so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The point is just that these theoretical truth conditions will never &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; yield a true sentence&lt;/strong&gt;, because, for example, the condition that our x is located in the intersection between &quot;colorless&quot; and &quot;green&quot; - which is obviously an empty set - will never be able to get satisfied.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since there is no situation in which the sentence can become true, it would be dubbed semantically contradictory - but this still implies that it has a semantic value, namely &quot;false&quot; in all situations.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly truth-conditionally, a sentence would only be nonsensical if it was syntactically not well-formed so the truth conditions which arise from a functional combination of the parts it is composed of cannot be formulated (like in your first example sentence, where you have a determiner + determiner + verb construction, for which there is no rule how to combine these types into a logical assertion under which the involved elements make a true sentence).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the level of formulating such truth conditions from the individual elements and their syntactic structure, the logic is &quot;blind&quot; for issues like semantic incompatibility; as long as &quot;ideas&quot; is a noun that predicates some individuals which form the subject, &quot;sleep&quot; is a verb that applies to these individuals and so on, it is truth-conditionally meaningful in that we can formulate conditions (namely &quot;= 1 iff there is some &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;em&gt;Idea(x)&lt;/em&gt; and ...&quot;) under which the sentence becomes true.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Truth-conditional semantics has a rather narrow world view, in which everything  - as long as it be a grammatical sentence - can either be true or false.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the famous &quot;King of France&quot; problem:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Assume that there is no present king of France.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is the sentence  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The present king of France is bald  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;true, false, or nonsensical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would by most truth-conditional semanticists be answered by &quot;false&quot;, because the assumption is that the sentence can simply be transformed into the predicate logic formula  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ∃x((KoF(x) ∧ ∀y(KoF(y) → (y=x))) ∧ Bald(x))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There is something which is the king of France (and for all other things that are also the king of France, this other thing is equivalent to the first individual, such that there really only one king of France), and this individual is bald&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can simply be negated by negating the whole sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ¬∃x((KoF(x) ∧ ∀y(KoF(y) → (y=x))) ∧ Bald(x))  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There is nothing which is the king of france and ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thereby negating the existence of such a king, which makes it a perfectly well-formed sentence with a truth value.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be the Russelian point of view - Frege (and I) would disagree and say that if the presupposition of a sentence (like that there exists a present king of France) is false, this sentence can neither be true nor false, because negating the sentence (&quot;The king of France is not bald&quot;) would &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; exhibit the presupposition (in fact, that the logical entailment follows from both the affirmative and the negative sentence is the very definition of a presupposition! So under the account presented above, the sentence would have no presupposition at all, which I find simply implausible). But enough semanticists would say that the sentence is meaningful, truth-conditionally.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Long story short: Truth-conditionally seen, the sentence has a truth value due to being syntactically well-formed, which, however, will turn out to be false in all situations, because the truth conditions that there is an x which is both colorless and green etc. are inherently combined in such a way that they can never succeed to make the sentence true - but then the answer is just &quot;false&quot; rather than &quot;nonsensical&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to get a more decent answer, you'd have to tune your semantics up quite a bit, for example with features. Then you can say that, for example, &quot;sleep&quot; is a predicate that can only apply to living entities (something like [+ LIVING]), a feature which ideas (being abstract entities) don't have, so the elements' types within the sentences don't match and then you can indeed say that the sentence is nonsensical rather than simply false.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But that requires a lot of complicated set-up and ontology and is not what is usually meant when talking about truth-conditional semantics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2020-02-28T22:17:48.913" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T22:17:48.913" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21091" CreationDate="2017-02-13T17:23:16.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the aspect system of Baltic and Slavonic languages, Baltic systems actually resemble the earlier stages of Slavonic systems (Comrie, 1976). In Lithuanian, adding a prefix to a verb root renders it Perfective, sometimes resulting also in some other semantic change. There is also a suffix &lt;em&gt;-inè&lt;/em&gt;, albeit with limited productivity, which changes these prefixed verbs back into Imperfective. Latvian is similar, though without this suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This in fact echoes the paths of change in language such as Russian. In the beginning there was a verb, say Russian &lt;em&gt;pisat'&lt;/em&gt; ('write'), to which would be added a prefix to form perfective form, either without change in meaning, as in Russian &lt;em&gt;na-pisat'&lt;/em&gt; ('write'), or with such a change, as in &lt;em&gt;vy-pisat'&lt;/em&gt; ('write out'). Latvian is still at this stage. Later, Imperfective versions of those verbs which gained more-than-aspectual prefixes would appear, so the Russian word &lt;em&gt;vy-pisyvat&lt;/em&gt; appeared. Lithuanian is going through this stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:&#xA;Comrie, B. (1976). &lt;em&gt;Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T01:27:55.947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T01:27:55.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T07:02:08.860" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making my own language, primitive, so I'm trying to figure out how much did primitive languages discriminate different species in the same families of animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dog vs Wolf, Lion vs Tiger, Grizzly Bear vs Polar Bear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All 3 of these could be indistinguished in the language and both called dog/cat/bear rather than seoarating them into the two different species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do older, more primitive, languages tend to call dogs and wolves both dogs, or do they distinguish between the two, usually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14852" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T00:51:00.943" Title="Animal Species discrimination in languages" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21125" CreationDate="2017-02-14T11:17:07.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the importance of the animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different words for dog (represented by Latin canes, Greek kynos, German Hund) and wolf (represented by Latin lupus, German Wolf) in the Indogermanic languages going back to proto-Indogermanic. On the other hand, the word for fox is often closely related to the word for wolf (e.g., Latin lupus &quot;Wolf&quot; and vulpes &quot;Fox&quot;, going back to the same Proto-Indogermanic root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T11:17:07.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21132" CreationDate="2017-02-14T12:47:49.740" Score="5" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'm looking for languages with a [j]/[ɥ] or [j]/[w] alternation that is triggered by the presence of a round vowel. For a hypothetical example with nonce words consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a. [ken] + [je] -&amp;gt; /kenje/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. [kon] + [je] -&amp;gt; /konwe/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Ponapean does this optionally, but I'm curious if there are others. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T01:52:40.257" Title="What languages have rounding assimilation/harmony with glides?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19354" CreationDate="2017-02-14T16:03:04.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brainstorming a bit turns up a lot of examples, it seems. Sometimes it will boil down to definition (are demonstratives pro-forms), but even excluding demonstratives, I can think of quite a lot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Generic pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *On*     ne  sait pas.&#xA; *3sg.*   NEG know NEG. (French)&#xA; *One* does not know / We can't tell&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) Speech act participants: &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;'m a little teaport, short and stout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) Reflexives in nominalised VPs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;不  患    人      之  不  *己* 知&#xA;Bu  huan  ren    zhi bu  *ji*     zhi&#xA;NEG worry others GEN NEG *self*   know (Old Chinese)&#xA;Do not worry about others' not knowing the *self*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) Reciprocals in nominalised VPs: Knowing &lt;strong&gt;each other&lt;/strong&gt; well is important for teamwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) Pro-sentences in polar questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ana    ruwa, *ko*?&#xA;one.is rain  *or*&#xA;Is it raining or **not**? (Hausa - Schachter and Shopen 2007)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) Answers to questions: The original sentence in the OP if it came from this conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A: Is pizza delicious?&#xA;B: *No*!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since the statement 'Pizza is not delicious' never appeared in the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schachter, P. and Shopen, T. (2007). Parts of speech. In Shopen, T. (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Language typology and syntactic description&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T04:04:37.753" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T04:04:37.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21125" CreationDate="2017-02-14T16:06:04.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages usually mark those differences that the culture they're part of consider important, and downplay or erase those that don't seem that important to the speakers. I would expect the languages of primitive cultures (meaning less technological, less urban, historically ancient, etc.) to mark more, not less, distinctions among animals (but see below), as well as plants, for the simple reason that in primitive cultures the people are (as we would say) &quot;closer to nature&quot;, and speakers need to note fine distinctions: different words for animals that can and cannot be eaten, or that can or cannot be dangerous to humans. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt you will find a language used by a primitive culture, in a part of the world where those animals exist, that uses the same word for &quot;dog&quot; and &quot;wolf&quot;, because a dog is a hunting companion or a pet while a wolf is a predator and a menace. Now a wolf does look a lot like a big dog, and if someone from a primitive culture who has never seen a wolf before is presented with one, they might use their word for &quot;dog&quot; to refer to it--at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for lions and tigers, which besides their appearance have completely different behaviours: lions live and hunt in prides, coordinating their pursuit of prey, while tigers are solitary --which is rather important to take into account if you're the one being hunted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the idea of animal species, families and genera &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a late scientific development. Primitive cultures will not group animals based on modern phylogenetic criteria. If two or more species share some salient features they might be lumped together conceptually as one (here I'm thinking of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011&amp;amp;version=NKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Testament's dietary rules&lt;/a&gt;, which are probably older taboos codified as religious law), and this might or might not be visible in their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, consider that while our modern languages have a lot of names for different species, most of us would only recognize and consistently use a few of them, and only a handful to refer to animals in our actual vicinity (i. e. not in some NatGeo documentary or someone's travel photo album).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14883" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T23:25:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T23:25:33.173" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8534" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:07:45.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though of course more language-specific information is needed, general criteria do exist. The finiteness of a clause is basically how non-nominalised it is (Givón, 2001), and, as is well known, the 'nouniness' of a constituent is gradient rather than absolute (Ross, 1973). Thus, the finiteness of the clause can be described as how few NP-like features it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givón (2001) lists the following criteria. Clauses which satisfy a lot of these are less finite (closer to the prototypical NP), whereas clauses satisfying most of these are the most finite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. The verb becomes a head noun&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  b. The verb takes nominalising morphology&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  c. Tense-aspect-mood distinctions are lost&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  d. Pronominal agreement is lost&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  e. Either the subject or the object acquires nominative case&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  f. Determiners are added&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  g. Adverbs become adjectives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givón, T. (2001). &lt;em&gt;Syntax: an introduction&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 2). John Benjamins Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ross, John R. (1973), 'Nouniness', in O. Fujimura (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Three Dimensions of Linguistic Theory&lt;/em&gt; (Tokyo: TEC Company, Ltd.), 137-258.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T17:07:45.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21127" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:24:37.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start with the analytic problem. Suppose in a language, /kon-ie/ → &lt;em&gt;konue&lt;/em&gt;. That resembles but is distinct from what you are (apparently) interested in. This is just plain old rounding harmony (or backing harmony, or rounding and backing harmony), which in this case affects diphthongs. If a language has a contrast between diphthongs and glide-vowel sequences, this can be easily sorted out, but such a contrast is rare. Lacking a contrast, you might then call on phonetic intuition (&quot;it sounds like a glide&quot;), which doesn't or shouldn't cut it in the scientific world. You might build an argument around durational measurements, since a canonical glide is typically shorter than a canonical high vowel, although nobody has, so far, done a reasonably extensive survey of duration patterns of glides and vowels in 'comparable' positions, so we don't have an established threshold value for glide versus vowel. Perhaps one might argue for a particular analysis of a high vocoid plus vowel based on prosody, if you can establish the syllabification [kon.we], or [ko.nue] where the second syllable is heavy. That, in principle, should not be too hard to do (e.g. look for which syllable attracts stress, if you're lucky enough to have such a stress diagnostic). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is that surface [konwe] could derive from intermediate &lt;em&gt;konue&lt;/em&gt;, thus surface arguments about the output don't establish what vocoid-harmony does (unless you specifically are restricting yourself to IO relations in OT). If the underlying question is about the status of glides in vowel harmony systems (as targets, in particular), then a surface [j ~ w] alternation isn't sufficient to establish that a &lt;em&gt;glide&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to a vowel was the target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those caveats aside, having been on the lookout for such a thing for decades, I've never encountered any example. Long-distant vowel-consonant harmony is quite uncommon, so the non-attestation of the kind of pattern you describe may result from the fact that vowel-to-consonant assimilations typically only apply between adjacent segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T01:52:40.257" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T01:52:40.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T21:50:01.493" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a list of file structures used by named entity recognition datasets. I am aware of the file structures mentioned below. What other file structures are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;CONLL 2003&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inline markup, tokenized:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-DOCSTART- -X- -X- O&#xA;&#xA;EU NNP B-NP B-ORG&#xA;rejects VBZ B-VP O&#xA;German JJ B-NP B-MISC&#xA;call NN I-NP O&#xA;to TO B-VP O&#xA;boycott VB I-VP O&#xA;British JJ B-NP B-MISC&#xA;lamb NN I-NP O&#xA;. . O O&#xA;&#xA;Peter NNP B-NP B-PER&#xA;Blackburn NNP I-NP I-PER&#xA;&#xA;BRUSSELS NNP B-NP B-LOC&#xA;1996-08-22 CD I-NP O&#xA;&#xA;The DT B-NP O&#xA;European NNP I-NP B-ORG&#xA;Commission NNP I-NP I-ORG&#xA;said VBD B-VP O&#xA;on IN B-PP O&#xA;Thursday NNP B-NP O&#xA;it PRP B-NP O&#xA;disagreed VBD B-VP O&#xA;with IN B-PP O&#xA;German JJ B-NP B-MISC&#xA;advice NN I-NP O&#xA;to TO B-PP O&#xA;consumers NNS B-NP O&#xA;to TO B-VP O&#xA;shun VB I-VP O&#xA;British JJ B-NP B-MISC&#xA;lamb NN I-NP O&#xA;until IN B-SBAR O&#xA;scientists NNS B-NP O&#xA;determine VBP B-VP O&#xA;whether IN B-SBAR O&#xA;mad JJ B-NP O&#xA;cow NN I-NP O&#xA;disease NN I-NP O&#xA;can MD B-VP O&#xA;be VB I-VP O&#xA;transmitted VBN I-VP O&#xA;to TO B-PP O&#xA;sheep NN B-NP O&#xA;. . O O&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://brat.nlplab.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brat rapid annotation tool (brat)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BRAT's output uses standoff annotations (and non-tokenized text):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Nuclear theory devoted major efforts since 4 decades to describe thermalization in nuclear reactions, predominantly using semi-classical methods  [13,14,10], in line with similar problems in quantum liquids  [15,16]. There were attempts to develop improved molecular dynamics methods combining quantum features with a semi classical treatment of dynamical correlations  [17,18]. Still, no clear-cut quantum approach is readily available yet, in spite of numerous formal attempts [19,20,10]. The field of clusters and nano structures is far younger but fast developing in relation to the ongoing developments of lasers and imaging techniques. Semiclassical approaches were also considered in the field to include some dynamical corrections  [21,22] and could qualitatively describe dynamical processes. But such approaches are bound to simple metals with sufficiently delocalized wave functions, and thus smooth potentials justifying semiclassical approximations. The case of organic systems, in particular the much celebrated C60   [4,23], cannot be treated this way. Semi classical, and even classical approaches, can be used at very high excitations such as delivered by very intense laser pulses  [2]. In such cases the system is blown up and details of its quantum mechanical features do not matter anymore. But for less violent scenarios, quantum shell effects cannot be ignored.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Annotations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;T1  Task 0 14   Nuclear theory&#xA;T2  Task 65 79  thermalization&#xA;T3  Process 65 79   thermalization&#xA;T4  Process 122 144 semi-classical methods&#xA;T5  Process 83 100  nuclear reactions&#xA;T6  Material 191 206    quantum liquids&#xA;T7  Process 248 283 improved molecular dynamics methods&#xA;T8  Task 284 310    combining quantum features&#xA;T9  Task 495 532    field of clusters and nano structures&#xA;T10 Process 611 617 lasers&#xA;T11 Process 622 640 imaging techniques&#xA;T12 Process 758 801 qualitatively describe dynamical processes.&#xA;T13 Material 835 848    simple metals&#xA;T14 Material 835 893    simple metals with sufficiently delocalized wave functions&#xA;T15 Task 975 990    organic systems&#xA;T16 Material 1026 1029  C60&#xA;T17 Process 1173 1198   very intense laser pulses&#xA;T18 Task 1261 1288  quantum mechanical features&#xA;T19 Process 1344 1365   quantum shell effects&#xA;T20 Process 318 368 semi classical treatment of dynamical correlations&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T08:56:33.617" Title="File structures for named entity recognition datasets" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T01:41:54.543" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in learning about the grammar of other languages (notably German, Russian, and Arabic), but I don't really want to &lt;em&gt;learn&lt;/em&gt; to speak them. Only their grammar, syntax, morphology, etc., to the point where I would theoretically be able to translate as best as possible, word-for-word and have it in a different language. Are there any books or online resources that I can use to help me learn this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T01:41:54.543" Title="Resources to learn just grammar" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2017-02-15T03:41:14.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is answered on, and I quote below: Lieber, Rochelle. &lt;em&gt;Introducing Morphology&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed 2010, but a 2 ed 2015 exists), p. 103.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Why did English lose all this inflection? There are probably two reasons.&#xA;The first one has to do with the stress system of English: in Old English,&#xA;unlike modern English, stress was typically on the first syllable of the&#xA;word. Ends of words were less prominent, and therefore tended to be pronounced less distinctly than beginnings of words, so inflectional suffixes&#xA;tended not to be emphasized. Over time this led to a weakening of the&#xA;inflectional system. But this alone probably wouldn’t have resulted in the&#xA;nearly complete loss of inflectional marking that is the situation in present&#xA;day English; after all, German – a language closely related to English – also&#xA;shows stress on the initial syllables of words, and nevertheless has not lost&#xA;most of its inflection over the centuries.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some scholars attribute the loss of inflection to language contact in&#xA;the northern parts of Britain. For some centuries during the Old&#xA;English period, northern parts of Britain were occupied by the Danes,&#xA;who were speakers of Old Norse. Old Norse is closely related to Old&#xA;English, with a similar system of four cases, masculine, feminine, and&#xA;neuter genders, and so on. The actual inflectional endings, however,&#xA;were different, although the two languages shared a fair number of&#xA;lexical stems. For example, the stem bōt meant ‘remedy’ in both languages, and the nominative singular in both languages was the same.&#xA;But the nominative plural in Old English was bōta and in Old Norse&#xA;bótaR.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The form bóta happened to be the genitive plural in Old Norse.&#xA;Some scholars hypothesize that speakers of Old English and Old Norse&#xA;could communicate with each other to some extent, but the inflectional endings caused confusion, and therefore came to be de-emphasized or dropped. One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is that&#xA;inflection appears to have been lost much earlier in the northern parts&#xA;of Britain where Old Norse speakers cohabited with Old English speakers, than in the southern parts of Britain, which were not exposed to&#xA;Old Norse. Inflectional loss spread from north to south, until all parts&#xA;of Britain were eventually equally poor in inflection (O’Neil 1980;&#xA;Fennell 2001: 128–9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T03:41:14.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="37939" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:59:40.673" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word used for &amp;quot;banana&amp;quot; seems to differ a lot depending on the country.  For example, it is &amp;quot;banano&amp;quot; in Colombia, &amp;quot;cambur&amp;quot; in Venezuela, &amp;quot;guineo&amp;quot; in El Salvador, &amp;quot;plátano&amp;quot; in Mexico, and &amp;quot;banana&amp;quot; in Guatemala. (Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/103771/what-are-three-words-for-banana-in-spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what are three words for banana in spanish?&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15214" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T21:43:29.183" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T01:00:52.753" Title="Why does &quot;banana&quot; have so many translations in Spanish?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21141" CreationDate="2017-02-15T14:04:09.210" Score="5" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;To compile a word-list database which includes the available scattered word lists (mainly Swadesh lists), which language code should one use? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; with 2679 entries, lots of linguistic data included. (Maintained Max Planck Institute)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glottolog&lt;/a&gt; with 7943 entries and also lots of data included. (Maintained Max Planck Institute)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguasphere.info/lcontao/fichier-pdf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguasphere&lt;/a&gt; with about 21000 entries and some info included from 2000 or 2011. Theoretically limit of 18.9 million entries, thus theoretically flexible to include dialects and historic languages. (as far as I can tell dormant, otherwise Linguasphere Observatory)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/language_codes.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 639-3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-3_codes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see also&lt;/a&gt; with currently about 7865 entries (theoretical limit of 17576 entries), used by several other sources. (Maintained by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a different language code set all together?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise this is a bit of a subjective question but does anyone feel confident enough to say &quot;&lt;em&gt;this language code set should be used for the following reasons&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T15:50:53.897" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T15:50:53.897" Title="Which language code set (WALS, Linguasphere, ISO 639‑3 or Glottolog) should be the basis for a comparative linguistic project?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21147" CreationDate="2017-02-15T14:45:23.490" Score="1" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a traditional representation of a sentence's parts and it's relation called Kellogs-Reeds diagramming method,which is not used in linguistics.&#xA;There are also linguistic representations like phrase structure grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you diagram the following sentence using both methods,the pedagogical and the linguistic depiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Evidently,the American campus has become a hatchery for insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T18:24:30.923" Title="How to diagram a sentence containing a sentence adverb?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2017-02-16T03:05:12.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21139" CreationDate="2017-02-15T15:44:18.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can afford the extra work, use as many of the lists as possible, of course using explicit tags declaring from which set the code is taken, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;languagecode type=&quot;iso639-3&quot;&amp;gt;eng&amp;lt;/languagecode&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use only one of them, use ISO 639-3 if possible. It is an International Standard, well-maintained, frequently used and easily accessible. It is well received in the community and used, e.g. by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.language-archives.org/&quot;&gt;OLAC: Open Language Archives Community&lt;/a&gt; and by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/sites/default/files/Standards%20for%20LRT-v6.pdf&quot;&gt;CLARIN Project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T15:44:18.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21142" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-15T15:51:57.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T15:51:57.567" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T15:51:57.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21143" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-15T15:51:57.567" Score="0" Body="For questions about standards (like ISO 693 for language codes) that are relevant to linguists." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T03:05:36.077" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T03:05:36.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2017-02-15T16:57:19.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of several examples of a distance function is the Levenshtein edit distance. It works by producing a value based on how many 'edits' a word has to go through to match another. For example, English 'make' and Dutch 'maken' have a distance of 1, as only 'n' needs to be added or removed for both words to match. Better results can be achieved by assigning different values for more relevant edits, such as 'p' to 'b' (corresponding to predicable phonological changes), as opposed to the rather unlikely 'b' to 'z'. This can be useful in searching for cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The values produced by calculating the Levenshtein edit distance can then be used as data for plotting a graph, giving both a numeric and visual indication of distance. Of course, this method does force you to reduce language to a scoring system, which, you could argue, leaves room for an uncomfortable amount of speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example, from a quick google image search:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uApIp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uApIp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Here&amp;#39;s an example, from a quick google image search&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a wikipedia article:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T16:57:19.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T17:43:27.340" Score="2" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a decent, up-to-date &lt;em&gt;french&lt;/em&gt; version of WordNet ready to use in ElasticSearch.&#xA;We already found Wolf and WoNeF but the format is not accepted by ElasticSearch.&#xA;(We're using ES v2.4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15221" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T17:43:27.340" Title="up-to-date french version of WordNet ready to use in ElasticSearch" Tags="&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21140" CreationDate="2017-02-15T18:24:30.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simplified Tree Diagram of Supplementary Adjunct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t4Old.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t4Old.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T18:24:30.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2017-02-16T07:06:28.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my understanding of the three aspects-&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;b&gt;Mother tongue&lt;/b&gt;- Learnt from birth, usually what is spoken by the parents.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) &lt;b&gt;Native tongue&lt;/b&gt;- Place where you are, have been living; irrespective of the place of your birth &amp;amp; the language spoken by the parents. Native 'of' the place.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) &lt;b&gt;The first language&lt;/b&gt;- It may be either of two, or a completely different, a 'third' language, learning which you grew up (usually in the school) . For example, in almost all the reputed Indian schools the English is the 'first' language.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;This is how I interpret these. I am afraid, have no authoritative references for these though.&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15223" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T07:06:28.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21024" CreationDate="2017-02-16T20:24:44.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That part you've mentioned contains a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.turkishclass.com/turkish_lesson_67&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implicit auxiliary verb&lt;/a&gt; like &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;. With a sample, I can explain it like when you say &lt;em&gt;Güzel ev&lt;/em&gt; which means &lt;em&gt;this house is nice&lt;/em&gt; but if you say &lt;em&gt;nice house&lt;/em&gt; which means an adjective declension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With another example; &lt;em&gt;this house is nice&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bu ev guzel&lt;/em&gt; which contains an auxiliary verb in it after &lt;em&gt;guzel&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Bu ev guzel(dir)&lt;/em&gt;. This is the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15227" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T06:10:23.560" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T06:10:23.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21125" CreationDate="2017-02-17T00:51:00.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Non-primitive&quot; languages have plenty of &quot;absurd&quot; designations for animals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Starfish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fledermaus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chauve-souris&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Peixe-boi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Guinea pig&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These designations weren't changed when we realised that &lt;em&gt;echinodermata&lt;/em&gt; aren't fish, that bats aren't rodents, or that manatees are mammals. So languages do not reflect our comprehension of the world like this; their words are conventional, and the conventions stand even when the misunderstandings that originated them are debunked. On the other hand we already had a different word for pandas even when we still tought they were a kind of bear (and we still call our toys &quot;teddy bears&quot; even when their fur pattern is clearly that of a panda).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;primitive&quot; language will probably have more nuance than modern languages, because it needs to make distinctions that are unnecessary for urban cultures. But they will have a diminished vocabulary in that they are much more limited geographically speaking. Probably no &quot;primitive&quot; language will have different words for &quot;lion&quot; and &quot;tiger&quot;, because a community of hunter-gatherers who live where lions are common probably never saw a tiger, and conversely. I doubt the Innuit have a word for camel that isn't imported from an European language, or that ancient Hebrew had a word for penguin, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if your conculture is a tropical one, it probably won't have a word for &quot;wolf&quot;; it won't have a word for polar bears if it has no contact with arctic regions; and unless in your conworld tigers and lions somehow live much closer to each others than in Earth, they won't have a word for tiger if they have one for lion, and vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please don't fall for the idea that &quot;not having a word for X&quot; implies not having the concept of X. Grizzlies are bears, just like polar bears. But any culture that is in contact with both very well knows the difference between them, even if they do not have different words for each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T00:51:00.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21133" CreationDate="2017-02-17T08:56:33.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, there are only two basic flavours of such files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Inline&quot;, as you call it; it is also called &quot;vertical&quot; or &quot;one word per line&quot; or &quot;one token by line&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Standoff&quot;, as you call it, also called &quot;horizontal&quot; or &quot;layered&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those types there exist lot of different implementations. For the first type there is (besides CONLL that you already mentioned) the vrt format used by the Open Corpus Work Bench (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/files/CWB_Encoding_Tutorial.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tutorial&lt;/a&gt;) that allows additional XML annotation in the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second type, there is, e.g.,  &lt;a href=&quot;http://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/weblichtwiki/index.php/The_TCF_Format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tübingen Corpus Format (TCF)&lt;/a&gt; used by WebLicht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both flavours have their pros and cons. The first type is geared for fast and efficient processing and can be used for online processing. The drawback is that one needs to add a lot of fillers (e.g., &lt;code&gt;0&lt;/code&gt;) for sparse annotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type is good when there are several layers of sparse annotation, but becomes unhandy when the files grow too large. One also has to load the whole file into memory before processing can start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T08:56:33.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21085" CreationDate="2017-02-17T08:58:20.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you're searching information over is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inflectional Morphology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I'm not sure the idea that &quot;it just seems to be taken for granted that tense is expressed by modifying the verbs.&quot; is very valid. If ever somebody made this claim there would be a lot of Eurocentrism in there. This claim might be true for a huge number of Indo-European languages and also fusional languages but it might not stand at all for a variety of other languages, ancient/Mandarin Chinese being an obvious example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, there is this (perhaps incomplete) classification of &quot;isolating&quot; vs. &quot;fusional&quot; vs. &quot;agglutinative&quot; languages. Citing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (apparently not the best source but it still provides some information), an &quot;isolating&quot; language by definition &quot;is a type of language with a very low morpheme per word ratio and &lt;strong&gt;no inflectional morphology&lt;/strong&gt; whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you find some materials in that direction. Simply searching for materials on &quot;isolating language&quot; should give you a lot of what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/26A#2/22.6/152.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This entry&lt;/a&gt; on WLAS might also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, there doesn't seem to be a pre-established reason why inflectional morphology must exist. A lot of missing language features in one language compared with another can be well covered by some other mechanisms. For example, in German there is no gerund, but it doesn't stop people from being able to express the idea of something happening right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T09:03:40.993" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T09:03:40.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21085" CreationDate="2017-02-17T10:27:04.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Vietnamese, neither the verb nor any part of the sentence is modified due to tense. To indicate tenses, particles &quot;đã&quot; (past tense), &quot;đang&quot; (present progressive tense), &quot;sẽ&quot; (future tense) before verbs. If none of these particles is in the sentence, the tense is still understood in the context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tôi &lt;strong&gt;đã&lt;/strong&gt; làm &lt;em&gt;rồi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;strong&gt;-ed&lt;/strong&gt; do &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;done&lt;/strong&gt;. (English present perfect is used as past tense with an adverb.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nó   &lt;strong&gt;đang&lt;/strong&gt;   làm việc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He   &lt;strong&gt;-ing&lt;/strong&gt;   work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He   &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;     work&lt;strong&gt;ing&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tôi &lt;strong&gt;sẽ&lt;/strong&gt; đến.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ngày mai&lt;/strong&gt; trời có mưa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt; sky have rain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt;, it &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; rain. (Auto-understood that this is future, as there is &quot;tomorrow&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15078" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T10:27:04.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T17:55:46.383" Score="2" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;In CFG we &quot;simply&quot; have production rules. Whereas in Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) on the other hand, we have both composition rules over categories, and a mapping from syntax to semantics (from the categories to lambda expressions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we equivalently use such mappings to semantics, over a CFG framework, to obtain semantic representations? similarly to how we use such mappings in CCG? asked differently and perhaps more precisely, what would a combinatory formalism for semantics over &lt;em&gt;CFG&lt;/em&gt; look like? would it just in fact be CCG, or would the production rules play any role?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T18:32:23.970" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T06:04:35.260" Title="Can we build semantic mappings for CFG same as we do in CCG?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T20:01:32.317" Score="4" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really can't figure out the etymology of these 3 'mac-' words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uxUEm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uxUEm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to google, the etymology for &quot;macaroni&quot; originates from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;late 17th century: from Italian maccaroni (now usually spelled maccheroni ), plural of maccarone, from late Greek makaria ‘food made from barley.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this could originate from early macaoroni pastas possibly being made strictly from barley? Is this true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a google search for the etymology of either &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/coconut-macaroons.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;macaroons&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;macarons&lt;/a&gt; says that these two words also originate from italian &lt;em&gt;maccarone&lt;/em&gt;. However, both foods are devoid of barley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what exactly is going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide an etymoligcal history of these terms and how they came to be called what they are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15237" LastEditorUserId="15237" LastEditDate="2018-06-02T14:44:07.843" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T14:44:07.843" Title="Macaroons, macarons, macaroni and...barley?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21156" CreationDate="2017-02-17T20:20:11.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary position on &quot;macaroni&quot; is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italian maccherone is perhaps &amp;lt; Byzantine Greek μακαρία barley-broth&#xA;  (only attested in Hesychius, and therefore possibly from a lost&#xA;  ancient Greek or Hellenistic Greek text) &amp;lt; ancient Greek μακάριος&#xA;  blessed (because originally a funeral or charitable meal); another&#xA;  suggested Greek etymology is &amp;lt; medieval Greek μακαρώνεια funeral chant&#xA;  (13th cent.) &amp;lt; ancient Greek μακάριος + αἰώνιος eternal (see aeonian&#xA;  adj.). maccherone is attested early in southern Italian use, and may&#xA;  have entered Italian or post-classical Latin from the Greek&#xA;  settlements in southern Italy (compare Italian macco , originally of&#xA;  similar meaning and perhaps of the same origin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they are of the opinion that it originally was a &lt;em&gt;gnocco&lt;/em&gt;. They are less informative about &quot;macaroon&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; Middle French macaron (mid 16th cent. in senses 1, 2) &amp;lt; Italian&#xA;  maccarone , macarone , obsolete or regional variants of maccherone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but at any rate, they reduce &quot;macaroon&quot; and &quot;macaroni&quot; to the same source (and don't even list &quot;macaron&quot; separately). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T20:20:11.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21155" CreationDate="2017-02-18T13:30:36.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can get from CG (Categorial Grammar) to the semantic mappings you want, I can show you a way to get from CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) to CG. So the answer to your question might possibly be &quot;yes&quot;, since CFG =&gt; CG and CG =&gt; CCG would imply (I guess) that CFG =&gt; CCG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave a brief account of how to get from my theory, &quot;2psg&quot;, which is an elaboration of PSG, to CG, in answer to a previous question on this forum, here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20262/difference-between-particle-and-adverb-in-english&quot;&gt;my second answer to question about particles&lt;/a&gt;.  The basic idea is to reformulate the information given in a node of a CG structure diagram as a phrase structure rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A basic problem in going from CFG to CG is that when phrase structure rules are combined to derive a new phrase structure rule, the derivation is not naturally functional, whereas the corresponding operation in CG is a function.  I've described a way to force the derivation of a phrase structure rule from others into functional form by making use of some ideas from Relational Grammar.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;my post on 2psg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_categorial_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia on CCG&lt;/a&gt;, I can reconstruct &quot;application combinators&quot; and a special case of &quot;composition combinators&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T13:42:36.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-18T14:39:24.260" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a project, I have been trying to understand the low-level heuristic approach from the perspective of a device attempting to behave smart, like Alexa and the likes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, it starts with STT, then text classification, PoS/NER, IR and finally TTS. (maybe some additional steps, but I am generally stating here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't clearly understand the text classification part properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the device able to come to a conclusion what the subject matter of the text is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various text classification heavily rely on the fact there would be large corpora to train with. And this makes sense, particularly for if the application is news categorisation, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here we are talking about spoken language. If the sentence is &lt;code&gt;Tell me the weather&lt;/code&gt;, there's only so much corpus you can generate for the variation in that simple statement. And still, find some other way to ask for the weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think for each category there can be a large datasets of statements which would help to make the device clearly distinguish between commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. Is the classification purely rule-based, statistical or hybrid?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. If either of these, any of these approach would introduce ambiguity. How to deal with that if building one and eventually approach near unambiguity? Since more categories (or skillsets) would mean more similar statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS - The hardware is on raspi, with Google STT, naive bayes for classification, nlp-compromise for NER, various APIs, and finally eSpeak.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PPS - Sure there is SVM, deep learning, RNN and more cool topics. But I don't see them do a classifier job only for this purpose, even if I rig a GPU externally to talk to it. But honestly I am not clear of what could be a reliable method for classification&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15106" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T03:44:17.720" Title="NLP text classification approach for smart devices" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-18T17:54:47.553" Score="7" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;My impression is that, whereas the grammaticalisation pathways of personal pronouns, agreement markers, auxiliary verbs, case markers, etc. all seem well understood, we know much less about interrogative pro-forms. We know what these guys can turn &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; (they feature a lot in pseudoclefts and relative clauses), but not much, it seems, about where they originate. The exception, in my view, might be &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;, since it seems that 'why' is quite transparently derived from 'for what' in a number of languages (&lt;em&gt;pourquoi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wei shenme&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) I guess the 'stubbornness' of wh-words might have something to do with it (a lot of PIE roots are retained in Indo-European languages for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do we know about common grammaticalisation pathways to wh-words? Pointers to relevant literature will be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T13:47:37.190" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T09:43:13.810" Title="What are some common diachronic origins of interrogative pro-forms?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17232" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:41:56.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unifying and subdividing speech forms under an ISO code is not a rigorous ontological claim: it is the standardization statement &quot;this linguistic thing is to be abbreviated that way&quot;. &quot;Quechua&quot;, &quot;Luyia&quot;, and &quot;Arabic&quot; (also &quot;Latvian&quot;) are examples of macrolanguages, under ISO 639-3. The individual languages are different enough that they are not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; mutually intelligible. Cypriot, Juba Arabic (pga), and Chadian are quite different, and it is well-known that Moroccan Arabic is &quot;challenging&quot;. I haven't experiences Tajiki or Uzbeki Arabic but I don't find the claims to be too incredible: we can leave it at that (I am skeptical about N and S Levantine by the mutual intelligibility criterion). The point is that there are significant linguistic differences between these varieties of Arabic, and linguists have documented even more differences than are presently recognized in the ISO system. (See for example the numerous varieties documented in T. Prochazka's book &lt;em&gt;Saudi Arabian dialects&lt;/em&gt;). All of the forms are still unified with a single identifier &lt;em&gt;ara&lt;/em&gt; which refers to the Arabic macrolanguage; individual varieties also have their identifiers. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/arab1395&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glottolog system&lt;/a&gt; makes even more distinctions (40) – subsuming Maltese under their arab1395 (not included under &lt;em&gt;ara&lt;/em&gt; in the ISO system), subdividing Libyan Arabic into 4 varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true of the various Luyia languages, which are unified under &lt;em&gt;luy&lt;/em&gt;, but also distinguished with particular identifiers (&lt;em&gt;lts&lt;/em&gt; for Tachoni, &lt;em&gt;lri&lt;/em&gt; for Marachi, and so on); idem the Quechua languages. Somali is presently not indicated as a &quot;macrolanguage&quot;, it is an individual language, but the main reason for the failure to subdivide is the lack of information on the extent of difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is thus not surprising that these languages enjoy subdivisions in ISO 639-3 classification. What &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; somewhat surprising is that there is no subdivision in the ISO analysis of English, where there are dozens of varieties that are mutually unintelligible in the same say that Moroccan, Syrian and Juba Arabic are. Glottolog does, however, subdivide (&quot;Mercian&quot;) &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/macr1271&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; into 35 varieties, plus 4 Scots varieties (which ISO registers as a distinct language, &lt;em&gt;sco&lt;/em&gt;, from English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T22:41:56.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T07:49:53.827" Score="3" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered a difficult question for syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors discuss a special case of coordination called “&lt;strong&gt;right node raising&lt;/strong&gt;”. When both conjuncts have the same string (e.g. typically an object or a complement, i.e. underlined strings) (i.e. (1a), (2a) and (3a)), the shared string (i.e. wavy underlined strings) can appear only once at the end of the clause or “right node raised” (i.e. (1b), (2b) and (3b)). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. They play unusual music, and I listened to unusual music.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;           b. They play and I listened to unusual music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. Everyone claims that John lied, but Mary does not believe that John lied.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   b. Everyone claims but Mary does not believe that John lied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Based on the coordination test results in (1b)—(2b), discuss which&#xA;  structures above the  data support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paul claim that the well-formedness of (1b), (2b) implies an&#xA;  unexpected structure involving the verb and modal.discuss why the test&#xA;  results in Part A are unexpected. Whenever  appropriate, include&#xA;  relevant examples in your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15244" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T07:30:28.027" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T08:02:20.227" Title="Right node raising" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T12:12:30.363" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a website that is equivalent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/go&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In oxforddictionaries, you see it gives all of the meanings of a word with example sentences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there such equivalent website for the Arabic language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. we have equivalent in Turkish language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T11:45:13.697" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T11:45:13.697" Title="Are there any equivalent of oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ in Arabic?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21165" CreationDate="2017-02-19T15:35:56.950" Score="6" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known that the derivatives of Latin &lt;em&gt;mulier&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fēmina&lt;/em&gt; competed in Romance languages as the main word for `woman'. For instance, the former remained as Spanish &lt;em&gt;mujer&lt;/em&gt; and Portuguese &lt;em&gt;mulher&lt;/em&gt; (though S &lt;em&gt;hembra&lt;/em&gt;, P &lt;em&gt;fêmea&lt;/em&gt; do remain). French language, however, has, to my knowledge, only &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: does any descendant of Latin &lt;em&gt;mulier&lt;/em&gt; remain in French language and if not, what would the gistorical derivative form look like if it survived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T16:22:40.347" Title="Derivatives of Latin *mulier* in French" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21164" CreationDate="2017-02-19T16:22:40.347" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9sor_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trésor de la langue française&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has most the answer to your question in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/femme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology section for &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Classical Latin &lt;em&gt;femina&lt;/em&gt; “female”, then “woman, wife” which competed against the Latin words &lt;em&gt;mulier&lt;/em&gt; “woman” which no longer survives in French (contrast with Italian &lt;em&gt;moglie&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;mujer&lt;/em&gt;) except in the archaic form &lt;em&gt;moillier&lt;/em&gt; “wife, woman” (which disappears from texts in the 14th century; 2 occurrences in the 15th and 16th centuries), and &lt;em&gt;uxor&lt;/em&gt; “wife” which gave the very rare &lt;em&gt;oissour&lt;/em&gt; “wife” (which disappears from texts in the first half of the 13th century; a few occurrences remain in the 13th and 14th centuries in epic retellings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, it didn't survive (nor did any word based on this root that I can think of or find in a word list). The Middle French form would be &lt;em&gt;moillier&lt;/em&gt;, which might have evolved to &lt;em&gt;*mouiller&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;*mouille&lt;/em&gt; (parallel to &lt;em&gt;moiller&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/mouiller&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;mouiller&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;”) or possibly to something simpler if it had been a common word (possibly via variants such as &lt;em&gt;muiller&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;molier&lt;/em&gt; which could have led to &lt;em&gt;*molie&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;*mole&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly, there is a rare modern French word which has the same root, through a different path: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/mouk%C3%A8re&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;moukère&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;mouquère&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which means a woman, from the Algerian Arabic word &lt;em&gt;moukera&lt;/em&gt; which was a borrowing from the Spanish &lt;em&gt;mujer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T16:22:40.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21176" CreationDate="2017-02-19T17:05:23.817" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you ever come across an example of a dually embedded content clause functioning as subject, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That that it works is obvious is disputed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:59:25.340" Title="Are examples of double-embedded content clause subjects attested?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21163" CreationDate="2017-02-19T17:23:52.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%84%D8%BA%D8%A9#Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. They have definitions, pronounciation, declension, etymology, ... for a fair amount of words in most major languages. You can also view the entries in languages other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:23:52.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21170" CreationDate="2017-02-20T02:15:50.227" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across Montague's treatment of &quot;John seeks a unicorn&quot;. He distinguishes de re and de dicto interpretations of it on the basis that the de dicto meaning does not entail the existence of any unicorn; in other words, John is seeking some set of properties that answers to the conventional description of a unicorn, but this property may not have any instances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in a slightly different example: &quot;Jack seeks a woman&quot;. Here there is no doubt that women do in fact exist, but it seems ambiguous as to whether Jack is seeking a particular woman, such as his wife, or any woman, i.e. he just desires some female company. Attempting to represent this sentence in classical predicate logic does not support this distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it there are several options: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could assimilate it to Montague's unicorn and say on the second interpretation it means Jack seeks some set of properties common to women.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could go 'modal' and say that on the first interpretation, Jack seeks a set of possible worlds in which he is with a particular woman, while on the second he seeks a set of possible worlds in which he is with any woman. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We could perhaps express the distinction using intuitionistic logic, as the difference between (∃x)(Woman(x) ∧ Seeks(jack,x)) and ¬¬(∃x)(Woman(x) ∧ Seeks(jack,x)).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe we could say there is no semantic ambiguity at all and the difference in the readings is just a matter of pragmatics. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any illumination that theoretical linguistics might shed on it. Thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15251" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:39:15.007" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:39:15.007" Title="Representing constructive and non-constructive claims in formal semantics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21168" CreationDate="2017-02-20T06:28:43.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is pragmatic, in a sense, and has to do with who is responsible for identifying what Jack seeks as a woman.  Consider for instance &quot;Jack seeks a woman, although he may be mistaken about her sex,&quot; where it is I the speaker who identifies her as being a woman.  When a sentence is assigned a representation that makes explicit various conversational participants (or others), that is a &quot;performative analysis&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T06:28:43.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21168" CreationDate="2017-02-20T06:50:15.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the answer lies in the co-reference between the object being predicated the existence and the verbal-object status over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall the formalization of the two readings:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;de dicto: &lt;code&gt;seek'(j, ^λQ∃x[unicorn'(x) ∧ Q{x}])&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  de re: &lt;code&gt;∃x[unicorn'(x) ∧ [seek'(j, ^λP[P{x}])]]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second reading, the &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; that is existentially quantified over is coreferential between the &lt;code&gt;unicorn'&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;seek'&lt;/code&gt; predication, with the two predicates being conjoined by conjunction. So whenever there is such an x which is a unicorn, this must be the same x that John is seeking. If it is true that there is some unicorn (possibly even several ones) but this none of these unicorns is the one that John is seeking, then the sentence becomes false, because what the existential quantifier ranges over is the conjunction of both the extensional unicorn predication and the reference in the intensional seeking construction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it less formal, the de dicto reading can be reworded as &quot;John seeks something which is a unicorn&quot;, whereas the de re reading can be reworded as &quot;There is a unicorn which John seeks&quot;, where it is clear that what John seeks must refer to the same entity that is claimed existence about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applied to your example, if it is clear that there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; woman, this doesn't entail the de re formalization - because if none of these women is what John is looking for, then the coreference between the (extensional) &lt;code&gt;woman'(x)&lt;/code&gt;and the intensional &lt;code&gt;seek'&lt;/code&gt;predication is incorrect. So as soon as you choose the second reading, you automatically imply that among the women that exist, one of them is what John is looking for. If you want to exclude that possibility, i.e. leave open the option that there is some woman but not that kind of woman that John seeks, you would have to go with the de dicto reading, since in that case, as soon as one of the conjuncts in the intensional expression becomes false, the existence of something which is both a woman and seeked by John is negated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my answer is: Whether among the women that definitely do exist there is one which John seeks is the same distinction as between whether any women exist at all, due to the coreference between the variables being predicated over. The the dicto reading is underspecified w.r.t. existence and doesn't exclude the possibility of there always (extensionally) being women, whereas the de re formalization commits you to the women claimed existence over being that woman that John seeks, if the sentence is to become true.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you choose the weaker statement, in which the existence of a woman doesn't entail the existence of the thing John is seeking, then this is only represented by the de dicto reading.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether one could tweak the representations in such a way that one would get a formulation of precisely the case you described, where the existence of unicorns is extensionally true but the coreference with the entity involved in the intensional predication is not. At the moment I can't think of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T06:57:19.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T06:57:19.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T10:02:33.757" Score="-1" ViewCount="1807" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a maximum subset of the English language such that words can be divided into two categories, one of which must include at least nouns, proper names, adjectives, numerals, verbs and adverbs, and the other must include at least the articles ('a', 'the'). Each of the groups may, and should, include other words, like different kinds of pronouns, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK to omit some words if they cannot be placed in one of the two categories (sacrificing the expressive power of the resulting subset of English). For example, if &quot;will&quot; the noun and &quot;will&quot; the verb, or &quot;mine&quot; the noun and &quot;mine&quot; the possessive pronoun fall into different categories, they may be omitted (yes, even sacrificing the whole future case is tolerable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't be hard if there were no constraints, would it? The division has to be natural (intuitive for a native speaker; words in the first group should be considered substantially more &quot;significant&quot; than words from the second one) and unambiguous: no word with the same spelling should fall into both categories, regardless of position in the sentence, part of speech, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15253" LastEditorDisplayName="user15253" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T14:43:34.337" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T18:40:38.893" Title="Specific English word classification" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21171" CreationDate="2017-02-20T10:16:51.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed some kind of classification along the lines you sketch, it is &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; word classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open classes easily accept neologisms and contain a lot of different words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closed classes contain a usually small number of fixed words and are resistant to neologisms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the notion of open and closed word classes depends on the language you are looking at. There are language outside where the pronouns are an open class and there are languages where adjectives or verbs are a closed class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English, the closed classes are articles and determiners, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles (words like &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;not&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T18:40:38.893" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T18:40:38.893" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21171" CreationDate="2017-02-20T12:49:55.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yielding roughly the same as the distinction between open and closed word classes, but from a more functional perspecive rather than w.r.t. productivity (i.e. how frequently are new words form based on their class, as is the case in the open vs. closed classification) is the distinction between content words and function words:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;content words&lt;/strong&gt; are mostly nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They usually refer to predications (i.e. properties of one individual or relations between several individuals) over concrete entities in the world, such as &quot;is a dog&quot;, &quot;sleeps&quot;, &quot;is red&quot;, &quot;loves Mary&quot; or predications over predicates (such as &quot;slowly&quot; which modifies some moving event, which can again be seen as a predication over entities).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Of course, abstract nouns such as &quot;theory&quot;, which do not really refer to a concrete entity, mass nouns such as &quot;water&quot; which can not discretely be counted or some other problematic cases do belong to this category too, but speakers have quite good intuitions about these words still belonging to the category &quot;noun&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since content words are used to refer to something in the actual word, they are rather productive, i.e. you can always invent new words (or build them up from existing ones) to fit the language to the circumstances you want to describe, such as &quot;bus stop&quot; (&quot;bus&quot; + &quot;stop&quot;).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;function words&lt;/strong&gt; comprise, roughly, categories such as articles, quantifiers, pronouns, adpositions, conjunctions and subjunctions, and are words that do not predicate something in the world but are rather there to express functional aspects such as relations between sentences and phrases (&quot;and&quot;, &quot;or&quot;, &quot;if&quot;, &quot;because&quot;, ...), quantification (such as &quot;a&quot;, &quot;2&quot;, &quot;many&quot;, ...), reference (&quot;he&quot;, &quot;there&quot;, &quot;then&quot;, ...), interjection (&quot;yes&quot;, &quot;no&quot;, &quot;hey&quot;, ...) and others.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since the set of concepts such as logical relations, quantities etc. are rather limited, the set of function words corresponds more or less to the set of closed class words, as new expressions are rarely invented.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, although languages may vary in the size and distribution of their lexical inventory (for example, some languages may have adjectives that behave very verbal and in which adjecties might not be seen as a separate class, or numerals which have more properties of a noun than of something determiner or adjective-like, or a rather productive and open-class set of adpositions, ...), the basic distinction between content words and function words, as well as the correponding word classes, is something more or less universal, and not specific to the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T13:03:45.953" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T13:03:45.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20884" CreationDate="2017-02-20T12:57:21.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric/latifa/arabic_corpora.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a list of Arabic corpora, with notes about their origins. While I doubt if any of them &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; exclude Quranic quotations, many of them will be predominantly non-Quranic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T12:57:21.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21171" CreationDate="2017-02-20T14:03:50.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some additional contributions of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stressed&lt;/strong&gt; vs &lt;strong&gt;unstressed&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns, adjectives, lexical verbs, numerals and adverbs in English all carry primary stress, whereas articles don't. Prepositions will go into either category ('of' to the second class, 'over' to the first class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterexample: The only one I can think of is that auxiliary verbs are unstressed, but you want them in the first category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bound&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words in the first class may stand alone in a phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) [NP [N Humans]] are [AP [A smelly]]. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (2) [NP [PN John]] is smelly. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (3) I've got [NP [# one]]. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (4) Humans [VP [V smell]]. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (5) I [VP [Aux will]]. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (6) He [AdvP [Adv really]] smells. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English articles, like articles in most languages, are bound forms and can't appear alone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) *That's [NP [Art the]]/[NP [Art a]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end you may end up needing a combination of the criteria proposed to get your classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:03:50.767" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21166" CreationDate="2017-02-20T14:59:25.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out that this type of embedding is discussed (and marked with #: semantically or pragmatically anomalous) in Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum's CGEL in the section called 'Processing factors', pp 1405-6. Also, Pullum tells me that such examples are never found. &quot;Fred Householder asserted in a couple of book reviews in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; that English has a surface constraint forbidding &quot;that that&quot;. Terry Langendoen's view is that it's a processing matter: stashing two subordinators in a row as promissory notes for finite clauses that are to come is too much of a strain on the old processing box.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9277" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:59:25.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21194" CreationDate="2017-02-20T19:08:34.733" Score="4" ViewCount="4278" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand there are different theories of grammar. There is the a set of traditional pragmatic grammars aiming at teaching languages, which might not even have names for themselves. Then, there is a set of grammars for academic purpose, two popular subsets are the dependency grammars and the phrase structure grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the building principles of a certain phrase is depends on the specific grammar it refers to, though there is a common layman understanding of it simply being a few words with a concrete function in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;main issue&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I met different definitions of what adverb phrases/adverbial phrases are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some state, they are nothing more but adverbs enhanced by one or more further adverbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;very suspiciously  &lt;strong&gt;quiet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other say they are prepositional phrases functioning as adverbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I threw a stone &lt;em&gt;into the bucket&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and still others say they consist of an adverb enhanced by other adverbs and prepositional phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wrote &lt;em&gt;tremendously lively for a mummy of 4000 years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I named just these , but I stumbled upon more , giving me the impression of  arbitrarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please shed some light, for instance by explaining how the adverb or adverbial phrase evolved, which term emerged first, when did the semantic explosion occur or however you think would make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T21:52:58.130" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T09:17:52.183" Title="Is the adverbial phrase and adverb phrase identical?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21177" CreationDate="2017-02-20T19:50:27.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I very much dislike the term &quot;adverbial&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is very unsatisfactory to have a function term that is morphologically derived from a category term. Adverb is a word category, and adverb phrase (a phrase headed by an adverb) the corresponding phrase category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adverbial is a function and may be realised by an AdvP (&lt;em&gt;He spoke quickly&lt;/em&gt;), a PP (&lt;em&gt;He spoke with enthusiasm&lt;/em&gt;), an NP (&lt;em&gt;He’s speaking this evening&lt;/em&gt;). AdvPs do not always function as adverbials: they may function as modifier in AdjPs (&lt;em&gt;It was quite amazingly expensive&lt;/em&gt;), etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adverbial phrase is quite often used for any phrase functioning as adverbial and hence likely to be confused with adverb phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confusion is overcome by the use of the term &quot;&lt;strong&gt;adjunct&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; as an alternative to &quot;adverbial&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T18:33:23.900" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T18:33:23.900" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T00:09:09.110" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;For practical reasons, it is obvious to assume there is chart giving an overview which phrases can be assigned to which functions in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, one sentence function is called an &lt;strong&gt;adverbial&lt;/strong&gt; (a confusing term, adjunct should be preferred) and three phrases, namely &lt;strong&gt;adverb phrase, prepositional phrase and noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt; can be assigned to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is one, then I am not successful in finding it, I need for instance a term for this kind of chart, just like there is a name for multiplication table&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T14:05:44.430" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T14:05:44.430" Title="Is there a chart showing all assignments of phrases to functions within a sentence?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21181" CreationDate="2017-02-21T00:41:51.220" Score="18" ViewCount="1797" Body="&lt;p&gt;As chance would have it, I came across three unrelated persons each describing the adverb as the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the garbage can among the word classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happened in Germany and the original wording was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Das Adverb dient als der Abfalleimer unter den Wortart en&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken the circumstances into consideration, the same metaphora and a background in linguistics in each of them, it is hard to believe in coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know about the origin of this metaphora or why adverbs could be regarded as the garbage can among the part of speeches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T02:33:35.477" Title="What is the idea behind calling the adverb the garbage can of words?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21180" CreationDate="2017-02-21T02:27:38.027" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional grammarians going all the way back to Donatus are accused of classifying as &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt; any word they couldn't make fit anywhere else in the canonical parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very old criticism. The Stoic grammarians are suspected of having their tongues skewed into their cheeks when they employed the word  &lt;em&gt;pandektes&lt;/em&gt; ('all-receiver') for &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt;. John Horne Tooke, &lt;em&gt;The Diversions of Purley&lt;/em&gt;, 1786, called the adverb “The common sink and repository of all heterogeneous and unknown corruptions”, citing the 4th- to 5th-century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— &lt;em&gt;Omnis pars orationis&lt;/em&gt;, every word, &lt;em&gt;quando desinit esse quod est&lt;/em&gt;, when a Grammarian knows not what to make of it, &lt;em&gt;migrat in Adverbium&lt;/em&gt;, he calls an Adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s a joke (what Servius actually says is that every part of speech can be converted into an adverb); but Horne Tooke was one of the first to recognize explicitly that the term &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt; doesn’t really tell you much about how a word so designated actually functions syntactically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemporary grammar has of course progressed beyond the classical notion; we no longer call unclassifiable terms &lt;em&gt;adverbs&lt;/em&gt; but employ the far more meaningful term &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T02:33:35.477" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T02:33:35.477" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21177" CreationDate="2017-02-21T12:49:24.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the adverbial phrase and adverb phrase identical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost, and I don't see the problem with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While, taken precisely, an adverb phrase is something that contains a lexical adverb while an adverbial might (but not needs to) consist of something different, like a PP or an NP, their &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; is essentially the same: They modify the verb, the verb phrase, the sentence, sometimes adjectives, and in general anything which is not nominal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a syntactic structure, what matters are not primarily the precise lexical classes - these can already be encoded in the tree by differentiating between node labels AdvP, PP, NP etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Rather, what is relevant in syntactic considerations is what role a constituent plays in a sentence. The reason why it is called &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is because they behave the same as adverbs. They occur in all the same positions, they make all the same kind of modifications, and if it wasn't for the lexical categories they consist of, you couldn't tell any syntactic difference between an actual adverb phrase and a general adverb&lt;em&gt;ial&lt;/em&gt; phrase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This makes &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; a useful coverterm for &quot;everything which behaves like an adverb (= &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt;)&quot;, which is at the same time more specific than the terms &lt;em&gt;modifier&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt;, which can as well refer to, e.g., PPs or AdjPs modifying an NP by adjunction, which I would not call adverbials. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, they are not exactly identical in that an adverb phrase is headed by a lexical adverb while an adverbial phrase isn't necessarily, but they are identical in their syntactic function (modifying verbs, VPs, sentences etc.) and this is what is relevant in syntactic analysis - after all, playing the same role as lexical adverbs in a sentence is the very reason why they are called so.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And as long as they serve to distinguish a certain class of constituents, the mere etymology of a term shouldn't bother one too much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T14:16:36.423" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T14:16:36.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T23:12:19.080" Score="4" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word category &lt;strong&gt;noun&lt;/strong&gt; has a corresponding phrase category &lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;adverb&lt;/strong&gt; has &lt;strong&gt;adverb phrase&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;noun&lt;/strong&gt; has &lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other word categories like, for instance, determiners and quantifiers seem to m being more puzzling whether the have or have not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe one word category has no corresponding phrase category in a given language , but then it has in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T23:51:40.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T00:27:08.413" Title="Does each word category have a corresponding phrase category?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T23:28:23.350" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hello everyone,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm trying to further define adjectives such as &quot;beautiful&quot; in an ontological sense.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any adjectives which denote abstract OR concrete nouns, be concrete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &quot;beautiful&quot; be an attribute, or is only &quot;beauty&quot; an attribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the ontology of adjectives dependent on their logic? (auto / hetero)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would be very thankful for help with this.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15272" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T23:28:23.350" Title="Can adjectives be concrete in an ontological sense?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-02-22T09:40:22.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21185" CreationDate="2017-02-21T23:47:09.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that syntactic analysis is more interested in functional rather than lexical aspects, it would be not implausible that in general, certain POS categories can be subsumed under one syntactic category label in order to caputure syntactic commonalities between different word classes, while at the same time it seems possible to create syntactic lables that do not have a direct equivalent in POS classes at all if such a new category label is syntactically well-motivated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, this question is of course highly dependent on your presumed POS and syntactic inventory; the below list of word categories is to be seen as an approximation rather than universally representative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word categories &lt;strong&gt;noun&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Adj&lt;/code&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;adposition&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;adverb&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Adv&lt;/code&gt;) rather undoubtedly have a corresponding syntactic category in mainstream phrase structure grammars.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conjunctions&lt;/strong&gt; are surprisingly rarely treated in syntactic analysis, probably because it imposes non-trivial problems to binary branching, but are, if represented, usually given the category label &lt;code&gt;Conj&lt;/code&gt;. However, as BillJ pointed out, this is not a &lt;em&gt;phrasal&lt;/em&gt; category: There is no such thing as &lt;code&gt;ConjP&lt;/code&gt;. So this would be an example of a word class that does not have a phrasal counterpart.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Subjunctions&lt;/strong&gt; usually occur in complementizer (&lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;) position. This is a point where one might argue about whether this class has an own syntactic label; every subjunction I can think of will receive the &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; label, but there are items labelled as &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; which are not lexical subjunctions.  So this is probably a problematic case.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pronouns&lt;/strong&gt; certainly don't have their own syntactic category. Depending on the type of pronoun (personal, reflexive, possessive, demonstrative, relative, indefinite, interrogative, ...), they might be classified as &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; (there is disagreement between different theories here), but they certainly don't make up their own category.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Articles&lt;/strong&gt; are assigned the category &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt;, but this category also comprises certain pronouns  and, for the sake of unifying all types of quantifiers under one syntactic category, sometimes also numerals, so there is no 1:1 mapping here either.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Particles&lt;/strong&gt; can either be put together with adverb(ial)s or given a special treatment (such as a category &lt;code&gt;Neg&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, but then again one might locate the negation in &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; and so on); this is a very problematic category - most of the time, &quot;particles&quot; would probably be treated the same way as &quot;adverbials&quot; - , but in any case, there sure isn't a standarly assumed syntactic category &lt;code&gt;PRT&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for &lt;strong&gt;interjections&lt;/strong&gt;, I have to admit I'm not even sure what the usual syntactic analysis is, but I've never seen a syntactic label such as &lt;code&gt;Itj&lt;/code&gt;, so they are probably subsumed under &quot;something adverbial&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the same time, functional categories don't (always) have a counterpart in lexical categories; this holds especially true for the categories &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt;, but also the types of constituents which occur under &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; do not belong to a fixed lexical category (which may contain not only different lexical types, but also purely featural or empty elements).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this stipulated set of lexical classes and my implicitely assumed inventory of syntactic labels, one would come to the conclusion that &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, not every lexical category corresponds to a syntactic category, as is especially visible in prononuns and articles sharing the catgories &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt;, as well the non-1:1 mapping between subjunctions and the &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; category, and also the problematic treatment of conjunctions and interjections.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But again - this answer is highly dependent on your presumed lexical and syntactic category inventory, on the properties of the individual language under investigation and - as always - of the presumed syntactic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T00:27:08.413" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T00:27:08.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21185" CreationDate="2017-02-22T08:01:39.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside &quot;interjections&quot;, we recognise eight (8) word categories (parts of speech). Six (6) of them can function as the head of corresponding phrases: the other two can’t. The very small coordinator and subordinator classes do not function as head but serve as markers of coordination and subordination: there is no such thing as 'coordinator phrases' or 'subordinator phrases'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Noun (&lt;strong&gt;NP&lt;/strong&gt;) “this clear case of dedication to duty”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Verb (&lt;strong&gt;VP&lt;/strong&gt;) “saw something in there”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] Adjective (&lt;strong&gt;AdjP&lt;/strong&gt;) “very eager for further news”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] Determinative (&lt;strong&gt;DP&lt;/strong&gt;) “almost every”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] Adverb (&lt;strong&gt;AdvP&lt;/strong&gt;) “quite separately from this issue”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] Preposition (&lt;strong&gt;PP&lt;/strong&gt;) “right out of the area”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[7] Coordinator (no phrasal category)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[8] Subordinator (no phrasal category)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: pronouns are not treated as a distinct part of speech, but as a subclass of noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T08:01:39.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21084" CreationDate="2017-02-22T09:29:36.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a good task for a vector space model. Vector models represent corpora in high dimensional space. Words or sentences that are dissimilar in meaning are further apart in the vector space. There are many different methods for generating the space, but they all rest on the idea that similar-meaning words appear in similar contexts. Latent Semantic Analysis (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSA&lt;/a&gt;) is one method, &lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word2vec&lt;/a&gt; is another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest training a word embedding on a much larger sample that doesn't include corpus A or corpus B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then analyze then language used to contrast topics A and B with respect the the distribution of their language within the space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15276" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:29:36.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21185" CreationDate="2017-02-22T16:58:05.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I question whether the premise of your question is true about language structure, though it is surely true about the way some people talk about language.  Why think there is any difference between single word and &quot;corresponding&quot; multiple word constituents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to think of counterexamples. &quot;Small&quot; is a single word prenominal modifier -- an adjective. Then how about &quot;very small&quot;?  Does having two words make it an adjective phrase?  I see no evidence for a difference in category.  In fact, if there were a difference in category, it should not be possible to coordinate an adjective and an adjective modified by an adverb.  Yet it is: &quot;wobbly and very small&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T16:58:05.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21177" CreationDate="2017-02-23T15:13:01.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An adverb phrase is best thought of as a phrase headed by an adverb, in the same way that a preposition phrase is a phrase headed by a preposition and so forth. An 'Adverbial' is a Modifier within a clause or sentence. In other words &lt;em&gt;Adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is a grammatical relation like &lt;em&gt;Subject&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Object&lt;/em&gt;, whereas &lt;em&gt;adverb phrase&lt;/em&gt; is a phrasal category like &lt;em&gt;verb phrase&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;preposition phrase&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Full answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is a bane to the principled study of language. It is the epitome of the worst problem in the field of language study  - a problem which  should by now be regarded as a schoolkid problem - the problem of not understanding the difference between syntactic functions (or grammatical relations) and parts of speech or types of phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a few principled writers who use the term, an &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is a phrase which functions as an Adjunct (read Modifier) in a clause. The important point there is that &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; in any principled description of language is a type of syntactic function (or grammatical relation). It is not a type of phrase or a type of word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic functions (also described as grammatical relations) are the different jobs that chunks of words can do in a sentence or phrase. So for example the chunk of words &lt;em&gt;the elephant you met yesterday&lt;/em&gt;, which happens to be a noun phrase, has the function of Subject in :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The elephant you met yesterday was coy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the function of Complement of a preposition in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm scared of the elephant you met yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the function of Object in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I admire the elephant you met yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the function of Predicative Complement in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That elephant was the elephant you met yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the function of Determiner in a noun phrase in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The elephant you met yesterday's ears were enormous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as can be seen from the examples above, a type of phrase, in this case a noun phrase, can have many different types of function. It's also important to realise that the same syntactic function can be realised by many different types of phrase. So, for instance, Predicative Complements can be noun phrases, adjective phrases or preposition phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beth was a doctor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beth was happy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beth was out of sorts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the examples above we see a noun phrase, an adjective phrase and a preposition phrase functioning as Predicative Complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjuncts in clause structure&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the important question here is: what's an Adjunct? In terms of clause structure, an Adjunct is an extra phrase in the clause. It is not a Subject or a Complement of the verb. A Complement of a verb is a phrase which fills a special slot set up by the verb. For example, the verb &lt;em&gt;PUT&lt;/em&gt; has two special slots for certain types of phrase. Apart from a Subject slot, it has a slot for the thing that is being moved and it has a slot for the destination of that thing. If one of these slots isn't filled the sentence will be ungrammatical or seem a bit odd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*He put the pen. (no destination, wrong)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*He put on the table. (no thing, wrong)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He put the pen on the table. (grammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example above &lt;em&gt;the pen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on the table&lt;/em&gt; are two separate Complements of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast with Complements, Adjuncts in clause structure don't fill a special slot set up by the verb. They are syntactically and semantically extra elements. Sentences are well formed with or without Adjuncts. Adjuncts have no special relationship with the verb. In the following example &lt;em&gt;at four o'clock&lt;/em&gt; is an Adjunct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He put the pen on the table at four o'clock.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He put the pen on the table.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences above are well-formed with or without the phrase &lt;em&gt;at four o'clock&lt;/em&gt;. Notice that we can stick this type of phrase on the end of just about any sentence regardless of the verb in the clause. There is no special relationship between &lt;em&gt;PUT&lt;/em&gt; and the preposition phrase &lt;em&gt;at four o'clock&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very importantly for the discussion here, Adjuncts can take many different forms. For example, they can be adverb phrases, preposition phrases or noun phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob plays football &lt;strong&gt;very well&lt;/strong&gt; (adverb phrase)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob plays football &lt;strong&gt;on Saturdays&lt;/strong&gt; (preposition phrase)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob plays football &lt;strong&gt;every day&lt;/strong&gt; (noun phrase)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adverbials&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the three examples above, for people who use the term in a principled way, the phrases &lt;em&gt;very well, on Saturdays&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;every day&lt;/em&gt; are Adverbials. They are phrases which have a special function in the clause structure. The term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is derived from the old-fashioned (and not very acutely observant) idea that different parts of speech are related to specific different syntactic functions or grammatical relations. Adverbs have traditionally been regarded as having the special function of modifying verbs or verb phrases. The term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt;, therefore, is used to describe phrases which have the function of modifying verbs, verb phrases or clauses. Remember though that there are many different types of phrase that can modify verb phrases, not only adverbs. The term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; then, when used in this way, means something like &lt;em&gt;having an adverbish type of syntactic function&lt;/em&gt;. It does not mean that the phrase is an adverb or anything like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, even that &lt;em&gt;adverbish type of function&lt;/em&gt; idea is misleading. It gives us the idea that Adjuncts are usually adverbs - and they aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adverbials and preposition phrases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in the examples of the different types of phrase that can function as Adjunct, you will remember that we counted adverb phrases, preposition phrases and noun phrases. Most unfortunately, the term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; is often confused with the phrase category &lt;em&gt;preposition phrase&lt;/em&gt;. People who use the term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; to mean &lt;em&gt;preposition phrase&lt;/em&gt;, always also use the term to refer to Adjuncts, whether the Adjunct is a preposition phrase or not. The problem with this is, of course, that not only are not all Adjuncts preposition phrases, but not all preposition phrases are Adjuncts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preposition phrases can have many different types of function. For example they can be Subjects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After Christmas&lt;/strong&gt; would be best.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be Predicative Complements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was &lt;strong&gt;over the moon&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be Locative Complements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was &lt;strong&gt;in Las Vegas&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be Modifiers in a noun phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was an &lt;strong&gt;out of the box&lt;/strong&gt; solution &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other types of function that preposition phrases can have. You need to be very careful therefore when you read passages which use the term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt;. If the writers are thoughtful, careful and principled writers they will use the term to describe a particular type of function, namely Adjunct in clause structure. On the other hand they may be talking about a type of phrase, namely a preposition phrase, as opposed to a noun phrase, for example. However, if you're very unlucky they will be mixing and matching the phrase type and the function without realising it. Nearly every writer who uses the term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; to mean a preposition phrase will be guilty of this crime. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst problem here is that the people who do this do not understand what they are doing. They will quite happily screw up the line between functions and types of phrase within the same paragraph or even within the same sentence without the slightest idea what they're doing. Perhaps even more gravely than this, the use of the term adverbial is so unevenly used and so confused in terms of whether it is a function or a phrase category, that many writers even substitute the word &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt; for the term adverbial. This means that you will see many intelligent people saying ridiculous things such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the sentence &lt;em&gt;I go to the gym every day&lt;/em&gt; the phrase &lt;em&gt;every day&lt;/em&gt; is an adverb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to do about this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally we can avoid actually using the term &lt;em&gt;adverbial&lt;/em&gt; ever at all. But if we do have to use it, because our peers do for example, we need to be careful that we use it to refer to a function in clause structure. If we absolutely have to use it to refer to a type of phrase (specifically a preposition phrase) we need to make it crystal clear to our readers or listeners that we are using it in this way. Most importantly we need to make sure that when we use it, we ourselves know exactly what we are referring to and that we don't slip between functions and phrasal categories like a hormonally confused teenager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tidbit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a nice quote from the second edition of the famous &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt; by James D. McCawley:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[I]n the many places where I was guilty of the reprehensible and shockingly common confusion of the notions of &quot;adverb&quot; and &quot;adverbial&quot;; these defects, for which I hang my head in shame, I have corrected wherever I have found them&quot;. (p. xii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T09:17:52.183" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T09:17:52.183" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21162" CreationDate="2017-02-23T15:25:11.803" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coordination is supposed to be a test for constituency.  Based on this test, it seems that in 1b &quot;they play&quot; and &quot;I listen to&quot; are constituents - precisely because they are coordinated.  Same for 2b.  Here the coordination test suggests that &quot;everyone claims&quot; and &quot;Mary does not believe&quot; are constituents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These results are unexpected because (I think) the mainstream view is that in English the subject + verb cannot form a constituent without also including the object.  And yet that is what we seem to be seeing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T15:25:11.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21177" CreationDate="2017-02-23T21:12:24.307" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his text &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;, McCawley on page 50, footnote 4, says how he uses several of the terms asked about, giving a few illustrative examples.  To read this page on the web, go here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;q=adverbial#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=adverbial&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adverbial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  the part of speech ADV (adverb), &quot;fortunately&quot;  &#xA;  'adverb phrase', &quot;fortunately for us&quot;  &#xA;  'adverbial phrase', &quot;for no reason&quot; in &quot;For no reason, he insulted me&quot;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is just a terminological footnote about McCawley's own use of terms; he does not say they are correct, or that anyone else should use the terms this way. That is appropriate, because his text is an introduction to linguistic theory, and terms are adopted for convenience -- they are not part of a theory, and so they are not the kind of thing that can be right or wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, elsewhere in the book, McCawley says that &quot;adverb&quot; means 'modifier other than adjective', and the illustrations of this footnote fit that definition.  So they are also adverbs.  The number of words in a constituent has nothing to do with whether it is a &quot;phrase&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T23:26:31.740" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T23:26:31.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20907" CreationDate="2017-02-24T01:34:18.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word is currently recorded as a noun, adjective, and verb in my copy of the OED. It seems the noun is the oldest form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full credit to &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=savvy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EtymOnline&lt;/a&gt; for this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;savvy (n.)&lt;/strong&gt; 1785, &quot;practical sense, intelligence;&quot; also a verb, &quot;to know, to understand;&quot; West Indies&#xA;  pidgin borrowing of French savez(-vous)? &quot;do you know?&quot; or Spanish&#xA;  sabe (usted) &quot;you know,&quot; both from Vulgar Latin *sapere, from Latin&#xA;  sapere &quot;be wise, be knowing&quot; (see sapient). The adjective is first&#xA;  recorded 1905, from the noun. Related: Savvily; savviness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T01:34:18.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21159" CreationDate="2017-02-24T03:44:17.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alexa is far less smart than we're led to believe. The real short answer to your question is: Those classifications are man-made, i.e. defined by developers. &#xA;In Alexa, they're called a &quot;Skill&quot;, and skills set the parameters for the syntax and sense it attributes to all words associated with this skill by mapping a skill with a content catalog, to which one must also introduce a long list of sample sentences covering a wide range of question/utterance possibilities associated with said skill. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &quot;Weather&quot; is considered a skill. In &quot;What's today's weather?&quot; versus &quot;What's tomorrow's weather&quot;, Alexa automatically determines that the category is &quot;weather&quot; and fetches the mapped sense for &quot;today&quot; and &quot;tomorrow&quot; linked to &quot;weather&quot; to establish which Accuweather page it fetches. &#xA;Underneath it all though is Amazon's machine learning platform and advanced deep learning functionalities driving the automatic speech recognition (ASR) (the stt engine), and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, which in this case is in deducing that one is asking a question about the category &quot;weather&quot;, as well as stochastic processes that sets an interpretation to all utterance variants not included as sample sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the general gist of it, but it really is as simple as that: categories are defined; a word(s) must be assigned as a trigger(s) for a category and, of course, these words must be as specific as possible, and their trigger linked to a set of grammatical functions, usually when the word occurs as the head of a subject NP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15288" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T03:44:17.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21226" CreationDate="2017-02-24T12:13:27.723" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robocop's catchphrase is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;somewhere there is a crime  happening&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence was just &lt;em&gt;a crime is happening&lt;/em&gt; it would be unproblematic for me:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;a crime&lt;/em&gt; would be a noun phrase in the function of a subject,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;is happening&lt;/em&gt; would be a verb phrase in the function of a predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in &lt;em&gt;somewhere there&lt;/em&gt;, both words are adverbs , so it has to be an adverb phrase and it's function is a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is which of them is the head of the adverb phrase, because both appear to me as if they could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;remark&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turned out , my question is based on wrong assumptions &lt;em&gt;somewhere there&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;somewhere there is a crime happening&lt;/em&gt; is not a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T14:32:37.120" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T00:20:31.550" Title="Which word is the head of the phrase &quot;somewhere there&quot;?" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21199" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:24:59.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: As Araucaria pointed out, OP (and consequently I) misinterpreted the sentence for &lt;em&gt;Somwhere there a crime is happening&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Somehwere there, there is a crime happening&lt;/em&gt;, which, however, is not what the sentence says; so my below answer only applies to the other assumption, not to the original sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is the head for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is semantically more prominent: the information that projects is that the crime happend &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; somewhat relativizes the specificness of this local information, but the crime still happend &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; and not just &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; would be a modifier to &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; adding more information about &lt;em&gt;somehwere&lt;/em&gt;, because the phrase as a whole has the meaning that the crime happend &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't think of a case where in English the head of the adverb phrase precedes its adverbal modifiers - nested adverb structures, just like adjective sturctures, are to my knowledge always left-branching, i.e. the modifiers occur to the left, so if the head was &lt;em&gt;somehwere&lt;/em&gt; while the modifier is &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, this would be a very unusual exception to this general pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T00:20:31.550" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T00:20:31.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T14:49:25.937" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have absolutely no idea where to begin with this question, but I think I can summarise it in such a way that someone might know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact thing I'm looking at is if two people met and one person taught the other how to speak their language, then that other person &quot;interpreted&quot; the language into their own character-set. For instance English uses Latin characters, maybe a person spoke that language to a Chinese person, who then continued to speak something very close to that language, but wrote it using Chinese logograms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to know if such a sequence of events ever may have happened, and what the result today might be. Preferably looking for a mainstream language, not just a cypher that somebody used purely to obfuscate text. As such, it would probably have to be the case that the languages are audibly similar today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15304" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:55:14.020" Title="Are there any two languages which have been interpreted to different forms from speech?" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21204" CreationDate="2017-02-24T15:00:09.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close to the situation you sketch comes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ottoman Turkish&lt;/a&gt;. Officially it was written in the Arabic script, but the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities in the Ottoman empire used their respective scripts to write (and even print) it. The dialects of the mentioned communities were also different from the dialects of the Muslim Turks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T15:00:09.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21204" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:55:14.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi and Urdu are very similar languages, written in Devanagari and Arabic, respectively.  The Uighur language in western China has 4 different writing systems in modern use, and a major historical literary tradition in a fifth alphabet.  The historical Uighur writing system is descended from the Sogdian alphabet, and it was adopted by the Mongols and became the predominant writing system of the Mongol empire, as well as the Manchus.  Starting in the 10th century, Uighurs became Muslims, and started writing their language in the Arabic script.  At the start of the People's Republic of China, the PRC attempted to discourage Muslim influence, and encouraged the Uighurs to write their language using Cyrillic (Russian) letters.  However, in the 1950s the PRC started to have tense relations with Russia, and enforced a rule that Uighur children should be taught to write their language with the Latin alphabet.  In 1982, China decided to return the Uighur language to the Arabic alphabet.  Now, in order to use ubiquitous latin-alphabet keyboards, many young Uighurs are using a latin characters to write their language, but with different conventions from the pre-1982 version of romanization.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize: a young Uighur today will read newspapers in the Arabic script, and text his friends with the latin alphabet.  His father will write using the latin alphabet in a very different way.  His grandfather will write in Cyrillic, and, if he's a scholar, he'll read old books in the ancient Uighur script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's Japanese, which will mix three different writing systems within a single sentence in a modern newspaper: logographic kanji alongside syllabic katakana and hiragana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many, many other similar examples around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15308" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:55:14.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T20:34:34.337" Score="2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;He is afraid of flying.  When he  flies tomorrow, he should pretend he was on a bus instead of an airplane.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I uttered the above statement in a recent conversation.  Of course, I could replace the &quot;was&quot; with &quot;is&quot;, but the &quot;was&quot; still sounds reasonably natural.  Neither &quot;should pretend he is&quot; nor &quot;should pretend he was&quot; appear in the CoCA corpus, but &quot;should pretend he was&quot; yields about half as many google hits as &quot;should pretend he is&quot;, suggesting that it is a reasonably common variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the grammatical properties of &quot;was&quot;? It's not bastardized subjunctive: &quot;he should pretend he were&quot; sounds horrible.  It doesn't seem to be conditional either.  And it certainly doesn't seem to be past tense.  So what role is it performing, and why does it sound OK (even if not ideal) to native ears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15309" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T02:29:21.467" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T03:04:43.373" Title="Tomorrow, he should pretend he *was* on a bus" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20131" CreationDate="2017-02-25T08:38:30.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to check out some of the materials provided for the assignment &quot;A3: CKY algorithm&quot; by Prof. Dr. A. Koller who has converted &lt;a href=&quot;http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~johnca/cfg-resources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ATIS grammar&lt;/a&gt; for the purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CL16 page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://coli-saar.github.io/cl16/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://coli-saar.github.io/cl16&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Materials: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~koller/materials/anlp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~koller/materials/anlp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also relevant: &lt;a href=&quot;http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~johnca/cfg-resources/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~johnca/cfg-resources&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15313" LastEditorUserId="15313" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T08:57:05.060" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T08:57:05.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21233" CreationDate="2017-02-25T09:58:03.037" Score="5" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sea&lt;/strong&gt;; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lake&lt;/strong&gt; respectively,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Dutch, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;zee&lt;/strong&gt;; and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;meer&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas the German translation of the same is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;das Meer&lt;/strong&gt;; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;der See&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This striking, almost completely opposing, contrast between the current Dutch terms and the German terms has been noted to numerous times, but my question is the following: which language has therewith diverged from a common linguistic heritage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please write as much information as possible, to enrich your answer. For example, I understand there are many derivative words in both languages, lending on either one of the phonetics.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Addendum by lemontree: Interestingly, accompanying the masculine noun &lt;em&gt;der See&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;lake&lt;/em&gt;, German also has the feminine noun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt; See&lt;/strong&gt;, which in turn means &lt;em&gt;sea&lt;/em&gt; again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T12:05:30.183" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T17:45:54.700" Title="Did the Dutch &quot;zee&quot; (sea) and &quot;meer&quot; (lake) diverge or did the German &quot;das Meer&quot; (sea) and &quot;der See&quot; (lake) diverge from a shared linguistic heritage?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21208" CreationDate="2017-02-25T13:44:04.230" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &lt;em&gt;pretend&lt;/em&gt; is to represent an assertion as true; the assertion itself is cast in the indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He pretends that he &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; on a bus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the tense&amp;mdash;temporal reference&amp;mdash;of the assertion is independent of the tense of &lt;em&gt;pretend&lt;/em&gt;, for you may assert a past, present or future fact; and the form/construction of the verb employed in the assertion reflects the interaction of the tense of the assertion with the Reference Time of the pretense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you want here is almost certainly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He should pretend (&lt;em&gt;in the future when he is flying&lt;/em&gt;) that he is on a bus (&lt;em&gt;at that time&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd bet that most of your hits on &lt;em&gt;He should pretend he was ...&lt;/em&gt; reflect a situation analogous to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He should pretend (&lt;em&gt;in the future&lt;/em&gt;) that he was on a bus (&lt;em&gt;at the prior time when the prosecution allege that he was flying&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T13:44:04.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21208" CreationDate="2017-02-25T14:52:23.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will dub this very interesting construction &quot;indirect mental discourse&quot;, since it seems similar to ordinary indirect discourse with verbs like &quot;say&quot;.  Indirect discourse allows a direct quote to be converted to a &quot;that&quot;-clause which characterizes indirectly what was said, rather than giving the exact words (which may not be known to the reporter). In converting from a direct quote, the tense of the indirect report may be changed to one which is relative to the time of the report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He says &quot;I am on a bus.&quot;  &#xA;==&amp;gt; He says that he is on a bus.&#xA;&#xA;He said &quot;I am on a bus.&quot;  &#xA;==&amp;gt; He said that he was on a bus.&#xA;&#xA;He will say &quot;I am on a bus.&quot;  &#xA;==&amp;gt; He will say that he was/is on a bus.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last example above, the present tense of the direct quote precedes the future tense of the quotation verb, so this licenses &quot;was&quot; in the indirect quote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example of the question, the construction is similar, but it is harder to recognize because (1) the speech is mental rather than aloud,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He will think &quot;I am on a bus.&quot;  &#xA;==&amp;gt; He will think that he was/is on a bus.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and (2), &quot;pretend&quot; with a direct quote is marginally grammatical, at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*He will pretend &quot;I am on a bus.&quot;  &#xA;==&amp;gt; He will pretend that he was/is on a bus.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T14:52:23.883" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-25T20:31:08.107" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a website or a study I could find a detailed list or net of priming connections between words? Here's how I imagine it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DOj8L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DOj8L.png&quot; alt=&quot;Priming words&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T20:31:08.107" Title="Where can I find a comprehensive list of priming connections?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21208" CreationDate="2017-02-25T21:53:35.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be an extension of the so-called &lt;em&gt;modal preterite&lt;/em&gt; (CGEL's term -- see StoneyB's comment on Pascal-Denis Lussier's answer), in which English constructions with irrealis semantics can take formally past-tense verbs even though there is no actual past-tense reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wish I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; on a bus right now!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's time you &lt;em&gt;came&lt;/em&gt; home.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd rather you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; here. (some dialects)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to be able to say that he &lt;em&gt;wrote&lt;/em&gt; brilliant poetry, but he doesn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If only we &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; there with you!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the last example shows, this may be a related phenomenon to the use of past-tense forms in the protases of unreal conditionals: &lt;em&gt;If I was rich, I'd buy a house&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though &lt;em&gt;pretend&lt;/em&gt; is not normally used with this construction, its irrealis semantics apparently license it for some speakers, including you -- a straightforward enough extension. (The exact set of circumstances under which modal preterites may be used in English is not clear to me, hence &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6982/which-languages-conflate-imperfective-past-and-irrealis-and-why&quot;&gt;this previous question&lt;/a&gt;, which also asked why this conflation of past tense and irrealis exists in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T21:53:35.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-25T23:00:57.183" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically what it says in the title. How would a sentence with both be parsed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15318" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T23:00:57.183" Title="How is it possible for a single sentence to have both a raising to subject verb and an object control verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;control&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T01:18:15.243" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;It came to my attention that a way to answer phone calls, in Japanese, is by saying &quot;&lt;strong&gt;もしもし&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (transliterated &lt;code&gt;Moshi Moshi&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;もし&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (transliterated &lt;code&gt;Moshi&lt;/code&gt;) is repeated twice. I was quite surprised by this, as I think (from other languages I know) answering phone calls informally typically is preferred to be done by using a greeting with a rather short pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thus began wondering whether or not there are any other languages with such a repetition of phonetics, in answering phone calls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastEditorUserId="8066" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T15:37:06.567" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T15:37:06.567" Title="Is there any language other than Japanese in which a phone call is answered by a greeting using repeated phonetics?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21221" CreationDate="2017-02-26T03:25:19.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some particularly conservative Hindi speakers say &quot;raam raam&quot; (राम राम) instead of &quot;hello&quot;, whether they are answering a telephone, or greeting someone in person. However, this phrase is becoming less and less common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T07:52:49.870" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T07:52:49.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T04:29:44.793" Score="0" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term, similar to sibilance with respect to sh, s, etc. that corresponds to words with respect to a and u(ah)? And also for the rest of the syllables and alphabets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15319" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T11:20:48.840" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T11:20:48.840" Title="Terms similar to Sibilant" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T12:23:02.363" Score="-1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;One day as they were walking along they looked down on the ocean and wondered what was beneath it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They(subject) - on the ocean(object) - One day (preposition) - looked down(verb) | (complimentizer) | as(prep) they(subject) - along (adjective? object?) - were walking(verb)  | and (conjunction) | What(subject) - beneath(prep) it(object) - wondered was(verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm converting to an SOV language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word Order should be like the following...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence Structure : [Subject] [Indirect Object] [Direct Object] [Verb]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Noun Phrase : [Adpositional Phrase] [Adjective] [Noun] [Possessive] [Complementizer]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Verb Phrase : [Adpositional Phrase] [Adverb] [Verb] [Copula] [Complementizer]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Adjective Phrase : [?] [Adjective]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Positional Phrase : [Noun] [Preposition?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an I getting this right? Or no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14852" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T14:51:12.750" Title="Am i breaking this sentence down correctly?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21199" CreationDate="2017-02-26T13:15:19.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Somewhere there is a crime happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence above from the Robocop films the word &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; is functioning as a Locative Adjunct. Notice that it can appear either at the beginning or end of the clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a crime happening somewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice also that the word &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; cannot move with the word &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Is a crime  happening somewhere there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the word &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is not part of this Locative Adjunct. If we look at the sentence above, it is easy to see that the main reason it is ungrammatical is because it does not have a Subject. This is because in the original example, the word &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; IS the Subject of the sentence as the data below indicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a crime happening&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a crime happening?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a crime happening, isn't there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example above shows &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; inverting with the auxiliary verb to form a question, as a good Subject should. The third example shows the word &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; appearing in the question tag &lt;em&gt;isn't there&lt;/em&gt; as we would expect (compare with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/strong&gt;'s happy, isn't &lt;strong&gt;he?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) The fourth example shows the sentence reduced to a minimal Subject and Predicate. Because the word &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; constitutes the Predicate, the word &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; must be the Subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to the Original Question then, the answer is that &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; do not form a  phrase in this sentence, and therefore neither one of them can be the Head of that phrase. &lt;em&gt;Somewhere&lt;/em&gt; is functioning as  Locative Adjunct, whereas &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is functioning as Subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T15:12:25.983" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T15:12:25.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-26T14:14:46.730" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The bleak cadance of last month's inauguration was &lt;strong&gt;still&lt;/strong&gt; in the air, &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; Trump lobbed the first Molotov cocktail of policies and executive orders against the capital’s brilliant-white porticos.....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above phrase, I can show 'still' can be represented as an adjectival or adverbial phrase (ambiguous), however is there a way to prove it is an adverb that relates to 'when' in the following clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T14:14:46.730" Title="Syntactic ambiguity of adjective/adverb" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21225" CreationDate="2017-02-26T14:45:36.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For this sort of exercise, I think you need to take into account verb phrases (VP) and make some assumptions about the SVO structure of an English sentence and what the heads of various phrases are, and assume that heads are consistently ordered either first in their phrase (SVO) or last in their phrase (SOV).  (Consistent ordering of heads in real languages is at best just a tendency.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An SVO language and an SOV language both have sentences divided into S and VP, but the VP of an SVO language has the head of a VP, the verb, before any complement to the verb, while the VP of an SOV language has its head last, after any complement.  Typically.  Similarly, you expect an SVO language to have head first PPs (where P is the head), but an SOV language to have head final PPs (so that the head P comes at the end of a PP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put aside the adverb &quot;one day as they were walking along&quot;, the rest of the SVO language sentence of your example has subject &quot;they&quot; followed by a compound VP, and let's assume the conjunction &quot;and&quot; is the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting with English SVO (head initial) order &quot;They [[looked-down on the ocean] and [wondered about it]]&quot; and moving all the heads to the ends of their phrases, we'd expect the SOV (head final) order to be, using English morphemes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   They the-ocean on looked-down it about wondered and.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T14:51:12.750" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T14:51:12.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21212" CreationDate="2017-02-27T07:02:26.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that &#xA;- Slavic languages also use  a root similar to &quot;mere&quot; for the sea RU: &quot;mor'e&quot;, UA: &quot;more&quot;, PL: &quot;morze&quot; &#xA;- Romance language have similar roots: LAT: &quot;mare&quot;, ES: &quot;mar&quot; etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd imagine that das Meer originates from common PIE root for the sea and thus is can be considered a common origin &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15328" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T08:09:34.863" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T08:09:34.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T08:12:40.327" Score="0" ViewCount="1673" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic calligraphy, it seems to me that some characters or signs are sometimes moved in some weird place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this picture, for example, letter ء is moved before ا of word شاء and it looks to belong to word الله‎‎:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IsUHs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IsUHs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this other picture, instead, the three dots of character ش are moved away, and, again, seem to belong to word الله‎‎:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9GsJn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9GsJn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it normal/common to move those signs around, in calligraphy? Or maybe it's just my poor Arabic skill that makes me misunderstand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in both pictures, I notice some &quot;strange&quot; symbols, looking like &quot;v&quot;, commas or apostrophes. Do those symbols have a particular role, or they just adorn the writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: this question have been moved from &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/2669/arabic-calligraphy-moving-characters-or-signs-other-symbols&quot;&gt;Language Learning.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:52:50.663" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T16:04:12.193" Title="Arabic calligraphy: moving characters or signs; other symbols" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21212" CreationDate="2017-02-27T11:42:11.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;Meer&lt;/em&gt;¹ has as its original meaning something like &quot;stagnating water&quot;, see also the related word &lt;em&gt;Moor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;swamp&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the word &lt;em&gt;See&lt;/em&gt;² originally had both meanings, and it was originally masculine. It stayed masculine in Southern Germany, where only lakes but no sea are known, but it changed to feminine in Low German where the sea is well known. In German it specialised meanings along that line: &lt;em&gt;der See&lt;/em&gt; is now only the Lake, and &lt;em&gt;die See&lt;/em&gt; is only the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Meer im deutschen Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GM02799#XGM02799&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GM02799#XGM02799&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;² See im deutschen Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GS23282#XGS23282&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GS23282#XGS23282&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T17:45:54.700" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T17:45:54.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21291" CreationDate="2017-02-27T12:03:01.913" Score="1" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;What software do lexicographers use these days to manage and search corpora? Is there a standard solution used by most people, or does every dictionary commission their own software to suit their own needs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I struggle to find anything online in this regard, which leads me to believe that a bunch of really arcane software is being used :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s. - I'm not sure whether this actually belongs here. Please let me know if this belongs to a different SE site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T18:48:52.430" Title="Dictionary building / corpus exploring software" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T22:54:00.563" Score="2" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been given the task for my bachelor thesis to investigate how doctors can benefit from the use of negations in sentences that reflect physiological sensor data such as heart- and respiratory rates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interest of this mainly comes from the assumption that negations can give more meaning in certain context but also that it may aide doctors in deduction and since it will probably be used in an Ontology that reasons about events. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems I am facing right now is how I should go about in generating medical sentences in ECG (Electrocardiography) data. The issues are primarly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What they should say.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How they should say it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that many factors can influence heart rate, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Activity level&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fitness level&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Air temperature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Body position (standing up or lying down, for example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emotions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Body size&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Medications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance should I compare two sentences like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S1: &quot;Patient X have fluctuating heart rates.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S2: &quot;Patient X is not fit and have fluctuating heart rates.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or should I produce sentences similiar to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S3: &quot;Patient X is obece and have fluctuating heart rates.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S4: &quot;Patient X is not fit and have fluctuating heart rates.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S2 compared to S1 contains more information whilst S3 and S4 contain equal only that S4 is negated, however when dealing with diagnosis, which one would doctors prefer? Maybe I should make the system generate all four? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All input is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15334" LastEditorUserId="15334" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T23:08:52.810" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T23:08:52.810" Title="The use of negations in fuzzy-data-to-text system" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21232" CreationDate="2017-02-28T04:05:48.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know ,This kind of writings are not the ones used in daily language&#xA;These are a kind of &lt;strong&gt;art&lt;/strong&gt; that specialists draw in mosques, palaces..etc&#xA;And changing the places of words is just part of making the calligraphy beautiful and artistic, It has nothing to do with semantics or syntax.&#xA;Native speakers of Arabic read the phrase above normally : ما شاء الله&#xA;The change of the order doesn't change anything when you read it. So you read the words in their primary order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some types of Arabic Calligraphy:&#xA;Naskh&#xA;Kufic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Symbols usually refer to vowels, but there is more than only vowels in both pictures. but I do not really know the meaning of these additional symbols. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T04:05:48.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-28T08:04:15.137" Score="2" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was listening to: &quot;Story of Human Language - John McWhorter&quot; and I stumbled upon an example of errors foreigners could do while speaking English (at least the American variant), mainly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This supermarket has a lot of vegetables and fruitS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct version of this sentece is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This supermarket has a lot of vegetables and fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am foreigner and I would definitely commit this error. Not for the first time though! I made this error many times while learning Italian, since you can't say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ho molte frutte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One should use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ho molta frutta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's particularly interesting for me as both a Spaniard and a French would use &lt;code&gt;frutaS&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;fruitS&lt;/code&gt; in the sentences above without any hesitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question: what is the origin of this similarity between English and Italian in this respect? Is this something reaching the Latin or something as far-fetched as possibility of Italian Diaspora in the United States having influenced the use of the word &quot;Fruit&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that in case of being something abstract both &lt;code&gt;frutta&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;fruit&lt;/code&gt; are pluralized in Italian and English respectively, like in &quot;fruits of my work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T08:43:41.477" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:48:48.520" Title="English &quot;fruit&quot; vs Italian &quot;frutta&quot; plural number" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21239" CreationDate="2017-02-28T14:12:06.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native Spanish speaker I might use &lt;em&gt;fruta&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;frutas&lt;/em&gt; according to the occasion. The difference might be small enough that I might doubt which one is correct, though. I suspect that nouns shifting from mass to countable and vice versa is extremely common; it is, indeed, in Spanish, and probably in all Romance languages, more than in English. (Maybe it's telling that I only learned of the difference between mass and countable nouns when I was studying English as a teenager; it was only after that that I began noticing there was such a distinction in my native Spanish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some contrasting examples are in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are a lot of fruits in this supermarket&lt;/em&gt; suggests to me, in order of decreasing likelihood:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that there are many types of fruit available in the supermarket;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that there are a lot of fruits (apples, pears, bananas, etc.) strewn about the place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are many kinds of fruit in this supermarket&lt;/em&gt; makes the point clear that the meaning is as in 1.1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is a lot of fruit in this supermarket&lt;/em&gt; suggests to me that the supermarket is well-stocked with fruit (in general); variety of fruit is implied but not emphasized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the first English sentence is a mistake, as you were told; it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a bit odd, because people would rather say &lt;em&gt;kinds of fruit&lt;/em&gt; (example 2) for the intended meaning. And it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a mistake if you're referring to the sheer volume of fruit available in the supermarket (example 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These same connotations apply if I think about the Spanish translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hay muchas frutas en este supermercado.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hay muchos tipos de fruta en este supermercado.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hay mucha fruta en este supermercado.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't speak Italian or French but I doubt a different logic applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T14:12:06.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-28T15:01:04.930" Score="0" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the specifics of the Czech phonetics is that everything is written &quot;phonetically&quot; and I wonder wheter one of the reasons for that could be that Czech simply uses less phonemes than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may sound as a language-biased note but I've always felt like the phonemes are in their &quot;perfect position in Czech&quot;. If you want to say the phoneme [a] in Czech, the more you open your moth in the vertical direction, better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interesting example is &quot;t&quot;. The English &quot;t&quot; is more &quot;noised&quot; so that it sounds a bit like &quot;th&quot;. You can hear a similar shift basically in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV8aekG92Ew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all consonants.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there really a smaller gap between English phonemes? If so, how has this difference originated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T20:16:43.940" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T21:01:57.750" Title="Are phonemes worse recognizable in English than in Czech?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21241" CreationDate="2017-02-28T15:47:10.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of phonemes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Czech&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Phonemes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; is a simple matter of counting, and both languages have about 40 phonemes (&quot;about&quot; since phonemic status is a hypothesis dependent on method of analysis, not an self-evident observation). The reason for the difference in the nature of the writing systems is historical-sodicl. English has been written for longer, and has undergone more extensive sound changes, compared to Czech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe about English pronunciation is a fact about pronunciation (not spelling) and specifically it is about the nature of the phonetic system. There is actually something &quot;difficult&quot; about English, which relates to timing of articulations and its interaction with prosody, one example being the rule of aspiration (which I take to be what you are referring to in talking about the noise of &quot;t&quot;) – p, t, k are pronounced aspirated or unaspirated, depending on position in the stress foot; vowels reduce depending on position in the foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest challenge of English is figuring out (undoing and producing) the myriad contextual variants. Compared to Spanish (sorry, no experience with Czech) or even Russian, English has a very complicated phonetics because a small set of phonemes is turned into quite a number of phonetic segments. Moreover, language teachers for German, Czech, Spanish and so on are aware of the phonetic relations in their language (such as how &lt;em&gt;b, d, g&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced in Spanich, how &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; varies according to the previous vowel in German), but there is relatively little awareness of the range of contextual variants in English. Not to mention the fact that English is almost a language family, and we often need subtitles for speakers of an &quot;extreme&quot; accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T15:47:10.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21208" CreationDate="2017-02-28T18:08:52.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems related to so-called &quot;sequence of tense&quot; phenomena, which are interesting and maybe hard to analyze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norbert Hornstein wrote an interesting little monograph a while ago about time, tense, and syntax. It's couched within a Chomskyan (GB) approach, but leverages ideas from Reichenbach's approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Reichenbach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Reichenbach&lt;/a&gt;'s_(1947)_theory_of_tense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there's enough theory-neutral substance for it to be of value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T18:08:52.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21241" CreationDate="2017-02-28T19:38:49.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is native-speaker bias at work, Czech phonemes aren't actually especially easy to distinguish in general if you don't speak Czech natively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czech has an unusually rich array of palatal or historically palatalized sounds that are phonemically distinct and may be difficult for speakers of other languages to distinguish, such as the distinctions between all of /d/, /ɟ/, /j/, /ʒ/, /z/, /r̝/. Listening to the video you linked to, I as a native English speaker had a hard time hearing the difference between &quot;eř&quot; and &quot;eš&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a Japanese speaker, it would probably be difficult to hear the difference between Czech syllable pairs like &quot;dý&quot; vs. &quot;dí&quot;, or &quot;dí&quot; vs. &quot;ží&quot; vs. &quot;&quot;zí&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T21:01:57.750" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T21:01:57.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21250" CreationDate="2017-03-01T05:08:00.060" Score="3" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contronyms are words that are their own antonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sanction&lt;/em&gt; can mean to penalize for or approve of.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Off&lt;/em&gt; can mean activated(the alarm went off) or deactivated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym#Examples&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Additional examples&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This existence of these words at all is bizarre, and I have no idea what kind of processes could lead to their creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T14:58:56.443" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:58:56.443" Title="How do contronyms (aka auto-antonyms) arise?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T05:22:16.983" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;We conducted a priming lexical decision experiment, and the response time was calculated from the target onset. However when we cleaned the data, we found that some responses were given before the target offset, thus, my question is: how should we deal with these data (to delete them, or delete those response time less than 200ms, or just take them as valid data)?  Since we use Chinese words as targets, so it has different contours, which produced different durations, with falling tone about 300ms and the others about 400-600 ms.so one more question: should we use a 200 ms cut-off from the target onset or offset? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15350" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T09:03:12.507" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T09:03:12.507" Title="dealing with those responses before target offset in a priming experiment" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21232" CreationDate="2017-03-01T09:05:10.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those additional symbols (&quot;looking like &quot;v&quot;, commas or apostrophes&quot;) have no meaning, no phonetic value, they are used just to fill the empty places, for the text to look more or less homogeneous and smooth, without gaps. That is again, the rason for using them is making the calligraphy beautiful and artistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T09:05:10.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2017-03-01T11:29:34.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have discussed this countless times with my wife (I am western, she is Japanese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides some of the reason aforementioned, she also told me that kanji allows to easily comprehend what you are reading. That is, a long and complex sentence that uses only hiragana would be quite difficult to understand since there is no blank spaces between &quot;words&quot;. You would not know where words start and finish, so the overall phrase will turn into a confusing mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say this sentence：&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;しんせつなだいがくせいだいがくではとうきょうにぼくがべんきょうしました。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A native Japanese person could understand it quite well (given that it is grammatically correct, since I am still learning Japanese), but that person should have to pay more attention to every single word, and still, it is possible that in a more complex sentence things become confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that same sentence using kanji among with kana:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;親切な大学生大学では東京に僕は勉強しました。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic thing is, the purpose of kana, specially hiragana, is not only to give meaning, but also work as word delimiter, allow you to understand categories of words, word functions in a sentence (you could think as &quot;derivation&quot; in German or Latin) and understand better what is what, but using only kana will make things confusing, since you will not know if a given hiragana is part of a word inflection/derivation, or just part of the root/stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about English without blank spaces:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Istudiedintokyoattheuniversitywithkindstudents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can clearly understand it if you read it, but it makes things easier if you can separate elements, either with a blank space or any other symbol of your choice, and if you can know easily what category of word is each word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I$studied$in$tokyo$at$the$university$with$kind$students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I¬studied¬in¬tokyo¬at¬the¬university¬with¬kind¬students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I studied in tokyo at the university with kind students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a japanese person would think: &quot;why westerns do not replace these random symbols (letters) with a representation of the meaning?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;University Student =　大学生.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tokyo　＝　東京.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;University　＝　大学.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kind　＝　親切な.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studied　＝　勉強しました.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I 勉強しました　in 東京 at the 大学 with the 親切な　大学生。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15353" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T11:29:34.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21246" CreationDate="2017-03-01T12:40:11.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would guess each of these words has a different history and therefore the reason for the existence of antonyms is not unique. For example, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sanction&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sanction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; comes from a Latin root that meant &quot;to decree, confirm, ratify, make sacred&quot; (related to &lt;em&gt;sanctum&lt;/em&gt; &quot;saint, sacred&quot;); that's the original meaning, while according to the source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seemingly contradictory meaning &quot;impose a penalty on&quot; is from 1956 but&#xA;  is rooted in an old legalistic sense of the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The double meaning of &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; has to do with its original use; since &lt;em&gt;off&lt;/em&gt; has the sense of &quot;away, departing&quot;, &lt;em&gt;go off&lt;/em&gt; was used for firearms meaning &quot;explode, discharge&quot;. It's a kind of event that makes something work and also renders it useless for a while. When an alarm goes off, it ceases to work in a way: it has warned you of something, but it won't warn you about what may follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=cleave&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cleave&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (another of your examples) comes from two different sources. At the beginning they were phonetically distinct and also conjugated differently, but then they coalesced, which is why they're used very little:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The confusion was less in Old English when &lt;em&gt;cleave&lt;/em&gt; (v.1) was a class 2&#xA;  strong verb; but it has grown since &lt;em&gt;cleave&lt;/em&gt; (v.1) weakened, which may&#xA;  be why both are largely superseded by &lt;em&gt;stick&lt;/em&gt; (v.) and &lt;em&gt;split&lt;/em&gt; (v.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The infamous &lt;em&gt;inflammable&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;flammable&lt;/em&gt; pair stems from a confusion between the Latin prefix &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt;, which denotes negation and comes from the Proto-Indoeuropean root &lt;em&gt;*n̥-&lt;/em&gt; (the origin of negatives such as &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nec&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), and the other prefix &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;into/upon&quot;, which ultimately comes from PIE &lt;em&gt;*h₁én&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auto-antonyms are not bizarre: they continue to exist as long as speakers are able to rely on context and common sense to distinguish between them, as pass out of fashion once they become a problem for comprehension. In this sense they're not different from other features.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14883" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T14:12:18.783" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:12:18.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21232" CreationDate="2017-03-01T16:04:12.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In old manuscripts the v-shaped signs indicate that a letter is not pointed (muhmal), but in modern practice they are used merely for decoration, or rather space-filling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T16:04:12.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T04:21:48.293" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me ask a question of an usage of schwa as a phoneme and [r].  This [r] is the sound which is used in English and generally expressed with R and not [r] expressed with IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schwa can be regarded as an independent phoneme, apart from weak forms of other vowels, I heard. And here, I treat this idea as true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then my question is: Is this schwa phoneme can be followed by consonant [r] in the same syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, I think that this schwa phoneme can take two forms, one just the ordinary schwa or little bit rhotic schwa, the other completely rhotic schwa, that is rhotacized schwa, because other vowels can take these two forms when being followed by consonant [r] in the same syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15358" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T18:32:00.497" Title="Can R sound follow a schwa in a syllable?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21254" CreationDate="2017-03-02T05:57:46.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is hazardous to ask questions about sound system of English without saying what dialects you mean, and what kind of analysis you are assuming, because the answer is &quot;It depends...&quot;. The observable facts are &quot;how things are pronounced&quot;, i.e. the phonetics of English, so you should start there. The vowel [ə] does not appear before [ɹ] (the English version of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;) within the syllable, at least in most American dialects. Things get even more complicated and under-reported when you look at other dialects, so I will only talk about the main patterns of American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In words like &quot;pervert&quot; (noun or verb), &quot;burn&quot;, there is a vowel-like thing in each syllable, which can be transcribed as [ɹ̩] (or [ɚ], also [ɝ]). Distributionally speaking, [ɹ̩] is in complementary distribution with [ə.ɹ], where [ɹ̩] occurs when the sequence is within a syllable, and [ə.ɹ] occurs when the vowel and consonant are in separate syllables (e.g. &lt;em&gt;parade&lt;/em&gt; [pəɹɛɪd] – I'll come back to this form). A common phonemic analysis of [ɹ̩] is that it derives from &lt;em&gt;əɹ&lt;/em&gt;, thus &lt;em&gt;ɹ̩&lt;/em&gt; is not an autonomous vowel, and derives from reduction of &lt;em&gt;əɹ&lt;/em&gt; within the syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reduction is actually somewhat more general, since &quot;parade&quot; is also pronounced [pɹ̩ɛɪd] or [pɹ̩ɹɛɪd], that is, the &quot;in the same syllable&quot; condition is often dropped from the requirement of the reduction rule, and this is widespread, but dialect-dependent (it's a feature of more-western US dialects, though widespread throughout US English). The extended rule is optional, though very likely to happen (whereas phonetic [pəɹvəɹt] in American English is either extremely rare or unattested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-syllable reduction of &lt;em&gt;əɹ&lt;/em&gt; can happen at the phrasal level, so that &quot;a rabbit&quot; can be realized as [ɹ̩ɹæbɪt]. This is much less likely, and this can lead to semi-minimal pairs like &quot;a rest&quot; [ə ɹɛst] vs. &quot;arrest&quot; [ɹ̩ɹɛst]. It is likely that if one were to extract examples of such words from a corpus of casual spoken English that there isn't really a difference between the two-word and one-word structures, but I don't believe a systematic study of this has been undertaken. An interesting and unanswered question is whether the more-casual form of &quot;a rest&quot; ever becomes phonetically indistinguishable from &quot;arrest&quot;, or is there always some distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T05:57:46.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T09:31:41.487" Score="1" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn most common Turkish words but I can't find resources, I've already finished 1000 words. Where do I find the most common Turkish words, at least 10k?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15360" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T13:25:00.643" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T11:11:41.737" Title="most common Turkish words" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21256" CreationDate="2017-03-02T13:31:46.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find frequency weighted Turkish word lists at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de?corpusId=tur_news_2005&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wortschatz pages&lt;/a&gt; of Universtät Leipzig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T11:11:41.737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T11:11:41.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21259" CreationDate="2017-03-02T16:59:45.760" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, what's the consonant symbol equivalent for the glide/semivowel /o̯/, like how /i̯/ is equivalent to /j/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15366" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T17:51:59.913" Title="Consonant symbol representation for /o̯/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21258" CreationDate="2017-03-02T17:22:51.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no simple IPA letter for [o̯] (or /o̯/). You can see the complete chart of IPA symbols on the following website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-charts/ipa-symbols-chart-complete/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-charts/ipa-symbols-chart-complete/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA obviously only has a limited number of letters that don't cover all possible human speech sounds. In phonetic transcriptions people just write [o̯]; in a phonological transcription—well, non-syllabic consonantal [o̯] is not a common sound [by which I mean, I don't know of any language that is uncontroversially analyzed with a phoneme /o̯/—see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21258/consonant-symbol-representation-for-o%CC%AF/21259?noredirect=1#comment48851_21259&quot;&gt;user6726's comment&lt;/a&gt;), so it might be analyzed in various ways depending on its distribution and the rest of the inventory: as /w/, or an allophone of /l/, or something like that. (In a narrow transcription, a way of indicating that the phoneme /w/ is pronounced as the phone [o̯] would be to use the &quot;lowered&quot; diacritic, [w̞].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Height contrasts between semivowels are much less common than height contrasts between vowels. In fact, while [i̯] and [j] are as you say pretty much equivalent, in many languages the /j/ phoneme may in fact be a bit higher on average than the /i/ phoneme—this is one reason why it's possible in some languages to have a sequence like /ji/ that is distinct from /i/ or /iː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T17:51:59.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15425" CreationDate="2017-03-02T17:40:40.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the result you can find out there would be the experimentation of someone else. So my suggestion is &lt;strong&gt;make your own experimentation&lt;/strong&gt;: build your own classifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A good and simple idea&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;collect as many classified data as you can&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;choose the &lt;em&gt;similarity&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;code&gt;feature&lt;/code&gt; and peek the &lt;code&gt;labels&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-similar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, assuming the data is linearly separable, find the farthest value from the two labelled sets using &lt;code&gt;SVM&lt;/code&gt; (Support Vector Machine) with a &lt;code&gt;linear kernel&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15367" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T17:40:40.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21256" CreationDate="2017-03-02T18:55:48.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/A-Frequency-Dictionary-of-Turkish/Aksan-Aksan-Mersinli-Demirhan/p/book/9781138839670&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Yeşim Aksan, Mustafa Aksan, Ümit Mersinli and Umut Ufuk Demirhan (Routledge, 2017) contains the &lt;strong&gt;5,000 most common words&lt;/strong&gt; in Turkish, based on a 50 million word corpus. The words are listed by frequency; each has an example sentence. (There is an alphabetical index at the end.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T18:55:48.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21264" CreationDate="2017-03-03T09:22:10.677" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this is the right place for this question. A friend of mine came across the word &quot;bossyi&quot; twice whilst digging through his family records. &#xA;I've trawled around the internet looking for word origins, meanings, mentions and have come up virtually empty. The only instance I could find is this lonely listing of an Alexander Bossyi from more than a century ago (&lt;a href=&quot;https://familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&amp;amp;query=%2Bsurname%3Abossyi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&amp;amp;query=%2Bsurname%3Abossyi&lt;/a&gt;). This doesn't actually tell me much about the word itself other than someone else used it as a name once upon a time.&#xA;Online translators draw blanks; Some suggesting it might be Finnish while others suggest Uzbek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping someone can shed some light. What language is it? Does it translate to anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time&#xA;Jarod&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15372" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T09:54:55.100" Title="Origins of a mystery name/word &quot;Bossyi&quot;" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21263" CreationDate="2017-03-03T09:47:16.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a surname which is widespread in Eastern Europe, mainly in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. This word comes from Ukrainian and it is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#uk/en/%D0%91%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjective which means&lt;/a&gt; &quot;barefoot, without shoes&quot;. In Ukrainian it is spelled &lt;em&gt;Босий&lt;/em&gt; ['bɔsɪj], in Russian the surname is spelled &lt;em&gt;Босый&lt;/em&gt; ['bɔsɨj] (the Russian word for &quot;barefoot&quot; is &lt;em&gt;босой&lt;/em&gt; [bə'sɔj]), and in Belarusian it is &lt;em&gt;Босы&lt;/em&gt; ['bɔsɨ]. The surname spread all over the former USSR, and since many Jews have this surname, it can be found all over the world, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting to note that the adjective &lt;em&gt;босий&lt;/em&gt; &quot;barefoot&quot; is actually an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bare&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymological cognate&lt;/a&gt; of the English adjective &quot;bare&quot; whose original meaning was &quot;naked, uncovered, unclothed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T09:54:55.100" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T09:54:55.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21267" CreationDate="2017-03-03T18:16:07.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning Indonesian and I was telling myself it's great for an anthropologist to be able to aproach so many aboriginal languages in the group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, I'm not really sure if this could be a real thing. Is it possible to communicate with local tribes in Indonesian. I know Indonesian is still being used more like a formal language (most of the Indonesains speak it as their 2nd language). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T02:37:02.093" Title="Are there tribes speaking Indonesian?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21269" CreationDate="2017-03-03T18:33:59.830" Score="3" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would make sense to me that, as the social differences decline due to the progresing demographic transition, the societies would tend to loose the the distinction between formal and informal language (not in general but in the sense of special word forms to talk about the person it's being spoken to), just as it'd happend in the evolution of English (where it had been the formal language that had faded out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="5609" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T13:43:01.003" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T16:15:22.990" Title="Do languages tend to lose the distinction between formal and informal language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21265" CreationDate="2017-03-04T02:37:02.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indonesian being the official language of Indonesia, it is widely spoken, so wherever you are you'd stand a better chance at being understood if you speak Indonesian than if you speak Batak. There is always the chance that if you are dealing with Kombai or Wano people that you may need a different language, but no language is more widely used in Indonesia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T02:37:02.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20667" CreationDate="2017-03-04T08:12:10.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference according to my understanding is that &lt;strong&gt;in inflective languages, one usually declines, or &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; morphemes (which are closely integrated into the word) to inflect meaning of the word. In agglutinative languages, one &lt;em&gt;append&lt;/em&gt; prefixes/suffixes to add meaning to a word - the word's stem is largely untouched. In analytic languages, those morpheme changes are largely absent - instead, one combines independent morphemes to convey meaning.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, few or none languages are purely inflective/agglutinative/analytic (isolating). Proto-Indo-European, and thus many Indo-European lanaugages, are heavily inflective. Romance languages are mainly inflective, but modern Romance languages have developed many analytic features as well (especially French). Mandarin Chinese is basically analytic, but it does have a few agglutinative features. Modern English is also mainly analytic, but it has some notable inflective features (e.g., what's left of verb inflections). Modern Japanese is both significantly analytic and significantly agglutinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think any answers have yet given examples of agglutinative languages, so I'll give some examples of the agglutinative features of Japanese. Let's take the Japanese verb 食べる &lt;em&gt;taberu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to eat&quot; as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;食べる    &lt;em&gt;taberu&lt;/em&gt;    &quot;eat&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  食べられる &lt;em&gt;taberareru&lt;/em&gt; &quot;able to eat&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  食べられたい &lt;em&gt;taberaretai&lt;/em&gt; &quot;want to be able to eat&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  食べられたくない &lt;em&gt;taberaretakunai&lt;/em&gt; &quot;do not want to be able to eat&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  食べられたくなかった &lt;em&gt;taberaretakunakatta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;did not want to be able to eat&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  食べられたくなかったら &lt;em&gt;taberaretakunakattara&lt;/em&gt; &quot;If I did not want to be able to eat&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could see that each suffix appended to the verb &lt;em&gt;taberu&lt;/em&gt; does exactly one thing: -&lt;em&gt;rareru&lt;/em&gt; expresses the potential to perform an action, -&lt;em&gt;tai&lt;/em&gt; expresses the wish to do some action, etc. They are largely independent from the verb stem, but do not form independent words on their own. Comparatively, English is basically analytic: to convey the same meaning, one use independent morphemes like &quot;able to&quot; and &quot;want&quot; to modify &quot;eat&quot;. While in a inflective language, it will be hard or nearly impossible to extract those morphemes out - not only because they are so closely integrated into the word stem itself, but also because it is simply not true that each prefix/suffix has one function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Japanese is heavily analytic in many other areas of its grammar, compared to languages generally considered primarily agglutinative (e.g., Turkish). I don't know any Turkish, but I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ev    &quot;(the) house&quot; &#xA;  evler &quot;(the) houses&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  evin  &quot;your (sing.) house&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  eviniz &quot;your (pl./formal) house&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  evim  &quot;my house&quot;&#xA;  evimde    &quot;at my house&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Turkish nouns seem to be generally agglutinative, Japanese nouns are generally not. A rough translation of the above mentioned expressions into Japanese would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;家 &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(the) house/(the) houses&quot; (there is no explicit plural in Japanese)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  あなたの家 &lt;em&gt;anata no ie&lt;/em&gt; &quot;your (sing.) house&quot; (literally &quot;house of you&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  あなた達の家 &lt;em&gt;anata-tachi no ie&lt;/em&gt; &quot;your (pl.) house&quot; (literally &quot;house of you (pl.)&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  私の家 &lt;em&gt;watashi no ie&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my house&quot; (literally &quot;house of me&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  私の家に &lt;em&gt;watashi no ie ni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;at my house&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pattern is very analytic. Instead of using prefixes/suffixes, Japanese uses independent words and particles in this case. The only thing that could be categorized as an agglutinative suffix is &lt;em&gt;tachi&lt;/em&gt; (which is equivalent to Chinese 們 &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;). Of course, one could analyze particles such as &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; as prefixes/suffixes, but this makes about as much sense as considering English &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt;, or Mandarin 的 &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; and 在 &lt;em&gt;zai&lt;/em&gt; as such. So, no, I would consider Japanese nouns as analytic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15373" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T08:12:10.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21266" CreationDate="2017-03-04T12:41:00.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are mixing different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that a stratified society has different degrees of formal education for different people. There consequently is a tendency for the upper layers of such society to speak a different &amp;quot;sociolect&amp;quot; than the lower layers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is that people speak in different registers in different contexts. Anyone, from a beggar to a Supreme Court justice, speaks differently when in court than when among friends in an informal &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying this to your specific question about pronouns, those things may or may not relate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking Portuguese as an example, let's imagine a dialogue between beggar and judge. In court, it should go more or less like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judge: &lt;em&gt;Afinal, &lt;strong&gt;o senhor&lt;/strong&gt; viu ou não viu quando o agressor fugiu?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beggar: &lt;em&gt;Já disse &lt;strong&gt;à senhora&lt;/strong&gt;: vi, mas 'tava escuro, então não vi direito.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albeit there is an enormous difference of status between judge and witness, it expected that both call each other a formal pronoun. It would be extremely rude for the witness to call the judge &amp;quot;você&amp;quot;, only excusable by ignorance. But it would also be rude for the judge to call the humble witness &amp;quot;você&amp;quot;, particularly if it is not a young man or woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's imagine a street dialogue between the same characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beggar: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'Cê&lt;/strong&gt; pode me dar uma moedinha aí, tia?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judge: &lt;em&gt;Se &lt;strong&gt;você&lt;/strong&gt; cuidar do carro pra mim, na volta te dou um trocado.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the context is informal, they may call each other informal pronouns (&lt;em&gt;você&lt;/em&gt; and its popular contraction &lt;em&gt;cê&lt;/em&gt;). It would be more respectful of both to use formal pronouns, but it is optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the use of formal pronouns in informal contexts may be intended as sarcastic, as in parents calling their children &lt;em&gt;o senhor&lt;/em&gt; during reprimands (and so, depending on context, the usage can easily be perceived as &lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; respectful than the use of an informal pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, archaic usage often sounds formal to our ears, even though it was intended as informal at the time it was uttered. We tend to hear English &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot; as formal because it is in the Bible and nobody speaks like that anymore; but it was informal, as opposed to formal &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;, a few centuries ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T16:15:22.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T15:14:16.600" Score="0" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi! This question is really important to me personally and I would love to hear from children-learning-experts as well as anybody who made a relevant experience in this area.&lt;/strong&gt; Some background first: My ex-wife (italian) moved from Germany back to Italy with our two kids, when they were 5 (Connor) and 2 (Lizzy) years old. I visited them from that time on 2-3 times per year for about a week each time. From the beginning on they were both reluctant to talk on the phone with me (reason for that is another case for a psychologist, I guess) but were always truly overjoyed when I came to see them in Venice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until today they accept and respect me as their father and listen to me when I tell them what they should/could do and what they'd better try to do differently (in contrast to my ex-wife I never shout at them). I speak just enough Italian (never learned it, just picked it up along the way) to have a basic conversation with the two (I speak English with my ex-wife) - but both kids never learned another language (despite having had English and German in school, which unfortunately proved to be totally useless). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today Connor is 17 and Lizzy is 14. Although it is very common in Italy to speak only Italian, even today, I am sad to say that my kids never picked up at least English - for their own good as well as, of course, for our ability to have a real conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now my question:&lt;/strong&gt; My ex-wife claims (from the beginning on until today), that both kids would speak at least good or even very good English and/or German, IF I only had talked with them in one of these languages on the phone from the start. (As I said, they never liked talking to me on the phone, which - according to my ex-wife - is also due to my &quot;reluctance&quot; to talk with them in English and/or German. I prefered talking to them in my rudimentary Italian because in that way they understood and answered my at least a bit). So, what I would truly like to know is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can a child learn a second language, if he/she talks (or listens to) another language on the phone - and if it is a question of the number and length of phone-calls, what would have been a sufficient number and length of calls?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thank you very much for your answer, I really appreciate it.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15379" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T15:14:16.600" Title="Can a child learn a second language only by hearing it over the telephone?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21273" CreationDate="2017-03-04T16:43:01.750" Score="4" ViewCount="816" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonants#Aspiration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(in English) &quot;The voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ are typically aspirated when they&#xA;  begin a stressed syllable, becoming [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ] [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these consonants weren't aspirated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt;, I thought the aspiration would appear and be explained in a diachronic description of English, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonants#Aspiration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I know, the explanation is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my questions : (1) How and when the aspiration appears ? (2) From when is the aspiration securely attested ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;addendum :&lt;/strong&gt; I read in Hogg's Cambridge History of the English Language (tome I, p. 89-90) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is impossible to be more precise&#xA;  about the articulation of the [Old English] dental consonants [...] there is no way&#xA;  of telling whether these stops would have aspiration in initial&#xA;  position [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T15:01:43.490" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T15:01:43.490" Title="When did Aspirated Consonants appear in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21271" CreationDate="2017-03-04T17:16:01.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how you reached the conclusion that Old English stops were unaspirated.  Here is the most relevant reference I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;T&quot; and &quot;p&quot; were possibly pronounced exactly like in Modern English &quot;turn&quot; and &quot;police&quot; respectively, but it is also possible that they were pronounced unaspirated - like in Modern Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/F%C5%8Drespr%C7%A3c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old_English/Fōresprǣc&lt;/a&gt;. And see the rest of the quoted paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T17:16:01.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21271" CreationDate="2017-03-04T22:54:53.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/36554/MA%20thesis%20Linguistics%20(research)%20Arienne%20Bruin.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This thesis&lt;/a&gt; by Bruin argues that aspiration is a feature of Old English, as also argued for Germanic in various places by Iverson &amp;amp; Salmons. Aspiration i.e. positive VOT is one of those under-reported phonetic details that is often ignored. For example, very few Bantu languages have an aspiration contrast and instead have a t/d voicing contrast, except that the voiceless stops are typically aspirated almost as much as in modern English. A widespread account of the ubiquity of aspiration fact is that aspiration &quot;enhances&quot; the contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants. Aspiration (long VOT lag) is so widespread in Germanic that it may be simpler to explain Dutch as an independent development than it is to explain multitudinous developments of aspiration (whereby Dutch would be a very conservative language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T22:54:53.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21279" CreationDate="2017-03-04T23:14:34.763" Score="5" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ido, the constructed language he helped to build, Louis Couturat attempted to introduce &lt;strong&gt;vel&lt;/strong&gt;, a conjunction that would express &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_disjunction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inclusive disjunction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;—so that, in logical sentences, the conjunction &lt;strong&gt;o(d)&lt;/strong&gt; would express &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exclusive disjunction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Louis Couturat was a logician who corresponded with Bertrand Russell. For some time, the conjuction &lt;strong&gt;vel&lt;/strong&gt; was adopted by the Ido Academy and people started using it. However, in &lt;em&gt;Progreso&lt;/em&gt;, the official Ido magazine, Couturat argued that Idists were using &lt;strong&gt;vel&lt;/strong&gt; incorrectly. For instance, somewhere one could read: &quot;We offer gratis [vel] not gratis books&quot;. He argued that the use of &lt;strong&gt;vel&lt;/strong&gt; in that sentence is wrong, since a book cannot be gratis and not gratis &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, he said that &quot;in the daytime [vel] in the nighttime&quot; is illogical, since day and night cannot exist &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt;. However, he gave this sentence as a &quot;good&quot; example: &quot;We are looking for someone who speaks German [vel] Ido&quot;, saying that German and Ido &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; coexist &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: was Louis Couturat right when he implied that the inclusive disjunction must be valid for &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; element of a group considered individually (i.e. a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; book cannot be gratis &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; not gratis), and not only for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; elements considered as a whole (i.e. &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; books can be gratis while &lt;em&gt;the others&lt;/em&gt; are not)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15380" LastEditorUserId="15380" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T12:59:31.087" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T16:48:49.520" Title="Louis Couturat on inclusive disjunction in Ido" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30611" CreationDate="2017-03-05T03:24:50.000" Score="7" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French, Standard Dutch, Tamil, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Modern&#xA;  Greek, and Latvian are languages that do not have aspirated&#xA;  consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch is a Germanic language without aspirated consonants. I think this is an influence of Romance languages on Dutch phonology. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T14:07:37.427" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:08:44.830" Title="When did Dutch lose its Aspirated Consonants" Tags="&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2017-03-05T05:56:11.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The foundational argument for UG is robust and has not been refuted despite claims to the contrary. The schools of linguistics mentioned above, e.g. functional, discourse studies, are irrelevant to the UG program, i.e. describing I-language to account for the child's amazing feat of first language acquisition. Chomsky makes this point abundantly clear on page 2 of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Authors such as Tomasselo and Evert who purport to refute UG fail to be convincing. Evertt for example claims he found a language that does not have the property of recursion, but there are few other linguists who can verify his claim. As far as the technical apparatus of UG, Chomsky did not insist on it; hence, the gradual evolution from the Standard theory, to GB, to the MP. The basic arguments of Plato's problem, poverty of stimulus, and degeneracy of input are rational arguments that can be confirmed by the evidence of any parent having raised a child. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15382" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T05:56:11.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3831" CreationDate="2017-03-05T07:46:19.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My explanation is Japanese became tied up with kanji when it decided to introduce widespread usage of &lt;em&gt;kun'yomi&lt;/em&gt; 訓読み, as opposed to Korean and Vietnamese which almost only have &lt;em&gt;on'yomi&lt;/em&gt;, or loaned Chinese readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it was made possible that native coined Japanese words would also have simple ideographic representations, making kanji conducive to comprehension, instead of an impedance. Instead of having to read the phonetic symbols みず &lt;em&gt;mizu&lt;/em&gt; and まぼろし &lt;em&gt;maboroshi&lt;/em&gt;, one can simply read and write the ideograms 水 and 幻, which are much more comprehensible. I am a native Chinese speaker, and I'm still almost unable to comprehend large amounts of Chinese transcribed into Pinyin. The same goes for reading Japanese without kanji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in Korea, few hanjas have native readings. Numerically, there are more Chinese loanwords than native words in both Korean and Japanese; however, the most frequently used words in both languages are almost all native. Thus, in Korean mixed-script texts, one sees much fewer hanjas than one do in Japanese texts. Moreover, since Korean is usually one syllable (hangul character) per hanja and has spacing between words, mixed script texts are very easily replaced by hangul-only texts, making hanja actually an impedance to reading comprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were movements in Japan to abolish kanji, but there were also those movements in China - and it was much bigger than China (even backed by the PRC regime initially). However, due to the Chinese characters being extremely conducive in expressing meaning concisely and in disambiguating homophones, neither of the movements succeeded - leaving Chinese and Japanese to be the only languages to use Chinese characters in their standard written forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15373" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T07:46:19.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T11:03:40.330" Score="8" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I apologize but my English skills are by far below the complexity of the question I need to ask. I am not a specialist and my question is not related to a single language. I would like to identify the subset of &quot;words&quot; or maybe better, of concepts, that once learned or labeled, for their semantic or logical relevance, are &quot;enough&quot; to create a meaningful description of all the other words in a language. If we call these words or concepts primitives (archetypes), how many of them do we need in a basic dictionary? They basically allow a language to becomes self explicative. I found a question about circular defined words, but that question seems more based on a statistical evaluation of words in a dictionary. I would like to do something similar but to focus on the semantic aspect, on concepts, and then extract the words. This could allow to avoid the &quot;minimum feedback arc set problem&quot; coming from the attempt to do a kind of reverse engineering of the dictionary. Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15385" LastEditorUserId="15385" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T12:13:43.027" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T05:48:21.113" Title="How many words can be considered &quot;core words&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21274" CreationDate="2017-03-05T14:44:28.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Ido coordinating conjunctions have ambiguous scope like English conjunctions, then it will be possible for logically coherent sentences to include sequences like &quot;gratis vel not gratis&quot; or &quot;in the daytime vel in the nighttime.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider the example &quot;gratis [vel] not gratis books&quot;. In the corresponding English phrase &quot;free or not free books&quot;, &quot;free&quot; and &quot;not free&quot; do not refer to the same things. There is an ellipsis; this really means &quot;gratis &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt; vel not gratis books.&quot; And this is a reasonable thing to offer, if you mean to emphasize that a customer can make either a selection composed entirely of free books, or a selection composed entirely of not-free books, or a selection composed of both free and not-free books. In other words, the idea expressed is &quot;either [free books], or [not-free books], or both,&quot; which is not logically incorrect and which is a disjunction. (I actually do think it sounds better to just use simple conjunction, though. I don't quite understand the logical underpinnings of how free-choice disjunctives work, and it seems simpler to me to just talk about what is offered in general and say that it includes &quot;(both) free &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; non-free books.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In the daytime, or in the nighttime, or both&quot; is a very unlikely thing to want to express, so I agree that it is likely that someone using &quot;vel&quot; in this context is making an error. But again, in English at least it might make sense if the conjunction is really operating on a wider scope, for example &quot;If [you like hiking in the daytime] vel [(&lt;em&gt;you like hiking&lt;/em&gt;) in the nightime], you will find it helpful to have a map.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T16:48:49.520" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T16:48:49.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21017" CreationDate="2017-03-06T19:33:34.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is all the difference in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Omitting Space:&lt;/strong&gt; arbitrary orthographic convention designed essentially by linguists to encode a particular language in writing; while this is likely to be based on some language features, it is extra-linguistic in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agglutination:&lt;/strong&gt; way of deriving words from morphemes - it is based on the concept of word as the minimal lexical unit and the agglutinated morpheme having only one grammatical function. Morphemes that are agglutinated to a lexical root cannot stand by themselves and form one word with the lexical root (e.g. English &lt;em&gt;urgent&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt; is essentially an agglutination because &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; has one grammatical function, to convert an adjective to an adverb, and it cannot stand on its own, cannot be separated from the root by another full-fledged word etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that agglutinative morphemes can behave in a way suggesting their original status as a word, e.g. in a multi-word phrase, they are added only to the last element: if we have &lt;em&gt;very large dogs&lt;/em&gt;, an agglutinative language with such a feature will have &lt;em&gt;very large dog-s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dog very large-s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dog large very-s&lt;/em&gt; (depending on its word order constraints) but the &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; (plural mark) just cannot stand on its own (form a sentence) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know any Turkish but note that your phrase &lt;em&gt;as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people&lt;/em&gt; contains actually very little few lexical elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;em&gt;Czechoslovak&lt;/em&gt; (this you cannot do away with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; (this can be easily a grammatical morpheme, in Czech we also do not say &lt;em&gt;English people&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Spanish people&lt;/em&gt; but we have morphemes allowing us to express this in one word, like &lt;em&gt;Englishmen&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Spaniards&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;em&gt;resemble&lt;/em&gt; (this can be easily encoded by a grammatical morpheme similar to English &lt;em&gt;-like&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;doglike behaviour&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;catlike gait&lt;/em&gt;,...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; (this is almost certainly a factitive derivation of which there is plethora in Turkish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest are clearly words with grammatical meaning, not lexical, hence it can all be agglutinated to the lexical basis and exist as a single word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is the decision of the powers that be to determine whether you write it all together without any separation, or whether you separate strong morphological units by, say, a dash or a dot, or whether you separate every single morpheme by a space. Compare the German and English attitude towards compound words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: Old Church Slavonic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German: Altkirchenslawisch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T19:33:34.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21285" CreationDate="2017-03-06T20:58:20.907" Score="5" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that [ən] can be reduced to [n̩] in some circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this possibility also apply to [ən] that comes from former [ɚn] in non-rhotic English dialects? I have had limited contact with non-rhotic English (mostly television), but I only recall hearing &lt;em&gt;eastern&lt;/em&gt; as [ˈiːstən] rather than [ˈiːsʔn̩] &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, while words like &lt;em&gt;prison&lt;/em&gt; are commonly heard with either [ən] or [n̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only information I could find was &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com.br/2009/11/heavnly-scansion.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;these blog comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;army198727: Is there anyone who consistently distinguishes /ˈsev.n/&#xA;  &quot;seven&quot; from /ˈsev.ən/ &quot;Severn&quot;? Or is the transcription of the former&#xA;  as /ˈsevn/ in most dictionaries another example of a distinction&#xA;  without a distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mallamb27: Yes I do, and /ˈbɪtn/ 'bitten' from /ˈbɪtən/ 'bittern', /ˈpætn/&#xA;  'patten', 'paten' from /ˈpætən/ 'pattern'. You may find this hard to&#xA;  believe, but I am always banging on about the upper limit of&#xA;  distinctive realization, and this is what makes this distinction&#xA;  justifiable. But only for a probably quite restricted population of&#xA;  consistent speakers. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need to add a new phoneme to the list of English phonemes (as shown by the minimal pairs &lt;em&gt;bitten&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;bittern&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pattern&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;patten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;seven&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Severn&lt;/em&gt;)? Or is it just an occasional idiosyncratic or artificial distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe the former is used in non-TV registers? Maybe I haven't paid enough attention?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T23:40:15.963" Title="Are there non-rhotic English speakers who distinguish between [ən] and syllabic [n]?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21084" CreationDate="2017-03-06T21:49:11.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another technique that would be relevant for your comparative task is &lt;em&gt;keyness analysis&lt;/em&gt;, which basically looks at words* which occur significantly more often in one group of texts than in another. The technique comes from the field of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a field which has developed a number of techniques and tools for analysing large amounts of texts in both qualitative and quantitative ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an introduction to corpus linguistics (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics&lt;/a&gt;) and you can find a brief introduction to keyness analysis on the site for Wordsmith Tool, a corpus linguistics software (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version5/HTML/index.html?keyness_definition.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version5/HTML/index.html?keyness_definition.htm&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*note that keyness analysis can be done at the level of words, but also semantic groupings of words or POS categories. In the latter cases, it would involve identifying &lt;em&gt;categories&lt;/em&gt; which occur significantly more often in one corpus than in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15394" LastEditorUserId="15394" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T06:28:47.720" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T06:28:47.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19113" CreationDate="2017-03-06T22:09:46.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That I am aware of, most corpora of British English are not freely available. There are, however, corpora of British English, including POS-tags and formal language, which can be downloaded by individuals, although I am not aware of any which are open source. These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the British National Corpus, which can be downloaded in its XML version from the Oxford Text Archive (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2554&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2554&lt;/a&gt;), free in the UK (via Shibboleth).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;various corpora, downloadable in various formats including a 'linear text' format, which can be purchased from the Brigham Young University corpus interface (&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/full-text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.byu.edu/full-text/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15394" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T22:09:46.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21282" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:40:15.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we should take the report of contrast at face value. The consequences of that fact are not obvious, though. Before leaping to a conclusion, you have to set out your analytic axioms, the most relevant issue being what definition of &quot;phoneme&quot; you are operating with. The most widespread understanding of &quot;phoneme&quot; is that a sound is a phoneme if it cannot always be derives from something else, for example [ɾ] in American English can always derive from /t/ or /d/ – whereas, [ʃ] &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a phoneme because it can't always be derived from /s/ (wash, shore) even though it sometimes can (face, facial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that view of phoneme, the primary question would be, are &lt;em&gt;m̩ n̩ l̩&lt;/em&gt; phonemes of English? There are decent reasons to believe that the syllabic sonorants derive from schwa plus sonorant, especially when a full vowel alternates with schwa owing to paradigmatic stress shifts. See for example &lt;em&gt;calorie ~ caloric&lt;/em&gt; where the first syllable alternates between stressed [ˈkæl] and unstressed [kl̩]. However, one can plausible derive many instances of syllabic sonorant from an otherwise unsyllabifiable CC cluster, thus /bɒtl/ &quot;bottle&quot;, /rɒtn/ &quot;rotten&quot; are possible analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is reportedly no difference between &quot;Peter&quot; and &quot;pita&quot;, there would be no reason to posit underlying /r/ in one word and not the other. So if &quot;bitten&quot; comes from /bɪtən/, then what would [bɪtən] &quot;bittern&quot; come from? Perhaps /bɪtərn/, since even though we don't have a reason to posit /r/ in &quot;Peter&quot;, we sort of do in &quot;bittern&quot; (it helps us maintain a smaller phoneme inventory). But another analysis is at hand: &quot;bottle&quot; is /bɔtl/, &quot;cotton&quot; is /kɒtn/, and in this dielect there is no reduction of schwa plus sonorant in that dialect – schwa is entirely gone. No new phoneme is added (schwa is already a phoneme); what is &quot;added&quot; is a kind of consonant cluster that wasn't there earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the answer really hangs on the strength of evidence for reduction of /ən/ to [n̩] in that dialect, in particular, the evidence that there is an underlying vowel before the nasal. I suspect that my alternation &quot;canon&quot; [ˈkænən] ~ &quot;canonical&quot; [kn̩̩ˈnɑnɪkl̩] is not found in that dialect of English and instead you have schwa in the first (unstressed) syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T23:40:15.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21295" CreationDate="2017-03-07T01:25:45.387" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a programming project with the main focus of 'understanding'. I'm fully aware of the technical implications but that's not why I'm here. I need to know what 'to understand' actually means, since all of the definitions I've found so far have been either circular or vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting because this is beyond my brain power alone and I'm a programmer not a linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put simply: What I'm asking for is a definition of understanding that doesn't invoke it or its synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of what I don't want:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/understanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/understanding&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Which points to:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprehension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprehension&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Which just points back to understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15395" LastEditorUserId="15395" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T12:31:34.320" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T21:35:26.117" Title="The Meaning of Understand" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ClosedDate="2017-03-08T11:18:03.810" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19054" CreationDate="2017-03-07T07:39:00.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One word for this phenomenon is &lt;em&gt;collocation&lt;/em&gt; - which is defined in many ways, but generally refers to two or more words which have a tendency to co-occur. The wikipedia page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation&lt;/a&gt;) currently defines it both as 'a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance' and as 'partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use' (two different definitions with different theoretical implications). Examples on the Wikipedia page include 'nuclear family' and 'make a decision'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research is ongoing to explore the idea that collocations are (mentally) processed differently from other groupings of words. A good starting-point to read about this could be Michael Hoey's theory of &lt;em&gt;lexical priming&lt;/em&gt;, which holds that what we know about a word comes from our experience of it, so that our mental representation of it includes knowledge about the words it tends to co-occur with. Hence when we encounter word X, we will more easily retrieve words which often co-occur with word X than words which co-occur less often with word X. An example of a study referring to lexical priming in relation to language processing is Gagné (2001) [1].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Gagné, C. L., (2001), 'Relation and lexical priming during the interpretation of noun–noun combinations.', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 27(1), Jan 2001, 236-254. See: &lt;a href=&quot;http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xlm/27/1/236/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xlm/27/1/236/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15394" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T07:39:00.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19054" CreationDate="2017-03-07T07:45:19.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A term I am aware of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Multiword expression&lt;/a&gt; (MWE). It seems quite fitting to the examples described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T07:45:19.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T09:56:09.577" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak Russian natively, but 95% of what I read is in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which translation of a Polish book should I read, Russian or English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question may sound strange, but I mostly prefer English translations of Japanese texts to Russian translations which I often dislike and are commonly based on English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polish is different in that it looks much closer to Russian. Does that mean that it's easier to make a good Polish-&gt;Russian translation and so the Russian translations often better than English ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15398" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T11:03:33.707" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T11:10:49.677" Title="Are Polish-&gt; Russan translations generally better than Polish-&gt;English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;polish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21289" CreationDate="2017-03-07T11:10:49.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a large variation in translation quality inside a given language pair. My guess is that this variation outweighs any systematic effects caused by choosing different target languages. Even if there were a tendency towards better translation quality for an &quot;easier&quot; language pair (I am not aware of any systematic studies of this question) I'd ask about the quality of translation for the given work (or look for books reviews, they often have information about the translation quality) and than choose on a work-by-work basis the better one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case that everything else is equal, I'd always prefer a translation to my native language to a translation to a foreign language (except I want to learn the foreign language better by reading in it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T11:10:49.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21235" CreationDate="2017-03-07T11:57:59.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm remembering correctly, according to Atkins and Rundell (2008) [1], many projects build their own software, but there are also commercial packages such as TshwaneLex (&lt;a href=&quot;http://tshwanedje.com/tshwanelex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://tshwanedje.com/tshwanelex/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atkins and Rundell (2008) go into some detail about the requirements of such software, so you may find their book helpful. They mention that there are two types of software which are needed for any lexicography project: what they call a &lt;em&gt;Corpus Query System&lt;/em&gt; (CQS) and what they call a &lt;em&gt;Dictionary Writing System&lt;/em&gt; (DWS). The point of a CQS is to access evidence on the basis of which dictionary entries can be written; in that sense, their needs are very similar to those of standard corpus linguistic software* (which include the ability to draw up concordances, as well as other features). The point of the DWS is to offer an interface for generating and storing what will make up the content of the dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Atkins, B.T. Sue and Michael Rundell (2008) The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*an example of corpus linguistic software is AntConc, which is free, though probably not powerful enough for a lexicography project. You can see a list of commonly used corpus linguistics software here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corpora4learning.net/resources/materials.html#5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.corpora4learning.net/resources/materials.html#5&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15394" LastEditorUserId="15394" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T12:24:06.287" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T12:24:06.287" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19054" CreationDate="2017-03-07T13:05:20.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several terms in use that are related to what you've asked, but there's some overlap between them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiword Unit (MWU) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Multiword Expression&lt;/a&gt; (MWE).  I believe this term fits what you are looking for most closely - it indicates 2 or more words that are treated as one in some way.  The meaning of the MWU is not strictly determinate based on the meaning of the parts.  Sometimes they can become psychologically linked to the point that we add suffixes onto the unit as a whole as per your examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bogglesworldesl.com/glossary/polyword.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polywords&lt;/a&gt; is another term that's close to your explanation, but is not used as broadly.  It refers to several words together that act as one.  It's usually used for phrases like &quot;by the way&quot; and &quot;of course&quot; where they are so closely mentally linked that it cannot endure even the slightest change of terms (you could never say &quot;by that way&quot; - it seems like a completely different phrase).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collocations&lt;/a&gt; are words that tend to co-occur.  They may not have an idiomatic meaning, and though they are mentally linked, they are not necessarily idiomatic in meaning or mentally parsed as a single word.  Collocations include MWUs, but also phrases like &quot;pine tree&quot; and &quot;angry citizens&quot; where the meaning is not idiomatic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Idioms&lt;/a&gt; are any phrases where the meaning is quite different from the individual words.  They are often figurative, but sometimes the figure of speech is forgotten.  They are often parsed syntactically so that alterations are possible; for example, we could change &quot;kick the bucket&quot; (idiom meaning &quot;to die&quot;) to &quot;kick the proverbial bucket&quot;, and the idiom is still recognized.  We can even turn the idiom on its head:  &quot;the squeaky wheel gets the grease&quot; could become &quot;the squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T13:05:20.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21286" CreationDate="2017-03-07T17:43:23.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's still not clear what fact of &quot;understand&quot; you want, because you haven't given us a definition of &quot;meaning&quot; (asking for &quot;actual meaning&quot; just confuses the matter, since it implies that there are non-actual meanings that you don't want). Here are some notions of &quot;meaning&quot; that I think you might be interested in. (1) a translation matrix into other languages or the same language, e.g. &quot;understand&quot;: &quot;comprehend&quot;: &quot;comprendre&quot;: &quot;fahamu&quot;: &quot;vorstå&quot;. (2) an reduction to defined terms of the states and events which are described by the word, in normative usage. (3) a statistically-adjusted reduction to defined terms of the states and events which are described by the word, in observed usage by all speakers of English. (1) is usually just wrong, and seems to be the thing you don't want. (3) is too complicated and is of dubious empirical value (sampling problems, for example). I surmise that you want something like (2), where you state the necessary and sufficient conditions for felicitously using &quot;understand&quot; in Standard English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-circular account would distinguish &quot;understand&quot; from every other word (unless you have a situation like &quot;sofa&quot; and &quot;couch&quot; where there is no difference referents), and is built on other well-defined concepts which ultimately are based in perception. Only a consciousness can &quot;understand&quot;, and what the consciousness understands is a fact of reality. This does not distinguish &quot;understand&quot; from &quot;think&quot; or &quot;know&quot;, but you can add more distinguishing features, so that you can differentiate &quot;understand&quot; from &quot;know&quot;. To do that, you could assemble pairs of sentences which differ in word choice, like &quot;I know Spanish&quot; and &quot;I understand Spanish&quot;, which should lead you to see some differences in the situations described by the two verb – you may understand Spanish yet hardly be able to speak it, but it would be infelicitous usage to say say that you know Spanish if you can't speak it. Similarly, the situations described by saying &quot;I know Jack&quot; and &quot;I understand Jack&quot; are different, though there is some intersection. If you apply these two verbs to somewhat different objects, the difference becomes sharper: you can say &quot;I understand this contract&quot; but it is almost senseless to say &quot;I know this contract&quot; – unless you mean &quot;I have encountered this contract before&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears, then, that you are looking for a characterization of how &quot;understand&quot; is distinguished from all other words of English, in terms of felicitous usage. Since you mentioned being a programmer, it is likely that you are not interested only in &quot;literal meaning&quot;, you would also be interested in metaphorical extensions. When A says to B &quot;We understand each other&quot;, A is not just saying that A literally understands B and vice versa, he is saying that they are in agreement (so B could respond &quot;I understand your position, but I don't think we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; agree&quot;). It depends on the nature of the programming task, but it is likely that it will have to deal with &quot;actual usage&quot;, which expands the range of situations that have to be dealt with substantially. So while I encourage approach (2), from a practical perspective, ignoring &quot;actual usage&quot; (figurative language, especially) may be a short-sighted and mistaken choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T21:35:26.117" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T21:35:26.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:26:25.890" Score="3" ViewCount="1327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do linguists represent the vowels as a vowel diagram, but use a table instead to represent the consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LDOv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LDOv.png&quot; alt=&quot;a vocal diagram:&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;against a consonant table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdXwg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdXwg.png&quot; alt=&quot;consonant table&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15406" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:52:28.347" Title="Representing consonants and vocal graphically" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21296" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:47:22.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowel diagram shows the position of the tongue when pronouncing this or that vowel. This position, as well as lips being rounded/unrounded are the only factors that influence the quality of the English vowels (the diagram is for the English language), all the vowels are produced in the same manner: the air freely flows through the open mouth, the position of the tongue only changes the shape and the volume of the resonator (mouth cavity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with the consonants it is all much more complicated. The quality of the consonants is not defined merely by the tongue position as is the case with the vowels. Some consonants are produced without any use of the tongue whatsoever (bilabial, labiodental, glottal), there are several &lt;em&gt;manners&lt;/em&gt; in which the consonants are produced (stops, fricatives, affricates) as opposed to just one manner with the vowels. Also, while pronouncing a consonant, the air can flow not only through the mouth, as with the vowels, but also through the nose (nasal consonants). And on top of that, the consonants can be voiced and voiceless. All of this makes the system of the consonants much more multi-dimensional than the two-dimentional vowel system. In other words, a vowel is defined by just 2 factors, tongue position and rounded/unrounded lips, a consonant is defined by much more factors that simply cannot be squeezed into a two-dimentional diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T20:02:30.510" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T20:02:30.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21296" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:48:46.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The differences in presentation reflect the nature of how consonants vs. vowels are produced. The arrangement on the horizontal axis reflects location of the major constriction, but is mapped in terms of the entire vocal tract as a straightened tube for consonants, vs. just the tongue body for vowels. The vertical axis for vowels iconically represents degree of constriction, but for consonants that is only half-true (plosives and fricatives). Since there are separate symbols for nasal or phonatory differences in consonants (and not in vowels), the vertical dimension has to be recruited to also represent those consonant properties. There are more degrees of constriction for vowels compared to consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:48:46.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T22:28:37.037" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for corpora for text classification with annotated support phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support phrases = phrases that explain why a text was given a label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the text is &quot;&lt;em&gt;The patient works at Firm X. He uses the computer all day long, and goes to the gym twice a week. He has 2 dogs.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and the label is &quot;Patient is a computer user&quot;, then the support phrase is &quot;He uses the computer all day long&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T22:28:37.037" Title="Corpus for text classification with annotated support phrases" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19054" CreationDate="2017-03-08T03:24:22.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the phenomenon you're looking for is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reanalysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reanalysis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(linguistics) Analyzing a lexeme with a different structure from its original, often by misunderstanding. For example, &lt;em&gt;hamburger&lt;/em&gt;, which is originally &lt;em&gt;Hamburg&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, was reanalyzed as &lt;em&gt;ham&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-burger&lt;/em&gt;, which produced words like &lt;em&gt;cheeseburger&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this definition gives examples in which a word is reanalysed in terms of its internal morphological structure, I don't see it as much of a difference if you're talking about multiple words (such as &lt;em&gt;fourth of July&lt;/em&gt;) being treated as a single lexical unit. In essence the morpheme/word boundaries are being reanalysed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3464" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T03:24:22.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21305" CreationDate="2017-03-08T13:40:23.767" Score="9" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lately I seem to get into a lot of discussions about stuff that is &quot;wrong&quot; in a language and whether it's really wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my last discussion there was a native Japanese saying you can use &quot;verb x&quot; as both a transitive and an intransitive verb and I corrected him saying no, that's wrong, look into the dictionary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now he argued that because there are a lot of natives that use verb x as a transitive verb it is correct (implaying &quot;languages evolves&quot;). I also googled this issue and a lot of natives agree that it's used but wrong.&#xA;Of course everyone believed the Japanese guy, because he's a native.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People argued that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the natives regularly and reliably say a thing, it's a part of the&#xA;  language, whether you like it or not, whether the dictionary agrees or&#xA;  not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;correct&quot; usage of a language is defined by how the native&#xA;  speakers talk, not some arbitrary bullshit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I brought up Japanese and English examples like &quot;you're vs. your&quot; or &quot;its vs it's&quot; which natives use wrong all the time I just got downvoted and ignored. Another user also mentioned &quot;alot&quot; and &quot;should of&quot; but also got ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can someone comment on this issue? How does linguistics decide that is &quot;wrong&quot; grammar and what is &quot;right&quot; grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15412" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T11:39:43.800" Title="When does language &quot;evolve&quot; and when is it just wrong grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21304" CreationDate="2017-03-08T14:11:29.833" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's right if other people who speak your dialect (other people in your &lt;em&gt;speech community&lt;/em&gt;) also say the same thing systematically. In the Japanese case, it's clear that the construction is correct in his dialect, since he's not alone in using that construction. What's wrong when it comes to &lt;em&gt;spoken language&lt;/em&gt; is usually when you make mistakes likes slip of the tongue, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) a. Spoonerism: You hissed all my mystery lectures. (Intended: You missed all my history lectures.) &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;       b. One of the lecturers are very nice. (Intended: One of the lecturers is very nice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People utter stuff like (1), but they do so because of memory limitations or other cognitive quirks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There could also be other reasons why you make mistakes - perhaps you just imperfectly acquired then language when you grew up, so you say e.g. 'deers' when everyone else says 'deer' - but that is unlikely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say something that merely deviates from the standard variety of the language, as codified in the Japanese dictionary, it doesn't mean that you're wrong. &lt;em&gt;It merely means that you're speaking something other than the standard variety.&lt;/em&gt; Sometimes, this can be because the dialect you speak is &lt;strong&gt;innovative&lt;/strong&gt; - which implies language evolution - and other times, this can be because the standard variety is more innovative. For example, it is non-standard in modern Chinese to use the morpheme corresponding to the character 至 to indicate superlatives, but it was not in Old Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good essay on these matters is &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Geoff Pullum, if you're interested in some further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases like 'you're/your' and 'alot' are orthographic errors, not grammatical ones, and are quite different from the Japanese case. Of course, with orthography there are also standard and non-standard varieties and both can also change through time, but it's not as systematic as spoken language. Whether writing 'alot' is wrong is more of a matter of definition here, though I'd say that if you're writing something that should follow standard orthographic conventions but you do not follow them, then you're 'wrong'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T14:59:22.683" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T14:59:22.683" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T14:34:03.020" Score="4" ViewCount="1536" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of loan words and New Latin words derived from Ancient Greek have word initial clusters of a plosive+nasal or dissimilar phonemes like /ps/ or /pt/. I cannot avoid aspirating or inserting a schwa when trying to pronounce these syllable initially, though syllable finally or word medially I can pronounce just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were these pronounced syllable initially in Ancient Greek? If so, how am I unable to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were these pronounced only when word medial? If so, what phonological process lead to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T03:13:25.970" Title="Are syllable initial consonant clusters pronounced in Ancient Greek?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21306" CreationDate="2017-03-08T14:55:26.577" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll assume you're a native English speaker. Since English doesn't have these clusters, it's difficult for an English speaker to hear or produce them correctly. But it is not impossible, and there is no reason to think Ancient Greek speakers did not pronounce them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Word initial plosive-plosive clusters are definitely possible since they occur in modern languages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite possible to have word-initial clusters of plosives without an intervening epenthetic vowel. Polish is an example of a language where this occurs; the word for bird is &amp;quot;ptak.&amp;quot; Here is the Forvo page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/ptak/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forvo.com/word/ptak/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it sounds like the female speaker is saying &amp;quot;tak,&amp;quot; and the male speaker is saying &amp;quot;puh-tak.&amp;quot; But this is probably not what they are actually doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that in fact, she is using a pronunciation with less audible release of the initial /p/, while he is giving it more audible release. It's true that it's hard to hear a stop with little audible release when there is no preceding vowel. But that doesn't necessarily mean the speaker is not articulating them. Aside from being easily to hear word-medially, as you mention, it would likely be more audible when it comes at the start of a word, and the preceding word ends in a vowel. This is a common situation in actual speech; speakers don't often say words in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While audible release sounds like a schwa in this position to an English speaker, phonetically there is a difference between audible release, and a vowel such as schwa. Hearing a schwa is an auditory illusion, like how Japanese speakers hear an /u/ vowel between the consonants of word-initial consonant clusters in English, such as the &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;m&amp;quot; of &amp;quot;smile.&amp;quot; (In fact, there are good phonological bases for both of these illusions: Japanese speakers commonly realize /u/ as zero in some positions, such as between two voiceless consonants, and English speakers may realize schwa as zero in some positions, such as between two voiceless consonants as in &amp;quot;s&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;ppose&amp;quot; or even in other contexts as in &amp;quot;p&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;lice&amp;quot;. But these are language-specific processes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough phonetics to be able to say how easy it is to distinguish aspiration word-initially before other obstruents. In fact, though, I don't think Ancient Greek has such a contrast; there might be exceptions that I can't bring to mind, but I think before unaspirated plosives we only see π τ κ, and before aspirated plosives we only see φ θ χ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Demotic Greek shows reflexes of the first consonant in such clusters; this indicates that there was also a pronounced consonant in the earlier forms of Greek&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/21310/5581&quot;&gt;LjL's answer&lt;/a&gt; makes a good point about these clusters being present in modern Greek and in loanwords from Greek in other languages. I left a comment where I wondered if these could be spelling pronunciations, but then I realized I could probably look that up myself to some degree. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_Greek#Phonological_features&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; indicates that Demotic Greek, which is the form of Greek that evolved mostly on the spoken level (so it was probably not influenced by the spelling) does have reflexes of these sounds. For example, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%AF%CF%89&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;φταίω&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is the demotic pronunciation corresponding to the learned πταίω.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact, we could say that even the Greeks somehow &amp;quot;preferred&amp;quot; other types of clusters over plosive-plosive clusters, and in unlearned pronunciation the first plosive naturally evolved to an aspirate or fricative, but the fact that this happened is evidence that the initial plosive was never lost altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This just applied to plosive + plosive clusters — unaspirated stops were unchanged in demotic Greek before nasals like /n/ or fricatives like /s/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this, along with the fact that the Ancient Greeks must have had some reason for writing these clusters of consonant letters in the first place, makes it pretty clear that the first plosive of word-initial clusters was pronounced in Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T22:07:13.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21308" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-08T15:42:28.250" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T15:42:28.250" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T15:42:28.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21309" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-08T15:42:28.250" Score="0" Body="A level of syntactic structure that contains a predicate, its arguments and possibly modifiers of the predicate. It is a smaller constituent than a sentence, but larger than a verb phrase or noun phrase." OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T16:28:01.447" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T16:28:01.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21306" CreationDate="2017-03-08T16:32:49.743" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is very little doubt they were pronounced: they are still pronounced in many languages other than English where they were loaned, and crucially in modern Greek; they were also spelled with those clusters when coeval Latin borrowed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact you cannot pronounce them doesn't mean they cannot be pronounced... No offense, but everyone's pronunciation abilities tend to be limited by their native language's phonology (which sounds are found and distinguished in the language) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonotactics&lt;/a&gt; (which combinations of sounds are allowable in which situations). Foreign sounds, or combinations of sounds, can be hard to produce without training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To hear how these sounds are pronounced in practice, you can just open Google Translate and click on the speaker icon to make it pronounce words of this sort in &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#el/en/%CF%88%CF%85%CF%87%CE%BF%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%82%2C%20%CE%BE%CE%B5%CE%BD%CE%BF%CF%86%CE%BF%CE%B2%CE%AF%CE%B1%2C%20%CF%80%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%8D%CE%BC%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern Greek&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#it/en/psicologo%2C%20xenofobia%2C%20pneumatico&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt; (this one has an obvious schwa in &quot;xenofobia&quot;, but I can testify that's a glitch in the speech synthesizer, as in standard Italian there is no schwa there), &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#es/en/psicologo%2C%20xenofobia%2C%20pneumatico&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#sv/it/psykolog%2C%20xylofon%2C%20pneumatiskt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swedish&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#de/en/Psychologe%2C%20Xylophon%2C%20pneumatisch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also recorded myself pronouncing some words starting with this kind of clusters in Italian: &lt;a href=&quot;https://instaud.io/O6d&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;psicologo, pseudonimo, pneumatico, pneumotorace, xilofono, xenofobo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, just to have them from an actual human speaker too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T03:13:25.970" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T03:13:25.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T04:27:11.303" Score="2" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a question I posed to a prominent researcher in French phonology during my undergrad. We didn't spend a ton of time on it, but we couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution. Now that I've discovered this StackExchange, I thought I'd bring it up again...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;[ps] pr [bz]?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English and French words &quot;observe&quot; both derive from Latin, the English through the French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some dictionaries give &lt;code&gt;/ɔbˈsɛʀv/&lt;/code&gt; for the French pronunciation and &lt;code&gt;/əbˈsɜːv/&lt;/code&gt; for the English; others give something more in line the common realizations &lt;code&gt;[ɔpˈsɛʀv]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[əbˈzɜːv]&lt;/code&gt; respectively. (The realization of that last vowel is not material here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This perplexing behaviour is not isolated; a similar situation obtains for pairs like &quot;absurd/absurde&quot;, where English tends towards &lt;code&gt;[bz]&lt;/code&gt; and French towards &lt;code&gt;[ps]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin, we shall presume, was at some point realized &lt;code&gt;[bs]&lt;/code&gt; or at least represented &lt;code&gt;/bs/&lt;/code&gt;. Either way, the ensuing assimilation evidently went in two different directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Which segment/feature exerts influence over the other?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the stop is more salient than the fricative, or vice versa, why did opposite developments take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the onset is more salient than the coda, or vice versa, why did opposite developments take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one cluster is otherwise more likely than the other, why did opposite developments take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To state it plainly: &lt;strong&gt;How are French and English treating these cases differently structurally?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Possible explanations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would obviously be helpful to know what state the French word was in when it entered English... but in the absence of that information, my ideas so far are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In French phonotactics, &lt;code&gt;/ps/&lt;/code&gt; is a legal onset cluster, as are other &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;-initial clusters. This is not the case in English. Perhaps the syllable actually breaks or broke before the &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt; and not between &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt;. Still trying to think of a coherent reason this would produce the data. Perhaps such an argument would go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Considering an isolated syllable segment, &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; causes devoicing assimilation of &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But in a whole word context, intervocalic lenition produces &lt;code&gt;[bz]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; are closely enough attached by sharing an onset, -voice feature holds out, otherwise +voice holds out&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This claim may be backed up by the observation that in French orthography, a lone intervocalic &quot;s&quot; generally corresponds to &lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt; but in a cluster it is &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Old and Middle French had final consonant devoicing due to Frankish influence. I don't know if English did (it would be surprising if not given its Germanic origins and surviving pairs like &quot;half/halves&quot;), but perhaps long-distance assimilation with a devoiced &lt;code&gt;[f]&lt;/code&gt; could have influenced the earlier cluster in French and not English...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The given English representation corresponds to most grammatical inflections. The French word corresponds to a particular inflection of &quot;observer&quot; &lt;code&gt;/ɔpsɛʀve/&lt;/code&gt;. In that  inflection and many others, there is an extra final syllable that carries the stress. Perhaps a stressed syllable's onset is stronger than that of an unstressed syllable. Unfortunately, this line of thinking produces the opposite outcome: the &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; should be strengthened in English and weaker in French. Moreover, other inflections and derivations where the stress shifts (e.g. &quot;observation&quot; in English) don't show any particular difference, to my knowledge. And this assumes a lot about historical stress patterning that I don't know enough about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Revised explanation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt; Here's a revised theory given the commenter's note below that it was thought to already be &lt;code&gt;[ps]&lt;/code&gt; in the Latin that would have given rise to French. If we combine the first and third options, we might get something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; overpowered &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt; naturally through, for example, onset strength;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But in variations of the word where the second syllable is stressed, the longer vowel contributed enough intervocalic lenition to turn the whole cluster into &lt;code&gt;[bz]&lt;/code&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Such a stress pattern obtained in English but not in Latin (&quot;observare&quot;, third syllable stressed) or in the standard French inflection (&quot;observer&quot;, third syllable stressed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I still don't know enough about the stress patterns of much earlier stages of English and French; if anyone can verify that, we might have a plausible account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a couple of years since I finished my undergrad in experimental linguistics (and I haven't pursued it at a graduate level despite maintaining it as a hobby), so if any of this indicates the obvious need for further education or a refresher on the basics, I don't mind if you point it out. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T14:57:29.797" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T01:58:56.323" Title="Different assimilation directions" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21296" CreationDate="2017-03-09T07:25:56.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to the 2 answers, it seems worth noting that the &quot;highness&quot; and &quot;backness&quot; of the two dimensional vowel space can be mapped to the frequencies of formants one and two of a vowel articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general answer is that consonants have too many distinctive features to give a nice spatial representation like what we have with vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15420" LastEditorUserId="15420" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T18:52:28.347" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:52:28.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21084" CreationDate="2017-03-09T07:36:19.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could analyze the texts with topic modeling, using something like latent Dirichlet allocation. In this way, maybe you could assume sub topics of topic a, and a different set of subtopics for topic b, or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go the word embeddings path that Manfred mentioned, there are also implementations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/doc2vec.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doc2vec&lt;/a&gt;, which allows you to compare documents directly, rather than at the word level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also try something simpler for a baseline analysis like TF-IDF, and with the vectors that it produces you can look at the cosine-similarity (or some other distance metric) between words or documents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15420" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T07:36:19.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21304" CreationDate="2017-03-09T11:39:43.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is important to look at the general tendency in which the language is evolving. If a language is loosing some distinctions, then there will be an important trend of speaking/writing without the distictions that are going archaic. There will be a counter-trend to keep them. And among such counter-trend, we will find hypercorrections, in which people will try to &quot;keep&quot; the distinction in contexts where the standard doesn't have it first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Portuguese there is a general trend to lose verbal person desinences (except the singular first person and the plural third). There is also a tendency to change personal pronouns, especially the second person ones, and, more recently, and still less remarkably, the first person plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in a more concrete example, here is a Standard Portuguese sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nós estamos ficando velhos. (We are growing old.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is like the same sentence will probably be rendered a few decades into the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A gente está ficando velho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the loss of the -mos desinence that marks the first person plural, and the change of the pronoun, from &quot;nós&quot; to &quot;a gente&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays both sentences are already considered standard, though, a century ago, the second one would be considered wrong, or colloquial at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here is an intermediate sentence, in which the verbal ending is lost, but the pronoun remains unchanged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nós está ficando velho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is quite unfortunate; it is too innovative for those who want to keep the standard, and too conservative for those who want it to change. Plus it poses a problem: &quot;Nós&quot; requires the predicative to go into the plural (nós... velho&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;). But the singular verb, &quot;está&quot;, requires the predicative in the singular, so it is hard for speakers to decide whether it should be &quot;nós está ficando velho&quot; or &quot;nós está ficando velhos&quot;. Probably due to such inconsistency, nowadays this sentence would be rejected as agrammatical by most speakers in both standard and colloquial registers. It can only be considered acceptable in the popular register - but then it has to get the verb changed, too: &quot;nós tá ficando velho&quot; (or &quot;ficando véio&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a &quot;Piltdown fossil&quot; of this evolutionary process, ie, a hypercorrection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A gente estamos ficando velhos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in which the dependent innovation (the pronoun change) is made, but not the innovation on which it depends (the verbal ending loss).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a common construction, but it has no future: the standard form of the language can accept the pronoun change, but not the incongruence between subject and verb; the popular register will avidly accept the pronoun change, but not the &quot;sophisticated&quot; verb flexion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is a difference: if the language &quot;evolves&quot;, then there are constructions that the standard register, that is most conservative, cannot accept, but become acceptable, or even the norm, in the more innovative registers, popular and colloquial (and will invade the literary register, too, since writers will feel the need to capture the gist of popular or colloquial speech to build their characters). But there are constructions that are misguided attempts to keep the formality of the standard, without really understanding the standard rules. Those can be quite widespread, but they represent neither the present nor the future of the language. In that sence, they are &quot;wrong&quot;, not part of the evolution of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of registers, it is necessary to notice that they have different grammatical requirements. What is acceptable in the popular register might be unnaceptable in the standard - but the converse is also true: some standard constructions are unnaceptable in popular register (I like to compare this to dress codes: you don't go to a night party dressed in a bath suit... but then you don't go to the beach in a tuxedo either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a construction is the standard norm, but becomes unacceptable in the colloquial or popular registers, it tends to go archaic. It will go archaic before it loses its social prestige. When a construction is the popular or colloquial norm, but is unacceptable in standard, its future depends on how much it represents a real trend of the language drift, or, on the contrary, how much it is a mere fad, destined to fade away. In any case, it will take more time to acquire prestige than to become widespread; when it acquires prestige, it will supercede the previous, now archaic, standard construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are a few different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pure mistakes, such as involuntary elisions, spoonerisms, typos, lexical misuses, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prestige mistakes - using popular constructions in formal contexts that require standard speech, or, conversely, standard constructions in contexts that demand popular speech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hypercorrections, in which the speaker tries to produce a standard construction, but due to insufficient knowledge of standard grammar, misapplies them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fads, usually slang terms, that become fashionable for a time, then become dated, rejected by most speakers, and finally go archaic, without ever acquiring standard status.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;True innovation - neologisms, acronyms, portmanteaus, foreign loans that &quot;catch&quot;, popular constructions that constitute the &quot;natural&quot; drift of the language, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to distinguish those things, even in one's first language. In a second language, it becomes almost impossible (so, rule of thumb, when speaking/writing a second language, it is best to err in the conservative side).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T11:39:43.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:08:07.970" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my MA thesis, among other things, I am coding the realisations of /t/ in English, by L2 speakers, as: 1) &quot;normal&quot; t, or 2) flapped, d-like t, 3) missing t, and 4) glottalised t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have tried to code it by ear, I would prefer a more secure method. I have been looking at the wave forms of the sounds in praat (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&lt;/a&gt;), but still find it difficult. There are times when a /t/ sounds like a [d] to me, but looks like a [t] in praat. I think the reason that it sounds like a [d] may be due to a reduced VOT (voice onset time). Also, there are times when the t looks like it is invisible or glottalised, but on closer examination, there does seem to be a tiny t-wave form. I also find it difficult to tell objectively whether a t is simply missing or whether it is glottalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any of you have any tips or resources for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15426" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T20:34:02.497" Title="coding t realisations English: how to do it objectively? any tips?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:10:14.097" Score="2" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages disallow vowel-vowel sequences in a word or phrase, instead inserting an extra consonant between them to keep them apart.  Some versions of English do this, like when Kennedy would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cuba-r-and America&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;inserting an epenthetic /r/ between vowels of adjacent words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which consonants are most commonly used for this purpose across languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:21:04.533" Title="Which epenthetic sounds are most common to separate vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21254" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:32:00.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the phonological level, it can. &#xA;E.g. water is pronounced /wɔdər/ or /wɑdər/ in US English according to the Oxford English dictionary.&#xA;[The answer above, that looks at the question from the phonetic level, states it is not possible. Though I do wonder for the rationale behind that!]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I am assuming you define schwa as the [ə] sound; people may define it differently (Backley, 2011, defines schwa as an ɨ I believe, though in that case it is quite probable that an [ɹ] can follow this sound too). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this question you may also want to look at the phonotactics of English and other languages: there are rules about which consonants and vowels are possible at which positions in the word and the syllable, based on feature theory, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15426" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T18:32:00.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21317" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:39:21.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't done a survey of languages or anything, so this isn't rigorous, just a few examples of epenthetic consonants that I have commonly seen in languages I am familar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;glottal stop. This occurs in some cases in English, actually, for example &quot;uh-oh&quot;. It's productive in some contexts in some accents of German.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;glides. English accents with epenthetic /r/ actually only use it after low or mid monophthongs (and in some accents, centering diphthongs). After rising-diphthong vowels or high vowels, transitions similar to the glides [j] (after front vowels) and [w] (after back vowels) are used instead. I know that French may also have a [j]-like transition after /i/ when it comes before another vowel phoneme. French also has /j/ derived from historical diphthongs that breaks up what would otherwise be hiatus &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/14517/verbs-ending-in-oyer-uyer-vs-eyer-vs-ayer&quot;&gt;in the inflected forms of some verbs&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. &lt;em&gt;je vois&lt;/em&gt; /vwa/, &lt;em&gt;vous voyez&lt;/em&gt; /vwa&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;e/. This occurs after /wa/ (spelled &quot;oi~oy&quot;) and /ɛ/ (spelled &quot;ai~ay&quot;). I don't know how productive it is but it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some other relatively common, not-very-marked consonant. E.g. &quot;t&quot; in French: while French actually does tolerate the existence of sequential vowels in hiatus (as in &lt;em&gt;créer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;create&quot;), there is morphologically conditioned epenthetic /t/ in a number of derived verbs such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/siroter/72937&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;siroter&lt;/a&gt;&quot; &amp;lt; &quot;sirop&quot;.  Eau qui dort gives some more examples in the comments and points out that /n/ is used after a nasal vowel. Of course French also has /t/ and /n/ fairly often as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;liaison&quot; consonants&lt;/a&gt; inserted between words (the phenomenon of liaison is also conditioned by morphological and syntactic factors, not just phonology); another somewhat common liaison consonant is /z/. The most common liaison consonants in French are all coronals, and the coronal place of articulation is generally considered to be one of the least marked (I think the main possible competitors for title of &quot;least marked POA&quot; are velar and glottal, but velars don't act very much like the least-marked POA in French as far as I know, and French doesn't have any glottal phonemes.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:39.163" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:21:04.533" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21235" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:43:36.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A software programme you can also use is WordSmith Tools: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version6/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version6/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website has a list of software that can be useful for linguistics:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistlist.org/sp/GetWRListings.cfm?WRAbbrev=Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://linguistlist.org/sp/GetWRListings.cfm?WRAbbrev=Software&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;There are multiple programmes listed for corpora exploration, which probably also includes freeware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15426" LastEditorUserId="15426" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T18:48:52.430" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T18:48:52.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21312" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:46:02.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that Chomsky and Halle's SPE theory predicts progressive assimilation of voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English morphologically simple forms, the only way you can have a weak word initial syllable followed immediately by a stressed syllable (as in &quot;Moˌnonga'hela&quot;) is when the initial syllable has a secondary stress (as in &quot;ˌMon'tana&quot;).  However, in words with Latinate prefixes (attached with an &quot;=&quot; boundary), we can have unstressed closed weak syllables before a stressed syllable, as in &quot;con='sider&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &quot;observe&quot; begins with an unstressed weak syllable followed immediately by a stressed syllable, we know that the &quot;ob-&quot; is a Latinate prefix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ob=sɜːv/ =&gt; [əbˈsɜːv]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a phonological peculiarity of Latinate prefixes is that &quot;s&quot; becomes voiced [z] in a voicing environment after a Latinate prefix.  Examples are &quot;de=sign&quot;, &quot;re=sign&quot; (compare &quot;consign&quot; with voiceless [s]), &quot;pre=serve&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this voicing assimilation might be expected in &quot;ob=serve&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ob=sɜːv/ =&gt; [əbzɜːv]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't recall the details of the voicing rule given in SPE, so I don't know why it doesn't apply after &quot;con-&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T01:58:56.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T01:58:56.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21316" CreationDate="2017-03-09T19:33:30.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that what you are looking at can be described in terms of a gradient (from the full form to the missing t), but in reality there is no single phonetic measure along which the various categories you are looking at are placed. So I guess the best option is actually coding them impressionistically, as you are doing already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do is to have two or three other independent people transcribing the data and then check the inter-transcriber agreement (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.statisticshowto.com/inter-rater-reliability/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.statisticshowto.com/inter-rater-reliability/&lt;/a&gt;). If the agreement is high, you can be more confident that the categorisation you made was possibly correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2599" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T19:33:30.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21316" CreationDate="2017-03-09T20:34:02.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Describing a /t/ as &quot;glottalized&quot; without including an alternative &quot;glottal stop&quot; may be unwise, because it invites confusion between between a /t/ pronounced like an ordinary [t] but with simmultaneous closure of the glottis (which I would write [tʼ]) and a glottal stop [ʔ], because both are possible. (Also, &quot;glottalized t&quot; in other languages can refer to an ejective t.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to give good examples for /t/, so please consider the difference between three kinds of /p/ in my speech: (1) plain [p] in &quot;spore&quot;, (2) glottalized [pʼ] in &quot;stopped&quot;, (3) glottal stop [ʔ] in &quot;pop bottle&quot;.  For (3), there is no lip closure for the second &quot;p&quot;: [pʰɑʔbɑdl̩].  There are correspondingly three varieties of /t/ also, but for &quot;pot bottle&quot; the difference between glottalized t and glottal stop is just a matter of timing the alveolar closure. (You may not have these exact pronunciatiions in your own speech.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T20:34:02.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30000" CreationDate="2017-03-09T23:34:44.470" Score="2" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages where there are different plural forms depending on the count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1 cook&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2 cooks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;10 cooks (this would be a different word)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15430" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T04:28:52.630" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T06:57:33.967" Title="Are there any languages with different plural forms for different numbers?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T02:20:39.353" Score="3" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a list of minimal pairs, highlighting the difference between American and British English?&#xA;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15431" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T04:29:56.563" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T17:29:24.920" Title="Minimal Pairs Highlighting the Difference between American and British English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T13:26:42.147" Score="3" ViewCount="930" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Chomsky's X bar theory applicable to any natural language other than English? Or is it applicable to English only or to only a subset of natural languages including English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the X-bar theory in its default version describes the English language. If so, I wonder if there have been any efforts of either Chomsky himself or some other linguists to assign a different version with a set of different rules to another language than English, such as French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T04:26:40.297" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T04:26:40.297" Title="Is the X bar theory applicable to any natural language other than English?" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21326" CreationDate="2017-03-10T13:43:10.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general X bar scheme is, although heavily motivated by English - or at least Indo-European languages - thought to be applicable to any natural language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;How well that works depends highly on what other restrictions you impose on your phrase structure (strict right/left linear and/or binary branching for example makes a lot of things not possible), but the basics of X bar theory are not more than a handful of rules determining how consitutent trees are built up, without making any claims about, e.g., available syntactic categories, morphological features or c-command relations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, yes, basic X bar scheme is definitely applicable and practically applied to languages other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T13:43:10.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21325" CreationDate="2017-03-10T14:20:57.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical sets&lt;/a&gt; has various tables comparing the vowels phonemes that correspond to each multi-dialectal diaphoneme. The first table compares General American to RP; I think that is the one you will find most useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two caveats: the tables don't include consonants (although there have much less dialectal variation than vowels in English), and they also list lexical sets that correspond to the same phoneme in different dialects (you'll have to filter these out to meet your requirement of &quot;highlighting the difference&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T14:20:57.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T16:33:28.120" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=hAEwpu6NTEUC&amp;amp;pg=PA67&amp;amp;lpg=PA67&amp;amp;dq=saussure%20primordial%20principle&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Txat3DXLfY&amp;amp;sig=pM-SRz3k7iaCFXkibNYDTBBEpgU&amp;amp;hl=cs&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwih5eq-qMrSAhUF2SwKHap5Bn0Q6AEILDAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=linear&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read&lt;/a&gt; about the Saussure's second primordial principle that states that language is linear. This is sometimes interpreted as the notion of one-dimensioness of language. The second dimension indeed doesn't usually play a significant role in language, since written language is perfectly legible even without intonation and stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language that has this second dimension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two examples I'm wondering might be the case (you don't have to include them in your answer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tonal languages. Is the use of tone in those languages often enough so that the languages could be called two dimentional?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Click languages. Are the click consonants in click languages such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xhosa&lt;/a&gt; being arranged so that they play a role of a standard phoneme, or can they play the role of the second layer of information?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll really appreciate an incomplete answer or an online literature recommendation since I understand this is a very broad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T18:10:37.320" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:10:37.320" Title="Is there a language that uses some kind of second layer traits (signs of a two-dimensional character)?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21333" CreationDate="2017-03-10T18:08:39.927" Score="-2" ViewCount="977" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to automatically determine if a verb is singular/plural in a program, I cannot think or find on Google any verb that ends in -s or -es before conjugation. Are there any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15433" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T19:42:40.400" Title="Do any English verbs end in -s or -es that are singular?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21330" CreationDate="2017-03-10T18:16:40.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are asking for an orthographic &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;-es&lt;/em&gt;: there are many examples, e.g. &lt;em&gt;miss&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;floss&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fuss&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kiss&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If it's about a phonetic [(ɪ)s]/[(ɪ)z], there are even moe: e.g. &lt;em&gt;rise&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;impose&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;sneeze&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;snooze&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;freeze&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:16:40.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T19:26:56.323" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;For American English, there's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict#about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMUDict&lt;/a&gt;, but is there one for Irish pronunciation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't, is there a way to translate American to Irish pronunciation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T12:46:26.040" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T12:46:26.040" Title="Is there a computer-readable Hiberno-English pronunciation dictionary?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21330" CreationDate="2017-03-10T19:31:50.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English verbs ending in -s would be a huge list from -ss alone, but but there are only a few ending in -es that I could find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/res#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;res&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/times#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;times&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mules#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jones#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jones&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snopes#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;snopes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Snopes#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Snopes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of them, except maybe &lt;em&gt;to yes&lt;/em&gt;, have limited usage (i.e. they are slang, archaic or just plain rare); your program doesn't really need to take them into account unless you want to be super comprehensive or you plan on using a very specific corpus (for example, add &lt;em&gt;res&lt;/em&gt; if your text comes from online video-game forums).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastEditorUserId="13780" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T19:42:40.400" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T19:42:40.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T21:36:43.250" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three parts of speeches attributed to &quot;down&quot; in the dictionary: adjective, adverb and verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand , that &lt;em&gt;at the bar&lt;/em&gt; is a sub phrase and a prepositional phrase.&#xA;I don't know the rules of how each type of phrase is allowed to be built and I don't know where to look those rules up. Maybe a prepositional phrase can follow both an adverb and an adjective or maybe only one of them. Maybe some phrases are ambient and can be both types , but I am just guessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole sentence, wherein I found the phrase is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Plenty of seats down at the bar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T22:14:36.367" Title="Is &quot;down at the bar&quot; an adjective phrase or adverb phrase?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21325" CreationDate="2017-03-10T23:27:59.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that &quot;minimal pair&quot; refers to two distinct words in one language signified by the choice of one vs. another sound. So minimal pairs  are not what you want. You want a list of &quot;same word&quot; pair between the dialects. The Oxford English Dictionary is pretty much the definitive work on English (you may need to access the online version, which gives US and UK norms)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T23:27:59.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19011" CreationDate="2017-03-11T17:34:13.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To complete lemontree's answer, I wanted to add a quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/holy-writ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Norris, &quot;Holy Writ&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (The New Yorker):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The comma as we know it was invented by Aldo Manuzio, a printer&#xA;  working in Venice, circa 1500. It was intended to prevent confusion by&#xA;  separating things. In the Greek, komma means “something cut off,” a&#xA;  segment. (Aldo was printing Greek classics during the High&#xA;  Renaissance. The comma was a Renaissance invention.) As the comma&#xA;  proliferated, it started generating confusion. Basically, there are&#xA;  two schools of thought: One plays by ear, using the comma to mark a&#xA;  pause, like dynamics in music; if you were reading aloud, the comma&#xA;  would suggest when to take a breath. The other uses punctuation to&#xA;  clarify the meaning of a sentence by illuminating its underlying&#xA;  structure. Each school believes that the other gets carried away. It&#xA;  can be tense and kind of silly, like the argument among theologians&#xA;  about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that your question assumes that German uses commas to mark pauses, when clearly the &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/551&quot;&gt;last spelling reform&lt;/a&gt; seem to focus on their use as a syntactic tool. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/22692/26103&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; about the differences between English and German punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:42:14.823" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T17:34:13.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21317" CreationDate="2017-03-11T18:36:19.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be highly language specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK in English, the epenthetic R is a pollution from the syllable final R disappearing and the re-emerging in certain social strata, and appearing elsewhere first by hyper-correction, then simply by confusion (non-rhotic English would probably pronounce &quot;Cuba&quot; the same as &quot;Cuber&quot;) until it evolved into full-fledged epenthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, you have quite frequent &quot;epenthetic&quot; T, again for historical reasons - in reality it is T that was preserved in intervocalic environment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;il s'appelle - ille se appela(t)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s'appelle-&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;-il - se appela&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; ille&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again this may spread by analogy elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general, it should be semi-consonant /j/ or /w/ that may be at first falsely perceived on the transition between a higher vowel and lower vowel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ae/ &gt; /aje/&#xA;/oe/ &gt; /oje/ or /owe/ (depending on the articulatory persistency of roundedness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T18:36:19.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21317" CreationDate="2017-03-11T21:18:19.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a book titled &lt;em&gt;Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond&lt;/em&gt;, apparently citing &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/579-0203/579-0203-LOMBARDI-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this work about epenthesis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lombardi (2002), reviewing examples of epenthesis from a wide range of&#xA;  languages, has argued that glottal stops, as pharyngeals, have the&#xA;  least marked place of articulation for a consonant and hence are to be&#xA;  expected as epenthetic consonants (e.g. to break hiatus) “all things&#xA;  being equal” (2002: 246-7). Coronals, she argues, are “the next best&#xA;  choice” of epenthetic consonant (Lombardi 2002: 223) and so will&#xA;  appear when “for some reason constraint conflict results in glottal&#xA;  stop being impossible” (2002: 223). She continues: “glottal stop has&#xA;  the least marked place, but conflicting requirements may force the&#xA;  choice of slightly more marked, but still relatively unmarrked Coronal&#xA;  … careful analysis shows that interacting facts about position,&#xA;  inventory, etc. in a given language can explain why the least marked …&#xA;  is not chosen” (2002: 246-7). English English, as we have seen,&#xA;  provides some evidence of coronals being used to resolve hiatus—/r/&#xA;  after non-high vowels, [n] after the indefinite article, but both&#xA;  contexts are now keenly adopting the glottal stop to replace these&#xA;  historical artefact coronals, in our London data, in Bedford, as well&#xA;  as further afield in South Africa and Singapore, for example. Language&#xA;  and sociocultural contact are wheat seem to unite the locations&#xA;  undergoing a shift to glottal epenthesis to break hiatus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of /n/ to break hiatus appears, that I know of, not only in the indefinite article in English, but also (and coincidentally) in the Greek negative prefix &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt;, changing to &lt;em&gt;an-&lt;/em&gt; when the main word begins with a vowel (hence &lt;em&gt;aerobic&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;anaerobic&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many examples of epenthesis in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/material/ZASPiL_Volltexte/zp52/zaspil52-zygis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another work&lt;/a&gt;, though many of them do not refer to hiatus breaking. Notably, it says that /r/ is used to break hiatus in several German dialects in Bavaria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some Northern dialects of Italian an epenthetic consonant, either /v/ or /g/, is inserted (irregularly) before empty onsets, usually breaking a hiatus (which in turn often arised from the deletion of a medial consonant somewhere between Vulgar Latin and Romance): L. &lt;em&gt;blada(m)&lt;/em&gt; → /bjeva/; L. &lt;em&gt;pauore(m)&lt;/em&gt; → /pagyra/; L. &lt;em&gt;uua(m)&lt;/em&gt; → /yga/. The medial /v/ in the names of the cities of Padova (Padua) and Genova (Genoa) is another example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T21:18:19.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:48:49.613" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The internal arguments of unaccusative verbs in English must raise to subject position to obtain case and satisfy the EPP. For example, verbs like &lt;em&gt;melt, fall, die, arrive,&lt;/em&gt; etc.must have their internal arguments raise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He died&#xA;He fell&#xA;He arrived&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expletives are not compatible with most of these verbs in English and not many people nowadays accept the ones that are. They sound pretty archaic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;?There arrived a man&#xA;?There spread a disease&#xA;*There fell a man&#xA;*There died a man&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Matter&lt;/em&gt; seems to be an unaccusative verb based on the semantics (especially the volitionality) of the subject; however, the internal argument of the verb is able to remain in object position, as in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;It doesn't matter which one you choose&#xA;[Which one you choose]1 doesn't matter t1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it because the internal argument of &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; is a clause and that clauses do not need to obtain case? I think it is, because &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; can also take a DP complement and DPs require case, which causes them to obligatorily raise. This is why when &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; takes a DP complement, the expletive is ungrammatical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*It matters him&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any more such unaccusative verbs that take clausal complements and can take expletive &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T01:32:42.903" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T01:32:42.903" Title="Why can the Internal Argument of &quot;Matter&quot; NOT Raise?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21347" CreationDate="2017-03-12T13:23:24.137" Score="4" ViewCount="4017" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned about prepositions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they establish a relation with two words&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the preposition is followed by an object&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-the object of a prepositional phrase is made by a noun phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if these rules are as precise as mathematical statements or just rules helping the learner to get a grasp on grammar without claiming to be state of the art of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance :&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I never had enough money to comfort a woman until recently&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, that &lt;em&gt;until recently&lt;/em&gt; is a phrase and it's function in the sentence is a modifier or adjunct (please correct me on this because I am not quite sure yet if it is an adjunct for real), &#xA;but I don't know what type of phrase it is, here is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maybe it is an adverb phrase with *recently * as it's head&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maybe &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; is it's head and the whole is a prepositional phrase even though &lt;em&gt;recently&lt;/em&gt; looks like an adverb and not a noun&#xA;-maybe &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; is the head of the prepositional phrase and &lt;em&gt;recently&lt;/em&gt;, though it looks like an adverb is a noun here, which seems odd but I still can't rule it out for sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please share your expertise and shed some light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T14:43:48.610" Title="What kind of phrase is &quot;until recently&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T14:42:51.220" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Palatalized consonants usually seem to exist as part of a larger system: if, for example, a language has a contrast between [k] and [k&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] then it will probably also contrast [p] and [p&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;], [t] and [t&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;], and likewise for all other widely-occurring consonants in its inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any known cases in which a language only has a palatal/non-palatal contrast for &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; (or some other limited number) of the consonants in its inventory? For example, a language with [k] and [k&lt;sup&gt;j&lt;/sup&gt;] but only non-palatal [p] and [t]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T14:53:52.570" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:59:42.907" Title="palatalization and consonant inventories" Tags="&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21345" CreationDate="2017-03-12T14:43:48.610" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your 'rules' mix traditional and contemporary grammars. It's true in both traditional and contemporary grammars that a preposition phrase [PP] consists of a preposition and an object; but in contemporary grammars PPs 'establish relations' between constituents, not as in traditional grammar 'words'. Your third rule acknowledges this in defining the object of a prepositional phrase as a 'noun phrase', but it is incorrect in implying that the object is always an NP. &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; points out that &quot;It is not only 'nouns or pronouns' (NPs in our terms) that occur after prepositions:&quot;, and it gives examples&amp;mdash;one of which is actually the one in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The magician emerged [from behind the curtain]                              [PP]&#xA; I didn't know about it [until recently].                                  [AdvP]&#xA; We can't agree [on whether we should call in the police]. [interrogative clause]&#xA; They took me [for dead].                                                  [AdjP]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Until recently&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition phrase with an adverb phrase (realized as a single adverb) as its object; in this case the phrase acts as an adclausal adjunct ('adverbial' in traditional grammar)&amp;mdash;that is, it modifies an entire clause, not just a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T14:43:48.610" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21350" CreationDate="2017-03-12T18:00:41.623" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;What term should I use to describe the branches of linguistics studying a specific language or language family such as &quot;Chinese philology&quot;? Is it possible to call it &quot;regional linguistics&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:01:43.413" Title="Term for &quot;regional linguistics&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21349" CreationDate="2017-03-12T18:01:43.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like what I'd call philology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:01:43.413" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T18:18:10.717" Score="2" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my accent, at least, &quot;bicycle&quot; is pronounced /bɑɪsɪkʊl/, but it's shortened to /bɑɪk/, and not /bɑɪs/. The latter would be analogous to how some people shorten &quot;decent&quot; to &quot;dece&quot; /diːs/, but it doesn't happen for bike. Is there a historical reason why this is so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T08:11:23.360" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T08:43:34.367" Title="Why is &quot;bicycle&quot; shortened to &quot;bike&quot; and not &quot;bice&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21346" CreationDate="2017-03-12T18:59:42.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you should keep palatal and palatalized separate. Norwegian has a palatalized fricative [ç] but doesn't have palatalized consonants, likewise Sanskrit, likewise, Hungarian and North Saami have palatals [c͡ç ɟ͡ʝ] or simply [c ɟ] but not palatalization (on labials, alveolars) – more on Saami belo. On the other hand, Russian hand Irish have a robust contrast between plain and palatalized consonants across places of articulation. It can be hard to tell if a sound is best represented as primitive palatal [c ɟ] vs. a palatalized velar [kʲ gʲ], and any proposal for a language as having only palatalization of velars (or palatalization of alveolars, though not both) can be suspected of maybe actually having palatal as an active place of articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is that palatalization (and labialization) are often analytically interchangeable with consonant plus glide analysis. Hence Mandarin might have palatalized labials and linguals, or it might have C+glide onsets. The evidence for one analysis vs. the other typically involves a theoretical decision about the advisability of adding more phonemes vs. allowing more (any) consonant cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for languages with palatal as a place of articulation (but excluding the glide [j] which is real common), there are some: much of Nilotic, Akan, Basque, many Uralic languages. Languages with palatalization at a single place or articulation would probably have to be labial, to persuasively exclude a &quot;palatal as primary place&quot; analysis. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_find.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt; reports the results of an old project on accumulating segment inventories, from which you can find languages said to have just palatalized labials. It reports Angas as having only palatalized labials: but, that is a matter of analysis. UPSID reports an analysis from a paper by Burquest with palatalized labials – which he treats as C+glide clusters in his dissertation. A good reason to go with the glide analysis is that palatalized (and labialized) consonants cannot appear syllable finally. I would say there is not any clear example attested of just a single place of articulation being palatalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:59:42.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3211" CreationDate="2017-03-12T20:06:16.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A child, or more precisely an infant (from Latin in-fans - not-speaking), is said to be &quot;universal phonetician&quot;. This stems from the fact that you can observe in children of this age the ability to distinguish between any two phonemes in any world language (and the child can grow and learn to make that difference in speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is no supernatural ability, superpower or proof that our educational systems kill children's wonderful abilities. This means that the child is a rough, unformed piece of wood that will eventually evolve into a precisely carved... something (sorry, I had a beautiful metaphor in mind but it slipped away).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this process of learning, you put stuff into context and you discard the rest, you build your phonological space, you segment the vowel space as required by the realities of language environment around you and you train your articulatory muscles for the gestures required to utter the sounds of that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this lengthy process is accomplished, you will inevitably struggle with distinctions, which you were learning in the long previous years to be irrelevant (because in your language they are varieties of the same phoneme). So you have to unlearn what you learned and overcome the constraints set up by your own own phonology. And considering certain articulatory gestures have to be very, very precise to produce the required sound (e.g. Czech voiced /h/, voiced /ř/ etc.), it may require lot of effort to learn them past certain age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T20:06:16.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T20:24:19.473" Score="2" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;Max Müller is mentioned as one of the pioneers of the study of the origins of language, as he &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;created&lt;/a&gt; a typology for the earlier origin of language theories based on the channel they draw the connection between sounds and meanings upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ding-dong theories were supposed to see the connection in some kind of &quot;natural resonance&quot;. I don't think Müller refers to actual sound resonance. In his work, he doesn't mention much more than Wikipedia: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Müller suggested what he called the ding-dong theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; This &quot;natural resonance&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he meant something along the lines of: &quot;There IS some kind of mysterious connection but we don't know what's behind it.&quot;? Or does the &quot;natural resonance&quot; actually refer to the &quot;concept of the word&quot; - (for ex. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kiki&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is made of short and intermittent sounds)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: No longer valid source switched for Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T18:30:32.107" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T18:30:32.107" Title="What exactly does the ding-dong theory of the origin of language state, according to Max Müller?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21371" CreationDate="2017-03-12T20:30:32.320" Score="0" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, verbals are nouns,adjectives and adverbs which are derived from verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand if a verbal is indeed one of the three parts of speeches mentioned or a part of speech of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the main confusion is whether &lt;em&gt;verbal&lt;/em&gt; is a specific term for a practical English grammar or a linguistic term denoting universal characteristics across different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are indeed other verbals in other languages how do they differ with the aid of a few examples from different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T14:28:39.203" Title="Do other languages than English have verbals ,too?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-12T21:35:05.037" Score="2" ViewCount="2861" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are three levels of units below the clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part of speeches&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roles within a sentence like Subject and Object&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, gerund is being described as a verbal, which is a derived noun,adjective or adverb from a verb,more precisely a present participle which can take a few specific roles in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a gerund just another category of part of speeches , is it something beyond the tripartite system of levels or are there more than three levels with gerund being within one of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T21:03:36.697" Title="Is a gerund a part of speech?" Tags="&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21358" CreationDate="2017-03-12T23:21:07.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edited into something slightly more useful in light of the comments below.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A gerund is not a part of speech in that it is not a category on the level of noun, verb, determiner, preposition, etc. (Of course, you can ask: &quot;What part of speech is that?&quot; when pointing to a gerund, as you can with any word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a range of items that look gerund-like, and delineating this range is not easy. There are &quot;gerunds&quot;, &quot;participles&quot; and, in some terminologies, &quot;(de)verbal nouns&quot; and so forth. The former two are considered forms of verbs. But classifying a given word ending in &quot;-ing&quot; as one or the other of these categories may depend mostly on its behaviour as a noun or verb in the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's one context that perhaps helps to delineate them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I enjoyed his singing. &lt;em&gt;(Noun.)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;I enjoyed his beautiful singing. &lt;em&gt;(Notice the use of an adjective.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I enjoyed his singing that song. &lt;em&gt;(Verb.)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;I enjoyed his beautifully singing that song. &lt;em&gt;(Notice the use of an adverb.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet in subject position, it can effectively function as an NP again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His singing was beautiful.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;His singing that song was beautiful. &lt;em&gt;(=the mere fact that he sang it was beautiful)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Also)&lt;/em&gt; His singing of that song was beautiful. &lt;em&gt;(=his singing itself was beautiful)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We propose different underlying structures to account for the different behaviour of the -ing form, but I would say it's difficult to parse at best and theoretically hazy at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been pointed out below, sometimes this form is simply referred to as a &quot;gerund-participle&quot;, and computer parsers treat it quite variably, from a V heading a VP to an N heading an NP to a &quot;G&quot; heading either one to, most perplexingly, a V heading an NP!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, however, it's not a part of speech, but the term is used to refer to one or more verbal forms that behave like various parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T14:38:31.757" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T14:38:31.757" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21351" CreationDate="2017-03-13T01:10:58.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED reports that the word was first attested in &lt;em&gt;Cyclist &amp;amp; Bicycling &amp;amp; Tricycling Trades Rev. 29 Dec. 100/1&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;We can conscientiously recommend it as an excellent shillingsworth of ‘bike’ and ‘trike’ literature&quot;. &quot;Bicycle&quot; was borrowed much earlier from French. There not being much evidence about the history of the word(s), one can only speculate. There is some resemblance to hypocoristic reduction and mutilation process for creating affectionate versions of words, like &lt;em&gt;Art ← Arthur, Ginnie ← Virginia, Bob ← Robert&lt;/em&gt;. The scare quotes in the citation probably indicates a judgment that the form is seen as &quot;cute&quot;. There is certainly nothing regular about the process. It might have been a writer's cute reintroduction of the velarity of original Greek κ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T01:10:58.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T01:51:32.610" Score="1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do overt subjects of non-finite clauses such as the gerund clause below obtain accusative case despite there being no accusative case or ECM assigner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Me arriving late is a sure thing&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can figure out how they get case if the verb of the matrix clause is a regular non-copular verb as in the sentence below with a perception verb, but the sentence above having a copula as the matrix verb makes it very difficult to analyse because I don't think the subject is able to obtain ECM from the copula. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I saw him eating the cake.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T13:43:15.373" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:43:15.373" Title="Overt Subjects of Non-Finite Clauses and Accusative Case" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20782" CreationDate="2017-03-13T08:37:04.230" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This verse is given as an example by the author King Bhoja (aka Bhojadeva) in his rather encyclopedic ~11th-century work &lt;em&gt;Sarasvatī-kaṇṭhābharaṇa,&lt;/em&gt; among (many!) other examples of word-play, specifically under the category or &lt;em&gt;varṇa-citra&lt;/em&gt; (roughly, verses interesting because of the letters in them), under the broader umbrella of &lt;em&gt;citra-kāvya&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;stunning poetry&quot;; constrained writing and other kind of stuff Oulipo might be interested in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs in the second &lt;em&gt;pariccheda&lt;/em&gt; (~chapter) of the work. An edition of this work, with the commentary of Rāmsinha (on I–III) and of Jagaddhara (on IV) was published in the Kāvyamālā series of the Nirṇaya Sāgar Press in 1934 (second edition), edited by Paṇḍit Kedārnāth Śarmā and Wāsudev Laxmaṇ Śāstrī Paṇśīkar. There is a scan of this book available online (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia800502.us.archive.org/18/items/TFIC_ASI_Books/SaraswatiKanthabharana.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;45 MiB PDF here&lt;/a&gt;), in which it occurs on page 267 (२६७, page 360 of the PDF). Here is the relevant part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uCbG.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3uCbG.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of scan&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same edition has also been transcribed and put online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://showcases.exist-db.org/exist/apps/sarit/works/sarit__sarasvat%C4%ABka%E1%B9%87%E1%B9%ADh%C4%81bhara%E1%B9%87a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SARIT&lt;/a&gt;, where you can see &lt;a href=&quot;http://showcases.exist-db.org/exist/apps/sarit/works/sarasvatikanthabharana-dn.xml_1.5.4.8.3144.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this verse&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://showcases.exist-db.org/exist/apps/sarit/works/sarasvatikanthabharana-dn.xml_1.5.4.8.3146.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commentary&lt;/a&gt;. (Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gsireesh/CU-SARIT/blob/b872020421/Sarasvat%C4%ABka%E1%B9%87%E1%B9%ADh%C4%81bhara%E1%B9%87a/pariccheda2-dn.xml#L3602-L3609&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a view of the xml source&lt;/a&gt; based on (probably) an old fork of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sarit/SARIT-corpus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the official GitHub repo&lt;/a&gt;.) Here's their transcription of the above image (I fixed a couple of obvious OCR-like typos):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;क्रमस्थसर्वव्यञ्जनं यथा—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘कः खगौघाङचिच्छौजा झाञ्ज्ञोऽटौठीडडण्ढणः ।&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  तथोदधीन्पफर्बाभीर्मयोऽरिल्वाशिषां सहः ॥ २६३ ॥’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;क्रमस्थेति । वर्णसमाम्नाये येन क्रमेण कादयो मावसानाः पठितास्तेन क्रमेण व्यञ्जननिवेशः । कः खगौघस्तत्तत्प्रसिद्धावदानपक्षिसमूहस्तमञ्चतीति क्विनि संयोगान्तलोपे कृते च खगौघाङिति रूपम् । चितं संविदं छ्यति छिनत्तीति चिच्छं यदोजस्तन्नास्ति यस्यासावचिच्छौजाः । ‘झमु अदने’ अस्मात् क्विप् । ‘अनुनासिकस्य क्विझलोः ६।४।१६’ इत्युपधादीर्घः । ‘मो नो धातोः ८।२।६४’ इति नकार इति झान् परबलभक्षको ज्ञः पण्डितः । ‘स्तो श्चुना श्चुः ८।४।४०’ इति नकारस्य ञकाराः । अटाः सङ्ग्रामाङ्गणपर्यटनशीलाः सुभटास्तानोठते बाधत इति क्विप् । ‘उठ गतौ’ इति धातो रूपम् । तेषामीडीश्वरः । अडण्ढणोऽचपलः । डण्ढण इत्यव्युत्पन्नं चपलवाचि प्रातिपदिकम् । तथा अभीर्भयरहितः एवंविधः को नामायमुदधीन् पफर्ब पूरयामासेति प्रश्नः । उत्तरम्—अरीन् लुनन्ति या आशिषस्तासां सहः क्षमो मयो दैत्यराज इति ॥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am tolerably fluent in elementary Sanskrit, so although I cannot claim to understand all the Pāṇinean derivations perfectly, I can tell you what the commentary says, with help from the source you linked and from &lt;a href=&quot;http://ramaswamysastry.blogspot.com/2015/02/sanskrit-unmatched-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;. The commentary, like typical Sanskrit commentary, goes over the original almost word-by-word, interspersing meanings and explaining difficult/unusual words by giving their derivation using sūtras (from the grammatical system of Pāṇini's &lt;em&gt;Aṣṭādhyāyī&lt;/em&gt;). So, I transliterated the above and split the &lt;em&gt;sandhi&lt;/em&gt;-s, and added some typographical niceties (split the sentences into a bulleted list by which word is being explained):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kramastha-sarva-vyañjanaṃ yathā—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘kaḥ khagaughāṅ acicchaujāḥ jhān jñaḥ aṭauṭhīḍ aḍaṇḍhaṇaḥ |&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     tathā udadhīn papharba abhīḥ mayo arilvā āśiṣāṃ sahaḥ || 263 ||’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kramastha iti | varṇa-samāmnāye yena krameṇa ka-ādayaḥ ma-avasānāḥ paṭhitāḥ tena krameṇa vyañjana-niveśaḥ |&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[कः] kaḥ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[खगौघाङ्] khagaughaḥ tat-tat-prasiddha-avadāna-pakṣi-samūhaḥ tam añcati iti kvini saṃyogānta-lope kṛte ca khagaughāṅ iti rūpam |&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[अचिच्छौजाः] citaṃ saṃvidaṃ chyati chinatti iti cicchaṃ yad ojaḥ tan-nāsti yasya asau acicchaujāḥ |&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[झान्] ‘jhamu adane’ asmāt kvip | ‘anunāsikasya kvijhaloḥ 6|4|16’ iti upadhā-dīrghaḥ | ‘mo no dhātoḥ 8|2|64’ iti nakāra iti jhān para-bala-bhakṣakaḥ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[ज्ञः] jñaḥ paṇḍitaḥ | ‘sto ścunā ścuḥ 8|4|40’ iti nakārasya ñakārāḥ |&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[अटौठीड्] aṭāḥ saṅgrāma-aṅgaṇa-paryaṭana-śīlāḥ su-bhaṭāḥ tān oṭhate bādhate iti kvip | ‘uṭha gatau’ iti dhāto rūpam | teṣām īḍ īśvaraḥ |&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[अडण्ढणः] aḍaṇḍhaṇaḥ acapalaḥ | ḍaṇḍhaṇa iti a-vyutpannaṃ capala-vāci prātipadikam |&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[तथा] tathā&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[अभीः] abhīḥ bhaya-rahitaḥ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  evaṃ-vidhaḥ ko nāma ayam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[उदधीन्] udadhīn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[पफर्ब] papharba pūrayāmāsa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  iti praśnaḥ |&#xA;  uttaram—&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[अरिल्वा] arīn lunanti yāḥ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[आशिषां] āśiṣaḥ tāsāṃ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[सहः] sahaḥ kṣamaḥ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mayaḥ daitya-rājaḥ iti ||&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The numbers you see above are references to Pāṇini, so that those who are expert in the vyākaraṇa tradition of grammar/derivation can “check the work” and arrive at those words by themselves.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To translate into English, these are the words of the Sanskrit‌ verse, in sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;kaḥ कः — means “who” (very common pronoun, obviously)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;khagaughāṅ खगौघाङ् — here, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22khaga%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;khaga&quot;&lt;/a&gt; ‌is a common word meaning &quot;bird&quot;, &quot;khagaugha&quot; is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=augha&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural compound&lt;/a&gt; meaning &quot;a flock of birds&quot;, from which the form &quot;khagaughāṅ&quot; meaning &quot;one who makes (assembles) a flock of birds&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;acicchaujāḥ अचिच्छौजाः — here, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22cit%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;cit&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a common word meaning &quot;mind&quot;, &quot;cicchaṃ&quot; means the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?tinput=chinatti&amp;amp;link=m&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;splitting/dividing/destruction&lt;/a&gt; of the mind, &quot;ojas&quot; is a common word meaning &quot;strength/energy&quot;, and so अचिच्छौजाः means &quot;one whose mental energies are not split/destroyed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;jhān झान् — from the verbal root &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22jham%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;√jham&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;eating&quot;, and some sūtras, jhān is explained as &lt;em&gt;para-bala-bhakṣakaḥ&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;consumer (of the strength of others)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‌jñaḥ ‌ज्ञः ‌— needs no explanation; common word meaning &quot;one who knows&quot;, i.e., &quot;scholar&quot; or &quot;expert&quot; (perhaps more familiar from compounds like sarvajñaḥ, &quot;one who knows everything&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;aṭauṭhīḍ अटौठीड् — &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22a%E1%B9%ADa%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;aṭa&lt;/a&gt;, wanderer (in the battlefield) + &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22u%E1%B9%ADh%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;√uṭh&lt;/a&gt;, strike, slay + &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%C4%AB%E1%B8%8D&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;īḍ&lt;/a&gt;, master. &quot;One who is master of (or, praised by) those who strike the wanderers (in the battlefield)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a-ḍaṇḍhaṇaḥ अ-डण्ढणः — meaning given as &quot;not fickle&quot;, thus &quot;steadfast&quot;. (This word I couldn't find in a dictionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22tath%C4%81%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tathā तथा&lt;/a&gt; — very common word meaning &quot;thus&quot; (or &quot;and&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=udadh%C4%ABn&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;udadhīn उदधीन्&lt;/a&gt; — accusative plural of &lt;em&gt;udadhi&lt;/em&gt;, ocean. Thus, &quot;oceans&quot; (in accusative case)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;papharba पफर्ब — &quot;filled&quot;. This is in the perfect tense, hence the reduplication (as in &lt;em&gt;dadarśa&lt;/em&gt;, “saw”; compare Greek &lt;em&gt;dedorka&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;abhīḥ अभीः — common word meaning &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=abh%C4%AB&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“fearless”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mayaḥ मयः — a name! &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22maya%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maya&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;arilvā अरिल्वा — from &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22ari%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;ari&quot; enemy&lt;/a&gt; +‌ &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=lunanti&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;√lū “cutting/destroying”&lt;/a&gt;, meaning &quot;foe-destroying&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%C4%81%C5%9Bi%E1%B9%A3%C4%81m&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;āśiṣāṃ आशिषां&lt;/a&gt; — genitive plural of āśis, blessing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&amp;amp;q=%22saha%22&amp;amp;lang=sans&amp;amp;action=Search&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sahaḥ सहः&lt;/a&gt; — able to bear, worthy of bearing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those words are common words, some are common morphemes put together in either standard or unusual (but grammatical) ways, and only a couple are obscure lexicographically, but the verse is grammatical and translates roughly to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Who is he, who&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; assembles flocks of birds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; has his mental energies intact,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; consumes the strength of others,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; is a scholar,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; is the lord of those who slay wanderers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; is steadfast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and, without fear, filled the oceans?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is Maya,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  worthy of blessings that destroy enemies.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And putting the words together with the usual rules of sandhi, you get the verse in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="87" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T08:37:04.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19936" CreationDate="2017-03-13T13:58:29.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, it is pretty standard in corpus linguistics to include punctuation as tokens and give them appropriate part-of-speech tags, e.g. in the UPENN tagset, there is a tag &lt;code&gt;SENT&lt;/code&gt; for the full stop closing a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that automatic tokenisers and POS taggers aren't infallible, in your scenario you may encounter false positives because abbreviations unknown to the tools come out as spurious end-of-sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T13:40:32.867" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T13:40:32.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21358" CreationDate="2017-03-13T14:16:28.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It definitely is a part of speech, but (in usual analysis) not in the first level of analysis. In the U PENN tagset (that does strange things to part-of-speech sometimes), all -ing forms of a verb are lumped under the tag &lt;code&gt;VING&lt;/code&gt;: It is primarily analysed as a verb, and secondarily as carrying the ending -ing, it is not properly separated from the present participle of the same surface form). Other tagsets may analyse it as a noun primarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T14:16:28.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21355" CreationDate="2017-03-13T14:28:39.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least, other Indogermanic languages have the ability to derive nouns from verbs, too. In Latin, there is a suffix -tio, -tionis that forms abstract nouns (like derivatio &quot;derivation&quot; from derivare), there is a suffix -or (applied to the supine stem) that derives agents (like actor &quot;actor&quot; from agere, ago, egi, actum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of derivation is part of the morphology of a language; but it is usually kept separate from the inflection part. Drawing the line between derivation and inflection is to some degree arbitrary and may by controversial for some boundary cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T14:28:39.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21411" CreationDate="2017-03-13T21:04:37.447" Score="4" ViewCount="780" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for parts of speech, I am quite sure it is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, some languages are problematic in separating clearly verbs from adjectives like Japanese and Korean, some native American languages seem to have much less categories than Indo-European. Since each part of speech corresponds to a phrase, the phrases can't be universal either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now grammatical relations are like roles certain phrases can take, and it strikes me intuitively that these roles are limited by logic and can't allow for idiosyncrasies like parts of speech can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it really so, are not even some sentence parts universal among languages but each language has the same set of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T03:41:37.910" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T03:41:37.910" Title="Do all languages have the same set of grammatical relations?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T21:19:41.027" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to start learning a few languages, admittingly my interest ,stamina and brain force didn't last for more than a couple of days each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nethertheless, I noticed , that the different grammars explained clauses being divided into Subject and Verbs as their minimal requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Subject is a sentence part and verb is a part of speach, furthermore other definitions of clauses name Subject and Predicative as the minimal requirements for a clause , which is a blessing feeling of absence of cognitive dissonance since in this case both are sentence parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is it so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T07:38:24.683" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T07:38:24.683" Title="Why do so many grammars divide a clause into Subject and Verb instead of Subject and Predicative?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T21:30:19.003" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is the distribution of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algonquian Language Family&lt;/a&gt; from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u502Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Algonquian Language Family&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They report this language family has 3 branches, but only one is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_relationship_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genetic&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (actually related in structure, not just in geography): &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Algonquian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eastern Algonquian&lt;/a&gt;. However, this is their map of Eastern's distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Algonquian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AbGD8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Eastern Algonquian languages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sure looks like the exact same map, with everything on the west side (beyond the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquoian_languages#Family_division&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iroquoian&lt;/a&gt; area) wiped clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the picture really this simple? Or are there actually some Eastern languages west of that gray area, and/or some non-Eastern languages east of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious, because a distribution with a glaring hole in the middle like that usually indicates that it used to be continuous, and the unrelated languages in the middle came to the area later. However, a lot of times when that happens, it leaves languages on both sides of the hole that are related to each other, and that doesn't look like it happened here. An alternative explanation might be that the Eastern tribes all derived from a single tribe that hopped the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and found lots of land on the coastal areas of the other side that the Iroquois couldn't use as well as they could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8124" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T21:30:19.003" Title="All all genetically Eastern Algonquian languages in the east?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T22:10:41.887" Score="4" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;At this point I don't want to explain my personal crackpot theories on how names for numbers emerged and I assume that anything remotely connected with the origin of language is highly speculative and hard if not impossible being researched empirically. &#xA;Nethertheless, centuries of speculation might have culminated into a few theories which might be considered an educated guess or even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I limit the theories onto the origin of the names for numerals, what probably doesn't make it much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T05:42:45.617" Title="Could you point out some theories on how the names for numbers developed?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21378" CreationDate="2017-03-14T02:30:57.163" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, basically by definition, subordinate clauses must be embedded in a matrix clause. Therefore, if sentences of the type &quot;&lt;em&gt;¡Que le vaya bien!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are subordinate, where is the matrix clause? Some have said that such constructions result from the omission of a main verb such as &lt;em&gt;espero&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;¡Espero que le vaya bien!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;). Would Spanish speakers interpret the two sentences as equivalent then? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if they are not subordinate, what is the function of the subordinator &quot;&lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;&quot;? How should its presence be analyzed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked for similar examples of subordinate clauses being used as complete sentences. The only one that came to mind is &quot;If only . . . !&quot; in English, but the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says that in this case, it's just that &quot;the apodosis is omitted.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also occurred to me that the &quot;&lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;+ subjunctive verb&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; construction is similar to &quot;would that . . .&quot; in English, but I think it's clear with &quot;would that . . .&quot; that there is indeed a main verb with an omitted subject &quot;I.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5284" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T10:57:41.400" Title="Are clauses such as &quot;¡Que le vaya bien!&quot; in Spanish subordinate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21377" CreationDate="2017-03-14T10:57:41.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't found a specific grammatical term or label for this usage, but all online resources that deal with the Spanish subjunctive explain it in the same terms as proposed in the question, i. e. that there's a verb expressing hope or expectation implied as the main clause (it could be &lt;em&gt;esperar&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;desear&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pairs like &lt;em&gt;¡Que le vaya bien!&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Espero que le vaya bien&lt;/em&gt; are semantically almost identical, but the intonation is rather different and a native speaker would not perceive the two sentences as socially equivalent. There's a reason why the former kind (beginning with &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;) is almost always written with an admiration point: it works rather as an interjection. It sounds emotional and spontaneous and it would also be the correct choice to insert an ironic tone. On the other hand the latter type of sentence (with the verb &lt;em&gt;esperar&lt;/em&gt;) is a complete sentence with normal prosody (not an exclamation, generally), and it states or reports a fact: that the speaker hopes for something. You would use the former as you wave someone goodbye before a journey, as they board the plane; the latter would be used if you had a while to sit down with someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case the difference is subtle. There's a third choice, too, which somehow bridges that gap: using &lt;em&gt;ojalá&lt;/em&gt; to head the subjunctive clause. It works as a hoping/wishing verb; indeed it comes from Arabic لو شاء الله  &lt;em&gt;law šá lláh&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;if God wanted&quot; ~ &quot;may God want&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T10:57:41.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T16:02:20.147" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me clarify the question,&#xA;There are traditional grammars to describe the working and structure of languages, mostly with the purpose of teaching someone to speak the languages. So, it is approach is simply educative and theoretical inconsistencies within the grammar used are neglected , it only has to work as a teaching instrument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there are descriptions of languages with the purpose of describing them for further linguistic evaluations. Maybe to have a common system of description to compare languages with one another, to group them according to some criteria, to follow their development through time by observing its change of grammar, to describe their structure precisely for computational evaluation and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, at this point I don't know how deep an answer to this question can get, if it is too comprehensive, please try to point out some relevant differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T00:44:25.320" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T00:44:25.320" Title="How does the description of the grammar of a language differ between a traditional and scientific approach?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;&lt;traditional-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21381" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21383" CreationDate="2017-03-14T16:39:24.637" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different types of texts, for I stance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;manuals &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;short stories&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;novels&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;recipes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;love letters&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;testaments&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;contracts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;fines&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;books for teaching children to read&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;political speeches&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;motivational speeches, like Jean Claude van damme talking to th UN soldiers in Street fighter - the movie&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;police reports&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so forth&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a field of linguistics which deals with analyzing them and establishing grammatical characteristics for each type of text. &#xA;Maybe, after a statistical evaluation of text types and comparison with each other one could come up with stable or frequent characteristics for each text type, perhaps differences like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the number of different words used per thousand words&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the average length or structural complexity of a sentence&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;different spectrograms of the types of phrases used&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the field or fields have to be quiet extensive, therefore I don't ask for a description, but rather a list of the names of the  linguistic subfields, theories and significant people dealing with it, maybe with  short annotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T17:55:03.660" Title="What parts of linguistics deal with the differences between text types?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;forensic-linguistics&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T17:37:10.127" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to convert human voice sample to formant voice? May be by extracting peculiarities from waveform? Is there a tool or a program library you can suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15470" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T17:37:10.127" Title="Get formant settings (e.g. f1, f2, f3.. frequencies, bandwidths etc) from human voice" Tags="&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21381" CreationDate="2017-03-14T17:55:03.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The features mentioned in the last paragraph of the question belong to the domain of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;corpus linguistics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stylometry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the categories mentioned in the first part of the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_functional_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Systemic Functional Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; offers a lot of categories for analysis, like &lt;em&gt;register&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tenor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;field&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe you want to learn more about this by studying the works of M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T17:55:03.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21380" CreationDate="2017-03-14T18:01:18.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional grammars were developed mainly for heavily inflecting languages (Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Classical Arabic). Such kind of grammars turn out to be inadequate for languages of other types, like English. Modern grammars are often developed with English in mind to suit the needs of a mainly isolating language. I am not sure how well they generalise to languages of other types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T18:01:18.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21387" CreationDate="2017-03-14T19:23:01.340" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify, by type I refer to terms like isolating, agglutinative,flectional...I think the terms which Humboldt introduced for a rough categorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I heard of languages, that changed their type:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English, from flectional to isolating&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bulgarian, from flectional to isolating&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Swedish, not quiet sure, but it seems to have lost a good deal of its flection in favor for the solating type,also&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chinese is sometimes theorized to not have been always isolating, but flectional back when the yellow emperor rode on dinosaurs fighting the agglutinative lizzard people&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I only have examples for a sequence of one transition and each time the same flectional→isolating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the braincells in my guts tell me, that noch each sequence of transitions from one type into the next  has the same likeliness, for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agglutinative → flectional → isolating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;makes most sense as the amount of dropping of morphemes between the transitions is the smallest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But than, my guts have no diploma &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T12:32:28.103" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T16:16:24.420" Title="Is there a dominant sequence in which a language throughout its evolution changes its type?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21380" CreationDate="2017-03-15T01:50:35.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is of course difficult to prove, but I would say traditional grammars tend to be &lt;strong&gt;prescriptive&lt;/strong&gt;, i. e. they are conceived as a list of rules to be followed in order to speak the language correctly, and usually to establish a standard; deviations from the standard will be either pointed out and discouraged as &quot;mistakes&quot; or &quot;deformations&quot;, or simply ignored. (This prescriptivism is the strategy adopted by certain national language academies, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academie Française&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Academia_Espa%C3%B1ola&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Real Academia Española&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas &quot;scientific&quot; grammars will probably tend towards a proper &lt;strong&gt;descriptive&lt;/strong&gt; approach, a non-judgmental exposition of how the language is actually spoken in its variety of registers: formal, familiar, intimate, slang, etc.; this variety will be acknowledged and studied as part of the language, as will the variety of regional accents, of lexical forms, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of prescriptive grammar in the face of obvious deviations from the supposed standard, I might offer the fact that traditional grammars in Argentina, where I was born, taught us only the pronouns and verb forms employed in European Spanish, even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rioplatense_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my dialect&lt;/a&gt; (spoken by maybe 30 million people!) uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voseo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;different second person pronouns&lt;/a&gt; and a very distinctive verb conjugation for them. This was thirty years ago; a few decades before not only was the European standard taught exclusively, but the use of our dialectal forms was pronounced a &quot;linguistic vice&quot; and the teachers were told to erradicate it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense, of course, to design grammars that only focus on the standard, especially for second-language students who won't have the opportunity to take in the language naturally and don't have the time to learn all registers. But they shouldn't be in the same category as real scientific grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T01:50:35.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21385" CreationDate="2017-03-15T09:50:56.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've hit upon one of the key insights in modern linguistic theory! :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are partially right in your observations. Humboldt actually made the opposite observation, that an isolating language is the more 'primitive' form, and languages tend to become morphologically complex afterwards (i.e. become agglutinative), and finally the morphological boundaries become less clear (i.e. the language becomes fusional). Humboldt's process is linear, like yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was later discovered by Gabelentz that fusional languages tend to become isolating. So he closed the loop, resulting in a cycle: Isolating -&gt; Agglutinative -&gt; Fusional -&gt; Isolating...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a common error is to regard this cycle as bidirectional. It is not; it is &lt;em&gt;unidirectional&lt;/em&gt;, because when a language reaches, say, another isolating state after passing through the agglutinative and fusional states, the new language is no longer the same as the original isolating one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this happen? This question is adequately answered by the modern theory of &lt;strong&gt;grammaticalisation&lt;/strong&gt;. The expression of meaning in the grammar goes through several stages. This &lt;strong&gt;cline&lt;/strong&gt; is roughly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Syntactic word &gt; Clitic &gt; Affix &gt; Suprasegmental &gt; Zero&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly, when a lot of grammatical categories are at the two ends of this spectrum, you have an analytic language; if a lot of grammatical categories are in-between, you have a synthetic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a periphrastic syntactic construction is used a lot, the words used it in will become functional, i.e. used for expressing grammatical meaning, for example &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; in English (still used in its original, concrete sense in phrases like 'in a while'). When these functional words become unstressed and cliticise to the words afterwards, they become clitics, such as the French article &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;, from the Latin demonstrative &lt;em&gt;ille&lt;/em&gt;. Clitics can then become affixes. For example, the French adverb marker &lt;em&gt;ment&lt;/em&gt; is a full clitic these days, but it used to be a clitic in Old French, e.g. [humble e douce]=ment. An affix can later become a suprasegmental; for example, in Old Chinese, *-s was (among other things) a causative suffix, but this later became a tone difference after tonogenesis in Middle Chinese, and some of this is retained in modern Chinese. And finally, an old distinction can simply disappear altogether; this is the cause for some of the Middle Chinese tonal differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in effect, the cycle is a fall-out of these diachronic processes in which words tend to be used frequently, become entrenched, enter the grammatical system, and go through successive stages of weakening until they eventually disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does the final isolating language become agglutinative again? Simple: New words will simply be grammaticalised into the system again. One ongoing example of this is the &lt;em&gt;be going to&lt;/em&gt; construction in English. As &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; becomes more and more grammatical, &lt;em&gt;be going to&lt;/em&gt; is replacing &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;'s older, 'more expressive' use. The same thing is happening in French: the &lt;em&gt;aller&lt;/em&gt; + infinitive construction is similar to &lt;em&gt;be going to&lt;/em&gt; in this respect. These periphrastic constructions will then go through the grammaticalisation process again: the development of &lt;em&gt;gonna&lt;/em&gt; in casual speech is the first step in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, yes, you're right, the transitions are unidirectional. Yet it is also cyclic, and language change doesn't 'end' at isolating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References (for Indo-European examples):&#xA;Hopper, P. J., &amp;amp; Traugott, E. C. (2003). &lt;em&gt;Grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T16:16:24.420" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T16:16:24.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-16T07:12:59.187" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;What reconstructed languages were spoken around 7500 BCE and which of those was likely to have the most speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know nothing is concrete about this, but best guesses would be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you could include, which are &quot;most accepted&quot; and if possible a good place to see the reconstructions, that would be helpful, but if you can't I can try to find them ^.^&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;side question : why no proto-language tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14852" LastEditorUserId="14852" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T08:07:49.673" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T21:23:18.593" Title="Languages Spoken in 7500 BCE?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20461" CreationDate="2017-03-16T13:58:09.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is easy for Vietnamese to learn Mandarin because they are already familiar with Chinese grammar and structure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vietnam was under Chinese influence for most of its history &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were many waves of Chinese migration to Vietnam. Because of this, Vietnamese also has another category of Chinese loan words that Korean and Japanese lack, which are called từ Hán Việt Khẩu Ngữ. Khẩu Ngữ are words derived straight from Chinese dialects through oral transmission, as opposed to the literary language. Majority of these came from Cantonese and Teochew, eg: tả pín lù, tài xế, hầm bà lằng, ca la thầu etc. And in regions with heavy Chinese settlement, words for family members such as &quot;a hia&quot; for brother,  chế for sister&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese literature is quite popular in Vietnam giving Vietnamese a lot of exposure to chinese sentence structure and grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A lot of Chinese idioms are still used in Vietnamese so Vietnamese are familiar with Chinese word order and word usage. Eg môn đăng hộ đối, danh chính ngôn thuận, danh bất hư truyền, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15486" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T13:58:09.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21390" CreationDate="2017-03-16T18:54:55.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interpreting your question literally in my answer, as I think you intended it: &quot;Which actually reconstructable proto-languages languages are believed to have been spoken around 7500 BCE?&quot;. PIE might have been spoken around that time (so Hittite was not spoken, nor Germanic) – this could actually push PIE back too far, see below for discussion of dating. Bantu was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; spoken then – that's a later development. Austronesian doesn't date back that far either (it's put more at the 3500 BCE). AFAIK, there is no reconstructed proto-language from which Austronesian descended, where we can say &quot;at 7500 BCE the language that was spoken is Proto-Austronic&quot;, so Austronesian drops out of the count. Austro-Asiatic is also thought to reconstruct to much later than that period, so scratch that family. You should note that I'm not mentioning &quot;Austric&quot; which could be an ancestor of Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian, because Austric isn't a reconstructed language (which might have a time depth), it's a conjecture that certain proto-languages might be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For pre-Bantu, we would probably conclude that Niger-Congo was spoken around that time (whence Bantu and related languages). The difference between Bantu and Austronesian is that for Austronesian, we can only say &quot;Something, which must have led to Austronesian, was spoken&quot;, but for Bantu we have to make a choice as to which specific level of reconstruction we are talking about. Likewise, Semitic probably reconstructs to 3500 BCE so that would not be a contender, but maybe Afro-Asiatic (but it may be that Afro-Asiatic actually is much older: yet we don't have a descendant branch in Afro-Asiatic that confidently reconstructs to 7500 BCE, in case Afro-Asiatic is too old). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of lack of time-depth in reconstructions, that lets out much of the New World, though Dené–Yeniseian could qualify. (A caveat: Dené–Yeniseian is not actually a reconstructed language, it's a family some parts of which are kind of reconstructable). We can probably add Uralic to the list. However, given the imprecision in dating reconstructed languages, it might be that Uralic and Austronesian have comparable time-depths (so Uralic should not be included?). Pama-Nyungan might reconstruct to that time depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, many languages will fall out of the count simply because there is no reconstructed language (viz. there are many language isolates) – Basque, Burushaski, Etruscan, Korean, Sumerian. I may have mentioned the entire set of proto-languages spoken at the target date, as long as you don't mean 7500 BCE plus or minus 4000. Clearly very many languages were spoken in 7500 BCE, but they mostly do not correspond to actually reconstructed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot look at structural changes from a proto-language and compute a time-depth based on a theory that languages change at a constant rate. Instead, you really need to look at archaeological and word-appearance facts (where a particular word referring to a significant cultural item, such as plant names or technology, correlates with language subgrouping, and this can be pinned to archaeological events like the emergence of Urewe ware maybe around 500 BCE). It may be that Indo-European archaeology is in a more advanced or, simply, lucky state compared to Niger-Congo. In fact, looking for &quot;7500 BCE&quot; is probably not reasonable, instead you should look for a range spanning at least 3 millenia, definitely not centered around 7500 BCE, since that is at the far limits of reconstructive technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T21:23:18.593" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T21:23:18.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21380" CreationDate="2017-03-16T19:17:02.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As indicated by pablodf76, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;scientific&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; approach to grammar is strictly descriptive. Also it tends to be really... scientific, i.e. it may be highly formal, sometimes going as far as resembling programming instructions for a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traditional&lt;/strong&gt; approach can vary widely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be &lt;em&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. based on what is considered the correct usage (this is actually not as unscientific as many would consider as it may be based on genuine demand from language users that are interest in &quot;what is correct/appropriate&quot;, but also it can be used as a political tool to suppress dialects and minorities etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be &lt;em&gt;didactic&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. created from categories that are more or less easy to understand for non-scientific users (i.e. no X-bar theories etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be &lt;em&gt;really traditional&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. based on a way used to describe some old, prestigious language (Latin, Greek,...), which was subsequently adapted to fit more or less the language in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T19:17:02.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21403" CreationDate="2017-03-16T22:45:40.483" Score="0" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of this type of relation between elements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All jacuzzis are hot tubs, but not all hot tubs are jacuzzis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All words are morphemes, but not all morphemes are words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15493" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T13:35:39.837" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T13:35:39.837" Title="Semantic/linguistic relation in &quot;All jacuzzis are hot tubs&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T00:07:43.610" Score="2" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know how typologically common it is to have number agreement on nouns even when that noun's plurality is implied by numerals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Spanish &quot;two houses&quot; is &quot;dos casas&quot;, i.e, the noun &quot;casa&quot; is marked for plural even though we already know there's two of them. Why not &quot;dos casa&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there more languages in which plural marking is always obligatory or more in which plural marking becomes optional with numerals? Is either strategy related to other features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15494" LastEditorUserId="15494" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T00:13:05.613" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T07:18:02.677" Title="Plural-marking and numerals" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21380" CreationDate="2017-03-17T01:56:51.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional grammar is supposed to be help people use language better.  Modern grammar attempts to tell what is true about human language, regardless of whether that helps anyone to use language better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T01:56:51.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T15:55:35.190" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the wikipedia article about definiteness I came upon this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the Germanic languages and Balto-Slavic languages, for example (as still in modern German and Lithuanian), there are two paradigms for adjectives, one used in definite noun phrases and the other used in indefinite noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand what it means, though I speak German and Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in German I can have this variations of an adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ein schöner Tag&#xA;a beautiful day&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;der schöne Tag&#xA;the beautiful day&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;schönen Tag!&#xA;This one is not used in a sentence , but as a stand alone greeting phrase&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the German example it is obvious, but how it is in other Germanic languages and the the Balto-Slavic languages. As for Polish, I am not sure if Definiteness is marked morphologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you provide examples and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T16:14:29.710" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T00:08:13.863" Title="How is the the adjective in a definite noun phrase different from a nondefinite one in Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21397" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:05:45.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One should differentiate between, on the one hand, the (logical) relation between the actual objects referred to by the words, and, on the other hand, the (linguistic) relation between the words themselves (i.e. the signs that denote these objects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logical relation of the &lt;em&gt;entities&lt;/em&gt; involved is, as suggested by sumelic's comment, the &lt;strong&gt;proper subset&lt;/strong&gt; relation:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The set of jacuzzis is a proper subset of the set of hot tubs; and the set of hot tubs is a proper superset of the set of jacuzzis.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In mathematical terms, a set A is a proper subset of B (A ⊂ B) if and only if every every element of A is also an element of B (A ⊆ B), and A is not identical to B (A ≠ B), so there is at least one element of B which is not an element of A.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that everything which is a jacuzzi is also a hot tub, but a jacuzzi is not the same thing as a hot tub, so there are hot tubs which are not jacuzzis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistic relation between the &lt;em&gt;lexical items&lt;/em&gt; resembles (!) one of &lt;strong&gt;hypernymy&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;hyponymy&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The word &lt;em&gt;jacuzzi&lt;/em&gt; would be a hyponym to the word &lt;em&gt;hot tub&lt;/em&gt; and the word &lt;em&gt;hot tub&lt;/em&gt; would be a hypernym to the word &lt;em&gt;jacuzzi&lt;/em&gt; - if one regarded &quot;hot tub&quot; as a word, which is not entirely accurate because it actually consists of two words, so this terminology which is defined on words doesn't apply here that nicely.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A more straightforward example would be something like &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; being a hyponym to &lt;em&gt;animal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;animal&lt;/em&gt; being a hypernym to &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; (every cat is an animal, but not every animal is a cat).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As curiousdannii pointed out, the statement about morphemes and words is linguistically not corret, but if it were, we could use the same description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T16:11:04.723" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T16:11:04.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21402" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:21:40.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia article is (as often) badly formulated. &quot;In the Germanic languages&quot; is wrong. &quot;In (some) Germanic languages&quot; would be all right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T16:21:40.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:34:42.787" Score="4" ViewCount="572" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, Korean and Japanese have been proposed to be part of other language families, for instance Altaic, but Altaic is not considered a valid term subterfuged by evidence as much as Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European. However, often both are described as isolated languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some very simple Japanese and Korean, and for a layman I see the similarities in grammar like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;agglutinative building principle&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;no strict difference between what we would consider adjectives and Verbs, both can act as Predicatives &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Predicate is in the final position, all other phrases come before it in no fixed order followed by a particle that tells the semantic role in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Verbs and Adjectives are being marked for social relationship between speakers such as politeness, respect, humbleness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Than, both sound related, though I hardly can find cognate words that sound similar, for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the words for &lt;em&gt;ugly&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;minikui&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mossaengi&lt;/em&gt; in Japanese and Korean respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;watakushi&lt;/em&gt; for I&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;dal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tsuki&lt;/em&gt; for moon&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least the words for bear sound similar (the Korean mythology tells about a bear princess and some guy who fathered the Korean people, The Ainu in Japan have strong mythological meaning for bears also)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kuma in Japanese and kum in Korean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another feature that sets them apart is Korean sandhi rules are very elaborated while Japanese neglectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you name further features that are considered as pro or contra arguments for a common origin ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T11:40:15.353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T11:40:15.353" Title="What are arguments for and against a common origin of Korean and Japanese?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T17:06:43.400" Score="0" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question points in the future and so I see the problem of having evidence but an educated guess or quotations of linguists would do, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is no secret any longer, though some nationalist Turks I know, passionate advocates of the Sun Language Theory, see it differently, languages have changed through time. Not quiet randomly, but by rules which historical linguists have discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, times are different know :&#xA;We ve have Jackie Chan, Star Wars, oppressive governments, prescriptive language advocates, the Kings James Bible, constitutions, TV series and all the things which urges us to speak their way either for entertainment to understand what Yoda said in plain English, for our constitutional rights to know how to read the laws and thus to know how to sit on a leather chair sponsored by welfare money instead the electrical one and all other modern reasons which keep our language in a specific shape like dinosaurs eyewitnessing mosquitoes in amber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the opinion on this the scientists came up with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T17:12:24.610" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T17:19:54.170" Title="Have modern languages slowed down or even stopped from language change?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21406" CreationDate="2017-03-17T17:19:54.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing, really nothing, can stop language change. It is best seen on the word level: Neologisms enter the language all the time, and other words become obsolete, archaic, and even completely unused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, on the level of grammar language change is working, e.g., for the English language there is a tendency to use the present continuous in more and more contexts, while other grammatical constructions (to name one: the passive) fall out of favour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even sound shifts still occur, despite IPA in dictionaries and sound recordings and mass media. Formerly dialectal or sub-standard pronunciations become accepted or even a new standard. All this happens every day around us, the younger generation speaks a different language than their ancestors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T17:19:54.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21442" CreationDate="2017-03-17T18:15:10.170" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;In another question someone pointed out, that at least some slavic languages use word order to express the grammatical category of definitiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in Polish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This example has been flagged by some as incorrect, but my expertise is too limited to evaluate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;maly pies&#xA;a small dog&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pies maly&#xA;the small dog&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know futher examples of languages with free word order, highly flectional languages like Balto-Slavic, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or agglutinative languages like Korean and Japanese with a free word order except for the predicate or others that use word order to convey some additional meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T21:24:17.070" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T21:24:17.070" Title="Could you provide examples of free word order languages that use word order to express grammatical categories?" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21398" CreationDate="2017-03-17T19:04:24.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The languages put under the Altaic group, generally have optional or non plural with nouns. For example Japanese doesn't have it all, or Turkic languages usage of plural nouns are discouraged and limited to the couple of cases. Sama goes for Ugro-Finnic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T19:04:24.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21372" CreationDate="2017-03-17T19:21:04.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume, based on the your posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21373/why-do-so-many-grammars-divide-a-clause-into-subject-and-verb-instead-of-subject&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, that by 'sentence parts', you are referring to &lt;strong&gt;grammatical relations (GRs)&lt;/strong&gt; like subject, object, etc. In the future, it would be clearer for you to call them that, as this is the standard terminology in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are confused about argument structures and grammatical relations. Argument structures specific semantic roles like agent, patient, etc. These may be universal, but they do not have bijective maps with grammatical relations. Indeed, what motivates the use of GRs in linguistic analysis is the lack of one-to-one correpsondence between semantic roles and certain grammaticalised aspects of language (e.g. nominative case). Moreover, although argument structure can be easily expressed in terms of traditional predicate logic, grammar is not bound by the rules of any system of logic, so this is not a good argument for the universality of GRs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, I'd like to split the question into three different ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Do there exist necessary and sufficient conditions that allow us to conclusively identify GRs in any language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is definitely &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. There are no objective criteria to help us pick out subjects, objects, indirect objects, oblique arguments, etc. in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language, in the same way that we can identify chemicals by spectroscopy. A set of criteria that works for English is not going to work for Chinese, and a set of criteria that works for Lakhota is not going to work for Swahili.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, GRs are not universal. We cannot give a formal characterisation of GRs that work for any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Is it possible to identify GRs in any language which are subject-like, object-like, etc.?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this I mean: given a set of prototype characteristics of subjects and objects, can we identify subjects and objects in any language?  The answer to this is &lt;strong&gt;uncertain&lt;/strong&gt;. Certain languages, such as Archi and Acehnese, have been claimed by some linguists to lack GRs, and the role usually played by GRs can be replaced entirely be semantics and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in most languages it is possible to identify certain elements as subjects, objects, etc. based on a) overt coding (word order, case, etc.) and b) behaviour-and-control properties (pivots, control, raising, etc.) But it must be noted that none of these are necessary-and-sufficient conditions for GRs; GRs are a fuzzy concept here. A classic example is Keenan (1976), which gave a list of 30 characteristics of subjects. So, under this characterisation of universality, yes, all languages could have the same set of GRs; but this set is one of fuzzy categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Are there linguists working with the assumption that GRs are universal?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;; GRs are central to lexical-functional grammar (LFG) and relational grammar (RG); in these theories, GRs are assumed to be theoretical 'primitives'. In RG, grammatical relations are called 1, 2, 3; LFG has a fancier hierarchy of GRs: SUBJ &gt; OBJ &gt; OBJ(theta) &gt; OBL(theta) &gt; COMP &gt; XCOMP &gt; ADJ &gt; XADJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in typological work it is often necessary to assume the notion of grammatical relations, or it would impossible to make word order generalisations; however, this is purely methodological and does not involve 'reifying' GRs or assuming their universality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T19:21:04.840" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21416" CreationDate="2017-03-18T01:59:56.790" Score="-2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on scientific (calculations in) literature, how many different &quot;sounds&quot; are there to be found across all languages of which the pronunciation is known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think tones, and a fortiori dialects, will further complicate the matter. The need for systematics and standards in language and their phonetics thus becomes apparent, when embarking on a counting endeavour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps even the possible amount of sounds which can be produced by the structural make-up of our body, has been systematically analysed in a biological-linguistic inquiry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastEditorUserId="8066" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T02:09:04.193" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T16:29:27.493" Title="How large is the number of all phonetic entities across all spoken languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21417" CreationDate="2017-03-18T15:17:27.237" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word kin 'hate, venom, spite' is quite unusual and took my attention for its meaning 'venom'. Is it an Anatolian-Turkish/Azeri only word or is it common in other Turkic languages? Does anyone know of any commentary on its etymology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T16:32:27.370" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T20:01:11.120" Title="Is the the Turkish word kin 'hate, venom etc' restricted to Anatolian-Turkish only?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-18T15:48:12.113" Score="3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the languages I know I think to believe, that a subordinated clause comes in a chunk and not scattered throughout the main clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I LIKE TO SING, while i slave away&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;while I slave away&lt;/em&gt; is the subordinated clause and in one continuous piece, there is nothing like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I  while LIKE i TO slave SING away&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't know if this contradicts some basic principle in linguistics, but a friend of mine,Aslan, who admittingly tends to be a crackpot, but has also proven to be smart, claims, that this is the case in one of the Balkan languages he speaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example I provide is necessarily just wrong grammar I had to make up, to exemplify what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T19:37:10.980" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T18:46:35.977" Title="Are there languages with discontinued subordinate clauses?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21412" CreationDate="2017-03-18T16:29:27.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends foremost on what exactly you mean by &quot;a sound&quot;, which could be counted. For example, the consonant [ʕ] is found in Arabic, Tigre, Somali, Chechen and a number of other languages. However, the exact pronunciation differs, so that [ʕ] in Moroccan Arabic isn't phonetically the same as it is in Levantine Arabic. Aspirated stops differ quite considerably in how much aspiration there is (e.g. in Navaho they are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; aspirated but in (related) Apache, not so much. If you are looking for fine-grained phonetic differences, the answer would be along the lines of &quot;unlimited&quot; (or at least unknowably huge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you are looking at phonemes, the answer is more computable. Although English phonetically has alveolar &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; (the regular case) and dental [t̪] (in &quot;width&quot;), this is an automatic feature of English pronunciation (or possibly universally required). However, [t] versus [t̪] is a phonemic choice in some languages (Ekoti). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt; is a conventional system for writing all such phonemic distinctions in languages. You can start calculating from a chart &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt; (I warn you however that that is an unofficial homebrew version, and one should always consult the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/IPA_chart_2005.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official version&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, the Wiki page for IPA is on the verge of being offensively misrepresentative). So for plain voiceless stops, you have [p t̪ t ʈ c k q]. Any of these can have rounding as a secondary articulation (notated in IPA as ʷ), and many can have palatalization (ʲ). Additionally, you can have differences between plain, aspirated, and ejective stops (p, pʰ, p') – so you have 7x2x3 i.e. 42 kind of voiceless stops (there are other properties that have to be considered, and a question of whether there is such a difference as [kʲ] versus [c], or [qʲ] at all). You can basically triple that number to include voiced and nasal consonants, and then there are fricatives and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/vowels.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;28 vowel symbols&lt;/a&gt; (this is a proper vowel chart). Any one of these can be modified by diacritically-indicated additional properties, such as nasalization, or creakiness vs. breathiness (the former can theoretically combine with either of the latter but the last two are mutually exclusive), which gives 28x2x3 vowels; then we can add length (2 or maybe 3 categories) and tone (errrm, that's a big number). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem you run into is the attestation gap. For example as far as I know, no language has [ʏ̤] (breathy lax [y]), which probably means we just haven't found it, since breathiness is not a very common phonetic feature. A related problem is that some of the odd sounds have an unclear phonetic and phonemic status. Clicks are a good example: some of the Khoisan languages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taa&lt;/a&gt; have a huge number of click distinctions, so [kʘ kʘʰ* ɡʘ ɡʘh ɡʘqʼ kʘʼqʼ ɡʘx ...]. Some of these clearly fall within the purview of normal voicing / aspiration / nasalization distinctions, but there seem to be inconveniently more kinds. The &quot;velar fricative release&quot; click [ɡʘx] might be a consonant cluster of [ɡʘ] plus [x], and there isn't any clear way to determine if that is correct / wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This at any rate gives one an initial basis for computing &quot;possibilities&quot;. The biggest impediment to giving a concrete number is that there are many rare phonetic properties attested especially in languages with few speakers (under 100,000), but not a lot of clear, probative data as to what distinctive properties there are. As for the question of a theory of such oppositions, starting with Roman Jakobson at the end of the 1940's and at least until 1995-ish, sounds have been analysed into a system of independent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctive_feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;features&lt;/a&gt;, where (in one standard system - the last standard), [p] is [+consonantal, -sonorant, -syllabic, -voice, -continuant, +anterior, -coronal...]. That system (Sound Pattern of English) has about 24 features (it does not actually say explicity which things are or are not features, and it proposes distinctions that nobody adopted). That gives a mathematical upper limit (around 16 million) which is certainly vastly more than anyone has actually observed. The underlying theory is that these specific properties are part of our biological faculty of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative approach is that the biological faculty of language has simply the notion &quot;feature&quot;, and a general relationship between &quot;feature&quot; and aspect of language (i.e. rule or phonemic distinction – rules operate in terms of feature values, sounds are distinguished in terms of features), but there is no actual substance of the features (i.e. nothing in the theory of grammar requires you to know that the sounds participating in a rule are produced by lowering the velum, or protruding the lips). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T16:29:27.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21414" CreationDate="2017-03-18T17:44:33.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer the first part of your question, but as far as etymology goes it is very straight-forward: it is from Persian kīn “hatred” (from Middle Persian kēn, Avestan kaēna- “revenge”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T17:44:33.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21415" CreationDate="2017-03-18T18:38:57.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about how this would be viewed in English but you can find a certain discontinuity in European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't know &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; you think you are doing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nevím, &lt;strong&gt;co&lt;/strong&gt; si myslíš, že děláš.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Czech, word &lt;em&gt;dělat&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to do&lt;/em&gt;) comes with obligatory transitivity (unless in it means &lt;em&gt;to work (in order to earn money)&lt;/em&gt;) and thus requires a direct object. In this sentence, the direct object would be &lt;em&gt;co&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;) but this is moved at the beginning of the first-order subordinate and merged with its own relative pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T18:38:57.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21414" CreationDate="2017-03-18T20:01:11.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I totally agree with fdb. Although I cannot say if it is used in Central Asian Turkic Languages( Turkmen, Uzbek and Uighur), for certain I can say that (not sure about today but) it existed in Azerbaijani. Look at the example from Fuzuli: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Gam değil ehl-i garaz eylerse benden men’-i hayr / Gam değil ehl-i hased bağlarsa ben miskîne &lt;strong&gt;kin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: A quick search revelead that it is used in Uzbek, Bashkurt, Tatar (no Crimean), Turkmen and Azerbaijani. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tdk.gov.tr/index.php?option=com_lehceler&amp;amp;arama=lehceler&amp;amp;guid=TDK.LHC.58cd91f5221869.95997362&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://tdk.gov.tr/index.php?option=com_lehceler&amp;amp;arama=lehceler&amp;amp;guid=TDK.LHC.58cd91f5221869.95997362&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit2: Appereantly the search function is a script here is a screen cap &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CF1Re.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CF1Re.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T20:01:11.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21376" CreationDate="2017-03-18T21:32:21.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might not be directly what you were looking for, but if you're interested in the &quot;names&quot; for numerals, one thing I think might be valid is the point of &quot;discrimination&quot;, i.e. because the numbers are all quite frequently used in daily conversations, people need to discriminate them as distinctly as possible. This is similar to the role played by genders in gendered languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus you might observe that the pronunciations of the basic number words from 1 to 10 are mostly very distinct in most languages and they're not easy to be confused together. Maybe the true &quot;origin&quot; of those names can be a bit random, but the point is, through the evolution they must be as distinct from each other as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the theory of one of our professors anyways and you may go to his blog for detailed expositions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://michaelramscar.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://michaelramscar.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://ramscar.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ramscar.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T21:32:21.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T11:50:41.890" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering where a good place (or good places) to start learning about linguistic (grammar, syntactic and semantic) theories would be.  I'm essentially a complete novice in this domain.  Any sort of resource - video, audio, websites, books, articles, etc. - would be great.  Thank you so much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15512" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T11:50:41.890" Title="Introductory linguistic theory books" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-03-20T10:11:29.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9270" CreationDate="2017-03-19T13:54:24.717" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the poster is describing is called &quot;Inflection&quot;. Changing the basic form of the word, typically by adding a suffix, to express a function such as tense, quantity, gender. Examples: the adjective 'mad' is &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt; to the adverb 'madly', nouns are &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt; in the plural, verbs are &lt;em&gt;inflected&lt;/em&gt; in the various tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Inflection' also means the WAY you say things, the highs and lows of your voice, or the stress patterns (anger, asking a question, joking,) but for that sort of thing I would go with &quot;intonation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15511" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T13:54:24.717" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T14:43:36.977" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long distance reflexives/anaphora/binding are much discussed in the literature, particularly among generativists, but while there seems to be rough agreement on what constitutes a long-distance reflexive, I can't find a good, theory-neutral definition of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general usage seems to be 'a reflexive whose anaphoric distance is longer than what English allows', reflecting the field's traditional anglocentricity, but even that is vague and imprecise. For example, (1) is not acceptable in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) *The father of John(i) is looking at himself(i) in the mirror&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not clear that the distance between 'John' and 'himself' is longer than in (2), which is acceptable in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) John(i) is looking at himself(i) in the mirror&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm looking for a good, citable definition, not laden in theoretical terminology, under which it is clear whether (1) is a type of long-distance reflexive. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T14:43:36.977" Title="Is there any good, theory-neutral definition of long-distance reflexives in the literature?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T15:13:46.683" Score="2" ViewCount="1023" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to learn Sanskrit alphabets, and want to see how I can pronounce the consonants. Then I noticed that when pronouncing the  consonants, which are voiced and unvoiced, my vocal chords are vibrating for both the sounds and I am not able to distinguish between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the consonants in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fypsyl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fypsyl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Consonant reference&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am  unable to distinguish between any consonant sounds, which are voiced vs unvoiced. My vocal chords are vibrating for sounds or not vibrating at all, when I am pronouncing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me whether I am pronouncing wrongly or if I need to do in different manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; my native is &lt;strong&gt;Telugu (Dravidian language).&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Previously, I was not that strong in pronunciation. Now, I am exploring more into learning languages and trying to become more adept, in phonetic and pronunciation wise. So, any help will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15515" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T05:49:11.160" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T05:49:11.160" Title="Advice on voiced and unvoiced in sanskrit sounds" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21425" CreationDate="2017-03-19T16:28:54.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most practical approach is to locate a speaker of Hindi or Gujurati (or other language that has the distinctions that Sanskrit has which you're trying to learn), and practice with them. The goal would be to mimic their pronunciation, until they feel that your pronunciation is close enough (however, people vary wildly in their ability to give useful feedback, ranging from premature acceptance of terrible pronunciations to insisting on native-quality production). Another approach is to listen to (good) recordings of a relevant language, where you listen to a pronunciation and then mimic it. For &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/languages/hi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/languages/gu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gujurati&lt;/a&gt;, you can access various recordings of words on Forvo. (Words are simpler than repeating what you hear in a movie dialogue). That opens up the possibility of using the Forvo &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/languages/sa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; recordings. Some of the recordings are garbage, and you have to watch out for posers (people who are not &quot;speakers&quot; in any real sense). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T16:28:54.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T17:31:57.580" Score="4" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we say that in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kim is tall.&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;constituent&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the standard answer is clearly Yes (see below). My questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the linguistic evidence for the assertion that &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is constituent? Below I give two pieces of evidence, arguably neither of which is individually conclusive. Are there more?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any evidence against that assertion?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a previous version of this post, I also asked: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I assume that the following is an equivalent question: is &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; a verb phrase (VP)? (Am I right to assume that?).' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have since learned enough about all this at least to be sure that this is indeed so: a VP simply &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, by definition, a constituent whose head is a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Literature does treat copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; + complement as a VP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are many kinds of theories of grammar out there. I am interested in the type of grammar exemplified by e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt;. I would be tempted to describe this as 'mainstream &quot;standard&quot; phrase-structure grammar', but please keep in mind that I am not a linguist, and this descriptor is almost certainly inadequate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that CGEL would say that &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent. On p. 50, they say that in &lt;em&gt;he is ill&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;is ill&lt;/em&gt; is a VP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Ya7Gm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Ya7Gm.png&quot; alt=&quot;constituent structure of &amp;#39;he is ill&amp;#39; from CGEL, p. 50&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as primary literature, I'm sure that there must be legion examples in which it is clear that the copula &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is considered part of a VP . So far, I have been able to locate one such example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lohndal.com/wp-content/uploads/copula06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt;. The context is how theta roles get assigned in sentences such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;em&gt;He is a good player&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An important suggestion, going back to Marantz (1984), says that it is&#xA;  the entire VP (the verb and its internal argument) that assigns the&#xA;  verb’s external θ-role, and not only the verb. ... Furthermore, it is&#xA;  also a common assumption that the internal argument is responsible for&#xA;  selecting the subject, that is, the postcopular element decides what&#xA;  can be able to be a subject. Hence the subject gets its role from the&#xA;  internal argument: [some examples are given] We see that the&#xA;  complement seems to restrict the external argument alone, not being&#xA;  affected by the presence of the copula. That is, &lt;strong&gt;the entire VP&#xA;  selects the subject, but since the copula is empty, it does not&#xA;  contribute in any sense.&lt;/strong&gt; [emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my present purposes, the point is that the paper implies that the copula + its complement is a VP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Showing constituency of some other kinds of word sequences containing verbs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;em&gt;He gave John a book.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We suspect that &lt;em&gt;gave John a book&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent. To show this, we note that the following sentence is acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;em&gt;He gave John a book, and she did, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second coordinate, the pro-form &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; substitutes for &lt;em&gt;gave John a book&lt;/em&gt;. And since it is widely accepted that only constituents can be substituted by pro-forms, it follows that &lt;em&gt;gave John a book&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in [1] instead of &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; we had &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt;, the same test would show that &lt;em&gt;seems a good player&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;em&gt;He seems a good player, and she does, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we have &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, this approach fails. As is well-known, copula &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; does not take &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; support, and so the following is not an acceptable sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] &lt;em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;#42;&lt;/sup&gt;He is a good player, and she does, too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I am not aware of any way one could replace &lt;em&gt;is a good player&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;) by a pro-form, and thus I don't know how to apply the replacement test---arguably one of the cleanest kinds of constituency tests---to &lt;em&gt;is a good player&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two arguments for the constituenthood of &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coordination&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We note that &lt;em&gt;is a good player&lt;/em&gt; can be coordinated with something which is definitely a VP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] &lt;em&gt;He is a good player and hits the ball hard.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We can show that &lt;em&gt;hits the ball hard&lt;/em&gt; is a VP by the replacement test: &lt;em&gt;He hits the ball hard and she does, too.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides at least some evidence that &lt;em&gt;is a good player&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent, i.e. a VP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my understanding is that the ability to be a coordinate is not always a reliable indication of constituenthood---see e.g. p. 21 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199583463&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carnie&lt;/a&gt;. One well-known case where coordinates fail to be constituents is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;right-node-raising&lt;/a&gt; (RNR, or, as CGEL prefers to call it, 'delayed right constituent coordination'). For example, in &lt;em&gt;F&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;d&amp;#x332; p&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;p&amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; and S&amp;#x332;u&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; the food&lt;/em&gt;, the underlined word sequences are coordinates but not constituents. If this was the only exception, we could say that the rule is, 'only constituents can be coordinated, except in RNR', and we know how to recognize RNR on grounds other than the fact that the coordinates are not constituents. (As Greg Lee pointed out, usually theories of RNR are formulated so that RNR is only apparently an exception. But it is still true that, for the purposes of constituenthood testing, one would need to pay special attention to RNR.) However, there are also counterexamples other than RNR; for example: &lt;em&gt;David introduced [[Chris] [to Tracy]] and [[Matty] [to Ken]]&lt;/em&gt; (p. 368 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0126135347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dalrymple&lt;/a&gt;). Perhaps there is a way to identify and separately characterize this phenomenon, too. Also, as far as I know, there is no known counterexample with sequences involving verbs: in every case where the coordinates are word sequences that involve verbs and whose constituenthood status is independently known, the coordinates turn out to be constituents. Nevertheless, the coordination test does seem to require way more elaboration than e.g. the pro-form substitution test, and is therefore less clean and compelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Being the item extracted by RNR&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We note that the following is an acceptable sentence (with big thanks to Greg Lee for coming up with it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[7] &lt;em&gt;Harriet knows that Kim, but doubts that Marcia, is tall.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is again RNR, but the word sequence of interest, &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt;, appears not as a coordinate but rather as the the shared material, the item extracted by the RNR. Sources such as McCawley's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0226556247&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; say that such items must be constituents (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=YCPURwLuprwC&amp;amp;pg=PA57&amp;amp;dq=%22smith+sells,+and+Jones+rents%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi98fKW1OPSAhUC7oMKHcmiBr0Q6AEIHDAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). However, here, too, there are counterexamples: many sources (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177950?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) would say that the following is an acceptable sentence (although McCawley denies this, see the link above): &lt;em&gt;Smith sells, and Jones rents, luxury cars to insurance executives&lt;/em&gt;. Here &lt;em&gt;luxury cars to insurance executives&lt;/em&gt; is not a constituent even though it is an item extracted by an RNR. CGEL concurs that such things can happen (note 67 on p. 1343):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We focus on cases where the delayed element is a single constituent;&#xA;  occasional examples are found where what follows the coordination is&#xA;  not a single constituent but a sequence: &lt;em&gt;It had to be ascertained&#xA;  whether the managers had suitable people to put forward for possible&#xA;  appointment from persons&lt;/em&gt; [&lt;em&gt;registered with, or applying to,&#xA;  t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;f&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;&#xA;  &amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;p&amp;#x332;l&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;y&amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;&lt;/em&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, again, although in the known problematic cases the extracted items do not involve verbs, the difficulty makes the RNR test seem less compelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have two pieces of evidence that &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent: it can be coordinated with other VPs, and it can be extracted by RNR. For both the coordination test and the RNR extraction test, it is known that the test is fallible in some cases (although none of these &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; problematic cases involve verbs). Also, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carnie&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest that copular constructions are tricky when it comes to constituenthood analysis (p. 260).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you provide further evidence (in addition to the two pieces of evidence discussed above) that &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any evidence that &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a constituent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="11228" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T15:42:18.910" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T15:42:18.910" Title="In 'Kim is tall', is 'is tall' a VP?" Tags="&lt;constituents&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15654" CreationDate="2017-03-19T17:48:34.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The following answer by &lt;a href=&quot;//academia.stackexchange.com/users/39434/canary-wharf&quot;&gt;Canary Wharf&lt;/a&gt; was posted to the &lt;a href=&quot;//academia.stackexchange.com/q/62307/7734&quot;&gt;closed cross-posted version of the question on Academia&lt;/a&gt;. I am posting it here to save it from deletion:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ph.D. student in sociolinguistics here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhetoric is likely to be centered on how to make language do particular things. Communicating clearly, making and structuring arguments, persuasiveness, word choice, writing techniques, finding fallacies in other people's logic, etc. Deliberateness and how to make language work for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sociolinguistics has more to do with speech communities and how people use language in particular contexts. Dialects, sex effects, multilingualism in society, pidgins and creoles, language variation and change over time, and the like. This is much more observation-based. Language data that you get to pick apart to find the patterns and their social/linguistic meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overlap might occur the most readily when it comes to pragmatics – i.e. things language does beyond the literal level – and discourse analysis and/or conversation analysis, which are like taking a magnifying glass to examples of real conversation and seeing what’s happening on basically the molecular level. For instance, how long is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; particular pause and why did it happen where it did between the speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of rhetoric as more of something that falls under the aegis of the humanities, and sociolinguistics as a social science. Especially variationist sociolinguistics, which is deeply quantitative and relies on statistical analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1822" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T17:48:34.593" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-19T17:48:34.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21425" CreationDate="2017-03-19T19:55:08.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken, Telugu (unlike Tamil) has a distinction between voiceless stops (e.g. ప pa) and voiced stops (e.g. బ ba). Surely you can hear the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T19:55:08.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21428" CreationDate="2017-03-19T21:09:11.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In TSPE, McCawley often uses RNR as a test for constituency.  The raised node must be a constituent.  &lt;em&gt;is tall&lt;/em&gt; passes this test: &quot;Harriet knows that Kim, but doubts that Marcia, is tall.&quot;  So if &quot;is tall&quot; is a constituent, what would it be other than a VP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the problem is with using as a diagnostic, coordination with another VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theta theory is a poor cousin of Fillmore's Case Grammar theory, where subjects of various sorts arise as complements to the verb.  (If you talk about theta roles instead of deep cases or semantic roles, you don't have to put Fillmore in your bibliography -- that's the point of theta theory.) I don't see the relevance to the question of whether &quot;is tall&quot; is a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T21:27:49.460" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T21:27:49.460" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21464" CreationDate="2017-03-20T09:34:31.100" Score="0" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some countries, their principal chinese characters are represented differently between Chinese and Japanese. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;意 vs 伊 (Italy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;法 vs 仏 (France)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;德 vs 独 (Germany)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, there are some cases that use the same principal character, like 韩 (Korea) and 英 (UK).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are they different between these two languages? What made them apart during the long history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T07:58:43.253" Title="Why are some words to express country names different between Chinese and Japanese?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21376" CreationDate="2017-03-20T13:30:16.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following theories that try to explain the origin of Proto-Indo-European numerals are mentioned in J. P. Mallory, D. Q. Adams, &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 *h₁oi-no-s: from the anaphoric pronoun *h₁ei- (i.e. English &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 *sem-s: originally &quot;one united together&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 *dweh₃(u), *dwoh₃(u): originally a demonstrative pronoun 'that one further away'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 *tréyes: from a root meaning &quot;further&quot; or a root meaning &quot;middle, top, protuding&quot; (referring to the middle finger)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 *kʷetóres: may have a relationship to idea of a span of four fingers or the little finger, or from the enclitic for &quot;and&quot; + the root of &quot;three&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4 *mei-wos: from a root meaning &quot;be small&quot;, referring to the little finger or expressing &quot;five minus one&quot;; alternatively, from a root meaning &quot;large&quot;, referring to a &quot;large span&quot; (of fingers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 *pénkʷe: from a root meaning &quot;fist&quot;; less likely, from a root meaning &quot;all, totality&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6 *kswek̂s: from a root meaning &quot;hand&quot; + a root meaning &quot;increase&quot;, or maybe borrowed from another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 *septḿ̥: borrowed from another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;8 *h&lt;sub&gt;x&lt;/sub&gt;ok̂tṓ(u): dual form of an uncertain root; the root may have meant &quot;sharp, pointed&quot;, maybe referring to a set of pointing fingers; alternatively, the root may have been borrowed from Proto-Kartvelian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9 *h₁newh₁m̥ (*h₁newh₁n̥): from a root meaning &quot;new&quot; (expressing &quot;new number after eight&quot;), or one meaning &quot;without&quot; (expressing &quot;ten without one&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 *dék̂m̥(t): from roots meaning &quot;two&quot; and &quot;hand&quot;, or from roots meaning &quot;right&quot; and &quot;hand&quot;, or having a root that means &quot;reach&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;12 *dwō dek̂m̥(t): &quot;two-ten&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;15 *penkʷe dek̂m̥(t): &quot;five-ten&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;20 *wīkitih₁: &quot;two-tens&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;30 *trī-k̂omt(h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;): &quot;formed on the full-grade&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;50: *penkʷe-k̂omt(h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;): id.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;60: *kswek̂s-k̂omt(h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;): id.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100: *k̂m̥tóm: shortening of a root meaning &quot;ten tens&quot; or &quot;tenth ten&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are just speculation. When mentioning the etymology of *h₁oi-no-s, the authors write that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although there are a number of other theories, this etymology is one of the few thought up for any of the numbers that is at all likely to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastEditorUserId="13780" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T16:14:02.940" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:14:02.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:15:11.790" Score="4" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the movie Prometheus, David, an Android tasked with maintaining the functions on the space ship while his human comrades are sleeping in cryostatic chambers, is learning PIE during his off-duty time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one sequence he is repeating after his holographic teacher a text in PIE.&#xA;One sound in the word &lt;em&gt;akwunsez&lt;/em&gt; sounds odd, it sounds like some one is beat boxing, a sound generated with probably only the larynx and its epiglottal membranes in a loud way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can hear it here, about the time stamp of 1:10&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTOcA_y1R_U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David is beat boxing very ancient lyrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this sound one of the exotic ones I asked about , are there more ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T15:36:47.303" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T14:07:35.547" Title="Did proto-indo-european possess sounds that are not any longer present or rare in modern IE languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21358" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:54:43.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;gerund&quot; is a fudge. It is used as if it was a subcategory of verb, when in fact, of course, it is just a particular inflected form of a given verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse than this, this pseudo part of speech, in English at least, is actually 25%  a part of speech and 50% a grammatical function label. The reason for this is that people who differentiate between &quot;gerunds&quot; and &quot;participles&quot; (meaning, with regard to English, &quot;present participles&quot;) do so on the basis of the words' grammatical relations. So whenever this form of verb is the head of a clause used as a subject or object of a verb or the complement of a preposition, they deem it a gerund. Whenever it is the head of a clause used as a modifier or as the complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;BE&lt;/em&gt; in a continuous construction, they deem it a participle. Of course this is to try and differentiate a different form of a verb according to its grammatical function and not its form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern English grammars such as &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; (Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum, 2002) deem this distinction unjustifiable, and refer to such inflected forms as &lt;em&gt;gerund-participles&lt;/em&gt; regardless of their grammatical relations. Notice though that this is a label like &lt;em&gt;plain form&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;past participle&lt;/em&gt; and does not refer to a part of speech in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that &lt;em&gt;gerund-participles&lt;/em&gt; are verbs regardless of whether they function as a subjects or objects or modifiers. For example, unlike nouns they take objects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eating children is wrong. (subject)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The people eating children need to be punished. (modifier)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns cannot take objects. Instead the noun phrase with the comparable semantic relation must occur in a preposition phrase after the noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The government destroyed the bill. (verb with object)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The government's destruction of the bill. (noun with PP complement).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike nouns, gerund-participles  are modified by adverbs just like other verbs. They cannot be modified by adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quickly eating elephants is wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eating elephants quickly is wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Quick eating elephants is wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a pertinent passage by Geoffrey K. Pullum about the function-form confusion. The quote is taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ZAA_final_proof.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;LEXICAL CATEGORIZATION IN ENGLISH DICTIONARIES AND TRADITIONAL GRAMMARS&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 2009:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Most of the deepest blunders in English grammar as traditionally presented over the past two or three centuries stem from a single long-standing confusion between (i) grammatical categories or word classes; (ii) syntactic functions or grammatical relations; and (iii) semantic and discourse-related notions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;It is surprising to see the tenacity of this confusion. It does not appear in other domains. People do not confuse butter knives with screwdrivers, even though occasionally someone who cannot find a screwdriver may use a butter knife to turn a screw. Yet in grammar people just cannot keep syntactically relevant categories or classes of words separate from the relational properties they have when used in particular constructions, and cannot keep either separate from meaning. They insist on trying to define the first of these in terms of the other two, and they have done so since the very earliest attempts to write grammars of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short we need to be careful about confusing word categories and functions/grammatical relations. These two things are entirely different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that we can form nouns out of verbs using an -&lt;em&gt;ing&lt;/em&gt; suffix in English resulting in multitudinous verb /noun homophones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The eating of children is forbidden.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the noun &lt;em&gt;eating above&lt;/em&gt; is preceded by the definite article and takes &lt;em&gt;of children&lt;/em&gt; as a PP. It cannot take &lt;em&gt;children&lt;/em&gt; as an object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The eating children is forbidden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:13:58.783" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:13:58.783" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T18:41:08.803" Score="1" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;In korean, consonants are divided into three categories of articulation or coarticulation, one of them is called &lt;strong&gt;Tenseness&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In korean orthography, tensed consonants are written with a reduplicated consonant sign. In IPA orthography, they are written with a pair of vertical parallel lines at the bottom of the letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P”ㅃ   T”ㄸ     Tɕ” ㅉ       K” ㄲ    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an article on Tenseness in Wikipedia, but it is on the Tenseness of vowels, nethertheless it is describing the articulatory way of production well:&#xA;widened mouth, less open, uplift tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about the Tenseness of consonants, what exactly is happening inside the the mouth and beyond, what is happening in the articulatory system in order to create them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T20:04:46.130" Title="What is tenseness with respect to consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21447" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:05:17.647" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the definition I read on anaphors, it is an expression, which refers back to a word. As examples  what this anaphoras can be I was given a pronoun and adverb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphor realized by a pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Teresa caressed the dying tree, &lt;strong&gt;her&lt;/strong&gt; well formed lips were about to kiss it good-bye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphor realized by an adverb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chris avoided to hug her, in doing &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt; he made sure there will be nothing left of him once the memories were gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about other realizations? Are there any? Could a whole sentence be an anaphor, if not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="15215" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T20:17:05.403" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T12:40:36.023" Title="By what can an anaphor be realized?" Tags="&lt;discourse&gt;&lt;references&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21437" CreationDate="2017-03-20T20:04:46.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2007/chang_cls43.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; starts with a convenient summary of the literature on the production of Korean tense consonants. One of the first studies on the topic is C.W. Kim &quot;On the autonomy of the tensity feature in stop classification&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Word&lt;/em&gt; 1970), who found they they involve greater duration of oral pressure buildup, less airflow at the start of the vowel and greater EMG activity (in the lips, for labials); there is also a significant lag in voicing at release. Various other studies have indicated significant laryngeal involvement in the production of the tense consonants, so that they could be called &quot;glottally constricted&quot; without being ejective. Additionally, they are longer to the point that there are two phonological analyses, one where they are treated as geminate consonants, and one where they are single consonants with a glottal feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T20:04:46.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2017-03-21T02:22:30.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In simultaneous bilingual children at first could mixes the languages while communication and even though they acquired the languages at the same time, there will be one of it  they use the most, so that language become dominant and in most cases the language used in the community they currently  live in will be the dominant one. Instead in sequential acquisition the previous knowledge of the first language will help to develop skills in the second acquisition, also because of the knowledge in the first language the child will past by a silent period that will overcome over the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion Children in both types of bilingualism past over the same acquisition process and face the same issues, As for the linguistic competence at the end they both are going to be proficient speakers in each language even though there will be a dominant language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15527" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T02:22:30.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T06:58:45.463" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;A student asked why English and French have different rhythms. luckily, I had an answer on hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English is a stressed-timed language - rhythmic beats align with stressed syllables &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French is a syllable-timed language - rhythmic beats do not align with stress syllables, syllables have a similar length &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The student left, apparently happy, but I don't feel like I adequately explained the phenomena. Maybe some sort of visualization would help. Is there a graphical representation that exemplifies the different between  stressed-timed and syllable-timed languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T06:58:45.463" Title="graphical representation that exemplifies the different between stressed-timed and syllable-timed languages" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21408" CreationDate="2017-03-21T09:44:48.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge Japanese has the feature you are looking for, provided that you consider such things as topicalization and focalization to be good examples of &quot;additional meaning&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, the predicate is always final, while the order of the pre-verbal NPs is quite free. The topicalized or focalized constituent always comes first. It's equivalent to the cleft construction in English but with no special additional phrasing needed (explicit topic and focus markers can be possibly, but not obligatorily, used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ano mise de hon o Taroo ga katta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;In that store, Tarō has bought the book&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hon o ano mise de Taroo ga katta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;It is a book that Tarō has bought in that store&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Taroo ga hon o ano mise de katta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Tarō has bought the book in that store&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T09:56:13.533" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T09:56:13.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21408" CreationDate="2017-03-21T10:19:06.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German is a verb second (for main clauses)/verb final (for subordinate clauses) language. But when a put the inflected verb in the first position, you turn a statement into a question. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Er geht heute zur Arbeit. (He goes to work today)&#xA;Geht er heute zur Arbeit? (Does he go to work today?)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T10:19:06.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21449" CreationDate="2017-03-21T11:09:12.393" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told here several times, that a part of speech is not universal, but specific for each language as much as the A,T,C and G's are in everyone's genome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nethertheless, occasionally the same terms are used for in different languages for practical reasons, e.g. Adjective in English and Japanese, even though they are similar but not equal in all respects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you compare the parts of speeches of thousands of languages?&#xA;Is it still the case, that no two languages have identical parts of speeches or could it be, that there is a limit for specific ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To draw an analogy, each language possess a subset of all phonetic sounds possible across all languages as described in the IPA chart, but the number of all sounds possible would have a limit, even if millions of languages existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something like an IPA of the parts of speeches or another approach to describe parts of speeches with a closed set of universal features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15215" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T21:56:22.857" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T21:56:22.857" Title="Given all the languages that have ever existed, is there a limit for different parts of speech?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T11:11:29.563" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an approximate date when speakers of semitic languages reached northern Levant and Syria? I understand that from the linguistic material this can be difficult, but I look for litterature (if any) that brings a hypothesis to the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T23:23:38.243" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T23:23:38.243" Title="When did speakers of Semitic languages reach northern Levant and Syria?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T12:30:58.670" Score="6" ViewCount="1335" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the words for &quot;with&quot; in most Romance languages seem to be direct descendents from Latin &quot;cum&quot; (e.g. Spanish/Italian &quot;con&quot;, Portuguese &quot;com&quot;, Romanian &quot;cu&quot;) it got replaced by &quot;avec&quot; in French. Could it be that this is due to the fact that the latin obscenity for the female genitalia &quot;cunnus&quot; (whose reflexes seem to survive as taboo word in most Romance languages) also came to be pronounced &quot;con&quot;, so that people tried to avoid the putative preposition &quot;con&quot; due to its obscene homophone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's probably hard to tell with certainty why this particular change took place, but I'd also be happy to know whether avoidance of words with taboo homophones is a well-known linguistic phenomenon and attested or at least conjectured in other cases.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T17:48:26.300" Title="Did Latin &quot;cum&quot; get replaced in French by &quot;avec&quot; because &quot;con&quot; sounded obscene?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;homophony&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21438" CreationDate="2017-03-21T12:40:36.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 ways of defining anaphors&lt;/a&gt;; the narrower definition you're using refers back to an antecedent; the broader definition includes cataphors, which refer forward to a later word or phrase, and exophors, which refer to something outside of the text (e.g. when you point and say &quot;There it is!&quot;, &quot;it&quot; is an exophor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphors can include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronouns (he, she, her, it, this, etc., as in your example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adverbs (like &quot;so&quot;, as in your example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nouns (like &quot;thing&quot;, &quot;place&quot;, etc., or any kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypernym&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rat crawled up Martha's leg.  She cried out when she saw the &lt;strong&gt;creature&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbs (like &quot;do&quot;):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I can play this song pretty well, but Sam &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; it better.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrases:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[After long explanation of a method] &quot;&lt;strong&gt;This way of doing things&lt;/strong&gt; is unnecessarily complicated.  Let's look at an easier method.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T12:40:36.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21444" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:10:14.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a theoretical question, so I would take my liberty to answer it in simple terms, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all sentences in all languages are about &lt;strong&gt;things&lt;/strong&gt;, their &lt;strong&gt;(inter-)actions&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;attributes&lt;/strong&gt; (for both &quot;things&quot; and &quot;actions&quot;). This does not automatically guarantee that within an arbitrary language you will have &lt;em&gt;discrete&lt;/em&gt; parts of speech serving the same purpose, but it would definitely suggest that there will be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; classes of words that &lt;em&gt;serve these three fundamental purposes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nouns and pronouns to denote &lt;em&gt;things&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verbs to denote &lt;em&gt;actions&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adjectives for attributes/properties of &lt;em&gt;things&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adverbs for attributes of &lt;em&gt;actions&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, each language has its own &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; for delivering finer details of sense. These tools can be &lt;em&gt;syntactical&lt;/em&gt; ones — separate parts of speech (like articles) in some languages, or &lt;em&gt;morphological&lt;/em&gt; ones (like affixes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T17:37:47.660" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T17:37:47.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21444" CreationDate="2017-03-21T16:31:12.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, part-of-speech is not an observable. It is a latent category inferred from the utterances we can analyse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a latent category, it is dependent on our analysis. There are lots of parameters we can play with: Granularity of the analysis (some part of speech tagsets have more the 500 tags, simple models come with 8 or 10 parts-of-speech), input from favourite theories, inherited terminology and analysis from prior linguists, comparison to other languages or historical stages of the same language or a strictly internal analysis, remembering what we learned in school (the theories of yesterday, the new theories of the today's big shots are of course much better!). Different choices lead to different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, there are daring people trying to unify parts-of-speech over all languages of the world, most active are the people developing &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/u/pos/all.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;, see also this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12777/a-list-of-parts-of-speech/12994#12994&quot;&gt;A list of parts of speech&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T16:31:12.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21446" CreationDate="2017-03-21T17:04:31.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this linguistic phenomenon is well-known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, they avoid using the numeral of Chinese origin 四 &lt;em&gt;shi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;four&quot;, because it sounds the same as the word 死 &lt;em&gt;shi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;death&quot;. This tradition is limited not only to Japan, but is widespread in the whole East Asian region. This phenomenon is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tetraphobia&lt;/a&gt;, it can go as far as skipping flour or room 4, after the 3rd floor the next floor is the 5th. Linguistically, the Japanese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_superstitions#Unlucky_Numbers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;would rather use&lt;/a&gt; the original Japanese word for &quot;four&quot;, &lt;em&gt;yon&lt;/em&gt;, which has no assotiation with death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, apart from the &quot;last&quot; superstition &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21446/did-latin-cum-get-replaced-in-french-by-avec-because-con-sounded-obscene#comment49344_21446&quot;&gt;mentioned&lt;/a&gt; by @bytebuster, there is a rather recent (since 1980s) tendency to avoid using the verb &lt;em&gt;кончить&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to finish&quot; since the spread of its slang meaning &quot;to cum, to ejaculate&quot;, the verb &lt;em&gt;закончить&lt;/em&gt; is used instead, it has the same meaning &quot;to finish&quot; but no sexual connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T17:04:31.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21446" CreationDate="2017-03-21T17:32:44.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last question in parentheses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A known example from the history of German is the death of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GA02121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whole class of composita (both verbal and nominal) with &lt;em&gt;after-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; after &lt;em&gt;After&lt;/em&gt; became a word meaning &quot;anus&quot; in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T17:32:44.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T18:23:18.923" Score="2" ViewCount="1614" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does linguistic under-determinacy mean? and why are irony, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, simile, understatment and indirect answer cases of of under-determinacy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15531" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T22:29:23.900" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T22:29:23.900" Title="What does linguistic under-determinacy mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21358" CreationDate="2017-03-21T21:03:36.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you need another level to find where gerunds fit in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  0. Inflectional forms of parts of speech&#xA;  1. Parts of speech&#xA;  2. Phrases&#xA;  3. Roles within a sentence like Subject and Object&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A gerund in English is an inflectional form of a verb formed by adding the suffix -ing to the base form of the verb.  It is found in factive nominalizations, which are noun phrases derived from sentences which refer to a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read over the other answers and previous comments, which discuss mostly how to tell whether something is a gerund.  However, linguists (at least many of them) learned from Chomsky to distinguish discovery procedures from the science of language -- linguistics.  See his discussion in &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/em&gt; and elsewhere. A gerund is what it is, regardless of what you have to go through to figure that out (which might not even be possible in some cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the difficulties in identifying gerunds is that the inflectional suffix -ing is also a derivational suffix that also turns up in nominalizations.  But the -ing derivational suffix, like other derivational suffixes in English, changes the part of speech, in this case from verb to noun.  However, the -ing inflectional suffix that creates gerunds, like other inflectional suffixes of English, does not change the part of speech -- you start with a verb and wind up with a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of active and factive nominalizations was clarified by Robert Lees in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Grammar_of_English_Nominalizations.html?id=GvIYAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Grammar of English Nominalizations&lt;/a&gt;. Active nominalizations are formed by first converting the main verb of a sentence to a noun by any of a large number of derivational suffixes, among them -ing, then converting the other parts of the sentence into things that can occur in ordinary noun phrases based on nouns (articles, possessives, PPs).  But factive nominalizations, although they are also noun phrases and cannot have subjects or finite verbs, since the gerund remains a verb, still look pretty much like sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T21:03:36.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21452" CreationDate="2017-03-22T10:04:04.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's make a comparison between &lt;strong&gt;formal languages&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ordinary&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;natural&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;languages&lt;/strong&gt;. In the former, you say exactly what you utter. In the latter your communicative intention can differ from the exact wording of your statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, a mathematical expression like &lt;em&gt;a+b&lt;/em&gt; consistently and predictably means &quot;the sum of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and nothing else (once the basic conventions on symbols have been fixed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the ordinary language, on the other hand, the senses of the utterance highly depend on the speaker's intentions. Such philosophers as Strawson, Grice and others have pointed out that the so-called &lt;strong&gt;speaker's meaning&lt;/strong&gt; can differ from the &lt;strong&gt;literal meaning&lt;/strong&gt; of an expression. For example, when you say &lt;em&gt;I think Mr. Johnson is a good administrator&lt;/em&gt; your intended meaning can vary a lot, ranging from literal interpretation to irony and metaphor. In case you were asked whether Mr. Johnson is a good physicist, your answer results elusive, which implies that you are ironically communicating a negative answer to the original question (to know more on this topic read something about Grice's &lt;em&gt;conversational implicatures&lt;/em&gt;, starting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that language allows under-determinate utterances, i.e. such that you cannot determine their meaning &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt;, consistently and conventionally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning is, thus, the result of a sort of free negotiation between the speaker and the hearer. At the end of this negotiation an agreement is reached on how a certain referential value is assigned to certain words. Such assignment can be more or less unconventional. The more it's unconventional, the more metaphorical is your expression. But, notice, it's a matter of degree, not of kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This amounts to say that there is no such thing as &quot;the right/exact word to say one particular meaning&quot;; in theory, you can use whatever word to communicate whatever meaning, provided that your hearer gets that meaning (in case s/he does not, you have to reformulate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T12:01:19.590" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T12:01:19.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-23T19:04:14.973" Score="7" ViewCount="873" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming the original pronunciation of words in Proto-Indo-European is unknown. How do linguists talk about the reconstructed roots, do they just assume sounds close enough to english or do they spell or ..? What about the oblique roots?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15498" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T23:49:10.960" Title="Do Linguists pronounce PIE roots" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21456" CreationDate="2017-03-23T22:51:11.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of variation. In my experience, many Indo-Europeanists will (try to) pronounce the voiced aspirates as breathy voiced consonants (possibly thanks to having studied Sanskrit, as jlawler points out). A bigger problem is the laryngeals, since the phonetic values of those are far from clear. Some people just pronounce them all as [h] and then specify &quot;...with h₁&quot; or whatever; others try to give each of them whatever phonetic value they think is likely. I've never heard anyone try to pronounce a distinction between the plain and palatalized velars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the main trouble spots I can think of; vowels are easy because PIE had a small and simple vowel inventory (/a e i o u/ at most).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: as other users point out, some linguists see reconstructed forms as basically an algebraic shorthand for correspondence sets, and are reluctant to treat them as representing sounds with specific phonetic content. To some extent this issue is orthogonal to your question if what you're asking is &quot;How do linguists pronounce PIE words when discussing them with other linguists?&quot; rather than &quot;How was PIE pronounced?&quot;, because whatever your views on the status of reconstructions, you still need a way of talking about the forms. (If what you're asking is &quot;How was PIE pronounced?&quot;, that's a whole other question.) The Indo-Europeanists I've known mostly happen not to be of the purist school, so I don't know how purists approach this practical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T23:49:10.960" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T23:49:10.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21456" CreationDate="2017-03-23T23:37:00.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some historical linguists feel about pronouncing reconstructions about the same way as structural linguist grammarians feel about pronouncing deep structures -- it's wrong in principle to attempt it.  If you base an analysis on correspondences and patterns, you wind up with the same sort of thing.  Not sounds, but rather, patterns.  You can't &quot;reconstruct forward&quot;.  &lt;em&gt;his [Hoenigswald's] conviction that it is not proper to present historical materials &quot;downward, as history&quot; but rather &quot;upward in time, as inference&quot;.&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Hoenigswald&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry M. Hoenigswald&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't share this view, so I can only hope that I describe it fairly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T23:37:00.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21461" CreationDate="2017-03-24T14:00:45.347" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any books which will talk about the specific semantic or syntactic properties of a specific word (in my case, a verb in the Swedish language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are many general reference books on syntax and semantics, but I am envisioning a reference work that talks about the function of a word in the context of modern semantic and syntactic theory, for example, spelling out precisely the proper usage of the verb, how it inflects and why so, etc., far beyond what a standard dictionary or table of verb conjugations might do. As I am an amateur I am lacking specific terms to express what I am searching for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15547" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T15:03:34.577" Title="Where can I find a semantic or syntactic analysis of a Swedish verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21456" CreationDate="2017-03-24T14:56:15.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share Antoine Meillet's skeptical approach to reconstruction. Meillet considered reconstruction as merely a convenient set of formulae to show the pattern of correspondences among forms in different ancient languages. Thus, instead of listing a series of cognate phonemes — for example, Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;bh&lt;/em&gt;, Greek &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt;, Gothic &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, Avestan &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; etc) — we simply write *&lt;em&gt;bh&lt;/em&gt; which sums them all. Therefore, *&lt;em&gt;bh&lt;/em&gt; is just an abstract formula, not a real sound. In case you have to pronounce it, you just spell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that we reconstruct IE forms on the ground of dead languages, of which we hardly know the real pronunciation. The only thing we have at our disposal are some ancient sources written in more or less standardised alphabetic scripts (and sometimes in syllabaries). We are lucky enough to have ancient phonetic treaties describing the pronunciation of Sanskrit, but nothing similar is available for the other sister languages. In many cases we have no certainty about the precise reading of some scripts, even in largely studied languages. For example, the &quot;epichoric&quot; alphabets used by Ancient Greek dialects are far from being understood with all phonetic details. Similarly debated is the pronunciation of the Avestan, Gothic, Cyrillic/Glagolitic alphabets, and many other scripts. The customary reading of such scripts are mere hypotheses, which, moreover, vary from country to country (even Latin and Classical Greek are pronounced differently in Italy, France, Germany and English-speaking countries). Therefore, IE forms are abstractions based on abstractions. Something too far from true linguistic reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;sonant coefficients&quot; — later called &quot;laryngeals&quot;, which is however quite an arbitrary term introduced by H. Müller by analogy with some Semitic data — were proposed by Saussure as a totally abstract, almost algebraic, means for explaining an apparently deviant phonological correspondences among some ancient IE language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T14:56:15.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21459" CreationDate="2017-03-24T15:03:34.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To long for a comment ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which Swedish verb do you mean? What languages do you read comfortably? When you are lucky, there is a paper (published in a journal or in conference proceedings) on that specific word. The draw-back is that this paper is probably completely unreadable for a lay person, because it uses terminology defined in other works (to be consulted) and is written in a very dense style..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you even luckier, the word was deemed important enough to be treated in a &lt;strong&gt;grammar&lt;/strong&gt; of the Swedish language. (Don't think of schoolbook grammar with conjugation tables, think of a work ten times as thick.) In this case, you may even have the chance to understand something of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for most of the words of the Swedish language, such kind of in-depth analysis will be not available at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T15:03:34.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21432" CreationDate="2017-03-25T05:34:25.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various reasons for this. The Chinese and Japanese people got into contact with foreign people separately. Each would then map the words they heard to what's closest their language. Due to the different in pronunciation of Hanzi/Kanji in both languages, in many cases they might choose the different characters to write that. In some cases it's because the names get into Chinese/Japanese from different languages. Sometimes it's because characters got changed when languages develop...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Japanese-word-for-the-United-States-beikoku-%E7%B1%B3-different-than-the-Chinese-Korean-%E7%BE%8E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why is the Japanese word for the United States (beikoku - 米) different than the Chinese/Korean (美)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T05:34:25.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21432" CreationDate="2017-03-25T07:58:43.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is simple - Japanese and Chinese read kanji differently. 露西亜 is read &lt;em&gt;roshiya&lt;/em&gt; in Japanese and is a good transliteration for English &quot;Russia&quot;, but 露西亞 is read &lt;em&gt;luh-hsi-ya&lt;/em&gt; in Mandarin and sounds nothing like &quot;Russia&quot;. Well, neither does 俄羅斯 sound like &quot;Russia&quot; in either English or Russian, but this translation came from Mongolian, not directly from Russian. This is why Russia is 俄 in Chinese but 露 in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Mandarin wasn't predominant in most of China, many regions of China did have their own translations of country names based on their local dialects. For example, Russia was called 羅宋 in Shanghai, where translation is based on the local Wu dialect. The name 羅宋 is still used in China now, as the name of the adapted version of the Russian soup borscht, 羅宋湯 (literally &quot;Russian soup&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to most names. Sometimes Chinese and Japanese do use the same translation (e.g. Britain and Colombia), but this is purely coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15373" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T07:58:43.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-25T08:13:02.283" Score="2" ViewCount="1499" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists have generally accepted that Japanese belongs to the Japonic family, and the only extant &quot;sibling&quot; language of Japanese are the Ryukyuan languages. It is also conjectured that Japanese is probably related to Korean and the Altaic languages, citing grammatical similarities and attributed cognates with Manchurian (Tungustic), Mongolian, and Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Japanese also has a few distinctive features that are similar to Austronesian languages. For example, both Japanese and (AFAIK) Bahasa Indonesia generally lack plural marking, and plurals are is often expressed by reduplication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;山 &lt;em&gt;yama&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mountain&quot;; 山々 &lt;em&gt;yamayama&lt;/em&gt; &quot;many mountains&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;人 &lt;em&gt;hito&lt;/em&gt; &quot;human&quot;; 人々 &lt;em&gt;hitobito&lt;/em&gt; &quot;many people&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while in Bahasa Indoensia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;burung &quot;bird&quot;; burung-burung &quot;birds&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;orang &quot;human&quot;; orang-orang &quot;all the people&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This similarity alone is definitely insufficient to conclude that Japanese is related to Austronesian. However, are there any other grammatical similarities cited to support this claim? Do comparative linguists today tend to credit or discredit this claim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15373" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T18:50:53.653" Title="Relationship between Japanese and Austronesian languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21446" CreationDate="2017-03-25T11:42:20.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a specialist in Old French, but I suspect that the obscene homophony was not the primary cause for the substitution of Early French &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;cum&lt;/em&gt;) with &lt;em&gt;avec&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;apud hoc&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ab hoc&lt;/em&gt;). More important is the homophony with the word &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; in the meaning of the Modern French comparative adverb &lt;em&gt;comme&lt;/em&gt; (see e.g. in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=WR72lYfyTP8C&amp;amp;hl=fr&amp;amp;pg=PA368#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; of the obsolete words in the XII cent. &lt;em&gt;Le roman du renart&lt;/em&gt;). Same spelling was used also for what is Modern French &lt;em&gt;quant&lt;/em&gt; &quot;how much&quot;. You cannot confuse such highly frequent words as &quot;with&quot;, &quot;as&quot; and &quot;how much&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; in its obscene meaning seems attested comparatively later than the other three meanings, just in the XIII cent. (search &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; on FEW &lt;a href=&quot;https://apps.atilf.fr/lecteurFEW/index.php/site/index&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T11:42:20.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21465" CreationDate="2017-03-25T18:50:53.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A. Vovin 1994 &quot;Is Japanese Related to Austronesian&quot; addresses the relation between Austronesian and Japonic, including morphological correspondences, and finds the hypothesis wanting. A. Kumar 1996 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://does%20japanese%20have%20an%20austronesian%20substratum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Does Japanese have an Austronesian substratum?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; investigates the matter further, with more emphasis on the hypothesis of an Austronesian substratum (as opposed to genetic relationship), though looks at Javanese and Japanese (for example) rather than the respective proto-languages, and does not propose any striking morphological relationships. The idea does not seem to have gained significant tractions, compared to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dené-Yeniseian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T18:50:53.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-25T21:22:25.017" Score="0" ViewCount="761" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in how do they decide &quot;X is a separate language from Y, but Z is a dialect of Y.&quot; I know there is the old adage &quot;a language is a dialect with an army and a navy&quot;, but surely there must be some semi-objective criteria linguists use to class speech/writing forms as one or the other, like &quot;Y and X are &amp;lt; or &gt; Z% lexically similar&quot;, or &quot;X and Y  share Z  grammar features, are N% mutually intelligible.&quot; Can anyone share any general linguistic guidelines that they know of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15090" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T11:55:00.643" Title="How do linguists differentiate a dialect from a language?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-03-26T13:26:44.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21470" CreationDate="2017-03-25T21:49:08.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest to a general consensus is the criterion of mutual intelligibility: if speakers of the lects can understand each other, they are dialects, otherwise they are languages. This immediately runs into the problem that Norwegian and Swedish seem to be mutually intelligible (although I suspect that is based on &quot;standard&quot; forms of the languages), but they are called separate languages. On the other side of the coin, people often speak of Mandarin and Cantonese as being dialects of Chinese, though they are not mutually intelligible. The general tendency in the profession is to take former dialects and call them languages, i.e. separate, rather than merge former &quot;separate languages&quot; into a single language with dialects (a tendency, not an absolute rule).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &quot;dialect&quot; used to be almost exclusively a geographical division, but contemporarily, numerous social facts can go into characterizing a dialect, thus young people now speak a different dialect from old people, whereas 50 years people would hardly talk of age-based dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no independent way to determine that two speech forms are &quot;separate languages&quot; vs. &quot;dialects&quot;, there isn't a degree-of-intelligibility test that can be applied, though one could stipulate that 80% comprehension is the cutoff, if one wanted (why not 75%? or 85%?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T21:49:08.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21476" CreationDate="2017-03-26T11:42:07.747" Score="2" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back I came across some very recently invented language that aim to have a simple, uniform, non-contradictory grammar, but I have completely forgotten the name. It's not Esperanto. I'm sorry I can't provide much more details, but I did try searching online for various keywords without any luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10503" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T21:31:47.433" Title="Invented Language with Noncontradictory Grammar" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21470" CreationDate="2017-03-26T11:55:00.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I adhere to the sociolinguistic view on this, represented by Max Weinreich's quotation that &lt;strong&gt;Language is a dialect with an army or navy&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. this is a social and political question rather than linguistic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mutual intelligibility is not a good criterion (but it is a good, albeit not necessary, condition) for this because e.g. Czech or Slovak are totally mutually intelligible, yet they are considered two separate languages, while you have certain dialects of German (to keep it close and not exploit Chinese all the time) that are not intelligible to each other yet they are still dialects of German. It is politics that dictated this status in Europe of nation states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good lead in this is prestige of the language variety - standard German is a variety understandable to pretty much anyone, it has a huge corpus of literature, reaching hundreds of years back, which many speakers consider prestigious and aspire to master this variety because it helps them to achieve/imitate adherence to higher socio-economical status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion, if you have two language varieties that do not have obviously different origins (different families), one of them is highly prestigious in a socio-economic entity that has the means and willingness to enforce it, and not necessarily through repression but also through science - by creating academic institutions that define the categories in harmony to the ruling willingness, than you are likely to end up with one variety being classified as the &quot;language&quot; and the other as &quot;its dialect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T11:55:00.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21473" CreationDate="2017-03-26T12:17:26.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably heard of a so-called &lt;em&gt;logical language&lt;/em&gt;. Due to a split in the community, there are at least two of them named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loglan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T12:37:19.437" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T12:37:19.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21473" CreationDate="2017-03-26T13:06:58.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose what you mean by &quot;non-contradictory grammar&quot; falls under the category of so-called logical languages, which try to establish a strictly systematic and, well, logical grammar without unpredictable irregularities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The most well-known one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loglan&lt;/a&gt; with derivates &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceqli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ceqli&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another, indepedently developed logical language is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ithkuil&lt;/a&gt; with derivate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil#Ilaksh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ilaksh&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for might also be a philosophical language; however these usually put more focus on a systematic lexicon (using an elaborate ontology and as close as possible 1:1 mapping between form and meaning) than on grammar.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The closest possible candidate would probably be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.frathwiki.com/Ars_signorum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ars signorum&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For conlangs that attempt a strictly systematic composition of words and sentences from atomic parts, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/20925/13238&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T21:31:47.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21480" CreationDate="2017-03-26T21:10:15.177" Score="3" ViewCount="1016" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, so I was just doing a bit of conlanging, and I was coming up with a verb ending /æɸ/. Because of the way I have begun this, /ɸ~ʍ/ are interchangeable. When I first tried saying /æʍ]/ I accidentally rounded the /æ/, which is 100% natural and to be expected. I am currently writing this rounded /æ/ as /æ̹/--it's the only thing I can do. This rounded /æ/ is honestly the most repulsive sound I have ever heard in my life, but I like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of vowels theoretically, but it seems like this one would have a general symbol for itself. I am having enough trouble finding a &quot;complete&quot; I.P.A. chart, as it is, with all of the symbols that have been made for the I.P.A. Any Help is greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T07:15:05.160" Title="Is there a rounded /æ/? Is there a Near-open front rounded vowel?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21479" CreationDate="2017-03-26T21:42:37.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA2005_1000px.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official IPA chart&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, the front round vowel in that region is the open front round vowel [ɶ], the round counterpart of [a], and [æ] has no round counterpart. Note that symbols are not exact vowels, and [a] can be located in a number positions in that general vicinity (as one can see by comparing placement in specific languages, in IPA descriptions). So using [ɶ] for a rounder version of [æ] is consistent with how symbols are used (though use of [œ] probably would not be, on the assumption that the vowel is closer to canonical [ɶ] than it is to [œ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T07:15:05.160" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T07:15:05.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21483" CreationDate="2017-03-27T00:19:46.673" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a source that lists languages and gives the number of L1 speakers in Africa, but I've had no luck so far. Any recommendations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, for languages such as Arabic which have many L1 speakers inside and outside Africa, I'm interested in just the number in Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10461" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T04:26:50.083" Title="List of languages with numbers of L1 speakers in Africa" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21482" CreationDate="2017-03-27T00:49:06.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get such information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/region/Africa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know of e.g. a document that lists all languages of Africa along with L1 population, but you can piece together such a list (tediously, unfortunately) from the Ethnologue info. Also, you either need to subscribe, or spend forever doing this 4 pages at a time (since free access is a thing of the past). Another source is &lt;a href=&quot;http://glottolog.org/glottolog/family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glottolog&lt;/a&gt;, and it's possible with a bit of programming to construct a list of languages from their (publicly available) data – but there aren't any population statistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a 'top 100' list, the following ought to cover Africa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hausa; Arabic, Algerian ; Yoruba; Arabic, Moroccan ; Amharic; Igbo;&#xA;  Arabic, Sudanese ; Somali; Malagasy; Arabic, Tunisian ; Rwanda; Zulu;&#xA;  Oromo, West-Central; Fulfulde, Nigerian; Akan; Shona; Xhosa;&#xA;  Afrikaans; Luba-Kasai; Rundi; Nyanja; Gikuyu; Tigrigna; Sukuma;&#xA;  Swahili; Moore; Oromo, Qotu; Arabic, Libyan ; Kituba; Sotho, Southern;&#xA;  Umbundu; Tswana; Sotho, Northern; Oromo, Borana-Arsi-Guji; Luyia (not&#xA;  really a single language); Tachelhit; Tamazight, Central Atlas;&#xA;  Kanuri, Central; Luo; Kongo; Wolof; Tsonga; Kabyle; Ganda; Mbundu,&#xA;  Loanda; Pulaar; Fuuta Jalon; Lomwe; Bambara; Malagasy, Southern; Jula;&#xA;  Hassaniyya; Makhuwa; Ewe; Kalenjin; Kamba; Maninka, Kankan; Tiv;&#xA;  Zarma; Bemba; Baoule; Tumbuka; Tarifit; Sidamo; Swati; Nyankore; Yao;&#xA;  Gusii; Afar; Luba-Shaba; Ndebele; Kongo, San Salvador; Ibibio;&#xA;  Fon-Gbe; Chaouia; Chiga; Soga; Meru; Gogo; Mende; Makonde;&#xA;  Gamo-Gofa-Dawro; Wolaytta; Teso; Themne; Haya; Mandinka; Fulfulde,&#xA;  Maasina; Makhuwa-Meetto; Soninke; Munukutuba; Bedawi; Zande; Tonga;&#xA;  Sena; Serer-Sine; Nyakyusa-Ngonde; Crioulo, Upper Guinea; Dan;&#xA;  Malagasy, Tsimehety; Chokwe; Songe; Anaang; Ebira; Edo; Arabic,&#xA;  Chadian ; Lango; Maninka, Western; Nupe; Nyamwezi; Hadiyya; Susu;&#xA;  Alur; Nandi; Ndau&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes some divisions such as national versions of Arabic, where Moroccan vs. Algerian might be unified (this being the classic language / dialect problem), and some questional unifications (Luhya is not really a language, it is a family of closely related languages) – the top 100 is probably contained in this list. This is also based on total speakers, not L1 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T04:26:50.083" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T04:26:50.083" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-27T06:42:46.087" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would concepts like grammar have even been understood/discussed until other languages with different grammars were encountered? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15564" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T14:27:29.223" Title="Has it been argued that linguistics could only have arisen after exposure to foreign languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21484" CreationDate="2017-03-27T09:57:13.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that, yes, grammar and linguistic studies would have been discussed even without contact with another language. Mainly because if the variation that one can find within a single language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today most of us are used to a more or less standardised language. It may be clear that language politics have made it so. Implicitly normative institutions such as dictionaries or explicitly normative ones such as the Dutch-Belgian &lt;em&gt;Taalunie&lt;/em&gt; make sure that a language is documented and that some sort of standard is followed. Oftentimes this is an item of interest for government as well: if there is a lot of diversity within the same language in a country (regiolects, dialects), that could influence how some groups behave to each other and to the reigning powers. In other words, a very clear difference in dialect may cause (in extremis) political and social unrest. Culturally, variation is a treasure, but politically it makes things harder than they have to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To document and standardize a language, a grammar needs to be developed and some linguistic research is needed. Interestingly, this also leads you into the field of dialectology and not only to normative grammar studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: yes, in a country where a written system was present but where spoken variation was common, we would still have developed grammar simply because of the ease of having a standard form of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T09:57:13.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21484" CreationDate="2017-03-27T14:27:29.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of reasons to think that development of linguistics is not dependent on knowledge that languages differ. First, the first known tradition of grammatical description, developed in ancient India, came about in order to perfectly preserve the pronunciation of Vedic hymns, and was not in response to encountering other languages. Second, the underpinnings of western grammatican tradition are the writings of Aristotle (in &lt;em&gt;Organon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt;), who developed a fairly sophisticated theory of language structure as a philosophical exercise. The originators of these traditions probably had some knowledge that there were languages other than Greek or Sanskrit, but there is no indication that the resulting theories had anything to do with the existence of such languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T14:27:29.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-27T20:19:16.967" Score="0" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;In doing genealogical research, I have found that my last name &quot;Barney&quot; used to be spelled &quot;Berney&quot; in England prior to the mid-1400's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the &quot;Great Vowel Shift&quot; that occurred during this period, I'm wondering how the name &quot;Berney&quot; might have been pronounced at that time. Would it have sounded like &quot;Barney&quot; does to modern American ears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15572" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T04:18:06.483" Title="Great Vowel Shift and pronunciation of name" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21487" CreationDate="2017-03-28T04:18:06.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Great Vowel Shift is actually not relevant to your question, because it only affected long vowels. There was, however, another vowel change which took place in the late Middle English or early Modern English period -- that is, around the 1400s -- by which the vowel &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; when it was followed in the same syllable by &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. This is the sound shift that changed &lt;em&gt;Berney&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;Barney&lt;/em&gt;; it's also the cause of some doublets, like &lt;em&gt;clerk / Clark&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;university / varsity&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;person / parson&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vermin / varmint&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the spelling change you've found probably tracks the change in pronunciation quite closely: in that period the sound of your surname was changing to the modern pronunciation. Before the change began, the vowel in the first syllable was probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_front_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[e]&lt;/a&gt;; standard Modern English doesn't have this exact sound, but the word &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; (in standard American pronunciation) might be a rough equivalent to the first syllable of Middle English &lt;em&gt;Berney&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T04:18:06.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T10:16:35.833" Score="4" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those who are bilingual or able to master three or four languages, is there a ruling langauge by which they mainly use to think and study? For instance, A person who was born and lived in the environment of English, French and German langauges can master them at the same time. But there should be a ruling langauage that control his mind when he think or remember sth while the other languages were just used in communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15576" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T10:33:14.123" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T11:03:56.043" Title="Do multilinguals have one language they predominantly think in?" Tags="&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-03-28T18:18:48.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a single native language (Russian) and have learned English. I can say that I occasionally think either in Russian or English even though I have never lived in English-speakling environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing here is that thinking is usually modelling a phrase in a conversation with imaginable opponent. So if I model some phrases to counter arguments of imaginary opponents or partners on English-speaking forums, like this one, or describe my vision to them, I think in English. If I think about something I discussed on a Russian-speaking forum or with a real person, like my relatives, I think in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language you think in is not something to which you stick in a long term. I think I even thought in programming languages when I was thinking about how would I code this or that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T18:18:48.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-03-28T19:33:16.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me, I am bilingual with English and Norwegian, and I master/have mastered some other languages as well.&#xA;I'll have some thoughts in English, some in Norwegian or something else, and sometimes in a programming language or mathematics or something. Of course, I sometimes have thoughts which are not linguistically formed, such as remembering someone's appearance or a route from one place to another. But the rest of this post discusses thoughts which are in some language or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A person who was born and lived in the environment of English, French and German langauges can master them at the same time. But there should be a ruling langauage that control his mind when he think or remember sth while the other languages were just used in communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with that. If you master a language well, that means being able to think in that language well. The language is not &lt;code&gt;ruling [my] mind&lt;/code&gt;, rather my mind is using the language to process a thing. If you have a dominant or native language, then using that language to think is semi-automatic (that means it happens automatically, unless you consciously decide otherwise, the same as breathing). So I can easily think in English or Norwegian, because those are languages which I know well, but I can choose a different one if I want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get by in German, but I don't speak it well. I can think in German if I am choosing to or if I am speaking to someone in German, but it's hard. It's hard for me to think in German, and I believe that's most of the reason I also don't speak German well. But on occasion, for example I have recently heard someone use German, or read a book or listened to some Bach or something, it'll happen that this language is going to be more active in my mind somehow. It's hard to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the key thing is that even though a language might be a (worse or better) medium for thought, thought may be independent of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T11:03:56.043" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T11:03:56.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-03-28T20:36:21.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people I know who are otherwise perfectly multilingual have strong preferences for memorizing e.g. phone numbers in one of their languages, and find it much more difficult to do so in their other language(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2020" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T20:36:21.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-29T04:56:11.360" Score="1" ViewCount="955" Body="&lt;p&gt;How will a Do-So test help in identifying if a PP is an adjunct or complement to the verb? Example : I ran to work. I need two pieces of evidence to prove the status of PP in a sentence.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15573" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T07:19:39.310" Title="Do-So Tests for VPs and PPs" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21503" CreationDate="2017-03-29T06:42:44.203" Score="6" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/380677/why-do-some-nicknames-have-no-apparent-relation-with-their-original-counterparts&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question about how alternative names develop for a given name (Bill for William, Peggy for Margaret etc.) It seemed reasonable to me to assume that at least some of these develop due to children having issue pronouncing their (or someone elses) name and thus being either taught simplifications by their parents or creating their own by mispronouncing the name in a specific way (for example &quot;Pája&quot; pronounced /paːja/ for &quot;Pavel&quot; /pavɛl/ is a valid nickname (though diminutive) in the Czech language and at least in the case of my daughter was a mispronunciation she came up with on her own trying to repeat the standard name).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies on whether/how children's pronunciation errors effect language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10281" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:11.070" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T07:56:39.377" Title="Do children's mispronunciations influence the development of a language?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21496" CreationDate="2017-03-29T07:19:39.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recall that in English, adjunction is believed to look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4MVu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Syntax tree \VP \V' \V' \V ran\ \ \PP to work\ \ \ &quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the lower V' is a constituent, then we should expect it to be substitutable by 'do so' in the standard test, but we can't say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#I did so to work. (meaning 'I ran to work')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, you can substitute the whole thing 'ran to work' with do-so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to work on Thursday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did so on Thursday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that 'on Thursday' is an adjunct and 'to work' is the complement, i.e. this structure is appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4RNGX.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4RNGX.png&quot; alt=&quot;The other tree&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T07:19:39.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21501" CreationDate="2017-03-30T03:09:34.980" Score="-1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone identify the language in the top line of text below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/90kum.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/90kum.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14368" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T05:45:15.197" Title="Can anyone identify this language?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-03-30T13:09:34.673" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21499" CreationDate="2017-03-30T04:48:16.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to come from &lt;em&gt;A collection of English proverbs digested into a convenient method for the speedy finding any one upon occasion : with short annotations : whereunto are added local proverbs with their explications, old proverbial rhythmes, less known or exotick proverbial sentences, and Scottish proverbs,&lt;/em&gt; by John Ray, 1678.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bit at the top is definitely in the Greek alphabet, and seems to be Greek. It uses a number of old-fashioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://bibletranslation.ws/down/ligatures.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek ligatures&lt;/a&gt;, which are a pain in the ass to decipher if you're not familar with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is a (possibly slightly garbled) version of a line in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text;jsessionid=195D8BD4D702AA34D679F3468C5C4671?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0035%3Acard%3D749&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/em&gt; by Aristophanes&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ta%5C&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=ta%5C0&amp;amp;prior=spla/gxna&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=u(pe/rteros&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;τὰ&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=d%27&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=d%270&amp;amp;prior=ta%5C&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=u(pe/rteros&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;δ᾽&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Du(pe%2Frteros&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ὑπέρτερα&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ne%2Frtera&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=ne%2Frtera0&amp;amp;prior=u(&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=u(pe/rteros&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;νέρτερα&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=qh%2Fsei&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=qh%2Fsei0&amp;amp;prior=ne/rtera&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=u(pe/rteros&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;θήσει&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons I think it might be slightly mis-transcribed (take this with a huge grain of salt as I don't know any Greek) are the apparent absence of the &quot;δ&quot; and the apparent use of &quot;θῆσαι&quot; (which apparently means &quot;suckle&quot;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=qh=sai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liddell &amp;amp; Scott&lt;/a&gt;) as the last word instead of &quot;θήσει.&quot; But maybe there is some reason for those that I am unaware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line in Lysistrata doesn't say anything about hunger or a horse, as far as I can tell. It corresponds to the part in Jack Lindsay's translation that goes &quot;(great Zeus the Thunderer) Shall put above what was below before.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of each of the words seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;τὰ: neuter plural demonstrative or pronoun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;δέ: (contracted to δ᾽) some kind of conjunctive particle &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὑπέρτερα: upper&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;νέρτερα: lower&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;θήσει: put, place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the meaning, I think it may in fact have been meant to match up with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rnlQoxh95VMC&amp;amp;q=horfe#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=could%20eat&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preceding line in the book&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To throw the &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; out of the windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHSdy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHSdy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T05:45:15.197" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T05:45:15.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21497" CreationDate="2017-03-30T13:38:48.060" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are such studies.  Notably, Jakobson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Child_Language.html?id=i2gUutbrJLkC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Child language, aphasia and phonological universals&lt;/a&gt;, and David Stampe's &lt;em&gt;The acquisition of phonetic representation&lt;/em&gt; in Chicago Linguistic Society, vol 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T20:45:45.517" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T20:45:45.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18906" CreationDate="2017-03-30T20:38:58.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's correct as stated in other answers. If you need to keep the tense information you can use a different structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gezdirmiş olduğum köpek uyuyor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gitmiş olduğum köy güzel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences carry the past tense information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15593" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T20:38:58.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T21:26:59.630" Score="-1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend found these artefacts for sale in Afghanistan, was wondering what the script is? Maybe Avestan?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0jglV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enter image description here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mJzBb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mJzBb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15594" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T09:00:06.887" Title="identifying unknown script from artefact" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-03-31T11:23:40.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:51:51.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European Lexicon out of UT-Austin will give you the Proto Indo-European root for many Latin words. That would be at least a partial solution. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the main page&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/languages/Lat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the page for Latin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15595" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T02:51:51.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-31T08:31:41.100" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses usually involve the movement of an operator, either overt (wh-operator) or covert (silent operator)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The person who1 t1 killed Mary has been caught.&#xA;The dog Op1 that the cat clawed t1 is injured.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the clauses below do not have any traces, which should mean that there is no movement of any operator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The fact that he is a murderer disgusts me.&#xA;The rumour that he was a murderer was spread all over the media.&#xA;The finding that objects fall because of gravity shook the world.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the clausal complements of the nouns above relative clauses or appositives like in the sentences below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;John, the man who was caught, was sentenced to life imprisonment.&#xA;My sister, the judge who sentenced him, is responsible for it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T08:31:41.100" Title="Relative Clauses or Appositives?" Tags="&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21506" CreationDate="2017-03-31T09:00:06.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before this item gets deleted: It is a crude forgery, a poor imitation of Avestan script. Some of the world's leading specialists have commented on it on my facebook page. Please contact me privately for the link. fcd23@cam.ac.uk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T09:00:06.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19364" CreationDate="2017-04-01T19:11:20.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phonology of Spanish might be vaguely similar to that of Japanese but the differences are also relevant. There are many consonantal clusters in Spanish and also word final consonants, and this simply cannot be transcribed in kana. By the way, this represents one of the main difficulties for a Japanese speaker who speaks a European language like Spanish. Normally they would insert reduced vowels after each non final consonant in a cluster and each word final consonant. Thus, English &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; has been borrowed into Japanese where it is spelled, and pronounced, &lt;em&gt;sutoppu&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, Spanish has many consonants that Japanese does not have. There is no way to make the difference, in kana, among such Spanish consonants as &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt;. Same for the dental fricative spelled &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;cien&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T19:11:20.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21435" CreationDate="2017-04-01T20:59:20.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;modern IE languages&quot; you have most probably intended English or some other of the most widespread &lt;strong&gt;European&lt;/strong&gt; IE languages. But if you reckon &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the modern IE languages, you can't even imagine the variety of sound they can have. Modern Dutch has many quite unique and &quot;strange&quot; vowels, Modern Indic languages have some weird &quot;breathy&quot; vowels and retroflex consonants; modern Scandinavian languages have tone-like accents; Modern Russian and other Slavic languages have rare fricatives and central vowels; and so on. Therefore, in comparison to the whole variety of the modern IE sound systems, nothing would be exotic enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difficulty is represented by the fact that we don't have a complete certainty about the pronunciation of the IE reconstructed phonemes. Indeed, there are at least two different phonetic interpretations thereof: the classical interpretation postulated by the Neogrammarians and that of the Glottalic theory. If we accept the latter, most consonants will sound quite odd to an English speaker. Another famous case is that of the laryngeals: we don't have the slightest idea of how they could have been pronounced, so that we just transcribe them with numbers: H₁ &quot;laryngeal 1&quot;, H₂ &quot;laryngeal 2&quot; and H₃ &quot;laryngeal 3&quot;. Many theories have been suggested in such respect but the issue is still under debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of the movie you quote must have simply asked a specialist in Indo-European studies to give them an idea of a possible pronunciation, and then the actor has performed - with a strong English accent - something that, for the average audience, sounded like gibberish meaningless formulae. And when someone who has no special training in field fonetics hears an unknown language, he/she cannot be even sure about what sounds have been pronounced. Thus, some &quot;normal&quot; sounds can appear exotic because of some additional features (like tones or special accents), as well as something really exotic can easily escape the attention of an untrained listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T14:07:35.547" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T14:07:35.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19364" CreationDate="2017-04-01T22:17:30.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with a kana transcription of Spanish (let's call it KTS) is the complex syllable structure. KTS would have to be able to adequately render two types of syllables that cannot be found in Japanese: 1) closed syllables (except those ending with a nasal), 2) consonant clusters in the onset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the closed syllables, KTS will be acceptable (in the sense of producing a phonetic result that would be easy for the Spanish hearer to recognize) if the coda consists of an unvoiced consonant such as /p/ or /s/ and it's followed by another syllable that begins with an unvoiced consonant, since short Japanese &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; between unvoiced consonants tends to be devoiced and to Spanish ears it practically disappears, so for example パスタ &lt;em&gt;pasuta&lt;/em&gt; would be correctly heard as &lt;em&gt;pasta&lt;/em&gt;. With voiced consonants the following vowel would not be devoiced and the result would be off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonant clusters in the syllable onset are a bigger problem, because these consist of a stop or fricative plus a (voiced) liquid, so no devoicing would take place in the Japanese reading, and the vowel would be perceived by the Spanish hearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The liquids will be a problem. A Japanese speaker can be trained to distinguish /l/ from /r/ (trill) and from /ɾ/ (flap) but there's no way to distinguish those in standard kana (maybe a modified &lt;em&gt;R&lt;/em&gt; series —ラ with a &lt;em&gt;dakuten&lt;/em&gt; for /la/, for example— could do the trick). The Spanish &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand should not be much of a problem, since in most Spanish dialects the sound of &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt; has merged with the one represented by &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yeísmo&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spanish /f/ could also be a problem, but Japanese has for the most part adopted a way to represent /f/ in loanwords with the &lt;em&gt;H&lt;/em&gt; series kana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dental pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; is not representable in kana, but it could arguably be left out without much of a problem. The majority of today's Spanish speakers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives#Seseo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do not employ that sound&lt;/a&gt;, and its merger with /s/ only rarely produces ambiguity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T22:17:30.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21524" CreationDate="2017-04-01T23:07:53.090" Score="4" ViewCount="789" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was contemplating the Norwegian word &quot;del,&quot; which means &quot;part&quot; or &quot;portion,&quot; it occurred to me that there is the same root in Russian, and that it means the same thing. I looked up &quot;del&quot; and &quot;делить&quot; (the verb formed from the root &quot;дел&quot;), and here's what I got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/del#Etymology_1_4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;del - Norwegian&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle Low German dēl, deil, from Old Saxon dēl, from&#xA;  Proto-Germanic *dailą, *dailiz (“part, portion, deal”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;делить - Russian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Proto-Slavic *děliti (“to divide”), from Proto-Balto-Slavic&#xA;  *doyl-, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰayl-, *dʰoyl-. Cognates include Old English dǣlan (English deal) and Lithuanian dailyti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these chains get constructed, and why don't these two lead to the same common ancestor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2093" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T18:06:07.833" Title="Origin of the word/root 'del'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21516" CreationDate="2017-04-01T23:38:29.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They definitely &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; go to the same common ancestor, just the first etymology you found does not go deep enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norwegian &lt;em&gt;del&lt;/em&gt; is reconstructed to proto-germanic &lt;em&gt;dailiz&lt;/em&gt;, but that originates from PIE &lt;em&gt;*dhail-&lt;/em&gt;, the etymon for the Slavic &lt;em&gt;děliti&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/del#Etymology_1_4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DEL in Norwegian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/dailiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DAILIZ in Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DĚLIŤ in Russian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T18:06:07.833" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T18:06:07.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T07:17:22.023" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tl;dr version first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following problem: I implemented Baum Welch for ergodic HMMs. I do it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pass the model two number &lt;code&gt;C1&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;C2&lt;/code&gt;, it builds a fully connected state machine with &lt;code&gt;C1&lt;/code&gt; states and &lt;code&gt;C2&lt;/code&gt; emissions. I map all tokens from my training data onto the range &lt;code&gt;[0, C2)&lt;/code&gt; and each label the HMM is supposed to assign a token during inference onto &lt;code&gt;[0, C1)&lt;/code&gt;. Then the HMM goes ahead and does Baum Welch Learning. When it is done it has configured its state machine to maximize the likelihood of the training data (locally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to my problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume I had two isomorphic initial state machines (isomorphic under consideration of all the probabilities, as structurally all the HMMs are isomorphic anyway, because ergodic). They vary only in their state IDs, so the IDs have been scrambled around from one machine to the other.&#xA;Now, after training both HMMs will be isomorphic again when trained with the same data. That means there is absolutely no connection between the IDs I map the labels from my label set to and the IDs of the states of the HMM. So how then can I interpret the HMM after training? How do I know which state corresponds to which POS-tag? Seems impossible, so I guess I am missing some crucial point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now a little more detail if the above was unclear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take my training data (texts, like newspaper etc.) and count the number of different words (types).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I pass &lt;code&gt;count(types&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;count(labels)&lt;/code&gt; the labels being a set of POS-tags. It then randomly constructs a probabilistic fully connected state machine with &lt;code&gt;pow(count(labels), order_of_model)&lt;/code&gt; different states. &lt;code&gt;order_of_model&lt;/code&gt; being the number of hidden variables (POS-tag ngrams) that get combined into an individual state. It also assigns each of these states an initial and an emission probability for all of the types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model assumes a mapping from &lt;code&gt;[0, pow(count(labels), order_of_model))&lt;/code&gt; as state IDs onto external tuples of labels. And a mapping &lt;code&gt;[0,count(types)-1)&lt;/code&gt; for the emissions onto words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10543" LastEditorUserId="10543" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T13:47:33.247" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T13:47:33.247" Title="Hidden Markov Models: Linking states to labels after EM training" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T11:37:37.273" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Duolingo describes a &quot;plural suffix&quot; &lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt; that gets appends to &quot;some words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are certain words, like &lt;em&gt;karibu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;asante&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;shikamoo&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;kwa heri&lt;/em&gt; that, when used to address more than one person, take the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt; to indicate plural references. So, saying &lt;em&gt;asante&lt;/em&gt; &quot;thank you&quot; to a group of people would be &lt;em&gt;asanteni&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make this more memorable than applying to &quot;some words.&quot; Does the &lt;em&gt;-ni&lt;/em&gt; suffix correspond to some linguistic category that I can look up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question was originally asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/2716/what-linguistic-category-does-swahilis-ni-fit-into&quot;&gt;Language Learning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15607" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T23:25:54.087" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T23:25:54.087" Title="What linguistic category does Swahili's *-ni* correspond to?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21520" CreationDate="2017-04-02T12:04:00.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a plural imperative inflectional suffix added to verbs, which can also be added to the above words, which are not verbs, but are interjections meaning literally &quot;near&quot; (welcome), &quot;thanks&quot;, &quot;grab the feet&quot; (a respectful greeting) and &quot;bye-bye&quot;, thus &quot;Welcome, y'all&quot;. Verbal examples are &lt;em&gt;toka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;go away!&quot;, &lt;em&gt;tokeni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;go way (pl.)!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T21:20:13.723" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T21:20:13.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T12:10:36.773" Score="3" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for examples of having 2 or more nouns in the same case but &lt;em&gt;with the different semantic roles given by the differing referents of the nouns, not entirely by one of morphological case, syntax nor context&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;For example, the double accusative in Ancient Greek:&#xA;&quot;τὸν λόγον φῐ́λον διδάσκω&quot; only differs in emphasis from &quot;φῐ́λον τὸν λόγον διδάσκω&quot; etc even though &quot;λόγον&quot; and &quot;φῐ́λον&quot; are classed as being in the same case, that is *something other than the case markers ('-ον') or the word order says that a friend is the person being taught and the reason is the thing being taught, rather it's &lt;em&gt;the things themselves&lt;/em&gt;. Canst thou imagine a friend being taught to the abstract thing logic?*.&#xA;Examples within Greek but using a different word welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15606" LastEditorUserId="15606" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T23:33:19.783" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T11:52:33.537" Title="Constructions like the double accusative outside of the Ancient Greek word &quot;διδασκειν&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20119" CreationDate="2017-04-02T15:26:13.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can reproduce this on Debian jessie, which shows the characters as nothingness (as in your case, compare the white entry box in the top with the yellow in the bottom):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0x8RR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0x8RR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, my system too is fully Unicode and has the relevant fonts.  I think this is a bug; Praat probably uses a UI toolkit to let the system draw fonts, and for whatever reason it's not using the font fallback stack properly on Linux.  There are font options for Pictures on &lt;code&gt;.praat-dir/prefs5&lt;/code&gt;, but nothing for annotations except font size.  The manual entry for annotation objects specifically claims that you can use Chinese characters.  We should report this bug to Praat devs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T15:35:20.207" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T15:35:20.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21516" CreationDate="2017-04-02T17:18:46.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are related, but they do not have any known cognates outside of Germanic and Balto-Slavic. “Proto-Indo-European *dʰayl-, *dʰoyl-“ (as posited on Wikipedia) is highly uncertain. It has been suggested that it is a substrate word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the etymology section here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/Teil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dwds.de/wb/Teil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T17:18:46.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T17:57:28.053" Score="8" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since in Latin no compound form of verb tense exists, AFAIK, I thought that origin of Present Perfect should be sought in Proto-Germanic also for Romance languages, but I found out that Present Perfect exists in Romanian as well and I think that Germanic influences should not have affected Romanian language. Should instead the origin be sought in Proto-Germanic nonetheless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15608" LastEditorUserId="15608" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T18:27:49.990" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T19:54:38.217" Title="Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21525" CreationDate="2017-04-02T19:29:32.367" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The similarity is due to a common pathway of grammaticalistion. The &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; + past participle form comes from a resultative construction (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca, 1994), which commonly leads to the perfect. Note that Bybee et al. do not use the term &lt;em&gt;resultative&lt;/em&gt; in the usual complex-predicate sense, but use it to mean sentences like 'The door is opened', whereby a past action leads to a present state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English have + past participle construction comes from sentences like (1), where &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; was still possessive and the participle agreed with the object in number, case and gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) Ic haefde hine gebundenne.&#xA;     I  had    him  bound&#xA;     I had him in a state of being bound. (Traugott 1972, cited in Bybee et al.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This construction later became the perfect, which asserts that a past action has effect on the present - a similar meaning to the resultative. The participle now no longer agrees with the object and the auxiliary and partiicple should usually be adjacent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Romance case, the resultative was already present in Vulgar Latin, both in have + participle form and in participle + have form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) Metuo    enim ne   ibi   vos habebam        fatigatos.&#xA;     Fear.1sg for  lest there you have-IMPF-I SG tired&#xA;     'For I fear that I have tired you.'&#xA;     (early fifth century, Augustine; Fleischman 1982, cited in Hopper and Traugott )&#xA;&#xA;(3) in ea  provincia pecunias magnas collocatas habent&#xA;     in that province capital  great  invested   have.3pl&#xA;     They have great capital invested in that province. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the construction became the perfect (and, in modern French, the past perfective). It lost the object agreement, spread to all dynamic verbs (not just change-of-state), and the have + participle form was the only form that survived in languages like French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is sufficient semantic similarity between the resultative and the perfect - described by Comrie thus: 'the present auxiliary conveys the present meaning, while the past participle conveys that of past action' - and this would explain why both Germanic and Romance languages developed this form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bybee, J. L., Perkins, R. D., &amp;amp; Pagliuca, W. (1994). &lt;em&gt;The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 196). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems (Vol. 2). Cambridge university press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopper, P. J., &amp;amp; Traugott, E. C. (2003). &lt;em&gt;Grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T19:36:30.640" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T19:36:30.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21525" CreationDate="2017-04-02T19:54:38.217" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the excellent answer by @WavesWashSands I'll only add that some Latin verbs employed a perfective construction with the verb &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be&quot; and a participle, which at some point could have motivated the appearance of the other well-known pattern for the compound perfect as found in Italian and French, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Siamo arrivati.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We have arrived.&quot; (lit. &quot;We are arrived.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Je suis tombé.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I fell, I have fallen.&quot; (lit. &quot;I am fallen.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the participle agrees with the subject in number and gender (e. g. if the first sentence were uttered by a woman, it would be &lt;em&gt;Sono arrivata&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; marking female-singular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most verbs did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use this pattern, in other Romance languages (such as Spanish) the form derived from &lt;em&gt;habēre&lt;/em&gt; gradually displaced the form derived from &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; and all the compound perfect tenses came to be conjugated using the latter (regularization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as the Latin verb &lt;em&gt;tenēre&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to keep&quot; gradually took the place of &lt;em&gt;habēre&lt;/em&gt; for the meaning &quot;to have&quot;, some dialects also adopted it as an auxiliary. To this day Portuguese employs &lt;em&gt;ter&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to have&quot;, cognate with Spanish &lt;em&gt;tener&lt;/em&gt;) as the preferred auxiliary for compound verbs, though the older form &lt;em&gt;haver&lt;/em&gt; is still understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, be aware that Latin &lt;em&gt;habēre&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; cognate with English &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; (or better, with its Germanic ancestor) despite the phonetical similarity. Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*habjaną&lt;/em&gt; is cognate with Latin &lt;em&gt;capere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to take, to seize&quot;, whence Spanish &lt;em&gt;caber&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to fit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T19:54:38.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21522" CreationDate="2017-04-02T22:15:26.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first example that comes to my mind is the &lt;strong&gt;dative shift&lt;/strong&gt; in English, i.e. the construction found in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave John a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both arguments are NPs (rather than PPs), so formally you can consider it a sort of &amp;quot;same case&amp;quot; situation. Both arguments can become Subjects of a passive sentence (&lt;em&gt;The book has been given to John by me&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;John has been given a book by me&lt;/em&gt;), which makes them equally good Direct Objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dative shift is a very debated construction: some scholars consider it &lt;strong&gt;derived&lt;/strong&gt; from the canonical transfer construction (such as &lt;em&gt;I gave a book to John&lt;/em&gt;), while others think that the difference in meaning between the two is relevant enough to view them as two independent constructions (see more on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting construction is to be found in Russian, in a particular type of sentences with a dative Subject governed by an infinitive, with a deontic meaning. In case the predicate has also a recipient semantic argument, then the dative-marked syntactic arguments become two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Не мне тебе объяснять&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ne mne tebe ob&amp;quot;jasnjat'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not I-DAT you-DAT explain-INF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is not up to me to explain it to you&amp;quot; (notice also the two PPs headed by &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; in the English translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although frequently used, this construction can be still considered ungrammatical by some speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T11:03:02.197" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21530" CreationDate="2017-04-03T00:18:07.353" Score="6" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a decent understanding of regular languages, CFLs and r.e. sets from a course in computer science theory. I'm just learning about the Chomsky hierarchy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an English speaker, I have a somewhat intuitive sense of why natural language is not regular. For instance, you could have sentences such as &quot;the cat ran&quot; =&gt; &quot;the cat [who lived in London] ran&quot; =&gt; &quot;the cat [who lived in London [but traveled to France]] ran&quot; ... each time you recursively expand the string, a subject just agree with an object. In general, you need something more powerful than a regular language to capture strings like &lt;code&gt;{w | 0^n,1^n }&lt;/code&gt;. Thus, intuitively, it makes sense that you'd need something like a CFL to generate potentially infinite strings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why do linguists think CFL are insufficient? Related: does anyone thing that natural language is actually r.e?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5465" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:25:33.140" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:25:33.140" Title="Intuitive English example of why linguists think natural language grammar is stronger than CFL?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21529" CreationDate="2017-04-03T01:45:17.660" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't personally believe that CFL are insufficient, but among linguists who care about weak generative capacity (probably most don't care about the issue), the consensus seems to be that they are.  The usual reference given is an article by Peter Shieber, which is online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and which is, in my opinion, an admirable work of scholarship.  (Which doesn't make it right, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, the case rests on the grammaticality of unbounded cross-serial dependencies in certain natural languages, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-serial_dependencies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross-serial dependencies&lt;/a&gt;.  Or, one might refer to them as &quot;respectively constructions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A conceptual example would be &quot;John smoked, ate, and drank cigars, caviar, and brandy, respectively&quot;, supposing that is interpreted as meaning &quot;John smoked cigars, John ate caviar, and John drank brandy&quot;.  The problem is getting the verbs to pair up with the objects that they go with. What seems to be a corresponding problem with CFL is generating &quot;copy&quot; languages, which have sentences with two consecutive copies of the same string, which is provably impossible in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far (you're probably thinking) this seems to be an imaginary problem, since the English example I gave above is not actually grammatical.  If by proposing CFL for natural languages, we predict that natural languages cannot have such constructions, that would seem to be a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some other languages do seem to have such constructions.  Shieber described a Swiss-German dialect, and others have since been found. So even if it happens that English doesn't have cross-serial constructions, since we're interested in human language in general, we have to give up on CFL as a general model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't, myself, think this argument has any force, since the only real prediction that CFL makes is that the depth of cross-serial constructions must be bounded and that the greater the depth of the cross-serial construction the more complex the CFL must be to emulate it.  That is the situation in Swiss-German, in Shieber's account.  Two-depth CS constructions are accepted by all, three-depth ones by some, but four-depth ones are not accepted by anyone.  So, in my view, the facts actually support the theory that natural languages are context free, rather than showing that they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your last question, yes, quite a few people believe that natural language is r.e., recursively enumerable, i.e., since all the languages in the Chomsky hierarchy are r.e.  One of the dissidents, I believe, would be C. F. Hockett, who proposed in &lt;em&gt;The State of the Art&lt;/em&gt;, reviewed &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1969.71.4.02a00130/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; by Chuck Fillmore, that human languages do not have definite systems of the sort that Chomsky assumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T19:42:24.880" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T19:42:24.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-03T11:00:01.747" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have successfully installed Semafor on Linux Mint 18.1 and I can run it. But the results I get from my version differs drastically from the online demo. I realized that online demo uses TurboParser, not MaltPraser. I tried A LOT to download TurboParser's model, but the remote host is sending data on 100 KB/s which is so lousy while I can download from other web sites at about 1 MB/s! But I kept on downloading and finally received a corrupted file. Now I have a request and a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can any one upload the model on a better host? Maybe a Google drive or so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can TurboParser be incorporated in Semafor? I could not figure it out because I failed to download the model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9207" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T11:00:01.747" Title="How To incorporate TurboParser Instead of MaltParser for improved results like from online demo?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21522" CreationDate="2017-04-03T18:19:56.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin is full of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Illum meum amicum appelo.&lt;/em&gt; (I call him my friend)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romulum regem romanum fecerun.&lt;/em&gt; (They made Romulus into a king)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is with verbs of change (somebody changed/made into something), verbs of appelation (somebody being called something but also nominated to be something, similarly to the previous example) and verbs of considering/belief (somebody considered to be something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T18:19:56.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-03T20:39:20.093" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formally representing constituency based structures, using brackets to denote constituents, is straight-forward - until discontinuities are thrown in the mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this example, adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuity_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sarah tutors John&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which could, for the sake of argument, be bracketed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;{ {Sarah} {tutors {John } } }&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By means of WH-fronting, we could easily turn this sentence into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who has Sarah been tutoring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visually representing this is quite easy - you simply cross some lines on a piece of paper (example, again, pilfered from Wikipeda):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oF6Qc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oF6Qc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you go about representing it via a bracketing system, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3329" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T20:39:20.093" Title="Bracket notation for discontinuous trees" Tags="&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21535" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21536" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T21:25:57.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-04T05:21:41.530" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a NLP project that aims at identifying different dialects of Hindi language. My über goal is to generate dialogs in once the program identifies which dialect is given. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried looking for Hindi Movie scripts (Bollywood movies) which have dialogs that are not pure Hindi. I could not find much training data. Can anyone suggest any techniques or resources? Would be of great help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15621" LastEditorUserId="15621" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T00:37:04.730" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T04:01:31.163" Title="Where can I find training data for dialects of Hindi?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21541" CreationDate="2017-04-04T08:55:25.307" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In transcriptions of the Akkadian language, there are frequently superscript prefixes. For example, in the transcription of Amarna Tablet #16:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wnvJT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wnvJT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there are prefixes such as &quot;matu&quot; and &quot;ilu&quot;. What is the meaning of the prefixes? If they represent characters in the actual cuneiform text, why are they not rendered the same as the other characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as long as we are on the topic, what does the notation &lt;pre&gt;I&lt;/pre&gt; mean (found twice in the transcription above)? Note that this transcription is from Die Amarna Tafeln by Knudtzon, one of the standard works of historical Assyriology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T12:08:49.027" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T12:08:49.027" Title="What is the significance of the super prefixes in Akkadian transcription?" Tags="&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21540" CreationDate="2017-04-04T09:06:18.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are so-called determinatives. They are not part of the word, but help to define the semantic scope of the following word. The raised “l” means that it is a male personal name. The sign which Knudtzon transcribed as a raised “ilu” means that it is the name of a god. (ilu is the Akkadian word for “god”; the practice of modern Assyriology is to transcribe it as “d”, short for dingir, the Sumerian word for “god”). And so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T09:11:44.440" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T09:11:44.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21402" CreationDate="2017-04-04T15:28:25.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adjective systems in Balto-Slavic and German languages are similar only from a very broad typological and historical point of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Slavic languages — I can speak about Russian, but it must not be too different elsewhere — have a special morphological paradigm (i.e. a set of endings) for the adjectives when they stand in the modifier position with respect to a noun. These endings are originally of pronominal origin. Effectively, they come from a relative pronoun agglutinated to the nominal stems (see on this Meillet, &lt;em&gt;Le Slave commun&lt;/em&gt;, 1934: §509).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the adjective is a predicate, it takes a nominal ending, which is shorter (hence they are called &quot;short adjectives&quot;) and is only realized in the Nominative (since the predicate is always in the Nominative). In Russian the short adjectives are gradually fading out, while the adjectival endings are being used more and more also in the predicative position. Compare the following constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Predicative position&lt;/strong&gt; (the nominative is marked by a zero-ending: Ø)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Судья строг, но справедлив.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sudj-a strog-Ø, no spravedliv-Ø&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Judge-NOM strict-NOM but fair-NOM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The judge is strict but fair&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modifier position&lt;/strong&gt; (note the longer endings of the adjectives glossed here as ADJNOM)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Строгий, но справедливый судья&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;strog-ij, no spravedliv-yj sudj-a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;strict-ADJNOM but fair-ADJNOM judge-NOM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;a fair but strict judge&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning, when these forms had been created, the intended function of those agglutinated pronouns was probably to encode the definitiveness (as claimed by Meillet). However, we have no certainty on that. Today these endings have simply become &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; adjectival endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the so-called &quot;strong declension&quot; was attested in all the ancient Germanic languages (from Gothic to Old English, Old Norse and Old High German) and survives today just in some of them (notoriously in German). In Modern German it has to do with definiteness, but, again, we are not allowed to automatically imply the same function for the ancient languages. Whatever it might be, the Gothic declension of the adjective is vaguely similar to the modern German usage: the weak endings are used when the article is present, while the strong endings are used elsewhere. See, for example, the following line from the Lord's Prayer (note the glosses wACC &quot;weak Accusative&quot; vs. sACC &quot;strong Accusative&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hlaif unsar-&lt;strong&gt;ana&lt;/strong&gt; þ-&lt;strong&gt;ana&lt;/strong&gt; sintein-an (gif uns himma daga)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bread-ACC ours-sACC the-sACC dayly-wACC (give us this day)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the bare adjective &lt;em&gt;unsarana&lt;/em&gt; has the strong, i.e. pronominal ending, same as the article &lt;em&gt;þana&lt;/em&gt;; on the other hand, the adjective &lt;em&gt;sinteinan&lt;/em&gt; has the weak ending, since it is preceded by the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Germanic strong endings have clearly a pronominal origin (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1392&amp;amp;context=pwpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper by McFadden&lt;/a&gt;). This makes them appear, for a specialist in Indo-European linguistics, as a parallel phenomenon to the adjectival declension in Balto-Slavic. The first to notice this parallelism was already Leskien (&lt;em&gt;Die Declination im slavisch-litauischen und germanischen&lt;/em&gt;, 1876: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_smoJAAAAQAAJ#page/n161/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 130ff&lt;/a&gt;). But we don't know much more than this. And in the modern usage this parallelism has been totally dimmed. For example, while the strong endings in Gothic were used in the predicative position, the &quot;longer&quot; adjectival endings in Slavic are excluded from exactly that same position. Moreover, modern Germanic languages have the article, while most of the Modern Slavic don't; therefore, the German construction differs from a possible Slavic parallel construction at least because of this lack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. By coincidence I have right now presented a paper on exactly this topic, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keidan.it/resources/Home/ISTAL23-slides.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T00:08:13.863" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T00:08:13.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T09:14:08.827" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially in Western branch of Turkic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15634" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T13:44:49.107" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T21:37:28.437" Title="Does anyone knows a work on Mongolian loanwords in Turkic languages?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21546" CreationDate="2017-04-05T10:42:36.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard work on Turkish etymology is Clauson's &quot;Etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T10:42:36.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-05T16:25:40.420" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard about lexical density, but is there such a thing as &quot;idiomatic density&quot;, and if so, does it have an established name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Idiomatic density&quot; would measure the effectiveness by which a phrase or fixed expression conveys a certain meaning as compared to another phrase with the same meaning, or as compared to &quot;spelling it out&quot; - using a description of the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A naïve example could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;spilled the beans&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;laid the cards on the table&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;revealed the secret&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where 1 and 2 are meant to be &quot;idioms&quot; or &quot;fixed expressions&quot;, as opposed to 3, that is a description of the meaning. 1 would be the densest, using fewer words or sounds, where as 2 would be the least dense, using more words or sounds than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or consider an object oriented programming language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;j = i.add(5)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;j = i + 5&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both statements have verifiable the same effect, and therefore arguably the same meaning, but 2 is denser than 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15639" LastEditorUserId="15639" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T07:31:46.140" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T07:31:46.140" Title="Is there such a thing as &quot;idiomatic density&quot;?" Tags="&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21546" CreationDate="2017-04-06T02:23:58.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend &lt;em&gt;ESKİ VE ORTA TÜRKÇEDE MOĞOLCA KELİMELER&lt;/em&gt; by Tuncer Gülensoy. Not only does it have a good summary, it also includes lots of sources for that topic. I also recommend this paper: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dergipark.ulakbim.gov.tr/iuturkiyat/article/viewFile/1023000769/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OSMANLICADA  MOĞOLCA  KELİMELER&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T21:37:28.437" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T21:37:28.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T08:26:05.860" Score="7" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many complex predicates are historically derived from serial verb constructions. This is not only true of the Sinitic family. For example, in Saramaccan (Byrne 1987, as cited in Givón 2009):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a  bi-fefi   di-wosu   kaba.&#xA;    he TNS-paint the-house finish&#xA;    He finished painting the house.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Chinese constructions are more innovative in that the object has been moved to the end of the sentence, for the most part. Yet in most dialects of modern Chinese except Mandarin, complex predicates also sometimes preserve the older V + O + C order similar to the Saramaccan example in (1). This is most common in negative clauses. (The C is what is traditionally termed a &lt;em&gt;complement&lt;/em&gt; in Chinese linguistics, but it's more like a &lt;em&gt;satellite&lt;/em&gt; in Talmy's sense, and is developed from the 'lighter' verb of an asymmetric serial verb construction). An example from Cantonese is (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) nei wan  ngo m   dou&#xA;    you find me  NEG arrive&#xA;    You cannot find me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: I know negative clauses are more conservative in general, but are there specific cases outside the Sinitic branch where object placement in complex predicates is more conservative in negative clauses? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Givón, T. (2009). &lt;em&gt;The genesis of syntactic complexity: Diachrony, ontogeny, neuro-cognition, evolution&lt;/em&gt;. John Benjamins Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T10:52:01.243" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T10:52:01.243" Title="In which non-Sinitic languages do negative clauses retain older constituent order in SVC-derived complex predicates?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T18:43:43.473" Score="0" ViewCount="6161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the Thai language classified as Sino-Tibetan/Sino-Burmese when its script looks like Sanskrit to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15612" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T12:39:00.497" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T03:03:17.900" Title="Is Thai language related or a descendant of Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21556" CreationDate="2017-04-06T19:09:47.110" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The script has nothing to do with the origin of the language. In fact, every script can be used to write any language. Usually a language adopts the script that is associated with the religion and/or dominating cultural influence. For example, Malay, which belongs to the Austronesian family of languages, used the Arabic script (with some variations) when the Arabic influence on the Malaysians was at its peak, but that doesn't mean they are a Semitic people. Now they use the Latin alphabet, because the Western influence on Malaysia is far more intense than previously, but that doesn't mean they are related to Romans or to Indo-Europeans directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Thai is concerned, firstly, it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; belong to the &quot;Sino-Tibetan/Sino-Burmese&quot; languages, Thai is a member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%E2%80%93Kadai_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tai–Kadai&lt;/a&gt; language family and it is not related to Chinese, although Chinese has influenced it a lot.  When the Chinese influence on Thai was at its peak, Thai was written in Chinese characters. But later, in about the 13th century, the Thai people came under the cultural influence of Khmers who were Buddhists. The Thais converted to Khmer-style Buddhism and borrowed their script, having transformed it a bit. All the southern Buddhists like Khmers or Thais use scripts that come from India; those scripts are all descendants of the ancient Indian script Brahmi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit, being one of the languages the sacred Buddhist scriptures were written in, also greatly influenced Thai, which has lots of loan words from Sanskrit. Still, neither borrowed words nor borrowed scripts make languages related. To see the relationships between languages is much harder than noticing similarities in scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T16:56:03.947" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T16:56:03.947" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="21559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21546" CreationDate="2017-04-06T19:30:39.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;found one research in English &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sosyalarastirmalar.com/cilt7/sayi32_pdf/1dil_edebiyat/tokat_feyza.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sosyalarastirmalar.com/cilt7/sayi32_pdf/1dil_edebiyat/tokat_feyza.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;according to the research, below are some words that are similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;castration aḫta /M. aḳda&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;golden     altun/altan&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;red        al&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;sibling    anda&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;pure       arig&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;profit     asig&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;eat        asa&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;leopard    bars&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;hero       batur&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;present    belek&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;source     bulag&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;group      buluk&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;spear      cida&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;flower     cecek&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;wise       cecen&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;face       ciray&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;secret     dalda&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;iron       temur&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;equil      deng&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;early      erden&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;knowledge  erdem&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;speak      keleci&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;braid      kekul&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;whole      lab&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;bread      manto&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;thousand   min&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;grow       os&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;beard      sahal&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;blind      sokur&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;absorb     soru&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;plate      tabag&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;land       tala&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;hell       tamu&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;chattels   tavar&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;earth      tobarak&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;net        tor&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;wedding    toy&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;law        toru&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;water      usu&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;reproduce  uru&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;big        reke&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also found another paper that list lots of words for references&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/corff/im/Sprache/hugjilt.unx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/corff/im/Sprache/hugjilt.unx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15612" LastEditorUserId="15612" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T20:37:42.960" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T20:37:42.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21561" CreationDate="2017-04-06T20:35:51.157" Score="4" ViewCount="2940" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious, why does &quot;vacuum&quot; have two &quot;u's?&quot; I am aware that it is a Latin-derived-Word, so therefore it was probably pronounced [wakwum], logically. Is this correct? I can understand us English speakers maintaining the original spelling, and then pronouncing it as any of: [vacym~vakym~vacjum~vakjum~vacjʌm], because of our willingness to preserve the original spelling*, but why do other languages maintain the the two &quot;u's&quot; also? Or, because I am unaware of Latin spelling, was it pronounced: [wakuːm] or potentially [wakwuːm].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*for instance, how words that maintained &quot;-tjon (-tion)&quot; like &quot;Nation.&quot; We opted to continue to spell them &quot;natjon~nation&quot; for preservation of the original spelling, and keep saying [naˑsjon~nasjon], rather than spelling it &quot;nacion,&quot; as some languages opted, to preserve the hint of the words' latin origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T20:45:13.213" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T22:42:20.737" Title="Why does &quot;Vacuum&quot; have two &quot;u's,&quot; and how is it pronounced?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21560" CreationDate="2017-04-06T21:04:13.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin &lt;em&gt;vacuum&lt;/em&gt; is the nominative neuter singular form of the adjective &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vacuus#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;vacuus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'empty'. Both words had and still have three syllables each, that is, both Us are pronounced as separate vowels, and yes, both words have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hiatus&lt;/a&gt;. That is why the transcription of &lt;em&gt;vacuum&lt;/em&gt; in Classical Latin is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vacuum /ˈwa.ku.um/, [ˈwa.kʊ.ʊm]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why there are two Us is that the word is formed from the verb &lt;em&gt;vacō&lt;/em&gt; (“I am empty, void”) +‎ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-uus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-uus&lt;/em&gt; (“adjective-forming suffix”)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T22:42:20.737" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T22:42:20.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="21564" CreationDate="2017-04-07T02:00:03.863" Score="1" ViewCount="1021" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to get a handle on the difference between the concepts of &lt;em&gt;phonological phrase&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;intonational phrase&lt;/em&gt;, as used in contemporary phonological theory. How do phonologists define these two terms and differentiate between them? What would be a clear example of the distinction? Are there agreed-upon criteria for what constitutes a phonological phrase or an intonational phrase? How much currency do these have as terms of art -- that is, regardless of theoretical orientation, if one phonologist talks to another about one of these two things, can it be expected that they will both be talking about the same thing or are there substantial disagreements about definition? Is there a view that these terms are not meaningful or necessary, and if so how common is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T17:51:55.087" Title="How do phonologists use the terms &quot;phonological phrase&quot; and &quot;intonational phrase&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21563" CreationDate="2017-04-07T05:13:44.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sometimes appear that the two concepts are interchangeable in actual usage, but I think that is a consequence of indeterminacy where you have evidence for grouping, but you don't have clear evidence for what level that grouping is. The standard answer is that an Intonational Phrase is a superior level in the prosodic hierarchy, generally composed by one or more Phonological Phrases. See Nespor &amp;amp; Vogel (1986) &lt;em&gt;Prosodic phonology&lt;/em&gt; for the basic theory, and various examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A P-Phrase is composed of some number of P-Words (or, Clitic Groups though that level of analysis has fallen by the wayside). The big question is, what exact rule defines that grouping of &quot;some number&quot;? Analogously, an I-Phrase is composed of some number of P-Phrases (with the same big question about how they are built). P-Phrases seem to built in two main ways, centered around a head word of a syntactic constituent – adding one complements in that phrase, or all complements – &quot;one complement&quot; being the most common option, with &quot;all&quot; being a less-common option. The latter basically reconstructs Xmax; the former might reconstruct X'. However, there are also a lot of quirky options, like &quot;and all following words in the S&quot;. The basic motivation for the PP is finding contrastive phonological behaviors of phrases like A B C, where for instance [B C] interact and A B don't in case the structure is Subject Verb Object (V+O = VP), versus where [A B] interact and B C don't in case the structure is N Adj V (N+Adj = NP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IP is more used in studies of intonational phonetics, and relies on things like &quot;intonational breaks&quot; and the number of intonational contours for its justification. Overall, there isn't much by way of crisp grammatical generalizations involved in grouping sequences of phrases into IPs, instead IP phrasing seems to be quite fluid and pragmatically governed, unlike PPs which more or less reconstruct standard syntactic structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good study that illustrates analysis in terms of these elements is Kanerva's 1990 Stanford dissertation &lt;em&gt;Focus and phrasing in Chicheŵa phonology&lt;/em&gt;. Certain phonological processes involve lexical heads and its modifiers, for instance Pre-H Doubling. (I should point out that Kanerva unfortunately diverges from standard terminology in labeling this the Focus Phrase, since one of the factors governing where this constituent ends is whether the word is focused -- a focused word ends the PP, where it wouldn't if the were s not focused. He has some discussion of FP vs PP at the end of ch. 4 which is, shall we say, inconclusive). Then, the IP is motivated by looking at intonational phenomena, where it is shown that intonational overlays span sequences of PP (FP) phrases, but utterances can have multiple IPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various problems in this model having to do with higher-level syntactic units: for example, nothing reconstructs &quot;S&quot;, or conjunctions of phrasal constituents (NP &amp;amp; NP). The IP can be pressed into service to handle such cases, but there are now alternatives such as allowing recursion in the PP. Since phonologists don't generally deal with intonation, the IP is not much used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/selkirk/pdf/Selkirk%202011%20TSPI.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Selkirk gives a general state of the art account of phrasal relations, with some of her extensions of the original constrained Nespor &amp;amp; Vogel model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as definitions of IP and PP are concerned, there is the fairly unhelpful purely formal statement that IP is immediately dominated by U (utterance) and immediately dominates PP, and PP immediately dominates CG (if there is such a thing) or W. There aren't any particular properties of PP or IP that are specific to that node, so if there is recursion (as is not assumed) then PP and IP are recursive; if rules refer only to Xmin, Xmax and X (neutral as to min or max) then that's a general property of all phrasal nodes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally there were attempts to set out necessary and sufficient conditions for creating PP (little effort was put into IP), basically in order to express the generalization that {X, Y} interact iff X is the head of the phrase that Y is a modifier of, but since that is not the only way in which grouping is defined (just the most frequent, it seems), the &quot;definition&quot; i.e. nature of the rules for building PP and IP are up in the air. The only grouping fact that prosodic theories (still, apparently) insist on is the strict hierarchy of the groupings: e.g. a parsing {[A B] [C } {D] [E F]} would be illegal. I would say that there aren't any clear a priori definitions of IP and PP, instead there are probabilities that a grouping effect would be handled as PP in some conditions (basically, &quot;if the domain looks like syntactic Xmax&quot;) and as IP in some other conditions (mostly having to do with the relevance of focus, variability in size, connection to overlays, and on the syntactic side grouping together a number of Xmax's)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T17:51:55.087" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T17:51:55.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-07T06:55:16.427" Score="0" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have presented a novel application of transformation-based learning&#xA;to the problem of identifying postings in chat-room conversations. &lt;strong&gt;Posting&#xA;act tagging&lt;/strong&gt; aids in the formation of models of social and semantic&#xA;relationships within chat data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the paragrape where i found the word. Is there anyone who can explain it easily?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15638" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T06:55:16.427" Title="What is posting act tagging in transformational learning?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-07T12:31:26.453" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've stumbled onto &quot;The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray&quot; and it's great but I'm almost entirely ignorant about the field of linguistics. I've never come across any of the jargon before (Merge, Parameters etc).  Despite not understanding much of it in any detail whatsoever there's enough of interest which I do understand to keep me ploughing through it, with the intention of re-reading once I'm better prepared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that it describes Chomsky's work on linguistics which is not really shared by most others in the field, but I was wondering what would be a good resource (book(s), papers, websites etc) for the interested layperson to get up to speed on, initially, Chomsky's theories and, more broadly, other contrasting theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user709" LastEditorDisplayName="user709" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T12:36:38.267" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T06:01:20.167" Title="Basic background reading request" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22581" CreationDate="2017-04-07T20:57:36.067" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use Stanford NER tagger from the following link:&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/ner/process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NER tagger&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I output format I have chosen 'slashTags' and entered the following sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; While in France, Christine Lagarde discussed short-term stimulus&#xA; efforts in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I got back: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    While/O in/O France/LOCATION,/O Christine/PERSON Lagarde/PERSON&#xA; discussed/O short-term/O stimulus/O&#xA;    efforts/O in/O a/O recent/O interview/O with/O the/O Wall/O Street/O Journal/O./O&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Location, person and organization tags make sense, but what does &lt;code&gt;O&lt;/code&gt; tag mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T12:12:23.047" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:12:23.047" Title="Stanford NER tagger" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T10:46:39.803" Score="3" ViewCount="3078" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Morphology&lt;/strong&gt; is the component of grammar that builds words out of units of meaning(morphemes) where a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology&lt;/strong&gt; is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any difference between morphology and etymology. Can somebody help me understand difference with examples!&#xA;Note:- Following questions seems duplicate but the intent of the question is different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3562/etymology-and-morphology&quot;&gt;seemingly duplicate question&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15658" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:11.357" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:02:19.047" Title="Morphology vs Etymology" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21568" CreationDate="2017-04-08T11:10:54.577" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology&lt;/em&gt; was the term used for both concepts up to the early 20th century. Then &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;de Saussure postulated&lt;/a&gt; the incompatibility of &lt;strong&gt;diachrony&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;synchrony&lt;/strong&gt; and nothing was ever the same again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology is a study of the history of words' form and/or meaning, and history implies &lt;strong&gt;diachrony&lt;/strong&gt;. Thus, the word &lt;em&gt;lord&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=lord&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;comes from&lt;/a&gt; Old English &lt;em&gt;hlafweard&lt;/em&gt; &quot;one who guards the loaves&quot;. During the centuries the form of this compound word changed (the two parts of the compound merged into a single stem), and also the meaning evolved into something different. The study of such processes is the diachronic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, morphology refers to the word form in &lt;strong&gt;synchrony&lt;/strong&gt;. When we analyse a word into its constitutive parts, such that they are functional within this language and speakers are, possibly, aware of them, we do a synchronic analysis. For example, an average speaker of English &lt;strong&gt;knows&lt;/strong&gt; that &lt;em&gt;landlord&lt;/em&gt; is a compound word built from &lt;em&gt;land&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;lord&lt;/em&gt;, or that &lt;em&gt;lords&lt;/em&gt; is a plural form of &lt;em&gt;lord&lt;/em&gt; built by adding the plural marker -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; to the stem. But no speaker would ever know the diachronic origin of the word &lt;em&gt;lord&lt;/em&gt; from its Old English prototype, without a specialist training in Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saussure's claim is that above mentioned two approaches to the analysis of language cannot be combined together. You can do either one or the other. In other words, you cannot describe the synchronic grammar of a language making reference to some of its preceding diachronic stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="15658" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T14:16:39.193" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T14:16:39.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T14:57:45.327" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told everything from I don't know to four different potential language, including the ancient language of &quot;Syriac&quot;. Any serious assistance is appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/og4uh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/og4uh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15661" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T00:10:58.527" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T01:28:31.210" Title="Can anyone identify the language from this book?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-04-09T06:08:22.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T15:22:39.047" Score="8" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been interested in Historical Linguistics (as a hobby) for quite a while and one of the recent topics that caught my attention was the hypothesis of Kortlandt, Bomhard, and others that Indo-European languages originated through an amalgamation of a pre-Uralic phylum under Ponto-Caucasian influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been able to get to some free resources about this theory, but unfortunately they were not thorough. For this reason, I would like to ask, if somebody knows any, to direct me to an article /pdf, online-book/ that descibes how Indo-Uralists explain the fundamental differences between IE and Uralic phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, how come (according to their theory) pIE had 3 series of plosives with free (probably pitch) accent, while pUralic is much more conservative with only one series of stops and a fixed stress on the root? I know some Uralic languages exhibit consonant graduation, however it is not semantic, so definitely cannot explain the difference between pIE *&lt;em&gt;bʰendʰ-&lt;/em&gt; /bend, bond/ and *&lt;em&gt;pent-&lt;/em&gt; ~ *&lt;em&gt;pont-&lt;/em&gt; /pass, path/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="10568" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T11:31:18.797" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T23:16:03.447" Title="How do proponents of Indo-Uralic explain the major differences between the consonant systems of pIE and pUralic?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21571" CreationDate="2017-04-09T05:46:25.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language is Biblical Hebrew. That text is from Bible, &lt;a href=&quot;https://azbyka.ru/biblia/?Is.7&amp;amp;agil#sel=119:1,119:15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaiah 7:14&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;לָכֵן יִתֵּן אֲדֹנָי הוּא לָכֶם אוֹת; הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה, הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן, וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ עִמָּנוּ אֵל&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the King James version it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I wonder why your Hebrew-speaking friends couldn't identify the language and the text which is one of the most often quoted pieces, the prophecy of the comming of the Messiah, it took me 5 minutes to do that, although I don't know Hebrew.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T01:28:31.210" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T01:28:31.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T16:15:21.850" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Composing this type of poetic meter  was mentioned as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/G502003.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a skill obtained through the first year of education&lt;/a&gt; of filídh (old Irish poets) at foclóc rank. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any reliable online resourses regarding meters and genres of the Old Celtic poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T12:27:34.493" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T12:27:34.493" Title="What was the dían type of old Irish verses?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22582" CreationDate="2017-04-09T20:12:02.857" Score="2" ViewCount="2354" Body="&lt;p&gt;They say nobody exactly knows how Indo-European words were actually pronounced since obviously there was no Sony sound recorder back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are these phonetic symbols that they use to represent Proto-Indo-European words? If they don't know how they are pronounced, what are they writing? We write something we can &quot;read&quot; later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16666" LastEditorUserId="16666" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T04:37:01.920" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T14:44:48.583" Title="Proto-Indo-European phonetic and pronunciation" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-13T09:18:29.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22577" CreationDate="2017-04-09T20:44:41.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very many opinions of the &quot;meaning&quot; of the letters used to represent PIE reconstructions. One approach treats them as algebraic abstractions, where e.g. &lt;em&gt;bh&lt;/em&gt; represents some sound that corresponds to &lt;em&gt;φ&lt;/em&gt; in Greek and &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; in some positions in Latin, and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; in English: there is no claim as to phonetic value. The other approach is that these are approximate hypotheses regarding the most likely pronunciation, thus reconstructed &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; is probably pronounced [m], and so on. Within the latter approach, there can be competing theories, for example some people reconstruct [d] where other people reconstruct [t'], that is there are competing ideas of what the substance of the proto-phonemes are. The strength of the argument for particular phonetic reconstructions varies, so while &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; is fairly uncontroversial (the reflexes are [n]), &lt;em&gt;gʷʰ&lt;/em&gt; depends on sophisticated argumentation, since no language actually directly attests [gʷʰ]. The so-called laryngeals are a particular mystery, since they are preserved in no living though do show up in Hittite (where we don't really know for sure how things were pronounced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reconstruction of phonetic values is based on overlapping analogies and estimations of phonetic likelihood. For example, &lt;em&gt;gʷʰ&lt;/em&gt; (a voiced aspirate labialized velar) is justified by the fact that that sound behaves like other voiced aspirates (is voiced in Germanic and Armenian, not devoiced), and acts like the other labialized velars (&lt;em&gt;kʷ, gʷ&lt;/em&gt;) which are better preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the letters represent hypotheses as to pronunciations, though with a certain limit on ability to reconstruct exact phonetics. I don't think there is much hope for reconstructing a very exact phonetic value of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, in light of the very many phonetic kinds of rhotics that exist, and even is one of the laryngeals is &quot;ħ&quot;, there are quite a number of phonetic types of &lt;em&gt;ħ&lt;/em&gt; in the world's languages, so some questions are probably unresolvable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T20:44:41.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22577" CreationDate="2017-04-09T22:26:10.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letters used to represent reconstructed proto-Indo-European words are like the symbols used in algebra. They are conventional symbols for unknown entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T22:26:10.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21568" CreationDate="2017-04-10T12:02:19.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's give an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be aware that all kinds of political scandals (especially in the US, like Iran-Contra-gate) are nowadays given names ending in -gate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a morphological point of view, -gate is is a suffix denoting &quot;scandal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an etymological point of view, -&quot;gate&quot; is derived from the common English word &lt;em&gt;gate&lt;/em&gt; (meaning, of course &quot;gate&quot;) that is related to other Germanic words like Icelandic &lt;em&gt;gat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hole&quot; and that has outer-Germanic relations as well. It has acquired the meaning scandal rather recently due to the Watergate scandal in 1972 (that got its name from a place name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, that etymology takes much more dimensions of explanation into account: Historical stages of the language, relations to other languages. Morphology is just a description of the present stage of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:02:19.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21567" CreationDate="2017-04-10T12:11:02.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an inline (choosen with slashTags) format, the &lt;code&gt;/0&lt;/code&gt; tag is necessary to denote everything that is not a named entity. You may find this superfluous on first sight, but when there are more layers of tagging, zero tags become essential for the interpretation of the corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Here is a link to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/resource/227/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford NER tutorial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T12:11:02.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22577" CreationDate="2017-04-10T14:44:48.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that the point of those reconstructed phonemes is that they &quot;oppose&quot; each other. I.e. a string of reconstructed phonemes uniquely (more-less) identifies a word, say, &lt;em&gt;domos&lt;/em&gt; in this exact configuration means &quot;building (something which was built)&quot;, as opposed, to, say, &lt;em&gt;tomos&lt;/em&gt; which would mean &quot;something which was cut in pieces&quot;. We know for sure that &lt;em&gt;tomos&lt;/em&gt; is different from &lt;em&gt;domos&lt;/em&gt; because their sequences of phonemes differ. We don't know how it was pronounced exactly, the real pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;domos&lt;/em&gt; could as well be something like &quot;tamash&quot;, we'll probably never know. But we know for sure that those were different words with different sets of sounds, and they had different reflexes (continuations) in daughter languages. We don't know the exact pronunciation but we still have to settle on some way to represent them symbolically (how do we tell them one from another otherwise?), so we settle on the most logically likely variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T14:44:48.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3725" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:08:30.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To beging with, English word &lt;em&gt;pledge&lt;/em&gt; is a loanword from Old French (attested in English since 14th c.), see &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=pledge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the French word is itself a Germanic loanword, coming from a West Germanic *&lt;em&gt;plegan&lt;/em&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/dmf/PLEIGE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The natural outcome of this West Germanic root in English is &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (this semantic change is less surprising if you remember that when you make a &lt;strong&gt;pledge&lt;/strong&gt; you effectively get in the &lt;strong&gt;game&lt;/strong&gt;). The connection of this West Germanic stem to the IE root *&lt;em&gt;dhl̥gh-&lt;/em&gt; ‘debt’ (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) is only an &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; hypothesis going against the general correspondences (German /p/ goes back to IE /b/, not /dh/). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pokorny's &lt;em&gt;IE Etymological Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; does not mention any German continuant of this root (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Fie%2Fpokorny&amp;amp;text_number=%20419&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). And even within the Germanic group it seems limited to the West subgroup, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/pflegen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the etymon of English &lt;em&gt;pledge&lt;/em&gt; must be considered unknown (cf. Orel's &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Germanic Etymology&lt;/em&gt;, p. 292).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:08:30.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22657" CreationDate="2017-04-10T19:59:09.250" Score="0" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the language itself is whimsical, its use is widespread and evolving.  There is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=John_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lolcat translation of the bible&lt;/a&gt;, Oxford University Press has even &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/12/lolcat-generator/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lightheartedly posted a lolcat generator&lt;/a&gt; on the Oxford Dictionary site and there are numerous lolcat translations sites on the web. Lolcat speak has even been used as the basis of a computer language, one form of which is apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turing complete&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in what the categorization of this language might be in the context of Linguistics, and other relevant information, including if it has been studied seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context: I am asking about a silly subject on Linguistics because I have an interest in how comedy is constructed.  This may involve intentional fallacies, inappropriate responses, random or calculatedly non-standard constructions, forms and usages, multiple meanings, and even vectors in the sense of leading up to an expected conclusion, then reversing.  (Exemplars range from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_Quickly#Character_and_role&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mistress Quickly&lt;/a&gt; to Rickles, and more recently, lolcats and &lt;a href=&quot;http://trailerpark.wikia.com/wiki/Rickyisms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ricky&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest in this language is three-fold. (1) &quot;Cuteness&quot; has a utility function, is certainly a strategy, and probably an adaptation; (2) Formation and evolution of this language is relevant and interesting; (3) I suspect it might be a useful example to convey basic linguistics concepts to kids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14981" LastEditorUserId="14981" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T01:54:41.550" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T01:54:41.550" Title="Is &quot;lolcat speak&quot; a constructed language?" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-04-17T22:02:30.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T07:04:00.320" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use the corpora of webtext to train n-gram model in NLTK.And i use katz back-off smoothing to solve 0 count-problem.But one problem is:while the smoothing used in based-on characters language model,r* (computed good-turning) &gt;r(original count),as a result the counting coefficient alapa&amp;lt;0.what's the problem?&#xA;And that problem doesn't come up in based in word language model.&#xA;i need your help ,thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16675" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T07:04:00.320" Title="n-gram language model smoothing" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-20T08:35:09.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19066" CreationDate="2017-04-11T07:09:31.047" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;you can use Kullback–Leibler divergence.the paper Entropy-based Pruning of Backoff Language Models may can help you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16675" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T07:09:31.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19279" CreationDate="2017-04-11T11:39:21.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best answer was provided on a similar question on 'Cross-Validated',recommending to use the word2vec algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I obtained great results by fitting the model on a very large dataset of financial tweets and specialized financial-newspapers articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Link to the answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/228291/financial-slang-and-nlp-for-sentiment-analysis&quot;&gt;https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/228291/financial-slang-and-nlp-for-sentiment-analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And for the curious ones, here's a great video explaining word2vect, from the not less great CS224D stanford class on machine-learning applied to NLP: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRqn8t1hLxs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRqn8t1hLxs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:00.997" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T11:39:21.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22591" CreationDate="2017-04-11T15:02:32.093" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a relatively small language corpus (ca. 250000 tokens). There are two possible stems for a verb in the language: active and passive. Some of the verbs in the language occur only in passive stems (like deponent verbs in Latin, for example). There is also a number of verbs, of which there are only a few instances in the corpus. These instances happen to display passive forms. I would like to evaluate these passive-only verbs and to select real deponents out of them (e.g. if a verb has 0 active forms and 16 passive, then it is more likely to be a deponent, contrary to the verb which has, for example, 0 active forms and 2 passive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I have already done:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;1) I gathered a small number of verbs which mostly have passive forms (more than 75%). Selecting verbs where the forms are 50-50 would lead to a lot of false positive results. The data looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;VERB    N_ACTIVE N_PASSIVE PERCENTAGE_PASSIVE&#xA;Verb_1  3        16        0.84&#xA;Verb_2  2        20        0.9&#xA;....&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Then I took the weighted average of this group. It turned out to be approximately 92%.&#xA;3) Then I assumed that the occurences of a verb were independent of each other, so having met n passive forms for a verb in my corpus I can assume that the probability of this is 0.92 ^ n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I am not sure how I would test the significance of the difference between 0.92 ^ n for a given verb and the obtained average. I tried applying t-test, but it provides weird results, and I think that it is not best suited for this kind of study. I would be grateful if anyone could point the direction in which I should be thinking/reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16677" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T15:38:35.930" Title="Classifying the verbs in a small corpus" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22590" CreationDate="2017-04-11T15:33:11.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume these are your hypotheses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H0: The verb is passive 92% of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H1: The verb is passive 100% of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't apply a t-test in this case; there's no t-statistic that can be generated. (Typically, when we apply a t-test, it's when we have some point estimate of a variable assumed normal minus the mean under the null hypothesis divided by the standard error, for example in the two-sample t-test or when we test hypothesis about simple linear regression.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the p-value is simply 0.92^n, since the p-value is the probability that you get the data you have given the null hypothesis (which, in this case, is that the verb is passive 92% pf the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a verb with two passive forms, the p-value is 0.92^2 = 0.8464, obviously insignificant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a verb with sixteen passive forms, the p-value is 0.92^16 = 0.26339, still not significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At alpha = 0.05, to conclude that a form is deponent, you need log 0.05 / log 0.92, or approximately 36 passive forms; at alpha = 0.1, you need 28.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T15:38:35.930" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T15:38:35.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21566" CreationDate="2017-04-11T17:58:22.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For someone who's mostly ignorant of the study of linguistics, I think two good starter books are &lt;em&gt;The Language Instinct&lt;/em&gt; (by Steve Pinker), and &lt;em&gt;Foundations of Language&lt;/em&gt; (by Ray Jackendoff). Both are people who started more or less in Chomskyan tradition, and branched on in slighly divergent ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those books are good overviews of the types of questions that linguistics asks and some of the types of phenomena it seeks to explain/account for. Unfortunately, both completely forego sociolinguistics, but I don't know offhand what a good lay introduction to that might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T17:58:22.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22594" CreationDate="2017-04-11T19:27:24.783" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to see if there are any free-to-use corpora in ASL (any domain is fine), transcribed so a computer can use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in doing some analysis on ASL syntax, morphology etc. But I have not found anything yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you know any computer-readable corpora  for other sign languages, I'd be interested in that as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T19:54:15.290" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T19:54:15.290" Title="Are there any computer readable corpora for ASL?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22593" CreationDate="2017-04-11T19:52:46.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply googling &quot;ASL corpus&quot; gives several results:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ASL:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/ncslgr-for-download/download-info.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Center for Sign Language and Gesture Resources (NCSLGR) Corpus&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://latlab.ist.rit.edu/corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASL Motion-Caputure Corpus&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sign languages:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bslcorpusproject.org/cava/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CAVA (British Sign Language Corpus)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ru.nl/corpusngtuk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.auslan.org.au/about/corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auslan Corpus (Australian Sign Language)&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/dgs-korpus/index.php/sl-corpora.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overview of corpora from different sign languages&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T19:52:46.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22596" CreationDate="2017-04-11T21:23:29.660" Score="2" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is an interesting and incestuous mangling of stuff. I sometimes think about &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; and it is a pretty interesting letter with much mystery and intrigue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In French, &lt;em&gt;oui&lt;/em&gt; begins with a &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; sound, yet the word contains no consonant. So firstly: how can &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; be a consonant? Its formation in the mouth is more like that of a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From Latin roots, there are words with double-&lt;code&gt;U&lt;/code&gt;s: &lt;code&gt;vacuum&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;continuum&lt;/code&gt;, etc. Yet, these are distinct from the &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;code&gt;vacwm&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;continwm&lt;/code&gt; are definitely not a thing. To this point, doubling other vowels (e.g. &lt;code&gt;a --&amp;gt; aa&lt;/code&gt;does not generally speaking make them into consonants.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In German, the &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; is more like our &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt;, and is indeed has a consonant sound to it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When and how did &lt;code&gt;UU&lt;/code&gt; become a &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are &lt;code&gt;U&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;UU&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; such a collective and cross-bred mess in English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do we not use &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; as a literal double-&lt;code&gt;U&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a typographic standpoint, why has the &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; been rendered as two &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;s and not two &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt;s?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16680" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T15:10:23.980" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T15:10:23.980" Title="What's up with the letter W?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22595" CreationDate="2017-04-11T22:18:27.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;W&quot; developed as a standard, distinct letter by about the 17th century, taking its sweet time getting there. It is the result of standardizing a ligature of &quot;vv&quot;, ramming the letters together. Bear in mind that the Latin alphabet did not distinguish &quot;u&quot; and &quot;v&quot; as one can see from inspecting Latin inscriptions (modern publications do, however, generously reconstruct the vowel vs. consonant values for you). The practice of using &quot;uu/vv&quot; to represent &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; in older Germanic languages such as Old English developed because of differences in the values of consonants in Latin vs. Germanic – Latin at the relevant stage (8th c or so) did not have [w], instead it had [β], so some convention was needed to represent this novel sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyw.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; gives samples of written &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;, and you can compare that to &lt;em&gt;v,u&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; – there is a striking range of variation in the appearance of &quot;w&quot; (also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyw2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;). A design feature of Gothic script (Blackletter), which was the dominant typeface of the relevant period, emphasizes angular strokes over curves, which rules against &quot;uu&quot; in favor of &quot;vv&quot; (given that &quot;u&quot; and &quot;v&quot; are basically the same letter, historically speaking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differentiation of the Latin labial voicoid into &quot;v&quot; and &quot;u&quot; was basically stylistic: &quot;v&quot; initially, &quot;u&quot; otherwise, and they were not used distinctly until 1386.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T22:18:27.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22595" CreationDate="2017-04-11T22:25:07.660" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't take spelling too seriously, it's often conventional and arbitrary. Language is primarily a spoken thing rather than a string of written letters. Don't confuse sounds (phonemes) with their written symbols. Letters and phonemes have their own separate lives. With this proviso, I can try to answer some of your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; be a consonant? Its formation in the mouth is more like that of a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, the vowel vs. consonant distinction is a matter of degree, not of type. Some sounds are in the middle. Then, each language decides which sounds can function as syllabic nuclei (and are, therefore, vowels) and which cannot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the French word &lt;em&gt;oui&lt;/em&gt; effectively &lt;strong&gt;there is&lt;/strong&gt; a consonant in the onset position, regardless the fact it is spelled as &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you call &quot;formation in the mouth&quot; is not the first thing to see: the very similarity is in the realm of Acoustics. Indeed, [w] is almost undistinguishable from the vowel [u] on a phonospectrogram, the only difference being the duration (the vowel lasts longer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In German, the W is more like our V, and is indeed has a consonant sound to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German spelling does not affect English spelling. In general, spelling is often more conservative than the spoken language. In English we still write some sounds that were pronounced around 6 centuries ago, and did completely disappear since then. In German they use W for [v], but V for [f], for similar historical reasons, mixed to arbitrary conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why are U, UU, V, W such a collective and cross-bred mess in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English orthography is a mess, period. But what you mention is not necessarily a mess. Can you provide examples of [w] or [u] spelled with V? Some confusion regards just the sound [w] which is spelled either W or U, on historical principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T22:48:32.620" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T22:48:32.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-12T05:56:32.720" Score="0" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if this question is too simple/repetitive/... as I'm not familiar with technical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a good reference that's explained the changes in sounds in Indo-European daughter languages. For example 'P', 'V' and 'F' have interchangeably been used in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what other sounds and in which languages this changes has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16666" LastEditorUserId="16666" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T06:27:53.350" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T06:47:12.617" Title="changes in sounds in Indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22598" CreationDate="2017-04-12T06:47:12.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always look into this one &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199296685&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mallory, J.P. and Adams, D.Q., 2006. The oxford introduction to proto-indo-european and the proto-indo-european world. Oxford University Press on Demand.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page &lt;strong&gt;464&lt;/strong&gt; there is a table with the sound correspondences in different major IE-language groups. There is a digital copy of that table (+ an addenda) here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com/Tools/PIEPhonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basic sound correspondences between PIE and the major IE groups&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T06:47:12.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22605" CreationDate="2017-04-12T12:43:03.657" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Royal Inscriptions of Assyria sometimes there are half brackets around phrases. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LwF43.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LwF43.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this excerpt from the online version of RIM we see raised half brackets around &quot;ri-ik-DI-DINGIR&quot; in the first line, around the &quot;EN&quot; in the second line, and around &quot;sur&quot; in the third line. The same kind of notation is found in the printed version. What does this notation mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What book describes these notations? I have read the paper volumes of RIM and they do not explain the notation in the book. It seems kind of strange that RIM should use a notation and not explain it. Is there a particular volume of RIM that explains how they use notation? (Note that in the preface to the books it says that &quot;Further technical details of the system of transcription is given in the Editorial Manual&quot;, but nowhere can I find this so-called 'editorial manual'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T14:09:29.913" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T22:10:41.230" Title="What do half brackets mean in Akkadian transcriptions?" Tags="&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22603" CreationDate="2017-04-12T12:43:59.927" Score="14" ViewCount="2961" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, the Greek word &lt;em&gt;ναι&lt;/em&gt; comes from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;ναί&lt;/em&gt;, which is a variation of &lt;em&gt;νή&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;, which means &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can a word have the opposite meaning to its origin? Or was Wiktionary wrong here, and this word actually comes from another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15078" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T19:37:25.657" Title="Why does Greek &quot;ναι&quot; mean &quot;yes&quot; while it comes from a PIE root meaning &quot;no&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22601" CreationDate="2017-04-12T17:45:27.440" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lat. nē 'really, true' and Tocharian B nai 'indeed, surely' seem to be the IE-parallels. The IE demonstrative *(h1e-)no- 'he there, that one' seems to be the root according to Beekes (with a questionmark though) and Babiniotis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T19:37:25.657" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T19:37:25.657" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22600" CreationDate="2017-04-12T22:10:41.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full brackets mean that these signs have been restored by the editor; the tablet is broken and nothing is visible at this point. The half-brackets mean that the enclosed signs are partially damaged, but at least partially legible. This is the standard convention in Assyriology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T22:10:41.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22609" CreationDate="2017-04-13T14:20:38.433" Score="4" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question comes from questions in japanese SE. Keiyōshi 形容詞 are translated as adjectives. Meishi 名詞 are translated as nouns. But are they really the same kind of words that we mean with nouns, adjectives, etc. in English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already found 3 examples that arises a lot of doubts in me if they are the same thing. &#xA;The first is a japanese word that I can't remember right now but that I've seen used as a noun, adjective or verb. May be there are words like these in English or Spanish, but I'm not sure if they are the same. For example the word paddle can be a verb, a noun or an adjective in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is japanese words that they see as a noun and that we see as adjectives. The word &quot;next&quot; for japaneses is a clear noun. They know that it can be used as an adjective, but when giving an example of when it is used as a noun (what it really is according to japanese), I got this &quot;when is the next?&quot; that is a sentence that could come in a conversation between 2 persons about events , and one of them ask the other &quot;when is the next (event)?&quot; . wouldnt it be for english speakers, still an adjective because it modifies an implicit noun (event)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the third is the word &quot;suki&quot; and similar words, that they see as a verb and it's translated as &quot;to like&quot; but it is used next to the verb desu (to be) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, are what we translate as adjectives, verbs, etc, from other non indoeuropean languages, really what we understand as verbs, adjectives, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T19:57:38.627" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T22:20:31.057" Title="are what we translate as &quot;adjectives&quot;, &quot;nouns&quot;, etc, the same kind of words in no indo-european languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21415" CreationDate="2017-04-13T18:46:35.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sort of behavior certainly occurs in some languages. Here's an example from Meskwaki where a relative clause is interspersed with the matrix clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iiniyeeka&lt;/strong&gt; [peeminehkawaatshiki &lt;strong&gt;ashaahaki&lt;/strong&gt; ihkweewani]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those.abs     chase 3p-3'/part.3p Sioux.pl  woman.obv&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those who they chased her the Sioux the woman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Those Sioux who were chasing the woman&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The head of the relative clause is the noun &lt;em&gt;Sioux&lt;/em&gt;, but it appears internal to the relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16699" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T18:46:35.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22607" CreationDate="2017-04-13T20:18:57.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the most natural case that languages have word categories that do not behave precisely the way that they do in the classical understanding of the terms motivated by IE. Given the huge variety of languages across the world, it would be extremely surprising if every language had their nouns, adjectives, etc. behave precisely the same way as English does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; an individual language there will be several clearly distinguishable categories, where ascribing properties such as &quot;adjectival&quot; and &quot;nominal&quot; is indeed not too unjustified, because such a categorization accounts for how different jobs are distributed across categories in a language. Every natural language will have some way of expressing events, entities, properties, etc., and every language will use a minimum of different categories for these functions. Whether this distribution is precisely the same as in a prototypical IE language (if there is such a thing as a &quot;prototypical IE language&quot;) is questionable, but most primitive notions like &quot;verb-like&quot; or &quot;noun-like&quot; are something that every language exhibits.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even though the resulting pattern might be in some way &quot;shifted&quot; with regard to the precise nature of the individual components as compared to how we understand them &lt;em&gt;in English&lt;/em&gt; (because linguistic terminology is hardly ever language-independent), in a more liberal understanding of these classification devices, Japanese &quot;adjective&quot; and &quot;nouns&quot; do fulfill the roles as we understand them in an abstract sense, i.e. w.r.t. how grammatical functions are realized by different word categories within a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="23653" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T22:20:31.057" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T22:20:31.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22613" CreationDate="2017-04-14T10:35:07.957" Score="8" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: Norwegian and Danish are very close. If for some reason, Norwegian and Danish people live together in the same place, after a certain time, they'll speak the same language, will they?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow-up question: Can two far languages be merged? What are the conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15078" LastEditorUserId="2619" LastEditDate="2017-04-15T11:57:34.190" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T12:01:33.773" Title="Can two close languages be merged?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22610" CreationDate="2017-04-14T15:10:04.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether Norwegians and Danes living in the same place would end up speaking 1 vs. 2 languages depends on the extent to which they remain culturally Norwegians vs. Danes, or simply generalized Scandinavians. Language is one of the most volatile distinguishing cultural features, as witnessed in North America by the loss of indigenous languages where other cultural practices are more robust, also in Scandinavia among the speakers of the southern Saami languages (Pite, Ume, South Saami) where the languages are dying out but cultural distinctness survives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is typically not really a merger, rather speakers of one language shift to using the other language (the dominant language, however that is culturally determined). The &quot;abandoned&quot; language will probably leave some traces. As an example, the Kerewe language was introduced to Kerewe Island about 500 years ago, via immigrants from across Lake Victoria who established a centralized kingdom on the island. The number of immigrants was pretty small, and they had a substantial impact due to the new technology of centralized government. The result was that most people adopted that language: but the language that it (partially) displaced, Jita, had a number of influences on Kerewe, so that one might say Kerewe is a version of Haya-Zinza with 10% influence from Jita – not exactly a &quot;merger&quot;. Similar (historically less-understood) language shifts affected the blending of the Pare and Shambaa where the tribe meet in the Gonja area: the dialect of Pare spoken there is substantially influenced by Shambaa, indicating that there was some interpenetration of the people. Again, the language is fundamentally Pare, with about 10% influence from Shambaa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something stronger than &quot;subtle influences&quot; may be found in creole languages, which arise in trade contexts where many cultures meet (esp. for trade purposes) and lacking a common language, a rudimentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pidgin&lt;/a&gt; language develops (not a language learned by children), and then this may further develop onto a full-blown language. This process involves boiling a language down to just basic vocabulary and getting rid of complicated grammar. Pidginization especially involves unrelated languages, whereas a pidgin would not develop via Kerewe-Jita contact, since the languages are similar enough that it's easy to become bilingual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T15:10:04.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22610" CreationDate="2017-04-14T16:44:26.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A pidgin /ˈpɪdʒᵻn/, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified&#xA;  means of communication that develops between two or more groups that&#xA;  do not have a language in common: typically, a mixture of simplified&#xA;  languages or a simplified primary language with other languages'&#xA;  elements included. It is most commonly employed in situations such as&#xA;  trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the&#xA;  language of the country in which they reside &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the most interesting part,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Linguists sometimes posit that pidgins can become creole languages&#xA;  when a generation of children learn a pidgin as their first&#xA;  language,[11] a process that regularizes speaker-dependent variation&#xA;  in grammar. Creoles can then replace the existing mix of languages to&#xA;  become the native language of a community&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastEditorUserId="13957" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T16:57:03.480" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T16:57:03.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21163" CreationDate="2017-04-14T16:54:19.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.almaany.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;المعاني&lt;/a&gt; is such a site. Go directly to the link in the menu labelled تركي if you want to include definitions in Turkish; انجليزي for English. Unfortunately, not all of the definitions include thorough example sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://context.reverso.net/translation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reverso&lt;/a&gt; is not very useful for esoteric words and phrases, but common vocabulary is shown with a plethora of examples in both Arabic and your preferred language (Turkish is not supported but English is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16702" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T16:54:19.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22616" CreationDate="2017-04-14T17:15:07.197" Score="9" ViewCount="1467" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the languages I know, verbal tense, number, gender, etc. is applied after the word stem. Is there any language where verb conjugation morphologically affects the beginning of a word and not the end of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T17:22:33.220" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:33:06.823" Title="Is there any language where verb inflection takes place word-initially?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-14T18:29:55.797" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look into the Bantu languages, such as Swahili. Tense, aspect, and subject agreement are all marked at the beginning of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T18:29:55.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-14T19:51:10.307" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Bantu has been mentioned, I won't mention it again, much. I'll mention Athabaskan, Ket (not Athabaskan but probably related), Semitic, Berber, Coptic, Bongo, Krongo, Nilotic, Nyulnyul, Gooniyandi, Tiwi, Lenakel, Camsá, Cayuvava, Seri, Nahuatl, Lakota. You can get more examples &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/26A#4/54.98/244.91&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. That said, if you mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; prefixing, with no suffixing at all&quot;, then that may be hard to find. The situation in Bantu is that tense-aspect-mood-polarity and sometimes subject number are marked suffixally, and tense-aspect-mood-polarity and subject are more marked (more distinctions are made) prefixally. In Semitic, subject can be marked in part prefixally (in the imperfective), but also suffixally. Athabaskan languages are mostly prefixing, but I don't think any are completely devoid of suffixes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T19:51:10.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T21:37:43.063" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a newbie to Named Entity Recognition (NER). In one of my projects, for the purpose of evaluating I calculated the precision, recall and f-measure values of NER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any recognized standard threshold values for precision, recall and f-measure of NER from which we can evaluate how good the NER service is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16707" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T21:37:43.063" Title="Evaluation of named entity recognition" Tags="&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-15T08:07:20.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Slavic languages, verbs have perfective/imperfective aspects, a core grammatical feature, and it's usually done via prefixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Russian: &lt;em&gt;delat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to do&quot;, &lt;em&gt;sdelat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to have done&quot;; &lt;em&gt;kormit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to feed&quot;, &lt;em&gt;pokormit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to have fed&quot;; &lt;em&gt;gotovit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cook&quot;, &lt;em&gt;prigotovit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to have cooked&quot;. Basically almost every verb comes in such pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T08:07:20.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-15T09:24:19.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew has verb inflections at the beginning, middle, and ends of verbs. For a simple example, first person simple future tense prepends an aleph at the beginning of the verb, while past tense has a suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more complex examples -- the three letter root &quot;fold&quot; gets a prefix and becomes the four letter root &quot;duplicate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verb_conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has many more detailed examples.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16713" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T13:13:59.193" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T13:13:59.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-15T09:46:52.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of languages which have polypersonal verbal inflexions at the beginning of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swahili. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ainu.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nahuatl.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the languages I know, verbal tense, number, gender, etc. is applied after the word stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, it seems that those features are marked on the verb last, i.e. after everything else has already been added. Whether they get concatenated onto the beginning of the verb or at the end, seems to be dependent on something else. The languages I listed tend to be head-final; maybe that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2017-04-15T09:52:05.607" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T09:52:05.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22640" CreationDate="2017-04-15T12:52:43.297" Score="4" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there words which sounds very similar in different languages, and which are proven not to be the result of cultural exchange? For example, we know most words related to technology comes from English, so that's probably why computer is computadora in Spanish and kompyuta in Japanese. But is there proof that words coming from cultures isolated from each other having very similar sounds? (not counting onomatopoeias which are supposed to imitate how a noise sounds) . If so, can you give me some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T10:03:05.383" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T10:03:05.383" Title="Are there words which sounds very similar in different languages, and which are proven not to be the result of cultural exchange?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22635" CreationDate="2017-04-16T04:47:48.580" Score="0" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rvsan/rv01163.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verse&lt;/a&gt; from RigVeda&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;यदक्रन्दः परथमं जायमान उद्यन समुद्रादुत वा पुरीषात | &#xA;शयेनस्य पक्षा हरिणस्य बाहू उपस्तुत्यं महि जातं ते अर्वन || &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can understand &lt;code&gt;उद्यन समुद्रादुत&lt;/code&gt; (in other versions, its &lt;code&gt;उदयन्त समुद्रादुत&lt;/code&gt;) as meaning '&lt;strong&gt;arisen from the sea&lt;/strong&gt;' but I can't make sense of the ending &lt;code&gt;दुत&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &lt;code&gt;दुत&lt;/code&gt; mean ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it have any relationship with &lt;code&gt;दूत&lt;/code&gt; (messenger) ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16728" LastEditorUserId="16728" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T05:08:42.603" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T07:04:33.903" Title="Is there a difference between 'doot' (दूत) and 'dut' (दुत) in Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-16T13:25:18.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22634" CreationDate="2017-04-16T06:59:07.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before understanding the mantra, we need to break it down into individual words. It is not an easy task to understand the words used in a vedic mantra even after breaking it down into words. If my memory serves me right, the separate words in the first mantra are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;यदक्रन्दः प्रथमम् जायमानः उद्यन् समुद्रात् उत वा पुरीषात्&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there's special sandhi happening between the words &lt;code&gt;उद्यन्&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;समुद्रात्&lt;/code&gt; Through the application of a few Panini rules, the augment &lt;code&gt;त्&lt;/code&gt; appears at the beginning of समुद्रात् There are no two version of the mantra. When sandhi is performed (and it always is while chanting the mantra), the additional &lt;code&gt;त्&lt;/code&gt; is heard. Publishers of the text may sometimes skip the sandhi, causing one to incorrectly presume that there are two versions of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm doubtful whether the first word is a compound or should be be shown as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;यत् अक्रन्दः&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only a commentary on the mantra can resolve this ambiguity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;उत&lt;/code&gt; is an indeclinable (also called &lt;code&gt;अव्ययम्&lt;/code&gt; in sanskrit). It is used in many meanings, one being in the sense of raising a question. Hence there's no possibility of the word &lt;code&gt;दूत&lt;/code&gt; appearing in the mantra. There's some kind of sandhi happening at &lt;code&gt;समुद्रात् उत&lt;/code&gt;- the trailing त् at the end of a word is replaced with a &lt;code&gt;द्&lt;/code&gt; This must've caused the confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Apte's dictionary: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.1:1:3075.apte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.1:1:3075.apte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;उत ind. 1 A particle expressing (a) doubt, uncer- tainty, guess (or);&#xA;  तत्किमयमातपदोषः स्यादुत यथा मे मनसि वर्तते Ś.3; स्थाणुरयमुत पुरुषः G.&#xA;  M. वीरो रसः किमयमित्युत दर्प एषः Veeracharitam. (b) alternative;&#xA;  usually a correla- tive of किं (whether, or); किमिदं गुरुभिरुपदिष्टमुत&#xA;  धर्मशास्त्रेषु पठितमुत मोक्षप्राप्तियुक्तिरियम् K.155; किं येन सृजसि&#xA;  व्यक्तमुत येन बिभर्षि तत् Ku.6.23; the place of उत is also taken by&#xA;  आहो or आहोस्वित्; sometimes आहो, आहोस्वित् or स्वित् are joined to उत.&#xA;  (c) association, connection, (having a cumulative force, 'and',&#xA;  'also'); उत बलवानुताबलः; (d) interrogation; उत दण्डः पतिष्यति; (e)&#xA;  deliberation; (f) intensity; (g) wishing (especially at the beginning&#xA;  of a sentence followed by a potential 'would that'); (h) some- times&#xA;  used as an expletive; (i) oft. used for the sake of emphasis&#xA;  especially at the end of a line after इति or a verb; तदा&#xA;  विद्याद्विवृद्धं सत्त्वमित्युत Bg.14.11; धर्मे नष्टे कुलं&#xA;  कृत्स्नमधर्मो$भिभवत्युत 1.4. -2 With a preceding प्रति = on the&#xA;  contrary, on the other hand; but; सामवादाः सकोपस्य तस्य प्रत्युत&#xA;  दीपकाः Śi.2.55; न केवलं ध्रियते प्रत्युत पर्युपास्यमानस्तिष्ठति Nāg.5.&#xA;  -3 With a preceding किं = how much more or how much less; see किम्. उत, -उत Either-or; एकमेव वरं पुंसामुत राज्यमुताश्रमः G. M. उत वा or&#xA;  else, and; वा-उतवा, उताहोवा पि-वा either-or; -आहो, -आहोस्वित् Used for&#xA;  the sake of emphasis; उताहो हत- वीर्यास्ते बभूवुः पृथिवीक्षितः&#xA;  Rām.7.31.4. शालिहोत्रः किं नु स्याद् उताहोस्विद् राजा नलः.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastEditorUserId="9623" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T07:04:33.903" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T07:04:33.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-16T09:06:00.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Tupi family of languages does person and number agreement with bound verbal prefixes.  Major Tupian languages include Guaraní, spoken in Paraguay; Nheengatu, spoken by a minority of Amazonian Brazilians; a number of endangered native Brazilian languages, and Old Tupi which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratum_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;substrate language&lt;/a&gt; of Brazilian Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Tupi examples follow.  I'll separate the morphemes by hyphens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ixé a-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;endé ere-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;You (sing.) go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a'é o-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;He/she/it/they go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;îandé ia-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We (inclusive) go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;oré oro-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We (exclusive) go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;peẽ pe-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;You (pl.) go&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ixé a-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;endé ere-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;You (sing.) talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a'é o-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;He/she/it/they talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;îandé ia-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We (inclusive) talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;oré oro-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We (exclusive) talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;peẽ pe-nhe’eng&lt;/em&gt; &quot;You (pl.) talk&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the verbal morphology uses both bound prefixes (&lt;em&gt;ta-pe-só&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you may go&quot;) and suffixes (&lt;em&gt;xe-só-reme&lt;/em&gt; &quot;if I go&quot;).  It also features a form of noun incorporation; the direct object, or a pronoun agreeing with it, must be tacked on before the verb as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ixé a-kunumĩ-epîák&lt;/em&gt; I 1s-boy-see = &quot;I see the boy&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ixé kunumĩ a-i-epiâk&lt;/em&gt; I boy 1s-3s-see = &quot;I see the boy&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T09:06:00.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21572" CreationDate="2017-04-16T09:50:19.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you read this article by Kortlandt? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art213e.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art213e.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;In it he explains how he understands the development of I-E stops from Indo-Uralic stops on the basis of stress patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T09:50:19.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22610" CreationDate="2017-04-16T12:01:33.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some examples of language merger in history. Note that such a merger is rarely a &quot;merger of equals&quot; where both languages contribute about the same amount to the resulting merged language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard German is often sloppily described as &quot;Southern German with Northern pronunciation&quot;, it has overtaken the formerly separate Low German language on a large scale (now acting as Dachsprache of Low German) and received its (highly artificial) standard pronunciation and some vocabulary from Low German.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, Modern Estonian is the result of the merger of two formerly independent languages, North and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Estonian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;South Estonian&lt;/a&gt;. Modern standard Estonian also contains a notable number of artificially created words (e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/relv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;revolver&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T12:01:33.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-16T15:34:04.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think False Cognates : &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&lt;/a&gt; might be what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T15:34:04.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-16T15:53:29.050" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Please tell me why you would down vote it in the comments]I am not sure about the technical term for it, but is there a language which could qualify as one with the least paralinguistic features? Where morphology and intonation cover it all? Where one does not need many facial / sound expressions e.g. snort for ignorance and stare for showing irritation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-04-17T09:42:10.853" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T09:42:10.853" Title="Which languages need the least paralinguistic features like facial / sound?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-04-16T16:06:28.877" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so I am a bilingual and can say that, thinking in L1 or L2, at least in my case, depends on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The environment I am thinking in. (home, gas-station, college etc.)&#xA;b) The matter I am thinking on, which largely is L1 except when I can't have the &quot;perfect&quot; description in it. (e.g. German vs English)&#xA;c) The people I am speaking/listening to (thinking in between obviously)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as I am comfortable with both L1 and L2, I can go both ways / code-switch , while thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that chips in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T16:06:28.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-04-16T17:34:17.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These answers deal with the parts of our thoughts that take place in language, and yes, that is largely context dependent, as others have outlined.  That is to say, if you're thinking about best way is to phrase something, or trying to understand a specific sentence you've just heard, then you'll think in the language you're thinking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, it's important to note that cognitive science shows us that most of our thoughts &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; take part in any language at all.  In fact, strictly speaking, thought precedes language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally the only time we think in language at all is is when we are thinking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; language, thinking specifically about talking to people, or for some other reason we are deliberately putting our thoughts into words. Language is essentially a medium to express our thoughts, not the medium in which we think.  So if I'm trying to decide what I'm going to say to my boss when I call up and phone in sick, I'll think about the words in whatever language I'm planning to speak to her.  But, if I'm thinking about what I'm going to do with my sick day, planning what I'm going to have for dinner, thinking about how I feel about a particular person or thing, or remembering something I did the previous day; none of that takes place &quot;in a language&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various studies in cognitive science that bear this out, as well as (less scientific but useful to understanding) observations about day to day life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, after we hear a speech or a lecture, we remember the concepts but rarely the exact wording; these are recorded in a &quot;raw&quot; &quot;language free&quot; format.  That is to say, unless a specific wording of a sentence jumps out at us for its poetic or aesthetic value, our brains don't remember a single individual sentence what we've just heard, and yet we retain the content.  Now that's not to say that we &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; memorise individual sentences word for word; we often choose to do this, and if a specific figure of speech jumps out at us as interesting then we might make a mental note of it word for word; but that doesn't mean we think &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; language any more than remembering the hook of a pop song means that we think in melody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, people who mutually speak more that one language with each other regularly often can't even remember in what language a specific conversation took place, but can remember the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember the specific study, but I once read one where polyglots were given a short piece of text and then asked afterwards to say what it said.  They took the same amount of time to do so regardless of whether they were summarising in the same language or a different language as the original; which showed that they weren't mentally &quot;translating&quot;, just relaying the information they had absorbed, showing that information isn't coded in a specific language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more on this I suggest you look into Steven Pinker, he's got some great freely available lectures on the subject online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastEditorUserId="10201" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T08:20:12.343" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T08:20:12.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22646" CreationDate="2017-04-16T20:39:51.667" Score="2" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;fully&quot; agglutinative I mean a language in which a sentence can be &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; expressed with a single word and a bunch of affixes. I know that in Klingon some complex concepts may be stated with a single word, but usually a proper sentence contains at least a few words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Okay, I got one very good answer on the topic and one down, so I guess I need to rewrite my questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" LastEditorUserId="11096" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T21:45:25.780" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T21:45:25.780" Title="Is there any &quot;fully&quot; agglutinative language (con- or real)?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22645" CreationDate="2017-04-16T21:18:33.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very many such languages. For example, Shona &lt;em&gt;ha-ndi-za-ka-va-on-a&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;I haven't ever seen them&quot; (morpheme breaks included, in case you thought that might be a bare root). Greenlandic &lt;em&gt;Nalunaarasuartaatilioqateeraliorfinnialikkersaatiginialikkersaatilillaranatagoorunarsuarooq&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Once again they tried to build a giant radio station, but it was apparently only on the drawing board&quot;; Imbabura Quechua &lt;em&gt;micurcani&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I ate&quot;; Turkish &lt;em&gt;yedim&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I have eaten&quot;; English &quot;Leave!&quot;. There aren't very many one-word sentences in English. An interesting study would be to compare languages in terms of the number of 1-word sentences actually encountered in texts, since in these languages, even though you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; construct 1-word sentences, typically there is more to a sentence than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, the concept of agglutinativity is actually related to having the possibility of multiple affixes, which combine with significant freedom, independence and regularity. Because of the complexity of person-number-tense-aspect marking in Romance languages, they aren't considered to be &quot;agglutinative&quot; (nor is English), whereas Quechua and Bantu languages allow many affixes to combine, each with some semantic function, and you have few complex dependencies (such as &quot;the 1s subject is &lt;em&gt;-əg&lt;/em&gt; except in the perfective it is &lt;em&gt;-ɬi&lt;/em&gt;). If you define &quot;fully agglutinative&quot; as a language with absolutely no (non-semantic) co-occurrence restrictions, shape irregularities, which also allows free combination of at least 3 affixes, there may be no &lt;em&gt;fully&lt;/em&gt; agglutinative languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T21:18:33.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-17T03:53:32.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will give you a perfect example from Turkish and Japanese.&#xA;Turkish &lt;em&gt;iyi&lt;/em&gt; and Japanese &lt;em&gt;ii&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;いい&lt;/em&gt; are read totally same. And more interestingly both of them have the very same meaning &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt;. If you add Ural-Altaic hyptothesis, one can totally jump to the conclusion those 2 words have something in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know story of the &lt;em&gt;いい&lt;/em&gt; but I can tell about the &lt;em&gt;iyi&lt;/em&gt;. In Istanbul Turkish it is &lt;em&gt;iyi&lt;/em&gt;, but in most of the Anatolian accents it is &lt;em&gt;eyi&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;eyü&lt;/em&gt;. It comes from the old Turkic &lt;em&gt;edgü&lt;/em&gt;-&gt;&lt;em&gt;eḏgü&lt;/em&gt;-&gt;&lt;em&gt;eygü&lt;/em&gt;-&gt;&lt;em&gt;eyü&lt;/em&gt;-&gt;&lt;em&gt;eyi&lt;/em&gt;-&gt;&lt;em&gt;iyi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So actually both words have nothing in common except meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastEditorUserId="14619" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T20:12:06.140" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T20:12:06.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21522" CreationDate="2017-04-17T11:52:33.537" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly this Hebrew case (with verbs of teaching and asking): &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/double-accusative.327943/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/double-accusative.327943/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15606" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T11:52:33.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-17T12:39:53.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are probably thousands of such words.&#xA;Off-hand, I can give tr bardak/ru бардак, iv מטוס/fr matos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice though to get the full list, in any pair (or more) of languages !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T12:39:53.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22653" CreationDate="2017-04-17T13:09:27.367" Score="3" ViewCount="1610" Body="&lt;p&gt;The voiceless velar fricative [x] is present in the English word &lt;em&gt;ye&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and sometimes &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but is often enunciated as [h] or [k] when English speakers pronounce calques or foreign names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is [h] or [k] a more accurate English approximation of the voiceless velar fricative? Would this vary based on the source language? (For example, would the most accurate interpretation of &lt;em&gt;Züri&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; differ from that of, say, &lt;em&gt;Maastri&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:35:31.357" Title="Anglicisation of the voiceless velar fricative [x]" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;velar&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22651" CreationDate="2017-04-17T13:43:13.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[I don't have sufficient reputation to comment; however, since this question is subjective, I'll dare to &quot;answer&quot; it instead.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer to use &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; (since it looks exactly like the Russian equivalent), but this is one of those instances where there simply isn't an English equivalent, and you go with what &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; works best (which is &lt;strong&gt;kh&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;). &lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt; is without a doubt too &quot;soft&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt; is without a doubt too &quot;hard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purpose of your question (as I see it and hear it), [x] is exactly halfway between [h] and [k] and can't be approximated either way. If forced at gunpoint to choose, I would go with [h], bearing in mind whether one would say say &quot;Me-hi-co&quot; or &quot;Me-ki-co&quot; when pronouncing &quot;Mexico&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16702" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T13:43:13.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22651" CreationDate="2017-04-17T16:06:39.767" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither [h] nor [k] is &quot;accurate&quot; as a replacement for [x]: but there are some linguistic issues related to how [x] in a source language word appears in English, when the word is borrowed. The velar fricative is not a robust phoneme of English, but it does robustly exist for some speakers who pronounce the name &lt;em&gt;Bach&lt;/em&gt; as [bax] (etc.). Phonetically it also exists in most performances of /sks/ as in &quot;masks, risks...&quot;; it can even affect intervocalic /k/ as in &quot;baker&quot; where /k/ can lenite to [x]. Therefore one option is simply, pronounce [x] as [x].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word with final [x] generally cannot be borrowed with [h], because English syllables do not end with [h], which only appears foot-initially, therefore &quot;Bach&quot; is not pronounced [bah]. (The word &quot;feh&quot; might be an anomaly, in case anyone actually says [fɛh] rather than [fɛχ] or [fɛ]). You have to look to word-initial position to &quot;neutrally&quot; figure out a preference for [h] vs. [k] for original [x].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source language, especially the circumstances of language contact, may matter. Words coming from Chinese are pronounced with [h] (Shanghai, Hunan, zillions of personal names like &quot;Hu Yaobang&quot;), despite being pronounced with a velar fricative in Mandarin: the reason is that the phoneme is conventionally transcribed with &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, and English speakers picking up such words do not acquire them from Chinese speakers, they acquire them from spelling. Most words from other languages that are pronounced by English speakers are generally not based on live other-language pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish words are the most robust source of [x] input to English, and I can't think of any word from Spanish which normally has [k] for original [x]. To the extent that there might be variation in the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Mexico&lt;/em&gt;, that is probably influenced by the mildly wide-spread knowledge that &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; pronounced [ks] in Spanish, and there is some &lt;em&gt;x ~ j&lt;/em&gt; spelling variation that people know of, so the word is &quot;special&quot; and may be treated as a special case, for some (few) people in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The status of Arabic words is unclear. There is a voiceless back fricative خ which is clasically uvular [χ] but in some Levantine dialects is pronounced [x] (that is, I know of that from some Levantine speakers: it may be more widespread). خ is usually rendered as [k], as in &quot;caliph, Khalil, Khalid&quot;, but again these are not words freshly borrowed into English from the speech of Arabic speakers (&quot;caliph&quot; has been westernized since the 15th century). It would be interesting to see how English speakers attempt to render unknown Arabic words spoken with [x] (not [χ]). Likewise, one can suspect orthographic influence in the rendition of Greek &lt;em&gt;χ&lt;/em&gt; as [k], since it is typically spelled &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T16:06:39.767" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22651" CreationDate="2017-04-17T17:31:49.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the theory that speakers ordinarily hear and aim to pronounce phonemes, if they can interpret the [x] as a /k/ phoneme of English which has been lenited to [x], then they will say /k/.  Using @user6726's example of English &quot;baker&quot;, where some of us customarily lenite a /k/ to [x], then an English speaker will aim to pronounce /bejkr/, and if he lenites the /k/ to [x], this will be phonetically [bejxr]. This gets it more or less right by accident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's possible for a foreign word with /x/ to be misheard as English /k/ and pronounced by a naive English speaker as the allophone [x] (at least sometimes). Whether this path of borrowing is followed depends on some more or less obvious circumstances, including whether the foreign /x/ is in a position where it could be lenited in English (not at the beginning of a word or syllable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T17:31:49.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-17T19:27:04.217" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;If not then who? &#xA;And maybe someone can suggest a good book of history of English linguistics? Can't find myself. &#xA;Thanks!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16739" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T19:27:04.217" Title="Did Chomsky made the first generalization of coordination?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22585" CreationDate="2017-04-17T21:41:06.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There probably can't be a definitive answer to this (somewhat similarly to the false dichotomy of languages v. dialects) because of the way in which lolcat speak arose and is used. Lolcat speak was developed incrementally by a large community of online writers (rather than face-to-face speakers, generally speaking). It is essentially a written language game that has since become a jocular constructed quasi-dialect of English and slowly bled into real-life non-written usage. If you consider George Orwell's Newspeak a &quot;real constructed language&quot; then it's not so much of a stretch to think of lolcat speak as a constructed language either. An opposing point might though be that no-one considers language games such as French Verlan to be constructed languages (and that's actually regularly spoken) so why think of lolcat speak in this way? Then again, Verlan is usually less restricted than lolcat speak in that only one or two words in a sentence might be subject to its rules. As I hinted at the beginning, I think it kind of straddles the border between constructed language and language game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T21:41:06.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22659" CreationDate="2017-04-17T22:08:24.597" Score="7" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish is commonly cited as an example of a language which is, with only one or two quirky exceptions, exclusively suffixing. Cross-linguistically, suffixing is much commoner than prefixing and I have heard that no language is as prefixing to the same degree that Turkish is suffixing. I am aware that there are various languages (e.g. Russian, Swahili, Navajo, Nahuatl, Kuot) that do make relatively extensive use of prefixes but does anyone have any idea which languages are the most prefix-heavy? (is it perhaps one of the aforementioned?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T16:58:49.900" Title="What are some of the most prefixing languages?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22658" CreationDate="2017-04-17T22:31:36.597" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Athabaskan languages would be the &quot;most prefixing&quot;, in (a) being almost or in fact exclusively prefixing and (b) allowing many prefixes (11 positions). Papers on Navaho include &lt;a href=&quot;https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/226113/1/cpiii-115-144.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, as well as J. Kari &lt;em&gt;Navajo Verb Prefix Phonology&lt;/em&gt; and Young &amp;amp; Morgan &lt;em&gt;The Navajo Language&lt;/em&gt;. One can check information from the related language &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ydli.org/biblios/sekbib.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sekani&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems that the language Slavey (K. Rice, &lt;em&gt;A Grammar of Slave&lt;/em&gt;) has over a dozen prefix positions. Another contender is related &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.drangle.com/~james/grammar/tlingit-grammar-outline.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tlingit&lt;/a&gt;, which however has more suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T22:31:36.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T06:18:10.397" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American Sign Language (ASL) a certain kind of anaphora is found by assigning things in the discourse to physical locations around the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you say &quot;my brother's new house&quot; and gesture to a point off to your right, you've now assigned that referent to that location.  Then you can gesture to that location again to use it like a pronoun, referring to your brother's new house without naming it again.  Then you might say &quot;the piano that fell on my car&quot; and gesture to your left, and now you can gesture to that location to talk about the piano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the proper terms for referring to this sort of concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the process of assigning a thing to a location (&lt;em&gt;assignment? reference? indexing?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the thing that is assigned (&lt;em&gt;referent?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the location that refers to the thing (&lt;em&gt;pronoun? anaphor?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the broadly-applicable terms, not ones that might only be used for ASL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T20:15:03.820" Title="What are the terms for assignable anaphora?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T18:51:41.087" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the definition of a ''linear'' grammar. For instance, there is a class of grammars called ``linear indexed grammars'' which is different from plain ''indexed grammars.'' What does ''linear'' refer to, formally speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5465" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T18:51:41.087" Title="What does it mean for a grammar to be linear?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22660" CreationDate="2017-04-18T20:15:03.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compared to speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gesturing to a new location is a &lt;strong&gt;pronoun used in apposition&lt;/strong&gt; to the noun phrase ('the house, here').  This is a form of 'mention' where the multiple possible locations correspond to something analogous to 'gender'.&#xA;('Indexing' seems good as a coined term)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The referent is the '&lt;strong&gt;antecedent&lt;/strong&gt;'. ('the house')&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The gesture to a mentioned location is a &lt;strong&gt;(demonstrative) pronoun&lt;/strong&gt;. ('this')&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T20:15:03.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T00:18:25.797" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Praat after converting stereo sound to mono, the intensity reduced to (-ve) so no sound is produced although the original stereo sound has a max intensity 70 dB !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16752" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T00:18:25.797" Title="Praat: Sound analysis" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-19T10:55:17.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a Facebook group &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/groups/linguisticcoincidences/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic Coincidences &amp;amp; Curiosities&lt;/a&gt; the members of which have been collecting such false cognates for years already. My favourites are the Latin and Malaysian &quot;dua&quot; which means &quot;two&quot; in both languages, there are also &quot;reverse&quot; coincidences like in Polish &quot;tak&quot; means &quot;yes&quot;, and in Indonesian it means &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T10:55:17.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T12:45:45.660" Score="1" ViewCount="4071" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a website(*) that provides word pronunciation guides for a general audience that cannot be expected to know IPA symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be enormously helpful to have a tool where I could paste or highlight ē-thē-ˈō-pē-ə and get back ee-thee-O-pee-uh , for example. (A Chrome extension would be most helpful, or a website, but any tool can be adapted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3378/does-an-ipa-to-english-translator-exist&quot; title=&quot;Does an IPA to &amp;#39;English&amp;#39; translator exist?&quot;&gt;a similar question asked in 2013&lt;/a&gt; but 4 years is a long time on the web; in 2013 the best answer was &quot;learn the IPA&quot; which is not a useful answer for my purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a great many books and web sites out there where pronunciation guides are supplied which give common words as examples of a given phoneme, and then use the 26 letters of the standard English alphabet to provide phonetic pronunciations; that's what I want to emulate.  I'm not trying to bootstrap English for learners, I'm trying to help people who are already fluent in English learn the pronunciation of unfamiliar vocabulary.   To stress the point, &quot;Learn the IPA&quot; is inappropriate for my target user audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of the type of phonetic representation I want to provide is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.netministries.org/resources/resource-pronunciation-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Net Ministries&amp;#39; Biblical name pronunciation guide&quot;&gt;this Biblical name glossary&lt;/a&gt; which gives a simple spelling of the sound of each name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oedilf.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;OEDILF&quot;&gt;OEDILF&lt;/a&gt; -- an audacious attempt to provide a limerick for every word in the English language.  New contributors very welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16713" LastEditorUserId="16713" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T09:31:20.453" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T00:38:47.523" Title="IPA to plain simple English translator" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22673" CreationDate="2017-04-19T12:54:55.457" Score="6" ViewCount="3716" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few words/names in French strongly resemble their English equivalents but with g substituted for w:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Guillaume ~ William&#xA;guêpe ~ wasp&#xA;guerre ~ war&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious as to how this came about. Is there a linguistic, etymological or historical background for this correspondence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16755" LastEditorUserId="16755" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T14:20:16.947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T09:36:11.050" Title="Substitution of w for g between certain words in French and English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22670" CreationDate="2017-04-19T13:11:42.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a library called Unidecode that translates any unicode (that includes IPA) to ascii. It is available in python and .net as far as I know. From what I see, you are using php in that site. I have not tried it, but there is a PHP-version of it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/alexei/silverstripe-unidecode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/alexei/silverstripe-unidecode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T13:11:42.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22671" CreationDate="2017-04-19T13:25:58.647" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words with &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; reflect the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norman French&lt;/a&gt; pronunciation, those words were borrowed into English early, from the Norman French language. The words with &lt;strong&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt; are from Parisian French, those words were borrowed into English later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T13:25:58.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T16:59:33.660" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the root of the word addiction is &quot;to be enslaved&quot; but what I'm seeing is &quot;addico&quot; &quot;to be devoted&quot;. Is there any truth to &quot;to be enslaved&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16756" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T16:59:33.660" Title="Origin of the word addiction" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15334" CreationDate="2017-04-19T22:42:05.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in Russian, we never call it &quot;double negation&quot; (at least I never heard it), although Russian is often listed in English-language sources as an example of a language with &quot;double negation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, we don't use the same particles. We apply &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; to verbs and &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; to everything else. In our tradition, &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; is called an &quot;intensifier&quot; (similar to how you add &quot;any&quot; in English for intensification: &quot;i don't know ANY ...&quot;). Etymologically, it stems from &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, which can be roughly translated as &quot;not also&quot;. Example: &quot;I don't know anyone&quot; = &lt;em&gt;ne znaju nikogo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, in fact, we put two &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; together (no &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;!), we have the same rule as in English, i.e. NO+NO=YES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ne mogu ne znat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I cannot not know&quot; =&gt; &quot;I DO know&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of that, I think &quot;double negation&quot; is a misnomer for Russian (maybe for Bulgarian, too?), because &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; are different particles with different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastEditorUserId="16671" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T22:58:00.233" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T22:58:00.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22678" CreationDate="2017-04-19T23:36:37.007" Score="0" ViewCount="7501" Body="&lt;p&gt;i've heard the Turkish president's name pronounced in about 100 ways.  what's the right way, and how does that connect with the latin letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s. this is not a duplicate.  I did not ask about g in Turkish in some particular situation, I asked about a specific word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastEditorUserId="12961" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T21:15:04.763" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:15:04.763" Title="why is erdogan pronounced erdowan?" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-04-20T07:05:40.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22676" CreationDate="2017-04-19T23:51:30.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name is properly spelled &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erdoğan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, with a &quot;soft g&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;soft g&quot; in Turkish doesn't have its own sound per se; before a consonant (or at the end of the word) it indicates lengthening of the previous vowel, and before a vowel it indicates that the two vowels are separated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the president's name is properly pronounced /ˈeɾdo‿an/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T23:51:30.170" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22676" CreationDate="2017-04-20T06:41:46.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_phonology#CITEREFZimmerOrgun1999&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zimmer &amp;amp; Orgun (1999, p. 155)&lt;/a&gt;, the letter &amp;lt;ğ&gt; has different pronunciation acording to its environment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word-finally and preconsonantally, it lengthens the preceding vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Between front vowels /e, i, ø, y/ it is an approximant, either front-velar [ɰ̟] or palatal [j].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, intervocalic &lt;strong&gt;ğ&lt;/strong&gt; is phonetically zero (deleted).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in the word &lt;strong&gt;Erdoğan&lt;/strong&gt; this &lt;strong&gt;ğ&lt;/strong&gt; is between the back vowels, the pronunciation of this name falls under the third case of the rule, that is it is not pronounced at all, it is just the transition from the rounded [o] to the unrounded [a] that sounds like [w] to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T06:41:46.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22671" CreationDate="2017-04-20T09:36:11.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guillaume and guerre are Germanic (Frankish) borrowings in French, borrowed at a time when French did not have the phoneme /w/ in isolation, and thus realised it as /gw/. French guèpe is from Latin vespa, but was influenced by the cognate Frankish ancestor of New High German Wespe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English wasp is inherited Germanic (Old English wæsf). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William and war are borrowed from Norman French, where /gw/ had been simplified to /w/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T09:36:11.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22681" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:37:27.397" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but I'm unsure as to how I can transliterate these letters for English-speaking readers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ii - this is pronounced as a hard letter 'i', as in 'ink'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ии - this is pronounced 'ee', as in 'feet'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Йй - this is pronounced 'y', as in 'boy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer the look of the words when I transliterate all three letters as 'i', but I fear this may be confusing for readers? Are there specific diacritical marks to show the different pronunciations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16763" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T16:51:41.170" Title="Transliteration of Cyrillic" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22680" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:51:41.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English sound 'i' as in 'ink' is closer to &lt;code&gt;Ыы&lt;/code&gt; [ɨ], which is usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet as &lt;code&gt;Yy&lt;/code&gt;. And don't forget, there's also a letter &lt;code&gt;Її&lt;/code&gt; that you can use as you like, in reality it's used in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet&lt;/a&gt; and is pronounced as [ji]. Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Cyrillic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbian Cyrillic alphabet&lt;/a&gt; uses the Latin &lt;code&gt;Jj&lt;/code&gt; for [j], so if you use the three of them, &lt;code&gt;Їі&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Іі&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;Jj&lt;/code&gt;, you'll have all of them with dots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T16:51:41.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21529" CreationDate="2017-04-20T18:01:08.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example is generating relative clauses parses with an intuitive structure. In a CFG, we'd need to define new rules to deal with the syntax of the relative clause in the following sentence, since &quot;saw&quot;, a transitive verb, isn't taking an object in the expected position (this would give us a grammar that has the same weak generative capacity as what we desire, but not the same strong generative capacity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy that I saw cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; get around this by defining a whole new set of rules for each subcategorization verb type when it appears inside a relative clause, but this gets messy. On the other hand, a mildly context sensitive formalism like CCG lets us produce the desired parse without having to define any new syntactic categories. In the following derivation, we achieve this with type-raising going from line 1 to 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the : boy : that : I : saw : cried&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP / N : N : (NP \ NP) / (S / NP) : NP : (S \ NP) / NP : S \ NP (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP / N : N : (NP \ NP) / (S / NP) : S / NP : S \ NP (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP / N : N : (NP \ NP) : S \ NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP : (NP \ NP) : S \ NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP : S \ NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that recovering the semantics for such sentences from a parse becomes much simpler once we move up to CCG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16764" LastEditorUserId="16764" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T22:08:02.843" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T22:08:02.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T18:28:11.873" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a database of lyrics with some 10000 songs and did a word frequency analysis to find the most common words. Next, i sorted the corpus according to the publication date and measured the change of frequency over time for different keywords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, for this 2nd analysis the size of each database is significantly smaller and the number songs per year can be quite different. For instance, i see a peak for certain words in the period from 1920-1930, but here i also have less data and the accuracy of the frequency estimate will be lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a proper way to address this issue and to calculate the error for a sample of size N? There should be some kind of sqrt(N) dependence i guess..? Can anyone recommend me literature for further reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16765" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T18:28:11.873" Title="Error of word frequency" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-21T09:35:53.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-21T03:42:58.317" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and Spanish (and likely other languages), the past subjunctive is used with conditional clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be better if we &lt;strong&gt;went&lt;/strong&gt; to the beach.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sería mejor si &lt;strong&gt;fuéramos&lt;/strong&gt; a la playa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the bolded verbs are in the past tense and subjunctive mood (although the latter is indistinguishable from the indicative in the English example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this the case? It would seem more logical that present tense &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; used because these statements are frequently generalizations or present truths (&quot;should we X?&quot; &quot;it would be better if we ...&quot;), for which the languages in question use present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just curious as to how this usage developed and why the past tense came into use here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16769" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T03:42:58.317" Title="Why is the past subjunctive used within conditional clauses in English and Spanish?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;conditionals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-21T06:54:26.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My modest knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic, MSA, which I acquired by weekly self-study after two years of classroom exposure several years ago, have taught me that &lt;em&gt;prefixes&lt;/em&gt; do indeed alter Arabic verbs in the &lt;em&gt;imperfect aspect&lt;/em&gt;, but not always exclusively so--the persons of some verbs attach both a prefix and a postfix; see, e.g, ta&lt;em&gt;thheb&lt;/em&gt;iina, she goes, below tehth.hebiina. 'th' is a single letter, voiced, as in 'that'&#xA;Consider the verb 'to go', transliterated in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., persons(p.); the prefixes show fairly clearly in front of the root, thahab ~ /THEH-heb/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pers/no./gender           Pronoun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1p sg. m/f..'athhebu     ('anaa    =  I,   1st p.    sg.), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;prefix: 'a ~ /'eh/; all final u &#xA;are silent in lower registers;&#xA;hence, colloq: 'athheb, vs. 'athhebu;//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2p sg. m....tathhebu     ('anta    =  you, 2nd pers. sing., masc.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2p sg. f....tathhebiina, ('anti    =  you, 2p. f. sg.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3p sg. m....yathhebu     (huu'a    =  he,  3p. m. sg.),pron /YETH-heb/.//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3p sg. f....tathhebu     (hii'a    =  she, 3p. f. sg.(but see 2p.sg.m.!)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1p pl.......nathhab      (naHnu    =  we,   1p.    pl.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2p pl m.....tathhabuuna  ('antum   =  you,  2p. m. pl.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2p pl f.....tathhabna    ('antunna =  you,  2p. f. pl.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3p pl m.....yathhabuuna  (hum      =  they, 3p. m. pl.)//&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3p pl f.....yathhabna    (hunna,   =  they, 3p. f. pl.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be glad to edit/correct any errors the readership may find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16768" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T06:54:26.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22689" CreationDate="2017-04-21T07:41:39.730" Score="18" ViewCount="6860" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some searching, I'm still unsure about what function the soft sign (Ь) performs in Russian. I have read that it indicates declension, palatisation, and iotation in different contexts, but with limited understanding of what the latter two concepts mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the function of the sign would also explain why it is variously represented as &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;'&lt;/em&gt; in Latin script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T10:55:05.490" Title="What is the function of the soft sign (Ь) in Russian?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22687" CreationDate="2017-04-21T09:27:35.777" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;WARNING: The question is sooo many-sided, it is very wide and can be split into at least 3 different questions. I'll answer it all, don't tell me later that you haven't been warned the answer would be long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, this letter &lt;em&gt;has no sound&lt;/em&gt; of its own. The main function of the soft sign &amp;lt;Ь&gt; in Russian is to change the sound of the consonant letter which stands before it. In Russian, most consonant sounds can be paired into couples of non-palatalized (&quot;hard&quot;) vs. palatalized (&quot;soft&quot;). In English no consonant sound has such a pair; most of them are non-palatalized and for English native speakers it is usually a hard part of studying Russian pronunciation to learn how to pronounce those sounds palatalized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palatalization&lt;/a&gt; (P) can easily be explained, but is very hard to produce with the tongue (for those who have no such thing as P in their native language). The main idea behind it is that palatalized consonants (PC) are bi-focal: beside the main focus of articulation, the tongue also makes the second focus touching the &lt;em&gt;palate&lt;/em&gt; with its back, hence the name. For example, Russian &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; is approximately like the English  [s], with the tip of the tongue nearly touching somewhere near the upper teeth, but in the Russian &amp;lt;&lt;strong&gt;CЬ&lt;/strong&gt;&gt; [sʲ] the tongue also touches the palate with its back adding a [j]-like air to [s]. Still, [sʲ] is &lt;em&gt;one sound&lt;/em&gt;, you can drawl, sustain it for a long time and all that time it will sound the same.  (Not all palatalized consonants can be sustained, of course, just as not all &lt;em&gt;consonants&lt;/em&gt; can be sustained.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another trick is that the P of a consonant sound can be shown not only with the soft sign, but also with vowel letters. They are also paired into the ones that cause P (they are called &quot;iotizing&quot; — that is, 'adding the [j] air') and the ones that don't (called &quot;non-iotizing&quot;). The pairs are like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Non-iotizing vowel letters:     a  э  ы  о  у&#xA;                                |  |  |  |  | &#xA;Iotizing vowel letters:         я  е  и  ё  ю&#xA;[1]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind the iotizing vowels is that when they stand after a consonant letter they palatalize it and then they are read as the corresponding non-iotizing letters. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;мал [mal] - small&#xA;мял [mʲal] - (he) crumpled&#xA;[2]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of words and after another vowel letter the iotizing letters are pronounced as [j] + the corresponding non-iotizing letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ясно [ˈjasnə] - clear&#xA;бояться [bɐ'jatsə] - to be afraid&#xA;(yeah, here the soft sign doesn't affect any sound)&#xA;[3]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if we need to write a word in which a consonant is followed by a distinct sound [j] + a vowel, like a 3-sound word [bʲju] - 'I beat'? We cannot write it as &lt;code&gt;бьйу&lt;/code&gt;, because (another trick is coming up!)&#xA;    the combination &amp;lt;Й&gt; + a non-iotizing vowel letter are (hahaha!)&#xA;    forbidden in spelling of Russian words which were not borrowed from another language. [4]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we write it as &lt;code&gt;бю&lt;/code&gt;, then according to [2] it will be read as [bʲu], a &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;-sound word... The only correct way to write that word is &lt;code&gt;бью&lt;/code&gt;, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;after &amp;lt;Ь&amp;gt; the iotized vowel letters&#xA;are read as [j] + the corresponding&#xA;non-iotizing letters:&#xA;&#xA;льёт [lʲjot] - he/she pours&#xA;пью [pʲju] - I drink&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at last, differentiating the gender of nouns with the help of &amp;lt;Ь&gt;. In Russian, most feminine nouns end in [a], but there are lots of them that end in a consonant. In the latter case a soft sign must be written at the end of the word (ahaha!) &lt;em&gt;irrespective&lt;/em&gt; of whether the final consonant is actually palatalized or not!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(masc.) мел [mʲel] - chalk &#xA;(fem.) мель [mʲelʲ] - shoal&#xA;(fem.) мышь [mɨʂ] - mouse (ends in a&#xA;non-P consonant!)&#xA;(fem.) ложь [loʂ] - a lie (ends in a&#xA;non-P consonant!)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually everything you asked about! Naturally, there are other issues with &amp;lt;Ь&gt;, like differentiating some verb forms where it doesn't in any way affect the pronunciation, or using it before non-iotizing letters in borrowed words, not to mention its historical usage problems, but that is another tale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2019-06-10T10:55:05.490" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T10:55:05.490" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22687" CreationDate="2017-04-21T09:40:05.537" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of the spelling, Ь simply means &quot;the previous consonant should be palatalized&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(phonetics)&lt;/a&gt; to learn what palatalization is, it's a lengthy topic (P.S. Yellow Sky has a nice overview). Most consonsants in Russian come in pairs: palatalized/non-palatalized (also called soft/hard). Additionally, before vowels, Ь means &quot;y&quot; (Воробьев =&gt; Vorobyov)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to morphology, -Ь is often found in cases where we have a null ending in words whose stems end in a palatalized consonant, example: путь. Also found in 2nd declension in nominative/accusative cases (of feminine gender) for historical reasons: ночь (consonant Ч is always palatalized, so no need to have Ь as a palatalization marker, but we still do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-ь is also found, for example, as a morphological unit, in imperative word forms: брось! i.e. it tells that C is palatalized, witch matches with the palatalizedness of С in the original infinitive: бросить&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, like -ешь in verbs (for 2nd person), the spelling is just historical, and Ь there doesn't mean anything anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, in a nutshell, you can think of Ь as yet another palatalizing vowel (similar to Е and И), except it's not actually pronounced, yet still has influence on surrounding sounds.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastEditorUserId="16671" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T09:52:11.510" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T09:52:11.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2017-04-21T10:15:26.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect subjunctive merged with indicative in English simply due to phonetical reasons. Look at Old English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I ate&quot; (indicative) - Ic æt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I ate&quot; (subjunctive) - Ic æte&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;we beat&quot; (indicative) - bēoton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;we beat&quot; (subjunctive) - bēoten&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(according to wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then vowel reduction happened, and unstressed vowels in affixes all turned into schwas or zero, it's not surprising that forms like &lt;em&gt;bēoton&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bēoten&lt;/em&gt; merged into one single &quot;beat&quot; both for simple past and subjunctive, as it is today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked at Proto-Germanic, and subjunctive forms differ from indicative forms there only slightly too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;you did&quot; (indicative) - *dedēz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;you did&quot; (subjunctive) - *dēdīz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;he did&quot; (indicative) - *dedē&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;he did&quot; (subjunctive) - *dēdī&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was just bound to collapse phonetically, all those endings eventually collapse into schwas in Germanic languages due to the fact that Germanic languages have strong expiratory stress closer to the beginning of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at &quot;to be&quot;, then you can see a pattern that still survives today to an extent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I was&quot; (indicative) - Ic wæs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I were&quot; (subjunctive) - Ic wǣre&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was/were still survives to this day, because there was no phonetical collapse like above (thanks to rhotacism &lt;em&gt;wǣse&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;wǣre&lt;/em&gt; between vowels). And, obviously, modern &quot;if I was&quot; is just analogical, because 99% other verbs do not tell between subj. and indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T10:15:26.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-22T06:05:59.267" Score="3" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;concúpiscent, concúpiscence, concúpiscible&lt;/em&gt; seem to be irregularly stressed (at least, according to their dictionary pronunciations; regularized pronunciations apparently have been heard &quot;in the wild&quot;) when compared to words like &lt;em&gt;reminíscent(-ce), dehíscent(-ce), oblivíscible, immíscible, permíscible,&lt;/em&gt; not to mention a lot of other words with &lt;em&gt;-éscent&lt;/em&gt;(&lt;em&gt;-ce&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this exception mentioned in the fourth edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LeOD_sYogbsC&amp;amp;pg=PA67&amp;amp;lpg=PA67&amp;amp;dq=concupiscence%20stress%20syllable&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=kxe05z3n3M&amp;amp;sig=-pP5SHOVPtEk8p4XF2Cd1JJV14E&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjS1qDYrbfTAhVs54MKHaUjCZ0Q6AEIMTAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=concupiscence%20stress%20syllable&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Walker's &quot;Critical Pronouncing Dictionary&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1846), but there is no explanation given. The Oxford English Dictionary entries for these three words also don't explain the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone attempted to do so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to think of possible reasons, and the only thing I could come up with is possible stress shift from an original Middle English &lt;em&gt;concupiscént/concupiscénce&lt;/em&gt; (taken from the stress in French or in Latin &lt;em&gt;concupiscentia&lt;/em&gt;) via the somewhat common pattern of putting secondary stress on alternating syllables. Whereas, presumably, the other &lt;em&gt;-scent/-scence&lt;/em&gt; words either came into English at a later period, when word-final stress was no longer common, or their pronunciation was remodeled for some reason while that of &lt;em&gt;concupiscence&lt;/em&gt; etc. was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED's earliest citation is &quot;c1340,&quot; spelled &quot;concupyscens&quot; which does seem earlier than the first OED citation for &quot;adolescence&quot; (&quot;?a1425&quot;) or &quot;pubescence&quot; (?a1425). I also wasn't able to find any earlier attested use of an &quot;-escence&quot; word in the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&amp;amp;type=headword&amp;amp;q1=*scence&amp;amp;rgxp=constrained&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English Dictionary quotations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if nobody knows about these specific words, I would appreciate any more general information on the stress patterns of words ending in &lt;em&gt;-ence&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ance&lt;/em&gt; in Middle English, and how they may have changed in the development to present-day English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T06:15:52.823" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T16:04:13.117" Title="Is there a known reason for the position of the stress in &quot;concupisc-&quot; words in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2017-04-22T10:11:24.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Vietnamese, the serial comma is optional, i.e. you can either put it or not. It is preferably omitted, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ở đây có một quả táo, một quả lê, và một quả chuối.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ở đây có một quả táo, một quả lê và một quả chuối.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;are both grammatically correct, but the latter is preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case a sentence is really ambiguous like this:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lWFX8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A meme about Oxford comma&quot;&gt;&#xA;(Though this one is not, but it's an easy example to find), you a serial comma should be added to clarify. These cases are rare, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15078" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T10:11:24.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6737" CreationDate="2017-04-22T10:24:49.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian does not use &quot;Oxford comma&quot;. It is considered a mistake. You can put a comma before &quot;and&quot; but only if it connects two phrases. If Oxford comma were allowed, it would create ambiguity (unlike English where it in fact disambiguates sometimes). We also do not put a comma before the expression equivalent of &quot;etc&quot; because in Russian it is a contraction of &quot;and so forth&quot;, &quot;и т. д.&quot;, something like &quot;and s. f.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T10:24:49.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-22T13:11:36.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;em&gt;strano&lt;/em&gt; and Russian &lt;em&gt;stranno&lt;/em&gt;, both meaning &quot;strange&quot; and totally unrelated. The English word &quot;strange&quot; is related to Italian one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T13:11:36.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6982" CreationDate="2017-04-22T22:32:26.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in my dialect of Spanish (Rioplatense) sometimes the imperfect past tense is used instead of both the subjunctive and the potential in conditional sentences (as exemplified below). This is colloquial and I'm sure many people would view it as ungrammatical, but is used often enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Si sabía no te decía.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literally: &quot;If I knew, I didn't tell you&quot; (both imperfect, maybe rather like &quot;If I was knowing, I wasn't telling you&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actual meaning: &quot;If I had known, I wouldn't have told you.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Correct&quot; form: &quot;Si hubiese sabido no te habría dicho.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Si me iba hace cinco minutos no me enteraba.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literally: &quot;If I went five minutes ago, I didn't learn of it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actual meaning: &quot;If I'd gone away five minutes ago, I wouldn't have learned of it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Correct&quot; form: &quot;Si me hubiese ido hace cinco minutos no me habría enterado.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard the same kind of construction in Brazilian Portuguese but I'm not confident enough about their usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T22:32:26.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22693" CreationDate="2017-04-23T05:25:47.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand Walker, he's saying the regular case is words like &quot;quiESCence&quot;, with accent on the penult.  If &quot;concupiscence&quot; were stressed on the penult, it would be pronounced &quot;concuPISSence&quot;, which sounds vaguely obscene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T05:25:47.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22629" CreationDate="2017-04-23T09:51:23.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Nahuatl word &lt;strong&gt;teotl&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;god&lt;/em&gt; makes me think of the ancient greek &lt;strong&gt;theos&lt;/strong&gt;, which has the same meaning [Theos — From Proto-Hellenic *tʰehós (whence also Mycenaean Greek  (te-o)), a thematicization of Proto-Indo-European *dʰéh₁s, s-suffixed noun derived from *dʰeh₁- (“to do, to put, to place”)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or even the Nahuatl verb &lt;strong&gt;cochi&lt;/strong&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;to sleep&lt;/em&gt; reminds me of the french verb &lt;strong&gt;coucher&lt;/strong&gt;, which means &lt;em&gt;to lay down&lt;/em&gt; (although they are pronounced a bit differently, since the french &quot;ch&quot; sounds more like a &quot;sh&quot;) , and is often used as to say &lt;em&gt;to go to bed&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &quot;Je me couche&quot; -&gt; &quot;I'm going to bed&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16780" LastEditorUserId="16780" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T21:09:15.960" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T21:09:15.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22693" CreationDate="2017-04-23T14:10:48.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of a bit of musing than a proper answer, but it could be the reason that at least the first two have this seemingly irregular stress pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Concúpiscent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;concúpiscence&lt;/em&gt; don't sound oddly stressed to me at all—in fact they sound perfectly acceptable and normal, despite the fact that I'm quite sure I've never heard anyone say either word. &lt;em&gt;Concúpiscible&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, sounds downright bizarre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you, I could find no other parallel for an &lt;em&gt;-Vscence/-Vscibility&lt;/em&gt; word having the stress on the syllable before the -sc-, so it puzzled me that I find &lt;em&gt;concúpiscent/-ce&lt;/em&gt; so normal-sounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to figure out what pattern made &lt;em&gt;-úpiscent&lt;/em&gt; sound perfectly normal—and it finally hit me: &lt;em&gt;magnificent&lt;/em&gt; and its ilk!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;-ficent&lt;/em&gt; suffix is etymologically unrelated, of course (apart from stemming from Latin participles), but it is phonetically /ˡVCɪsənt/ with antepaenultimate stress, just like what we find in &lt;em&gt;concupiscent&lt;/em&gt;. And unlike more closely related word like &lt;em&gt;reminiscent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dehiscent&lt;/em&gt;, there's no base verb &lt;em&gt;*concupisce&lt;/em&gt; to show where the stress should go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would theorise that perhaps &lt;em&gt;concupiscent/-ce&lt;/em&gt;, wherever the stress originally lay, may have retracted its stress due to phonetic similarity with words in &lt;em&gt;-ficent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't account for &lt;em&gt;concupiscible&lt;/em&gt;, of course, and I'll admit that I'm stumped there. Looking through a reverse dictionary I cannot find a single other word ending in &lt;em&gt;-cible&lt;/em&gt; that has preantepaenultimate stress—it seems to be totally irregular and counter to all logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastEditorUserId="2253" LastEditDate="2017-04-23T16:04:13.117" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T16:04:13.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22705" CreationDate="2017-04-23T17:10:05.447" Score="1" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to doing an exercise that requires me to reconstruct a proto language from two languages that has a difference in the [a] and [e] phonemes. I know I cannot use the majority rule because there are only 2, but I am assuming that [a] is more natural than [e], is this assumption correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16799" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T23:47:59.557" Title="The naturalness principle for [a] and [e]?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22704" CreationDate="2017-04-23T18:03:37.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual understanding of &quot;naturalness&quot; is either cross-linguistic statistical frequency or asymmetrical implication (e.g. &quot;no language has X unless they also have Y&quot;). If we take the letters &lt;em&gt;a,e&lt;/em&gt; at IPA face value, then this could be true. The main problem is that &quot;a&quot; is not a particularly uniformly-used letter – it represents something low and not rounded, but the exact location is up for grabs. There actually is no IPA letter that ideally reflects the pronunciation of &quot;a&quot; in Spanish or German, rather, the typical pronunciation of &quot;a&quot; in Arabic (&lt;em&gt;katab&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he wrote&quot;, Levantine pronunciation) is closest to Jones cardinal vowel 4. So if for example the letter &quot;a&quot; is used to represent IPA [ɑ] and &quot;e&quot; is used to represent [æ], a &quot;naturalness&quot; claim is on shaker grounds. With those caveats, the most common vowel in human language is [a], and there is a widespread, probably universal implication that any language with [e] also has [a], but the reverse is not the case. There is, of course, the question of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system where &quot;a&quot; seems to be more marked that &quot;e&quot;, which itself could suggest that the letters shouldn't be taken to represent those most common phonetic values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third factor that bears on the concept of &quot;naturalness&quot; is whether phonological distinctions are phonetically sensible under one theory vs. the other. If &quot;a&quot; causes palatalization of a preceding consonant, that is more sensible if &quot;a&quot; is really [e]; if &quot;e&quot; causes retraction of &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; to some back vowel, that is more sensible if &quot;e&quot; is really [a]. As always, you have to clear about the supposed phonetic values of the vowels in question. In Arabic, &quot;a&quot; has an affinity for fronting and raising to [e] or [i], which isn't particularly natural if you think of &quot;a&quot; as the back vowel [ɑ]. But it is less surprising if it is a front vowel, as it actually is in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T23:47:59.557" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T23:47:59.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22704" CreationDate="2017-04-24T05:15:01.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that it is helpful to try comparing the &quot;naturalness&quot; of single sounds.  But you you might be able to compare the naturalness of the sound systems of the protolanguage or the naturalness of sound changes, under various hypotheses of what the protolanguage was like.  But you're not telling us anything else about the vowel systems of any of the languages involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to find instances elsewhere of context free vowel changes [a] &gt; [e] versus [e] &gt; [a].  The latter change applied in the development of Indo-Iranian from PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T05:15:01.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22710" CreationDate="2017-04-24T18:46:52.740" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generative tradition, as far as I (an amateur) understand, revolves around the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can understand why I clearly get the meaning 'she shelved her books' or at least the grammatical soundness of it. But I see no reason to believe the structure in (2) of [1], pg. 2 (image uploaded in [2] for quick view) where the NP 'her books' is assigned(i know assigned is not the correct term) 'on the shelf' in the structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the verb 'shelve' is derived from the noun shelf with its idiosyncratic meaning of 'putting an item on the shelf'. It might as well had been something absolutely arbitrary, like, 'taking an item off the shelf', or 'creating a shelf'. I guess this is a neat argument.&#xA;In the article, it's taken that the sentence has an internal syntax that somehow assigns the structure (2) to it. Now yes, we have a very specific usage of the verb shelve in English and so on, but let's just suppose so I can come to a point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same vein, in this same article [1], another sentence &quot;it cowed a calf&quot; goes through the same operation. &quot;the cow had a calf&quot; it says. &#xA;I just wonder WHY? I understand cowed is some 'verb in past tense' with the 'colorless green...' argument, but why should cowed = gave birth to a calf? and why should the syntax have anything to do with it? Isn't it in the realm of semantics/meaning which is just arbitrary(like that of shelve)?&#xA;UG alone is just not enough to account for such bizarre etymologies, not at least without context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.sci-hub.bz/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1995.tb00016.x/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.sci-hub.bz/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1995.tb00016.x/pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://goo.gl/photos/yQCfX4ZdgehLxynZ6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://goo.gl/photos/yQCfX4ZdgehLxynZ6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the above description places my doubt clearly, even if the doubt itself is wrong(due to ignorance). I request some readings if possible. &#xA;The way I've found the literature, it's a big fat mess and(without any formal linguistics training) nothing even came close to a neat sourcebook-style treatment of this tradition.&#xA;The book itself of which [1] is a review is unavailable on the web, so there are other things I've been reading (like chomsky's mildly inaccessible papers and Adger 2003, Carnie 2012). At least trying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3231" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T02:07:45.843" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T02:07:45.843" Title="semantics of bizarre usages in view of a second-language-speaker" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22707" CreationDate="2017-04-24T22:34:38.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think I've clearly understood what your question really is, but I'll assume it has to do with how new verbs (and, sometimes, terms) are born and acquire a meaning that derive from their root-word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert but I think it's because languages always tend to become more &lt;em&gt;flexible&lt;/em&gt; and to adjust to the speakers' needs (I would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; say they get simpler with time, but the grammar surely becomes less complex). That's why intransitive verbs tend to become transitive, and words give birth to new verbs with a (slightly) new meaning (which often only make sense when used in a certain context; e.g. &quot;She shelved her books&quot; or &quot;it cowed a calf&quot;) and sentences in general adapt to the &lt;em&gt;minimalist program&lt;/em&gt;, which (as far as I understood by the research paper you published the link to) is based on the simplification of a sentence to nothing more than a subject, a verb and an object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16780" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T22:34:38.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22707" CreationDate="2017-04-25T00:57:17.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not about &quot;poverty of the stimulus&quot;.  It's about the creativity of human language.  Humans have both an evolved grammatical mechanism and an intellectual capacity which they bring to language communication.  These are separate.  In acquiring the capacity for language, people don't use their intellects to figure out a grammatical system -- that's just not possible (the &quot;poverty of stimulus&quot; argument establishes this).  But they do use their intellects and knowledge of the world to fit what they need to say into the grammatical system they have inherited.  And to understand what others' communicative intentions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples about the interpretation of the verbs &quot;cow&quot; or &quot;shelve&quot;, in my opinion, have to do with using the intellect to arrive at some creative solution to solve the problems of interpreting verbs meaning &quot;perform some action centrally connected with nouns &quot;cow&quot; or &quot;shelve&quot;&quot;.  I see no reason to think that this is otherwise dictated by the grammatical system of one's language.  This is the creative part of language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T01:06:19.700" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T01:06:19.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T18:37:59.060" Score="3" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a phrase and I have to draw a tree structure of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;These many awful photographs&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that I don't get is the &lt;em&gt;&quot;many&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;These&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is DP, &lt;em&gt;&quot;awful&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the adjective, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;photograph&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess &lt;em&gt;&quot;many&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a determiner, but how I should indicate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And where in the structure the post determiners fit? I guess it's the adjunct right and not a specifier or complementer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16813" LastEditorUserId="16813" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T19:24:54.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T20:46:06.000" Title="How to analyze an NP with two determiners?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22713" CreationDate="2017-04-25T19:39:11.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a general answer to the title question, because the &amp;quot;determinative&amp;quot; (in &lt;em&gt;Cambridge GEL&lt;/em&gt; terminology; or &amp;quot;determiner&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Comprehensive GEL&lt;/em&gt; terminology) word class seems to be heterogeneous and have a number of significant subdivisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Many&amp;quot; can be classified as a quantifier or with the term you use in your question, &amp;quot;post-determiner&amp;quot; (which I found explained more in the blog post &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2012/08/exploring-determiners.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exploring determiners&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of &amp;quot;These many awful photographs&amp;quot;, I would say &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; does not function syntactically as a &amp;quot;determiner&amp;quot; (in &lt;em&gt;Cambridge GEL&lt;/em&gt; terminology; or &amp;quot;determinative&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Comprehensive GEL&lt;/em&gt; terminology); rather, it is adjectival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find a statement that supports this in &amp;quot;Chapter 2: Categories&amp;quot; of &lt;em&gt;A Grammar of English&lt;/em&gt; Gelderen 2000, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, quantifiers are adjectival, as in &lt;em&gt;the many problems&lt;/em&gt; and in (34) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;34&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The challenges are many/few.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if this is a simplification, so I might be wrong about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It essentially means the same thing as &amp;quot;numerous,&amp;quot; another word that can be a quantifier, but that clearly has adjective morphology (the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ous&lt;/em&gt;) and that seems to also be able to be used as an adjective. As evidence that the word &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; can be adjectival when it comes in this post-determiner position, consider its coordination with adjectives in phrases like &amp;quot;these many and complex causes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;these many and great dangers&amp;quot;. According to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cf0OBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA119&amp;amp;lpg=PA119&amp;amp;dq=syntactic%20test%20distinguish%20quantifiers%20from%20adjectives%20English&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=kFDUv6Llw-&amp;amp;sig=sHNLl4FXc36Z3kvWQuBfjocV6gs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjZh7S4scDTAhXM3YMKHcXoDT44ChDoAQgyMAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=syntactic%20test%20distinguish%20quantifiers%20from%20adjectives%20English&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beyond Syntactic Change: &lt;em&gt;various&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;numerous&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Tine Breban, there is a claim made by Bache (1978) that coordination between adnominal modifiers is only possible if they have the same grammatical function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in your example, there is no coordination, so this argument, if correct, would only show that &amp;quot;many&amp;quot; could be adjectival in this position, not that it has to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is adjectival, it would indeed be an adjunct according to the theories of grammar that I am familar with. The blog post &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/course/lx522-f05/lx522/archives/52.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Of adjectives and adjuncts&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by  Paul Hagstrom says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives are modifiers, like adverbs are. So, the way they attach is with Adjoin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another description of adjectives as adjuncts is available from the XTAG Project page &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Extag/tech-report/node169.html#adj-modifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adjectives&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T20:46:06.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22718" CreationDate="2017-04-26T05:38:05.897" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;By which I mean changing a noun into an adjective by adding '-ed'.&#xA;For example: the noun 'horn' becomes the adjective 'horned'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for the type of adjective that is formed from a noun by adding '-ed'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, when a verb becomes a noun by adding '-er' the noun becomes an 'agent noun' and the suffix is an 'agentive'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14692" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T10:06:59.620" Title="Term for -ed as an adjectival suffix?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22717" CreationDate="2017-04-26T08:07:59.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there's a name for this specific case that's more general than &quot;denominal adjective&quot; but it might be called a &quot;possessive denominal adjective&quot;. There is work on this out there, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/cssp2011/abstracts/cssp2011DeoFrancezKoontzGarboden.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this abstract&lt;/a&gt; (p.2) by Ashwini Deo, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T08:07:59.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22717" CreationDate="2017-04-26T10:06:59.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;em&gt;horned beasts&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;crowned heads&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd call this a sort of indirect passive deverbal adjective . The &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; represents the past (passive) participle form of a verb which is represented by the same morpheme as the underlying noun. In effect, the noun &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; is recategorized as a verb, whether or not that verb is actually in current use, and its participle is employed in the passive sense &quot;furnished with &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know a term for the thematic role here. Unless someone comes up with something better, I suggest &lt;em&gt;praebitive&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;praebere&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;furnish, supply, provide&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T10:06:59.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17427" CreationDate="2017-04-26T11:33:46.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the correct answer for this, but I think that every person has an inherited innate sense for language that has developed over hundred of thousand of years of human evolution.&#xA;Many linguists believe that the sense for grammar and word building for example is inherited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example for this innate sense: an English speaker may have never heard of the term &quot;exponential&quot;, but he can tell that this word is an English one, while he can definitely tell that the word &quot;lesen [le:zen]&quot; is not English (which is German for &quot;to read&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16820" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T11:33:46.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22615" CreationDate="2017-04-26T14:25:02.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The perfect tense is formed by reduplication of the root&lt;/em&gt; and the &#xA;addition of a special set of personal endings. As in athematic &#xA;present stems,Thus from drs ‘see’, dadarsa ‘he saw’, dadrsuh &#xA;‘they saw’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel of the reduplication is i/u for roots containing 1/fi, a &#xA;for other roots.  eg, &lt;strong&gt;from svap ‘sleep’, susvipa, susupuh, or sru ‘hear’ : thus susruma ‘we heard’&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beleive a few other languages of Indo-European family inherit this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastEditorUserId="2516" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T14:33:06.823" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:33:06.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T16:54:47.983" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a phonology project on Spanish and one of the components is describing how the language adapts loanwords. I'm particularly interested in Arabic loanwords and how they are adapted as I understand that several words such as the Spanish word for oil come from Arabic, but I'm unable to find any reliable sources. So far, I've only found things like about.com articles and I of course can't use those for my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anybody can recommend some texts or articles that describe this process, it would really help me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I really like this blog post below, but I would need to find a journal article or textbook that describes the same adaptions the writer is discussing. In some textbooks that I've rented on Amazon, I see long lists of Spanish words that were borrowed from Arabic, but nothing about how they were worked into the language, so I'm mainly looking for a book or article that might briefly describe this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.as.uky.edu/thebhlog/?p=87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://blog.as.uky.edu/thebhlog/?p=87&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16822" LastEditorUserId="16822" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T19:57:29.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T06:49:05.753" Title="Can anybody recommend some textbooks/articles that deal with the adaption of loan words into Spanish?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20669" CreationDate="2017-04-26T19:04:12.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://coorsy.com/topics/linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coorsy Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; topic, it shows online courses from several providers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16823" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T19:04:12.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T18:54:52.763" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my teachers at the university told us that &lt;em&gt;Structuralists believe that the human mind is a limited store with a lot of sentences&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I wonder to what extent this is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bit &quot;trivial&quot; for me that De Saussure himself believed that the brain is a store of ready-to-use sentences, because it would be easy to refute this idea since the human mind is creative and can produce unlimited sentences (and sentences we never heard before) with only few rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T18:54:52.763" Title="Is the human mind only a limited store for sentences according to structuralists?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22800" CreationDate="2017-04-28T02:18:19.927" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that pluperfect is simply past tense relative to a subsequent past moment rather than to the moment of the utterance.    “I had blown out the candle” indicates that this event occurred prior to some past event.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard that future perfect can also be analyzed as relative to some prior future event.    “I will have done my homework” indicates that the completion of my homework occurred in the future but before some other future event. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is present perfect always relative to the moment of the utterance?    I’m not sure, because some present events are ongoing.   “He has climbed Mt. Everest” indicates an event that was completed before the moment of the utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that different linguistic theories analyze linguistic data differently, and that some analyses are more useful in some contexts than in others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T21:49:50.790" Title="Is pluperfect an aspect or a relative tense?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T02:52:27.237" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a problem pronouncing a uvular trill when lying on my side (I mean completely horizontal, without a tilt), but normally I can trill for over 20 seconds. Even if I start trilling and move my body in a horizontal position, it stop sounding like a trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I know what's going on, the uvula hang in the wrong direction and that might be the cause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep practicing till I get the hang of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16833" LastEditorUserId="16833" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T21:05:38.060" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T15:47:01.793" Title="Does the position of the body relative to gravity limit or change the sounds we can make?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22722" CreationDate="2017-04-28T06:49:05.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try Federico Corriente's &quot;Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects&quot;. It's an etymological dictionary of Arab loanwords into the four major Iberian Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician). Also, there is an introductory chapter which deals with the different processes of adaptation; this chapter apparently is open in Google Books -or at least for me it is-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=N_hAzIqriakC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.es/books?id=N_hAzIqriakC&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14511" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T06:49:05.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T12:16:48.230" Score="7" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll take spanish for my example, but it's also true for French an Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to remember the gender of nouns, they are almost always found with an article. It's often a definite article. I've even heard things like this : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; rata&quot; is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; rat, but &quot;&lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; ratón&quot; is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; mouse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets in the head of the learner with the article. Why are indefinite articles rarely used? It feels much more natural to say &quot;a cat&quot; than &quot;the cat&quot; if you need too add an article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is because &quot;la/el&quot; and &quot;le/la&quot; are easier to tell apart than &quot;un/una&quot; and &quot;un/une&quot;, but that wouldn't be a good enough reason if I were to teach such a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't even work in every case. For example in French, &quot;&lt;em&gt;l'image&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is feminine and &quot;&lt;em&gt;l'étalon&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is masculine. You have to say &quot;&lt;em&gt;une image&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;un étalon&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to know the gender, it doesn't help at all to add a definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16835" LastEditorUserId="16835" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T12:58:16.460" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T23:35:18.460" Title="Why are definite articles generally used for learning gendered languages?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22733" CreationDate="2017-04-28T12:42:10.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all simple: you cannot put an indefinite article before &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; noun, but definite articles have no limitations, every noun can have a definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is, in most European languages with articles (including English) the indefinite articles developed from the word &quot;one&quot; and in most of those languages it is still identical to the word &quot;one&quot;. But &quot;one&quot; being a numeral can combine only with the nouns that name countable things, it cannot be combined with most of the abstract nouns like &quot;friendship&quot; or &quot;eternity&quot; or with names of substances like &quot;sugar&quot; or &quot;blood&quot;. Since you need to learn the gender of &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; noun, the indefinite articles cannot fulfill this task completely, but the definite articles being able to combine with &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; noun do this job perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T12:42:10.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T14:44:33.143" Score="0" ViewCount="755" Body="&lt;p&gt;This problem's going through my head for a while. Take Indonesia - everybody speaks fluently Indonesian there but Indonesian remains a second, &quot;official language&quot; for most people anyway. In Canada, there's​ a huge percentage of bilinguals - but even though French and English affect each other and create neologisms occasionally, they seem to remain two very distinct communication systems (I have no references for this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, do languages merge together or tend to merge together when coexisting in an area for certain time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T04:17:14.687" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:36:01.127" Title="Can languages merge together?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-05-02T06:38:12.637" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22735" CreationDate="2017-04-28T17:47:06.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. History knows no equal merge. If two languages are merging, usually it means one of them is heavily influenced by the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T17:47:06.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T20:38:09.840" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've read so far, autosegmental phonology treats dissimilation as deletion of a feature and the result of the Obligatory Contour Principle. So how is the following case treated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Modern Greek, or sometime between Modern Greek and Ancient Greek, the first oral stop in a two voiceless oral stop sequence becomes the corresponding fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems this is a dissimilation of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[-continuant, -sonorant, -voice] -&gt; [+continuant] / _ [-continuant, -sonorant, -voice],&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I really don't know how to write this using autosegmental phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Relevant info: such consonant clusters in Greek are always inhomorganic - the places of articulation of the two consonants always differ. So there won't be cases like */t̪t̪/→/θt̪/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T22:04:23.413" Title="How does autosegmental phonology deal with dissimilation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22737" CreationDate="2017-04-28T21:59:16.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard account of such patterns is to say that in sequences of [-continuant] segments, the first specification is deleted (because of the OCP). This leaves the first segment unspecified, whereupon it acquires the value [+continuant] by default. This is sketched in Odden 1987 &quot;Dissimilation as Deletion in Chukchi&quot; (ESCOL vol 3) and a longer unpublished paper of the period. The pattern of Greek is somewhat challenging, since it appears to necessitate a special default mechanism, since it is typically held that [-continuant] is the default value, not [+continuant], so additionally one might hold that the default value can be governed by the OCP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative view is that this is actually a mix of assimilation and dissimilation, whereby stops acquire [+continuant] from the preceding sonorant – which however does not work for word-initial stop cluster. However, the synchronic evidence for application in initial clusters is, as I recall, non-existent. From a historical perspective (where the original two-stop analysis is oncontroversial), it is more likely that stops before stops become aspirated (a mechanism for enhancing identifiability of the first stop, found in Tsou as reported by Wright 1996), and aspirated stops then spirantize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T21:59:16.517" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22737" CreationDate="2017-04-28T22:04:23.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe the first stop lenites to a fricative because it is in the offset of a syllable, and the change is limited by the law of similarity, which allows changes to be limited to those sounds most similar to a neighboring sound. The &quot;law&quot; is due to James Hutcheson: Hutcheson. J. 1973. Remarks on the nature of complete consonant assimilation. CLS 9.  As it applies here, the principle could be phrased, &quot;Only the most similar dissimilate.&quot;  I argued for this interpretation in &quot;Natural phonological descriptions (Part II).&quot; U. of Hawaii WPL 8:3.45-54.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I didn't answer your question about Autosegmental Phonology.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T22:04:23.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22742" CreationDate="2017-04-29T03:43:01.083" Score="1" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to find the origins of the Hindi word &lt;strong&gt;अफ़ीम&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;Afeem&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. It means &lt;em&gt;opium&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Rajpal Hindi Shabdakosh&lt;/strong&gt; gives the origin of &quot;afeem&quot; as Arabic:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hi.oxforddictionaries.com/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AD%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B7%E0%A4%BE/%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%AB%E0%A4%BC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%AE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hi.oxforddictionaries.com/परिभाषा/अफ़ीम&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been lead to this word in Arabic: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;أفيون&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that I have not been able to further find its origin. If someone will be willing to point me to its Arabic etymology that would be really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16840" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T13:26:06.577" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:49:33.663" Title="Etymological origins of the Hindi word Afeem" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22740" CreationDate="2017-04-29T08:20:15.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%84%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%BF%CE%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ultimate origin&lt;/a&gt; of that word is Ancient Greek &lt;code&gt;ὄπιον&lt;/code&gt; (ópion, &quot;opium&quot;) which is a diminutive form of &lt;code&gt;ὀπός&lt;/code&gt; (opós, “juice”). It was borrowed into Persian as &lt;code&gt;اپیون&lt;/code&gt; (apiyūn) and from Persian it was borrowed into Arabic as &lt;code&gt;أفيون&lt;/code&gt; (ʾafyūn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T08:20:15.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22740" CreationDate="2017-04-29T19:32:40.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Persian-Arabic borrowings were rare (unlike the borrowings in opposite directions, that is, from Arabic into Persian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data in Wiktionary suggesting that borrowing direction is based upon a sourse of the XIXth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is more likely therefore that the Arabic word derives from the root &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%88_%D9%81_%D9%8A#Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;و ف ي&lt;/a&gt; (w+f+y) meaning 'to (over)fullfill'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T19:32:40.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22748" CreationDate="2017-04-30T04:35:16.840" Score="6" ViewCount="659" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning Korean pronunciation, and find it reported that the distinguishing feature of Korean consonants such as orthographic ㅂ (b) and ㅍ (p) is aspiration. However, to my ears both (b) and (p) (and by extension, the pairs (d,t), (g,k), (j,ch)) sound aspirated, when spoken by my Korean friends. (I am Bengali, and am quite confident at detecting aspiration.) Now, the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean phonology&lt;/a&gt; does mention that for many young speakers both are aspirated, and distinguished primarily by pitch patterns. My query, however, is that while I do acknowledge (and hear) the tonal differences, I also feel that (p) is aspirated more strongly than (b) --- similar to the difference between English (p) and Japanese (p), but definitely distinct from (p) in Bengali. Is there any study (references are welcome) on the degree of aspiration in Korean? And, if my observation is correct, would Korean be the only language to contrast degree of aspiration, that is to say, are there other languages that use such a parameter at a phonemic level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[P.S.: I don't know how to put angle brackets to mark orthography, hence the parentheses surrounding the p's and b's.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T23:25:03.977" Title="Contrast of degree of aspiration in Korean" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-30T16:14:13.007" Score="-2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen on this site, one of the users who claims that he doesn't have a native language. Could it be? If it could, then how? &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wz89x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wz89x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T18:44:34.610" Title="Could it be a person without a native language?" Tags="&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22746" CreationDate="2017-04-30T18:25:29.403" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion &quot;degree of X&quot; really requires a three-way distinction to be valid, as in degrees of length (Estonian, Saami, Dinka), nasalization (Palantla Chinantec) or breathiness (Bor Dinka). If there are only two systematic values, we say &quot;it is&quot; or &quot;it isn't&quot;, and we don't have to say &quot;how much&quot; (degree). In the present case, it is likely that you are using one language (Bengali) to set a standard of comparison for another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean has been subject to a half century of acoustic analysis, and it is clear that there has been recent language change where /p/ et al. in Seoul Korean have become &quot;more aspirated&quot;, over time and compared to other dialects. It is now to the point that the unaspirated stops of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/jun/Cho%20et%20al-JPhon.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seoul Korean&lt;/a&gt; are comparable in voice onset time to the contrastively aspirated stops of languages like Apache and Khonoma Angami (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447099900943&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cho &amp;amp; Ladefoged&lt;/a&gt;). Some languages have extreme degrees of aspiration, for example Navaho [k] at 45 msc vs [kʰ] at 154 msc; 28 and 128 msc respectively for the same pair in Tlingit. From that perspective, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in Korean is &quot;somewhat aspirated&quot; and &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;more aspirated, compared to Bengali or other Indic languages where the phonologically unaspirated stops don't have a very long VOT at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes Korean so special is that it has a third kind of consonant, transcribed typically as &lt;em&gt;pp&lt;/em&gt;, which is termed 'fortis; tense; glottal; geminate' – all of these seem to be appropriate descriptions of the facts. These 'tense' consonants have an even lower VOT, which is the element missing for claiming that there are &quot;degrees of aspiration:. However, the 'tense' consonants also have some kind of glottalization associated with them, at least for older speakers. It is possible that some time in the future, the &lt;em&gt;p, pp, ph&lt;/em&gt; contrast will develop into a three-way difference in aspiration alone, but at present, there are enough other differences associated with these consonants that we can legitimately treat the system as having two orthogonal two-way differences (aspiration versus glottalization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one way of looking at it, English could provide another example of three-way aspiration differences (though not contrasts). It is well-known that aspiration of voiceless stops is governed by a rule where they are aspirated in foot-initial position and not aspirated elsewhere. This is often treated as a phonological (categorial) allophonic process. However, it has also been observed that for many speakers, the contrast between &quot;g&quot; and &quot;k&quot; does not involve voicing, it involves aspiration (&quot;g&quot; is really unaspirated [k] and &quot;k&quot; is aspirated [kʰ]). Putting these two facts together, one can say that phonetically we have three aspirations states: unaspirated (&quot;g&quot;), lightly aspirated (&quot;k&quot; not in foot-initial position), and more-aspirated (&quot;k&quot; foot-initially as in &quot;cap&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of ways to reduce the significance of these aspiration differences. One can maintain that the &quot;k&quot; / &quot;g&quot; contrast is indeed one of voicing and the failure of vocal fold vibration in phonetic outputs is the result of something about phonetic implementation; or one can say that that contrast is indeed phonologically one of aspiration, but phonetic implementation amplifies the degree of aspiration of foot-initial aspirated stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation with English is different from that of Korean in that English only has two kinds of underlying consonants as opposed to three in Korean, and &quot;what is underlying&quot; is one definition of &quot;phonemic&quot;. But the other definition of &quot;phonemic&quot; refers only to phonetic outputs and the ability to reduce two phonetic categories to one by rule, referring only to available phonetic properties and not abstract phonological ones. Because of resyllabifications (an abstract phonological process), you can actually get all three stop types in comparable contexts: &quot;a Benny&quot; (unaspirated), &quot;up any&quot; (lightly aspirated), &quot;a penny&quot; (most aspirated). This is typically dealt with by referring to juncture / word boundary, but junctures or boundaries are not phonetic events, they are abstract phonological units. Since I don't subscribe to the strict surface-oriented view of the concept &quot;phoneme&quot;, I don't know whether advocates of that theory would then hold that English also has &quot;degrees of aspiration&quot;. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/bv230/li8/aspiration-uwm.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;handout&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/300581/English_Aspiration_Glottalization_and_Flapping_Revisited&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; by Vaux gives an overview of relevant facts and theoretical interpretations of the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T16:22:02.493" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T16:22:02.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22747" CreationDate="2017-04-30T18:44:34.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no non-pathological possibility of a person not having a native language, so such a rhetorical statement amounts to saying that it's hard to decide which of many languages is one's &quot;best&quot; language. However, there are instances of people who have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; language, at some point (when they would have normally acquired a language), for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genie&lt;/a&gt;. The concept &quot;native language&quot; is a convenient but inaccurate and unscientific term (often used by scientists, tsk tsk) for identifying a kind of language knowledge – similar terms are &quot;first language&quot;, &quot;dominant language&quot; and &quot;mother tongue&quot;. The factors that are most relevant in identifying a speaker are degree of fluency, order of acquisition, and mode of acquisition. All of these terms identify people who are completely fluent (though not necessarily omniscient or eloquent) in a language. &quot;First&quot; language can be misleading if a person first acquires Japanese but then moves to an English-speaking environment at age 4 – they may well not know a word of Japanese as an adult, but technically their first language is Japanese. &quot;Mother tongue&quot; suffers the disadvantage that it often means the language of your mother, as opposed to the language of their father, and I've had people tell me that they don't speak their mother tongue (meaning, the language of their mother). And the problems with &quot;dominant language&quot; is that it assumes that only one language can be &quot;dominant&quot;, and there's no evidence for the claim &quot;there can only be one&quot;, plus in many cases, people who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fluent speakers of English still have English as their now-dominant language. (I know folks who haven't used their first language for 50 years, but still have an accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, since &quot;native language&quot; doesn't have an objective definition, there's no way to determine how many &quot;native languages&quot; a person has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T18:44:34.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-30T18:52:09.837" Score="2" ViewCount="2435" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is a stupid question.  I just started studying linguistics today, so I'm kind of blundering through the subject at this point.  I've been reading about various basic linguistic concepts such as dialect, discourse, and register.  The articles I've read (mostly on Wikipedia) explain the difference between a dialect and a register or discourse fairly clearly, but I can't seem to find any explanation as to the difference between a register and a discourse, or even if there is one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16850" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T23:36:43.913" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:36:43.913" Title="What is the difference between a discourse and a register?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22750" CreationDate="2017-04-30T20:11:44.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A register is usually a concept of social usage and is a property of a word or a phrase (e. g. a colloquial register, a high register, a low register, etc). A register by itself is not communicative and is dependend upon a social value of a communicative unit (a word or a phrase) attributed by a language speaker. It depends on sociolinguistic hierachy and the thing said (e.g. formal greatings, informal greatings and, in some languages, even swaring greetings are the different registers of greetings. Some languages, like Tibetan, Japanese, Tamil or Russian, have different words and/or grammars for different registers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discourse is a narrative, a text or a metatext as a stream of communicative units. It is therefore communicative by itself (and by the origin of the term),  interdependent, based upon the things unsaid and incorporates various registers. E. g. different types and modes of greetings listed above produce a greeting discourse in a specific language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the meaning of register units is usually more permanent as compared to that of discourse units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T20:11:44.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22756" CreationDate="2017-05-01T03:51:27.163" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't (the Noun Adjunct) 'meaning' substitute (the Adjective)  'semantic' (I bolded) in the examples below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: Paul Elbourne, &lt;em&gt;Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics&lt;/em&gt; (1 ed. 2011).&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=IcNEH279CsgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA40&amp;amp;ots=npJ94Xanvt&amp;amp;dq=semantics%20slim%20guide%20%22semantic%22&amp;amp;pg=PA33#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=semantic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; p. 33&lt;/a&gt; : ]   In this chapter I will discuss some &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; properties that words &#xA;  are traditionally supposed to have. I will concentrate on synonymy, &#xA;  ambiguity, and vagueness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=IcNEH279CsgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA40&amp;amp;ots=npJ94Xanvt&amp;amp;dq=semantics%20slim%20guide%20%22semantic%22&amp;amp;pg=PA40#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=semantic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; p. 40&lt;/a&gt; : ] Faster processing caused by &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; similarity is called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; priming&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=IcNEH279CsgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA40&amp;amp;ots=npJ94Xanvt&amp;amp;dq=semantics%20slim%20guide%20%22semantic%22&amp;amp;pg=PA40#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=semantic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; p. 117&lt;/a&gt; : ]  Anaphora is the &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  dependency between pronouns and Other phrases illustrated in (2) &#xA;  and (7): the pronouns in these cases seem to be dependent on preceding quantifier phrases in some way for their &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; functioning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=IcNEH279CsgC&amp;amp;lpg=PA40&amp;amp;ots=npJ94Xanvt&amp;amp;dq=semantics%20slim%20guide%20%22semantic%22&amp;amp;pg=PA126#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=semantic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; p. 126&lt;/a&gt; : ] So now we come to the claim &#xA;  about the proposition expressed that involves covert indexicals: it &#xA;  is that the proposition expressed is always the result of assigning &#xA;  referents or other &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; values to the words in a syntactic tree and &#xA;  then combining those &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; values by means of compositional &#xA;  rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T16:27:48.760" Title="Why cannot 'meaning' substitute 'semantic'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22754" CreationDate="2017-05-01T08:57:56.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; refers to a particular or specific case or example, something practical, whilest &lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;semantics&lt;/em&gt; refer to an abstract theory of language in general, to metanarration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T08:57:56.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22754" CreationDate="2017-05-01T11:55:01.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; is a dangerous term. There has been too much debate, during the XX century, about the &quot;meaning of meaning&quot;, i.e. about the problem of defining the essence of the linguistic meaning as a phenomenon. A widely shared solution has never been reached in such respect. Therefore, authors might prefer to avoid such term at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in the contemporary usage &lt;strong&gt;semantics&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a network of selectional properties that a lexeme can have, rather than to a flat meaning. The latter can be easily ignored in a structural — grammatical, morphological or syntactic — analysis of the language. For example, we are usually not interested in the concrete meaning of the verbs, since doing grammar means making generalizations over a set of different but analogous elements. We are interested, instead, in their argumental structure, subcategorization etc., i.e. whether a verb is (di)transitive or intransitive, whether it imposes some semantic features on its arguments (like when we say that the verb &lt;em&gt;assassinate&lt;/em&gt; must have a [+human] direct object while the verb &lt;em&gt;elapse&lt;/em&gt; cannot have a [+human] subject), or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T16:27:48.760" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T16:27:48.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-01T13:04:08.583" Score="1" ViewCount="560" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading the paper &lt;em&gt;Constraints on Null Pronouns&lt;/em&gt; by Speas, in which the author defines two constraints for a cross-linguistic OT analysis of the occurrence of null pronouns across languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Control(CTL): A featureless pronoun must be coindexed with the closest c-commanding nominal element in its C-Domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Binding Theory Principle B (BTB): A pronoun must be free in its Binding Domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the author also defines what she means by &amp;quot;C-Domain&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C-Domain: α is the C-Domain for β iff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;α dominates β&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;α dominates some set of checked feature(s) γ and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;γ c-commands β and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no other set of checked features c-commands β&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume by the &amp;quot;Binding Domain&amp;quot; of an α the author meant the Minimal Governing Category for α, which consists of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maximal projection that contains α,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a SUBJECT accessible to α, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the governor of α.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the two constraints are close opposites to each other (one asks featureless pronouns to be bound, one asks pronouns to be unbound), and the important point of the author's argument is that different languages allow different occurrences of the null pronoun since they rank these two constraints (and 4 others she mention) differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the issue is whether this oppositeness always holds. I think that depends on whether the C-Domain of a null pronoun would always match with its Binding Domain, but I cannot answer my own question. Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the author considers the null pronoun to be a featureless pronoun. Thus null pronouns are subject to both of the two above constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T13:04:08.583" Title="When do C-Domain and Binding Domain mean different things?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22735" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:36:01.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to some, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lsa2013.lsa.umich.edu/2012/05/bilingual-mixed-languages/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yes&lt;/a&gt;. I was in the class provided in the link. The example I remember the most was this language somewhere in eastern Russia where all the nouns came from one language and all the verbs from the other (the two languages being a native language and Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:36:01.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22761" CreationDate="2017-05-01T18:42:49.887" Score="-6" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Although some Humanists were clubbish snobs-an intellectual elite with narrow, &lt;strong&gt;antiquarian&lt;/strong&gt; interests-others preached a civic Humanism...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastEditorUserId="15031" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T18:59:36.233" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T19:27:11.980" Title="What is the meaning of the word &quot;antiquarian&quot; in this context?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-05-02T10:16:59.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28518" CreationDate="2017-05-01T19:19:37.767" Score="2" ViewCount="916" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencealert.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ScienceAlert&lt;/em&gt; article&lt;/a&gt;, which republishes an article from &lt;a href=&quot;https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers-75828&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Conversation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; written by Caleb Everett (the son of the linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel Everett&lt;/a&gt;) makes the claim that &amp;quot;hand&amp;quot; is etymologically related to &amp;quot;five&amp;quot; in many world languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European was decimally oriented because, as in so many cultures, our linguistic ancestors' hands served as the gateway to realisations like &amp;quot;five fingers on this hand is the same as five fingers on that hand&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such transient thoughts were manifested into words and passed down across generations. This is why the word &amp;quot;five&amp;quot; in many languages is derived from the word for &amp;quot;hand&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not appear to be the case, at least for the languages I know these two words in, most of which are Indo-European in origin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: five, hand (Etymonline doesn't list any relationships between &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=hand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hand&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=five&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;five&lt;/a&gt;, with the closest relationship being a &amp;quot;high five&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German: Fünf, Hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French: cinq, main&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: cinco, mano&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese: 五， 手&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek: πέντε(pente), χέρι(cheri)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any known etymological relationship between these two words in any other language (Indo-European or not), or is the author's claim incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T20:41:50.677" Title="Is &quot;hand&quot; etymologically related to &quot;five&quot; in many world languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22759" CreationDate="2017-05-01T19:27:11.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the present context &lt;strong&gt;antiquarian&lt;/strong&gt; seems to refer to the fact that these intellectuals were interested in some humanistic subject merely as a matter of amusement or curiosity, instead of trying to understand it in a more analytical manner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T19:27:11.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22763" CreationDate="2017-05-01T21:33:04.003" Score="-2" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that in Persian &quot;Man yek sag daraam&quot; means &quot;I have a dog&quot;, where:&#xA;Man = I, sag = dog, daraam = have. What is the purpose of yek? Is it a/an, the indefinite article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16858" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T21:55:45.093" Title="meaning of yek in Persian or Farsi" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-05-02T11:57:39.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22762" CreationDate="2017-05-01T21:55:45.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means &quot;one&quot; (the number) but is also used as an indefinite article, just like (for example) un(e) in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T21:55:45.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22733" CreationDate="2017-05-01T23:35:18.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an arbitrary convention, pretty well limited to Romance and Germanic languages, and a few in the Balkans, because most of those have definite articles which distinguish gender. &#xA;Most other languages I can think of, both within and without Indo-European, either do not have definite articles, or the articles do not reliable distinguish gender, so other ways have to be used to learn the gender of nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most Slavonic languages there are no articles, but the gender of most nouns is apparent from their ending (also true to a lesser degree in Latin). But in many languages (eg Welsh, Hebrew, Amharic) neither the form of the word nor the definite article gives you much help in determining the gender. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T23:35:18.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-02T10:47:25.207" Score="31" ViewCount="20542" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I watch Anime, I notice that Japanese English pronunciation is really bad, they twist all the sounds, and they can't pronounce sounds like &quot;L&quot;. I think English is the easiest language when it comes to pronunciation, and I don’t think it has something related to their native language, as for me, I learned Arabic,French and English, and I have no problems with the pronunciation, even though my mother language (Tamazight) has nothing related to these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16864" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T11:33:56.270" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T19:55:09.553" Title="Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="25" FavoriteCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22760" CreationDate="2017-05-02T11:31:01.880" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of that article. So the piece actually says &quot;many&quot;, not most. You can check the book for examples. This is even true in some languages I've done field work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And btw I'm a Professor of anthropolical/cognitive linguistics--my PhD is in linguistics.) All the best, Caleb &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16865" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T23:34:23.403" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:34:23.403" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-02T13:03:07.870" Score="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;English pronunciation isn't easy&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't think that, just because you find it easy, most people in the world will;  English pronunciation is actually quite complex by any measure.  The language has something around 10 vowels (not counting diphthongs) and 44 phonemes; well above the average, and more than double Japanese's 5 vowels and 17 phonemes.  What's more, English syllables are unusually complex, and may have long sequences of consonants (as in &quot;lengths&quot;) and consonant-only syllables (as in &quot;bottle&quot;).  Even people in Spain or Italy will unconsciously add vowels between the consonants in order to simplify English syllables—and Japanese syllables are even simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;People generally have trouble with foreign sounds&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you find it easy to pronounce sounds not in your native language, and I don't doubt you.  However, you're being unfair to the Japanese by singling them out; just listen to second-language speakers anywhere in the world, and you'll find that people generally have trouble distinguishing sounds not in their languages.  For example, the Chinese speakers I known find it difficult to distinguish sounds like b/d or e/ɛ when learning my native Portuguese.  English &lt;em&gt;gringos&lt;/em&gt; have trouble with the nasal &quot;ã&quot;, or even with saying a simple /o/ without turning it into a diphthong [oʊ]. I have trouble with English t/th; anyone from a non-tonal language has trouble with Chinese tones, and so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; learn these sounds (if properly instructed); but it's a well-known fact that many &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;, even after years living in another country.  This is interesting, because babies &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; learn all the sounds people speak around them (well, except for a few cases of &quot;speech dysfunction&quot;, like lisps; but these are unusual).  Adult foreign learners have a lot more difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;English is incorporated into the Japanese sound system&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you know that around 58% of English words came from Latin and French? But they pronounce them very different than actual Latin or French.  The word &quot;Latin&quot; itself, for example, is like [ˈlæ.ʔn̩] rather than /ˈla.tin/.  &lt;em&gt;Et cetera&lt;/em&gt; is /ˌɛtˈsɛtɹə/ instead of /ɛt ˈkeːtera/, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, when you incorporate lots of words from a foreign language into your own, you adapt the pronunciation to fit yours.  It would be a bother to keep changing from English sounds to Latin sounds all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has something like 30% &quot;foreign&quot; (&lt;em&gt;gairaigo&lt;/em&gt;) words (not counting Chinese), most of which are English.  Just like English speakers adapt words like &quot;Et cetera&quot;, &quot;Paris&quot; or &quot;Mexico&quot; to fit their own sound system when speaking English, Japanese adapt English words (and others) to fit their own sound system when speaking Japanese.  So &quot;hamburger&quot; becomes &lt;em&gt;hambāgā&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;cut&quot; becomes &lt;em&gt;katto&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this means Japanese people have an easy-available but inexact &quot;version&quot; of English already in their minds, and this makes it harder to learn actual English pronunciation.  When English people learn Latin, they have to begin by &lt;em&gt;unlearning&lt;/em&gt; the way they pronounce Latin words and Latin letters, and get used to actual Latin sounds.  Japanese people, too, have to learn to set aside their native &lt;em&gt;gairaigo&lt;/em&gt; pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Japanese person needs to actually speak English, for example to live in England, they will learn it; but if they're just living in Japan and talking to other Japanese people, they'll just use the Japanized English words, for the same reason that English speakers use an Anglicized pronunciation of Latin words when talking to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;English classes in Japan usually suck&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japan has mandatory but atrocious English education, which is worse than no education. Richard Schmidt has pointed long ago that foreign learners won't acquire non-native sounds unless you draw conscious attention to them first. However, the typical English course in Japan doesn't try to teach the basics of articulatory phonetics or how to enunciate the sounds; they just keep doing grammar drills and such. I'm living in Germany, and I got a Japanese student to pronounce German-only sounds like &quot;ö&quot; and &quot;ü&quot; in one afternoon by explicitly explaining tongue and lip positions to her.  I'm sure that, if a Japanese person is &lt;em&gt;actually taught&lt;/em&gt; English phonology, they'll be able to pronounce English without major issues.  I've met plenty of Japanese individuals with better English pronunciation than mine (admittedly, they usually have lived overseas, and therefore had incentive to learn actual English pronunciation, as opposed to their native Japanized English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T13:40:20.863" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T13:40:20.863" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-02T22:03:18.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm not a linguist I am married to a Mandarin Chinese speaker who learned English in adulthood and I have noticed some very definite patterns in her learning.  Specifically, learning new ways of saying something is easy for her (no surprise as she is also fluent in several local dialects of Chinese.)  Learning new fundamental language concepts is far harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese is spoken by the syllable, not the letter.  English speakers learn to enunciate the sounds of each letter and thus have little trouble when faced with a non-word or an unknown word.  Consider, for example, &quot;bot&quot;.  While it does have a meaning out of biology most people did not know it before the coming of the computer revolution--yet a native English speaker would have no difficulty with how to pronounce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese, however, does not have this flexibility.  As they have only learned to say a specific set of syllables.  Their standard written language does not even permit the expressing of alien pronunciation, although it can be done with Pinyin.  When foreign things get incorporated into Chinese it is within the context of those syllables--often changing it to the point that it is no longer recognizable (and this cuts both ways--she will often not recognize the proper pronunciation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning syllables that she did not learn as a child is a much harder thing for her.  She once actually told me that Chinese does not have an &quot;r&quot; sound--yet it most certainly does.  She did not equate &quot;er&quot; with &quot;r&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do not know Japanese it is a descendant of Chinese and most likely suffers from the same limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And while not actually relevant to the question there is a related issue with concepts.  When we have two words that map to one word in Chinese she has a much harder time learning the right English.  To this day she still occasionally slips up and opens a light or turns on a door.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16889" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T22:03:18.473" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T09:35:03.547" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found somewhere that &quot;sagon&quot; is the reconstructed proto-germanic word for &quot;story&quot;, which later became &quot;saga&quot; in Norse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other places I find &quot;sago&quot; instead as the reconstructed proto-germanic word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the correct term &quot;sagon&quot; or &quot;sago&quot;? I am not sure how to verify this.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16904" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T10:56:26.843" Title="Is &quot;sagon&quot; or &quot;sago&quot; the reconstructed proto-germanic term for &quot;story&quot;?" Tags="&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22773" CreationDate="2017-05-03T10:56:26.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stem is reconstructed as *sagōn-. The nominative singular is reconstructed as *sagǭ (with nasalised long vowel). Of course, this is all hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T10:56:26.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11949" CreationDate="2017-05-03T13:40:06.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The debate ended in 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after this, Chomsky (2005/2008 (written in 2005, and circulated, published in 2008) wrote &lt;em&gt;On Phases&lt;/em&gt; which did not acknowledge anything from his previous papers co-written by Hauser and Fitch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chomsky (2005/2008) he proposes this (p. 5 in the 2005 version, and I'd assume the 5th page of the 2008 version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose that some ancestor, perhaps about 60,000 years ago, underwent a slight mutation rewiring the brain, yielding unbounded Merge. Then he or she would at once have had available an infinite array of structured expressions for use in thought (planning, interpretation, etc.), gaining selectional advantages transmitted to offspring, capacities that came to dominate, yielding the dramatic and rather sudden changes found in the archeological record. Speculation, of course, as are all such stories, but about the simplest one imaginable, consistent with what little is known, and presupposed in some form (often tacitly) in all speculations about the matter. Since the integration of language precursors into FL together with innovation of unbounded Merge would have been sudden (in evolutionary time), effects of path-dependent evolution and other complexities that underlie the logic of Jacobian “bricolage” might be secondary phenomena, and evolution to a form of FL approaching SMT, not too surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing about spandrel structures, or anything else. It is nothing but pure speculation. He does not even cite himself from Chomsky, Hauser &amp;amp; Fitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two years after &lt;em&gt;On Phases&lt;/em&gt; was published, one of Chomsky's co-authors and co-workers Marc Hauser was embattled in a massive scandal over scientific misconduct, and resigned. Accusations of scientific misconduct arose four years before his resignation in 2011.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chronicle.com/article/Marc-Hauser-Resigns-From/128296/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.chronicle.com/article/Marc-Hauser-Resigns-From/128296/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hauser has gone on to continue publishing works in language origin, but is unaffiliated with any universities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know what Chomsky's thoughts are on the Spandrel Structure idea for the biology of Language Origin. He has not written about it (I reckon) since 2005. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's work gravitated into &lt;em&gt;biolinguistics&lt;/em&gt; with the likes of Samuel Epstein, around 2005 and hasn't consulted with biology since then, to my knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His work towards the end of 2005 no longer seems to acknowledge the things hypothesised in Chomsky, Hauser, &amp;amp; Fitch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it terminated right where you stopped reading, to answer the question explicitly. You got to the end of it. Afterwards, Chomsky went in a different direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to Hauser--in 2014 Hauser et al., published a paper in Frontiers about the evolution of language (interestingly, Hauser affiliates himself as a CEO of Risk Eraser in the author affiliations). The paper does not conclude much and is more of Squib if you ask me. It provides suggestions for future research, and summarises the problems so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&#xA;Chomsky, N. (2008). On phases. &lt;em&gt;Current Studies in Linguistics Series&lt;/em&gt;, 45, 133.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2005 version is available at:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fosssil.in/chomsky_phases.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fosssil.in/chomsky_phases.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hauser, M. D., Yang, C., Berwick, R. C., Tattersall, I., Ryan, M. J., Watumull, J., ... &amp;amp; Lewontin, R. C. (2014). The mystery of language evolution. &lt;em&gt;Frontiers in psychology&lt;/em&gt;, 5, 401. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastEditorUserId="16908" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T13:46:23.360" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T13:46:23.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T19:55:48.037" Score="1" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tamil, there is a single word எண்(eN) which means 'count', 'number', 'think'. I am wondering if this is unique to Tamil? I am wondering if the other old classical languages have a similar word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16920" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T23:26:49.580" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T23:26:49.580" Title="Languages having same word to denote &quot;count&quot; and &quot;think&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T20:12:33.067" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am missing something here, but does Edit Doron adopt: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) a lexicalist view of morphology (as it seems from &quot;A Unified Approach to Reflexivization in Semitic and Romance&quot; by Edit Doron and Malka Rappaport Hovav)in which she says &quot;our theory, which recognizes only lexical reflexivization and anaphoric binding, is clearly superior to a system such as R&amp;amp;S’s, which recognizes syntactic reflexivization in addition to lexical reflexivization and anaphoric binding.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) a syntactic one (as it seems from &quot;Agency and Voice: The Semantics of the Semitic Templates&quot; by Edit Doron). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T19:19:56.420" Title="Edit Doron: Reflexivity in Syntax or the Lexicon" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4667" CreationDate="2017-05-03T20:54:44.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognate isn't a very well defined term in linguistics, and can mean all of the above definitions, although the distinctions about origin are only applied to historical linguistics. The main distinction is cognate v. non-cognate, which indicates synonyms between languages that share a phonological representation v. synonyms that do not share a phonological representation. In theory, they should be translational equivalents, but in practice this is not generally true, especially for abstract concepts. Cognates can be loanwords (aka borrowings), and this is from language contact situations. The roots of these words are shared, even when the languages do not share any (recent? obvious?) historical root. They will sound similar, but not the same, as borrowed words do not generally keep the sounds of the original language, but adapt to the new speakers' phonology. Additionally, words that sound the same can homophones (aka false-friends). These are words that generally bear no conceptual overlap. However, the binary distinction of words isn't really accurate, as words considered homophonous may have some conceptual overlap due to shared historical roots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16921" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T20:54:44.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22776" CreationDate="2017-05-03T21:01:39.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the case for Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;считать&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ɕːɪˈtatʲ]&lt;/code&gt; has two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;to count&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;I &lt;strong&gt;counted&lt;/strong&gt; my cats; fifteen are they&quot;&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;to consider, to think&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;I &lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt; that I'm too fat&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology dictionaries (Vasmer) provide with the following explanation (note the &lt;strong&gt;Old&amp;nbsp;Indic&amp;nbsp;origin&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; Old Indic &lt;code&gt;сḗtаti&lt;/code&gt; «to comply, think, discover, understand», &lt;code&gt;kḗtas&lt;/code&gt; «thought, idea, will», &lt;code&gt;cikitvā́n&lt;/code&gt; «understanding, knowing»,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Avestan &lt;code&gt;čikiθwā̊&lt;/code&gt; «wise»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-05-03T21:13:32.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T21:13:32.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22776" CreationDate="2017-05-03T21:03:56.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word &quot;reckon&quot; has the same two meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T21:03:56.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8630" CreationDate="2017-05-04T04:59:46.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's not 'obvious' when you take into account both the lexical distance, and date of divergence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, and I feel like it would be good to hear from a historical linguist who speaks both, but seeing as no one has answered this yet... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, Germanic and Romance languages obviously split much earlier than Mandarin and Cantonese did, but the problem with that is that languages change at different rates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not a widely-accepted way of measuring language distance in historical linguistics. There are some proposals like Glottochronology, but the problem with Glottochronology, is again, that languages change at different rates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we think about this in the framework of evolutionary biology, then Mandarin and Cantonese probably last shared a common ancestor in early Middle Chinese, spoken around 600 AD, with a rhyme table recorded in the Qieyun in 601. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, Mandarin underwent many radical changes, including the loss of most word final consonants, which in turn created lots of homophones, which in turn caused speakers to make lots of compounds to disambiguate these homophones causing huge lexical changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking whether or not Mandarin is as lexically distant from Cantonese as English is to French elaborates only one dimension of the picture. Mandarin and Cantonese share a closer recent common ancestor than English and French do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Mandarin and Cantonese are probably much more divergent than say, the Germanic languages, which also began diverging around that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember one textbook, &lt;em&gt;Anthropology of Language&lt;/em&gt;, claiming Mandarin and Cantonese are as lexically divergent as English and Italian. I don't think it cited any sources, and I don't have the book on me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to keep in mind that Mandarin and Cantonese may be as divergent as English is to Italian, but that this change happened fast with Mandarin; within the last 1,400 years, while English and Italian probably last shared a common ancestor more than 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T04:59:46.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-04T05:36:26.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are numerous cultural reasons, here are the primary linguistic reasons imo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As was mentioned briefly, Japanese has a very different phonological system than English, virtually all &quot;syllables&quot; are CV or V. Examining this chart of the Japanese mora is very educational of how the system functions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Phonotactics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realizing this, one can begin to see how absolutely different a sound system would be where multiple consonants are mashed together into the same syllable, as English does. This, according to several of my friends who speak Japanese, makes Japanese speakers inclined to place vowels in between consonants, which obviously alters the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The simple lack of similar consonants, and vowels, between Japanese &amp;amp; English. This chart, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Consonants&lt;/a&gt; , gives all the Japanese consonants and you can see a number of English sounds are missing. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the difficulty in pronouncing &quot;l&quot; specifically, you may notice on the chart that there is a weird l-shaped letter and a weird r-shaped letter that are in the same box separated by a squiggly line. This indicates that the sound is a spectrum between the two l &amp;amp; r sounds. This is likely the main difficulty in pronouncing l's in English for Japanese speakers, the sound is split into two! (also note that a similar situation exists in Korean)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, according to a friend who speaks Japanese, the most difficult phrase for Japanese speakers to say is the name of the movie, Dances with Wolves. I believe this is because the consonant clusters as well as numerous consonants that do exist in Japanese! (such as L)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16923" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T05:36:26.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22883" CreationDate="2017-05-04T05:39:08.370" Score="13" ViewCount="1174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike Latin &quot;ursus&quot; or English &quot;bear&quot;, the Slavic word &quot;medved&quot; is not cognate to the reconstructed PIE &quot;*Hrtkos&quot;. It is believed that this word is a Slavic euphemism meaning &quot;honey-eater&quot;. I am interested, however, what would happen if Slavs didn't use it, but still retained all the sound laws that shaped the Slavic languages. Can we try to reconstruct this word in Proto-Slavic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13099" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T13:32:06.603" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T14:28:09.187" Title="How would Slavs call a bear if they didn't use euphemism?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T05:50:46.707" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a large excel file like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Timestamp       Text                                Work        Id&#xA;5/4/16 17:52    rain a lot the packs maybe damage.  Delivery    XYZ&#xA;5/4/16 18:29    wh. screen                          Other       ABC&#xA;5/4/16 14:54    15107 Lane Pflugerville, &#xA;                TX customer called me and his phone &#xA;                number and my phone numbers were not &#xA;                masked. thank you customer has had a &#xA;                stroke and items were missing from his &#xA;                delivery the cleaning supplies for his &#xA;                wet vacuum steam cleaner.  he needs a &#xA;                call back from customer support     Delivery    YYY&#xA;5/6/16 13:05    How will I know if I                Signing up  ASX&#xA;5/4/16 23:07    an quality                          Delivery    DFC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to work only on the &quot;Text&quot; column and then eliminate those row that have basically just have gibberish in the &quot;Text&quot; column (rows 2,4,5 from the above example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading only the 2nd column as follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import xlrd&#xA;book = xlrd.open_workbook(&quot;excel.xlsx&quot;)&#xA;sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0)&#xA;for row_index in xrange(1, sheet.nrows): # skip heading row&#xA;    timestamp, text = sheet.row_values(row_index, end_colx=2)&#xA;    text)&#xA;    print (text)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I remove the gibberish rows? I have an idea that I need to work with &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt; and have a positive corpus (one that does not have any gibberish), one negative corpus (only having gibberish text), and train my model with it. But how do I go about implementing it? Please help!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16925" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T19:08:21.713" Title="How to extract rows with only meaningful text in a column" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-04T07:28:46.803" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Here's an answer from developmental psychology:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a baby is born they can natively pronounce phonemes of every language, but as they develop, their brains are constantly calculating and keeping track of which phonemes are more often said. This causes the baby to lose their ability to natively pronounce or even differentiate other phonemes except the ones spoken in the languages of their environment. This does mean that biracial babies will be able to pronounce more phonemes natively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After what is known as the &quot;critical period&quot;, it is very, very difficult to retrain the brain to learn to pronounce/differentiate new phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quote from Neuroscience, 2nd Edition, specifically answering about the pronounciation of the l/r:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Very young human infants can perceive and discriminate between&#xA;  differences in all human speech sounds, and are not innately biased&#xA;  towards the phonemes characteristic of any particular language.&#xA;  However, this universal appreciation does not persist. For example,&#xA;  adult Japanese speakers cannot reliably distinguish between the /r/&#xA;  and /l/ sounds in English, presumably because this phonemic&#xA;  distinction is not present in Japanese. Nonetheless, 4-month-old&#xA;  Japanese infants can make this discrimination as reliably as&#xA;  4-month-olds raised in English-speaking households (as indicated by&#xA;  increased suckling frequency or head turning in the presence of a&#xA;  novel stimulus). By 6 months of age, however, infants show preferences&#xA;  for phonemes in their native language over those in foreign languages,&#xA;  and by the end of their first year no longer respond to phonetic&#xA;  elements peculiar to non-native languages. The ability to perceive&#xA;  these phonemic contrasts evidently persists for several more years, as&#xA;  evidenced by the fact that children can learn to speak a second&#xA;  language without accent and with fluent grammar until about age 7 or&#xA;  8. After this age, however, performance gradually declines no matter what the extent of practice or exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Development of Language: A Critical Period in Humans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other answers note, Japanese and English doesn't necessary have much phoneme overlap&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From a very famous and informative TED talk about this topic, that explains that it's very difficult for the brain of a native Japanese to differentiate between an &quot;l&quot; and an &quot;r&quot;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies&#xA;  tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they&#xA;  listened to &quot;ra&quot; and &quot;la&quot; — sounds important to English, but not to&#xA;  Japanese. So at six to eight months, the babies are totally&#xA;  equivalent. Two months later, something incredible occurs. The babies&#xA;  in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are&#xA;  getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing&#xA;  for exactly the language that they are going to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies/transcript?language=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patricia Kuhl, The linguistic genius of babies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The TED talk even shows demonstration videos on this effect, check it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16928" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T07:28:46.803" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T10:26:02.663" Score="1" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am kind of writing a book, which is set in medieval times and I have a kind of conflict between a drunk and a tavern-keeper that takes offence to the drunk calling him a Finn because his accent sounds like a Finnish one. I really need an ethnicity/mother tongue for the tavern-keeper to be of for this misunderstanding to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might not be the right place for this question but thanks in advance if I do get answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:I guess it boils down to estonian then. Those dialects and languages people propose are in finland or in areas that are in my book norse. And they wouldn't work since the only finns that are left in my books universe live on the east side of ladoga and the only estonians that are left lives in Ingermanland(Ingria) and maybe ryazan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the answers everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16934" LastEditorUserId="16934" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T12:00:23.603" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T16:29:19.290" Title="A good example of a Finnic or Finno-Ugric language that can be confused with Finnish?" Tags="&lt;finno-ugric&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T10:40:59.360" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happened when my son was 1.5 years old. He would play with my nephew who is the same age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of their favorite game is to act like someone who is trying to park a car and moving backward. The cars here make a warning sound ( a repeating sound like a mild ambulance alarm) on reverse-gear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kids used to reproduce the sound of this alarm. But surprisingly the sound they made was vastly different from the original sound; it only had some rhythmic similarity with the original sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing was absolute. The sound they made were as if someone read a sequence of alphabets from Tamil - their mother tongue. I was curious because they are yet to be introduced into the alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess the kids have unknowingly modeled the sounds to a sequence of phonemes in their native language and when they reproduced the sound, they did not reproduce the sound but they reproduced the identified phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is vast because each phoneme in a language has some freedom and the kids chose the sound that is easy to reproduce but still falls into the same phoneme of the native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16920" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T10:40:59.360" Title="Impact of native language on toddlers reproducing non-speech sounds" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22810" CreationDate="2017-05-04T10:58:14.313" Score="10" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally all number systems use addition or multiplication to express numbers like - '12*3 + 6 for 42 in a base 12 system', '2 on the way to 50' or 'even 10+10+10+10+2 in some'. But, are there number systems which use subtraction like 10*5-8 (for an exemplar base 10 system), I know Ainu is close but not what I want to know about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T09:23:35.623" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T09:23:35.623" Title="Is there any language with number system that uses subtraction? (Other than Ainu)" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T13:31:30.020" Score="8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was difficult to phrase what I mean in an accurate and precise way here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to a fossil word, but fossil words are words which have fallen out of general use except where they are preserved in an expression.  (for example &lt;em&gt;fro&lt;/em&gt; in the expression &lt;em&gt;to and fro&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about a word that is still in general use for its prior purpose, is also used for something directly derived from this meaning, but that this derivation no longer makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T17:18:12.450" Title="What is it called when a word is used based on an extant definition which no longer actually applies? e.g. &quot;dial&quot; with phones" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22790" CreationDate="2017-05-04T14:54:45.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Yoruba language has a rather elaborate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_numerals&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vigesimal (base-20) numeral system&lt;/a&gt; that involves both addition and subtraction and multiplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are words for each of the decades; units in 1–4 are created by adding to these, while units in 5–9 are created by subtracting from the next decade. The odd decades are created by subtracting ten from the next even decade:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;14=10+4; 15=20-5; 16=20-4; 50=20×3−10, 700=200×4−100; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar#Numerals_and_numbers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin used subtraction in numerals&lt;/a&gt;. Among the numbers from 18 to 98, those that ended in 8 or 9 were formed by subtracting 2 and 1 from the following decade:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;27: septem et vīgintī ('7 and 20')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;28: duodētrīgintā ('2 from 30')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;29: ūndētrīgintā ('1 from 30')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T14:54:45.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22788" CreationDate="2017-05-04T15:39:28.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some candidates are Estonian, Karelian, Votic, and Livonian. These languages are quite close but probably all existed as distinct languages in medieval times (there is not a huge amount of old documentation of these languages, and Finnish is directly documented only in the post-medieval period). Karelian is similar enough to Finnish that some people classify it as a dialect of Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T15:39:28.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-04T15:51:21.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really amusing question. I usually think: before someone asks, why does someone speak in a language with accent or that why are they not so idiomatic, flip the coin, and ask: can you even speak 2 or 3 complete sentences in their languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese language doesn't have some phonics (vowels and consonants) that is in English. Just like English doesn't have some phonics in Spanish. For example, a lot of Westerners cannot pronounce the word Ng, which is a Chinese last name. So to make it possible for them to pronounce it, it is transformed to &quot;Eng&quot;. I heard the theory was that (1) you are not used to saying that phonics all your life, so can you say it immediately if it deviates from your habit (2) when in childhood, some of your bone and joint structure near your mouth is already formed for you to use that phonics system a lot, so if you want to pronounce some different phonics, you are working against your bone and joints to do the job (after you have become an adult).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16947" LastEditorUserId="16947" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T01:04:02.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T01:04:02.077" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22791" CreationDate="2017-05-04T17:18:12.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's called the 'generalization / extension / broadening' of meaning: words with concrete meaning (like 'dialing' meaning 'calling by turning the round wheel on the phone') begin to mean more general things (now 'dialing' means 'calling from any kind of phone'). There are many examples of such generalization: &lt;em&gt;manuscript&lt;/em&gt; once meant only handwritten documents, now it means any authorized copy, both handwritten and printed; &lt;em&gt;picture&lt;/em&gt; once meant only a painting, now it means any kind of image, even photos; &lt;em&gt;pipe&lt;/em&gt; used to mean &quot;a musical wind instrument&quot; now it can mean &quot;any hollow oblong cylindrical body&quot;(e. g. &lt;em&gt;water pipes&lt;/em&gt;); in Russian &lt;em&gt;стрелять&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;стрела&lt;/em&gt; 'arrow') used to mean only 'to shoot arrows', now it means shooting from any kind of weapon, even from tanks and with missiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T17:18:12.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22785" CreationDate="2017-05-04T18:18:10.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Define “meaningful”. Implement that definition by means of a filter that will accept meaningful text, i.e., text that can be understood under such rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modern way to solve this problem would be to train a neural network of some sort with a large set of phrases that are “meaningful” (e.g., famous quotes and excerpts from books) and a set of randomly-generated “gibberish” strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A cheaper option would be to look for specific words in the English language. Adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and determiners, as there's a finite list of them and they're most likely to be present in colloquial language. Telling nouns, verbs and adjectives apart is much more difficult, as there are words that can be used either way (“answer”, “giant”, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither option will allow you to accept street addresses, phone numbers and other kind of structured data as “meaningful” text; you'll have to parse them separately. In particular, “fifteen thousand one hundred and seven” is meaningful English text, but “15107” is a number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T18:18:10.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22788" CreationDate="2017-05-04T20:21:17.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Estonian and Finnish existed in Medieval times as numerous dialects. I am not sure if the ethnonim for Finns existed then. Besides, it's an exonim; the name of Finnish people as they could call themselves would be something like 'Suomi' or 'Soomi' or perhaps even 'Soom' (pronounced with long 'o', not like in, say, 'boot'). I don't put here the correct name for the nationality (which differs from a name for language, unlike in English) intentionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference among Finnish and even among Estonian dialects has survived up to modern days. Since a borderline between a language and a dialect is often arbitrary (and it was so especially during Medieval times), the options would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Savvo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savonian_dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Savo&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language#Dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tavastian&lt;/a&gt; / Yemi / Häme [hæme]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rauma_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rauma&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to be more Tolkien-like and less punctual about centuries, you could mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Finns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forest Finns&lt;/a&gt; as well. As we can see from Ukrainian story, neighbors and kins are more likely to have an issue with human lives than more distant nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karelian and Votic have a lot of consonant clusters (unlike Finnish). Same with Veps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my offer is either to use one of these survivors among dialects, or (if the consonant clusters are OK for you) to choose for one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saami languages&lt;/a&gt;. It's Fenno-Ugric (although not as much Fenno-Ugric as to be mistaken for Soomi by anything save its name), and the Saami tribes were driven northwards by Finnish and Germanic tribes since Medieval period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting option is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Komi language&lt;/a&gt;. Despite of being heavily russified by now, it has an interesting history, a fantastic grammar and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Permic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its own writing system&lt;/a&gt; that predated the Cyrillic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T20:33:03.300" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T20:33:03.300" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22788" CreationDate="2017-05-04T21:37:57.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would depend on the sample, but it would probably be a Finnic language, such as Karelian or Estonian. Also, where is it? This could help with what language is likely enough to be spoken by a tavern-keeper, but not so common that it would be instantly recognizable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastEditorUserId="16961" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T16:29:19.290" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T16:29:19.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22729" CreationDate="2017-05-04T21:49:50.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Latin, the pluperfect would appear to be a combination of an aspect (perfect) and a tense (past). It is even sometimes called the past perfect. This is based off the fact that the pluperfect endings in latin are 3rd principle part (used for forming perfect, future-perfect, and pluperfect), plus the past forms of to be. In other languages, what they call a pluperfect might be analyzed differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T21:49:50.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-05T02:56:48.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a very good Wikipedia article at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;/l/_by_Japanese_speakers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, there is the remark that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;native speakers of Japanese who have learned English as adults have difficulty perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/, even if the speakers are comfortable with conversational English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine your name is Robert Loyal!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the next time you think someone from Japan is lamenting lack of beauty (&quot;I ugly&quot;), realize he or she may be saying, &quot;I agree!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your amusement, I suggest the poem &quot;The Chaos&quot; by Gerard Nolst Trenité:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16965" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T02:56:48.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14717" CreationDate="2017-05-05T05:05:26.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'd just like to clarify that the chereme is not “the emic unit” for signed languages, but rather the signed version of a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; — which indeed is exactly the cause for what you noticed. Due to the exact parallel between chereology and phonology, linguists have generally agreed to simply use the same terms as in spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way of understanding this decision is to consider the other emic units of signed language: just because the mode and medium have changed doesn't mean we use different words for the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of signed languages. Phonology is completely parallel in spoken and signed languages, so there's arguably no reason to differentiate between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also asked “by what discourse communities” has this terminology been abandoned. If you meant “whose decision was it,” I'm not sure (though I would guess linguists at large), but if you meant “who no longer uses this terminology,” I can say that &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; is what both my Deaf ASL professor and my linguistics professors use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And, just to add a third-party source, I also found this passage from 2006 in the Encyclopedia of Language &amp;amp; Linguistics, in the section on William Stokoe:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…Stokoe's cheremic terminology has been discarded (it is now usual for sign language linguists to refer to the phonology of signed languages)…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14293" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T05:05:26.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9499" CreationDate="2017-05-05T05:21:58.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any sources to reference here, but it seems completely logical to me. The purpose of applause, in either mode, is to participate in making “noise” to signify approval (or some other contextually apparent emotion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aurally, the randomness of a large audience clapping creates a sonic footprint similar to white noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visually, the randomness of a large audience fluttering their hands is similar: our brains are attuned to movement, and the constant random shifting creates the same basic effect as something like sequined fabric, or television static.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same effect could be achieved through other means, like standing up and down, or waving one's arms dramatically, but hand-fluttering is comparatively much more low energy, especially important for sustained applause. This is true for aural applause as well: sure, you can shout to show excitement, and people frequently do in addition to applause, but you'll run out of breath much more quickly than your hands become tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14293" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T05:21:58.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22806" CreationDate="2017-05-05T06:01:29.423" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a few languages (the examples are from English), it seems to be common for negative morphemes to modify a verb that's &quot;higher&quot; in the syntactic structure of a sentence (not sure what the correct word is for directions in a tree). This causes the negative morpheme to be modifying a different verb than what you would expect if negation were strictly compositional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance (1) is an utterance a native English speaker might produce, but (2a/b) would only be produced in very restricted contexts, such as a humorous answer to a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) I don't want to buy an apple.&#xA;&#xA;(2a) *I want not to buy an apple. / (2b) *I want to not buy an apple.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can also occur in cases where you have a dependent clause. To my ear, (3) and (4) mean approximately the same thing, although the emphasis is different. In particular, I do not interpret (3) to mean or be consistent with &quot;I don't know whether the Earth is flat or not&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(3) I don't think that the Earth is flat.&#xA;&#xA;(4) I think that the Earth is not flat.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sort of an interesting phenomenon, since it makes the meaning of negation non-compositional. Does it have a name? Are there languages that don't exhibit this tendency to move negative morphemes around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(5) Il ne faut pas réveiller le chat qui dort.&#xA;It is necessary not to wake the cat that sleeps.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastEditorUserId="13573" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T06:14:32.497" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T06:29:55.973" Title="Name for tendency of negative morphemes to climb to &quot;outermost&quot; position" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22805" CreationDate="2017-05-05T06:29:55.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. The phenomenon is known as NEG-raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1721" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T06:29:55.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-05T06:56:58.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of a theory of foreign pronunciation proceeds straightforwardly from David Stampe's theory Natural Phonology.  Every natural language is phonetically difficult for a child, because many sounds tend to be changed into easier ones. A child's task is to learn not to let this happen for the languages he must learn to pronounce.  See Stampe's article in CLS 5, &lt;em&gt;The acquisition of phonetic representation&lt;/em&gt;.  The phonological system of a language consists in the set of those those simplifications of sounds, the &quot;processes&quot;, which needn't unlearned by children in order for them pronounce their language correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a considerable difference between what must be learned by children learning Japanese and children learning English.  For instance, children have a tendency to drop word-final obstruents (p/b/t/d/k/g/f/v/s/z/...), and they have to get over that to pronounce English correctly, but to learn Japanese, they needn't bother, because Japanese doesn't have word-final obstruents.  This is why Japanese trying to pronounce English drop such obstruents at first.  It is simply something they didn't have to learn when learning Japanese as children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether it is available online, but Julie Lovins' dissertation &lt;em&gt;Loanwords and the phonological structure of Japanese&lt;/em&gt; is an excellent account along these lines of what we can infer about the structure of Japanese from borrowings of English words into Japanese.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Beth_Lovins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julie Beth Lovins&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, English words are easy to pronounce for English speakers, because they've learned how to do that, but difficult for Japanese speakers who haven't yet learned how.  Pretty obvious, really (though the details are complicated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T06:56:58.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T07:38:31.780" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my brother helps me translate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the subject of the dependent clause surfaces as an object pronoun. In generative grammar there have been several approaches to analyzing this phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is also the &quot;to drop&quot; issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my brother helps me to translate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This second sentence seems inferior to the above one. ...at least in my dialect of American English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what is this phenomenon called so I can do some initial research into it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10497" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T07:54:15.673" Title="Looking for the name of research area *my brother helps me (to) translate*" Tags="&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T09:02:07.793" Score="4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Helen drove to the party&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find in a book that it is a &lt;strong&gt;location&lt;/strong&gt;, but I am thinking it is a &lt;strong&gt;goal&lt;/strong&gt;, because there is no actual place called &quot;party&quot;. In the other hand, the definition of the Goal is : the entity towards which something moves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T09:23:03.833" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T19:31:36.953" Title="What is the thematic role of &quot;to the party&quot; in this sentence?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22790" CreationDate="2017-05-05T09:02:31.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's somewhat curious that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the Roman calendar and the Roman numerals used subtraction quite extensively; for neither is there any modern equivalent. For example, even the Advent sundays (which are defined as the four sundays &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; Christmas) are counted upwards; surely one could call them the fourth, third, second, first sunday (before Christmas) in that order instead, but that is not being done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the Roman calendar used subtractive counting throughout, being entirely based on months and 'signal post' days within each month (kalends, nones, ides) that are being counted 'towards'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, in numerals, I, II, III, IV, V stand for the numbers one to five, with IV replacing the more straightforward IIII (which form is still used on clock faces, though). This is repeated with higher numbers, viz IX = 9, XC = 90, CM = 900 and so on. Be it said that usage appears to have been far from uniform, though; also, the Wikipedia article has many contradictory examples, and most are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; from early (classical and pre-classical) times, so it's not immediately clear what the earliest forms were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the downward counting is so counter-intuitive to a modern observer that one is compelled to think there should have been a strong motivation for it to occur; maybe that motivation was in the number words of the early language; and, indeed @Yellow Sky cites duodētrīgintā ('2 from 30', 28 = 30 – 2) and ūndētrīgintā ('1 from 30', 29 = 30 - 1), which are quite naturally written out as IIXXX and IXXX in Roman numerals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could venture a wild hypothesis that in ancient Latium, there was a people with a language that used (partially) subtractive counting, vestiges of which system are to be found in their calendar and written number systems, akin to the 'twelve' vs 'thirteen', 'dozen' and 'gross', 'quatre-vingt-dix' of modern times that betray earlier duodecimal and vigesimal systems. The German Wikipedia article on Roman numerals somewhat rejects the link between written and spoken forms: &quot;Die subtraktive Schreibung [...] stimmt aber mit [den Schreibweisen] nicht überein. Bei den lateinischen Zahlwörtern werden die Wörter für 1 und 2, aber nicht auch die für 10 und 100 subtraktiv verwendet und hierbei dann in der Regel auch nur den Vielfachen der 10 ab 20 (duodeviginti = 18, undeviginti = 19)&quot;; OTOH, it admits that 'undecentum' = 99 (= IC) does sometimes appear in ancient sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Months&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Months&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6mische_Zahlschrift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6mische_Zahlschrift&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16971" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T09:02:31.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T11:26:29.837" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen references in the literature on vowel harmony to the possibility of it being a mere epiphenomenon rather than a phonological phenomenon in its own right (e.g. using alignment, agreement or spreading constraint in an OT-style anaylsis), but it's never much more than lip-service. Would anybody be able to point me to work conducted from this perspective or that comes to this conclusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T09:52:42.157" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T09:52:42.157" Title="Vowel harmony as epiphenomenon?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22808" CreationDate="2017-05-05T13:15:47.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example is a classical linguistic question with the canonical example phrase &quot;help him (to) write&quot; (for an overview and more references, see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://lexis.revues.org/943&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pinson (2015)&lt;/a&gt;), but it is not a &lt;em&gt;named&lt;/em&gt; subdiscipline of linguistics. You can look at it from different perspectives (e.g., historical, intra-linguistic variation, or semantics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T13:15:47.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22822" CreationDate="2017-05-05T15:04:03.310" Score="10" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;Erudite English has an interesting practice where the plural form of loanwords may follow the inflectional grammar of the source language.  Thus &quot;campi&quot; as well as &quot;campuses&quot;, &quot;minima&quot; as well as &quot;minimums&quot;, &quot;these kanji were&quot; as well as &quot;these kanjis were&quot;.   Though this is likely a conscious, artificial scholarly invention, many of these word-forms have been absorbed into the living language, to the point where some plurals all but only occur in the Latin style (algae/??algas, larvae/??larvas, desiderata/??desideratums, nuclei/??nucleuses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since speakers are normally unfamiliar with the source grammar, this practice sometimes generates putatively &quot;foreign&quot; plurals that wouldn't be part of the source language: &quot;virii&quot; for what in Latin would be *&lt;em&gt;vira&lt;/em&gt;, or &quot;octopi&quot; rather than Greek &lt;em&gt;octopodes&lt;/em&gt; (though some people do use the latter). The so-called &quot;fake&quot; or &quot;spurious&quot; plurals might be argued to be evidence of productivity, and thus of an English mini-grammar (in the construction-grammar sense).  The implication is that &quot;Latin-style plurals&quot; (at least) are now part of the natural English language, if peripherally (with productive rules like &quot;if a word end in &lt;em&gt;-us&lt;/em&gt;, its erudite plural is &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that German, a language with four cases, used to go a step further; I don't know anything about old German practices, but apparently erudite texts used to inflect Latin loans in the corresponding cases whenever appropriate in a German context.  It seems that Catholic liturgy still declines Jesus, for example: &lt;em&gt;„daß ihr einerlei gesinnt seid untereinander &lt;strong&gt;nach Jesu Christo&lt;/strong&gt;…“&lt;/em&gt; (where the German preposition &lt;em&gt;nach&lt;/em&gt;, which governs the dative, causes the Latin &lt;em&gt;Jesus Christus&lt;/em&gt; to be declined in the Latin dative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there more examples of languages where loanwords keep their source-language inflection, even if only in erudite or literary usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T16:01:48.943" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T08:47:39.683" Title="Languages preserving loanword inflections" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22813" CreationDate="2017-05-05T15:42:30.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more likely to happen when the original language is fairly well known amongst the community of writers–speakers of the adopting language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin often does it for Greek words. That is, one usually has two options in Latin: either one translitterates the Greek endings directly into Latin, or one Latinises the entire paradigm. Which option is chosen also depends on the word; I believe the Greek word &lt;em&gt;aer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;air&quot; always has the (Greek) accusative ending &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; in Latin, so it will be &lt;em&gt;aëra&lt;/em&gt; in the accusative in Latin, rather than the Latinised &lt;em&gt;?aerem&lt;/em&gt;. Using the Greek endings seems to be most common in poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jesu&lt;/em&gt; happens to be an example of this. In Greek, it is an irregular noun with a nominative singular &lt;em&gt;Iesous&lt;/em&gt;, genitive and dative &lt;em&gt;Iesou&lt;/em&gt;. Greek &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; is normally translitterated into &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; in Latin (cf. &lt;em&gt;ou-topia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;non-place&quot; → utopia), whence Latin &lt;em&gt;Iesus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Iesu&lt;/em&gt;. As to the dative ending in Greek, which is highly irregular, it may be an ending borrowed from Hebrew (or a later normalised error).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also seem to remember that this happens far more often with the accusative and genitive than with the dative, probably also because dative endings are very often (almost) the same between Greek and Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T19:23:27.033" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T19:23:27.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T16:05:14.050" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I search info and explanations about &quot;transitive nouns&quot;, I didn't read Chomsky yet. I know he talks about &quot;transitive nouns&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Transitivity is typically thought of as a property of verbs, and perhaps of adpositions,&#xA;      but it is not a typical property of nouns or adjectives. In the influential cross-&#xA;      classification of syntactic categories developed by Chomsky (e.g. 1981: 48),&#xA;      nouns and adjectives are actually defined in opposition to adpositions and verbs&#xA;      by their inability to govern objects, that is by their inability to be transitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.philsoc.org.uk/2017/04/01/transitive-nouns-and-adjectives-evidence-from-early-indo-ary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would need some more explanations, so, what is your (simple!) definition for transivity applied to nouns, its rules of use, some examples, and in which family of languages they apply or not apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9871" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T12:39:58.057" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:39:58.057" Title="Transitive nouns (and adjectives) evidences from early Indo-Aryan languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22818" CreationDate="2017-05-05T17:10:29.127" Score="9" ViewCount="6236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is a language without nouns possible? And another one without verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And other ones without adjectives or adverbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some real examples? (In preference: non-constructed languages, because everything is possible with constructed languages, but you can mention a few, it's also interesting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Credit for the question: TseDanylo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9871" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T10:16:36.360" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T10:16:36.360" Title="Is a language possible without verbs or without nouns?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22813" CreationDate="2017-05-05T18:01:01.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;German does so, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It preserves plural forms from English (really frequently), Italian, and Spanish; but usually not from French (Garage, pl. Garagen), Latin (Museum, pl. Museen), nor Greek (Thema, pl. Themen)..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:01:01.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22816" CreationDate="2017-05-05T18:04:06.593" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not possible for there to be a human language that does not have a way of referring to entities, or to predicate states and actions of an entity. If that is what you mean by &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot;, then all languages have nouns and verbs. However, noun, verb, adverb, adjective are typically treated by linguists as &quot;word classes&quot;, defined in terms of how they are structured or function with other word classes (and not in terms of what they mean), and it is (at this point in linguistic theory) not entirely clear that the distinction is vital. For example, Salishan languages are flexible in noun / verb relations, so a root may be more noun-like with a certain prefix, and more verb-like with a different affix (suffix, in Lushootseed). Nouns and verbs both have past and future tenses. One can typically discern, on a language specific basis, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; formal basis for calling certain words &quot;nouns&quot; versus &quot;verbs&quot;, such as &quot;adding &lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt; makes this a noun&quot;, but it may not yield any significant benefit to making such a distinction. The formal properties of English nouns, verbs and adjectives do not define an &quot;architype&quot; for such words in most languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way of understanding the underlying issue is that there are two different questions you can ask about word classes. One is whether there is always compelling evidence in all languages for distinguishing nouns and verbs (or verbs and adjectives), and the answer to that is &quot;No&quot;; but, you can also ask if it is always possible to define such a distinction in a language, on the premise that there might be mandatory but not particularly useful categories of analysis, and the answer to that is &quot;Yes&quot; (but IMO this begs the question of whether there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; mandatory categories in grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:04:06.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22820" CreationDate="2017-05-05T18:06:49.980" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a dataset where lot of names are written like man1sh instead of manish, vikas as v1kas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can one correct these names in NLP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16984" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T18:10:08.707" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:13:18.293" Title="Correcting the names in NLP" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22819" CreationDate="2017-05-05T18:13:18.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The errors you describe are typically for scanned text and are introduced by the imperfections of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search for &quot;OCR correction&quot; to get an overview of techniques available to correct those errors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For highest quality, manual correction (with at least two independent proofreaders) is still the best we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:13:18.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21017" CreationDate="2017-05-05T20:16:29.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agglutination is when many words/morphemes are joined into a single word.  If you define &quot;word&quot; as &quot;the pieces that we separate by spaces in writing&quot;, then sure, if you changed the rule for adding spaces, you could arbitrarily change what's a word.  If that were all it meant to be a &quot;word&quot;, then there'd be no difference whatsoever between agglutination and omitting spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However! That's not the only definition of what a &quot;word&quot; is—it's not even the most useful one.  Let's try to identify &quot;words&quot; in another way.  Try figuring out what the concept might mean to someone who never learned to read.  Are words distinguished by pauses in speech? Listen to someone speaking on Youtube, and you'll quickly realize that's wrong; most words are spoken in a row, one after another, and there's no obvious cue to where they start and end (try listening to a language you don't know and identify the words!).  Not even the divisions we mark with commas (or other punctuation marks) imply pauses (contrary to what uninformed highschool teachers preach).  So what does &quot;word&quot; even &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; in the context of pure speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer will depend on the language (see Haspelmath, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/haspelmt/pdf/WordSegmentation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The indeterminacy of word segmentation&#xA;and the nature of morphology and syntax&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).  Let's use English as an example.  In English, a nominal &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; may get an -s suffix to make a plural, or in some cases change vowels (&lt;em&gt;foot→feet&lt;/em&gt;).  However, a piece of a word won't change even in the plural.  So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Toothpaste&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Toothpastes&lt;/em&gt; is a single word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tooth paste&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;Teeth pastes&lt;/em&gt; is two words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly with verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;She stir-fries&lt;/em&gt; (one words)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;She stirs, fries&lt;/em&gt; (two word)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is also marked by things like stress and pitch.  Each English word can only have a single stressed syllable, so &quot;TOOTH PASte&quot; vs. &quot;TOOTHpaste&quot;.  I think &quot;tooth paste&quot; also has a lower pitch (I'm not a native speaker, sorry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now you should be realizing that the use of spaces in English isn't arbitrary.  The orthographic words are designed to basically match speech-words as defined by tests such as the above ones.  If you wrote &lt;em&gt;I stir – fry the tooth paste&lt;/em&gt; (awful example, sorry) as &lt;em&gt;Istirfrythetoothpaste&lt;/em&gt;, your new &quot;orthographic word&quot; would obscure the difference between that and &lt;em&gt;I stir-fry the toothpaste&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. the stresses and pitch melody: &quot;I STIR[low] FRY[high] the TOOTH PASte&quot; vs. &quot;I STIRfry[high-low] the TOOTHpaste&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish has its own particular ways of defining &quot;word&quot;.  As &lt;code&gt;jlawler&lt;/code&gt; has pointed above, one simple test (among several possible ones) is the phenomenon of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowel harmony&lt;/a&gt;.  In Turkish, vowels change to match each other, so that either all vowels are &quot;front&quot; (iüeö) or all are &quot;back&quot; (ıuao)… &lt;em&gt;within a single word&lt;/em&gt;.  So if you put a few things together, and they change vowels in order to harmonize, they're a single word, and it's &lt;em&gt;because of that&lt;/em&gt; that the orthography has them without spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T22:04:22.477" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T22:04:22.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22813" CreationDate="2017-05-05T21:01:06.537" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A great number of loanwords from Ancient Greek have been integrated into Czech with great attention to the original forms. For instance, many Ancient Greek nouns from the third (athematic) declension preserve their stem consonants when declined in Czech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the proper name &lt;a href=&quot;http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Paris&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (the Greek mythological prince). In the table given on the linked page, the forms on the right (&lt;em&gt;Paris&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Parise&lt;/em&gt;, ...) demonstrate what the regular Czech declension would be, but the ones on the left (&lt;em&gt;Paris&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Parida&lt;/em&gt;, ...) are the ones that are actually used, to correspond with the original Greek declension &lt;em&gt;Πάρις&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Πάριδος&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common example are loanwords that were originally dental stem neuters, such as δρᾶμα (drama). Such Czech nouns are commonly declined with the irregular interfix &lt;em&gt;-at-&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;drama&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dramatu&lt;/em&gt;, ...), so as to approximate the Greek declension &lt;em&gt;δρᾶμα&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;δράματος&lt;/em&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the prime example is the Greek name &lt;em&gt;Ζέυς&lt;/em&gt;, in Czech &lt;em&gt;Zeus&lt;/em&gt;. In Ancient Greek, it was declined irregularly as &lt;em&gt;Ζέυς&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Δίος&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Δίι&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Δία&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ζέυ&lt;/em&gt;. The Czech loanword faithfully replicates this irregularity and declines as &lt;em&gt;Zeus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Dia&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Diovi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Dia&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Die&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Diovi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Diem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16987" LastEditorUserId="16987" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T21:11:25.507" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T21:11:25.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22811" CreationDate="2017-05-05T21:14:53.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you'll have problems with the addition &quot;phenomenon in its own right&quot;. Linguists tend to reduce all facts to being &quot;epiphenomenal&quot;, and dislike admitting any &quot;phenomenon in its own right&quot;. This is actually reasonable from a theoretical perspective, since I think it amounts to saying &quot;this pattern of facts can be further analysed, and reduced to interaction between independent theoretical elements&quot; – in other words, &quot;vowel harmony&quot; is not an atomic fact of language completely unrelatable to &quot;nasal assimilation&quot; or &quot;voicing harmony&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Work in OT, for example, tends to say that the facts that a rule (such as the vowel harmony rule of Finnish) would cover are &quot;epiphenomenal&quot;, because there isn't one single thing that embodies the generative rule of vowel harmony, rather there is a collection of constraints and rankings which express the generalization about vowel harmony. It might be tempting to define &quot;epiphenomenal&quot; as &quot;requires at least two independent theoretical concepts to express&quot;, but then a rule-based account of vowel harmony would also be &quot;epiphenomenal&quot; (it calls on concepts of &quot;feature&quot;, &quot;class of segments defined by features&quot;, &quot;structural description&quot;, &quot;structural change&quot;, &quot;direction&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I think most formal accounts of vowel harmony see VH itself as &quot;epiphenomenal&quot;. It is possible that a &quot;typological&quot; perspective sees VH as an unanalyzable primitive, but I'm not a typologicalist so I won't make a claim abot that kind of approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T21:14:53.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22651" CreationDate="2017-05-05T23:35:31.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one, I would pronounce most instances of /x/ as /k/, unless I'm really thinking about how to pronounce it, in which case I might say /x/. Most people I have heard do this, though some pronounce german ch like it is in English. This is based on American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:35:31.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20227" CreationDate="2017-05-05T23:58:36.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about looking in to Serbo-Croatian? It was considered one language under Yugoslavia, but now is considered multiple languages. You might like to see:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/04/economist-explains-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/04/economist-explains-4&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagesoftheworld.info/europe/serbo-croatian-tale-two-languages-three-four.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.languagesoftheworld.info/europe/serbo-croatian-tale-two-languages-three-four.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T23:58:36.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20227" CreationDate="2017-05-06T01:05:56.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1920s, the Japanese linguist Hattori Shirō wanted to investigate local dialects.  At the time, the two most notorious dialectal areas in the region were Tokyo-style or &quot;Eastern&quot;, and Kyoto-style or &quot;Western&quot; Japanese.  The two areas differ in vocabulary: For example, the copula &quot;to be&quot; in Tokyo is &lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt;, while Kyoto prefers &lt;em&gt;ya&lt;/em&gt;. They differ in grammar: for example, to conjugate the verb &lt;em&gt;taberu&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to eat&quot;, into the negative, &quot;not eat&quot;, Tokyo goes &lt;em&gt;tabe-nai&lt;/em&gt; while Kyoto uses &lt;em&gt;tabe-hen&lt;/em&gt;.  And they differ in pitch accent patterns; in Tokyo &lt;em&gt;HAshi&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;chopsticks&quot; and &lt;em&gt;haSHI&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;bridge&quot;, while in Kyoto it's the other way around.  But Hattori wanted to map out precise borders, so he took the train, and stopped at every stop to talk to people and listen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out that &lt;em&gt;exactly up to the east margin&lt;/em&gt; of the Ibi river in Mie one finds Tokyo-style pitch.  Cross the river and people on the other side clearly talk in Kyoto pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/80PtF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/80PtF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was surprising to everyone because people to the east of Ibi (in Gifu and Aichi) used Kyoto-style &lt;em&gt;grammar and vocab&lt;/em&gt;; before Hattori's research, people thought they spoke &quot;Western (Kyoto-style) Japanese&quot;.  To put it another way, if you come from Tokyo you'll find a mixed &quot;buffer zone&quot; east of Ibi where the pitch is still Eastern (Tokyo) style, but word choice and inflections are already Western-style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hattori explained this as follows.  In modern times Tokyo is the prestige, standard dialect, and it's easy to find Kyoto natives who adopt Tokyo-style words and grammar; however, they hardly ever manage to change their pitch accent.  (One reason is that the &quot;accent classes&quot;, i.e. the groups of words with the same melody, do not match between dialects; so that you can't predict how will the pitch change in the other dialect).  To put it simply, pitch is more resistant to the standard. It's easy to imitate the rules of the prestige grammar, or to borrow the words of the standard lexicon; but it's hard to change the tones of every single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it so happens that, for most of Japanese history, the standard dialect was Kyoto, not Tokyo (i.e. the opposite of today).  The fact that the Kyoto pitch falls neatly along the Ibi river must show that it spread up to this natural/cultural barrier, and stopped.  The fact that the people east of the river have a Tokyo pitch shows that they must have been originally Tokyo-style speakers; they've managed to absorb Kyoto grammar and vocab, but couldn't absorb the pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These observations have inspired Robert Ramsey's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/132278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bold theory of the history of Japanese pitch&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn has proved to be quite productive. (The picture above, a translation from Hattori's, is from the linked article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T08:16:55.057" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T08:16:55.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22808" CreationDate="2017-05-06T07:54:15.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;@jknappen is surely right in terms of studying those phenomenons in general. However, philologists of a given language often do specialize in a given &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;class of words&lt;/a&gt;. In this case, you might want to look at the role of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;particle&lt;/a&gt;-verb combination (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/149_fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fraser, 1974&lt;/a&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T07:54:15.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2017-05-06T16:07:48.283" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish has lots of those kind of verbs: &lt;em&gt;kılmak, etmek, eylemek, yapmak, olmak, saymak&lt;/em&gt;. They can be used for all kinds of nouns, but especially they are used with loan words to indicate verbal form of it. Like:&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;farz etmek&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;to assume&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;strong&gt;farz&lt;/strong&gt; is an arabic loanword meaning assuming)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it should be noted that most of the loanwords have Turkic equivalent. But both loan and Turkic words are used for different situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14619" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T16:07:48.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25570" CreationDate="2017-05-06T18:53:23.567" Score="3" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principle A in binding theory states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an anaphor (reflexive or reciprocal, such as &quot;each other&quot;) must be&#xA;  bound in its governing category (roughly, the clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which strikes this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Himself saw John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as incorrect.&#xA;However, we can rebuild this sentence to be a cleft-sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is himself that John is seeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is 'himself' still an anaphora (and thus violates Principle A)? Or does it become a cataphora (referring to something that comes after)? &#xA;If so, why Principle A does not account for such sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastEditorUserId="16994" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T19:46:32.417" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T19:30:46.090" Title="Principle A in binding theory - reflective pronoun in cleft sentences higher than the R-expression" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22767" CreationDate="2017-05-06T19:45:27.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to all the above answers, I would like to point out the same phenomenon is to be found even between neighbouring European languages. Sometimes it's a simple matter of cultural politeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a trilingual English-Dutch-Spanish speaker I have observed that while English and Spanish both contain the phonetic θ    (thing, paz) and English contains the ð (this, other, smooth), they both require &lt;strong&gt;sticking your tongue out of your mouth&lt;/strong&gt;, beyond your teeth. The Dutch language does not contain any such phonetic that requires that, and also Dutch people learn it is impolite and an obscene gesture to stick your tongue out of your mouth. As a result, and with no other physiological inhibition, the Dutch, most of whom are proficient in English, pronounce both phonetics as 'de' or 'te'. Spanish, even those less proficient in English, have no such problem. It also explains why Hispanics on the American continent pronounce the Spanish θ as 's'.&#xA;The same of course, goes for the Germans, hence their 'ze'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, English is such a rude language, the English constantly sticking their tongue out towards you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to bough down in all humility, I must admit I cannot distinguish between the Spanish 'r' and 'rr' (pero vs. perro). My Spanish wife cannot for the life of her understand that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16995" LastEditorUserId="16995" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T19:55:09.553" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T19:55:09.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2017-05-07T07:37:59.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is just a /t/ sound, not a morpheme. This makes as much sense as asking where the /n/ in &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nickel&lt;/em&gt; come from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fight&lt;/em&gt;, and others like &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; historically had a fricative before the /t/, and words like &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rough&lt;/em&gt; ended in that fricative (compare English &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt; [θɹu:] with German &lt;em&gt;durch&lt;/em&gt; [dʊɐ̯çç]).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Middle English, the fricative likely varied regionally, and it inconsistently either deleted (through, plough, night, fight, wight, drought) or became [f] (rough, trough, enough) in Modern English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because night and fight end in -ght it does not mean that sound was one morpheme. It just happens to be the consonant cluster they ended in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastEditorUserId="16908" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T08:10:03.477" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T08:10:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22841" CreationDate="2017-05-07T12:17:42.197" Score="2" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we compare two unrelated languages with lexical tone, where both languages have the same number of tonal contrasts,  are there any universals/tendencies regarding: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the kinds of tonal contrasts (rising vs falling vs contour) or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;characteristics which make a e.g. rising tone be classified as &quot;rising&quot; or falling tone be classified as &quot;falling&quot; (i.e. is there a necessary f0 change in every tonal language). I suppose contour tones have some universal tendencies to be classified as contours, but they are probably to some extent language specific.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T18:37:53.133" Title="How is &quot;rising tone&quot; the same in all tonal languages?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3665" CreationDate="2017-05-07T14:43:32.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, at least no documented languages have only front vowels. The general explanation for this is given by various theories for vowel dispersion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schwartz, Boë, and Abry (1997) summarise one of these theories pretty well. Basically, there is a strong tendency for languages to spread their vowels evenly. Most theorise that this is because of learnability, others because of articulatory economy (Lindblom, 1975), others because they think systems self-organise in nature (de Boer, 2000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 3 vowel systems, the most common vowels are /a/ /i/ /u/ with lots of speaker variation. In 5 vowel systems it tends to add in /e/ and /o/, 6 vowel systems most often add in a mid vowel like schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7 or higher start getting rounding contrasts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages with asymmetric vowel inventories. Many dialects of Danish have a highly asymmetric vowel inventory, with about twice as many front vowels as back vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Australian English also has a slightly asymmetric vowel inventory, with only 3 back vowels out of 11 monophongal minimal pairs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JngIB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JngIB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshotted from Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One language I speak, Polish, has a fairly asymmetric vowel inventory despite having only 9* vowel phonemes (if you count the nasal diphthongs as vowels, that is)&#xA;/i/    /ɪ/ &#xA;/ɛ/ /ɛ̃ w/ /ɔ/ /ɔ̃ w/&#xA;a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The vowel [e] occurs as an allophone before /j/ or a palatalised consonant, the and /ɔ/ occurs as [o] before /w/ or /l/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two high front vowels, and the default tends to be +lax/-tense, rather than +tense/-lax (which is fairly unexpected).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are languages with asymmetric vowel inventories, but none as extreme as only having front vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why this wouldn't happen, or would be highly improbable. For example, there is a tendency for languages to end up with an asymmetric inventory if [u] shifts forward to [y] or [ʉ], and sometimes to even shift forward to [y] and then un-round to [i]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, what happens though, is the vowel does not shift forward before [k] [x] or another velar consonant, and then they wind up in allophonic variation, or over time, even in phonemic variation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another tendency is for [o] to raise and fill the place of where [u] used to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say a 5 vowel inventory language has: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/i/  /u/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/e/ /o/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shifts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/i/ /y/~/u/ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/e/     /o/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, a few generations later we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/i//y/  /u/ (o shifted up)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/e/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/i//y/ /u/ (the vowel became contrastive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/e/    /o/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*There is debate on even this in Polish, sadly. The controversy is over the front vowels, and whether the contrastive vowel is [ɪ] or [ɨ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many Slavic languages, such as Russian, there are two vowels in allophonic distribution: one occurs after palatalised consonants and /k/ [i], the other after non-palatalised consonants [ɨ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanders (2003) identified the Polish vowel as [ɪ], at least in Warsaw Polish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Polish, the only consonants with a palatalisation contrast are the bilabials, and before a back vowel. Some Slavicists like to transcribe the bilabials before /i/ as being something like [mʲ] instead of [m].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't do this for pure consistency-with-other-Slavic-languages concerns, it is fairly obvious that /ɪ/ and /i/ are minimal pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/mi/ 1sg-DAT&#xA;/mɪ/ 'we'&#xA;/bitɕ/ 'to beat'&#xA;/bɪtɕ/ 'to be'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are phonemic at least in the environment of bilabials. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Boer, B. (2000). Self-organization in vowel systems. &lt;em&gt;Journal of phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, 28(4), 441-465.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lindblom, B. (1986). Phonetic universals in vowel systems. &lt;em&gt;Experimental phonology&lt;/em&gt;, 13-44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanders, R. N. (2003). &lt;em&gt;Opacity and sound change in the Polish lexicon&lt;/em&gt; (Doctoral dissertation, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schwartz, J. L., Boë, L. J., Vallée, N., &amp;amp; Abry, C. (1997). The dispersion-focalization theory of vowel systems. &lt;em&gt;Journal of phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, 25(3), 255-286.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T14:43:32.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22838" CreationDate="2017-05-07T18:37:53.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attempts to define tone types (e.g. rising, falling; mid, high, low) in terms of phonetic properties don't go very far, and crash when you try to devise rigorous criteria that apply to all tones within a language, in the same way for all languages (the strong sense of &quot;same&quot;). A falling tone is roughly one where F0 decreases within the syllable over time, and a rising tone is one where F0 increases within the syllable. From that definition, there are obviously no level tones in any language, because pitch goes up and down all over the place. Even if you filter out local variation by averaging F0 over evenly-spaced thirds of the syllable, there are still enough changes in pitch over these intervals that such &quot;technically measured&quot; level tones would be quite rare. (Two reasons for that are consonantal effects and pitch-coarticulation where an adjacent especially preceding syllable can influence a given syllable's F0 substantially).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial remedy for that would be to exclude syllable margins and look only at the central 2/3 of the vowel, then dividing that into subintervals. Of course, the odds of getting two means that are exactly the same are negligible, so you also need to add in a &quot;significantly different&quot; criterion, so that a 1 Hz drop in the mean does not define a falling tone, for example use a &quot;2 standard deviations&quot; criterion for deciding if two sub-intervals are &quot;the same&quot; or are &quot;different&quot;. This is a potential approach to defining contour vs. level tones on strictly phonetic grounds.  However: it has questionable utility, since there isn't much reason to think that phonetics actually cares about being rising, falling, or level – those are phonological concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;purely phonological&quot; account would set aside phonetic properties entirely, and instead looks at how pitch functions in the grammar. The problem with such an approach is that what tone-types are about &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; some range of phonetic distinctions. When you claim that [tá] has the same tone as [dá], or that one utterance of the word [má] has the same tone as another utterance of the same word, you are claiming that the physical differences in pitch are not grammatically important, and they all instantiate a single concept (&quot;H tone&quot;). But you can't entirely disregard phonetic facts: it would be arbitrary to claim that [tá] has the &quot;same tone&quot; as [pà] or [kâ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonological analysis can't be pure, but it can be minimally dependent on phonetic details, instead identifying the smallest / most revealing set of categories and operations. The common trend for H tones to rise somewhat (which could force a &quot;rising tone&quot; analysis on a language) and for L tones to fall somewhat (likewise imposing a &quot;falling tone&quot; analysis) would thus give way to a simpler theory: there are single phonological tones, H and L, and languages can have rules of phonetic implementation that spell out exactly what H or L means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under that kind of analysis, Mandarin's 4 tones can be analyzed as H, Rise (LH), L and Fall (HL), so only two tonal entities, and the 2 two-element combinations that H, L allow. The way this minimal phonological system is realized physically is then the domain of a phonetic study of tone in a language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best justification for a particular analysis of tones (esp. contours vs. level tones) comes from combination effects – the classical argument for deriving falling tone from a sequence of H plus L, argued for when a given morpheme has the tone pattern [pátà] in one context but [pât] in a context where the final vowel deletes. Unfortunately, such phonological evidence is not always available, and thus one may have to rely on formal combinatoric properties. (Northern) Vietnamese is a bit of a problem since it has 6 tones, but no non-arbitrary analysis into just 2 or 3 simple elements that freely combine. The main reason why an analysis of Vietnamese eludes us is that the language doesn't have morphological / morphophonemic processes which give rise to paradigmatic changes in tone, within a single morpheme. (The second reason is the dearth of generally-accessible information on the language. And I should mention that reduplication does appear to have some relevance for tone, but it's not clear what light that sheds on the question). I think the situation with Thai is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aiming to address the question of &quot;identifying&quot; contour tones. There is a tendency (not an absolute law) that rising contours have increasing F0 and falling contours have decreasing F0 (and level tones have steady F0), but the equation cannot be reversed, so you cannot conclude that a syllable with a measurable increase or decrease in F0 is has a contour tone. The analysis of Mandarin L-rising tone as being simply L is a case where you can't rely on pitch values to automatically provide the phonological analysis (and thus the third tone has been phonologically analysed as a low-register rise and as simply a L).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that, there are a few things that could be said, in a separate narrowly-focused question, about crosslinguistic tendencies for various tones, as long as you accept a more minimalist phonological account of tone categories, as opposed to a bottom-up analysis that attempts to define tone types based on F0 measurements. (Hint)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T18:37:53.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25517" CreationDate="2017-05-07T19:45:40.070" Score="4" ViewCount="2676" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify: V-T movement would be a type of movement of the V head (verb phrase) to I (or T) head (inflection phrase). Some languages, like French, allow for this movement. But during my syntax classes I've been told that such movement is illicit in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in a book on syntax (A. Witkos 'Movement Rules. Foundations of GB syntax of English' p. 252) I came across this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a student outside the classroom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's bracketed derivation looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;IP&lt;/strong&gt; There is [&lt;strong&gt;VP&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;t(is)&lt;/em&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;PP&lt;/strong&gt; a student [&lt;strong&gt;P'&lt;/strong&gt; outside the classroom]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rWzxG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rWzxG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which shows an instance of such a movement. The 'is' trace sits in [head, VP] and then moves to [head, IP].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastEditorUserId="16994" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T20:13:46.407" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T16:55:42.803" Title="Is the V-T movement possible in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4561" CreationDate="2017-05-07T21:15:52.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume we count a phoneme as 1 sound and its allophones, and don't count tone and length differences as different phonemes. Then Rotokas (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language&lt;/a&gt;) has 6 consonants and 5 vowels, for 11 total. Pirahã (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Phonology&lt;/a&gt;) has 10-12, depending on the source, under that definition.&#xA;A commoner definition of phoneme would be a sound and its allophones, believing the ability to distinguish vowels with length and tone. That gives Pirahã 13-16 and Rotokas 14-16&#xA;A stingy definition, counting all occasional separate sounds, would give Pirahã 16 and Rotokas 19.&#xA;Note: Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages often have limited inventories. For Hawai'ian, the common (middle) definition would give them 18 phonemes.&#xA;Note: Conlangs, of course, have even fewer phonemes in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T21:15:52.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2017-05-08T00:54:47.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, you can say créée or créées, as the feminine past-tense fo créer, which is to create in English. For the past tense of any verb consisting of être, (être né) or to be born, we add an extra e for the female conjugation. An example of this in a sentence is. Les filles d'esprit ont été créées il y a 5,000 années, (the spirit girls were created 5,000 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, you can also find some words in English with three consecutive letters in them, but, they are not vowels. The feminine grammar for godship is goddessship, which has three of the letter, s, in a row. So does headmistressship, but again, these are not vowels. Hope this helped! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17014" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T00:54:47.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2017-05-08T06:34:10.650" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a prefix &lt;em&gt;ō-&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;big&quot; and pronounced as a long &quot;o&quot; (as if pronouncing two &quot;o&quot;s in a row), which in kana writing is おお.  If this prefix is added to any word starting with お, you'll get three おs in a row: おおおじ &lt;em&gt;oo-oji&lt;/em&gt; &quot;great-grandfather&quot;, おおおく &lt;em&gt;oo-oku&lt;/em&gt; &quot;great-interior&quot; = &quot;inner palace&quot; (of the shogun's castle), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;kanji&lt;/em&gt; writing there's 御御御付 &lt;em&gt;o-mi-o-tsuke&lt;/em&gt; &quot;miso soup&quot;, an unusual orthography exploiting the fact that 御 can be pronounced both &lt;em&gt;o-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mi-&lt;/em&gt;.  I like to think that the creator of this orthography had a sense of humor; reading it feels like a puzzle (and it doesn't really respect the etymology of the word, &quot;miso broth&quot;, for which 御味御付 or 御味御汁  would be better ways of writing it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're more interested in sound than writing, there are several cases where a sequence of two long &lt;em&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt;s follow each other, making for an extra-long sound; e.g. &lt;em&gt;hōō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Pope&quot;, &lt;em&gt;sōō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;suitable&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Tōō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Eastern Europe&quot; etc.  Likewise with long &quot;e&quot; there’s &lt;em&gt;kēē&lt;/em&gt; &quot;management&quot;, &lt;em&gt;sēē&lt;/em&gt; &quot;elite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T08:18:27.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T08:18:27.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2017-05-08T06:35:52.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. 'flood', 'blood' vs 'good', 'hood', 'foot', 'book' vs 'door', 'floor' vs 'food', 'loose'. All of them had a /o:/ as the vowel, IIRC, but now they have /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /ɔ(:)/ and /u(:)/, respectively. There are also example like 'steak', 'break' vs 'bread', 'dead', though I don't know whether their original vowels were the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 3 things happening with your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A phonological split where one phone becomes two in either allophonic or phonemic variation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lexical diffusion; sound changes actually don't often happen with every single word in the language all at once. We can see this from sound changes happening right now, more later with examples and references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different environments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For #3, for all of the vowels before /ɹ/, look at the phonetic environment. There's your explanation for why floor is [flɔɹ]. In very few dialects of Modern English, is [u:ɹ] even a sequence that is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my native dialect of English (Pacific Northwest American English), that segment is only phonotactically allowed if the [ɹ] is its own syllable. So &lt;em&gt;brewer&lt;/em&gt; is [bɹu:w(ə)ɹ̩ ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also true for me of [l]. Fool and fuel are definitely two syllables for me:&#xA;[fuwəɤ̯ ]~[fuɫ̩ ] and [fjuwəɤ̯ ]~[fjuɫ̩ ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also true for my girlfriend, who speaks Australian English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we can surmise that when */o:/ became /u:/, it then lowered before [_l] and [_ɹ] in most dialects of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For phonological splits, those are more tricky. In Southern British dialects of Early Modern English, there was another shift after the Great Vowel Shift called the FOOT~STRUT split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Northern England and Scotland, as well as some dialects in Ireland, the vowels in FOOT is the same as the vowel in STRUT and FLOOD. Liverpool speakers would pronounce the vowel in FLOOD, RUN and SUN the same way they pronounce it in HOOD, FOOT, and BOOK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a map of England where the Isoglosses of this split are, per Wikipedia (this is the vowel for SUN in various British dialects):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4wD8G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4wD8G.png&quot; alt=&quot;from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_back_vowels&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can infer from my examples, the split affected not only Middle English */o:/ but also Middle English */u:/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIKcT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIKcT.png&quot; alt=&quot;Nother from Wikipedia&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand varieties of English are all strut~put splitting dialects, because most of the initial settlers of the colonies came from southern and western England after the split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The split was probably originally phonologically constrained, but then something happened to make it phonemic in many dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2 Lexical Diffusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most sound changes start in a set of words, and then spread to more words. This is called Lexical Diffusion, and was described in depth by Kiparsky (1995).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty obvious from pieces written in Early Modern English, that the Great Vowel Shift did not happen all at once to every word in the lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1582, John Hart wrote his book &lt;em&gt;An Orthographie&lt;/em&gt; in which he proposed a spelling reform due to the change in the language in his lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He designed a phonetic orthography based on his own speech, and spelled the vowel in TIME and BY as &amp;lt;ei&amp;gt;, but the vowel in MIGHT and TITLE as &amp;lt;ị&amp;gt;. It is evident, that the Great Vowel Shift started in a group of words, and then spread to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the back vowels, we see the least-complete shifts. Kiparsky (1995) noted many patterns with the back vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiparksy's original explanation for this was that some words have underlying phonological forms, while others are unspecified in the lexicon, and are instead built by analogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find that explanation far-fetched, but there are some experimental phonology papers which would support it, I'll get back to those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another explanation would be an Exemplar Theory approach, where a speaker produces vowels based on their input. The entire system is analogy, but some more high frequency words might either be more innovative, or more conservative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bit of evidence supporting the idea that some words are more lexically encoded with phonological information, while others aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In nonsense word vs real word production experiments such as Hay, Drager, and Thomas (2013), speakers often are more conservative with nonsense words than with real words:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HuKZt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HuKZt.png&quot; alt=&quot;from Hay et al&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/za2Vn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/za2Vn.png&quot; alt=&quot;from Hay et al&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under an exemplar theory approach, we would expect new words to be less innovative than high frequency words because a speaker hears less of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hay, J., Drager, K., &amp;amp; Thomas, B. (2013). Using nonsense words to investigate vowel merger. English Language and Linguistics, 17(02), 241-269.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiparsky, P. (1995). The phonological basis of sound change. &lt;em&gt;The handbook of phonological theory&lt;/em&gt;, 640, 70.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wells, J. C. (1982). &lt;em&gt;Accents of English&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T23:56:16.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22848" CreationDate="2017-05-08T08:27:41.927" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine i gave you recordings of a few syllables in an unknown language, but told you that there are H and L tones in that language. In that case you could probably distinguish H from the L syllables using only the f0, correct? If so: This means that there is something universal about phonetic realization of tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say now that I didn't tell you which tones were in the language, so you don't know if it's a H, L, HL, LH language, or just a H vs L language, or even that it's not a tone language at all. In that case, I guess you couldn't distinguish categories of tones, correct? If so: This means that there is something language specific about the realization of tone,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what you think about the two ideas above. Thanks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:55:34.573" Title="Are there necessary and sufficient features for categorizing tone using only f0?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22847" CreationDate="2017-05-08T09:55:46.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For ease of reference, let's give names to your experiments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experiment 1&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data: recordings of a few sample syllables.  For the sake of argument, let's assume the syllables are canonical recordings, and you've avoided nontonal pitch transformations such as prosody, downstep etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data: the information: &quot;this is an HL language&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expected result: I can identify the HL tones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experiment 2&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data: recordings of a few sample syllables as above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Result: I cannot identify whether the language is tonal, nor whether the tones are high or medium or rising etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does experiment 1 necessarily succeeds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume a language A with the following tone sandhi rules, where each letter stands for the pitch of a single syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/H#/ → [H] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/L#/ → [L] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/HH/ → [RH] (raises to high)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/LL/ → [FL] (falls to low)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/HHH/ → [LRH]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/LLL/ → [HFL]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[L] can be either /L/ or /H/, depending on its position.  If you just give me isolated syllables, I can't know the phonemic tone.  (Many other phonetic transformations could be imagined; perhaps /H/ tones end up lower-pitched than /L/ tones when the /H/ is between nasals and the /L/ follows an aspirate, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's say you're not worried about contextual tone phonetics like that.  You want to know about good standard canonical cases where high tones are higher in pitch, dammit.  So we do a modified experiment 1':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data: recordings of a few sample syllables.  These are the canonical-est realizations of each tone, not subject to any sort of phonetic or contextual transformation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data: the information: &quot;this is an HL language&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I can identify the high-tone syllables—but that's a trivial result, because I've been told what to find (I know that the language is tonal, that its tones are distinguished by high and low pitch, and that they're not subject to pitch changes).  Experiment 1' amounts to giving me the territory and the map; of course I can find stuff on it, but that tells us nothing about universals.  For example, if I tried to infer an universal from it, I might wrongly conclude that /H/ tones are always realized higher in pitch than /L/ tones, even in a world where languages like language A exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does experiment 2 show that languages have something specific in the phonetic realization of tones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume for the sake of argument a restricted universe where all tonal languages realize tone in exactly the same way: /H/ is always a simple level high-pitch, and /L/ is always a simple level low-pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's postulate a non-tonal language, say language B, with the following phonetic behavior: aspirated consonants cause high-falling pitch, unaspirated stops cause medium-level pitch, and voiced consonants cause low-rising pitch, except that the first syllable of a word is always low-rising.  From this data, I can't even tell whether B is tonal or not; from my point of view, pitch seems to be all over the place.  And yet, in this universe, every single tonal language has exactly the same phonetic realization of tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is again no; I can't conclude anything about tone universals (or lack thereof) from experiment 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it's worth noting that in the real world, &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ToneWithoutPitch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tone is not just pitch&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T10:03:20.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T10:03:20.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T12:12:14.693" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by this answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/22788/a-good-example-of-a-finnic-or-finno-ugric-language-that-can-be-confused-with-fin/22798#22798&quot;&gt;A good example of a Finnic or Finno-Ugric language that can be confused with Finnish?&lt;/a&gt; I want to know more about the Tamga signs. Did they constitute a writing system? Is their derivation known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T05:57:43.687" Title="Were the Old Komi Tamgas a writing system?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;finno-ugric&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22847" CreationDate="2017-05-08T15:55:34.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are problems with your experimental set-up, but we can fix that. The first is that what you tell me shouldn't count. I might tend to believe certain specialists who have proven to be credible, but you always have to determine the facts yourself. It might be more surprising to discover a tonal dialect of Dutch (or would have been until such things became widely known) or a non-tonal dialect of Vietnamese, but determining the existence of nature of a tonal system is not dependent on what you were told. A responsible researcher would have a factual basis for rejecting a hypothesis (e.g. that there is tone). I can't tell if you are asking what role expectation has in the conduct of fieldwork – I don't think you are (because that's a question about researcher state of mind, not linguistic fact). However, there might be an interesting experiment to develop along those lines, where you prank a set of field linguists. Give them data from a language (or, fake language synthesized by rule) with, say, 2 levels and 2 contours, and then tell subjects either &quot;This language has no tone&quot;, &quot;This language has 2 levels and 2 contours&quot;, or &quot;This language has 4 levels and 6 contours&quot;: then set them to transcribing. The underlying hypothesis would be that the instructions strongly influence the outcome. The main problem is that there aren't enough reasonably-qualified subjects for such an experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is that &quot;recordings of a few syllables in an unknown language&quot; are scientifically useless and I would even say dangerous. That is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; how you go about determining tonal categories in an unknown language (recordings of a few syllables cannot distinguish systematic pattern from random variation). Let's change the context, so that you have a lexicon of a couple hundred citation words, and a sufficient supply of longitudinally-controlled tokens (i.e. not a single reading of a word list in one session).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case where &quot;I didn't tell you which tones were in the language&quot; is the normal case in fieldwork. That lack of knowledge does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean that you can't distinguish tonal categories; and the fact (and it is a fact) that there is something language specific about the realization of tone does not mean that linguists are incapable of discerning a tonal system on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the question you really want an answer to is &quot;how &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; one go about figuring out the tonal categories of a language: does the method require certain assumptions of universality?&quot;. However, a vague reference to universality really should be replaced with a more specific statement about what the status of the 'universal' is. Naming tendencies might be &quot;universal&quot;, in that Mandarin 1st tone is more likely to be called &quot;High&quot; and 3rd tone is more likely to be called &quot;Low&quot; than the reverse; and it is unlikely that 1st tone would be called &quot;Brown&quot; (vs. &quot;Yellow&quot;). But that doesn't tell you about language, that tells you about sound-symbolism. &quot;Universal&quot; is used in many ways in linguistics, so you need to be more specific about ontological status of the &quot;universal&quot; yuo're probing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI your question resembles a version of the Hale &amp;amp; Reiss card grammar problem. I disagree with their conclusion, because I don't think that auditory perception is always in terms of phonological features, even when the substance being sensed is linguistic in nature. The specific issue there is whether phonological properties have to be grammatically pre-wired in terms of substance – they seem to say it does, I say it doesn't – it can be learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:55:34.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T16:40:24.537" Score="4" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been a recent popularization over the questionable use of the word 'literally' as an intensifier rather than as a marker of non-figurative, especially since it seems to be used non-literally by &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-respected modern authors&lt;/a&gt;. There is a lot of evidence that it has been used non-literally literally &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for centuries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Literal&quot;, in English, is primarily used to imply 'exactly as spoken/written' so that when something is said that sounds like hyperbole, it will be taken as truthful rather than exaggerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that situation also is semantically ambiguous in that things could seem truly exaggerated. And then, if one didn't know otherwise, the term 'literally' could be understood as an intensifier, and therefore taken in a non-literal manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there is nothing special about 'literal' in English that it should be the only one to have such ambiguity leading to semantic drift. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Romance languages all have a similar sounding word with base 'literal-' and it is just as opaque (no conscious implication of 'verbatim' or 'as written/read'). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Germanic languages all have variants of 'buchstäblich' or 'wörtlich' which sound a little closer to 'word for word'. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly, Slavic uses cognates of either 'bukvalno' or 'doslownie'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese has 字面, meaning (closely) 'by character'. This meaning seems transparent to me (and therefore unlikely to lead to drift).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as figurative meanings don't even need phonetic changes to help them become figurative, I wonder if there are similar figurative uses of the word or phrase corresponding to 'literal' in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that the corresponding terms for 'literal' in non-English languages have similar figurative uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T15:36:11.347" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T15:36:11.347" Title="'Literally' non-literally" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22815" CreationDate="2017-05-09T01:25:00.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Begin with &quot;The sloppy eating of fish is disgusting&quot;, with the noun &quot;eating&quot;, and replace the PP &quot;of fish&quot; with the direct object NP &quot;fish&quot;, thus creating a transitive construction.  Notice that &quot;eating&quot; loses its status as a noun and becomes a verb: &quot;Sloppily eating fish is disgusting.&quot;  Why does that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's because nouns can't be transitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T05:20:26.400" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T05:20:26.400" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2017-05-09T02:34:02.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese language, 漢語 han4 yü3. Literally means &quot;Han [Chinese] language&quot;. The Vietnamese name for the Vietnamese language, Tiếng Việt (㗂越), also means &quot;Viet language&quot; literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15373" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T02:34:02.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T06:46:52.997" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I think that I understand how tonal phenomena is meaningfully represented from an autosegmental perspective, I wonder about how other phenomena can be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a while ago about so-called &quot;floating&quot; features, like voice and nasal, that spread in some of the more &quot;exotic&quot; languages. Is there a paradigmatic example that illustrates the utility of autosegmental phonology to account for e.g. floating nasal or similar? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T19:11:10.583" Title="autosegmental representations of floating features like voice/nasal" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22859" CreationDate="2017-05-09T10:51:52.193" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;When dealing with coreference resolution, what is the correct way to handle a possessive pronoun followed by another noun? Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alice has a cousin called Bob.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Alice went to visit her cousin.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second sentence, I can see three potential ways to resolve &lt;em&gt;her cousin&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; refers to Alice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; refers to Alice and &lt;em&gt;cousin&lt;/em&gt; refers to Bob.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;her cousin&lt;/em&gt; refers to Bob.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the literature I have found examples of both 1 and 3, so it is unclear which is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17027" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T11:56:14.543" Title="How should coreference resolution be handled for possessive pronouns?" Tags="&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22858" CreationDate="2017-05-09T11:56:14.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;1 and 3 are not mutually exclusive, and they are both correct.  2 is not possible, because &quot;cousin&quot; is a noun, not a NP, and only NPs refer, not nouns.  Nouns predicate, they don't refer (unless they are also NPs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T11:56:14.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2017-05-09T11:56:56.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The native name for &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Lingua Latina&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Latin language&quot;. The adjective &lt;em&gt;latinus&lt;/em&gt; is not only used for the Latin language, but also for people and things coming from the region of Latium (where the Latin language was originally spoken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T11:56:56.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T14:44:07.090" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone teach me/show me how to search for either...or, neither...or/nor, whether...or and etc. in Sketch engine (in BAWE corpus particularly)? I have read basically every guide and watched a lot of youtube videos, but I still haven't stomped upon anything similar to what I need, or I'm just not smart enough, who knows... But anyway, save a poor student in need. &#xA;I'm apologizing if this question, or whatever this is, is unrelatable for this page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16739" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T14:44:07.090" Title="corpus search in Sketch Engine for particular correlative coordinators" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22856" CreationDate="2017-05-09T19:11:10.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the canonical examples of &quot;floating non-tonal feature&quot; is [constricted pharynx] in the article &quot;Emphasis harmony in a Modern Aramaic dialect&quot; (Language 1984: 1-26). There are various analyses of non-tonal phenomena which make the assumption that those feature are &quot;floating&quot;, but are equally amenable to a segmental treatment where a specific segment has the feature, and local assimilations apply (an example being Guarani nasalization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are analyses if vowel harmony in Maltese by Hume and a Palestinian Arabic dialect by Kenstowicz where features ([round], I believe) are set afloat and then reassociate, though I would not presently claim that no alternative is possible without reviewing the article. Another fairly classical case for floating features is rounding in Palatalization in verb inflection in Gurage lagugages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all cases where paradigmatic mobility supports the case for floating no-final features, which are maximally like the strong case for autosegmental tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T19:11:10.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T21:25:08.277" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a concept for a constructed language for a story I'm writing. The people/culture that it's for have no vocal cords and communicate with a combination of body language, tapping/percussion, and pharamones among themselves, but have developed a separate language for use when trading with other peoples/cultures. This trade language involves plucking strings of various tensions, much like music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is it viable as a &quot;spoken&quot; language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/10004/is-music-a-language&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asked if &lt;em&gt;music&lt;/em&gt; could be considered a language (which it can't, not on it's own), but I don't feel it addressed the idea of using sounds produced by strings/stringed instruments to create a &quot;spoken&quot; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If it matters, the other peoples/cultures that interact with this one all have verbal languages. Please note, I know very little about the technicalities of music or music writing and that I'm more than fine with the language having very little in common with music.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12595" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T08:42:57.453" Title="Stringed music as a constructed language" Tags="&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22863" CreationDate="2017-05-09T21:43:47.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an older conlang that can be &quot;spoken&quot; via music, Solresol (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sidosi.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sidosi.org/faq&lt;/a&gt;). So, yes, people have used music to make conlangs. I'm unsure of how it would arise, but, then, there are whistled languages that aren't conlangs. I don't think it would go away or anything, but why did it exist in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T21:43:47.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22863" CreationDate="2017-05-10T05:25:24.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see why not, but as for interspecies communication, the string-music language makes the assumption that the auditory perception of the different species is similar enough that the sounds can be perceived in a comparable way.  Perhaps the acoustic vibrations are perceived haptically by one species and auditorily by another. That would certainly be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T05:25:24.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2017-05-10T05:28:03.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A parts of the Linguistics community considers &quot;Computational Linguistics&quot; to have a very narrow scope about how the human brain computes during the processing of language, what are the limits of this processing, and how can we create tests that measure these limits of the human brain. Sometimes this involves computer simulation to test a theory. This community would say that Artificial Intelligence that uses computers to process language should be called &quot;Computer Linguistics&quot; or &quot;Natural Language Processing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mainstream point of view, however, is the one already given in previous answers: &quot;Computational Linguistics&quot; is the same as &quot;Computer Linguistics&quot; and contain &quot;Natural Language Processing&quot;, with the difference that the latter operates on a much more shallow representational level than the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T05:28:03.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-10T07:09:53.437" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always assumed a dichotomy between f0 and pitch, such that the former is objective/physical  whilst the latter is subjective/mental. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I was introduced to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ToneWithoutPitch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;presentation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6bcd/bf0a8de432355285583cd3381771510e794a.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the claims made on the 2nd slide of the presentation, my assumption about pitch and f0 isn't exactly true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine that one could claim that a particular calculation of f0 (like that done in Praat, for ex) isn't objective (because it results in octave jump), but the existence of f0 itself is difficult for me to challenge. Can someone explain to me in what respect f0 isn't objective? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="10119" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T11:49:19.723" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T11:49:19.723" Title="In what sense if f0 not an objective measurement?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22863" CreationDate="2017-05-10T08:42:57.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are whistled languages, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Silbo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;El Silbo&lt;/a&gt; whistled on Gomera. I see no problems in general, to extend that concept to languages created by some musical instruments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perception is of course a problem, specially when different species are involved (with different frequency ranges they can hear, with different features they can identify (consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Absolute pitch&lt;/a&gt;, an ability that is rare among adult humans)), so any design of such a language needs to be &quot;tuned&quot; towards the specific abilities of the involved species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T08:42:57.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22867" CreationDate="2017-05-10T09:13:02.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The presentation is not challenging &quot;the existence of f0 itself&quot;. It is saying that tone is not just pitch (true) and that pitch is not just f0 (true). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tone, in the sense that is being used there, is a linguistic concept that is used as a distinguishing feature in some languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pitch is the perception of whether a sound (which could be non-linguistic) is &quot;high&quot; or &quot;low&quot;, and this perception (like most of our other perceptions) results from a combination of things (one of which is the frequency of the sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems the presentation raises are not with f0 per-se, but with the methods that are used to estimate (keyword being &lt;em&gt;estimate&lt;/em&gt;) what that value is. Of course, that something is hard to measure correctly does not mean it is not &quot;objective&quot;. That, I'd say, is a confusion of terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or put in another way: if f0 &lt;em&gt;did not exist&lt;/em&gt;, which is what it sounds like you were left with, then how could the speaker know that in page 14 it was doubled? Doubled with respect to ... what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T09:13:02.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-10T15:58:07.593" Score="2" ViewCount="1794" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the sound 'w' is always pronounced as 'v', and 'v' as 'f' in German words, relative to their cognate English words. So my questions, why did these sounds shift, and when? As far as I know, neither shift is die to the High German Consonant Shift, though I could be mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T18:13:07.437" Title="When did the sounds of 'w' and 'v' change in High German?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22872" CreationDate="2017-05-10T17:02:52.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right that it's not part of the High German Consonant Shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the exact dates, so this is not exactly an answer, but it's too long to be a comment. I wanted to post some additional information about the etymology that is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;W as [v]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &quot;w&quot;, as you mentioned, is generally cognate to English &quot;w&quot; ([w]) and for this reason the corresponding Proto-Germanic phoneme is standardly reconstructed as [w]. German and English are standardly classified as further belonging to the &quot;West Germanic&quot; group specifically, so we can extend the reconstruction of [w] to Proto West Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I Googled and found a book, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NtineqlXDqMC&amp;amp;pg=PA50&amp;amp;lpg=PA50&amp;amp;dq=date%20of%20split%20of%20west%20and%20north%20germanic&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=UlRc1uL9xK&amp;amp;sig=342IRO8dx0XPBtzjVwDCv5KtZeM&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiy6IS-7eXTAhVM74MKHXh1CgkQ6AEIUzAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=date%20of%20split%20of%20west%20and%20north%20germanic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysis of the Scandinavian Loanwords in the Aldredian Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Sara M. Pons Sanz, that says North and West Germanic are thought to have split around 500 AD or later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems at some point between 500 AD and modern German, there was a shift of [w] to [v]. (This is an important part of your question that I don't know the answer to.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It still patterns similarly to an approximant/sonorant in German phonology, though, and I believe that there are regions in Germany where a more approximant pronunciation [ʋ] is used. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology#Fortis.E2.80.93lenis_pairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says this is more common in Southern accents.) So in a way, you could say the change of the approximant /w/ to an unambiguously fricative /v/ is not fully complete across German even today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;V as [f]&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &quot;v&quot; (in native words) corresponds to Proto-Germanic *f, which we're pretty sure was a voiceless labial fricative of some sort (either [f] or [ɸ]); this developed in English to &quot;f&quot; and &quot;v&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern standard German, &quot;v&quot; is pronounced as [f] in native words. The explanation I remember learning for the spelling is that it represents a feature that was present in some historical dialects of leniting/voicing word-initial and intervocalic *f to [v], similar to the leniting/voicing of word-initial *s to [z] that is well-known as a feature of standard German today (a number of regional accents of German have voiceless [s] in this position, however). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article I linked to earlier says that there are accents of German that retain a distinction between semi-voiced or lenis f/v, from *f, and fortis f, from consonant-shifted *p. (This is similar to the constrast between intervocalic &quot;s&quot; and &quot;ß&quot; in modern standard German.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this phonological information doesn't seem to be enough to determine the date of voicing/lenition of /f/ to /v~v̊/, because there is evidence that the HGCS initially resulted in geminate fricatives like /ff/ intervocalically. So voicing/lenition could have applied either before the HGCS, or after it, as long as it occured at some point before the loss of consonant length (a loss that I have heard is not complete in all modern German accents) and was restricted to affecting singleton /f/, not geminate /ff/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word-initial voicing of *f to [v] also occcured in at least some accents of Dutch (explaining the standard Dutch spelling of words like &quot;vriend&quot;, which corresponds to the pronunciation with [v] that is present in some modern accents of Dutch, although others have voiceless [f]) and in some old accents of English (explaining the &quot;v&quot; in &quot;vixen&quot; and &quot;vat&quot;). However, I don't believe this voicing reflects a shared inherited feature of English, Dutch and German, but a regional tendency towards voicing word-initial as well as intervocalic fricatives (which is most robustly evident in the reflex of *þ as /d/ in both German and Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, this voicing process was either reversed, or did not occur for *f in accents ancestral to modern Standard German pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialect mixing seems to have resulted in the rather random use of word-initial &quot;v&quot; vs. &quot;f&quot; in modern German spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T18:13:07.437" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T18:13:07.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2017-05-10T17:50:43.200" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/strong&gt; :&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Refined (speech)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Sanskrit verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- may be translated as &quot;refined,&#xA;  elaborated&quot; As &lt;strong&gt;a term for refined or elaborated speech&lt;/strong&gt;, the adjective&#xA;  appears  in Epic and Classical Sanskrit in the Manusmṛti and the&#xA;  Mahabharata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2516" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T17:50:43.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-10T19:15:00.907" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to create a static list of words that can be used for encoding large numbers.  The words are selected on a variety of factors and I would like to include a measure of the word's stability over time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ic () understand that all languages mutate, but are there metrics or models that I can use to help predict which words are likely to decay over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best I can come up with is searching through Google's ngram database, as this would measure spelling and usage.  However, this strikes me as fairly naive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17035" LastEditorUserId="17035" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T21:44:26.743" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:00:17.390" Title="Metrics for word stability?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22925" CreationDate="2017-05-11T05:28:47.590" Score="1" ViewCount="1616" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could one frame the differences between phonetics and phonology in Saussurian terms?  I know langage/langue/parole were not developed to these ends, but this explanation can help me get a handle on these terms. If this exercise isn't too &quot;clunky&quot;, that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my first pass, but I appreciate your expertises and advises in helping me refine. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonology is the scientific study of how the sounds that comprise parole are organized into systems in a langage (or langue?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics is the scientific study of how parole is produced and perceived&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T11:11:58.067" Title="Langue vs parole in Phonetics and Phonology" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22875" CreationDate="2017-05-11T09:21:46.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For orthografically spelled words, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Levenshtein distance&lt;/a&gt; is a commonly used metric. It can be extended to spoken language by using an IPA rendering of the spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any metric (in the mathematical sense) of &quot;meaning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T09:21:46.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6491" CreationDate="2017-05-11T09:41:45.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Finnish perfective olen purenut (I have biten/gnawed) could be combined either with 'tätä palaa' (imperfect+infinite) or 'tämän palan' (perfect+finite). The verb itself is mostly perfective, as counterpointed with a frequentative/imperfective 'pureskella'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phrase could also have an imperfective aspect: *olen pureskellut (perfect, imperfective/ pureskelin (imperfect, imperfective) * X tämän palan loppuun (this piece till the end; perfect+finite) / tätä palaa vähän aikaa (this piece for a while, imperfect+finite). Any combination could be grammatical (although not necessarily of a highly frequent usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we stick to the IE paradigm of perfectiveness/imperfectiveness being represented by the verbs only, then we would get 'a perfect tense of an imperfective (frequentative) verb'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, the verbs &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;касаться/коснуться&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to touch) are perfective, while &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;трогать/дотронуться&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to touch) are imperfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forms &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;дотронуться/притронуться/потрогать&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would be a perfect-type of imperfective verb, while &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;касаться&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would be an imperfect-type of perfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T09:41:45.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2017-05-11T11:41:43.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ainu is one of those: (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/ainu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/ainu.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1   sinep        1 obj.&#xA;2   tup          2 obj.&#xA;3   rep          3 obj.&#xA;4   inep         4 obj.&#xA;5   asiknep      5 obj.&#xA;6   iwanpe       6 obj.&#xA;7   arwanpe      7 obj.&#xA;8   tupesanpe    2 obj. to 10* obj.&#xA;9   sinepesanpe  1 obj. to 10* obj.&#xA;10  wanpe        10 obj. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T12:44:03.907" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T12:44:03.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22784" CreationDate="2017-05-11T14:19:52.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, the question is, which tribes are to be defined as 'Ancient Slavs'. In other words, into which depths of hystorical abyss we are to enter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning would be more like 'honey-knower', not 'honey-eater', because the Southern form of this word was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ведмедь&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ведмід&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in more archaic Ukranian) and therefore in speakers' minds the structuring went most  likely as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;мёд + вед&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a parsing is also confirmed by the Komi belives, whose language and culture preserved a lot from ancient Slavic times, seeing bears as spirits with a knowledge of wealth (the honey, alongside with furs, being one of the forms of ancient 'currency') and solar deities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should also mind the Paleoasiatic bear cult, common for many ancient tribes, not just for Slavs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Slavic languages, there are two options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we can use the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;бер&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;берлога&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a place for a bear to lay) and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;бирюк&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (more often used to describe a wolf, but we shall return to the mistaking wolves and bears for each other later), but that did not derive from the PIE root you have mentioned, or even less common and, in my opinion, rather disputable &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ком&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the Old Greek cognate is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ἄρκτος&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arcas&lt;/a&gt;) which is related to Fenno-Ugric &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;karhu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ohto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;otso&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as well as the Armenian [&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;arjer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;] and Iranian cognates (Persian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;خرس&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [xarsh] and Kurdish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hirç&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hurç&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Osetian &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;арс&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [ars]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by the Fenno-Ugric parallels and exceptions from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruki_sound_law#Exceptions_in_Slavic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.U.R.K. law&lt;/a&gt; for Slavic languages, and also by the Iranian cognates, we have the initial [x], the following sound between [a] and [o], the [r] from retroflexive [d] and a final [s] with a shwa or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these facts put together, we receive Х@р(ъ)съ [х@r(ъ)sъ]  =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Хърсъ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [хъr(ъ)sъ] (cf. Ukrainian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khortytsia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khortytsa&lt;/a&gt; - remember the mistaking wolves for bears?) who was most likely a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solar-bear deity&lt;/a&gt; than a loan from Persian theological system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T14:28:09.187" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T14:28:09.187" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22899" CreationDate="2017-05-11T15:49:44.550" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an essay on a (very old) functional exposition of judgement. I note that two functions of the mind respectively provide what is functionally equivalent to the statements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'If a particular, P, bears the mark, M, then P is an instance of the universal, U'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'P bears the mark M'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which collectively constitute the input of another function, which outputs the propositional judgement &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'P is an instance of U'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put simply: the first two propositions are only analogous to representations which do not need to be, and likely aren't, explicit (i.e. they're not something we're necessarily cognizant of having). However, the third one isn't meant to be analogous. It's exactly the sort of thing we could hear ourselves thinking (e.g. 'That thing is a tree'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there delimiters (parentheses, fonts, etc.) that convey that what they delimit is a proposition? Alternatively, are there delimiters that convey that what they delimit is functional, or analogous to something else, or otherwise able to convey the difference between the first two statements and the third statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest thing to do would just be to state the difference. However, my professor's a big of using notation wherever there's a convention for it (even a weak convention). I'm also asking for the sake of my own curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I acknowledge that this question straddles cognitive science and linguistics, but given the close relationship of the two disciplines to each other, and that the question is about the notation related to a linguistic object (a proposition), it seemed appropriate to ask it here.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Hal &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="3064" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T15:57:18.290" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T23:49:31.703" Title="Are there delimiters (parentheses, fonts, etc.) that convey that their content is a proposition?" Tags="&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-11T16:31:50.497" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;WALS chapters 31 (wals.info/chapter/31) and 32 (wals.info/chapter/32). I need examples in French and German languages regarding these chapters. One language would be enough too!hello can you please explain the values (chapters) seperately? for one language would be enough!!! I will try to find the whole book! I have just got the whole book but I would like you ti explain the values in a few sentences regarding just one language! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="14920" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T13:07:42.863" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T13:07:42.863" Title="Need examples from German and French, for chapters 31 and 32 on WALS" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-05-12T10:16:22.847" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T03:11:03.993" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noticed a curious usage in the White Stripes song &quot;We're Going to be Friends&quot;; I know I've seen it before but can't think of another example. The line is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Teacher marks our height against the wall.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, &quot;against&quot; is not the right preposition there. If the teacher wanted, say, to compare our height-against-the-wall, our height-in-the-middle-of-the-room, our height-outside, etc., then it might be the right preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we actually have here is the picture of kids standing &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the wall and the teacher measuring (perhaps by also holding a tape measure &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the wall) and then marking their height &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; the wall. By using &quot;against,&quot; the part of the picture that isn't specifically described is suggested. In a sense, the preposition &quot;against&quot; is transferred, so to speak, form the bit that was elided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No big question here, just a curiosity. Thinking that the examples I can't quite call to mind involved maybe an adjective or a verb, something with more conventional descriptive content than a preposition. I think there must be cases where more work is done by the word that has been &quot;smuggled in&quot; than here, where we could fill in the rest just from cultural knowledge. (It does enable a certain desirable compression in the lyric, which is also curious.) Maybe arguments with suppressed premises. Maybe a rhetorical technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14252" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T03:11:03.993" Title="Ellipsis with a &quot;transferred&quot; word" Tags="&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2017-05-12T04:09:02.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is the case. Chinese usually read a Japanese loan word according to the pronunciation of the characters in Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;they didn't understand some Japanese loanwords I used&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because English borrow a Japanese word by its pronunciation, while Chinese borrow the same Japanese word by its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason is that Chinese and Japanese both use Chinese characters in their writing system. Japanese use Chinese characters to coin new words for new concepts, just like Europeans coin new words with Latin or Greek roots. Even though the pronunciation of the same Chinese character are different between Chinese and Japanese, the meaning is usually the same. Take origami(折り紙) as example, ori(折り) means folding, gami(紙) means paper. In Chinese, 折 also means folding, 紙 also means paper. After all, 拆 and 紙 in Japanese are just adopted Chinese characters, so it's not strange they share the same meaning. To a Chinese native speaker, it's the characters making up the word that make sense, rather than the Japanese pronunciation of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Alternatively, are words that are Japanese loanwords in English&#xA;  derived from Japanese words that are ultimately derived from Chinese&#xA;  words, and it's the Japanese word that's &quot;different&quot; in pronunciation,&#xA;  not the Chinese word?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is: It's not the Japanese word that are ultimately derived from Chinese, it's the characters or morphemes out of which the Japanese word are built that are derived from Chinese. Japanese use these Chinese derived morphemes to coin new words, which may not exist in Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is proper names. As @Yoshi Asao mentioned, when Japanese proper names are translated to Chinese, the characters making up the word are usually kept intact and pronounced according to the Chinese pronunciation of the characters. Refer to the &quot;Japanese names in Chinese&quot; part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#Japanese_names_in_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese name&lt;/a&gt;. Take Japanese Nobel laureate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideki_Yukawa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hideki Yukawa&lt;/a&gt; as an example. It's written as 湯川秀樹 in Japanese, 湯川秀樹 in tranditional Chinese, and 汤川秀树 in simplified Chinese. It's read as Yukawa Hideki in Japanese. But in Chinese, it's read as Tāng Chuān Xiù Shù, just how a Chinese speaker will read 汤川秀树 in Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese characters are logograms. A logogram is a written character that represents concept rather than sound. When Chinese borrow new word from all other languages, not specific to Japanse, it prefers free translation to phonetic translation. Take telephone as an example. When the word telephone was first introduced to Chinese in 1920s, it was phonetically translated to 德律风(délǜfēng), but later 电话(literally means &quot;eletric speech&quot;), built out of native Chinese morphemes according the meaning of telephone, became prevalent, bacause it's more comprehensible to Chinese native speakers, and it's easy to see the logic behind the word. Interestingly, the word 电话 was first coined in Japanese and later borrowed to Chinese, but almost no Chinese native speaker will notice this fact unless someone else tell him about that explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13620" LastEditorUserId="13620" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T07:19:38.270" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T07:19:38.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22813" CreationDate="2017-05-12T08:35:05.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi, for sure, English borrowed examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pencils - &lt;em&gt;pencil -ẽ / -õ&lt;/em&gt; (depending on use -&lt;strong&gt;general&lt;/strong&gt; pl. marker, -&lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt; pl. marker), &lt;strong&gt;3 of them&lt;/strong&gt; used as the environment demands (English in &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; environments, Hindi inflection in &lt;em&gt;informal&lt;/em&gt; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cars - &lt;em&gt;car -ẽ / -õ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;English  word  with  Hindi  inflection  like computerõ (कम्प्यूटरों) were the English word “computer” is inflected  by  the  Hindi  plural  marker –on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;sab &lt;strong&gt;artists&lt;/strong&gt; ko bulayaa hai&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (all artists have been called) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(last 2 from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-3914&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-3914&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T08:47:39.683" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T08:47:39.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22885" CreationDate="2017-05-12T09:39:07.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;according to what I understand, WALS ch 31 and 32 talk about Gender based systems, Given below is an excerpt from (Gender By Greville G. Corbett) for French (refer to book for more details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1QjNt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1QjNt.png&quot; alt=&quot;French example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is an excerpt for German (same book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YjIq8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YjIq8.png&quot; alt=&quot;German example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T09:39:07.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T14:36:34.583" Score="2" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it accurate to claim that the underlying level is (only) characterizable by a phonemic representaiton of a word and the surface level is (only) characterizable by a phonetic representation of a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T16:52:45.663" Title="Is a Phonemic representation ONLY at the underlying level?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22892" CreationDate="2017-05-12T15:03:24.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, even when you have a perfect one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes and (allo)phones used: even when the language has literally no phonetic variation/allophony, [ɡeɡe] will always be the phonetic/surface equivalent of /ɡeɡe/. This is a strictly theoretical approach, clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: there are even deeper levels of analysis: archiphonemes and morphophonemes are sometimes mentioned in such contexts, and they tend to (in the roughest possible of terms) act in a manner analogous to how phonemes relate to phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T15:03:24.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22896" CreationDate="2017-05-12T15:44:17.477" Score="0" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia entry on Optimality Theory&lt;/a&gt; states, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, such as&#xA;  autosegmental phonology and linear phonology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone point me to a textbook or a paper which has the same example analayzed by the three approaches side-by-side? Feel free to add an analysis to an existing example. I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/66/what-does-optimality-theory-explain-that-rule-based-phonology-doesnt&quot;&gt;a similar question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm interested in an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13085" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:01:45.550" Title="Optimality theory, Autosegmental phonology and linear phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22892" CreationDate="2017-05-12T16:52:45.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is one theory of underlying forms and phonemes, which depends on how you define &quot;phoneme&quot;. If you &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; phoneme as &quot;anything that can appear in underlying forms&quot;, and if you likewise define &quot;surface level&quot; and &quot;phonetic representation&quot; in an analogously tautological manner, then that would be true. There are, however, other theories especially hinging on what a &quot;phoneme&quot; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classical taxonomic phoneme is essentially a partitioning of surface forms, which unifies non-contrastive variants (e.g. English [t, ʔ, tʰ, ɾ]) being grouped into a single concept, the /t/ phoneme). Accordingly, allophones are not phonemes, and by the above reasoning you would expect that allophones are not present in underlying forms. That is one position, but the alternative position is that underlying forms &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; contain allophones, especially in no-alternating cases. Under the &quot;allophones can be underlying&quot; view, the underlying form of &quot;water&quot; could be /waɾɹ̩/, and an underlying form would not be composed &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; of phonemes. There has been a tradition of gratuitously requiring underlying forms to be abstract to the point of never containing &quot;allophones&quot;, but there really haven't been any good arguments for that requirement (which basically follows from making &quot;economy of inventory&quot; be an inviolable principle of analysis). The alternative, that allophones &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be underlyingly present, has the advantage of being consistent with the well-known fact that allophonic differences can become phonemicized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, underlying representations, at least under contemporary &quot;non-segmental&quot; theories (anything even mildly autosegmental) contain things that are not phonemes – e.g. floating tones, empty consonants. Of course if you simply &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; &quot;phoneme&quot; as &quot;anything that can appear in underlying form&quot;, floating tones and empty C's would be phonemes. So it really depends on how you define &quot;phoneme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &quot;surface level&quot; question, there is probably less theory-dependency, as long as you distinguish &quot;surface level&quot; from &quot;phonetic output&quot; (where &quot;surface level&quot; would be the last stage in a phonological derivation – necessarily a representational entity, and &quot;phonetic output&quot; would be physically-implemented facts such as patterns of articulation and acoustic outputs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T16:52:45.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22894" CreationDate="2017-05-12T17:01:45.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia claim misstates the situation. OT is a theory of &quot;derivational mechanics&quot;, and autosegmental phonology or linear phonology are theories of representation. One therefore find many analyses conducted in OT which assume autosegmental representations, and ones which assume SPE-style representations. Wiki is creating a false trichotomy. &lt;em&gt;Every&lt;/em&gt; OT analysis is either &quot;linear&quot; or &quot;autosegmental&quot; (and actually, many analyses are mixed / non-commital).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule-based account on the other hand would be in opposition to an OT account. As far as I know, there are no &quot;good&quot; papers which give an actually balanced rule-based vs. constraint-based account. You can find papers that assume one theory and make disparaging remarks about the other account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:01:45.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T18:58:12.107" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently looking for a list of adjectives that I can use as a seed for a machine learning model. These do not need to be annotated. Are there any open source lexicons that exist which could be used for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17053" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T16:44:24.367" Title="Where can I find a lexicon of adjectives?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T20:10:48.060" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on machine translation for physicians, and I was wondering if there was a resource for medical reference texts? Where it shows an original English transcript, and then several possible &quot;expert&quot; translations into different languages - specifically within a medical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17055" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T20:10:48.060" Title="Reference text database for medical translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22884" CreationDate="2017-05-12T23:49:31.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are there delimiters (parentheses, fonts, etc.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; convey&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   -   &amp;nbsp;    &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;  &amp;nbsp;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; is a proposition?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   -   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; they delimit&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are, and you used three of them in your question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They're called &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/73368/15299&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Complementizers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and they serve to introduce various kinds of subordinate clauses.  Almost all of these clauses represent propositions, hence are abstract noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is English grammar, not &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/IELL-LogicalNotation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;logical notation&lt;/a&gt;. If you want formalization,  you need look no further than composition of functions. Your third sentence is a straightforward &lt;code&gt;y = f(x)&lt;/code&gt;, but the first two together are &lt;code&gt;y = f(g(x))&lt;/code&gt;. I.e, there's a hidden variable (and a function  &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; producing it) that's involved in choosing &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt;, given only &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's always possible to posit a hidden property; otherwise metaphors would be impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your specific formulations, obviously there are special meanings attached to terms like &lt;em&gt;individual, universal, mark, bear,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;instance&lt;/em&gt;, so I can't say anything about them. I'm curious about whether &lt;em&gt;bearing the mark &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; refers to an actual identifiable mark, or merely a nonterminal node in a decision tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T23:49:31.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22904" CreationDate="2017-05-13T05:00:57.697" Score="1" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Bengali (Calcutta dialect), I found it quite surprising that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_phonology#Allophony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_phonology#Allophony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia article on Bengali phonology asserts, &quot;for most speakers &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; are phonemically distinct.&quot; I had always assumed that only those dialects which have shifted &lt;code&gt;/tɕ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/tɕʰ/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; can be fairly analyzed to have such a phonemic distinction. The page gives examples such as সিরকা (sirakā &amp;lt;-- سرکه from Persian) &lt;code&gt;/ˈsiɹkä/&lt;/code&gt; (a word I've never used) and বাস্ (bās &amp;lt;-- bus, from English) &lt;code&gt;/bäs/&lt;/code&gt; which indeed are often (though not always or consistently) pronounced with &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; as distinct from &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; (phonetically &lt;code&gt;[s̠]&lt;/code&gt;, a laminal retracted sibilant, seldom palatalized or domed), but are obviously loanwords. What really caught my attention, however, is the pair আস্তে (āste: slowly, softly) &lt;code&gt;/ˈäst̻e/&lt;/code&gt; and আসতে (āsate: to come) &lt;code&gt;/ˈäʃt̻e/&lt;/code&gt;. For me, they are homophones, both &lt;code&gt;[ˈäs̻t̻e]&lt;/code&gt;, but I do know people who consistently distinguish the two. And, I can also mention কাস্তে (kāste: reaping-hook, scythe) &lt;code&gt;/ˈkäst̻e/&lt;/code&gt; and কাশতে (kāśate: to cough) &lt;code&gt;/ˈkäʃt̻e/&lt;/code&gt;, which even I sometimes distinguish. In fact, the chapter on Bengali in &lt;i&gt;The Indo-Aryan Languages&lt;/i&gt; (Routledge (2003), eds: George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain) confirms this 'phonemic' distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that in both examples, the variation between &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; can be explained by morphemic breaks. The default (laminal) post-alveolar sibilant &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; (or as mentioned before, &lt;code&gt;[s̠]&lt;/code&gt;) assimilates to laminal denti-alveolar &lt;code&gt;[s̻]&lt;/code&gt; adjacent to other laminal denti-alveolar consonants, such as &lt;code&gt;/t̻/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/t̻ʰ/&lt;/code&gt; (and for some people, even &lt;code&gt;[n̻]&lt;/code&gt;); this gives আস্তে (āste) with &lt;code&gt;[s̻]&lt;/code&gt;. The word আসতে (āsate), however, is an inflection of the verb আসা (āsā: to come) &lt;code&gt;/ˈäʃä/&lt;/code&gt;, with the inflectional ending -তে (-te) suffixed to the stem আস- (āsa-) &lt;code&gt;/äʃ/&lt;/code&gt;, and therefore, assimilation is not triggered. The same analysis applies to কাস্তে (kāste) and কাশতে (kāśate), where the suffix -তে (-te) is added to the stem কাশ- (kāśa-) &lt;code&gt;/käʃ/&lt;/code&gt;. If this is true, why are the authors suggesting a phonemic distinction? The distribution of the two sounds seems to be entirely predictable (even though minimal pairs clearly exist). Most monolingual Bengali speakers are, in fact, unable to distinguish &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; from other languages, such as Hindi-Urdu and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, of course, is not Bengali specific, but the above simply serves as an example. My understanding was that (roughly speaking) two sounds are distinct phonemes if they are distinguished in similar environments, and no other factor can explain the difference. Even if other distinguishing features exist, does the presence of different sounds in minimal pairs deserve to be granted phoneme statuses, or is this a manner of preference on the part of the phonetician in charge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T00:17:13.660" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T00:17:13.660" Title="&quot;Phonemic&quot; distinctions induced by morphology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-13T06:00:08.800" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Umbrians, for example, continued to make inscriptions in their language for centuries after Roman annexation. But eventually the power and status of Latin prevailed, particularly after all residents of Italy became Roman citizens in the middle of the last century bc. At ﬁrst other groups would just have used Latin for “outside” purposes, but gradually the centralizing power of Rome “relegated the local speech, just as it did political initiative and concerns, to a secondary, subordinate, and ever retreating position.” We do not know exactly when the last speakers of Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, and other languages of the peninsula ﬁnally passed away, but the elimination of all non-Latin languages from the Italian peninsula is likely to have been almost complete by the time Herod washed his hands of another death in another part of the Roman Empire.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;-Nick Evans, Dying Words&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will penetration of world-dominating languages, start making hollow the not so dominant ones around them (not, though, in this way, but in a morphed one)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T12:33:46.730" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:33:46.730" Title="Is this what English/Mandarin Chinese or other 21st century dominant langauges would eventually do too? (details below)(yup that's opinion based)" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-05-14T08:43:56.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22902" CreationDate="2017-05-13T14:58:27.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem that you're encountering is due to different definitions of &quot;phoneme&quot;, a problem which is about as old as the tern &quot;phoneme&quot; itself. Some questions here that center around the definition of phoneme are &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1502/6726&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/6150/6726&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/21282/6726&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/22892/6726&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Formal views of the phoneme can be broadly classified as &quot;data-oriented&quot; versus &quot;derivation-oriented&quot;. The former view starts with &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; narrow phonetic transcriptions and some indication &quot;Utterance X is / is not the same word as utterance Y&quot; (for example &quot;heart&quot; said one time is the same word as &quot;heart&quot; said a second time; &quot;heart&quot; is a different word from &quot;hearts&quot;). The data-oriented view then looks for patterns within the narrow transcriptions and extracts generalizations like &quot;aspirated [tʰ] only appears before a vowel&quot;, &quot;aspirated [tʰ] does not appear after [s]&quot;, &quot;[t] appears after [s]&quot; and so on, arriving at the conclusion that [t] and [tʰ] are in complementary distribution, and a rule can be given for stating when you get one versus the other (looking at the narrow transcriptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivation-oriented view is what you might call &quot;holistic&quot; in that it looks at narrow phonetic transcriptions, but also considers hypotheses about the phonological source of those transcriptions (underlying forms), also the syntactic and morphological status of an utterance. It especially shifts the focus from asking &quot;is it the same word?&quot; to asking &quot;is it the same morpheme?&quot;, so while &quot;heart&quot; and &quot;hearts&quot; are distinct words, they contain a common morpheme. Accordingly, the status of being a &quot;phoneme&quot; in this kind of approach is not a statement about sound relations at the surface level, it is a statement about whether certain sounds occur in underlying representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the nature of derivational mechanics, these two approaches to &quot;phoneme&quot; can give different classifications to sounds. They have in common the idea of &quot;being able to predict&quot;, but differ in what the basis of the prediction is. The data-oriented perspective looks &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; at the surface form, and cannot tell whether [ʃt] comes from /sVt/ versus and [st] comes from /st/; or from /st/ versus /s+t/ – from that perspective, there is a phonemic contrast. If you expand the range of things that can be considered in judging &quot;predictability&quot; beyond that which can be directly heard as in the derivation-oriented view, you have greater &quot;predictive power&quot; and thus fewer things will be &quot;phonemic&quot;. The confusion rests on the second part of your summary: &quot;no other factor can explain the difference&quot; is not universally accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to determine which definition is &quot;correct&quot;, since there is no agreed-on independent means of determining whether two sounds &quot;are distinct phonemes&quot;, or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T14:58:27.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-13T18:40:58.490" Score="4" ViewCount="1004" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I'm an engineer with a passing interest in linguistics, so this might well have an obvious answer--it's just not obvious to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA, as I understand it, includes three distinct trills, the alveolar trill [r], the uvular trill [ʀ], and the bilabial trill [ʙ]. However, I find it quite easy to produce a dental trill, a sort of trilled /t/ that I'm told sounds like I'm imitating a machine gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the IPA is not meant to categorize every possible sound but only those that actually exist in known languages, so my question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;why isn't there a symbol for this?&quot;, it's &quot;why don't any languages have this sound?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that it simply takes more air to produce than most sounds, but I'm not sure if that's even true, let alone whether it's the reason for this or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17063" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T16:19:19.930" Title="Why isn't there a dental trill?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22906" CreationDate="2017-05-13T19:16:25.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear whether there are no languages with dental trills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_trills#Dental&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;These guys&lt;/a&gt; suggest they exist in Romanian, Hungarian and Russian, though that would be a phonetic claim (&quot;dental&quot; is not a distinctive phonological category in any of these languages, as opposed to Australian languages where it is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson in &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt; mention lingual trills in a number of languages but largely are non-committal about their place of articulation. They report that Toda has trills that are &quot;fronted alveolar, alveolar, retroflex&quot;. However they report that the lingual stop places of articulation are dental, alveolar and retroflex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologically, &quot;fronted alveolar&quot; would pair with &quot;alveolar&quot;, and to be honest I do not understand what fact forces them to use different terms for those places. I suspect under-reporting, rather than this being a puzzling gap that needs to be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T19:42:32.240" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T19:42:32.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22909" CreationDate="2017-05-13T23:27:32.880" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assumed it's a complement like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VUqte.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VUqte.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems like the only adjectives that can replace 'same' are numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two-day delivery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*good-day delivery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's going on here? What do you call the class of words that 'same' is part of in that sentence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not even sure if 'same' is truly &quot;just&quot; an A, since you can't say &quot;*that day is same&quot;, or &quot;*I have a same dog&quot;, almost as if it's part of the DP in some phrases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this same dog &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the same dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the same green dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*the green same dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*green same dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4943" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T08:48:05.107" Title="What kind of word is 'same' in 'same-day delivery'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22908" CreationDate="2017-05-14T08:42:04.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Same-day” is a compound, more precisely: an exocentric compound, or bahuvrihi, “a delivery whose day is the same”. The compound is formed from an adjective “same” and a noun “day”, but in this phrase “same” does not function as an adjective but as part of a compound. For the purposes of syntax “same-day” is a single word, not two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T08:48:05.107" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T08:48:05.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22875" CreationDate="2017-05-14T12:00:17.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going from the body of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but are there metrics or models that I can use to help predict which words are likely to decay over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, none, since words do not generally change much individually: what happens is that sequences of sounds undergo joint mutation, and generally all words containing those sequences will undergo the changes together. This covers strictly the phonetic part of language change (even ignoring the maldefinedness of &quot;decay&quot; in a linguistic context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further changes of word properties may be morphological and paradigmatic (morphological levelling, analogy, etc.), as well as individual (or of a narrow group) and semantic (changes in meaning of a word or several words in one of several directions, including amelioration and generalisation). This too is generally unpredictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best tendencies (read: only nearly accurate predictions) can be draughted for languages with taboo word replacement tendencies: in such systems, words considered taboo will be replaced on a regular basis. This works for names of certain predatorial animals, diseases, and names of dead relatives (among other possible taboo categories). This is generally poorly quantifiable and predictable, just like the rest of these processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:00:17.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T16:48:22.177" Score="0" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard several times the terms 'serial' and 'parallel' in phonology. In one of them the context was SPE and OT, respectively. However, from my feeble understanding of OT, the output is determined in rounds, such that in each round a different constraint is considered (according to the language specific ranking).  Could someone elaborate these terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13085" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T03:03:22.107" Title="Serial vs. Parallel" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22906" CreationDate="2017-05-14T16:54:21.317" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;May be this doesn't exactly answer the question, but pure dental consonants are cross-linguistically rare. Ladefoged and Maddieson discuss in detail how stops which are generally labeled dental, are actually denti-alveolar, with the bulk of the articulation at the alveolar ridge. They also state that for languages that distinguish different types of coronal stops, the actual difference in articulation is caused by tongue shape (laminal versus apical) as opposed to tongue position (dental versus alveolar). The answer by @user6726 notes the Australian aboriginal languages as having distinct dental consonants. Now, I don't know much about Australian languages, in general, but from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages#Phonetics_and_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, it seems they too use a laminal and apical distinction. I can, however, vouch for this fact --- as a native speaker --- about the Indo-Aryan languages which have a similar distinction. The so-called retroflexes actually involve curling the tongue back (retroflexing) only in careful and slow speech, or in artificially learned speech (for example, a lot of people learn this careful retroflexed articulation in school, and therefore may have retroflexes in English --- signature Indo-Pakistani accent --- but completely lack retroflexes in their first languages). At least for me, the &quot;retroflexes&quot; 〈ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh〉 are always apical alveolar (with zero affrication, so they sound quite different from English) and are post-alveolar only inter-vocalically, while &quot;dental&quot; 〈t〉 and 〈th〉 are laminal denti-alveolar and &quot;dental&quot; 〈d〉 and 〈dh〉 are actually laminal alveolar! My point of saying all this is to point out that &quot;dental&quot; is often a placeholder for laminal, and in this sense, I can't imagine a &quot;dental&quot; trill, because I find laminal trills impossible, even though an apical trill is easy to make (regardless of whether its dental or alveolar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other interpretation of dental consonants may be inter-dental, like English 〈th〉, which are also cross-linguistically rare. The hyperlinked Wikipedia page and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdental_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; says it occurs in careful pronunciation for plosives in Australian languages. I can make an inter-dental trill, with the tip of my tongue sticking out and trilling against the sharp edge of the upper incisors, but this doesn't seem to be a very natural (for want of a better word) thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again (as the other answer mentions), Russian and Hungarian (and Rumanian, which I know very little about) have been claimed to have dental trills (for Russian it is the palatized r), but in both these languages the said trills (at least in my experience) are very often taps, and even then are denti-alveolar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T17:53:14.923" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T17:53:14.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22912" CreationDate="2017-05-14T19:04:35.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those linguistic theories that distinguish underlying from surface expressions by deriving surface from underlying using transformation rules of some sort, when several changes are required to get from underlying to surface, one must decide how many steps the derivation can have.  If there are many changes involved and only two steps, that requires parallel processing, since all the changes must be made at once, but if many derivational steps are countenanced, perhaps serial processing is sufficient, with changes made one at a time (i.e., serially).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual standard of comparison is the SPE theory, because it is so carefully worked out (not necessarily because it is correct).  In SPE, each single rule applies in parallel to all sound segments the rule is applicable to, but distinct phonological rules must apply serially, so that derivations ordinarily have many steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T19:04:35.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T19:05:02.497" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even after many years, even after getting proficient in a foreign language, non-native speakers won't lose their foreign accent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an equivalent to this for non-native writers? Will be something there that indicates that a writer is foreigner? Do native writers exists at all? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17066" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T19:05:02.497" Title="What only native speakers and native writers (?) know" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7274" CreationDate="2017-05-15T00:24:28.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/benseler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pape–Benseler&lt;/a&gt;'s 1911 dictionary of proper names is old, and its etymologies maybe disproportionately rely on the etymological guesses of Byzantine lexicographers; but it is comprehensive, and always a good starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T00:24:28.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20545" CreationDate="2017-05-15T00:39:12.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your criteria, of course. Of the contemporary monolingual dictionaries, the Triantafyllidis  and Babiniotis' are both well-regarded, for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comprehensiveness, there are some bigger monolingual alternatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old Dimitrakos dictionary (15 vols): not as scientific, but tries to cover all of Greek. Updated recently as the Papyros dictionary. Both online in pirated versions. Slightly better breadth even for modern Greek than the dictionaries above, which really only concentrate on contemporary current usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek (now up to sigma; 1100-1669). Scans online for the full dictionary; the abridgement up to pi is searchable online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/medieval_greek/kriaras/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/medieval_greek/kriaras/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek: primarily a dialect dictionary, goes up to delta, and the volumes before the latest are now online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.academyofathens.gr/kendi/index.php/gr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://repository.academyofathens.gr/kendi/index.php/gr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T04:15:23.613" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T04:15:23.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22922" CreationDate="2017-05-15T00:53:41.287" Score="3" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many of the scripts descended from Brahmī, a consonant cluster like /kt/ is written as a ligature; but there happen to be no such combinations in the small samples I've seen of Brahmī itself.  Are any conjuncts attested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13200" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T13:08:20.763" Title="Did Brahmī use consonant conjuncts?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22912" CreationDate="2017-05-15T03:03:22.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is generally framed in terms of the notion of &quot;time-invariant computation&quot;, whether the output of one computation requires the results from another computation to be available. In a serial derivation, as in the case of a standard pre-OT phonology, it is possible for one rule to apply first, and apply a second rule after that – in a series. Thus the plural &quot;bushes&quot; /bυʃ-z/ → &lt;em&gt;bʊʃɨz&lt;/em&gt; to which devoicing cannot apply. You have to know if the vowel is to be inserted, in order to correctly not apply devoicing, which could apply to /bυʃ-z/. The standard account is then to say you first actually do epenthesis, and then do devoicing to whatever results (and insertion of a vowel prevents devoicing of /z/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if a language has a rule of intervocalic voicing and one palatalizing velars before front vowels, the derivation of /iki/ → [igʲi] does not require serial application of the rules, because no information provided by applying one of those rules is part of the information required for the other rule to apply (changing place of articulation by palatalization doesn't affect voicing since voicing doesn't care about place of articulation; voicing doesn't affect palatalization, since palatalization applies to velars regardless of voicing). In that case, we might say that the rules can be applied &quot;in parallel&quot;. There actually two views of what that would mean, one being that the two rules literally apply at the same time, the other being that the rules apply one after the other, but it doesn't matter what order they apply in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In classical OT, the computation of stars with respect to a given constraint is independent of the computation of stars for any other constraint. All constraints are evaluated in parallel (can be done at the same time, or in any random order). The potential for seriality arises from the adjudication of a tableau full of stars: if there are two constraints A, B ordered s.t. A precedes B, then {*,**} beats {**,*}. The easiest way to conceptualize this is to process the table of stars serially from left to right, but that isn't how they do it. There is a dense discussion of recursive summing-up of stars in Prince &amp;amp; Smolensky 1993. If you happened to be familiar with signal processing and A-to-D conversion as the simultaneous parallel weighted comparison of voltages, this might make some sense, otherwise I grant that it looks like hand-waving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical OT &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have serial elements: GEN must precede EVAL, assignment of stars must precede the winnowing of stars. And then there are post-classical developments (&quot;classical&quot; lasted about 4 years) which added a number of serial computations – Sympathy theory (star assignment in one column requires knowledge of all of the stars &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the filtering, of a subset of candidates); Output-Output constraints (you have to know the results of the computation of one word before you can determine the star-assignment for another related word). Stratal OT also have multiple cycles of evaluation, so is somewhat serial (imposing an order between levels, but not on the derivation within a level). In fact, &quot;Candidate Chains&quot; cleans all of this mess up, by writing derivational steps left-to-right separates by commas (e.g. &lt;em&gt;deʃʔ,deʃeʔ,deʃe&lt;/em&gt; is one candidate, where the last item is what is pronounced. OT-CC essentially abandoned the pretense of meaningful parallelism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T03:03:22.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22921" CreationDate="2017-05-15T05:38:59.200" Score="-6" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to figure out the meaning of this image, but I couldn't find anything. Anyone knows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XaHSI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XaHSI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17074" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T07:06:58.687" Title="What language is this? And, what does it mean?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-05-24T00:21:15.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22920" CreationDate="2017-05-15T07:06:58.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's Chinese; the big white characters read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;真情—True Love&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the ones in the little red seal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;萬事如意—May your wishes come true / may everything go as you please&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16971" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T07:06:58.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22918" CreationDate="2017-05-15T08:07:40.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nice question. Apparently, the original Brahmī did have conjuncts similarly to its modern descents (Devanāgarī etc). So say open sources (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancientscripts.com/brahmi.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). If we look at the evidence provided by the oldest inscriptions, we effectively find some examples of consonantal conjuncts, but not as many as in Sanskrit Devanāgarī. This is easily explained if you think to the fact that Aśoka's Brahmī inscriptions were in Prakrits, rather than in Sanskrit, and in Prakrits most of the old consonantal clusters were phonetically simplified into single consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us look at Aśoka's Edict at Mount Girnar. I've marked with color some examples of conjunct akṣaras: the one in orange reads &lt;em&gt;tpā&lt;/em&gt;, the one in pink is &lt;em&gt;vyaṁ&lt;/em&gt;, the one in blue reads &lt;em&gt;mhi&lt;/em&gt;. Notice also that the first two are built bottom-up, while the last is built from left to right. The sign after the one I've marked with orange reads &lt;em&gt;pa&lt;/em&gt;, while the official transcriptions renders it as a &lt;em&gt;pra&lt;/em&gt;: this must be an archaicizing transcription of this akṣara, since most probably it was not a cluster anymore and was effectively read as [pa].&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/joNXB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/joNXB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Aśoka&amp;#39;s Edict at Mount Girnar&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T13:08:20.763" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T13:08:20.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22928" CreationDate="2017-05-15T08:25:10.703" Score="2" ViewCount="1139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a number of textbooks, and on the wikipedia page for natural classes, I see that &quot;class&quot; and &quot;natural class&quot; are used interchangeably, see excerpt below (with key words in bold)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In phonology, a &lt;strong&gt;natural class&lt;/strong&gt; is a set of phonemes in a language that&#xA;  share certain distinctive features.[1] A natural class is determined&#xA;  by participation in shared phonological processes, described using the&#xA;  minimum number of features necessary for descriptive adequacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Classes&lt;/strong&gt; are defined by distinctive features having reference to&#xA;  articulatory and acoustic phonetic properties,[2] including manners of&#xA;  articulation, places of articulation, voicing, and continuance. For&#xA;  example, the set containing the sounds /p/, /t/, and /k/ is a &lt;strong&gt;natural&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;class&lt;/strong&gt; of voiceless stops in American Standard English. This class is&#xA;  one of several other classes, including the voiced stops (/b/, /d/,&#xA;  and /g/), voiceless fricatives (/f/, /θ/, /s/, /ʃ/, and /h/),&#xA;  sonorants, and vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, I just wonder what the modifier &quot;natural&quot; means in front of &quot;class&quot;.  Is there a distinction between a &quot;class&quot; and a &quot;natural class&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T11:59:25.740" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T14:08:36.993" Title="Is there a distinction between &quot;classes&quot; and &quot;natural classes&quot; in phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22897" CreationDate="2017-05-15T09:12:01.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;'s adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs,&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;adjectives&lt;/strong&gt; and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms&#xA;  (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find them in the archive or retrieve them programatically with tools such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/howto/wordnet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt;. More detailed explanations about the adjectives in WordNet can be found in the following paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gross, Derek, and Katherine J. Miller. &lt;a href=&quot;https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/ijl/3/4/10.1093_ijl_3.4.265/1/265.pdf?Expires=1494933177&amp;amp;Signature=QlTr2xUP0BQQElJ~FHUwC~sx3pzxFwN21A5MA-9Ix4zxK7PVPI51jDZUjEN5wyM8rdWk0zym8E74TyV68SimfHu02ltZ0EpNYq2EMct06oMjNDQwQnDOZxpiWED9VLdAqzNWpi0YnsfQQVZQAC7RNzfIa~qVxaf0k1NWMPGiy-2vv2Cu~6BFAN71zDfDYqz5gNNUtvYOwQagXZx2N8XImZmg3BkrrgS~lY7BKi1776Rn~Ib5fKHzQavhQS0sOMTHiiLjCKGM~tdYas7Utm7hWn-6P1~Ps73PUO0Y9oNM9e4zi4TWZcHLJoIh2~V2qdwFAhItH1eqzYtEtUkOBprRwg__&amp;amp;Key-Pair-Id=APKAIUCZBIA4LVPAVW3Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Adjectives in wordnet.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; International Journal of lexicography 3.4 (1990): 265-277.&#xA;APA &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T09:12:01.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22877" CreationDate="2017-05-15T11:06:53.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start with a small dictionary of Saussurean terminology. We have to distinguish three levels of analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saussure's &lt;em&gt;langage&lt;/em&gt; means something similar to 'the faculty of language' or 'competence' in Chomsky's terms. In Saussurean analysis it is never really relevant, so we won't mention it here anymore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saussure's &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt; refers to either an unspecified and abstract 'linguistic system' or to a concrete historically attested language (e.g. English, French etc). The &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt; is, therefore, an abstraction provided/constructed by the linguist, not a really existing. Notice that English term &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; is closer to Saussure's &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;langage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saussure's &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; is to be understood as a term covering all the phenomenal manifestations of a &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;. The acts of &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; are, therefore, concrete and physical and present variability. No two acts of &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; are ever identical to each other. However, &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; is the manifestation of the &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;, and cannot persist without the latter. The reverse is also true: diachronically (i.e. historically) a &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt; grows up from the &amp;quot;sedimentation&amp;quot; of a huge series of acts of &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt;. Step by step, tiny changes in &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; make the whole system (i.e. &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;) drift towards a systemic change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the equivalency of Phonology with &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt; and of Phonetics with &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt; is not an idea of Saussure's, but was suggested by Trubeckoj (who obviously read Saussure's &lt;em&gt;Cours&lt;/em&gt; but especially was friends with Karcevskij, another member of the Prague circle who, moreover, personally attended Saussure's classes some 20 years earlier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we must consider this equivalency within Trubeckoj's framework rather than the Saussurean one. Trubeckoj strongly privileged systematic phenomena to the accidental ones. He considered linguistically relevant only the phonemes, meant as abstract entities needed for distinguishing meanings of the words. Whatever is abstract automatically belongs to the &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;. Hence comes the first part of the equivalency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonology (meant as a set of phonemes) → &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trubeckoj disregarded any type of variability as irrelevant in Phonology. Variability is concrete and physical and therefore belongs to the realm of Phonetics. In Saussure's terms, unsystematic variability is automatically reckoned as pertaining to &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt;. Hence the second part of the equivalency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics (meant as an open set of physical realisations) → &lt;em&gt;parole&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that post-Trubeckojan Phonology is less strict with respect to variability. Let's distinguish three levels of variability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accidental variability&lt;/strong&gt;: no two utterance of &amp;quot;the same&amp;quot; word or sound can be ever perfectly identical, due to the fact that humans are biological organisms rather than machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we do our best trying to pronounce the sound [i] identically, every act of pronunciation will differ at least slightly from all the others. Accidental variants are non systematic and therefore phonetic, rather than phonological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free variability&lt;/strong&gt;: quite often phonological systems allows two, or more, possible phonetic realisations of one and the same phoneme, and these variants can be freely chosen by the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in a number of European languages one can freely choose between two realisations of the phoneme /r/: alveolar [r] and uvular [ʀ]. The choice does not involve any change in meaning and is provided already at the level of the abstract system (because every speaker &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; that both pronunciations are possible in his/her &lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contextual variability&lt;/strong&gt;: some variant realisations depend on the adjacent phonemes, or context. These variants have been termed &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt; by Trubeckoj. They are systematic and predictable and can be described through formal rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, English voiceless stops /p/, /t/ and /k/ are realised with aspirated allophones [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ], when they occur &lt;strong&gt;immediately&lt;/strong&gt; before (no sound in between) a &lt;strong&gt;stressed&lt;/strong&gt; vowel, and are not preceded by /s/; otherwise the non-aspirated allophone is realised. See the realisations of /p/ in &lt;em&gt;pot&lt;/em&gt; [pʰɑt] vs. &lt;em&gt;spot&lt;/em&gt; [spɑt] vs. &lt;em&gt;potato&lt;/em&gt; [pəˈteɪtoʊ] vs. &lt;em&gt;plop&lt;/em&gt; [plɑp].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Trubeckoj no variability belongs to Phonology since Phonology is an abstract construction made by the linguist in order to describe a language with the smallest means: the phonemes are effectively needed in such respect, while the allophones and the accidental variants can be dismissed. For other linguists, contextual variability and perhaps even free variability, are also part of Phonology. This approach is consistent with the view of Phonology as an attempt of representing the real linguistic knowledge of the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T11:11:58.067" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22929" CreationDate="2017-05-15T13:25:46.670" Score="4" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the words above from the same root (PIE)? Or are these a bunch of false cognates like behtar (Farsi) better (English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T19:54:59.783" Title="Are Latin &quot;virīlis&quot;, Punjabi &quot;vīr&quot;, Old Irish &quot;fer&quot; , Wels &quot;gwr&quot; and Hindi &quot;var&quot; related?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22923" CreationDate="2017-05-15T14:08:36.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonology there is no distinction, and we simply say &quot;natural class&quot; because it is a habit. Some people tend to just say &quot;class&quot;, but the most popular expression is &quot;natural class&quot;. Theoretically, classes could be divided into &quot;natural&quot; and &quot;unnatural&quot;, where {p,r,y,a} is a class (collection) of sounds but they cannot be described &quot;naturally&quot; (using some motivated theory of notation and some motivated theory of features). If you have the right theory of notation and features, the idea was, then &quot;natural class&quot; would in fact be &quot;possible phonological expression&quot; (e.g. [+a,-b,+c...]). The elimination of certain abbreviatory devices from SPE changed (narrowed) our view of what classes are &quot;natural&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T14:08:36.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22927" CreationDate="2017-05-15T15:54:59.393" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin vir, Sanskrit vīra-, Avestan vīra-, Old Irish fer, Lithuanian výras, Gothic wair, all mean “man” and all derive from Indo-European *wīro- (or *uiH-ro).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T19:54:59.783" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T19:54:59.783" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22897" CreationDate="2017-05-15T16:44:24.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can extract adjectives (for many different languages, not only English) from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. Wiktionary has a higher coverage of the vocabulary than WordNet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T16:44:24.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-15T16:46:37.817" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an item that has text on it, written in a different language. Ive been doing research trying to find it or something similar, but no luck. Anyone know what it says or the language? Much appreciated thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uGqGg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full picture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eBJLe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eBJLe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;one part, reversed&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17078" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T18:37:54.653" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T20:13:49.707" Title="Trying to find language written on item" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-05-17T08:43:38.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-15T18:49:07.530" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a statistical language model, should one tokenize compounded words through agglutination as words by themselves (unigrams) or should they be tokenized into n-grams?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Staatspolizei&lt;/em&gt; (ISO 639-1: &lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt;) :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a. unigram: staatspolizei&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. ngram (bigram): (&lt;em&gt;stāt&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;polizei&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Purushottama&lt;/em&gt; (ISO 639-1: &lt;strong&gt;hi&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a. unigram: purushottama&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. ngram (bigram): (&lt;em&gt;purusha&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;uttama&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the modeling (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;) is linguistically proper (will yield a better language model)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17083" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T20:12:17.873" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T20:12:17.873" Title="Should compounded words through agglutination be treated as unigrams or n-grams?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-05-17T08:44:09.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22931" CreationDate="2017-05-15T20:13:49.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Amharic, and the picture is upside down. The items below (at the top of your picture, between horizontal bars) are numerals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T20:13:49.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22933" CreationDate="2017-05-16T01:21:33.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I don't have much background in linguistics) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think - &lt;em&gt;if you are relating to agglutinantive and not polysynthetic languges&lt;/em&gt; - it would depend on &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; you are trying to build and the &lt;strong&gt;language&lt;/strong&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) may occur around words like- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt; (whereas polizei would require and adjective before e.g. The Secret-State-Police vs The secret Police), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; (... Staatspolizei found and staats polizei found &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; have ambiguous interpretations if the language allows it, &lt;em&gt;XYZ found something&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;XYZ found by me&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;changing it's use totally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas purushottama (man + ultimate/best/ideal = ideal man) is as you can see a compound of Noun + Adj. in that order, in Hindi , Sanskrit and other languages where it might be used &lt;em&gt;purush uttama asti&lt;/em&gt; (please ignore grammatical/morphological endings if wrong) and &lt;em&gt;purushottama asti&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; different meanings; &lt;em&gt;The man is ideal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The ideal man (is) exists&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also &lt;em&gt;purush uttama karya karta hai&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;purushottam karya karta hai&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;The man does the best work&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The ideal man does work&lt;/em&gt; respectively (The Adj. might be used to modify verb occuring in the same position)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above distinctions thus, show that treating them as &lt;strong&gt;unigrams&lt;/strong&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than treating them as n-grams as far as the &lt;strong&gt;semantic&lt;/strong&gt; role is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T01:21:33.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-16T12:24:51.083" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not really a linguist but I am analysing some medical free text so that I'll be able to extract various phrases using regular expressions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that the sentences are usually very short, do not contain subclauses and are very factual in their content. I want to be able to quantify the complexity of the terms used so that I can demonstrate that the free text is a simple substrate for my regular expression extraction to work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I demonstrate sentence complexity? Is there some linguistic terminology I can look up that analyses sentence complexity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T11:22:43.480" Title="How to assess sentence complexity" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-05-26T13:23:35.447" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-16T13:04:39.503" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;hello I have read wals chapter 136 very carefully and I cannot understand what paradigmatic means! can someone explain it (m-t pronouns referring to paradigmatic)  shortly and give examples in german french or turkish? I am not phonologist and I cannot understand it! your help would be appreciated! thanks and best regards!  here you can view the chapter : &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/chapter/136&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="14920" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T13:17:12.967" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T13:20:29.077" Title="wals chapter 136 m-t pronouns paradigmatic" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22937" CreationDate="2017-05-16T13:20:29.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS chapter 136&lt;/a&gt;, the languages are divided according to their words for the first and second person singular pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The M-T languages are the languages which have an /M/ sound (or similar sounds) for the first-person singular pronoun and a /T/ sound (or similar sounds) for the second-person singular pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The M-T &lt;strong&gt;paradigmatic&lt;/strong&gt; languages are the languages where the /M/ and the /T/ sounds occur in the same position, i.e. you can find a common pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;German&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             1sg   2sg   common&#xA;Accusative   mich  dich  _ich&#xA;Dative       mir   dir   _ir&#xA;Possessive   mein  dein  _ein&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;French&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             1sg   2sg   common  note&#xA;Disjunctive  moi   toi   _oi&#xA;Accusative   me    te    _e      same as dative&#xA;Genitive     mon   ton   _on     masculine&#xA;             ma    ta    _a      feminine&#xA;             mes   tes   _es     plural&#xA;Possessive   mien  tien  _ien&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Turkish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             1sg    2sg    common&#xA;Absolute     ben    sen    _en&#xA;Accusative   beni   seni   _enin&#xA;Genitive     benim  senin  _eniN&#xA;Dative       bana   sana   _ana&#xA;Locative     bende  sende  _ende&#xA;Ablative     benden senden _enden&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that we can have a column &quot;common&quot; is what makes those language M-T paradigmatic instead of M-T non-paradigmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T13:20:29.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22936" CreationDate="2017-05-16T16:11:18.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terminology used is either &lt;em&gt;syntactic complexity&lt;/em&gt; (see also this question on [languagelearning.se]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/2719/measuring-syntactic-complexity&quot;&gt;Measuring syntactic complexity&lt;/a&gt;) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Readability&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Specifically for the English language there are several formulæ available (e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale%E2%80%93Chall_readability_formula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dale–Chall formula&lt;/a&gt;) to determine the readability of a sentence from easy-to-count features. Those formulæ are fitted to empirical judgements of the readbility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T11:22:43.480" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T11:22:43.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22933" CreationDate="2017-05-16T23:11:07.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For parsing: if the word is already in your 'dictionary' then treat it as a 'unigram'; but if it is new to you then treat it as an 'ngram'.  If you are doing semantic statistics on a corpus then you may need to do both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T23:11:07.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20683" CreationDate="2017-05-17T02:55:53.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The connecting vowel in Ancient Greek compounds depends on the declension of the first noun: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007%3Apart%3D3%3Achapter%3D24&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007%3Apart%3D3%3Achapter%3D24&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the first noun is first declension, the connecting vowel was originally -ā- : &lt;em&gt;agor-ā-nomos&lt;/em&gt; 'market clerk', &lt;em&gt;nik-ē-phoros&lt;/em&gt; 'bringing victory' (-ē- is the Ionic for -ā-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the first noun is second declension, the connecting vowel was originally -o-: &lt;em&gt;log-o-graphos&lt;/em&gt; 'speech-writer'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the first noun is third declension, and the stem already ends in a vowel, leave it alone, e.g. &lt;em&gt;ichty-bolos&lt;/em&gt; 'catching fish'; otherwise, add -o-, e.g. &lt;em&gt;sōmat-o-phylax&lt;/em&gt; 'bodyguard'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The selection of vowels is not random of course: first declension nouns have inflections based on -ā-, and second declension nouns have inflections based on -o-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule has been massively messed up by analogy though: in Ancient Greek, there are plenty of first declension nouns with -o- (&lt;em&gt;dik-o-graphos&lt;/em&gt; 'writer of legal speeches'), and second and third declension nouns with -ā- (&lt;em&gt;elaphē-bolos&lt;/em&gt; 'deer-shooting'). The -o- linking vowel eventually prevailed, and is the only one used in Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;agoraphobia&lt;/em&gt;, the precedent in Ancient Greek was that &lt;em&gt;agora&lt;/em&gt; compounds, like &lt;em&gt;agorānomos&lt;/em&gt;, always had -ā- as the connecting vowel. The new coinage preserved that precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T02:55:53.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22950" CreationDate="2017-05-17T05:32:47.257" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading about Clements' structural representation of features, the phonetic contents of a segment are organised into feature tiers and 5 class tiers (root, lar, supralar, place, manner). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rT6eJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rT6eJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;illustration&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this model, there are &quot;association lines&quot; which cannot be crossed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naively, I understand that association lines are used to represent phonological &lt;em&gt;processes&lt;/em&gt;. Without them, the representation would only represent phonetic content of a segment,  but with association lines, phonological processes can be illustrated. &lt;strong&gt;Is this an accurate understanding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, what is the motivation for the ban on crossing association lines? That is, for what reasons does the ban have explanatory value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T15:25:59.483" Title="What is the origins for the ban on crossing association lines in feature geometry?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T09:30:30.190" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a wordlist which includes single-word entries and their part-of-speech tags in UCREL CLAWS7 format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list must be comprised of scientifically collected data, for example words collected from COCA or BNC data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the list will also include frequency data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of the type of thing I am looking for: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/100k.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.wordfrequency.info/100k.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17097" LastEditorUserId="17097" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T07:15:52.940" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T20:01:30.150" Title="Is there any free, single-word wordlist with CLAWS7 part-of-speech tags?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="22946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T11:51:12.630" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbE1r.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sbE1r.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one, I Googled but couldn't find much, any, in fact not even something else than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T13:49:33.467" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T13:49:33.467" Title="Need more examples/ sources, for Ceq Wong language animal prefixes" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;examples&gt;&lt;language-games&gt;&lt;prefixes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T12:22:44.557" Score="2" ViewCount="971" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several linguistics questions about the meaning in context of words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is called in linguistics the fact some words have a meaning only with other words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it called when a word changes completely its meaning when another word is in the same sentence, and when it's just next to another word? And when it gains other meanings (that are not always in the dictionary)? And the meaning are the opposite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language, in general, has the ability to change words according to the context: Are all languages like this? How this property of the language is called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this property a brake to the use of computer-made speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there name for all that concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9871" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T12:59:05.510" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T07:06:32.013" Title="Linguistics concept about meaning of words according to a context" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T13:52:02.177" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the notion of 'construction' in construction grammar. When a construction, say a coordination or a prepositional phrase or something, allows or doesn't allow extraction, is that property of allowing or not allowing extraction part of the properties of the construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance with coordination and across-the-board extraction, is it correct under construction grammar to say that (1) realises a coordinate construction X-AND-Y and one of its properties is that parallel extraction is allowed across-the-board from within all conjuncts? Or are (1) and (2) just completely different constructions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Alex both makes extreme cakes and eats extreme cakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Which cakes does Alex both make and eat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainly, I'm confused about whether wh-questions are linked to declarative statements in construction grammar. In generative grammar (broadly) wh-questions are derived from the structure of the declarative statement, i.e. (2) is derived using the underlying structure of (1) as the base form, meaning that the availability of (2) is a property of the structure of (1), i.e. the two are linked. How is this link handled in construction grammar? Or are (1) and (2) simply viewed as completely different constructions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17103" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T08:07:57.287" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T08:07:57.287" Title="In construction grammar, is extraction a property of the construction or a separate construction?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;questions&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T14:16:00.890" Score="3" ViewCount="7806" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to linguistics, and have just started reading about sociolinguistics. I'm interested in language change and motivations for it. There are three terms that I have come across, but am struggling to create a definition for them, and their differences. Would anybody be able to help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are:&#xA;internal motivations&#xA;external motivations&#xA;extra-linguistic motivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that internal motivations are linguistic things, like how easy it is for a language to merge with another because of similar features. I've also read that external motivations concern usually involve geographical and social factors. The last is more troublesome. I've heard that it also involves social attitudes and factors, so how is this different to extra-linguistic motivation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be great if anyone could point me in the direction of studies that relate to each of these. I've been reading Labov's department store study, and how social class dictates if pre-vocalic r's are pronounced. Would this be a study demonstrating external or extra-linguistic change though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17100" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T12:44:13.843" Title="Definitions of extra-linguistic, internal and external change?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22944" CreationDate="2017-05-17T15:25:59.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Association lines are used for phonological representations, not processes (processes operate on representations). In the simplest kind of case, &lt;em&gt;bábâ&lt;/em&gt; has two tiers, &lt;em&gt;baba&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;HL&lt;/em&gt;, with the elements of the tiers being related by association lines.  Without association lines, neither tier could be phonetically implemented – a vowel cannot be implemented without &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; tone, and a tone cannot be implemented without &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; vowel. &#xA;The origin of the no-crossing condition is the origin of autosegmental phonology, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/goldsmith76.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goldsmith’s dissertation&lt;/a&gt;, and is specifically laid out in section 2.3 “Excursus on Formalism”. The motivation is actually that some such statement is required in order to have a well-defined system, and the issue of whether there is an empirical need for the principle is not raised.&#xA;The “No-Crossing Constraint” is a later restatement of a theorem from the Well-formedness condition which simply says “πi and inverse(π),i preserve connectedness” (discussion surrounding (28) specifically shows how non-crossing follows from that). The constraint (or what follows from the constraint) says that “this cannot be”, not “you may not do” – the former entails both “you cannot do” as well as “you cannot have such a thing underlyingly, or by any other means”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequent research provided empirical support, albeit within the general autosegmental context, that NCC eliminates the need for conditions on association rules which would be of the form “associate this thing with the leftmost element, &lt;em&gt;as long as no association lines are crossed&lt;/em&gt;”.  Since no case has been detected where you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; the lines to cross, this has been a fairly robust constraint on representations, whereas all of the other sub-cases of the WFC have proven to be language-specific. (That, incidentally, indicates that the above-mentioned simple formalization of the WFC can’t be right, since the requirement to have complete linkage between the elements on the various tiers cannot be separated, under that statement, from NCC, but only NCC is actually correct as a universal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T15:25:59.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22947" CreationDate="2017-05-17T16:49:25.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're just looking for a broad term: context-dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17103" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T16:49:25.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14493" CreationDate="2017-05-17T21:42:47.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading about a study that associated warm, humid climates to tonal languages. Give it a read, it might inspire you: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1322.short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Everett, Blasi &amp;amp; Roberts, 2015)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17107" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T21:42:47.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17084" CreationDate="2017-05-18T02:09:38.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we can train a joint model for POS tagging and dependency parsing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the paper (and its source code): &quot;A Novel Neural Network Model for Joint POS Tagging and Graph-based Dependency Parsing&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05952&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05952&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We present a novel neural network model that learns POS tagging and graph-based dependency parsing jointly. Our model uses bidirectional LSTMs to learn feature representations shared for both POS tagging and dependency parsing tasks, thus handling the feature-engineering problem. Our extensive experiments, on 19 languages from the Universal Dependencies project, show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art neural network-based Stack-propagation model for joint POS tagging and transition-based dependency parsing, resulting in a new state of the art. Our code is open-source and available at: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/datquocnguyen/jPTDP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/datquocnguyen/jPTDP&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17109" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T02:09:38.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14493" CreationDate="2017-05-18T04:16:01.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another interesting one from Everett is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;connection between ejectives and high altitudes&lt;/a&gt;. Everett did not control for phylogeny or do proper statistical analysis, but others &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.replicatedtypo.com/altitude-and-ejectives-hypotheses-up-in-the-air/6324.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have&lt;/a&gt; and found that the relationship remains significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T04:16:01.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2017-05-18T04:26:29.613" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/During-antiquity-did-anyone-in-Greece-or-Rome-recognize-similarities-between-Greek-and-Latin-languages-and-hypothesized-relationships-between-them/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;posted&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Other Place&lt;/a&gt;, there was indeed a notion of Latin being a dialect of Greek, which a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/10153527/Aeolism_Latin_as_a_Dialect_of_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recent paper&lt;/a&gt; has described as &quot;Aeolism&quot;. The locus classicus for it is Dionysius of Halicarnassus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The language spoken by the Romans is neither utterly barbarous nor&#xA;  absolutely Greek, but a mixture, as it were, of both, the greater part&#xA;  of which is Aeolic; and the only disadvantage they have experienced&#xA;  from their intermingling with these various nations is that they do&#xA;  not pronounce all their sounds properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greeks were well attuned to systematic differences between lects through their diversity of dialects, so they would have known something was up with the Latin–Greek relation. They might have noticed something similar further afield; but as I have also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/History-During-Alexanders-invasions-would-his-soldiers-have-found-Old-Persian-or-Indic-to-be-somewhat-familiar-sounding-given-their-closeness-to-Greek/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;speculated&lt;/a&gt; in The Other Place, they were very unlikely to have cared: Greeks were not terribly curious about the languages of barbarians. We certainly have nothing recorded about Greeks noticing similarities with any language other than Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T04:26:29.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22947" CreationDate="2017-05-18T07:06:32.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is called in linguistics the fact some words have a meaning only with other words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words that have many context-dependent meanings are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;polysemes&lt;/a&gt;. Although their meaning depends usually on much more than just other words in the sentence – it's often affected by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intonation&lt;/a&gt;, broader context of the sentence, opinions of the speaker and much more. There is also a category of words called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;auto-antonyms&lt;/a&gt;, which have two opposite meanings that depend on the context. One such word is the verb „&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dust&lt;/a&gt;“, which can mean either „to remove dust“ (eg. dusting shelves) or „to add dust“ (eg. dusting a cake with sugar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this property a brake to the use of computer-made speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's usually not a big problem in the field of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech synthesis&lt;/a&gt; (converting text to speech) as the intonation could be most probably approximated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neural networks&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885230815300486&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885230813000041&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;. It will however cause problems in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homographs&lt;/a&gt; that are pronounced differently, for example „read“ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/read#Pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is pronounced&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;/ɹiːd/&lt;/strong&gt; in present tense and &lt;strong&gt;/ɹɛd/&lt;/strong&gt; in past tense and past participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural language understanding&lt;/a&gt; (ie. making computers understand human language), as this dependency on context, together with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphors&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374712/literary-term-for-implied-meaning&quot;&gt;implied meanings&lt;/a&gt;, makes NLU an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AI-hard problem&lt;/a&gt;. This means that it's generally believed that computers won't understand human speach until they are as inteligent as humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17106" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T07:06:32.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T07:44:48.843" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowels in 'book' and 'good' are both represented by an inverted omega in&#xA;the international phonetic alphabet (ʊ), according to the OED.  Can it not express their difference?&#xA;'Isaac Pitman's Shorthand Instructor' uses the sentence 'That book is not much good' to show the six short vowels in English.  Maybe he presupposes a different pronunciation of 'book', but how is that represented in the IPA? &#xA;The symbols used by the Pitman book are ĕ (book) and ŏŏ (good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12706" LastEditorUserId="12706" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T08:19:04.420" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T10:27:38.627" Title="The vowels in book and good" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-05-18T13:51:22.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22988" CreationDate="2017-05-18T08:16:58.413" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all nations provide education in the national tongue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In India, being educated in English is generally preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for any study with details about the situations in different countries about this - with details about to what level (primary, secondary school, bachelors or masters) education in the national tongue is provided.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any recent trend among the parents to switch to English?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide any study which would be of help. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16920" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2017-05-20T18:46:56.747" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T16:17:12.063" Title="Educating people in their mother tongue" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;language-planning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22961" CreationDate="2017-05-18T10:27:38.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people pronounce book and good the same, so there is no reason to differentiate them. Other pronunciations vary minorly, and can be created in International Phonetic Alphabet by usage of diacritics. Some people pronounce book like ʊ̜, which is the inverted omega you mentioned earlier plus a less rounded/unrounded diacritic (probably doesn't show up well). That sound is fairly rare. So, yes, IPA can express the difference in accents where it exists, but not well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-back_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-back_unrounded_vowel&lt;/a&gt; gives you other possible characters for the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16961" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T10:27:38.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22965" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-18T12:14:16.763" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T12:14:16.763" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T12:14:16.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22966" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-18T12:14:16.763" Score="0" Body="For questions about language planning and language policy.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;Note that this is not about planned or constructed languages like Esperanto, use the tag constructed-languages instead." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T12:20:32.923" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T12:20:32.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T14:50:28.373" Score="-6" ViewCount="1628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boys loves to cry.&#xA;She didn't went to the market.&#xA;They are going for the party, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17113" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T15:24:47.303" Title="Why are the sentences below ungrammatical? Explain giving any four syntactic reasons" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-05-24T00:20:17.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22967" CreationDate="2017-05-18T15:24:47.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this your homework assignment? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*'Boys loves to cry.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person agreement.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*'She didn't went to the market.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tense.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Generativist model would probably explain this as 'do' occupying the spot where tense normally is licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are languages where double tense marking is grammatical (and also double person agreement; this is even found in one Indo-European Language: Bulgarian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'They are going for the party, isn't it?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actually this is grammatical.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some dialects of English in the UK this is grammatical. In many dialects, the clitic &lt;em&gt;innit&lt;/em&gt; can be used even when referring to plural subjects, and even to personal pronouns. 'Isn't it' has been grammaticalised as a negative tag question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Dogs are in the room, innit?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'You like pizza, innit?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, 'isn't it' can be used to mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;isn't it/aren't they/aren't we/aren't I/aren't you/aren't those/aren't these&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't you/don't I/don't they/don't we&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the two above sentences would both be highly ungrammatical in any American, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian English dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16908" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T15:24:47.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14493" CreationDate="2017-05-18T16:49:06.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems a reasonable one, to see if there are any correlations of language features with extra-linguistic situations. And if memory serves, there has been lots of cross-linguistic research to attempt to find these correlations a good rainy day can be spent in armchair exploration of &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; to this end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all this research I'm pretty sure that &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; such correlations have been found...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...except for one. Described in the paper &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Charles Hockett et al., &lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they found that there was one phoneme, F (the unvoiced labio-dental fricative) that was correlated with a cultural use of cultivating grain. Many cultures are hunter-gatherer, many others are pastoral and yet others stay in one place and grow crops. The hypothesis is that those cultures that grow crops have a certain way of cooking and eating grains and that somehow (I can't remember their details) that is conducive to having labiodentals where the other ways of cooking eating do not. Of course this was statistical and not strictly determinative. But there was some correlation (I don't know how strong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T16:49:06.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16933" CreationDate="2017-05-18T17:00:00.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;so I was basically looking for a similar structure to the sentence &quot; John hacked and smashed the box&quot;. Yet to learn advanced syntax but can this be an option?&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gcCe5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17114" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T17:00:00.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22974" CreationDate="2017-05-18T18:04:49.953" Score="4" ViewCount="1907" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study Mathematics and Statistics and one of the most common symbols we tend to write is μ which obviously is the lower case 'Mu'. It is one of the easiest symbols to learn when first encountered since it is so similar to u, both in writing and in the way it is pronounced. After all, 'Mu' and 'u' both have very similar pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have absolutely no experience in Linguistics, but I definitely know that the symbol W has its origins in Latin. Is there a similar connection in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17115" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T12:23:29.123" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T20:28:33.543" Title="Is there some relationship between the modern u and μ?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22971" CreationDate="2017-05-18T18:23:00.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you say, μ is the lower-case version of the Greek letter M. On the other hand, u is not Greek at all; it is Latin lower-case version of U or (in Classical Latin) V. There is no connection between the Greek M and the Latin V, either in shape, or pronunciation, or origin. They are two different letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T18:57:09.507" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T18:57:09.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22971" CreationDate="2017-05-18T19:35:57.790" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no relationship. The lowercase form μ  is just a calligraphic development of the uppercase form. Here's an illustration with colored dots to indicate the corresponding parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/II7Ar.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/II7Ar.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just a coincidence that this looks similar to the lowercase form &quot;u&quot; that developed from Latin &quot;V&quot;. (Just as it's a coincidence that the middle of uppercase &quot;M&quot; looks like the letter &quot;V&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mu&quot; is pronounced with an &quot;u&quot; sound simply because the second letter of the name &quot;mu&quot; is &quot;u&quot;. This is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek name for the letter, &quot;μῦ&quot;. I don't know the etymology of the Ancient Greek name; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet#Letter_names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says it comes from Phoenician &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mem&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. In Greek, it rhymes with the next letter, νῦ (from Phoenician &quot;nun&quot;); I would conjecture that this is part of the reason it was pronounced with the vowel υ instead of some other vowel closer to the one used in the Phoenician name, like ι.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T16:36:29.940" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T16:36:29.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17044" CreationDate="2017-05-18T21:24:32.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machine translation &lt;strong&gt;in general&lt;/strong&gt; is in its infancy. Even for major languages like Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, computers have trouble with context-dependent concepts such as verb inflection and words with multiple meanings. &lt;strong&gt;No machine translation is reliable&lt;/strong&gt;. All it's good for at this time is to help you get the &lt;strong&gt;gist&lt;/strong&gt; of a text in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Translate, which is pretty much state-of-the-art technology, uses a statistical model which computes the most likely translation of a word based on its context, which is generated from large corpora of text with English translations. The larger, more diverse the texts fed to the model, the better. A machine translation to Spanish will be much more reliable and accurate than one to Latin. Since there's not a lot of digitally-available Coptic literature that has already been translated to English in the first place, its &lt;strong&gt;highly unlikely&lt;/strong&gt; that a Coptic translation engine will be developed in the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think that you're trying to kill a fly with a cannon ball. You most certainly don't need to teach Coptic or Egyptian to your primary school students. You probably just need to give them a general overview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Look for already-translated texts&lt;/strong&gt;. Though for Ancient Egyptian there are texts available that deal with various subjects, for Coptic you won't find much else aside from liturgical texts, and there are a couple of interlinear Gospels around whose sources aren't quite trustworthy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, my advice for you is to stick to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. They look good, they're easier to read (!) and you can give a good overview of Egyptian writing without getting into nasty details. OTOH, Hieratic and Demotic are extremely cursive and difficult to read, and Coptic literature is mostly gospels and psalters written in an embellished Greek font (though I haven't looked hard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an aside, an a personal pet-peeve of mine. There are ways in which you can write your name in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian#Table_of_conventional_transliteration_schemes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(uniliteral) Egyptian Hieroglyphs&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_alphabet#Alphabet_table&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coptic&lt;/a&gt;. The wrong way is to transliterate all letters from A to Z one-by-one. The right way is to follow the phonology of both languages and transcribe their sounds into writing. For Ancient Egyptian, you can only write consonants; as a work-around, write e and ee as the Quill glyph /j/, write o and oo as the Quail Chick glyph /w/, and use the Vulture glyph /ꜣ/ at the beginning/end of words that start/end with a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastEditorUserId="16950" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T22:54:34.880" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T22:54:34.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17044" CreationDate="2017-05-18T23:27:12.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Locoluis explained in his excellent answer, machine translation in general is unreliable. For dead languages, the best attempts are laughable: Google Translate's English-to-Latin, for instance, tends to produce incomprehensible gibberish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want your students to pronounce something in Ancient Egyptian, the &lt;em&gt;Book of the Dead&lt;/em&gt; is the obvious choice. But this is not a trivial task, especially for English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chapter, transliterated, begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hrw n qrs wsı͗r ꜥq m-xt prt ı͗n [NAME]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  kꜣ ı͗mnt ı͗n đħwty nswt nħħ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ı͗nk nčr r-gs dpt&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ꜥħꜣ.n.ı͗ ħr.k&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ı͗nk wꜥ m nw n nčrw&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  đꜣđꜣt smꜣꜥ xrw wsı͗r r xftyw&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  hrw wđꜥ mdw&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  n-wı͗ wnđwt.k wsı͗r&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ı͗nk wꜥ m nw n nčrw&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/religious/bdbynumber.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, no vowels are included. And many of the reconstructed consonants are not easy for English speakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ꜣ is a glottal stop as in &quot;uh-oh&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ꜥ is the Arabic &lt;em&gt;'ayin&lt;/em&gt;, a pharyngeal consonant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ħ is the voiceless pharyngeal fricative, Arabic's emphatic &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;x is a velar fricative like the German &quot;ch&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;q is a uvular stop like in &quot;Iraq&quot; (Arabic pronunciation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best option is probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Egyptological pronunciation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is entirely disconnected from reconstructions of how the language was actually spoken, but is easy for English speakers. This is the system that gives us pronounceable names like &quot;Tutankhamun&quot;. Transliterated, his name would be &lt;em&gt;twt-ꜥnx-ı͗mn&lt;/em&gt;; in reconstructed pronunciation, that would be something like [taˈwaːt ˈʕaːnxu ʔaˈmaːn]. The most difficult consonants are replaced with vowels, and other vowels are inserted arbitrarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T23:27:12.360" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22980" CreationDate="2017-05-18T23:53:25.233" Score="2" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone give a brief explanation for it? I heard about it once and I couldn't wrap my head around it, and the Wikipedia article wasn't much help either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17118" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T01:18:39.240" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T02:36:12.500" Title="Austronesian Alignment" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;&lt;valency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-05-26T13:21:24.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22977" CreationDate="2017-05-19T02:22:03.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most languages, there are (at least) two fundamental types of verbs. &lt;em&gt;Transitive&lt;/em&gt; verbs require two nouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice hits Bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt; verbs require one noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Claire sings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the verb is transitive, there needs to be some way of marking which noun is &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; the action, and which is having the action &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; to it. In English, this involves the placement of the nouns: the noun doing the action goes to the left of the verb, and the noun it's done to goes to the right. In Latin (and German and Japanese), this involves putting different markers on the two nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, then: what sort of marking do you put on the noun attached to an intransitive verb? Is it &lt;em&gt;doing something&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;having something done to it&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, we treat it as a &lt;em&gt;doer&lt;/em&gt;. Which makes a certain amount of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice eats the pie.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice eats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes that single noun isn't really &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; anything, and it's still marked as a &lt;em&gt;doer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bob broke the window.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The window broke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is called a &lt;em&gt;nominative-accusative&lt;/em&gt; language, because it treats the noun on an intransitive verb as the &lt;em&gt;doer&lt;/em&gt;. Languages which make the opposite decision are called &lt;em&gt;ergative-absolutive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages, however, don't want to choose one or the other. They use one system in one circumstance, and the other system in the other circumstance. The noun attached to an intransitive verb is always marked with the &quot;direct case&quot;. And with a transitive verb, one of the nouns is marked as either &quot;thing doing the action&quot; or &quot;thing the action is done to&quot;, while the other is &quot;direct&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you could have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice-DIRECT eats.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice-DIRECT eats the pie-THING DONE TO.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob-DOER breaks the window-DIRECT.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The window-DIRECT breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While complicated, this is in some ways the most logical system. Since &quot;Alice&quot; is marked the same in both sentences, and &quot;the window&quot; is marked the same in both sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T02:36:12.500" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T02:36:12.500" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="22987" CreationDate="2017-05-19T11:33:21.353" Score="5" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this a phenomenon in many languages? If so, what is its reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ø/: bleu, feu, jeu, peu, queue, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/œ/: neuf, peur, auteur, vainqueur, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/e/: -ai (first person future), -é (past participle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɛ/: -ais (first person conditional)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T22:11:01.077" Title="Vowels tend to be open in closed syllables and closed in open syllables" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22971" CreationDate="2017-05-19T12:29:02.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @sumelic already explained, there is no historical relationship. The use of &quot;u&quot; instead of &quot;µ&quot; is an artifact of English-only character sets like ASCII. &quot;u&quot; is visually close enough to &quot;µ&quot; to be treated as a replacement. I know the usage specially from the short name of the MicroVAX II computer &lt;strong&gt;uVAX&lt;/strong&gt; in the mid 1980's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &quot;u&quot; or even &quot;U&quot; instead of &quot;µ&quot; for the micro- prefix was sanctioned by some ISO standards dating back to early 1970's (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-#Symbol_encoding_in_character_sets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the article on Micro- on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T15:03:05.890" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T15:03:05.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-19T12:42:09.817" Score="1" ViewCount="960" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the word नर [nara], sometimes represented as नार [nāra] primarly means 'man, human, person' and the word नारक /  नरक  [nāraka / naraka] means 'hell', 'infernal' and/or 'inhabitant of hell', then where did this meaning come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two words related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is it possibly because of क [ka] being a particle for inanimate / unconscious agent (inanimate causative)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T23:34:16.083" Title="Etymology of Sanskrit नारक /	नरक [nāraka / naraka]" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22984" CreationDate="2017-05-19T13:33:26.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;नर (nara)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from Proto-Indo-European &lt;strong&gt;*h₂nḗr&lt;/strong&gt;. Cognates include Ancient Greek &lt;strong&gt;ἀνήρ&lt;/strong&gt;, genitive &lt;strong&gt;ᾰ̓νδρός&lt;/strong&gt;, whence English &lt;strong&gt;andro-&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;नरक (naraka)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://hi.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%95&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hi.wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;पुराणों और धर्मशास्त्रों आदि के अनुसार वह स्थान जहाँ पापी मनुष्यों की आत्मा पाप का फल भोगने के लिये भेजी जाती है । वह स्थान जहाँ दुष्कर्म करनेवालों की आत्मा दंड देने के लिये रखी जाती है ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is translated, by Google Translate, into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Puranas and Dharmashastras etc., the place where the soul of sinful humans is sent to enjoy the consequence of sin. The place where the souls of the perpetrators are kept to pay the penalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;en.wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Naraka&lt;/strong&gt; (Sanskrit: नरक) is the Sanskrit word for the underworld; literally, &lt;em&gt;of man&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which could explain the relationship between &lt;strong&gt;नर&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;नरक&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12958" LastEditorUserId="12958" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T13:39:23.380" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T13:39:23.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22982" CreationDate="2017-05-19T13:59:45.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a trait common for most living Germanic languages (e.g. Swedish and Dutch)  and those that had been in contact with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in Finnish this doesn't work (because it has vowel harmony system and other overtones in quality of vowels):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; | &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; | &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maahan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the three forms of 'earth' have more or less same sound quantity and quality in openness/closeness as represented by the orthography. The nasalisation&lt;br&gt;&#xA; before N is usually perceived as an allophone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T19:41:27.657" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T19:41:27.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22982" CreationDate="2017-05-19T14:11:44.993" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency in some of Romance and Germanic for historical vowel length to be associated with open-mid / close-mid or tense / lax distinctions, and vowel length is cross-linguistically correlated with syllable structure (short if closed). (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bstorme.scripts.mit.edu/site/StormeGenerals1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; addresses &quot;loi de position&quot; and assembles a possibly complete list of cases of such a correlation in allophony). Even in French, it is not limited to the open-close distinction, since Laurentian French has also developed [i/ɪ; u/ʊ] correlated with syllable structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking across language in general, there does not seem to be any &lt;em&gt;documented&lt;/em&gt; tendency in that direction. Usually, the distinction between e/ɛ, o/ɔ or i/ɪ, u/ʊ is attributed to a feature ATR, except in Romance and Germanic. In the many languages with an ATR distinction, there is no tendency for ATR contrasts to be dependent on syllable closure. However, languages with reported e/ɛ, o/ɔ, i/ɪ, u/ʊ contrasts are not all that common outside the ATR set (diagnosed by vowel harmony), so it is hard to tell if there is a significant trend within that set of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T14:20:46.473" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T14:20:46.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22962" CreationDate="2017-05-19T21:47:20.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that there are not any &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; studies that will give you a comprehensive answer. You might be able to find a compilation of official national educational policies that covers a sufficient number of countries, but official policy and reality are different things. For example, policy used to be in Tanzania and AFAIK still in Kenya that for one or two years there would be &quot;mother tongue education&quot;, but policy was doesn't reflect reality when there exist no mother tongue resources (for which reason Kenya and Tanzania differed in the extent to which they &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; provide mother tongue education, and this also accounts substantially for the actual high degree of mother tongue instruction in South Africa, whose law is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Policies/GET/LanguageEducationPolicy1997.pdf?ver=2007-08-22-083918-000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/5/1994/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;study&lt;/a&gt; speaks of the benefits of &quot;local language&quot; instruction, but the case study involves primary schools in Zanzibar where the national language, Swahili, is actually the local language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, actual &quot;mother tongue&quot; education is rarely even a policy reality, instead you find &quot;local language&quot; education (which differ when people move around). National-level surveys of language policy and attitudes at least in Africa are few, far-between, and not particularly reliable. I would hesitate to extrapolate from European language practices to the rest of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T21:47:20.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22982" CreationDate="2017-05-19T22:05:35.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed vowels are typically more tense and require higher articulatory effort, and as such there should be correlation between these tense vowels and long vowels (not necessarily speaking phonologically here) because it takes more time for the articulatory muscles to execute the proper gesture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that many languages have somewhat isosyllabic timing (meaning that all syllables have very roughly the same duration), phonemes in more complex (e.g. closed) syllables are bound to have shorter duration than phonemes in less complex (e.g. open) syllables. For example /y/ in French &quot;lu&quot; will be longer than /y/ in French &quot;illustre&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it would make sense if there were a global tendency towards closed vowels in open syllables and vice versa, albeit I cannot imagine it being very strong as there would be many overriding factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T22:11:01.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T22:11:01.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T06:14:27.620" Score="3" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;ɛə̯&quot; or &quot;ɛə&quot; can be written as  &quot;ea&quot;  &quot;ɛː&quot; &quot;ɛ&quot; and &quot;ɛə&quot; in various dictionaries.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://teflpedia.com/IPA_phoneme_/e%C9%99/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://teflpedia.com/IPA_phoneme_/e%C9%99/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; I don't see the value as they aren't fixing the non-intuitive nature of IPA symbols &quot;j&quot; as y sound is still standard.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://teflpedia.com/IPA_phoneme_/e%C9%99/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://teflpedia.com/IPA_phoneme_/e%C9%99/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Why change when it doesn't make the reading of the symbols any easier- you still need to memorise them?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16979" LastEditorUserId="16979" LastEditDate="2017-05-20T08:48:57.743" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T14:44:21.040" Title="Why do dictionaries use non-standard IPA symbols" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3908" CreationDate="2017-05-20T08:41:53.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ὀψέ has survived in Modern Cypriot Greek, as the adverb ψες &quot;last night&quot;. (The deletion of initial unstressed o- is semi-regular; the addition of final -s to adverbs is also semi-regular.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;late&quot; &gt; &quot;(last) night&quot; is a common semantic transition; cf Spanish &lt;em&gt;tardes&lt;/em&gt;, and for that matter Ancient βραδύ &quot;late&quot; &gt; Modern βράδυ &quot;evening&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Modern Cypriot, as in all other dialects of Modern Greek, the preposition and adverb for &quot;after&quot; is μετά, from the ancient preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while the two words coexist in Cypriot, they retain meanings close to their original function, and don't show evidence of competition. I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/3345/user3345&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/3345/user3345&lt;/a&gt; is quite right, that the use of ὀψέ as a preposition is a one off in Philostratos, not a generalised usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T08:41:53.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T09:07:39.750" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a presentation in my class about the influence of Germanic languages on the Esperanto grammar. I was wondering if you could help me further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already said that Esperanto was a non pro-drop language and that Germanic languages tend to be also non pro-drop. I found that Esperanto can create very easily compounds and the same goes for German and Dutch. I also found that Esperanto is equally dependent on prepositions as English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the grammar is very easy to learn, but have you got any other influences on the grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance,&#xA;Bruno &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17131" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T13:02:05.237" Title="What is the influence of Germanic languages on Esperanto grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22730" CreationDate="2017-05-20T13:54:20.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think , of all the IPA consonants and vowels, the ones with association to air would be a bit difficult to pronounce in the same way, 'cause changing gravity (in drastic way) can change air thickness. E.g. Implosives, Explosives, Aspirations, Clicks etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T13:54:20.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T14:19:08.787" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn IBM Models and statistical machine translation. I have read various resources and realized that in same articles, alignment function is designed in direction from target language to source language and vice versa in others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example; if we are translating from French to English and alignment function is designed in direction from source to target. Then there would be one English token for each French token and we would add a NULL token to English. Because, French word can align with NULL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty confused with direction of alignment function. What is direction of alignment function, are we try to map from source to target or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17132" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T14:19:08.787" Title="Direction of alignment function in statistical machine translation" Tags="&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22991" CreationDate="2017-05-20T14:44:21.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is only a set of symbols and approximate phonetic values, and there is no mandate to transcribe English words any particular way. The variants [eə, ɛə, ɛə̯, ɛː] are all within IPA, and the labeling of [ɛə̯] as &quot;strict IPA&quot; is a misnomer: There is no such thing as &quot;strict IPA&quot;, there is IPA, or not IPA (as in traditional dictionary &quot;trän-SKRIP-shun&quot;). It is possible that [ɛə̯] is specifically taught by UCL or used in Jones dictionary, but IPA does not officially sanction any particular transcription practices for languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries correctly tend to avoid narrow phonetic transcriptions, since they tend to reflect individual idiosyncracies. Instead, they give broad phonemic transcriptions which describe a wider range of language forms (though for English it's really impossible to give a single form that generalizes to all dialects), and then leave it to the user to discern how &quot;square&quot; i.e. [skwɛɹ] is pronounced in a particular region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T14:44:21.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T17:48:21.843" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why would this be translated as a demon/goat?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also unclear as to the lemma.  Is seems unrelated.  Is it שָׂעַר&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17133" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:37:57.967" Title="what is the etymology of Hebrew word lasse‘irim לַשְּׂעִירִם" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T20:08:51.670" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember my teacher saying something about when we can ellide the schwa and something about syllabic nasals (&quot;often more&quot; as an example of a case where we cannot do regressive nasal assimilation due to syllabic nasals in the words. I don't know what syllabic nasals are exactly) Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17135" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T20:08:51.670" Title="When are we not able to make regressive nasal assimilation in phonetics?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T22:25:16.640" Score="0" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if there are proposals of writing systems that would be created for a set of specific goals such as :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reading/writing speed as high as possible for humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reading/writing learning as natural as possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;universality (applicable to &quot;any&quot; spoken language)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ink and paper saving&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;simplicity (no useless rules)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point I'm looking for is the &quot;natural&quot; element, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;optimization given how the human brain, eyes and even hands work&lt;/strong&gt; by default. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of neuronal plasticity, however I'm convinced that there are several aspects of our various writing systems that are not optimized, meaning that they require more time to learn, more efforts and time to read/write, or even lead to more ink and paper use than they could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I guess the &quot;universality&quot; objective might add a lot of complexity, especially for learning, but I feel like we can't neglect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, maybe I'm too confident and it would be wiser to wait and get more knowledge before addressing such a big question ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17137" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T17:15:52.517" Title="Has a optimized universal writing system been proposed based on scientific knowledge?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23000" CreationDate="2017-05-21T03:12:21.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want universality, then IPA letters would have to be your base. (Or, one could construct an alternative alphabet that translates the units of IPA into different-shaped letters, but that wouldn't gain you anything significant). You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; write German using IPA: Nun, vi solltɛst du &quot;bund&quot; gegɛn &quot;bunt&quot; buxʃtabiʀɛn? (Apologies to German speakers). That is, there are two different German words, spelled &quot;bund&quot; (federation) versus &quot;bunt&quot; (colorful) which are pronounced the same way, because of a rule of German. A &quot;universal&quot; system of writing would disallow language specific rules of spelling, therefore both words would have to be spelled [bunt]. But now you cannot tell from the spelling which word you're talking about (which you can do with the present system). A similar problem arises in many dialects of American English where &quot;writer&quot; and &quot;rider&quot; are pronounced the same, but from spelling you can tell which word was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Universality&quot; works to the advantage of people who don't know the language, but language-specificity can works to the advantage of speakers of the language. By &quot;language&quot;, I really mean &quot;idiosyncratic pronunciation of the individual&quot;. Some English speakers pronounce &quot;Mary, marry, merry&quot; differently, some pronounce two of them the same way (I think &quot;Mary&quot; and &quot;merry&quot;), and some people pronounce them all the same. A &quot;universal&quot; system is &quot;write the words they way they are pronounced&quot;; so &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; English speakers would write [meri], [mæri], [mɛri], and some would just write [mɛri]. This would be really confusing, and would make reading extremely difficult, at least for English, given the vast number of pronunciation differences there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &quot;universality&quot; works against the desideratum of &quot;efficiency&quot;. A universal system would be highly inefficient: you'd need to decide which is more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T03:12:21.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-21T05:18:57.730" Score="1" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;'This' is proximal demonstrative pronoun/ adjective.&#xA; 'That' is distal demonstrative pronoun/ adjective. &#xA;What is 'it' called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17121" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T17:24:12.263" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T15:18:59.277" Title="What is the linguistic term for 'it'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12639" CreationDate="2017-05-21T06:28:44.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek used both the feminine singular and the neuter plural to refer to subjects and fields through an -&lt;em&gt;ikos&lt;/em&gt; adjective. The feminine singular was considered to imply &lt;em&gt;technē&lt;/em&gt; &quot;art&quot;; the neuter plural implied &quot;things relevant to&quot;. Thus, per &lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/contextualize.pl?p.45.LSJ.122460&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSJ&lt;/a&gt;, Aristotle referred to mathematics as both &lt;em&gt;hē Mathematikē&lt;/em&gt; (fem.sg) and as &lt;em&gt;ta Mathematika&lt;/em&gt; (neut.pl)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, the feminine singular was the form that prevailed (as far as I know): &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mathematica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; gives only the singular mathematica, which implied &lt;em&gt;ars&lt;/em&gt; &quot;art&quot; just as the singular Greek implied &lt;em&gt;technē&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It thus follows that mediaeval languages, which had contact with Latin and not Greek, would use singular forms: &lt;em&gt;arsmetick&lt;/em&gt; = arithmetic; while the 16th century revival, which was much more of Greek than of Latin learning, served to reintroduce the Greek plural form, and remodel field names in English in the plural: Mathematics, Physics. That remodelling has not taken place in other languages, like French and German, which have kept their -ic/-ik/-ique field names in the singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T06:28:44.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23007" CreationDate="2017-05-21T09:12:56.930" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the only speech phenomena one can see in a speech signal are those that arise from articulator movement and which have features that aid perception (like energy as particular freqs+times and a/periodicity of a waveform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, specifically, I guess you can &quot;see&quot; vowels, fricatives and stops in the waveform (even if you don't know what language it is). Is this accurate? Are there are other speech sounds you can see in the waveform even if you don't know the language which is spoken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T02:45:57.387" Title="Speech signal analysis: What can be seen in the signal?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23009" CreationDate="2017-05-21T13:52:44.667" Score="1" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, look at this statement I found on an internet conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Memes are the opener now I guess &lt;strong&gt;lmao&lt;/strong&gt; but that seems pretty good to me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the statement makes perfect sense without the &quot;lmao&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, I am not a linguist but I have seen such seemingly arbitrary uses of &quot;lol&quot; and &quot;lmao&quot; in the middle of sentences and it makes me curious does it serve a psychological or linguistic purpose and does it have a technical term associated to it? &#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To me it sounds as if it has been used to introduce a tone of self-deprecation or uncertainty although the use of &quot;I guess&quot; does not seem to exactly replicate the expression.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, before these terms came into common use were there any other words in the English language that served a similar purpose? Or is it something you find only in internet communications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15602" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T23:52:09.497" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T23:52:09.497" Title="What is the particular function of &quot;lol&quot; or &quot;lmao&quot; in the middle of sentences?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23004" CreationDate="2017-05-21T16:02:46.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The things that you can &quot;see&quot; in a spectrogram can arise from all sorts of things, including things produced by a speaker and things produced by other noise sources. By &quot;speech phenomena&quot; I assume you intend to exclude those other noise sources, and also non-speech noises from the speaker like coughing, burping, sighing and so on. Sort of by definition, speech sounds involve &quot;articulators&quot;, although the vocal folds are not usually talked about as &quot;articulators&quot;. Still, one can say that the articulators are all of the organs involved in speech. However, not all aspects of the speech signal involve &lt;em&gt;movement&lt;/em&gt;: things that you can &quot;see&quot; in the speech signal can be there because of the &lt;em&gt;state&lt;/em&gt; of some articulator (which affects vocal tract geometry, thus acoustic output). The acoustics of a sustained &quot;s&quot; can be seen, and is not the result of a movement, it's the result of a state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A spectrogram simply reports what is there and does not care about perception. You can thus see facts of speech which do not aid perception and in fact hinder it. The only way to tell if a feature aids perception or is neutral / antagonistic is to design a word-recognition experiment that manipulates acoustic properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't directly &quot;see&quot; vowels, fricatives, stops, but you can infer that they are present from the distinctive acoustic properties of those (and other) sounds. The inference is quite fallible, so you may not actually &quot;see&quot; a vowel or stop that is there. You can't really &quot;see&quot; specific sounds unless you are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; experienced, but you can see that something is probably a fricative (but which one?). That is, you can detect features, to some extent. You can likewise detect voicing, aspiration, place of articulation (up to a point; practice necessary), nasality, breathy voicing, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T02:45:57.387" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T02:45:57.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23002" CreationDate="2017-05-21T16:29:03.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a neutral (as opposed to feminine &quot;she&quot; and masculine &quot;he&quot;), singular, third person personal pronoun (&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an adjective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T02:04:54.217" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T02:04:54.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23006" CreationDate="2017-05-21T18:57:13.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing syntactically unusual about such uses of these expressions, though how exactly they're deployed and understood is debatable: you may consider them either as orthographically abbreviated finite clauses (&lt;em&gt;I'm laughing my ass off&lt;/em&gt;) or as abbreviations recategorized as words&amp;mdash;specifically, as adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case they act syntactically as what &lt;em&gt;CGEL&lt;/em&gt; calls 'supplements'&amp;mdash;constituents which lie outside the clause and typically qualify either an internal constituent or the entire clause. &lt;em&gt;lmao&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lol&lt;/em&gt; usually qualify an entire clause, providing a personal comment on its substance. The same function is served by familiar phrases like &lt;em&gt;in my opinion&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;unfortunately&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of formal pointing makes your particular example ambiguous. It may be that &lt;em&gt;lmao&lt;/em&gt; actually follows a deleted stop and introduces the second clause, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Memes are the opener now, I guess. I'm laughing my ass off, but that seems pretty good to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it may be that as you say &lt;em&gt;lmao&lt;/em&gt; actually lies in the middle of the utterance. In more formal registers you might expand it to a clause or replace it with a more conventional clause or adverbial (&lt;em&gt;to my great amusement&lt;/em&gt;), and bracket it with dashes or parentheses, and it would look perfectly ordinary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Memes are the opener now, I guess&amp;mdash;it's totally ridiculous&amp;mdash;but that seems pretty good to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T21:52:59.557" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T21:52:59.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-22T08:25:42.813" Score="4" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard representation that combines onset, nucleus, coda with mora? That would help me visualize the prosodic hierarchy better, because I could put something beneath the syllable level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition says that the relation between onset, nucleus, coda and morae is language-independent, but I'm not confident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one of you help me shed light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T09:19:21.437" Title="Components that comprise a syllable" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;syllable-timing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23010" CreationDate="2017-05-22T09:11:24.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Draga Zec in &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, the older model of onset, rime, nucleus, coda—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4i1C0.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4i1C0.png&quot; alt=&quot;syllable(onset, rime(nucleus, coda))&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—was superseded by the mora model—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6JcXR.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6JcXR.png&quot; alt=&quot;a: syllable(C, head_mora(V)); b: syllable(C, head_mora(V), mora(C/V)), c: syllable(C, head_mora(V), C)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—which can account for everything the notion of 'rime' could, and more.  It's mostly language-independent, but there's a distinction in that some languages have weightless C codas (as in (c) above), while in others C codas carry weight (as in (b)). For example, in Cairene Arabic both CVC and CVV attract stress, so CVC falls under structure (b), while in Khal Mongolian only CVV attracts stress, so that CVC are monomoraic as in (c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T09:19:21.437" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T09:19:21.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23017" CreationDate="2017-05-22T15:30:47.167" Score="1" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere this assertion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ido is a try to make Esperanto looking more like French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain me in which extend Ido could be closer than French than Esperanto, in which fields?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I didn't start Ido courses yet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9871" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T19:14:44.660" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T19:14:44.660" Title="Comparison between Ido, Esperanto and French" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-22T18:45:08.360" Score="7" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the reflexes of Proto-Germanic velar consonants  before front vowels were usually palatal consonants in Old English, which in turn generally yield palatal or palato-alveolar consonants in Modern English, as in &lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt; from Proto-Germanic *gelw-. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does Modern English have /g/ at the start of the second syllable of &quot;begin,&quot; which the OED says is from Proto-Germanic *ginnan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are words where /g/ is thought to have been established before a front vowel due to Scandinavian influence, such as &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;give,&lt;/em&gt; but I haven't found any mention of that for &lt;em&gt;begin.&lt;/em&gt; The OED and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=begin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; say that in Old English, a more common word built on the same root was &lt;em&gt;onginnan,&lt;/em&gt; but this still seems like it should have palatalization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the OED does record some OE spellings of &lt;em&gt;onginnan&lt;/em&gt; with the letter &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;ongynnan&lt;/em&gt;) which according to my understanding usually represented /y/ in Old English, a vowel which was not usually preceded by a palatalized consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that the /g/ is due to some kind of analogical leveling under the influence of the past-tense and past-participle forms, which have back vowels and therefore wouldn't have regularly developed a palatal consonant. Is this thought to be correct? If so, I'm curious about if we have any evidence of the date of this, and if the word is ever thought to have had /y/, or if the spellings with &quot;y&quot; are likely just ways of representing /i/ after a velar consonant (or mere unconditioned variants of the spelling with &quot;i&quot; used by scribes who had lost the phonemic distinction between /i/ and /y/). I don't see any real phonetic basis for rounding this vowel, unlike in &quot;busy&quot; (&amp;lt; PG *bisig-) where there is at least an adjecent labial vowel, but perhaps the &quot;u&quot; of the past participle and some past tense forms provided an analogical basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T03:33:06.020" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T03:33:17.963" Title="Why does &quot;begin&quot; have /g/ instead of /j/ if it's from PG *ginnan?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23019" CreationDate="2017-05-22T19:02:37.970" Score="4" ViewCount="1766" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding attributive nouns, or noun-noun compounds, and how they are integrated into syntactic rules for NP formation. Typically, the rule given in textbooks for forming a NP is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP --&gt; (D)(AdjP+) N (PP+)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am trying to figure out how the noun-noun compounds can fit into this. Examples of these include &quot;chocolate chip cookie dough&quot;, where &quot;chocolate chip&quot; and &quot;cookie&quot; are both nouns, but here are acting adjective-like in how they modify &quot;dough&quot;. More examples include &quot;grandfather clock&quot;, &quot;coffee break&quot;, and &quot;polka dot sweater&quot;. However, it feels wrong to simply call these all adjectives. How do we go about integrating these (what I consider NPs) into the NP rule? Would they act as adjuncts, just like adjectives do when modifying a noun (so NP --&gt; (D)(AdjP+)(NP+) N (PP+))? Any help on this problem would be GREATLY appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17149" LastEditorUserId="17149" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T20:37:55.693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T14:33:56.880" Title="How do noun-noun compounds fit into a noun phrase in syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23012" CreationDate="2017-05-22T19:14:18.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The design of Ido indeed intends to make it more similar to modern Romance languages (so French is a fair—but may be polemic—pick).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes phonology (abolishing the letter ĥ), derivation using Romance suffixes, introduction of more &quot;international&quot; words (hospitalo for malsanulejo, olda for maljuna or malnova).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ido failed community-wise: it wasn't the next version of Esperanto everyone wanted to adopt. For fans of more naturalistic international languages, (IALA) Interlingua is the choice for a contender of Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T19:14:18.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23015" CreationDate="2017-05-23T02:24:51.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, this is a short general post about some exceptions in which &lt;strong&gt;palatalization of /g/ before a front vowel did not happen&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a well-known phenomenon and virtually all books on historical phonology of English worth reading devote a special section to this topic - see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BVlXG_-y4uQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hogg 1992&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VAggrp5dNkMC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lass and Anderson 1975&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TAOrBgAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minkova 2014&lt;/a&gt;. cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=del0AgAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Durkin 2014&lt;/a&gt;: 195 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the quote below from Lass and Anderson 1975:&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T7a9b.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T7a9b.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is even discussed in slightly &quot;less technical&quot; literature, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405190248.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Upward and Davidson 2011&lt;/a&gt; write the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One recurring feature &lt;strong&gt;in words of Scandinavian origin&lt;/strong&gt; that sets them apart from Anglo-Saxon-derived words is &lt;strong&gt;the retention of /g/ before a front vowel&lt;/strong&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; (if these words had derived from Anglo-Saxon English, it should have resulted in Modern English forms such as * &lt;em&gt;yet&lt;/em&gt;, * &lt;em&gt;yive&lt;/em&gt;, * &lt;em&gt;beyin&lt;/em&gt;)&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pp. 28-29; emphasis mine - Alex B.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sara Pons-Sanz (&lt;a href=&quot;http://orca.cf.ac.uk/85767/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2015&lt;/a&gt;) traces this idea back to Björkman 1900.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Scandinavian influence on English vocabulary, I strongly recommend reading at least Part IV. Scandinavian Influence (pp. 171-221) in Durkin 2014, &lt;em&gt;Borrowed Words&lt;/em&gt; (Philip Durkin is the chief etymologist of the OED, by the way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One very important thing to remember - as Durkin reminds on p. 192&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;in some of these instances, it is perhaps more likely that what we have is &lt;strong&gt;substitution of the Scandinavian form for its similar-sounding native cognate&lt;/strong&gt; within a particular bilingual speech community, with the Scandinavian form then gradually spreading at the expense of the native form&quot; [emphasis mine - Alex B.].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB! by Scandinavian Durkin means &quot;the ancestor varieties of both West Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) and East Norse (Danish and Swedish), but at a time earlier than our earliest substantial surviving documents for any of the Scandinavian languages, and at a time when the differences between West and East Norse were still very slight&quot; (p. 175).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Back to your OP - &lt;strong&gt;we don’t really know why, and this happens not infrequently in historical linguistics.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, we don’t really know why OE ceorfan &gt; PDE carve (and not *cherve).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for OE beginnan, two explanations are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.    Scandinavian influence&lt;/strong&gt; (Dieter Kastovsky, e.g. Kastovsky 1992 specifically mentions OE beginnan):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no direct evidence to support this hypothesis but we may have some indirect evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, even though we can find OE beginnan, another verb was much more common – OE onginnan, until it was superseded by ME beginnen around the fourteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting similar case could be the development of OE ongean (&gt; PDE again). The ODEE (ed. Onions, 1966) says “the native forms in aȝ-, ay- did not survive beyond XVI, being superseded universally by forms in ag-, derived from Scand. and appearing first in northern and eastern texts XIII.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information about the chronology of this change could come from the development of OE giefan (&gt; PDE give). The ODEE mentions that the non-patalal variant appears c.1200 and that the regular ME forms yive, yeve etc. “prevailed in southern and midland writings till XV.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the remark by darkgamma that &quot;the etymology is off and the chronology is wrong by a few hundred years&quot; is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the biggest problem is the apparent lack of a Scandinavian (Old Norse) cognate, and I'm by no means the first linguist to notice this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.    (Analogical) leveling:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no conclusive evidence to support this, either. We have to remember that even though it is “inherently irregular,” it is a &lt;strong&gt;“fairly systematic process”&lt;/strong&gt; (Hock and Joseph 2009: 152; emphasis mine - Alex B.), which means we should be able to find other examples – very few but they should be out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. Hogg 1992 “with the degree of allomorphic variation noted in §7.41, it would be expected that there should be considerable analogical levelling and extension” (Hogg 1992/2011: 269) and later he claims that &lt;strong&gt;“[a]mongst strong verbs there appear not to be clear-cut examples [of analogical levelling – Alex B.] in OE”&lt;/strong&gt; (p. 270; emphasis mine - Alex B.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in our case this would contradict the directionality of Mańczak’s seventh tendency of analogy, which states that “the forms of the present more often bring about the reshaping of other tenses than vice versa” (as cited in Campbell 2013: 265).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of levelling (strong verbs, West Saxon):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE gyllan – geal – gullon, cf. PDE yell (yelled)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE gyldan – geald – guldon, cf. PDE yield (yielded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the analogical levelling hypthesis cannot explain why OE onginnan &gt; ME aginnen was superseded by ME beginnen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://orca.cf.ac.uk/85767/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pons-Sanz 2015&lt;/a&gt; writes, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In the end, it is up to the linguist’s judgement and his / her willingness to accept the Norse derivation of a term without a formal Norse imprint that determines whether or not it will make it to the list of medieval English words with a Norse etymon. This, of course, is a serious problem for historical linguistics, given the central place of many Norse-derived terms in the English language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T03:33:17.963" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T03:33:17.963" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23016" CreationDate="2017-05-23T03:52:53.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Noun-noun compounds are nouns: N -&gt; N N.  The structure of your example is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[N [N [N [N chocolate] [N chip]] [N cookie]] [N dough]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or possibly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[N [N [N chocolate] [N chip]] [N [N cookie] [N dough]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first means &quot;dough for making chocolate chip cookies&quot;; the second means &quot;cookie dough flavored with chocolate chips&quot; -- a subtle culinary ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interpretation of noun-noun compounds is very free and can be adjectival. In your other examples, there are no adjectives -- the parts are all nouns. You can test that by trying to add modifiers to the parts.  If you can add an adverb, it must be an adjective, since adverbs can't modify nouns; if you add an adjective, the resulting N-bar cannot be part of a noun-noun compound, since those are built from nouns, not N-bars. (Does a &quot;small polka dot sweater&quot; have small polka dots?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T14:33:56.880" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T14:33:56.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23015" CreationDate="2017-05-23T11:37:50.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible it was an analogical development. I checked Guus Kroonen's &lt;em&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic&lt;/em&gt;, and he lists Old English &lt;em&gt;beginnan&lt;/em&gt; as a direct descendant of PGmc &lt;em&gt;*(bi/du)-ginnaną&lt;/em&gt;, a strong verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*&lt;strong&gt;ginnan&lt;/strong&gt;- s.v. 'to begin' - Go. du-ginnan s.v. 'id.', OE be-ginnan s.v. 'id.', E to begin, OS be-ginnan s.v. 'id.', Du. be-ginnen s.v. 'id.', OHG bi-ginnan s.v. 'id.', G be-ginnen s.v. 'id.' (EUR?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He further lists the North Germanic synonym as deriving from &lt;em&gt;*burjaną&lt;/em&gt;, which is definitely not its cognate. Furthermore, &lt;em&gt;byrjȧ&lt;/em&gt; is attested in Old Norse, and &lt;em&gt;byrja&lt;/em&gt; is its descendant in Icelandic, Faroese and western Norwegian, all meaning &quot;begin&quot;. The verb &lt;em&gt;begynne&lt;/em&gt; is a loan from Low German into the continental Scandinavian languages. Furthermore, Wiktionary lists the Old English verb as &lt;em&gt;beġinnan&lt;/em&gt;, obviously showing a palatal /j/. I am not sure what the source of the Wiktionary entry is, but this is a possible sign that analogy had taken place — since it, as a strong verb, must have had a /g/ in the preterite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling &lt;em&gt;begynnan/ongynnan&lt;/em&gt; is unetymological, and would probably not represent an original i-umlauted PGmc. /u/ vowel (since the verb is strong, it cannot be anything like **&lt;em&gt;begunnijaną&lt;/em&gt;, though such a weak verb would indeed be well-formed); if anything, it would represent a rare-ish u-umlaut of an /i/, or (far more likely) a hypercorrection or scribal error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing contradictory in that it now has /g/; it never inherited the /g/ into early Old English in the first place, but generalised it out of a paradigm that showed a /g~j/ alternation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T11:37:50.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26709" CreationDate="2017-05-23T20:16:05.843" Score="6" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember this from a linguistics professor I had in graduate school about 30 years ago. He named the source, but I can't remember. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14404" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T10:10:10.373" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T13:08:44.267" Title="Who said &quot;The difference between a language and a dialect is in who has the army&quot;" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23022" CreationDate="2017-05-23T20:27:45.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weinreich&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Max Weinreich&lt;/a&gt; is usually said to be the person who created the quip, but according to the Wikipedia entry on him, he was actually quoting someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T20:27:45.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-24T01:54:39.300" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to figure out what components of a non-restrictive relative clause (if any) corefer with a previously mentioned antecedent. Here is the example I am working with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Mandy Monroe, one of the newest members, asked me….”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this example, does the entire clause [one of the newest members] corefer with [Mandy Monroe]? (Or does it not corefer at all)? Any help on this is welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Please let me know if this isn't actually a non-restrictive relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17149" LastEditorUserId="17149" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T14:16:36.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T14:16:36.147" Title="What part of a non-restrictive relative clause corefers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;binding-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-24T12:00:31.057" Score="4" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing some research on a manuscript which I need to identify the language. My hypothesis is that it is written in phoneme by someone who does not understand the language. Spoken aloud, one that does understand it can guess context and meaning of sounds. Akin to Marcel Duchamp's LHOOQ paintings with its title written in &quot;French phoneme&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a thing as a database of phoneme's (x-axis) occurrence (y-axis) across many languages (old French, Occitan, old English, Gaelic, etc) ???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;upsid or phoible are close but they do not show occurrence of individual phoneme for a given language, only total number of phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any hints will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps. I was able to get a distribution of phoneme for English and French.&#xA;Processing corpus of text such as in Gutenberg.org would provide words in many languages but not the phonemes (or sound within the words)... syllables might be more appropriate that phoneme... but then there is no list of syllables for languages... or is there ???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17159" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T00:15:35.853" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T00:15:35.853" Title="Is there a phoneme distribution graph for multiple European languages?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23024" CreationDate="2017-05-24T14:14:50.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that your example is a reduced non-restrictive relative clause.  For evidence that appositives of this sort are reduced clauses, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;pg=PA469&amp;amp;lpg=PA469&amp;amp;dq=mccawley%20phenomena%20appositive&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=uOlA8M7xVc&amp;amp;sig=_T79D8HlAAHJaw3rl2goAtL9u8c&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjnqoP31IjUAhXIslQKHekzB8cQ6AEINjAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mccawley%20phenomena%20appositive&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McCawley's discussion of appositives&lt;/a&gt;.  However, in the clause &quot;(who is) one of the newest members&quot;, the expression &quot;one of the newest members&quot; is not in a coreferential position.  It predicates something of &quot;who&quot;.  The term &quot;coreference&quot; is ordinarily reserved for presupposed coreference, not asserted reference, as we have here.  There is discussion of the difference between asserted and presupposed reference in Postal's book &lt;em&gt;Crossover phenomena&lt;/em&gt; (1971).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T14:14:50.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22962" CreationDate="2017-05-24T16:17:12.063" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Google search will bring up a huge number of articles. Also look at UNESCO and UNICEF and the Global Reading Network websites. There is a big international push for mother tongue-based education (also referred to as multilingual education) and a number of countries have introduced MLE, but on a large scale across all languages, it is not feasible for a range of reasons including lack of materials, lack of orthographies, cost, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17160" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T16:17:12.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23033" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:46:03.047" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.1914506&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Infants&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.381770&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some mammals&lt;/a&gt; can apparently perceive VOT continuum categorically, which I guess is evidence for natural auditory sensitivities, and can explain, at least in part, the mechanisms through which phonemes are perceived categorically. But, even if I have an inkling of the impact, one thing I don't really understand after reading these and similar articles is what is meant by &quot;perceiving the VOT continuum&quot;. What does it mean to perceive a continuum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T16:06:56.470" Title="What does it mean to perceive VOT continuum categorically?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23029" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:39:00.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Categorical means yes vs no or one of  small set of things like red/green/blue. Phonemic features of consonants are usually like this, place of articulation, stop vs fricative, voiced vs unvoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuous means on a smooth scale like frequency or a large approximate set of things (like time in milliseconds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perception works through sensor devices, special nerve cells like rods and cones in the eye or hair cells in the cochlea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The action of these sensors is limited to firing once past a threshold and then taking some (very short time) to reset so that it can fire again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there are many cells of the same kind so that they may not fire all at the same time but if exposed to an extended source of one particular kind of energy can seem to, as a set, fire continuously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single firing is a sign of a category, the number of firings (by multiple cells, or by a single cell over time) approximates continuity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perception of timing is not done in these primary sense cells, but further down the neural pathway. However the same principles apply to these dependent cells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite the inherently categorical (binary) nature of a single cell, a bunch combined together or analyzed over time produce a continuous measure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice Onset Time, in terms of production, is the time from the start of some articulation and the start of vibration of vocal cords at some generic frequency. Timing is a continuous parameter, there's no threshold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt; consonant phonemes in human language are perceived categorically, meaning there is some VOT value that acts as a threshold, that is there is no slow statistical increase in probability of a positive voicing feature, rather a sudden jump from always considered yes to always considered no. When the VOT is less than this threshold then the voicing feature is almost always considered on, when greater then off, and only in the smallest neighborhood of the threshold is it questionably on or off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T13:47:45.760" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T13:47:45.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18947" CreationDate="2017-05-25T14:16:30.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many factors, time spent in each language, consistency and exposure to each (at school, at home, at work, with friends/family).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be only one change that makes it considerably hard to change ones accent and that is puberty. Before puberty it is very easy to get and maintain a native speaker accent in a second language, but afterwards it takes lots of time and training (with study and practice, grammar and vocabulary don't seem to be a problem after puberty). There is no biological mechanism yet discovered that comes close to explaining this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you spoke a language fluently as a child, even if you stop using and hearing it before puberty, you shouldn't have much problem with re-establishing fluency later in life and getting rid of any accent from the in-between language. If you entirely quit the language at 5 years old, because that is so young, you may have some difficulty, but it won't be like entirely learning a new language sound-wise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One anecdote that shows this is Henry Kissinger, a former US Secretary of State. He moved with his family to the US from Germany at age 15. He has a very noticeable German accent. His brother, Walter Kissinger, is two years younger and has virtually no accent in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T14:16:30.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23029" CreationDate="2017-05-25T16:06:56.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has to do with two things: the experimental task, and the nature the things being perceived. All acoustic measurements are continuous, i.e. capable of having any number of values. However, the mind does not handle continuity well, and linguistic units are all categories (a small set of discrete values), but are based on physical continua. Tone in a language with downstep is a great example of the categorical vs. continuous, since any number of pitches can occur in an utterance and be treated as H vs. L, depending on phonological context (for instance, in H!H!H!H, the last H may be lower than L in LHHH).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task is typically to present subjects with stimuli continuously varying along some dimension and tell them to identify a stimulus as a particular word (bad vs.pad, for example). If &quot;perception&quot; of linguistic stimuli were continuous, you would expect speakers to have slowly increasing rates of &quot;bad&quot; over &quot;pad&quot; as you reduce VOT, and instead you get rather rapid rates of &quot;bad&quot; identification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are quite capable of &quot;perceiving&quot; such differences when treated as physical signals, though it may take work to get subjects to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; treat the task as linguistic-identification. Bilingual subjects can be good, because they have higher degrees of awareness of differences in VOT. The problem is that &quot;perceive&quot; is used in two ways: one can &quot;perceive&quot; pitch and duration continously, or categorially. Likewise though not a obviously, one can perceive that stimuli A, B, C all have different VOT values, or you can treat them as falling into two categories. The second kind of &quot;perception&quot; might be better termed &quot;analysis&quot;; however, I think it is actually correct to call all of these automatic processes as being &quot;perception&quot;, just as you can perceive an apple, or a combination of somewhat round, shiny, and red: you don't &quot;perceive&quot; &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the low-level stimuli, and there is no conscious analysis involved in integrating facts into an apple or specific phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T16:06:56.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T21:03:48.197" Score="-1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;hello I just do not understand how to calculate consonant-vowel ratio referring wals chapter 3! I need to calculate the consonant-vowel ratio regarding german french and turkish! Concerning the alphabeth german and french have 21 consonants and 5 vowels and turkish has 21 consOnants and 8 vowels, however there are 3  umlauts in german and the amounts of consonants and vowels may vary in these 3 languages concerning complex combinations! Still just looking at the alphabeth can someone make the calculations and explain the values on wals regarding these 3 languages? Thanks and best regards! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hey I may be blocked and may not be able to comment on my question! Can you please show me how to calculate in one of these languages? Thanks!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T07:54:25.040" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:32:11.807" Title="Wals chapter 3 consonant vowel ratio" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T12:33:16.140" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to obtain word embeddings (vector representation of words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it is better to try to directly obtain a word embedding using some neural network approach or is it better to learn character embeddings then, use them to build word embeddings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T16:06:54.853" Title="What's the best approach to creating word-embeddings?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T13:49:46.780" Score="1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek verbs with initial #i+H4-&#xA;from Arnaud Fournet (May 2017)&#xA;*H4eH4- ‘to heal, guard’:&#xA;(1)Hurrian a-tt- ‘to guard, protect’&#xA;(2) Greek ἰάομαι ‘to heal’ &amp;lt; *y-ā-&#xA;(3) The question : why &quot;ia&quot; instead of &quot;a&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17174" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T23:30:06.780" Title="Greek words with initial &quot;ia&quot; instead of &quot;a&quot;" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-05-30T09:28:42.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23037" CreationDate="2017-05-26T16:06:54.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you read this article by Ling et al:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@Conference{Lingetal2015,&#xA;Author = {Wang Ling and Chris Dyer and Alan Black and Isabel Trancoso},&#xA;Title = {Two/too simple adaptations of word2vec for syntax problems},&#xA;Booktitle = {Proceedings of NAACL},&#xA;Year = {2015},&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains a guidance on doing word embeddings properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T16:06:54.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T16:19:01.980" Score="9" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been learning Greenlandic and I came across this term, and I can't find anything about it online. Can anyone explain it in Layman's terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17118" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T17:59:49.040" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T22:52:05.673" Title="What is a half-transitivizer?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;greenlandic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28468" CreationDate="2017-05-26T17:48:51.513" Score="2" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;The special characters page of my English keyboard on Android contains what appears to be a Thai character (ฯ). I've so far found that it is used as a kind of punctuation or phrase-shortening particle in Thai orthography, but haven't had any success figuring out why it's on my keyboard. I can only assume that it has some broader significance. What (if any) usage does this character have outside of Thai that justifies its presence on a standard issue phone keyboard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b6sbC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b6sbC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17181" LastEditorUserId="17181" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T06:49:41.523" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T04:06:16.890" Title="Significance of 'ฯ' in English orthography" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23044" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23045" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Greenlandic language." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:00:22.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23052" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:05:57.310" Score="4" ViewCount="950" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native english speaker here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently learned from an intro linguistics class that I have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;abysmal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; transcription skills.&#xA;Can you recommend practice software?&#xA;I think I'm looking for IPA drills on consonant &amp;amp; vowels, and eventually transcription practice, but I would love guidance on &quot;what you really should start with is $FOO&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IPA drills:&lt;/strong&gt; maybe flashcard-like quizzes, e.g. Given &lt;strong&gt;ð&lt;/strong&gt; choose place+manner+voicing &amp;amp; vice versa.&#xA;Maybe choose symbol(s) given sounds, kind of like &lt;a href=&quot;http://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/ipa/unit01a.html#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site, IPA Online&lt;/a&gt; , which has solid content.  But it uses Flash and runs poorly on my Windows 10 laptop (need to use IE, video clip looping stutters so have to restart to watch full clip).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ipachart.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interactive IPA chart&lt;/a&gt; is kind of helpful but many vowel differences  seem imperceptable (to me).  And while it is a great reference chart it doesn't do much to help with practicing recall &amp;amp; memorization (probably because it is a reference chart).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speaking of practice...&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I would like to see adaptive skill calibration (drop to simpler drills w/errors, advance when mastered), spaced repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit: next class info&lt;/strong&gt; as per sami's thoughtful comment, here is some more context about my goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to get a head start on phonetics because I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; struggled with simple IPA transcriptions and phoneme/allophone things during my recent intro-to-ling class.  &lt;em&gt;[edit r.e. user6726's comment: phonemes/allophones not a priority, just smth that felt rough, maybe I should revisit that after I've taken some to absorb more phoentics]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect this next class to be more challenging, so I'm pretty sure I would benefit from early prep work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.washington.edu/courses/2017/autumn/ling/550/c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LING 550 C: Introduction To Linguistic Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&quot;Introduction to the articulatory and acoustic correlates of phonological features. Covers mapping of dynamic events to static presentations, phonetic evidence for phonological description, universal constraints on phonological structure, and implications of psychological speech-sound categorization for phonological theory. Prerequisite: either LING 200 or LING 400.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17180" LastEditorUserId="17180" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T03:26:22.740" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T17:01:21.457" Title="Seeking IPA study aids (symbol memorization, audio recognition, transcription practice)" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23039" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:23:03.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I find all this laryngealist madness highly unscientific. Some scholars use laryngeal phonemes as a jolly when there is something uncertain in the etymology of some word. These reconstructions are not only typologically unlikely, but also inconsistent with the initial, and brilliant, idea of &quot;sonant coefficients&quot; suggested by de Saussure. This usage of laryngeals is unfalsifiable, and should therefore be avoided. I think such reconstructions as *&lt;em&gt;H₄eH₄&lt;/em&gt; are simply wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the Greek verb ἰάομαι, the etymology is quite uncertain. For sure, it cannot go back to a *&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;- because antevocalic /i/ in Greek evolved into an aspiration /h/ or, perhaps, into /dz/ in such forms as ζυγόν vs. Latin &lt;em&gt;iugum&lt;/em&gt;. Moreover, knowing some basic Greek is important in dealing with IE etymologies. As you can easily see, ἰάομαι starts with a hiatus which very likely implies some lost consonant between the two vowels, i.e. either a /s/ or a /w/. Pokorny's dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Fie%2Fpokorny&amp;amp;text_number=%20%20%20459&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentions&lt;/a&gt; this word under the PIE root *&lt;em&gt;eis&lt;/em&gt; which has a very vague semantics, so the etymology cannot be considered certain. But if the root is this, then the lost consonant must be the sibilant, and therefore the reconstruction as &lt;em&gt;H₄eH₄&lt;/em&gt;, whatever we might think of it, is disallowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T19:45:06.110" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T19:45:06.110" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23034" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:32:11.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing difficult with the concept: the ratio of X to Y is X/Y. If you want to know the consonant-to-vowel quality ratio of Turkish, you need to know the number of consonants in Turkish, and the number of vowel qualities in Turkish. According to the map and definitions in ch. 1, Turkish has an average number of consonants, defined as 22±3, and a large set of vowel qualities, which is 7-14. Turkish is reported to have an average C/VQ ratio, defined as 2.75 or higher but less than 4.5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than computing such a ratio, you can just look up the ballpark of the ratio. If you want to actually compute an exact number, you have to decide what values you want to assign for C and VQ. The counting criteria are not clearly spelled out in the articles: the procedure is &quot;Long and short variants of the same vowel are always counted once, nasalized vowels do not add to the inventory as long as a non-nasalized counterpart occurs, &lt;em&gt;and so on&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (that is, one is free to add similar criteria, if you want). There are in fact 8 vowels in Turkish (though earlier the author reported 9), so that part is not wildly controversial. In some other language, this could be utterly unclear, for example is the English seat / sit distinction a length distinction (some people say so) or a quality distinction (some people say so)? What about phonatory differences in Otomanguean or Nilotic, or tones of Vietnamese (which are a mix of pitch and phonation)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the consonant-counting methodology, Ch. 1 states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a strong effort has been made to apply consistent criteria in&#xA;  determining the consonant inventory size. This sometimes leads to some&#xA;  difference from the conclusions in published descriptions of the&#xA;  languages concerned. For most languages relatively straightforward&#xA;  decisions can be reached, but others are more problematic. A difficult&#xA;  choice often concerns whether to include consonants found only in&#xA;  words borrowed from other languages; generally those sounds introduced&#xA;  just in the last few generations as the result of the spread of world&#xA;  languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Modern&#xA;  Standard Arabic have been excluded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki article on Turkish&lt;/a&gt;, there are 24 consonants, with 3 of them being somewhat marginal; the C/VQ ratio for Turkish is thus between 3 and 3.42857. Ch. 1 does not explain any special criteria for consonant-counting, so the fact that Turkish has geminate consonants could mess with the count, though obviously given the report that Turkish has an average count of consonants, we can surmise that the author did not include geminate consonants, at least in counting Turkish. The palatal consonants of Turkish are both &quot;predictable&quot; and phonemic. The discussion in Ch. 1 implies that allophonic variants are not included (so aspiration in English does not bump up the count); possible the flap [ɾ] is excluded as being always derived, but this is controversial (given &quot;capitalistic&quot; vs. &quot;militaristic&quot;). Counting issues will also arise depending on whether [mp, mb, nt, nd...] are analyzed as clusters of [m, b, p, n, d, t] or as independent &quot;prenasalized&quot; consonants. The procedure is, as far as I know, to accept the analysis of the original source author unless there is a good reason to disbelieve. There is no discussion of actual numbers for particular languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might, however, probe deeper by looking at UPSID, which gives phoneme lists for specific languages. The Turkish UPSID phoneme list is &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/L/L2158.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which reports 9 vowels and 25 consonants. Inspecting the set of languages reported to have &quot;long consonants&quot;, 12 languages are said to have them. Turkish, Finnish, Arabic, Japanese are included in the UPSID language set, all actually have long consonants, and none of these languages are reported as having long consonants. The discrepancy may be explained by some theory of consonant length in e.g. Wolof, Archi, Avar (which are said to have long consonants) and the many other languages which do have long consonants but are not reported in UPSID as having them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a scientific POV, C/VQ ratio should be considered to be a range, rather than a precise computation, for reasons that should be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T18:32:11.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23039" CreationDate="2017-05-27T00:20:20.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin of &lt;em&gt;iáomai&lt;/em&gt; is unknown, but it seems as though the first two syllables could result from *&lt;em&gt;iCa-&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; = a consonant that was lost in all forms of Greek before dialectal breakup, but after the older *j- glide disappeared or transformed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intervocalic -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;- is one candidate for such a consonant: compare Greek &lt;em&gt;heu-&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;heuō, heuein&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) &quot;to singe&quot; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;eus-&lt;/em&gt; (&gt; Latin &lt;em&gt;ūr-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to burn&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, there might be a connection with e.g. Welsh &lt;em&gt;iach&lt;/em&gt;, Breton &lt;em&gt;yac'h&lt;/em&gt; &quot;healthy&quot;, since intervocalic -s- has disappeared in British Celtic as well. But this isn't an especially good match (for example, there is nothing in the Greek word that obviously corresponds to British Celtic &lt;em&gt;-ch&lt;/em&gt;), so this is just a speculative connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T00:20:20.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23046" CreationDate="2017-05-27T21:09:08.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned from William Smalley's &lt;em&gt;Manual of Articulatory Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;.  This predates the change from the &quot;American&quot; style of transcription to IPA.  The audio tapes that Smalley prepared to accompany his text are great.  The tapes themselves are no longer available, but they're online here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://bach.arts.kuleuven.be/MOAP/wav/07/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smalley files&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T21:09:08.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23046" CreationDate="2017-05-27T21:54:49.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there isn't an optimal useful electronic thing like you seem to be looking for. For starters, I recommend Ladefoged &lt;em&gt;A course in phonetics&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; is another IPA reference chart (by Peter Ladefoged), and contains &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/contents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; which assembles the online material for the book. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of vowels&lt;/a&gt; is useful from the perspective of auditory training, because it gives 3 real masters of proper IPA standards, so that you can hear what &quot;ɑ&quot; is supposed to sound like (the performers &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; differ, so it's useful to understand concretely that the symbols have approximate values, not exact values).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another resource is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/computing/ipahelp/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; from SIL, where you can navigate to &lt;a href=&quot;http://downloads.sil.org/IPA%20Help/Corporate%20Release/2.1/SIL_IPA_2_1.exe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;. This is probably the best bet from a pedagogical perspective. One problem with learning IPA is that it's impossible to both use actual language data and to control variations in speaker anatomy. If you combine the SIL samples and the Ladefoged samples, you can hear actual speakers of languages of the relevant languages so you hear how it actually is; but then you get all sorts of confusing differences in how things sound simply because one sample comes from an 80 year old 5 ft. tall woman, and another comes from a 7 foot tall 25 year old man. There are some IPA flash cards &lt;a href=&quot;https://quizlet.com/5254040/ipa-phonetic-alphabet-flash-cards/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which are useful only for their comic value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the phoneme/allophone business, it's hard to suggest anything since it's not clear what problem you're facing (how do you know you have a problem?). &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.washington.edu/courses/2017/summer/ling/450/a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;450&lt;/a&gt; in summer would not be a bad way to overcome IPA struggles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T21:54:49.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-27T22:28:48.213" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need examples to whole language typology in turkish ! The value is inconsistent for turkish language which means it has both dependent marking and head marking at the same time referring whole language typology! 2 sentences (one dependent marking one head marking) would be enough! Best regards and thanks!Check out www.wals.info chapter 25 : locus of marking : whole language typology ! Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="14920" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T23:59:28.060" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T22:09:59.530" Title="Examples to Whole Language Typology in Turkish" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23039" CreationDate="2017-05-28T00:54:51.523" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a co-relation of sorts between *H4eH4- ‘to heal, guard’ and the Sanskrit term for &quot;heal&quot; , medicine, etc. However I have no correlation with the Greek term ἰάομαι ‘to heal’ &amp;lt; *y-ā- . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*H4eH4- ‘to heal, guard’&#xA;Hurrian a-tt- ‘to guard, protect’&#xA;Greek ἰάομαι ‘to heal’ &amp;lt; *y-ā-&#xA;*H4eH4- ‘to heal, guard’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit - To heal : भिषज् (भिषज्यति) bhiSaj &#xA;The remedy:  भेषजं, भैषज्यं,&#xA;औषधं, रोगहं.&#xA;MEDICINAL- (Having healing properties) औषधीयः -या -यं, Aushadhiiya&#xA;भैषजः -जी -जं, भेषजीयः -या -यं, औषधोपयोगी -गिनी -गि (न्)&#xA;Hurrian a-tt has a co-relation with Hindi - &quot;aaTaa&quot; ground wheat flower.During the fifties in the cities in India, private doctors who attended to patients in small private clinics, had assistants who ground minerals and herbs to powder to prepare medicinal syrups (jarabes). &#xA;Not a historical linguistic co-relation but this is as far as I can go on the subject. The Academia.edu discussion on the topic has ended; I have seen no answers to Arnaud Fournet´s query.Perhaps I am the only one who attempted an answer , but not in the historical linguistic sense. It would be more in line with Cultures and interacting dialects and languages, over an enormous geographical area and an intervening period of six to ten thousand years BP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17174" LastEditorUserId="17174" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T23:30:06.780" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T23:30:06.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23046" CreationDate="2017-05-28T17:36:00.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; recommend, based on my own experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Memorize the IPA chart - this includes, first, the ability to read the IPA (it requires lots of practice). You can test yourself by reading the broad transcription of the North Wind and the Sun passage (for American English first); it can be found e.g. in the IPA Handbook on p. 44. Then you can read the same passage transcribed for other English dialects. You're a native speaker of American English, so you shouldn't really struggle with the IPA consonants (for English). Mastering the IPA vowels could be more challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Start transcribing single (isolated) English words - broad transcription only - and then start transcribing sentences. Some exercises in Ladefoged &lt;em&gt;A course in Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; (a standard intro text), pp. 48-52 should help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of websites that may help you. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/English_Phonetics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/English_Phonetics/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(caveat: linguistics has been traditionally underfunded so those websites might be obsolete technology-wise or less user-friendly than what we are accustomed to)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now you should be ready to learn narrow transcription. First learn to read it - e.g. the same passage from the IPA Handbook. Narrow transcription is the hardest.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually you may want to learn how to transcribe a language you don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T17:59:31.527" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T17:59:31.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23046" CreationDate="2017-05-28T19:23:06.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; Wikipedia!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; Since the others have pointed you to some good resources, I will just add general advice on how to go about learning to produce, distinguish and describe phonetic units (or at least the way I went about learning these things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start, being bilingual (tri-, quadri-, ...) helps. So, if you know another language, you already have some idea how the phonetics of that language differs from yours, and you can distinguish among a bigger set of speech sounds. Even if you don't, here are some ways you can improve on the things I mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, an understanding, in phonetics, of why certain speech sounds are called what they are is paramount. As you probably are aware, something like a &lt;code&gt;voiceless labeo-dental fricative [f]&lt;/code&gt; is called that for a reason. The trick is to break down each word in that name and pay careful attention to what your vocal cavity is doing while making an &lt;code&gt;[fːːː]&lt;/code&gt; sound. Then compare with what changes when you change each word in that name: change &lt;code&gt;voiceless&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;voiced [v]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;labeo-dental&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;dental [θ]&lt;/code&gt; etc. Begin by analyzing sounds that you know occur in English, i.e., sounds you are familiar with. Once you are comfortable with what such terms really stand for (in other words, what your vocal cavity does), you will be able to put together such strings of words and guess the sounds on your own, even if you have never heard these before. For example, none of the languages I grew up speaking (I had the luck of growing up trilingual) had a &lt;code&gt;voiceless palatal plosive [c]&lt;/code&gt;, but I knew what a &lt;code&gt;voiceless velar plosive [k]&lt;/code&gt; was, and I knew how to produce a &lt;code&gt;(voiced) palatal approximant [j]&lt;/code&gt;, then all I had to do is to position my tongue as in &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;do what I do&quot; with &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;, and voila!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to check if you've got the correct sound? Well, there are tons of resources online for that. My favorite is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_pulmonic_consonants_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, where clear audio for most &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_vowels_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowels&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_pulmonic_consonants_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonants&lt;/a&gt; (including these ones: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_affricate_consonants_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;affricates&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_co-articulated_consonants_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;co-articulated consonants&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA_chart_non-pulmonic_consonants_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-pulmonic consonants&lt;/a&gt;) that you would want is available. Moreover, the individual pages on the phones (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_stop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one for &lt;code&gt;[c]&lt;/code&gt;) contain a list of languages (dialects) that make use of the phone at least allophonically. You can use these references to search for recordings (videos, audios, music if you prefer) in these languages to hear these sounds in actual speech. At least for the more populous languages, you can definitely find something on youtube. A lot of people on youtube teach ways to produce specific sounds or to distinguish between &quot;similar&quot; sounds that are hard for non-natives, and some of them are really good. For instance, some good ones include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqkFv9Y2Wao&amp;amp;index=8&amp;amp;list=PLF4CWx5QycQ2TxSXiYTsG3jZHUaAp_DW3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; teaching how to distinguish &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɨ]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBZacz5w5X8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; providing a fun tutorial on producing an &lt;code&gt;alveolar trill [r]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvlwXQ1bDvc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; explaining rather clearly one of the hardest three-way distinction among fricatives in any language I know of. For sounds that occur in more obscure languages than Russian or Swedish (addressed in the videos I linked), you can search the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/main2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCLA Phonetics Archive&lt;/a&gt;. Some of the audios are old (and not the clearest), but still is an indispensable resource for auditory training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think any Memrise/Duolingo style resource exists for phonetics, which seems to be what you are looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would like to see adaptive skill calibration (drop to simpler drills w/errors, advance when mastered), spaced repetition.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you take the time to go through some of the stuff I mentioned, you should be able to get much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes without saying that just listening won't help you accomplish what you are after. You will have to be able to produce the distinctions you hear (it's kind of cyclical: if you can produce a distinction, you will automatically realize what the distinction is). I would suggest starting off with the sounds of English (as that is your native tongue), and then trying to listen to some language with relatively simple phonetics, such as Finnish or Hungarian (Note: I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; suggesting these are any easier to learn than other languages, but simply that they have fewer allophonic variations to deal with as a beginner), but which are quite different than English in that they will be able to help you try out and understand new sounds and features, such as (lack of) aspiration, palatal stops, vowel and consonant length etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, regarding the allophone/phoneme business, do not worry if you can't hear the difference between all the variations of a certain phoneme. In general, native speakers are &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be deaf to these variations. Once you get used to sound patterns in other languages, the allophones will automatically make themselves apparent to you. Often reading about these allophonic variations first, and then trying to listen specifically for the things you read about helps. This works really well in phonetics, to try to search for something once you know that it exists; sort of like how you can understand (not the meaning, but to be able to hear words clearly) songs in foreign languages once you have the lyrics. For the specific case of allophonic deaspiration of English stops, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PSdlctYBsw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe6MIo816jo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; videos (n.b.: imho, turning off aspiration is probably the phonetic feature English speakers, even pros, struggle with the most).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final word of caution, remember that (as @user6726 mentions in his answer), IPA symbols are meant to be approximate. The same symbol may be used in two languages or dialects to stand for two or more different sounds. For example, the symbol &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt; is used to refer to a post-alveolar sibilant in each of English, Bengali, Kabardian (one of their many many sibilants) and sometimes Russian, even though none of them is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; like any of the others. And, the symbol &lt;code&gt;ð&lt;/code&gt; used for each of English, Icelandic and Danish when again all three are very clearly distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T19:23:06.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23059" CreationDate="2017-05-29T04:57:01.717" Score="1" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek nouns are cassified into three declensions, and we can say that this is largely based on the ending of the stem of the noun. If a noun's stem ends in &lt;code&gt;-ā&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;-ē&lt;/code&gt; in Attic when not after &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;), for example, then it belongs to the first declension; if it ends in &lt;code&gt;-es&lt;/code&gt;, however, it belong to the third declension then. This may not be a perfect correlation, but this is not what is important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Ancient Greek had diphthongs like &lt;em&gt;ai&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;au&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt;. While there are nouns whose stem ends in diphthongs, the only permissible set of diphthongs in this context seems to be those ending in &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt;. We have &lt;em&gt;basileus (βασιλεύς, king)&lt;/em&gt; whose stem ends in &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt;, and two singletons &lt;em&gt;bous (βοῦς, cow, ox)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;graus (γραῦς old woman)&lt;/em&gt; whose stems end in the diphthongs &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;au&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is there no noun whose stem ends in an &lt;code&gt;-i&lt;/code&gt;-ending diphthong, like &lt;em&gt;ai&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;oi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ui&lt;/em&gt;, and their long versions? Is there an explanation based on historical linguistics, or is it really just a matter of unbelievably purest luck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastEditorUserId="14808" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T06:30:01.950" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T11:47:02.737" Title="Why is there no Ancient Greek noun whose stem ends in an &quot;i&quot;-ending diphthong (like &quot;-ai&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23057" CreationDate="2017-05-29T08:47:09.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;τρεῖς “three” has the full-grade form of an IE -i stem, *trey-es.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T08:47:09.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23057" CreationDate="2017-05-29T10:02:01.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only in a few cases you can find a meaningful answer to a question asking &quot;why there is something lacking in a language&quot;. Normally, there is simply no answer. For example, why did not Ancient Greek have e Locative case in its nominal declension? Probably because it coalesced with the Dative. But why didn't it have a Comitative case? There is no answer to this question, because in Proto-Indo-European there has never been a Comitative case, without any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see whether type your question belongs to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, in historical linguistics to &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; some feature of a language amounts to find its &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt; in some proto-language. So, let's start from clarifying what we mean by &quot;stem&quot; in the IE languages. The average IE noun can be either a &lt;strong&gt;radical noun&lt;/strong&gt; (where case endings are attached directly to the root), or a &lt;strong&gt;thematic noun&lt;/strong&gt; (where between the root and the case endings intervenes the so-called &lt;strong&gt;thematic vowel&lt;/strong&gt;), or a noun that has a &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; proper, i.e. a root plus a derivative suffix, with case endings attached directly to this stem. Now, let's exclude radical nouns and thematic declension and concentrate on nouns with a stem. Then your question must be reformulated: &quot;why is there no nominal derivative suffix having the form of, or ending in, an -&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; diphthong?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are mentioning stems in -εύς as an example of diphthong ending stems. Now, let's exclude such words as βασιλεύς, Ἀχιλλεύς and other non-IE nouns whose origin is simply unknown and concentrate on words indicating professions: κεραμεύς 'potter' or ἁλιεύς 'sailor, fisher'. These stems are built with the suffix *&lt;em&gt;ēw&lt;/em&gt;, which eventually evolved into something that was spelled, in Classical Greek, with the so-called diphthong ευ. But what is a diphthong? Phonologically a diphthong is hardly distinguishable from a mere sequence of a vowel plus a sonorant. In the teaching of Greek the notion of diphthong is widely used for the seek of simplicity, but it's more about spelling than about language. Suffice it to say, the &quot;diphthongs&quot; ου and ει are often just conventional spellings for long closed vowels /oː/ and /eː/ (outcomes of contraction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All put together, you question can be reformulated in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why was there no PIE nominal suffix of the type -&lt;em&gt;Vy&lt;/em&gt;- (where &quot;V&quot; indicates a vowel and &quot;y&quot; indicates a palatal sonorant), which then would evolve into something that is conventionally called &quot;diphthong&quot; in the Classical Greek spelling tradition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's remember the PIE vocalic alternations: roughly speaking, every vowel could change into a zero. In the case of the suffix we are looking for this would result into a variant form -&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;-. Therefore, what we really need is a declension type with a stem ending in -&lt;em&gt;Vy&lt;/em&gt;- in full (i.e. non zero) grade, preserved as such down to the Classical period. Unfortunately, there is no such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have words with the zero grade of the suffix -&lt;em&gt;Vy&lt;/em&gt;-, i.e. the -ι declension (πόλις). It does not show any &quot;diphthong&quot; (with the possible exception of some oblique case forms).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We also have some words exhibiting the full grade of the suffix -&lt;em&gt;Vy&lt;/em&gt;- (from IE *-&lt;em&gt;oi&lt;/em&gt;-) but they have mostly lost the sonorant element, so no &quot;diphthong&quot; is there in the spelling. What I mean here is the declension in -ω, i.e. such words as ἠχώ 'echo'. The original Proto-Greek suffix is reconstructed as -οj- but the palatal element has been lost almost everywhere except for the dative form: ἡχοῖ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References: Chantraine, &lt;em&gt;Morphologie historique du grecque&lt;/em&gt;, §§82–88.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T11:47:02.737" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T11:47:02.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23062" CreationDate="2017-05-29T11:31:50.497" Score="4" ViewCount="5928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to be able to build a &quot;word&quot; using IPA symbols (ex:sʌnʃaɪn) and then be able to link together a bunch of .wav files (one per phoneme) and play it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I need a full set of wav (or mp3 or midi) files... Do you know where I might be able to download those ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17159" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T13:51:17.657" Title="Where to download wav/mp3 files for each of the ipa phoneme?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T16:32:23.077" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding asymmetrical case marking in German referring WALS chapter 50, I understand the asymmetry in German (&lt;em&gt;ich&lt;/em&gt; : I; &lt;em&gt;mich&lt;/em&gt; : me; &lt;em&gt;mir&lt;/em&gt; : to me; &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; : he; &lt;em&gt;ihm&lt;/em&gt; : to him; &lt;em&gt;ihn&lt;/em&gt; : him, etc.) but the value is coded as syncretism in relevant NP types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone show me syncretism in NP types? I have doubts what I should consider as NP types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14920" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T18:13:07.147" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T23:01:07.357" Title="wals chapter 50 regarding german language" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23060" CreationDate="2017-05-29T16:56:15.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a table of IPA performances by Peter Ladefoged &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: they happen to be in AIFF format, but you can presumably work around that. Note however that only the vowels are produced with &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the letter in question, and in the case of consonants you have a choice of &quot;pa&quot; or &quot;apa&quot;, but not just &quot;p&quot;. This is mainly because there's virtually nothing recordable with isolated stops, and formant transitions to a vowel are essential to identifying a consonant. The clearest case of the problem with trying to glue together isolated segments would be the attempt to glue together &quot;tip&quot; from the components &quot;t&quot;, &quot;ɪ&quot; and &quot;p&quot;. You can get a steady-state recording of &quot;ɪ&quot; (the snippet of &quot;ɪ&quot; on that page is 458 msc. long, which is abnormally long for speech). But &quot;t&quot; and &quot;p&quot; simply involve closing the lips or raising the tongue, and there is no actual sound during their production, so all you have is silence (the ability to discern &quot;p&quot; versus &quot;t&quot; comes from the formant transition effect that these articulations have on adjacent sonorants). This, &quot;tick, tip, tit, pit, kit...&quot; would all sound the same using this technique, namely [ɪ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you limit yourself to word without stops, you could piece together &quot;s&quot;, &quot;æ&quot; and &quot;ʃ&quot; with steady-state recordings of those segments. If you do this, you also have to decide about the margins: do you leave an acoustic gap between &quot;s&quot; and &quot;æ&quot;, or do you trim the samples so that you pick just the center of a performance? A no-tech way to decide this is to articulate the sounds &quot;s&quot; &quot;æ&quot; &quot;ʃ&quot; in rapid succession, and if this is satisfactory, you can go from there. If you aren't happy with that (&quot;doesn't sound natural&quot;) you can trim the segments to eliminate the gaps and also make the durations more realistic, say vowels=100 msc, fricative=200msc. Piecing the parts together, I think you will find the result to be even more unnatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no repository of isolated fricatives out there, so you would have to create it. A simple way to determine if it's worth your time is to either record your own samples or copy the Ladefoged recordings and edit out the surrounding vowel, then paste the parts together. If that does not dissuade you, then you might try extending the set of consonants to include nasals and voiced stops, which you can hyperarticulate (strong voicing, sustained duration) and use as the basis for extracting appropriate centers. I think that the Ladefoged samples of &quot;b&quot;, &quot;m&quot; etc. would provide a decent basis, since the articulations are longer than usual and voicing / nasality is stronger (more controlled).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other impediment is that even if you have a transcription of a language using just IPA letters, the &quot;exact&quot; values employed in the transcription are often rather divergent from the actual sounds of the language. Supposing you had the word &quot;cotton&quot; in an IPA-transcribed database which gives you [katən] – that's one of the possible IPA transcriptions. But in American English it is usually pronounced something like [kʰɑʔn̩]. Unfortunately, all existing (professional) recordings of IPA letters omit the modifier-type letters such as &quot;ʰ&quot; and &quot;̩ &quot;, and you won't be able to find all of the aspirated, ejective, affricated and so on type modifications. And you will probably have to manually edit the transcriptions to apply allophonic details that are typically omitted, or to &quot;correct&quot; somewhat arbitrary choices in letter selection (the vowel of &quot;hot&quot; is not well-matched by either IPA &quot;a&quot; not &quot;ɑ&quot;, so people typically pick one without denying the possibility of the other choice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One fairly simple way to overcome the problem of formant transitions is to use &quot;diphone synthesis&quot;. This roughly involves recording all two-phoneme sequences (from real words), selecting an area around the transition, and then gluing them together, so &quot;sunshine&quot; could be generated from a stock of parts of &quot;sʌ&quot;+&quot;ʌn+&quot;nʃ&quot;+... However, I think all methods of synthesis require a serious dose of programming ability plus knowledge of acoustics. There was a question about IPA and synthesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3301/6726&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, you could slog through &lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=30392&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; on xkcd, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/7146122&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is also on the topic of IPA synthesis. And let us not forget the virtues (and vices) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/de/frantagrabble%20bishmortny&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google synthesis&lt;/a&gt;, where you can play real and non-real words in English (and get credible results as long as it's phonotactically possible in English). &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#fi/de/lappanuoskielamantiella&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is Finnish gibberish, which sounds like Finnish. &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#sw/de/lasimudhonamibi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swahili&lt;/a&gt; gibberish doesn't sound like Swahili; &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#is/su/perkele%20min%C3%A4%20rakkasa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icelandic gibberish&lt;/a&gt; is a bit better but not good. There is no synthesis for quite number of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T22:53:06.980" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T22:53:06.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T07:29:33.633" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;there's a well-known diagram made proposed by Fant (see image, passive perception is ABCDE and passive perception is ABCKFE) but it a quite anatomical and neurological account. (And I'm not even sure what the arrows represent, specifically arrow A!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there generally-accepted alternatives to representing the difference between the two kinds of speech perception?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ONqjY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ONqjY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;passive perception be active perception&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T12:59:56.827" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T12:59:56.827" Title="Distinguishing between active vs passive perception" Tags="&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23065" CreationDate="2017-05-30T07:47:06.757" Score="1" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the question word is the subject of the clause, there is no aux verb, eg 'Who saw you?'. I understand this, but why is 'who did see you?' also correct, with respect to Chomsky's linguistic theory (The Minimalist Program) using x-bar theory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the Doubly filled COMP filter play into this? &#xA;If I've understood correctly, the Doubly filled COMP filter states that the wh-word can only move to the [Spec, CP] if the C is not overt. This makes sense to me in embedded questions, but in direct questions, isn't this a contradiction, as the aux verb moves to the C?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T12:38:56.977" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T12:38:56.977" Title="Why is it that the wh-word as a subject in the spec position cannot raise over an auxiliary verb like 'did'?" Tags="&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;questions&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23064" CreationDate="2017-05-30T09:59:08.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is not the case that &quot;who&quot; cannot raise over &quot;did&quot; in T (or more precisely - over the tense affix), because it does so when moving from Spec-VP to Spec-TP anyway (under the VP-internal subject hypothesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, X-bar theory itself says nothing about the constraints on movement; it simply states how the structure is organized - basically that every head has a bar-projection and then there is a specifier and a complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Doubly-filled COMP filter uses the conception of COMP present in 70-80's, where both wh-words and complementizers like &quot;that&quot; both were of COMP category, that is C. So it does not really apply to cases where there is a wh-word in Spec/CP and &quot;did&quot; in C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to the main question - why?&#xA;Radford in his 2006 textbook &quot;Minimalist Syntax Revisited&quot; suggests that wh-words are attracted by an edge feature [EF] to Spec/CP and tense affix T is attracted to C by a tense feature [TNS], both of features are part of C.  He then refers to Pesetsky &amp;amp; Torrego's analysis where wh-subjects can bring [TNS] with them when moving from Spec/TP (unlike wh-objects which never pass that position) and thus satisfy both [EF] and [TNS] of C in Spec/CP. Another option is that wh-subjects never really possess [TNS] and that [TNS] in C simply &quot;needs&quot; to attract something from T or its projections. In wh-object questions [TNS] can only attract whatever is in T and not the subject that is in Spec/TP because Spec position of C is already occupied by the wh-object. In wh-subjects cases, though, both [EF] and [TNS] would be satisfied by just moving a subject to Spec/CP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any other analysis of this and honestly I would be very unsatisfied by the one above since it posits the [TNS] feature which has no justification and is mostly unneeded in the analysis of wh-movement in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T09:59:08.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T19:42:44.107" Score="2" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on an introductory guide to X-bar Theory for a group of students, and was wondering whether to classify a specific part as a Determiner Phrase or an Adverb Phrase. I have included the sentence in my post. The sentence in question is the interrogative sentence 'Where are my beans?'.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://imgur.com/aIA29Tx.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;#39;Where are my beans?&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source material I am using (from years ago) puts the 'where' in a Determiner Phrase, which is kind of odd, since 'where' is supposed to be a relative adverb. I guess the source material uses a DP because a lot of wh-questions use a relative pronoun instead... or am I missing something here? Can anyone enlighten me on why the source material would possible classify 'where' as a DP in X-bar, rather than an Adverb Phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17199" LastEditorUserId="17199" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T17:51:58.123" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T17:51:58.123" Title="X-bar: Put 'Where' in a Determiner Phrase or in an Adverb Phrase?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23067" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T21:59:11.003" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am curious if there is a written English corpus that offers word frequency lists for the elementary stage vocabulary, i.e. K-5 grades? Something like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sightwords.com/sight-words/fry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Edward Fry's &lt;em&gt;sight&lt;/em&gt; words&lt;/a&gt;, which is updated in 1980s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordfrequency.info/top5000.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; and it has an up to date list, in 2010 I guess, of the most common general vocabulary. However, it does not offer a specialized list for the elementary stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3050" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T21:59:11.003" Title="Vocabulary Wordlist for the elementary school English" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T14:21:41.967" Score="3" ViewCount="2399" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to really be a very minor difference between analytic and isolating languages. A lot of the time I just don't see isolating used at all but analytic used instead. Generally I also see Mandarin Chinese referred to as analytic, but once I saw it called isolating. What's the difference? Are they just synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17205" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T15:36:05.490" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T19:23:47.977" Title="The difference between isolating and analytic languages?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23069" CreationDate="2017-05-31T15:35:12.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sapir (1921) is the more commonly cited source about this issue, and he sets up two typologies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Analytic/Synthetic/Polysynthetic: These refer to the degree to which different parts of a sentence are fused together to form single words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Isolating/Affixal(Agglutinative+Fusional)/Symbolic: These refer to the &lt;strong&gt;techniques&lt;/strong&gt; used for encoding grammatical information. From Sapir:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those languages that always identify the word with the radical element would be set off as an “&lt;strong&gt;isolating&lt;/strong&gt;” group against such as either affix modifying elements (&lt;strong&gt;affixing&lt;/strong&gt; languages) or possess the power to change the significance of the radical element by internal changes (reduplication; vocalic and consonantal change; changes in quantity, stress, and pitch). The latter type might be not inaptly termed “&lt;strong&gt;symbolic&lt;/strong&gt;” languages. ... We may designate the two types of affixing as “&lt;strong&gt;fusing&lt;/strong&gt;” and “juxtaposing.” The juxtaposing technique we may call an “&lt;strong&gt;agglutinative&lt;/strong&gt;” one, if we like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So French is considered an analytic language because various parts of the sentences are cut up into words, but it is also considered a fusional language (not an isolating language!) because we use fusional affixes (e.g. ils chant-ent, 3pl sing-3spl) to express information. Mandarin is both isolating and analytic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that in recent years, there is less focus on putting languages into (somewhat arbitrary) macro categories like these, and instead there is more interest in looking at the typology of particular constructions, so one hears quite frequently about the analyticity and syntheticity of particular constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T19:23:47.977" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T19:23:47.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23076" CreationDate="2017-06-01T00:36:59.753" Score="4" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first two syllables on many biblical Hebrew names with the initial theophoric element יְהוֹ &lt;em&gt;yeho&lt;/em&gt; were abbreviated to יוֹ &lt;em&gt;yo&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmp2G.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmp2G.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,  &lt;em&gt;Yehochanan&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;Yochanan&lt;/em&gt;. I was curious what the linguistic term was for such a syllabific abbreviation if it was primarily due to the /eh/ simply dropping out of /yeho/ because of the preference for saying /yo/ instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1920" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T02:51:40.613" Title="Term to describe change from /yeho/ to /yo/ in biblical Hebrew names" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6734" CreationDate="2017-06-01T01:33:02.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The place to look is Herodotus. The only unaugmented, contracted imperfects forms I see there are ἑσσοῦντο, ἑσσοῦτο 'defeat'; Herodotus did not contract normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T03:40:46.280" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T03:40:46.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23074" CreationDate="2017-06-01T02:51:40.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elision&lt;/a&gt;, the loss of sounds, usually &lt;em&gt;unstressed&lt;/em&gt; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change#Terms_for_changes_in_pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms for changes in pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grimm's law&lt;/a&gt;, a set of statements that discuss the &lt;em&gt;systematic&lt;/em&gt; nature of sound changes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, this very example of elision had mostly religious (not linguistic) reason, so the change may be irregular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T02:51:40.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T04:33:13.477" Score="3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German word Rahmen, which means frame (something you can put a picture in), looks like it could be cognate with frame if one could explain the initial f in English (or its loss in German). Is there something to this hypothesis or are they just false cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T09:55:33.313" Title="Are German Rahmen and English frame cognates, and if so, where does the f come from/how did it get lost?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23077" CreationDate="2017-06-01T05:44:44.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although they sound similar, these words are not related. Rahmen ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;code&gt;*rem(w)-&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;a support, a base&quot;). And frame ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European &lt;code&gt;*promo-&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;front or forward&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T05:44:44.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T06:34:32.393" Score="1" ViewCount="944" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble attaching the 'proud' to the 'am'. 'Am' is a verb and 'proud' is an adjective for the noun 'I', so should come as an adjunct for 'I', but here it would have to somehow come from the verb? After that, attaching the preposition 'of' and 'my students' is fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T22:46:56.370" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T18:22:40.077" Title="What is the x-bar tree of 'I am proud of my students'? (having trouble with proud)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23077" CreationDate="2017-06-01T09:55:33.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is in fact hotly debated. Some reputable scholars maintain that English “frame” is a borrowing from Old French, which had it from a Germanic form like *hraman, with hr &gt; fr. In this case “frame” and “Rahmen” are cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the “Etymologie” section here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/Rahmen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dwds.de/wb/Rahmen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T09:55:33.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22949" CreationDate="2017-06-01T12:44:13.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hickey (2010:7) has a clear definition of internal and external changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Internal change is that which occurs within a speech community, generally among monolingual speakers, and external change is that which is induced by contact with speakers of another language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in your description, both the terms 'internal' and 'external' should be used for what you call 'linguistic things'. The difference between the two is that internal change is a change that could occur in a monolingual environment even if there were no contact with other languages at all (e.g. reanalysis of two adjacent morphemes into a single morpheme), whereas external change is change that has been triggered by contact with another language (Thomason 2010:34 later in the same volume discusses conditions that need to be met for a change to count as language contact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a series of studies in different types of change, take a look at: &quot;Language change: the interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors&quot;. Johanson (2002:306) of that volume gives examples of extra-linguistic factors as &quot;dominance relations in terms of social, political and/or economic strength.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these definitions, 'social attitudes and factors' would fall more under 'extra-linguistic change'. It could still be 'external change', e.g. if change was caused by contact through two varieties used in different communities (i.e. still related to social attitudes, but as a result of two different language systems being used and a feature from one spreading into the other), but would be 'extra-linguistic change' if social attitude was the driving factor in change, e.g. a word being stigmatised and falling out of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hickey, R. (2010). Language Contact: Reconsideration and Reassessment. In Hickey, R. 'The Handbook of Language Contact'. Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 1-28.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomason, S.. (2010). Contact Explanations in Linguistics. In Hickey, R. 'The Handbook of Language Contact'. Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 31-47.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johanson (2002). Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In Jones, M. 'Language Contact'. De Gruyter: Berlin, pp. 285-314.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17103" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T12:44:13.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T16:56:35.680" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to parse a piece of text (Spanish if possible, otherwise English) and point each word in the text to its correct entry in a dictionary. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I turned her down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would point to the most common definitions of &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;her&lt;/code&gt; while pointing &quot;turned down&quot; to the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to refuse or reject (a person, request, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently using the Stanford Nlp Pipeline via python, while the sentences I am using are coming from &lt;a href=&quot;https://tatoeba.org/eng/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tatoeba.org/eng/&lt;/a&gt;. I am interested in any solutions which might help me to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ultimate aim is to estimate if a sentence contains only words which employ very common meanings. For example in the case of the sentence &quot;I turned her down&quot;, all the words are very common but the specific meaning &quot;to refuse or reject (a person, request, etc.)&quot; is not at all common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to clarify things further. If we take these three sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ran to the shop. &#xA;  I ran out of batteries. &#xA;  Please run that by me again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that only very common words are used, however the first sentence is also using the most common meanings associated with these words while the second two contain phrasal verbs. &quot;run out&quot; is somewhat common but &quot;run by&quot; is less so. I would like to be able to associate a higher score with the first sentence, with the last sentence getting the lowest score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the nlp data I extract for the last sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{  &#xA;  'index':2,&#xA;  'basicDependencies':[  &#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ROOT',&#xA;        'governor':0,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'ROOT',&#xA;        'dependent':1,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'Please'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ccomp',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':2,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'run'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'dobj',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':3,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'that'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'case',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':4,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'by'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'nmod',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':5,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'me'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'advmod',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':6,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'again'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'punct',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':7,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'.'&#xA;     }&#xA;  ],&#xA;  'enhancedDependencies':[  &#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ROOT',&#xA;        'governor':0,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'ROOT',&#xA;        'dependent':1,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'Please'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ccomp',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':2,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'run'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'dobj',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':3,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'that'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'case',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':4,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'by'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'nmod:by',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':5,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'me'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'advmod',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':6,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'again'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'punct',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':7,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'.'&#xA;     }&#xA;  ],&#xA;  'enhancedPlusPlusDependencies':[  &#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ROOT',&#xA;        'governor':0,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'ROOT',&#xA;        'dependent':1,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'Please'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'ccomp',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':2,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'run'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'dobj',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':3,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'that'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'case',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':4,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'by'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'nmod:by',&#xA;        'governor':2,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'run',&#xA;        'dependent':5,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'me'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'advmod',&#xA;        'governor':5,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'me',&#xA;        'dependent':6,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'again'&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'dep':'punct',&#xA;        'governor':1,&#xA;        'governorGloss':'Please',&#xA;        'dependent':7,&#xA;        'dependentGloss':'.'&#xA;     }&#xA;  ],&#xA;  'tokens':[  &#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':1,&#xA;        'word':'Please',&#xA;        'originalText':'Please',&#xA;        'lemma':'please',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':43,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':49,&#xA;        'pos':'VB',&#xA;        'before':'\n',&#xA;        'after':' '&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':2,&#xA;        'word':'run',&#xA;        'originalText':'run',&#xA;        'lemma':'run',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':50,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':53,&#xA;        'pos':'VB',&#xA;        'before':' ',&#xA;        'after':' '&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':3,&#xA;        'word':'that',&#xA;        'originalText':'that',&#xA;        'lemma':'that',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':54,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':58,&#xA;        'pos':'DT',&#xA;        'before':' ',&#xA;        'after':' '&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':4,&#xA;        'word':'by',&#xA;        'originalText':'by',&#xA;        'lemma':'by',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':59,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':61,&#xA;        'pos':'IN',&#xA;        'before':' ',&#xA;        'after':' '&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':5,&#xA;        'word':'me',&#xA;        'originalText':'me',&#xA;        'lemma':'I',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':62,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':64,&#xA;        'pos':'PRP',&#xA;        'before':' ',&#xA;        'after':' '&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':6,&#xA;        'word':'again',&#xA;        'originalText':'again',&#xA;        'lemma':'again',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':65,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':70,&#xA;        'pos':'RB',&#xA;        'before':' ',&#xA;        'after':''&#xA;     },&#xA;     {  &#xA;        'index':7,&#xA;        'word':'.',&#xA;        'originalText':'.',&#xA;        'lemma':'.',&#xA;        'characterOffsetBegin':70,&#xA;        'characterOffsetEnd':71,&#xA;        'pos':'.',&#xA;        'before':'',&#xA;        'after':'\n'&#xA;     }&#xA;  ]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="12878" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T21:34:48.320" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T21:34:48.320" Title="Pointing words in a sentence to their specific dictionary defininition" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T01:32:26.950" Score="0" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do linguists study silence, listening, and/or body language as types of communication? Also, do they study miscommunication in general? If so, what type of sub fields of linguistics would these topics be under? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17202" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T01:32:26.950" Title="Silence, Listening, Body Language, Miscommunication" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2017-06-02T07:11:48.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is just an addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19842/9739&quot;&gt;Greg Lee&lt;/a&gt;'s answer here. John Chadwick popularized how Michael Ventris and he deciphered Linear B, but the first &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; steps to the decipherment were made by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kober&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice Kober&lt;/a&gt;, an American classicist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was the one that classified the little characters that were found in the tablets and she first proved that the language was inflected, a truly important feature of a language and a decisive clue for the investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if you can find it online (the links are mostly paywalled) but her paper &lt;strong&gt;Evidence of Inflection in the Chariot Tablets from Knossos&lt;/strong&gt; is, to my mind, something very close to what someone does when one finds an unknown script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that Arthur Evans, who unearthed the tablets, never did at least with this kind of scientifically solid method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9739" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T07:11:48.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23086" CreationDate="2017-06-02T07:33:01.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tasks you are attempting at are two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lemmatisation&lt;/strong&gt; (this maps &quot;turned&quot; to the lemma &quot;to turn&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Word sense disambiguation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first task is pretty standard (at least for well-resourced languages like English and probably Spanish, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second task is an area of active and on-going research, but knowing the term will help you to dig out references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T07:33:01.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18943" CreationDate="2017-06-02T07:57:38.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Turkic languages make usually a conversation without using the first person narrative, however they do have the first person. It's an agglunative language where they use suffixes to express themselves. Most of the time they speak in first person without ever using the &quot;I&quot; in the sentences. If they want to emphasize themselves in a conversation then the first person &quot;I&quot; will be used but then again only when they want to distinct themselves in a conversation &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17224" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T07:57:38.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23093" CreationDate="2017-06-02T10:57:50.250" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at this example:&#xA;For the butler to attack the robber would be surprising. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the butler and the robber are assigned accusative Case. Is 'For' assigning case to the butler and 'to attack' assigning Case to the robber? Doesn't there need to be a subject in the clause, so something with nominative case? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in saying 'to attack' does not assign nominative Case to anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentences such as:&#xA;'That the butler attacked the robber is surprising.'&#xA;I understand the Case assigning, attacked assigns nom. to the butler and acc. to the robber. As soon as an infinitval clause gets involved, I find myself getting very confused. Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T11:08:09.227" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T15:23:26.533" Title="How do you assign Case to sentences with an infinitval clause?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23092" CreationDate="2017-06-02T15:16:16.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though BillJ is right in saying that full NPs have no case in English, I think your question would become valid if we replace the full NPs with personal pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For me to attack him would be surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;-complement clause, it is necessary to look into a bit of history. &lt;em&gt;For&lt;/em&gt; was not originally a complementiser in English. Sentences like (1a) originally arose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) a. It is [AP healthy [PP for him]] [VP to exercise regularly].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because 'him' and the subject of 'exercise' co-refer, sentences like (1a) were naturally reanalysed as something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) b. It is healthy [S' for [S him to exercise regularly]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and thus, since [&lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; + NP + &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;-infinitve VP] is now a nominal constituent, we can have sentences like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) c. [S' For him to exercise regularly] would be healthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accusative form &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; thus reflects its earlier status as the complement of the preposition &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is not what you're looking for - your tags suggest you are looking for a theoretical treatment within a Chomskyan framework - but I think we don't really need to look for a synchronic explanation when a good diachronic one exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harris, A. C., &amp;amp; Campbell, L. (1995). &lt;em&gt;Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 74). Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T15:23:26.533" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T15:23:26.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T16:14:38.297" Score="2" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;It follows from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sumerian/Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this course of Sumerian grammar and basic syntax&lt;/a&gt;, that the forms of copula (though I prefer to call it '&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a predicate-indicating final verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;') for the 1st and 2nd singular were identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions shall be; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) does Sumerian show any cases of Evidentiality (like e. g. Tibetan, where a question verb addressed to a secong singular person has the 1-st person singular form for a polite evidential form)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) What are the meanings of i. and .men?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T16:14:38.297" Title="Similarity of I am / you are in Sumerian" Tags="&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;tibetan&gt;&lt;sumerian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23080" CreationDate="2017-06-02T22:35:54.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I am not a specialist in Syntax)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the X-bar Theory, Adjectives, as any other lexical category, undergo three different levels of projection. They can have Complements (which are sisters to the head), Specifiers (or Subjects, i.e. sisters to Adj′) and Adjuncts (sisters to AdjP). Semantically speaking, the complement of an adjective is usually a Prepositional Phrase that is necessarily required for completing the meaning of the adjective. Thus, if you say &lt;strong&gt;proud&lt;/strong&gt;, you have to mention the reason of the pride, which constitutes the complement of this adjective. Syntactically, &lt;em&gt;proud of my students&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent made of an adjectival head and a prepositional complement selected by the head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gfgza.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gfgza.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the internal structure of the PP the usual analysis applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T22:35:54.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18848" CreationDate="2017-06-03T09:54:16.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is fairly possible to make an account of the anaphoric words as deictic (or indexical; I consider &lt;strong&gt;deixis&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;indicality&lt;/strong&gt; plainly synonymous). I personally share this approach. In my formulation (published &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fupress.com/Archivio/pdf/2975.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in Italian; summed up &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keidan.it/resources/Home/Keidan_LCM6_slides.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in English), being deictic, for a word, means that the context disambiguates it deterministically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such words as &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;table&lt;/em&gt; etc. are not deictic since they might denote whatever real object the speaker decides to denote thereby. This means that the hearer has also the &quot;right&quot; to misunderstand, or not to know, what the speaker is speaking about. There is always a bit of ambiguity in such words (what horse/dog/table was effectively intended?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when we use such words as &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; etc. we don't admit any ambiguity. The hearer &lt;strong&gt;does not have the right&lt;/strong&gt; not to know who is meant by an utterance of the word &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; (and other deictics). That is, the rules of language do not let us ignore the meaning and the reference of the deictic words, which are, therefore, completely unambiguous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are they unambiguous? Because they rely on the elements of the communication circuite which the speakers cannot avoid knowing. In other words, when we are engaged in a conversation, we &lt;strong&gt;have to&lt;/strong&gt; know &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; is speaking, &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; does the conversation occur, and &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; was said so far (plus some other elements that I don't mention here). All the language apparently have means of referring to such obligatorily known elements. Pronouns denote the speakers, the so-called &quot;shifters&quot; denote space and time, and anaphoric words denote the bulk of information communicated in the preceding &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/linguistic-semantics/text-and-discourse-context-and-cotext/B09D2C741DC9F143FF49CD45788F119A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;co-text&lt;/a&gt; and considered already disambiguated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, if we explain deixis as a reference to an obligatory element of the communication circuit, then anaphors are plainly deictic since they refer to something that has been said in the previous utterances, and the speakers are supposed to have assimilated, if they want to continue speaking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, when you say &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you mean &quot;at the times has been mentioned right now, and you cannot avoid remembering&quot;. The reference of this adverb is rigid, not unlike the reference of the word &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, whoever utters it in a discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar approach is to be found also in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://philpapers.org/rec/RECDAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper by Fr. Recanati&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T09:59:47.650" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T09:59:47.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T00:05:58.620" Score="1" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been asked to list the historical change from one language to another, using a list comparing words between the languages. I need to order the rules in chronological order, and knowledge of syllable boundaries is important to solving the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have advice or recommended resources? I'm struggling with this.&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17230" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T18:42:39.197" Title="Listing the historical change between two languages (phonology)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T01:52:21.477" Score="0" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope you can help as I'm teaching English overseas and I want to teach the standard pronunciation to students. I have a South African accent but I am starting to get paranoid and wonder if I pronounce things wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &#xA;The phonetic spelling for &quot;golf&quot; is /ɡɒlf/ or  /ɡɑːlf. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say golf, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no contact&lt;/strong&gt; between my tongue and the roof of my mouth or my teeth. My tongue actually stays at the bottom of my mouth when making the l sound.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to know, when I pronounce &quot;golf&quot;, am I making the /l/ sound or is it more like a vowel sound. Please can you give me a phonetic transcription of how I say it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &lt;strong&gt;contact&lt;/strong&gt; needed to produce a /l/ - or am I still producing an /l/ sound? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastEditorUserId="14426" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T12:53:09.367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T12:53:09.367" Title="Some questions on how I pronounce &quot;l&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-07-11T15:55:50.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23098" CreationDate="2017-06-04T04:19:16.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I haven't any measurements of the articulation, my impression of my own American pronunciation of &quot;golf&quot; and &quot;also&quot; is that the &quot;l&quot; part is a uvular glide.  That is, there is no real &quot;l&quot; there at all (as in your speech), but shortly before the onset of the &quot;f&quot; or &quot;s&quot;, the articulation of the preceding vowel is modified by bringing the back of the tongue closer to the uvula.  In your speech, I hear no such glide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that, phonologically, a syllable offset &quot;l&quot; has been uvularized, as syllable offset &quot;l&quot; is in other words, and vocalized (meaning all tongue contact is lost) before a voiceless fricative, leaving behind only the uvularization gesture in my speech, but leaving nothing at all in your speech (except perhaps some compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T04:19:16.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23098" CreationDate="2017-06-04T05:23:29.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way to determine the exact nature of your &quot;l&quot; is with a broader corpus of recordings plus some actual physiological data. L is subject to various degrees of backing and vocalization not only in English but many other languages. In my dialect of American English, /l/ is retracted, but still lingually articulated, when preceded by a back vowel in the same syllable (however: /l/ is completely deletes after /ɑ/ in certain clusters, e.g. &lt;em&gt;wa(l)k, pa(l)m&lt;/em&gt; where some people retain &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;). In some dialects, this backing also applies in &lt;em&gt;milk, help, fill&lt;/em&gt;. It resembles [w] to the point that you might well transcribe &lt;em&gt;milk&lt;/em&gt; as [mɪwk]. It is thus possible that in your dialect, &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; has simply become &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; in some coda context. The question then is whether &quot;code&quot; and &quot;cold&quot; are pronounced the same or different for you. You also want to look at &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; intervocalically, as in &quot;folly, allow&quot;, because stress affects syllabification which may affect how &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is realized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no right or wrong in terms of pronunciation, just confusing or not, from a TESOL student's perspective. There is no one standard, rather there are many standards, for example US standard, RP for British Standard, Kenyan Standard, etc. If you're aiming for RP, sorry, you missed the mark, but it sounds pretty okay for SA standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downward formant transition at the end of the vowel in in your &quot;golf&quot; clearly indicates that there is a w-like element for &quot;l&quot;. In the case of &quot;also&quot;, there is nothing at all. I suspect that the vowel quality is different, and different from &quot;ostrich&quot;, &quot;awesome&quot; or &quot;arse&quot; (if you have the arse/ass distinction). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T14:06:37.607" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T14:06:37.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19429" CreationDate="2017-06-04T12:02:19.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, extensions are… no one knows what exactly they are or whether they really exist. They look like suffixes, because they are encountered at the final position of what one thinks is the Proto-Indo-European root. The problem with them – I mean the extensions (élargissements, Erweiterungen etc.) – is that it is impossible to define their functions or meanings. Some clever blokes try to speculate that they modify slightly the meaning of the root and therefore may be called determinatives. Benvenist went as far as trying to explain them as ordinary suffixes, but this attempt of his failed, like his root theory, too. There is another major problem to that. Some roots, or what linguists believe to be such, are nowhere detected without extensions, like, for instance, *gen-, allegedly meaning ‘to pinch’ – look it up in IEW. This makes us question the correctness of the reconstruction *gen-.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15139" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T12:02:19.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23097" CreationDate="2017-06-04T18:42:39.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is something a bit &quot;off&quot; in the question, so it's not clear what you are looking for. It is conceptually wrong to historically &quot;change&quot; Norwegian into German, but you can meaningfully &lt;em&gt;compare&lt;/em&gt; Norwegian and German (because they both descended from the same earlier language). You can even give correspondence rules between Norwegian and German (although language-to-language comparison tends to be unreliable if the common language was rather far back in the past). If you just want &quot;comparative sets&quot;, I recommend Malcolm Guthrie's &lt;em&gt;Comparative Bantu&lt;/em&gt;, which assembles masses of data and has a keying system that allows you to make language-to-language comparisons. (That works by indexing the data to something that is in fact homologous to a historical reconstruction, though he says it is not one). The first volume is full of methodological hints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way in which you can meaningfully write rules changing one language into another is if the first language actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the historical ancestor of the other, for instance Middle English and Modern English, or Latin and French. In the latter kind of case, in practice we do not rely just on the facts of French, we look at all of the Romance languages, and that is really how we get the chronology right. The reason for that is, more or less, that the language that Romance languages descended from is not (classical) Latin itself, but a later spoken version that differs from Classical Latin in a number of ways. As an exercise, an instructor might give you words of Proto-Salishan and words of Lushootseed, and ask you to write out the rules (sound changes) that get you from the former to the latter – except, we have no records of Proto-Salishan, and are not really sure about all of the details of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we use the comparative method to figure out what the earlier language is and then figure out the steps involved in getting to specific languages. This requires looking at a number of languages to create a third previously unknown language; so you could look at Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, German and English and try to come up with something about earlier languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like what you're looking for is some version of the basic methodology of solving phonology problems, going from underlying to surface forms. There are a number of textbooks out there that do this, though generally they take it to be self-evident how you come up with rules and order them. You might try &lt;em&gt;Introducing phonology&lt;/em&gt; which emphasizes methods, although it requires you to figure out what the initial state is (and justify that belief), so it's really more like doing comparative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T18:42:39.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T22:45:04.110" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;coming here redirected from the history stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lacking a proper literal translation for the word benedict in the language –as in &quot;well spoken (of)–&quot;, I figured the best would be to create it by joining the words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[xn nfr] good {Aa1 N35 Y1 F35}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[mdw] (v.) speak, address (someone){S43 D46 G43 A2} &#xA;(or one of its variations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now however, how should one approach the merging of the words? Can't find much info on the subject.&#xA;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: This is the dictionary I'm using:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.pyramidtextsonline.com/documents/DicksonDictionary.pdf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17235" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T22:45:04.110" Title="Portmanteau in Middle Egyptian" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-06-05T15:33:42.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22849" CreationDate="2017-06-05T17:15:22.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends mainly on what to be considered as a writing systen. If we regard a picrtogram writing system (e.g. similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefullwiki.org/Daba_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daba script&lt;/a&gt;) to be a writing system as well, then the answer to your question is positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A travelog by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ahmad ibn Fadlan&lt;/a&gt; mentions two kinds of writing system used by who later were identified as Komi ancestors called &lt;em&gt;Wisu&lt;/em&gt; (which sounds similar to Balto-Fennic Veps and Russian 'Vesj'). The facts are, however, mentioned not in an academic publication but in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.komi.com/mc/arhiv/new001.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a local newspaper&lt;/a&gt; (in Russian). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, a local amateur researcher (and a gymnasium teacher) mentioned in 1850 that the system of 'pases' was used for writing down daily costs, obligations, loans, etc., including dates, types of articles and names of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other system of writing, that of 'shipases', was supposedly an adoptation of some North-Iranian alphabet, also used in Bulgarian Khaganate at its pre-Islamic days as stated by &lt;a href=&quot;http://foto11.com/komi/docs/bible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another local researcher&lt;/a&gt; in the 19th century (source in Komi and Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The systematic nature is confirmed by the fact that the symbols were used as ornamental details and/or inscriptions by representatives of clans other than those owning the Tamgas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pictographic nature of the system is confirmed by the fact that the symbols had various meanings and interpretations. E.g. the sign X could mean a facet, or crossing beams, or a new ornament (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vyl ser&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), or fire, or sun, or a cross as a symbol opposite for Christianity (&lt;a href=&quot;http://foto11.com/komi/docs/bible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the source&lt;/a&gt; in Russian) plus a clan could use any sign in some private and particular sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T05:57:43.687" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T05:57:43.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T17:28:27.383" Score="9" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went through my entire English and French educations learning nothing about aspect. We only learned about tenses and a little bit about mood. With that K12* vocabulary, we'd call &lt;em&gt;J'avais mangé l'orange&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I had eaten the orange&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;plus-que-parfait&lt;/em&gt; or indicative past perfect &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now giving teaching support at a linguistics and translation school and the instructors insist that my previous teachers were wrong; my colleagues would call &lt;em&gt;J'avais mangé l'orange&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I had eaten the orange&lt;/em&gt; the indicative, past tense, perfect &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;aspect&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I shared that with my social network. The K12 language teachers went on the counterattack and they had plenty of sources online to cite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried googling around for arguments on either side of the debate, but everyone I've found seems to be talking past each other. I can't find any sources that recognize that there is a debate. Is that because the K12 language teachers are truly clueless or are they so right that people don't think it's worth talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing? Is the perfect tense really a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NB1:&lt;/em&gt; My confusion isn't helped by the fact that I'm seeing three terms used that could be relevant to the above example: &quot;perfect tense,&quot; &quot;perfect aspect,&quot; and &quot;perfective aspect.&quot; I can't help but notice that &lt;em&gt;perfective&lt;/em&gt; doesn't exist as a tag on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NB2:&lt;/em&gt; I think my colleagues' main point is that K12 language teachers should teach aspect. There remains a possibility that I'm misunderstanding them and putting words in their mouths. On that note, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/grammar/parts-of-speech-the-verb/verb-aspect-simple-progressive-and-perfect/v/intro-to-aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khan Academy has an aspect lesson&lt;/a&gt; mapped to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/L/5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Core's CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.5&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Examples:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;This link seems consistent with &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how K12 teachers see it&lt;/a&gt;. This link is mostly consistent with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/6clft6/english_tense_aspect_mood_chart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how I think my colleagues see it&lt;/a&gt;. I've more found cite-worth documents which seem consistent with this, but these linguists are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPerfect.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so gunshy&lt;/a&gt; when it comes to prescribing their viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt; I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect#Meaning_of_the_pluperfect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article that refers to a shift in terminology&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect; namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect (state of being completed). It is used to refer to an occurrence that was already in the past (completed) at a past time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;* When I refer to &quot;K12 teachers&quot;, I'm mostly thinking of French and Spanish teachers. But there are probably others.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15607" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2020-02-05T01:05:03.660" LastActivityDate="2020-02-05T01:05:03.660" Title="Is there really a perfect tense?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23106" CreationDate="2017-06-05T20:18:03.790" Score="13" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Tense vs. aspect vs. mood&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's first clarify what the different categories mean in the first place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tense&lt;/strong&gt; is a category that locates events on a timeline. Distinctions between different tenses are often described by means of relations between event time (E), speech point (S) and reference point (R).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For example, when I utter something like &lt;em&gt;I realized that I had forgotten my wallet&lt;/em&gt; and we consider the embedded sentence &lt;em&gt;I had forgotten my wallet&lt;/em&gt;, the speech point is now, the reference point is the moment in the past where I had the realization, and the event time is even further in the past, namely the point where I lost my wallet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspect&lt;/strong&gt; is a category that specifies the view taken on an event: An event can either be viewed from an outside perspective, perceiving the event as a completed whole, or from an inside perspective, perceiving the event from within as something continous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mood&lt;/strong&gt; is something rather different: Roughly, it signals whether, e.g., the event described is a fact, a command, a possibility, a counterfactual proposition, a reported speech, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt; &#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Perfect vs. perfective&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between perfect and non-perfect can be illustrated by a pair of sentences like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)-a &lt;em&gt;The military have taken over leadership&lt;/em&gt; (perfect)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;vs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(1)-b &lt;em&gt;The military took over leadership&lt;/em&gt; (non-perfect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;strong&gt;perfect&lt;/strong&gt; sentence indicates the action is still having an effect on the reference point (the miltary is still in power), this does not follow from the &lt;strong&gt;non-perfect&lt;/strong&gt; sentence (the military took over leadership at some point in the time, but the resulting state might not extend up to today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Velupillai (2012) treats perfect as an instance tense and not of aspect, under the assumption that it is the defining property of the perfect to express than an event is still relevant/having an effect to some later location on a timeline, thereby making the event span between two locations on a timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQED4.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQED4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this account, perfect is be considered a tense, rather than an aspect, because it has the function of locating an event on a timeline - more precisely, locating the event to be spanning the time between the points E and S/R.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Here, S and R coincide - however, this holds only true for the present perfect where the speech time is the same as the reference time (as in &lt;em&gt;They have taken over&lt;/em&gt;); in past perfect (as in &lt;em&gt;They had taken over&lt;/em&gt;), the reference time is before the speech time, and the event would extend only until R, not up to S).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &lt;strong&gt;perfective&lt;/strong&gt; is considered an instance of aspect, indicating that the event is being viewed as a &amp;quot;bounded whole&amp;quot; (from an outside perspective), rather than as an ongoing event from an inside perfective (which would be called &lt;strong&gt;imperfective&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZXe5V.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZXe5V.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Velupillai (2012))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference would be between sentences like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)-a &lt;em&gt;I cooked lunch&lt;/em&gt; (perfective)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;vs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2)-b &lt;em&gt;I was cooking lunch&lt;/em&gt; (imperfective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the perfective sentence, the event is reported from an outside perspective as a bounded event, while in the imperfective sentence, the event is being viewed from an inside perspective as something ongoing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Velupillai makes a sharp distinction between perfect and perfective here, arguing that the former is an instance of tense (because it locates an event on a timeline) while the latter is an instance of aspect (because it describes the view taken on the event). However, she also notes that perfect is often being labelled as an aspect category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The problem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that English (or French) does not actually express aspect independently: The distinction between perfect and non-perfect, and perfecitve vs. non-perfective becomes apparent only in combination with tenses, such as &lt;em&gt;past perfect&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;past perfect progressive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;simple past&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;present progressive&lt;/em&gt;, etc. This makes it hard to actually draw the line between what is an aspect and what a tense, especially given that in school, different &amp;quot;tenses&amp;quot; (which might now be arguably pure tenses or mixtures of tense and aspect) are beingt taught in the shape of the complex conglomerates mentioned above.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Note that, for example, Wikipedia introduces the term &lt;strong&gt;imperfect&lt;/strong&gt; as &amp;quot;a verb form [...] which combines past tense and imperfective aspect&amp;quot;. I think it's pretty much the same issue with the name &amp;quot;past perfect&amp;quot;: It combines a notion of tense with a notion of aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially in as far as the difference between perfective (what we considered a tense above) and imperfective (what we considered an aspect above) in English is concerned, the difference is not immediately obvious: In a situation like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3)-a &lt;em&gt;John has lived in Chicago for five years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;vs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(3)-b &lt;em&gt;John lived in Chicago for five years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that it is both tense and aspect that make the difference in meaning:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In (3)-a, the use of &amp;quot;past perfect&amp;quot; indicates that John's living in Chicago is a still ongoing state of affairs, there while in (3)-b, the use of &amp;quot;simple past&amp;quot; (non-perfect) suggests that the situation described does no longer hold true in the present, which is a tensual concept (supporting the view that perfect is a tense category).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, at the same time, viewing (3)-b as something that describes a terminated event comes with a strongly perfective notion, as opposed to (3)-a, where the event is not really regarded as a bounded whole, which is an aspectual category. (Note how things are twisted: The sentence that doesn't use past prefect tenes is the more perefect&lt;em&gt;ive&lt;/em&gt; one!)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This would lead to the conclusion that the use of perfect does have an aspectual component, and that it is not simply a matter of tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And now what?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this all boils down to is that it might not be wrong to categorize perfect as an instance of tense, by assuming a difference between perfective and imperfective where the latter as a form of aspect and perfect is a device that locates events on a timeline (in the sense that some event is still of relevance to the speech or reference time), in the style that Velupillai treats these two terms.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, what the above discussion also shows is that this distinction is not as straightforward when interpreting how different &amp;quot;tenses&amp;quot; are being used in English (or French or whatever other language), and that complex combinations of tense, aspect and possibly mood are being subsumed under the term &amp;quot;tense&amp;quot; because it reflects how aspect is being used in that language - namely in combination with tense categories, and not as an isolated grammatical function.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And because it is simply easier to explain to students. Telling them they are going to learn a new tense is easier to grasp than starting to introduce terminology that even linguists disagree about. Up to now, I haven't seen a word of command that puts an end to the discussion of perfect vs. non-perfect, perfect vs. perfective, tense vs. aspect once and for all, because such complex abstractions are vague by nature and languages don't always behave exactly in the categories you want them to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Perfect&amp;quot; can be considered a tense if one distinguishes it from &amp;quot;perfective&amp;quot; and considers perfect as soemthing that locates events on a timeline.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Perfect is in reality often, if not usually considered an aspect.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The reason is that the way perfect is being used in English, French etc. is a complex combination of tensual and aspectual concepts, putting into play the notion of perfective vs. imperfective also.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Calling it all tense is simply easier if it's only for the purpose of teaching students and not in the context of detailled linguistic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. &lt;em&gt;An introduction to linguistic typology&lt;/em&gt;. John Benjamins Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T22:18:55.023" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4311" CreationDate="2017-06-06T05:23:42.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Juncture&quot; is an analytic entity constructed to account for problems in phonemicization, which primarily encodes morphological and syntactic information, often involving syllable structure (syllabification tends to be assigned bottom-up as determined by the morphemic distribution of phonemes -- CV always forms a syllable within a morpheme, C+V or C#V does not always). The underlying premise is that surface phones can be mapped to a subset of such sounds, the phonemes, by eliminating all purely &quot;predictable&quot; sounds. But the fact of there being phonetic differences such as &quot;a name&quot; vs &quot;an aim&quot;, or the night-rate / Nye-trait pair, would suggest that English has many more &quot;phonemes&quot; than we want to believe (for example, aspirated and unreleased &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; would be phonemes, because they both occur in the same surface environment). By positing an entity &quot;juncture&quot; which can be positioned just like any other phoneme, aspiration as a contrastive property of phonemes can be eliminated (and there are a lot of other problems that juncture eliminates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem could also be solved by directly referring to morphological or syntactic structure, but at the time (prior to the 60's) this would run afoul of the &quot;single level&quot; theory that prevailed, where phonemic analysis can only consider phonemes, morphophonemic analysis can only consider morphophonemes, morphological analysis can only consider morphemes. There was nothing in the theory that would prevent having &quot;juncture&quot; be the realization of morpheme concatenation, so by translating morphological structure into analogs on the phonemic level, mixing of analytic levels was avoided. This is essentially the driving force behind later (1980's) prosodic theories of the syntax-phonology interface, where rather than letting phonology directly see syntactic structure in determining whether a given rule applies, a phonological analog was constructed (such as &quot;the prosodic word&quot; or &quot;the prosodic phrase&quot;): that way, phonology only refers to phonological things, which are constructed by reference to syntactic things (and similar moves were made for indirectly encoding morphological information). A classic paper using the concept &quot;juncture&quot; is W. Moulton (&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 1947) &quot;Juncture in Modern Standard German&quot;; see also Hockett's 1958 &lt;em&gt;A Course in Modern Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, Lehiste 1960 &lt;em&gt;An Acoustic-Phonetic Study of Internal Open Juncture&lt;/em&gt;, and the not totally unrelated 1956 paper by Chomsky, Halle and Lukoff &quot;On Accent and Juncture in English&quot; (not structuralist, though). Scheer &lt;em&gt;A Guide to Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface Theories&lt;/em&gt; provides a reasonable overview. Juncture too on a second and more obscure interpretation, as a means of indicating facts of intonation, supplanted by current theories of boundary tones and different kinds of accents. Basically, the reason why you can't find web resources is that the concept has fallen into desuetude in linguistics over the past half century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T05:23:42.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2017-06-06T10:00:39.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The major piece of evidence is the mere existence of agglutinating and inflecting languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were only evolutionary processes that make formerly inflecting or agglutinating languages isolating , there would be no inflecting or agglutinating languages (given the time language is around, all languages would have reached the isolating stage and stay there forever. Also, Pidgins and Creoles are typically isolating, so they do not provide a source of inflecting languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is of course theoretically possible that an isolating language becomes directly inflecting without and agglutinating intermediate step, but afaik this transition has not been observed yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, of course, somewhat unsatisfactory to have only a &quot;non-constructive&quot; argument for the typological cycle, seeing all proposed transitions in action (and not seeing the transitions the other way round) would be more satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T13:33:06.957" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T13:33:06.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T12:05:45.700" Score="3" ViewCount="1823" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to transcribe text into X-Sampa, but I am an IPA transcriber, so for simplicity purposes I will transcribe in IPA and will then try to convert into X-Sampa. Is there any tool that would automate this process for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be free, I can pay. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17246" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T12:18:54.380" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T02:35:31.607" Title="Is there a tool for conversion of IPA into X-Sampa?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;sampa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T21:50:58.893" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not clear on an aspect of linguistic terminology. I have a programming background, so maybe my conception of this is too hard-edged, but here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some grammatical categories into which we can classify lexemes, namely Verbs, Nouns, Adverbs, etc. We call each of those categories a part of speech. So there's a super-category named Parts of Speech. In many languages, verbs are further divided into conjugations, and nouns into declensions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether there's a standard term referring to such subdivisions of the parts of speech. That is, a term meaning &quot;conjugation or declension&quot; that's analogous to &quot;part of speech&quot;, meaning &quot;verb, noun, or whatever&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would use the term &quot;category&quot;, but it's already used to refer to things like Tense, Aspect, Number, Gender, and so forth, which seem to me to be orthogonal to what I'm talking about. That is for instance, in a given language, verbs may inflect for TAMV, person, and number, with each conjugation doing it differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17250" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T22:21:40.893" Title="Common linguistic term for conjugations, declensions" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23113" CreationDate="2017-06-06T22:21:40.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are generally termed &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflections&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T22:21:40.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T03:53:51.027" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was adopted from China when I was 10 months old. I have lived in the US since then and English is the only language I am fluent in. Would my native language and first language be English? What is my mother language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if possible, I would like a simple explanation of first language, native language, and mother tongue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17252" LastEditorUserId="17252" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T04:04:04.083" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T04:04:04.083" Title="What is my native language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-06-07T08:30:09.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T09:58:42.447" Score="-2" ViewCount="863" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my grammar, 'Uber today announced a new invention' sounds fine but 'Uber yesterday announced a new invention' is marked if not ungrammatical. Any literature on this/explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastEditorUserId="8113" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T12:47:30.587" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:49:27.080" Title="'today announced' vs. '*yesterday announced'" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23122" CreationDate="2017-06-07T12:56:47.997" Score="1" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IxWxg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IxWxg.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Bengali alphabet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;dot&lt;/em&gt; diacritic works for [dzo] to [jo] , for [do] to [ro] and for [dho] to [rho]. But /ba/ and /ra/ are completely unrelated sounds, so what is the dot doing to /ba/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T02:37:00.097" Title="What is the function of the *dot* diacritic, when it converts /ba/ to /ra/ (if it can be called so) in Bengali?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23328" CreationDate="2017-06-07T13:53:23.890" Score="2" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following Chomsky's linguistic theory (The Minimalist Program), r-expressions must be free, where free means that nothing should c-command it such that the indices have a non null intersection (if I have understood correctly). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence 'His boss criticised John' where his and John are coreferenced, is John free or not? He does not c-command John, but the possesive does. So what exactly is coreferenced in this tree with John, he or (pos).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I hope the tree is correct! If the DP His Boss was actually an NP with head boss, I think the problem would be solved?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ckko.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ckko.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;This is what I think the x-bar tree for &amp;#39;His boss criticised John&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T10:43:56.753" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T22:57:36.477" Title="How do you coreference a possesive pronouns with an x-bar tree?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T18:50:28.660" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, one can use the verb слышать ([ˈslɨʂətʲ], &quot;hear&quot;) with both sounds and smells, though it's more common to use чувствовать ([ˈt͡ɕustvəvətʲ], &quot;feel&quot;) for smells. Example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%BB%D1%8B%D1%88%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Я &lt;strong&gt;слы́шу&lt;/strong&gt; како́й-то стра́нный за́пах.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ja &lt;strong&gt;slýšu&lt;/strong&gt; kakój-to stránnyj zápax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I smell something strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, you can describe a smell as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/loud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loud&lt;/a&gt; (definition #7), but to my knowledge you can't say you &quot;smelled a sound&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is the correlation between smells and hearing cross-linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4943" LastEditorUserId="4943" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T19:23:09.383" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T19:23:09.383" Title="Languages where smells are heard" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23118" CreationDate="2017-06-07T21:05:00.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That “dot” symbol is called BENGALI SIGN NUKTA (U+09BC) in Unicode, and is used “for extending the alphabet to new letters”. Other Indic scripts also have nukta signs for the same purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following are examples of its use. The last three are precomposed characters in Unicode. I'm using Unicode names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Base Letter  With Nukta&#xA;  ক   KA       ক়   QA&#xA;  ফ   PHA      ফ়   FA&#xA;  গ   GA       গ়   GHA&#xA;  জ   JA       জ়   ZA&#xA;  ভ   BHA      ভ়   VA&#xA;  ড   DDA      ড়   RRA&#xA;  ঢ   DDHA     ঢ়   RHA&#xA;  য   YA       য়   YYA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, র BENGALI LETTER RA doesn't appear in Unicode as precomposed with NUKTA, as RRA, RHA and YYA are. It could be that RA and ব BENGALI LETTER BA are independent letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geocities.ws/languageranger/bnscriptevol.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This table shows the evolution of the Bengali script since the 11th century&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastEditorUserId="16950" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T02:37:00.097" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T02:37:00.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23134" CreationDate="2017-06-07T23:11:40.683" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that in context of French grammar (at least in traditional grammar) talking about stative and dynamic verbs is not relevant.&#xA;because there is no real progressive aspect in french and there is a tense like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperfect#French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;imperfect&lt;/a&gt; which we can use it for permanent &#xA;or progressive situations for both stative and dynamic verbs. so syntactically it is not necessary to talk about stative and dynamic verbs in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so syntax and morphology of French is not much sensetive to stative and dynamic verbs. and traditional grammar is actually syntax and morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not expert in French grammar. Do you know any cases in French grammar which for explanation of syntactical or morphological behaviors something was said about the concept of stative and dynamic verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T03:14:30.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T13:28:32.210" Title="Is there any case which we need to care about stative verbs in French grammar?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23112" CreationDate="2017-06-08T02:35:31.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.lgm.cl/xsampa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://tools.lgm.cl/xsampa.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool allows for two-way conversion between IPA and X-SAMPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T02:35:31.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T15:56:13.420" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;em&gt;Elizabeth Alexandra Mary&lt;/em&gt;, the unique title &lt;em&gt;The Queen of England&lt;/em&gt;, and the definite description &lt;em&gt;the elder daughter of Cecilia Bowes Lyon&lt;/em&gt; all refer to the same unique entity. We might think of them as species of one kind of thing, as they have at least one feature in common: they refer (designate a single entity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are all nominals. However, nominals includes words that don't (at least not obviously) designate a single entity. For example, the word &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence &lt;em&gt;running is good for you&lt;/em&gt;. Is there a hypernym (general term) that designates all, and only, linguistic entities that refer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:29:36.997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:29:36.997" Title="What is the hypernym of names, unique titles, and definite descriptions?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2017-06-08T22:37:21.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is not alone in that. The languages of mainland Scandinavia also lost the case system. And so did the western Romance languages, which did not lose the full vowels in the endings. Also German shared stress on the first sylllable, so it is an unlikely root cause. Among the Romance languages the easternmost representative, Romanian, kept the case system.&#xA;That suggests that the answer is that loss of case is just an areal feature of Western Europe and Germany is located in Eastern Europe for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17269" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T22:37:21.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23126" CreationDate="2017-06-08T23:08:06.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for is probably the &lt;strong&gt;singular term&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. a term that inherently refers to an &lt;em&gt;object&lt;/em&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_term&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. On the other hand, following Frege, we have &lt;strong&gt;predicates&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;functions&lt;/strong&gt;) denoting &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;propositions&lt;/strong&gt; that refer to &lt;em&gt;truth-values&lt;/em&gt; (which are thought as two really existing object: the Truth and the False).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Frege's intention was to describe the formal language of science, where all terms are, effectively, singular and where there are no humans involved, just numbers. This is why he was able to use the German word &lt;em&gt;Eigenname&lt;/em&gt; ‘proper name’ as a synonym for what we call singular term nowadays. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T23:08:06.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2017-06-09T01:50:05.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say that in this piece of fiction, the writer is the first and only person to have written down his language. So, any text in the language that your character encounters, was written by this one author. It's pretty likely it would be very logical because there wouldn't be any mutations.&#xA;You can invent a few plausible ways for the archeologist to get a rough understanding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the author wrote a direct translation or grammar (the writing system is his creation after all) in another language your character knows&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a different author wrote a commentary on/reply to the text in a known language&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the same author wrote different texts in both languages but has a sufficently repetitive/idiosyncratic style &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the author's writing system is an adaptation of another writing system and talks about some very well known event/thing eg DahNuld TReump xxx DeeRektor Kaumie&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purpose of fiction, why can't it be that your character made a lucky leap and is proven correct on testing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14672" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T01:50:05.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6859" CreationDate="2017-06-09T07:10:26.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;German just continues the ancestral state. It shares that with the Scandinavian languages.There is little to explain there.&#xA;German has a competing system with adverbs like &quot;gerade&quot;, &quot;weiter&quot;  and &quot;los&quot;, which allow you to express such things but are facultative. Hence there is no pressing need for speakers to develop more means of expressing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17269" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T07:10:26.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23132" CreationDate="2017-06-09T08:08:07.997" Score="4" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browsing the Wiktionary randomly, I bumped into this PIE word, &lt;em&gt;*h₁l̥h₁onbʰos&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;deer&quot;. Interestingly enough, it evolved into words for &quot;deer&quot; or similar in several languages, but in PG it gave rise to &lt;em&gt;*lambaz&lt;/em&gt;, the ancestor of many Germanic-language words for &quot;lamb&quot; (&quot;lamb&quot; included). Even more curiously, the etymologically related synonym &lt;em&gt;*h₁elh₁en&lt;/em&gt; produced two synonyms for &quot;elk&quot;, &lt;em&gt;*algiz&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*elhaz&lt;/em&gt;. That is, at least, what I gathered from the Wiktionary. How did this come about How did &quot;elk&quot;/&quot;deer&quot; shift to &quot;lamb&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T20:01:45.063" Title="How did *h₁l̥h₁onbʰos shift from &quot;deer&quot; to &quot;lamb&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23131" CreationDate="2017-06-09T11:02:19.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We do not have any texts in Proto-Indo-European, so we do not really know what any PIE words meant. We can only deduce this by examining the meanings in the daughter languages. In this case descendants of *el-en- (the proposed laryngeals do not really help us any further) mean “deer” in Armenian, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic, Tocharian, while the suffixed form *el-en-bʰo- gives the word for “deer” in Greek (elaphos, with full grade in the first syllable and zero grade in the second), but “lamb” in Germanic (*lambaz, with zero grade in the first syllable and full grade in the second). It has been suggested that these all go back to an IE root *el- “brown”, in which case the original meaning could have been “brownish animal”, later narrowed down to either “deer” or “lamb”. Wild sheep are typically brownish, not white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T11:02:19.747" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23123" CreationDate="2017-06-09T13:28:32.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a French Canadian native speaker, the only time I remember the distinction being mentioned was in French class back in high school where the teacher gave us a very short list of stative verbs to remember as verbs that used &quot;be&quot; as their auxiliary, but even that falls short of being either useful or significant because verbs conjugated with be as their auxiliary are not necessarily all stative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, when I did my English&amp;lt;-&gt;French translation degree at university, which involved a few courses in linguistics and a lot of courses focused on French grammar since a translator needs to write fluently and grammatically in his native language, the topic never came up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would agree with your interpretation that on a grammatical level, there is no relevant distinction to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T13:28:32.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23143" CreationDate="2017-06-09T14:53:54.057" Score="6" ViewCount="1237" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to this website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://parts-of-speech.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://parts-of-speech.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now go to this Wikipedia article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grab the first paragraph and feed it into POS tagger to see the&#xA;tags. This is an image of the result:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9cgNz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9cgNz.png&quot; alt=&quot;parts of speech tagging result&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as human beings, to understand this text, we need to understand some concepts that are denoted by more than one word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evolutionary psychology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Natural science&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Natural selection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are technical terms that mean more than simply a bunch of words and they are not tagged. For example, if you know &lt;strong&gt;natural&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;selection&lt;/strong&gt;, you don't necessarily know &lt;strong&gt;natural selection&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a technical term to refer to concepts which are composed of more than one word? Also, is there a way to identify them in a given text? In other words, what is the name for technical terms in Linguistics, and how does find technical terms using NLP algorithms and techniques?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="17257" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T19:12:47.053" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:16:52.517" Title="What are multi-word concepts (technical terms) called and how are they found?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;study-of-terms&gt;&lt;term-extraction&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23135" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:08:53.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are dealing with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (a discipline of applied linguistics) and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_extraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;term extraction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. You are looking for &lt;strong&gt;terms&lt;/strong&gt;. The quoted wikipedia articles will give you some starters for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:08:53.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23135" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:09:30.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are called multi-word expressions (MWEs). Before we put things into a POS tagger, we need to perform another process known as &lt;em&gt;tokenisation&lt;/em&gt; to separate characters into words. This is especially important in Chinese, where there are no whitespaces at all, but is also needed in English, where strings surrounded by word boundaries (in the sense of regex) are not always words either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For solutions, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com.hk/scholar?q=multiword%20expressions&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;hl=zh-TW&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search on Google scholar&lt;/a&gt;; there is a huge literature on that. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:09:30.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23138" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23139" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" Score="0" Body="For questions on terminology as the study of terms (a subfield of applied linguistics). &#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;The tag terminology is already established for questions about linguistic terms." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:22:02.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23140" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23141" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" Score="0" Body="For questions about term extraction, i.e., the inference of terms from a corpus containing them." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:25:43.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23131" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:39:05.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth looking at Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak's article &quot;A New Look at the Etymology of Germanic  *lambaz&quot;. This can be found on www.academia.edu .&#xA;He believes the word originally referred to a species of wild sheep, probably the mouflon, and probably the young of it. In areas where the wild sheep was wiped out (most areas) the name was transferred to another animal, either wild such as the deer, or domestic, such as the farmed sheep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:39:05.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23135" CreationDate="2017-06-09T17:23:23.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several terminologies for such words. Here are their definitions found in Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multi-word Expressions (MWEs):&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;A multiword expression (MWE), also called phraseme, is a lexeme made up of a sequence of two or more lexemes that has properties that are not predictable from the properties of the individual lexemes or their normal mode of combination.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[URL]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Terminology:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words or multi-word expressions that in specific contexts are given specific meanings—these may deviate from the meanings the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[URL]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Collocations:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[URL]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that all of these are similar. Both &quot;collocations&quot; and &quot;terms&quot; are &quot;MWEs&quot;. The terms are usually MWEs that are specific for a given topic, while collocations are MWEs which co-occur together in a corpus more frequently than by chance. Collocations and terms often coincide (you can always use a predefined MWE dictionary with terms/collocations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to discover MWEs in an unsupervised manner by using the corpus statistics - you should use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation_extraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collocation extraction&lt;/a&gt; techniques. There have been plenty of work on collocation extraction, so it should be easy for you to find software or some APIs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a list of tools (feel free to edit the list):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.athel.com/colloc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collocation extraction software: Collocate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.freedownloadmanager.org/Windows-PC/Collocation-Extract-FREE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collocation Extract&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~awirote/resources/collocation-extract.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collocation Extract (other source)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;APIs:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Java] Stanford's CoreNLP &lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/trees/CollocationFinder.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CollocationFinder&lt;/a&gt; (predifined, uses WordNet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Java] Mahout's &lt;a href=&quot;https://mahout.apache.org/users/basics/collocations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collocation extraction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resources (all of its MWEs can be seen as collocations/terms)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiktionary.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, a nice reading resource is the paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/research/2013_STG_DeltaP&amp;amp;H_IJCL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;50-something years of work on collocations&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12878" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T17:23:23.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23131" CreationDate="2017-06-09T20:01:45.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer given by fdb is excellent, I just want to expand some more on the notion of &lt;strong&gt;semantic change.&lt;/strong&gt; The fact is that semantic change is unpredictable, and in any way comparable to the regularity of the phonological change, which was the first impulse for Comparative linguistics to become a science. So far, none of the proposed frameworks for the description of the semantic change has been convincing enough, notwithstanding some interesting attempts (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14977/are-there-laws-of-semantic-change&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). As long as there is no general rule, there could not be any rigorous answer to a question like yours (i.e. why, and how, a certain meaning changes at some time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read an etymological dictionary of whatever language extensively, you will realise how frequent are the cases of abrupt and seemingly unnatural semantic change. Nonetheless, comparative linguistics has systematically used semantics as a heuristic tool: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, we observe that some &quot;same meaning&quot; words from different languages show regular phonological correspondences. (Let's pretend that such thing as &quot;same meaning&quot; really exists). For example, all the IE languages attest a word for 'mother' coming from the PIE root *&lt;em&gt;méh₂ter&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On this evidence we establish some phonological patterns and generalize them to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt;, of the remaining lexicon. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then it comes out that in Albanian there is a cognate word &lt;em&gt;motër&lt;/em&gt; coming from the same PIE source but meaning 'sister' rather than 'mother' (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/m%C3%A9h%E2%82%82t%C4%93r&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Is this a problem? No, it's not, since we know how labile semantics might be. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, once we have established the general patterns of the phonological correspondence, semantics looses its relevance and can be simply ignored  when there is apparently an unexpected or unlikely semantic change. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This implies that we can also have cases of semantically unrelated words that are, however, cognate, provided that their phonological form justifies such hypothesis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T20:01:45.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19837" CreationDate="2017-06-09T21:05:04.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the interesting question. A first thing to do would be to verify the fact that this is really a language and not a, say, ornament. To distinguish asignal from noise, so to say. This could be done by identifying a writing system as such (that is, to check wheather it's abugida, glyphs, pictogramms, or other).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, because it's a fiction, we have to check if that's a language of human species or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just by establishing a writing system alone we could not make any noticeable progress. Even a 'Rosetta stone' with a known nature of writing and its language type would be a poor clue (as it is the case with both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khitan_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khitan Scripts&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, depending on a writing and a language types, the first step is to identify them, and then, the repeating combinations of signs (provided there are any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we regard a language of a human kind, then a sequence of pictures with inscriptions could be a great help, but not numbers, because numbers can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tricky&lt;/a&gt; (to mention a few - several different words for 'five' depending on a grammatical class of items counted; different types of numbers for animate and inanimate objects, and even types of numbers other than singular, dual and plural). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, because we regard a proto-language, it could be untuitevely understood by everybody and with a same meaning (yes, a myth of proto-language from which the other languages appeared as a golden dream of (the post-)Christian mankind). In this case, researches would only have to identify the writing system and the grammer (but this, again, depends on how much 'fiction' you want to put into your story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T21:05:04.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23147" CreationDate="2017-06-10T09:54:47.710" Score="1" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;I self-studied Greek long ago, and I found this Perfect Imperative. Now all the Greek grammars I looked at just throw it at you, expecting you to either completely ignore or downright not have what seems like a natural and inevitable reaction to me: «WTF DOES THIS MEAN?!?!?!». Seriously: Perfect usually means past, so how do I make an imperative referring to something past? So I'm wondering: what other languages have Imperative Perfect, and what is the meaning of this mood-tense combination, generally speaking and also in particular in Greek?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My guess&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I guessed was that, putting together &lt;em&gt;imperative&lt;/em&gt;, a command, and &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt;, a completed action of which we can see the result (an interpretation of &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt; that probably comes from the English Present Perfect, which I have been told to be used for actions of which the result is presently visible, with the example my professor always makes being &quot;I have written 20 letters&quot;), the Greek Imperative Perfect was a command of which one thought they already knew the result, in some sense. For example, in the Gongyla poem by Sappho (see p. 47 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/doc/34720745/Sappho-and-Alcaeus-Loeb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, older version &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600209.us.archive.org/25/items/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here pp. 239-240&lt;/a&gt;, something close to my reconstruction &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stixoi.info/stixoi.php?info=Lyrics&amp;amp;act=details&amp;amp;song_id=7304&amp;amp;hl=%CE%93%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B3%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), I accepted the Perfect Imperative because a command was perfectly fitting with &quot;κέλομαι&quot;, and the &quot;known result&quot; was described later on in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked about this on Greek SE, but it's still in commitment, and since I've recently opened &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelegorini.blogspot.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog&lt;/a&gt; where I will sooner or later upload translations of a fragment by Sappho I reconstructed (in a way that is clearly wrong in the sense that all authoritative sources give another version that is incompatible with mine) to have an Imperative Perfect, and thus I will have to explain what I.P. means, presumably, I decided to ask here as well in a broader less language-specific fashion, also because of a mild curiosity about how common such a mood-tense combination is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastEditorUserId="17268" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T13:19:08.643" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T10:10:57.767" Title="What languages have a Perfect Imperative and what is the meaning of such a tense-mood combination?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23146" CreationDate="2017-06-10T11:20:54.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the overall meaning of your question as relations between forms and semantics of imperative and various forms of past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanscrit (another ancient language), the Imperative did belong to a group of present-tense forms, although some endings of Imperative were similar to those of imperfective forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunctive_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;injunctive&lt;/a&gt; forms in Sanskrit were conveying the meaning of imperative having forms partially similar to a past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskrt.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/%D0%A2%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%A1.%D0%A1.-%D0%92%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B8-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F-%D0%B2-%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5.-2003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The source&lt;/a&gt;, in Russian)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The living languages offer us at least two examples with imperatives that are both past and perfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, the Past Imperative (&lt;em&gt;impératif passé&lt;/em&gt;) is used only to describe something that should have been done by a certain time (I think it is used in sentences of 'it-should-have-been-done-by-yesterday style):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aie écrit ce rapport demain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have this report written by tomorrow. (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/french-past-imperative-1368897&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, the past perfective imperative conveys a meaning of rude command (third person perfective past tense):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Вернул на место!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;returned-P.T.-Sg.-Masc. - to - place-Acc. Neut. Sg. Inanimate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (to a man), give it back at once!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Заплатил сейчас же!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;payed-PT-Sg.-Masc. - now - INTENSIFIER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (to a man), pay immediately!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that in Ancient Greek, as far as I remember, the imperatives had two forms similar to past tenses. The Aorist Imperative conveyed the meaning of perfectiveness, yet not necesserily related to a past. cf:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;λέγε&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (imperatīvus praesentis) - speak!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;εἰπέ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (imperatīvus aoristi)    - say!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://elib.bsu.by/bitstream/123456789/92176/1/zarembo-tananushko.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the source&lt;/a&gt;, in Russian)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Perfective Imperative in Ancient Greek is, according to Corien Bary (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GQ2N2Q2Y/aspect_in_ancient_greek.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 5&lt;/a&gt;) similar to that existing in Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my conclusion is that the Perfective Imperative in Ancient Greek is a form of modal command regarding an action that should have been done, from a speaker's point of view, by a certain time beforme the moment of utterance. It was also used as a form of command for a single action (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scholiastae.org/docs/el/aspect.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 5&lt;/a&gt;, another source in English, where the cited form of imperative 'raised the sails!' makes a lot of sense from a Slavic point of view: urgent, emotionally intensified command, and/or a reference to a one-time action).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T17:01:10.010" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23146" CreationDate="2017-06-10T12:35:11.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Formally, Latin has perfect imperatives, too. They are very rare and usually only used with verbs that exist only in the perfect stem, like &lt;em&gt;meminisse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to remember&quot; with the imperative forms &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;memento!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mementote!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T10:10:57.767" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T10:10:57.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21405" CreationDate="2017-06-11T11:34:02.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;common origin&lt;/strong&gt; for two languages is a concept that has been proposed and theoretically grounded within the comparative method invented at the beginning of the 19th cent. by Rask, Bopp and Grimm. Two languages are considered genetically related &lt;strong&gt;if and only if&lt;/strong&gt; they present patterns of regular phonological correspondences in words with similar meanings. No other feature is required, or is enough, to prove the genetic relatedness. Typological similarity, even as striking as the one between Japanese and Korean, does not prove the genetic relationship. There are languages that are typologically similar but genetically unrelated. On the other hand, genetically related languages diverge very easily in their grammatical structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one has been able so far to provide a convincing set of regular phonological correspondences between Korean and Japanese (less so for the alleged &quot;Altaic family&quot; in its entirety). Good attempts have been made in such respect, but eventually they have not met with general acceptance. It's a long standing controversy. It started with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bulgari-istoria-2010.com/Rechnici/etymological_dictionary_of_altaic_languages.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymological Dictionary of Altaic Languages&lt;/a&gt;, a huge work by Starostin, Dybo and Mudrak (eminent Russian specialists in a big number of Altaic languages), then continued with a vehement, but meaningful, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41928378?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;criticism by Vovin&lt;/a&gt; (a specialist in Japanese) and eventually concluded with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/compmeth.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebuttal&lt;/a&gt; by Dybo and Starostin Jr. The rebuttal is not convincing in many points, as has been pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/3644600/How_to_prove_genetic_relationships_among_languages_the_cases_of_Japanese_and_Korean&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ciancaglini&lt;/a&gt;, who makes also a good introduction to the Comparative method and briefly sums up the history of the Altaic controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;null hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; concerning the genetic relationship between languages is always negative. The burden of proof is on those who claim that a relationship exists. Therefore, answering your original question, we don't need special arguments for proving that Japanese and Korean are unrelated, but we need arguments for the opposite claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T11:39:29.333" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T11:39:29.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23156" CreationDate="2017-06-11T12:17:03.600" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the declination for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ett snabel-a&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. the name for the symbol @?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11088" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T18:24:19.003" Title="What's the declination for snabel-a?" Tags="&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:48:30.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-11T13:37:31.727" Score="11" ViewCount="1202" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an English speaker with 26 characters, the concept of sorting is ubiquitous.  If I see a list, I inherently expect it to be sorted by one of the columns, and of course clicking a column to sort is useful to me if that column's value is what I seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had/have never considered languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese. My question is twofold, and I'll use Chinese as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do Chinese readers expect and use some type of sorting system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it as useful to their mental process as alphabetic sorting is to say an English speaker?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really value input from a native speaker, especially someone who does say research on the web as part of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17287" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T00:09:42.037" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T11:11:45.633" Title="Is use of sorting expected and used in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23154" CreationDate="2017-06-11T15:42:12.793" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, all of these cultures expect and use sorting pretty much just like alphabet-using cultures do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a set of some 46 phonetic characters called &lt;em&gt;kana&lt;/em&gt;.  They're arranged by phonetics in a table of fixed order, called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 50 sounds table&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;gojūonzu&lt;/em&gt;), a descendant of Sanskrit phonetic tables.  Textual data, glossaries, lists etc. are usually sorted in &lt;em&gt;gojūonzu&lt;/em&gt; order, and speakers will mentally use &lt;em&gt;gojūonzu&lt;/em&gt; order to find words in indexes, etc.  There's also another system called &lt;em&gt;iroha&lt;/em&gt; order.  In the past, people learned to write with a poem called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iroha song&lt;/a&gt;, which uses every &lt;em&gt;kana&lt;/em&gt; symbol exactly once.  The order of characters in the poem then doubled as an order for sorting.  This is today old-fashioned, but you can still stumble on things sorted by &lt;em&gt;iroha&lt;/em&gt; order from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For counting, Chinese had a set of 12 ordinals called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Branches&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earthly Branches&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dìzhī&lt;/em&gt;, 地支), and a separate set of 10 ordinals called the the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_stem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Celestial Stems&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;tiāngān&lt;/em&gt;, 天干).  These are thought to derive from the 12 months of the lunar year and the 10 days of an ancient week system; they're used to count things like &quot;A, B, C…&quot; or &quot;I, II, III…&quot; in lists.  (The 12 Branches were later associated with 12 Zodiac-like animals, providing an easy mnemonic.)  By combining one Earthly Branch and one Celestial Stem to make a pair, and then iterating both of them together as if in a system of gears, you'll get an ordered sequence of 60 pairs; this is used for counting years in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagenary_cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sexagenary cycle&lt;/a&gt;.  The Japanese use these Chinese counters for sequences, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorting Chinese text itself, like we sort text in alphabetical order, is trickier.  Some dictionaries and things today sort by pronunciation, arranged in alphabetical order according to its &lt;em&gt;pīnyīn&lt;/em&gt; spelling in the Latin alphabet.  (That is, first convert Chinese characters to the &lt;em&gt;pīnyīn&lt;/em&gt; alphabet, then use that spelling to sort them.) Older systems generally order characters by number of strokes, and by the components they have in common.  By far the most used system for that is the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;214 Kangxi section headers&lt;/a&gt;, originally the indexers of a dictionary dating from 1615.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In computing, the sort order of text is called &quot;collation&quot;, and there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard algorithms&lt;/a&gt; to sort text in the order expected by each language/script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T21:42:48.847" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T21:42:48.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23153" CreationDate="2017-06-11T18:24:19.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.saob.se/so/visa.php?id=1652102314&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAOB&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;snabel-a&lt;/em&gt; is quite regular: like other letters of the alphabet, abbreviations, etc., a colon is used to separate the stem from its desinences, and the forms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ett snabel-a&lt;/em&gt; | &lt;em&gt;ett snabel-a:s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:et&lt;/em&gt; | &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:ets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;snabel-a&lt;/em&gt; | &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:s&lt;/em&gt; &amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;nbsp; &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:n&lt;/em&gt; | &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:ns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:na&lt;/em&gt; | &lt;em&gt;snabel-a:nas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Though some of those strike me as being highly unlikely to ever be used; indefinite plural possessives are rare in general, and I don't believe I've personally ever had any need to use one with the word &lt;em&gt;snabel-a&lt;/em&gt; at all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T18:24:19.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23159" CreationDate="2017-06-11T22:31:00.993" Score="6" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language noob here. Just curious; does are body, while learning a language, make a distinction between spoken language and sign language? Or are they all just inputs and outputs to your brain? Each just as able to be incorporated in the language production/comprehension process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, from a language development standpoint, are our vocal-cords, tongue, glottis, etc. special? Or are they all just muscles; with your hands, feet, neck, etc. being just as valid to your brain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if my question's sloppy. Still new to this part of SE. But you know, are our speech producing muscles inherently special, or just most commonly used in the language development process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T16:16:48.110" Title="Does your brain make a distinction between vocal and non-vocal language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23158" CreationDate="2017-06-12T00:04:50.317" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoken and signed languages are distinguished in the brain in different ways. From the perspective of perception, spoken language is processed in the cochlear nucleus of the brainstem and then the primary auditory cortex, whereas signed language is processed by the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and then the visual cortex. As for production, different areas of the brain control muscular movements for speech apparatus versus hand, arm and facial movements in signed language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glottis actually is not a muscle, it is a hole, defined by the vocal folds, which are also not muscles, they are mucous membranes. The speech organs of humans are special from the perspective of comparative mammalian anatomy, since we have greater volitional control over these organs; of course it would be comparing apples to oranges to compare control over the tongue versus the hands. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brains don't treat any body parts as being invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people think that there is no difference between brain processing of language and brain processing of any other stimuli, but I think the evidence does support the view that language is special. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T00:04:50.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23175" CreationDate="2017-06-12T09:23:15.167" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a difficult question, because I've heard that pronunciation can vary greatly even within Chinese-speaking countries. I'm also not really aware of when Mandarin or Cantonese would be used; based on some research, it seems that Mandarin is the standard in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The average English speaker's background knowledge roughly equates pinyin &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; with /tʃ/, and &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; with /ʃ/. &lt;em&gt;Zh&lt;/em&gt; is one of the most confusing digraphs, because the same spelling is used in Romanising the /ʒ/ of Cyrillic languages. Nevertheless, since spellings like this commonly crop up even in Western countries, it seems that pinyin is the system usually used to transcribe Chinese names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question boils down to this: which system is closest to the Chinese pronunciation using easily understood English spelling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="13933" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T13:14:30.900" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T04:22:00.290" Title="Which Chinese Romanisation system is most intelligible to English speakers?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;&lt;cantonese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25764" CreationDate="2017-06-12T12:53:36.837" Score="13" ViewCount="1371" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there natural languages that have the following set of properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language possesses nouns, adjectives, and definite articles &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nouns and adjective are both inflected for number and case (or at least one of the categories) and show agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The definite article is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; inflected, but is invariable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This set of features is present in Esperanto:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;la bela virino / la belaj vironoj / la belan virinon/ la belajn virinojn  &quot;the beautiful woman&quot; / &quot;the beautiful women&quot; (Nom. Sg. /Nom. Pl. /Acc. Sg. /Acc. Pl.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is different from the behaviour of articles and adjectives in the standard average European languages: Either both articles and adjectives are inflected, or both aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T14:55:17.737" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T14:55:17.737" Title="Are there natural languages with the following properties (seen in Esperanto)?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23162" CreationDate="2017-06-12T14:21:32.523" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The language possesses nouns, adjectives, and a definite article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Nouns and adjectives are both inflected for number and case and show agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The definite article is not inflected, but is invariable for gender, number and case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic fits these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="10009" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T18:21:13.307" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:21:13.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T15:56:08.370" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sentence like &quot;Will you, Maria?&quot; where there is cataphora, can you be both deictic and cataphoric? In general, can a term be both anaphoric and deictic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17297" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:04:53.463" Title="Can a term be both deictic and cataphoric?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23162" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:49:09.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Welsh_morphology#The_article&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welsh&lt;/a&gt; is another such language, to some extent at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns and adjectives do not inflect for case; most nouns and a subset of adjectives inflect for number; the majority of adjectives do not inflect for number, though. All adjectives inflect for gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no indefinite article, but there is a definite article. The definite article has three different forms, but like English /ə ~ ən/ and /ðə ~ ði/, the forms are based on phonological environment, not morphological form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the following word begins with a vowel sound (including /j/ and /h/, but not /w/), the article is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;yr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the following word begins with a consonant sound (including /w/), the article is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the article follows a word that ends in a vowel sound, regardless of what the following begins with, the article is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;’r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Wikipedia’s examples of the nouns &lt;em&gt;bwrdd&lt;/em&gt; (m.) ‘table’ and &lt;em&gt;bord&lt;/em&gt; (f.) ‘table’ with the inflecting adjective &lt;em&gt;brwnt&lt;/em&gt; ‘dirty’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    | m.                 |  f&#xA;-------------------------+--------------------&#xA;sg. | y bwrdd brwnt      | y ford front&#xA;pl. | y byrddau bryntion | y bordydd bryntion&#xA;----+--------------------+--------------------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;em&gt;bwrdd ~ byrddau&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bord ~ bordydd&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;brwnt/bront ~ bryntion/bryntion&lt;/em&gt; inflect for number here, but the article is uninflected. Apart from the regular gender inflection of adjectives modifying feminine nouns being subject to soft mutation, &lt;em&gt;brwnt&lt;/em&gt; also has a specifically feminine form &lt;em&gt;bront&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2253" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:49:09.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23164" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:04:53.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, depending on what it means for &quot;a term to be both anaphoric and deictic&quot;. &lt;code&gt;You&lt;/code&gt; is both referring to a context-specific thing (deictic) and also refers to a term that appears later in the sentence (cataphoric).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could reasonably be thought that &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; carries a &lt;code&gt;[+deictic]&lt;/code&gt; property since any sentence with &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; will necessarily reference something in the context. However, &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; does not seem to carry a &lt;code&gt;[+cataphoric]&lt;/code&gt; property since &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; can come in a sentence where there is no cataphora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are smart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above sentence, there is no cataphora since &lt;code&gt;you&lt;/code&gt; does not refer to any term/phrase that appears later in the sentence. Cataphora seems to be a relationship between terms in a sentence, and thus the term itself is not cataphoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:04:53.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23135" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:16:52.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may also want to look into &lt;strong&gt;Idioms&lt;/strong&gt;. An Idiom is a phrase (series of words, usually) whose meaning is not composed of its parts, at least not without a layer of metaphorical or (usually lost) historical meaning. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fly [kicked the bucket] (to mean the fly died)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is an idiom since knowing what [kick] and [the bucket] mean does not allow one to derive what [kick the bucket] means. It may be productive to look into whether or not [natural science] can be derived from what [natural] and [science] means in the technical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:16:52.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23117" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:49:27.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps your getting a discourse effect from an unanalyzed and assumed context. Do you interpret 'Uber yesterday announced a new invention' as either of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Breaking News! Uber yesterday announced a new invention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*This just happened! Uber yesterday announced a new invention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences work with 'today':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breaking News! Uber today announced a new invention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This just happened! Uber today announced a new invention. (perhaps redundant)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T18:49:27.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T20:49:28.763" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'generic' subclass of the definite article treated in the pag. 112, section 1.12.3.1 of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=ctNgCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=arabic%20comprehensive&amp;amp;pg=PT138#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=brass&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; reads as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;it denotes a generic meaning مائدة من النحاس المحفور 'a table of engraved brass’, contrasting with other possible materials. Indeﬁnite phrases also occur in a similar sense, عوارض غليظة من خشب ‘rough joists of wood’, but here the intention is not generic but rather ‘made of some kind of wood’ with no particular contrast with any other possible material.&quot;​&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second volume of V. Cantarino's Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose, the expanded sentence, remarks that it's used 'after a determinative' and examplifies it in page 274 with the sentences صليب من الذهب 'a cross of gold', سرير من خشب 'a wooden bed' or ثوب من الخرير الأبيض 'a dress of white silk'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I cannot find anything similar taken into account in generalist theories, although it seems to be a clear exception. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I cannot make sense of the contradictory english wording, so I'd like to find an elaboration thereof using more technical linguistic terminology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relation between &lt;strong&gt;'Definiteness vs. Uniqueness/Specificity'&lt;/strong&gt; could be the crux of the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2554" LastEditorUserId="2554" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T20:44:13.583" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T20:44:13.583" Title="generic definite article with uncountable/mass nouns after preposition 'of' indicating material" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23162" CreationDate="2017-06-13T04:55:46.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maltese exhibits these properties (which you might have expected after @fdb's answer since Maltese is the &quot;Arabic&quot; European language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definite article in Maltese is &lt;strong&gt;il-&lt;/strong&gt; and does not change according to number or gender. I can't quite claim that it's &lt;em&gt;invariable&lt;/em&gt; as it changes to &lt;strong&gt;ic-&lt;/strong&gt; in front of a &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ix-&lt;/strong&gt; in front of an &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt; and so on for the so-called &lt;em&gt;sun letters&lt;/em&gt;, but to me at least that's a little like English choosing to use &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt; before vowels and &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns and adjectives are inflected for both number and gender: &lt;em&gt;the dog&lt;/em&gt; in Maltese is &lt;strong&gt;il-kelb&lt;/strong&gt; and the dogs are &lt;strong&gt;il-klieb&lt;/strong&gt;.  (I was going to use cat -- &lt;strong&gt;qattus&lt;/strong&gt; -- but then I'd have to explain how to pronounce that &lt;strong&gt;q&lt;/strong&gt;).  A big dog is &lt;strong&gt;il-kelb il-kbir&lt;/strong&gt; and &quot;big dogs&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;il-klieb il-kbar&lt;/strong&gt;.  For many nouns there is also a third plural form into indicate there are exactly two of something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17299" LastEditorUserId="17299" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T07:46:33.500" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T07:46:33.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-13T12:16:03.033" Score="2" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing some crowdsourcing trying to create simple semantic markup for my native language (Russian). At the moment I am trying to classify the world by the tangibility feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some items are obviously tangible (an apple), some are obviously intangible (a dream). But I have a difficulty trying to classify events or forms of people interactions, like &lt;em&gt;a war&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a party&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a meeting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a manifestation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand those events occur in the real world. But on the other hand it's a kind of interaction between people and a form of that interaction thus making it kind of intangible thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the truth? Should events be classified as tangible or intangible items?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="5562" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T12:32:30.583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T00:04:36.097" Title="How to define tangible? E.g. is war/party/meeting tangible or not?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23176" CreationDate="2017-06-13T12:43:33.957" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled across the fact that in many cases city names are different across different languages. For example the british capital London is spelled Londres in French and Spanish, but also London in German. That's the case for many other different cities, for example Milan in Italy is called Mailand in German and Milano in Italian. I think there are countless other examples for this, also for different countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand there are also a lot of cities and countries where there only exist one common name, for example I never heard a lot of different names for US cities.&#xA;Is there an explanation why for some cities there are language specific names and for others there is only one common name? Does it depend on the historical importance or are there some rules for this.&#xA;There's some discussion on this wikipedia page about naming conventions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(geographic_names)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(geographic_names)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17304" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T15:50:02.067" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T16:58:49.183" Title="What are determinants of language specific city names" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;toponyms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22993" CreationDate="2017-06-13T13:02:05.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a significant portion of root words derived from Germanic languages, e.g., drinki (to drink alcoholic beverages), trinki (to drink), hundo (dog), jaro (year), verŝajne (probably), bedaŭrinde (unfortunately).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the affixes are Germanic, e.g., -ino (feminine, from German -in as in Lehrerin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compounding (as you already noted) is clearly Germanic (and specifically German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to ask this question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://esperanto.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Esperanto Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; to get more answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T13:02:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23161" CreationDate="2017-06-13T15:13:00.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yale&lt;/a&gt;. It's rarely seen nowadays. Wikipedia says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Yale romanization of Mandarin was developed in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy to help prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the standard romanization of the time for Mandarin, the Wade–Giles system, a new system was invented that utilized the decoding skills that recruits would already know from having learned to read English, i.e. it used English spelling conventions to represent Chinese sounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it does still have a number of digraphs and trigraphs that are likely to be somewhat unintuitive for an untrained monoglot English speaker: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin [ɕ] is represented by &quot;sy&quot;, which is likely to elicit a better approximation from an English speaker than the &quot;x&quot; of Pinyin, but is perhaps not as effective as &quot;sh&quot; or &quot;shy&quot; would be. (Actually, I can't figure out why the version of Yale described by Wikipedia doesn't use &quot;sh&quot; for [ɕ]: as far as I can tell, it would cause no transcriptional ambiguity and it would be more consistent with the Yale romanization of the sibilant affricates.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like Pinyin, Yale uses a phonemic rather than a phonetic spelling of the vowel in the final &quot;yan&quot;, which is actually supposed to be pronounced more-or-less the way an English speaker would say &quot;yen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T04:22:00.290" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T04:22:00.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23173" CreationDate="2017-06-13T15:46:58.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;External names for some foreign toponyms are called &lt;strong&gt;exonyms&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). The reason the exonyms can be different from the &lt;strong&gt;endonyms&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. the indigenous toponyms) is to be sought for in the history. Linguistically, it depends on how long the name of a certain city was known to the speakers of a certain language. Some cities — like Milan — were founded in the antiquity and have been known by everyone for centuries since then. The ancestors of the contemporary Germans borrowed the name of this city already in the 1st millennium A.D. and it kept evolving together with the general evolution of the German language for a very long period. Time provokes phonetic changes. Latin &lt;em&gt;Mediolanum&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;Mailand&lt;/em&gt; thanks to a folk etymology: the ending -&lt;em&gt;lan&lt;/em&gt; (a Celtic word for 'valley') has been transformed in &lt;em&gt;land&lt;/em&gt;, which means 'land' in German and was possibly perceived as more appropriate for a city name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to analyse the form a city name had at moment of the borrowing. Sometimes a borrowing depends on some intermediate language. For example, the name of &lt;em&gt;The Hague&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Den Haag&lt;/em&gt;, in Dutch) sounds very different in Italian: &lt;em&gt;L'Aia&lt;/em&gt;. This is because it was borrowed in the Middle Age from Dutch to French and from French to Italian. Note that the French variant must reflect some dialectal variant of the Dutch name, where the final -&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; weakens into a glide, rather to the nowadays standard fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has special names for the most important Italian cities, in terms of the medieval commercial routes. Thus, there are special exonyms for Rome, Milan, Genoa, Venice, which were all obviously important cities, but also for Livorno which used to be called &lt;em&gt;Leghorn&lt;/em&gt;: it is a small town today but was of great importance in the past. Other small towns of the medieval Italy don't have special exonyms in English because, historically, they were not important enough in the past, while today they are simply borrowed in the official Italian spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leghorn is the result of a folk etymology. In other cases, English exonyms reflect the Latin form of some Italian toponyms (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Apulia&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Puglia&lt;/em&gt;; see the list &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_exonyms_for_Italian_toponyms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T16:58:49.183" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T16:58:49.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23173" CreationDate="2017-06-13T15:51:05.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The normal situation is that locations have a local name in the local language, and that is how the place is known. Certain places become sufficiently famous that they become regularly known to other people, who speak other languages, and the pronunciation may change for them because of the rules of that language. The city &quot;Washington&quot; [ˈwɑʃɪŋtən] is pronounced [wásindoni] by speakers of the language Logoori for that reason. Once a word is adopted into a language, it becomes subject to the rules of that language, and over time, the local pronunciation versus the &quot;foreign&quot; pronunciation can diverge. These kinds of independent developments explain the change of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Londinium&lt;/a&gt; into &quot;London&quot;, &quot;Londres&quot;, &quot;Londýn&quot; (and likewise may explain the development of some other word into Latin Londinium, though we don't know what the ultimate source of the place name is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, there may be competing local names especially when there are two prominent ethnic groups, each with their own name. The town of Kautokeino has two local names, Kautokeino (in Norwegian) and Guovdageaidnu (in North Saami) – the Norwegian name (by which the town is generally known) is a phonological adaptation of the indigenous name. In the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitoria-Gasteiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vitoria-Gasteiz&lt;/a&gt; (now known with both names though one can find signs with just &quot;Vitoria&quot; and ones with &quot;Vitoria&quot; painted out), it seems to have to do with there being two places merged into one, with Vitoria having been a Spanish location and Gastehiz being a Basque one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T15:51:05.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23173" CreationDate="2017-06-13T15:55:03.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It tends to depend on the history on the name itself, not &quot;historical importance&quot; of the city per se, although it is definitely plausible that, generally speaking, cities with a more complicated naming history that spans various languages and civilization are in fact more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no hard and fast &quot;rules&quot; at all, but I can provide some examples of things that have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single placename can evolve differently in different languages, just like any other element of the language. The city of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cologne&lt;/a&gt; was called &lt;em&gt;Colonia&lt;/em&gt; in Latin (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colonia#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;colony&lt;/em&gt;), and the current English name still reflects that clearly enough. However, the name in German is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ln#German&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Köln&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which reflects the very same etymology, but sounds rather different at this point. Italian calls it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Colonia#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Colonia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; like the original Latin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A name can be borrowed into another language and, in the process of becoming an integrated loanword (which is more likely to happen if the placename it refers to is often mentioned in the recipient language), adapt to the recipient language's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonotactics&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, the city of Stockholm, which is also &lt;em&gt;Stockholm&lt;/em&gt; in Swedish, is &lt;em&gt;Stoccolma&lt;/em&gt; in Italian, reflecting both standard Italian spelling and its phonotactics requiring a final vowel. Spanish goes further and calls it &lt;em&gt;Estocolmo&lt;/em&gt;, as the /st/ cluster is not valid at the start of a word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A name's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transliteration&lt;/a&gt; can change, sometimes resulting in pronunciation changes in languages that base the pronunciation on that. The city of Beijing used to be called &lt;em&gt;Peking&lt;/em&gt; in English, and the new spelling usually corresponds to a different pronunciation by English speakers, but the two names are, in fact, just different romanizations of the same original Mandarin &lt;em&gt;北京&lt;/em&gt;, and no actual pronunciation change occurred in China itself when the preferred romanization changed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A foreign language may retain an older version of a placename that stopped being used locally. The city of Istanbul has been called Κωνσταντινούπολη in Greek (corresponding to Constantinople in English) for several centuries, but locals began using the locution &lt;em&gt;εις την πόλιν&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to the city&quot;) to refer to it, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Istanbul#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;developed&lt;/a&gt; into the current Turkish name &lt;em&gt;İstanbul&lt;/em&gt;. While English stopped referring to the city as Constantinople and started calling it Instabul instead, partly due to pressure from the Turkish government in the early 20th century, Greek usually retains the older name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A foreign language may use a version of a placename that corresponds more closely to the regional language currently or historically employed at that location than to the official language of its country. The city of Milan is, as mentioned, called &lt;em&gt;Milano&lt;/em&gt; in Italian, but it is in fact called &lt;em&gt;Milan&lt;/em&gt; in the Milanese dialect of Lombard, although foreign names can usually be traced directly to the Latin name &lt;em&gt;Mediolanum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lastly, a complete &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;exonym&lt;/a&gt; might be employed, meaning that a language's term for a city might be completely unrelated to any local name, either current or historical. I do not believe this actually happens very often with cities, being more often found with names of countries and people: Germany, for instance, comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;Germania&lt;/em&gt;, and French calls it &lt;em&gt;Allemagne&lt;/em&gt;, both unrelated to German &lt;em&gt;Deutschland&lt;/em&gt; (which is, instead, related to the English word &lt;em&gt;Dutch&lt;/em&gt; and the Italian &lt;em&gt;tedesco&lt;/em&gt;, used to refer to peoples).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T16:14:30.733" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T16:14:30.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T12:41:13.810" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondered if anyone had seen this article on Relational Frame Theory in the most recent edition of the New Scientist? It reports an active laboratory based research programme: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431280-200-spoken-rules/?utm_content=buffer69239&amp;amp;utm_medium=social&amp;amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;amp;utm_campaign=buffer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431280-200-spoken-rules/?utm_content=buffer69239&amp;amp;utm_medium=social&amp;amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;amp;utm_campaign=buffer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More boldly here is a blog from one of its originators, Steven C. Hayes, suggesting it offers a full and complete account of language and cognition: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stevenchayes.com/finding-the-key/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.stevenchayes.com/finding-the-key/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The professional organisation for Applied Behaviour Analysis has made a statement:&#xA;ABAI President Michael Dougher on Freddy Jackson Brown’s and Nic Hooper’s “Spoken Rules”:&#xA;“Finally, after so many years of misunderstanding and mischaracterizing Skinner’s work on verbal behavior, it is thrilling to see that work get the recognition that is its due. As this piece makes clear, the fundamental disagreement between Skinnerian and Chomskyan accounts of language was always a reflection of deeper, pre-analytic assumptions about which aspects of language to study (function or structure) and how best to study it. Aided by recent developments in stimulus equivalence and relational frame theory, which extend Skinner’s analysis to provide a compelling functional account of generativity, it is very gratifying to see this validation for the critical role of learning in language development.” &#xA;The article appears in The New Scientist this month and can be read in full online for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested how few linguists appear to have heard of this account. I would be very keen to get a sense of how linguists on this list might respond to this and what, if any, rebuttals or appraisals might be made of this. Some of what is written about linguistics/Chomsky seems incomplete to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17312" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T12:41:13.810" Title="New Scientist Article on Spoken Language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-06-21T10:32:34.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T13:46:13.493" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page made a passing mention that people of different backgrounds &quot;speak in tongues&quot; differently, but I was curious if there were any papers on this topic. I'd be interested in if there is some correlation between how people try to speak gibberish, and their actual native tongue. Can anyone point me to a paper on the subject, or give some details on this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17313" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T12:43:14.437" Title="Impact of native language on glossolalia" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T17:45:05.667" Score="1" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;So as we all know in both Englisch und Deutsch there are many nouns/verbs that either mean the same or close to the same as eachother, but are chosen based on the context (ex: damp, moist, soggy, etc..). Look up any adjective/noun/verb on either LEO or Dict.cc and there will be at least five different words to choose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is picking the word the best fits a given context. For example the english word &quot;waiting game&quot;. LEO (since I have the app) told me it was Verzögerungstaktik.I wrote my Sentence that I would put on Twitter and ran it by my soulmate (who is a native German speaker), &amp;amp; she replaced the word w/Hinhaltespiel. Asked her why since LEO gave it as the only noun translation. She said it did not fit well in the sentence, and that the machine doesn't know about context like a native speaker does (true).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non native speaker, is there some methodology I can use to accurately choose the appropriate noun/verb for the desired context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11218" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T15:28:46.573" Title="How to know whether a word is context appropriate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:40:50.970" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23187" CreationDate="2017-06-14T23:11:47.273" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a NLP tool called Spacy to parse the parts of speech for some sentences. I am new to linguistics so please bear with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parser is splitting, for example, &lt;code&gt;it's&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;it&lt;/code&gt; as a pronoun and &lt;code&gt;'s&lt;/code&gt; as a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand why &lt;code&gt;'s&lt;/code&gt; is a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Well, if that's how it's going to be, then I'm out!&#xA;Well INTJ&#xA;, PUNCT&#xA;if ADP&#xA;that DET&#xA;'s VERB&#xA;how ADV&#xA;it PRON&#xA;'s VERB&#xA;going VERB&#xA;to PART&#xA;be VERB&#xA;, PUNCT&#xA;then ADV&#xA;I PRON&#xA;'m VERB&#xA;out PART&#xA;! PUNCT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17315" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T23:24:22.587" Title="Why is 's a verb?" Tags="&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23185" CreationDate="2017-06-14T23:23:02.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &quot;that's&quot; can always be replaced by &quot;that is&quot;. When &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is not a possessive, it is a shortened version of &quot;is&quot; or &quot;has&quot; (or, in rapid speech after &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;does&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T23:23:02.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23185" CreationDate="2017-06-14T23:24:22.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are these two sentences the same to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then I would claim that they are synonymous because &lt;code&gt;'s&lt;/code&gt; is written shorthand for &lt;code&gt;is&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;Is&lt;/code&gt; is the verb &lt;code&gt;to be&lt;/code&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T23:24:22.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23172" CreationDate="2017-06-15T00:04:36.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should events be classified as tangible or intangible? Maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If tangible (&quot;concrete&quot;) and intangible (&quot;abstract&quot;) nouns existed, their should be some linguistic test where the answer would separate words into these two categories. According to the introduction to a paper titled &quot;Abstract and Concrete Sentences, Embodiment and Languages&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3173827/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3173827/&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nelson and Schreiber (1992) and Wiemer-Hastings et al. (2001) asked people to judge the concreteness of large sets of words; they found a bimodal distribution (according to features, such as tangibility or visibility), not a dichotomy. Things are even more complicated when words are embedded within contexts. Most of us would agree that the noun “apple” and the verb “to grasp” are concrete, but judging verb–noun pairs such as “to grasp the meaning,” or “to think about an apple” (e.g., Aziz-Zadeh et al., 2006) is all but simple. In addition, the meaning of a sentence is often influenced by a specific language and culture; furthermore, it has been shown that this linguistic and cultural influence is particularly strong for abstract compared to concrete words (Boroditsky, 2003).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguistic tests are run on native speakers, the results are mixed within a language community (perhaps indicating that the categories are not really a part of the shared grammar of the linguistic community), vary across cultures and linguistic structures, and change depending on linguistic context (&quot;an apple&quot; vs. &quot;to think about an apple&quot;). The paper goes on to discuss and advance theories which attempt to correlate the huge variety in interpretation of tangible/intangible nouns to biological systems (e.g. brain functioning, the visual system, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have stumbled across an active area of research for some linguistics. If you are interested in responding to or implementing your own theories on the subject, I found googling &quot;abstract&quot; vs. &quot;concrete&quot; nouns to be a good starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T00:04:36.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T02:11:39.373" Score="-1" ViewCount="2473" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the title says, can anyone give an explanation on the difference between nominal and pronominal cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17118" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T05:06:26.660" Title="Can anyone explain the difference between nominal and pronominal cases?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23203" CreationDate="2017-06-15T03:22:57.527" Score="2" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Case with Mandarin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m quite familiar with Chinese Pinyin, and I know it has some irregularities with how it represents it phonemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;w&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;yu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; when &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;u&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ü&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; are part of a syllable with a null initial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The elimination of the diaeresis when &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ü&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is preceded by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;q&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;j&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;x&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Representing the &lt;code&gt;/jəu/&lt;/code&gt; coda with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;you&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;-&amp;lt;iu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; but &lt;code&gt;/jau/&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;yao&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;-&amp;lt;iao&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Representing the &lt;code&gt;/wəi/&lt;/code&gt; coda with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;wei&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;-&amp;lt;ui&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; but &lt;code&gt;/wai/&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;wai&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;-&amp;lt;uai&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Representing the &lt;code&gt;/uə/&lt;/code&gt; coda as just &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;o&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; after &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;f&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;m&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;uo&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; elsewhere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Rules 3 and 4 are, surprisingly, among some of the most regular of irregulars since there are a few more rules that follow the pattern of dropping the letter representing &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What About Vietnamese?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some irregular ways Vietnamese represents its phonemes? My understanding of Vietnamese phonotactics is limited, and the spelling rules seem to carry a lot of baggage from Latin, Portuguese, and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of what I figured out from Wikipedia’s pages on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnamese_phonology&amp;amp;oldid=783915391&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vietnamese phonology&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnamese_alphabet&amp;amp;oldid=782718424&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alphabet&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; is represented by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;c&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;k&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;q&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;k&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; appearing before &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;qu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; representing &lt;code&gt;/kw/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;c&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in all other cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɣ/&lt;/code&gt; is represented by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;g&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; appearing before &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;g&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in all other cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ă&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is represented by just &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; before an offglide (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;u&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) or palatal consonant coda (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ch&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;nh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;iê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;yê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ya&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ươ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ưa&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;uô&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ua&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tone marks over the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the initial sequence &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; distinguishes &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. When the syllable has no tones, it’s ambiguous!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any more rules?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastEditorUserId="16696" LastEditDate="2017-06-18T01:15:53.033" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T01:24:31.680" Title="Vietnamese Spelling Irregularities" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23189" CreationDate="2017-06-15T03:26:06.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nominative case refers to how the subject of a verb in a given language will change form simply by being the subject. Present day English does not change the forms of most nouns simply because they are the subject. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sally likes John.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John likes Sally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sally&lt;/code&gt; did not change form despite going from the subject position in (1) to the direct object position in (2). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative%E2%80%93accusative_language#Case_marking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a great example of Japanese&lt;/a&gt; displaying the use of nominative case to clearly mark the subject of a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kabin-ga(S) kowareta&#xA;vase-NOM    broke&#xA;’A vase broke’&#xA;&#xA;Watashi-wa(S) kabin-wo(O) kowashita&#xA;I-NOM         vase-ACC    broke&#xA;’I broke the vase’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subjects are marked with (S), the objects marked with (O) in the first line. In the second line, NOM stands for the nominative case and ACC stands for the accusative (or direct object) case. What these examples show is that &lt;code&gt;-ga&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-wa&lt;/code&gt; mark the nominative case of the subject of a verb. So, a Japanese speaker could technically scramble the word order and just by hearing &lt;code&gt;Kabin-ga&lt;/code&gt; know that &lt;code&gt;Kabin-ga&lt;/code&gt; is the subject of some verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronominal case is similar, but specifically for how pronouns change form. English has pronominal case, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like Susy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Susy likes me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; has become &lt;code&gt;me&lt;/code&gt; simply by going from subject to direct object position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One difference between pronominal and nominative case&lt;/strong&gt;, then, is that pronominal case refers to the changing of the form of a pronoun depending on its position in a sentence while the nominative case refers to the changing of the form of words in specifically the subject position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17298" LastEditorUserId="17298" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T04:48:19.460" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T04:48:19.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15497" CreationDate="2017-06-15T12:12:01.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to encourage you in your transcription efforts on cat's phoneme inventory! I am a student of linguistics (B.Sc.) and I have two cats, too -  that's why I have been thinking of doing the same one day. We often face men, even scientists, who claim that speech as a unique feature to the human race. When it comes up to explore speech in other species, the research is no longer free or open to new ideas but blocked as the results may question no less than the human supremacy: If we had evidence that various species do have language and use it on purpose (this requires advanced cognitive skills), it would be increasingly hard to keep up the human centric view on the world. So keep on noting down the distinctions that you recongnize in your cat's utterances and do not be discouraged if this would require creating a new kind of IPA chart for the felidae. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17319" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T12:12:01.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23194" CreationDate="2017-06-15T14:06:23.813" Score="1" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3086/17321&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I understand that logograms represent words in a language, while ideograms represent concepts independent of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about numerical digits like &quot;1&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linked answer, these are classified as ideograms, because they represent a concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't they also represent specific words in English (&quot;one&quot;), as well as other words in other languages (&quot;un&quot;, &quot;eins&quot;, &quot;uno&quot;) and thus can be seen as both logograms and ideograms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17321" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T15:54:21.950" Title="Are numerical digits logograms, ideograms or both?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23193" CreationDate="2017-06-15T15:46:18.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I argue that numerals are true ideograms (or &quot;semantograms&quot;, meaning-symbols).  Ask yourself: what does the symbol '1' stand for in the following examples?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10 apples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 apples &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1st place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The American comic book &lt;em&gt;100 bullets&lt;/em&gt; (published in Argentina as &lt;em&gt;100 balas&lt;/em&gt;)…&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1 it stands for the word &quot;one&quot;, yes.  But in 2 it doesn't stand for any particular word, by itself; you have to take it together with another symbol, 0, and read both of them simultaneously as the word &quot;ten&quot;.  Likewise in 3, with two zeroes, for the word &quot;hundred&quot;.  What is the symbol &quot;1&quot; &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; standing &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; in these numbers? Well, if you substitute it for a 2 or 3, you'd get from &quot;ten&quot; to &quot;twenty&quot; or &quot;thirty&quot; etc., which are words naming the concepts of one times ten, two times ten, etc.  So the commonality between the various uses of 1 isn't the word &quot;one&quot; itself, but rather the mathematical concept of unity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What word does &quot;1&quot; stand for in example 4, &quot;1st&quot;? Well not a full word, of course; when followed by &quot;st&quot;, the entire set represents the word &quot;first&quot;, so that the 1 represents the partial sequenc &quot;fir-&quot;.  &quot;st&quot; acts as a determinant for a special &quot;ordinal&quot; meaning of 1.  Similar examples would be things like &lt;em&gt;1º lugar&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese, where it represents &lt;em&gt;primeir-&lt;/em&gt; rather than its normal reading &lt;em&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; (incidentally, consider also that 1 stands for the word &lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt; in Italian &lt;em&gt;1 ragazzo&lt;/em&gt;, but for the word &lt;em&gt;una&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;1 pizza&lt;/em&gt;).  5 show how the same numeral orthography can change 'language' in the same text: the first &quot;100&quot; is read as &quot;hundred&quot; and the second, as &lt;em&gt;cien&lt;/em&gt;. The common trend between all those ways of using the symbol &quot;1&quot; is that they're always related to the mathematical concept of unity, regardless of how it's put in words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Chinese characters stand for morphemes, or phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't read a Chinese character without producing a sequence of phonemes.  Some have argued that they're just a complicated notation for sequences of phonemes, making them no different than alphabets.  However, in their most basic, systematic principle of usage, there's a fundamental difference between phoneme-based notation, and Chinese-style notation: you have to change Chinese characters not only when phonemes change, but also when morphemes change (&lt;em&gt;yīn&lt;/em&gt; 'cause' is written as 因, &lt;em&gt;yīn&lt;/em&gt; 'sound' as 音, &lt;em&gt;yīn&lt;/em&gt; 'flourishing' as 殷…) This is what we mean when we call Chinese characters &quot;morphograms&quot;.  It's not that they don't represent sounds; they do.  It's just that they represent sounds &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; meanings together, as units; that is, morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, an ideogram (or semantogram, semasiogram etc.) isn't a symbol that cannot be put into words and will never represent words, ever.  It's a symbol whose usage systematically points to a given concept, which can then be expressed as words according to context (words which, in turn, are expressed as phonemes, just like morphograms/logograms).  1 doesn't systematically denote the word 'one' or any other particular set of words, but the mathematical concept of unity, however it's expressed. (This is unsurprising when we consider that it's not originally a linguistic symbol, but a math symbol.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the difference is still confusing, compare it with a Chinese morphogram (or, to keep with your example, let's pick one that works as a logogram, though Chinese symbols are basically morphograms).  The Chinese symbol 狗 always represents the word &lt;em&gt;gǒu&lt;/em&gt;, 'dog'; so it can be said to be a logogram for &lt;em&gt;gǒu&lt;/em&gt;, 'dog'.  However, like English with 'dog' and 'hound', Chinese has other words for 'dog', like &lt;em&gt;quǎn&lt;/em&gt;; and &lt;em&gt;quǎn&lt;/em&gt; isn't written as 狗 but rather 犬.  So 狗 cannot in any way be said to represent the idea or concept of 'dog'; it represents the specific morpheme &lt;em&gt;gǒu&lt;/em&gt; (which, in turn, is realized as a sequence of three phonemes and a tone).  The symbol '1' does not work like that; it represents the concept of 'oneness', no matter if it's realized as the words &quot;one&quot;, &quot;ten&quot;, &quot;fir(st)&quot;, &lt;em&gt;cien&lt;/em&gt;… &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T15:54:21.950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T15:54:21.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2017-06-15T19:04:26.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this answer satisfying: &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/dʲ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;. Edwin G. Pulleybank wrote in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/43731884&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some Notes on Chinese Historical Phonology&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vietnamese &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; are also partly derived from earlier &lt;strong&gt;*j&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;*w&lt;/strong&gt; respectively as we can see from other comparisons with Mương (Thompson 1976). This accounts for the fact that &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; corresponds regularly in Sino-Vietnamese with LMC &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; (initial yu 喻 Grade IV). Presumably Vietnamese &lt;strong&gt;*j&lt;/strong&gt;, including Sino-Vietnamese &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;, had become &lt;strong&gt;dʲ&lt;/strong&gt; in the seventeenth century when the missionary orthography was invented. The phonetic change is comparable to that by which Latin Jacobus has given Diego in Spanish. After this change &lt;strong&gt;*j&lt;/strong&gt; merged with &lt;strong&gt;dʲ&lt;/strong&gt; from softened &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;. Some modern dialects preserve this pronunciation but in Hanoi the pronunciation is &lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt; and in Saigon it is &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; whatever the origin. It is likely that this is the result of a secondary loss of occlusion since the seventeenth century rather than a continuation of earlier &lt;strong&gt;*j&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought the comparison to Latin &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;ACOBVS&lt;/em&gt; giving rise to Spanish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;DI&lt;/strong&gt;EGO&lt;/em&gt; was rather brilliant, &lt;em&gt;(everything that follows is an edit/addendum…)&lt;/em&gt; although as noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/13182/how-was-the-y-initial-in-middle-chinese-borrowed-into-vietnamese#comment51208_23195&quot;&gt;one of the comments below&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Diego&lt;/code&gt; actually comes from &lt;code&gt;Sant&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;yego&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn’t to say that it didn’t happen that way. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fortition&amp;amp;oldid=715358032#Examples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scottish Gaelic underwent a fortitioning process&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/v/ → /p/ Scots vervane, werwane ‘vervain’ → bearbhain /pɛɾavɛɲ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/ʍ/ → /kʰ/ Scots quhel ‘wheel’ → cuidheall /kʰujəl̪ˠ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/w/ → /p/ Middle English wall → balla /pal̪ˠə/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/f/ → /p/ Latin fundus → bonn /pɔun̪ˠ/ (foundation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/θ/ → /t̪ʰ/ Norse þrǣll → tràill /t̪ʰɾaːʎ/ (slave)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/h/ → /t̪ʰ/ Scots hogsheid ‘hogshead’ → tocasaid /t̪ʰɔʰkəs̪ətʲ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;/j/ → /kʲ/ English yawl → geòla /kʲɔːl̪ˠə/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connection between &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; can also be found in the Japanese languages. In the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Japanese_Related_to_Korean_Tungusic_M.html?id=7ysws67HZegC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is Japanese Related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic?&lt;/a&gt;, Martine Irma Robbeets writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…the assumption that proto-Japanese had voiced obstruents is stronger in the case of pJ &lt;strong&gt;*b&lt;/strong&gt; and pJ &lt;strong&gt;*d&lt;/strong&gt; due to some modern southern Ryukyu dialects that have &lt;strong&gt;b-&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt; corresponding to OJ &lt;strong&gt;w-&lt;/strong&gt; and OJ &lt;strong&gt;y-&lt;/strong&gt;. As for the reconstruction of pJ &lt;strong&gt;*d&lt;/strong&gt;, the dialectal evidence rests entirely on a single dialect Yonaguni, which reflects initial OJ &lt;strong&gt;y-&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt;. The dialectal evidence is rather weak because the Yonaguni &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt; is restricted to the initial position. Moreover, &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt; also appears in borrowings from Chinese such as Yo. &lt;em&gt;dasai&lt;/em&gt; ‘vegetables’ which reflects a fortition &lt;strong&gt;y-&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, I doubt the antiquity of Yonaguni &lt;strong&gt;d-&lt;/strong&gt; and I am reluctant to reconstruct pJ &lt;strong&gt;*d-&lt;/strong&gt; as an ancestor for OJ &lt;strong&gt;y-&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, Robbeets writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An argument contra the reconstruction of pJ &lt;strong&gt;*y&lt;/strong&gt; is that from the cross-linguistic viewpoint a fortition of a palatal glide to a dental stop is an unnatural sound change, but Miyake mentions a similar development from pre-Middle Vietnamese &lt;strong&gt;*y&lt;/strong&gt; to Middle Vietnamese &lt;strong&gt;*d&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is far more likely, then, that the fortition of &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; to a dental happened via some intermediate fricative or affricate. A similar fortitioning process changed the pronunciation of some words borrowed from Chinese from a sibilant to dental stop:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;三&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/sam/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tam&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tâm&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;心&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/sim/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tâm&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tim&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;世&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/ɕiaj/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thế&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thá&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thé&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thể&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;少&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/ɕiaw/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thiểu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thẹo&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thểu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thỉu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thiếu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thẻo&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;使&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/ʂɨ/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sứ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sử&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sửa&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;thửa&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;性&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/siajŋ/&lt;/code&gt;) → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tính&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dính&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;tánh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; was indeed one of the former pronunciations of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; as commonly stated, then the sound change might have gone the route: &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/ðʲ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/dʲ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;. The fortition was at least strong enough for the missionaries to assign the phoneme to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Of course, none of this is for certain and anything without citation is just my pure conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastEditorUserId="16696" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T13:34:44.213" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T13:34:44.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T20:26:15.220" Score="5" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know any rule how I can decide (formally), wheter a German sentence contains a Genitivus subjectivus or a Genitivus objectivus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &quot;der Besuch des Botschafters&quot;. Here, the ambassador visits, so &quot;des Botschafters&quot; is a genitivus subjectivus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&gt; one rule could be that if the construction GENITIVE-OBJ + verbalized noun (here: &quot;Der Botschafter besucht&quot;) exists, it's a Genitivus subjectivus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;zum Besuch der Bundesrepublik nach Bonn&quot; --&gt; Genitivus objectivus, since &quot;Die Bundesrepublik besucht&quot; doesn't make any sense (and is, very probably, not found in any German corpus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would have one rule. But I don't know if there would be others, so I'd like to ask you if you know other rules / formal test which I can do in order to decide wheter it's an objectivus or a subjectivus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, I'd like to put the ideas and the rules in my code. I've a big, annotated corpus available, so it would be possible to do some checks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T20:26:15.220" Title="Genitive forms (German)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;&lt;genitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-16T18:33:40.623" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am readin a paper about dialogue modelling and the identification of dialogue acts using prosody. The paper describes 2, maybe three types of model for utilizing the speech signal: a separate, sequential model and EITHER a combined and intergrated model OR a combined model, and an intergrated model. It's not clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference between a combined model and an intergrated model or should I count those together? If there is a difference, then what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17042" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T18:33:40.623" Title="Speech Recognition: prosody. What is the difference between combined and intergrated models?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23198" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23199" CreationDate="2017-06-16T22:01:30.520" Score="4" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a hard time distinguishing nasals and laterals on the spectrogram. They both seem to exhibit lower amplitude, and I think on average nasals have lower F1. Are there any sources on the acoustic differences across languages? Or studies on the acoustic parameters used for classification? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17011" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T21:14:45.597" Title="What's the acoustic difference between laterals and nasals" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23198" CreationDate="2017-06-17T01:16:00.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist205/index_files/Handout%2011%20-%20Source%20Filter%20of%20Sonorant%20Cs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; may be a useful overview, also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/consonant_acoustics.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (ultimately, Johnson “Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics” chapter 9, not online). Nasals have anti-formants at 1100 Hz and 3300 Hz, laterals at 2100 Hz, and the anti-formant of laterals is not as strong (the nasal passage is much larger so absorbs more sound energy). The formants are not as close together for laterals as they are in nasals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="17190" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T21:14:45.597" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T21:14:45.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23162" CreationDate="2017-06-17T16:08:12.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For typological questions you can consult related databases, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt; (the most widely used), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.autotyp.uzh.ch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AUTOTYP&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sswl.railsplayground.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSWL&lt;/a&gt; to get the answer. As mentioned, Arabic might be one such example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T16:08:12.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23158" CreationDate="2017-06-17T16:16:48.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really isn't just one high-level, abstract, &quot;language production/comprehension process&quot;. That view would be much Chomskian and is now generally derided. Language production/comprehension is the result of cooperation between several cognitive capabilities. There are definitely overlaps for spoken and sign languages, especially in meaning comprehension and production (not in the sense of the final muscle movement, which is different of course). There would also be differences, in terms of concrete perception mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language acquisition researchers also looked into the acquisition of sign languages (e.g. for children that are born deaf). Those who had normal parents showed demonstrably worse results than those with also sign-language using parents, presumably because the normal parents can't provide an immersion environment. This is the same as what happens in the acquisition of spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T16:16:48.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23190" CreationDate="2017-06-18T01:24:31.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After much reading, I figured that I pretty much answered my question in the question itself. There is one more rule, however!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese velar codas undergo labialization after back vowels (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;o&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ô&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;u&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Original form   → Labio-velarized form&#xA;1. xong /sɔŋ˧/  → [sɔŋm˧]&#xA;2. trong /cɔŋ˧/ → [cɔŋm˧]&#xA;3. múc /muk˧˥/  → [mukp˧˥]&#xA;4. công /koŋ˧/  → [koŋm˧]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Table 5.6: Examples of the labio-velarization rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not apply to &lt;code&gt;/uə/&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;uô&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;suông&lt;/em&gt; /suoŋ˧/ &quot;flow smoothly&quot;, not affected by the Labio-velarization rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In words where labialization is not desired for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;o&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ô&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, the vowel is doubled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The vowel /ɔ/ is written &lt;em&gt;oo&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt; (since &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; in that position represents /aw/): /ʔɔk/ = &lt;em&gt;oóc&lt;/em&gt; 'organ (musical)'; /kiŋ kɔŋ/ = &lt;em&gt;kính coong&lt;/em&gt;. This generally only occurs in recent loanwords or when representing dialectal pronunciation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Similarly, the vowel /o/ is written &lt;em&gt;ôô&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt;: /ʔoŋ/ = &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%B4%C3%B4ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ôông&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngh%E1%BB%87_An&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nghệ An&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A0_T%C4%A9nh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hà Tĩnh&lt;/a&gt; variant of &lt;em&gt;ông&lt;/em&gt; /ʔəwŋ/). But unlike &lt;em&gt;oo&lt;/em&gt; being frequently used in onomatopoeia, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcriptions&lt;/a&gt; from other languages and words &quot;borrowed&quot; from Nghệ An/Hà Tĩnh dialects (such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vo%E1%BB%8Dc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voọc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;ôô&lt;/em&gt; seems to be used solely to convey the feel of the Nghệ An/Hà Tĩnh accents. In transcriptions, &lt;em&gt;ô&lt;/em&gt; is preferred (e.g. &lt;em&gt;các-tông&lt;/em&gt; 'cardboard', &lt;em&gt;ắc-coóc-đê-ông&lt;/em&gt; 'accordion').&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here are the rules I mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/23190/16696&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; is represented by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;c&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;k&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;q&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;k&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; appearing before &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;qu&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; representing &lt;code&gt;/kw/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;c&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;  in all other cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɣ/&lt;/code&gt; is represented by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;g&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; appearing before &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;e&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;g&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in all other cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ă&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is represented by just &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; before an offglide (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;y&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;u&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) or palatal consonant coda (&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ch&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;nh&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;iê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;yê&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ya&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ươ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ưa&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;When not followed by a coda, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;uô&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; is written &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ua&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tone marks over the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the initial sequence &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; distinguishes &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gi&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. When the syllable has&#xA;  no tones, it’s ambiguous!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emerich, Giang Huong, &quot;The Vietnamese Vowel System&quot; (2012). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 632. &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/632&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/632&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;André-Georges Haudricourt. The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet. Mon-Khmer Studies, 2010, 39, pp.89-104. &amp;lt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824v2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;halshs-00918824v2&lt;/a&gt;&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vietnamese alphabet. (2017, May 28). In &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;. Retrieved 01:05, June 18, 2017, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnamese_alphabet&amp;amp;oldid=782718424&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnamese_alphabet&amp;amp;oldid=782718424&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T01:24:31.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-18T08:33:50.737" Score="-6" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)&lt;/a&gt; but couldn't see anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I was curious to ask is because this word just doesn't make any sense for what it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to reinvent all the words that don't make sense, and they become normal in a given culture, communication would be far more efficient and clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that the linguists has plenty of examples (which they've already given examples for) of the structure of words just not making any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17337" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T08:56:05.927" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T08:56:05.927" Title="What are the historical origins for the naming of the word 'function' in its mathematical context?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:42:04.163" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-18T12:02:58.993" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some authoritative Vietnamese dictionaries? …and how do they disambiguate the two pronunciations of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;? (Something with an English or Chinese gloss is preferred.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnamese_alphabet&amp;amp;oldid=782718424#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia on the Vietnamese Alphabet&lt;/a&gt; has this to say about &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;gia&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This causes some ambiguity with the diphthong &lt;em&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;iê&lt;/em&gt;, for example &lt;em&gt;gia&lt;/em&gt; could be either &lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt;+&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; [za ~ ja] or &lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt;+&lt;em&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt; [ziə̯ ~ jiə̯]. If there is a tone mark the ambiguity is resolved: &lt;em&gt;giá&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt;+&lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gía&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt;+&lt;em&gt;ía&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T12:02:58.993" Title="What are some authoritative Vietnamese Dictionaries? …and how do they disambiguate the two pronunciations of &lt;gia&gt;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23189" CreationDate="2017-06-18T12:09:40.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the summary &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199206476.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199206476-e-17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on this page&lt;/a&gt;, it appears to be terminology completely orthogonal to the function of the case used to distinguish which parts of speech the case applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understood the distinction correctly, you could, therefore, talk about the nominal accusative case, the pronominal accusative case, or even adjectival accusative case if you were dealing with a language that marks case only on some parts of speech, but not others. In that respect, you could, I suppose, describe English as having pronominal nominative, accusative, dative and genitive cases as vestiges of a case system that has disappeared for nouns and adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that you came across it in a conlanging context because a fair number of conlangers deliberately set out to make their language different from what is found in natural languages, so even if asymmetric case-marking is rare in reality, a conlanger might decide to create a language where case is marked on nouns but not on pronouns, or vice-versa, depending on whatever rule struck their fancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T12:09:40.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23183" CreationDate="2017-06-18T12:43:14.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s a paper by Heather Kavan from Massey University: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nzlingsoc.org/documents/Kavan.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“We don’t know what we’re saying, but it’s profound”: The language and contexts of glossolalia&lt;/a&gt;. I found this paper to be enlightening, and if I have time some of her references seem worth it to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of her points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Glossolalia is no different than asking someone to invent a language on the spot and speak it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Utterances contain real words that are rendered in disguised form. In other words, the speakers are applying all sorts of phonological changes to actual words to produce nonsense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open syllables (CV) are the most common. (My guess is that they are the easiest to produce.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In churches, the people are given “encouragement” to speak in tongues.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Things that are uttered may ultimately be borrowed from other people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People have rehearsed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A minority of Christian groups had what the author terms “spontaneous glossolalia” (as opposed to context-dependent glossolalia):&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spontaneous glossolalia is an intense uprush of vocalisations where tongues flow without prompting or prior knowledge of them, and the participant does not know what is happening to them. This was experienced in the purification group, it was evident in a minority of Christian accounts, and is likely to have occurred during the early Pentecostal revival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was another document I read a while back that was intriguing, but I do not know which of my browsers’ history to look to retrieve the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T12:43:14.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23204" CreationDate="2017-06-18T15:18:24.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Function derives from the Latin &lt;em&gt;fungi&lt;/em&gt; meaning to perform or execute (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=function&lt;/a&gt; ), and from a mathematical perspective (disclaimer: I'm a mathematician) this makes perfect sense.  A function is something that performs an operation or sequence of operations to obtain a result from an input.  So I would disagree that that the word &quot;just doesn't make any sense for what it does&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English at least it's usually fairly easy to trace words back to their origins and understand how they obtained the meaning they did today as there are excellent reference sources for just that.  Learning how to use them well might be tricky though.  Reinventing all words that &quot;don't make sense[1]&quot; is probably more effort than just throwing them away though: you might want to look &lt;em&gt;Newspeak&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak&lt;/a&gt; ) to see where that could lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I disagree here as well I'm afraid: a word with a meaning, by definition, makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17299" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T15:18:24.983" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23184" CreationDate="2017-06-18T15:28:46.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was learning German I was advised to buy a &lt;em&gt;Stilwörterbuch&lt;/em&gt; (by Duden, as I recall) which provides this kind of context and usage.  It's used like a dictionary, in that you look up the word (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Verzögerungstaktik&lt;/em&gt;) and if it's in there it gives examples of usage, context, and idioms containing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't got such a reference I would suggest googling the word that you're planning on using or using &lt;em&gt;Linguee&lt;/em&gt; (Linguee.de exists) which searches for the word in corpora and returns excerpts from real-word documents that contain and use the word.  Asking Linguee for verzögerungstaktik yields this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguee.de/deutsch-englisch/uebersetzung/verz%C3%B6gerungstaktik.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.linguee.de/deutsch-englisch/uebersetzung/verzögerungstaktik.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and asking it for &lt;em&gt;Hinhaltespiel&lt;/em&gt; yield &quot;Keine Ergebnisse für Hinhaltespiel&quot; which very much suggests, as per the comments above, that your soulmate is wrong on this occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17299" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T15:28:46.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21398" CreationDate="2017-06-18T18:29:03.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pluralising after a number is an arial feature, not necessarily a question of language family.  For example, Armenian, Georgian, Persian and Turkish do not mark after a number (or after the word &quot;many/much&quot;), although they are from 3 completely separate language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are many borderline cases.  Some languages never pluralise with morphology anyway.  Some languages have a singular, a dual or paucal and a plural.  Some languages do not pluralise after a number in some cases.  For example, in German, it is correct to say &quot;2 Bier&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we somehow handle the edge cases, the definition of &quot;common&quot; is arbitrary, because there is no objective way to count languages.  Does Luxembourgish count?  Does it have the same weight as Bengali with hundreds of millions of speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it probably makes more sense to look at map than at a number or even a list.  But we should beware of false precision in answers to questions like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T07:18:02.677" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T07:18:02.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23212" CreationDate="2017-06-18T22:11:57.513" Score="15" ViewCount="6430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if there are languages where there aren't words for father and mother, but for parent, and how one would say [something like] this to their father in that language: where's mom?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it could be: where is parent?&lt;br&gt;&#xA; It also could be: where is the other parent? [strange]&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Or...&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Where is the female parent? [sounds unnatural, maybe it's not in a language other than english]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-06-18T22:30:00.290" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T19:03:16.517" Title="Are there languages without words for &quot;father&quot; or &quot;mother&quot; but only &quot;parent&quot;?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23211" CreationDate="2017-06-18T22:45:53.813" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only such language I know about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Kinship_terms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pirahã&lt;/a&gt;, the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. It is minimalistic in many ways, having the least number of phonemes (only 11), lacking words for numbers and for colors. Daniel Everett, the greatest specialist on Pirahã who spent years living with the tribe, states Pirahã has the same word for &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everett (2005) says that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. A single word, &lt;em&gt;baíxi&lt;/em&gt; (pronounced [màíʔì]), is used for both &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt; (like English &quot;parent&quot; although Pirahã has no gendered alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T22:45:53.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="525" CreationDate="2017-06-19T11:43:33.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well no one knows for sure and the veiw that second declension nouns evolved out of collective nouns fits the known lexicon better than any hypothesis I know of . This also explains the the mistaken nexus with the female sex since many animals herded as females yet the singular animal was usually or often the male ( lupa/lupus). Even in English &quot;vixen&quot; is an old plural/collective  form. &#xA;There is a similar thing going on with abstract nouns which is manifested in modern Italian as the singular &quot;a&quot; ending that is really an ancient plural form.&#xA;To demand certainty is to ask too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17350" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T11:43:33.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17157" CreationDate="2017-06-19T18:15:51.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brazilian Portuguese:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;D S T Q Q S S&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Domingo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Segunda-feira&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Terça-feira&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Quarta-feira&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Quinta-feira&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sexta-feira&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sábado&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Brazil it's common to write and pronounce the ones with -feira without it, so it is commonly segunda, terça, quarta and so on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't know about how it works in other portuguese-speaking-countries, but in Portugal I'm sure is basically the same thing. &#xA;The order can change, with Segunda-feira being the first or second day, and Domingo being the first or last day, it's somewhat controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T18:15:51.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17157" CreationDate="2017-06-19T19:00:16.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is implemented using language files. To support a new language, you won't need to update your code, just add a new language file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/virasak/jscalendar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The DHTML Calendar&lt;/a&gt; has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/virasak/jscalendar/tree/master/lang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of language files&lt;/a&gt; already available, published under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Calendar._SDN has the following values:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chinese: new Array&#xA;(&quot;日&quot;,&#xA;&quot;一&quot;,&#xA;&quot;二&quot;,&#xA;&quot;三&quot;,&#xA;&quot;四&quot;,&#xA;&quot;五&quot;,&#xA;&quot;六&quot;,&#xA;&quot;日&quot;);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Korean: new Array&#xA;(&quot;일&quot;,&#xA;&quot;월&quot;,&#xA;&quot;화&quot;,&#xA;&quot;수&quot;,&#xA;&quot;목&quot;,&#xA;&quot;금&quot;,&#xA;&quot;토&quot;,&#xA;&quot;일&quot;);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spanish: new Array&#xA;(&quot;Dom&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Lun&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Mar&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Mié&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Jue&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Vie&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Sáb&quot;,&#xA;&quot;Dom&quot;);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you absolutely need one character, you may use D L M X J V S.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:00:16.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23222" CreationDate="2017-06-19T22:28:07.480" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's going on when words like &quot;what&quot; and &quot;how&quot; are used in the following, non-interrogative and relative-pronoun, way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, [how] kind of you! My, [what] a nice young man you've become, love!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, unless I'm an idiot (which is possible,) may I ask what these words are? And what they're doing? As I don't quite understand, and have recently began noticing them popping up more and more in my writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know these can't be relative-pronouns, as in Japanese, relative-clauses are made by putting the clause behind the noun-phrase being talked about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The student went home today.&quot; -&gt; &quot;To be the student who went home today.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;「&lt;a href=&quot;http://jisho.org/search/%E5%AD%A6%E7%94%9F%E3%80%81%E3%81%8C%E3%80%81%E4%BB%8A%E6%97%A5%E3%80%81%E5%B8%B0%E3%81%A3%E3%81%9F%E3%80%81%E3%81%A0%E3%80%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;学生が今日帰った。&lt;/a&gt;」 -&gt; 「&lt;a href=&quot;http://jisho.org/search/%E5%AD%A6%E7%94%9F%E3%80%81%E3%81%8C%E3%80%81%E4%BB%8A%E6%97%A5%E3%80%81%E5%B8%B0%E3%81%A3%E3%81%9F%E3%80%81%E3%81%A0%E3%80%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;今日帰った学生だ。&lt;/a&gt;」&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meaning of course that Japanese doesn't have relative-pronouns. However, Japanese still has these non-interrogative &quot;what&quot; and &quot;how&quot; words, one example being the adverb &lt;a href=&quot;http://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95%E3%81%A8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;何と&lt;/a&gt; (nanto).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ya, what exactly are these words? What exactly do they do to speech? And why do they all seem to be, or be made from, originally interrogative words (何 means &quot;what?&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking and haven't found much, thus I ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastEditorUserId="17211" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T23:02:06.847" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T02:37:36.050" Title="What is it called when words like &quot;what&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, aren't acting interrogatively, and aren't relative-pronouns?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23211" CreationDate="2017-06-19T22:51:16.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another such language, though fictional, is Mando'a. Mando'a is spoken by the Mandalorian faction in Star Wars. As stated by the creator of the language, Karen Traviss, Mando'a is regularly gender-neutral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gender nouns are the same for men and women. Gender is implied contextually, if relevant. Where gender clarity is necessary, the adjectives jagyc (male) or dalyc (female) are added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20111125225244/http://www.karentraviss.com:80/page20/page26/page25/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Karen Traviss on her personal lexicon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for parent is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mandoa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;buir&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and it is used regardless of whether or not the parent is a birth parent or an adoptive parent. Family is highly regarded in Mandalorian culture, but in a manner that is very much different than the Pirahã in @Yellow Sky's answer. There is very little emphasis on adoption versus birth, and families (known as aliite, aliit singular) are made up of larger organizational units comprised of those related by blood, family friends, and pets. They are also lead by a clan buir who is responsible for leading and representing the clan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When addressing a parent, &quot;buir&quot; is often used as a suffix, much like Japanese Honorifics. Kal Skirata, the Mandalorian training sergeant responsible for training Omega squad, is called Kal'Buir by the clones he trained. This is because of the relationship they shared on Kamino, but also because he later adopted the members of Omega squad as his children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the specific questions at the end of the post, &quot;buir&quot; can be treated very much like the Japanese honorific Sensei. When addressing a teacher or speaking of them, they can either be addressed as &quot;Sensei&quot;, context permitting, or addressed as their name followed by &quot;-Sensei&quot;, such as &quot;Akari-Sensei&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is important to note that this post draws heavily upon Star Wars Legends, but that's a topic for another SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only post two links, otherwise I'd post more sources for my post, but some reading points are the Mando'a Legends page on Wookiepedia and &lt;em&gt;The Mandalorians: People and Culture&lt;/em&gt; by Karen Traviss as printed in &lt;em&gt;Star Wars Insider 86&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17355" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T22:51:16.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23220" CreationDate="2017-06-19T23:08:37.693" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What&lt;/strong&gt; a good question! [sorry, couldn't resist that].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now seriously, as you said you don't know, neither did I.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I got to do a quick search on my favorite site [wiktionary] for this kind of questions, it gives you easy technical information to basically every word in the english language or any other language that's available there. It's really useful.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I learned from it is that:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those words are said to be adverbs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And these adverbs function as &lt;strong&gt;intensifiers&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, when you use those words you are intensifying the meaning of other words, mainly adjectives, ya know That's it. How wonderful.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastEditorUserId="17340" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T23:13:26.593" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T23:13:26.593" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T05:29:26.997" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can combinatory categorial grammars be used for inflected languages like Slavic and Baltic languages? I am aware only of this thesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://pwmarcz.pl/pm-thesis-final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pwmarcz.pl/pm-thesis-final.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I have investigated the papers in this field, I can say that there are no wonders: each inflection of each word (verb, subject) is entered as new word in lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T08:09:16.493" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T08:09:16.493" Title="Combinatory Categorial Grammar for inflected languages?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23225" CreationDate="2017-06-20T08:03:20.347" Score="1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;h2&gt;For instance:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Object moving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who do you think that John saw &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;? (correct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Who do you wonder that John saw &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;? (incorrect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject moving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who do you think &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; saw John? (correct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Who do you wonder &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; saw John? (incorrect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjunct moving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do you think that I left &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;? (correct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Why do you wonder that I left &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;? (incorrect)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T08:13:33.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T08:13:33.340" Title="Why do 'wonder' and 'think' act differently in wh-movement?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23224" CreationDate="2017-06-20T14:00:46.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wonder&lt;/em&gt; takes an embedded interrogative complement with its own internal &lt;i&gt;t&lt;/i&gt;race:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You wonder who John saw &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You wonder who &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; saw John.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You wonder why I left &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you front that &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; you're asking it to do double duty, in both an  external interrogative and the embedded interrogative: in effect it's standing for itself rather than for the trace!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDED:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's the interrogative role of the &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; complement which prohibits this movement. Note that this pair sustains the movement, because the original &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; clause is deployed not as an interrogative but as a pronominal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know who saw John.  ⇒ &lt;sup&gt;ok&lt;/sup&gt;Who do you know saw John?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this pair doesn't, because the original &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; clause is interrogative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to know who saw John. ⇏ &lt;sup&gt;&amp;lowast;&lt;/sup&gt;Who would you like to know saw John?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some grammarians distinguish these two uses of the &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; clause as 'embedded questions' and 'free' or 'fused relatives'. I don't, because the internal structure of the &lt;em&gt;wh-&lt;/em&gt; clause is identical; but the difference in the external syntactic roles justifies a distinction at that level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T10:05:09.823" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T10:05:09.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23262" CreationDate="2017-06-20T16:17:53.003" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the ability to take normally interrogative words like &quot;what&quot; and &quot;how&quot;, and turn them into intensifier adverbs, seem like such a language universal concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, you can take the interrogative 何, and turn it into the intensifier adverb 何と, just like how English interrogatives can be similarly made into intensifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ya, why does this seem so universal? What about interrogatives make them so commonly able to derive intensifiers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T17:04:59.870" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T23:45:04.283" Title="Why can interrogatives so often be used-as/made-into intensifier adverbs?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23211" CreationDate="2017-06-20T16:37:39.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To approach this from a different angle, I am married to a Xhosa woman. There may be no word in her language for 'parent' in the sense of a biological parent. Rather, mothers and fathers are those who belong to the next generation up, in other words one's biological parents and all of their siblings. Sometimes the siblings may be called &lt;em&gt;tata mncimnci&lt;/em&gt; (small father) or &lt;em&gt;mama mncimnci&lt;/em&gt; (small mother), or &lt;em&gt;tamnci&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mamnci&lt;/em&gt; for short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Afrikaans language has absorbed this in small corners of the language (they are rare words in Afrikaans) as &lt;em&gt;kleinpa&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kleinma&lt;/em&gt;. Those are the finer details, sometimes encountered. But in practice, 'mother' and 'father' refers to a group of people one generation up. In a sense, then, there may be no words for father and mother &lt;em&gt;as we know them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17360" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T19:03:16.517" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T19:03:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T17:28:45.303" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get the named entities in a small test using stanford NER tagger. Here is the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from nltk.tag import StanfordNERTagger&#xA;st = StanfordNERTagger('english.all.3class.distsim.crf.ser')&#xA;print st.tag('Ram offers computer science course'.split())&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Output I get is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[(u'Ram', u'O'), (u'offers', u'O'), (u'computer', u'O'), (u'science', u'O'), (u'course', u'O')]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not getting why all the tags are 'O'. While Ram is a person, Computer is an object,science and course are also classifiable objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can get named entities for my sentence Like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ram -&amp;gt; Person&#xA;Coputer Science -&amp;gt; Course&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16984" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T13:28:29.217" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T17:52:32.627" Title="named entities recognition using stanfordNERTagger" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20722" CreationDate="2017-06-21T04:41:57.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ar(y)ma - meaning &quot;don't get tired&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17362" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T04:41:57.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4678" CreationDate="2017-06-21T04:59:38.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qazaq I think comes from the verb qaz- meaning to scrape, scratch, dig.&#xA;This was applied to horses (qazaq at) when they scraped snow (hoofed) to find some food. It's necessary to wander for it. And then it was applied for humans as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17362" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T04:59:38.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T05:56:38.230" Score="5" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=in%20the%20Ukraine%2Cin%20Ukraine&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2017&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cin%20the%20Ukraine%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cin%20Ukraine%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Google ngram&lt;/a&gt; compares the use of the phrases &quot;in the Ukraine&quot; and &quot;in Ukraine&quot; over time. A big change happened in the mid-1990s, when use of the definite article declined significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of the definite article in English is said to be inherently insulting to Ukrainians by implying that their country is not sovereign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent is this assertion justified on linguistic and philological grounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17364" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T10:28:22.370" Title="Use of the definite article in &quot;the Ukraine&quot;" Tags="&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23232" CreationDate="2017-06-21T06:28:44.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In standard Russian, there's a similar phenomenon: the preposition &quot;in&quot; in the phrase &quot;in Ukraine&quot; is literally &quot;on&quot;, unlike what's the case for most other modern European countries (preposition &quot;in&quot;), although &quot;on&quot; is naturally used for island countries, and for many names of historical regions/countries (it's always &quot;on Cuba&quot;; it's always &quot;on (Kievan) Rus&quot;; and the name &quot;Ukraine&quot; was used for that historical region long before the modern country appeared). Ukrainians themselves always use &quot;in&quot; and think it's insulting to them that Russians say &quot;on Ukraine&quot;, because we say &quot;in Germany&quot;, &quot;in Poland&quot;, etc. There's never intent to insult Ukrainians, however, when we say &quot;on Ukraine&quot;, it's just how it sounds natural in our dialect. The Ukrainian govt in the early 1990's issued a statement where they asked other post-Soviet countries to use &quot;in Ukraine&quot; instead of &quot;on Ukraine&quot; in official documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages develop in various complex ways, and there's always at least one exception for every rule. I don't think we say &quot;geese&quot; instead of &quot;gooses&quot; in English because we specifically hate geese and think they're not true birds. That's just how we're used to say it, we simply copy what we heard from our parents and grandparents, who themselves don't already know why it's so. I don't think there are any philological grounds for such assertions in either case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want to stay politically correct, at least not to provoke unnecessary confrontations, I think it's reasonable to say &quot;in Ukraine&quot; when communicating with Ukrainians (or any other nation with similar demands)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastEditorUserId="16671" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T06:33:49.683" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T06:33:49.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23232" CreationDate="2017-06-21T08:19:52.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been discussed in various fora more than it probably even deserved, may the gods of linguistics forgive me for contributing to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite simply the Anglophone world had no direct contact with what is now Ukraine, nor was English a lingua franca in Eastern Europe in that era, at the time that some cognate of &lt;em&gt;Ukraine&lt;/em&gt; entered the English language.  So toponyms, ethnonyms and so on in English tended to be inspired by French, German or even Latin in that era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the few historic mentions of Ukraine in English, we can try to infer whether it was more French-inspired or Latin-inspired or even perhaps Polish-inspired:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1651 Ukrain, 1671 Ukraine, 1688 Ucrania, Ukrania, 1762 Ocraine.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages typically have no definite or indefinite articles, whereas French and German uses articles with many more countries and regions than English do.  Both French and German still use the definite article with Ukraine -- &lt;em&gt;l'Ukraine&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;die Ukraine&lt;/em&gt; -- as French also does for France and many other countries, and German does for Switzerland and some other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also true for regions or countries in or near Ukraine: &lt;em&gt;die Moldau&lt;/em&gt; usually, &lt;em&gt;die Bukovina&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;das Buchenland&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;das Banat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;das Kosovo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;der Kosovo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;die Batschka&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;die Krim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;die Dobrudscha&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;die Slowakei&lt;/em&gt; and, again somewhat controversially, &lt;em&gt;die Tschechei&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;Moldawien&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Galizien&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ruthenien&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bessarabien&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Siebenbürgen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tschechien&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a logic to this in the sense that based on lexical features a native speaker would impute an article and gender for a name he or she had not heard before, but there is no geopolitical logic to it in the sense that article or lack of article does not imply a greater degree of autonomy or official status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, French uses &lt;em&gt;en Ukraine&lt;/em&gt;, that is, there is no definite article when saying &lt;em&gt;in Ukraine&lt;/em&gt;.  This is not specific to Ukraine but to the preposition &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, it is the same for &lt;em&gt;la France&lt;/em&gt; itself, and for most if not all other countries or regions which take a definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, there are fewer geographical regions or countries with the definite article, and we can say that there is likewise no geopolitical meaning to it.  The common name of a certain global superpower has an article, as do &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; United Kingdom, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Russian Federation, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; People's Republic of China and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no fundamental linguistic basis for this drama, in the sense that there is no definite article in Slavic, and no geopolitical meaning to the definite article in the relevant European languages that do use definite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a political and personal matter, most of us try to respect the wishes of countries, cities, organisations, persons and so on with regard to their own official name for themselves in various languages.  See the cases of Ivory Coast, Burma, Macedonia, South Korea, Czechia, Constantinople, Calcutta, Bangalore, Golda Meir, Cat Stevens and so on, to say nothing of the maiden name concept.  And likewise most of us are a bit forgiving if other persons do not instantly or consistently update their names for all such entities and persons in all contexts in all languages.  That is outside the scope of this SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T09:24:36.717" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T09:24:36.717" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23229" CreationDate="2017-06-21T12:05:20.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;no tool is perfect. It seems, that Stanford NER with the default model (no specific training) does not recognise &lt;em&gt;Ram&lt;/em&gt; as a personal name and that is is also agnostic about course titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may train it (or just add Ram to its dictionary) to get &lt;em&gt;Ram&lt;/em&gt; right. I am not sure whether you can add categories of named entities like courses and how much effort this will take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T12:05:20.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13079" CreationDate="2017-06-21T13:25:39.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indoeuropean apophony was fully grammaticalized already at the earliest stage of the family that one caqn reconstruct. It seems like it originated as sound changes, but one does not really know when these chages occured. They must therefore have occured in a much earlier stage, and that stage could have been an earlier proto-language that also other language families originated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apophony therefore possibly orginated in a remote proto-language or dialect continuum from which also Semitic and the other Afroasiatic languages arouse. But the grammaticalization process of cource occured differently in those than in Indo-european.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Nostratic was a wide dialectical continuum in the Middle East, Indo-european and Semitic possibly originated from neighbouring areas in that continuuem, the southern Aforasiatic languages from the southernmost area, and the Uralic and Altaic languages from the Northernmost part. Such a scenario explains the fact that Indo-european in some respects resamble Uralic, while in other respects Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T13:25:39.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23232" CreationDate="2017-06-21T15:30:07.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from use in &quot;regions&quot; (the Sahara, the Middle East, the South...), definite articles are often used with certain countries: Ukraine, Bahamas, Netherlands, Philippines, Congo, Comoros, Maldives, Seychelles, Sudan. The use is more predictable in names that form branching NPs, like Central African Republic and even more obligatorily in Central African Empire, Solomon Islands, Dominican Republic, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Marshall Islands, United States of America, United Arab Emirates, Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, Holy See. And then there's Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. In the case of The Gambia, the country was named after the Gambia River, where the article is obligatory. Similarly, The Bahamas derives its name from an island chain that extends past the current country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no sense in which use of a definite article in a country name is intrinsically &quot;insulting&quot; in English, especially given that English is spoken in &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; United States and &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; United Kingdom. The Google ngram fact is the result of political events, following the general pattern that journalists tend to use whatever the official English version is of a place name. Other examples of journalistic name-shift include Peking/Beijing, and a couple decades long uptick in Cambodia/Kampuchea. The official demise of the article in Ukraine is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1991/499102.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dec. 3, 1991&lt;/a&gt; (though it declined in use in the preceding weeks). It is reported that some Ukrainians felt that the use of the article was insulting, and that was sufficient to cause an official name shift. The shift from the spoken form of the name Burma ဗမာ to the written form &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Myanmar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Myanmar&lt;/a&gt; မြန်မာ has not been anywhere near as complete since the official change in 1989, perhaps because it was an arbitrary decision by a a military dictatorship.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T15:30:07.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18775" CreationDate="2017-06-21T20:27:37.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, check out www.physioalphabet.com.  Physioalphabet is a featural international phonetic alphabet based on the physiology of human speech production.  In many respects, it offers many advantages over IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17368" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T20:27:37.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T04:50:46.807" Score="1" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;What data sources and/or softwares can generate a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphological derivatives&lt;/a&gt; for a given English word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3339" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T04:50:46.807" Title="data sources and/or softwares to get morphological derivation of words" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;references&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11176" CreationDate="2017-06-22T07:15:41.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers provided are not very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common ways that words gain new meanings are through metaphor and metonymy. Words also shift by changing word classes. A common situation is nouns being used as verbs, such as google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of metaphor-induced change (I wrote a paper on this): &quot;over&quot; never used to be usable in talking about time, such as &quot;over the past few days&quot;. In the 1800s though, there were poetic uses, such as saying that a major event cast a shadow over the following decade. That is using a common schema of visualizing time as a space. If it is a space then something can cast a shadow over it. If enough people speak in this metaphoric sense about time, using the word &quot;over&quot;, then eventually people can get used to in normal grammar, and it will find it's way into more phrases, like &quot;over a period&quot;, &quot;over time&quot;, and &quot;over the years&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever a new concept arises in a culture, metaphor is typically used to speak about such concepts. For example, a computer mouse is only called such, because it is kind of the shape and size of a mouse and traditionally had a cord attached that that resembles a mouse's tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the form or function of a thing can change &lt;em&gt;over time&lt;/em&gt;, gradually, while the word(s) associated with it follow along. Think about the earliest telephones compared to the modern idea of a phone. I'm sure better examples of this could be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metonymy is where one thing is commonly associated with another and used in place of it, such as saying that &quot;George flew to Brazil.&quot; Did George actually fly, or did he get in a plane which flew to Brazil? It would be considered metonymy, if the temporal sense of &quot;over&quot;, had developed from a common association with the spatial sense, having to do with travelling over distances, which of course takes time as well. However I do not believe &quot;over time&quot;, developed this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do suspect that one way &quot;over&quot; began being used in a temporal sense has to do with graphs used in economics, stock markets and science. Considering that graphs would typically put time on the X-axis and chart changes in a dependent variable on the Y-axis, the resulting graph could be seen going up or down &lt;em&gt;over time&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know if this should be called metaphor or metonymy or something else, but it is an example of the &quot;inside joke&quot; phenomenon mentioned by curiousdanni. Innovative language in one realm, such as sports and games (low blow, rain check, pawn), the military (fubar, deadline, blockbuster), leaks into common usage. Such terms usually have a specific meanings in there origin but broaden or shift greatly when it enters common parlance. The shifts again take place through metaphor, metonymy, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common trend is for words to shift in meaning from concrete and tangible to abstract. If you look at the etymology of any abstract word in English, there is a good chance it has origins is some everyday physical thing. For example, &quot;government&quot; comes from the verb, &quot;govern&quot; which ultimately originates from the Greek word &lt;em&gt;kybernan&lt;/em&gt;, which means &quot;to steer or pilot a ship&quot;. Metaphor strikes again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact of the matter is, the only way people learn (and thus perpetuate) words is by observing how others use it and making up some unconscious rule in their head about what the word means and how to use it, based on the contexts that they hear it in. But human minds are not like computers. They are very fuzzy and like to generalize things and consider the whole rather than the parts. In the process of learning words it is very easy for one person to store slightly different rules in their head compared to the people they have learned it from. Thus they will stretch or shift the boundaries whenever they use the word. And of course people enjoy stretching meanings deliberately too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastEditorUserId="2373" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T12:59:28.223" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T12:59:28.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23247" CreationDate="2017-06-22T08:36:40.583" Score="10" ViewCount="2555" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has a set of words with &quot;ch&quot;, coming — more or less directly — from the Greek language. They all have a /k/ sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;character&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;charisma&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;psychology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;choreography&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;archive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to name a few. All these words are spelled with &quot;ch&quot; — no matter the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there's &lt;em&gt;autarchy&lt;/em&gt;. Pronounced with /k/, spelled with &quot;ch&quot;... and &quot;k&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autarky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/autarky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autarky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autarky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might not be the only one, but I'm wondering why there's an odd one out in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: I was about posting this question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; but then I realised that the same exception applies to my native language (German) as well. &lt;em&gt;Autark&lt;/em&gt; is spelled with &quot;k&quot; (there's no &quot;ch&quot; spelling in German for this word); and all the other words I mentioned above are spelled with &quot;ch&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Psychologie&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Archiv&lt;/em&gt;, however, are not even pronouned with an /k/-sound whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1719" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T06:28:17.100" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:20:49.970" Title="Why can &quot;autarchy&quot; be spelled with an &quot;k&quot; while other words not?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-06-27T08:52:17.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23242" CreationDate="2017-06-22T10:04:18.233" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, “autarky” and “autarchy” are two different words. The former means “self-sufficiency” and comes from the Greek arkein “to suffice”. The latter means “absolute rule” and comes from Greek arkhē “rule”. They are pronounced the same in English, but not in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T10:09:49.047" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T10:09:49.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23232" CreationDate="2017-06-22T10:28:22.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this special case, English usage might be influenced by German usage. For the German language, there are the following rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By default, countries are neuter singular and without definite article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Countries that are masculine (der Iran, der Irak), feminine (die Schweiz, die Türkei, die Ukraine, die Elfenbeinküste), or plural (die Niederlande, die Vereinigten Staaten/die USA) have the definie article&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a few exceptional countries that are neuter and carry the definite article (das Saarland, das Elsass, das Allgäu)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some country names look like plurals but are treated as neuter singulars anyway (Bayern, Hessen, Italien, Spanien)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a diachronic tendency to drop the use of articles for some of the countries (Saarland, Iran, Irak) but not for others (die Schweiz, die Türkei)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T10:28:22.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23336" CreationDate="2017-06-22T10:39:33.770" Score="4" ViewCount="1711" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a text corpus for my NLP project in Hindi, however all the corpora I found are not free for downloading. Is there any free annotated Hindi text corpus at all? If yes, where can I find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17372" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:24:46.897" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:24:46.897" Title="Where can I find a free text corpus for the Hindi language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23242" CreationDate="2017-06-22T18:45:43.170" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general rule is that only Greek chi (χ) turns into English CH; Greek kappa (κ) turns into English K, or sometimes English C (if it's in a context where the pronunciation of C would be unambiguous). So for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;αρα&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;τήρ -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;ara&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;γλαύ&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;ωμα -&gt; glau&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;oma&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;αὐτάρ&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;εια -&gt; autar&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;μόναρ&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;ος -&gt; monar&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;αὐταρ&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;ία -&gt; autar&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the former case, αὐτάρ&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;εια is derived from αὐτός + &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%BA%CE%B5%CF%84%CF%8C%CF%82#Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;αρ&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;ετός&lt;/a&gt; &quot;sufficiency&quot;. (See Strong's concordance &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/greek/strongs_713.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter case, αὐταρ&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;ία is derived from αὐτός + &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CF%81%CF%87%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἀρ&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;ός&lt;/a&gt; &quot;leader&quot;. (See Strong's concordance &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/greek/strongs_758.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Wiktionary actually covers this very well: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarchy#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autarchy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autarky&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &quot;leukemia&quot;: Interestingly, the modern Greek word for &quot;leu&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;emia&quot; is λευ&lt;strong&gt;χ&lt;/strong&gt;αιμία, but that's a borrowing from medical language back into Greek; the original medical term came from Ancient Greek λευ&lt;strong&gt;κ&lt;/strong&gt;ός + αἷμα. And, this being back in the days when English was classier, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=leukemia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German-medical&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Leukämie&quot; was originally borrowed into English as &quot;leucaemia&quot; — any schoolboy would have known that &quot;-cae-&quot; was pronounced like a a hard C followed by a long E. But spelling reform gave us &quot;leucemia&quot; and the decline of Greek gave us finally &quot;leukemia&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=leukaemia%2Cleukemia%2Cleucaemia%2Cleucemia&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=1960&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram viewer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastEditorUserId="6848" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T18:20:49.970" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:20:49.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11807" CreationDate="2017-06-23T07:40:31.803" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chomsky proposed that linguistics should be explanatory rather than taxonomic, and mostly, modern linguists have agreed with him.  Taxonomic linguistics endeavors to develop a framework of terminology that is sufficient to describe facts of natural language, as we encounter them.  This is the sort of thing that preoccupied linguists in the midst of the 20th century, and led to, e.g., tagmemics, or stratificational grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under Chomsky's influence, we don't do that anymore.  It appears to me, you are asking a taxonomical question.  Not wishing to sound mean, but my answer is: Who cares?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T07:40:31.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23289" CreationDate="2017-06-23T08:10:20.437" Score="3" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider these examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'I am happy with my parents' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my parents gets assigned Case by 'with'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*'I am proud with my parents' &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is as follows:&#xA;What is the reasoning for 2 being incorrect? Shouldn't 'with' assign Case to 'my parents' (in 2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T06:17:22.217" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:59:19.633" Title="Case assignment with prepositions" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2017-06-23T23:20:58.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pinyin tosses out a lot of semantic information. Once Chinese characters are removed from the language, it becomes harder for Mandarin to coexist with different Chinese languages under the same umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I learned history right, the French used the Latin script to do that very thing: cut off the Vietnamese from the Chinese sphere of influence. Nowadays, borrowed words there are even imported verbatim into the language instead of naturalized as English and French becomes trendy. I reckon most Latin-based scripts eventually run into the problem that English faces: words that retain the spelling of their originating language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to address the problems is a language regulatory institution that has the backing of a government to do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Differentiate homophones with etymological spelling like French. The spelling should pose no problem to reading since it contains more information than what is spoken aloud. A reader will know to collapse the different graphemes (like the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;m&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;n&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; nasal codas) into one phoneme or to delete silent letters (like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;k&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the coda position). However, speech cannot be written with etymologically correct spelling without knowing beforehand how the morphemes should be spelled.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;原因&lt;/strong&gt; “reason” (&lt;em&gt;yuányīn&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;元音&lt;/strong&gt; “vowel” (&lt;em&gt;yuányī&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;em&gt;yuányī&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;香蕉&lt;/strong&gt; “banana” (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;iāng&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;iāo&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;iāng&lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;iāo&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;相交&lt;/strong&gt; “cross over” (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;iāng&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;iāo&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;iāng&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;iāo&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;目的&lt;/strong&gt; “goal” (&lt;em&gt;mùdì&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;mù&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;dì&lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) and &lt;strong&gt;墓地&lt;/strong&gt; “burial ground” (&lt;em&gt;mùdì&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Promulgate spelling rules for transliterating foreign words into the native spelling rules that do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accommodate foreign phonology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it works or not, the use of Chinese characters is a very cultural/political issue. The use of Latin may be seen as kowtowing to Western civilization. There might be a happy medium like the use of &lt;em&gt;Zhuyin&lt;/em&gt; which is indigenous but not too difficult to master for anyone. Zhuyin is already used to write some non-Chinese languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T23:20:58.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16886" CreationDate="2017-06-24T00:09:23.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would you count &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erhua&amp;amp;oldid=782392671&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;erhua&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as a form of resyllabification? The &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; invades syllables like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franchise)&amp;amp;oldid=787161372&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;facehugger&lt;/a&gt; to people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;哪儿&lt;/strong&gt; “where” (&lt;em&gt;nǎ &lt;strong&gt;ér&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;em&gt;nǎ&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; /naɚ̯˨˩˦/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;一点儿&lt;/strong&gt; “a little” (&lt;em&gt;yì diǎn &lt;strong&gt;ér&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;em&gt;yì diǎn&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; /i˥˩.djaɚ̯˨˩˦/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;好玩儿&lt;/strong&gt; “fun” (&lt;em&gt;hǎo wán &lt;strong&gt;ér&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;em&gt;hǎo wán&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; /xau̯˨˩˦.waɚ̯˧˥/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;一瓶儿&lt;/strong&gt; “one bottle” (&lt;em&gt;yì píng &lt;strong&gt;ér&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; → &lt;em&gt;yì píng&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; /i˥˩.pʰjɚ̃˧˥/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last example, the &lt;strong&gt;ér&lt;/strong&gt; literally replaces the nucleus of the prior syllable leaving only the initial and the medial intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T00:09:23.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2017-06-24T00:27:47.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, in arabic too. &quot;3ami&quot; is used to adress the paternal uncle; &quot;3amti&quot; the paternal aunt, &quot;khali&quot; the maternal uncle and &quot;khalti&quot; the maternal aunt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People usually use this the same way that they do in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17388" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T00:27:47.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-24T09:20:42.890" Score="1" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Translationg the terms makes a semantic rendering important. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The English resourse&lt;/a&gt; translates &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;क्रोध [krodha]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as 'anger' wrath, passion, etc.' with  the same definition for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;कोप​ [kopa]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; plus defining it as 'morbid irritation or disorder of the humors of the body'. The compound noun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;कोपकारण [kopakāraṇa]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is rendered there as 'cause of anger', by which I deduce that in English translation these two words are mainly synonymous and covered by a same semantic field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tibetan language renders both &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;क्रोध [krodha]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;कोप​ [kopa]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;strong&gt;ཁྲོ་བ་&lt;/strong&gt; [khro ba] and &lt;strong&gt;ཁྲོས་པ་&lt;/strong&gt; [khros pa] respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://spokensanskrit.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German resourse&lt;/a&gt; covers both terms with the word 'wrath' with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;क्रोध [krodha]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; being in some context synonymous to 'passion'. Ah, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;कोप​ [kopa]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, are there any other possible distinction between the meaning of these two words except of possible [structured] &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;क्रोध [krodha]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; VS [non-structured] &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;कोप​ [kopa]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two words cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T21:02:50.377" Title="Difference in translating Sanskrit words कोप​ [kopa] and क्रोध [krodha]" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-24T14:21:38.303" Score="1" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do speech therapists and speech pathologists have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet as part of their profession? They might want to learn it, but my question really is: are they required to learn it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17202" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T20:19:42.190" Title="Speech Pathologists and the International Phonetic Alphabet" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-24T15:00:00.387" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are they viewed by the scholarly community now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17389" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T05:20:58.190" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T05:20:58.190" Title="It's now 12 years since Everett made his startling claims about Pirahã. How have his claims held up?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;piraha&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-06-26T13:55:16.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23258" CreationDate="2017-06-24T20:19:42.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I retired (7 years ago) I taught a linguistics course in articulatory phonetics from time to time.  About half my class were undergraduate majors in Speech Pathology.  So that course was clearly a requirement for Speech Path at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used IPA in the course, but there was never a requirement to learn IPA.  Linguistics is not about learning notations.  You can just look at a chart for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T20:19:42.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23227" CreationDate="2017-06-24T23:45:04.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how universal the use of interrogative words as intensifiers is, but one possibility comes to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People will often spontaneously exclaim &quot;What!?&quot; or &quot;How?!&quot; when something unexpected happens. It seems like a short step from that to applying the same word as an intensifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T23:45:04.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T16:33:08.183" Score="8" ViewCount="1184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard several people tell me that automatic segmentation and transcription to (narrow) IPA of fieldwork-quality audio is impossible at the moment, and even from laboratory-quality audio recordings for known languages it appears to be a hard and error-prone process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can comprehend that background noise, and speaker changes and other effects of recording in the field make the processing harder and that knowledge about the phonotactics of an existing language makes it easier to disambiguate possible options for sounds reflected in a recording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given that it is so easy to extract the formant shape from a waveform using standard software (eg. praat) and that formants seem to map to the vowel trapez so nicely; and also because clean transcription is a significant economic and time hurdle to research, I am surprised that this is such a big problem in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the current big issues in automatic audio-to-IPA and what makes them so hard? Which bits are essentially solved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1517" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T06:54:56.430" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:47:51.403" Title="What are the current hurdles to automatic audio to IPA transcription?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23263" CreationDate="2017-06-25T18:14:17.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Dividing up the audio&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, formant analysis can place vowels nicely on a chart. But first you have to cut the vowels from the surrounding sounds. Often their formants are changed by nearby consonants; the nice F1/F2 plots use vowels in isolation, or the middle part of the vowel without the messy edges. And when vowels are reduced, or too thoroughly colored by nearby phonemes (consider English &amp;quot;r-coloring&amp;quot;), this second option isn't always possible. Then consider the case of diphthongs: when does one vowel end and the other begin? If you take the Fourier transform of [ai], it'll average out the formants and give you results similar to [e].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Consonants are harder&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While vowels are easy to identify, consonants are harder. What differentiates a [p] from a [k], acoustically, isn't anything in the sound itself: that's just silence, and then raw noise. It's the distortion of the formants of the surrounding vowels; the same distortion that needs to be removed in order to identify the vowels. So you need to first know the baseline that the distortion happens relative to before you can figure out which plosive it is. Sibilants also tend to look like pure extended noise, and differentiating them based on their frequencies is more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Everything is a gradient&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite its name, the IPA was designed for &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; transcription, not phonetic: there's a symbol for the Swedish &amp;quot;sj-sound&amp;quot; /ɧ/, even though there is no such sound as *[ɧ]. And taps and flaps are unified, despite being acoustically different, because no known language distinguishes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In acoustic reality, the cut-offs between different sounds—between a palatal [c] and a velar [k]—are much less distinct. They're divided because they're phonemic in some languages, rather than because there's a notable feature which separates one from the other. Given a sound in between pure [c] and [k], or a vowel in between pure [a] and [æ], the IPA isn't good at indicating that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T18:14:17.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23263" CreationDate="2017-06-25T20:41:44.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most basic problem is that it is impossible (given any realistic i.e. non-Star Trek technology) to map waveforms to IPA letters for an arbitrary language. It is, however, possible for well-enough studied languages, using Google-grade technology, for example you can speak Norwegian or English to Google, it will return the spelling, and you can use that to get an IPA spelling from a phonetic dictionary of the language (except: when there are multiple pronunciations like &quot;to-MAY-toe&quot; and &quot;to-MAW-toe&quot;, when you'd need to know how Google handles many-to-1 mappings of pronunciation to spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the vast majority of languages which are not as well worked out, the problem comes from the fact that mapping between phonetic properties and IPA is many-to-many. For many languages, it is essentially arbitrary whether you will transcribe a given vowel as [i] vs [ɪ], or [ɪ] vs. [e]. Field linguists solve these problems (to the extent that they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be solved – often they cannot) by appeal to myriad poorly- or totally-not understood heuristics, indeed it is well known that the native language as well as fieldwork experience of the fieldworker play a major role in their judgments as to appropriate IPA letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA letters represent ranges of acoustic and articulatory values (the latter being inaccessible to any speech-recognition program): they are not precise things. The IPA (the association) has not promulgated definitive / authoritative reference recordings or values (especially covering the acceptable range of values, such as F1 and F2 defining [e] vs. [ɪ]). It would also be insufficient to extract such values from Peter Ladefoged's IPA performances, since Ladefoged does not define the IPA standard, and in fact he has made a point of the fact that IPA experts do vary in their pronunciations of &quot;the same thing&quot; (he left us with an illustration of this point for vowel &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and wrote a dissertation on the topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without such standard values, even if you could segment the waveform into candidate segments, and even if you have formant trajectories, that still doesn't tell you which segment you have. A simple illustration (and challenge) is that nobody can give you the defining formant values of [ɨ ə ʌ ø ʊ ɜ ɤ]. You can perhaps find formant values of [ə] is some specific language, but the goal is to find &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above points have focused on the easiest problem to solve: how to map steady-state properties to IPA letters. Segments are rarely &quot;steady&quot; (even within a defined granularity of measurement), so for instance a hallmark of the acoustics of [ɪ ʊ ɛ] in English is that their formant shift over time. This is a language-specific property – [ɪ ʊ ɛ] in Nilotic are reasonably steady-state vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue (which is a bit easier to solve) is that IPA transcriptions can be narrow broad. You could write the distinction between &quot;tab&quot; and &quot;stab&quot; in IPA in many ways: [tæb, stæb], [tʰæb, stæb], [tʰæəb, stæəb], [tʰæəbp, stæəbp]. A narrow transcription hugs the phonetic ground and doesn't care if a transcriptional feature is redundant; a broad transcription gets the essential details of the language. To get a broad transcription, you'd need to first work out the phonological system (how did you do that?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an interplay between &quot;absolutist&quot; judgments in transcription and &quot;rationalist&quot; judgment. What I'm referring to is, on the one hand, a linguist has some standard in mind for &quot;ɪ&quot; (as an absolute thing), but that judgment is modified via exposure to many tokens and a solution to the phonemicization problem (the variation is reasoned away). This kind of reasoning takes many forms. The main form of reasoning that feeds back into transcription decisions is a phonological analysis. If there is a vowel &quot;I&quot; which could reasonably be spelled [ɪ] &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; [e], but it behaves in the phonology clearly like [i u ɨ] and not like [ɛ ɔ], then you ought to spell &quot;I&quot; as [ɪ]. Fieldworker decisions involve a continuous loop between conscious reasoning about the phonological system and the notion of an absolute acoustic anchor (which I regret to say is a mythical beast).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T20:41:44.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23279" CreationDate="2017-06-25T21:01:14.427" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The well-known CLAWS5 tagset, for tagging English language lexemes etc, has one tag &lt;code&gt;PRF&lt;/code&gt;, specifically for tagging the preposition &quot;of&quot;, while other prepositions get the tag &lt;code&gt;PRP&lt;/code&gt;, which is for all prepositions except &quot;of&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, this kind of thing has some use, since two revisions later, CLAWS7 has separate tags also for &quot;with/without&quot; and &quot;for&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the motivation behind these distinctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T15:27:14.303" Title="Why does the CLAWS5 tagset separate &quot;of&quot; from all other prepositions?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T04:19:23.750" Score="2" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did the Latin past participle suffix -atus develop into modern French -é?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the two following examples: modern French &lt;em&gt;état&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;state; status&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;été&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;been&quot;). Both derives ultimately from the Latin past participle &lt;em&gt;status&lt;/em&gt;. But while the former, as a noun, retains a somewhat faithful representation of the root word, the latter deviates for some reason. Compare cognates in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish which have perfect parallels: Italian &lt;em&gt;stato&lt;/em&gt;, Portuguese and Spanish &lt;em&gt;estado&lt;/em&gt; are the single form of both the noun and past participle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another note, considering the suffix &lt;em&gt;-té&lt;/em&gt; of the unrelated noun &lt;em&gt;été&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;summer&quot;) which is on the other hand, regular, as it derives from the Latin suffix &lt;em&gt;-tas&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the most straightforward routes would be Latin &lt;em&gt;-atus&lt;/em&gt; &gt; French &lt;em&gt;-at&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-as&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-é&lt;/em&gt;. Yet the past participle ending &lt;em&gt;-é&lt;/em&gt; doesn't follow these routes. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastEditorUserId="9822" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T04:28:03.387" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T22:48:24.820" Title="How did the Latin past participle suffix -atus develop into modern French -é?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23275" CreationDate="2017-06-26T07:58:56.210" Score="9" ViewCount="3628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs exist for /z/ and /s/, /g/ and /k/, /b/ and /p/, and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've never heard it for /ɹ/ or /l/. I think it's totally possible to use the vocal cords for those consonants, as well as not using the vocal cords for them. After all, we can easily whisper words with /l/ or /ɹ/ in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm talking about the untrilled r in normal American English. I can't do trilled r's so I can't experiment to see if it's unvoiceable, but I suspect it's whisperable like every other sound I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does such a distinction happen in any language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17403" LastEditorUserId="17403" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T23:39:51.957" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T23:24:29.103" Title="Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voice-biometrics&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T08:11:23.113" Score="10" ViewCount="2119" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I see at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this wiki page&lt;/a&gt;, these two versions of Armenian show differences in phonology and sometimes in grammar which are greater than, say, a difference between Russian and Polish (and quite close to that between Finnish and Estonian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are books written in each one of these two dialects equally intelligible for a speaker of each version of Armenian? Or is there one-direction understanding (as it is the case with Estonian speakers, who can intuitively understand most of spoken and written Finnish, but whose speech is hard to be deciphered by an unprepaired Finnish speaker)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T10:54:53.177" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T10:54:53.177" Title="To which degree are Western and Eastern Armenian mutually intelligible?" Tags="&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;varieties&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-26T08:11:23.830" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there's a lot, but one example would be Icelandic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hlít&lt;/em&gt; /l̥iːt/ ‘throughly’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lít&lt;/em&gt; /liːt/ ‘I look; you look’&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;hraða&lt;/em&gt; /r̥aːða/ ‘to speed up’&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;raða&lt;/em&gt; /raːða/ ‘to put in order; to employ’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that depends on the kind of ‘r’ you're talking about; the above is the alveolar trill. If you mean the unusual English approximant, then I don't know a language which contrasts it for voice phonemically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T02:00:40.213" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T02:00:40.213" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T08:28:11.330" Score="3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6694/how-much-lithuanian-and-romanian-languages-are-mutually-intelligible&quot;&gt;an answer to anoher question about Lithuanian&lt;/a&gt; suggests that 'quite a large number of words was borrowed from non-IE languages'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some words in Sanskrit indeed seem to have Fenno-Ugric (or Paleo-Asiatic) cognates, I am curious about the rest of the language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is approximate distribution of the suggested loanwords in Sanskrit by language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T14:58:37.230" Title="Does Sanskrit really have a large proportion of borrowings from non IE stock?" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-26T10:03:18.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welsh has 'rh' and 'll' as the unvoiced counterparts of 'r' and 'l'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17404" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T10:03:18.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26988" CreationDate="2017-06-26T10:26:24.777" Score="5" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russians seem to feel (e.g. the answers and comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/14706/why-isnt-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BE%CC%81%D0%BD-spelled-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%91%D0%BD&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/13075/question-about-spelling-%D1%87%D1%8C%D1%91-%D1%87%D1%8C%D1%8F-%D1%87%D1%8C%D0%B8&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/12422/pronunciation-of-spelling-rule-%D0%B5-vs-%D0%BE-vs-%D1%91&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) that there is a large difference between sounds produced via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_first_palatalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palatalization&lt;/a&gt; (via interaction with soft vowels or the soft sign ь) and sounds produced via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iotation&lt;/a&gt; (via interaction with the letter й, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palatal approximant&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, whenever I try to pronounce the two, I am unable to distinguish them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Can someone link to an audio recording which makes the distinction between them clear? I.e. how is palatalization supposed to be phonetically different from the effects of the palatal approximant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are the sounds produced by the palatal approximant and palatalization different in Slavic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BB%D1%91%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;лён&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BE%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;почтальон&lt;/a&gt;. According to the IPA writing, the former's &quot;o&quot; sound is supposed to be only palatalized but not iotated  [lʲɵn], while the latter's (final) &quot;o&quot; sound is both palatalized and iotated [lʲjɵn]. But for the life of me I can't hear the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a link to an audio recording would be preferred, a detailed description of how the position of one's mouth differs between the two would also be very helpful. That being said, it would probably have to be very detailed, because using the descriptions I have already found, I have not been able to create a perceptible difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This might be a duplicate of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20196/what-are-the-differences-between-palatal-consonant-and-palatalized-consonant&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't understand the previous question enough to be sure. In particular, I only know that palatalization = &quot;soft vowels&quot; and palatal approximant = &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;y-sound&lt;/a&gt; in English&quot;. The other terms I am trying to pick up as I go, but I have very little experience with all of them and am not confident that I understand any of them correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, consider this question to be specific to Slavic languages only (or Russian in particular), and the previous question to be general to all languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14660" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T23:25:14.627" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T10:54:01.917" Title="How are the palatal approximant and palatalization different in Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-26T12:01:12.937" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As leoboiko mentioned, there are languages with voiceless liquids, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icelandic&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the IPA, they are simply transcribed with a voicelessness ring diacritic: [r̥] and [l̥].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Icelandic, these sounds can be analyzed as allophonic realizations of /r/ and /l/ in some contexts, or as the sequences /hr/ and /hl/ in other contexts. It's similar to how in English, the &quot;wh&quot; sound has been analyzed either as a single phoneme /ʍ/, or a sequence /hw/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, similar to how the voiceless counterparts of non-lateral approximants such as [j], [w], [ʋ], [ɰ] often tend toward being fricatives ([ç], [ʍ], [f], [x] respectively), the voiceless counterpart of [l] is often realized more as a fricative than as an approximant. This voiceless lateral fricative  is transcribed in IPA as [ɬ]. This is the standard realization of Welsh &quot;ll&quot; (so the corresponding Welsh phoneme is standardly transcribed /ɬ/), and it is said to be a common realization of the Icelandic /l̥/ phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I don't know of any language where /ɬ/ and /l̥/ exist as distinct phonemes (Peter Ladefoged says the same thing in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VqEXghQ-ow0C&amp;amp;pg=PA53&amp;amp;lpg=PA53&amp;amp;dq=contrast%20voiceless%20lateral%20fricative%20approximant&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mtTIpDDx9D&amp;amp;sig=Y65AP7lFGFcgt5CKSQsaFu0EiBY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiU-NX9vNvUAhVo74MKHeA4AbM4ChDoAQgtMAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=contrast%20voiceless%20lateral%20fricative%20approximant&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1971), p. 53). But it is definitely possible to distinguish them from a phonetic standpoint. An article of possible interest is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281610457_A_COMPARATIVE_STUDY_OF_ESTONIAN_SWEDISH_VOICELESS_LATERALS_ARE_VOICELESS_APPROXIMANTS_FRICATIVES&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Comparative Study of Estonian Swedish Voiceless Laterals: Are Voiceless Approximants Fricatives&lt;/a&gt;?&quot; by  Eva Liina Asu, Francis Nolan and Susanne Schötz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exact voiced counterpart to the fricative [ɬ] also exists; it is the voiced lateral fricative [ɮ]. In some languages, it is an allophone of a /l/ phoneme, while in others such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~hoole/kurse/artikul/zulu_laterals.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zulu&lt;/a&gt; there is a phonemic contrast between /l/ and /ɮ/ (Zulu also has /ɬ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T01:29:32.167" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T01:29:32.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23270" CreationDate="2017-06-26T12:46:45.600" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eastern and Western are just two codifications, the total dialect variation within Armenian is similar to that within English and arguably much less than that within German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the other answer, while the spoken dialect continuum developed over a thousand years, the minor fork in codifications only happened in the past two centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One soft proof of their intelligibility is that you will hardly find a website which is in both Eastern and Western Armenian, nor will you find subtitles in television interviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Eastern vs Western&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the situation across the aspects that affect intelligibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eastern Armenian is more conservative in terms of pronunciation.  Western Armenian is more conservative in terms of grammar and in terms of orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Eastern and Western Armenian have taken on new vocabulary for some concepts that emerged since their split, at least informally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soviet Armenian has taken on, via Russian, more internationalisms like &lt;em&gt;desinfekcia&lt;/em&gt;, but Western Armenians will often understand those thanks to their better knowledge of French or English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western Armenian was more influential historically, while Eastern Armenian is much more influential since the Genocide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How we know this&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armenian and Georgian have been written since the 4th century, so there is a reasonably sized corpus of &quot;grabar&quot;, Classical Armenian from before and during the split, from which these assertions are derived.  Even the pronunciation can be reconstructed, because of loanwords from Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Iranic, Kartvelian and so on, and using the comparative method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Intelligibility in Practice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So educated Eastern Armenian speakers can read Western Armenian without any problem, because it is basically classic Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, Western Armenians can understand spoken formal Eastern Armenian because the pronunciation is very clear, and they may be exposed to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice there are many Russian words and other jargon in the street language that are difficult.  This is more of a factor for intelligibility than any aspect of grammar or pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the use of Russian words as opposed to French or Arabic or English words actually has nothing to do with Eastern and Western.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Definition of Eastern and Western&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commonly people use &quot;Eastern&quot; to mean Soviet Yerevanian and &quot;Western&quot; to mean the diaspora, especially in the Levant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Western/Eastern dichotomy is highly imperfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it was always a dialect continuum, someone in Gyumri, someone im Kars and someone in Erzurum spoke similarly, no matter in which group we would place them today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, some speakers in Russia, Soviet Armenia and especially Georgia speak with Western pronunciation, but because they were in the Soviet Union, they are familiar with the so-called Eastern orthography and vocabulary.  Conversely, speakers in or from Iran, which includes those in places like India and Singapore, speak with Eastern pronunciation, but because they were not in the Soviet Union, they are not familiar with the so-called Eastern orthography and vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are actually 4 basic groups: Western and not Soviet, Western but Soviet, Eastern and Soviet, and Eastern but not Soviet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Forces of Harmonisation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are those who moved across those groups more recently.  To ask if Vartan Oskanian or Levon Ter-Petrosyan or their parents speak Eastern or Western Armenian is like asking if Elon Musk speaks British or American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, a series of events - the Genocide, and today the flight of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Syria and Iraq, whose families had found refuge there during the Genocide - has severely endangered Western Armenian, by killing most of the speakers and scattering the surviving ones across the world.  It is strongest in Lebanon and Syria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those few Western Armenian speakers who do re-settle in the slice of historic Armenia where Armenian is still spoken inevitably learn Eastern Armenian instead, but also contribute words amd expressions and effectively force some dialect levelling.  In the 1910s and 1920s a few hundred thousand refugees from the West arrived, roughly half the people in Armenia are descended from one, and that proportion is surely much higher in Yerevan.  In Georgia too this is a non-trivial phenomenon, most Armenians in the Armenian-majority areas had fled from near Erzurum around the time of the Hamidian massacres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is net economic emigration, so for example an estimated 100,000 Eastern Armenian speakers now live in Istanbul, perhaps a similar number in Western Europe, and more in the United States, generally always to places where there was an earlier and continuing wave of Western Armenian speakers.  Similarly the Armenians of Iran, while safe and very successful there, also emigrate in high numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net effect of this is that the Eastern and Western speakers keep coming into contact with each other, if not in historic Armenia then in places like Rostov, Boston, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Bulgaria, the Emirates, Zurich, San Francisco and so on.  (Concrete examples where I know of speakers of both.)  And online, and in music, film and television.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contact, combined with a more than thousand years tradition of writing and emphasis on literacy arguably precisely as a means of bridging the imposed divide, has led to the constant harmonisation of the formal and informal standards, so that even new scientific words and so on are mostly the same in both variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Relative to Other Languages&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in fact not so unique, half the world's major languages are polycentric.  Standard formal British English and standard formal American English are quite similar, whether written or spoken.  However, within each, the most unintelligible dialects are barely intelligible to someone who has learnt only the standard, let alone to someone who has learnt only another standard.  We could say similar for German or Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we can make an analogy regarding the fact that often one variant is perceived as archaic, and one as corrupted, when in fact the other variant is just as often archaic or corrupted, but in any case perceiving something as archaic or corrupted is also a tacit admission of intelligibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, one could argue that the divide has been the key to maintaining the language, as it is the only common language between Armenians living for centuries in the different spheres, very very few of whom are monolingual in Armenian.  In that there are some parallels to Hebrew in the 19th century, and Romanes and Kurdish today. These languages were never very useful for, say, marketing, they are useful as a lingua franca between the different nodes of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in summary, they are as mutually intelligible as the variants of the language we are writing now, but it is not so much a question of some metrics of the phonetic, grammatical or lexical differences, but of the sociopolitical reality, which is that the two standards do not exist in total isolation from one another, in contrast to, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homshetsi_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homshetsi&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T18:59:47.073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T18:59:47.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T13:28:53.637" Score="2" ViewCount="408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a sentence I'm working on now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tom saw [Jane reading the book].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think 'saw' takes two arguments, &quot;Tom&quot; and &quot;Jane reading the book&quot;. But I'm not sure what phrase that is, and what the head is in the phrase. And is it okay to consider that 'see' theta-marks Tom and the phrase? I cannot think of any appropriate theta role to assign to the phrase.. I've just started learning linguistics by my own so please help me out. Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17400" LastEditorUserId="17400" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T13:54:34.490" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T14:03:45.253" Title="What kind of phrase is Acc-ing gerund?" Tags="&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23270" CreationDate="2017-06-26T13:50:28.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are the following differences: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The current Armenian language (which is also considered as Eastern Armenian) was created by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khachatur_Abovian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khachatur Abovian&lt;/a&gt;, who is best remembered for his novel, &lt;em&gt;Wounds of Armenia&lt;/em&gt;. Written in 1841 and published posthumously in 1858, it was the first novel published in the modern Armenian language using Eastern Armenian based on the Yerevan dialect instead of Classical Armenian. Since then, language started diving, but in current Armenia modern Armenian is used for everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In 1915, after the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey, lots of Armenians escaped the country in the hope of finding a life and saving themselves; most of them were in Western Armenia, so basically speakers of Western Armenian, and they still that now. Of course, their language is also influenced by the countries where they are living, for example Western Armenian from the US is different from Western Armenian from Turkey or Syria. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The differences are quite huge also, because basically, Khachatur Abovian completely changed the language, and unfortunately, in schools we do not learn Western Armenian, so for people from current Armenia it is quite hard to understand Western Armenian, apart from Church personnel who use Western Armenian as their language, though learning modern Armenian also.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17407" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T12:54:45.347" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T12:54:45.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23267" CreationDate="2017-06-26T14:06:10.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The function word &quot;of&quot; is sometimes difficult to classify, think of cases like&#xA;&lt;em&gt;to be aware of something&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to be fond of something/someone&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;because of&lt;/em&gt;. Putting it in a category of its own reduces the errors of misclassification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T14:06:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3640" CreationDate="2017-06-26T14:31:32.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a short English example from the paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~nivre/docs/acl09.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Non-Projective Dependency Parsing in Expected Linear Time&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ukk6F.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ukk6F.png&quot; alt=&quot;Dependency tree for an English sentence (non-projective).&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you want it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/in9Tm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/in9Tm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Universal Dependencies non-projective tree for an English sentence.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the LaTeX code to generate the latter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\begin{dependency}&#xA;    \begin{deptext}[column sep=1.2em]&#xA;        A \&amp;amp; hearing \&amp;amp; is \&amp;amp; scheduled \&amp;amp; on \&amp;amp; the \&amp;amp; issue \&amp;amp; today \\&#xA;    \end{deptext}&#xA;    \deproot{4}{root}&#xA;    \depedge{2}{1}{det}&#xA;    \depedge{4}{2}{nsubj:pass}&#xA;    \depedge{4}{3}{aux:pass}&#xA;    \depedge{7}{5}{case}&#xA;    \depedge{7}{6}{det}&#xA;    \depedge[edge start x offset=-6pt]{2}{7}{nmod}&#xA;    \depedge[edge slant=6pt]{4}{8}{nmod:tmod}&#xA;\end{dependency}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="100" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T14:31:32.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23283" CreationDate="2017-06-26T14:47:10.587" Score="1" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some English speakers insert a /t/ absent in standard American English in ⟨else⟩.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this arise? What’s the mechanism behind it? Is it related to the insertion of a /ks/ in ⟨espresso⟩, as in /ɛkspɹɛsɵ/, or the consonant-swapping some speakers perform in ⟨ask⟩, saying /ãks/? Is it a feature of AAVE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17408" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T15:32:50.247" Title="Why do some English speakers insert a /t/ in ⟨else⟩ and say /ɛlts/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23281" CreationDate="2017-06-26T15:02:46.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard this, and don't know which accents it pertains to. But it appears to me to be a perfectly normal example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis#Bridging_consonant_clusters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epenthesis&lt;/a&gt; (in fact it is mentioned in that article) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think /k/ in &quot;espresso&quot; is different: that is because of the influence of English words like &quot;express&quot;. /aks/ is an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metathesis&lt;/a&gt;, which is a different process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T15:02:46.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23281" CreationDate="2017-06-26T15:32:50.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In /l/, there's a closure between the sagittal middle of the tongue and the roof of the mouth. Air is released along the sides of the tongue. In /s/, more or less the opposite happens. The sides of the tongue are raised, and a groove is formed along the sagittal middle. If you move the tongue from an /l/ towards an /s/, and you don't time the formation of the groove correctly, you'll form a complete closure between the tongue blade and the roof of the mouth. The sound emerging from that configuration is a /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, /t/ is formed as a transition from /l/ to /s/ when the different tongue configurations are not perfectly synced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the reverse happens in Icelandic, where the sequence &lt;em&gt;sl-&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced /stl-/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T15:32:50.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-26T22:07:44.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll just add a bit of fuel to the above fire. As Sumelic notes, Zulu (and other Nguni languages) have /ɮ, ɬ, l/. The fact that /ɮ, l/ contrast suggests that /ɬ/ which is a voiceless version of /ɮ/ is not &quot;voiceless &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, it is a voiceless lateral fricative (as he notes), and not a voiceless /l/. Similarly, the existence of /ɬ/ in Lushootseed and numerous other PNW languages, &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; the fact that there aren't other voiceless versions of sonorants, indicates that Lushootseed /ɬ/ is a voiceless lateral fricative, not a voiceless /l/. Same goes for lateral fricatives in Chadic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrarily, evidence from Klamath indicates that would-be voiceless sonorants are phonologically aspirated. The language has /l l' ɬ/, that is plain, glottalized and &quot;voiceless&quot; /l/ (there is also a plain, glottalized and voiceless contrast in obstruents and sonorants). When /l/ or /n/ stand before /ɬ l'/, the result is [lʔ, lh]. This makes sense if /ɬ/ is really an aspirated sonorant, and the rule splits a geminated aspirated sonorant into a plain sonorant plus the corresponding laryngeal glide. &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.ucsc.edu/~ito/papers/1989_ito_mester_underspec.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ito &amp;amp; Mester 1989&lt;/a&gt; in their Rendaku paper mention a number of reasons for treating the &quot;voiceless sonorants&quot; of Burmese as being aspirated. (A similar argument from Lhasa Tibetan could probably be made, based on aspiration throwback in negative verb, but I don't have a datum on any /ɬ/-initial H toned verb). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been observed for English that &lt;em&gt;r,l&lt;/em&gt; &quot;devoice&quot; in &quot;pray, clay&quot;, but not &quot;spray, splay&quot;, but this is exactly where you get aspiration differences on stops in English. Although English does not have &quot;voiceless&quot; liquids, it does (in some dialects) have voiceless glides, e.g. &quot;which; human&quot;. There is evidence that these should be treated as &quot;aspirated&quot;. The argument centers on the general distribution of aspiration in English: it has to be foot-initial (at the beginning of a syllable, and not immediately preceded by a stressed syllable unless the syllable with aspiration is also stressed). This not only determines aspiration of voiceless stops, it also explains the distribution of &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; and its deletion in &lt;em&gt;prò(h)ibítion&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;prohíbit&lt;/em&gt;. This also affects the realization of &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt; which is &quot;voiceless&quot; in &lt;em&gt;where, what&lt;/em&gt;, but voiced in &lt;em&gt;anywhere, somewhat&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it has been conjectured that there are no &quot;voiceless sonorants&quot;, instead, there are aspirated sonorants (and glottalized sonorants), and plain sonorants. I have not seen a convincing example of [-voice] sonorants in any languages, though that is the usual description of how aspirated sonorants are produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T18:41:53.127" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T18:41:53.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23268" CreationDate="2017-06-26T22:37:08.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a fairly regular evolution.&#xA;Starting with the accusative ending &lt;em&gt;-átum&lt;/em&gt;, we have the loss of final nasal. Then the accented /a/ in the open syllable transitioned slowly to open /ε/ (cf. &lt;em&gt;-arium&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-aire&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-alem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-el&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;mare&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;mer&lt;/em&gt;). Eventually the post-accentual vowel got lost (and the /t/ probably first got voiced intervocally, lenited to a fricative and then lost voicing word finally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from &lt;em&gt;statum&lt;/em&gt;, there was something like &lt;em&gt;estεθ&lt;/em&gt; at this stage (cf. Chanson de Roland, first strophe - &lt;em&gt;(Charles li reis) ad estet in Espaigne&lt;/em&gt;). With the loss of word final consonant, the syllable opened and followed the rule of closed vowel in open syllable, becoming /e/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;été&lt;/em&gt; (summer) follows pretty much the same path from &lt;em&gt;aestas/aestatem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;état&lt;/em&gt; (state) is the exception here and I bet it is not a direct descendant but rather an early borrowing from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T22:48:24.820" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T22:48:24.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-27T06:36:28.687" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is it called in spoken English when a hard consonant at the end of a word 'pulls' the next word to it. For example: I don't like tea at all. --&gt; 'I don't like tea uh tall.&quot;  The wind is strong. --&gt; 'The win diz strong.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17414" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:04:01.300" Title="Is this a form of reduction?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23252" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:48:26.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is more about semantics than just a case adjustment. The semantics are those of 'inanimate causative action' or 'intermediate action' that require &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as a marker of non-animate instrument (cf. &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;hand&lt;/em&gt; VS  &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;a pen&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of a preposition, in my opinion, depends on innner semantics of the verb, which historically is close to a meaning of 'making a hap' (as a noun-derived word):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;happy &amp;lt;= &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hap&lt;/a&gt; &amp;lt;= happen &amp;lt;= ME happen &amp;lt;= PG &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/hampijan%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hampijaną&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the choice is governed by the semantics of the verb (and not by the complement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because parents are 'living beings', but the hap is not, it is not 'feasible' to use 'with', which goes with inanimate 'causative' instruments. And, yes, the causativity for the 'hap' (I'm not sure if causativity is the best term, but let's take this due to the lack of another option) is one of the key concepts here, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the &lt;em&gt;causativity,&lt;/em&gt; the choice of the 'case-preposition' is governed by the 'hap' and not 'parents'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a case of 'being proud', the choice of a 'case' is governed by the 'parents', not 'pride'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T18:59:19.633" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:59:19.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23288" CreationDate="2017-06-27T11:56:43.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called &quot;liaison&quot;, after the more systematic phenomenon in French, where consonants at the end of a word, which would ordinarily come at the end of a syllable, are pronounced as though they came at the beginning of a syllable whose vowel is the first sound of the following word.  Commonly, consonants at the beginning of a syllable are strongly articulated, i.e. &quot;fortis&quot;, while consonants at the end of a syllble are weakly articulated, i.e. &quot;lenis&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a period to stand for syllable boundary, in your example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I . don't . like . tea . at . all&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;through liaison becomes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I . don't . like . tea . a . tall&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;t&quot; at the end of the &quot;at&quot; syllable, since it is between vowels, is ordinarily lenited in American English by making it into a voiced flap.  But after liaison, because it is now at the beginning of a syllable, &quot;t&quot; is fortified by making it aspirated instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar example in American English is pronouncing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;this . evening&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with lenis &quot;s&quot;, as instead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;thi . sevening  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with fortis syllable-initial &quot;s&quot;.  In this example, the change in syllabification also has consequences for the pronunciation of the vowel of &quot;this&quot;, which is not reduced to schwa in the closed syllable of &quot;this&quot;, but is reduced in the open syllable formed by liaison, making it sound like &quot;the&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T12:04:01.300" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:04:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-27T18:19:21.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of Tolkien's most popularized languages, Quenya and Sindarin, possess voiced\voiceless pairs for L and R, though word-initially only. There are such minimal pairs as S &lt;em&gt;lheweg&lt;/em&gt; 'ear' vs. &lt;em&gt;leweg&lt;/em&gt; 'worm', and Q &lt;em&gt;hráva&lt;/em&gt; 'wild, savage' vs. &lt;em&gt;ráva&lt;/em&gt; 'bank of a river'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T18:19:21.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T01:16:41.320" Score="3" ViewCount="941" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lateral (egressive) consonants are made by obstructing the path of the airstream using some part of the tongue and directing it to escape the along the sides of the mouth. This gives lateral approximants like &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/ɫ/&lt;/code&gt; etc. their distinctive sound, different than the corresponding central approximants &lt;code&gt;/ɹ/~/z̞/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;j&lt;/code&gt; etc. Of course, the same principle applies to lateral fricatives, affricates and taps, which find use in a lot of languages. However, I have never seen a mention of lateral plosives. To me, it seems that they should exist – at least in principle. In fact, I think I can make what seem to be lateral plosives and even ejectives! So, is there really some physiological reason that makes lateral plosives impossible (i.e., what I am producing are something else), or are they never mentioned because no (living, known, attested, well-documented) language uses them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines, I have seen some stuff on laterally released (IPA &lt;code&gt;/◌ˡ/&lt;/code&gt;) plosives, such as the -ddle in middle &lt;code&gt;[ˈmɪdˡɫ̩]&lt;/code&gt;. Is this what I am calling a lateral plosive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T06:19:40.850" Title="Is a lateral plosive a thing?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23293" CreationDate="2017-06-28T05:03:12.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is basically a terminological problem. It is sometimes said that there are no lateral plosives, because you don't see any lateral plosive letter in the IPA row for plosives. Plosives are categorized in terms of the place where the constriction is, and &quot;lateral&quot; isn't considered a place, it's termed a &quot;manner&quot;. That's not totally inappropriate, since plain stops and affricates are (reasonably) classified differently, and lateral release is very similar to fricative release in its acoustic realization. If you change from IPA terminology to the terminology of phonological theory, plain stops (plosives) and affricates (including lateral affricates) have something in common: they stop airflow through the oral cavity, and are treated as &quot;stops&quot;. They differ in how they are released, so affricates (including lateral affricates) are stops with something else. (It is still not resolves &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; that something else is). There are a decent enough number of languages with lateral affricates, for example Lushootseed, Tlingit, Haida, Sotho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &quot;middle&quot;, however, it is better to treat the word as disyllabic, with syllabic [l̩] as the peak of the second syllable (whose onset of [d]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T05:03:12.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23293" CreationDate="2017-06-28T05:55:24.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally, the page of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VqEXghQ-ow0C&amp;amp;pg=PA53&amp;amp;lpg=PA53&amp;amp;dq=contrast%20voiceless%20lateral%20fricative%20approximant&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mtTIpDDx9D&amp;amp;sig=Y65AP7lFGFcgt5CKSQsaFu0EiBY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiU-NX9vNvUAhVo74MKHeA4AbM4ChDoAQgtMAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=contrast%20voiceless%20lateral%20fricative%20approximant&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1971)&#xA;by Peter Ladefoged that I cited recently in my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/23269/is-there-a-voiced-unvoiced-pair-for-r-or-l-in-any-language&quot;&gt;Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?&lt;/a&gt; actually has something to say about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Table 33 includes some items labeled lateral stops. In this label it might appear that the term lateral is being used in an unusual way; but the best way of distinguishing between the sounds at the beginning of the Zulu words for &lt;em&gt;pound&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dress up&lt;/em&gt; is by calling one of them an alveolar lateral click and the other an alveolar central click. It is theoretically possible to regard these items as sequences, but of which segments I am not at all clear. Consequently in practice &lt;strong&gt;it seems difficult to avoid applying the terms central and lateral to clicks&lt;/strong&gt;; and once the practice has been established of regarding certain stop consonants (the clicks) as central or lateral, it seems logical to extend this usage to ejectives (and, in other languages, to implosives and &lt;strong&gt;plosives&lt;/strong&gt;). There is clearly a physiological unity to &lt;strong&gt;ejective laterals&lt;/strong&gt; (such as Zulu cʎ̥’ and the more common tl̥’ which forms part of the ejective series in many Amerindian languages such as Navajo). It is very difficult to describe these gestures as sequences of two other gestures. So we may regard the central-lateral distinction as an additive component for stops, as well as for fricatives, approximants, and flaps. When used in relation to stops this opposition specifies not just the manner of the sound after the closure, but more especially &lt;strong&gt;the place of release of the closure.&lt;/strong&gt; (53-54)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bolding added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what this passage says, it sounds like &quot;ˡ&quot; would indeed signify what Ladefoged refers to as lateral plosives. Of course, different phoneticians might have different opinions. The Wikipedia page on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navajo phonology&lt;/a&gt;&quot; transcribes the lateral stop series as affricates, except for the plain unaspirated one (&quot;tˡ tɬʰ tɬʼ&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the table mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Table 33&lt;/strong&gt; Contrasts involving laterals in Zulu (suggested by L.W. Lanham). All these items are imperative forms of verbs, all with a sequence of low tone followed by high tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                               Voiced        Voiceless &#xA;Alveolar lateral approximant                   londa&#xA;                                               preserve&#xA;Alveolar lateral fricative                     ɮuɮa          ɬoɬa&#xA;                                               roam loose    prod&#xA;Alveolarlateral velaric stop (click)           g͡ʖoba         ʖoʖa&#xA;                                               pound         narrate&#xA;Palatal lateral glottalic stop (ejective)      cʎ’ecʎ’a&#xA;                                               tattoo&#xA;Postalveolar central velaric stop (click)      g͡ʗoka         ʗaʗa&#xA;                                               dress up      explain&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(54)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(rotated 90 degrees to fit better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T06:19:40.850" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T06:19:40.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2017-06-28T07:01:07.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://docsplayer.com/25363210-4d-f736f-f-d20c1f5d2bbc4d0cdd0b8a3e1dbb7e5b4cabbe-a1aabbf9b4a1b4cabbe3b2bfb7d6a3a8c8aba3a92e646f63.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I found a copy of the PDF&lt;/a&gt; available for download by selecting the Download tab and passing the CAPTCHA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably a widely pirated English lesson from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.koolearn.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;koolearn&lt;/a&gt;, which other websites copied and pasted without taking care of the IPA symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is the full mapping. There are other symbols between brackets but they appear as is in the PDF, not mapped by the braindead font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;5   ˈ&#xA;7   ˌ&#xA;9   ˌ&#xA;:   ː&#xA;?@  ＵＳ&#xA;A   æ&#xA;B   ɑ&#xA;C   ɔ&#xA;E   ə&#xA;F   ʃ&#xA;I   ɪ&#xA;J   ʊ&#xA;L   ɚ&#xA;N   ŋ&#xA;Q   ʌ&#xA;R   ɔ&#xA;T   ð&#xA;U   u&#xA;V   ʒ&#xA;W   θ&#xA;Z   ɛ&#xA;\   ɜ&#xA;^   ɡ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T07:01:07.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23272" CreationDate="2017-06-28T14:10:54.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit and wider the Vedic language really &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substratum_in_the_Vedic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;had a non-IE substratum&lt;/a&gt;, or, to be more precise, no less than three substrata: Dravidian, Munda, and one more called &quot;unknown Language X&quot;. Apart from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.313685&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;T. Burrow's The Sanskrit Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; starting from page 374, here are more sources on that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tamilvu.org/slet/l4330/l4330pd1.jsp?bookid=261&amp;amp;pno=53&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; on Dravidian substratum. The page navigation is in Tamil, the &quot;next page&quot; button is &quot;அடுத்த பக்கம்&quot; in the bottom right corner of the page;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/sarasvati/dictionary/9MUNDA.HTM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list&lt;/a&gt; of Sanskrit lexemes of Munda origin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T15:10:51.170" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T15:10:51.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2017-06-28T21:32:45.943" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;All world languages are related. Specially the semitic and indo european languages  renamed by the linguist Zaidan Ali Jassem as Eurabian or Urbanian languages. His work is published in a serie of articles as the radical linguistic theory approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17422" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T21:32:45.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23300" CreationDate="2017-06-28T22:11:47.957" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the name and nature of this odd bit of consistent yet seemingly redundant English found in many forms of colloquial English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;She gave me dates, she did!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The little lads ran home, they did!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's getting dark, it is.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I apparently speak like this, I do.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We'll wait 'ere, we i'll!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is this repetitive pair at the end for? It appears to be for the last clause of a spoken sentence, and reiterates the subject and tense of it. It also appears to either never, or rarely, be interrogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what exactly this little utterance is for, and yet I seem use it IRL all the time, I do. So... what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T22:38:31.660" Title="What's this punctuating feature of some peoples' English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23299" CreationDate="2017-06-28T22:38:31.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &quot;tag&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/psicl/files/9/01_Bublitz.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a paper on tags. &lt;a href=&quot;http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED066081.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Armagost 1972&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;English declarative tags, intonation tags, and tag questions&lt;/em&gt; is a good introduction, IMO. Your examples are &quot;declarative tags&quot; (section I), and there are other types (You won't, will you?&quot;; &quot;You won't, wont you?&quot;)&quot;. Basically, tags convey pragmatic information, about speaker attitudes and presuppositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T22:38:31.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23269" CreationDate="2017-06-28T23:24:29.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mehri has voiced and voiceless laterals, conventionally transcribed as “l” and “ś” respectively. Many scholars ascribe this contrast to proto-Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T23:24:29.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-29T14:04:22.467" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a long shot but it will try it anyway?... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on developing a speech recognition application, capable of detecting utterances consisting of the words yes/no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A utterance could be of sort  &quot;yes no yes yes yes no yes&quot; spoken at a normal speed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently detecting the words yes, no and silence -  so its a 3-class problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently became interested in phonology, and the possibility of detecting words at a phone level could be cool, but  a bit confused on what the words  yes, no would be at a phone level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is phonetic division a subjective things us humans do, or are there general baseline rules for how words are divided into phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17431" LastEditorUserId="17431" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T21:40:26.983" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T21:40:26.983" Title="What phonetic elements is the word yes and no put together by?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-07-15T14:57:00.730" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23305" CreationDate="2017-06-29T14:43:40.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human speech is noisy, and speech recognition must be able to find patterns in the noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phones have a series of articulatory attributes: places and manners of articulation, tongue shape, etc.; which cause voice resonance and distortion. All of those variables are continuous, and a continuous change in one of these parameters produces a continuous change in the produced phone. There's a spectrum of sounds between [a] and [i], for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different languages make different distinctions between sounds, and some attributes are more important than others. For example, the distinction between voiced stops and voiced fricatives is significant in English but not in Spanish; similarly, the distinction between plain and aspirated among voiceless stops is significant in Hindi but not in English. So yes, it's a subjective distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, not every English speaker pronounces yes and no the same way. There's a general pattern that makes a yes or no word recognizable, and a system could be trained to recognize these distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On its most basic form, you only need to be able to recognize &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; from everything else, including ambient noise and other words. In fact, this might be a much easier problem to solve than a general speech recognition system, since you don't need to tell &quot;no&quot; from &quot;know&quot; (a context-dependent distinction) or lone &quot;yes&quot; from &quot;YESterday&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You still need to be able to recognize the &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; said speakers other than yourself, and that will require training your system with a decent amount of speech recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T14:43:40.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23305" CreationDate="2017-06-29T16:24:54.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you are not using the expression &quot;phone level&quot; in its technical sense. Also &quot;detecting words at the phone level&quot; isn't meaningful, but perhaps you intend &quot;detecting words, given a waveform-to-phone conversion&quot;. To clarify, a &quot;phone&quot; is a reduction of the continuous acoustic waveform to percepually-based units (i.e. a narrow phonetic transcription). The words in question could be [jɛs] and [nɜʊ], but that really depends on dialect and details of a given token (e.g. [jɛs n̥ɜʊ] could occur). The premise of such a conversion is that there is a language-independent mapping from acoustic property to surface categorization: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/23263/what-are-the-current-hurdles-to-automatic-audio-to-ipa-transcription&quot;&gt;this q&amp;amp;a&lt;/a&gt; for discussion). However, that premise turns out to be an ideal rather than a reality, at least currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of getting from continuous waveforms to ordered discrete unit is not subjective (it is based on real world facts), but we don't understand those facts well. Segmentation is a poorly-understood objective reality. There are numerous &quot;baseline rules&quot; in the phonetic literature over the past 70 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to &quot;detect&quot; a word based on a conversion to phones (not phonemes, which is where phonology comes in) you would need a list of all of the phone realizations of a given word, and that would be a pretty huge task, even using just one speaker. If you manage to solve the continous-to-discrete conversion problem, you could gather a large corpus of tokens of the words of interest, run that through your converter and (manually) tag instances of &quot;no&quot; and &quot;yes&quot;; that would give you a list of attested phone sequences representing the words in question, though not necessarily all of the possible realizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T16:24:54.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20219" CreationDate="2017-06-30T02:39:36.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to understanding is the difference between objects and names of objects: &#xA;A meronom is a part. &#xA;A meronym is the name of a part. &#xA;A meronomy is a relationship between parts and sub-parts. &#xA;Meronymy is a relationship between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mereology is the mathematical study of parts and wholes. It cares about mathematical objects, not about words. The kind of mathematical structure mereology studies is a relation called a meronomy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not 'mereonomy'? You do see that sometimes. But 'meronomy' is more common, and more correct, albeit also more obnoxious. You see, someone was being clever: 'Meronomy' is a back-formation from 'taxonomy'. Taxonomy is based on subsumption, rather than composition. Taxonomy is in turn the basis for set theory. Set theory and mereology are alternative ways to formulate a universal foundation for mathematics. If you're a programmer, you can think of them as the difference between relational data structures and object-oriented data structures. (If you're not a programmer, you're on your own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a metonym is a figure of speech that substitutes one word or phrase for another. This is superficially unrelated to meronymy and meronomy. But if a metonym happens to involve substituting a meronym for a holonym, then you have a kind of metonymy called synecdoche. Actually, though, I think the Wikipedia entries on these other terms include &quot;Not to be confused with metonymy&quot; based on the similar spellings, rather than this somewhat tortured connection. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17436" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T02:39:36.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T08:49:15.183" Score="7" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to apply Cornell Semantic Parsing framwork &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cornell-lic/spf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/cornell-lic/spf&lt;/a&gt; (implementation of Combinatory Categorial Grammars CCG) to Russian language. This framework takes natural language texts, learns grammar and translates those texts into logical expressions (lambda calculus) that are useful for natural language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is - are there some developments of CCG for Russian language? Google gives almost nothing fundamental, only some examples are considered. But I searched only resources in English language. Maybe there are good developments and efforts that are available only in Russian language? I would be happy to hear about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is general consensus about applicability of CCG to Russian/Slavic language? Russian has very rich inflection forms and very uncertain word order (inflection creates big part of meaning), so, this can be complex. But maybe there are efforts still?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas and hints are welcome. It would be nice to continue already existing efforts and not to reinvent everything from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" OwnerDisplayName="TomR" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T10:21:06.400" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T10:21:06.400" Title="Combinatory Categorial Grammar (комбинаторная категориальная грамматика) developments and lexicon for Russian language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22776" CreationDate="2017-06-30T16:15:24.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English verb &lt;em&gt;to ponder&lt;/em&gt; carries the two meanings of &lt;em&gt;to think, mull over&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to weigh, measure&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;pondus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;weigh&quot;, which gave both the Italian verbs &lt;em&gt;pensare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pesare&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to think' and &quot;to weigh&quot; respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T16:15:24.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22760" CreationDate="2017-06-30T16:32:40.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nahuatl &lt;em&gt;macuilli&lt;/em&gt; &quot;five&quot; comes from &lt;em&gt;ma-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hand&quot; and &lt;em&gt;cui&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to take&quot;, and so does &lt;em&gt;makwil&lt;/em&gt; in Pipil and similar cognates in Yaqui, Shoshone and other Uto-Aztecan languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T16:32:40.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T18:43:37.410" Score="6" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently studying Japanese and Korean for professional reasons and have become very interested in Middle Chinese as the hearth of substantial vocabulary in many East Asian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recalling my days studying Latin in high school, I've become interested in learning, or at least exposing myself to, Middle Chinese of c. ~1000CE but have found finding learning resources very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interest in learning such a language, however, presumptiously assumes the language has been fully reconstructed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm certainly able to track etymologies of individual words to their Middle Chinese forms, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Phonetic_correspondences_between_Modern_Chinese_and_on.27yomi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;here&quot;&gt;Example of Japanese's Borrowing from Middle Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, knowing isolated words is hardly satisfying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one learn Middle Chinese in the way one might learn Latin or Ancient Greek? How fully has the grammar, lexicon or syntax been recovered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understandably, with no written texts and native speakers, this may be little more than an academic exercise, but for me, understanding the etymological context for Japanese and Korean vocabulary would certainly be worth the effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13681" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T14:19:30.567" Title="To what extent has Middle Chinese been reconstructed?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T23:20:21.387" Score="14" ViewCount="402" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to understand what are the rules for using Chinese punctuation symbols and I stumbled upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation#cite_note-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, which states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For instance, a Song Dynasty print of Chronicles of Huayang used&#xA;  full-width spaces to denote a stop,[4] whereas a print of Jingdian&#xA;  Shiwen from the same dynasty simply used &quot;。&quot; and &quot;、&quot; marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Jingdian Shiwen&quot; is a 6th century dictionary (according to this wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingdian_Shiwen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my question. How come that &lt;code&gt;。&lt;/code&gt;and &lt;code&gt;、&lt;/code&gt; are so similar to their western counterparts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a mere coincidence (as far I know Chinese could not have studied any latin based scripts at the time) or maybe there is an underlying logic for using very similar symbols for expressing the idea of full stop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure on which area I should post this question. Hopefully, the answer will be more related to linguistics/history of linguistics, than to history of China. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T10:25:17.480" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T10:19:39.420" Title="Why are Chinese punctuation marks 。and 、so similar to its western style equivalents?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T00:13:24.087" Score="8" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Older people living in some rural areas north of Venice use the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ for many words, like &lt;em&gt;cena&lt;/em&gt; &quot;supper&quot; which is pronounced &lt;em&gt;θena&lt;/em&gt;, exactly like in Spanish &lt;em&gt;cena&lt;/em&gt; (Castilian, not Latin American) while in Italian the pronunciation is &lt;em&gt;t͡ʃena&lt;/em&gt;. Other examples can be &lt;em&gt;graθie&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;grazie&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;θereza&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;ciliegia&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cherry&quot; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The /θ/ sound was allegedly introduced by a Greek saint during his evangelization of those areas, and it remains as a legacy of his origin since it corresponds to the Greek letter &lt;em&gt;theta&lt;/em&gt;. I've read than one can even trace the path followed by the saint by looking at the places where this sound is still being used, from Venice and up to Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and Belluno in the Alps mountains. Towns located a few miles apart didn't adopt the &lt;em&gt;theta&lt;/em&gt; at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether this story is true or not, but I'd be happy if it could be confirmed! Anyway, despite its respectable origin, the /θ/ spoken in those parts of Italy is today unequivocally associated with poorly educated people, especially of older generations and living outside the big cities. The Venetian dialect and its variants are still widely used throughout the Venice region, including every urban area, but the vast majority of people never use the /θ/ sound, which has a decidedly &quot;peasant&quot; connotation. It is generally replaced with /s/ or /tz/, so in the example above &lt;em&gt;θena&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;sena&lt;/em&gt;, which is perfectly acceptable in any conversation and in theatrical works spoken in dialect, where the use of /θ/ is absolutely out of question!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stigmatization may be difficult to grasp for English or other non-Italian speakers, but it makes perfect sense for an Italian as it doesn't exist in our alphabet and it is so distinctly different from all the other phonemes we use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grandparents didn't speak with the /θ/, but sometimes they'd throw in words with this sound to stress the fact that they grew up pronouncing words this way but then they became more educated, and also to mock people that still speak in dialect this way! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other example of phoneme stigmatization, not necessarily associated with the level of education but in any other context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T12:53:37.790" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T21:23:50.720" Title="Any other example of &quot;socially stigmatized phoneme&quot; like the &quot;th&quot; sound in some Venetian dialect?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;&lt;prestige&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23319" CreationDate="2017-07-01T06:24:19.403" Score="10" ViewCount="10879" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like &quot;If it sounds like Japanese but you can't understand what is being said, then it's Korean&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What characteristics, apart from the lack of tones, are shared by the two languages making them sound similar? And what explanations, apart from the Altaic Hypothesis, are there for the two languages being similar for those characteristics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T21:36:50.633" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T08:21:29.783" Title="Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T07:58:19.283" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to apply &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cornell-lic/spf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cornell Semantic Parsing framework&lt;/a&gt; (implementation of Combinatory Categorial Grammars CCG) to the German language. This framework takes natural language texts, learns grammar and translates those texts into logical expressions (lambda calculus) that are useful for natural-language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;Are there some developments of CCG for German language?&lt;/strong&gt; Google gives almost nothing fundamental, only some examples are considered. But I searched only resources in English language. Maybe there are good developments and efforts that are available only in German language? I would be happy to hear about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is general consensus about applicability of CCG to German language? From the one side German language has strict word order and therefore CCG seems to be applicable. From the other side,  German has article and word inflections and this can make things more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas and hints are welcome. It would be nice to continue already existing efforts and not to reinvent everything from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" OwnerDisplayName="TomR" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T23:08:15.657" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T22:48:49.107" Title="Combinatory Categorial Grammar developments and lexicon for German language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T17:41:32.713" Score="4" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know of parallel corpora for English-Spanish (that is, texts or language originally in English translated into Spanish and aligned by excerpts of texts) other than those on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Opus list&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am particularly interested in finding a corpus of conversation, interviews or other spoken English translated into Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Opus&lt;/a&gt; list of parallel corpora:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corpora I am using already:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Europarl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Global Voices (an online news site)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;News Commentary (a collection of opinion articles)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tatoeba (edited my manythings.org)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ted Talks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ubuntu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;UN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corpora I have rejected because of poor alignment or other issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Subtitles (many erroneous translations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Books corpus (poorly aligned; many erroneous translation pairings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gnome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;KDE4 (too much bad English)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ECB (too many errors)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DGT (language too technical, too many obscure words)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eu-bookshop (poorly aligned; many erroneous translation pairings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any others? (Please include links.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17443" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T13:34:36.380" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:34:36.380" Title="Parallel English-Spanish corpora?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23315" CreationDate="2017-07-01T17:53:45.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Extremely similar phonemic systems. In particular, both languages tightly limit syllable-ending consonants, unlike English which permits almost any consonant to end a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Large numbers of loan words from Chinese converted into those similar phonemic systems means that there are many phonetic cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Korean&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Korean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17443" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T17:53:45.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23315" CreationDate="2017-07-01T18:13:44.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The similarity in sound is the result of two factors: overlapping phonetic inventories, and word length (which affects syllable duration). If you wanted to quantify the similarity, those would be the factors to focus on. The other part of &quot;why&quot; focuses not on what you are reacting to, but what causes the languages to be similar. The best explanation is that this is an areal feature. Japanese and Korean sound similar, but Korean and Khakas do too, likewise you can fold in Kazakh, Mongolian and Chukchi (possibly other languages of the area that I haven't heard). However, Chukchi doesn't sound a lot like Japanese, it sounds more like Mongolian, which sounds like Khakas, which sounds like Korean... We can rule out common genetic basic because (1) errm, Altaic isn't really a valid historical linguistic group, (2) Turkic spoken further west does not sound like related Khakas etc. and (3) Chukchi is not vaguely hypothesized to be related to Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lack of tone would not be relevant, since Korean has tonal and non-tonal dialects and virtually all dialects of Japanese (maybe indeed all) have tone, the reduced-contrast system type most common in tone languages (as contrasted with Chinese and SE Asian languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar phenomenon exists in the Pacific Northwest, where the languages all sound alike, but they are split up into a half-dozen or more genetic groups. For some reason, in contact situations, people can easily pick up a &quot;foreign accent&quot; without the kind of deep linguistic contact that results in exchange of many words and morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T18:13:44.453" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T01:18:35.200" Score="-1" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;In other words, how would understanding non-linguists' (or the folks') beliefs about and attitudes towards language help us understand dialect diversity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17369" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T15:25:59.193" Title="Why would sociolinguists want to study perceptual dialectology?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23322" CreationDate="2017-07-02T01:41:27.017" Score="1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I pronounce [v] and [ʋ], [v] sounds just like [ʋ̤]. This led me to analyze them via spectrum. So I recorded [f], [v] and [ʋ] with my smartphone, moved them to my computer, normalized them with Audacity, and graphed their spectrum with Matlab. Here're the sounds I recorded and edited: &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/ndos-dannyu/sets/phonetics-test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://soundcloud.com/ndos-dannyu/sets/phonetics-test&lt;/a&gt; And here're the spectrums, [f], [v] and [ʋ] respectively:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mKP4X.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mKP4X.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;f&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OPDIr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OPDIr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;v&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjXZQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjXZQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ʋ&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As you see, the spectrum of [v] looks like an intermediate sound between [f] and [ʋ]. At low frequency, it is more like [ʋ], but at high frequency, it is more like [f]. It really turns out that [v] is [ʋ̤]. This leads me to few questions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Does this also apply to other places of articulation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; If so, does this mean that usage of ˔ and ˕ (ex. β̞, ɹ̝, ʁ̝, ʁ̞) to distinguish a fricative and an approximant is from a misconception, and must be distinguished by the breathy-voice mark?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17445" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T04:58:10.843" Title="Voiced fricatives are just breathy approximants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23321" CreationDate="2017-07-02T04:58:10.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be surprised if your native language has these phonemes, which suggests that they are the result of you attempting to produce sounds based on instructions in a phonetics class. If not, you need to identify your native language. Indeed, they do not sound like human language sounds, rather they resemble synthesized fricatives. The relevance of this is that to study the acoustics of a given sound, you need to actually have a production from a native speaker. The recordings that you posted are not suitable lab quality for acoustic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot draw any conclusions based on single tokens. While [f] and [ʋ,v] in your spectra look different enough, there isn't any evidence for significant difference between [ʋ] and [v]. You might establish such a difference with e.g. 5 samples of each of those sounds. If you are familiar with the literature on acoustic studies of breathiness, you will know that there are various ways to quantify distribution of energy over frequencies. Neither of the voiced tokens particularly resembles the sharp spectral downtilt associated with breathiness. &#xA;Changing of the general pattern of ups and downs as a metric of phonatory distinctions is valid only for a constant vocal tract configuration, especially place of articulation, since the amplitude of harmonics is strongly determined by the resonance properties of the vocal tract (where the constriction is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are no languages that contrast breathy voiced vs. modal voiced fricatives at the same place of articulation. Breathiness requires high rates of voiced transglottal airflow, which requires a fairly unobstructed supraglottal tract to prevent buildup of air pressure (which would extinguish voicing). Fricatives on the other hand require a fairly constricted oral tracts and zero nasal airflow, in order to get the high rates of airflow past the oral constriction that generates a fricative. If the transglottal airflow is the high rate associated with breathiness, that airflow would be rapidly terminated by pressure buildup from the narrow constriction necessary for a fricative (but not a sonorant). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T04:58:10.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T06:55:18.617" Score="0" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a complete list of English compound words (or a frequency list of English compound words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd prefer a list that lists the compound word and also its constituent words (for instance, widespread,wide,spread).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_compound_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary's category listing for compound words&lt;/a&gt;, but it has the drawbacks of being a Wiki rather than a professional publication and also of not listing the component words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_compound_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_compound_words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17443" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T16:26:42.077" Title="Complete List of English Compound Words?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T09:56:47.627" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a degree &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word (e.g., E. &lt;em&gt;how,&lt;/em&gt; G. &lt;em&gt;wie&lt;/em&gt;, F. &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt;, Sp. &lt;em&gt;qué&lt;/em&gt;,  It. &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt;, Port. &lt;em&gt;como&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) grades an adjective, in some languages (= the 'Pied-Piping Type') the adjective must accompany the degree word as the latter gets fronted into the Focus position of the CP layer), whereas in others (= the 'Non-Pied-Piping Type') only the degree &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-word gets fronted, whereas the adjective remains &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, for example, in English we say &lt;em&gt;How beautiful you are __, Rome, when it rains!&lt;/em&gt; not * &lt;em&gt;How you are __ beautiful, Rome, when it rains!&lt;/em&gt;, whereas in Italian they would say &lt;em&gt;Come/Quanto sei bella, Roma, quando piove!&lt;/em&gt;, not  * &lt;em&gt;Come/quanto bella sei, Roma, quando piove!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I had occasionally come across such expressions in isolation in various languages and was aware that the non-Pied-Piping ones should not really occur, since they violate what used to pass as a would-be universal principle (‘the Left Branch Condition’), I had never stopped to think about how strange the geographic distribution of the two options is and how heterogeneous the languages having each type of construction are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, to consider just some of the major languages spoken in Europe, to the ‘pied-piping’ group belong (at least) a) Germanic languages like English, German, Frisian, Dutch, Swedish (but not Danish!), Norwegian, Icelandic, and Yiddish, b) Latin, and Latin-derived Romance languages like Spanish, Catalan, Corsican, and Romanian, c) Slovenian, d) Modern Greek, e) Latvian and Estonian, and f) Finnish, if I am not misinformed. To the ‘non-pied-piping’ group, on the other hand, belong no less heterogeneous languages, including, from West to East, a) Romance ones like Portuguese, Galician, French and Italian, b) Danish, c) Lituanian, and d) both western and Eastern Slavic languages like Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. Neither list is exhaustive (I do not know what happens in this respect in Irish, or Hungarian, for example), but a simple glance at the map of Europe shows how messy that distribution is, particularly in its Western half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is this: Does anybody here know of any coherent theoretical account of the nature of the apparent ‘parameter’ that explains the possibility of the ‘non-Pied-Piping' construction (&lt;em&gt;contra&lt;/em&gt; the 'LBC' principle), the  strange geographic distribution, and the internal typological heterogeneity of the resulting two groups of languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T09:56:47.627" Title="On +/-Pied-Piping of A's in AP's containing wh-degree words" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23245" CreationDate="2017-07-02T11:39:02.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the time being, I could not find any free corpora for the Hindi Language, however for those who are curious to find out the available corpora (irrespective of the price) here are some:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/hindiwac-corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi WaC Corpus: Sketch Engine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/documentation/tenten-corpora/#toggle-id-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi TenTen Corpus: Sketch Engine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/opus-parallel-corpora-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPUS Parallel Corpora: Sketch Engine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17372" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T11:39:02.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23320" CreationDate="2017-07-02T15:25:59.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the question of whether your instructor was speaking of auditory perception and dialectology, a study of attitudes regarding language reveals much about attitudes about culture. If people say that dialect of language X is &quot;refined&quot; or some such notion, they probably have a positive attitude towards that culture, and if they say that the language form is &quot;primitive&quot; or some such term, they probably have the opposite attitude. If they just say &quot;Hm, sounds a bit different&quot;, then they are probably more neutral. You would want to also survey attitudes about non-linguistic features of the culture. Because people generally like to be like everyone else (there are exceptions), that predicts the direction of language shift. If everybody speaking disparaged dialect X shifts to speaking prestige dialect Y, dialect X will cease to exist, and dialect diversity will be decreased. If people are neutral, diversity will not tend to abate so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T15:25:59.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23119" CreationDate="2017-07-02T22:57:36.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example, whether &lt;em&gt;His boss&lt;/em&gt; is analysed as a DP or as an NP with the noun &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; as head, the possessive &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; c-command &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; (you are mistaken in this respect), which, as a consequence, is 'free' and satisfies Principle C of Binding Theory, as all r-expressions must. What Principle C says is only that r-expressions must &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be &lt;strong&gt;c-commanded&lt;/strong&gt; (and therefore automatically 'bound') by any co-referential expression, be it in the same 'binding domain' (the clause, in this case) or in a higher one, but that does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; block co-reference between &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt;: as &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; c-command &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt;, it cannot bind it either (= make &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;obligatorily&lt;/strong&gt; co-referential with it). Principle C &lt;strong&gt;allows&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be co-referential; it by no means forces then to be &lt;strong&gt;non&lt;/strong&gt;-coreferential, a very different claim. In consequence, in your example the possessive &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; indeed refer to the same individual as the noun &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; does (= John, in that case), but it need &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;; it may also refer to any other male individual. The only r-expression that does c-command &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; in your example is &lt;em&gt;His boss&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;His boss&lt;/em&gt; cannot possibly be interpreted as referring to the same individual &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; does; if it could, the r-expression &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; would automatically be 'bound', in violation of Principle C of Binding Theory, and to save the sentence it would be necessary to replace it with the matching reflexive &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;, according to Principle A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T22:57:36.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23334" CreationDate="2017-07-03T05:27:16.320" Score="4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cyrillic letter Ge (Г) is often Anglicised as ⟨g⟩. However, this depends on its pronunciation within each source language. Ge in Ukrainian is closest to the English /h/, and is therefore translated as ⟨h⟩. Keep in mind that an Anglicisation system is intended for English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ge in Belarusian is often Anglicised as ⟨h⟩ (as in the name Siarhei), despite being closer to the English ⟨g⟩. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T17:24:01.540" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T17:24:01.540" Title="Why is ⟨Г⟩ in Belarusian commonly Anglicised as ⟨h⟩, not ⟨g⟩?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23347" CreationDate="2017-07-03T13:23:25.387" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a man.&#xA;There are men. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we explain that agreement of the verb comes from the object in this case alone? What movement happens in the verb complex of the xbar tree of the above sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T05:48:13.113" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T05:48:13.113" Title="How do we explain the fact that agreement comes from the object with 'there'?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23332" CreationDate="2017-07-03T14:53:06.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'The man' in your sentence is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an object, since 'to be' cannot have objects at all, neither direct objects, nor indirect ones. In your sentence 'the man' is &lt;strong&gt;the subject&lt;/strong&gt; of the sentence, and, naturally, the verb agrees with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That kind of a sentence, with 'there is / there are' construction has a reverse word order, 'there' being the marker of the reversal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, a typical sentence usually begins with the theme (old, already known information, if it's an NP, then it's marked with 'the') followed by the rheme (new information, NPs are indefinite in this position, marked with 'a/an'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The/that man is ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, this sentence looks unfinished, the new information, the rheme, should follow, but it's absent. Now, let's complete it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The/that man is an artist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English the new information, the rheme, is usually at the end of the sentence, since we begin with something known and then tell something new about it. But sometimes it is the subject which is the new information. Since English has a fixed word order in the sentence, we face a dilemma: the new information must be at the end of the sentence, but since the new information is the subject, it must be at the beginning of the sentence. English has a way out of this situation: reversed word order when you put the subject after the predicate verb and mark that change by putting 'there' before the verb to fill the slot where the subject should have been. This 'there' is a purely formal filler, it doesn't indicate a place, it isn't translated into other languages when a sentence with 'there is / there are' is translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I ask you to describe your room, you'd probably like to tell about the furniture in your room. &quot;[In] my room&quot; is the theme, the information I already know, and you'd start with it and then name the furniture items which will be the information new to me, the rheme, that's why the nouns you'll use will be indefinite, but still they will be subjects. This is exactly the situation when you need the 'there is / there are' construction. You'll probably say something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my room there is a table, a chair, a sofa, and a book-shelf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note, since 'there' in 'there is / there are' has no lexical meaning of is own, if you do want to use the real adverb 'there' as an adverbial modifier of place, you'll have to use it for the second time in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a table there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only the second 'there' that names a place and it's only that second 'there' that will be translated into another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T19:02:54.310" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T19:02:54.310" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23331" CreationDate="2017-07-03T15:16:46.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because it's the closest unambiguous sound.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belarusian also has a /ɡ/ sound, used mainly in loanwords. Some speakers follow the convention of Ukrainian and write this sound with &amp;lt;Ґ ґ&amp;gt;, though this isn't official.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there's both a /ɡ/ and a /ɣ/ phoneme, the latter is usually romanized as &amp;lt;H h&amp;gt;, again based on Ukrainian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T15:16:46.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23339" CreationDate="2017-07-03T16:12:48.100" Score="2" ViewCount="1189" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary seems[ &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; to be here]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary tried [PRO to be here]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't Mary be generated in spec VP of 'seems' but can in 'tried'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead it looks like it works more like a passive verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary is believed [ &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; to be here]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in context of The Minimalist Program by Chomsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T16:45:31.920" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T22:47:21.870" Title="Why does 'seem' behave differently?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23245" CreationDate="2017-07-03T16:25:56.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wortschatz corpora at Leipzig University offer some Hindi corpora of different sizes and genres for download, go to this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/en/download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/en/download/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and click on &quot;more&quot; and than on &quot;Hindi&quot; (the page URL stays the same, but some javascript magic selects the Hindi language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T16:25:56.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23332" CreationDate="2017-07-03T16:42:59.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments reflect the complexity of &quot;there&quot; subjects, and I'm fairly certain that jlawler can fill us in on previous work on the topic. I will just long-comment on data problems. First, 'there' can be a deictic or a dummy (the former exemplified by &quot;There is the remote, here is the TV&quot;, meaning &quot;over yonder&quot;; the latter by &quot;There's a monkey in the garden&quot;). Within the dummy uses, there + copula can be further divided into existential and what one call &quot;considerative&quot; versions: &quot;there are fleas on the cat&quot; meaning that fleas exist or are present on the cat, versus &quot;well, one possibility is...&quot;. In response to a question like &quot;Where shall we go&quot; or &quot;What do you want for dinner&quot;, you can say &quot;One possibility is NP&quot;, or &quot;There's NP&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A caveat is required about judgments: when I say &quot;X is ungrammatical&quot;, I mean it's unacceptable in the dialect that I speak, so it's not a claim about rural Floridian or Tasmanian English. With the deictic use, agreement with post-copular NP is mandatory: &quot;&lt;em&gt;There&lt;/em&gt; are (*is) the keys I've been looking for&quot; – &quot;there&quot; can be stressed, and you can substitute various other deictics like &quot;here, yonder&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existential &quot;there&quot;, which is unstressed, generally requires a following locative (which could be a deictic like &quot;there&quot;, &quot;here&quot;, &quot;yonder&quot;), so &quot;There are children in that school&quot;, &quot;There is a child in that school&quot; (paraphrasing &quot;A child is in that school&quot;), but *&quot;There is a child a thief&quot; (from &quot;The child is a thief&quot;). The subject is indefinite (&quot;There is a (*the) cow in the well&quot;). Agreement is required (*&quot;There is cows in the hills&quot;) though this may be possible in some dialects), and contraction of the copula is optional. This use is perfectly normal as an out-of-the-blue utterance, and you could felicitously enter a room and say &quot;Holy cow, there's a pig in the bed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closely related construction is the &quot;There copula NP RElClaus&quot; construction, exemplified by &quot;There are people who speak French&quot;, &quot;There is a child who sings opera&quot;. The previous existential construction could be derived from &quot;NP is LOC&quot; by inversion, but this is not plausible here (*&quot;People are who speak French&quot;, though ok &quot;People exist who speak French&quot;). I can't at this point muster an opinion as to whether &quot;?There exists a cow in the well&quot; is ungrammatical versus just stupid-sounding. The agreement patterns are the same for these constructions, whether or not you use the copula or &quot;exist&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construction &quot;There copula NP&quot; doesn't take a post-verbal locative (or anything), and is used to offer an NP choice: this requires a context that calls for a choice. In response to &quot;How do I remove this tree?&quot;, the answer can be &quot;There's dynamite, there's a chainsaw, there's the bucksaw, or there's an ax&quot;. A singular copula is AFAICT always possible and maybe required (&quot;How do we fasten this board to the house?&quot; &quot;There's nails&quot; *&quot;There are nails&quot;, though this might be possible for some speakers of my dialect). Contraction is probably required: &quot;There's (*There is) chicken&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you have to pin down the specific construction of the form &quot;There copula NP&quot; that you're looking at. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T16:42:59.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T18:14:29.410" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to ask &quot;Is there a language that marks singular?&quot; but found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singulative_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. So instead, I'm asking: Are there any purely singulative-collective languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (admittedly abstract) idea behind this is that if the answer is affirmative, singulative-collective and singular-plural should be considered different variants of the number category, whereas a negative answer would indicate that they may be different number categories. Note that an affirmative answer would contradict &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenberg%27s_linguistic_universals#Morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greenberg's universal 35&lt;/a&gt; (I don't have the book near me, so maybe someone will also expand on this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;35&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&quot;There is no language in which the plural does not have some nonzero allomorphs, whereas there are languages in which the singular&#xA;  is expressed only by zero. The dual and the trial are almost never&#xA;  expressed only by zero.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note (entirely besides the point): The last sentence is funny. What does &quot;almost never&quot; mean here --- does he have a counterexample or is he  over-hedging? And what would the dual and the trial being expressed only by zero imply (I suspect it would imply a contradiction, but don't want to dig into this ATM)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T18:14:29.410" Title="Is there a purely singulative-collective language?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23335" CreationDate="2017-07-03T19:11:21.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is that &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; is a two-place predicate that assigns an Agent theta role to &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; and a Theme (or similar) role to its infinitival complement, whereas &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;monadic&lt;/strong&gt; (in your example), must assign &lt;strong&gt;just one&lt;/strong&gt; theta role, to its complement, and cannot have a second argument in its specifier to which it can assign Agent (or any other) role. [Of course, &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; may also be two-place, e.g., in &lt;em&gt;It seems &lt;strong&gt;to me&lt;/strong&gt; that Mary is an excellent teacher&lt;/em&gt;, but in that case it must have two &lt;strong&gt;'internal'&lt;/strong&gt; arguments, and assign a Theme role to the subordinate clause and an &lt;strong&gt;Experiencer&lt;/strong&gt; role to the PP complement &lt;em&gt;to me&lt;/em&gt;; under no circumstances can it assign an Agent role to the PP &lt;em&gt;to me&lt;/em&gt;, because Agent is never assigned to an internal argument in complement position; Agent can only be assigned in Spec v/V position, and, of course, never by a non-agentive verb like &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt;]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence of that difference in argument structure between &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt;, in a sentence like &lt;em&gt;Mary tried [PRO to be there]&lt;/em&gt; a PRO is needed in the subordinate clause to discharge the Theme role projected by the predicate &lt;em&gt;be there&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;some other argument&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;, in this case) is also needed to discharge the Agent role assigned by &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; in the upper clause to its own Spec V. If you had only one argument, i.e., if you base-generated &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; as the specifier of &lt;em&gt;be (there)&lt;/em&gt; in the subordinate clause, and then raised it into the Spec of the higher verb &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, the chain formed by &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; in Spec &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; and its trace in Spec &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (or by the two copies of &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;, under the 'Copy Theory of Movement') would receive &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; theta roles (Agent and Theme, respectively), the Theta Criterion would be violated, and the derivation would be ungrammatical. (Under later versions of Chomskian grammar, of course, that Theta Criterion violation need no longer be invoked to block the derivation: since &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; already has a valued role attribute in Spec &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, it could never be raised into a higher thematic position, e.g., Spec &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, because there would be &lt;strong&gt;no feature to check&lt;/strong&gt; in Spec &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; and Economy would automatically forbid that movement. &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; could still raise, of course, but not in search of a second theta role; it could raise directly into Spec Tense, for example, to check its Nominative Case feature there, but it would have to do so skipping Spec &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, and therefore would never get assigned a second theta role as Agent of &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, in a sentence like &lt;em&gt;Mary seems [t to be there]&lt;/em&gt; (where, recall, &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; is monadic and assigns a theta role &lt;strong&gt;only to its complement&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to its specifier), replacing 't' with a PRO in the subordinate clause would make the sentence ungrammatical, because, in that case, it would be PRO that would receive the only undischarged theta role available in the sentence (the Theme role assigned by &lt;em&gt;be there&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;, on the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;would not receive any theta role&lt;/strong&gt; in Spec &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt;, and, again, the Theta Criterion would be violated (by defect, in this case) and the sentence would be ungrammatical. If &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; is base-generated as a Spec of &lt;em&gt;be there&lt;/em&gt;, though, it gets the Theme role assigned by &lt;em&gt;be there&lt;/em&gt;, and, as the higher verb &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; does not assign any theta role to its own specifier, &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; never receives a second theta role, the Theta Criterion is not violated, and the sentence is well formed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T19:18:49.970" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T19:18:49.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23335" CreationDate="2017-07-03T22:16:02.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;raising&lt;/strong&gt; verb, &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; is an &lt;strong&gt;equi/control&lt;/strong&gt; verb ('equi verb' and 'contol verb' are usually used synonymously).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equi verbs have a semantic subject: It is part of the meaning of &lt;em&gt;to try&lt;/em&gt; that there is someone who is trying, which is Mary in this case. &lt;strong&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; selects &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; as an argument&lt;/strong&gt;, more specifically, as the subject argument. This subject starts of as the subject of the embedded clause and is raised up to the subject of the matrix clause, if you believe in a transformational syntax.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same does not hold for raising verbs: &lt;strong&gt;There isnt's any actual seemer&lt;/strong&gt;, someone who fills a thematic role in the seeming event. If anything, a grammatical subject in a sentene with &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; as the main verb would be realized by &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;It seems that Mary is here&lt;/em&gt;), but then it is clear that this &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is just a filler for something that would otherwise be empty, because there is no semantic subject; just like in &lt;em&gt;It is raining&lt;/em&gt;, when &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is not an actual subject that is raining; &lt;em&gt;rain&lt;/em&gt; is a zero-place verb. The &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; in both senetences is merely a phonetic filler that needs to be there because English doesn't want the subject position to be emtpy, but there are cases where this pseudo-subject isn't an actual subject. The verb &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; doesn't have any more theta role to assign, because there isn't a &quot;seemer&quot; - contrary to the verb &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, which does assign the theta role of agent (namely the one who is trying). And since &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; is not selected as an argument of &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt;, it can not be generated as a subject in SpecVP.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's simply the semantics of the two verbs that make them behave syntactically different.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note the difference between subject-oriented and object-oriented raising and equi verbs. &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt; are both subject-oriented: The filler element takes the position of the subject in the matrix clause.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The example you gave with &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; is an object-oriented raising verb. The reason why you chose the passive sentence is that &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; is actually the object of the outer sentence: Having started as the subject of the embedded clause (&lt;em&gt;Mary is here&lt;/em&gt;), it is &lt;strong&gt;raised to the object position&lt;/strong&gt; of the matrix clause (&lt;em&gt;John believes [Mary] to be here&lt;/em&gt;). But &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; is not semantically selected by the verb &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - the verb doesn't assign any theta role that Mary now fills; Mary isn't &quot;the believed&quot; or something it's just there due to the syntactic operation of raisin. With this behavirous, &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; is an object-oriented raising verb.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An example an object-oriented equi verb is &lt;em&gt;persuade&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;Peter persuaded Mary to be here&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; starts as the subject of the embedded clause and is raised to the object of the matrix clause. However, it is also &lt;strong&gt;selected by the verb&lt;/strong&gt;: Mary is the one who is being persuaded; she fills an argument position that is semantically required by the verb - there is someone who is being persuaded, and this role is satisfied by the now raised &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;. This makes &lt;em&gt;persuade&lt;/em&gt; an object-oriented equi verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these behave synactically differently, but the main distinction is simply whether or not the NP in question fills a theta role that is semantically required by the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T22:47:21.870" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T22:47:21.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23343" CreationDate="2017-07-03T22:46:10.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading a little bit about glyphs, and their importance in typography, I am left wondering whether the letter α would count as a glyph in Ancient Greek, or whether only diacritical marks such as accents and breathing marks would count as glyphs. Could anyone answer this question for me? Are there multiple answers depending on context (e.g. typography in the pre-computing era versus typography in computing) or would α in Greek and the letter a in English be universally recognized as glyphs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T01:32:06.607" Title="Do letters of the alphabet count as glyphs?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-07-15T14:56:28.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23341" CreationDate="2017-07-04T01:32:06.607" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glyph is a single unit of writing, which has a meaning within an agreed-upon method of communication. So for example, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; is a single glyph, while the dot part of it isn't (since the dot means nothing on its own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that glyphs are defined within a method of communication: in Turkish, for example, &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; with a dot and &lt;em&gt;ı&lt;/em&gt; without a dot are distinct glyphs, because they have distinct meanings within Turkish. In English &lt;em&gt;ı&lt;/em&gt; only has meaning as part of &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, so it's not its own glyph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the typesetting days, ligatures were also often treated as glyphs, because they were single blocks of type. Nowadays that's less common, except in cases like the German &lt;em&gt;ß&lt;/em&gt; (originally a ligature of &lt;em&gt;ſz&lt;/em&gt;) where they've taken on their own meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T01:32:06.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23363" CreationDate="2017-07-04T08:08:51.060" Score="0" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are my conditions for detecting an expletive position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if spec IP has been assigned non 'null' Case and is not theta marked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after this I struggle to choose between 'it' and 'there'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that 'it' takes a CP associate and 'there' takes an NP associate. I need to implement this in code and don't understand the logic to detect the associate (to clarify, one doesn't need to know code to answer the question, they only need to understand the logic given an x-bar tree). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in context of 'The Minimalist Program' by Chomsky, and 'Government and Binding Theory' by Haegeman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastEditorUserId="17193" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T11:15:57.900" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T12:43:14.220" Title="'there' vs 'it' expletive insertion" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23332" CreationDate="2017-07-04T20:25:52.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are interested only in 'existential' (unstressed) uses of &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. If so, here is my answer to your question (which, by the way, starts from a wrong presupposition): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to 'dummy it', which is inherently singular (and categorially a CP!), 'dummy there' (categorially a DP) has &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; inherent number attribute value. Of course, it is a 'nominal' and must have a number attribute, but it is an &lt;strong&gt;unvalued&lt;/strong&gt; one until &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is 'associated' with some other nominal in the same derivation that does have a properly &lt;strong&gt;valued&lt;/strong&gt; number attribute. 'Association', by the way, is just &lt;strong&gt;chain-formation&lt;/strong&gt; in this context, and, of course, members of chains must agree in number and other grammatical features (e.g., they must share just one theta role, just one case, a single referent, etc., etc.). Just this fact largely yields the explanation you are looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, since, surprisingly, none of my - very competent! - predecessors has referred yet to a special type of cases that are crucial to your question, let me do so myself: in &lt;em&gt;There is/are &lt;strong&gt;a student/several students&lt;/strong&gt; waiting for you in your office&lt;/em&gt;, the 'chain' is formed by &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; and the DP &lt;em&gt;a student/several students&lt;/em&gt; (subjects in Spec VP!), where &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; supplies the chain with [Case: nominative], whereas &lt;em&gt;a student/several students&lt;/em&gt;, which have &lt;strong&gt;no valued Case feature&lt;/strong&gt; in Spec VP position (= VP-Internal &lt;strong&gt;subject!&lt;/strong&gt; position), supply it with [Number: singular/plural],[Theta-Role: Agent], etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows that 'dummy &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;' &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; form a chain with any other DP in that sentence (i.e., &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;your office&lt;/em&gt;), because, if it did, a Case conflict (&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;number&lt;/strong&gt; conflict!) would immediately arise: the hypothetical chains &lt;em&gt;{There-you}&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;{There-your office}&lt;/em&gt; would be illegitimate because both would have &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; valued Case attributes (i.e., nominative from &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, and objective/oblique from the prepositions &lt;em&gt;for/in&lt;/em&gt;, respectively). Also,'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; can &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; be associated with an &lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt; either (contrary to what you claim in your question!), because, if it were, the resulting chain would also immediately contain two incompatible &lt;strong&gt;valued&lt;/strong&gt; Case attributes (i.e., nominative from &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; itself and accusative, dative or oblique from the DP functioning as direct, indirect, or prepositional object, as the case might be). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, 'dummy there' can only be 'associated' with a &lt;strong&gt;theta-marked&lt;/strong&gt; DP containing &lt;strong&gt;no valued Case attribute&lt;/strong&gt;. That includes &lt;strong&gt;subjects in Spec VP&lt;/strong&gt;, as in my examples above, and complements of &lt;strong&gt;non-case-assigning verbs&lt;/strong&gt; like 'existential' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, eventive &lt;em&gt;arise&lt;/em&gt;, etc., but &lt;strong&gt;never objects&lt;/strong&gt; of transitive, ditransitive, or prepositional verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, it is simply not true that with &lt;em&gt;dummy there&lt;/em&gt; agreement 'comes from the object', as you assumed, and, so, properly, there is no fact to be explained, :-)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T20:25:52.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T10:27:23.490" Score="3" ViewCount="4980" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American English, one's &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; refers to his or her physical dwelling, while one's &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; is so much more. A home is a building, a city, even a country where one feels he or she belongs most. It's a very powerful word describing a very powerful and innately human concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's also a concept that doesn't translate well. I've been working with Google Translate (ugh) and for most languages of interest I really can't find a word that represents the idea of &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; properly. Is it uncommon for this concept to have an associated term? Is this simply representative of a feeling firmly American in origin? Are there any good examples of this idea in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T10:54:07.847" Title="House vs. home in other languages" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T10:37:51.860" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there dictionaries translating roots from one Indo-European language (family) to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such dictionaries would be helpful for translating calques like выставка, Ausstellung, and exhibition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the only dictionaries of Russian morphemes/roots which I could find (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slovorod.ru/der-tikhonov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) don't include the PIE roots, so it is difficult to find correspondences between them and the corresponding roots/morphemes in other languages (for example, I couldn't find any such dictionary for German at all, although I imagine that they are plentiful for Latin and Greek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of any references which might be useful for such problems? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14660" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T10:37:51.860" Title="Are there dictionaries translating roots from one Indo-European language to another?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;calques&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23344" CreationDate="2017-07-05T11:16:43.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/bhatt/lin380l/380l-f01-l11-12.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.umass.edu/bhatt/lin380l/380l-f01-l11-12.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to answer most of my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17193" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T11:16:43.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8853" CreationDate="2017-07-05T13:03:52.570" Score="10" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In many Germanic languages it's /ve/, as fdb said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other Germanic languages, including German, its name is similar to that of English V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W#Name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W#Name&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Polish it's /vu/. In Italian it's also pronounced as /vu/ in common acronyms for brevity&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Somali it's /wæʉ̯/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/W#Somali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/W#Somali&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastEditorUserId="2313" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T09:13:09.837" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T09:13:09.837" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="23352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-05T13:34:19.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, the terms &quot;&lt;em&gt;foyer&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;chez soi&lt;/em&gt;&quot; express the concept of &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; with a strong nuance of &quot;one's family' for the first (&lt;em&gt;foyer&lt;/em&gt; is originally the fireplace, and by extension the hearth), while the latter is &quot;one's own place&quot; and therefore the place where one feels they belong. In some contexts, the word &lt;em&gt;demeure&lt;/em&gt; also shares some of the nuances of the English word &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, there are terms like &lt;em&gt;uchi&lt;/em&gt; (内) or &lt;em&gt;wagaya&lt;/em&gt; (我が家) that can partially cover the concept (the first is broader in that in can cover any in-group to which the speaker belongs, depending on the context, while the second is my/our home/household/family), but their use is more restricted. There is also the term &quot;ibasho&quot; (居場所) which refers to the place where one belongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak any other languages fluently enough to provide other examples, but I think you'll find that, as with most terms, and especially those describing abstract concepts, you won't find a one-to-one correspondence where other languages will have only one word corresponding exactly to &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt;. Rather, as with my French and Japanese examples above, you'll find that although the concept (or, rather, set of concepts) is quite common, how it is expressed will vary (sometimes considerably) from one language to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T13:34:19.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="23364" CreationDate="2017-07-05T17:21:35.390" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently learning Japanese (みんなさん、こんにちは！), and I've began noticing myself doing the oddest thing while listening to Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes find myself uttering back sounds I hear; even when I don't know what's being said. I don't know why I do this; and often don't notice for a good bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like:&#xA;&quot;ee watashi wa kono geemu ga atarashii to totemo tanoshiku asobu geemu tte omoimasu ne!&quot;(ええ、私はこのゲームが新しいととても楽しく遊ぶゲームって思いますね！)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be uttered back as a vary subtle and hushed:&#xA;&quot;ee... ko, k-ko no... ee... ata.. atarashii... ee.. to.. temo... tano... aso.. bu.. te... n-ne...&quot;(えー、こ、っこーの、えー、新しい、えー、とー、ても、楽ー、遊ー、ぶ、てー、んーねー)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I just weird? Or is this normal? As I've heard people learning English doing something similar; murmuring back what's being said; subtly; without really understanding what's being said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a thing? Or am I seeing patterns where there are none?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: For the curious; &quot;ええ、私はこのゲームが新しいとても楽しく遊ぶゲームだって思いますね！&quot;(the above version is riddled with errors...) means: &quot;Heh, I think this [game] is a new and vary fun to play game!&quot; with the listener being expected to agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastEditorUserId="17211" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T16:32:45.807" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T16:32:45.807" Title="Do people &quot;babble&quot; while learning an L2?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T19:57:00.283" Score="-2" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7bn9K.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7bn9K.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;unknown language on image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please translate the text in this image please, I have no clue where to start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17477" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T11:42:54.807" Title="can anyone translate this language please? what Language is it?" Tags="&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-06T19:34:19.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23354" CreationDate="2017-07-05T21:08:44.143" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language is Kazakh. It's a fragment of a poem by &lt;a href=&quot;https://kk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2i%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B5_%D2%9A%D2%B1%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B5%D2%B1%D0%BB%D1%8B&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Шал (Тілеуке) Құлекеұлы&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; aka &lt;em&gt;Шал ақын&lt;/em&gt; (1748 – 1819):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Бұл дүниенің мысалы&#xA;Ұшып өткен құспен тең.&#xA;Өмірде көрген жақсылық&#xA;Ұйықтап өткен түспен тең.&#xA;Атадан мирас ақылың,&#xA;Түзік айтқан мақұлың,&#xA;Ләзім болған іспен тең.&#xA;Үлкеннен көрген зорлығың,&#xA;Жаманнан көрген қорлығың&#xA;Ойлап тұрсаң, бозбала,&#xA;Дұшпаннан көрген күшпен тең.&#xA;Ағайының көп болса,&#xA;Бірлігі оның бек болса,&#xA;Жамандық жер кез келсе,&#xA;Бір-біріне сеп болса,&#xA;Бүтін тұрған бұзылмай,&#xA;Отыз екі тіспен тең.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's how Google translates it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;An example of this world&#xA;It is equal to the birds that fly.&#xA;Goodness in life&#xA;It is the same as sleeping color.&#xA;From the Father to Your Majesty,&#xA;The verdict,&#xA;It is equal to the pleasure.&#xA;Your aggression from the eldest,&#xA;It's a bad idea&#xA;Wait, boy,&#xA;Equal to the force seen by the enemy.&#xA;If he has a big brother,&#xA;If his unity is firm,&#xA;When a wicked person comes to an end,&#xA;If you sow each other,&#xA;Without a break,&#xA;Thirty-two teeth are equal.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://muslim.kz/uploads/kk/audio/839/bul-dunienin-mysaly-[audio]-shal-aqyn-qulekeuly.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;audio&lt;/a&gt; for the whole poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T21:08:44.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-05T21:25:34.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, both &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt; are the same, дом [dom], but in Ukrainian (which is closely related to Russian) the same word, дім [dʲim] (gen. sg. дому ['dɔmu]) is usually used to mean &lt;em&gt;home&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; is called by different other words, like хата ['xata], будинок [bu'dɪnɔk], кам’яниця ['kamjanɪtsʲa] (rare), etc. I wrote &quot;usually&quot;, because дім [dʲim] is sometimes used to mean &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T22:47:43.387" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T22:47:43.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-05T22:40:46.543" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Romance languages have this distinction. In addition to French &lt;em&gt;foyer&lt;/em&gt; noted by @Philippe, there are the Romance cognates Spanish &lt;em&gt;hogar&lt;/em&gt;, Galician &lt;em&gt;fogar&lt;/em&gt;, with the meaning of &quot;home&quot;, from Vulgar Latin &lt;em&gt;focarium&lt;/em&gt;, ultimately derived from the Latin &lt;em&gt;focus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hearth&quot;. These are distinct from &lt;em&gt;casa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;house&quot; (&amp;lt; L.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, Portuguese has &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lar#Portuguese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;home&quot;, derived from the Etruscan (via Latin) &lt;em&gt;LAR&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T22:40:46.543" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T01:25:04.060" Score="0" ViewCount="2086" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there difference of meaning between two word below ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;لم تكتب (lam taktub)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ما كتبت (maa katabat)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the meaning is same : &quot;She didn't write&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the meaning correct ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is anyone can explain different use of لم and ما.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17192" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T10:17:09.730" Title="Different Meaning Arabic ْلَمْ تَكْتُب (lam taktub) and ْمَا كَتَبَت (maa katabat)?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-07-09T19:40:15.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T05:44:27.073" Score="-1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;For words with a dark L like &quot;milk, help; golf; wolf&quot; etc I don't have contact between the tip of my tongue and the alveolar region. My tongue touches nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However. I have spoken to South Africans who say they do make alveolar contact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read up on L-Vocalisation online, I see that it takes place in England and Australia and NewZealand but there is no mention of South Africa at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it normal for a small percent of a population to  be an exception and vocalise their &quot;l's&quot; when most people in that population don't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastEditorUserId="14426" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T21:18:51.577" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T23:43:40.983" Title="Does L-Vocalisation exist in South African English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-08-11T01:22:39.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24392" CreationDate="2017-07-06T06:14:52.007" Score="1" ViewCount="1933" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some aspects of the IPA chart are not intuitive to me. I tend to think of &quot;place of articulation&quot; as &quot;where a sound is produced&quot; and &quot;manner of articulation&quot; as &quot;how a sound is produced&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a useful understanding or does it reduce the meaning of the rows and columns in the IPA chart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: Is there an image that combines place and/or manner with an x-ray view of the speech organs? That'd help me better understand those terms. The examples I find online don't correspond exactly to the IPA chart so they're often more distracting than helpful. For example, the image below only has 9 places of articulation mentioned, whereas the IPA has 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cNwR8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cNwR8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be awesome if there was an image or images like this that included both place and manner, but maybe it'd be too complicated.  Any input/advice on this would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T23:00:05.440" Title="Disambiguating place vs Manner of articulation" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23359" CreationDate="2017-07-06T12:22:54.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Classical Arabic lam + apocopate and mā + perfect are used interchangeably to express the negative of a past action. There does not seem to be any difference in meaning. In modern Arabic dialects only the latter survives. Consequently people who are trying to write “Modern Standard” Arabic tent to avoid the construction with mā in the mistaken assumption that it is non-classical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T12:22:54.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23344" CreationDate="2017-07-06T12:43:14.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I explained in my answer to another question of yours, the 'association' between 'dummies' and their 'associates' is &lt;strong&gt;chain-formation&lt;/strong&gt;: 'dummy &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;' a) has no valued Thematic role feature, but b) it has a valued Category feature(= CP), c) a valued Case feature (nominative, when it occurs in subject position, objective, as in &lt;em&gt;I expect &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; to be clear that I am just a beginner&lt;/em&gt;, or oblique, as in &lt;em&gt;You can depend on &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; that I mean no harm at all&lt;/em&gt;), and d) a valued Number feature (always singular), so its associate must be an argument with 1) a valued theta role feature, 2) a valued (and compatible!) Category feature (= CP), 3) a compatible Number feature (= singular), and 4) NO valued Case feature (or the chain &lt;em&gt;{It-CP}&lt;/em&gt; vill violate the Case Filter). That automatically excludes any 'associate' except a CP with a valued theta role and NO Case assigned to it, which, in practice, solves your problem in all cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to 'dummy &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;', it has a) a valued Category feature (= DP/NP), b) a valued Case feature (nominative, when it is a subject, but alternatively objective, as in &lt;em&gt;I expected &lt;strong&gt;there&lt;/strong&gt; to be some sort of celebration&lt;/em&gt;, or oblique, when it follows a P, as in &lt;em&gt;I was fed up with &lt;strong&gt;there&lt;/strong&gt; never being anybody to talk to&lt;/em&gt;), c) no valued Number feature, and d) no valued Theta Role feature, either, which, in practice, also solves your problem in all cases: the 'associate' can only be a) a DP, b) it must have a valued Number feature (since, otherwise, &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; will not inherit it and the &lt;em&gt;{there-DP}&lt;/em&gt; chain will not be able to 'agree' with the tensed V), c) it must have a valued Theta Role feature (or, again, the argument chain &lt;em&gt;{there-DP}&lt;/em&gt; will lack a Theta Role and the Theta Criterion will be violated), and d) it cannot have a valued Case feature (or, in association with 'there', which already has its own valued Case feature - nominative, accusative, or oblique - the chain &lt;em&gt;{there-DP}&lt;/em&gt; will have &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; valued Case features and will violate the 'Case Filter'). Again, such requirements in practice determine the only possible 'associate' of 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; in all cases: the associate must be a singular or plural DP with a theta role, but &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be the complement or the specifier of &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; Case-assigning category (i.e., neither the complement of V or P, nor the specifier of T or D). That leaves you with specifiers of V, P, or A and with complements of non-Case assigning V's or A's, and, as no sentence will contain more than one &lt;strong&gt;accessible&lt;/strong&gt; item of any of such classes, in practice, your problem vanishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T12:43:14.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23353" CreationDate="2017-07-06T13:10:16.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's common, but I vaguely remember mumbling or muttering to myself when I was first learning Japanese. In my case, I think it was a way of trying to parse the stream of sounds that I couldn't break down into words and phrases because my vocabulary and knowledge were still too limited at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the L2 is a living language being studied for the purpose of actually speaking it, I expect some form of attempted repetition of the sounds heard will be quite common. At the early stages, it may very well sound like babbling because the learner isn't capable of putting the sounds together in meaningful units. Also, depending on the degree of phonetic/phonological proximity between the learner's L1 and L2, those sounds may be completly misheard and mispronounced, further making it sound like babbling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an interesting contrast, when I worked as an English teacher in Japan, I didn't see a whole lot of attempts at babbling or murmuring back what was heard, but I think that's because a lot of my time was spent teaching junior high school students who had to learn English for their high school exams, people who were being told to take English classes by their employer, or people who saw taking English classes a a hobby but had not real need, or even intrinsic desire, to actually learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The anecdotal distinction I observe is that a self-motivated learner who actually wants to acquire the ability to speak in the L2 being studied will inevitably practice one or more forms of (sub)vocalization as part of the learning process. In contrast, people who have the study of a second language imposed upon them by some external agency will rarely do so because they don't actually have an internal desire to be able to use the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also expect people studying dead languages such as Latin don't babble a whole lot either, but I imagine you were thinking in terms of learning a second language that's actually in use! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T13:10:16.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T21:28:30.163" Score="-1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't quite find this in the research I have done so far that surveys various vowel normalization methods...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17485" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T20:59:59.660" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T20:59:59.660" Title="Does Neary Vowel Normalization account for Vocal Tract Length?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-06T09:33:54.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T21:52:30.423" Score="6" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has/had so many of these trios: where/there/here, whereby/thereby/ hereby, whither/thither/hither, whence/thence/hence ... and when/then/NOW? Whatever happened to &quot;hen?&quot; Did that form exist in an earlier stage or dialect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17486" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T01:35:51.570" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T19:32:41.640" Title="Did English ever use &quot;hen&quot; to mean &quot;now?&quot;" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T00:14:46.863" Score="7" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time ago, I remember reading about a work that showed that there were no distinct breaks in the local dialects as one travelled from west to east across France, and how at the easternmost areas, the dialect shared more in common with German than it did with the westernmost dialects. Now, many years later, I am trying to track down some concrete references to anchor this memory. But I have had no luck! I vaguely have the notion that the study was a classic or well-known one in linguistics, but this, too, might be wrong ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help out? Either by affirming this is true with pointers to references, or by firmly knocking me on the head and telling me that I am misremembering in my old age due to the misadventures of a misspent youth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, maybe I am even more confused and I meant a French-&lt;em&gt;Italian&lt;/em&gt; gradient rather than French-German. In which case, Ferdinand de Saussere's &quot;Course in General Linguistics&quot;, Part 4 (&quot;Geographical Linguistics&quot;), Chapter 3 (&quot;“Causes of Geographical Diversity”), describes part of the phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Just as one cannot say where High German ends and Low German begins,&#xA;  so also it is impossible to establish a line of demarcation between&#xA;  German and Dutch, or between French and Italian. Taking points far&#xA;  enough apart, it is possible to say with certainty ‘French is spoken&#xA;  here; Italian is spoken there’. But in the intervening regions, the&#xA;  distinction becomes blurred. The notion of smaller, compact&#xA;  intermediate zones acting as linguistic areas of transition (for&#xA;  example, Provençal as a half-way house between French and Italian) is&#xA;  not realistic either. In any case, it is impossible to imagine in any&#xA;  shape or form a precise linguistic boundary dividing an area covered&#xA;  throughout by evenly differentiated dialects. Language boundaries,&#xA;  just like dialect boundaries, get lost in these transitions. Just as&#xA;  dialects are only arbitrary subdivisions of the entire surface covered&#xA;  by a language, so the boundaries held to separate two languages can&#xA;  only be conventional one”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it does talk about the blending of French into &lt;em&gt;Italian&lt;/em&gt;, without any distinct breaks between dialects. But it does not describe not the easternmost French dialects being closer to westernmost Italian dialects rather than the westernmost French dialects, which was the other part of what I remembered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17488" LastEditorUserId="17488" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T00:35:41.687" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T00:35:41.687" Title="French dialects from west to east: no distinct breaks, blend into German?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23367" CreationDate="2017-07-07T01:34:44.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hen#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English henne, heonne, hinne, from earlier henene, heonenen, henen, from Old English heonan, hionan, heonane, heonone (“hence, from here, away, from how”), from Proto-Germanic *hina, *hinanō (“from here”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱe-, *ḱey- (“this, here”). Cognate with Dutch heen (“away”), German hin (“hence, from here”), Danish hen (“away, further, on”). See also hence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(dialectal) Hence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDITED TO ADD: To be sure, this answer addresses the &quot;Whatever happened to &quot;hen?&quot; Did that form exist in an earlier stage or dialect?&quot; part of your question. &lt;strong&gt;hen&lt;/strong&gt; did not really mean 'now'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T13:44:43.017" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T13:44:43.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23366" CreationDate="2017-07-07T01:46:26.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_I_estimate_a_persons_vocal_tract_length_using_a_recorded_audio_file&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Wright indicates that it does, assuming a &quot;a fairly thorough and evenly distributed set of vowels&quot;, and similarly &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/norm/norm1_methods.php#nearey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this summary&lt;/a&gt; says it performs well in reducing variation from physiological differences. By &quot;account for&quot;, I assume you mean &quot;effectively control for&quot;, since actual vocal tract length measurements cannot be part of the computation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T01:46:26.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T03:19:49.593" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do the Native American names Pocahontas and Pocatello share a common linguistic root, since they both start with &quot;Poca&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17491" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:28:12.027" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:28:12.027" Title="Do the Native American names Pocahontas and Pocatello share a common linguistic root?" Tags="&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23373" CreationDate="2017-07-07T04:52:27.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymologies of those two names is at best conjecture. Given that the individuals in question (the town is named after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocatello_(Shoshone_leader)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chief&lt;/a&gt;) are from completely unrelated tribes speaking unrelated languages (Pocahontas – an Algonkian tribe given her father's name, &quot;Powhatan&quot;; Pocatello, whose native name was Tondzaosha – member of the Shoshone tribe, whose language is part ofthe Uto-Aztecan group), there is no basis for thinking that there is anything in common between the names. It is not even established that &quot;Pocatello&quot; is a word of Shoshone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T04:52:27.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T14:14:39.877" Score="0" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a student of English syntax and I have a question about complement and adjunct. In this phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the strong influence of Latin upon English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that the PP 'of Latin' is an adjunct, while the PP 'upon English' is a complement, on the ground that the phrase above can be paraphrased into &quot;Latin has a strong influence upon English&quot;. But when I took a kind of mock test for syntax, the answer turned out that both PP are complements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have not understood why they belong to complements, and if you have another or possible answer ( if you have the reason why they both are complements), please let me understand this problem with careful analysis and explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for paying attention to my question and I hope I will get an answer soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17495" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T23:44:03.047" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T22:48:27.257" Title="A Question About Complement and Adjunct" Tags="&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23376" CreationDate="2017-07-08T04:11:43.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Complements are arguments, in the sense of logic. Your example is a nominalization  of the sentence &quot;Latin influence(d) English strongly.&quot;  In the sentence, &quot;Latin&quot; and &quot;English&quot; are subject and object, making them arguments and therefore complements (while &quot;strong(ly)&quot; is not). So, they should also be counted as complements in the nominalized form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think of the above reasoning as being about traditional nomenclature, not principle, because I do not know of any logical principle which can distinguish arguments from non-arguments for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T04:11:43.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23369" CreationDate="2017-07-08T06:59:24.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I don't understand what you mean but saying &quot;there were no distinct breaks in the local dialects as one travelled from west to east across France&quot; sound to me as a complete fallacy. There's no absolute continuum between the different regional dialects of France. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the extreme west we have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breton_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Breton&lt;/em&gt; language&lt;/a&gt; which is a Celtic language. Going further west we find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gallo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which belongs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Langues d'oïl&lt;/em&gt; family&lt;/a&gt; that covers most of northern France and has absolutely no relationship to Celtic languages.  All the various &lt;em&gt;langues d'oïl&lt;/em&gt; are indeed connected, and they belong to the  Gallo-Romance languages, as do the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitano-Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occitano-Romance languages&lt;/a&gt; that covers most of southern France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Basque&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is spoken in a small area in the south west of France (and north west of Spain) has absolutely no relationship with any other neighbouring language (and it is unrelated to any other known European language, it is even said it existed even before Romance languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is true is that all border areas have transborder local dialects. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alsatian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is closer to the language spoken on the other side of the border with Germany than to the French dialects west of Alsace, and that's logical when we know this area has changed hands several times, sometimes belonging to France, other times to &quot;Germany&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%C3%A7ard_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nissart&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; language belongs to the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occitan dialect&lt;/a&gt; and is closely related to &lt;em&gt;Ligurian&lt;/em&gt; that is spoken in Italy on the other side of the border. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Catalan&lt;/em&gt; language&lt;/a&gt;, also belonging to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Occitan dialects&lt;/a&gt; is spoken on both sides of the Franco-Spanish border.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way the Breton language I was mentioning a few lines earlier is very close to the Celtic language spoken in Cornwall (no wonder since it was brought by the Britons in the Middle Ages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an exhaustive list, just some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On  the website of the French Ministry of Culture: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Langue-francaise-et-langues-de-France/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French language and languages of France&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Languages of France article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (the map is very good).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://atlas.limsi.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sound atlas of regional languages of France&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add that local dialects are not usually spoken nowadays, except in Alsace perhaps. But they are a great subject of study !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="637" LastEditorUserId="637" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T16:05:35.383" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T16:05:35.383" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23314" CreationDate="2017-07-08T12:44:32.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In any place where regional origin is associated with lower social status (basically, where internal migration in search of jobs and wages is/was important, or where a central political authority was recently imposed into a periphery) we will find such phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some from Brazilian Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;ti&quot; pronounced /θi/ instead of /t͡ʃi/ (very much the same as in your example, btw, except that both pronouciations only exist before /i/) shows a Northeastern (more specifically, Recife-an) pronounciation; as there was intense migration from the drough-afflicted Northeast to more economically dynamical Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which lead to a significant part of the working class in these cities being of Northeastern origin, and so to speak like this, it resulted in the pronounciation being stigmatised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-stressed &quot;e&quot; pronounced as /ɛ/ instead of /e/, involving the same regions and &quot;logic&quot; as the previous;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-vocalic &quot;r&quot; pronounced as a retroflex is characteristic of the hinterland of São Paulo. As there is always migration from the countryside to the capital, and the rural areas have a low prestige, again this pronounciation is stigmatised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final &quot;e&quot; pronounced as /e/ instead of reduced to /i/ is similarly characteristic of rural Rio Grande do Sul, and as such stigmatised in a similar way (though in this case, due to the importance of the rural area in the identitary mythology of &lt;em&gt;gaúchos&lt;/em&gt;, it gets more complicated, the pronounciation being derided by inhabitants of Porto Alegre when uttered by migrants from the countryside, but upheld as a source of pride against people of the centre of the country).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T12:44:32.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-08T14:22:17.390" Score="0" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they got it from the protolanguage, then why does it have different phonetics? Is it possible that they were developed separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Mañana' in Spanish – means 'morning' and 'tomorrow'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Morgen’ in German – means  'morning' and 'tomorrow'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Slavonic languages we can observe the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Russian, 'utrom' means 'in the morning'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Polish, 'utrom' means 'tomorrow'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could phonetics so drastically change? 'Morgen', 'Mañana', 'Utro'? What is the Sanscrit word for 'morning' and 'tomorrow'?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a word was adopted with all its meanings but with the change of phonetics, like German 'der Schloss’ transferred all its meanings into Russian “Замок” – 'Lock' and 'Castle' simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, with 'tomorrow', how did people live before without the adopted word 'tomorrow' since it defines the basic understanding of time? I can imagine living without 'castles', but cannot imagine living without 'tomorrow'. I think all Structuralism and Poststructuralism philosophies will argue language could exist without the word 'tomorrow'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do Ferdinand de Saussure, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenshtein think about this? Has this question already been raised? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17500" LastEditorUserId="10009" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T20:28:19.963" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T23:04:27.447" Title="Two languages have the same homonym for two meanings but different phonetics" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-07-16T00:38:34.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23381" CreationDate="2017-07-08T15:22:47.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;utrom, morgen, mañana&lt;/em&gt; don't all derive from the same word in Proto-Indo-european, so that is why they are pronounced differently. As to why &quot;morning&quot; and &quot;tomorrow&quot; are sufficiently similar in semantics that they can be the same word, this is a reasonably common fact across languages (very common in Bantu, for example). If you're going to develop terminology for time, the most fundamental division is the boundary delineated by the long sleep, which terminates in the morning, which comes tomorrow. (The &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; basic distinctions of time are &quot;present&quot;, &quot;future&quot; and &quot;past&quot;, and &quot;tomorrow&quot; is a much higher order concept, which depends on also developing a discrete 24-ish hour concept &quot;day&quot;). The fact that &quot;tomorrow&quot; is an important concept for human existence does not mean that the word for &quot;tomorrow&quot; is doomed to remain unchanged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swallow (the bird) is likewise often the same root as the verb (e.g. in Logoori), which is explained by the distinctive feeding habit of swallows. There are similar semantic intersections between &quot;right&quot; (direction) and &quot;right&quot; (correct), or &quot;male&quot; (&quot;right hand&quot; is the &quot;male hand&quot;), explained by the predominance of right-handedness in humans and thus various ostensively positive descriptions of right (direction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under language contact, polysemy of a word or phrase can be borrowed by a language. An example is French &lt;em&gt;marché aux puces&lt;/em&gt; which we translate as &quot;flea market&quot; (that's how it literally would translate into English), even though nobody sells fleas there. Such borrowings of translations are known as &quot;calques&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lakoff &amp;amp; Johnson have a book, &lt;em&gt;Metaphors We Live By&lt;/em&gt;, which discusses the importance of metaphor in language and human life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T15:22:47.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-08T15:28:17.847" Score="-1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing an essay on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance Analogy (Philosophy of Language) and I need your help to find a neat example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have thought of indoeuropean languages as an example of things that are related to each other for different reasons. I am looking for an example of four or five indoeuropean languages, that share overlapping similarities and relations between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I know certain indoeuropean languages that share vocabulary (names of numbers, body parts). But they could also share morphology, grammar, or phonetic rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you help me find four or five indoeuropean languages, and point out the different overlapping similarities that they share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18500" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T18:59:36.660" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T18:59:36.660" Title="examples for indoeuropean languages which are related to each other in different ways" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-07-14T10:32:55.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="24384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24383" CreationDate="2017-07-08T15:58:52.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it stands, I think the question is a bit misguided or unclear. The various extant IE languages are mostly similar because they historically derived from a language spoken thousands of years ago. In that respect, the similarity is like the similarity between British, American, Australian and Indian English – they have a common origin. Another reason why languages could be similar is because one language was influenced by another (thus the many Latin-derived words of English are due to the influence of French and Latin, predominantly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want 4 languages with lots of similarity, you could pick e.g. Slavic. Or you could pick Romance. Or Germanic. This is because each of these groups of languages derives from a more recent common language (in the case of Romance, somewhere in the past 1500 years). However, if you want your languages to come from distinct branches of Indo-European, then the task is vastly harder, unless you rely on ancient languages. English is not very similar at all to Hindi in terms of grammar, but Old English is more similar to Sanskrit – structural differences have accumulated over the millenia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, you can discern similarities between case marking in Icelandic and Russian, but they are sufficiently different to the eye that doesn't know the history of Indo-European that you can't establish meaningful &quot;similarity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing of significance can be derived from a similarity between two or more languages: significance only comes from including a causal explanation – X and Y are similar because one language borrowed from another; or because they derive from a common historical source; or they are based on a shared fact of human cognition (for example, onomatopoeia); or it is just a coincidence. Most languages that have case inflection have trivial similarity: it is accomplished with suffixes. This is because most morphology is suffixing, rather than prefixing (or other rare types).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of certain phonological processes that are common to IE languages is mostly explained by the fact that certain things are phonetically natural and likely to be &quot;discovered&quot;. If you were looking for examples that illustrate &quot;common source&quot; similarities, you shouldn't look at nasal place-assimilation, post-nasal voicing or final devoicing, because these are extremely common processes across languages and reveal more about the nature of humans and language. The similarity between the inflectional morphology of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavic is, on the other hand, explained by the fact that the morphemes derive from a common historical source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want similarities that have to do with &quot;the nature of humans&quot;, you need to look at maximally unrelated languages, like Chinese, English, Lushootseed, Malay.&#xA;If you only look at IE languages, the implication is that you're looking for similarities that are due to historical unity. Assuming that the goal is to exemplify common-original similarities using grammar, that is a very tough bill to fill, using IE languages, because the modern languages are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; very similar in grammar. You could maybe gain some traction looking at verb inflection in Slavic, Romance, Icelandic and Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T16:13:08.213" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T16:13:08.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23381" CreationDate="2017-07-08T23:04:27.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian word &quot;utrom&quot; most likely came from Proto-Indo-European root a̯u̯es- meaning &quot;glow&quot;. It is cognate to English &quot;East&quot;. Compare PIE words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯u̯estrom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; east (-&gt; Austria, Australia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a̯u̯esos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; dawn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Aura&quot; and &quot;Aurora&quot; are also of this root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T23:04:27.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23359" CreationDate="2017-07-09T10:17:09.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would translate the sentences like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;لم تكتب (lam taktub)&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;She didn't write&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ما كتبت (maa katabat)&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;she never wrote&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;code&gt;لم&lt;/code&gt; means &lt;code&gt;did not&lt;/code&gt;, whereas &lt;code&gt;ما&lt;/code&gt; means &lt;code&gt;never&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly both Arabic and English syntactically use the present form of the verb in (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;تكتب&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;write&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;(she) writes&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And both use the past form of the verb in (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;كتبت&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;wrote&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;(she) wrote&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As fdb also points out, to my knowledge only (2) survives in modern usage, except when using classical Arabic, for example in a formal setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18508" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T10:17:09.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23169" CreationDate="2017-07-09T10:41:06.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we translate the two sentences, preserving the definite/indefinite articles, we would get something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;مائدة من النحاس المحفور&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;a table of (the) engraved brass&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;Of course in English, you would not typically use &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;عوارض غليظة من خشب&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;rough joists of (some) wood&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, often the definite or indefinite forms would be used interchangeably, as is the case in the two examples. &#xA;If anything, I would tend to attribute the use of definite form (&lt;code&gt;مائدة من النحاس المحفور&lt;/code&gt;) as serving to place emphasis on &lt;code&gt;النحاس المحفور&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;the engraved brass&lt;/code&gt;, taking emphasis away from the object &lt;code&gt;مائدة&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;a table&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text claims that the purpose is for contrast, interpreting the following as contrastive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;مائدة من النحاس المحفور&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;a table of brass - not any brass - of engraved brass&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this as not contrastive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;مائدة من نحاس محفور&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;a table of engraved brass&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And similarly, interpreting this as contrastive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;عوارض غليظة من الخشب&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;rough joists, made of not any wood - but some specific wood&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this as not contrastive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;عوارض غليظة من خشب&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;rough joists made of wood&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that is a possible interpretation of such constructions (use of the definite form), I would not go as far as to claim that this is often the intention of these constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18508" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T10:41:06.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8630" CreationDate="2017-07-09T12:03:57.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/16908/ghoti657&quot;&gt;Ghoti657&lt;/a&gt;, I do speak Cantonese and some Mandarin, but I speak neither French nor German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can offer my opinion that German, being a Germanic language, and French, being a Romance language are quite different because of spelling differences and differences in phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, however, is different depending on what you are analyzing. The writing system and vocabulary is largely identical even after accounting for the fact that mainland China uses simplified characters. Common (like pronouns) and colloquial words will be more divergent, but Cantonese does not have too many dialectical characters of its own and the vocabulary is fairly close due to a shared literary tradition, and being nearly directly descended from the same historical language. However, written Cantonese may still be unintelligible depending on the subject. Where the subject matter is more technical, the vocabulary will tend to be very similar like English use of Latin-derived words for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoken, there is a large difference between the two with the main difference being that Cantonese stop codas are absent in Mandarin, and the rich Mandarin vowel sequences are not present in Cantonese. There is enough correspondence between Cantonese and Mandarin phonology that sometimes the pronunciation of the other language can be guessed with some training and a good command of one's own native language. Multi-syllable words can sometimes be understood between the two and the grammar is comparable, although I have trouble with standard Mandarin Chinese grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So spoken, I would liken the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, then, as between Italian and French. Written, I would liken it to the difference between Spanish and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German and French, though, are like Mandarin and Fujianese (which hypothetically split off before Middle Chinese even came into existence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T12:03:57.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-09T15:06:32.613" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there relationship (and translation) between Link Grammars and Combinatory Categorial Grammars? Link Grammars have very unusual parse structure - links between words, but CCGs have parse trees. Some connections are mentioned in &#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/cl/gschneid/papers/FINALSgeroldschneider-latl.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/cl/gschneid/papers/FINALSgeroldschneider-latl.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this informal discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/opencog/ATnOqdpDDdM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/opencog/ATnOqdpDDdM&lt;/a&gt; is mentioned that Link Grammars can be mapped to CCGs? Is it really possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice to have such mapping. There has already been done great work with Link Grammars and translation to CCGs would allow to attach automated inference systems for the natural language understanding and automatic deduction on natural language texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T15:06:32.613" Title="Is there relationship (and translation) between Link Grammars and Combinatory Categorial Grammars?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23376" CreationDate="2017-07-09T22:43:18.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distinguishing between arguments and adjuncts has never been a strong point in the X-bar theory. My approach is to think about them in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic valency&lt;/a&gt;. Words — usually, but not necessarily, verbs — can have valences, i.e. a sort of obligatorily resolved variables. Knowing a verb implies the knowledge of its valences. For example, the verb &lt;em&gt;to break&lt;/em&gt; has two valencies: the one who breaks and something that is broken. Once you've selected a verb, you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; know who, or what, corresponds to its valencies. You cannot say &lt;em&gt;Yesterday I broke&lt;/em&gt; without being able to specify what exactly you succeeded in breaking. Not knowing a valence of a verb makes it impossible to use the verb in a sentence correctly. Usually, semantic valencies become the subject and the direct object in a sentence (which are both complements of V, provided that you believe the Internal Subject Hypothesis), while all further information you might provide on an event goes to the adjunct area. In our example, semantically you &lt;strong&gt;have the right&lt;/strong&gt; not to know at what time the breaking happened, because time is not a valence, but an adjunct, of the verb &lt;em&gt;to break&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens to some nouns and adjectives, especially those deriving from a verb and inheriting its valences. Back to your question: the noun &lt;em&gt;influence&lt;/em&gt;, like the corresponding verb, has surely two valences. When you use this noun, you &lt;strong&gt;have to&lt;/strong&gt; know who, or what, influenced whom (or what). Therefore, they are both complements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T22:48:27.257" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T22:48:27.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23361" CreationDate="2017-07-09T23:00:05.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't represent a manner graphically because... it's a manner, not a thing. By the way, you better think of manner in terms of &quot;type of obstacle&quot;. Indeed, all sounds need a stream of air to be articulated. The articulation consists in interrupting such stream in various ways. Sometimes you get a complete occlusion which prevents the air from moving at all (so, you have the &lt;strong&gt;stops&lt;/strong&gt;). Some other times, you let flow some amount of air; this might be a &lt;strong&gt;fricative&lt;/strong&gt; or, e.g., a &lt;strong&gt;lateral&lt;/strong&gt;. In a lateral, the obstacle is incomplete because some residual air stream flows through openings between the tongue sides and the palate. Such an approach explains why lateral is a manner rather than a place, notwithstanding that the term has a &quot;location&quot; in it. Similarly for &lt;strong&gt;nasals&lt;/strong&gt;: the air flows through the nasal cavities, so that the obstacle is not as complete as in stops. &lt;strong&gt;Vowels&lt;/strong&gt; are just another type of obstacle, i.e. a null obstacle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T23:00:05.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24395" CreationDate="2017-07-10T06:52:36.623" Score="2" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I don't think is worthy of a question, but it is something I noticed happening to me, and I was curious if there are any other cases. For me for somereason I have begun switching my vowel+&quot;r&quot; letter combinations in certain situations, and I have noticed something similar in at least one case (&quot;bryȝt&quot; becoming &quot;bird.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that certain words for somereason my mind has begun switching, such as &quot;thirty [ˈθʌ̆ɻ.ti]&quot; switching to: [ˈθɾɪx.ti] or [ˈθɾiç.ti]. Also &quot;thirteen [θʌ˞ɹʔˈtin]&quot; becoming [ˈθɾɪxtin].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In speech I don't say this, as usually the difference trips me up and I slow down, and say the right word. Just something interesting, I am curious if there are any other similar cases in history. The only thing I can think of that would be comparable would be how some English dialects insert a rhotic consonant where there is naught: America said as: [ˈʌmeɹɪ̈kʊɻ] in some UK dialects, or [hɔɻk] for &quot;hawk.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T10:55:28.413" Title="Letter switching? &quot;r&quot; and vowels switching" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26561" CreationDate="2017-07-10T08:25:07.297" Score="7" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the right side of a ship (and everything beyond said side) is called «&lt;strong&gt;starboard&lt;/strong&gt;». I know enough about sailing and about stars to know that stars can't have anything to do with that name, and thus I got to wonder: &lt;strong&gt;maybe «starboard» came from Spanish «estribor»?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, in Spanish, the right side of a ship (etc.) is called «&lt;strong&gt;estribor&lt;/strong&gt;». Once again, I know that it can't possibly have anything to do with a «estribo» (which is where you put your  feet when you ride a horse). So &lt;strong&gt;maybe it's the other way around, and «estribor» comes from English «starboard»?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done my fair bit of research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merriam-Webster English dictionary says «&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/starboard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;starboard&lt;/a&gt;» comes from Old English «stēorbord» and is first found in writing before s. XII.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google's NGRAM has nothing about the Middle and Old English words, though. It claims it has results for «starboard» in books from 1550, but when you query for the actual books, only books from s. XVII onwards come up.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RAE Spanish dictionary says «&lt;a href=&quot;http://dle.rae.es/?id=GzZTd0r&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;estribor&lt;/a&gt;» comes from old French «estribord». However, I've checked the etymology for modern French «tribord» on some French dictionaries and they say it comes from «stirbord» instead; no references to «estribord» anywhere.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NGRAM has nothing for «estribor» before ~1740...  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... but CORDE has registered uses for «estribor» from &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.rae.es/cgi-bin/crpsrvEx.dll?visualizar?tipo1=5&amp;amp;tipo2=0&amp;amp;iniItem=1&amp;amp;ordenar1=3&amp;amp;ordenar2=0&amp;amp;FID=100717%5C010%5CC003O10072017101645206.1212.1208&amp;amp;desc=%7BB%7D+%7BI%7D+estribor%7B|I%7D,+en+todos+los+medios,+en+%7BI%7DCORDE+%7B|I%7D+%7B|B%7D%7BBR%7D&amp;amp;tamVen=1&amp;amp;marcas=0#acierto1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as early as 1527&lt;/a&gt;. Then again, it seems strange that «estribor» was already written like that in early 16th century.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books/about/Lexicon_Tetraglotton_an_English_French_I.html?id=PCtWAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexicon Tetraglotton&lt;/a&gt;, an English-Italian-French-Spanish dictionary from 1660, says Spanish for «starboard» in s. XVII was «&lt;em&gt;estroiborda&lt;/em&gt;». Probably a mistake, but there's that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... I'm aware that, most certainly, both words come from some old Indo-Germanic-Something root meaning «the side of the steering stick». But &lt;strong&gt;which one appeared first in its current form in their own language?&lt;/strong&gt; And &lt;strong&gt;has any of them, directly or indirectly, influenced the way the other one is written today?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14509" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T11:08:10.037" Title="What came first: «starboard» or «estribor»?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24393" CreationDate="2017-07-10T10:55:28.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;metathesis&lt;/a&gt;, and as you suggest, it is common in language change, and in individual errors. Besides &quot;bird&quot;, other well-known examples are English dialect &quot;aks&quot; for &quot;ask&quot; (a purely consonantal example, but still regarded as the same phenomenon) and many examples in the Wikipedia article I linked to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is nothing to do with letters - it is about sounds, and happens in unwritten as well as written languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Intrusive r&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is an interesting phenomenon in non-Rhotic English, but it is not as you have characterised: I don't think any UK speakers put an /r/ n the words you've mentioned except in two cases. The common one is when a vowel-final word is followed by a vowel (&quot;America is&quot;) and then some speakers regularly insert /r/: this has been widely studied by linguists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other, which I have not seen remarked on, is when non-rhotic speakers are imitating rhotic speech: they sometimes get it wrong, and insert /r/ where there is none, because their non-rhotic accent has neutralised a distinction. So, for example, I have heard an English actor doing an American accent pronounce &quot;drama&quot; with a final /r/. So I can imagine somebody pronouncing &quot;hawk&quot; as [hɔɻk] in such circumstances, as though it were spelt &quot;hork&quot;, because there would be no difference in their normal accent between those words. But they would not do so in their normal speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T10:55:28.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24397" CreationDate="2017-07-10T15:03:57.347" Score="1" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there are IPA symbols which are the subject of some controversy? For example, I suppose there are some who would like to have a unitary&quot;tS&quot; t-esh  sound as a unitary phoneme...  but I bet there are loads of other examples. I'd really like to learn about any ongoing/resolved discussions about IPA symbols... Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Zu5X.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Zu5X.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T17:26:20.860" Title="Discussions around symbols included/excluded in the IPA" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24396" CreationDate="2017-07-10T17:26:20.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh yes, very much so! The IPA is constantly changing and expanding, and existing symbols are moved, repurposed, and deleted. Many linguists still use the &quot;Americanist&quot; system, for instance, which prefers diacritics to new symbols (/š/ instead of /ʃ/) and single symbols (like /č/) for affricates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a few other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people like affricates being written as two separate symbols, but others prefer to give them their own symbols (since they're often phonemic). So as a compromise there used to be ligature letters like /ʧ/ and /ʦ/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Until 1895, /q/ was used for the voiced velar fricative. It was then replaced with &quot;g with a loop&quot; (as opposed to loopless /ɡ/), and then with &quot;g with a bar&quot;, before finally becoming the modern gamma /ɣ/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Until 1989, clicks were written with Latin-like letters /ʇ ʗ ʖ/ rather than /ǀ ǃ ǁ/. This was a subject of significant debate, which affected some languages' orthographies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By analogy, /ʞ/ was proposed for a velar click. In 1970 the IPA changed their minds and said that a velar click was impossible, and removed the symbol. But now some linguists suggest that it's possible and found in some languages; the debate is ongoing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more examples, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_and_nonstandard_symbols_in_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's summary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T17:26:20.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-10T23:42:00.220" Score="4" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed that in English words starting with &quot;ge-&quot; or &quot;gi-&quot;, when the &quot;g&quot; is pronounced /ɡ/, they tend to be etymologically Germanic, while the words where the &quot;g&quot; is pronounced /dʒ/ tend to be etymologically French (or possibly Latin). I'm sure there will be the odd exception here and there, such as words that come from neither Germanic or Latin sources, but is this an accurate observation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/get#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get&lt;/a&gt; - from Old Norse &lt;em&gt;geta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giggle#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;giggle&lt;/a&gt; - unknown - perhaps from Middle English &lt;em&gt;gigen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/girl#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;girl&lt;/a&gt; - probably from Old English &lt;em&gt;*gyrle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;*gyrele&lt;/em&gt;, a diminutive form of Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*gurwijaz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;via French / Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentle#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gentle&lt;/a&gt; - from Old French &lt;em&gt;gentil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/giraffe#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;giraffe&lt;/a&gt; - from French &lt;em&gt;giraffe&lt;/em&gt;, from Arabic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gist#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gist&lt;/a&gt; - from Old French &lt;em&gt;gist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T09:31:56.223" Title="Is /ɡ/ Germanic and /dʒ/ French in English ge-/gi- words?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24401" CreationDate="2017-07-11T03:36:36.190" Score="1" ViewCount="2023" Body="&lt;p&gt;What programming languages should aspiring computational linguists learn?  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18516" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T23:45:54.430" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T06:19:27.510" Title="What are the most useful programming languages for computational linguists?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-07-11T15:08:23.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24400" CreationDate="2017-07-11T07:45:48.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Python and C++&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old days, C/C++ was the language of Moses, Giza etc, and the language of the research pipelines and production infrastructure at Google (and I assume Microsoft) for search, translation, speech recognition, handwriting recognition and so on.  fastText is in C++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, the Python ecosystem now has more to offer, both in natural language processing and in machine learning in general, and in serving infra.  Dealing with strings is just easier in Python, especially in Python 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the major Python libs use Cython, so the implementers know C++, although the consumers need not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanford NLP uses Java.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach for answering this pseudo-objectively would be to count the number of libraries or commits with certain keywords in GitHub, questions on SE and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if we search Google Scholar for &lt;em&gt;&quot;NLP&quot; OR &quot;computational linguistics&quot; OR &quot;natural language processing&quot; x&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C++: 705 (2017: 16)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Python: 19,900 (2017: 2,640)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Java: 35,900 (2017: 2,310) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing research papers over lines of code or other metrics is subjective, there are also some idiosyncrasies because these names could refer to other concepts or have synonyms like &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;.  And it will depend which subfield, which company, which region and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is as important to know technologies and resources as languages.  For example, Unicode, ISO codes, file formats, distributed computing, TensorFlow seq2seq, containerisation, AWS, GitHub, StackExchange...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T06:19:27.510" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T06:19:27.510" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T08:02:02.833" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there are any good, up-to-date advanced textbooks in parsing, after having finished the preliminary treatments in Jurafsky &amp;amp; Martin and Manning &amp;amp; Schütze.  Either constituency or dependency parsing will do, though I'm not interested in deterministic parsing. I have a background in statistics, though not really in computer science; however, I'll be happy to fill in any gaps in my knowledge as I go. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T08:02:02.833" Title="Any good, up-to-date advanced textbooks/handbooks in statistical parsing?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24399" CreationDate="2017-07-11T16:42:04.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fun answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English should not have &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; inherited words beginning in &lt;em&gt;ge-/gi-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is the so-called Anglo-Frisian palatisation that shifted of original Germanic *&lt;em&gt;ge-/gi-&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ye-/yi-&lt;/em&gt;. Whenever there is a word beginning in &lt;em&gt;ge-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;gi-&lt;/em&gt; some explanation is needed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might be a loan word from Old Norse. This applies to the most common cases (get, give)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Levelling has unified a split pattern to restore the original g in the &lt;em&gt;anlaut&lt;/em&gt; (goose/geese might be an example, to begin (began, begun) might be another one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might be a loan word from some other language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might be an onomatopoetic word (this could apply for to giggle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vowel e/i might have developed from another vowel (a, o, or u) at a time when the Anglo-Frisian palatisation was no longer active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words beginning in /dʒ/ are all loans, this sound wasn't originally in Old English and was imported from Norman French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T09:31:56.223" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T09:31:56.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T18:12:36.950" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listen to those &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZV-loFZFUs&amp;amp;list=PL-v1MRrBt24tFTCPrKGcHA_yjtzGiiB6Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indonesian words&lt;/a&gt;. The sound is very clear and native speakers agree with me it's way better than the voice of English Google Translator. I doubt Indonesian speaker uses more advanced technology than English, so what's &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T17:04:44.217" Title="Why is Indonesian Google Translator voice so much better than English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T19:03:14.093" Score="3" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John sings the hymn. &lt;br&gt; John sang the hymn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John sang the hymn. &lt;br&gt; The hymn was sung by John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important that John is at the meeting. &lt;br&gt; (This presupposes that he is and says that is important.) &lt;br&gt; It is important that John be at the meeting. &lt;br&gt; (This is normative, prescribing what ought to be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So verbs have &lt;b&gt;tenses&lt;/b&gt; (present and past in this example), &lt;b&gt;voices&lt;/b&gt; (active and passive in this example), &lt;b&gt;moods&lt;/b&gt; (indicative and imperative? Or would this be called something else?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are three different &lt;b&gt;BLANK&lt;/b&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With which common noun does one fill in this blank? Or is there none? And are there more things besides these three that belong in this list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T03:31:25.710" Title="Tenses, voices, moods, and what else?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24404" CreationDate="2017-07-11T19:30:52.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO the English is better than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/id/The%20cat%20is%20scratching%20my%20dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indonesian&lt;/a&gt;, though both are 10 times better than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/af/The%20cat%20is%20scratching%20my%20dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afrikaans&lt;/a&gt; which is 100 times better than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/sw/The%20cat%20is%20scratching%20my%20dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swahili&lt;/a&gt; (which is infinitely better than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/zu/The%20cat%20is%20scratching%20my%20dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zulu&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/is/The%20cat%20is%20scratching%20my%20dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icelandic&lt;/a&gt; is ignominiously the same as Swahili.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply asking Indonesian speakers to judge the quality of synthesis for English vs. Indonesian is, experimentally speaking, not valid evidence regarding the quality of synthesis across languages. It's not at all clear what &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be a valid procedure to test comparative quality, since there are so many variables to control (subject knowledge of the details of language A vs. language B; subject exposure to other synthesis of a language such as comparing original Klatt synthesis of English with Google synthesis). It might be best to use people with absolutely no exposure to the test languages (maybe impossible in the case of English), and play Real-X:Synth-X::Real-Y:Synth-Y sets (where &quot;real&quot; and &quot;synthesized&quot; are identified), which could get at subjective judgments of similarity. Even so, there would have to be good controls over the native languages of the subject (so that Germanic speakers don't overwhelm the subject pool, or Chinese speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know exactly how Google does its synthesis, but it is likely that for some of the worse syntheses, they are using a text-to-IPA type filter with some kind of knowledge (or misunderstanding) of surface phonetics in the language fed into Klatt synthesis. Whereas in the better languages, they probably rely on a large corpus of sampled speech (which is the basis for some kind of diphone resynthesis). The combinatorics of vowel-consonant-vowel configurations are more complicated and probably speaker-variable in English compared to Indonesian, so it's easier to acquire an ideal corpus of Indonesian that generalizes to the ability to handle any arbitrary input (&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/id/%C3%86%20tenker%20att%20du%20kan%20ikke%20forst%C3%A5%20orden%20minn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not just actual words&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T19:30:52.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24405" CreationDate="2017-07-11T21:46:39.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With which common noun does one fill in this blank?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no &lt;em&gt;hyperonym&lt;/em&gt; covering the above terms, &lt;em&gt;voice, tense, aspect, and mood|modality&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is an informal term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TAM&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which stands for &quot;Tense–Aspect–Mood&quot;, also known as  &lt;strong&gt;TMA&lt;/strong&gt; (Tense–Modality–Aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you may find the term of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;verbal categories&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in some works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And are there more things besides these three that belong in this list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are usually called &lt;em&gt;aspects&lt;/em&gt;, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T21:46:39.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24410" CreationDate="2017-07-12T03:34:38.933" Score="1" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;My native language is Korean. And including me, probably most Korean people often confuse /θ/ with /s/, and /ð/ with /d/. The problem is, I don't know enough how sibilant fricatives and non-sibilant fricatives are discriminated. I know that they are discriminated by whether the airflow goes between the teeth or not, but such difference are made by the tongue, isn't it? So how different is the tongue?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With enough practice to speak English, I can now speak /θ/ and /ð/ properly, but I still don't get /ɹ̝/, /t͜θ/, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17445" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T06:37:09.787" Title="What does the tongue do to discriminate sibilant vs. non-sibilant?" Tags="&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24408" CreationDate="2017-07-12T05:29:11.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tongue does not discriminate, the ear does (the tongue articulates). The sibilants of English, [s,ʃ], are formed with airflow hitting an obstruction at a sharp angle, and the non-sibilants (f,θ) are formed without such an obstruction. Actually, the term &quot;sibilant&quot; isn't a technical term in linguistics, so it's impossible to say what the &quot;sibilants&quot; versus &quot;non-sibilants&quot; are except that we know that &lt;em&gt;s, ʃ&lt;/em&gt; are sibilants. The theoretical linguistic distinction (of dubious empirical validity) is between strident fricatives (&lt;em&gt;s,ʃ&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;) and non-strident (&lt;em&gt;φ,θ&lt;/em&gt;). In the production of &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;, the tongue impinges on the teeth further forward, so that the air more or less passes straight down the tongue and through the teeth (creating very little turbulence), but in producing &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, the tongue is retracted so the air hits the roof of the mouth around the alveolar ridge, then takes a turn down the teeth, which creates a lot of turbulence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T05:29:11.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24408" CreationDate="2017-07-12T06:05:05.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In /s,z/ the sides of the tongue are slightly raised, creating an u-shaped channel or groove, known as &lt;em&gt;sulcus&lt;/em&gt;. You probably already do that unconsciously when you say a Korean /s/ (unless you have a lisp). Sulcalization (grooving) concentrates the airflow, making it sound more strident as it hits the top front teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In /θ,ð/ the tongue is comparatively flat, without sulcalization; this makes the airflow spread, resulting in a softer sound. An easy way to do that is to make the tongue tip peek out beyond the teeth. Many native speakers do that (if you pay attention, sometimes you can spot a tongue tip in a singer's /θ/ in a music video). Depending on the dialect and phonetic context, other speakers don't pop out the tongue at all; they can produce /θ,ð/ sounds with a flattish tongue entirely inside, tongue tip behind the top teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T06:37:09.787" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T06:37:09.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24420" CreationDate="2017-07-12T13:38:29.523" Score="4" ViewCount="2878" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying syntax with '&lt;em&gt;Introduction to government and binding theory&lt;/em&gt;' by Haegeman by myself and I encountered something I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to PRO theorem, PRO must be ungoverned. And these two sentences were presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) *John doesn't know [if [PRO to leave]].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) John doesn't know [whether [PRO to leave]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he explains that in (a), &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; is the head and it governs PRO so the sentence is ungrammatical.&#xA;But in (b), &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; is at the [Spec, CP] position so nothing governs PRO and the sentence is grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood earlier, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; are samely complementizer. But how come &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; goes in [C, CP] while whether &lt;em&gt;goes&lt;/em&gt; in [Spec, CP]? Why these two act differently and how can I tell it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate it if someone could help me. Thanks!&#xA;(If I posted this on the wrong place, please let me know. I'm not sure if I should go to English forum.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17400" LastEditorUserId="17400" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T15:27:53.653" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T15:27:53.653" Title="if vs. whether (complementizer)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20924" CreationDate="2017-07-12T18:29:26.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that these are regional. I've only ever used and read the standard &quot;Bombay&quot; forms (I'm actually from Delhi though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:29:26.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23314" CreationDate="2017-07-12T18:37:24.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindi the usage of only /s/ in the place of /ʃ/ /ʂ/ and /s/ generally makes one sound less educated. Same with the realization of the monophthongs /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ as diphthongs /əɪ/ and /əʊ/. These are mostly found in rural areas that don't use standard Delhi Hindi (also called Khadi Boli), speaking e.g Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:37:24.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-12T18:48:59.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindi घर (ghar) can mean both &quot;house&quot; and &quot;home&quot;. मकान (maka:n) only means &quot;house&quot; but is a pretty common word nevertheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:48:59.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T19:15:29.240" Score="0" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between czech construction &quot;býval + m.č.&quot; and m.č.?&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Harry by si &lt;em&gt;přál&lt;/em&gt; mít aspoň čtyři páry oči navíc.&#xA;Harry by si &lt;em&gt;býval přál&lt;/em&gt; mít aspoň čtyři páry oči navíc.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18534" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T11:13:38.380" Title="Czech: &quot;Býval + minulý čas&quot; VS. minulý čas" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-13T13:11:02.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;em&gt;(o)uchi&lt;/em&gt;, Japanese has &lt;em&gt;furusato&lt;/em&gt; which is translated to &lt;code&gt;hometown&lt;/code&gt;. With nuisance, however &lt;code&gt;the area in which one grew up&lt;/code&gt; is more accurate than the mapped borders of the town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese words often carry emotional weight: &lt;em&gt;(o)uchi&lt;/em&gt; has a feeling of belonging, &lt;em&gt;wagaya&lt;/em&gt; has a feeling of family and any associated feelings thereof, and &lt;em&gt;furusato&lt;/em&gt; has a heavy feeling of nostalgia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17487" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T13:11:02.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24411" CreationDate="2017-07-13T16:26:35.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In spite of what elementary textbooks tend to say, i.e., that the values of Comp are &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; (or 'null &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;'), &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; (or 'null' &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;) in English, there is well established syntactic evidence that that initial analysis - dating back to the late 60's and early 70's - was &lt;strong&gt;incorrect&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; is, like &lt;em&gt;when, why, where, how much, what book, under what conditions&lt;/em&gt;, etc., a &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;phrase&lt;/strong&gt; landing in Spec Focus, &lt;strong&gt;not a Comp head&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest argument in this respect is that &lt;strong&gt;whether&lt;/strong&gt; can be coordinated with other &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;phrases&lt;/strong&gt; that must themselves occupy Spec Focus, whereas &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; cannot. Thus, in &lt;em&gt;I would like to know &lt;strong&gt;whether and (,if so,) under what conditions&lt;/strong&gt; I could postpone payment of my teaching fees&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; is clearly coordinated with a PP &lt;strong&gt;phrase&lt;/strong&gt; and both land first in &lt;strong&gt;Spec&lt;/strong&gt; Focus and then in &lt;strong&gt;Spec&lt;/strong&gt; C (not in Focus and C!). Or, to take a different example, &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; can also be coordinated with &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;I would like to know &lt;strong&gt;whether or not&lt;/strong&gt; I am admitted to the AI programme&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; is independently known to be a phrase base-generated in Spec Polarity (but not in the head of Polarity, as initially assumed). On the contrary, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, a C head, cannot be so coordinated, cf. * &lt;em&gt;I would like to know &lt;strong&gt;if or not&lt;/strong&gt; I am admitted to the AI programme&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirming evidence is available if you consider the etymology of &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; (from OE &lt;em&gt;hw-aeither&lt;/em&gt;) - or, for that matter, that of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;n(e)+a+wiht&lt;/em&gt;, approximately 'not a bit', a negative &lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt;). Significantly, in Old and Middle English, &lt;em&gt;hwaether&lt;/em&gt; did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; interfere with the ascension of the finite verb into the head of FocusP. Although it is true that the finite verb did &lt;strong&gt;not have&lt;/strong&gt; to ascend in &lt;em&gt;hwaether&lt;/em&gt;-introduced clauses, and did not usually do (as in Modern English), the OED still cites quite a few OE and ME examples in which it &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt;, yielding the word order &lt;em&gt;...hwaether&lt;/em&gt; + Verb + Subject...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if &lt;em&gt;hwaether&lt;/em&gt; had been a C (or Focus) &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt;, such verb-raising would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have been possible in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; case, because the finite verb is itself a head and can raise only into an empty head position (= Head Movement). Consequently, &lt;em&gt;hwaether&lt;/em&gt; was already a specifier, as it is today, in Old and Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T16:26:35.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24422" CreationDate="2017-07-13T18:21:26.127" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard a non-native speaker of English saying something would be &quot;split into&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a fraction of a second I realized that what was intended was &quot;split in two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference appears to be that in the two-word phrase, the stress is on the second syllable. And possibly it's a bit longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries tell you which syllable should get the primary stress and in some cases the secondary stress, but only within each word. That there's more to getting the stress on the right syllable than doing so in each word separately is something I might not have noticed without this example. Is there some explicit systematic account of this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T18:42:05.110" Title="&quot;split into&quot; -- putting the stress on the right syllable" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24421" CreationDate="2017-07-13T18:44:04.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of accounts of this fact. Without trying to go back to the earliest linguistic accounts of this, the &lt;em&gt;Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; by Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle has a account of stress-levels, especially regarding the difference between words versus phrases. The basic generalization is that within a word, stress would go on the penult in words like &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt;, but &quot;in two&quot; is composed of two monosyllabic words (each of which has an independent stress). There is a long literature on which word will get the most prominent phrasal stress, and suffice it to say that in phrases like &quot;in two&quot;, the second word (phrasal head) has higher stress. &quot;To&quot; in the word &quot;into&quot; would have lower stress, indeed shouldn't have any stress except by dint of the &quot;veto&quot; rule (p. 191).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem has to do with the status of &quot;into&quot; / &quot;in to&quot;, as word versus couple of words in a phrase. If you manipulate semantic focus, you can get &quot;in two&quot; and &quot;in to&quot; being pronounced nearly the same, for example &quot;He broke &lt;em&gt;in TO&lt;/em&gt; the jail, not &lt;em&gt;out of&lt;/em&gt; it&quot;, with greater prominence on &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, analogous to &quot;The log broke in two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;veto&quot; rule simply says that lax &lt;em&gt;ɔ&lt;/em&gt; gets a 3-stress when it appears at the end of the word. The real question is, why would you claim there is such a rule? The &quot;veto&quot; rule exploits a putative lexical distinction between tense versus lax &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; at the end of a word, motivated by the difference between &quot;veto&quot; versus &quot;motto&quot;. The claim is that the last vowel in &quot;veto&quot; has 3-stress, and the last vowel in &quot;motto&quot; is unstressed. The fact supporting the claim for this difference is that &quot;t&quot; is flapped in &quot;motto&quot; but not in &quot;veto&quot;; we do know that in cases of intervocalic &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; before a secondarily stressed vowel, &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; is not flapped, for example &quot;la&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ex&quot;, &quot;soli&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ude&quot;. The stress difference between &quot;latest&quot; and &quot;latex&quot; on the final syllable is uncontroversial and evident via the vowel quality difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with &quot;veto&quot; versus &quot;motto&quot; is that there is actually no phonetic difference between the two vowels &quot;o&quot;. This is not a problem for SPE, since they allow abstract representations. They require stresses to be predicted by rule. They do not actually provide a derivation of &quot;into&quot;. It is most likely that &quot;to&quot; would be /tʊ/ with a lax vowel, so that it would not have main stress (*intó). But the last syllable is not obligatorily entirely stressless (not mandatorily &quot;inna&quot; with flapping and reduction of the final vowel to schwa). If &quot;into&quot; is /ɪntʊ/, the stress rule can skip the final vowel; then a generalized form of the &quot;veto&quot; rule applies, 3-stress is assigned to the last vowel which blocks reduction t schwa and flapping. The number &quot;two&quot; on the other hand is /tō/ with a tense vowel, so it always gets main stress (and only stress within that word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair &quot;veto, motto&quot; is partially analogous to &quot;into, winter&quot;, in that there is a problem of predicting when &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; flaps. By claiming 3-stress in &quot;into&quot;, &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; won't get flapped (just as it won't get flapped in clear main-stressed &quot;in two&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T18:42:05.110" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T18:42:05.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="24423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T22:43:08.180" Score="-1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a list of the most common words used in either English or Spanish preferably organised by semantic fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any of you point me in the right direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18538" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T13:41:41.613" Title="Vocabulary list" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2017-07-14T04:04:53.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classical Nahuatl speakers refer to their language as &lt;em&gt;Nahuatlahtolli&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Nahuatl language&quot;, from &lt;em&gt;Nahuatl&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tlahtolli&lt;/em&gt;. However they add &lt;em&gt;tlahtolli&lt;/em&gt; to any other language, so &quot;I speak English and German&quot; is translated &lt;em&gt;Nitlahtoa Inglatlahtolli ihuan Teutontlahtolli&lt;/em&gt;. In modern Nahuatl &lt;em&gt;tlahtolli&lt;/em&gt; may be omitted: &lt;em&gt;Nitlahtoa zan tepitzin Nahuatl&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;I only speak a little Nahuatl&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T04:04:53.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24423" CreationDate="2017-07-14T13:41:41.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German publisher Klett Verlag has bilingual dictionaries called &quot;Thematischer Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Englisch&quot; (for English) and &quot;Thematischer Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Spanisch&quot; (for Spanish) that may meet your criteria. They are directed at language learners, and the frequency data are not included in the dictionaries (but the organisation by semantic fields is well-done).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T13:41:41.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24429" CreationDate="2017-07-14T15:20:10.257" Score="3" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying Government and Binding Theory and have a question about unaccusative verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood, Unaccusative verbs (1) cannot assign Accusative Case and (2) lack external argument, i.e. fail to assign external theta role. And also, the values of unaccusative verbs are (1) passive verb, (2) raising verb and (3) verbs of movement and (change of) state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was considering these sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) &lt;em&gt;[e arrived [four men]].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) &lt;em&gt;[Four men arrived [t]].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) &lt;em&gt;[There arrived [four men]].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (a), both EPP and Case Filter are violated since unaccusative verb cannot assign Case. And in (b), NP has moved so the subject position is filled and &lt;em&gt;Four men&lt;/em&gt; is case-marked now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in (c), EPP is satisfied with expletive &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt; is still not case-marked, I think. How does this sentence survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17400" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:10:17.460" Title="Unaccusative verbs, EPP and Case Filter" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T18:04:18.340" Score="1" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need some help from a person who have a degree from Translations. I am looking for a brief informations about a major translation theories in English version but everytime I find something really useful, it turns out to be very comprehensive and I need just strict, clear definitions. Would be very glad for any kind of your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18545" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T18:04:18.340" Title="Major translation theories" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24426" CreationDate="2017-07-14T19:10:17.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentence c) is grammatical because 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; forms &lt;strong&gt;a single chain&lt;/strong&gt; with its 'associate' NP, &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt;. The chain minimally has two 'links' in this case (more if you consider the hidden structure between Comp V and Spec Tense, but that is inmaterial now). Any chain, whether it is constituted by a 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; and its NP associate, as in your c) example, or by a displaced DP and its 'trace(s)' (= its 'copies', under the 'Copy Theory of Movement'), as in your b) example, needs 1) a valued theta role feature (a 'Theme' one, here, supplied by the unaccusative verb &lt;em&gt;arrived&lt;/em&gt; to its complement &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt;), 2) a valued Case feature (nominative, here, supplied to the 'dummy' link of the chain by the Tense element visible in the finite verb *arrivED), and 3) a set of valued 'AGR' features - [Number: Plural], here - supplied to the chain by the 'associate' NP link &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt; and inherited by 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; - which inherently has no valued Number feature and so is compatible with both singular and plural NP associates. Furthermore, if the chain is the only argument that can become subject of the sentence and satisfy EPP, as in this case, 4) one of its links, the NP/DP or its associated 'dummy', must be inserted/land in Spec T/Infl to satisfy EPP. As in your c) example the two links of the chain &lt;em&gt;{There-four men}&lt;/em&gt; jointly satisfy all such conditions, the derivation complies with all the output constraints established at the interfaces and the sentence is grammatical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens in your sentence b), except that in b) it is the NP &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt; itself that directly raises to Spec T, receives a valued nominative Case from T there, satisfying the Case Filter, and thereby also satisfies the EPP constraint at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your sentence a), on the contrary, the chain has a single link, the NP/DP &lt;em&gt;four men&lt;/em&gt;, which contributes 1) a valued Theme role feature, and 2) a valued plural number AGR feature, but, as it remains in situ and, there being no 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; associate, the subject position (Spec T) remains empty, the chain neither acquires a valued (Nominative) Case feature nor satisfies the EPP. With the 'Case Filter' violated and the EPP unsatisfied, of course, derivation a) 'crashes' at the interfaces and the corresponding sentence * &lt;em&gt;Arrived four men&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:10:17.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-14T21:30:49.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian there are adverbs дома and домой similar to English adverb &quot;home&quot; (as in go home, at home)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я дома = I am at home (adverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я в доме = I am in the house (noun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я иду домой = I am going home (adverb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я иду в дом = I am going into the house (noun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T21:30:49.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9315" CreationDate="2017-07-15T02:55:48.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for short sentences tailored toward the phonemes of specific dialects, there are some good examples from &lt;a href=&quot;http://clagnut.com/blog/2380/#English_phonetic_pangrams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the now-deleted Wikipedia article &quot;List of pangrams&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“With tenure, Suzie’d have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.” (for certain US accents and phonological analyses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“Shaw, those twelve beige hooks are joined if I patch a young, gooey mouth.” (perfect for certain accents with the cot-caught merger)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“Are those shy Eurasian footwear, cowboy chaps, or jolly earthmoving headgear?” (perfect for certain Received Pronunciation accents)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.” (a phonetic, not merely phonemic, pangram. It contains both nasals [m] and [ɱ] (as in ‘symphony’), the fricatives [x] (as in ‘loch’) and [ç] (as in ‘hue’), and the ‘dark L’ [ɫ] (as in ‘all’) - in other words, it contains different allophones.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9425" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T02:55:48.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24404" CreationDate="2017-07-15T17:04:44.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that hundreds of languages are supported, at any given point in time the voices for different languages are from different versions of the system, different datasets, or even completely different libraries from different projects or vendors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You happen to have found a language for which the quality is better than for English, and for some reason users are more often surprised by a quality difference that way around than the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T17:04:44.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20398" CreationDate="2017-07-15T17:44:40.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be more surprised to find exceptions, among the world languages, to the pairs &lt;em&gt;above/before&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;below/after&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;front/before&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;back/after&lt;/em&gt;. The latter being referring to a &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt; (and so variable) idea of direction, which is forward most of the time but the Aymara example shows exactly the opposite. The former pairs instead are intuitively associated with the force of gravity, a non-human phenomenon that's a constant everywhere, where an object is up &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; being pulled &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt;. The concept of the hourglass perfectly summarizes this connection between &lt;em&gt;above/below&lt;/em&gt; and the flowing of time. I would be excited to see how constant is the expression &lt;em&gt;above all&lt;/em&gt; , in the meaning of &lt;em&gt;before everything else&lt;/em&gt;, across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastEditorUserId="17427" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:54:05.683" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:54:05.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24435" CreationDate="2017-07-15T22:23:43.633" Score="5" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would break the sonority principle, but. Who knows...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was thinking on a similar thing to semivowels, it seems they are only possible between vowels, if there is one between two consonants, it's not a semivowel, its a vowel, but I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T16:24:41.583" Title="Can a syllabic consonant exist between two vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24434" CreationDate="2017-07-15T23:37:14.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite rare, but it arguably exists. Fante Akan has syllabic consonants which appear at ends pf words, preceded by a vowel. Such a word can be followed by a vowel-initial word, thus [ɔ̀p&lt;strong&gt;ám̀ à&lt;/strong&gt;tàŕ] &quot;he sewed + a dress&quot; (accents are tone). The historical explanation is that final CV was reduced to a syllabic consonant in some contexts, so compare Akuapem Akan [àtàdé] &quot;dress&quot;. A similar example is Logoori, where the locative clitic /mʊ̀/ optionally reduces to [m̀], so you can get [kʊ̀rɪ̀ɪ̀ndà m̀ áváànà] &quot;to-watch+in-there+childen&quot;. Finally, in Swahili, the class 1 object prefix on verbs is [m̩]. Most verb roots which begin with vowels do not eliminate vowel hiatus (though a few do, in some contexts), giving rise to forms like [wa-me-m̩-ondok-e-a] &quot;they went away for him&quot; (morpheme boundaries added).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are no cases of underlyingly syllabic consonants between vowels within a morpheme – such things always seem to arise by rule, of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T23:37:14.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-16T00:09:45.950" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an amateur I lack information about specialized resources for linguists. What I’m looking for is a list of stunning examples of false cognates in any discipline, that can be either exact matches, such as &lt;em&gt;mahina&lt;/em&gt; which is both Hawaiian and Urdu for “month”, or near misses such as &lt;em&gt;rumai&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rumah&lt;/em&gt;, respectively Lithuanian and Malay for “house”, or be more different but meaning the same thing, such as &lt;em&gt;Ehecatl&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Eolos&lt;/em&gt;, the “wind deity” in Nahuatl and Greek. The criteria I’m looking for are that 1) the words should be longer than monosyllables, and 2) not being onomatopoeic, like &lt;em&gt;papalotl&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;papillion&lt;/em&gt; in Nahuatl and French.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that a resemblance between two words can be highly subjective, but I wonder if this type of resource exist? I would like to have a grasp of the extent of linguistic convergences across the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastEditorUserId="17427" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T00:15:31.743" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T00:15:31.743" Title="Is there any resource about &quot;exceptional&quot; examples of false cognates available?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24434" CreationDate="2017-07-16T03:59:07.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Japanese letter ん represents a moraic /n̩/ sound, which always follows a vowel. Finally, it sounds like [ɴ], the uvular nasal, but elsewhere, its pronunciation assimilates to the following consonant's place of articulation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_%28kana%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article about the letter&lt;/a&gt; states that it &quot;is followed by an apostrophe in some systems of transliteration whenever it precedes a vowel&quot;, in which case it is realized usually like [ũ͍] or sometimes [ĩ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That article gives no examples of words containing &lt;em&gt;n'&lt;/em&gt;. But off the top of my head, I remembered the name of the failed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin%27en_%28spacecraft%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shin'en space probe&lt;/a&gt;, which is four morae /si-n̩-e-n̩/. A bit more digging turned up the boy's name &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%91%E3%82%93%E3%81%84%E3%81%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;けんいち (Ken'ichi)&lt;/a&gt;, consisting of four morae /ke-n̩-i-ti/. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/10559/draconis&quot;&gt;Draconis&lt;/a&gt; pointed out another in a comment: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%81%8B%E6%84%9B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;恋愛 (れんあい, &lt;em&gt;ren'ai&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;, meaning &quot;romantic love&quot;, is also four morae /re-n̩-a-i/. In each case, /n̩/ is a full mora but may belong to the previous full syllable depending on how your linguistics professor defines a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the Japanese Language Stack Exchange question &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/23434&quot;&gt;Difference between んい (n'i) and に (ni)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="2712" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T16:24:41.583" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T16:24:41.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24416" CreationDate="2017-07-16T12:29:32.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_mood#Slavic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;past tense of the conditional mood&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (kondicionál minulý, podmiňovací způsob minulý). A short official and authoritative description in Czech can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?id=575#nadpis2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?id=575#nadpis2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note you should use genitive &lt;em&gt;očí&lt;/em&gt;, not nominative &lt;em&gt;oči&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry by si přál mít aspoň čtyři páry očí navíc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry would like to have at least four extra pairs of eyes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry by si býval přál mít aspoň čtyři páry očí navíc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry would have liked to have at least four extra pairs of eyes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: James D. Naughton (2006) Czech: An Essential Grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To talk about what might have been in the past (but wasn't), you can&#xA;  add &lt;strong&gt;byl&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;býval&lt;/strong&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;conditional&lt;/em&gt;, making a 'past&#xA;  conditional', corresponding to 'would have done' in English. ...example... For&#xA;  the past conditional of the verb &lt;strong&gt;být&lt;/strong&gt; 'to be' use &lt;strong&gt;byl býval&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not that archaic as some claim. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://nase-rec.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php?art=6175&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nase-rec.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php?art=6175&lt;/a&gt; (in Czech). I cite and translate: &lt;em&gt;&quot;We can therefore conclude that the thing is not that the past conditional would be disappearing from Czech; but it is &lt;strong&gt;used only when the past is not signified by other means or if the past is not understood from context&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;explicitly asks&lt;/em&gt; for the difference with m.č. (minulý čas), so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The past tense (minulý čas, složené préteritum (compound preterite), developed from the Old Czech perfect tense) is the only non-archaic past tense in Czech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry chtěl mít aspoň čtyři páry očí navíc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry wanted at least four extra pairs of eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastEditorUserId="9466" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T10:39:31.843" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T10:39:31.843" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-16T14:40:20.873" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning about combinatory categorial grammars and the formal semantics of natural language, course by Partee &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05_formal_semantics.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05_formal_semantics.htm&lt;/a&gt; (especially lecture &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU052.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU052.pdf&lt;/a&gt; is relevant for this question) is great indtroduction into these themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - there are syntax rules and semantic rules from natural language (e.g. English) and general principles that allows us to make semantic rules from the syntactic rules. There is some literature about supervised or even unsupervised learning of combinatory categorial grammars and this literature specifically deals with the induction of syntactic rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is - &lt;strong&gt;are there literature, efforts, developments about supervised or unsupervised induction of semantics/semantic rules for natural language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T14:40:20.873" Title="Induction of semantics for grammars of natural languages (as opposed to syntax)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23367" CreationDate="2017-07-16T19:32:41.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, and, what's more, the &lt;strong&gt;deictic&lt;/strong&gt; (IE *ke &gt; &lt;em&gt;hen&lt;/em&gt;)-related forms that Mark Beadles refers to cannot be &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; connected with the bound morph &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; of Modern English &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; because &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; (just as &lt;em&gt;-ere&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-us&lt;/em&gt; - as in &lt;em&gt;thus&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) &lt;strong&gt;is not deictic&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;then, there, thus&lt;/em&gt;, etc. What &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; deictic in all such complex words is the bound morph &lt;em&gt;th-&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;-ere, -us&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) that follow it. And, of course, the reason why &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; does not fit in the pseudoparadigm attempted above and why &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; can never have meant &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; in English, is that &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;is deictic&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This impossibility can be explained in a principled way: a word (or phrase) containing &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; deictic elements, be they free or bound forms, would violate a universal principle, i.e., &lt;strong&gt;that variables (say a time variable, as in &lt;em&gt;th-en&lt;/em&gt;) cannot be &lt;em&gt;doubly bound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Hence, no deictic can possibly 'bind' (read 'apply to', if you prefer) a constituent that already contains an internal deictic: once the (time/place, etc.) variable is bound, a second deictic would have no variable to bind, biuniqueness would be violated, and the resulting word/phrase would be necessarily ill-formed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, in short, why &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; can not be analysed as [&lt;em&gt;t(h) + -(h)en = now&lt;/em&gt;] and why the answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;No, English could never have used &lt;em&gt;-hen&lt;/em&gt;, (&lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;, rather), to mean &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, even if deictic &lt;em&gt;hen&lt;/em&gt;-related forms did exist in, presumably, all primitive IE languages, as Mark Beadles pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T19:32:41.640" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24447" CreationDate="2017-07-17T02:54:13.830" Score="0" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a bit hard for me to find content on this, I know it's common and read it's nearly universal, with exceptions like Russian ng mk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastEditorUserId="17340" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T05:06:53.067" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T20:01:20.650" Title="How common is nasal assimilation before stops?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-07-31T12:33:57.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24460" CreationDate="2017-07-17T03:14:33.550" Score="2" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;By fluid-s I mean a stative-active language that relies on semantics for its morphosyntactic alignment, using things such as volition, empathy, animacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17340" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T12:25:10.343" Title="Is there a language that's purely fluid-s?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-17T14:20:13.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;家 means home, including but not limited to the physical dwelling, and family members. This word can means a lot and makes people feel warm emotionally. I think this is the word best matches home in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, there are some related words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;家庭 means family.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;家乡 means hometown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;房子/房屋/住宅 means house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18552" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T14:20:13.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2017-07-17T14:26:44.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premise of the questions is wrong. Czech dictionaries do often list the noun gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest (and sort of &quot;official&quot;) dictionaries of the standard modern Czech language are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PSJČ - Příruční slovník jazyka českého&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://bara.ujc.cas.cz/psjc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bara.ujc.cas.cz/psjc/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and more recent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SSJČ - Slovník spisovného jazyka českého&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://bara.ujc.cas.cz/ssjc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bara.ujc.cas.cz/ssjc/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;both available online at the website of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. They both do list noun genders. The former with abbreviations m., f., n., the latter with abbreviations m., ž., s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The much older Jungmann's Czech-German dictionary Slowník česko-nĕmecký does list the gender as well using m., f., n. (available at Google books or archive.org).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T14:26:44.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-17T15:59:09.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Czech and Slovak they are two different words (unlike Russian where дом can be both).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dům - house &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;domov - home&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doma, domů - at home, (towards) home&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;originates in Proto-Slavic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/dom%D1%8A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*dȏmъ&lt;/a&gt; - house, home&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastEditorUserId="9466" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T10:54:07.847" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T10:54:07.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24442" CreationDate="2017-07-17T19:11:19.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a general belief among phonologists that (regressive) nasal place assimilation is very common: we can usually cite a half-dozen off the top of our individual heads. I think I could cite a few thousand examples, most of which would be Austronesian or Niger-Congo languages. Because there are so many Niger-Congo and Austronesian languages, I would probably be correct in saying that most languages have such assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're looking for an actually scientific answer, the answer is that nobody knows. The problem is not limited to just place assimilation, but rather follows from the fact that we don't have a sufficient database on what languages do that we can consult, and what we know is skewed in favor of certain languages (those that we, individually, know about). The only South American language that I know anything about is Quechua, which has such assimilation, and I honestly can't say whether it is &quot;common&quot; in South American languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is sorting languages as to degree of assimilation. For instance, all Bantu languages (as far as I know) have some place-assimilation (certain nasals always assimilate), but some languages also have un-assimilated nasals (usually from reduction of /mu/), for example Swahili &lt;em&gt;um̩saidie&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you should help him&quot;. Keley-i (an Austronesian language) has a couple of nasal place assimilation processes, but /m/ does not assimilate, and some outputs of vowel-deletion create unassimilated NC sequences. We know even less about how common it is to have &lt;em&gt;universal&lt;/em&gt; place assimilation in a language, versus some non-assimilated cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a great lifetime project for someone to construct a database whereby we could answer such questions about &quot;how common&quot;, but unfortunately all we have to go on is personal experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T19:11:19.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24442" CreationDate="2017-07-17T20:01:20.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name &quot;nasal assimilation&quot; may be misleading.  Is it the nasality of a consonant that makes it especially subject to regressive place assimilation? In English, not only does alveolar nasal stop n assimilate, but alveolar non-nasal stops d and t also assimilate in position to a following stop.  Maybe it is the fact that n is a stop that causes it to assimilate, rather than that n is a nasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general principle dubbed the &quot;law of similarity&quot; (by David Stampe, which he attributes to Paul Passy, founder of the IPA) requires that when a segment is affected by a nearby sound, it must also be affected correspondingly by more similar sounds.  This suggests that English regressive assimilation affects n before a stop because n is a stop, not because n is a nasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T20:01:20.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24450" CreationDate="2017-07-17T21:40:59.127" Score="2" ViewCount="1144" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perfective aspect is makes it so that the verb is viewed &quot;outside&quot; the verb, while imperfective verbs have an internal view into the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense for past tense verbs, in order to view a past perfective (preterit) verb from the outside, it is already done, while past imperfective (imperfect) verbs just show something is in the past but have no indication that it has stopped (and therefor continue to have an internal view of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say, &quot;I walked,&quot; just tells the action but does not give any internal information about what happened during the process of walking. &quot;I was walking,&quot; implies something happened during walking (stopped, hit by a bus, abducted by aliens, etc.), which gives interior composition, or &quot;I used to walk,&quot; which implies that it was a continuous thing, giving an internal view into that as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also makes sense for the future tense, &quot;I will hit him,&quot; implies that the action will take place, but it does not give away any information about what will happen during that process, while &quot;I will be hitting him,&quot; might imply that it would be continuous or something might happen in the process of hitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is how the perfective aspect can represent boundedness in the present (where a person would always have an internal view of it). If you are doing something in the present, it is continuous (and therefor imperfective), and the moment you talk about it without having any internal structure (perfective), it exists in the past and you are just using the preterit tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18554" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T23:19:38.727" Title="How can the perfective aspect apply to the present tense?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24449" CreationDate="2017-07-17T22:58:36.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, at least, the ordinary simple present is imperfective; but there are genres in which a perfective use is common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In sports broadcasts, for instance: &quot;He shoots, he scores!&quot; describes an ongoing course of action but the individual events are expressed immediately after they happen. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oral storytelling has always alternated frequently between simple past and simple present; jokes in particular are most often told entirely in the simple present. And the convention in English is that summaries of plots (in the programs at plays and operas, for instance) are told in the simple present.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Art&quot; fiction often employs present-tense narrative; indeed, it has become something of conventional mannerism in much contemporary fiction. And it is not unknown for even very sober historical accounts to switch for a time into the &quot;historical present&quot;, particularly when recounting events from a particular individual's point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all these genres the primary effect aimed at in using the simple present is to make the events more immediate, as if they occur immediately before our eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1597" LastEditorUserId="1597" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T23:19:38.727" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T23:19:38.727" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24455" CreationDate="2017-07-18T07:56:05.153" Score="2" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nominal predicates in copular sentences are peculiar because in certain languages, they acquire case other than accusative case. Even English was so, e.g. &quot;it is I (NOM)&quot; vs. &quot;it is me (ACC).&quot; Perhaps this is because there is no actual verb that could assign accusative case to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do post-copular DPs receive case if there is no actual verb? I've heard that the pre-copular DP gets theta-marked by the post-copular one but I'm not sure where I got that from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are nominal/adjectival/prepositional predicates considered arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone direct me to literature related to theta-marking and case-marking in copular sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:13:46.770" Title="Theta-Marking, Case-Marking and Argumenthood in Copular Sentences" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T16:29:33.820" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a good decoder to pair my acoustic model output with my language model output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my acoustic model outputs a string of phonemes they need to be fuzzy matched with the pronunciation model in order to generate possible sentences for evaluation by the language model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the possibilities (even for small sentences) can become overwhelming and certainly explodes the memory on my 64GB machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My pipeline is mainly implemented in python and all of my models have been created by me so I do not have a convention similar to HTK or Kaldi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knows of an open-source alternative for homemade models. I am not too worried about speed since my project is for research and not a product but I need something efficient enough to be usable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18557" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T13:24:03.693" Title="Homemade ASR decoding" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T17:19:35.050" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have about 40,000 documents( of which 6,000 are test set) I ran cross validation, selected a model that works well for me and recorded a 98% recall with a document classification task.&#xA;Now, to finally deploy my model, I have a question! : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I train my model on all my data(all 40,000 of them)? If so, how do I know I'm not over-fitting to it? Stop it the very first time it reaches 100% accuracy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18558" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T04:02:52.070" Title="How to train an NLP model(which is to be deployed) without over-fitting?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24451" CreationDate="2017-07-18T20:13:46.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-copular DPs do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; need Case because they are &lt;strong&gt;not arguments&lt;/strong&gt; of copular &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;. Such DPs, as Atamiri says, are (one-place) 'predicates' or constituents of 'predicates' (see Bowers' alternative analysis &lt;em&gt;infra&lt;/em&gt;), their only argument is, indeed, theta-marked internally to the DP, at some stage occupies the Spec DP position, and, eventually, raises into Spec T/Infl and becomes the subject of the copular sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that this applies only to cases of copular &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, not to those in which &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; expresses &lt;strong&gt;identity&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., 'A is B' : 'A = B') as in &lt;em&gt;That tall woman is John's wife / John's wife is that tall woman&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;two-place&lt;/strong&gt; verb with two 'reversible' arguments, one in complement position and the other - under the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis - in Spec VP (= Spec &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;). Whichever of the two DPs functions as complement of 'identificational' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; does need Case, of course, but that causes no problem, because dyadic &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is transitive-like and assigns (accusative?) Case to its internal argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copular &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, on the contrary, selects just a non-verbal one-place &lt;strong&gt;predicate&lt;/strong&gt; as its complement, i.e., minimally a 'predicative' DP in the cases you are interested in. The hedge 'minimally' is not gratuitous, though, because there is fairly compelling syntactic evidence that the complements of 'copular &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;' are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; directly 'predicative' DPs, but &lt;strong&gt;Predication Phrases&lt;/strong&gt; headed by a 'functional' Pred head that selects a DP as its complement (i.e., structures like [__ Pred [DP]]) and assigns Case to it. (See John Bowers' 'The Syntax of Predication', &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Inquiry&lt;/em&gt; 24/4 (1993), pp. 591-656, or his more recent summary 'Predication', in &lt;em&gt;The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory&lt;/em&gt;, Blackwell 2001, pp. 298-333 for classic statements of this alternative view). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:13:46.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24405" CreationDate="2017-07-19T03:31:25.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure of what we are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages, verbs are inflected in tense and mood, and in person and number. Tense is usually mixed with aspect (in a not much consistent system), so it is usual to refer to &quot;tense/aspect&quot;. In many languages, including many that inflect verbs according to tense/aspect, mood, person, and number, verbs do not inflect according to &quot;voice&quot; (which is more commonly indicated by syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, morphologically, there is no &quot;tenses, voices and moods&quot;, but - for most Western languages, at least - &quot;tense/aspect, mood, person, and number&quot;. And I am not sure that those are legitimate semantic cathegories (voice for instance seems to me to be clearly not semantic - &quot;John sang the hymn&quot; is synonim to &quot;The hymn was sung by John&quot;, which is not the case regarding tenses, moods, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you asking for what features are grammaticalised in verbal morphology, or are you asking for what semantic categories are covered by verbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphologically, I suppose that verbs can be inflected according to many other semantic categories - evidentiality, as pointed in other answers and comments, gender, intensity, for instance. Or even to mark sentences as affirmative/negative/interrogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T03:31:25.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23277" CreationDate="2017-07-19T09:30:29.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The complement of &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jane reading the book&lt;/em&gt;, is, categorially speaking, an &lt;strong&gt;IP&lt;/strong&gt; whose I(nfl) head is the non-finite affix &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt;, with a subject &lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/em&gt; in Spec I position (but &lt;strong&gt;not a CP&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., not a complete 'clause', against what jlawler's comment claims). That IP is, indeed, theta-marked by &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; with the role traditionally called 'Theme'. It is not, however, Case-marked by &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt;, because IPs cannot absorb Case, which entails that the accusative Case feature that &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; can assign remains available to be absorbed by some available DP (i.e., &lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/em&gt;, in this case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As non-finite I(nfl) &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; cannot assign Case (except 'null' Case to PRO in constructions like &lt;em&gt;I enjoyed [ __[PRO reading the book]]&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;enjoyed&lt;/em&gt; takes a full CP complement), in &lt;em&gt;I saw Jane reading the book&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/em&gt; then 'exceptionally' receives accusative Case from &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; (one of the 'exceptional Case marking' (ECM) verbs - which, at bottom, means a small number of verbs that &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; select IP instead of CP complements). The difference is that the DP occupying the Spec I of IP complements is not 'protected' by the CP barrier and remains accessible to Case-marking by an external verb, &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; in this case, whereas the PRO subject of full CPs is inside the CP barrier and inaccessible to the higher verb (&lt;em&gt;enjoyed&lt;/em&gt;, in my example above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence for the classical analysis just offered comes from at least two simple facts: one is that * &lt;em&gt;I saw [&lt;strong&gt;PRO&lt;/strong&gt; reading the book]&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical (whereas e.g. &lt;em&gt;I enjoyed [__ [PRO reading the book]]&lt;/em&gt; is not), and it is ungrammatical because its PRO subject is &lt;strong&gt;doubly Case-marked&lt;/strong&gt; (as 'null' Case by the IP-internal &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; Infl, and as accusative by the governing verb &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt;; the other is that when the higher verb &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; appears in passive form and so loses its transitivity and its capacity to assign accusative Case, as in &lt;em&gt;__ was &lt;strong&gt;seen&lt;/strong&gt; [__ reading the book]&lt;/em&gt;, the lower subject &lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/em&gt; can no longer receive accusative Case from &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; and, to avoid violating the Case Filter, must raise from Spec IP into the Spec T of the main clause and become its subject, as in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/strong&gt; was seen [ &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; reading the book]&lt;/em&gt;. This, in turn, entails that the &lt;em&gt;ing&lt;/em&gt;-clause cannot have a PRO subject after ECM verbs like &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt;, since it has a trace-of-&lt;em&gt;Jane&lt;/em&gt; one, and so that it must be an IP, not a CP, Q.E.D. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T09:30:29.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24458" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24469" CreationDate="2017-07-19T09:37:23.677" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am already familiar with some text (document) classification algorithms after processing into a Bag-of-words &amp;amp; tf-idf representation. Classification algorithms such as Multionmial Naive Bayes, Logistic regression, Support vector machine, etc. I also looked into word2vec and not sure if it's suitable for what I am trying. I need something more than just a tf-idf computation, I want to classify based on the semantic relations in the text and I will provide an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume as a simple case I want to predict if a movie is receiving a good review or a bad one, for example the movie &quot;A.I.: Artificial Intelligence&quot;. But the sentence is usually composed of one or move movies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sentence example: &quot;I really disliked the movie &quot;Ex Machina&quot;, but &quot;A.I.:&#xA;  Artificial Intelligence&quot; was quite good!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus inside the sentence I only want to find the relation with the movie &quot;A.I.: Artificial Intelligence&quot; and I don't care at all about other movies. But traditional algorithms could interpret this as a bad review because they capture the words not related to &quot;A.I.: Artificial Intelligence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is what is the best way to handle such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18565" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T02:41:21.877" Title="Text classification of semantic relations within text" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24458" CreationDate="2017-07-19T11:32:51.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your broader question is about semantic relations, but the example you gave was about a narrower, but still widely researched field, that of opinion mining. Since you're asking about an entire field, it would be hard for me to get into the details. I'll treat the question as a reference request, and recommend the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/omsa/omsa.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Opinion mining and sentiment analysis&lt;/a&gt;. Published in 2008, the book is somewhat dated now, but it's still a good enough starting point to explore the various techniques used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T11:32:51.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24443" CreationDate="2017-07-19T12:25:10.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Crow language (Apsáalooke) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_language#Verbal_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;divides verbs into two classes, &quot;Active&quot; and &quot;Stative&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The division between classes is based on semantic criteria. The objects of transitive active verbs are marked like the subjects of stative verbs, and there is a different set of pronominal affixes for each verb type. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T12:25:10.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22730" CreationDate="2017-07-19T15:47:01.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Articulation can be affected by gravity. Jaw movement and tongue position depends on neural feedback mechanisms to determine if the target has been reached. This doesn't absolutely limit ability to make certain sounds, but it can make it more difficult to articulate correctly. A &quot;simple&quot; test is to try talking upside down: it can be done, but it takes a little while to readjust. Respiration (thus phonation) is also affected by having your giblets on top of your lungs, but again you can learn to adjust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting experiment would be studying acquisition of new sounds (e.g. Arabic ʕ, Lushootseed ƛ', Hungarian gy, Khoisan clicks), when subjects practice the sound &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; when inverted. I predict initial difficulties in articulation when subjects are allowed to make these sounds when standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T15:47:01.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23002" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:36:16.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'It' is a neutral third person singular personal pronoun. 'It' can be used as a subject or object, as opposed to the other third person pronouns:&#xA;'he' (subject) vs 'him' (object) and&#xA;'she' (subject) vs 'her' (object)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18568" LastEditorDisplayName="user18568" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T15:18:59.277" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T15:18:59.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:47:03.607" Score="5" ViewCount="1455" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the minimum number of forms that one needs to memorize in order to be able to fully conjugate a Sanskrit verb? I've found differing answers: some say six, others ten, and in fact, I personally had thought that it was sufficient to know the class number and the voice (&lt;em&gt;parasmaipada&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ātmanepada&lt;/em&gt;) (and whether the verb was &lt;em&gt;seṭ&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aniṭ&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;veṭ&lt;/em&gt;, but I also thought that could be derived based on the ending letter and class number of the root, with a number of exceptions to the rules of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of what has made it such a difficult question to answer for me (besides the fact that the idea of principal parts never really belonged to traditional pedagogy, but rather to that of Latin and Greek) is that sometimes the so-called &quot;principal parts&quot; can actually be derived from the root through rules, however complex they may be. For example, the perfect tense form is often given as a principal part, yet I thought it could be derived through the rules of reduplication (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;, √&lt;em&gt;arh&lt;/em&gt; [1P] has initial &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; followed by a conjunct consonant, so when it comes to reduplication, √&lt;em&gt;arh&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ān-arh-a&lt;/em&gt; [&quot;he deserved&quot;]). So, exceptions to the rules of reduplication, &lt;em&gt;seṭ&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;aniṭ&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;veṭ&lt;/em&gt; identification, etc. aside, how many principal parts do Sanskrit verbs have? And how reliable are these rules I mentioned above? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5284" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:22:53.390" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:22:53.390" Title="How many &quot;principal parts&quot; do Sanskrit verbs have?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;pedagogy&gt;&lt;principal-parts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="24477" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:47:43.793" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the exact nature of a language's possessive elements may vary in meaning, usage, syntax, etc. what they all seem to share is that they ether present the superior element before the inferior one, or the inferior before it's superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples: A's B, B of A, B de l'A, B du A, AのB, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've not yet found a language where the possessive's extra syntax is anywhere other than between the two elements, but that aspect doesn't seem nearly as universal as the above mentioned word order does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this (I assume) universal aspect of possessives, I must ask; how exactly do linguists describe the two elements involved? What are they called? What terminology is used to talk about their word orders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T13:02:41.997" Title="How do linguists describe the element order of a possessive? (aka. &quot;A's B&quot; vs &quot;B of A&quot;)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T23:11:52.097" Score="0" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find some exhaustive collection of classified sample sentences - passive, with relative clauses, conditionals, and so on. Is this available? It does not have to be online, I am also OK with some published material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2464" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T13:12:39.980" Title="Collections of classified sample sentences (about certain grammatical feature)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24464" CreationDate="2017-07-20T02:18:35.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you may already know, there are 10 tenses/moods in Sanskrit (11 if you include the tense that is used only in the veda). Of these, you will see a similarity in the forms of 4 tenses/moods since they are all derived in a specific manner. Likewise forms of the remaining 6 tenses/moods are all derivable similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take up verbs of the first group (called &lt;strong&gt;bhvaadi-gana भ्वादिगणः&lt;/strong&gt;) and examine their conjugations in the 4 tenses/moods &lt;code&gt;लट्&lt;/code&gt; (present tense), &lt;code&gt;लोट्&lt;/code&gt; (imperative mood), &lt;code&gt;लङ्&lt;/code&gt; (past tense) and &lt;code&gt;विधिलिङ्&lt;/code&gt; (imperative/potential mood) (excuse me I don't have the best translations for these tenses/moods), they all follow a specific pattern. These are called &lt;strong&gt;saarva-dhatuka-lakaraaha सार्वधातुकलकाराः&lt;/strong&gt; Knowing the 9 forms (singular, dual and plural for each of the first, second and third persons) will enable you to guess forms for other verbal roots in these 4 tenses/moods. As long as you are aware of certain rules that apply modifications to the verbal base, you should be able conjugate all forms with ease. The common factor for conjugating verbs in these 4 tenses/moods is that there's a suffix that interposes itself between the verbal root and the tense. For e.g &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;भू + लट् - भू is the verbal root and लट् is the lakara for present tense&#xA;भू + तिप् - लट् is replaced with तिप् for first person singular&#xA;भू + शप् + तिप् - शप् is this new suffix&#xA;भू + अ + ति - The indicatory letters are dropped&#xA;भो + अ + ति - A modification to the verbal base&#xA;भवति - When two vowels are next to each other, they are modified accordingly.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you pick verbs from a different group (say the second one called adaadi-gana अदादिगणः), their conjugations will differ only in that the intervening suffix between the verbal base and the person/number suffix changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are always exceptions to these generic statements and only a study of Panini's grammar will equip one with the tools to conjugate any verbal root for any tense/mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second category is the remaining 6 tenses/moods are called &lt;strong&gt;aardha-dhatuka-lakaraaha आर्धधातुकलकाराः&lt;/strong&gt; They are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;लिट्&lt;/code&gt; (some kind of past tense)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;लुट्&lt;/code&gt; (some kind of future tense)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;लृट्&lt;/code&gt; (some kind of future tense)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;आशीर्लिङ्&lt;/code&gt; (benediction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;लुङ्&lt;/code&gt; (some kind of past tense, probably aorist if my memory serves me right)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;लृङ्&lt;/code&gt;(impossibility of action)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conjugating verbs for these tenses/moods, it should be noted that a very specific suffix falls in place between the verbal root and the suffix that indicates person/number. For e.g&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;भू + लुट् - भू is the verbal root and लुट् is the lakara for future tense.    &#xA;भू + तिप् - लुट् is replaced with तिप् for first person singular&#xA;भू + तास् + तिप् - A new suffix तास् appears between भू and तिप् This suffix is the same, regardless of which verbal root you pick (from any of the 10 groups/गणाः)&#xA;भू + तास् + डा - तिप् is replaced with डा &#xA;भू + इतास् + डा - The verb being सेट्, the augment इट् is added to तास् &#xA;भू + इत् + आ - A portion of तास् is elided&#xA;भो + इता -  A modification to the verbal base&#xA;भविता - When two vowels are next to each other, they are modified accordingly.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these 6 tenses/moods, the knowledge of whether a verb is सेट्/अनिट्/वेट् is very important. In &lt;code&gt;लिट्&lt;/code&gt; the verb is always duplicated and undergoes many modifications. While it is easy to spot the duplication when you come across a conjugated form in reading, deriving the same (or sometimes identifying the verbal root itself) from a verb is non-trivial. In &lt;code&gt;लुङ्&lt;/code&gt; too, there are many rules that govern the modifications to verbal bases and sometimes to suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Memorizing the conjugations of all verbs in all tenses/moods is a daunting task. One of the main benefits of studying Panini's grammar is that conjugating a verb in any tense becomes trivial with sufficient practice and knowledge of the rules. Someone who hasn't undergone such training may be able conjugate verbs to some extent but will always fall short when special knowledge is required in some places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sanskrit verb has just one part. The conjugated part is derived by adding one or more suffixes to the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T02:18:35.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T02:37:46.980" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;To describe the ordinariness of a certain 25-year-old man, someone said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He's the kind of guy that you could walk into a bar in any part of the country and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A guy that you can see&quot; makes sense; &quot;A guy that you can walk&quot; does not, unless the word &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt; is used in the sense of walking the dog rather than in the sense of walking into a bar. I.e. that verb is intransitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my tentative idea was that &quot;walk into a bar and see&quot; is being used here in effect as a compound transitive verb. But on the other hand, if you say &quot;I walked into the bar and saw him.&quot;, I would say simply that &lt;em&gt;walked&lt;/em&gt; is an intransitive verb and the pronoun &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; is the object of the transitive verb &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how would syntacticians analyze the quoted sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:36:52.037" Title="Parsing and a possible compound verb" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24458" CreationDate="2017-07-20T02:41:21.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two paths you can take to solve this problem, both outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/15.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jurafsky &amp;amp; Martin (2016), Ch. 15&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If computing your own semantic similarity matrix, you can shrink the size of the window where the model looks for co-occurrences. In your example, if the window around the title was 3 words, it would pick up &quot;quite good&quot; but not &quot;disliked.&quot; In general, the smaller the window size, the more syntactically related the co-occurrences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) You can use an algorithm that takes semantic/syntactic dependency into account. From the above textbook:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other words, we could define the dimensions of our context vector&#xA;  not by the presence of a word in a window, but by the presence of a&#xA;  word in a particular dependency (or other grammatical relation)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of previous studies have used this, as outlined in the linked chapter. They either &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; count semantic/syntactic co-occurrences, or under/overweight co-occurrences based on semantic/syntactic relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T02:41:21.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25495" CreationDate="2017-07-20T07:19:17.357" Score="8" ViewCount="3223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among all attested Indo European languages, which one best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European? Which is most useful in the reconstruction of PIE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18572" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T08:48:21.403" Title="Which Indo European language best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2017-07-20T07:24:00.343" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian, Latin and Greek possibly have the most features of PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T07:24:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2017-07-20T08:31:35.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I think this is a useless question. All IE languages have preserved certain features of the hypothetical parent language and have lost others. All IE languages need to be taken into account in reconstructing the proto-language. There is no objective way to determine which daughter languages have “best” preserved these features. For example, the hypothetical IE laryngeals are preserved as such only in Anatolian, but Anatolian has lost lots of other features which have been attributed to PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or to stay with living languages: Russian has a very complex system of cases, but has lost all conjugated forms of the verb except the present indicative active. Modern Greek, on the other hand, has a pruned-down system of cases, but a very well preserved verbal system (active and middle voice, aorist vs imperfect, subjunctive etc.). Which has been “better” at preserving PIE features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T09:19:05.667" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T09:19:05.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T08:35:34.617" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with large amounts of text and already have a bunch of programmatic instruments to explore them (Python, R, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say the truth, most of the exploration tasks like bigram extraction, collocations, context sampling are rather standard and I would like to use more handy tool to do the preliminary analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there fast and smart tools to explore text corpora? Tried &lt;em&gt;AntConc&lt;/em&gt;, but it seems rather slow and not much user-friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T16:26:58.927" Title="Software for exploring large set of textual data" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2017-07-20T09:31:58.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical (and still true) answer is: The older, the better. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gothic is better than Modern High German, Latin better than French, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, one should use as many languages as possible. To assign a certain feature to Proto-Indogermanic it should have left traces in more than one branch. Only accumulating information from several branches allows a reliable reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, there are indeed some features that are better preserved in certain branches or languages than in others: Laryngeals in Hittite, Verbal inflection in Greek and Sanskrit, Accent in Lithuanian, Greek, and Sanskrit, Nominal inflection in Latin, Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T16:06:01.463" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:06:01.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24465" CreationDate="2017-07-20T09:47:51.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &lt;em&gt;Order of Genitive and Noun&lt;/em&gt; and common abbreviations are GenN (for A's B) and NGen (for B of A). For a survey, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS chapter 86&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T13:02:41.997" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T13:02:41.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T12:38:21.223" Score="9" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer: I do not know Arabic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of Spanish words of Arabic origin: &lt;em&gt;alacrán, albañil, alquimia...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder why Spanish language borrowed so many Arabic words along with the Arabic definite articles (the prefix 'al' in the examples). If I take for example English borrowings into Polish language I find no words which contain the English articles like 'the' or 'a'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this the case?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any other examples of borrowings with articles/other grammatical markers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Arabic and English definite articles might actually work in quite a different way so, as for instance Arabic definite articles are more inseparable from words than their English counterparts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Borrowing Arabic in medieval Spain was different than today's borrowing of English words by Polish. As some of us actually understand English and can skip the article. My intuition is that People in the Iberian Peninsula understood Arabic much less than Polish understand English nowadays, so the words Spanish borrowed are in their most common form, that is the form with the article included.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastEditorUserId="14690" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T10:28:59.663" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T21:36:15.057" Title="Borrowing words along with the articles or other grammatical parts (like Spanish from Arabic)" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="24479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T12:41:49.300" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an absolute beginner with basic knowledge on linguistics, phonetics, phonology, poetics or musicology acquired by reading from Wikipedia, and currently attending a short course to learn to use the IPA chart. Despite the practical motivations to pronounce English words correctly, the way sounds, tones and rhythms interacting and resonating with our mind and psychology really fascinates me. I know poetics and musicology may largely be out of linguists' scope, but since phonetics is essential for these fields, I think it is appropriate to ask about its theory and applications here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any good introductory book on phonetics, preferably with its applications in poetics or musicology? I have a physics background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T16:27:03.467" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T16:27:03.467" Title="What introducing phonology book cover its applications on poetics or musicology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24466" CreationDate="2017-07-20T13:12:39.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For syntactically annotated sentences, I suggest to get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treebank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;treebank&lt;/a&gt;, for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc99t42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Treebank&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a great tool called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/showcase/gretel-search-engine-querying-syntactic-constructions-treebanks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GrETEL&lt;/a&gt; that allows you to enter a sentence (in ordinary language) and query for syntactically similar sentences. GrETEL is supported by the European Language Research Infrastructure &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T13:12:39.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T13:53:50.387" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;This morning I have asked the following question on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage SE: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an Italian, I find the interaction between my language and the English language fascinating. One big problem I am facing now is the scarceness of academic resources on the subject. Apart from some websites and blog or newspaper articles, there isn't much one can read about the Italian language in an AE linguistic context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My greatest interest lies in the sociolinguistic dynamics of said interaction, but anything that has to do with the subject will be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fear of it being closed (after I got told off by a member of said SE), I decided to post it here, where it might be welcomed due to its having to do both with linguistic research and academic resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to the original question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/400939/204250&quot;&gt;References for Italian-American slang&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14445" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T13:53:50.387" Title="References for Italian-American slang (cross-post from English Language &amp; Usage)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24478" CreationDate="2017-07-20T15:35:25.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is an example of Spanish words of Arabic origin: alacrán, albañil, alquimia...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's curious.  But it was not just Spanish - &lt;em&gt;alembic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;alcohol&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;algorithm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;elixir&lt;/em&gt; had the article added by Greek or Mediaeval Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistic evolution, it is often really hard or impossible to say why.  I think it's fair to say that the Iberian Romance speakers probably did not speak Arabic very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any other example of borrowings with articles/other grammatical markers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are examples, even examples of whole sentences like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;vasistas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imam_bayildi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;imam bayildi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je_ne_sais_quoi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;je ne sais quoi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; being understood or used as a noun, even in the source language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arabic and English definite articles might actually work in quite a different way so, as for instance Arabic definite articles are more inseparable from words than their English counterparts.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, Arabic articles are not so so different than modern Romance articles, and &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; in some dialects) are superficially quite similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference compared to Iberian Romance is that the adjectives also take an article.  (&lt;em&gt;kabir&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalquivir#Name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Guadalquivir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an adjective.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider that your example target language, Polish, has no articles at all, like many languages, the potential for this sort of mistake between Arabic and Spanish is lower.  And many many other languages took massive contributions from Arabic, but few of them introduced this error so consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, Latin does not have definite articles, and Latin was still used as a written language in Spain in mediaeval times.  It could be that the words were borrowed before that shift was formalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My intuition is that People in the Iberian Peninsula understood Arabic much less than Polish understand English nowadays, so the words we incorporated in its most common form, that is the form with the article included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your intuition is logical, it seems like a necessary but not sufficient condition for this type of error.  But there are some other potential factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Polish and English are written in the same alphabet, and most Poles are literate, so the word boundary is obvious to Polish speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English is a prestige language in Poland and internationally, not unwelcome, and the elite will laugh at those who butcher it too much.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of the Arabic words in Iberia were place names, that is, proper nouns.  Polish does use articles in cases like &lt;em&gt;The Beatles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's notable that just as many of the Arabic words did not have this article added when they were borrowed into Spanish, Portuguese and Ladino.  It could be worth analysing the characteristics of both groups, and perhaps a variable - the part of speech, the phonetics, the era, the domain... - will reveal itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T08:51:09.643" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T08:51:09.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13123" CreationDate="2017-07-21T10:14:57.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/srparser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website for the SR parser&lt;/a&gt; explicitly states that the measures were for parsing on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc99t42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Treebank WSJ (Wall Street Journal) corpus&lt;/a&gt;, section 23:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pNsjO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pNsjO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of performance table from Stanford CoreNLP SR parser website&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14543" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T10:14:57.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24475" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:26:58.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;AntConc won't ever be comparable to professional tools like Python or R. And it's not possible to know what the software is doing, or to adapt it, since it's not open source (it's freeware, I believe). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also create some GUIs on the top of Python packages like nltk and have the functions that you use at hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13153" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T16:26:58.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24478" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:39:48.760" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a linguistic process called &lt;strong&gt;rebracketing&lt;/strong&gt;, and more specifically &lt;strong&gt;juncture loss&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rebracketing is when word or morpheme boundaries are re-analyzed, especially when a word is borrowed from one language into another. The standard example of this is &lt;em&gt;hamburger&lt;/em&gt;: the original German word was &lt;em&gt;hamburg-er&lt;/em&gt; (because it came from the city of Hamburg), but in English it's been re-analyzed as &lt;em&gt;ham-burger&lt;/em&gt;; this leads to new forms like &quot;cheeseburger&quot; and &quot;chickenburger&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Juncture loss is a specific subset of this: when the boundary between two words is lost, and they become one. For example, Arabic &lt;em&gt;al-kuħl&lt;/em&gt; &quot;antimony&quot; (two morphemes) to English &lt;em&gt;alcohol&lt;/em&gt; (one morpheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon isn't limited to Arabic: consider English &lt;em&gt;the alligator&lt;/em&gt;, from Spanish &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;el&lt;/strong&gt; lagarto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; lizard&quot;; English &lt;em&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;hoi&lt;/strong&gt; polloi&lt;/em&gt;, from Ancient Greek for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; people&quot;. But it's far-and-away more common with Arabic words than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason for this is that the definite article in Arabic is much more widely-used than in English or Spanish, and definitely more common than in Latin (which had no articles at all until well into the Romance period). For example, none of these languages tend to use the definite article in front of proper names. So the name &lt;em&gt;al-Khwārizmī&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed into Latin as &lt;em&gt;Algorismi&lt;/em&gt;, hence &lt;em&gt;algorithm&lt;/em&gt;. This happens in reverse as well: the Greek name &lt;em&gt;Alexander&lt;/em&gt; was analyzed in Arabic as &lt;em&gt;al-Iskandar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the Arabic definite article is much more closely attached to the noun than in English. A noun and article are written as a single word, and the last letter of the article tends to assimilate to the first letter of the noun (look up &quot;sun and moon letters&quot; for more info on this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closely-joined morphemes are known to make this sort of rebracketing much more likely to happen: the same thing often happens in Swahili, where nouns have prefixes indicating their class/gender. One type of inanimate object is marked with &lt;em&gt;ki-&lt;/em&gt; in the singular and &lt;em&gt;vi-&lt;/em&gt; in the plural, so the Arabic word &lt;em&gt;kitāb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;book&quot; became &lt;em&gt;kitabu/vitabu&lt;/em&gt;, and the English word &quot;video&quot; became &lt;em&gt;kideo/video&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, as you surmised, the medieval Europeans who were borrowing many of these words were not particularly familiar with Arabic. The speakers of European languages tend to be more familiar with each other, and thus rebracketing is less likely in loanwords—though it can still happen, as in &lt;em&gt;hamburger&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;alligator&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T15:33:54.877" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T15:33:54.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="24488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:43:45.803" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently trying to understand speech perception, and are at the moment a bit stuck..  I seem to understand how the ear process incoming sound, but i don't understand the concept of phones.  Why is it a thing?.. The ear isn't exactly coded to interpret phones, and such thing is usually language dependent, so why even bother? I know that there is currently no accurate model of how speech is being perceived, but perceiving based on phones seems incorrect to me, as those are language dependent and not universal...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my actual question is more... What is the connection between phones and speech perception?..  Why are we trying to link acoustic signal to phones? and why does it somehow determine the human speech perception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17431" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T19:57:41.437" Title="Acoustic signal to phones?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24488" CreationDate="2017-07-21T18:53:36.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phones are a &quot;thing&quot; because they were the first decent method of objectively and accurately recording unwritten languages (in the 19th century). Back then, if you heard a Lushootseed speaker translate English &quot;The bear ate the salmon&quot;, the standard practice was to guess with untrained English-speaker ears that the person said &quot;Oo uhshluh tube tea skuchicuss uh tea spots&quot;. Because tape recorders and even wax cylinder recorders did not exist, there was no decent way to say how the utterance was actually pronounced. &quot;Phones&quot; are simply standardized transcriptional symbols that have a (relatively) fixed meaning in terms of what appropriately-trained people hear (i.e 'ʃʲ' should sound a particular way, no matter what the language is). When you start getting into whether a particular sound is &quot;important&quot; in a language, that is where you get into phonology and &quot;phonemes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;phone&quot; became systematic in linguistic practice in the 30's onwards, during a period of methodological frenzy. The idea was that you have to first start by writing down what was actually said (given knowledge of the symbols and competence in distinguishing &quot;ʉ&quot; from &quot;y&quot;), and this is recording in terms of &quot;phones&quot;. This is basically the conversion of a continuous physical signal into a discrete symbolic representation. After you've got this reduction of speech to phones, you can analyze the distribution; you will record for English such phones as [t, tʰ, ɾ, t˺, t˟], and yet you notice that these sounds never appear in the same context (as happens with &quot;tie&quot; versus &quot;die&quot;). Thus phones are grouped together into sets: a set of phones that never is the basis for distinguishing utterances (very roughly) is a &quot;phoneme&quot;. Choices of phoneme is what makes different words different (in sound). Hence the view that phonemes are about perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem with saying that we perceive in terms of phonemes is that this is simply false, or requires a special definition of &quot;perceive&quot;. There is a classroom stunt that is often pulled on students in phonetics-phonology classes, where you record a speaker saying &quot;stick&quot;, &quot;tick&quot; and &quot;Dick&quot;, then edit out the fricative from &quot;stick&quot;, and playing the words, ask the students to identify the words. Edited &quot;stick&quot; comes out as &quot;dick&quot;. The &quot;explanation&quot; is that English has the phonemes /t,d/ and the phones [t,tʰ,d], and speakers can't &quot;perceive&quot; the phone [t] as distinct from [d], they only perceive the two phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flaw in this is that it's task-determined. Speakers &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; correctly identify edited &quot;stick&quot; as being distinct from &quot;dick&quot;, and they can tell if a person uses the &quot;wrong phone&quot; in pronunciation (e.g. saying [stʰɪk]). It's not that we can't perceive low-level predictable details, it's that we disregard them for most especially linguistic purposes. Also, people are able to learn new languages with new sounds, but that would be impossible if you could only perceive the phonemes of your language. You can actual learn that German &quot;bieten&quot; and English &quot;beaten&quot; are pronounced differently albeit quite similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, however, quite a number of physical differences which quite literally cannot be detected by people, for example the difference between a tone at 200 Hz and one at 201 Hz. The concept of &quot;phone&quot; &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have utility in distinguishing sound-differences which are completely incapable of being linguistically exploited, versus ones that happen to not be exploited in a particular language (like aspiration in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal is to do speech recognition on English (or some other well-understood language), then &quot;phones&quot; are completely superfluous. We already know what the range of acoustic variation is going to be for &quot;p&quot;, &quot;f&quot; and so on, and we can adjust our programs (database) accordingly. Phones are more important in that first stage of mapping speech to symbols. They continue to be important for quite a while, because we still don't know what a &quot;phoneme&quot; is. For example, we do not know if [ɾ] is a phoneme of English (everybody seems to have their own opinion, there is no scientific consensus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the bottom line for perception and phones. There is a limit to what kinds of sound differences can be distinguished by humans; there are also limitations where one's prior linguistic knowledge influences you (to perhaps not notice the difference between &quot;bieten&quot; and &quot;beaten&quot;); then there are differences that you really just can't miss, assuming you already know the language. &quot;Phones&quot; are about the middle class of problems, where you can hear that sounds are &quot;somehow different&quot; in a systematic way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Lushootseed example is [ʔuʔəɬətub ti sq'əčqs ʔə ti spaʔc]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T18:53:36.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24488" CreationDate="2017-07-21T20:45:44.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When hearing language, we can distinguish articulations, such as whether the vocal cords are vibrating or the tongue body is lowered in the mouth.  A phone is the sound made by a certain state of the articulatory organs -- tongue, lips, vocal cords, and so on.  When the sound of a language expression is described as a sequence of phones, this means that it was produced by a succession of changes of the organs of articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We worked out the basics of how this system works over 2500 years ago when the ancient Greeks devised the alphabet, and since then, this way of describing human speech has been elaborated and refined to be more useful for recording the various human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact perceptual mechanisms in the ear and brain that allow humans to estimate articulatory changes from acoustic signals is something others could perhaps tell you about.  My impression is that much is still unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T19:57:41.437" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T19:57:41.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T00:17:47.370" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could classify words in all sentences in a text file as PERSON, LOCATION, ORGANIZATION etc. using Stanford's Named Entity Recognition. But how to extract names of a specific group of persons (eg: All borrowers names)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18587" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T17:43:33.990" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T17:43:33.990" Title="How to return only the person names who belong to a group?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13073" CreationDate="2017-07-22T01:23:53.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Norse_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Norse language&lt;/a&gt; is attested in Runic inscriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19587" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T01:23:53.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2017-07-22T13:15:33.470" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many possible answers to this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Historically, the comparative method was born from observing the regularity of phonological and morphological correspondences between Classical European languages (that is, Latin and Greek), Germanic languages and dialects on one hand and, on the other hand, Sanskrit and Avestan (two &quot;oriental&quot; languages which have been discovered and started to be learned by the Europeans only at the beginning of the 19th cent.). Therefore, the Proto-Indo-European has been initially shaped on the model of these comparanda. Sanskrit was initially considered not only the most conservative of the IE languages, but even the very Proto-language from which the others would have descended. Later it became clear that Sanskrit was conservative in some aspects (e.g. preservation of the aspirated stops), but innovative in some others (e.g. merger of the ablaut vowels into one phoneme /a/). The Proto-languages, therefore, had to be re-designed in order to reestablish the right chronology of the preserved phenomena. For the vowels, for example, Latin and espcially Greek were more trustworthy than Sanskrit. Later on, also the morphology started to be reconsidered. Were the case system of Sanskrit a perfect match of the one that we should postulate for the PIE? It is not considered obvious anymore: some cases could have been created independently in every branch of the IE family from a preexisting simpler system with less cases. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A better and more meaningful question to ask is: what are the unique IE features preserved exclusively by each of the IE branches? Sanskrit has some of them (preservation of the aspiratae, or, say, of the so-called injunctive), Greek has others (the vowel system, the position of the accent), Lithuanian has its own (the quality of the accent) etc. Interestingly, even some very &quot;recent&quot; IE branches can help reconstructing some very important IE feaures. Thus, Albanian apparently preserves the otherwise unattested and only presumed distinction between velar, palatal and labiovelar stops. Therefore, each branch's contribution is important for the whole picture. Speculating on which one is &quot;more important&quot; than others does not make much sense. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the oldest languages preserve more IE features just because they are closer to the proto-language. But this is often countered by some striking examples of conservative features preserved by a modern language. This is often used as a proof os presumed &quot;superiority&quot; of such languages. The most famous case is, probably, Lithuanian, which has preserved some very archaic features (the pitch accent, for example, or the nominal endings with the final -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in the Nominative). However, it is also rather innovative in some other respect. Sometimes you can hear that Lithuanian is &quot;the PIE today&quot;, but this is a nationalistic exageration. Interestingly, at the beginning of the comparative linguistics the same was thought concerning the Germanic languages. Moreover, the initial impulse for this field was exactly the German cultural nationalism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T13:15:33.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25504" CreationDate="2017-07-22T14:36:40.607" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading in the literature about text processing I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5782-character-level-convolutional-networks-for-text-classification.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; scientific paper about text classification using artificial neural nets. The authors feed their convolutional neural network with just the letters from the text. The network's output is the classification so there is no internal representation of the text's content or syntax in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore to understand the neural net's decisions is a very hard task since visualizing filters and the neuron's activations is not as comprehensible as it is when working with images instead of texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples for solving other speech and language processing tasks without referring to language itself? For example a speech recognition system could map directly from my voice to computer commands on my phone without converting my speech to some internal representation of language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any solutions for the task of visualizing/understanding the decision making of convolutional neural networks that work with texts especially when the input is just the text letter by letter? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18579" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:25:05.673" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:25:05.673" Title="Speech and Language Processing without Representation of Language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T16:56:20.660" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading Velupillai's &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt;, and the author stresses how much work still needs to be done for sign languages in general. She mentions in particular that there are almost no reference grammars available for any sign language at all, so that typological studies become rather difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now trying to find a reference grammar on any sign language, and I can only come up with one: &lt;em&gt;New Zealand Sign Language: A Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, by Rachel McKee. It's only available as an ebook, and I'm not sure if it is actually a comprehensive reference grammar or a shorter grammar for reference by learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone refer me to a comprehensive reference grammar on any sign language? If I am mistaken and there are now plenty, a list of some good examples would be especially useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T20:18:35.757" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:09:01.433" Title="comprehensive reference grammar on any sign language" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24492" CreationDate="2017-07-22T17:17:48.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_extraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Knowledge Extraction&lt;/a&gt;, a task that goes far beyond Named Entity Recognition. It is an area of ongoing research, don't expect ready-made tools for this right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T17:17:48.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25496" CreationDate="2017-07-22T17:29:46.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, even a character based neural network (CNN) does not only take the letters of a text into account, but also the their order. So, a text is not just reduced to a bag of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a CNN is completely agnostic of morphemes, words, sentences, syntax trees and other linguistic representations, indeed. So it has some internal representation of the text, but this representation is probably very far from what we'd call a &quot;linguistic representation&quot; or a &quot;representation of language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your question 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CNNs are a very hot research topic right now, and applications are sought for everywhere, but there is not much usable yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your question 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is a plain &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. The internal space of neural network (counting in hundreds of dimensions) is very hard to visualise, when it is visualisable at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T09:59:00.863" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T09:59:00.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T18:32:28.713" Score="3" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Persian, the word &lt;em&gt;Qadaqan&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; is an uvular stop consonant, i.e. having the same place of articulation as the French &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;) means &quot;emphasis&quot; and &quot;illegal&quot;, in some Persian dictionaries it is mentioned as a Turkic word, and some say it's Mongolian and in a linguistics book I read it's native Persian. I want someone who knows Turkic or Mongolian to tell me is this word from that origins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19591" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-07-26T18:48:38.350" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T14:07:19.023" Title="Is &quot;Qadaqan&quot; Mongolian or Turkish?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2017-07-31T12:39:42.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19454" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:19:06.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing is that Persian is a language, just as math is a language and music is a language, so no matter what your daily language is, that language has no effect on math notations or musical notations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the matter of lyrics, well we manage adding the lyrics, like, above each &quot;bar&quot; (in music) we add it's own text. but it's not so important to be a concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19592" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:19:06.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15705" CreationDate="2017-07-22T20:20:18.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is ق which is in both Persian and Arabic, we don't pronounce it with thick accent, some how (not exactly) the same way french pronounce &quot;r&quot;. but for غ which is basically an Arabic alphabet, pronunciation is thicker and you bring out the voice from the end of your throat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19592" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T20:20:18.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25506" CreationDate="2017-07-23T03:48:25.943" Score="3" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the paper titled Deep parsing in Watson (DOI: &lt;a href=&quot;http://brenocon.com/watson_special_issue/03%20Deep%20parsing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;10.1147/JRD.2012.2185409&lt;/a&gt;) and need help understanding this figure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DqmG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DqmG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the paragraph that describes the tree in the figure above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An SG parse tree is a dependency tree: Each tree node N is centered on&#xA;  a headword, which is surrounded by its left and right modifiers, which&#xA;  are, in turn, tree nodes. Each modifier M of N fills a slot in N. The&#xA;  slot shows the grammatical role of M in N. In our example, the node&#xA;  with headword &quot;chandelier&quot; fills the subj (i.e., subject) slot for the&#xA;  coordinated VP (verb phrase) node with headword &quot;but&quot;. This modifier&#xA;  tree structure is the surface structure of the parse analysis. In our&#xA;  sample parse display, you can see, on the left side, the surface&#xA;  structure tree lines - each line connecting a node M to its mother&#xA;  node N and showing the slot filled by M in N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able to interpret the tree even after reading that paragraph many times (English isn't my first language). The questions I have are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given a node M, how exactly do I identify its mother node, N, from the lines in the tree? In the example cited in the paragraph, the mother node of the word &quot;chandelier&quot; is &quot;but&quot;. However, I don't understand why its not &quot;look&quot; or &quot;do&quot; or some other word in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do the dots (e.g. on the word look, but, do) in the tree mean and why don't all words have that dot above them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm used to seeing the output of a dependency parser in this form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gUOls.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gUOls.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This figure is from the paper titled &quot;Using Slot Grammar&quot;(IBM Research Report, RC23978REVISED(W1003-081) March 24, 2010). I find the arrows really helpful in interpreting the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17484" LastEditorUserId="17484" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T03:56:35.210" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T06:49:50.290" Title="How to interpret the dependency parse tree of an English Slot Grammar?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25496" CreationDate="2017-07-23T06:03:55.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To your question 1)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question assumes that neural networks have no representation. Fact is, that neural networks have a layout (of layers, convolutional weight schemes) that are setup before training starts, and it highly depends on this layout what can be learned in that particular NN and whether it can solve a certain task. During learning, the weights in these layers are trained, and the overall configuration of weights again obtains a structure that allows to predict what is learned. This structure can be seen as a representation. Provocatively asked: the human brain is a neural network, so do you think humans cannot represent anything in their head? It is true that we cannot visualize the representation easily (see question 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from this comment, I would say that the new version of Google Translate is probably the best example of a system &quot;without representation&quot; that applies CNN on a large scale in a productive system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The research paper is here: Wu, Y., Schuster, M., Chen, Z., Le, Q. V, Norouzi, M., Macherey, W., ..., Dean, J. (2016). Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation. arXiv:1609.08144 &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To your question 2)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientists are trying to visualize the decisions done in a neural network. This is especially important due to new laws that will require AI systems to give an account of how a decision was made. So far only logical systems provide a way to explain their decisions. If neural networks and other systems that do not use an explicit symbolic representation shall find their way into daily life, they will need to be able to explain their reasoning, or we will only be able to use logic programming and other rule-based systems like ontologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One recent work about explaining the reasoning of a neural network, already cited quite a bit, is `Abbeel, P., Chen, X., Duan, Y., Houthooft, R., Schulman, J., &amp;amp; Sutskever, I. (2016). InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets. NIPS.' &lt;a href=&quot;http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6399-infogan-interpretable-representation-learning-by-information-maximizing-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6399-infogan-interpretable-representation-learning-by-information-maximizing-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T06:03:55.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="590" CreationDate="2017-07-23T07:22:22.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Sinosphere they often mime the writing of characters during a conversation (or even while talking to themselves). This is commonly used to explain characters and spelling, but speakers will often write things while talking even if the speaker cannot see what is being written. Paula Cibulka gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/1816231/The_Writing_Hand_A_Japanese_Gesture_Family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a nice summary&lt;/a&gt; of the phenomenon as seen in Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T08:47:38.623" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T08:47:38.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25503" CreationDate="2017-07-23T09:51:19.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your second question is the answer to your first question: The dots indicate the head node of the respecitive phrase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt;is the head of the entire sentence,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;look&lt;/code&gt;is the head of the VP &lt;code&gt;look great&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;is&lt;/code&gt; is the head of the relative clause &lt;code&gt;from which their name is derived&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case a sub-tree consists of a single node only, heads are not marked by a dot as there is only one node that could be the head anyway - as in the subject NP &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt; is the only node and at the same time the head node of the NP &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt;. If it had any dependents, e.g. a determiner, it would look like just like the structure around &lt;code&gt;name&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can identify that &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt; must be the head of the sentence that &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt;belongs to because &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt;is the node that is marked by a dot. It can not be &lt;code&gt;look&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt; because the are not marked by a dot (more precisely, they are, but on a different level: &lt;code&gt;look&lt;/code&gt; is the head of the VP &lt;code&gt;look great&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;look&lt;/code&gt; is the head and &lt;code&gt;great&lt;/code&gt; is its dependent, and &lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt; is the head of the VP &lt;code&gt;nowadays do not ...&lt;/code&gt;; however, as indicated by the lines being more rightwards, this is nested one level deeper than the main sentence, and therefore, &lt;code&gt;look&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;do&lt;/code&gt; are the head of the respective VPs rather than of the entire sentence, because otherwise the dot should appear on the leftmost level).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want, you can just rotate the tree 90° and add arrow tips:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L5hjZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L5hjZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This graph tells you the exact same thing as the output in the Watson format. It just looks a bit differently - this is really no more a matter of style.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is thus not actually one about English slot grammar in particular: It is about the graphical representation of dependency trees - where the Watson parser referred to in the paper happened to use some less common format for displaying the output, which is, however, independent of the type of dependency grammar (e.g., slot grammar) or language (e.g, English). A universal Stanford dependency parse could be displayed in the way your Watson SG screenshot does, and a slot grammar analysis tree could be displayed in the way you are used to from the literature (like in the graph I provided above); the difference lies only in whether to show the graph horizontally or vertically, or whether to choose dots or arrow tips for the edges and apparently a vertical tree with dots happens to be more useful for the three column display so they chose that format to display the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, you should be a bit careful about wording: head ≠ mother. The paragraph talks about heads and modifiers, which is a notion that involves some semantic/linguistic information, while &quot;mother&quot; is a purely syntactic (graph-theoretic) concept that is about which node is immediately dominant to some other node.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt; is not the mother of &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt; - it is the head of the phrase that is the mother of the node consisting of &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt;. The mother node would be the complex node consisting of the entire sentnce; or in the NP &lt;code&gt;their name&lt;/code&gt;, the mother node of both &lt;code&gt;their&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;name&lt;/code&gt; would be the complex node consisting of exactly these two nodes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But since dependency trees, as opposed to constituent trees, are not direclty interested in constituent hierarchies and relations such as immediate dominance or sisterhood, that the complex consituent is the mother node is not directly of interest here - what is more important is that &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt; is the head of the phrase that &lt;code&gt;chandeliers&lt;/code&gt; belongs to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T06:49:50.290" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T06:49:50.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24468" CreationDate="2017-07-23T19:35:11.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's the kind of guy SUCH that you could walk into a bar in any part of the country and see (him). I see this as merely the omission of &quot;such&quot; or &quot;of the type that&quot; or even &quot;whereby&quot;, and not part of the verb at all. It's modifying the word &quot;guy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19598" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T19:35:11.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24468" CreationDate="2017-07-23T21:31:48.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two VPs have been coordinated, &quot;[walk into a bar] and [see whom]', and a relative pronoun has been extracted from the second conjunct.  This is an exception to Ross's Coordinate Structure Constraint of the sort Ross mentions &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/ross.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:31:48.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24468" CreationDate="2017-07-23T21:36:52.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences can be conjoined (“I bought a car and Sally sold a goat”), and so can VPs, thus you can say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I walked into the bar and saw him&#xA;I could walk into the bar and see him&#xA;I picked up the phone and dialed him&#xA;I built a house and sold it&#xA;I protested and sold the house&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have is basically a relative clause, analogous to “The man who I walked into the bar and saw &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;”, where “the man” is the object of the second conjunct (not the first). The problem is that this violates Ross’s Coordinate Structure Constraint, which explains why you can’t say *“This is the girl who Bob knows the girl and &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;”, or *“Which girl does Bob know &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; and hate the boy”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Papers by Lakoff (1986) and Goldsmith (1985) have observed examples that contradict this principle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;How much can you drink __ and still stay sober (Goldsmith)&#xA;That’s the stuff that the guys in the Caucasus drink __ and live to be a&#xA;hundred (Lakoff)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One analysis of these problems is that these are “consecutive” constructions, which mean “and then”, not just “and”. This is certainly the case for the “walk into the bar and see” construction.  So, there is an excuse for having the head noun “guy” linked to only one lower clause (“guy you can walk into a bar and see __”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:36:52.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T22:39:26.803" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if someone has compiled a list of fundamentally distinct characteristics (verbs, adjectives, nouns)? I'm aware of the Toki Poni language, but that's TOO minimalist, it neglects important, universally fundamental properties. I'm also aware of Donald Brown's Human Universals, but that lists more social traits and less fundamental properties of the universe and life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a minimalist, distinct list would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOUNS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dimenion: A measurable aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Horizontal: ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vertical: ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sagittal: ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quantity: A countable aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Size: The quantity of dimension.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Norm: The middle quantity of a set.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADJECTIVES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;True, Positive: The existence of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neutral, Null: The non-existence of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;False, Negative: The opposite existence of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More: Having additional to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Less: Having subtraction to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VERBS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add: To join the quantity of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subtract: To disjoin the quantity of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have/Possess: Of one's own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this list could go on, but I'm trying to list just enough to make a point. Thus, something like &quot;tall&quot; could essentially be minimally defined as &quot;more vert than norm&quot;. While that surely seems more effort than just saying &quot;tall&quot;, such a distinct minimalist list could still be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any resources for something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19601" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T02:22:05.090" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T02:22:05.090" Title="Minimalist Language: List Of Distinct Universal Properties?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-07-31T12:38:47.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25513" CreationDate="2017-07-24T02:12:17.337" Score="2" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given recorded speech with known text, is there an automated way to find the start/end time points of each sentence within the recording?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud Speech API does not appear to return any time point metadata. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sppas.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPPAS&lt;/a&gt; seems like it ought to do this, but based on the docs, it seems to only tokenize words, not sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3067" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T06:11:04.633" Title="Automatic sentence segmentation of recorded speech with text" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25512" CreationDate="2017-07-24T10:25:31.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the text is &lt;strong&gt;known&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., transcribed), segmentation (even on word level) can be done automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale (BAS), a CLARIN centre in Germany, offers a web service named &lt;a href=&quot;https://clarin.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/BASWebServices/#!/services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WebMAUS&lt;/a&gt; for this purpose. Some tutorial on how to use WebMAUS can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/kwsearch/webmaus/0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeLeMaCo&lt;/a&gt;, a Teaching and Learning Materials Collection provided by Universität des Saarlandes (another CLARIN centre).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T10:25:31.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15705" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:43:04.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have mentioned, the two letters have close but distinct pronunciations in Arabic, but the two letters have the same pronunciation in Farsi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, both letters correspond to &quot;throat-y&quot; sounds, but 'ق' corresponds to a 'k' sound while 'غ' corresponds to a 'gh' sound. In Farsi, both letters correspond to a 'gh' sound because Farsi does not have a throaty 'k' sound. Technically speaking, 'غ' and 'ق' in Arabic correspond to two &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonemes&lt;/a&gt;, while the two letters correspond to the same phoneme in Farsi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;Iraq&quot;/&quot;عراق&quot; and &quot;Baghdad&quot;/&quot;بغداد&quot; exemplify the distinction between 'غ' and 'ق'. A Farsi speaker will pronounce both the 'q' and 'gh' as a guttural 'gh', but an Arabic speaker will pronounce them differently (as specified above). &quot;Qatar&quot; is as another example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other mismatched honeme/letter pairs between the Farsi language and its Arabic-based script exist as well, such as 'ث' and the numerous 'z' consonants. In Farsi, 'ث' corresponds to 's' just as 'س' and 'ص', but the Arabic 'ث' corresponds to a soft 'th' (like in the English word &quot;thought&quot;). That's why Farsi and Turkish speakers pronounce Ottoman as &quot;O&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;man&quot; while Arabic speakers pronounce it as &quot;U&lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;man&quot;. The hard 'th' equivalent (like in the word &quot;that&quot;) is in the letter 'ذ'. In Farsi, 'ذ' is annoyingly just another 'z', but 'ذ' is 'th' in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use this strategy to distinguish the origin of many Farsi words (Persian vs Arabic) but not always. If I remember correctly, Farsi used to have the soft 'th' sound, hence &quot;gozasht&quot;/&quot;گذست&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Linguistics SE experts, please point out how I can improve my answer. I'm an aerospace engineer with an interest in linguistics, so I understand some of the basic concepts not not their technical vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19609" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T15:43:04.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22842" CreationDate="2017-07-24T16:49:49.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the standard XP-Internal Subject Hypothesis, the derivation above is correct, and &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; does indeed exceptionally raise from V to T in cases like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true, though, that V-T movement (and further raising of finite main verbs into higher heads like Focus and C) was available in English until well after Shakespeare's time, and that, whereas in languages like Spanish, French, Italian or German it still remains generally available, in English it has since become restricted to a) auxiliaries (i.e., modals, aspectual &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, passive &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; and 'dummy' &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;), b) the main verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (in all its existential, identificational, or copular uses), and, to the extent the construction survives, in the speech of old-fashioned British English speakers, mainly, c) possessive uses of the main verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;You haven't money&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Have you money?&lt;/em&gt; (instead of the much more common &lt;em&gt;You don't have money&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Do you have money?&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard explanation for why V-T Raising has remained possible for just auxiliary verbs and main verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; used to be that none of them theta-marks its complements (and none projects a subject argument, either), which would leave them free to raise from the VP in order to check their inflectional features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may well be right for auxiliaries, certainly, &lt;strong&gt;copular&lt;/strong&gt; uses of main verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;She is brilliant, She is an engineer, She is in London&lt;/em&gt;, etc. in which the subject receives its theta-role from A, P or N), and for existential uses of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; like the one you mention in your question, where &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; selects a PP complement but it is the P &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; that theta-marks &lt;em&gt;a student&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the classroom&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that 'explanation' gets much more dubious, or plainly unacceptable, for a) existential uses of &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; in which &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; followed by any theta-marker (as in, e.g., &lt;em&gt;There is a cafeteria&lt;/em&gt;, unless some hidden/ellipted PP structure is assumed, of course), b) 'identificational' uses of main verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;That tall man is my brother&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; must be a two-place predicate and theta-mark the two NPs/DPs, and c), to the extent the construction survives, possessive uses of the main verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, which is also a two-place predicate and must theta-mark its two arguments, the subject as 'Possessor' and the object as`Theme', or whatever the right role-label is for the entity 'possessed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, what used to be the standard explanation for the exceptional survival of V-T raising in the above-mentioned cases is far from satisfactory, and, &lt;strong&gt;to my knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;, please correct me if I am mistaken, it has not been replaced with any other, but the facts are solid enough: finite auxiliaries, finite main verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, and, marginally, finite main verb &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; can still raise to T/Infl and higher, whereas no other English verbs can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T16:55:42.803" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T16:55:42.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:53:39.140" Score="3" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm current learning about compositional semantics, quantifier raising and scope ambiguity in my semantics class and I'm having trouble answering some questions. I've attempted to answer the questions below, but i'm not sure if i'm answering the questions in the correct way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) If Jake owns a donkey, he beats it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) The following predicate logic formula does not correctly represent the truth-conditional meaning of (1). Why not? Explain your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) ∃x[donkey(x) ∧ own(j, x)] → beat(j, x)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) The following predicate logic formula does not correctly represent the truth-conditional meaning of (1) either. Why not? Explain your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) ∃x[[donkey(x) ∧ own(j, x)] → beat(j, x)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Provide a predicate logic formula that most closely represents the truth-conditional meaning&#xA;of (1). Explain your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The formula does not represent the truth conditional meaning because the existential quantifier does not scope over (x) in beat(j,x), meaning that (x) is free. The donkey that Jake owns in own(j,x), is not the same donkey that was beaten in beat(j,x). The truth conditions of the entire sentence would be false, because (x) is not an element of both own(j,x) and beat(j,x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused about b) and c), because I thought that b) was the correct representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could get any help with these questions, I would be very grateful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19612" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T12:49:18.307" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T15:22:37.907" Title="Truth-conditions of predicate-logic formulas for donkey sentences" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23348" CreationDate="2017-07-25T01:57:42.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Swedish&lt;/strong&gt; and the Scandinavian languages in general we have the exact same distinction as in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;House&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Hus&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(same in Norwegian and Danish)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Home&lt;/strong&gt; -&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Hem&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(Hjem in Norwegian and Danish)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(If someone has the phonetics they may add them)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19613" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T01:57:42.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25512" CreationDate="2017-07-25T06:11:04.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach would be to look at the volume (amplitude) of the audio signal at each point in time. If the signal falls below some configured level (accounting for any noise in the recording), treat it as silence. Then, if the silence occurs for at least a configured duration (e.g. 10ms) mark it as actual silence with the start and end times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will not give you the start/end of each sentence, but of each utterance (i.e. when the speaker decided to pause). This will tend to correlate to phrase-terminal (comma, etc.) and sentence-terminal (full stop, etc.), but not necessarily. For example, a speaker may pause before a conjunction (&quot;and&quot;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide better results, you need to perform full speech recognition on the audio with the text as a reference to match against. A simplistic approach here would be to match a few words around the sentence terminal, but you need to be careful to avoid word sets that could occur within the sentence itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech recognition is complex, and is harder to do when you don't know what is being said. This is because of accent differences, like the don-dawn merger in some American English acccents, suprasegmental features changing phonemes between words such as with the linked r sound (e.g. in &quot;China and Taiwan&quot;), and changes due to normal/informal speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to these problems, knowing what text is meant to be spoken can be used as a hint to the speech recognising algorithm to help guide its internal models (e.g. recognising 'atom' instead of 'Adam' for an American English speaker). This is still complex, because speakers may rephrase parts of the text, repeat some words or phrases, or introduce words such as 'er' and 'um'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what software is available to provide the above functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T06:11:04.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:17:34.717" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Classical Japanese, the auxiliary verb &quot;-つ&quot; (&quot;-tsu&quot;) has a perfective function, indicating the completion of an action or process. According to Haruo Shirane's &lt;em&gt;Classical Japanese: A Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;-て&quot; (&quot;-te&quot;), the &lt;em&gt;ren'youkei&lt;/em&gt; or continuitive conjugation of this auxiliary verb, later developed into a conjunctive particle with several different meanings: (1) temporal/sequential connection, (2) parallel connection, (3) causal connection, and (4) existing condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how a usage of a marker for perfective aspect could develop meanings 1 and 3, as these both rely on posterior or definite qualities, but my question is how do meanings 2 and 4 derive from such a form? 1 and 2 in particular seem to have conflicting definitions, the first meaning &quot;and then&quot;, the second meaning &quot;at the same time&quot;. Are there any explanations for how the meaning could shift in this way? And are there any papers that discuss the semantics behind the development of this kind of change (whether specific to Japanese or not)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19615" LastEditorUserId="19615" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T12:29:54.197" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T22:36:01.273" Title="What is the relationship between perfectivity and the Classical Japanese conjunctive particle &quot;-て&quot; (&quot;-te&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25678" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:21:12.107" Score="5" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/24472/which-indo-european-language-best-preserves-the-features-of-proto-indo-european&quot;&gt;Which Indo European language best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European?&lt;/a&gt;, I want to ask the follow-up question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did we learn for the reconstruction of Proto-Indogermanic from the Tocharian languages? The proto-language was already well fleshed out before the discovery of the Tocharian inscriptions. Did their discovery bring up some new insights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T12:21:31.900" Title="What is the contribution of Tocharian to the reconstruction of Proto-Indogermanic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;tocharian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25523" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:29:04.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Tocharian languages Tocharian A (Agnean or East Tocharian; natively ārśi), Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian) and Tocharian C (a bunch of loan words in a Prakrit from Krorän) form an independent branch of the Indo-European languages. They were spoken and written in the Tarim Bassin (Western China).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Records of Tocharian date from the 3rd–8th century CE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The were discovered only in the early 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:32:28.550" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:32:28.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25524" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:29:04.177" Score="0" Body="For questions about the now extinct Tocharian languages, formerly spoken and written in the Tarim Bassin." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T12:29:04.177" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T12:29:04.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25518" CreationDate="2017-07-25T12:47:20.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;a) Correct. Some fine-tuning to your answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The donkey that Jake owns in own(j,x), &lt;em&gt;is not the same&lt;/em&gt; donkey that was beaten in beat(j,x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;not necessarily&lt;/em&gt; the same. Depending on which assignment function the formula is evaluated under, the assignment for the second occurence of the variable &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; can co-incide with the one for the first &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;. But what is important is, as you figured out, that the first occurence of the variable is in the scope of a quantifier why the second one is not, which means that &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; are not the same variable and thus possibly differ in their denotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The truth conditions of the entire sentence would be false, because (x) is not an element of both own(j,x) and beat(j,x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to be careful about syntax and semantics: &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;is a variable, i.e. some string of symbols, and &lt;code&gt;own(j,x)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;beat(j,x)&lt;/code&gt; are formulas, i.e. also just some strings of symbols. Syntactically, &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; does occur in both of the formulas. It is also not meaningful to say that something is an element of (the interpretation of) &lt;code&gt;own(j,x)&lt;/code&gt; because &lt;code&gt;own(j,x)&lt;/code&gt; is a formula which evaluates to a truth condition, &lt;code&gt;true&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;false&lt;/code&gt; is not something a variable or an individual could be an element of. What you want to say is that the tuples &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;j,x&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;j,x&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; are not talking about the same element, i.e., the denotation of &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; for the first tuple is not necessarily an element of the denotation of the second tuple and vice versa.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;∃x[[donkey(x) ∧ own(j, x)] → beat(j, x)]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carfully look at what the formula says: It says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there is an something such that if this something is a donkey and owned by Jake, then it is beaten by Jake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the desired outcome:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By putting an existential quantifier with scope over the entire sentence, the formula forces there to be such a something. This is, however, not implied by original sentence: It just says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a thing which is a donkey and owned by Jake, then...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having an existential quantifier with scope over the entire sentence thus makes a wrong existential prediction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is even worse: Suppose a variable assignment assings &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; some individual &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; from the domain, and this &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; happens not to be a donkey owned by Jake (could be it is not a donkey, could be it doesn't belong to Jake, could be both). We will most likely find such an individual if we assume that our domain consists of more than just Jake's donkeys. As we know, if the antecedent of the implication fails, the implication gets true tirivally, no matter whether or not this &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; is beaten by Jake. And since we found at least one assignment for which the implication gets true, we're now done with evaluating the existential quantifier and the statement evaluates to true.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;This means that as soon as we find one individual which is not a donkey and owned by Jake, the whole formula suddenly becomes true.&lt;/strong&gt; This is certainly not what we want!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, an existentially quantified implication (i.e. &lt;code&gt;∃x[φ → ψ]&lt;/code&gt; is almost always a sign that something is wrong.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) What you want to say instead is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look at an arbitrary individual. If this individual is a donkey and owned by Jake, then... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is equivalent to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For any individual it holds that if it is a donkey and owned by Jake, then it gets beaten by Jake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic lies in the word &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;: This condition triggers a universally quantified formula. What you thus end up with is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) &lt;code&gt;∀x[[donkey(x) ∧ own(j, x)] → beat(j, x)]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem unintuitive at first sight we we would need a universal quantifier here, but it helps to think about it in terms of the recursive evaluation of truth conditions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(4) is true if the implication is true for all assignments of the variable &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; to some individual &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; in the domain. Now go through the possible assignments step by step: Under the current assignment, is &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; both a donkey and owned by Jake?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No? Then we don't care - it could be beaten by Jake or it could not; in any case it doesn't matter because we are only interested in whether those individuals that do satisfy the antecedent also satisfy the consequent. Therefore, the implication gets true for those individuals which make the antecedent false.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes? Then we found a donkey which is owned by Jake and need to make sure now that it is also beaten by Jake. Thus, for those assignments which deliver an indivdual &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; that satisfy the antecedent of the implication, the consequent must hold as well. As soon as we find one counterexample (i.e. some &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; such that &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; is a donkey and owned by Jake, but not beaten by him), we know that the sentence must be false (because it says that if there is a donkey that is owned by Jake, then it must be beaten by him). If, however, all such &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; that satisfy the antecedent also satisfy the consequent of the implication, then the sentence is true, no matter how many of them are there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If these conditions succeed for all assignments, i.e. any individual we look at is either not a donkey of Jake's (in which case we don't care) or it is beaten by Jake (in which case the proposition about Jake's donkeys applies), then the formula becomes true.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that this formula now doesn't come with an unwanted existential force either: In case that there just isn't any donkey that is owned by Jake, under all variable assignments the antecedent gets false, the implication true and thus the universally quantified formula is vavuously true - so it doesn't hurt if there just aren't any donkeys that Jake owns, as long as if there is one, it gets beaten, which is what the original sentence states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T15:22:37.907" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T15:22:37.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25521" CreationDate="2017-07-25T16:07:52.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Shirane follows the traditional grammarian's account (in this as in everything else), according to linguist Bjarke Frellesvig's &lt;em&gt;A History of the Japanese Language&lt;/em&gt;, the non-perfective, connective &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; already existed in Old Japanese.  In this analysis, there is then no evidence to say that the connective &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; (also called a &quot;gerund&quot;) is a later derivation of the perfective &lt;em&gt;-tu/te&lt;/em&gt;; both of these usages go as far back as we have records.  The connective has a wide range of uses comparable to English &quot;and&quot; or &quot;-ing&quot;, among which are included the things about parallelism, conditions etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for example the grammatical role of &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; in the following passage of the &lt;em&gt;Kojiki&lt;/em&gt; (ca. 712 – one of the oldest sources).  The goddess Suseri-bimye (Suseri-hime) is talking to her husband Opokuninusi (Ōkuninushi) about his polygamy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;賣迩斯阿禮婆 那遠&lt;strong&gt;岐弖&lt;/strong&gt; 遠波那志 那遠&lt;strong&gt;岐弖&lt;/strong&gt; 都麻波那斯&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  めにしあれば なをきて をぱなし なをきて つまぱなし&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 &lt;em&gt;mye ni si areba&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2 &lt;em&gt;na wo &lt;strong&gt;kite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3 &lt;em&gt;wo pa na-si&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  4 &lt;em&gt;na wo &lt;strong&gt;kite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5 &lt;em&gt;tuma pa na-si.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 Being a woman [as I am],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2 &lt;strong&gt;excluding&lt;/strong&gt; you,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3 [I can] have no other man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  4 &lt;strong&gt;excluding&lt;/strong&gt; you,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  5 [I can] have no other husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly wide uses of &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; can be found elsewhere in the &lt;em&gt;Kojiki&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Man'yōshū&lt;/em&gt; etc., meaning they go as far back as we have data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pefective &lt;em&gt;-tu/te&lt;/em&gt; makes a pair with perfective &lt;em&gt;-nu&lt;/em&gt;; they occur in Old Japanese more or less with the same function, but with &lt;em&gt;-tu/te&lt;/em&gt; preferred for transitive verbs and &lt;em&gt;-nu&lt;/em&gt; for intransitives.  They're thought to be both derived from copulas, &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-nu&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt;.  Frellesvig thinks connective &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt;, perfective &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt;, copulas &lt;em&gt;-to, -tu&lt;/em&gt;, genitive &lt;em&gt;-tu&lt;/em&gt; and continuative &lt;em&gt;-tutu&lt;/em&gt; all trace back to some proto-element with a &lt;em&gt;-t-&lt;/em&gt;; but this is reconstruction, we don't have documentation of this common ancestor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T22:36:01.273" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T22:36:01.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2017-07-25T23:06:25.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this post has already attracted quite a few really good answers, I want to touch on a different aspect that has not been &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; addressed. As several others have said, older languages like Hittite, Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, and Latin definitely have more in common with Proto-Indo-European (PIE) as they are not removed as far from the ancestral source in time, and also because PIE was mostly reconstructed &lt;em&gt;in their image&lt;/em&gt;. A more interesting question to ask is which modern (still living and thus changing) Indo-European language is the most &quot;like&quot; PIE and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual answer to this is Lithuanian ― though not in all respects. Lithuanian, and Balto-Slavic languages, in general, do behave quite conservatively when it comes to nouns and adjectives ― cases (including the vocative) and all, and Lithuanian, in particular, preserves some of the morphology, as well. It also preserves the PIE pitch accent (although with some details changed). However, Lithuanian, at least dialectally, also has come up with some noun cases that were likely not present in PIE. It has also lost the neuter gender, still preserved in all Slavic languages, as well as a few others like High and Low German (Germanic), Icelandic (Germanic), Romanian (Italic), Gujarati (Indo-Iranian). In other respects, other languages have been more conservative. Modern Greek preserves the verbal morphology extremely well. Slovenian (Slavic) preserves the dual number. Most (but not all) Indo-Aryan languages preserve breathy voiced stops (&lt;code&gt;/ɡʱ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/d͡ʒʱ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/d̻ʱ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/bʱ/&lt;/code&gt;, plus the innovated retroflex &lt;code&gt;/ɖʱ/&lt;/code&gt;). Also, nearly all Indo-Iranian (IIr) languages, from Bengali and Wakhi in the east to Ossetic and Kurmanci in the west (as well as Armenian ― not IIr, but close), preserve the SOV word order found in some of the old IE languages but subsequently changed to SVO in the European branches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-07-26T01:28:19.613" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T01:28:19.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T02:47:48.050" Score="2" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create some syllable like /ba/, /pa/, /ta/, /da/, with either Praat or Klatt synthesis interface. But I was overwhelmed by the information I found on the Internet. I was wondering what I should know if I just want to make these syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12534" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T19:26:17.413" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T19:26:17.413" Title="Where do I start if I want to a create a syllable like /ba/ or /pa/?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25541" CreationDate="2017-07-26T17:42:17.990" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've built myself a little corpus that I'm using for language-learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm reaching the limits of standard command-line tool-chain: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linux.die.net/man/1/grep&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grep&lt;/a&gt; and friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I might look for sentences where a word is used as an adverb, maybe together with a particular type of verb. If you want to do this 'correctly' you end up wanting to parse to sentence and categorise words in the sentences by their grammatical function. But queries like &quot;this word is not first&quot; are often good enough to rapidly find relevant use cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Are there any good tools for this sort of querying?* Even just a a general tool to cleanly parse and separate sentences would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite like &lt;strong&gt;command-line tools&lt;/strong&gt; because they increase the chance that the tool is composable and that it is easy to both install and set-up. This is particularly important in niche fields where tools can be immature and installation is not made easy. However, if there is some &lt;strong&gt;magic framework that is guaranteed to work and solve all my problems&lt;/strong&gt; then that is good as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16821" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T12:54:17.787" Title="Command line tools for querying corpuses" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:03:50.187" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;A colleague of mine made a claim that the phonemic length of the root morphemes in whatever language does not usually exceed 5, as an average. I have some doubts about this unsubstantiated claim, based mostly on the &quot;linguist's intuition&quot;. Does anyone have a good reference for a paper, or some other kind of source, dealing with the topic of the average root length cross-linguistically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I am not interested in word-form length (polysynthetic languages would obviously show impressive figures), but just the length of the roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T19:45:30.997" Title="average root length cross-linguistically" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19654" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:21:25.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;espeak&lt;/a&gt; does a lot of what you are after, it seems to deal with both arbitrary words as well as having a list of exceptions. Though how complete this list of exceptions is remains to be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;espeak -q -v de --ipa warm&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be the case that german orthography is pretty regular... though I don't fluently speak german so don't trust me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting: &lt;strong&gt;IPA is a useful approximation&lt;/strong&gt;, a more complete model is a 2-d space plus roundedness. To get an idea how much of a lie IPA can be have a look at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#/media/File:Korean_short_vowel_chart.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chart of korean vowels&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;controversy over whether the /ɛː/ sound even exists&lt;/a&gt; as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=H%C3%A4hnchen&amp;amp;rdfrom=h%C3%A4hnchen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hähnchen&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your use cases you might prefer to use google text-to-speech (commmand-line tool &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ). This, unfortunately, provides no ipa output but it is pretty good, so if you just want to know how something is pronounced and have learned to hear all the german vowels then this can be a good reference tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16821" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T18:21:25.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25537" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:24:27.423" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about the city of Los Angeles and how I rarely refer to it by its full name but rather its abbreviation, LA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem unbelievable to me that, in a mostly illeterate society, this abbreviation (or perhaps a homophone of it like 'Elay') would evently replace the more difficult to pronounce full name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any historical examples of an abbreviation or acronym replacing an existing place name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19624" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T23:19:58.443" Title="Is there evidence of a place name originating from an abbreviation or acronym?" Tags="&lt;toponomastics&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;&lt;toponyms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25539" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:31:14.147" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;So my understanding is vowel sounds can be modelled in a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2-d space together with roundedness&lt;/a&gt; in terms of location and openness or equivalently in terms of first and second &lt;em&gt;formants&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get pictures like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#/media/File:Korean_short_vowel_chart.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want a tool that can synthesis all these vowel sounds&lt;/strong&gt;. Ideally I would have something where I could drag my finger around a 2-d space and have it change the vowels sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My use case is partly just for fun, and partly to help me learn to make different vowel sounds: being able to explore &lt;em&gt;around&lt;/em&gt; the sound that you  want to make is pretty useful in terms of honing in on the target sound.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16821" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T05:10:37.117" Title="Text-to-speech for arbitrary vowels (i.e not just ipa)" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25535" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:46:02.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One famous example in such respect is the name of Pakistan, which however was coined purposedly when it became an independent nation. It comes from an acronym formed from the names of the five northern provinces of the British India:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;unjab, &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;fghan Province, &lt;strong&gt;K&lt;/strong&gt;ashmir, &lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;ind, and Baluchi&lt;strong&gt;stan&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Pakistan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). The &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; vowel was inserted for euphonic purposes. However, the word &lt;em&gt;paki&lt;/em&gt; has also a separate meaning in Urdu (where it means 'pure').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another such artificial creation is the name of &lt;strong&gt;Banzare&lt;/strong&gt; Coast, coming from &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;ritish-&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;ustralian-&lt;strong&gt;N&lt;/strong&gt;ew &lt;strong&gt;Z&lt;/strong&gt;ealand &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;ntarctic &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;esearch &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;xpedition that discovered it (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzare_Coast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably prefer some natural developments rather than an artificial creation. I am sure there are many examples. I can mention two Russian cities. First is &lt;strong&gt;Saint Petersburg&lt;/strong&gt; which is commonly known, and effectively called, &lt;strong&gt;Piter&lt;/strong&gt; by the native speakers. Someone calls it by the acronym &lt;strong&gt;SPb&lt;/strong&gt;, even if more in writing than orally. Another example is the city of &lt;strong&gt;Yekaterinburg&lt;/strong&gt; which is commonly abbreviated into &lt;strong&gt;Ye-burg&lt;/strong&gt;, including also the spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The city names in the Spanish domains in South America were often derived from quite lengthy phrases with some religious content. Later they underwent spontaneous abbreviation. This is the case of &lt;strong&gt;Buenos Aires&lt;/strong&gt; coming from the former denomination Puerto de Nuestra Señora Santa María del &lt;strong&gt;Buen Ayre&lt;/strong&gt; (at least, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.todobuenosaires.com/buenos_aires/en/historia/origenombre.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;popular sources&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I suppose I don't need to mention &lt;strong&gt;Frisco&lt;/strong&gt; for San &lt;strong&gt;Fr&lt;/strong&gt;anc&lt;strong&gt;isco&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T20:38:01.783" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T20:38:01.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25533" CreationDate="2017-07-26T19:45:30.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that there is no &quot;decent&quot; study of the question, i.e. one that is non-anecdotal and is well-balanced in the languages considered, so it's unsubstantiated; but the feeling probably could be born out, within the margins of what's clearly establishable in morphology. For example, the majority of roots in Bantu languages are C(V)V(N)C, though there are some roots like *&lt;em&gt;kamat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hold&quot; which seem a bit longer: but this is usually analyzed as a CVC &quot;core&quot; root plus a non-productive extension -&lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt;. Austronesian languages have a considerable share of longer roots that look reduplicated, so one might reduce with &quot;roots&quot; to a true root plus a reduplication morpheme. If you have weak criteria for establishing what is a root, it's easier to eliminate longer roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem has to do with claims about &quot;on average&quot;, as a claim about human language . On average, languages are Niger-Congo or Austronesian, so if it turns out that most Niger-Congo and Austronesian roots are 5 phonemes or less, you'll probably get the desired result. It is probably true that in most Niger-Congo languages you have one root syllable with maximally CVC struction, and Austronesian roots tend, as far as I know, to be shortish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T19:45:30.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25536" CreationDate="2017-07-26T20:05:28.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A colleague had such a device some years ago, but it depended on a touch interface that was a decade before there were touch interfaces. Theoretically it would not be hard to create such an interface, where a touch corresponds to F1/F2 values; then you simply synthesize the vowel with those formant values. Praat allows you to play around like that: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/25530&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; with comments on how to create a synthesis script (it would be easier in the case of just a vowel rather than a CV transition). There is an online Klatt synthesis interface &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech/tutorials/synthesis/vowels.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, where you can specify all of the formants and anything else of interest. The hard part is mapping from intuitive vowel positions to actual formant values (which is not &lt;em&gt;terribly&lt;/em&gt; hard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For educational and entertainment purposes, I highly recommend using the online Klatt program and play with formant values, not being bound by empirically-justified limits on particular formants: see what happens when F1 is 1800, and thereby find the boundaries between vowel-like sounds and machine-buzzing noises. This gave me an appreciation for the importance of F1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by Jeremy Needle, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dood.al/pinktrombone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pink Trombone&lt;/a&gt; kind of approaches the desideratum of an articulation-based synthesizer (it looks &quot;backwards&quot;, i.e. the vocal tract looks rightwards). With a mouse you can only change one articulatory setting at a time, but with a touch screen, you can get multiple constrictions. You could use Audacity sound capture to extract samples and find formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T05:10:37.117" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T05:10:37.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25531" CreationDate="2017-07-27T10:14:56.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Corpus Workbench&lt;/a&gt; originally developed at IMS Stuttgart has such a tool, called cqp (Corpus Query Processor). There are other implementation of similar tools, to mention one, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://poliqarp.sourceforge.net/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poliqarp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tool can do really amazing things when your corpus is annotated (e.g., for part-of-speech), you can issuer mixed queries for word forms and part-of-speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T10:14:56.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25500" CreationDate="2017-07-27T11:18:15.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern Persian word pronounced /γadaγan/ means “prohibition” and the like; it is spelt both as غدغن and as قدغن. It can hardly be a native Persian word. I have searched for it in Clauson’s “Etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish” (do note that Clauson uses “Turkish” to include all Turkic languages), as well as in several dictionaries of modern (Anatolian) Turkish, but found nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs, however, in the Urmi dialect of Neo-Aramaic. In his dictionary of that language Geoffrey Khan derives it via Azeri from Mongolian qadagala “to keep in confinement”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T14:07:19.023" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T14:07:19.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-27T13:41:43.133" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the ambiguity that arises when you can't tell a word's part of speech due to capitalization ? E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Run Engine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity: Command or compound noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19629" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T13:41:43.133" Title="Is there are name for this type of ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-27T14:46:24.767" Score="0" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a good dataset or library or some trick for getting the similarity between languages, or n most similar languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarity here means lexical and structural similarity for the purposes of translation and translation errors, especially into and out of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one of the closest languages to Basque would be Spanish, because translation systems use similar training datasets for them, because they deal with things like English named entities in similar ways, because they have the same punctuation and casing rules, some flavour of T-V distinction, and use a similar character set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example for Kazakh I would put Russian, Turkish, Kyrgyz and Uzbek in the top 10 in terms of predictiveness for translation and translation quality.  We should be biased a bit towards the big languages, so Uyghur and Turkmen are technically closer but it's really important to have Russian and Turkish in there, because those systems are working better and their data bleed into everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solution would simply measures the distance (say, in km, or sq km of overlap) between the languages where their locations could be defined by centroids or multiple points or areas, because location is a really good proxy for these sorts of features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solution would give multiple dimensions, that can then be averaged, weighted or selected for the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also just be a hand-built dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options that will not work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Word vectors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can get the word vector for the actual English string, like &lt;code&gt;'Ukrainian'&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;'Ukrainian language'&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;'speaking Ukrainian'&lt;/code&gt; if our model was trained with word-level n-grams.  This seems to work but is far from ideal.  Some names are strictly for a language, others often refer to a country or nation.  &lt;code&gt;'Persian'&lt;/code&gt; is also used for rugs and cats.  Some languages have multiple names.  '&lt;code&gt;Somali'&lt;/code&gt; and '&lt;code&gt;Indonesian&lt;/code&gt;' may be near to each other because they both often occur before &lt;code&gt;'pirates'&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;WALS&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WALS - which is available as a Python lib: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mayhewsw/wals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mayhewsw/wals&lt;/a&gt; - will not work out of the box, the results are simply nonsense for any kind of real-world application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;langsim.langsim('language.csv', 'rus', 0.5, False)&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[(0.26315789473684215, 'Ladakhi:Bodic:Sino-Tibetan'), (0.26315789473684215, 'Latvian:Baltic:Indo-European'), (0.26315789473684215, 'Turkish:Turkic:Altaic'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Brahui:Northern Dravidian:Dravidian'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Burushaski:Burushaski:Burushaski'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Chuvash:Turkic:Altaic'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Greek (Modern):Greek:Indo-European'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Hindi:Indic:Indo-European'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Kannada:Southern Dravidian:Dravidian'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Khalkha:Mongolic:Altaic'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Malagasy:Barito:Austronesian'), (0.31578947368421051, 'Ndyuka:Creoles and Pidgins:other'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Abkhaz:Northwest Caucasian:Northwest Caucasian'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Amele:Madang:Trans-New Guinea'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Arabic (Egyptian):Semitic:Afro-Asiatic'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Basque:Basque:Basque'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Catalan:Romance:Indo-European'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Coos (Hanis):Coosan:Oregon Coast'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Hungarian:Ugric:Uralic'), (0.36842105263157898, 'Indonesian:Malayo-Sumbawan:Austronesian')]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;langsim.langsim('language.csv', 'ukr', 0.5, False)&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[(1.0, '!Xun (Ekoka):Ju-Kung:Kxa'), (1.0, '!Xóõ:Tu:Tu'), (1.0, &quot;'Are'are:Oceanic:Austronesian&quot;), (1.0, '//Ani:Khoe-Kwadi:Khoe-Kwadi'), (1.0, '/Xam:Tu:Tu'), (1.0, '=|Hoan:=|Hoan:Kxa'), (1.0, 'A-Pucikwar:Great Andamanese:Great Andamanese'), (1.0, 'Aari:South Omotic:Afro-Asiatic'), (1.0, 'Abau:Upper Sepik:Sepik'), (1.0, 'Abaza:Northwest Caucasian:Northwest Caucasian'), (1.0, 'Abenaki (Western):Algonquian:Algic'), (1.0, 'Abidji:Kwa:Niger-Congo'), (1.0, 'Abipón:South Guaicuruan:Guaicuruan'), (1.0, 'Abkhaz:Northwest Caucasian:Northwest Caucasian'), (1.0, 'Abui:Greater Alor:Timor-Alor-Pantar'), (1.0, &quot;Abun:North-Central Bird's Head:West Papuan&quot;), (1.0, 'Acehnese:Malayo-Sumbawan:Austronesian'), (1.0, 'Achagua:Northern Arawakan:Arawakan'), (1.0, 'Achang:Burmese-Lolo:Sino-Tibetan'), (1.0, 'Acholi:Nilotic:Eastern Sudanic')]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:13:36.630" Title="How to get the similarity between languages?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25544" CreationDate="2017-07-27T15:13:36.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach I know of is the comparison of Translationese (like in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220873567_Translationese_and_Its_Dialects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translationese and its Dialects&lt;/a&gt; by Koppel and Ordan) and trying recognize the source language. The confusion matrix gives some clues about the &quot;distance&quot; between different languages. It works quite intuitively on the Europarl corpus of translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But extensive amount of translations are often unavailable, so this may not meet your demands. The method also fails to give a distance to the target language (in this case, English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:13:36.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-27T15:57:52.327" Score="4" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find any information on the internet that doesn't confuse me. But basically, is DH-stopping when in words such as 'there' - the 'th' is pronounced as a /d/? so 'dere'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19631" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T16:14:24.397" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T16:14:24.397" Title="What is DH- stopping?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25546" CreationDate="2017-07-27T16:13:18.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Th-stopping&quot;, in general, is when a dental fricative (/θ ð/, written as &quot;th&quot; in English) turns into a dental or alveolar stop (/t d/). This is currently happening in many dialects of English and has historically happened in the other Germanic languages: compare English &quot;brother&quot;, &quot;mother&quot; with their German cognates, &lt;em&gt;Bruder&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mutter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general process seems to be that the dental fricatives first become dental stops, which preserves the distinction between words like &quot;die&quot; and &quot;thy&quot; (the former is pronounced with an alveolar stop, the latter with a dental). Then later, the distinction between dental and alveolar stops collapses, so &quot;die&quot; and &quot;thy&quot; become true homophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dh-stopping&quot; is a particular type of &quot;th-stopping&quot;. &quot;Dh&quot; is a poor-man's way of writing /ð/; &quot;dh-stopping&quot; affects /ð/ (as in &quot;thy&quot;) but not /θ/ (as in &quot;thigh&quot;). This is less common than both being affected, but for example several London dialects and some types of AAVE feature &quot;dh-stopping&quot; and &quot;th-fronting&quot; (/θ/ merges with /f/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T16:13:18.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25551" CreationDate="2017-07-27T17:34:53.773" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any language that has a lateral consonant where air is allowed to pass by only one side of the tongue instead of both? This would be for example &quot;l&quot; but with the tongue moved to the left or right until it completely blocks one side. Is there an IPA symbol for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19634" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T16:03:03.630" Title="Is there any &quot;one-sided lateral consonant&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25552" CreationDate="2017-07-27T18:11:54.220" Score="4" ViewCount="1385" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/137024/5960&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; were the OP makes the point that the schwa vowel (a.k.a. central or neutral vowel) is produced when other vowels are reduced to that sound. It makes perfect sense since the brain is just trying to pronounce the words in a very efficient way, with the minimum effort involved in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about those languages that don't have a schwa vowel, isn't the brain adapted so the physiognomy, tongue and vocal folds work as little as possible to pronounce clear distinguishable words in those languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do languages without a schwa vowel have in common so the brain is not able to take advantage of this shortcut?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1522" LastEditorUserId="1522" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T21:24:40.197" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:53:03.020" Title="What do languages without a schwa vowel have in common?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25549" CreationDate="2017-07-27T19:59:50.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sidedness&quot; in laterals is not a linguistically distinctive property, so one could be right-lateral, left-lateral or bilateral, though behavior is speaker-governed. There may be a tendency for people to have the opening on the right: I don't know of any studies of sidedness of laterals correlating with handedness (I have suspicions), or even systematic articulatory studies of any kind of lateral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T19:59:50.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25550" CreationDate="2017-07-27T20:43:09.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic tendency is that vowel tend to be less differentiated when they are shortened in some way (usually related to stress, of syllable structure), because it is harder to perceive and accurately produce subtle vowel distinctions with significantly reduced duration. But languages differ in terms of how extensive that reduction is: you might reduce all unstressed vowels to one vowel, or eliminate 3 out of 7 vowels. The thing that a vowel reduces to is partially a function of which distinctions are neutralized, and also what the vowel inventory is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One language that fits the type that you're looking for is Makonde, where unstressed [e,o] become [a] (vowels=[aeiou]). There simply is no vowel schwa in anywhere in Makonde. Another language might be English, because although we have a phonetic schwa, it is in complementary distribution (in unstressed syllables) with the vowel [ʌ]. In the phonological sense, English doesn't have schwa (it does have wedge), although schwa is present phonetically. In talking about languages that &quot;don't have schwa&quot;, you have to distinguish &quot;languages with the phoneme /ə/&quot; from &quot;languages without the phone [ə]&quot;. Ojibwa is sort of like English (vowels reduce to schwa) except that in Ojibwa, vowel reduction is the only source of schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third example would be Russian, where unstressed non-high vowels (or at least /a,o/) become &quot;[a]&quot; which is apparently actually pronounced more like [ə] when the stress is 2+ syllables to the right. There is, in addition, some degree of vowel reduction of /u,i/, and the pronounced vowel depends in part on whether the preceding consonant is palatalized (the result being that /e/ and /i/ neutralize, we could say to &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; pronounced more like [ɪ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catalan is sort of mixed. Unstressed /a,e/ reduce to [ə] which is not an independent phoneme of the language, but /o/ reduces to [u], which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a phoneme. In Chamorro, unstressed [e,o] become [i,u]: this is of interest compared to Makonde, because Chamorro has the vowel system /æɑeoiu/, basically one more vowel than Makonde, but a different output for reduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The brain doesn't actually adapt or change in any way: rather, the grammar (which is a set of mental principles allowing people to speak a given language) can be different between languages. There has not been enough research on the different kinds of vowel reduction that exist in human language to be able to explain when reduction of /e, o/ yields [ə] vs [a] vs. [i,u] or similar vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to keep in mind that not every letter &quot;ə&quot; is actually pronounced [ə]. In Moroccan and Syrian Arabic, there is a vowel which can be the result of reduction, conventionally transcribed as &quot;ə&quot;, but which is phonetically closer to [ɨ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T20:43:09.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T00:22:53.860" Score="7" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union. When the country fell apart, the nationalist politicians (all of them) wanted to separate their language by name, i.e. Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian etc. but it really remains the same language, only really different dialects less distinct than let's say Brazilian and Portuguese, which are BTW both properly called Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reaching out to the community of experts to inquire whether there are any scientific grounds by which these now four (above three + Montenegrin) can  be considered distinct languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19637" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T01:18:11.227" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T09:29:30.340" Title="Can Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian be considered linguistically distinct?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25553" CreationDate="2017-07-28T01:17:43.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the linguistic point, distinguishing languages vs. dialects can be tricky. There are quite a few posts on this site about this very problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/810/how-are-languages-and-dialects-distinguished-from-one-another&quot;&gt;How are languages and dialects distinguished from one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21470/how-do-linguists-differentiate-a-dialect-from-a-language&quot;&gt;How do linguists differentiate a dialect from a language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1915/whats-the-difference-between-a-form-of-a-language-and-a-dialect-of-a-language&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between a form of a language and a dialect of a language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend reading the above questions along with their answers prior to moving forward here. Maybe the most crucial point is that the following statements about Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin are &lt;strong&gt;all true&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are parts of a larger Serbo-Croatian language (or the Southern-Slavonic language, if you will);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;these can be considered individual languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they have a high level of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3007/1009&quot;&gt;mutual intelligibility&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, &lt;em&gt;&quot;dialect&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a linguistic term, many people would deny they speak a &quot;dialect&quot; because of its connotation of &quot;speaking a spoiled version of a language which is used correctly elsewhere&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/12251/2984&quot;&gt;political/regulatory factors&lt;/a&gt; that take place, and each country naturally prefers to have their own regulatory institutions, rather than depending on a neighbor's book named, e.g., &quot;Standard Serbo-Croatian&quot;, and each country would claim that &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; Serbo-Croatian is correct, while others are &quot;dialects&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T01:17:43.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25550" CreationDate="2017-07-28T01:25:48.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;What do languages without a schwa vowel have in common so the brain is not able to take advantage of this shortcut?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Stampe's theory of Natural Phonology, human languages differ phonologically because they have in their histories made different choices about how the brain (and the rest of physiology) must be prohibited from taking advantage of such shortcuts.  If a language has schwa among its sounds, speakers of that language must not have learned not to apply any of the &quot;shortcuts&quot; that would remove schwa, and the same goes for any other specific sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, sometimes schwas can be lost by being deleted or assimilated to nearby sounds.  If such processes are unconstrained, clearly no schwas can be pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T01:31:36.560" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T01:31:36.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T02:11:40.983" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I understand that it is impossible to assign a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; time to any sound change in Greek, I am curious about the spirantization of voiced stops, particularly of beta. I'll present the evidence here that I am aware of. It seems that for beta, most scholars rely on parallel indications that  the /au, eu/ diphthongs acquired fricative consonantal status, e.g. Mod. Greek /av, ev/; the graphic evidence for both were confusions of -υ with β, e.g. ῥάυδους for ῥάβδους (2nd c. BCE.) However, I am wondering if anyone has a clue as to &lt;em&gt;which sound change probably occurred first&lt;/em&gt; if the evidence for both is the same. Gignac (1976) argues for /b/ &gt; /v/ (or /β/) in the 1st CE and /au, eu/ &gt; /aβ, eβ/ (via /aw, ew/) in the Early Byzantine period (when, he claims, interchanges of -υ with β are most common, but there are earlier examples.) However, I am slightly cautious about the evidence for betacism occurring first––the β transcription of Latin consonantal 'v' (pronounced /w/ &gt; /β/)––as these could just be a close approximation of a foreign sound. I'd be curious to know if anyone is aware of other evidence for either sound change apart from the spelling confusions I mentioned. (I also understand that dialectal variation is a further complication, e.g. Boeotian already has -υ for β in the 3rd BCE.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19638" LastEditorUserId="19638" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T04:59:44.120" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T04:59:44.120" Title="Reviewing the evidence of the spirantization of β (betacism) in Greek" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T02:42:22.027" Score="6" ViewCount="572" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I was just thinking about. In English, we seem to rely mostly on articles to tell proper nouns and common nouns apart. Proper nouns are always singular, and lack an article. While common nouns can only lack an article in the indefinite plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of this because of, well, superheros. Many have common nouns for names. And not all of them are even combinations of words like Batman or Superman. What about Robin, Raven, and Cyborg? If a language lacked articles, then the word 'robin' could just as easily be interpreted as 'a robin' or 'the robin' as the name of a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that some languages do treat proper nouns differently. Tagalog for instance uses an entirely separate set of prepositions for them (all noun clauses in Tagalog require a preposition, also they only have 3, barring the different forms they can have of course for proper nouns and plural nouns and groups of proper nouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read that Russian requires proper nouns in the accusative case to take the genitive ending (normally the accusative ending is identical to the nominative). Spanish also requires proper nouns to take a 'personal a' as a preposition when used as a direct object. Of course, Spanish has articles so its kinda moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other ways do languages have to avoid getting common nouns confused with proper nouns? Do they just avoid using common nouns as names (at least ones that aren't unusual compounds)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And note that I'm referring to spoken speech. Many languages written with the Latin alphabet capitalize proper nouns, but that doesn't help when hearing the name spoken, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know this for a conlang. I was thinking of having my conlang lack articles, but if I do that, then it would create an ambiguity in a lot of places when it comes to proper nouns. Maybe I should just have articles, or in general some kind of way of marking definiteness? Yes, I'm aware not all languages use free-standing particles to mark definiteness like we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19639" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T22:01:00.653" Title="How do languages distinguish proper nouns from common nouns?" Tags="&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T07:24:35.817" Score="0" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;So let's just say that one acquired a sample of an unknown tongue (let's just pretend it's Japanese,) and they wanted to dissect it word for word without knowing anything about it based off an interpretation given. How would one go about doing that (thinking about the Rosette Stone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without looking anything up, not even knowing the sentence structure, if there are particle markers, reflexives, what, is there a general guide of how one would go abouts it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are few steps I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transliterate it into IPA to your best (or some other system you know you won't mistake,) and graph the phonological inventory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.1. look for phonemes that could give the language a particular climate or elevation -- i.e.: /q/ would imply most likely dry-arid climates like the Sahara, or a very clearly pronounced louder /k/ which would imply a higher elevation like a mountain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.2. look for phonological inventories similar to particular regions such as a vowel heavy language may imply an Aſian language, and a tonal pattern of distinct tones noting differences may imply it being Aſian more, but very simple patterns (saying 2 maybe three) would imply something like a North Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.3. confound the sounds or deconfound them particularly using Grimm's law to look for any others that look or sound similar or other such things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;look for words that appear multiple times, and see if there appears to be a correlation with any words in the unknown tongue that may match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.1. look for a particular word or syllable that shows up frequently as this may be a syntax marker of some sort, or article.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assume S.O.V. unless otherwise good reason not to assume that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a video clip of the speaker, then pay attention to his body language, especially when they get to certain words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.1. pay attention to particular tones of voice and ways the sounds are modified which may incite particular emotion -- i.e. if the speaker starts to get really low pitched, &quot;turns-up-the-volume,&quot; and begins to growl a bit, then assume that the words or phrases should incite anger.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pretend you are a native speaker, and based off of the phonological inventory, decide which type of writing system you might would have made for your language: i.e.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.1. you have few vowels, and seldom do two words sound the same, and you distinguish and take  pride in your consonants, you would probably develop an abjad, and therefore may be a semitic langauge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.2 regardless of the number of vowels you have, you tend to use one (say a schwa) 70% of the time after consonants and may only need to mark other vowels for convenience, you might develop an abugita, and therefore might be indic (ignore Amharic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.3 you realize you know that sounds merge and words merge, and that beloved fricative that once distinguished &quot;light&quot; from &quot;lite,&quot; can be lost in time, and so in an effort to slow that and because several words may be the same already, or you prefer literacy and phoneticity over ease of writing, you may choose to develop an alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.3.1 unless you're language is syllabic in which case you opt for a syllabary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.4. given any case, you care about universality and may choose to make a logogram (this doesn't help at all, I just had to list it.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T07:38:02.837" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T07:38:02.837" Title="Dissecting an unknown language sample with nothing but an interpretation thereof?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T10:47:06.103" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be a useful software and/or systematic &quot;manual&quot; method for data analysis in a study of transitivity (Systemic Functional Linguistics) that would like to incorporate some kind of statistics despite being overall qualitative in nature? I am especially asking for methods and softwares appropriate for linguists with a non-mathematical background. (NB: The software needs to be non-Roman script-friendly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19641" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T10:47:06.103" Title="Useful software and/or &quot;manual&quot; method for data analysis in a stylistic study of transitivity (SFL)" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25557" CreationDate="2017-07-28T13:21:30.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish has what is known as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://studyspanish.com/grammar/lessons/persa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;a personal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or &quot;personal a&quot;. When a person is the direct object of most verbs, it takes an 'a' preposition (which normally translates as 'to' in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a case that is not exactly identical with yours, since the preposition is required when the direct object is a &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;proper noun&lt;/em&gt; per se, but it illustrates how a noun class can be marked in a distinctive way by speakers of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abrazo &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; mi hermana. (I hug my sister.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mi padre abraza &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; mi hermanita. (My father hugs my little sister.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abrazo &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; Elena. (I hug Elena.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veo &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; Ana. (I see Ana.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veo &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;l Papa. (I see the Pope.) (Note that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; combines with the 'el' direct article to form &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Llamo &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;l presidente. (I call the president.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veo un gato. (I see a cat.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Toco la guitarra. (I play the guitar.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carlos fumó todos mis cigarros (Carlos smoked all of my cigars.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ana bebe una Coca-Cola (Ana drinks a Coca-Cola.) (not &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; una Coca-Cola, because although it is a proper noun, it is not a person)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14005" LastEditorUserId="14005" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T11:47:46.910" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T11:47:46.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25557" CreationDate="2017-07-28T14:54:23.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bantu languages typically treat names distinctly from common nouns. In Logoori and Kerewe, nouns have an initial vowel which is part of class agreement (omitted in certain contexts): names do not allow this prefix. The form of certain preposition differs when attached to a common nouns vs. names, for example &lt;em&gt;ha&lt;/em&gt;- &quot;at&quot; for common nouns, &lt;em&gt;hali&lt;/em&gt;- for names. Singular vs. plural in common nouns is signaled by selection of a particular class prefix. Names do not have a plural form, even when the name is recognizably based on a common noun with a class prefix – they do, however, trigger apropriate singular vs. plural class agreements (humans in cl. 2, places in cl. 10) so the restriction is about affixation to the noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T14:54:23.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25563" CreationDate="2017-07-29T03:56:43.357" Score="0" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned that the difference in dB is 20 times the log of the voltage ratio of two sounds. But, it just occurred to me, what is the unit of the amplitude on the y-axis in a waveform? Is that &quot;voltage&quot;, or &quot;watt&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12534" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T05:16:50.383" Title="What is the unit of the amplitude on the y-axis in a sound waveform?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25562" CreationDate="2017-07-29T05:16:50.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the above. The waveform display program shows the raw sampled numbers (not anything in decibels), but there can also be an intensity curve, in dB, superimposed on the waveform display. In Praat, the string of numbers that is the waveform is typically scaled to a real between -1 and 1, but underlyingly (in the input file) it is a 16 (or so) bit signed integer. The numbers are produced by the A-2-D converter, which maps varying input voltage to integers, and the microphone converts varying sound pressure into varying voltage. Thus, a unit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#Acoustics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound pressure level&lt;/a&gt;, defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure#Sound_pressure_level&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T05:16:50.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25569" CreationDate="2017-07-29T05:42:53.757" Score="5" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any words in Swedish borrowed directly from Sami languages? Excluding proper nouns.&#xA;One example would be enough for &quot;yes&quot; answer. A link to some research on related subject is required for &quot;no&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19620" LastEditorUserId="19620" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T10:36:57.260" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T15:49:47.333" Title="Sami loanwords in Swedish language" Tags="&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;&lt;finno-ugric&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-31T12:32:43.823" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12433" CreationDate="2017-07-29T09:52:35.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.385.951&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 3.3 of  the syntax of french&lt;/a&gt; says that &quot;à&quot; and &quot;de&quot; at least in some cases aren’t prepositions, but rather DP*-internal inherent-case markers. (sorry I am not expert in linguistics for explain what the book says and &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/25422/descriptive-grammar-for-french&quot;&gt;French does not have a Descriptive grammar for non experts.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T11:18:32.550" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T11:18:32.550" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-29T09:52:35.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T10:14:30.407" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the place of &quot;isolated&quot; (i.e. &quot;standing alone&quot;) nominal and prepositional elements/groups within a transitivity analysis (i.e. there is no mention of an explicit process), and how can one analytically incorporate them into the overall analysis in a meaningful way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19641" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T10:14:30.407" Title="The place of &quot;isolated&quot; nominal and prepositional elements/groups within a transitivity analysis" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25564" CreationDate="2017-07-29T14:49:33.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The set of candidates is small. The word &quot;tundra&quot; is from Saami (Proto-Sami *&lt;em&gt;tuonder&lt;/em&gt;), though I don't know if it went direct to Swedish, or via Russian. There are some Saami words used in Norwegian (at least northern Norwegian) which therefore might also be used in Swedish, namely &quot;duotji&quot; (handicrafts, not sure how it's spelled in Norwegian), and &quot;joik&quot;, but one might decide that they aren't yet words 'in Scandinavian'. A rather old word is Swedish &lt;em&gt;lunnefågel&lt;/em&gt;, Norwegian &lt;em&gt;lunde&lt;/em&gt; &quot;puffin&quot;, from Proto-Sami *&lt;em&gt;londe&lt;/em&gt; and Finno-Urgic *&lt;em&gt;lunta&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bird&quot;. Another (possibly not in Swedish) is the northern Norwegian semi-dried cod &lt;em&gt;boknefisk&lt;/em&gt;, from Saami &lt;em&gt;boahk-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dry&quot;. I would be remiss if I didn't mention &lt;em&gt;samisk&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Saami&quot;, which is from Saami.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: I have to somewhat retract the example &lt;em&gt;duodji&lt;/em&gt; (N. Saami spelling), related to the verb &lt;em&gt;duddjot&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to do work by hand&quot;. Sammallahti indicates this comes from Germanic &lt;em&gt;tōwja&lt;/em&gt; and Old Notse tø̄ja &quot;to accomplish&quot;. I was unaware of  sarv, vaja, härk in Scandinavian, but you'd expect there to be more influence of Saami in the realm of reindeer terminology. In contrast to the words &lt;em&gt;duodji&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;joik&lt;/em&gt; which are Saami words pretty transparently used in Scandinavian, &lt;em&gt;sarv&lt;/em&gt; would most likely be from N. Saami &lt;em&gt;sarvva&lt;/em&gt; where it means &quot;moose&quot;, suggesting that it is an older loan. The example &lt;em&gt;härk&lt;/em&gt; also seems to have undergone a semantic shift pointing to it being an older word, since the closest N. Saami noun is &lt;em&gt;heargi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;draft reindeer&quot;, with a number of related derivatives. Interestingly, there is one verb &lt;em&gt;heargut&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be castrated (of reindeer)&quot; with the missing semantic element. So while &lt;em&gt;härk&lt;/em&gt; surely derives from Saami, it's not just a Saami word that happens to be used in Scandinavian (as &lt;em&gt;duodji&lt;/em&gt; is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally there is a Norwegian product name, &lt;em&gt;Boazo&lt;/em&gt;, a brand of reindeer meat, transparently derived from N. Saami &lt;em&gt;boazu&lt;/em&gt; – I don't know if that can called a loanword (analogous to &lt;em&gt;Sriracha&lt;/em&gt; now being an English word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T15:49:47.333" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T15:49:47.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22833" CreationDate="2017-07-29T19:15:51.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Principle A DOES account for such sentences: in '*Himself saw John' the anaphor is free (= unbound) in its binding domain and the principle is violated (as well as Case Theory), but, in your example 'It is himself that John is seeing', 'himself' is coindexed with the phonetically null 'wh'-operator hidden in the Spec Comp of the relative 'that'-clause (recall the old 'doubly filled Comp Filter') and also with the 'copy/trace' that the 'wh'-operator itself leaves after the verb 'seeing', which IS correctly c-commanded and bound by the subject 'John'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apparent trouble arises only if it is forgotten that the 'links' of any given 'chain' (e.g., antecedents and 'wh'-items and their traces, in this case) must contain the same referential specifications, which, for the purposes of Binding Theory, makes them function as a unique 'discontinuous' category. Hence, if the trace/copy of a 'wh'-item is bound in its referential interpretation by a suitable antecedent (= 'John', here), so is its null 'wh'- 'copy' (= antecedent) in Spec Comp itself, and since relative 'wh'-items must themselves have a co-referential antecedent (= himself' in this case), by definition, the antecedent 'himself' must refer to the same individual that the 'wh'-item and its trace/copy refer to, ergo it IS bound by the antecedent 'John' as Principle A requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar Binding Theory pseudo-problems arise in cases of topicalization like 'About himself, John almost never says anything __': Having been displaced leftwards, at 'surface structure' 'About himself' seems to be neither c-commanded nor bound by 'John', but its trace/copy is, so such sentences do not constitute violations of Principle A, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T19:30:46.090" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T19:30:46.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25557" CreationDate="2017-07-29T22:01:00.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean lacks articles, or any grammatical/orthographic feature to distinguish proper nouns (e.g., capital letters).  On the other hand, most Korean names do not coincide with common words, so there's less potential for confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case when a name do sound like another word, usually we think of them as just two different words that happen to have the same sound, and the context is enough to understand what is meant.  (E.g., 한국 &lt;em&gt;hanguk&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;Korea&quot;, but it's also a male given name.  But if I say &quot;I lent that book to &lt;em&gt;hanguk&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; then it's clear I'm talking about a person.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it does raise some difficulties for translating English fantasy/SF novels filled with the Ring, the Grey Mountains, the Culture, the Foundation, and what not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T22:01:00.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T10:18:27.600" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say someone writes a message like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bob: You are my best friend Daniel Nelsion: You have helped me a lot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this type of written messages be separated as :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bob: You are my best friend&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Daniel Nelsion: You have helped me a lot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it need machine learning ?&#xA;If Yes, supervised learning or unsupervised learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19655" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T10:18:27.600" Title="Detecting Sentence Boundry" Tags="&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9176" CreationDate="2017-07-31T10:35:36.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you understand what matrix clause is, the way I do :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One clause may be embedded within another, that is, it may be used as a constituent part of another clause. Such a clause is called an &lt;strong&gt;embedded clause&lt;/strong&gt; (or a subordinate clause) and the clause within which it is embedded is called the &lt;strong&gt;matrix clause&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This resembles one of the meaning of matrix which is also used to refer &lt;strong&gt;mass of fine-grained rock in which gems, crystals, or fossils are embedded&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;e.g: nodules of secondary limestone set in a matrix of porous dolomite.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S : comments by @jlawler and @Xophmeister indicate almost the same.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19655" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T10:35:36.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9176" CreationDate="2017-07-31T11:01:10.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In classical Latin matrix means &quot;a female animal kept for breeding&quot;. Then in late and mediaeval Latin it takes on the meaning &quot;womb&quot;. All of its usages in English involve the concept of embedding one thing into another, like a foetus in a womb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T11:01:10.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21539" CreationDate="2017-07-31T13:15:37.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any central repository for all Bollywood scripts, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imsdb.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Internet Movie Script Database&lt;/a&gt; does not host Bollywood movies at the moment. But the screenplay of individual movie are not hard to come by. The troublesome part is looking for screenplay one movie at a time. There are a few blogs run by keen amateurs that host a few titles each. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.filmcompanion.in/scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.filmcompanion.in/scripts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://filmmakersfans.com/famous-bollywood-hindi-scripts-download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://filmmakersfans.com/famous-bollywood-hindi-scripts-download/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://moifightclub.com/category/scripts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://moifightclub.com/category/scripts/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these screenplays are not in NLP-friendly formats. Let alone the effort of scraping PDF, the screenplay of newer movies are in a mix of Hindi and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T13:15:37.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12460" CreationDate="2017-07-31T21:06:30.950" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have any linguists considered that if, early in the divergence of the PIE language family, if among some dialects a term like Ghabh was used to mean 'to receive', and in others 'to give', that term might translate as 'tribute'? If the speakers of some early PIE languages systematically gave, and others received, tribute, this might serve as a rough survey of systems of cultural and political dominance over a 3,000 year period of pre-/protoceltic history with no other contemporary records. In English we use 'give', 'grab', and 'gather' as successor terms, but few other modern languages are derived from as many mixed roots as English, and I gather most other modern languages of the PIE family use primarily one form 'give' or 'receive' after the Ghabh root.&#xA;Given the rate at which the PIE family spread across two continents with relatively little absorption of the pre-PIE languages on the way, speakers of early-PIE languages would seem to be anomalous of a reciprocal gift-giving society, as the simultaneous 'give/receive' meaning of ghabh seems to been interpreted by some to indicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19660" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T21:06:30.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12460" CreationDate="2017-08-01T01:04:13.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It didn't.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...maybe. Everything we know about PIE is to some extent an educated guess. But some modern linguists say there were two distinct roots here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/g%CA%B0eh%E2%82%81b%CA%B0-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;*gʰeh₁bʰ-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &quot;to grab, take, receive&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancestor of Latin &lt;em&gt;habeō&lt;/em&gt;, Welsh &lt;em&gt;gafael&lt;/em&gt;, Gaelic &lt;em&gt;gabh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/g%CA%B0eb%CA%B0-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;*gʰebʰ-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &quot;to give, move&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancestor of English &quot;give&quot;, German &lt;em&gt;geben&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/indogermanisches02pokouoft#page/406/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pokorny&lt;/a&gt; wrote before the Laryngeal Theory was really a thing, and the AHD for some unknown reason doesn't include laryngeals (like &lt;em&gt;*h₁&lt;/em&gt;), listing forms &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; the laryngeal sounds had already disappeared from the language. So they conflate the two into a single root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T01:04:13.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T10:57:29.277" Score="7" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on project regarding German dependency parsing, and came across something I'm a bit unsure about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a parser, when given an input (whether it be in a sentence or just the verbs) which contains &quot;sich ___ lassen&quot; (for example &quot;sich beeindrucken lassen&quot;) I would have assumed that since &quot;sich beeindrucken&quot; doesn't really exist on its own, that the dependency relation should be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4GB4t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4GB4t.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but instead the parser interprets it as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nb5L4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nb5L4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one is the correct one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11192" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T02:48:54.167" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T02:48:54.167" Title="German Dependency Parsing - question about dependencies between &quot;sich ____ lassen&quot;" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25584" CreationDate="2017-08-01T13:38:46.480" Score="2" ViewCount="2706" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a course of introduction to Generative Grammar, my teacher told that auxiliary (Aux in the tree diagram) is the element that comes before the subject (NP) in an interrogative sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I found this rule causes a trouble in the case of the sentence &amp;quot;John can be happy.&amp;quot;, because only 'can' can be the (modal) auxiliary in the rule but I learned 'be' is also known as an auxiliary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a more comprehensive rule to identify Aux in a given sentence in Generative Grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for that example, the diagram below represents the structure of the sentence, but how can it be written right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rSa0j.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rSa0j.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19663" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T15:39:21.243" Title="Auxiliaries in generative grammar" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25583" CreationDate="2017-08-01T15:04:07.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your teacher seems to have referred to a very elementary and partial account of auxiliaries popular in the 1960's that does happen to handle the example you cite, since &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is not an auxiliary in that case but a 'main' verb, but is entirely inadequate to describe the complexity of English in this area and has long been superseded by much more detailed and precise theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you surely are aware that an English sentence may contain up to &lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt; auxiliary verbs, as in &lt;em&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;could have been being&lt;/strong&gt; followed by the police&lt;/em&gt;, where the first four 'verb-like' elements do belong to the class of auxiliaries, and elsewhere would satisfy all the relevant tests of auxiliarihood, but only the first one, the modal auxiliary &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;, which is finite/tensed, can be 'inverted' with the subject in the corresponding question or appear preceding &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in the corresponding negative sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such internally more complex sequences, the 'verbs' after &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; (aspectual &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, aspectual &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, and 'passive' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;) are also 'auxiliaries', and could themselves be 'raised' to Tense/Infl and be 'inverted' across the subject in questions and precede negation &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; they appeared &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;carried tense&lt;/strong&gt;, but, as things are, they can do neither, because in an English simple clause only &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; 'verb' can be tensed, whichever is leftmost (= hierarchically higher). The following ones, if any, will carry non-finite inflections selected by whichever other auxiliary precedes them (i.e., 'zero' after modals, past participle &lt;em&gt;-ed/-en&lt;/em&gt; after aspectual &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, present participle &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; after aspectual &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;, and passive past participle after 'passive' &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;), and, as a consequence, will not qualify to appear under Tense/Infl (the head of the predicative part of the clause) nor be able to undergo 'subject-auxiliary inversion' (further movement of the tensed auxiliary from Tense/Infl into a higher head), or to appear before negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question also reveals that you are, understandably, a bit confused by a terminological problem that arose in early Chomskian syntax: in early TGG (1950's and 60's), the label 'Aux' was used in two different ways: a) as a functional label for the node dominating &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the auxiliary verbs a sentence contained, tensed or not (i.e., the 'auxiliary component' in opposition to the 'main verb phrase'), as in Chomsky's (1955) thesis, &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt; (1957), or when, even as late as in &lt;em&gt;Aspects&lt;/em&gt; (1965), he continued to offer the PS rule Pred Phrase -&gt; Aux + VP..., and b) in a more restrictive sense, to refer to whichever auxiliary carried tense and could invert with the subject, precede negation, and undergo a few other important 'transformations'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the latter sense of 'Aux', the tree diagramme you show us is almost 'right' (ignoring that Aux and VP do form a unique constituent and should be dominated by a single node), since that sentence contains just one auxiliary, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, and, of course, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; is finite, but you should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; assign the same NP + Aux + VP structure to sentences like my &lt;em&gt;You could have been being followed by the police&lt;/em&gt;: there is massive syntactic and semantic evidence that a sentence like that cannot have the structure [[You] + [could have been being] + [followed by the police]]!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you consult some more recent English TG syntax textbook (maybe Haegeman &amp;amp; Guéron's &lt;em&gt;English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, or Radford's successive C.U.P. introductions, or Carnie's,... there are lots of them) to get a more up-to-date view of how the English auxiliary system is currently analysed, as well as of the syntactic, semantic, morphological, and phonological criteria by which  English 'auxiliaries' can be distinguished from English 'main verbs'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T15:04:07.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T20:19:08.980" Score="10" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there has been (generally) a feminisation of &quot;men's language&quot;. Lakoff's claims in &quot;women's and men's language&quot; are almost half a century old and there have been contradictory and confirming studies (for sure context, interlocturor etc. are important factors). &#xA;Lakoff claims are the following about &quot;women's language&quot; (Lakoff 2004:78-79):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;women have a large stock of words related to their specific interests , generally relegated to them as &quot;women's work&quot;: magenta, shirt, dart (in sewing), and so on. If men use the words at all, it tends to be tongue-in-cheek&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;'empty' adjectives like divine, charming, cute....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Question intonation where we might declaratives: for instance tag questions (&quot;It's hit, isn't it?) and rising intonation in statement contexts (&quot;What's your name, dear?&quot; &quot;Mary Smith?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The use of hedges of various kinds. Women's speech seems in general to contain more instances of &quot;well,&quot; &quot;y'kmow,&quot;,&quot;kinda,&quot; and so forth:words that convey the sense that the speaker is uncertain about what he (or she) is saying [...]women do it more, precisely because they believe asserting them strongly isn't nice or ladlylike, or even feminine. Another manifestation of the same thing is the use of &quot;I guess&quot; and &quot;I think&quot; prefacing declarations or &quot;I wonder&quot; prefacing questions, which themselves are hedges on the speech-acts of saying and asking. [...] hedges, like question intonation, give the impression that the speaker lacks authority or doesn't know what he's talking about [...].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;[...] intensive 'so' [...] more frequent in women's language, though certainly men can use it. Here we have an attempt to hedge on one's strong feelings, as though to say: I feel strongly about this - but I dare not make it clear HOW strong [...].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;hypercorrect grammar: women are not supposed to talk rough. [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Superpolite forms [...] speak more politely [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Women don't tell jokes. As we shall see in a while this point is just an elaboration of the two immediately preceding. But it is axiomatic in middle class American society that, first women can't tell jokes - they are bound to ruin the punchline, they mix up the order of things, and so on. Moreover, they don't &quot;get&quot; jokes. In short women have no sense of humor&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Women speak in italics, and the more ladylike and feminine you are, the more in italics you are supposed to speak, [...].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lakoff's says this difference in language is due to the different position of men and women in society. Women are less likely to be taken seriously which is also reflected in their language use and a consequence of it.&#xA;Howeve,she also states that academic men and upper class British men use more often &quot;women's language&quot; (2004: 47). Same with gay men.&#xA;Holmes for example claims - as far as I remember it was in her #hedges and boosters paper (published in the 90s) that she couldn't find a difference between women and men using a different number of the linguistic devices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I was wondering whether there are some up-to-date studies about change in the language of men? I know I shouldn't generalise but I am talking about general tendencies in &quot;men's language&quot;. The reason I am wondering about that is that femininity becomes more and more accpeted in society also amongst males, especially the more liberal people. Hence, the question about whether this is already observable in language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19665" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T13:32:02.113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T14:49:32.100" Title="Feminisation of men's language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T02:41:09.183" Score="2" ViewCount="767" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making my conlang, I've found myself avoiding word-final stops (specifically p, t, and k) because I think they would be inaudible anyway. But does this phenomenon occur in all natural languages? Is this just a common trait, or is it actually impossible for humans to pronounce a plosive at the end of a word? I think Finnish marks plurals with a final t, but do they actually pronounce it or are they relying on some kind of redundancy, like how English speakers tend to pronounce vowels longer when they appear before a voiced consonant (or a voiced plosive, at least)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T05:56:04.670" Title="Do word final plosives always have 'no audible release' in all languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25587" CreationDate="2017-08-02T03:50:19.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is it actually impossible for humans to pronounce a plosive at the end of a word?&quot; No, not at all. In French, word final plosives often have audible release (I just say &quot;often&quot; because I only have an intermediate level of proficiency and don't want to make too absolute claims; this may be understating things).  I'm talking about words that end with a consonant in the phonology, not in the spelling. E.g. the word &quot;tape&quot; in French is generally pronounced [tap] with one syllable ending in a released /p/. A disyllabic pronunciation [ˈtapə] exists, but is not usual except for in poetry/singing or in southern France, so I usually see it transcribed phonologically as /tap/ (although it seems that some more abstract analyses of modern French make use of the idea of some kind of underlying final schwa in words like this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is a difference between &quot;no audible release&quot; and &quot;not pronounced&quot;. A plosive with no audible release &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pronounced: the articulators make contact in the same place as for an audibly released stop. As you mentioned, the plosive is likely to affect the pronunciation of the preceding segment(s), allowing a listener to identify the place of articulation of the plosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat like how some languages have geminate stops at the start or end of a word, even though gemination is not always audible in these positions (I am thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-l21DgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA207&amp;amp;lpg=PA207&amp;amp;dq=geminate%20swiss%20german&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=UkX-WB_P_Z&amp;amp;sig=pzk9gqOXZTsgZYM3j3IvKhUTrUo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiny7eL0rfVAhVmjlQKHWb3COYQ6AEIQTAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=geminate%20swiss%20german&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swiss German&lt;/a&gt; in particular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T05:56:04.670" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T05:56:04.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25604" CreationDate="2017-08-02T05:51:09.020" Score="3" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a machine learning developer who is currently working with natural language processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, I was thinking about language identification. I have a couple of ideas how to do so for the ~200 most common languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm thinking about how to design the programmers interface. I want a function&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;identify_language: string -&amp;gt; list of tuples (ISO 369-3, score)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach would be to make each score a probability. Say we have a text (of sufficient length; for the sake of discussion say at least 140 characters as counted by Twitter). And suppose it belongs to one language (e.g. no URLs, no codes; just natural language): Does it always belong to exactly one language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11424" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T18:36:15.813" Title="Can one &quot;sentence&quot; belong to multiple languages?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25613" CreationDate="2017-08-02T08:20:33.757" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Germanic roots of &lt;em&gt;wine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;street&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cheese&lt;/em&gt;, and many other words were loaned into Proto-Germanic from Latin during the ‘zero period’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the fact that these were loaned from Germanic into Latin be taken as evidence that the Germanic peoples learned e.g. wine fermentation, road-building, cheese-making from the Romans, or at least that wine and roads and cheese were unknown to them before they experienced them through trading with the Romans?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9794" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T13:47:55.620" Title="To what extent are Zero Period loans from Latin into Germanic evidence that the Germanic peoples acquired technologies from the Romans?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T08:30:57.117" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an n-gram language model on the Penn Treebank using the following command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ngram-count -text $trainfile -order 5 -lm $temp/templm.ptb -gt3min 1 -gt4min 1 -kndiscount -interpolate -unk&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This code snippet was taken from Mikolov's rnnlm toolkit.&#xA;I tried to check if the created ngram LM is valid, and I think it is not (or maybe I don't understand something).&#xA;When I open the created ARPA file, I looked, for example, on all bigrams that start with the word &quot;country&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-1.445136   country 's  -0.06955435&#xA;-0.91566    country &amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&#xA;-1.380222   country &amp;lt;unk&amp;gt;   -0.06098625&#xA;-2.46688    country N   -0.06098624&#xA;...&#xA;-1.756313   country with    -0.06098624&#xA;-2.699641   country without -0.06098625&#xA;-1.975222   country would   -0.1501413&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and on the unigram&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-3.751397   country -0.3271779&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as I understand (and probably I have a mistake somewhere), the number to the left of all bigrams are the log10 conditional probability: &lt;img src=&quot;https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=tx&amp;amp;chl=%5Clog_%7B10%7D(%5CPr(%5Ctext%7Bword|prev%20word=country%7D))&quot; alt=&quot;\log_{10}(\Pr(\text{word|prev word=country}))&quot;&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the number to the right of the unigram &quot;country&quot; (which is -0.3271779) is log10 of the backoff.&#xA;When I sum all the probabilities P(word|prev word=country) (without the backoff) I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=tx&amp;amp;chl=%5Csum_%7Bword%5Cin%20W%7D%20%5CPr(%5Ctext%7Bword|prev%20word=country%7D)=0.64&quot; alt=&quot;\sum_{word\in W} \Pr(\text{word|prev word=country})=0.64&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The backoff number is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=tx&amp;amp;chl=10%5E%7B-0.3271779%7D=0.47078444&quot; alt=&quot;10^{-0.3271779}=0.47078444&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I add this number to the sum I get 1.110339152, which is higher than 1.&#xA;What do I miss? Shouldn't it be equal to one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19668" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T08:30:57.117" Title="Language model created with SRILM does not sum to 1" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25589" CreationDate="2017-08-02T09:54:50.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll also have sentences/examples containing chunks of one or more foreign languages, especially if you work with social media text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have a tweet like: &quot;Du KM classique au KM 2.0 : le renouveau du Knowledge Management à l’ère du digital&quot;, where you'll have a percentage of French and a percentage of English languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I would rather add up at 1 and get as score the distribution of languages present in my example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it depends of what is your most frequent usecase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16684" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T09:54:50.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20840" CreationDate="2017-08-02T18:30:39.817" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best would be just to hear the native pronounciation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.forvo.com/search/lodz/pl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://de.forvo.com/search/lodz/pl/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19671" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:30:39.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2017-08-02T18:54:36.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to show that you mean particularly this cat you can say ten/tamten kot (this/that cat). Otherwise you don't need to add any article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This information (definite/indefinite article) is not important, exactly like in English there is no gender for any noun - just a cat/mouse/animal, not ten(kot)/ ta(mysz)/to (zwierzę) or like in German der/die/das...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19672" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T18:54:36.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25599" CreationDate="2017-08-02T21:00:28.513" Score="2" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English speaking cultures, we have the 5 traditional senses (sight, sound, taste, touch and smell), but I'm wondering if other cultures have only one word for two of those things, ie taste being considered the same as touch. Or if there are words in other languages describing senses we don't have words for in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19674" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T22:01:44.693" Title="Do all cultures have the 5 senses?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25598" CreationDate="2017-08-02T22:01:44.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fivefold division seems to be old, widespread and established, but not universal. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://aleatorclassicus.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/aulus-gellius-attic-nights-6-6-1-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights&lt;/a&gt;, 2nd century CE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ex quinque his sensibus quos animantibus natura tribuit, visu, auditu, gustu, tactu, odoratu&lt;/code&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five senses Nature has given  to living beings, sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then compare the pseudepigraphical book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pseudepigrapha.com/pseudepigrapha/enochs2.htm#Ch30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 Enoch 30:11&lt;/a&gt; c. 1st Century CE (probably originally in Greek):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I gave him seven natures: to the flesh hearing, the eyes for sight, to the soul smell, the veins for touch, the blood for taste, the bones for endurance, to the intelligence sweetness [enjoyment].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which includes the traditional 5 plus a couple more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_wits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_wits&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T22:01:44.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T05:16:34.107" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; (The title hopefully states the abstract question in full.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional question: do you know more examples, possibly even clearer examples than &quot;electron cloud&quot; below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remarks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;electron cloud&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both A=electron and B=cloud are usual nouns, and so is &quot;electron cloud&quot;, yet an &quot;electron cloud&quot; is neither an electron, nor a cloud (in the water-vapour-sense). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-example is &quot;red herring&quot;: while it is true that a &quot;red herring&quot; in general is neither &quot;red&quot; nor a &quot;herring&quot;, &quot;red is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T06:35:43.287" Title="Is there a technical term for the phenomenon of two usual nouns A and B such that the concatenation A B denotes neither an A nor a B?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25600" CreationDate="2017-08-03T08:19:13.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/idiom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;idiom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idiom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or, more specifically, &lt;strong&gt;idiomatic expression&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is widely accepted that idioms break the principle of compositionality which, in turn, can be expressed as &quot;the meaning/value of a composition can be deducted from individual meanings/values of its parts&quot;. Idioms quite often don't follow this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;…[U]se of segmentally complex expressions whose semantic structure is &lt;strong&gt;not deducible&lt;/strong&gt; jointly from their syntactic structure and the semantic structure of their components.&lt;/em&gt; — Weinreich (1972:89)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T06:35:43.287" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T06:35:43.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25600" CreationDate="2017-08-03T11:26:56.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a good question, but your example is not a good one.  An “electron cloud” is indeed not a cloud in the original sense of the word “cloud” (in the atmosphere), but it is a “cloud” in the figurative sense of a nebulous cluster. A better example would be something like “lion heart”, which is not a lion and not a heart, but a person whose heart (here in the sense of “bravery”) is like that of a lion. This is an example of what in linguistics is called a “bahuvrihi” or “exocentric compound”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T18:13:18.153" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T18:13:18.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25589" CreationDate="2017-08-03T13:01:23.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If being the official written standardized form of the official language of an independent country is enough to be a “language”, the answer is yes. The difference between languages and dialects is often tricky and politically loaded, and in some cases, languages are very closely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the best case showing this is the pluricentric &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbo-Croatian&lt;/a&gt; language, which, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, now corresponds to four official national languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian). According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian,_Croatian,_Montenegrin_and_Serbian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page comparing these languages&lt;/a&gt;, the 1st article of the Univerwal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) can be translated as follows in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima. Ona su obdarena razumom i sviješću i treba da jedno prema drugome postupaju u duhu bratstva.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this sample is 164 characters long according to Twitter, it answers your question as specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another set of languages I would look for possible confusions would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nordic languages&lt;/a&gt;, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Norwegian_Bokm%C3%A5l_and_Standard_Danish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish and Norwegian Bokmål&lt;/a&gt;. But most generally, if you want to automatically find naturally occuring similar strings of text for different languages, I would look at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/udhr/translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of UDHR translations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you are concerned about sentences specifically crafted to be ambiguous, I would bet it is possible to construct identical sentences in unrelated (or weakly related) languages, with different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T13:01:23.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T18:29:40.397" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; How can we use syntactic phenomena that target subject to design tests for subjecthood (or even possibly derive a cross-linguistic definition of subject)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reading Van Valin's &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Syntax&lt;/em&gt;. It has many interesting examples of &quot;syntactic phenomena that target subject&quot;, for example, reflexivization, relativization, wh-question and cleft formation and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, such phenomena often always target the subject but not necessarily exclusively so; they can sometimes target other grammatical relations, such as English cleft formation, which can certainly target direct objects as well as subjects, as demonstrated by the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was his son&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; who _&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; stole the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was the product&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt; that his son stole _&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which are clefts both possibly formed from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His son stole the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say we want to know whether &lt;em&gt;his son&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the product&lt;/em&gt; is the subject of this sentence. Relying solely on the fact that subjects can be clefted in English does not help us determine which of the two NPs is the subject. It is better to test with yet another syntactic construction until only one of the NPs is eligible to a construction, such as matrix-coding-as-object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe his son&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; _&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; to have stolen the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*I believe the product&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt; his son to have stolen _&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since matrix-coding-as-object applies to &lt;em&gt;his son&lt;/em&gt; but not to &lt;em&gt;the product&lt;/em&gt;, now we are more confident that &lt;em&gt;his son&lt;/em&gt; is the subject in (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above process is what I think is the utilization of syntactic phenomena that target subjects, which are observations that &lt;strong&gt;certain types&lt;/strong&gt; of constructions only involve subjects (or potentially other grammatical relations as well), as tests for subjecthood in a sentence. By transforming a given sentence into constructions of one or more of these &quot;certain types&quot;, we see if the resulting constructions are grammatical or not, and determine the subject based on such results. The more tests we apply, the more confident we are about our judgment. Is this process correct, or canonical in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From tests for subjecthood, can we possibly derive a cross-linguistic definition of subject? I personally don't consider this possible, since we are only &quot;more confident&quot; about a constituent being the subject of an examined sentence with increasing number of tests we apply; we are never 100% confident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T18:29:40.397" Title="Relationship between &quot;subject-targeting syntactic phenomena&quot; and &quot;subjecthood tests&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T23:41:57.980" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was listening to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Despacito&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and it seems that both singers use /v/ (Fonsi at 0:42 with his mouth visible, DY at 1:00) as an allophone of native /β/ (still used, e.g Fonsi, 1:52).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Spanish speakers I know only pronounce /β/ labiodentally when smiling through rapid speech (on which occasion they'd also pronounce /p/ and /m/ labiodentally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this standard in Puerto Rican Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19689" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T02:44:25.257" Title="Voiced labiodental fricative in Puerto Rican Spanish?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-04T02:15:21.253" Score="6" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;As some of you may know, auxlangers tend towards isolating languages. At the very least, the direct object is determined by word order rather than with a case ending (mostly because most West Europeans struggle to understand the accusative suffix in Esperanto). But reading through the Language Construction Kit 2, the author seems to believe the opposite, that fusional languages are easier (he argues they require less rules), and that children pick up agglutinating (though not inflectional) case endings sooner than they do word order (in that part he even explicately states: are you listening auxlangers?) He also has a segment the briefly covers Mandarin grammar, just to demonstrate that configurational languages are highly complex. He claims he shows people a book by the name of 'Mandarin Chinese: a Functional Reference Grammar', which is 700 pages long, to anyone who claims that isolating languages are easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've been wondering, are they actually any harder than languages with say case endings? I can see some things, like English tending to use words as if they could be any part of speech, and often times a word's meaning changes depending on whether its used as a noun, verb, or w/e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I fail to see how having the accusative be specifically marked really helps. If your language is consistently SVO, then any noun that follows the verb must be a direct object (of course things can get muddied if you have ditransitive verbs). If their parts of speech are marked, then why would an accusative marker be necessary? Other than permitting free word order. I could understand how someone who's used to speaking a language with subject and object markers could struggle with this, but really, people who are used to making do without such things struggle to make use or case endings or ad-positions that explicitly mark roles in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides English (obviously), the only conjigurational language I've ever tried to learn is an Auxlang named 'Kah'. The grammar is obviously inspired by Chinese, though it seems highly simplified. At least it looks that way looking through the grammar. I've never learned it well enough to actually read texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, is Rosenfelder correct in saying that fusional languages are actually easier than isolating languages? He clearly seems to think so. I think at one point in his book he even states that a grammar of even a highly inflecting language full of irregularities has fewer rules than English or Chinese. He doesn't appear to know any inflecting language to any large extent. The only language (besides English), he really gives any indication of knowing is Quecha, which is an agglutinating language with case endings and polypersonal agreement on verbs. It would appear to me that it's also SOV, but pretty much all I know of the language comes from the sample sentences he gives in his own books (he mentions it quite often).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think this would be hard to test. I mean, is there really a language out there that's neither isolating nor fusional? I don't see how such a thing could exist. Therefore, you'll find one or the other easier to learn depending on whether your own language is isolating or fusional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T01:50:52.263" Title="Are fusional languages easier to learn than isolating languages?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25582" CreationDate="2017-08-04T13:46:04.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your intuition is correct, the parser is wrong in this case. Note that the argument structure for &quot;lassen&quot; taking an open complement is &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt;⟨_,_,P⟨...⟩⟩ where P is the secondary predicator. This means that in a sentence like &quot;er ließ sie ermorden&quot; the causee depends on the finite verb. Reflexivisation unifies the subject with the argument in object position which in turn plays a role in the open complement's argument structure (this is referred to as argument fusion or coreference depending on the theory of dependency grammar used). For more on how argument structures interact with dependencies I'd recommend the PhD theses of Alsina and Manning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T13:46:04.373" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25589" CreationDate="2017-08-04T18:36:15.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are sentences that are simply exactly the same in similar languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;No.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&quot;Gol!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Trump!&lt;/em&gt; would be some extreme examples, but between languages like Portuguese and Galician, Croatian and Bosnian or Danish and Swedish there is significant overlap in any parallel corpus.  It is really then more a function of orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rarely there are also random or not so random collisions - &quot;false friends&quot; - where a phrase or sentence in one language means something completely different in another.  &lt;em&gt;&quot;50ml Gift, 1 Roman &amp;amp; 1 Abort&quot;&lt;/em&gt; means something very very different in German than in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last example is not a sentence, but you will see plenty of not quite a sentence language in the Twitter data.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2015/evaluating-language-identification-performance.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2015/evaluating-language-identification-performance.html&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also think what you want to do about a case like &lt;em&gt;Pozor!&lt;/em&gt;, which is valid in almost all Slavic languages written in Latin, but could also be Russian &lt;em&gt;позор&lt;/em&gt; given that on the internet people do write Russian in translit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The input and output of language identification is application specific, we cannot speak of accuracy for this task in the abstract.  In many applications, the probabilities should not add up to 1.0 as they are not mutually exclusive.  Commonly for example the API client wants to know if content is in one of the user's languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T18:36:15.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25591" CreationDate="2017-08-04T20:54:51.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic evidence can be combined with other historical and archaeological evidence to form hypotheses, but the existence of loans alone cannot be used to prove this, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loans can exist happily alongside native words. The absence of a native word would be much more telling, but in a case like &lt;em&gt;street&lt;/em&gt;, Germanic also had the ancestors of words like &lt;em&gt;road&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lane&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;highway&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gasse&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bahn&lt;/em&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loans can exist because of substrate not superstrate.  Germanic languages had not yet expanded to their present area at the time in question, it could be simply that people in, say, the Alps had streets, wine and cheese when they were speaking Celtic, Romance or Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loans observe network effects.  Latin was a lingua franca for a time, like English is today.  We all understand that just because many cultures took a word like &lt;em&gt;shorts&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boxing&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;canyon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;clan&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cybersex&lt;/em&gt; from English does not imply that the cultures had no such concept before, or that the concept was originally invented by the English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loans can also be in either direction, see  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Latin_terms_derived_from_Proto-Germanic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Latin_terms_derived_from_Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt;.  The Latin word for &lt;em&gt;shirt&lt;/em&gt; is from Latin, but the Germanic tribes did not bring shirt technology to the Romans.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, although there is a correlation between loaning words and loaning technologies, in the case of a specific technology like wine it is better to read ancient reports, find evidence of grapes actually being grown north of the Alps and so on - ie out of the scope of this sub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T13:47:55.620" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T13:47:55.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25591" CreationDate="2017-08-05T10:36:19.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Wine” is a prehistoric wander word occurring not only in Indo-European, but also in Semitic (Arabic wayn, Hebrew yayin etc.) and Kartvelian. It is possible that Germanic had it from Latin, but that is far from certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T11:47:19.907" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T11:47:19.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25531" CreationDate="2017-08-05T12:54:17.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering my own question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first terrible approach was to use: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190985/how-to-put-sentences-on-separate-lines-on-linux&quot;&gt;this command line script to put sentences on their own lines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;pdftotext&lt;/code&gt; to change &lt;em&gt;PDF&lt;/em&gt; documents to plain text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A tiny script wrapping &lt;code&gt;grep -P&lt;/code&gt; to search (and &lt;code&gt;\b&lt;/code&gt; to search for word breaks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Advantages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easy to do (no unknown steps and plain text formats)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of people already know how to use &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt; and command line tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Disadvantages&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knowing and searching for words by their grammatical function could be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lack of indexing means searching becomes very slow for huge corpuses, other tools will get around this by indexing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16821" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T12:54:17.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25610" CreationDate="2017-08-05T22:11:19.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what Mark actually said, since no direct quotation or link was given.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And if he did say something like that, I likewise have no idea where he got the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about &quot;Which (kind of) language(s) is/are easier?&quot; are perennial, especially in English,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;since American English speakers are notoriously leery about learning other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they're really several different questions, all difficult to answer in general terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which (kind of) language(s) is/are easier for a child to learn as the first language?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Or is there any difference at all?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which (kind of) language(s) is/are easier to learn as a second language?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Does it make a difference whether it's before or after puberty?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which (kind of) language(s) is/are easier to learn for speakers of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Insert Language&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Almost always, &quot;English&quot; is understood, which is part of the problem right there.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as is known, the answer to all of these is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It varies, from person to person, from situation to situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that people, even people who're speaking the same language, are each doing it -- and each learned it in the first place -- in their own individual manners, for their own individual reasons, with their own individual strategies and histories and perspectives and beliefs, and all that may fit in nicely with the way a particular language is set up. Or it may not. There's no way to tell in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the reason why some people seem to pick up a language right away while others never lose their native accents in their native language, even after decades away from it.  Some people feel more comfortable speaking one language in a given situation rather than a different language; this seems about as normal as feeling more comfortable with certain foods or clothing in a given situation than with other choices, and there's no way of predicting that, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't even characterize language learning usefully, let alone describe it or predict it; everyone's language habits are uniquely their own; just like their microbiomes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T22:11:19.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T23:29:01.633" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know people have used lambda terms which &quot;compile into&quot; first-order logic, but based on what I have seen that is not particularly great for representing complex sentences with causal or temporal relations, or dealing with certain quantifiers.  There are so many flavors of logic (modal, epistemic, temporal, higher-order) - has anybody opined about the logic which can represent the maximal subset of English language?  I've read about Episodic Logic, which seems promising, but I haven't seen it used by researchers outside of Computer Science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T00:01:20.807" Title="What is the best/state-of-the-art logic for representing English language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25610" CreationDate="2017-08-06T01:50:52.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;L1 difficulty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not at all obvious that it even means anything to say that one language is harder to learn (as L1) than another. If some language were really so hard that children simply didn't learn it, then they wouldn't have learned it and it would have died out eons ago. You might imagine that a test of difficulty of learning could be quantified as the mean age at which children acquire Complete Knowledge of the language. An obvious problem with that is that lexical items like &quot;epicene, empirical, tergiversation&quot; which are part of English may not be learned at all (fess up, how many know all 3?), and many people never learn &quot;I would have gone&quot; rather than &quot;I would of gone&quot;, or &quot;If I were confused&quot; rather than &quot;If I was confused&quot;. I suspect that some (modern, urban) children learning Javanese never really acquire the &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; language encompassing &lt;em&gt;krama inggil, krama, madya&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ngoko&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to point to specific things that tend to be learned later: CV syllables are manifested first, CCCVCC syllables are later, and that doesn't make CCCVCC syllables &quot;hard to learn&quot;. Patterns for which there is scant evidence will not be mastered as quickly as blatantly-obvious patterns. The point is, there is no meaningful metric of &quot;difficulty&quot; for a language (much less a language of some ill-defined &quot;type&quot;). It's unreasonable to expect complete fluency by age 3 or 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;L2 difficulty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of L2 difficulty might be meaningfully addressed, experimentally, provided one controls the relevant variables, by attempting to teach random languages to random subjects and see whether they can acquire fluency (defined somehow) after a given period of time – if a language is intrinsically hard to learn, fewer subjects will acquire fluency, and subjects will acquire a lower mean degree of fluency, as somehow computed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some variables to control: native language of subject, similarity of L1 and L2. Amount of exposure that subject has to L2; individual's attitude towards L2-speaking society compared to their own society; pedagogical expertise of L2 instructors (example: on average, French teachers are more effective as teachers than Somali teachers, because French teachers enjoy the benefits of vastly more collective teaching experience than do Somali speakers, who most often bring to the table the fact that they speak Somali). Not to mention the problematic concept of objectively quantifying degree of fluency in a culture- and language-independent way. In other words, although you might sort of imagine a huge experiment to answer the question empirically, I don't see any plausible way to actually conduct the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is reasonable non-quantificational evidence that Spanish speakers tend to learn Portuguese much quicker than they learn Russian, Norwegian speakers learn Swedish much quicker than they learn Saami, and Swahili speakers learn Luganda quicker than English speakers can. The one generalization about L2 acquisition that might have some plausibility is that a person attempting to learn an L2 that is sufficiently similar to L1 will have an easier time than a person whose L1 is substantially different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T01:50:52.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25617" CreationDate="2017-08-06T11:15:38.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend looking at Jerry Hobbs' way of parsing and representing English, it's one of the most elaborate ones when it comes to logic and commonsense representation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isi.edu/~hobbs/disinf-tc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jerry Hobbs: &quot;Discourse and Inference&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T11:15:38.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27442" CreationDate="2017-08-06T20:07:08.393" Score="2" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for the language mentions a 'controversy' about whether it is a language, macrolanguage or language family.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an official status for the language and what are the arguments for it not being a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13895" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T12:34:20.800" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T12:34:20.800" Title="Is Occitan a single language or have its different dialects become separate languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;occitan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25617" CreationDate="2017-08-07T00:01:20.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wording of your question seems to imply an equivalence between first order predicate logic and higher order logics.  They are not equivalent.  First order predicate logic was shown to be consistent and complete by Kurt Gödel, but &quot;Stronger logics, such as second-order logic, are not complete.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consistency&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether first order predicate logic is sufficient to describe the logic of natural languages is an open question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T00:01:20.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T00:04:37.553" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I've found is that word-final /a/ in native Malay words and words up to the time of the Portuguese invasion (16-17th century) undergo reduction, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/a/ → [ə] / __#&#xA;&#xA;Mata (eye) - [matə]&#xA;Kura-kura (tortoise) - [kurə kurə]&#xA;Gila (crazy) - [gilə]&#xA;&#xA;Jendela (janela, window) - [dʒəndelə]&#xA;Kemeja (camisa, shirt) - [kəmedʒə]&#xA;Tinta (tinta, ink) - [tintə]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-native words retain /a/, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sfera (sphere) - [sfera]&#xA;Koma (coma) - [koma]&#xA;Tuala (towel) - [tuʷala]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, the vowel in 'bola' (ball) does not undergo change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bola (ball) - [bola]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the retention of the word-final /a/, we could arguably say that 'bola' is a foreign word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what might the native word for such a basic word be? If not, why is the vowel not reduced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T00:04:37.553" Title="The Word for 'Ball' Pre-Colonisation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T10:15:07.423" Score="2" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine told me that German philologists (whom he did not name) in the 18th century were the first ones to argue that in any natural language no two words can mean exactly the same. Is this true and if so who were these philologists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10448" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T17:56:33.990" Title="Who first said that no two words mean the exact same?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;&lt;philology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T13:59:21.683" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time were me and my brother, spending time at my grandma's in Romagna. We discovered she pronounced /ʃ/ almost like /s/, and even made fun of that by having her say «Schubert, Schumann e Chopin scioperavano» (IPA /'ʃu.bert 'ʃu.man e ʃo'pɛn ʃo.pe'ra.va.no/, translates to «Schubert, Schumann and Chopin went on strikes»). Another joke that arose from this pronunciation defect, which was shared with grandpa (and I guess is widespread enough among older people of the area, that is of Russi and neighboring towns) was «Perché ci sono i s(c)emi? Perché non tutti sono intelligenti» (Why are there seeds/idiots? Because not everyone is intelligent – semi /'se.mi/ = seeds, scemi /'ʃe.mi/ = idiots).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, I was trying to explain to my dad what a retroflex consonant is in the context of teaching him Mandarin pronunciation, and he compared it to that pseudo-/ʃ/ we made fun of, and I thought «Yep, that's it».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I was randomly reading about &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reajuste_de_las_sibilantes_del_idioma_espa%C3%B1ol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the readjustment of sibilants in Old Spanish&lt;/a&gt; (Spanish article), and I tried producing an apico-alveolar consonant, and I was like «Oh, maybe grandma actually had /s̺/ (apico-alveolar), not /ʂ/, as I previously thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How widespread is this mispronunciation of /ʃ/ among old people in Romagna, and is it a retroflex or an apico-alveolar consonant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't end there. Recently, I was re-listening to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7wfVu72zk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Hakka song&lt;/a&gt;, and I thought I noticed a number of sibilants in the singer's pronunciation, going from plain lamino-alveolar /s̻/ to alveolo-palatal /ɕ/ to some other sibilant which sounded like – wait for it… here it comes… – apico-alveolar /s̺/. So here comes another two questions. Firstly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that some Hakka dialects actually contrast apico-alveolar and lamino-alveolar, with any one of those or perhaps both palatalizing to alveolo-palatals in front of /i/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And secondly, I thought of those Chinese people who seem to mispronounced retroflexes as alveolars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that at least in some cases the distinction is there but it is not perceived by others because retroflexes become apico-alveolar and alveolars stay as lamino-alveolars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T13:59:21.683" Title="Apico-alveolar consonants in Romagnol Italian and certain accents of Chinese: is that a thing?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28369" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:00:37.737" Score="6" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sorta-kinda was &quot;taught&quot; that Sicilian turns all unstressed &quot;e&quot;s to &quot;i&quot;s and &quot;o&quot;s to &quot;u&quot;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I got to know a couple Calabrian songs whose dialect seemed almost Sicilian, so I extended that principle to Calabrian (at least Siculo-Calabrian) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except I was given the lyrics to them, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv76qjSS7n8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;La mamma&lt;/em&gt;, by Otello Profazio) has both unstressed &quot;e&quot;s and &quot;o&quot;s, and the singer in the linked video clearly pronounces e.g. &quot;oliofanti&quot; as &lt;code&gt;/ɔ.li.o'fan.ti/&lt;/code&gt; and &quot;contentezza&quot; as &lt;code&gt;/kon.tɛn'tet.tsa/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I explain all this away as non-strict dialect, perhaps an influence of Italian? Is there a distinction between Sicilian and Calabrian in this respect, e.g. Sicilian is strict and Calabrian is more lenient, the latter allowing unstressed &quot;e&quot;s and &quot;o&quot;s in some cases whereas the former never allows them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T10:38:13.013" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T11:49:54.290" Title="Calabrian/Sicilian and unstressed e/o" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25630" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:05:45.183" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin word for &quot;finger&quot; is &lt;code&gt;digitus&lt;/code&gt;. In Italian, I assume the &quot;gi&quot; was lost, perhaps via some lenition of the &quot;g&quot; to &lt;code&gt;*dijitus&lt;/code&gt; and then &lt;code&gt;j&lt;/code&gt; was lost, giving &lt;code&gt;*dītus&lt;/code&gt;, or perhaps accusative &lt;code&gt;*dītum&lt;/code&gt;, whence Italian &quot;dito&quot;. What happened in Sicilian though? THe corresponding term is &lt;code&gt;ìritu&lt;/code&gt;. Could it be that there was a metathesis giving &lt;code&gt;*giritus&lt;/code&gt; (as happened with &lt;code&gt;parabola&amp;gt;*paraola&amp;gt;*paraula&amp;gt;*parola&amp;gt;palora&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;palora&lt;/code&gt; is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/palora&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;), and then the &quot;g&quot; was lost? Or is &lt;code&gt;ìritu&lt;/code&gt; completely unrelated to &lt;code&gt;digitus&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, what are the detailed etymologies of Italian &lt;code&gt;dito&lt;/code&gt; and Sicilian &lt;code&gt;ìritu&lt;/code&gt;, and are they etymological cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T13:33:38.983" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T13:33:38.983" Title="How did ìritu evolve from digitus?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26801" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:30:22.910" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words which have the sound sequence /s/-/t/-/r/ in standard Italian (and probably had that sequence in their Latin ancestor form) have a simple retroflex fricative in Sicilian, which is spelt &quot;str&quot;, perhaps copying the Italian spelling of the word. Now I get how &quot;r&quot; could have become a retroflex /ɻ/, maybe due to external influences, and then /t/ could have been retroflected to /ʈ/ when near a /ɻ/, which in turn was devoiced to produce the affricate /ʈʂ/, spelt &quot;tr&quot; in Sicilian. I could even imagine &quot;str&quot; becoming /sʈʂ/ and then /ʂʈʂ/. But how did this turn to a simple /ʂ/? Is it actually the case that &lt;code&gt;/str/&amp;gt;/stɻ/&amp;gt;/sʈʂ/&amp;gt;/ʂʈʂ/&amp;gt;/ʂ/&lt;/code&gt;? Or is the evolution different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T15:02:43.883" Title="How did the sequence /str/ become /ʂ/ in Sicilian?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25628" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:31:30.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meyer-Luebke, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/romanischesetymo00meyeuoft#page/206/mode/2up/search/digitus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1911):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2638&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;digitus&lt;/strong&gt; „Finger&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rum. &lt;em&gt;deget&lt;/em&gt;, vegl. &lt;em&gt;detco&lt;/em&gt;, ital. &lt;em&gt;dito&lt;/em&gt;, log. &lt;em&gt;didu&lt;/em&gt;, obwald. &lt;em&gt;det&lt;/em&gt;, engad. &lt;em&gt;daint&lt;/em&gt;, bergell. &lt;em&gt;dant&lt;/em&gt;, friaul. &lt;em&gt;det&lt;/em&gt;, frz. &lt;em&gt;doigt&lt;/em&gt;, prov. &lt;em&gt;det&lt;/em&gt;, katal. &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;, span., portg. &lt;em&gt;dedo&lt;/em&gt;; mazed. &lt;em&gt;dzeadit&lt;/em&gt;, maram. &lt;em&gt;ǧedet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;siz., kalabr. &lt;em&gt;yiditu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yiritu&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; neap. &lt;em&gt;yirȩtȩ&lt;/em&gt;; mazed. &lt;em&gt;dzeadzit&lt;/em&gt;, megl. &lt;em&gt;zezit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zest&lt;/em&gt;, istr.-rum. &lt;em&gt;žežet&lt;/em&gt;. —&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plur. DIGITA: rum.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;degete&lt;/em&gt;, ital. &lt;em&gt;dita&lt;/em&gt;, obwald. &lt;em&gt;deta&lt;/em&gt;, afrz. &lt;em&gt;doye&lt;/em&gt;, lyon. &lt;em&gt;daya&lt;/em&gt; „Fingerbreite&amp;quot;, prov. &lt;em&gt;deda&lt;/em&gt;, vgl. astur. &lt;em&gt;deda&lt;/em&gt; „Zehe&amp;quot; neben &lt;em&gt;diu&lt;/em&gt; „Finger&amp;quot;. —&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ablt.: röm., abruzz. &lt;em&gt;ditone&lt;/em&gt;, lomb. &lt;em&gt;didon&lt;/em&gt; „Daumen&amp;quot; RomF. XIV, 453; gen. &lt;em&gt;dieta&lt;/em&gt; „Fingerschwamm&amp;quot; GStLLig. IV, 272; engad. &lt;em&gt;dancler&lt;/em&gt; „Fingerhut&amp;quot; ; frz. &lt;em&gt;doigtier&lt;/em&gt; „Däumling&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, there was a metathesis of digitus &amp;gt; *giditus &amp;gt; yiditu &amp;gt; (y)iritu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T14:41:57.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25549" CreationDate="2017-08-07T16:03:03.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Early Arabic phoneme represented by the letter ض was a one-sided lateral, and is described as such by the father of Arabic grammar, Sībawayh. (The modern pronunciation is different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T16:03:03.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25639" CreationDate="2017-08-08T00:16:46.187" Score="4" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the following sentence: &quot;He wrote a love letter at night for his girlfriend&quot;. &quot;He wrote a love letter&quot; is the basic SVO clause, but what is the &quot;at night&quot; and &quot;for his girlfriend&quot; part called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They seem to be quite regular in that they start with (in English at least) a preposition, and are followed by a noun-phrase. I know the prepositions, but what is the entire structure called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about building a interlingua based translator, and I'm not sure what to call these things that seem to extend an otherwise basic clause into a more complex one, and I'm not sure what is and isn't one of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T12:07:48.060" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T12:59:41.170" Title="What's the name of the elements used to extend otherwise basic clauses?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25669" CreationDate="2017-08-08T07:11:55.560" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Radford (2011) merges AdvPs in the specifiers of the phrases that they modify. What are the advantages of such an analysis over augmented XPs (AdvP adjoined to XP)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31oM5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31oM5.png&quot; alt=&quot;AdvP in SpecPP&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z1VsF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z1VsF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Augmented PP&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, specifiers are usually reserved for constituents that play certain roles in the meaning of a sentence. For example, SpecTP is reserved for subjects, which originate in SpecvP in which it is assigned its agent role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the accepted analysis of AdvPs, are other modifiers (such as adjectives) also analysed as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bhelz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bhelz.png&quot; alt=&quot;AP in SpecNP&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T09:20:03.553" Title="AdvP Merged in Spec XP or Adjoined to XP" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25635" CreationDate="2017-08-08T12:03:26.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you correctly figured out, &lt;code&gt;at night&lt;/code&gt;and &lt;code&gt;for his girlfriend&lt;/code&gt; start with a preposition followed by a noun phrase. This is called a &lt;strong&gt;prepositional phrase (= PP)&lt;/strong&gt;: The head (= the element which determines the grammatical properties and the main meaning of the phrase) is a preoposition, and the noun phrase is a complement that is selected by the prepositional head.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But PPs are not the only elements that &quot;extend otherwise basic clauses&quot;: Consider, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;yesterday&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;last year&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He &lt;strong&gt;carefully&lt;/strong&gt; wrote a love letter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;alone&lt;/strong&gt; (in his room)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these are phrases headed by a preposition, but nevertheless they serve a similar job as the examples mentioned by you: They modify a structure that is itself already a full sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, as Atamiri already mentioned, such phrases are called &lt;strong&gt;free modifiers&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;adjuncts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. This is a very broad term for anything which in some way modifies something else .&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the case of clausal modifiers, this comprises most commonly &lt;strong&gt;PPs&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;adverb phrases (= AdvPs)&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. phrases that are headed by an adverb, such as &lt;code&gt;quickly&lt;/code&gt;), sometimes external adjectives (such as &lt;code&gt;alone&lt;/code&gt;, which is an adjective that in fact predicates over the subject rather than the verb phrase) or noun phrases (such as &lt;code&gt;last year&lt;/code&gt;, which is phrase that is headed by a noun and in turn modified by an adjective).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Oftentimes, modifiers that act on sentence-level like the above mentioned ones are also called &lt;strong&gt;adverbials&lt;/strong&gt;, but this is discouraged by some syntacticians as &quot;adverbial&quot; might suggest the underlying part of speech were an adverb (like &lt;code&gt;quickly&lt;/code&gt;), which is not necessarily the case (as with PPs, for example).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But there are modifiers for other types of elements than just sentences: For example, &lt;strong&gt;adjectives/adjective phrases&lt;/strong&gt; can serve as modifiers to noun phrases (e.g. &lt;code&gt;big&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;big shoes&lt;/code&gt;), and PPs can also modify noun phrases (e.g. &lt;code&gt;on the table&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;the books on the table&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than so-called &lt;strong&gt;complements&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;arguments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, adjuncts are not selected/subcategorized for by other elements: There is nothing in the sentence which requires them to be there, and the sentence would remain grammatical and pertain its meaning if they were left away. They merely add some more local/temporal/... information to the structure they attach to and are thus modifying the sentence.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In contrast, arguments/complements are grammatically required and contribute to the core meaning of the sentence: For example, &lt;code&gt;a love letter&lt;/code&gt; is an argument selected by the verb &lt;code&gt;wrote&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;night&lt;/code&gt; is a noun phrase complement selected by the head &lt;code&gt;at&lt;/code&gt;. Without them, the structure would be ungrammatical or drastically change its meaning&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, I should mention that the binary distinction &quot;complements vs. adjuncts&quot;/&quot;arguments vs. modifiers&quot; is not as simple and undisputed as it may seem from my exemplifications: Many people argue - for good reasons - that such a two-way distinction is obsolete and that there need to be more more finegrained levels of how an element may contribute to a sentence. But that is a bit out of the scope of this post.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;adjunct&quot; or &quot;free modifier&quot; is the term you are looking for.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The distinction between &quot;free modifier&quot; and &quot;adjunct&quot; is not as straightforward; &quot;modifier&quot; is a bit more theory-independent in that &quot;adjunct&quot; is usually used in the context of phrase structure grammars, but &quot;modifer&quot; is also a more vague term that is more semantically than syntactically motivated. You'll find both terms in the literature, but in computational parsing, which often relies on dependency structures, &quot;modifier&quot; is probably the more common term.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The distinction between the two terms &quot;complement&quot; and &quot;argument&quot; is not always made accurately either; sometimes the criterion is that an argument needs to be something nominal, i.e. a phrase that semantically refers to concrete individuals taking part in some event, while &quot;complement&quot; is a more general syntactic term that may apply to any category, for example PPs which may be selected by verbs (such as &lt;code&gt;on the table&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;John put the flowers on the table&lt;/code&gt;) without being a noun phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Another way to check whether something acts as a complement or as an adjunct is that adjuncts may be iterated rather freely, while complements need to be present exactly once (i.e. they may neither be left away nor may there be more than one element occupying the same complement position):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wrote a love letter &lt;em&gt;(0 adjuncts)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;alone&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(1 adjunct)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;alone at night in his room with a fountain pen&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(4 adjuncts)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;* He wrote &lt;em&gt;(no verbal complement)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * He wrote a love letter &lt;strong&gt;an SMS&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(2 verbal complements)&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjuncts to a sentence may be iterated practically unlimitedly - including the possibility of there being none at all -, while the complement position needs to be occupied no less than and no more than once.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; Not a particularly nice example, but cf. &lt;code&gt;John drowned&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;John dronwed Mary&lt;/code&gt;: Leaving away &lt;code&gt;Mary&lt;/code&gt; still keeps the sentence grammatical, but the role John takes in the action (in one he is actively causing the drowning to someone else, in the other he is the one undergoing the drowning) changes drastically - so &lt;code&gt;Mary&lt;/code&gt; must be an argument rather than an adjunct. In contrast, adding &lt;code&gt;at night&lt;/code&gt; to the love letter sentence doesn't fundamentally change the sentence's meaning or grammaticallity: It merely acts as a modifier; thus it is a free modifier or adjunct rather than a complement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T12:59:41.170" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T12:59:41.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25642" CreationDate="2017-08-08T12:19:59.487" Score="-1" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;p&gt;after carefull consideration I have decided to put my question here. I  contacted several people well-known in history/antropology of languages and so on. Nobody answered or wasnt willing to help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am strongly interested in studying of history, I would love to know something more about a history of the surname Szakal. As far as I know, surname is of Hungarian origin meaning &quot;beard&quot;, also I found that it might be of Turkic origin as they influenced Hungarian language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, i have my own theory in which this surname may have a connection to ancient tribes Scythians whereas Persians called them &quot;Saka&quot; (possible Szaka - Szakal?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody known a bit of history/ethnology/anthropology share more upon this? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19714" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T14:41:56.757" Title="Etymology/Origin of surname Szakal" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-08T14:55:56.783" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Celtic and Arabic both exhibit singulative forms and both lack the verb 'have'.  I would like to know whether there are are singulative languages that have the main verb 'have'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19715" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T07:17:53.080" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:47:33.027" Title="Are there languages with both the singulative and the main verb 'have'?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25640" CreationDate="2017-08-08T15:12:42.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, i have my own theory in which this surname may have a connection&#xA;  to ancient tribes Scythians whereas Persians called them &quot;Saka&quot;&#xA;  (possible Szaka - Szakal?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlikely, because surnames only became a convention in Central Europe in the middle of the last millennium, and the peoples of Hungary, like most peoples, took their current surnames even more recently, based on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;their occupation (Lakatos, Pásztor, Kovács, Szabó)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;their ethnicity &lt;em&gt;as understood in the 19th or 20th century&lt;/em&gt; (Görög, Nemet, Tót, Székely, Örmény, Oláh, Rácz) OR country of origin&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;their city or region of origin (Kecskeméti, Visontai)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Hungarian rendering of their original non-Hungarian surname (Liszt, Kossuth, Dóczi)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the original rendering of their original non-Hungarian surname (Wigner, Neumann)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the translation of their original non-Hungarian surname (Hidegkuti)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the personal name of their father or ancestor (Ádám, Lázár, Benes)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;some personal characteristic (Féher, Nagy)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames_in_Europe#Hungary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames_in_Europe#Hungary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarization#The_Magyarization_of_personal_names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarization#The_Magyarization_of_personal_names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often what happened was that people chose a name with a meaning in the new bureaucratic language because it sounded similar to their original name, by a very loose definition of &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt;, for example &lt;em&gt;Kohn&lt;/em&gt; was Magyarised to &lt;em&gt;Kun&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Purczeld&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Puskás&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Günszberg&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Gábor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Engländer&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Erdős&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the name in the case of a family could have an actual origin distinct from the origin of the current Magyarised surface form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why would somebody in Hungary have chosen &lt;em&gt;Szakal&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Sakal&lt;/em&gt; in other orthographies) in the 18th, 19th or 20th century?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=sakal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to ancestry.com&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Sakal&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;Jewish (Sephardic): occupational name for someone who polished wood, gems, metals, or armor, from Arabic ?saqqal ‘polisher’. Hungarian (Szakál): descriptive nickname from Hungarian szakál ‘beard’, Turkish sakal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For those who do not know, &lt;em&gt;Szakál&lt;/em&gt; in Hungarian orthography would be &lt;em&gt;Sakal&lt;/em&gt; in many other orthographies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also lists a &lt;em&gt;Szalmon Sakal&lt;/em&gt;, which is Polish orthography.  (The same name in Hungarian would be something like &lt;em&gt;Salmon Szakal&lt;/em&gt;.)  Given that there were very very few Sephardim north of Hungary, the given etymologies seem not to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other ideas: In Latin &lt;em&gt;sacal&lt;/em&gt; meant Egyptian amber.  &lt;em&gt;Szakál&lt;/em&gt; is also the Hungarian name of the Săcal River in Transylvania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T05:57:45.153" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T05:57:45.153" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25646" CreationDate="2017-08-08T21:04:13.873" Score="0" ViewCount="1289" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I describe a tap or a flap using distinctive features?&#xA;Is {[+consonantal] [+coronal] [-continuant] [+sonorant]} enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13086" LastEditorUserId="13086" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T22:01:15.153" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T00:20:24.053" Title="What are the distinctive features of the alveolar tap?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25644" CreationDate="2017-08-09T00:20:24.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard SPE analysis is that a flap is a sonorant stop, and the feature assignment is [+cons,-cont,+son,+coronal] for a generic lingual tap: then you add other features to specify a particular coronal place of articulation. Features like &lt;em&gt;lateral, nasal, voice&lt;/em&gt; etc. can be independently varied. This is not entirely problem-free, however. There is a nasal flap in &quot;fast speech&quot; in English [wɪ̃ɾ̃ɹ̩] 'winter' (see also the discussion of the &quot;divinity fudge&quot; problem in Stampe 1972, Lee &amp;amp; Howard 1974, and other thoughts on that flap by &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/11/winter-and-winner.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Wells&lt;/a&gt;). The reason why this would be a problem is that [n] is [+cons,-cont,+son,+cor,+nasal] – featurally the same as a nasalized alveolar flap. However, the nasal flap &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; phonological object could be disposed of by re-transcribing such examples as [wɪ̃ɾɹ̩], [dəvɪ̃ɾi] (one of the variants of &quot;divinity&quot;), and the physical fact of nasalization after a nasal vowel can be attributed to phonetic implementation (post-nasal nasalization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;sonorant stop&quot; theory is correct, there can't be a flapped fricative. Laver p. 263 *Principles of phonetics *describes how such a thing might be articulated (that is, it is not a physical impossibility), but it remains linguistically unattested. The phonological account for that is, of course, that if it's [+continuant], it's not a flap/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T00:20:24.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19294" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:07:11.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sumerian language is known in Sumerian as &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlp/cdlp0002_20160104.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eme-gir15, which means &quot;native tongue&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Foxvog, Daniel A., Introduction to &#xA;Sumerian Grammar. 2016 January 4, p. 21).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Japanese language is known natively as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;日本語 (&quot;Nihongo&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;, which literally means &quot;sun rise language&quot;, or, more loosely, &quot;language of the rising sun&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14005" LastEditorUserId="14005" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T14:12:11.687" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:12:11.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25641" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:47:33.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the reference to Stassen, I believe I have identified several languages in which these features co-exist: Kanuri, Shilluk, Krongo, Nobiin, Tirmaga and Nandi. Thanks to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19715" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:47:33.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25653" CreationDate="2017-08-09T20:30:27.713" Score="6" ViewCount="938" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just started an &lt;em&gt;Intensivkurs&lt;/em&gt; of Russian. What really struck me is the ubiquitous palatalization, but what I find most difficult is wrapping my head around the sound represented by ы. To me it sounds almost like a pharyngealized [ɪ] (in words such as  вы or ты), but I am not sure about how to articulate it. I have been trying the whole day and sometimes it comes out, but not in a controlled manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are, then, the articulatory phonetic properties of ы?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14445" LastEditorUserId="14445" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T23:08:26.753" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T00:44:51.513" Title="On the phonetics of Russian ы" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25657" CreationDate="2017-08-09T21:27:21.377" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;As if aorist isn't confusing and ambiguous enough, what could Prokosh mean in &lt;em&gt;A Comparative Germanic Grammar&lt;/em&gt; when referring to &quot;aorist presents&quot;? If anyone has the book, it's on page 66. Here are a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IE wéi(n)k-/wi(n)k'- (L. vīncō): Go. weihan 'fight'--ON vega, vā &amp;lt; *waih, vögom, vegenn; OE wīgan; OHG ubar-wehan 'conquer'; OE OS wīgand, OHG wīgant 'fighter' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IE bhéuk-/bhuk'- (Lith. buklùs 'sly') and bhéug-/bhug'- (L. fugiō): Go. biugan 'bend', ON bogenn (past part.) OE būgan, OS *būgan, OHG biogan, but OHG buhil 'hill'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19727" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T03:13:35.063" Title="Aorist Present--what does this mean? I thought aorist was primarily reserved for past action" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;aorist&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-09T21:48:27.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest way is probably this: pronounce the [u] sound (as in ’soon’, for example) and then try to unround your lips, without changing the position of the tongue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13331" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T21:48:27.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-10T00:49:49.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian ⟨ы⟩ can be a little difficult to master, especially if one wishes for a native-like pronunciation. When stressed, the vowel in question is a &lt;code&gt;close central unrounded vowel&lt;/code&gt;: IPA &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt;. But, as with all &quot;hard vowels&quot; in Russian, it strongly velarizes any preceding consonant, which manifests as a noticeable glide after the consonant and before ⟨ы⟩. So, ты comes out phonetically as &lt;code&gt;[t̻ˠɰɨ]&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;ɰ&lt;/code&gt; is the IPA symbol for the velar approximant – a ⟨w⟩ (as in water) without rounding the lips. This gives ⟨ы⟩ a diphthong-like quality distinct from &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt; in many other languages. One thing to note is that Russian speakers maintain the velar approximant before &lt;code&gt;[ɨ]&lt;/code&gt; even when pronouncing ⟨ы⟩ in isolation (without any consonant before it to velarize), e.g., when reciting the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make &lt;code&gt;/ɨ/&lt;/code&gt;, try following the instructions in this video: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hogVBFECQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hogVBFECQ&lt;/a&gt;. For an English speaker, one way may be to start with something like 'woo', and get rid of the lip-rounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T15:03:22.300" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T15:03:22.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T05:51:30.143" Score="-1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; What is an attested technical term for the following kind of &lt;em&gt;pleonasm&lt;/em&gt;? Has this been described scientifically and &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt;? What are other examples than the one I give below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let N be a &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;. Let n be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noun_modifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;noun modifier&lt;/a&gt;. Let a be an adjective. Assume the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The compound 'n N' lexically exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is nothing pleonastic about 'n N' in that not every 'N' is an 'n N', in any reasonable sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The compound 'a n N' however, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pleonastic, in that &lt;strong&gt;every 'n N' is 'a'&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The compound 'a n N' is however, &lt;em&gt;not quite so&lt;/em&gt; pleonastic that every 'N' were 'a', too: there &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; exist 'N' which are &lt;strong&gt;non&lt;/strong&gt;-'a'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End of Question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example.&lt;/strong&gt; a := bicyclic, n := mountain, N := bike. This results in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bicyclic mountain bike&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, all the above are satisfied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'mountain bike' lexically exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The compound 'mountain bike' is not pleonastic at all; by far not every bike is a mountain bike, in any reasonable sense. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The compount 'bicyclic mountain bike' &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; pleonastic, in a reasonably clear sense: no usual mountain bike has a number of wheels other than 2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There exist bikes which are non-bicyclic, in that there exist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicycle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unicycles&lt;/a&gt;. So this is an example of the kind of pleonasm in the question: it is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; pleonastic to &lt;strong&gt;add&lt;/strong&gt; the 'a' to the 'n N'. It is not pleonastic to add 'a' to 'N' alone. (Note that 'bicyclic bike', while unusual, is &lt;strong&gt;not pleonastic&lt;/strong&gt;, and appropriate in certain contexts, in view of unicycles or training wheels.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is not my main motivation for this question, yet the compound I am &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; interested in I prefer not to give, for several reasons, already because it is so specifici to a scientific subfield that it would be incomprehensible to most.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T16:25:46.610" Title="What are technical terms and treatments in the literature for the exactly the following special kind of pleonasm?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25659" CreationDate="2017-08-10T08:30:38.323" Score="0" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not encounter so big problems with the English language although I'm not a native English speaker. But I'm curious why some languages (like English or French) are written different from the way they are read? And the German or Slavic languages are WYSIWYG.&#xA;So especially for beginners (but I use them sometimes too) there are transcriptions in the dictionaries how to read the corresponding word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this because in the middle ages the west European societies were separated in classes (castes) and some of them were privileged to be literate and some not?&#xA;Or this is a special way to save the pronunciation of the word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance and regards!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Some examples (the entire language is an example but... ;))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;example [ig'za:mpl] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sometimes ['sʌmtaimz]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;literate ['litərət]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;language ['længwidʒ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;although [ɔːlˈðəʊ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;because  [bi'kɔz]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you [ju]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in German the corresponding words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beispiel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;manchmal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gebildet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obwohl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weil&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;du / ihr / Sie&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here (in German) you can see few exceptions too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ei&quot; is actually [ai].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;sp&quot; is [ʃp]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ch&quot; is [h]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vowel + &quot;h&quot; = long vowel / obwohl [obvo:l] / ihr [i:r]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ie&quot; is [i:]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A&quot; is [a] and [ei]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;C&quot; is [s] and [k]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;E&quot; is [e] and [i] and nothing at the end of the word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in German &quot;A&quot; is only [a], &quot;E&quot; is only [e]...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll not give you examples in Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19729" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T00:58:16.480" Title="Why the writing and reading in English are different?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-10T08:39:39.297" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;ы&quot; is a compound sound. It is made of two sounds.&#xA;The first one is [ʌ] or [ə] in the English word &quot;jump&quot;.&#xA;The second one is [ɪ] in &quot;way&quot; or &quot;day&quot;.&#xA;So it makes [əɪ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19729" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T08:39:39.297" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25651" CreationDate="2017-08-10T09:39:52.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Aorist presents” is a term used by many (but not all) Indo-Europeanists to describe verb forms for the present tense with zero-grade ablaut (like the strong aorist). A classic example is Sanskrit tudati “he bumps into”, which forms its present tense from the zero-grade root *tud-, not the full grade *taud-. In this sense it resembles the aorist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T10:32:55.583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T10:32:55.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T13:20:24.600" Score="5" ViewCount="2245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to transform texts written in Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages with non-latin alphabet to the IPA. For now, I can only think of dictionaries. Are there any other ways? Any software systems/tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, do I need to transform them to an 'intermediate' language eg English or directly to the IPA? I can understand that I may not be able to represent all the sounds of such a language with the English alphabet for obvious reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19730" LastEditorUserId="19730" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T16:45:12.590" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T12:16:09.060" Title="Transform Chinese, Korean, Hebrew and Arabic to IPA" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25655" CreationDate="2017-08-10T14:38:10.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essential reason is that writing systems historically tend to not be modified, until there is a frenzy of orthography reform, and some languages have had more phonological change than others. English and French are noteworthy because their spelling was fixed a long time ago and there has not been a massive reform; and then there substantial phonological changes in the spoken language. Tibetan is similar, having been written for as long a time, and having undergone probably more substantial phonological change. Norwegian spelling can also be a nuisance (there is no &quot;d&quot; in &lt;em&gt;bønder&lt;/em&gt;; one kind of has to guess how &quot;o&quot; is pronounced; for some dialects, you have to just know how to spell &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt; in a given word: &quot;rs&quot;, &quot;kj&quot;, &quot;sj&quot;). In contrast, German had an orthography reform just a decade ago, and was standardized much later than English. Indeed, Standard German as a spoken language is a relatively new language, somewhat over 200 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people would like English spelling to be &quot;phonetic&quot;, in that if you know how a word is spelled, you know how it is pronounced, and vice versa. This is perhaps tenable for small languages with only a couple of speakers in one village. For any other language, you do not know how all speakers actually pronounce words. ɪf ɔl ɹaɪɾɪŋ wɹ̩ bɛɪst ɔn hæw ðə ɪndəvɪdʒʊl̩ ækʃəli tɔks, ɪɾəd bi ɹɪli dɪfəkl̩t tə əndɹ̩stæn pipl̩z ɹaɪɾɪŋ. wɹs, sɪns ðɛɹ aɹ mɛni wɛɪz ðæt ən ɪndəvɪdʒʊl̩ dʌz prənæwns ʌ wɹ̩d, you would spend all your time trying to figure out how you pronounce a word, so that you would know how to spell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that improvements to English spelling are unimaginable: but especially for a language like English (with a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; set of pronunciations for all words), just adopting phonetic spelling is a fairly bad idea. The Oxford list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/common-misspellings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most common mis-spellings&lt;/a&gt; does point to candidates for change. &quot;Amoeba&quot; is not on the list, probably because most people don't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T00:58:16.480" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T00:58:16.480" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15344" CreationDate="2017-08-10T20:58:40.427" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the generative rule for VP is too weak.  To handle 'at the dog with one eye' as two adverbial phrases, the rule should be something like VP -&gt; [adverb] verb [[PP]] [NP] [[PP]] {allowing any number of sequential adverbial phrases}.  Any PP generated under the NP formula would be restrictive to the NP, not adverbial.  This new VP rule is still weak, as adverbial phrases include adverbs as well as prepositional phrases, and they can occur before the subject, as well as in the predicate: before or after the verb, or even after the object. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T20:58:40.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23360" CreationDate="2017-08-10T23:43:40.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language changes can be thought of as the result of universal rules (of how a language CAN change) being realized, even if the rules may not be that apparent, or not realized in a dialect, doesn't mean the rule couldn't be possible in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phenomena like l-vocalization, which may occur more often in some dialects of English, are still driven by a rule, and these rules may be more or less generally applied without making yourself unintelligible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-linguistically, l-vocalization seems quite common in Germanic/Romance/Slavic languages, so it's incorporation into your idiolect is not unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19737" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T23:43:40.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25651" CreationDate="2017-08-11T02:35:51.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once heard that some verbs typically called &quot;aorist presents&quot; in Germanic are actually the result of &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; vowel coloring by surrounding velar and labial consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Germanic &quot;come&quot;-word (Eng. &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;koma&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) is sometimes termed an aorist-present verb because it has apparent zero-grade in the present tense in Old English (&lt;em&gt;ic cume&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I come&quot;) and elsewhere. However, the root originally contained a labiovelar onset and a labial coda (&lt;em&gt;*gWem-&lt;/em&gt;). In some Germanic branches, such as Gothic, the e-grade remains as such (Gothic &lt;em&gt;qiman&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to come&quot; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;kWem-&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explanation doesn't seem to work for Norse/Icelandic &lt;em&gt;vega&lt;/em&gt;, though, because the &lt;em&gt;-g-&lt;/em&gt; coda implies a different stress pattern (the one typically associated with zero-grade). Thus, this cannot simply be a question of the effect of the surrounding consonants on the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With OE &lt;em&gt;būgan&lt;/em&gt;, there is a labial onset and a velar coda, so this might be a case of vowel coloring rather than actual zero-grade, but maybe the length of the &lt;em&gt;ū&lt;/em&gt; vowel conflicts with this explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T03:13:35.063" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T03:13:35.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-11T05:40:27.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen palatal sounds described as raising the middle of the tongue, which has the effect of pulling the tongue root to the front and consequently enlarging the pharyngeal cavity.  There is a nice X-ray of an [i] articulation at the back of &lt;em&gt;Preliminaries to Speech Analysis&lt;/em&gt; by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle.  And what is more or less the opposite tongue movement is used for ы -- the tongue root is retracted so as to shrink the pharyngeal cavity and, as a consequence, lowering the middle of the tongue.  See the discussion of the feature &quot;+/- advanced tongue root&quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This description gives a way of discussing the ы articulation that relates your own remark about associated pharyngealization and descriptions that make ы the back counterpart of [i], and parhaps also those that mention some sort of diphthong involving movement of the back of the tongue.  The middle of the tongue and the root are connected, so moving one of them has consequences for the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T05:40:27.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25668" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:54:55.920" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most search engines exclude special characters (henceforth SC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried SymbolHound, but its source material is limited and generated nothing for &lt;a href=&quot;http://symbolhound.com/?q=&amp;amp;l=&amp;amp;e=%22%2C+still+less%22&amp;amp;n=&amp;amp;u=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my search for&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;, still less&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T05:24:41.917" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T05:24:41.917" Title="How do linguists search the web for text containing special characters?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-08-14T12:37:45.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25667" CreationDate="2017-08-11T19:34:09.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One solution is to use a linguistic corpus like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&amp;amp;q=58265634&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Contemporary American English&lt;/a&gt; (or, if you can program, build your own corpus for your purposes, for example using Python NLTK).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sample size is smaller than searching the entire web, but it's usually enough to be significant.  You can do your own web scraping if you need more data (or just use public domain texts, if that's adequate for what you want).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T19:34:09.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25637" CreationDate="2017-08-12T00:00:13.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ever since Larson (1988) 'shell theory' of phrase structure (a two-layered X-bar theory, at the time) became popular, in Chomskian grammars (P&amp;amp;PT and then 'minimalist' ones) there has been a growing tendency, which eventually became standard doctrine, to place both arguments and adjuncts in specifier positions. This conception has come to be known as the 'all-in-spec hypothesis', and its consequence is that adjunction is no longer a constructional option: all earlier 'adjuncts' (broadly: 'modifiers', including AdvPs, PPs, APs, Rel-Clauses, etc.) have been reanalysed as specifiers of 'something'. Of course, that would not have been possible without the wild proliferation of 'functional' categories in such influential works as Cinque's &quot;Adverbs and Functional Heads&quot; (OUP, 1999) and subsequent 'cartographic' work since. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'all-in-spec hypothesis' further reduced the constructional machinery of the Language Faculty in comparison with X-bar theory, and, in retrospect, was a crucial step towards the current minimalist doctrine that the FL contains only (recursive) Merge (with Move[ment] reanalysed as internal Merge and NO X-bar principles). From a minimalist point of view ('less is more/better'), therefore, dispensing with all adjunction simplified the theory, but, of course, it did so at a price, and there are good reasons to be sceptical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, since arguments and 'modifiers' have completely different semantic types (modifiers are second or higher-order predicates - i.e., 'functions', in Fregean-Montagovian terms - whereas arguments are referring expressions - and 'objects', in Frege's sense - cancelling the long-established structural distinction between complements and adjuncts is at best a questionable move and a serious blow to the broadly accepted requirement of a transparent correlation between semantics and syntax. Secondly, and, in my view, above all, a 'specifier of x' is only as credible as the specified head 'x' itself is, and, simply, in too many cases, the ontological and semantic status of the specified 'x' heads has remained dubious or completely undefined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the specific example you are interested in, since the head (= &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;) of the PP &lt;em&gt;to bed&lt;/em&gt;, as in e.g., &lt;em&gt;I went straight &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; bed&lt;/em&gt;, is &lt;strong&gt;monadic&lt;/strong&gt; and the only argument it requires is satisfied by &lt;em&gt;bed&lt;/em&gt; in Comp P position, the specifier of P is empty and, apparently, there is no reason why it should not be filled by the P-modifier/adjunct &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt;, as you say Radford claims, but that 'solution' &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be generalised to all PPs: in cases like &lt;em&gt;The bomb was &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; in the middle of Trafalgar Square&lt;/em&gt;, the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;dyadic&lt;/strong&gt;, and, according to the 'XP-Internal Subject Hypothesis' of modern Chomskian grammars, its higher argument (= &lt;em&gt;the bomb&lt;/em&gt;) must itself be base-generated in Spec P, which, obviously, prevents &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; from appearing in that position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What position, then, does the 'adverb' &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; occupy in such cases? At first blush there seems to be only one option: &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; must be &lt;strong&gt;adjoined&lt;/strong&gt; to the P' &lt;em&gt;in the middle of Trafalgar Square&lt;/em&gt; and leave Spec P empty to lodge the higher argument of the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; (= &lt;em&gt;the bomb&lt;/em&gt;), which entails that 'adjunction' (&lt;strong&gt;to X'&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to XP) cannot be dispensed with, after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minimalist way out of this 'cul de sac', however, would be to claim that &lt;strong&gt;above&lt;/strong&gt; the PP &lt;em&gt;[the bomb [in the middle of Trafalgar Square]]&lt;/em&gt; there is &lt;strong&gt;another XP&lt;/strong&gt; headed by an empty functional category 'x' (whose categorial and semantic properties must still be defined) which takes the PP as a complement (= Comp x) and the 'adverb' &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; as its specifier (= Spec x). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that 'solution' would be compatible with minimalist grammars to the extent that functional categories (= 'x', here) can be more or less freely postulated in them, but its credibility would depend on how ontologically and semantically plausible that new functional head itself turned out to be. To my knowledge, the 'x' presumably specified by &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt;, for that matter) in such examples has never been clearly specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your final question, in Chomskian linguistics &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; 'modifiers' must be treated alike, a) either as 'adjuncts' of X' (= N', V', A', P', etc., but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; NP, VP, AP or PP!), in early theories that preserve adjunction, or b) as specifiers of the corresponding hypothetical 'x' heads, in later minimalist ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjunction of YP to XP, although briefly entertained as a solution to the adjunction problem between the GB and the early P&amp;amp;PT period, has, to my knowledge, been completely dismissed in subsequent work. Leaving aside theory-internal reasons, that operation has always raised a serious theory-neutral semantic objection: if both XP and YP are 'saturated' (= maximal projections), then, neither can take the other as an argument. Since adjuncts are interpreted as higher-order predicates of their heads, a) YP cannot be a maximal projection (= an YP) if XP functions as its argument, and b) if YP is a higher-order predicate, then XP should always be a first- or lower order &lt;strong&gt;predicate&lt;/strong&gt;. Condition a) by itself already blocks all YP-to-XP adjunctions; condition b) excludes any adjunction of APs, PPs, etc. to NPs/DPs like &lt;em&gt;the book&lt;/em&gt;, which, obviously, are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; predicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Spec NP is NOT needed to lodge determiners. That was true until about 1986, but ever since Abney's MIT thesis (1987) forcefully defended the 'DetP hypothesis', all Chomskian syntacticians base-generate determiners outside, and above, the NP (in DP). As to the Spec NP, at 'initial (roughly = deep) structure' it is either empty or filled by N's highest argument, but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; by adjectives, with one possible exception (although, in this respect, there is no consensus): Spec N can arguably be filled by an adjective when the adjective is broadly equivalent in meaning to the highest argument of N and &lt;strong&gt;alternates&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;does not co-occur&lt;/strong&gt;, with it, as in e.g. [&lt;em&gt;the [&lt;strong&gt;American&lt;/strong&gt; invasion of Iraq]]&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;American&lt;/em&gt; arguably plays the Agent role of &lt;em&gt;invasion&lt;/em&gt;, vs. * &lt;em&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;The Americans'&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;American&lt;/strong&gt; invasion of Iraq]&lt;/em&gt;, or * &lt;em&gt;[the [&lt;strong&gt;American&lt;/strong&gt; invasion of Iraq &lt;strong&gt;by the Americans&lt;/strong&gt;]]&lt;/em&gt;, where the adjective does not alternate, but co-occurs, with the real Agent, &lt;em&gt;the Americans&lt;/em&gt;, either in Spec N (N = &lt;em&gt;invasion&lt;/em&gt;) and then in Spec D (D = &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;), or in the 'agentive' [&lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; + DP] phrase after &lt;em&gt;invasion of Iraq&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T08:33:13.367" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T08:33:13.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-12T04:17:26.677" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for nasals, fricatives, etc to be implosive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15343" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T05:16:41.440" Title="Is it possible for a sound other than a plosive to be implosive?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25670" CreationDate="2017-08-12T05:16:41.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Implosives other than stops (including affricated stops) are not attested, and there is theoretical reason to believe that they could not exist. In order to create negative oral pressure by downward movement of the larynx, the vocal tract must be sealed. Only stops have complete vocal tract closure. Downward movement of the larynx in the case of a nasal would have negligible acoustic result since air pressure would be quickly equalized through the nasal passages. In the case of fricatives, there might be some attenuation of airflow across the glottis to the point of constriction, but no vacuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonological theory lumps ejectives, implosives and laryngealized sounds together with a single feature, [constricted glottis], and the specific realization of the sound is a result of phonetic implementation, where, in essence, downward movement of the larynx as typifies an implosive is what is necessary to have both voicing and glottal construction, when there is no supraglottal escape for air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T05:16:41.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-12T09:50:39.643" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have epenthesis and deletion, but obviously for very different reasons. Is there an OT overview with an account of the most common epenthesis and deletion processes? That way when I work on an OT account of a language with either of those processes, i can refer to comparable accounts given for other languages, to help guide and inform my analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T16:11:32.533" Title="Is there a cross-Linguistic OT overview on epenthesis and deletion?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25672" CreationDate="2017-08-12T16:11:32.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is, yes, there are myriads. As far as I know, there is no work that attempts to assemble all or even 50% of the instances of epenthesis and deletion across languages, and discuss what it all means within OT (that would be way too broad). An &quot;overview&quot; would probably mention the best-known trends, and there are a number of such works (although not limited to &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; insertion and deletion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of references would be Prince and Smolensky &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Optimality theory&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and McCarthy &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&amp;amp;context=linguist_faculty_pubs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is Optimality theory&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. P&amp;amp;S does have the disadvantage that it has no faithfulness constraints, but otherwise this overviews the basic logic of &quot;why do we get epenthesis?&quot; and &quot;why do we get deletion?&quot;. McCarthy WIOT gives examples whereby Max and Dep are called on to rein in those two processes (though it is heavy on technology and light on cross-linguistics). McCarthy &amp;amp; Prince &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/60-0000/60-0000-MCCARTHY-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Faithfulness and Reduplicative Identity&lt;/a&gt;&quot; lays out Correspondence Theory and exemplifies with numerous insertions and deletions, especially considering &quot;factorial typology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such discussions have to factor in the vast wealth of reasons for inserting or deleting – &quot;because this language hates coda consonants&quot;, &quot;because they hate inserting vowels&quot;, &quot;because that really want to keep the end of the morpheme aligned with the end of the syllable&quot;, &quot;because this language wants adjacent segments in the input to be adjacent in the output&quot;, &quot;because the language hates short words&quot;. There is in fact nothing that is universally irrelevant to the choice, so clearly one cannot say anything useful about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; there is insertion and deletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most attention has been given to the question of what gets inserted. Lombardi, for instance, has a paper on &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/578-0203/578-0203-LOMBARDI-0-1.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the typology of epenthetic vowels&lt;/a&gt;, if you want to know why a certain vowel is the epenthetic vowel (for example, why is [ỹ:] never or at least rarely the epenthetic vowel, though you'd have to figure that out on the basis of her approach, she doesn't specifically talk about that possibility). Going back to the very beginning, OT had markedness constraints like *t, *k, *s, and by ordering these constraints correctly e.g. by making *s be the lowest-ranked constraint, you can regulate the nature of the inserted segment. Limiting deletions (for instance, only high vowels undergo syncope, only glides are deleted inter-vocalicly) can be regulated either by the motivating constraint (&quot;high vowels in the context VC__CV are forbidden&quot;) or by a faithfulness constraint (vowels in the context VC__CV are forbidden, but deletion of low vowels is even more forbidden). &lt;a href=&quot;http://udel.edu/~heinz/classes/2014/607/materials/readings/Kager-1999-Optimality%20Theory-CH03-Syllable%20Stucture%20and%20Economy(text).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kager 1999&lt;/a&gt; gives a brief survey of insertion and deletion as driven by syllable structure (typically, no branching or onsets, *Coda, Ons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T16:11:32.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-12T17:32:24.860" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;CCG is governed by a set of meta-rules which are commonly called &quot;Principles&quot;. E.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Combinatory Projection Principle (CPP)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Projective Dependency Principle (PDP)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found most descriptions of these principles somewhat lacking in accessibility, something I can also say about discussions of why they are a good choice or trade-off in the limitations they impose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you propose a very self-contained explanation of these principles, drawing as little as possible from earlier terminology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="2547" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T18:19:30.237" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T18:19:30.237" Title="Self-contained explanation for the CCG Principles" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22809" CreationDate="2017-08-12T20:04:03.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring theory-bound preferences as to the way theta roles should be labelled in different linguistic 'schools', since in current ontologies 'entities' include not only 'individuals' and 'substances', but also &lt;strong&gt;'events'&lt;/strong&gt; (among other ontological categories), and since in &lt;em&gt;Helen drove to the party&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the party&lt;/em&gt; does denote an event, the definition of 'Goal' that you refer to applies perfectly well to that PP: as you seem inclined to think, in most, or even all, current linguistic frameworks, &lt;em&gt;to the party&lt;/em&gt; will be analysed as the 'Goal' (not the 'Location'*) of the driving event described in that sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*ADDITIONAL CLARIFICATIONS: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the theory of thematic roles, 'Location' technically refers &lt;strong&gt;not to a place&lt;/strong&gt; (an 'individual', in Strawson's sense) but to a &lt;strong&gt;functional concept&lt;/strong&gt; generally expressed by means of a preposition such as &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; (selected or not by the head) that relates the event expressed by the theta-role assigner (usually, but not necessarily, a main verb - it may also be a noun or a preposition) to an area of two/three-dimensional space &lt;strong&gt;in(side)&lt;/strong&gt; which an 'individual' - or an 'event'- is situated or takes place, respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crucially, the name of a place (e.g., &lt;em&gt;London&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Charles Street&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;cannot by itself play the role of 'Location'&lt;/strong&gt; (nor that of 'Goal', for that matter), because 'places', like 'events', are 'individuals'(in Strawson's sense), &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; functional entities. If the contrary were true, sentences like * &lt;em&gt;Helen lives &lt;strong&gt;London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or * &lt;em&gt;Helen drove &lt;strong&gt;London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; would be well-formed and synonymous of * Helen lives &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; London* and &lt;em&gt;Helen drove &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; London&lt;/em&gt;, respectively, but, of course, they are neither. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the thematic role is assigned to the whole PPs &lt;em&gt;in London, to London, to the party&lt;/em&gt;, etc., instead of to the DPs that act as the complements of the respective prepositions. In the examples above, in other words, it is the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; (in the latter case selected by the verb &lt;em&gt;drove&lt;/em&gt;) that does the crucial 'functional' work and allows the place or the event to become arguments of two-place relations involving the main event as their other argument. This is very clearly expressed in Davidsonian semantics in LF clauses like 'Location-of(e, London)' - part of the LF of a sentence like &lt;em&gt;Helen works in London&lt;/em&gt; - or  'Goal-of(e, the party)'- part of the LF of the OP's &lt;em&gt;Helen drove to the party&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the specific nature of 'Location', since areas of space may be contained in more extensive ones, some more careful theta-role theories further distinguish between 'locative' roles like 'point', 'area' and 'region' of space, and, at bottom, they must, because such 'locative' roles may well co-occur in the same sentence (cf. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In London&lt;/strong&gt;, she lives &lt;strong&gt;in Charles Street&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;right in the middle of Mayfair&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;), but, anyway, what really matters for present purposes is that 'locations' - in all their subvarieties - are &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; introduced by the directional preposition &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;; they are invariably introduced by 'locative' prepositions such as &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;at, by, near, behind&lt;/em&gt;, etc. That, by itself, should be strong evidence that &lt;em&gt;to the party&lt;/em&gt; cannot be a Location'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as already explained, the &lt;strong&gt;complement&lt;/strong&gt; of the directional preposition &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;usually&lt;/strong&gt; denotes a place, but may also denote an event instead (as happens in the OP's example). Straightforward evidence in support of this claim is that it is possible to add to &lt;em&gt;party&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;temporal&lt;/strong&gt; specifications like &lt;em&gt;this evening's&lt;/em&gt; (cf. &lt;em&gt;Helen drove to &lt;strong&gt;this evening's&lt;/strong&gt; party in her new Audi&lt;/em&gt;). The reason is obvious: events occur in time, but 'places' do not, and usually reject time modifiers (unless the place name has been 'coerced' - in Pustejovsky's sense - to refer to something that is not really a place, but something more comprehensive, as in e.g., &lt;em&gt;London at night&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The London of Shakespeare's time&lt;/em&gt;, etc., but such 'coercions' need not be taken into consideration to offer the OP a reasonable answer to his question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For such reasons, I even find it hard to swallow that the prepositional DP complement &lt;em&gt;the party&lt;/em&gt; should be interpretable as a place at all (contrary to what a commentator claims), but, even if that were possible, the PP &lt;em&gt;to the party&lt;/em&gt; is by no means interpretable as a 'Location'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum: as PP[to] complements like &lt;em&gt;to Charles Street&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to London&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to the party&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; denote places-in-which-an-entity-is-situated-or-an-event-takes-place, they &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be assigned the role of 'Location' as the term is normally understood in the linguistic literature; what such PPs denote is the destination of the movement of some individual (Helen's driving, in the OP's example), and so must be thematically classified as 'Goals' (or equivalent labels like 'Destinations', etc.), but surely not as 'Locations'. Under the standard interpretation of the labels 'Location' and 'Goal' in thematic-role theory, therefore, it is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; true that, in the OP's sentence, &lt;em&gt;to the party&lt;/em&gt; should be analysable &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; as a 'Goal' or as a 'Location'. It definitely must be analysed as a 'Goal'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6814" LastEditorDisplayName="user6814" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T19:31:06.127" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T19:31:06.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-12T22:28:08.863" Score="4" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the time of Koine greek, in general, it was much the same as today, but I always see the Ancient Greek pronunciation being taught, why is this? Is is it because most people learning koine in english tend to be Christian and learn it purely for just for biblical interpretation, not for to be fluent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:17:08.497" Title="Why Is It That Ancient Greek Reconstructed Pronunciation Is Always Used For Koine?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25522" CreationDate="2017-08-13T13:29:42.150" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, Tocharian was not quite a game changer.&#xA;Tocharian languages are the most-eastern IE languages; and yet they belong to the centum group, although they share with the satǝm group at least one phonetic feature – the unrounded velars where the western group has labio-velars. Tocharian shows us clearly, that the reconstruction of PIE is still incomplete. &#xA;Some word forms confirm old PIE etymologies, and, at the same time, they raise new questions. Ex. g., the ‘earth’-words: To. A tkaṃ, tkanis with an initial dental stop like Hitt. tegan. Does it prove that Greek χθών had undergone a metathesis? If yes, why did this metathesis not occur in To. tkaṃ, keeping in mind the To. ‘tongue’-words A käntu, käntwis, B käntwo, käntwa, which look like they had been transformed by an old metathesis of the stops – cf., ex. g., Go. tuggo? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15139" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T13:29:42.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T15:26:29.330" Score="6" ViewCount="850" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read several articles that claim that phonemically, /j/ and /i/ are the same and distinguished from each other by being syllabic or not. What confuses me is that I can hear the difference between the English, &quot;ye&quot; /jiː/, and the &quot;ee&quot; sound /iː/. Or similarly, why we can distinguish a &quot;w&quot; sound from  &quot;womb&quot; /wuːm/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they always pronounced this way in other languages or can they truly be identical phonetically, and just be reliant on syllable structure? Are these pronunciations flipped around in any language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18554" LastEditorUserId="18554" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T17:14:01.750" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T22:35:40.723" Title="What is the phonetic and phonemic destinction between a semivowel and a vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T15:31:39.867" Score="-1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language is a system of communication (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3214/11424&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). So surely German, Austrian, French and Bavarian are all languages. But which of those 4 are distinct languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next question is: What is a dialect and what makes dialects distinct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11424" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T16:25:03.807" Title="What is a language and what is a dialect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-08-13T17:00:10.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25658" CreationDate="2017-08-13T15:35:21.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Hebrew and Arabic it would only work if all the vowel signs are written out. Which normally they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T15:35:21.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25680" CreationDate="2017-08-13T16:25:03.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no cut-and-dry line. Languages differ between each individual, but if they can understand one another very well, we still say they speak &quot;the same language&quot; (even if you use &quot;haters be like&quot; and they don't, and you say &lt;em&gt;caught&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;cot&lt;/em&gt; and they don't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes languages differ in a consistent way among a certain geographic or political line, or community (e.g. Afro-Americans) etc. If these differences are pronounced enough that they have some trouble understanding one another, but can still &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; understand it, we call it a &quot;dialect&quot;. If understanding is low or zero, we say it's &quot;another language&quot;. That is, the most common criterion linguists use is &lt;strong&gt;mutual intelligibility&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a fuzzy, subjective measure, prone to disagreements.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes things are defined as &quot;languages&quot; or &quot;dialects&quot; out of nationalism, politics or tradition. So, for example, many varieties of Japanese and Chinese that their governments call &quot;dialects&quot; are considered to be &quot;different languages&quot; by scientists, due to being clearly unintelligible to standard speakers (so that linguistics books talk of &quot;the Ryūkyūan language family&quot; where the government says &quot;the Ryūkyūan dialects&quot;). On the other hand, I speak Portuguese and can mostly understand Spanish without ever studying it; perhaps Portuguese would be considered a &quot;dialect&quot; of Spanish, were it not for the fact that it's a different nation and they'd be pretty annoyed at the idea. This led to the oft-repeated quip that &quot;a language is a dialect with an army and a navy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T16:25:03.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25679" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:48:32.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An article that claims that /j/ and /i/ are phonemically the same and distinguished from each other by being syllabic or not is either very confused about the concept of &quot;phoneme&quot;, or doesn't know the difference between &quot;phonemically&quot; and &quot;segmentally&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard late-SPE analysis of the distinction is that [j,w] are [-syllabic] and [i,u] are [+syllabic]: they have a difference in a feature. With the advent of CV phonology in Clements &amp;amp; Keyser 1983, the feature &lt;em&gt;syllabic&lt;/em&gt; was exiled in favor of some kind of suprasegmental distinction, such as &quot;is dominated by C vs V&quot;, or &quot;Is dominated by 'N' (nucleus)&quot;, and then things got more complex in moraic theory. In fact, in moraic theory, &quot;consonantal&quot; was redefined to essentially mean &quot;non-syllabic&quot; (j, w, h are [+consonantal]), which is okay because as argues by Hume &amp;amp; Odden, there is no good evidence for the feature &lt;em&gt;consonantal&lt;/em&gt; (as defined in SPE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the CV and later but not moraic accounts, the difference is not in terms of a segmental feature, it is in terms of a prosodic property. If one incorrectly things of &quot;phonemes&quot; as being defined solely in terms of segmental features, it would be true that [j,i] and [w,u] are featurally identical. (Indeed, moraic theorists do not &lt;em&gt;uniformly&lt;/em&gt; embrace the &quot;let's call them [+consonantal])&quot; account of glides a.k.a semivowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of being &quot;phonemic&quot; is a question about phonological contrast, and not about phonetic properties. There is great phonetic similarity between [i,u] and [j,w], but that doesn't mean that [j] and [i] phonemically contrast. It is an open question whether there is a real, hard-core contrast between glides and vowels (and much ink spilled on the topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I don't accept this analysis as correct, the examples &quot;year&quot; versus &quot;ear&quot; can be phonemicized as /iir/ vs. /ir/, so there is no phonemic contrast. The rule is (as a first approximation) that high vowels become glides before vowels. Those who deny that there is a phonemic contrast between vowels and glides must analyze all glides as coming from corresponding vowels, by some rule. (Logically, they could also hold that all high vowels come from glides, but nobody does that). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin in her dissertation &quot;A metrical theory of syllabicity&quot;, and subsequent post-CV phonology theories have sort of eliminated the question of vowel / glide contrast from serious consideration, because the distinction is purely predictable from prosodic position: being the head of the nucleus means you are a vowel, otherwise you are a glide. The discussion then has to move to the issue of nuclear vs. non-nuclear status. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the phonetics of glides vs. high vowels, there's sort of a mixed bag out there. The two main tendencies are that a glide is shorter than the corresponding high vowel, and glides are more constricted. Sometimes you get other differences, such as that in Logoori, /j/ is (typically produced as, though optionally) a very fronted tongue-tip down approximant, unlike /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T22:35:40.723" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T22:35:40.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25658" CreationDate="2017-08-13T20:18:06.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English Wiktionary has some Lua infrastructure to do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese languages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Module:zh-pron&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Module:zh-pron&lt;/a&gt;. Generates IPA from the&#xA;romanizations of the various languages (Mandarin pinyin, Cantonese&#xA;jyutping, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Module:ko-pron&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Module:ko-pron&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic: Module:ar-pronunciation (cannot link). Requires vowel signs, as fdb stated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These all have local dependencies and aren't easily portable, but look up &quot;Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual&quot; if you want to read more about how to use the Mediawiki Lua module system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19587" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T20:18:06.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25687" CreationDate="2017-08-13T21:01:08.307" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of a software that transforms the counting syllables slowly automatically from a word in audio at normal speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;des-pa-ci-to  please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to do that with audios from this page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.forvo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://es.forvo.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15153" LastEditorUserId="15153" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T21:06:40.010" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T22:32:00.433" Title="How do I pronounce each syllable slowly from a word in audio?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25679" CreationDate="2017-08-13T22:25:42.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saussure proposed a phonetic theory of syllables according to which syllable onset sounds have increasing oral aperture for their duration (called &lt;em&gt;explosive&lt;/em&gt;), syllable offset sounds have decreasing oral aperture for their duration (called &lt;em&gt;implosive&lt;/em&gt;), and (Saussure doesn't say this, but it seems implied) syllabic nuclei, which have constant oral aperture.  This is part of the discussion of the syntagmatic nature of speech in the &lt;em&gt;Cours de linguistique general&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The charm of this theory is that it does not require a separate level or dimension of syllable position or metrical structure, since it makes sense on a purely articulatory level.  That is not to say there is no relevant notion of structure other the stream of articulations in speech, since Saussure also describes a &lt;em&gt;syntagmatic&lt;/em&gt; structure for syllables (but, if I understand him, that is not a separate dimension, but is rather another aspect of langue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I do not understand how Saussure can fit syllables like [staps] into his theory, since aperture sometimes decreases in a syllable onset or increases in an offset.  Accordingingly, I have proposed in other postings here a version of this theory with +/- stress replacing Saussure's explosive/implosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theories with separate dimensions for articulation and prosodic structure must assume ad hoc principles for relating the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T22:25:42.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25685" CreationDate="2017-08-13T22:32:00.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that you are not asking how you, yourself, can talk slowly, you want to hear recordings stretched out. The first thing is to get the sound file itself, which in the case of Forvo is not trivial, but not impossible. Let's just assume that you have a sound file on your computer. The program &lt;a href=&quot;http://software.sil.org/speech-analyzer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speech Analyzer&lt;/a&gt; has 'slowing down' as a built-in slider-type function in its player, so you can play back (the file or selection) at rates between 10% and 333% of recorded speed (at those margins the distortion is fairly extreme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can also be done in Praat, using Convert-Length(overlap-add) and setting a suitable factor (2 or 3 are reasonable, 4+ gets strange and also you lose the end of the recording: SA seems to implement this concept without the truncation). I will mention that Audacity has a Change Tempo function, but it's really not any good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T22:32:00.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25698" CreationDate="2017-08-14T06:58:53.360" Score="6" ViewCount="743" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the vocalized dental fricative [ð] so rare across languages? Is it just a coincidence or is there a pattern behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T16:24:24.227" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T16:24:24.227" Title="Why is [ð] so rare?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13198" CreationDate="2017-08-14T07:43:27.203" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please check these github repositories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hongyunnchen/JointSLU/tree/master/data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hongyunnchen/JointSLU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/yvchen/JointSLU/tree/master/data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yvchen/JointSLU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastEditorUserId="12618" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T09:01:53.430" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:01:53.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T07:44:36.107" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a neural network to do intent detection and slot filling. The results I am getting are somewhat poor. Hence, I am looking for an approach to improve my results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to use multi-task learning (like in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/papers/unified_nlp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collobert and Westonäs paper&lt;/a&gt;) to take advantage of an additional's task knowledge for improving the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I have been thinking about using a question-answering approach (sequence-to-sequence) that would share the intermediate representation with the rest of my architecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that question-answering would be a good task in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale behind this choice is that question-answering would need to learn a representation of the input sentence's intent in order to be able to generate an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12618" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T07:44:36.107" Title="Improve intent classification and slot filling with question-answering" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25688" CreationDate="2017-08-14T09:10:33.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of rare phones. Its well-known that many phones are more common than others. I should note though that there are none that are universal. No one really knows the reason for this, just that it exists. There's speculation that it may be because some phones are easier to pronounce than others, but this is an argument you mostly see in the auxlang community. Still, it may explain why some phones are virtually universal (the sounds m p t and k occur in over 90% of languages each) while others are rare or in a few cases unattested (there is no documented language that has a lateral alveolar trill).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistics in general is more of an analytic study. We study how languages work, but there's little effort being put into why languages work the way they do. Its also unknown why most languages on this planet are subject/agent first. Or why grammar changes over time (its pretty well understand how sound change works, but little is known about how grammar changes). Similarly, we don't know why there's such a discrepancy in how common specific phones are. For all we know it may just be happenstance. There are trends though. For instance, front vowels are normally un-rounded while back vowels are rounded. Rounded front vowels and un-rounded back vowels are rare. As a matter of fact, the 'u' sound (a high back rounded vowel) is the most common phone on earth, while its un-rounded counterpart is the rarest. Non-sibilant fricatives (like ð) are also quite rare. Humans also seem to lean away from consonant clusters (languages seem to prefer simpler syllable structures overall, even if the language allows some rather elaborate consonant clusters). Also, all languages have at least one voiceless plosive. There is no other place of articulation that is universal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it could be said there really is no answer to this. We can find patterns behind things like this, but we just don't know what causes these patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:10:33.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11146" CreationDate="2017-08-14T11:47:01.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is described in &lt;em&gt;The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook&lt;/em&gt;, p. 432:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two characteristic sound changes are generally accepted as NWS [North-West Semitic] isoglosses (Blau 1978, 35), but they are both very natural and have at least sporadic parallels in other Semitic idioms: first, due to weak labial articulation, word-initial */w/ became /y/ (e.g., *√wrd &gt; √yrd 'to come') excluding the conjunction /wa-/ 'and' (where /w/ was supposedly felt as word-medial) and some other lexemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Weninger, Stefan, Janet C. E. Watson, Michael P. Streck, and Geoffrey Khan. 2011. The Semitic Languages : An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed August 14, 2017).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to Blau is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1004.8160&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hebrew and North West Semitic: Reflections on the classification of the Semitic languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which does not explain reasons for the sound change but uses it to argue the unity of the language group, &quot;since it is not easy to explain it phonetically&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T11:47:01.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-14T12:51:18.097" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also want to add that Russian speakers in Ukraine often substitute [ɨ] with [ɪ], so if you can't master [ɨ], you can still use [ɪ] as well, you won't sound like a Russian from Russia, and you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16671" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T12:51:18.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25658" CreationDate="2017-08-14T13:34:57.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is a representation of sound; therefore &quot;transforming to IPA&quot; implies converting text to sound.  That task is harder than it seems, because writing systems are &lt;strong&gt;underdetermined&lt;/strong&gt; – they don't include all the relevant information for pronunciation.  You need language-specific knowledge to pronounce things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just compare heart, beard, and heard,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dies and diet, lord and word,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sword and sward, retain and Britain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Mind the latter, how it's written.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now I surely will not plague you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With such words as plaque and ague.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But be careful how you speak:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cloven, oven, how and low,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even dictionaries aren't enough, since sounds may change in context (British speakers may say &lt;em&gt;fear&lt;/em&gt; as /fiə/, but &lt;em&gt;fear of&lt;/em&gt; as /fiə&lt;strong&gt;ɹ&lt;/strong&gt;ɒv/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are nonetheless attempts at automatically converting text to sound (from which you can derive proper IPA).  These are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;text-to-speech (TTS) systems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  They aren't perfect, but are getting better these days (as you must have noticed if you ever pressed &quot;play&quot; on Google Translate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best bet at converting text from a language into IPA is to look for a) a TTS system for that language, which b) has the option to output as IPA.  For example, this is the Mandarin Chinese output of the TTS system &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;espeak&lt;/a&gt; in my Linux machine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ espeak --ipa -v zh 你好&#xA; nˈiɜ xˈɑ‍u2&#xA;&#xA;$ espeak --ipa -v zh 知者樂水，仁者樂山.&#xA; t‍s.ˈi.5 t‍s.ˈo-2 lˈə5 s.wˈe‍i2&#xA; əː1 t‍s.ˈo-2 lˈə5 s.ˈa5n&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the &lt;code&gt;espeak&lt;/code&gt; output has some idiosyncrasies; it marks stress before vowels, but in the case of Chinese this feature is pointless/a bug; it marks so-called &quot;retroflex&quot; (backed) sibilants with a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt;, rather than IPA /ʂ/ etc.; and it uses &lt;em&gt;pīnyīn&lt;/em&gt; tone numbers, rather than IPA tone marks.  These could be easily solved in post-processing.  More problematic is the fact that TTS isn't perfect, and errors may creep in (/əː1/?).  I find it's generally better to try and find TTS systems specifically made for that language, rather than broad ones like &lt;code&gt;espeak&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T13:34:57.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25696" CreationDate="2017-08-14T14:45:48.587" Score="7" ViewCount="4564" Body="&lt;p&gt;All languages in the world that I know of use words with more than one syllable. Are there any where all words have strictly one syllable? That would mean that there is just one vocal cluster per word, be it a single vowel (short or long) or a diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read that Chinese or Vietnamese has polysyllabic words even though morphemes are monosyllabic. That would be the closest I have found. Are there any real monosyllabic languages out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @leoboiko explains below, the number of possible syllables would need to be quite high to support a sizeable vocabulary. But it is not unfeasible to combine e.g. 30 consonants 'C' with 9 vowels 'V' with 5 semi-consonants S, to yield 30 x 5 x 9 x 5 x 30 ~ 200k possible combinations with the structure CSVSC. Adding some tones like in SE languages would give us even more possibilities. The question is, does this happen in practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19757" LastEditorUserId="19757" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T21:27:02.730" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T22:45:34.397" Title="Are there any purely monosyllabic languages in use today?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25695" CreationDate="2017-08-14T15:14:03.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official Chinese language isn't &quot;supposed to&quot; be monosyllabic, at all.  That's a misconception.  Chinese languages are polysyllabic and that's it, including the putonghua standard (the pīnyīn orthographic standard, for example, includes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edu.cn/yu_wen_dong_tai_480/20120720/t20120720_812395.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt; to space the letters by polysyllabic words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusion arises because Chinese &lt;em&gt;morphemes&lt;/em&gt; are usually monosyllabic, so that most (not all!) syllables are also morphemes (source: Packard, &lt;em&gt;The Morphology of Chinese&lt;/em&gt;).  This feature is reflected in the traditional writing system, which is syllabic, and thus lends an impression of &quot;monosyllabism&quot;.  But morphemes are not words, and syllables being morphemes isn't the same as the language being monosyllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past, some people (Karlgren) have argued that Chinese &lt;em&gt;used to be&lt;/em&gt; monosyllabic.  According to this old hypothesis, the syllables used to be more complex, and were used as independent words; as the phonetic system simplified, they supposedly became too similar to one another, so that new, polysyllabic words had to be coined.  However, in reality polysyllabic words occur throughout the historical record; they're not new at all (see: Mair, &lt;em&gt;Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp; forthcoming; and Dong, &lt;em&gt;The Prosody and Morphology of Elastic Words in Chinese&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not hard to see why languages aren't monosyllabic.  English has well over 100,000 words; so does my copy of the CEDICT Chinese dictionary.  Even with tones and unusually complex syllables, the number of possible syllables hardly reaches the low-tens of thousands.  So a language that was monosyllabic would have to deal with an unusually restricted vocabulary—&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the words would sound confusingly similar to one another, to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T15:14:03.427" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25688" CreationDate="2017-08-14T15:14:41.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won't say that a voiced dental fricative is &quot;so rare&quot;. With a frequency of 4.88% in the UPSID sample (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://menzerath.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_find.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://menzerath.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_find.html&lt;/a&gt; for a nice interface to the UPSID data) it is neither particularly frequent nor particularly rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course patterns in the sound systems of the languages of the world, many of them under heated debate. There is some agreement on the vowel systems that the vowels tend to take maximal distance in the vowel space (so a three vowel system comes out as /a/, /i/, /u/ and not, say /e/, /ə/, /o/). For consonants, things are much more difficult (e.g, there is no such thing as an easy-to-picture consonant space).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, in the UPSID sample, the vowels /i/ and /a/ are more frequent than /u/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T15:14:41.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25688" CreationDate="2017-08-14T15:39:19.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, [ð] is not so rare across languages. Apart from English, it exists in Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian dialects, Danish, Kven, Saami, Welsh, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, various Italian languages, Albanian, Greek, Arabic, Tiberian Hebrew, Berber, Hawrami, Mari, Bashkir, Turkmen, Somali, Dahalo, Moro, Didinga, Kikuyu, Kamba, Swahili, Tamil, Burmese, Thao, Iai, Palauan, Fijian, Aleut, widely in Athabascan, Shoshone, Lakota, Osage. It is not as common as [t] or [s], but certainly not rarish like [ʕ, ƛ'] or rare like [ʘ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing that [ð] has working against it is that it is acoustically harder to detect. Because of the lingual constriction, it has reduced airflow which means less acoustic energy, and the flow is not turbulent (which makes a sound noisier, thus easier to detect). The energy is spread out over the frequency spectrum (compared to [ʒ]) and such peak as it has is relatively higher (compared to [γ]). The latter fact is relevant because sounds in the &quot;frequency center&quot; are most audible and those at the high and low ends are less audible to human ears, given the same sound pressure level (and as I said, it also has a lower net amplitude).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that one can accurately say that a phonemic contrast between &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; is rare (often, as in Spanish, &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; are in an allophonic relation), though there is no systematic database of phonemic contrasts that we can consult to see what its frequency is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T15:44:50.063" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T15:44:50.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25695" CreationDate="2017-08-14T20:20:17.760" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese is monosyllabic, at least according to some teachers of Vietnamese to non-Viet speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19760" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T20:20:17.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25658" CreationDate="2017-08-14T21:53:55.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll deal with Korean writing.  I don't know that there are any tools for directly converting the Korean writing system, hangeul, to IPA, but you can do it in several steps.  You'll need some knowledge of Korean phonetics though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you'll have to convert from hangeul syllables to letters.  If you're programming in R, you can import the package &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/KoNLP/KoNLP.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;KoNLP&lt;/a&gt; and use the function convertHangulStringToJamos.  This will take syllables like 한글 and turn it into individual letters like ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ.  If you're using Python, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://python-jamo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;information about this process here&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven't tried it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, you'll need to make some changes to deal with the assimilation rules in Korean:  for example, ㅎ+ㄷ/ㄱ/ㅂ/ㅈ -&gt; ㅌ/ㅋ/ㅍ/ㅊ and ㄴ followed by ㄱ -&gt; ㅇ.&#xA;Thus you will change the above ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ to ㅎㅏㅇㄱㅡㄹ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you'll need to convert these to the correct IPA symbols for each one.  Korean is fairly phonetic, so this won't be too complicated, but your algorithm will have to take into account whether a consonant is beginning or ending a syllable, and whether a syllable-ending consonant is followed by a vowel, consonant or nothing.  You would convert ㅎㅏㅇㄱㅡㄹ to [haŋgɯl].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process will get you a correct pronunciation almost all of the time.  However, there are some words which just aren't pronounced exactly as they are written.  For example, the word 효과 is actually pronounced as if &quot;효꽈&quot;.  You could only get these correct with a dictionary of irregular spellings - however, I have no idea if such a thing exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T21:53:55.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25650" CreationDate="2017-08-15T00:44:51.513" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you know German, Russian &lt;strong&gt;ы&lt;/strong&gt; is to &lt;strong&gt;и&lt;/strong&gt; as German &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; is to &lt;strong&gt;ö&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt; is to &lt;strong&gt;ü&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T00:44:51.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-15T22:26:24.383" Score="2" ViewCount="2135" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;You&quot; sounds like &quot;U&quot;. U is a vowel.&#xA;so does &quot;You&quot; begin with a vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T11:42:19.057" Title="Does &quot;You&quot; or &quot;Unicorn&quot; begin with a vowel sound" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2017-08-15T23:09:10.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Azerbaijani language there are separate connectives for both inclusive and exclusive ors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VƏ YA&lt;/strong&gt; — inclusive or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;YA DA&lt;/strong&gt; — exclusive or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qapını ört &lt;strong&gt;ya da&lt;/strong&gt; bağla — Close or open the door (exclusive sense)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Çantalarınızı &lt;strong&gt;və ya&lt;/strong&gt; zənbillırinizi masanın üzərinə qoyun — Put your bags or packages on the table (inclusive sense)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in non-formal speech &quot;ya da&quot; is used more frequently. And the interesting fact is that inclusive or &quot;və ya&quot; is literally translated as &quot;and or&quot; (which is true including third case, when A and B are both true).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19766" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T23:09:10.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25704" CreationDate="2017-08-16T00:16:15.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;You&quot; begins with a consonant, in all senses of the word &quot;consonant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between &quot;vowel&quot; as used in English orthographic pedagogy and &quot;vowel&quot; as used in linguistics. The name of the letter &quot;u&quot; in English happens to be pronounced [ju], the same as &quot;you&quot;. But in spelling books, the vowel letters are &quot;a, e, i, o, u&quot; and &quot;sometimes y&quot;, and I recall them trying to teach us that the letter &quot;w&quot; can even be a vowel (in the spelling-rule sense sense). However, the linguistic sound that occurs at the beginning in the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; of the letter, IPA [j] is a consonant. Similarly, the letter &quot;r&quot; is a consonant, but the name of the letter is pronounced the same as the word &quot;are&quot;, which linguistically begins with a vowel. In other words, there's a difference between a consonant / vowel value in spelling rules, which are about letters, and the actual linguistic sounds that the letters frequently represent. And then you have the fact that the names of the letters are sometimes quite different from the corresponding linguistic sounds, such as &quot;h, y, w&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T00:16:15.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25709" CreationDate="2017-08-16T01:39:47.497" Score="0" ViewCount="6182" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of this is quite vague. Token I understand to be the total number of words in a given text, but type I am not so sure about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a variety of inflected forms (e.g &lt;em&gt;eat, eats, eating, ate&lt;/em&gt;) in a text, are these the same type as one another? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I eat what I eat, even if I have never eaten it before.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 13 tokens in this text, and I figure that the two instances of &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; count as a single type. What I don't know if I am supposed to count &lt;em&gt;eat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eaten&lt;/em&gt; as two types or one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10687" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T10:48:21.103" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T10:48:21.103" Title="What is the difference between type and token?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="925" CreationDate="2017-08-16T06:28:32.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to coin one more way to express inclusive OR versus exclusive OR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ukrainian, we use &lt;strong&gt;&quot;or X, or Y&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; construct to denote exclusivity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;дай мені яблуко &lt;strong&gt;або&lt;/strong&gt; помаранч — &quot;give me an apple or an orange&quot;, inclusive;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  дай мені &lt;strong&gt;або&lt;/strong&gt; яблуко, &lt;strong&gt;або&lt;/strong&gt; помаранч — &quot;give me either an apple or an orange&quot;, exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T06:28:32.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25707" CreationDate="2017-08-16T08:03:27.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'eat' and 'eaten' as two types or one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on what you're trying to do. Are you interested in &lt;strong&gt;word-forms&lt;/strong&gt; (inflected words), or &lt;strong&gt;lemmas&lt;/strong&gt; (words abstracting infections, as in dictionaries)? Do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; want &quot;eaten&quot; to count as an instance of &quot;eat&quot;, or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose you're trying to measure how often the suffix &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt; occurs relatively to &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;. Then you want to count things like &quot;eaten&quot; and &quot;devoured&quot; as independent. But suppose you're interested in measuring how often the verb &quot;eat&quot; occurs relatively to the verb &quot;devour&quot;. Then you'll want to increment the &quot;eat&quot; counter—let's call it EAT—whenever you see &quot;eaten&quot;, &quot;eats&quot;, even &quot;ate&quot;; while DEVOUR will count &quot;devoured&quot;, &quot;devours&quot;... To do that, whenever you see a word-form like &quot;eats&quot;, you'll want your code to convert it to EAT. This is called &lt;strong&gt;lemmatization&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is orthogonal to the type/token distinction. You can count types or tokens of word-forms or lemmas, in all combinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many words are there in the sentence &quot;I eat apples because she eats apples?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a sense, 7 words (word-form tokens: I, eat, apples, because, she, eats, apples)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In another sense, 6 words (word-form types: I, eat, apples, because, she, eats)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In another sense, 7 words again (lemma tokens: I, EAT, APPLE, BECAUSE, SHE, EAT, APPLE); but here we can measure things like &quot;EAT occurs twice&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And in yet another, 5 words (lemma types: I, EAT, APPLE, BECAUSE, SHE).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which ones you want depends on what you're trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T08:03:27.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25704" CreationDate="2017-08-16T11:21:09.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be mixing up letters with sounds - don't mind the downvote; this is something that confuses many people who haven't had much linguistic training.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;u&quot; as the written &lt;strong&gt;letter&lt;/strong&gt; is just a symbol in the alphabet, which happens to be classified as a vowel in English, since &quot;u&quot; behaves as a vowel in words such as &quot;turn&quot;, &quot;tour&quot; or &quot;up&quot;. In this sense, &quot;u&quot; as a letter is a vowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Similarly, &quot;you&quot; as a written string of letters starts with the letter &quot;y&quot;, which is sometimes a vowel an sometimes a consonant in English: It behaves like a consonant ([j]) in environments like &quot;you&quot;, &quot;yes&quot;, &quot;voyage&quot;, but it behaves like a vowel ([i]) in environments like &quot;happy&quot;, &quot;layman&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So as a written letter, &quot;u&quot; would be a vowel.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the letter &quot;u&quot; des not only have a &lt;strong&gt;written spelling&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;u&quot;), but also a &lt;strong&gt;pronounciation&lt;/strong&gt;: It is pronounced as the &lt;strong&gt;sound sequence&lt;/strong&gt; [juː] - which starts with a consonant, [j].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The pronounciation for the letter &quot;y&quot; is even different: It is pronounced [waɪ] - starting with the semi-vowel [w], like in &quot;water&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So the spelling of letters can be different from the pronounciation of the letters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at how these individual letters are realized as sequences of sounds in words, we notice that most words are not written as they are spelled:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In &quot;turn&quot; or &quot;up&quot;, for example, the &quot;u&quot; is not pronounced like in the word &quot;tour&quot;, the &quot;o&quot; in &quot;tour&quot; is not pronounced at all, and so on. And only in words such as &quot;unicorn&quot; or &quot;use&quot; the letter &quot;u&quot; is realized like its letter counterpart &quot;ju&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Smililarly, &quot;y&quot; is often pronounced as the vowel [i] rather than the consonant [j], and almost never as [waɪ].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, as a letter, the &lt;em&gt;written string&lt;/em&gt; &quot;u&quot; is &lt;em&gt;pronounced as the sound sequence&lt;/em&gt; [juː], and these are two different things. And as used in words rather than as a letter in the alphabet, it can be pronounced even differently - the same holds for &quot;y&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it so happens that the word &quot;you&quot; is pronounced the same as the letter &quot;u&quot;, namely [juː]. The pronounced word &quot;unicorn&quot; starts with the same sequence of sounds: [juːnɪkɔːn]. So in their pronounciation, both &quot;u&quot; and &quot;you&quot; and &quot;unicorn&quot; start with a consonant - [j]. In their spelling, two start with a vowel (&quot;u&quot;) and one with (depending on how wants to classify &quot;y&quot; as a letter) a consonant or a vowel (&quot;y&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not now &quot;you&quot; or &quot;unicorn&quot; start with a vowel depends on which level of reprentation you are talking about:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In terms of spelling, &quot;you&quot; starts with the &lt;strong&gt;letter&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;y&quot;, which can be seen either as a consonant or as a vowel, and &quot;unicorn&quot; starts with the letter &quot;u&quot;, which is  avowel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In terms of pronounciation, &quot;you&quot; and &quot;unicorn&quot; start with the &lt;strong&gt;sound&lt;/strong&gt; [j], which is a consonant and not a vowel, followed by the sound [u], which is a vowel.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case, it is false to claim that &quot;you&quot; starts with a vowel because it is pronounced like &quot;u&quot; - this would be mixing up two differnt things:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is true that they have the same pronounciation, but at the level of pronounciation (i.e. sounds), they start with the consonant [j], and this is something different than the concept of &quot;u&quot; as a (vowel) letter, which, as a letter, just happens to be pronounced the same way as the word &quot;you&quot; (despite their spelled forms starting with different letters (&quot;u&quot; and &quot;y&quot;), and despite neither of the pronounced alphabet letter &quot;u&quot; nor the pronounced word &quot;you&quot; starting with the sound [u], but both with the consonant [j]).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Letters ≠ sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T11:42:19.057" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T11:42:19.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-16T13:07:58.200" Score="6" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question for a conlang. I know that's normally too subjective for this forum, but honestly, I think this may be an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to try to keep things as terse as possible. Often times my case endings are just the 5 or so vowels of the language. Nothing more. But I was wondering, would this be too minimalist for common use? Not that I intend my conlang to actually be used, but it would just seem weird to me for the fictional people who speak my language to use something that would be unusable in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't have things be too minimalistic, you need redundancy. Humans don't catch every phoneme pronounced, and this problem is even worse over a phone. So in general its a bad idea to have distinctions that differ only in one phoneme. Not that this doesn't happen (English's plural and possessive endings are an example, also there's only one phoneme of difference between 'can' and 'can't'). But looking at languages that do have case systems, they don't just change the final vowel and leave it at that. They often add consonants, sometimes entire syllables, when declining their nouns. Also, I've noticed that languages seem to dislike having endings that are just a single vowel be anywhere close to eachother. For example, in Latin, there is no declination where two of the cases are marked with -i and -e. And in Finnish the only cases that end in a vowel are -a and -i, all the others are differentiated by consonants too. Russian does allow nouns to take an -i or -e ending for different cases, even in the same declination, though in Russian an -e always palatalizes the previous consonant, creating a redundancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But looking at Latin and Finnish, I have noticed something. They do allow cases to be differentiated by just a consonant. For example, the Latin first declination singular ending for the nominative is -a, and -am for the accusative. And looking at the second declination again, I see that there is a long -i ending that contrasts with a short -e ending, in the second declination. Still, the different lengths is a redundancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this interesting that I can't seem to find a language with cases differentiated with a single vowel (or close ones at least), but languages seem to have nothing against cases being differentiated by a single consonant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this universal? If there was a language where the case endings were just -a, -e, -i, -o, and -u, would speakers find these too similar to each other? Would they require some extra redundancy, like a consonant being added to one of the front vowel cases to differentiate it from the other, lengthening one, or just letting the two cases merge into one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, this is a question as to how much redundancy is necessary. Obviously, redundancy is necessary, but how little can you get away? What is the minimum redundancy that is necessary? Does anyone even know the answer to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T16:24:18.577" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T09:13:15.030" Title="How dissimilar must case endings be to each other?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25711" CreationDate="2017-08-16T15:09:30.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't even have to have case endings at all. The overwhelming majority of Niger-Congo languages don't, neither do Salishan, Chinese or most Romance languages. Classical Arabic did just fine with the case ending &lt;em&gt;-i, -u, -a&lt;/em&gt; (modern dialects dispensed with that, not because it was uninformative but because final vowels got deleted). Most Russian case endings are just a vowel; all of the case markers in Hawrami are just a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T15:09:30.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25711" CreationDate="2017-08-16T19:06:24.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there was a language where the case endings were just -a, -e, -i, -o, and -u, would speakers find these too similar to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider modern Russian, which has six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. In the first declension these are indicated for the most part by single vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = a book&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = of a book&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = to a book&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = a book (object of a verb)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;oj&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = using a book&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;knig&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; = a book (object of a preposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T19:06:24.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-16T20:34:50.150" Score="0" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the pronunciation of 'ABA' ( אבא ) is straightforward, while the pronunciation of 'IMA' ( אמא ) is not ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it be pronunciated 'AMA' instead of 'IMA' ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19775" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T16:23:27.933" Title="Why hebrew אמא pronounciation vary from the logic of אבא pronouciation?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25715" CreationDate="2017-08-16T21:35:07.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I'm assuming your question relates to how the writing relates to the pronunciation, rather than how the words came about historically. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm also approaching this from an Aramaic perspective rather than a Modern Hebrew one; both of these words are Aramaic in origin, and the spelling given in the question is the Aramaic one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Aramaic writing system didn't generally indicate vowels the way the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets do. Certain letters, such as aleph, can either indicate a consonant or a long vowel. And short vowels are just unwritten. Compare the modern Arabic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a convention called &quot;pointed writing&quot; (as well as probably fancier names, but that's the one I learned) where diacritical marks are placed on letters to indicate how they're actually pronounced. That makes it much clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first word you mention is written in &quot;pointed writing&quot; as אַבָּא &lt;em&gt;ʾabbā&lt;/em&gt;. The second word is אִמָּא &lt;em&gt;ʾimmā&lt;/em&gt;. In both of these, the first aleph doesn't indicate a vowel &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, but rather a consonant: the glottal stop. The short vowel following that glottal stop doesn't get its own letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NB: It doesn't get its own letter in Aramaic, at least. In Modern Hebrew, the use of actual letters for vowels has become more widespread, whether the vowels are long or short. As har-wradim points out, the second word is thus prescriptively spelled &lt;strong&gt;אימא&lt;/strong&gt;, with the &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; explicitly marked. Yiddish has taken this trend to its obvious conclusion, using letters for all vowels.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Historically, the different vowels in these roots seem to go back to Proto-Semitic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T15:47:12.467" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T15:47:12.467" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25711" CreationDate="2017-08-16T22:17:46.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, you are trying to set the limits for redundancy, regarding the case endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, the direct answer to this question &lt;strong&gt;depends on your conlang's articulatory stress patterns&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your conlang allows the stress to lean towards the last syllable (or even better, be able to shift towards the end in noun cases other than Nominative), the single-proneme case endings are just fine — simply because even a &quot;lazy&quot; speaker will be forced to produce it clearly (that's what the articulatory stress is!);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;however, if your words (in Nominative) can be long enough, and the stress patterns lean towards the 1st syllable, you probably need more redundant case endings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is largely relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6878/why-did-english-lose-declensions-while-german-retained-them/6906#6906&quot;&gt;Why did English lose declensions while German retained them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The loss and weakening of unstressed syllables at the ends of words..... had disastrous effects on the inflectional system, since many endings now became identical.&quot; — (Barber, 1993: 157)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T22:17:46.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15583" CreationDate="2017-08-17T05:31:35.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is. The standard term of art is &quot;conlang&quot;, short for &quot;constructed language&quot;. Conlangs are further divided into numerous more specific categories like philosophical languages, artistic languages (artlangs), logical languages (loglangs), engineered languages (engelangs), auxiliary languages (auxlangs), and so forth. Where applicable, they can also be categorized by the natural language family from which they take inspiration, as in romlangs (artificial romance languages, generally the most popular of this sort), germlangs (artificial germanic languages) and slavlangs (artificial slavic languages). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6750" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T05:31:35.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-17T05:42:06.467" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ogham&lt;/a&gt; is historically used to write Old Irish and Primitive Irish, but I have not been able to find any evidence of its use persisting in modern Irish. It does not have a nice correspondence with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the modern Irish alphabet&lt;/a&gt;, and lacks critical features for accurately representing modern Irish phonology. However, the normal modern Irish orthography makes extensive use of digraphs and displaced contrast (i.e., the &quot;&lt;em&gt;caol le caol agus leathan le leathan&lt;/em&gt;&quot; rule for using vowel letters to indicate palatal/velar contrast on consonants) anyway, and it seems a similar system could be used to adapt Ogham. Additionally, there are other alphabetic scripts that don't bother with a full and accurate representation of the spoken form of the language anyway (i.e., the Younger Futhark used to write Old Norse), so perhaps modern Irish could be written in Ogham without the same sort of accommodations as are used in the standard Latin-based orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, has modern Irish ever been written in Ogham, and/or is there any standard method of transcription / transliteration into that alphabet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6750" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T05:42:06.467" Title="Is there a standard system for transcribing modern Irish in Ogham?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-17T09:43:05.443" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does somebody knows a good paper or textbook that would have a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach to declension class? Ora Matushansky writes that it is an &quot;underlying nominal property influencing gender assignment&quot;. Is declension class a feature then? And how is it possible for DM to have features influencing gender assignment and not define it? Is there any competition allowed? (must not be, right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19778" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T15:17:00.940" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T15:17:00.940" Title="How is declension class represented in Distributed Morphology?" Tags="&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;declension&gt;&lt;distributed-morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25726" CreationDate="2017-08-17T21:07:27.360" Score="4" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Microsoft Research Machine Translation system (MSR-MT) is actually a hybrid system, using both rules and statistical methods&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91.1486&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; (1) &lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Peter Norvig&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/chomsky.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; (2)&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Machine translation: 100% of top competitors in competitions such as NIST use statistical methods. Some commercial systems use a hybrid of trained and rule-based approaches. Of the 4000 language pairs covered by machine translation systems, a statistical system is by far the best &lt;strong&gt;for every pair except Japanese-English&lt;/strong&gt;, where the top statistical system is roughly equal to the top hybrid system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this because Japanese is a very regular language (agglutinative), which makes it easier to use rules? Or is it only because of sociopolitical reasons (Microsoft had some sort of relationship with Japanese people, etc.)? If the first, why aren't other agglutinative languages (Turkish, Korean) also using statistical/rules hybrid systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19784" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T17:45:30.143" Title="Machine Translation: Why is Japanese-English the only pair where rules are still used?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25732" CreationDate="2017-08-18T03:54:44.280" Score="-2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDITED:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a handwritten note that was folded. I don't know where it came from. It was located in a trash can in my home.  I live in rural United States.  No one in my house claims to know where the note came from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if anyone can either tell me what the language is and possibly translate it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally though that it was written right to left and so thought it was likely from the Middle East. Because of comments made it looks like I may have been looking at the note upside down. These early commentators thought it to be Devanagari script.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize for the sloppy work with the question as it was posted very late and I should have waited until I was better prepared to formulate a proper question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reposting the image rotated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any assistance is appreciated.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Po3Pu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Po3Pu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE 2: I had a coworker look at it and he thought it was Hindi but was unable to read it.  I started to look at it more in depth and I was seeing patterns.  The handwriting doesn't match exactly to Hindi type faces (just like my handwriting doesn't look like Times New Roman) so I am not sure if I got this right but I see the same word 3 times and it looks similar to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;आरव (Aarav)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see below:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zGDI1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zGDI1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19785" LastEditorUserId="19785" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T16:09:24.040" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T19:20:48.093" Title="Can someone assist translating a handwritten note I found? Possible Devanagari script" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;devanagari&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-08-21T08:47:00.163" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25724" CreationDate="2017-08-18T10:29:12.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As another user wrote in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/25724/machine-translation-why-is-japanese-english-the-only-pair-where-rules-are-still#comment52413_25724&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese-English does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; used rules-based machine translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Norvig quote must be interpreted in the historical context of 2011.  The other facts mentioned in it are also out of date (eg &lt;em&gt;4000 language pairs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;statistical methods&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to neural given that usually NMT is distinguished from SMT even though NMT is also statistical not rules-based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you re-read the Norvig quote, you will notice that he did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; write that a rules-based system was being used for Japanese-English in production, he wrote only that for that one pair the results of the statistical system were only equal to those of the rules-based system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being so at that time had more to do with the available tools and data for the pair than some inherent property of the structure of one of the languages in the pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you imagine some very obscure language like Chechen for which there are no researchers who know the rules and parsers, stemmers etc and no tools, it may be more clear to you for which languages a statistical approach will beat a rules- and tools-based approach.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prove to yourself that this has nothing to do with typology, consider the case of a language like Swiss German, which has tools like Chechen but typology like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside, I do not remember if this was the case for Japanese-English only, English-Japanese only or both.  As a rule, x-English systems perform better than their complements, again for reasons that have little to do with the inherent structure of the languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T17:45:30.143" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T17:45:30.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11524" CreationDate="2017-08-18T10:58:41.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, so this question is quite old, but the problem is still relevant. Luckily, the solution is on the horizon: the 3rd edition of Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; have &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/14.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a chapter on dependency parsing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19790" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T10:58:41.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T18:26:39.447" Score="2" ViewCount="1271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fan of watching subbed Chinese movies and series and with them sometimes happens something that very rarely happens with movies or series from other languages that's the fact that I haven't been able to read the subbed sentence before the next sentence appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I know from Chinese, this a logical consequence of how lots of their words are, being usually short to pronounce and having different meanings depending from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that I get the feeling that Chinese people even have an higher speed on pronouncing their words, I don't consider to be a slow talking person in my native language and I get the feeling that, at least on films and movies, they talk even faster than me in their own language, not sure how much that translates into daily life, although from the little times I've heard Chinese people in their native language, they also looked to maintain that fast paced way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some reason that lead to Chinese being developed like that? Maybe it's an historical one, so this might fit better in history.stackexchange.org, any way I think it's worth it giving it a shot here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19793" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:45:02.050" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:45:02.050" Title="Why is spoken Chinese so fast paced?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;speed&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22816" CreationDate="2017-08-18T18:55:53.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree and disagree with user6726--humans are naturally concerned with entity versus action distinctions (exactly the same as user6726 puts it), but that does not necessarily mean that such distinctions are directly encoded into a language lexically. The question, I think, is less whether or not a language has verbs or does not, but rather to what extent do conversational participants have to work in order to disambiguate information in an utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Riau Indonesian is notorious for being &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; language sans noun and verb classes. Speakers of the language, though, clearly use contextual cues in conversation in order to discern whether a given utterance is to be construed as an action or an entity. As such, Riau Indonesian categorically defies attempts at cleanly splitting &quot;words&quot; into one of the before mentioned categories or the other. Language developes with respect to the environment that a culture blossoms within, and as such researchers need to take that into account. Even &lt;em&gt;location&lt;/em&gt; can influence the context of an utterance and whether or not a given segment is noun-ish, or verb-y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11045" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T18:55:53.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22816" CreationDate="2017-08-18T19:18:01.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an artificial language called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%93len&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kēlen&lt;/a&gt; which lacks verbs (or supposedly). It instead uses four 'relationals' to show how the noun phrases interact with each other. It was designed to be alien, but people have supposedly translated texts written by the author back into a natlang. And she has I believe translated texts herself into the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it looks more like a language with a very minimal verb system. But perhaps that's what you're looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also heard of some odd philosophical languages that treat all 'actions' as a state of being, or treat nouns as being transient phases rather than objects (this mostly just boils down to nouns having tense). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for natlangs that do? No, there are none. Its one the few linguistic universals: all languages differentiate nouns from verbs. Of course parts of speech aren't universal. Chinese has 'coverbs' that act as both prepositions and verbs. And eastern languages in general tend to treat adjectives as just a sub-class of verbs (they double as verbs meaning 'to be X', and can even take tense, even if used adjectivally). But there is no language that puts nouns and verbs into the same category. Well, confrontational languages kind of do, but often times the word has different meanings depending on whether its used as a noun or verb (a fly vs to fly, produce vs to produce). Honestly its more like a lazy form of derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T21:54:49.390" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T21:54:49.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25725" CreationDate="2017-08-18T19:20:48.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a translation, you're probably better off going to a forum dedicated to the language. You can find sub-forums for dozens of languages on unilang and wordreference. Even if you don't know what language it is, I imagine someone who speaks Hindi would at least be more familiar with the Devanagari script and be more able to pinpoint exactly what language is it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T19:20:48.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T21:37:39.320" Score="2" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on a  paper that deals with a Psalm from the Septuagint  known as the Violet fragment - LXX, Psalm 77.The particular verses i am interested in, are written in Greek uncials, however translated in Arabic, using the same Greek script( so technically it consists a phonetic transcription- translation of the text). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i want to do is transcribe and transliterate both Greek and Arabic text.&#xA;Which  transcription method is considered more suitable and easy to use when transcribing Greek from that period? Also, when it comes to dealing with the translated in Arabic text written in Greek, shall i transcribe, or transliterate the text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19794" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T01:18:39.810" Title="Transliteration-transcription method for ancient Greek &amp; Arabic" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25740" CreationDate="2017-08-18T22:18:26.640" Score="-1" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a valid, known link (academic source or even speculation) regarding the Greek and Arabic language, when it comes to syntactic- grammatical or morphological cohesion? I ve only come across Kees Versteedh &quot;Greek elements in Arabic Linguisting thinking&quot; which only impies a connection especially with Aristotelian logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19794" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T01:03:16.807" Title="Greek - Arabic language relation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23245" CreationDate="2017-08-19T04:50:06.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tdil-dc.in/index.php?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Technological Development for Indian Languages&lt;/a&gt; has a lot of resources for research in areas of NLP and Computational Linguistics on Indian Languages. It offers both annotated and unannotated corpora if you &lt;a href=&quot;http://tdil-dc.in/index.php?option=com_download&amp;amp;task=viewtoolsbyParam&amp;amp;categoryid=125&amp;amp;lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search by keywords in their Resources and Tools section.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17372" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T04:50:06.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-19T12:46:36.663" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese they use 分, 厘, 毛, 糸, 忽, 微, 繊, 沙, 塵, 埃 for negative powers of 10 from 10&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt; to 10&lt;sup&gt;-10&lt;/sup&gt; respectively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nSCXD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nSCXD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Old system&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also another system with a little bit different value range&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k6K2w.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k6K2w.png&quot; alt=&quot;New system&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Powers_of_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Powers_of_10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any other languages have words similar to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2313" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T12:46:36.663" Title="Are there any languages with words for negative powers of 10 like Japanese?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25734" CreationDate="2017-08-20T01:03:16.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Speculated, yes. Accepted, no.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguists agree that there is no relationship between these two languages. Greek is Hellenic which is Indo-European; Arabic is Semitic which is Afro-Asiatic. And while many people have posited links between the IE and AA language families, the idea has never gained widespread approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common form of this is called the &amp;quot;Nostratic Hypothesis&amp;quot;, and also posits links to the Kartvelian, Uralic, Dravidian, Altaic, and Eskimo-Aleut families. But again it's a very fringe theory; I've never met a linguist who actually believed it. The evidence is scarce at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if the Nostratic hypothesis were true, the relationship between Greek and Arabic would be distant enough that any apparent cognates are more than likely coincidence. Sound changes would have long since erased any similarity at the surface level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T01:03:16.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25733" CreationDate="2017-08-20T01:18:39.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since all of the text is written entirely in the Greek alphabet, a direct and straightforward transliteration is possible. There is a widely-accepted standard for Greek transliteration based on the methods the Romans used, which is the most common way for Ancient and Koine Greek names to be Romanized nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eta and omega are transcribed with macra: &lt;em&gt;ē, ō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gamma before a velar is transcribed with an &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (e.g: &lt;em&gt;angelos&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;angel&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rough breathing is transcribed with an &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All other letters are transcribed in the &quot;obvious&quot; way based on their ancient pronunciation:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ  Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ  Χ  Ψ  Ω&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;A B G D E Z Ē Th I K L M N X O P R S T Y Ph Ch Ps Ō&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors use &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; for kappa, &lt;em&gt;kh&lt;/em&gt; for chi, &lt;em&gt;ks&lt;/em&gt; for xi, or &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; for hypsilon, but readers will recognize any of these variants without difficulty (and none of them cause ambiguity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any variant or archaic Greek letters should be mentioned specifically. Using &lt;em&gt;ś&lt;/em&gt; for san, &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; for digamma, and &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; for qoppa is common, for example, but I would be very confused finding any of those in a transcription without them being explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T01:18:39.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-20T05:39:54.440" Score="7" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading into Balto-Slavic languages and come across a problem. &quot;To need&quot; is always imperfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the imperfective past verb, &quot;to need,&quot; I am going to be still, presently needing something (because the verb is viewed internally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That works fine, but what if I needed something in the past and I stopped needing it? If I stopped needing something, that would mean that the &quot;process&quot; of needing has concluded and I am viewing it from outside the duration of that action. This would require a perfective though, and almost none of the Slavic languages have them for that verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reference words are наблюдать and нуждаться.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: I am talking about the perfective aspect NOT a perfect tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19802" LastEditorUserId="19802" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T08:26:12.897" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T01:20:00.253" Title="Why is the verb &quot;to need&quot; and &quot;to observe&quot; always imperfective in Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-20T07:10:08.617" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;There wont' be any verbal help, just text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it's difficult since the IPA is the Alphabet for the representation of all sounds and if you try to explain rules etc in a language, you are bounded by the sounds that this language uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19730" LastEditorUserId="19730" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T16:44:52.340" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T16:44:52.340" Title="Is there a way to teach the IPA to someone in a written way?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25743" CreationDate="2017-08-20T07:32:32.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can maybe try relating it to common phones in words of your language , for starters and then develop upon the harder ones (non-local-phones). For example, in English the 'question mark thingy' in IPA is the middle of 'uh-oh' and 'x' is the sound in Lochness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T07:32:32.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25743" CreationDate="2017-08-20T14:20:39.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned the IPA entirely online. I don't see why its that much of an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started with learning how sounds are produced. The first things I learned were the concepts of 'place of articulation' and 'manner of articulation'. The first is obviously easier to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can pretty easily teach someone about place of articulation. For example, you can explain that p, b, and m are all bilabial consonants, because they're pronounced by touching the lips together. F and v are labio-dental, because they are pronounced by touching the upper teeth to the lower lip. Etc etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want an example of how it can be done, go look at the Language Construction Kit. Though admittedly, it might be somewhat difficult without being able to show someone a chart, but you can find plenty of charts online that you can point them to. Also, its not that hard to make a consonant chart in a word program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for learning new consonants? That's harder. I myself had no problem learning the voiceless velar fricative from a book, but that may just be me. Also, being an English-speaker, my native language has both velars and fricatives. Learning a velar fricative wasn't really that much of a leap. Though come to think of it, I was also able to learn the voiceless palatal fricative just as easily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, learning a sound when you can't hear what it sounds like is hard, unless you're already very familiar with how phones/phonemes are produced. Wikipedia has sound files for all the symbols of the IPA (each symbol has its own article), but the sound quality isn't the greatest. Either way, it is something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T14:20:39.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25750" CreationDate="2017-08-21T11:57:34.200" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of examples of degemination and prenasalization of the same geminate affricate/stop in Calabrian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;menzu&quot;, which should have evolved from &quot;mediu(m)&quot; through &quot;mezzu&quot;, or maybe this assumption is just because I'm Italian and want to reduce this Calabrian word to its Italian counterpart &quot;mezzo&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;mentu&quot;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://scn.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%A8ntiri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sicilian Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; links to Latin &quot;mitto&quot;, which would be Italian &quot;metto&quot;; the other (to me) strange evolution is the &quot;i&quot; becoming an open &quot;e&quot; /ɛ/, which in Sicilian normally doesn't happen, but that is another matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I ask: how common is the phenomemon of an afficate/stop both degeminating and prenasalizing, in Sicilian specifically but also more generally in other languages? And are the above etymologies correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T13:14:29.703" Title="Degemination and prenasalization together: how common?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25749" CreationDate="2017-08-21T13:14:29.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is usually called “dissimilation of geminates” is a well-known phenomenon in Semitic languages and in words borrowed from Semitic in other languages. A few examples with nasals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew šabbòṯ “Sabbath, Saturday” &gt; Aramaic šabbṯā  &gt; Persian šambih, Geʽez sanbat, Church Slavonic сѫбота, Old High German sambaztag &gt; New High German Samstag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Persian gumbaδ &amp;lt;  Aramaic qubbṯā ”dome”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with r/l:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arabic ʼarmala “widow” &amp;lt; Aramaic armaltā &amp;lt; *almartu &amp;lt; Akkadian almattu “widow, woman without financial support”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lots more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T13:14:29.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4101" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:47:35.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Bernard Comrie masterpiece &quot;Language universals and linguistic typology&quot; there is a functional explanation to justify the distinction between proximate and obviative in Algonquian languages. In chapter four, discussing about case marking, we can find a hierarchy of animacy referring to Algonquian languages wich is (from the higher to the lower in animacy): second person&gt;first person&gt; third person proximate&gt; third person obviative. The distinction between two different subtypes in third person avoids the possibility to find a transitive sentence where A and P are equal in animacy (A referring to the first argument of a transitive construction where P is the second). In a non-marked transitive construction the normal flow of information implies an A high in animacy and a P low in animacy (roughly, an agent and a patient). That is the reason why a lot of languages feel the need to specify a different pattern, namely a pattern in wich the A is lower in animacy than the P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19809" LastEditorUserId="19809" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T15:32:12.157" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T15:32:12.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T22:56:20.423" Score="1" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I've been thinking about. It would be rather hard to tell a story without using a pluperfect. I know there are languages that lack tense, like Chinese, but what about languages that do have tense systems? Japanese for instance has pretty much just past and non-past. What kind of structure would they use where we would use a pluperfect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that the only languages I'm deeply familiar with are English (my native language) and German (which does have a pluperfect, formed the same way we form one in English). I did study Japanese for a few years when I was younger and into anime, but I never really got far into it. I only know the basics of the grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T18:39:33.717" Title="Are there languages with tense that lack a pluperfect?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25869" CreationDate="2017-08-22T12:42:47.357" Score="10" ViewCount="2188" Body="&lt;p&gt;The corpus in NLTK &lt;code&gt;sinica&lt;/code&gt; can be used for research.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are two shortcomings for &lt;code&gt;sinica&lt;/code&gt; to be used in research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;too small  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is a traditional Chinese corpus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone here introduce a big and simplified Chinese corpus that can be freely downloaded for research?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19814" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T15:59:27.763" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T08:40:30.090" Title="Is there free and open Chinese corpus?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25715" CreationDate="2017-08-22T16:16:15.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story behind אמא and אבא is slightly more complicated than explained in Draconis' answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jewish Aramaic (the two words in question are of Aramaic origin - see below) and all stages of Hebrew were/are written in square script which originally did not have means to denote vowel sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two mutually non-exclusive strategies used to assist the reader are: 1) the addition of special &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niqqud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocalization diacritic symbols&lt;/a&gt; and 2) introduction of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;matres lectionis&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. consonant letters denoting vowels. Vocalization marks came very late and are/were rather inconvenient in day-to-day writing. The general trend in the development of Hebrew writing has thus been the more extensive usage of matres lectionis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four matres lectionis in use in Hebrew and Aramaic are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;י - /i/ in Modern Hebrew (occasionally also /e/)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ו - /u/ and /o/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ה - word-final /a/ (in Hebrew)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;א - word-final /a/ (in Aramaic, most notably the definite article -א as in אבא/אמא), occasionally also /a/ and /o/ in the middle of a word in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was indeed a tendency for the matres lectionis to be written in long syllables, but this is not evident in Modern Hebrew writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the words in question. Both אמא and אבא are Aramaic words and in such shape they entered Mishnaic Hebrew. The motivation for the lack of י in אמא is likely twofold: first, the corresponding syllable was closed by the geminated m (it must be said though that in Aramaic orthography closed-syllable vowels could be denoted with matres lectionis as well) and second, the word was easily recognized without י. In Modern Hebrew, nevertheless, the spelling אימא is &lt;a href=&quot;http://hebrew-academy.org.il/2016/02/09/%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%9C%D7%9B%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A4%D7%97%D7%94/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prescribed&lt;/a&gt;, although this prescription is to a large extent ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, Hebrew preserved also the original Hebrew words for father and mother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *ʔimm &gt; ... &gt; Tiberian Hebrew אֵם /ʔem/ [ʔe:m] (inflected /ʔimm-/) ~ Modern /em/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *ʔimm &gt; ... &gt; Judeo-Aramaic אִמָּא */ʔimma:/ &gt; ... &gt; Modern /ima/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *ʔab &gt; ... &gt; Tiberian Hebrew אָב /ʔɔ̄v/ [ʔɔ:v] ~ Modern /av/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *ʔab &gt; ... &gt; Judeo-Aramaic אַבָּא */ʔabba:/ &gt; ... &gt; Modern /aba/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2558" LastEditorUserId="2558" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T16:23:27.933" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T16:23:27.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25753" CreationDate="2017-08-22T18:39:33.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. Czech and other Slavic languages. Pluperfect in English is very often used in indirect speech where there is no present, past or future but rather simultaneity, &quot;previousness&quot; and  &quot;consecutiveness&quot;, for which English uses simple past, pluperfect and &quot;conditional&quot; (or future past - past tense of the auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;) respectively, while Czech would use typically the present tense for simultaneous action, past tense for previous action and future tense for following action as it is clear that the temporal reference point of the clause is not &quot;now&quot; (time of the current utterance) but rather as &quot;then&quot; (time of the utterance the main clause is talking about).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mother &lt;strong&gt;said&lt;/strong&gt; that children &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; asleep. (past - past:&#xA;  simultaneous)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Matka &lt;strong&gt;řekla&lt;/strong&gt;, že děti &lt;strong&gt;spí&lt;/strong&gt;. (past - present: simultaneous)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mother &lt;strong&gt;said&lt;/strong&gt; that children &lt;strong&gt;would&lt;/strong&gt; fall asleep. (past - future&#xA;  past: following)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Matka &lt;strong&gt;řekla&lt;/strong&gt;, že děti &lt;strong&gt;usnou&lt;/strong&gt;. (past - future: following)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T18:39:33.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25813" CreationDate="2017-08-22T20:00:22.927" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a run-of-the-mill judgement rating task where participants have to rate sentences on a Likert scale (e.g. 1 to 6) and that is constructed using a Latin square design, what statistical tests can be used to check for lexicalisation effects and which is the most commonly used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By lexicalisation, I mean checking the different realisations of each condition. So if there's a variable 'transitivity' giving two conditions, i.e. transitive and intransitive, I want to test whether any of the choices of transitive verbs behave in a different way to the other choices of verbs in that condition. Can it be shown just using t-tests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17103" LastEditorUserId="17103" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T13:50:16.457" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T11:30:59.697" Title="What statistical tests can be used to check for lexicalisation effects in a judgement task?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T07:05:49.440" Score="3" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Not sure if this is the right site to ask) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an online (preferably free) database of English sentences and the corresponding first-order representations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19818" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T16:20:18.453" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:20:18.453" Title="Database of formalized english sentences?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25754" CreationDate="2017-08-23T16:27:19.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some standard choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Chinese Wikipedia dump&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Leipzig Wortschatz collection, for simplified Chinese they have a corpus of the following dimension Sentences: 19,421,893 · Types: 1,704,991 · Tokens: 517,982,852. It is reachable under the URL &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de?corpusId=zho-simp_news_2010&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de?corpusId=zho-simp_news_2010&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T12:24:29.733" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:24:29.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2017-08-23T19:33:00.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dutch &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hottentottententententoonstelling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hottentot&lt;strong&gt;tentententen&lt;/strong&gt;toonstelling&lt;/a&gt; Hottentots' tents' exhibition, in use for many years.  Other &quot;lettergreepstapels&quot; (syllable pile-ups) include &lt;strong&gt;kerkerkerkerker&lt;/strong&gt; the erker (bay window) of the kerk (chapel) in the kerker (jail), even if bay windows are rare in such buildings; more plausible although not proven by online photographs is Lek&lt;strong&gt;kerkerkerkerkerker&lt;/strong&gt;, a bay window of a church in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lekkerkerk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;town&lt;/a&gt; on the river Lek.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opperlans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opperlans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17197" LastEditorUserId="17197" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T21:07:55.607" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T21:07:55.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T23:00:20.743" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on Taiwanese Mandarin&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The official Guoyu is almost identical to the official language of the People's Republic of China, called Pǔtōnghuà, with the exception of their writing systems. However, Mandarin as spoken informally in Taiwan has some notable differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation with Standard Mandarin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether Standard Mandarin can be understood by Taiwanese if simplified characters are mapped to traditional ones (in written context). There still seem to be differences in vocabulary and grammar but how are that different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastEditorUserId="6854" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T00:10:41.153" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T14:52:48.980" Title="Is Mandarin understandable by Taiwanese in written context if simplified characters are mapped to traditional ones?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25763" CreationDate="2017-08-24T02:01:45.700" Score="6" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words for &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot; in at least a few language families have a phonetic similarity which I find interesting. Compare the Latin and Greek words (μήτηρ/πατήρ mater/pater) with the (ancient) Hebrew words (אב/אם) with the Mandarin words (Mǔqīn/Fùqīn). The three sets of words all have a nasal consonant in a prominent position (the phoneme /m/) for the word &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt;. They also have a plosive or a fricative in a prominent position (the phonemes /p/, /b/, /f/, and /v/) for the word &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;. Is this just a coincidence, or could there possibly be a psychological (or even biological) reason why plosives/fricatives are linked to &quot;father&quot; and nasals are linked to &quot;mother&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that the answer is most likely, &quot;It's just a coincidence,&quot; or, &quot;It's actually different in this other language family&quot;, but I thought it would do no harm to ask. The coincidental phonemic similarity between the three families is a little striking, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastEditorUserId="14150" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T04:08:40.120" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T05:58:29.567" Title="Phonemic similarities between &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot; in different language families" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25762" CreationDate="2017-08-24T05:58:29.567" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic explanation is based on a combination of infant anatomical development and parental expectation. Infants don't initially know how to control their velum, so everything is nasalized. Also, when breastfeeding a child has to lower the velum (to breath). This weights the probabilities in favor of the word for &quot;mother&quot; having a nasal. They initially can best control their lips and jaws (lips are vastly more important for breastfeeding that the tongue is, so naturally lip-control is really important). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Random babbling from an infant is most likely to generate syllables like [ma] and then [ba], as compared to [na], [da]. Parental expectation comes in because the most likely parental response to a child randomly babbling something language-like is &quot;They're referring to me!&quot;. The tendency to associate [ma] with mothers and [ba] with fathers is founded on the fact that infants have more frequent interactions with mothers than with fathers, and [ma] is the most likely candidate for a &quot;first recurrent syllable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard words in languages were conventionalized a really long time ago, hence &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot; don't particularly resemble &quot;ma&quot; and &quot;ba&quot;, unless you know a bit more about Indo-European historical linguistics. Even epithets like &quot;mama&quot;, &quot;papa&quot; (or &quot;daddy&quot;) are conventionalized though subject to a more variation than the standard lexical items. See for example the relative uniformity of &quot;mama&quot; for mothers, but more variation for fathers, being &quot;dada&quot; or &quot;baba&quot; (or voicing variants &lt;em&gt;tata, papa&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most stable consonants in language is [m], so there is no common path whereby [ma] becomes something else. But [ba] easily changes to [pa], from which [fa].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, there are natural physical reasons for utter [ma] correlated with the presence of mother, and [ba] correlated with the presence of father; parents then interpret there phonations as referential, which encourages the conventionalization or [mama] as a word meaning &quot;mother&quot;, because parents believe that the child its referring to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T05:58:29.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23162" CreationDate="2017-08-24T06:25:41.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generalising from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/23163/17305&quot;&gt;fdb's answer about Arabic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/23171/17305&quot;&gt;postmortes' answer about Maltese&lt;/a&gt;: there are several languages in the Semitic family that have these three properties. Inflected nouns and adjectives are in Proto-Semitic, but definiteness was not a morphological category at that stage. However, some languages developed prefixes and suffixes for this purpose (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definiteness seems not to have been a morphological category of Proto-Semitic. Akkadian does not indicate definiteness at all, and Ge'ez only in an incipient or covert way. In those languages which do have a definite article, the formal variation is striking. The article, though always affixal, is a prefix in some languages, a suffix in others. Thus Hebrew has the prefix &lt;em&gt;ha-&lt;/em&gt;, Arabic has the prefix &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt;, whereas Aramaic uses the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ā&lt;/em&gt; and South Arabian has the suffix &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;. Amharic has innovated a new definite suffix &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; from the old 3sg possessive clitic ‘his’ (see 2.). Nouns which have a pronominal possessive suffix, or which occur in the Construct form (and thus take a following dependent genitive), do not take the article. An indefinite article is found only in Arabic, where its suffixal form (nunation: &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;) contrasts with the prefixal definite article &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt;, so that ‘definiteness’ is expressed in two different slots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;al-kitābu&lt;/em&gt; ‘the book’ vs. &lt;em&gt;kitābu-n&lt;/em&gt; ‘a book’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; is an indefinite marker in Arabic, but a definite marker in South Arabian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Weninger, S., Watson, J. E., Streck, M. P., &amp;amp; Khan, G. (2011). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it appears that the definite article has been a separate development in several branches of West Semitic (at least Arabian, North-West Semitic and Ethiosemitic). However, Amharic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Definiteness&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflects the article&lt;/a&gt; so the non-inflected definite article seems to be restricted to Central Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T06:25:41.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-24T08:22:42.400" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;S1. I lived in Paris for many years. I, therefore, know many places in Paris&quot;; &quot;S2. Having lived in Paris for long, I know several places there&quot;. Can NLP techniques infer that S1 and S2 are similar semantically? If yes, which one (references)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19823" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:26:46.980" Title="NLP techniques on semantic similarity with different sentence construction" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2017-08-24T10:31:06.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the following fun sentence in German with a fivefold repetition of the syllable &quot;ni&quot; (spelled &quot;ni&quot; or &quot;nie&quot;, but with identical pronunciation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leider sah Paganini nie Ninive&lt;/em&gt; (Unfortunately, Paganini never saw Niniveh.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T16:40:41.570" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T16:40:41.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-24T19:44:05.123" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for corpora of extractive summaries. I am mostly interested in English, and any type of document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T09:22:57.757" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T09:27:00.347" Title="Corpora for extractive summaries" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;summarization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2017-08-24T22:12:54.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish you can say &lt;strong&gt;la yaya ya yace&lt;/strong&gt;, which means &quot;The granny is lying already&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T22:28:16.797" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T22:28:16.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-24T22:39:52.627" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;While some verbs in french with intransitive sense use &quot;être&quot; for complex tenses (Je suis entré), other verbs with transitive sense use &quot;avoir&quot; to show subject-object relations: Je les ai vus. (&quot;Je&quot; - subject, &quot;les&quot; - object).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronominal verbs in french are always directed at oneself, which means they are some kind of transitive and should use &quot;avoir&quot; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do they always use &quot;être&quot; as their auxiliary?&#xA;Is the situation with &quot;etre (to be)&quot; and pronominal verbs the same in other roman languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10266" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:36:13.303" Title="Why use “être” with pronominal verbs in complex tenses in french?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25774" CreationDate="2017-08-24T22:43:41.373" Score="3" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the language, gender inflection can arise from natural gender, or even perhaps as a way of simplifying an extremely complex inflection system, but regardless, grammatical gender is a just a construct for classifying words with similar inflectional qualities: strong, quick to anger, easily gives into peer pressure, etc. they're all the same in these qualities, therefore, we call them all masculine. (yes that is a joke)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, does a language, such as Hochdeutsch for instance, which uses one inflectional pattern for plural which is isolated, being unique from the three main grammatical genders, technically have four grammatical genders? The Usual Endo-European Masculine, Feminine, Neutered, but also Plural. There is no masculine-plural nor feminine plural as in a Semitic Language, but the inflection is not the same as another grammatical gender's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thank any answerers in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T23:20:22.000" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T02:42:52.023" Title="Does plural count as a grammatical gender?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25773" CreationDate="2017-08-24T23:29:36.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To some extent, this is just a question of terminology. In some languages, it is conventional to speak of &quot;genders&quot;; in others, &quot;noun classes&quot;; in some languages, the plural is considered to be one of the genders/noun classes, while in others, it isn't. In general, though, my impression is that linguists tend not to consider plural to be a distinct grammatical gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number system of a language often interacts with the gender system, but that doesn't mean that they can only be analyzed as a single system. To make an analogy to another part of linguistics, the &quot;tense&quot; system of a language often interacts with the &quot;aspect&quot; system, but that doesn't mean that it is useless to have separate words for &quot;tense&quot; and &quot;aspect&quot;. That said, some people do find it useful to be able to not distinguish between tense and aspect, and just speak of &quot;TAM&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93mood&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tense-Aspect-Mood&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good overview of the issues involved is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/gender.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gender&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Anna Kibort &amp;amp; Greville G. Corbett (Grammatical Features. 7 January 2008.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They point out that it is often useful to distinguish between &lt;em&gt;controller&lt;/em&gt; genders and &lt;em&gt;target&lt;/em&gt; genders. &lt;em&gt;Controllers&lt;/em&gt; are nouns, and &lt;em&gt;targets&lt;/em&gt; are the words that show agreement with their associated nouns. The most typical, uncontroversial types of targets for gender agreement are other words in the noun phrase (like adjectives, determiners, or demonstratives) or the head of the associated clause (e.g. subject-verb agreement); anaphoric pronoun choice is also sometimes considered to be a type of agreement, but this is a bit more controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a language has &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; types of target gender marking, there may be more or fewer than &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; types of noun paradigms of controller gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kibort and Corbett give Romanian as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good example of a language whose gender system has been the source of continuing disagreement is Romanian (for references to the extensive literature on this topic see Corbett 1991:150). The argument, which has gone on for decades, is whether we have two genders or three. In terms of agreement classes, the situation is clear: there are three classes that should be set up as follows (where the agreement endings are typical allomorphs for each target gender):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. class I nouns taking -∅ in the singular and -i in the plural (e.g. bǎrbat 'man')&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;b. class II nouns taking -∅ in the singular and -e in the plural (e.g. scaun 'chair')&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;c. class III nouns taking -a in the singular and -e in the plural (e.g. fatǎ 'girl')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, simply to say that Romanian has three genders suggests that it is like German, Latin or Tamil, even though in each of these languages, intuitively, the situation is rather different. It can be seen that Romanian has three controller genders (i.e. the genders into which nouns are divided), and it has two target genders (i.e. the genders which are marked on adjectives, verbs, and so on, depending on the language) in both singular and plural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Bantu_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bantu languages&lt;/a&gt;, plural and singular nouns are often considered to belong to different noun classes. Sometimes one plural noun class corresponds to more than one singular noun class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kibort and Corbett say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'For two nouns to be in the same agreement class, they must take the same agreements under all conditions - that is, if we hold constant other features such as case and number. (...) If two nouns differ in their agreements when factors such as case and number are held constant, then they belong to two different agreement classes and normally they will belong to two different genders' (Corbett 2006:750). Note that the earlier Bantuist tradition treated nouns as being in different noun classes when singular and plural, and it is often stated that Bantu languages have twenty noun classes. Counted in the way outlined above, the number is typically between seven and ten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the matter of German brought up in the question, it could be said to have three target genders in the singular, and one target gender in the plural. But the nouns fall into three controller-gender paradigms, not four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T02:42:52.023" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T02:42:52.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-25T01:28:33.887" Score="1" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few different Romance etyma with the meaning 'marriage'.  Some are derived from Latin &lt;em&gt;casa&lt;/em&gt; 'house', some from &lt;em&gt;mater&lt;/em&gt; 'mother', and some from &lt;em&gt;mas/maris&lt;/em&gt; 'man': &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;casa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [+ &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-mentum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;] &gt;  CA &lt;em&gt;casament&lt;/em&gt;, ES &lt;em&gt;casamiento&lt;/em&gt;, PT &lt;em&gt;casamento&lt;/em&gt;,  RO  &lt;em&gt;căsătorie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mater&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;-monium&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;matrimonium&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; CA &lt;em&gt;matrimoni&lt;/em&gt;, ES/IT &lt;em&gt;matrimonio&lt;/em&gt;, FR &lt;em&gt;matrimoine&lt;/em&gt;, PT &lt;em&gt;matrimónio&lt;/em&gt;, RO &lt;em&gt;matrimoniu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;maris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + -&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;aticum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; FR &lt;em&gt;mariage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the origins of the word coming from &quot;casa&quot; in these languages, the word could literally be translated in to English as 'housement'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I have a hunch that the word would have originally meant the joining of two houses as this is what marriage typically meant in more traditional societies.  However, I could be wrong and the house portion of the word could just refer to the household of the husband and wife. What is the significance of the root &quot;casa&quot; as a part of the word's etymology? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19827" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T17:05:26.967" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T17:05:26.967" Title="Etymology of Romance words for Marriage" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-25T19:18:04.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25776" CreationDate="2017-08-25T08:52:27.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian there is a verb accasare “to marry”, and a noun accasamento “marriage”, etymologically “taking to the house, taking home”. This is evidently the basic meaning of the forms that you have cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T08:52:27.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25814" CreationDate="2017-08-25T15:29:06.307" Score="2" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question arises from my research on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_maritau_Rosa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Si maritau Rosa&lt;/a&gt;, a Sicilian song, where I found what seems to be a clear diminutive of &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt;, that is &lt;em&gt;vanidduzza&lt;/em&gt;. Nowhere do I find that word directly, so I have no better guess as to its meaning than assuming it is indeed a diminutive of &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; and see what the latter means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.terralab.it/sishilianu/Vocabolario.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terralab&lt;/a&gt;, which gives me &quot;stradina [little road] = vaneddha&quot; – &lt;code&gt;ddh&lt;/code&gt; is the way that site denotes the retroflex &lt;code&gt;dd&lt;/code&gt; that others (me included… well, I use &lt;code&gt;đđ&lt;/code&gt; to be very precise) indicate with plain &lt;code&gt;dd&lt;/code&gt; – and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salviamoilsiciliano.com/termini.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;salviamoilsiciliano&lt;/a&gt;, which explains &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;piccola strada di campagna, o in città, vicolo&quot; (small country road, or, in a city, alleyway). So I come to interpret &quot;apru / a porta a vanidduzza&quot; (which is the part of the song using &lt;em&gt;vanidduzza&lt;/em&gt;) as &quot;I open / the door to the small road&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I find &lt;a href=&quot;https://scn.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_vanedda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sicilian Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, which gives me &lt;em&gt;a vanedda&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;a fessura, socchiuso&quot; (in a slit-like fashion, ajar) in Italian, &quot;entrebâillé, entrouvert&quot; (ajar, half-open) in French, and surprisingly &quot;small street, alley&quot; in English. This gives me a meaning of &quot;slit&quot;, with which I interpret &quot;apru / a porta a vanidduzza&quot; as &quot;I half-open the door&quot;, which interpretation I prefer, also because of another version of the song giving me &quot;Tegnu la porta aperta / La mettu a padiduzza&quot;, which seems to mean &quot;I keep the door open / I put it ajar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder: does &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; have both senses, i.e. mean both &quot;small street&quot; and &quot;slit&quot;? And what sense is used in the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to go back into the etymology to see how this word formed and maybe choose the option closest to the meaning of its ancestors. I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://pietromaccallini.blogspot.it/2010/03/etimologia-di-finestra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; which, while discussing the etymology of &lt;em&gt;finestra&lt;/em&gt;, mentions &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; as a possible cognate of &lt;em&gt;vano&lt;/em&gt;, itself possibly related (at least semantically) to &lt;em&gt;fanu&lt;/em&gt; in Etruscan, which the post says Pittau (never heard that name before…) gives as the ancestor of &quot;finestra&quot; (=window). So &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; would have formed as a diminutive of &lt;em&gt;vano&lt;/em&gt;, originally meaning &lt;em&gt;passage&lt;/em&gt;, via addition of -edda, or -ella in Italian (cfr. &lt;em&gt;Grotta delle Vanelle&lt;/em&gt;, which I gather is a cave on the Etna volcano in Sicily), so it would mean &quot;small passage&quot; and therefore allow both the above interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I look &lt;em&gt;vanus&lt;/em&gt; (Latin) up on the Wiktionary, besides not finding any such sense (nor do I find it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dizionario-latino.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this dictionary&lt;/a&gt;), I find etymological information linking &lt;em&gt;vanus&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%81weh%E2%82%82-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PIE h₁weh₂-&lt;/a&gt;, which means &quot;empty&quot;, and does not seem to support that other meaning, and is consistent with the meaning of &quot;vanus&quot;, &quot;vain&quot;, &quot;empty&quot;, &quot;useless&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where does this word come from? Is it possible that it does come from &lt;em&gt;vanum&lt;/em&gt;, which had a semantic shift from &quot;empty(ness)&quot; to &quot;passage&quot;, and then to &quot;road&quot; and &quot;slit&quot;? Or is this a bogus etymology? And in the latter case, where does &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt; stem from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what does the word mean? Does it have both the meanings suggested above, or only one, and if the latter, which? And if it has both, which one is used in the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;«Language-specific grammar and usage questions are off-topic unless primarily concerned with linguistics rather than usage», says the &lt;em&gt;on hold&lt;/em&gt; banner on this question. So it appears that the last part of the question, about the meaning of &lt;em&gt;vanedda&lt;/em&gt;, is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1754/is-this-question-about-etymology-and-meaning-really-off-topic&quot;&gt;have reason to believe&lt;/a&gt; that the etymology part of th question is not off-topic. Alongside the etymology question, the question &quot;How did the meaning of this word evolve in the ages?&quot; should be on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me drop the &quot;current meaning&quot; part, and sum the question up as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where does the word &quot;vanedda&quot; come from? Is it possible, as suggested &lt;a href=&quot;http://pietromaccallini.blogspot.it/2010/03/etimologia-di-finestra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, that it relates to &lt;em&gt;vano&lt;/em&gt; with that word having had the meaning of &lt;em&gt;passage&lt;/em&gt; long ago? In that case, would it be correct to say that &quot;vanedda&quot; is &lt;em&gt;vano&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-edda&lt;/em&gt;, a diminutive suffix, and hence that the meaning evolved from &quot;small passage&quot; into either &quot;narrow road&quot; or &quot;slit&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastEditorUserId="17268" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T13:40:15.113" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T15:01:27.403" Title="What is the etymology of Sicilian &quot;vanedda&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-26T09:27:58.617" Score="6" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Turkic languages (like Turkish and Kazakh), the word &lt;code&gt;Yaz&lt;/code&gt; means &lt;code&gt;Summer&lt;/code&gt;, while in other Turkic languages (like Azeri, Chuvash and Yakut) the very same word means &lt;code&gt;Spring&lt;/code&gt;. The Old Turkic meaning was also &lt;code&gt;Summer&lt;/code&gt;, so it seams that the Azeri group has changed its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any good explanation for this difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3596" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T12:46:28.967" Title="Turkish &quot;Yaz&quot; vs. Azerbaijani &quot;Yaz&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25781" CreationDate="2017-08-26T12:46:28.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that there is any good explanation. Clauson’s &lt;em&gt;Etymological dictionary&lt;/em&gt; writes that “there is utter confusion in the Turkish languages about the words for 'spring' and 'summer'”. Perhaps this reflects an older situation where the Turks distinguished only two seasons: hot and cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T12:46:28.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-26T21:52:51.283" Score="3" ViewCount="810" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are clusters such as /sk/ (as in &lt;em&gt;sky&lt;/em&gt;), /st/ (&lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt;), and /sp/ (&lt;em&gt;spill&lt;/em&gt;) allowed as onsets in English? The sonority decreases in these clusters and does that not violate the phonotactic rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, it seems intervocalic clusters such as /ks/ are divided into two syllables instead of counted as the onset of the succeeding syllable: &lt;em&gt;Anaximenes&lt;/em&gt; is usually syllabified as /ˌæ.næ&lt;strong&gt;kˈs&lt;/strong&gt;ɪ.məˌniːz/ instead of /ˌæ.næˈ&lt;strong&gt;ks&lt;/strong&gt;ɪ.məˌniːz/, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the latter observation could be explained by rejecting the maximal onset principle, but when combined with the first observation, it seems to show that there is something special about /s/ (and perhaps sibilants in general) in English. I had trouble finding any explanation for this phenomenon, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight is appreciated! Thanks for reading my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19833" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T17:37:49.963" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T17:37:49.963" Title="English onsets with /s/ and sonority hierarchy" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;sonority&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25784" CreationDate="2017-08-27T01:55:33.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syllables do not have to conform to the notion of &quot;sonority sequencing&quot;, which is only a rough approximation of crosslinguistic syllable structure tendencies. It is generally recognized (following decades of argument by Ohala, also see &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.ucla.edu/images/stories/wright.1996.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wright 1996&lt;/a&gt;) that abstract &quot;sonority&quot; is not particularly relevant in explaining segment sequence tendencies, and what matters is whether a sequence is easily parsed. The desirability of onset [tr] relative to [rt] or [tw, nw] relative to [wt, wn] can be explained by the fact that the former lead to acoustic landmarks which make it easy to identify the segments (in an onset), but the latter are not (for instance, [w] has very weak acoustic cues, no striking release, low amplitude, but a strong influence on vowel formants, so [w] &quot;should&quot; be next to a vowel). Sequences of the form [sC] where C is not a fricative are fairly easy to parse acoustically – though not trivial, so they might be allowed, or they might be disallowed. Sequences of the form [ʃC] would also be good, but having a constrast between [sC] and [ʃC] is not so good (because it is harder to distinguish the difference between [s] and [ʃ] before a consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since [ks] is not a possible onset in English, there is only one possible syllabification of /VksV/: [Vk.sV]. The maximum onset principle does some work for you, in explaining why /VstV/ syllabifies as [V.stV] in English, not [Vs.tV].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T01:55:33.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25791" CreationDate="2017-08-27T06:33:30.347" Score="3" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;A cursory search shows that the English adjective &quot;wise&quot; and the German verb &quot;wissen&quot; descend from the same root: the PIE *weyd- (&quot;to see, to know&quot;). I found this by using Etymonline to search the English word, and Wiktionary to search the German word. I trust the former, but not necessarily the latter. Could you kind folks confirm that this common ancestry is true? And if so, how did the phonetic changes come about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T20:36:45.010" Title="Do &quot;wise&quot; and &quot;wissen&quot; share the same root?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25786" CreationDate="2017-08-27T14:42:36.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, en &lt;em&gt;wise&lt;/em&gt; and de &lt;em&gt;wissen&lt;/em&gt; share a root, but not as recently as Levenstein distance would suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;de &lt;em&gt;weise&lt;/em&gt; is more directly cognate with en &lt;em&gt;wise&lt;/em&gt;, whereas de &lt;em&gt;wissen&lt;/em&gt; is directly cognate with en &lt;em&gt;wit&lt;/em&gt;, which until recently was also a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, not coincidentally, &lt;em&gt;wise&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wit&lt;/em&gt; also share a root, but it split before the ancestor of English and German split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusion is that &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; changed to something like &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tz&lt;/em&gt; in many words in the ancestor of High German and related languages, but not in other Germanic language families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T19:06:23.293" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T19:06:23.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25786" CreationDate="2017-08-27T14:44:23.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'i' being pronounced differently in English is because of the 'great vowel shift' (look it up). As for the w being pronounced differently, its because the w was originally pronounced as the English w in all Germanic languages, but in several of them (including German), it changed into a v sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the final 'e' in English 'wise' was originally pronounced. This caused the 's' to be pronounced as a 'z' sound, which is a common thing to happen to consonants that appear in between vowels. This obviously didn't happen in German though. Funny enough, the 's' in German is more often than not pronounced as a 'z'. Its only pronounced as an 's' when it appears at the end of a syllable or word, or its doubled (as in wissen). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what the word they are descended from meant, I don't know. But its obvious that these two are related. Wissen means 'to know (a fact)' while 'wise' means something like 'to be knowledgeable'. Not only are their meanings related, but they also obviously resemble each other. German is one of English's closest surviving relatives (though not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; closest, English's closest relatives would actually be the Frisian languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T14:44:23.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-27T14:59:25.123" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my third or fourth language, when I don't know a word or phrase, I substitute a word from my other non-native language rather than the one I obviously know in my native language.  Or if I'm looking for a Russian word, I'll say &quot;in French, we say...&quot; Rather than &quot;in English, we say...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this linguistic impulse? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is an idea that should have a term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19835" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T22:38:07.863" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T22:38:07.863" Title="Second and third language &quot;search&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25786" CreationDate="2017-08-27T16:09:42.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are indeed cognate! They both stem from the PIE root *&lt;em&gt;weyd-&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;to know&quot; or &quot;to perceive&quot;, along with less obvious cognates like &quot;guide&quot;, &quot;vision&quot;, and &quot;eidolon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Indo-European, the vowels *&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;, and *[nothing] tended to alternate, a pattern called &quot;ablaut&quot;. You can see traces of this still in the &quot;strong verbs&quot; which change their vowels to indicate tense, like drive/drove or freeze/froze. So the &quot;zero-grade&quot; form of *&lt;em&gt;weyd-&lt;/em&gt; was *&lt;em&gt;wyd-&lt;/em&gt;, also written *&lt;em&gt;wid-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Germanic, *&lt;em&gt;wyd-&lt;/em&gt; gave rise to a verb *&lt;em&gt;witaną&lt;/em&gt;; the *&lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; became *&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; through Grimm's Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old High German, the *&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; then lenited into a &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;, giving OHG &lt;em&gt;wizzen&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; then developed into &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, giving Modern German &lt;em&gt;wissen&lt;/em&gt;. (Somewhere along the line &amp;lt;w&gt; became pronounced as /v/, though the spelling remained.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the *&lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; remained, but the inflectional endings slowly dropped off, giving Old English &lt;em&gt;witan&lt;/em&gt;, and Modern English &lt;em&gt;wit&lt;/em&gt;. The verb died out but the noun survived. (An inflected form of this, with a mutated vowel, was generalized to give the poetic verb &lt;em&gt;wot&lt;/em&gt; &quot;know&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the participles of *&lt;em&gt;weyd-&lt;/em&gt; was *&lt;em&gt;weyd-tos&lt;/em&gt;, which became *&lt;em&gt;weyd-stos&lt;/em&gt; and then *&lt;em&gt;wī-saz&lt;/em&gt; in Proto-Germanic. Again in English the endings dropped off, giving Old English &lt;em&gt;wīs&lt;/em&gt;, which was respelled &lt;em&gt;wise&lt;/em&gt; in Modern English. The pronunciation of the vowel changed in the Great Vowel Shift and the /s/ lenited to give the modern /wajz/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T20:36:45.010" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T20:36:45.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12628" CreationDate="2017-08-27T21:05:52.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s just take the beginning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Afro-Asiatic we have the feminine ending -a which has the following&#xA;  evolution history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-a &amp;lt; -ah&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; &amp;lt; -at &amp;lt; et&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does -ah&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; mean in an AA context? There are actually lots of real-life laryngeals in Semitic. Which one is h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;? Where does “et” come from? Then you write: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;where h&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt; is aleph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aleph is the first letter of the alphabet. Are we talking about phonology or about spelling? Actually, the pausal form of the feminine singular nouns (which is what you are talking about) is spelt with final aleph in Eastern Aramaic, but with he in Western Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic. Which one do you think is more original? And why is this orthographic question at all relevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T20:21:37.277" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T20:21:37.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25767" CreationDate="2017-08-28T06:10:20.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a problem that is very similar to the &quot;Interpretable Semantic Textual Similarity&quot; task of SemEval 2015 and 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task is to align two sentences and provide information which phrases of both sentences are related in which way with respect to semantic similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details see &lt;a href=&quot;http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2016/task2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2016/task2/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T06:10:20.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25757" CreationDate="2017-08-28T10:32:11.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Likert scales are usually analysed with the Mann-Whitney U test or a Chi square test. T-tests are fine if the test assumptions are met, but they are not always (which is why people use the MWU which has different assumptions regarding normal distribution of means).&#xA;In your case it seems like it might be difficult to establish this, so I'd go with the MWU (if you can establish them though, you should feel free to use a t-test). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The test can show that it is &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; that the two groups (e.g. transitive and intransitive) behave differently and it may exclude to a degree that this difference is due to chance. No test can however show that they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in fact different though, and more importantly that the underlying cognitive division you may assume is indeed the driver of that difference. Convincing yourself and your reader of those things is ultimately up to your arguments for the experimental choices and interpretations you make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10419" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T10:32:11.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25806" CreationDate="2017-08-28T11:07:17.730" Score="5" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vowel harmony and Umlaut are widely attested, whereby vowels are affected by other vowels in the sense of making them closer in features to other vowels in the same word. &lt;strong&gt;Is there a comparable phenomenon that leads to regular dissimilation of vowels?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This effect could work as an inverse form of vowel harmony, whereby there are two or more sets of vowels in the language, and no two (or more) vowels belonging in the same class can appear in the same word, or as a more restricted rule whereby, for example, similar vowels in consecutive syllables would tend to shift away from each other by exaggerating one feature in opposite directions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure this does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; exist (the only thing remotely approaching this is the well-known tendency of onomatopoeic reduplication to alternate vowel features, such as in &lt;em&gt;ding dong&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tick tock&lt;/em&gt;), but I wanted to check. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T15:33:05.833" Title="Does regular vowel dissimilation/disharmony exist?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25772" CreationDate="2017-08-28T12:36:13.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;An Outline of Middle Voice in Syriac&lt;/em&gt; by M. Farina, she connects this with unaccusativity (some layout changed in the examples):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unaccusativity can surface in different ways in languages. In Italian, for example, unaccusative intransitive verbs receive a different auxiliary (&lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt; 'to be') from unergative intransitives (which take &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; 'to have'). Moreover, the unergative verbs have the same auxiliary received by active transitive verbs (such as &lt;em&gt;mangiare&lt;/em&gt;, 'to eat'), while unaccusatives take the same auxiliary which is used to express the passive. This proximity to the passive shows how the subject of the unaccusative verb is considered as undergoing an action or a process, just like the subject of passive verbs. Both subjects are objects at a deeper level of analysis. The situation of Italian can be exemplified as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;em&gt;partire&lt;/em&gt; 'to leave' vs. &lt;em&gt;camminare&lt;/em&gt; 'to walk'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stefania ieri sera &lt;strong&gt;è partita&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; — &amp;quot;Yesterday evening Stefania left.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stefania ieri sera &lt;strong&gt;ha camminato&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; — &amp;quot;Yesterday evening Stefania walked.&amp;quot; (with a Terminative Aoristic interpretation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;em&gt;mangiare&lt;/em&gt; 'to eat'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;La mela &lt;strong&gt;è mangiata&lt;/strong&gt; da Stefania&lt;/em&gt; — &amp;quot;The apple is eaten by Stefania.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stefania &lt;strong&gt;ha mangiato&lt;/strong&gt; la mela&lt;/em&gt; — &amp;quot;Stefania has eaten the apple.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, her claim (for which she sadly does not give any references) is that &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; is used when the syntactical subject is affected / a semantical agent, whereas &amp;quot;to have&amp;quot; is used when the syntactical subject is also the semantical agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronominal verbs are syntactically &amp;quot;directed at oneself&amp;quot;, as you put it, but are semantically often middle voice. They are not true active transitive verbs, since it concerns an affected agent. This affectedness is reflected by using the same auxiliary as the one used for passive constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;An Outline of Middle Voice in Syriac&lt;/em&gt; this is really a remotely related issue; Farina uses it just to explain the concept of unaccusativity and how it can surface in a language. So, surely there are better references for this available (which also compare other languages), but this is not my field so I wouldn't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:36:13.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25798" CreationDate="2017-08-28T13:04:05.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  In Patricia Donegan's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers/1978phd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory of vowels&lt;/a&gt;, contextual conditions on vowel fortitions are generally dissimilatory. (Vowel harmony and umlaut, which you mention, are lenitions rather than fortitions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T13:04:05.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25798" CreationDate="2017-08-28T13:39:34.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sound shifts are not in general “regular”, but there are sound laws that work with a fair degree of predictability. One example is the phenomenon in Semitic known as Barth’s law. As originally formulated it dictates that in Hebrew and Aramaic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the prefix vowel of the prefix or imperfect(ive) conjugation in the&#xA;  base (i.e., G) stem is dependent on the theme vowel of the respective&#xA;  verbal base. When the theme vowel is /i/ or /u/, the prefix vowel is&#xA;  /a/, while when the theme vowel is /a/, the prefix vowel is /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-hebrew-language-and-linguistics/barth-ginsberg-law-EHLL_COM_00000350?s.num=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-hebrew-language-and-linguistics/barth-ginsberg-law-EHLL_COM_00000350?s.num=3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This law has been reformulated (and generalised)  by Klaus Beyer to the effect that words which in proto-Semitic had the vowels a…a in the tonic and pre-tonic syllables dissimilate these to e…a in Aramaic. For example, Arabic &lt;em&gt;ʼamara&lt;/em&gt; “he commanded” corresponds to Syriac &lt;em&gt;ʼemar&lt;/em&gt; “he said”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting example of vowel dissimilation in French and English is discussed here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/1972/does-noel-really-have-its-origin-in-latin&quot;&gt;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/1972/does-noel-really-have-its-origin-in-latin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T13:46:44.277" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T13:46:44.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1802" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:04:06.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time has passed since the original question. For people looking at this question now, I'd say &quot;Computational Linguistics&quot; certainly encompasses more researches related to humanities, such as historical linguistics. A parallel would be the computational approaches employed in sociology or history research - Fundamentally they are still sociology and history nonetheless. &quot;NLP&quot; is much more closely related to computer science. Especially now in 2017, NLP is almost exclusively about how deep learning helps with various practical tasks such as speech recognition, machine translation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another illustration of the matter would be that NLP is mostly a research direction under various Computer Science departments, especially in the US, while many &quot;Computational Linguistics&quot; research is actually under the Linguistic department/Philosophy faculty and the degree program confers a Bachelor of Arts degree, especially in many European universities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the boundary might not be that clear and many universities which offer Computational Linguistics degrees have long been involved in more &quot;NLP-esque&quot; aspects of research as well and have been hiring professors with CS background. But the above generalization still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:04:06.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25761" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:15:32.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not very different at all. I'd say the difference is much smaller than the difference between say Spanish in Spain and Chilean Spanish, which have undergone 500 years of evolution after all. Yet they are still classified as both Spanish and certainly people from both countries would understand each other's written texts. The separation of China (the end of the Chinese civil war) is not even 100 years old. One would naturally expect the difference to be much smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would also consider the fact that written text is much more formal than spoken language and involves much fewer slangs, as is the case across different languages just like Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact you don't even need to map the characters for the language to be understood. Simplified Chinese is mostly just that. &quot;Simplified&quot;. It might take longer for a Taiwanese to react but they can still make out the meaning just fine. Vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't have references at all but this is based on my experience as a native Chinese speaker and my interaction with Chinese/Taiwanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:15:32.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25767" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:26:46.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may look at deep learning approaches in general. This would be similar to what &quot;reading comprehension tasks&quot; are trying to achieve. Search for some papers and you shall find related ones, for example the paper &quot;A Thorough Examination of the CNN/Daily Mail Reading Comprehension Task&quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02858&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02858&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a paper list from a course I just had the last semester: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~ddekok/dl4nlp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~ddekok/dl4nlp/&lt;/a&gt; which you might find helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:26:46.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T15:26:22.510" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick question as I'm slightly confused&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to report the use of e.g. [t] among males and females, in a graph, would the percentages be worked out as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;males/ all tokens collected for [t]&#xA;or&#xA;males/ all tokens collected by males for all /t/ variants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy question just haven't done it in a while&#xA;Thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19631" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T15:26:22.510" Title="How do I report the distribution of a variant among genders?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25798" CreationDate="2017-08-28T15:33:05.833" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the realm of regular synchronic processes, vowel dissimilation is relatively uncommon (dissimilation itself is uncommon, and vowel-to-vowel dissimilation is most uncommon); however, it does exist. Examples are low-vowel dissimilation in Woleaian where /a/ becomes [e] before &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in the next syllable (described in Sohn 1971), and reportedly the rule is found in Marshallese. Kera dissimilates /a/ to [ə] (or [ɨ]: sources differ). Wintu has a dissimilation where /e,o/ become [i,u] before /a/, though only lexically specified root vowels undergo this dissimilation. Finally, a fairly well-knownish (but under-documented) example of this type are dissimilative akan'e and jakan'e in SW Russian and NE Belorussian dialects: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/vestnik/article/view/1402/1318&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nesset 2002&lt;/a&gt; for data and analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of backness dissimilation is reported (Ito 1986). There is a stem-formation process in Ainu where various vowels may be added; within the subset where a high vowel is selected, the suffix is back after front vowels and front after front vowels. It is interesting that raising of low vowels is virtually the only kind of V-to-V dissimilation attested (lowering of high vowels, for example, is unknown).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a straightforward explanation for why harmony and disharmony are so different in their &quot;totality&quot;. In the case of harmony, it is typically said that vowels must be the same for the spreading feature, so all vowels must be [+ATR] if one is. That is cashed out as a local requirement that a vowel must be [+ATR] if it is adjacent to a [+ATR] vowel – this iterates through the word, effecting complete spread of [+ATR] to all vowels (because each time the rule applies, a new environment is created). In the case of dissimilation, each time the rule applies, the environment is &lt;em&gt;destroyed&lt;/em&gt;: so /pataka/ → [pateka], with no two adjacent low vowels. Hence dissimilations almost always create an alternating pattern, and you don't find a situation where &quot;there can be only one low vowel in a word&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T15:33:05.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25550" CreationDate="2017-08-28T21:33:09.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to your question actually lies in something you wrote, let me place the emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;isn't the brain adapted so the physiognomy, tongue and vocal folds work as little as possible to pronounce &lt;strong&gt;clear distinguishable words in those languages&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that some languages are structured in such a way that makes it hard to distinguish words unless you can clearly hear all vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese is a great example of this phenomenon.  Japanese does not have a schwa sound, it just has five vowels, &quot;a,e,i,o,u&quot;.  It has some reduction or shortcuts that happen in typical use, but &lt;em&gt;there is no vowel reduction like in English&lt;/em&gt;.  The reductions or shortcuts typical are of another nature, like leaving out syllables in certain words, or omitting certain vowels in certain syllables in a predictable pattern (i.e. &quot;su&quot; becomes just &quot;s&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, nearly all possible syllable combinations made of commonly-used sounds, produce real words.  Furthermore, there is considerable overlap: some words are distinguished only by pitch accent, and some words are homonyms &lt;em&gt;even with the pitch accent&lt;/em&gt;.  It's not at all like in English where if you string together commonly-used sounds, you end up with mostly gibberish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, if you slur a single vowel and it gets misheard, someone might hear you as saying a completely different word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese also does not have stress...it is a &quot;mora-timed&quot; language, meaning it consists of syllables in an equally spaced rhythm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to speak Japanese and mispronounce vowels by shortening them, Japanese speakers will not always hear the words the way you intend them.  For example, I frequently hear English speakers mispronounce Japanese words shortening &quot;a&quot; into the schwa.  But native Japanese speakers will sometimes hear the schwa as closer to the &quot;o&quot;, depending on context.  This can lead people to miscommunicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think the key or &quot;interesting&quot; characteristic here is not whether or not languages have a schwa sound, but whether or not things reduce unstressed vowels to a schwa sound.  Mandarin Chinese has a staggering variety of vowels (far more than Japanese) but, like Japanese, it has tons of homonyms and you need to distinguish all the vowels in speaking because hearing a single vowel differently, will usually result in it sounding like a completely different word.  There are vowels in Mandarin Chinese that are very schwa-like, including neutral vowels where you basically leave your mouth in the same shape used to pronounce whatever consonant they follow, and also ones that occur in dipthongs that are very close to the sound of the schwa in English.  But they don't play the same role that the schwa does in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind, languages can shorten vowels to sounds other than a schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Turkish uses vowel harmony, but it isn't perfect in the sense that like, when you put a suffix on a word, the vowel gets reduced in a certain pattern.  Turkish does have a schwa sound too, it is denoted with a dot-less &quot;i&quot;, i.e. &quot;I/ı&quot;.  And sounds are sometimes reduced to this sound, but not always.  For example, to make &quot;Adam&quot; into the direct object using the accusative case, it would be &quot;Adamı&quot;, so the &quot;a&quot; vowel creates a schwa sound after it in the vowel harmony.  But the &quot;e&quot; vowel creates an &quot;i&quot;, so for example &quot;Ekmek&quot; becomes &quot;Ekmeği&quot;, and the same pattern plays out with other words, like &quot;Yer&quot; (eat) becomes &quot;yerim&quot; (I eat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start learning Turkish, you'll realize that the system of vowel harmony is pretty intuitive...when you speak fast, certain sounds wouldn't get distinguished, but others would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I think the &quot;interesting&quot; question here is a little broader.  Just having a schwa or not, isn't the same as reducing vowels.  Languages can have no schwa-like vowel (like Japanese) and not reduce vowels.  Or they can have a schwa-like vowel (like Mandarin) and also not reduce vowels.  And they can have a schwa (like English) and reduce vowels to them a lot.  Or they can have a schwa (like Turkish) and reduce them sometimes in a sort of predictable pattern in certain circumstances but not in the exact same pattern as English nor as often as English in situations where we would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think, whatever happens, it comes down to the language needing to be understood as it is spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19851" LastEditorUserId="19851" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T16:53:03.020" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:53:03.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T23:04:02.833" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been looking into words like &quot;pure&quot; and &quot;cube&quot; and I sometimes get /pʲɔɹ/ and /kʲub/, but other times I get /pjɔɹ/ and /cjub/. I know some Slavic languages make the distinction between those two, and I would like to eventually be able to articulate that difference, as well as learn which IPA representation is more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18554" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T23:59:34.250" Title="What is the difference in articulation between /CjV/ and /CʲV/?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21572" CreationDate="2017-08-28T23:16:03.447" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Indo-Uralic split up in 10,000 BC, some of them mixed with North Caucasians (Indo-Europeans), while the others mixed with Vasconic Samis (Uralo-Yukaghirs). The two halves migrated away from each other and became different. The original center of the Indo-Uralic people was the north shore of the Caspian Sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T23:16:03.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25809" CreationDate="2017-08-28T23:59:34.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no IPA principle that prefers superscript rather than regular &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; based on pronunciation alone. Both [pj] and [pʲ] identify the same phonetic fact, but differ in phonological analysis. In writing [pj], the claim is that there is a cluster of consonants, the second being a palatal glide. In writing [pʲ], the claim is that there is a palatalized consonant. You have to call on some phonological theory to decide which is more appropriate for the facts of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a sequence like &quot;pj&quot; can appear anywhere &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; can, including before other consonants, people are more likely to posit palatalization as a secondary articulation and call the thing [pʲ]. If it only appears before vowels, it's more likely to be treated as a cluster &lt;em&gt;p+j&lt;/em&gt;. You might have stronger evidence for a cluster analysis if for example the language allows only two consecutive consonants and breaks up three-C clusters with an epenthetic vowel, and you find that /pjt/ becomes pjVt] but /pj/ remains unchanged. Contrarily, if you find that /p/ becomes &quot;pj&quot; &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; a front vowel (thus &lt;em&gt;ip → ipj&lt;/em&gt;), it is more likely that people would treat that as secondary articulation, thus [ipʲ]. However, these kind of arguments are not particularly compelling on their own, and only hold relative to some concept of what a possible phonological rule is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people, for example Steriade at different times, have tended to deny the distinction between a cluster and complex segment. Fujimura's CD model, in fact, rejects the distinction, in favor of complex articulations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T23:59:34.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25742" CreationDate="2017-08-29T01:20:00.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you are asking this question because you have read that the perfective is used for completed actions. This is perfectly true. But it is important to understand in what sense they are completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actions described by perfective verbs are completed in the sense that they stop because they have accomplished their object. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Я открыл дверь. (I opened the door.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a completed action. It is not simply discontinued as if it had ceased to be interesting and rewarding to the one doing it. It is completed because it has accomplished its purpose. Opening a door allows one to see what is on the other side and to pass through. If one is telling a story, saying that a door was opened moves the narrative ahead by one step. This ability to propel the narrative is what it means for a verb to be perfective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verbs you cite simply do not describe such a decisive action. For example &quot;наблюдать&quot; means &quot;to observe&quot; in the sense of &quot;I observed how the birds raise their young.&quot; This is an extended passive activity which does not create new possibilities all by itself. Thus it is an imperfective idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to needing something as expressed by &quot;нуждаться&quot;. Needing  is not a real action it is more of a state. It is not a decisive action like opening a door or an act which one can carry to completion. On cannot &quot;do a needing&quot;. One can only cease to need. Thus it too is an imperfective idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5681" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T01:20:00.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25757" CreationDate="2017-08-29T11:20:47.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you are looking for are 'linear mixed models'. You can fit them with subjects and items as random factors with varying intercepts and slopes to control for and measure their influence on the ratings when you fit so called 'maximal models'. Fitting these models is pretty easy with R. If you look into the recent literature from experts in the field of experimentally gathered judgement data, this is also what most researchers do, even if the model assumptions are violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10323" LastEditorUserId="10323" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T11:30:59.697" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T11:30:59.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25779" CreationDate="2017-08-29T15:01:27.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Antonino Traina, &lt;em&gt;Nuovo vocabolario siciliano-italiano compilato da Antonino Traina&lt;/em&gt; (1869):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(A Napoli dicon vinella, quasi vena o venatura della città. A me pare che il nostro derivi meglio da vano; ma non sappiamo se il nostro sia nato dal Napolitano o viceversa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michele Pasqualino, in &lt;em&gt;Vocabolario Siciliano etimologico, Italiano e Latino&lt;/em&gt; (1795) mentions a similar connection (Latin &lt;em&gt;venula&lt;/em&gt;), and expresses doubt that it comes from &lt;em&gt;veniendo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the age of these sources. I've been unable to find more recent ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13780" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T15:01:27.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T19:40:04.510" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to say in German, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I speak a little German&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, you would say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;ein wenig&quot; is reminiscent of the English phrase &quot;a little&quot;, but what is interesting about &quot;ein wenig&quot; is that it is not an adverb proper. It belongs to a different class called an adverbial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you classify the English phrase &quot;a little&quot;? Is it also an adverbial? And how would you classify the word &quot;little&quot; (in this usage) on its own? It does not seem to be an adverb here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T19:40:04.510" Title="Does &quot;a little&quot; (en) correspond to the same grammatical class as &quot;ein wenig&quot; (de)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T19:51:39.227" Score="6" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a reliable, reasonably up-to-date historical-comparative grammar of Sanskrit written in English? Failing that, what are the standard works for historical Sanskrit phonology and morphology in other European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T06:28:44.117" Title="Good recent historical grammar of Sanskrit, preferably in English?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25816" CreationDate="2017-08-30T08:52:28.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Burrow’s &lt;em&gt;The Sanskrit language&lt;/em&gt; (1955) is still very good (though pre-laryngealist). There is also an English translation of Mayrhofer’s &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit-Grammatik&lt;/em&gt;, which is short but also very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T08:52:28.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25522" CreationDate="2017-08-30T09:51:24.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my bid: &lt;em&gt;The r medio-passive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the discovery of Tocharian, the r medio-passive was already known from Italic and Celtic. Tocharian evidence asserts that it is a feature of Indogermanic (and not an Italo-Celtic innovation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T09:51:24.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-30T13:09:55.797" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can there be a &lt;strong&gt;SINGLE&lt;/strong&gt; standard Latin script (mainly for International purposes) which properly represent standard Iranian Persian, Afghan Persian and Tajik Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially the different vowels seems to be an issue (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_phonology#Historical_shifts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;historical vowel shifts&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;Persian phonology - Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples which are merely suitable for Iranian Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unipers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UniPers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pársik&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, things get more complicated when we consider Afghan and Tajik Persian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word for fruit میوه is pronounced mīvé in Iranian Persian but&#xA;mēwa in Afghan Persian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The long vowel in زود &quot;quick&quot; and زور &quot;strong&quot; is realized as /ū/ in Iranian Persian [&lt;strong&gt;zūd&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;zūr&lt;/strong&gt;], in contrast, these words are pronounced /&lt;strong&gt;zūd&lt;/strong&gt;/ and /&lt;strong&gt;zōr&lt;/strong&gt;/ respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonology differences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15579" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T10:05:07.033" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T16:21:39.240" Title="How is it possible to use a single Latin alphabet for Persian which will represent ALL three standards?" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25824" CreationDate="2017-08-30T18:30:00.647" Score="0" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;What grammatical feature is being used, when we say something like, &quot;I drink a cup of coffee&quot;? In this sentence we have one noun modifying another noun, &quot;coffee&quot; modifying &quot;cup&quot;. Would &quot;cup&quot; or even &quot;a cup of&quot; be an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;determiner&lt;/a&gt;? If not, how would you describe these X of Y sentences in grammatical terms, where X and Y are nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a very last question, would the grammatical terms used be the same in both English in German, where in German you would say, &quot;Ich trinke eine Tassee Kaffee&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastEditorUserId="14150" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T18:48:52.777" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T04:36:34.910" Title="How would you describe X of Y phrases where X and Y are nouns?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25823" CreationDate="2017-08-30T21:25:11.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Cup of&quot; is not a determiner for &quot;coffee&quot;; rather, &quot;of coffee&quot; is a restriction of &quot;cup&quot;.  'X of Y' means that Y possesses X (Y has X) (X is a part of Y).  This is clear in expressions like &quot;leaf of tree&quot; or &quot;top of table&quot;.  It is less clear in &quot;box of books&quot; or &quot;cup of coffee&quot; because X is a container of Y.  We might use 'with' instead of 'of', but 'of' uses simpler phonemes.  English can specify just the container with &quot;book box&quot; or &quot;coffee cup&quot;, but not the entire set sans preposition: *&quot;box books&quot; or *&quot;cup coffee&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T21:25:11.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T02:39:45.013" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do distributed-frequency, distributed-frequency cum-age, raw-frequency, and raw-frequency-cum-range mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are mentioned on &lt;a href=&quot;http://lbms03.cityu.edu.hk/theses/abt/phd-ctl-b42000269a.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Second, young age group under 15 rely more on core vocabulary than adults. For age group over 15 years old, core vocabulary occupies a stable ratio in their mental lexicon despite age increase. Each age group tends to acquire more core words selected on the basis of distributed-frequency-cum-age than those selected on the basis of raw frequency or raw-frequency-cum-range (e.g., Longman Defining Vocabulary, Oxford Defining Vocabulary, i.e. Oxford 3,000)&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19862" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T02:39:45.013" Title="What do distributed frequency and raw frequency mean?" Tags="&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3378" CreationDate="2017-08-31T07:25:55.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only half an answer, unfortunately (I came here looking for the same thing!) — but I'd like to point out that the technical term for what you're looking for, is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-phonemic pronunciation respelling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of what you need exists already — that is, a thorough mapping of “IPA” to “truh-DISH-shən-uhl” does exist, here, on Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Pronunciation_respelling_key&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Pronunciation_respelling_key&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that helps somebody in building towards a “quick IPA translator for English speakers!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19863" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T07:25:55.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25770" CreationDate="2017-08-31T09:27:00.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_anyone_know_of_an_annotated_corpus_for_extractive_summarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of extractive summary corpora&lt;/a&gt; can be found over on ResearchGate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, a quick search revealed multiple papers on supervised extractive summarization (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1599205&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/data.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DUC&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://tac.nist.gov/data/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TAC&lt;/a&gt; datasets. Although I've not personally worked with these datasets, if they're used in supervised learning approaches they should contain the information you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T09:27:00.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T14:04:55.377" Score="2" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a conlanger and I would like to know when PGmc was spoken for a new Germanic/Italic conlang I am making.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19865" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T03:11:30.420" Title="When was Proto-Germanic spoken?" Tags="&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T17:01:13.710" Score="4" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I've been thinking about lately. You look up any reconstructed proto-language, you'll probably find an estimate as to when it was spoken. But how can this number be determined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research, these numbers came from an outdated theory that languages all change at the same rate (which has clearly been proven false), thus you can date a proto-language by the number of changes that have occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if this method has long since been debunked, then why are the results of it still widely accepted? That doesn't make any logical sense. Why would you continue to accept the results decades after the method used to determine said results has been debunked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T13:05:43.567" Title="How are proto-languages dated?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T22:24:33.290" Score="2" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found that Arabic doesn't have the sound P - and they use B instead of it (when they pronounce non-Arabic words that contain the sound P, obviously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other language not having the sound/phoneme P?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19869" LastEditorUserId="19869" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T16:31:46.187" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T16:31:46.187" Title="Languages missing the sound P?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25831" CreationDate="2017-09-01T00:33:57.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean &quot;lack voiceless bilabial stops&quot;, there are a number. In Afro-Asiatic I know of Somali, Tigre, Soqotri, Berber languages in general (there may be specific exceptions), Beja. Proto-Athabaskan has no bilabials so this carries over to many daughter languages (Tanaina, Tutchone, Tanacross, Tagish, Sarcee), and they are also lacking in Tlingit, Eyak and Ket (related) and Tillamook (not related except maybe areally, with Athabascan influence). Most Irooquoian languages lack it (Cherokee does) -- e.g. Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora; add in Yoruba, Efik and a number of Grassfield languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T00:33:57.227" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25830" CreationDate="2017-09-01T10:35:16.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the obvious fact: Any proto-language must precede its descendants by quite some amount of time, this gives a data point for the end of the proto-language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some (heavily debated, but much used) internal linguistic methods that estimate time depths by the amount of language change. These methods are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottochronology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, external evidence is used: Does the reconstructed proto-language have a common word for some cultural artifact (domesticated animals, cultivated plants, invented or newly introduced things)? in the case, it must post-date the invention or introduction of that artefact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tying a linguistic group to some archeological artifacts (e.g., some style of ceramics) is also often done, although the ceramics does not tell anything about the language of its makers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also attempts to align genetic markers of origin with languages and use the dates from genetic changes to estimate the age of a proto-language (but languages can be learned by genetically unrelated people).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those methods all put together lead to some estimates that are more or less trusted in the community. There is always a rather large error margin on those estimates as well—you will see ranges covering a millennium or more for the proto-language's age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T13:05:43.567" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T13:05:43.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T17:58:00.840" Score="4" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just a video of a guy who delivered the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet in the modern received pronunciation of (British) English and then the same lines in what he claimed was the original accent of Shakespeare - which sounded close to a Celtic or a &quot;Pirate&quot; accent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since we don't have any recordings of the period, how can we make any statements at all of what people's accents were like at the time? Or are they just using social and historical conjectures to estimate what the accent might have sounded like? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written records allow us to trace the evolution vocabulary, but I don't see how we can trace the evolution of sounds and pronunciation in any objective way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastEditorUserId="13931" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T12:30:50.960" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T12:30:50.960" Title="How is it possible to reconstruct old accents of a language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25835" CreationDate="2017-09-01T22:43:58.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes we have documents that talk about how things were pronounced, especially when they criticize people for how they talk (the Romans were rather famous for that).  Texts like poems are also very helpful for knowing where words would have similar pronunciations or stresses, and can even help demonstrate sound evolutions despite spelling being the same.  On a similar note, inconsistent spellings that suddenly crop in after years of consistency may represent a sound in flux, especially if they later stabilize with the innovated form.  Many of those sound changes are relatively consistent across languages, which help confirm those observations (in the sense that we know condition A has resulted in innovation B in unrelated languages due to some known principal C).  Finally, we have documents where someone from one language reports on a word from another language and talks about how it sounds in relationship to their language, or more simply a word that gets imported and brings its pronunciation along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken together, there are generally enough pieces to put together to demonstrate how a language may have sounded with pretty high certainty.  If there aren't enough pieces, though, there may be several pronunciations that are consistent with the evidence, and absent more evidence, it may be impossible to know which is the most accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T22:43:58.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25835" CreationDate="2017-09-02T06:24:12.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I gather that &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; was written near the end of the 16 c., and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hart_(spelling_reformer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Hart&lt;/a&gt; was describing some facts of English in that time (Hart was an orthoepist/spelling reformer).  There is a discussion of what we can learn from Hart and other orthoepists about English pronunciation of that time in &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T06:24:12.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T09:27:09.787" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/25742/why-is-the-verb-to-need-and-to-observe-always-imperfective-in-slavic-languag/&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt;'s answer says that &quot;to need&quot; is imperfective because a perfective must be successfully completed, while many of the responses to &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/14942/is-the-perfective-aspect-used-to-indicate-failure/&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; seem to imply that a perfective doesn't need to complete it's objective but simply be a changed state. Can anyone clear this discrepancy up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19876" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T16:47:30.370" Title="Do perfectives have to be successfully completed?" Tags="&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T13:37:50.280" Score="3" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is recognition based on detecting individual phonemes, and not chunks such as morphemes or syllables?.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question were in relation to human perception, and the existence of phonetic boundary, that is visible when one change the VOT. VOT &amp;lt; 30 is recognised as /da/ and above is it detected as /ta/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/akPtD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/akPtD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some form of categorical perception is clear at this level, so why not use it in computers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17431" LastEditorUserId="17431" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:50:38.423" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T21:47:13.123" Title="Why is recognition based on phonemes and not syllables or morphemes?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T14:44:28.253" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) Good vocabulary, knowledge&#xA;of grammar, sense of style--all&#xA;are basic writing skills. 2) Basic&#xA;writing skills--good vocabulary,&#xA;knowledge of grammar, sense&#xA;of style-- can be learned by&#xA;almost everyone. In (2) the&#xA;series of appositives are &quot;good&#xA;vocabulary, knowledge of&#xA;grammar, sense of style&quot;. So by&#xA;definition &quot;The appositive is a&#xA;noun or noun phrase that&#xA;modifies another noun&quot; so it&#xA;means appositive comes after&#xA;the subject right? But my doubt&#xA;is can we use appostives before&#xA;a subject like in (1) and in (1)&#xA;which is the subject(i.e noun)&#xA;that modifies the noun phrases&#xA;&quot;Good vocabulary, knowledge of&#xA;grammar, sense of style&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19877" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T15:33:37.830" Title="Can we use appositives befor the subject?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25841" CreationDate="2017-09-02T15:33:37.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Appositive' means 'side by side', but as its purpose is to give additional information, the more definite noun phrase will usually come first (so we could call the extra info postpositive).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In (1), the list is the subject and 'all' is the postpositive (all [of the preceeding items]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My brother, Allen&quot; and &quot;Allen, my brother&quot; both have equal 'definiteness'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My brother, a doctor&quot; works, but *&quot;A doctor, my brother&quot; is weak because the definiteness increases in the postpositive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T15:33:37.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25840" CreationDate="2017-09-02T15:52:52.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Recognition' works at multiple levels, but (at the level you want) what we recognize are 'allophones'.  These are sometimes similar to syllables, and early alphabets were syllabic.  The muscle changes used to produce allophones allow representation as phonemes.  Converting allophones to phonemes is only needed when spelling with a [semi-]phonetic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T15:52:52.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25839" CreationDate="2017-09-02T16:06:25.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;perfective&lt;/strong&gt; predicate regards the action as a whole, and only subsets of that whole are regarded as &lt;strong&gt;imperfective&lt;/strong&gt;.  'To need' is no different than 'to eat' in terms of whether you can consider starting, progressing, interrupting or completing the action, or the entire (therefore started and stopped) action.  In English, the only real imperfective predicates are those that use the active participle (verb+'ing').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T16:06:25.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25846" CreationDate="2017-09-02T19:23:15.313" Score="-3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a non-English native (Arab)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have constructed the following epithet and want to check whether or not acceptable to English-natives' ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come across a thin layer of deposits-covered artifact on a riverbed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19882" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T12:50:35.063" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T12:50:35.063" Title="How Acceptability is this Epithet?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-09-04T12:31:28.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25845" CreationDate="2017-09-02T20:05:34.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;....of artifacts covered by deposits...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T20:05:34.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25850" CreationDate="2017-09-02T20:57:50.590" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that each language has one name in each language and that they are not necessarily the same. For example, &lt;em&gt;German&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Deutsch&lt;/em&gt; in German and &lt;em&gt;Allemand&lt;/em&gt; in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've just seen Sranan has six names in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sranan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sranan Tongo or Sranantongo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surinaams&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surinamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surinamese Creole&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taki Taki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that the case? (Please note: I'm not specifically asking for Sranan; I guess there are other examples)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11424" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:29:20.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T13:23:40.057" Title="Why do some languages have many names?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25848" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T21:39:37.097" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Predicate noun phrases (NPs) have different patterns of case in different languages.&#xA;Even closely related languages can show significant differences (Sigurðsson 2008). For example, among the Germanic languages, Danish, Norwegian and English standardly assign accusative case to predicate NPs, while Icelandic, Swedish and German have nominative predicate NPs (Maling &amp;amp; Sprouse 1995: 168).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern English regularly uses the accusative/objective case for predicate NPs (with a few possible exceptions in learned constructions, such as the acceptability for many speakers of sentences like &amp;quot;It is he who is...&amp;quot;—probably generated by a &amp;quot;him who&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;he who&amp;quot; &amp;quot;virus&amp;quot;, considering the common overextension to contexts like &amp;quot;Let he who is...&amp;quot;—and the unacceptability for many speakers of sentences like &amp;quot;*That is whom he is&amp;quot;—but &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; behaves differently from normal accusative NPs in other ways also, and &amp;quot;who&amp;quot; is the usual pronoun used in accuative contexts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think it is theoretically impossible for a version of English with nominative predicate NPs to exist, or to have existed. (If there are actually good theoretical reasons to suppose this is impossible, I would appreciate learning about them!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on ELU a while back about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/318508/being-he-him-is-not-easy-which-is-prescriptively-correct&quot;&gt;the prescriptive &amp;quot;traditions&amp;quot; about what case to use for predicate NPs&lt;/a&gt; in English in various contexts after non-finite forms of &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot; when nominative NPs are treated as a potentially grammatical option. There doesn't seem to have been any clear consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I ran into an annoying situation: some of the grammatical &lt;em&gt;explanations&lt;/em&gt; of the rules I encountered in old prescriptive grammar books seemed very unconvincing, but I couldn't see any way of refuting their &lt;em&gt;conclusions&lt;/em&gt; aside from the simple empirical counterargument &amp;quot;nobody speaks that way,&amp;quot; which is true but not very deep or interesting. Even if the rules seem arbitrary and senseless to me, for all I know it could be possible for a language to work that way. That bothers me a bit, because the rules don't just feel inconsistent with reality to me; they also seem to be in some way &lt;em&gt;internally&lt;/em&gt; inconsistent, and I was hoping I would be able to support this feeling somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I tried to look up some contemporary literature about case assignment to see if we have learned anything since the era of the prescriptivist writers that either adds support or takes support away from their prescribed rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after reading a bit, I still feel just as ill-equipped to evaluate the patterns of case usage described in e.g. Reed and Kellogg (who prescribe &amp;quot;Its being &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; should make no difference&amp;quot; alongside &amp;quot;I wish to be &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Icelandic has complicated patterns of case usage that are apparently challenging to describe in terms of modern case theory (Sigurðsson 2008). German speakers use predicate nominative NPs in contexts where it doesn't seem theoretically possible for nominative case to be assigned structurally (Haider 2010: 264 (6.3.2)), posing a problem for Maling &amp;amp; Sprouse's hypothesis that predicate NPs in Germanic languages always receive case structurally through specifier-head agreement (1995). It seems like just about anything goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Sigurðsson (2008) actually argues (to my understanding) that there is a &lt;em&gt;fundamentally&lt;/em&gt; non-one-to-one relationship between morphological case and the thing that syntactic theories of &amp;quot;Case&amp;quot; are about. If true, this would seem to sharply limit our ability to predict the distribution of morphological cases in a language using information about other morphological and  syntactic patterns of the language (Sigurðsson references a quote from Jespersen 'no one ever dreamed of a universal morphology'). (While I was writing this question, I was shown a link to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/947/are-there-any-recent-articles-on-the-current-state-of-case-theory&quot;&gt;Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?&lt;/a&gt; that mentions Marantz (1991), who also seems to take the position that m-case is not particularly correlated to the abstract &amp;quot;Case&amp;quot; of generative grammar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading Sigurðsson's arguments made me pessimistic, but I'm still curious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of literature that analyzes how a version of English with nominative PCs might or did &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; according to some modern theory of morphological case, and that gives &lt;strong&gt;predictions&lt;/strong&gt; about which morphological case(s) would be grammatical after non-finite forms in various contexts (e.g. to-infinitives after various types of subject control verbs and object control verbs, to-infinitives used as the subject of a clause, gerunds with genitive subjects)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone familar enough with contemporary theories of (m-)case to be able to do such an analysis, and describe it to me in an answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Haider, Hubert. 2010. &lt;em&gt;The Syntax of German.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maling, Joan and Rex A. Sprouse. 1995. Strutural Case, Specifier-Head Relations, and the Case of Predicate NPs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 2008. Externalization: the case of C/case. Lund University&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T22:00:06.720" Title="Are there any universals about how m-case can pattern for predicate NPs?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;predicatives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25847" CreationDate="2017-09-02T22:04:07.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason is that a language name reflects some historical fact, and many different historical facts are available for naming a language. Typically, language names are related to an ethnic identifier, but not everybody uses the same identifier for a group. Some names are more about &quot;what the people call themselves&quot; (for example Saami), some are about &quot;what other people call them&quot; (e.g. &quot;Eskimo&quot;), and some are about &quot;what some people think they call themselves&quot; (Snoqualmie, based on &lt;em&gt;sdukʷalbixʷ&lt;/em&gt;). There are many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;names for Germany&lt;/a&gt; because there have been many interactions between non-Germans and Germans. And then there is the fact that single languages can be the result of political mergers of different (albeit related) people – such as the Germans and Italians. Less frequently, a language may have two names &lt;em&gt;in that language&lt;/em&gt;, for example there are a number of Korean expression for Korean language, and North Saami is known as &lt;em&gt;davvisámegiella&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gollagiela&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &quot;North Saami language&quot; and &quot;golden language&quot;). Interestingly, the language Llogoori (the name of the language in the language) which is typically used by speakers when speaking English is &quot;Maragoli&quot; (additionally, westerners will render Llogoori as e.g. Luragoli, Logori, Logooli and similar variants). The origin of &quot;Maragoli&quot; is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for Taki-Taki (&quot;talk-talk&quot;), the names of Sranan Tongo derive from variants of something like Suriname with optional &quot;Tongo&quot; which means &quot;tongue&quot; (language). The source of Suriname is uncertain, but it might be from&#xA;the name of a local Taino indigenous group. I would say that &quot;Surinaams&quot; (which is Dutch) is not English, anymore than &quot;Deutsch&quot; or &quot;Kiswahili&quot; is English. Analogously, &lt;em&gt;za`aṭar&lt;/em&gt; is not a word of English, but it may be used in English sentences by English speakers, when talking about the stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T22:04:07.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25847" CreationDate="2017-09-02T22:19:47.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The names for a given language can be divided into exonyms and endonyms. Exonyms are the names given to the language (sometimes by extension, from the name given to the people who speak it) by foreigners and/or people who speak other languages. Endonyms are the names given to the language by the people who speak it. Exonyms can be simple adaptations of the main endonym to the phonology and morphology of the other language (such as French &lt;em&gt;anglais&lt;/em&gt; and Spanish &lt;em&gt;inglés&lt;/em&gt; for English), or they may be completely different (such as French &lt;em&gt;allemand&lt;/em&gt; for German). Some languages don't have an endonym; I'd bet most of these are the languages of primitive or isolated ethnic groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German is an example of a language with many exonyms. Wikipedia says this is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because of Germany's geographic position in the centre of Europe, as&#xA;well as its long history as a non-united region of distinct tribes and&#xA;states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So being the language of a large national entity that used to be made up of many tribal groups or of many smaller former states might be one factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Sranan, it's a &lt;em&gt;lingua franca&lt;/em&gt;, i. e. by definition a language spoken by people of many different ethnic groups and linguistic backgrounds, as a second or auxiliary language, but it's also not the official or prestige language of an important national entity, which might have imposed on it one official endonym. As we see in the case of German, having a well-established endonym is not enough, but it would surely help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language (actually language family) currently known as Quechua is an example of an endonym imposed from the outside. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru the Inca Empire had just achieved its peak but as far as we know there was no unified name for the language spoken by the people around Cusco. The Spaniards called it &lt;em&gt;lengua general&lt;/em&gt;; the natives referred to it as &lt;em&gt;runa simi&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;the language of people&amp;quot;, and then they also used a word, &lt;code&gt;/qitʃwa/&lt;/code&gt;, which might have been the name for the temperate valleys of the Andes, and which the Spaniards transcribed as &lt;em&gt;quichua&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;quechua&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this day there's a squabble over whether Spanish should be called &lt;em&gt;español&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;castellano&lt;/em&gt;, because Spain is made up of several linguistic communities and what most people call &lt;em&gt;español&lt;/em&gt; (or its equivalent forms in other languages) is only the standard language derived from that of the old kingdom of Castille (just as modern standard Italian is derived from the Tuscan dialect). So it might be the case that the language of a national entity can have several endonyms because the different groups within that nation don't agree on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="28236" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T13:23:40.057" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T13:23:40.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9564" CreationDate="2017-09-02T22:33:24.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/Grano.finalthesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘Me and her’ meets ‘he and I’:&#xA;Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns&lt;/a&gt;”, &#xA;by Thomas Grano (2006) seems relevant. Grano says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The puzzling distribution of case in English coordinated pronouns has sparked &lt;strong&gt;a number of attempted&#xA;  explanations.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some explanations take case variation to be syntax-internal, and among these, some model it&#xA;  as resulting from optionality (Schwartz 1985, Johannessen 1998) or underspecification (Parker et al. 1988) in the syntax, and others model it as constraint reranking (Sadock 2005) or reweighting (Quinn 2005). Still, other explanations take case variation to be the result of a natural variation-free grammar pitted against explicit prescriptive instruction, through which speakers adopt either&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; transformational rules (Emonds 1986) or grammatical viruses (Sobin 1997) in an attempt to conform to the prescriptive standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 23)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Maybe one of the options is not &quot;grammatical&quot;, only &quot;acceptable&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solution is to say that the &quot;naive&quot; opinion of native English speakers is wrong, and one of the two options is ungrammatical after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you ask a speaker to judge a sentence, you're really getting an acceptability judgement, not a grammaticality judgment in the technical sense of &quot;grammaticality&quot;. And there are reasons to suspect a sentence may be judged acceptable even if it is not &quot;grammatical&quot; from a theoretical perspective. Norbert Hornstein has made various posts about this on the generative-grammar blog &quot;Faculty of Language&quot;; e.g &lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2013/02/acceptability-and-grammaticality.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acceptability and Grammaticality&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2015/09/degrees-of-grammaticality.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Degrees of grammaticality?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2015/09/judgments-and-grammars.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Judgments and grammars&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem like a reversion to the pre-scientific viewpoint of the prescriptivists, but there are various reasons to suppose that speakers sometimes systematically produce and accept constructions that are not &quot;grammatical&quot; in a generative-grammar sense. E.g. do we really expect a synchronic grammar of English to account for the remnant uses of the subjunctive in sentences like &quot;God save the queen&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preminger (2017) seems to take this viewpoint about the case of coordinated noun phrases in English: he says sentences like &quot;My mother and I went to the market&quot; aren't actually grammatical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(18) a. He&lt;sub&gt;c1&lt;/sub&gt; is here on time.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;b. Her&lt;sub&gt;c2&lt;/sub&gt; and him&lt;sub&gt;c2&lt;/sub&gt; are here on time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;➻ I’m assuming, with Sobin (1997), that the other forms are just prescriptive (hyper)correction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;that they exist doesn’t mean we should shove them in the grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;any more than the existence of “Numeral NP do/does not a NP make” means we should make the grammar of English verb-final&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preminger, Omer. &lt;a href=&quot;http://omer.lingsite.org/files/Preminger---DP60-slides.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Case in 2017: some thoughts&lt;/a&gt;. UMD Department of Linguistics &amp;amp; Maryland Language Science Center (Workshop in Honor of David Pesetsky’s 60th Birthday)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sobin explains the acceptability of constructions like &quot;My mother and I&quot; as the result of a post-grammatical &quot;virus&quot; that changes &quot;and me&quot; to &quot;and I&quot;. This is supposed to account for the over- and underextension of the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This position with respect to examples like these is discussed in more detail in my and Ron Maimon's answers to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/313/when-do-i-use-i-instead-of-me&quot;&gt;When do I use “I” instead of “me?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on ELU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Maybe there are multiple valid sources of case assignment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is an optional process that results in an alternative case assignment. While I'm less certain about this position, I think I encountered it in a paper by Joan Maling and Rex A. Sprouse, &quot;Strutural Case, Specifier-Head Relations, and the Case of Predicate NPs&quot; (1995).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maling &amp;amp; Sprouse provide the following example of variation in case assignment from Icelandic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Jón  bað   mig,  [CP að PRO vera fljótur/fljótan]                  Pred AP&#xA;   John asked me-ACC    to     be   quick-NOM/quick-ACC&#xA;&#xA;b.  Jón  bað   mig,   [CP að PRO vera dyravörður/dyravörð]            Pred NP&#xA;    John asked me-ACC     to     be   doorkeeper-NOM/doorkeeper-ACC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They explain it by saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let us consider this to be an instance of the phenomena traditionally known as &lt;strong&gt;Case Attraction&lt;/strong&gt;. Under our assumptions &lt;strong&gt;it is not obvious why this alternation is possible&lt;/strong&gt;. However, let us assume that the case of the controller may &lt;strong&gt;optionally&lt;/strong&gt; be copied onto PRO (as long as PRO is not assigned lexical case by the embedded predicate). Then the paradigm in (11) above and in (12)-(13) below will follow straightforwardly. In (11), PRO may either receive structural nominative from I or it may receive structural accusative via Case Attraction. &lt;strong&gt;In either case, I will serve as the source for case features&lt;/strong&gt; for the predicate NP...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 173)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T09:43:48.840" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T09:43:48.840" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25855" CreationDate="2017-09-02T22:55:01.910" Score="2" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading up on pharyngealization and I have the somewhat foggy idea that it might be triggered by pharyngeal (obviously) and other &quot;back of the mouth&quot; sounds, but I haven't found any well-rounded study of the likely or attested (diachronic) origins of (phonemic) pharyngealization across languages and language families. My first question would be whether there's a &lt;strong&gt;cross-linguistic theory of the origins of pharyngealization&lt;/strong&gt;, or something that might approach that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question would be: &lt;strong&gt;what sounds are most likely to undergo distinctive pharyngealization?&lt;/strong&gt; The Semitic examples I've read about seem to imply that alveolar consonants are prime targets for it, but is that so? Are labial or velar consonants then less likely to be pharyngealized? What do they do instead, if anything, in the same context where an alveolar consonant is pharyngealized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:24:41.200" Title="Origin and likelihood of pharyngealization" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25852" CreationDate="2017-09-02T23:14:38.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(partial answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the uvular stop in Semitic languages is often thought to have developed from an earlier &quot;emphatic&quot; velar stop. I think there are some extant Semitic languages where it is realized with some kind of secondary articulation rather than a simple uvular POA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#Emphatics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that emphatic &quot;p&quot; also occurs/occured in some Semitic languages (Hebrew and Ge'ez), although it might have been a secondary development related to loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, aside from that, I don't know the answer to your question because pharyngealized consonants seem to be relatively rare and in Semitic, the most well-known group of languages that have them, they are already present in the reconstructed proto-language (although descendent languages may have somewhat different distributions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In loanwords into Semitic, words that in the source language had unaspirated voiceless stops or back vowels have sometimes been given naturalized pronunciations with &quot;emphatic&quot; consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T23:20:01.447" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T23:20:01.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11296" CreationDate="2017-09-02T23:59:14.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on chapter 2 (section 8: &quot;Infinitival &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;) of &lt;em&gt;Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English&lt;/em&gt; by Andrew Radford (2004), and &quot;Auxiliaries: To's company&quot; (2012) by Robert Levine in &lt;em&gt;Journal of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Infinitival &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is an auxiliary. It is the same category as the other auxiliaries, but it is considered &quot;defective&quot; in a single respect; it does not have inflected forms. It's as simple as that. All the properties you can come up with in which &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; seems to differ from finite auxiliaries, it shares with non-finite auxiliaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some reasons to believe &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is an auxiliary? The most intuitive one is the structural parallel. Like other auxiliaries, &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; takes as a complement a verb phrase headed by a bare verb or non-finite auxiliary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John expects Mary &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;   [like Bill]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John expects Mary &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; [like Bill]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John expects Mary &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; [have liked Bill]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John expects Mary &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; [have liked Bill]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most widespread argument for the analysis of &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; as an auxiliary is that it is capable of elliptical stranding, a property characteristic of auxiliaries. Notice that both finite and non-finite auxiliaries have this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They said that John would have gone to the store...&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he should &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he expects &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, in Verb Phrase (VP) topicalization, auxiliaries are not fronted with the VP but left behind. This is true of both finite and non-finite auxiliaries. Sentences with fronted auxiliaries are ungrammatical, even when they are non-finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They said that John would go to the store... &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and [VP go to the store] he should &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*and [VP &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; gone to the store] he should ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; has the same distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I now have the evidence to challenge all those involved... &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and [VP challenge them] I intend &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*and [VP &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; challenge them] I intend ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; also patterns along with non-finite auxiliaries in its acceptance of stress. Non-finite auxiliaries resist contrastive stress (indicated below by an acute accent) before a gap created by VP-deletion. This property is shared by infinitival &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;They wanted John to meet Mary... &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he shóuld &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*and he should &lt;strong&gt;háve&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;and he wánted &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*and he wanted &lt;strong&gt;tó&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer above points out that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; cannot precede clausal negation. It would not be unreasonable at first glance to see this as a problem for the analysis of &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; as an auxiliary. However, in reality, the fact that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; cannot precede clausal negation follows straightforwardly from &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;'s status as a non-finite auxiliary. Notice that the same distribution is shared by non-finite auxiliaries. In the following, the interpretation of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as clausal negation is unacceptable. Only the interpretation of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; as VP negation obtains, making the relevant predicates &quot;not joke&quot; and &quot;not like.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;John may &lt;strong&gt;be not&lt;/strong&gt; joking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;John may &lt;strong&gt;have not&lt;/strong&gt; liked Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;John expects Mary &lt;strong&gt;to not&lt;/strong&gt; like Bill.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elliptical stranding makes the restriction more evident, as in the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*They said that John might not be joking, and he may &lt;strong&gt;be not&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*They said that John wouldn't like Mary, and he may &lt;strong&gt;have not&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;*They said that John expected Ann to like Bill, but he expected Mary &lt;strong&gt;to not&lt;/strong&gt; ___.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; follows negation is therefore not an argument against its status as an auxiliary; it should actually be considered evidence that it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another property which comes as a consequence of &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;'s being a non-finite auxiliary is that it cannot undergo inversion, which is what a previous answer seems to be getting at with the claim that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; must follow &quot;complementizers, foci, [and] subjects.&quot; Tensed auxiliaries undergo inversion in English, for instance in questions and stylistic inversion, but non-finite auxiliaries do not; as a &lt;em&gt;non-finite&lt;/em&gt; auxiliary, &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is completely unexceptionable in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a summary of the above evidence that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is a non-finite auxiliary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; is distributionally and selectionally parallel to other auxiliaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; licenses elliptical stranding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; is left behind in VP-topicalization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; resists stress&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To&lt;/em&gt; follows clausal negation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in conclusion, let's reconsider the idea that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;defective.&quot; The allegedly &quot;defective&quot; property of &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is that it does not have inflected forms; how defective is that property, really? Notice that modal auxiliaries in fact lack uninflected forms. Are they defective as well? We might well say that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is defective, but we can only say so in the same capacity that we're willing to say modals are defective as well for their lacking uninflected forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote the last couple few of &quot;Auxiliaries: To's company&quot; because I think it's appropriate (the paper argues in favor of an argument originally made by Geoffrey Pullum in 1982 that &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is an auxiliary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Certainly there is room for argument – very few questions in the descriptive analysis of even as well-studied a language as English can be said to have been answered definitively – but I believe the preceding discussion vindicates Pullum’s (1982) original conclusions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19883" LastEditorUserId="19883" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T00:07:45.433" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T00:07:45.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25852" CreationDate="2017-09-03T02:02:12.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pharyngealization is encountered in Semitic; some Interior Salishan languages; some Caucasian like Ubykh, Tsakhur and Udi; !Xóõ; Chilcotin; Berber languages; Even.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, it is a feature of vowels (Udi, !Xóõ). Sometimes it is involves consonants, but in a way that points to effect-on-vowel as an important feature of pharyngealization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a connection between some Central Semitic pharyngealized (emphatic, uvularized) consonants and ejectives in South Semitic (Ethiopic and South Arabian, where the outcome is mixed and variable in South Arabian languages). There are various positions as to whether ejectives became pharyngealized or the converse: my limited grasp of the facts favors the &quot;originally pharyngealized&quot; hypothesis given the existence of pharyngealized &lt;em&gt;ḍ&lt;/em&gt; in Arabic corresponding to ʕ in some forms of Aramaic, plus the fact that there's no such thing as &quot;ejective d&quot;. I do think that it would be great to get a detailed Semitic-specific answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Arabic and Berber it is typically analyzed as a feature of certain consonants, though it also phonetically affects adjacent vowels (in Arabic, the influence on vowels is large enough that it can be the only cue indicating a pharyngealized consonant). The consonants which are phonemically pharyngealized are mainly coronal, but there are pharyngealized dorsals reported for some dialects of Arabic in Yemen, and low-frequency emphatic labials are reported in Syrian Arabic. In Berber, the proto-language apparently had just &quot;ḍ, ẓ&quot; but other coronals have been picked up under Arabic influence; some analyses treat pharyngealization as a high-level prosody that starts at one point and continues to the end (analogous to the situation described by Hoberman in his Language article on Aramaic). Proto-Afro Asiatic reconstruction have been essayed by Dolgopolsky, but reconstruction of earlier phonetic values is fraught with difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Interior Salishan, there were primary pharyngeal consonants in the proto-language, which seem to have given rise to a distinction between retracted and non-retracted (pharyngealized) vowels and consonants in Lilooet and some related languages, and the source of the retracted series seems to be a general vowel harmony which managed to give rise to a retracted lateral (the only consonant with the feature). Comparative work on proto-Salishan isn't thick on the ground, so the situation there is less than clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chilcotin, it's an automatic feature of alveolars (the language, which is Athabaskan, is coronal-rich, contrasting dentals, alveolars and palatals). It is not clear that there is a phonetic difference in the consonants, and one could treat them as the same as dentals, which trigger &quot;flattening&quot; (a vowel harmony process, roughly equivalent to spread of retraction in neighboring Interior Salishan which is the presumed source of this process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of Even seems to be a phonetic development from an ATR system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, there aren't any clear generalizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T02:02:12.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19134" CreationDate="2017-09-03T06:46:25.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a short and perhaps inadequate answer: the correspondence is briefly but clearly sketched in the wikipedia article &quot;pregroup grammar&quot;. The simplest pop-sci reference I know of is an article from Bob Coecke, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/NewScientist.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Scientist&lt;/a&gt;.  If you stare at the diagram that appears in that article, you will notice it has a very striking resemblance to the link-grammar diagrams in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/link/pub/www/papers/ps/tr91-196.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original link-grammar papers&lt;/a&gt;; and indeed, those authors mumble something about category theory in multiple publications. Once you see this, a light-bulb should go off: the types of type theory (see chapter 1-2 of the HoTT book) are more-or-less exactly the same thing as the link-types of link grammar, which are more-or-less the same things that the type constructors are constructing in the Lambek calculus and the categorial grammars. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear: type theory can be understood as category theory viewed from the side: the types are the types of morphisms; so e.g. simply-typed lambda calculus is the internal language of cartesian-closed categories; in this example, there is only one type. For the more general monoidal case, you have more types, which tell you when and how to form tensor products in the monoidal categories, and dually, when you can &quot;contract indexes&quot; (link them together with links). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship to Hopf algebras is &quot;shallow&quot;. So, for example, if you have an ordinary Hilbert space, you can form arbitrary tensors, but there is only one single type of index on those tensors, which you can contract freely.  That is, if you have a single Hilbert space, you can form a &quot;tensor algebra&quot; (see wikipedia), and the tensor algebra has a natural Hopf algebra structure. It sounds &quot;deep&quot; but it isn't: it's just saying, in a fancy, rigorous way, that you can form arbitrary tensors and make arbitrary contractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, the fun starts when you realize that you can have multiple kinds of indexes which can be tensored and contracted. Each distinct &quot;connector&quot; belongs to it's own Hopf algebra; the part that is interesting is that words can have multiple different kinds of connectors - e.g. a verb can connect to a subject and an object but cannot in general connect to some other verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This generalizes further to graphs -- instead of thinking of a graph as a set of vertexes and a set of edges connecting them, instead think of a graph as a set of vertexes (e.g. &quot;words&quot;) and a set of connectors on each vertex: a connector is &quot;half of an edge&quot;, and its type tells you what other connectors (half-edges) it can connect to. Edge types are then connector types. With this picture, you can view e.g. the English language as a sheaf, a la &quot;sheaf theory&quot;, where each dictionary word is festooned with connectors that can connect to other words. Then, word-phrases, colocations, &quot;institutional expressions&quot;, idioms, etc. are then sections of a sheaf, and obey the usual axioms of sheaf theory.  The lexis of natural language obeys the axioms of algebraic topology. So that's kind of neat. Abstract, and fun, but I'm not sure its useful or deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregroup_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregroup_grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the doors open, then you will find other writings by Bob Coecke enlightening on this topic.  To round out your education, John Baez has a nice article called the &quot;Rosetta Stone&quot;, which unfortunately fails to mention linguistics. But if you go through that paper, cross out the word &quot;symmetric&quot; everywhere you see it, and mentally substitute the non-symmetric ideas from &quot;pregroup grammar&quot;, then you can add one more column to the rosetta stone of equivalent things.  Its kind-of-neat, and it clarifies why linear-logic type ideas show up in linguistics (again, for example, in the link-grammar &quot;dictionary entries&quot; (lexical entries)).  I'm not sure that it's &quot;deep&quot; but it is fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mentioned &quot;quantum groups&quot;, but I don't believe that there is any connection.  Usually, a &quot;quantum group&quot; is the same thing as an &quot;affine Lie algebra&quot;, where you talk about q-series and q-polynomials on Virasoro algebras. There is nothing analogous in linguistics. You can, if you wish, slap probabilities and likelihoods onto connectors and links (e.g. on word-pairs or phrases) and compute the entropy for these (mutual information and max-entropy methods are a big deal in computational linguistics).  However, those probabilities do not obey any sort of Lie-algebra-type structure that I am aware of.  Numerical probabilities, Bayesian statistics doesn't &quot;work that way&quot;.  Some books on quantum groups start by blabbing about Hopf algebras, but the right way to think of Hopf algebras is as links and connectors, rather than in terms of assigning a real or complex numerical value to the objects.  In quantum, you have an &quot;algebra over a field&quot; with the field being the complex numbers, and that field is important, it holds your interest.  In linguistics, you have an algebra, but the field is irrelevant and plays no role. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19884" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T13:03:47.993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T13:03:47.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19131" CreationDate="2017-09-03T08:16:18.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I gave a long answer to a closely related question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19134/how-is-category-theory-applied-in-linguistics/25856#25856&quot;&gt;How is category theory applied in linguistics?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer there talks mostly about category theory and quantum mechanics, so is much narrower in scope. But still perhaps its an adequate partial answer for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19884" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T08:16:18.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T09:22:32.267" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;An&#xA;Introductory Series of&#xA;Appositive. Example:The&#xA;depressed, the stressed, the&#xA;lonely, the fearful— all have&#xA;trouble coping with problems. My doubt is on which basis &quot;The&#xA;depressed, the stressed, the&#xA;lonely, the fearful&quot; these words considered as appositives? Could anyone please clarify my doubt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19885" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T18:36:36.147" Title="&quot;The depressed, the stressed, the lonely, the fearful&quot; are these appositives?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25840" CreationDate="2017-09-03T18:27:45.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the goal of writing a speech recognition program that does what the human mind does, a large non-linguistic front end must be dealt with first (a front end that is decidedly not part of linguistics), namely, how does the human auditory system work, starting at the ear? What exactly hits the brain coming from the primary auditory cortex, or later? If you can determine what kind of inputs are specifically linguistically processed (not undifferentiated sound which includes music and car horns), then the question of language perception (hence recognition) might be addressable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a completely non-linguistic question that has to be resolved (jointly by philosophy and experimental psychology), namely, what is &quot;perception&quot; or &quot;recognition&quot;? &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; do humans perceive (or, what is the nature of a &quot;perception&quot;), and what do they infer from what they perceive? In seeing a dog, do we &quot;perceive&quot; numerous minuscule attributes and infer that there is a dog, or do we perceive a dog, and infer numerous minuscule attributes? These are not linguistic question, but they need to be answered before answering the question w.r.t. language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic linguistic question analogous to the preceding is, do we perceive features and infer segments and so on, or do we perceive larger things (like utterances) and infer smaller things (down to the feature). And how could you ever tell? There is no coherent way to maintain the &quot;perceive big, analyze down to the small&quot; theory at least at the utterance-based end of speech. If we required an entire utterance in order to perceive language and had to figure out what the parts are based on that primary percept, you would predict that people had no idea what was said until the utterance was complete, at which point they can proceed to break up the utterance. That is patently absurd, and while it's not as obvious for English because of the relative shortness of words, it is also absurd for words as the basic unit of perception. You don't have to have experienced the entire word in order to know what sounds and parts of the word you're heard: you can cut off various amounts of the &quot;allomorphy&quot; and still be aware that the person has said &quot;allo(m(or(ph(y))))&quot;. It's untenable to say that people directly perceive morphemes. We can't even decide where the morpheme breaks are, and the determination that the substring &lt;em&gt;xyz&lt;/em&gt; is a morpheme may not be decidable until the end of the word. Morphemes are like underlying representations: they are the product of relatively sophisticated computation, involving a lot of analysis so that you can unify surface [mi,mu,mɨ,my] as realizations of a single morpheme. Morphemes, words and utterances have in common the fact that they are defined not in terms of what you hear, but state a relationship between what you hear and how you use it (e.g. &quot;is that a complete sentence? is that a well-formed word? can you assign a semantic / grammatical function to that much of the sound input?&quot;). The physical thing that is presented to people for decoding is sound, not function, but if you assume that people perceive words (etc) and discover sound properties from analysis of what they've perceived, you have to explain, on what basis can they know the function of something that they haven't yet discovered by analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three most credible and obvious candidates for the basic perceptual unit are sound-based things, the feature, the segment, and the syllable; the fourth, non-obvious but credible, is the demi-syllable (basically, a stretch of vocalic and consonantal material which isn't necessarily a whole syllable). Theoretical considerations favor the feature as the basic unit of sound perception: there are maybe 2 dozen features, and parsing on the basis of features is most economical. However, the relationship between features and the raw data is extremely complicated, to the point that one would have to smuggle a lot of inferential mechanism into your theory of perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Segments are reasonably credible, but less economical: there might be dozens or even a couple hundred segments (in Khoisan languages with over-loaded segment inventories). Syllables are very non-economical: the number of distinct units that would be perceived under a syllable-as-percept theory is usually big and may be gargantuan, depending on clustering possibilities and inventory size in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But constructing an empirical argument for a particular choice is non-trivial. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0443.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Categorical perception&lt;/a&gt;&quot; tests establish that in English (and a few other languages), speakers are sensitive to the narrow range of variation of certain acoustic correlates of phoneme differences, especially voice onset time. By manipulating a stimulus, speakers will respond &quot;pie&quot; vs. &quot;buy&quot; based on the particular manipulation, because the task is to make a categorical choice (what word is it?). They could be primitively perceiving syllables, or they could be primitively perceiving segments, and the task really does not tell you which it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've referred to what I hold to be the basic unit of perception as &quot;the segment&quot;, so as to avoid the definitional problem of phones vs. phonemes. They are both instances of the genus &quot;segment&quot;, where phone is viewed from a perspective that is closer to the physical input, and phoneme is viewed from the higher-level grammatical perspective of function in a language. English has a number of voiceless velar phones – [k kʰ kʷ kʷʰ kʲ kʲʰ k˺] – and one voiceless velar phoneme, [k]. I do not believe that there is enough empirical evidence to support a claim that people perceive phones and analyze that into phonemes, or vice versa, so I don't make a claim. One &quot;resolution&quot; of the matter is to say that by definition, people perceive speech in terms of phonemes, and therefore you use (currently nonexistent) knowledge of the primitive units of perception as your definition of &quot;phoneme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T21:47:13.123" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T21:47:13.123" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25858" CreationDate="2017-09-03T18:36:36.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are not appositives. Apposition is when one noun phrase describes another. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Solomon, a wise king, ruled the Kingdom of Israel for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, the phrase &quot;a wise king&quot; is placed in apposition with Solomon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, there is simply a series of independent noun phrases, separated by commas. None of them describe the other in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T18:36:36.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25784" CreationDate="2017-09-04T12:07:01.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The status of /s/ and sC clusters does indeed pose a problem for phonotactics. /sp, sk/ violate the sonority profile; /sl/ violates constraints against identical place of articulation (POA) in onset; /st/ violates both; and /sn/ violates three phonotactic constraints: sonority, POA, and sonority distance of onsets (other Cn onsets are not permitted in English). Furthermore, sC clusters permit different POAs in 2nd position e.g./sp, st, sk/; whereas POA is restricted in other onsets clusters, mostly coronal /r,l/ e.g. /pr,pl,tr,kr,kl/. In all these ways, /s/ behaves in a special way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has led some people to propose that /s/ is an appendix linked to a level higher than the syllable in prosodic structure (e.g. Goldsmith 1990). In the Government Phonology framework, /s/ in sC is considered to be a coda. This view is recently developed by Goad (2012) &quot;sC Clusters are (almost always) coda-initial&quot;. Goad argues against the perceptually-based account by pointing out that cross-linguistically s+stop are the most common sC clusters. The perceptual cues to C in sC will be compromised by /s/; therefore, we would expect the most common sC to have a C with robust internal cues such as s+liquid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding /ks/: according to English phonotactics, this would be syllabified as /k.s/; otherwise, it would violate the sonority distance principle. In English, onset profiles cannot consist of stop+fricative or stop+nasal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T12:07:01.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T14:58:38.700" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a complete linguisitic novice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been exploring text analytic tools and I have become interested in how to extract interactions, mainly between humans in fictional text. I am trying to understand how to frame the problem and to find out what kind of things I should be looking up on Google or wherever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the field is probably hugely complicated depending on the level of interaction and what is defined as an interaction but if I could be given guidance as to the problem domain this falls into I would be very grateful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example paragraph is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to extract the following relationships:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Narrator (I)- wife&#xA;Dean-parents&#xA;Dean-Chad King&#xA;I-Chad King&#xA;Chad-Nietzsche&#xA;Carlo-I&#xA;Carlo-Dean&#xA;Dean-Marylou&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastEditorUserId="17091" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T20:37:29.263" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T20:37:29.263" Title="Understanding the problem realm of text interactions" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T20:35:05.673" Score="1" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I don't think it's been definitively proven, there is evidence to suggest that language is shaped, at least partially, by the physical landscape the speakers are using it in. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-countrys-land-shapes-its-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-countrys-land-shapes-its-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm preparing to work on a constructed language for a fictional culture that exists primarily at sea. I haven't yet determined if it will be a pidgin/creole or a separate language all it's own, but I am wondering how the sea/ocean itself will affect its phonology. If high altitudes encourage the use of ejectives (&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/can-geography-shape-the-way-we-speak/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;), are there any particular sounds that low altitude and high humidity would encourage or discourage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12595" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T17:06:50.997" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T17:06:50.997" Title="How would the ocean affect language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;geolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25864" CreationDate="2017-09-04T22:00:55.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a quick look to &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;, my initial impression is that the number of unusual features in world languages tends to increase with historical isolation. Geographical proximity and language contact may result in the formation of Sprachbünde, or areas of linguistic convergence, which favors the use of common features instead of unusual ones. Influential languages may become sources for loanwords and cause spelling irregularities and sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Also, standardization, which occurs in advanced literate societies for languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers, also aims to remove much of the unwanted or redundant complexity, creating a prestige dialect that will be taught at schools and spoken by most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that your sea-faring fictional culture has a rich merchant tradition and interacts with many other cultures, I think that it should have a fairly typical language. 5-6 vowels, not too many consonants, lack of complex consonant clusters. A quite typical syllable structure is (consonant)(glide)vowel(consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastEditorUserId="16950" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T06:36:52.377" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T06:36:52.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25829" CreationDate="2017-09-05T03:11:30.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Roughly, 500 BCE - 200 CE.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no firm date at which Proto-Germanic stops being Proto-Indo-European, or becomes other Germanic languages. These are all artificial divisions imposed on a continuous process of evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when people talk about Proto-Germanic, they generally mean the last common ancestor of the modern Germanic languages, which has been dated to somewhere around 500 BCE. To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NlExDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ringe&lt;/a&gt;, the best authority I know on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Germanic [...] is unlikely to have been spoken before about 2,500 years ago (ca. 500 BC).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...] This is not the only possible definition of PGmc [Proto-Germanic]; for instance, the 'Protogermanisch' of Euler 2009 is a somewhat earlier stage of development of that language.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...] Early Jastorf, at the end of the seventh century BC, is almost certainly too early for the last common ancestor of the attested languages [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the end of Proto-Germanic is generally said to be when different dialects have changed significantly enough to be analyzed on their own. The oldest inscriptions of any Germanic language are Proto-Norse, written in the Elder Futhark script; for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98vre_Stabu_spearhead&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Øvre Stabu spearhead&lt;/a&gt;, dated to the second half of the second century CE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not everyone considers Proto-Norse meaningfully distinct from Proto-Germanic. There's reasonable evidence of Proto-Norse from the second century onward, but no comparable evidence of other dialects, so we can't compare them to see when they become meaningfully different. The major changes which separated Old Norse from other attested languages (the three different types of umlaut) didn't happen until after 500 CE. So even if you don't consider Proto-Norse an independent language, that's a definite upper bound on the end date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T03:11:30.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T07:07:09.467" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do english-speaking people feel grammatical gender of words like &quot;California&quot; or  &quot;America&quot; being feminine and &quot;New York&quot; being masculine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of geographical names are obviously came from languages where grammatical genders easily recognized not only by those languages but also by some from related families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19900" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T10:27:44.317" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T16:22:29.967" Title="Do english-speaking people feel grammatical gender of words like &quot;California&quot; or &quot;America&quot; being feminine and &quot;New York&quot; being masculine?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25754" CreationDate="2017-09-05T07:25:49.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Opus corpus (open subtitles) has a chinese subcorpus.  It really comes much in handy when you want to train tools with parallel corpora. It is open source and the lannguage is derived from movies so it shouldn't be too traditional. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19872" LastEditorUserId="19872" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T15:14:19.507" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T15:14:19.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25868" CreationDate="2017-09-05T08:30:20.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. English speakers refer to all countries as &quot;it&quot;, not &quot;he&quot; or &quot;she&quot;, except occasionally in a poetic or rhetorical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T08:30:20.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2017-09-05T12:31:30.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/menschliche-kommunikation-das-wichtigste-wort-der-welt-1.1815029&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; (popular science, but quoting Mark Dingemanse of Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen), there is one such word given in German orthography as &lt;em&gt;hä?&lt;/em&gt; (English &lt;em&gt;huh?&lt;/em&gt;) meaning &quot;I don't understand you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here is a link to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://huh.ideophone.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original work&lt;/a&gt; (thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguihttps://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/1270/b-astics.stackexchange.com/users/1270/b-a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ba&lt;/a&gt; for the hint!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T12:15:14.617" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:15:14.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T12:46:04.957" Score="6" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just read a piece describing ablaut reduplication, where the first vowel is almost always a high vowel and the reduplicated ablaut variant of the vowel is a low vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: chit-chat, ding-dong, knick-knack, flip-flop, zig-zag, flimflam, hip hop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the underlying mechanism that gives rise to this pattern... Is it that high-to-low vowel is just easier for the muscles involved in speech? Is there other physiology or psychology involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19905" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T14:48:24.617" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T11:17:02.117" Title="Ablaut reduplication: why high vowel to low vowel?" Tags="&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25868" CreationDate="2017-09-05T14:00:40.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How people &quot;feel&quot; (regardless of their first language) can be quite subjective, and in a linguistic context even the word &quot;feel&quot; can have multiple interpretations. As such, a single English-speaker, picked at random, may associate with any of these geographical names a particular gender based on analogy with similar/familiar terms. For example, names of female individuals often (of course, not always) end in &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; (orthographically ⟨a⟩), e.g., Andrea, Antonia, Erica etc., and this may cause some individuals to build a feminine association with names like California or America. [In North Carolina, where I live, I have often heard of people refer to the state as a 'she' or 'her'.] But this should not be taken to imply that such words have a particular gender, since English definitely lacks grammatical gender, except in pronouns, which the answer by @fdb addresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't identify as a native English-speaker, but I do speak English like a native, and more importantly, my first language is genderless (more so than English; we even lack gendered pronouns), and I can vouch for the fact that while I may sometimes refer to a geographical/political location as masculine or feminine, I certainly do not associate with these any notion of actually possessing any biologically female or male attributes, the way I would for human beings or even some animals – at least, not in the way a Russian- or German-speaker would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T16:22:29.967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T16:22:29.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25873" CreationDate="2017-09-06T00:41:02.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a version of the general phenomenon of fixed-segmental reduplication. Many languages have partial reduplication where a particular element is a fixed phoneme (e.g. &lt;em&gt;di-dō&lt;/em&gt; from /dō/; &lt;em&gt;gbi-gbona&lt;/em&gt;). A number (smaller) have complete reduplication: &lt;em&gt;rimisirana-rimisirana&lt;/em&gt;. The English &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~inkelas/Papers/2013HandbookOfDerivationInkelas.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;echo reduplications&lt;/a&gt; mentioned above combine those two properties; likewise, Kolami &lt;em&gt;maasur-giisur&lt;/em&gt; ('men and the like') has a fixed constituent (the onset of the second syllable). Replacive vowel patterns are also found in a number of languages, such as the Munda language Gta', where root vowels are replaced in various ways for various effects (e.g. &quot;gross&quot;, &quot;tender&quot;, &quot;different&quot;), so fixed segmentalism is not limited to reduplication. (I would be remiss if I ignored Semitic root-and-pattern changes in vocalism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate historical explanation for the specific vowel pattern found in English is not clear, but it is something that languages do. It is fairly common in &quot;affective&quot; word-formation (i.e. processes that convey an added nuance to a meaning, as opposed to being a grammatical inflection). There does not seem to be any extensive study that assembles the facts and tries to discern universal patterns (e.g. is [ɪ-æ] more common than [æ-ɪ]). If the English choices and orders of vowels is just one of a myriad set of attested patterns, then there isn't much to explain other than &quot;what happened that &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; pattern got fixed and not [ɛ-u]?&quot;. It's really not know if there are significantly recurring patterns across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T00:41:02.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25873" CreationDate="2017-09-06T11:17:02.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found one study*, and though far too detailed and technical in its body for my purposes, seems to support the author's initial hypothesis, that 'basically, it just sounds good' [my paraphrase].  :/  I suppose if I wanted to pursue further, I would look for psycho- and/or physio-linguistic experts/reports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from Summary: &quot;The question of why English Ablaut reduplication imposes specific restrictions on the choice of vowels in the two halves of the structure has been addressed before, but the answers have not covered the empirical facts in a satisfactory way. This study proceeds from the assumption that English Ablaut reduplication follows a well-defined dipodic template composed of syllabic trochees. The structure of the template is justified on the basis of independently available prosodic and segmental characteristics of the parts and the whole of the string. The two halves of the structure are treated as morphological equals and their relationship is evaluated in terms of output-to-output copying. A product of its time, the account uses Optimality Theory, positing constraints on identity in reduplication and general segmental and prosodic markedness and well-formedness constraints. The latter jointly satisfy a principle valid for other verbal art patterns relying on the iteration of linguistic sames, the principle of Interest. The Ablaut template enriches the taxonomy of verbal art structures in English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Donka Minkova (2002). Ablaut reduplication in English: the criss­crossing of prosody and verbal art. English Language and &#xA;Linguistics, 6, pp 133­169 doi:10.1017/S1360674302001077. &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674302001077&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674302001077&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19905" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T11:17:02.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8511" CreationDate="2017-09-06T13:10:22.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language where the only targets of gender agreement are the pronouns can be said to have a &quot;pronominal gender system&quot;. Such languages are fairly rare, but there definitely do seem to be examples other than English. Anna Kibort and Greville G. Corbett give the example of &quot;Defaka (Niger-Congo, Nigeria; Jenewari 1983:103-106)&quot; (7 January 2008, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/gender.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gender&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (Grammatical Features)). I haven't been able to find a detailed grammatical description of the Defaka pronoun system, but what I have found seems to indicate that the distinction is only marked in the 3rd-person singular, as in English. Some languages may have gender marking on other types of pronouns (with or without more typical patterns of gender agreement on non-pronominal targets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more possible examples are discussed in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/227_fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reinventing Pronoun Gender&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Jenny Audring (which I only skimmed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T20:41:13.693" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T20:41:13.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T14:31:53.840" Score="1" ViewCount="4326" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the IPA transcription of a whole sentence, does it matter in terms of readability if it only has a pair of brackets encompassing the whole transcription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance the transcription for &quot;as soon as possible&quot; would appear like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/əz sun əz ˈpɑsəbəl/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/əz/ /sun/ /əz/ /ˈpɑsəbəl/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1522" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T11:46:40.283" Title="Only a pair of brackets in IPA transcription sentence, does it matter?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T20:46:22.463" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking about it, most of the Romance languages I have heard nasalize vowels quite frequently and it seems consistent: that has me wondering, is there any evidence to show that Latin was a heavily-nasalized language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T20:46:22.463" Title="Was Latin A Nasalized Language?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25880" CreationDate="2017-09-07T22:58:21.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should only have two brackets -- some people separate words in a sentence with pound signs (#).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;/əz sun əz ˈpɑsəbəl/&lt;/em&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;/əz sun əz ˈpɑsəbəl/ or /əz/ /sun/ /əz/ /ˈpɑsəbəl/&lt;/em&gt;, but is rather: /əz#sun#əz#ˈpɑsəbəl/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here is a thing, it is personal preference, but some people, like me, use forward slashes (/) for just phonemes, and square brackets ([]) for words and sentences. I would type that sentence or handwrite it as &lt;em&gt;[əz#sun#əz#ˈpɑsəbəl]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In speech, words slur together and the boundaries are not easily divisible, unless you are a speaker, and so it is best to use just two brackets. The &quot;#'s,&quot; though not needed technically, shew forth the division between the words and still allow the sounds to be next to each other, if that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T11:46:40.283" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T11:46:40.283" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-08T13:33:58.873" Score="-1" ViewCount="542" Body="&lt;p&gt;In other languages (mainly Romance languages such as: &lt;em&gt;Portuguese and Spanish&lt;/em&gt;), we have many grammatical cases such as: &lt;em&gt;abessivo&#xA;ablativo,&#xA;absolutivo,&#xA;acusativo,&#xA;adessivo&lt;/em&gt;;&#xA;English doesn't feature such cases, what would the possible answer for this be? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm brazilian and my main language is Portuguese, I noticed a few different reasons due to which English may noy feature such cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default sentence arrangement in English is almost always the same, except in other moods, such as imperative and question: &lt;em&gt;Subject + Predicate + Complement&lt;/em&gt; while in Romance languages such as Portuguese, there are several ways to arrange a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject + Predicate + Complement (Eu gosto de você - I like you)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Predicate + Subject + Complement (Gosto eu de você - &lt;em&gt;Like I you&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Complement + Subject + Predicate (Você eu gosto - &lt;em&gt;You I like&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Complement + Predicate + Subject (De ela gostamos nós - &lt;em&gt;Her like we&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we can see above, some arrangements that work in Portuguese don't work in English since English's default sentence arrangement is almost the same -&#xA;would it be the reason why English doesn't feature such cases? It's not necessary since the probability of there being a confusion in the understanding of the sentence is almost zero, while in Portuguese, if there were not such cases, there would be many confusions due to the arrangement of the sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Does my interpretation sound correct? I would like to know the real reason for due to which English doesn't feature such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19925" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T02:53:03.177" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T16:16:25.413" Title="Need for English not to have many grammatical cases" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-08T16:52:51.397" Score="7" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a teaching material I needed a good example of vocalic mutation of the root, aka &lt;strong&gt;Umlaut&lt;/strong&gt;, and I got stuck at the fact that, while the &lt;strong&gt;Umlaut&lt;/strong&gt; is often postulated for some reconstructed languages, there seem to be few, if any, good examples of this phenomenon in some contemporary living languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;strong&gt;Umlaut&lt;/strong&gt;/vocalic mutation I mean a morpho-phonological mechanism such that the vowel of the root (or stem) is assimilated to the vowel of the ending. Note that I want the ending vowel to be preserved, therefore such examples as the Old English nom.sg. &lt;em&gt;fōt&lt;/em&gt; ~ nom.pl. &lt;em&gt;fēt&lt;/em&gt; are not accepted, because the ending that provoked the vowel mutation is never attested in the written sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curisouly enough, the opposite phenomenon, i.e. the vocalic harmony (when it's the ending vowel to change accordingly to the vowel of the root), is well attested cross-linguistically, for example in Turkish. Not sure what general conclusion can be drawn here, but still...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T17:07:58.927" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:16:11.950" Title="Examples of Umlaut in a living language" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;umlaut&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25884" CreationDate="2017-09-08T17:03:32.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I wouldn't claim to know a lot about Romance languages, it is quite well-known that most Romance languages (including Portuguese and Spanish) also lost the complex case system of Latin. Assuming &lt;em&gt;abessivo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ablativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;absolutivo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;acusativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adessivo&lt;/em&gt; mean the same as &lt;em&gt;abessive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ablative&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;absolutive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;accusative&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adessive&lt;/em&gt;, I seriously doubt that Portuguese possesses any of these cases in the linguistic meaning of the word 'case'. Also, while having a lot of cases does render word order &lt;strong&gt;somewhat&lt;/strong&gt; immaterial, the examples you give do not seem to solely differ by word order. Compare the same sentence in a few Indo-European languages with cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German: &lt;code&gt;Ich mag dich.&lt;/code&gt; Here, 'ich' is 'I' in the nominative case, 'mag' means 'like' and 'dich' is the accusative form of 'du' meaning 'you (singular)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ossetic: &lt;code&gt;Æз дæу уарзын.&lt;/code&gt; [Romanization: &lt;code&gt;Æz dæw warzyn.&lt;/code&gt;] Again, 'æз' is 'I' in the nominative, 'уарзын' means 'love/like' and 'дæу' is the genitive (which functions as the accusative for personal objects) form of 'ды' (dy) which means 'you (singular)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian: &lt;code&gt;Aš myliu tave.&lt;/code&gt; Here, 'aš' is 'I' in the nominative case, 'myliu' means 'like/love' and 'tave' is the accusative form of 'tu' meaning 'you (singular)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bengali: &lt;code&gt;আমি তোকে ভালোবাসি।&lt;/code&gt; [Romanization: &lt;code&gt;Āmi toke bhālobāsi.&lt;/code&gt;] 'আমি' is 'I' in the nominative case, 'ভালোবাসি' means 'like/love' and 'তোকে' is the accusative form of 'তুই' (tui) meaning 'you (singular)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of these languages, any permutation of the three words would mean the same. Of course, some word orders are preferred, and indeed, some would sound very unnatural. For example, in Lithuanian and German, the most natural form would be with the verb in the middle, while in Ossetic and Bengali, the natural form is with the verb in the end (as I have written). And each of these would avoid putting the verb first, but even that can be understood by native speakers. In the Portuguese examples, however, you are not merely changing word order, but modifying the vocabulary and syntax. That can be done in English as well to convey specific meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I am not contradicting the fact that English has lost its cases to a large extent. And a discussion of the reasons behind is linked in a comment by bytebuster, which you can check out. I am merely addressing the fact that comparing English with Romance languages when the subject of comparison is cases is not entirely relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: Lithuanian, Bengali and Ossetic do not strictly possess verbs meaning 'like', and the example sentences mean 'I love you' instead of 'I like you'. Each employs a special construction to convey the meaning of 'I like you', which is not entirely relevant to the question. I chose these three as examples because I wanted to get a good spread. [And, more importantly, I had to stick to languages I know. ;)] It would be great if someone could add examples here from other languages families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T15:44:50.927" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T15:44:50.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25886" CreationDate="2017-09-08T17:27:31.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the essential character which you're seeking is that it is regressive suffix-to-root assimilation (not progressive, and not bidirectional), and the trigger has to actually be there. This would leave out cases that are regressive root-to-prefix as well (various dialects of Arabic have such rounding &quot;harmonies&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various Romance languages (&quot;Italian&quot; and &quot;Spanish&quot;) have suffix-triggered raisings, a.k.a. metaphony, which I believe are triggered only by suffixes. Jose Hualde has written on that (not that I can remember a specific paper). There is also regressive non-iterative harmony in North Saami which is triggered by a suffix and applies within the root, though only to epenthetic vowels connected with &quot;Q3&quot; (both rounding and fronting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/173_fulltext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali and Assamese&lt;/a&gt; have such a non-iterative suffix-triggered harmony, but more digging into word structure is necessary (one putative example &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; exemplify harmony within a suffix – or, a different analysis of the suffix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For illustrative purposes, metaphony might be the best bet. There may be other examples, depending on whether you want to broaden the characterization. For example Icelandic u-umlaut is arguable iterative. Likewise Uyghur umlaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T17:56:54.347" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T17:56:54.347" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25886" CreationDate="2017-09-08T17:35:43.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, umlaut is admittedly no longer productive, but it is still very much in evidence in words like Mann &gt; Männer, Kuh &gt; Kühe, and many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T17:35:43.917" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T14:53:13.360" Score="-2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;1st person: myself, ourselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2nd person: yourself yourselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3rd person: himself, herself, itself, themselves, oneself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and German there is only one reflexive pronoun, used only in the third person, except that in those last four it's also a second person &quot;polite&quot; as opposed to &quot;familiar&quot; second-person pronoun. In Swahili there's a single reflexive infix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Hardy" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T19:10:51.270" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T19:50:19.433" Title="Does any other language have as many reflexive pronouns as English?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25890" CreationDate="2017-09-08T18:47:26.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on whether or not you consider the morphology to produce other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From functional standpoint, all words in your example contain &lt;strong&gt;a single morpheme &lt;code&gt;-self-&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; which introduces reflexive meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, if &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt; are considered &lt;strong&gt;essentially different&lt;/strong&gt; then you take a language with 4, 6, 7, or 25 noun cases, take a single reflexive pronoun &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; and get a result of 25 essentially different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 25 more for &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;, 25 for &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; and for each word listed in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these produced words would be reflexive pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T18:47:26.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25890" CreationDate="2017-09-08T19:21:56.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, French has more than one reflexive pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clitic reflexive pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;me, te, se, nous, vous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastEditorUserId="15062" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T19:50:19.433" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T19:50:19.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25880" CreationDate="2017-09-08T19:40:45.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, one set of slashes or brackets would be used, with or without spaces in between the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as whether you should use slashes or brackets, generally slashes suggest a broad transcription, meaning you're aiming more for showing phonemes than exact phonetic detail, whereas brackets suggest a narrow transcription, meaning you're aiming to show a lot of phonetic detail, regardless of whether any of the phonetic traits form natural classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In actual practice, neither slashes nor brackets are actually necessary if it's clear what type of transcription you are going for and can even be something to avoid depending on how you feel about the theoretical foundation of the phoneme/phone distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a good example of a transcription of more than a single word by a well respected phonetician: &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2012/06/three-cheers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Wells, Three Cheers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're writing something for a publication, however, I would follow that publications style guide. If you're writing something for a class, I would follow the instructor's preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T19:40:45.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="555" CreationDate="2017-09-08T19:53:17.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here a few more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pulë (chicken) - pullë (button),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plakë (old woman) - pllakë (plate),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plumb (bullet) - pëllumb (dove),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lum (river) - llum (dirt, sludge),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;palë (layer) - pallë (sword),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kollë (cough) - Kolë (a shortened form of the male name Nikollë)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19931" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T09:07:15.110" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T09:07:15.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25884" CreationDate="2017-09-09T12:23:49.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Portuguese doesn't have a case system. Neither has Spanish, or French, Catalan, or Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A case system means that nouns (and possibly adjectives) take different forms for different grammatical functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Latin has cases. The noun &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; (man) has different forms whether it is a subject, object, vocative, etc. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homo homini lupus.&lt;/em&gt; - Man is wolf to man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; is the nominative form, meaning it is the subject of the sentence. &lt;em&gt;Homini&lt;/em&gt; is the dative form, meaning it is the indirect object of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing in Portuguese. &lt;em&gt;O homem é o lobo do homem&lt;/em&gt;: both the subject and the object take exactly the same form in Portuguese, because Portuguese has no case system. The only exceptions are personal pronouns, that still have two or three cases (&lt;em&gt;eu/me/mim&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tu/te/ti&lt;/em&gt;, - like English &quot;I&quot;/&quot;me&quot; - and are anyway not called &quot;abessive&quot;, &quot;ablative&quot;, &quot;absolutive&quot;, etc; they are just called &quot;&lt;em&gt;caso reto&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;caso oblíquo&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (literally, &quot;straight case&quot; and &quot;oblique case&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word order is relatively more free in Portuguese than in English, not because of nominal case inflections, but because of verbal person inflections. For instance, &lt;em&gt;nós gostamos delas&lt;/em&gt; (We like them) has the verb inflected for first person plural, so we know that the subject can only be &lt;em&gt;nós&lt;/em&gt; (we), and never &lt;em&gt;elas&lt;/em&gt;, which is third person. This makes &quot;&lt;em&gt;delas gostamos nós&lt;/em&gt;&quot; grammatically correct, because you cannot confuse subject and object (which isn't the case in English, were the verbal form for all persons, except third singular, is the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;delas gostamos nós&lt;/em&gt; is by no means synonimous with &lt;em&gt;nós gostamos delas&lt;/em&gt;. The latter means &quot;we like them&quot;; the former means &quot;it is us who like them&quot; (and &lt;em&gt;delas nós gostamos&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;it is them we like&quot;). Because of this, those inverted order sentences are usually used anaphorically (except perhaps in literary register).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gosto eu de você&lt;/em&gt; is, by my reckoning, an ill-formed sentence. &lt;em&gt;Eu gosto de você&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;I like you&quot;, while &lt;em&gt;de você gosto eu&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;it is me who likes you&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;de você eu gosto&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;it is you that I like&quot;. But a VSO or VOS order seems to me simply wrong (except perhaps within longer constructions, like &lt;em&gt;como o mar gosta da praia, assim gosto eu de você&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;like the sea likes the shore, so I like you&quot;), and even then it seems to me quite literary). That is perhaps because the inverted sentences, in Portuguese, are instances of topicalisation, and the verb cannot be topicalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Você eu gosto&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, is grammatically wrong, because the verb &lt;em&gt;gostar&lt;/em&gt; demands prepositioned (indirect) objects. So without the preposition &quot;de&quot;, the sentence is ill-formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T15:34:08.670" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T15:34:08.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-09T19:49:30.070" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the original 1916 edition of Ferdinand de Saussure's &lt;em&gt;Cours de linguistique générale&lt;/em&gt;.  The book must be out of copyright by now; does there exist an online scan or similar facsimile that preserves the original page numbering?  Failing that, are there any modern reprints of the first edition (again, preserving the original page numbering)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9370" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T19:49:30.070" Title="Online facsimile of the original Cours de linguistique générale" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-10T13:34:23.220" Score="4" ViewCount="545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago, I met this guy from Cameroon. I asked him what language he spoke, and, besides Italian and French (and maybe some English), he said he spoke Kwa, a Bamileke language from his home country. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I thought I'd found it as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwa%E2%80%99_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kwa'&lt;/a&gt;, but he said no, the apostrophe shouldn't be there, because apostrophes mark &quot;fat&quot; (his term, probably means &quot;glottalized&quot;, will be discussed at post end) vowels, and the name of his language doesn't have a fat vowel in it. But &quot;Kwa&quot; with no apostrophe is either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kwa of Nigeria aka Baa&lt;/a&gt;, or one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwa_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kwa languages aka New Kwa&lt;/a&gt;, none of which are from Cameroon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what language is this? Is my friend being confused by the apostrophe or is there really an apostrophe-free Kwa in Cameroon? (Also, what does that apostrophe denote?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extras&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to study the phonology of the language by asking him specific questions, and the following are excerpts from an article I submitted for creation on Wikipedia which will soon be deleted for lack of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vowels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The vowels of Kwa are five, the same as in Italian: /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/. I don't yet know if the /e/ and /o/ phonemes are [e] and [o] or [ɛ] and [ɔ], I will investigate as I go on. I haven't yet investigated the various possible phonations. Anyway the sounds are similar to Italian and - most of all - French, as - as my consultant says - &quot;Kwa is assimilated to French&quot;. Apparently it isn't written, and the way to write it is to approximate it with French sounds. However, there are what he calls &quot;fat vowels&quot;, indicated with an apostrophe (e.g. &quot;a'&quot;), which are probably glottalized, as they're marked with the same mark that marks glottalized consonants, which he terms as «assorbite nella gola» (absorbed in the throat). Investigating this is part of the vowel phonation investigation I still have to conduct.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What I have to investigate is: nasalized, epiglottalized*, glottalized*, pharingealized, palatalized, velarized, breathy voiced, slack voiced*, creaky voiced*, stiff voiced*, faucalized*, harsh*, strident* and ballistic*. * means I can't pronounce them, except for: - glottalized, where Wikipedia says «Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure)», so I'll merge the two; - creaky voiced, where I can obtain what I define creaky voice only on low notes; - faucalized, where I'm not sure about how I make them, and I make them the way I would if I were yawning and speaking at the same time; - strident and ballistic, where besides being unable to make them I think I can infer from Wikipedia that they aren't present in Kwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Consonants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As with the vowels, I still need to investigate the phonations - voiceless, voiced and voiceless aspirated apart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  According to my consultant, there is a three-way contrast among voiceless stops: plain, aspirated, and &quot;absorbed in the throat&quot;, which are probably glottalized or ejective. Indeed he approved my ejective p'. Now if we define &quot;glottalized&quot; as &quot;coarticulated with a /ʔ/, glottalized and ejective are two sides of one coin: if the stops are released simultaneously, you get what we could call a &quot;tense&quot; stop, if you release the oral stop before the glottal, the opening of the mouth rarefies the air, causing the glottis to shoot up and you to pronounce an ejective consonant. That's the conclusion I reached by trying to pronounce glottalized stops as defined above, and observed that with /p/ I ended up on the ejective almost always. Therefore, I guess one can choose either of the two. However, since my consultant approved the ejective /p'/, I recommend ejectives.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For now, voiced plosives are, two me, in a two-way contrast by glottalization. Again, the above definition of glottalization brings to something that, to me, sounds like implosives, though I'm not sure about my implosives. I'll try to investigate, but it will be rather difficult.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As for other consonants, they can't be glottalized. At least, none of those I found were &quot;absorbable in the throat&quot; according to my consultant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With that, the chart of consonants - for now - reads thus:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9NYHM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9NYHM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As you can see, the chart is incomplete and some zones need further investigation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Glottalized fricatives are absent as labial, but need investigation outside that column.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's curous that Kwa lacks ʃ while having ʒ, and that nasals don't assimilate: Nzinkomba, a name, is not /nziŋ'komba/, but /nzin'komba/. That's how I excluded both the velar and the labiodental nasals.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /pf/ and /bv/ are apparently absent, both as affricates and as plosive-fricative sequence.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Palatals may be the result of velar palatalization, i.e. /c/ may actually be /kj/, since the two are hard to tell apart for me and impossible for my consultant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Retroflex, Alveolo-palatal and Palato-alveolar sounds, outside fricatives and affricates, are to me indistinguishable from their alveolar equivalents, so I can't investigate them. I excluded all sounds of these kinds which didn't exist as alveolar, assuming they don't exist because the alveolars don't, and I don't think he'd distinguish the various kinds to the point of saying &quot;no&quot; to alveolars but &quot;yes&quot; to other articulation places.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The /t/ and /d/ are alveolar, a thing which I inferred from his pronunciation of Italian, with the evident alveolar stops that go outside a standard Italian accent which would have dentals. Since the alveolarity is constant, which it isn't in French, I assumed it came from Kwa. The other interesting thing is that /t/, in the /nt/ sequence, becomes dental: [ntɛ], as he noticed himself, sounds different. He said it's &quot;a different letter&quot; or something like that. I must investigate if this works with /d/ as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All I know about this is in the message my consultant sent me via facebook: «en effet c est une communauté très refermé sur elle mème , qui a tous vecu sur les montagnes et trés jalouse de sa culture et un peu trop conservatrice !!» (actually it's a community very closed in itself, which has lived everything on the mountains, and very jealous of its culture and a bit too conservative!!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;References&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actually, my only reference is my mothertongue consultant. That's why I submitted this for review, in order to get more precise information and clear the mystery of the name, for according to Wikipedia Kwa is Nigerian, while Kwa' is Cameroonian, and my consultant says that there's no apostrophe in his language, because the vowel is not «grassa» (fat) as the apostrophe would make it. All I have is him and what I know from Wikipedia about sounds. Please help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nZAOO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Screenshot of another section under Phonology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T18:39:24.443" Title="About Bamileke language Kwa" Tags="&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2017-09-18T08:14:35.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25903" CreationDate="2017-09-10T16:24:20.560" Score="-1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for Saturday in many languages both Romance (Italian, Spanish etc.) and Slavic (Russian, Polish, for example) is Sabado / Sobota - very similar words!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal amateur guess is that it comes from the Christian religious word (in English): &quot;sabbath&quot; and therefore probably comes from Latin and the spread of Christianity a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true or are there better explanations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19941" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T16:39:04.190" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T20:03:00.677" Title="Origin &amp; explanation of sabado &amp; sobota being similar in latin and slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25905" CreationDate="2017-09-10T19:26:57.193" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking through xml file of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opencorpora.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opencorpora.org&lt;/a&gt; and trying to understand their meaning. Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sentence id=&quot;23847&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                &amp;lt;source&amp;gt;это просто прекрасно по-моему.&amp;lt;/source&amp;gt;&#xA;                &amp;lt;tokens&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;token id=&quot;434143&quot; text=&quot;это&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;tfr t=&quot;это&quot; rev_id=&quot;4440916&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;386574&quot; t=&quot;это&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;PRCL&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;386575&quot; t=&quot;это&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;NPRO&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;nomn&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;386575&quot; t=&quot;это&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;NPRO&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;accs&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;386581&quot; t=&quot;этот&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADJF&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Subx&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Apro&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Anph&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;nomn&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;386581&quot; t=&quot;этот&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADJF&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Subx&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Apro&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Anph&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;accs&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;/tfr&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;/token&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;token id=&quot;434144&quot; text=&quot;просто&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;tfr t=&quot;просто&quot; rev_id=&quot;1267522&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;285025&quot; t=&quot;просто&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADVB&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Prdx&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;285026&quot; t=&quot;просто&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;PRCL&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;285050&quot; t=&quot;прост&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADJS&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Qual&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;/tfr&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;/token&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;token id=&quot;434145&quot; text=&quot;прекрасно&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;tfr t=&quot;прекрасно&quot; rev_id=&quot;1267523&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;267583&quot; t=&quot;прекрасно&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADVB&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;267591&quot; t=&quot;прекрасен&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADJS&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Qual&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;/tfr&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;/token&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;token id=&quot;434146&quot; text=&quot;по-моему&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;tfr t=&quot;по-моему&quot; rev_id=&quot;1267524&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;241289&quot; t=&quot;по-моему&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADVB&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;241290&quot; t=&quot;по-моему&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;CONJ&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;Prnt&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;/tfr&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;/token&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;token id=&quot;434147&quot; text=&quot;.&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;tfr t=&quot;.&quot; rev_id=&quot;1267525&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;l id=&quot;0&quot; t=&quot;.&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;                                    &amp;lt;g v=&quot;PNCT&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;                                &amp;lt;/l&amp;gt;&#xA;                            &amp;lt;/v&amp;gt;&#xA;                        &amp;lt;/tfr&amp;gt;&#xA;                    &amp;lt;/token&amp;gt;&#xA;                &amp;lt;/tokens&amp;gt;&#xA;            &amp;lt;/sentence&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody knows why &lt;code&gt;это&lt;/code&gt; has multiple tags? What does other tags mean such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;g v=&quot;ADJS&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;g v=&quot;Qual&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;g v=&quot;neut&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;g v=&quot;sing&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/g&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" OwnerDisplayName="user1700890" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T20:59:53.637" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T20:59:53.637" Title="Tags in opencorpora Russian corpus." Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25901" CreationDate="2017-09-10T20:03:00.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In both Romance and Slavic languages it was borrowed indirectly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%91%D7%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt; - in both cases through ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%AC%CE%B2%CE%B2%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;σάββατον&lt;/a&gt; which, in turn, was borrowed to medieval Latin (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ecclesiastical Latin&lt;/a&gt;, to be more precise) as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sabbatum#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;sabbatum&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T20:03:00.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25902" CreationDate="2017-09-10T21:46:07.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They call it &lt;em&gt;&quot;gramemes&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. They roughly can be described tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full list of these is &lt;a href=&quot;http://opencorpora.org/dict.php?act=gram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;located here&lt;/a&gt;, and the description (pretty vague) is in column #4 &quot;Описание&quot; (&quot;Description&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;gramemes&quot; in question are (sequential numbers from table above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ADJS #4 &quot;adjective/short&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Qual #59 qualitative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neut #27 neuter gender&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sing #30 singular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T21:46:07.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-11T06:48:34.140" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first days of their lives, French infants already cry in a different way to German babies. This was the result of a study by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, the Centre for Pre-language Development and Developmental Disorders (ZVES) at the University Clinic Würzburg, and the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In this study, the scientists compared recordings of 30 French and 30 German infants aged between two and five days old. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mpg.de/research/babies-crying-accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mpg.de/research/babies-crying-accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has in the last 8 years anyone researched this for other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T06:48:34.140" Title="Accent of babies crying. Is there research other than for German and French?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25913" CreationDate="2017-09-11T17:26:45.187" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the novice question. I've sincerely been searching, but all I can find are articles/papers exploring very specific topics for mostly unrelated languages. I'm looking for something more basic, and I'm shocked that I'm having such a hard time finding this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it helps, the specific languages I'm looking for sonority hierarchy data on are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old Norse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middle English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ecclesiastical Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attic Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said, given how studied all of these are, I'm shocked that I'm struggling to find what I would think is such simple data. I'm sure that I must be erring somewhere in my search. But if you can forgive me my mistakes and point me in the right direction, I would be extremely grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19949" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T17:33:03.273" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T19:01:20.553" Title="Where does one find data on sonority hierarchies for specific languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sonority&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25909" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some sounds are louder than others. In general, vowels are louder than consonants, fricatives are louder than stops. This phenomenon is termed sonority and the ranking of sounds according to their sonority is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonority hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25910" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the sonority of sounds and the sonority hierarchy." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T17:36:45.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25900" CreationDate="2017-09-11T18:39:24.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will re-interpret the question so that it is clearly not off topic, as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I met a gentleman who claims to speak the Bamileke language Kwa in&#xA;  Cameroon. He denied that it was the language Kwa', which is known to&#xA;  be a dialect of Bamileke. I discerned the following features of the&#xA;  language... Since he denies that his language is Kwa', I would like to&#xA;  know based on the properties of the language what language he speaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonant chart indicates a very rich set of consonants, including aspiration, glottalization, and glottalization of voiced stops, and a fairly limited vowel inventory. Bamileke languages have a relatively small consonant inventory (voiced / voiceless stops), and a rich vowel inventory (i ʉ u e o ə a ɑ, or similar arrangements). No Grassfields langauge is recorded as having glottalization. In fact, no Cameroonian language is recorded as having glotalized consonants. There are some Bantu languages spoken in Mozambique and South Africa which have glottalization, implosives, and a 5-vowel inventory, but even then, none has anything like the full inventory of segments reported in the present language. Glottalized consonants are found in Afro-Asiatic languages in the area of Ethiopia, but they do not have an aspiration contrast or any contrast among voiced consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ejectives are also found in Khoisan languages of southern Africa, and !Xu is reputed to include [p t k ph th kh t' k' b d g b' d' g'] in its consonant inventory – however, it also has a huge number of clicks. Sandawe (Central Tanzania) has among others [p t k ph th kh b d g p' t' k'], so lacking one series, but it also has clicks (not as many as !Xu). Because implosives are rare and ejectives are rare, it's not difficult to sift through the language families of Africa to determine that no language has this inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you eliminate various segments from the inventory, you widen the possibilities. If you reduce the set of consonants to [p,b], then it would well be any Grassfields language, including Kwa'. Without knowing which segments are felt to be most dubious, it's not possible to be more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go with just the name and country, it might be the Adamawa language &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silcam.org/download.php?sstid=030100&amp;amp;folder=documents&amp;amp;file=kuo_fluckiger1987_1635_p.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kuo&lt;/a&gt;, the Bamileke language &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silcam.org/download.php?sstid=030100&amp;amp;folder=documents&amp;amp;file=kwa_brye2000_2413_p.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kwa'&lt;/a&gt;, or the related Ring language Oku also known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silcam.org/languages/languagepage.php?languageid=240&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kuɔ&lt;/a&gt;. If you go with the name, country and reputed area of Cameroon, it must be Kwa', in which case you have to discount the gentleman's rejection of that identification. It is very likely that his rejection is based on confusion of local orthography versus general Wiki-type language name reports. Since Bamileke languages also have complex tone systems, it is relatively likely that apostrophe is used in a practical orthography (perhaps for tone, perhaps for representing vowel contrasts). Glottal stop is a common final consonant in the area, and we may presume that the spelling &quot;Kwa'&quot; means that it is called [kwaʔ]. &#xA;Since we don't have any further information on the Bamileke dialect &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/bko/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bko&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, all one can say at this point is that if we believe the geographical and naming claims, it is most likely &lt;em&gt;bko&lt;/em&gt;. The linguistic claims have to be totally discounted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T18:39:24.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-11T18:50:10.977" Score="5" ViewCount="1159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speciation and extinction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one ancestral language (e.g. latin), several languages are born (e.g. spanish, portuguese, french, italian, romanian, ...). Languages therefore speciate. Such speciation could eventually happen via hybridization of existing languages. Languages also get extinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the rate of speciation is higher than the rate of extinction, then the number of languages is increasing and when the opposite is true, then the number of languages is decreasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Atlas of endangered languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UNESCO, in its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/atlas-of-languages-in-danger/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger&lt;/a&gt; (also listed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_Europe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) recognizes a large number of endangered languages. Increase world-wide communication and globalization makes me think that the number of languages should be currently decreasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have estimates of the speciation rates and extinction rates of languages (or estimates of the rate of decrease/increase) today? A rate would be in unit of number of languages lost or gain per amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3663" LastEditorUserId="3663" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T19:14:14.610" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T13:05:33.700" Title="How fast is the number of languages spoken today decreasing/increasing?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;endangered-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25908" CreationDate="2017-09-11T19:01:20.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic method behind making such a determination is that you partition the segments into subsets and look at precede-and-follow restrictions in the language, and impute those restrictions to the notion of &quot;sonority hierarchy&quot;. This is based on the premise that within the syllable, sonority increases up to the peak, then decreases, and ordering is based on sonority. For example, syllables in English start with [pl] but not [lp]; then end with [lp] and not [pl]. Therefore, [p] is less sonorous than [l]. Since syllables can end [jl] and not [lj] we surmise that [j] is more sonorous than [l]. In addition, there are some a priori concepts about sonority, based on the idea that &quot;sonorous&quot; means &quot;more vowe-like&quot;, so that [p] is very un-vowellike and [m] is relatively more vowel-like. However, many languages have syllable-initial NC clusters – known as a &quot;sonority reversal&quot;. So you can't &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; use sequencing as the determinant of sonority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is generally a tendency to put all vowels into a single sonority category (most sonorous), however, modern Greek vowel hiatus resolutions is &quot;hierarchical&quot; (in many dialects) and thus people actually say that dialects differ as to the sonority of particular vowels (Newton, Kaisse have written on this). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steriade in her &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiD5azP553WAhVmwlQKHbSyAGEQFggrMAA&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ai.mit.edu%2Fprojects%2Fdm%2Ftheses%2Fsteriade82.pdf&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNF6DgWIoNm-XAsIH8BYA2qEFuf0jw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissertation&lt;/a&gt; exploits sonority to account for syllabification in Greek, and Lehmann invokes sonority in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/Latin_syllable_in_typological_perspective.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin syllabification&lt;/a&gt;. Sonority is called on in a number of publications on Icelandic syllabification, which could substitute for Old Norse. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.csun.edu/~bashforth/301_PDF/301_P_P/RussianSyllableOnsets.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; makes weak sonority claims about Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T19:01:20.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25912" CreationDate="2017-09-11T19:13:14.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If language-name plays a central role in determining what &quot;language&quot; one speaks (I speak English, as do hundreds of millions of others), then the number of languages is decreasing. Many languages are completely disappearing very rapidly, so that the bottom 80% of languages with only a couple hundred thousand speakers or fewer are likely to be mostly gone in another 100 or so years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, if you look at &quot;distinctive speech forms&quot;, the number of languages may be increasing. For example, the number of distinct speech forms known as English has increased over the past 100 years (and it's not just English where this happens). We tend to talk about those differences as being &quot;dialects&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no meaningful estimates of rate of decrease (in the first sense of &quot;language&quot;), because there no predicting what facts cause language attrition. 40 years ago, people would not have predicted the current decline in linguistic diversity, because they were not aware of the impact that cell phones, the internet, and general urbanization would have. Social isolation encourages language diversity (you generally only interact with people near you who speak the same language, and have no idea that you &quot;ought to&quot; speak English or one of the other major languages, to get ahead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T19:13:14.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T04:17:24.413" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me say that I'm bad at grammar. Everything I know about grammar I've learned because I want to make my own languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I've created an ergative-absolutive language (I'm learning as I go) in which the agent of the transitive verb is marked with the suffix '-a'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mary opened the red door with a key.&quot;&#xA;     reads as&#xA;&quot;Mary with a key the red door opened.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So (opened) is my transitive verb, (the red door) is my object, and (Mary with a key) is the agent of my transitive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary with a key = Mary kep evo wawʉt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to mark this noun phrase with '-a', but I'm at a loss as to where. Do I mark 'Mary' (Marya) or both 'Mary' and 'key' (Marya, wawʉta)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated, thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12595" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T04:17:24.413" Title="How do I decline a noun phrase?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T11:34:57.213" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that speech is perceived linguistically, meaning is there evidence that shows that speech in the brain is perceived as phonemes, morphemes, and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking whether such experiments have been conducted, stating the importance of those concepts for the perception of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17431" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:36:06.517" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T15:50:03.353" Title="Evidence proving lingustic perception of speech in brain?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25852" CreationDate="2017-09-12T12:24:41.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that &quot;emphatic p&quot; (in the context of Semitic languages) is the ejective /p'/, not /pˤ/, and thus is not a example of pharyngealization (contra sumelic's answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the only instance of a language with a pharyngealized labial consonant as listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is Ubykh (which seems to have an exceptionally large consonant inventory). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says about Ubykh that &quot;the pharyngealised labial consonants /pˁ/ /pˁʼ/ are almost exclusively noted in words where they are associated with another pharyngealised consonant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the only cases (at least in the list I quoted) have their pharyngealized consonants inherited, I'm not sure if it's possible to pinpoint in which cases a consonant becomes pharyngealized, but you might find it easier to look at cases such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sandhi&lt;/a&gt; and other internal sound changes: e.g. ת assimilates to emphatic ט in Hebrew when next to emphatic צ; in Akkadian, ṭ dissimilates to t when in the same root as ṣ (e.g. Akkadian ṣbt as compared to Hebrew צבט)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Borrowing between languages: e.g. Greek σ sometimes ends up as emphatic צ in Hebrew&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:24:41.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T15:20:14.587" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is a follow-up to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/5149/latin-passive-endings-why-is-mini-sticking-out&quot;&gt;Latin passive endings: Why is -mini sticking out&lt;/a&gt;. The Latin 2nd person plural passive ending &lt;em&gt;mini&lt;/em&gt; has attracted the attention of scholars for centuries, but no satisfying explanation is found so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the r-mediopassive goes back to Proto-Indogermanic with attestation in other branches than Italic and Latin proper, does the outer perspective shed some light on this ending?  (EDIT:) In particular, was the apparent irregularity already present in the proto-language, or is the Latin ending -mini a later replacement of something more regular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked into Old Irish, but alas, it has already simplified the passive paradigm featuring only one ending for all plural persons. Therefore it is of no help here. Do other Celtic languages or Tocharian give some new insights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T12:53:34.840" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T12:53:34.840" Title="The Indogermanic r-mediopassive and the Latin ending -mini from a broader perspective" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;&lt;mediopassive&gt;&lt;tocharian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25917" CreationDate="2017-09-12T15:50:03.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There won't be evidence that speech is perceived linguistically, since that is not a sufficiently precise claim that it could be tested experimentally. Since it is self-evident that people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; perceive the linguistic units words and utterances (in one understanding of what perception is), no experiment has been conducted (as far as I know) to prove that this happens. Everything starts from the fact that we perceive words, and larger chunks, and works from there. On the other hand, the exact method whereby speech is perceived is not at all established, for example the issue of features, segments, syllables, phonemes etc. as &quot;basic units&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic of units has an extremely rich literature which cannot be covered here, but there are some important works that may include sufficient evidence for your purposes. (The problem is that if you frame your question in a novel way, there is not likely to be evidence available that distinguishes your theory from some similar theories). At the level of reference books we find Miller &amp;amp; Eimas &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Perception and Cognition: Speech, Language, and Communication&lt;/em&gt;; Pisoni &amp;amp; Remez &lt;em&gt;The Handbook of Speech Perception&lt;/em&gt;; Pickett &lt;em&gt;Speech perception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues&lt;/em&gt;. Some classical articles especially relevant to the linguistic-unit question of speech perception are Cooper, Delattre, Liberman, Borst &amp;amp; Gerstman 1952 &quot;Some experiments on the perception of synthetic speech sounds&quot; &lt;em&gt;JASA&lt;/em&gt; 24; Liberman 1957 &quot;Some results of research on speech perception&quot; &lt;em&gt;JASA&lt;/em&gt; 29; Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler &amp;amp; Studdert-Kennedy, &quot;Perception of the speech code&quot; &lt;em&gt;Psychological Review&lt;/em&gt; 74; Stevens 2002 &quot;Toward a model of lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features&quot; &lt;em&gt;JASA&lt;/em&gt; 111. Additional articles include OCallaghan, &quot;Auditory Perception&quot;; Holt &amp;amp; Lotto &quot;Speech perception as categorization&quot; &lt;em&gt;Attention, Perception, &amp;amp; Psychophysics&lt;/em&gt; 72; Rubin, Turvey &amp;amp; van Gelder &quot;Initial phonemes are detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords&quot; &lt;em&gt;Perception &amp;amp; Psychophysics&lt;/em&gt; 19; Pisoni &quot;Some current theoretical issues in speech perception&quot; &lt;em&gt;Cognition&lt;/em&gt; 81; Miller &amp;amp; Isard &quot;Some perceptual consequences of linguistic rules&quot; &lt;em&gt;Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior&lt;/em&gt; 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T15:50:03.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25923" CreationDate="2017-09-12T21:06:28.103" Score="5" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the first sentence of Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on generative grammar&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a&#xA;  system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words&#xA;  that form grammatical sentences in a given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read this sentence a thousand times and find it completely impenetrable. (I read: &#xA;&quot;Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as [tautological definition of grammar].&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I have missed the joke. But is there actually any refutable &quot;theory&quot; known as generative grammar? Or is &quot;generative grammar&quot; really more of a paradigm/an approach to analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &quot;generative grammar&quot; is a theory in the strict sense, what is its claim, and what might be a counterclaim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19534/what-does-generative-mean-can-a-linguistic-theory-be-non-generative&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;generative&amp;quot; mean? Can a linguistic theory be non-generative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/76/what-are-some-alternatives-to-chomskian-generative-grammar&quot;&gt;What are some alternatives to Chomskian generative grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13542" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T15:07:11.187" Title="Is generative grammar a theory or an approach?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25922" CreationDate="2017-09-12T22:21:41.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My impression is that generative grammar is viewed by some grammarians as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos#Research_programmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lakotosian 'research program(me)&lt;/a&gt;', not as a 'refutable &quot;theory&quot;'. I am not a generative grammarian (or any kind of grammarian), but I read the Generativist blog &quot;Faculty of Language&quot;, whose contributor Norbert Hornstein has made references to a &quot;research program&quot; in various posts (e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-i-see-minimalist-project.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How I See The Minimalist Project&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wildly-successful-minimalist-program.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The wildly successful minimalist program&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-shortish-whig-history-of-generative.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A (shortish) Whig history of Generative Grammar (part 1)&lt;/a&gt;&quot;). Obviously Hornstein is one particular person, and has his own invidual biases (probably evident from just the title of these posts), but that is my impression. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable about Generative Grammar will post a more enlightening answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T23:05:44.917" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T23:05:44.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25922" CreationDate="2017-09-12T22:54:20.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an approach, not a theory (IMO, naturally).  In &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (where &quot;generative grammar&quot; was first given currency, Chomsky likens the relationship of a grammar to the sentences it describes to algebraic expressions  and the graphical figures they trace out, or &quot;generate&quot;, in analytic geometry.  Hence the term &quot;generative&quot;.  Chomsky's own summary of the term's force is that a generative theory is one that is explicit (as analytic geometry or, e.g., context free phrase structure grammar are explicit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this original understanding of &quot;generative&quot;, there can be many different generative theories of language(s), so generative grammar is a kind of theory, not a specific theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have noticed that the term is often not used in Chomsky's sense, by people who don't know enough about linguistics to know that there have been various generative theories of language, and who are presumably using &quot;generative grammar&quot; to refer to the one theory they know about (which is not necessarily even generative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T22:54:20.687" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25912" CreationDate="2017-09-13T12:29:30.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add to what user6726 said, in that even &quot;distinctive speech forms&quot; is a vague idea. There's a case to be made that idiolects (one's personal language patterns) are languages, at which point the number of languages in the world is equal to the number of people in the world, more or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not very satisfying, but the definition of &quot;language&quot; in linguistics has never been very concise at all. To someone working on language planning, and even many working in generative grammar, sociopolitical entities such as &quot;English&quot; may be taken for granted as being languages, but for a sociolinguist interested in variation or a psycholinguist interested in idiolects, that definition doesn't fly at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T12:29:30.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25912" CreationDate="2017-09-13T13:05:33.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages often disappear when they coexist with an other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Official languages&lt;/em&gt; are often institutionalized (national, supranational), whereas &lt;em&gt;dialects&lt;/em&gt; are in general more volatile (currently Catalan vs. Spanish). Frisian in the Netherlands one official language, in Germany quite lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general in an ever smaller world dialects, regional/ethnic languages may fear extinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages came into (stronger) existance by the creation of Israel in the previous millenium, the balkan fragmentation (Croatian becoming more &quot;Croatian&quot; as opposed to Serbian). Separate evolution of a language like American English from British English is hard to judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So total disappearance might be measured, but other numbers are (1) hard to collect numerically and objectively (language like Catalan being part of ethnic pride). One might for instance count languages in the internet... - a minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are there sufficient linguistic studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T13:05:33.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3707" CreationDate="2017-09-13T18:10:10.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was wondering how many of Latin (both Classical and Medieval varieties) words have Greek roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a fraction of words in the dictionary, relatively few, but as a fraction of words in formal texts, not insignificant, depending on the topic and context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to words of Greek origin in English, which are largely via Romance.  Examples would be &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;church&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;oil&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;democracy&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, the names of the academic or encyclopædic topics themselves are disproportionately Greek - &lt;em&gt;geology&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;architecture&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;economics&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;politics&lt;/em&gt;...  As are the words &lt;em&gt;academic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;encyclopædic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;topic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But plenty more were just coined in other languages in recent centuries and then only borrowed back into modern Greek - &lt;em&gt;photography&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anarchism&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Anglicanism&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Greek the common root of most IE languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, no living language or subfamily is, they are branches of a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T13:35:09.427" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T13:35:09.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="25930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T19:46:19.513" Score="-2" ViewCount="6210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very new to this field and I'm now studying semantics. I got a question on the difference between Sentence/Utterance/Proposition. Could someone clarify the following example to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: I have a car&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: Sorry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: I have a car&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: You have a car&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many Sentence/Utterance/Proposition are in this conversation? I guess the answer might be 2/5/1 but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19960" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T02:24:57.660" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T00:26:28.350" Title="Sentence/Utterance/Proposition" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25930" CreationDate="2017-09-13T20:50:27.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An utterance is the perfect or imperfect use of a particular sentence on a particular occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence is an ideal string of words representing a proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposition is the underlying sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 5 utterances for sure. How many sentences and propositions are involved is debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Sentences are debatable because it depends on how many propositions you believe there are, which depends on which propositions you think each of these utterances is linked ultimately to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastEditorUserId="15062" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T13:45:06.647" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T13:45:06.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25930" CreationDate="2017-09-14T08:29:34.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can vouch for my answer from the perspective of how philosophers in general (and philosophers of language at the introductory level) answers this. For linguistics, I include what I was able to glean, but apparently there's a large diversity of opinion on these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1 A: I have a car&#xA;&#xA;2 B: Sorry?&#xA;&#xA;3 A: I have a car&#xA;&#xA;4 B: You have a car&#xA;&#xA;5 A: Yes.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, off I've taken the liberty of changing 1 and 2 to A and B, so that we  can put line numbers on the front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to give some simple definitions and see where things lie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/utterance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;utterance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to mean &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a distinct instance of verbal linguistic expression often seen as interrupted by silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, in the conversation you post A makes 3 utterances and B makes 2 utterances. So there are 5 utterances since utterances always carry with them the specificity of when they are uttered.  Apparently, there's disagreement about what constitutes an utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia claims that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in linguistics is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a textual unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this type of definition, I would actually count 5 sentences -- one for each utterance because no utterance here contains multiple sentences, and the units are broken by  the utterances (sentences) of the other speaker. I would count 4 &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; sentences because &quot;I have a car&quot; is repeated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In philosophy, &lt;strong&gt;proposition&lt;/strong&gt;, it is a claim about the world that can be either true or false.  On this definition,  there is only 1 clear proposition that occurs throughout:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A has a car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lines 1,3, and 4 are expressions in sentences and utterances of this same content. Yes, the &quot;I&quot;/&quot;you&quot; varies but it doesn't change the content of the proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Line 2 would not be a proposition in philosophy since a question is not true or false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be possible to argue that the final line (5) A: &quot;Yes&quot; contains a second proposition or repeats the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A affirms/confirms that the proposition A has a car is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But unless there's some special reason to be so pedantic, I wouldn't draw out a second proposition from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the definition of &lt;strong&gt;proposition&lt;/strong&gt; used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/proposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL's linguistics glossary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A proposition is that part of the meaning of a clause or sentence that is constant, despite changes in such things as the voice or illocutionary force of the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm reading it correctly there are two or maybe even three propositions here,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1,3,4 = A has a car.&#xA;2 = B is sorry [presumably for misunderstanding A or something like that?]&#xA;5 = either same 1,3,4 or the same issue as identified in the philosophy account (is it a repetition or a claim with respect to the claim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently these terms are used in very different ways by linguists in different subdisciplines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3620" LastEditorUserId="3620" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T15:55:07.270" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T15:55:07.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6878" CreationDate="2017-09-14T15:56:07.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have look at this from a broader historical context. Up until a few thousand years ago tribes and cities were somewhat small and tended to be relatively isolated from each other. Also life was more static than now in that new technologies and cultural changes came about slowly. Languages were gradually evolving to be more and more sophisticated, some of them (like Proto-Indo-European) developing complex inflection systems and other linguistic innovations revolving around a relatively stable set of vocabulary. Then as civilization developed and empires grew suddenly cultures were coming in contact with each other much more frequently. Tribes were suddenly forced to integrate new technologies and cultural changes, including learning new languages and, often, losing old ones. That put pressure on languages in two ways: 1) Because there was so much borrowing of words from other languages, it became increasingly difficult for the tribes to invent a set of inflections for each new borrowed word; and 2) With so many people learning new languages, there was a tendency for each new generation to want to simplify the grammar to make it easier for the various ethnic groups learning the language to communicate. So as a result the trend for the last few thousand years has been for languages to simplify and lose inflections. It turns out it is much easier to learn to convey meaning by word order than it is to learn complex systems of inflection. And it is much easier to incorporate new vocabulary from other languages if you do not have to worry about inflection. Hence you see that most modern Indo-European languages have much more simple inflection systems than, say, Ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit. English in particular, because of the complex history of Britain with so many invasions and mixings of cultures, has simplified to the point of having almost no inflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19965" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T15:56:07.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-14T22:09:26.223" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160419125856/http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stated goals of the Kirshenbaum transcription&lt;/a&gt; are that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should be possible to represent all symbols and diacritics in the IPA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The previous guideline notwithstanding, it is expected that (as in the past) most use will be in transcribing English, so where tradeoffs are necessary, decisions should be made in favor of ease of representation of phonemes which are common in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The representation should be readable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should be possible to mechanically translate from the representation to a character set which includes IPA. The reverse would also be nice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the third, fourth, and fifth of the goals, why did Kirshenbaum choose to invert the IPA’s decision to make ‹r› the symbol for the alveolar trill and require ‘fancy characters’ for the other rhotic consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most IPA phonemic transcription schemes for English sensibly use the more familiar symbol ‹r› for English’s rhotic consonant. If Kirshenbaum transcriptions are to be mechanically transliterated to IPA, then the long-winded ‹r&amp;lt;trl&gt;› form must be used for it to come out correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the IPA’s choice to use ‹r› to represent the alveolar trill is nicely international, since many languages will at least sometimes use it even if it is not the dominant realization of any phoneme (just as in English). Among European languages [ɹ] is unique to English as the ‘normal’ realization. This is a jarring contrast to Kirshenbaum’s general approach, which (despite the third goal) is highly international, arguably more so than IPA, due to its featural nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This choice of symbol for the alveolar approximant seems to be excessively focussed on one specific use case: the narrow phonetic transcription of English. For broader purposes it exists in direct conflict with the goals of Kirshenbaum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other reason for Kirshenbaum to prefer it this way around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Furthermore I noticed while writing this that Appendix D of the specification says that ‹r&amp;lt;trl&gt;› is alveolar while Appendix E incorrectly gives the IPA symbol for the uvular trill as its equivalent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9794" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T23:15:50.017" Title="Why does Kirshenbaum use ‹r› for [ɹ] and ‹r&lt;trl&gt;› for regular [r]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25936" CreationDate="2017-09-14T23:15:50.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because of the existence of labial trills, &quot;b-trl-&quot; must also be accounted for. Suppose that &quot;r&quot; is taken to represent a trill, then would a labial trill be &quot;b&quot;? His system somewhat encourages use of phonetic modifiers, akin to the practice of APA, where IPA would use separate letters. If we agree that using &quot;b-reg-&quot; in virtually all instances of a bilabial voiced stop would be absurd, then either the trilling of the labial and lingual trills must be written differently, or preservation of IPA interpretation cannot be dispositive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third goal is sufficient to motivate this decision: all things being equal, a system whereby English requires no fancy letters or sequences is preferred. You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to represent the flap in English (one-letter * is available if you want to do so), and having to use 5-letter &quot;r-trl-&quot; would probably render the proposal unacceptable for most computational users. I do not see any conflict in his principles, since he doesn't claim that he will maintain IPA values as much as possible. All IPA values can be represented (at least with some augmentation), and although it is not a principle, they are indeed as much as possible the same as IPA. Consistent with his principles, the alveolar trill could be represented as F (which doesn't not appear to be used), which suggests an unspoken principle &quot;pick bas characters that most resemble the IPA character&quot; (though that is violated by the choice &quot;r-lbd-&quot; over &quot;v-lbd-&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA &quot;r&quot; theoretically represents a trill, except that most of the time when there is no trill / flap contrast and the rhotic is [ɾ], people simply write &quot;r&quot;. Likewise, &quot;a&quot; represents a wide range of phonetic values; it is only when there is a contrast that one must resort to &quot;a ɑ&quot; or &quot;a æ&quot;. Typically, if a language has 5 vowels and the mid vowels are actually [ɛ ɔ], people don't write &quot;ɛ ɔ&quot;, they use regular letters. The vowel written as &quot;ə&quot;, when there is just one non-front unrounded vowel, often is realized as any of [ə ʌ ɨ ɜ ɘ ɤ]. When there is a contrast, or when it is necessary to communicate narrow phonetic value, other letters will be pressed into service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T23:15:50.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-15T00:05:14.353" Score="-1" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;The visarga in रामः शेते is facing Sh so it should change to Sh, right? And we get the one word रामश्शेते Raamashshete, but I am not sure how it should be pronounced. Should the dobule Sh be mingled and pronounced the Raamashshete as Raamashete like the word soccer or kissing in English? Or should I pronounce Raammash and then Shete, Raamash'Shete ike I am pronouncing two words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19967" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T00:44:43.427" Title="How should I pronounce double consonant in a Sanskrit word?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-09-17T23:40:59.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25938" CreationDate="2017-09-15T00:44:43.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The changing of visarga to श् is optional. Therefore the words can be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;रामश् शेते&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;रामः शेते&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above, there are two ways to pronounce these combination of words. A सन्धिः is performed in &lt;code&gt;संहिता&lt;/code&gt; (closely uttering letters) and when it happens, you should pronounce it as &lt;code&gt;RamaShShete&lt;/code&gt;. There should certainly be a doubling of the &lt;code&gt;Sh&lt;/code&gt; and it closely resembles Sh in &lt;em&gt;shake&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of &lt;code&gt;संहिता&lt;/code&gt; the words रामः and शेते are pronounced separately, so the visarga in रामः is clearly audible, followed by a small gap (at least 1 second) and the word &lt;code&gt;शेते&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T00:44:43.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12874" CreationDate="2017-09-15T02:01:13.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seeing Speech&lt;/a&gt; is a remarkable site that has MRI, UTI and animations for most IPA sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3067" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T02:01:13.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T22:56:07.657" Score="2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read somewhere that Greek used, say, three or four words to express an idea; Latin used five or six words to express the same idea; and nowadays we use eight to ten words to express the same idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers need not to be exact: the point is that we use more words today than our cultural ancestors used millennia ago (and the Latin more than the Greek) to make the same statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have examples of this progression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19825" LastEditorUserId="19825" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T02:13:35.343" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T00:58:28.773" Title="Evolution in number of words from Greek to Latin to modern languages" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T23:02:05.937" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for corpora for sentence compression. I am mostly interested in English, and any type of sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google-research-datasets/sentence-compression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google-research-datasets/sentence-compression&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Overcoming the Lack of Parallel Data in Sentence Compression&lt;/em&gt;, Katja Filippova and Yasemin Altun, Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '13), pp. 1481-1491. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D/D13/D13-1155.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T23:38:59.883" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T23:38:59.883" Title="Corpora for sentence compression" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;summarization&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T14:41:40.373" Score="3" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;buy&quot; and &quot;sell&quot; that are basically the same action/event, but reverse arguments (subject of one, the object of the other): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X sold his car to Y. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Y bought a car from X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a any special name for verb pairs? &#xA;How many verb-pairs exist in English exist? (is it like &amp;lt;5 or one can come up with mechanism/algorithm to generate many more pairs?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2748" LastEditorUserId="2748" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T00:48:35.493" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T21:35:28.673" Title="Verb pairs similar to &quot;buy&quot; and &quot;sell&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25922" CreationDate="2017-09-17T15:07:11.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Generative Grammar' is an ill defined term. You will find linguists using it to mean 'Chomskian Grammar', and linguist who think it can also refer to certain construction grammars. You mention that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is the definition of grammar. But this is not the case. There are two kinds of grammatical theory, generative enumerative (which fit this definition), and model theoretic. Model theoretic approaches to grammar do not postulate rules which build grammatical structure, but rather constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T15:07:11.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T21:31:55.553" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the tests for determining whether a noun is part of a full NP or if it is simply a noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of tests for nounhood generally (plural, formation of an NP with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, modification by adjectives, etc.). However, my understanding for determining whether or not something is an NP comes down simply to whether or not it can be substituted by a single pronoun (&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), and whether or not it can be expanded out to take a determiner and modification (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;the stone cottage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt; is a noun pre-modifier and not a full NP as it can't be expanded out: * &lt;em&gt;the a stone cottage&lt;/em&gt;; * &lt;em&gt;the stone which is crumbling cottage&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this has so far been adequate, I'm now struggling to apply this same logic to idiomatic and fixed expressions, especially when the noun in question may not have a visible determiner, for example in the phrase &lt;em&gt;come into mind&lt;/em&gt; - the substitution test gives &lt;em&gt;come into it&lt;/em&gt; which doesn't sit right and I'm also not happy with ?&lt;em&gt;come into a mind&lt;/em&gt;, ?&lt;em&gt;come into the mind&lt;/em&gt;, or other expansions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any more criteria for determining full-NP status? Or do we treat fixed expressions differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10687" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T20:44:10.180" Title="Tests for determining NP status" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T08:10:29.080" Score="4" ViewCount="889" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically when the surface structure uncontracted would be ungrammatical. Eg: &quot;Don't turtles live forever?&quot; (Do turtles not live forever/*Do not turtles live forever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT - Sorry if it's broad and vague, perhaps I simply have a poor grasp of x-bar theory in general ^_^' What I mean is, what's going on with the negation in a sentence like this? We know that it can't be put before the subject as in *Do not turtles live forever, and we know that when we say &quot;Don't turtles live forever?&quot; we really mean &quot;Do turtles not live forever?&quot; so why is the contraction &quot;Don't&quot; acceptable? If the surface structure was &quot;Do turtles live forever&quot; it would seem as simple as moving the dummy do into the CP head position, but the contraction/negation thing throws me off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17366" LastEditorUserId="17366" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T16:14:19.183" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T19:13:00.453" Title="How do contractions work in syntactic movement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25949" CreationDate="2017-09-18T08:29:44.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of a special name/class for them. Yet I can imagine some pairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;loan / borrow (I loan to you / You borrow from me) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write / read (I write to you / You read from me) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;send / receive (I send to you / You receive from me) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;speak / listen (I speak to you / You listen from me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to think about a class for this. At first I thought about some kind of antonyms (buy is antonym of sell, loan is antonym of borrow). But I can't apply it to my whole list, so it's not right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like... The second verb in the pair is like a new word for the passive form of the first verb, something like this. Hard to define.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12597" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T08:29:44.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25952" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:01:00.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Summarizing the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper by Zwicky and Pullum&lt;/a&gt; commented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/5581/sumelic&quot;&gt;@sumelic&lt;/a&gt; above: They suggest that &lt;em&gt;most contractions are clitics, but &amp;lt;-n't&gt; is an inflection.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most English contractions, such as &amp;lt;-'s&gt; &amp;lt;-'ve&gt; &amp;lt;-'d&gt;, behave like clitics that can be directly substituted for the words they abbreviate. One of their examples is &quot;The ball you hit's just broken my dining room window&quot; where the &amp;lt;-s&gt; for &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; is cliticized to 'hit'. One can even string multiple clitics, like &quot;I'd've done it if you asked me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the contraction &amp;lt;-n't&gt; for &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; does not pattern like a clitic, but rather behaves an inflectional suffix; specifically as an inflectional suffix on finite auxiliary verbs. This supports your own example, where &quot;Don't turtles live forever?&quot; cannot be expanded to &quot;*Do not turtles live forever?&quot;, and also precludes things like &quot;*I'dn't&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T18:23:24.717" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:23:24.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25944" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:44:29.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;there is no such progression. whatever you read is plainly wrong, and easily disproven. find the ancient Greek equivalents of English words like &quot;fun&quot;, &quot;guts&quot;, &quot;beer&quot;, etc.  or German &quot;Schadenfreud&quot;, French &quot;esprit&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12961" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:44:29.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25952" CreationDate="2017-09-18T19:13:00.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not convinced the notion &quot;clitic&quot; is really needful to explain what is going on.  Some syntactic rules depend on what the words are, and you can't always trust  traditional English orthography to tell you the truth about where the words are.  Why should should you? Probably printers made up those rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule of subject auxiliary inversion  moves a &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; to before the subject.  In your example, &quot;don't&quot; is a word, but &quot;do not&quot; isn't a word, and that's why we do not get *&quot;Do not turtles live forever?&quot;  Two words moved, not just one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T19:13:00.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25944" CreationDate="2017-09-18T20:16:56.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of change in sentence length over time is discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3602/is-there-a-historical-trend-towards-shorter-sentences&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The number of words per sentence in English in the past 400 years has decreased, which is the opposite of what you predicted. Other studies have shown temporal volatility in sentence length &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1jH2D2Vo0UMC&amp;amp;pg=PA33&amp;amp;lpg=PA33&amp;amp;dq=average%20sentence%20length%20latin&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Gvhu5VwQoE&amp;amp;sig=mcXTnAu2ocNrHPIZJUjDW8DMyik&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj29d6_xK_WAhUY6WMKHUFbDdgQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=average%20sentence%20length%20latin&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Latin&lt;/a&gt;. The article &quot;On a Distribution Representing Sentence-length in written Prose&quot; (J. R. Statist. Soc. A, (1974), 137, Part 1, p. 25) investigates the matter in English, Greek and Latin texts, and finds that authors vary substantially. It is reasonably well understood for English that the change is a consequence of stylistic norms. I it were to be empirically substantiated that Ancient Greek texts tend to be shorter than Modern English ones, we still couldn't  tell whether this has to do with the language, versus the writing style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T20:16:56.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T20:23:42.670" Score="3" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to clear up some longstanding confusion of mine on subordinate clauses, especially since it is a rather simple grammatical topic and it is about time that I learn it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the following sentences have a subordinate clause? I suspect that they all do, but I just want to make sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not good that man should be alone. (Gn 2:18)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He said that it would rain today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could not decide which pancake to order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I did not see who was shouting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was shocked that he would be so gracious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my suspicion is right, and each of these sentences contains a subordinate clause, then does it follow that a subordinating conjunction (that, who, whom, which) &lt;strong&gt;necessarily&lt;/strong&gt; introduces a subordinate clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am assuming that all relative clauses are also subordinate clauses, as indicated on this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateclause.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammar website&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T21:59:31.347" Title="Does a subordinating conjunction necessarily introduce a subordinate clause?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25944" CreationDate="2017-09-18T23:25:47.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that the &quot;we&quot; in your question means &quot;English speakers&quot;. (ETA: it actually seems to mean &quot;speakers of modern European languages&quot;, but the difference doesn't substantially affect my arguments.) If so, the claim you're presenting is partly true, but also partly false, and the part that is true is probably not particularly meaningful or important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the true part: on the whole, English does use more words to convey a given idea than either Latin or Ancient Greek. This fact is familiar to most people who've studied these languages, and is easily seen in e.g. the volumes of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/digital.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loeb Classical Library&lt;/a&gt;, which present Greek or Latin texts with facing English translations. The right-hand (English) page usually contains more text than the left-hand (Greek or Latin) page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason for this is that Latin and Greek are highly inflected languages, which lets them pack more items of meaning into each word. For example, a verb in these languages will include information about person, number, tense, voice, and mood, much of which would in English be parceled out into separate words: e.g. to reflect the single Latin word &lt;em&gt;amabar&lt;/em&gt;, English needs a longer phrase such as &lt;em&gt;I was being loved&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part of your claim that's probably wrong, though I haven't tried to check this empirically, is about the difference between Latin and Greek. As someone who teaches both languages, my sense is that Latin is more compact than Greek rather than the other way around. There are a few reasons for this, such as the fact that Latin lacks definite articles, which are very common in Greek; and that Greek has a large array of discourse particles that add various nuances of meaning, which it uses more freely than Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the larger question is, given that Latin and Greek really are more concise than English, does that tell us anything important? To this the answer is almost certainly no. First, the difference probably does not represent any kind of general trend over time from higher to lower concision. English happens to be a less-inflected language, but there are many languages spoken today which are just as heavily inflected as Greek or Latin and presumably comparably concise; while on the other hand, of the thousands of languages that were spoken two thousand years ago, there were certainly many that were of the English type rather than the Greek and Latin type. So there's nothing to be concluded from these particular data points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the subtext of your question seems to be the idea that a lower word-to-idea ratio in a language is somehow better or more efficient. But this too is difficult to argue for. First, even if we accept that concision is a virtue, why count words rather than some other unit? Why not phonemes, syllables, or morphemes? If it turned out that Greek uses fewer words than English but more syllables to express the same idea, which language is more concise? But more importantly, there's really no particular reason to value concision. The expense of producing words (or syllables, or whatever) is virtually nil, so it's hard to see why the words-per-idea ratio should matter in any way. The extraordinary success of English as a global language suggests that it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T00:58:28.773" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T00:58:28.773" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25949" CreationDate="2017-09-19T00:02:04.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be an issue of valency of the verbs. In such pairs, the valency is inverted, regarding subject/indirect object. In other pairs, the inversion is regarding subject/direct object (such as in &lt;em&gt;I like you&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;You please me&lt;/em&gt;). I am sure that there are pairs where the inversion relates to direct/indirect objects too, but I can't think of an example just now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure there are technical names for these oppositions - you might coin them, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T00:02:04.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25930" CreationDate="2017-09-19T00:26:28.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proposition&quot; is a category in logic, not in grammar. A proposition is a statement about the state of affairs of the world, and it can be true or false. In your example, &quot;I have a car&quot; is a proposition. Notice that it is the same proposition as &quot;Tiengo un coche&quot;, &quot;J'ai un auto&quot;, &quot;Tenho um carro&quot;, etc, though those are evidently different sentences or utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sentence&quot; is a category in grammar, not in logic. It is a complete meaningful utterance. &quot;I have a car&quot; is a sentence as much as a proposition, and it may be said that all propositions must be a grammatical sentence. But the opposite is not true; for instance &quot;Do I have a car?&quot; is a sentence, but not a proposition. Notice that &quot;I have a car&quot; and &quot;I own a car&quot; are the same proposition, but different sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Utterance&quot; is any group of words that convey some meaning, even if it is anaphoric (like &quot;yes&quot; in your example). So all sentences are utterances, but not all utterances are sentences, because they may lack the grammatical structure (subject/predicate) of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: I have a car. (utterance, sentence, proposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2: Sorry? (utterance)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: I have a car. (utterance, sentence, proposition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2: You have a car? (utterance, sentence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1: Yes. (utterance)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T00:26:28.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T01:33:09.333" Score="1" ViewCount="1479" Body="&lt;p&gt;can anyone provide some minimal pairs for these in Albanian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just begun studying the language and would like to improve my ability to hear the differences in these, which is challenging as a native English speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found a ton of examples on here of l vs. ll, but not for the below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;r vs. rr&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xh vs. gj&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;q vs. ç&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19992" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T21:27:34.123" Title="Albanian minimal pairs for r vs. rr, xh vs. gj, and q vs. ç" Tags="&lt;albanian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T09:14:53.710" Score="2" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you draw a tree diagram in phrase structure grammars, should you draw a complement of a verb any differently than an adjunct of a verb by using different tree structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I slept &lt;strong&gt;on the floor&lt;/strong&gt;. [adjunct]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I relied &lt;strong&gt;on my mother&lt;/strong&gt;. [complement]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in these two sentences, &amp;quot;on the floor&amp;quot; is an adjunct of the verb &amp;quot;slept&amp;quot; whereas &amp;quot;on my mother&amp;quot; is a complement of the verb &amp;quot;relied&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, is the tree diagram of (1) any different than that of (2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T20:19:17.963" Title="Is a complement of a verb treated any differently than an adjunct of a verb in a tree diagram?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25965" CreationDate="2017-09-19T10:48:30.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In mainstream phrase structure grammars that rely on some form of X-bar theory, yes: In fact, the differing tree structures are the crucial point where the difference comes into play (coming along with grammatical implications concerning lexical selection, government of morphological features etc.).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The distinction between complements and adjuncts behaves the same way for VPs as it does for NPs or other categories.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a classical X-bar account as taught in basic linguistics classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An adjunct to a verb(al projection) is a sister to the V' it adjoins to and daughter to a new V' projection:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rmFZY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rmFZY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e., the verb already forms a higher bar projection (V' instead of just V) by itself. At the level of V', the phrase is already somewhat &quot;complete&quot; in terms of grammaticality; what potentially misses now is a specifier, but VPs are generally not assumed to have specifiers, so at this point, we can already obtain a full verb phrase (which is visible by the V' going over directly into a VP). The adjunct acts merely as a modifier to the V' (in the sense of adding more information) and thereby produces a new V' projection; i.o.w., adjunction doesn't really change anything about the grammatical status of the verbal projection - we had a V' previously and we have a new one now; the adjunct might as well be left away and leave a healthy verb phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complement of a verb is a sister to the verbal head, and daughter to a first V':&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gfPXo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gfPXo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I.e., a verb that requires a complmement forms the next projection level only together with its complement; without it, the sentence is ungrammatical. V does not make a V' by itself. It requires the complement as a direct sister in order to form a higher, more &quot;complete&quot; projection that can stand by itself. So the next level of phrasal completeness may only be added after combining the V head with its PP argument.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other variants of phrase structure grammar will propose slightly different tree structures, e.g. by omitting redundant bar levels (redundant because there is no specifier present) and making the V' a VP right away, and all the other usual disagreement on the specifics of tree structures, but the basic functionality is the same: Adjuncts adjoin to a node that is by itself already &quot;complete&quot;, while complements are direct sisters to the head.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-classical phrase structure grammars like, as mentioned by BillJ, CGEL, or tree representations of dependency analyses, ... might handle this entirely differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T16:55:29.263" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T16:55:29.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T13:27:53.293" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for languages that have extraction markers or wh-agreement markers like those cited in Chung (1994) in Chamorro below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSKd8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSKd8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example shows wh-agreement morphology on the verb when the questioned constituent is extracted. The constituent moves successive-cyclically and triggers wh-agreement on each verb of each clause it passes through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have an example of a general extraction marker or displacement marker (caused by focus movement, topicalisation, or any kind of movement in general) but, if I'm not mistaken, some Bantu languages have these. If you know any languages that have either or both of them, feel free to comment or answer with a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="2581" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T06:00:12.193" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T01:09:17.933" Title="What languages have extraction markers?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21491" CreationDate="2017-09-19T16:26:45.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thought is not necessarily linguistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It often feels that way because communicating our thoughts is usually linguistic, and self-reflection is an attempt at making whatever is floating around in our heads communicable. The fact that you are reading this now means you're in the middle of communicating, which biases you to think that your thoughts are words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of our thoughts are things like to make dinner tonight, I'll have to start boiling the potatoes early and at the last minute do I sautee the greens and garlic, oh I'll need to ask someone to bring home lemons, which reminds me of that trip to Florida last year. I'm using words to express this, but the thoughts were all a sequence of nebulous ideas. Not that thoughts involved in playing chess or rock paper scissors are generic thoughts, but you're not literally speaking in your head &quot;If they do this then I'll do that, but then I should do this now so that...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said, yes, there does seem to be a 'narrator' to the 'blooming buzzing confusion' of senses, desires, and expectations we're thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that narrator speak? Well, frankly, you should tell us. We don't know what your dream is unless you show us. We don't know your inner monolog unless you tell us. Language is arbitrary, meaning we can lie, so there is some lack of total trust, but there are generalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the shortest way to say it possible, your first language will most likely be your inner narrator your whole life (this is obvious) but if your second language comes in early enough and is what you use 99% of the time, the second one may become the narrator. It all depends on how soon and how much. And similarly for more than two languages. Many people get along fluently their whole lives in a second language while fully being conscious of a process of mentally translating (without ever taking the 'conscious' leap of thinking directly in the other language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a 'ruling' language that controls the others is a thin metaphor. One may have one internal 'pre-verbalized' practice language or more than one. Different people might do things differently: one may have an internal narrator that is always one language whatever is being spoken, others may have language for talking with their parents and another for business or school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the external evidence is that things like numbers and expletives tend to be from the first language (or rather they're the last to be replaced by a second language). So you'll have to wait to your own later stages of dementia to have others confirm what you may have claimed all a long whether you've entirely converted your inner monolog to a newer language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T16:26:45.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25965" CreationDate="2017-09-19T20:19:17.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A rule of thumb that will seldom (if ever) lead you astray is that a modifier (or &quot;adjunct&quot;) modifies a constituent of the same category as the entire modification structure.  Complements do not obey this rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when we have a structure [A ... [B ... [C ...] ] ], when category A = C, then B modifies C (and B is an adjunct).  But when A and C have different categories, C is a complement of B.  Similarly, for post-modification, we have [A [C ...] ... B] with A = C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A way to think about this is that adding a modifier to a constituent does not change the category of the constituent, but adding a complement does change the category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a pure phrase structure theory, a modification structure is described by a recursive rule, which necessarily generates an infinite number of modification structures, unlike a complement structure. (Compare adjective and adverb modifiers with subjects and objects, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, no known syntactic theory describes this basic fact of language structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T20:19:17.963" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25964" CreationDate="2017-09-19T21:27:34.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;arë&lt;/em&gt; &quot;soil&quot; vs &lt;em&gt;arrë&lt;/em&gt; &quot;nut&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;çaj&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cut&quot; vs &lt;em&gt;qaj&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cry&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;xham&lt;/em&gt; &quot;glass&quot; vs &lt;em&gt;gjak&lt;/em&gt; &quot;blood&quot; (near-minimal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the International Phonetic Alphabet, here's how these contrasts would be written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ɾ/ vs /r/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /d͡ʒ/ vs /ɟ/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /t͡ʃ/ vs /c/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of these is the easiest to explain: &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is a tap, while &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt; is a trill. In other words, in &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; your tongue flaps once, like a very short &quot;d&quot;, and in &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt; it flaps several times. Spanish makes this same distinction, written the same way, and recordings should be easy to find: the classic minimal pair is &lt;em&gt;pero&lt;/em&gt; &quot;but&quot; / &lt;em&gt;perro&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dog&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and third contrasts are more difficult. In Gheg Albanian the distinction is entirely lost, and this is spreading to some speakers of Tosk Albanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sounds written &lt;em&gt;ç&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;xh&lt;/em&gt; are &quot;affricates&quot;, like in the English words &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;urch&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt;. They're pronounced by stopping the flow of air, then releasing the obstruction partially. The sounds written &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gj&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand are &quot;plosives&quot;, closer to the sounds in English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt;een&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ear&lt;/em&gt;, pronounced by blocking the flow of air and then releasing it all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English doesn't have Albanian's &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gj&lt;/em&gt; as distinct sounds, but they're very close to the pronunciation of English &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; before the vowel in &quot;feed&quot;. These sounds also exist in Hungarian, where they're written &lt;em&gt;ty&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gy&lt;/em&gt; (as in &quot;Magyar&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T21:27:34.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-20T04:01:42.787" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the first-person singular pronouns, it seems obvious that these pronouns can only refer the speaker, since there is always only one speaker, so it must be always coreferential, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I(i) took my(i) bag.&#xA;*I(i) took *my(j) bag.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it also seems obvious that the third person pronouns do not have to be coreferential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;He(i) took his(j) bag.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not so sure about second person pronouns and plural pronouns. In most of the cases of English, they seem to be always coreferential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We(i) took our(i) bags.&#xA;*We(i) took our(j) bags.&#xA;You(i) follow yourself(i).&#xA;*You(singular, i) follow you(singular, j).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this also the case for other languages? How about those languages with inclusive first-person pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. not a native speaker of English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20001" LastEditorUserId="20001" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T14:33:26.210" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T14:33:26.210" Title="Are first-person and second-person pronouns always co-referential for a given speaker at a given context?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25971" CreationDate="2017-09-20T10:43:40.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting question for Czech, where we use reflexive pronouns in case of co-reference and there is a clear distinction of co-reference and multiple reference in the third person &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1) Já(i) jsem si vzal svůj(i) batoh - I(i) took my(i) bag&#xA;2) On(i) si vzal svůj(i) batoh - He(i) took his(i) bag&#xA;3) On(i) si vzal jeho(j) batoh - He(i) took his(j) bag&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a language user's point of view, I would say you can extend it frequently also to the first and second person plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4) My(já,Pavel) jsme byli na naší(tým) poradě - We(me, Paul) were on our(team) meeting.&#xA;5) My(já,manželka) jsme byli ve svém(já,manželka) domě - We(me,wife) were in our(me,wife) house.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly cannot imagine using the reflexive &lt;em&gt;svůj&lt;/em&gt; in the case 4). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it is necessary to mention that the usage of the reflexive in the first/second person plural tends to get somewhat blurry in the last years and one can see the reflexive pronoun falling somewhat out of use even in case of a very clear co-reference (my personal suspicion is that this is an influence of advertising where they typically want to highlight &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; as the customer and &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; choices, which the reflexive pronoun does not really do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: Also it surprises me that you would not permit &lt;em&gt;*We(i) took our(j) bags.&lt;/em&gt; in English. I admit that without any pragmatic context, my preferred reading of &lt;em&gt;We took our bags&lt;/em&gt; would be that with co-reference, however in a context of, say, a group of tourists, saying something like...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) We (me,Paul) took our(our group) bags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...seem perfectly cromulent to me, but then again, I am not a native speaker of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T10:43:40.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-20T17:21:41.867" Score="0" ViewCount="1291" Body="&lt;p&gt;She's a teacher working at a public high school. Now, you can say either of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) She teaches at a public high school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) She works at a public high school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the prepositional phrase &amp;quot;at a public school&amp;quot; a complement or an adjunct in (1)? How about in (2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bunchsyntax.weebly.com/steps-for-analyzing-a-sentence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; shows this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Sneeden teaches English at the University of Florida.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they say &amp;quot;at the University of Florida&amp;quot; is an adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while I was looking at Oxford Modern English Grammar the other day, I came across a sentence similar to (2) with the verb &amp;quot;work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work in the Physiology Department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the book says &amp;quot;in the Physiology Department&amp;quot; is not an adjunct but a complement, because if the PP is left out the meaning of the sentence changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess, according to these references, the PP in (1) is an adjunct and the one in (2) is a complement. If so, I'm still not sure why leaving out the PP from (2) changes (2)'s meaning but leaving out the PP in (1) doesn't change (1)'s meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T08:19:31.277" Title="complement vs adjunct" Tags="&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25967" CreationDate="2017-09-21T01:09:17.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, you're asking about a specific extraction marker that occurs always and only when a nominal is extracted, and in clause chains it appears in each clause. As far as I know, this does not exist in Bantu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages which show subject and object agreement reflecting the pattern of movement, for example in Kipsigis (Jake &amp;amp; Odden 1979 &quot;Raising in Kipsigis&quot;) when a 1st or 2nd person is raised out of an object complement it controls object agreement and when raised out of an subject complement it controls subject agreement, and each intervening clause shows the appropriate agreement. Bantu languages do likewise with subject-to-subject raising. But in both cases, this involves marking that is not specific to extractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What many Bantu languages &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have is a special verb form employed in relative clauses, which can obviously be related to extraction. However, this is probably a subset of extractions. The same verb forms are widely used in subordinate clauses like &quot;&lt;em&gt;having build a house&lt;/em&gt;, the farmer took a nap&quot;, and also &quot;&lt;em&gt;when he took a nap&lt;/em&gt;, the dog barked&quot;. A distinction is often made for these languages between main clause affirmative forms, versus all else (subordinate, or negative). It's not obvious that those clauses all involve extraction, but perhaps that is a contemporary analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also generally the case in Bantu that an immediately pre-verbal wh-NP causes the verb to shift to the aforementioned relative clause form, thus *&quot;Which child cried?&quot;, but okay &quot;What child rel-cried?&quot;. Wh-extractions in Tharaka are reported by Muriungi (&quot;WH-questions in Kitharaka&quot;) to exhibit a &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-extraction-sensitive allomorphy in the present tense marker, which is -ku- ordinarily, but -ri- in case the clause contains an in situ WH object (so, if the WH object is extracted, -ku- is used). Selection of -ri- is not actually governed by extraction though it superficially correlates with it (in a strange way): it correlates with in-situ focus. You also use -ri- in the present on object-complement verbs (no extraction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T01:09:17.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25989" CreationDate="2017-09-21T04:18:47.007" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently working on a problem set where we are using quine quotes (corner quotes) and normal quotes to distinguish use and mention. In class I felt that examples were much simpler, both of these sentences have features that are just incomprehensible to me and I was hoping for some guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: I'm looking for more than just answers to these two problems but to really understand this stuff so if you have any helpful resources, tips, etc. please include them in your answer!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If  the  sentence  is  as  it  stands  false  or  senseless,  change  it  to  a  true  sentence by supplying quotes and/or corner quotes, or explain why no such alteration is possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) For every sentence φ, the last word of the last word of φ is polysyllabic is polysyllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, the two repeated phrases &quot;the last word&quot; and &quot;is polysyllabic&quot; throw me, I just don't see how they can be incorporated. No variation of use or mention makes the last word of a last word of phi make sense-- and the double polysyllabic? I'm at a total loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) The first letter of the Greek alphabet is α is satisfied by an object β only if β is identical with α.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is even more frustrating, it seems that there is an α missing and it should read: [...]alphabet is α, α is satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20009" LastEditorUserId="20009" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T15:51:20.747" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:57:31.563" Title="Making Sense of Nonsense: [Corner/Quine] Quotes!" Tags="&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25973" CreationDate="2017-09-21T08:19:31.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prepositional phrases are always tricky and depend on the semantic frame dictated by the verb and related participants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use FrameNet for example to see the set of known frames for a given verb. In your example &lt;a href=&quot;https://verbs.colorado.edu/verb-index/vn/cooperate-73.php#cooperate-73-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;work&lt;/a&gt; takes a PP{at} as a theme so it is a participant thus a complement.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://verbs.colorado.edu/verb-index/vn/transfer_mesg-37.1.1.php#transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Teach&lt;/a&gt; on the other hand takes only a recipient or a topic as second participants so anything else is a circumstance/adjunct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12905" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T08:19:31.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-21T13:34:57.813" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Armenian word for seven is &quot;yotta&quot;, which sounds suspiciously similar to the Greek prefix for a factor of one septillion (though AIUI it comes from the ancient Greek word for eight, not seven). Is there evidence that these words are related, or is it just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20015" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T18:35:18.053" Title="&quot;yotta&quot; in Greek and Armenian" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25979" CreationDate="2017-09-21T18:35:18.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a coincidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prefix &quot;yotta-&quot; is in no way Greek. It is a modern, invented, coinage, derived from Greek  ὀκτώ (okto) by a very roundabout and idiosyncratic route. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armenian յոթ (yot') derives from Old Armenian եօթն (eot'n), older  եւթն (ewtʿn), ultimately from IndoEuropean *septḿ̥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Wiktionary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yotta-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%B5%D5%B8%D5%A9#Armenian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T18:35:18.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25960" CreationDate="2017-09-21T18:45:03.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the examples you cite indeed contain subordinate clauses, but in general a subordinating conjunction does not necessarily introduce a subordinate clause. In numerous languages of the world, there are sentences like “That you be happy!” or “If you could give me your phone number”, which are not short versions of “[I wish that you] do smth”, but are independent main clauses with a so-called hortative or jussive meaning. It’s often called “insubordination”: &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.574.8305&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.574.8305&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17190" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T18:45:03.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25960" CreationDate="2017-09-21T21:59:31.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;, McCawley discusses this problem of identifying subordinate clauses.  He suggests testing whether a construction allows for the extraction of a constituent simultaneously from the main clause and a putative subordinate clause as a negative test, since in general this works only for coordinate clauses, not subordinate clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, beginning with &quot;She said to some man that the doctor would see him,&quot; if we form a question by extracting &quot;some man ... him&quot;, we get *&quot;Who did she say to that the doctor would see?&quot;  Since that is ungrammatical, we can conclude that the clause &quot;that the doctor would see him&quot; is a subordinate clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T21:59:31.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3369" CreationDate="2017-09-22T15:13:40.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been known for some time that there is huge mismatch between the terminology and the reality when we talk about the description of vowels. Vowels are rather simple acoustically (they can be pretty well described by their formant structures), but rather complex in the articulatory domain (articulations are continuous, and different articulations can give rise to similar formant effects; for instance, both lip rounding and backness depress F2 and are in a sense contradictory—that’s why languages usually have [u] and [i] and much more rarely [y] and [ɯ]). So, when we are talking about vowels we are effectively describing their sounds (and use the formant plots for studying vowel systems). Consonants, on the other hand, are very complex acoustically because they mostly consist of aperiodic turbulent noise, which is hard to describe in a concise fashion; however, it often easy to describe the positions of different articulators because those are mostly well defined and ‘discrete’ (tongue pressed against teeth or the alveolar ridge, etc.) and this is often done using different instrumental techniques like palatography and ultrasound. Therefore, when describing consonants and vowels, we not only use different words, but also actually mean completely different things by them so a chance for a unified descriptive methodology is pretty slight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17190" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T15:13:40.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-22T16:21:09.490" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the exclamation &lt;em&gt;That you be happy!&lt;/em&gt; what part of speech is the word &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;? Is it a conjunction via ellipsis, i.e. &quot;(I wish) that you be happy!&quot; If yes, then does this poke a hole in the idea that subordinating conjunctions necessarily introduce subordinate clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T22:07:28.177" Title="What part of speech is the word &quot;that&quot; in &quot;That you be happy!&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="25992" CreationDate="2017-09-22T17:50:30.473" Score="0" ViewCount="1294" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can you write/capture the generalized phonological rule for: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary stress on all words is on the first syllable?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been awhile since I've had to formally write rules, and I'm needing a refresher....Any help is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20026" LastEditorUserId="20026" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T21:21:30.280" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T21:21:30.280" Title="Writing Phonological Rules" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25975" CreationDate="2017-09-22T18:50:04.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For every sentence φ, the last word of &quot;the last word of φ is polysyllabic&quot; is &quot;polysyllabic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, since &quot;polysyllabic&quot; is polysyllabic,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For every sentence φ, the last word of &quot;the last word of φ is polysyllabic&quot; is polysyllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The first letter of the Greek alphabet is α&quot; is satisfied by an object β only if β is identical with &quot;α&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T13:57:31.563" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:57:31.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25988" CreationDate="2017-09-22T19:16:08.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the usual notation of Generative Phonology, that could be formulated: V -&gt; [1 stress] / ##C0__ (where the 0 is a subscript).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T19:16:08.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25988" CreationDate="2017-09-22T19:17:09.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question cannot be answered in a theoretical vacuum, especially when it comes to stress. However, in standard SPE style rule theory, this would be &quot;V → [+stress] / #Co _&quot;. &quot;V&quot; is a common abbreviation for &quot;[+syllabic]&quot; and &quot;C&quot; for [-syllabic]. &quot;Co&quot; (where &quot;o&quot; is subscript-zero) means &quot;any number of; &quot;#&quot; is the standard symbol for word boundary. The SPE account did not have syllables, instead stress was assigned to vowels. The expression &quot;any number of consonants&quot; was required since a rule applying to a vowel in the context &quot;#__&quot; would only apply to a word-initial vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-SPE (starting around 1977), this segmental theory of stress was abandoned for a metrical theory of stress, where syllables were labeled as &quot;prominent&quot; or &quot;strong&quot;, versus &quot;weak&quot;. In that approach, you would make the first syllable of the word be &quot;strong&quot;. The exact mechanism for doing this changed over time: it sometimes involved building tree structures, sometimes piling up marks like &quot;x&quot; or &quot;*&quot;, sometimes putting in brackets (paired or not). As for the formalism of rules, there usually weren't any, instead a language would be said to have certain &quot;parameters&quot;, such as &quot;build a left-headed foot&quot;, &quot;start at the left&quot;, &quot;ignore the first syllable&quot;, all of which were said to be part of an inventory of parameters in Universal Grammar. Consequently, the actual rule part in a grammar was negligible, and usually neglected. Hayes, in his dissertation, offered a few rules, such as &quot;destressing&quot;, which (in Aklan) is &quot;delete a non-branching foot before a strong syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             /&#xA;F → Ø / ___ s&#xA;         |  σ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T19:17:09.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25987" CreationDate="2017-09-22T22:07:28.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your phrase is a fragment (not a sentence).  It might occur as the answer to a question (&quot;What do you want?&quot;).  'That' is a complementizer -- it makes 'you be happy' the complement of 'what'.  This is similar to the demonstrative pronoun function of 'this' or 'that', except that the antecedent is a phrase rather than something in the external environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T22:07:28.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-23T00:05:56.193" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those not fluent in internet-ese, the semantics are something like &quot;The subject under discussion has an aesthetic I want to emulate&quot;; if I saw a picture of someone wearing an outfit I like, I might type &quot;#goals&quot;, or if I was actually talking with my voice I'd pronounce that as &quot;hashtag goals&quot;. The fact that I'm effectively just expressing an emotion makes me think that it's an interjection, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20028" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T11:42:17.033" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T11:42:17.033" Title="How do you analyze a standalone hashtag like &quot;#goals&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;interjections&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25994" CreationDate="2017-09-23T00:45:39.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I know little of syntax, so don't take this as an expert viewpoint. (I would not advise accepting this answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's really possible to give any single analysis. &quot;Goals&quot; is normally a noun, and I see no reason why that wouldn't be true in this context. Nouns can play many syntactic roles, and in a one-word utterance, there isn't a lot that pins down what the role of the word is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a document on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin J. Packer's website&lt;/a&gt; that provides some discussion of the syntax of one-word utterances (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holophrasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;holophrasis&lt;/a&gt;). It mentions David McNeill, who argues that single-word utterances by children should be understood as having grammatical relations that are not overtly expressed. But even if we assume there is an underlying syntactic structure like this to &quot;#goals&quot;, I see no way of knowing exactly what this internal structure is. &quot;Goals&quot; could be seen as expressing the idea &quot;These are my goals&quot; (where the word is syntactically part of a predicate) or &quot;I have these goals&quot; (where the word is syntactically part of a direct object). (Of course, there are also many multiple-word sentences that have multiple possible syntactic parses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really know what &quot;interjection&quot; means as a syntactic term. It seems to me that it might be a placeholder categorization for things that don't fit in well in other categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T00:45:39.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3013" CreationDate="2017-09-23T03:09:58.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in an article by Roehrs that in Romance articles have a morphosyntactic function, they are there mostly to agree with the noun they are modifying in gender, number and case (in Romanian), whereas in Germanic they also have the semanrtic-pragmatic reasons you mentioned. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20030" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T03:09:58.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T07:51:10.173" Score="2" ViewCount="2986" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone said Anunasika is like trying to say something entirely in nasal voice. So let’s say I want to pronounce a vowel ‘U’kara with Chandrabindu on top of it. I know it’s should be completely a nasal sound. So based on my understanding it is to be I pronounced with my mouth formed as if I’m trying to say the vowel U but sound should mainly come out of my nose and little bit in mouth. Is it correct??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19967" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-09-24T17:41:53.357" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T12:59:03.330" Title="Anunasika(Chandrabindu) in Vowels (Sanskrit)" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T16:59:10.233" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the linguistic terminology for the phenomenon of semantic change in a discourse within a closed community. This closed community could be a couple, a company etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, imagine the following scenario. Employees in a company complain about lack of equipment, e.g. printers. They initially just want additional printers. The managers don't do anything about it. The employees again complain about the lack of printers, and the circle continues. However, at some point the complaint about lack of printers starts to shift its meaning from &quot;we don't have enough printers&quot; to &quot;management doesn't listen to us&quot;, &quot;management don't care&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about a similar scenario in a romantic relationship where complaints such as &quot;you always leave the light on&quot;, or &quot;you never wash the dishes&quot; is used in a similar way to express something deeper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a terminology in linguistics that would describe these scenarios? I was thinking about polysemy/metonymy but don't think it describes this properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20046" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-09-24T23:31:51.483" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T23:31:51.483" Title="Terminology for a phrase that changes meaning over time within a closed community" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25997" CreationDate="2017-09-24T17:33:54.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anunāsika&lt;/em&gt; is the Sanskrit name for what linguists call &lt;em&gt;vowel nasalization&lt;/em&gt;. A vowel marked with a &lt;em&gt;chandrabindu&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced with the soft palate lowered, allowing air to escape through your nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to describe nasalization in text, but it's characteristic of French: in standard Parisian French, a vowel followed by a (silent) &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; will be pronounced nasalized, e.g. &lt;em&gt;un vin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also test if you're pronouncing a nasal vowel correctly by closing your mouth while saying it. If it turns into an /m/ sound, that's a nasal vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T17:33:54.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T20:04:42.780" Score="1" ViewCount="466" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am concerned with movement spanning the barrier between two clauses, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did John say [CP that Mary will buy __]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did John say [CP will Mary buy __]? //with the same meaning as&#xA;the former&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before appearing in the very beginning of the entire sentence &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is to move to SpecC of the embedded clause. Why? Can it be caused by altogether different principles at the same time? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, according to [Pesetsky &amp;amp; Torrego 2000] &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is equivalent to the inversion in the embedded clause in being triggered by &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;T in the interrogative clause. But these embedded clauses are not interrogative. So, why do these processes occur? I must have lost sight of something... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T01:17:41.650" Title="What is the difference between successive-cyclic wh-movement and long-distance wh-movement?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;movement&gt;&lt;embedding&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3013" CreationDate="2017-09-24T20:43:42.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that all Romance languages use articles in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For pure predicative assertions as L'eau est liquide, Le tigre est un&#xA;animal no choice is possible as far as I can tell: the definite&#xA;article has to be used. But as soon as one leaves this simple context,&#xA;my intuition is not so good. For instance Un chimpanzé adore les&#xA;bananes (A chimp loves bananas) and Le chimpanzé adore les bananes&#xA;(The chimp loves bananas) both seem equally degraded with respect to&#xA;the perfect Les chipanzés adorent les bananes but nevertheless&#xA;acceptable to my ear (with the meaning Chimps love bananas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Portuguese, &lt;em&gt;um chimpanzé gosta de bananas&lt;/em&gt; usually has not this generic meaning of &amp;quot;chimps love bananas&amp;quot;, and would be used in different contexts. And &lt;em&gt;o chimpanzé gosta de bananas&lt;/em&gt; is at least ambiguous, and I think would be used more like as &amp;quot;this chimp loves bananas&amp;quot;. Furthermore, &lt;em&gt;chimpanzé gosta de banana&lt;/em&gt; (for some reason, now the object needs going in the singular, too) is colloquial, not standard (which would be &lt;em&gt;chimpanzés gostam de banana(s)&lt;/em&gt;, with the object accepting both singular and plural. And, finally, as you see, &lt;em&gt;banana&lt;/em&gt; in any case rejects articles. And so the usage is different from French, albeit both being Romance language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On further thought, it &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; to be different: French has three sets of articles, definite, indefinite, and partitive, while Portuguese (as English) has only definite and indefinite articles. Portuguese expresses the French idea of partitive by an &amp;quot;article 0&amp;quot; (though by no means this is the only use of the absence of an article). Colloquially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Me dá o pão.&lt;/em&gt; - Give me (this precise loaf of) bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Me dá um pão.&lt;/em&gt; - Give me a loaf of bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Me dá pão.&lt;/em&gt; - Give me (some) bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then &lt;em&gt;pão&lt;/em&gt; is used both as a countable noun (in which it means &amp;quot;loaf of bread&amp;quot; and as a non-countable noun (in which it means &amp;quot;bread&amp;quot;, the substance of which loaves of bread are made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, my feeling is that the use of articles in Portuguese if by far more &amp;quot;syntactical&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;semantic&amp;quot;. Some constructions require definite articles, others require indefinite articles, some require no article at all. This is far from consistent, as probably best shown by the usage of country names, where it has absolutely no semantic value:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venho d&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; França.&lt;/em&gt; - I come from France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venho d&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt; Vietnã.&lt;/em&gt; - I come from Vietnam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venho de Portugal.&lt;/em&gt; - I come from Portugal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is probably unpredictable. For instance, while the opposition definite article/no article implies the opposition between countable/non-countable nouns in some cases, in other cases it marks the opposition between a person itself and the work of that person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gosto do José&lt;/em&gt; - I like (this guy) Joseph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gosto da Bete&lt;/em&gt; - I like (this lady) Beth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gosto de Mozart&lt;/em&gt; - I like Mozart. (the music, not necessarily the man).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gosto de Jane Austen&lt;/em&gt; - I like Jane Austen. (the books, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other contradistictions possibly exist, but it is not easy to spot the illogicalities in one's own language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T20:43:42.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25997" CreationDate="2017-09-24T22:13:59.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2261/53466/1/ggr033003.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper by Cardona&lt;/a&gt; surveys the problem of determining the status of anunāsika versus anusvāra (I don't derive any firm conclusions from this, but it does lay out the textual facts). Pāṇini is said to have believed that the terms refer to different phonetic things, and Whitney thinks the difference is terminological / theoretical without basis in reality. Aṣṭādhāyi &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VeMoAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA10&amp;amp;lpg=PA10&amp;amp;dq=anunasika&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=JyMI8EddX3&amp;amp;sig=u2964E7preRrzNfSgb9J63KNn4U&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj71uGb2b7WAhUB9WMKHTu3B_AQ6AEIRTAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=anunasika&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bk.1 Ch1. Sut.8&lt;/a&gt; says, in typical telegraphic style, &quot;mukhanāsikāvacano 'nunāsikaḥ&quot;, which Vasu translates as &quot;that which is pronounced by the nose along with the mouth is &lt;em&gt;anunāsika&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;. In addition to vowels, which may be nasalized, /n+l/ undergoes regressive lateralization to give [l̃l], which is also anunāsika. So the term may refer to nasalization of vowels and approximants. From a practical perspective, making a nasalized vowel is sufficient, until you decide to dig at a high level into the terminology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T16:23:50.750" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T16:23:50.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26014" CreationDate="2017-09-24T22:35:04.480" Score="9" ViewCount="703" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have over 5000 language on Earth as of now, some extant and others not. These all came from what we now call proto languages, but do scientists believe that all proto languages came from one &quot;mono-language&quot; or several different language origins. Ergo are there multiple &quot;language trees&quot; so to speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19978" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T02:33:18.093" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T02:33:18.093" Title="Was language invented only once or several times?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26000" CreationDate="2017-09-25T01:17:41.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, compare TG ( Transformational Grammar) and GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar).  TG allows the formulation of rules that perform long distance movement, using the variables of a transformation to stand for arbitrarily long strings of parts of a &quot;proper analysis&quot;.  For your example, a variable X of the WH movement transformation represents &quot;John Past say that Mary will buy&quot; (labeled brackets omitted), which is the material across which the &quot;what&quot; must move in order to get to the beginning of the sentence.  The length of such a string is in principle unbounded, which makes this use of a variable &quot;crucial&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one time, it was thought that this was the killer argument for TG as against CFG (Context Free Grammar).  For any given instance of WH movement, we can allow the movement or not, by fiddling with the details of the phrase structure rules of a CFG, but describing constraints on WH movement in a general way is impossible, simply because there would be an unbounded number of phrase structure rules to modify, but in principle a CFG can have only a finite, fixed number of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the significance of the original title of Haj Ross's MIT dissertation, &lt;em&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if there are actually no rules in natural languages that perform such unbounded movements, then we perhaps no longer have this difficulty of the Ross constraints to deal with.  Perhaps things move around in small steps, such as proposed in the successive cyclic proposal, where there are no unbounded movements.  The implication is that each step can be constrained in some appropriate way, and so there will be many different ways of violating a constraint on WH movement, for instance, because movement within each cyclic domain is separately constrained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was Gerald Gazdar who described how to do this, by using &quot;slash&quot; features in a PSG to describe the distribution of gaps on a constituent-by-constituent basis. For instance, if it is possible for the CP after &quot;say&quot; to contain a gapped NP, we describe that by giving a phrase structure rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; VP/NP -&amp;gt; say CP/NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which says that a possible VP with a NP which has been moved away can have &quot;say&quot; followed by a CP from which a NP has been removed.  And then, we need also to say that a CP with a NP gap may have the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; CP/NP -&amp;gt; that S/NP  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is &quot;that&quot; followed by an S from which a NP has been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, movement is resolved into small steps, each of which can be described with a phrase structure rule (when the movement is actually possible).  There is no unbounded movement possible, but we can hope that none is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could say, then, that Chomsky's proposal makes use of Gazdar's idea, without giving credit, and without pointing out that the general form of the proposal apparently makes transformations altogether unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T01:17:41.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26008" CreationDate="2017-09-25T09:06:42.337" Score="7" ViewCount="819" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a lecture, my professor said that assumig a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German is problematic. Now I´m wondering why. The issue came up during a discussion on whether or not morphemes should be defined as the smallest signs carrying meaning (signifiant + signifé) or whether morphemes primarily have a signifié side (because of allomorphy of plural number of nouns in German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;null morpheme&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_allomorph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;null allomorph&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia entry (not the most reliable source, I know), which mentiones null morphemes signifying the singular number of nouns in English as an example, also says that some linguists object to this notion: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some linguists object to the notion of a null morpheme, arguing that it sets up an unverifiable distinction between a &quot;null&quot; or &quot;zero&quot; element, and nothing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Some linguists&quot; - Who, apart from my professor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other reasons to object to null morphemes (in general)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20049" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:55:50.613" Title="Why is it problematic to assume a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German?" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26003" CreationDate="2017-09-25T10:31:29.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it happens even nowadays that languages are created anew from fragments of other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are creoles like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papiamento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Papiamento&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tok Pisin&lt;/a&gt; that are created from fragments of different and unrelated languages and have no clear antecessor. There are also constructed languages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loglan&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; that did not evolve from any natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember (but I could not retrieve a quotable reference in short time) a story about twins raised in circumstances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language deprivation&lt;/a&gt; who developed their own language allegedly not related to the language of the country they lived in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all this, the main reason for having unrelated language families is time depth: Any traces of relatedness are completely wiped out by linguistic changes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T10:31:29.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26006" CreationDate="2017-09-25T10:33:26.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short, assuming invisible stuff is always problematic from a theoretical point of view, because you can never really prove it's there, and even worse, you can never really prove it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; there - because it's invisible. This is scientifically seen very undesirable and therefore often rejected  - a hypothesis should always be possible to both be verified and be falsified by empirical facts, and this is not so straightforwardly possible for things that are never observable on a physical basis, indifferently between whether you claim it to be absent or present in that particular situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T13:55:50.613" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T13:55:50.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25994" CreationDate="2017-09-25T11:41:58.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different approaches to such innovations in part of speech tagsets (for an overview see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12777/a-list-of-parts-of-speech/12994#12994&quot;&gt;this answer to &quot;A List of Parts of Speech&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). You can treat it as a &quot;symbol&quot; (a special class for internet speech related things, in Universal Dependencies), as &quot;other&quot; (a quite typical approach), or, as you propose, as an interjection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you decide, make your decision and your reasoning behind it clear in the documentation of your corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T11:41:58.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26812" CreationDate="2017-09-25T15:57:53.857" Score="5" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindi, Bigul (बिगुल) (IPA /bigul/) is a bugle-like instrument, if they are cognates can someone also tell me how they might have been formed.!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T06:17:07.637" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T20:32:00.603" Title="Are Hindi &quot;Bigul&quot; (बिगुल) and English &quot;Bugle&quot; cognates?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26003" CreationDate="2017-09-25T16:51:59.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question raises three terminological issues: what is &quot;language&quot;, what is &quot;invented&quot; and what is &quot;once&quot;? It does presuppose that there was a prior state without language, and a later state with it (no controversy about that). To answer the question, we need to understand exactly what is being asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is one aspect of a more general set of cognitive tools unique to humans. Some parts are clearly learned, and others are clearly genetically inherited (those who deny a language-specific genetic component nevertheless do not deny that human cognitive abilities are genetically transmitted). &quot;Language&quot; is a myriad of evolutionary developments such as the physical enhancements which allow us to make speech articulations; the ability to retain an open-ended and replicable set of articulations (we don't just learn 12 calls, and we can easily reproduce the hundred and thousands of calls that we make – not by memorizing acoustic patterns of whole words); the ability to combine sequences of units into higher-level units; the ability to do this recursively; the ability to treat order of elements as distinctive... and many facts that are plainly about language, such as &quot;grammatical agreement&quot;, &quot;movement&quot;, &quot;palatalization&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can always conjecture that there was a single evolutionary event, via a single linguistic Eve, which catapulted mankind from chimpanzee-like linguistic abilities to having full grammars, but that is more a sci-fi movie storyline. The various genetic abilities that resulted in our current or pre-current state must have happened over the course of many generations. And it is highly improbable that humans had these latent abilities – to create phonemes, words, sentences, and unbounded dependencies – without actually ever doing this, until one day somebody got the idea &quot;I should invent language&quot;. Forming and fleshing out the idea &quot;I should invent language&quot; cannot be done without language, in some form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what &quot;once&quot; would mean, in an evolutionary sense. If we take a hereditary genetic mutation to be the causal spark for the development of a new trait, &quot;once&quot; can be limited to a part of a human lifespan: there may be a single mutation that brings about a change, transmitted to a being's offspring. As I said, it is extremely unlikely that there was just one mutation that created the full underpinnings of language. However, you could look at &quot;once&quot; from a grander perspective, summing up over hundreds of thousands of years of human development. You can, effectively, answer the question in the affirmative simply by adopting a broad definition of when &quot;once&quot; is, as opposed to &quot;twice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since language involves both genetic and learned facts, and in light of the fact that the question is about language being &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt; (not developed), we could narrow the question by focusing on the learned aspects, presupposing the prior existence of requisite genetic abilities. An example of a learned aspect of language is the set of sounds used to communicate something. Somehow, particular sound sequences got associated with real-world situations like &quot;water; food; bear; tiger; rabbit; sex&quot;. The learned ability to create words (stable correlations of signal and referent) must have preceded the learned ability to create sentences out of multiple words, which must have preceded the learned ability to distinguish event by ordering words in a different fashion. I would say that it is inescapable that different learned aspects of language developed at different times (thus, &quot;more than once&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related question about &quot;single common language&quot;, which can't be answered. We can reasonably suppose that in the way-olden days, there were many groups of humans with developed languages. It is then possible that at some point, all of those languages were obliterated (perhaps all their speakers died off), and thus every human language is the result of linguistic change from that single surviving language. Thus every existing language could be, accidentally, descended from one language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a theoretical experiment (which will never get IRB approval), where infants are completely and absolutely deprived of all forms of language, with the question being whether the infants could develop full-blown languages. Poto and Cabengo-like situations differ from this imaginary experiment because in the former case, the stimulus is impoverished, but not totally lacking. Even performing the experiment would not tell you if language &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; invented twice, but it would be evidence that it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="2549" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T14:37:18.580" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:37:18.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26018" CreationDate="2017-09-25T17:43:16.047" Score="0" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently listened to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration/transcript?language=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TEDTalk given by Louis von Ahn,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; co-founder and CEO of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Duolingo.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  During this talk, which he gave in 2011, he addresses the topic of machine translation a bit.  Specificially, he says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate? Machine translation is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can't we use it to translate the web? The problem with that is it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about his prediction ever since.  Specifically, I've been wondering if his 15-20 year estimate is conservative, generous, or spot-on.  For a variety of reasons, I decided to come up with my own predictions based on the prediction Mr. von Ahn has made.  Those predictions are below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/ZLHqoHx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;You'll notice that the list is not all that inclusive, but my purpose is not to get a language by language prediction and I felt it was best to keep it to languages I was most familiar with (the one exception being the Asian languages).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting aside all reports of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ibtimes.com/will-asteroid-hit-earth-nasa-discovers-10-potentially-hazardous-objects-2550900&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;an asteroid hitting Earth in 2025&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or reports that we will &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reach &quot;singularity&quot; by 2045,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I am curious about the opinions of others who are more learned with the topic of linguistics, machine learning, and/or artificial intelligence with regard to the predictions I've made.  In fact, I thought about posting this on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Artificial Intelligence StackExchange,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but I sensed it would be seen by more people who have discussed this question by posting it here in the Linguistics StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be interested in knowing how you come up with your predictions.  Mine, as I said, were based off of Mr. von Ahn's predictions, but beyond that, I factored in the difficulty of the various languages based off of previously established models (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FSI's categories of language difficulty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), my own personal experience with the language, and how well I've noticed tools such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google Translate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; perform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem to me that this process of going from human translation to machine translation will be a gradual process and quite different from the transition that took place between use of the abacus and the hand-held calculator.  However, the path technology has taken and the speed with which it has spread seems to indicate that it is inevitable that one day machine translation will eclipse human translation.  Sadly, however, I've never heard anyone lament, &lt;em&gt;But I was really good with the abacus!  What am I going to do now that the calculator is here!!&lt;/em&gt;  I say sadly, because learning a language may be the one true talent some of us have and it takes a lot of time and energy to learn a language.  Despite that (or perhaps because of it) I wonder if it makes sense to continue such a pursuit.  The quality of some machine translations I've seen is so good that I wonder if continuing to learn a language is akin to continuing to master your skills with the abacus when the calculator is about to hit the market.  In other words, is it now a waste of time to bother learning a foreign language because a machine will soon be able to do it so much faster and so much better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider and answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14217" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T18:58:09.007" Title="Will machine translation eclipse the need for human translation some day and if so, by what date do you predict?" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-09-29T15:18:56.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26015" CreationDate="2017-09-25T18:58:09.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Already, Google Translate has reduced the need for knowledge of foreign languages and for translators. There is the possibility that human translators will become much less useful, especial for major languages, and combined with the prospects of radical reduction in the number of languages spoken, needs for human translation may shrivel significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual need and theoretical need are different. The former is driven by social forces, and the latter is just an exercise in combinatorics. I don't think there is a Norwegian-Chukchi translator out there (human or machine), the reason being that there's no social need for such a thing (yet). There is a current and actual need for translation of Mushunguli, Af May and Af Mahaa (standard Somali). Case in point, the Missouri dept. of health has a pamphlet translates English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At home, school, work, and even in our cars, we need to know what to&#xA;  do in an emergency. We need to know  where to go in an emergency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into Somali as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Marka aynu joogno guriga, dugsiga, shaqada, iyo xiitaa baabuurka&#xA;  dhexdiisa, waxa loo baahan yahay inaynu naqaano wixii aynu  sameyn&#xA;  lahayn marka wax lamo-filaan ahi dhacaan. Waxa loo baahan yahay inaynu&#xA;  naqaano meesha la tago marka wax degdeg inoogu dhacaan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(not a speaker, but my limited knowledge of the language and use of a dictionary tells me that this is reasonable – if a Somali speaker can weigh in, that would be enlightening). Google translates the Somali text to English as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we are at home, at school, at work, and even in the car, we need&#xA;  to know what we do not do anything - The dusk happens. We need to know&#xA;  where to go It's in no hurry happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no machine translation at all for Af Maay or Mushunguli, and hospitals completely have to rely on human translators (sometimes to the detriment of the patient). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major contributing factor to inadequacies in machine translation is the lack of adequate study of one of the desired languages. Major languages with 25 million speakers or more tend to be somewhat better studied, compared to the thousands of virtually unknown languages with 1000 or fewer speakers, so under a &quot;social need&quot; approach to the question, there is little social need for Norwegian-Chukchi translation, and thus it may be irrelevant if we don't know the Chukchi verb for &quot;distill&quot;, or how to put it in the 3rd person dual perfective (if indeed there is such a thing in the language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of covering &quot;Asian languages&quot; by 2045 is seriously mistaken. There is virtually no chance of having machine translation for Lahu, Hawrami, Laz, Woi, Lamet and Ket by 2045, or 2145 (whether or not there will be speakers of the language beyond that point is hard to say). However, it may be that by that time, translation of Japanese, Korean and Mandarin will progress to the point that machine translation is useful. (In contrast, current Finnish and Turkish translations are not very useful). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Machine translation comes in a number of forms, one being text-to-text mapping, and the other also encompassing spoken language. Speech-based translations will be absolutely required for the many languages that have no written form. Real-time computational translation of speech is even more pie in the sky, although I am surprised at how good it has gotten for some languages. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/is/At%20home%2C%20school%2C%20work%2C%20and%20even%20in%20our%20cars%2C%20we%20need%20to%20know%20what%20to%20do%20in%20an%20emergency.%20We%20need%20to%20know%20where%20to%20go%20in%20an%20emergency.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notable exceptions&lt;/a&gt;, but that language only have some 300,000 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T18:58:09.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2137" CreationDate="2017-09-26T05:14:15.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a forthcoming volume edited by B. Samuels entitled &lt;em&gt;Beyond markedness in formal phonology&lt;/em&gt; which addresses the question. Basically, this is a case where the term is taken to be primary, and the referent is taken to be &quot;open to discovery&quot; – which is a nice way to say that it doesn't have a fixed meaning, and depending on school of thought, it refers to unrelated facts. Trubetzkoy's imported the concept of a &quot;mark&quot; into linguistics, and used it to refer to a distinguishing property that a linguistic unit has. In phonology, it was intimately tied to privative features, where a voiced consonant might &quot;have the mark&quot; and voiceless ones might lack it. Subsequent developments retained the term but radically altered what it was about. This was especially necessary when Trubetzkoy's privative analysis was replaced with Jakobsonian binary features, whereby all oppositions become equipollent. The nature of being &quot;marked&quot; then had to change, and it changed in the direction of being &quot;more basic&quot; versus &quot;less basic&quot;, with a presumed acquisitional bias in favor of the &quot;more basic&quot; value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg explicitly tied the notion of &quot;marked&quot; with frequency of occurrence, and Chomsky and Halle in SPE followed up on this assumption by creating a formal theory of &quot;markedness&quot; whereby rules were simpler to express if they produced unmarked results – consequently, the thinking was, unmarked outputs will be more frequent. Generally speaking, since that time the term has been taken to mean &quot;happens most often&quot;, and the puzzle then is, what is the nature of the fact that &lt;em&gt;causes&lt;/em&gt; something to be more frequent (i.e. &quot;unmarked&quot;). SPE held that it was a list of context-sensitive specifications that come &quot;for free&quot;. More recently, &quot;markedness&quot; has been taken in OT to mean &quot;a configuration that is to be avoided&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is some note, IMO, that there is negligible interaction between the concept of markedness in phonology, and its use in semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T05:14:15.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26024" CreationDate="2017-09-26T18:45:47.473" Score="-2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know what Egyptian hieroglyph was used to describe time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19716" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T18:56:57.290" Title="what Egyptian hieroglyph(s) meant/depicted &quot;time&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-09-26T21:55:09.070" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T20:52:24.757" Score="5" ViewCount="2092" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, very young children have no trouble distinguishing many different phonemes. However, when they get older they lose the ability to hear the difference between different phonemes that their native language doesn't distinguish. As a result, German native speakers generally can't distinguish between &quot;believe&quot; and &quot;belief&quot; or &quot;cap&quot; and &quot;cab&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what age does this ability get lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T00:42:59.843" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T22:59:29.150" Title="At what age do children lose the ability to hear phomene differences that their native language doesn't make?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26022" CreationDate="2017-09-26T20:53:05.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;time&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;3t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w15ir.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w15ir.png&quot; alt=&quot;hieroglyph for 3t&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;instant&quot; or &quot;moment&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;88&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBB14.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBB14.png&quot; alt=&quot;hieroglyph for 8&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1DjKo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1DjKo.png&quot; alt=&quot;hieroglyph for sun&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBB14.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBB14.png&quot; alt=&quot;hieroglyph for 8&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;eternity&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sp&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dfWIZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dfWIZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;hieroglyph for sp&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;time&quot; as an abstract concept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also hieroglyphs for &quot;year&quot;, &quot;month&quot;, and various other units of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Regarding transliteration, what I write as &lt;em&gt;3&lt;/em&gt; is the glottal stop or alef, also written &lt;em&gt;Ꜣ&lt;/em&gt;: /ʔ/; what I write as &lt;em&gt;8&lt;/em&gt; is Arabic's &quot;emphatic h&quot;, also written &lt;em&gt;ḥ&lt;/em&gt;: /ħ/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T18:56:57.290" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T18:56:57.290" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26023" CreationDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a general age. Some people retain the ability into old age; some people retain it into their 30's, maybe it declines for some around 20. Since &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; are contrastive phonemes of German, very few German speakers lose the ability to distinguish those phonemes. There might be a question about German speakers detecting it in word-final position, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English speakers who don't speak Logoori don't generally have the ability to distinguish &lt;em&gt;i ɪ; u ʊ&lt;/em&gt; in that language, even though English has that contrast. The reason is that those vowels in Logoori are much closer together than they are in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fundamental methodological problem with answering the question, that there is no good way to test if a person can &quot;distinguish&quot; two sounds. You would have to present listeners with two recordings and ask if they are different or the same. Assuming these are sounds of a language that they don't know, they don't have any idea about phonemic boundaries in that language, so you're effectively asking them to set aside their own language, and listen for absolute acoustic differences. You could perform the test by giving similar words, different tokens of the same word, or playing the exact same token twice – the question would be &quot;are these the same, or different&quot;. I don't know of any good studies looking at sampled speech that way, though I've done this with pure tones with marginally different physical properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone does the experiment, they will have to include children in the subject pool, because we don't know how children (say age 8) are perform on this test. We know that ultimately they could learn any language, but this kind of experiment is not the same as learning a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26013" CreationDate="2017-09-27T00:03:44.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bigul&quot; is not in Turner's Comparative Dictionary, nor in Platts' Dictionary of Classical Urdu/Hindi. It is evidently a borrowing from English, with simplification of the /ju/ in the first syllable to /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T00:10:56.757" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T00:10:56.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T02:32:53.507" Score="0" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to Distributive Morphology and cannot find any resources of how to construct formative lists for morphemes. I know they're meant to be the feature bundles of the morphemes, but I don't really know anything else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, what I'm trying to work out are the formative lists for the suffix &quot;-ian&quot; and &quot;-ism&quot;. Some examples of words formed are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;magic &gt; magician, Canada &gt; Canadian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;race &gt; racism, manner &gt; mannerism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I already know are that, &quot;-ism&quot; is a category selecting affix (it attaches to nouns in general) while &quot;-ian&quot; is a root selecting morpheme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;-ian&quot;, I question whether it even has feature bundles when it doesn't have a set rule for the kinds of things it attaches to and has a kind of idiosyncratic meaning. For &quot;-ism&quot;, I struggle with what are the possible kinds of features I could be considering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want the answers, but I would really appreciate some hints to point me in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20060" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T06:35:03.180" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T06:35:03.180" Title="Determining formative list of -ian and -ism" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;distributed-morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26031" CreationDate="2017-09-27T03:45:43.587" Score="0" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the following morpho-syntactic representation of the below phrase using brackets correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Bike Ride&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And subsequently, would the below cyclically applied rules showing the resulting stress levels represented by numbers also be correct for &quot;long bike ride&quot; where the meaning is for the duration of the ride rather than the physicality of the bike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[[Long]A [[Bike]N [Ride]N]N ]NP&#xA;____1___   &lt;strong&gt;_1&lt;/strong&gt;   ___1_____      Main Stress Rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Long [Bike Ride]NP&#xA;_____      &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;     &lt;strong&gt;_2&lt;/strong&gt;        Compound Stress Rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Long Bike Ride]NP&#xA;____1___   &lt;strong&gt;_2&lt;/strong&gt;   ___3_____      Compound Stress Rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20061" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T15:25:57.243" Title="English Stress and Rule Based Accounts SPE Chomsky/Halle" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26028" CreationDate="2017-09-27T15:25:57.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bracketing is correct. The Compound stress rule will apply to give the 1-2 contour to &quot;bike-ride&quot;; then the Nuclear stress rule assigns 1 stress to &quot;bike&quot;, causing across the board reductions of other stressed, so you get a surface 2-1-3 profile. This is analogous to SPE's derivation 16a, for &quot;black board-eraser&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T15:25:57.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2017-09-27T16:57:18.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scottish English has short vs. long in near-minimal pairs like &quot;need&quot; vs. &quot;kneed&quot;, &quot;brood&quot; vs. &quot;brewed&quot;, distinguished purely by vowel duration. This is pretty much only possible for the vowels /i/ and /u/ before a /d/, where the /d/ is either tautomorphemic (for the short one) or a suffix (for the long one). There are also some words where a long vowel occurs unexpectedly, like &quot;dude&quot; and &quot;lewd&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the distribution of the vowel duration is mostly predictable from the status of the /d/, strictly speaking the short-long duration difference is not phonemic, and is one aspect of the so-called Scottish Vowel Length &quot;Rule&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20071" LastEditorUserId="20071" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T17:08:24.683" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T17:08:24.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2017-09-27T17:07:01.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-rhotic varieties of English have a number of phonemic contrasts in which vowel duration is pretty important. It might be a primary cue to the vowel contrast in some varieties, as exemplified above. Perhaps English will develop more durational minimal pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the vowel in &quot;hut&quot; is often a short version of the vowel in &quot;heart&quot; or STRUT vs. HEART in lexical sets, though this is not conveyed in traditional transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pairs distinguished by duration (alone, or primarily) are increasingly met for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;piss&quot; vs.  &quot;pierce&quot; (KIT vs. NEAR in closed syllables)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;led&quot; vs. &quot;laird&quot; (DRESS vs. SQUARE in closed syllables)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20071" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T17:07:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T19:35:12.693" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both nasal and stops interrupt the airflow in mouth. Affricates do this as well, but release the airflow turbulently. The trills too, but the interruptions are created and released intermittently. The flaps and even laterals can also be regarded as they interrupt the airflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a formal term for such a class of phonemes that interrupt the mouth airflow? Either by interrupting completely, or by interrupting one airflow but creating another via nose, or by switching interruption and releasing continuously, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the term &quot;occlusive&quot; (or even &quot;stop&quot;), when used with the adjectives &quot;oral&quot; and &quot;nasal&quot; is an umbrella term for either nasal consonants and the mainstream oral stop consonants. But I don't know any term which spans further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11231/what-feature-classes-do-%ca%99-r-%ca%80-belong-to/11237#11237&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; the name &quot;intermittent stops&quot; for trills, but I don't know whether this term is widely recognized or not. Is it? And may &quot;stop&quot; thus refer to the wide class of phonemes which I am looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such umbrella term would be suitable in studying Proto-Oceanic, which had pairs of voiceless and prenasalized-voiced stops &lt;code&gt;/p, ᵐb/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/t, ⁿd/, etc...&lt;/code&gt; (written &quot;p, b&quot;, &quot;t, d&quot;, etc.) plus the trill pair &lt;code&gt;/r, ⁿr/&lt;/code&gt; (written &quot;r, dr&quot;), which can be seen as a occlusive-like, since it was derived from Proto-Austronesian's pair of stops /*d, *nd/. If including flaps, this umbrella could be even used to refer to the English &quot;allophone continuum&quot; of /t, d/, which, in some contexts, is flapped (for example &quot;matter&quot;, &quot;butter&quot;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19623" LastEditorUserId="19623" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T13:00:21.403" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T13:00:21.403" Title="Is there a name for sounds formed by interruption of airflow? Is &quot;intermittent stop&quot; a synonym for &quot;trill&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26034" CreationDate="2017-09-27T20:06:07.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were asking about a distinctive feature analysis, those classes can be unified as the [-continuant] segments, although the analysis of trills is not entirely established (the issue is whether a separate feature [trill] is necessary: let's say that it is). You can then call them the &quot;non-continuants&quot;, as long as it's understood that you're referring to an SPE-style analysis of features. There is otherwise no term that puts stops and trills together. The term &quot;occlusive&quot; almost fills the bill, except that trills are not typically included under that umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T20:06:07.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-28T14:39:38.833" Score="1" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context for this question is that I am preparing an introductory grammar course to be taught to adult Papua New Guineans from different language groups who have varying levels of secondary school education. Actually, I am revising existing materials for the course and I am troubled by the confusing picture the materials paint about transitivity and the very limited examples of ditransitive verbs that are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried consulting Wikipedia but the Ditransitive Verb page leaves much to be desired. I have consulted various text books and they are not entirely clear on this matter either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that a common definition of ditransitive verbs only includes those which can use dative shift to allow for two bare NPs as objects of the verb. This limited list includes, of course, &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;, and also verbs like &lt;em&gt;tell (someone a story)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;show (someone a picture)&lt;/em&gt;. Even verbs like &lt;em&gt;bake (someone a cake)&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;read (someone a book)&lt;/em&gt;, are included even though the beneficiaries of the reading and baking seem only loosely connected, semantically. In English this 'restricted definition' of ditransitive verbs seems to only allow recipients and in some cases beneficiaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why such a restricted list? In my thinking, if the verb needs three arguments to feel complete, then it should count as a ditransitive (trivalent) verb. Why are verbs that take PPs, gerunds, infinitive phrases, adjectives, complement clauses, quoted speech, etc. as arguments excluded? Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She put the keys in the drawer. (*She put the keys.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The guards prevented the man from escaping. (*The guards prevented the man.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That makes me uncomfortable. (*That makes me. — an adjective is not a typical object.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The judge sentenced Billy to 2 years in prison.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob drove the truck to Arizona. (Both &quot;the truck&quot; and &quot;to Arizona&quot; are omittable, but still)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Momma told me not to come. (Again, just &quot;Momma told me&quot; is grammatical, but the infinitive phrase seems to be very much an argument of &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He told us &quot;This is the way.&quot; (A variant of #6.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He told us (that) this is the way. (A variant of #7.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I bet Dave $50 that the Cubs would win. (actually tritransitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on, but you probably get the idea. Each of the verbs takes three arguments. Either it is ungrammatical to remove any of the arguments, or they just seem to be too closely associated to the verb, according to my intuition, not to be called an argument. This issue also applies to (what I would call) transitive verbs which don't take a prototypical object, such as &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; [quote or complement clause], &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; [PP goal], &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; [adjective], &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; [complement/WH clause], and &lt;em&gt;enjoy&lt;/em&gt; [gerund phrase].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what an adjunct is. These verbs in question are different from something like &quot;I work out [at the gym on third street, on Mondays and Fridays, from 7 to 9]&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Work out&lt;/em&gt; is an intransitive verb and everything in the square brackets there is peripheral information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am prepared to accept that some transitivity is more transitive than other transitivity. I can see how you could have various tests for transitivity or &quot;true argument status&quot; and some verbs/arguments might pass all the tests while others only partially do. For example, allowing dative shift and allowing the argument to be the subject of a passive clause would be strong evidence for transitivity. Surely if the clause sounds broken without the argument, that is another piece of evidence. Presumably tests could be constructed that even let the GOAL of a movement verb be considered a true argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to know what I can safely teach these students. I have a hard time telling them that only verbs like &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; can be called ditransitive, but is this the standard view out there? I am having trouble proving otherwise. One textbook I read (Analyzing Grammar, Paul Kroeger) talks about oblique arguments being real arguments of the verb, but it didn't give any definition of what constitutes a ditransitive verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T04:49:22.850" Title="What qualifies as a ditransitive verb, really?" Tags="&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26072" CreationDate="2017-09-28T18:37:05.270" Score="4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic is a right-to-left language, so when using Google Translate to translate this expression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;x/y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from English to Arabic, it returns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;س / ص&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where 'x' is on the right, 'y' is on the left. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also happens for other mathematic operator symbols (+, -, *, ^). What should the correct algebraic notation be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20081" LastEditorUserId="20081" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T18:52:24.510" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T12:52:27.217" Title="How are algebraic operations written in a right-to-left language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2137" CreationDate="2017-09-28T21:41:07.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2005, Martin Haspelmath published a paper called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/3452962/Against_markedness_and_what_to_replace_it_with_&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Against Markedness (and what to replace it with)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which defines twelve different senses of &lt;em&gt;marked, markedness&lt;/em&gt; and arguing that this polysemy obfuscates rather than helping and should be eliminated.  Unfortunately, he seems to have been a voice crying in the wilderness so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The twelve senses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trubetskoyan specification for a phonological distinction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specification for a semantic distinction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Overt coding as opposed to zero&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetic difficulty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphological difficulty / unnaturalness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conceptual difficulty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rarity in texts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rarity in the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restricted distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deviation from a default parameter setting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and a multidimensional correlation between any or all of these.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2668" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T22:58:39.940" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T22:58:39.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25886" CreationDate="2017-09-29T12:05:40.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe Standard High German counts in here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In High German, the plural of &lt;em&gt;Fuß&lt;/em&gt; &quot;foot&quot; is &lt;em&gt;Füße&lt;/em&gt; with double marking: both umlaut and the ending -e /ə/ occur. Note that the dialectal basis of the so-called &quot;Lutheran e&quot; is rather restricted, it is absent in the North, the West, and the South of the German linguistic area and only occurs in the Central and Central-East area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other dialects, the process is completed, e.g. Bavarian &lt;em&gt;Fuß/Fieß&lt;/em&gt; or Ripuarian &lt;em&gt;Fooß/Fööß&lt;/em&gt; show the same stage of development as English &lt;em&gt;foot/feet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more German words following this pattern, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Kuh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cow&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Zug&lt;/em&gt; &quot;train&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Trog&lt;/em&gt; &quot;trough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another pattern is given by &lt;em&gt;Fass&lt;/em&gt; &quot;barrel&quot; with plural &lt;em&gt;Fässer&lt;/em&gt; (both umlaut and -er occur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T14:16:11.950" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:16:11.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26045" CreationDate="2017-09-29T17:17:45.983" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wiktionary page on the English word &quot;with&quot; &amp;lt; *wi says that the meaning of &quot;with&quot; shifted in Middle English to denote association instead of opposition. The latter sense is still present in phrases like &quot;He picked a fight with the older boy&quot; (opposition), whereas we see the former sense everywhere, e.g. &quot;I walked to school with my friends today.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have any more information on how or why this shift may have happened?  Are there other descendants of *wi that reflect this shift as well, or only the preposition &quot;with&quot;? The alternative to &quot;with&quot; may well have been &quot;mid&quot; (&amp;lt; *me, cognate with German mit), still seen in words like &quot;midwife&quot;. Any idea why this fell out of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T09:44:07.853" Title="Do we know anything more about the semantic shift of &quot;with&quot; in Middle English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26048" CreationDate="2017-09-29T18:01:21.127" Score="7" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is actually spawned from a rather embarrassing personal blunder years ago, that was that when I had first begun to learning an heavily inflected language, I had made the mistake of assuming that if an article declined, then it carried enough grammatical information that the noun went undeclined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the reason why I ask this is because it was natural for me -- different things are natural for different people, but I do declare that if it was for me, could it have been for another culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EXAMPLE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it has been requested, here is a made up example, using some Old English declensions mixed with Contemporary english:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the undeclined word &lt;em&gt;King,&lt;/em&gt; it's article is &lt;em&gt;þe.&lt;/em&gt; If the word is in nominative, the undeclined form, one says &lt;em&gt;þe King,&lt;/em&gt; if it is plural, then a man says &lt;em&gt;þa kings,&lt;/em&gt; if it is in dative, then it is, for singular, &lt;em&gt;þæm Kinge,&lt;/em&gt; plural, &lt;em&gt;þam Kingum,&lt;/em&gt; if it is accusative, then it is &lt;em&gt;þone/þa king/kings.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I am asking is, is there a language that will, instead of declining the noun and making the article agree with it, will instead decline the article and leave the noun be, so instead of saying: &lt;em&gt;Iċ geaf þam &lt;strong&gt;kingum&lt;/strong&gt; þæt sweord,&lt;/em&gt; you would instead say &lt;em&gt;I gave þam &lt;strong&gt;king&lt;/strong&gt; the sword;&lt;/em&gt; this being done because the article carries the necessary grammatical information to tell you the gender and number of the noun &lt;em&gt;King.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt that using &quot;king&quot; instead of &quot;cyning&quot; would push the point across a bit easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T02:06:38.037" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:49:29.377" Title="Were/are there any languages that decline(d) articles but not nouns?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26042" CreationDate="2017-09-30T09:44:07.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“With” is originally a shortening of “wither”, cognate with German &lt;em&gt;wider&lt;/em&gt; “against” and, further afield, with Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;vitaram&lt;/em&gt; “further”, from the Indo-European particle of separation *wi- and the comparative suffix *-tero-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic development of English “with” is neatly described in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The prevailing senses of this prep[osition] in the earliest periods&#xA;  are those of opposition (‘against’) and of motion or rest in proximity&#xA;  (‘towards’, ‘alongside’), which are now current only in certain&#xA;  traditional collocations or specific applications. These notions&#xA;  readily pass into fig. uses denoting various kinds of relations, among&#xA;  which those implying reciprocity are at first prominent. The most&#xA;  remarkable development in the signification of with consists in its&#xA;  having taken over in the Middle English period the chief senses&#xA;  belonging properly to Old English mid mid prep.1   (cognate with Greek&#xA;  μετά with). These senses are mainly those denoting association,&#xA;  combination or union, instrumentality or means, and attendant&#xA;  circumstance. These are all important senses of Old Norse við, to&#xA;  which fact their currency and ultimate predominance in the English&#xA;  word are partly due. The last important stage was the extension of&#xA;  with from the instrument to the agent, in which use it was current for&#xA;  different periods along with of and through, and later with by, which&#xA;  finally superseded the other three. The range of meanings in general&#xA;  has no doubt been enlarged by association with Latin cum. The&#xA;  interaction of senses and sense-groups has been such that the position&#xA;  of a particular sense in the order of development is often difficult&#xA;  to determine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: the shift in meaning of the English preposition was at least partially influenced by the usage in Old Norse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T09:44:07.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26043" CreationDate="2017-09-30T16:57:36.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think French is very close to what you are looking for. Most nouns are pronounced identically in the singular and plural (though the plural is mostly still written with a silent “s”), but number and case are indicated audibly by articles. Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;singular: le garçon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;plural: les garçon(s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possessive singular: les main(s) du garçon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possessive plural: les main(s) des garçon(s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;singular indirect object : donne-le au garçon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T11:38:49.480" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T11:38:49.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-01T01:02:34.153" Score="0" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be wrong, but I don't seem to have come across the term '&lt;strong&gt;weak definite article&lt;/strong&gt;' in English linguistics though I think I've encountered it in German or French linguistics. (I've read '&lt;strong&gt;weak definites&lt;/strong&gt;, referring to noun phrases with definite articles that does not allow you to uniquely identify the referents, but not '&lt;strong&gt;weak definite articles&lt;/strong&gt;' in English linguistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it not used? Or, is it just me and my lack of experience? Any and all thoughts would be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T02:59:58.430" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T19:42:54.317" Title="weak definite article in Engish linguistics" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-01T06:10:37.693" Score="5" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French verb trouver (to find/think) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trouver#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can trace its ancestry&lt;/a&gt; back to the Greek word τρόπος, which means a turn, manner, style, or figure of speech. Is there any logic to this seemingly disconnected progression? I can perhaps see some kind of figurative relationship between the two. Each person's thinking is unique to them in the way that a style or manner can be. Is it this figurative description that explains the semantic shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T18:12:19.833" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T19:07:55.123" Title="How do we get from Greek τρόπος to French trouver?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26052" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-01T12:21:06.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions pertaining to a Dravidian language spoken in southern India, Asia. It is predominantly spoken in the state of Kerala and is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T18:51:17.287" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T18:51:17.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26053" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-01T12:21:06.190" Score="0" Body="Questions pertaining to a Dravidian language spoken in southern India, Asia." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T18:50:42.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T18:50:42.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26051" CreationDate="2017-10-01T14:04:37.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ancient Greek word &lt;em&gt;τρόπος&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%84%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meant originally &quot;turn&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, hence various meanings like &quot;way (to be), manner, style&quot;... and even &quot;way to sing/compose&quot; like in Plato's Republic 424c &lt;em&gt;μουσικῆς τρόποι&lt;/em&gt; &quot;~ musical modes&quot;. The Latins created the (post classical) verb * &lt;em&gt;tropare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;~ invent, compose an air&quot;, lately &quot;~ compose a poem&quot; and finally &quot;~ compose, invent&quot;. The word &lt;a href=&quot;http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=351000870;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is attested in French&lt;/a&gt; from the tenth century (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_de_saint_L%C3%A9ger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the Saint-Léger poem&lt;/a&gt;, v. 100) with the meaning &quot;~ invent, meet by chance&quot;, hence the modern meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T18:45:33.433" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T18:45:33.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26051" CreationDate="2017-10-01T19:07:55.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The derivation of trouver “to find” &amp;lt; *trobare &amp;lt; *tropare, supposedly meaning “to compose poetry” &amp;lt; tropos “rhetorical figure” can be found in many respectable etymological dictionaries, but it is semantically very difficult as far as the French meaning is concerned. Another possibility that has been considered (e.g. by Meyer-Lübke) is that trouver derives from Latin turbare “to agitate, stir up”, then specifically in the sense “to disturb the water in a fish pond”, and hence “to find” fish. I think the jury is still out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T19:07:55.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T08:18:28.660" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted a corpus of recent English fiction (20 century onwards) which I can use as a reference corpus for my research work. It should consist of at least 5 million words. I do not need it in downloaded form. I just want to use it to generate KWIC in my study corpus. Can I use the fiction portion of BNC for this purpose? Or is there any other suggestion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20103" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T04:29:34.780" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T04:29:34.780" Title="Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26059" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:30:29.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies, not necessarily uniquely, a specific individual human. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning also) and is, when consisting of only one word, a proper noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:28:51.393" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:28:51.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26060" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:30:29.617" Score="0" Body="a word or set of words by which a person, language or thing is known, addressed, or referred to." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:28:23.863" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:28:23.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26061" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:32:40.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A word is a unit which is a constituent at the phrase level and above. This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:29:05.373" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:29:05.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26062" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:32:40.283" Score="0" Body="a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T14:27:55.440" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:27:55.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26064" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:33:50.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word class (similar to part of speech) is a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) lexical (or open or form) classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)&#xA;2) function (or closed or structure) classes (determiners, particles, prepositions etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T05:59:57.890" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T05:59:57.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26065" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:33:50.443" Score="0" Body="a set of words that display the same formal (linguistic) properties, especially their inflections and distribution." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T06:00:48.907" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T06:00:48.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26066" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:43:50.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a Program and not a theory. It can be thought of as an injunction to minimise the the amount of linguistic-specific information we invoke in explaining natural language. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6799/what-is-minimalist-about-the-minimalist-program&quot;&gt;Click here to find out more about Minimalism on Linguistics StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T04:30:09.350" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T04:30:09.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26067" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:43:50.193" Score="0" Body="Minimalism or Minimalist program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T06:00:40.387" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T06:00:40.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26068" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:47:40.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In non-functional linguistics, a sentence is a textual unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked. In functional linguistics, a sentence is a unit of written texts delimited by graphological features such as upper case letters and markers such as periods, question marks, and exclamation marks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T05:59:49.057" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T05:59:49.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26069" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-03T03:47:40.597" Score="0" Body="A sentence is a grammatical unit that is composed of one or more clauses or of written texts delimited by upper case letters and markers such as  .  ,  ?  and  !  ." OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T06:00:35.160" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T06:00:35.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-03T06:36:17.797" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well attested that the Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka for adjectives together with the syntesized participle on nominals like krta-ka&gt;done, evolved as the possessive case marker in modern Indo-Aryan. My question is, is it possible that the -ka (apart from being possessive case marker) has extended its function as perfective aspect in any modern Indo-Aryan languages? If yes, how do I determine the stages of its evolution as perfective aspect? What should I read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20110" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T23:25:43.737" Title="Evolution of perfective aspect from Sanskrit derivational suffix -ka in Modern Indo-Aryan languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23257" CreationDate="2017-10-03T11:04:13.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;( &lt;em&gt;Since I am not an expert on Tibetan and German, this answer might be biased to Sanskrit and Hindi but this won't affect the answer asked for&lt;/em&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have generally seen &lt;em&gt;krodha&lt;/em&gt; when there is a negative connotation of anger or when the anger might result in a (mythological) curse and &lt;em&gt;kopa&lt;/em&gt; when it's godly/well-reasoned/non-cursing anger. AFAIK cognates are a pair of words which are similar semantically and phonetically but are from &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; different languages, but &lt;em&gt;krodha&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kopa&lt;/em&gt; are both used simultaneously (at least now) in Sanskrit and Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Now though, in Hindi, generally, &lt;em&gt;kopa&lt;/em&gt; is used to refer it's religious nature and &lt;em&gt;krodha&lt;/em&gt; is used in almost every sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T11:04:13.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26039" CreationDate="2017-10-03T11:16:38.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;add N’Ko&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of two modern living RTL mathematical tradition: Arabic and N’ko. I have no idea how other living RTL scripts (Hebrew, Dihevi, Syriac) deal with math.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Arabic&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Arabic (including other languages (Farsi, Urdu), written in the Arabic alphabet), there are three distinct traditions (Morocco, Maghreb, Mashrek), so I think the fraction order might be ambiguous depending on the country you're in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/TR/arabic-math/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W3C document on Arabic mathematical notations&lt;/a&gt; says, for this specific case :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, although stacked fractions are rendered the same way in both European and Arabic, bevelled fractions in RTL Arabic will appear, as one would expect, with the terms in RTL order, i.e. A divided by B would appear as &amp;quot;B/A&amp;quot;. In some locales, the preference is for the slash to also be mirrored, as &amp;quot;B\A&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This document also contains many other examples. You also have some examples on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Arabic_mathematical_notation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the corresponding Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;N’Ko&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;N’Ko&lt;/a&gt; is a modern (20th century) RTL script used in western Africa for Manding languages. I happen to have an introductory book on N’Ko at home, and it ends with some example of elementary arithmetic operations, which are written right to left, as expected. Furthermore, the numbers in N’Ko (contrary to Arabic) are written right-to-left: The current year (2017) is written ߂߀߁߇, with (߂=2 ;߀=0 ;߁=1 ;߇=7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Remark on historical texts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you look at historical texts, then you have lots of different conventions to adapt maths to different typographical traditions, including vertical writing in East Asia. (See e.g. this Unicode proposal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17219-chinese-math.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt; about notations used to translate Western mathematical texts in Ming and Qing China).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T12:52:27.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-03T12:15:02.243" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reduplication (a natural language feature) which changes meaning, pluralize, emphasize etc.  is basically doubling of the word, partially doubling it or doubling it with phonetic constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grice's maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this doubling , oppose Grice's Maxim of Manner or Quantity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Or if Grice's Maxims are not to be compared with one particular linguistic feature, does it follow all others?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T15:43:43.677" Title="Does Reduplication oppose any Gricean Maxim?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26074" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-03T12:18:22.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The repetition of phonological material within a word for semantic or grammatical purposes is known as reduplication, a widely used morphological device in a number of the world’s languages. The languages classified on the accompanying map are sorted into three categories: languages that do not employ reduplication as a grammatical device, languages that productively employ both partial and full reduplication, and languages that only employ full reduplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here @WALS&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here @Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T12:33:11.797" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T12:33:11.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26075" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-03T12:18:22.327" Score="0" Body="for questions pertaining to &quot;a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.&quot;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T12:33:21.423" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T12:33:21.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26073" CreationDate="2017-10-03T15:43:43.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the alternative question. But, Gricean maxims are not absolute rules about human language, they are defeasible assumptions about human social behavior which aid a person in getting from a grammar-based meaning to a probable actual communicative intention. The maxim of brevity does not say that the word &quot;elephant&quot; is somehow amiss because it's too long, nor does it criticize Sanskrit verb inflection because it is too obscure (not like Turkish). Grammatical features of a language are above reproach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a way in which Gricean analysis might be useful in thinking about reduplication, in the realm of the linguistic function of reduplication. It is reasonably common in productive and optional reduplications that the meaning is hard to pin down, so that 'cut-cut' might be used to talk about disorganized cutting, or multiple cuttings, or extended periods of cutting. Gricean analysis can help you discern the difference between cut-cutting an onion vs. cut-cutting a forest. At some point, the vague meaning conveyed by reduplication may be grammaticalized into &quot;habitual action&quot;, &quot;repeated action&quot;, or &quot;insistent action&quot;. At an early stage in the development of reduplication, a hearer might be presented with an anomalous form &quot;cut-cut&quot;, and have to wonder &quot;what the heck does that mean&quot;. A communicative intent might be inferred from context, where reduplication becomes a meme, and eventually a hard grammatical property. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T15:43:43.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-03T21:25:06.920" Score="-1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions? Does it depend on the locale? I am mostly interested in Midwestern and Northeastern USA, but I would also care to know how it is in England and Great Britain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there is a preference, does it sound awkward or stilted when people avoid using them? Or, on the contrary, does it signal a higher register? I'm talking about contractions like you're, they're, haven't, we'll, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T22:31:22.050" Title="In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26079" CreationDate="2017-10-03T21:48:21.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a clear dispreference for using contractions in term papers and journal publications, and a clear preference for using 'em in ordinary conversation. There's an extremely strong dispreference for contracting future &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; when the point is to deny a claim that some event won't happen, so it would be bizarre to say &quot;No, he'&lt;strong&gt;LL&lt;/strong&gt; bring it back&quot;. In mixed style writing (e.g. SE), you'll find both outcomes, and I doubt that you will find a consistent pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/~bresnan/contraction.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; looks at effect of word frequency on contraction, and happens to include ample references to quantitative studies and factors influencing contraction (phonology of preceding word, syntactic nature of following comp, word length of subject NP, information load). &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2873&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog&lt;/a&gt; might be informative as well, from a historical perspective (did we used to not contract in American English?), and there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/dnb/download/9317&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissertation here&lt;/a&gt; on yet another aspect of contraction. I don't know of an experimental study that asks listeners to attitudinally judge spoken English samples as &quot;educated&quot;, &quot;stilted&quot;, &quot;ignorant&quot;, &quot;awkward&quot;, &quot;pretentious&quot;, &quot;sloppy&quot; and so on, as a function of contracting vs. not contracting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T22:31:22.050" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T22:31:22.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-03T23:10:39.380" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us imagine there to exist, for instance, a DP. We always observe the only head D on the left or the right of the phrase (depending upon the direction of branching). But every constituent naturally have &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; borders which we normally indicate by brackets. Why aren't they detected? If they were expressed morphologically as heads and terminators how should we mark them in drawing the tree? As being category-markers, they would pertain to the same category thus causing us to assume the existence of discontinuous morphems (instances of the head), right? If so, how should we draw it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T00:20:28.937" Title="Constituent borders" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26081" CreationDate="2017-10-04T00:20:28.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt;, Chomsky remarked that natural language needs a grammar more powerful than regular grammar (type 3), such as context free phrase structure (type 2), in order to keep track of the pairing of such phrase introducers as &quot;if&quot; and the corresponding &quot;then&quot; clauses which go with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall C's exact example, but consider the language generated by this context free phrase structure grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; S -&amp;gt; it rains  &#xA; S -&amp;gt; if S then S  &#xA; S -&amp;gt; {john, mary} leaves&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which pairs up each &quot;if&quot; with the correct following &quot;then&quot; (&quot;correct&quot;, because in the tree structure, the &quot;if&quot; and corresponding &quot;then&quot; are in the same S).  E.g. &quot;if it rains then john leaves&quot;, &quot;if if mary leaves then it rains then john leaves&quot;, &quot;if if if it rains then it rains then mary leaves then john leaves&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, an obvious problem with the facts of English, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T00:20:28.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T13:18:33.887" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for resource or some way(maybe using multiple resources) which can help me figure out which adjectives to use. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weight &gt; 40 : heavier&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;age &gt; 40 : older &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how to express it in words but I think the example is clear. Is there any resource like word net for this?  I am currently interested only in numeric quantities and comparative adjectives, excluding adjectives like &quot;good&quot; and &quot;best&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across this cool paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://uwnlp.github.io/verbphysics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://uwnlp.github.io/verbphysics/&lt;/a&gt; but this is not what I am looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16825" LastEditorUserId="16825" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T05:41:11.187" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T05:33:36.607" Title="Data/Resource for adjectives related to nouns" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26084" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T14:43:58.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between the terms &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/stem&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;stem&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;stem&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/root&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;root&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;root&lt;/a&gt; can be fuzzy and is in general language dependent. For example in the Latin language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'love', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;amã&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;amãv&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;amãt&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vid&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'see', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;vidē&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;vīd&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;vīs&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;aug&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'help', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;augē&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;aux&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;auct&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cap&lt;/em&gt;- is the root for 'start', with infinitive stem &lt;em&gt;capi&lt;/em&gt;-, perfect stem &lt;em&gt;cēp&lt;/em&gt;-, and participial stem &lt;em&gt;capt&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Example taken form the answer by John Lawler in exile to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9428/what-is-the-difference-between-a-word-root-and-a-word-stem&quot;&gt;What is the difference between a word root and a word stem?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:19:16.560" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:19:16.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26085" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T14:43:58.853" Score="0" Body="For questions about linguistic roots (e.g., reconstructed roots for proto-languages or roots for paragigms in inflected languages like Latin)" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:15:58.547" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:15:58.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26086" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26087" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:05:44.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26088" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:09:31.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A phrase is a syntactic structure that consists of more than one word but lacks the subject-predicate organization of a clause. Except on a theory-specific basis for single-word, minimal instances of phrases. E.g. Any Noun, which is also a Noun Phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T23:00:23.273" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T23:00:23.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26089" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:09:31.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:09:31.917" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:09:31.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26090" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:15:39.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, [&lt;em&gt;pʰ&lt;/em&gt;] (as in pin) and [&lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Greek, &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; , the term was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. The term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/allophone-word-sounds-1689078&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Detail&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL's Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T16:10:48.310" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T16:10:48.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26091" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:15:39.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:15:39.857" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:15:39.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26092" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26093" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:24:48.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26094" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:32:06.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of how to define multilingualism has engaged researchers for a very long time. It is difficult to draw a line, the below links give an idea of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/multilingualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSA's discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-multilingualism-1691331&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Examples and Observations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T23:00:45.120" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T23:00:45.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26095" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:32:06.027" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:32:06.027" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:32:06.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:38:24.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Current approaches to morphology (field of studies in morphemes) conceive of morphemes as rules involving the linguistic context, rather than as isolated pieces of linguistic matter. They acknowledge that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmental phonological units, such as tone or stress.&#xA;the meaning of a morpheme with a given form may vary, depending on its immediate environment.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a morpheme stands by itself, it is considered as a &lt;em&gt;root&lt;/em&gt; because it has a meaning of its own and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an &lt;em&gt;affix&lt;/em&gt; because it has a grammatical function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Food for thought: &lt;em&gt;Every word comprises one or more morphemes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL's definition and examples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T23:00:39.227" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T23:00:39.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T15:38:24.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:38:24.577" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T15:38:24.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T12:53:41.230" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for terminology to describe voices/speech/language patterns in a dataset in a publication based on whether they seem to the linguistically-educated transcriber to be &quot;masculine&quot;, &quot;feminine&quot; or &quot;other/both/neither/undecided&quot;. However, I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; concerned with the actual gender of the participants, and I haven't got data on that anyway, so using the term &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; seems misleading to me. Is there any common terminology which is used to capture this general categorization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14543" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T17:11:22.737" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T17:11:22.737" Title="Terminology for masculine vs. feminine speech/language styles" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26103" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-06T07:06:37.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T07:06:37.377" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T07:06:37.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26104" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-06T07:06:37.377" Score="0" Body="The official form of Modern Chinese based on the language used in Beijing and Northern China." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:49:32.857" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:49:32.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-06T07:21:14.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T07:21:14.220" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T07:21:14.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-06T07:21:14.220" Score="0" Body="For question concerning the Dutch language, a Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:47:40.727" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:47:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25585" CreationDate="2017-10-06T20:41:03.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These claims seem to be fantasies. Looking at them in detail,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;women have a large stock of words related to their specific interests&#xA;, generally relegated to them as &amp;quot;women's work&amp;quot;: magenta, shirt, dart&#xA;(in sewing), and so on. If men use the words at all, it tends to be&#xA;tongue-in-cheek&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All people have large stockof words related to specific interests. When was the last time you heard &amp;quot;laparatomy&amp;quot; from the mouth of someone who was not a physician, veterinary, or otherwise related to medical professions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just happens that at the time these claims were made, few women were professional, or, better saying, most of them had just one profession, that of housewives. No wonder they would use words related to cooking or sewing more often than men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Magenta&lt;/em&gt; to me has nothing &amp;quot;feminine&amp;quot; on it; it is a word used by graphic workers of both sexes, and seldom by anyone who works on other trades. But perhaps this is distorted by my having Portuguese, instead of English, as a first language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;'empty' adjectives like divine, charming, cute....&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Divine&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;charming&lt;/em&gt; seem to be &amp;quot;posh&amp;quot; words, used to express meaningless politeness by middle and upper class women; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;cute&lt;/em&gt;, they do not seem to be increasingly used by men, except in sarcastic ways (which btw it seems to be the way most women use them). They seem also to express affectation rather than feminility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Men would use other &amp;quot;empty&amp;quot; adjectives rather than those, but the need to express politeness without compromise (ie, to say that something is good without actually recognising any specific good characterists in it) doesn't seem to be exclusively feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Question intonation where we might declaratives: for instance tag questions (&amp;quot;It's hit, isn't it?) and rising intonation in statement contexts (&amp;quot;What's your name, dear?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mary Smith?&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former looks like an appeal for concordance; I fail to see anything &amp;quot;feminine&amp;quot; in it. Maybe in the sixties or seventies this was more common among women than men, but don't see any reason for that. The later I have never heard except in ironic context (&amp;quot;Mary Smith?&amp;quot; implying &amp;quot;why are you asking, don't you already know this?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;The use of hedges of various kinds. Women's speech seems in general to contain more instances of &amp;quot;well,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;y'kmow,&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;kinda,&amp;quot; and so&#xA;forth:words that convey the sense that the speaker is uncertain about&#xA;what he (or she) is saying [...]women do it more, precisely because&#xA;they believe asserting them strongly isn't nice or ladlylike, or even&#xA;feminine. Another manifestation of the same thing is the use of &amp;quot;I&#xA;guess&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I think&amp;quot; prefacing declarations or &amp;quot;I wonder&amp;quot; prefacing&#xA;questions, which themselves are hedges on the speech-acts of saying&#xA;and asking. [...] hedges, like question intonation, give the&#xA;impression that the speaker lacks authority or doesn't know what he's&#xA;talking about [...].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems a general trait of written discourse in the second half of the 20th century; the aggressive tone of 19th century polemics came out of fashion, and was replaced by an increased use of irony dressed in polite forms. Marx called Ure a &amp;quot;dwarf economist&amp;quot;; we wouldn't use such terms, even if we thought they were factually appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But written, or at least published discourse has been a masculine privilege from earlier than that. And if anything, the internet seems to be reverting the trend described above: violent, vicious polemics is back, often even intensified when compared to that of 150 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;[...] intensive 'so' [...] more frequent in women's language, though&#xA;certainly men can use it. Here we have an attempt to hedge on one's&#xA;strong feelings, as though to say: I feel strongly about this - but I&#xA;dare not make it clear HOW strong [...].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see the raw data for this. It doesn't seem likely, and the explanation - in which the use of an intensive is said to not intensify - is even less convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;hypercorrect grammar: women are not supposed to talk rough. [...]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Superpolite forms [...] speak more politely [...]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it usual to describe &amp;quot;not talking rough&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;hypercorrect grammar&amp;quot;? I wouldn't, because to me &amp;quot;hypercorrection&amp;quot; is a different thing, and is not &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; at all, much less &amp;quot;more than correct&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two claims seem to me to be the same, though. In this case, even if there was a difference, the visible trend for the last half century is not that men are growing more polite and quitting talking rough, but that women are definitely getting less polite, and increasingly speaking rough more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Women don't tell jokes. As we shall see in a while this point is just an elaboration of the two immediately preceding. But it is&#xA;axiomatic in middle class American society that, first women can't&#xA;tell jokes - they are bound to ruin the punchline, they mix up the&#xA;order of things, and so on. Moreover, they don't &amp;quot;get&amp;quot; jokes. In short&#xA;women have no sense of humor&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this at least is contextualised as an American middle class thing, which would probably wiser to do for all of those claims; but it seems more prejudiced than &amp;quot;axiomatic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether such &amp;quot;lack of sence of humour&amp;quot; just reflects the fact that masculine &amp;quot;humour&amp;quot; is so often misogynistic; I suppose Polish jokes aren't that popular among poles, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;9 .Women speak in italics, and the more ladylike and feminine you are,&#xA;the more in italics you are supposed to speak, [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't make any sence to me. First, italics are definitely a &lt;strong&gt;graphic&lt;/strong&gt; resource, and I am not sure there is any kind of oral correspondence (people use more intensity to orally express what is graphically represented by &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;, or a lower tone to express parenthetic remarks (like this), but I am not aware of anything comparable regarding italics - people are more likely to use gestures, such as gestual &amp;quot;quote marks&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is even deeper. &lt;em&gt;Italics&lt;/em&gt; are used to highlight some part of the text; if you use italics as a rule, then you are not highlighting anything; you would rather be using a different font than really italicising. So even if it was possible to define some oral resource that substitutes for italics in spoken language, it would make little sence to say that a person speaks &amp;quot;in italics&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T11:41:00.037" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T06:59:31.303" Score="-1" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You fought so bravely for it.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, the verb 'fought' is followed by two dependents: &lt;em&gt;so bravely&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;for it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that &lt;em&gt;for it&lt;/em&gt; was a complement whereas &lt;em&gt;so bravely&lt;/em&gt; was an adjunct. But then, I remember hearing that an adjunct cannot come between a verb and its complement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that &lt;em&gt;so bravely&lt;/em&gt; here is a complement as well?&#xA;Or that an adjunct can come between a verb and a complement?&#xA;Or that actually both these dependents are adjuncts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T12:45:52.930" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T12:45:52.930" Title="You fought so bravely for it. [adjunct vs. complement]" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T07:32:48.427" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, but i can see the connection between speech impairment and language learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only asking because I have a slight speech impairment myself (unable to pronounce guttural sounds like Guh, or Tuh, also 's' sounds like 'sushi'  or 'sausage'). This is due to physical constraints/left side face paralysis due to surgery I have had in the past. Although as I age I have become increasingly more aware of this which has helped i guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been to a speech therapist before without much luck, I was young and through my naivety found saying the same stupid phrase over and over again, a drag (and still do :P). They said my hearing has become attuned to thinking I sound normal. I was thinking lately however about learning a new language but i am concerned that i might end up learning it incorrectly. Will it be more beneficial to try and sort out my english first (if i can) or see if i can push the reset button on a new language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20142" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T07:32:48.427" Title="Can learning a new language help with speech impairment?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26115" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:14:42.260" Score="0" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know the classification for these sounds: &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; as in &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;itano, tren&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ito, &lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;orro and ca&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;a, in Latino American Spanish. For instance, which ones are fricatives, or affricates, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1522" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T15:34:43.440" Title="What is the IPA classification for these sounds?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26114" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:34:43.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA symbols [ɡ, c] are termed &quot;plosives&quot;, and [z, s] are &quot;fricatives&quot;. This is true no matter what language you are talking about. There is no IPA category &quot;affricate&quot;, although phoneticians do talk about such things (from the IPA perspective, they are sequences of plosive plus fricative). However, the letters &lt;em&gt;g, c, z, s&lt;/em&gt; used in Spanish spelling are not used as IPA symbols (and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is not an IPA symbol at all). I believe that the letters &lt;em&gt;z, s&lt;/em&gt; as used in Spanish always stand for fricatives, whereas the letters &lt;em&gt;g, c&lt;/em&gt; can stand for many different things, especially &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;. Your question is about the letters used in spelling Spanish, which have some relation to phonemes, which in turn have some relation to IPA transcriptional symbols – &quot;gitano&quot; only contains letters, not sounds, and those letters represent certain sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T15:34:43.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-08T00:51:27.620" Score="6" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name used to refer to the subset of particles (or prepositions) which mark sentence's arguments/complements in a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose that the prepositions &lt;em&gt;sub&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dir&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;ind&lt;/em&gt; were used in English to mark the subject, the direct object and the indirect object of a sentence, respectively; so the phrase &quot;Paul gave his wife a necklace&quot; would be &quot;Gave &lt;em&gt;sub&lt;/em&gt; Paul &lt;em&gt;ind&lt;/em&gt; his wife &lt;em&gt;dir&lt;/em&gt; a necklace&quot;. What would be the name of this particular subset of function words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, in Tahitian, is for the sentence &quot;Maria have bought/traded this car&quot;. It is a VSO language, I am using the symbol &quot;∅&quot; to indicate the absence of particle/preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Active form: &lt;em&gt;'Ua ho'o ∅ Maria &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; teienei va'a&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Passive form: &lt;em&gt;'Ua ho'ona ∅ teienei va'a &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; Maria&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the active predicate &lt;em&gt;'ua ho'o&lt;/em&gt; (to have bought), the agent argument &lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;/em&gt; isn't marked (it is the zero-argument, marked with no particle), but the patient argument &lt;em&gt;teienei va'a&lt;/em&gt; (this car) is marked with the &quot;patient particle&quot; &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;In the passive predicate &lt;em&gt;'ua ho'ona&lt;/em&gt; (to have been bought), the patient argument &lt;em&gt;teienei va'a&lt;/em&gt; isn't marked (it is the zero-argument), but the agent argument is marked with the &quot;agent particle&quot; &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These particles &quot;&lt;em&gt;i, e&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (and others, in the case of more complex predicates) are members of the lexical class of the &quot;argument markers&quot;, whose name I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest I have found is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementizer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;complementizer&lt;/a&gt;, but it is used to refer to particles which make a dependent clause into another sentence's argument (e.g., &quot;I hope &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; it works.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19623" LastEditorUserId="19623" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T16:41:25.120" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T13:02:10.357" Title="The argument/complement marker prepositions" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26117" CreationDate="2017-10-08T02:47:03.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They would normally be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;case markers&lt;/a&gt;. They could be affixes or clitics, depending on how they would be used for multi-word noun phrases. That they would be written as separate words is irrelevant to their syntactic status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T02:47:03.153" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-08T14:52:35.400" Score="3" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllabification and Allophony&lt;/a&gt; John Wells argues for a view of English syllabification based on phonetic processes within the pronunciation of words. He mentions elsewhere that it is unorthodox, but to my eyes his arguments are very convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the arguments against his viewpoint? Why is it not universally accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9794" LastEditorUserId="9794" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T18:43:37.703" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T18:43:37.703" Title="What are the arguments against Wells’s syllabification of English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26121" CreationDate="2017-10-08T21:20:27.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tags include &quot;phonetics&quot; but not &quot;phonology&quot;, but people often ask questions about phonetics and tag them &quot;phonology&quot;, so I assume that you're asking about a phonological issue. If you really mean specifically and only &quot;as a question of phonetics, to be answered in strictly phonetic terms&quot;, I refer you to myriad statements by the phonetician John Ohala which can be summed up by asking &quot;Where do you see syllables in the phonetic facts?&quot;. Syllabification is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a phonetic matter that can be transcribed in the same way that aspiration (VOT), length (duration) etc can be. It is purely phonological (&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; we assume the syllable, and such-and-such structure, we can efficiently account for the observable facts of speech – we should also inquire about the analysis that omits the syllable, since it could be redundant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two questions here, one about &quot;arguments against&quot;, and one about &quot;why not universally accepted&quot;. The answer to the latter is pretty straightforward. Universal acceptance is an unattainable goal: even wide acceptance is close to non-existent. The reasons for non-acceptance are going to be myriad, and will especially be sensitive to one's philosophical &quot;primaries&quot; in linguistic research. Some linguists take descriptive adequacy to be the most important consideration and abjure theoretical speculation; others take theoretical enlighteningness to be primary, and are willing to dispense with a few inconvenient-looking empirical challenges (known as &quot;problems for future research&quot;). If Wells' account fails to cover certain facts, that would be a particular problem for people of the first type: if it fails to be stated elegantly in a well-supported linguistic theory, that would be a problem for people of the second type. (Alternatively, fail to state the analysis in such a way that it could be easily translate into such a theory). It's very hard to satisfy people who want the best of those two worlds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me that I can empirically test the paper, because it depends on non-obvious factual claims. His analysis relies on a 5-point continuous stress scale, which gives meaning to &quot;more strongly&quot; in his basic rule of syllabification. I take &quot;main stressed&quot;, &quot;secondarily stressed&quot; and &quot;unstressed&quot; to be fairly uncontroversial observational primaries, and question the two additional degrees. I see no way to dispose of at least three distinctions, since in a word with two stresses (ˈtarpən, ˈtæmˌpɔn, ˌlæmˈpun), you can't predict which syllable has the primary stress. However, I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; actually know if that would be his analysis of these words – we need a guide that enables us to know where stress marks are to be introduced, vs. omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His distinction between 4 and 5 stress hinges on the full versus reduced vowel distinction, exemplified with &lt;em&gt;substitution-product&lt;/em&gt; /ˌsʌb.stɪ.ˈtjuːʃ.ən.₀prɒd.ʌkt/ and &lt;em&gt;magnitude&lt;/em&gt; /ˈmæg.nɪ.tjuːd/. The former is claimed to have the stress profile 2, 5, 1, 5, 3, 4 with [ən] having 5 strength, and the latter is X, 5, 4 (he doesn't say – I assume it is 1). The 4/5 distinction has to do with having a reduced vowel or not – how do we determine that a vowel is reduced? I assume that [ə] is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; a reduced vowel in English, and if you have a schwa-like vowel that isn't reduced, you transcribe it as [ʌ]. In &quot;magnitude&quot;, following his transcriptions, the 5-strength vowel is [ɪ], not [ə]: but not every [ɪ] is a reduced vowel (at least I don't think that is the case). I can make all sorts of conjectures about what his analysis would be for various words, but the fact is, since I do not know when he will say that a given vowel is reduced vs. unreduced, I can't empirically test his theory against a wider corpus. I simply do not know if he gets the facts right. I am inclined to assume that the system is descriptively adequate, but faith-based theory-testing is not proper science. (This could be a framework-related communication problem: &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; knows what he means, and so do others working in his framework, but I don't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume that your underlying question is about empirically adequacy and you're not concerned with abstract theory comparison, but in case that is of interest, I will simply say that I resist the idea that theoretical entities can be created and exploited &lt;em&gt;ad libitum&lt;/em&gt;: this is the problem with his stress-strength scale. In a similar vein, I find the condition &quot;Phonotactic constraints on syllable structure (as established with reference to monosyllables) are not violated&quot; to be theoretically incomprehensible, and even descriptively pretty imprecise. It is not clear to me how he gets the distinction between &quot;militaristic&quot; and &quot;capitalistic&quot;, with  an aspiration contrast between &lt;em&gt;itʰarist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;italist&lt;/em&gt;. We would have to assume syllabification differences &lt;em&gt;i.tarist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;it.alist&lt;/em&gt;: but how does that come about? For instance is &quot;it&quot; in &quot;capitalistic&quot; more strongly stressed, compared to &quot;militaristic&quot;? Or does he have some kind of &quot;surface analogy&quot; rule where the pronunciation of these words is determined by referring to the pronunciation of &quot;military, capital&quot;? No doubt he has answers to these questions, but if I don't know the answer, I can't evaluate his theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, something like his theory looks like it is correct, since it restates the Selkirk-Ito-Mester (and others) perspective on English allophony and syllabification, indeed continues a line of analysis that Kahn could have more rigorously pursued in &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; analysis (the main point of difference being the treatment of &quot;city&quot;: [sɪ.ti] for Kahn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T21:20:27.007" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26121" CreationDate="2017-10-08T21:37:18.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can there be arguments against a &quot;viewpoint&quot;? I agree with many of Wells' observations.  Not all.  I'm not convinced that the facts really support his idea that there is a 5-way distinction of vowel stress necessary to correctly  predict the syllable membership of medial consonants in English, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an unbiased observer, since I have my own theories about English stress and syllabification. I describe consonants in syllable onset as stressed and in syllable offset as unstressed. Then the shifting of consonants into the preceding syllable before an unstressed vowel is due to a simple stress assimilation: a consonant becomes unstressed (i.e. goes in syllable offset) before an unstressed vowel.  If we adopt Wells' idea that the degree of stress of the vowel is important to syllable membership, then I'd predict that the syllable membership of the consonant subject to such assimilation is also a matter of degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However that may be, I mention this to distinguish between a phonological theory and Wells' observations, with which I mostly agree.  Wells is a keen observer.  I'm not convinced he has a theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T21:37:18.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T02:06:09.220" Score="-2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/11ow8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/11ow8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;I found this silver bracelet in the early 1950's and cannot identify the language, even after checking several help sites on the internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20160" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T06:08:23.137" Title="What is the language on this bracelet?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-10-09T06:26:29.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26124" CreationDate="2017-10-09T06:08:23.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's Chinese, and it should be read from right to left as &quot;阿弥陀佛&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the most widely used phrase, in my own layman opinion, in Buddhism. When visiting a Chinese monastery, you are likely to be greeted with a devout &quot;阿弥陀佛&quot; by monks with their palms put together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20162" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T06:08:23.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T10:26:26.577" Score="8" ViewCount="3476" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone wanted to talk to 50 or even 75% of the population, how many languages would he have to learn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there maps showing how language speakers are distributed? In many cases it's not safe to assume that all citizens speak the national language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20163" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T10:58:09.433" Title="Geolinguistics: how many languages to talk to 50|90%" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26126" CreationDate="2017-10-09T10:45:56.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you have lists of languages by number of speakers and the population percentage those make up. Then it's just a question of adding up until you're at your desired threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T10:45:56.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26126" CreationDate="2017-10-09T10:46:26.720" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;With 12 languages -Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali(Bangla), Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, Javanese, German- you can communicate with at least 50% of the world population, talking in their native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with higher percentages, is that the share of speakers decreases exponentially. For each additional percentage point you would be adding more and more languages. To approach the 75% figure, you'll need to add languages like Bhojpuri, which cover a mere 0.43% of the world population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2464" LastEditorUserId="2464" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T10:58:09.433" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T10:58:09.433" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T10:54:32.347" Score="4" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do I sometimes come across a label like v* instead of v in the literature? As I understood, it is the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T17:17:58.517" Title="What is the difference between vPs and v*Ps?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26131" CreationDate="2017-10-09T13:25:33.907" Score="-5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to OEIS the only other alpha language that has no numbers 0 to 9 with an i is Albanian.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oeis.org/A159878&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oeis.org/A159878&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;1 – një&#xA;2 – dy&#xA;3 – tre&#xA;4 – katër&#xA;5 – pesë&#xA;6 – gjashtë&#xA;7 – shtatë&#xA;8 – tetë&#xA;9 – nëntë&#xA;I wonder why so? Any historic reasons?&#xA;I noticed the similar situation for Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20165" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T14:34:03.870" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T15:12:48.037" Title="Why no 'i' in Albanian for digits from 0 to 9?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-10-09T18:23:37.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26130" CreationDate="2017-10-09T15:12:48.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not accept that this is a trivial question. In Proto-Indo-European (as usually reconstructed) the only one of the lower numbers that has the vowel /i/ is *tri-, the zero-grade of *trei- &quot;three&quot;. This means that when the other lower numbers in IE daughter languages have the vowel /i/ this is a secondary development. Since Albanian has developed *treis to tre there is no reason why it should have /i/ in any of its lower numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T15:12:48.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26126" CreationDate="2017-10-09T20:39:51.773" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;well I would say mostly the majors such as english, mandarin, spanish-spain, spanish-latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T20:39:51.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26126" CreationDate="2017-10-10T00:29:26.897" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a quick spreadsheet based on the data from wikipedia that MGN supplied the answers are 5 (for 50%) and 14 (for 75%). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20179" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T00:29:26.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T04:28:15.623" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Object&lt;/strong&gt; is a noun or a pronoun that &lt;strong&gt;receives&lt;/strong&gt; an action in a sentence. There are three types namely Diect object,Indirect object and Object of a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both direct object and indirect object receive the action in a sentence. But I have a doubt about &quot;object of preposition&quot;. If there is no receiving action in &quot;the object of the preposition&quot; then how could we say it is a &quot;object&quot; by the definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19899" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T15:24:41.427" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T08:22:23.560" Title="How could we say it is a “object” by the definition?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T10:30:20.593" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;By this, I'm asking whether there are languages (natural or constructed) which somehow function without verbs, relying instead upon other types of words like prepositions or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the purpose of verbs is to describe the relationship between the subject, direct object, and indirect object. Is there a language that doesn't have a verb system, but instead describes this relationship between these three aspects differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T01:43:26.063" Title="Are there any languages that either effectively don't have verbs or that somehow get around using a &quot;standard&quot; verb system?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26135" CreationDate="2017-10-10T17:11:25.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your definition is faulty - it is a coalescence of two different possible meanings of &quot;object&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept the phrase &quot;Object of a preposition&quot; (not all accounts of grammar do) then the definition &quot;that receives an action in a sentence&quot; doesn't apply to it: you would need to distinguish &quot;object of a verb&quot; (or &quot;of the sentence&quot;) from &quot;object of a preposition&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T17:11:25.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T10:40:08.877" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a conference paper where I want to include the PRAAT analyses of some spoken sentences (I will use screenshots), but I cannot get rid of the red cursor lines. Is there a way to deactivate the cursor? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20188" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T10:40:08.877" Title="How can I remove the red dashed lines of the cursor in Praat?" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26135" CreationDate="2017-10-11T23:32:17.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From one point of view, or as @Colin Fine above says, you're comparing apples and oranges.&#xA;From another, it's interesting to investigate if there is actually a common phenomenon. Thus for &quot;object of a preposition&quot; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.let.uu.nl/Uil-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=inherent%20case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inherent Case&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site linked cites a German example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;jemandem (dative) helfen &#xA;&amp;lt;someone&amp;gt;         &amp;lt;help&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; (to help) is inherently dative [assigning]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sagso.at/nominalisierung/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nominalize&lt;/a&gt; it and you will find all but this (dative) case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hilfe für jemanden (accusative)&#xA;&amp;lt;help&amp;gt;&amp;lt;for&amp;gt;&amp;lt;someone&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;das Helfen/Hilfe von jemandem (indeed dative, but see what follows)&#xA;&amp;lt;help&amp;gt;&amp;lt;by,from&amp;gt;&amp;lt;someone&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;jemandes Helfen/Hilfe (genetive)&#xA;&amp;lt;someone's&amp;gt;&amp;lt;help&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;key note:&#xA;there is no way of assigning to the object (ie who is being helped) original dative as soon as nominalized&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;further note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;jemandem (dative) wird geholfen&#xA;&amp;lt;someone&amp;gt;&amp;lt;is being&amp;gt;&amp;lt;helped&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;jemand (nominative) wird gesehen&#xA;&amp;lt;someone&amp;gt;&amp;lt;is being&amp;gt;&amp;lt;seen&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;disclaimer:  for most of these forms of jemand(e)(m)(n)(s), most people simply say &quot;jemand&quot; (without case marking), but I couldn't think of another quick and neutral example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T23:48:08.800" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T23:48:08.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-12T19:20:54.017" Score="-2" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Japanese &quot;subaru&quot; related to Russian &quot;soberu&quot; (&quot;I'll put together&quot;) and Latin &quot;conferre&quot; (&quot;to bring together&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think both Latin and Russian words derive from Proto-Indo-European &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;com bheroa̯&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; &quot;I am putting together&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T00:19:58.380" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T10:27:16.290" Title="Is Japanese &quot;subaru&quot; related to Russian &quot;soberu&quot; and Latin &quot;conferre&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22971" CreationDate="2017-10-12T20:28:33.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, in the same way &lt;code&gt;ν&lt;/code&gt; is not related to &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;μ&lt;/code&gt; is based upon &lt;code&gt;Μ&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; is more closely related than &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare it to a false cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;U&lt;/code&gt; comes from Greek &lt;code&gt;Υ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14666" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T20:28:33.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26141" CreationDate="2017-10-12T22:08:02.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No relation at all. In linguistics the absence of a genetic relation is the null hypothesis. The burden of proof relies on those who claim a certain etymological relation or a common origin of two or more words. So, unless someone proves the relation between &lt;em&gt;subaru&lt;/em&gt; and the other two words, the answer is: unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Don't let phonetic similarities fool yourself: when two words sound alike this is a good hint of their unrelatedness. Genetically related words usually have different phonetic shapes, as you can witness for Russian &lt;em&gt;soberu&lt;/em&gt; (first singular of &lt;em&gt;sobrat'&lt;/em&gt; 'to collect', formed by the prefix &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;- and the root &lt;em&gt;ber&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;bir&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;br&lt;/em&gt;, meaning 'to take' and going back to the PIE root &lt;strong&gt;bher&lt;/strong&gt; 'bring') and Latin &lt;em&gt;conferre&lt;/em&gt; (a prefixed verb with multiple meanings relating to the notion of 'bringing' and going back to the same PIE root as the aforementioned Russian verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T22:14:06.357" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T22:14:06.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26070" CreationDate="2017-10-12T22:39:15.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your presuppositions are faulty. Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;kṛtaka&lt;/em&gt; is exactly what it is: a past passive participle from &lt;em&gt;kṛ&lt;/em&gt; 'to do', followed by the adjectival suffix -&lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt;. As such, it means 'the one who has been done'. Then, depending on the context, you can translate it in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://sanskritdictionary.com/k%E1%B9%9Btaka/61041/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;number of ways&lt;/a&gt;, including a simple 'done', but this does not make it an &quot;expanded variation of &lt;em&gt;kṛta&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. It's another lexeme, not just a word-form of &lt;em&gt;kṛ&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore, you can't search in the Modern Indo-Aryan languages for a continuation of something that did not exist in the Old Indo-Aryan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T22:39:15.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26111" CreationDate="2017-10-13T01:47:43.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that the original unaccented phrase is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You fought for it so bravely&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you give sentence stress to &quot;so bravely&quot; (raising it syntactically and thus privilege it semantically) it renders&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You fought so bravely for it t_[so bravely]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggestion requires a theory that has some Focus or Accent etc. Phrase there above the lexical complement but below the verb. t means trace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T01:47:43.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26151" CreationDate="2017-10-13T07:49:16.550" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may or may not be true, but it's my perception of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English there seems to be a phenomenon where we need a word for something that might be considered offensive, e.g. body parts, certain disabilities, skin colours, etc, so we come up with a word for it. Over time it becomes offensive to use that word so another word is created for it, then this pattern repeats&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of examples, but obviously it would be offensive to list the words here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a certain degree you could call this political correctness, I'm not sure that's all encompassing though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is first, is this a correct assumption? Is it backed up by evidence? But mainly, is this purely an English phenomenon or is shared with others languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20202" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T04:26:47.627" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T04:26:47.627" Title="Offensive words over time in other languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26154" CreationDate="2017-10-13T12:55:21.577" Score="4" ViewCount="2490" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the quirks of English is that it does not have gendered nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages in the Indo-European family that have also lost this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T16:26:14.663" Title="Is English the only Indo-European language without gendered nouns?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26147" CreationDate="2017-10-13T15:48:11.440" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without a list, we can't be sure how narrowly you want the explanation to be tailored. What I think you're talking about is probably universal in language, and isn't a feature of language per se, it's a cultural one, manifested in language. Farting is deemed to be socially negative, so the term &quot;fart&quot; is one of those dis-preferred words, and instead to use some euphemistic replacement, like &quot;poot&quot; (but that's child language) or &quot;flatulate&quot; (rather medical sounding), or &quot;pass gas&quot;. There are numerous other examples referring to body parts and actions, also ethnicity. What's on the list and which list it's on varies over time, as does the most likely referent, for example &quot;breast&quot; was for a while a less-polite term. Ethnic terms seem to be particular volatile, no doubt because the underlying social issues change rapidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same phenomenon exists is every language that I know of. For example, in Logoori polite speech in the presence of elders, you should use the verb &quot;breathe&quot; to refer to farting; the singular of &quot;buttock&quot; (cheeks) is used to refer to the anus; there are various insulting ethnic terms which of course you don't use in the presence of members of that ethnicity (words which meant things like &quot;foreigner&quot;, &quot;mud-person&quot;, &quot;bush savage&quot;, &quot;despised&quot;). On the other pole of word-tabooing, a number of languages have special rules about men saying words that contain sounds from their mother in law's name, such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40463571?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hlonipha&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in Nguni society. In Javanese, there are at least three speech registers, depending on one's relationship to the interlocutor, which involves different lexical items and different grammatical constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest albeit most risky way to determine that there really are such conventions is to try violating the apparent conventions, and see what the effect is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T15:48:11.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26147" CreationDate="2017-10-13T16:11:31.047" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed a cross-linguistic phenomenon! Stephen Pinker named it the &quot;Euphemism Treadmill&quot; in his book &lt;em&gt;The Blank Slate&lt;/em&gt;; the more general linguistic term is &quot;pejoration&quot;, when a certain word or phrase becomes less polite over time. And it happens in pretty much every situation where a euphemism is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classic (SFW) example in English is the name of the room where one defecates: the terms &quot;water closet&quot; (closet with plumbing), &quot;toilet&quot; (place for doing makeup), &quot;bathroom&quot; (room with a bath in it), and &quot;restroom&quot; (room where one rests) all originated as euphemisms and then experienced pejoration. And even such a now-obscene word as &quot;shit&quot; originated as a euphemism; the original meaning was something like &quot;to separate&quot;, cognate with &quot;schism&quot; and &quot;scissors&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The opposite of this is &quot;amelioration&quot;, where a word's meaning becomes more positive over time. This happened to &quot;fine&quot; and &quot;nice&quot; in English, which were originally neutral words but developed a positive connotation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T20:09:05.367" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T20:09:05.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-13T19:21:55.050" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the to infinitives, gerunds and bare infinitives objects? I see that everyone says different things.&#xA;For example: &lt;strong&gt;I agreed to give him the money&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Some people will say that here &quot;to give&quot; is a catenative complement to &quot;agree&quot;. Other people will say that &quot;to give him the money&quot; is a to-infinitive phrase that acts as the object of the sentence. I have previously asked a similar question in the ELL forums but I think this is the place for such a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to see what you people think about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20206" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T19:21:55.050" Title="Are the to infinitives, gerunds and bare infinitives objects?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-14T06:15:19.490" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is not the exact same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3004/correlation-between-politeness-of-a-culture-and-its-languages&quot;&gt;this question here,&lt;/a&gt;. Here, I want to ask if code mixing (if that's the right term) is affecting languages which are in contact with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Hindi is losing the honorific &lt;em&gt;ji&lt;/em&gt; and that has (probably) happened after the contact with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this happened with other languages too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T00:15:46.647" Title="Are languages losing features like honorifics due to code mixing with English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26149" CreationDate="2017-10-14T07:22:45.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, some languages, such as English and Afrikaans, have nearly completely lost grammatical gender (retaining only some traces, such as the English pronouns &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;strong&gt;Bengali, Persian, Armenian, Assamese, Ossetic, Odia, Khowar, and Kalasha have lost it entirely&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That corresponds to my understanding.  It is a spectrum.  English does have some traces of gender, many of the most closely related Germanic languages and dialects have collapsed gender (common and neuter).  But Persian, Ossetic and Armenian really have no grammatical gender even in pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is not always a clear line between gender and noun classes or even declension patterns.  If modern linguistics were a legacy of Bantu prescriptivists not European ones, we would be calling the same thing something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question becomes if one of those obscure IE languages without grammatical gender has developed other flavours of noun classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T12:37:03.430" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T12:37:03.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26149" CreationDate="2017-10-15T11:47:24.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of this depends on how you define gender. English does have “gendered nouns” in the sense that the use of the pronouns “he, she, it” depends on the “gender” of its antecedent. Thus, “boy” is a masculine noun in the sense that it requires the (historically) masculine pronoun “he”. The difference between modern English and the gender system in most Indo-European languages (including Old English) is that English has replaced “conventional” gender by “natural” gender, reinterpreting all inanimate nouns as neuter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different from the situation in Persian etc., where the personal pronouns are invariable for gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T16:26:14.663" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T16:26:14.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26158" CreationDate="2017-10-16T00:04:11.007" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to construct sentences using only Semantic Primes (i.e., from the Natural Semantic Metalanguage). However, I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to do so without &quot;to&quot; and &quot;from&quot;. For example, how might a language say something like, &quot;I move from this place to this place&quot; without using using &quot;to&quot; and &quot;from&quot; and without changing the fundamental meaning of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19601" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T06:08:27.863" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T06:08:27.863" Title="Languages Without &quot;To&quot; And &quot;From&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26157" CreationDate="2017-10-16T00:10:07.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;American Sign Language doesn't use &quot;to&quot; and &quot;from&quot;. Instead, you would sign something along the lines of &quot;PAST, I live Orlando. LAST-YEAR, I move Seattle.&quot; The word for &quot;move&quot; is directional, meaning that you would move your hands in the direction from Orlando to Seattle - or, northwest. So you might argue that &quot;move&quot; is more literally &quot;move-to&quot;, but there still is no specific word for &quot;to&quot; in ASL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20219" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T00:10:07.943" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26153" CreationDate="2017-10-16T00:15:46.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure about this, but I would like to point out on a side note that English took some of its honorifics from France. Mr. is basically Monsieur and Mrs., Maistresse (&lt;em&gt;mistress&lt;/em&gt;). So if you just want examples of mixed cultural honorifics, the English language itself is a good example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20219" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T00:15:46.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26167" CreationDate="2017-10-16T01:38:49.150" Score="1" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I pronounce an approximant, a trill, and then a stop, I have an impression that they are discriminated by the strength of articulation (the &quot;strength of articulation&quot; here means the strength of force of the active articulator against the passive articulator, and is distinguished by the diacritics like [k͈] and [k͉] by extIPA). The approximant feels like the weakest, the trill the middle, and the stop the strongest.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; I have a voice sample to demonstrate this, here postalveolar, so it's a shift from [ɹ̺] to [r] to [t̚]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/ndos-dannyu/approximant-trill-stop-shift-postalveolar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; I tried to apply this to other places of articulation, and discovered that the &quot;middle&quot; is a creaky voice. Here is the voice sample to demonstrate this, which is a shift from [a] to [a̰] to [ʔ̚]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/ndos-dannyu/approximant-trill-stop-shift-glottal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a creaky voice is a glottal trill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17445" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:42:42.367" Title="Is a creaky voice a glottal trill?" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26157" CreationDate="2017-10-16T02:11:19.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are asking is a normal phenomenon in languages with &lt;strong&gt;noun cases&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; case (&lt;code&gt;LAT&lt;/code&gt;) is used to denote &lt;em&gt;movement toward&lt;/em&gt; an object, while&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ablative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; case (&lt;code&gt;ABL&lt;/code&gt;) denotes &lt;em&gt;movement from&lt;/em&gt; an object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, in these languages your example sentence would be formed,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I move A-&lt;code&gt;ABL&lt;/code&gt; B-&lt;code&gt;LAT&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ablative is much more widespread among the Indo-European languages, probably because it was one of the noun cases found in Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that some languages still use particles along with certain noun cases, so it may not be a clear &quot;without &lt;em&gt;&quot;to&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;from&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More than that!&lt;/strong&gt; Some languages differ the &lt;em&gt;movement toward&lt;/em&gt; an object (Lative) from &lt;em&gt;movement into&lt;/em&gt; an object (Illative) or &lt;em&gt;movement onto/under&lt;/em&gt; an object (Sublative),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and also a similar distinction with &lt;em&gt;movement away from&lt;/em&gt; (Ablative) and &lt;em&gt;movement from inside&lt;/em&gt; an object (Elative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the full list of noun cases for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases#Motion_from&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movement from&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases#Motion_to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movement to&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T02:11:19.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T12:34:00.697" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might only apply to LFG, but are there any tests for if a word is functional or content/lexical? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to ascertain whether or not there is a lexical 'be' in English. The active 'be' in sentences like 'don't be silly' may only be adding an 'active' feature to the content word, similar to morpheme -ing. It seems to be a copula, though maybe a lexical copula like 'act' - 'don't act silly'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20144" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T15:26:30.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:26:30.437" Title="Test for function or content word? (LFG)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;lfg&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T13:08:06.620" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am no study of linguistics, it is an hobby, so certainly nothing I know about in depth, but this one I do find puzzling. I understand that sometimes sounds change, this happens in English today due to pronunciation and written form diverging. But what it is this that I find interesting is how often particular words across Germanic languages seem to develop in the same direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example is the possessive determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In English, they are &lt;em&gt;my/mine&lt;/em&gt; and in both, the believed /i/ vowel has shifted first to /ɨ/, most likely, then finally to /aɪ/ today, but in some accents it has become a form of /a/, like in the American Southern accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In Scots, English /aɪ/ corresponds to /a/ like in the American southern accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In modern High-German, the possessive pronoun &lt;em&gt;mein-&lt;/em&gt; also has evolved in this same pronunciation, even unto a vowel similar to either an /a/ or /ɛɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am unfamiliar with Low German dialects and accents, but it seems to be that for some the possessive pronouns can have any of /ɪ/, /i/, or something like /ɪˑə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In Dutch, if I am not mistaken, &lt;em&gt;mijn&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced as /m.n/ and &lt;em&gt;mijne&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced as /mɛɪnə/. Not the same, but very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I have never personally heard West Frisian, but I am awares their possessive pronouns are spelled with a  in their writing system, which should mean it is either pronounced as /i/ or /ɛɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am probably not one to be forming opinions on this topic, but I would think that the common language from which West Germanic languages developed either used one of these vowels or diphthongs: /ɨ~ɪ̈~əɪ̈/ at least somewhere in that area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, this is food for thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T16:57:35.470" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T16:57:35.470" Title="Why is it believed the West Germanic /i/ became /aɪ/ in some cases?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;umlaut&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T13:15:59.493" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still have a confusion in relation to verb classes, I read somewhere here that 'unaccusatives' are types of unpaired unergatives, and somewhere else 'unaccusatives' are the opposite of 'unergatives'.. I get confused all the time about verb classes? Could someone explain them clearly please, or guide me to some references. thanks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T15:18:31.363" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:18:31.363" Title="Verb classes confusion: unaccusative, unergative" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;unaccusative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-10-17T06:14:02.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26160" CreationDate="2017-10-16T15:42:42.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Trill&quot; is a property of the primary consonantal articulator, so [˷] is not a trill. All modes of voicing constitute a kind of &quot;trilling&quot; of the vocal folds, including normal, breathy and creaky voicing. What makes creaky voice distinctive is that the arytenoid cartilages are pressed together, so that the glottis remains closed longer and the opening and closing phases are shorter and more abrupt. On the other end of the glottal-constriction scale, breathy voicing has less glottal constriction leading often to incomplete closure during the closed phase, and a more gradual, sinusoidal shape of opening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;active articulator&quot; vs. &quot;passive articulator&quot; does not apply to the action of the glottis. However, it is a basic truism of physics that if you supply sufficient force to an adjustable opening, you can block airflow, given normal subglottal pressures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T15:42:42.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T18:39:35.480" Score="0" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the infinitive stem? Can you explain it giving examples please?&#xA; And is there something that called &quot;resulting stem&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20222" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T18:39:35.480" Title="What's the infinitive stem?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;&lt;stems&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T19:15:32.397" Score="4" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently read a book written by J.C Milner, in French, entitled '&lt;em&gt;introduction a un traitement du passif&lt;/em&gt;' (1986), he was influenced by Generative theory and some of his basic assumptions regarding the passive correspond to Chomsky's 'syntactic structures' and 'remarks on nominalization'. However, in this book, Milner comes to the conclusion that the 'passive' is an illusion and/or its paradigm doesn't exist. I still don't see what his conclusion is aiming at. Why considering passive illusory?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b7Ryg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b7Ryg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5b7Ge.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5b7Ge.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="20155" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T12:51:07.667" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T13:44:59.860" Title="Passive: illusion or fact?" Tags="&lt;passive&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-17T11:35:13.707" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using the Stanford POS tagger to process German text and I'm interested in assessing the number (singular/plural) of the nouns in the sentence, so that I can classify them accordingly. This is achievable for English sentences as the tags used for singular nouns and plural nouns differ. But when using the model for German tags, I get the same tags for singular and plural. This probably has to do with the fact that the English model is trained with Penn Treebank tags, which has the NN and NNS tags for example.  How can I get this sort of information for German text by using the Stanford CoreNLP tools? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19872" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T17:42:23.790" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T17:42:23.790" Title="How to get morphological information from Stanford POS tagger?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26147" CreationDate="2017-10-18T04:25:19.237" Score="-2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may I know which answers of mine were not well received?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;amelioration and pejoration are cross linguistic. 'make out' is now being used for 'sleeping with' the opposite sex, which itself originated as a euphemism for the f-word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5433" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T04:25:19.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2017-10-18T08:16:59.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an easy way to type IPA English characters easily. Watch this video:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukp1TTzJCck&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Type IPA English easily&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20229" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T08:16:59.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T11:46:28.243" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Singers more often sing &quot;oohs&quot; than they do &quot;eehs&quot;. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's exemplified in this article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/767812/millennial-whoop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://qz.com/767812/millennial-whoop/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've listened to a fair amount of 50's, 60's, and 70's songs, and it seems to hold true in the past too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19601" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T11:46:28.243" Title="Why Do Singers Prefer Back Vowel Non-Lexical Vocables?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;frontness-backness&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T14:22:24.160" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a solid historical reason for some adjectives from nouns taking -y as an ending and some taking -ly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun =&gt; funny (*funnly)&#xA;Friend =&gt; friendly (*friendy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T15:55:43.217" Title="Friend(ly) versus funn(y). -Ly versus -y for adjectives" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15751" CreationDate="2017-10-18T14:26:15.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you already know X-SAMPA, you could use my &lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.lgm.cl/xsampa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X-SAMPA ↔ IPA Converter&lt;/a&gt;. There, you can type in X-SAMPA, then convert to IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you type &lt;code&gt;%int@&quot;n{S@n@5 f@&quot;nEtIk &quot;{lf@%bEt&lt;/code&gt;, and press &lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, it yields &lt;code&gt;ˌintəˈnæʃənəɫ fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəˌbɛt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T14:26:15.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26176" CreationDate="2017-10-18T15:55:43.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation is rather simple. &#xA;The suffix &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/word/-ly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-ly (2)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is derived from the Proto-Germanic suffix &lt;em&gt;*-līkaz&lt;/em&gt; originally with the sense of 'having the body or form of',  related to the Proto-Germanic noun &lt;em&gt;*līką&lt;/em&gt; 'body'. It is a cognate of the English &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;. So, &lt;em&gt;friendly&lt;/em&gt; can be interpreted as 'friend-like' and, say, &lt;em&gt;masterly&lt;/em&gt; as 'master-like.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suffix &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/word/-y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-y (2)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;full of or characterized by,&quot; that is why &lt;em&gt;funny&lt;/em&gt; can be interpreted as 'full of fun / characterized by fun' and &lt;em&gt;dirty&lt;/em&gt; as 'full of dirt / characterized by dirt.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the main guideline for the usage of the two suffixes. Naturally, there are exceptions and inconcistencies in their usage caused by historical reasons, but the main trend is like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T15:55:43.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T15:57:15.917" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been studying Peter Master's &lt;a href=&quot;http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kb4p9r0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2003 paper&lt;/a&gt; regarding null and zero articles and I am still not clear if he is saying that this is a peculiarity of English or if he is saying that this is a conceptual matter and that it will be apparent in all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this particularly as the matter of absent articles is something I meet with in Greek which has no indefinite article and is very generous with the definite. When the Greek article is missing, therefore, it is often quite a significant matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: This question was asked on ELU but was thought to be more appropriate here as it concerns languages other than English.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note to clarify : I am particularly interested in the precision of Hellenistic  Greek. In English 'I have a dog' is ambiguous. (I might have three dogs, but I am deliberately not specifying.) But in Greek, there is no ambiguity - I am only admitting to possessing the concept 'dogness'.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20234" LastEditorDisplayName="user20234" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T20:03:55.697" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T20:03:55.697" Title="Are null and zero articles present in every language, conceptually, or only in English?" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26179" CreationDate="2017-10-18T16:25:53.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No language can have something &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, there are no languages with one tense, or one case, or one number, etc. There always must be an opposition for the category to exist in a language. For example, Hungarian has only the definite article &lt;em&gt;a/az&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;az&lt;/em&gt; before a vowel). But you cannot say Hungarian has just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; article, because the absence of the article in Hungarian is meaningful, it means the indefinite noun state, that is why the definite article &lt;em&gt;a/az&lt;/em&gt; is opposed to the zero article. The same in English: &lt;em&gt;the money&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;money&lt;/em&gt; – the zero article means &quot;not definite, i.e. indefinite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take Russian which has no articles whatsoever, you cannot say that all the nouns there have zero articles, because they are not opposed to anything non-zero. In such cases we say that a language has no such category. There is no category of definiteness/indefiniteness in Russian, that is why there are no even zero articles in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it looks like a language has something &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; (one tense, or one case, or one number, etc.), we say this language has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; tense, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; case, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; number, etc. If it looks like a category is expressed with zero morphemes only, be sure, that language has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; such category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T16:25:53.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26185" CreationDate="2017-10-19T14:02:51.710" Score="8" ViewCount="1222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages where articles appear&amp;mdash;as independent words&amp;mdash;on the right-hand side of the noun phrases they occur in - in other words after the head noun in the noun phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T14:16:37.130" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T16:08:21.193" Title="Languages where articles occur to the right of nouns" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26169" CreationDate="2017-10-19T14:38:07.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A passive serves the function of promoting a direct object to subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the main focus is on the agent most of the time (an agent is the person/thing that does something in a sentence). This helps in what is called 'pivotting', where two sentences are assumed to have the same subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e: Bob bought groceries, then went home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't need to restate the subject in the second clause, thanks to pivotting. However, what if the agent of the first sentence is the direct object of the next sentence (or vice-versa)? A passive allows this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e: The cat run up a tree because it was being chased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the second example demonstrates, using a passive also allows you to drop the agent. This can also be used to improvise an anti-causative, which is a construction where something happens to something with no apparent cause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all languages have passives. But not all languages have nominative alignment. Ergative languages for example typically have an anti-passive instead. This is because in ergative languages, the direct object is more focused on than the agent. In fact, you can determine which alignment a language has by simply telling a person who speaks the language this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob hit bill, then ran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you ask them: Who ran away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they answer 'Bob', then the language is nominative. But if they speak an ergative language, they will assume its bill, because that's how their language works. Sentences pivot around the direct object rather than the agent most of the time. If they wanted to specify that Bob was the one who ran away, they would have to use an anti-passive construction in the second clause. English being a nominative language, we don't need to do such. However, we have the reverse problem in that if the direct object of the first sentence is the agent/subject of the next sentence, then we have to use a passive construction in the first sentence. Neither really has an advantage over the other, in fact languages are almost as likely to be ergative as nominative. It should be noted though that there's other alignments besides these two. And one language family uses an alignment system unique to that family (its called Austronesian alignment, named after the language family of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course some languages just don't bother with either a passive or anti-passive. For example, Basque, which is an ergative language, doesn't have an anti-passive, or pivotting in general. Speakers claim that their language doesn't really have a concept of a subject. They do have agents and direct objects, but they don't ever emphasize one over the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it should be noted that generative linguistics is an out-dated theory that mostly only fans of Chomsky really pay attention to. If you want to see why, read up on L1 acquisition (the study of how kids pick up their first language). It pretty clearly disproves generative linguistics. Children for example don't realize that they can transform statements into questions or vice-versa. In fact, they tend to learn to ask questions first before statements. Which makes sense. They don't know enough at first to give an answer to anything, they're still learning about the world. So of course questions come before statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T14:38:07.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26181" CreationDate="2017-10-19T15:43:37.213" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Persian the indefinite article /i/ can be attached to a noun, or to a noun+adjective phrase. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pesar-i “a boy”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pesar-e bozorg-i “a big boy”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though of course in written Persian this article is written to the left of the head word. Just as a comment on the inadequacy of this &quot;left / right&quot; terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T15:43:37.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-19T16:55:20.857" Score="0" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most grammars, an adjunct is differentiated from a complement in that the former &lt;strong&gt;modifies&lt;/strong&gt; something whereas the latter &lt;strong&gt;complements&lt;/strong&gt; something. But is it really the case that what an adjunct does is &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here are a couple of sentences from CGEL (page 222):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[18] i &lt;em&gt;She treated us &lt;strong&gt;remarkably well&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; [obligatory: complement]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii &lt;em&gt;She carried out all the duties &lt;strong&gt;remarkably well&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; [optional: adjunct]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the adverb phrase (AdvP) &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;remarkably well&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a complement of &lt;em&gt;treated us&lt;/em&gt; in [i] and an adjunct of &lt;em&gt;carried out all the duties&lt;/em&gt; in [ii]. But does the AdvP in [ii] really &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;carried out all the duties&lt;/em&gt; in any way, shape or form? All it does is simply &lt;strong&gt;describe&lt;/strong&gt; the manner in which she carried out all the duties. It doesn't &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; even slightly the fact that she carried out all the duties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; something is what the AdvP in [i] does to &lt;em&gt;treated us&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning of which would be different without the AdvP in [i]. Therefore, I believe that the terms &lt;strong&gt;modify/modifier/modification&lt;/strong&gt; should not be used to describe the function of an &lt;strong&gt;adjunct&lt;/strong&gt;, because these terms actually describe the very function of a &lt;strong&gt;complement&lt;/strong&gt; such as the AdvP in [i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I was wondering why grammarians would even use these terms &lt;strong&gt;modify/modifier/modification&lt;/strong&gt; when they describe the function of an adjunct. Am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to StoneyB's comments, I've gotten to know that the word 'modify' used to mean 'limit, restrict' when first adopted as a grammar term, and that that meaning has been mostly bleached over time. Since 'modify' mainly means 'change or alter' in the present-day English, I think it'll inevitably lead to confusion when the same term is used in grammar not as 'change or alter,' which describes what complements do in grammar, but as 'limit, restrict', which describes what adjuncts do in grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this confusion, why not abandon the term 'modify' altogether as a grammar term? Or am I the only one who thinks this is unnecessarily confusing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T11:26:38.510" Title="Does an adjunct really &quot;modify&quot; something?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26181" CreationDate="2017-10-19T17:49:20.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem is determining that the item is an article, not a demonstrative (assuming that we use semantic tests and not conventional translations into English to decide that matter). There might be some question as to the obligatoriness of the article, if one believes that &quot;if you have articles, everything is either marked with a definite article or an indefinite one&quot;, but this doesn't even pass the empirical sniff test for English (Sentences with no articles exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is determining that the thing is a word and not a suffix. The distinction is elusive or nonexistent in some grammatical frameworks. A semi-test  – which arguably fails to capture the word / affix distinction – would be whether the item appears after non-nouns in case the NP has a structure like N+Adj. This is not a particularly good test, because not all affixes go on a single part of speech (like &quot;on the noun&quot;). A good example of that is the English possessive marker -&lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;, which goes at the end of the NP. This has been termed &quot;edge inflection&quot; in work on the topic, by Philip Miller, where there is a syntactic requirement that the constituent have a certain feature and the value travels down the right edge of that constituent. Thus in &quot;The King of England's name&quot;, the possessive marker is realized on the last word of the NP that is the possessor, and can be indefinitely separated from the head N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that &quot;appears at the edge&quot; is not a sufficient diagnostic of wordhood. We can call on certain other facts to make an ad hoc argument that &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is a suffix and not a word in English. The most compelling is the allomorphy argument, that possessive &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; does not combine with plural &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, though it does combine with plurally-inflected nouns (&quot;the children's dog&quot;). There are other variable issue regarding realization of &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; on &quot;Jesus&quot; (some people say &quot;In Jesus name&quot; rather than &quot;In Jesus's name&quot;). A second is the basic phonological fact that every word in English has to have at least a vowel. So the main question for examples like Persian is what the arguments are for the thing being an independent word rather than an edge-inflected affix. &lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/determiners/determiners-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; discusses what they call the Persian indefinite enclitic (a nice thing about that page is that you can click on (many) examples and hear them, and not have to be able to read Persian -- unfortunately, some of the examples are misordered); &lt;a href=&quot;http://nelc.uchicago.edu/sites/nelc.uchicago.edu/files/Perry2007%20Morphology%20of%20Persian_0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;There are no dedicated definite or indefinite articles in Persian&quot;, but also calls &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; an enclitic (doesn't deny its existence, rather it is a terminological matter). &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; has a certain degree of allomorphic selection: variant &lt;em&gt;ye&lt;/em&gt; after the plural suffix; it seems (Perry says) that the ezafe marker is dropped when the indefinite clitic appears on the head noun. I can't say that I've seen a linguistic article explicitly comparing the clitic vs. full word question for the Persian indefinite marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A candidate for independent post-nominal word exists Logoori. There is a lexeme &lt;em&gt;-éné&lt;/em&gt; which appears towards the right edge of the NP, which can be preceded by any part of speech (not just nouns), which seems to signal definiteness, and passes certain tests of word-hood. Some examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kémóórí !chééné &quot;the calf&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kémóórí kɪ́rítú !chééné &quot;the heavy calf&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kémóó!rí cháMáróvá chééné &quot;the heavy calf of Marova&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vímóó!rí vyáMáróvá vyééné &quot;the heavy calves of Marova&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kémóórí chééné vʊza &quot;only the calf&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NP is head-initial (I use &quot;NP&quot; non-technically), and the purported article is at the right side of the NP, though can be followed by &lt;em&gt;vʊza&lt;/em&gt; &quot;only&quot;. As a first approximation, it agrees in noun class with the head noun (hence the &lt;em&gt;chééné ~ vyééné&lt;/em&gt; variants). Actually, when nouns simultaneously have two classes (as is the case with the locative classes) agreement can be with the lexical class of the noun, or the locative class, hence &lt;em&gt;hányʊ́ʊ́!mbá yééné ~ hányʊ́ʊ́!mbá hééné&lt;/em&gt; &quot;at the house&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a morphological argument that &lt;em&gt;-éné&lt;/em&gt; is not a suffix. The specific class morpheme that is selected under agreement is determined by the formative that agreement attaches to. There is a distinction (in some classes) where the class marker has one shape when attached to nouns and adjectives, and another shape when attached to possessives, demonstratives, or numerals. Thus you get &lt;em&gt;ma-rwá! má-rá!hí g-ɪ́ɪ́tʊ ga-vɪrɪ́&lt;/em&gt; &quot;our two good beers&quot; (beers good our two), with the noun and adjective exhibiting the primary class marker /ma/, and the possessive and numeral exhibiting the secondary agreement morpheme /ga/. In &lt;em&gt;ma-rwá má-rá!hí g-ééné&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the good beers&quot;, the article, which follows the adjective, has the secondary marker /ga/, not the primary marker /ma/ (seen on the adjective itself). Accounting for this would be challenging if &lt;em&gt;-éné&lt;/em&gt; were a suffix on the adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally there is the question of the semantic function. There are a number of distinct demonstratives in the language, such as /yI-AGR/ &quot;this (visible)&quot;, /AGR-nʊ/ &quot;this (possibly not seen)&quot;, /yI-AGR-o/ &quot;that (relatively close)&quot; and /AGR-ra/ &quot;that (very remote)&quot;, which express notions of physical proximity. /-éné/ on the other hand signals that the referent is known from the discourse, and functions to tell the interlocutor that the thing in question is known from the discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest impediment that I see to answering the question is distinguishing &quot;article&quot; on functional grounds from similar kinds of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T20:14:14.647" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T20:14:14.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-19T17:50:53.690" Score="1" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;h2&gt;CASES&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The function of &lt;strong&gt;cases&lt;/strong&gt; is to differentiate nouns in order for the reader/hearer to know what syntactic/semantic function it is performing in a sentence since others languages, such as &lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt;, have a flexible order in the sentences, OK!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in languages such as &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; (nominative-accusative languages), are the &lt;em&gt;declension&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;adpositional case-marking systems&lt;/em&gt; really necessary considering that the sentence's arrangement is always the same (&lt;strong&gt;SVO&lt;/strong&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Declension&lt;/strong&gt; - Case-marking system where the noun changes its form morphologically.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adpositional&lt;/strong&gt; - Case-marking system where the noun receives a suffix or prefix.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19925" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T09:33:53.157" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:33:53.157" Title="Is case-marking really useful for such languages?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26186" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:12:26.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The circumstances under which case marking is &quot;really necessary&quot; can best be summarizes as &quot;when otherwise most sentences become highly ambiguous and communication becomes impossible&quot;. In languages with fairly fixed word order and with prepositions / postpositions signalling certain grammatical functions, case marking could be dispensed with: in a strict SVO language &quot;child sold cat&quot; is unambiguous. In a strict SOV language &quot;child cat sold&quot; is likewise unambiguous. If you have free word order where all word orders are possible and equally likely, you can't rely on word order, so having case marking to distinguish subjects, objects, recipients and so on would be a good choice, communicatively speaking. Even so, given free word order and no case marking, there is little confusion over the meaning &quot;cut child meat knife&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case marking (in the normal understanding of the concept) is not even always required for free word order languages. In Khoekhoe, &quot;basic&quot; word order is SVO, but pretty much all word orders are possible. There is gender marking in the language: and the language uses gender marking to disambiguate. The subject has just it's own lexical gender; if you scramble an SOV sentence, the non-subjects have to also bear the gender marking of the subject (so any double marked NP is not subject).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a number of Bantu languages are pretty flexible with word order, but they have subject and sometimes object agreement. By matching the agreement properties of the verb, you can tell that &lt;em&gt;ng'ombe &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;kagura mwana&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;The child (mwana) bought a cow&quot; and &lt;em&gt;ng'ombe &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;kagura mwana&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;The cow (ng'ombe) bought a child&quot;, bizarre as the latter may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T18:12:26.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-19T19:35:01.117" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reasons of &lt;em&gt;Economy &amp;amp; Parsimony&lt;/em&gt;, The Minimalist Program discards &lt;strong&gt;Deep&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Structure&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;DS&lt;/strong&gt;) because it’s not a linguistic level. The main reasons for eliminating &lt;strong&gt;DS&lt;/strong&gt; were based on ‘conceptual grounds’ (related to methodological considerations) not ‘empirical grounds’, at least as far as I know. Is there any ‘empirical reasons’ for eliminating DS, in terms of 'data'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T00:06:40.627" Title="Are there any empirical arguments for eliminating 'Deep Structure' in Minimalist Syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-19T20:13:06.673" Score="3" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen that linguists do not consider &lt;em&gt;fuṣḥa&lt;/em&gt; as one, but two varieties: classical and modern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the grammar is nearly identical, but how about the lexicon? false friends etc? Is there for example a study that gives a percentage of similarity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14775" LastEditorUserId="14775" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T22:17:00.440" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T11:54:15.397" Title="Lexical difference between classical and modern standard arabic" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26181" CreationDate="2017-10-19T22:26:06.117" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swedish for Definite Articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.G: en stol for &quot;a chair&quot;, stolen for &quot;the chair&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20241" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T22:26:06.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26188" CreationDate="2017-10-20T00:06:40.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is empirical evidence against DS, though it has nothing to do with MP. DS is required for transformationalist theories to move things around so as to get constituents where they are observed to be in surface structures.  We need to describe movement, to describe the relationship between active-passive pairs of structures, for instance, among the many movement constructructions studied in transformational grammar.  But Gerald Gazdar and others found a way in the 70s and 80s to describe movement without DS and without transformations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from simplifying TG radically, Gazdar's method predicts some of the Ross constraints on movement.  This, then, is the evidence.  The Ross movement constraints are not explained, and probably not even formally describable in Chomsky's original TG theory.  However, once transformations are removed, the CSC (Coordinate Structure Constraint), the across-the-board condition on the CSC, and perhaps also the CNPC (Complex NP Constraint) &quot;fall out&quot;; that is, they are predicted.  This is empirical evidence against DS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CSC is due to a general constraint on coordinate structures that only constituents of the same syntactic category can be coordinated.  The across-the-board condition on the CSC has the same cause.  See for example Gazdar, G. 1981. “Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure”. Linguistic Inquiry 12.155-184.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were not for the CNPC, using Gazdar's non-transformational analysis, an unbounded number of syntactic categories would be required, but this is not possible in a context free phrase structure grammar.  Thus, some version of a CNPC-like constraint is also predicted when transformations are eliminated from TG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T00:06:40.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26181" CreationDate="2017-10-20T01:27:56.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is not clear. What an article is and what separate is is arguable. (many of my references are from WALS)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, the definite article derives from demonstratives, explicit adjectives that mark proximity, and indefinites, a vague singular, derive from the numeral for one. There are many languages in Africa where &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/88&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;demonstratives&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numbers&lt;/a&gt; come &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the noun. Among IE, the Celtic languages seem to be the only ones with post-noun demonstratives (the indefinites come before the noun in Celtic). WALS does not have a chapter specifically on articles, therefore the difficulty in saying definitively yes or no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to things called articles specifically, again there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many languages that have them after the noun&lt;/a&gt;. However they all seem to be inseparable, that is, they seem to be suffix-like rather than separate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanian&lt;/a&gt;, the definite article comes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Articles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;after the noun&lt;/a&gt; but other adjectives don't seem to appear between the noun and he article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;frate - brother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fratele - the brother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fratele mare - the big brother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find a language where there is an article that comes after a noun -and- is obviously separable. (as an aside, it is rare that an article comes before the noun and is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; separable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T13:56:10.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26181" CreationDate="2017-10-20T04:49:59.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question definitely seems to be &quot;yes&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, finding clear-cut examples has been difficult for me (though I would imagine that there are a number of them). It is of course often difficult to draw a line between independent words and bound clitics, or between articles and demonstratives. Among the well-known European languages, languages with postposed definite markers occur in two main areas that I know of, but the difficult point is the &quot;independent word&quot; requirement. It seems that many argue that the Balkan-sprachbund languages have definite suffixes, not independent words (see &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/26473436/Romanian_definite_articles_are_not_clitics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanian definite articles are not clitics&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Albert Ortmann &amp;amp; Alexandra Popescu). (There was another question on this site about that: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/574/why-is-the-definite-article-in-balkan-languages-always-called-a-suffix-when-it-r_&quot;&gt;Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?&lt;/a&gt;) The status of the articles in North Germanic languages seem to be similarly dubious. It seems that, for examples of postposed definite articles that are &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt; independent words, we have to look at lesser-known languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would tentatively propose &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miskito_grammar#Determiners_and_quantifiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miskito&lt;/a&gt; as a clear example of a language with a post-posed definite article that is an independent word; Wikipedia gives the example &lt;em&gt;aras ba&lt;/em&gt; 'the horse'. Interestingly, in this language demonstratives precede the noun phrase, and it appears demonstratives and the article can co-occur, with the latter marking the end of a relative clause (as the article comes at the end of the noun phrase). The following example comes from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1MeX8240YTUC&amp;amp;pg=PA62&amp;amp;lpg=PA62&amp;amp;dq=%22Miskito%22%20definite%20article&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lcvvJwhXoL&amp;amp;sig=qL8ZhrgwGhfiOQl96cG-3lwa85U&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwinjOHxrP7WAhWQ14MKHUQsDPAQ6AEIRDAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Miskito%22%20definite%20article&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definiteness&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Christopher Lyons (p. 62):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;baha waikna naiwa balan ba  baku win.&#xA;that man    came  today REL said so.&#xA;'The man that came today said so.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of that page and the following few pages also seem to have &lt;strong&gt;a lot of relevant information&lt;/strong&gt;, so I would encourage checking it out (I don't know how to summarize it, and I don't want to quote paragraphs upon paragraphs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, less relevant source that I found that has some relevant, maybe-interesting info and references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/pers/vandevelde/files/pdfs/The-order-of-noun-and-demonstrative-in-Bantu.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The order of noun and demonstrative in Bantu&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Mark Van de Velde, mentions that in some Bantu languages, there is apparently (based on descriptions of their grammar) a tendency for the same morpheme to occur pre-posed when used more like a definite article, and post-posed when used more like a demonstrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I see it, the preposed demonstratives are on a path of grammaticalisation from textual anaphora markers to definite articles. Why this evolution affects their position vis-à-vis their head noun is not clear at this point. Dryer (1992: 104) notes that there is a statistically significant tendency for articles to precede the noun in VO-languages. Curiously, the languages of Africa form an exception to this generalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found Miskito by looking through the WALS map showing the overlap between languages with a definite article distinct from the demonstrative, and OV word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T16:08:21.193" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T16:08:21.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-20T08:57:13.330" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question occurred to me as I was listening to the infamous German song, &quot;Neinundneunzig Luftballons&quot;, where Nena pronounced the word &quot;horizon&quot; something along the lines of /hoʀi&lt;strong&gt;ʦ&lt;/strong&gt;on/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did that come to be? That sound doesn't appear to be there in just about any other language that has this word. I couldn't think of any other explanation, other than the fact that in German, the letter Z is pronounced as a /ʦ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, did that distinct pronunciation (along with other words from that language, of course) dictate these reading rules, or rather the opposite is correct? And could that be true in other languages as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm referring of course to long-used words that have been used in the language for centuries, not to any modern words, in which case it would be quite obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20248" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T14:24:15.770" Title="Could the pronounciation of some words have derived from reformed pronunciation rules?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26194" CreationDate="2017-10-20T09:19:14.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;/ts/ is, as you already noted, the standard German pronunciation of the letter &quot;z&quot;. This applies to loan words from other languages, including classical Greek, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not unusual that words mainly learned by reading (instead of hearing them) are pronounced according to their written form. The English pronunciation of Latin and Greek loan words has nothing to do with their original pronunciation in any variety of Latin or Greek—it follows the spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T13:51:04.700" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T13:51:04.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26129" CreationDate="2017-10-20T12:36:14.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not the same. &lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; v* (with this label) corresponds to a verb projection with a full argument structure or what is called a Core Functional Category (CFC) with transitivity. This v*P is the small or light vP that can enter into a checking relation of Case/Agreement. Its head, along with C and T, constitutes the set of CFC. Also this head is always transitive in nature, it selects another V, it has phi-features for object agreement and case, and finally it has an optional EPP for object shift constructions. &lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; The other v (the normal light or small v with no * label), however, is the one that Legate (2003) reacted to Chomsky (2000) for, saying that also passives, unaccusatives, TPs, other authors even suggested DPs, are phases on the basis of some phasehood tests she clearly shows in her article (based on wh-movement &amp;amp; Binding). To this point, Chomsky (2001) in another article has drawn a line between strong and weak phases, these weaks phases he considers passive/unaccusative vP, TPs, etc. They are not labelled v* because they don't have a fully argument structure. So indeed there's a difference. You could say that the light or small v (v*) is more functional in nature, and the normal light v is thematic or substantive in nature. This is briefly the difference between them as far as I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="20155" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T17:17:58.517" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T17:17:58.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26169" CreationDate="2017-10-20T15:08:43.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think he is using 'passive' to mean 'the passive transformation', probably because this was the most common meaning of 'passive' at the time. He's arguing that we can generate and interpret passive sentences directly without using transformations, and that the difference between passive and active is that in the passive, the verb cannot take an object. I suspect he would not disagree that the word 'passive' is still useful for talking about the sentence structure; it's just that he does not agree with treating it as a transformation from the active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why he takes opposing the passive transformation to be the same as opposing the passive is apparently because he believes that transformational grammar serves as a universal metalanguage for describing natural language syntax, and linguistic concepts should be defined in terms of this universal metalanguage. Since the passive does not exist in this metalanguage, it does not exist at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T15:08:43.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-20T16:14:44.660" Score="1" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I was just thinking about. Adjectives in a lot of languages can also take modifiers of their own: very big, more intelligent, etc... But is there an actual word for the part of speech such words comprise? I've mostly seen them thrown under 'adverbs', even though some can't be used adverbially, aka to modify a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs, so what modifies adjectives and adverbs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really feel like they're a part of speech of their own, but grammarians don't seem to agree with me, as I've already mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for one prefer linguistic terminology over what terminology you're taught in grammar class. I don't like to use the terms 'relative clause' and 'dependent clause' (or w/e the terms are), I just use 'adjectival clause' and 'adverbial clause' all the time, because I find them far more logical. And besides, they often have words for parts of speech that you don't see in your average grammar class (such as stative verb and coverb, granted English doesn't have words in either of those parts of speech, but I see that as irrelevant here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there even a name for words in this part of speech? I don't think there would be too many words in that category, but so what? There's some languages on this planet that only contain 2 or 3 prepositions (Tagalog and Tok Pisin come to mind). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T18:05:52.243" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T06:32:49.847" Title="What is the part of speech of 'modifiers to adjectives'?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26200" CreationDate="2017-10-20T18:05:01.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In standard average European languages and also in classical Latin and Greek, there is no new part of speech for a modifier of an adjective or adverb, it is just an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether there are languages having &quot;adadjectives&quot; that are different from adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T18:05:01.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26184" CreationDate="2017-10-20T22:28:51.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adjuncts do modify verbs: how was the action done - well or poorly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger problem is with complements: &quot;The waiter treated me well.&quot; differs from &quot;The doctor treated me [well].&quot; in that the first 'well' is obligatory (&quot;The waiter treated me&quot; would mean that my meal was free!), but the second is not (&quot;The doctor treated me&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both forms (adverbial or complement) could use the same storage method, with the only difference being idiomatic, so arguing about which is which may be a waste of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T22:28:51.050" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2017-10-21T04:19:34.587" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;recursion in language means a repetition of function or role. for example, i &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; love you. in the sentence you can notice that definitely, completely, and really are having same function, adverb. so ya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20254" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T04:19:34.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-21T05:01:57.310" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of the grammatical transformation that consists in creating a verb from a noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20255" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T07:04:06.757" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T10:51:49.523" Title="What is the name of the noun to verb transformation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2017-10-21T06:20:34.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making this post pretty much just to link to something that seems relevant. I don't really understand the definition of recursion or its relevance to language. This may be a bit dangerous, but hopefully someone will tell me in the comments if I've mis-summarized something or if none of what I've linked to is worth anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers and comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/5875/whats-the-difference-between-recursion-and-embedding&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between recursion and embedding?&lt;/a&gt; indicate that the defintion of &amp;quot;recursion&amp;quot; may vary between different theoretical frameworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01017/full&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On recursion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Jeffrey Watumull, Marc D. Hauser, Ian G. Roberts and Norbert Hornstein (Front. Psychol., 08 January 2014) is a review article that seems to lay out a generativist perspective on the linguistic definition of &amp;quot;recursion&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core computational mechanisms of recursion, proposed to be constitutive of FLN, are: (i) computability, (ii) definition by induction, and (iii) mathematical induction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there may be problems with the article (see the comments on the blog posts linked below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although embedding is often used as an example of recursion (which relates to the Pirahã debates), the article says that the absence of embedding is not the same thing as the absence of recursion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another section that seems relevant, although I can't claim to really understand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] it is false that “boundedness is principled” if for instance it is possible for the generative function only to “produc[e] a maximum phrase consisting of the verb's lexical frame plus as much as one modifier word per constituent of the phrase and up to one prepositional adjunct phrase” (Everett, 2012: 558); incidentally, the bound is claimed only for “sentential syntax,” but of course syntax—and recursion—extends “super-sententially” (as we will discuss). This function is demonstrably computable: i.e., the set of possible phrases is non-arbitrary and, even if finite, contains too many members to be listed as a lookup table; thus it must be generated by a finitary (recursive) procedure. The function is defined by induction: i.e., &lt;strong&gt;outputs are recursed (carried forward on tape) as inputs to strongly generate structured expressions&lt;/strong&gt;; thus the process is not a form of iteration (equivalently tail recursion) as claimed&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. And finally, the function is mathematically inductive: i.e., unboundedness would emerge with relaxation of the arbitrary lexical restrictions; furthermore, even with such restrictions, it has not been demonstrated that the number of arguments per verb and the number of modifiable constituents is bounded by principle. In short, this function is recursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, any boundedness is demonstrably arbitrary as proved by the undisputed fact that recursion is unbounded in some (i.e., most or, as we submit, all) languages: i.e., it follows from mathematical law that recursion is unlearnable and thus must be part of the species endowment (UG), and thus universal [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore even if it were true that “[t]he upper limit of a Pirahã sentence is a lexical frame with modifiers [a]nd up to two […] additional sentence-level or verb-level prepositional adjuncts” (Everett, 2012: 560), nothing would follow for the universality of recursion. And incidentally, to reiterate, it is undisputed that all languages are recursively unbounded at the super-sentential (discourse) level; and the sentential/super-sentential distinction is artificial [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hornstein made a post about the article on the blog &lt;em&gt;Faculty of Language&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/01/more-on-recursion.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;More on recursion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;) that has some relevant discussion in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A follow-up post (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/01/jeff-w-comments-on-comments-on-recursion.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeff W comments on comments on recursion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;) contains the following elaborations from Watumull:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is no error to equate Turing computability with Gödel recursiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important aspect of the recursive-function/lookup-table distinction is not computability per se (table look-up is trivially computable) but explanation.  A recursive function derives--and thus explains--a value.  A look-up table stipulates--and thus does not explain--a value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jeffrey Watumull&lt;/strong&gt; January 15, 2014 at 11:54 AM&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;“Assume that the process is Merge. Take a word and combine it with another word. Then combine the result of that operation with another word. This is neither using the same word over and over (it is using separate tokens) nor recursive -- it is iterative” (Everett 2012: 4). This is misleading, for this process is technically recursive: the value of Merge at step n is defined by the value at step n-1 (i.e., it is a definition by recursion/induction.) This is tail recursion (in the mathematical sense) because the value of n is a function only of n-1 (i.e., the “tail” of the derivation, c.f., “recursive”/“iterative” implementations of the factorial function).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jeffrey Watumull&lt;/strong&gt; January 15, 2014 at 12:00 PM&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;(N.B. The Pirahã process is in fact not merely tail recursive, because the value of Merge at n is not only a function of the value of n-1, but I assumed it for the sake of argument.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As these last comments indicate, in the generative Minimalist Program,&#xA;the idea of recursion in language is connected to the idea of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merge&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T17:59:00.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26205" CreationDate="2017-10-21T08:20:13.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you're looking for is &lt;strong&gt;denominal verbalization&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T08:20:13.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26506" CreationDate="2017-10-21T23:48:54.497" Score="8" ViewCount="11801" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;a href=&quot;https://kaldi-asr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaldi ASR&lt;/a&gt; compare with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla DeepSpeech&lt;/a&gt; in terms of the speech recognition accuracy (e.g., in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_error_rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word error rate&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T18:33:29.293" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T18:33:29.293" Title="How does Kaldi compare with Mozilla DeepSpeech in terms of speech recognition accuracy?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-22T06:55:48.027" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a language I'm studying for a field methods class, the range of tense/aspect/mood marking on verbs seems to be relatively limited in interrogative clauses. For example, in some verbs, a past tense marker must be omitted if the verb is found in a negative interrogative. If it is found in an A-not-A question (the language is not Sinitic but is Sino-Tibetan), then the A part also drops the tense marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This got me thinking about some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this common crosslinguistically? Are there any other examples?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is common, are there any proposed explanations? e.g. are questions conceptually more complex and therefore TAM markers are removed to simplify things?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T06:55:48.027" Title="Is the obligatory omission of tense/aspect/mood marking in polar interrogatives common?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;interrogatives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T08:37:00.643" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &quot;Cognitive interpretation of Czech verse&quot; by Pavel Jiráček about a way to analyze poetry by reading how the consonants, syllables and words conotate &quot;up&quot; and &quot;down&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best broader term for those kind of theories? I guess I need a version for dummies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T08:37:00.643" Title="Name of the theory of lexical semantics that distinguishes consonants by the values &quot;up&quot; and &quot;down&quot;?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T15:01:44.603" Score="1" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've started wondering how to characterize &quot;linguistic input&quot; and realized that the notion is very rarely unpacked. It seems as if everyone takes it to be obvious, and immediately goes to more specific topics such as &quot;how parents modify the linguistic input to facilitate children's language acquisition&quot;, &quot;the role of the linguistic input in L1 versus L2 acquisition&quot;, etc. But there has to be some precise, fairly standard definition of what linguistic input is. I would be most grateful for any hints and/or references. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20274" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T15:01:44.603" Title="Is there any &quot;standard&quot; definition of &quot;linguistic input&quot;?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T22:18:21.370" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is sort of a silly question, but the other day when walking in the park, I saw a squirrel and said, &quot;Hello, Mr. Squirrel&quot;. I know for me, my choice of Mr. over Mrs. was random, or at least influenced by factors outside of language, but it got me thinking. I wonder if in a particular language, if squirrel were feminine, would a speaker of that language automatically use &quot;Mrs. Squirrel&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20278" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T10:07:24.720" Title="Do speakers of languages that use gendered nouns automatically use the same gendered pronouns when referring to an animal as Mr. or Mrs.?" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T23:17:56.143" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble answering the following syntax and morphology question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages allow identical looking verbs to behave like both unaccusatives AND unergatives or mark different types of intransitivity in the inflection. Have a look at these examples and determine which one is the unaccusative and which one is the unergative version. Explain your answer. Don’t worry too much about the abs/erg glosses, focus on the theta role you think the subject has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)    Batsbi (Nakh language family)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So woze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I.abs fell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As woze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.erg fell (my own fault)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fell (my own fault)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)    Choctaw (Muskogean family).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sa-ttola-tok&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1.acc-fall-past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ittola-li-tok&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fall-1-past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fell on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;c)    Lakhota (Siouan family)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ma-hixpaye&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1sg-fall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wa-skate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1sg.-play&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I determine which one is the accusative and which one is the unergative version in the above examples a, b, and c ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20279" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T23:17:56.143" Title="which one is the unnacusative and which one is the unergative version of the following verbs" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26216" CreationDate="2017-10-23T23:40:35.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not anymore so than in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, &lt;em&gt;Herr Pferd&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Frau Pferd&lt;/em&gt; both work.  &lt;em&gt;Pferd&lt;/em&gt; is neuter, and I think that is almost the answer right there: so-called grammatical genders are just noun classes, in IE languages there are often three classes, not two, so how would a strict 1:1 mapping to two forms of address even be possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bär&lt;/em&gt; is masculine.  &lt;em&gt;Frau Bär&lt;/em&gt; is fine, and &lt;em&gt;Frau Bärin&lt;/em&gt; is a bit odd, &lt;em&gt;Herr Bär&lt;/em&gt; is of course fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;Herr Kuh&lt;/em&gt; is unnatural, not because of the grammatical gender of the noun, but because of the actual gender of a cow in real life.  Just as in English one would probably not say &lt;em&gt;Mr Cow&lt;/em&gt;, and one would definitely not say &lt;em&gt;Mrs Rooster&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will depend on the language, but only because it depends on whether and how strictly a word specifically refers to only one gender of a species.  (That probably varies within a language too, given speakers' varied exposure to animals in nature and agriculture.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in German or Russian there are specific words for female and male cats, a bit like &lt;em&gt;chicken&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rooster&lt;/em&gt;, and note that female is the default, for an unknown individual or mixed group.  &lt;em&gt;Herr Katze&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Herr Kater&lt;/em&gt; are roughly equally frequent on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more complications to all of this, for example in Spanish the word for cat, &lt;em&gt;gato&lt;/em&gt;, default male, can be feminised to &lt;em&gt;gata&lt;/em&gt;, but the word for cow, &lt;em&gt;vaca&lt;/em&gt;, cannot be made &lt;em&gt;vaco&lt;/em&gt; for bull, so there is &lt;em&gt;señora gata&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;señora gato&lt;/em&gt;, but there is no &lt;em&gt;señor vaco&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To really make a point that grammatical genders are just arbitrary noun classes, consider that in such languages even inanimate nouns like &lt;em&gt;Automobil&lt;/em&gt; or abstract nouns like &lt;em&gt;Situation&lt;/em&gt; have a gender, and speakers do not even think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T04:51:18.637" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T04:51:18.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T01:47:10.157" Score="3" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did English &quot;man&quot; and Latin &quot;homo&quot; take both the sense &quot;gender-neutral human&quot; and &quot;male adult&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/word/man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymonline.com&lt;/a&gt;, English &quot;man&quot;, and incidentally Latin &quot;homo&quot; (which originally meant &quot;gender-neutral human&quot;) superseded more specific words like &quot;were&quot; and &quot;vir&quot; in the sense of &quot;adult male&quot;. Is there any theory as to why this happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This part is just secondary, feel free to ignore it:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems (to me) beneficial to have both &quot;man&quot; and &quot;were&quot;, both &quot;homo&quot; and &quot;vir&quot;, because &quot;woman&quot; might not end up being considered &quot;sexist&quot; (?), and you might not have had to borrow &quot;person&quot; or &quot;human&quot; from French. Non-gender-based languages like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. have managed to keep words for &quot;human&quot;, &quot;adult male&quot; and &quot;adult female&quot; just fine, so why don't English and Latin (and their daughter and sister languages for that matter) do that? Is this phenomenon universal among gender-based languages? Not to make a feminist statement here, but apparently if a group of people consist of 100 females and 1 male, they will be referred to as &quot;ils&quot; in French, or &quot;female&quot; appears to be a product of a male-dominant mindset as it was falsely, folk-etymologically built on &quot;male&quot;, so gender role probably plays a role here (which is one of the many reasons I have to agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this guy&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastEditorUserId="9822" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T04:14:06.477" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T14:25:09.407" Title="Why did English &quot;man&quot; and Latin &quot;homo&quot; take both the senses &quot;gender-neutral human&quot; and &quot;male adult&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T08:59:19.817" Score="9" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in short:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Is there any discussion available online of the following reinterpretation (due to Alwin Kloekhorst) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Stop_series&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the stops in the Indo-European phoneme inventory&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;classical inventory    reinterpretation&#xA;p  t  ḱ  k  kʷ      →  p: t: kʲ: k: kʷ&#xA;b  d  ǵ  g  gʷ      → ˀp ˀt ˀḱ  ˀk ˀkʷ&#xA;bʰ dʰ ǵʰ gʰ gʷʰ     →  p  t  kʲ  k  kʷ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;what are the arguments backing up Alwin Kloekhorst's statement ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;full details :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in Alwin Kloekhorst's monumental thesis, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_University&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Leiden University&lt;/a&gt;, about &lt;a href=&quot;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/11996&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Hittite lexicon&lt;/a&gt; that, speaking about the &quot;Proto-Indo-European phoneme inventory&quot; (title after 1.1, p.29):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) I follow Kortlandt (2003: 259) who argues that the traditional 'voiceless'&#xA;  series (*p, *t, *ḱ, *k and *kʷ) in fact were plain fortis stops [p:,&#xA;  t:, kʲ:, k:, kʷ], the traditional 'voiced' series (*b, *d, *ǵ, *g,&#xA;  *gʷ) were lenis (pre-)glottalized stops [ˀp, ˀt, ˀḱ, ˀk and ˀkʷ] and the traditional&#xA;  'aspirated voiced' stops (*bʰ, *dʰ, *ǵʰ, *gʰ, *gʷʰ) were plain lenis stops [p, t, kʲ, k, kʷ]&#xA;  (1.1, p.30) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that although I tried to copy exactly what Kloekhorst wrote, I had to modify the symbols for (pre-)glottalized stops and; I also avoid, for technical reasons, italicizing as the author did.&#xA;As as sidenote, I think it's worth noting that Kloekhorst's views seem to have nothing to do with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalic_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottalic theory&lt;/a&gt; even if Kloekhorst graduated from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_University&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leiden University&lt;/a&gt;, where the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;proponents [of the glottalic theory] today are historical linguists&#xA;  at the University of Leiden&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalic_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Alwin Kloekhorst doesn't justify his allegiance to Kortlandt's assumption, I followed the given reference, namely &quot;Kortlandt (2003; 259)&quot; which leads to the article &lt;em&gt;An Indo-European substratum in Slavic?&lt;/em&gt; (Languages in Prehistoric Europe (edd. A. Bammesberger &amp;amp; T. Venneman), Heidelberg, 253-260), &lt;a href=&quot;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/3777&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;but this article seems to be out of my reach&lt;/a&gt;. Full bibliography &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kortlandt.nl/bibliography.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've only read another article from Frederik Kortlandt, &lt;a href=&quot;https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=3&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj2_YHE4YTXAhVE6xoKHanHAb4QFgg1MAI&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kortlandt.nl%2Fpublications%2Fart066e.pdf&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0BTgfmKvnFbaPt_FTQlV24&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic, 1994&lt;/a&gt;. But what I read is somehow different from Alwin Kloekhorst's views: Proto-Indo-European would have fortes (p, t, ḱ, ...), glottalic (b, d, ǵ, ...) and aspirated (bʰ, tʰ, ǵʰ, ...) stops and &quot;Dialectal Indo-European&quot; (namely Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Albanian, Armenian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian and probably Tocharian) would have fortes (p, t, ḱ, ...), (pre-)glottalized (ˀb, ˀd, ˀǵ, ...) and voiced (bʰ, tʰ, ǵʰ, ...) stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hence my question: what are the arguments backing up Alwin Kloekhorst's statement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T13:42:37.363" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T13:42:37.363" Title="(indo-european) *b, *d, *ǵ... vs ˀp, *ˀt, *ˀḱ" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26220" CreationDate="2017-10-24T10:19:13.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, a major argument in favour of the reinterpreted consonant system is the suspicious rareness of &lt;em&gt;*b&lt;/em&gt; in the protolanguage. The absence of /b/ in the presence of /p/ and /bʰ/ is more difficult to explain than the absence of /ˀp/ in the presence of /p:/ and /p/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that no Indogermanic language has preserved glottalised stops (they are present in Armenian but this can be explained as a later acquisition due to areal influence of Caucasian languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T10:19:13.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26205" CreationDate="2017-10-24T10:51:49.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called derivational morphological process as well as verbalisation after attached and some affixes (bound morphemes). see Derivational affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20284" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T10:51:49.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26226" CreationDate="2017-10-24T14:14:17.260" Score="2" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very common description of ergativity defines it as a morphosyntactic alignment where the intransitive subject follows a pattern similar to the object and dissimilar from the transitive subject --- in opposition to the accusative alignement (like the answers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20689/accusative-or-ergative-language&quot;&gt;Accusative or ergative language?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this presupposes that the very concept of subject would be applicable in all languages and as the answer of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4079/how-do-linguists-define-the-idea-of-a-grammatical-subject&quot;&gt;How do linguists define the idea of a grammatical subject?&lt;/a&gt; makes the case, this is questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end it seems to me that the definition of ergativity in terms of intransitive/transitive subject and object is hardly satisfying and looks either circular or ethnocentrist. So why is it still in use? And more generally why isn't the fuzzy and dubious notion of subject made obsolete in linguistics and replaced by more rigorous and appropriate concepts when dealing with languages in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20287" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T18:23:41.860" Title="About the universality of the notion of subject and the description of ergativity" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26223" CreationDate="2017-10-24T14:59:23.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greenberg's universal #38 (&quot;Where there is a case system, the only case which ever has only zero allomorphs is the one which includes among its meanings that of the subject of the intransitive verb&quot;) presupposes the existence of intransitive verbs, and by convention the primary argument of an intransitive verb, to which the verb may agree, is called the &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt;. All languages that have intransitive (monovalent) verbs will have subjects, which makes this a pretty uncontroversial linguistic topic (as far as topics in linguistics go).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphological ergativity is something that can only be described in languages that have morphological case marking. The form that the marker of a NP may take, to mark for the argument of intransitive verbs, will determine what the 'alignment' is; if the marker is used to mark certain thematic roles of transitive verb arguments (such as agent), the agreement will be accusative, and if the marker is used to mark other roles (such as patient), the agreement will be called ergative. In both cases, linguists typically name the agreement after the secondary marker's name (accusative as the marker for P in transitives where S &amp;amp; A have the same marker, and equivalently for the ergative and A marking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactical ergativity is a different beast, and does not care for the surface phenomena of morphological ergativity (and is equvalently called 'deep ergativity'), but it still hinges on the way the S argument chooses to align with either the P or A arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see where the fuzziness comes in. Robert Dixon's &lt;em&gt;Ergativity&lt;/em&gt; is a brilliant read on the nature of morphosyntactic alignment, even though it is quite a hearty read. Defining ergativity as the phenomenon of the S argument aligning with the P argument does not seem circular, as the S/A/P argument system is divorced from this consideration. I do not see which concepts are more appropriate, if intransitivity is taken as a given (unless one is willing to dispute basically all of syntax, as well as Greenberg's typology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T14:59:23.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26219" CreationDate="2017-10-24T16:09:04.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I misread the question, so this is strictly speaking not an answer any more but still relevant: in biblical Hebrew, אישׁ &lt;em&gt;'yš&lt;/em&gt; can refer to &quot;man&quot; as a male adult and to a human in general, and it's much more common than אדם &lt;em&gt;'dm&lt;/em&gt; &quot;human&quot;. The verb has masculine and feminine endings; the plural feminine ending is only used for groups that consist &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; of women, for all other groups, the masculine plural is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Hebrew I think it's widely agreed upon that this is because of men being more important in society in general: this leads to the word &quot;man&quot; occurring much more often than &quot;woman&quot;, which eventually leads to it taking on the meaning &quot;somebody&quot;. I presume a similar argument can be made for Latin and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T19:42:44.273" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T19:42:44.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26223" CreationDate="2017-10-24T16:18:44.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in the end it seems to me that the definition of ergativity in terms of intransitive/transitive subject and object is hardly satisfying and looks either circular or ethnocentrist. So why is it still in use? And more generally why isn't the fuzzy and dubious notion of subject made obsolete in linguistics and replaced by more rigorous and appropriate concepts when dealing with languages in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph seems to suppose that in all languages that display the phenomenon of &quot;ergativity&quot;, the concepts of &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; are artifacts of applying an analysis based on non-ergative languages. This really isn't the case, though: many languages have ergative morphology &lt;em&gt;and also&lt;/em&gt; other aspects of grammar that make it possible to demonstrate in a rigorous fashion that absolutive-marked NPs in intransitive sentences and ergative-marked NPs in transitive sentences behave alike in cetain contexts or in certain respects. That is, there are motivations for distinguishing the concept of &quot;absolutive-marked noun phrase&quot; from the concept of something we can  call the &quot;subject&quot; that arise from the structure of these languages, not just from the imposition of external concepts of subject- and object-hood taken from languages without ergative morphology. Sure, we could call this concept something other than &quot;subject&quot; if we wanted to, but &quot;subject&quot; seems to fit the semantics and has mnemonic value, so why use a different word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many (but not all) languages with an &quot;ergative&quot; system of case-marking, the noun phrase that is morphologically marked as ergative case in a transitive clause acts syntactically similar  in a number of ways to the noun phrase marked as absolutive case in an intransitive clause. This phenomenon is often called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_ergativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;split ergativity&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So within many particular languages that makes use of ergative marking, we can have quite clear evidence of a concept of &quot;subject&quot; in those languages from other patterns of marking in other contexts (e.g. the difference in case marking in the past/perfect and present tenses in Hindi and Urdu), or from syntactic evidence e.g. the behavior of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_pivot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pivots&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the more general typological criteria for applying the concept of &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; to a language that only uses ergative morphology and has a fully ergative syntactic system, there might be some fuzziness. I haven't studied the matter, so there might be more subtle grammatical phenomena other than morphology and pivots that we can use to identify the subject. If not, it just means that &quot;subject&quot; and &quot;object&quot; are defined at this level by mainly semantic grouping, which is not that strange for universally applied typological categories. We can distinguish them by the same vague kind of criteria that we use to distinguish &quot;nouns&quot;, &quot;verbs&quot;, and &quot;adjectives&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that level of typology, these kind of &quot;universal&quot; classifications are often disputed if we take them to represent some important fact about the structure of all languages, but they are often felt to at least provide some rough method of inter-linguistic comparison. It's easier to remember a few terms that mean slightly different things in different languages than it is to remember a bunch of terms that are all specially designed to refer to specific features of individual languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T18:23:41.860" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T18:23:41.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T18:46:14.943" Score="0" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The performance of a machine translation system is highly impacted by the parallel corpus it is trained on. Therefore, as we all know, a good quality normalized and (ideally) noise-free corpus is essential. To know how a MT system is performing we have to actually train the model first and then test its performance on the test data set. This is sometimes time consuming due to the fact that the data sets are usually huge. For my thesis I have 5 different versions of my parallel corpus. If I precisely want to measure the performance using BLEU score or some other metrics I need to train the model 5 times and that will take a lot of my time. Therefore, I was wondering if there is any way to measure the quality of a parallel corpus beforehand?&#xA;I have found &lt;a href=&quot;http://depts.washington.edu/uwcl/nw-nlp-2010/papers/EetemadiAndRadha_Poster.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; which is kind of doing what I am looking for, however, I cannot cite it for my thesis as a reference since it is not a published work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20288" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T18:46:14.943" Title="Is there any theory for mathematically judging the quality of a parallel corpus before running it through a machine translation pipeline?" Tags="&lt;statistical-mt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26216" CreationDate="2017-10-25T00:55:52.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Portuguese there are animals for which there are two different names, one for the male, and one for the female:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O touro (bull) - a vaca (cow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O cavalo (horse) - a égua (mare)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other animals are referred by just one name, but it inflects by gender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O gato - a gata (cat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O porco - a porca (pig)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still others have just one name, that does not inflect by gender. Those have a fixed gender, irrespective of the sex of the animal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A onça (jaguar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A doninha (weasel)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O elefante (elephant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O furão (ferret)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are a few names that do not inflect, but accept articles of either gender, according to the sex of the animal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O jabuti - a jabuti (tortoise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third and fourth categories are more commonly composed by names of non-domesticated animals - and the fourth is more usual among borrowings from Tupi-Guarani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the issue is somewhat blurred. Some would say that &amp;quot;elefante&amp;quot; does have a feminine form (and then disagree whether it is &amp;quot;elefanta&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;elefoa&amp;quot; - placing the word in the second category above - or &amp;quot;aliá&amp;quot;, which would make it an instance of the first category). And definitely there are cases where there is inflection, but one of the genders is more or less automatically used when the sex of the animal is unknown - &amp;quot;raposa&amp;quot; (fox) does have a masculine form, &amp;quot;raposo&amp;quot;, but the feminine is used whenever the sex of the animal isn't important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a use such as &amp;quot;Seu Esquilo&amp;quot; (Mr. Squirrel) is unusual - it is either children talk or a peculiar subset of the literary register, pertaining to fables or fairy tales. And then the rules are much laxer than in standard or colloquial register. If the animals come in couples, it would often be natural to call them &amp;quot;Dona Onça&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Seu Onço&amp;quot;, even though the latter would be weird in colloquial speech. This is however very irregular, and the use of one of the forms may sound weird even in a fable (&amp;quot;Seu Furão&amp;quot;, ?&amp;quot;Dona Furona&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Dona Zebra, ?&amp;quot;Seu Zebro&amp;quot;). Also in fables, the modern (and somewhat colloquial) masculine &amp;quot;Seu&amp;quot; could possibly be replaced by the archaic &amp;quot;Dom&amp;quot; - as in &amp;quot;Dona Baratinha e Dom Ratão&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the case in point, I think the most natural thing would be to call the squirrel &amp;quot;Seu Esquilo&amp;quot;, unless for some reason one would assume it is a female (the word does have a feminine form, &amp;quot;esquila&amp;quot;). If it was a fox, it would be more natural to call it &amp;quot;Dona Raposa&amp;quot; unless for some reason it was assumed to be a male.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was a jaguar, it would be &amp;quot;Dona Onça&amp;quot;, with the alternative &amp;quot;Seu Onço&amp;quot; only if we intended to stress it was a male, if we are telling a fable; in colloquial or standard Portuguese we would call a male jaguar &amp;quot;onça-macho&amp;quot; (and use the feminine articles and adjectives - &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; onça-macho estava furios&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T10:07:24.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-25T04:06:50.957" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copulas are regarded as semantically vacuous auxiliaries merged in V, then raised to T. Lexical verbs are merged in V and are raised to v. I have not found any literature discussing the copula with regards to the split VP hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, this question remains: Is the copula merged in V or v?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have found any references or links to articles discussing this, please post the link or title in the comments section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My bet is that it is merged in v like light verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T04:06:50.957" Title="Copulas and the Split VP Hypothesis" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26200" CreationDate="2017-10-25T06:32:49.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such kind of words can be a Intesnifier, you can tag it as a Intensifier, intensifier works as a modifier for adjective in NLP point of view we take is as Intensifier to avoid the ambiguisties among the adverb and Intensifier.&#xA;sometime its also called adverb according to Tradintional grammar. &#xA;eg very beautiful girl.&#xA;very big stone.&#xA;in Hindi-&#xA;bahut(INTF) achhi (ADJ)ladki (N).&#xA;very beautiful girl.&#xA;INTF- intesifier, ADJ -adjective, N- Noun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20284" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T06:32:49.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-25T12:43:34.417" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens in many languages. For example, in many languages the letter &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; transliterates to IPA's &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; if it is the last letter of the word (instead of &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;). Consider, in English the &quot;d&quot; in &quot;demon&quot; and in &quot;baked&quot;. We sort of attach a default phoneme to the letter, and then there are exceptions where the letter is pronounced differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13215" LastEditorUserId="13215" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T20:13:55.163" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T08:06:30.103" Title="Is there a word for the last letter of a word is pronounced with a different phoneme than it would otherwise?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26219" CreationDate="2017-10-25T12:48:53.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Men have traditionally been &quot;public&quot;. Men are often traditional rulers (kings, chieftains) and the heads of households. Not so long ago men were the only visible political agents, as elected leaders, ministers, etc. and also (in democratic societies) as voters. In many countries it was only in the last century that women could enter some public professions, graduate from universities, etc. Traditional gender roles, still prevalent in many parts of the world, place men in the public sphere and &quot;hide&quot; women. All of this has no doubt influenced the shift of words like &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; from &quot;human being&quot; to &quot;man, male&quot;. This is however speculative. We don't know why people started using &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;male human being&quot;, thus losing a perfectly good generic word, even when they had another perfectly good term, &lt;em&gt;vir&lt;/em&gt;, to designate men. We can only document the change and guess at the cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gender roles aside, historical contingency obviously also plays a role. While English changed the main meaning of &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; from a generic human being to a male one (all the while preserving the generic sense because of the gender issues mentioned above), closely related German did differently: it did change &lt;em&gt;Mann&lt;/em&gt; into &quot;male human being&quot; but kept &lt;em&gt;Mensch&lt;/em&gt; (derived from the same root) to mean &quot;person&quot;, and the indefinite pronoun &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; to mean &quot;one&quot; (not unlike French &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;). Modern German also notably employs &lt;em&gt;Mann&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Frau&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;man&quot; and &quot;woman&quot;) as synonyms for &quot;husband&quot; and &quot;wife&quot;, a parallelism that is not found in other languages (e. g. in Spanish one says &lt;em&gt;mi mujer&lt;/em&gt;, lit. &quot;my woman&quot;, to mean &quot;my wife&quot;, even though &lt;em&gt;mi hombre&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my man&quot; does not mean &quot;my husband&quot;). German speakers are, I'm sure, not particularly less prone to assign gender roles than English speakers, but this does not show in this particular subset of its lexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T12:48:53.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26231" CreationDate="2017-10-25T15:15:51.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be talking about &quot;neutralization&quot;. For example in German and Russian, word-final &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; are both pronounced [t]. We have a version of that in English, where the past tense &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced [t] after certain sounds (as in &quot;baked, based, laughed&quot;). To make any sense of the English pattern, especially, you have to not think in terms of &quot;letters&quot;, and instead think in terms of the &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; that the letter-sequences represent (somewhat obscurely in English). Given some two similar but distinct sounds of a language (like &lt;em&gt;t,d&lt;/em&gt;) the language may have some rule which eliminates (neutralizes) the phonetic difference between those two sounds so that they are pronounced the same way. It could be that &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; becomes pronounced like &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; becomes pronounced like &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;, or both are pronounced the same way like [ɾ], for example English &lt;em&gt;write, ride&lt;/em&gt; having the contrast between &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;writer, rider&lt;/em&gt; being pronounced the same way, in most American dialects, with [ɾ] in place of &lt;em&gt;t,d&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T15:15:51.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26231" CreationDate="2017-10-25T21:03:54.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is one special case of what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-Prague-school&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prague School&lt;/a&gt; called the &lt;em&gt;demarcative&lt;/em&gt; function of language: &quot;The term demarcative is applied to those elements or features that in particular languages serve to indicate the occurrence of the boundaries of words and phrases and, presumably, make it easier to identify such grammatical units in the stream of speech.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Neutralization&lt;/em&gt;, referred to by @user6726, is also a Prague School notion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T21:03:54.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26231" CreationDate="2017-10-25T21:40:47.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of &quot;baked&quot; is actually a special case in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English phonotactics do not allow /t/ and /d/ to contrast at the end of a word &lt;em&gt;when there is a preceding voiceless obstruent&lt;/em&gt; (a sound like /k/, /p/, /f/, /s/), so the suffix spelled &quot;-ed&quot; is realized as /t/ in this context (and /d/ in other contexts). This is a type of neutralization, as described by user6726, and the realization of the neutralized segment as a voiceless sound can be explained as the result of &quot;assimilation&quot; in voicelessness to the preceding voiceless phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But /t/ and /d/ do contrast at the end of a word in other contexts in English: there is a clear difference in pronunciation, easily heard   for a native English speaker, between words like &quot;mel&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;mel&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;end&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;L&lt;/strong&gt;ent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it is well known that in some European languages, such as standard German and Dutch, there is a &quot;neutralization&quot; between voiced and voiceless obstruents word-finally no matter what the preceding sound is. A typical example is standard German &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/30535/are-rad-and-rat-seriously-pronounced-in-the-same-way&quot;&gt;&quot;Rad&quot; and &quot;Rat&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: they are considered to be homophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is often treated as the result of a phonological rule that causes consonants to be recategorized as &quot;devoiced&quot; or &quot;fortis&quot; or something like that at the end of a word, although in some languages, such as Dutch or Russian, the situation is complicated by the fact that the neutralized sound may in fact be voiced, not voiceless, if it occurs in the middle of a phrase before a voiced obstruent (in the onset of the first syllable of the next word). I found a paper that talks about this phenomenon in Dutch: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/303-0399/roa-303-grijzenhout-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Final Devoicing and Voicing Assimilation in Dutch Derivation and Cliticization&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; Janet Grijzenhout &amp;amp; Martin Krämer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another complicating factor is that apparently, in these languages, word-final neutralization of voicing contrasts is often &quot;incomplete&quot; in the sense that careful measurements may reveal some kind of differences in production that are just too small to be perceived by human listeners. See e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bodowinter.com/papers/winter_rottger_IN_grazer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nature of Incomplete Neutralization in German: Implications for Laboratory Phonology,&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Bodo Winter and Timo Röttger. This seemed very surprising to me when I first read about it, but I believe I have read about similar cases of a mismatch between production and perception of word-initial or word-final geminate/long consonants in some languages. It's not obvious to me if this is relevant to a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of devoicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T21:40:47.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26241" CreationDate="2017-10-26T04:55:59.633" Score="10" ViewCount="2574" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some alphabets capitalize proper nouns, others capitalize all nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does ipa notation ever get capitalized to match their written counterparts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume not, as it might be sending mixed messages - especially if they could represent different IPA letters. I don't have a definitive answer though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T19:30:17.880" Title="Does IPA notation ever get capitalized to match their written counterparts?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T05:21:50.607" Score="3" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a popular image floating around the internet, but like many things floating there, it seems like a gross simplification and just plain inaccurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I’m more of an armchair linguist than a bonafide linguist like most of you guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent is this accurate, would you use it as a heuristic for undergrads?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ex.: It seems strange to distinguish between “literal meaning” (do linguists even believe in literal meaning?!) as an object of study itself? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the first four circles suggest a “is made up of” relation: “phrases are made up of words are made up of phonemes...) but that doesn’t work for the outermost two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc etc. but maybe this is still a useful tool to understanding units and subdisciplines in the field. What’s your take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/maiO3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/maiO3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T15:39:48.243" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T04:41:55.383" Title="To what extent does this image accurately express the modularity of linguistic units?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2017-10-26T05:22:51.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope, as you correctly surmised, it is not standard practice to capitalize IPA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T05:22:51.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2017-10-26T06:10:38.640" Score="23" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The concept of &amp;quot;capitalization&amp;quot; is not part of the official IPA&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official chart showing the International Phonetic Alphabet is downloadable from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/full-ipa-chart&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA website&lt;/a&gt;. IPA letters are not defined in cased pairs. Most of them look like lowercase letters (and I believe are treated as lowercase letters in Unicode encoding; I don't know if there are any exceptions to that). Some look like small caps; these are just separate letters, representing separate sounds. (Usually the sound is similar in some regard to the source letter, but there is no single rule connecting the sound of an IPA letter that looks like a Latin alphabet small-caps letter to the sound of an IPA letter that looks like the &amp;quot;corresponding&amp;quot; Latin alphabet lowercase letter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the IPA letters a, b, c... z, which are identical to letters of the familar Latin alphabet, have upper-case equivalents A, B, C... Z in the context of the larger set of Latin alphabet characters, but these upper-case equivalents are not formally defined as part of the IPA, and there is no common informal use for them in phonetic transcriptions that I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use of capital letters in some phonological transcriptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In phonological transcriptions, full-sized capital letters of the Latin alphabet may be used in a way Typhon mentioned in a comment below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen upper case used to denote archiphonemes in broad transcriptions. I'm not sure if it's standard practice. – Typhon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say this still isn't exactly &amp;quot;capital&lt;em&gt;ization&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; because the capital letters don't correspond to a single lowercase IPA letter, but to a set of them (e.g., N might be used as a symbol representing the neutralization of both /n/ and /m/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a transcription with archiphonemes is fairly definitely not phonetic (I don't mean to say that there is a clear line between phonetic and phonemic transcriptions, just that I think most people agree that no matter how blurry the line is, archiphonems are on the phonemic side, and maybe even beyond it i.e. on a &amp;quot;third&amp;quot; level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Use of capital letters in some practical orthographies based on the IPA&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical orthographies of some languages contain letters taken from the IPA (or from other similar phonetic transcription systems), and in this context, capitalized/uppercase letters often may occur. But these are not official IPA, just similar but distinct scripts. There are even some upper-case equivalents to certain letters of the IPA outside of the 26 basic Latin ones: while these uppercase forms are not part of the IPA, they are used in some alphabets like the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Africa Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (which has Ʃ as the upper-case form of ʃ, Ʒ as the uppercase form of ʒ, Ŋ as the uppercase form of ŋ, and some others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the glottal stop letter &amp;lt;ʔ&amp;gt;, there is some variation. It is used as a case-invariant letter in the orthographies of some languages, but there is also a pair of derived characters that are used as a cased equivalent in the orthographies of some other languages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;uppercase &amp;lt;Ɂ&amp;gt; and lowercase &amp;lt;ɂ&amp;gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see more examples at the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_variants_of_IPA_letters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Case variants of IPA letters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T23:04:28.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2017-10-26T09:03:14.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't capitalise IPA characters, because there are enough IPA characters that look like upper case letters that it would be very confusing: ʙ, ɢ, ʜ, ɪ, ʟ, ɴ, and ʀ are all distinct IPA characters and are not the same sounds as b, g, h, i, l, n, and r.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T14:38:13.193" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T14:38:13.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T11:30:12.010" Score="4" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is, is there a language, natural or constructed, which has, for example, a word for top right (up right), separate from their word for top (up) and their word for right? Or a word for northeast, separate from their word for north and for east?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20301" LastEditorUserId="20301" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T13:05:34.887" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T01:14:21.597" Title="Is there a language with distinct, non-compound words for cardinal diagonal directions?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26239" CreationDate="2017-10-26T14:38:38.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it more accurate to see the world as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GftiE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GftiE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO it's not very accuate to depict semantics as an extension of syntax. There is a crucial difference in what phonology, morphology and syntax do and what semantics and pragmatics are concerned with: &lt;strong&gt;The former are about form, the latter about meaning.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a distinction that is sometimes disputed, but nevertheless still quite apparent in the way the different fields are investigated. There is a fine line between the study of the internal structure of words and that of phrases, which is why I tried to make the transition between morphology and syntax a bit blurry - some linguists might say that morphology is just word-syntax - and the way from phonemes to the items that are composed of them is quite plausible to depict as an &amp;quot;on top of&amp;quot; relation, but the step from syntax to semantics is rather different. It's not just shifting the zoom level of the elements whose structure is being investigated, but it's a whole different question that is tackeld by semantics an pragmatics: It doesn't ask about how linguistic elements are shaped and inherently structured, but how to interpret them. I therefore found it more accurate to display these areas as two rather parallel fields of study that interact which each other (this is what the lines between left and right are supposed to mean).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On top of that, I find it not very useful to display semantics as the thing that comes after syntax. &lt;strong&gt;Semantics starts at the level of words and extends over phrases up to sentences&lt;/strong&gt;, and should therefore touch the structural level of words. Pragmatics can only meaningfully done at the level of larger phrases and sentences, and extends beyond the sentence boundary to the level of discourses. I tried to make the vertical alignment accordingly. Again, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics is blurry.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Phonetics is a bit difficult.&lt;/strong&gt; I find the placement just below phonology not good enough; this would make it look like phonemes are a larger unit that are built up of speech sounds just like what we call words are made up of the units called phonemes, or phrases are put together from words. Rather, phonetics and phonology look at the concept of &amp;quot;sound&amp;quot; from different perspectives - one is concerned with &amp;quot;what comes out of your mouth&amp;quot;, the other is concerend with &amp;quot;what is in your head&amp;quot;. W.r.t. how research is done in the two fields, the questions that phonologists are concerned with and how they are approached are conceptually much closer to what is done in syntax and morphology; phonetics is not primarily interested about the rules and patterns that govern the inherent structure of linguistics, but rather on their physical properties. So maybe one should place phonetics and phonology more parallelly to each other, but in the end both are concerned with form rather than meaning, so this is a bit of a tricky one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &lt;strong&gt;labels&lt;/strong&gt;, I don't find the graph you showed too inaccurate. (Interestingly, the descriptions I chose are almost identical to your picture - it seems like the classical definitions of the fields are very persistent.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One might argue whether &amp;quot;speech sounds&amp;quot; precisely captures what phonetics is about in contrast to phonology, the addition of &amp;quot;speech&amp;quot; is very important here.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for syntax, one can decide to drop &amp;quot;sentences&amp;quot; if one assumes that sentences are also just kinds of phrases, but this is hairsplitting.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I do agree with the summar &amp;quot;literal meaning&amp;quot; as opposed to &amp;quot;meaning in context of discourse&amp;quot;. Eventually, this is what usually separates the two fields: While semantics is interested in a precise account of the meaning of linguistic entities as they are, it doesn't quite care about what could be there &amp;quot;between the lines&amp;quot;. Subjects of linguistics that raise questions concerning speaker's intentions, dynamics of conversation, linguistic economy etc. have established as a field on their own, while there obviously is still a close connection between research in semantics and pragmatics. (For example, presupposition theory is usually regareded as an issue of pragmatics, but the way it is handled, it is actually a very semantic topic.) And pragmatics did take a long time to establish as a field on its own (one of my professors used to say &amp;quot;There is no such thing as pragmatics, there's good semantics and there's bad science.&amp;quot; I won't attempt to comment on that here.) The element that is reponsible for when this distinction comes into play is probably best described as the &amp;quot;context of discourse&amp;quot;, leaving semantics as the field concerned with the non-contextually-modified, more literal meaning, so I'd agree on these lables as long as I don't find anything better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, as already addressed by Mitch, the graphical representation with circles seems to suggest an &lt;strong&gt;inadequate subset relationship&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e., the questions that phonology is concerned with is part of the questions that syntax is concerned with, for example), which is inadequate. Rather, at least in as far as the left half is concerend, it should be a kind of mereological relationship (phrases are made up of words are made up of phonemes). The relationship might mot be as parallel for the right half, but pragmatics could be seen as made up of semantics + conversational context (at least pragmatics can't be done without semantics, just like syntax can't be done without words). This is why I chose ellipses that are stacked on top of each other (in hindsight I think rectangular blocks would have been nicer because they can better be thought of as being piled up from bottom to top), while allowing for some overlap/blurry borders in order to show that they are not entirely separate and sharply distinguishable from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: What I find most inaccurate about the illustration is that semantics is depicted as the thing that comes after syntax, which is inaccurate in that 1) the study of form and the study of meaning are fields that exist next to each other rather than on top of each other, 2) semantics starts at the level of words already, not after sentences. The placement of phonetics is difficult; labels can in some respects be argued about, but for a three-word description, I think they are good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T04:41:55.383" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T04:41:55.383" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2017-10-26T15:08:15.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA transcriptions transcribe sounds or phonemes. Even when in a broad transcription a symbol represents a phoneme, it is in some sense referring to a group of possible sounds, which can contrast with another group of possible sounds to differentiate meaning. IPA transcriptions make no allowances for the orthography or written conventions of language apart from in three specific ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most transcription systems allow for white space between words. This is just to make the transcription easier to read. It is not for any kind of punctuation reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When a group of scholars decide upon a convention for representing the phonemes of a particular language in language-specific, phonemic transcriptions, they  may sometimes choose one symbol over another because it more closely resembles the orthography. So, whereas Southern Standard British English /e/ is  in between [e] and [ɛ], most authorities use /e/ as opposed to /ɛ/ to represent the phoneme because this is how the phoneme is most often 'represented' in the orthography. This it is felt, will make life easier for learners of English, who will have to use these transcriptions in dictionaries and language learning materials.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When used in written essays about phonetics or phonology, lists of phones or phonemes are often separated within their brackets by commas. The comma does not feature as an IPA diacritic and so serves to show that we are talking about a list of discrete phones or phonemes and not a string of sound or a string of phonemes. So people tend to write [p, t, k] or /p, t, k/, for example, as opposed to /p/, /t/, /k/ and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, is as far as it goes. We do not allow for punctuation marks or capitalisation and so forth in phonemic or phonetic transcriptions. Phones and phonemes do not have capital or small case realisations! Several other problems would arise if we did. First of all many symbols used in punctuation have a distinct specific meaning when used in IPA transcription. To illustrate, the exclamation mark, &amp;lt; ! &gt;, represents an alveolar click; an apostrophe &amp;lt; ’ &gt;  after a consonant makes it ejective. Most importantly here, the IPA system  actually uses small caps capitals to represent specific types of phone. So [ʙ,ɢ, ʜ, ɪ, ʟ, ɴ]  and [ʀ] are completely different and distinct sounds from [b, g, h, i, l, n] and [r]. If you use a &amp;lt; B &gt; to represent a [b], you will actually be indicating a voiced bilabial trill&amp;mdash;in other words a bilabial raspberry&amp;mdash;instead of a plosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA transcriptions match sounds not their written counterparts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T19:30:17.880" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T19:30:17.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26231" CreationDate="2017-10-26T15:54:42.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Final obstruent devoicing&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;where a lenis consonant is systematically and cumpulsorily replaced by its fortis counterpart word finally and before fortis consonants&amp;mdash;is a feature of many languages, for example Catalan, German or Turkish. This is a case of one phoneme being replaced by another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this is a phonological rule and is very different from the phonetic devoicing undergone by lenis consonants, in English for example, when they occur next to unvoiced sounds or next to silence. These consonants remain lenis, even when devoiced and the devoicing can in no way be thought of as being 'compulsory'. When said in isolation the [d] in &lt;em&gt;bed&lt;/em&gt; is likely to be devoiced, but will nonetheless remain a [d].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T08:06:30.103" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T08:06:30.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26239" CreationDate="2017-10-26T16:55:50.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It represents something similar to “made up of”, though more accurately, it means “logically depends on, when analyzing”. It is the logical onion of classical taxonomic analysis – you would be analyzing a particular utterance – and the procedural requirement was that you had to first capture the utterance in terms of “phones”, then group phones together into “phonemes” based on distribution, then organize sequences of phonemes into morphemes, which create words whose distribution is covered by syntax. The taxonomic (behaviorist) approach had nothing to say about semantics, probably because they could not see any operational means of analyzing meaning. We’ve gotten over that limitation. Pragmatics didn’t exist in linguistics until the late 60’s (and was subsumed under semantics for a long time), so of course the taxonomists had nothing to say about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diagram is basically a way of controlling the flow of information in analysis: you have to start with a narrow phonetic transcription, free of preconceptions about communicative function, word order, morphophonemic and phonemic analysis. Then looking just at the product of phonetic analysis (a transcription), you can discover the phonemic analysis – this is done without referring to a morphological analysis or an analysis in terms of quantifier scope, at each stage defining elements of level N in terms of things of level N-1. And so on, until you get to the outermost shell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as this onion has no current practical application, especially at the introductory / internet level, it is pretty useless, except as a stimulus for asking &quot;what the heck does that (even) mean?&quot;. It does not represent any basic claim of a surviving linguistic theory (the implied modules, though, are widely accepted, to some extent if not totally). I would not ever use such such a dominance diagram. It does not represent actual contemporary analytic practice (i.e. that is not how a field worker operates in studying a language), and from what I can tell it only represented a theoretical ideal even in the remote past, and does not represent actual rigorous practice. We study pragmatic function early in the game, in order to discover what the difference is between some two verb tenses, which are realized in part by a change in tone. I don’t deny, though, that most phonological field-workers schedule their pragmatic investigates for a few years after their transcription-and-paradigm work, and field-pragmatists leave for future investigation what the exact vowels or morphemes in the language are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not at all strange for “literal meaning” to be an object of study itself. You literally &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; “distinguish between ‘literal meaning’”, because “distinguishing” requires two things, not just one. You certainly &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; distinguish between “literal meaning” and “meaning in context”. Linguists (use of bare plurals is at your own risk: “Linguists” means, literally, “more than one linguist”) do believe in literal meaning, and they do &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt; believe in literal meaning. In social context, the question “do linguists even believe in literal meaning” asserts that the belief is not even a little bit credible, and this is a way of insulting the belief (which gave rise to the generalized insult “can’t even” without a following VP). That isn’t what the even-construction &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for developing tests for literal vs. implied meaning, I like the Chierchia &amp;amp; McConnell-Ginet textbook. I would say that a grasp of the difference between linguistic entailment and social-contextual inference is the core of the study of language and law, and is the area where theoretical linguists can in principle make substantive applied contributions (if that is an area of interest). I do accept that the term “literal” is used arcanely, in a way that doesn't capture the lexicality of poly-morphemic constructions with non-compositional meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T16:55:50.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2017-10-26T17:29:57.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, IPA is used to describe only how words are pronounced, which is independent of how the words would be written in any specific writing system. Capitalization doesn't have any meaning in spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15205" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T17:29:57.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26239" CreationDate="2017-10-27T02:48:04.523" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;phrases are made up of words&quot; ??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is commonly said, but I wonder whether it really should be words in the plural.  What are some phrases that have more than one word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prepositional phrase? The preposition is ordinarily a word, but the other part of a PP is not a word -- it's a noun phrase (though a NP containing a single word is possible, of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence?  Neither a noun phrase nor a verb phrase is a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun phrase?  Well, a NP might have an article and a noun, but sometimes article is made part of a determiner phrase, and the noun part of an N-bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T02:48:04.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28347" CreationDate="2017-10-27T22:11:46.683" Score="5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there 2 letter ISO codes for the pinyin or hepburn transliterations? If not, are there non-ISO abbreviations in common use? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20318" LastEditorUserId="20318" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T16:20:08.220" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:44:55.323" Title="Abbreviations for pinyin and hepburn transliterations?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-27T22:59:48.997" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;a href=&quot;https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/speech/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft speech recognition API&lt;/a&gt; compare with &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/speech/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Cloud Speech API&lt;/a&gt; in terms of speech recognition accuracy (e.g., in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_error_rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word error rate&lt;/a&gt;, character error rate (CER), or sentence error rate (SER))?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in other online speech recognition APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have crossposted the question at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://qr.ae/TbceCR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://qr.ae/TbceCR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/796pxp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://redd.it/796pxp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T22:59:48.997" Title="How does Microsoft speech recognition API compare with Google Cloud Speech API in terms of speech recognition accuracy?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-28T02:15:02.787" Score="-1" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello at first I thought that it is only to count each syllable of a word very slowly but I think I am wrong, but I can not understand the explanation of Luca Lampariello is because I am a native speaker of Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05ropOnt3s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05ropOnt3s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these arrows ↗ ↘ apply in all languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself as a beginner can I place those arrows ↗ ↘ or is it recommended that a native speaker do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15153" LastEditorUserId="15153" LastEditDate="2017-10-28T02:26:27.730" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T21:38:12.637" Title="How to know where to put those arrows ↗ ↘ to represent the intonation?" Tags="&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-11-10T14:21:41.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26257" CreationDate="2017-10-28T21:38:12.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of those IPA letters is pretty open-ended: they stand for &quot;global rise&quot; and &quot;global fall&quot;. If the overall intonation goes up, you pick one symbol, and if it goes down, you pick the other. You can't be more specific than that without specifying a particular language and tradition of analysis. There are many traditions for transcribing intonation in English, and few for Bambara (probably only one). Only some traditions use those arrows: ToBI and ToDI use tone letters with modifier diacritics. There is a version of ToBI for Spanish (where you would not use the arrows), and an older classical study by Bowen which uses numbers of up/down arrows (upstep and downstep in current IPA). So you would have to investigate the details of the theory that you're working in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T21:38:12.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T01:28:36.057" Score="6" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question would be better on &lt;a href=&quot;https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/105196/dutch-languages&quot;&gt;Dutch Languages SE, but that site is still in Area 51&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was discussing Dutch grammar with a Dutch native and how I'd just learnt that Dutch is a V2 language (as are most Germanic languages). She gave me the following sentence as a counterexample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Waarschijnlijk deze zomer &lt;strong&gt;ga&lt;/strong&gt; ik naar Spanje.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Probably this summer &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; I to Spain.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can be rearranged to form the definitely V2 sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ik &lt;strong&gt;ga&lt;/strong&gt; deze zomer waarschijnlijk naar Spanje.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt; this summer probably to Spain.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her reasoning is that &lt;em&gt;waarschijnlijk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;deze zomer&lt;/em&gt; can be separated. However, I feel that combined they form the first position as they are both modifying the basic sentence &lt;em&gt;Ik &lt;strong&gt;ga&lt;/strong&gt; naar Spanje&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waarschijnlijk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deze zomer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ga&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ik&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;naar Spanje.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; is in the third position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waarschijnlijk deze zomer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ga&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ik&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;naar Spanje.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; is in the second position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can multiple, separable bits together occupy the first position in the V2 structure or do they occupy one position each? Particularly in Dutch, but also in any V2 language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:07:27.657" Title="Does the Dutch sentence &quot;Waarschijnlijk deze zomer ga ik naar Spanje&quot; follow the V2 structure?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-29T07:50:27.363" Score="6" ViewCount="2631" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian possessive adjectives are preceded by a definite article: “&lt;em&gt;il mio amico&lt;/em&gt;” (the my friend), “&lt;em&gt;la nostra casa&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;i tuoi libri&lt;/em&gt;”. The article however is always dropped with singular nouns indicating family relationship: “&lt;em&gt;mio padre&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;mia sorella&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;mio cugino&lt;/em&gt;”, and it comes back in the case of plurals: “&lt;em&gt;i miei fratelli&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;i miei cugini&lt;/em&gt;”. So we have the case where for “my husband” we can either use “&lt;em&gt;mio marito&lt;/em&gt;” without article, and also “&lt;em&gt;il mio uomo&lt;/em&gt;” (my man) with the article, both meaning the same thing - the latter being less common but perfectly acceptable, as we find in Spanish too. In the plural case, it’s again “&lt;em&gt;i miei mariti&lt;/em&gt;” and “&lt;em&gt;i miei uomini&lt;/em&gt;”. The same goes for “my wife/wives”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK this exception is peculiar to Italian. In at least three other Romance languages the article is added to the possessive adjective, but in all cases this includes singular family nouns too. I.e. in Portuguese (but not in Brazil) and Catalan it’s “&lt;em&gt;o meu pai&lt;/em&gt;” and “&lt;em&gt;el meu pare&lt;/em&gt;” for “my father” , and in Romanian “&lt;em&gt;frate-le meu&lt;/em&gt;” for “my brother”, all cases retaining the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Italian language is well known for using definite articles quite liberally, before dates, weekdays, numbers, in some cases even in front of personal names as it is the case of the Milanese dialect: “&lt;em&gt;il Giorgio&lt;/em&gt;”, “&lt;em&gt;la Maria&lt;/em&gt;”. So I wonder what’s the origin of this “economy of expression” reserved to a family member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T23:25:53.640" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T11:44:29.190" Title="Why does Italian use definite articles before possessive adjectives, except when these are followed by a singular family noun?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-30T11:02:31.777" Score="0" ViewCount="1219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to understand the East Anglian accents better (Norfolk, Suffolk etc) but can't seem to differentiate it from a West country accent (Devon Somerset, Cornwall) properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What linguistics mechanisms are found in the East Anglian accent so that I can properly differentiate them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19978" LastEditorUserId="19978" LastEditDate="2017-10-30T14:21:32.877" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T14:21:32.877" Title="How to differentiate an East Anglian accent from a West Country accent?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-30T16:26:28.137" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a database or tool that can be used to produce or find images that help describe or reinforce the meaning of a given sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The car was going very fast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePPvF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePPvF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The car was going too fast&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am producing exercises for my language students and I would like to complement the sentences involved with visual cues. Google Images is useful but I'm interested in exploring alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1835" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T13:10:31.217" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T13:10:31.217" Title="Sentence to Image" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-14T14:20:02.523" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26219" CreationDate="2017-10-30T23:12:22.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about English, but in Latin the phenomenon might be part of a much wider set of grammatical changes. Latin had three genders, but Romance languages typically have only two. What happened is that the Latin masculine and neutral genders collapsed into a single gender, which is called &quot;masculine&quot; in Romance languages. This collapse is related to similarities between masculine and neutral words, which were intensified by the drop of final consonants in the evolution of Classical Latin into Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case it was quite probably more of an issue of phonology and its impacts on the grammatical structure of the language than an ideological one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T23:12:22.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26216" CreationDate="2017-10-31T22:07:08.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the previous answers missed the point by focusing on animals, which have a biological gender (apart from the gender assigned to the noun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Spanish, if I wanted to address, say, a fork, my first instinct would definitely be to say Señor Tenedor as opposed to Señora Tenedor. But if I wanted to get the attention of, say, a napkin, I would say Señora Servilleta and not Señor Servilleta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T22:07:08.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T07:20:26.060" Score="0" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that a punctuation of dialogues in literary texts in Russian and French may use dashes:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;— Hé, arrête avec ça, dit-il. &lt;em&gt;(In French)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;— Эй, прекрати, — сказал он. &lt;em&gt;(In Russian)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in English the dialogues are different:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Hey, cut that out,&quot; he said. &lt;em&gt;(In English)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a form of direct speech in Russian, for example, most often means the &quot;inner voice&quot; of the character, i.e. his thoughts. Due to this, it is easy to distinguish what the character says out loud, and what only he thinks inside his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder, when such &quot;dash dialogues&quot; phenomenon arised historically and what languages use it? What they have in common?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And why Russian and French use dashes, while English do not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;(in my subjective opinion, punctuation of dialogs with dashes is much easier to understand and visually distinguish from the author's speech).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20337" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T14:13:59.083" Title="&quot;Dash&quot; dialog punctuation in different languages" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T11:20:56.700" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I read through my generative-oriented textbooks I see scant reference to Amerindian languages. Sure, there is some reference to African and Asian languages (especially with tonal stuff), but very little attention is given to indigenous American languages. Naively, it makes me wonder if generative theory is adequate to account for phenomena in such languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose this is for historical reasons, but then again if you search in Google scholar, there is almost nothing done with even the major indigenous languages of the Americas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: Maya, Aztec, Quechua, Tupi (to name a few that come to mind) don't appear in Kenstowicz’ Phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T05:59:18.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T05:59:18.587" Title="Why didn’t generative grammarians value linguistic data from native languages?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;pedagogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26272" CreationDate="2017-11-01T13:31:23.113" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are languages which put a prefix or a clitic before a noun to mark definiteness or case.  How different languages using Latin alphabet which have this declension or marking deals with capitalization of proper names in those environments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any, but in a hypothetical English-based language whose accusative names are inflected putting a &quot;mu-&quot; before them; what are the options to capitalize the name &quot;Peter&quot; in a sentence saying that Arthur saved him, based on how actual languages in which this occurs do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arthur &lt;strong&gt;muPeter&lt;/strong&gt; saved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arthur &lt;strong&gt;Mupeter&lt;/strong&gt; saved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arthur &lt;strong&gt;mu-Peter&lt;/strong&gt; saved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T16:43:52.540" Title="How do languages which prefix proper nouns (by case marking, clitic article, etc) do capitalization in Latin Alphabet?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26270" CreationDate="2017-11-01T16:43:52.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoiseach&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish&lt;/a&gt; is an example of your first option: the original initial is left capitalised, with prefixed letters lower-case. (It happens that in Irish orthography both the original and the eclipsed consonant are written. In Welsh, on the other hand, when an initial consonant is altered, only the altered one is written, so your question doesn't really arise). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingwa_Maltija&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maltese&lt;/a&gt; follows your third option, using a hyphen and then capitalising the original first letter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buganda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swahili&lt;/a&gt; is possibly an example of your second, as the prefix is treated as part of the word, and its initial is capitalised if required; but in general, a form without any prefix does not exist as a word, so perhaps this is a different case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T16:43:52.540" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26269" CreationDate="2017-11-01T16:56:39.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The real question that should be asked is, why would anyone write a textbook in the first place? I will only address the question as it applies to phonology, but similar answers can be given for all domains of linguistics. First, there is a difference between &quot;making reference to&quot; and &quot;making extensive use of&quot;. I could mention that Lushootseed has only 1 or two words with nasal consonants, but I can't make extensive use of Lushootseed in illustrating some important point about phonology, nor can I do that with Makah or Kutenai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every textbook author has to make a decision as to what &quot;the point&quot; is. Some authors favor unloading all information they can find in a domain. One (generative-oriented) perspective on phonology is that phonology is about computing changes from underlying to surface form. Not all languages have interesting changes from underlying to surface form, so Lushootseed for the most part simply assembles morphemes and pronounces the result. One phonological change is the change /txʷ,dxʷ/ → [tu,du] in some context (involving verbs – as an exercise, look at the available materials to figure out where this happens), but that is a morpheme-specific alternation, so not necessarily of any use in a textbook (depending on the degree of generality that, as an author, you demand of your processes). Unless the point is to exemplify &quot;consonants becoming vowels&quot;, this fact doesn't exemplify anything. Then finally, there is the problem of actually showing in a textbook-suitable fashion that this even happens.  Paradigms are really important for some perspectives (esp. as exemplified in Kenstowicz's book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as an author, you have to have a clear understanding of the standards you want to convey. Some authors are willing to pick up a word or two from a source and simply assert &quot;/kʷaxʷadxʷ-bš/ → [kʷaxʷadubš]&quot;, but other require more data and more convincing. This brings us to the problem of descriptive grammars. There is lamentably little by way of grammatical description of Lushootseed: a couple of dissertations, a textbook (possibly out of print), a collection of data hosted by John Lawler, a few journal articles, and a few people who worked with the last fluent speakers (and whatever unpublished notes they have). Kenstowicz does not know Lushootseed at all, so it would be ridiculous to expect him to know of this process and be able to work it into a textbook. I know a bit of Lushootseed, and know that my hard-core data on this process is limited; and I also know that the process doesn't illustrate something important that needs to go in a textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to Makah, I know virtually nothing about the language, though I think there could be some interesting phonological alternations (figuring that Makah is similar to Nootka) – but I don't know of a Makah grammar that I could peruse to pull out paradigmatic examples. As for Kutenai, I know nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are similar cogent reasons for the lacunae that you call out in Kenstowicz's textbook. You might want to engage in a larger-scale comparison of textbooks, at a minimum comparing K's textbook with earlier Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, to see what languages are employed, for what purpose. Tupi, being an extinct language with inadequate synchronic description, is not going to figure in phonology textbooks that have high demands of paradigmicity (where the facts demonstrate what the underlying forms must be, and URs aren't just handed down from on high). There is limited potential with related Guarani, where there probably is something about nasal spread that is interesting: but the data simply have not been there for the average work-a-day phonologist. The one thing that might be of some interest is the question of whether there actually is a phonological rule of nasal spreading. There is reasonable evidence that the claimed nasal spread is low-level phonetic coarticulation, which is a question that has to be addressed experimentally with a large supply of speakers, not written-language assertions. Similar issues thwart attempts to incorporate Aztec (Nahuatl), Quechua (a language family) and Maya (a language family) into a Kenstowicz-like textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suggest paying more attention to authors' data sources. Kenstowicz has worked on a number of Asian and African languages, and has had students who did so, therefore those languages figure prominently in his textbook. If he had worked extensively on Lakota or Ojibwa, he might have included paradigms from those languages. It turns out that the phonologists who &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; worked on those languages mostly haven't written textbooks, or have written textbooks of a completely different nature. The fascinating phonology of many Athabascan languages is simply too complex to be of use in a textbook, unless the book intends to use Navaho or Slave as the main language to exemplify all phonological concepts (any takers? E.g., convert Rice's Grammar of Slave into an introductory phonology textbook).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if an author has no personal knowledge of a language, little reasonable chance of gaining adequate knowledge, and no concrete reason to believe that there is a pedagogical payoff in the language, that language is unlikely to figure in a textbook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you move past textbooks and look at phonology at large, your claim is simply wrong. Native American languages have figured prominently in theoretical phonology – see Ojibwa, Menominee, Lakota, Sarcee, Navaho, Klamath (the mother-lode language), Karok, Tunica, Choctaw, Paiute, Mohawk. Salishan languages mostly don't figure in discussions of phonology, except for reduplication studies, but they do figure prominently in morphosyntax and semantics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T16:56:39.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T19:18:00.993" Score="2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I was wondering about the similarity of &lt;em&gt;domain&lt;/em&gt; (eng), &lt;em&gt;domaine&lt;/em&gt; (fr) and the words for home or house &lt;em&gt;dom&lt;/em&gt; (rus), &lt;em&gt;dům&lt;/em&gt; (cz) makes me think they have some common root, is that true? If so, what is that root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that at least Latin back in the days of the Roman empire had the word &lt;em&gt;&quot;domus&quot;&lt;/em&gt; or does it go even further back to older languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am new to the site so please feel free to edit tags or other things if they are not suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19941" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T19:58:39.100" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:53:36.673" Title="Common language root for dom, domain" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26274" CreationDate="2017-11-01T20:01:13.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those words are really etymological cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English &lt;em&gt;domain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is from Middle French &lt;em&gt;domaine&lt;/em&gt; &quot;domain, estate,&quot; from Old French &lt;em&gt;demaine&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lord's estate,&quot; from Latin &lt;em&gt;dominium&lt;/em&gt; &quot;property, dominion,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;dominus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lord, master, owner,&quot; from &lt;em&gt;domus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;house&quot; (from PIE root &lt;em&gt;*dem-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;house, household&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC#Etymology_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian &lt;em&gt;дом&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;dom&lt;/em&gt;) is Proto-Slavic &lt;em&gt;*domъ&lt;/em&gt;, from from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*dṓm&lt;/em&gt; (“house, home”), from root &lt;em&gt;*dem-&lt;/em&gt; (“to build”). Cognates include Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;δόμος&lt;/em&gt; (dómos), Albanian &lt;em&gt;dhomë&lt;/em&gt; (“a chamber, a room”), Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;दम&lt;/em&gt; (dáma).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T20:01:13.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26274" CreationDate="2017-11-01T20:04:26.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true. These languages are all historically related, being part of a language family known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;, and those words are representatives of the root reconstructed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*dem-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*&lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, meaning 'house, household'. Briefly, most languages of Europe (excluding Basque, Uralic languages, Turkish), as well as those of Iran to India (and neighboring areas), are members of this language family. German, Norwegian, English, Icelandic etc. for one branch (Germanic); Hindi, Panjabi and so on descended from Sanskrit are another branch (Indic). &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This web page&lt;/a&gt; at Texas provides a wealth of information on lexicon for further study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Domus&quot; and &quot;domain&quot; are via Latin – English borrowed lots of words. The Slavic words, on the other hand, are indigenous Slavic inheritances. A similar common word is the root for father, *pəter. The correspondence English &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;: Latin &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; reflects a sound change (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grimm's Law&lt;/a&gt;) in the history of Germanic, and that (among other things) is how we know that English &lt;em&gt;domain&lt;/em&gt; comes via Romance and Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T20:04:26.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-02T04:37:13.823" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a sentence as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patient Trigger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gipalit nako ang mangga.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agent Trigger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nipalit ko ug mangga.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO Patient trigger is default and is used for talking about an actual event than agent trigger which talks about as if it is narrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now why does they tell these languages uses passive voice as the main voice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20347" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T04:37:13.823" Title="Passive voice that is not the main voice in a language" Tags="&lt;passive&gt;&lt;austronesian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26259" CreationDate="2017-11-02T18:10:49.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very bad sentence in Dutch :&#xA;&quot;Waarschijnlijk deze zomer ga ik naar Spanje.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The normal word order would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deze zomer ga ik waarschijnlijk naar Spanje.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The referential adverbial in sentence initial position serves to determine the temporal reference of the phrase, the modality 'waarschijnlijk' remains VP internal. I do not know how this bears on the original question posed here, but these are my observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice ter Meulen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T18:10:49.180" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23257" CreationDate="2017-11-03T19:23:37.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;कोप and क्रोध are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; cognates (or more accurate, doublets, since they are in the same language). They have different Sanskrit roots (कुप् and क्रुध्) and no proposed common source in Proto-Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They at least have a large semantic overlap even if they aren't exactly the same. क्रोध is not uncommon in Hindi as a Sanskrit borrowing (Sanskrit is a superstrate of Hindi), while कोप is rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T21:02:50.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T21:02:50.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T03:18:03.483" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can prepositions following a verb not  affect the meaning of Verb Phrases that differ by only a preposition? I.e., what explains the semantic sameness between Verb Phrases that differ by only a preposition, but that both mean the same? I can't divine why, but to me 1 looks wrong and 2 correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Example 1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22agree+a+price%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=8iz9WYLpPMnrmQGcs7GACQ&amp;amp;start=10&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;biw=1408&amp;amp;bih=622&amp;amp;dpr=2.73&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;agree + DO (Direct Object)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22agree+on+a+price%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=eS_9WdH_PIm3mwGe6I6IAw&amp;amp;start=30&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;biw=1408&amp;amp;bih=622&amp;amp;dpr=2.73&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agree on&lt;/a&gt;/with DO&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=cOQmDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT141&amp;amp;dq=%22agree+a+price%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiCqvu49qPXAhXJdSYKHZxZDJAQ6AEIUDAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22agree%20a%20price%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 93 Top.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/textbook-on-contract-law-9780198732808?lang=en&amp;amp;cc=hu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Textbook on Contract Law&lt;/em&gt; (2016 13 ed.)&lt;/a&gt; ] In English law, even where there is only an agreement between the parties to &lt;strong&gt;agree a price&lt;/strong&gt;, it &#xA;  seems that the courts will enforce that agreement if at all possible once performance has begun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=1jooDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA187&amp;amp;dq=%22agree+a+price%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwir8LXH9qPXAhWKSyYKHSGrCs84ChDoAQgnMAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22agree%20a%20price%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 187 Middle.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-practical-approach-to-conveyancing-9780198787563?cc=ca&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Practical Approach to Conveyancing&lt;/em&gt; (2017 19 ed.)&lt;/a&gt; ] If you are fortunate enough to &lt;strong&gt;agree a price reduction&lt;/strong&gt; and you act for both borrower/ &#xA;  buyer and lender then, subject to your duty of confidentiality to your borrower client, &#xA;  you have a duty to inform the lender of the price reduction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1.3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=STMYHOUu5aYC&amp;amp;lpg=PA198&amp;amp;dq=%22agree%20on%20a%20price%22&amp;amp;pg=PA198#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22agree%20on%20a%20price%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 198 Top.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B010WIK3DS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;White-Collar Crime: The Essentials&lt;/em&gt; (2012.)&lt;/a&gt; ] Price fixing offenses occur when competitors &lt;strong&gt;agree on a price&lt;/strong&gt; at which goods or services should be sold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Example 2: allowed + DO vs. allowed to DO&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Schütze. &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/eu-law-9780198714927?cc=ca&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;European Union Law&lt;/em&gt; 2 ed. 2018&lt;/a&gt;. p. 107. All emboldenings are mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From there, the Court reasoned as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Consequently, observance of the general principle of equal treatment, in particular&#xA;    in respect of age, cannot as such be conditional upon the expiry of the period&#xA;    allowed &lt;strong&gt;[TO]&lt;/strong&gt; the Member States for the transposition of a directive intended to lay down&#xA;    a general framework for combating discrimination on the grounds of age …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T00:49:13.167" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T00:49:13.167" Title="What explains the semantic sameness in 'Verb + preposition + Direct Object' and 'Verb + Direct Object'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26301" CreationDate="2017-11-04T08:43:36.490" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;A relatively straightforward research question in the study of dead languages is of the form: &quot;We have root XYZ that means A in context P and B in context Q. How can we generalise A and B to arrive at a general meaning for XYZ?&quot; The question can be approached both from a diachronic perspective (&quot;How did meanings A and B derive from older, more general meaning C?&quot;) and from a synchronic perspective (&quot;What do A and B have in common, and what aspects characterise both?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a diachronic approach would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.co.za/content/otswa/19/1/AJA0000017_40&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gluck (1976). &lt;em&gt;The root lḥm in Hebrew and in the Semitic languages&lt;/em&gt;. OTSWA (19), pp. 41&amp;ndash;43&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;An example of a synchronic approach would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/641346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kotzé (2016). &lt;em&gt;Comments on the Uses and Meanings of אין in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible: Revisiting Vriezen.&lt;/em&gt; Hebrew Studies (57), pp. 17&amp;ndash;38&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I call such a study, particularly one with a synchronic approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T21:18:50.893" Title="What is a study trying to synthesise different meanings of a root (synchronically) called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T11:49:49.153" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it is often cited that dependency grammars are more adequate for free word order languages. How actually, is dependency grammar more descriptive or less limited, than constituency grammar, in describing free word order language texts? can you provide few common cases where constituency grammar would fail to capture the grammar of a sentence in a free word order language?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastEditorUserId="2547" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T19:18:36.637" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T02:56:20.653" Title="In what ways might dependency grammar be a better fit for free word order languages?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T15:44:41.637" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people call implicature as ambiguity and to me it is what words refer to,  I'm confused what implicature actually is and what is relationship between implicatures, entailment and presupposition. Plz.help me with elaborate easy examples I'm student I want to know all of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20349" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T15:44:41.637" Title="Semantics and pragmatics" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-10T14:20:38.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17224" CreationDate="2017-11-04T16:40:15.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetic changes (&quot;sound changes&quot;) are generally arbitrary (or done under the influence of other languages, but we'll just say arbitrary for now, at least on the surface, and definitely for our needs as well) and this is fairly uncontroversial. Phonetic changes are also unavoidable, and are a &lt;em&gt;constant&lt;/em&gt;, rather than an exceptional alteration, and all speaker groups shall see their languages alter phonetically over time. This is also fairly uncontroversial as far as all linguists are concerned. This simply leads into the premise of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, there is no unique 'British' pronunciation, nor is there any one unique 'American' pronunciation. The respective 'standards' (as far as sociolects go) are the &lt;em&gt;Received Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; (RP) and &lt;em&gt;General American&lt;/em&gt; (GA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, sound changes are also a large scale sociolinguistic and geolinguistic phenomenon. When a sound change happens in one speech community or social stratum, it may spread to others, or may be intentionally adopted by other communities (this intentional adoption of a different idiom's phonetics and grammar is pretty much what happens with dialect levelling). Sound changes that happen in some small community may, with time, spread to others, and this is particularly noticeable within England, which has had a massive shift of rhotic accents to a non-rhotic form (coda rhotic dropping) in the last hundred or so years. This (non/rhoticity) is a fairly major phonetic feature, and is very noticeable and well-known even amongst laymen. Curiously (for many people at least; sadly it's lost charm to me), the English 'accents' from which North American English stems were, in phonetics, somewhat closer to their American counterparts than their English ones, especially with regards to rhoticity and diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both consonants and vowels are subject to phonetic change, and may influence one another just as easily as change on their own. The resulting noticeable differences that lead people to delineating and clearly cutting 'accents' apart are just the culmination of many small, individually inconspicuous changes. The source and extent of these changes may be obstructed by many factors as speakers interact with one another and with speakers of other groups, and each 'dialect' is the result of a multitude of interactions and shared changes. The dialects in America just happen to share more of those changes with one another than they do with the dialects of English outside of North America (for understandable, geographic reasons!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T16:40:15.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T16:50:38.767" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;By relationships I mean things like &quot;hypernym&quot;, &quot;hyponym&quot;, &quot;synonym&quot;, &quot;antonym&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what type of tool I'm after; I just want to &quot;easily explore&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered WordNet and the &lt;code&gt;wn&lt;/code&gt; tool in Linux that lets you list such things. A point and click interface would be kind of nice. I don't know if any of the online dictionaries provide this sort of interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16821" LastEditorUserId="16821" LastEditDate="2017-11-04T22:26:35.310" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T22:26:35.310" Title="Programming tools for exploring semantic relationships between words" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26794" CreationDate="2017-10-27T12:12:11.473" Score="5" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a Finnish-speaker learning Danish I have observed certain similarities, at least when compared to English. I am not discussing loan words (some of which exist through Swedish or English) or similarities in rules of grammar. I'd like to know if there exists a term for such similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish has words &quot;leikkiä&quot; and &quot;pelata&quot;, Danish has &quot;lege&quot; and &quot;spille&quot;, while the poor Englishmen play both a serious game and with toys.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In both Finnish and Danish if clock is half three, that means it is half an hour until clock is three (so the time is 2:30 or 14:30). In English, the clock would rather be half past two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Finnish, &quot;asua&quot; ja &quot;elää&quot; are different, as in Danish &quot;bo&quot; og &quot;leve&quot;, while in English these are &quot;live&quot; and &quot;live&quot; (or the not-so-often used &quot;reside&quot; for the first one, I guess, but that is not to my knowledge so often used in speech).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem to be conceptual similarities between two languages, or maybe English is just weird. Is there a term for such similarities between languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20368" OwnerDisplayName="Tommi Brander" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T18:22:13.653" Title="Term for similar structures and phrases in languages" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-05T08:16:20.350" Score="10" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if this seems vague, but this is mainly looking at the Germanic languages. Proto-Germanic probably used an alveolar  of some sort, most likely a trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of Modern Germanic languages, all of the North Germanic languages utilize the /ʀ/ with the exception of Danish which uses a different uvular phoneme I can't quite describe (in large part because I still struggle with its pronunciation,) that I am aware of all. So because I don't know of any North Ger. language I don't know about, I cannot quite say of any that don't use a uvular sound other than Icelandic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the West Germanic langauges, English's &amp;#x3c;r&gt; in some accents remained /r/ but /r̥/ was lost completely and it was also shortened into /ɾ/ in others and the most dramatic change afterwise was the development of /ɹ~ɻ~ɹˤ~ɻˤ/ before the time of Shakespear and massive colonial expansion, which preserved this variation in colonies that would later develop into such countries as America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and from there, many dialects began to use the &amp;#x3c;r&gt; as a length marker on vowels, prefering to drop it, except in initial positions and in consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch and Frisian kept the trilled &amp;#x3c;r&gt; exclusively, unless I am unaware of some obscure accent, and German's split with most of Germany trading to the voiced and unvoiced uvular trills, and some southern and rural parts and other german speaking countries, like Austria, using a mixture of the two either or using solely the alveolar trills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good guess as to why this phenomenon occurred in the Germanic languages all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume that it might could have something to do with the popularity of the French language or possibly some sort of celts that were involved with Germans, but for the rest, I am afraid I can't guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is a bit long and is a brief history on the English &amp;#x3c;r&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-11-05T18:24:40.733" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T02:04:37.993" Title="Why do phonemes such as /r/ and /ɾ/ evolve into uvular sounds like /ʀ/?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26299" CreationDate="2017-11-05T15:33:01.257" Score="0" ViewCount="1462" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Swahili (and hence cognates of other Bantu languages) &lt;em&gt;simba&lt;/em&gt; have any relation to &lt;em&gt;सिंह&lt;/em&gt; (~&lt;em&gt;singh&lt;/em&gt; or ~&lt;em&gt;simha&lt;/em&gt; in Hindi and Sanskrit respectively according to Wiktionary, please correct me if I am wrong), or is it simply a coincidence? After all, they sound very similar and have almost identical meanings. If so, did this borrowing result from contact?&#xA;      Did Bantu and Indic/Indo-European language families have common ancestors? A cursory search on Wikipedia doesn't yield any clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Links:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Bantu/%C7%B9c%C3%ADmb%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Bantu/%C7%B9c%C3%ADmb%C3%A1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simba#Swahili&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simba#Swahili&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/स&lt;/a&gt;िंह)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#Suggested_macrofamilies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#Suggested_macrofamilies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20365" LastEditorUserId="20365" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T07:52:22.297" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T03:25:45.207" Title="Are ~simba (Bantu) and ~simha (Indic) related?" Tags="&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26298" CreationDate="2017-11-05T15:59:55.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a coincidence, the two words are not related, neither are the Indo-European and Bantu languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Swahili &lt;em&gt;simba&lt;/em&gt; 'lion' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Bantu/%C7%B9c%C3%ADmb%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comes&lt;/a&gt; from the Proto-Bantu &lt;em&gt;*ǹcímbá&lt;/em&gt; 'any of various wild felines or similar, including wildcat, lion, leopard, civet, genet'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T15:59:55.127" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26314" CreationDate="2017-11-05T18:58:16.747" Score="-2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there are any good examples of &lt;strong&gt;acronyms&lt;/strong&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;initialisms&lt;/strong&gt; which contain no vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20369" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T22:03:09.667" Title="Ex of Acronym, not Initialism, no vowels in form" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-11-06T22:07:35.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26289" CreationDate="2017-11-05T21:18:50.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Describing the meaning of a word (lemma/root) is what a lexicographer does. So I'd call this a lexicographic study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T21:18:50.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-05T23:21:12.883" Score="19" ViewCount="1466" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I know that the dialects of Vulgar Latin evolved into the Romance languages in the Western Roman Empire, but I've always wondered why they only formed in Europe instead of in North Africa. Does anyone know? What languages were spoken in North Africa between Vulgar Latin and the arrival of Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20316" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T12:16:41.433" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T10:05:02.423" Title="Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26298" CreationDate="2017-11-05T23:25:38.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indic languages are not related to the Bantu languages genetically; however, both Hindi/Urdu and Swahili were influenced by Arabic due to contact between speakers. Neither of these words arose through mutual loans from Arabic, though; 'lion' in Arabic is 'أسد,' or ' 'asada.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20316" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T23:25:38.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26296" CreationDate="2017-11-06T01:29:02.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any answer given here will perforce be speculative, but... There is a well-known speech impediment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotacism_(speech_impediment)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhotacism&lt;/a&gt; (or de-rhotacization), whereby speakers cannot pronounce sounds similar to the alveolar trill and substitute others, often velar or uvular. It's not a stretch to suppose that, when a speech impediment is so common as rhotacism, it shows a tendency of certain sounds to change into other sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that so many dialects and languages alternate between alveolar trills/flaps and uvular trills/approximants/fricatives is another indication that this change has a tendency to occur. (By alternating I mean both that one or the other of a pair of alternative realizations might appear in different dialects, and also that one realization might be favored at a given moment in time and another one a few centuries later.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just among Western European languages, this vacilation happens in several Germanic languages, in French, and in Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the French borrowing hypothesis, see my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21102/does-the-french-r-sound-come-from-germanic-influence/21105#21105&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T01:29:02.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26296" CreationDate="2017-11-06T02:04:37.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard explanation, insofar as it seems mysterious given the different articulators of the sounds, is that uvulars and lingual rhotics have in common a lowering of F3 – they sound similar. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; gives a list of claimed cases of &quot;guttural r&quot; (also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). It is reasonably likely that it arrived by boat in southern Norway and Sweden, and Denmark is the most likely immediate source, but how it got to Denmark is non-obvious. Independent development is not out of the question, especially given a phonetic motivation (acoustic similarity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T02:04:37.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-06T07:12:45.493" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compete&lt;strong&gt;te&lt;/strong&gt; a variant of &lt;em&gt;Compete&lt;/em&gt; used in colloquial speech, but is written with the same spelling as the latter, has come into use (at the least) in Indian English variants if in no other English variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is how could it have been formed? I had a few ideas of my own:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) It is maybe the result of &lt;em&gt;-tion&lt;/em&gt; deletion which generally adds a &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; sound in return, thus adding an extra &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; sound after &lt;em&gt;compete&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) It is maybe the pronunciation /kum-&lt;strong&gt;pe&lt;/strong&gt;-ti-shun/ and not /&lt;strong&gt;kom&lt;/strong&gt;-puh-ti-shun/ which requires the extra &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; sound syllable to maintain the pronunciation stress on &lt;em&gt;pe&lt;/em&gt; - /kum-&lt;strong&gt;pe&lt;/strong&gt;-teet/ and not /&lt;strong&gt;kum&lt;/strong&gt;-peet/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: this is unlike association -&gt; associate and connotation -&gt; connotate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T07:05:14.007" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T07:05:14.007" Title="What is the linguistic cause of the formation of &quot;competete&quot; a wrong variant of &quot;compete&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26302" CreationDate="2017-11-06T08:32:17.213" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What languages were spoken in North Africa between Vulgar Latin and the arrival of Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Romance and Arabic failed to totally supplant the &lt;strong&gt;Berber languages&lt;/strong&gt; as they supplanted other languages in many other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Latin and then Arabic came Mediterranean &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sabir&lt;/a&gt; a.k.a. lingua franca, another Romance language, but not until the 11th century or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other Romance languages spoken in North Africa would be French, Spanish and Ladino, which all arrived more recently, after Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at least on Wikipedia there is apparently &lt;strong&gt;no consensus on when and how &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Romance#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;African Romance&lt;/a&gt; disappeared&lt;/strong&gt;, and if it was still spoken when Sabir arrived:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happened to African Romance following the Arab conquest in 696 is difficult to trace, though it was soon replaced by Arabic as the primary administrative language. At the time of the conquest a Romance language was probably spoken in the cities and Berber languages were also spoken in the region.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%AC%D9%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; Loanwords from North African Romance to Berber are attested and are usually in the accusative form: examples include atmun (&quot;plough-beam&quot;) from temonem.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%AC%D9%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; It is unclear for how long Romance continued to be spoken, but its influence on North African Arabic (particularly in the language of northwestern Morocco) indicates it must have had a significant presence in the early years after the Arab conquest.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%AC%D9%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether Mozarabic, the group of Romance dialects spoken in medieval Moorish Spain that developed separately from Spanish, shared features with African Latin is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Normans, when they were acquiring their African kingdom in the 12th century, received help from the remaining Christian populations of Tunisia, and some historians such as Vermondo Brugnatelli argue that those Christians still spoke a Romance language. The language may have existed until the arrival of the Banu Hilal Arabs and probably until the beginning of the fourteenth century, according to scholar Andrew H. Merrills and others.[2]Furthermore, the 12th-century Maghrebi geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, describing Gafsa in southern Tunisia, noted that &quot;its inhabitants are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue (al-lisān al-laṭīnī al-ifrīqī).&quot;[3] According to one author,[2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Christian communities, generally labelled Afariqa or Ajam in the Arab sources and speaking a latin dialect (&quot;al-li-san al-latini al-Afariq&quot; as is termed by al-Idrisi) are known to have survived until the fourteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;— Alan Rushworth, Vandals, Romans and Berbers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;em&gt;Afariqa&lt;/em&gt; means African, and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%AC%D9%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ajam&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; means non-Arab, foreigner, in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-12-11T18:37:27.527" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T18:37:27.527" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26306" CreationDate="2017-11-06T11:24:57.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called analogy, and besides &lt;em&gt;competition&lt;/em&gt; there is also &lt;em&gt;competitor&lt;/em&gt; (already with two t's) suggesting the form &lt;em&gt;to competete&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the Latin original forms (competere, competo, competivi, competitum) the creation of the form &lt;em&gt;to compete&lt;/em&gt; looks irregular, it should be something like &lt;em&gt;to competite&lt;/em&gt; using the most prevalent borrowing pattern of modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T11:24:57.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26309" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:39:31.713" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T15:39:31.713" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T15:39:31.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26310" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-06T15:39:31.713" Score="0" Body="This is a special tag that is designed to be used only by the system for questions that have had all of their other tags removed. Do not add this tag to existing questions, it is reserved for use by the system to identify posts with no valid tags." OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T10:41:17.220" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T10:41:17.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-06T19:36:35.670" Score="22" ViewCount="3577" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computer science, programming languages can be described in terms of &quot;Turing completeness&quot;, basically, whether a programming language is capable of expressing any* algorithm. A non-Turing-complete programming language has notable limitations in terms of what ideas it can express.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does such an idea also exist for spoken languages, as some measure of empirically describing the limitations of the ideas a language can be used to express?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first thought as to a way of answering this question was to try to think of an idea that couldn't be expressed in a given language, quite the feat given the thinking itself happens largely within the confines of that language. I stumbled on ideas related to alternative versions of reality, for example, &lt;em&gt;Had he not gone back in time to change the past, he wouldn't have eventually had to avoid his younger self in the future.&lt;/em&gt; English seems to have the tenses to cover such a situation, but it's not difficult to imagine a language that doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This is an oversimplification of course. More accurately, a Turing-complete language can be used to express a Turing machine, which in itself can solve most any problem, but caveats abound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T11:58:12.407" Title="Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26311" CreationDate="2017-11-06T20:20:14.823" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the realm of natural language, the &quot;ideas a language can be used to express&quot; are basically &quot;any&quot;: all languages are capable of expressing any idea, so there's only one category of expressive type. Languages do differ in the way that they express a given idea. Assume a language Gwambomambo which lacks the word &quot;recursion&quot;. That very word could be introduced into the language, just as &quot;ballet&quot; or &quot;ghee&quot; was introduced into English; or, a word might be invented using traditional roots of the language (e.g. &quot;thing sits on itself&quot;). Some languages have specific tenses for negative propositions and some use words like &quot;not&quot; to convey the idea; some languages have different forms of words to indicate that there is just one, or many, or maybe even just two, of the thing in question – other languages don't do this but do allow you to say &quot;1 child&quot;, &quot;many children&quot;, &quot;more than 1 child&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greatest disparity between languages is lexical differences, that is the fact that we need a long expression to convey the notion &quot;2 year old male reindeer&quot;, whereas languages spoken by reindeer-herding cultures usually have a single word for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T20:20:14.823" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26300" CreationDate="2017-11-06T22:03:09.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of two examples.  One is BP or BPS, which stands for &quot;basis point&quot; or &quot;basis points&quot;, used in reference to rate changes in a financial instrument or the difference between two interest rates.  They are pronounced, respectively, &quot;bip&quot; and &quot;bips&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other example is &quot;Tcl&quot;, for &quot;Tool Command Language&quot;, a scripting language commonly used for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs, and testing.  It is pronounced &quot;tickle&quot; by most users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these examples meet your criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T22:03:09.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26311" CreationDate="2017-11-06T23:55:15.690" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computer science, one essential property of all Turing-complete languages is that they are able to describe, &quot;in their own way&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;how they themselves work&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can use a Turing&amp;nbsp;machine to express how &lt;em&gt;a Turing&amp;nbsp;machine&lt;/em&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you can write, for example, a Prolog program that can &lt;em&gt;interpret&lt;/em&gt; Prolog&amp;nbsp;programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the linguistic realm, it would seem to me that an analogon of &quot;Turing&amp;nbsp;completeness&quot; is a language that can &lt;strong&gt;express concepts of the language itself&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can use English to describe English grammar, English words etc. Similarly, you can use Latin to describe Latin grammar. But you will in all likelihood not be able to use a language consisting of, say, 3 different whistled&amp;nbsp;tones to describe &lt;em&gt;how the tones themselves are constructed and related&lt;/em&gt;. This follows from the simple fact that the vocabulary and grammar are &lt;strong&gt;too&amp;nbsp;restricted&lt;/strong&gt; to talk about anything on the meta-level, or at least under reasonable assumptions (note that you can encode any information even with a single whistled tone, by reasoning about the time intervals between different occurrences of the&amp;nbsp;tone). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In computer science, a Turing machine that describes, in general terms, how &lt;em&gt;a Turing&amp;nbsp;machine&lt;/em&gt; works, is called a &lt;strong&gt;universal Turing&amp;nbsp;machine&lt;/strong&gt;. Characteristically, a universal Turing machine is able to &lt;em&gt;execute its own description&lt;/em&gt;, arbitrarily deeply layered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as a linguistic analogy, a language that can be used to express properties of its own constructs could maybe be called a &lt;em&gt;universal&amp;nbsp;language&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think this &lt;strong&gt;reflective&lt;/strong&gt; ability is a good test to see whether a language, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language, is expressive enough also for other important&amp;nbsp;tasks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="20382" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T00:19:09.990" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T00:19:09.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T02:32:20.650" Score="5" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question contains some speculation that a good answer would confirm or deny:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The North Korean government recently released a statement that referred to Donald Trump, the current US president, as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/world/asia/trump-north-korea-dotard.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;dotard&quot;, meaning a senile old man.&lt;/a&gt;  This is a fairly rare word in the English language, one that human translators would not usually use due to its obscurity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the few places in modern English prose where this word occurs in the book &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt; by J.R.R. Tolkien.  It is used by the wizard Saruman when he is trapped in the tower of Orthanc after the siege of Isengard. The exact quote is: &quot;Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs?&quot;  It's is also used by the steward Dentheor in the Tolkien book &lt;em&gt;Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;My son, your father is old but not yet dotard.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; series has been translated into many languages over the years &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translations_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;including into Korean&lt;/a&gt;.  One of the most commonly used translation softwares at the current time is Google Translate.  It largely uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;statistical machine translation&lt;/a&gt;.  In contrast to other machine translation techniques that try to build a syntax tree, it instead uses bilingual text corpora, in other words, texts that exist in two languages to statistically match up corresponding words and phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this leads me to the following hypothesis that I cannot prove, due to my lack of knowledge of Korean:  that the North Korean government may have fed their statement about Donald Trump through Google Translate or similar statistical translation software, and with suprising accuracy, it translated the Korean word &quot;neukdari&quot; into English &quot;dotard&quot; based on the words being used as equivalents in the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One straightforward way to partially substantiate this hypothesis would be to see what word is used in place of &quot;dotard&quot; in the Korean editions of the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; books.  This is beyond my abilities, but may be practical for someone to do. Another way to see if this works is to try a practical test of Google Translate from Korean.  While we may not be able to see what specific texts Google uses to drive it's software, these could be strong circumstantial evidence that the hypothesis may be true.  There may also be other ways of probing this question that other people may think of.  I would be interested to hear of those and of any evidence that can be brought to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4810" LastEditorUserId="4810" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T09:07:11.773" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T09:07:11.773" Title="Did Google Translate supply North Korea with the word &quot;dotard&quot; because of J.R.R. Tolkien's &quot;Lord of the Rings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26316" CreationDate="2017-11-07T06:15:23.657" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely, since Google translates the Korean original 늙다리(미치광이) (neulgdalimichigwang-i) as &quot;an old man lunatic&quot;, where &quot;늙다리&quot; (neulgdali) conveys &quot;old&quot; and &quot;미치광이&quot; (michigwang-i) conveys &quot;maniac&quot;. Google maintains that &quot;dotard&quot; is &quot;도살장&quot; (dosaijang) which, however, it translates back to English as &quot;slaughterhouse&quot;, so I think Google can be let off the hook here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://apnews.com/c2d919f8a5864d838e638d88ac5e8569/North-Korean-leader-Kim-called-Trump-a-what?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&amp;amp;utm_source=Twitter&amp;amp;utm_medium=AP&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AP suggests&lt;/a&gt; indirectly that this is the result of some popular Korean-English dictionary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T06:15:23.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T06:39:16.007" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most dictionaries and grammars, 'noun phrase' is defined by the function it performs, i.e., a subject, an object or a predicative complement. But this definition is not quite helpful considering this from CGEL*:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to their prototypical function as complements in clause structure, NPs may appear with a number of other functions, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] i I was talking [to &lt;strong&gt;the doctor&lt;/strong&gt;]. [complement in PP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii I like [&lt;strong&gt;Sue’s&lt;/strong&gt; analysis of the passive construction]. [subject-determiner in NP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii Fred arrived &lt;strong&gt;the day before yesterday&lt;/strong&gt;. [adjunct in clause]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iv The nail was [&lt;strong&gt;three inches&lt;/strong&gt; long]. [modifier in AdjP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;v Fred arrived [&lt;strong&gt;a whole day&lt;/strong&gt; late]. [modifier in AdvP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vi The wreck was discovered [&lt;strong&gt;a mile&lt;/strong&gt; under the sea]. [modifier in PP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vii She was writing a treatise on [the opera &lt;strong&gt;‘Carmen’&lt;/strong&gt;]. [modifier in NP]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;viii I finally met his wife, &lt;strong&gt;a distinguished anthropologist&lt;/strong&gt;. [supplement]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ix &lt;strong&gt;Elizabeth&lt;/strong&gt;, your taxi is here. [vocative]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'function' of 'noun phrase' discussed by most dictionaries and grammars is its syntactic function, which, as is shown above, can be quite messy and therefore doesn't really help neatly define 'noun phrase'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, there is another function of 'noun phrase' that is not syntactic. In any given sentence, 'noun phrase' refers to something, be it concrete or abstract or animate or inanimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in [6i] above, &lt;strong&gt;the doctor&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a specific person who was a doctor and was being talked to by me. Similarly, in [6iii], &lt;strong&gt;the day before yesterday&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a specific day when Fred arrived. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, what a noun phrase refers to in a given sentence can be any concrete object(s) or any abstract concept(s) or any animal(s) or any inanimate thing(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you're to use a single term to describe what a noun phrase can refer to in any given sentence, what can it be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that that term should be able to encompass &amp;quot;any concrete object(s) or any abstract concept(s) or any animal(s) or any inanimate thing(s)&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about 'object' and 'thing', but the problem is, 'object' has the nuance of excluding abstract concepts, and 'thing' has the nuance of excluding animate objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Pullum (p 327)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T23:44:52.670" Title="What do you call what a noun phrase refers to?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26318" CreationDate="2017-11-07T08:41:01.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term for what a nominal refers to is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;referent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T08:41:01.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T18:54:24.380" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only imagine this has been asked before, but the closest I found in a search had to do with translation and slang. Sorry if it's been answered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the watering-down of English words, in particular, as I'm not familiar with others. For example, &quot;awesome&quot; coming to mean &quot;pretty cool&quot; instead of &quot;worthy of awe,&quot; and &quot;tribe&quot; coming to mean &quot;a group of people with similar ideas who want to feel connected&quot; instead of &quot;a group of people who share a culture.&quot; I was once told that the term for this was &quot;language meiosis,&quot; but that turns out to be a different thing. &quot;Trivialization&quot; and &quot;diminishment&quot; turn up nothing. Is there a word for this process?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20392" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:33:01.610" Title="Is there a term for the diminishment of intensity of meaning over time?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26322" CreationDate="2017-11-07T19:21:28.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantic Change&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the term you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article has a nice summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article also contains a broad list of sub-types of the Semantic shifts, including Degeneration and Meiosis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T19:21:28.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T23:36:47.987" Score="9" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an adult, I'm working on learning French, coming from a background growing up speaking a few languages natively. According to French friends of mine I practice with, I have a &quot;good&quot; accent, but I've never been a big fan of &quot;good&quot;. So to me this begs a question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a few more years of work, could I as an adult reach the point where as far as, say, 95% of native speakers can tell from my accent, I'm Parisian by birth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T22:21:14.643" Title="Is it possible for an adult to learn a language without carrying a foreign accent?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T11:02:26.897" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, common nouns include all the nouns except for proper nouns. Specifically, common nouns include abstract nouns as well as concrete nouns, which include material nouns and collective nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But concrete nouns also include a large subset of nouns that are neither material nouns nor collective nouns. For example, concrete nouns such as 'car', 'building', 'person', 'country' and 'chair' are neither material nouns nor collective nouns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this subset of concrete nouns are always countable unless they are converted to material nouns in context. Is there a name for this large subset of concrete nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why, but comments suggest 'pronouns' as the answer to my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not interested in pronouns. I'm interested in common, concrete nouns such as 'car', 'building', 'person', 'country' and 'chair'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the term 'common noun' is too board as it also includes abstract nouns, material nouns, and collective nouns. Even the term 'concrete noun' is too board as it also includes material nouns and collective nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T02:04:22.897" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T03:49:22.197" Title="A subset of concrete nouns" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26322" CreationDate="2017-11-08T11:11:17.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the particular direction of semantic shift, I am aware of the term &lt;strong&gt;semantic bleaching&lt;/strong&gt;. Semantic bleaching is part of the process of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T20:33:01.610" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:33:01.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:33:22.777" Score="3" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that often, when speaking in English with native speakers of certain East Asian languages, they tend to skip consonants at the ends of words. I'm wary of providing examples out of a desire to not be interpreted as asking a racially-leading question, but this accent trait seems to be common among native speakers of Vietnamese and some dialects of Chinese, and likely others that I'm less familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would this be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T10:09:58.670" Title="Why do speakers of certain East Asian languages chop off the end of English words?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26328" CreationDate="2017-11-08T21:08:48.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the possible reasons is that in many East and Southeast Asian languages word-final stops are unreleased (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release&lt;/a&gt;). When words of European languages are pronounced in this manner, this may give an impression of a final-consonant omission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T21:08:48.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T23:37:14.420" Score="3" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;The three lexical categories (or parts-of-speech) particles, markers, and adpositions are extremely vague to me. Some grammars call marker what others call particle or adposition. For example, the English &lt;em&gt;marker&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;-'s&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (as in &quot;Mary's book&quot;), the Maori &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;a&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Te pukapuka a Mere&quot;), the Japanese &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;no&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Marī no shoseki&quot;) and the Spanish &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;de&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;El libro de Maria&quot;), all creates a genitive-like phrase, but each belongs to a different category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only patterns I can notice in those terminologies are the following (They are probably wrong):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Particles and markers are generally synonyms. In the English phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mary &lt;strong&gt;'s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the bold word may be either a marker or a particle, depending on the grammar (others may also say it is a possessive/genitive inflection ending).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is clitic or phonetically appended to another word, it is more likely it will not be called adposition. For example, in the Spanish phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;para&lt;/strong&gt; Maria&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;to Mary&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), the bold word is phonetically independent, and it is a preposition; but in the English phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;Maria &lt;strong&gt;'s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the bold word is phonetically dependent on the preceding word, so it is not an adposition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is used to mark predicates, instead of arguments or adjuncts, it is more likely it will not be called adposition either. For example, in the Maori phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;ka&lt;/strong&gt; mahi&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;to work&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), the bold word, which turns something into a predicate instead of an argument or adjunct, is not a preposition; but in &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; mahi&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;work's&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, genitive), the bold word may be called preposition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is used to mark adjuncts, mainly the locative ones (over, under, etc.), it is more likely it will be called adposition. For example, in the Spanish &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;sobre&lt;/strong&gt; la mesa&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;over the table&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is used to mark arguments of a predicate, it is more likely it will not be called adposition. For example, in the Maori phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; mahi&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the bold word, which marks the object (accusative) or source (ablative) argument of a predicate, may not be a preposition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is used to mark grammatical functions in the same way as mainstream grammatical cases do, it is more likely it will not be called adposition. The words which mark a genitive-like or dative-like phrase are exceptions. If the word mark directional sense (as in allative or ablative), the terminology may be ambiguous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the definitions of particle, preposition and marker. What are the differences between them (i.e., the words with belong to a category but not to another) and the intersections between them (i.e., the words with belongs to two or all tree categories)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19623" LastEditorUserId="19623" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T23:56:02.153" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:41:06.757" Title="What's the difference between particle, marker and adposition?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T00:42:32.690" Score="4" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a language has separate phonemes /r/ and /d/, the distinction between which appears to be contextually neutralized after the nasal /n/ on the grounds that the sequence [nr] never occurs in the language and that morphophonemic //un+rak// and //un+dak// will both yield phonetic [undak], is this R-fortition a phonological or a morphophological process? On the one hand, the nonexistence of the sequence [nr] and the fact that [nd] occurs instead where [nr] would be expected suggests to me that it is phonological. On the other hand, the phenomenon of R-fortition can only be observed across a morpheme boundary, suggesting that it is morphophonological. Hence, my question is whether morphophonemic //un+rak// yields phonemic /unrak/ and then phonetic [undak] or if morphophonemic //un+rak// yields phonemic /undak/ and then phonetic [undak], and how can we tell in a situation like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20401" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T08:38:13.260" Title="Distinction between phonology and morphophonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26331" CreationDate="2017-11-09T03:41:26.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is a theory-dependent terminological one. Taxonomic structuralist linguistics distinguishes allophonic vs. neutralizing phonology, and some people distinguish &quot;automatic&quot; phonology (no grammatical or lexical restrictions) from grammatically-restricted phonology. &quot;Morphophonology&quot; can refer to &quot;not allophonic&quot;, or it can refer to &quot;not governed by purely phonetic factors&quot;. Your brackets etc. in the last sentence suggests you're asking about the taxonomic view. That is basically the correct analysis, and you can't &quot;tell&quot; empirically, rather it is a question of whether neutralization is necessarily a morphophonemic process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="19623" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T05:23:05.260" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T05:23:05.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26328" CreationDate="2017-11-09T06:51:25.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is because &lt;strong&gt;the phonetic tools&lt;/strong&gt; (of English and speaker's native language) &lt;strong&gt;are too different&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The secondary reason is that in the languages of Asian region (namely, those belonging to &lt;em&gt;Sino-Tibetan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tai–Kadai&lt;/em&gt;, and, to a certain extent, &lt;em&gt;Austroasiatic&lt;/em&gt; families), &lt;strong&gt;the syllable&lt;/strong&gt; arguably plays a bigger role (than in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without loss of generality, let me focus on &lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt; speakers speaking English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is a broad set of &lt;strong&gt;initial&lt;/strong&gt; consonants in Thai syllable, the &lt;strong&gt;final&lt;/strong&gt; consonants are very limited. Namely, only voiceless plosives &lt;code&gt;[p/t/k]&lt;/code&gt;, nasals &lt;code&gt;[ng/m/n]&lt;/code&gt;, and sonorants &lt;code&gt;[y/w]&lt;/code&gt; are available. The rest of the consonants, when in final position, are mapped to the eight ones above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why you can hear &lt;code&gt;/gon/&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;goal&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (a football term), &lt;code&gt;/dit/&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;this&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;/bit/&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;beach&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English words containing consonant clusters can also be distorted, either by &amp;quot;converting&amp;quot; consonants to syllables or by simply losing them. This is easy to notice when some Thai speakers say &lt;code&gt;-s&lt;/code&gt; suffix denoting the plural number; the very word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;words&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; can be pronounced &lt;code&gt;/wot/&lt;/code&gt;, completely losing the final &lt;code&gt;-s&lt;/code&gt; consonant. Note, no vowel → no syllable → no sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many distortion happens to R-colored vowels: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;there&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; can convert to &lt;code&gt;/de/&lt;/code&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All listed phenomenons can be perceived by English speaker as chopping off the words at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you like to help your friends mastering final consonants, consider the technique &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19424/1009&quot;&gt;I described here&lt;/a&gt;. The trick is very simple: if they can not pronounce e.g. &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt; as a &lt;em&gt;final&lt;/em&gt; consonant, make it &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T10:09:58.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26328" CreationDate="2017-11-09T08:44:26.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human languages prefer an alternation of energetically articulated consonants, using little breath, and vowels, which need less effort expended in the mouth (by tongue, lips, jaw, ...), but use more breath.  Just why this is, I'm not prepared to say, but the tendency toward a preferred consonant + vowel (CV) syllable structure is ubiquitous.  I don't know that it is confined to human language -- perhaps the same thing may be found in birdsong, or other non-human acoustic communication systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, the force to weaken or entirely eliminate consonants or vowels that can't be fit into the CV pattern is amplified for syllables at the ends of words.  I don't understand that, either.  Maybe words were evolved from syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to go to Asian languages to observe this.  Any human language will do.  Why is lip rounding lost in English for r at the ends of words and syllables, and why in some r-less dialects do these r's disappear entirely? Why are obstruent stops strengthened by being aspirated at the beginnings of syllables and words?  Same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginnings of words and syllables starting with vowels are good places to find epenthesis of glides and the ends are good places to find simplification of consonant clusters.  Same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T08:44:26.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26339" CreationDate="2017-11-09T17:13:00.637" Score="1" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask this question, but my parents grew up in Chattaroy Washington, and I'm curious what the word's origins are.  I've done a little searching and I can't even determine what language it has its roots in.  Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20410" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:12:50.190" Title="Etymology of the place name Chattaroy" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26338" CreationDate="2017-11-09T17:33:13.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a word in a Siouan language, though Chattaroy, WA was not founded until the early 1880's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;CHATTAROY.&lt;/strong&gt; The name has been recorded since 1775 (as Tatteroy,&#xA;  Tatterio, Chatterio, Chattarawha etc.) The term referred to the Big&#xA;  Sandy River as well as to the Indian group called the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutelo_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tutelo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, of&#xA;  the Siouan linguistic family....There is also a Chattaroy in Wash. (Spokane Co.), established in the early 1880's.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=5XfxzCm1qa4C&amp;amp;lpg=PA89&amp;amp;ots=ZUcul0mltm&amp;amp;dq=Chattaroy%20etymology&amp;amp;pg=PA89#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Chattaroy%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Native American Placenames of the United States&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T17:45:06.353" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T17:45:06.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26331" CreationDate="2017-11-09T22:03:57.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a fortition; it's an assimilation.  The r becomes a stop after the stop n. Assimilations are lenitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding of the term &quot;morphophonemic&quot;, it refers to a change whose effect is phonemic.  Since /d/ is a phoneme, that makes this change morphophonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably in the SPE version of generative phonology, such an example would be accommodated by making the rule subject to the linking convention of Chapter 9 in SPE (so that once r becomes a stop, it also ceases to be retroflex or liquid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T22:03:57.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T23:57:14.927" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there efforts to formalize and formally represent (e.g. as semantic network, as some kind of logic) of semantic of pragmatic knowledge. It is known, that every speaker/listener has two types of knowledge - linguistic/semantic knowledge (and pragmatic knowledge - sense about context) and everyday knowledge (commonsense knowledge). There are many efforts in computer science to formalize and represent commonsense knowledge. But what about efforts for formalize and represent linguistic/semantic/pragmatic knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are such efforts then combination of linguistic and commonsense knowledge processing can lead to really, really strong natural language processing and generation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of semantic knowledge (I know, that better list can be generated but I am only starting to learn semantics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;knowing that 'A above B' means the same as 'B under A'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;knowing popular metaphors, ability to differentiate between direct and indirect meaning of sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;extraction of propositions from the sentences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google is no help for me, because it return everything that is connected with the Web Semantics and description logics but it is completely unrelated to the semantics of natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computer science has managed to formalized 20 types of emotions and put human personality in 5 dimensional models, there are efforts of consciousness modeling, so - why not to formalize linguistic knowledge and use it for automation of natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware about formal semantics and categorial grammars but they are about technical parsing of the sentences and the knowledge represented by formal semantics of NL/combinatory categorial grammars (CCG) do not come near the completeness of the knowledge that is described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Semantics-Introducing-Linguistics-John-Saeed/dp/1118430166/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Semantics-Introducing-Linguistics-John-Saeed/dp/1118430166/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pragmatics-Oxford-Textbooks-Linguistics-Huang/dp/0199577765&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pragmatics-Oxford-Textbooks-Linguistics-Huang/dp/0199577765&lt;/a&gt; So - my question is - &lt;strong&gt;are there efforts to formalize knowledge included in usual textbooks of NL semantics and pragmatics?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in logical methods of semantics and pragmatics, I have no belief in statistical methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T00:40:14.273" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T09:05:28.683" Title="Formalization and representation of semantic and pragmatic knowledge?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-10T15:55:04.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26341" CreationDate="2017-11-10T02:04:59.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been efforts to formalize pragmatic knowledge for quite some time now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main formalisms I know of that attempt to go beyond the sentence-level are things like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfu.ca/rst/01intro/intro.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RST (rhetorical structure theory)&lt;/a&gt; and its successors/competitors, like SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) (cf Asher &amp;amp; Lascarides, 2007) or D-STAG (Discourse-Synchronous TAG, an attempt to integrate discourse analysis into the TAG syntactic formalism, cf Danlos 2008). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These formalisms are geared toward text coherence, discourse relations and inferred relations within discourse, and as such, they seem to fit especially the third problematic you give as an example. These formalisms are all about how propositions within a text are connected together to form a consistent whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your other two examples, knowing that &quot;A above B&quot; implies &quot;B under A&quot; seems to me to be more of a formal semantics question : are those two propositions strictly equivalent ? They seem to be, and as such they should be represented by the same logic formula. &#xA;I think it's a very straightforward case, much less tricky than say, temporal relations, which require some kind of event based semantics. In this case, any kind of formal syntactico-semantic framework might be used (e.g HPSG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And regarding &quot;popular metaphors&quot;, I think it's pretty likely that if they are popular they are lexicalized to an extent and thus can be integrated seamlessly in syntactic paradigms as fixed expressions . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the bigger challenge is the case of metaphors which are not popular, which are incidental, and there are active efforts on metaphor detection, and efforts to bridge it with formal discourse analysis (for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W15-4650&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T02:04:59.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26341" CreationDate="2017-11-10T07:34:25.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A well known approach in linguistics to formalizing semantics is Montague Semantics, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montague-semantics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford's Plato&lt;/a&gt; and jump to section 3.4 for a very brief summary and some references on pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T07:34:25.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26311" CreationDate="2017-11-10T08:31:39.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had the same thought before and this is what I have found. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main concerns. Semantic completeness and grammatical completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantics: A language needs a minimum set of meanings, but the lack of some random arbitrary noun representing an abstract or concrete thing does not make the language incomplete in terms of thought. If the language lacks such a word, it's likely due to the thing being unknown to the speakers of that language. A noun is interchangeable in the structure of a language so you can simply add a noun for it and voila they can think about it. To have the thought of a cup, you must know of cups, but that is not a limit of your language. We are only concerned with the ability have thoughts, ie. fundamental semantic structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For semantic completeness, I refer to the Semantic Meta Language. There are 62 primes. For instance, the word 'kill' can be defined in these primes as follows.&#xA;An explication is a breakdown of a non-prime concept into prime ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone X killed someone Y:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  someone X did something to someone else Y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  because of this, something happened to Y at the same time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  because of this, something happened to Y's body&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  because of this, after this Y was not living anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think Cognitive Linguistics might have insight here. A language surely must have ways to express all the image schemas, for example as containment &quot;in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar: I do not know yet, but I imagine there is a list somewhere. If it hasn't been constructed, it really ought to be! For instance, a language must have a way to determine which word in a sentence is the subject and which word is the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly there is a minimum set, or else creoles would not differ so much in their sophistication from their parent pidgins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally I want to add that though I mentioned nouns and verbs need not be there for 'thought completeness', perhaps they do for a sort of minimum human completeness. There are certain concepts which are found in all languages because all people deal with them  no matter how different they are. Words for basic things like 'people', 'animal', emotions, basic colours, basic objects and animals 'tree', 'bird', basic verbs like 'run' and 'sleep'. Sky. Ground. For a good example of such words, you can check out the Swadesh list. However, the Swadesh list is not exhaustive, just a selection. A more exhaustive set of such concepts could be constructed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20412" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T10:13:04.770" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T10:13:04.770" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26341" CreationDate="2017-11-10T09:05:28.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that the whole research area of Knowledge Representation, including Description Logics, Modal Logics, Temporal Logics, Fuzzy Logics, aims at formally representing semantics (and sometimes pragmatics) of knowledge that is usually represented in natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However these research areas usually see the representation and reasoning independent from the question how to automatically translate natural language and natural language texts into formal representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also representing knowledge is different from representing the structure of knowledge in text (RST) or the structure of natural language text (Syntax/Grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T09:05:28.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26348" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-10T18:52:59.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T18:52:59.467" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T18:52:59.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26349" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-10T18:52:59.467" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the process, techniques, and methodology of identification of unknown languages. Don't use this tag for questions asking to identify a language or a script based on specific samples or inscriptions as such questions are explicitly defined off-topic." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T02:21:29.583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T02:21:29.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26360" CreationDate="2017-11-10T21:07:11.277" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have encountered, I believe mostly in works from Generativist phonological traditions along the lines of Chomsky and Halle's &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English,&lt;/em&gt; the idea that words like &lt;em&gt;potency, latency, decency, presidency&lt;/em&gt; end at some level of morpho-phonology with the sound /j/ rather than some nuclear vowel sound like /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've realized I don't quite understand the point of this analysis; could anyone explain it to me and tell me if it is still considered to be correct by anyone, or by most people, or by only a few people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Stress &amp;amp; vowel length&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main motivation that I think I understand is stress and vowel length: if we say that &amp;quot;potency&amp;quot; has only two syllables at the level of phonology where stress and vowel length rules are applied, this explains why it doesn't show &amp;quot;trisyllabic laxing&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Luick's law&amp;quot; and has a long rather than a short vowel in the initial syllable. Likewise, the stress of &amp;quot;presidency&amp;quot; can be analyzed as antepenult rather than pre-antepenult. However, this seems kind of a lame motivating factor in itself considering that there are many other extra-metrical suffixes in English that aren't, as far as I know, analyzed as lacking syllabic nuclei, such as &lt;em&gt;-ness, -less.&lt;/em&gt; Also, I know of at least one exception to the apparent extrametricality of &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;-ency/-ancy&lt;/em&gt; nouns: the word &lt;em&gt;discrepancy,&lt;/em&gt; which is typically pronounced with antepenult stress on the &lt;em&gt;e,&lt;/em&gt; which is &amp;quot;short&amp;quot;. It seem to me that it would be bizarre to explain this by saying that &amp;quot;potency&amp;quot; ends in /j/ but &amp;quot;discrepancy&amp;quot; ends in /i/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Apparent consonant changes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose another reason might be the apparent palatalization of /t/ to /s/ in these words (&lt;em&gt;latent &amp;gt; latency&lt;/em&gt;). While palatalization is undoubtedly the diachronic source of /s/ in words ending in &lt;em&gt;-cy,&lt;/em&gt; it is not obvious to me that we can explain the /s/ as the result of a synchronically active process of palatalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Palatalization before written &amp;quot;i&amp;quot;/phonetic /i~j/ in word-medial contexts usually yields /ʃ/, not /s/ (or at least can): consider &lt;em&gt;potential, potentiality.&lt;/em&gt; Unlike these words, &lt;em&gt;potency&lt;/em&gt; cannot be pronounced with /ʃ/. This suggests to me that &amp;quot;potency&amp;quot; has to be analyzed somewhat differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we see /s/ in &lt;em&gt;-ance/-ence&lt;/em&gt; words, where there is no (at least, no overt) following segment corresponding to /j/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also odd formations like &lt;em&gt;normalcy &amp;lt; normal,&lt;/em&gt; where there is no /t/ in the source word; &lt;em&gt;baronetcy,&lt;/em&gt; with /t/ followed by /s/; and, in  spelling if not in pronunciation, also &lt;em&gt;bankruptcy, vicountcy, paramountcy.&lt;/em&gt; These examples suggest that in at least some cases, /si/ is apprehended as a suffix, in which case &amp;quot;ancy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ency&amp;quot;, rather being analyzed as -ant + -y and -ent + -y, can or should be analyzed as -ant + -cy and -ent + -cy, with no need to consider the /s/ as derived synchronically from palatalization of /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T06:06:23.793" Title="What are current perspectives on analyzing word-final /i/ in English words like &quot;potency&quot; as synchronically derived from /j/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-10T21:51:13.710" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In recent years, a massive amount of attention in linguistics has been devoted to the variation within language varieties of grammatical structures caused by semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors, such as DOM and split ergativity. However, it seems that less crosslinguistic work has been done on &lt;em&gt;differential&lt;/em&gt; adjective-noun order. I did some Google Scholaring, but only found a creolistics paper suggesting the historical origins of differential adjective-noun order, but not much else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was pretty surprised when looking at data from my field methods class, because it seemed that the intricacies of adjective-noun order in the language I'm studying (which is Tibeto-Burman) were very similar to French. The words for &lt;em&gt;pretty&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fat&lt;/em&gt; in the language are prenominal while most other adjectives are postnominal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to wonder if I am looking at a coincidence, or if there is a deeper connection going on. Thus I'll be glad if I can be pointed to some relevant literature in the area, whether in the form of a large-scale typological survey or a smaller-scale study that gives possible explanations of crosslinguistic tendencies in differential adjective-noun order. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: To clarify: I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; looking for crosslinguistic studies regarding &lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;unmarked&lt;/em&gt; A-N order and other word-order parameters. I'm looking for crosslinguistic tendencies of factors that explain adjective-noun order variation within languages (for example, is it common for colours to go after and size to go before, in languages with variable A-N order?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T16:07:39.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T16:07:39.493" Title="Has there been cross-linguistic work on differential adjective-noun order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2462" CreationDate="2017-11-11T01:21:07.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am myself a native speaker of Bengali. I also learned English at a very young age. I am really surprised at your comment,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having different vocabularies, the two languages seemed very similar - faithful word-by-word translations could be performed on sentences without need to restructure or heavily rework their fundamentals or word order.. This contrasted later with my frequent frustration at the French and German learnt later at school, here even the concepts behind the language often seemed alien and upside-down.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Bengali and English, share many common roots in their vocabulary, going back to (the reconstructed) proto-Indo-European. This is obvious just from looking at the words for numbers, much more so for the old Sanskrit forms, as also for nose, mouth, hand, foot, etc., taking into account well known sound shifts. This commonality of root vocabulary between Bengali and English is only one example of the more general commonality in this regard between Indic (Indo-Aryan) and (most) European languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when it comes to syntax, including word order, the Indic languages (including Bengali) are very different indeed from the major European languages (of the Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic families, along with Albanian and Greek) including English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this, for example, if you translate the English sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I put the book on the table.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into Bengali:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;(Ami) boi-t'a tebil-er opor-e rakh-l-am.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I have separated out compounds into their parts with a hyphen (-). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to translate the Bengali back into English word for word, it would read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;(I) book-the table's top-at put-did-I.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had instead translated the original sentence word for word into Bengali, it would have read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ami rakh-l-(am) t'a-boi e t'a-tebil.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the general Bengali positional postposition &quot;e&quot; stands for the specific English preposition &quot;on&quot;, and the Bengali definite article suffix &quot;t'a&quot; has been used for the English definite article prefix &quot;the&quot;, with postposition and preposition locations of course interchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20417" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T02:01:37.350" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T02:01:37.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T01:26:53.600" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listening to some example French conversations between an experienced, fluent speaker and an inexperienced learner, I noticed by chance that the experienced speaker differentiates between similar vowel pairs (such as the 'o' and 'e' sounds in 'comprend'), while the learner does not. In working on my own pronunciation, I had not thought of paying attention to differentiating similar vowel sounds rather than merging them as a particularly important feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How significantly does merging similar vowel sounds contribute to perception of fluency (or inexperience) to listeners, most specifically in the French language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T01:26:53.600" Title="How much of a difference does vowel mergers make to perception of fluency?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T08:23:32.643" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using natural language processing/speech recognition techniques so that I can provide better tools to learn English pronounciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While research on relevant topics, I found this fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain phonemes already well-articulated to reflect its pos position. For example, for the case of the suffix &lt;code&gt;-ate&lt;/code&gt;, there's a pattern like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Noun and adjective:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;IPA(key): &lt;code&gt;[...kət]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;intricate, predicate, delicate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Verb:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;IPA(key): &lt;code&gt;[...keɪt]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;complicate, sophisticate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pattern actually makes the computation process a lot faster because of this simple fact. I really glad to know this, and need to know any theoretical/academic names for this phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20418" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T10:56:09.057" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T10:56:09.057" Title="Any name for this proposition? : Sounds reflects P.O.S. of the word" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T14:21:53.740" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European feminine declension looks like the neuter plural. The usual explanation seems to be that feminine evolved out of an earlier inanimate collective but the semantics doesn't seem to be well understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also been told that Semitic languages treat non-human plurals as being grammatically feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these phenomena related? If not, what is the semantic motivation that relates feminine and inanimate plural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T14:21:53.740" Title="Feminine and neuter plural" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26362" CreationDate="2017-11-11T16:27:22.650" Score="0" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me what are the soft consonants in Devanagari?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sanskrit-trikashaivism.com/en/essentials-alphabet-alphabet-english-1/670&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; gives me a list of the devanagari soft consonants. However, is this the complete list? I find in other sources another list. Can someone definitively tell me what are the soft consonants in Devanagari&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20420" LastEditorUserId="20420" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T18:45:14.687" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T01:48:38.097" Title="Soft consonants in Devanagari" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;devanagari&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-24T06:29:17.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26350" CreationDate="2017-11-11T17:54:21.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the most part, phonologists aren’t invested in the analysis of classical SPE issues of English phonology (e.g. the &lt;em&gt;supr&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;me ~ supr&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;macy&lt;/em&gt; relationship, idem &lt;em&gt;professsor ~ professorial&lt;/em&gt;). When these relations are analyzed, this is mostly carried out within Lexical Phonology. The primary reason why these relations are no longer seen as central to the concerns of phonology is that the sound patterns are not clearly part of a system of grammatical rules (which is what most phonologists are interested in) with a reasonable degree of generality. Because there is the viable alternative of simply saying that “supreme” and “supremacy” are separate words, each of which has to be learned (i.e. there is no rule), we can say that [ɪj] and [ɛ] as stem vowels are part of what you learn when you learn the words “supreme” and “supremacy”. Under SPE-era analytic standards, there was a feeling that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; ‘linguistically significant’ generalizations had to be captured in the formal grammar, whereas now there is more tolerance of leaving some generalizations to be captured by linguistic theories outside of grammar (especially by historical linguistics – “because that word comes from Latin, where it was pronounced X” is a possible answer).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the possibility of affixing, the choice of affix, and pronunciation of resulting form is somewhat word-specific, there have to be separate lexical entries for “supreme” and “supremacy”, and we no longer view grammars as data-compression devices (whereby you can only have one root underlying a half-dozen words). In some cases (e.g. &lt;em&gt;un-, pre-, -ing, -s, -er, -ness&lt;/em&gt;… affixation) there is good reason to claim that we are looking at current rule-governed behavior, but that cannot be said about &lt;em&gt;supreme / supremacy&lt;/em&gt; and ilk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't opinion polls taken of the International Phonologists' Society (which does not exist), so it is hard to say how many people do still believe in the program of reducing the size of the lexicon even when relations are not fully predictable. Based on what I know of phonologists' thinking, I believe that most people don't presume that there are such synchronic relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T06:06:23.793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T06:06:23.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26359" CreationDate="2017-11-11T18:42:29.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Soft&quot; is not a meaningful linguistic term, though it may be used for various idiosyncratic purposes in a given language (e.g. in Slavic, soft consonants are palatalized. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/19180/6726&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;. Tamil consonants are classed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hard, soft and medium&lt;/a&gt;. This split is invoked in Monier Wiliams' &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510023542503;view=1up;seq=26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Practical Grammaar&lt;/a&gt; p. 14, and seems to refer to &lt;em&gt;ghoṣavant&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. &quot;voiced&quot; sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T18:42:29.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26359" CreationDate="2017-11-11T22:31:06.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consonants that your link calls &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; are now usually called &quot;voiceless&quot; and &quot;voiced&quot; respectively. This is the standard terminology in modern linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T22:31:06.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26359" CreationDate="2017-11-12T09:36:34.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LmllO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LmllO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Edit Image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;: Added an image...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a Hindi speaker myself (which uses Devanagari alphabet) I can &lt;em&gt;definitively&lt;/em&gt; tell you that the link has all of the &lt;em&gt;soft&lt;/em&gt; consonants. Do tell me if you are confused by any other links and attach the hyperlinks (as you mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T01:48:38.097" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T01:48:38.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27181" CreationDate="2017-11-12T15:19:12.057" Score="2" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having some trouble finding a publication or paper that will define the difference between Speech Act and Dialog Act. The overlap between the used terms in different papers seems to correlate to the same thing in the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight between the distinct differences is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20424" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T07:16:14.880" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T07:16:14.880" Title="What is the difference between Speech Act and Dialog Act?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:38:49.710" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many languages have verbs where you can detach a prefix and put it at the end? That's like the German 'trennbare' Verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in German, for depart/leave ('abfahren') you say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Der Zug is abgefahren.&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;The train has left.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Der Zug fährt um 5 Uhr ab.&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;The train leaves at 5.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20429" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:38:49.710" Title="Cross-linguistic cases of German 'trennbare' Verbs" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T18:21:03.503" Score="1" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you describe the difference in modifications a PP can make to a VP i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I want to visit them][before this time]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I want to [visit them before this time]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand there is very little difference in this context and I'm struggling to see how you would justify placing the PP in one place of a syntax tree versus another&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20431" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:49:47.580" Title="Description of various placements of PPs in a syntax tree" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;verb-phrase&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26385" CreationDate="2017-11-14T00:07:43.057" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natural language quantifiers such as &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; are formalised for compositional semantics as &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt;. Compared to the formalisation of quantifiers such as &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; I do not quite understand why ∧ is used rather than ⇒.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∀x.P(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt; would mean all &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; satisfy &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt;, which is not the correct meaning, but how in the case of &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt; would it make a difference if ∧ was replaced by ⇒, obtaining &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)⇒Q(x)&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one difference I see is that &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)∧Q(x)&lt;/code&gt; actually asserts that at least one &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; exists for which &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt; hold. &lt;code&gt;λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)⇒Q(x)&lt;/code&gt; on the other hand would mean that if there is an &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; for which &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; holds it must also hold for &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt;. It does not assert that there actually is any &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; at all though for which &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; holds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when I compare this to the intuitive meaning of &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; I would say that if &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; asserts the existence of an &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; for which &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt; hold, then surely so does &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question can be split up like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I identified the difference between defining &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; with an implication or defining it with a conjunction correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the reasoning behind defining &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; to NOT assert existence of an &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; to satisfy &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or conversely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the reasoning behind defining &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; to DO assert existence of an &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; to satisfy &lt;code&gt;P&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I did not not identify the difference between defining &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; with an implication or defining it with a conjunction correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the actual difference and what is the reason to use a conjunction rather than an implication?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10543" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T17:14:02.973" Title="Motivation behind the definition for existential quantifiers such as *some* in compositional semantics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-14T05:16:39.907" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/10610/how-to-teach-a-child-a-foreign-language-at-home-when-both-parents-arent-native/10611#10611&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; on the Parenting Stack Exchange describes the possible effect on a child's overall language ability when well-meaning immigrant parents with limited mastery of the local language attempt to raise their children in that language rather than in their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like some references to research on this issue, particularly quantitative measures of the degree of long-term language impairment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is there a threshold level of L2 ability in the parents above which any negative effects are minimal (for instance, if they become undetectable once exposure to the local language begins at school)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20435" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T05:16:39.907" Title="Early language acquisition from non-native input" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26384" CreationDate="2017-11-14T08:03:05.200" Score="-4" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't figure out how to draw the syntax tree diagrams for these sentences. Any help would be great&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who said that John is nice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A teacher in my school said the children disliked him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you want to eat?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20436" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T12:34:42.613" Title="How do I draw these syntax structure trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-11-15T12:57:18.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-14T13:16:20.543" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing research on speech, but I'm not a linguist. Hopefully it won't be a silly question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been reading a little on regional variations of formants, because in my research we use formant space as a measure of psychological distress (as per Scherer, S. et al., 2015. Reduced vowel space is a robust indicator of psychological distress: A cross-corpus analysis. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, pp. 4789–4793.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The research I've read mostly compares American English speakers with a standard formant space, however, we are based in Ireland and have Irish English speakers. I was wondering if the difference in accent can have an influence in the formant space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I understand that it has an influence on the vocal expression of the vowels, and I understand that a regional variation will mean that the same word is pronounced differently, but I think that the formant space itself should not be affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20437" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T15:04:13.773" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T15:04:13.773" Title="Can regional variations of a language cause the formant space to be reduced?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;formants&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26318" CreationDate="2017-11-14T16:07:04.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the idea that we can define nouns or noun phrases through meaning won't stand close scrutiny. Very often a noun phrase will have no referent at all. For example, in the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's strange that she didn't call back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the noun phrase &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is a dummy subject, merely filling that syntactic position that would be occupied in canonical sentence by the clause &lt;em&gt;that she didn't call back&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That she didn't call back is strange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we need to identify a noun phrase is a combination of different bits of syntactic information. Syntactic functions, of course, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be useful. For example, all of the NPs in the &lt;em&gt;CamGEL&lt;/em&gt; excerpt could be used as Subjects, Objects or appended with a genitive clitic and used as Determiners. So that kind of info is helpful for determining the phrasal category of noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, being ultimately headed by a noun is a good indication that a phrase is a noun phrase. But to determine whether something is a noun or not, we again need to use a variety of syntactic information. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/229194/how-can-i-prove-a-word-is-a-noun/229218#229218&quot;&gt;Here's a post on how to determine whether an item is a noun (in English)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T23:44:52.670" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T23:44:52.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26382" CreationDate="2017-11-14T16:33:09.460" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand language tags get validated by IANA registration of being proper standard compliant tags. &#xA;If I have a given tag like &quot;mn-mong&quot; how do I go about looking up the meaning of the tag in the registry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T19:13:33.467" Title="Where can I lookup what language corresponds to a IANA language tag?" Tags="&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-14T17:23:18.357" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pardon the awkward phrasing in the title, but I am essentially wondering about the following scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person, Alice, grows up bilingual, speaking languages A and B. She lives in a country C in which the national language is A, but her social circle is primarily people who grew up in country D whose native language is B. She has no B-accent when speaking language A. Alice then moves to D, and now speaks B almost 100% of the time with other native speakers. A few years later, she appears to have adopted not only a B-accent when speaking A (subtle, but heard by native speakers of A), but also certain broken-A phrases common for people whose first language is B and &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; language is A. That is, she now speaks A as if it is her second language, albeit still fluently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is then: is such a phenomenon well-known? Where can I read more about it, if so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, to what extent does one's environment affect fluency of one's native language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20439" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T17:23:18.357" Title="Is it possible to not only lose/gain an accent, but also lose some fluency in native language?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-11-26T21:06:22.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26380" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26381" CreationDate="2017-11-14T18:53:24.390" Score="1" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not to well versed in all of the inner and outer workings of the international phonetic alphabet, and I was curious if /∅/, not to be confused with /ø/, could always be used for silent characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fine example would be with the word &lt;em&gt;light,&lt;/em&gt; transliterating it as &lt;em&gt;[ˈlaɪ∅t]&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to the usual &lt;em&gt;[ˈlaɪt].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T19:05:19.493" Title="Can /∅/ be used transliterate silent characters? (I.P.A.)" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26380" CreationDate="2017-11-14T18:58:01.987" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is not typically used for transliteration. It is often used for phonemic transcription, and sometimes for phonetic transcription.&#xA;(Phonemic transcriptions are conventionally enclosed with slashes, and phonetic transcriptions are conventionally enclosed with square brackets.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert on the IPA, but based on my experience reading linguistics articles and things like that, I would say that the symbol ∅ shows up mostly in descriptions of rules or sound changes (like &quot;f &gt; ∅ /V_V&quot;). I have never seen it used in the context of phonetic transcription of an utterance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symbol ∅ does not even seem to be part of the International Phonetic Alphabet, techncially speaking: I can't see it anywhere on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official IPA chart as of 2015&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia lists some other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;uses of the empty set symbol in linguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no IPA police that will arrest you if you transcribe the pronunciaton of &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;[ˈlaɪ∅t]&quot;, but I don't see the point of doing this. A phonetic transcription is not supposed to indicate information about the spelling of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T19:05:19.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T19:05:19.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26377" CreationDate="2017-11-14T19:13:33.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look these up at IANA's own site: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags/language-tags.xhtml#language-tags-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags/language-tags.xhtml#language-tags-1&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &quot;Tags for the Identification of Languages&quot; [BCP47] [RFC3066] there&#xA;  is a provision for listing unique &quot;tags&quot; or names for languages and&#xA;  variants of languages.  This document summaries the list of assigned&#xA;  language tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T19:13:33.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26372" CreationDate="2017-11-15T12:34:42.613" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kRlQO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kRlQO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ENOyZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ENOyZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LewN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LewN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the diagrams for your three sentences. &#xA;Note the cross-referencing symbols &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; for the prenucleus items in the last tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T12:34:42.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26370" CreationDate="2017-11-15T15:20:23.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For ALL we need &quot;for all objects, if they are P, then they are also Q&quot;. If we would use logical AND, it would mean &quot;for all objects, they are P and they are Q&quot; which is obviously not what we want.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For SOME we need &quot;for some object, it is P and it is Q&quot;. If we would use implication, it would mean &quot;for some object, if it is P, then it is Q&quot; and it is possible to construct a counterintuitive example where this is the wrong translation:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume we have &quot;some apple is green&quot; and we have a world where there are only red apples and green bananas. Then for each apple the implication apple(X) -&gt; green(X) is false because the apple is not green, but for all bananas the implication apple(X) -&gt; green(X) is true, because the banana is green (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_implication_(rule_of_inference)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_implication_(rule_of_inference)&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means the green banana makes &quot;some apple is green&quot; true, which is clearly not the right translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With logical and, we need to find an object that is green and an apple, and this is the right translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this example is helpful to understand the reason for using conjunction in one case and implication in the other case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T15:20:23.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26370" CreationDate="2017-11-15T17:03:18.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;... λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)⇒Q(x) on the other hand would mean that if there is an x for which P holds it must also hold for Q.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You're being careless about the scope of the existential quantifier. In your informal rendering into English, you take the scope to be P(x), so that the antecedent of if-then is ∃xP(x). Then in the expression you're discussing, Q(x) is not in the scope of any x quantifier, and the expression is not closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why I commented above that your formula corresponds only to English nonsense. The closest pseudo-English to ∃x.P(x)⇒Q(x) would be: &quot;There is something for which if it is a P, then it is a Q.&quot; so that both P(x) and Q(x) are in the scope of &quot;there is some x&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T17:14:02.973" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T17:14:02.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26351" CreationDate="2017-11-15T18:16:28.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As usual, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/60&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; is a great start, explaining the different modifiers: genitives, adjectives, and relative clauses. And there are number of articles on the &lt;em&gt;order&lt;/em&gt; of modifiers: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/86A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order of genitives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/87A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order of adjectives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/88A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order of demonstratives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/89A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order of numerals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/90A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;order of relative clauses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the position of modifiers tends to go with the left- or right- branching parameter. e,g in Mandarin, most modifiers branch to the left (adjectives, relative clauses). But languages are a mess: English and German are mixed, adjectives come/before relative clauses after, but in French as you noted some adjectives come before, some after, and relative clauses after. Irish distinguishes between article and demonstratives location (the box = an bosca, this box = an bosca seo), and numerals are an effing mess (thirteen boxes = trí bhosca déag = three boxes -teen). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the branching parameter should determine the order, but many languages just take it more as a suggestion or guideline than a rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T00:05:38.667" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T00:05:38.667" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26351" CreationDate="2017-11-16T01:48:05.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an oft-cited 1988 paper by Matthew Dryer dealing with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dryer/DryerOVAdjNOrder.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjective-noun order&lt;/a&gt;, most of which goes over my head, really, but the gist of it is that the purported tendency of VO (verb-object) languages to have adjectives that follow nouns, and conversely, that OV languages tend to be AdjN, appears not to hold at all if one excludes continental Eurasian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a list, with explanations, of those &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/grammar/adjectives_position.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French adjectives which go before the noun&lt;/a&gt;, or that take on different meanings according to their position. For what it's worth, these adjectives, or ones very much like them, work in exactly the same fashion in Spanish and Portuguese. It also appears something like this happens &lt;a href=&quot;https://italian.stackexchange.com/a/1256&quot;&gt;in Italian as well&lt;/a&gt;, and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=5bAbAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA813&amp;amp;ots=gdjpDA9huU&amp;amp;dq=adjective%20noun%20order%20romanian&amp;amp;pg=PA388#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Romanian&lt;/a&gt;. This covers basically all of Romance. I haven't been able to find a study linking this feature to its presumed origin in Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T01:48:05.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2017-11-16T14:49:04.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of absolute synonyms among technical terms:  &lt;em&gt;Creutzfeld-Jakob disease&lt;/em&gt; is absolutely synonymous with &lt;em&gt;Jakob-Creutzfeld disease&lt;/em&gt;, and likewise for variants with &lt;em&gt;Kreutzfeld&lt;/em&gt;.  It's a prion-caused brain disorder similar to mad cow disease.  Similarly, it is all one whether you say &lt;i&gt;Simia pygmaeus&lt;/i&gt; as Linnaeus did, or &lt;i&gt;Pongo pygmaeus&lt;/i&gt; in the modern style: the orangutan of Borneo is meant in either case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2668" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T14:49:04.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T23:00:29.527" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Will&lt;/em&gt; used to mean &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; (and sometimes still does) but in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, the cognate still means &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was different about English to cause this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T00:34:03.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T00:37:23.293" Title="How did &quot;will&quot; lose the meaning &quot;want&quot; in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26395" CreationDate="2017-11-17T00:47:35.410" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was listening to the 8 Primary Cardinal Vowels and 10 Secondary Cardinal Vowels. I found the Front Vowels easier to distinguish than the Back Vowels. If I were to pick the 8 most distinguishable monophthongs, it'd be close to the Primary Cardinal Vowels, but I'd actually replace 1 Back Vowel with a Secondary Cardinal Central Vowel. This would be it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1   [i] close front unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2   [e] close-mid front unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3   [ɛ] open-mid front unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4   [a] open front unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5   [ɑ] open back unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6   [ɨ] Close central unrounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7   [ɔ] open-mid back rounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8   [u] close back rounded vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a universal phenomenon, for people to distinguish Front Vowels more easily than Back Vowels? Is there much research on which Vowels people (whether phoneticians or from the general population) can distinguish the easiest/most accurately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19601" LastEditorUserId="19601" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T06:44:32.833" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T06:44:32.833" Title="Most Distinguishable Monophthongs/Vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26394" CreationDate="2017-11-17T06:12:08.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a valid trend whereby vowel height distinctions are more perceptible in front vowels than in back vowels, and if there is a front/back asymmetry in terms of number of vowel heights, front vowels will have more heights than back vowels. The pattern is clearest when you specifically look at front unrounded versus back rounded vowels, and virtually always, there are fewer heights for front rounded vowels than there are for front unrounded vowels. The most likely explanation for this that F1 and F2 are fairly well separated for front vowels, so that the exact frequency of F1 (the cue to vowel height) is more perceptible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some research on the question of perceiving vowel distinctions, which involves comparing pairs of pairs – for instance, i / ɪ versus u / ʊ. A basic limit on this kind of study is that you have to use speakers of a language with the relevant contrasts, thus you can't ask a speaker of Italian to make i / ɪ judgments, since Italian doesn't have that contrast. Instead of doing perceptual experiments (which are done, anyhow), we rely more on patterns of historical sound change, for example observing a historical loss of an u / ʊ distinction while preserving the i /ɪ distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T06:12:08.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T13:10:54.277" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Cloud Language API&lt;/a&gt; (GCL API) to do syntactic analysis of English sentences.  In particular, I'd like to identify all noun phrases.  I don't care how they are used (subject, object, etc.) but I just want the sequence of words corresponding to each noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using some simple rules based on parts of speech, I can get a lot of them (e.g., DET NOUN, DET ADJ NOUN) but I'd like to do better.  Noun phrases that include verbs and hyphenated words get complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The response from GCL API includes a lot more than part of speech, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A head token index of a dependency tree (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/reference/rpc/google.cloud.language.v1#dependencyedge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A parse label with about 40-50 options (same link) such as &quot;Adjectival complement&quot; or &quot;Adverbial clause modifier&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a relatively straightforward way to use this extra info to parse out the noun phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20456" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T13:10:54.277" Title="Find noun phrases using syntactic analysis from Google Cloud Language API" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26400" CreationDate="2017-11-17T14:04:40.380" Score="10" ViewCount="2215" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA lists Plosives first, then Nasals, then Trills, then Taps, then Fricatives, then Approximants. Why is it ordered that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if it was to do with ease of use. However, it doesn't seem that making an &quot;m&quot; sound takes anymore effort than an &quot;k&quot; sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then wondered if it was to do with the order in which humans develop phonemes. However, I found that infants generally learn Approximants first, then Plosives, then Nasals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then wondered if it's to do with frequency of use. Plosives are common in normal speech. Also, people do seem to use Nasals a lot considering Speech Disfluency Fillers (e.g. um). Could this be the reason? Or, is there a different reason for the ordering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19601" LastEditorUserId="19601" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T13:14:24.557" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T13:14:24.557" Title="IPA, Why Is It Ordered That Way?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26398" CreationDate="2017-11-17T15:10:38.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nasals consonants are occlusives, just like oral stops; this means that in both cases there's no air escape through the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to ordering pulmonic consonant sounds by manner of articulation, it makes sense that similar manners of articulation appear close to each other in the table. Also, the possible places of articulation in stops and nasals are almost the same (apart from the epiglottal and glottal stops, which have no nasal counterpart).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that logic, fricatives are put next to approximants, flaps/taps next to trills, and laterals are also grouped together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T15:10:38.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26398" CreationDate="2017-11-17T15:10:56.403" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The organisation of the consonant and vowel tables of the IPA is an approximation of the place and type of the phonemes' articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the columns are arranged in order from left to right according to place of articulation in the mouth from the lips to the back of the throat, and the rows are sorted according to their manner of articulation by increasing aperture, from the most closed articulation to the most open, which is why it starts with stops then nasals, then fricatives, then the others which necessitate to open the mouth more and let the air flow more freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, if you read Saussure's &lt;em&gt;Cours de Linguistique Général&lt;/em&gt;, you'll see that to him, vowels are merely further than consonants on the same aperture continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This understanding is now probably a bit dated, but it's not completely wrong either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T15:10:56.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T16:20:03.003" Score="2" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing some research on Anglo-Saxon England and wondering if there are any particular forms of address in Old English that are a) roughly equivalent to Mr. Mrs. Ms., etc. in terms of formality, b) or was it an entirely other mode of addressing strangers and/or people in a more formal environment (i.e. use of titles, names, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, how similar would this be from how addresses are dealt with in Old Norse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20459" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T13:18:09.467" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T23:18:47.463" Title="Old English forms of address" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2017-11-17T17:31:55.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Esperanto does so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;drinki&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;to drink alcohol&quot; while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;trinki&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;to drink&quot; with no associations to alcohol&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T17:31:55.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26398" CreationDate="2017-11-17T18:42:33.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brahmic scripts&lt;/a&gt; such as Devanagari (the standard script for Sanskrit) employs a phonetically-based order of letters, which is based on Vedic phonetic instructions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiksha#Sound_and_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;śikṣā&lt;/a&gt;). The creators of the IPA were well aware of Indian phonetic tradition, though IPA order diverges superficially from the varṇamālā sequence (Sanskrit places are ordered back-to-front and IPA is front-to-back). Because Vedic phonetic theory differs somewhat in details and purposes from IPA, the specific order of letters differs as well, but the organizational idea of IPA order comes from from Vedic phonetics. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet#/media/File:IPA_consonant_chart_(pre-1912).png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earlier version of the IPA&lt;/a&gt; were closer to Sanskrit order (back-to-front, fricatives last), in 1905, but in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet#/media/File:IPA_chart_(1912).png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1912&lt;/a&gt; place of articulation order was reversed. Fricatives bubbled upwards in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet#/media/File:IPA_chart_(1951).png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1932&lt;/a&gt;, then in &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/28/IPA_as_of_1979.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1979&lt;/a&gt;, the order was nasal-plosive-fricative-trill. At the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Association_Kiel_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kiel convention&lt;/a&gt;, the current order was set (&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/IPA_as_of_1989.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but some items were exiled from the main chart to the non-pulmonic box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would probably have to interview participants in the 1989 convention to get a good history of why those changes were made; there are no survivors from the earliest days. One could read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/lematrephontiqu00vivagoog#page/n647/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Maître phonétique&lt;/a&gt; to see what discussion there is preceding presentations of new orders of letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T18:42:33.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T22:53:29.323" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Causatives have been analysed as a single clause with a split-VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the binding of reflexives is only possible intra-clausally, why is there this contrast ingrammaticality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Mary]i let [John]j kill [herself]i*&#xA;[Mary]i let [John]j kill [himself]j&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that precedence does play a part after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:03:19.073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:03:19.073" Title="Causatives and Reflexives" Tags="&lt;binding-theory&gt;&lt;causative&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26408" CreationDate="2017-11-18T03:43:46.577" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you're analyzing a completely &quot;new&quot; unstudied language, and you come across a set of sounds [g],[k] that are in complementary distribution and that you suspect are allophones of the same phoneme. What do you then call this phoneme? Do you just ask the native speakers what sound they think it is? Or look at elsewhere conditions? Why call it /g/ over /k/, or not something entirely different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T11:19:20.313" Title="How are representative phonemes determined?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26326" CreationDate="2017-11-18T03:49:22.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears the term you're looking for is &lt;em&gt;countable concrete noun&lt;/em&gt;. (Curiously, &lt;em&gt;count&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;countable&lt;/em&gt; is used in both the linguistic literature and in pedagogic texts, a rare instance of consensus between the two). These can be modified with numbers and quantifiers except when the nouns themselves are used as modifiers (i.e. 'cars' but *'cars shop'). I don't know of an umbrella term that encompasses both countability/discreteness and concreteness, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In pedagogic materials, the term &lt;em&gt;count&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;countable&lt;/em&gt; is used at least in the &lt;em&gt;Focus on Grammar&lt;/em&gt; series, last updated in 2012. I recall these being common linguistic terms as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20433" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T03:49:22.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26406" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:00:34.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One type of argument is based on &quot;behaves like&quot;. Suppose for example that there is a contrast between /p,b,t,d/ but [k,g] is predictable by rule. If /b,d/ do things that /p,t/ don't do and the mystery sound does the same thing that /b,d/ do, then you have evidence that it is /g/. Another is based on simplicity of resulting rule system. For example, if [k] only exists word-finally, then a rule /g/ → [k] /__# is simpler to formalize, but a rule turning /k/ into [g] before a consonant or vowel is more complex. One problem with the simplicity argument is that it depends on having a theory of rule-formulation. A related problem is that people are fond of reifying heuristics like &quot;you get X in this context, and Y elsewhere&quot; into a rule where &quot;/z/ → Y elsewhere&quot; is an actual possible rule. (The problem is that &quot;elsewhere&quot; has no independent meaning and instead stands for a complex kind of rule that produces two different outputs – the &quot;elsewhere&quot; rule isn't actually a separate rule). This presupposes that you have a good enough reason to think that the two surface sounds have the same underlying form. Simple complementary distribution is not an automatic reason to assume a difference between surface and underlying forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T06:00:34.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2017-11-18T06:09:19.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess that if a specific verb for “drinking alcohol” existed, it would be difficult to exclude from that the meaning of “getting drunk”, for the very nature of alcohol. Are there languages that have the subtlety to distinguish “drinking in moderation” from “getting drunk” using different verbs?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I know that some Romance languages have a verb for “getting drunk” distinct from “drinking water or other liquids”: in Spanish is &lt;em&gt;emborracharse&lt;/em&gt;, in French &lt;em&gt;se souler&lt;/em&gt;, in Italian &lt;em&gt;ubriacarsi&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;inebriarsi&lt;/em&gt;. Whereas in Mexico, Nahuatl speakers use &lt;em&gt;tlahuana&lt;/em&gt; for “drinking pulque”, an alcoholic beverage, and &lt;em&gt;coni&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tlai&lt;/em&gt; for drinking all the other liquids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T06:09:19.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T08:50:47.697" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;At an early stage of acquisition the utterances children produce consist of only two words. Can these two word utterances be seen as syntactically or semantically analysed in any way? How productive is the Pivot theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20461" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T10:57:03.723" Title="Are two word utterances by young children grammatically analysed?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26410" CreationDate="2017-11-18T10:57:03.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. I was deeply impressed by the reports of vertical constructions by Ron and Suzy Scollon in the '70s.  Here is a discussion by Charlene Sato of that and other relevant work: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=U3IFfzQtbhcC&amp;amp;pg=PA17&amp;amp;lpg=PA17&amp;amp;dq=scollon%20vertical%20constructions&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=gyQ4FlLz9a&amp;amp;sig=AKsos_MyND6T07ykPLIuPd-MRrw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjl6p_u-cfXAhXhjFQKHckHC3QQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=scollon%20vertical%20constructions&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Syntax of Conversation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T10:57:03.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26406" CreationDate="2017-11-18T11:19:20.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poetic conventions and language games may provide some evidence.  See this previous discussion here and my answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15238/what-does-psychological-reality-of-sound-mean&quot;&gt;psychological reality question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T11:19:20.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26393" CreationDate="2017-11-18T12:58:16.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is an old field, its almost as old as writing itself. The first writing systems weren't very precise. Any syllable that sounded similar was represented with the same symbol. Some however did notice the different syllables that one grapheme could represent, and thus began research that evolved into phonology. However, this remained the only field of linguistics up until modern times. You'll notice that its the most developed field of linguistics. Its well understood how the phoneme inventories of languages and the pronunciation of words change over time, but virtually nothing is known of how grammar changes. The only thing that's really known well is the evolution of case endings, which is solely because it overlaps heavily with sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for jlawler's comment, that doesn't mean its impossible to determine. We do have information on how a word's meaning can change over time. And we do have information on the evolution of past tenses in the Germanic languages. Several times German's imperfect and perfective have merged, only for another perfective to develope and to later merge again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, how 'will' came to be a future tense marker is pretty obvious. People probably improvised a future tense by saying 'X wants to Y'. This later became a grammatical particle. The question is more how the modern word 'want' developed. Looking up its etymology, it originally meant 'to lack'. It would appear that over time, English speakers came to associate 'lacking something' with wanting it. I imagine this was strengthened as 'to will' lost its original meaning. This is also evident in the noun 'want', which started off meaning 'deficiency', but later came to mean 'something not possessed but wanted'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting side note, 'ich will' still means 'I want' (the infinitive form is 'wollen', but the o becomes an i in several conjugations). They instead use their verb 'werden' meaning 'to become' to form a future tense. Though it does still maintain is independent meaning of 'to become'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T12:58:16.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26401" CreationDate="2017-11-18T16:25:37.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Anglo-Saxon &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leof&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lēof&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'beloved, dear' was used in a similar manner, though it was not as formal. e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lēofa Bēowulf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; 'dear Beowulf', &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Ve_8AwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA241&amp;amp;lpg=PA241&amp;amp;dq=leof%20form%20of%20address%20anglo%20saxon&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=C32PrFcaIC&amp;amp;sig=H4Wt35DYkZqABj15XBm84AKIrds&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjaxtiMxMjXAhUJr1QKHfDIBQQQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=leof%20&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lēof ealdormann&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot; 'Mister Alderman'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old Norse some sources have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform?type=exact&amp;amp;lookup=herra&amp;amp;lang=non&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;herra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'venerable' with a usage similar to &quot;master, lord&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T23:18:47.463" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T23:18:47.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-18T19:55:22.587" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a dataset for an NLP task connected with sentiment analysis. While thinking on word roles in composing of the overall sentiment and marking particular as being positive/negative, we came across to three different situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word is considered generally positive: food, sleep, health, chocolate, help, politeness, etc;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word has an appraisal role: respectful, beneficial, responsible, objective &lt;em&gt;(adj.)&lt;/em&gt;, strong, useful;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;word is emotionally charged: unforgettable, to admire, happy, magnificent, impressive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there &lt;strong&gt;papers and/or research&lt;/strong&gt; on the subject? I am looking for a formalized differentiation between those classes of positive/negative words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T07:38:54.563" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T07:38:54.563" Title="Is there an generally positive / appraisal / emotion boundary?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29385" CreationDate="2017-11-18T21:01:44.537" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was studying the complicted verbal morphology of Georgian language, when I came across the description of versioners in Hewit's &lt;em&gt;Georgian: A Structural Reference Grammar&lt;/em&gt;. In discussing the Objetive Version, he points out that generally speaking the Objective Version can be expressed with the version vowel -ი- for the 1st and 2nd person, and with the version vowel -უ- for the 3rd person, preceded by the appropriate indirect object pronoun of the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;-set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he says that there are a few verbs for which the Objective Version is conveyed with the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;-set pronouns directly added to the verb root without an intervening version vowel. For verbs belonging to this group he provides the following example sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) წერილს დედას &lt;strong&gt;ვ&lt;/strong&gt;წერ.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  letter-DAT mother-DAT &lt;strong&gt;1SG.SUBJ&lt;/strong&gt;-write.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  I write a letter to the mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the verb წერ &quot;to write&quot; doesn't show the version vowel after the subject pronoun marker ვ- highlighted in bold, as if it were in the Neutral Version. He also gives other examples of this behaviour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) (მე) წერილს &lt;strong&gt;მ&lt;/strong&gt;წერ.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  (me-DAT) letter-DAT &lt;strong&gt;2SG.SUBJ-3SG.INDIR&lt;/strong&gt;-write.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  You write a letter to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;strong&gt;გ&lt;/strong&gt;წერ&lt;strong&gt;ენ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;2SG/PL.INDIR&lt;/strong&gt;-write-&lt;strong&gt;3PL.SUBJ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  They write it to you/you all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then he also gives the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) წერილს დედას &lt;strong&gt;ვუ&lt;/strong&gt;წერ.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  letter-DAT mother-DAT &lt;strong&gt;1SG.SUBJ-OV&lt;/strong&gt;-write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which he translates with &quot;I write a letter for the mother&quot;. However, in the page dedicated to Georgian grammar on Wikipedia a similar expression is translated as &quot;I write it (a letter) to the mother&quot;, exactly like the sentence in (1). In this last example the Objective Version (OV) is expressed with the version vowel -უ-, indicating the 3rd person singular indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there any difference between the sentence in (1) and the one in (4) from the semantic point of view? Why both the Neutral Version (?) and the Objective Version are used to convey the same meaning? And if (1) and (4) have the same meaning, can I also use the Objective Version in persons other than the 3rd? In other words, could a verb form such as მიწერ &quot;you write (it) to me&quot; actually exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14732" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T14:53:34.237" Title="Difference between forms of the georgian verbs with and/or without objective version vowel" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;georgian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21556" CreationDate="2017-11-19T04:46:59.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern Thai script is descended from Pallava, itself descended from Brahmi. It is similar and draws from Khmer, and is closest in similarity to Lao. Note that it is largely unrelated to the Myanmar/Burmese script. Sanskrit is itself is a language written in a variety of scripts, including Thai). On the other hand, Pali (the liturgical language of Theraveda Buddhism) can be written in Thai, with the addition of three specifically Pali characters found in Thai fonts (Nikkhahit, Pinthu, Yamakkan). On the other hand, Thai has many loanwords from Pali and Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3609" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T04:46:59.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T15:34:35.510" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you have a theoretical language which has verbs that are never inflected. If that verb appears, it will only appear in one form. Tense and such things are marked with particles that follow the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine another language which is exactly the same except the particles are suffixes. The only real difference is that spaces have been removed. It seems like a very minor difference, and probably wouldn't even be noticeable when speaking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems like the second language is more agglutinative and the first is more analytic. This seems weird considering how similar the languages are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there really a meaningful difference between particles and affixes? Is the difference between analytic and agglutinative languages merely superficial? Or does it go deeper that putting extra spaces when writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the answer to that last question is yes, considering Chinese languages like Mandarin are usually written without spaces. So if the only thing that mattered for words were spaces, then Chinese would be considered polysynthetic, since it would have sentence spanning words. But it's not, and it doesn't. In fact, it's considered to be analytic. So it seems like to answer this question, it might be required to get into the deeper question of what even is a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14771" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T15:34:35.510" Title="Is the difference between analytic and agglutinative languages superficial?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;&lt;analytic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-11-20T21:32:54.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T18:48:30.630" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the Romance languages do this with pronouns, but they don't do this with noun phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any natlangs out there where the subject and direct object always precedes the verb, but everything else comes after it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T21:43:40.590" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T21:43:40.590" Title="Are there any languages that place subjects and direct objects before the verbs, but everything else after?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T22:21:09.547" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;English language has Miss and Missis for referring to unmarried and married women. German has Frau and Fräulein. What caused such words to appear in some languages and not in others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2672" LastEditorUserId="2672" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T12:00:19.287" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T12:00:19.287" Title="Why do only some languages have different words for calling a married and unmarried women?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26481" CreationDate="2017-11-19T22:57:04.390" Score="4" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages develop double consonants and other quirks for different reasons -- English' double consonants were originally developed because the consonants were doubled in speech, like Latin, and that later developed to how early modern, modern, and contemporary English all used double consonants to show that the proceeding vowel was a short vowel. In Spanish, the letter ⟨n⟩ was doubled to show that the consonant used was pronounced /ɲ/, and Korean uses double letters to show that consonant with voiced aspiration is used. Over time, pronunciation of these changes, and due to this, they are still used with new pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Case And Argument As To Why I Ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I notice is that even going back 1900 years, to my understanding, the letter Veeta ⟨β⟩ was most likely pronounced as either or both of /v/ or /β/, and I see that, for instance, the Hebrew word &lt;em&gt;רַבִּי&lt;/em&gt; pronounced as /rabi/ was transliterated as &lt;em&gt;ῥαββί&lt;/em&gt;. I would think that this alone would imply that it could have been that ⟨ββ⟩ was a digraph for the sound /b/ but ⟨β⟩ on its own would have been either /β~v/, thus rendering the word as being pronounced as probably /r̊abi~rabi/. This is probably a weak argument to turn to, but ⟨γ⟩ when in digraphs, the first becomes /ŋ/. But I think that a stronger argument is is that the letter Veeta is from the Phonecian letter beth, which was pronounced as both /b/ and /β/, and it was adopted into Hebrew performing these two functions which then became /b/ and /v/ (perhaps as it did into modern Greek, but /b/ was dropped.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have digressed, but I pray this shows better why I ask this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, linguistics, especially historical linguistics, it can be hard to be certain of anything, especially if lacking in complex descriptions or especially recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T02:12:28.223" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T18:30:30.307" Title="Why Did Koiné Greek Still Write Double Letters?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26419" CreationDate="2017-11-20T01:03:35.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/files/mandelang/nikitina_tezis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mande languages&lt;/a&gt; generally have SOVX word order. Otherwise, it is quite rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T01:03:35.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-20T13:34:44.500" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen it before, but I don't know what it would be called. I know that some of the Romance languages used to have a specific tense used only for stories (at least, fictional ones). They're no longer used, and as a consequence only the third person conjugations are still known for most verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think I've ever seen an actual name for this. I'm not even sure if its actually considered a tense, or mood, or what. Either way, could someone perhaps tell me the name of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T16:46:52.213" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T13:15:36.107" Title="Is there a name for the tense some Romance languages used to use for stories?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26425" CreationDate="2017-11-20T20:28:35.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could be referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aorist&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps the &quot;simple past&quot; (passato remoto) that occurs in Italian which is sometimes used to place a distance between the actions described and the present context. Historical actions, or past narrative actions are often expressed in the &lt;em&gt;passato remoto&lt;/em&gt;, which is the continuation of the Latin preterite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the &lt;em&gt;passato remoto&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly productive and is not limited to the third person or defective in any particular way. Neither is it obsolete in the modern language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="746" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T20:37:23.953" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T20:37:23.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1408" CreationDate="2017-11-20T21:30:45.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons for that, most of them were already mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Homophony of conjugated verb forms, mostly in present tense. Therefore, to identify the subject, people needed to express it by pronoun. Nowadays, some linguist even postulate that the pronoun became part of the predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) French is the first Romance language to have appeared as distinct from Latin. French is different from other Romance languages in many ways and the most distinct from Latin, so it has many particular characteristics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) The influence of German and other Germanic languages. French is the northernmost Romance language and neither German nor English are pro-drop languages. The influence of German could have been seen (mostly in the past) in many other phenomena like e.g. the word order: Hier je fus.. &gt; Hier fus je.. (like Gestern bin ich..) or up till now in phonetics: no other Romance language has a [y] (ü) sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20474" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T21:30:45.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-20T21:41:57.917" Score="8" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I see from time to time is the proportion of words from various sources, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; has about 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic and 6% Greek words. I've never seen anything similar with grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the languages I'm learning at the moment is Norwegian, and I'm constantly amazed at how often the word order is identical to English, taking into account minor differences such as the Norwegian definite article being suffixed to the noun, instead of being preceded by a separate word in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have expected English grammar to be closer to Dutch and German since all three are West Germanic languages, and Norwegian is a North Germanic language, although there was a heavy Old Norse influence on Old English. From my own experience it seems that English grammar is closer to Norwegian than Dutch or German, and this is something I'd like to learn more about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that is studied? The comparative similarity between two languages' grammars? If so, what is it called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T13:22:01.733" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T15:02:15.290" Title="Is there a measure for grammatical similarity?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26434" CreationDate="2017-11-21T03:37:34.407" Score="6" ViewCount="3424" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not understanding how a word can begin with a glottal stop? Is it a glottal plosive? I guess I am trying not to outright ask why is it not called a glottal plosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say some words that are supposed to begin with a glottal stop, there is a slight puff of air, but not aspirated, and when I hear words, like the Arabic words for mother, I just hear a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T08:56:12.890" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T20:22:31.947" Title="Is it possible for a word-initial vowel to not have a glottal stop before it?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26432" CreationDate="2017-11-21T05:21:28.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;English words with vowel initial tend to get a glottal stop. This occurs in most dialects, so a native speaker wouldn’t notice its presence or absence; they will just hear it as a “normal” vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally speaking, a &lt;em&gt;glottal + vowel&lt;/em&gt;  is perceived as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allophone&lt;/a&gt; of that vowel alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a significant difference between pronunciation of word-initial vowels &lt;em&gt;at the beginning of an utterance&lt;/em&gt; and in its middle. Words that begin with vowels get a preceding glottal stop &lt;strong&gt;only if&lt;/strong&gt; they are at the start of an utterance. Compare &lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the&amp;nbsp;apple&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; rhymes with &lt;em&gt;bee&lt;/em&gt;). There will be no glottal stop in the second case, and it is very easy to notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages (like Hawa'iian), the presence or absence of the glottal stop (including the initial position) changes the meaning. One example is &lt;em&gt;ʻai&lt;/em&gt; (with the initial glottal stop). It means &lt;em&gt;food,&lt;/em&gt; and one should not use its counterpart word with a plain vowel at the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T15:11:04.527" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T15:11:04.527" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-21T11:46:29.203" Score="1" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonology, words can be classified according to the position of the stressed syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An oxytone word is a word stressed in the last syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A paroxytone word is a word stressed in the second last syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A proparoxytone word is a word stressed in the third last syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_in_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, this classification affects only to those words with more than one syllable. According to that classification, we speak about words than can be &lt;em&gt;agudas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;llanas&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;esdrújulas&lt;/em&gt;, respectively. Nonetheless, there are a few words in Spanish that have two stressed syllables: the adverbs ending with &quot;-mente&quot;, the Spanish version of the English &quot;-ly&quot; adverbs. So &quot;quickly&quot; (from &lt;em&gt;quick&lt;/em&gt;) becomes &quot;rápidamente&quot; (from &lt;em&gt;rápido&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;quick&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of these words is the latin word &lt;em&gt;mens&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;mind&quot;. So doing something &quot;rápidamente&quot; etymologically means to do it &quot;with a quick mind&quot;. Originally those adverbs were written as two words: &quot;rápida mente&quot; (&quot;quick mind&quot; indeed). And that is the reason why today we pronounce &lt;em&gt;rápidamente&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;code&gt;RApidaMENte&lt;/code&gt;, with two stressed syllables as if the two words were still present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the Royal Spanish Academy does not recognise these adverb words as classifiable within the aforementioned classification, as this classification system only affects words with one stressed syllable. So is there a proposed classification for multi-stressed words? Do any language where words with two stressed syllables happen more often exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14927" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T08:21:08.760" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T02:35:35.097" Title="Do a classification of words with two or more stressed syllables exist?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26439" CreationDate="2017-11-21T20:49:05.040" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for a word that is traditionally an adjective or noun becoming a verb over time? A word I'm thinking of is &amp;quot;adult&amp;quot;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/adulting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster has reported&lt;/a&gt; has become increasingly used as a verb.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't heard it (or don't use it) already, you'll hear it soon: &lt;em&gt;adult&lt;/em&gt; as a verb, as in &amp;quot;Someone please teach me how to adult.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also common as a gerund—that is, in the form &lt;em&gt;adulting&lt;/em&gt; as a noun, as in &amp;quot;Adulting is hard&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I’m not very good at adulting.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also heard similar adjective to verb transitions like &amp;quot;I work so hard, I can't afford to lazy,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;these decorations should happy up the place&amp;quot;. Similarly, I've heard noun to verb transitions like &amp;quot;I'm going to Mohammad Ali that jerk&amp;quot; (meaning to punch him). Sometimes they are used for comedic effect because they are grammatically inappropriate, but other times they seem to be following the pattern of &amp;quot;to adult&amp;quot; in becoming more sincerely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this linguistic transition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Merriam-Webster does note that &amp;quot;adult&amp;quot; was rarely used as a verb in previous decades, but it was with a different meaning. The modern usage meaning &amp;quot;to behave like an adult, specifically to do the things—often mundane—that an adult is expected to do&amp;quot; appears to have started being used around 2008 or 2009.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14564" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T20:54:08.983" Title="Is there a term for an adjective or noun becoming a verb, like &quot;to adult&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26438" CreationDate="2017-11-21T20:53:40.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process of deriving a verb from an adjective would be called deadjectival verbalisation, which is in turn an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;derivaton&lt;/a&gt;. The resulting word could be called a &lt;strong&gt;deadjectival verb&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the example you cite, the term that the verb is derived from could also be claimed to be the noun &quot;adult&quot;, which would then be a denominal verbalisation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T20:53:40.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26499" CreationDate="2017-11-22T02:34:57.137" Score="0" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adjective 'common' has two basic meanings according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/common&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Occurring, found, or done often; prevalent: ‘common misspellings’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shared by, coming from, or done by two or more people, groups, or things:&#xA;‘the two republics' common border’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact meaning of the adjective 'common' in the grammar term 'common noun'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the adjective 'common' mean 'found often' or 'shared'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI, 'common noun' is defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/common_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A noun denoting a class of objects or a concept as opposed to a particular individual. Often contrasted with proper noun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T01:04:28.200" Title="What is the exact meaning of 'common' in 'common noun'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2017-11-22T04:10:51.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages make it more difficult (impractical, though maybe not impossible) to express some concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, most European languages have a wide range of tenses for verbs, including conditional tenses, while some other languages are missing these (Mandarin Chinese is the biggest example) - in some languages the workaround for a missing future tense is to add a word like 'tomorrow' - that may work fine in normal conversation, but it may be impractical (too many extra words needed) to work around a missing conditional tense or a missing future-perfect tense, so people often rely on context, which can be ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some languages don't easily express whether something is a subject or object (or other cases) - Latin and German modify articles or word endings to show their case, and some other languages (e.g. English) do it in other ways, often by position, but some languages appear not to worry about it (so the context is critical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder if some complex or technical ideas, especially involving relative timings or conditionality, are more difficult to express clearly (at least without excessive verbosity) in some languages than others.&#xA;That doesn't mean that the language isn't &quot;fit for purpose&quot;, but it might have implications for which purposes the language is a good fit for. For example, complex legal/contractual or philosophical concepts could be tricky to express precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the question of whether such limitations would extend to our inner thoughts - if my language can't easily or precisely communicate some ideas, does that mean I can't easily think those ideas? Or can I think them but not easily put them into words - and would I be aware of that limitation?&#xA;Sometimes it takes me a minute to work out how to express something that I'm thinking - might that be easier, in some cases, if I was thinking in a different language, or is it simply a question of 'getting my thoughts organised' (turning half-baked ideas into something more precise)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20487" LastEditorUserId="20487" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T04:18:11.063" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T04:18:11.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T04:36:12.787" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;When used in the singular, a countable noun is required to have a determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I bought car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the same countable noun is not required to have any determiner when used in the plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I bought cars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any linguistic reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T06:34:20.970" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T03:34:28.563" Title="Why isn't a countable noun required to have a determiner when used in the plural?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26443" CreationDate="2017-11-22T12:22:18.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just the rule for English, other languages differ, e.g., Russian and Chinese don't have articles at all (neither definite nor indefinite ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T12:22:18.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27498" CreationDate="2017-11-22T19:36:14.240" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my dictionary some words are marked with αρχαιοπρεπής (dated, archaic), λόγιος (learned form) and παλαιότερα (more ancient use). What are the differences, if any, between these terms, and what is their relation to Katharevousa? Can these four categories be used interchangeably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is it possible that some words from Katharevousa, e.g. αποστολεύς, are not to be used in Modern Greek (even in a proper context) but that the use of a declination of the word, e.g. του αποστολέως, would be acceptable in the proper context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, when does Katharevousa ends and when do so-called learned words begin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14770" LastEditorUserId="14770" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T14:05:31.977" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:31:52.350" Title="Greek: differences between words marked as αρχαιοπρεπής, λόγιος or παλαιότερα" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26209" CreationDate="2017-11-23T10:32:10.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kaldi provides WER of 4.28% whereas deepspeech gives 5.83% on librispeech clean data. Check this out: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/syhw/wer_are_we&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/syhw/wer_are_we&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20494" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T10:32:10.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26311" CreationDate="2017-11-23T11:58:12.407" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;A language needs a minimum set of meanings&quot; as said above!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my 5 cts here are that language expresses lernt concepts &quot;stored&quot; in our minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is the real world and for its objects we can find symbols. Or there are social interactions which can also be expressed by a word. More complex are introspective tokens expressing mood/feeling for example, this I think are best represented in most languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there has been a folk having no concept of ownership/money, so the whole set of economics related terms was absent and could not expressed. So their learnt set of concepts got extended, so the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a look on language extensions introduced with the car age: I am sure there will be phrases and expressions which appeared only later, like &quot;gib Gas&quot; in German meaning &quot;go faster&quot;  also without relation to driving, but actually coming from &quot;hit the gas pedal&quot;. Possibly, in the future age of electric cars this will be outdated and disappear again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My final reference here are semiotics - science giving us foundations about how we express our symbols in the language and link both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T11:58:12.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26325" CreationDate="2017-11-23T12:02:03.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Might be a weird perspective but it should be possible with the help of a &lt;em&gt;speech and language therapist&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20493" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T22:21:14.643" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T22:21:14.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26425" CreationDate="2017-11-23T13:15:36.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the Italian passato remoto, the French passé historique is used to narrate past events. In French it is used only in the written language, but it is certainly not the case that &quot;only the third person conjugations are still known for most verbs&quot;. The conjugation is fully intact, but, as mentioned, it is not used in spoken French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T13:15:36.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26443" CreationDate="2017-11-23T13:20:44.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linguistic reason is that in English a/an is not a determiner, but an indefinite article. Etymologically it the same word as the numeral &quot;one&quot;. Its function is to indicate that the following noun designates a single indefinite thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T13:20:44.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26458" CreationDate="2017-11-24T04:50:06.330" Score="1" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently in the process of translating a text from one language into another, and the original uses a compound noun that can either be translated into English as &lt;em&gt;&quot;fly-eating&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (losing the original's charm) or a fancy quasi-medical term involving &quot;-phagia&quot;. I have tried searching for rules regarding Ancient Greek compound nouns' formation but could not unearth a definite algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for &lt;em&gt;&quot;fly&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BC%CF%85%E1%BF%96%CE%B1#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;myia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-phagy#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-phagia&lt;/a&gt; could be appended at the end to signify &lt;em&gt;&quot;eating&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. I would appreciate it if someone with better knowledge of Ancient Greek could help me combine the two together, and I would love to see some scholarly articles on this topic. Surely there are some rules that medical scientists and jurisprudents follow when giving names to new terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20499" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T05:00:08.403" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:36:35.390" Title="Rules to constructing a proper compound noun in Ancient Greek" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T06:00:06.790" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably, before the development of a proper spoken language, humans referred to a cat as a &quot;meow&quot;, the sound it makes. That is just the natural candidate for what to call an animal. This is what little kids do, before they learn what a cat is called in English (of any other language spoken by their parents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, almost no present day language retains any footprints indicating that animals were called by the sounds they make, except perhaps Chinese, where one of the words for a cat is &quot;mei&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, words in a language are not as intuitive as one might expect them to be. My question here is, why, during the course of early development  of a language, do words like &quot;meow&quot; get replaced by unintuitive ones like &quot;cat&quot; or &quot;kat&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20502" LastEditorUserId="20502" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T06:09:59.747" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T19:26:33.407" Title="Why isn't a cat called a meow?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26456" CreationDate="2017-11-24T06:22:24.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Linguistics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Do you have anything to support the presumption that says &lt;em&gt;words like &quot;meow&quot; get replaced by unintuitive ones like &quot;cat&quot; or &quot;kat&quot;&lt;/em&gt; ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;em&gt;In general, words in a language are not as intuitive as one might expect them to be&lt;/em&gt;; is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, that &lt;em&gt;does not hold true&lt;/em&gt;, as no words are &lt;em&gt;forced&lt;/em&gt; into the vocab in a language, the words develop as people want them to (there are exceptions, &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt;, but not in the words of daily use, not in the realm of words you are talking about). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Google says that &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; comes from: Old English catt, catte, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kat and German Katze ; reinforced in Middle English by forms from late Latin cattus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assuming (1) to be true&lt;/strong&gt;, the reason for that might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) English (like many other languages) doesn't have it's own set of words (i.e. the set is not exclusive), it has &lt;em&gt;borrowed&lt;/em&gt; words from many other cultures and languages along the way and will continue to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Every language has it's own &lt;em&gt;phonotactics&lt;/em&gt;, which I -personally- think might have been another reason for &lt;em&gt;dropping&lt;/em&gt; &quot;meow&quot; and &lt;em&gt;accepting&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't know how universal this is, but, kids/ people still use &lt;em&gt;meow&lt;/em&gt; for identifying cats, it's not vanished yet!) :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T06:22:24.780" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26455" CreationDate="2017-11-24T11:12:20.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules for the formation of compounds are explained in the more elaborate Greek grammars, but I think you are asking about this specific word. In Classical Greek there are quite a large number of compounds from μυιο- or μυο-, as you can see here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/search3t?dbname=LSJ&amp;amp;dgdivhead=%CE%BC%CF%85%CE%B9%CE%BF*&amp;amp;orthmode=unaccented&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;μυιο-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/search3t?dbname=LSJ&amp;amp;dgdivhead=%CE%BC%CF%85%CE%BF*&amp;amp;orthmode=unaccented&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;μυο-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click on the individual words for their meaning. Myo- or myiophagia would be a correctly formed compound and there is theoretically no reason why you should not be able to use it in the more bookish register of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T18:15:10.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T18:15:10.587" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2619" CreationDate="2017-11-24T11:45:56.053" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;ㅔ is just the normal &quot;e&quot; we use in the word &quot;bed&quot;, &quot;said&quot;, and &quot;went&quot;, but ㅐ is like the sound you make during the transition of saying the word &quot;sway&quot;, or &quot;day&quot;, or &quot;make&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20505" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T11:45:56.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T11:46:17.090" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romance languages are known to have lots of so-called &lt;strong&gt;pronominal verbs&lt;/strong&gt;, which are always conjugated with a reflexive pronoun even though the action is not actually reflexive: for example, Spanish &lt;em&gt;irse, acostarse, despertarse, imaginarse&lt;/em&gt;. Being new to German, I've noticed that German has some of these too, e.g. &lt;em&gt;sich freuen, sich ansehen&lt;/em&gt;, but as far as I see they're simply called &quot;reflexive&quot;. I gather that Slavic languages have them too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is: is this a single phenomenon? That is, are Romance pronominal verbs and these other &quot;reflexive&quot; verbs in other language families the same underlying phenomenon, or is there some fundamental difference among them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: are there any cross-linguistic studies about this pseudo-reflexivity? Is it found outside Romance-Germanic-Slavic, or even outside Indo-European?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T13:29:41.907" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T18:55:58.647" Title="Romance-like pronominal verbs elsewhere" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26460" CreationDate="2017-11-24T18:55:58.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These verbs are very typical in Indo-European languages in general and indeed exist in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. This has to do with working with semantic roles like agent, patient, source etc. and you will find similar classes of verbs in old IE languages like Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin, where they are not connected with reflexive pronouns but instead assume medio-passive form (and exist in it only without having active form - this is called verba deponentia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both reflexive and passive constructions are used for de-agentisation, i.e. the verb is there but the agent of the verb is typically out of focus and omitted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the reflexive and ancient deponent (i.e. medio-passive only) verbs, you will often find that their meaning is typically also somewhat devoid of agent - &lt;em&gt;sich freuen&lt;/em&gt; will have a subject but that subject is not actively happy by his own doing but typically it is just an experiencer. The same with Czech &lt;em&gt;smát se&lt;/em&gt; or ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;mainesthai&lt;/em&gt; - the subject is doing the action (laughter, madness) but not from his own volition, he is mostly experiencing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there is most likely no objective need to mark this, as evidence by English, where you do not have these verbs and where even the very notion of real reflexivity is getting erased (cf. &quot;I am warming up&quot; and &quot;I am warming up dinner&quot;) but if you already use these means for regular de-agentive constructions, by analogy they may spread to verbs whose semantics feels reminiscent of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T18:55:58.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26456" CreationDate="2017-11-24T19:26:33.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of the basic tenets of linguistics - in simplified terms, &lt;strong&gt;the tie between the designated reality and the word-sign used for it is arbitrary&lt;/strong&gt;. There might have been a time when this was not the case and the word-signs were formed solely on the basis of imitation, but that would be a long gone prehistory and we have evidence that no such thing is necessary when forming proto-language-like structures (e.g. when apes are taught sign languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you have &lt;strong&gt;certain exceptions&lt;/strong&gt; to this general rule, the &lt;strong&gt;onomatopeic words&lt;/strong&gt;, however these just come and go. A famous example given by Saussure is the word &lt;em&gt;pigeon&lt;/em&gt;, which by no means appears to be onomatopoeic, except it is because it comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;pipio&lt;/em&gt;, but it evolved to the existing form following the laws of sound change affecting the entire language and resulting in what we now call French (from which English deemed fit to take the word). As such, if you go deep enough for the word &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt;, traced to the Latin &lt;em&gt;cattus&lt;/em&gt;, which might have come from some non-IE language, which itself changed radically during the previous millenia, you might come to a form that came up to existence as an onomatopoeic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now beware of impending rant:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, allow me also to finish by pointing short-sightedness of such view. When we think of onomatopoeics, i.e. words created on the basis of similarity, we limit ourselves just to a sound correspondence, but that is just our arbitrary decision, made from assumptions about fully developed languages. Who are we to say that the similarity was based solely on sound similarity? The proto-languages in early human history might have very well made heavy use of non-audio-oral signal transmission, i.e. besides the words/grunts, they may have used also a lot of gestures. Furthermore one cannot know how much priority they assigned to their senses, i.e. the sense of smell was probably much more important than it is now for us but it is unlikely they were able to capture this with language-relevant means, so they might have had to be arbitrary from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One has to rid himself of humanocentrism in this - e.g. there is a rather famous video of an elephant that was trained to paint a flower when they put it in front of him and people typically marvel at the elephant's intelligence and deep soul. However do we really believe that what the elephant paints is a flower? Is this the way the elephant really perceives it? as a visual object representable on two-dimensional canvas? Or is it more likely we just trained the elephant to execute a certain set of moves when that flower is in front of it and that it sees no connection whatsoever between the drawings on the canvas and the flower in front of it (except perhaps the pain it had to suffer during the harsh training)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is necessary to take this step away when discussing the origins of language because many of the principles we work with routinely might not have been applicable back then... First of all, people could not talk (obviously...), so that might have had a rather significant effect on their general cognisance. Besides that, they probably had somewhat different physiology and generally different outlook at the outside world, so there is no a priori reason to think that symbols they would have formed would necessarily be more likely to be based on sound similarity between the symbol and some limited aspect of the object it referred to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. why would you reduce the cat to meowing? is it more interesting than the fact that it is e.g. black? that it is so fast, elegant and agile? that is has such hypnotic gaze? so reminiscent of the terrible predators of you ancestors you may hear in legends about? or that is kills mice that plague your food supply... Sorry, but your westernocentric &quot;meow&quot; just does not cut it in terms of intuitiveness...:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T19:26:33.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26432" CreationDate="2017-11-24T19:42:57.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phonetics, there is a distinction among:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hard vocal onset&lt;/strong&gt; - effectively this is most typically the glottal stop; the exact realisations sometimes differ (e.g. strident phonation / harsh voice instread of a stop) but that corresponds in the variation of of glottal stop phonemes too; hard voice onset is typical e.g. for Czech, where most of the times all word initial vowels start with glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;soft vocal onset&lt;/strong&gt; - this happens when the glottis does not get so tense and the vowel starts pretty much right away; this is typical for French (you can have hard voice onset there too, but it carries certain markedness).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aspirated vocal onset&lt;/strong&gt; - again glottis is not fully tense and the vowel starts with brief [h]-like sound; from the top of my head I do not recall any language using this, but if I remember correctly it may be found in some English dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T19:42:57.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26432" CreationDate="2017-11-24T20:22:31.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two distinction questions here: is it physically possible, and is it linguistically significant. It is clearly physically possible to have an initial vowel without a glottal stop, also with. What is much less clear is whether there can be a surface contrast between a bare utterance-initial vowel and an utterance-initial glottal stop plus vowel sequence. That is, can [ama] contrast with [ʔama]? Areare is a languages reputed to have a contrast between initial vowel versus initial ʔV; to detect the difference, you have to put a vowel before the word, in which case it is no longer utterance-initial. I cannot say that there is actually a phonetic distinction made in that language (I only worked on it for a quarter). So there can be no doubt that glottal stop can contrast with Ø (it is a real phoneme), I do not know of a phonetic study that demonstrates an utterance-initial distinction, as exists in the case of &quot;pit&quot; versus &quot;bit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T20:22:31.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26466" CreationDate="2017-11-24T22:02:15.390" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is probably a really simple question, but just help me out I am very desperate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to determine formants from a waveform if given time on the horizontal axis and amplitude on the vertical axis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20509" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T01:44:23.687" Title="How to determine formants from a waveform if given time on the horizontal axis and amplitude on the vertical axis?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26465" CreationDate="2017-11-25T01:44:23.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You almost certainly do not want to compute the formants yourself (complex programming, way too long to describe here). If you can see a waveform in Praat, having selected a sound object and you clicked View &amp;amp; Edit, there should be 1 or two windows with waveform on the top, and another window at the bottow, which should display a spectrogram (if, clicking &quot;Spectrum&quot;, you see a check on &quot;Show Spectrogram&quot;). In that same window, it will display pitch, amplitude and formants (look under &quot;Formant&quot;). If you want something besides a picture (i.e. numbers), if you select a part that you want analyzed, under Formant, you can select &quot;formant listing&quot; which will give you a series of formant calculations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T01:44:23.687" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26489" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:14:00.390" Score="2" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently building an alien language that I'm trying not to base on English or basically Europe in general, because that's what cool these days, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, what I think proper nouns are is a word (doesnt have to be a dictionary word) that is used to identify a specific thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other languages that don't use these proper nouns, and if so, what do they use to identify specific people and places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask for you to think of a system instead of proper nouns, but that belongs more to world building than here. Bonus points, though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20512" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T11:57:36.153" Title="Do all languages use Proper Nouns?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26469" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:25:29.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Linguistics SE. The answer to your question would be yes ( &lt;em&gt;is what I think&lt;/em&gt; ), since all cultures/languages have names and all names are &lt;em&gt;proper nouns&lt;/em&gt;. Now, that is just one case, but it answers your question. Were you meaning to ask about any other class of proper nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T08:25:29.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26480" CreationDate="2017-11-26T09:21:03.013" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0465019323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language at the Speed of Sight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1 ed. 2017), p. 45 Bottom.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Combining graphical elements to create words is an essential property of &#xA;  modern writing systems, but the cuneiform implementation included triumphs and disasters. Compounding and forming words out of a cue to sound &#xA;  and a cue to meaning were winners, carried forward into modern writing sys- &#xA;  tems. &lt;strong&gt;The disasters included representing a word such as FOOD (&quot;gu&quot;) by the &#xA;  signs for HEAD (&quot;sag&quot;) and BOWL (&quot;sila&quot;). The meanings of the components &#xA;  were relevant but not their pronunciations.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand how the bolded sentences constitute a disaster? The book didn't include the Sumerian for food, but Google yielded:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2B9X4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2B9X4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't the bolded accurately describe those Chinese Compound Ideographs where each of the characters may be relevant to the Compound Ideograph, but all are pronounced disparately? If the answer is yes, then how's the bolded disastrous? If the Chinese can achieve this, why couldn't the Sumerians? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Compound_ideographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; exemplifies with:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;武&lt;/a&gt; &quot;military&quot;, formed from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%88%88&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;戈&lt;/a&gt; &quot;dagger-axe&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;止&lt;/a&gt; &quot;foot&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All 3 characters have disparate pronunciations in Mandarin and Cantonese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T09:26:15.383" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:53:14.750" Title="Why is a Compound Ideograph disastrous if the meaning of the characters are relevant, but not their pronunciations?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;sumerian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T09:25:58.560" Score="0" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0465019323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language at the Speed of Sight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1 ed. 2017), p. 45 Bottom.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Combining graphical elements to create words is an essential property of &#xA;  modern writing systems, but the cuneiform implementation included triumphs and disasters. Compounding and forming words out of a cue to sound &#xA;  and a cue to meaning were winners, carried forward into modern writing sys- &#xA;  tems. The disasters included representing a word such as FOOD (&quot;gu&quot;) by the &#xA;  signs for HEAD (&quot;sag&quot;) and BOWL (&quot;sila&quot;). The meanings of the components &#xA;  were relevant but not their pronunciations. &lt;strong&gt;Polyphony—using one sign to &#xA;  represent several semantically related words, all pronounced differently—was &#xA;  also a major fail.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct that the bolded is equivalent to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heteronyms&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, then how was polyphony a fail in Sumerian, by the bolded? English can't have a problem with its many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_heteronyms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heteronyms&lt;/a&gt;, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.1. some are startingly also Functional Morphemes like 'do' and 'quite' and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.2. if distinguishing the heteronym for the functional morpheme (from the other heteronyms) were too confusing and grueling, then the heteronymy'd end and the heteronyms'd be substituted by words with different spelling, pronunciation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Anglophones can achieve and live with this, then why couldn't the Sumerians? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T09:44:04.590" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T15:15:51.063" Title="Why was polyphony a failure for the Sumerians, when English functions with heteronymy?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;sumerian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26472" CreationDate="2017-11-26T15:15:51.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinon, English heteronymy is not the same thing. English words are not a single sign; each word is made up of multiple signs (letters) and even heteronyms have a phonetic basis for their pronunciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better comparison might be Chinese languages though. Chinese characters include &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.701.2474&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about 800 polyphonic characters&lt;/a&gt; which can make up 25% of a typical corpus by frequency. Their existence has quite obviously not been a &quot;major fail&quot; for Chinese characters, as evidenced by their daily use by billions of people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T15:15:51.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:17:30.233" Score="15" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classes of words in languages tend to be either &quot;open&quot; (accepting new members readily) or &quot;closed&quot; (rejecting new members). This distinction is fairly easy to see: compare how readily English accepted the verb &quot;to google&quot;, versus the hundreds of years of resistance to singular &quot;they&quot;. So descriptively, verbs in English are an open class, while pronouns are closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But have we ever observed a class of words changing from open to closed, or from closed to open? Or an intermediate &quot;half-open&quot; stage, where new words are accepted but not commonly used or always seen as foreign?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T19:07:30.667" Title="Have we observed classes changing from open to closed, or vice versa?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26475" CreationDate="2017-11-27T00:00:47.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But have we ever observed a class of words changing from open to closed, or from closed to open? Or an intermediate &quot;half-open&quot; stage, where new words are accepted but not commonly used or always seen as foreign?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example a full verb acts like a modal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;brauchen = need (full verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;du brauchst nicht (zu) kommen&#xA;you need not (to) come&#xA;you need not come&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. sollen  (clearly a modal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;du sollst nicht (*zu) kommen&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is (Austrian) German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T00:00:47.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26475" CreationDate="2017-11-27T02:12:59.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes we have, in English. Our prepositions used to be an open class (its why we have so many). New prepositions were derived using the suffixes a- be- de- and a fourth one I can't seem to recall nor find right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it can happen. I admit though, I have no idea why it happened in English. All I know is that it did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though come to think of it, the same thing may be happening to Chinese's pronouns. Thanks to communism, they've done away with their old system of pronouns, which relied heavily on their honorific system. Now there's only one word for I, one for we, etc... The older system is only still remembered because its used to stories taking place in the past, just for the sake or historical accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T02:12:59.140" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26475" CreationDate="2017-11-27T14:23:49.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe we can see a (semi-)opening of the personal pronoun class in English &lt;em&gt;just now&lt;/em&gt;: There are not only a lot of suggestions of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epicene pronoun&lt;/a&gt; floating around (this would extend the closed class by one member, but is in itself not an opening), but there are also a bunch of new pronouns on the verge for a &quot;Third gender&quot;, going as far as allowing every individual to &lt;a href=&quot;https://studentactivism.net/2013/01/10/pgp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chose Eir own pronoun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Right now here on stack overflow pronouns are an open class, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336364/what-does-the-code-of-conduct-say-about-pronouns/336365#336365&quot;&gt;I5 in this official staff post here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-10-23T12:46:21.493" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T12:46:21.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T14:32:32.983" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a reference to the claim that negative comparative operators like &quot;less&quot; are cross-linguistically rarer than their positive counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone familiar with this claim, and able to provide a reference? Thanks in advance for any assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: This question is specifically about the &quot;morphosyntactic inventories&quot; of the world's languages -- are negative comparative operators (e.g. &quot;less&quot;) more marked than positive ones. In saying this, I intend to distinguish my question from questions about whether speakers tend to avoid negative comparisons in preference of positive ones (e.g. avoiding &quot;X is shorter than Y&quot; in favor of &quot;Y is taller than X&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20522" LastEditorUserId="20522" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:57:46.530" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T10:42:39.210" Title="Are negative comparative operators like &quot;less&quot; typologically rarer than their positive counterparts?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26471" CreationDate="2017-11-27T14:50:43.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't feel we have enough context to judge the full argument, but going by what you've quoted, it seems that his line of argument is indeed that composing a symbol such that it has a compound meaning but no relationship to a compound pronunciation is problematic, because you dissociate the symbol from the pronunciation. You make it arbitrary and unpredictable. The implicit conclusion is that readers of such a writing system will have a harder time with literacy and (to go a step further that I will soon explain) with cognitive processes supposedly tied to literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider your counterexample from Chinese excellent. In reality this dissociation does not appear to be a hindrance to reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the fear Seidenberg expresses is not a new one. It rests on the opposite premise: that there are writing systems where there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an association between symbol and pronunciation, and that the pronunciation &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; predictable. This of course refers to alphabetic or syllabic writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, we can't escape the arbitrariness of the relationship. That the symbol &amp;lt; a &gt; makes (in many languages) the sound we transcribe /a/ is an utterly contingent fact. However, we can combine these letters in more or less predictable ways and thereby make the pronunciation of new words predictable. In English this doesn't work so well, but if we take a spelling-reformed language like Spanish we can observe that an invented word like &lt;em&gt;calabrenoda&lt;/em&gt; will be accurately pronounced by all speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume you know all this. What might be surprising is the importance that has been attached to this fact in the past. Keep in mind that language theorists have historically (before linguistics became more of a science) identified random features of their own language and argued for their being the key to the cultural superiority of speakers of their language. The argument generally runs along one of two lines: (a) The mysteriousness/power of the feature shows that the language is highly expressive and poetic (&quot;see how many meanings arise out of one word; how subtle is the English mind!&quot;); or (b) the regularity/sense of the feature shows that its speakers have a naturally logical mental bent. Such arguments, incidentally, are used first and foremost to further political or sociological ends; for example, such linguistic observations were used by medieval Christian critics to argue (along nonsensical lines) that Hebrew was an inherently backward language, aligning with their conviction that Judaism was an inherently backward religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such arguments are not extinct in our day. One recent theorist who argues for the significance of the compositional quality is Kieran Egan, e.g. drawing from Vygotsky in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Educated_Mind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. For Egan, there is a succession of stages that humans and human cultures move through in terms of refinement of thought, and each succession requires that they have certain cognitive tools. He argues that having an alphabetic writing system &lt;em&gt;lends itself&lt;/em&gt; to developing the cognitive tools to move on to the next stage. Therefore, for him, cultures whose language has a less phonologically transparent writing system are at a cognitive disadvantage. One example he cites is that of an indigenous people in Russia who were subjected to a logic test involving syllogisms: &quot;Everywhere in the north is snowy; Siberia is in the north; is Siberia snowy?&quot; They responded, &quot;I don't know. I haven't been there.&quot; He claims that their inability to understand syllogisms (as he reads that exchange) can be attributed to the lack of what he considers a sophisticated, i.e. phonologically transparent, writing system.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's where Seidenberg's argument may be tending towards—I'm speculating. Now, is that view valid? I would tend to side with you and your objection, partly because of that history I referred to. Linguistic features have been tied to cultural superiority questions for a long, long time and rarely with any good reason. Is China exactly a backwards society? I think not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the question more head-on might require some good, hard data on literacy (% among population, age first learned, grade reading level, etc.) among Chinese students with comparable education to that of English students or students of other languages whose language is alphabetic. But intuitively I strongly suspect that there is not a significant discrepancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this whole answer rests on reading a lot into a short quotation from Seidenberg. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* If I had my book with me I would cite the passage. I will try to remember to return to it when I'm home.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:10:04.023" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T19:10:04.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26422" CreationDate="2017-11-27T15:17:23.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your speculation is more or less right, not a weak argument at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a word like רַבִּי ~ ῥαββί ~ &lt;em&gt;rabbi&lt;/em&gt; we can see the influence of Hebrew/Aramaic. The dot you see in the &lt;em&gt;beth&lt;/em&gt; is, as you probably already know, a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dagesh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; in Hebrew indicates various pronunciations whose common feature is that they involve a &quot;stronger&quot; version of a sound. For example, a &lt;em&gt;beth&lt;/em&gt; without a &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced as the fricative /β/ whereas one with a &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced as the stop /b/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying phonological processes for this were various. One of them is simply forte/lene positions, e.g. postconsonantal vs. postvocalic. Another is duplication. Semitic languages have a root system where words usually consist of three consonants, and one of the &quot;defective&quot; root types is roots where two consecutive consonants are the same. They are defective because in speech those two consonants tended to merge into one long consonant, which was also represented in writing. That long consonant, even if originally a weak version of the phoneme, would then become a strong version. For example, /β:/ would be /b/ (I can't remember right now if that would be /b/ or /b:/). As one of the indicators of the root, this pronunciation carried semantic value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caveat is that the &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; was invented long after the time of both Hebrew and Koine Greek. Thus, in the Hebrew writing system of the time, strong/weak pronunciations of certain letters were not marked. Problematically, a casual reader of that word with a cursory knowledge of Hebrew would probably conclude that it was weak because of its postvocalic position. My speculation is therefore that the Koine Greek spelling you identify is an attempt to represent that difference. We can see in the modern writing system that רַבִּי has a strong &lt;em&gt;beth&lt;/em&gt;, but they could only hear it, not see it. So the transliterators into Koine Greek opted to helpfully mark it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T18:30:30.307" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T18:30:30.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26479" CreationDate="2017-11-27T17:09:52.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a quick test using &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de?corpusId=deu_newscrawl_2011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wortschatz&lt;/a&gt; at Leipzig University&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from German language &lt;em&gt;mehr&lt;/em&gt; &quot;more&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;weniger&lt;/em&gt; &quot;less&quot;; &lt;em&gt;größer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bigger&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;kleiner&lt;/em&gt; &quot;smaller&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Wort: mehr Anzahl: 820,965 Rang: 55 Häufigkeitsklasse: 4 &#xA; Wort: weniger Anzahl: 125,207 Rang: 288 Häufigkeitsklasse: 7&#xA; Wort: größer Anzahl: 16,693 Rang: 2,393 Häufigkeitsklasse: 10 &#xA; Wort: kleiner Anzahl: 22,824 Rang: 1,752 Häufigkeitsklasse: 9 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair &lt;em&gt;größer/kleiner&lt;/em&gt; seems to contradict the intuition, but there a lots of non-comparative uses of the two words, specially of &lt;em&gt;kleiner&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;ein kleiner Frechdachs&lt;/em&gt;). Testing with the comparison particle &lt;em&gt;als&lt;/em&gt; restores the ranks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Wort: größer als Anzahl: 3,393 Rang: 10,121 Häufigkeitsklasse: 12 &#xA; Wort: kleiner als Anzahl: 1,325 Rang: 21,873 Häufigkeitsklasse: 13 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the claim seems to be supported by the available data. Unfortunately I have no references on who formulated the claim first (although I think it is a well-known claim in the linguistic community). I am also not aware of a catchy name given to this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T17:09:52.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:34:46.963" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering whether it is possible for a language to move from non-concatenative (root-and-pattern, Arabic-style) morphology to concatenative type known from the Indo-European languages? If any language has undergone such a change, what were the reasons behind it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20529" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:34:46.963" Title="Is it possible to move from non-concatenative to concatenative morphology?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:56:51.113" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it true that has a rule, a language where subject and object aren't explicately marked will always have SVO or OVS order? I've been thinking that it may be possible to get away with having no marking for subject/direct object in a verb-final language. Well, one that relies heavily on coverbs anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to demonstrate my point, I was thinking of a 'primitive' conlang that had a lot of unusual features. One of them being complete lack of any sort of abstract 'grammatical' particles. Every verb in the language is a coverb that can only take ONE argument (typically a direct object). A 'subject' may stand alone at the start of a sentence, though some intransitives can take an agent as its only object (the language has ergative alignment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, my conlang isn't meant to be spoken by modern people. Its my own speculation on what an early proto-language may have looked like. I figured a language like this would be the next stage after an 'improvised' grammar that relied solely on an agentivity heirarchy (like a direct-inverse language) to differentiate subject from object. Simply a single hominid may realize that it could guess which role an object performed in an event based purely on what it is. It wouldn't be 100% reliable of course, but it would serve some benefit that individual to be able to decipher everyone else's babbling with some amount of certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I diverged a bit. But I was wondering if there was any known language that demonstrated zero-marking with either a verb final or verb initial order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T11:00:12.523" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T11:00:12.523" Title="Are there any configurational languages that AREN'T verb-medial?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-28T07:09:46.180" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any online dictionary which shows conversational version of phrases e.g. /ə ˈkʌpə tiː/ instead of /ˈə ˈkʌp ˈəv ˈtiː/ ? And if there's no one, where can I obtain conversation versions of phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20535" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:09:46.180" Title="Conversational IPA" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26479" CreationDate="2017-11-28T10:42:39.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is to the now edited question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It maybe surprising for speakers of Standard Average European languages that so-called &quot;particle comparatives&quot; are rare among the languages of the world, most of the languages use other means to express comparison. For an introduction, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS, Chapter 121&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, WALS does not provide data on positive/negative comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also, that German lacks a positive comparison operator in the strict sense, you just say &lt;em&gt;Peter ist größer als Paul&lt;/em&gt; using the comparative form of the adjective in question. You can say (altho' this is a marked construction, the use of &lt;em&gt;kleiner&lt;/em&gt; is more natural) &lt;em&gt;Paul ist weniger groß als Peter&lt;/em&gt; with a negative comparison operator. Imitating English or French and saying &lt;em&gt;*Peter ist mehr groß als Paul&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical for German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T10:42:39.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26484" CreationDate="2017-11-28T10:54:55.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using WALS with &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/81A_49A#2/16.7/148.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a combined view of &quot;Order of Subject, Object and Verb&quot; with &quot;Number of Cases&quot;&lt;/a&gt; gives 10 VSO languages without case marking, including Welsh, Chamorro, and Tagalog. Malagasy is VOS without case marking. There are alos some verb-final languages without case marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T10:54:55.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26469" CreationDate="2017-11-28T11:44:07.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be possible, if cumbersome, for a hypothetical language to avoid proper nouns. Writing the aliens' dialogue in a book might not be fun, but it might work for an occasional detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, what function do proper nouns fill? And can anything else do that job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proper nouns pick out a particular entity or set of entities. They are a shorthand. There are other ways to do that, often used if you don't know the name for a thing. These include possessives, predicates, and pronouns.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; You have a dog with no name.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;Your dog.&quot; The possessive + a singular noun narrows it down to a single entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; But you've had other dogs in the past. You are unsure which &quot;your dog&quot; I mean.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;The dog you have now.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; You have a few children, one of whom I want to refer to.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;Your second child.&quot; Or perhaps she's the only girl. I say &quot;Your daughter.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; There are photos of my cousins in a photo album.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;Have you ever met the one who's wearing a white shirt in this photo?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; You find it hard to identify which cousin I mean.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;This one&quot; and I point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case:&lt;/strong&gt; I want to discuss the Jesuits.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solution:&lt;/strong&gt; I say &quot;The missionaries who started going to other countries about four hundred years ago and who have been to all six continents.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the last one requires a few qualifying predicates; I can't even say Catholic or identify a single country they went to, at least by name. And it might still not be enough for you to realize that I mean the Jesuits. Even worse, we may not know the same things about them. You might think I mean some other set of missionaries because you don't happen to know how many continents the Jesuits have been to or in which century the society was founded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, we might not even agree on a predicate. You and I could talk about &quot;the greatest English writer&quot; and I could be talking about Shakespeare when you mean Ian McEwan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are the cases that would be harder to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, even proper nouns aren't always enough to do this job. If you address &quot;Luke&quot; now, we know you mean me. But if there are two people named Luke in the room, you have to say &quot;Luke S.&quot; or &quot;Luke A.&quot; But what if a person's full name isn't unique? Say there are two people named Luke Sawczak. Now you have to fall back to the same strategies shown above: &quot;The Luke Sawczak who was born in Canada&quot; or &quot;That one there&quot;... and in sentences like those, the name looks awfully like a common noun, not a proper noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I mention that pronouns are one of the strategies to avoid proper nouns. Obviously these are a huge help. And I can't imagine a language that could function without them. Even to identify the speaker (&quot;I&quot;) or the listener (&quot;you&quot;) in any conversation would become monumentally difficult. That said, there are languages that have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person#Additional_persons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bigger sets of pronouns&lt;/a&gt; than we do whose speakers might wonder how on earth we get by... :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T11:57:36.153" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T11:57:36.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26491" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The measure of information entropy associated with each possible data value is the negative logarithm of the probability mass function for the value. Thus, when the data source has a lower-probability value (i.e., when a low-probability event occurs), the event carries more &quot;information&quot; (&quot;surprisal&quot;) than when the source data has a higher-probability value. Generally, entropy refers to disorder or uncertainty, and the definition of entropy used in information theory is directly analogous to the definition used in statistical thermodynamics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of information entropy was introduced by Claude Shannon in his 1948 paper &quot;A Mathematical Theory of Communication&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic model of a data communication system is composed of three elements, a source of data, a channel, and a receiver, and the &quot;fundamental problem of communication&quot; is for the receiver to be able to identify what data was generated by the source, based on the signal it receives through the channel. The entropy provides an absolute limit on the shortest possible average length of a lossless compression encoding of the data produced by a source, and if the entropy of the source is less than the channel capacity of the communication channel, the data generated by the source can be reliably communicated to the receiver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information entropy is typically measured in bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26492" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" Score="0" Body="For questions about entropy in language." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T13:56:58.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-29T09:24:21.840" Score="0" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to find dictionary bilingual word lists like English-Swedish, English-Danish, English-Hindi, English-Hungarian and many others. I am also interested in English-Multilingual word lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20455" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T10:48:40.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T10:48:40.147" Title="Where can I download dictionary bilingual word list in many languages?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-29T10:11:21.747" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there languages in which lexical tone can associate to semivowels or glottal stops, or does tone ALWAYS associate only to vowels when it is realized in a spoken word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T17:55:07.950" Title="Tone associated to segments other than vowels" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26441" CreationDate="2017-11-29T15:49:27.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is a question better posed elsewhere, but a quick answer in point form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;name&quot; are to be considered synonymous here, as a result of Latinate languages' influence on this terminology, e.g. French whose word &lt;em&gt;nom&lt;/em&gt; refers to both.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;proper name&quot; has existed since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/proper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least the 13th century&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At that time, &quot;proper&quot; had more of the original Latinate meaning: that which is one's own, that which belongs to one, or is natural to, inherently characteristic of one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At that time, &quot;common&quot; too had more of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/common&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original Latinate meaning&lt;/a&gt;: what is shared or owned by the community, by more than one person; hence what is not proper to any one thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A &lt;em&gt;proper noun&lt;/em&gt; is thus a noun that belongs to some particular entity, and a &lt;em&gt;common noun&lt;/em&gt; is one that does not belong to some particular entity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You're not alone in your curiosity! The modern (Lewis's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dangerous&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) senses of these words has made the grammar terms technical &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=RRtAAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA43&amp;amp;dq=%22common+noun%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjVjoP5jeTXAhVK_IMKHfC-CD0Q6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22common%20noun%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;since at least 1850&lt;/a&gt;, when they were the subject of jokes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If &quot;city&quot; is a common noun, &quot;Philadelphia&quot; is an uncommon noun! And if &quot;Philadelphia&quot; is a proper noun, &quot;city&quot; is an improper noun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T01:04:28.200" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T01:04:28.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26495" CreationDate="2017-11-29T17:55:07.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Associating&quot; is a phonological relation, pertaining to the distribution of tones relative to segments. The notion that a segment is capable of having the association relation with a tone is abbreviated by saying that such and such segment is a Tone Bearing Unit (TBU). Being a phonological relationship, there can not only be a considerable degree of variation between language in terms of the segments that define TBUs, there may also be derivational variation within a language (some segments only become TBUs later in the derivation). There is a point at the end of the phonology when things become murky and we stop talking about tones associating, instead talking about &quot;realization of tone as F0&quot; (i.e. we look at pitch tracks). I will forego an extensive discussion of relating the latter kind of continuous phonetic event to categorial segment / tone relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most basic generalization about TBUs is that vowels are always TBUs, thus are capable of (directly or indirectly) bearing lexically-specified tones. In saying &quot;directly or indirectly&quot;, I'm referring to an extended version of the simple dominance-type relation that is the formalization of &quot;associate&quot; in autosegmental phonology. The underlying issue, with reference to an string [bá], is whether the tonal object is immediately dominated by the laryngeal node of the vowel, the segmental root node, its mora, or the syllable containing that vowel. Moreover, since tones are not unstructured letters (they are structures defined by combinations of features), we have to settle on what thing we mean by &quot;a tone&quot;. Conventionally, we say that a tone is the totality of features defining a tone, more verbosely called a &quot;tone root node&quot;. While I am convinced that the best solution is that tone root nodes (i.e. tones) are immediately dominated by moras, there have been many proposals about what exact thing tones associate to. So tones at least indirectly associate to vowels in that they are immediately dominated by moras, which immediately dominate segmental root nodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question is, what kinds of segments can be moraic? Just asking that much, the answer is, &quot;any&quot;. However, it is well-known that there are major asymmetries between vowels and other segments, in terms of their ability to be moraic. Dissertations and other research by Draga Zec and Bruce Morén-(Duolljá) have explored this topic (though non-tonally), and there are some typological generalizations about what segments are optionally moraic (optional in the sense &quot;may be, but are not always in all languages and items&quot;). Moraic consonants generally are found in the syllable coda, although see work by Jen Muller and Nina Topintzi on non-coda geminates (moras being implicated via the credo that geminates are moraic). One language that figures prominently in the discussion of geminate consonants and moras is Luganda: all non-continuants can be geminate, and they act as TBUs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common non-vowel which is tone-bearing is the syllabic nasal. An example is Logoori [ḿꜜkwáasi] 'in-law'. This is probably due to the fact that nasals are most susceptible to being autonomously syllable. Looking at post-vocalic coda segments, the main generalization is that sonorants (liquids and nasals) are most capable of being tone bearing. Glides will be kicked down the road for a while. Although [h, ʔ] are sonorants under SPE criteria, they do not appear to enter into the &quot;asymmetrical coda consonant&quot; class. When we get to the point of asking whether obstruents can be TBUs, we are now in the realm of rare events: they may be, but are usually not. Now turning back to laryngeal glides, there are languages (Chinese languages especially) where glottal stops are TBUs, but I am not aware of any language where glottals &lt;em&gt;and not other obstruents&lt;/em&gt; are TBUs. It may be that the basic TBU cut is vowels / sonorants / consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the status of glides as TBUs, there is a problem of circularity of analysis here: glides almost never minimally contrast with glides. If one encounters something that sounds like it has the segments &quot;maw&quot; and has a falling tone (when contour tones require two TBUs), we would usually say that the string is [máù], and if there is only one tone, we would say it is [máw]. Sometimes, you encounter transcriptions like [máẁ] (e.g. in Akan), but the transcription there is being led by a phonological premise, that there are no vowel sequences in the language. So it is extremely difficult to determine whether you are dealing with a tone-bearing glide, or a tone-bearing vowel in a monosyllabic (or even disyllabic) vowel sequence. Morton in her dissertation on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/osudl/Morton204dissertation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anii&lt;/a&gt; discusses the interesting problem that there is a phonological contrast between vowel-vowel sequences and vowel-glide sequences. In this language, vowel-vowel sequences &quot;act short&quot; (true diphthongs have only one TBU), but sequences of V-nasal, V-glide and long vowels &quot;act long&quot; (have two TBUs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, briefly addressing the phonetic issue, people also use &quot;associate&quot; in a phonetic sense to refer to whether a given segment has a surface-distinct pitch pattern, that is, the consonants &quot;are pronounced with their own tone&quot;. This matter really can only be addressed in the context of a full phonetic analysis of F0 ~ tone realizations in a language, without which you could pretty automatically reject potential examples of surface tone-bearing consonants by saying &quot;That's just X&quot; (for a small range of Xs). Examples like Logoori [ḿꜜkwáasi] are hard to trivialize, whereas [ḿsáára] 'tree' can be eliminated from the set of hard-core examples by saying that it is really [m̩sáára] with higher pitch phonetically anticipated on the preconsonantal nasal. Bearing all of that in mind, at the phonetic level (and by definition), any segment &quot;with phonetic tone&quot; must be voiced. As example of a surface-distinctive tone bearing (voiced) obstruent in Logoori is [d́ꜜdíiji] &quot;wall&quot; (compare [ddɪ́kʊ] &quot;day&quot;). Such examples are extremely rare, and not well-studied from a phonetic perspective in any language (the main other candidate that I know of being Luganda). My actually final point will be that Nantongese Chinese (and possible other dialects) have some unusual vowels, which sound like syllabic voiced fricatives, and are fully tone-bearing throughout the phonology. This is conceptually related to Mandarin &quot;syllabic z&quot;. In Mandarin, these only appear after sibilants and may be reduced to being an allophone of some other high vowel; this does not appear to be possible for Nantongese. However, from the perspective of phonological function, these things are vowels, just not the usual unconstricted kind of vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T17:55:07.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-29T19:43:31.667" Score="8" ViewCount="1283" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hellenization of the classical world is one of the biggest events in ancient history, similar to the conquests of Rome in later centuries. Greek rulers held Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey, even places as far as Afghanistan and Delhi. This trend continued into antiquity, with koine Greek becoming the lingua franca of the eastern half of the Roman Empire and still being used as a language of administration until the 1500s. My question is, why did Greek not develop into different languages over such a long period of time? Latin diverged into dozens of distinct languages in half the time, yet Greek remained mostly pure from Anatolia to Bactria. Why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20316" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T00:01:40.980" Title="Why did Greek never develop into other languages like Latin?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26502" CreationDate="2017-11-30T00:01:40.980" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; develop into other languages. It's just that they did not end up as widespread as many of the descendants of Latin did. As happens to many (if not most?) languages, its descendants died out before becoming established.  Even today, though, there are descendants of Ancient Greek which diverge from the Demotic/Katharevousa standard: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Modern_Greek#Outlying_varieties&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pontic, Cappadocian, Griko, Rumeíka.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most divergent from standard Greek is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsakonian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tsakonian&lt;/a&gt;, which although sometimes called a Greek 'dialect', is not mutually intelligible with standard Greek and probably deserves to be considered a distinct language. It is believed to be descended from Doric. It has only a few hundred speakers at most and is probably moribund. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this happened, that's hard to say. Language evolution takes its twists and turns due to accidents of history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T00:01:40.980" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2017-11-30T01:57:18.390" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;AUG - Applicative universal grammar, by Shauman. It somewhat mix of chomsky ideas with semiotic approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20572" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T01:57:18.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26209" CreationDate="2017-11-30T08:17:05.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171130080859/https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/a-journey-to-10-word-error-rate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20171130080859/https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/a-journey-to-10-word-error-rate/&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our &lt;strong&gt;word error rate on LibriSpeech’s test-clean set is 6.5%&lt;/strong&gt;, which not only achieves our initial goal, but gets us close to human level performance. [...] (5.83% according to the Deep Speech 2 paper).  On a MacBook Pro, using the GPU, the model can do inference at a real-time factor of around 0.3x, and around 1.4x on the CPU alone. (A real-time factor of 1x means you can transcribe 1 second of audio in 1 second.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook AI Research Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit&lt;/a&gt; (Torch+lua, BSD License) gets 4.8% WER test-clean and 14.5% WER test-other on the  LibriSpeech corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T08:27:41.840" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T08:27:41.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-30T13:49:05.777" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am attempting a problem with anaphora resolution. I need help with some terms in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J94-4002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lappin and Leass'&lt;/a&gt; paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the paper, it is mentioned &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A pronoun P is non-coreferential with a (non-reflexive or non-reciprocal) noun phrase N if any of the following conditions hold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P and N have incompatible agreement features.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P is in the argument domain of N.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P is in the adjunct domain of N.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P is an argument of a head H, N is not a pronoun, and N is contained&#xA;  in H.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P is in the NP domain of N.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;P is a determiner of a noun Q, and N is contained in Q. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DS8zc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DS8zc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Some Examples&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far I know,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjuncts&lt;/strong&gt; are not necessary to give meaning to the sentence, they just add more information. i.e. omission of adjuncts doesn't change the meaning of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arguments&lt;/strong&gt; are necessary. Their omission may cause a change in meaning os sentence. (They basically are complements right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So what does an argument domain and adjunct domain mean? And how do I classify them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there another way to differentiate arguments and adjuncts? I need to teach it to a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again what is &lt;em&gt;domain&lt;/em&gt; of noun phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please elaborate the 6th point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20058" LastEditorUserId="20058" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T14:20:35.060" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T14:20:35.060" Title="Adjunct domain and Argument domain" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-30T14:09:54.940" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. in total, how many people around the world spoke Spanish and French respectively in the 18th century?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I know the data on most languages are scanty. So no, I'm focusing on major world languages like English, French or Spanish, whose data are supposed to be abundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no, I don't need a precise number or a particular year. I'm only interested in the general trend. A rough estimate in units of century will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried many times searching things like &quot;English number of speakers in history&quot;, &quot;Total population French over time&quot; or &quot;Portuguese users historical data&quot; on Google. But I just can't find any statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the historical trends I'm interested in include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) how the total number of English speakers increased over the past 1500 years, from the tongue of a few Anglo-Saxon tribes to a global language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) how the total number of French speakers increased over the past 300 years, as more and more West Africans in the colonies adopts it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be even greater if there are mini-trends, e.g. how the proportion of Spanish speakers in Mexico increased over the past 500 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I know, half a century after the conquest of the Aztec Empire, Central Mexico was still predominantly Nahuatl-speaking. Today, however, Spanish is the mother tongue of 97% of the population. How did this language shift take place over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T14:09:54.940" Title="Where can I find the HISTORICAL data on the total no of speakers of a language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-30T19:06:18.503" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is called the property of phonemes due to which one minimal pair is enough to establish the phonemic status of a sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20582" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T09:16:39.353" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T09:16:39.353" Title="Phonemes and phonemic sounds" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26023" CreationDate="2017-11-30T22:59:29.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Infants can reliability perceive contrasts between sounds in various languages. However, by the age of 10-12 months, babies' ability to distinguish between contrasts important for their native language(s) continues to improve while the ability to hear non-native contrasts declines. In other words, the brain and auditory systems &quot;tune into&quot; aspects of the incoming input that are important for their native language and starts &quot;ignoring&quot; variation that might be important in other languages but not in the native language(s). See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies#t-227277&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies#t-227277&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for older listeners, like adults, there is variation in how well learners are able to still &quot;hear&quot; these forgotten contrasts or re-learn them. Tests of language aptitude may attempt to measure this ability. For example,  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/slrf/2008/paper2382.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/slrf/2008/paper2382.pdf&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, re-learning may be easier for people who have overheard the to-be-learned language in childhood, even if they don't remember anything about it consciously. See, for example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.664.6921&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.664.6921&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20585" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T22:59:29.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2017-12-01T03:10:26.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just adding another language that I don't think has been mentioned yet. The Bengali (or Bangla) word for both the fruit and the color is কমলা (transliteration: komola). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20590" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T03:10:26.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26515" CreationDate="2017-12-01T10:14:41.597" Score="0" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some of the stopwords in Tamil. The ones I could come up with were 'வது', 'ஆம்'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20595" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:27:35.607" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:27:35.607" Title="What are the stopwords in Tamil language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;tamil&gt;&lt;stopwords&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26514" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:42:43.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look for the most frequent words in Tamil and make, e.g., the 50 most frequent words your stopwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List of the 50 most frequent words for many languages are available from the &lt;em&gt;Wortschatz&lt;/em&gt; portal at Leipzig University, here is a direct links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://cls.corpora.uni-leipzig.de/de/tam_community_2017/3.2.1_The%20Most%20Frequent%2050%20Words.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2017's TOP 50 words for Tamil&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:42:43.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26516" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:44:11.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stopwords are words that are excluded from Natural Language Processing for a variety of reasons (e.g., processing efficiency or clarity of the results). Usually the most frequent words are selected as stopwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hans Peter Luhn who is also the creator of KWIC (Keywords in context) is credited for the coining of the terms stopword and stoplist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:49:21.537" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:49:21.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26517" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:44:11.213" Score="0" Body="For questions about stopwords, i.e., words that are excluded from Natural Language Processing." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:45:58.457" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:45:58.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:01:44.303" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any freely available online data giving the numbers and frequencies of nouns used in some well-known novels, whether or not the novels are in the public domain? I mean data such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dan Brown, &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No. of noun instances: 30407&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No. of unique nouns: 900&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nouns appearing once: 17&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nouns appearing twice: 32&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: these are made up data!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20601" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T11:24:09.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T11:24:09.313" Title="Online data giving numbers and frequencies of nouns in some well-known novels?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26553" CreationDate="2017-12-02T21:17:37.420" Score="4" ViewCount="1046" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to find the proper term for when a language's alphabet has one to one correspondence between the letters written and the pronunciation for those letters. Turns out its called phonemic orthography. I can't think of any cases where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Telugu&lt;/a&gt; deviates from being phonemic. On the other hand I've also read that no language is 100% perfectly phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any one tell me in what situations Telugu behaves non-phonemically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, th in English can be pronounced as ð (as in this) or θ (as in thin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this never(?) seems to happen in Telugu. If you consider the Telugu letter 'ప' it is always(?) Pronounced 'pa' like the pronunciation of 'p' in puppy. My question is does Telugu ever Violate this one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes because Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one&#xA;  correspondence (bijection) between the graphemes (letters) and the&#xA;  phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be&#xA;  represented by its corresponding grapheme. So the spelling of a word&#xA;  would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation, and&#xA;  conversely, a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be&#xA;  able to infer its spelling without any doubt. That ideal situation is&#xA;  rare but exists in a few languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20631" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T19:55:41.853" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T09:24:41.007" Title="Does the Telugu script have near perfect phonemic orthography?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T04:05:56.027" Score="4" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In particular, I'm curious about the phenomenon where a language creates most new, modern words using a dead ancient language, rather than its existing, living original word roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is Japanese, which created most words using classical Chinese instead of native Japanese word roots during the Meiji Restoration (and English since the end of WWII).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is modern English. Yes, of course English could've created most new words with the original English roots in theory. But people just don't do it in practice. Why? A simple explanation is that it's just a tradition. A convention. A habit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is actually begging the question. The question remains: why do people stick to this tradition, when the Roman Empire fell long ago, when it was just a dead ancient language, and when it was no longer the dominant academic langauge from the 18th century on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it isn't even a minor academic langauge. Most scholars don't write in it any more. BUT English is STILL deriving NEW, modern words from it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow, people just find it more &quot;suitable&quot;, more &quot;appropriate&quot; to continue to express new, modern things using Latin words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we start creating new words using old English roots again? Could we stop borrowing from Latin from now on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;could&quot; I do not mean its capability in theory, but whether it's feasible, workable and/or possible in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since modern English is still creating new words TWO CENTURIES after Latin ceased to be the academic langauge, can I safely assume that without major social change, it will continue to do so over the next two centuries? Or even 1000 years later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20373" LastEditorUserId="20373" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T05:29:47.843" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T23:15:30.830" Title="What determines how a language creates new words? For example, is it likely for English to continue to create new words from Latin in future?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;prestige&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T04:48:42.760" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;A field linguists is most likely an adult, after all. We all know that babies are capable of hearing the specific sounds in natural languages. As a person grows up, however, he/she starts to lose the ability to distinguish between different phonemes in a non-native language. The same goes for other features of a language, like the subtleties in semantics, grammar, pragmatics, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's true that a field linguist generally receives adequate training in linguistics before going on to document an unknown language. But what if there are rare, unknown sounds or grammatical structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistics training he/she has received wouldn't have covered this because these things are, well, unknown to linguistics yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some rare sounds (like the click sounds) are easy to spot for even non-natives, others are more subtle and therefore harder to pick up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some undocumented langauges are endangered, so there are often many bilingual speakers (who have to learn a more prestigious language) who can help the linguist and point out these nuances. But he/she may not be aware of them without linguistic training, and few people happen to both speak the obscure langauge and have studied linguistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And anyway what about those langauges that have mostly or only monolingual speakers? Like many native Amazonian languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the field linguist takes the pain to learn it, he's still a non-native speaker who is unlikely to be able to distinguish those things that are not known in linguistics yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how is it possible to record these rare, unknown details in an undocumented language? Is it likely for him/her to miss them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20373" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:22:41.130" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:22:41.130" Title="How does a field linguist record rare, unknown features of an undocumented language? Is it likely for him/her to miss the details?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T18:33:30.437" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key distinction, where Spell-Out is a &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; in the derivation rather than a true &lt;em&gt;level of representation&lt;/em&gt; is still rather obscure to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you explain why Spell-Out is something different, rather than a different name for the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:33:30.437" Title="Isn't postulating Spell-Out resurrecting the old notion of Surface Structure?" Tags="&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26524" CreationDate="2017-12-03T18:45:05.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got some money from one of my teachers (Cathy Callahan) to drive out to California to do some field work on Yawelmani (a well-documented American Indian language).  But the only Yawelmani speaker I could locate refused to speak to me -- he seemed to be angry about something.  So with help from a guy at a museum in Bakersfield, I got the name and address of a woman north of Bakersfield who spoke &quot;Indian&quot;.  So I headed up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She said she spoke Tachi (but she got that information from someone at the Bakersfield museum).  Later, I found that name in a list of Yokuts tribes made by Kroeber, but the language seems to be undocumented.  So anyhow, I spent a couple weeks transcribing forms from her (Maria Domingo).  She was a great informant. I had some difficulty with some nominalized verb forms that seemed to end with [h].  Sort of.  The [h]-like sound might have been aspiration of the preceding voiceless consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Stanley Newman's monograph &lt;em&gt;Yokuts Language of California&lt;/em&gt;, I was familiar with Yawelmani, and it was apparent that Tachi was very close to Yawelmani. Some of the Tachi forms that had me puzzled were clearly related to Yawelmani forms ending in /a/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weeks later after I got back to Ohio and looked more at Newman's book, I found much more evidence that the Tachi forms I'd collected were like Yawelmani, and I was also reminded that another Yokuts dialect had some word final voiceless vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then I knew.  Well, I can't prove it, but I'm convinced that the &quot;Tachi&quot; forms I'd written down were so very similar to Yawelmani, because they were actually Yawelmani, and Maria had picked up a few forms with voiceless final vowels from one of the other Yokuts dialects.  I had never heard in person a language with voiceless vowels, and when I heard [kA]/[tA]/[pA], aspiration was as close as I could come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:45:05.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T20:02:47.843" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the historical linguistics of constructions like &amp;quot;that's me&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;this is she&amp;quot; when answering the phone. Searching online led to a Google Books peephole view of a book that describes this as happening with the transition to late modern English (Denison, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xW_JAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA22&amp;amp;ots=Q39zxgFPYC&amp;amp;dq=english%20copula%20subjective&amp;amp;pg=PA22#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=english%20copula%20subjective&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Historical Syntax&lt;/a&gt;). Unfortunately since I don't have other access to that particular book, I can't tell where exactly Denison's periodization places the transition to late modern English (1700? 1800?), or whether he has a theory about what process took place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Browsing online suggests two possible theories to me. (1) This is just part of the centuries-long process through which English has been losing its case structure. (2) The emphatic pronoun, which happens to have the same form as the nonemphatic objective pronoun, became preferred. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299779&quot;&gt;This post&lt;/a&gt; on english.SE suggests this theory, but he admits he doesn't have evidence.) I suppose both 1 and 2 could be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fill in the picture, it would also be interesting to know which form authors such as Jane Austen used, and whether or not there is evidence that the archaic form was consciously revived by prescriptivists after it had died, or simply survived in certain set phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one of these theories is right, how does it deal with the following? I ask &amp;quot;Where's the basketball team?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*That's they over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?That is they over there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my ear, the first one sounds like nothing a native speaker would ever say, while the second one might pass. Does the lack of a contraction make it sound more emphatic (theory #2), or less formal (#1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12663" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T20:08:11.897" Title="Subjective pronouns in English copulas: gradual loss of objective case, or emphatic construction taking over?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26522" CreationDate="2017-12-03T20:42:16.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to write this as a comment, but it was too long. Anyway, I don't speak Telugu, I speak Kannada. While I can't tell you about the differences between what's indicated in the script and what's actually spoken in Telugu, I can tell you about that in Kannada. This might help you come up with analogous examples for Telugu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) Regional dialects&lt;/strong&gt; may demonstrate their own peculiar deviations. While ಎಲೆ (&quot;leaf&quot;) indicates &lt;em&gt;/ele/&lt;/em&gt;, and that's mostly how it's pronounced in most dialects, in the northern dialects it is pronounced &lt;em&gt;/eli/&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) Contemporary informal registers&lt;/strong&gt; tend to omit sounds indicated by the script. While news readers or literary scholars might enunciate all the sounds of &quot;ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾರೆ&quot; (&quot;will do&quot;, 3rd person plural) and pronounce it &lt;em&gt;/maaDuttaare/&lt;/em&gt; most native speakers would read it as &lt;em&gt;/maaDtare/&lt;/em&gt; or  &lt;em&gt;/maaDtaare/&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T23:11:08.017" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T23:11:08.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26524" CreationDate="2017-12-03T20:48:54.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to record rare features of a language because it is possible to encounter such a feature, and it is possible to record. It is up to the linguist to take appropriate note of the feature, which does depend on the background and interest of the linguist. Even a native speaker of a language may be completely unaware that his language has such-and-such feature, in fact it is uncommon for native speaker linguists to initially have awareness of &quot;rare&quot; features of their language which are not also found in the dominant standard language(s) of the region. Outside of certain parts of Asia, tone is an &quot;exotic&quot; feature of language not found in standard languages, but tone is overall &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a rare feature in language (between 1/3 and 1/2 of languages have tone). Commonly, linguists who are starting their training, and speak a tonal language, will &quot;miss&quot; the fact that tone is a significant feature of their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a continuum of &quot;not getting&quot; some feature of a language. One end is absolute unawareness. Staying with a theme, the linguist could be completely unaware that the language he is looking at is tonal. There are various linguistic reason for this unawareness, such as that tonal distinctions have very low functional utility especially no grammatical distinctiveness, or it has low physical differentiability (differences in the 5-10 hz realm; very long spans for physical realization). The linguist can contribute to total unawareness in unnummerable ways, for example they only worked on the language for two weeks; they gathered the wrong kinds of materials (raw conversations between speakers); they didn't care enough (put differently, the linguist is focusing on something &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt;: looking at pragmatics, not phonemes; looking at phonemes, not information structure encoded in tenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that we discover rare features is that we pay attention and return to things that are puzzling. We can do this if we are engaged in a long-term controlled scientific investigation of the language. Even if we weren't carefully trained to transcribe tone, fancy duration properties or distinctive vowel phonation, we are capable of noticing that some two words have similar yet somehow different vowels. When you notice such a thing, you start to wonder &quot;Hmmm I wonder if there's some distinction in the language that I'm not getting&quot;, so we dig deeper and eventually we learn that breathiness is contrastive, that there are 4 tone levels, 5 types of falling tone, or three degrees of length. With more and more experience, you better able to notice obscure things about new languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is ideally. In reality, sometimes we don't notice at all, or we notice something yet can't figure out what it is or how to notate it (some people say they are &quot;tone-deaf&quot;, which is not ever true, but some people are really bad at it). We may not really care enough about the feature to ask all of the relevant questions (semanticists typically don't mess with transcribing tone; phonologists typically don't mess with the elaborate contexts required for distinguishing kinds of focus in verbs). We are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; all in it for the really long-haul (decades of research on a language). Sometimes we &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; record everything, so if you made an error in the field, you can't go back to the recording and re-check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's possible to say anything substantive about rates of blatant error in fieldwork. Very rarely, we can know that X is wrong about some language that they were working on; more often, we know that we found something different with &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; speakers, but here are dialects, and languages change. We do know, though, that there are very few absolutely perfect descriptions of languages: we don't expect a description of a language to give an absolutely flawless description of word order, morphology, semantics and phonology in some language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Field workers don't actually get much by way of training in what exists in languages. We get a relatively standard superficial exposure to unusual sounds in the general phonetics class (which usually amounts to learning IPA for English then maybe a week of &quot;not English&quot; sounds and symbols); other general linguistics classes don't provide you with the cross-linguistic background needed to immediately recognize &quot;Aha, this is an ergative language!&quot;. What we get in field methods training is experience in figuring out how to collect and make sense of data. So &quot;what is known&quot; in linguistics doesn't have much applicability to the average field linguist. There are some institutional exceptions, where students have extensive and relatively rigorous training in grammatical diversity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T20:48:54.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2017-12-03T21:15:02.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Bulgaria, the definite article did start as a separate word, which loosely translates to &quot;this one&quot;. or &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot; and &quot;it&quot; for the 3 genders, so Bulgarian ended with different suffixes for each gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;котка+тя = котката [kotka + tya = kotkata] {cat+she} FEMALE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;куче+то = кучето [kuche + to = kucheto] {dog+it} NEUTRAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;елен+той = еленът [elen + toy = elen't] {deer+he} MALE &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;кон+той = конят [kon + toy = konyat] {horse+he} MALE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It seems the ending for male words had been abbreviated to simply the letter T with a vowel between it and the last consonant of the word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the article as a separate word is also clearly visible, as stated above, in the way the suffix is added to the adjective before the noun while leaving the noun in its indefinite form, but carrying the gender of the noun. In case of multiple adjectives, only the first one gets the suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;голяма+тя бяла котка  = голямата бяла котка [goljama+tya byala kotka = golyamata byala kotka] {the big white cat}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that way Bulgarian is similar to English, German, Spanish, and other European languages where only the first of a series of adjectives is &quot;affected&quot; by the definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20648" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T21:15:02.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T22:40:13.130" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In written English, I often see redundant repetition of the same or similar words even in the same sentence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugu_Mbatha-Raw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's an example&lt;/a&gt; I've just seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was born to Patrick Mbatha, a black &lt;strong&gt;African&lt;/strong&gt; doctor originally&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;from South Africa&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's another one from the Uncle Scrooge story &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Atlantis&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Donald, &lt;strong&gt;collect&lt;/strong&gt; this debt, and I'll give you half of what you &lt;strong&gt;collect&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Influenced by my native Latin language, I'd prefer to write just &quot;a black South African doctor&quot;, and would likely change the structure of the second example to, &quot;and you'll get half of it,&quot; like the official translation of &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Atlantis&lt;/em&gt; in my country - it says, literally, &quot;and half of it is yours.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend who's a native speaker of a Slavic language agrees with me that written English is much more accepting to this than the standard forms of the other languages we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these examples really sound completely fine to native English speakers and happen more often than in other European languages, or we're being affected by confirmation bias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20652" LastEditorUserId="20652" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T22:45:17.397" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T22:45:17.397" Title="Is standard written English really more open to the repetition of words?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26544" CreationDate="2017-12-04T05:01:41.893" Score="8" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;English isn't a highly inflected language, but it did evolve from one and still has at least: -s, -es; -ed, -ing; -er, -est; for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if these all evolved from separate words, or do they go too far back into PIE to know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:05:07.083" Title="Are the inflectional endings in English known to have evolved from separate words or do they go too far back into PIE to know?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T07:00:48.070" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that I have the ability, like all, to force air out of the little places behind the tonsils, and I was curious if this is an actual articulation? I don't know what part of the mouth, or vocal tract, this would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that the more I pronounce it, the more it kind of sounds like a pharyngeal fricative. I am not quite sure which part of the mouth exactly is the pharynx, I just know I can pronounce pharyngeal sounds. I guess either it is a pharyngeal fricative and I am not used to thinking of it differently, or perhaps an allophone of the pharyngeal fricative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mouth anatomy is a little &quot;lacking,&quot; but I think the area I am speaking of is between the &lt;em&gt;vellum&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;posterior faucial pillar.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T00:30:38.787" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T00:30:38.787" Title="Are there any fricatives pronounced behind the tonsils?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8493" CreationDate="2017-12-04T07:22:49.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's very sensible to me, as I, too, am trying to understand the relationship between lemmas and lexemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to what others have said about comparatives and superlatives, I believe regional differences in spelling should be categorized under the same lemma: &lt;em&gt;colorfully&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;colourfully&lt;/em&gt; share the lemma &quot;colorfully&quot; (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). And they also share a lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will argue here that there are cases where two words form a lemma yet don't share a lexeme. In biology, a &lt;em&gt;chimeric&lt;/em&gt; organism is a type of genetic hybrid; in art/culture, a &lt;em&gt;chimerical&lt;/em&gt; idea is a type of mixed up thought. Since a biologist wouldn't speak of a &lt;em&gt;chimerical organism&lt;/em&gt; and an artist wouldn't say a &lt;em&gt;chimeric idea&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=chimeric%20gene%2C%20chimerical%20gene%2Cchimeric%20idea%2C%20chimerical%20idea&amp;amp;year_start=1988&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=20&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cchimeric%20gene%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cchimerical%20idea%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see Ngram Viewer chart&lt;/a&gt;), shouldn't these be classed as separate lexemes? Yet, grammatically, they are both adjectives with slightly different inflections (&lt;em&gt;Calvinist/Calvinistic&lt;/em&gt; is another example), so shouldn't they share a lemma?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To finally get back to adverbs, then, what are we to do with &lt;em&gt;chimerically&lt;/em&gt;? Both the biologist and the social scientist have to share this since there is no &lt;em&gt;chimericly&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=chimeric%2Cchimerical%2Cchimerically%2Cchimericly%2Cchimaeric%2Cchimaerical%2Cchimaerically&amp;amp;year_start=1988&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=20&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cchimeric%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cchimerical%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cchimerically%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cchimaeric%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cchimaerical%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;). I'm in favor of splitting &lt;em&gt;chimerically&lt;/em&gt; into two different lexemes. It's also possible, but seemingly rare, for a BrE writer to use &lt;em&gt;chimaerically&lt;/em&gt;, which would add to the lemma &lt;em&gt;chimerically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;examples:&#xA;&quot;The &lt;strong&gt;chimerically&lt;/strong&gt; clonal grape The problems posed by clonality, collectivity, and chimerism are brought together... in the case of Pinot meunier&quot;&#xA;- &lt;em&gt;Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Suppose Hailey hallucinates a &lt;strong&gt;chimerically&lt;/strong&gt; colored dragon.&quot;&#xA;- &lt;em&gt;The Sources of Intentionality&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20661" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T07:22:49.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T08:59:32.037" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;My working model is thus: An &lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt; should be flexible in that it can describe a variety of nouns. A &lt;strong&gt;noun adjunct&lt;/strong&gt; looks like an adjective but can only be connected to a limited number of nouns. So, &lt;em&gt;hot&lt;/em&gt; oven and &lt;em&gt;microwave&lt;/em&gt; oven show 'oven' described by an adjective and a noun adjunct, respectively. But may I apply the same method to words that appear to be adjective-like but function like a noun adjunct, and vice versa? Examples follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gordian.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; To me, &lt;em&gt;Gordian&lt;/em&gt; is a noun adjunct, in spite of its suffix, because it basically can only be used to describe 'knot' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*%3D%3EGordian_ADJ&amp;amp;year_start=1988&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=20&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t2%3B%2C%2A%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bknot%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BKnot%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bknots%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BIII%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bof%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BNew%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BKnots%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BII%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3B_ROOT_%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BYork%3D%3EGordian_ADJ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see Ngram Viewer data&lt;/a&gt;, refresh the search to see the results, if needed)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fermi.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;Fermi&lt;/em&gt;, when not used in reference to the person, can be an adjective because it can modify a variety of nouns (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*%3D%3EFermi_ADJ&amp;amp;year_start=1988&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=20&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t2%3B%2C%2A%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Blevel%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Benergy%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bsurface%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDirac%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Blevels%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bliquid%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bgas%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bfunction%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bsurfaces%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmomentum%3D%3EFermi_ADJ%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my reasoning sound? Do you have other criteria to distinguish these parts of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20661" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T08:59:32.037" Title="Where is the boundary between an adjective and a noun adjunct?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T14:02:40.280" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in short :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1) how shall I scan Beowulf.64b &quot;herespēd ġyfen&quot; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2) How shall I understand &lt;a href=&quot;http://kansaigaidai.academia.edu/SeiichiSuzuki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seiichi Suzuki&lt;/a&gt;'s remark about 64b : &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[a verse whose] second lift fails to be occupied by a sequence of a&#xA;  short stressed syllable and a following syllable through suspension of&#xA;  resolution : e.g. 64b [... and] 2912b&quot; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/10718739/The_Metrical_Organization_of_Beowulf_Prototype_and_Isomorphism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metrical Organization of Beowulf: Prototype and Isomorphism&lt;/a&gt;, 8.1.3; p. 342)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;full details :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in this account of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heorot.dk/kaluza-dating-txt.html#a3n4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaluza's law&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[in Beowulf, Kaluza's law] applies regularly [... in] verse-finally under primary stress in&#xA;  Bliss's verse types 2A1b [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beowulf&lt;/a&gt;.64b, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heorot.dk/kaluza-dating-txt.html#a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the verses concerned by Kaluza's law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;herespēd ġyfen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This verse is analyzed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heorot.dk/kaluza-dating-txt.html#a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as a (Bliss) 2A3b verse and a (Hutcheson) 1rAn [pxSpx] verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure to understand what's behind [pxSpx] : is its something like /herespēd &lt;em&gt;caesura&lt;/em&gt; /ġyfen ? Seiichi Suzumi describes 64b as a Sievers' &quot;A1s&quot; verse (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/10718739/The_Metrical_Organization_of_Beowulf_Prototype_and_Isomorphism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metrical Organization of Beowulf: Prototype and Isomorphism&lt;/a&gt;, p. 498) and adds the following remark about 64b :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[a verse whose] second lift fails to be occupied by a sequence of a&#xA;  short stressed syllable and a following syllable through suspension of&#xA;  resolution : e.g. 64b [... and] 2912b&quot; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/10718739/The_Metrical_Organization_of_Beowulf_Prototype_and_Isomorphism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metrical Organization of Beowulf: Prototype and Isomorphism&lt;/a&gt;, 8.1.3; p. 342)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1) how shall I scan Beowulf.64b &quot;herespēd ġyfen&quot; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2) how shall I understand &lt;a href=&quot;http://kansaigaidai.academia.edu/SeiichiSuzuki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seiichi Suzuki&lt;/a&gt;'s remark about 64b ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="2678" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T15:36:08.353" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T15:36:08.353" Title="Kaluza's law and Beowulf.64b" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26537" CreationDate="2017-12-04T14:43:37.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pharyngeal, epiglottal and glottal frictives are produced lower in the throat that the palatine tonsils, which is presumably what you're looking at. A uvular fricative would not be fully behind the tonsils, but would be &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the tonsils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T14:43:37.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26536" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:05:07.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is generally regarded as having the following 7 inflectional suffixes. All of them have been suffixes since Proto-Indoeuropean, but most have followed a rather circuitous path along the way. This is rough outline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plural &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; AS &lt;em&gt;-as&lt;/em&gt; 'masc. &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;-stem nom.-acc. pl.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-anz&lt;/em&gt; 'acc. pl.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;-(o)ns&lt;/em&gt; 'acc. pl.'      &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;third person singular &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; AS &lt;em&gt;-st&lt;/em&gt; '2nd person sg.' (2sg was leveled with 3sg by analogy with ON)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-zi&lt;/em&gt; '2nd person sg.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;-si&lt;/em&gt; '2nd person sg.'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;past tense/participle &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; AS &lt;em&gt;-ode&lt;/em&gt; 'class 2 weak verb past'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-ode&lt;/em&gt; 'class 2 weak verb past'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;-to-&lt;/em&gt; 'adjectival derivational suffix'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;past participle &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; ON &lt;em&gt;-inn&lt;/em&gt; 'past part.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-īnaz&lt;/em&gt; 'adjectival derivational suffix'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;-nos&lt;/em&gt; 'adjectival derivational suffix'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;progressive &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; collapse of AS &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; 'gerund' and &lt;em&gt;-ende&lt;/em&gt; 'present participle'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-ung-&lt;/em&gt; 'gerund' / &lt;em&gt;-and-&lt;/em&gt; 'pres. part.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;-enkw-&lt;/em&gt; 'deverbative' / &lt;em&gt;-nt-&lt;/em&gt; 'active pres. part.'  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;comparative &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; AS &lt;em&gt;-ra&lt;/em&gt; 'comparative'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-iz(o)/-oz(o)&lt;/em&gt; 'comparative'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NlExDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA316&amp;amp;ots=eOh9zN2Hn1&amp;amp;dq=proto%20germanic%20comparative%20superlative%20proto%20indo%20european&amp;amp;pg=PA316#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=proto%20germanic%20comparative%20superlative%20proto%20indo%20european&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PIE &lt;em&gt;-yos-&lt;/em&gt; 'elative'&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;superlative &lt;em&gt;-est&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; AS &lt;em&gt;-st&lt;/em&gt; 'superlative'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;-istaz/-ostaz&lt;/em&gt; 'superlative'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; PIE  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NlExDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA316&amp;amp;ots=eOh9zN2Hn1&amp;amp;dq=proto%20germanic%20comparative%20superlative%20proto%20indo%20european&amp;amp;pg=PA316#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=proto%20germanic%20comparative%20superlative%20proto%20indo%20european&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;-yos-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-tas/-tos&lt;/em&gt; 'nominalizer'&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:05:07.083" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26443" CreationDate="2017-12-04T22:05:47.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is efficiency.  If the detectable omission of any part of speech is done consistently enough, that omission can replace a word.  In this case, it is a 'zero article'.  The determiner that is omitted is either 'all' or 'some', depending whether the noun is the subject or not, and whether the clause is defining or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have been done the other way, with the zero article indicating the singular; but 'a[n]' (from 'one') is so minimal already that it would be a shame to trade it for a plural determiner.  The count determiner often goes away completely when a definite article is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T22:05:47.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26522" CreationDate="2017-12-04T23:51:10.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot say Telugu is 100% phonetic, but close to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A deviation I can think of is, there are a couple of letters e.g., ర, ఱ in classical scripts, which are pronounced with same sound, but scripted differently in classical literature. Examples: కురుచ, చిఱుత, చేరువ, చెఱువు. Interestingly, no composite letter exists with ఱ except itself like in గుఱ్ఱము. It is being scripted as గుర్రము in modern print media to reduce the number of letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the classical scripts, there used to be a letter between చ, ఛ to denote చాప (meaning mat) which is different from చాపము (bow). Similarly between జ, ఝ, to make Telugu more phonetic than its mother language Sanskrit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the letter ఋ in ఋణము is also seeing its demise along with its immediate three sisters (ruu, lu, luu) in modern scripts (even classical literature is being changed), thus making Telugu less phonetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20675" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T19:54:27.463" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T19:54:27.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26443" CreationDate="2017-12-05T02:51:27.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English indefinite article comes from the word for &quot;one&quot; (Old English &lt;em&gt;ān&lt;/em&gt;), which, because of its semantics, is somewhat resistant to pluralization. (This resistance is not perfect, however, and pluralization has happened in various cases: cf. Spanish &lt;em&gt;unas personas&lt;/em&gt; &quot;some people&quot;, Finnish &lt;em&gt;yhdet ihmiset&lt;/em&gt; &quot;some/certain people&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;unos&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yhdet&lt;/em&gt; are plural forms of the word meaning &quot;one&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the English definite article comes from a demonstrative pronoun meaning &quot;that&quot;, which can be used in the singular or plural, just like most other modifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the article-free indefinite plural (&lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;things&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) may be a leftover from the era when English had no articles (a stage that is still partly seen in Old English). Once the definite article became entrenched in English, the indefinite interpretation of article-free plurals may have become automatic (more-or-less) through the process of elimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8017" LastEditorUserId="8017" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T03:34:28.563" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T03:34:28.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26331" CreationDate="2017-12-05T08:38:13.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of both phonemic and morphophonemic analysis is to produce simpler underlying descriptions for what appear on the surface to be complicated patterns. In purely phonemic analysis the data is just a set of words in a language, while for the purposes of morphophonemic analysis the words must be considered in grammatical paradigms to take account of the underlying morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20684" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T08:38:13.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4369" CreationDate="2017-12-05T15:39:22.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign languages generally do not have rich case systems because they tend to be much more head-marking than, say, English. By this I mean that a translation of your Latin sentences into a hypothetical sign language might be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;BOY FARMER KILL-he-him&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;code&gt;he&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;him&lt;/code&gt; are verbal inflections that make it clear who killed whom. If we consider word order, then ASL and BSL both are like Latin: they have default word orders, but a sentence might deviate from it (for example to highlight the boy or farmer, or a contrast from an earlier sentence), which means that word order itself cannot unambiguously distinguish, for example, agents from patients, like English word order usually can. But that doesn't matter so much, because the distinction is marked on the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, if verbs act this way in a given language, then noun phrases tend to be more head-marking too. It's rather like how Hebrew, Berber or Ainu do possession and this appears to be a linguistic universal. So for instance, &quot;the farmer's boy&quot; might be translated as &quot;the farmer, his boy&quot; in both ASL and BSL. So here there doesn't need to exist a genitive case either*. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a pronouns are a slightly different consideration. For example English and Norwegian are both languages where pronouns have two or more forms, which have something to do with case, even though the nouns do not productively inflect for case. ASL is the same! Here are some examples from ASL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;1&lt;/code&gt; handshape (extend the index finger but clench other fingers together into a fist) and point towards any person is for a subject or object pronoun, like I, me, he, they, them, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The pronate &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; handshape (all four fingers straight out and parallel and touching) and point towards any person is for a possessive, like my, mine, his, their, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The supinate &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; handshape, accompanied by a downward movement is an alternative to &lt;code&gt;1&lt;/code&gt;, which is rather like a T/V distinction except it may be used in any person, including 1st.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm not aware of any other inflections in this morphological class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: Some sign languages are invented for didactic reasons and they artificially include morphology and most word order from the culture's spoken language. An example of this is SEE, which means Signed Exact English. These tend to be falling into disfavour now. I didn't describe these in my answer because I feel they are better described as a manually coded version of a spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T20:25:06.707" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T20:25:06.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26522" CreationDate="2017-12-05T21:15:39.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before getting to the specifics of Telugu, it would be useful to review what it might mean for an orthography to be 100% perfectly phonemic. Based on how the notion &quot;phonemic&quot; is used in language description and orthography development, it would be a system where for each phonemes there is a unique and rule-governed orthographic sequence, and for each such orthographic sequence there is a unique mapping to a phoneme. I say sequence since in a language that does not have the cluster &quot;s+h&quot;, we could represent the phoneme &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;sh&quot;. Furthermore, this 1-to-1 correlation between orthography and phonemes is not tempered with exceptions of the type &quot;except in the word...&quot; or &quot;depending on the origin of the word&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples of features that would disqualify the orthography. In Russian, unstressed /a,o/ are neutralized to &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and /e,i/ become &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;: this is not reflected in the spelling. When the phoneme /o/ neutralizes with the phoneme /a/, in a phonemic orthography, the spelling would change. In this respect, Russian spelling is not phonemic. (I have nothing to say about the letter ы because the phonemic status of that vowel is controversial). Additionally, stress, which is not predictable (is phonemic), is entirely omitted from the spelling. If phonemic distinctions are omitted in the spelling (stress), the system is not purely phonemic. If orthographic distinctions are made which do not correspond precisely to a phonemic distinction (vowel letters are distinct where the vowel sounds are not), the system is not purely phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other potential disqualifier would be if there is a distinction in letters which is in all contexts predictable – it reflects a phonetic fact which is not phonemic – then the system is not purely phonemic. A hypothetical example would be if English spelling notated aspiration with a raised ʰ – there is a phonetic difference, but not a phonemic difference, so it should not be indicated in the spelling. It is possible that Sanskrit has that property, since there are graphemes that reflect sub-phonemic differences (or even possibly non-existent sounds). The problem is pinning down a specific historical stage of Sanskrit pronunciation and writing: an examples is &quot;ñ&quot; which is predictable (adjacent to a palatal) and probably does not exist as an independent phoneme once you exclude later introductions (the noun ञ, plus grammarian's meta-usage). &quot;Jh&quot; (झ) is at least suspicious as a phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One very common feature of writing systems frequently renders the system not 100% phonemic, an that is when spelling does not reflect phonemic changes due to sandhi. Sanskrit is exceptional, in that when two phonemes are neutralized in sentential context, the writing reflects that change (so, /...as#m.../ is realized as [o#m] and is spelled that way too). Otherwise, when languages have external sandhi, those rules are typically not indicated in the spelling (for instance, there is no change in the spelling of word-final obstruents in Russian depending on whether the next word begins with a voiced consonant versus a voiceless consonant). Accordingly, you might want to subdivide the question about phonemicity into &quot;with respect to citation forms&quot; versus &quot;in all contexts&quot;, since otherwise failure to reflect sentential phonology would disqualify a language. I believe that Telugu would be disqualified on that basis, since there is a process deleting vowels between certain consonants, described by Krishnamurti 1957, for instance &lt;em&gt;gula:bi mogga&lt;/em&gt; → *gula:b mogga &quot;rose bud&quot;. It may be that this is actually reflected in the spelling: if not, that would be an instance where the spelling includes something that is not in the phonemic output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sociolinguistic issues mentioned in the Telugu-informed answers point to a further way in which it is unlikely that any language has a 100% phonemic spelling. As far as know, in no language is it the rule that you &quot;spell it as &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; pronounce it&quot;. Apparently, there are very many things in Telugu spelling that are not pronounced that way by all speakers. For instance there is apparently an aspiration difference in writing, which is not pronounced by some speakers. V. Sastry's 1987 SOAS dissertation mentions a number of regional and social variations, though the dissertation is not about the spelling system. From what I understand, spelling is fairly standard, and the spelling of &lt;em&gt;duhkham&lt;/em&gt; &quot;grief&quot; does not change to &lt;em&gt;dukkaw̃&lt;/em&gt; when you pronounce the word that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues then would be whether there are letter distinctions that are not based on pronunciation (e.g. you have to know the etymology of a word), or (less likely) are there phonemic distinctions that are just ignored (e.g. tone in virtually all tone languages; vowel length in many languages; anything that doesn't conveniently translate to letters of the dominant alphabet, such as breathy voicing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T21:15:39.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4715" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:50:23.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; In most Latin American Spanish dialects (and most of Southern Spain) &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt; has merged with consonantal &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. &lt;code&gt;/j ~ ʝ/&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In many dialects of Argentina and Uruguay, &quot;ll&quot; / &quot;y&quot; represents &lt;code&gt;/ʒ/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few other Iberian romance languages that also use &lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt; to represent &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt;, and within these there are words which are &lt;code&gt;ll-&lt;/code&gt; initial (Catalan in particular has a large amount of words that begin as such):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aragonese&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;agulla&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asturian / Leonese&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;llingua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Galician&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;illado&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Catalan&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;llum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-romance Iberian language Basque also uses &lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt; to represent this sound:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basque&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;bonbilla&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in some dialects of French &lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt; is also still pronounced as such (though in most it has merged with &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Occitan, Mirandese, Portuguese (which inherited this orthography from Occitan)&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; and Breton, this sound is represented by &lt;code&gt;lh&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Occitan&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;miralhar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;ralho&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mirandese&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;lhéngua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Breton&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;familh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Franco-Provençal this sound is represented by &lt;code&gt;ly&lt;/code&gt;, and in Aromanian by &lt;code&gt;lj&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Franco-Provençal&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;balyi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aromanian&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;ljepuri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian this sound is represented by &lt;code&gt;gli&lt;/code&gt; before &lt;em&gt;a, e, o, u&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;code&gt;gl&lt;/code&gt; before &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;figlio&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eglino&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, a number of native American languages which have had historic contact with Spanish colonies and have this sound in their language transcribe it with &lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aymara&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;ll'aki'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quechua&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;qallu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_lateral_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_lateral_approximant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeísmo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8fcvK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8fcvK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; • &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SX0wDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=l+mouill%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Bon usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, André Goosse, Maurice Grevisse (§33, b, H):&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The Occitan classical orthography and the Catalan orthography are quite similar: They show the very close ties of both languages. The digraphs &lt;em&gt;lh&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nh&lt;/em&gt;, used in the classical orthography, were adopted by the orthography of Portuguese, presumably by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_of_Braga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerald of Braga&lt;/a&gt;, a monk from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moissac&lt;/a&gt;, who became bishop of Braga in Portugal in 1047, playing a major role in modernizing written Portuguese using classical Occitan norms.&lt;sup&gt;[55]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; • &lt;a href=&quot;https://portuguese.stackexchange.com/a/2906/2711&quot;&gt;55: &lt;em&gt;Petit précis – Chronologie occitane – Histoire &amp;amp; civilisation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Jean-Pierre Juge (2001) (p.25)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extra:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;A list of Catalan &lt;code&gt;ll-&lt;/code&gt; initial words (not exhaustive):&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;llacer, llach, lladre, lladó, lladós, llama, llamas, llamp, llana, llanas, llanda, llanes, llano, llanos, llanxa, llança, llao, llapis, llar, llard, llarg, llast, llatí, llauna, llaurí, llautó, llavar, llavi, llavis, llavor, llaç, llaçar, llaüt, llebre, llec, lledó, llegar, llegir, llegua, llegum, llei, lleial, lleida, lleig, lleir, lleis, lleixa, llena, llenas, llenya, lleona, lleons, llepar, llera, llers, llesca, llest, llet, lletra, lletós, lleu, lleure, lleva, llevar, llevat, lleó, lli, llibre, lliga, lligam, lligar, lligat, llim, llima, llimac, llimar, llimó, llimós, llinas, llinda, lliri, llis, llisa, llista, llistó, llit, llitja, lliura, lliure, lliçà, lliçó, lloar, lloba, llobet, llobí, lloc, llocs, llodio, llogar, llogat, llom, llonch, llong, llonza, llop, llopis, llora, llorac, llorca, lloren, llorer, lloret, lloro, llort, llosa, llosc, llossa, llot, llotja, llotós, llovet, lloyd, llubí, llucar, lluch, llucia, lluent, lluer, lluert, lluir, lluita, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Llull&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Llull&lt;/a&gt;, llum, llums, llumí, lluna, lluny, llunyà, lluor, llur, llurba, llusa, lluç, lluçà, lluís, llépol, llíber, llíria, llívia, llúpol&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;In Catalan and Italian, &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt; is distinguished from a geminated &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt;, by different orthographies (e.g. &lt;strong&gt;cat:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;cel·la&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;it:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;cella&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+----------+-------+-------+&#xA;| Language |  /ʎ/  | /l.l/ |&#xA;+----------+-------+-------+&#xA;| Catalan  | ll    | l·l   |&#xA;| Italian  | gl(i) | ll    |&#xA;+----------+-------+-------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T12:47:03.910" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T12:47:03.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-06T18:48:57.593" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often hear people mention in passing that grammatical features are more reliable than lexical features in diachronic research, specifically when detecting pseudepigraphs, because it is relatively easy to fake old lexicon but difficult to fake old grammar (as is evidenced anecdotally by people imitating old English but mixing &quot;thee&quot;, &quot;thou&quot; and &quot;thy&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to mention this in my paper, who should I cite? Where can I read more about this hypothesis? Has there been any statistical analysis on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T15:09:21.410" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T15:09:21.410" Title="What to reference for grammatical features being more reliable than lexical features for diachronic research?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17596" CreationDate="2017-12-07T09:21:35.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A late answer but.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a real time viewer for vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The VowelWorm can plot vowel features on a canvas in real-time. It is based on the work done at the Department of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xErgB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xErgB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://byu-odh.github.io/apeworm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://byu-odh.github.io/apeworm/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also look onto the speechace site by SpeechAce LLC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We develop best in class speech recognition software designed specifically for language learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our patented technology is unique in its ability to score a learner's&#xA;  speech and pinpoint individual syllable and phoneme level mistakes in&#xA;  a user's pronunciation in real time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mistakes are then presented to the user in an appealing visual format&#xA;  along with supplementary feedback on stress, intonation and speaking&#xA;  rate. Such comprehensive feedback speeds up the learning process and&#xA;  is invaluable to users who do not have constant access to a qualified&#xA;  instructor for pronunciation practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GZ248.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GZ248.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20705" LastEditorUserId="20705" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T01:15:41.483" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T01:15:41.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-07T12:06:47.800" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the horizontal axis, and within the same high, I'd like to know whether  back vowels (e.g. /ɤ/) are more sonorous than front ones (e.g. /e/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2554" LastEditorUserId="2554" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T17:57:43.627" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T23:46:04.253" Title="sonority hierarchy within vowel backness" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;sonority&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24394" CreationDate="2017-12-07T13:17:10.590" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to CRNTL&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and the RAE&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;*steuraz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;*burdą&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stēorbord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Middle English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;sterbord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;starboard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Classic Dutch&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stierboord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1588) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;destribort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1550)&lt;sup&gt;9&lt;/sup&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;destribord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1677)&lt;sup&gt;7, 8&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;destrebort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1484) &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(G&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ARCIE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Le Grant routier&lt;/em&gt;, Rouen ds &lt;em&gt;Fr. mod.&lt;/em&gt; t. 26 1958, p. 58)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;estribord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1601)&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Early Modern Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;estriborda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1607)&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;estribor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1605)&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stribort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;stribord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1559)&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tribort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1545) / &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tribord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1552)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(C&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ARTIER&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Brief recit&lt;/em&gt;, éd. D'Avezac, 1863, 8 r&lt;sup&gt;o&lt;/sup&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ibid&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; / &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(R&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ABELAIS&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Quart livre&lt;/em&gt;, XXII, éd. R. Marichal, p. 117)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tribord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1798) (Common and accepted use)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a similar etymological story for &lt;em&gt;babor&lt;/em&gt; (esp.) &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;babord&lt;/em&gt; (fra.) &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;bakboord&lt;/em&gt; (ned.); &lt;em&gt;bæcbord&lt;/em&gt; (old eng.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/tribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/tribord&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 2. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dle.rae.es/?id=GzZTd0r&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dle.rae.es/?id=GzZTd0r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=piF2AAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=estribor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Florida Del Inca,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Garcilaso De La Vega&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 4. &lt;em&gt;stribort&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t15OAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP144&amp;amp;dq=stribort&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;x1&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;em&gt;stribord&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t15OAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP144&amp;amp;dq=stribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;x2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;  • &lt;em&gt;Voyages avantureux (et tables de la declinaison que fait le Soleil de la ligne equinoctiale par Olivier Bisselin.), Jan Sainctongeois Alfonce&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 5. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M4eDH2aekWAC&amp;amp;pg=PP744&amp;amp;dq=estribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tesoro de las dos lenguas francesa y española,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; César Oudin&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 6. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ku5jAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA20-IA2&amp;amp;dq=estribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le second livre, iovrnal ou comptoir,...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 7. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g5C7j-QcKvoC&amp;amp;pg=PA29&amp;amp;dq=destribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L' Architecture navale contenant la maniere de construire les navires,...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 8. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z0lbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA6&amp;amp;dq=destribord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'art de naviger demontré par principes, &amp;amp; confirmé par plusieurs ...,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Claude Francois Milliet de Chales&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 9. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FGtLAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT91&amp;amp;dq=destribort&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Amadis de Gaule: Contenant partie des faictz chevalereux d ..., Volume 5&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 10. Use of both spellings &lt;em&gt;destrebort&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fMJjAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;dq=destrebort&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;x12&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;destrebord&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fMJjAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;dq=destrebord&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;x1&lt;/a&gt;) in one work (1622)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;  • &lt;em&gt;Le grand Routier, pillotage et encrage de mer, tant des parties de ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 11. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tribord%2Cstribord&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=19&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;stribord&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;tribord&lt;/em&gt; Google ngrams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T11:08:10.037" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T11:08:10.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-07T14:13:14.530" Score="3" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Dutch word 'mooi' (beautiful) doesn't seem to have a clear etymology nor any cognates. Does anyone have theories or ideas for possible origins or cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to have caused Dutch 'schoon' to shift from 'beautiful' to 'clean', when compared to Flemish Dutch 'schoon' still having that meaning and German 'schön'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was already attested in Old Dutch, so perhaps it's of substrate origin? &#xA;Anyway, I'm curious to hear your ideas.&#xA;Anyway &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/mooi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/mooi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20706" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T20:46:40.170" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:58:51.357" Title="possible etymologies and cognates for Dutch 'mooi'?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;substrate&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26562" CreationDate="2017-12-07T15:40:07.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mooi#Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary has&lt;/a&gt; a rather plausible etymology of &lt;em&gt;mooi&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;moy&lt;/em&gt;, from Old Dutch &lt;em&gt;*mōi*&lt;/em&gt; (“nice, pleasant, clean”), from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*mawjaz&lt;/em&gt; (“clean, washed”), from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*mou-io-&lt;/em&gt; (“washed”), from Proto-Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*mū-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;*mew(ə)-&lt;/em&gt; (“to wash, wet”). Cognate with Middle Low German &lt;em&gt;moie&lt;/em&gt; (“nice, sheen”) (Low German &lt;em&gt;moi&lt;/em&gt; (“pretty, good, nice”)), Middle Low German &lt;em&gt;mūten&lt;/em&gt; (“to wash the face”), and possibly to Latin &lt;em&gt;mundus&lt;/em&gt; (“clean, neat, elegant”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T15:40:07.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3244" CreationDate="2017-12-07T15:50:59.203" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example of metathesis, the rearranging of sounds or syllables in a word. It occurred in a number of words in the evolution from Latin to Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Latin&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parabola#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pa&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;abo&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;pa&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ab&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/palabra#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pa&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ab&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'word'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Latin&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/miraculum#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;mī&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ācu&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;um&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ác&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;mi&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ag&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milagro#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;mi&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ag&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'miracle'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Latin&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/periculum#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pe&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;icŭ&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;um&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;pe&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ico&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;pe&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ig&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peligro#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pe&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ig&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'danger, peril'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Latin&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crocodilus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ocodīlus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ocodilo&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cocodrilo#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cocod&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ilo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 'crocodile'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;ima&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ima&lt;strong&gt;ñ&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;int&lt;strong&gt;egr&lt;/strong&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ent&lt;strong&gt;reg&lt;/strong&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vi&lt;strong&gt;dŭ&lt;/strong&gt;us/a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;vi&lt;strong&gt;ud&lt;/strong&gt;o/a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;crusta&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;rost&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;ostr&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ge&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;A&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ge&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;guir&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;da&lt;/em&gt;  &gt; &lt;em&gt;guir&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;da&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;mur&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ciego&lt;/em&gt;&gt; &lt;code&gt;Old Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;murciégo&lt;/em&gt; &gt; (diminutive) &lt;em&gt;murcié&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;murcié&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even instances of this happening multiple times to recreate the original syllabic pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;rae&lt;/strong&gt;lātus&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;re&lt;/strong&gt;lado&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt;lado&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;re&lt;/strong&gt;lado&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also occurs commonly with these non-standard (i.e. not recognised by the &lt;em&gt;RAE&lt;/em&gt;) pronunciations (and associated spellings):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dent%C3%ADfrico#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;roqu&lt;/strong&gt;eta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;c&lt;strong&gt;ocr&lt;/strong&gt;eta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dent%C3%ADfrico#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dent&lt;strong&gt;ífr&lt;/strong&gt;ico&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;dent&lt;strong&gt;ríf&lt;/strong&gt;ico&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calcoman%C3%ADa#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;calc&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;m&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;nía&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;calc&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;m&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;nía&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ve&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ve&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ce&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ebro&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ce&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ebro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;gui&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;rr&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;gui&lt;strong&gt;rr&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;rogr&lt;/strong&gt;ama&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;ogr&lt;/strong&gt;ama&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nea&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;de&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;tal&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;nea&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;de&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;tal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ol&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;oneta&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;ol&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;oneta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;met&lt;strong&gt;eoro&lt;/strong&gt;logía&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;met&lt;strong&gt;ereo&lt;/strong&gt;logía&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; These changes do not occur in all Romance languages, see:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Algérie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;miracle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Italian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;miracolo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;guirlande&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Italian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;ghirlanda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Portuguese&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;crocodilo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Galician&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;crocodilo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Portuguese&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;perigo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Galician&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;perigo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Italian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;pericolo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;But other Romance languages &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; in fact undergo the same change as Spanish with this last word:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Italian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;coccodrillo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sicilian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cuccudrillu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vernazzese (Spezzino (Ligurian))&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dialettu.it/parola.php?voce=cuccudrillu1746&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cuccudrìllu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Logudorese Sardinian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://vocabolariocasu.isresardegna.it/definizione.php?codice=l3871300&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cuccudrillu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Corsican&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://co.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idra_di_Lerna#In_u_medievu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;cuccudrillu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Asturian&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cocodrilu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Old French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cocodril&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Picard&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cocodril&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Catalan&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cocodril&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;code&gt;Languedocien (Occitan)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cocodril&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sources:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)#Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met%C3%A1tesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metátesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;• &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crocodile#French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crocodile#French&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T19:43:01.530" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T19:43:01.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3787" CreationDate="2017-12-08T00:13:55.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chinese number names, and both Korean number systems, the numbers follow strict base 10 representations: the name for any number from 11-19 is the name for 10 plus the name for the unit value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e.g. the Chinese name for 14 - 十四 (&lt;em&gt;Shí sì&lt;/em&gt;) - can be literally translated as &amp;quot;10-4&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this strict regularity doesn't seem to exist in the teens of most European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In English and German, the words for 11 and 12 have unpredictable names only historically related to 1 and 2 (from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*ainalif&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eleven#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(one left)&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;*twalif&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twelve#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(two left)&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In most Romance languages there is some phonetic representation of 10 in the names for teen numbers (albeit heavily modified in Spanish and French), but this representation 'flips' somewhere along the way (between 15-16 in Spanish and Portuguese, and between 16-17 in Italian and French etc). See below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Units&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;English&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Latin&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Spanish&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Portuguese&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Italian&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;French&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;zero&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nihil&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cero&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;zero&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;zero&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;zéro&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;one&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ūnus&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;uno&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;um&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;uno&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;un&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;two&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;duo&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dos&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dois&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;due&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;deux&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;three&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;trēs&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;tres&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;três&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;tre&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;trois&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;four&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quattuor&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cuatro&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quatro&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quattro&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quatre&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;five&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quīnque&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cinco&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cinco&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cinque&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cinq&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;six&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sex&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;seis&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;seis&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sei&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;six&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;seven&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;septem&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;siete&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sete&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sette&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sept&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;eight&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;octō&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ocho&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;oito&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;otto&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;huit&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nine&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;novem&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nueve&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nove&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nove&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;neuf&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ten&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;decem&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;diez&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dez&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dieci&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dix&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Teens&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;English&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Latin&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Spanish&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Portuguese&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Italian&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;French&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;eleven&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ūn&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;on&lt;strong&gt;ce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;on&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;un&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;on&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;twelve&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;duo&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;do&lt;strong&gt;ce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;do&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;do&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;dou&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;thir&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;trē&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;tre&lt;strong&gt;ce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;tre&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;tre&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;trei&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;four&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quattuor&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cator&lt;strong&gt;ce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;cator&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quattor&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quator&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;fif&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quīn&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quin&lt;strong&gt;ce&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quin&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quin&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;quin&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;six&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sē&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diez&lt;/strong&gt; y seis&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;deze&lt;/strong&gt;sseis&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;se&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;sei&lt;strong&gt;ze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;seven&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;septen&lt;strong&gt;decim&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diez&lt;/strong&gt; y siete&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;deze&lt;/strong&gt;ssete&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;assette&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dix&lt;/strong&gt;-sept&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;eigh&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;duodēvīgintī&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diez&lt;/strong&gt; y ocho&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dez&lt;/strong&gt;oito&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;otto&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dix&lt;/strong&gt;-huit&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;nine&lt;strong&gt;teen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;ūndēvīgintī&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diez&lt;/strong&gt; y nueve&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;deze&lt;/strong&gt;nove&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dici&lt;/strong&gt;annove&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dix&lt;/strong&gt;-neuf&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;twenty&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;vīgintī&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;veinte&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;vinte&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;venti&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;vingt&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-catalan/en/cat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catalan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dieli.net/SicilyPage/Tables/numbers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sicilian&lt;/a&gt;, Friulian follow the same pattern as French and Italian.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical Latin itself is regular up until 18 and 19, where representations translated as &amp;quot;2 from 20&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;1 from 20&amp;quot; are the norm (if this seems unexpected, remember the roman numeral representation for 19 is &lt;strong&gt;XIX&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1 from 10&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it might seem strange that the 'flip' in the Romance languages representations wasn't present in Classical Latin, switched forms such as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;decem et septem&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; for 17 can be found in some Latin texts, and was a feature of some rural and lower class Latin speech that was presumably particularly prevalent among the settlers and soldiers, whose speech directly affected modern Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=SX8pPNs3PCkC&amp;amp;pg=PA91ac#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nature of Mathematical Thinking&lt;/a&gt;, Robert J. Sternberg, Talia Ben-Zeev&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T11:55:31.107" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T11:55:31.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-08T02:57:59.693" Score="5" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am coming up with constituency tests to distinguish between complements and adjuncts.  But I was thrown off by the fact that I can coordinate &quot;the jam to Pam on a holiday&quot; as if it is a constituent.  But &quot;to Pam&quot; and &quot;on a holiday&quot; should be adjuncts of the verb phrase, so they shouldn't form a phrase with &quot;the jam&quot; without also including &quot;sold&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They sold [the jam to Pam on a holiday] and [the flan to Don on a Monday].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the adjuncts could've been adjoined to the verbal projection before the verb moved, but I wanted to see what other analyses people gave, if mine was even correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20710" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T01:02:25.247" Title="Why can I coordinate direct object + verbal adjuncts?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26560" CreationDate="2017-12-08T04:23:44.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking into account the theory of distinctive features, all vowels have the same sonority. Since the distinctive features are binary, or is - or is + sonorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20711" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T04:23:44.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26244" CreationDate="2017-12-08T17:02:40.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indonesian has the distinct word tenggara for southeast. But for the each of other three equivalent directions it doesn't have a distinct word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Southwest is barat daya, where barat means west but daya means power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Northwest is barat laut, where barat means west but laut means sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Northeast is timur laut, where timur means east but laut means sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strange, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Sundanese (Only Indonesian) but from the dictionary Sundanese seems to have four distinct words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20666" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T17:02:40.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26560" CreationDate="2017-12-08T17:43:43.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposing that in English, unstressed vowels are backed, and flaps are more sonorous than unflapped [t], and that flapping of [t] is assimilatory in &quot;petty&quot;, etc. vs. no flapping in &quot;petite&quot;, then this suggests that back vowels are more sonorous than front vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T17:43:43.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26589" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:32:41.697" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pinyin Chinese text contains less information than its Hanzi equivalent, so its transcription is ambiguous: to identify the correct characters for some given Pinyin requires context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason ICU uconv will convert Latin text into Han (Hanzi) text, but not the reverse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there free or free-to-use software that will return a list of possible Han characters for a given Pinyin syllable or syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13167" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T05:49:52.397" Title="Enumerating the possible Pinyin -&gt; Hanzi transcriptions" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26572" CreationDate="2017-12-08T21:44:13.353" Score="0" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that a lot of Indo-European languages use a common word to denote both a language, and the tongue (body part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, the same word is used for both aspects (&lt;em&gt;langue&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;It is also the case in Croatian (&lt;em&gt;jezik&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;Spanish uses &lt;em&gt;lengua&lt;/em&gt; for the body part, and &lt;em&gt;idioma&lt;/em&gt; for a language.&#xA;English uses respectively &lt;em&gt;tongue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;But both in Spanish and English, the body part can also mean a language/dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this was already the case in Latin (&lt;em&gt;lingua&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;When did this extension of meaning from the body part &quot;tongue&quot; take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there Indo-European languages where this is not the case?&#xA;Is it the case in a lot of non Indo-European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15009" LastEditorUserId="15009" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T15:34:26.807" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T23:55:32.667" Title="The origin of a common word for tongue/language?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26571" CreationDate="2017-12-08T23:24:45.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you will find this as useful - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html#DECLINE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Head over to the last paragraph before the next topic starts and it emphasises that the word started to be used in 11th century as the word-composite &quot;Mother Tongue&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article proceeds to establish how the pattern came to be adapted in different languages over the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for second part of the question, Hindi (an Indo-European language spoken in Northern parts of India) uses distinct words for the two. While the word for tongue (body part) is jihwa or jeebh(in vernacular usage), written as जिह्वा (jihwa) (IPA: /d͡ʑiɦ.ʋɑ́ː/) and जीभ (jeebh) (IPA: [dʒiːbʱ]) respectively, the word for language is भाषा (bhasha) (IPA: bhāṣā).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say that the pattern is not found in non-germanic languages is not entirely true though, since Urdu (a Persianised and standardised register of Hindustani language) uses the same word for both of them, the word being زبانِ (zabaan) (IPA: zəbaːn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How and why they were influenced? Trade routes. While the countries and subsequent languages near the areas speaking Germanic languages in 11th century came to use the similar word-composite, thus causing a bi-partitioning of the word leading to the two popular meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the word in written religious context appears in the form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glossolalia&lt;/a&gt; over &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia#400_to_1900&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20673" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T23:24:45.240" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26244" CreationDate="2017-12-09T01:14:21.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the case in some Uralic languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fennic languages such as Finnish and Estonian have names for all eight cardinal directions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L7Vks.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L7Vks.png&quot; alt=&quot;Names for cardinal directions in Estonian (top) and Finnish (bottom)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the names for the eight cardinal directions in Estonian (top) and Finnish (bottom).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lule Saami also seems to have eight noncompound names. However it does not appear to be true of all Saami language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T01:14:21.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24394" CreationDate="2017-12-09T02:03:03.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed in other answer, &lt;em&gt;starboard&lt;/em&gt; comes from Middle English &lt;em&gt;sterbord&lt;/em&gt;. What wasn't pointed is that that would mean &quot;steerboard&quot; - the side of the steerwheel, relative to pilot of a ship, as opposed to &quot;backboard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Spanish &lt;em&gt;estribor&lt;/em&gt; (like French &lt;em&gt;tribord&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;stribordo&lt;/em&gt;, Portuguese &lt;em&gt;estibordo&lt;/em&gt;) is a loan from some Germanic language, not the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T02:03:03.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-09T09:44:05.990" Score="1" ViewCount="1024" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;lexical verb&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;copular verb&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-lexical-verb-auxiliary-verb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt; it seems that lexical verb it is just a simple verb (run, go, jump etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For example: He &lt;strong&gt;went&lt;/strong&gt; to the store. ‘&lt;strong&gt;Went&lt;/strong&gt;’ is the &lt;em&gt;lexical verb&lt;/em&gt; showing&#xA;  what the subject did. It starts out the verb phrase ‘went to the&#xA;  store’.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But based on Thomas Payne in his article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.uoregon.edu/tpayne/UEG/UEG-additionalreading-ch11-2bes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two be's of English&lt;/a&gt;&quot; it seems that lexical verb is a copula (or copular verb), as in the sentence &quot;She &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a doctor&quot;, the lexical verb is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end of the day, also by googling I found chaos regarding to the definition of lexical verb and auxiliary verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T13:37:52.417" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T13:37:52.417" Title="What is the difference between lexical verb and copular verb?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26566" CreationDate="2017-12-09T13:08:02.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @BillJ said in the comments above, one can analyze this example as a case of non-constituent coordination.  Non-constituent coordination occurs when two sequences can be coordinated, giving evidence that they are constituents, even though they fail all (or almost all) other constituent tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example reinforces the point that one should always perform multiple constituency tests and remember that each successful test only provides more evidence for the claim that the tested sequence is a constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that there are other analyses of similar examples e.g. double-object constructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) They gave the butter to the Medici.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it is increasingly common to analyze [the butter to the Medici] as an actual constituent (as opposed to a nonce-constituent) from which the verb moved out of, and into the vP above the VP.  This analysis is not hindered by the possibility of attaching adjuncts like [on a holiday] to [the butter to the Medici] because [the butter to the Medici] is already posited to be a phrase, namely VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T13:08:02.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26579" CreationDate="2017-12-09T14:25:39.457" Score="4" ViewCount="549" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the verb &quot;be&quot; in this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copular with an implicit predicate &quot;here&quot; or &quot;now&quot; or non-copular, as the predicate of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T16:37:14.323" Title="Is &quot;be&quot; always a copular verb or there are instances of it being the predicate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26578" CreationDate="2017-12-09T16:37:14.323" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Be&amp;quot; can sometimes be a predicate&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &amp;quot;be&amp;quot; has several different meanings. The most prominent one is just as a copula, but it can also mean &amp;quot;to exist&amp;quot;, as in Descartes' famous &amp;quot;I think, therefore I am&amp;quot;. In this sense, it can be a predicate: try replacing it with &amp;quot;exist&amp;quot;, which clearly isn't a copula, and the structure and meaning of the sentence will remain exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence in your question might be using this meaning, or might be a copula with an implicit predicate. It depends on context. (If it were preceded by &amp;quot;Hey, are you coming to the meeting?&amp;quot; for example, &amp;quot;I am&amp;quot; would be followed by an implied &amp;quot;...coming to the meeting&amp;quot;. In this case, it's just an auxiliary verb.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T16:37:14.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26575" CreationDate="2017-12-09T17:23:41.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a few issues need to be cleared up first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the first source you mentioned is an ESL source rather than a linguistics source. If you'd like to learn more about linguistics, I'd suggest consulting more linguistically-oriented sources like Payne's article, since ESL sources tend to be simplified - they are, after all, aimed at language learners, not linguistics students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, another issue to be cleared up is whether we're talking about descriptive categories, which are specific to languages or comparative concepts, which are used for cross-linguistic comparison. It seems here that we're talking about descriptive categories, but you did not specify this in your question, so I think it is helpful to make this explicit. This is because the discussion of what constitutes a lexical verb and a copular verb in English has nothing to do with, say, French &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; or Mojave &lt;em&gt;iðuːm&lt;/em&gt;, or even Middle English &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Payne never defines the lexical verb as a copula verb. He is, in fact, arguing &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the treatment of the copular verb &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; as an example of a lexical verb. He regards it as an &lt;em&gt;auxiliary&lt;/em&gt;, and uses several kinds of evidence to show that the copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; and the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; behave the same way morphosyntactically except when the difference in behaviour is purely semantic/pragmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, lexical words are generally those that form an &lt;em&gt;open class&lt;/em&gt; in the language, i.e. a class of words to which words can be added freely. For example, in English, you can easily form new words, e.g. you can form new lexical verbs by &lt;em&gt;X-ise&lt;/em&gt; meaning 'to make something like X'. It's much harder to form new auxiliaries like &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;. This is the 'general idea' behind the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these criteria seem not to be really helpful for determining whether &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is lexical or auxiliary in its predicative use, since we don't know whether &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; belongs to the first group or second group just by looking at it. This is where morphosyntactic criteria come in: We can define lexical verbs and auxiliary verbs by means of their morphosyntactic behaviour. This is the whole idea behind language-specific descriptive categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptive categories are invented on a language-specific basis to describe the particularities of the grammar of a particular language, in this case English. Payne cited language-internal evidence for treating the copula and auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; both as auxiliary, e.g. &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; can take the negator &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and be fronted in questions, whether as a copula or as an auxiliary for tenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) a. Was he a good boy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Was he crying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) a. He is not a good boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. He is not crying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then suggests that the traditional opinion that the copula &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; is a lexical verb is based on the erroneous assumption that every sentence must have a lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Payne a) suggested a language-specific definition of lexical verbs , and b) defended the unified treatment of copular and auxiliary &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; as both auxiliary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T17:23:41.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26523" CreationDate="2017-12-09T23:15:30.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I'm sure you know, there are many ways to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duolingo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neologisms&lt;/a&gt;. (Here are a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://themedium.ca/features/lukes-languages-let-me-presto-myself/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I summarized&lt;/a&gt; in a student paper as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed undergrad.) It would be fair to speculate that borrowings using Latin roots are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vappingo.com/word-blog/great-examples-of-neologisms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;far outnumbered&lt;/a&gt; by some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/17/tom-chatfield-top-10-internet-neologisms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other means&lt;/a&gt; active today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of people with direct access to Latin has certainly declined over the last century. It is far from a given that a given person's higher education includes Latin. Moreover, the sort of people who do speak it are not often the movers and shakers in terms of neologisms (new words tend to come from popular, not esoteric, groups of people). Therefore, the chances are low of widespread neologisms entering English based on a direct firsthand borrowing from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are many Latin roots that have essentially become English roots. That a morpheme can be traced to a Latin root is not a reason to say that new words formed using it are &quot;using Latin&quot;. Take the relatively recent word &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=metrosexual&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmetrosexual%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmetrosexual%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMetrosexual%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metrosexual&lt;/a&gt;. The OED and etymonline.com &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/metrosexual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agree&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;metro&quot; is from &quot;metropolitan&quot;, a word that English has possessed for at least 500 years, and &quot;sexual&quot; is so ubiquitous in English that no one would say we had to look to Latin to use it in a neologism. Therefore, we can describe this as mere derivation. English is merely &quot;borrowing&quot; from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's what you're referring to, then yes, I predict that those &quot;Latin&quot; roots will continue to be productive for a long, long time. Even if we're more likely to form new words by other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T23:15:30.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26571" CreationDate="2017-12-09T23:55:32.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tongue#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, this is true for several Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Maltese), Turkic (Turkish, Turkmen, Kazakh), and Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, Eastern Mari) languages, and some others including Mongolian, Hausa,Zulu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether any of these have been influenced by each other, or by Indo-European, I can't say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I observe the biblical &quot;If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth&quot;, which is often interpreted to mean &quot;May I lose the power of speech&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T23:55:32.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-10T11:46:29.120" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary says on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/-h%E2%82%83onh%E2%82%82-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PIE -h₃onh₂-&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Descendants&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italic:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Latin: -iō (from *-i-h₃onh₂-) (e.g. legiō (“group of selected people”))&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Latin: -ō (e.g. Nāsō (“having a conspicuous nose”), poss. Iūnō (“having heavenly authority”))&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Latin: -tiō (from *-ti-h₃onh₂-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tio#Suffix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The -tio suffix&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;dictātiō (“a dictating, dictation”), from dictātum, supine of dictō (“I dictate”)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  quadripartītiō (“a division into four parts”), from quadripartītum, supine of quadripartiō (“I divide in four parts”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, this article does not say that dictātiō is from dictō, but it says it is from dictātum, supine of dictō.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supine#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supine&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two supines, I (first) and II (second). They are originally the accusative and ablative forms of a verbal noun in the fourth declension, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Fourth_declension_(u_stems)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fourth declension&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nominative    portus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Accusative    portum&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ablative  portū&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dicto#Inflection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inflection of dicto&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;non-finite forms - participles - passive - perfect : dictātus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  verbal nouns - supine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - accusative : dictātum&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - ablative : dictātū&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have common part dictāt, (but most of them has common part dictātu), I can conclude that maybe supine of dictō has stem dictāt, and dictātiō is dictāt + iō.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most forms of &quot;dicto&quot; have common part &quot;dicta&quot;, so I can conclude that maybe dictātiō is dictā + t + i + ō , where t is passive perfect participle suffix and ō makes agent noun from verb according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-o#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-o#Latin&lt;/a&gt; . so, &quot;i&quot; should be a suffix that makes a verb from a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there really &quot;i&quot; suffix that makes verb from a noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe really dictātiō is not from dictātum, but directly from dictō (infinitive dictāre) as dictā + ti + ō, in that case what is meaning of &quot;ti&quot; suffix that does not consist of t + i?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/q/5680&quot;&gt;https://latin.stackexchange.com/q/5680&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13708" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T21:26:35.527" Title="is there &quot;i&quot; suffix that makes verb from noun, in latin or its ancestors? etymology of tio(n) suffix" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-12-11T07:08:17.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26584" CreationDate="2017-12-10T21:26:35.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that the supine is an &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; stem (i.e. fourth declension, in traditional Latin grammar), I'm dubious that &lt;em&gt;-tio&lt;/em&gt; is appropriately described as &quot;from the supine&quot;. I think it is a parallel formation, which may use the same -to- suffix (or might even use an originally different formant). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T21:26:35.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-10T21:28:20.027" Score="2" ViewCount="506" Body="&lt;p&gt;In questions where a wh-element refers to the object, we can observe SAI (Subject-Auxilliary inversion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Who did [you see]]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, C-head has a [+Q] feature and it's occupied by a null bound morpheme that needs a verb to attach to. Since V-to-C is impossible (for the previous step, V-to-I is illicit as well) in English, only auxiliaries have the power to raise to C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is it so that wh-elements pertaining to the subject of the clause do not trigger SAI? The C-head still has the [+Q] feature and do-support is available in English if there is no other auxilliary present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Who [read this book]]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T14:03:55.390" Title="Why is there no Subject-Auxilliary inversion in Subject questions?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26586" CreationDate="2017-12-10T21:34:43.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now, as I'm reading my question, it seems that there's simply no &quot;space&quot; to do such an inversion. &quot;Who&quot; is in [spec, CP] and auxiliary after inversion occupies the C-head after head-to-head movement. Sure, according to Rizzi's proposal there are other functional projections above CP, but it'd seem too convoluted to even resort to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion, for SAI to take place, either the subject (wh-element) would have to stay in its EPP position, or the auxiliary to move to an unnatural (for him) [spec, CP] position. Given it's a head, such movement would be illicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Who [read this book]]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lB9C4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lB9C4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T21:34:43.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-10T22:23:30.107" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I consider him a good person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is prohibiting us from positing a three-place predicate here?&#xA;In such a scenario, consider would discharge &lt;strong&gt;three theta-roles&lt;/strong&gt; to agent (I), percept (him) and theme (a good person).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fully aware of the current explanation behind exceptional case-marking (ECM), either because of &lt;strong&gt;raising-to-object&lt;/strong&gt; or doing away with the &quot;protective&quot; CP layer (so that V can assign case to &quot;him&quot; through TP) - I was just wondering where my line of reasoning was flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T03:14:47.533" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T03:14:47.533" Title="Why can't we explain exceptional case-marking as sentences with a three-place predicate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26570" CreationDate="2017-12-11T05:49:52.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a multitude of online &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.purpleculture.net/online-chinese-input/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pinyin&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pinyinput.com/?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanzi converters&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Pinyin_IME&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pinyin-based&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogou_Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IMEs&lt;/a&gt; that do what you want but not in a way that you can include them in your own program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over on the Chinese Language Stack Exchange they suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/23790/need-an-api-to-convert-pinyin-to-simplified-chinese-characters&quot;&gt;the Google Translate API&lt;/a&gt;. This would allow you to integrate it with you own program but won't give you a list of all possible Hanzi characters, like you request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find an out-of-the-box solution that does everything you need but depending on your programming ability, you may be able to build your own rudimentary pinyin-to-Hanzi converter using available resources. Looking into several Hanzi-to-pinyin converters, I've noticed that most simply perform a dictionary look-up and that they store the actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozillazg/pinyin-data/blob/master/pinyin.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanzi-to-pinyin conversions&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lxyu/pinyin/blob/master/pinyin/Mandarin.dat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plain text files&lt;/a&gt;. You could easily read those files yourself, strip out the tonal information, and build a reverse mapping where each valid pinyin syllable maps to a list of Hanzi characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T05:49:52.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26594" CreationDate="2017-12-11T15:29:50.367" Score="3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring languages such as spanish that distinguish between /ɾ/ and /r/, as such is not what I refer to, are there any languages that would differentiate between say, /p/ and /ppp/. It is a weird concept, but it is something that came to mind. I suppose, with the example I have in mind, the stammer would be realized as [pĭpĭpĭ], if that helps. Recalling back on the first, differentiating between /ɾ/ and /ɾĭɾĭɾĭ/ would be what I am referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the simplest example would be languages such as latin that use(d) double consonants to differentiate. e.g. &lt;em&gt;anvs,&lt;/em&gt; [anus] (ring) vs. &lt;em&gt;annvs,&lt;/em&gt; /an.nus~anənʊs~anːus/ (year.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T10:36:57.630" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T13:02:07.200" Title="Are there any languages that use rapidly repeated or stammered/stuttered sounds for differentiation?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26597" CreationDate="2017-12-11T17:49:22.380" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a famous paper on phonology R. Jakobson made an example of an English minimal triplet as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pop&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;tot&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;cock&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this example he wanted to show that syllable onset and coda positions produce different realisations of the occlusives, but these realisations are just positional variants of the same phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I needed to present this example to my students but I realised that, while in Jakobson's times, when &lt;em&gt;cock&lt;/em&gt; meant just a male chicken, and nothing else (at least, in &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; linguistic competence), this example sounded perfectly acceptable, today it would unavoidably provoke some giggles among the students. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to change the vowels but different profanities came out again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone help me with individuating a presentable, profanity free, minimal triplet in English? It must have the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/k/ Vowel /k/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/t/ Vowel /t/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/p/ Vowel /p/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My English competence apparently is not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T20:40:54.650" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T10:52:26.810" Title="help with minimal pairs in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26591" CreationDate="2017-12-11T19:09:20.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gemination&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of consonants (and long vowels) as a sound phonologically distinct from single consonants (or short vowels) is a feature common to many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a selection of minimal pairs of words distinguished by consonant length:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cairene Arabic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;حَمَام &lt;code&gt;/ħa.maːm/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;dove; pigeon&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;حَمَّام &lt;code&gt;/ħam.maːm/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;bathroom&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; some pairs of words may appear to be minimal pairs orthographically, but often have different vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;مدرسة &lt;code&gt;/mad.ra.sa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;school&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;مدرّسة &lt;code&gt;/mu.dar.ri.sa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;female teacher&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Berber&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;imi&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/imi/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;mouth&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;immi&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/immi/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;mother&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bengali&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;আটা &lt;code&gt;/ˈät̺ä/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;flour&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;আটটা &lt;code&gt;/ˈät̺t̺ä/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;eight (of something)&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Catalan&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;gala&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈɡa.ɫə/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;Show in a festival; party&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;gal·la&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈɡaɫ.ɫə/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;Gallic; Gaulish person (fem.)&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;unaimed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ʌnˈeɪmd]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;unnamed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ʌnˈneɪmd]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Finnish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;takka&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ˈtakːa]&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;[ˈtakka]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;fireplace&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;taka&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ˈtaka]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;back&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;French&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, consonant length is usually not distinctive, but in certain exceptional cases it can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;courons&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[kuʁɔ̃]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;courrons&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[kuʁːɔ̃]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ganda / Luganda&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-kapa&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/kapa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;coarse&amp;quot; (suffix)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kkapa&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/kːapa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;μέλω &lt;code&gt;[mélɔː]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;I am of interest&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;μέλλω &lt;code&gt;[mélːɔː]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;I am going to&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cypriot Greek&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;πολύ &lt;code&gt;[poˈli]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;very&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;πολλοί &lt;code&gt;[polˈli]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;a lot&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hindi; Urdu&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;पता ; پتہ &lt;code&gt;/pəˈt̻ä/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;address&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;पत्ता ; پتہ &lt;code&gt;/pət̻ˈt̻ä/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;leaf&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hungarian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;megy&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ˈmɛɟ]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;goes&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;meggy&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[ˈmɛɟː]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;sour cherry&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Japanese&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;来た (きた, &lt;code&gt;/kita/&lt;/code&gt;) &amp;quot;came; arrived&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;切った (きった, &lt;code&gt;/kitta/&lt;/code&gt;) &amp;quot;cut; sliced&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Polish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;saki&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/saki/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;sacks, bags&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ssaki&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/sːaki/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;mammals&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Punjabi&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ਸਤ &lt;code&gt;[sət̪]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;truth&amp;quot; (liturgical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ਸੱਤ &lt;code&gt;[sət̪ː]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;seven&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Russian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;подержать &lt;code&gt;[pədʲɪrˈʐatʲ]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;to hold&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;поддержать &lt;code&gt;[pəddʲɪrˈʐatʲ]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;to support&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Turkish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ata&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/aˈta/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;predecessor; forefather&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;atta&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/aˈtːa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;horse&amp;quot; (singular locative)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ukranian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;мана &lt;code&gt;mɑnɑ&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;delusion&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;манна &lt;code&gt;mɑnnɑ&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;manna; semolina&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages even have examples of 3-way consonant length distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Danish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bunde&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[b̥ɔnə]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;bottoms&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bundne&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[b̥ɔnnə]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;bound&amp;quot; (pl.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bundene&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[b̥ɔnn̩nə]&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;the bottoms&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Estonian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;lina&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/linɑ/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;sheet&amp;quot; (short)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;linna&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/linːɑ/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;town&amp;quot; [gen. sg.] (long)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;linna&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/linːːɑ/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;town&amp;quot; [ine. sg.] (overlong)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; In the following languages, they are not true minimal pairs, since the stress shifts from the preceding vowel to the consonant giving a two-way distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Standard Italian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;beve&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈbeːve/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;he/she drinks/is drinking&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bevve&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈbevːe/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;he/she drank&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Latin&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ānus&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈaː.nus/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;ring; anus&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;annus&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈan.nus/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;year&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Norweigian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;måte&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/moːtə/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;method&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;måtte&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/motːə/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;had to&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Swedish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;håla&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/'hoːla/&lt;/code&gt;  &amp;quot;deep hole; cave&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hålla&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/'holːa/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;hold; grip&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_phonology#Suprasegmental_length&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_phonology#Suprasegmental_length&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/gala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/gala&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/gal%C2%B7la&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ca.wiktionary.org/wiki/gal·la&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/hindi-english/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/hindi-english/पता&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/hindi-english/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/hindi-english/पत्ता&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.learnluganda.com/concise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.learnluganda.com/concise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://asegzawal.net/english/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://asegzawal.net/english/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/%7Eohala/papers/o_and_o_banff.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonetic Universals and Hindi Segment Duration&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Manjari Ohala &amp;amp; John J. Ohala&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ThD6g5laZFYC&amp;amp;pg=PA75&amp;amp;lpg=PA75&amp;amp;dq=Tamazight+immi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Katherine E. Hoffman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indiana.edu/%7Elingdept/faculty/davis/Davis_Ragheb_Geminate_Rep_Arabic_2014.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Geminate representation in Arabic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Stuart Davis and Marwa Ragheb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.202.8058&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gemination in Swedish &amp;amp; Arabic with a particular reference to the preceding vowel duration. An instrumental &amp;amp; comparative approach&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Zeki M. Hassan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/files/hankamer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perception of consonant length: voiceless stops in Turkish and Bengali&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Jorge Hankame, Aditi Lahiri and Jacques Korenan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T13:02:07.200" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26593" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:24:55.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coke, pope, tote is the only one that completely avoids potential snicker-words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T20:24:55.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26593" CreationDate="2017-12-12T09:34:01.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Vowels&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pap, tat, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cack#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;cack&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɑ ~ æ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pep, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/teth#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;teth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kek#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kek&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/e ~ ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; (Second word very rare, third very informal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peep, teat, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keek#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;keek&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; (Is &lt;em&gt;teat&lt;/em&gt; too anatomical for your taste?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pip, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tit#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;tit&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, kick &lt;code&gt;/ɪ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pup, tut, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cuck#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;cuck&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ʌ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pop, tot, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cock#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;cock&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɒ ~ ɔ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poop#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;poop&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, toot, cook &lt;code&gt;/u ~ ʊ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Diphthongs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pipe, tight, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kike#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;s&gt;kike&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/aɪ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pape#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pape&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tate#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tate&lt;/a&gt;, cake &lt;code&gt;/eɪ/&lt;/code&gt; (Second word a proper noun (name))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pope, tote, coke &lt;code&gt;/oʊ ~ əʊ/&lt;/code&gt; (Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coke#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;coke&lt;/em&gt; (cocaine)&lt;/a&gt; problematic?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt;, tout, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/cowk?s=ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cowk&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;/aʊ/&lt;/code&gt; (Third word dialectal, Northeast Scot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ɔɪ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How old are your students? I can't imagine that the momentary giggle that some of these words might raise would continue for very long or be detrimental to the lesson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only one I would avoid is &lt;code&gt;/aɪ/&lt;/code&gt;, since therein lies a pretty offensive slur. Maybe avoid the ones which contain very uncommon words too, for the sake of familiarity to the audience. Everything else seems pretty benign, removed of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T10:52:26.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-12T18:31:28.293" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question sounds vague, and there may not be much evidence yet, but I suspect it is falsifiable. The question is, in the modern era (post European imperialism, in particular post-mass-media and post-Internet), are the languages of the world converging? For example, many new words that are being generated (like computer, in the sense of &lt;em&gt;computing machine&lt;/em&gt;, and telephone) are cognates/loanwords in many languages, even unrelated ones. For these recent concepts, words may be &quot;the same&quot; not just between Germanic, Romance, or Indo-European languages, but even in East Asian languages like Korean and Japanese, and other entirely unrelated languages, due to the rapidity in the spread of ideas and culture from one nation to another. I imagine this is also happening with a lot of slang and idioms not directly related to modern technology, especially loanwords from American English to other languages. However, there may still be substantial divergent forces (new words being generated locally and not spreading outside the language of origination, words changing meaning over time so that they are no longer cognates), and it is theoretically possible that these outweigh the convergent forces. So is there any evidence that overall, languages are converging today, by measures like lexical similarity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20743" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T18:31:28.293" Title="Are languages converging in the modern era?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-12T21:43:00.507" Score="-1" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know Yves Cortez came up with theories suggesting that French and Spanish/ Romance languages came from old Italian instead of Latin. He argued that this is because Latin was only the written language and this actually co-existed with old Italian explaining the links between Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any further theories on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20746" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T23:07:46.140" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T23:28:30.020" Title="What are the theories for Spanish and French/ Romance languages not coming from Latin?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26600" CreationDate="2017-12-12T23:28:30.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;em&gt;Italian&lt;/em&gt; is used for the Romance language, so you probably mean the Romance languages came from some Italic language(s), which coexisted with Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know quite a bit about the non-Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italic languages&lt;/a&gt;, which include Umbrian, Faliscan, Oscan and some others. They were spoken in Italy and were related to Latin. No doubt they had some influence upon Latin, especially before the classical era, but, from what we know, Latin resembles the Romance languages more closely than do the other Italic languages. So it seems extremely unlikely that e.g. early Italian should have developed from e.g. Oscan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also know quite a bit about Vulgar Latin, 'Latin of the People', which was spoken by the common people in Antiquity. It is somewhat different from classical/literary Latin, but it's quite close. Information on Vulgar Latin is mostly from source such as graffiti, quotations, and comedy, which often emulated the Latin of the common people. The Romance languages are thought to have developed from Vulgar Latin, and we have quite a bit of information about intermediate stages, which match what one would expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you meant &quot;other, non-Italic languages spoken in Italy&quot; by your &lt;em&gt;Old Italian&lt;/em&gt;, then it would seem even less likely, for they would resemble the Romance languages far less than do the Italic languages. The major non-Italic languages spoken around Italy by the time the Romance languages took shape, in the early Middle Ages, were Latin, Greek, Germanic languages, and probably some scarce remnants of Etruscan. Greek is from the Greek branch of the Indo-European family of languages; Germanic is of the Germanic branch; and Latin is of the Italic branch, like the Romance languages. Resemblance is closest within the same branch. From the little we know about Etruscan, it does not resemble Latin at all, for it is not just of a different branch, but of an entirely different (unknown) family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore not take this Cortez very seriously, unless by &lt;em&gt;Old Italian&lt;/em&gt; he meant simply &quot;Vulgar Latin&quot; or some intermediate stage between Vulgar Latin and Mediaeval Italian. In that case, I would want to know which exact stage this would be; but, truly, I don't think it makes sense to think that French developed from a local, non-standard Italian variant of Latin in the early Middle Ages, when there had existed old and established Latin-speaking cities in France for half a millennium. Why would they switch to a strange variant of the same language (Latin) from a thousand kilometres away (from Italy) only at that time? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T23:28:30.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T01:51:31.857" Score="0" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;You see this a lot in the auxlang movement that having gendered pronouns is sexist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But making conlangs of my own, I find its absence to be often annoying. No one seems to realize how useful it is to be able to use different pronouns to refer to different people. If you only have one, you're often forced to just refer to everyone by name or some kind of title. I imagine in the real world, a true gender-neutral pronoun would eventually vanish due to its definition being too broad. At the very least its use would diminish over time even if it did exist, thus making it relatively temporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T01:27:01.317" Title="Are there any natural languages that actually have gender neutral 3rd person pronouns?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-12-13T02:56:36.077" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26604" CreationDate="2017-12-13T02:52:13.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot. All Turkic languages (Turkish, Qazaq, Tatar, O'zbek, Sakha etc.), all Uralic languages (Finnish, Sami, Hungarian, Komi, Mari, Nenets etc.), a lot of Indo-Iranian langages (Persian, Sorani Kurdish, Bengali, Ossetic etc.), and many more. All the languages mentioned so far don't have grammatical gender, but even some languages with grammatical gender may fail to have gendered pronouns, for instance, Hindi-Urdu, and Kurmancî Kurdish in the absolutive case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16776" LastEditorUserId="16776" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T01:27:01.317" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T01:27:01.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T11:03:16.317" Score="0" ViewCount="1268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anybody found an easy way of drawing tree structures in Microsoft Word? I have to do all my parsing using tables and would much prefer to draw tree structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T12:40:46.987" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T12:40:46.987" Title="How to draw tree structures in Microsoft Word?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26607" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words can be derived from other words by several means. Typical means of derivation are prefixes and suffixes, but other means like stem alternations are also frequently seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of derivation include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by suffix: distinguishable from to distinguish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by prefix: undistinguishable from distinguishable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26608" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" Score="0" Body="For questions about derivation, i.e., the process of forming new words from existing words." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:38:22.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26609" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:50:52.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While modern English has only one infinitive (e.g., &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to see&lt;/em&gt;) other languages can have more infinite forms. For Latin there are several infinitives, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;laudare&lt;/em&gt; Infinite Praesens Active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;laudari&lt;/em&gt; Infinite Praesens Passive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;laudavisse&lt;/em&gt; Infinitive Perfect Active&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;laudatum esse&lt;/em&gt; Infinitive Perfect Passive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;laudatum iri&lt;/em&gt; Infinitive Future Passive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T04:35:33.367" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T04:35:33.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26610" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:50:52.150" Score="0" Body="A special verb form not inflected for person and number." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:48:49.687" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:48:49.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26611" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old Norse is the predecessor of the modern Scandinavian languages Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a North Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26612" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" Score="0" Body="For question about Old Norse, the language spoken and written in Scandinavia ca. 9th to 13th century." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T15:57:34.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26613" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:03:58.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prototypical implementation of a wordnet is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/download/current-version/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Princeton Wordnet&lt;/a&gt; developed at Princeton University since 1985. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordnets are also available for other languages than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2018-09-29T10:12:33.927" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T10:12:33.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26614" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:03:58.123" Score="0" Body="For question about wordnets, special linguistic resources providing semantic relations like synonomy and hyper-/hyponomy between words." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:03:58.123" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:03:58.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26615" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26616" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" Score="0" Body="For questions about the passive, a grammatical voice." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:09:06.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26617" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part-of-Speech tagging can be done manually or automatically by a part-of-speech tagger. POS taggers of different quality and with different implementations exists for a lot of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are sometimes several POS tagsets for the same language (e.g. Penn tagset and CLAWS7 for English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26618" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" Score="0" Body="Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is the task to assign each word in a text corpus a part-of-speech tag." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:11:56.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26619" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:18:22.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous and successful case of language revival is the revival of the Hebrew language as a common language in modern Israel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other projects of language revival, e.g., for Cornish, a Celtic language of Cornwall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:58:09.777" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:58:09.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26620" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:18:22.247" Score="0" Body="The conscious revival of a dead language." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:18:22.247" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:18:22.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26621" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26622" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" Score="0" Body="The Chinese language of Southern China and Hongkong." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:19:59.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26623" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In V2 languages the word order is relatively free, but there is always the verb at the second position.  In a V2 language, the word orders SOV, OVS, and XVSO can coexist with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example for a V2 language is Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26624" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" Score="0" Body="For question about word order with the *verb second* rule." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:22:01.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26625" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26626" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Tibetan language, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Tibet and neighbouring regions." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:27:39.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26627" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26628" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" Score="0" Body="For questions about the langauges and language families used in Australia by the Australian Aboriginees." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:29:33.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26629" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26630" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" Score="0" Body="For question concerning Slovenian, a Slavonic language spoken in Slovenia (the northernmost republic of former Yugoslavia), Kärnten, and Trieste." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:31:13.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26631" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting fact about Norwegian is the parallel existence of two standard languages in the same country, namely Bokmal and Nynorsk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26632" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" Score="0" Body="Norwegian is a Germanic language spoken in Norway." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:32:17.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26633" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26634" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" Score="0" Body="Tamil is a Dravidian language in spoken Southern India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:36:32.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sumerian language is considered an isolate language, no external relation could be demonstrated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was wirtten in cuneiform script and extant bilingual wordlists of Sumerian and Akkadian (a Semitic language) exist. Long after its death Sumerian was continued as a classical language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" Score="0" Body="For question about the Sumerian language, an Ancient language used from the 3rd millenium BCE upto the 1st century CE  in the Iraq." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:40:30.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" Score="0" Body="The Swadesh list contains a list of words that are supposed to be stable over language evolution." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T16:44:25.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26639" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several well-known ways of word formation, including &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/derivation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;derivation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;derivation&lt;/a&gt; from already existing words, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/loanwords&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;loanwords&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;loanwords&lt;/a&gt; are imported from other languages, and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/calques&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;calques&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;calques&lt;/a&gt; or loan translations are formed consciously in the language using a model from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26640" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" Score="0" Body="For questions on how words in a language are formed." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:14:44.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:45:34.787" Score="1" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;if a phoneme appears twice in a english word, it will be pronounced as the same allophone both times; ie, two different phoneme of two different allophones of the same phoneme cannot be used in a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20753" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:01:19.260" Title="can two phonemes of two different allophone appear in one word?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3609" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:48:33.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are measures.  Whether they are consistent or useful is subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A probabilistic parser like &lt;a href=&quot;https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/&lt;/a&gt; returns one parse.  But under the hood, it had a few candidates and just chose the most probable one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the even the first candidate had a low probability then we could say that the sentence was &quot;hard to parse&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the second candidate had almost the same probability as the first one, likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first parse is in fact wrong then tautologically it was (too) hard for that parser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is grammatically correct but semantically improbable then we enter into a philosophical question about what the parsing task includes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many metrics you can extract from the returned tree itself, like depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:48:33.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26641" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:01:19.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a phoneme appears twice in a word, it will be pronounced the same if and only if the tokens of the phonemes appear in the same context (as defined by the allophonic rule). The phoneme /t/ is aspirated foot-initially, and it is glottalized syllable-finally after a vocoid: &quot;tout&quot; is pronounced [tʰæʊt˺]. It is non-aspirated and non-glottalized elsewhere, as in &quot;stacked&quot; [stækt], or &quot;statistician&quot; [s&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;æ̀ɾəs&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ɪ́ʃn̩] (where two of the t's are in the same environment and have the same allophone, and the third on in the middle is in a different context as has the allophone appropriate for foot-medial intervocalic position). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:01:19.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:28:02.803" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm wondering whether the Greek/Roman grammarians already wrote about six/four basic forms based on which a Greek/Latin verb can be conjugated in all its forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they did, did they pick the same forms we use today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they didn't, when did the concept appear and in relation to which language? When and how did it spread to the description of other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20754" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:17:04.880" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:17:04.880" Title="When was the concept of verbs' principal parts codified, and by whom?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;&lt;principal-parts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26650" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:57:07.003" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the correct nomenclature for languages constructing logical functions through desinences (through declensions) and what for the ones doing it via prepositions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13860" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T11:57:41.997" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T11:57:41.997" Title="What is the technical name for declensible languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26648" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principal parts of a verb are a minimal set of verb forms that is sufficient to derive all inflected forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: go, went, gone; drive, drove, driven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin: venire, venio, veni, ventum; scribere, scribo, scipsi, scriptum &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26649" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" Score="0" Body="The principal parts of a verb are a minimal set of verb forms that is sufficient to derive all inflected forms." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:20:20.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26646" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:17:18.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language with a certain degree of inflection is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synthetic language&lt;/a&gt;. The subsets are &lt;em&gt;highly inflected&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;weakly inflected&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;synthetic language&lt;/em&gt; which has derivational morphology so that the complex words become synthesized by concatenation of &lt;em&gt;unchanged&lt;/em&gt; morphemes is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agglutinative language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the bound morphemes serve several roles at once (e.g., person+case or gender+time) and therefore change, that would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fusional language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above cases, the prefixes are not considered separately because usually, all types of affixes serve the common role in the morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T20:17:18.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T07:09:07.160" Score="7" ViewCount="2197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently in the bus I sat next to two persons conversing* in sign language. &#xA;In their conversation, they were not only using gestures and mimics for expressing what they wanted to say but also were constantly making whispering sounds all the time when doing this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these sounds for? I thought deaf people actually cannot hear anything, how can sounds support the conversation? If these sounds hold semantic information, is then anything missing when you see sign language expressions in which these sounds are not even sensible for non-deaf people? I think of news shows of certain public broadcasting stations which often include translations* in sign language, there no whispering sounds are noticeable from the translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I hope 'converse' is the right verb for an exchange between two people in sign language and I hope 'translate' was the right word to use in this context. Please forgive me if that was insensitive however I am not familiar with the details of sign language yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20757" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T10:34:40.970" Title="When people converse in sign language, why do they make whispering sounds?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26652" CreationDate="2017-12-14T10:09:08.120" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually when we sign* we use our mouths to mouthe a word. This can be used to disambiguate certain lexemes (for example, divorce and ex-spouse have the same sign in ASL, so one way to clarify which you mean is to mouthe whichever of those two English words.). So it's quite natural to also whisper it because you can't help but let some air pass through your mouth. It's almost instinctive. But if you were watching a video, you could mute it, or if you're completely deaf or it's too loud you might miss it, which means that that sound is not necessary to the understanding, but rather an anatomically conditioned side effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A parallel with spoken languages: when you speak, your head will move around. You (almost) can't help it. But if that movement were unobservable, for example on the phone, it doesn't affect your communication at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you thought deaf people cannot hear anything. It's not usually true. Most deaf people, even profoundly deaf people, have at least some hearing. And sometimes, sounds accompany signed conversation. (It's rather a separate matter from what you're asking about, but it's related. And in case anyone comes here from a google search...) These &lt;em&gt;sounds which are lexically part of a sign language&lt;/em&gt; are usually a single syllable like &lt;code&gt;pah&lt;/code&gt; (which means something like &quot;at last!&quot;) or &lt;code&gt;cha&lt;/code&gt; (which means &quot;large&quot; or &quot;overwhelming&quot;, or &lt;code&gt;ooo&lt;/code&gt; which I can't remember what it means. (these can also be distinguished non-audially, by lip-reading). These three examples come from ASL. I can't quite put my finger on the syntactic role of these, but it's kind of adverbial or possibly modal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: &lt;sub&gt;It's fine to say converse too. even &quot;speaking&quot; sign language is okay terminology! It doesn't bother us. And of course, &quot;translate&quot; is the right word for when we take for example a sentence in ASL and render it for example in English.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T11:18:36.380" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T11:18:36.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:35:07.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For sure, there was an advance in linguistic capabilities from great apes to humans, and this advance is determined by some genes. One gene, termed &lt;a href=&quot;https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/66260/name-of-human-language-related-gene&quot;&gt;&quot;The language gene&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in popular science and &lt;code&gt;FOXP2&lt;/code&gt; in genetics is already identified. Its protein differs in two positions between humans and the other mammals (it is the same for great apes and mice!). The mutation is shared by Neanderthalers and modern men, therefore it is at least 300 thousand years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be differences in linguistic capabilities between modern men, but there is a strong &lt;em&gt;levelling effect&lt;/em&gt;: Assume, that a minority of men has some advanced linguistic capabilities and they can communicate more effectively with each other. They need to communicate with the majority of people lacking those advanced capabilities using the majorities' language, so they cannot take profit from their mutations. It is unlikely that speech communities with advanced linguistic capabilities can form and will be identified by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T15:35:07.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T22:48:07.033" Score="0" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am able to say &quot;no&quot; clearly while simultaneously holding my tongue down at the bottom of my mouth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the n sound made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T00:42:12.503" Title="Can the &quot;n&quot; sound be made without the tongue touching the roof of the mouth?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26655" CreationDate="2017-12-14T23:15:01.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in English is produced by raising the tongue to contact the palatine process of the maxilla, also by adducting the vocal folds and opening he velopharyngeal port. The exact point of contact on the tongue and on the hard palate is open to some variation, even within one language. Without an audiovisual record, it would be impossible to comment on what you are doing or how canonical a pronunciation of &quot;no&quot; you are producing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T23:15:01.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26655" CreationDate="2017-12-15T10:18:08.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consonant [n] in IPA is an an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_nasals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar nasal stop&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by definition&lt;/a&gt; means that it is made by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth. The word &quot;no&quot; in English is pronounced with this consonant, /noʊ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since English only contrasts two nasals in word-initial position ([n] and [m]), there are a lot of ways to make a sound resembling [n] without being an alveolar consonant. For example, you might have pronounced [ŋoʊ] or [ɴoʊ] (velar and uvular nasals respectively). Since English doesn't have [ŋ] (for instance) in word-initial position, you wouldn't naturally detect a difference between it and [n] without speaking a language that distinguishes between the two sounds in that position. This means that you &lt;em&gt;perceive&lt;/em&gt; the consonant you pronounced to be /n/, but a speaker of a language that contrasts would perceive them to be two entirely different &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonemes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T00:42:12.503" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T00:42:12.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14413" CreationDate="2017-12-15T11:37:35.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A crown in head would define the horisontal plane. However, the coronal plane is same as frontal plane and as far as I know it is named by the coronal sutures (sutura coronalia) of the skull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20766" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T11:37:35.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26662" CreationDate="2017-12-15T16:29:33.653" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a phonic unit? I tried to find out this notion on the Web, but I did not find any explicit or accurate definition but just others definitions that use this notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20768" LastEditorUserId="20768" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T16:39:50.113" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T16:58:30.183" Title="What is a phonic unit?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-15T16:48:11.430" Score="1" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a (probably now-deleted comment) elsewhere on SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Church Latin and Classical Latin] are more or less the same languages. Some new words were added and the pronunciation changed over the years, but it is the same Latin language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit to not being an expert in linguistics, Latin, or the history of Latin, but I find it hard to believe that a language spoken today can be the same language as one spoken in the 1st century.&#xA;Furthermore, I see the two assumed to be different (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/are-there-any-active-classical-latin-users-nowadays&quot;&gt;Are there any active Classical Latin users nowadays?&lt;/a&gt;) in many ways, even down to having separate wikipedia pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are modern church Latin and classical Latin considered to be the same language?&#xA; What word describes their relationship (dialect, ancestor, etc.)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15196" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T00:31:28.527" Title="Are modern chuch Latin and classical Latin different languages?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26660" CreationDate="2017-12-15T16:58:30.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a standard technical term used in linguistics, though it appears to have been used in an English translation of a French textbook by Ruwet.&#xA; &quot;Phonic&quot; itself is most generally used in spelling pedagogy, and has to do with speech sounds. It could refer to a phoneme, or an allophone of a phoneme, or a group of letters that corresponds to a phoneme (such as &quot;th&quot; = [θ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T16:58:30.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6147" CreationDate="2017-12-15T18:45:14.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no proof that the Indus valley language was Dravidian at all. Looking only at the geographical distribution of the Dravidian languages, it looks at the first sight that Brahui is an old relic of a formerly existing Dravidian language continuum stretching from the southern tip of India to the border of Pakistan and Iran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, newer research has completely turned the picture: Now we think that the Brahui speaking people are rather recent immigrants from central India. They picked up words from Indoarian languages during their migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glottochronology also tells us that the last common ancestor of the Dravidian languages is rather young and post-dates the Indus civilisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T17:27:07.690" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T17:27:07.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-15T18:52:44.083" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly familiar with verbal predicates (&lt;em&gt;VP-shell, passivisation, PISH&lt;/em&gt; etc.) but every time I have a &lt;strong&gt;non-verbal predicate, like NP or AP&lt;/strong&gt;, I seem to struggle - partially because I don't know whether they discharge any thematic (theta) roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John considered him a good person&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is especially tricky and the question of NP discharging theta roles may be really helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; receives two theta roles - one from &quot;a good person&quot; and second from &quot;consider&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXt26.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXt26.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That clearly violates the Theta-criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think?&#xA;Thanks for shedding any light on this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16994" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T18:52:44.083" Title="Do non-verbal predicates discharge thematic roles?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2414" CreationDate="2017-12-15T18:54:36.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Nigerian Standard English categorized as a discrete language, a dialect of English, or does it fall under some other category?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the answer is: It is classified as a &lt;strong&gt;variety&lt;/strong&gt; of English like British English, American English, or Australian English. All varieties of English have regional dialects and other kinds of lects and slangs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T07:24:15.333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T07:24:15.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26661" CreationDate="2017-12-15T22:53:09.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, language-relatedness is not a well worked-out science with a clear taxonomy of relations (such as &quot;language&quot; vs. &quot;dialect&quot;), so this is one of those &quot;it depends on how you define...&quot; questions. If two language forms are not mutually intelligible to monolingual speakers, we generally say that they are different languages. Since there are no first-language speakers of any form of Latin, the mutual-intelligibility test is not clearly performable. Even if you draw only on &quot;really good&quot; speakers of Latin, it is highly unlikely that anyone learns one form of Latin without also learning a reasonable amount of the other form – there won't be any monolingual speakers, even if one person was trained mostly in Church Latin vs. Classical Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of linguistics and even inside linguistics, it is widely thought that English (as currently spoken) is one language. Yet various forms of English are on the borders of mutual unintelligibility, at least at the level that Spanish and Portuguese, or Danish and Norwegian are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mutual intelligibility is, as you would expect, not a clear yes/no distinction. It would be interesting to take sets of related languages and do controlled experiments with speakers so that we could say with some degree of precision how easily monolingual speakers of A can understand speakers of B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T22:53:09.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26661" CreationDate="2017-12-16T00:26:06.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LatinPronunciation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Church Latin and Classical Latin were quite different phonologically&lt;/a&gt;. Classical Latin was syllable-timed and had vowel length and predictable stress; Church (i.e, Medieval) Latin was stress-timed and had lost vowel length and stress was (therefore) unpredictable. My guess is that if a fluent speaker of one and a fluent speaker of the other had to discuss something they both knew about, they would each think the other's accent barbarous, but they would eventually be able to understand one another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is native speakers; there were many fluent speakers of one dialect or another of Medieval Latin over its 1500 or so years, but no native speakers born in a speech community. For the first 15 centuries of the Christian Era, anyone in Europe who read or wrote &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; -- with very few exceptions -- read and wrote in Latin, whatever language they spoke natively.  Thus, all fluent Latin speakers were literate, having learned the language in order to be able to read and write. This constituted a very small (but very important) proportion of the population. However, this is the case for Classical Latin as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time of J. Caesar, the language spoken in the streets of Rome was not the same as Classical Latin, since it was Vulgar Latin -- a quite different language, and busy turning into all the Romance languages (Modern Italian is basically the Tuscan dialect of Vulgar Latin with two millennia of age on it). The first thing that happened was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Grammaticalization.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a lot of sound changes, leading to a total restructuring of the grammar&lt;/a&gt; -- no cases and only two genders, for instance. So the fluent speakers of Classical Latin from early Imperial times were not native speakers of it, either. Diglossia was a prominent feature of European language communities, and still is in many places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, since the language was identical when written for 1500 years and could be spoken by many at any time (it was necessary for any serious work), though the pronunciations and word meanings changed, as necessary, when the cultures did. I'd say they were the same language, as much the same as Mexican Spanish and Peninsular Spanish, say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T00:31:28.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T00:31:28.527" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26675" CreationDate="2017-12-16T00:58:01.810" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am curious as to the number of homographs (sets of word meanings that share a common spelling) that occur in the English language. Also what the current state of the art would be for automatically differentiating senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GloVe&lt;/a&gt; project makes available a word vector model with a 2.2 million vocabulary based on 840 billion tokens (taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://commoncrawl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Crawl&lt;/a&gt; dataset] - unfortunately from my understanding there model takes no account of homographs and I'm firstly trying to get a feel for how much of an effect that would have, and secondly thinking of how to go about recreating a similar model using word senses instead of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20772" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T14:18:21.823" Title="Estimate of the number of homographs in english" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-16T08:38:21.760" Score="5" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest I can find is 'cognate' but that term is used for words that have similar etymology and phonetic characteristics but not necessarily the same or similar meaning in different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I said 'can have' in my question is because words in different languages can share a meaning but not all possible meanings. Each word in a language has a sort of meaning cloud which can overlap with a particular meaning of a word in another language, while other meanings are not shared between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20774" LastEditorUserId="20774" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T11:06:49.433" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T12:29:08.033" Title="Is there a linguistic term for words that can have the same meaning in different languages?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36317" CreationDate="2017-12-16T09:44:26.367" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently reading some historical records wherein a lady was mentioned, Olga Malar (née Cuch), born in &quot;Napodiwka,&quot; Poland, in 1922. She was said to be the daughter of &lt;strong&gt;Xelefon&lt;/strong&gt; Cuch and Jewdokia Romaniuk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every individual name on the record can be cross-referenced elsewhere, apart from the birthplace, and father's given name (&lt;strong&gt;Xelefon&lt;/strong&gt;). Both are possibly misspellings, but of what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online, there are barely any concrete results for a search of &lt;em&gt;Xelefon&lt;/em&gt;, or even possible permutations like &lt;em&gt;Kselefon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Helefon&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Chelefon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems particularly unusual for the letter &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; to appear in Polish. It is not part of the standard alphabet, though it may appear in calques. However, even then, &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is often substituted for &lt;em&gt;ks&lt;/em&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: No official answers by 2020.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13933" LastEditorUserId="13933" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T05:04:55.163" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T12:35:39.710" Title="Where might the given name Xelefon originate?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26368" CreationDate="2017-12-16T13:00:29.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that the adjunct &quot;before this time&quot; belongs not in the matrix clause, but in the catenative complement clause, as shown in this tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yn33D.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yn33D.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T13:00:29.607" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26670" CreationDate="2017-12-16T14:18:21.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page on English homographs&lt;/a&gt; as it stands lists 164,  as the following paper title suggests: &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/bf03202766.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Alberta norms of relative&#xA;meaning frequency for 566 homographs&lt;/a&gt; there are substantially more, the same paper referencing other studies finding as much as 44% of randomly sampled words forms have multiple meaning (and 85% of the most common words in the language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the University of Alberta study &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;many of the homographs in our&#xA;  list have more than two meanings; nearly half (230) have&#xA;  three or more meanings, and 75 have four or more meanings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as to using separated word senses to build word vector models - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-kinds-of-related-words-that-Word2Vec-outputs/answer/Ajit-Rajasekharan#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to this answer on Quora&lt;/a&gt; something close to the state of the art (published 2015) can be found in the paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.07257&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breaking Sticks and Ambiguities with Adaptive Skip-gram&lt;/a&gt; which describes the AdaGram model that from my limited understanding estimates and differentiates word senses as it builds the model with similar computation requirements to word2vec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20772" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T14:18:21.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26678" CreationDate="2017-12-17T00:24:35.627" Score="-1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phoneme g is not original in Czech and is present only in foreign words. There is an official grammar rulebook declaring the inclination in locative case to be &quot;ž&quot; or &quot;z&quot;, however I feel like phoneme &quot;dz&quot; would fit much better, even though it's not even a letter in Czech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;: The mages are fascinating. We talked about mages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official translation: Ti mágové jsou fascinující. Mluvili jsme &lt;em&gt;o mázích.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggested language: Ti mágové jsou fascinující. Mluvili jsme &lt;em&gt;o mádzích.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example2:&lt;/strong&gt; We use tags. We talk about tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Official translation: Používáme tagy. Mluvíme o &lt;em&gt;tazích.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggested language: Používáme tagy. Mluvíme o &lt;em&gt;tadzích.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T16:14:50.713" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T16:14:50.713" Title="Why do I feel like &quot;g&quot; should mutate to &quot;dz&quot;?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26677" CreationDate="2017-12-17T00:45:34.487" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you're following the analogy of the /k~ts/ alternations in words like kluk, klucích.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound /g/ is a voiced counterpart to the sound /k/, and likewise the sound /dz/ is a voiced counterpart to the sound /ts/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T00:45:34.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4834" CreationDate="2017-12-17T03:43:20.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English h is not a voiceless vowel; it's a voiceless glide -- the non-syllabic counterpart to a voiceless vowel. (If it were syllabic, it would be a voiceless vowel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with Lawler's answer above  only in regard to his omission of a non-syllabic mark on the first sound of [i̥it], [ɪ̥ɪt], [e̥et], [ɛ̥ɛn], [æ̥æt], [ḁat], which he writes as though each word had two syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T03:43:20.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26672" CreationDate="2017-12-17T12:12:27.337" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you are looking for (depending on etymological link) is &lt;em&gt;cognate&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;false cognate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;False cognates&lt;/strong&gt; are pairs of words that seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognates&lt;/a&gt; because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous example is the Mbabaram (extinct Australian Aboriginal language) word for dog, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_&amp;quot;dog&amp;quot;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some further examples are listed in the above Wikipedia page, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Hindi&lt;/code&gt; काट (&lt;em&gt;kaṭ&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;cutting&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;ache&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/code&gt; ἄχος (&lt;em&gt;ákhos&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;pain, distress&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;lake&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;French&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;lac&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;island&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;isla&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;mucho&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;usted&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Arabic&lt;/code&gt; أستاذ (&lt;em&gt;ʾustāḏ&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;formal pronoun; teacher&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Japanese&lt;/code&gt; 見る (&lt;em&gt;miru&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;mirar&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to watch&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Japanese&lt;/code&gt; 秘伝 (&lt;em&gt;hiden&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;hidden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Japanese&lt;/code&gt; 絵文字 (&lt;em&gt;emoji&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;emoticon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Japanese&lt;/code&gt; ありがとう (&lt;em&gt;arigatō&lt;/em&gt;); &lt;code&gt;Portuguese&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;obrigado&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;thank you&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there is the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;false friend&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;False friends&lt;/strong&gt; are words in two languages that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;look&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound&lt;/a&gt; similar, but differ significantly in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would cover cognates and false cognates which differ in (at least one of) their meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cognate false friends:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; &quot;current&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;preservative&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;preservativo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;condom&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; ice; &lt;code&gt;Japanese&lt;/code&gt; アイス (&lt;em&gt;aisu&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;ice-cream&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-cognate false friends:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;English&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;afraid&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;code&gt;Russian&lt;/code&gt; ефрейтор (&lt;em&gt;yefreitor&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;corporal&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;afamada&lt;/em&gt; &quot;famous&quot;; &lt;code&gt;Catalan&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;afamada&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hungry*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An amusing example is 手紙 (composed of the characters 手 - hand, and 紙 - paper) which in Japanese means &lt;em&gt;tegami&lt;/em&gt; &quot;written message&quot; but in Chinese means &lt;em&gt;shǒuzhǐ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;toilet paper&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T12:29:08.033" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T12:29:08.033" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T15:22:50.723" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German and Spanish (I think), you use the word for 'from'. In Japanese though, I think they use 'ni' (which can either mean 'to' or 'at'). In English we use the preposition 'by', which is rarely used for anything other than passives. Though it can have a locative meaning, which is what I think was its original meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other ways languages do this? To me, improvising with another preposition can potentially cause ambiguity issues. At least in English, if two 'by's would appear in a sentence, we can replace one with 'next to'. I.e:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&quot;It was put by the fridge by Bob&quot;&#xA;&quot;It was put next to the fridge by Bob&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German though, I don't know what you would do. As far as I know, they don't have another preposition they can use to mean 'von/from'. And of course 'von' is far more commonly used than 'by' in English. And Japanese 'ni' is even more commonly used than that! Really the only two things we express exclusively with 'by' is the agent of a passive construction, and the author of a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some other ways that languages use? I'd prefer answers from languages from different families. Languages that are related to each other are of course more likely to use the same tactic than languages that aren't (its probably why most European languages use the word for 'from').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:24:43.813" Title="What methods do languages use to re-introduce the subject of a passive construction?" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T16:54:11.900" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that some syntacticians sometimes use the word subregularity instead of irregularity. Is there any difference between these two terms or they cover same concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T17:23:16.437" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T17:23:16.437" Title="Subregularities and irregularities" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26685" CreationDate="2017-12-17T16:54:27.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, &lt;em&gt;par&lt;/em&gt; ('by') and &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; ('from/of') can be used depending on the verb. In Late Archaic Chinese, the more common passive construction that includes the agent was &lt;em&gt;jian&lt;/em&gt; + main verb + &lt;em&gt;yu&lt;/em&gt; + agent. The morpheme &lt;em&gt;yu&lt;/em&gt; normally marks the locative, so it's somewhat similar to the Japanese example you mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both of these, and the examples you mention, the agent is marked as oblique. However, there are constructions where this isn't the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Early Middle Chinese, a new kind of passive was innovated that uses a strategy you haven't mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;為  王    所  殺&#xA;Wei wang suo sha&#xA;COP king SUO kill&#xA;'was killed by the king' (Records of the Grand Historian)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strategy is interesting because it's not 'prepositional' like the ones you mentioned. &lt;em&gt;Wang suo sha&lt;/em&gt; alone is means 'he whom the king killed'. You can consider this structure a patient nominalisation or a headless object relative clause; either way, the agent is expressed as part of this nominal phrase. So 'literally', the VP translates to 'was a person whom the king killed'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern Chinese, this is the construction we use. It is attested since Late Archaic Chinese, but without the agent; the agent only appeared around Middle Chinese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;我  被   他  看  見   了&#xA;Wo  bei ta  kan jian le&#xA;1sg BEI 3sg look see SFP&#xA;'I was seen by him'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although people these days often gloss &lt;em&gt;bei&lt;/em&gt; as 'by', this isn't completely accurate because &lt;em&gt;bei&lt;/em&gt; didn't grammaticalise from a preposition; its original meaning was &lt;em&gt;undergo&lt;/em&gt;. For example, &lt;em&gt;bei sha&lt;/em&gt; would mean 'undergo killing' (i.e. get killed). The agent was just put between &lt;em&gt;bei&lt;/em&gt; and the main verb sometime in Middle Chinese (why this happened, I'm not sure). I'm not sure what you'd call this strategy; you could say it's unmarked, since people just inserted the agent there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS You might want to look up how it works in Austronesian languages - that would be really exciting! It's a pretty complicated phenomenon, so considering that I'm not well-read in it, I won't post anything about it - perhaps others could!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just looked up Keenan and Dryer's chapter in &lt;em&gt;Language typology and syntactic description&lt;/em&gt;. I found these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Haya, the agent is just unmarked, like the modern Chinese example I mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ebitooke bí-ka-cumb-w’       ómukâzi&#xA;bananas  they-past-cook-pass woman&#xA;'The bananas were cooked by the woman'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, the agent is incorporated into the verb. Keenan and Dryer cite English examples like 'this project is state-controlled', and mention that this process is more productive in Quechua:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kuru miku-sqa-mi       manzana-ø  ka-rqa-n&#xA;bug  eat-ptcpl-comment apple-subj be-past-3&#xA;'The apple was bug eaten'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T06:24:02.760" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T06:24:02.760" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:21:47.413" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compared to other Sino-Tibetan languages, the Chinese languages have a lot less inflection. Why is that? Did Old Chinese lose affixes and agreement systems? Or did other languages in the family get influenced by other languages with more complex grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20786" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T19:49:43.983" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T19:51:56.760" Title="Why are the Sinitic languages so different from the rest of Sino-Tibetan?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26672" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:39:31.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides cognates, there are also &lt;em&gt;chance coincidences&lt;/em&gt; (say, Maya &lt;em&gt;vuh&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;Buch&lt;/em&gt; &quot;book&quot;) when clearly unrelated words have the same sound and meaning in different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:39:31.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26043" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:44:25.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is common to drop the plural from nouns when they are preceded by plural forms of determiners or numerals in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, but this is considered non-standard/uneducated speech by people who pay attention to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eu vi os menino[s]. - I saw the boy[s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eu vi aqueles menino[s]. - I saw those boy[s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ela tem dois gato[s]. - She has two cat[s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20787" LastEditorUserId="20787" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T20:49:29.377" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:49:29.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-18T07:22:51.703" Score="-3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &quot;a&quot; is called the &lt;strong&gt;indefinite&lt;/strong&gt; article in contrast with the &lt;strong&gt;definite&lt;/strong&gt; article &quot;the&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does &quot;a&quot; in this sentence denote indefiniteness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, &quot;a&quot; is needed here not because we need to make &lt;em&gt;mistake&lt;/em&gt; indefinite but because we need to make it an individual, separate entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can prove the above argument as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once &quot;a&quot; is removed from the above sentence, it becomes ungrammatical as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I made mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, is this sentence ungrammatical because now &lt;em&gt;mistake&lt;/em&gt; isn't indefinite anymore without &quot;a&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or because now &lt;em&gt;mistake&lt;/em&gt; isn't an individual, separate entity anymore without &quot;a&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this proves that &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;I made a mistake&lt;/em&gt; doesn't denote indefiniteness, why do we have to call it the indefinite article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T16:11:58.093" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:43:08.863" Title="Does &quot;a&quot; in &quot;I made a mistake&quot; denote indefiniteness?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="34" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-12-18T17:11:26.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2017-12-18T13:42:30.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; No, this is not vowel harmony, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_irregular_verbs#Vowel_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;vowel raising&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Vowel raising&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowel raising appears only in verbs of the third conjugation (&lt;em&gt;-ir&lt;/em&gt; verbs), and in this group it affects &lt;em&gt;d&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;rmir, m&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;rir, p&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;drir&lt;/em&gt; (alternative of the more common &lt;em&gt;p&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;drir&lt;/em&gt;) and nearly all verbs which have &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; as their last stem vowel (e.g. &lt;em&gt;s&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;ntir, rep&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;tir&lt;/em&gt;); exceptions include &lt;em&gt;cernir, discernir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;concernir&lt;/em&gt; (all three diphthongizing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vowel raising... affect[s] &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; in the last (or only) syllable of a verb stem... Vowel raising changes the mid vowels &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; to the corresponding high vowels: &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-u-&lt;/em&gt; respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason &lt;em&gt;cernir&lt;/em&gt; (and the verbs based on it: &lt;em&gt;discernir, concernir&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;hendir&lt;/em&gt; are exceptions to this is that they are alternative forms of the &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; verbs &lt;em&gt;cerner&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hender&lt;/em&gt;, and as such still act (in this regard) like their original forms when conjugated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; As for where this phenomenon came from, in the Vulgar Latin which gave rise to modern Spanish, this tended to occur in certain vowels that occurred near a semi-vowel &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is the [j] in this sequence that accounts for the raising of the root vowel throughout the imperfect subjunctive in verbs like &lt;em&gt;dormir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pedir&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Vowel Raising&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the influence of a nearby [j] – which has a very high tongue position – the vowels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a, ε, ɔ, &lt;strong&gt;e, o&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;were in many cases raised in stressed syllables in Vulgar Latin to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/e, e, o, &lt;strong&gt;i, u&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This series of sound changes can be regarded as an instance of &lt;strong&gt;metaphony&lt;/strong&gt;, a process that leads to the approximation of one vowel’s quality to that of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. in &lt;em&gt;dormir&lt;/em&gt; the affected forms are those where a neighbouring &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; represents the semi-vowel &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; (as part of a diphthong). In the unaffected forms (if they have a neighbouring &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt;) this &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; is a pure vowel &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;d&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;rm&lt;strong&gt;ie&lt;/strong&gt;ron&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;duɾˈmjeɾõn&lt;/code&gt;; &lt;em&gt;d&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;rm&lt;strong&gt;ió&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;duɾˈmjo&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;d&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;rm&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;mos&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;doɾˈmimos&lt;/code&gt;; &lt;em&gt;d&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;rm&lt;strong&gt;í&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;doɾˈmia&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This does not readily explain the vowel raising that occurs in forms such as &lt;em&gt;durmamos&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_irregular_verbs#Vowel_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_irregular_verbs#Vowel_raising&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/vowelsr.htm#metaphony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/vowelsr.htm#metaphony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pxHNh7uyGpgC&amp;amp;pg=PA10&amp;amp;dq=El+verbo.+Evoluci%C3%B3n+morfofon%C3%A9tica+cernir+excepcional&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;El verbo. Evolución morfofonética&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishlinguist.us/2017/12/irregular-irregulars/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://spanishlinguist.us/2017/12/irregular-irregulars/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T13:42:30.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26691" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:27:08.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;indefinite article&amp;quot; is called that because it is an article* and it is used with indefinite noun phrases. It certainly isn't a necessary part of all indefinite noun phrases: the English indefinite article is specifially a singular article, unlike the definite article, so it isn't used with plural or non-count nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've noted, not all indefinite noun phrases have &amp;quot;a/an&amp;quot;, so in most contexts the presence of the indefinite article doesn't exactly mark indefiniteness. Rather, in many contexts indefiniteness in English is indicated mainly by the absence of the definite article. The presence of the indefinite article with an indefinite common noun indicates that the noun phrase is grammatically singular and count. When the indefinite article is absent, a noun phrase is usually interpreted as plural or indefininte noncount (e.g. the difference between &amp;quot;a stone&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;stones&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;stone&amp;quot;); if that interpretation is impossible, the noun phrase will just seem to be ungrammatical (as in your example &amp;quot;*I made mistake&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The indefinite article does serve as a marker of indefiniteness when it appears before proper nouns that usually lack a definite article even when they are definite, like people's given names. A noun phrase like &amp;quot;Sandy&amp;quot; is definite; a noun phrase like &amp;quot;a Sandy&amp;quot; is indefinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;*The definition of &amp;quot;article&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of the word &amp;quot;article&amp;quot; seems to be somewhat unclear. Its application to &amp;quot;a/an&amp;quot; is traditional, not necessarily based on any deep underlying connection between this word and &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; (although they do have similarities; they are both determiners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that &amp;quot;The articles in English grammar are &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a/an,&lt;/em&gt; and in certain contexts &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctlgsp.wikispaces.com/file/view/articles.def.indef.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another source&lt;/a&gt; refers to &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; as an &amp;quot;article equivalent&amp;quot;. Obviously, these are not particularly advanced linguistic sources; I just am trying to make the point that at least some people seem to be confused about, or disagree about, what exactly the word &amp;quot;article&amp;quot; refers to. So you shouldn't necessarily expect the terminology in this area to have much explanatory value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A point similar to the one that you seem to be making was made in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7mBbDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA246&amp;amp;lpg=PA246&amp;amp;dq=linguistics%20definition%20indefinite%20article&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=h9uTjpUXDc&amp;amp;sig=jDh2ICcSmB3mkKq_-nIfuBQTPrA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj0kun1_pPYAhWL5oMKHcFqBkw4ChDoAQg_MAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=linguistics%20definition%20indefinite%20article&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Article in English&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by David M. Perlmutter, in 1970.  Perlmutter says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct, the relationship between the definite article and the indefinite article in English is quite different from what has been generally supposed. Grammarians have worked on the assumption that NP's may bear either a definite or an indefinite article, and that the two constitute some sort of opposition. If the analysis given here is correct, however, the indefinite article is simply a numeral like all other numerals, and the occurence or non-occurence of the definite article is a completely independent phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how Perlmutter's paper was received (some parts of the analysis seem a bit far-fetched to me), and I don't know what kind of progress has been made on the characterization of the indefinite article since then; I know that I've seen other analyses that treat the indefinite article as some kind of special reduced version of the numeral &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; (which is consistent with the etymology, although that doesn't prove that it's a correct synchronic analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:43:08.863" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26691" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:27:49.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; is removed from the above sentence, it becomes ungrammatical as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I made mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, is this sentence ungrammatical because now mistake isn't indefinite anymore without &amp;quot;a&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your example sentence is ungrammatical in English because the rules of English require that all singular countable nouns have some sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;determiner&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; is needed here not because we need to make mistake indefinite but because we need to make it an individual, separate entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Individual, separate entity&amp;quot;: this sounds like the semantic category of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specificity_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;specificify&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the semantic category of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definiteness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;definiteness&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; concerns &lt;strong&gt;identifiability&lt;/strong&gt;. You use definite markers when you think your listeners can identify the referents of your noun phrases, and you use indefinite markers when you think your listeners would not be able to identify the referents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &amp;quot;I made a mistake&amp;quot;, you know what the mistake is, but your listeners do not because this is the first time that they've heard about it. If you go on to explain what the mistake is, then it becomes appropriate to say &amp;quot;the mistake&amp;quot; because your listeners can now identify what you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specificity_(linguistics)#Relationship_Between_Specificity_and_Definiteness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gives a few helpful examples&lt;/a&gt; which show that the English articles, when they are present, do indeed mark definiteness (identifiability), &lt;em&gt;not specificity&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for &lt;strong&gt;the manager&lt;/strong&gt;, Ms Lee.&lt;/em&gt; [definite, specific]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for &lt;strong&gt;the manager&lt;/strong&gt;, whoever that may be.&lt;/em&gt; [definite, non-specific]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;There's &lt;strong&gt;a certain word&lt;/strong&gt; that I can never remember.&lt;/em&gt; [indefinite, specific]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Think of &lt;strong&gt;a word&lt;/strong&gt;, any word.&lt;/em&gt; [indefinite, non-specific]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T17:03:25.873" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-18T16:35:44.870" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the Wikipedia article regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It struck me that the verb for knocking is similar to the onomatopoeia of knocking in various languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To knock&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;knock-knock&lt;/em&gt; in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Toquer&lt;/em&gt;, and  &lt;em&gt;toc-toc&lt;/em&gt; in French&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kucatim&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;kuc-kuc&lt;/em&gt; in Serbo-Croatian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as an onomatopeia is defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the sound that it describes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that in the languages mentioned above, one can conclude that the verb was derived directly from the onomatopoeia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15009" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T12:51:37.110" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T12:51:37.110" Title="Verbs and onomatopeias for knocking" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-18T17:07:34.023" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, the agent of a passive construction can be re-introduced using the preposition 'von' (well, 'durch' can be used too, but that's not really relevant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if there's another noun phrase in the sentence that uses 'von' to mean 'from'? In English, the preposition we use ('by') is rarely used for anything else. Pretty much the only two things that only it can express is the agent of a passive construction, and the author of a book. It's rarely used for its locative meaning. And even then, it can be replaced with 'next to'. But German, to my knowledge, doesn't have an alternative for 'from'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do Germans deal with this when it comes up? Granted, I know it may not come up much since Germans seem to use the passive less than English speakers (they can omit the subject with 'man', and besides that they do technically have free word order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="1333" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T20:01:15.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T07:24:40.547" Title="In German, doesn't using 'von' for agents of passive sentences result in ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26261" CreationDate="2017-12-18T17:44:34.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally (in Central &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt;), the definite article always accompanies a possessive pronoun - except when referring to a certain kinship names (&lt;em&gt;singenionimi&lt;/em&gt;) in the singular. These are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;padre, madre, figlio, figlia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many dialects of Italian this is extended to include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;mamma, papà&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fratello, sorella&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zio/-a, cugino/-a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;nonno/-a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;moglie, marito&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cognato/-a, suocero/-a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, the article &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required for these variations of the above exceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plurals&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;i miei genitori&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my parents&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;synonyms&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;la mia mamma&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my mommy&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;diminutives&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;la mia sorellina&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my sister.DIMIN&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;third person&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;il loro fratello&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET their brother&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;derived terms&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;la mia bisnonna&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my great-grandmother&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adjective modified forms&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;la mia nonna materna&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my grandmother maternal&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is often also included in these circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In sentences with specific emphasis (where the possessive is normally postponed):   &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;il figlio mio&quot;, &quot;il nonno mio&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where the kinship name is accompanied by an anthroponym (first name or surname)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Note: In some other Romance languages of Northern Italy, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Venetan/mgx_veneto.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Venetian&lt;/a&gt;, articles proceed &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; personal names, and so this feature (though prescriptively proscribed for Standard Italian) may extend to these cases in dialects of Italian influenced by these languages.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, this is in fact a feature of the other two Romance languages you mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Catalan&lt;/strong&gt;, the article is required for almost all nouns, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;el meu cotxe&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my car&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;la meva planta&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;DET my plant&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in certain dialects, with the following classes of noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some kinship terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;names of relatives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nouns &lt;em&gt;casa&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;house; home&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;vida&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;life&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and in certain fossilised expressions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternate forms (the &lt;em&gt;weak/unstressed&lt;/em&gt; possessive adjectives) absent the definite article may be used (how common this is is dependent upon the specific dialect):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;mon avi, ta mare, ses nétes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;code&gt;my grandfather, your mother, their granddaughters&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sa Majestat&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;His/Her Majesty&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vine a ma casa&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;Come to my house&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;En ma vida no havia vist un espectacle semblant&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;Never in my life have I seen such a spectacle&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Note that unlike Italian, in dialects of Catalan that have this feature it can also apply to &lt;em&gt;plurals&lt;/em&gt; of kinship terms.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt; when referring to &lt;em&gt;singular&lt;/em&gt; kinship terms, the definite article may also be dropped (note: this is more common in Brazilian Portuguese than Iberian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Minha irmã mora em [sic] Alemanha&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;My sister lives in Germany&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meu pai é engenheiro&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;My father is an engineer&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in very formal/religious addresses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pai Nosso, que está no céu…&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;Our Father, who art in heaven…&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nosso Senhor&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;Our Lord&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vossa Excelência&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;code&gt;Your Excellence&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in a few fossilised expressions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a seu prazer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;por minha vontade&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a meu ver&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar features are present in some non-Romance languages also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Mandarin Chinese&lt;/strong&gt;, for family members, the possessive particle 的 (&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;) can be omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;我妈妈 (&lt;em&gt;Wǒ māma&lt;/em&gt;) - &lt;code&gt;I mother&lt;/code&gt; (meaning &lt;em&gt;My mother&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;我的妈妈 (&lt;em&gt;Wǒ de māma&lt;/em&gt;) - &lt;code&gt;I POSS mother&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;My mother&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This construct can be used with certain other close but non-familial terms too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;我朋友 (&lt;em&gt;Wǒ péngyǒu&lt;/em&gt;) - &lt;code&gt;I friend&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;My friend&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also in &lt;strong&gt;Cantonese&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;我姑姐 (&lt;em&gt;nɡo&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; gu&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;ze&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) - &lt;code&gt;I aunt&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;my aunt&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;我嘅姑姐 (&lt;em&gt;nɡo&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; ɡe&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; gu&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;ze&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) - &lt;code&gt;I POSS aunt&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;em&gt;my aunt&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237436940_Acquisition_variation_change_On_the_definite_article_and_kinship_nouns_in_Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acquisition, variation, change: On the definite article and kinship nouns in Italian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Grande_grammatica_italiana_di_consultazi.html?id=Xk8dAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione&lt;/a&gt;, Lorenzo Renzi (1988)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xxPGZ9yEMcMC&amp;amp;pg=PA320&amp;amp;lpg=PA320&amp;amp;dq=italian+kinship+definite+article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Split Possession: An Areal-linguistic Study of the Alienability Correlation and Related Phenomena in the Languages of Europe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/5228819/The_Uses_of_the_Definite_and_Indefinite_Article_in_Portuguese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Uses of the Definite and Indefinite Article in Portuguese&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4024/f444b996dac6d612a37f928cf2e58ae0e8f4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kinship in grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dcvb.iecat.net/results.asp?Word=mon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dcvb.iecat.net/results.asp?Word=mon&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Ús literari i dialectal&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/en/italian-language/language-consulting/questions-answers/uso-dellarticolo-dellaggettivo-possessivo-nom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uso dell'articolo e dell'aggettivo possessivo coi nomi di parentela&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; • &lt;sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3myusr/why_does_italian_use_the_definite_article_for/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3myusr/why_does_italian_use_the_definite_article_for/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T11:44:29.190" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T11:44:29.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2104" CreationDate="2017-12-18T19:44:56.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with the other respondees here, I do not know the answer to your question, but can speculatively suggest one main one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All natural languages accommodate the fact that there is a pay-off between time and effort on the one hand, and informativity or cognitive effect on the other. So we will prefer a shorter and less energy- or time-consuming way of saying something given a choice and an identical cognitive effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is simply much more calory-expending to use sign language than to use an air-pressure mechanism to communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the reasons may be multi-factorial in any case. So a preponderance of factors weighing in on one side or th other may make a difference. One other factor wich may benefit an air-pressure mechanism (i.e. sound) is that a lot of spoken language occurs when there is little or no light available, which is clearly very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T11:01:47.393" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T11:01:47.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26688" CreationDate="2017-12-18T19:51:56.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Old Chinese did loose a previously existent system of affixes (and simplified their syllable structure significantly). With respect to inflection, the Tibetan languages are more conservative than the Sinitic ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T19:51:56.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-18T20:52:48.187" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put another way, is pitch purely a function of how the vocal tract is constricted, or do the vocal folds modulate the frequency of how they vibrate as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T21:57:51.210" Title="Does the frequency of vocal fold vibration change with pitch?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26702" CreationDate="2017-12-18T21:29:37.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pitch is the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency. The fundamental frequency of a semi-periodic waveform &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the frequency with which the vocal folds vibrate, e.g. 150 times per second. The rate of vibration of the vocal folds is not determined by the degree of constriction in the vocal tract, until the constriction becomes so significant that air-flow is blocked and the vocal folds cease vibrating entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T21:57:51.210" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T21:57:51.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T03:51:29.700" Score="3" ViewCount="908" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to get breaks between words in a sentence written using IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following IPA sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;/gaɦi ʃammer gan manuʃer tʃee naɦi kitʃʰu bɔɽɔ naɦi kitʃʰu mɔɦian/&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when i play it using amazon polly SSML, the voice goes through the sentence way too fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there is a way to put punctuation or break in between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20797" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T13:12:57.017" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:05:45.143" Title="Punctuation/Pause character in IPA" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26697" CreationDate="2017-12-19T07:24:40.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like with any overloaded preposition it is possible to construct examples which are ambiguous, especially out of context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is trivially easy to construct examples which are grammatically ambiguous but semantically or logically are less ambiguous.  In fact it is more difficult to avoid constructing these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, natural human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and we humans continually solve endless Winograd Schema challenges without even being conscious of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing specific to German or &lt;em&gt;von&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T07:24:40.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13271" CreationDate="2017-12-19T16:35:07.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entropy formula as quoted has some ideosyncrasies making it different from standard Shannon entropy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a (not really relevant) factor of &lt;code&gt;100&lt;/code&gt; (probably to produce more beautiful numbers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The term &lt;code&gt;log N&lt;/code&gt; in the denominator is absent in Shannon entropy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;p(i)&lt;/em&gt; cannot mean anything but the frequency of the i-th type, obtained by dividing the number of occurences of it by the total number of tokens. The frequency equals the probability in a bag-of-words (or more general, a bag-of-types) model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T17:08:05.760" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T17:08:05.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2017-12-19T18:31:38.273" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that the field of linguistics as it is understood today begins in the 20th century, with deep roots in prior study of language. The practice of asking questions about language and how it works is much more ancient, as is the practice of asking questions about the mind and how it works and develops, but it is not until the 20th century that we start to see a systematic approach that links those questions, which in my view is what marks linguistics as a discipline today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of analogy, the field of chemistry can be said to start in approximately the late eighteenth century. The practice of asking questions about the internal structure of matter or the interactions of different sorts of matter goes back much further, through alchemy and various informal knowledge systems (Roman concrete, for example) back to the Greek speculations, and so forth, but it is not until it the questions of internal structure and interactions become linked that modern chemistry begins. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5686" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T18:31:38.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23022" CreationDate="2017-12-19T23:31:13.350" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Max Weinreich&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As WavesWashSands says, the earliest known published source is Weinreich's article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;דער ייִוואָ און די פּראָבלעמען פֿון אונדזער צײַט&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;originally presented as a speech on 5 January 1945 at the annual YIVO conference. Weinreich did not give an English version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article, Weinreich presents this statement as a remark of an auditor at a lecture series given between 13 December 1943 and 12 June 1944:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;What is the difference between a dialect and language?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I know that, but I will give you a better definition. &lt;strong&gt;A language is a dialect with an army and navy.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other mentions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Some scholars believe that Antoine Meillet had earlier said that a language is a dialect with an army, but there is no contemporary documentation of this.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Jean Laponce suggested in 2004 that Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) may have originated the phrase at a meeting of the Académie française, and proposed to call it the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Loi de Lyautey&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; 'Lyautey's law'. But again there is no good evidence for this.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Randolph Quirk adapted the definition to &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;A language is a dialect with an army and a flag&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (adding a defense policy and a national airline).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Citations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The YIVO Faces the Post-War World&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The YIVO and the problems of our time&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    from &lt;a href=&quot;http://download.hebrewbooks.org/downloadhandler.ashx?req=43629&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;YIVO Bleter (vol. 25 nr. 1)&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (in Yiddish). Jan–Feb 1945.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; 2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T13:08:44.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6908" CreationDate="2017-12-19T23:51:35.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern syntax was first put on a scientific basis by Zelig Harris and Noam Chomsky: Harris with his development of formal models of phrase structure and Chomsky through his elaboration of Harris' techniques, by his clarifying the distinction between empirical study of syntax and language pedagogy, and by devising the first formalized model of the traditional idea that many language constructions involve movement of sentence parts to new positions.  That last was, of course, transformational grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an historical account of our discipline, Pāṇini of course deserves a prominent role, but his grammar can't be accounted as right or wrong, except on accuracy of factual claims, because it is &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; about pedagogy. It gives a method for reciting the scriptures without error.  While Chomsky made the crucial point that a scientific account needs to make predictions about expressions that are never problematic for human language learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not mean to imply that Chomsky's theories have been correct theories.  As a matter of fact, I think that transformational grammar has been shown to be wrong.  But this is a characteristic of scientific theories -- they can be shown to be wrong.  It is confused to disparage Chomsky's place in developing modern linguistics because you happen not to be a follower of TG, or minimalism, or whatever Chomsky's very latest ideas are.  The great thing about TG is that you can &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; whether it's wrong. (It is, as Ross and others showed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T23:51:35.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-20T13:40:58.897" Score="5" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been living in Hungary for a year now and I've been slowly learning the language, so naturally a question arouse: are there any homographs in Hungarian?&#xA;When I'm talking about &lt;code&gt;homograph&lt;/code&gt; I mean a word that has the following characteristics (as per many dictionaries &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;shares the same written form&lt;/em&gt; as another word;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;has a &lt;em&gt;different meaning&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(and) &lt;em&gt;sounds different&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking a lot on the web and I've been asking my Hungarian friends and coworkers and it seems that even the word &lt;em&gt;homograph&lt;/em&gt; doesn't really have a meaning for them (at least for the people I've asked), let alone have some homographs in Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20804" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T11:07:29.423" Title="Hungarian homographs" Tags="&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15748" CreationDate="2017-12-20T15:02:59.790" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native Polish born in Upper Silesia here. Here is my answer: When a native Silesian of older generation (say, 60+) speaks standard Polish, he/she has a strong regional accent which includes following features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nasal vowel ę before consonants, is completely decomposed and shifted towards 'yn'. Std. Polish 'ręka' is typically pronounced renka with a slightly nasal 'e' and a weakly pronounced 'n'. The Silesian pronounciation is 'rynka'. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nasal vowel ą is decomposed to 'ón' or 'óm' Dąb: standard Polish 'Domp' with slightly nasal o and a weak m, Silesian Polish: Dómp.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Combinations 'en', 'em', 'on', 'om' are pronouced as 'yn', 'ym', 'ón', 'óm', for instance &quot;Cyntrum&quot;, 'Kónkuryncja' etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Difference between u and ó is maintained while speaking standard Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference in pitch (intonation), especially in questions, which have a falling intonation (in Polish, the intonation rises). I can provide you with audio examples per Skype:)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For younger generation, the regional features are not so strong, some people are completely 'bilingual' and swich to std Polish with absolutel no accent. However, people who speak Silesian at home usually are not able to eliminate the above listed features while speaking Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer given above 'jo myśla' instead of 'ja myślę' is not true: it refers to the dialect, and the question was about the regional pronounciation of standard Polish. Today, almost all speakers of Silesian are able to switch to standard Polish, and they would say 'ja myślę'. However, the differences listed as 1-5 will be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also some vocabulary and very little grammar stuff which Silesian maintain even while speakig standard Polish:&#xA;1. Kołaczyk (pl: drożdżówka)&#xA;2. Tyta (pl: does not exist: a paper conic tube with sweets which is given to children on their first school day).&#xA;3. Zalecki (pl. Wypominki)&#xA;4. Familok: a typical working class house&#xA;5. Brat od Zosi (pl. Brat Zosi), Zosia's brother: here the German influence: Der Bruder von Zosia.&#xA;6. Tego nie idzie zrobić (pl. tego nie da się zrobić): again German influence: Das geht nicht zu machen&#xA;7. Szkrobać (pl. skrobać)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Features 5-6 are actually incorrect in Polish and the educated people avoid these expressions.&#xA;Perhaps the list is longer but I do not remember more at the moment. Generally, it is quite common to include some dialect words into standard Polish (Some more popular words which are sometimes used even by non-native Silesians are: 'ja', 'kiecka', 'hasiok', 'wyciepnóńć', 'fajrant', 'kołocz', 'modro kapusta', 'farorz', 'wodziónka', 'krupnioki', 'kopalnioki')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20805" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T15:02:59.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26705" CreationDate="2017-12-21T13:15:18.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A double vertical bar is often used in transcriptions to indicate a major intonational phrase boundary, and a single one to indicate a minor one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/stɒp ‖ bɪfɔ: sʌmwʌŋ geʔs hɜ:t/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T16:05:45.143" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:05:45.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-21T16:01:03.733" Score="4" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-Aryan languages have acquired some vocabulary and other features that aren't present in the Iranian languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is ascribed to substrate influence. What is the current understanding of those substrates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T16:49:02.817" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T16:49:02.817" Title="What is the current understanding of the substrate(s) to the Indo-Aryan languages" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;&lt;substrate&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1853" CreationDate="2017-12-21T16:33:53.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot give an exact number of correlation, but the correlation between genetic relationship and typological features is strong enough to be annoying when one tries to construct an unbiased sample of the languages of the world. Picking just languages at random is not a good idea because a few very large language families (Austronesian, Niger-Kongo and Indo-Germanic) contribute a large bulk of related languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is fruitful to include genetic relations between languages in typological studies, as demonstrated by Levinson, S., Greenhill, S., Gray, R., Dunn, M.&#xA;(2011). Universal typological dependencies should be detectable in the history of language families. Linguistic Typology, 15(2): 509-534 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:33:53.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26716" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-Aryan languages&lt;/a&gt; are a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian language which themselves are a branch of the Indo-Germanic language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26717" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Indo-Aryan languages like Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Singhalese, and Romani." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T16:47:14.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2414" CreationDate="2017-12-21T20:50:41.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to R. Hickey ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ru/imgres?imgurl=http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q%3Dtbn:ANd9GcTIIsuc_89ZjaRz-KybnZ0hNTbw8Oj5xCA6ApyG2o1hqwgU0k29&amp;amp;imgrefurl=https://books.google.com/books/about/Legacies_of_Colonial_English.html?id%3D30o5SwAACAAJ%26source%3Dkp_cover&amp;amp;h=648&amp;amp;w=432&amp;amp;tbnid=yToYyS7Q1b0rnM:&amp;amp;tbnh=160&amp;amp;tbnw=106&amp;amp;usg=__AowocUEPy_RmY8uaHnzHn9UZySU%3D&amp;amp;vet=10ahUKEwiQxbmL-5vYAhVBOJoKHf71Am8Q_B0IjQEwCg..i&amp;amp;docid=BdWFhq17YEFMaM&amp;amp;itg=1&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiQxbmL-5vYAhVBOJoKHf71Am8Q_B0IjQEwCg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialect.&lt;/a&gt;), the Nigerian English, as most other African Englishes, should be classified as a part of common meta-cluster merged together with South-Eastern Asian Englishes (pp. 510-522). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if we pay closer attention to &lt;a href=&quot;https://cup.columbia.edu/book/asian-englishes-beyond-the-canon/9789622096660&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kachru's Asian Englishes; Beyond the Canon&lt;/a&gt;( e. g. at p.14 of the 2005's copy) we can easily notice that the issue of classification for world Englishes is still open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T20:50:41.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26727" CreationDate="2017-12-22T00:00:02.620" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember some publications from the 1970ies dealing with the language of Dolphins. They were able to communicate via telefone lines without direct contact and their conversation was recorded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the date of (popular science) publications, there was not much decoded, only self-identifaction, like &lt;em&gt;hello, this is Dash&lt;/em&gt; (one of the Dolphins).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the current understanding of the language of dolphins today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T01:59:31.080" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T07:08:37.927" Title="Language of Dolphins" Tags="&lt;non-human-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26721" CreationDate="2017-12-22T01:17:54.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't really give an answer, because I haven't read and digested the scientific literature on the topic, and I'm a linguist, not an animal behaviorist. There are some references: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ac.els-cdn.com/S2405722316301177/1-s2.0-S2405722316301177-main.pdf?_tid=09c99db6-e6b3-11e7-9b28-00000aab0f27&amp;amp;acdnat=1513904409_4a165e5f52a51688f69ebd9a97d54cf7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; that makes strong claims (also additional references) to the effect that dolphins have language, indeed conversations; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.whyanimalsdothething.com/posts/2016/9/13/nodolphinsentences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skewering&lt;/a&gt; of that article – with additional references; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wilddolphinproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Herzing-2017.-Interfaces-and-Keyboards.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; that less ambitiously discusses some of the problems of even doing research in this area and a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wilddolphinproject.org/media/scientific-publications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of publications&lt;/a&gt; arising from that project, on dolphin &lt;em&gt;communication&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T01:17:54.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26724" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26725" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" Score="0" Body="For questions about language in other species than humans, e.g., great apes or dolphins." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T01:38:20.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26714" CreationDate="2017-12-22T18:03:28.603" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally accepted that there is a significant Dravidian substrate in Indo-Aryan, and a smaller number of substrate words from Austroasiatic languages like Munda and Khasi. There is a chapter on “Loanwords in Sanskrit” in Burrow’s famous book “The Sanskrit Language”, which you should be able to find in a good library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T18:03:28.603" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26721" CreationDate="2017-12-22T20:10:46.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't answer your question about current research, but here are a couple of older references.  In 1986 a linguistics grad student, Esmé Hoban, at the University of Hawaii spent time observing experiments on dolphin-human communication experiments done at Lou Herman's Kewalo Basin lab.  She did her dissertation on this and on broader concerns, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/9927&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The promise of animal language research&lt;/a&gt;.  She thought the experiments that she observed had severe methodological problems. I was on her dissertation committee, and her chairman was Derek Bickerton, who himself wrote about the general topic in, among other books, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-dNc5GJgqWYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Language%20and%20Species,%20bickerton&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwik39DGsp7YAhXIyVQKHd48DfoQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Language%20and%20Species%2C%20bickerton&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language and Species&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derek also wrote a novel, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2652431-king-of-the-sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King of the Sea&lt;/a&gt;, which speculates about what dolphin language would be like, if there were a dolphin language. (Derek also takes up the matter of human-dolphin sexual communication, in the novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T07:08:37.927" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T07:08:37.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T06:01:21.123" Score="3" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, is this an example of a pseudoscientific language comparison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flatassembler.000webhostapp.com/Indo-Austronesian.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-Austronesian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the webpage on the link claims that there are a few regular sound correspondences between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Austronesian, such as that PIE *s corresponds to PAN *q and that PIE *r corresponds to PAN *l, and that this alone is enough to tell that those languages are related with reasonable certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20821" LastEditorUserId="20821" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T11:28:31.147" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T05:41:32.077" Title="Is the Indo-Austronesian Hypothesis an example of a pseudoscientific language comparison?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T10:38:59.557" Score="8" ViewCount="577" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the 't' pronounced like 'ch' sometimes or even like &quot;t+sh&quot;? Do the English phonotactics allow for a word to start with &quot;ch+r&quot; ('ch' as in 'chair', not as in 'Christmas')?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't appear to be true for all languages. The 't' (three) in the Croatian word 'tri' is pronounced quite differently from the 't' in the English word 'tree', even though they are usually pronounced the same. Also, the word for 'black' in the Kaikavian dialect of Croatian is 'črn' ('č' representing a 'ch' sound), while the word for 'thorn' is 'trn', and those are pronounced quite differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20821" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T07:28:14.557" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T07:28:14.557" Title="Why is 't' sometimes pronounced like 'ch'?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26730" CreationDate="2017-12-23T11:23:28.330" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is based on a false premise. I do not think there are any speakers of English who do not distinguish between &quot;trees&quot; and &quot;cheese&quot;, or between &quot;train&quot; and &quot;chain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T11:23:28.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26730" CreationDate="2017-12-23T14:18:02.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon occurs in many varieties of English, but doesn't got as for as neutralising the contrast. The transcription that @Wilson gives ([t͡ʃɹi]) captures this reasonably well. This might be a consequence of the backward movement of the tongue after [t] during which it passes the place of articulation of [ʃ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the phenomenon is one of co-articulation and not a phonological process. So an onset /t͡ʃɹ/ (which might be spelled &lt;em&gt;chr&lt;/em&gt; if it weren't for the confusion with /kɹ/ as in &lt;em&gt;Christmas&lt;/em&gt;) is still illegal in English phonotactics. However, over time this co-articulatory process may become so common that it is phonologised and the contrast is neutralised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the eminent phonetician John Wells argues in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.netflix.com/watch/70205862?trackId=14272744&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; that it already has been (thanks to @Sumelic for the link). His case in point is the pair &lt;em&gt;century - sentry&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="2278" LastEditDate="2017-12-25T03:26:16.403" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T03:26:16.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26730" CreationDate="2017-12-23T16:26:21.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ch-like sound in &quot;tree&quot; is a phonetic change, not a phonemic change, so the resulting sounds are not adapted to the phoneme system of English.  It is due to an assimilation of obstruency, in my view (I haven't seen anyone else describe it this way).  The coronal r becomes an obstruent after a  coronal obstruent when both sounds are in the onset of the same syllable. (It is very similar to the change of y (yod) to sh in &quot;tune&quot;, which is also an assimilation of obstruency and voicing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also assimilation of voice, so after d, in &quot;dream&quot; e.g., the r remains a voiced fricative, but devoices in &quot;trip&quot;.  Since r before a stressed vowel in the same syllable is generally rounded, that rounding remains in &quot;trip/dream&quot;.  It may be that some retroflexion of &quot;r&quot; is also carried over to the tr/dr obstruent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My formulation implies that r in words like &quot;shriek&quot;, &quot;shrike&quot;, &quot;ashram&quot; should also become an obstruent.  I'm not sure that happens. Unlike the change of y to an obstruent, the change of r does not happen when r and the preceding coronal obstruent are in different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T16:26:21.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26325" CreationDate="2017-12-23T18:32:43.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it has happened, thus it is possible, but it depends on many factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all people can do it, and there will always be some holes, under a thorough enough test, unless you go redo all steps of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is much more likely that you end up with an accent in both LN and L1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most practical way to mask a non-native accent is to learn a different standard of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T18:32:43.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T19:40:42.913" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages, such as Japanese, mark number words with suffixes denoting size, shape, and other qualities (e.g., &lt;em&gt;ichi&lt;/em&gt; (one) becomes &lt;em&gt;ippon&lt;/em&gt; for one book). Why would such a linguistic practice develop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20827" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T00:43:22.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T11:44:39.927" Title="Markers for size, shape etc. on number words in Japanese" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T00:10:38.413" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;My undergraduate textbook builds a case to posit separate classes of verbs as lexical, auxiliary, modal in nature. One criterion is how auxiliary and modals (unlike main verbs) undergo inversion but the sentence &quot;Has he any shame&quot; sounds perfectly grammatical to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20828" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2017-12-25T00:31:50.680" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T12:05:25.583" Title="Does a main verb undergo inversion in &quot;Has he any shame?&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;inversion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T01:31:38.777" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;My textbook flags the above mentioned phrase as non-finite but it clearly seems to indicate tense. After all, alterations like &quot;have eaten&quot;, &quot;have been eating&quot;, &quot;have had been eating&quot;, &quot;having been about to eat&quot; are possible. So, is the author wrong or am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20828" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T01:31:38.777" Title="Finiteness of embedded clause in &quot;Susan seems to have gone&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26739" CreationDate="2017-12-24T11:54:56.630" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, only Japanese has phonetic symbols that correspond to syllables. I wonder if there are any others. I probably have used the wrong jargon but hopefully, you know what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20829" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T23:30:06.183" Title="What are some phonetic writing systems where symbols correspond to syllables?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26738" CreationDate="2017-12-24T16:29:23.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend googling the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;syllabary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are quite a few languages that use writing systems like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20831" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T23:30:06.183" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T23:30:06.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26738" CreationDate="2017-12-24T19:03:30.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unclear what you are asking. You say that &quot;Japanese has phonetic symbols that correspond to syllables&quot;, and I don't know what you mean by &quot;correspond to syllables&quot;. I assume that by &quot;phonetic symbol&quot; you mean &quot;a grapheme which represents sound units&quot; (thus excluding logographic writing). There are a number of plausible interpretations of &quot;correspond to&quot;, such as &quot;every syllable is represented by a single, unique grapheme&quot; or &quot;each grapheme is interpreted as one or more syllables&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking only at kana, there are symbols which do not represent syllables. For instance, the symbol ン is a coda nasal, not a syllable. Second, ガ [ga] is a syllable and is composed of two symbols, カ plus that other thing (dakuten) which I don't know how to type independently. There is also a symbol ッ (sokuon) which indicates gemination, and is not a syllable. チェンジ [tʃendʒi] has two syllables but 4 symbols. Perhaps you mean &quot;are there languages where each autonomous symbol represents both a specific consonant plus a specific vowel?&quot;. If you are interested in the conventional terminology for classifying writing systems, I suggest reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/types.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Omniglot&lt;/a&gt;. It is possible that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/eskayan.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eskayan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yi script&lt;/a&gt; are the two &quot;true syllabaries&quot; where each grapheme represents an entire and unique syllable. &quot;Syllabary&quot; is the term generally applied to Japanese non-kanji writing, so you could read about &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabaries&lt;/a&gt;&quot; if that's what you're looking for. There are a number of books on the broad topic (Coulmas, &lt;em&gt;Writing systems. An introduction.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems&lt;/em&gt;; Daniels &amp;amp; Bright &lt;em&gt;The World's Writing Systems&lt;/em&gt;; Rogers &lt;em&gt;Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach&lt;/em&gt;; Sampson &lt;em&gt;Writing Systems&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T19:03:30.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T19:09:17.447" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Propositional representation is explained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_representation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is semantic parsing different from propositional representation? Or is propositional representation the next step after you do semantic parsing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13124" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T21:07:20.103" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T09:40:52.347" Title="Semantic parsing vs Propositional Representation" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26741" CreationDate="2017-12-25T21:34:18.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both entail the compositional process of converting natural language into a formal or machine-interpretable language. I believe the difference is that propositional representation is how some psychologists/psycholinguists believe people interpret speech, as a series of discrete symbols much like a formal language. This is related to the idea of 'mentalese', if you're familiar with that. Semantic parsing, on the other hand, is a deliberate process which is carried out to make natural languages into formal meaning representations which can be interpreted by machines. This is a computational idea and has nothing to do with psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20840" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T21:34:18.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-26T10:00:25.257" Score="2" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my professor's notes, we have syntactic ergativity when the arguments P and S display the same syntactic behavior. But how is the term &quot;syntactic behavior&quot; defined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T14:52:19.313" Title="What is ''syntactic behavior&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26745" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:48:19.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that there's no exact answer. There is no clear cross-linguistic definition of what a 'word' is, and therefore no real distinction between syntax and morphology. Indeed, there are calls to unify the study of grammar into morphosyntax instead of using the traditional syntax-morphology distinction. Haspelmath (2011) writes: 'Instead of a subdivision of the grammar of sign combinations into morphology and syntax, we can just work with a unified domain of morphosyntax'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the context of ergativity, I think 'syntactic behaviour' is easier to tell. You can think of it as behaviour other morphological ergativity, which is usually realised as overt coding on core arguments using case morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactic behaviour, on the other hand, is typically related to &lt;em&gt;syntactic pivots&lt;/em&gt;: in clause linkage, which participant serves to link different clauses together? In a nominative-accusative language like English, the pivot is typically nominative, i.e. A and S can serve as the pivot. In a syntactically ergative-accusative language, the pivot is typically absolutive, i.e. S or P. Compare English and Dyirbal, the classic example of a syntactically ergative langauge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a. I saw the girl and ran away.&#xA;      (I ran away, not the girl. The pivot is A in the first clause and S in the second.)&#xA;    b. bayi yarra baninyu           banggun rdugumbi-rru balgalnganyu&#xA;       ABS  man   came.NONFUTURE    ERG     woman-ERG    hit.NONFUTURE&#xA;       'The man came and the woman hit (the man).' (Dixon, 1972)&#xA;       (The woman hit the man, not the other way around.&#xA;       The pivot is S in the first clause and P in the second.)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, if we want to use the girl to link up the two clauses, we can passivise the first clause. A similar situation obtains in syntactically ergative languages, which instead use the antipassive, where the A becomes S (and is thus absolutive) and the P becomes oblique. Compare the behaviour of English and Waalubal, a dialect of Bandjalang, below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) a. The girl was seen by me and ran away. (The girl ran away, not me)&#xA;    b. yanga:-nj ŋay  gila:, ga:ŋa-li-ya:       bulaŋ &#xA;       go-FUT    1sgS THERE  take-ANTIPASS-PURP meat&#xA;       'I will go there to get some meat.' (Crowley, 1978, as cited by Dixon, 2004)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dixon, R. M. W. (1972). &lt;em&gt;The Dyirbal language of north Queensland&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 9). CUP Archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dixon, R. M. W. (2002). &lt;em&gt;Australian languages: Their nature and development&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath, M. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. &lt;em&gt;Folia Linguistica&lt;/em&gt;, 45(1), 31-80.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T14:52:19.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T14:52:19.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-26T14:33:23.780" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, is noun word-order governed by a universal ranking of semantic fields, as with adjectives, or do other considerations in general English word choice and order (well-formedness of resulting prosodic phrases, phonetic alliteration or assonance, etc.) have some influence as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an extreme case, I can image that a certain context-dependent logical ordering does necessarily hold. When listing arguments to be made at the opening of a paper, for example, a certain chronological or logical flow is to-be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when  all of the items to be listed are semantically similar, I can't help but feel that, for example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I bought apples, bananas and berries.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sounds more natural than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I bought berries, bananas and apples.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of me has a suspicion that &quot;bought apples&quot; rolls off the tongue better due to the potential elision of the t, but more formal arguments, research and papers would be appreciated. This argument, though, seems less unique to the listing of nouns and relevant to English word choice/ order more generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13681" LastEditorUserId="13681" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T21:11:59.103" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T21:11:59.103" Title="In English, what rules govern the optimal order of nouns in a list?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26735" CreationDate="2017-12-27T01:49:12.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The &lt;em&gt;pon&lt;/em&gt; in 'ippon'&lt;/a&gt; is not actually a suffix (well, at least not according to the academic tradition of Russian japonology). It is [hon], a calque from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese classifier&lt;/a&gt; (aka a measure word) 本  [běn].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone of the classifiers is a grammatical entity opposite, in a sense of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;partialness&lt;/a&gt;, to a  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_venery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;term of venery&lt;/a&gt; and/or any collective noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classifiers borrowed from Chinese also exist in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_numerical_classifiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burmese&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_count_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean&lt;/a&gt; and, presumably, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_grammar#Classifier_position&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;em&gt;hon&lt;/em&gt; is more likely a specific stem than an affix, the stricter term would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agglutination&lt;/a&gt;, which by itself is not a specific language practice at all. The examples of agglutination can be shown by such English nouns as &lt;em&gt;Batman, pineapple, hedgehog,&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change [h] makes turning itself into  [p] or [b] after [n] / [m] is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assimilation&lt;/a&gt;, so a proper name for the phenomenon would be &lt;em&gt;assimilative agglutination.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this phenomenon occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, because of combination of causes and effects, just like any existing phenomenon, like a coulour of grass or a human brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T11:44:39.927" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T11:44:39.927" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26807" CreationDate="2017-12-27T13:03:13.270" Score="0" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;em&gt;Can you get me a coffee da&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;em&gt;get off the computer, da&lt;/em&gt; even &lt;em&gt;just give me a name, da&lt;/em&gt; in Kannada English code switched sentence. And Cosmo in Gaurdians of the Galaxy new Comic series can give one examples for Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T14:32:17.830" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T04:04:10.263" Title="Can &quot;da&quot; phrase endings used in Russian and Kannada be traced back to the same origin (as in usage, not like cognates)?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26750" CreationDate="2017-12-27T14:04:16.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin and roles are different since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannada&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kannada is a Dravidian language&lt;/a&gt;, not a relative of the Japanese or Basque, while Russian makes a part of the Slavic branch within the Indo-European family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of the Russian word is a particle (connecting sentence parts) or 'yes'-word, or an intensifier related either to a pronoun or, which I beleibe to be more realistic, a verb meaning 'to give'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kannada word ಡಾ, as the dictionaries say, is an abbreviation for 'doctor', which by itself in English could be traced back to a Proto Indo-European verb meaning 'to take'. A theory of Dravidian-IE philum seems to lack any sustainable proof. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first traces of proto-Kannada, as the Wikipedia puts it, could be traced back to 500 B. C., the times when the very existence of any Slavic language and/or nation is less than questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my answer is negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T22:24:20.290" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T22:24:20.290" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T14:20:06.970" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am researching Fake News as a topic at my university. Right now, I am searching for some literature in which a method for measuring the degree of disagreement in an online comment setting (Facebook, Twitter, Forums, ...) is presented. However, I can't seem to provide Google some key words to find a method for measuring the degree of disagreement between comments. Are there any natural language analysis methods or libraries out there which provide one of these methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20849" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T15:22:21.833" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T15:22:21.833" Title="Which method measures the degree of disagreement in online comments?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T18:26:01.293" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have decided to call our product &quot;svelte&quot;, we want to sell it worldwide. We want to make sure that other languages don't have a similar sounding word with a bad connotation.&#xA;(I am not a linguistic professional.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I ran a search on google translate and got a few results. (this is very rough)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Icelandic - svelt - to starve,&#xA;Slowenian - svet - world / holy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Aafrikans - swel - swell,&#xA;Western Frisian - swelt - swing,&#xA;Russian - svel - reduced,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there something like an online phonetic dictionary, where it would show me similar sounding words in other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or any other tips?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20851" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T19:33:52.593" Title="Svelte as a product name, are there any similar sounding negative words in other languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-01-07T19:42:40.597" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T20:44:26.250" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to apply combinatory categorial grammars and type logical grammars (Montague semantics etc.) to the compound sentences and the subordinate clauses. Are there efforts to  develop those grammars for such analysis? E.g. there is syntactic category s (sentence), are there syntactic categories for subordinate clauses? Does the type logical semantics of subordinate clause is just elaboration (additional constraint) on some word in the main sentence to which the subordinate clause refers? Are there examples in the literature of such analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google gives no good references, good reference can be the answer, I can read it myself further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. how to analyse sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;building land — land parcel, &#xA;in relation to which &#xA;a construction permit has been issued for the building thereof &#xA;or &#xA;for the construction of engineering communications therein&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:37:20.683" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:37:20.683" Title="Formal semantics of subordinate clauses (compound sentences) - in categorial and type logical grammars?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26754" CreationDate="2017-12-27T21:12:55.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, no. You would first need a massively-multilingual dictionary which really covers &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the words in each language, and there isn't such a thing. You can always decide, at your peril, to ignore some languages. Then you would have to determine what would constitute &quot;close enough&quot;, for example is &quot;vitu&quot; close enough to something in Finnish, or &quot;pool&quot; close enough to something in Norwegian. You can't just use pronunciation, so you would want to not use the Somali word for &quot;food&quot;. Finally you would need the dictionary to be well-annotated for cultural information, which would indicate the additional nuances of &lt;em&gt;hooyada&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &quot;your mother&quot;) which are not found in &lt;em&gt;aabaha&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;your father&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T21:12:55.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26755" CreationDate="2017-12-27T22:04:17.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I recall (I haven't gone back to McCawley's books to check this), McCawley treats subordinate clauses like prepositional phrases whose objects are sentences, and prepositions as predicates with objects of prepositions as arguments.  I guess that would construe subordinate clauses to be predicates (prepositions) with subordinated clauses (objects of prepositions) and main clauses as arguments and sentences containing subordinate clauses as the results of those predications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course doesn't tell you anything interesting, but I don't think type logical treatments ever do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T22:04:17.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26775" CreationDate="2017-12-28T05:47:39.040" Score="10" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we English speakers say phrases like &quot;King Kong&quot; and &quot;delicate daffodil,&quot; some of us can't help but think that the &quot;k&quot; sound is rough-and-tumble and the &quot;d&quot; sound is mild-mannered. Apparently there is a term for sounds or parts of words that the speakers of a given language associate with a mood or theme.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there is a name for such sounds or parts of words--&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonestheme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonesthemes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more information about phonesthemes on the Net, except, apparently, for the consensus among professional linguists about how seriously we should take the existence of phonesthemes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T14:41:18.993" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T21:29:25.177" Title="How seriously do modern linguists take the idea of phonesthemes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="269" CreationDate="2017-12-28T16:10:28.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reasons for borrowing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Social needs such as educational needs or social status of one language than the other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing due to the prestige of one language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To meet communication needs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To culturalize the language, i.e to relate it with the culture of other languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to the advancement of science and technology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;borrowings might occur more likely from a nearby dialects, i.e both languages are dialects of the same language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20858" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T16:25:03.980" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T16:25:03.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26763" CreationDate="2017-12-28T20:01:31.233" Score="-4" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be happy if someone could translate the text which is written on the carpet shown on the photo: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dH7OL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dH7OL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;text on carpet with zodiac signs&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20859" LastEditorUserId="20859" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T21:59:37.227" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T23:26:56.220" Title="Persian text on carpet" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-12-29T16:39:23.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26760" CreationDate="2017-12-28T21:47:48.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Persian, not Arabic, but a bit too faint for my old eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T21:47:48.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26760" CreationDate="2017-12-28T23:26:56.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jacobsenrugs.com/blog/is-your-rug-signed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jacobsenrugs.com/blog/is-your-rug-signed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This source gives an excellent and very interesting explanation for that sort of signature woven into oriental carpets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote: &quot;Most all signed rugs are city rugs, rugs woven in a metropolitan area where someone can be found to write the initials or inscription even if the weaver is illiterate. Almost never is the signature the actual mark of the weaver; rather, it is almost always the mark of the entrepreneur or money man who caused the rug to be woven. Usually the inscription is in Arabic, or in Farsi (Persian) written in Arabic script.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: &quot;Not all text appearing in a cartouche in rug is a signature; some of what looks like text is not really writing at all. There is a long history of city weavers incorporating decorative Arabic calligraphy into their rug designs. Often this script is so ornamental that it is no longer readable as text. This kind of stylized writing used as design is often called &quot;Kufic&quot; or &quot;Kufesque.&quot; &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says about &quot;Kufic&quot;: Kufic is the oldest calligraphic form of the various Arabic scripts and consists of a modified form of the old Nabataean script. Kufic developed around the end of the 7th century in Kufa, Iraq, from which it takes its name, and other centres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20843" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T23:26:56.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-29T10:36:50.850" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my professor, argument sharing under co-ordination only seems possible when an argument in the transitive is in ABS or NOM. What is meant by &lt;code&gt;argument sharing&lt;/code&gt;? Could you give an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T10:36:50.850" Title="What does &quot;argument sharing&quot; mean in terms of co-ordination?" Tags="&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;argument&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8369" CreationDate="2017-12-29T14:03:50.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;/f/ as [ϕ] in Andean, Palenquero, Caribbean, Puerto Rican Spanish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/andeanr.htm#f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Linguistics of Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; - Andean Spanish - 2. Pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.4 Pronunciation of /f/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  /f/ is commonly articulated as a voiceless bilabial fricative (symbol: [ɸ]):   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ˈɸɾuta]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;fruta&lt;/em&gt; ‘fruit’   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An epenthetic [w] is often inserted between [ɸ] and a following vowel:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ɸwaˈmilja]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;familia&lt;/em&gt; ‘family’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://apics-online.info/sentences/48-221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://apics-online.info/parameters/187#2/25.5/-11.3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ɸ - voiceless bilabial fricative  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Palenquero | Exists only as a minor allophone | Spanish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In words like &lt;em&gt;fue&lt;/em&gt; 'be', &lt;em&gt;fuego&lt;/em&gt; 'fire' and &lt;em&gt;fuette&lt;/em&gt; 'strong' the bilabial fricative /f/ is common, and reflects dialectal variation in (rural) Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4084752/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dialect Density in Bilingual Puerto Rican Spanish-English Speaking Children&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, dialect features of Puerto Rican Spanish, such as the substitution of /ʃ/ for /ʧ/, /ŋ/ for /n/, or /ɸ/ for /f/ do not involve substituting a less complex sound for a more complex sound, as they are relatively similar in complexity (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4084752/#R24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jakobson, 1968&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=bzYUAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA150&amp;amp;lpg=PA150&amp;amp;dq=%C9%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Los sonidos del español:&lt;/strong&gt; Spanish Language edition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, By José Ignacio Hualde&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTU7k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTU7k.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=U9CL4xNpZXwC&amp;amp;pg=PA96&amp;amp;lpg=PA96&amp;amp;dq=%C9%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uz9mx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uz9mx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;/sb/ as [ϕ] in Andalusian Spanish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonolog%C3%ADa_del_espa%C3%B1ol#Sonidos_conson%C3%A1nticos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/strong&gt; - Fonología del español&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;El sonido de &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricativa_labial_sorda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*[ɸ]&lt;/a&gt; aparece en español de Andalucía como alófono de /B/ (&lt;em&gt;b, v&lt;/em&gt;) después de &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;de&lt;strong&gt;sb&lt;/strong&gt;aratar&lt;/em&gt; &gt; [deɸaɾa'ta]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;lo&lt;strong&gt;s b&lt;/strong&gt;uenos&lt;/em&gt; &gt; [lɔ ɸwenɔ]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Y también ocasionalmente en secuencias como &lt;em&gt;clu&lt;strong&gt;bs&lt;/strong&gt;, o&lt;strong&gt;bs&lt;/strong&gt;curo, su&lt;strong&gt;bs&lt;/strong&gt;tancia&lt;/em&gt; en ciertas variedades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalusian_Spanish#Phonological_features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/strong&gt; - Andalusian Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Andalusian and Murcian Spanish syllable-final /s/ is very unstable; often assimilated to [ɸ] before /b/ (/sb/ → [hβ] → [hɸ] → [ɸː]), as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;desbaratar&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;*effaratar&lt;/em&gt; [ɛhɸaɾaˈta]~[ɛɸːaɾaˈta] ('to ruin, to disrupt') &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or to [ɹ] (where ceceo or distinción occur) before /θ/ (/sθ/ → [ɹθ]), as in &lt;em&gt;ascensor&lt;/em&gt; [aɹθẽ̞nˈso̞] ('lift').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/andalusir.htm#2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Linguistics of Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; - Andalusian Spanish - 2. Pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;2.2 Consonantal weakening&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Syllable-final &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; may be realized as &lt;code&gt;[h]&lt;/code&gt; (as in &lt;code&gt;[ehpaɲa]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;España&lt;/em&gt;), it may be elided (as in &lt;code&gt;[laola]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;las olas&lt;/em&gt; ‘the waves’), or there may be a process of assimilation vis-à-vis the following consonant. When the following consonant is a voiceless obstruent or a sonorant, the output of the process is usually a geminate, as in &lt;code&gt;[eloβippo]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;el obispo&lt;/em&gt; ‘the bishop’ or &lt;code&gt;[mimmo]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;mismo&lt;/em&gt; ‘same’. With voiced obstruents, on the other hand, the output is usually a single (voiceless) consonant: &lt;code&gt;[laxaʝinah]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;las gallinas&lt;/em&gt; ‘the hens’, &lt;code&gt;[laɸolah]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;las bolas&lt;/em&gt; ‘the balls’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Misc.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/strong&gt; - Voiceless bilabial fricative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6xXEn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6xXEn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; Boyd-Bowman, Peter (1953), &quot;Sobre la pronunciación del español en el Ecuador&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.&lt;/strong&gt; Cotton, Eleanor Greet; Sharp, John (1988), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=89KX2RC6Gx0C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spanish in the Americas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6.&lt;/strong&gt; Wetzels, W. Leo; Mascaró, Joan (2001), &lt;a href=&quot;http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~prince/hold/wetzels-mascaro.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Typology of Voicing and Devoicing&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/383-0300/383-0300-MORRIS-0-1.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coda obstruents and local constraint conjunction&#xA;  in north-central Peninsular Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8.&lt;/strong&gt; Pérez, Ramón Morillo-Velarde; Aguilar, Rafael Cano; Jiménez, Antonio Narbona (1998), &lt;em&gt;El Español hablado en Andalucía&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcripci%C3%B3n_fon%C3%A9tica_del_espa%C3%B1ol_con_el_AFI#cite_note-b-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/strong&gt; - Transcripción fonética del español con el AFI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En el dialecto andaluz, murciano, manchego y canario y también en las Antillas hispanohablantes la aproximante [β̞] se puede tornar fricativa sorda [ɸ] cuando va precedida de /s/ aspirada, [ʰ]; &lt;em&gt;desbordar&lt;/em&gt; [dɛʰɸo̞ɾˈð̞a̠ɾ]~[dɛʰɸo̞ð̞ˈð̞a̠(ɾ)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/f/ se pronuncia bilabial [ɸ], como la &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; de la romanización del japonés (Rōmaji). Es oído en algunas zonas aisladas de España y sobre todo en la América andina; &lt;em&gt;fuera&lt;/em&gt; [ˈɸwe̞ɾa̠].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T12:58:17.183" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T12:58:17.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2017-12-29T21:15:30.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know why Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit had the grammatical systems that they did, or why modern languages related to these have developed different grammatical systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to measure the overall &quot;complexity&quot; of a language. The other answers give some idea of how people have tried to address this question, but as far as I know there is still no consensus between all linguists about whether we can meaningfully compare the complexity of different attested natural human languages. Some people have argued that all human languages are of similar complexity; other people have argued that some languages such as pidgins and creoles actually are less complicated overall than other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other people have pointed out, complexity is not only a matter of conjugations and declensions; we can also see complexity in areas like syntax or vocabulary, which might be harder to measure. However, the idea that languages that are simple inflectionally &quot;compensate&quot; by having more complex syntax is as far as I know not particularly well-supported, either theoretically or empirically. (If anyone does know of a compelling argument for this hypothesis, please let me know—I am certainly not an expert.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Atamiri pointed out, there are languages spoken in the present day that have systems of inflection that look as complicated, or more so, than the ancient Latin systems of inflection. So it does not seem to be impossible for ordinary people to speak inflectionally complex languages in the present day. This suggests that it is also not impossible that ordinary Latin speakers in the past used without difficulty some of the constructions that seem &quot;complex&quot; to Latin learners today. (We know that there were differences between refined and everyday Latin, but the things in refined Classical Latin that native Latin speakers had trouble with aren't necessarily the same as the things that modern non-native learners of Latin have trouble with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no obvious universal (by which I mean, worldwide and exceptionless) trend of languages developing simpler inflectional systems, although there might be some kind of non-obvious or non-universal trends along these lines. I don't think we have any strong and well-supported explanations of the possible causes of these possible trends. I think people fairly often point to things like contact between different languages or different varieties of a language, and incomplete acquisition as potential causes of &quot;simplification&quot; in the grammar of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T21:15:30.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26758" CreationDate="2017-12-30T05:22:56.363" Score="14" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion that sounds carry inherent meanings certainly figures in folk ideas about language; it somehow matches many people's intuitions. But a non-arbitrary connection between sound and sense obviously violates some principles of modern linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is lots of research being done right now, but it often involves an acknowledgement that the phenomena are underdeveloped and/or not accepted in mainstream linguistics. Also, we should distinguish between a universal, interlinguistic sound-meaning connection and merely intralinguistic patterns. The former seems hard to defend, but ideas about synesthesia may be reopening the question. The latter seems to be cropping up in a large number of articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer may change further if curiosity leads me to keep prodding the subject...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Catalogue search&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Modern_phonosemantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonesthetics&lt;/a&gt; (or &quot;sound symbolism&quot;) indicates that it's a very old question. But in the &quot;modern&quot; part of that article, the story seems to peter out in the 1970s and '80s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a simple search (&quot;phonoesthetics&quot;, &quot;phonestheme&quot;, &quot;sound symbolism&quot;, &quot;sound semantics&quot; in scholarly articles, book reviews, and conference proceedings) using the University of Toronto catalogue suggests that the situation is the reverse. The research is accelerating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eLvMz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eLvMz.png&quot; alt=&quot;U of T catalogue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the article titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ideophones, Interjections, and Sound Symbolism in Seediq (Lee 2017)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Case for Sound Symbolism (Nuckolls 1999)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Specificity of Sound Symbolic Correspondences in Spoken Language (Tzeng, Nygaard &amp;amp; Namy 2016)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sound-symbolism: A Piece in the Puzzle of Word Learning (Parault &amp;amp; Schwanenflugel 2006)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning (Nygaard, Cook &amp;amp; Lamy 2009)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary (Wichmann, Holman &amp;amp; Brown 2010)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the link between synaesthesia and sound symbolism? (Bankieres &amp;amp; Simner 2015)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the 20 or so articles that I checked have decent numbers of reads, downloads and citations for the field (ranging from a half-dozen to a few dozen). Tellingly, however, almost every abstract includes a line qualifying the phenomena as &quot;not widely accepted&quot;, &quot;contradictory to the principles of linguistics&quot;, or &quot;not yet well understood or explained&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The abstract of Nuckolls' 1999 review says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated.&lt;/strong&gt; This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. &lt;strong&gt;Magnitude sound symbolism also catalyzed a number of experimental studies by psychologists and linguists in search of a universal sound-symbolic substrate underlying all languages. Although the search for a sound-symbolic substrate has been abandoned, the success rates of these studies have never been satisfactorily explained.&lt;/strong&gt; Sound-symbolic processes have had a definitive impact on morphological analyses of phonesthemes and on historical linguists' understandings of diachronic processes. A typologically widespread form of sound symbolism occurs as a kind of lexical class known as the ideophone, which is conspicuously underdeveloped in standard average European languages, and highly perplexing for linguists and anthropologists. Although it has always been a respectable domain of inquiry in ethnopoetics and interpretive ethnography, &lt;strong&gt;the case for sound symbolism has of late been argued with renewed vigor on the part of psychological anthropologists and philosophers who see a paradigm shift under way&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this telling: It's not necessarily linguists who are the most curious about sound symbolism nowadays, but anthropologists. And it's not so much digraphs that hold interest, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ideophones&lt;/a&gt; (more or less onomatopœia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I will suggest is that popular conceptions of phonesthetics are based on poorly defined criteria. One question is what happens when we find counterexamples. Take the notorious &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;itter, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;isten, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;ow, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;eam, etc. idea. How about &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;ad, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;and, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;utton, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;acier, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;itch, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;obe, &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;oat, and &lt;strong&gt;gl&lt;/strong&gt;ob, which have nothing to do with light or vision? Do they matter and if so to what degree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps unclear questions like these are why practitioners of the increasingly scientific field of linguistics feel the need to apologize for their interest in the phenomena, even in the abstracts of papers studying them. (Incidentally, I don't think there are many ancient ideas about language that would still be studied today without an apologetic tone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Psycholinguistics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One direction of possible interest for the cross-linguistic non-arbitrary hypothesis is psycholinguistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-known experiment involves the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bouba/kiki effect&lt;/a&gt;. In short, speakers of many languages associate the nonsense word &quot;bouba&quot; with rounded, cloud-like figures but &quot;kiki&quot; with spiky ones. Synesthesia appears to be involved.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar vein, the Bankieris &amp;amp; Simner article above includes these highlights from the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;We tested synaesthetes’ and controls’ ability to determine foreign word meanings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All participants correctly identified some word meanings at above chance rates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grapheme-colour synaesthetes performed significantly better than nonsynaesthetes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The same cross-sensory integration driving synaesthesia may underlie sound symbolism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Synaesthesia endows/co-occurs with enhanced multisensory skills in unrelated domains.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work on this question is recent and has potentially plausible mechanisms underlying it, so watch this space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Though one could imagine that other factors are involved. For example, in English the shapes of the letters that make up these words could bias round/spiky associations. A person could visualize the letters even without seeing the word written.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Thoughts on inter- vs. intralinguistic patterns&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own thoughts: I find the subject interesting as regards sounds' perceptual value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always think of an anecdote of my mother's. She spent some time in India in her youth, and one day asked a man what he thought was the most beautiful word in Hindi. He immediately answered: &quot;The word for 'lady': &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;begum&lt;/a&gt;!&quot; Savouring the word, he repeated: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Begum!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual response to this story is laughter. Why? Because to a North American English speaker, no word that sounds like &lt;em&gt;begum&lt;/em&gt; could mean &quot;lady&quot;. This tells us two things: One, that intuitions about which sounds have which meanings are not universally shared interlinguistically. Two, that there is nevertheless some intralinguistic consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To poke more holes in the interlinguistic hypothesis: Find someone who doesn't speak a language that you do. Ask them to guess the approximate meanings of ten words (not cognates of ones they know). The study on synesthesia I quoted mentions that people guess word meanings correctly at above-chance rates. My own anecdotal evidence suggests that they don't have a chance when the question is open-ended, testing between the utterly unrelated Hebrew and English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do believe in the effects within a language. Even if people don't have intuitions about the meanings of digraphs like &lt;strong&gt;gl-&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;sn-&lt;/strong&gt; (at least I don't), speakers of the same language do share vague affective perceptions like those about &lt;em&gt;begum&lt;/em&gt; — or about &lt;em&gt;bouba&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kiki&lt;/em&gt;, for that matter. And you can create new words with fairly reliable categorizations, at least if you make the categories as extreme as opposites. How many English speakers would fail to categorize &lt;em&gt;Galadriel&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Mordor&lt;/em&gt; correctly into good and evil?&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article mentions that phonesthetic phenomena may be due to priming, which makes sense to me. Even if there's no reason why a woman should be called a &lt;em&gt;begum&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;lady&lt;/em&gt;, once a language settles on one or the other, speakers may make similar judgements about other words using the same sound configurations. The first connection is arbitrary, but later words can be derived from or influenced by it. Over time, perhaps that could even account for a tendency — far from a scientifically predictable rule — for phonological clusters to form semantic patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; When the categories are arbitrary, opinions become unreliable. I wonder how many of us would disagree with Monty Python's sorting into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;tinny&quot; and &quot;woody&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;gone&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;newspaper&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;litterbin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sausage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;antelope&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;seemly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;prodding&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vacuum&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;caribou&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;leap&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;bound&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T21:09:03.903" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T21:09:03.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26741" CreationDate="2017-12-30T09:40:52.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most computational parsing methods yield an output that is a propositional representation within the computer. This includes pure syntactic parsers (if one assumes we can have pure syntax) and semantic and also pragmatic parsers. Why? Because parsers in computers always produce discrete output and every discrete output can be converted into a graph representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributional representations of words (word2vec) would be a representation that is not propositional. But such a representation is (currently) not used as the main structural component of a parser output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about semantic parsing in the human it is a different story and I would not say that it is clear what kind of processes or representations semantic parsing includes in the human brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T09:40:52.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9840" CreationDate="2017-12-30T19:01:15.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are such corpora. One freely availble corpus is &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/10230/20052&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IULA Spanish-English Technical Corpus&lt;/a&gt; from Universitat Pompeu Fabra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one, concentrating on Computational Linguistcs, is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://acl-arc.comp.nus.edu.sg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACL anthology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is special search interface for language resources like corpora at &lt;a href=&quot;http://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO)&lt;/a&gt; provided by the European &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN&lt;/a&gt; consortium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T21:34:51.673" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T21:34:51.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26754" CreationDate="2017-12-30T19:33:52.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple more languages come to mind offhand:&#xA;Italian: svelto = quick, brisk, fast, slender etc&#xA;hence Modern Greek σβέλτος = quick, swift, lively, nimble etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for 'other tips', consider the spelling (the -e ending makes me think of French, and feminine, e.g. blond/blonde, fianc'e/fianc'ee).  Also vet the visual appearance of the font you will use for this, make sure that it doesn't look like a potentially undesirable letter or symbol in another alphabet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;HTH  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20872" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T19:33:52.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25497" CreationDate="2017-12-30T22:16:46.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there are many signed &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; spoken languages with a truly comprehensive reference grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best descriptive grammar that I know of for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auslan&lt;/a&gt; is this publication by Adam Schembri &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ridbc.org.au/renwick/sites/default/files/renwick/structure-and-formation-signs-auslan-part-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The structure and formation of signs in Auslan&lt;/a&gt;. More technical works on Auslan by the same author are &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Q-I4TgcAAAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. A more general introduction to Auslan is this work by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookdepository.com/Australian-Sign-Language-Auslan-Trevor-Johnston/9780521540568&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trevor Johnston&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, NZ Sign Language and Auslan are very closely related (both being grouped with British Sign Language as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANZSL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BANZSL&lt;/a&gt; family of sign languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://researchers.cdu.edu.au/en/publications/a-grammar-sketch-of-yolngu-sign-language-2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yolngu Sign Language&lt;/a&gt;, described by the authors as a sketch grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T22:16:46.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26790" CreationDate="2017-12-31T04:58:40.890" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) Does it change, even slightly, due weakening of the last consonant sound?&#xA;2) If it does what is this phenomenon called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T15:49:11.173" Title="How does the pronunciation of r change from &quot;art&quot; to &quot;arth&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26788" CreationDate="2017-12-31T07:08:30.720" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;During my fieldwork, I recorded, transcribed and translated a dozen or so narratives in an indigenous language of Central America, in close cooperation with a couple native speakers (including some beautiful illustrations). Now we'd like to publish these narratives in an open source book --- but not necessarily (or at least not only) as a linguistics textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think lang-sci press may be too technical, I'd prefer to make this more for the community than for linguists (although hopefully both, nice that it can be in LaTeX).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried Mac publisher, but the interface is very annoying ... Ideally there is an opportunity (even in a vanity press) to submit in LaTeX. But maybe some of you guys have experience with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T18:06:00.383" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T18:08:45.617" Title="What's a good resource where I can publish some narratives in a minority language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;&lt;language-preservation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T09:20:19.130" Score="5" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;The PIE *septm should have changed to Pre-PG *sefθen, by the Grimm's Law. Then, by the Verner's Law, it should have changed to *sebθen. Why did the *θ disappear for the word to develop into &quot;sieben&quot; in German and into &quot;seven&quot; ('b' regularly changes to 'v' in English between two vowels) in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd expect it to have developed into German **siebden ('th' changes to 'd' in German regularly) and English **sevthen or **sebthen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20821" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T07:40:22.980" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T07:40:22.980" Title="How did Proto-Indo-European *septm evolve into English &quot;seven&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T10:59:29.907" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on building a semantic markup for my native language and I have bumped into the fact that ready semantic hierarchy or tagset is a very scarce resource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am looking for is something like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- CONCERETE&#xA;  - LIFE&#xA;    - HUMAN&#xA;      - POWER&#xA;        :: king, prime-minister, president, etc&#xA;    ...&#xA;- ABSTRACT&#xA;  - EVENT&#xA;    :: wedding, inauguration&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(example are just for illustrative purpose only, I need structure only)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, some classical works like Roget's Thesaurus, but it has been developed long long ago and I am looking for something more contemporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T18:12:04.537" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T15:05:58.167" Title="Looking for semantic hierarchy, tagset or connected active research" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26259" CreationDate="2017-12-31T13:30:58.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence &quot;Waarschijnlijk deze zomer ga ik naar Spanje&quot; is completely incorrect Dutch, as mentioned by someone else. You can say &quot;Waarschijnlijk ga ik deze zomer naar Spanje.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are dealing with something particular to the Dutch language here, namely 'inversion'. Normally the Dutch sentence order is subject + conjugated verb + the rest of the sentence, however after certain words the order is reversed and becomes (other part of the sentence, f.i. the adverb of time) + conjugated verb + subject + the rest of the sentence. Here's a source that explains it simply:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3733010/Grammar-Dutch-Word-Order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3733010/Grammar-Dutch-Word-Order&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;You should be able to find more sources on correct word order if you google for 'dutch grammar inversion' or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But honestly, as a Dutch native this just sounds wrong, like &quot;I tomorrow hamburger eat&quot; would sound ridiculous in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20874" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T13:30:58.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26784" CreationDate="2017-12-31T13:54:15.463" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The excellent German etymological dictionary by Pfeiffer has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sieben&lt;/strong&gt; Num. Ahd. &lt;em&gt;sibun&lt;/em&gt; (8. Jh.), mhd. siben (md. &lt;em&gt;siven&lt;/em&gt;), asächs.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;siҍun&lt;/em&gt;, mnd. &lt;em&gt;sēven&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sȫven&lt;/em&gt;, mnl. &lt;em&gt;sēven&lt;/em&gt;, nl. &lt;em&gt;zeven&lt;/em&gt;, aengl. &lt;em&gt;seofon&lt;/em&gt;, engl.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;seven&lt;/em&gt;, anord. &lt;em&gt;sjau&lt;/em&gt; (wohl umgebildet durch frühen Einfluß des unter&#xA;  acht, s. d., behandelten Zahlworts, vgl. got. &lt;em&gt;ahtau&lt;/em&gt;), schwed. &lt;em&gt;sju&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  got. &lt;em&gt;sibun&lt;/em&gt; (germ. &lt;em&gt;*sebun&lt;/em&gt;) lassen sich mit aind. &lt;em&gt;saptá&lt;/em&gt;, griech. &lt;em&gt;heptá&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;em&gt;ἑπτά&lt;/em&gt;), lat. &lt;em&gt;septem&lt;/em&gt;, air. &lt;em&gt;secht n-&lt;/em&gt; auf ie. &lt;em&gt;*septṃ&lt;/em&gt; ‘sieben’&#xA;  zurückführen, wobei das Germ. den inlautenden Dental aufgegeben hat,&#xA;  wohl dissimilatorisch unter Einfluß der gleichfalls mit Dental&#xA;  gebildeten Ordinalzahl ie. &lt;em&gt;*sep(t)ṃto-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/sieben&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dwds.de/wb/sieben&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: back-formation from the ordinal, with dissimilation of t...t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T19:51:12.573" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T19:51:12.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26783" CreationDate="2017-12-31T14:48:55.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be about where one would put such materials (not how one would handle the typesetting issue). There are at least three places which don't require content review: Zenodo, Figshare, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.soas.ac.uk/elar/depositing-with-elar/who-can-deposit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SOAS Endangered Languages Archive&lt;/a&gt; (I can't say for certain that the later is  appropriate, so read their material).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T14:48:55.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T15:03:03.537" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natural sciences observe facts and make models. Mathematics more or less arbitrarly generates axioms and investigates all the possible consquences of them. What is the source of semantic knowledge (e.g. one that is described in Saeed Semantics &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Semantics%2C+4th+Edition-p-9781118430163&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Semantics%2C+4th+Edition-p-9781118430163&lt;/a&gt;)? How researcher generates the semantic knowledge from the text? &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do the researcher is required to use only his/her inner sense of language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to classify the possibilities of language use, roles of the words and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is somewhat obscure but its aim is to automate the semantics as a science. It is quite is to imagine experimental machine that makse observations and automatically generates and adjust models. It is quite easy to imagine system that generates and proofs/discards mathematical lemmas. In fact - such systems already exist for decades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what about semantic science - how we can automate it, how can we automate the discovery of semantic knowledge?&lt;/strong&gt; There is great necessity for such automation to boost symbolic processing of natural language and symbolic computational lingustics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of type logical grammars, categorial grammars, research in line with &quot;Linguistics and Philosophy&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/journal/10988&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://link.springer.com/journal/10988&lt;/a&gt; but work as expemlified by Saeed Semantis if far, far more richer than these efforts/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One can imagine the use of methods of classification. E.g. researcher extract all the possible uses of nouns from the texts and then researched can make automated clustering of the type of uses of those nouns and in such manner she can discover specified clusters of uses and name thoses clasters as thematic roles of the nouns?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T15:03:03.537" Title="What is the source of knowledge/discovery for the semantics? Automation of semantic science?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26781" CreationDate="2017-12-31T15:49:11.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general process is known a lenition, which unfortunately refers to very many different processes. The underlying idea is that &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;weaker&quot; than &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; (likewise &lt;em&gt;f,x&lt;/em&gt; compared to &lt;em&gt;p,k&lt;/em&gt;), and one of the environments where this happens is postvocalically (with or without a tautosyllabicity condition). However, the term also encompasses the changes &lt;em&gt;t → d,h,ʔ,ɾ&lt;/em&gt;. Usually, such a lenition takes place right after a vowel or glide and not a consonant, so if &quot;r&quot; is included in the context, one may reasonable suspect that &quot;r&quot; is a vocoid &lt;em&gt;ɹ&lt;/em&gt; as in English, and not a trill. The physical mechanism beneath the process is not clear, but seems to have to do with delaying the transition from a very open vocal tract to a closed one. If the process were triggered &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; by preceding &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and not a vowel, that would be a typologically novel process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T15:49:11.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26783" CreationDate="2017-12-31T18:08:45.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another potential archive for documentation of endangered languages is &lt;a href=&quot;https://tla.mpi.nl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Language Archive&lt;/a&gt; currently hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen (The Netherlands).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T18:08:45.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26785" CreationDate="2017-12-31T18:15:57.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordnet&lt;/a&gt; is a resource that can help you as a starter. I do not know what language is in your mind, but there is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Multilingual Wordnet&lt;/a&gt; project hosted by Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) that may even cover the language of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T18:15:57.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26295" CreationDate="2017-12-31T18:22:13.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Convergent features in unrelated languages in contact like Danish and Finnish in the example given are an indication of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sprachbund&lt;/a&gt;. However, I am not aware of a special term for features involved in a Sprachbund, they are just called features by anyone I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T18:22:13.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6457" CreationDate="2018-01-01T08:25:36.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kaldi-asr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaldi&lt;/a&gt; is currently the best option: state-of-the-art speech recognition accuracy (or close to it), and mature code base.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A more recent alternative, released in 2017-11: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla DeepSpeech&lt;/a&gt; (based on TensorFlow).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another alternative, released on 2017-12: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook AI Research Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit&lt;/a&gt; (Torch+lua, BSD License).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the performances, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/26209/2680&quot;&gt;How does Kaldi compare with Mozilla DeepSpeech in terms of speech recognition accuracy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T08:25:36.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8712" CreationDate="2018-01-01T09:57:49.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was definitely an alveolar trill [r] (or flap [ɾ]) at the syllable onset, as in, in prevocalic positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in non-prevocalic positions (in positions where a non-rhotic speaker would elide /r/ today), it was probably an alveolar approximant [ɹ], like in Modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see this complementary distribution play out with /l/ as well - a clear [l] before vowels, a dark [ł] when there's no vowel following. This happens in Modern English as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This complementary distribution for /r/ was the norm not just in Old English, but English all accross till around ~1700. According to some people on reddit who once scolded me for not having &lt;em&gt;&quot;known&quot;&lt;/em&gt; this before, not just in Old English, but also in Old Norse, and Proto-Germanic as well, /r/ was a complementary distribution between flap [ɾ] and approximant [ɹ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14374" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T09:57:49.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-01T10:06:16.267" Score="1" ViewCount="2067" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, who used the alveolar trill [r] in his speech, not the Standard German [ʁ]. This is only to be expected for an Austrian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the German Wikipedia, in Austrian German, the vowels Srandard German vowels /ə ɐ/ are &lt;em&gt;replaced by / surface as&lt;/em&gt; [ɛ a] respectively. That means that /hɪtlər/ would be [hɪtlɛr] in Austrian German as opposed to the Standard German [hɪtlɐ], right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I did listen to one Hitler speech, and he pronounced the word &quot;aber&quot; /aːbər/ as [aːbaː], NOT [aːbɛr]. He did however pronounce &quot;kapitulieren&quot; /kapɪtʊliːrən/ as [kapɪtʊliːrɛn], as opposed to the Standard German [kʰapʰɪtʰʊliːʁn̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, did Hitler pronounce his own surname as [hɪtlaː] then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Austrian German non-rhotic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14374" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T13:44:18.667" Title="How did Adolf Hitler pronounce his own name?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26798" CreationDate="2018-01-01T13:44:18.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting discussion of Hitler's speech in Hubert's contribution to this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/40864/gab-es-einen-deutschen-posh-accent&quot;&gt;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/40864/gab-es-einen-deutschen-posh-accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is significant is that Hitler went out of his way NOT to speak with an Austrian accent, but to emulate as well as he could the &quot;deutsche Bühnensprache&quot;, one of the obvious features of which is (or rather was) the alveolar &quot;r&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T13:44:18.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26804" CreationDate="2018-01-02T02:39:28.240" Score="9" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which adverbs (in the sense of verb modifiers) inflect to match the verb they modify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20771" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T17:26:05.440" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T22:28:45.897" Title="Are there languages in which adverbs inflect?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25629" CreationDate="2018-01-02T15:02:43.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, it's actually [ʂɻ] or [ʂɹ], not [ʂ]. Likewise, I read that &quot;tr&quot; and &quot;dr&quot; are actually [t͡ʃɹ~ʈ͡ʂɻ] and [d͡ʒɹ~ɖ͡ʐɻ] respectively, not [ʈ͡ʂ] and [ɖ͡ʐ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that in both Romance and Slavic languages, it is very common to turn the clusters /st͡ʃ/ into a simple /ʃ/. This happens in Russian with the &amp;lt;щ&gt;, which originally represented /st͡ʃ/ or /ʃt͡ʃ/ (which it still does in Ukrainian), but eventually turned into /ʃː/. (I suspect the same thing happened to the Italian &quot;sci&quot; ). I believe this is what might have happened to the Sicilian  - [str] -&gt;[sʈ͡ʂɻ~ʂʈ͡ʂɻ] -&gt; [ʂɻ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14374" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T15:02:43.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-02T19:54:54.670" Score="1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Happy New Year, everyone!&#xA;I am reading an article by G.Corbett on canonical morphosyntactic features. He mentiones two kinds of inflection: inherent and contextual. These notions look to me somewhat alike the distinction between interpretable and uninterpretable features in the generative framework. I question whether the things are realy so, are the both dichotomies parallel and concerning the same phenomena? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="20034" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T20:02:40.397" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T01:46:41.133" Title="Terminology: types of inflection and features" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-02T21:33:42.650" Score="2" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is a tree-representation of an action sequencing hierarchy, taken from Fischmeister et al 2016 (Journal Cortex).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sKWee.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sKWee.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone explain (the paper does not) by which rationale the different nodes (levels) in the tree are deemed to be either Head or Preparation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the tree seems ill-formed as the nodes at the second level from the top do not have a title/description, but only their Head/Preparation function specified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20885" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T21:33:42.650" Title="How are head nodes of a tree determined?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26800" CreationDate="2018-01-02T22:28:45.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are supposed to be some languages that have adverbs that show inflectional agreement with the head verb. I don't know enough to give an overview, but one example seems to be Maori, where adverbs modifying a passive verb take passive marking, and those midifying a nominalized verb take nominalizing marking (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/20cf/825ee589e50b2ffce4c3a64bec2be78868bd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Formal Property Inheritance and Consonant/Zero Alternations in Maori Verbs&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Nicholas Kibre, October 1, 1998; p. 11).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T22:28:45.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26802" CreationDate="2018-01-03T01:37:25.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Geert Booij defines inherent inflection as “inflection of a word that is not required by its syntactic context” whereas by contextual inflection he understands “inflection that is required by the syntactic context in which a word occurs” (Booij 2007). He gives some examples, e.g. he argues that case markings on nouns are contextual but the present tense on the verb is inherent inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that inherent inflection is indeed equivalent to interpretable features in MP (understood as those features that have an effect on semantic interpretation, e.g. Adger 2003), whereas contextual inflection is equivalent to uninterpretable features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T01:46:41.133" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T01:46:41.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26750" CreationDate="2018-01-03T08:08:53.813" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. Its similar to asking if Kannada word &lt;em&gt;alla&lt;/em&gt;, which is a negation suffix and also a separate word for no/not, is same as the Islamic deity. It's just coincidence. They are false friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt; phrase ending, which sort of replaces &lt;em&gt;dude&lt;/em&gt; in English, is actually a suffix and it is not of Kannada origin. It is of Tamil origin and it is a bona fide suffix in that language. This suffix is mostly used in English (and never Kannada) spoken in Bangalore, a city right at the border with the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu where Tamil is spoken. There is a long history of Tamil migration to Bangalore but this suffix is a recent thing and only a few decades old. You might also hear &lt;em&gt;ra&lt;/em&gt; used, which is a Telugu origin suffix serving the same purpose. I grew up using &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; and still use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it is one of the aspects of Indian English. The general North Indian variation is to use the word &lt;em&gt;yaar&lt;/em&gt;, which means friend in Persian, and consequently in Hindi, Urdu etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's up da = What's up yaar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T04:04:10.263" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T04:04:10.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2700" CreationDate="2018-01-03T08:51:38.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I know this is an old question with an accepted answer, but I am posting this as I see that an important point is missing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, this is an idiomatic usage. Idioms are usually native to a language so much that a literal translation to another language might not carry the same meaning, even sound absurd. However, funnily, idioms can diffuse across languages, even across families. Typically a dominant language lends its idioms to the subservient ones. Note that I am making a distinction between calque and idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the common English idiom 'never look back', as in 'She never looked back after that first exhibition' means &lt;em&gt;to continue to be successful after doing something with a good result&lt;/em&gt;. This idiom has made its way into Indian languages due to the high status English had during colonial times. I am not sure how many languages are affected, but I can vouch its usage in Kannada. This phrase by itself doesn't have any special meaning natively as far as I can tell. Outside of the literary usage, if you ask an average Kannada speaker 'what is your dream' using the literal word for dream(kanasu), you would get a perplexed look. You would have to use one of the several words for desire, or rephrase the question by explicitly mentioning 'dream in life' or 'dream of becoming in your life' etc, to extract the intended answer. I am sure a lot of idioms were borrowed from Sanskrit which was the original prestige language in India, but they were borrowed so long back that they have been naturalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point I am getting at is, it would help to look at the sociolinguistics to determine the dynamics of languages to truly understand the usage of dream this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T08:51:38.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26522" CreationDate="2018-01-03T09:24:41.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Kannada speaker not Telugu (I can speak no Telugu at all), but due to historic sociolinguistic relations between the two languages, I think I can answer this fairly well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking do Telugu letters represent the sounds to be uttered accurately such that there is not inconsistencies as with English spelling, then yes. The consonants always retain their sounds. Unlike Tamil, 'pa' and 'ba' don't use the same letter which are uttered differently based on the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking do Telugu speakers utter the intended sounds when they look at a letter, then no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, as with Kannada, some sounds, and, consequently, their corresponding letters were discarded centuries back. So people don't know how to utter the sounds and use the nearest ones if the letters are used. In Kannada such letters appear only in studying older forms of the language. I guess that's where they occur in Telugu as well. Secondly, the script is an adaptation and extension of script intended for Sanskrit and its derivatives. It is unreasonable to expect an average Telugu speaker to mimic Sanskrit specific sounds such as r in rishi which is different from r in rama, for instance. The same applies to mahapranas. Thirdly, due to colloquialism, some vowels are uttered in 'non standard' way. The one my Kannada ear picks up is the sound for long 'e', the one represented by 'a' in 'gate'. Many people utter it as if it were 'a' from 'gap'. I specifically hear this when some say the word 'lekapote'. Lastly, if you consider the usage of 'f' and 'z' sounds, which are foreign, you tilt more towards 'no'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13546" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T09:24:41.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26811" CreationDate="2018-01-03T11:05:09.500" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my search for Master's programs, I'm looking to work on speech synthesis or speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what sub-discipline of linguistics I should be searching in. My first guess was Computational Linguistics, but that sub-discipline seems mainly dedicated to (written) text analysis, automatic translation, and the like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find a Master's program on these and similar topics? Is there a particular sub-discipline that is dedicated to this study?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T19:00:37.383" Title="Which sub-field of linguistics does research into speech synthesis/recognition belong?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;interdisciplinary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26810" CreationDate="2018-01-03T19:00:37.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you want linguistics rather than CS, you should first identify individuals who do the kind of research that you are interested in. Typically, those would be authors of research papers in the area that you find most interesting. For instance, there a number of interesting papers on phonetic properties of under-described languages, and I would take note not only of the names of the authors, but also papers that are referred to therein (generating a second wave of paper-and-author identifications). I would eventually learn who I would really like to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would discard the notion of looking for a Master's program, at least temporarily, and only apply the MA program desideratum if there is a compelling reason to do so. If you are totally and irrevocably committed to an MA-only approach, then you could google that and see if you really want to work with one of the faculty so identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T19:00:37.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26013" CreationDate="2018-01-03T20:11:03.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shyamsundara Dasa's &lt;em&gt;Hindi Shabdasagar&lt;/em&gt; dictionary has an entry &lt;a href=&quot;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.12:1:4500.dasahindi.2497790&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(link)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;बिगुल&lt;/strong&gt; संज्ञा पुं० [अं०] अँगरेजी ढंग की एक प्रकार की तुरही जो प्रायः सैनिकों को एकत्र करने अथवा इसी प्रकार का कोई और काम करने के लिये संकेत रूप में बजाई जाती है । मुहा०—&lt;strong&gt;बिगुल बजना&lt;/strong&gt; = (१) किसी कार्य के लिये आदेश होना । (२) कूच होना ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &quot;an English style of horn usually used to call soldiers to one place, or in other cases [used] as a signal&quot;. The [अं०] part means it's a borrowing from English, so fdb is correct. &lt;em&gt;Rajpal Hindi Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; also agrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T20:32:00.603" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T20:32:00.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T20:23:42.737" Score="16" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read some works on Proto-Indo-European which mention different schools that advocate for different paradigms of reconstruction, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_University&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leiden&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Erlangen-Nuremberg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erlangen&lt;/a&gt; schools. I'd like to know if there are any other such schools and a quick run-down of their proposed paradigms (as well as any scholarly works relevant to this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T15:08:44.650" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T19:52:08.863" Title="What are the different schools of PIE reconstruction?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26814" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-03T21:13:02.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T21:13:02.513" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T21:13:02.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26815" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-03T21:13:02.513" Score="0" Body="Umbrella term for dialects that include Hindi, Urdu, and other Hindi-belt languages." OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T03:58:38.960" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T03:58:38.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2018-01-03T21:24:59.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this has more to do with not being a prestige language. English was a &quot;borrowing language&quot; because all higher-level vocabulary was coined in Latin historically, and Latin was the prestige language in Europe. I mean think about it, wouldn't it be inefficient to have both a native and borrowed word for something, when the language that it is being borrowed from is already well established? So naturally, English borrowed from Latin, because the &lt;em&gt;words were already there&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In India, English is a prestige language, so people will often intermingle English words into their speech (even languages like Tamil which are thought to be less accepting of borrowings have a large English element now). So people will say &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;TV&lt;/em&gt; since these things the words label were first invented in English-speaking places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of resisting loanwords is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguistic purism&lt;/a&gt;. This is not common in mainstream English; Latin and Greek borrowings persist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T21:24:59.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26823" CreationDate="2018-01-04T08:25:03.240" Score="5" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main idea behind this questions is that I have some difficulty to accept that a certain language can be a dialect of another one by simply basing that argument on the similarity of the vocabulary only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the grammatical rules? What about phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story&lt;/strong&gt;: I lived in Lebanon for quite a long time and the spoken language in general doesn’t have even a close phonology to the proto-arabic that is shared among the arabic speaking nations. Now, after many decades of Arabism and colonialism, the Lebanese spoken language acquired arabic words in a huge quantity, however the phonology was changed drastically and kept the original phonology that is present in Syriac and Aramaic languages (also some Semitic similarities). Moreover the grammar kept its structure from the Syro-Aramaic ancestry. TLDR the current Lebanese spoken language is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- &lt;strong&gt;Vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt;: half-half between Arabic and Syro-Aramaic and Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- &lt;strong&gt;Grammar&lt;/strong&gt;: nothing shared with Arabic basics. Strong Syro-Aramaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3- &lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt;: in Europe, when I speak Lebanese, they think I’m Israeli. Which somehow proves the point that phonology is as well important to appropriate a language source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Can i say that the Lebanese language is a version of Arabic seen that phonology and Grammar aren’t shared but only some part of the vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Shouldn’t we examine language appropriation by probabilistic measures of syllabes that determine the accent? I.e. the similarity between the Lebanese spoken language with today’s Hebrew and Syriac accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appreciate any clarification on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15521" LastEditorUserId="28236" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T10:12:51.750" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T10:12:51.750" Title="Conflation of language dialects and phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T09:13:41.513" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose there are at least two ways to read this question (forgive me, I'm not a linguist, just a struggling practical language student):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Which languages' aspects map onto those in English most closely (semantically)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Which languages express aspect most similarly to English (formally)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20891" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T13:06:57.063" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T01:47:31.593" Title="Which language expresses aspect most similarly to English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26819" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26820" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" Score="0" Body="For questions dealing with all aspects of the preservation of endangered languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T11:14:35.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T16:40:58.600" Score="6" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;The orthography of Modern Greek is to a great extent historical and, therefore, complicated. There are multiple spelling variations for the [i], [e] and [o] sounds, and awkward digraphs to represent the [b], [ɡ] and [d] sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any proposals for a spelling reform for Modern Greek? If yes, what kind of a new orthography do they suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13846" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T09:53:41.973" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T09:53:41.973" Title="Are there any proposals for a spelling reform of Modern Greek?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26817" CreationDate="2018-01-04T18:15:10.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of speech-form clusters in the world, that is, genetically related languages which are so structurally similar that they are said to be &quot;dialects&quot; of a language – e.g. Saami, Shona, Somali, Luhya, Chinese, Arabic, Kurdish, Quechua and Mongolian. You might say that the various Saami languages are versions of Saami, or they are dialects of Saami, but there is no standard reference form that one could actually write down (likewise Quechua, Luhya and Kurdish). Because of the writing system, there is a standard thing that can be identified as Chinese – and nobody &lt;em&gt;speaks&lt;/em&gt; that language (it's a written form, not a spoken form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;Arabic&quot; you mean either &quot;Modern Standard Arabic&quot; or &quot;Classical Arabic&quot;, which is not a first language anymore, then it is a stretch to say that any modern spoken dialect is a &quot;version&quot; of the classical language, just as it is a stretch to say that any modern Chinese dialect is a &quot;version&quot; of classical Chinese or Khalkha Mongolian is a &quot;version&quot; of Classical Mongolian (idem classical Tibetan and modern Tibetan, and so on). The &quot;Arabic versions&quot; of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and so on have a clear historical connection to Classical Arabic that is similar to the connection between the individual Romance languages and Latin, or the various Chinese dialects and an earlier common version of Chinese. They all derive historically from a common language, just as the North Germanic, Saami and Mongolian languages do. The primary reason that most &quot;versions of Arabic&quot; are called Arabic is political (and the reason why Maltese is not generally called Arabic is likewise political, though it is clearly not as similar to Classical Arabic as Spoken Levantine Arabic is). In other words, saying that Lebanese is &quot;a version of Arabic&quot; does not clarify anything, and you can't decide whether it is &quot;a version&quot;, unless you have a clear and well-justified terminological alternative. (If you were speaking of Chaldean Neo-Aramaic in Iraq, that could &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be considered a &quot;version&quot; of Arabic). It is sensible to ask about the relationship between two genetically-related languages, it's just that &quot;version&quot; does not impart any clarity to the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a significant similarity between Classical Arabic and Spoken Lebanese Arabic in the realm of grammar, and a huge similarity between Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian and so on. For example, the patterns of verb inflection in the modern languages are extremely similar, and recognizable related to Classical Arabic – though there are a number of things in Classical Arabic that have disappeared (for instance, jussive and subjunctive inflections). I think the 1sg perfective suffix is /t/ in all modern Arabic varieties, clearly related to Classical /tu/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that phonologists think about &quot;the phonology&quot; of a language, phonology is primarily about the rules which manipulate roots and affixes, so that in some dialects, /katabt/ is pronounced [katábit] (or, elsewhere, /katab/ it pronounced [kítab]). This system of rules is complex enough to be an area of significant interest for linguists and has been reasonably well studied. I would agree that there is not much similarity between Classical Arabic and the modern dialects, but it is easy to see how the phonologies of the modern dialects arose historically. For instance, in Classical Arabic the roots /dʕw/ and /rmy/ end with different underlying glides; in the modern languages, the glide is gone and instead you get epenthetic &lt;em&gt;e:, i:&lt;/em&gt;; the inflection of roots like /mdd/ has changes drastically so that &lt;em&gt;madadtu ~ maddat&lt;/em&gt; gave way to &lt;em&gt;madde:t ~ maddat&lt;/em&gt;. It would be a wonderful project to line up the relevant properties and compose a model of relatedness based on such shared changes from the classical language: this has been done somewhat, and research on the topic will continue for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some other Arabic speakers think you are Israeli, that probably reflects the fact that the varieties of Arabic spoken along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean are extremely similar. It would be interesting, but quite impractical, to conduct a well-controlled and extensive survey of perceived similarity among varieties of Arabic. Factoring in language-external comparisons such as Aramaic-Arabic, Berber-Arabic is just that much more difficult: not impossible, but difficult. Please note that this just looks at large-scale subjective judgments of &quot;similarity&quot;; another approach is to develop a metric of objective grammatical and lexical similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:15:10.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26821" CreationDate="2018-01-05T08:48:23.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there have been suggestions of reducing υ, η, ει, οι etc to ι since that is the way they are pronounced today. Also ω to ο and αι to ε. Nevertheless, orthography in Greek is kinda &quot;holy&quot; and such suggestions are fiercely opposed.  One of the arguments is the readability of ancient texts in the school (kids should recognize the words easier). For the consonants like β, δ, ζ there is not much to do as it is not a modern sound change anyway. The discussion has always been around the vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T21:58:30.367" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T21:58:30.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26882" CreationDate="2018-01-05T12:03:08.770" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a textual corpus consisting of about 500 different texts, written in the time span of several centuries. The authors of these texts belonged to the same culture, so they used to read and cite each other. So, I want to be able to find all the quotations from a text (let's call it &lt;code&gt;mytext&lt;/code&gt;) in the other texts of the corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, using a naïve approach, I made a program, which took all the (overlapping) sequences of 5 (or 6, or 7) words from &lt;code&gt;mytext&lt;/code&gt; and looked for these sequences in all the other texts. This algorithm works, but has certain drawbacks and raises some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know beforehand, how long my sequence should be. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There could be non-verbatim quotations: a word could be substituted by a synonym or simply deleted, word-order could be slightly changed etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both &lt;code&gt;mytext&lt;/code&gt; and some other text may quote a third source, sometimes outside my corpus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There can be trivial quotations, e.g. idioms, etc. Moreover, there can be trivial quotations of 5 words and non-trivial ones of 3 words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am looking for some theory and known algorithms, which I could implement in my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20066" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:25:39.253" Title="Tools and algorithms for finding non-verbatim quotations" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T17:18:35.567" Score="9" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any publications which list words of English that one might reasonably expect a child to know? I assume that &quot;father&quot; would be on the list, and &quot;allophone; metallurgy&quot; would not be. As for age of this ideal child, between 6 and 12 is in the relevant range. My need for such a list relates to the question of how English phonology is acquired, especially whether the phonological generalizations that describe a plausible child lexicon are radically different from those describing the entire set of English words (the answer is &quot;Clearly&quot;, this is about demonstrating that). My preference would be for a list that is based in actual observation, but a policy list (&quot;children in grade 5 should know these words...&quot;) might work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T18:13:58.503" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T01:59:23.147" Title="Is there a word-list for child English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T23:44:42.430" Score="11" ViewCount="763" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dialect continuum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or dialect chain is a spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties are not mutually intelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A variety of languages are spoken as you move from Rome to Northern Italy and then west towards Portugal: Romanesco, Umbrian, Tuscan, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Provençal, Catalan, Castilian Spanish, Galician, Portuguese and several others not mentioned here.  Would a certain sequence of these (or other) languages be an example of dialect continuum in Europe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10185" OwnerDisplayName="Centaurus" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:56:34.253" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:56:34.253" Title="Can the &quot;dialect continuum&quot; phenomenon be recognized from Rome to Lisbon?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T20:11:40.650" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Praat script to measure center of gravity in fricatives. I don't understand what the difference is in the power values. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Spectrum__Get_centre_of_gravity___.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manual&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;Common values are 2, 1, or 2/3&quot;, but I don't understand what that means for my measurements, exactly. Which value is useful for measuring what? Or, what values are useful in what situations? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T20:11:40.650" Title="Power in Center of Gravity" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T21:39:48.590" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak General American English, and I pronounce voiced &quot;th&quot;'s in two different ways. The first, which is how I pronounce it in &quot;the&quot; and &quot;father,&quot; feels somewhat like a stop; part of my tongue touches the roof of my mouth. The second way, which is how I pronounce it in &quot;worthy&quot; feels more like a &quot;true&quot; voiced dental fricative. Is this just an idiosyncrasy of mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20786" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T10:32:15.113" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T10:32:15.113" Title="The pronunciation of the voiced &quot;th&quot; in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26835" CreationDate="2018-01-05T22:16:02.913" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;In P&amp;amp;P, I assume that 'be' occupies the head of VP as P&amp;amp;P doesn't allow for empty heads. From that I assume that copulas head objects/complements in the same way that a lexical verb would?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In LFG, copulas pretty much disappear in f-structure but do they at least select complements in c-structure (while the head of VP is empty)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I suppose VP being empty isn't really the issue. Lexical verbs without an aux can and do occupy IP/TP, leaving VP empty anyway. In f-structure, the predicative noun/adj. etc. is the predicator, while in c-structure I guess the order of things still shows objects as complements of what is ultimately the lexical or copula verb in IP/TP. Does this mean that LFG presents a conflicting analysis of copulas in f- and c- structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20144" LastEditorUserId="20144" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T22:43:53.877" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:07:52.437" Title="Are copulas object/complement heads? P&amp;P &amp; LFG" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T23:39:15.357" Score="2" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I can hear from somebody that Indo-European linguistics is somewhat neglected. And instead, there some people who think that it is very important field. What can you say about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20894" LastEditorUserId="20894" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T02:02:00.930" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T02:02:00.930" Title="Is Indo-European Linguistics relevant or dead field?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-01-07T14:08:46.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26833" CreationDate="2018-01-06T02:07:52.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case the outermost f-structure is the IP whose functional head is the predicative phrase. Copulae are (in LFG parlance) coheads, i.e., they have no PRED though they extend the predicator of the content word they fuse with. In this respect they're somewhat similar to complex predicates such as causatives which extend the predicator (by adding the causee which is always a NP and changing the GFs of the direct object if present). At c-structure though copulae are (again in LFG parlance) categorial heads governing the predicative NP or AP (which is not really a complement thought this is merely a terminological issue). The analyses are by no means conflicting, in fact the two structures mesh pretty well together (by structural correspondence). Note that c-structures capture only configurations (&quot;hierarchical&quot; word order) whereas f-structures capture only dependencies (they're tree-like) so they're disjoint and there's no conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:07:52.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26838" CreationDate="2018-01-06T04:05:35.940" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found many different N-Gram lists, but never of any complete consonant-only or vowel-only N-grams. Lists generally combine consonants with vowels. Some lists also document what the pronunciation n-grams would be rather than the spelling. For clarity, here's what I'm looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the word &quot;miaouing&quot;,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;m&quot; is a consonant-only 1-gram&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;iaoui&quot; is a vowel-only 5-gram&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;ng&quot; is a consonant-only 2-gram&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what I can find a complete, or near complete, list of such N-grams of english?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="20901" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T04:25:24.847" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T10:26:02.013" Title="Consonant-Only &amp; Vowel-Only N-Grams List?" Tags="&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26836" CreationDate="2018-01-06T10:26:02.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is unreasonable to expect to find a ready-made list of that kind. Just take a generic n-gram list and use some filters (e.g. &lt;code&gt;grep -E -v '[aeiou]'&lt;/code&gt; to get consonant-only patterns) to extract the n-grams of interest. The letter &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; may be a tricky case due to its dual nature, and you may even argue about the letter &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;motion&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;code&gt;gh&lt;/code&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;sigh&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T10:26:02.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26834" CreationDate="2018-01-07T01:42:36.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indo-European is a field in which many scholars have been working for a very long time and which has to a certain extent ended up in a dead end, or perhaps rather in a fruitless impasse  (multi-laryngealists versus mono-laryngealists). If you want to make a big splash you might be better off researching a little-studied family such as Austroasiatic. It will not make you rich, but it might make you famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T01:54:43.903" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T01:54:43.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-07T13:29:12.813" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any cases of doubly filled COMP in contemporary English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle English had relative clauses with wh-phrases and complementisers co-occurring. I’ve also read that the variety of English spoken in Ireland can have doubly filled COMP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve found one kind of sentence that could possibly be analysed to have a doubly filled comp…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The more (that) you read, the more (that) you learn.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… but this could as well just be relative clauses though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T13:29:12.813" Title="Doubly Filled COMP in Contemporary English" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T08:34:30.233" Score="5" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is thought that the moraic post-vocalic consonant [N], spelt with ん, appeared in Japanese under the Chinese influence, with the influx of borrowings. Are there any &lt;em&gt;kun&lt;/em&gt;-readings in Japanese that have the final ん? And with what processes could they have emerged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T11:24:08.537" Title="Japanese kun'yomi with final N?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-01-08T15:48:19.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26841" CreationDate="2018-01-08T11:18:52.330" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kun&lt;/em&gt;-readings are an orthographic notation for the native lexical stratum (&lt;em&gt;Yamato-kotoba&lt;/em&gt;).  So the underlying question is, are there native morphemes with closed syllables (that is, with a consonant at the end)? Originally, no; Old Japanese was a CV language (syllables started with a consonant and ended in a vowel).  However, what are currently voiced consonants used to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenasalized_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prenasalized&lt;/a&gt; (as they still are in certain dialects, e.g. in Tōhoku); so that ざ was /ⁿza/, ば was /ᵐba/ etc.  Modern &lt;em&gt;tanabata&lt;/em&gt; used to be pronounced &lt;em&gt;tanambada&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around Heian times, this worked in tandem with the new Chinese layer to introduce the moraic, syllable-final N-consonant.  Consider for example the &lt;em&gt;onbin&lt;/em&gt; sound changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A verb like &lt;em&gt;hanasu&lt;/em&gt; inflected to the i-form to get the suffix &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt;, generating &lt;em&gt;hanasite&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A verb like &lt;em&gt;hanatu&lt;/em&gt;, likewise, was &lt;em&gt;hanatite&lt;/em&gt;; but elision of the vowel rendered it &lt;em&gt;hanatte&lt;/em&gt; – a new geminated form that was only possible after CCV syllables became part of the system, along with Chinese consonant-final loans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A verb like &lt;em&gt;asobu &gt; asobite&lt;/em&gt; also underwent elision – but recall that the Old pronunciation was &lt;em&gt;asombite&lt;/em&gt;; the pre-nasal survived elision while the voicing assimilated to the &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt;, generating &lt;em&gt;asonde&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Yamato morphemes got syllable-final N due to internal processes, at the same time that the Chinese wave brought another syllable-final nasal (and not just the nasal; syllable-final /p/, /k/, /t/ survived in &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; loans—the last two for many centuries).  One way of explaining this is, multiple pressures changed the syllable structure from a simple CV to a moraic system, and once the language was moraic, syllable-final nasals could be generated even in the Yamato stratum (along with other moraic structures: geminated consonants and diphthongs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the above aren't &lt;em&gt;kun&lt;/em&gt;-readings proper, since verb inflections aren't normally written as &lt;em&gt;kanji&lt;/em&gt; readings.  Still, there are &lt;em&gt;kun&lt;/em&gt; readings with ん in them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are the result of simple elision, like 何 &lt;em&gt;nan&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;nani&lt;/em&gt;, 神 &lt;em&gt;kan&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;kami&lt;/em&gt;, 懇ろ &lt;em&gt;nengoro&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;nemogoro&lt;/em&gt;, or 女 &lt;em&gt;onna&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;womina&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are readings resulting from the morphophonological processes described above, like 冠 &lt;em&gt;kanmuri&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;kauburi&lt;/em&gt; *[kãw̃ᵐburi], or 芳しい &lt;em&gt;kambasii&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; かぐはしい &lt;em&gt;*kangubasii&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are ultimately Chinese morphemes that ended up counting as &lt;em&gt;kun&lt;/em&gt; in the orthography, like 鞄 &lt;em&gt;kaban&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; ?Ch. 夾板 &lt;em&gt;*keap-paen&lt;/em&gt;; or  the &lt;em&gt;don&lt;/em&gt; of 丼 &lt;em&gt;donburi&lt;/em&gt; (etymology unclear but probably Chinese &lt;em&gt;don-&lt;/em&gt; + Japanese &lt;em&gt;-furi&lt;/em&gt;; standard view traces &lt;em&gt;don&lt;/em&gt; to 貪 &lt;em&gt;*thom&lt;/em&gt; &quot;covet&quot; in 慳貪  &lt;em&gt;*kʰˠɛn thom&lt;/em&gt; &gt; J. &lt;em&gt;kendon&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;greed, gluttony&quot;, since &lt;em&gt;kendon-ya&lt;/em&gt; is attested for &lt;em&gt;donburi&lt;/em&gt; sellers; alternatively from 緞子 &lt;em&gt;donsu&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;damask&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frellesvig, &lt;em&gt;A History of the Japanese Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Kokugo Daijiten&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gogen-allguide.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gogen.all-guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baxter-Sargat Middle Chinese reconstruction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Jōyō Kanji table and the Kanjidic file for kun-readings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T11:24:08.537" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T11:24:08.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T19:10:21.070" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one sentence that is an optional practice question for my syntax class that I just cannot figure out. It's ambiguous as far as where the PP falls but I hope someone can help anyways by giving at least one possibility. The sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy will bring my mother Bill's most recent book about global warming when he can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help if you can! It would be great just to look at someone's interpretation to help me figure out the logic behind it. The trees give me a headache, I'm trying to make sense of them :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20908" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T20:27:13.890" Title="Syntax tree help?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-01-09T14:35:46.840" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26843" CreationDate="2018-01-08T20:27:13.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the off-topic aspect of tree-construction, and modifying the example to &quot;The boy will bring my mother Lee's most recent book about global warming when he can&quot; (where you can't rely on gender-to-name correlations), it's necessary to identify two distinct meanings for this, one where the mother's name is Lee, and the other where some other person named Lee has a book. If you can't identify those meanings, that's a problem. If you can, then the question reduces to understanding how to represent an appositive, and how to represent a possessive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T20:27:13.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26846" CreationDate="2018-01-09T05:49:59.970" Score="28" ViewCount="6527" Body="&lt;p&gt;I translated &quot;How to use Web?&quot; into some other language using machine translation, but after I translated the result back into English, it is not the same as the first text I put into the translator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did that happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20912" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:42:36.097" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:42:36.097" Title="Why don't you get back the original text when you use translation software to translate something into another language and then back into English?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26845" CreationDate="2018-01-09T06:55:49.640" Score="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no one-to-one correspondence between languages and their vocabularies.  This means it is impossible for a computer translator to be invertible. The translator's task going from language A to B is fundamentally different from going from language B to A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand this, consider the French word &quot;allumette&quot;, which in English is &quot;match&quot;, that is, the short piece of wood that can be used to start a fire.&#xA;A computer translator could easily translate &quot;allumette&quot; into the English word &quot;match&quot;. There really is no other way to translate it (though I may be unaware of some idiomatic uses that should be translated another way). But it's not so easy in the other direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because the English word &quot;match&quot; has many meanings - it also can mean a soccer match (&quot;le match&quot; in French) or it can be a verb, which may be translated as &quot;associer&quot;, &quot;assortir&quot;, or other verbs. So whereas the translation from French &quot;allumette&quot; to English gave only one choice to the translator - &quot;match&quot;, the translation of English &quot;match&quot; to French gives the translators many choices.  And they may not get it right.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;I lit the match&quot; translates into French &quot;J'ai allumé le match&quot;.  Here, the incorrect word &quot;match&quot; (e.g. soccer match) was chosen instead of &quot;allumette&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the translator were perfect, it couldn't even deal with this perfectly - in the sentence &quot;I saw the match&quot;, does match refer to a sports contest or something to start a fire? Both could be correct, and without context even a good human translator could only guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastEditorUserId="21993" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T18:27:52.307" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T18:27:52.307" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-09T20:31:43.113" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently been on a kind of a morphology seminar and was informed that it is not an uncommon phenomenon for languages to specifically mark subjects and objects which are not pronouns - an example being the Coptic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately all of my internet queries upon this subject have been to no avail because I do not know the name of this phenomenon. Has anyone here ever heard of something like this and would they be able to put a name on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EDIT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some example sentences illustrating this kind of marking in Coptic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eseqep-paibōk (FUT-she FUT-catch (-) NPOBJ-that-slave)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nerepaiqam napōt (COND-NPSUB-that-bull COND-run)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;šansotmk (PRES-we-hear-you)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;erepennēb nempefjaje ewem-phalēt (FUT-NPSUB-our-master and-his-enemy FUT-eat (-) NPOBJ-bird)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;erepjaje ehotbs (FUT-NPSUB-enemy FUT-kill-she)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;šarepairōme wōm (PRES-NPSUB-that-man eat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nesnabel-pekqam (COND-she-COND-untie (-) NPOBJ-your-bull)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was said that &lt;em&gt;-rep-&lt;/em&gt; marks a non-pronoun subject (glossed NPSUB) and &lt;em&gt;p-&lt;/em&gt; a non-pronoun object (glossed NPOBJ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20925" LastEditorUserId="20925" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T16:31:43.207" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T02:13:35.107" Title="Marking subject/object that is not a pronoun?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26853" CreationDate="2018-01-10T00:04:05.270" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;While for phones we use IPA but it seems that there is no equivalent for phonemes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T12:24:47.013" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T05:33:41.223" Title="Is there any International standard for representing phonemes?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26852" CreationDate="2018-01-10T01:13:08.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is neutral as to analysis: it is used to represent sound at any level, including underlying, intermediate form, phonemic transcription and surface realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T01:13:08.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26861" CreationDate="2018-01-10T20:29:29.617" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on the research project in NLP domain. Basically, we are looking for a free audio corpus of spoken disabled people to study (for instance, aged people, or people has difficulty in normal daily communication due to experienced with psychological, neurological, sensorial, or body problem). Can anyone point me out how to get a possible free public corpus of spoken disable people (audio corpus of disabled people in Italian is preferred, but not limited with English, French, Germain)? Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20942" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T11:04:26.640" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T11:04:26.640" Title="where can I find free corpus of spoken disabled people (in english, italian)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T22:37:19.327" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that I never really noticed growing up until I began learning about other languages and the elegance of writing systems is how, in America for sure, we use letters like syllabic glyphs as well on occasion, particularly when we are reading an unfamiliar word and find a consonant cluster difficult to pronounce or like a pairing of letters is weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No better example can I think of than the division of some writing &quot;okay&quot; and others writing &quot;ok.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what I may be trying to ask is: is it normal for people to insert the name of a letter if it stumbles them in a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T01:50:24.273" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T01:50:24.273" Title="Why does the English Alphabet sometimes function like a syllabary?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26925" CreationDate="2018-01-11T00:06:44.223" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a database of english minimal pairs that is at least somewhat organized by some principle such as features or phonemes similar to : &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=125:wordlists&amp;amp;catid=9:resources&amp;amp;Itemid=108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=125:wordlists&amp;amp;catid=9:resources&amp;amp;Itemid=108&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minpairs.talktalk.net/minimal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.minpairs.talktalk.net/minimal.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are fine, but I would need to write a web scraper to parse through all the data. Is there any publicly available minimal data in a more accessible format like a .csv?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T14:41:55.943" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T09:45:34.570" Title="Looking for a database of minimal pairs" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26857" CreationDate="2018-01-11T10:41:41.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a corpus of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/abgeschlossene_projekte/alc_speech.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alcoholic speech&lt;/a&gt; hosted by Bayerisches Archiv für Sprachsignale, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin-d.net/de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN-D centre,&lt;/a&gt; that may meet your requirements. The corpus is usable free of charge for academic research and accessible via federated login from many European universities. When you are located outside the federation, you need to apply for a password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T10:41:41.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-11T12:40:04.880" Score="3" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it's a common issue that words transliterated from a non-latin alphabet towards latin alphabet will depend on which language using the latin alphabet they're translated into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic example : The profet's name is Muhammad in English and Mahomet in French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyrillic (Russian) example : Tshaikovsky in English, Tschajkowski in German, Czajkowski in Polish, Tchaïkowsky in French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese example : Mao Zedong was known as Mao Tsé-Toung in French.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For japanese however, it seems extremely rare that transliteration does not follow stricly the Hepburn system, designed towards english pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when transliterating from Japanese to French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The city Hiroshima should be romanized &quot;Hirochima&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The island of Hokkaido should be romanized &quot;Hokkaïdo&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Wasabi&quot; should be romanized &quot;Wassabi&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nevertheless, the English romanizations are used everywhere, leading to wrong pronunciation. If this was the case for all non-latin scripted languages I'd understand that the global impact of English language is predominant over correct French pronunciation. However what I don't understand is why this is the case only for Japanese and not for Arabic nor Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T15:28:48.437" Title="Why is transliteration of japanese always done English-style while transliteration from other non-latin script languges doesn't?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26862" CreationDate="2018-01-11T13:19:29.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of the Hepburn system is to provide a more or less regular, unified system for writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet. Though superficially similar to English, it doesn't have to follow the particular rules of a specific language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is most visible regarding the vowel system. Japanese vowels あ, い, う, え, お are spelled &lt;strong&gt;a, i, u, e, o&lt;/strong&gt; in Hepburn; long vowels are spelled &lt;strong&gt;aa/ā, ii, ū, ee/ē, ō&lt;/strong&gt;; えい and おう are spelled &lt;strong&gt;ei&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ō&lt;/strong&gt;. In English, the closest vowels are those in the words &lt;strong&gt;bat, bit, put, bet, bot; bar, bee, boo, bay, go.&lt;/strong&gt; In French, it would be &lt;strong&gt;a, i, ou, é, o&lt;/strong&gt;, with the &lt;em&gt;tréma&lt;/em&gt; used as in French. Neither English nor French spelling works for Japanese vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most languages written with the Roman alphabet, they use Hepburn to spell Japanese words because they are spelling Japanese words, not loanwords of Japanese origin. There is a difference. In English, many words of Japanese origin are simple transliterations based on Hepburn (without macrons), though some have a more-or-less English-like spelling. Examples: &lt;strong&gt;bokeh&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;noh&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;tycoon&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;moxa&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;mox&lt;/strong&gt;ibustion), &lt;strong&gt;skosh&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;rickshaw&lt;/strong&gt;. In Spanish, 東京 is written &lt;strong&gt;Tokio&lt;/strong&gt;, and 屏風 has been loaned as &lt;strong&gt;biombo&lt;/strong&gt;. Even in French there are such loanwords with French-like spelling: &lt;strong&gt;Aïnou, atémi, daïkon, daïmio, taïcoun&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a choice to be made, between a standard romanization system that reflects the phonology of the source language (such as Hepburn for Japanese or Pinyin for Chinese) and a customary romanization system that adapts foreign words to the spelling system of the target language (which is what you're proposing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter is more prevalent between European languages (and also Arabic whose speakers are geographically and culturally close to Europe), possibly because of an earlier tradition of literary exchange that favored the development of customary systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those traditions didn't exist between Europe and the languages of East Asia, because geographical distance and isolation made cultural exchange difficult, so each book used ad-hoc romanization systems that didn't become widely adopted until rather recently, when global commerce created a need for standardized romanization systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastEditorUserId="16950" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T15:28:48.437" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T15:28:48.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26866" CreationDate="2018-01-11T15:22:54.770" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The symbol # refers to the word boundary, which is the beginning and the ending of a word. So does the phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;# of Cs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mean that a consonant is the first or last letter in a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole sentence (found in my professor's notes) is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;# of Cs always larger than # of Vs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T17:40:09.580" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T17:43:12.257" Title="What does '# of Cs' mean?" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-11T15:29:03.780" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it true that languages with average vowel inventory size (5-6 Vs) are most widely scattered? How can this be explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T00:09:19.190" Title="Why are languages with average vowel inventory size scattered?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26864" CreationDate="2018-01-11T17:02:51.103" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tragically, the letter &quot;#&quot; has two meanings. In linguistics, it is used to refer to a word boundary. More generally (i.e. not in the special usage of linguists), it (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;number sign&lt;/a&gt;) stands for &quot;number&quot;. The consequence of shorthand is obscurity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the entire sentence should probably read,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;the number of consonants is always larger than the number of vowels&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T17:43:12.257" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T17:43:12.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26865" CreationDate="2018-01-11T17:34:35.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best resource on this question is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/2A#1/19/152&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS map&lt;/a&gt;, which calls into question the claim. Before calling it into question, we'd need to determine what the actual claim is, in particular what makes a distribution &quot;wide&quot; versus &quot;narrow&quot;. Theoretically, I guess, we could take the land areas of the planet, straighten out any curves, impose a grid of the area, and then observe how many cells have at least one small, medium or large V-count language in them. I seriously doubt that this has ever been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WALS reports languages as points, not as areas, so notice that the &quot;distribution&quot; of English is a tiny spot in southern England, French is a tiny spot south of Paris, and so on. This is completely wrong, as a statement of the distribution of those languages. Ainu, on the other hand, is reported as a tiny spot in Hokkaido, Japan, which is reasonably correct. Additionally, Austronesian languages generally have a medium count of vowels, and Austronesian is extremely widely distributed (by boat): also, there are more Austronesian languages than any other type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also recall that the languages reported in WALS are not selected at random: they are selected based on availability of information. The Central Sudanic belt in Africa is well-represented because the author and colleagues have done extensive field work in that area. The southern zone, populated by Bantu languages, is sparsely represented for other reasons – not that there are few languages in the area (compare to the case of Eastern Siberia or the Sahara, where language density &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; low).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The map doesn't attempt to state current actual geographical distribution, it simply states a property of certain languages on a list, and incidentally tells you a little be about what &quot;Natügu&quot; is, rather than making you look it up. The point corresponding to English has to do with where we historically know the language was originally spoken, and some of that knowledge goes back millenia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T17:34:35.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26865" CreationDate="2018-01-11T17:44:29.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to take a guess that what your professor meant by &quot;widely scattered&quot; is referring to the location of the articulation of the vowel in the &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt;, and not geographically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is because it's easier to contrast vowels that are articulated far from each other than to contrast vowels that are articulated near each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, a fairly common distribution for a vowel inventory of five:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             Front Central Back&#xA;Close        i             u&#xA;Near-Close&#xA;Mid-Close    &#xA;Mid          e             o&#xA;Mid-Open&#xA;Near-Open&#xA;Mid-Open           a&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The locations of the articulations of these vowels are as far away from each other as they can possibly be, making it easier to distinguish the different vowel qualities from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the similarly-shaped chart below, which has five vowels very close to each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             Front Central Back&#xA;Close        i             u&#xA;Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ&#xA;Mid-Close          ɘ&#xA;Mid                   &#xA;Mid-Open&#xA;Near-Open&#xA;Mid-Open    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's technically possible to articulate all of these vowels, no language is going to contrast five vowels so close to each other, when half of the possible space in the mouth is left unused, because it's much harder to contrast /i/ with /ɪ/ than it would be to contrast /i/ with /e/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once you have a large vowel inventory, as in English, it becomes more likely that a language will contrast vowels that are so similar to each other, because there are simply more vowels to contrast, as you can see below (in a convenient rather than accurate analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             Front Central Back&#xA;Close        i             u&#xA;Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ&#xA;Mid-Close    eɪ            oʊ&#xA;Mid                 ə  &#xA;Mid-Open     ɛ             ʌ ɔ&#xA;Near-Open    &#xA;Mid-Open     æ             ɑ ɒ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there's no wonder why we have all of /i, ɪ, and eɪ/: There are simply more vowels to contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there aren't languages that look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;             Front Central Back&#xA;Close        i y           &#xA;Near-Close&#xA;Mid-Close    &#xA;Mid          e ø&#xA;Mid-Open&#xA;Near-Open&#xA;Mid-Open     a ɶ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there's no reason to contrast front rounded vowels with front unrounded vowels when there are no back vowels at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true with consonants. There aren't any languages that look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;           Stops&#xA; Dental    t̼&#xA; Alveolar  t&#xA; Retroflex ʈ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it would be much easier to contrast consonants pronounced farther apart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;         Stops&#xA;Labial   p&#xA;Alveolar t&#xA;Velar    k&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T17:44:29.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2018-01-12T01:07:01.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a video a while back by YouTuber Artifexian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs&lt;/a&gt;) which presents evidence that many languages seem to evolve some similar features based on geography. The most detailed example he mentions in the video is that ejective consonants, where the sound is produced only by the throat and mouth without extra air from the lungs, tend to appear in languages native to high-altitude regions where it might be helpful not to lose excess moisture by breathing into the consonant sounds. Although he doesn't mention this directly in the video, two of the areas where ejectives are common are in the Andes range and the Rockies, and it is commonly believed that native American languages all evolved from the languages spoken by the first Siberians to cross the Bering land bridge. So although the languages of the Andes are distant &quot;cousins&quot; to those of the Rockies, there is a sizable gap between the areas and they probably developed ejectives independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20952" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T01:07:01.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2018-01-12T15:28:08.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Germanic languages, both High German and English developed the same diphthong au in the words Haus/house and Maus/mouse independently, while Low German keeps the original long u.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English and High German also both diphthongised the long i to ai, e.g., in mein/my where Low German keeps the original long i.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T15:28:08.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26865" CreationDate="2018-01-12T15:55:41.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is mainly a consequence of basic statistics: Languages with an average¹ vowel inventory are also the most frequently occurring languages, the distribution thins out very quickly towards the more extreme values. And the most frequent type of languages tends to be found &quot;everywhere&quot; or &quot;geographically spread out&quot; while more extreme types tend to form smaller local clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Given the small value of the average, the statistical distribution is not yet a Gaussian, but rather skewed (more like a Poisson distribution), and there are more languages with a &quot;large&quot; inventory than languages with a &quot;small&quot; inventory, as seen on the already quoted &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/2A#2/19.3/152.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS map&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹In a strict numerical sense, 5–6 vowels are not an &lt;em&gt;average&lt;/em&gt; value but close to the &lt;em&gt;median&lt;/em&gt; value. The avarage calculated as an arithmetic mean is somewhat larger, at least for the WALS sample, because of the skewness of the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T00:09:19.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T00:09:19.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26874" CreationDate="2018-01-12T17:33:30.990" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;does anyone know what the acoustic parameter of phonation is in a sound wave? I mean, how can we recognize if a sound is voiced or voiceless (and devoiced, of course) based on its wave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching online but I unfortunately couldn't find a clear-cut answer concerning the representation of phonation in sound waves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help?! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20961" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T06:56:57.370" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T06:56:57.370" Title="Acoustic parameters for phonation" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-12T18:51:58.580" Score="3" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what additional claims can be made for the Principle of Compositionality in regards to a language like Basque?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that Basque is a &quot;free word order&quot; language and the position of subject, object and verb can be permuted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can a speaker know the meaning of a sentence if there is no set syntactical structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just getting started with semantics so I hope someone can explain it to me simply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20962" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T12:11:01.443" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T12:11:01.443" Title="Principle of Compositionality: Free Word Order Languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26872" CreationDate="2018-01-12T21:19:37.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voicing is defined as the semi-periodic vibration of the vocal folds. Accordingly, you look to see if there is something that happens repeatedly at a reasonably low but not ridiculously low frequency, e.g. for a given speaker it might be in the range of 80-200 Hz, but higher or a wider range for another. The technique of autocorrelation can be used to detect such repeated patterns (and underlies computation of pitch). The idea of autocorrelation is to look at the shape of a piece of waveform, and find the most similar part that follows it (within an appropriate window). If there is enough of a semi-regular pattern, you have voicing. If you have creaky voice, this method may well not detect the glottal pulses. If you are not looking at fricatives, you can look for visible voicing pulses in the spectrogram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look at a spectrogram, looking for the &quot;voice bar&quot;, which is high amplitude at a low frequency. With voiceless fricatives, you can get high amplitude from the turbulent airflow, but the frequency is up there above 1KHz: high amplitude in the realm of 200 Hz does not come from a noisy (aperiodic) source. The problem with voice bar as a detector is that with stops especially, the amplitude of the glottal pulses can be low enough that it's hard to detect. Also, if you are looking at spectral slices, you have to make sure that the low-frequency amplitude is &lt;em&gt;enough&lt;/em&gt; higher than the amplitude at higher frequencies (this is an issue in case you intend some automated voicing detection and don't have ideal recordings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately the various acoustic methods have reasonable but not total success, and the only way to determine if the vocal folds are vibrating is physiologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T21:19:37.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26873" CreationDate="2018-01-12T21:46:30.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In mathematics, semantics, and philosophy of language, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're confused how sentences could have meaning without compositionality. This is probably because &lt;em&gt;word order&lt;/em&gt; is the only way you've ever seen it done so you conflate compositionality with word order. Word order is not the only kind of rules you can have for combining constituent expressions. There are rules in free word order languages for combining them, but instead of using word order, they use case marking. It's entirely arbitrary to mark the relation between the words with word order. The only thing that matters is that there is &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; way it is marked. Furthermore, free word order only pertains to subject, verb, object order, not to the order of all words. There can be word order rules for other constructions of the sentence. For instance, the placement of an adjective might have a fixed word order in a &quot;free word order&quot; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both word order and case marking tag words to show whether they are subject or object. Word order tags a word but it's an invisible tag, because the tag is its &lt;em&gt;place&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence. Case marking tags the word by putting a sound on the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free word order does not mean having no set syntactical structure. Basque does not violate the principle of compositionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20412" LastEditorUserId="20412" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T21:59:22.197" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T21:59:22.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26873" CreationDate="2018-01-12T21:57:52.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a certain &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;, and a sentence constructed in a particular &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, obviously, uses the linguistic &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; (or instruments) of that language to convey the &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the word order is a tool (one of many) to convey grammatical information. No other tool can replace its function. Hence, &lt;em&gt;&quot;John loves Mary&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mary loves John&quot;&lt;/em&gt; convey two essentially different meanings (and &lt;em&gt;&quot;loves Mary John&quot;&lt;/em&gt; conveys no meaning at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, &lt;em&gt;other tools&lt;/em&gt; are used. One of the most typical &lt;em&gt;tools&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;case system&lt;/em&gt;. Using case markers, one can mark subject and object to make the sentence meaningful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the case system is developed well enough, the word order (or another &lt;em&gt;tool&lt;/em&gt;) can be more or less safely ignored, without losing the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few questions on this site that can shed the light on this phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1476/&quot;&gt;What is word order used for in &amp;quot;free word order&amp;quot; languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/7235/&quot;&gt;Free Word Order Languages: How Much Freedom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21408/&quot;&gt;Could you provide examples of free word order languages that use word order to express grammatical categories?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T21:57:52.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26873" CreationDate="2018-01-12T22:49:25.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no link between the principle of compositionality and (free) word order. Basque (and many other languages, such as most Indo-European and native American languages) use morphology to indicate grammatical functions whereas word order encodes topic-focus articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T22:49:25.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26880" CreationDate="2018-01-13T11:09:26.617" Score="13" ViewCount="1992" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among historically low income/education groups in the US and in my native Mexico City, &quot;ghetto talk&quot; is heavy on the use of pitch to convey meaning. I've always attributed this to people compensating for a lack of vocabulary with pitch cues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering what &quot;ghetto talk&quot; is like in tonal languages. How do they &quot;compensate&quot; if not through pitch (which, I assume, would make things very confusing)? Or maybe my assumption about the relationship between pitch and the command of language in the West is just plain wrong...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My exposure to tonal languages is minimal, so I would really appreaciate an apples and oranges answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; It was pointed out to me that my question could be interpreted as saying that tonal languages are somehow inferior to others. This is most definitely not what I mean, as arguing that variations in pitch are an objectively worse or better phonetic solution than consonants or vowels would be silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastEditorUserId="20339" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T18:03:58.213" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T18:03:58.213" Title="How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26878" CreationDate="2018-01-13T12:15:50.947" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your assumption on a correlation between pitch variance and vocabulary size is wrong. The use of pitch you speak of is called &quot;prosody&quot; in linguistics; different speaking groups in society may use different levels of pitch in their prosody, or even different prosodic melodies, without any predefined relationship to vocabulary or social standing (for example, in many Anglophone communities higher pitch variance may be associated with femininity, rather than ghetto-ness; while for a Japanese native of Morioka, Iwate, unusually high pitch variance may just signal the speaker as coming from the nearby city of Miyako).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prosody is pitch at the level of phrases and sentences; tone is pitch at the level of words or syllables.  In a tonal language, the shorter pitch sequences (tones) modulate the overall melody of the sentence (prosody), &quot;like waves riding atop larger waves&quot;.  Different speaking groups (and individual speakers) may vary the pitch more strikingly or more subtly, both in the wider prosodic melody, or in the shorter tonal notes; though, again, this difference isn't caused by vocabulary size or lack thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T12:15:50.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26878" CreationDate="2018-01-13T15:47:40.033" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lexical tones and prosody peacefully co-exist in these languages. The speakers intuitively use only those pitch contours that &lt;em&gt;do not overlap&lt;/em&gt; with the lexical tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more, sometimes &lt;strong&gt;an exaggerated tone&lt;/strong&gt; may serve as an intonation, and this is used in &amp;quot;ghetto talk&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tonal contours in normal speech&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native speakers &lt;strong&gt;often dilute the lexical tones&lt;/strong&gt; in day-by-day conversation. This phenomenon also becomes evident in situations when preserving tones is somewhat complicated: See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3314/1009&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for how Chinese and Thai song writers differently deal with the situations when following melody contradict the lexical tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An example from personal experience&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an expat who lives in Thailand and studies Thai language, I tend to use the tones &amp;quot;properly&amp;quot;, as they are taught in schools, unlike the natives who often &amp;quot;dilute&amp;quot; the tones. I'm often being told that my speech sounds &lt;strong&gt;more emotional&lt;/strong&gt; than it should be. Trying to use &lt;em&gt;less vivid&lt;/em&gt; tones solves the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the following video (&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/JP1w9sH5vX8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube&lt;/a&gt;). It's a trailer of a youth comedy &amp;quot;ATM: Er Rak Error&amp;quot;. You will see many situations young people use slang, impolite expressions, and even expletives (to an extent it is allowed for use in movies rolled in theater and TV). Pay special attention to scenes when the young people talk to each other (when no boss around), and especially the final scene (at time mark 02:25). You will definitely notice &lt;strong&gt;extremely vivid tone contours for swear words&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T15:47:40.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T16:06:22.150" Score="-1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;English uses “activity” verbs such as the verb “to be” to describe that a person is dead, as in “He is dead,” or “He died.”  Is there a language that doesn’t do this?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I know that some languages have more capability of expression than others, and English is very capable, however I don’t believe it is capable of describing “death” without using a verb, and I cannot think of any English verb that doesn’t at least imply either motivation or activity of some kind, so I would like to know if any language other than English has this capability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20969" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T17:45:10.033" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T18:47:47.180" Title="Is there a natural language that doesn’t use an action verb to describe death?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26828" CreationDate="2018-01-13T20:46:16.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use word embeddings (google word2vec) to help you do inexact matches of words. I would look for sequences of at least 4 words (4-grams) as anything shorter would be difficult to call a quote. Create a function that gives you a distance between each 4-gram and then find a value for this distance that yealds results on some examples you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9740" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T20:46:16.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T22:15:36.850" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone has ever studied the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;graph&lt;/a&gt; where vertices correspond to words of a language and there is an edge between two vertices if and only if there is a word association between the corresponding words. I want to know which (random) graph model would be a good approximation (so I'm mostly interested in the quantitative properties like the average degree or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_coefficient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clustering coefficient&lt;/a&gt;). The results for English language are preferable but ultimately I'd be happy with anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding motivation, I've been thinking about word association games lately (particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codenames_(board_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codenames&lt;/a&gt;). In the simplest mathematical model I can think of we have a graph described above so to have any meaningful results I need a good model. Of course, if you're aware of any research of this kind please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathoverflow.net/questions/290318/which-popular-games-have-been-studied-mathematically&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20973" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T14:19:45.727" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:19:45.727" Title="Is there any research on the graph of word associations in a language?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;&lt;language-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11087" CreationDate="2018-01-13T23:18:40.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Russian constructions literally mean &quot;At me house&quot; and 'At me all done' respectively. Since there is no 'have' verb used here, we cannot talk about parallels between these sentences and the have-perfect of Mediterranean-Euro-Atlantic languages. The discussed Russian constructions have their counterparts in Polish. The first one would be 'Ja mam dom'. Here 'Ja mam' means 'I have' and it refers to the fact of possession. The second Russian sentence in Polish must be rendered as 'U mnie wszysko (jest) zrobione (*At me everything (is) done). The verb have (mieć) is not used at all. The message is more or less 'In my section everything is done,' with no indication that the speaker has done it himself. The sentence 'Ja mam zrobione wszystko' (literally 'I have done everything') in Polish means that the job has been done by or for the speaker, with no indication of who has done it. It is not the equivalent of the Mediterranean-Atlantic have-perfect. Furthermore that construction works only with the verb meaning 'do/make'. A sentence '*Ja mam zobaczone wszystko' (literally 'I have seen everything') is meaningless in Polish. As far as I know Slavic Languages do not have the have-perfect construction, with the possible exception of Macedonian quoted above. I would like to know if the have-perfect constructions can be used in Macedonian with participles other than the equivalent of the English 'been,' and ’had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20974" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T23:18:40.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T02:37:00.567" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In US films and television, characters with a British accent are typically smart. Characters with a deep south accent are typically foolish or uneducated. And characters with a Scottish accent are typically violent. This has been going on for so long, that audiences don't think &quot;Oh, that character is from England/the South/Scotland&quot; anymore; we understand immediately we should expect the character to be intelligent/stupid/aggressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if other major film and television hubs (e.g. Bollywood, Korean soaps) have developed such a system and successfully instilled it in their audiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I would imagine that the use of &quot;rural&quot; accents to point to low education is widespread, like the deep south accent in the US, and accents from the Yucatan and northern regions in Mexican films and television. I would like to hear about systems that go beyond this rich/poor, educated/uneducated trope (i.e. systems that routinely use more than two accents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20339" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T22:52:00.140" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T22:52:00.140" Title="Is accent prejudice well-established in film/television hubs other than Hollywood?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T12:45:54.317" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;There're languages with topicalization system like Philippines, English, etc. I was wondering since the counterpart of 'Ergative' is 'Accusative', what could be the counterpart of a 'topicalized language'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T12:45:54.317" Title="What could be the opposite of a 'Topicalized language'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T15:47:12.057" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples would include (languages in which) males and females use different words, there are no numerals or grammatical gender or number distinction, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a field of linguistics that studies or collects and organizes such data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20976" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T18:34:31.380" Title="What subfield of linguistics studies curious or unique features of natural languages?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26889" CreationDate="2018-01-14T17:06:16.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no linguistic discipline that studies such unique features exclusively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, such phenomena are a part of linguistic typology, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/44065&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rara &amp;amp; Rarissima: Documenting the Fringes of Linguistic Diversity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2010).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T17:06:16.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26889" CreationDate="2018-01-14T18:34:31.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Collection of data is one area of linguistics, though there is currently a nomenclature problem that we don't know what to call it. I'm referring to field-working, where one gathers data from speakers of an un(der)-described language and presents it to the world. The first step in dealing with &quot;curious&quot; features of language is knowing and showing that they exist in a specific language. Finding such rarities depends in part on good luck (there's nothing that you can do about it if the language is totally ordinary), and in part on the analyst's recognition that a particular fact of the language &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; unique in the world's languages. Because finding such nuggets is a low-frequency event, it (rarity-finding) is not generally a practical specialization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typology seeks to determine the range of possibilities in languages, and in so doing cares about what things are common versus uncommon (for some practitioners, it also includes the development of a set of &quot;types&quot;, and may seek functional explanations for observed correlations and frequencies). Typology depends on the research product of field workers, indeed many typologists are also field-workers. However, typology's interest is not limited to just those things that you could call &quot;unusual&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The organization of knowledge of features across languages is what we could call an &quot;emerging&quot; discipline. One main impediment to systematically studying unusual features (i.e. features with surprisingly low occurrence in human language) is the non-systematic form of the available data – there is no structured database of all of the facts known by field-workers. I cannot call up a complete or even particularly good list of languages that have inflectionally-conditioned tone changes on verbs, so if I encounter a language that distinguishes two verb tenses solely by tone pattern, there's no central repository where I can see if that is common or rare. Instead, I would have to rely on my prior experience, or email a colleague (who may also not know). Accordingly, I do not know if there is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language where geminate consonants block vowel harmony, other than the one that I know of. This area is &quot;emerging&quot; in that more and more data is becoming available online (thus potentially part of a systematic study), and methods are developing for encoding analysis. I am skeptical that anything short of a sentient data-crunching program would answer the question of geminate-blockage, unless it goes on a checklist of questions to ask (similar to the Lingua descriptive questionnaire).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most subdisciplines of generative grammar have an implicit typological component, given the premise of that theory that there are limits to how languages can differ, thus you have to know what is possible versus impossible, and in particular you would need to be able to distinguish &quot;impossible&quot; from &quot;rare&quot;. In principle, syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and phonetics could be concerned with rarities (in a certain component of grammar), as a tool to reaching their ultimate research goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T18:34:31.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T21:05:07.717" Score="0" ViewCount="820" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand how a word can be marked, for example the word &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;walks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is marked with the suffix -s.&#xA;But what is meant by &lt;code&gt;marked and unmarked syllables&lt;/code&gt; ? (Not marked or unmarked words)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give an example?&#xA;Also, why is the core syllable VC the most marked syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="10918" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T11:31:54.283" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T11:31:54.283" Title="How can a syllable be marked?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26892" CreationDate="2018-01-14T21:21:06.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This originates in linguistics with Trubetzkoy, who spoke of distinctive &quot;marks&quot; (in the sense of &quot;indication&quot;). -s is a &quot;mark&quot; of plurality, also &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; has a &quot;mark&quot; of voicing. You may be interested in the recent volume &lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/la.241/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology&lt;/a&gt;. Subsequent developments of the theory equated &quot;unmarked&quot; with &quot;common, natural&quot;, and thereby expanded the range of things that could be called &quot;marked&quot; or &quot;unmarked&quot;. The notion of &quot;natural&quot; is widely used in the literature, but there is not a clear understanding of what &quot;natural&quot; actually means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should emphasize that &quot;marked&quot; is comparative, not absolute: A is marked compared to B, B is marked compared to C – that does not mean that C is completely unmarked. Some theories may stipulate that you have to set up your primitives and distribution so that there is always an item that is &quot;completely unmarked&quot;, but that's an added theoretical stipulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, markedness seems to mean &quot;most frequent&quot;, although there are other &quot;If P then Q&quot; implications. Probably all languages have syllables with an onset (there are some reported cases of languages where all words begin with a vowel), and any language that allows onsetless syllables also allows syllables with onsets – the possibility of onsetless syllables presupposes the possibility of onsetful syllables, but not the opposite. Likewise with codas – all languages allow open syllables, not all languages allow closed syllables. Such implicational relations are often called on to determine what is marked vs. unmarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &quot;most natural&quot; in the implicational and frequency senses for a syllable to have an onset, and to be open. Therefore, the least-marked syllable would be CV. Syllables of the type V, and also CVC, are more marked compared to CV, but no ordering can be established (none has been proposed) between V and CVC. If you look only at single C and V possibilities in the syllable, the last syllable type, VC, is the most marked, in being marked compared to both CVC and V. VCCC would be even more marked compared to VC (but, it's not a core syllable in Clements &amp;amp; Keyser terminology). You cannot compare the degree of markedness of CCV and VCC syllables, at least not in C&amp;amp;K theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with asking why something is marked is similar to questions of why phlogiston has the properties it has. But we can make that be a question about how this is expressed in a particular theory of markedness, if we assume there is such a thing. In Clements &amp;amp; Keyser theory, this derives from taking CV to be the universal primitive syllable template, and deriving other syllable types from transformations of that – adding a coda, or deleting the onset. If you do both things, you have added two degrees of markedness. In OT, CV is the one un-punish syllable type; V (and VC) violate &lt;em&gt;Onset&lt;/em&gt; (the requirement to have an onset), and CVC (and VC) violate &lt;em&gt;No-Coda&lt;/em&gt;. VC syllables get two marks against them. But you can also sensibly ask, what are the functional phonetic considerations that make it good for syllables to have onsets and to not have codas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T22:53:55.573" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T22:53:55.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T21:57:00.523" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can access just the vocabulary list of pre-trained vectors for word2vec and GloVe? I do not need the entire n-dimensional embeddings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:28:31.460" Title="Vocabulary List From word2vec and GloVe" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T22:29:09.293" Score="0" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says Donald Trump stated in an interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trump denies this, claiming that he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's call the first sentence A and the second one B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WSJ then &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wsj.com/video/disputed-audio-from-donald-trump-interview-with-wsj/33003B4D-0DA4-4760-B913-0C2CDC903E74.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;released a recording&lt;/a&gt; claiming to corroborate that Trump said A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, the White House then &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/952405070955544576&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;released a recording&lt;/a&gt; claiming to corroborate that Trump said B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is a case where the tools and expertise of phonetics (such as spectrographic analysis) could be convincing. Do the recordings provide any evidence that Trump said (or attempted to say) &quot;I'd&quot; here, i.e. that he said (or attempted to say) B and not A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2401" LastEditorUserId="2401" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T06:12:27.810" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T06:12:27.810" Title="Did Trump say &quot;I&quot; or &quot;I'd&quot; &quot;probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ClosedDate="2018-01-15T06:21:41.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26895" CreationDate="2018-01-14T23:22:04.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the conflicting claims about what was said are not necessarily a phonetic issue.  We ordinarily refer to what was intended or perceived to be said when quoting or otherwise characterizing what someone said.  For instance, if you say &quot;Ib probably&quot; that might well be interpreted, and quoted as &quot;I'd probably&quot;, because in American English, a t/d/n before a word starting with p/b/m often becomes a labial, pronounced with the two lips, in partial agreement with the following labial p/b/m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This and perhaps further phonetic changes could make &quot;I'd probably&quot;, as measured by instruments, sound like &quot;I probably&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T23:32:02.053" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T23:32:02.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26898" CreationDate="2018-01-15T05:25:39.343" Score="5" ViewCount="930" Body="&lt;p&gt;Farsi does not distinguish between ث (soft 'th' in Arabic, like &quot;think&quot;) and ذ (hard 'th' in Arabic, like &quot;that&quot;). A native Farsi speaker pronounces ث like the 's' in &quot;sing&quot; and ذ like the 'z' in &quot;zoo&quot;. For example, a Farsi speaker would pronounce Arabic loan words like ثریا and ذوالفقار as as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;oraya&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Z&lt;/strong&gt;olfaqar&quot; respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've noticed some &lt;em&gt;Persian&lt;/em&gt; words that are written using these consonants--like کیومرث (&quot;Qumar&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, name) and گذشت (&quot;go&lt;strong&gt;z&lt;/strong&gt;asht&quot;, to pass)--but the words are pronounced normally (no 'th' sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, and what happened? Did Persian (Old, Middle, or New) at some point use 'th' sounds (phonemes?)? That would explain words like &quot;Zarathustra&quot; or &quot;Azar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Forgive me if I'm oversimplifying the label &quot;Persian&quot; for the language historically spoken in Iran. I'm an engineer by trade, so I'm not sure when to use Old/Middle/New Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19609" LastEditorUserId="19609" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T23:12:37.460" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T23:12:37.460" Title="Did Persian ever have a hard or soft &quot;th&quot; sound?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26897" CreationDate="2018-01-15T12:30:55.587" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two different issues here. First: New Persian never had a voiceless /ϑ/, at least not in words of Persian origin (though it is possible that in early Islamic times bi-lingual speakers did pronounce ث correctly as /ϑ/ in Arabic loan words). گيومرث is simply a misspelling of  گيومرت which happened to catch on in this proper name. It entered the spoken language from the (wrongly) written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: Early New Persian did have a voiced /δ/, written ذ, in Arabic loan words, and also in Persian words for etymological post-vocalic /d/. In early manuscripts ذ and د are clearly distinguished. For example in /būδ/ بوذ “he was”. Later (probably in the 12th century) this Persian /δ/ shifted back to /d/ and was written with د. In Arabic words ذ was retained and pronounced /z/. In a small number of genuine Persian words ذ was also retained, and pronounced as /z/. This has a complicated reason, which is discussed here (pp. 94 sqq.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/DictionaryOfManichaeanVol2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/DictionaryOfManichaeanVol2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T12:30:55.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26894" CreationDate="2018-01-15T14:18:12.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the word2vec models, you probably can load them with the &lt;code&gt;gensim&lt;/code&gt; package and access the vocabulary using &lt;code&gt;wv.vocab&lt;/code&gt; property.&#xA;Like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from gensim.models.keyedvectors import KeyedVectors&#xA;&#xA;model = KeyedVectors.load_word2vec_format(filename, binary=True)&#xA;words = model.wv.vocab&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;code&gt;filename&lt;/code&gt; is the path to the pretrained model.&#xA;&lt;code&gt;binary&lt;/code&gt; should be False if the pretrained model is in a text representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastEditorUserId="873" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T14:28:31.460" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:28:31.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26884" CreationDate="2018-01-15T14:18:37.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are language resources called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wordnets&lt;/a&gt; that represent graphs of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypernymy and hyponymy&lt;/a&gt; and synsets. The prototypical example of such a resource is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Princeton WordNet&lt;/a&gt; for the English language that is available under a free licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another type of language resource called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ontology&lt;/a&gt;. Typically, ontologies are constructed for particular domains of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:18:37.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26828" CreationDate="2018-01-15T14:25:39.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/article.asp?issue=133&amp;amp;article=010&amp;amp;volume=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vesanto et al., Applying BLAST to Text Reuse Detection in Finnish Newspapers and Journals, 1771-1910&lt;/a&gt; successfully used BLAST, a computer program to compare proteins, for a similar task: They tracked the spread of news items in Finnish newspapers (ORCed, so many typical OCR errors were present in the electronically available texts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T14:25:39.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29994" CreationDate="2018-01-15T16:19:45.897" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was wondering whether some languages are inherently more comprehensible when spoken, than others. Has this been measured in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things more precise, let's define a &quot;please say again&quot; (PSA) phrase a remark uttered by someone who didn't get the last sentence. In English, &quot;Pardon me&quot;, &quot;Say again&quot;, &quot;What's that?&quot; etc. could count as PSA phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to possibly measure oral comprehensibility is to record a conversation between people in a language they speak as mother tongue, and count, how often PSA phrases occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this been done, or has oral comprehensibility been compared in another way? Or is there no meaningful way to measure and compare oral comprehensibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20981" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T15:29:26.253" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:29:26.253" Title="Measuring oral comprehensibility between different language" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26904" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:36:56.463" Score="3" ViewCount="2128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really can't tell the difference between these two. At first I thought that ɐ was something similar to ə, but I'm not sure. I'd appreciate any examples to distinguish these sounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20982" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T22:51:25.537" Title="What's the difference between ɐ and a?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26903" CreationDate="2018-01-15T18:18:42.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can listen to expert IPA pronunciations of the difference &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;Examples&quot; would come from a specific language. As you can see from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki article&lt;/a&gt; on the vowel, it is widely transcribed as [ə], but maybe [a]. It does not apparently contrast with [ə] in one language, but may be found in certain dialects instead of [ə]. It may also be conflated with [ɜ]. It is most useful to compare the performance pronunciations of the above-linked experts, since IPA does not specify particular formant values or lexical items in specific languages as representing the value of a given symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/languages/de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt;, you can get over a half million pronunciations of German words. There is a difference between &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the word, where final &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; may be [ɐ]. I don't know of a way to efficiently assemble all of the relevant words, but this is a resource for potentially hearing examples (I'd generally suggest listening to anything with final &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;). It might be best to pick a &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/user/ReinerSelbstschuss/pronounced-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;single speaker&lt;/a&gt; and listen to their pronunciations. Sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/kiffer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speakers differ&lt;/a&gt;, and you can pick a speaker who has the pronunciation of interest like the first one, and see what &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/user/DjangoFett/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;similar words&lt;/a&gt; there are. &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/br%C3%BCder/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some words&lt;/a&gt; are attested with multiple recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T22:51:25.537" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T22:51:25.537" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T03:36:20.063" Score="2" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a studying Natural Language Processing and came across multiple types of ambiguity like lexical, scope, global, attachment and coordination ambiguities.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Lexical ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;: Ambiguity of a single word, like book, study&#xA;‘There was not a single man at the party’, two interpretations can be, there was not a single person at the party and there was not a bachelor at the party&#xA;This ambiguity can be removed using parts of speech tagger(lexical disambiguation).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Syntactic ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;(structural ambiguity): &lt;br&gt;There are 2 types&#xA;Scope ambiguity and attachment ambiguity&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Scope ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;:  operators and quantifiers can introduce ambiguity.&#xA;Old men and women went to the church, does it mean (old men and women) or ((old men) and women)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Attachment ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;: This occurs when a phrase can fit different points in a parse tree thus creating ambiguous meanings &#xA;The man saw the girl with the telescope, it is unsure if man with the telescope saw the girl or the man saw the girl with the telescope&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Semantic ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;: When meaning of words can get ambiguous, then that type of ambiguity is semantic ambiguity.&#xA;X loves her mother and Y loves too&#xA;The car hit the pole while it was moving&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Anaphoric ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;: Anaphoras are entities that are previously introduced into the discourse.&#xA;    Horse is running up the hill. It is very steep. It is getting tired.&#xA;    Anaphoric reference of ‘it’ can cause ambiguity.&#xA;    &lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Pragmatic ambiguity&lt;/b&gt;: the toughest to handle in nlp. This requires a clear understanding of context, when there is ambiguity in context, its pragmatic ambiguity. Usually information inferring capacity is low.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;I would like to know, how does a human interpret sentences and identify ambiguities? Are there any materials that help in understanding and interpreting them? &lt;br&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20985" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T10:41:57.037" Title="Interpreting different types of ambiguity in a sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26908" CreationDate="2018-01-16T05:39:21.537" Score="5" ViewCount="600" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a bit of trouble figuring this one out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lake, meaning &quot;A large, landlocked stretch of water.&quot; seems to have some confusion in the Wiktionary pages. I've looked in the American Heritage Dictionary, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary and they both state something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Early Middle English lac , &amp;lt; Old French lac, &amp;lt; Latin lacus basin, tub, tank, lake, pond&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;[Middle English, from Old French lac and from Old English lacu, both from Latin lacus.]&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Wiktionary on page seems to make exception to this and states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;From Middle English lake (“lake, watercourse, body of water”), from Old English lacu (“lake, pond, pool, stream, watercourse”), from Proto-Germanic lakō, lōkiz (“stream, pool, water aggregation&quot;, originally &quot;ditch, drainage, seep”), from Proto-Germanic lekaną (“to leak, drain”), from Proto-Indo-European leg-, leǵ- (“to leak”).&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It even goes on to address this and states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Despite their similarity in form and meaning, English lake is not related to Latin lacus (“hollow, lake, pond”)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Wikipedia sources can sometimes be questionable, but I would like to not be confused about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20986" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T10:24:30.603" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T10:15:49.307" Title="Is English &quot;lake&quot; Derived from Latin, or is it Indo-European?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26907" CreationDate="2018-01-16T06:15:16.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word is without doubt Indo-European, the question is whether it is strictly Germanic or did it come via Latin. Pokorny says *&lt;em&gt;laku&lt;/em&gt; is the source of Gr. λάκκος, lat. lacus, OIr. loch, and lagu etc. in Germanic: see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/1120&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Texas collection&lt;/a&gt; for more attestations, which includes English &quot;lake&quot;. For *&lt;em&gt;leg&lt;/em&gt;, the &quot;leak&quot; root, Pokorny gives Armenian, Celtic and Germanic only; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/1129&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Texas&lt;/a&gt; elaboration relates that root to &quot;lack; leak&quot;, and nothing like &quot;lake&quot;. (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/1131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leĝ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would be a different root meaning &quot;collect&quot;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/languages/OE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Texas&lt;/a&gt; lists &lt;em&gt;lagu-lad, lago&lt;/em&gt; for OE and not &lt;em&gt;lacu&lt;/em&gt;. I would be inclined to believe Texas and Pokorny (and AHD) over Wiki (also bearing in mind that the Texas list for Modern English gives &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; related words, no matter how they got there). But there's more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is at least one other vote, the Oxford English Dictionary. It gives two entries for modern English &quot;lake&quot;. One, which they list in its earliest form as &lt;em&gt;lac&lt;/em&gt;, has the sense &quot;A large body of water entirely surrounded by land&quot;, attested c1275  (▸?a1200) in &lt;em&gt;Laȝamon Brut (Calig.) (1963) l. 642&lt;/em&gt;  &quot;Ouer þen lac [c1300 Otho lake] of Siluius &amp;amp; ouer þen lac [c1300 Otho lake] of Philisteus&quot;, and a1225   &lt;em&gt;St. Marher. 14&lt;/em&gt;   &quot;Ich leade ham..iþe ladliche lake of the suti sunne&quot;. This is the ordinary use of &quot;lake&quot;. They say of the contemporary word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The present English form lake (recorded from the 14th cent.) may be&#xA;  due to confusion with lake n.3, or perhaps rather to independent&#xA;  adoption of Latin lacus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another sense lake n.3 is &quot;A small stream of running water&quot;, is attested as OE &lt;em&gt;lacu&lt;/em&gt;, citing the attestation from 955 &lt;em&gt;Charter of Edred in Earle Charters 382&lt;/em&gt;   Ðæt to Mægðe forda andlang lace ut on Temese. This they say is not from Latin &lt;em&gt;lacus&lt;/em&gt; because of the meaning, and they derive the word from the &quot;leak&quot; root *&lt;em&gt;leg&lt;/em&gt;. A half-vote also goes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/lake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymologyonline&lt;/a&gt;, which lists both roots, says that the modern word is borrowed, and gives both Old English &lt;em&gt;lacu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;stream, pool, pond&quot; and &lt;em&gt;lagu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sea flood, water, extent of the sea&quot; (&lt;em&gt;lagu&lt;/em&gt; being the OE form cited in Pokorny).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the weight of evidence indicates that it is borrowed (in some fashion, including adaptation of semantics), the source would be French (hence Latin), and that it is the result of two distinct roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T17:06:51.913" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T17:06:51.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26906" CreationDate="2018-01-16T10:41:57.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some research to answer the &quot;how&quot;, I am mainly aware of a community called Computational Neurolinguistics where they do experiments with humans and language understanding and relate the results to artificial intelligence techniques. You find some pointers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1625183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1625183&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no clear understanding of &quot;how&quot;, we just know that certain tasks are harder and/or can be impaired (damaged) independently from other tasks in natural language processing. For example it is possible to more or less lose the ability to understand language while having a sense of grammar (Wernicke aphasia), on the other hand it is possible to lose the ability to form grammatical sentences while that person can still understand some part of the meaning of sentences (broca aphasia). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3530" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T10:41:57.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26913" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26914" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Standard Average European (SAE) Sprachbund and its common features." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T15:01:49.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26919" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:18:40.113" Score="3" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Floating quantifiers are quantifiers that can move away from the corresponding noun, such as &quot;each&quot; in &quot;The boys hit each other&quot; where it modifies &quot;The boys&quot;. I am interested in prepositions in these bipartite reciprocal constructions, as in &quot;They followed each others &lt;strong&gt;onto&lt;/strong&gt; the stage&quot; or &quot;They waited &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; each other.&quot; These constructions are comparable to &quot;They waited, each &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; the other.&quot; In this last example, the preposition is near its complement &quot;the other&quot;, but in the earlier examples it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for these kind of &quot;floating prepositions&quot;? This term does not yield any results on Google Scholar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T22:00:52.937" Title="Is there such a thing as a &quot;floating preposition&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T18:40:54.110" Score="8" ViewCount="4073" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a bit of trouble differentiating these, and I'm wondering if it's because these are generally fuzzy concepts and nobody cares much, if I haven't read into it enough, if my innate assumptions about spoken language are obfuscating the definitions, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this: The &amp;nbsp; ⃠ &amp;nbsp;  (No, not allowed, banned, etc) symbol is considered a pictogram, which by the format of the answer to the linked question, is a subset of the ideograms. However, it is usually seen composed with other pictograms (such as &amp;nbsp; ⃠ &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; superimposed), or coupled with another ideogram. If written Chinese is often taken as logographic, not ideographic, since logograms are defined as representing morphemes, basic units of meaning, rather perhaps more nebulous notions represented by ideograms (which I suppose all the major religous symbols would fit, e.g. dharmacakra☸, arguably ichthys, orthodox cross☦, peace symbol ☮, etc), then would the composition of this pictogram with a Chinese logogram now be a pictogram or a logogram? I find it tough to decide since it doesn't necessarily have a word in that language which represents it, since some words or emerging ideologies don't have clear antithetical terms, but sometimes they do? While nuclear weapons are arguably not an ideology, would the classic &quot;no nuclear weapons symbol&quot; fit into any category neatly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, i'm not really sure if a difference based on &quot;idea, concept&quot; vs &quot;word, morpheme&quot; vs &quot;symbol representing concept which bares resemblence to physical manifestation&quot; is that sensible, since aren't words pretty much abstract, conceptual &quot;placeholder&quot; symbols. I'm not well read on linguistics at all, so I don't know if Ludwig Wittgenstein is discredited, but he felt humans communicated by mapping &quot;mental images&quot; to words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspiration:&#xA;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3076/relation-between-some-linguistics-terms/3086#3086&quot;&gt;Relation between some linguistics terms&lt;/a&gt; we have: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;logogram or logograph - represents a morpheme or word, e.g. the Mandarin copula ⟨是⟩; ⟨&amp;amp;⟩ 'and', ⟨@⟩ 'at', ⟨$⟩ 'dollar' in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ideogram or ideograph - represents an concept, e.g. ⟨上⟩ 'up' in Chinese/Japanese; digits like ⟨8⟩ 'eight'; ⟨♡⟩ 'love'; the no symbol ⟨&amp;nbsp; ⃠ &amp;nbsp;⟩; the red octagonal stop sign&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pictogram or pictograph - an ideogram consisting of a pictorial representation of its referent, e.g. ⟨木⟩ 'tree' in Chinese/Japanese, ⟨⟩ 'pile of poo', many emoticons, astronomical symbols like ⟨☽⟩ 'waxing crescent moon'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20994" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T20:59:05.673" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T20:59:05.673" Title="Difference between ideogram and logogram?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26915" CreationDate="2018-01-16T19:18:11.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any floating of a preposition in your examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;pg=PA24&amp;amp;lpg=PA24&amp;amp;dq=mccawley%20phenomena%20%22each%20other%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=uPdB3LczNl&amp;amp;sig=OBopFGSBK195FtoKsT2Fj8Kle24&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj4oJWek93YAhWmwVQKHW8OA9gQ6AEIRTAL#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mccawley%20phenomena%20%22each%20other%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McCawley&lt;/a&gt; has some interesting remarks about reciprocal &quot;each other&quot;.  In the reference, click &quot;next&quot; until you get to occurrences 6-9, and especially 8, which &#xA;mentions an analysis by Dougherty attempting to relate this &quot;each&quot; to the one that floats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T19:18:11.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26915" CreationDate="2018-01-16T20:19:16.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The boys hit each other.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Each&lt;/em&gt; is not a 'floating quantifier' here (whatever that means), and &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; does not modify &lt;em&gt;boys&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reciprocal meaning is expressed by &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; in combination with &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt;, and although &lt;em&gt;each other&lt;/em&gt; is written as two orthographic words it is actually a single grammatical word.  The two components are inseparable and thus form a compound reciprocal pronoun. In your example, the compound functions as direct object of &lt;em&gt;hit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be thinking of the 'spilt' construction as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They are each required to consult with the other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is semantically and syntactically different. Here &quot;each&quot; is a determinative and &quot;other&quot; a common noun, as opposed to a single compound pronoun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T22:00:52.937" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T22:00:52.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T01:42:27.247" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a thorough online site or downloadable text that goes into detail about English phrase markers as in this example from Beth Levin's Verb Alternations book &quot;This alternation involves verbs found in two frames in a near-paraphrase relationship: NP1 V[pp P NP2]' and '[np NP1 &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; NP2] V &lt;em&gt;apart&lt;/em&gt;]&quot; where &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;apart&lt;/em&gt; are actual words and not slots to be filled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like phrase markers from generative grammar, but I don't necessarily need the text to be linguistic theory specific, although it would be okay if the text or site did go into detail about how academicians proposing different theories use phrase markers in their work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building an NLP software tool and will need to incorporate these markers into the code. Thanks in advance to any answers. All will be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20825" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T07:26:21.580" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T17:54:26.330" Title="Reference work needed for Phrase Markers in English" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26859" CreationDate="2018-01-17T01:53:13.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For future people who may need this, I ended up writing a webscraper and compiling everything from www.minpairs.talktalk.net. You can view/download the corpus here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aSdkp5omzWF0-Tfq2VJH9c5UWnj7BVJN7BBssWDFqNQ/edit?usp=sharing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aSdkp5omzWF0-Tfq2VJH9c5UWnj7BVJN7BBssWDFqNQ/edit?usp=sharing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T01:53:13.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26829" CreationDate="2018-01-17T01:59:23.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following link regarding the CHILDES database that might be helpful to you in extracting the list of words you want. The description reads &quot;ChildFreq is a tool that lets you extract word frequencies from the Childes database,&quot; and it is located here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://childfreq.sumsar.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://childfreq.sumsar.net/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20825" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T01:59:23.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T08:19:02.353" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there connections/translation or common tools usage/adaptation between combinatory (concrete) categorial grammars (incl. Lambek calculus) and abstract categorial grammars? Can tools for one of them be used as tools for the other? Is the analysis for the same sentence available in both of these grammars for comparison?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question can lead to understanding how (and if) Grammatical Framwork and CCG parsers be used together or in place of one another, see question &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/85623/semantic-parsing-with-grammatical-framework-is-this-possible&quot;&gt;https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/85623/semantic-parsing-with-grammatical-framework-is-this-possible&lt;/a&gt; and answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gf-dev/otGvS6dIAdM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gf-dev/otGvS6dIAdM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T08:38:29.153" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T08:38:29.153" Title="Connections between combinatory categorial grammars and abstract categorial grammars?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26942" CreationDate="2018-01-17T09:57:32.517" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I would put you in a closed room with a computer containing terabytes of alien written symbols. Those aliens are from another dimension where the physical laws are different and our understanding of the world and needs do not apply. Given as much time and computing power as you want, how far would you be able to go in your understanding of their language and way of living? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21001" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T07:10:45.707" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T05:49:35.060" Title="To which extent language exists disconnected from the physical world?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26931" CreationDate="2018-01-17T21:36:05.703" Score="2" ViewCount="745" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a public corpus of dialogue recording in short/medium appointment between doctors and patients, aims to study speech variation, the prosody of speech, measuring speech' rhythm, innovation and so on. I need relatively large audio recording sample, so I can train those on the specific neural network to precisely predict and classify the speech by different specific criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched from possible NLP labs around but couldn't find the corpus that meets my expected research. Is there any experienced linguistics experts could point me how to get possible corpus for NLP research?  Can anyone guide me how to acquire the corpus that I stated above? Thanks in advance &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;secondary preferable corpus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If getting above corpus is not feasible at this moment, I'd like to try other spoken recording corpus with the following specification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;corpus of monologue recording in reading newspaper/short stories, poem/reading basic sentence (English, Italian, or other European language can be taken into consideration)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;corpus of the audio recording in conversation/dialogue between standard English/Italian (or other European languages) and its specific dialect counterpart. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or other language corpuses (spoken) that closely aligned the statement that I mentioned above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T12:15:22.920" Title="looking for corpus of dialogue recording in appointment between doctors and patients" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26930" CreationDate="2018-01-18T10:47:08.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to the expectations of some commentators, doctor-patient corpora are available (under some conditions, needing to sign some licence and confidentially agreement) for research. The standard entry point for a search for such corpora is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; and entering &lt;code&gt;doctor patient&lt;/code&gt; in the search slit gives currently twelve results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/?q=doctor%20patient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookmarked query&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T12:15:22.920" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T12:15:22.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="26934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26924" CreationDate="2018-01-18T17:54:26.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per Atamiri's suggestion I found the following papers on Lexical Functional Grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Faulk, Yehuda. Lexical-Functional Grammar. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/pdf/1575863405.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/pdf/1575863405.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dalrymple, Mary. Lexical-Functional Grammar: Comparing Frameworks. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 19 of an unknown textbook. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/PDF/Web1.Chapter19LFG%20copy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/PDF/Web1.Chapter19LFG%20copy.pdf&lt;/a&gt; [This provides a look at alternative theories and the linguistic theories underlying LFG.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20825" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T17:54:26.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-18T19:57:08.170" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;typo&lt;/em&gt; is a term used to refer to a situation when one (accidentally) mistypes a word or expression leading to a word or expression which is not the &quot;expected&quot; one, which may also be respectively an inexistent word or expression. I think we can also use the expression &quot;spelling error&quot;. Can this also be called a typographical error? If not, what is a typographical error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other types of errors. For example, when a person accidentally writes twice a word. How would you call such an error?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;em&gt;which words or expressions are there to refer to different types of errors?&lt;/em&gt; I would appreciate an example of each type of error. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;grammatical error&quot; a general term to refer to any type of error that may exist while using a (human) language? If not, then what other types of errors exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an which may serve as a reference for other people. Note that I am just talking about human languages and, in particular, I am interested in the English terminology, context and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21009" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T23:05:14.983" Title="Which types of errors are there in a human language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-02-06T15:52:19.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26935" CreationDate="2018-01-18T23:05:14.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the theory of syntax&lt;/em&gt;, Chomsky distinguished &quot;grammatical error&quot; from language &quot;performance error&quot;. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/slips-of-the-tongue.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slips of the tongue&lt;/a&gt;, Fromkin distinguished spoonerisms, which conform to a language's phonotactics, from other speech errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T23:05:14.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2018-01-19T03:06:29.847" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think replacing Chinese Characters with only pinyin is absolutely stupid. Chinese writing has existed for more than 5000 years while pinyin only 100 years. One of the biggest problem with pinyin is that the syllables in pinyin gives you multiple words which is very ambiguous and confusing where as with using the Chinese characters the meaning of the word is accurate or concise and without ambiguity. Very poor thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21013" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T03:06:29.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T05:26:57.687" Score="0" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to detect tweet text agreement. Suppose someone posts some subjective opinion in twitter. Other users will post reply either agreeing or opposing the original tweet. I want to estimate the amount of agreement. Is there any algorithm/library to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21016" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T05:26:57.687" Title="How to detect if one tweet agrees with another" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9228" CreationDate="2018-01-19T06:04:45.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure this out also. Using your example, so far my understanding is:&#xA;Find the verb in the sentence (ie. escape). This will give you one or more &quot;templates&quot; to check against (Verbnet refers to these as &quot;syntax&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now find all nouns/noun phrases within the sentence. If the sentence was &quot;The convict escaped from London to New York&quot;. In this example we would have one noun phrase before the verb &quot;the convict&quot; and two noun phrases after the verb &quot;London&quot; and &quot;New York&quot; (or &quot;from London&quot; and &quot;to New York&quot; if you prefer. NP V NP NP. This would match to the syntax Theme V {+path} Destination where &quot;the convict&quot; is your theme (because it occurs before the verb, escape is your verb, &quot;London&quot; (or &quot;from London&quot; is your path and &quot;New York&quot; (or &quot;to New York) is your destination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence was &quot;The convict escaped to New York&quot; then your would use the syntax Theme V Destination (as there is no path). This is NP V NP. I'm still working on how to select the correct syntax but i guess I'll need to count the number of NP's after the verb to select the correct one although the use of &quot;from&quot; and &quot;to&quot; complicated things as in the example &quot;He escaped from the heat&quot;. In this case &quot;from the heat&quot; i guess would be the path and there would be no destination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitions for all terms (Agent, theme, destination) are in the manual you linked however these appear to be only for descriptive purposes. I can't see any way to determine a destination vs a non-destination (ie. He escaped the punishment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21017" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T06:04:45.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26946" CreationDate="2018-01-19T07:01:13.310" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the implicational universal &quot;if a language has voiced obstruents, then it must have voiceless obstruents,&quot; what would I have to observe from tableaux to verify its validity? The three main constraints of the tableux are Voiced Obstruents Prohibition, *Voiced Coda, and ID-IO(Voice). Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21020" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T17:40:42.343" Title="Factorial Typology--determining implicational universals?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26928" CreationDate="2018-01-19T07:07:30.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for understanding their language, it depends on what you would consider &quot;understanding&quot;. Given sufficient training data, we may be able to devise rules of its grammar, without knowing what any of it refers to. This is pretty much how most language models work for us at the moment. You might talk to your phone and tell it, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Make an appointment with Dr. Smith for tomorrow at noon&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Your phone would follow through, and may mark &quot;Dr. Smith&quot; as the person with whom you have the appointment, but it would have no conception of what a person is. Given your scenario, we will never get to the stage of comprehending their language to understand their lived experience in any capacity. The idea is further explored in Searle's paper &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minds, Brains, and Programs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's missing in your scenario is covered in the topic of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://summer10.isc.uqam.ca/page/docs/readings/HARNAD_Stevan/symgro.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symbol grounding problem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not all is lost. Given a suitable corpus of their language, we may be able to figure out their formal mathematics. By that, I mean, the kind of mathematics that Russel &amp;amp; Whitehead got around to formulating in &lt;em&gt;Principia Mathematica&lt;/em&gt;. As a result of that, we may understand some of their mathematical proofs, and that may include theorems not yet proven by humans so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T09:26:17.843" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T09:26:17.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16790" CreationDate="2018-01-19T10:02:06.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Christian theology the usage of the original greek words in the bible give way to the churches to interpret the message for congeragation members. FE. Jesus said he is the way, the truth and the life (ζάω). In this case ζωή differs from bios. ζωή refers to 1 to live, breathe, be among the living (not lifeless, not dead). 2 to enjoy real life. 2a to have true life and worthy of the name. 2b active, blessed, endless in the kingdom of God. Bios refers to just life as opposed to not being alive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21021" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T10:02:06.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T13:12:38.297" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in the sentence ‘your daughter don’t hate school’, the scope of negation would be entire sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if 'your' is phonologically stressed like 'YOUR daughter don't hate school', the implication could include the there may be other children who hate school, but your daughter do not.’ Then, does the scope of negation change? Or it has same scope of negation as the former but just the focus is changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21022" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T13:12:38.297" Title="Does the scope of negation change when there is a stressed word within a sentence?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;scope&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26918" CreationDate="2018-01-19T16:28:32.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a collection of mostly German references I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Doblhofer, Ernst: Die Entzifferung alter Schriften und Sprachen (The deciphering of ancient scriptures and languages), Wien, 1957: He makes a difference between a &quot;Wortbildzeichen&quot; (word picture sign) which he calls ideogram and a &quot;Wordlautzeichen&quot; (word sound(?) sign) which is a logogram to him. A word picture sign is something like a pictogram. The picture of a house may stand for &quot;Haus&quot;, &quot;house&quot;, &quot;maison&quot;, &quot;casa&quot;, maybe for &quot;cottage&quot;, &quot;palace&quot; as well. A word sound sign has a codified reading: it can only be read &quot;house&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Falkenstein, A: Das Sumerische (The Sumerian), Leiden, 1964: He does only speak of &quot;Wortzeichen&quot; (word signs) which are mostly polyphonic. I think this is the meaning of Doblhofer's &quot;word picture sign&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ungnad, Matous: Grammatik des Akkadischen (Akkadian Grammar): München, 1969: seems to use &quot;Wortzeichen&quot; (word signs), logogram, and ideogram with no distiction between them (§3a).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Borger, Rylke: Assyrisch-babylonische Zeichenliste (Assyrian Babylonian cuneiform list), Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1988: Borger does not distinguish between the terms. He subsumes logogram, ideogram, and sumerogram under &quot;Wortzeichen&quot; (§3E) and says that logogram is the most common one at the time of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;von Soden, Wolfram: Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik (Outline of the Akkadian Grammar), Rom, 1995: He speaks of &quot;Wortzeichen&quot; (word signs) and discourages the term ideogram (§5c). Word signs might be polyphonic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list is by no means concluding. I would appriciate of other users would add more references. However, from this list it seems that the difference between ideogram and logogram is a bit artificial and not consistent accross the literature. Especially for languages written in cuneiforms we may not be able to make the distinction, because the signs have a syllabic (phonetic) reading too, as well as the reading of the signs changed over the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10399" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T16:28:32.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26941" CreationDate="2018-01-19T17:12:15.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;FT refers to what can arise, given all possible orderings of constraints. Each ordering defines a language. Since the set of constraints is rather large, conventionally one focuses on the constraints of interest, by excluding any that don't seem relevant (e.g. *Round which prohibits round sound – not relevant to the issue at hand). Also in testing the implications of an ordering, you have to test it against all linguistically-possible inputs, for example /pa, p'a, ba, pʰa, ɓa, mpa, bʰa, ma/ and so on, even if some of those segments don't exist in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have #1 = *Voiced-Obst (a standard stipulation) and #2 = ID-IO voice (also standard), there are only two orders, 1,2 and 2,1. the relevant candidate subset is the product of any input combined with any output, e.g. {pa, p'a}, {pa, pa}, {pa, ba}, {pa, ma}, {ba, pʰa}, {ba, ba}, {p'a, p'a}, {p'a, ba}, {p'a, pa} and so on, where the first string is the input the the second is the proposed output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the grammar where 2 &gt; 1 (the faithfulness constraint is dominant), and since there are, for the sake of discussion, no other constraints, the winning candidates will be {pa, pa}, {ma, ma}, {ba, ba}, {p'a, p'a}, {ɓa, ɓa} and so on. When 1 &gt; 2, the winners are {pa, pa}, {ma, ma}, &lt;strong&gt;{ba, pa}&lt;/strong&gt;, {p'a, p'a}, &lt;strong&gt;{ɓa, p'a}&lt;/strong&gt;: any voiced obstruent must be eliminated. Of course there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; other constraints, so you ultimately have to throw in those constraints. For example, there would be a constraint *CG which prohibits glottalized consonants like implosives and ejectives, so if the language in question has no implosives or ejectives, the markedness constraint *CG would have to dominate the faithfulness constraint ID-IO(CG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An implicational universal, under OT, is the result of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; possible orderings of constraints yielding a particular fact pattern, such as that if a language has voiced obstruents, it also has voiceless obstruents. In order for the method to work, you also have to stipulate the non-existence of certain constraints, for example *Voiceless-Obstruent. If there were such a constraint, then ordering *Voiceless-Obstruent first would mean that all obstruents have to be voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for tableaux, you would create a set of meta-tableaux which contain just the segment of interest (not even the vowel) and just the constraints of interest, in both orders. The inputs of interest include (in the case of an IO constraint plus a markedness constraint) those with the prohibited value and those with the allowed value. If given all inputs and all ordering of those constraint, the voiced segment is not ever pointed at, you've derived the implicational universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, *Vioced-Coda is irrelevant, except by way of explaining how a language could exist with final devoicing, but that is a separate complication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T17:40:42.343" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T17:40:42.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T23:56:58.013" Score="5" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;not a linguist. I was just wondering if the degree of robustness of a language to environmental noise is somehow measured or studied. I presume not every language is equally robust, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21027" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T15:48:19.240" Title="Robustness of a language to noise" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26949" CreationDate="2018-01-20T01:57:59.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a currently non-existent but potentially interesting specialization in linguistics. The design of the experiment would not be very difficult: make good quality recordings using a head mic, standardized recording parameters and multiple speakers, speaking normally (according to norms of that culture, which is the main thing that matters) – don't normalize amplitudes (since that would obscure a feature of interest). Then overlay environmental noise of differing characters, and see what the effect is on listener comprehension. If Bella Coola turns out to be harder to hear than Cantonese, Bella Coola speakers can adjust by talking louder, so there's no insurmountable problem regarding noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from cultural norms regarding how one should speak, a language like Hawaiian is probably one of the most robust against noise because it has only open syllables and a rather restricted phonemic inventory, so less chance of noise overriding the signal. A language with significant consonant clusters and lots of consonant types would be most at risk: candidates include Berber,  Kartvelian and Salishan languages, Polish and Mongolian. In the case of Berber, some of the languages have epenthetic vowels and others don't, where the vowels can make the individual consonants more audible. Another possibility would be languages like Vietnamese and Hmong, which rely heavily on phonatory differences on vowels as part of their tonal system (vowel phonation contrasts are not very robust w.r.t. noise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T01:57:59.490" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26928" CreationDate="2018-01-20T05:43:06.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's absolutely impossible to find out if the something is a language or not, if we don't have even a tiniest clue. If you're, say, John, and in some galaxy you find some stars situated so that they look like to make the the shape of the word &quot;John&quot;, you can never know if it was intended or it was just a coincidence. We cannot know if the patterns on the Andean textiles are symbols of their ancient script, we cannot know, if the patterns of the sunspots are messages from an alien race... Without a clue or feedback nothing can be identified as a language, for languages can be immensely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T05:43:06.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26949" CreationDate="2018-01-20T12:06:23.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been said that the Piraha language could be understood even if it's just &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whistled&lt;/a&gt; in the air. If that's true, it's very robust to noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20821" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T12:06:23.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26954" CreationDate="2018-01-20T22:08:42.003" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have decided to include an apico-labial nasal in my latest conlang. The sound is produced by voicing while simultaneously extending the tip of the tongue to touch the upper lip and thus prevent airflow out of the mouth while allowing airflow out of the nostrils. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first encountered an apico-labial consonant in a playful speculative article by a scientist named I.J. Goode, who thought that the &quot;pt&quot; in ancient Egyptian might have been used to transcribe a voiceless apico-labial stop.  However, I'm guessing that apico-labial consonants are found in natural languages, even if they are rare across languages.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that consulting this page, my usual go-to page for phonemic transcription, has only left me scratching my head, so any help here would be appreciated.   &lt;a href=&quot;http://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T22:36:18.293" Title="What is the correct way to transcribe an apico-labial nasal in the IPA?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26953" CreationDate="2018-01-20T22:36:18.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA take no position on this, but there is a diacritic combined with &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; etc for &quot;linguolabial&quot; ([t̼]: &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; plus seagull). This is how the IPA chart deals with it, and it is what Ladefoged and Maddieson say in &lt;em&gt;Sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;. IPA say nothing about an apico-labial. The term &quot;apico-labial&quot; is mentioned &lt;em&gt;Sounds&lt;/em&gt;, but they note that they have no example of such a thing (that is, examples are not actually apical). Theoretically you might write [p̺], &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; plus inverted bridge, since the inverted bridge is the diacritic for &quot;apical&quot;, but this would be trying to set a standard, rather than following a standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T22:36:18.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T00:08:19.617" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new Klingon dialogue sounds noticeably different, perhaps they could be using a sound filter or simply acting in a lower register; although Klingon character Voq's voice sounds particularly restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found no mention to this detail except for 'harsh voice' being used alongside 'guttural,' 'clipped,' 'fierce,' 'unusual' and other informal descriptions of the Klingon language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3410" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T05:29:53.457" Title="Does the Klingon spoken in Star Trek: Discovery present a harsh/ventricular/pressed voice phonation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27007" CreationDate="2018-01-21T01:17:48.597" Score="-1" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I just stumbled upon this beautiful word, Eleusinian(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries&lt;/a&gt;), named after a Greek town. &#xA;Given they had a history of cool initian rites, and all the jazz of ancient cults, I'm wondering if Elusive and Eleusinian have any connection? &#xA;Wiktionary suggests no, can anybody verify? Supposedly &quot;elusive&quot; is derrived from &quot;elude&quot;. Does this word have a greco-roman origin?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elusive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elusive&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20994" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T16:45:28.120" Title="Elusive etymology, false cognate?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26928" CreationDate="2018-01-21T05:49:35.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we mean by understanding a thing is fitting it into our understanding of the physical laws of our universe, so the answer is: no way. If you could go any way in your understanding of this hypothetical alien language, it would show that there was after all something in common between your and the aliens' understanding of the physical world.  Thus, you cannot understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fictional working out of this idea which, though it is not scientific, is nonetheless worked out by a brilliant scientific mind.  See Fred Hoyle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Black Cloud&lt;/a&gt;. On his deathbed, the protagonist scientist who has tried and failed to conform his thinking to that of the alien's idea of what the world is like, conjectures that he might have succeeded if he had been a newborn, who had not yet learned anything about humans' ideas of what the world is like.  (I would be less optimistic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T05:49:35.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26962" CreationDate="2018-01-21T09:03:04.093" Score="20" ViewCount="1082" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I noticed when reading some different older English bibles. Often times, it seems there was originally &amp;amp; traditionally a digraph (I guess) ⟨Hi⟩ where now the more proper letter ⟨J⟩ is used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi&lt;/strong&gt;erusalem (&lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;erusalem)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi&lt;/strong&gt;ob (&lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;ob)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi&lt;/strong&gt;eremias (&lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;eremiah)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hi&lt;/strong&gt;acobos (&lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;acob), etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one of these occasions, I saw that the Greek transliteration was probably pronounced as /hi/, so I assume it would have been a similar case for greek, but that would spawn the question of if that was pronounced /j/ and why it was there, and that is off-topic, so I am only explicitly mentioning it also for that reason of that's on my mind too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="10009" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T17:54:07.030" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T22:15:36.813" Title="Why did some Hebrew words beginning with Yod become transliterated into Latin as &quot;hi?&quot;" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T11:33:17.497" Score="0" ViewCount="1082" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the symbol &lt;code&gt;*!&lt;/code&gt; mean when it is referred to the constraints ONSET and NoCODA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in my professor's notes, when /CVCV/ is syllabified as CVC.V, both ONSET and NoCODA take the symbol &lt;code&gt;*!&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:21:49.120" Title="What does &quot; *! &quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26959" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:21:49.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume this is Optimality Theory, so that mark indicates when a constraint violation is the deciding 'fatal' violation for one of the possible forms. Specifically, asterisk (*) marks a violation of a constraint, and the addition of the exclamation mark (!) indicates that this violation was the deciding one. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_Theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_Theory&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:21:49.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26958" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:24:10.970" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek had the /h/ phoneme only at the beginning of a word, and it was marked with a diacritic (rough breathing sign) rather than with a letter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koine Greek&lt;/a&gt; lost the /h/ phoneme and early manuscripts (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codex Sinaiticus&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codex Vaticanus&lt;/a&gt;) didn't mark rough breathing, or had it added by a later scribe (according to their respective Wikipedia pages), and so they don't offer evidence on how it was pronounced. Latin, which did have represent /h/ with a letter, would translate the rough breathing as &quot;h&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since readers unschooled in Hebrew had to guess for themselves whether the Greek word began with a rough breathing mark, both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B8%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AE%CE%BC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ierousalem&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B9%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AE%CE%BC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hierousalem&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B8%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B5%CE%BC%CE%AF%CE%B1%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ieremias&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B9%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B5%CE%BC%CE%AF%CE%B1%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hieremias&lt;/a&gt; existed in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alexander Sperber wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/23503646?seq=124#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; with a list of Greek transliterations (Septuagint and Origen) and Latin transliterations (Jerome) of Hebrew words. Since the Greek words don't mark breathing, only the Latin is helpful here. Jerome uses i/j for this letter; he never uses &quot;hi&quot; to translate words beginning with Hebrew yod (his full list is on p. 124). Jerome, who learned Hebrew, certainly would have had no doubt as to the correct pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, the rough breathing interpretation won out, because that was what was borrowed into Latin. It certainly helped that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B1%CE%B5%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;hieros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; meant &quot;sacred&quot; in Greek (that point made &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Jerusalem#cite_ref-21&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), which would have been meaningful to Christians who considered Jerusalem a holy city, but also could have been a simple hypercorrection. Notably, names such as Iesous are never (to my knowledge, at least) spelled Hiesous, which might support the theory of a &lt;em&gt;hieros&lt;/em&gt; misunderstanding, but if names such as Hiakobus are indeed  attested, I can only explain this as having been made by analogy to words such as Hierousalem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;hi&quot; spelling in Latin &lt;em&gt;Hierusalem&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hieremias&lt;/em&gt;, etc. would have necessarily come through Greek, and not directly from Hebrew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:24:10.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T19:03:09.780" Score="5" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a 1968 paper by Kiparsky (&quot;Linguistic universals and linguistic change&quot;), a historical-change argument is made for the brace notation of SPE, based on the history of vowel shortening. The premise is that there was a single rule in Old English which shortened a long vowel before three consonants (gōdspell → godspell; brǣmblas → bræmblas), and also shortened a vowel which is followed by only two consonants as long as it is in the third syllable from the end of the word (blēdsian → bledsian). It is claimed that there is one rule in OE which does this: V → [-long]/ __CC{C,...V...V} with braces combining &quot;a third consonant, or two vowels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is claimed that Modern English has a related rule, V → [-long]/ __C{C,...V...V}, shortening a long vowel before two consonants or a consonant followed by two syllables, and moreover this rule arose in Early Modern English. An alternative view is that there are simply two separate rules. Kiparsky uses this  rule change as evidence for brace notation, on the grounds that it would be a &quot;peculiar fact that two separate, unrelated rules have undergone &lt;em&gt;an identical modification at the same point in the history of English&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two factual claims are made: there was a uniform change in the nature of the two rules, where for both subcases, &quot;two consonants plus&quot; becomes &quot;one consonant plus&quot;; this happened at the same time. The subsequent literature has, to the best of my knowledge, not critically re-investigated this claim (there are sporadic counterclaims that the sub-changes were at different times, with no supporting data). I am aware of the competing analysis that the change has to do with a change in syllable structure – the deeper question is whether the underlying factual claim is actually well-supported?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any evidence at all emerged since then that either supports or refutes Kiparsky's claim of &quot;same change at the same time&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T19:03:09.780" Title="What historical change(s) shortened vowels in Old and Middle English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;notation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26969" CreationDate="2018-01-22T20:03:12.053" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is it called when a word is dropped (or implied):&#xA;&quot;Have a beer or two&quot; == &quot;Have a beer or two beers&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this phenomenon have a name? Any pointers on where to learn more about it are appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T22:04:03.357" Title="Word drop: have a beer or two" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26967" CreationDate="2018-01-22T22:04:03.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_ellipsis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noun ellipsis&lt;/a&gt; or N-ellipsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... a mechanism that elides, or appears to elide, part of a noun phrase that can be recovered from context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T22:04:03.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T01:36:23.193" Score="2" ViewCount="763" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been studying about Russian phonology and its phonemes and I wanted to ask a question: are there any minimal pairs between [ɨ] and [i] or are they just allophonic variations of the phoneme /i/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21046" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T06:11:02.417" Title="Are there any minimal pairs between [ɨ] and [i] in Russian phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26437" CreationDate="2018-01-23T05:04:24.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any terms used for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English words where the primary stress falls on the third syllable or later always, or at least almost always, have a secondary stress on either the first or second syllable (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/11/gigo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GIGO&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, John Wells's Phonetic Blog). I think the placement of secondary stress is just ignored when terms like &lt;em&gt;oxytone, paroxytone, proparoxytone&lt;/em&gt; are applied to English words (which is uncommon in my experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T05:04:24.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26970" CreationDate="2018-01-23T06:01:58.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;minimal pair&quot; means &quot;pair of words distinguished only by the selection of a single phone&quot;. As far as I know there is a single minimal pair, икать &quot;to pronounce unstressed е (je) as и (i), the Standard Russian pronunciation, rather than as е (je)&quot; versus ыкать &quot;to make the sound of the letter ы&quot;. Otherwise, there are no minimal pairs, because the vowel distinction simultaneously correlates with the preceding consonant ([i] iff preceding C is palatalized). There is a chicken-egg question there, so it is still possible that [ɨ] is an allophone of /i/ appearing after a non-palatalized consonant. Minimal pairs are based on distribution of phones in the surface transcription, and the surface transcription is supposed to reflect the phonetic facts, not the phonological analysis based on those facts (that would be obviously circular). Apart from that verb pair, there are non-Slavic place names with initial Ы, but there would not be any minimal pairs involving such words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T06:11:02.417" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T06:11:02.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T17:17:44.767" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;In PIE, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯oinos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;one alone&quot;, &quot;one separated&quot;, it has the same root as in the word for &quot;goes&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;e̯eiti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Semantically it meant the one that went away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;som&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; meant &quot;one united&quot;, &quot;all as one&quot;, &quot;together&quot; and had the same root as the reflective pronoun meaning &quot;self&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the first meant one thing of a set or quantity while second meant the whole set as a unity. In a sense these words were antonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any other languages have similar opposition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastEditorUserId="624" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T04:19:52.507" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T04:19:52.507" Title="Besides Proto-Indo-European, does any language have separate words for &quot;one alone&quot; and &quot;one united&quot;?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16790" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:36:49.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding their meaning/usage during the &quot;Classical&quot; and &quot;Hellenistic&quot; period in non-technical literature, I would say ζωή refers the opposite of &quot;death&quot; in terms of existence, and is used for animals, plants, etc., with common overtones of transcendence, whereas βίος refers to human lifestyles and activities, which by metonymy would also relate to things need to sustain such &quot;life.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21052" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:36:49.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26325" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:37:38.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible but it is difficult. It is especially difficult after puberty. Before then one naturally picks up a native accent. Afterwards, only with lots of training is it feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider getting a dialog or acting coach used by actors. They are directly interested in helping you adopt a particular accent, even if it is not your native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:37:38.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T01:08:08.760" Score="15" ViewCount="3680" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered why French is (almost) unique in the Romance languages in using the guttural 'r' – in particular, the uvular fricative. Apart from Piedmontese / Piedmontese Italian (and even there it's far from universal), French seems to be the only Romance language that uses this sound, whilst many Germanic languages and dialects use it commonly. Occitan on the other hand did and even now does not use it, as far as I can tell, and many Southern French speakers still tend to employ the more traditional Latin alveolar sounds when speaking Standard French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I came across this curious map of the distribution of uvular rhotic usage in Western Europe, which shows a clear geographical cluster. Most surprisingly though, areas of common usage appear to cross significant linguistic boundaries (Romance-Germanic) quite freely!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYBZx.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYBZx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Map of guttural &amp;#39;r&amp;#39; in Europe&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#/media/File:Uvular_rhotics_in_Europe.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for the key.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I thought the guttural 'r' might have been an old Germanic feature that spread into French, even as far back as the Franks perhaps (which would certainly explain its greater prevalence in the north of the country), but there is apparently clear evidence (from Molière, no less) that as late as the 18th century in Paris, the alveolar trill was being used to pronounce 'r'. Hence I wonder, is this phonology truly a modern innovation? If so, where and precisely when did it originate? And how did it cross the linguistic barrier so that it permeated both Romance dialects and High German, Dutch, and the North Germanic languages so thoroughly? I presume that these phonologies are not independent, but perchance even this premise is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416" LastEditorUserId="416" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T15:19:00.900" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T18:37:00.187" Title="When and where did the guttural 'r' originate?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26978" CreationDate="2018-01-24T01:31:51.300" Score="0" ViewCount="984" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;long i&quot; sound in English, as in &quot;fight&quot; is usually written /aɪ/, so fight = /faɪt/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But /a/ is the sound in &quot;hat&quot;, and /ɪ/ is the sound in &quot;hit&quot;. When I say the two together it doesn't sound anything like the diphtong in &quot;fight&quot;. In fact, it doesn't sound like any kind of sound I've ever heard anyone say in any language, except maybe English with an exaggerated upper class British accent. If I had to guess, I'd say the long i sounds more like /ai/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a dialect issue, or am I just not paying close enough attention to what my mouth is doing? How can I convince myself I'm wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12711" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T22:14:33.313" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T22:17:36.933" Title="Why is the &quot;long i&quot; sound in English written /aɪ/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26977" CreationDate="2018-01-24T02:43:02.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American dialects, the sound in 'hat' is generally /æ/, not /a/. The use of /i/ (meaning /ai/) in the 'fight' vowel would be too long/close; you probably do not pronounce 'might' exactly the same as the phrase 'ma eat'. The vowel in 'might' is shorter/opener, and so /ɪ/ (meaning /aɪ/) is appropriate. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Transcription&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T02:43:02.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2018-01-24T07:32:31.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize you're not interested in Aymara, but perhaps it's interesting anyway to elaborate on the basis for this metaphor in this language, with an eye (!) on tense and evidentiality. Aymara has four tenses: the simple (present + immediate past), recent past, distal past, and future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The future is unknown, not visible therefore it is &quot;behind&quot; the speaker. Comparatively, the simple and immediate past are known, visible (in memory or even at the moment), so these tenses are metaphorically construed as being in front of the speaker. The remote, historical/narrative past is also construed as being in front of the speaker, but further ahead out of visual range. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12684" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T07:32:31.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T09:21:15.810" Score="0" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do we understand if the foot construction is Right to Left or Left to Right? Does it have to do with the head of the foot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in a trochee (the head is leftmost in the foot), is the directionality of footing leftwards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T12:22:17.643" Title="What does &quot;directionality of footing&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26981" CreationDate="2018-01-24T12:22:17.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to answer this is by using an example of each. Look at the following examples from Pintupi and Wargamay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Pintupi (Hansen and Hansen, 1969, as cited by Peng, 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. pá.ɲa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. tú.ʈa.ya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. má.ɭa.wà.na&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. pú.ɭiŋ.kà.la.tu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) Wargamay (Dixon, 1981, as cited by Peng, 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. bá.da &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. ga.gá.ra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. gí.ɟa.wù.lu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. ɟu.ɽá.gay-mì.ri&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how in Pintupi, stress falls always falls on odd-numbered syllables whereas in Wargamay, it falls on odd-numbered syllables when there is an even number of syllables and falls on even-numbered syllables when there is an odd number of syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can capture this fact by stating that Pintupi divides syllables into feet from left to right and Wargamay does this from right to left, then both languages assign stress to the first syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) Pintupi (Hansen and Hansen, 1969, as cited by Peng, 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. (pá.ɲa)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. (tú.ʈa).ya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. (má.ɭa).(wà.na)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. (pú.ɭiŋ).(kà.la).tu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) Wargamay (Dixon, 1981, as cited by Peng, 2014)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. (bá.da) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. ga.(gá.ra)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. (gí.ɟa).(wù.lu)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. ɟu.(ɽá.gay)-(mì.ri)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note that the notion of directionality is not a concept inherent in language, but rather a category we invent to describe linguistic phenomena with greater elegance, i.e. it is an artefact of our analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T12:22:17.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T13:57:35.280" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browsing through Wiktionary, I ran across a note in a-stem declension tables (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/%C5%BEena&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;žena&lt;/a&gt;) which claims that &lt;em&gt;-asъ&lt;/em&gt; is the expected Balto-Slavic form of locative plural, which is however found only in some Old Czech documents and is replaced elsewhere by &lt;em&gt;-axъ&lt;/em&gt; in analogy with the other declension types. I've never seen this claim in literature, Czech or any other, and it does not seem to be substantiated on Wiktionary, so I was wondering if anybody here might have some pointers on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16987" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T23:25:37.233" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T23:25:37.233" Title="Proto-Slavic a-stem locative plural in -asъ?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26987" CreationDate="2018-01-24T14:12:31.690" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Is there an attested technical term for the construction &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Object O is A.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where O is a noun and A is an adjective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remarks.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;The phenomenon that I am hoping to read about, and find a usual terminology for, is that the adjective is not juxtaposed with the noun to modify it (as in e.g. 'the blue sky.'), but the noun is said to 'be' the adjecive (as in e.g. 'the sky is blue'). I need to know whether there are attested technical terms T1 and T2 with which one can modify the genus 'adjective' (here I use 'genus' in the biological sense) and speak of species called 'T1-adjectives' and 'T2-adjective', and in 'the blue sky', 'blue' is a 'T1-adjective', while in 'the sky is blue', 'blue' is a 'T2-adjective'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T14:27:30.263" Title="Is there a technical term for the kind of adjective A which appears in sentences of the form 'The object O is A.'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26984" CreationDate="2018-01-24T14:16:18.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;-asъ changed to -axъ in this context, it’s a pretty known fact in historical Slavonic linguistics. Note that -s- can still be found in modern Lithuanian in plural locatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T14:16:18.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26985" CreationDate="2018-01-24T14:27:30.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction you're looking for is between &lt;strong&gt;predicative&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;attributive&lt;/strong&gt; adjectives. Predicative constructions take the form &lt;code&gt;N V A&lt;/code&gt; where N is a noun in subject position, V is a verb (often the copula &lt;code&gt;is&lt;/code&gt; but other verbs are possible) and A is the predicative adjective. Contrasted to this, an adjective used attributively will appear inside the noun phrase, modifying the noun, ie. &lt;code&gt;A N&lt;/code&gt;. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/attributive-and-predicative-adjectives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/attributive-and-predicative-adjectives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21057" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T14:27:30.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23274" CreationDate="2018-01-24T15:01:03.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An old question, but perhaps the answer might still be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I believe that regarding Slavic languages, &lt;em&gt;iotation&lt;/em&gt; is considered a feature of vowels (iotated vowels are preceded by [j]), while &lt;em&gt;palatalisation&lt;/em&gt; is a feature of consonants (during their articulation, the tongue is raised towards the speaker's hard palate). Of course, the terminology may vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding their interaction in Russian orthography,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;я, е, ё, ю are the iotated variants of а, э, о, у; unless following a consonant, they are preceeded by [j] in pronunciation (compare the archaic Russian pronoun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%B7#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;аз&lt;/a&gt; [as] with its modern equivalent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%8F#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;я&lt;/a&gt; [ja]. The letter и is slightly unusual; it is not iotated in isolation, so иметь represents [ɪˈmʲetʲ], not [jɪˈmʲetʲ], but it does palatalise preceeding consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;palatalisation of consonants is represented by ь, e.g. т [t] × ть [tʲ]. However, when a iotated vowel follows, the consonant is palatalised while the vowel loses iotation, hence лён [lʲɵn].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to represent palatalised consonants followed by iotated vowels, ь is inserted to break apart, so to speak, the interaction described in the previous point. Thus we have [lʲjɵn] in почтальон or [svʲɪˈnʲja] for свинья, which might be less confusing as it contains the iotated я instead of the “plain” о.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, regarding actual pronunciation, I believe that the recordings you linked to do actually make the distinction you are asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In почтальон, the speaker would&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pronounce the л as a palatalised lateral approximant [lʲ], i.e. with the tip of his tongue on the alveolar ridge and with the tongue itself slighty curved upwards, so the blade of the tongue is closer to his hard palate. He would then&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;detach the tip from the alveolar ridge and move the body of his tongue even closer to the hard palate to articulate the approximant [j], before&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moving on to the vowel [ɵ].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, pronouncing лён, he would articulate the palatalised [lʲ] as before, but then directly detach the tongue from the ridge and move it back to articulate [ɵ], i.e. he would omit step two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that the difference is audible in the recordings in the Wiktionary entries. Actually, the sequence (palatalised consonant) + (iotated vowel) might be heard even more clearly in the recording of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8C%D1%8F#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;свинья&lt;/a&gt;. I may later try to record myself carefully pronouncing the discussed sequences, but I don't really have a lot of experience with audio recording, so it may come out terribly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16987" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T15:01:03.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2018-01-24T17:45:00.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Czech, the verb &lt;em&gt;být&lt;/em&gt; (to be) is used in all four of bytebuster's senses (constructions like 4 are not really common, I'd say that &lt;em&gt;znamenat&lt;/em&gt; (to mean) is used in such cases, but there are very sparse examples in the Czech National Corpus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;být&lt;/em&gt; may be used with different valency; specifically, when used as a copula, the nominal part is usually in the nominative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;To       je můj    bratr.&#xA;That.NOM is my.NOM brother.NOM.&#xA;&#xA;Jsme   přátelé.&#xA;be.1PL friends.NOM&#xA;We're  friends.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when used with a complement or when denoting transitional states, the nominal may appear in the instrumental instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dva roky  byl       novinářem.&#xA;Two years was.3SG-M journalist.INS&#xA;He was a journalist for two years.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples adapted from &lt;em&gt;Stručná mluvnice česká&lt;/em&gt; (Concise grammar of Czech) by B. Havránek and A. Jedlička.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16987" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T17:45:00.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26977" CreationDate="2018-01-24T17:50:17.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are indeed dialect issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume you are aware that IPA letters represent regions of vowel articulation and not precise points. There is an informal transcriptional practice for vowels that in transcribing a language, one uses the symbol which most closely matches &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard reference performances&lt;/a&gt;. But this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an absolute rule, and in fact usually people write &quot;a&quot; unless there is a contrast such as [a,ɑ]. For most American dialects, one could use either [æ] or [a] for the vowel in &quot;hat&quot;, since [æ] and [a] do not contrast. Typically, [æ] is used because that better matches the reference pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The treatment of diphthongs in IPA is analogous to the treatment of affricates: they are written with two letters, possible with the tie diacritic to imply a phonological analysis as a single segment. Again, the convention of &quot;closest phonetic match&quot; would be applicable in deciding how to transcribe &quot;fight&quot;. There are about 3 reasonable choices for the first vowel: [a, ɑ, ɐ]. Because of the following diphthong element [ɪ], it's difficult to make the decision based just on introspection (hearing [ɪ] right after the low vowel is a distraction), but you can use Praat to extract just the initial 1/3 of the diphthong and compare it to the initial 1/3 of other vowels to see which vowel you think the a-like vowel is closer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that you won't find [ɐ] to be a particularly good match (there are dialects where that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the appropriate vowel, often diagnosed by the pair &quot;rider/writer&quot;). Many dialects have both a low front vowel and a low back unrounded vowel, so [a, ɑ] are plausible choices. Whichever vowel you pick, it won't really match the phonetic quality of the low-vowel part of &quot;fight&quot;. This is when &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articulation-adjustment diacritics&lt;/a&gt; are appropriate, for example you might classify it as an advanced ([˖]) version of [ɑ], or a retracted ([ˍ]) or centralized ([¨]) version of [a].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic closeness is not the only consideration: another, relevant to transcribing diphthongs, is whether the component vowels are individually required. If a language has an ai-like diphthong that sounds most like [æi] but the language has only [a] and not [æ] as a phoneme, then you might appeal to the lack of an [æ] phoneme as justification for the transcription [ai]. Since many American dialects have both [æ] and a lower backer vowel written either [ɑ] or [a], any of [æɪ, aɪ, ɑɪ] would be a possible transcription for that diphthong. [aɪ, ɑɪ] fare better in terms of matching the quality of the initial part of the diphthong to the corresponding reference vowels. Assuming that &quot;father&quot; is transcribed with [a], then you would write [faɪt] if you're not introducing new vowel symbols for diphthongs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dialect lacks [ɑ] (&quot;cot&quot; and &quot;caught&quot; are both [kɔt]), so I would opt for [aɪ]. However, the vowel [a] exists only in [aɹ, aɪ] and adult-acquired foreign words like &quot;pasta&quot;. If I were minimizing the number of letters in my transcriptions, I would probably write [æɪ, æɹ], but that would be phonetically misleading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T20:55:19.687" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T20:55:19.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26977" CreationDate="2018-01-24T20:07:37.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bear with me, there are a few errors there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Error 1, Typically, brackets ([]) typically are used for precise pronunciations and slashes (//) are typically used for broad transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*A good example of how vastly different vowels of the same articulation can sound is with the /a/ vowel. In Southern American accents, the diphthong /aɪ/ is replaced with an /a/ vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Error 2, the &quot;american 'a'&quot; in &quot;hat&quot; is the vowel /æ/. /a/ is not that common of a vowel in american english, but it is present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: /aɪ/ is the diphthong. If you say it, then I recommend holding the ending articulation of it, you will find that it should be probably a high articulation of the /ɪ/, if you pronounce it of a similar articulation to I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T22:17:36.933" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T22:17:36.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T20:27:14.520" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anglo Saxon did not distinguish by voicing usually, particularly with the sounds /s~f~z~v/. After the adoptions of the Latin Alphabet letters &quot;f&quot; and &quot;s&quot; were doubled when representing a voiceless sound in the Wessex dialect's accent when it fell between two voiced sounds in the same syllable. That being said, are there any runic writings that attest to something similar them-in? or was this something that seems to have just been introduced by those who introduced the latin script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I am aware of the younger futhark introducing dots to distinguish voicing and I am aware of some anglo saxon rune sets introducing the letters kalk and gar to have runes that specifically only made the sounds /g/ and /k/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T20:27:14.520" Title="Are there any historical runic transcriptions that utilize two runes to represent a sound change? (particularly in the Anglo Saxon rune sets)" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;writing&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T20:36:37.667" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take the example 'A kiwi is [a type of bird]'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 109 of this book &lt;a href=&quot;https://faculty.mu.edu.sa/public/uploads/1367260110.5528Understanding%20Syntax.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://faculty.mu.edu.sa/public/uploads/1367260110.5528Understanding%20Syntax.pdf&lt;/a&gt; sais that the head of a phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Has the same distribution as the entire phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. Is the one obligatory item in the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would mean that the head of [a type of bird] is 'bird' because we can say 'A kiwi is a bird' and not X'A kiwi is a type'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be different to partitives, where 'some' does seem to be able to act as the head: 'Some of his remarks were quite flattering', 'Some were quite flattering' (some context retrieving needed?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the problem is that this goes against how we normally analyze these phrases. How can a word embedded in a PP which is embedded in the root NP be the head of the root NP? I suppose it would follow that &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; is a complement of &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; is an adjunct NP? And that this preposition (if it is even a preposition) isn't selecting a complement. Or is 'type' indeed the head? If so, what is the evidence that it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20144" LastEditorUserId="20144" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T10:30:58.380" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T10:30:58.380" Title="A sort/type/kind of N. Which is the head?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26977" CreationDate="2018-01-24T20:50:42.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As user6726's answer mentions, IPA letters (like [i], [e], [ɪ], [ɨ], [a]) refer to ranges of sounds (phones); for vowel letters, these can be thought of as regions of the &quot;vowel space&quot; (which in turn can be thought of as either an acoustic space (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/facilities/vowelspace.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defined by certain frequencies&lt;/a&gt;), or a physiological space (&lt;a href=&quot;https://notendur.hi.is/peturk/KENNSLA/02/TOP/VowelSpace.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defined by tongue position&lt;/a&gt;)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And phonemic transcriptions (conventionally indicated by the use of slashes rather than brackets) don't even technically use IPA letters to refer directly to the associated ranges of phones. Rather, traditions for phonemic transcription establish conventional associations between IPA symbols and particular phonemes in a language, regardless of the actual phonetic realization of the latter. If there gets to be too much of a difference between the conventional transcription and the phonetics of some particular accent, a new convention may be proposed/adopted, but often the old conventions still stick around for a long time. You can see some of the diversity in transcriptions of English vowels on the web page &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english-uni.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA transcription systems for English&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by John Wells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonetic realization of the phoneme /aɪ/ is variable between accents, and between different utterances made by a single speaker (some of the variation can be predicted fairly easily from the context, and some can't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Liberman, a linguist, has a post on Language Log mentioning some of the features that may make a phonetic transcription like [aɪ] valid for the phoneme /aɪ/ in at least some contexts in some present-day accents of English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2678&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The rɑɪt sɑʊnz?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it isn't necessarily incorrect to use something like /aj/ as a phonological transcription. Geoff Lindsey, a linguist and dialect coach,  transcribes the standard Southern British English &quot;price&quot; vowel as /ɑj/. In his blog post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The British English vowel system&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Lindsey says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in SSB, the upper corners of the vowel space function as the&#xA;  endpoints of its two subclasses of diphthongs. I prefer to transcribe&#xA;  them as the semivowels &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;, which are exactly equivalent in terms of the vowel space, but have additional benefits. First, &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt; make explicit that the English diphthongs are falling, ie moving from&#xA;  greater to lesser prominence. Second, they reinforce English vowel&#xA;  linking for the foreign learner, eg way out &lt;strong&gt;wɛjawt&lt;/strong&gt;, show off &lt;strong&gt;ʃəwɔf&lt;/strong&gt;, as&#xA;  well as initialisms like those in the previous paragraph.&#xA;  Additionally, they provide by far the best way to teach cardinals 1&#xA;  and 8 to native English speakers: simply pronounce intervocalic &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; or&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;, then “hit the pause button” in the middle of the semivowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In final position, especially when heavily accented, SSB diphthongs&#xA;  are sometimes followed by a short, schwa-like sound which highlights&#xA;  the final &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;. Here are me and loo said by Kate Winslet: [sound sample on the original blog post]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such pronunciations clearly differ from the closing diphthongs of old&#xA;  RP with their distinctively not-quite-high endpoints &lt;strong&gt;ɪ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ʊ&lt;/strong&gt;. These&#xA;  sound very old-fashioned, especially in final accented position, e.g.&#xA;  May in this 1932 newsreel clip: [sound sample on the original blog post]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or the Queen saying Christmas Day in 1957: [sound sample on the original blog post]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or the narrator of the 1948 film Quartet saying 24 plays: [sound sample on the original blog post]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, in the less accented contexts of continuous speech the&#xA;  contemporary &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt; endpoints will often not be reached. This kind of&#xA;  target undershoot is a universal phenomenon in running speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are phonetic reasons for the traditional transcription of the vowel of PRICE as /aɪ/; some of them are historical but others continue to be relevant. The use of this transcription however does not necessarily imply that /aɪ/ ends in the same sound as the KIT vowel phoneme on either a phonological or a phonetic level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong with using another transcription like &lt;strong&gt;ai, aj&lt;/strong&gt; or even &lt;strong&gt;ay&lt;/strong&gt; if you have some valid reason to do so. The choice of symbols for phonemes in a phonemic transcription is basically arbitrary, and most phonemic analyses treat the &quot;PRICE&quot; vowel as a single phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transcriptions that identify the last element of the PRICE with the palatal semivowel (as in the start of the word &quot;yam&quot;) have some theoretical support and are also supported by a tradition of use that continues to the present day, although it is not as prominent as the tradition that uses /aɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FLEECE vowel of course is also phonetically and phonologically similar to the palatal semivowel, but I think transcriptions like &lt;strong&gt;ai&lt;/strong&gt; have not been as popular as ones like &lt;strong&gt;aj&lt;/strong&gt; because using a symbol like &lt;strong&gt;j&lt;/strong&gt; that is explicitly dedicated to transcribing glides makes it clear that we are not talking about a disyllabic sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend not worring too much about the details of phonemic transcription unless you're planning on learning or teaching some kind of standardized transcription system (e.g. for use in EFL contexts). Whether you're primarily interested in phonology or in phonetics, IPA transcriptions are fairly superficial*, and the most commonly used transcriptions of phonemes tend to be common because of tradition rather than because of deep theoretical reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I don't mean this in a negative way. If IPA transcription were more strongly based on phonological theories, it would make it harder to give transcriptions in a relatively theory-neutral fashion; if IPA transcription were more strongly based on phonetic details, it would make it harder to give &quot;broad&quot; transcriptions that are appropriate for describing how a speaker pronounces a phoneme across a range of contexts, or how a group of speakers tend to pronounce a phoneme. But the compromises of IPA mean that there is often more than one theoretically reasonable way to transcribe something, and so the specific way that people actually do transcribe it is  based on tradition and somewhat arbitrary from a theoretical perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T21:13:31.840" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T21:13:31.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26984" CreationDate="2018-01-24T22:35:01.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems the use of x in -axъ is thought to be related to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Balto-Slavic_language#RUKI_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ruki&lt;/a&gt;&quot; law. However, becasue this is not the usual context for the application of this sound law, it is supposed that some kind of analogy caused the original *s sound to develop to [x] in this ending. As Atamiri's answer mentions, some evidence that the locative plural originally had the consonant *s comes from Baltic languages like Lithuanian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/127154/1_LinguisticaBrunensia_14-2013-1_10.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On The Origins Of &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; in Slavic&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Ondřej Šefčík, in &lt;em&gt;Linguistica Brunensia&lt;/em&gt; 61, 2013:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We can formulate Pedersen’s Law for Common Slavic as:&#xA;  “If Indo-European &lt;em&gt;*s&lt;/em&gt; is preceded by &lt;em&gt;*ı̄̆, ū̆, r, k&lt;/em&gt; and is not followed by an obstruent, it changes to &lt;em&gt;*š&lt;/em&gt;, if followed by a palatal/front phoneme, or to &lt;em&gt;*x&lt;/em&gt;, if followed by a non-palatal/back phoneme.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(122)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The collateral effect of Pedersen’s Law and the source of a &lt;strong&gt;secondary analogical &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; of the Slavic sigmatic aorist when, besides regular forms like OCS &lt;em&gt;rěxъ, prosixъ, krychъ,&lt;/em&gt; there arose by analogy such new forms as &lt;em&gt;znaxъ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nesoxъ.&lt;/em&gt; The original forms that do not show the effect of Pedersen’s Law are attested in OCS &lt;em&gt;bljusъ, grěsъ.&lt;/em&gt; Similarly, the &lt;strong&gt;locative plural&lt;/strong&gt; OCS &lt;em&gt;ženachъ&lt;/em&gt; is due to analogy with the regular &lt;em&gt;synъxъ.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 123)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, I don't know anything about possible attested examples of -asъ, but I hope this explains why it might be considered the &quot;expected&quot; form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T22:40:23.590" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T22:40:23.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-25T08:59:01.990" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76578/why-is-american-english-so-wedded-to-the-subjunctive&quot;&gt;American English Use subjunctive more than British English&lt;/a&gt; and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31608&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;they heavily use modal verb &quot;would&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Grammatical moods like subjunctive in many European languages like German and Spanish are stronger than British English. So is it correct that non-British European immigrants influence modality and moods of American English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;following is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1575514/1/Waller_Waller%202017%20PhD%20thesis.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The subjunctive in Present-Day English&lt;/a&gt; page 144:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of possibilities are put forward by Övergaard as reasons for the return of the mandative subjunctive in AmE at the beginning of the twentieth century, all of them speculative and almost impossible to prove. These include the influence of the native languages of the large number of&#xA;immigrants from north-European backgrounds and the importance of the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, in which subjunctive forms are prominent features. She points&#xA;out that these books represent ‘practically the only English that all gentile immigrants . . . came in contact&#xA;with’ (1995: 46). Regarding the increase in the mandative subjunctive in BrE between 1960 and 1990, Övergaard follows commentators such as Quirk et al. (1985: 157) and Gowers, in his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965: 595), in ascribing it to the influence of AmE and the growth of mass media after the Second World War, as a result of which ‘American texts of every kind flooded Europe, and their impact on BrE evidently led to renewed availability of the non-inflected subjunctive, causing what&#xA;appears to have been something of a sea change’ (1995: 51).&#xA;In summary, Övergaard’s monograph is clearly a major contribution to the understanding of developments regarding the mandative subjunctive in BrE and AmE in the twentieth century. The evidence of the revival early in the century in AmE and the later revival in BrE is very strong. Yet certain&#xA;things need to be borne in mind when referring to her findings...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T13:40:20.053" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T13:40:20.053" Title="Impact of European languages on AmE modality and grammatical moods" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27001" CreationDate="2018-01-25T09:21:56.927" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I am interested in knowing is what exactly a specific diacritic does to a sound, and which muscles in the vocal tract are responsible for making those sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20509" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T09:11:23.737" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T09:11:23.737" Title="Can anyone send me a link or recommend me a book about IPA diacritics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26999" CreationDate="2018-01-25T16:59:40.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good and official source for IPA letters is &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. From it you can learn exactly what each diacritic is called, e.g. ̥ is &quot;voiceless&quot;. This also includes illustrative performances of most of the IPA letters, although there is a gap for the vowel-nudging diagritics. To go with that, I suggest Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;, where you can look up particular terms in the index and see what they say about it. There is no unified resource which spells out the acoustics and articulation of each diacritic. In general, there is very little data out there which documents sound differences at the muscular level. IPA diacritics are particularly hard to define, because they refer to a modification of something more basic. The exact acoustics and articulation of palatalization depends on what sound you are comparing with, so it's different to some extent in [pʲ, tʲ, qʲ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-25T16:59:40.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27005" CreationDate="2018-01-25T20:52:20.903" Score="4" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dark L is considered by the IPA to be a velar consonant, meaning it is &quot;articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate&quot; (Wikipedia).&#xA;However, it is far from that: it is pronounced with the back of the tongue the &lt;em&gt;farthest&lt;/em&gt; from the soft palate. It can be produced using an open back unrounded vowel together with the tongue touching the tip of the front palate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21074" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T13:49:19.463" Title="Is the dark L truly velar?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27003" CreationDate="2018-01-25T21:11:57.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA letter ʟ is described as a lateral approximant at velar place of articulation, and is know to exist in only a few languages. The thing in English called &quot;dark l&quot; is transcribed as ɫ (either as a stand-alone character or l plus &quot;combining tilde overlay&quot;), and is a &quot;velarized l&quot;, where &quot;l&quot; could have various places of articulation (dental, alveolar, postalveolar). The same diacritic is usable with any consonant, and describes a secondary articulation, not a primary place of articulation (as would be the case of the velars k, g, ʟ). A secondary articulation is &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; more open than a primary one, i.e. more vowel-like, though in some cases labialization as a secondary articulation may be realized as simultaneous closure at the front and the back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel analog of a velar is ɨ, but velarization is realized over a range of vowel heights, analogous to ɨ...ɤ. So a &quot;velarized&quot; sound might in fact be better  described as a uvularized sound, if indeed in a language the tongue is retracted further and lowered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T13:49:19.463" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T13:49:19.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27003" CreationDate="2018-01-26T00:39:46.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think you are correct.  American English l in the onset of a syllable is velar, typically, while in the offset of a syllable it is uvular.  The SPE feature system gives a good foundation for describing this with its three binary tongue body features high, back, and low, which apply to primary articulations or secondary articulations, and as well to vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the SPE system, velars and velarized sounds are [+high,+back] and uvulars and uvularized sounds are [-high,+back].  It is not clear to me about how [+/- low] fits into this scheme, so far as secondary consonant articulation is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The textbook consensus that syllable offset l in American English is velarized rather than uvularized has puzzled me, since it seems so obviously wrong.  Maybe this is due to the influence of Peter Ladefoged, who, of course, did not speak American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T00:39:46.040" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26956" CreationDate="2018-01-26T16:45:28.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, let me say I'm not sure why your question has so many close-votes: it is directly about the etymology of a word, and so is definitely within scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, &lt;code&gt;elusive&lt;/code&gt; comes more-or-less directly from Latin. Latin has the word &lt;code&gt;ēlūdō&lt;/code&gt; which apparently can mean &quot;avoided&quot;. This word is made up of &lt;code&gt;ex-&lt;/code&gt; (out of) and &lt;code&gt;lūdō&lt;/code&gt; (a trick). This is evidence against any direct descendance from Greek, because these elements in turn come directly from Proto-Indoeuropean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any etymology for Eleusis though. But the most likely explanation is a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T16:45:28.120" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T21:56:31.717" Score="-1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Cartesian space&quot; refers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coordinate system&lt;/a&gt; that is sometimes referred to as a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;map&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It is named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Descartes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanehile, the french word for &quot;map&quot; is &quot;carte.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any relationship? Or coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21083" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T11:55:46.920" Title="Is there an etymological relationship between Cartesian and words like carte?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-01-30T02:28:41.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T23:14:27.777" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know, most languages of the world are spoken orally. And there is a number of signed languages, mostly used by Deaf people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there any languages which use both modality at once ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages that require both gesture and sounds ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T23:14:27.777" Title="Are there &quot;mixed languages&quot; that are neither wholly oral or signed ?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T10:15:38.293" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, I am doing some research on indexicals, by which I mean words like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;here&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;now&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;today, tomorrow, yesterday&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;local&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;present, current&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ease of reference, let’s call these the ‘standard’ indexicals. The few languages with which I’m familiar contain (translations/equivalents of) the standard indexicals. However, I also know of a few non-standard indexicals. In particular, English has ‘yesteryear’, which is like ‘yesterday’ and denotes the previous year (or the past more generally). Similarly, some German dialects have ‘heuer’ (not be confused with ‘heute’), which means the current year; so, ‘heuer’ is to ‘year’ what ‘today’ is to ‘day’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is: does anybody know of any language that contains non-standard indexicals, like ‘yesteryear’ and ‘heuer’? Similarly, are there languages that lack one or more of the standard indexicals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, less urgent question: does anyone know a language that contains synonymous indexicals? E.g., German has both ‘jetzt’ and ‘nun’, both meaning ‘now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT in response to a comment by @Atamiri&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I called the indexicals on my list ‘standard’ because they exist in all the languages with which I’m familiar (again, that’s not many). More particularly, they exist there as &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; – at least according to one way of individuating words. (Focus on 'I', 'now', and 'here' if you don't think 'to-day' etc. can count as words.) By contrast, there’s no word for &lt;em&gt;heuer&lt;/em&gt; in English and we must use a compound (viz. ‘this (current) year’) to translate it. So, the kind of example I’m looking for goes a bit like this: there’s this language, Example-ese, and in Example-ese, there’s the indexical word ‘dexi’, and ‘dexi’ is roughly synonymous with ‘last month’ – but ‘de’ doesn’t mean ‘last’, and ‘xi’ doesn’t mean ‘month’. (Of course, 'dexi' doesn't have to mean 'last month' or 'next week' or anything temporal. I'd also be interested if there's an indexical (word) that denotes the speaker's birth place, say, or the person sitting opposite the speaker.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21085" LastEditorUserId="21085" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T00:34:41.350" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T15:27:15.717" Title="'Non-standard' indexicals" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27010" CreationDate="2018-01-27T11:50:42.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you say, “Cartesian” is from the Latinised form of the family name “Descartes”. This derives from the one-time place name “Les Cartes”. So “Descartes” means “from (the place called) Les Cartes”. However, I have not found any satisfactory explanation for this toponym. It could be from the plural of carte,  “playing card, map”, but this does not sound like a very plausible name for a village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, do you know if Descartes himself (writing of course in Latin) ever referred to the co-ordinate system as a “charta”? Maybe you would get a better answer in the “History of science and mathematics&quot; forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T11:55:46.920" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T11:55:46.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T13:03:00.587" Score="7" ViewCount="1663" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia says that Japanese katakana vowels “The gojūon inherits its vowel and consonant order from Sanskrit practice. “.   Could expert explains this in easy language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15612" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T15:21:03.400" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T14:14:09.090" Title="In what way is Japanese related to Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T14:30:07.750" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it is commonly said that what distinguishes the qualities of different vowels in a language are the frequencies of the first two or three peaks (formants) on a spectogram, so that one can plot all vowels in a two- or three-dimensional space with very little loss of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm a little surprised by this. Even if we barely perceive formants above F5 or so, why is it not the case that the relative intensities of different formants are perceptually important as well? E.g. instead of classifying vowels like &quot;F1 is around 720 Hz, F2 is around 1800 Hz,&quot; one could imagine classifying vowels like &quot;F1 is about 720, F2 is around 1800 Hz and has 60% of the intensity of F1, F3 is around 2500 Hz with 20% of the intensity of F1&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that as an empirical question, just writing down F1-F3 values is good enough to distinguish vowels in all (?) known languages, so I guess I'm looking for some perceptual or physiological reason why we don't need to do some kind of more complicated Fourier analysis that takes their relative intensities into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21087" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T17:44:12.560" Title="Why are vowels distinguishable merely by formant frequencies and not formant intensities?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-27T14:47:05.683" Score="5" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Armenian diminutive for personal names are formed by adding 'o' for some short part of the name (I'm intentionally not calling this short form &quot;root&quot; cause it's not necessarily a root), so some examples would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Արթուր → Արթո (Arthur → Artho)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Բաբկեն → Բաբո (Babken → Babo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Զավեն → Զավո  (Zaven → Zavo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Լուդվիգ → Լուդո (Ludwig → Ludo) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is the similar form of hypocorism &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocorism#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exists&lt;/a&gt; in Turkish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abdullah → Apo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;İbrahim → İbo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mehmet → Memo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Süleyman → Sülo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Muzaffer → Muzo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on. My question would be: regarding the fact that these two-languages co-existed for centuries in the same geographical area, which one influenced which one on this aspect. Or, may be, it's just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T15:09:27.427" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T15:09:27.427" Title="Similar diminutive name construction in Turkish and Armenian" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;armenian&gt;&lt;diminutive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27015" CreationDate="2018-01-27T15:38:25.430" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to the study of Buddhism and its scriptures in the source language (either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_Hybrid_Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pali&lt;/a&gt;) Japanese scholars were aware of the structure of the Indic scripts finally coming from the tradition of Sanskrit. When they created the Katakana they applied the ordering priciples of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari Script&lt;/a&gt; to it; the deviations (i.e., the ordering of the consonants s and h) can be explained by later sound shifts: The /h/ was a /p/ originally and developped via /ɸ/ to /h/, the /s/ was a /ts/ originally and thus closer to the Devanagari letter ca (च).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Incorporated information from the comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T10:11:28.183" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T10:11:28.183" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11287" CreationDate="2018-01-27T15:53:00.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Armenian. I'm failing to translate whole text, though it's not a dialect, on the contrary, it seems to me to be a literary language, quite standard, it's just that I'm failing to understand 10% (or to read, some letters are unclear) of words, but this is 100% Armenian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some words I understand but never heard in that form (like &quot;ջուրիկ խըմելու&quot;). Still, it's Armenian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="533" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T15:53:00.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1544" CreationDate="2018-01-27T16:33:09.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;User tchrist made an excellent point in a comment to an answer by Mark Beadles, which probably deserves to be expanded into a separate answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many spoken varieties of Spanish, (3) will never be naturally produced (though it will be understood). But there will be focal contrasts such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)' MARÍA lo compró.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3)' Lo compró MARÍA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) María está.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Está María.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that the focal contrast (2)'-(3)' and (4)-(5) is present in virtually all contemporary dialects of Spanish. Certainly it is in the dialect I am most familiar with: &quot;standard&quot; Colombian Spanish (i.e. the Bogotá dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To be clear, (4) would be the most natural default response (in Colombian Spanish) to a question, &quot;María está allí?&quot;, and (5) would be the default response to a question such as, &quot;Quién está allí?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21087" LastEditorUserId="21087" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T16:43:57.273" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T16:43:57.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27018" CreationDate="2018-01-27T17:44:12.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, they are, sort of, but not in English. The underlying reason is that formants are the result of filtering the glottal source wave to enhance resonant frequencies. There is no physical mechanism that adds amplitude to just F1. The general pattern of the glottal source wave is that most of the energy is at the fundamental, and amplitude decreases according to which harmonic you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that you can control the slope of the glottal source (make it flatter; make it fall more steeply), you can control the amplitude of an individual formant (though not to the point of making F3 much higher in amplitude compared to F1). A number of languages (e.g. Dinka, Hmong, Taa) employ a contrastive breathy phonation which has a rapidly falling amplitude in the glottal source wave. Thus, if you can control the source you can weakly control the amplitude of a formant. If you can speak Dinka, you can control the source (or you could just learn how, somewhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For amusement, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; synthesize complex waves from individual harmonic and unnaturally modify formant amplitudes (if you can synthezise a complex wave from harmonics), and check the perceptual effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T17:44:12.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27013" CreationDate="2018-01-28T13:51:17.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand the question correctly, then answer is yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;languages are not 1:1&lt;/strong&gt; and that includes function words.  That is why translation is hard and, in some cases, impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is no standard set of words that should be opaque single words, the modern English set is certainly not the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, my question is: does anybody know of any language that contains non-standard indexicals, like ‘yesteryear’ and ‘heuer’?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe, by providing two examples, you have answered this yourself.  In fact you have pointed out that the sets vary even between dialects of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of opaquely-formed or anyway single-word indexicals common to not very exotic languages for concepts which are hard to represent without analysable constructs in modern English: &lt;em&gt;like this, like that, the day before yesterday, the day after tomorrow, last night, you all, over there, of this, you (explicitly singular)...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your set of concepts is basically the English one, it will be hard to find these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor can we assume the reverse.  &lt;em&gt;here, there, today, tonight&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;this place, that place, this day, this night, this hour...&lt;/em&gt; in plenty of languages.  The English versions are not totally opaque either, &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt; are lexemes, it is obvious there was evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, English can express a concept in a single word, but not precisely.  For example &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; is very overloaded compared to any language known to me, except maybe English-based creoles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are concepts like the dual, we inclusive vs we exclusive, and different flavours of there (see &lt;em&gt;ahí, allá, aquí, acá&lt;/em&gt;), and pronouns for noun classes beyond m f n which are hard to express elegantly in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is not to show that English is deficient, but to show that the number of potential concepts is great, and every language is missing many if not most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also do not have a perfect definition of what a word is anyway.  The absence of a space is more of an orthographic convention.  You should look at language cycle theory and creolisation to understand how this works.  English and French alone provide plenty of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T17:23:31.850" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T17:23:31.850" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2018-01-28T15:15:20.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there are no writing systems nor languages which employ more than two cases (sets of aesthetically coherent unique forms of each letter) the use of which goes beyond style and even augmenting or clarifying meaning.  While some freedom of their usage exists, a set of formal rules prescribes certain obligatory usage scenarios which also carries syntactic and grammatically significant information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has generated an interesting thread with some insightful and interesting observations and perspectives.  A great deal of confusion and misunderstanding (or misinformation/ignorance) has also been revealed.&#xA;Most of this could have been avoided by a careful and thoughtful reading of the question.&#xA;The OP's misidentification and association of the Latin script with the English language gives implicit specifications of the type and scope of information solicited and expected.&#xA;That being: a system of letter/character cases whose usage has a linguistic and grammatical component which is not considered optional.  Another important aspect of cases is that they are complete sets of different forms of the same letters/characters (not glyph variants, contextual alternates, positional/decorative forms, or different characters of parallel/historic systems), and their distinction is recognizable to even someone unfamiliar with the script because of the shared characteristics of each case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For instance, even without knowing or being able to read Cyrillic or Armenian, I don't think anyone reading would have trouble picking out phrases, words or even individual capital letters from text of either script – even if we can't enumerate all the distinctions like a type designer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was quite surprised by the amount of discussion about features of writing not even closely related to cases.  But I was very pleased to learn of the origin of terns &quot;upper&quot; and &quot;lower&quot; cases!  In fact, in a sense – in the original sense of the common use terminology,  there are/were more than just two cases (storage containers)  for the Latin script; however, that does not apply to the originally asked question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are complementary sets of character forms representing the same set of phonetic elements which share aesthetic characteristics specific to each group, and they have interesting, distinct usage protocols as well which is required and not interchangeable; their shapes are not related or linked in any way which excludes them from being cases.&#xA;But each set does have two forms with similarities to our cases...  They have half and full width forms of each character some of which differ in their shapes in ways that is definitely parallel to how upper and lower case letters are related.  But this doesn't carry any of the information or meaning that the uses of capital letters impart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, most of the world's writing systems do not have cases, or any feature that resembles that feature.  Of course, many other writing writing systems are far more complicated &amp;amp; extensive that the Latin alphabet often requiring dozens or even hundreds of unique ligatures and various other contextual forms and for them to be represented/displayed in print or by computer software.  Many require specialized, complex rendering engines which must process and analyze the input information with intricate rules &amp;amp; algorithms which re-order and store the data internally in a particular, canonical abstract form which is distinct from the characters used to display or print it so that the text may be dynamically edited.&#xA;While our concept and use of letter cases has become an integral aspect of our written languages it is actually technically a superfluous and unnecessary convention which could be abandoned without losing or altering the underlying basic information stored, communicated or expressed in the text.&#xA;However, it is interesting to note that while most writing systems (present &amp;amp; past) are unicameral, but the systems which do – particularly the Latin alphabet – are used extensively around the world and have influenced developing scripts and have been adopted to encode numerous spoken languages which means that the majority of text (in printed, handwritten, inscripted/engraved, or in digital form) which exists in the world is encoded using one of the bicameral alphabets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17058" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T15:15:20.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26437" CreationDate="2018-01-29T02:35:35.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the Royal Spanish Academy does actually have an accepted term for words in Spanish whose stress falls &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the antepenult: &lt;em&gt;sobreesdrújulo&lt;/em&gt; (also sometimes spelled &lt;em&gt;sobresdrújulo&lt;/em&gt;) -- you can look it up in the RAE. If I understand correctly, this would even apply to words whose primary stress falls on the fifth-to-last syllable, such as &lt;em&gt;automáticamente&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though personally I'm not sure why you are so concerned with the existence or absence of officially-sanctioned terms to describe these things. Independently of whether the Royal Academy had deigned to list a term for these words in their dictionary, they would nevertheless exist, and reading the Academy's publications is one of the last methods I would recommend to anyone wishing to really study the grammar or phonology of the Spanish language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21087" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T02:35:35.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1544" CreationDate="2018-01-29T09:46:04.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native speaker of Spanish, I am Brazilian, but I speak Spanish as well. In my opinion, answer (2) would be the natural answer for (1), however (3) would be understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be the same in Portuguese:&#xA;(1)' Quem comprou o jornal?&#xA;(2)' MARIA comprou o jornal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentence (3)' would be odd.&#xA;(3)' Comprou o jornal MARIA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21096" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T09:46:04.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T14:58:52.747" Score="0" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure whether to post this here, or on mythology stack exchange. Since it deals with the origin of a word, I choose here. But if I am wrong, tell me and I will move it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The originally meaning of the word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.topix.com/forum/afam/TKOGRLKVQPTAPMJSC/original-meaning-of-virgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;virgin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; meant unmarried, one-in-herself, not belonging to a man-a woman.&#xA;The modern meaning means never experienced copulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I have read a Greek Myth that suggests both meanings were true. In short, the 50 daughters of one king was set to marry the 50 sons of another. In some way the kings were related(cousins/brothers). The father of the daughters was against it and ordered them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. The 50 couples married and 49 of the daughters obeyed their father and killed their partner. The one that didn't only did so because of her desire to remain a virgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I ask. She is married, therefore, not a virgin, in the original respect. Yet, she did not kill her husband out of his respect for her to remain a virgin, in the modern respect. Is is plausible that both definitions were true in ancient times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21060" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T13:34:15.873" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T13:34:15.873" Title="Is it possible that the word virgin originally had two meanings?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-29T15:09:33.330" Score="3" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strangely, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_flap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; doesn't contain any recording for it (usually it has a recording for each consonant or vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I'm &lt;strong&gt;a native Hebrew speaker&lt;/strong&gt; who's interested in pronunciation, especially American-English pronunciation (with focus on GenAm/Midwestern Accents) and Modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my decades of hearing Hebrew, I got into the conclusion that the Modern Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ר&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the Voiced uvular fricative([ʁ]) sound, but it actually has a vowel quality to it, like the English [ɹ ]. when pronounced &quot;correctly&quot; (or natively), the Resh has no &quot;friction&quot; sound, and it's very smooth, almost like a back-palatal vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone on the internet has suggested that Modern Hebrew ר is actually voiced uvular flap instead, and I would like to test it with some audio recording, to compare (my) Resh to this sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there an online recording of the sound voiced uvular flap open to the public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19889" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T08:11:13.783" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T08:11:13.783" Title="Any online recording of [ʀ̆]?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27051" CreationDate="2018-01-29T15:48:23.880" Score="-2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I just string a couple letters together, slap on a meaning and call it a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is their a process it has to go through to be considered a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do all new words need to be traced back to an existing word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21060" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T02:07:21.233" Title="Inventing a word?" Tags="&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6371" CreationDate="2018-01-30T01:23:35.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish doesn't follow it. Not even remotely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21104" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T01:23:35.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3600" CreationDate="2018-01-30T20:27:17.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to convert natural language into first-order logic using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_representation_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourse representation theory&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/race/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACE reasoner&lt;/a&gt; is an automated theorem prover that can convert English text into first-order logical predicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2465" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T20:27:17.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T21:53:52.557" Score="7" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the language only has 'two' prepositions (though there seems to be a some dispute to that). Regardless, the two prepositions 'long' and 'bilong' seem to be quite broad in definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do wonder though how this works in practice. Note that I've been having a hard time finding information about the language other than 'introductory' grammars. Like, has there been any major publications or translations in the language? Is the language so context sensitive that it doesn't work when written? Can you explain complex thoughts in it? Like, can you debate philosophy or science or what not. Does anyone speak nothing but Tok Pisin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because there's lots of auxlangs out there that try to be minimalistic, with some rediculing languages that have more than Tok Pisin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I know such a minimal list isn't always what it seems. Like Tagalog, which just marks everything on the verb. I think the Polynesian languages do this too to an extent. Essentially, the verb takes markings (well, I think the Polynesian languages use particles, but not like that's relevant) that give more precise meanings to the prepositions. For example, they only have one generic preposition for locations, they use affixes/particles to disambiguate whether the one locative preposition means 'in, on, outside of, etc...' But to my knowledge Tok Pisin doesn't do this. You just have to rely on context on common sense it seems to figure out the intended meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-01-31T01:23:01.883" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T11:43:41.847" Title="How does Tok Pisin get by with just a few prepositions?" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27040" CreationDate="2018-01-31T08:30:12.007" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Tok Pisin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Prepositions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikibook&lt;/a&gt;, Tok Pisin does have compound prepositions beyond the two &amp;quot;basic&amp;quot; prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two basic prepositions in Tok Pisin: bilong and long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bilong&lt;/strong&gt; is used for attribution. Examples: haus bilong mi, My home; Han bilong diwai, Arm of a tree; branch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; is used as a universal preposition for other meanings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there is one other self standing preposition: &lt;strong&gt;wantaim&lt;/strong&gt;, with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also all kinds of compound prepositions like &lt;strong&gt;ananit&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt;, under; &lt;strong&gt;insait&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt;, in; &lt;strong&gt;antap&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt;, on, above, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Tok Pisin does have more than two prepositions when there is a need to make a distinction between different ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a lack of prepositions doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to express complex philosophical ideas — it just means that the ideas are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; than what we're used to. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ugaritic&lt;/a&gt; doesn't distinguish between motion towards (&amp;quot;to&amp;quot;) and motion away (&amp;quot;from&amp;quot;), both being &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; /li/. But many cases in which it would be natural for an English speaker to say &amp;quot;to&amp;quot; use the preposition &amp;quot;with&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;‘m&lt;/em&gt; /ʕimma/). I don't speak Tok Pisin, but the case could be similar here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T08:30:12.007" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27040" CreationDate="2018-01-31T11:43:41.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the compounds as b_a explained, simple context will get you a long way.  Below I have rewritten Sylvia Plath's prepositions using only &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bilong&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grandfather and I had a standing joke. He was the head waiter bilong a country club bilong close my home town, and every Sunday my grandmother drove here long bring him home long his Monday off. My brother and I alternated going long, and my grandfather always served Sunday supper long my grandmother and whichever of us was there, long suppose we were regular club guests. He loved introducing me long special tidbits, and bilong age nine I had developed a passionate taste long cold vichyssoise and caviar and anchovy paste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The joke was that long my wedding my grandfather would see I had all the caviar I could eat. It was a joke because I never intended long marry, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn't have afforded enough caviar unless he robbed the country club kitchen and carried it away long a suitcase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T11:43:41.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27047" CreationDate="2018-01-31T16:24:54.393" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is it that in many or all Slavic languages e.g. the verbs “need” and “see” mark the direct object with genitive case, whereas the nouns “buy” and “eat” do so with accusative case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it related to the reason that the object of “do not have/see ....” requires a genitive noun  but the object of “have/see ....” requires an accusative one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there’s some explanation for this interplay between GEN and ACC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T22:34:21.397" Title="Why is it that direct object may be marked with either ACC or GEN case, depending on the verb in Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-31T17:08:28.693" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me quickly introduce myself to provide a context for my questions. My PhD research focuses on ways that we can teach primary school children (9-12) ways of handling complex, contradictory and uncertain environmental knowledge. One of the major cornerstones of my study is the need for the development of language awareness, especially of language of modality and ‘conditional language’ (stating things as a possibility, rather than as a fact). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding language of modality is am especially focused on the expression of &lt;strong&gt;certainty&lt;/strong&gt; of beliefs/knowledge and on expressing &lt;strong&gt;possibility&lt;/strong&gt;. Linguistic devices of interest are, for example, &lt;strong&gt;modal auxiliary verbs&lt;/strong&gt;,  &lt;strong&gt;modal adverbs&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;evidentials&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to connect research from e.g. the fields of psycholinguistics, child development, critical thinking and education. I have some questions about potential literature, that I hope you will be able to answer for me. I am interested in &lt;strong&gt;L1&lt;/strong&gt; language acquisition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you know who is &lt;strong&gt;currently&lt;/strong&gt; doing research into the &lt;strong&gt;development of the language of modality&lt;/strong&gt; in children? Most literature seems to be from the 70ties, 80ties and 90ties.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have suggestions for literature that deals with development of language of modality in &lt;strong&gt;children 8-12 years of age&lt;/strong&gt;? The literature that I was able to find seems to be focused mainly on children between approximately 3-8.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you aware of any literature that connects the development of modal language skills in children with ways in which &lt;strong&gt;education&lt;/strong&gt; could support this development?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you aware of any literature that connects the development and further refinement of &lt;strong&gt;modal language skills in adolescents (and adults)&lt;/strong&gt; and the problems found in the development of &lt;strong&gt;critical thinking skills&lt;/strong&gt;, such as the ability to assess the credibility of knowledge sources and the ability to evaluate the reliability of information?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21113" LastEditorUserId="21113" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T09:09:41.493" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T09:09:41.493" Title="Research on development of language of modality in children 8-12?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;modality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27045" CreationDate="2018-01-31T18:19:11.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You mix up two notions, subcategorisation and genitive objects. In the case of &quot;need&quot; etc. taking a genitive complement, it's just convention. In Slavic the genitive used to serve as a partitive so some verbs that frequently use partitive objects simply spread the use of the genitive to all objects. The fact that in some Slavic languages the direct object always is in the genitive case when the verb is negated has a similar reason--in the case of negation partitive or other reinforcing particles were often used, but it's a different phenomenon. You can see how the genitive works especially well in Russian where direct objects use the genitive or accusative depending on definiteness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW in which Slavic languages does the verb &quot;see&quot; take a genitive complement (if not negated)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T18:19:11.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T00:13:37.990" Score="1" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the extract below on a website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Dark L is the sound English speakers (the vast majority, anyway)&#xA;  make when an L follows a vowel, and it’s articulated in what we might&#xA;  call two ways at the same time:&#xA;  1. The tongue-tip presses against the alveolar ridge – some people even slide it onto the back of their teeth.&#xA;  2. Using the tip of the tongue for support, push the back of the tongue up, at the very back of the mouth, while voicing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to the above extract:&#xA;The order of dark-l articulation is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, the tongue tip rises to touch the alveolar ridge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then the back of the tongue raises. (Velarization)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it was the other way around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, the back of the tongue raises.(Velarization)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then the tip of the tongue rises to touch the alveolar ridge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T20:41:20.997" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:41:20.997" Title="What is the correct order of Dark L articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27048" CreationDate="2018-02-01T01:15:03.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation is more or less correct, as long as you are speaking of the initiation of those articulatory gestures and not their completion (the events are roughly simultaneous). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/featgeom/sproat-fujimura93-L.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sproat &amp;amp; Fujimura's study&lt;/a&gt; using x-ray microbeam tech found that dorsal retraction and lowering begins earlier in dark &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; compared to light &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;. The article has a number of informative details about how dark &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is actually produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T01:15:03.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27036" CreationDate="2018-02-01T02:07:21.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I just string a couple letters together, slap on a meaning and call it a word? Or is their a process it has to go through to be considered a word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all practical intents and purposes, yes you can — if the amount of people who'll be considering it a &quot;word&quot; is limited to just one (that is, you). If you make a word out of existing morphemes, that just haven't been arranged like so merely due to chance, but whose meaning is inferrable by natives, that's clearly permissible — and happens somewhat 'frequently' in scientific circles when new terminology is coined or introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do all new words need to be traced back to an existing word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, in essence, untenable — we know that there was a time &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; human language, and as such no word can truly be traced back to an infinite tree of descent. Now, more realistically what you're asking: no, words can be coined all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your coinage merely &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like a word, but has no inferrable meaning (such as 'stralts' in English), it is highly unlikely it will catch on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words do exist outside of dictionaries — but to get into them, they have to exist and be in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T02:07:21.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T03:54:00.617" Score="6" ViewCount="2757" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Is this the main difference between &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;L-vocalization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dark L&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vocalised L - The tip of the tongue DOES NOT touch the roof of the mouth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dark L - The tip of the tongue DOES touch the roof of the mouth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14426" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:25:37.357" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:53:54.033" Title="Dark L vs L Vocalisation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3843" CreationDate="2018-02-01T03:58:26.653" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greek words are also seen in the bible. Along with Latin phrases as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21117" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T03:58:26.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T14:47:24.407" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project where I have syntactic frames in the form of something like &quot;N.agent V PP.stimulus&quot;, where each PP consists of a P and a N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a set list of verbs, and a list of PPs for each tagged semantic category, but I'm finding that I can't indiscriminately combine a verb with any PP. For example, if I have the V &quot;marveled&quot;, I could say &quot;John marveled &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the canyon&quot;, but not &quot;John marveled &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; the canyon&quot;--but if I have V &quot;worried&quot;, I could say &quot;John worried &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; the canyon&quot;, but not &quot;John worried &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; the canyon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know about any corpuses that lists legal (or illegal) V-P pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21121" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T16:04:22.160" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T16:04:22.160" Title="Is there a phrasal verb corpus somewhere online?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27052" CreationDate="2018-02-01T15:18:50.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabic&lt;/a&gt; l (IPA [l̩]) is no different than the ordinary consonant [l] in place of articulation, but takes the place of a vowel in a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants#Velarized_alveolar_lateral_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dark l&lt;/a&gt; (IPA [ɫ]) is a velarized (or pharyngealized) form of the consonant [l], meaning that back of the tongue simultaneously articulates an [l] and is raised at the velum (or pharynx).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each can exist independently of each other. Neither has to do with whether the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth (which is the distinction between apical/laminal consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, every syllabic l is also a dark l (and could therefore be written [ɫ̩] in IPA), e.g. &amp;quot;apple&amp;quot; [æpɫ̩]. However, a dark non-syllabic l exists at the coda (end) of a syllable, as in &amp;quot;pool&amp;quot; [pu:ɫ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:53:54.033" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:53:54.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27052" CreationDate="2018-02-01T15:56:03.917" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an unfortunately confusing term &quot;L-vocalization&quot; which refers to the process where &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; becomes one of &lt;em&gt;w, u, o&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. in Serbo-Croatian final l → o. Some dialects of English have this process, so that &quot;milk&quot; is [mɪwk]. The essential difference between one of the vocoids &lt;em&gt;w, u, o&lt;/em&gt; and dark &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is tip raising, so yes to those two questions. However, &quot;vocalic&quot; can also used to describe syllabic consonants (this was common in older studies of Indo-European).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T15:56:03.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T15:56:36.013" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a mobile app to practice/teach IPA. The idea is you look at a word and then input the correct IPA.&#xA;I've used some dictionary APIs, but they either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't include the IPA&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it includes the IPA, it's not using American accent (Oxford API)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is super slow (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionaryapi.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dictionaryapi.com/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't use standard IPA. Instead of using 'ʊ' uses 'o͝o' . I've never even seen that before and doesn't work with the rest of my app (&lt;a href=&quot;http://developer.wordnik.com/docs.html#!/word/getTextPronunciations_get_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://developer.wordnik.com/docs.html#!/word/getTextPronunciations_get_5&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would rather just use a csv file of at least 1,000 words and store my dictionary locally.&#xA;Is there somewhere I can get a large list, or a file containing a bunch of words with IPA using American accent? Ideally, someone out there has a file on github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21123" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T00:36:39.370" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T00:36:39.370" Title="Looking for large word list file/db (&gt;1k) with IPA transcriptions" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27058" CreationDate="2018-02-01T18:33:32.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMU Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; is easily convertible if you are willing to do a tiny bit of programming. Each phoneme is surrounded by space and there's a pretty obvious mapping from e.g. &quot;AE&quot; is [æ], &quot;AH&quot; is [ə/ʌ], &quot;AY&quot; is [ai], the numbers indicate primary, secondary versus no stress. The advantage of this as a source is that (for English) there are very many ways to transcribe words ([e: ei ɛɪ ɛi ej ej] in &quot;save&quot;). If you want to write that vowel as [ei] then EY becomes [ei]. This is American English, not sure what dialect, but it records &quot;fortune&quot; with [tʃən] and &quot;tune&quot; with [tuwn], that is, it is not the &quot;tyune&quot; dialect. You could extract the most frequent 1000 or 5000 words (they do include a lot of non-English place and personal names).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T18:33:32.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27064" CreationDate="2018-02-01T23:32:28.143" Score="4" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I recall, we were taught in Latin that &quot;b&quot; was pronounced like &quot;v&quot;, but in class we always said &quot;b&quot; anyway. For example, &quot;liber&quot; was pronounced LEE-ber. Now, in Welsh the word for book is &quot;llyfr&quot; which is pronounced &quot;liffer&quot; and is the same word, so this would suggest that the ancient Romans pronounced liber the same way, liffer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that true, or was it pronounced libber or lee-ber? Or were different pronounciations used randomly by some Romans and not others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T00:36:27.263" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T00:07:40.180" Title="Was the Latin &quot;b&quot; pronounced like &quot;v&quot; in ancient times?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T06:27:57.403" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;A: Between vowels, /h/ may either be voiced [ɦ] or become inaudible or disappear often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: Intervocalically, it is realized as voiced [ɦ], and after voiced consonants it is either [ɦ] or silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some speakers articulate 기회, 생활, 사랑해요, 후회 as 기외, 생왈, 사랑애요, 후외. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What phonological rules are there behind all of these articulation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21124" LastEditorUserId="21124" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T15:40:38.917" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T12:48:57.940" Title="Explain ㅎ being silent in Korean language" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T07:17:53.010" Score="0" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I knew about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Major Mnemonic System&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;I thought: &quot;Are there the languages that have writing systems consisting only numbers?&quot;&#xA;Do they exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20965" LastEditorUserId="20965" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T16:27:38.873" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T17:33:01.277" Title="Are there the languages that have writing systems consisting only numbers?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-04T02:40:09.543" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27062" CreationDate="2018-02-02T08:24:57.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) The Major Mnemonic system isn't a language. It's just a coding system, but considering that to be a language, the binary codes fed to a computer is also a language and so on.&#xA;2) A language's purpose is to be able to convey thoughts. Thus such a language (which has just numbers) would only exist in a society where people just talk about numbers (which is obviously not possible) , not even mathematicians can talk just using numbers, because they have a &quot;human&quot; life to live which requires words/sounds to convey that meaning.&#xA;3) (a personal opinion) Number words came into a language , only after nouns or &quot;object&quot; words. One would have counted something only after she knew what is to be counted. Thus showing that other words &quot;needed&quot; to exist before numbers. And that the numbers aren't enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. this answer is to an older version of the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T16:34:00.063" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T16:34:00.063" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27060" CreationDate="2018-02-02T11:04:39.800" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin &quot;b&quot; apparently developed a pronunciation variant [β] (a voiced bilabial fricative or approximant) at some point that was used between vowels. Presumably there was a period when the shift from [b] to [β] in this context was incomplete. One piece of evidence for this shift is spelling confusion between &quot;u&quot; and &quot;b&quot; in some Latin texts, which is attested as far back as the first century AD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=iXMcGIIrp28C&amp;amp;pg=PA74&amp;amp;lpg=PA74&amp;amp;dq=Latin%20b%20lenition%20%CE%B2&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=yuyFE1yOKx&amp;amp;sig=aBo5szMsconPbjqLO57lpQtkF94&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjb1fnSi4fZAhXBslkKHXpYBNAQ6AEISDAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Latin%20b%20lenition%20%CE%B2&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lenition and phonemic contrast in Majorcan Catalan&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by José Ignacio Hualde, Marianna Nadeu &amp;amp; Miquel Simonet (in &lt;em&gt;Romance Linguistics 2009,&lt;/em&gt; edited by Sonia Colina, Antxon Olarrea and Ana Maria Carvalho), says that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whereas we cannot be sure when /b/ started to admit approximant realizations or even when these approximant realiations of intervocalic /b/ became the usual articulatory target, we know that /b/ merged with /w/ by the first century of our era. This is because around this time the graphemes B and V start getting confused (Allen 1978: 41). We also know that all Romance languages have merged the results of Classical Latin intervocalic -V- and -B- phonemes. The details of this evolution appear to have been the following. First, /b/ acquired approximant allophones in intervocalic position: [b] &gt; [β]/V_V, as in HABERE [abe:re] &gt; [aβe:re]. At this point, we would still have a contrast between /b/ and /w/, since HABERE [aβe:re] would contrast with LAVARE [lawa:re]. Then the contrast was lost, through another change affecting [w], which became labiodental, [w] &gt; [v], as in [lawa:re] &gt; [lava:re], thus reducing the distance between the two phonemes. A subsequent process was the merger between [β] and [v], which is found in all Romance languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 74)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what evidence the detailed description that  Hualde, Nadeu &amp;amp; Simonet give of the stages of the sound change is based on. Maybe someone else will be able to say more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other SE posts with relevant information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Linguistics SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/15702/how-did-the-letter-v-come-to-represent-the-voiced-labio-dental-fricative&quot;&gt;How did the letter “v” come to represent the voiced labio dental fricative?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment on the answer by Alex B. mentions &quot;the w ~ β merger in Vulgar Latin, which included w &gt; β and simultaneous b &gt; β (intervocalic position only) (Weiss 2009/2011, p. 512).&quot; This description seems to conflict with Hualde, Nadeu &amp;amp; Simonet's account of the development of Classical Latin [w] &gt; [v].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Latin SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/2353/when-did-consonantal-v-start-being-transcribed-as-%CE%B2&quot;&gt;When did consonantal “v” start being transcribed as “β”?&lt;/a&gt; [i.e. in Greek]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(apparently sometimes around the second or third century A.D)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/325/when-did-the-consonant-u-i-e-v-begin-to-be-pronounced-as-the-fricative-v-i/326#326&quot;&gt;When did the consonant U (i.e., V) begin to be pronounced as the fricative [v] instead of [w]?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(apparently, fricative pronunciations for original /w/ in Latin may have occurred as early as the 1st century AD, but the evidence for this is b/u confusion, so it could instead be taken as evidence for an approximant realization of b at this time)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh had its own intervocalic lenition processes, actually, so I don't know if the form of the Welsh word &lt;em&gt;llyfr&lt;/em&gt; tells us much about the pronunciation of the Latin source word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A nitpick on the side: As far as I know, the pronunciation of Welsh &quot;llyfr&quot; is not represented accurately by &quot;liffer&quot;, so I'm not sure why you suggest it is pronounced like that. The initial consonant is supposed to be a voiceless fricative [ɬ], and the middle consonant is supposed to be voiced [v]. In Welsh orthography, the single letter &quot;f&quot; represents the sound [v], while the voiceless fricative [f] is represented by the digraph &quot;ff&quot;. The traditional way of approximating the pronunciation of &quot;llyfr&quot; using English sounds would be something like &quot;thlivver&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reconstructed Latin pronunciation of &quot;liber&quot; meaning &quot;book&quot; could be written as [ˈliber], [ˈlɪbɛr] if we want to get more specific about vowel quality, and [ˈlɪβɛr] if we want to represent a pronunciation with lenition of intervocalic b. This is something like English &quot;libber&quot; or &quot;liver&quot; (the organ), if you want an approximate comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T00:07:40.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T00:07:40.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27052" CreationDate="2018-02-03T00:46:51.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;L-vocalisation&lt;/em&gt; is often far divorced from the term &lt;em&gt;dark L&lt;/em&gt;, in that they are two totally independent processes. Vocalisation of a consonant is its change into a vowel — any vowel. Aside from the typical English vocalisation of preconsonantal dark L to [u̯], many other avenues of vocalisation exist; Serbo-Croatian vocalisation makes it into a syllabic [o̞] (as has been mentioned), and Austro-Bavarian varieties typically vocalise their L into a high front [i], rather than a back vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, &lt;em&gt;L-vocalisation&lt;/em&gt; is a sound change, while &lt;em&gt;dark L&lt;/em&gt; is a term for a specific sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T00:46:51.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27079" CreationDate="2018-02-03T07:45:14.030" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following examples from different languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(en) The bridge has been built a &lt;strong&gt;couple&lt;/strong&gt; years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(de) Das Problem ist größer als vor ein &lt;strong&gt;paar&lt;/strong&gt; Jahren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pl) Poznaliśmy się &lt;strong&gt;parę&lt;/strong&gt; lat temu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(sv) Det tar ett &lt;strong&gt;par&lt;/strong&gt; veckor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and I am sure there are other examples too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the notion of pair/couple has become to mean more than two (I'd even argue in these sentences it would be a stretch to interpret it as &amp;quot;two or more&amp;quot;, to me it sounds clearly as &amp;quot;more than two&amp;quot;). At the same time - in other contexts, in the same languages - the word 'pair' or similar means exactly 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How come several languages ended up with such (same!) ambiguity?&#xA;Moreover affecting involving different stems (~pair, ~couple)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16719" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T16:11:12.073" Title="How has pair/couple ended up meaning both 2 and more in different languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27066" CreationDate="2018-02-03T12:35:16.130" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there is an advantage in ambiguity. &quot;Couple&quot; means &quot;about two&quot;, in the same way that &quot;dozen&quot; means &quot;about twelve&quot; and &quot;score&quot; means &quot;about twenty&quot;. By contrast &quot;two&quot;, &quot;twelve&quot; and &quot;twenty&quot; are exact quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T12:35:16.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27061" CreationDate="2018-02-03T12:48:57.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a very common phonological process - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assimilation&lt;/a&gt;, whereby one phoneme takes on properties of nearby phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the voiceless glottal fricative [h] takes on the property &quot;voiced&quot; from the vowels on both sides (or a preceding⟨ŋ⟩in words like 방학 [paŋɦak] to become the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the ㅎ ceases to be pronounced at all, it is a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elision&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10945" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T12:48:57.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27062" CreationDate="2018-02-03T14:49:28.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are using those terms a little loosely, and when you pin them down to the usual ideas they represent, that doesn't exactly make sense. But it does give a vague idea of what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language is a communication device and, especially here on linguistics.SE, one between humans to communicate ideas. Then there are recording devices, like writing or codes, that map one thing into another which has certain properties, such as permanence and replicability, like writing, or efficiency and organization, like codes (Morse code, ASCII code, ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human languages have many possible recording technologies, one of which is writing. Usually these are linear codes that capture the pronunciation or meaning step by step over the course of an utterance. Human language communicate many concepts including numbers. If you had a writing system, you could possibly have writing elements that capture numbers, a small set of the concepts a human language wants to get across, but most of the elements of writing would probably represent better most other non-numerical concepts (like 'dog' or 'truth').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many writing systems for human languages and the ways they represent numbers is sometimes by having separate symbols for the numbers (that's the modern way), but in the past it is often by using existing symbols for other words or letters. But there are &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; natural writing systems that have symbols for numbers that are reused to represent phonology or concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt; had no separate set of characters to represent numerals by themselves. It used the pronunciation letters, in its alphabetic ordering, to represent numerals as a secondary use. That is, alpha represented the digit that is written '1' in English, beta for '2', ... iota for '10' and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the basic Greek alphabet, used normally for pronunciation guide, could also be used for accounting/arithmetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is no natural writing system that starts off with numbers and these get reused for the rest of the natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T17:33:01.277" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T17:33:01.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-05T14:05:31.453" Score="2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those of you who deal with phonetics and phonology of English, and perhaps other languages as well, will surely have read John C. Wells’s article “Syllabification and allophony”, which you can find here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things that he discusses in the article that I do not understand. Perhaps you can help me sort them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the syllabification of words &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt;  and &lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt;. He states that &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt; is /ˈdɪs.trɪkt/ and &lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt; /ˈeks.trə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt; cannot be  */ˈdɪst.rɪkt/, because a syllable-final /t/ would be tappable and “glottallable”. However, it doesn’t brake any phonotactic constraints, does it? There are monosyllabic words that can both start and end the way both of those two syllables in this incorrectly syllabified &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt; do. So why does he state that rule (4) is the reason such a syllabification is wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if /tr/ is indivisible*, why is &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt; not */ˈdɪstr.ɪkt/? That would be the result of rule (2), correct? Is it because /t/ of /tr/ is aspirated, thus it must begin a syllable, and not end it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;district&lt;/em&gt; comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;dis-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stringō, stringere&lt;/em&gt;, from which of these two ⟨s⟩ is /s/ a remnant of and should that have any implications on Wellsean syllabification, i.e. could one posit a possible */ˈdɪ.strɪkt/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If /dr, tr/ are indivisible, why, then, do we have &lt;em&gt;Woodrow&lt;/em&gt; as /ˈwʊd.rəʊ/, &lt;em&gt;woodruff&lt;/em&gt; as /ˈwʊd.rʌf/, or &lt;em&gt;midriff&lt;/em&gt; as /ˈmɪd.rɪf/, but he allows for &lt;em&gt;bedroom&lt;/em&gt; to be /ˈbedr.ʊm/ (it can also be /ˈbedr.uːm/, /ˈbed.ruːm/, /ˈbed.rʊm/, according to his &lt;em&gt;Longman Pronunciation Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;)? Why hasn’t he allowed for the possibility of /ˈwʊdr.əʊ/, /ˈwʊdr.ʌf/, and /ˈmɪdr.ɪf/ in those entries respectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was also wondering why *extra is /ˈeks.trə/ (and where exactly has the syllabification of this word been widely discussed)? If /tr/ is indivisible and a stronger syllables glues onto itself as many phonemes as it can without breaking phonotactic constraints, and &lt;em&gt;petrol&lt;/em&gt; is /ˈpetr.əl/, why is &lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt; /ˈeks.trə/ and not */ˈekstr.ə/? Aspiration? Etymology? Both? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is the word &lt;em&gt;monstrous&lt;/em&gt; /ˈmɒns.trəs/. If this was ever **/ˈmɒnst‿&lt;em&gt;ə&lt;/em&gt;r.əs/, and if a stronger syllables attracts onto it as many phonemes as it can without breaking the phonotactic constraints, why does he syllabify it as /ˈmɒns.trəs/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, regarding /dr, tr/, what are those two? Are the phonemes, which I think they’re not, or something else? What is the succinct way that defines them? Are they consonantal clusters that sometimes coalesce into an affricate, making them an allophone not of a single phoneme, but of two when the two meet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Wellsean syllabification has exceptions, which, I believe, are often a result of how Wells himself feels a word is syllabified. The only one that comes to mind right now is the name &lt;em&gt;Sade&lt;/em&gt;, as in – the singer Sade, which is /ˈʃɑː.deɪ/, but there are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second matter regards Wells’s aforementioned &lt;em&gt;Longman Pronunciation Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;? Those of you who have it will known that when recapitulating syllables, he will use the symbols bullet ⟨•⟩ and ⟨-⟩ hyphen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does any one of you who regularly rifles through the dictionary know when does he use which?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume that the bullet, obviously, stands for one syllable, and the hyphen for two or more, but why does he sometimes omit the stress marks and sometimes includes them or why does he sometimes recapitulates the whole word with bullet symbols and stress marks when he can easily bundle several syllables into a hyphen without creating confusion? On the other hand, although one can say it’s glaringly obvious to which syllable the alternative pronunciation refers to, the entry &lt;em&gt;reexamine&lt;/em&gt; just uses hyphens and no bullet symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just when I start thinking I might have got it, another entry appears which demolishes my theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he also sometimes splits pronunciation with a semicolon. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor matters, I know, but it itches me to solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d also like to point out that I think he wrote somewhere that he was given limited space to explain certain matters and choices he made (probably on his blog somewhere), but I wish he expanded on them while he was writing the blog regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*It seems that /tr/ is sometimes /tr/ and sometime /t/ + /r/, but it’s not really explained when. I guess one has to use one’s own pronunciation as a guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T09:35:32.790" Title="Wellsean Syllabification and Recapitulation Symbols in the LPD" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27072" CreationDate="2018-02-05T15:25:07.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: ..surely have read John C. Wells’s article “Syllabification and allophony... no to both of the things, i am a high school student interested in linguistics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) since you labelled this question as phonotactics, each language has its own phonotactics, thus making some syllables feasible and pronouncable and &quot;seamless&quot; in that particular language thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) /ˈdɪst.rɪkt/ -&gt; you would have to literally pronounce it like two words ~seamless~&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) /ˈekstr.ə/ -&gt; &quot;kstr&quot; ~feasible~ in English , also American English generally allows a vowel-only-last-syllable when it is aspirated so even if &quot;ekstr&quot; was possible, it would have to end with &quot;əh&quot; (with that h flying above)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) A language should have syllables that exist or fit&#xA;phonology coszily&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)/'dɪstr.ɪkt/ -&gt; both syllables don't already exist in major dialects of English (by syllables I mean separate syllables independently, &lt;strong&gt;not like&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;distract&quot; also has the same string of characters so it should be right to separate distr)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) wood , mid, row and riff already exist as common words / prefixes (which I know is not the case here) and that's the point, it's (idk psychologically?) easier to break words into known parts rather than maintaining some rules. Take a non-existent word - Bigred , did you pronounce this like big-red in your mind? Why not bigr-ed (maybe that's right because of some rule which says gr is indivisible as it exists in grass , Groot and so on) but no big and red are &quot;easier&quot; to pronounce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) you can (mostly) only pronounce what the spelling says (it's stating the obvious) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) since monstrous is not monsterous it is pronounced as &#xA;ˈmɒns.trəs/ and not the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ˈdɪ.strɪkt/ (I am not really sure of, but I think two consonant clusters make it a really heavy syllable in English, but in other languages like Hindi you can actually pronounce it easily and it is a spoken variant around here in India)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, regarding /dr, tr/... (Those are too many linguistic terms hope the info above and people around here help)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Curly waves mean a cut through the word)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T15:25:07.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27072" CreationDate="2018-02-05T20:33:22.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partial answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As commenters and other answers have mentioned, morpheme boundaries may be important to the syllabification of a word. Wells's rules are not meant to apply to all words: the existence of exceptions is made clear in the Introduction (which refers to &quot;competing pronunciations that differ only in syllabification&quot; and &quot;morpheme boundaries ... that upset the implicitly expected syllabification&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If /dr, tr/ are indivisible, why, then, do we have Woodrow as /ˈwʊd.rəʊ/, woodruff as /ˈwʊd.rʌf/, or midriff as /ˈmɪd.rɪf/, but he allows for bedroom to be /ˈbedr.ʊm/ (it can also be /ˈbedr.uːm/, /ˈbed.ruːm/, /ˈbed.rʊm/, according to his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary)? Why hasn’t he allowed for the possibility of /ˈwʊdr.əʊ/, /ˈwʊdr.ʌf/, and /ˈmɪdr.ɪf/ in those entries respectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wells does not argue that the sequences /dr/ and /tr/ are indivisible. What he argues is that the &lt;strong&gt;presence of affrication&lt;/strong&gt; in /dr/ or /tr/ implies that there is not a syllable boundary between /d/ or /t/ and a following /r/. Whether /dr/ and /tr/ are pronounced with affrication cannot be deduced just from knowing the sequence of phonemes: it must be determined empirically by listening to how people pronounce them. Presumably, Wells did not include transcriptions like /ˈwʊdr.əʊ/, /ˈwʊdr.ʌf/, and /ˈmɪdr.ɪf/ for one or more of the following reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;he felt that he had not heard people pronounce these words these ways&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;he felt that these pronunciations were not common enough to be worth mentioning&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;he felt that these pronunciations were not standard enough to be worth mentioning&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;could one posit a possible */ˈdɪ.strɪkt/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wells would say that this violates, for no clear reason, a constraint against ending a stressed syllable in a short vowel. Compare the example mentioned in the section &quot;The phonotactic condition&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better is /ˈbet.ə/ rather than */ˈbe.tə/ not only because the /t/ triggers pre-fortis clipping and is tappable, but also because a syllable /ˈbe/ would not be phonotactically well-formed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how to answer your questions about words like &lt;em&gt;extra, district, monstrous&lt;/em&gt; because I've also wondered how to fit these in with Wells's idea that consonants are preferentially syllabified with the stronger adjacent syllable, and that /tr/ is a valid coda in words like &quot;petrol&quot;. Perhaps Wells would say that /tr/ and /dr/ can only be analyzed as codas when preceded by stressed vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T01:22:43.010" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T01:22:43.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T03:40:08.287" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this term in a text on the linguistics of legislation: Frederick Bowers &quot;Linguistic Aspects of Legislative Expression&quot;, chapter 2. I haven't found any definition or reference to it in other linguistic resources such as dictionaries or encyclopedias. Could someone enlighten me ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14497" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T03:40:08.287" Title="What does &quot;associational meaning&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15447" CreationDate="2018-02-06T05:09:47.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I grew up around Boston, Ma and I would always pronounce the th in thanks and thank you as voiced never voiceless.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21144" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T05:09:47.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12323" CreationDate="2018-02-06T07:53:15.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sketchengine.co.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sketch Engine&lt;/a&gt;, a corpus manager and text analysis software, provides a few corpora with open access for research on &lt;a href=&quot;https://app.sketchengine.eu/#open&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://app.sketchengine.eu/#open&lt;/a&gt; The largest English corpus (freely available) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/acl-anthology-reference-corpus-arc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACL Anthology Reference Corpus&lt;/a&gt; with 62 million words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you can try 30-day free trial of Sketch Engine and search one of the biggest English corpus which currently exists with over 35  billion words, see more at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.eu/timestamped-english-corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sketchengine.eu/timestamped-english-corpus/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastEditorUserId="21145" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T13:38:47.517" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T13:38:47.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27066" CreationDate="2018-02-06T16:11:12.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a lexical gap, also borderline case of an accidental semantic gap (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap#Semantic_gaps&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap#Semantic_gaps&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, there is a concept that is missing a word from the lexicon. Therefore the next best thing that is available, its immediate neighbour pours into that space and integrates its meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, on an imaginary scale, this would be along the lines of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;plenty &amp;gt; many &amp;gt; numerous &amp;gt; several &amp;gt; a few &amp;gt; more than two but not quite so many that we could call them a few or several &amp;gt; couple / pair (as in exactly two) &amp;gt; one / single&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, few and a couple overlap and allow for a choice in everyone's personal dictionary. So this has nothing to do with stems, it is based purely in semantics. Also exists in, say Hungarian, where the word &lt;code&gt;pár&lt;/code&gt; has the same exact connotation meaning a couple (male and female of the same species) and also a few, more than two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13761" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T16:11:12.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T17:12:06.063" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble with a particular x bar tree. We're mostly using Liliane Haegeman &amp;amp; Jacqueline Guéron's &quot;English Grammar – A Generative Perspective&quot; as our bible, with some adjustments, e.g. DP's instead of naked NP's. I could really use a fresh pair of eyes, and I hope this is the place to find them. Would you generate the tree differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaWMq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaWMq.png&quot; alt=&quot;x bar tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21152" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:12:06.063" Title="X-bar tree of the sentence &quot;Why would she not have actually been giving him back the present yesterday?&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27082" CreationDate="2018-02-06T20:34:18.793" Score="0" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does modern Greek use initials and/or initialisms? Like similarly to how we might call John Kennedy John F. Kennedy or JFK, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation the FBI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21155" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:54:21.997" Title="Initials in Greek" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27081" CreationDate="2018-02-06T22:40:03.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. See this picture of the signature of Nikos Kazantzakis (Νίκος Καζαντζάκης) from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6fKov.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6fKov.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis#/media/File:Nikos-kazantzakis-signature.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis#/media/File:Nikos-kazantzakis-signature.svg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T23:07:46.037" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T23:07:46.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27085" CreationDate="2018-02-07T10:20:30.100" Score="3" ViewCount="6076" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This is not a question about software or tools. Please don't comment if you think that's what I'm asking about.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parsing Unicode-encoded text is a major pain for a software developer, so I thought there must be a better way and quickly came up with an extensible way to do it without &lt;em&gt;too much&lt;/em&gt; overhead (no analysis done yet). The scheme depends on no script having more than 127 characters -- without distinction between upper and lower case characters or any special graphical representation of the same basic character (i.e. all of the different ways to write a character based on context, counts as one character).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there any scripts which have more than 127 characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21157" LastEditorUserId="21157" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T13:51:28.127" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T13:51:28.127" Title="Are there any scripts which have more than 127 characters?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="24" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T10:25:20.567" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m sometimes confused about representations of speech sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if I know a spectrum is 2D and a spectrogram is 3D, and the axes are different, I often struggle to figure our what I’m looking at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’d be great to find a couple images e.g. of CV  syllables or even just phonemes as a  spectrum and spectrogram, to better understand in my own mind how they are different and could be “read”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe some of you guys know of some good pointers or instructive examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T10:25:20.567" Title="Is there an instructive image where I can see a spectrum and a spectrogram, side-by-side?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27083" CreationDate="2018-02-07T10:40:56.090" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most famous is of course the Chinese script with several thousand characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Unicode purposes, Korean also has a lot of characters, because Unicode encodes Korean syllables as one character (and not just the hangul alphabet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the Latin script has surpassed the limit of 127 characters because there are many accented letters (like ä, é, ô, etc.) encoded as single characters, not to mention all those odd additions to the Latin alphabet used for languages where the usual character set wasn't sufficient (e.g. Icelandic Edh and Thorn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T10:40:56.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27083" CreationDate="2018-02-07T11:17:04.470" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese, Japanese, Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, the list is endless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T11:17:04.470" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8436" CreationDate="2018-02-07T14:05:42.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Atypically for a sign language, many JSL morphemes are derived in some way from the writing of the society's spoken language (I could suggest that's because Japanese has quite an unusual way of writing, but that's by the by). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example 井戸, which means a well (where water is drawn from under the ground) is signed by holding the index finger and middle finger of both hands crossed so that the fingers resemble 井. Similarly, the word ルール (which means a rule), is signed by its striking appearance, with each hand fingerspelling (and also resembling) a ル.  Another example is the syllable へ which is signed with the thumb and pinkie extended, and hand pointed downward, as though to suggest the shape of the letter へ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the JSL Latin manual signs seem to be derived in the same way from the Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the JSL Latin manual alphabet does not seem to have been imported or exported, or else we would see something similar in neighbouring countries, for example Taiwan or Korea (which each have related sign languages) or USA, from which JSL borrows quite heavily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two things lead me to conjecture that the JSL Latin manual alphabet was innovated in Japan sometime before the ASL manual fingerspelling alphabet was introduced. Unfortunately, JSL history is quite scantily documented, so that it's hard to find any sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T13:36:59.970" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T13:36:59.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27083" CreationDate="2018-02-07T15:53:10.167" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an alphabet used for a single language, Vietnamese has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;29 letters (including the vowels without tone marks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;12 vowels can accept 5 tone marks each&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All these of course in upper and lower case&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a total of &lt;strong&gt;178 letters&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Windows-1258 codepage solves this by implementing the tone marks as combining characters only (except for some of the composed caracters that already existed in Latin-1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For VISCII, the entire upper half is filled with 128 letters, along with six more that replace C0 control characters (a total of 186 letters are encoded, the 178 mentioned, plus the basic ASCII letters &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; used for Vietnamese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T15:53:10.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27083" CreationDate="2018-02-07T19:44:17.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tamil&lt;/a&gt; is another example; there are 12 vowels and 18 consonants, plus one special character, so the alphabet has 31 (12+18+1) independent letters and 216 (12 * 16) combined letters (consonant + a vowel mark) for a total of 247 letters. The Wikipedia page link has the Unicode tables for the characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10529" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T19:44:17.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27098" CreationDate="2018-02-08T10:49:06.343" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently realized that English has no inflected future tense. I would like to study a language that has an inflected future tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What options are available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21170" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T13:43:07.183" Title="What are some languages with inflected future tense?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9106" CreationDate="2018-02-08T11:54:19.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do you need to download such corpus? The corpus managers enable you to search for these corpora better than to work with them on your own computers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see dozens of corpora in Sketch Engine which some of them are freely available, e.g. 62-million-word English corpus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/acl-anthology-reference-corpus-arc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ACL Anthology Reference Corpus (ARC)&lt;/a&gt; available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further corpora are accessible with free 30-day trial account, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/historical-collection-eebo-ecco-evans/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EEBO corpus&lt;/a&gt; (English from the 15th to the 19th century), 18-billion-word &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/timestamped-english-corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timestamped English corpus&lt;/a&gt; and also next &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/jozef-stefan-institute-newsfeed-corpus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 languages&lt;/a&gt; (2014-2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/bigger-and-up-to-date-timestamped-jsi-web-corpora/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timestamped corpora&lt;/a&gt; with every day updated data are accessible with paid subscriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastEditorUserId="21145" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T12:19:06.043" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T12:19:06.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14926" CreationDate="2018-02-08T11:59:13.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open American National Corpus&lt;/a&gt; with free online n-grams search engine or download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T11:59:13.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14982" CreationDate="2018-02-08T12:15:20.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See a list of Korean corpora available in Sketch Engine at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/user-guide/user-manual/corpora/by-language/korean-text-corpora/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/user-guide/user-manual/corpora/by-language/korean-text-corpora/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them are accessible with 30-day free trial account on Sketch Engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T12:15:20.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18890" CreationDate="2018-02-08T12:22:18.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a manner of speaking, a corpus annotator can be a programme, called lemmatizer or PoS tagger which tag text corpora automatically based on trained data which were tagged manually by people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T12:22:18.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27092" CreationDate="2018-02-08T13:43:07.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty to choose from!&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/67A#2/25.5/148.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Just take a look at this map.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few examples from that page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Banjalang (also known as Bundjalung, and several other spellings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zulu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T13:43:07.183" CommentCount="9" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-02-08T15:52:20.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T16:07:51.773" Score="-1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the modern English discourse there are a lot of dualistic distinctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An object is either located on the right or the left. That dualistic conception then gets translated into a lot of other realms.&#xA;It would be possible to have trialistic distinction of direction and have words for 60 degree, 180 degree and 300 degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An object is either hot or cold, we distinguish casually between physical and mental phenomena. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a language that uses trialistic distinctions a lot more than English and other European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:28:01.430" Title="Is there a language that's as trialistic as English is dualistic?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27100" CreationDate="2018-02-08T16:28:01.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has two-way distinctions, as you say. The examples you gave are more or less universal as far as I can tell, but some others aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, English has &quot;here&quot; (that means &quot;close to me&quot;) and &quot;there&quot; (that roughly means &quot;not close to me&quot;). It's a two-way distinction. Japanese has a three-way distinction &quot;koko&quot; (close to me), &quot;soko&quot; (a little way off, or close to you), and &quot;asoko&quot; (a long way off, or neither close to me nor close to you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you're after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T16:28:01.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26881" CreationDate="2018-02-08T22:14:41.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Decades ago, another student of the Spanish language and I were taken by a newspaper clipping on a bulletin board in a building on the Ohio State campus where staff conducted many foreign language classes. The clipping announced, &quot;Menéndez Pidal deja de existir.&quot; To me this phraseology hints at a negation of action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21182" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T22:14:41.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2541" CreationDate="2018-02-09T14:13:40.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give your question a go. First, in some cases, dialects and languages are for all intents and purposes the same. That does not mean in all cases, but in rare cases, they can be as different as either one is from another dialect or language. What distinguishes a language from a dialect in such cases is the cradle that embraces that language or dialect, made up of or lacking a military, a country, a poplulation, a history, a heritage; official recognition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it's even more complicated depending on the theories of linguistics embraced or appealed to if to argue either or. For example, for some people, and indeed many, Chinese is a language. Point blank: it is its own language. It's not a dialect, it's not a family of languages, it is simply a langauge. Period. And in Chinese, there are several dialects, two of which are of course very well-known. Other people will argue, however, that no, this is wrong: that Cantonese is its own language, just as Mandarin is. And, from there, things start to get messy. I personally am of the view that Chinese is a language, and the latter, varieties or dialects therein. At any rate, for them to become a language, or for some language like Portuguese or Spanish or so forth to become languages, the factors I think are more relative to the period in which the languages came to be and what happened and in some cases has happened within and outside those languages (sciences, philosophies, etc) along the way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you might compare it to countries. When does a country become a country? Well, if you ask someone from Tawain if they have their own country, you can imagine that they will tell you that they do. They'll even give you all kinds of justifications: their own passport, their own government, military, etc. Embassies even. But if you look up the UN's list of countries, or that of the Department of Defense, you'll not see it listed as a country. So is it a country? Well, what makes a country a country is such that Tawain is about as close as you can get to a country without being officially recognized as such for political reasons. Languages are very much like this. There are all kinds of external factors that come into play when thinking of such in terms of language versus mere variety or dialect. It is not enough that internally the population should vie for such a status. For example, The Ivory Coast recently declared that it wishes to be called Côte D'ivoire, retaining its French identity. Or, for example, many people outside of Iran erroneously call Persian Farsi without knowing that Farsi is actually a transliteration of Arabic because Arabic doesn't have the P sound in its language, meaning that Farsi actually comes from Parsi, both of which are endonyms (or languag/place names) within the Persian language itself, the root of which is now used within the language to distinguish between the two dialects of Persian between Iran and Afghanistan but that nonetheless gave us the word in English that we already have to begin with: Persian. All too often people hear a country or place or language as pronounced or said in the original language and think that they have to say it in such a way if to say it correctly, but this is wrong. Farsi and Côte d'Ivoire are no exception. At any rate, as you can see, internal and external influences play a critical role in the determining of the status of a language. The rest of the world has to agree and for a long enough time, even if ultimately the status is merely a putative one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short, even ignoring all the unstated factors for what makes a language an actual language versus something else, outside factors would seem to complicate the definition to so great a degree that trying to model language on a time line in the way that you ask could only best be done hypothetically such that through estimates from a couple hundred years, or in the longest cases, thousands, where given factors typically present in official languages could be observed and potentially later fade away or die out immediately, one could argue through induction that any given language could occur. In the minimal amount of time possible, like empires or rapid migrations or expansions etc, one might conclude that although considered a language locally or in surrounding regions, or even more broadly yet still hypothetically, only temporarily so, prior to dying or being overtaken, etc. In short, I don't think that 200 years is impossible depending on the initial sociolinguistic conditions, but I think that would likely be the absolute best-case scenario, where the only hurdle the protolanguage or dialect might be thought to have to overcome be something like state formation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21190" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T14:13:40.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T15:32:31.813" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ask the question here and not in world formation because as an aspiring author I know that linguistics and other such specialists in the study of language &#xA;treat the notion of language in a very particular way, such that defining a language in a formal sense and according to given criteria is much more delicate in some cases than it might first seem, and certainly so when to those outside the discipline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my question, I mean to highlight the fact that our human languages have patterns, such as individual words, or morphemes and, of course sounds or phonemes, etc. There are also rules, commonly enough, that regulate how those items are to be used alongside one another, and still other common features such as tense, aspect, mode, case, gender, and so forth. Hence, when I highlight the fact that our human languages have patterns, I do so knowing full well that such is not necessarily the same at all should it evolve in a different kind of intelligence but that plausibly so, it could at least be entertained that such languages have certain patterns before others or certain more advanced patterns therein, necessarily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ethologists might tell us a great deal about the communication of elephants or whales or dolphins or monkeys or even dogs and cats that would seem to lend credibility to the notion that languages might well develop along very different principles that we could nonetheless understand analytically how ever unintelligible they may otherwise be to us. Of course, I agree right off the bat that a given alien language would be totally hypothetical, but I don't ask for an exhaustive description of any one alien language, much less an entire list of them, since of course it's just speculation. I only mean to ask what your personal take may be regarding potential linguistic patterns that might seem useless for us, or that were once common in certain languages but have since died, or that are used in computers but not human languages; or still in other systems, as it were. In the same way that we know that if an intelligent* life form is to exist and to succeed as a species, being ambulatory or having hands or eyes will typically ensure their longterm survival versus having no hands, no feet, and no capacity to fly or swim, likewise we can speculate that certain features of language may be present where others would be less likely or would necessitate certain kinds of intelligence, physiology, society, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps an advanced (alien) intelligence could well develop a language, as is often our means of distinguishing our intelligence from that of animals, but incorporate different aspects of reality that aren't necessarily present or that are not emphasized in many successful human languages today. So, what could such a principle like tense or aspect or case be that is not at once present in any human language that, at the same time, merits inclusion because of its possible or probable linguistic utility for that species? Of course, you may not know every single human language and every one of its patterns, that is true. An accomplishment that would be! But you nonetheless know tense and gender, suffixes and sentences; and how successful these patterns are across all or most all (modern) human languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that if I put myself in your place, I imagine that some of you will want to deflect my question, since unless we know the physiology of the alien intelligence, there is little in the way of speculation that can be supported since whatever the assumed language, we have no way of knowing if it operates through sound, signs only, or still some other medium or media. This would be true and a good point on your part, so to it I'll respond that the language have enough communicative and used signs or symbols to be compared to a system so vast and so developed that were it to occur in our case, it would be considered a language or near language. I might even say that so long as it can be shared and used as a means to communicate among hundreds or thousands or better, millions of intelligent life forms, then to me that qualifies as a candidate of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that still leaves open the notion of mere visual signs that might be communicated through body language, or a phonology so many times removed from our own that no visual representation need ever occur. The phonetics might be so many times different that only by calling it language could it be considered such. I agree, again, that these are indeed possible. I only seek to know what some principle patterns might be; the kinds of language that could (possibly) evolve, in your mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you have to offer if you were to answer that maybe an alien language would operate in such and such a way? Maybe if there were lots of little clicks, the clicks would be distinguishable because... Or maybe if there were lots of signs, the signs would be read and gestured rather than spoken because... Or maybe any such languages would never be able to advance very far because without other media, they would lack critical aspects of linguistic depth, utility, recognition, and the cognitive conveniences that we might not immediately consider when pondering the question, etc. For example, how far could sign language go... for billions of people? Could billions of people communicate with sign language only, or through sound only? Clearly accent and no spelling or written system would very much complicate if not impair the higher reaches of thought, such as jurisprudence, mathematics, philosophy, and so forth: and so essentially, for language to be advanced, mustn't it be visual? Patterns!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that my question leaves a lot to be desired, but please give it a go. Maybe some really interesting ideas will come out of your answer that other people would never have considered and will find really, really interesting! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Intelligence here being literal and used in the connotatively standard sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21190" LastEditorUserId="21190" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T15:43:33.090" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T16:48:59.723" Title="What are some plausible patterns that could develop in alien languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-02-09T22:52:55.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27113" CreationDate="2018-02-09T16:28:01.333" Score="0" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was checking family records and found out that a great grandfather married a Musa. I know that Musa is a male name but the records are kept in Turkish although the great grandparents were of Bosniak origin (Montenegro), so there is a high possibility that the registry person recorded the name in a Turkified form or made a typo when they arrived in Anatolia (still Musa doesn't make sense as it is the equivalent of Moses in Turkish). The closest I came is that Musa might be Mojca, a hypocorism of Maria (or Miriam as she was likely a Muslim). Still no clue, I don't know Serbo-Croatian. What can that name in original be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17068" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T21:49:20.013" Title="Is Musa a Montenegrin Muslim female name?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27106" CreationDate="2018-02-09T16:48:59.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are infinitely many answers to the question, none of them right or wrong, just maybe more popular vs. less popular. You might start by looking at actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_language_in_science_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alien languages in the literature&lt;/a&gt;, such as The Hero's Tongue, the fart language of the Yherjak, smoke signal language, whatever that is that the Buggers transmit, or the metaphor language of the Tamarians (&quot;Dharma and Greg at the beach!!&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, authors focus on the &quot;phonology&quot; i.e. the means of transmission, such as sound, smell, something tactile, and direct mind implanting. You obviously have to tailor the mode of transmission to the physiology (is any) of the beings, so a language with lots of clicks is not very likely for pure energy beings. This may explain why the guy from Vhoorl is called [kʟ̝̊ʊlʔ.ɬuː] – he is a slave to his octopus-dragon physiology. Often, authors leave the audience wondering how a civilization whose language is just short bursts of &quot;ack&quot; and &quot;rack&quot; could fly to Earth and take over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very little attention is paid to structural details, and usually alien languages are portrayed as being infinitely logical and compact, or infinitely complicated and nuanced. It is likely that many of these languages are preloaded so no learning is required. To design an alien &quot;language&quot;, you have first decide what kind of beings these are, and what the &quot;language&quot; is for. For example, maybe these beasts automatically turn colors in response to their emotional state, and use sine waves to convey propositional content. That would affect their sound-based system. We have to decide if the creatures have free will, or not. If they do, can they lie? Do they use shorthand abbreviations like &quot;dog&quot;, or do they use longer descriptions like &quot;being with four legs and fur, which likes to chase the smaller beings with four legs, fur, and needle-like claws&quot;? The possibilities are infinite.&#xA;And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T16:48:59.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2541" CreationDate="2018-02-09T16:58:44.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the fastest documented language forks is the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afrikaans&lt;/a&gt;: Systematic Dutch colonisation of South Africa started around 1679, and already 100 years later Afrikaans has developed enough to be considered a distinct language from standard Dutch. Standard Dutch remained the medium of writing for another 100 years, and it took until 1925 for official recognition as a national language of South Africa (replacing Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T16:58:44.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T19:26:16.800" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: &quot;aggressive recruitment&quot;, &quot;aggressive cleaning&quot; or &quot;more aggressive guidelines&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21192" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T04:18:05.910" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T21:31:11.880" Title="Is there a formal term for when a word begins to be used in a broader sense than the original sense?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27107" CreationDate="2018-02-09T21:49:20.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Ukrainian and my grandmother's name was &lt;em&gt;Марія&lt;/em&gt; - Maria, and the endearment form of it everybody used was &lt;em&gt;Муся&lt;/em&gt; [ˈmusʲa]. That can well be the case with your grandmother, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T21:49:20.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27116" CreationDate="2018-02-10T09:56:59.640" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some doubts if there is downward entailing environment with &quot;remember&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Mary forgot that she saw anyone.&#xA;b. Mary forgot that anyone saw her.&#xA;c. #Mary &lt;strong&gt;remembered&lt;/strong&gt; that she saw anyone.&#xA;d. #May &lt;strong&gt;remembered&lt;/strong&gt; that anyone saw her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see that &lt;em&gt;forget&lt;/em&gt; licenses the NPI anyone, in a test I realized that &lt;em&gt;forget&lt;/em&gt; is downward entailing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NP: Mary forgot that French students saw her -&gt; Mary forgot that tall French students saw her // VP: Mary forgot that she saw French students -&gt; Mary forgot that she saw tall French students)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have the case that &lt;em&gt;remember&lt;/em&gt; behaves as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NP: Mary remembers that her parents had Italian Food -&gt; Mary remembers that her mother had Italian Food. (downward entailing)&#xA;VP: Mary remembers that she had Italian Food - Mary remembers that she had Pizza (&lt;strong&gt;Not&lt;/strong&gt; downward entailing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Remember&lt;/em&gt; thus creates a downward entailing environment (in my opinion) yet this contradicts the hypothesis that this kind of word licenses NPIs (negative polarity items). But as we see above, the phrases with remember + anyone are ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Is the hypothesis or my assumption wrong then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you a lot!&#xA;Best,&#xA;Paul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20944" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T13:29:03.223" Title="Downward entailing verbs: is the verb &quot;remember&quot; downward entailing?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27115" CreationDate="2018-02-10T10:38:12.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &quot;remember&quot; is downward entailing. &quot;Forget&quot; licenses the negative polarity item &quot;anyone&quot; because &quot;forget&quot; is negative, not because it is or is not downward entailing. If you forget about something, you do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; remember it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I think the usual term for what you call &quot;downward entailing&quot; is &quot;factive&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T10:54:28.110" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T10:54:28.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27111" CreationDate="2018-02-10T11:24:48.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by @guifa, a commonly used term is &lt;strong&gt;semantic widening&lt;/strong&gt; (as opposed to &lt;strong&gt;narrowing&lt;/strong&gt;), dating to Arsène Darmesteter (1887) at least and also used by Leonardo Bloomfield, Stephen Ullman and many others.  An equivalent term is &lt;strong&gt;generalization&lt;/strong&gt; (as opposed to &lt;strong&gt;specialization&lt;/strong&gt;), used by Paul Hermann (1880) and also by Bréal, Blank and many others.  Depending on the specific semantic theory, these technical terms may be given more specialized or narrower (&lt;em&gt;wink&lt;/em&gt;) meanings.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; has more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T20:59:26.793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T20:59:26.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27115" CreationDate="2018-02-10T13:29:03.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NP: Mary remembers that her parents had Italian Food -&gt; Mary remembers that her mother had Italian Food. (downward entailing) VP: Mary remembers that she had Italian Food - Mary remembers that she had Pizza (Not downward entailing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your tests for downward entailing can't both be correct. &quot;Her parents had Italian food&quot; implies that her mother had Italian food. However, the implication in your other example goes the other way: &quot;Mary had pizza&quot; implies that Mary had Italian food, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T13:29:03.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2018-02-10T20:44:32.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pulmonic-ingressive voiceless bidenti-alveolar lateral fricative would be my guess. I notice that I produce this sound with my jaw shut and my teeth clamped together, so the frication is at least partially bidental (hence the nonce designation &quot;bidenti-alveolar,&quot; modeled after the accepted &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denti-alveolar_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;denti-alveolar&lt;/a&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can narrowly transcribe this phone as [h̪͆͡ɬ↓]. (If you can't read that, it's supposed to represent a coarticulated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bidental_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voiceless bidental fricative&lt;/a&gt; and voiceless alveolar lateral fricative with ingressive airstream.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only source I can offer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/tag/pulmonic-ingressive-voiceless-lateral-fricative/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a very informal video&lt;/a&gt; from somebody with an MA in linguistics, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21200" LastEditorUserId="21200" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T20:52:48.917" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T20:52:48.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-11T02:33:23.803" Score="4" ViewCount="920" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that languages with the same word order often have similarities, even if they're not related, purely because some grammatical features will force a language to use others. For instance, if a language doesn't indicate case, it'll be forced into a verb-medial order (SVO or OVS) to differentiate subject from object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm finding annoying is I can't find anything like this for verb-final languages. The only other language I know to any extent is German. I have tried to learn Japanese in the past, and more recently Korean, but I never got that far with either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find it annoying that you can't just find lists of grammatical features languages can have. Everything I can find just goes into excessive detail about one specific language rather than giving a general overview of languages that fall into specific categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese is pro-drop, and its common to leave out most noun phrases. Japanese tend to just leave it to the listener to fill in the gaps. That doesn't mean they never specify subjects and objects, they just don't bother to repeat them once they're introduced. And of course Japanese is topic-prominent, so its normal to assume that every sentence has the same topic until another is specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are all SOV languages like this? Personally, I find it annoying that you have to work your way through all the noun phrases before you get to the verb, which does most of the work in determining the role of everything in the sentence really; i.e. you can't figure out what happened to the direct object until you get to the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only 'universals' I know of is they tend to be head-final and post-positional. That's it. Like I said, I don't know one myself to any degree (and yes, I know German sometimes uses SOV, but its primarily SVO, well unless maybe you count sentences with auxiliary verbs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T04:43:31.823" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T12:18:37.933" Title="What grammatical features do SOV languages often share?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;sov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9531" CreationDate="2018-02-11T07:41:32.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few tools which can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;Tregex mentioned by Jon Gauthier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a few others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PML-TQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pmltq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pmltq/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tundra &lt;a href=&quot;https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/tundra-beta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/tundra-beta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iness search&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among them, I know Tundra best since I used to work in the group who created it.&#xA;Tundra has a very nice UI based on bootstrap, as well as a cool tree visualizer based on D3.&#xA;It uses the well-known tiger search language and supports searching both constituency trees and dependency trees.&#xA;Thanks to the highly efficient indexing scheme it employs, Tundra can handle large-scale Treebanks, such as automatically parsed Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T07:41:32.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-11T08:27:49.963" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;You’ve all heard the phrase “plummy accent” and many variants of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve been trying to find out how can this be called or described in more scientific and phonetic terms. So I bumped onto John Charles Herbert’s PhD thesis “Broadcast Speech and the Effect of Voice Quality on the Listener”. On page 121 he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excessive pharyngeal tone is achieved by constriction of the palatal&#xA;  arches and raising the back of the tongue. This results in the voice&#xA;  quality that can best be described as 'plummy'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, John C. Wells in his &lt;em&gt;Accents of English&lt;/em&gt;, on page 283 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The other obvious change I make involves voice quality: U-RP demands a&#xA;  ‘plumminess’ achieved by lowering the larynx and widening the&#xA;  oro-pharynx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, how do you consciously lower the larynx and widen the oro-pharynx?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, is there a name for the speech process he is describing? It doesn’t seem as if this is pharyngealization. I presume he would’ve put it that simply if it were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, isn’t what he’s describing kind of even the opposite of pharyngealization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When referring to “plummy accent”, two of the speakers that come to mind are Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire and Alec Douglas-Home. And also John Spencer-Churchill, 11th Duke of Marlborough. You can find the first two easily on YouTube, but for the third speaker you will have to dig a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for deaffrication, is there an official name for the change in pronunciation from &lt;strong&gt;ˌbeɪ ˈdʒɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;ˌbeɪ ˈʒɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt;, something one of John C. Wells’s correspondents once named “yoghism”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/blog0709.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/blog0709.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps “ezhism”? Or simply “deaffrication”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastEditorUserId="20376" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T08:34:20.537" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T16:21:21.657" Title="Is plumminess pharyngealization? Plus: Deaffrication" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27122" CreationDate="2018-02-11T10:40:44.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Plummy” is not a term in phonetics, but at best in socio-linguistics. The Oxford English Dictionary qualifies it as “colloquial” and defines it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Of a person's voice, speech, etc.: mellow, deep, resonant, and&#xA;  carefully articulated (in a way associated with the educated English&#xA;  upper classes); (hence) mannered, affected, posh, upper-class. Also&#xA;  occasionally: drawling; indistinct, as though hampered by plums in the&#xA;  mouth (cf. plum n. and adj.2 Phrases 1). Also in extended use.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ”plummy accent” is simply the way upper-class Southern English people speak, or rather how they used to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T10:40:44.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-11T10:44:08.720" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;When is a word descended from another word? Is it limited to ancestor-to-child language relationship? If, for example, Spanish borrows from French, is the loanword a descendant of the French word? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21205" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T21:39:57.137" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T21:39:57.137" Title="What is a descendant?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27124" CreationDate="2018-02-11T11:40:55.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics we distinguish (usually) between descendants and borrowings. French chauve &quot;bald&quot; is a descendant of Latin calvus. French calvitie &quot;baldness&quot; is borrowed from Latin calvities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T14:49:57.847" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T14:49:57.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27120" CreationDate="2018-02-11T12:18:37.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One must be careful in making generalising statements, for example, languages without (morphological) case needn't be SVO or OVS, just look at Abkhaz. However there are typically some tendencies or predominant patterns. In the case of SOV, the languages tend to be agglutinative (which mostly implies rich morphology and therefore pro-drop) and non-configurational whereby SOV only applies to non-emotive (information-structurally unmarked) utterances. They also often exhibit head-marking predicates. If a SVO language has adpositions, they tend to be postpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW German is neither SOV not SVO but V2 in the standard typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T12:18:37.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27130" CreationDate="2018-02-11T14:48:23.137" Score="3" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Government and Binding introduces D-structure and S-structure as two distinct levels of representation, however, this changed within the Minimalist Program. Could someone explain or point me in the right direction to find out why the MP does not recognize them anymore? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14601" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T23:13:36.617" Title="Why is there no D-structure or S-structure within Minimalism" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27111" CreationDate="2018-02-11T21:31:11.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A term often used synonymously to &quot;generalisation&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;bleaching&lt;/strong&gt;. Joan Bybee in his Cambridge Textbook in Linguistics on &lt;em&gt;Language Change&lt;/em&gt; defines it as &quot;a meaning change in which specific features of meaning are lost&quot; (p. 267).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T21:31:11.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27127" CreationDate="2018-02-11T23:13:36.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: In the Government and Binding framework, D-structure had to be built completely before any movement could occur, while in Minimalism movement occurs as the structure is being built, eliminating the need for a D-structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In GB syntactic representations are built in two stages: 1) D-structure is generated according to the rules of X-bar syntax, 2) the base generated tree is mapped to S-structure by a series of transformations, or movements, in which structures move around the tree leaving indexed traces (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  [XP [] [X' [X] [B_i]]] ==move==&gt; [XP [B_i] [X' [X] [t_i]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minimalism formalizes movement differently, making it a special kind of structure building, and eliminating the need for an intermediate level of representation. The structure-building operation, Merge (2), takes two trees a and b as input, and gives back a new tree c with a and b as sisters and a new node Z immediately dominating both a and b (and no other node).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Merge(a,b) = [Z a b]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merge simulates movement when the input a is actually contained within input b, giving a structure with two copies of a, one c-commanding the other. This is called Internal Merge (3). Following Internal Merge, the lower copy is (generally) unpronounced, taking the place of the trace in Government and Binding. Unpronounced copies can be noted in angle brackets: .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Merge(a, [B [C] a]) = [Z a [B [C] ]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crucially, the example of Internal Merge (and all cases of Internal Merge) grows the tree, adding a new node Z. This means that in Minimalism movement happens before a complete structure (like D-structure) has been built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12784" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T23:13:36.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27122" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:21:21.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For such sociolinguistic characterisations of speech (&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; one as culturally-specific as &quot;plumminess&quot;), one has to disentangle all its many possible features. These may vary between different speech producers; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UB9KDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watt (2018)&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Plumminess&quot; for one person may be manifested by a markedly velarized tongue body, minimal jaw lowering, a spread lip posture and low vocal pitch, for instance, whereas for another it might correlate with pharyngeal resonance/larynx lowering, a dentalized setting, and a wide pitch range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, even segmental features can contribute a &quot;plummy&quot; sound to speech; Arboleda-Guirao (2014) &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BvO4AwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA394&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt; it's not just vocal timbre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well try speaking with a small object in your mouth and you will find that as the front and central parts of your tongue and mouth are otherwise occupied, sounds will be produced further back in the mouth. Very back realisations of /u:/ /ʊ/ /ɔ:/ often sound quite old-fashioned, and in recent years these vowels are clearly moving forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &quot;plumminess&quot; has a strong cultural connotation in the Anglophone media, some study has been done on it the world of vocal pedagogy, whether it's approached from acting/dramaturgy, from opera/singing/music, or from speech pathology and the ENT medical arena. The studies on the last generally come from the perception that there is some sort of non-standard nasalisation, generally hyponasalisation, which might be indicative of physical medical problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the mechanics of &quot;lower[ing] the larynx and widen[ing] the oro-pharynx&quot;? According to vp's comment &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/exotic-spices.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on this thread&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yawn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T16:21:21.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-12T18:01:05.793" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;From *wers we get English &lt;em&gt;war, worse, worst&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From *wert we get English &lt;em&gt;versus, verse, version, vertex, vortex, vertical, revert, invert, divert,..., worth, -ward, weird&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From *werb/p we get English &lt;em&gt;warp, wrap, re&lt;strong&gt;verb&lt;/strong&gt;erate, en&lt;strong&gt;velop&lt;/strong&gt;(e), de&lt;strong&gt;velop&lt;/strong&gt;, over&lt;strong&gt;lap&lt;/strong&gt;, lap&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/war#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary etymology entry&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;war&quot; has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compare Latin versus (“against, turned”), past participle of vertere (“turn, change, overthrow, destroy”). More at worse, wurst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest a relation between PIE *wers (root of war, worse) and *wert (root of versus and possibly wurst). I'm also asking about *werb since it is so similar to *wert in sound and meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are any of these 3 roots actually related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2401" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T01:37:25.280" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T13:37:56.897" Title="What is the relation of PIE *wers (“to confuse, mix up; to beat, thresh, grind”), *wert (&quot;to turn, to rotate&quot;), and *werb (“to bend, to turn”)?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27132" CreationDate="2018-02-12T18:56:39.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The currently fashionable theory is that *wer is a root, and -s, -t, -b are &quot;extensions&quot;. What is still missing is an explanation of what exactly the function of these &quot;extensions&quot; is supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T13:37:56.897" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T13:37:56.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27136" CreationDate="2018-02-13T12:25:43.683" Score="3" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;In (usually British) English the date &quot;2018/02/13&quot; is pronounced &quot;13th of February, 2018&quot;, which corresponds to the DD/MM/YYYY date format. Same thing is true for Russian, for example (&quot;тринадцатое февраля 2018 года&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any European languages that read out dates in a way that directly corresponds to the YYYY/MM/DD date format, i.e. year, then month, then day?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; says that the YYYY/MM/DD format is used formally in Hungary, Lithuania, Albania, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Montenegro and Sweden. It is not clear whether this format is used &lt;em&gt;coloquially&lt;/em&gt; in the languages they speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21091" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:43:45.890" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:43:45.890" Title="Are there any European languages that read out dates in the order of year, month, day?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;branching&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27135" CreationDate="2018-02-13T12:35:13.330" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;New answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments of A. M. Bittlingmayer convinced me my quick answer based on Wikipedia was insufficient. I then ran a small script through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cldr.unicode.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLDR&lt;/a&gt; (actually a python script using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://babel.pocoo.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babel&lt;/a&gt; package) to output a given dates in all included languages and sort out the “Big endian” ones. It confirms my old answer, and completes it.&#xA;Of course, it is just as good as the CLDR data, and more knowledge of the languages would be needed to validate this.  The list below goes beyond Europe, because 1. why not? 2. The borders of Europe are difficult to define, and “big endian” languages in Russia (Uzbek, Chechen). It gives the &lt;code&gt;'long'&lt;/code&gt; date format of CLDR for “”, which is intended to reflect the way it is spoken. The corresponding output for English is “February 19, 2018” (“19 February 2018” for British English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list also misses “partially big endian languages”,  like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/32/verify/dates/az.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Azerbaidjani&lt;/a&gt; where January 13, 2012 is 13 yanvar 2012, but January 13 – 14, 2012 is indeed 2012 yanvar 13–14.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;European languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hungarian: 2018. február 19. (&lt;em&gt;checked on Wikipedia, see old answer below&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian: 2018 m. vasario 19 d. (&lt;em&gt;checked on Wikipedia, see old answer below&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chechen: 2018 февраль 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inari Sami: 2018 M02 19 (&lt;em&gt;the form seems a bit suspect, but 1. Chinese use the same kind of form, since the month do not have Chinese names, only numbers; 2. Northern Sami seems to be big-endian too, but with month names.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Northern Sami: 2018 guovvamánnu 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Breton: 2018 Cʼhwevrer 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basque: 2018(e)ko otsailak 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Church Slavic: 2018 феврꙋа́рїа 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Central Asian Languages (including Asian Russia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uzbek: 2018 Феврал 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kyrgyz: 2018 февраль 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sakha: 2018, Олунньу 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;East Asian Languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese, Cantonese, and Japanese : 2018年2月19日&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean : 2018년 2월 19일&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sichuan Yi: 2018 ꑍꆪ 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dzongkha: སྤྱི་ལོ་2018 ཟླ་གཉིས་པ་ ཚེས་ 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tibetan: སྤྱི་ལོ་2018 ཟླ་བ་གཉིས་པའི་ཚེས་19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mongolian: 2018 оны 02 сарын 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;South Asian Languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sinhala: 2018 පෙබරවාරි 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malayalam: 2018, ഫെബ്രുവരി 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nepali: 2018 फेब्रुअरी 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pashto: د 2018 د فبروري 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;American Language&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quechua: 2018 Hatun puquy 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;African Languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ngomba: 2018 Pɛsaŋ Pɛ́pá 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Akan: 2018 Kwakwar-Ɔgyefuo 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Metaʼ: 2018 imeg àbùbì 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kinyarwanda: 2018 Gashyantare 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Artificial Auxiliary Languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Esperanto: 2018-februaro-19 (&lt;em&gt;but a quick glance on Wikipedia seems to infirm this&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Volapük: 2018 febul 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Old answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian in an example of such a “big endian” European language. See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Hungary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for example. This wikipedia page in Hungarian uses “1956. október 23-án” for October 23rd, 1956.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian also uses a similar format, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktas_d%C4%97l_Lietuvos_nepriklausomos_valstyb%C4%97s_atstatymo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this wikipedia page in Lithuanian&lt;/a&gt; uses  “1990 m. kovo 11 d.” for MArch 11, 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond Europe, this convention is fairly common in East Asia, where it is used in Chinese and Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#/media/File:Date_format_by_country_(new).png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map on wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, these languages corresponds to the only European countries where the YMD convention is used exclusively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAKMN.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAKMN.png&quot; alt=&quot;Date format by country&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I know Germans only use DMY colloquially, while this map says both YMD and DMY are used, I guess that DMY there is only “administrative”, and the case might be similar for the other similarly coloured countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T07:13:41.130" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27139" CreationDate="2018-02-13T22:47:04.807" Score="4" ViewCount="2099" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a WAV file contains a subject speech. The subject speaks a sentence once at a time, then a short period of silent appears. I'm interested to analyze the phonemes of that speech and what time each phoneme occurs. For instance, I am looking for something like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6.5-6.8 'AE' &lt;br&gt;&#xA;6.8-7.0 'NG'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any software supports such a thing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21221" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T20:57:43.260" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T20:57:43.260" Title="Any software that label a WAV file into phonemes" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27137" CreationDate="2018-02-14T05:30:14.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; is the main program used to analyze sound data for phonetics research.  It's available for free at the link.  You can use the program to add markers and replay snippets, as well as analyze formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21223" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T05:30:14.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27137" CreationDate="2018-02-14T05:48:01.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broadly, you're describing the entire (not-fully-solved) problem of automatic speech recognition/automatic transcription. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;However, if you have the text of the sentences (e.g., if the recordings are scripted, or if you've manually transcribed their speech), then the problem is more tractable: you want 'forced alignment'. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;A popular software option for that is the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner  (available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.sas.upenn.edu/phonetics-lab/facilities/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.sas.upenn.edu/phonetics-lab/facilities/&lt;/a&gt;). There is documentation, but you might also do a web search for tutorials and guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T05:48:01.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27144" CreationDate="2018-02-14T13:04:22.307" Score="3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; just the past tense form of &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;? Or are they different lexemes entirely? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21230" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T03:30:33.730" Title="Are 'yesterday' and 'now' forms of the same lexeme?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27141" CreationDate="2018-02-14T14:03:43.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; can be analysed as a pro-preposition, a word standing in for a prepositional phrase. It isn't verbal, so the category of tense doesn't apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; are not parallel terms. &lt;em&gt;Yesterday&lt;/em&gt; can refer to a whole day, but &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; doesn't even refer to a moment just before now. There's no reason to think that they're the same lexeme. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T03:30:33.730" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T03:30:33.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27141" CreationDate="2018-02-14T14:25:55.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, only verbs have a past tense but the other parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, ...) don't have one. The fact that you can express a notion of past-ness for some of them (e.g., &lt;em&gt;former president&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ex-wife&lt;/em&gt;) does not form a past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; aren't derivations from a common stem. While using common stems (or recognisably related stems) is not strictly necessary for a past tense (think of the past tense of the verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;) it helps to have some morphological rules for forming a lot of past tense forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together with the semantic arguments formulated by @curiousdannii there is no reason to think of &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; as one lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T17:45:26.183" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T17:45:26.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T14:54:29.107" Score="2" ViewCount="2187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was Julius Caesar originally spelled with and I before &quot;J&quot; was invented? Or was it spelled some other way? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21060" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T09:41:27.663" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T09:41:27.663" Title="Julius Caesar original name spelling?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27145" CreationDate="2018-02-14T17:42:12.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was spelled IVLIVS CAESAR originally (lowercase letters weren't there yet, and also U was not yet differentiated from V).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the development of the Latin script, see these questions on [latin.se]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/332/when-did-the-latin-alphabet-become-bicameral&quot;&gt;When did the Latin alphabet become bicameral&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/658/dvcitis-ducitis-d%C5%AAcitis&quot;&gt;DVCITIS, DUCITIS, DŪCITIS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T17:42:12.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27145" CreationDate="2018-02-14T17:46:10.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others stated, on monumental inscriptions, the name of Julius Caesar would look similar to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IVLIVS CAESAR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, saying it was &quot;spelled with an I instead of a J&quot; may be misleading, because 'J' as a later innovation did not arise from thin air: while 'I' and 'J' were not distinguished in Roman times, they existed as graphically distinct variants of the same letter, which always looked more like 'I' in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_square_capitals&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;capitals&lt;/a&gt;, but could sometimes look more like a (dotless) 'ȷ' in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;everyday cursive script&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction was originally just a matter of natural variation within people's handwriting, but in time, a habit tended to form where the first and/or last letters in a word may come to stand out more, resulting in 'ȷ' being used more often than 'ı' in those contexts, just like a better-defined 'v' would stand out more than a more fluidly-written 'u'. I think this pattern can be observed in a few of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindolanda_tablets&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vindolanda tablets&lt;/a&gt; for example. I consider it somewhat natural for the first bit of handwriting to be written more carefully or incisively than what follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of 'ȷ' (often called the equivalent of &quot;long I&quot; in several modern languages), the distinction may also have been influenced by the standardized classical Roman habit of writing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_I&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;longer 'I'&lt;/a&gt; to indicate that it was a long vowel, something they routinely did in inscription too, and which was unique to 'I' as the same indication was given for other vowel letters by writing an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_(diacritic)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;apex&lt;/a&gt; above them, at least when useful to reduce ambiguity. This use, in any case, is distinct from the specific shape and use that 'J' later evolved into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another letter that often underwent shape/length changes depending on position in Roman cursive was 's', and this distinction also survived into modern times as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;long ſ&lt;/a&gt;, this time used &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; words whereas 's' would be used at the extremities. Since this also appears in Caesar's name in both word positions, we can reconstruct the way his name would typically have been written in Roman cursive by approximating it, at least in concept, with the modern lowercase form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ȷulıus caeſar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps because words that begin with 'I' or 'V' in Latin are statistically more likely to use those as the semivowels /j/ and /w/, rather that the vowels /i/ and /u/ which are more common in the middle of words, eventually — but well after Roman times, and partly after the Middle Ages — 'J' and 'V' established themselves as semivocalic forms, while 'I' and 'U' remained for the vowels, and since the informal cursive distinction in &quot;glyph length&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swash_(typography)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;became systematized as swashes in printing&lt;/a&gt;, this was no longer just restricted to handwriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meanwhile, the phoneme /w/ had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Neutralization_of_/b/_and_/w/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;since long mutated&lt;/a&gt; into  /β/ or /v/ in Latin and its successors, so 'V' is rarely used as a semivowel in today's languages that employ the Latin script, instead representing [v] or related fricatives or approximants. In some languages, /j/ stopped being a semivowel too, becoming [ʒ] in French for instance. So, the way 'V' and 'J' are used today varies with languages, and additionally, Germanic languages that still had a separate semivocalic /w/ created a convention of using a double 'U' or 'V' (which were not yet generally distinguished at that stage) to reduce the ambiguity with both /u/ and /v/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tangentially related point is the origin of the dot on both 'i' and 'j' in modern non-capital scripts: this can be traced back to the apex diacritic mentioned above, which eventually became the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;acute accent&lt;/a&gt; used in many modern languages to mark either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;word stress&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent#Letter_extension&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowel quality&lt;/a&gt; resulting from ancestral length distinction, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent#Length&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some languages&lt;/a&gt; still use it to mark length. Because 'ı' and 'ȷ' were thin letters which often caused confusion (especially with 'm' when they were next to 'n') in minuscule handwriting, the apex or acute accent, then known as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/tittle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tittle&lt;/a&gt;, started being systematically used regardless of length, quality or stress, merely to make those letters stand out as separate from the adjoining ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T18:47:41.657" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T18:47:41.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T17:54:45.803" Score="3" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any phonetically annotated corpora of accented English speech? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably English spoken by native English speakers with a strong accents, such as speakers from a specific region in the UK (Scotland, Liverpool etc), Ireland, Jamaica, Australia etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some great resources for accented speech, but only a part of IDEA seems to be phonetically annotated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone please recommend a corpus of accented English speech that has been phonetically annotated and temporally aligned? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21233" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T11:10:54.730" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T22:22:48.903" Title="Phonetically annotated speech corpus" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T15:37:16.963" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider the following phrases with respect to downward entailment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary remembers that French students saw her.&#xA;Mary remembers that tall French students saw her. &#xA;(in my opinion, this is not downward entailing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary remembers that Italian food is good.&#xA;Mary remembers that Pizza is good. &#xA;(Rather downward entailing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary remembers that her parents had Italian food.&#xA;Mary remembers that her mother had Italian food.&#xA;(Definitely downward entailing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it seem that some phrases are downward entailing but the others don't? Is it maybe a problem of sets? &quot;Mother&quot; is rather an indispensable part of parents whereas French students are still French students even without tall ones -&gt; subset. But what about pizzas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20944" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T15:37:16.963" Title="Are these phrases downward entailing?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2018-02-15T17:23:13.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some interesting answers here but none really get at the crux of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that civilization only really rose up around 10,000 years ago (and even then not all at once). Humans before that lived in small, isolated communities. Technological progress was slow. The languages of individual tribes were able to develop over long periods with minimal influence from their neighbors and without the need to frequently add new words to describe new technologies, new places, etc. In that environment languages were able to develop complex grammars with complex inflections for individual nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then enters civilization. Contact with other cultures and rapidly advancing technology causes the vocabularies of the languages to have to change rapidly making inventing inflections for the new words challenging (all of the speakers have to understand the inflections to communicate). Perhaps more importantly, the increased contact between cultures means that people are having to learn each others' languages. The natural result of that is a gradual simplification of the grammars as the different languages blend with each other; if you study how creole languages form, it is natural for the grammar of the creole to be more analytic in its structure than the parent languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is not that less inflection is more natural, per se. It is that complex morphologies tend only to form in environments where the culture is relatively small and isolated, which is something that has not existed in our world for a few millenia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19965" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T17:23:13.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27149" CreationDate="2018-02-15T22:22:48.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc93s1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TIMIT Corpus&lt;/a&gt; has &amp;quot;time-aligned orthographic, phonetic and word transcriptions&amp;quot; of eight major dialects of American English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The textbook &lt;em&gt;Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Harrington has a list of example databases listed at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/publikationen/harrington/pasc/Harrington_pasc_databases.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;.  One listed database that may be of use to your research is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://andosl.rsise.anu.edu.au/andosl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all from a quick Google search and not meant to be comprehensive.  Checking out the textbook I mentioned might lead you to more useful citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21223" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T22:22:48.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-16T09:36:15.860" Score="9" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a 'context-free grammar' in relation to natural languages? This &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, gives a broad description, but it isn't clear exactly what features of a language would result in it not being considered context free, or being considered so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the fundamental property of a grammar that would result in it being context-free or non-context-free? Why is this property of special interest to linguists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally an answer would be digestible by readers with no mathematical background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T20:46:57.840" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T20:46:57.840" Title="Context-free grammars" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky-hierarchy&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27154" CreationDate="2018-02-16T11:05:34.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no fundamental properties. Some/most (?) natural languages are mildly context-sensitive to allow for features such as cross-serial dependencies. Pure context-free grammars are too cumbersome to be used in linguistics, one needs to add a constraint system (in the form of a formal logic, typical an equational logic) which makes the whole system Turing-complete even if the backbone is a context-free grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T11:05:34.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28366" CreationDate="2018-02-16T14:56:12.333" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across an initiative for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.islrn.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Standard Language Resource Numbers&lt;/a&gt;. Visiting their website leaves some questions open on the current status and the prospects of the initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is backing up the iniative?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will it be persistent (in the sense that ISRLNs are resolvable over the internet in the forseeable future)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T02:10:51.870" Title="Status of ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number)?" Tags="&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27154" CreationDate="2018-02-16T16:10:00.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CFG (context free phrase structure grammar) is important in linguistics, even fundamental, because it is what allows us to describe natural language expressions with hierarchical tree structures, which have become the universal descriptive tool of grammarians.  Many linguistic theories are variants of CFG; e.g., Reed-Kellogg diagramming, tagmemics, the base component of transformational grammar, GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar), dependency grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the grammatical constructions in human languages which seemingly cannot be properly described by a CFG are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-serial_dependencies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cross serial dependencies&lt;/a&gt;, mentioned by Atamin above, and various constructions with discontinuous constituents, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_node_raising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RNR&lt;/a&gt; constructions (in McCawley's theory of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an enthusiast for CFG, personally, though the consensus of contemporary syntacticians is that CFG is not sufficient to describe human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T19:32:30.463" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T19:32:30.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27154" CreationDate="2018-02-16T16:39:34.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes technical descriptions are made with technical vocabulary neologisms in order to capture complicated and nuanced concepts which might be ungainly to convey correctly with simpler non-technical terms. So it may be difficult to come up with a description of a technical concept using only non-technical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule in a language is context-free if the rule (affecting some words together) does not use text surrounding those words in order to apply correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose you want to make a comparative out of an adjective. Just add '-er': hot -&gt; hotter, tall -&gt; taller. For longer words, you use 'more' first: 'more consistent', 'more independent'. And then for a few words, like 'good' you have a rule exception: 'better'. For all of these, it doesn't matter what the word is, you don't need to know anything else in the sentence to form that comparative: in 'he is good' and 'he is better', the comparative doesn't depend on anything else in that sentence outside of what happens to the adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, one might say that conjugation of verbs is context-sensitive (the alternative to context-free). For example, in the present simple in English, it is 'I say' and 'he says': to get the right ending on the verb, you need to know the context (the pronoun that comes before). The pronoun itself is not part of the thing that changed, but its presence changed the following word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T16:39:34.997" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2018-02-16T17:18:40.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The suggestion above that the Anglo-Norman/French language was just a fad of some sort in the English court is rather untrue. Although it was very mixed, there was a long period during which most of the aristocracy spoke little, if any, English. They were true Francophones, although as mentioned their language was not exactly Parisian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During the colonial period the colonial powers were often far more advanced than the nations they conquered so it was somewhat natural, albeit unfortunate, for their national languages to be overshadowed by their conquerors. You can see something similar during the Roman Empire. In the east where Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, etc. were at least if not more advanced than the Romans, the local languages survived. In the West where the Celtic, Germanic, etc. cultures were substantially less advanced than the Romans, they largely picked up Latin. Indeed, even later when the various Gothic/Vandal tribes conquered the western Roman provinces, they themselves adopted Latin (albeit a very bastardized version) rather than preserving their own languages (i.e. the conquerors adopted the language of the conquered). In the case of Norman conquest, the Normans were arguably somewhat more advanced than the Anglo-Saxons but not that much more. So there was a culture war which ultimately resulted in a creole language that more heavily favored English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19965" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T17:18:40.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-16T21:02:04.517" Score="5" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some languages, nouns low on the animacy hierarchy, particularly inanimates cannot surface as A, and if a situation arises where they are underlyingly A, some reparative strategy such as a passive must be used. Some theorise that this was the case in early PIE, and a friend of mine mentioned Algonquian and Japhung Qiangic in the conversation that lead me to consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages where a similar rule is found at the other end of the animacy hierarchy, such that the 1st person is defective and cannot be O, and an underlying 1st person O requires a syntactic derivation to be used, moving the first person either to S (a passive) or oblique status (an antipassive)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chukchi&lt;/a&gt; seems to come close, as it has a verbal prefix &lt;em&gt;(i)ne- ~ (e)na-&lt;/em&gt;, which Comrie(1979) analyses as a &quot;de-ergativising prefix&quot; which in some cases acts like an antipassive is required with 1st person singular Os when the A is not 3rd person plural (in which case a 1sg.S/O suffix &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used), however it's not quite a full antipassive as in these cases, as while there is a change to verbal person agreement (absolutive forms are used to mark underlying A) there is not change to nominal case marking, and furthermore, in the &quot;present II&quot;-tense it's used with a much larger set of A/P combinations. Further examples of borderline cases like Chukchi would be fine, but what I'm really interested in is if there are any more clear-cut examples where the construction involved is clearly a syntactic derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comrie, B. 1979: &lt;em&gt;Degrees of Ergativity: Some Chukchee evidence&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 219-40 in Plank, F. 1979 (ed.): &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f3eXlLDI2qC3yeMG1YStsmtH5RSXzHLE/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ergativity - Towards a Theory of Grammatical Relations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Academic Press&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21246" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T00:59:56.697" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T00:59:56.697" Title="Are there any languages where the first person cannot be an object?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;&lt;person&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19456" CreationDate="2018-02-17T01:20:16.570" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Polish and to me Slovenian has almost the same accent like Polish (Czech and Slovak languages have more similar words but their accent is more different imo). Little more shhh tshhh and so on in Slovenian and there would be any difference in sound and accent (not in meaning of words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21251" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T01:20:16.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26368" CreationDate="2018-02-17T16:43:43.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare it to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[I want [them to visit me [before this time]]]&#xA;[I want [them to visit me] [before this time]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I drew you the trees of your two and these two examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YI2aG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YI2aG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vhIuq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vhIuq.png&quot; alt=&quot;edit: (PRO) or PRO is a typo; both are the &amp;quot;semantically controlled&amp;quot; but phonologically null pronoun PRO (ntbc with pro with is slightly different)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: (PRO) in the above tree and PRO in this one should both be the same (typo). PRO is the &quot;semantically controlled&quot; but phonologically null pronoun. Here it refers to &quot;I&quot;, that is, its (accusative) form &quot;me&quot; (as in &quot;I want me/myself to ...&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare your examples to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zEI3M.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zEI3M.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QNws5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QNws5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try the last ones with &quot;wanted&quot; or &quot;will want&quot; instead. The meaning is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T16:52:18.627" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T16:52:18.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T20:09:26.577" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I write &quot;X said to Y that they would do A today, but B happened yesterday&quot; in predicate logic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example;&#xA;Bart said to Lisa that he would braid her hair today, but he chopped his hand off yesterday'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit for possible answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I have come up with two possible answers, although both may be completely off track...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BRAID(bart, lisa, hair) ∧ CHOP(bart, hand)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SAID(bart(BRAID(bart, lisa, hair)) ∧ CHOP(bart, hand)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit for context&lt;/strong&gt;: my question just states 'predicate logic notation'. We have never called or been taught it under any other name, but some of my textbooks use the term 'first order logic'&#xA;The sort of things we have covered so far are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;• L: is a linguist  • R: reads  • S: is a semanticist  • c: Chomsky &#xA;• g: Gosia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Translate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;∀x(S(x)→L(x)) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;∃x(L(x)∧R(x,c))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gosia is not a linguist but she reads Chomsky anyway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21230" LastEditorUserId="21230" LastEditDate="2018-02-17T21:24:06.640" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:40:00.320" Title="How to write 'x said they would do y but...' in predicate logic?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27171" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:33:41.183" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of a comprehensive phonological grammar of a language, along the lines of SPE, Sound Pattern of Russian or Chomsky's thesis on Hebrew, written in a framework that postdates SPE? I assume that the majority of grammars out there fall between being entirely descriptive and incorporating formal analysis for only a subset of phenomena. What I'm interested in is a work that attempts to provide the entire formal phonological system in a framework such as Optimality Theory. Otherwise, I'd be interested in the most complete, (single) theory-specific phonological sketch of a language you're aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21256" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T02:15:26.773" Title="Comprehensive phonological sketches post-SPE" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;&lt;spe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27167" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:40:00.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bart said to Lisa that he would braid her hair today, but he chopped his hand off yesterday.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(SAY (BART,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; (INTEND (BART,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; (TODAY (BRAID (BART, LISA_HAIR))))) &#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; LISA))&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; ∧&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(YESTERDAY (CHOP_OFF (BART, BART_HAND)))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the convention of Source, Trajector, and Goal, in that order, for 3-place SAY puts &lt;em&gt;LISA&lt;/em&gt; at the end. That doesn't matter for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;predicate calculus&lt;/a&gt;, since dative is syntax, not semantics. Also tense doesn't matter, so SAY is fine, and I've represented &lt;em&gt;Lisa's hair&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bart's hand&lt;/em&gt; as single objects so as to avoid unnecessary lambdafication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is nothing contradictory here; the implications of Bart's missing hand yesterday and its results on his braiding Lisa's hair today are not part of the logic, but rather the contextual interpretation. It's signalled by the &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; in the sentence, but it has no place in the logic; that's why &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; in logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:40:00.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-18T01:42:23.303" Score="1" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) express the application of phonological rules? (This question arose in the comments to another question about CFG.) My answer is yes, it can, in some cases, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer, to be given below, has the form of assuming that a context free language without a certain example context sensitive phonological rule (n-&gt;m/_p) is context free that a CFG can be constructed for a corresponding language which is the same except for reflecting the application of the phonological rule. That will show that the language reflecting the application of the rule is still context free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of this question being asked or answered in the linguistic literature, although in his book &lt;em&gt;The Organization of Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, Stephen Anderson considers a related question, which is whether phonological features have real numbers as specifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T13:40:55.007" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T19:07:24.093" Title="Is phonology context free?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chomsky-hierarchy&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27168" CreationDate="2018-02-18T02:15:26.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are vast numbers of such works, if you have the right criteria. As a starting point, there are the volumes in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/p/the-phonology-of-the-worlds-languages-pwl/?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonologies of the World's Languages&lt;/a&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of &quot;framework&quot; may complicate the matter. Brame's dissertation on Classical Arabic phonology was written after SPE, but was still within that broad framework. Sommerstein's &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of Ancient Greek&lt;/em&gt; is in a somewhat divergent version of SPE theory (but then, SPE diverges from itself), and likewise Vago's dissertation on Hungarian might count. There were competing later frameworks such as Natural Phonology, Function Phonology, UDRA, NGP, but as far as I know there were no works in competing earlier frameworks that provided a comprehensive analyse of a language. There were analyses of parts of languages, but not whole languages. The first complete language analyses in a clearly distinct generative framework were carried out in Autosegmental Phonology, then Lexical Phonology, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In searching for such works, it's not clear to what extent a work has to be &quot;in a framework&quot;. Basbøll's book in the OUP phonology series is really more a description of Danish phonology, rather than being an exemplification of claims etc. of a theory (and I can't really identify what his framework is). On the other hand, Sharon Hargus' dissertation on Sekani, conducted in Lexical Phonology, is a comprehensive analysis of the language and does thoroughly assume (and exemplify) Lexical Phonology. Bickmore's Chilungu Phonology of conducted within a derivational autosegmental framework. Buckely's &lt;em&gt;Theoretical aspects of Kashaya phonology and morphology&lt;/em&gt; adopts non-linear representations and Lexical Phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is that SPE, SPR and Chomsky's Hebrew are really &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; comprehensive, even though there are a lot of words in those works. It's hard to judge comprehensiveness unless you are familiar with the language. I don't know Basque, so I can't tell whether Hualde's &lt;em&gt;Basque phonology&lt;/em&gt; is comprehensive, i.e. covers even the uninteresting stuff. Likewise, Y. Kim's dissertation on San Francisco del Mar Huave may count, you'd need to know the language to know what was omitted. Some works on Dravidian phonology focus on just the theoretically interesting parts, so I would not include them in the list. In fact, if you have high-enough standards (requiring the inclusion of phonotactic statistical analysis), there probably never have been any comprehensive studies of phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T02:15:26.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27170" CreationDate="2018-02-18T13:08:40.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is yes, certain phonological rules are context free, in the sense that they can be described for any context free language.  I'll just consider a hypothetical case in which the phoneme n changes to the phoneme m before the phoneme p. The general idea of this answer is to adapt techniques used in GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar), in which theory syntactic transformations are avoided by, essentially, applying them to a CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) rather than to language expressions that are generated by a CFG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a very small scale example to illustrate.  I use lower case letters standing for phonemes and terminal symbols of a CFG, but to make the examples easier to read, I use ordinary English spelling. Please imagine that the spellings are actually phonemic forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Language without phonological rules:  &#xA;  {Dan punps, Elsa spits}&#xA;CFG for this language:  &#xA;  S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;  NP -&amp;gt; Dan, Elsa&#xA;  VP -&amp;gt; punps, spits  &#xA;&#xA;Language with the rule n -&amp;gt; m /__p:  &#xA;  {Dam pumps, Elsa spits}  &#xA;CFG for this language:  &#xA;  S -&amp;gt; NP-ends-with-m VP-begins-with-p  &#xA;  S -&amp;gt; NP-ends-with-n VP &#xA;  NP-ends-with-m -&amp;gt; Dam  &#xA;  NP-ends-with-n -&amp;gt; Dan  &#xA;  NP -&amp;gt; Elsa    &#xA;  VP -&amp;gt; spits  &#xA;  VP-begins-with-p -&amp;gt; pumps  &#xA;  VP -&amp;gt; spits  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, enough phonemic information is incorporated into syntactic category names (non-terminal symbols of a CFG) to describe which words and phrases have undergone the phonological rule and which words or phrases will trigger the rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'll give a more general account of how to produce a CFG for a context free language in which all the n's have changed to m's before p.  Beginning with the language which has not undergone the change, we need to characterize all the words and phrases ending in n, all those that begin with p, which will tell us where the rule is applicable, then make the change everywhere it is applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a CF rule begins on its righthand side with terminal symbol (i.e., phoneme) p or a non-terminal symbol with the suffix -begins-with-p, then we check that the nonterminal symbol on the left of the CF rule has the suffix -begins-with-p, or add that suffix if it is not already there.  (We will need to scan through all the CF rules several times to make sure this change is made everywhere it is applicable, but there are only a finite number of rules to check, since a CFG can have only a finite number of rules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, we need to check for CF rules whose rightmost symbol is either n or a non-terminal with the suffix -ends-in-n, the if so, add to the non-terminal on the left side of the rule the suffix -ends in n.  As above, this change has to be made everywhere applicable, for each of the finite number of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the change, we begin by going through all the rules checking on the right side for any n before immediately following p and change any such n's to m's. Then any rule with a non-terminal with the suffix -ends-with-n, before terminal symbol p or a non-terminal with suffix -begins-with-p has its suffix changed to -ends-with-m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, any rule that has a non-terminal with suffix -ends-with-m and terminal symbol n at the end of the right side of the rule has that n replaced by m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used a notation above that extends the non-terminal symbols of a CFG by adding suffixes to their names to add phonemic information, because I wanted to make clear that I was not changing a CFG into some other sort of grammar.  But this notation conceals the fact that the above is just a GPSG metarule.  In the notation of &lt;em&gt;GPSG&lt;/em&gt; the book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0674344561&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, I would have instead have described CF rules using features, instead of suffixes.  Then, the structural description of the n-&gt;m/_p rule would be described with &quot;foot features&quot; which percolate up a syntactic tree and the structural change of the rule with a &quot;head feature&quot; which percolates down a syntactic tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T10:48:38.473" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T10:48:38.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27170" CreationDate="2018-02-18T18:48:41.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, something even more restricted the a Context Free Grammar, namely a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_transducer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finite State Transducer&lt;/a&gt; (FST), has been successfully employed in research on phonology and on sound shifts in historical linguistics. There a lots of groups around the world working with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rule like &lt;code&gt;n-&amp;gt;m/_p&lt;/code&gt; can be expressed by a finite state transducer as long as it is not applied recursively, i.e., to the string produced after the application of the rule.Note also, that the notation &lt;code&gt;n-&amp;gt;m/_p&lt;/code&gt; is already the notation of a rule for a popular FST. Despite superficial similarity with the notation of rules for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-sensitive_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Context Sensitive Grammars&lt;/a&gt; (CSG), it isn't the same thing. There are no &lt;em&gt;symbols&lt;/em&gt; of CSG here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T13:39:20.593" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T13:39:20.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27170" CreationDate="2018-02-18T19:42:34.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only issue with encoding phonological alternations in CFG is unbounded dependencies: in whatever way GPSG manages that issue, that would be required for phonological relations as well. In explicating this, I will speak in terms of &quot;words&quot; though the term &quot;signs&quot; might be better, to generalize over words, larger-than-word chunks, and morphemes. The set of words in a language is finite, and each has a finite length. Therefore each word has a finite set of variants, Wα1, Wα2... Wα&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;... In the worst case, the set of rules introducing Wα have to be pretty specific, e.g. X → Wα2 Wβ5: there is a finite set of such rules. The realization rules then would be e.g. Wα1 → [don], Wα2 → [dom], Wβ1 → [pan], Wβ2 → [pam], Wγ1 → [kan] and the allomorph-selection rules would tell you to select Wα1 before Wβ1 and Wβ2 but not Wγ1. So X → Wα1 Wβ1; X → Wα1 Wβ2; X → Wα2 Wγ1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minor complication arises when the triggering word is not adjacent to the target, but this simply requires a few more rules: X → Wα1 Wδ1 Wβ1; X → Wα1 Wδ1 Wβ2; X → Wα2 Wδ1 Wγ1. Phonology has unbounded dependencies. I can't say that I understand how unbounded dependencies are handled in GPSG, but whatever the technology is for obvious syntax, you do the same with phonology. There may be ways to tidy up the system of rules so that you have something which more directly expresses the generalization underlying vowel harmony, for example. Context sensitive metarules that generate sets of rules would be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of this system conform to the requirements of a type-2 grammar: A → γ where A is a nonterminal and γ is a string of terminals and non-terminals. (Graphically I used sequences of letters such as Wα1 for convenience, rather than introducing many new letters like &quot;䝿&quot;: hopefully it is obvious that the rule &quot;Wβ1 → [pan]&quot; is of type 2, as is obvious if I re-write it as &quot;䝿 → [pan]&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method can work for absolute, symbolic distinctions, but not for continuous real functions – i.e. phonetic implementation. For example, in the production of &quot;extreme&quot; in English, for dialects with rounding of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, lip protrusion starts at some point before &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and increases over time, reaching a maximum at the end of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. Unless you settle for a close-enough finite set of time-instants, you can't expand the grammar to include selection of &quot;...Wα1-at-40msc Wα1-at-41msc...&quot; as an expansion of Wα1, since you skipped infinitely many times that exist between 40 and 41. But, the question asks about phonology and not phonetics, and phonology does not face the problem of infinitely subdividing time: it stops at the segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a related vein, Anderson in &lt;em&gt;Organization of phonology&lt;/em&gt; revises the SPE theory of feature coefficients so that rather that mapping + and - to 1, 2, 3, 4..., phonetic values range from 0 to 1. There is no representation of time in this theory, so no issue of continuously subdividing time. If Plougrescant Breton has rules that assign [0nasal], [.3nasal], [.5nasal], [.7nasal] depending on context, the phrase structure rules can simply be expanded to select [.5nasal] in the relevant context. The number of actual real values is determined by the number of rules, and it will be small. though more than 2. In fact, there isn't a compelling argument for using reals, and if you multiply his phonetic reals by 10, you get integers – nothing that he says &lt;em&gt;depends&lt;/em&gt; on phonetic feature coefficients being reals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T19:07:24.093" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T19:07:24.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27177" CreationDate="2018-02-18T21:01:49.403" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a constraint (align -ap left) that gives a violation for every letter that shifts affix -ap one place to the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidates: ap.teb.rut (0 violations), lap.teb.rut (1 violation), slab.teb.rut (2 violations), pa.teb.rut (?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many violations would the 4th candidate receive if there is no -ap fixation present in it? It doesn't make sense to me if it doesn't receive any violations since it doesn't have an -ap fixation at all, but it does violate the constraint, I wouldn't be able to point out where exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21020" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T22:17:25.353" Title="Assigning violations for optimality theory?" Tags="&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27176" CreationDate="2018-02-18T22:17:25.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alignment is defined in McCarthy &amp;amp; Prince 'Prosodic Morphology I' as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;In  ALIGN(GCat,  GEdge,  PCat,  PEdge),  the  GEdge  of  any  GCat  must  coincide  with PEdge of some PCat, where&#xA;GCat ≡ Grammatical Category, among which are the morphological categories&#xA;MCat ≡ Root, Stem, Morphological Word, Prefix, Suffix, etc.&#xA;PCat ≡ Prosodic Category ≡ μ, σ, Ft, PrWd, PhPhrase, etc.&#xA;MEdge, PEdge = Left, Right&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'Generalized Alignment' it is similarly defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Align(Cat1, Edge1, Cat2, Edge2) =&#xA;∀ Cat1 ∃ Cat2 such that Edge1 of Cat1 and Edge2 of Cat2 coincide.&#xA;Where Cat1, Cat2 ∈ PCat ∪ GCat&#xA;Edge1, Edge2 ∈ {Right, Left}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the constraint says &quot;any X aligns to some Y&quot;, there is no violation if there is no X, but there is a violation if Y is lacking: it depends on the order in the constraint (Cat1 vs Cat2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case you mention is the same as Tagalog infixation, where in GE they state the constraint as Align([um],L,Stem,L), so if &lt;em&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; is lacking, there is no violation. Given the choice of *[sulat] and [sumulat], the former does not violate the alignment constraint. However, there is a higher-ranked constraint requiring &lt;em&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; to be present in that grammatical context (&quot;actor focus&quot;, as I understand), so *[sulat] is ruled out as an actor focus form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, assuming that the root in question is /tebrut/, this raises a different complication: why don't you get /um-sulat/ → [musulat] in order to satisfy *Coda and Ons? Metathesis violates Linearity, and since there is no morpheme-internal metathesis, Linearity is apparently undominated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T22:17:25.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-18T14:25:33.177" Score="-4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that Turkish is a  very old language, but I can't really find any information on how old Bulgarian is. Which of those two languages is older?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Muhamed Cicak" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:59:38.340" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:59:38.340" Title="Is Turkish older than Bulgarian?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27178" CreationDate="2018-02-18T18:46:55.323" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than a direct answer, let me explain why it makes little sense to ask such a question. Current languages didn't appear at a distinct moment in time,[1] but rather it evolved gradually from an older language. For example, Bulgarian (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulgarian language#History&lt;/a&gt;) descended from Proto-Slavic (also ancestor of other Slavic languages, e.g. Russian), which gradually became Modern Bulgarian. To make classifying things easier, linguistic historians talk about &quot;Old&quot;, &quot;Middle&quot; and &quot;Modern Bulgarian&quot;, but in truth there is no clear limit between Modern Bulgarian and Middle Bulgarian, or between Old Bulgarian and the previous Slavic language that it descended from. People from each generation speak more or less the same language as their parents, it's only if we &quot;zoom out&quot; we'll notice the difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what does it have to do with your question? It means that the start of a language is quite arbitrary. There is no objective criteria to say whether 1st century or 10th century is a start of a new period.&#xA;It depends more on how historians or linguists decide that &quot;Bulgarian&quot; or &quot;Turkish&quot; started at a particular period or century, and does not have any relation to how old a linguistic tradition is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] There are exceptions, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;creoles&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pidgins&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;constructed languages&lt;/a&gt;, but these are very rare and neither Bulgarian and Turkish are those things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2447" OwnerDisplayName="user69715" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T18:46:55.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T01:54:41.843" Score="5" ViewCount="885" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first question on this site, so please be somewhat lenient :))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, put succinctly: Why do we asterisk the &lt;em&gt;vowels&lt;/em&gt; in profane words, rather than the consonants? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, just a disclaimer,&lt;/strong&gt; some may be put-off by profanity, or consider some words with different levels of vulgarity than others do, so please use your discretion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sh*t&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;F*ck&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;H*ll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B*tch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C*nt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;D*mn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all the 'common asterisk' spellings. After reviewing through books, social media, television closed-captions, and other instances which call for reduced profanity, I noticed that common practice dictates that the &lt;em&gt;singular vowel&lt;/em&gt; be omitted. Since &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; profanity consist of only one vowel, the process of censorship is quite easy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistic reason as to why we censor the vowels in profanity, rather than the consonants? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21265" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T07:19:45.623" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:49:21.960" Title="Why do we censor vowels, rather than consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26364" CreationDate="2018-02-19T06:21:26.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I have been reading, Speech Acts are meant to be more general than Dialogue Acts. However, you are correct, there is much overlap between the Speech Acts and the difference is not apparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia's stub on Dialogue Acts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A dialog act is a specialized speech act. For example, Question is a speech act, but Question_on_hotel is a dialog act. Dialog acts are different in different dialog systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course they only site one work there, that being Andreas &#xA;Stolcke et.al 2000 &quot;Dialogue act modeling for automatic tagging and recognition of conversational speech&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other Tag Sets out there including DAMSL, SWBD-DAMSL (which is referenced in above paper), ICSI-MR, MALTUS, and a listening-oriented Dialogue Act tag set by Meguro et.al 2010. There are more too. I have found them to range in the number of tags from 6 -- 200+ (Shriberg's being the smallest and original DAMSL being the largest). The tags obviously vary and a specific dialogue tag set for open-domain does not seem to be well defined at the time being in academic literature. I suspect that the open-domain dialogue tag set will closely relate to that of Speech Acts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is only my personal view and has no grounding that I know of in academia, but it appears that Dialogue acts are really just speech acts intended for Dialogue Agents. These can therefore be either as general as normal speech acts if the dialogue agent is intended for open-domain, or more specific if there is a specific domain focused on. That is only my opinion though given what I have seen so far. That Wikipedia stub seems to back me up on this, but even then that is not the most credible source given it being a stub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stolcke, Andreas, et al. &quot;Dialogue act modeling for automatic tagging and recognition of conversational speech.&quot; Computational linguistics 26.3 (2000): 339-373.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shriberg, Elizabeth, et al. &quot;Can prosody aid the automatic classification of dialog acts in conversational speech?.&quot; Language and speech 41.3-4 (1998): 443-492.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popescu-Belis, Andrei. &quot;Abstracting a Dialogue Act Tagset for Meeting Processing.&quot; (2004): 1415-1418.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meguro, Toyomi, et al. &quot;Controlling listening-oriented dialogue using partially observable Markov decision processes.&quot; Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21061" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T06:21:26.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27185" CreationDate="2018-02-19T10:23:25.913" Score="6" ViewCount="1038" Body="&lt;p&gt;In all the languages I am familiar with (mostly English and my native German as well as some rudimentary Italian and French, so all somewhat related.), the tense of a verb only indicates the time of an action comparatively with another or the present (that is at most in the form of before, after or at the same time). For example a perfect form is used to indicate that something happened before the current time, a pluperfect to indicate that something happened before another past event, and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if this is the only possibility, or if there are languages where the tense also depends on something like elapsed time. So as an example, are there languages for which the following sentences would use a different tense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I did X this morning.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I did X last week.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I did X ten years ago.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that there are languages which might use the present tense for events in the near future or past, but I am specifically interested if there are languages with different past or future tenses in such a situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21268" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T12:30:58.450" Title="Are there languages where the tense depends on time elapsed between events?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27183" CreationDate="2018-02-19T12:30:58.450" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having one or more remoteness distinctions in the past tense is reasonably common, particularly in Papua, parts of the Amazon and parts of Africa: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/66A&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/66A&lt;/a&gt; (note that the map is quite sparse with data points). I'll give examples mostly from Papuan languages as I'm more familiar with those than the other areas. See e.g. &lt;em&gt;The Papuan Languages of New Guinea&lt;/em&gt; by William A. Foley for examples and further sources on specific languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common distinction is &lt;em&gt;earlier today&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;hodiernal&quot;) vs. &lt;em&gt;before today&lt;/em&gt;. WALS says that if there is one well-defined cutoff point (rather than say, just two different past tenses that are used contrastively, and where the exact difference between the two depends on context) then it's almost always that, but I know of at least one example where this isn't the case, &lt;strong&gt;Marind&lt;/strong&gt; (Marind(TNG), PNG), which distinguishes past through yesterday from events before yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;before today&lt;/em&gt; category is often divided further, e.g. into &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;hesternal&quot;) vs. &lt;em&gt;before yesterday&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Enga&lt;/strong&gt; (Engan(TNG), PNG) is an example of a language with such a system. Some languages have even more distinctions. &lt;strong&gt;Yimas&lt;/strong&gt; (Ramu-Lower Sepik, PNG) distinguishes &lt;em&gt;ealier today&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;roughly 2-5 days ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;before roughly 5 days ago&lt;/em&gt;, and may additionally sometimes use the irrealis mood for legendary or highly remote past. &lt;strong&gt;Yagua&lt;/strong&gt; (Peba-Yaguan, Peru) has five clearly grammaticalised tenses: &lt;em&gt;a few hours ago&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;a day ago&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;roughly one week to one month ago&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;roughly one to two months up to one or two years ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;further distant or legendary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distance contrasts in future are also possible, though to my knowledge much less common, an example is &lt;strong&gt;Dani&lt;/strong&gt; (West-TNG, Indonesia) which has two optional tense markers in the &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; status, which distinguish a relatively near future from a far-flung future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to these absolute tenses, the relative tenses common on Papuan &quot;medial verbs&quot; may also show multiple distinctions. A simple &lt;em&gt;simultaneous/sequential&lt;/em&gt; distinction is very common, but some languages, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Naasioi&lt;/strong&gt; (South Bougainville, PNG) further divide the sequential category into &lt;em&gt;immediate sequential&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;delayed sequential&lt;/em&gt;, and a couple of languages, e.g. &lt;strong&gt;Telefol&lt;/strong&gt; (Ok (TNG), PNG) further divide the delayed sequential into &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;much later&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21246" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T12:30:58.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27186" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that this tag is intended only for linguistic applications of the Chomsky hierarchy, like syntax parsing, using Finite State Transducers for phonology, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chomsky hierarchy and formal languages are also heavily used in Computer Science, for questions without a clear and stated application in linguistics, consider one of the following two stackexchanges &lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Computer Science&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Theoretical Computer Science&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27187" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" Score="0" Body="For questions about linguistic applications of the hierarchy of formal languages or grammars named after Noam Chomsky." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T13:48:04.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7002" CreationDate="2018-02-19T14:23:44.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last surviving reduplicating verb in modern German is &lt;em&gt;tun&lt;/em&gt;, past tense &lt;em&gt;tat&lt;/em&gt;, past participle &lt;em&gt;getan&lt;/em&gt;. It is cognate to English &lt;em&gt;do, did, done&lt;/em&gt; which also shows traces of reduplication (but this is no longer obvious, because in English &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; is the standard past tense suffix, and did can be reanalysed as d-ed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;tat&lt;/em&gt; clearly shows reduplication, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tun&lt;/em&gt; is a strong verb, as the past participle &lt;em&gt;getan&lt;/em&gt; shows&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; ending in the third person singular past tense, compare &lt;em&gt;er ging&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he went&quot; or &lt;em&gt;sie lief&lt;/em&gt; &quot;she ran&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even weak verbs dont have a final &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; in the 3rd sg. past, see, e.g., &lt;em&gt;er sagte&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he said&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;ihr sagtet&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you (pl) said&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T17:11:22.740" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T17:11:22.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26949" CreationDate="2018-02-19T15:48:19.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the mathematical theory of communication, which is an enterprise of engineering mostly electronic, noise reduction, detection and correction of errors, robustness (to use your word) under conditions of noise, all these are very important, maybe even &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; most important issue in the human designing of engineering artifacts (codes) to facilitate machine communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, for whatever reason, all that very important research, while discussed philosophically by intellectuals in an informal manner, never really had a discipline transfer to linguists. There is surely some research into confusion of phonemes and other phenomena &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; particular languages, but I don't know of much into &lt;em&gt;comparing&lt;/em&gt; different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds similar to comparisons of language &lt;em&gt;length&lt;/em&gt;: the size of a text that has been translated into a number of languages, and which is the shortest and which the longest. There may well be succinct and, likewise, verbose human languages but the experiment to do so will be difficult because of the bias and artifice involved in both human composition of narratives and in the translation process. Average document length is actually one possible technical metric for comparing coding mechanisms so this is not just an analogy but also one very narrow example of what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to your first question, no, I don't think there is any established technical literature (or much of it) that experimentally compares spoken language and content transfer under noisy circumstances. I could easily be wrong; it's just that linguistics, despite being a natural science, is not as interested in experimental methods as say psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your second question, very informally I would guess that it all depends on under what context you're comparing robustness. If you are comparing yelling but/sell commands in a noisy stock market environment, one could experimentally determine which language is more accurate, but still allow that there may actually be either 1) No significant difference, or 2) a statistically significant difference that in the long run has little substantial effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are too many social variables to account for before saying that one human language is more accurate under noise than another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T15:48:19.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T19:55:20.520" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Zipf's law&quot; is just a pretentious way of saying that many types of data, in various sciences, fit certain kinds of power law distribution. E.g. in linguistics, for a corpus of English word frequency is inversely proportional to the word's rank in frequency (the most common word occurs twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, etc.). I'm assuming that letter frequency, bigram frequency, trigram frequency, phoneme frequency, etc. are also power-law distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking isn't especially to do with the distributions being power laws. I want to know: are the rankings of word frequencies, and other frequencies, &lt;em&gt;more similar&lt;/em&gt; (in whatever precise sense of similarity that linguists and statisticians use), between languages which are more closely related?(E.g. are more closely related languages, more likely to have the same most-common phoneme?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21274" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T18:45:35.420" Title="Do more closely related languages, have more similar Zipfian distributions?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27170" CreationDate="2018-02-19T21:35:11.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think phonological rules are context-free. The earliest speech synthesis techniques like formant synthesis and diphone selection synthesis where either each phone or diphone could be run on a finite-state machine to either synthesize or select an appropriate sound to output. But these methods exhibited various kinds of unnaturalness that later techniques are aiming to overcome, by incorporating more and more coarticulatory effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~moebius/documents/wade_etal_jphon2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllable frequency effects in a context-sensitive segment production model, 2010&lt;/a&gt;, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Based on our perception simulation results, we propose that this memory store is effectively composed of representations of fairly long stretches of speech. Individual ‘‘exemplars’’—that is, portions of such a representation that might be associated with a category label (for example, segment, feature, or word)—&lt;em&gt;are stored adjacent, or closely linked, to the contexts in which they originally occurred, including neighboring, overlapping, or encompassing exemplars&lt;/em&gt;. Selection of exemplars for production is informed by this context information. Just as exemplar perception models identify newly encountered sounds by comparing them with stored members of existing categories, the basic assumption of the Context Sequence account is that selection of a stored category exemplar for production is weighted by the similarity of the exemplar’s original context with the relevant neighboring sounds in the current production context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a system is using combinations of neighboring, overlapping, or encompassing exemplars, I don't think a CFG is powerful enough to accommodate it all. Quoting again from the same paper,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A key assumption of the Context Sequence account is that a meaningful amount of this variability is predictable given the acoustic characteristics of surrounding segments, due to both local coarticulatory and longer-range context-specific production patterns. Suppose now that we take not only the target exemplar, but some of its surrounding context in addition, and compare the entire (now longer) resulting acoustic vector with the sequences of the same length centered around, again, all of the other segments in memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that you haven't mentioned prosody in your question. If we have to account for prosody too, it would add another layer of complexity to a unit selection synthesis system. In that case, a CFG is definitely not powerful enough to accommodate phonological rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T21:35:11.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T22:24:43.817" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either in English, Spanish or French.&#xA;I haven't found a comparative  grammar but I got pretty excited with this monograph:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Portuguese_and_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Portuguese_and_Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested on verb usage, pronoun usage, cognates and loanwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3410" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T12:56:24.547" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T12:56:24.547" Title="Looking for a thorough comparison of French and Spanish" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27195" CreationDate="2018-02-19T23:24:36.620" Score="10" ViewCount="2709" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my research online, I have found a truism that CV is &lt;a href=&quot;https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/browse.php?number=687&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the most basic syllable type cross-linguistically&lt;/a&gt;, and is in fact &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguisticsnetwork.com/the-basics-on-syllabic-structure/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;present in all languages&lt;/a&gt;. Other syllable types are not present in all languages. This raises the question: is there any language that uses &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; CV syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I had found my answer from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/a&gt;, which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a relatively small number of languages this [CV] is the only type of syllable permitted. Such languages include Hawaiian and Mba (Adamawa-Ubangian, Niger-Congo; Democratic Republic of Congo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_phonology#Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article on Hawaiian phonology&lt;/a&gt; contradicts the claim that Hawaiian is strictly CV. It describes Hawaiian syllables as (C)V(V), and provides the following example: &quot;/alo/ ('front') contrasts with /ʔalo/ ('to dodge').&quot; It's clear that the first syllable of /alo/ is V, not CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding online information about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mba_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mba&lt;/a&gt; was harder, but here's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia800300.us.archive.org/28/items/rosettaproject_mfc_swadesh-1/mfc.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;word list&lt;/a&gt;. It's possible that the transcription is incorrect or ignores glottal stops, but it certainly looks like plenty of words have V or CVV syllables: for example &lt;code&gt;nuÍbebea&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bia&lt;/code&gt;, and even &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another language, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minyanka_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mamara/Minyanka&lt;/a&gt;, most of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.malien.net/mamara/lexique/lexicon/main.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the words starting with 'a'&lt;/a&gt; seem to be borrowings from European languages, but a couple seem to be native words beginning with V syllables: &lt;code&gt;aa&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ahayi&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: are there actually any languages in which &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; syllables are CV, without any V, CVV, or other types?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I'm particularly interested in languages that don't have diphthongs, as those could be considered sequences of two vowels or a vowel and a glide. However, I will also accept languages that are strictly CV where the V can include diphthongs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14880" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T00:19:22.607" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T22:38:43.367" Title="Are there any languages that only allow CV syllables?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27194" CreationDate="2018-02-20T00:48:40.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! I wasn't able to find any unambiguous examples either with a short search, and I found one source that says there are no known examples of languages with only CV syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4DAlDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA38&amp;amp;lpg=PA38&amp;amp;dq=syllable%20%22CV%22%20%22onset%22%20obligatory%20glottal%20stop&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NxuHsjdWRj&amp;amp;sig=p49EXZKaCBSJAuEOmpHYMX8n_KU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwity_TYpLPZAhUJSK0KHdFRB8gQ6AEINDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=syllable%20%22CV%22%20%22onset%22%20obligatory%20glottal%20stop&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Understanding Phonology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Fourth Edition), by Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The onset may be obligatory. Languages with obligatory onsets are not hard to find, like Arabic, Dyirbal, and Klamath, but &lt;strong&gt;languages that allow only CV, i.e. an obligatory onset followed by a monomoraic vowel, must be rare, to the extent that we have no example.&lt;/strong&gt; Analytical issues may arise from phonetic onsets in onsetless syllables. Many languages, like German, regularly have a glottal stop in these contexts, as in [ˈafə], pronounced [ʔafə], 'monkey', while in Mba and Ndunga word-initial high vowels appear to be variably preceded by [ʔ], [ɦ] or a homorganic semivowel (Pasch 1986: 32, 91). Henan Mandarin has a homorganic semivowel preceding a non-low onsetless vowel, as in [i&lt;sup&gt;214&lt;/sup&gt;], pronounced [ji], 'one, numeral'; [y&lt;sup&gt;41&lt;/sup&gt;], pronounced [ɥy], 'fish'; [u&lt;sup&gt;341&lt;/sup&gt;], pronounced [wu], 'house', [ɤ&lt;sup&gt;341&lt;/sup&gt;], pronounced [ɰɤ], 'hungry'; and a glottal stop before low vowels, as in [æɛ&lt;sup&gt;341&lt;/sup&gt;], [pronounced [ʔæɛ], 'love' (personal field notes, CG, 2014). Phonemic glottal stops are easily distinguished in languages like Hawaiian, where they contrast with empty onsets, as in [aa] 'jaw' and [ʔaa] 'fiery' (Elbert and Pukui 1979), or Arabic[*&lt;em&gt;see my note below&lt;/em&gt;], which has the same contrast in the coda of the syllable and has the glottal stop in the onset within words, as in [lawʔa] 'sorrow' (Thelwall and Sa'adeddin 1990). German has none of these three properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 38)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it will be hard to find clear answers to this question because for theoretical reasons, in ambiguous situations a CV analysis is often favored over an onsetless V analysis. (In fact, there is even a theoretical tradition of abstractly analyzing languages that appear to unambiguously have non-CV syllables as actually only having CV syllables with empty positions: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://btk.ppke.hu/uploads/articles/51961/file/passino-GPRT.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strict CV phonology&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. So from a certain theoretical perspective, the answer to your question could actually be &quot;all of them&quot;!) This can sometimes lead to confusion when sources don't mention the theoretical basis of analyzing a certain language as having obligatory onsets. (User6726 brought up another theoretical point that can be tricky that I had forgetten about, the analysis of C + glide sequences (or C + coarticulated glide) as phonemes vs. consonant clusters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example (this wouldn't even be a CV-only language anyway, as it allows coda consonants, but just to illustrate the point)  Mandarin Chinese can be said to have obligatory onsets, from a certain point of view. But in fact, in Mandarin this is accomplished by analyzing what could be thought of as vowel-initial syllables as starting with a &quot;zero onset&quot; that has a variable realization, and can be [ʔ], [ŋ] or [ɣ]. This is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=PFwTDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA73&amp;amp;lpg=PA73&amp;amp;dq=syllable%20structure%20%22obligatory%20onset%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=VzTXr_YTVj&amp;amp;sig=Eiz7gaP7d_5_ytyuW50xOAxz96c&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjyzb7QoLPZAhUOA6wKHV8YDyAQ6AEIRDAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=syllable%20structure%20%22obligatory%20onset%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllable Structure: The Limits of Variation&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by San Duanmu, 2008 (p. 73). In fact, Duanmu expresses doubt about this analysis and ends up saying &quot;In summary, the zero onset effect in utterance-initial position is probably unintended, and in medial positions there is no evidence for the zero onset or for resyllabification across a word boundary&quot; (p. 76). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine that in many languages that are said to have &quot;obligatory&quot; onsets, some of the onsets might be consonants that could be seen as epenthetic in at least some contexts, such as glottal stops or glides that are homorganic to the following or the preceding vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the examples given by Gussenhoven and Jacobs of languages with obligatory onsets are not all entirely straightforward. Arabic has glottal stop onsets that can be analyzed as epenthetic at least some of the time (see the note below), as well as /ji/ and /wu/. Dyirbal has /ji/ and /wu/, and according to &quot;Revisiting Phonological Generalizations in Australian Languages&quot;, by Emily Gasser and Claire Bowern, it is possible that &quot;some writers of grammars [of Australian languages] may have analyzed /u-/ or /i-/ initial words as exhibiting an on-glide, because of the expectation that Australian languages tend to disprefer vowel-initial words. We have no way of investigating this problem with the current data&quot; (p. 7). (I haven't been able to find any relevant further information about the phonology/phonotactics of Klamath.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These complications certainly don't mean that it is invalid to describe these languages as having obligatory onsets, but they raise some questions about how simple it is to divide languages into two neat classes of &quot;allow onsetless syllables&quot; and &quot;don't allow onsetless syllables&quot; since languages that are often described as having V-initial syllables like English or German may also show similar kinds of epenthetic consonants in the onset of &quot;vowel-initial&quot; syllables in at least some contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* my note: even in (Modern Standard**) Arabic, the situation is complicated in that words that are pronounced in isolation with an initial glottal stop don't all behave the same way in connected speech. There is a phonological distinction between words that start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hF_P3UpKZMkC&amp;amp;pg=PA19&amp;amp;lpg=PA19&amp;amp;dq=arabic%20glottal%20stop%20hamza%20elidable&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=il6aC7MT6v&amp;amp;sig=i7Tmdk_JA2bEKV-0VVbS4Pea6xc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwij-LDwqbPZAhUFA6wKHeCKDRYQ6AEIcjAM#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=arabic%20glottal%20stop%20hamza%20elidable&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'weak' or 'elidable' glottal stop and 'strong' glottal stop&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** I don't know anything about the phonology of glottal stops in the various regional varieties of Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12696/are-there-languages-that-disallow-initial-vowels-and-lack-glottal-stop&quot;&gt;Are there languages that disallow initial vowels and lack glottal stop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2585/rules-for-glottal-stop-insertion-across-languages&quot;&gt;Rules for glottal stop insertion across languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T22:38:43.367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T22:38:43.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27194" CreationDate="2018-02-20T02:16:16.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cayuvava, Hua (Yagaria), Hawaiian and Senufo are the languages most widely misbelieved in the literature to have only CV syllables. Key 1961 &quot;Phonotactics of Cayuvava&quot; (IJAL) clearly shows CVV and V syllables, so scratch that. Hua has ʔ and n as coda (I don't have access to the full grammar, but that is enough to answer the basic question). Hawaiian is dealt with in the OP. Senoufo is really a language family (Minyanka is an example), and individual languages differ somewhat. Senadi has V, CVV, NCV, CGV syllables, as do Supyire and Suchite. A common way of disposing of postconsonantal glides it to posit that the onsets have palatalization or rounding, and NC is often disposed of by calling the onset a &quot;prenasalized consonant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T02:16:16.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-20T07:21:41.677" Score="0" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the best explanations to present the ideas of d-structure and s-structure in sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21280" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T07:21:41.677" Title="What are the best explanations for d-structure and s-structure in sentences?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27190" CreationDate="2018-02-20T12:50:22.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is definitely a correlation, but it is not absolute.  If we imagine a spectrum of values of &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; (the value of the exponent characterizing the distribution), different language families overlap on the spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distribution is a function of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_typology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morphological typology&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;orthography&lt;/a&gt;, and sometimes otherwise very closely related languages differ fundamentally with regard to these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Morphological Typology&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example English lost most morphology and gender compared to earlier Germanic languages and generally IE languages.  A famous example for Zipf's law is English &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; vs Spanish &lt;em&gt;el, la, los, los, del...&lt;/em&gt;.  As that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_typology#Cyclical_evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cycle&lt;/a&gt; completes some grammaticalised words may become affixes like English &lt;em&gt;'ll&lt;/em&gt;, or syntax may change as was the case with French shifting to non-pro-drop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Orthography&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hindustani has two scripts.  Chinese has many homographs when written in Chinese, but many homophones when written in Pinyin.  In some Hebrew corpora, vowels are indicated, in others only when necessary, resulting in more homographs.  German writes noun compounds together, but modern English usually does not.  The space character was an innovation that is still not universal, and the definition of a word or token is a matter of debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So English and Chinese may have distributions more similar to each other than English and Celtic, or Chinese and Old Chinese, even though English and Chinese are completely unrelated, whereas the other pairs are in the same family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, some of these typological changes happen because of creolisation or substrate, so there are open questions about whether these languages are not in a different family than their nominal ancestors.  But even if we assume English is a fusion language, it is a fusion of IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all assuming that the corpora used are actually comparable.  English and Scots are very similar languages, but if we use each language's  Wikipedia as a corpus to generate the distribution, then there are other variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T18:45:35.420" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T18:45:35.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27200" CreationDate="2018-02-20T12:58:23.200" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a speech and audio processing class the lecturer pointed out that the vowel space is indicated by F1 plotted against F2-F1.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched online, and most sources I've found (including this paper Sharifzadeh, H. R., McLoughlin, I. V. and Russell, M. J. (2012) ‘A Comprehensive Vowel Space for Whispered Speech’, Journal of Voice, 26(2), pp. e49–e56) just mention that that is how the plot is traditionally made, but I can't seem to find the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will of course ask him if I can't find an answer by the next class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20437" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:42:26.040" Title="Why is the second formant plotted as F2-F1 in vowel space plots?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27199" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:42:26.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's done to make the plot resemble the traditional articulatory plot of vowels by height and backness of the tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:42:26.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25754" CreationDate="2018-02-20T14:20:19.683" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one is fairly easy to use, although it cannot be downloaded, but only accessed online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/query-zh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/query-zh.html&lt;/a&gt;. It consists of three corporas: Chinese Internet Corpus (280 million tokens), Chinese Business Corpus (30 million tokens) and Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (more on this one here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/LCMC/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/LCMC/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14601" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T14:20:19.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-20T18:29:57.137" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bouki pa konnen Boukinet&#xA;(S)   (NEG)  (V)         (O)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there no V-T raising in this example? Is it because there is no adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21020" LastEditorUserId="21020" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T18:54:29.377" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T18:54:29.377" Title="Head to head movement (V to T) in Haitian Creole" Tags="&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27206" CreationDate="2018-02-21T00:16:22.950" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, so my question is most probably &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; poorly worded. I have obviously searched on google, but to no avail. Is there a language that has noun declensions or suffixes/affixes that place the noun in a specific point in time? I suspect that if such a language exists, it will probably be polysynthetic. Here are examples of what I'm trying to find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I have the past-report&quot; (I have [the report that &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;], I have [the old version])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I love past-you&quot; (I love [the person that you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I am working the future-field&quot; (I am working [the plot of land that &lt;em&gt;will be&lt;/em&gt; the field])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I hoped to receive now-money&quot; (I hoped to receive [the money that I have now received])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21286" LastEditorUserId="21286" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T15:27:24.720" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T16:37:21.603" Title="Is there a language that has temporal noun modifiers?" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27205" CreationDate="2018-02-21T00:40:13.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three examples come to mind. First, English &quot;ex-&quot;, as in &quot;My ex-boss&quot;, which puts the boss relationship in the fast (but it does entail that he is no longer my boss). If you aren't satisfied with that example, explaining why that doesn't count should clarify what you're really interested in. Second, in Lushootseed, the past and future clitics can be used on nominals, as in [tsi d-&lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;-čəgwas] &quot;my former wife&quot; [tsi d-&lt;em&gt;ɬu&lt;/em&gt;-čəgwas] &quot;my future wife&quot;. Unfortunately, there are no more fluent speakers, but John Lawler might be able to fill in details. And finally, Guarani has such constructions, discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/tonhauser.1/papers/sub9tonhauser.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Judith Tonhauser, also discussing a paper by Nordlinger &amp;amp; Sadler in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 80 which discusses the question in a number of other languages. Tonhauser, however, claims that these are nominal aspects, not tenses, and frankly the argument is kind of above my pay grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T00:40:13.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2018-02-21T04:49:02.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are never supposed to capital&lt;em&gt;ise&lt;/em&gt; letters, though small capitals are sometimes used (e. g. the bilabial trill is represented as /ʙ/ and the uvular trill is /ʀ/). It would be both confusing and irrelevant to capitalize letters, considering especially the confusion that would occur when presented with vowels such as /ɑ/ and /a/, both of which have the capital counterpart ⟨A⟩, or /œ/ with its counterpart ⟨Œ⟩, which is reminiscent of the open front rounded vowel /ɶ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21287" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T04:49:02.063" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T06:02:49.430" Score="0" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Shaktapramode&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.407147/2015.407147.Shaktapramod#page/n280/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;example page&quot;&gt;example page&lt;/a&gt;), there is a strange symbol &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/imwf6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/imwf6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;unfamiliar symbol&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that I have never encountered before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is in the context: &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VmYS1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VmYS1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know what it signifies? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21289" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2020-03-21T16:43:56.380" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T16:43:56.380" Title="Can you help identify a strange Devanagari symbol in a book that doesn't look like any Devanagari letters?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-02-23T15:32:03.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T07:35:22.430" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly  - pharases &quot;in relation to which&quot; (subordinating conjunction) function as one word. How such process is named in linguistics. It would also be interesting to know how such formation is handled in Grammatical Framework and Abstract Categorial Grammars generally? Is it allowed to handle such phrases as one lexical unit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T10:33:26.863" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T10:38:19.520" Title="What is the term for the formation of word groups with single meaning/function (e.g. &quot;in relation to which&quot;) in lingustics" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27210" CreationDate="2018-02-21T10:38:19.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term for such kind of phrase is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiword_expression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multiword expression&lt;/a&gt;. I am not aware of a special term for the process that creates multiword expression. I am also not aware of some special treatment of them; in corpus linguistics usually each word is tagged separately with a part-of-speech tag and syntax trees are built from the single words (as separated by spaces). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T10:38:19.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27213" CreationDate="2018-02-21T14:53:58.233" Score="3" ViewCount="1220" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking up the etymology of the French &lt;em&gt;vendredi&lt;/em&gt; online, I can only find the suggestion that it comes from the Latin &lt;em&gt;Veneris&lt;/em&gt; (Venus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish words for Friday all come from either &lt;em&gt;Frigg&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Freyja&lt;/em&gt; (which both likely originate from the same Germanic/Norse goddess), who is also referred to as &lt;em&gt;Vanadis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the similarity between &lt;em&gt;vendre&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;vendredi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Vanadis&lt;/em&gt;, and taking into account that many neighbouring languages derive their words for Friday from the same god, is it reasonable to suspect that the French word &lt;em&gt;vendredi&lt;/em&gt; also comes from Freyja?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21294" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T15:36:48.110" Title="Does the French word for Friday, &quot;vendredi&quot;, come from the Latin &quot;Veneris&quot; or the old Norse &quot;Vanadis&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;old-french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27212" CreationDate="2018-02-21T15:19:36.713" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very unlikely! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the phonetic similarities &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; real, the old Norse name of the weekday etymologically goes back to &lt;em&gt;Frig's day&lt;/em&gt;, and not &lt;em&gt;Freyja's day&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual form of the Norse word is somewhat blurred by a possible early loan from Old Saxon (or some other such west Germanic language) into the attested Norse &lt;strong&gt;frjádagʀ&lt;/strong&gt;. This form is very likely from an unattested old Norse *&lt;em&gt;frīadagʀ&lt;/em&gt; before the diphthong, indicated by &lt;em&gt;*-īa-&lt;/em&gt; here, changed to &lt;strong&gt;-já-&lt;/strong&gt;. The same change is attested and exemplified in &lt;strong&gt;Kíarr&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; &lt;strong&gt;Kjárr&lt;/strong&gt; 'Caesar', and the source form of the initial &lt;em&gt;*frīa-&lt;/em&gt; is backed up by Faroese reflex &lt;strong&gt;fríggjadagur&lt;/strong&gt;, which (due to a Faroese sound change called &lt;em&gt;skerping&lt;/em&gt;) must come from an older &lt;em&gt;*-īa-&lt;/em&gt; sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was probably a loan from an unattested Saxon form such as &lt;em&gt;*frīadag&lt;/em&gt; (backed up by cognates in Old High German &lt;strong&gt;frīatag&lt;/strong&gt; and Old English &lt;strong&gt;frīġedæġ&lt;/strong&gt;), etymologically sourced from proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*frijjōzdagaz&lt;/em&gt; 'Frig's day'. The Norse form would have been reflected as *&lt;em&gt;friggjudagʀ&lt;/em&gt;, which we cannot find anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of the word as 'Freyja's day' is untenable because the only time &lt;strong&gt;freyjudagʀ&lt;/strong&gt; appears is in Old Icelandic, attested only in certain authors and &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;strong&gt;frjádagʀ&lt;/strong&gt; — and can probably be discarded as a poetic or stylistic innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this, &lt;strong&gt;Vanadís&lt;/strong&gt; as the name of Freyja is only a very ritualised poetic convention (a kenning for skaldic poetry, to be specific) and is not a spoken form. It is quite unlikely that this byname would be used to refer to Freyja when her actual name itself was much, much more commonly used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="3472" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T20:20:07.883" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T20:20:07.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27209" CreationDate="2018-02-21T15:32:21.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible that this glyph is what Unicode calls &lt;strong&gt;VEDIC SIGN ARDHAVISARGA&lt;/strong&gt; (seen &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1CD0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this codepoint list&lt;/a&gt; for the Vedic Extensions block). Despite its positioning in the Vedic Extensions block, its use is reportedly &amp;quot;not limited to Vedic.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T15:32:21.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27209" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:01:27.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The technical term for this symbol is called jihvamuliya. When a visarga is followed by either क/ख the visarga is replaced with this special symbol. It is pronounced with as &quot;ahka/ahkha&quot; with some amount of aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9623" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T16:01:27.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T22:18:58.290" Score="7" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been researching the topic of nominalizations. I learned that such structures might be created by means of morphological derivation (be it affixes, clitics, light verbs) or zero-derivation. I also learned that a term &quot;conversion&quot; lies somewhere very close to zero-derivation. I have been struggling with understanding what is conversion ever since. I mean, technically it is pretty straightforward, things just change syntactic categories, however, I have been wondering how do we know that for example it is a verb that turns into noun, and not the other way round?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in a language like Mandarin Chinese there are very many cases of words that switch categories, such as 死亡 (N death, V to die). How to determine in which direction does the category changing process work? What kind of tests could possibly be conducted in order to find out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14601" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T06:34:26.333" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T06:34:26.333" Title="How to determine the direction of conversion?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T05:36:50.660" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: Blank, A. 1999. &lt;em&gt;Why Do New Meanings Occur? A Cognitive Typology of &#xA;the Motivation for Lexical Semantic Change.&lt;/em&gt; In &lt;em&gt;Historical Semantics &#xA;and Cognition&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by P. Blank Koch, 61-90. Berlin/New York: &#xA;Mouton de Gruyter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphrasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Antiphrasis&quot;&gt;Antiphrasis&lt;/a&gt;: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the   concepts, e.g., &lt;em&gt;perfect lady&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &quot;prostitute&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Auto-antonymy&quot;&gt;Auto-antonymy&lt;/a&gt;: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g., &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; in the slang sense of &quot;good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both, the original word adopts the (polar) opposite of its original meaning. So how do these 2 semantic shifts differ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/87ap1v/antiphrasis_vs_autoantonymy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This deleted Reddit comment&lt;/a&gt; doesn't expound the distinctions enough, and I still can't distinguish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Perfect lady” and “prostitute” are, even if they could be considered opposite, are not antonymous in the same way that “good” and “bad” are. A lot of times we use antiphrases when we are speaking sarcastically, but you would not say that someone who exclaims “wicked!” is being sarcastic or is intentionally saying something that they mean the opposite of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T07:03:52.110" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T13:04:25.547" Title="Antiphrasis vs. Auto-antonymy" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27212" CreationDate="2018-02-22T10:39:27.660" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The etymology of vendredi is completely straightforward. It is from “Veneris dies” (the day of Venus), well attested in Roman texts as the name for one of the seven days of the “planetary” week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T10:39:27.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27220" CreationDate="2018-02-22T16:58:34.233" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for glossary/dictionary corpus in machine readable form. Basically huge file/db which would contain word and its definition. Here is sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Authenticity: a feature that characterizes naturally occurring corpus data&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T17:17:47.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T21:04:25.313" Title="glossary/dictionary corpus for NLP task" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27219" CreationDate="2018-02-22T17:03:37.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two resources are particularly popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T17:03:37.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T17:30:43.060" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a list of lexical roots for Punjabi, with frequency information whereby one can get an idea what the 1000 most-frequent words of the language are. I need to exclude case forms etc. hence lemmata; I also need to exclude grammatical particles and interjections, looking for just nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. If there is none, a possible substitute could come from a closely-related language (I don't have a handle on relatedness issues on modern IA). Any script is okay, transliterated is preferred (Gurmukhi is second runner-up), and glossed would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T13:27:12.673" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T13:27:12.673" Title="Is there a frequency-ranked corpus of Punjabi NAV lemmata?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27219" CreationDate="2018-02-22T21:04:25.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/tools/aboutapi.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macmillan Dictionary has an API&lt;/a&gt; that you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9511" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T21:04:25.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T09:34:45.223" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is high tone retention typologically true? When one of the two adjacent vowels at a word boundary undergoes deletion, one of the two tones also undergoes deletion. And it is said that high tone is always retained regardless of whether it was originally associate with the surviving or with the deleted vowel. Are there any examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21304" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T16:50:05.237" Title="high tone retention" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27205" CreationDate="2018-02-23T16:37:21.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kayardild and Lardil mark tense (time) in the verb, but also in the nouns by suffixes like &lt;em&gt;-(i)na&lt;/em&gt; (past) in Kayardild:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dangka-a burldi-jarra yarbuth-&lt;strong&gt;ina&lt;/strong&gt; thabuju-karra-nguni-&lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/strong&gt; wangal-nguni-&lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; “The man hit the bird with the brother's boomerang&quot;: &lt;em&gt;yarbuth&lt;/em&gt; &quot;bird&quot;, &lt;em&gt;thabuju-karra-nguni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;with brother's&quot; and &lt;em&gt;nguni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boomerang&quot; are all marked for past tense. (&lt;em&gt;-jarra&lt;/em&gt; is the verbal past marker.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;-kur&lt;/em&gt; (future) or &lt;em&gt;-ngarr&lt;/em&gt; (non-future) in Lardil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ngada bule-thur ya-&lt;strong&gt;kur&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I will catch a fish.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sources: Strazny's &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;; Hale, &lt;em&gt;Damin and Lardil Phonotactics&lt;/em&gt;, via wikipedia page on Lardil.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T16:37:21.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27223" CreationDate="2018-02-23T16:50:05.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty complex topic. The standard theoretical account is that a vowel deletes, its tone is not deleted, and then it associates with &quot;the other vowel&quot;. This gives you the Lomongo pattern, where (1) the language has H, L, Rise and Fall at the word level and (2) syllable fusion results in even more conplex tones. In this language H#L→Fall and L#H→Rise (Fall#H→Fallrise...). Under the premise that Fall is the combination of H+L on one unit, the generalization is that all tone are preserved under vowel deletion (and realized on the surviving vowel). So you do not always delete a tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we speak of &quot;H tone retention&quot;, we mean something less general, i.e. whene a tone &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; deleted: retention of H and only H, not other tones. An example of that type is in Kerewe, where /ba-ka-óléka/→ [bakóóléka] 'they showed': the combination L + H is realized as H. It is important to know that Kerewe has no rising or falling tones. In other words, the tone retained has a connection to the kinds of contour tones allowed in the language. One concrete account of the Kerewe-type pattern is that there is a representational asymmetry: only H tones are specified, apparently L tones are actually phonologically toneless. This automatically gives you &quot;H tone retention&quot;, since there is no L to retain. An alternative is to specify both H and L, and have rules that delete L when both H and L associate with a single vowel. Or, if the language has fall but not rise, deletes L before H on a single vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, no language has &quot;L tone retention&quot; in the sense of having H and L, and always preserving L at the expense of H under vowel deletion. There are a few thousand tone languages, so I may have missed an example, but &quot;L tone retention&quot; is either extremely rare or nonexistent. There are cases which are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; actually L retention, such as the common pattern in Luhya languages where L+H→H, but in case a H follow, i.e. you have L+H+H, the result is L+L+H. For example Logoori /kʊ-éyáa/→[kweeyáa] &quot;we are sweeping&quot;, vs. /kʊ-érema/→[kwéérema] &quot;to float&quot;. This is explained if tone is preserved in the usual fashion, but then other rules modify the resulting contour tones (Logoori has falling but not rising tones). Accordingly, the result of syllable merger would be &lt;em&gt;kweérema, kweéyáa&lt;/em&gt;, then H which is part of a rising tone deletes before H, finally, remaining rising tones become H.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep this from getting any more complex, I will just mention that this pattern is not just about vowel deletion, it also shows up in systems of melodic tone mapping, such as Shona which has inflectional tone that mark certain tenses, and where there is a &quot;preference&quot; to preserve the Hs at the expense of the Ls in this mapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I take &quot;H retention&quot; to refer to retention of H at the expense of some other tone (typically L), given a case of two tones where only one is possible (following whatever the rules there are in the language). Some combination of underspecification and phonotactic deletions will give the H retention pattern: there are quite a number of such cases. &quot;L retention&quot; would be retention of L at the expense of H, and that pattern may not exist at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as far as I know, patterns of tone retention under syllable merger are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; divorced from general phonological patterns (they are not a quirk about &lt;em&gt;keeping&lt;/em&gt; a tone that is set afloat). Theoretically, one could have a parameter like &quot;when syllables fuse, keep the H tone&quot; which is independent of output that simple reassociation of the Lomongo type would give. Instead, tonal output can be reduced to saying e.g. &quot;Fall (Rise) does not exist in this language&quot;, plus the core &quot;H retention generalization&quot; which is that Fall and Rise become H under context-free contour simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T16:50:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27228" CreationDate="2018-02-23T18:22:19.110" Score="6" ViewCount="455" Body="&lt;p&gt;When analysing a language, when do we analyse certain morphemes as one word as opposed to multiple, or is this arbitrary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I could make the claim that (in certain cases) &lt;em&gt;'a/an'&lt;/em&gt; is a bound morpheme, and I could analyse it as a prefix on nouns. So, I would write &lt;em&gt;'anapple'&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;'an apple'&lt;/em&gt;. We already see a considerable number of cases of this in English (eg: &lt;em&gt;'a lot'&lt;/em&gt; becoming &lt;em&gt;'alot'&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Since it's been pointed out that the &lt;em&gt;'a/an'&lt;/em&gt; example is in fact incorrect, a better example would be analysing &lt;em&gt;'of'&lt;/em&gt; as a head-marked posessive suffix.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The converse is also possible. Why should I see Turkish &lt;em&gt;'evimiz'&lt;/em&gt; (house-our, &quot;our house&quot;) as one word, and not &lt;em&gt;'ev imiz'&lt;/em&gt;? Turkish has bound words that display vowel harmony too, so why exactly must it be analysed as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20707" LastEditorUserId="20707" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T22:26:19.337" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T04:53:58.207" Title="What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27227" CreationDate="2018-02-23T18:50:15.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not arbitrary, but it is very theory-dependent. One popular criterion for affix-hood is that affixes tend to affix to a particular word-class, thus if you treat &quot;an&quot; as an affix, you would expect that it only attaches to nouns (for example); but in fact it attaches to anything that can be on the left edge of an NP (&quot;an old apple; an enormously expensive apple&quot;, etc.). However, there are &quot;edge-inflections&quot;, where a certain feature is realized on the left or right edge of some constituent. From what I can tell, word / affix distinction is nonexistent in contemporary Minimalist approaches. &lt;a href=&quot;https://arnoldzwicky.org/about/papers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arnold Zwicky&lt;/a&gt; has written a fair amount about the problem of &quot;words&quot; and affixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T18:50:15.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T19:47:11.337" Score="-2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The end goal of asking this question is to find a big (probably several hundred petabyte) data file expressing the meanings of words based on their interactions with other word in as many languages as available for some programming code being writing. However, 3 major problems arise when trying to obtain this meta-dictionary being looking. These three problems make this dictionary not just an ordinary synonym list, but rather a unspoken implication, literal context, and implied connotation based thesaurus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #1: Unspoken Implications&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let's compare the following 3 sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;1. How do I use a chair at a table?&#xA;2. How do I sit down at a table?&#xA;3. How do I sit down in a chair?&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen in the 3 sentences above, it's quite easy for a human to understand that all 3 sentences are basically asking the same question. However, that is not the way a computer sees it. The way a computer would see it, &lt;code&gt;sit&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;chair&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;table&lt;/code&gt; are not direct synonyms, so all 3 sentences are not asking the same thing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The solution for this is the thesaurus being looked for needs to contain a list of which word are implied in which contexts. For an example relating to the the above 3 sentences, this unspoken implication part of the thesaurus might contain an entry of technical information that can be understood in english as:&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;em&gt;A person uses a chair to sit down at a table.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;This example unspoken implications entry allows the computer to fill-in-the-blanks with the 3 example sentences listed at the beginning of this section. For example, when the computer cross references example sentence #1 with this thesaurus entry, it will think: the &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; in the thesaurus is the personal pronoun &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;use&lt;/code&gt;, the &quot;chair&quot; is &lt;code&gt;chair&lt;/code&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;table&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;table. Thus, because there is only one remaining unfilled blank, it is safe to assume that this blank is filled with the default which in this case is the word&lt;/code&gt;sit`. In this way, the above entry in the thesaurus would allow the computer to understand that the 3 example sentences at the start of this section are asking the same thing. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #2: literal Context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I use the term &quot;literal context&quot; to describe words where their definition is based on other modifying/modified words. A very good example of this is the word &lt;em&gt;nuclear&lt;/em&gt; which can mean a lot of completely different things based on the context. &lt;em&gt;Nuclear&lt;/em&gt; can refer to the nucleas of a cell (ex. &quot;nuclear envelope&quot;), dangerous radioactive material (ex. &quot;nuclear energy&quot;), to immediate family (ex. &quot;nuclear family&quot;), to an ailment called &quot;nuclear cataract,&quot; and even to extreme excitement (ex. &quot;The crowd of people went nuclear&quot;). In a case like as the word nuclear, a simple synonyms list can't just be used because the meaning changes based on the literal context. Thus, for this aspect, there needs to be a massive thesaurus to also list which words mean what when used in conjunction with which other words.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem #3: implied Context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Implied context is where the definition of words cannot be determined just based on the literal interpretation of which words surround it. Rather human intuition and common sense are needed to figure out what is ment. In this, we will examine the usage of the word &quot;date&quot; in 8 different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;1. I asked her father for permission to have dates.&#xA;2. I asked the father for permission to have her dates.&#xA;3. I picked a date between the two females.&#xA;4. My girlfriend and I go to the store to have dates.&#xA;5. I asked her &lt;b&gt;what&lt;/b&gt; today's date is.&#xA;6. I asked her &lt;b&gt;when&lt;/b&gt; today's date is.&#xA;7. I dated her to college.&#xA;8. I dated the female to 536 B.C.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;While in normal situations implied context is much less blunt, it still does make up an appreciable portion of what we speak. In example #1, dates is referring to the romantic phenomena. However, as seen in example #2, this assumption cannot be known through just having a gender-biased word (&quot;she&quot;) that modifies or indirectly modifies the word &quot;dates&quot;. Then, in #3, it is seen that while stating &quot;I picked a date&quot; would likely refer to the date fruit, when &quot;between the two females&quot; is added, date now refers to the romantic phenomenon. Further, in #4, it is seen that the meaning of &quot;date&quot; even depends upon the setting. Going to a store for dates would refer to the fruit, whereas going to a restaurant would refer to the romantic phenomenon. Then, as seen in #5 and #6, date can even flip-flop between romance and fruit just based on the type of pronoun used. Finally, as seen in #7 and #8, &quot;date&quot; can also depend on the time period. #7 refers to the romantic phenomenon, whereas #8 refers to the archaeological dating as in determining the time period of an artifact. Thus, since the implied diction can get so tricky, a very complex tangled web of conditional word relations would be necessary to figure this aspect of the problem out.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The overarching question is where can a find a gigantic list of the meanings of all words in all languages in all contexts that includes at least these kinds of interactions between words as listed above. Please note that it the list doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be workable. For example, there may be some odd-ball idioms with an unanticipatable definition that are based on the context of the surrounding passage instead of the surrounding sentence. Bizarre lingual phenomena things like this would also be very helpful to know about, but are not a priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20716" LastEditorUserId="20716" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T14:01:31.967" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T16:13:31.743" Title="Natural Language Processing Meta-Super-Dictionary" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27233" CreationDate="2018-02-23T19:56:06.207" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;English's spelling was changed after sometime and became more like French in some areas, such as the digraph ⟨ou⟩ to represent /u/, after ⟨u⟩ came to represent /ʊ~ʌ/. The reason I ask this, however, is not related to french, but because of how often the the letter ⟨u⟩ today is read as /ju/, which I sounds like it could have been an attempt at pronouncing /y/, and that was an historic phoneme in english.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A probably weak example is the spelling of the word &quot;busy,&quot; which comes from &quot;bisgian,&quot; /bizjiɑn~bizɟiɑn/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is really my speculations on not much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastEditorUserId="15561" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T20:18:42.850" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T00:41:51.397" Title="Has the letter ⟨u⟩ in english ever historically represented the phonemes /y/ or /ʏ/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T21:24:55.410" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure &quot;sign post&quot; questions are appropriate however that is what this is. I am looking for a tool, a means of answering questions such as &quot;Word X is used more by demographic Y than demographic Z.&quot; to achieve this end I think the following is required: A large diverse collection of documents and sources with meta-data which can then be used as selection criteria to define a corpus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of such selection might be: Include/Exclude social media from x,y,z sources. Include/Exclude academic papers. Include/Exclude magazines (by name), newspapers (by name), blogs. Only select where the authors geographic zone is known or self identified, and restricted to some geographic zone(City, country). Restrict search by gender. Use audio to text capture from media sources? Only include books found under the following sections: a,b,c. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then apply word frequency counts by methodology (first x words from text), sum boolean word occurrence by document, in the case of audio-to-text indicate audio sample size per count. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a tool exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21309" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T14:01:50.383" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T14:01:50.383" Title="How to determine word frequency based on demographic? (Does a public library of word frequencies exist by demographic)" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27227" CreationDate="2018-02-23T23:01:52.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words are the minimal forms that speakers memorize. (There might be exceptions to that general principle.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several peculiarities of words not shared by other expressions, but so far as I know, there is no good discovery procedure for words -- that is, there is no set of observable facts about an expression that give a definite answer about whether or not it is a word.  In that respect, words are like phonemes.  Giving the words of a language is like giving the phoneme inventory; it is part of a theory of the language. There is no way of knowing for sure that it is entirely correct.  Theories can be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is probably no accident that not only do words and phonemes share this abstract property, but also that words are always made of phonemes, with the exception of words made up of a single morpheme with some non-native sounds in it (I'm thinking here of &quot;Bach&quot; [bax], but I'm not sure whether the [x] always reverts to /k/ when an affix is added.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T23:01:52.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27230" CreationDate="2018-02-24T00:41:51.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are referring to the [ju] pronunciation of the letter in tube, cube, pubic, putrid, mutate and so on. In some modern dialects it does represent a front-ish vowel, as in &quot;super' [sʉpɜ], but that's a UK regional thing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology#Monophthongs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SW Middle English&lt;/a&gt; seems to have had a series of front round vowels. There were ME diphthongs [eu, ɛu, iu] (lewd, chew, new) which phonologically shifted to [iu] then [ju] except in Welsh English. That diphthong also arises from Romance [y:]; the adaptation of [y:] as /iu/ is highly likely as a way of maximally preserving the French pronunciation, without adding non-existent vowels. It is reported that in Zachrisson 1913 &lt;em&gt;Pronunciation of English Vowels 1400-1700&lt;/em&gt; concludes that there is no conclusive evidence for [y] in (Standard) English since Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T00:41:51.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27227" CreationDate="2018-02-24T00:51:57.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's generally assumed that you can't stick material of arbitrary length and near-abitrary content into the middle of a word. As mentioned in Yellow Sky's comment, we can say, in addition to &quot;an apple&quot;, &quot;a yellow apple&quot;, &quot;a lovely, delicious yellow apple&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Of&quot; is not analyzed as a head-marked possessive suffix for a various reasons. There are many contexts where &quot;of&quot; phrases are used where &quot;of&quot; is not directly after the head of a possessive construction. &quot;Of...&quot; can be used predicatively or used in coordination (&quot;the well-being of the people and &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; the government&quot;). Also, you can put a conversational aside before &quot;of&quot;, like &quot;the perception--which I think is false--of X as Y...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some real cases where it's unclear whether to analyze something as one word, but I don't think any of the examples you gave are of this kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples I know of that have actually been considered to cause some difficulty for analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French verbs and the prefixed pronouns (especially the non-subject pronouns, but to an extent even the subject pronouns)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French prepositions before proper nouns (like country names). This is discussed in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/4PPFS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counterexamples in French&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Miller, Pullum, &amp;amp; Zwicky (1997) (it's on the page that user6726 linked to; the analysis is as &quot;phrasal inflection&quot; of the first word of the NP).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English compound nouns of the form adjective + noun that are written closed (like &quot;blackbird&quot;) vs English adjective + noun sequences that are written open, but stressed on the first element (like &quot;solar system&quot; and &quot;social worker&quot;). This is discussed in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/view/230/0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adjectives, Compounds, and Words&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Laurie Bauer, which is also the source of these examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T04:53:58.207" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T04:53:58.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27240" CreationDate="2018-02-24T20:27:42.267" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman's &lt;em&gt;Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, they mentioned a way to increase the loudness is to increase the speed of closing the vocal folds. The points are summarized below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The the most effective way to increase the loudness is to increase the vigor of the vocal folds (which can be done by stronger elastic forces of the vocal fold) such that the vocal folds can be rapidly closed. The rationale is that the largest peaks in the waveform of a speech signal are caused by the rapidly closing vocal folds, not by their (slower) opening. The advantage of this way is that less air and energy are needed because the vocal folds are open for shorter periods. This method is used by trained speakers and singers and can be used unconsciously by speakers when they stress individual syllables of a word. And the amount of stress can be regulated much more finely by adjusting the speed of opening and closure of the vocal folds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why &quot;the largest peaks in the waveform of a speech signal are caused by the rapidly closing vocal folds, not by their (slower) opening&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12534" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T22:27:47.940" Title="Why can increasing the speed of closing the vocal folds increases the loudness?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27239" CreationDate="2018-02-25T15:20:08.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5412481/figure/f4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This picture&lt;/a&gt; may be useful (likewise &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5412481/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;). The thing of interest is the glottal flow derivative, modeled in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/qpsr/1985/1985_26_4_001-013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; (fig. 2 has an analogous graph). The flow derivative is held to be the best model of the pressure wave (i.e. the source that is filtered by the vocal tract). The greatest amplitude excursion in the flow derivative is associated with the closing phase, which is fairly brief, and thus rapid. The rightward-leaning asymmetry in the wave shape has to do with glottal and vocal tract acoustic mass, delaying flow increase (when it increases, at the beginning of the cycle), plus rapid decay (when it starts to close). I follow the Liljencrants-Fant-Rotheberg rule on relating glottal flow derivative to the acoustic source: if they agree that that that is the source, I'm gonna believe them. (95% of Fant is way above my head).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-02-25T22:27:47.940" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T22:27:47.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3921" CreationDate="2018-02-26T05:55:28.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, many people have been interested in exploring these kinds of ideas (that synchronic English phonology is closer to English orthography than is usually thought). It comes across to me as something that's clever but ultimately unconvincing, but there is still a lot of interesting (if you like learning about English orthography and historical linguistics, at least) data involved in the analyses. I think these kind of analyses have been associated with &amp;quot;Generative Phonology&amp;quot; in particular, and a work that is considered somewhat of a landmark (whether you find it convincing or not) is Chomsky and Halle's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1968), often abbreviated to &amp;quot;SPE&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are actually a fairly large number (not enormous compared to the entire phonology, but not just a handful) of alternations, mainly but not exclusively in Latinate words, between /æ/ and /eɪ/, /ɛ/ and /iː/, /ɒ/ and /oʊ/, and /ɪ/ and /aɪ/. (There are fewer alternations between /ʌ/ and /juː/, because unlike /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɒ/ and /ɪ/, which can occur in orthographically &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; (that is, vowel-final) syllables in Latinate words, /ʌ/ is usually restricted to orthographically &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; (consonant-final) syllables in Latinate words. Although there are a few /ʌ/-/juː/ alternations--like &lt;em&gt;conduct&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;conduce&lt;/em&gt;--there are also a few alternations between things like /ʌ/ and /aʊ/ (pronounce--pronunciation) or /ʌ/ and /ɔɪ/ (join-junction), which make the analysis a bit less straightforward, so I've never felt fully convinced that /ʌ/, /juː/ should be considered to be paired in the same way as the other four, although it often seems to be assumed that they are in the literature that I've read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common example is &amp;quot;shortening&amp;quot; before the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ity,&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;sane/sanity, divine/divinity, serene/serenity.&lt;/em&gt; The more general phenomenon is that &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; vowels tend to show up in stressed syllables that are followed by an unstressed syllable and then another syllable; this has been given various names like &amp;quot;Luick's law&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Three-syllable shortening&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Trisyllabic laxing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Short&amp;quot; vowels tend to show up before certain suffixes, mostly spelled with the letter &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; before a consonant (like the verb suffix &lt;em&gt;-ish&lt;/em&gt; and the adjective suffixes &lt;em&gt;-ic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-id&lt;/em&gt;), and we have variation related to this in pairs of words like &lt;em&gt;tone/tonic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;lyre/lyric.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The letters &amp;quot;a&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;o&amp;quot; (the &amp;quot;non-high-vowel&amp;quot; letters) tend be pronounced as &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; before a single consonant followed by the letter &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; and then another vowel letter (e.g. &lt;em&gt;cre&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;tion, fac&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;tious, fer&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;cious&lt;/em&gt;) but &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; is almost always pronounced &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; in this context (e.g. &lt;em&gt;ign&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;tion&lt;/em&gt;). There are some related alternations (e.g. &lt;em&gt;voracious/voracity, ferocious/ferocity, ignite/ignition&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In native English vocabulary, we see alternation between &amp;quot;long e&amp;quot; in the present and &amp;quot;short e&amp;quot; in the past tense of some &amp;quot;irregular&amp;quot; weak verbs like &lt;em&gt;sleep/slept, keep/kept, sweep/swept, leave/left.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see more description of these kinds of alternations and linguistic analysis of them in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://btk.ppke.hu/uploads/articles/6623/file/BBK-szakdolgozat-1998.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Syllable Structure and Vowel Shortening&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Balogné Bérces Katalin (1998).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the presence of alternations between [eɪ] and [æ] doesn't require us to analyze words pronounced with [eɪ] like &amp;quot;sane&amp;quot; as underlyingly having the phoneme /aː/. People differ with regard to how much they think the phonology should account for alternations like this. From user6726's answer to my question &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26360/5581&quot;&gt;What are current perspectives on analyzing word-final /i/ in English words like “potency” as synchronically derived from /j/?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary reason why these relations are no longer seen as central to the concerns of phonology is that the sound patterns are not clearly part of a system of grammatical rules (which is what most phonologists are interested in) with a reasonable degree of generality. Because there is the viable alternative of simply saying that “supreme” and “supremacy” are separate words, each of which has to be learned (i.e. there is no rule), we can say that [ɪj] and [ɛ] as stem vowels are part of what you learn when you learn the words “supreme” and “supremacy”. Under SPE-era analytic standards, there was a feeling that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; ‘linguistically significant’ generalizations had to be captured in the formal grammar, whereas now there is more tolerance of leaving some generalizations to be captured by linguistic theories outside of grammar (especially by historical linguistics – “because that word comes from Latin, where it was pronounced X” is a possible answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the possibility of affixing, the choice of affix, and pronunciation of resulting form is somewhat word-specific, there have to be separate lexical entries for “supreme” and “supremacy”, and we no longer view grammars as data-compression devices (whereby you can only have one root underlying a half-dozen words). In some cases (e.g. &lt;em&gt;un-, pre-, -ing, -s, -er, -ness&lt;/em&gt;… affixation) there is good reason to claim that we are looking at current rule-governed behavior, but that cannot be said about &lt;em&gt;supreme / supremacy&lt;/em&gt; and ilk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T06:19:13.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27247" CreationDate="2018-02-26T08:17:11.820" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a command in the Praat scripting language that will get the user's current Praat version? The reason I ask is that I want to distribute a script that uses vectors, but since vectors were only introduced in the last year, some users won't be able to run the script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21332" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:25:10.140" Title="Get Praat version in script" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T12:33:29.590" Score="0" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study Swedish and I have a question. I know ancient grammatical masculine and femenine gender fused into one (&quot;common gender&quot;) at some point in time, but I was wondering...&#xA;They say that the grammatical gender a word has in our native tounge can shape the way we think of talk about that specific thing. I once read an article about how people whose native language is a Romance language, when asked to say the first adjective that came to their mind when thinking of the word &quot;chair&quot; (feminine in most Romance languages), tended to use adjectives like &quot;comfortable&quot; which depict a &quot;nice&quot; characteristic.&#xA;On the other hand, when German-native speakers were asked to take part in the same task, they would more likely use words like &quot;hard&quot; or &quot;heavy&quot;, words usually associated with masculinity and manhood (&quot;chair&quot; is masculine gender in German).&#xA;Hence, my question would be: if your native language has no grammatical gender (or does but has no distinction between masculine and feminine, like Swedish), would it be less likely for a native speaker to have biased thoughts or use biased adjectives about a specific word? Could speaking an agender language have as a direct result a minor bias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to write a paper about that so it would be really appreciated if you could link me any resource or research about that matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21334" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T09:55:32.563" Title="Common gender in Swedish and gender equality" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27244" CreationDate="2018-02-26T12:51:03.047" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples of languages with no grammatical gender at all, not even in pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Persian, Mongolian, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz... and generally the languages of Afghanistan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T12:51:03.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T14:39:19.987" Score="0" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish T and English T are quite different. I was wondering if the difference is just about laminar/apical realisations. I'm talking about unstressed T; that is, no aspiration included. Recently I found a video where an English man says that English T has something special: affrication. It's not an affricate; it's just a plosive consonant with affrication.&#xA;Here is the video:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PSdlctYBsw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PSdlctYBsw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about this? Is English T (at least in most dialects) an apical alveolar plosive with affrication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21335" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:14:03.513" Title="Realisations of T - affrication" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27243" CreationDate="2018-02-26T14:59:39.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This line echoes the script version: &lt;code&gt;echo 'praatVersion$'&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to check for the current version you sound do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;versionPraat$ = left$(praatVersion$, (rindex(praatVersion$, &quot;.&quot;)-1));&#xA;versionPraat = 'versionPraat$' #convert string to numeric&#xA;&#xA;if versionPraat &amp;lt; 6&#xA;   exit Please download the most recent version of Praat.&#xA;endif&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stole this from a script written by Chun Chan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21292" LastEditorUserId="21292" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T15:06:13.710" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T15:06:13.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27229" CreationDate="2018-02-26T16:13:31.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have two input choices: 1. analyze dictionaries (wordnet, worknik or wiktionary), 2. use word embeddings (word2vec, glove, elmo). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this data with a WSD (word sense disambiguation) solution. Search github for WSD. Also, this is worth looking at: &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.openai.com/discovering-types-for-entity-disambiguation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.openai.com/discovering-types-for-entity-disambiguation/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T16:13:31.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:40:46.597" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there are term in linguistics for the phenomenon that there are a greater number of ways to express common, basic, and more frequently used concepts than there are ways to express concepts that are more rarely employed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there are a myriad of synonyms for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/big&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;big&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and a wide variety of ways to express this concept. There are significantly fewer ways to express &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/curvaceous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curvaceous&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and far fewer synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no actual term for this phenomenon, is there are branch of research in linguistics that discusses this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21337" LastEditorUserId="21337" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:08:09.027" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:08:09.027" Title="Relationship between commonality/rarity and synonymy" Tags="&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27246" CreationDate="2018-02-26T21:14:03.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Geoff Lindsey does has this affrication feature in his pronunciation of /t/ – his pronunciation doesn't strike me as strange, just British. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/homes/patrick/livlen.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Honeybone&lt;/a&gt; discusses similar lenition in Liverpudlian which includes [ts] realizations. It is probably true for some range of UK dialects. I can't say that I've heard this from any American English speakers, but sub-phonemic details are easy to miss: it's certainly not present in my local dialect. Dialects can't be meaningfully counted, so questions about &quot;most&quot; can't be resolved. At present, I don't believe there has been a systematic survey of where this affrication shows up. FWIW, the same thing happens in Siswati and the dialect of Arabic spoken by many Berber speakers, and it is connected to aspiration. His realizations of /t/ in unaspirated contexts is not affricated by comparison to the aspirated allophone (I didn't do a systematic acoustic study), so I suspect it is an enhancement feature for aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:14:03.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T22:28:17.503" Score="11" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French all have a (compound) perfect tense, which I find curious, given that Latin did not. (You can alternatively perhaps say that it is either united with the perfect and preterite/aorist tenses, rather than it not existing, but in either case, Classical Latin did not have a &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;compound&lt;/em&gt; perfect active tense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is then: where did this compound perfect tense come from in the (Western) Romance languages? And why are there two of them?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Germanic languages I'm aware of (English and German) both have a compound perfect tense, while German uses both &quot;to have&quot; and &quot;to be&quot; as auxiliaries. The uses of these auxiliaries aligns rather closely with uses in both French and Italian, while of course Spanish only uses the single auxiliary &quot;to have&quot;, like modern English, albeit with a slightly different sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416" LastEditorUserId="416" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T22:58:55.240" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T21:13:43.300" Title="Where did the use of the two auxiliaries in the Romance languages come from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27244" CreationDate="2018-02-27T02:35:21.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese lacks gendered pronouns, and always has. The language is as un-sexist as you can get; there aren't even words for man and woman. The only 'gendered' words that exist are literally just the words for 'male' and 'female'. To translate 'man' or 'woman', you would have to say 'male person' and 'female person'. But I believe its common to make that distinction anyway. And besides, ancient China was hardly egalitarian. When it comes to gender equality, surprisingly enough, medieval Europe was one of the better cultures out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T02:35:21.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27256" CreationDate="2018-02-27T03:01:42.707" Score="3" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always think of the Spanish verb &quot;ser&quot; being related to &quot;essence&quot;, which can be contrasted with the verb &quot;estar&quot;, which is related to &quot;state&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ser&quot; is also a noun with various meanings including &quot;being&quot; as in &quot;ser humano&quot; = &quot;human being&quot;, and &quot;essence&quot;. There is also another Spanish word &quot;esencia&quot; meaning &quot;essence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But am I actually correct in thinking &quot;ser&quot; is related to &quot;esencia&quot;, &quot;essence&quot;, &quot;essential&quot;, etc? Or is it just one more linguistic coincidence after all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've checked Wiktionary and the Dicc. RAE but didn't find a full answer so I bring it here to the experts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T19:40:43.537" Title="Are the English words &quot;essence&quot; and &quot;essential&quot; related to the Spanish word &quot;ser&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27254" CreationDate="2018-02-27T05:22:36.733" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Some forms of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; are cognate with &amp;quot;essence&amp;quot;, but &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; itself is not.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ser&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish is a &amp;quot;suppletive verb&amp;quot;, which is missing some of its forms and has stolen them from other verbs to compensate. Compare English &amp;quot;go&amp;quot;, which doesn't have the past-tense form *goed; instead, it's stolen the past form &amp;quot;went&amp;quot; from the unrelated verb &amp;quot;wend&amp;quot; (as in &amp;quot;wend your way&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ser&lt;/em&gt; itself comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;sedēre&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to sit&amp;quot; (*). (&lt;em&gt;Estar&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand is from &lt;em&gt;stāre&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to stand&amp;quot;.) English has various cognates of &lt;em&gt;sedēre&lt;/em&gt;, but &amp;quot;essence&amp;quot; isn't one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, forms such as the present-tense &lt;em&gt;soy, es, somos, son&lt;/em&gt; come from the Latin &lt;em&gt;sum, es, sumus, sunt&lt;/em&gt;: the present indicative of the verb &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;to be&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Essence&amp;quot; and related words do come from &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt;; the participle ending &lt;em&gt;-nt-&lt;/em&gt; was added to &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; to form a word meaning &amp;quot;being&amp;quot;. Thus &amp;quot;essence&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;that which is being&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;essential&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;related to essence&amp;quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the noun &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;, I'm afraid I don't know its etymology, but I'd assume it's related to the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The etymology I'm familiar with is &lt;em&gt;sedēre&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;seder&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;seer&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;, though as pointed out in the comments it could also be from &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;essere&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;esser&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt;. Most likely the two forms influenced each other, because there are some forms of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; that are definitely from &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; and others that are definitely from &lt;em&gt;sedēre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T19:40:43.537" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15580" CreationDate="2018-02-27T09:26:50.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, we need to remember that language can be analysed in different ways. If you are describing the sequence of sounds a speaker produces, it is adequate to classify segments of sound as phonemes and to call the characters or sequences of characters that represent each phoneme in the written language as a &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt;. In that sense, the word &quot;light&quot; would be composed of the letter &quot;l&quot; for the sound /l/, the letter &quot;igh&quot; for the sound /ai/, and the letter &quot;t&quot; for the sound /t/. The letter &quot;igh&quot; is composed of three characters, namely &quot;i&quot;, &quot;g&quot;, and &quot;h&quot;, each of which is represented graphically with a different drawing (glyph). So, responding your question: yes, a letter is a graphological unit that corresponds to a phoneme. In that sense, a letter is a unit as long as we are analysing text in terms of phonology and graphology. It is not, however, a grammatical unit of any kind. The smallest grammatical unit is the morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21344" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T09:26:50.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27252" CreationDate="2018-02-27T11:33:29.073" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What we know is that the &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; perfect is a Sprachbund feature of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Average European&lt;/a&gt;. Where it originated is less clear. Because Romance languages are better documented in the late antiquity and early medieval time we have more early precursors of the have perfect in them. However, Southern German had a real need to develop a new perfect or past tense because the loss of the final -e neutralised the difference between past and present tense in the 3rd person singular (Modern High German present/past &lt;em&gt;er sagt/er sagte&lt;/em&gt;, Southern dialects: &lt;em&gt;er sagt/er sagt&lt;/em&gt;). Southern German dialect have completely lost the synthetic past tense, a phänomenon known as &lt;em&gt;Präteritumsgrenze&lt;/em&gt; in German dialectology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Modern German periphrastic tenses already developped in Old High German time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T16:30:00.410" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T16:30:00.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T12:53:21.697" Score="0" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading Geoff Lindsey's blog and stumbled across an interesting matter. He says FLEECE vowel is actually a diphthong. Perhaps ij or ɪj. I can hear the diphthong [ɪj] in -ly, for example, and in words like &quot;me&quot; and &quot;see&quot; at the end of sentences, in British accents. Also, in Australian accent it seems to be [ej]. But I can't here a diphthong in words like &quot;believe&quot; and &quot;peace&quot;. Does it vary depending on the situation? Or does it have to do with the speed of the speech?&#xA;In Australian accent I can hear it in any cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21335" LastEditorUserId="21335" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:15:19.800" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:15:19.800" Title="Fleece vowel - a long vowel or a diphthong?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4420" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:12:00.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another word widely heard in Laos when they want to make a sentence more polite, I hear &quot;ໂດຍ&quot; or &quot;ໂດຍຂ້ານ້ອຍ&quot;. After asking some friends who speak Lao as a mothertongue, they always use &quot;ໂດย&quot;, the shorten form of &quot;ໂດຍຂ້ານ້ອຍ&quot; which is older and more polite, with people in general but prefer using &quot;ເຈົ້າ&quot; with people in higher age and rank, additionally for official use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21346" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:12:00.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27252" CreationDate="2018-02-27T20:32:28.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It actually came form Late Latin (e.g., &lt;em&gt;probatum habeo&lt;/em&gt;). It's a natural process, a similar construction with &quot;to have&quot; has developed, for example, in Northwest Russian which is very interesting because Russian has no corresponding verb so it had to resort to its &quot;у+NP&quot; construction (e.g., &lt;em&gt;у него корова подоено&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he has milked a/the cow&quot;, lit. &quot;at him cow milked&quot;) which clearly shows the origin of this tense is semantic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:32:28.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27254" CreationDate="2018-02-27T21:51:51.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Draconis says, some conjugations of &lt;em&gt;ser&lt;/em&gt; are cognate with Latin &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; derived words in English, but not all. I made this chart (based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishlinguist.us/tag/suppletion/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; blog post) a while ago, it details which are which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TBwFT.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;^ &lt;strong&gt;Note for &lt;em&gt;ve&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;In voseo dialects, the 2nd person sing. pos. (&lt;em&gt;vos&lt;/em&gt;) imperative for &lt;em&gt;ir&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;andá&lt;/em&gt; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt;). This is cognate with Spanish &lt;em&gt;andar&lt;/em&gt;, Catalan &lt;em&gt;anar&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;andare&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;aller&lt;/em&gt; (all meaning to go/to walk).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishlinguist.us/2017/02/why-ser-and-ir-are-so-irregular/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://spanishlinguist.us/2017/02/why-ser-and-ir-are-so-irregular/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T21:51:51.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T16:17:05.647" Score="3" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that voiced sounds are harmonic, e.g. the frequency spectrum consists of integer multiples of F0. If these are precise integer multiples, the human voice would be considered a perfect harmonic source. Yet I know many musical instruments, although harmonic sources to a first approximation, have spectra containing harmonics that deviate from precise integer ratios of the fundamental in consistent ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm looking for a source that quantifies the deviation between the harmonics of the human voice and those of a perfect harmonic source.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interests me because any consistent discrepancy between the typical harmonic spectrum of the human voice and other roughly harmonic sources would likely be perceptually salient, if they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I found this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jneurosci.org/content/23/18/7160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to have some of what I'm looking for. In figure 2b, there is a normalized frequency spectrum with peaks very close to integer ratios. The audio is taken from a large corpus of American English. So, at least when it's averaged over a large number of utterances, speech seems to closely resemble a perfect harmonic source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21355" LastEditorUserId="21355" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T01:09:57.320" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T21:24:33.437" Title="How harmonic is speech?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27266" CreationDate="2018-02-28T18:17:45.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any work on this topic in linguistic phonetics, but there may be something out there in musical acoustics for voice. The main problem for quantifying inharmonicity is detecting harmonics exactly, and the main issues can be seen using Praat. Frequency information comes in fixed-width bins which is inversely related to the length of the analyzed signal: the longer the analysis window, the smaller the frequency step between successive frequency computations. Each glottal pulse is fairly short, say in the range of 8 msc, and an analysis that looks at the harmonic shape of just one glottal cycle will have a much larger frequency step. A large frequency step means higher uncertainty as to the actual frequency which a reported peak corresponds to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing an 8 msc window to an 80 msc window, the shorter window has a frequency resolution of about 86 Hz whereas the longer window has a frequency resolution of about 11 Hz. In the former short window, it's not practical to try to identify harmonics. Even increasing the window length to 16 msc (about 2 glottal pulses), the identified &quot;peaks&quot; are way off from integer multiples of the fundamental (about twice the actual multiple). With an 80 msc window, frequency resolution is mathematically pretty decent, but even then you will get apparent inharmonicity, because of the limited frequency resolution of the apparent fundamental. If you look at a higher harmonic such as the 10th, the apparent peak should occur at 10 times the frequency of the fundamental, give or take one-tenth the frequency resolution (so about 1 Hz for an 80 msc window). The computed frequency of the fundamental, on the other hand, is that apparent peak, give or take 10 Hz. Autocorrelation methods for pitch extraction can solve that problem, as long as pitch changes negligibly within the window. What you will probably find is not that higher harmonics are &quot;off&quot; relative to the fundamental, rather, the harmonic peak of higher harmonics occurs a multiple of the fundamental, and the lowest peak that supposedly reflects the fundamental is off a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a piano string or tuning fork, you can strike a note, sample it and get a long analysis window with excellent frequency resolution (assuming that you don't have gremlins jumping up and down on the vibrating string). Human speech is full of acoustic gremlins, so the longer the window of analysis, the more &quot;noise&quot; you're going to introduce (especially variation in the shape and duration of individual glottal pulses). This may be more controllable with professional musicians performing sustained notes, but that is not speech. Since perfect vs. imperfect harmonic series is not linguistically salient, I think you won't find any linguistic phonetic literature on this. You may find something in the realm of speech pathology and dysphonia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to overcome the frequency-bin problem is to (very carefully) select a small number of cycles – two – selecting the zero-crossing at the same point of two successive cycles, then concatenate a number of copies. You will get spurious harmonics (every even harmonic, I think, will be a lower-amplitude artifact) and also you have to define &quot;peak&quot; in a special way (it should be the midpoint in the series of &quot;peak-ish&quot; numbers, but that point may be a negative number with the set of dB values). But, the frequency resolution will be improved to the point that if F0 is 110, you'll get harmonics at every integer multiple of that. This minimizes the changes over time that characterize speech and introduces fewer artifacts (esp. compared to iterating a single cycle). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a published source on this, but experientially, I know that synthesized complex waves built from sine wave components of integer multiple periods sound mind of mechanical. A bit of variation in the components (within a cycle and between cycles) makes it sound somewhat more natural. I expect that too much variation has the opposite effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T21:27:18.053" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T21:27:18.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T19:00:29.020" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having linguistics and Chinese knowledge, I need some basic notions to understand an academic article. I add an example of the kind of language used&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. liang zu xuesheng 'two teams/sections of students'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. [[zu]] = λkλx∃n [ ∪ k(x) ∧ µteam/section(x) = n] k &gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. [[liang]] = λP λx [P(x) ∧ 2(x)] &amp;lt;, &gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. [[liang zu xuesheng]] = λx [ ∪∩ students (x) ∧ µteam/section(x) = 2]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore some concise exposition and some reference wuold do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2554" LastEditorUserId="2554" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T21:55:14.663" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T21:55:14.663" Title="Formal semantics explanation" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T00:49:42.037" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make sure I understand entailment properly, but my prof basically said two sentences that only briefly explained what entailment is, and he's not teaching this course with a textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) The dog was fed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Johnny fed the dog a treat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does sentence (a) entail sentence (b), or is it mutual entailment? I don't think it's mutual because the dog being fed doesn't necessarily mean that Johnny was the one who fed it. A similar example was this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) The children were served candy for dinner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) The children ate candy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I overthinking it to wonder if the children being served candy doesn't necessarily mean they ate candy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) John and Susie love each other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) John loves Susie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think sentence (a) entails sentence (b), but I wonder if they contradict each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21360" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T12:52:18.263" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T12:52:18.263" Title="Am I understanding semantic entailment correctly?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="180" CreationDate="2018-03-01T07:14:17.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1841p5/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_phonetics_and/c8bh6ui/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit comment chain&lt;/a&gt; helped me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/user/kjoonlee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kjoonlee&lt;/a&gt; 5 years ago [as of 2018 Mar. 1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short simple answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetics deals with sounds as they are made in your throat/mouth/nose/etc. and sounds as they are received by your ears. (Articulatory &amp;amp; acoustic phonetics vs. Auditory phonetics) This also means phoneticists/phoneticians can learn to become speech therapists and dialect coaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonology deals with sounds as your &lt;em&gt;brain&lt;/em&gt; perceives them. And there is a difference between the ideas of sounds (phonemes) and the actual acoustic sounds (phones/allophones) themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might think you say the same &amp;quot;t&amp;quot; sounds in &amp;quot;tar&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; but they're actually different acoustically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/user/lalalalalalala71&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lalalalalalala71&lt;/a&gt; 5 years ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post is the best answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you might think you say the same &amp;quot;t&amp;quot;sounds in &amp;quot;tar&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; but they're actually different acoustically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, OP: phonetics is the discipline which tells you the /t/ sounds in &lt;em&gt;tar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;star&lt;/em&gt; are different (in &lt;em&gt;tar&lt;/em&gt;, it is &amp;quot;aspirated&amp;quot;; that is, it is pronounced along with a puff of air, like a very soft version of the sound of the letter H. This aspiration is absent in &lt;em&gt;star&lt;/em&gt;). Phonology, on the other hand, is the discipline which tells you these sounds are the same, as they're just variations of the sound /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T07:14:17.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2018-03-01T07:37:53.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/phoneme-sound-allophone-phone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this helpful website&lt;/a&gt; that I edited for readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SQ7bA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SQ7bA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post will clearly define and exemplify several terms in phonetics which are often confused: &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;allophone&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; (Gr. &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; “sound, voice”) is the smallest contrastive unit of language that may change the meaning of a morpheme and, as a pursuant, a word.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put it simply, phoneme is a contrasting phonological unit. Consider several examples:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) pig – big /p/* – /b/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) pen – pan /e/ – /æ/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3) sink – think /s/ – /θ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From 1-3 overhead, the distinction between /p/ – /b/, /e/ – /æ/, and /s/ – /θ/ creates new words in English, which means that English has such phonemes as /p/, /b/, /e/, /æ/, /s/, /θ/ (among other English phonemes). When linguists construct phonological system of a language (let’s say the language of a tribe), they try to find pairs of words in which the distinction is as small as in the words above. If such a pair is found, then it means that this language has such phonemes. Let us consider one more example, in Russian this time:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;em&gt;люк&lt;/em&gt; [luk] “hatch” – &lt;em&gt;лук&lt;/em&gt; [ɫuk] “onion” /l/ – /ɫ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this pair the only difference between two words is /l/ – /ɫ/, that is, soft /l/ vs hard /ɫ/. As example 4 shows, in Russian, there are two distinctive phonemes /l/ – /ɫ/ since they change the meaning of the word (via the root morpheme). However, in English, there is no phoneme /ɫ/ since it does not serve the purpose of distinguishing words or morphemes. For example, whether we pronounce [lamp] or [ɫamp], it does not change the meaning; therefore, it is not a phoneme in English. In contrast, in Russian, there is no pair of words which would be distinguished based on the /e/ – /æ/ opposition (example 2 above); therefore, /æ/ is not a phoneme in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sound&lt;/strong&gt; (= &lt;strong&gt;phone&lt;/strong&gt;) is a vibration or wave caused by an object.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition comes from acoustics and underlines physical characteristics of sounds of speech. Sounds are instances of phonemes in real speech. Put it simply, sounds are everything we hear with our ears. Here are some examples of sounds:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) [k], [b], [f], [u], [d], [e], [i:]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;6) the word “cat” consists of three sounds and can be transcribed as follows: [kæt]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In dictionary transcriptions, we have sounds, not phonemes. Sounds are physical segments. Sounds, unlike phonemes, have such concrete characteristics as duration in time and loudness. Sounds are produced by organs of speech. Sounds are quite concrete and linguists consider them to be units of speech; while phonemes are abstract (they are generalizations made on the basis of comparison of words) and linguists consider them to be units of language (cf Saussurian distinction langue – parole). Sometimes, in non-linguistic circles, the word “sound” is used to name what is, in fact, a phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Allophone&lt;/strong&gt; (Gr. &lt;em&gt;allos&lt;/em&gt; “other” and &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; “sound, voice”) is a variant of a phoneme.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allophones are different pronunciations of words which don't change the meaning of these words. Consider the following allophones:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7) [pʰ] as in “pin” and [p] as in “spin”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;8) [l] as in “lean” and [ɫ] as in “fill”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether we (or a foreigner) pronounce [pin] or [pʰin], [spin] or [spʰin]; [li:n] or [ɫi:n], [fil] or [fiɫ], it does not really change the meaning in English. Therefore, we are dealing not with phonemes, but with allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allophones can be of three types (Kocherhan, 2006, p. 158):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a) &lt;em&gt;individual&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. a foreigner or a person with a speech disorder cannot pronounce [p] correctly);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) &lt;em&gt;territorial&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. when in some part of a country [p] is always pronounced as [pʰ]); and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c) &lt;em&gt;positional&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. [l] at the end of words is usually pronounced as [ɫ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Kocherhan, M.P. (2006). &lt;em&gt;Vstup do movoznavstva&lt;/em&gt; (2nd ed.). Kyiv: Academiia.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Scupin, R. (2012). &lt;em&gt;Cultural anthropology: A global perspective&lt;/em&gt; (8th ed.). Boston: Pearson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*/Slashes/ are usually used for phonemes and [square brackets] for sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T07:37:53.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="301" CreationDate="2018-03-01T07:41:43.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/transcription/broad-narrow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; from Prof. &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kevin Russell&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/linguistics/people/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(BSc Manitoba; MA, PhD USC)&lt;/a&gt; should help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; transcription of a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, you can only transcribe a single utterance -- for example, how Kevin Russell pronounced the word &lt;em&gt;cat&lt;/em&gt; at 12:58:03 pm on February 4, 2004. You can transcribe this utterance as exactly as possible, within the limits of your hearing and the conventions provided by the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to go beyond that, to try to describe how Kevin Russell pronounces the word in general, or further still to how English speakers pronounce it in general, then you have to start making abstractions -- you have to decide which details to include and which to ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's common to distinguish between two kinds of transcription, based on how many details the transcribers decide to ignore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Narrow transcription:&lt;/strong&gt; captures as many aspects of a specific pronunciation as possible and ignores as few details as possible. Using the diacritics provided by the IPA, it's possible to make very subtle distinctions between sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Broad transcription&lt;/strong&gt; (or phonemic transcription): ignores as many details as possible, capturing only enough aspects of a pronunciation to show how that word differs from other words in the language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key factor in a broad transcription is meaning -- if a pronunciation detail can change the meaning of words in a language, it must be included in a broad transcription of that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the difference between the vowels in [liv] and [lɪv]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For Canadian English, a narrow transcription would note the difference between the [i] and the [ɪ]. So would a broad transcription, since &lt;em&gt;leave&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; mean different things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For Canadian French, a narrow transcription would note the difference between [i] and [ɪ]. But a broad transcription would not.  [liv] and [lɪv] do not mean different things in Canadian French -- they're both ways of saying 'book'. Both [i] and [ɪ] occur in the language, but they never &lt;em&gt;contrast&lt;/em&gt;, that is, they never cause a difference in meaning. So a broad transcription would ignore the difference and write both as [liv]. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the symbols covered in this section, we are able to make broad transcriptions of Canadian English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/transcription/broad-narrow-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequently asked questions&lt;/a&gt; about broad and narrow transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T07:41:43.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-01T09:36:24.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both types of bilingualism have different nuances depending on the family, the context where we are and if the second language takes part of a minority. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had experience with both cases and if we talk about effectiveness both have it, although we must consider the aspects mentioned before. A family who uses a simultaneous or sequential bilingualism where children speak with parents in English and in the community in Spanish, for instance, they are always in contact with both languages. They are able to speak in English at school, they can watch English movies at the cinema or at home, but, what happened if the second language is a minority culture? Imagine that you live in a small city where the migrant rate is low and the second language you want to teach children is not known, do you think it would be as easily to teach as other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reckon that more than the type, simultaneous or sequential, is the rules and possibilities that you can have to teach both languages. The context plays a vital role where children decides not to speak their second language because nobody else use it, let it apart and make it its acquisition slower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21362" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T09:36:24.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T11:13:45.363" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you think is the accurate equivalent &lt;em&gt;les verbes symétriques&lt;/em&gt; in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T11:33:45.333" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T11:33:45.333" Title="Translation of 'verbes symétriques' from French to English" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9840" CreationDate="2018-03-01T14:14:49.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ironically, your best bet is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/download/stackexchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/download/stackexchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T14:14:49.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17606" CreationDate="2018-03-01T17:27:52.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I would focus on one part of the original question, namely &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this variation arises in the first place. The question presuppose that there is some unit that underlies pronunciations (I accept the presupposition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the term &quot;phoneme&quot; to refer to the segment in its underlying form, each phoneme is pronounced (realized, implemented, or whatever term you want to use) with a particular high-level acoustic and articulatory intent. The phonemes /t/ and /d/ in English call for raising the blade of the tongue in a certain manner, and they are distinguished by what happens at the larynx. However, it is extremely difficult to realize a phoneme in a very specific and identical manner in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; contexts, owing to various physical forces of speech (articulatory, aerodynamic and acoustic factors). An aspect of articulation that plays a significant role in contextual variability of speech is coarticulation. In uttering the sequences {/ti/, /tu/, /tæ/, /pi/, /pu/, /pæ/}, the motor system faces the problem that in /ti/, there are two uses of connected articulators that have to be carefully orchestrated (involving positioning of the tongue blade), but in /pi/ the articulators for the vowel and consonant constrictions are different, and one does not constrain the other. Consequently in articulating /ti/ there is a physical necessity to adjust the articulations of /t/ and /i/ that does not exist in /pi/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linguistic consequence of this is that there is a latent tendency to modify the pronunciation of /t/ in the direction of /i/, when /i/ follows. This tendency becomes linguistically interesting because the motor system only weakly pushes articulation in a particular direction, and speakers have to &quot;decide&quot; exactly how  coarticulatory influences are implemented. One approach would be to let tongue raising and fronting for /i/ commence early, resulting in a palatal-sounding consonant [tʲ]. Another is to retard raising and fronting (in order to maintain the details of articulation for /t/), resulting in an initially-retracted vowel [ɨ̆i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial impetus for contextual variation is this necessity of coordinating consecutive articulations in fluent speech. Languages can regulate automatic coarticulation in many ways, and this can lead to historical changes in the high-level acoustic and articulatory intent behind a given segment. So in some (Indic and Bantu) languages, the original goal of producing breathy voicing as a distinctive property of stops has been modified, to the point of becoming the goal of producing distinctive L tone on a following vowel. The interesting but unanswered question is, what causes languages to respond differently to that initial physical impetus? That is, why aren't allophonic rules the same in all languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T17:27:52.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T23:16:50.240" Score="0" ViewCount="1033" Body="&lt;p&gt;While many languages possess unrounded front vowels (e. g. /e/ and /i/) and rounded back vowels (e. g. /o/ and /u/), rounded front vowels (e. g. /y/ and /ø/) as well as unrounded back vowels (e. g. /ɤ/ and /ɯ/) seem to be far less common. Is there a reason for the statistic correlation between vowel backness and rounding? Does for example rounding facilitate the pronunciation of back vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T00:32:35.613" Title="Why are unrounded front vowels and rounded back vowels much more common than rounded front and unrounded back vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27280" CreationDate="2018-03-02T00:32:35.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essential acoustic difference between front vowels and back vowels is their difference in F2: back vowels have a lower F2 than do front vowels. This is because the front cavity (which correlates with F2) of back vowels is longer than that of front vowels, and the longer the tube, the lower the resonance frequency. Lip rounding has a similar effect: rounding a vowel makes the front cavity longer, lowering F2. When backness correlates with roundness (front unrounded, or back rounded), vowel identification is easiest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T00:32:35.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8730" CreationDate="2018-03-02T04:54:38.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dominik Lukes' answer is quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to elaborate on the specific development: all of the sounds associated with the letter &quot;j&quot; in present-day languages are ultimately based on the front high semivowel sound that &quot;j&quot; is currently used for in German. (This is probably in part why the letter &quot;j&quot; is used in IPA for the semivowel sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter &quot;j&quot; originated as a graphical variant of the letter &quot;i&quot;, which typically is used to represent the front high vowel [i], which is pretty much a syllabic equivalent to [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other pronunciations of &quot;j&quot; developed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Romance languages, Latin /j/ (originally written with the letter &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;) developed via regular sound change to something like [ɟ] or [dʒ] in certain contexts. (Not necessarily in all phonetic environments! And there were other sources of the sound [dʒ]. But the specifics depend on the particular language we're talking about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French had the sound [d͡ʒ] when the word &quot;just&quot; was borrowed from it into English, and English speakers have mostly retained this pronunciation. French speakers later simplified the affricate to a fricative [ʒ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of how Spanish got &quot;j&quot; = /x/ is the longest. In Spanish, the letter &quot;j&quot; at one point was used to represent the sound /ʒ/, as in modern French, probably for similar reasons. The sound /ʒ/ occurred in inherited native Spanish vocabulary as the reflex of word-initial Latin /j/ before back vowels (as in your example &lt;em&gt;justo&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; L. &lt;em&gt;iustus,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;juego&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;iocum&lt;/em&gt;). It also occurred word-medially as the reflex of Latin &quot;l&quot; in certain palatalizing contexts, in words like &lt;em&gt;ajo&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;alium, fijo&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;filius, ojo &amp;lt; oculus.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, Spanish [ʒ] was devoiced and merged with the reflex of [ʃ] (which used to be spelled with &quot;x&quot;), and the merged reflex was further retracted to [x]. Because of the merger, in modern Spanish spelling the letter &quot;j&quot; is used in many words that used to be spelled with &quot;x&quot;: e.g. &lt;em&gt;ejemplo.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Interestingly, in some regional varieties of Spanish the sound /ʝ/ (often written &quot;y&quot;) has gone through or is going through similar changes to the ones that Latin /j/ went through centuries before in words like &lt;em&gt;justo.&lt;/em&gt; Spanish speakers in certain areas may realize the sound as a voiced affricate like [dʒ], a voiced fricative like [ʒ], or a devoiced fricative like [ʃ].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound changes and examples taken from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/cons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of Spanish Consonants&lt;/a&gt;&quot; from &lt;em&gt;The Linguistics of Spanish,&lt;/em&gt; Mackenzie, Ian. 1999–2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize: the various pronunciations of &quot;j&quot; can all be explained as resulting from sound changes in various languages that affected original /j/: however, this does not mean that every particular word in a modern language spelled with &quot;j&quot; used to be pronounced with the sound [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T04:54:38.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27307" CreationDate="2018-03-02T05:47:09.493" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compounds can vary by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spanning multiple words without using a hyphen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spanning multiple words and using a hyphen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;being only comprised of 1 word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some compounds seem common in all forms. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pick up, pick-up, pickup&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some compounds seem common in only a couple forms. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;freeze dry, freeze-dry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rain fall, rainfall&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;life-like, lifelike&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some compounds seem common in only 1 form. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;swimming pool&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semi-automatic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blackmail&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to find out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What conditions incline compounds to vary in this regard?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under what conditions are they likely to transition from one dominant form to another over time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What implications or effect does one form have over another in writing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any research studies on this topic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T18:16:25.640" Title="Compounds: Comparing Hyphenated With Other Forms?" Tags="&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-02T06:41:18.337" Score="0" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machine learning equipped with artificial intelligence is looking very promising in the field of machines understanding various human languages including English and translating one into another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert in the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm or anything like that; all I know is that some kind of a statistical model is used in the process, and also that the current state-of-the-art technology is not perfect yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is whether machine learning still could use a better linguistic theory to make some more breakthroughs that would eventually allow A.I. to perfect its language acquisition and translation expertise, or whether all that needs improving is more computing power and more sophisticated statistical models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T00:16:39.350" Title="Does machine learning still need a better linguistic theory?" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27252" CreationDate="2018-03-02T10:25:35.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through the process of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;. It is very common among various languages that the means of expressing &lt;em&gt;perfectivity&lt;/em&gt; develops via those of expressing &lt;em&gt;possession&lt;/em&gt;. (&quot;Sum&quot; in Latin used to have a possessive function too, say, in constructions with Dative). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why there are two auxiliaries, one traditionally discriminates the verb class called &lt;em&gt;unaccusatives&lt;/em&gt; which is conjugate with &quot;be&quot;. In Middle English there also existed two auxiliaries whose choice was determined in accordance with the verb class, one residue being &quot;go&quot; (e.g. &quot;She is gone&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T21:13:43.300" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T21:13:43.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27317" CreationDate="2018-03-02T13:06:05.697" Score="0" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;What periphrastic verb form are attested in the Gothic language, the oldest Germanic language we have substantial records from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skimming through a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/gotischegrammat02braugoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammar of Gothic&lt;/a&gt; I found that for the past tense passive a periphrastic construction was used (which is remarkably identical to the Modern German one, using the Gothic cognate of Modern German &lt;em&gt;werden&lt;/em&gt; and the past participle; Gothic also has a be passive comparable to the English one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not found any traces of a &lt;em&gt;have perfect&lt;/em&gt; but this may just be outside the scope of the grammar and is maybe attested in the Gothic corpus (similarly, short Latin grammars probably don't mention &lt;em&gt;probatum habeo&lt;/em&gt; as a periphrastic perfect active form). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there periphrastic verb form other than the passive I have already mentioned attested in the corpus of Gothic text we have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27252/where-did-the-use-of-the-two-auxiliaries-in-the-romance-languages-come-from&quot;&gt;Where did the use of the two auxiliaries in the Romance languages come from?&lt;/a&gt; and its answers and comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T15:52:45.333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T15:52:45.333" Title="Periphrastic verb forms in Gothic" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;perfect&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;&lt;gothic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27289" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gothic is the earliest well-attested Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related tags include &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/proto-germanic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;proto-germanic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;proto-germanic&lt;/a&gt; for questions about the last common ancestor of the Germanic languages and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/germanic-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;germanic-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;germanic-languages&lt;/a&gt; for questions dealing the the family of Germanic languages as a whole or relations between Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27290" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Gothic language, a dead Germanic language attested in the late antiquity and early medieval time." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T13:15:24.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-02T17:16:57.273" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are there some sounds that you can continue making like “sssssss” or “ooooo” and sounds that you can only make once and can’t repeat like “k” or “d”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21372" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T02:39:32.627" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T16:19:21.563" Title="Why are there some sounds you can continue making and some you can’t?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27292" CreationDate="2018-03-02T17:39:06.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can articulate any phoneme for as long as you are able, but (1) you may not be able to articulate some phonemes as long as others and (2) some phonemes are by themselves inaudible, and can only be detected via their effect on other sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of [o] or [s], you can put your face in the required configuration and you can breathe, sustaining [o] for about 15 seconds and [s] for about 45 seconds. These sounds can be heard because air is flowing continuously through the vocal tract (speech sound is modulation of airflow coming out of the vocal tract). You can form a [k] and hold it for about 4 minutes, but you won't hear anything, until you release the k and start making some other sound. The reason you don't hear anything is that the vocal folds (the source of voicing) are abducted and the pressure below and above the glottis equalizes almost instantly, and then you're just holding your breath until you are compelled to breath in. Pressure equalization in the case of [k] is because there is nowhere for the oral air to go, whereas with [o] and [s], air can escape the mouth, thus there can be continuous sound. [d] is closer to [k], except that the vocal folds are adducted, causing voicing (thus you can hear something), but because [d] still completely blocks the flow of air out of the mouth, pressure builds up in the oral cavity very quickly, and you can only maintain [d] for about 1 second (you get better mileage with [b], maybe twice as much time phonating, because you can let your cheeks balloon out, although we don't do that in actual speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T17:39:06.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27296" CreationDate="2018-03-02T18:57:06.480" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall from my undergrad Phonetics course (many years ago), the professor was talking about the limitations of describing phonemes by place and manner of articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to remember an example he gave in which a particular vowel (/o/?) was thought to be pronounced one way, but it was later found out that some languages (possibly a Nordic language) use different articulators to make the same sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My memory is a bit hazy, does this sound familiar? I'm trying to make an argument by analogy that reductionism can be problematic when the construct of interest (e.g., a particular sound) is multiply realizable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21373" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T19:18:08.260" Title="Can a single vowel (or consonant) be pronounced in multiple ways (different place/manner of articulation)" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-02T21:50:11.930" Score="2" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not 100% sure of the proper terminology here, so I'm just using the one used in the LCK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean by a sentential argument is an argument that is a sentence rather than a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point: 'That people still read that book annoys me'. Here, the 'subject' is an entire sentence complete with its own objects: &quot;(that) people still read that book&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how do languages that mark nouns for case deal with this? You obviously can't apply a case ending to an entire sentence. Yes, I know some languages, like German, don't mark case on the noun itself, but what about languages that do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T12:16:27.970" Title="How do languages with case deal with 'sentential arguments'?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27294" CreationDate="2018-03-02T21:55:48.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is much hope for reconstructing what the instructor was talking about based on your recollection, and asking him is your best bet. However, there is a somewhat well-known fact that the same thing can have multiple causes. This is especially true of the so-called ATR vowel distinction, between involving pairs like i/ɪ, e/ɛ, o/ɔ. This distinction exists in many languages of the world (not in any Nordic language), and it has been determined empirically that the articulation of that distinction is not identical across languages. There are in fact many articulatory primitives that can be combined to create this distinction, and languages differ in their exact recipe for making these vowels. (This is a topic that has been researched since Lindau in the early 70's). At the time there may have been some sense of &quot;discovery&quot; that Akan ATR and Kalenjin ATR are different, but that is probably because nobody has worked on both Akan and Kalenjin at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that should be asked is, in what sense is the distinction [u/ʊ] as observed in Somali, Akan, Kikuyu, Teso and Mongolian &quot;the same&quot;, when they are physically produced differently? The answer usually given by phonologists is that the sameness comes from reflecting the same cognitive thing (the feature ATR), and that ATR is not a precise description of how a vowel is produced, it is &quot;just precise enough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the standard distinctions that are made in place and manner of articulation, a description like &quot;back high unrounded vowel&quot; only identifies a neighborhood, and languages with [ɯ] can pronounce that vowel in lots of different ways. IPA letters and their corresponding articulatory descriptions have low-to-medium granularity in terms of describing exactly how a sound is produced in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want something Nordic, in Norwegian the letter &quot;o&quot; is somewhat ambiguous in representing /u/ and /o/ (which in turn both have variants depending on context). For example the name Ove is pronounced [uve] and the verb sleep &quot;sove&quot; is [sove]. But this fact has been known for a long time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T21:55:48.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27285" CreationDate="2018-03-02T22:14:57.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a funny question because of 'machine learning' (ML), 'still', and 'better'. Presumably you mean 'machine learning methods &lt;em&gt;in NLP&lt;/em&gt;' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-language_processing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Language Processing&lt;/a&gt;), because I'm having a hard time thinking of linguistic theory that informs ML uses outside of NLP. 'Still' implies it has a 'better' one now, and 'better' implies a current one is not sufficient. That is a bit too motivated in one very particular direction, so I will just answer simply just how linguistic theory and NLP implementation are involved together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latest popular and successful methods for things like [Seq2Seq] translation and chat (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_machine_translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_machine_translation&lt;/a&gt;) models, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RNN&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_short-term_memory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSTM&lt;/a&gt;, use barely any linguistic knowledge at all (little more than &quot;here's a sequence of characters that might be whitespace-separated 'words'&quot;). No parsing/phrase structure grammars, POS (parts of speech), anaphora resolution. Some NLP methods may use these linguistic ideas but they are almost entirely avoided in methods that are ML based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, there was an attempt to use syntactic parsers, and those did well-enough, but the these latest statistical methods have been much more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the narrower field of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech-to-text&lt;/a&gt; (a common stage before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLU&lt;/a&gt;), some phonological theory is used, but its mostly years of incremental engineering that have produced the high quality you have today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a famous quip by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frederick Jelinek&lt;/a&gt; about speech processing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't saying that linguistic theory is necessarily useless, just that... maybe... those trained in language theory aren't as good at implementation as maybe others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I suspect that once a lot of accuracy has been squeezed out of tweaks of the Deep Learning methods mentioned above, there will have to be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; use of explicit knowledge of language specifics to get things 'human'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, current statistical machine translation has trouble with presumably simple things like getting gender right, which is hardly deep linguistic theory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Douglas Hofstadter&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a recent Atlantic article about the shortcomings of purely statistical methods&lt;/a&gt;. His simple example about gender translation is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#en/fr/There%E2%80%99s%20his%20car%20and%20her%20car%2C%20his%20towels%20and%20her%20towels%2C%20and%20his%20library%20and%20hers.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which currently translates to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et la sienne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which only gets the French agreement right on the last pair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other direction though is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sciencenonfiction.org/2014/12/18/why-computer-scientists-and-linguists-dont-always-see-eye-to-eye/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article about how current methods are pushing up against the limits of what they can do without linguistics&lt;/a&gt;. At first it shows how little linguistics is actually used, and then goes on to claim that linguistic models may be added to translators soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all related to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/chomsky.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rule based vs statistical controversy in AI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T13:47:54.280" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T13:47:54.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27295" CreationDate="2018-03-02T22:34:33.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean overt, traditional case, not abstract case which every language is said to have, in certain theories. It depends on the rules for case marking in the language. In Imbabura Quechua, some subordinate clauses can be case marked, for example &lt;em&gt;can wagra michij-ta ricurcani&lt;/em&gt; (you cow herding-acc I-saw) &quot;I saw you herding cattle&quot;; &lt;em&gt;jari atalpata shuwasca-ta-mi yuyani&lt;/em&gt; (man chicken-acc stole-acc-witness I-believe) &quot;I believe that the man stole the chicken&quot;. The entire embedded S is nominalized and marked accusative or ablative (for &quot;after&quot; clauses). So you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;  mark case on a sentence. This is because case marking in IQ is an NP-level enclitic. Angas likewise &quot;case marks&quot; embedded clauses, again with an enclitic (the case distinction is rather degenerate: it only marks &quot;is an argument of the verb&quot;). In North Saami and Kalenjin, only nominals are case-marked, so object complement clauses don't have case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T22:34:33.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27295" CreationDate="2018-03-03T02:19:53.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Korean case markers qualify as genuine case markers, but you can absolutely add case markers to a whole clause in Korean.  E.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;범인이 그 기차를 탔음이 확실하다.  It is certain that the criminal took the train.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[beomin-i [geu gicha]-reul ta-ss-eum]-i hwaksil-ha-da.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[criminal-SUBJ [that train]-OBJ take-PAST-(noun making suffix)]-SUBJ certainty-(verb making suffix)-(sentence ending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the verb of the subordinate clause is turned into a noun form, somewhat like &amp;quot;the criminal having taken the train&amp;quot;, and then the subject marker attaches to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can add a dummy noun 것 (serving the same role as &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; people still read that book&amp;quot;) and attach the case marker there: think of it as analogous to &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The fact&lt;/strong&gt; that people still read that book annoys me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T02:19:53.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27295" CreationDate="2018-03-03T11:41:39.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one adoopts the Pesetsky's conjecture about the nature of Case, according to which Case is an uninterpretable Tense feature and CP (sentential argument) is the same category as DP - C/DP, complementizers like &quot;that&quot; carry the Case feature in themselves, so it will be enough to only make use of the complementizer to mark the Case. All languages I know stick with this strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is how to tackle sentential arguments when they come in &lt;em&gt;prepositional objects&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Gerund phrases&lt;/em&gt; take care of it in English (e.g. &quot;She doesn't believe &lt;strong&gt;in getting lost&lt;/strong&gt; in the wood&quot;). Nevertheless, other languages don't like non-finite complementation to that extend. In Russian, for example, there are so-called &lt;em&gt;pronominal-correlative sentences&lt;/em&gt;: the subordinate clause is finite, in its head is a complementizer, the predicate in the higher clause requires a preposition, the preposition assignes a particular case to its object, the complementizer of the lower clause cannot take a case value, so an expletive (demonstrative pronoun in this case) is to be made use of in order to receive a case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ona ne verit &lt;strong&gt;v to, čto&lt;/strong&gt; zabludilaś v lesu&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[She not believe-Pres-3pSg &lt;strong&gt;in that (dem.pron.)-AccSg, that (complementizer)&lt;/strong&gt; get lost-Past-Fem in (the) woods-Preposition.CaseSg].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no expletive, one can simply get rid of the preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ona ne verit, čto zabludilaś v lesu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether this construction is grammatical in English (&quot;She doesn't believe that she has got lost in the woods&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the complementizer is not &quot;that&quot; (čto), the situation remains the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ona rasskazala &lt;strong&gt;o tom, kak&lt;/strong&gt; provela leto&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[She tell-Past-Fem &lt;strong&gt;about that (dem.pron)-Preposition.CaseSg, how (complementizer)&lt;/strong&gt; spend-Past-Fem (the) summer-AccSg]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;She told &lt;strong&gt;about how&lt;/strong&gt; she spent the summer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, the preposition can be ommitted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to your example 'That people still read that book annoys me' - the Russian translation will be with the expletive too, I mean, not simply &quot;that people read&quot;, but &quot;That (dem.pron)-Nom, that people read that book annoys me&quot;. Nonetheless, when the sentential argument is not in the subject position, the expletive is not necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion is that in Russian the case value on sentential arguments is absent, except for when they appear as the arguments of PPs or in the subject position: then the case values are assigned to the expletive.&#xA;I guess, this expletive pronoun can be substituted by &quot;the fact&quot;, so in Russian &quot;fact&quot; dropped and only &quot;the&quot; (which I indicate by &quot;that&quot;) is present. With such an analysis the English constructions are essentially parallel to the Russian ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="20034" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T12:02:37.800" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T12:02:37.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27319" CreationDate="2018-03-03T12:14:42.237" Score="2" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a small research project, I am looking at the negation in Finnish. I don’t actually speak Finnish, but I understand that there is a special auxiliary verb – the negation verb – which is used to negate statements. It is inflected for person and number. When the negation verb is used on a non-past indicative verb, that verb takes a special form, instead of the usual inflection for person and number. So, if I understand correctly, &lt;em&gt;Otan sen&lt;/em&gt; (‘I take it’) becomes &lt;em&gt;En ota sitä&lt;/em&gt; (‘I don’t take it’) instead of #&lt;em&gt;En ota&lt;/em&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;sitä&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Sen&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;sitä&lt;/em&gt; because the direct object of a negated verb takes the partitive, right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is how &lt;strong&gt;personal pronouns&lt;/strong&gt; enter into this. In particular, is there any difference between the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;En ota sitä&lt;/em&gt; - vs - &lt;em&gt;Minä en ota sitä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both grammatically correct? Is ‘minä’ redundant but acceptable? Are both equally natural? Do they &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; the same? What if we move to a different person or a different tense? (I hope I got the sample sentences right.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Ei ota sitä&lt;/em&gt; - vs - &lt;em&gt;Hän ei ota sitä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;En ottanut sitä&lt;/em&gt; - vs - &lt;em&gt;Minä en ottanut sitä&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is that there is no difference, or only a small difference, are there &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; contexts where the two come apart? What about e.g. ‘Jane doesn’t like Henry and neither do I / and I don’t either’. (I’ll spare us all the embarrassment of a bad translation.) Would it be possible / necessary, to say &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt; in the second part of the sentence? Similarly, would it be possible / necessary to say &lt;em&gt;hän&lt;/em&gt; in e.g. ‘Every time a customer orders a steak, he doesn’t finish it’?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should stress that I am primarily interested in cases where the pronoun is &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; (if there are any), and less interested in ones where the pronoun is obligatory (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if I want to say ‘John knows that I didn’t take it’, would the following be correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4a) &lt;em&gt;John tietää, etten ottanut sitä.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is &lt;em&gt;etten&lt;/em&gt; an inflected form of &lt;em&gt;että&lt;/em&gt; (‘that’), and is it correct that there is no negation verb present? Could one add it, and could one also add &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt;? In other words, what’s the status of the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4b) &lt;em&gt;John tietää, etten en ottanut sitä.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4c) &lt;em&gt;John tietää, etten minä ottanut sitä.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4d) &lt;em&gt;John tietää, etten minä en ottanut sitä.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21085" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T10:30:15.847" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T18:52:07.737" Title="Negation and Pronouns in Finnish" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27303" CreationDate="2018-03-03T12:51:33.607" Score="0" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;is there anyone who can please clarify how these schools diverge from and converge with each other? A prof. told me interpretive semantics and generative semantics can be both categorized under generativist semantics. However, I have not been able to find a source discussing the issue and the whole thing is so confusing I can't understand how these schools differ from each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&#xA;Thanks a million in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20961" LastEditorUserId="20961" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T13:56:29.543" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T18:15:12.077" Title="Generativist, Generative, Interpretive Semantics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27302" CreationDate="2018-03-03T16:10:38.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main idea of generative semantics is that meaning is present from the start (deep structure), and rules specify how words are inserted and arranged, given that. For a single article, I suggest George Lakoff &quot;On Generative Semantics&quot;, in Steinberg &amp;amp; Jacobovits eds. &lt;em&gt;Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader&lt;/em&gt;. Interpretive semantics, by contrast, specifies the structure of a sentence with no reference to meaning, and towards the end of the derivation, the meaning is computed based on what the syntax has done. See Chomsky &quot;Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation&quot;, same volume. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T16:10:38.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27292" CreationDate="2018-03-03T16:19:21.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the other answer is technically correct, here's one that might be more readily accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds are generally made and distinguished based on where you put your tongue (of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some sounds, your tongue is relatively low and allows a constant stream of air to pass over it. This is the basic definition of a vowel: 'oo', 'ah', 'ee' ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some sounds, your tongue nearly closes the gap, but not quite. The air experiences some &quot;friction&quot; as it passes over. For example, 'sss', 'fff', 'thhh'... Because of that friction these are called fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other sounds, your tongue completely closes the gap. The air is actually blocked, and the sound you hear is the air being released. These are called &quot;stops&quot; and include 'd' and 'k'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you can't release the air slowly when making these sounds. It's like striking a match. Either it's fast or your brain doesn't think it's a 'd' or a 'k'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; actually hold those sounds, in a way. The nose is a second air channel. Try holding 'nnn' for a while. You'll find that what you're doing is putting your tongue where you make 'd', and letting air pass through the nose. These &quot;nasal&quot; sounds are almost as loud as vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T16:19:21.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27284" CreationDate="2018-03-03T16:48:27.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you have to be careful to not confuse compounds themselves with the orthography for compounds. What you're asking about is the orthographic variation in how compounds are represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as orthographic variation goes, there has been very little research done in this area, most likely because there's been very little reason to think to look into it up until the internet age as, before now, written communication was limited to very few domains and so was likely to be far more influenced by standardization attempts than domains like texting or tweeting are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there have of course been many attempts in many societies to standardize spelling, and these almost certainly play a role in why compounds are represented in one way or another, but actual use most likely varies along social dimensions. For example, those living in one region might tend to spell compounds in one way while those living in another region might spell them a different way. You can see regional variation even in standardization attempts, whereas there are British standards (e.g. behaviour) that differ from American standards (e.g. behavior). Other examples might be people of different age groups spelling them different ways or people of different ethnic backgrounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good correlate to look at to better understand why a compound would be spelled one way or another is studies on phonological variation in sociolinguistics, of which there is a massive literature starting from Labov (1966) and continuing to the present day. The same approach can be taken to orthographic variation, including how compounds are spelled, and there are some signs of that happening (see Tatman (2016) or Eisenstein (2015), for example), but as of yet, the best anyone would be able to tell you are the invented rules of some prescriptivist grammarians, which are really just suggestions, not explanations of why things are the way they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eisenstein, J. (2015). Systematic patterning in phonologically-motivated orthographic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(2), 161–188. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12119&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Labov, W. (2006). The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tatman, R. (2016). “I’m a spawts guay”: Comparing the Use of Sociophonetic Variables in Speech and Twitter. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 22(2). Retrieved from &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol22/iss2/18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol22/iss2/18&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T16:48:27.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27302" CreationDate="2018-03-03T18:15:12.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A semantic theory for a natural language is a translation scheme for relating the pronunciations of the natural language to the expressions of a logic.  A logic is more convenient for describing (correct) human reasoning, in general, and implication, in particular. If the translation goes from the natural language to the logical expressions, it's &quot;interpretive&quot;, and if it goes the other way, it's &quot;generative&quot; (though one needn't necessarily distinguish the two directions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To supplement the references in user6726's answer, here is an online copy of a relevant influential article by David Lewis, &lt;a href=&quot;http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~ivano/SemBabble_old/LogicSeminar_15W/Material/Lewis_GeneralSemantics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Semantics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T18:15:12.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27284" CreationDate="2018-03-03T18:16:25.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only question I can answer is what conditions incline compounds to vary in this regard. It reflects the morphological type of the language, namely, &lt;em&gt;isolating&lt;/em&gt;. Since affixes serve (despite many other functions) to delimit words, the fact that these languages lack affixes disturbs the system and calls for new means of marking it. It also causes context dependance to determine if the combination is of the form adjective+noun or noun+noun or even noun=noun+noun. In English the disctinction between the three is often invisible as in the pair &quot;rain fall&quot;-&quot;rainfall&quot;: &quot;rain&quot; in the former may be intended to be either a noun or an adjective (like &quot;rainy&quot;) - this process is called &lt;em&gt;conversion&lt;/em&gt;, the latter is definitely a compound noun, whose formation came about in a deeper level of derivation and which is considered as a whole by default. Owing to the impoverished morphology, there is no clear formal means to show how a word or a compound is formed. The same holds true for the derivation of adjectives. Phrasal verbs are written separately for the principle to write separately whatever can be separated by insersion of something else, but when undergone convesion into nouns, they are written as one word. Here you see dependance on the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T18:16:25.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27294" CreationDate="2018-03-03T19:18:08.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a stage art called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventriloquism#Making_the_right_sounds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ventriloquism&lt;/a&gt; where this indeed happens. A ventriloquist needs to articulate some replacement sound for sounds involving visible labial movement (e.g., /b, p, w, v, m/) that is resolved to the original sound by the listener of the show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those replacement sounds need to be close enough in the phonological qualities to pass unnoticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T19:18:08.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-03T20:32:05.347" Score="4" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read in a book about the theory that explains why in many languages pronouns meaning first person contain letter 'm' (e.g. me, moi, меня, mich) and pronouns describing second person contain letter 't' (e.g. toi, ты). Unfortunately, I can't remember the book nor the theory. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21379" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T19:13:32.973" Title="'m' in the words meaning first person" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27310" CreationDate="2018-03-03T21:13:08.300" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the specific pronouns that you mention, the explanation is that those languages are Indo-European and have a common historical origin (*me, *tu). This happens to extend to Uralic, and the branches of what might be Altaic (if there is such a family). So there are conjectures that these language groups may also be historically related. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jolr.ru/files/(5)jlr2009-1(37-48).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; gives reconstructed pronouns for various language groups. There is a fair amount of controversy over whether the similarities are coincidence, borrowings, or evidence of genetic relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T21:13:08.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27285" CreationDate="2018-03-04T00:16:39.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading Mitch's answer and some of his references, I think a prior question needs to be addressed: Does machine learning need a theory? In the essay from Norvig, &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/chomsky.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chomsky&lt;/a&gt;, I don't see any theory going on, at all, much less a linguistic theory.  Does Norvig know what a theory is?  He talks a lot about statistical modeling, and I think here he uses the term &quot;modeling&quot; appropriately.  However, models and theories are two different animals altogether.  Models can be deduced (or induced) from the facts, but not theories. I suspect most linguists' understanding of these two terms is similar to, or perhaps even derived from, Braithwaite's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Scientific_Explanation.html?id=hxo7AAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scientific Explanation&lt;/a&gt;. (You can use the index of this partially online book to sample what Braithwaite says about &quot;model&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitch also mentions Hofstadter's reservations about current translators. I take Hofstader's point, but I think the problem is straightforward.  Humans share with the non-speaking animals many mental abilities -- just not language.  When accurate translation from one human language to another hinges on what the animal non-linguistic world is like, translation devices are just going to have to model this part of our mental abilities, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T00:16:39.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36322" CreationDate="2018-03-04T02:17:41.257" Score="7" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;Biblical Hebrew consistently uses the letter ס (s) to transcribe names with the Akkadian consonant š. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esarhaddon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esarhaddon&lt;/a&gt; for Aššur-aḥa-iddina, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther#Origin_and_meaning_of_the_name_Esther&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esther&lt;/a&gt; from Ištar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sargon&lt;/a&gt; from Šarru-ukīn (all Akkadian transcriptions copied from Wikipedia). Etymologically, Akkadian š and Hebrew š almost always correspond (š and ṯ, although Akkadian š can also correspond to Hebrew ś, but not to s to my knowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception I can think of is Aššur which is transcribed that way (with š). Since the Aramaic reflex is Attur, the word seems to have reached both languages as a descendant (through *Aṯṯur) and not a borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalmaneser_V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shalmaneser&lt;/a&gt; comes from Šulmanu-ašarid, and yet preserves the š at the beginning of the word, while the second š is transcribed as s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Why does Hebrew not transcribe Akkadian š with Hebrew ש (š) instead of ס (s)? Does this indicate that Akkadian š was actually pronounced s (maybe only in Assyria)? And why was the š preserved in the name of Shalmaneser (only one of the two times)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T20:26:33.843" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T23:04:59.037" Title="Why does Hebrew transcribe Akkadian š inconsistently?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27910" CreationDate="2018-03-04T03:10:33.410" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a basic phoneme-grapheme alignment algorithm which can be called in Python from a machine running OS X. So far the only implementations I've been able to find are part of larger C++ libraries (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AdolfVonKleist/Phonetisaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/letter-to-phoneme/m2m-aligner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) which seem like they would be overkill to install, especially given the added difficulty of getting them running on an OS X machine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a good standalone P2G implementation written in Python?&#xA; Maybe something living in a git gist somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21380" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T21:37:00.167" Title="P2G Alignment Algorithm in Python (OS X)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27313" CreationDate="2018-03-04T03:39:56.417" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, some people think Akkadian š was pronounced [s]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the sibilants, traditionally /š/ has been held to be postalveolar [ʃ], and /s/, /z/, /ṣ/ analyzed as fricatives; but attested assimilations in Akkadian suggest otherwise. For example, when the possessive suffix -šu is added to the root awat ('word'), it is written awassu ('his word')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian#Consonants&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also relevant discussion in the Wikipedia article on Proto-Semitic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;maximal affricate&quot; position additionally posits that *s *z were actually affricates [t͡s d͡z] while *š was actually a simple fricative [s] [...] According to Kogan, the affricate interpretation of Akkadian s z ṣ is generally accepted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#Fricatives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#Fricatives&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familar with any of the literature, so I can't expand beyond what Wikipedia says. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T03:45:45.293" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T03:45:45.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27288" CreationDate="2018-03-04T04:58:46.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michail Kotin - it's worth checking out his monograph &lt;em&gt;Gotisch&#xA;Im (diachronischen und typologischen) Vergleich&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.winter-verlag.de/de/detail/978-3-8253-5991-1/Kotin_Gotisch_Im_diachronischen_Vergleich/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kotin 2012&lt;/a&gt;) - argues that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Gothic &lt;strong&gt;does not have&lt;/strong&gt; the construction with have and past participle, which was the main indicator of the latest analytic form in Western Germanic encoding perfect.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T04:58:46.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27301" CreationDate="2018-03-04T08:09:23.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a list of publications on the 'pro-drop'-ness of Finnish (though it's not 'true pro-drop', but that's part of the conclusion), long story short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the subject - when it's grammatically implied is -'grammatical but redundant'; eg, &quot;(minä) en ota sitä&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dropping the subject when there's grammatical ambiguity - it 'ungrammatical' (very simplified)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note - that in Finnish - this has nothing (afiak) specific to negation, it's just the negation happens to be the 'main (conjugated) verb' in such sentences, I believe it behaves the same as any other 'main verb'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good summery article I know about this is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Empty Subjects in Finnish and Hebrew /  Vainikka and Levy , 1995 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Followed by later articles quoting it. Ignoring the issue of whether 'null subject' is the simplest way to model this - these articles present field collected examples, and some model to produce more valid exemplars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I guess a book that might over it nicely is (if any)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leila White / A Grammar Book of Finnish / Isbn 9789517921466&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're out to do a study about this - I would recommend looking at one of the corpora of spoken Finnish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1605" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T08:09:23.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27301" CreationDate="2018-03-04T18:52:07.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native Finnish speaker here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your recap of the use of the negation verb is correct, as far as it goes. It's also well documented at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ei#Verb_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ei#Verb_2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &amp;amp; (3) Both alternatives are correct and natural, but there is a difference. When the pronoun &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt; is included, there is an emphasis on the subject. &lt;em&gt;It's not me who takes it&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/strong&gt; not taking it&lt;/em&gt; (with an implied or explicit continuation such as &lt;em&gt;give it to someone else&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;someone else will&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, in informal everyday speech the personal pronouns are omitted much less often, but instead of the formal pronouns the informal, shortened versions are used mostly (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%A4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%A4&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above applies to the first and second person pronouns, and neither the tense nor the mood has any effect. However ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The third person pronouns can never be omitted, so &lt;em&gt;Hän ei ota sitä&lt;/em&gt; is the only correct alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane doesn’t like Henry and neither do I / and I don’t either&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Here the subject pronoun &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is definitely emphasized and can't be omitted from the Finnish translation, which could be something like &lt;em&gt;Jane ei pidä Henrystä, enkä myöskään minä.&lt;/em&gt; Here instead of &lt;em&gt;ja&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;) we use the suffix -kä tagged on to &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; to give &lt;em&gt;enkä&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;... ja en myöskään minä&lt;/em&gt; would be understandable but slightly unnatural. &lt;em&gt;... ja minä en myöskään&lt;/em&gt; is possible if we want to give extra emphasis to &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt;. But omitting &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt; would be an error here. &#xA;And as always, the third person pronouns can't be omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4a) is correct. &lt;em&gt;Etten&lt;/em&gt; is a contraction of &lt;em&gt;että + en&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ettei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ettei&lt;/a&gt;  so the negation verb is actually present. &lt;em&gt;John tietää, että en ottanut sitä&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;John tietää, että minä en ottanut sitä&lt;/em&gt; are also correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4b) &amp;amp; (4d) are incorrect because there are two negation verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4c) is correct, but the word order feels a teensy bit unnatural to me. I would prefer &lt;em&gt;John tietää, etten minä sitä ottanut&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;minä&lt;/em&gt; gets extra emphasis here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10911" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T18:52:07.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27310" CreationDate="2018-03-04T19:13:32.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some very instructive maps on &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS chapter 136&lt;/a&gt; with a lot of food for further thought. Note that besides the M-T-system there is also a N-M-system prevalent in the Americas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T19:13:32.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-04T20:55:21.580" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why haven't I come across any references to the DF in literature on GG? Given that the main goal of the approach lies in detecting the properties Language exhibit, what role do such long known traits as Double Articulation play in this? Moreover, I have heard Chomsky claimed that investigating other semiotic systems than natural languages gives nothing to the task. Why? May they be implicitly assumed? By far, there must exist some principles which would make it possible to differenciate between the entities operating in the derivation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T23:03:40.943" Title="Design Features of Human Language and their role in Chomskyan Linguistics" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-03T04:16:50.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27325" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:28:41.293" Score="0" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In John Coleman's (2003) paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447003000615?via%3Dihub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Discovering the acoustic correlates of contrast&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, he mentions using &quot;15 autoregressive filter coefficients (a1 - a15)&quot; as an acoustic variable in measuring the correlates of a contrast. My advisor told me these are LPC coefficients, but I am a little confused as to exactly what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T02:19:34.890" Title="What are LPC coefficients?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27321" CreationDate="2018-03-04T23:03:40.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reasonably sure that Chomsky would not agree with you that &quot;the main goal&quot; is to collect properties of Language.  The goal is to understand human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-human animals have semiotic systems, but Chomsky's position is that the important characteristics of human language are species specific to humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T23:03:40.943" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27322" CreationDate="2018-03-05T02:19:34.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A waveform can be described as a sequence of integers. A speech waveform comes from running a source sound (the glottal wave, a kind of buzzing sound) through the &quot;transfer function&quot;, which embodies vocal tract resonances. LPC coefficients (14 would be normal: twice the number of expected formants, plus 2 – this is the &quot;order&quot; of the model) come from estimating an &quot;LPC model&quot;, which is an equation that allows you to predict the value of the waveform at a point, based on preceding waveform values. Suppose you have 2 coefficients a(1) and a(2), and waveform samples y(1) and y(2), then the value of y(3) should be a(1)*y(1) + a(2)*y(2). The coefficients are the weight assigned to a particular previous sample, so y(15)=a(1)*y(1)+a(2)*y(2)...a(14)*y(14). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T02:19:34.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-05T04:58:14.727" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a set of words categorizing a set of documents, what are some ways I could use the content of the documents to disambiguate the sense of these category words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could have a bunch of documents tagged as being related the category &quot;squash&quot;, which could either be about the vegetable squash or the racket-based sport squash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that identifying category-specific words like &quot;ball, racket, hit&quot; in the sports sense and &quot;cook, recipe, grow&quot; in the vegetable sense would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming the category-specific words would be useful, would a topic model extracting a single topic be a good approach to this? If not, what are some other approaches to identifying the keywords?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once the category-specific keywords are identified, how could they be used to disambiguate the original category words? One approach I've tried is using the synset of a category word that maximizes the wordnet similarity score when compared to all synsets of the category-specific words (ex: the canine sense of the category &quot;dog&quot; would have the highest score if a keyword was &quot;puppy&quot;). However, this seems inefficient and doesn't work well for words that are related but don't share a close &quot;is a&quot; relationship in wordnet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21252" LastEditorUserId="21252" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T15:37:41.473" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T15:37:41.473" Title="Word Sense Disambiguation of Words Describing a Set of Documents" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-04T00:33:11.687" Score="5" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a student of formal linguistics and Russian language, my question has been surprisingly hard to google -- I've studied a little Ukrainian, and I've read that its structurally similar to Russian but has absorbed a lot more of its vocab from Polish, supposedly a hugely influential culture at one time in Ukraine's history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anybody could tell me whether there is any specific source (aside from English, Latin, Greek) that Russian had historically absorbed a lot of vocab from, or whether there were any specific national languages that had absorbed huge amounts of vocab from Russian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21806" OwnerDisplayName="user173361" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T09:50:58.567" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T14:10:08.777" Title="Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27327" CreationDate="2018-03-04T02:27:18.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can find examples of words borrowed into Russian language on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BC%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%B2_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary RU.&lt;/a&gt; However, this is far from being a comprehensive list. The number of words borrowed from Turkic languages is somewhere around 2-4 thousand. Probably the largest number of words was borrowed by Russian language from Church-Slavonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15582" OwnerDisplayName="Vitaly" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T14:58:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27327" CreationDate="2018-03-05T08:53:43.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is this question has more to do with history and culture than language per se. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say that English was influenced by French 'a lot' due to the Norman conquest (you can probably speak of 'specific source' of influence in this case). In this sense there is no any specific modern national language from which Russian had to borrow on a massive scale (the exception is Church Slavonic which was (since the Middle Ages) and is used in services by the Orthodox Church, and which influeced other Slavic languages). However Russian was and is borrowing from different languages due to various reasons and at different speeds: French and German were popular 150-200 years ago, now it's mainly English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as for the opposite direction, the speakers of languages of the ethnicities who live in Russia (and there are quite a few of them) have to use Russian words and concepts due to cultural reasons. In that sense one can probably say these minor languages are influenced by Russian which usually occurs when a certain thing or concept doesn't exist in a local language.  Besides the Soviet Union meant that all ethnicities had to learn Russian, hence massive bilingualism (local language at home + Russian as major official language) and influence of Russian on minor local languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21390" LastEditorUserId="21390" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T05:23:35.340" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T05:23:35.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27326" CreationDate="2018-03-05T13:16:36.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a human annotated corpus, there &lt;em&gt;should be&lt;/em&gt; documentation available on the annotation scheme. In particular, you should already &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; whether the annotation &quot;squash&quot; refers to the sport or the fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the documentation of the annotation scheme is lost, your outlined approach using category specific words for unclear categories looks valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;topic model&lt;/a&gt; is an entirely different beast and I doubt that it will help you much for your particular question. A resource with semantic relationships (e.g., a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt;, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ontology&lt;/a&gt;, or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thessaurus&lt;/a&gt;) can prove useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T13:16:36.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27326" CreationDate="2018-03-05T14:11:51.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nouns/entities help to determine the verb sense, and verb senses influence the noun sense. Complements &amp;amp; prep phrases help with both. &quot;The dog walked along the bank of the river.&quot; (along river indicates a route/path)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google describes their approach here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://research.googleblog.com/2017/01/a-large-corpus-for-supervised-word.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://research.googleblog.com/2017/01/a-large-corpus-for-supervised-word.html&lt;/a&gt; (source code available)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have used propbank frames: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/propbank/propbank-frames/tree/master/frames&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/propbank/propbank-frames/tree/master/frames&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for entities, you might look at OpenAI: &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.openai.com/discovering-types-for-entity-disambiguation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.openai.com/discovering-types-for-entity-disambiguation/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T14:11:51.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27336" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:46:21.583" Score="-1" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching this video of a woman speaking Circassian on Youtube :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiexAvps44Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiexAvps44Q&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i'm not a linguist but to me, it sounded like Sumerian or a very old semitic language and also there is a comment in that video saying that it is indeed &quot;one of the oldest languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the description of the video, it said that it is a language isolate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the articles about Circassian, Kabardian and Adyghe but there is nothing about the origins and the history of those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, have you some information about this language : is it Kabardian or Adyghe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is its origin, is my intuition true? is it related to old semitic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21394" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T18:01:13.533" Title="What is the origins of this language from the Circassian family?" Tags="&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-03-13T12:17:38.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27334" CreationDate="2018-03-05T18:01:13.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious how you know what Sumerian sounded like, or what the extinct Semitic languages sound like. It does not sound like Modern Hebrew, nor in my opinion like Arabic or Tigre (Ethiopian Semitic). I do see the vague similarity to unrelated Chechen. The feature that you are probably noticing that makes you think &quot;Semitic&quot; is the back of the mouth articulations: pharyngeals and uvulars. You will also notice occurrence of [ɬ], which would exclude most of Semitic besides Modern South Arabian, and also excludes Chechen. The &lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt; of [ʕ], at least within that chunk of speech, suggests that whatever that language is does not have [ʕ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody claims to have &quot;one of the oldest languages&quot;. It is plausible that people have been living in that place speaking that language or its immediate predecessors for a long time (5 millennia): compare that to Norwegian, which has been spoken in Norway for 2-3 thousand years, or English, spoken in England for less than 2,000 years. The problem is that there are numerous old archaeological sites in the Caucasus, and they are not labeled as to the language of the local inhabitants, so we have no idea how long that collection of languages has been spoken in that particular area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T18:01:13.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-05T18:50:18.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that both types are examples of bilingualism. The only differentiation is they way of acquisition. With simultaneous bilingualism kids tend to mix both languages at early ages. This is the way of acquisition by having one parent speaking a language and the other a second one. However once they become fluent in both, they are capable to use one or another depending on the context, as well as switching from one into another automatically. They´ll develop both languages at the same time and, depending on the exposure, one of them will become dominant if the speaking tongue for the daily life is more practice than the other one. However if the balance is appropriate and the use of both is equal within the different contexts, that would mean that the bilingualism would be perfectly achieved. I would say that this way of acquisition is very successful although at the beginning can create confusion and maybe push the kids into some silent periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequential bilingualism is the one learnt after acquiring a mother tongue. This way happens when kids move to a different country and they have to study and attend school in the L2. So this language is going to become the main and dominant one, because is the one in use daily (academically, with friends..). However, at home kids are going to continue speaking in the mother tongue. But if this family tongue is not extremely worked and taught, the lack of vocabulary or structures will start to become poor while the L2 will get power and dominance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experiences in this cases of acquisition, the L2 language is going to finally become the strongest one. But I have to say both ways of acquisition (simultaneous or sequential) are effective if they are worked properly. The differentiation is going to be related with the context, the way the family promotes and stimulates languages and the time of exposure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21397" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T10:47:30.843" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T10:47:30.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-05T23:49:18.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roy Major's thesis at Ohio State described his child's simultaneous acquisition of English (from father) and Portuguese (from mother), and he has since worked in the area of acquisition and foreign accent.  His book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Foreign_Accent.html?id=MF7vy3m_MEkC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foreign Accent&lt;/a&gt; should have some interest for you (though I haven't read it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T23:49:18.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-06T01:39:34.493" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at a list of synonyms in several different East Asian language families, I found that many languages have a similar-sounding word for &quot;this&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: This&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Khmer: នេះ (nih)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean: 이 (i)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Burmese: ဤ (i)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indonesian: Ini&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai: นี้ (Nī̂)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this similarity due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word-borrowing&lt;/a&gt;, or does it indicate a possible &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_relationship_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genetic relationship&lt;/a&gt; between the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Korean, and Tai-Kadai language families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2465" LastEditorUserId="2465" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T02:56:25.920" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T13:12:19.727" Title="Similar demonstrative pronouns in several different East Asian language families" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27340" CreationDate="2018-03-06T13:12:19.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowel /i/ is  maybe explained by sound symbolism (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bouba-Kiki Effect&lt;/a&gt;; compare also French &lt;em&gt;ce ... ci&lt;/em&gt; &quot;this&quot; &lt;em&gt;ce ... là&lt;/em&gt; &quot;that&quot;), also words for that often come with the vowel /a/ or a variant of it. The common consonant /n/ may indicate some linguistic connection either via inheritance or borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T13:12:19.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27327" CreationDate="2018-03-06T14:05:21.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quickly address the first question only - about the most common donor languages, here's what Lopatin and Ulukhanov 1997 mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old East Slavic (aka Old Russian);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Church Slavonic;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turkic languages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, a quote from As Lopatin and Ulukhanov,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;в совр. лит. языке производные (словообразовательно мотивированные) слова составляют примерно 95% всего словарного запаса&quot; (p. 444).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T14:05:21.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27327" CreationDate="2018-03-06T17:34:35.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the languages already named in other answers (Turkic languages, Finnic languages, German, French, and English) Greek should be mentioned. It seems that Russian prefers borrowing technological vocabulary from Greek where English takes a Latin loan, as observed in pairs like &lt;em&gt;cosmonaut/astronaut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Russian also has a lot of loans from Latin, even in places where  some Western Slavonic languages retained a native word (e.g., the month names).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One notable thing is the etymological nativisation that renders foreign /h/ as Russian /g/. This is obviously motivated by the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian, an Ukrainian /h/ corresponds to a Russian /g/ (hospod' : gospod')&#xA;and Russian generalised thei relation to other languages as well (see Principles of Historical Linguistics by Hans Henrich Hock (1991))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T14:10:08.777" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T14:10:08.777" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-07T00:00:24.030" Score="4" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read somewhere that all known ergative languages are either verb-initial, or verb-final. I find this surprising, but I don't know of any counter-examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen plenty of nominative languages, and it seems like they can have the verb anywhere. Well, I don't know about languages that have an OS (object, then subject order, as in OVS, OSV, and VOS), but I've never seen such languages so I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does alignment somehow restrict what kinds of orders a language can use? I find it hard to believe that ergativity would force a language into a verb-peripheral order, considering that the nominative alignment clearly isn't as restricted (assuming it is at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started thinking about after wondering about split-ergative languages, specifically the kind that treat noun phrases either nominatively or ergatively depending on where they fall on the agentivity hierarchy (Dyirbal is the only example I can seem to find, and it has SOV order as far as I can tell, but the only sentences I've been able to find have only pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: By 'agentivity hierarchy' I mean that some split-ergative languages treat some nouns nominatively and some ergatively. For example, Dyribal treats first and second pronouns nominatively, while everything else is treated ergatively. Another language I know of, called Ritharngu (which I can't find much information about) treats all pronouns nominatively, humans and 'higher animals' are tripartite, while everything is treated ergatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 120 of the Language Construction Kit 2 gives a heirarchy of agentivity, and claims that all languages with split alignment place the split somewhere on the heirarchy. The order is: verbal agreement, first person, second person, third person, proper nouns, humans, animals, and inanimate objects. Basically if two of these categories are given the same alignment, then everything between them will have the same alignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorDisplayName="user19661" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T01:09:08.477" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T03:01:02.940" Title="Do different alignments restrict what kind of word order a language can have?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;morphosyntactic-alignment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27350" CreationDate="2018-03-07T00:46:33.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kashmiri is split ergative and word order matches ergativity: imperfective/accusative is SOV, perfective/ergative is SVO. Igbo is claimed &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.bu.edu/manfredi/RLV.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to be abstract ergative and SVO, but also acknowledges the general claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T00:46:33.357" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27295" CreationDate="2018-03-07T22:13:04.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can tell you about my language (Croatian, or BCMS): such arguments are simply subjects and they are not marked in any way. There's no dummy pronoun. But the verb still agrees with the subject: it's in the third person, singular, and the phrase has neuter agreement (the same holds if the subject is an infinitive of a verb, and in impersonal constructions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Živcira (annoy-pres.3.sg) me (I.acc) [ da (conj.) ljudi (people.pl) još (still) čitaju (read.pres.3.pl) tu (that.fem.acc) knjigu (book.acc) ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past tense it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Živciralo (annoy.past.neut.sg) me je (aux.3.sg) [ da ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The auxiliary for the past tense is in the 3rd person: the clause is the subject. The clause doesn't change (there's no tense shift).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting question is: what if a clause is an object? Again, nothing happens. The clause is unmarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a clause can be an indirect object, or an object of a preposition. Then, a pronoun 'to' (actually, an adjective which functions as a pronoun as well) gets inserted before the clause and it inflects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Razmišljam (think.pres.1.sg) o (about) tome (that.dat/loc.sg) [ da ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lit. 'I'm thinking about that people still read that book.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4747" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T22:13:04.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27045" CreationDate="2018-03-07T22:34:21.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the genitive case expresses also parts, like 'some, any'. I can give you examples from Croatian (BCMS):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popio sam vode.&#xA;Drink.perf.past.masc aux.1.sg water.gen.sg&#xA;I drank (some) water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popio sam vodu.&#xA;Drink.perf.past.masc aux.1.sg water.acc.sg&#xA;I drank (the) water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence implies totality. You drank the water (in the glass). The first one implies some unknown quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why in negative sentences, objects were often in genitive in older stages of Slavic, and often still are. You don't have ANY money. The acc would imply you don't have THE money (or A money, but this is not a real option). But gen can be generalized to all objects. In older literature you can read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Djevojke nije vidio&#xA;girl.gen aux.neg.3.sg see.past.masc.sg&#xA;He didn't see any/some (also: the) girl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is genitive connected with 'some, any'? There are various hypotheses. It might be Uralic influence, for example, where the partitive case has a similar use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also explains 'need' + gen. You often need SOME water, SOME money. From such frequent use of the verb with gen it can be generalized to all objects of 'need'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4747" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T22:34:21.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T04:35:32.303" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking into extracting the meaning of expressions used in everyday speaking. For an instance, it is apparent to a human that the sentence &lt;code&gt;The meal we had at restaurant A tasted like food at my granny's.&lt;/code&gt; means that the food was tasty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I extract this meaning using a tool or a technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The method I've found so far is to first extract phrases using Stanford CoreNLP POS tagging, and use a Word Sense Induction tool to derive the meaning of the phrase. However, as WSI tools are used to get the meaning of words when they have multiple meanings, I am not sure if it would be the best tool to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best method to extract the meanings? Or is there any tool that can both identify phrases and extract their meanings? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21417" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T16:28:10.203" Title="How to extract meaning of colloquial phrases and expressions in English" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27359" CreationDate="2018-03-08T10:36:29.400" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DJ6L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6DJ6L.png&quot; alt=&quot;notation in semantics book&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the semicolon and period mean, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, this is from Truswell's 'Events, Phrases and Questions' and this section in particular is talking about the causal ordering of events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21230" LastEditorUserId="21230" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T11:32:03.233" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T13:39:43.870" Title="What do the semicolon and period mean in semantics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27357" CreationDate="2018-03-08T13:39:43.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The semicolon in ∀;y is surely a typo. It should just be ∀y, just like the ∀x that precedes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A period is often used to introduce the &lt;em&gt;scope&lt;/em&gt; of a variable binding expression like ∀x, e.g. ∀x.φ. By convention, the scope stretches all the way to the end of the entire expression. So, for example, in ∀x.Px ∧ Qx, the occurrence of x in Qx is bound by ∀x. That is, it's not equivalent to Qx ∧ ∀x.Px (by convention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors instead delimit the scope with square brackets or parentheses, e.g. ∀x[φ] or ∀x(φ), while others don't use anything at all, e.g. ∀xφ. (In the latter case, complex expressions like Px ∧ Qx are defined recursively to contain brackets, e.g. (Px ∧ Qx), which by convention are dropped only when no confusion arises. For quantified expressions, this then yields ∀x(Px ∧ Qx), so that the scope of ∀x is automatically clear.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author that you quote seems to use a combination of a period &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; parentheses. This is basically a case of redundancy: assuming by convention that a scope introduced by a period stretches all the way to the right, it would be just a clear to write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;∀x.∀y.x &amp;lt; y → ∃z.x &amp;lt; z ∧ z &amp;lt; y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with just periods and no parentheses, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;∀x(∀y(x &amp;lt; y → ∃z(x &amp;lt; z ∧ z &amp;lt; y)))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with just parentheses and no periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For historical reasons that I don't fully understand, using a period to introduce the scope of a λ-binder, e.g. λx.φ, is particularly common (though not universal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1567" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T13:39:43.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27356" CreationDate="2018-03-08T16:28:10.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is very difficult. I'll recommend three things: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the U of I CogComp shallow parser to get phrases (not CoreNLP), see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.cogcomp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nlp.cogcomp.org/&lt;/a&gt; It's much better at picking up phrases, IMO. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you google around, you'll find several pre-built list of phrases (idioms, fixed expressions, etc.); use the ones that meet your needs for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WithEnglishWeCan/generated-english-idioms/blob/master/idioms.build.json&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/WithEnglishWeCan/generated-english-idioms/blob/master/idioms.build.json&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do old fashion RegEx matching between the list of phrases and your input sentence. Later, you can look at fancier machine learning classifiers. For example, swap out their &quot;sarcasm&quot; data with your colloquial expressions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/surajr/SarcasmDetection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/surajr/SarcasmDetection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's a couple organizations that specialize in this task. It's worth checking out places like: &lt;a href=&quot;http://afflatus.ucd.ie/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://afflatus.ucd.ie/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T16:28:10.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T19:30:03.133" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16131732/Hebrew-and-Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Duolingo discussion&lt;/a&gt;, 'S.Liebermann' mentions that in Hebrew and Arabic, &quot;the verb needs to agree with the level of passive/active&quot; and &quot;Hebrew has 7 degrees of passive/active, while Arabic has 10 of them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this passive/active agreement that he is speaking of in Hebrew, and if possible also in Arabic, and what are some examples of its use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T13:35:32.857" Title="What is the concept of verb agreement with passive-active level in Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27363" CreationDate="2018-03-08T20:30:23.750" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I haven't heard of the term &quot;degrees of passive/active&quot; before, they are almost certainly talking about the verbal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derived_stem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;stems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This is a concept indeed alien to Western European (or broader) but common to all Semitic languages. The core idea is that the stems differentiate &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Aktionsart&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an earlier stage of the language (pre-1000 BCE) there must have been ten verbal stems, nine of which fit into a 3x3 grid of voice and Aktionsart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Unmarked Aktionsart   Verbal plurality    Causative&#xA;Active      G                     D                   C  (Š)&#xA;Reflexive   Gt                    Dt / tD             Ct (Št)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;G is called G for the German &lt;strong&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt;rundstamme. D is called D because of &lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;oubling of the middle radical (/qatal/ &gt; /qi&lt;strong&gt;tt&lt;/strong&gt;el/). C is called C for &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;ausativity. It is also called &lt;strong&gt;Š&lt;/strong&gt; sometimes which better reflects phonology (although in Hebrew the marking consonant became /h/). Dt is often called tD because the /t/ became a prefix rather than an infix elsewhere.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbal plurality can be of subject, object or action, e.g. &quot;they broke the glass&quot; in G becomes &quot;they shattered the glass (in &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; pieces) in D via object plurality, or &quot;they &lt;em&gt;repeatedly&lt;/em&gt; broke the glass&quot; (action plurality) or &quot;they all broke the glass&quot; (subject plurality). Causativity is e.g. to cause to be seen, i.e. &quot;to reveal&quot;. Thus you see that these distinctions are in English covered by lexicon rather than grammar (i.e., there are different verbs for different Aktionsarts, &quot;broke&quot;-&quot;shattered&quot; and &quot;see&quot;-&quot;reveal&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides this nice symmetric system there was an N-stem, the original semantics of which are still debated but which probably had to do something with middle voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Central Semitic, &quot;internal passives&quot; are developed for the three core stems G, D and C. In Arabic grammar these are usually not treated as separate stems, but in Hebrew and other languages they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Passive     Gp                    Dp                  Cp&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This system developed differently in different languages. I cannot comment on the situation in Arabic (which as far as I can see from Wikipedia must also have developed the new L stem) because I don't know enough about it. In (Biblical) Hebrew, there was the issue that Gt, Gp and N both indicate relatively rare non-active voice unmarked for Aktionsart. This leads to the dropping of Gt and to a large extent that of Gp as well, whereas N takes on passive meanings and Dt takes over reflexive voice unmarked for Aktionsart. Also, Ct is almost not attested in Biblical Hebrew and as far as I know does not exist in Modern Hebrew because reflexive causativity is so rare. Thus in Hebrew the situation has become far less symmetric than it once was. On the other hand, in Syriac, the function of the passives was taken over by participles and the N disappeared, leading to a highly symmetric system of only 6 stems (in fact, like the original table above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this long detour I would still like to comment on the terminology of &quot;degrees of passive/active&quot;. I'm sure that the author had his reasons for this term, but it doesn't seem to be accurate: it covers only one dimension of the system (voice) but neglects the other (Aktionsart). Thus, the verbal stems G, D and C all indicate active voice (the same &quot;degree of passive/active&quot;), whereas Gt/Dt/Ct all indicate reflexivity and Gp/Dp/Cp all indicate passive voice. (Only in Hebrew the system is more complicated, because N can indicate both middle and passive voice, thus being in between degrees).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, for your convenience a table of the more common names of the stems in language-specific grammars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Heb.         Arab.         Heb.     Arab.       Heb.    Arab.&#xA;G   qal          I         D   piel     II      C   hiphil  IV&#xA;Gp  qal-passive  –         Dp  pual     –       Cp  hophal  –&#xA;Gt  –            VIII      tD  hitpael  V       Ct  –       X&#xA;&#xA;N   niphal       VII&#xA;&#xA;L                III&#xA;tL               VI&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good diachronic overview paper with many references is Gzella, H. 2009. 'Voice in Classical Hebrew against Its Semitic Background', Orientalia 78(3), pp. 292–325.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T13:35:32.857" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T13:35:32.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27411" CreationDate="2018-03-09T19:14:29.323" Score="0" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble figuring out the formula for Brunet's index which can be found in this paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/annalspaper.aspx?v=6&amp;amp;i=1&amp;amp;p=11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/annalspaper.aspx?v=6&amp;amp;i=1&amp;amp;p=11&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to apply it to interviews with ~1000 words, however, the values generated seems to be very extreme around e-100. Is this statistic not valid for large text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6HoDU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6HoDU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21426" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T14:00:05.057" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T21:13:30.400" Title="formula for Brunét's index" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T04:58:35.990" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have seen (this)[&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14417/where-can-you-download-the-ipa-chart-with-audio&quot;&gt;Where can you download the IPA chart with audio?&lt;/a&gt;) and can not find any solution to my problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i want the ipa chart with audio offline.&#xA;where can i download it from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21428" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T04:58:35.990" Title="where can i download ipa chart with audio offline?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-03-11T13:38:07.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T06:29:59.227" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm homeless and live in a tent so I'm constantly having to fix things instead of throwing them away or replacing it all together so I come up with ways to solve my problem with what I have on hand. &#xA;Ingenuity is similar to the word I'm looking for by definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21429" LastEditorUserId="21429" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T06:35:26.983" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T07:18:36.293" Title="I was called this recently by a friend but I can't remember what it was" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-03-10T14:03:46.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27368" CreationDate="2018-03-10T07:18:36.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly the same, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tinker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinker&lt;/a&gt;, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T07:18:36.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27373" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:24:40.293" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are ㅔ and ㅐ referred to as diphthongs in some Korean teaching materials even though the equivalent sounds (/e/, /ɛ/) do not constitute a change from one sound to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the orthography is a combination of ㅏ andㅣbut shouldn't diphthongs be based on phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14408" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T21:57:06.810" Title="Why are ㅔ and ㅐ referred to as diphthongs?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27375" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:41:58.263" Score="0" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to read the following sentence. It should be some film or play (English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CwFkU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CwFkU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be glad if you could help me with translating &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21434" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:15:54.737" Title="Reading IPA sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-03-12T09:01:07.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27371" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:51:41.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are referring to the difference between the pedagogical use of the term &quot;diphthong&quot;, versus the linguistic use. The pedagogical use is based on the fact that those vowels are written with two vowel letters. If you are operating in a linguistic context, then you &quot;should&quot; refer to those sounds as vowels and not diphthongs. It is generally pointless to demand that language teachers learn and adopt contemporary technical linguistic terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:51:41.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:09:01.573" Score="3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a work of fiction, I have a character who speaks Russian, German and Hungarian, none of which I speak. The character wrote a fictional novel that appears only in its English translation, but the translator (also fictional, of course) occasionally rears his head to say &quot;I do not know exactly how to express this next sentence, because the author uses the [Russian/German/Hungarian] word [------], which has no obvious counterpart in English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good example&lt;/a&gt; is the German word &lt;em&gt;Ungeziefer&lt;/em&gt;, which appears in the first sentence of Kafka's &quot;Metamorphosis.&quot; It's the thing that Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into, and is alternately translated as &quot;insect,&quot; &quot;bug&quot; or &quot;vermin.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good example is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5#Russian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian word &lt;em&gt;prividénije&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (привидение), which Gogol uses (in the vernacular &lt;em&gt;skaz&lt;/em&gt;) to describe the reappearance of the deceased Akaky Akakievich. It appears to most commonly translate to &quot;ghost,&quot; but I believe Constance Garnett uses &quot;apparition.&quot; Others refer to a &quot;corpse.&quot; It's unclear whether Akaky is corporeal. Is he a phantasmal projection or a sort of zombie?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to collect great examples of these in those three languages. I suppose one way to start would be if I had highly non-prescriptive [German/Russian/Hungarian]-to-English dictionaries, where the editor listed ever defensible translation and not the one he or she thinks is best. I have fluent speakers of all three languages on hand to comment on whether the word is in fact highly ambiguous, but don't want to pass the buck to them to produce dozens of possible examples from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on a good source for this hunt, either in print or online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10741" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:09:01.573" Title="How to find words to other languages that have no clear translation in English" Tags="&lt;german&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27372" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:15:54.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure that this should be a particular film or play? The last three words are clearly &quot;for other programs&quot; (in American English the &quot;o&quot; in &quot;for&quot; is often pronounced with a schwa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the other two words, I would say this reads &lt;strong&gt;Call theater for other programs&lt;/strong&gt;. Note that the middle symbol in the second word, though it looks like an &quot;r&quot;, is in fact an alveolar flap - the sound an English speaker often makes when pronouncing a /t/ or /d/ in the middle of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21436" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:15:54.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27371" CreationDate="2018-03-10T18:05:52.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to user6726's answer, it is likely that the materials originally referred to &quot;double vowel letters&quot; (or graphemes, or however you call 한글 자모) but was incorrectly translated to &quot;diphthong&quot;, which generally only means &quot;double vowel sound&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%95%9C%EA%B8%80#%EB%82%B1%EC%9E%90&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Korean wikipedia article on Hangul&lt;/a&gt;, the vowel letters ㅐㅒㅔㅖㅘㅙㅚㅝㅞㅟㅢ are listed under &quot;겹홀소리&quot; (compound vowel), which should be understood as &quot;compound vowel &lt;strong&gt;letters&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:05:52.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T11:03:20.220" Score="4" ViewCount="623" Body="&lt;p&gt;French language is known to be a Roman language, just like Spanish, Italian, Swiss Roman…&#xA;Those Roman languages are told to be originating from Latin language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I learnt Latin, one of the first (and most important) things I learnt, were the cases (nominative, accusative…), and let's face it: the Latin language is full of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meanwhile I've learnt Dutch, German, French and Spanish, and I've observed that in the mentioned Roman languages there are no traces of the cases (while those traces are very visibly in the non-Roman languages), so my question is: how can languages like French, Spanish (and I guess, also Italian) be called Roman languages if the main grammatical structure of a Roman languages is nowhere to be found in those languages? In other words, while inventing the so-called &quot;Roman languages&quot;, where did the cases go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28393" OwnerDisplayName="Dominique" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T09:07:05.840" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T09:13:47.860" Title="As French is a so-called Roman language, where are the cases?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-03-13T12:18:40.177" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27377" CreationDate="2018-03-10T11:22:38.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are called Romance languages and not &quot;declensive&quot; languages for a reason. They have indeed lost their declensions (which remain in very rare cases like pronouns, e.g. &lt;em&gt;il/lui&lt;/em&gt;) but they have kept a lot of characteristics from Latin. Note also that the Romanian language still has some declensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar situation exists in English, which belongs to the Germanic languages family, despite a large amount of French vocabulary and not only having lost its declensions but also grammatical gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4717" OwnerDisplayName="jlliagre" LastEditorUserId="4717" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T09:07:43.083" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T09:07:43.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27377" CreationDate="2018-03-10T15:20:37.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronouns are cased, though many of the distinctions have been erased in this bizarre fashion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mWlLC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mWlLC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Les cas grammaticaux des pronoms&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jlliagre implies, not all these forms are derived directly from their Latin forms. Also, I don't know Latin, but as far as I'm aware the uses don't overlap perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French cases are still used for the same purpose, though — to mark a noun's role in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say I either send Marie across campus to Abdul's office, or Abdul to Marie's office. Those two scenarios could be expressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je la lui envoie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je le lui envoie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sentences differ by just one letter, but from Marie's point of view they're pretty different. After all, in one she's &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt;, walking across campus, and in the other she's &lt;em&gt;lui&lt;/em&gt;, staying in her office. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case (no pun intended), as jlliagre said, the category of Romance or Latinate language doesn't imply that all the qualities were inherited. It's more about a genetic history than it is about functional similarity. Linguistic apples sometimes fall far from their trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" OwnerDisplayName="Luke Sawczak" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T15:38:38.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27371" CreationDate="2018-03-10T21:57:06.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because, historically, when Hangul was first created, they did represent diphthong sounds. But over time, sounds changed and many evolved either into either new monophthongs or approximant+vowel pairs. The naming is outdated, obviously, but its still used obviously. Probably because, like people have said, the characters are all combinations of two vowel symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T21:57:06.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27384" CreationDate="2018-03-10T22:00:31.270" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are plenty of languages out there where possessive &lt;em&gt;personal pronouns&lt;/em&gt; can and do agree with the head noun in number and case. But I was wondering if there were any where nouns also had to agreed when placed in the possessive/genitive case? If grammatical number is marked with a suffix, then that means that such nouns may need to take two endings in the possessive: one to indicate the number of the noun, and another to agree with the number of the head noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T23:38:44.820" Title="Are there any languages where possessive nouns have to agree with the head noun?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27383" CreationDate="2018-03-10T23:38:44.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is possible, and it is my understanding that this phenomenon is called &quot;Suffixaufnahme&quot;. One of the most well-known examples seems to be Old Georgian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mkracht/html/suffixaufnahme.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suffixaufnahme&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Marcus Kracht, gives the following examples, among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;qeli-ta     mocikul-ta-ta &#xA;hand-obl.pl apostle-obl.pl-obl.pl &#xA;through the hands of the apostles&#xA;&#xA;c̣inamsrbol-n-i     lašḳar-ta-n-i &#xA;forerunner-pl-nom army-obl.pl-pl-nom &#xA;the vanguard of the armies&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few other related or just similar-looking, but distinct phenomena are sometimes also called &quot;Suffixaufnahme&quot;. I think Valdeut gives a good overview in the following post on the thread &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?p=1113792#p1113792&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basque's Surdéclinaison&lt;/a&gt;&quot; at the Zompist Bulletin Board:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in some languages, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Nominal_morphology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sumerian&lt;/a&gt;, it seems the head noun usually comes at the start of the noun phrase, but case markers are applied at the end of the noun phrase rather than at the end of the head noun. The result is that embedding causes multiple case markers to appear after each other at the end of the noun phrase. Wikipedia cites the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sipad udu siki-ak-ak-ene&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;the shepherds of woolly sheep&quot;), where the first genitive morpheme (-a(k)) subordinates &lt;em&gt;siki&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wool&quot; to &lt;em&gt;udu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sheep&quot;, and the second subordinates &lt;em&gt;udu siki-a(k)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sheep of wool&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Zólyomi, Gábor (2014). Grzegorek, Katarzyna; Borowska, Anna; Kirk, Allison, eds. &lt;em&gt;Copular Clauses and Focus Marking in Sumerian.&lt;/em&gt; De Gruyter. p. 8. ISBN 978-3-11-040169-1. Retrieved 21 July 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Valdeut mentions the term &quot;Suffixhäufung&quot; as a name for this phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in some languages, such as Basque, there is not agreement within the noun clause, but an additional case marker may be added after a case marker in contexts of afterthought or when an inflected word is used by itself (with ellipsis of the head noun).  Some people seem to avoid using &quot;Suffixaufnahme&quot; to refer to this. As the linked thread indicates, the French term &quot;surdéclinaison&quot; has been used to refer to the phenomenon seen in Basque.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T23:38:44.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27377" CreationDate="2018-03-11T01:26:44.547" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language families classify languages according to their history. Italian, French, Spanish and so on are Romance languages because there was a gradual evolution from Latin to these languages. Evolution means change: some features of the resulting language differ from the original language. Usually languages in the same family share a lot of vocabulary, but may have different grammatical properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the expansion of the Roman Empire, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vulgar Latin&lt;/a&gt; spread around the Mediterranean. It gradually split into separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romance languages&lt;/a&gt;. Vulgar Latin mostly used Latin vocabulary, but it evolved a simpler grammar. This is probably because, for many of its speakers, it was a trade language, not a native language. Among the major simplifications were the gradual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Case&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;erosion of declensions&lt;/a&gt; and the loss of the neutral gender. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar#Case&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanian&lt;/a&gt; has three cases, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old French&lt;/a&gt; had two, and most modern Romance languages only have one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns tend to preserve more distinctions than nouns. For example, most (all?) Romance languages have different forms for subject and object pronouns, at least for some persons. French has traces of a neutral case with &lt;em&gt;qui/que&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;il/elle/ce&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is not unique to Romance languages. For example, English, Dutch and many Scandinavian languages also lost declensions and have considerably reduced gender variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T09:13:47.860" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T09:13:47.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-11T03:34:55.037" Score="-1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the grammatical or syntax term for a &lt;em&gt;sentence structure&lt;/em&gt; in which there are more than one subject or more than one object continuously in the sentence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: &#xA;In this sentence, the there are three &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/about-words-clauses-and-sentences/objects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He studies &lt;strong&gt;English, Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Portuguese&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example there are two subjects: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The boy and the girl&lt;/strong&gt; ate the food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:51:57.847" Title="What is the grammatical or syntax term for such a sentence structure?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27387" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27398" CreationDate="2018-03-11T03:47:59.883" Score="0" ViewCount="920" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to complete an NLP assignment using the Jaccard Distance metric function &lt;code&gt;jaccard_distance()&lt;/code&gt; built into &lt;code&gt;nltk.metrics.distance&lt;/code&gt;, when I noticed that the results from it did not make sense in the context I would expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I examined the implementation of &lt;code&gt;jaccard_distance()&lt;/code&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/metrics/distance.html#jaccard_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online source&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that it was not consistent with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathematical definition&lt;/a&gt; for the Jaccard index.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the implementation in &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;return (len(label1.union(label2)) - len(label1.intersection(label2)))/len(label1.union(label2))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but according to the definition, the numerator term should only involve an intersection of the two sets, which means the correct implementation should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;return len(label1.intersection(label2))/len(label1.union(label2))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when I wrote my own function using the latter, I indeed obtained correct answers to my assignment. For example, I was tasked to recommend a correct spelling suggestion for the misspelled word &lt;strong&gt;cormulent&lt;/strong&gt;, from a comprehensive corpus of words (built in &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt;), using Jaccard Distance on trigrams of the words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I used the &lt;code&gt;jaccard_distance()&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt;, I instead obtained so many perfect matches (the result from the distance function was &lt;code&gt;1.0&lt;/code&gt;) that just were nowhere near being correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I used my own function the latter implementation, I was able to get a spelling recommendation of &lt;strong&gt;corpulent&lt;/strong&gt;, at a Jaccard Distance of 0.4 from &lt;strong&gt;cormulent&lt;/strong&gt;, a decent recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could there be a bug with &lt;code&gt;jaccard_distance()&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21441" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T07:03:16.280" Title="Implementation of Jaccard Distance metric in nltk.metrics.distance not consistent with the mathematical definition?" Tags="&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27386" CreationDate="2018-03-11T13:06:13.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure about how it is called in grammar of English, but &quot;English, Spanish and Portuguese&quot; is just the direct object, and &quot;the boy and the girl&quot; is just the subject. Each structure can be formed by more than one word and by more than one real world item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15015" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T13:06:13.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:06:42.327" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak any Slavonic languages and am merely seeking a fuller understanding of what R.G.A. De Bray has to say in his book ' Guide to the Slavonic Languages ' . For one thing , on page 369 , he mentions ' The palatal consonants of Czech and Slovak : ť , ď , ň , ř ( Czech only ) ... but on page 442 he tells us about ' the palatalized ď , ť , ň , ř , and j ... '  My question , please , is simply : why does he call the SAME individual four consonants ď , ť , ň , ř ' palatal ' on the first of those two pages but ' palatalized ' on the second page ? Assuming these two terms are not synonymous , it puzzles me that he applies two somewhat similar but nonetheless  DIFFERENT terms to the very SAME individual consonants . There ought to be a rational explanation .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21448" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:33:26.170" Title="Description of Czech consonants" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:17:40.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stemming from my personal experience as a language learner and from working as a language teacher for many years, I agree that both Simultaneous bilingualism and Sequentialis lead to different types of bilingual. Beginning with Simultaneous bilingualism (or multilangualism), when growing up I was raised with Catalan and Spanish as the main languages both at home and in school. Now as an adult, I have no problem being able to speak, read and write in both languages and I also have no problem disassociating one with the other, although you can argue that they are both similar languages, they are still two languages with each having its own alphabet and accent rules. &#xA;To follow, with Sequentialis being the topic in mind here, my wife grew up in a home where Spanish was the main and only language being spoken by her parents, however at school the main language was English. Now as an adult, my wife is able to speak English better than Spanish and the same goes with her being able to speak, read and write, she is better in English than in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, these two examples lead me to believe that simultaneous bilingualism is a method that should  be applied to children during the “critical age” if parents want their children to be able to grasp two different languages at the same level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21449" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:17:40.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27390" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:33:26.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose &quot;palatal&quot; is a misnomer. In Slavic languages themselves, they are termed, literally, &quot;soft consonants&quot; (Czech: &lt;strong&gt;měkké souhlásky&lt;/strong&gt;, Slovak: &lt;strong&gt;mäkké spoluhlásky&lt;/strong&gt;). While palatalisation is sometimes called &quot;softening&quot;, one doesn't customarily speak of &quot;softened&quot; consonants, but of soft/hard &quot;pairs&quot; or &quot;counterparts&quot;. This Slavic choice of adjective referring, as it were, to being and not becoming, may have influenced the author's not-quite-correct choice of &quot;palatal&quot; instead of &quot;palatalised&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I don't think it's correct to call &lt;code&gt;j&lt;/code&gt; palatal&lt;em&gt;ised&lt;/em&gt;, when it obviously has no non-palatalised counterpart. Also, if those quotes are complete, they fail to mention the Slovak-only &lt;code&gt;ľ&lt;/code&gt;. So I'd put this down to simple carelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:33:26.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27386" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:51:57.847" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is called: &lt;strong&gt;conjunction-reduction&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In transformational grammar it is a rule that reduces coordinate sentences, applied, for example, to convert &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;John &lt;strong&gt;lives&lt;/strong&gt; in Ireland and Brian lives&lt;/em&gt; in Ireland&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;John and Brian &lt;strong&gt;live&lt;/strong&gt; in Ireland&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/conjunction-reduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Credit: @jlawler in the comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:51:57.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27395" CreationDate="2018-03-11T21:27:14.620" Score="0" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am taking a course on linguistics and got introduced to a lot of abbreviations. Other than the obvious &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; for verb, I am having a lot of trouble finding out what the others mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Speech and Language Processing&lt;/em&gt; by Jurafsky and Martin uses a lot of these abbreviations too without explaining what they all mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does someone have a link to a list in a website or book or whatever that I can use to know what all these short forms stand for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can use google to find out what they mean but am wondering if there is a bigger list out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9Yc1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s9Yc1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21451" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T06:31:29.497" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T06:31:29.497" Title="What do these morphemes' abbreviated glosses mean?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27394" CreationDate="2018-03-11T22:55:25.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the first example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;blame    blame+V+Inf&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word form blame is lemmatised as &lt;code&gt;blame&lt;/code&gt;, part-of-speech-tagged as verb &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; and and further anylysed as the infinitive &lt;code&gt;Inf&lt;/code&gt; (which includes all of the present tense except the 3rd person singular &lt;code&gt;Pres3s&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other tags of the example should be no problem: &lt;code&gt;Pret&lt;/code&gt; stand for the past tense aka &lt;em&gt;preteritum&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;PastPart&lt;/code&gt; for the past participle and &lt;code&gt;PresPart&lt;/code&gt; for the present participle aka gerund aka &quot;the -ing form&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T22:55:25.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27387" CreationDate="2018-03-12T07:03:16.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are implementing the Jaccard &lt;em&gt;coefficient&lt;/em&gt; whereas the library has the Jaccard &lt;em&gt;distance&lt;/em&gt;. The coefficient tells how related two sets are (it is high when they are similar), whereas the distance does the opposite; it is low when they are similar. In fact, they are each other's complement, i.e. &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; = 1-&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; = 1-&lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also explained on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index#Similarity_of_asymmetric_binary_attributes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article you linked&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EiDJw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EiDJw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that from the definition follows that the distance between entirely unrelated sets is 1 (not &amp;infin; as you may expect) which explains the many &quot;perfect matches&quot; with a distance measure of 1. A perfect match in fact has a distance of 0 (which only happens when the sets are identical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T07:03:16.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T08:53:28.957" Score="-2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tree diagram of &quot;he refuted the allegation that he is gay&quot;&#xA;How can it be drawn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21457" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T11:24:48.800" Title="The tree diagram of he refuted the allegation that he is gay" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-03-12T10:35:02.463" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T11:18:30.743" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to parse trees, and if I understand correctly, SBAR indicates the beginning of a subordinate clause.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Penn Treebank II Tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SBAR - Clause introduced by a (possibly empty) subordinating conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, can SBAR be the first tag of a sentence? &#xA;This doesn't make sense to me, but is the result of running python &lt;em&gt;stat_parser&lt;/em&gt; parser on the sentence: &lt;em&gt;&quot;I will say that I will send him mail tomorrow&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KM4a4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KM4a4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21459" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T11:18:30.743" Title="Can SBAR be the first tag of a sentence?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27399" CreationDate="2018-03-12T11:19:28.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a simplified tree diagram of your sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VdKiq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VdKiq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T11:24:48.800" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T11:24:48.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2018-03-12T11:24:51.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;it's not unique to Czech. We have it in European Portuguese. It's written RJ in words like 'gorjeta' or 'sarjeta'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21460" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T11:24:51.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T13:55:45.733" Score="0" ViewCount="3182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only know English as a language aside from classes in Spanish and French and the typical stuff learned through movies and the like. To people who are multilingual, is English the most descriptive language? I wouldn't be surprised if it's up there but I never really hear of other languages having such a diverse vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I mean how many different ways of expressing a thought. For example, I know &quot;ja&quot; means yes while &quot;jawohl&quot; is a very-affirmative yes. Now I don't doubt there are more variations of it and not knowing much German, I can't really say. I do know in English, you can say things such as: yes, sure thing, absolutely, affirmative, and at once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also noticed that when looking for translations, I'll sometimes get the same results for two similar phrases or words, hence indicating that maybe there isn't much of a variety in vocab for the destination language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The idea of asking wasn't to boast about English at all. And of course of all the languages both past and present, it's nearly impossible to get a definitive answer. But all I'm asking is in one's own experience, is it at least a plausible assumption. It's not something we can actually quantify or qualify, but something we may gauge roughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21462" LastEditorUserId="21462" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T23:55:42.137" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T18:43:03.380" Title="Is English the most descriptive language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26219" CreationDate="2018-03-12T14:25:09.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is as simple as historical, gender bias. Men have pretty much always taken dominance in societies, especially in roles of power (politics, religion, warfare, business). When one would think about humans (man) and their contributions, one would almost be referencing men. Man has built cities, man has cultivated crops, man has conquered lands, man has mapped the stars, etc. Women have been seen more as a side role to men, here to serve, to bear offspring, not to learn, work, or command. I speak not out of personal belief, but from what I know of history. Of course, every society isn't and hasn't been like this but vast majority have and are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simpler solution for modern times as to why it hasn't changed might be because we are lazy, at least as far as English goes. Man is easier to say, write, and type than 'humans' or any other variation. Three letters is all it takes. This also eliminates the need for an additional, new word. Same reason why people use 'they/them' as a pronoun for a person which the gender is unknown, because it's easier than saying him/her every time. It's easier to say 'man' than humans or man/woman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I think my first argument might help explain why 'brotherhood' takes prevalence in most forms when used as opposed to brother and sisterhood, especially since there isn't specifically a gender-neutral form of the word. Same with fraternity, as it can be used to describe a group of males with bonds or group of people in general, with bonds. As far as student Greek organizations go, fraternity can be male-only or co-ed whereas female-only will only be a sorority. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it's one of those words that requires context to determine if one is talking about men or men and women. Unfortunately, some people require the use of something completely gender-neutral choices or both gendered iterations, which many are too lazy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21462" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T14:25:09.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T14:55:15.560" Score="0" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am revising for my NLP quiz and am getting confused at the difference between semantic and pragmatic. I studied that semantic is the study of words and their meaning in sentences while pragmatic takes context into consideration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) When is a sentence semantically &lt;strong&gt;incorrect&lt;/strong&gt; ? What do I need to identify to distinguish between correct and incorrect ? Are there any examples ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) How do I identify sentences that are semantically correct but pragmatically incorrect ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Is a syntactically correct sentence also always semantically correct ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) What are examples of semantically correct but pragmatically incorrect sentences ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21451" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T14:55:15.560" Title="Semantic vs Pragmatic" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-04-02T16:45:04.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27403" CreationDate="2018-03-12T16:31:34.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no realistic prospect for comparing languages in terms of number of ways to express a thought, because every language has infinitely many ways to express any thought. &quot;A thought&quot; isn't a quantifiable units. You might, however, be able to quantify the synonym-density of a language, taking a clue from your example: how many words are there for &quot;couch&quot;, &quot;dog&quot; and so on. That is, how many expressions are there that refer to more or less the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your specific example also points to the problem of defining what you're looking for. You left off an infinite set of expressions which express that same thought: &quot;yupparoonee; roger; ok; mhm; yeah no yeah; but of course; naturally; is the Pope Catholic; that should be obvious; and that's why were here...&quot;. In other words, are we counting communicative uses, or literal meanings? Let's say we exclude questions about the Pope's religion, which are used to communicate &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have to decide what level of officiality to insist on. Apart from the normal word for &quot;dog&quot;, we have &quot;hound, mutt, mongrel, canine, fido, bowser, pooch, flee-bag, shit-factory. Once you pry into the Urban Dictionary repository, you discover that English has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=literally&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literally&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=zillion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;zillions&lt;/a&gt; of words that you probably didn't know, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=zab&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;zab&lt;/a&gt; (I'm not zab, so I didn't know this). If you allow this set, then English almost certainly wins hands-down, because the world spends much of its free time populating UD with new putative English words. The competing &lt;a href=&quot;http://KamusiyaJiji.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kamusi ya Jiji&lt;/a&gt; project (sorry about the 404) hasn't gotten very far off the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you insist on a fairly high degree of officiality to purge zab and the like, a possible competitor would be Javanese (there are other languages that do this, so it might be that Balinese wins the count-contest). This is because there are a number of official social register variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no scientific answer, because the question isn't yet made precise enough that it can be addressed, but I've indicated the main issues that need to be addressed: &quot;same&quot; in what sense, and level of officiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T16:31:34.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27403" CreationDate="2018-03-12T18:17:19.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but if it were, it would be very hard to objectively prove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I don't doubt there are more variations of it and not knowing much German, I can't really say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head there is the famously untranslatable &lt;em&gt;doch&lt;/em&gt;, and also &lt;em&gt;sicher&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;absolut&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;definitiv&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Stimmt.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eben&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;klar&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;selbstverständlich&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;genau&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;freilich&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mit Freude und sofort&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Passt.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Das schon&lt;/em&gt;... some of which are also hard to translate perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But trusting my memory of one language of thousands is not a great approach to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've also noticed that when looking for translations, I'll sometimes get the same results for two similar phrases or words, hence indicating that maybe there isn't much of a variety in vocab for the destination language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are not 1:1, and 1-n and n-1 happens in both directions.  Naturally produced content in any language uses words and phrases without perfect equivalents in all other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine the mappings from the words in one language to the words in another, assuming both languages have the same number of words.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Ki2u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Ki2u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you pick a subset of those points on only one side, then follow the mapping, you could easily come to the false conclusion that one language has more words, or fewer words, for each concept.  The exact skew depends greatly on the domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using Google Translate or Wiktionary or nearly any online tool, you should also consider that the dictionary data for each language and language pair are not created equal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also inherent structural differences.  Some languages express in one long word what others express in a few short words.  So an adverb could map to a tense, or a compound noun could map to a phrase, or a noun ending could map to a preposition.  The definition of a word is subjective and varies across languages.  Total unique word counts measured over large corpora are also subjective and incomparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of this would be the translation of &lt;em&gt;umbrella&lt;/em&gt;.  The German word is &lt;em&gt;Regenschirm&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;rain screen&lt;/em&gt;), but &lt;em&gt;Schirm&lt;/em&gt; can be used by itself in context, and a good dictionary will give you both translations.  Many other compounds are formed with &lt;em&gt;Schirm&lt;/em&gt;, including &lt;em&gt;Sonnenschirm&lt;/em&gt;.  So you will encounter &lt;em&gt;Schirm&lt;/em&gt; again and again.  English compounds do not necessarily get their own entry.  And I find &lt;em&gt;Sonnenschirm&lt;/em&gt; very descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the above example hints, languages borrow and calque words, some more than others.  If they co-exist with another word but with another shade of meaning then they do tend to increase the expressivity.  &lt;em&gt;umbrella&lt;/em&gt; is a borrowing, so is &lt;em&gt;parasol&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;dentist&lt;/em&gt;, but their roots are opaque to monolingual native speakers, not descriptive, and have replaced another more descriptive word if one ever existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, to your point, I think you could make the case that Standard German specifically is traditionally a bit of an artificial language, but it would be hard to argue that total expressiveness in diglossia is less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescriptivism is also varied and arbitrary and would be hard to apply consistently anyway, so a typical bi-lingual dictionary would have standard American and British terms and standard Swiss, Austrian and German, but not all the German dialect words for chicken or potato.  Google Translate does not even have the standard Swiss and Austrian words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also observe that large polycentric languages with multiple standards and variants, like English, but also German, Spanish, Arabic and Serbo-Croatian, do have more words total in their theoretical dictionaries than those that are more narrowly defined, say Icelandic, but the passive and especially active vocabulary of any given speaker is a smaller subset of that total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of language, word and expressiveness are just too varied and too subjective to make a strong claim about this.  My personal subjective opinion is that expressiveness varies as much by culture, milieu and person as by language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T23:02:50.577" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T23:02:50.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T18:27:25.950" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Modern Hebrew, the words לזכור and להיזכר both mean &quot;to remember&quot; and they both come from the root 'זכר'. As an English speaker, it's as if there were two words, &quot;remember&quot; and &quot;remomber&quot; and there was a slight difference between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do both of these Hebrew words exist, and what's the difference between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T11:39:12.620" Title="What's the difference between לזכור and להיזכר in Modern Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-03-13T12:17:46.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27365" CreationDate="2018-03-12T20:23:23.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found out that the formula was actually BI = N^V^(-.165) which returned more reasonable values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21426" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T20:23:23.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T20:27:05.740" Score="4" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do the words Wave(English) Welle(German) Vague(French) have the same Etymology as Val(Serbo-Croatian,Slovenian),Vlna(Czech,Slovakian),BолнаVolna. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these words mean the same thing-Wave. but I found it surprising, given their relative similarity, that they have a different Proto-Indo-European root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wave/Welle comes from the Inde-European &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*wegh-?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*wegh&lt;/a&gt; where Val/Vlna comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*wel-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*wel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain why these word that mean the same thing and are so alike still do not have the same etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21468" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T10:22:49.937" Title="Etymology of the words ''Wave''" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-13T00:58:46.960" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to get an electronic list of occupations/professions/jobs in English, like &quot;doctor,&quot; &quot;cowboy,&quot; &quot;assistant to the regional manager,&quot; etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't quite find this in the WordNet hierarchy (strangely, there are &quot;professions,&quot; but that only has a few occupations listed), and I tried &lt;a href=&quot;http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?type=search&amp;amp;qsearch=occupation(s)&amp;amp;word=occupation(s)&amp;amp;page=1#id=197787&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the historical thesaurus&lt;/a&gt;, but with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other resources for machine-readable hierarchical thesaurus-like lexicons? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1787" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T07:51:36.797" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T16:40:59.403" Title="Where would I go to find a hierarchical list of occupations in English?" Tags="&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;ontologies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27412" CreationDate="2018-03-13T11:15:19.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First note that German &lt;em&gt;Welle&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;wave&lt;/em&gt; aren't cognates. Grimm derive German &lt;em&gt;Welle&lt;/em&gt; from a verb &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GW04638#XGW04638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;walen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to writhe, to wallow, to roll&quot; that is traced to Indogermanic *vel (in their notation, identical to your *wel). There is another German word for &quot;wave&quot;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GW24689#XGW24689&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Woge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;wage&lt;/em&gt;) that derives from Indogermanic  *wegh and that is related to English wave. French &lt;em&gt;vague&lt;/em&gt; is probably a loan from Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know details about the etymology of &lt;em&gt;val&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vlna&lt;/em&gt;. Are they inherited from proto-Slavic or are they loan words from German?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T10:22:49.937" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T10:22:49.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27410" CreationDate="2018-03-13T11:39:12.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both words come from the root זכר, but are in different conjugations (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verb_conjugation#Binyanim_or_conjugations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;binyanim&lt;/a&gt;). לִזְכּוֹר or זָכַר is in the kal (pa'al) conjugation, and לְהִזָּכֵר or נִזְכָּר is in the nif'al conjugation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymologically, זָכַר is a transitive verb meaning &quot;to remember,&quot; and this meaning goes as far back as Biblical Hebrew. נִזְכָּר, on the other hand, means &quot;to be remembered&quot; in Biblical Hebrew and is intransitive. In Mishnaic Hebrew, נִזְכָּר is first used with the meaning &quot;to remember&quot; and usually appears as נִזְכָּר שֶׁ- meaning &quot;to remember that...&quot;. In modern Hebrew, נִזְכָּר is usually followed by בְּ- &quot;to remember about...&quot; (since the word is still intransitive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, נִזְכָּר differs from זָכַר in that it carries a connotation of realizing, i.e. remembering something that had previously been forgotten, whereas זָכַר can refer to uninterrupted remembering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one dictionary defines זָכַר as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;לא שכח, השאיר במודעות (&lt;a href=&quot;https://milog.co.il/%D7%96%D7%9B%D7%A8/e_29168/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;didn't forget, kept in awareness &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and נִזְכָּר as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;חזר אל זכרונו דבר מה ששכח (&lt;a href=&quot;https://milog.co.il/%D7%A0%D7%96%D7%9B%D7%A8/e_3219/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;something he forgot returned to his memory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T11:39:12.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27414" CreationDate="2018-03-13T16:40:59.403" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are approximately 1,000 professions in the English language. Enjoy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.amazonaws.com/dictionary-legendary/Professions.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://s3.amazonaws.com/dictionary-legendary/Professions.txt&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T16:40:59.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27412" CreationDate="2018-03-13T17:41:28.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These sorts of coincidences happen quite often in comparative linguistics, just by random chance. For a famous example, German &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; (~English &quot;have&quot;) and Latin &lt;em&gt;habēre&lt;/em&gt; mean the same thing, but come from totally separate roots; &lt;em&gt;haben&lt;/em&gt; is instead cognate with Latin &lt;em&gt;capere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;seize&quot;, via Grimm's Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main similarity between all these words is the initial /v/, which goes back to PIE. It might be a coincidence that *&lt;em&gt;wegh&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;wel&lt;/em&gt; started with the same phoneme, or it might not (if one affected the other), but all the later similarities can be traced back to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T17:41:28.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12762" CreationDate="2018-03-13T17:55:00.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most users of a language will neither know nor care about an individual word's etymology. The odds that an individual native speaker of French knows that &lt;em&gt;accabler&lt;/em&gt; comes from &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;cata-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ball-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-āre&lt;/em&gt; are close to zero. They know the word for what it &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;, not what it used to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;cata-ballein&lt;/em&gt; was originally Greek, as the Wiktionary entry points out. But when it was borrowed into Latin, the common everyday Latin-speakers didn't care that it had the prefix &lt;em&gt;cata-&lt;/em&gt; already; in Latin, &lt;em&gt;cata-&lt;/em&gt; isn't meaningful, and the whole word was taken as a single unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare English &quot;important&quot;. Very few English-speakers still see this as Latin &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;porta-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-nt&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;. You might ask &quot;why does it still have the Latin participle ending &lt;em&gt;-nt&lt;/em&gt; instead of the English &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, or &quot;why do English-speakers add prefixes like 'un-' onto a word that already has a Latin prefix&quot;, or &quot;why does it appear as &lt;em&gt;im-&lt;/em&gt; when a native English prefix wouldn't assimilate like that&quot; (*). But most English-speakers would consider these questions nonsensical. &quot;Important&quot; is just a word like any other now; as far as English is concerned, it's a single atomic unit of meaning that can't be broken down any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) &lt;em&gt;In-&lt;/em&gt; appears as both a Romance and a Germanic prefix, from the same PIE root. But the Romance version assimilates, and the Germanic one doesn't: compare &lt;em&gt;im-becile&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in-bound&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T17:55:00.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11550" CreationDate="2018-03-13T21:29:57.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps,  in BOTH 1 and 2 , Y is the thing that fails to withstand ( Y being the ' implicit subject ' of the phrases containing the word ' notwithstanding '  as well as the '  explicit subject ' of the main clauses ) and the positioning makes no difference to that fact . So there's no difference in meaning in REALITY and both actually mean ' Y can't withstand X ' .  If your intuition is therefore to be considered erroneous , might it be because the word order in 2 erroneously suggests to your intuition that X is the subject ( because subjects are usually in first position ) and that your intuition is therefore labouring under a delusion ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21448" LastActivityDate="2018-03-13T21:29:57.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-14T03:41:35.330" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Friends! First of all, thanks for your time and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm conducting a research on the word &amp;quot;Mark&amp;quot;, and before I explain all I know so far, let me tell you:&#xA;The goal is to trace the connection between all cognates until it results in the current English word &amp;quot;mark&amp;quot;—one of its meanings being &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;symbol&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;figure&amp;quot;, and the main topic of my art research.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word begins in Proto-germanic, &amp;quot;mörk&amp;quot;, meaning &amp;quot;forest.&#xA;Since forests were natural borders, the word modified a bit and its new meaning was exactly this: &amp;quot;boundary&amp;quot;. From this, words like &amp;quot;Marquis&amp;quot; are born—that is, the one responsible for caring for the borders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close to these times, the word would acquire the meaning &amp;quot;mark&amp;quot; (such as a mark on the ground), &amp;quot;sign&amp;quot; (such as evidence of sth [a boundary, for instace]) and other visual connotations, leading to words like &amp;quot;Marksman&amp;quot;. (Not 100% sure of how it connects to images, &lt;em&gt;please, leave your insights&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all happening within a narrow cultural scope (mainly German, then France and England), and spreading throughout all Nordic cultures and having similar meanings in Icelandic, Norwegian, and others up to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The missing link here is the damn unit marc (for gold and silver): why would a piece of gold/silver have such name? Were there objects called &amp;quot;mark&amp;quot;? (A coin/ingot with a symbol, for instance.)&#xA;I believe this is where we get 100% sure of the visual meaning/connotations of the word &amp;quot;mark&amp;quot;. (It's already obvious, but this is academic, so...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is eventually connected to the Germans “brand” (to burn) and livestock branding, getting even more visual then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here goes an insight from another forum:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German WP article on Mark (Gewicht), i.e. the weight unit, gives the following etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymologic dictionary by Kluge traces the word back to Germanic marka- &amp;quot;unit of weight or value&amp;quot;, originally &amp;quot;partition, divided&amp;quot;; the one by Pfeifer cites Old High German marc &amp;quot;demarcation, sign&amp;quot; as word of origin and assumes that marc first referred to the embossment, and only secondary the ingot or the coins minted from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either etymology would also be a fit for Mark in its meaning of &amp;quot;border&amp;quot;. Other German words based on the stem mark (markieren - to mark something; Marken - badges or vouchers) that reinforce my impression that the common denominator here is the &amp;quot;sign&amp;quot;, the &amp;quot;standing for something&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any sort of reference (text) or visuals (paintings, etc.) would be extremely appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps: excuse me if this is an easy/stupid question. I’m not a native English speaker, so the more specific a topic gets, the harder the research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T13:24:00.610" Title="Etymology of the unit “Marc” (German►English)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-14T04:35:42.660" Score="1" ViewCount="1037" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the first auxiliary is normally treated as the head of a verb phrase (VP) in the X-Bar theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; writing a letter.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, for example, the first auxiliary, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is normally treated as the head of the VP, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; writing a letter&lt;/em&gt;, in the X-Bar theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some respect, however, the first auxiliary, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is merely indicating the tense and aspect of the following verb &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I wonder if the first auxiliary &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can be treated as the specifier of the VP and the following lexical verb &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; as the head of the VP in some variant of the X-Bar theory, or if this kind of treatment is a no go in any variant thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T04:53:02.283" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T01:27:12.197" Title="Can the first auxiliary verb be the specifier of a VP in the X-Bar theory?" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27403" CreationDate="2018-03-14T14:34:44.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two fallacies in your argument which both bear pointing out separately, though I think the other answers here already answer the overall question adequately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common observation in translation is that the source language tends to be more succinct, irrespective of which language you are translating from or to. The translator simply has a harder job than the original author, because they have to attempt to preserve the original author's intent, while at the same time adapting it to the cultural framework of a new audience and the structures of a different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is routine, to the point where many localization agencies will allocate 120% of the source language's area to a text box in a layout which is going to be translated. (The factor will need adjustment up or down depending on circumstances; for example, if the target languages are all like Chinese where the orthography will typically make the translation fill up a smaller area more densely than alphabetic writing, it makes sense to go negative, assuming obviously that we are talking about translation from a language with alphabetic orthography here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fallacy is the supposition that the source language is more succinct, or more precise, or richer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, your data may be dominated by translations &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; English. On the other, it's not hard to find individual examples of sentences which are very succinct in some language, and cannot be expressed shortly and elegantly in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the vocabulary level, for example, some languages contrast the inner vs the outer corner of something and can't say &quot;inner or outer corner&quot; in one word; they are not &quot;better&quot; or &quot;worse&quot; than English, just different, and you can often find examples where the opposite holds (&quot;sky&quot; vs &quot;heaven&quot; is just &quot;cielo&quot; in Spanish; &quot;roof&quot; vs &quot;ceiling&quot; is just &quot;tak&quot; in Swedish).  Which is more succinct depends on what you happen to want to talk about.  If you want to highlight the contrast, and your language allows you to do that easily, good for you; conversely, if you want to ignore it, you have to use a longer phrase, or live with some ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structural differences can be much harder to cope with for a translator.  In Russian, your choice of verb indicates whether an action was successfully completed or not. Languages with gender can use it to convey undertones which aren't possible in English, which doesn't mark gender for nouns or verbs.  Languages which don't have gender in their pronouns can say &quot;his or hers&quot; with a single word, or intentionally fail to reveal the gender of a person as a convenience or as a plot device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is objectively and measurably true is that English has a large vocabulary, measured in number of entries in dictionaries of the language.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jkorpela.fi/lang/vocab.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;But what does that mean?&lt;/a&gt;  As the linked article explains, that's only one way of counting among many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;many Eskimo words for snow&quot; parable aptly illustrates the second fallacy (even though you should be skeptical of this anecdote as well &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;).  A &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; concept may be more succinctly expressed or have a finer granularity in one language's vocabulary than another.  The fallacy is generalizing to &quot;all concepts&quot; or &quot;all important concepts&quot; or &quot;all culturally significant concepts&quot; etc, when there are many reasons why vocabularies have gaps, including pure chance and cultural conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In my language, we have a word in my dialect for &quot;being forced to&quot; which isn't part of the main dialects in my country. Many people know this, and many people agree that this is an inconvenient gap, but still, you can't just convince people to adopt this, even though they would find it convenient on a personal level, and the dialectal word is completely transparent to speakers of those other dialects because it's just an inflection which is just not used by their convention.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion, it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that English is more succinct or more &quot;descriptive&quot; than many languages in some particular register or domain, but generalizing to &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; most descriptive language in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; domains appears to be an obvious over-generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These arguments by themselves do not prove you wrong; but as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  I have pointed out some problem areas where at the very least you would have to collect a substantial amount of proof and counter-arguments to really support your hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that early linguists &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; had an embarrassing tendency to postulate superiority of &lt;em&gt;their own&lt;/em&gt; language, in what now, with modern eyes, can only be characterized as an inexcusable naïvety about cultural bias and perhaps even xenophobia.  Any claim that your language in particular is somehow remarkable should be examined with the utmost prejudice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow&lt;/a&gt; -- I was mainly referring to Pullum's seminal article when I looked this up, but there's more in the Wikipedia article so I'm linking there for context, though not necessarily as an authoritative or credible academic source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; I should say &quot;early Western modern linguistics&quot; at the very least but I recall scholars in antiquity who had the same bias, in spades; it's of course still possible that this is a purely &lt;em&gt;European&lt;/em&gt; problem, and not a feature of human nature (and I shall be duly embarrassed, but unsurprised, if it should turn out to be so that I myself am unaware of my biases here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T05:36:24.543" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T05:36:24.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:20:22.997" Score="0" ViewCount="743" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think syntax is concerning with the theories of syntax like structuralism, behaviorism, traditional, and informational since each school has it's own rules and theories while Grammar is in regard to the rules that form the correct text via applying or depending on the school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a common understanding of these terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21492" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T17:49:54.807" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T17:49:54.807" Title="What is the difference between syntax and grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-03-15T19:55:27.940" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27433" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:43:34.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that was supposed to be a question, like &quot;is that how linguists see it?&quot;. Syntax is not about theory of syntax: theories of syntax are about syntax. Syntax is generally understood to refer to the rules of how sentences and clauses are put together, and a theory of syntax is a theory of those rules. Some theories may include large chunks of &quot;morphology&quot; within the scope of syntax, others may include some aspects of meaning. Some theories actually exclude word order from the scope of syntax. There are a lot of school-dependent differences. I don't think there is any theory that say &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; about language structure is &quot;syntax&quot;, so usually there is something like &quot;phonetics&quot; or &quot;phonology&quot; (or both), &quot;lexicon&quot;, and &quot;semantics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Grammar&quot; as used by linguists refers to pretty much all of the structural facts of a language, encompassing semantics, phonetics, phonology. This is in contrast to popular definitions of &quot;grammar&quot;, which refers to &quot;proper grammar&quot;, that is, normative rules about how you should speak in a context. Sometimes there are official academies that declare what is proper, otherwise (and especially in the case of English) is is via subjective apostolic tradition, where one may adjudicate a matter by reference to The Chicago Manual of Style (or some other text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists may study normative grammar, but typically without approving of the underlying dictates. For example there is a linguistic study, &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar&lt;/em&gt; which studies what normative grammarians have said. Linguistics is a science, meaning that is describes what the facts are, and does not make claims as to how people should behave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T17:43:34.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27424" CreationDate="2018-03-15T01:27:12.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right that the auxiliary is merely a TAM carrier, it's a function word without any meaning of its own. It's however completely logical to take it to be the structural head of the &quot;verb phrase&quot; (the whole IP). People often confuse categorial and functional heads. The auxiliary is the head of the IP because we can &quot;observe&quot; this constituent in the sentence. However the functional head is the V because it's the (only) content word giving the IP its meaning. (The situation would be a little more complicated in the presence of a light verb.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, it's safe to say that taking the auxiliary to be a specifier would be (as you put it) &quot;a no go in any variant of X' theory&quot;, at least as far as English is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T01:27:12.197" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31552" CreationDate="2018-03-15T06:24:54.540" Score="10" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I answered a question on this site yesterday where in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/27432/1668&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt;, I alluded to a problem with cultural bias in early modern Western linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried my best search engine fu to come up with a good link to explain this in more detail, but I failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particular anecdote I mentioned in a comment would be nice to have covered; I recall reading that the French Academy set out in earnest to scientifically establish that French was an optimal language for science. I probably misremember the details, but this is a good illustration of the type of phenomenon which was fairly prevalent in the emerging field of linguistics in Europe, probably even before the proper rise of what we today call modern linguistics in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I would like a pointer to an accessible and popular treatment of this cultural bias in linguistics and its manifestations, suitable for giving someone who may be unaware of this tendency in our culture and perhaps in themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to quote a passage from my answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... early linguists had an embarrassing tendency to postulate superiority of their own language, in what now, with modern eyes, can only be characterized as an inexcusable naïvety about cultural bias and perhaps even xenophobia. Any claim that your language in particular is somehow remarkable should be examined with the utmost prejudice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be exemplified and explained in more detail? Specifically the application of ostensibly scientific ideas about language to reaffirm a chauvinistic agenda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or am I wrong, and biased?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T22:04:20.277" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:01:19.840" Title="Cultural bias in early modern Western linguistics" Tags="&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;&lt;prescriptivism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20826" CreationDate="2018-03-15T19:22:21.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me post a slightly tongue-in-cheek answer, then perhaps expand on it in useful directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your corpus is 2.3 million words, the &lt;em&gt;ideal&lt;/em&gt; gold standard is 2.3 million words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to try to frame that, what I really mean is that you are approaching this from the wrong direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not creating a corpus to satisfy your statistics teacher; you are creating a corpus for a particular purpose, and you want to maintain the highest quality you can with the available resources. &lt;em&gt;Ideally&lt;/em&gt; it should be perfect, but we all live in reality - and if you can't make something perfect, at least strive to make it useful. That means, document what you have; explain to your prospective users what they can realistically expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To approach this from a different direction, let's say you have a toy corpus - for example, written weather reports in English from a single weather station. What can we hope to do with this? Well, a linguist might look for variations in linguistic expression. In really formulaic (and these days, probably mostly automated) language, you will get bored after 5 or, if you are really patient and/or easily amused, maybe 20 reports. That's good. Now we don't need any more data because we have a reasonably representative - not to say exhaustive, even exhausting! - sample of the phenomenon we wanted to investigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that's not the only linguistic inquiry we could think of for this example (aberrations in punctuation? Diachronic evolution, if you have reports from different decades?) but let's stop here. The point should hopefully be clear - you have enough data when a lot of it is redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expand this to a real-world corpus and there will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be too little data for some of the hypotheses somebody will want to test - too few samples, of course, but also too few samples in some particular subcategory, and too little metadata (was this sample old or new? Produced by a native speaker? Produced by a member of some minority? From the Midwest? In a noisy environment? Under stressful conditions? Male or female? Young or old?) and there's only so much you can do to improve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two obvious conditions I want to point out for your specific question. You want to make sure there is as little garbage as possible in the full 2.3M, and you want to take as much as possible of it into the golden set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The procedure I'd like to propose is iterative. If you decide to try to start with 0.5% for the golden set by random sampling, it is somewhat likely that some part of those samples are unsuitable for various reasons. That's good! Now you know what problems to look for in the rest of the corpus. Then maybe try to push it to 1%. By and by you will also get a feel for where there are problems which you can't solve by just discarding bad data. That's not so good, but definitely something you want to mention in the accompanying documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We really cannot tell if 0.5% is reasonable.  If each sample is a single word then even 0.1% should be sufficient.  On the other hand, if samples are sentences (on the order of 23 words) or paragraphs (on the order of 230 words) an off-the-cuff estimate of a good number of samples to review thoroughly for inclusion in a gold standard set would be higher.  But again, this depends a lot on the types of samples, and the cost of processing and reviewing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without seeing your data or understanding your requirements, we can really only reason in very general terms.  But a good rule of thumb at least to get you started is to assume that you have a logarithmic distribution -- if not exactly a Zipf distribution then at least a few phenomena with a lot of hits and a long tail of different types of outliers.  And in the absence of any better data to guide you, remember the 80/20 rule -- 20% of the explanation will already cover 80% of the samples (so in your case, if you have a set of rules which capture 1/5 of the corpus, you can expect to put in roughly 4x this amount of rules to achieve reasonably full coverage).  This also extends to error estimation -- when you start seeing mostly the same error over and over again, you have covered roughly 20% of the total errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry if this is a bit rambling; I seem to have gotten a bit over-enthusiastic here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T08:18:33.723" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T08:18:33.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27403" CreationDate="2018-03-16T05:27:14.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your experience reflects... your experience: you are a quite proficient speaker of English, but your knowledge of other languages is sketchy. You can easily find the most succint wording in English, and if needed, you can add variety and subtlety. While in other languages you just know the most common words, and so it seems to you that they are less &quot;descriptive&quot;, as you name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. M. Bittlingmayer reports the many ways one can give an affirmative answer in German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;doch, and also sicher, absolut, definitiv, Stimmt., eben, klar,&#xA;  selbstverständlich, genau, freilich, mit Freude und sofort, Passt.,&#xA;  Das schon...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though my very limited knowledge of German - apparently similar to yours - only informed me of ja and jawohl. In my first language, I would say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sim, claro, como não, óbvio, evidente, naturalmente, de fato, e muito, com gosto, não diga, estou dizendo, é, é claro, com certeza, é fato, pode ser, só se for agora...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not to mention that Portuguese also allows me a different, context-related  affirmative by merely repeating the verb of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Posso ir? - Pode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sabe falar javanês? - Sei.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fala javanês? - Falo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eles já chegaram? - Chegaram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vamos ao cinema? - Vamos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that while English can be more concise than most other languages, it trades that for ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pretty little girls school&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I can't know, except contextually, if we are talking about a pretty little school for girls, a pretty school for little girls, or a school for pretty little girls. Wouldn't that make a language less, rather than more, descriptive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T12:16:41.887" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T12:16:41.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T11:41:08.833" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any stats, research papers, etc. surrounding trends for startup naming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems quote popular to, for example: remove vowels from words, start the company name with a lower-case letter, etc. and I am wondering if anyone has done analysis on said trends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am familiar with this informative article on the subject: &lt;a href=&quot;https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/10/startups-are-still-making-weird-name-choices/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/10/startups-are-still-making-weird-name-choices/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T18:22:52.853" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T18:22:52.853" Title="Patterns and trends for startup names" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25621" CreationDate="2018-03-16T19:38:59.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the general distinction between a language and a dialect and a language family; what makes it one rather than the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/810/how-are-languages-and-dialects-distinguished-from-one-another&quot;&gt;How are languages and dialects distinguished from one another?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no consistent, scientific distinction between two dialects of a single language, and two separate languages (with a common ancestor). It's most often a political distinction. Some highly mutually intelligible lects are considered different languages (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbian&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Croatian&lt;/a&gt;) whereas others with extremely low degrees of mutual intelligibility are considered the same language (e.g. the &lt;em&gt;Valais&lt;/em&gt; dialect of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walser_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walser German&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard German&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistic circles, the Romance dialect continuum native to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;historical Occitania&lt;/a&gt;, having evolved from Old Occitan, are all considered dialects of one language: Occitan. These are divided into various groupings of dialects, but they're all considered Occitan. Occitan and Catalan are often grouped together when discussing the romance languages, separate from the sandwiching Iberian and Gallo-Romance groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S7NoT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Languages&lt;/em&gt; are to &lt;em&gt;language families&lt;/em&gt; what &lt;em&gt;dialects&lt;/em&gt; are to &lt;em&gt;languages&lt;/em&gt; - groupings of genetically related lects, just at different degrees of magnification. Sometimes other intermediate subgroupings are used, like &lt;em&gt;macro-language&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sub-family&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sub-dialect&lt;/em&gt;, etc. These kinds of terms are akin to the use of &lt;em&gt;Species&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Genus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Family&lt;/em&gt; etc in biological &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taxonomic ranking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a political level, since Occitan is spoken in southern France, Italy's Occitan Valleys, Monaco, and Spain's Val d'Aran, the governments of these countries/regions are the relevant political entities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Catalonia&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aranese_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aranese&lt;/a&gt; (the subdialect of Gascon spoken in Val d'Aran) is an official language, and since September 2010, the Parliament of Catalonia has considered Aranese Occitan to be the officially preferred language for use in the Val d'Aran.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Occitan has no official status in &lt;strong&gt;France&lt;/strong&gt;, the country having a very &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unfortunate history&lt;/a&gt; in its treatment of minority languages...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French is the sole official language of &lt;strong&gt;Monaco&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Italy&lt;/strong&gt;, Occitan is officially recognised as &quot;historical language minorities&quot; by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.parlamento.it/parlam/leggi/99482l.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Law no. 482/1999&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Piedmont&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;promotes&quot;, without recognising, Occitan (as well as Franco-Provençal, French and Walser) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arianna.consiglioregionale.piemonte.it/base/coord/c2009011.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Legge regionale 7 aprile 2009, n. 11, Art. 1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T22:46:16.360" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T22:46:16.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7130" CreationDate="2018-03-16T21:01:10.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Caribbean style Spanish (with aspirated s sounding like an h) is actually directly related to Canarian Spanish.  In the canary islands the Spanish spoken is very similar.  It's so similar that Puerto Ricans and Canarians can be confused in certain areas (I imagine Andalusian as well ass this can sound similar in some areas).  I am sure this confusion also occurs between Canarians and other Caribbeans as well.  I recommend reading about Canarian Spanish (in addition to Caribbean Spanish as a whole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21509" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T21:01:10.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15368" CreationDate="2018-03-17T15:18:24.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could not find exactly what you were talking about. I was looking for the same thing. But this website has a list of the most frequent sounds across languages: &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21512" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T15:18:24.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15368" CreationDate="2018-03-18T15:16:46.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are mixing popularity with universal acceptability, but they are two different things. Pork is a very popular staple of the diet in many parts of the world, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable to everyone, as you are well aware (vegetarians, religious reasons, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are modern languages with very constrained syllabic structure, so to construct a language which is equally easy to pronounce for speakers of contemporary Japanese, Hawai'ian, Rotokas, Pirahã etc etc etc you would be restricted to roughly something like CV structure with maybe eight consonants and four vowels. This sort of very limited repertoire typically leads to very long words (as seen in many languages of the Pacific) and/or heavy homonymy (cf Chinese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But examining only modern languages completely misses language evolution; to the extent that we can recover, reconstruct, or reason about earlier language, it is not uncommon to find a different set of constraints which have changed over time. Chinese is a good example; modern Mandarin has a fairly constrained syllable structure, but earlier proto-Chinese apparently had a more complex one. Similarly, some modern Romance languages have acquired constraints which did not exist in Latin (word-initial &lt;em&gt;sp-&lt;/em&gt; is forced to &lt;em&gt;esp-&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;del&gt;Italian and&lt;/del&gt; Spanish, for example, I believe). Reconstructed proto-Germanic word forms have many features which are outright alien to modern German; etc etc etc. This brief exposition barely touches the surface of language evolution; let's just note that it's constant, inevitable, arbitrary, and universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact, for a work of fiction, no particular features of a constructed language would make it more credible or feasible to a linguistically informed reader. If anything, postulating that it has a direct connection to or influence over modern languages is the one thing that would make it hard for me personally to suspend my disbelief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exploring genuinely universal language features &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; interesting to linguists, because it can reveal things about our innate language mechanisms. However, to the extent that truly universal features have been identified across all known languages over time, these findings tend to be more on the level of &quot;all languages have vowels and consonants&quot;, and even though &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; languages share a particular contrast, it's often hard to say unequivocally even that back vs front vowel contrast or voiced vs voiceless consonants are a universal feature of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T07:42:57.980" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T07:42:57.980" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27449" CreationDate="2018-03-18T17:27:08.620" Score="2" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my basic lay understanding of non-polysynthetic linguistics (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19220/21520&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;), a word may be either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#1. A single root (or &quot;stem&quot; or &quot;base&quot;) morpheme; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;#2. One or more affixes combined with a root.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more specific term for a word of the #2 type? For example, the word &quot;enjoy&quot; would be an instance of that term, but the word &quot;joy&quot; would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/197941/terminology-for-a-word-containing-a-prefix-suffix-or-neither&quot;&gt;An existing english.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; question asks almost the same thing, but its answer is that #1 is a root and #2 is a root plus affix(es), which doesn't quite answer my question. I'm looking for a term that specifically means #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21520" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T20:27:03.707" Title="What's the term for a word which contains an affix?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27446" CreationDate="2018-03-18T19:37:54.107" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Affixation (def), &quot;the result of adding an affix to a root word&quot; (WordNet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T19:37:54.107" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27446" CreationDate="2018-03-18T20:33:02.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are appropriate adjectives, but not nouns: &quot;joy&quot; is monomorphemic, &quot;enjoy&quot; is polymorphemic (under a liberal interpretation of English morphology). Other words like derivation, inflection etc. refer to the morphological process, but not the product of a morphological process (or its lack, in the case of an underived / monomorphemic root). Also note that an answer from English SE is likely to only consider the kinds of morphology found in English, and in many languages, roots are not even words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T20:33:02.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27446" CreationDate="2018-03-18T20:43:32.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of terminology floating around that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the basics: There are &lt;em&gt;word forms&lt;/em&gt; occurring in real life. A word form belongs to a &lt;em&gt;lemma&lt;/em&gt; that is a canonical word form relating to some other forms (e.g., for the lemma &quot;have&quot; there are the word forms &quot;have&quot;, &quot;having&quot;, &quot;has&quot;, and &quot;had&quot;). Then, there is a &lt;em&gt;stem&lt;/em&gt; that is generated off a word form by cutting some affixes. All those terms relate to basic morphology (there is not a lot of it left in English, other languages have a much richer morphology). Note that one lemma can have several (more or less obviously) related stems, like Latin scribere, scribo, scripsi, scriptum exhibiting three stems (present, perfect, and supine stem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morphemes come into play when you consider semantics. Derivational morphology and composition are means of creating word forms (and even stems) containing more than one morpheme. A word form containing only one morpheme is called &lt;em&gt;monomorphemic&lt;/em&gt;. With two morphemes, it is &lt;em&gt;dimorphemic&lt;/em&gt; and so on. As an opposite of monomorphemic, the term &lt;em&gt;polymorphemic&lt;/em&gt; can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also put your focus on word formation, than you find that a word is &lt;em&gt;suffixed&lt;/em&gt; (only rarely &lt;em&gt;suffigated&lt;/em&gt;, has a suffix attached), &lt;em&gt;prefixed&lt;/em&gt; (with a prefix), &lt;em&gt;infixed&lt;/em&gt; (with an infix), or just &lt;em&gt;affixed&lt;/em&gt; (with an unspecified affix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T20:27:03.707" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T20:27:03.707" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27446" CreationDate="2018-03-18T20:49:39.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several common terms in use, e.g. monomorphemic or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Simplex&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;simplex&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; words, and polymorphemic or &lt;strong&gt;complex&lt;/strong&gt; words; cf. the screenshot below from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199641604&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Handbook of the Word&lt;/a&gt; (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199641604-e-002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the article&lt;/a&gt; written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://geertbooij.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geert Booij&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pBnMU.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pBnMU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I would analyze enjoy as a simplex word, at least synchronically in (Modern) English; see the screenshot above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T22:14:36.250" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T22:14:36.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20494" CreationDate="2018-03-19T16:00:40.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/word-lists/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/word-lists/&lt;/a&gt; The word lists for English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Each language has a longer word list for all words (unrecognized according to PoS categories) and shorter word lists for particular PoS categories, such as German nouns, German verbs, German adjectives, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21145" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T16:00:40.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2018-03-19T19:18:48.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The tenth chapter of Geoffrey Sampson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grsampson.net/BWSys.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (1985)&lt;/a&gt; discusses English orthography, and by and large reaches a conclusion which somewhat resonates with yours; that &lt;em&gt;logographic&lt;/em&gt; writing (such as Chinese) is efficient for the reader, somewhat at the expense of the writer, and that the quirks of English orthography push it in the direction of obtaining some benefits of a somewhat more logographic approach (so the different and sometimes decorative spellings of some homonym pairs in English accidentally but conveniently help the reader quickly distinguish between them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sampson quotes many sources, some linguistic (e.g. Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle 1968) but many others from &quot;the psychology of writing&quot;. I don't know if this is a proper subfield of psychology, or just Sampson's informal label for these studies. Notable references include Albrow 1972, P.T.Smith 1980, Wijk 1969, Frith 1979, 1980, and Bryant &amp;amp; Bradley 1980.To the extent that Sampson refers to (some of) these authors collectively, they are called &lt;em&gt;psycholinguists.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also not that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Psycholinguistics&lt;/a&gt; has a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics#Reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reading subsection&lt;/a&gt; though it mainly discusses the basic motorics around reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T10:48:37.043" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T10:48:37.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27180" CreationDate="2018-03-19T21:14:55.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at censorship of larger swear words in (British) English, we can see more clearly that the trend seems to be to remove all the internal letters/sounds, as opposed to exclusively the vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/formula-1/ferrari-star-kimi-raikkonen-describes-5912441&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferrari star Kimi Raikkonen describes pay cut talks as 'b******t' as contract nears expiration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/its-bs-boris-johnson-hits-out-at-david-cameron-over-impact-of-brexit-on-trade-and-jobs-a6988236.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'It's b******s': Boris Johnson hits out at David Cameron over impact of Brexit on trade and jobs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/helen-mirren-slams-jimmy-savile-5487264&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen Mirren slams Jimmy Savile as a ''f***ing b*****d'' who would think his abuse was justified&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a compromise between censoring the word completely, and maintaining 'readability' of what the word is (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/jul/22/mind-your-language-asterisks-swearwords&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for an example of complaint over the ambiguity of censoring which only leaves the initial letter intact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note the inconsistency when censoring, for example, &lt;em&gt;bloody&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/709726/Poldark-fans-uproar-Aidan-Turner-topless-episode-two&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'B****y disgrace' Poldark fans in uproar as Aidan Turner doesn't go topless in episode two&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/i-was-bl-y-annoyed-former-sheffield-wednesday-legend-nigel-pearson-reveals-how-he-voted-against-brexit-1-8851161&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'I was bl***y annoyed!' Former Sheffield Wednesday legend Nigel Pearson reveals how he voted against Brexit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.classicfm.com/music-news/videos/mitsuko-uchida-music-can-be-so-serious/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘People can be so bl**dy serious about music, but it should be pure pleasure’ – Mitsuko Uchida&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably because the trend of 'censor all internal letters' seems to coincide in most cases with leaving consonant (cluster) book ends, while &lt;em&gt;bloody&lt;/em&gt; ends in a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36938/correct-usage-of-replacing-cuss-words-with-symbols&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36938/correct-usage-of-replacing-cuss-words-with-symbols&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T21:14:55.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11093" CreationDate="2018-03-19T23:07:47.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concepts of &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; have to be judged relative to some standard. There are at least (at the &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; least) two standards by which to judge the correctness of a sentence like &quot;It ain't broke&quot; (likewise &quot;It isn't broke&quot;; &quot;It ain't broken&quot;; &quot;He done broke it&quot;; or &quot;Not be the broken of it is&quot;). One standard is a normative standard: there is an assumption (scientifically unsupported) that there is an identifiable language &quot;Proper English&quot;, that there is a way to verify whether a given sentence is in Proper English, and then if the sentence is in PE, it's &quot;good&quot;, otherwise it's &quot;bad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another standard is the descriptive standard: does the sentence accord with the rules of a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; dialect of English. My judgment it that &quot;It ain't broken&quot; conforms to the rules of my dialect but &quot;*It ain't broke&quot; doesn't. Also, &quot;Not be the broken of it is&quot; does not conform to the rules of my dialect. In the dialect of some individuals (ones that I know!), &quot;It ain't broke&quot; does follows the rules. So we would say that by the descriptive standard, a given sentence could be good (or bad), and it's an empirical matter that needs to be determined. I suspect that my last example follows the rules of very few, if any, dialects of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One substantial problem is determining whether a given sentence is or is not generated by the rules of the grammar in a particular dialect. We do now actually directly know what those rules are, so instead we interpolate: we develop theories of rule systems. A very common practice is to equate willingness of a speaker to accept a given sentence with &quot;grammaticality&quot;. There is over 50 years of literature on the extremely fraught topic of determining what a given rule system really does (generates, allows), since all we have access to is behavior of speakers. A related problem is the notion of &quot;dialect&quot;. Every person who speaks a language has learned implicit rules that enable him to speak the language, and not everybody who learns &quot;English&quot; learns the same set of rules. Obviously, there are differences between US and UK English, Indian and South African English, and so on. We also know about East Coast US, Southern US and Chicago English... not to mention Columbus OH English vs. Grove City OH English. Apart from regional dialects, there are ethnic dialects, occupational and class dialects, age dialects, and just random but systematic differences that we can't classify. A semi-famous example is the question of whether &quot;Tom's difficulty to understand makes him a bad teacher&quot;, which is completely grammatical for me (it means &quot;the fact that people can't understand Tom makes him a bad teacher&quot;), which other people – many of whom teach syntax – reject this kind of construction. When people say &quot;It's good in my dialect&quot;, they generally mean &quot;I accept that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now turning to Question 2, we have 2 sentences and 3 fragments. I am least optimistic that &quot;We keeps done the works&quot; is generated by anybody's grammar – that is, as long as we're only considering people who are native speakers of English. I would not be surprised to encounter a language learner uttering or accepting &quot;I am not buy it yet&quot;, but I would be surprised if this is generated by the grammar of any native speaker. I have a neighbor who says &quot;I does this&quot;, so that's just a flat-out &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sort of understand the idea underlying saying that ungrammatical utterances is &quot;using a set of words in a way which have never been used that way while communicating&quot;, but people invent new sentences all the time, especially when talking about new situations. The notion of &quot;rule of grammar&quot; that I've relied on here overcomes this, because it says that there are general and co-minglable properties of sentence structure that allow me to invent completely novel structures all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can judge particular sentences as &quot;good&quot; or &quot;bad&quot; in a particular dialect (because we have identified a standard – do the rules of that dialect generate the sentence?), there is no sensible standard for comparing the goodness or badness of a language – good for what purpose?? Punjabi may be better for attracting a business partner; or maybe you should use English because the potential partner doesn't know any Punjabi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T18:18:45.423" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T18:18:45.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-20T00:27:17.357" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen linguistics arguing in favour of using either ɪ/ʊ or j/w sets in glides offset. What are your arguments regarding the use of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21335" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T00:27:17.357" Title="Glides offset: ɪ/ʊ or j/w?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-03-27T06:45:34.083" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-20T09:25:17.850" Score="6" ViewCount="1656" Body="&lt;p&gt;To come to a computational and statistical analysis of some machine translated texts, a colleague of mine wants to quantify Long Distance Dependencies. The problem is, that we cannot seem to find sources that actually puts down a solid definition of what a LDD is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hpsg.stanford.edu/book1/slides/Ch14a.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;These HPSG slides from Stanford&lt;/a&gt; are useful, but rather general, and so are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/courses/syntactic-theory-09/slides/LDD.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these slides&lt;/a&gt; from Saarbrücken University. Of course there are a lot of papers on it as well, going back to Chomsky himself where he discusses discontinuous morphemes. However, from what I have read there doesn't seem to be any way to &lt;em&gt;quantify&lt;/em&gt; LDD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LDD is often linked to wh-questions, relative clauses, topicalization, and some adjectives that put the verb and what is being described in an awkward position respective to each other. That is fine. But is there a way to quantify it, or—in other words—is it possible to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compare two LDD and state which one is longer (simple token distance comparison, number of phrases in the gap, or something else?);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;define &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; (in quantitative terms) we are talking about LDD (e.g., token distance, number of phrases in gap ...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues especially feels strange because we are not entirely sure whether LDD is restricted to the structures mentioned above (wh, topic, relative clause and so on), or whether it is also the case in more intricate cases. For instance, is there a LDD in cases such as &lt;code&gt;the man that I saw yesterday after lunch went fishing&lt;/code&gt; (the man _ went fishing), or even something as simple as &lt;code&gt;a two-hundred-and-fifty-old, tall, fragile tree&lt;/code&gt; (a _ tree)? If these are LDDs as well, then it seems that every phrase with more than two base tokens is a LDD, doesn't it? So is there a lower limit when we start talking about LDD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are a lot of sub-questions, but we're mainly looking for a concrete definition of LDD that can be used in quantitative research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T10:46:16.663" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T19:59:42.377" Title="What constitutes a Long Distance Dependency, and how can it be quantified?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27446" CreationDate="2018-03-20T12:04:04.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Derived words' are also used, especially in the context of functional linguistics. In French, we don't use 'complex words' for the words su/pr/in-ffixed, rather we used 'les mots dérivés'. &#xA;You'll find different terminology associated with these, but the standard assumption is that 'affected' 'marked' or 'derived' are always the opposite of 'basic form' 'root form', etc.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T12:04:04.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27457" CreationDate="2018-03-20T13:26:12.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could count the nonprojective dependencies in a sentence. This is actually a very nice definition of long-distance (unbounded) dependencies. The degree of nonprojectivity also gives you a measure of how marked (“weird”) the construction is (aside from its length which would need to be normalised to be statistically meaningful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2451" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T13:26:12.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27457" CreationDate="2018-03-20T14:22:37.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long distance dependencies have to do with clauses. They occur when some element within a clause is &amp;quot;missing&amp;quot;. Depending on what kind of grammar you subscribe to, you might want to think of that missing element as a 'gap'. Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'sentence' above will seem odd if not ungrammatical to most English speakers because the verb &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; usually requires an Object. Such an Object is missing from the phrase above. We cannot use &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; with its normal meaning without a Direct Object in a straightforward clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: Do you like chocolate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: *Yes, I like. (ungrammatical)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are more complex constructions where we do see strings like &lt;em&gt;I like&lt;/em&gt; without any overtly expressed Direct Object:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the elephant I like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence above we can see that there is a 'gap' in the clause &lt;em&gt;I like&lt;/em&gt; where we would normally expect a Direct Object to be. We can model the sentence like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the elephant [I like ___ ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pertinent question at this point might be: How do we interpret this gap so that the clause makes sense? Well, our interpretation of the gap here is tied in with the 'antecedent' of this relative clause, &lt;em&gt;the elephant&lt;/em&gt;. We can liken the relationship between this gap and the antecedent to the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the elephant&lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;. I like it&lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the subscript (i)'s are there to show that our interpretation of the word &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is co-indexed with the word &lt;em&gt;elephant.&lt;/em&gt; They refer to the same thing. So now we can model our relative clause sentence like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the elephant &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; [ I like __&lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we can see from the above that our interpretation of the gap in the clause &amp;quot;I like _&amp;quot; is anaphorically &lt;em&gt;dependent&lt;/em&gt; upon our understanding of &lt;em&gt;the elephant&lt;/em&gt;. There are many such constructions in English (and of course other languages) where our interpretation of the identity of some missing element is anaphorically dependent upon some other word or phrase. In many cases this is because the missing element has 'moved' to the left of the body of the clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now I like that elephant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now that elephant&lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;, [ I like __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You like which elephant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which elephant &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; [ do you like __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in other instances one might feel that the feature is just a part of the construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; is easy [ to find __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the sentence above we might not feel that &lt;em&gt;Bob&lt;/em&gt; has moved to the beginning of the clause from another position, exactly. It is more as if a second &lt;em&gt;Bob&lt;/em&gt; has been deleted from the end of the smaller clause. Again, this would depend on what kind of grammar you subscribe to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it is the relationship between these gaps and the words or phrases that they depend on for their interpretation which we refer to as &lt;em&gt;long distance dependencies&lt;/em&gt;. Why do we call them &lt;em&gt;long distance&lt;/em&gt; dependencies? Well, for one thing, these gaps are non-adjacent to their antecedents. We could suppose that we could measure the distance between the antecedent phrase and the gap itself to see how &lt;em&gt;long distance&lt;/em&gt; this dependency was. So consider the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; did Bob say I punched __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;  did that awful nit-picking man with the bobbly hat and stripy shoes punch __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (5) there is a five word interval between the gap and the antecedent phrase. In (6) the interval is fourteen words. However, this kind of interval is of little interest to most linguists, and has little to do with the term &lt;em&gt;long distance dependency&lt;/em&gt;. In fact it is sentence (5) and not sentence (6) which we would say best illustrated a long distance dependency in its most important sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the other examples given so far, the antecedent phrase occurs directly to the left of the main body of the immediate containing the gap. So if we showed this in (6) we would get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who&lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;  [did that awful nit-picking man with the bobbly hat and stripy shoes punch __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt;]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see the word &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; occurring directly to the left of the nucleus (the main body) of the clause containing the gap. The long string &lt;em&gt;that awful nit-picking man with the bobbly hat and the stripy shoes&lt;/em&gt; is just the subject of the verb &lt;em&gt;punch&lt;/em&gt;. Because it is long it has moved the gap further away from its antecedent &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;. But nonetheless, the word &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; occurs here directly behind the very clause containing the gap. We can compare that to (5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; did Bob say [ I punched __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here we see that the clause &lt;em&gt;I punched __&lt;/em&gt; is embedded within a larger clause &lt;em&gt;Bob said [ I punched __ ]&lt;/em&gt;. So here the gap depends on a word not just to the left of the immediate clause it occurs in, but on a word to the left of a different larger clause that that smaller clause is embedded in. So the dependency relationship here is spanning two clauses. It is this property of the antecedent gap relationship existing across clause boundaries which leads us to call them &lt;em&gt;long distance&lt;/em&gt; dependencies. Some linguists call constructions such as the ones above &lt;em&gt;unbounded dependency&lt;/em&gt; constructions, because in theory there is no limit to the number of embedded clauses involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's the elephant Chris said Ben believes you like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's the elephant &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; [Chris said [Ben believes [ you like __ &lt;sub&gt;(i)&lt;/sub&gt; ]]].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, with many of these constructions there are practicalities which make multiple embeddings difficult to process, for which reason sentences like (7) are relatively rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we wanted to somehow measure how &lt;em&gt;long-distance&lt;/em&gt; the dependency between the gap and its antecedent was  in a particular sentence, we would most likely want to quantify this in terms of the number of embeddings involved—in other words the number of clause boundaries intervening between the gap and it's antecedent &lt;sup&gt;+&lt;/sup&gt;. The number of words is usually of less interest to us. If we did want to measure the intervening material though, we might want to measure it in terms of syllables, not letters, characters, words, or phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;+&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sup&gt;When measuring this it would be important to note that we'd only want to count clauses that the gap actually appeared in. A whole discrete clause occurring between the antecedent and the gap would not count for anything.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammar note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;With regard to the Original Poster's examples:&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1. a two-hundred-and-fifty-old, tall, fragile tree&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;We wouldn't regard this noun phrase as exhibiting any kind of LDD. One reason for this is that there is no clause involved. The second reason, however, is that there is no gap in the phrase. Every element of the noun phrase is fully expressed and in exactly the position we would normally expect it to be.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 2. The man that I saw yesterday after lunch went fishing.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This sentence on the other hand does use an LDD construction. However, there is no gap here between the word &lt;em&gt;lunch&lt;/em&gt; and the verb &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;. The word &lt;em&gt;lunch&lt;/em&gt; is just the last word in the noun phrase &lt;em&gt;the man that I saw yesterday after lunch&lt;/em&gt;. This noun phrase is occurring in the normal subject position in relation to the verb &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;. So there is no missing element between the two. However, within this subject noun phrase there is a relative clause &lt;em&gt;that I saw yesterday after lunch&lt;/em&gt;. This clause has a gap where we would expect the direct object to be. The gap is co-indexed with the antecedent &lt;em&gt;the man&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 3. The man(i) that [I saw __(i) yesterday after lunch] went fishing.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Again, how you wished to measure the 'distance' of the dependency relationship would depend on what exactly you were trying to show.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T19:59:42.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11093" CreationDate="2018-03-21T05:11:49.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you study linguistics, you learn about two approaches -- &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;descriptive.&lt;/em&gt;  Modern linguistics tend to prefer the descriptive approach, whereas early linguistics were often done in a (presumably often unconscious) prescriptive mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prescription is problematic because it comes with an agenda, so in some sense, it is less scientific.  &lt;em&gt;There is no objective, scientific basis for ranking one norm as better than another.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, a lot of what would eventually become science was done in pursuit of documenting, consolidating, and celebrating the status quo and the perceived virtues of the ruling class, the rich, and the culturally dominant. The concept of &quot;correct standard English&quot; has its roots in an earlier movement to define a particular register of English as normative, and all others as somehow incorrect, deficient, and inferior. (This was by no means an exclusively British idea; similar endeavors took place elsewhere, often as one of the many expressions of what we now see as the darker side of nationalism.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are situations where it makes sense for linguistics, or rather, linguists to define a particular convention as a norm.  Modern linguistic norms help improve understanding and communications by introducing standards for a language where none existed before, or the old standards had problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting example is the orthography for Quechua, where an older norm which was based on Spanish conventions is being displaced with one which is better adapted to the requirements of the language itself and removes a heavy bias for favoring a particular dialect.  It should be noted that there is a lot of resistance against this movement -- the (in some sense) linguistically sound agenda clashes with the conservative agenda, sometimes violently so.  Part of the reason this is problematic is that Spanish conventions and the cultural dominance of the Cuzco region are still assigned high status among the population, and so the reformed spelling is perceived as &quot;worse&quot; because it is at odds with their established cultural norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... At the same time, you will notice &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; bias in describing this as &quot;linguistically more sound&quot;.  This is obviously dubious; I am certainly not qualified to prescribe a particular orthography for a language I do not speak. But I can tell that the agenda for the new orthography points out some unfortunate features of the old convention which seem like obvious flaws; for example &lt;em&gt;que-&lt;/em&gt; is clearly a weird way to write &lt;em&gt;/ke/&lt;/em&gt; in a language where there are no traces back to an earlier Latin pronunciation with rounding. Whether this simplification, and the many others introduced by the reform, outweigh the drawbacks of making earlier texts hard to read for new generations who are trained in the new orthography, I cannot say; and the possible cultural stigma of dialectal spelling might cause the reform to fail for external reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, your question doesn't make sense &lt;em&gt;strictly linguistically&lt;/em&gt; but there is a lot of social science to be derived from the relative status of registers of English or Punjabi dialects.  That's not to say that the cultural and social factors which shape our language are uninteresting (indeed, that is the domain of sociolinguistics) but these phenomena tend to be analyzed from a descriptive, rather than presecriptive, point of view (and it's hard to see how prescription could make sense in that context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T12:52:05.973" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T12:52:05.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27457" CreationDate="2018-03-21T08:39:14.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;long distance dependency&quot; is not well chosen if what is meant is &quot;unbounded dependency&quot;, because &quot;unbounded&quot; and &quot;long distance&quot; don't mean the same. The distance between the parts of a construction can grow arbitrarily if there is an unbounded dependency, which means the distance doesn't matter. But you seem, actually, to be interested in constructions where distance does matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suggest that instead of unbounded dependency constructions, you look at constructions whose parts can be separated a little ways, but not too far, by strings of words which are not part of the construction.  Such cases are often described as discontinuous constituents. For instance, particle verbs in English don't like to have verb and particle separated too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T20:41:09.810" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T20:41:09.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="35778" CreationDate="2018-03-21T12:51:42.813" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed a phenomenon in (Central) Catalan speech that I had seen no mention of when studying the language. In words with a final &lt;em&gt;-nys&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-lls&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is assimilated and becomes palatal &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt; (or possibly &lt;code&gt;[tʃ]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt; /aɲ/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;anys&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt; /aɲʃ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;aquell&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/əˈkɛʎ/&lt;/code&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;aquells&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/əˈkɛʎʃ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how widespread is this phenomenon in Catalan?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in dialects with this feature, does it apply in all &lt;code&gt;/ɲ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; environments or is it limited to certain words (e.g. only those with word final &lt;em&gt;-nys/-lls&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;at what point did this phenomenon begin to emerge?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T16:35:30.770" Title="Catalan assimilation of 's' /s/ → [ʃ] after palatal consonants 'ny' /ɲ/ and 'll' /ʎ/" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;palatalization&gt;&lt;catalan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27466" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:06:48.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:06:48.887" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:06:48.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27467" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:06:48.887" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Catalan language, a Romance language spoken in North-East Spain, Andorra, and Alghero (Sardinia, Italy). " OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:25:02.660" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:25:02.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-21T14:53:16.300" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Professor will write something like this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[+consonantal, - sonorant, - continuant] →  / _____ $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't seem to figure out what it means. Does it mean at the end of a syllable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain what &quot;$&quot; means and when it is used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21540" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T15:08:29.313" Title="When Using &quot;$&quot;, what specifically does it mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27468" CreationDate="2018-03-21T15:08:29.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that such a disjunction (itself an indicator of a problem) appeared so many times in so many languages, with variations that directly mimicked the syllable structure of the languages in question, was one reason why the notion of syllable was reintroduced into generative phonology. It was first re-introduced somewhat informally, using shorthand notations like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X ˈ Y / __ $&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;where the dollar sign or some other symbol, such as a period, was meant to indicate a syllable boundary&lt;/strong&gt;, although syllables were not part of the formal apparatus of the theory). Such shorthand notations did not indicate for everyone at the time that the syllable was necessary. Hyman wrote in (1975:192) that “[w]hile the use of $ instead of C, V, and ## sometimes simplifies phonological statements [...], the fact that it can always be avoided is seen as evidence that it has no phonological status.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arts-sciences.und.edu/summer-institute-of-linguistics/faculty/marlett-steve/phonology-from-the-ground-up-student-edition.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonology from the ground up - The Basics&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen A. Marlett (P29)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T15:08:29.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-21T15:16:34.113" Score="1" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, someone once told me that Uighur is a Turkic langugage. But just wondering, for Persian and Uighur, the two, Are they similar in any way? or just helps a little bit? Could one understand another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15612" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T11:07:23.457" Title="If I learn Persian/Farsi, could I be able to understand Uighur language?" Tags="&lt;persian&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27470" CreationDate="2018-03-21T15:20:52.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your friend is right about Uighur being Turkic. But Persian is not Turkic; it's Indo-European, so lexical similarity between these languages is going to be VERY low and limited to a few loan-words. From what I can tell, the only thing that's similar is the alphabet, both having been derived from Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T15:23:23.573" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T15:23:23.573" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-21T18:28:55.867" Score="2" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;ate&quot; and &quot;eight&quot; are supposed to be homophones in English, yet in &lt;em&gt;(thick)&lt;/em&gt; Hungarian, Dutch and Swedish accents, they are not homophones. As a native Hungarian-speaker, I will attest to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;ate&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;late&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;mate&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;Kate&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;make&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;cake&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;lake&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;mate&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;late&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;mane&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;lane&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;cane&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I &lt;em&gt;(and other Hungarians)&lt;/em&gt; pronounce /eɪ/ as a long monothong [eː]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;eight&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;day&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;lay&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;may&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;ray&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;way&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;main&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, I &lt;em&gt;(and other Hungarians)&lt;/em&gt; pronounce /eɪ/ as a long diphtohng [eːi̯]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Dutch friend of mine attests that he does the same thing, saying that the English &quot;ay&quot; sound to him is sometimes equivalent to the Dutch &quot;ee&quot; /eː/, other-times to &quot;eei&quot; /eːj/ &lt;em&gt;(a diphthong I think doesn't even exist in Dutch)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of spelling pronunciation? Because I even hear the two words differently when listening to American English. Are my ears biased by the spelling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14374" LastEditorUserId="14374" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T12:29:28.913" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T12:29:28.913" Title="The ate-eight split?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3678" CreationDate="2018-03-21T18:37:18.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Insofar as the question is tagged for OT, I assume the question is specifically &quot;within OT&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1065&amp;amp;context=linguist_faculty_pubs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; by McCarthy give what is essentially the defining position on the concept in OT. He notes that the term derives from rule-theoretical work by Kiparsky in the early 70's. McCarthy adopts a phenomenological definition (he unfortunately has to approximate K's intent):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A phonological rule P of the form A→B/C_D is opaque if there are&#xA;  surface forms with any of the following characteristics: (a) Instances&#xA;  of A in the environment C__D, (b) Instances of B derived by P that&#xA;  occur in environments other than C__D, (c) Instances of B not derived&#xA;  by P that occur in the environment C__D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under clause (b) [beŋ] is opaque, because &lt;em&gt;ŋ&lt;/em&gt; is derived by P (place assimilation) but the context &quot;Ø_k&quot; is not present in the surface form (the left context is null, the triggering element on the right is not present on the surface). Which is basically what musicallinguist said, with definitions and references inserted. As it turns out, OT &quot;accepts&quot; the concept wholesale from rule theory, but rejects it as a theoretical concept which epiphenomenological (as it was in rule theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T18:37:18.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27472" CreationDate="2018-03-21T20:47:42.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are obscure British accents where words spelled with &lt;em&gt;eigh&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;eight&lt;/em&gt; can have a different vowel from words spelled with &quot;long a&quot; like &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; or words spelled with &lt;em&gt;ay/ai/ey/ei.&lt;/em&gt; This is not technically a split, but the lack of a merger that is present in nearly all other accents of English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, &lt;em&gt;eight&lt;/em&gt; had a fricative consonant [ç] before the [t], which caused the preceding vowel to diphthongize, while the vowel in &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; comes from the Middle English monophthong [aː], which ended up being raised and fronted to [eː] and then diphthongized to its typical value of something like [eɪ~ɛɪ~ej~ɛj] in most accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology#H-loss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that in some accents, the vowel of words like &lt;em&gt;eight&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;weight&lt;/em&gt; developed differently due to the presence of the fricative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/h/ spelled -gh- is realized as [x] even today in some traditional dialects of northern England and more famously Scots. Some accents of northern England lack the /x/, instead exhibiting special vowel developments in some such words; for example, &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt; as /niːt/ (neat) and in the dialectal words &lt;em&gt;owt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nowt&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;aught&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;naught,&lt;/em&gt; pronounced like &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nout,&lt;/em&gt; meaning 'anything' and 'nothing'). Also, in northern England, a distinction is often preserved between the vowel /ɛɪ/ in words like &lt;em&gt;weigh, weight&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eight,&lt;/em&gt; and the /eː/ of &lt;em&gt;wait&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; (the northern realization of the vowel resulting from the &lt;em&gt;pane-pain&lt;/em&gt; merger).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a third set of words that can have a distinct vowel sound: certain words, usually spelled with &lt;em&gt;ay/ai/ey/ei,&lt;/em&gt; that had some diphthong like [ai] or [æi] in Middle English. In most accents, this merged with the &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; vowel, but in some British accents, it remained distinct. Wikipedia says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs#Pane%E2%80%93pain_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pane–pain merger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;pane–pain&lt;/em&gt; merger is a merger of the long mid monophthong /eː/ and the diphthong /ei/ that occurs in most dialects of English. In the vast majority of Modern English accents the vowels have been merged; whether the outcome is monophthongal or diphthongal depends on the accent. But in a few regional accents, including some in East Anglia, South Wales, and even Newfoundland, the merger has not gone through (at least not completely), so that pairs like &lt;em&gt;pane/pain&lt;/em&gt; are distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A distinction, with the &lt;em&gt;pane&lt;/em&gt; words pronounced with [eː] and the &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt; words pronounced with [æɪ], survived in Norfolk English into the 20th century. Trudgill describes the disappearance of this distinction in Norfolk, saying that &quot;This disappearance was being effected by the gradual and variable transfer of lexical items from the set of /eː/ to the set of /æɪ/ as part of dedialectalisation process, the end-point of which will soon be (a few speakers even today maintain a vestigial and variable distinction) the complete merger of the two lexical sets under /æɪ/ — the completion of a slow process of lexical diffusion.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Walters (2001)[8] reports the survival of the distinction in the Welsh English spoken in the Rhondda Valley, with [eː] in the &lt;em&gt;pane&lt;/em&gt; words and [ɛi] in the &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt; words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In accents that preserve the distinction, the phoneme /ei/ is usually represented by the spellings ai, ay, ei and ey as in &lt;em&gt;day, play, rain, pain, maid, rein, they&lt;/em&gt; etc. and the phoneme /eː/ is usually represented by &lt;em&gt;aCe&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;pane, plane, lane, late&lt;/em&gt; etc. and sometimes by &lt;em&gt;eCe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;re, cafe, Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When words like &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pane&lt;/em&gt; are distinguished by non-native speakers, it is most likely an example of spelling pronunciation. I know of no American English accent that has this distinction. Different accents of American English may have more or less use of a more monophthongal value [e] vs. a more diphthongal value like [ei̯], but these are allophones, not distinct phonemes. (I left out length markers because in English, phonetic vowel length is highly dependent on context: a vowel before a tautosyllabic phonologically voiceless consonant as in &lt;em&gt;wait&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; will be relatively shorter than a word-final vowel as in &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; or a vowel before a phonologically voiced coda as in &lt;em&gt;wage, paid&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other people have mentioned, the word &lt;em&gt;ate&lt;/em&gt; is a special case: in a number of British English accents, the spelling has an irregular correspondence to the pronunciation, and the vowel may be short: /ɛt/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T21:00:10.860" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T21:00:10.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27472" CreationDate="2018-03-21T21:11:21.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Northern Irish dialects of English, there is a 3 way distinction here, but not as you split it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ɛ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;says&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(take, make, lake, rake )&lt;sup&gt;1 2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(bag, fag (feg), gag (geg), lag, nag, rag)&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;closed-syllabic &lt;code&gt;[eə ~ ɛə ~ ɪə ~ iə]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(ate), date, gate, hate, late, mate, rate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bake, cake, take, fake, make, lake, rake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;daze, haze, laze, maze, phase, raise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;brave, gave, knave, save, rave&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;open-syllabic &lt;code&gt;[eɪ]&lt;/code&gt; / &lt;code&gt;[ɛː]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bay(s), day(s), lay(s), ray(s), way(s), gay, hay, say&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tae&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; before &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; in Lagan Valley&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; before velars in broad, working-class Belfast dialect, now largely only before &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in open syllables a long monophthong near &lt;code&gt;[ɛː]&lt;/code&gt; in broad, working-class Belfast dialect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs#Pane%E2%80%93pain_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs#Pane–pain_merger&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology#H-loss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology#H-loss&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T23:03:50.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27484" CreationDate="2018-03-21T23:33:17.817" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;TIMIT is a well known, publicly accessible corpus that contains &lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;lexicalic&lt;/strong&gt; transcription of language (American English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sample sentence of TIMIT looks like:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year&lt;/em&gt; (lexicalic)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;h# sh ix hv eh dcl jh ih dcl d ah kcl k s ux q en gcl g r ix s ix w ao s epi w ao dx axr ao l y ih axr h#&lt;/em&gt; (phonetic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am not talking about actual acustic data (which is also part of TIMIT), but rather about IPA that has been translated to latin alphabet.&#xA;This type of representation is ideal for G2P or P2G models, which use one of the above as input and learn the mapping to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question:&#xA;I have searched online for a long time and I've spoken to some experts as well, but nobody was aware of a German corpus that contains a phonetic as well as a lexicalic transcription. Am I missing something? Any hint is highly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21548" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T13:22:28.337" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T15:05:13.923" Title="German corpus for grapheme-phoneme (G2P or P2G) mapping" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-22T05:41:45.727" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/771/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this xkcd&lt;/a&gt;, which got me wondering, were there any examples of number based shorthand like “ten-four” in the comic used in the time periods this comic considers “old-timey”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, what was the first known use of numbers to communicate a meaning entirely unrelated to their numerical values? (i.e. time would not count, as it’s numbers are directly related to the time being communicated) When did this practice start becoming common?&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/period_speech.png&quot; alt=&quot;xkcd #771: period speech&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21550" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T05:41:45.727" Title="When were numbers first used as code/shorthand for unrelated meanings?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27472" CreationDate="2018-03-22T09:21:11.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In England the “Received Pronunciation” (RP) of “ate” is [ɛt], so it is not the same as “eight” [eit]. But the difference that you make, and that you perceive, is clearly based on the orthography: where you see a diphthong you pronounce (and imagine to hear) a diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T09:21:11.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27477" CreationDate="2018-03-22T10:41:25.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/11022/1009-0000-0001-231F-6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clarin-d.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN-D centre&lt;/a&gt;, has lots of corpora containing the acustic signal, phonetic transcription (in SAMPA), and orthographic transcription (that's what you call lexicalic in your question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://clarin.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/BASRepository/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a list of the available resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T15:05:13.923" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T15:05:13.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27486" CreationDate="2018-03-22T13:23:25.040" Score="4" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it a common feature for a writing system to include a capitalized variant of itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of capitalization in itself? Is it ever truly necessary for comprehension?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15009" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T00:05:15.187" Title="Is capitalization a recurring feature across writing systems?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27485" CreationDate="2018-03-22T14:57:14.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Case is by no means universal; it is found in scripts descended from Greek (but not most other branches of the phylogenetical tree which is rooted in Egyptian hieroglyphs; e.g. Arabic and Hebrew, as well as the Indic family, do not have case) and a few other scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Bicameral_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Bicameral_script&lt;/a&gt; mentions Armenian, Coptic, and of course Cyrillic and Latin, and a few others (though apparently Cherokee should not be there!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mayan, cuneiform, and East Asian scripts do not have case, so it's really not something you would postulate as a typical or expected feature by any means. We can thus emphatically conclude that this feature is by no means necessary; though it is indeed thought to improve legibility in the systems which have this distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; ALL UPPERCASE IS ANNOYING BUT PERFECTLY READABLE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The convention to use capitals at the beginning of a sentence seems to have developed from the practice of writing a decorative initial letter at the beginning of a script in medieval European writing, and have then been loaned back to Greek, but I could not quickly find a source with better details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T16:10:46.800" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T16:10:46.800" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27485" CreationDate="2018-03-22T17:05:35.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A supplement to tripleee's answer: Although most Brahmi-descendant scripts in India and South-East Asia do not have separate upper-case letters, Javanese does have 7 letters that are used instead of ordinary letters in all positions (initial, medial, final) in certain proper names. They are called “aksara murda” or “huruf kapital”. You can find them here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksara_Murda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksara_Murda&lt;/a&gt; (in Indonesian only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T18:11:48.373" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T18:11:48.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11093" CreationDate="2018-03-23T00:56:20.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;dialect&quot; is unfortunate, because it means different things in speakers different, oh, ah, hum, &quot;dialects&quot;. In the good old times, it used to mean a kind of &quot;sub-language&quot; or &quot;quasi-language&quot; - what was described, with some wit, as &quot;a language without an army and a navy&quot;. In that sence, Venetian, or Hunsruekisch, are &quot;dialects&quot;. More recently, and more politically correctly, in our troubled times when it is deemed improper to talk about some facts of life, including navies and armies, &quot;dialect&quot; came to mean any variant of a given language. The former definition became badmouthed for being &quot;extra-linguistic&quot; - but unfortunately the word dialect is still applied to things such as Pommersch or Neapolitan, while now being used also for very different phenomena, such as AAVE, the Portuguese spoken in Rio de Janeiro, the several non-standard varieties of any given language, slang, professional jargons, etc, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it possible to say that &quot;Venetian is a dialect&quot;, and that, being a dialect, it is &quot;inferior to Standard Italian&quot;? Well, there would be a problem here; after all, &quot;Italian&quot; is just &quot;Tuscan dialect&quot; upgraded to national language through a political decision. If other factors had prevailed, perhaps the newly unified Kingdom of Italy would have chosen Sardinian, or Sicilian, or Piedmontese, as its national language, and now we would speak of Tuscan as a &quot;dialect&quot;. So, both languages, Venetian and Tuscan/Italian were &quot;born equal&quot;. But the fact is, the Italian State machinery is run in Italian, not in Venetian, Calabrian or Friulian. And this introduces a deep inequality between Italian in the one hand, and the other languages of Italy in the other, because the State, albeit being &quot;extra-linguistic&quot; in the sense it is meant when we say that the difference between language and dialect is &quot;extra-linguistic&quot;, is a very powerful glossopoietic entity, that &quot;produces language&quot; everyday - especially through its courts and academic institutions, but also, even if less decisively, through its army and navy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives the standard language a decisive, if unfair, advantage against dialects such as Venetian or Hunsruekisch: the State speaks Standard Italian or Standard German, and if you want, or need, to communicate with the State, you will have to do it through the appropriate national Standard. In this precise sense, Standard Italian is &quot;superior&quot; to any other language of Italy: it is the language that is taught in schools, that you need to know to read the national press, to listen to TV, to demand in court, to write your doctoral thesis... and to properly communicate with your sargeant, nevermind if you are a footsoldier or a captain or general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I suppose you are asking about &quot;dialects&quot; in the more modern meaning. Is Standard English &quot;superior&quot; to cockney, or AAVE? Or is Standard English &quot;correct&quot; English, while the other variants are &quot;wrong&quot; English, or perhaps different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say no. Those variants are part of a same language, English, and they serve different purposes. You don't write a dissertation in cockney, but you also don't address your buddies at the bar (or your family at home) in Standard English. You use different &quot;registers&quot; of the English language, some more formal, some more informal. The informal registers tend to vary more geography-wise than the standards, but that doesn't make the English spoken in Pennsylvania a different language than the English spoken in South New Wales (though, of course, if given a few centuries more, they very weel might evolve into exactly this, and become mutually incomprehensible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A traditional, prescriptive, point-of-view is that the standard is the only &quot;correct&quot; language. This is the reason people look at constructions like &quot;it ain't true&quot; and say they are &quot;wrong&quot;. They do not conform to standard grammar, or standar lexic, or both. And since the standard is the only variant that is studied in school, and consequently, the only whose rules are aprehended consciously, people tend to imagine that the standard &quot;conforms to the rules of language&quot;, while informal variants are like the Old Far West, a territory of lawlessness. But this is false; the speech of the prostitutes or the teamsters is not less regulated by rules than the English of the Queen - they are just different rules, quite probably not even less strict than those of Standard English, and those rules are not taught or even studied in the same depth as stardard rules are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are sentences that do not follow the rules of Standard English, but the rules of other variants of English. Those are &quot;wrong&quot; only if your intention was to speak or write Standard English. If used in an informal social context, they are probably correct. The opposite is also true: to speak among friends like you were in court or parliament will result in you being told to stop; they probably won't tell you you are speaking &quot;wrong&quot; English, but the effect is the same: to enforce the rules that are contextually correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also sentences that do not follow the rules of Standard English, nor the rules of any other variant. Those would be wrong English by any measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T00:56:20.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-23T01:37:02.027" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antconc&lt;/a&gt; be used to build a corpus for Mandarin, Chinese?  Specifically, could characters be recognized, or if one were to upload a pinyin text, could tones be displayed?  Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20026" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T07:45:10.373" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T07:45:10.373" Title="Mandarin Chinese and Antconc" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27081" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:54:21.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. The Value Added Tax is /fipia/ (foros prostiθemenis aksias). The Communist Party of Greece is /kukue/ (komunistiko koma elaðas). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, initialisms in Greek often use the &quot;informal&quot; alphabet used in early schooling for spelling out words, where vowel letters are pronounced as phonemes, and letters as the letter followed by /u/ or /i/, rather than the official letter names: /fipia/, not /fi pi alfa/, /kukue/ alongside /kapa kapa epsilon/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek does not pronounce initialisms for proper names (that I know of), although initials do show up; ΓΑΠ for George (son of) Andreas Papandreou.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:54:21.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26821" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:00:52.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest such proposal was Ioannis Vilaras' in 1814, proposing eta (not iota) for all /i/ sounds, and omicron for /o/: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Vilaras&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Vilaras&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most successful such proposal was in the Soviet Union in the 30s, when all Greek (including Demotic, Pontic, and Mariupolitan) was written phonetically in the Greek alphabet (with upsilon for /u/ and universal final sigma)—the latter two variants with new digraphs like ςς for /ʃ/. Those digraphs have been revived in the Pontic Wikipedia's orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The digraphs for voiced/(optionally) prenasalised stops are arguably awkward, and transcription of dialect can dodge them; I'm not aware of orthographic reform proposals taking issue with them, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:00:52.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25677" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:17:08.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much simpler reason. The teaching of Koine Greek is dependent on the local tradition for the teaching of Classical Greek: Classical Greek is more prestigious in language teaching, and is how most language teachers and linguists have been exposed to pre-Modern Greek. There was not a strong impetus for a separate tradition of pronouncing Koine in teaching to evolve: whatever the local convention was for pronouncing Classical Greek was simply carried over to Koine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's not that absurd an outcome. It is practical—the local convention for pronouncing Classical Greek is going to be well known and widely taught, and is (most of the time) stable. It also avoids drawing an unnecessary barrier between teaching of Classical Greek and teaching of Koine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, Koine likely did sound much closer to Modern Greek than Classical Greek; but Koine was a system in flux (which is the point), and there was possibly register variation in the pronunciation of phonemes, precisely because it was in flux. That's a complication that's utterly useless for language teaching: do we need people to be pronouncing phis differently in Luke and in Mark? Do we have any certainty when phi switched pronunciation for a particular social group to begin with? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stable system like Teaching Erasmian is simply more practical, however ahistorical it may be. Unless you're jumping into a timeship, meticulous historical accuracy of phonetics is not actually the primary consideration in teaching dead languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:17:08.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26446" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:31:52.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;παλαιότερα is not &quot;more ancient use&quot;, but &quot;older&quot;. And that's significant: it can refer to an older Demotic form which is now obsolete. In fact, it is far likelier to be Demotic than Katharevousa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learnèd forms (λόγιος) are indeed forms that (re-)entered Greek via Katharevousa, but have been accepted into Standard Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;αρχαιοπρεπής (archaic) is more literally &quot;ancient-looking&quot;; it hints (although it doesn't assert) that the word has not been accepted into Standard Modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the answer to &quot;when does Katharevousa end and when do so-called learned words begin&quot; is &quot;the 1920s&quot;, when the generation of Demoticists after Psichari (Tzartzanos and Triantafyllidis) stopped fighting Katharevousa, and accepted that hybrid Katharevousa forms would enter into Demotic—as long as (most of) the morphology was Demotic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinda. But it's contentious. You're right that the nominative -εύς is unacceptable in Standard Modern Greek, and that genitive of old -εύς, -ις nouns is still an area of free variation, with both -ης and -έως used; the decision on which to use is tied up in register, but also in lexicon—commonplace nouns like κατάσταση will usually not use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:31:52.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26455" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:36:35.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20683/why-agoraphobia-not-agorophobia/22943#22943&quot;&gt;Why &amp;quot;agoraphobia&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;agorophobia&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;myia is a first declension noun, so &lt;em&gt;originally&lt;/em&gt; in Greek the correct answer was &lt;em&gt;myiaphagia&lt;/em&gt;, just as &lt;em&gt;agoraphobia&lt;/em&gt; is actually the correct form, historically. But the -o- of the second declension extended to first declension nouns in compounds very very early—so early that -a- compounds are the archaic exception in Classical Greek, rather than the rule. The normally expected connective is indeed -o-, and that's what fdb's answer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26458/17064&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26458/17064&lt;/a&gt;) reports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:36:35.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21109" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:48:06.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is: Is the accent (tone) system of Ancient Greek which we are using now a result of linguistic reconstruction, or it is mainly based on historical references such as the descriptions of ancient grammarians or other sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the discussion in Vox Graeca (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521335558&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Vox-Graeca-Pronunciation-Classical-Greek/dp/0521335558&lt;/a&gt;; pirated versions are easy to find online). The basics can indeed be recovered from the Roman-era grammarians and the early usage of accents. (We know that grave was neutral pitch, because initially it was used on all unstressed syllables.) Some of the detail—notably the moraic account of pitch contours in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_accent&lt;/a&gt;—comes from linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:48:06.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3283" CreationDate="2018-03-23T14:37:17.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old question, but what the hay. As alluded by Tim Osborne, this is known as a &quot;catenative&quot; construction. The term &quot;catenative&quot; comes from &quot;chain&quot;, and this use refers to the formation of a chain of infinite verb forms in a single string of meaning: &lt;em&gt;He wanted to try to begin to understand.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cambridge's &lt;em&gt;A Student Introduction to English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; has a good chapter on it, that can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.br/books?id=qlxDqB4ldx4C&amp;amp;pg=PA215&amp;amp;lpg=PA215&amp;amp;dq=english+catenative+comp&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=WRDDg_gky4&amp;amp;sig=5JNPFV7_Fs54L6YPN_1GQAIOX4I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiV85DgsIDaAhWDPpAKHZPbAYgQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=english%20catenative%20comp&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;previewed on Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12544" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T14:37:17.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-23T20:45:16.287" Score="2" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know what is approach implemented in Google Speech API and Siri for Turkish voice to text speech recognition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in details of these two services, not the general or theoretical research. The reason is that this is an agglutinative, and I doubt that the same techniques that were successfully implemented for English would work here well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21565" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T15:15:47.050" Title="Turkish voice to text speech recognition references" Tags="&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-23T23:22:51.780" Score="-1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Thai ไป,-'Pị' as used in 'di pi' and the English 'good bye' sound the same and mean the same. Is there a known etymological link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21566" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:56:13.317" Title="Is 'good bye&quot; from an Asian origin?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27503" CreationDate="2018-03-24T03:56:13.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bpai&lt;/em&gt; comes from Proto-Tai &lt;em&gt;pai&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to go&amp;quot;. This is clear from its various cognates in other related languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bye&lt;/em&gt; comes from a shortening of &amp;quot;God be with you&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;God be wi' you&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;God b'i'y'&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;God by&amp;quot;, which then became &amp;quot;good bye&amp;quot; by analogy with &amp;quot;good morning&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;good night&amp;quot;, and so on. We have attestations of the different stages of the process, so it seems clear that this etymology is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T03:56:13.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27502" CreationDate="2018-03-24T15:15:47.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you actually try to speak a very long Turkish word, for example &lt;em&gt;Afyonkarahisarlılaştırabildiklerimizdenmişsinizcesine&lt;/em&gt;, is it recognised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today's speech recognition is end-to-end, that is, the input in training is just the audio and the transcript.  There is ideally nothing language-specific in that part.  It can be done, for example, with seq2seq architecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be augmented with unsupervised models - an acoustic model trained on raw audio with no transcript and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language model&lt;/a&gt; trained on raw text with no audio - and ideally those also do not have any language-specific components, but they may have language-specific parameter values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language with this structure that drives much of the research is Japanese.  Agglutination and generally morphology, including compound nouns that are written together in languages like English, can be addressed with &lt;em&gt;character-level&lt;/em&gt; models, as opposed to strictly word-level models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the language model parameters for the minimum and maximum character n-grams to learn can be different for different languages.  And because language models are used in many if not most tasks - and because agglutination is an issue in most English-specific approaches to most tasks - that is not specific to speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through &lt;a href=&quot;https://research.google.com/pubs/HasimSak.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://research.google.com/pubs/HasimSak.html&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://research.google.com/search.html?q=kaisuke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://research.google.com/search.html?q=kaisuke&lt;/a&gt; gives you a concrete idea of the experiments.  However there are engineering reasons not to maintain separate components or even approaches for each language when you are supporting more than a hundred languages, and many of the additions forced by agglutinative languages like Japanese, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish are also useful innovations if generalised to all other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it does not work perfectly yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T15:15:47.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27508" CreationDate="2018-03-24T18:53:36.027" Score="3" ViewCount="3268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying the secondary and double articulation, but got confused. Is double and primary articulation the same thing or what is the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21576" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T18:22:04.533" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T18:22:04.533" Title="What is the difference between double, secondary and primary articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27507" CreationDate="2018-03-24T20:27:39.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Secondary articulation refers to a &quot;lesser&quot; constriction, compared to the constriction of primary place of articulation. So in [tʷ, sʷ], the primary place of articulation is alveolar, and there is a secondary (vocalic-ish) labial articulation. Typically, secondary articulations are glide-like. &quot;Double articulation&quot; refers to segments which have two places of constriction which as &quot;equal&quot; in terms of constriction, for example [kp]. The phonological analysis of double articulations is controversial (the majority of evidence indicates that one of the places is indeed primary, but languages can differ in their analysis so that [kp] may behave like a &quot;very labialized velar&quot;, or a &quot;very velarized labial&quot;. Also note that these terms are quite variable in their use, so that [kʷ] may be called a &quot;double articulation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T20:27:39.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27571" CreationDate="2018-03-25T12:30:04.270" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember this term mentioned in the context of an argument about Spanish and Portuguese: one party claimed that it is equally hard / easy for either one to understand another language, while another party insisted that Portuguese speakers are much more likely to understand Spanish speakers without training to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of which party was right, what is the term that describes this ability to understand a related language without studying it (alternatively, is it a property of a language, if it can be understood by speakers of a different, but related language)?  I'm sure there was a term for it, but cannot remember it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6738" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T02:31:41.610" Title="Ability to understand another language without studying it" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T16:45:21.457" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;eSpeak&quot;&gt;eSpeak&lt;/a&gt; is capable of transforming text to IPA, as also mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/325/automated-french-italian-german-to-ipa-transcription?utm_medium=organic&amp;amp;utm_source=google_rich_qa&amp;amp;utm_campaign=google_rich_qa&quot; title=&quot;question&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use the same feature in its Windows version. Is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried a lot, but failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for helping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T00:07:02.623" Title="eSpeak - Use transformation to IPA in Windows" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T16:50:18.803" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fictional example:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;zelun&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;zel-&lt;/em&gt; (verb stem: &quot;to make leather&quot;) + &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; (personal suffix, 3rd person sg.) + &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (temporal suffix, present))&#xA;vs. &lt;em&gt;zelud&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; (3rd sg.) + &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; (preterite))&#xA;&lt;em&gt;zelun&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;He/She/It is making leather&quot;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;zelud&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;He/She/It made leather&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T23:51:23.140" Title="Is there a language in which personal suffix precedes the temporal suffix in conjugation?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27513" CreationDate="2018-03-25T17:05:44.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Note: the question has been clarified, making this answer no longer correct. This answer is about &lt;em&gt;affixes&lt;/em&gt;, while the question is about &lt;em&gt;suffixes&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Bantu languages, including Swahili and Lingála. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ni-na-soma&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1SG-PRESENT-READ&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I am reading&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T23:51:23.140" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T23:51:23.140" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27518" CreationDate="2018-03-25T22:24:02.287" Score="2" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia states that the greek prefixes for zero are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;meden-&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ouden-&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any examples in a modern language? (preferably spanish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21588" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T04:46:00.363" Title="Greek prefix for zero - any examples?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;prefixes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27512" CreationDate="2018-03-26T00:07:02.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly what you failed to do. Assuming that you have the program installed and located the command-line exe, you opened a command window and ran the program as e.g. espeak --phonout=&quot;test.txt&quot; --ipa &quot;this is my text&quot;, you should get the IPA string &quot; ðɪs ɪz maɪ tˈɛkst&quot; in test.txt. If you run the program in the Program Files (x86) directory where espeak is installed and write to that diretory, you have to run under an admin command window, in order to also write to the directory where you're running the program (I forgot this and wasted some time remembering this). Maybe clarify what worked and what didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T00:07:02.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27516" CreationDate="2018-03-26T04:46:00.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's not a lot. The obvious place to start is Modern Greek :-) , and even there, there's just words corresponding to Latin nihil- words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;μηδενιστής &quot;nihilist&quot; (obviously a recent calque)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;μηδενίζω &quot;to give a zero grade; to dismiss as worthless; to clock a counter&quot; (also looks to be recent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ουδενίζω, oυδενόω &quot;to annihilate&quot; (shows up in Patristic Greek)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek does have οὐδενία &quot;worthlessness&quot; (in Plato) and οὐδενόσωρος &quot;nobody's concern = worthless&quot; (in Homer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T04:46:00.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T08:40:06.277" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my reading, Active–Stative languages typically feature the core arguments of Agent (AGN) and Patient (PAT). While the precise rules differ by language, it seems to be that for intransitive verbs, the sole argument will take one of these forms based on a quality such as volition, e.g., &quot;I jumped&quot; would mark the subject as A as in &quot;1sg-AGN jump-PST&quot; as jumping is intentional, while &quot;I fell&quot; would mark the subject as P as in &quot;1st-PAT fall-PST&quot; as falling is not intentional. For transitive verbs, the argument that shows more agency would take A and the other one P, e.g. &quot;I ate the cake&quot; might be &quot;1st-AGN cake-PAT eat-PST&quot;. An adjectival predicate might be expressed as a stative verb, e.g. &quot;I'm cold&quot; as &quot;1st-PAT cold-PRS&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how do such languages express nominal predicates as in &quot;I am a person&quot;? My being a person requires no volition, so shouldn't take A, but that would leave two PAT arguments, which as far as I understand would seem to be ungrammatical. Do such languages use techniques such as copula affixation (essentially inflecting nouns like verbs) or other syntactic structures to express these kinds of predicates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any examples from how Active–Stative languages handle these kinds of expressions would be really helpful. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19615" LastEditorUserId="19615" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T08:46:01.830" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T08:46:01.830" Title="How are nominal predicates expressed in active-stative languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T11:46:54.533" Score="3" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you please clarify whether the phonemic symbols /ɪ/ and /i/ can be used interchangeably to represent the sound at the end of such words as coffee, taxi, happy, easy, ready? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21589" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T10:52:29.107" Title="Can two phonemic symbols represent the same sound?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27525" CreationDate="2018-03-26T12:11:24.110" Score="1" ViewCount="817" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good morning, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;r&quot; is the word &quot;Universe&quot; syllabic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned how to identify the syllabic letters, but still find it hard to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21584" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T14:11:07.050" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T20:42:04.027" Title="Is the &quot;r&quot; in &quot;universe&quot; syllabic?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27520" CreationDate="2018-03-26T12:38:52.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-front_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on ɪ&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes, especially in broad transcription, this vowel is transcribed with a simpler symbol ⟨i⟩, which technically represents the close front unrounded vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is really, &quot;how specific do you want to be&quot;.  In a language where there is no contrast between these two sounds, you would typically only use /i/ but in some contexts, you might want to consider the difference as marked, and thus highlight the contrast, even though the language doesn't generally see the two sounds as phonologically distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coffee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; lists British pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;coffee&lt;/em&gt; as /ˈkɔː.fɪ/ as an alternative with the caveats &lt;em&gt;(conservative RP, dated)&lt;/em&gt; and prefers a final /i/ for both British and American English.  To my untreaned eye and ear, an /ɪ/ pronunciation would vaguely suggest an Australian accent, not a completely free (i.e. unmarked) variation in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T12:38:52.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27520" CreationDate="2018-03-26T15:06:15.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some, mostly older, speakers of Southern Standard British English (SSBE or RP) who consistently use [ɪ] at the ends of the words &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; and so forth. However, a majority of younger speakers use something closer to [ i̞ ]. And other speakers use a vowel where the difference between the two is neutralised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In older transcriptions of SSBE, /ɪ/ was consistently used to transcribe the vowel at the end of the word &lt;em&gt;happy&lt;/em&gt; in phonemic transcriptions, and this reflected the two facts that a) the sound most speakers used at that time was [ɪ] and b) they considered this vowel to be the same phoneme that they used in the word KIT. However, as SSBE English evolved and the pronunciation changed in the manner described in the paragraph above, people started to use the symbol /i/ in broad, phonemic transcriptions to represent this vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This instance of the use of /i/ in SSBE broad transcriptions was an innovation used because for some speakers the vowel is the same phoneme as the KIT vowel and for others it is the same phoneme as the FLEECE vowel. Notice that in traditional transcriptions of SSBE, the FLEECE vowel is represented by the symbol /i:/, which uses two dots after the i. The /i/ symbol therefore represents a vowel which may be /ɪ/ for some speakers and /i:/ for others, and indistinguishable between the two for others still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some SSBE dictionaries and other resources still use /ɪ/ for HAPPY vowels, but most now use /i/. So, in the sense that you may decide to fall in with one group or the other by using either /ɪ/ or /i/, you can make that choice. However, of course once you have made that choice you need to stick with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As John Wells remarked in &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/happy-again.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of his blogs about /i/&lt;/a&gt; - 'it seemed like a good idea at the time!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T10:52:29.107" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T10:52:29.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T17:46:48.793" Score="4" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences in (1) contain the same words, but differ in word order. Nevertheless, the sentences have very similar, if not identical, meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1a) I am home today.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(1b) Today, I am home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the sentences differ in &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; form, I understand that syntacticians usually say that there is a deeper level of representation ('deep structure') at which both sentences have the same syntactic structure? For instance, would people invoke some type of (optional) movement and hold that ‘today’ was moved in either (1a) or (1b), so that pre-movement, they have the same structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would this mean cross-linguistically? For instance, there’s no German sentence with the same surface structure as (1a) or (1b). Sentence (2c) and (2d) are grammatical in German, but their English counterparts are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2a) *Ich bin daheim heute.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;..........I...am...home...today&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2b) *Heute ich bin daheim.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.........Today...I...am...home&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2c) Heute bin ich daheim.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.......Today..am..I....home&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2d) Ich bin heute daheim.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.......I.....am..today..home&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although no common surface structure exists, would people still want to say that there is a level of representation at which the German and English sentences have the same structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise this a rather broad question, but perhaps people could point me in the right direction for further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21085" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T22:39:03.477" Title="Linking surface and deep structure" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27521" CreationDate="2018-03-26T18:30:49.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Universe&amp;quot; certainly might be pronounced with a syllabic r. Whether it actually is depends on your accent. Many American English speakers can have &amp;quot;syllabic r&amp;quot; in any position in a word, unlike other syllabic consonants, which must occur in unstressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because syllabic r in American English behaves similarly in terms of phonology to a vowel + consonant sequence or just a vowel, it may be transcribed as something like ər, ɜr, əɹ, ɜɹ, or ɚ, ɝ. (A transcription like er would not be considered correct!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a transcription like [ɹ̩] is not incorrect. See the following handout from the website of &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Ekrussll/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kevin Russell&lt;/a&gt; at the University of Manitoba: &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Ekrussll/phonetics/transcription/english-symbols/syllabic-r.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ɹ̩] -- Syllabic [ɹ]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a major split between English dialects where the pronunciation of the word &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; contains an [ɹ] sound (e.g., western Canada, central and western U.S., northern England) and those where it does not (e.g., southern England, Australian, parts of the north-east and southern U.S.). In dialects which do not use an r sound in &lt;em&gt;bird,&lt;/em&gt; the vowel between the [b] and the [d] is traditionally transcribed as [ə] or [ɜ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialects which do use an [ɹ] sound in &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; tend to use nothing but. In normal western Canadian or American speech, the period of time between the [b] and the [d] will be entirely occupied by an [ɹ] sound, and there will be no other vowel in the word. The [ɹ] is acting as the core of the syllable in [bɹd], a privilege which is usually reserved for vowels. A vertical line diacritic is used to mark those occasions where [ɹ] has a special vowel-like role in a syllable. The usual transcription &lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; is therefore [bɹ̩d]. (Sometimes you'll run across the symbols [ə˞] or [ɜ˞] or even the sequence [əɹ] used instead of [ɹ̩].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonological analysis of syllabic consonants is somewhat complicated, but I think a fairly common analysis is to treat them all as sequences of schwa + a consonant phoneme. So you may be more likely to encounter something like /junɪvərs/ or /junəvərs/&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in the context of phonemic transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Actually, a number of American dictionaries seem to feel like there is something special about the last syllable of &lt;em&gt;universe&lt;/em&gt; relative to the last syllable of a word like &lt;em&gt;Oliver’s,&lt;/em&gt; in that they mark the last syllable of &lt;em&gt;universe&lt;/em&gt; with a stress marker, or transcribe it with the symbol ɜ. This can sometimes indicate a lack of vowel reduction; however, I myself cannot hear any difference in quality between the supposedly unreduced or minor-stressed /ɜr/ or /ˌər/ and reduced, fully unstressed /ər/. However, I guess the absence of “flapping”/“tapping” of the /t/ in the final syllable of words like &lt;em&gt;dramaturge, thaumaturge, taciturn, Astroturf&lt;/em&gt; could be considered to imply that either the presence of minor stress or the presence of vowel reduction is phonologically contrastive for [ɹ̩] in American English. Thus, if we mark stress, and use the symbol ˌ to indicate minor (i.e. tertiary) stress as well as secondary (major) stress, it may be correct to transcribe the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;universe&lt;/em&gt; in American English as  /ˈjunɪˌvərs/ or /ˈjunəˌvərs/&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many American English speakers have the &amp;quot;weak vowel merger&amp;quot; and so do not feel like they have a phonemic contrast between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in fully unstressed syllables. The neutralization of /ɪ/ and /ə/ is typically transcribed as /ə/, although word-final /ə/ in American English (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;comma&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Rosa&lt;/em&gt;) tends to be realized with a more open quality (often near the realization of the STRUT vowel, which may be somewhere around [ɜ] or [ɐ]) than the neutralization of /ɪ/ and /ə/ that occurs in non-word-final positions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T20:42:04.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T18:42:59.847" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm noticing that some English verbs use the -ed suffix to indicate the current state. Using this example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/base&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/base&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the verb sense, ‘the film is &lt;strong&gt;based&lt;/strong&gt; on a novel by Pat Conroy’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I (incorrectly?) thought current state verbs were presented in base form or progressive form. Are there a set of verbs that use -ed to indicate current state? Is there a name for this concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T01:32:19.500" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T10:59:43.063" Title="Suffix -ed indicating current state" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27535" CreationDate="2018-03-26T19:37:30.770" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language where, given that number and case are affixed seperately not fusionally, a noun can have the structure of , e.g. &lt;em&gt;ithawen&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;itha-w-en&lt;/em&gt; [woman]+GEN+PL (&quot;of the women, the women's&quot;)? I can only think of (1) languages that have indiscernible affixes combining case and number (fusional affixes in respect of number and case, e.g. Ancient Greek -&lt;em&gt;ōn&lt;/em&gt; or Latin &lt;em&gt;-orum&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ibus&lt;/em&gt;, that ‒ to my knowledge ‒ cannot (or no longer) be further reduced to a &quot;sub-affix&quot; component representing either number or case) or (2) languages where case is more proximal to the stem than number (e.g. &lt;em&gt;women's&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;Examples where case might precede number (as a suffix), the combination  may be treated as a new lexeme (is rather a derived than inflected form of the old lexeme), e.g. &lt;em&gt;the Smithses&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;the Smith's person + plural affix&quot; ([[Smith]s]-es).&#xA;I beg to be corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T08:28:22.703" Title="Is there a language where in declension number is affixed peripherally to case?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27526" CreationDate="2018-03-26T20:24:29.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Based&quot; here is either the past/passive participle of the verb &lt;em&gt;base&lt;/em&gt; used in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passive&lt;/a&gt; construction &quot;BE + past participle&quot;, or an adjective derived from the past participle (a &lt;em&gt;departicipial adjective&lt;/em&gt;—also known as a &quot;participial adjective&quot;).  &quot;The film is based on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot; means approximately the  same thing as &quot;[The creators of the film] based the film on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running through a few tests for establishing adjective-hood, I couldn't find a totally clear indication of whether &quot;based&quot; is an adjective or a participle in this context&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in either case, it's not really a case of using &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; to mark a verb form indicating the current state. The thing that indicates present state in this sentence is mainly the auxiliary &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tests for adjective-hood in English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. I go over some of these tests in my answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/366940/77227&quot;&gt;question on ELU&lt;/a&gt; (which is partly based on BillJ's answer on the same page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;very&quot; test&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my judgement, &quot;based&quot; in this sentence doesn't pass the &quot;very&quot; test.&#xA;The &quot;very&quot; test for distinguishing departicipial adjectives from participles is based on the commonly accepted fact that a verb cannot be modified by the word &quot;very&quot; (in a comment below, Greg Lee gave the following example showing how we can see that &quot;very&quot; obviously doesn't work with &quot;based&quot; when it is used as a finite verb: &quot;*The author very based the film on a novel&quot;). Therefore, if the word &quot;based&quot; in your sentence can be modified by the word &quot;very&quot;, we can be sure that it is not a verb (and so we would assume that it is a departicipial adjective). But in fact, we can't modify &quot;based&quot; with &quot;very&quot; in your sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&quot;the film is very based on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all adjectives can be modified by &quot;very&quot;, so failing the &quot;very&quot; test doesn't prove that something isn't an adjective. Thus, the &quot;very&quot; test is inconclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;un-&quot; test&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Based&quot; in this context also doesn't seem to past the &quot;un-&quot; test, which establishes that something is an adjective (keeping in mind that the adjective prefix &quot;un-&quot;  functions as a negative prefix, unlike the &quot;reversative&quot; verb prefix &quot;un-&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&quot;the film is unbased on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the &quot;very&quot; test, this only fails to show that &quot;based&quot; is an adjective here: it doesn't show that &quot;based&quot; is not an adjective, because not all adjectives can be prefixed with &lt;em&gt;un-.&lt;/em&gt; (In fact, based on the results of a Google search, the word &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; followed by a prepositional phrase starting in &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; can be prefixed with &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; in some other sentences, so it seems that &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective sometimes; but I'm not sure what the criteria are for when it is and isn't possible to use &quot;unbased on...&quot;--it may be that only some speakers use this construction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;seems&quot; test&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Based&quot; in &quot;based on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot; might be able to pass the &quot;seem&quot; test, which is apparently considered to establish that something is not a verb/participle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?&quot;the film seems based on a novel by Pat Conroy&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the use of the in my view semantically similar &quot;seems based on a true story&quot; in the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes it really seems based on a true story...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@matt_pais/masterminds-should-go-straight-to-the-brew-and-view-2f05e8379070&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘Masterminds’ should go straight to the Brew and View&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Matt Pais, Sep 29, 2016, medium.com)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One test out of three doesn't seem quite convincing to me; also, even if it is the case that &quot;based&quot; is an adjective in some sentences, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is an adjective in the original sentence that you brought up. That said, it's true that the sentence has a stative rather than a dynamic meaning, and &quot;stative&quot; passives often are analyzed as containing departicipial adjectives rather than participles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One interesting thing about &lt;em&gt;based on...&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;unbased on...&lt;/em&gt;) as an adjective is that the prepositional phrase starting with &quot;on&quot; seems to be an obligatory complement. According to Rodney Huddleston's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=irXAKZSHc38C&amp;amp;pg=PA305&amp;amp;lpg=PA305&amp;amp;dq=english%20adjective%20with%20obligatory%20complement&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=7xHbhimNmB&amp;amp;sig=JaaQwrd_ZrfwD4jBhqHSJmO6xzM&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi2jfmQ7pjaAhVKyoMKHeKKAaw4ChDoAQhTMAY#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=english%20adjective%20with%20obligatory%20complement&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to the Grammar of English&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; &quot;very few adjectives take obligatory complements&quot; (p. 305)--Huddleston gives the example &lt;em&gt;fond&lt;/em&gt;: we can say &quot;Sally is fond of sweets&quot; but not *&quot;Sally is fond&quot;. Other examples are &lt;em&gt;devoid of&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lo(a)th to.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T10:59:43.063" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T10:59:43.063" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27527" CreationDate="2018-03-26T21:32:10.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you allow another order of suffixes like Stem+PluralSfx+CaseSfx instead of your example of Stem+CaseSfx+PluralSfx, then Armenian language has such declension, except for few very old words like շուն[shun] (dog), տուն[tun] (home), etc., which are declined with fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here  PluralSfx is suffix for plurals, and CaseSfx is suffix for one of cases, including &quot;zero&quot; suffix for nominal case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;սեղան [seg^ ՛an] (table) -i type declension&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;սեղաններ [seg^ann՛er] (tables=pl.nominative-case)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;սեղանների [seg^anner՛i] (of tables, plural, genitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;սեղաններով [seg^anner՛ov] (with tables. plural, instrumental case) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally 6 lexical cases in Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21592" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T21:32:10.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27526" CreationDate="2018-03-26T22:57:28.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The state is an acquired state meaning that it does not necessarily follow from the semantics of the word &quot;film&quot;: &lt;em&gt;Film&lt;/em&gt;, in its &quot;naked&quot; sense, does not have to be &quot;based&quot; to mean &lt;em&gt;film&lt;/em&gt;. In adding the participle &quot;based&quot;, the speaker refers to (albeit with inferior focus on) the external force that caused the change of state of the film (i. e. the force that made &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; film &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; film). The film, as an enduring, &quot;reverberating&quot; manifestation (canonically irreversible manifestation that is) of that input of effort, is a result, usually explicated using a perfect form to become understood as a result of that input. Passive and perfect often go hand in hand, since the latter is learned by thinking through the former: &quot;I cut the apple.&quot; (active) &gt; &quot;(Now see,) The apple is cut.&quot; (result, perfect) &gt; &quot;The apple is &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;becomes&lt;/em&gt; cut.&quot; (passive)&#xA;Without supposing a perfect (=(canonically irreversible) result) state (such as the apple by itself staying irreversibly cut) one would never grasp the gradient of force, one could never distinguish between subject and object.&#xA;In short: present-imperfective-active; past-perfective-passive. Present passive is a complex of those more primitive aspect/tenses. The passive follows from the perfect.&#xA;The ambiguity comes from &quot;is based&quot; being both interpretable as perfect (i. e. result &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; conclusion of action) or as passive (i. e. result co-occuring with action (of &lt;em&gt;being affected&lt;/em&gt;)), as sumelic has already pointed out in the first paragraph of her/his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. Uni Konstanz' Universals #507, #895, #958 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/browse.php?number=1&amp;amp;PHPSESSID=udvvebsagjco5gls4m5sm8aj451ca7nc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/browse.php?number=1&amp;amp;PHPSESSID=udvvebsagjco5gls4m5sm8aj451ca7nc&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastEditorUserId="21583" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T10:08:38.810" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T10:08:38.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T03:53:09.787" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there's a name  for a phenomenon that I think of in the following way: Some words are far more deeply embedded within a language than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm contrasting the words &quot;do&quot; and &quot;become&quot; in English with their respective German counterparts &quot;tun&quot; and &quot;werden&quot;. &quot;Do&quot; is more deeply embedded in English than &quot;become&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is used in such sentence as &quot;What will you do?&quot; or &quot;That's what I did.&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;but it is also used as an auxiliary verb in negative and interrogative sentences, as in &quot;He does not sing&quot; rather than &quot;He sings not&quot; or &quot;Did he sing?&quot; rather than &quot;Sang he?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is also used as a pro-verb, standing in for other verbs, as in &quot;Did he sing?&quot; &quot;He did.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, in German, &quot;werden&quot; is more deeply embedded in the language than &quot;tun&quot;. &quot;Tun&quot; is used in German counterparts of &quot;What will you do?&quot; or &quot;That's what I did.&quot; but it does not have the other uses listed above. &quot;Werden&quot; not only means &quot;become&quot; but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is also used as the auxiliary verb for forming the future tense, corresponding to &quot;shall&quot; or &quot;will&quot; in English (German, like English, lacks a full-fledged future tense)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and in addition is used in forming the passive voice, just as &quot;be&quot; serves that purpose in English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there some name for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2602" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T01:51:48.343" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T01:51:48.343" Title="Is there a name for the phenomenon of some words being more deeply embedded in a language than others?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27531" CreationDate="2018-03-27T04:16:33.257" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could say that English &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; is more &quot;grammaticalized&quot; than German &lt;em&gt;tun,&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;werden&lt;/em&gt; is more grammaticalized than English &lt;em&gt;become.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section II of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ijlll.org/vol1/24-X00055.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Grammaticalization of Aspectual Auxiliary Verbs in Korean&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Hae-Yun Lee reviews the concept of grammaticalization and gives some examples of what is meant by the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T04:16:33.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T06:23:37.227" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Good Morning/Good Day formula is pervasive in European languages, but is presumably not universal, and presumably it has not always been around. Do we have any evidence of when and where it first originated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T06:23:37.227" Title="In what language and when did people first start saying &quot;Good morning&quot; / &quot;Good Day&quot; as a greeting?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27533" CreationDate="2018-03-27T06:23:37.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have any information on Latin/Early Romance (which would be a prime vector for such an expression to have diffused through Europe). And I hope someone else can answer for Latin!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have stumbled across an early attestation of &quot;Good day to you&quot; in Greek—which seems to indicate that the expression was at the time regarded as novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/is-the-%CF%83%CE%BF%CF%85-in-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AE-%CF%83%CE%BF%CF%85-%E1%BC%A1%CE%BC%CE%AD%CF%81%CE%B1-out-of-place-in-northern-greek/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/is-the-σου-in-καλή-σου-ἡμέρα-out-of-place-in-northern-greek/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Life of St Auxentius (written in the early 6th century AD, in an episode preserved in two linguistically archaised versions from the 11th century) records the saint making fun of a villager for greeting him with &quot;Good day to you&quot;: he retorts &quot;and a Good [entire] season to you&quot;, and grumbles that the villager should have asked for a blessing instead. One of the two versions explicitly calls the expression &quot;local&quot;, which implies &quot;vernacular&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the 10th century, the expression was commonplace in Greek: it is reported in court ceremonies in the &lt;em&gt;De Cerimoniis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found no earlier instance of a &quot;Good Day&quot; expression in Greek than the 6th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T06:23:37.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27527" CreationDate="2018-03-27T08:28:22.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's Greenberg's Universal #39:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where morphemes of both number and case are present and both follow or both precede the noun base, the expression of number almost always comes between the noun base and the expression of case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Greenberg's sample was small, I can't seem to find later counterexamples.  The closest thing I could find is the standard reconstruction for Proto-Indo-European; accusative &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt; and accusative plural &lt;em&gt;-ns&lt;/em&gt; could lead one to see the latter as &lt;em&gt;n-s&lt;/em&gt; = ACC-PL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see #7 here&lt;/a&gt;), though when I look at the whole PIE paradigm, I think that's kind of a stretch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T08:28:22.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-27T10:46:53.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, you can be fluent in both languages no matter if you are a simultaneous bilingual or a sequential one. However, I am going to talk about how they differ from my own experience growing up as a sequential bilingual. I learned two languages in the following particular context: I was about 6 years old, ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿which could still be considered the 'critical age', when I was introduced to a second language. My family used one language at home but a different﻿ language was used in other of my environments.﻿﻿&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognise that I have higher competence in my L1 than in ﻿my L2. Even though I feel I have native speaker competence in both languages, I could say I am a better writer, feel more confident in the use of the grammar and vocabulary, and make fewer mistakes using my L1 than my L2. Furthermore, I also admit that, while I have acquired my L1 unconsciously, it has taken me more effort learning my L2.  I don't remember mixing both languages or having problems switching from one language to another, but it is true that at that age I already had a strong language understanding in the L1, as well as an advanced cognitive development in comparison to earlier ages﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿. As I remember, t﻿﻿﻿﻿he balance using both languages was settled to me when I was about 9 years old. Over the years, my L1 keeps being the dominant language. Sometimes I feel the development of my L2 is still in progress, not to say of my L3 which I started acquiring years later﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, my experience leads me to believe that using simultaneous bilingual strategies in early childhood settings helps people to have higher probabilities in mastering proficiency levels in both languages, due to being early exposed to a multiple first languages development. Research shows that bilingualism is not associated with language delays so, the way we acquire a second language doesn't increase or decrease the chances of it. In terms of promoting cross-cultural understanding, I would say that both ways of acquisition, simultaneous and sequential, are very powerful. Likewise, I also share the opinion that context, the age of the child, the child's motivation, sociocultural factors, the values that are given to the different languages, length of time exposed to L2, and quality of exposure, among other factors, are fundamental aspects that affect the different ways of acquiring a second language. Thus, taken into consideration individual characteristics makes very difficult to elaborate further generalizations. Nevertheless, simultaneous acquisition and sequential acquisition are both valid ways to acquire more than one language in early childhood.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21597" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T10:46:53.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T12:46:47.427" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theme and Patient are often described as distinct thematic roles. My understanding is that Themes undergo an action but does not change their state, while Patients undergo an action and do change their state. Despite this, it seems that in a lot of languages the thematic roles of theme and patient are treated the same way and marked the same way syntactically within a sentence, so I am interested in what basis there is to distinguish them. Are there any languages that indicate these thematic roles differently, marking them as different kinds of arguments in a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19615" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T12:46:47.427" Title="Are there any languages that distinguish the thematic roles of theme and patient?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;&lt;argument&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2176" CreationDate="2018-03-27T20:28:00.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One could imagine that genitives agreeing with both object and subject represent a transition stage from genitive (as a case only agreeing with subject) to adjective. Cf. German &lt;em&gt;Grimm’sch&lt;/em&gt;, alternative spelling &lt;em&gt;grimmsch&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;Grimms Bruder/Schwester&lt;/em&gt; only agrees with &lt;em&gt;Grimm&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;Grimm’sch&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; Bruder&lt;/em&gt; is also congruent with obj., different from &lt;em&gt;Grimm’sch&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; Schwester&lt;/em&gt; and * &lt;em&gt;grimmischer Bruder&lt;/em&gt; would only agree with the object of the genitive relation. The difference between these forms would be if one would like to focus more on the subject or the object, &lt;em&gt;grimmisch&lt;/em&gt; making &lt;em&gt;Grimm&lt;/em&gt; more abstract than &quot;&lt;em&gt;Grimms&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T20:28:00.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27531" CreationDate="2018-03-27T20:41:35.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, a reasonable answer to your question may be &quot;yes&quot;, but a number of terms actually covers what you are writing about. Just like is shown in the post of @sumelic, &quot;deep embedding&quot; exhibits the properties of &lt;em&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/em&gt;: having grammatical meanings, synsemanticity, contiguous negation and interrogative inversion abilities, emphatic and VP-substitution functions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extend that the verb in question has lexical meanings too, it is not completely grammaticalized. The intermediate step between the two stages I would call either &lt;em&gt;everysemy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;light/thin verb&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also say this phenomenon seems to exemplify &lt;em&gt;lexicon-grammar continuum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T20:41:35.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27524" CreationDate="2018-03-27T21:42:07.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language is constrained by its serial channel, but the memory network it represents has more dimensions.  Here is a plausible deep net for all your versions of &quot;I am home today&quot;: (sorry I can't draw a nice picture)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;det(one) @ Mark&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;___ TAM(have) @ det(one) @ home &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;___ TAM(be [at]) @ [the] (one home)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;_____________ [at] @ [this] (one day)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nesting (indents) can't be represented in speech unless we use case markers, strict positioning, or syntax clues.  &quot;Today&quot; is temporal, which is a clue that it is adverbial, and because of that clue its position is lightly constrained.  We are then permitted to use relative position for 'focus'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T21:42:07.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T01:44:36.843" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several languages, the word for &quot;chapter&quot; (a self-contained unitary text of a book) comes from the word for &quot;head&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Latin, &lt;em&gt;&quot;capitulum&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (literally &quot;small head&quot;) comes from &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; (head). This word have derivatives in a lot of other languages, including English' &lt;em&gt;&quot;chapter&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Greek, the word for chapter is &lt;em&gt;&quot;κεφάλαιο&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;cephalaio&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), which comes from &lt;em&gt;&quot;κεφάλι&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;cepháli&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, head), which the english prefix &lt;em&gt;&quot;cephalo-&quot;&lt;/em&gt; comes from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some Slavic languages, including Russian, chapter is &lt;em&gt;&quot;глава&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;glava&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), which also means &quot;head&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Armenian, &lt;em&gt;&quot;գլուխ&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;glux&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) is both &quot;chapter&quot; and &quot;head&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Guarani, &lt;em&gt;&quot;akã&quot;&lt;/em&gt; means both &quot;chapter&quot; and &quot;head&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Maori, &lt;em&gt;&quot;upoko&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is both &quot;chapter&quot; and &quot;head&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the word for chapter related to head in those languages. Which semantical derivation or metaphor was used in the formation of the words for chapter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19623" LastEditorUserId="19623" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T17:34:48.610" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T18:42:26.607" Title="How is chapter related to head?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27546" CreationDate="2018-03-28T01:51:34.877" Score="4" ViewCount="2157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused with the usage of the terms root, lemma and stem. My understanding of the terms are as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Root&lt;/strong&gt;:The central (free) morpheme which has the content to which other bound morphemes are added so as to form a word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lemma&lt;/strong&gt;: An inflected form that acts as a head. It represents all the inflected word forms of a given root, when used independently like in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stem&lt;/strong&gt;: The portion of strings that are common in all the inflections of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am further confused, when it comes to the derived words. For example, if I am dealing with the inflection 'drivers'. What is the lemma of the word, and what is the `root' of the word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13696" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:57:14.797" Title="difference between the root, lemma and stem for a derived word" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T02:35:36.593" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see a spectral representation of my left and right channels individually. I'm not sure which channel Praat's spectrogram corresponds to. How do I show multiple spectrograms, with each corresponding to a different channel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T02:35:36.593" Title="How to show a multichannel spectrogram in Praat?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27542" CreationDate="2018-03-28T04:33:31.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't know exactly which quality led so many languages to independently develop or borrow the metaphor — etymological dictionaries rarely speculate on the &quot;why&quot; — but here are my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least three qualities of &quot;head&quot; that have a possible metaphor with &quot;chapter&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head = (most) important.&lt;/strong&gt; So natural that examples are hardly needed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head = first.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Headwaters&quot;, &quot;headline&quot;, &quot;head off&quot; (get there first), &quot;ahead&quot; (first), etc.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For some cross-linguistic confirmation from an unrelated language, consider e.g. Hebrew &lt;em&gt;Rosh Hashanah&lt;/em&gt; lit. &quot;head of the year&quot;, translated &quot;New Year's Day&quot;. (The root of &lt;em&gt;rosh&lt;/em&gt; incidentally appears in many words, including &lt;em&gt;bereshit&lt;/em&gt; usually translated &quot;in the beginning&quot;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head = orientation.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Ahead&quot; (in the direction faced), &quot;head somewhere&quot;, &quot;head fake&quot;, etc. Perhaps by connection with &lt;em&gt;face&lt;/em&gt; (which direction are you &lt;em&gt;facing&lt;/em&gt;?).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's investigate using the OED. Their etymology is a good example of how we usually ignore the &quot;why&quot; while charting the &quot;how&quot;; nothing here identifies the link used in the metaphor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymology:&lt;/strong&gt; A later syncopated form of &lt;em&gt;chapiter&lt;/em&gt; n., &amp;lt; Old French &lt;em&gt;chapitre&lt;/em&gt;, earlier &lt;em&gt;chapitle&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;capitulum&lt;/em&gt;. diminutive of &lt;em&gt;caput&lt;/em&gt; head, used, in ancient Latin, in the senses ‘little head, head of a plant, capital of a column’, and later, those of ‘head-dress of women, chapter of a book, section of a law’. The form &lt;em&gt;chapter&lt;/em&gt; appears in Scots in 14th cent., but in English is rare before the 16th; &lt;em&gt;chapiter&lt;/em&gt; survived beside it till the middle of the 17th, and is still occasional in the sense ‘capital of a column’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think the definitions themselves give us clues that (1) above is the relevant link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. a.&lt;/strong&gt; A main division or section of a book (whether the latter is an entire literary work, or one of the divisions or parts of a large work). Esp. used of the main divisions of the books of the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples from as early as c. 1000, but this is the earliest one that's unambiguous to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c1386   Chaucer &lt;em&gt;Nun's Priest's Tale&lt;/em&gt; 245   In the same book..Right in the nexte chapitre after this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ambiguity of the earlier examples arises from overlap with this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;fig.&lt;/em&gt; Head, heading, subject, category. (Usually preceded by &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;upon&lt;/em&gt;.) &lt;em&gt;arch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A seemingly relevant example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1681   W. Temple &lt;em&gt;Mem.&lt;/em&gt; iii, in &lt;em&gt;Wks.&lt;/em&gt; (1731) I. 342   Upon which Chapter I said a good deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one more whose examples are much later but possibly related to the underlying mechanism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. c.&lt;/strong&gt; A branch of an organization or society, esp. of a college fraternity. &lt;em&gt;U.S.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these, we could propose a semantic development along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;head&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;     ↓&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; (broadening) important thing&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;        ↓&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; (narrowing) among some group of collected items, e.g. people, the representative or chief&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;           ↓&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; (sideways/synecdoche) something having been organized, a main division&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;               ↓&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; (narrowing) a main section of a book&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;                      ↓&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; (broadening) any section of a book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paradox is how a word that means &quot;head&quot; came to mean &quot;subdivision&quot;. We have to switch our point of view: Looking at a book, the chapters are subdivisions. But looking at the mass of words, each chapter &lt;em&gt;heads&lt;/em&gt; a group of them. The chapters of an organization are &lt;em&gt;branches&lt;/em&gt; of the whole, but in terms of the members a chapter collects them under a single head(ing). And again, the world has any number of things that are grouped into the &quot;categories&quot; of definition 2. And not just any sections, but the &quot;main&quot; sections of definition 1c. To start with, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a chapter is a &quot;head&quot; not looking from the top down, but from the bottom up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T18:42:26.607" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T18:42:26.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27543" CreationDate="2018-03-28T09:56:18.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For your English example &lt;em&gt;drivers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;lemma&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;driver&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;stem&lt;/strong&gt; is also &lt;em&gt;driver&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;driv&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing is better explained in a language with more inflections, where things become interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the Latin verb &lt;em&gt;laudare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to praise&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;lemma&lt;/strong&gt; is (depending on convention) either &lt;em&gt;laudare&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;laudo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I praise&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are three &lt;strong&gt;stems&lt;/strong&gt;: The present stem &lt;em&gt;lauda&lt;/em&gt;, the perfect stem &lt;em&gt;laudav&lt;/em&gt;, and the supine stem &lt;em&gt;laudat&lt;/em&gt; represented by the &lt;strong&gt;principal parts&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;laudare, laudo, laudavi, laudatum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; is just &lt;em&gt;laud&lt;/em&gt; without the so-called &lt;strong&gt;thematic vowel&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The noun &lt;em&gt;laus, laudis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;praise&quot; has root and stem &lt;em&gt;laud&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the term root is language dependent, for Semitic languages it usually consists of three consonant without any vowels. Also for stems there is some leeway in the definition. Both root and stem are product of the analysis of word forms, and often there is a canonical way of doing this, but sometimes linguists may disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T13:57:14.797" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:57:14.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27550" CreationDate="2018-03-28T14:39:11.063" Score="9" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m making a website, and using ISO standard two letter language codes for tagging user-submitted content. I’m not intending on adding every single language, but would like an &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; category. It’s not a huge problem, but it got me wondering, is there a standard code for &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt;? If there is nothing official, is there a common convention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21607" OwnerDisplayName="Aidan F" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T16:50:43.867" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T18:39:12.823" Title="Is there a standard ISO language code for ”other”?" Tags="&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27549" CreationDate="2018-03-28T16:18:07.050" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two-letter codes are defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 639-1&lt;/a&gt; and the current list does not contain a code for &amp;quot;other&amp;quot;. (As &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list of ISO 639-1 codes&lt;/a&gt; shows, not all possible two-letter codes have been used so far, i.e. only 184 out 676 possible codes, so it is &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; possible that such a code gets added later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the possible number of codes allowed by two-letter codes is much too low for the world's languages, ISO has defined three-letter codes in ISO 639-3. However, I am not aware of an ISO 639-3 code for &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; language. The standard has a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3#Special_codes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special codes&lt;/a&gt; for situations when you can't use a language code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;mis&lt;/code&gt;: for documents using uncoded languages, i.e. languages don't have a ISO code (yet);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;mul&lt;/code&gt;: for documents using multiple languages (however, in markup languages, you can use the &lt;code&gt;lang&lt;/code&gt; attribute on specific elements that contain content in a single language);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;und&lt;/code&gt;: for documents where the language has not been identified;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;zxx&lt;/code&gt;: for documents without any linguistic content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest match with what you need is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;und&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T18:39:12.823" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T18:39:12.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27549" CreationDate="2018-03-28T16:56:11.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Addition to @Tsundoku's answer, there is a kind of private use area in ISO 639-3: In addition, 520 codes in the range &lt;code&gt;qaa&lt;/code&gt;–&lt;code&gt;qtz&lt;/code&gt; are 'reserved for local use'. So you can assign in your application the code &lt;code&gt;qot&lt;/code&gt; for &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; when you want to do this. Note that the same code can have completely different assignments on other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition in reply to the comments: There is no such option with ISO 693-1 &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; letter codes, all codes in there are assigned to languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T15:31:06.247" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T15:31:06.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-29T02:09:41.767" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently took an exam where one of the questions was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Is &quot;Brexit&quot; an acronym?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I selected no and was marked incorrect by my professor. My common sense says that this was a portmanteau and not an acronym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could any linguistic experts weigh in on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21613" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:37:21.990" Title="Is &quot;Brexit&quot; an acronym?" Tags="&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-04-03T04:13:14.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12488" CreationDate="2018-03-29T05:43:50.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a value judgement, clearly. To be &lt;em&gt;litos&lt;/em&gt; is to be plain as a positive value judgement; cf. English &quot;plain-spoken&quot;. Plainness of speech was extended to avoiding superlatives in speech, as excessively emotive: Ancient Greek culture valued &quot;moderation&quot;, which includes understatement. Saying something is &quot;not uncommon&quot; or &quot;not ungraceful&quot; increases processing time, but the praiseworthy plainness from an Ancient Greek perspective is not about processing simplicity (and reading isn't really the point here—these were conventions of oratory). The praiseworthy plainness is about making a show of being reluctant to go overboard in one's positive descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's speculation based on what I know of Greek and Ancient Greeks. While &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes&lt;/a&gt; reports that  the rhetorical figure is already in place in Homer, LSJ reports that the earliest use of &lt;em&gt;litotes&lt;/em&gt; to describe it is in late Roman grammarians: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurus_Servius_Honoratus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurus_Servius_Honoratus&lt;/a&gt;' commentary on Virgil, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Donatus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Donatus&lt;/a&gt;' commentary on Terence (4th to 5th centuries AD.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T02:11:20.923" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T02:11:20.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6619" CreationDate="2018-03-29T06:00:46.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @hippietrail mentioned, Wiktionary does: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B2%CE%BB%CE%AD%CF%80%CF%89#Conjugation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/βλέπω#Conjugation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does the Triantafyllides Institute's dictionary, which is the only one of the three major contemporary dictionaries that's online: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/lexica/triantafyllides/search.html?lq=%CE%B2%CE%BB%CE%AD%CF%80%CF%89&amp;amp;dq=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/lexica/triantafyllides/search.html?lq=βλέπω&amp;amp;dq=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;βλέπω [vlépo] -ομαι (κυρ. στις σημ. I5, II3) Ρ αόρ. είδα, προστ. δες,&#xA;  απαρέμφ. δει και (σπάν.) ιδεί, παθ. αόρ. ειδώθηκα, απαρέμφ. ιδωθεί,&#xA;  μππ. ιδωμένος :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the perfective simplex δω is not discussed separately from the perfective past είδα and the perfective imperative δες is... regrettable. But yes, Triantafyllides does give principal parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T06:00:46.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27558" CreationDate="2018-03-29T06:13:26.770" Score="8" ViewCount="1652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word to describe the phenomenon where a final sound of a word is linked to the starting sound of the next word? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;hold on&quot; sounds like &quot;whole Don&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;this guy&quot; sounds like &quot;the sky&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article of &quot;liaison&quot; seems to suggest that the process of linking a final consonant to a starting vowel is called &quot;enchaînement&quot;. But this is a French word and only describes part of what I was talking about. The second example above is a linking of consonant to consonant. I was reading the Wikipedia article on &quot;Sandhi&quot; as well, but again there is no addition of sounds in my examples, so this term doesn't seem to be suitable as well. So is there an English word to describe this general phenomenon, or is it just called (rather informally) &quot;word linking&quot;? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10025" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T16:09:44.753" Title="Is there a term for the phenomenon of linking the end of a word to the beginning of the next word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27556" CreationDate="2018-03-29T09:12:33.070" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems like you're looking for '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10355232&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;resyllabification&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T09:12:33.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27556" CreationDate="2018-03-29T10:17:43.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another term which you might find relevant is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juncture&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;juncture&lt;/a&gt;, in particular, &quot;plus juncture&quot; or &quot;open juncture&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T10:17:43.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27552" CreationDate="2018-03-29T13:07:25.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not an acronym. It is what Lewis Carroll called a portmanteau word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T13:07:25.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27552" CreationDate="2018-03-29T14:37:21.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, the word acronym is used to describe words/initialisms which use only the &lt;strong&gt;initial&lt;/strong&gt; letter(s)/syllables of the original phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;acronym&lt;/strong&gt; is a word or name formed as an abbreviation from the initial components in a phrase or a word, usually individual letters (as in NATO or laser) and sometimes syllables (as in Benelux).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, hypothetical 'Brex' would be uncontroversially an acronym, but 'Brexit' would only fall under this if you classify an entire word as an initial part of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is (minimal) precedent for including the end portions of words&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; in what is commonly called an acronym, take &lt;strong&gt;amphetamine&lt;/strong&gt; for example: &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;lpha-&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/strong&gt;ethyl&lt;strong&gt;ph&lt;/strong&gt;en&lt;strong&gt;et&lt;/strong&gt;hyl&lt;strong&gt;amine&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, using this interpretation of 'acronym', one could call 'Brexit' one. But it's much more common to label such words portmanteaux or blends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* or the entirety of the final word, depending on how far you want to split &lt;em&gt;methylphenethylamine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:37:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27556" CreationDate="2018-03-29T14:53:30.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mondegreen&lt;/a&gt;, if you're talking about mishearing one phrase as the other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21622" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:53:30.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27556" CreationDate="2018-03-29T16:09:44.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's called linking. See this video:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuh6_d_pBaE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuh6_d_pBaE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21624" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T16:09:44.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27531" CreationDate="2018-03-29T22:09:33.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, entrenchment is the term you are looking for. Words that are used more often are more ready at hand. Our choice of words is dominated by more frequent words, e.g. rather talking about &lt;strong&gt;brother and sisters&lt;/strong&gt; than &lt;strong&gt;siblings&lt;/strong&gt;. The opposite, namely choosing awkwardly the less frequent synonyms (or &quot;homoeonyms&quot;) can add an air of archaism or poetry (as in your example &quot;Sang he?&quot;) until it becomes downright agrammatical.&#xA;Your example describes grammaticalisation (or subjectification), as has been pointed out. Another example: &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; evolves from meaning &lt;strong&gt;to want&lt;/strong&gt; to an optative (similar to &lt;strong&gt;shall&lt;/strong&gt;) and ultimately to a future auxiliary verb, a process that occurs in similar fashion in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T22:09:33.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-30T01:23:41.373" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's normal enough for people to say that we can attribute the percept of 'stress accent' to certain acoustic correlates – usually higher relative fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of syllables. It's easy enough to measure duration and compare that across 'stressed' and 'unstressed' syllables. But what about intensity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two things about intensity that I can't wrap my head around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If intensity is measured in RMS, that means it's an average over time. So an intensity trace on Praat, for example, is working out some kind of average as it goes along from left to right. So what exactly should you measure then - the average RMS for the whole vowel? the highest RMS value in the intensity trace? is that intensity peak already somewhat flattened out if it's measured in RMS?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once you have a measure, how do you compare them across syllables? Do you need to do a log transform of the RMS dB in order to make it a linear scale when you do a comparison, or would that not make sense because your ears hear logarithmically anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should point out that my research relates to Australian languages, not English, so the cues are considerably more subtle, and vowel quality does not change much between stressed and unstressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21629" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T05:08:09.633" Title="Measuring phonetic correlates of stress (intensity in particular)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27569" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27570" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about groups (usually pairs) of languages that allow its speakers to comprehend another language of a pair without special training or deliberate learning. Not for translation or identification requests." OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T02:27:15.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27511" CreationDate="2018-03-30T02:31:41.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for sake of posting an answer (comments get deleted often).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mutual intelligibility&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties &lt;strong&gt;can readily understand each other&lt;/strong&gt; without prior familiarity or special effort. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intelligibility between languages &lt;strong&gt;can be asymmetric&lt;/strong&gt;, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understanding the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We even have a dedicated tag for questions about this phenomenon: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/mutual-intelligibility&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mutual-intelligibility&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mutual-intelligibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T02:31:41.610" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-03-30T02:31:41.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27568" CreationDate="2018-03-30T05:08:09.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume your goal is to describe the acoustics of &quot;stress accent&quot; in a language, distinguishing between stressed and unstressed syllables. Then you would treat amplitude and F0 in basically the same way. Both are window-defined functions: the (RMS) amplitude is a value in a certain window, as in F0. The difference is that RMS directly says &quot;average&quot;, but still RMS amp. and F0 are reductions of waveform values in a window to a single number. The exact details of pitch and intensity windowings in Praat are not anything I know about, but you can select a chunk and get the same number of pitch and intensity values for the selection. With a sequence of numbers for a portion of speech corresponding to some segment or larger unit, you have to decide how to reduce those many points to few points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic argument against picking highest or lowest points is that this is susceptible to artifacts, when what you want is reliable trends. One relatively minimalist method that I favor when dealing with vowel-centered measures is to divide the segment into thirds, and take the mean pitch / amplitude of that segment. That reduces a dozen points to 3 (and preserves some syllable-internal dynamics). Another is to compute a single value for the syllable: either the entire syllable (hoping that consonantal edge effects are minimal), or 50% of the syllable, in the center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the merit of further massaging the computations with rescaling. The basic question should be &quot;does this even matter?&quot;, so one of the fundamental issues that you will be concerned with is whether amplitude is even a significant factor, given F0 and formant values (that is, is amplitude an independent variable, or is it just an automatic consequence of something else). The reasoning here is that you want to know if there is something significant about amplitude as a correlate of stress in the physical signal. You can always discount a finding of significance if there is an overriding perceptual reason to think that the difference can't be noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T05:08:09.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-30T12:16:04.320" Score="1" ViewCount="902" Body="&lt;p&gt;sorry if this seems really basic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am stuck on what to name 'because' in the syntax tree I am drawing, which is for the sentence:&#xA;'The boy gave Alice a present because he likes her'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially thought that it would be a CP but also considered that like 'and' it would be a conjunction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can some please clarify for me?&#xA;Much thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21630" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:56:15.443" Title="What category is because?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-03-31T12:26:03.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27295" CreationDate="2018-03-30T12:16:27.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An explanation, by and large coinciding with the one giving by Aharon M. Vermont:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A verb can take another direct object without actually increasing valency (or changing its meaning) thus forcing the listener to identify (or: equate) both direct objects (O1 - the usual direct object, and O2 - the abstract, attached, &quot;metaphorical&quot; (the &quot;id est&quot;-object so to speak)), e. g.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(weak O2, since not nominal but an predicative adjective)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;He is painting the house&lt;/em&gt; (O1)&lt;em&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;He is painting the house&lt;/em&gt; (O1) &lt;em&gt;green&lt;/em&gt; (O2)&lt;em&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;; or &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(strong O2, since fully nominal)&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;They crowned him.&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;They crowned him king.&lt;/em&gt; (not quite grammatical, I admit)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sentential argument (I like the phrase) is a predicative adjective in that respect. It can be marked as object by making its subject an object, e. g. AcI (&lt;em&gt;accusativus cum infinitivo&lt;/em&gt;) in Latin, Greek, German, English, Spanish, French, all IE languages as far as I know of, but I suppose the feature is universal. E.g. &lt;em&gt;Vidi te currere.&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;I saw you[ACC] run[INF].&quot;)&#xA;In the same way as the O2 is reduced in marking compared to the O1 in &quot;ditransitive&quot; constructions, the sentential argument is reduced in marking to indicate its subordination by using an infinitive (or less finite) verb form, e. g. &quot;They crowned the boy king.&quot; sounds more grammatical than &quot;They crowned the boy &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; king.&quot; (The latter being ambiguous as to which argument is O2.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subordination may not be marked within the sentential argument by reduced marking in parts of the sent. arg. (e.g. infinitive of the AcI) but outside the sent. arg. by equating the unreduced sent. arg. with a complementizer (strictly speaking &quot;the fact&quot; is not a complementizer, since it cannot be used without &quot;that&quot; to link the sentential argument to the main sentence in the way that &quot;that&quot; can). The complementizer is an abstract word (unlike &quot;the fact&quot;) acting as a null noun to link the O2.&#xA;Correspondingly Spanish has &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;that&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;lo que&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;the fact that&quot;/&quot;that which&quot;/&quot;the following, to wit&quot;/etc. German has &lt;em&gt;dass&lt;/em&gt; (obviously cognate to neuter article &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;), dialectally &lt;em&gt;der/die/das was&lt;/em&gt; and more formally &lt;em&gt;das Folgende, nämlich...&lt;/em&gt; (for &quot;the fact that&quot;/&quot;the following, to wit&quot;). As a non-IE example Ga has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; which translates to &quot;that&quot;, &lt;em&gt;dass&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; in neuter (or inanimate) null object, demonstrative pronoun and complementizer senses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The O2 (or &quot;id est&quot;-object) is identified with O1 without using a copula, but nevertheless there is identification involved. The difference between (2) and (3) is that the sentential argument is O2 in (2) and O1 in (3)*, and the difference can be used to focus rather on the content or on the action bringing about the content. E.g. I would rather use (2) &quot;I saw you running.&quot; to emphasise that I was witness (focus on action bringing about content) and (3) &quot;I saw that you ran.&quot;** or even more emphatic &quot;I saw the following: You ran.&quot; (some sort of build up, probably with an hiatus before sent. arg.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Accordingly an abstract (or &quot;null&quot;) noun is preferred in cases of (3) since it is inconspicuous, lacking irritating semantics by its own. It compensates the need for reduced marking of either one of the objects in the ditransitive construction. Either the complementizer or the sent. arg. has to carry reduced marking to convey the framing involved in the construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**Cf. arguably &quot;I saw &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you ran.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T12:16:27.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27573" CreationDate="2018-03-30T13:56:15.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on who you ask. 'Because' is not in the same syntactic category as 'and', as they show different behaviour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) a. I am looking for her because she is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. She is missing and her boyfriend is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) a. Because she is missing, I am looking for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. *And her boyfriend is dead, she is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More traditional approaches categorise 'because' as a &lt;strong&gt;subordinating conjunction&lt;/strong&gt; in the same category as &lt;em&gt;since&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;as long as&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;although&lt;/em&gt;, etc., as opposed to coordinating conjunctions like &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;. More modern approaches subsume the category of subordinating conjunctions under &lt;strong&gt;prepositions&lt;/strong&gt; instead. A prominent grammar that advocates the preposition view is the Huddleston and Pullum grammar. Pullum also makes the cause that &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9494&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The basic idea is that a preposition may subcategorise for a full clause, which is what 'because' can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T13:56:15.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27542" CreationDate="2018-03-30T14:16:18.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dutch we have chapter=&quot;hoofdstuk&quot; (head piece, literally).&#xA;&quot;hoofd&quot; (head) can both mean literal head (body part) and figurative (leader/boss), as English head can also mean. The semantics here is &quot;hoofd&quot; as main/governing part of the body --&gt; governing/most important person in general.&#xA;So the &quot;main parts&quot; of the book are called hoofd-stuk. In Westerlauwer Frisian the same theme can be seen; here we have two words &quot;holle&quot; (for the body part) and &quot;haad&quot; (for the boss) and a chapter is &quot;haadstik&quot;, (not &quot;*holstik&quot; or some such).&#xA;Capital (also caput = head) letters are also &quot;hoofdletter/haadletter&quot; resp.&#xA;So I'd look into the head=boss semantics in the languages you mentioned as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3317" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T14:16:18.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T01:42:32.660" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;friends! How is it going? : )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been conducting a heavy research on the word &quot;mark&quot; for the past month, but unfortunately I'm far from being a linguist, so I lack decent resources... hahaha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know when and where the word &quot;mark&quot; started and the names it took throught the centuries (I have already checked the first 10-15 Google Pages), but there's one thing that I still can't fully grasp (and that's what I need the most): when, AND HOW, exactly the word changed from &quot;boundary&quot; to &quot;sign&quot; and &quot;symbol&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: some say that by the 13th century it changed from &quot;boundary&quot; to &quot;sign of a boundary&quot;... How do they know that? Any proofs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also related to &quot;marksman&quot; (apparently because they marked the places they would shoot at), but then again, no explanatory texts on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put: I know the whole word tree, but I lack a few referenced explanations like every decent thesis' need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thank you all!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21483" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T07:05:03.890" Title="Origins of &quot;Mark&quot; as &quot;symbol&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-03-31T20:11:20.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27580" CreationDate="2018-03-31T06:24:20.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do they know that? Any proofs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can’t prove a negative, so there’s no way to prove that a word &lt;em&gt;didn’t&lt;/em&gt; have such-and-such meaning before a certain date.  What we do is, we look at the earliest mention of a word where it clearly seems to mean X.  Then we known that meaning X dates &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; as early as the date of that document.  In fact it had that meaning earlier (or the writer wouldn’t have used it!), but there’s no way to know how much earlier.  All we can say is that &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; that date it already had the meaning (the technical term is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_post_quem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;terminus ante quem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, dating &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; earliest mentions of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; meanings of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; words is quite a monumental task! You English speakers are actually spoiled for choice: the Oxford English Dictionary—the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;big, multi-volume one&lt;/a&gt;—is probably one of the best such compendiums in all languages, if not the best;  it’s been 160+ years in the making and by now it has accumulated a lot of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you are interested in a particular word, I heartily recommend you head to the nearest public library and consult the OED.  The entry for &quot;mark&quot; lists &lt;strong&gt;42&lt;/strong&gt; meanings (not counting idioms), all of them with copious attestations of ancient use, and with most of them  grouped into two main branches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I. a boundary, a border between lands. Earliest English attestation is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114169?rskey=NChHNy&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Metres of Boethius&lt;/a&gt; (880–950) xi.65: &lt;em&gt;Hæfð se ilca god eorðan and wætere mearce gesette&lt;/em&gt; (“having set the border for the same good earth and water”, if I’m not mistaken—someone who actually knows OE please correct this).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;II. an object marking a boundary; a sign. First attestation in this family is the Old English Hexateuch (traditionally said to date around the 950s): xxiv.4. &lt;em&gt;Moyses..getimbrode an weofod æt þam munte nyðeweardon &amp;amp; twelf mearca on twelf Israhela mægðum.&lt;/em&gt; (something about Moses building up the mound an altar and twelve 'marks' of the twelve Israeli tribes).  It also pops up in Ælfric’s &lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (late 10th century), denoting ‘a banner, a standard’: &lt;em&gt;‘Victricia tollite signa‘, nymað þa sigefæstan mearca&lt;/em&gt; (=victorious banner).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern ‘mark’ has has a quite complicated etymology, too, merging together at least three different cognates: Old English &lt;em&gt;mearc&lt;/em&gt; (strong feminine declension) = boundary, borderland, present with this meaning in several Germanic languages; &lt;em&gt;mearc&lt;/em&gt; (strong neuter declension), more related to the meaning of ‘sign’ (these may give different reflexes in other languages, e.g. Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;marke&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;marc/merc&lt;/em&gt;, or Old Icelandic &lt;em&gt;mǫrk&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;mark&lt;/em&gt;); and, thirdly, as a Scandinavian loan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all scratching the surface.  By a rough count, the OED entry for ‘mark’ &lt;strong&gt;alone&lt;/strong&gt; has some 17 &lt;em&gt;thousand&lt;/em&gt; words (an entire novella about &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; word).  So if you’re interested in historical details about a word, go check the OED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T07:05:03.890" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T07:05:03.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:06:35.710" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thoroughly confused about something for quite some time and hope that someone here can enlighten me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the very famous literary opus &quot;Ossian&quot; edited by James Macpherson (JM), what is supposed to be a poetical work based on Gaelic traditions from the Scottish highlands, which were collected and translated or created by JM. The history of its reception and its influence on European literature and culture in general is epic. So I abstain from trying to summarise it here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was published in the early 18th century and since then there has been much debate on the role of JM in general and the authenticity of the material in special. Funny enough Macpherson could deliver Scottish Gaelic &quot;originals&quot; only after some time and even then it did not resolve the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My basic question is about the very nature of the language of the Gaelic version of that Ossian &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia801400.us.archive.org/27/items/daoiseinmhicfhin03macp/daoiseinmhicfhin03macp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(&quot;The poems of Ossian. Dana Oisein mhic Fhiun&quot;, Edinburgh 1859, Maclachlan &amp;amp; Stewart)&lt;/a&gt;. E.g. Is it authentic Gaelic (e.g. vs. made up gibberish)? Can it be narrowed to some regional/temporal variant (e.g. can something be said on the age of the language variant)? Is it exactly representing what Macpherson could produce in terms of language himself (i.e. was it possibly his own  mother tongue, or is it possible that it eexceeds JM's Gaelic abilities) or is it recognisably some &quot;retro-style&quot; Scottish Gaelic (so that it is likely he wrote it in a way &quot;mocking&quot; old style), or does it contain clear signs of authentic language-archaisms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(After finding that the literature SE does not have a Gaelic/Celtic/Irish Tag; It thought that might be a question fir this site, especially since it implies a linguistic characterisation of the Ossian corpus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts will be most gratefully acknowledged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here is no Scottish-Gaelic tag, But since it is known that Middle-Gaelic and Middle Irish are very similar variants, possibly only accents, I am using the Irish tag) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12990" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T20:14:47.647" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T20:14:47.647" Title="The language of Macphersons Ossian" Tags="&lt;gaelic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T19:54:59.980" Score="2" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen the word &quot;prejacent&quot; in many linguistics related papers. However, none of them explains what exactly a prejacent is. Could someone elaborate more on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19961" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T20:10:47.957" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T20:10:47.957" Title="Meaning of &quot;Prejacent&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the celtic language family there is a tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/celtic&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;celtic&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;celtic&lt;/a&gt; and for questions about the Irish gaelic language there is the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/irish&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;irish&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;irish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the scotish gaelic language, a celtic language spoken in Scotland." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T20:18:10.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T21:51:59.073" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working closely with semantic class of &lt;em&gt;containers&lt;/em&gt;. It's not that obvious though how to define the class. Should it be enclosed? Obviously not, spoon is an example. Could flat surface serve as the container? Tray seems to prove the point. But should we call a table container then? Seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you help me figuring the borders of the containers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T21:51:59.073" Title="Is TRAY a container?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T03:08:32.330" Score="-2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for lists of words (preferably txt files) in various languages  I was looking for just lists of words without any additional data spanning as many languages as possible. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21638" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T06:32:44.517" Title="Word Lists of Various Languages" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-04-09T15:36:40.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T05:12:11.093" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Researching the origins of counting systems, I came across the question I cannot seem to find an answer for: what is the typological distribution of languages that consider thumb a finger (5 fingers on hand) vs. those that do not (4 fingers, thumb is not a finger). English is in the latter category, although since recently, due to its status as a &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; international language, it seems to have become more fluid on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexically, there seems to be not a clear-cut distinction among even language families. Danish (Germanic) has &lt;em&gt;tommelfinger&lt;/em&gt; for the thumb, and Russian (Slavic) has большой палец &lt;em&gt;bol'shoy palec&lt;/em&gt;, “great finger”, while Slovenian (also Slavic) uses the same root &lt;em&gt;palec&lt;/em&gt; for “thumb,” and has a non-cognate &lt;em&gt;prst&lt;/em&gt; for “finger.” Romance languages seem to prefer a separate root for the thumb, after Latin, but again, Romanian has &lt;em&gt;deget mare&lt;/em&gt;, “great finger” for the thumb, making it a “thumb-unaware” language. There are signs, such as remnants of the dual declension of Russian numerals for two to four and Latin &lt;em&gt;octo&lt;/em&gt;, and the cognacy of &lt;em&gt;nine&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt;, suggesting that PIE placed more weight on counting in fours and not fives when its counting developed (a relation to the number of fingers seems likely to be a factor), but the modern daughter languages fluctuate between 4 and 5 rather non-systematically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, having a separate root lexeme for the thumb may be tangential to finger counting. It is possible that of “thumb-aware” languages, some count 5 fingers, despite having a separate root for the thumb, and some do 4. Cf. English has &lt;em&gt;pinky&lt;/em&gt; but it is still unquestionably a finger. This is the main, the most interesting question of my research: how many fingers languages count on a hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; does not have this category. There are distributions for languages that lexically distinguish hand and finger (topics 130A and B), but this monumental atlas seems shy on semantic topics in general, so this question may be even out of their scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can anyone help with references to the research on the typological classification of languages into “4-finger” and “5-finger” categories? A wide, methodologically consistent review would be the best&lt;/strong&gt; (WALS is a great example). As I am dealing with the &lt;em&gt;development&lt;/em&gt; of counting, references to reconstructed and ancient languages would also be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Splitting the latter (5-finger) category into those having and not having a root lexeme for thumb is secondary and less important to me currently, but I believe, for the general nature of SE questions, would also lie in the scope. This should be related in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="674" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T05:12:11.093" Title="4 or 5: is thumb a finger? Distribution across languages" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="21" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27589" CreationDate="2018-04-01T09:42:58.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;FAIR have trained word embedding models for hundreds of languages, with the side effect that they have compiled words lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Wikipedia only, 300+ languages&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/crawl-vectors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fasttext.cc/docs/en/crawl-vectors.html&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/pretrained-vectors.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/pretrained-vectors.md&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Wikipedia + Common Crawl, 157 languages&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/pretrained-vectors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fasttext.cc/docs/en/pretrained-vectors.html&lt;/a&gt; / &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/docs/crawl-vectors.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/docs/crawl-vectors.md&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/docs/crawl-vectors.md#format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Format&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the words are sorted in order of frequency.  They provide Python code, if you do not care about the vector representation then you could use bash to split on space and take only the first column.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To download them all, get &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SignalN/ftio/blob/master/ftio/wiki/download.sh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download.sh&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ftio/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ftio&lt;/a&gt; package:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;for (( i=1; i&amp;lt;=$#; i++ )); do&#xA;    wget -c &quot;https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/fasttext-vectors/wiki.${!i}.zip&quot;&#xA;done&#xA;&#xA;# For example:&#xA;# ./download.sh bg el ka hy ru fa es fr de it pt ar tr pl ko&#xA;&#xA;# If stopped it will not re-start automatically, but if re-started it will continue from where it stopped.&#xA;&#xA;# Tested on macOS Sierra only.&#xA;&#xA;# Remember to check if there is enough disk space - they are about 4GB each.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For Wikipedia + Common Crawl, change &lt;code&gt;wiki.${!i}.zip&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;word-vectors-v2/cc.${!i}.300.vec.gz&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also try Open Data SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T06:32:44.517" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T06:32:44.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T14:14:53.567" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several taxonomies for discourse structures (markers, connectives, functions) exist including PDTB, RST, RST extensions, etc. That said, I've noticed that several of these efforts are 10-20 years old. What are the most common/popular  modern approaches (in 2018) to label discourse via a taxonomy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T14:04:24.977" Title="Discourse Structure: Taxonomy, Labels" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27597" CreationDate="2018-04-01T23:17:42.943" Score="5" ViewCount="8441" Body="&lt;p&gt;How different are Chinese dialects, on average, relative to the differences between European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the dialects spoken in Western and Eastern China as different as, say, Russian and Polish, or Italian and Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T10:49:36.373" Title="How different are Chinese dialects?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-02T12:56:03.073" Score="4" ViewCount="3550" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about ideophones on Wikipedia, and the way it was described seemed like it was describing onomatopoeia. Apparently the claim is that onomatopoeia is a sub-class of ideophone. In the main description it only lists onomatopoeia, and in the list of examples in English I think they're all onomatopoeia except for two. Here's the list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;boing; the sound of a spring being released&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      boom; the sound of an explosion&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      bang; the sound of a gunshot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      bling-bling; glitter, sparkle - not onomatopoeia?&lt;br&gt; &#xA;      pitter-patter; the sound of rain drops&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      swish; the sound of swift movement&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      splish-splash; the sound of water splashing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      ta-daa!; the sound of a fanfare&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      thud; the sound of something heavy falling on the ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      tick-tock; the sound of time passing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      twinkle; the glow of something sparkling or shiny - not onomatopoeia?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only ones that I would venture to say aren't onomatopoeia are twinkle and bling-bling because I don't think they make a sound. So I can understand why the word &quot;ding&quot; is onomatopoeic, because when spoken it kind of sounds like a bell ringing. But I don't understand how the word &quot;tinkle&quot; can reflect shimmering or glimmering for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: Are there ideophones in English that aren't onomatopoeia?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2: If so, is the criterion that what the word describes doesn't make a sound? And how does a word like &quot;tinkle&quot; reflect how an object shimmers, glimmers, or shines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21640" LastEditorUserId="21640" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T15:57:02.417" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T03:06:37.423" Title="How do ideophones and onomatopoeia work in English?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27594" CreationDate="2018-04-02T16:33:27.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to answer the first question, primarily because there is no independent test for whether a word is onomatopoeia or not. You can find claims that &quot;boff&quot;, &quot;bump&quot;, &quot;cry&quot;, &quot;gallop&quot; are examples. Opinion polls might reveal a sliding scale of onomatopoeticity where &quot;wham&quot; is most often judged to be onomatopoeia, &quot;boff&quot; is rarely so judged, and &quot;house&quot; is never. In English, correlation between &quot;onomatopoeia&quot; and sound is virtually guaranteed because that is how the concept is taught in schools (and &quot;ideophone&quot; is never taught).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also hardly any way to independently distinguish onomatopoeia from ideophone. One structural property can be often used to diagnose ideophonicity, namely use in light verb constructions like &quot;Subj. went 'bang/wham/woof/crash...&quot;. In other languages, those with rich ideophonic vocabulary, it's fairly easy to show that ideophones are not limited to sound relations (they can indicate sharpness, dullness, darkness, sweetness etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There being no reason to distinguish ideophone and onomatopoeia, and no objective test or criterion for onomatopoeia classification in English. One can maintain that &quot;twinkle&quot; is not onomatopoetic, and you probably would not be contradicted by an opinion poll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T03:06:37.423" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T03:06:37.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27593" CreationDate="2018-04-02T19:05:24.033" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is an interesting one, in general how to compare the comparisons of languages and more specifically about the Chinese family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual qualitative measure of difference is mutual intelligibility; but quantitative measures of this are hard to come by except by a large collection of anecdotes or great linguistic experience. That is to say there is not enough electronic material in all these varieties to do a computer comparison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, labels like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc, are complicated by politics, history, culture, and translation, and may force thresholds that are in reality vague or not even there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the details of your question are answered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia page on the varieties of Chinese languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most of the following there are many details left out, so consider this a broad idea with lots of small exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are seven primary dialects of Chinese: Mandarin, Wu (Shanghainese), Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, and Yue (Cantonese). These dialects are all mutually unintelligible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hTxQv.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hTxQv.gif&quot; alt=&quot;map of Chinese varieties&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within each of these dialects, there is a continuum of intelligibility, but from the extremes may not be intelligible (the wiki page gives many examples of unintelligibility within a dialect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say the differences are as much as the differences within say Romance is difficult. But it is often repeated that the Chinese varieties are as far apart as the Romance languages. What I think that means is that if you know one of the Chinese varieties, learning any of the other varieties is just as easy as say a French person learning Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some notes about your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The writing set is the same for the great majority of the Chinese Languages. There might be some very minimal moving around of characters to reflect syntax change and a some different choice of characters to show some change in vocabulary, but writing is mostly understandable by everyone, no matter what the writer actually thinks they're speaking. That is to say that, someone from Beijing can easily read a newspaper articles written by Cantonese speakers, &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more easily than say a French person could understand a Romanian newspaper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the state language of PRC is Mandarin, so everybody in school learns it, even though the local business and home language is primarily something else. So non-native-Han speakers are usually bilingual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the greatest change over direction is from north and west to south-east, not east to west. The western part of PRC (Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet) was colonized by Han Chinese and ethnic Han there speak Mandarin (the non-Han locals speak mostly Turkic or Tibetan). That is, someone from Chengdu and someone from Harbin can more easily understand each other, but neither could follow at all a Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong. The Cantonese speaker could probably understand both of them though because of Mandarin taught in school.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, Chinese languages are &lt;em&gt;very loosely&lt;/em&gt; related like Romance, for example Mandarin and Cantonese are like Italian and French, and even within Mandarin/Italian there are large differences between varieties (like Hebei vs Sichuan and Tuscan (standard) vs Sicilian). Don't take the analogy too far!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T10:49:36.373" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T10:49:36.373" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27594" CreationDate="2018-04-02T20:40:17.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Onomatopoeia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is strictly about lexical imitation of sounds. Animal noises are a simple example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ideophone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a term that refers only to a limited number of languages where it identifies some special morphological or lexical peculiarity, often associated with onomatopoeia. Strictly speaking, English doesn't have ideophones, though there is certainly plenty of onomatopoeia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that what you're looking for is a more general category, which is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sound Symbolism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That term describes any situation in which the appearance of a particular sound (consonant, vowel, syllable, cluster, etc.) in a lexical item correlates systematically with the meaning of the lexical item. This includes onomatopoeia, generally, but it's not the most common case. English does have plenty of sound symbolism, mostly centered around monosyllabic word roots (&quot;simplex words&quot;) broken up into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Assonance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (initial cluster, e.g, &lt;em&gt;st&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;- in &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/-ump.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rime&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (nucleus plus coda, e.g, &lt;em&gt;-ump&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;stump&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is the set of simplex words with the &lt;code&gt;KL-&lt;/code&gt; assonance, which are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/kl-chart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;displayed as a Venn diagram here&lt;/a&gt;. Note, first, that the semantics of this assonance has to do with connection or contact of one sort or another. There are plenty of words that have to do with ballistic contact -- &lt;em&gt;Impact&lt;/em&gt; on the diagram -- and of those there are many that also indicate the noise made by solid things hitting each other. There's your onomatopoeic function; whenever there is a meaning that refers to things that can make noise, the noises made will often have the same symbolic mark as the event or thing that produces them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to follow this up, here's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/monobib.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bibliography on the phonosemantics of Assonance and Rime&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T14:27:59.843" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T14:27:59.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T03:07:19.290" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/so&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; states 'so' to originate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from PIE reflexive pronominal stem &lt;em&gt;*swo-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;so&amp;quot; [...], derivative of &lt;em&gt;*s(w)e-&lt;/em&gt;, pronoun of the third person and reflexive (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/idiom?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What semantic notions connect the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/so#h47136903683860&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5 meanings beneath of 'so'&lt;/a&gt;, with its PIE Etymon 'se-' that signifies &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/1657&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'self, one's own'&lt;/a&gt;? I can't understand how ''self, one's own'' semantically generalized to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ADVERB&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[as submodifier] To such a great extent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2.] 4. In the way described or demonstrated; thus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;CONJUNCTION&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3.] 1. And for this reason; therefore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4.] 1.1. (&lt;strong&gt;so that&lt;/strong&gt;) With the result that. With the aim that; in order that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5.] 3. And then; as the next step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T10:24:42.370" Title="Why was the English 'so' imputed to the PIE *se-?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T04:40:48.610" Score="0" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, Mood is marked by suffixes, prefixes, infixes etc. But are there languages which have mood marked by phonetic changes at syllable / word boundaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T15:14:44.727" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T09:23:59.567" Title="Are there examples of phonetic mood markers at syllable/word boundaries?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27599" CreationDate="2018-04-03T10:24:42.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is legitimate but I am afraid there is no convincing answer to it. Comparative Indo-European linguistic analysis is based mainly on regular correspondences among forms with &lt;strong&gt;similar&lt;/strong&gt; meanings. The concept of &lt;em&gt;semantic similarity&lt;/em&gt; is not well-defined however. Formal regular correspondences are so many and so clearly not based on chance that the difference in meaning are often disregarded as having little probatory power. In other words, if we observe words in two, or more, IE languages that patently present regular correspondences in their phonological shape, then the meanings can be also quite different, but we will consider them cognate nevertheless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is especially confusing with pronominal stems: sometimes they change their reference or grammatical characteristics quite abruptly. Usually, all the meanings that are more or less related to pronouns and pronoun-like adverbs are accepted as &quot;corresponding&quot; meanings for some forms under consideration. In other words: reflexive 3rd person pronouns are &quot;interchangeable&quot; with anaphoric/demonstrative 3rd p. pronouns, which, on their turn, are &quot;interchangeable&quot; with adverbial meanings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T10:24:42.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27606" CreationDate="2018-04-03T11:21:38.063" Score="1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Refer: WALS feature 3A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple Google search yielded -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5529419/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5529419/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which could be one of the reasons. But can anyone come up with some other reasons maybe concerning historical linguistics etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T15:14:42.990" Title="Why do most Austronesian and Polynesian languages have low consonant vowel ratio?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27600" CreationDate="2018-04-03T14:59:14.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes or no, depending on what exactly you are looking for. In most Bantu languages, tense etc. inflection for verbs involves adding certain tones. Verb inflection in Bantu covers all sorts of things, including mood, and there are indeed tonal markings that indicate subjunctive and imperative. This is frequently realized as a particular tone pattern on the last vowel of the verb (at the rightmost word boundary). I'm not sure that that constitutes a &quot;change&quot;, since all of the tonal distinctiveness is on the root-initial syllable, and the tones added for inflection really constitute more of a choice than a change. Also, it's not really phonetic, it is phonological (these are not low-level adjustments in H and L tones, these are categorial distinctions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Shona, there is an actual change which you could say marks a mood: interrogatives can be marked by changing the last H tone of a word to L. This is indeed a change, from whatever tone the final vowel would have (by whatever set of rules) to L, and this is the last rule of the grammar. However, this applies to any word, and I would say is not a &quot;marker&quot; in the usual sense, it is a phonological rule that applies in a specific pragmatic context that happens to correspond to a mood as found in some inflectional systems. Also, this applies at utterance boundaries, not word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Gurage languages, there are palatalizations and labializations that indicate various categories, and which affect root consonants. The labialization effect can apply to multiple consonants (non-coronal sonsonants can be labialized). Because Gurage has no C-clusters longer than 2, all consonants are at a syllable boundary. However, I don't believe that the labialization prosody happens to mark mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T14:59:14.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27602" CreationDate="2018-04-03T15:14:42.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;WALS doesn't make this explicit, but the C/V ratio is kind of a language family property. Berber languages have a high CV ratio, as do Khoisan, Salishan, Wakashan and Pama-Nyungan. PAN is reconstructed with 8 vowels and diphthongs and under 2 dozen consonants, which gives you a low CV ratio. Indo-European languages tend to have a higher CV ratio because PIE had more consonants. Of course any language can evolve and pick up or drop consonants and vowels in large numbers, but radical changes are historically less likely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T15:14:42.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T17:43:02.393" Score="0" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listening to political speeches and, other people talking about a list of things,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fix the water problem.&#xA;Fix the Roadways.&#xA;Cut Taxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that they have a raised tone on the last word as if they are asking a question.  Has this been there always and I hadn't noticed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21653" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T19:35:37.090" Title="intonation in a list of items" Tags="&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27607" CreationDate="2018-04-03T19:35:37.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a long-standing feature of various dialects outside the US. In the US, it was most strongly associated with Valleyspeak, although it is also a long-standing feature of North Dakota and Minnesota English (originating in Norwegian). It is now fairly standard across US dialects, but age- and gender-associated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T19:35:37.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27611" CreationDate="2018-04-03T23:10:45.703" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most tutorials I've seen on language models illustrate MLE estimation by counting. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;three blind&quot;) = count(&quot;three blind mice&quot;) / count(&quot;three blind&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But joint probability is commutative, and I'm pretty sure so is the context. P(c|a, b) = P(c|b, a)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused where this leaves MLE estimation though. Because I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the above means,&#xA;P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;three&quot;, &quot;blind&quot;) = P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;blind&quot;, &quot;three&quot;). In other words, P(&quot;three blind mice&quot;) = P(&quot;blind three mice&quot;) in this trigram model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the above incorrect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is correct, how then does MLE estimation work? Is the actual formula something like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;three&quot;, &quot;blind&quot;) = &#xA;[count(&quot;three blind mice&quot;) + count(&quot;blind three mice)] / &#xA;[count(&quot;three blind&quot;) + count(&quot;blind three&quot;)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21646" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T07:00:47.603" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T07:00:47.603" Title="Do language models ignore word order in the context?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27610" CreationDate="2018-04-03T23:45:58.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there are some context models that are unordered (Latent Semantic Analysis, some semantic word-vector approaches), that's not what you seem to be talking about. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Instead, I think the critical point is that you're describing the n-grams incorrectly. An n-gram model is usually ordered, so that the whole sequence &quot;three blind mice&quot; is a trigram, and &quot;blind three mice&quot; is a totally different trigram. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Your final formula seems to be trying to do both at once, which I'm not sure I've seen before. If you're really trying to answer the question 'What is P(&quot;mice&quot;) given that I know the last two words were &quot;three&quot; and &quot;blind&quot;, but I don't know in what order?', then I think it would just be P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;three blind&quot;) + P(&quot;mice&quot;|&quot;blind three&quot;). Obviously, this would get a lot more verbose at higher n-gram orders, but at that point I think you are indeed doing something closer to vector semantics. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;You might review &lt;em&gt;Speech and Language Processing&lt;/em&gt; by Daniel Jurafsky &amp;amp; James H. Martin, Chapter 4 'N-grams' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/4.pdf&lt;/a&gt;), specifically Eq. 4.2; it's true that the focus on bigrams makes it slightly ambiguous that larger n-gram models are not ignoring word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T00:22:42.737" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T00:22:42.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20777" CreationDate="2018-04-04T05:12:25.890" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-languages are indeed theories, the way that Evolution or Gravity is a theory. Confirmation of theories comes through their fit of the data, as @sumelic argues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As theoretical constructs, they are unstable, and subject to refinement—as the iterations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable&lt;/a&gt; illustrate. They are best guesses, and they are driven by trying to account for modern data, rather than as exercises in time travel. That's why the fact that they aren't always particularly pronounceable or typologically plausible is not really the point. They are not meant to be real languages; they are meant to be short-hand accounts of how a bunch of modern languages are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An added problem with the historical accuracy of proto-languages is that they only reconstruct what has survived in all the daughter languages; if a feature has died out in all daughter languages, you're unlikely to posit it for their ancestor, because you simply won't know it was ever there (and because you're following Occam's Razor in your modelling exercise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, because proto-languages are posited to have a historical reality, they could potentially be verified objectively through a time machine—comparing how close a fit the reconstructed proto-language is to what was actually spoken on say the steppes of Ukraine 5000 years ago. Unlike gravity. But like evolution, which would (and does) get confirmed through &quot;missing link&quot; fossils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the proto-Indo-European spoken on the steppes of Ukraine 5000 years ago (maybe) might not look all that close to our reconstruction, for reasons @sumelic mentions in passing. The history of IE may be explained by the Wave model more than we'd prefer, with Trubetzkoy proposing the extreme account that there may not even have been a single proto-Indo-European language. Trees are neater models than waves, and that's why we use them; they're not necessarily more historically accurate. But again, the point of proto-reconstruction is to explain regular relations between modern languages; it's not time travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, has there been confirmation? Not a lot, but some. A standard exercise is to reconstruct Vulgar Latin from Modern Romance languages, and to see how close it comes to what little Vulgar Latin we have. Sardinian is pretty critical in any reconstruction, because it preserves stuff from Latin that no other daughter does (which proves how fragile the reconstructions are.) From what I recall, the reconstruction is close, although we have so little Vulgar Latin attested, we rely on reconstruction to make sense of it anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact that circularity gets in the way of the few &quot;confirmations&quot; of proto-languages there have been. You could argue that the deciphering of Linear B confirms the reconstruction of kw in Proto-Greek, for example. But Linear B is such a poor transcription of Proto-Greek, that it would be impossible to decipher without the reconstruction of Proto-Greek in place to begin with. The deciphering of Linear B is so contingent on the reconstruction of Proto-Greek, that it'd be misleading to say it &lt;em&gt;confirms&lt;/em&gt; that reconstruction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for the one laryngeal that turned up in Hittite: it confirmed that Saussure wasn't just doing silly algebra when he came up with the laryngeals for Hittite, but it really is just one out of three laryngeals, and people embraced the other two laryngeals because they made sense as a reconstruction—whether or not they left any consonantal relics in Hittite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T05:12:25.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27621" CreationDate="2018-04-04T13:18:06.140" Score="3" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;When plotting the chart of the acoustic space of AmE vowels, we can represent F1 values on the y-axis and F2 values on the x-axis, like a chart on the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://sail.usc.edu/%7Elgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filter/SFc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Formant Frequencies&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, we can represent F1 values on the y-axis and F2-F1 values on the x-axis, like the chart on &lt;a href=&quot;https://sail.usc.edu/%7Elgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filter/SFc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 25&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the spatial distribution of vowels in the chart representing F2-F1 on the x-axis better resembles that in the IPA vowel chart, like the chart in an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/790/163363&quot;&gt;How can I practice differentiating between the “æ” and “ɛ” sounds in English phonology?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if this is true. And, if it is true, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12534" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T04:59:41.100" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T04:59:41.100" Title="When plotting vowel space, why does using F2-F1 better resemble the idealized vowel chart than using F1?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3035" CreationDate="2018-04-04T16:19:25.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although doing so it not with caveats, it is not hard to covert IPA to speech today. As other answers suggest, the free software/open source program &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eSpeak&lt;/a&gt; has been able to synthesis speech from something &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; IPA for years but its notation for describing phonemes is different. As a result, one must first convert from IPA to eSpeak's notation. Once that's done, it will synthesize text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is now a &lt;a href=&quot;https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phoneme synthesis tool&lt;/a&gt; that runs entirely in your browser and does these two steps (IPA→eSpeak phoneme notation→synthesized speech). The page for the tool explains the process, remarks that it is strange that this hasn't been done before, and even links to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21665" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T16:19:25.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2018-04-04T16:23:10.503" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phoneme synthesis tool&lt;/a&gt; that runs entirely in your browser and converts IPA into sound that you can play in your browser or download as a WAV file. It requires no software to install, no notation to learn (beyond IPA itself), and works quickly and well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program is Javascript and uses several of the tools described in other answers. In particular, it uses the free software/open source program &lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eSpeak&lt;/a&gt; has been able synthesize speech from something &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; IPA for years but its notation for describing phonemes is different. As a result, one must first convert from IPA to eSpeak's notation. Once that's done, it will synthesize text. The tool at the URL above does these two steps (IPA→eSpeak phoneme notation→synthesized speech). The page for the tool explains the process and remarks that it is strange that this hasn't been done before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21665" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T16:23:10.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27615" CreationDate="2018-04-04T18:46:02.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't entirely understand the why, but here is what I do know. The main reason for this convention is that F2-F1 gives a plot where the X axis better matches tongue position in back round vowels. The problem with bare F2 is that it makes vowels positions slope to the right as you go up (with [u o ɔ] not matching [ɯ ɤ ʌ]), but F2-F1 makes the back round vowels track actual tongue position, so that they slope to the left. The exact reason for this is somewhat mysterious to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the mysterious nature of the relationship between formants, tongue position and vowel charts comes from the traditional habit of thinking of vowel articulations as being a governed by two independent factors. However, a lifetime of work by Fant and others has demonstrated that a better model is a tube with a constriction, so there is as a first approximation only one factor (the second approximation adds differences in tube length, as a function of lip protrusion). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rounding lengthens the tube, which lowers all formants. The effect of rounding is greatest on F2, and it is greatest in back vowels. This bit of subtractive magic has the effect of &quot;figuring out&quot; what the lowering contribution of rounding is, and mostly removing it from the vowel plot. What is left, then, is an X value more based on tongue position, rather than the total length of the front tube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T18:46:02.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T02:21:59.277" Score="4" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about how a people who speak a language without rhotics would perceive a rhotic sound. Obviously of course, this would depend on exactly which rhotic we're talking about. I thought about making this question about rhotics specifically, but I think it would probably be more beneficial to talk about how languages deal with foreign phonemes in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experience, they typically just replace it with a native phoneme that overlaps with the foreign phoneme in how its pronounced. For instance, words with the voiceless velar fricative often have that phoneme replaced with the voiceless velar plosive in English. This can be seen in how the word 'loch' as in 'loch ness' is often pronounced, at least in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also seen languages that replace an 'f' sound with a 'p' sound. Humans seem to perceive alien fricatives as sounding as plosives. I have noticed that most Americans can't hear the difference between x and k, or a voiceless palatal fricative versus a voiceless post-alveolar palatal fricative (I personally can't understand how someone could fail to hear the difference between those two, but its surprisingly common).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some rhotics belong to unusual parts of speech. There's the alveolar flap for instance, and the alveolar trill. How do languages deal with phonemes that are part of a manner of articulation their language simply doesn't have? Personally, I suspect the most common replacements for an alveolar flap would be an alveolar approximant or plosive. They might perceive it as being somewhere between say 'l' and 'd'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course there's the extremely rare English 'r' sound. European languages just replace it with their own rhotic, obviously. But what about non indo-european languages that lack a rhotic? The only non IE language I know is Japanese, which does have a rhotic (a lateral alveolar flap, ironnically). The only 'manner of articulation' I've seen any language deal with are nasals, which people seem to like to replace with voiced stops (which makes pretty obvious sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T07:59:50.493" Title="How do people deal with loanwords with highly alien phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27622" CreationDate="2018-04-05T05:02:52.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rhotics aren't a special case here. They will still either be deleted or be replaced with the sound that is perceptually (to speakers of the receiving language) closest to the original sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English's /r/ [ɹ̠] is similar to /n/ and /l/ among others. For example, in the Algonquian language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innu_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Innu&lt;/a&gt;, English /r/ tends to be replaced by /n/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary → Mânî&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Andre → Ântane&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Pierre → Pien&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Marguerite → Mânikanet&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.innu-aimun.ca/pages/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ILP-Innu-and-English-Structures.pdf#page=11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T05:02:52.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27622" CreationDate="2018-04-05T05:32:09.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They adapt the sounds that are not in their native phonological systems by applying unsuppressed processes of that system, according to the theory of Natural Phonology.  Here is a bibliography of some online papers: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/donegan/Papers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural phonology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T05:32:09.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27600" CreationDate="2018-04-05T09:23:59.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;German marks mood by umlaut, e. g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ich mag&lt;/em&gt; (indicative) &gt; &lt;em&gt;ich möge&lt;/em&gt; (subjunctive II)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ich sehe&lt;/em&gt; (&gt;preterite: &lt;em&gt;sah&lt;/em&gt;) &gt; &lt;em&gt;ich sähe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ich liege&lt;/em&gt; (&gt; &lt;em&gt;ich lag&lt;/em&gt;) &gt; &lt;em&gt;ich läge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ich trage&lt;/em&gt; (&gt; ich trug) &gt; &lt;em&gt;ich trüge&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(a + j &gt; ä /ɛ/, u + j &gt; ü /y/,...)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This inflection is based on i-umlaut motivates different morphophonological developments. In older German the non-real moods were marked by suffigation of a /-j/, but this suffix was incorporated into the verb stem. Back vowels become fronted by merging with the /-j/, front vowels are moved towards /e/. This development is similar to ablaut which is basically used to mark tenses, namely present &gt; preterite &gt; perfect participle (i &gt; a &gt; u) with falling vowel formant gradient. Since tense is never purely tense but also mood (i. e. accessibility of the event from the context at hand) preterite served as a base for the less immediate, less accessible irrealis expressed by subjunctive II.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB causatives were also derived by i-mutation, e.g. &lt;em&gt;food&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;feed&lt;/em&gt; in Engl., &lt;em&gt;trinken&lt;/em&gt; (“to drink”) &gt; &lt;em&gt;tränken&lt;/em&gt; (“to make/let someone drink”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T09:23:59.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27465" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:17:13.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think palatalization of final s in such environments is the most common outcome, and I wouldn't trust native speakers not versed on linguistics since the difference is not phonemic, let alone represented in spelling.&#xA;I also have the feeling that palatalization in &lt;em&gt;nys&lt;/em&gt; is clearer than in &lt;em&gt;lls&lt;/em&gt;. My &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;anys&lt;/em&gt; is a downright /ʃ/, but in &lt;em&gt;valls&lt;/em&gt; it's so soft that I'm not even sure if it's palatalized at all. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/FocFollet/status/981206484506828800&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lluís' tweet&lt;/a&gt; (and he's quite a knowledgeable guy IMHO) where he transcribes &lt;em&gt;anys&lt;/em&gt; (before vowel) as /aɲʒ/, while Tonifranro's version (Valencian &lt;em&gt;apitxat&lt;/em&gt;) uses /aɲtʃ/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &quot;final&quot; is a necessary condition, it just happens that the vast majority of instances are plurals from a word ending in &lt;em&gt;-ny&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ll&lt;/em&gt;. The only counterexamples I can think of are &lt;em&gt;menystenir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;menysprear&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea, but my feeling is that since the very first moment these sounds come into contact it's totally natural to assimilate them. Note that the opposite direction also takes place: in words with &lt;em&gt;nx&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;lx&lt;/em&gt;. See DCVB's entries for e.g. &lt;em&gt;llanxa&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Elx&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21675" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:17:13.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-06T00:10:20.307" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the phrase &lt;em&gt;a month in&lt;/em&gt; in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] a. &lt;em&gt;Richmond turned nineteen his third week in Vietnam. A&amp;#x332;l&amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;, he was &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;still looking for anything he could relate to.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nBzpPGNn0xMC&amp;amp;lpg=PA130&amp;amp;dq=%22A%20month%20in%2C%20he%22&amp;amp;pg=PA130#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22A%20month%20in,%20he%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. &lt;em&gt;Honestly it's just been a nightmare from the beginning. My bf wanted me to quit &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;a&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332; without another job.&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/7cpovu/quitting_without_notice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should this &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; be analyzed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been unable to find an answer in any of my usual sources. To begin with, the OED does not record this usage of &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; anywhere in any of its entries for that word. Neither do any of the three comprehensive grammars I usually look at (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0582517346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ComGEL&lt;/a&gt;, and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0582237254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absent an explicit treatment by sources known to me, two theories would seem to suggest themselves. Which, if any, is right?&#xA;(This question is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/439867/what-does-died-a-year-in-mean/439873?noredirect=1#comment1056129_439873&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; over on ELU StackExchange, and these two theories came up during discussions with others at ELU.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theory 1: &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; in [1] is the same as &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; in [18] below&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt; (p. 632), noting the similarity between [1] above and [18] in the passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; the thrust of this part of my question is not on whether CGEL has correctly analyzed [18]. For example, maybe &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; in [18] a isn't a preposition after all. My primary question, actually, is whether &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; in [1] and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; in [18] b are both instances of the 'same thing', i.e. whether they should both be analyzed the same way, whatever way that is. (Having said that, if you think they can be analyzed in the same way, but think that &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; in [18] cannot, I would be interested to hear why.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; following expressions denoting periods of time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More problematic is the analysis of the bracketed phrases in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[18] a. &lt;em&gt;She died [ten years a&amp;#x332;g&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;].&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. &lt;em&gt;[Ten years o&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;] nothing had changed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymologically, &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; derives from a past participle form &lt;em&gt;agone&lt;/em&gt; (the prefix &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; + the past participle of &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;), so that &lt;em&gt;ten years ago&lt;/em&gt; has its origin in a subject-predicate construction  comparable to that in [17ii] (&lt;em&gt;No one — [missionaries i&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;c&amp;#x332;l&amp;#x332;u&amp;#x332;d&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;d&amp;#x332;] — had any right to intrude on their territory&lt;/em&gt;) except that the past participle is active rather than passive. &lt;em&gt;Ago&lt;/em&gt;  is of course no longer construed as a past participle, but how the construction should now be analysed is unclear: it is syntactically highly exceptional. Expressions like &lt;em&gt;ten &#xA;  years&lt;/em&gt; occur as optional modifiers modifying prepositions (&lt;em&gt;ten years b&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;f&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332; her death&lt;/em&gt;) and &#xA;  adverbs (&lt;em&gt;ten years e&amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;l&amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332;&lt;/em&gt;), but with &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; such an expression is obligatory, which indicates that it has the status of a complement. Traditional grammar classifies &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; as an adverb, but on the basis that it takes a complement we analyse it as a preposition, in accordance with the criteria given in §2.4. It is even more exceptional than &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt;, etc., in  that it always follows its complement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On&lt;/em&gt;, in the sense it has in [18b], namely &quot;later&quot;, likewise cannot occur without the accompanying phrase: &lt;em&gt;&amp;#42;On, nothing had changed&lt;/em&gt;. We again take the dependent to be a  complement, therefore, and treat on in this sense like &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;, as a preposition that follows its complement. (One further case where a preposition follows its complement is in the idiom &lt;em&gt;(all) the world over&lt;/em&gt;, which is essentially equivalent to the syntactically regular construction &lt;em&gt;all over the world&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further arguments that &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521612888&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston and Pullum&lt;/a&gt;, p. 141:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The exceptional preposition &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is one preposition that is strikingly exceptional in that it invariably FOLLOWS its complement. This is &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;She arrived two weeks ago&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;two weeks&lt;/em&gt; is complement of &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;. The order here reflects the historical origin of &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt;: it derives from the form &lt;em&gt;agone&lt;/em&gt;, containing the past participle of &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;. Originally &lt;em&gt;two weeks ago&lt;/em&gt; meant something like &quot;two weeks gone&quot;, i.e., located at a point in time that is now two weeks gone by into the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dictionaries classify &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; as an adverb, but there is compelling evidence that it is a preposition, exceptional only in its position relative to its complement. Consider the following data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[29] i a. &lt;em&gt;I spent t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; in Paris.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; b. &lt;em&gt;&amp;#42;I spent t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;g&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; in Paris.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;ii a. &lt;em&gt;&amp;#42;She arrived t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332;.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. &lt;em&gt;She arrived t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;g&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;iii a. &lt;em&gt;I recall his behaviour t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;g&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;nbsp;b. &lt;em&gt;That was t&amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;w&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;e&amp;#x332;k&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;a&amp;#x332;g&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Examples [i-ii] show that &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; is head of the phrase &lt;em&gt;two weeks ago&lt;/em&gt;: the distribution of the whole phrase is quite different from that of &lt;em&gt;two weeks&lt;/em&gt; alone. In [iii] we see that &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; phrases readily modify nouns or function as predicative complement to verbs like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: these functions are characteristic of PPs, not AdvPs, as we noted in §2.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theory 2: &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; in [1] is the result of an ellipsis of an &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; phrase&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this theory, the sentences in [1] are ellipted versions of something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] a. &lt;em&gt;Almost a&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;u&amp;#x332;r&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;f&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;d&amp;#x332;u&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;y&amp;#x332;, he was still looking for anything he could relate to.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;b. &lt;em&gt;My bf wanted me to quit a&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;m&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;n&amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;t&amp;#x332;h&amp;#x332;i&amp;#x332;s&amp;#x332; &amp;#x332;j&amp;#x332;o&amp;#x332;b&amp;#x332; without another job.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why in [2] we have &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; is that the NP that follows would have been in the accusative (in the days when English had a well-developed case system). The OED explains it as follows in its entry for the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The preposition expressing the relation of inclusion, situation, position, existence, or action, within limits of space, time, condition, circumstances, etc. In ancient times, expressing also (like Latin &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;) motion or direction from a point outside to one within limits; the two senses being determined by the case of the word expressing the limits, the former taking the dative (originally locative), the latter the accusative or case of direction. These cases being subsequently levelled, this distinction ceased to be practicable, and the latter relation is now ordinarily expressed by the compound &lt;em&gt;in-to, into prep.&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;adj&lt;/em&gt;.; but there are various locutions in which (either because the accompanying verb conveys the sense of motion, or through the preservation of an ancient phrase without analysis) &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; still expresses motion from without to within.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then the idea is that the ellipsis of expressions like those in [2] into those like those in [1] perhaps happened &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the accusative got lost and got compensated by changing &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, perhaps when the ellipsis of [2] happens, we would be left with &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; on his own, which is not acceptable, and so is shortened into &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; (which is what it was in the first place, while NPs still all had cases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some reasons to think that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a case of ellipsis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. It is not listed as an example of ellipsis in either ComGEL or CGEL, even though they list a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of types of ellipsis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. It really &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; fit all that well the criteria for ellipsis given in ComGEL (pp. 883-888). Let's consider some of these criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(a) The ellipted words are precisely recoverable&lt;/strong&gt; This means that in a context where no ambiguity of reference arises, there is no doubt as to what words are to be supplied: &lt;em&gt;She can't sing tonight, so she won't.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not satisfied in my case—it is in fact &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; completely clear what words are omitted (is it really 'his tour of duty'? Are we sure it isn't e.g. 'his service'?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(b) The elliptical construction is grammatically 'defective'&lt;/strong&gt; Typically, ellipsis is postulated in order to explain why some normally obligatory element of a grammatical sentence is lacking. If such 'gaps' did not occur, there would be no obvious grammatical motive for invoking the concept of ellipsis in the first place. For example, in &lt;em&gt;She can't sing tonight, so she won't&lt;/em&gt;, the auxiliary &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; occurs without a following main verb.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this it follows that the burden of proof is on those who claim that something &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an instance of ellipsis. And in this case, we do have an alternative possibility, namely Theory 1, which (maybe) can explain [1] without resorting to postulating an ellipsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(c) The insertion of the missing words results in a grammatical sentence (with the same meaning as the original sentence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned, our case will fail to satisfy this &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; we change &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt;. But that already means we are not dealing with a typical ellipsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(d) The missing words are textually recoverable&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the discussion of (a) above, it is clear that our sentences do not satisfy (d), either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But doesn't the above then show that Theory 2 is definitely wrong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, not quite. ComGEL also says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ellipsis defined in terms of gradience&lt;/strong&gt; In view of the variable application of the above criteria (a-e) for ellipsis, it is reasonable to use the term 'ellipsis' in a way which acknowledges different degrees of strictness in its interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason to why &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; might be different from &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; is that the phrases in [18] could not have come about as ellipses of anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it seems that one can repeat everything in [29] above for &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; (literally just replace &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;). True, all that shows is that &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; is a preposition in that phrase; but if &lt;em&gt;ago&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; can function like this, why couldn't &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;? Why postulate an ellipsis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to repeat: how to analyze the &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; in [1]? Is either of my theories correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="11228" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T20:51:44.103" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T20:51:44.103" Title="'Ago' and 'on' vs. 'in'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22670" CreationDate="2018-04-06T00:49:44.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;best&quot; answer always depends upon the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Learn IPA&quot; is certainly the most widely useful answer, but it may not be possible for the people you are dealing with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One use I can think of is to take one language, translate it to IPA then translate the IPA to the nearest phonetic equivalent words in a second language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it does not do a lot of things, it does make it possible for someone to learn to pronounce phrases knowing no more than their own language. For translation aimed at illiterate people, this would be fast and immediately useful--often serious considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, every language would have IPA as it's written form--no silent letters or words. Every written symbol pronounceable. This would be highly useful and it even saves data space, it would put everyone a step up on learning any new language, and provide an instant written language for any verbal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is needed is a way to translate the 80% of communications which, being non-verbal, cannot be represented in IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21678" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T00:49:44.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-04-06T08:37:25.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is too vague to effectively answer. When you ask, “How will they differ?” – are you wanting to know whether there will be a noticeable accent difference or a thought-pattern difference (e.g. it’s easier to ‘think’ in either language)? Unfortunately, sequential vs simultaneous bilingualism simply addresses the circumstances of acquiring the languages, not to the end result. So resulting speech and thought patterns will be extremely dependent on the individual and their linguistic context. When you ask “Who will be a better speaker?”- are you asking who will have a broader lexicon or better listening skills or stronger translating skills? The answer is likely “whichever receives a more thorough education, all other factors being equal.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language development is highly individualized, extremely context-driven, and of course education dependent. These cast an entire spectrum of nuance into any aspect of discussion. For example, it’s difficult to cast ‘simultaneous bilingual’ learners into the same light as many of them will still have ‘dominant bilingualism’ rather than ‘balanced bilingualism.’ For many of them, their language learning process may still have similar aspects to the sequential bilingual learner as their proficient language may help frame and inform the less proficient one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21687" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T08:37:25.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27633" CreationDate="2018-04-06T11:04:39.857" Score="3" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible due to mythological reasons or some other human error (what can be the reasons of those errors in that case) that a language's number is flawed for e.g. -&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Zoque-Copainala.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Copainala Zoque number system&quot;&gt;Copainala Zoque number system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/Zoque-Rayon.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Rayon Zoque number systems&quot;&gt;Rayon Zoque number system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases (probably because they are neighbours/dialects) they miscount 8 and 9 as 9 and 10 respectively. (Or is this just some negligence on the linguist's side, which doesn't seem to be the case, as the miscounting is specifically indicated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also does anyone know of more examples like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T11:23:22.623" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T17:08:49.513" Title="Is it possible that a language's number system is inherently wrong?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27631" CreationDate="2018-04-06T13:13:36.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are examples like this, and we all use that example every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look how Arabic digits look like, compared to Devanagari, Gujarati, and other Indic scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;૫ ૬ ૭ ૮&quot; are &quot;5 6 7 8&quot; correspondingly, but they visually resemble &quot;4 5 6 7&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fQfuq.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fQfuq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Digits in Indic scripts&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T13:13:36.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27631" CreationDate="2018-04-06T17:08:49.513" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think a number system can be inherently wrong any more than gravity can be wrong; but a system can be confusing from a historical perspective. Numbers seems to be highly subject to reanalyses. From that number page, you can get additional examples of Mixe-Zoque numerals. These are the numerals 1-12 in Quetzaltepec Mixe, Juquila Mixe, Chuxnaban Mixe, Tontontepec Mixe,  (Highland Popoluca), the latter parenthesized since they switch to Spanish  for 6 and higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1: tuʼuk, tuʼuk, tuʔuk, toʼk, (tuum)&#xA;2: mæhck, mæhck, mææht͡sk, mæhck, (wɨsteen)&#xA;3: tɨɡɨɨk, tɨɡɨk, tɨkɨɨk, toohk, (tukuteen)&#xA;4: mahktaxk, mahtaxk, taʃk, maktaaxk, (maktasteen)&#xA;5: mɨɡɔxk, mɨɡɔxk, mɨkoʃk, muɡɔɔxk, (mosteen)&#xA;6: tɨduhk, tɨduhk, tɨtuuhk, tohtɨk&#xA;7: wɨxtuhk, jɨxtuhk, hʃtuuhk, wuxtohtɨk&#xA;8: tuktuhk, tuktuhk, tuktuuhk, toodohtɨk&#xA;9: taxtuhk, taxtuhk, taʃtuuhk, taaxtohɨk&#xA;10: mahk, mahk, maahk, mahk&#xA;11: mahktuʼuk, mahtuʼuk, maahktuʔuk, maktoʼk&#xA;12: mahkmæhck, mahmæhck, mamææht͡sk, makmæhck&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare to Rayón Zoque, Copainalá Zoque:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1: tumɨ, tumɨ&#xA;2: meca, meca&#xA;3: tukaʼ, tukaʼy&#xA;4: makšku, makškuʼy&#xA;5: mosaʼ, mohsaʼy&#xA;6: tuhtaʼ, tuhtaʼy&#xA;7: kuʼyaʼ, kuʼyaʼy&#xA;8: tukuduhtaʼ, tukuthtaʼy&#xA;9: makstuhtaʼ, makstuhtaʼy&#xA;10: mahkaʼ, mahkaʼy&#xA;11: maktumɨ, maktumaʼy&#xA;12: makwɨstɨhkaʼ, makwɨstɨhkaʼy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Zoque numbers for &quot;8&quot; are sufficiently similar to the numbers in the other languages that I could accept that these reflect the earlier situation, whereas &quot;9&quot; diverges substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can engage in the exercise of comparing the bits of these numerals and discern partial similarities across the languages. Zoque &quot;9&quot; &lt;em&gt;makstuhtaʼ&lt;/em&gt; looks like it contains &quot;4&quot; &lt;em&gt;makšku&lt;/em&gt;, but it also looks like it contains &quot;10&quot; &lt;em&gt;mahkaʼ&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;1 from 10&quot;). Zoque &quot;6&quot; and &quot;3&quot; seem to have common elements. Zoque &quot;12&quot; seems to have the elements of &quot;10&quot; and &quot;2&quot;, except that that &quot;2&quot; element itself is only found in Popoluca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common enough historical pattern across languages that adjacent numbers influence each other. If &quot;8&quot; &lt;em&gt;tukuduhtaʼ&lt;/em&gt; looks like &quot;3-6&quot;, and if Zoque &quot;9&quot; should have been &lt;em&gt;takstuhta&lt;/em&gt;, then it is not surprising that Zoque &quot;4&quot; &lt;em&gt;makšku&lt;/em&gt; could have influenced the change of &lt;em&gt;takstuhta&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;makstuhta&lt;/em&gt;. There is an analogous influence in Russian (and maybe all of Slavic, I don't know) where expected &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;ev'at'&lt;/em&gt; appears as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;ev'at'&lt;/em&gt;, under the influence of &lt;em&gt;des'at'&lt;/em&gt; &quot;10&quot;, and similarly &quot;8&quot; &lt;em&gt;vos'e&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was influence by &quot;7&quot; &lt;em&gt;s'e&lt;strong&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T17:08:49.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-07T04:53:42.470" Score="3" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find a paper containing new lists of cognates on PIE root level, and don't know such phenomena or rules are convincing or not, the list follows below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. The voiceless stop vs. voiced aspirated stop alternation3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.1. *dʰrei̯k(ʰ)- vs. *dʰrei̯gʰ-: ‘hair, bristle’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.2. *h₁eḱ(s)- vs. *h₁eǵʰ(s)-: ‘out’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.3. *(h₂)kou̯s- vs. *gʰou̯s-: ‘hear, sound’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.4. **h₁reu̯t- vs. *h₁reu̯dʰ-: ‘red’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.5. *ḱ(e)rd- vs. *ǵʰ(e)rd-: ‘heart’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.6. *kap- vs. *gʰabʰ-: ‘grab, take’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.7. *kaput- vs. *k(a)ubʰut-: ‘head’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.8. *ḱel-1 vs. *ǵʰel(h₂)-/*gʰel-1: ‘warm, bright, shine, yellow, green, blue, sun’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.9. *ḱelb- vs. *ǵʰelb-/gʰelb-: ‘help’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.10. *ḱer-2 vs. *gʰer-: ‘grow’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.11 . *ḱe-/*ḱo- vs. *gʰe-/*gʰo-: ‘this, that’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.12. *ko(m)- vs. **gʰo(m)-: ‘with, together’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.13. *lei̯p-1 vs. *Hlei̯bʰ-: ‘smear, stick’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.14. *lei̯t-1, *lei̯t(ʰ)-29 vs. *lai̯dʰ-: ‘be disgusted, suffer, hurt’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.15. *lento-12 vs. *lendʰ-1: ‘flexible, fluid’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.16. *mei̯k- vs. *mei̯gʰ-: ‘close the eyes’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.17. *n̥ter- vs. *n̥dʰer-: ‘under, below’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.18. *pel-9 vs. *bʰel-1: ‘white, shine, burn’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.19. *per-2/*per-2B vs. *bʰer-1: ‘over, go over, carry over’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.20. *pleu̯- vs. *bʰleu̯-: ‘run, flow, swim’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.21 . *pleu̯k- vs. **pleu̯gʰ-: ‘fly’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.22. *plou̯- vs. *b(ʰ)lou̯-: ‘flea’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.23. *rep- vs. *rebʰ-: ‘grab, rip out, be taken, be furious’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.24. *sek-2, *skei̯- vs. *segʰ-, **sgʰei̯-: ‘cut, separate’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.25. *(s)keu̯p- vs. *(s)keu̯b(ʰ)-: ‘bundle, flock’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.26. *telek- vs. *teleǵʰ-13: ‘hit’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.27. *ters- vs. *dʰer-2: ‘dry’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.28. *-tlom vs. *-dʰlom, *-trom vs. *-dʰrom: instrumental suffixes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.29. *tragʰ- vs. *dʰ(e)ragʰ-: ‘pull, bring’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.30. *u̯ekʷ- vs. *u̯egʷʰ-: ‘speak, speak solemnly’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. The *l/*n alternation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.1. *al-1, *ol- vs. *an-2, *on-: ‘this, that’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.2. *mel-4 vs. *men(e)gʰ-: ‘much’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.3. *pleu̯- vs. *pneu̯-: ‘flow, blow’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.4. *-sleh₂ vs. *-sneh₂: object indicative suffixes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.5. *su̯el- vs. *su̯en-: ‘sun’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.6. *u̯el-2 vs. *u̯en-1/*u̯enH-: ‘want, love’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.7. *u̯el-8 vs. *u̯en-2: ‘hurt, hit’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Co-occurrence of both alternations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.1. *gal-2 vs. *gʰel- vs. *kel-6 vs. *kan-/*ḱan-: ‘call, cry, sing’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322721257_Consonantal_Alternations_in_Indo-European_Roots_Diatopic_andor_Diachronic_Variants_or_Functional_Mechanism?enrichId=rgreq-cc79053788bc6478c2b94e45b04cf6e6-XXX&amp;amp;enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzMyMjcyMTI1NztBUzo1ODcwMzE0NzQzNzI2MTZAMTUxNjk3MDYxODYzOA%3D%3D&amp;amp;el=1_x_2&amp;amp;_esc=publicationCoverPdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Consonantal Alternations in Indo-European Roots: Diatopic and/or Diachronic Variants or Functional Mechanism?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, published by &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jies.org/docs/jies_index/Vol45.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Journal of Indo-European Studies The 45 Vol., 2017&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T07:13:35.017" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T07:13:35.017" Title="Can these new etymological pairs of PIE roots be true?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-07T06:33:03.307" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder makes the claim that case endings 'makes things compact and frees up word order'. The latter is pretty obvious, but do case endings really make things more 'compact'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to see why. For case endings you still have to add a phoneme or two to the end of a word (well, assuming the language uses suffixes to mark case), which is about as long as many prepositions. Also, many languages with case (though not all) also have adjective-noun agreement, which means that the case ending appears for every adjective and noun that appears in a noun phrase, which can obviously multiply the number of phonemes that the case ending adds to the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it also may be worthwhile to note that the author claims to know Quecha, which has case endings that are all syllables, some of them are even multiple syllables long. I don't know if quecha has adjective-noun agreement or not, but it doesn't really look like it uses any less phonemes than a free-standing adposition. Perhaps the lack of spaces may help a bit, but other than that I fail to see how case endings can make a language more 'compact'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that I don't really know any language with case. Well, German does, but only in its personal pronouns. For nouns the case is (typically) only marked on the article. This does save some space since you have a single word (most of which are mono-syllabic) that indicates both case and definiteness, and also number (though very few German nouns rely solely on the article to indicate number, most nouns do have distinct singular and plural forms). Latin, of course, lacks definiteness. Also, it could be said this space-saving is due to inflections rather than case endings. Yes, inflections CAN reduce the number of phonemes in a sentence. Spanish for instance has verb endings that indicate person, number, tense, and mood. And most of these are only one or two phonemes long. An agglutinating language would need a minimum of 4 phonemes to indicate all of this (assuming that each of these could be marked with a single phoneme, which I don't think many agglutinating languages do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T14:30:30.857" Title="Do case endings really make sentences shorter?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27637" CreationDate="2018-04-07T07:55:41.067" Score="2" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for &lt;em&gt;Linguistics Competitions&lt;/em&gt; suitable for MSc or PhD students in Computational Linguistics.  I don't see anything current on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/competitions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaggle&lt;/a&gt;, and I am looking into &lt;a href=&quot;https://trec.nist.gov/faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TREC&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;added:&lt;/strong&gt; recurring preferred (thank you, @tripleee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just a student myself, so I would welcome any pointers about where to look that experienced Linguists can suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about whether this is an &lt;em&gt;answerable&lt;/em&gt; question and it seems that community resources, like competitions, &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have concrete answers (vs &quot;only opinions&quot;).  So I'm tentatively raising the question.  And I am totally open to being corrected and will un-ask if this won't be helpful to others (or is otherwise ill-suited for the stackexchange Linguistics forum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17180" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T05:49:17.893" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T20:02:00.170" Title="linguistics competitions?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27636" CreationDate="2018-04-07T08:41:12.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one that I know of: Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/lorehlt-evaluations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is the link&lt;/a&gt; (also a NIST competition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T08:41:12.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27634" CreationDate="2018-04-07T09:13:17.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly but we're delving here into the language that went before proto-Indo-European.&#xA;The alternations are ones found in other languages. For example the l/n alternation is found in Ancient Egyptian and the k/gh is reminiscent (although different) to Verner's alternations in Germanic, so the theory is not far-fetched.&#xA;There may be the relic of the l/n alternation in Germanic in the word for 'sun' (English 'sun' but Gothic 'sauil'), which indicates there may have still been an l/n grammatical alternation in proto-germanic.&#xA;Given the number of pairs found by Bizzocchi it looks likely and I'm sure that many theories can be built around this evidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T09:13:17.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27640" CreationDate="2018-04-07T13:53:43.687" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's First Folio (please see the picture), I found that a letter 'u' is used instead of 'v'. For example, &quot;seuen&quot; means &quot;seven&quot;. To know this reason, I visited many websites, but what I've got is only the fact that &lt;code&gt;Before the use of the letter U, the shape V stood for both the vowel U and the consonant V&lt;/code&gt;. If you follow this rule, I think &quot;seven&quot; remains &quot;seven&quot; but &quot;you&quot; becomes &quot;yov&quot;. Why in the folio is 'u' used as a substitution for 'v'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't either know the reason why 'c' in &quot;Acts&quot; looks like an ampersand '&amp;amp;'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is also strange that 's' in &quot;stage&quot; looks like 'f', but I know it is so-called a long s.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MsyWU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MsyWU.png&quot; alt=&quot;![enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(picture from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21692" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T03:24:13.143" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T03:24:13.143" Title="'u' as a substition for 'v'" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27639" CreationDate="2018-04-07T14:59:53.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is best to consider first the origins of the English orthography. If we consider the alphabet of Golden Age Latin, it comprises 23 letters: A  B     C   D   E   F   G   H   I   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   V   X   Y   Z. Because U and V share the same etymological link to the Phoenecian letter 'waw', «v» could represent either the phonemes /v/ or /u/.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By the Middle Ages should this grapheme occur at the beginning of a word, it was resolved that «v» would be used to depict the phoneme, and if in the intermediate or end position of the word, «u» used. &#xA;This is the reason 'you' would never be realised as 'yov', appearing rather slavic!&#xA;Haue an vplifting day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21693" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T13:45:39.470" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T13:45:39.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26560" CreationDate="2018-04-07T23:46:04.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some evidence indicating that back vowels are more sonorous than front vowels, although the relation could also be based on round (more sonorous) vs non-round, since the data comes from Modern Greek where back and round correlate in the typical way. This is discussed in E. Kaisse's Harvard dissertation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a general phenomenon of hiatus resolution whereby V#V sequences reduce to a single vowel by deleting one of the two vowels. Which vowel deletes depends on the properties of the vowels; there is also variation between dialects; there are multiple rules that implement this hiatus-resolution plan; and there are different syntactic conditions on the different rules. The general pattern (most pan-Greek) is that the &quot;more sonorous&quot; vowel is retained, and the hierarchy of vowels, in terms of sonority, is [a &gt; o &gt; u &gt; e &gt; i]. Examples of this here come from Peloponnesian (glosses are my construction based on available information from Kaisse). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ta éxo/ → [táxo] (I have them); /me aγapái/ → [maγapái] (he loves me);&#xA;  /ta onirévome → [tanirévome] (I dream of them); /to alázo/ → [talázo] (I&#xA;  change it); /to urliazi/ → torliázi] (?he howls it); /tu oðiγó/ →&#xA;  [toðiγó] (I lead to him); /mu éðosa/ → [múðosa] (he gave to me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the system is rather different in Urban Athenian, which has more specific sandhi processes and a different sonority hierarchy, viz [o &gt; a &gt; u &gt; i &gt; e]. There are other claims regarding sonority-based vowel rules in Greek such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/thal/article/viewFile/5223/5109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assimilation in Cretan&lt;/a&gt; which confirms the general pattern though collapsing /e,i/ into a single position. The interesting thing about the Greek pattern is that it seems to contradict the typical functional explanation for the effect, that more sonorous vowels have a more open vocal tract. Round vowels have a more closed vocal tract. If &quot;scale&quot; effects are always based on sonority, then this calls into question the functional explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other type of oft-cited evidence regarding sonority is that schwa is often treated differently in stress systems, viz. is skipped for stress. This leads some to say that central vowels are particularly non-sonorous, but that does not address back vs. front. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T23:46:04.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T14:28:15.907" Score="2" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both terms, &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prototype&lt;/em&gt; occur in semantic texts roughly in the sense &lt;em&gt;a mental object denoted by a word&lt;/em&gt;. There should be some difference in definition between the two. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the following in an elementary text in semantics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The concepts that we use as word-senses are defined in terms of clear, typical, central, cases (called prototypes), but their boundaries are left unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the relation between the two terminologies &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prototype&lt;/em&gt; still appears very unclear to me. Could anyone tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21703" LastEditorUserId="21703" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T23:58:19.080" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T03:21:06.380" Title="what’s the difference between ‘concept’ and ‘prototype’ as semantic terminologies?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T23:07:30.347" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope everyone is fine. I was wondering if you could help me with some suggestions about which book(s) should I start with to learn the Davidsonian semantics, so that I will be able to read and write its notation and labeling system. Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T07:47:21.887" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T07:47:21.887" Title="davidsonian semantics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27651" CreationDate="2018-04-09T00:28:19.263" Score="0" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I got this question in my midterm exam and it was out of nowhere. All what I could think about that time is that letters are written and sounds are spoken, the letters are made from a vowel and a consonant, but a sound is made from either a vowel or a consonant. and also the sound can be written in different letters such as the sound /k/ it can be written in C, K or, Q.&#xA;Can anyone give me other reasons??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21576" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T16:14:06.690" Title="there is no relation between phonetic sounds and letters. explain?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-15T08:54:30.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27644" CreationDate="2018-04-09T00:44:15.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the question is something like &quot;Is it true that there is no relation between phonetic sounds and letters&quot;, the answer would be &quot;No, that is false&quot;. For example, you can probably make a reasonable approximation of the sounds of the preceding sentences of English, just based on the letters. In some languages, you can be pretty sure what sounds correspond to what letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of English, the relationship is very complicated and does not always work – it also depends on what other knowledge you can bring to bear on getting the pronunciation. For example, [θ] and [ð] are both represented with &quot;th&quot; in spelling, but you can predict that if you can distinguish the historical source of a word with &quot;th&quot;. If you know that &quot;either&quot; is Germanic and &quot;ether&quot; is Greek, you can predict the pronunciation of &quot;th&quot; (in Germanic words, initial [ð] is limited to articles / demonstratives). Unless you spend a lot of time trying to discern subtle rules about spelling in English (and the origin of words in English), English is fairly irregular in the relationship between letters and sounds. However, &quot;k&quot; is not pronounced as [p], or as [v], or as [l], so saying that there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; relation is a bit of hyperbole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the chance (suggested by triplee) that the intended point is that letter shapes don't resemble articulatory diagrams, that's generally true except that Korean Hangul is (historically) a conventionalized articulatory diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T16:14:06.690" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T16:14:06.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27642" CreationDate="2018-04-09T03:21:06.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we talk about &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; we're referring to the mental ideas and knowledge we possess. For a simple example, we have the concept of BIG or BIGNESS. (BIG is a semantic prime in &lt;a href=&quot;https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/schools-departments/natural-semantic-metalanguage/what-is-nsm/semantic-primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that it is a core concept which can't be broken down into other concepts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Models of semantics based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prototype theory&lt;/a&gt; argue that prototypes rather than boundaries are the best way to understand how we humans actually reason, while also sometimes providing an effective way to describe the concepts we know. For BIG, prototypical big things would include mountains, elephants, and sky scrapers. Defining something by its prototypes (which NSM argues you don't do for BIG because it's a prime) would mean saying that BIG means &quot;when I think of something that is BIG, I think 'That's like a mountain' or 'That's like an elephant'.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we use concepts to think about non-prototypical things. We think about big mice, or big ants. But it's important to understand that the concept BIG is not being misused when we think or talk about big ants. It's not limited to its prototypes. Nor is the concept BIG being only metaphorically applied to ants. When an ant is BIG that is still a pure use of the concept of BIG even though it's not prototypical. We might teach a concept through its prototypes, but its meaning is not necessarily truly found in its prototypes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, a small star is truly SMALL. I think this shows one last difference between concepts and prototypes: prototypes are identified relative to being a human, but concepts (for adjectives at least) are relative to whatever is 'normal' for the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T03:21:06.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27622" CreationDate="2018-04-09T07:59:50.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lexicalization of loans is a longer process, you have many words which are undiscernible from native words by a layperson because they have been so completely internalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, you have words like &lt;em&gt;ditty&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; which can be traced back to stems of Latin origin, but which have been so completely adapted to the form of modern English that you need specialist knowledge to establish this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swedish, a lot of the old Norse vocabulary has been displaced with German loans which sometimes make little sense in Swedish. Everyday words like &lt;em&gt;anhörig&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;begära&lt;/em&gt; are somewhat opaque (though some morphemes trace back to shared Germanic roots which were also present in older Norse) but make perfect sense in German. Some others which are outright peculiar in Swedish include &lt;em&gt;fogsvans&lt;/em&gt; (literally &quot;joint tail&quot;, where the German word means &quot;fox tail&quot; -- still a weird term for a saw). Later, French loans have entered the language in the 18th century, originally in forms like &lt;em&gt;lavoir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;manquements,&lt;/em&gt; but now have modernized spelling and native-like pronounciation &lt;em&gt;lavoar,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;mankemang.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish is pecular because even more than Swedish, it has replaced much of the original Fenno-Ugric vocabulary with loans of Indo-European origin. A large number of words like &lt;em&gt;pallo&lt;/em&gt; (ball) and &lt;em&gt;ranta&lt;/em&gt; (beach, cf Swedish &lt;em&gt;strand&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;Strand)&lt;/em&gt; are clearly of Germanic or even earlier Indo-European origin, and there is a set of trisyllabic words like &lt;em&gt;mehiläinen&lt;/em&gt; (bee) and &lt;em&gt;kuningas&lt;/em&gt; (king) which are of somewhat later origin, and sometimes attest to forms which are no longer straightforwardly recognizable in the neighboring IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of these languages, you can find recent loans which are used in a form which is much closer to the origin. With reading and writing skills approaching 100% of the population, the process for internalizing these is likely to look quite different -- it is not unlikely that &lt;em&gt;résumé&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;coup d'état&lt;/em&gt; will remain in English in their French form for a very long time. Similarly, obviously English loans like &lt;em&gt;jazz&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;policy&lt;/em&gt; may well have come to stay for the foreseeable future without any further adaptation to the host language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T07:59:50.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T09:47:12.743" Score="5" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chinese, when written in Han characters, does not have &quot;word boundaries&quot;. Because Han script is a morphosyllabic script where under most circumstances each character correspond to a morpheme, it is intelligible without resorting to word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we are given a piece of Chinese text written in Han script, how can we separate the script into words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a very simple Chinese sentence as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;你好嗎？&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 3 characters corresponding to exactly 3 morphemes: you, good, (question), but actually how many words are in this sentence? Is the last morpheme 嗎 considered an inflectional morpheme changing the mood of the previous morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider another Chinese sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;我今天去了你家。 (I have been to your home today.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the 7 characters also corresponds to morphemes one-by-one. Is it true that the sentence consists of 5 words? 我/今天/去了/你/家 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more complicated examples, how to determine a phrase is a word itself or a compound consisting of multiple words, e.g. 飯盒 (lunch box, morpheme-by-morpheme &quot;rice box&quot;)、高速公路 (motorway, morpheme-by-morpheme &quot;high speed public road&quot;)、地下鐡路 (underground railway, morpheme-by-morpheme &quot;ground under iron road&quot;). These examples are clearly lexemes but actually how many words they contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Dungan script is a working example of writing Mandarin in a western style with spaces of word delimiter, what's the rule when writing the morphemes out to determine if a morpheme is written as a single word or part of another word containing a freestanding morpheme? The orthography may serve as a valuable reference when analysing Mandarin samples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21707" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T14:00:07.647" Title="How do we identify &quot;words&quot; in Chinese?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27635" CreationDate="2018-04-09T13:55:51.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not much saving (of words, syllables, or phonemes) in simple sentences. Case endings allow for a pro-drop language saving one word in a simple sentence, and saving adpositions is also a minor thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It becomes more interesting when one looks at more complex sentences; the case-heavy Latin language has compact constructions like &lt;em&gt;ablativus absolutus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;participium conjunctum&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;accusativus cum infintivo&lt;/em&gt; that often require a subordinate clause or a relative clause in an English translation (with a lot of additional words: A conjunction, some words for a finite verb form, some words to be repeated from the main clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T13:55:51.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27644" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:51:13.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the professor was actually getting at the arbitrariness of letter shapes, much like the sounds of a word are arbitrary ...? There is no straightforward reason &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; looks the way it does, or why &lt;em&gt;&amp;lt;dog&amp;gt;&lt;/em&gt; refers to a particular animal in English (though there is some overlap, as in how &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; is spoken with rounded lips, and &lt;em&gt;crow&lt;/em&gt; vaguely imitates the bird's sound).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T14:51:13.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T19:01:00.263" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new ESL teacher, and I would like some help to &lt;strong&gt;understand&lt;/strong&gt; my student's error so I can better explain WHY it needs to be changed. I can't figure out the &quot;rule&quot; as to why it needs to change. Layman's terms are greatly appreciated if possible!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what my student wrote, &quot;He is working to keep clean and safe the Earth.&quot;&#xA;I know it should be, &quot;He is working to keep the Earth safe and clean,&quot; but I can't understand the rationale (or how to put it in kid-friendly terms for my ESL pupils).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21711" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T21:56:46.950" Title="Syntax Explanation?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-04-18T13:33:18.517" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26881" CreationDate="2018-04-10T01:40:40.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages do not use a verb in a sentence of Subject + Adjective. If 'dead' exists as an adjective in those languages, then they could say, &lt;em&gt;He dead&lt;/em&gt;, just like they can say &lt;em&gt;He big&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;He happy&lt;/em&gt;. I think Russian might be an example. There is still a verb in Russian that means 'to die', though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21715" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T01:40:40.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26881" CreationDate="2018-04-10T05:24:05.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English copula “is” (and related forms) is a verb, and so is “die/died”. There are various criteria that allow you to argue pretty convincingly that “be” and “die” are verbs, also that “dead” is an adjective. A very basic test for the verb status of “be” is subject-verb agreement: the copula agrees with the subject. English sentences can’t describe &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; without using a verb – this is a basic structural fact of English. Many languages have sentences without any verb, dispensing with the requirement for a verb “be” in sentences with stative predicates, analogous to English “John is dead/sick/tall”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bantu language Matumbi is such a language. You can convey the present state “The person (muundu) is dead” either using a verb – &lt;em&gt;muundú a-wíile&lt;/em&gt; (tense inflection tells you that this is a verb; &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; is a subject-agreement prefix), or using an adjective &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; any verb – &lt;em&gt;muundú ŋ-waá&lt;/em&gt;. The adjective &lt;em&gt;ŋ-waá&lt;/em&gt; agrees with the noun &lt;em&gt;muundu&lt;/em&gt;, and the prefix for agreement &lt;em&gt;ŋ-&lt;/em&gt; is used only on nouns and adjectives, and not on verbs. Additionally, by using a different tense form of the verb, they can convey “the person died”, as &lt;em&gt;muundú a-a-wíile&lt;/em&gt;. It may be just as common for languages to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require a verb to express stative predicates as it is to require a copula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave untouched the reasonably large set of languages where there is no reason to distinguish adjectives and verbs at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the problem of translation, if we take an &quot;accurate translation&quot; to be one that conveys all and only the connotations and denotations of the original utterance into a structurally similar (short) text in a target language, then &quot;accurate translations&quot; are usually very hard to obtain. The meanings of tenses don't generally line up perfectly across languages, but &quot;good enough&quot; is possible. In the specific case of Matuumbi to English, there may be some subtle nuance about emphasis associated with the adjective construction versus the inflected verb construction, but in my (defeasible) opinion &quot;The person is dead&quot; is good enough as a translation for both utterances. Whatever subtle differences exist in the two constructions of Matuumbi, it is possible to encode that in a more long-winded translation into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T18:47:47.180" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T18:47:47.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27674" CreationDate="2018-04-10T15:51:19.707" Score="4" ViewCount="2196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for software for illustrating tree diagrams am wondering whether anyone knows which was used to create the one in the post linked below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried messaging the author, but had no luck and was wondering whether someone recognized the application used or maybe has suggestions for others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19006/analyzing-negation-with-a-syntactic-tree?answertab=active#tab-top&quot;&gt;Analyzing negation with a syntactic tree&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HhX3F.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HhX3F.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21676" LastEditorUserId="21676" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T21:09:42.087" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T04:31:31.237" Title="What software is used to make these X-bar trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27652" CreationDate="2018-04-10T19:03:18.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of what are called &quot;small verbs&quot; in English, which are used in many idioms and constructions, often with special syntactic provisions. These verbs include &lt;em&gt;keep, make, like, want, do, give, take, go, come,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;, among others. And this is one (probably at least two, as the possibility of infinitive &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; shows) of those construction types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of idiomatic small verb construction occurs with the verbs &lt;em&gt;keep, make, want,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;SmallVerb + NP + PredicateAdjective&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; may or may not appear before &lt;code&gt;PredicateAdjective&lt;/code&gt;, depending on &lt;code&gt;SmallVerb&lt;/code&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He likes/makes/keeps/wants &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; it &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; tidy here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;We like/make/keep/want &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; the Earth &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; clean and safe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;She keeps/wants &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; the American dream &lt;code&gt;+&lt;/code&gt; preserved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(I.e, &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; don't work with this combination of &lt;code&gt;NP + PredicateAdjective&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;He likes/wants it to be tidy here&lt;/em&gt; is grammatical, but&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;He makes/keeps it  to be tidy here&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; grammatical.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(I.e, &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; don't work with &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;code&gt;PredicateAdjective&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T19:03:18.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27663" CreationDate="2018-04-10T19:11:45.820" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an English speaker, I've had very little experience with retroflex consonants, but have recently come upon their use in Polish, and am having difficulty hearing them as particularly distinct from non-retroflex consonants at similar articulation points. In particular, I've learned that the glyph &amp;lt;ż&gt; indicates the [ʐ] phoneme, but I have enormous difficulty hearing any distinction from [ʒ]. Whenever I have this impression of any sounds, my first assumption is that the distinction simply lies somewhere I'm not used to listening for, but any suggestions on what aspects of the sound I should focus on would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; notice a fairly significant change to any surrounding phonemes, especially when they are vowels. For example, if I just make the sound sequences [aʐa] followed by [aʒa] I don't notice much difference in the consonantal part of the sound, but the [a] sounds in the former are very, very noticeably retroflexed. My initial assumption is that this effect is probably more a result of my relative clumsiness and slowness in moving my tongue into retroflex position; on the other hand, it also seems possible that the primary phonemic distinction might simply involve surrounding phonemes to a greater degree than in other types of consonants. Is this off base?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T19:35:16.590" Title="Does the primary distinction of retroflex consonants lie in their effect on surrounding phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27662" CreationDate="2018-04-10T19:35:16.590" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem is that retroflex consonants are a disparate group, so that one might be comparing apples and oranges if you try to apply the lessons of Tamil to Polish. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/silke/articles/Hamann_2003_Diss.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This dissertation&lt;/a&gt; by Haman gives the best overview of acoustics and perception of retroflex consonants). In the case of the unaspirated stop [ʈ], because the stop itself is just silence, ability to perceive that stop as distinct from [t] or [t̪] has to come from formant transitions to or from another vowel. Fricatives, however, have distinctive spectra, so it is possible to perceive the distinction between [ʃ] and [ʂ] just within the fricative. Since Polish retroflex consonants all have a fricative element, it is possible to hear the difference independent of formant transition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as is generally true of consonants, the best cues to place of articulation come from the influence of the consonant on a neighboring vowel. At the same time, the articulation of retroflex consonants is changed as a function of the surrounding vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T19:35:16.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27652" CreationDate="2018-04-11T07:02:19.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;He is working to keep the Earth safe and clean,&quot; there are several subject-predicate relations.  (1) &quot;he&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;working ...&quot;, (2) &quot;he&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;keep ...&quot;, and (3) &quot;the earth&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;safe and clean&quot;.  In English, subjects precede predicates, and so for each of the three subject/predicate pairs in your example, the subject should precede the predicate.  And for all three, the subject does precede its predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &quot;the earth&quot; (subject) should precede &quot;safe and clean&quot; (predicate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might reasonably doubt whether there are actually 3 different subject/predicate relations in your example.  To see that there are, consider the 3 different interpretations of &quot;for every day of the year&quot;, if we add that to the example: &quot;He is working to keep the Earth safe and clean for every day of the year.&quot;  Does he work every day, does he keep earth safe and clean every day, or is the earth safe and clean every day of the year?  There are 3 possible interpretations, because there are 3 different predications that the adverbial could modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T07:02:19.500" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27652" CreationDate="2018-04-11T07:28:42.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transitive clauses, the kind with a transitive verb and a direct object, can sometimes contain a further constituent called an objective predicative complement that refers to the direct object. It is typically an adjective phrase, as in your example, but it can also be a noun phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The objective PC occurs after the direct object, not before it. Reversing the order either changes the meaning, or yields an ungrammatical sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1a] &lt;em&gt;We painted the fence blue&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1b] We painted the blue fence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2a] &lt;em&gt;She made him a good husband&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2b] * &lt;em&gt;She made a good husband him&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these pairs, [1a] tells us that we painted the fence, and we painted it a blue colour. But [1b] has a different meaning; it tells us we painted the blue fence, but it does not tell us what colour we painted it – perhaps we painted it green or white, who knows? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In [2a] we understand that her efforts resulted in him being a good husband, but [2b] where the predicative precedes the object is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T07:28:42.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T14:22:46.817" Score="2" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iy7P4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iy7P4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the resolved exercise below, it is mentioned F2 is related to the pharynx cavity and F3 is related to the front cavity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F1 is calculated taking into account the whole shape of the vocal tract. I would like to know whether there is any specific feature that F1 is related to in the vocal tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21729" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T16:13:25.970" Title="What is the first formant (F1) dependent on in reference to the vocal tract?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27666" CreationDate="2018-04-11T16:13:25.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johnson in &lt;em&gt;Acoustic and auditory phonetics&lt;/em&gt; addresses this; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-915-linguistic-phonetics-fall-2015/lecture-notes/MIT24_915F15_lec5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nomogram&lt;/a&gt; here on slide 7 graphs the problem. essentially, the answer is &quot;it's complicated&quot;. You compute the resonance of each tube based on their length. Whether the first formant is &quot;due to&quot; the back cavity or the front cavity depends on which is longer (and thus which resonance is lower). When the back cavity is short and the front cavity is long (meaning: the vowel is more back), the front cavity has a lower resonance frequency than the back one, and the length of the front cavity &quot;causes&quot; F1. When the back cavity is long and the front cavity is short, the back cavity &quot;causes&quot; F2. The back cavity is usually at least 6 cm long whereas the front cavity can be 3-4 cm long. On the nomogram, the light grey descending line graphs the contribution of the back cavity and the dark blue ascending line graphs the contribution of the front cavity. But as the slides also indicate, they basically have two models of formant computation, based on whether there is a pharyngeal constriction (the back tube is very narrow, the model is &quot;both tubes closed at one end&quot;) versus a short constriction in the mouth (the model is &quot;back=tube closed at both ends, front=tube closed at one end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T16:13:25.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T16:17:40.767" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was thinking about a language I'm currently learning and its similarities with my own native language. While I assume grammar to change considerably depending on language it came to mind that intonation does not seem to change that much (or perhaps I'm just not as &quot;trained&quot; to perceive the differences). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tried asking Google the question and it did return some interesting papers such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://perso.limsi.fr/mareuil/control/gussenhoven.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Intonation and Interpretation: Phonetics and Phonology (Gussenhoven, ...)&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/gibbon/Docs/1998HirstDiCristo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Survey of Intonation Systems (Hirst and Cristo, ...)&lt;/a&gt;. Both mention that there are, in fact, considerable differences in intonation for different languages, but Hirst &amp;amp; Cristo seem to point out the lack of proper research into the why's and how's, as well as an adequate model to categorize Intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are you aware of any effort being made into understanding the origin (biological, cultural, ?) for these differences? Is there something akin to etymology for Intonation? Do these questions even make sense or am I overthinking this?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21732" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T16:17:40.767" Title="Do we have an Intonation &quot;etymology&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27636" CreationDate="2018-04-11T20:02:00.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;NIST was kind enough to relay this by email (April 2018):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;re Text Retrieval Conference (TREC):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/call2018.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;call for participation in TREC 2018&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is still active, so&#xA;  you can sign up to participate this year is you would like.  You can&#xA;  learn more about the types of tasks the tracks have focused on in&#xA;  previous years from the Overview papers in the Proceedings.  The&#xA;  proceedings are in the Publications section of the TREC web site&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://trec.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;https://trec.nist.gov/&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TREC's focus is on search, and while there is definitely room for&#xA;  linguistic approaches to search, that is not the most frequent&#xA;  approach.  Our group at NIST has a sibling project to TREC called the&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://tac.nist.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Text Analysis Conference (TAC)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that focuses specifically on&#xA;  natural language processing tasks.  The TAC link currently points to&#xA;  TAC 2017, but I expect it will be updated for TAC 2018 very soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You might also be interested in evaluations run by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NIST&#xA;  Multimodal Information Group&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17180" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T20:02:00.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T22:04:16.647" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to figure out why it is that Babylonian (and Assyrian) king names do not match their Akkadian transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the one known inscription for Nabonassar, which is written in Akkadian, his name is given as &quot;AG-URU-ir&quot;, but it is translated as &quot;Nabu-nasir&quot;. How is the translator (Grant Frame?) obtaining Nabu-nasir from AG-URU-ir?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This same phenomena is true not just for kings, but lesser officials as well. For example, in the same inscription, the viceroy of Babylon is named as AG-GIN-NUMUN and this is translated as Nabu-mukin-zeri. I would guess this is supposed to be the same name in a different language? In other words the cuneiform symbols have different soundings depending on the language. So, AG=Nabu, URU=nas, GIN=mukin, etc. What is the explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T09:47:41.177" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T09:47:41.177" Title="Why is it that Babylonian king names do not match their Akkadian equivalent?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27671" CreationDate="2018-04-12T00:54:50.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes down to the ambiguities in the Cuneiform script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuneiform doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence between signs and sounds. The sign DIŊIR is a good example. The sign started out in Sumerian meaning &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;heaven&quot;. It was used for both the sounds /an/ and for the word &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;. Because it was pronounced /an/, it started being used for the word &lt;em&gt;An&lt;/em&gt; also, the name of the sky god. And this led to it expanding to cover the word &lt;em&gt;diŋir&lt;/em&gt; &quot;deity&quot; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Akkadian, this sign was still used for /an/ as in Sumerian, but also for the word &lt;em&gt;il&lt;/em&gt;, Akkadian for &quot;deity&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;šamû&lt;/em&gt;, Akkadian for &quot;heaven&quot;. And due to the &quot;deity&quot; meaning it started representing the sounds /il/ in other contexts as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now the same cuneiform sign can mean /an/, /il/, &lt;em&gt;šamû&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;diŋir&lt;/em&gt;, or even just indicate that the following word represents the name of a deity. When cuneiform is transliterated into Latin letters, all of these different meanings are conventionally written DIŊIR (in capital letters). It's up to the translator to figure out which of the meanings was actually intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the sign AG can mean the sounds /nabu:/, or &lt;em&gt;Nabû&lt;/em&gt;, the god of reading and writing: this last one was written with the two signs DIŊIR-AG, to indicate that it was a divine name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T00:54:50.967" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-12T02:18:43.070" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Language Construction Kit 2, the author makes the assertion that sub-clauses, in particular center-embedded clauses, add complexity. That is obviously true, but he claims that you can make do without them (its in a section where he's talking about auxlangs and what features he thinks you should avoid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there any languages that actually lack this? Thinking about it, it would be hard and rather clumsy to have to break up center-embedded clauses into separate sentences, but that may be just because I'm used to having such a convenience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that languages differ on how complex a sub-clause can be. English allows constructions that wouldn't be allowed in other languages, but there are still things that some languages allow that English doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe I've ever seen a serious auxlang (unless you count Toki Pona, but that was more intended to be an artlang) that didn't allow sub-clauses. I even found an auxlang called 'Kah' whose grammar is obviously based off of Chinese, but even that allows sub-clauses and even center-embedding (which is surprising given the lack of explicit marking on anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T02:36:16.140" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T02:36:16.140" Title="Are there languages that don't allow sub-clauses?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27660" CreationDate="2018-04-12T07:37:56.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX&lt;/a&gt;, or one of its friends, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/tikz-qtree&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tikz-qtree&lt;/a&gt; package. It is an improvement of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/qtree&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;qtree&lt;/a&gt; package with nicer node placement. If you are not familiar with LaTeX, and want to learn more, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Linguistics#Syntactic_trees&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikibook&lt;/a&gt; might help (link is to the page about linguistics, but the book is in general about LaTeX). Both tikz-qtree and qtree have a quite extensive manual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is LaTeX code using the tikz-qtree package to draw your tree. The only difference with the original seems to be that the bar over the T and the v is less bold. Perhaps this was done with something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/66537/making-hats-and-other-accents-bold&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but I cannot get it to look exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass[margin=5mm]{standalone} &#xA;\usepackage{tikz-qtree}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;&#xA;\Tree [.TP&#xA;    [.NP Jane$_i$ ]&#xA;    [.\=T&#xA;        [.T did T(past) ]&#xA;        [.NegP&#xA;            [.Neg not ]&#xA;            [.vP&#xA;                [.NP t$_i$ ]&#xA;                [.\=v v [.VP \edge[roof]; {go to school} ] ]&#xA;            ]&#xA;        ]&#xA;    ]&#xA;]&#xA;&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUtr7.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUtr7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older version of this answer just used the qtree package (instead of tikz-qtree) and draws something that looks like your tree. The only trick we need is to use &lt;code&gt;array&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;\setlength{\extrarowheight}{2pt}&lt;/code&gt;, because otherwise the bar over the T is touched by the edge. The differences with the original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The overbar is less bold;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the original, nodes on one level are on the same height (e.g. Jane&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; and T and NegP);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;qtree does not consider text height to draw edges, so there is a lot of space from the edge to the text of the v node at the very bottom (because it has no capital); in the original this looks better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\documentclass[margin=5mm]{standalone}&#xA;\usepackage{qtree}&#xA;\usepackage{array}&#xA;\setlength{\extrarowheight}{2pt}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;&#xA;\Tree [.TP&#xA;    [.NP Jane_i ]&#xA;    [.\=T&#xA;        [.T did T(past) ]&#xA;        [.NegP&#xA;            [.Neg not ]&#xA;            [.vP&#xA;                [.NP t_i ]&#xA;                [.\=v v \qroof{go to school}.VP ]&#xA;            ]&#xA;        ]&#xA;    ]&#xA;]&#xA;&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6tpe.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6tpe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T07:53:57.267" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T07:53:57.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-12T08:48:47.110" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Generative Grammar&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a&#xA;  system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words&#xA;  that form grammatical sentences in a given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GG tree diagrams always have a symbol S at the apex, representing &quot;sentence&quot;. There is no higher level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/441247/3175&quot;&gt;a question I asked on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage site about &lt;em&gt;&quot;What to do?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I've been told that's a valid question but that it's not a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just as not all sentences are questions, not all questions are&#xA;  sentences. That doesn’t make them ungrammatical. They simply aren’t&#xA;  sentences, since all sentences have a subject and a finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that there are two conflicting meanings of &quot;sentence&quot;? If &lt;em&gt;&quot;What to do?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is not a sentence, is that a peculiarity of GG? What should it be called instead? Is there a level higher than &quot;sentence&quot; which covers both &quot;sentence&quot; and things such as &lt;em&gt;&quot;What to do?&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T14:25:21.790" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T01:12:51.363" Title="Is either of these meanings of the word &quot;sentence&quot; more conventional?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-12T08:58:54.027" Score="0" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some grammarians classify transitive phrasal verbs into &lt;em&gt;separable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;inseparable&lt;/em&gt;. Just for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phrasal verbs that can be divided by objects are commonly referred to as being &lt;em&gt;separable&lt;/em&gt;; those that cannot be divided are known as being &lt;em&gt;inseparable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Herring, &lt;em&gt;Complete English Grammar Rules&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shut somebody up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stand somebody up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tell somebody/something apart&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;talk somebody into something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third category: &lt;em&gt;separated&lt;/em&gt;? Isn't it more accurate to classify transitive phrasal verbs into &lt;em&gt;fixed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unfixed&lt;/em&gt;, for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Please note that I know different kinds of multi-word verbs and how to identify them as explained in this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/2071/21738&quot;&gt;Difference Phrasal Verb, Prepositional Verb and Prepositional Phrasal Verb&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is to do with the accuracy of classifying transitive phrasal verbs into &lt;em&gt;separable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;inseparable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21738" LastEditorUserId="21738" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T18:43:57.523" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T18:43:57.523" Title="Transitive phrasal verbs classification" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;phrasal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27678" CreationDate="2018-04-12T14:59:33.147" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was searching around for some hebrew texts and I stumbled upon this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZg5I.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZg5I.png&quot; alt=&quot;From the seals of Solomon&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can cleary make out the letters:&#xA; Mem, Yud, Ghet, Tet &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is where it gets tricky, the circled letter is a mystery for me, I thought of it being Lamed but it's too odd with the line going through underneath it..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what we're dealing with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C.C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: can't really wrap my head around the fact that the question was centered around linguistics.. but it somehow isn't. &#xA;What sort of StackExchange should this be asked on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21741" LastEditorUserId="21741" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T18:27:33.277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T18:27:33.277" Title="What hebrew letter is this?" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-04-12T16:49:53.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27677" CreationDate="2018-04-12T15:07:08.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a ב (beth). The thing above it that made you think of a lamed is a cholem (the vowel sign), and it has a dagesh in the middle. This is a masculine plural participle of the root בטח &quot;to trust&quot;, i.e. &quot;those who trust&quot; (if used as a noun). This word is for instance used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/jer/46/1/t_conc_791025&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeremiah 46:25&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;אָמַר יְהוָה צְבָאֹות אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הִנְנִי פֹוקֵד אֶל־אָמֹון מִנֹּא וְעַל־פַּרְעֹה וְעַל־מִצְרַיִם וְעַל־אֱלֹהֶיהָ וְעַל־מְלָכֶיהָ וְעַל־פַּרְעֹה וְעַל &lt;strong&gt;הַבֹּטְחִים&lt;/strong&gt; בֹּֽו&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, said: “Behold, I am bringing punishment upon Amon of Thebes, and Pharaoh and Egypt and her gods and her kings, upon Pharaoh and &lt;strong&gt;those who trust&lt;/strong&gt; in him. (ESV)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T18:25:34.130" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T18:25:34.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27684" CreationDate="2018-04-12T15:42:38.477" Score="5" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. /knank stjajts smoms/ even they do follow the Sonority Sequencing Principle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T00:05:05.080" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T00:05:05.080" Title="Do languages generally tend to avoid palindromic syllables?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27675" CreationDate="2018-04-12T15:55:37.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we can confidently conclude that there are two or even more conflicting definitions of &quot;sentence&quot;. Analogously, there are multiple definitions of &quot;markedness&quot;. However, your first quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a&#xA;  system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words&#xA;  that form grammatical sentences in a given language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not a definition of &quot;sentence&quot;, it is a claim about GG and what a grammar does does. I will leave aside the question of whether it is accurate as a characterization. If this claim is true, we might infer some definition of &quot;sentence&quot;, but it isn't a definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume that your real question is about some claim, and not the definition of &quot;sentence&quot;, but I'm not entirely sure what the claim in question is. The primary question, I think, is a version of the old competence / performance problem: is &quot;what to do?&quot; grammatical, or merely acceptable? If this string is grammatical, then (by definition) it is generated by the grammar, and the claim that (grammars only generate sentences and all sentences have subjects and verbs) is false. That is, at least one of those claims is false, possibly both. If the string is ungrammatical but acceptable, then we learn nothing about what a grammar does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim that every sentence has a subject and a finite verb has a consequence, that imperatives are also not sentences. Forget that, I say. It also means that many utterances in languages without verbal copulas are not sentences. Perhaps (indeed, almost certainly), the claim was intended to be about English, not the concept &quot;sentence&quot;, but GG is not a theory of English, it is a theory of language (despite initial appearances). We could say that the claim is not a claim about surface word order, it's a claim about logical form, so that there are always elided finite verbs or deleted subjects, but that &quot;What to do?&quot; would come from &quot;What should we do?&quot;. Similarly, &quot;Banana&quot; could be the sort form of a number of sentences, such as &quot;I'll have a banana&quot; or &quot;The English word for 'banana' is 'banana'&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no good way to assess the social construct of conventionality, because there's no system of opinion-polling / voting. One may reach certain surmises by looking at the literature to see what certain people say, and perhaps that it the only operationally-sensible way to talk about conventionality of concepts. Each publication is weighted according to impact factor of something like that, and if high-impact papers tend to converge on a particular conclusion, that is what counts as &quot;conventional&quot;. I presume the problems with this approach are obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T15:55:37.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:00:53.823" Score="18" ViewCount="2100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a writer doing some research into ancient languages for a story I am creating. Despite having done some formal and informal study on linguistics (I am familiar with a phonetic chart) and informal study on etymology, there are certain symbols that pop up in historical linguistics I have been unable to decipher. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any keys online, they're very rarely explained in textbooks that use reconstructions (e.g. The Horse, The Wheel and Language) and I haven't been able to find enough words also written using phonetic spellings, to compare them and work them out for myself. The most prevalent of these is the number &quot;2&quot;, usually written below the line, as in the example above, in Proto-Indo European reconstruction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another would be letters written above the line, such as the &quot;w&quot; in *Perkʷunos (the name of a thunder/storm God). Although, I am fairly sure this denotes the sound is glottal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone could shed some light on these matters and/or point me in the direction of a chart, detailing the meaning of more unusual symbols, I would be eternally grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21743" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T17:37:22.323" Title="What is the meaning of the number 2 in Proto-Indo European reconstructions? e.g. As in *tewtéh₂, meaning &quot;people&quot; or &quot;tribe&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27679" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:02:03.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No language has a significant tendency to exclude palindromic syllables: if plarg and gralp are possible syllables, plalp and grarg are as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T16:02:03.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27681" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:18:51.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like the ₂ is called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Laryngeals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laryngeal&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phonemes *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, with cover symbol H also denoting &quot;unknown laryngeal&quot; (or *ə₁, *ə₂, *ə₃ and /ə/), stand for three &quot;laryngeal&quot; phonemes. The term laryngeal as a phonetic description is out of date, retained only because its usage has become standard in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ʷ indicates &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Dorsals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;labialization&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the traditional reconstruction, such as the one laid out in Brugmann's Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen more than a century ago, three series of velars are reconstructed for PIE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Palatovelars&quot; (or simply &quot;palatals&quot;), *ḱ, *ǵ, *ǵʰ (also transcribed *k', *g', *g'ʰ or *k̑, *g̑, *g̑ʰ or *k̂, *ĝ, *ĝʰ).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Plain velars&quot; (or &quot;pure velars&quot;), *k, *g, *gʰ.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Labiovelars, *kʷ, *gʷ, *gʷʰ (also transcribed *ku̯, *gu̯, *gu̯h). The raised ʷ or u̯ stands for labialization (lip rounding) accompanying the velar articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21745" LastEditorUserId="21745" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T15:51:33.643" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T15:51:33.643" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27679" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:57:06.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons conspiring to make palindromic syllables rare in natural languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most languages have certain restrictions on the beginning and ending consonant clusters of syllables, and those restrictions are typically not symmetrical, i.e., in general a reversed syllable needn't be legal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a diphthong at the syllable core cannot occur in a palindromic syllable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are also some consonants (e.g. affricates like /ts/ or /pf/) that cannot be reversed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diachronic processes like dissimilation tend to get rid of double occurrences of the consonants /l, n, r/ in one syllable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, simple palindromic syllables occur and some frequent words (like English &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;) are examples of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T18:09:36.397" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T18:09:36.397" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27681" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:57:07.320" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The numbers are specific to Proto-Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scholars aren't sure how PIE was pronounced: after all, there are no native speakers around now, or records from the time. All of the sounds in reconstructed words are educated guesses at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sounds were fairly easy to guess. For instance, there was a sound that seems to have become &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in most of PIE's descendants. Thus, it makes sense to call that sound *t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But others are harder to guess. The well-known linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that PIE needed a few extra sounds to explain all the evidence, sounds that didn't have direct reflexes in any Indo-European language known at the time. (Since then we've found one family of languages which has reflexes for these sounds, which adds evidence to his theory.) He simply called these unknown sounds &amp;quot;coefficients sonantiques&amp;quot; and didn't speculate as to what they might have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they were &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; fricatives, and weak fricatives at that, people took to writing them all as *h. Except that there were three different ones. So with typical lack of creativity, they're now written *h₁, *h₂, and *h₃. There are various theories as to what they actually were, but the notation has become standard now and is unlikely to change. Personally, I'm fond of Rasmussen's claim that *h₁ was a glottal fricative (English &amp;quot;h&amp;quot;), *h₂ was a velar fricative, and *h₃ was a voiced velar fricative with lip rounding. But many other linguists would disagree. Some say *h₁ was a glottal stop, others say *h₂ was uvular, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Semitic reconstruction, by the way, there was a similar problem: Semitic languages tend to have multiple sounds that are sort of like &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt;, and it's not clear what the original forms were. So they're conventionally transliterated *h, *ḥ, *ẖ, *ḫ. The moral of the story is we really need better conventions for writing &amp;quot;h-like sounds&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the superscript w, that's standard linguistic notation for lip rounding (&amp;quot;secondary labial articulation&amp;quot;). PIE distinguished between velar consonants and rounded velar (aka labiovelar) consonants, roughly equivalent to the difference between English &amp;quot;keen&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;queen&amp;quot;. Some transcriptions use a normal *w instead of the superscript, or even a *u; it's just a matter of style. (No matter which style is used, though, the rounded consonants are generally considered single phonemes, not clusters of a velar and a labial.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T17:37:22.323" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T17:37:22.323" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27652" CreationDate="2018-04-12T21:56:46.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my (psycholinguistic) perspective, the explanation here is not from some rules of syntax, but rather from a tendency of the native speaker to avoid so called &lt;em&gt;garden path sentences&lt;/em&gt;, especially in a spoken language. Rules emerge as secondary to the primary intent to convey the information unambiguously and efficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is working to keep clean and safe...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, it is a clear and unambiguous message that the subject's goal is to keep clean and stay safe, and this is why he keeps a job, as opposed to becoming a jobless and/or homeless person, getting lice and living in an unsafe place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Earth&lt;/em&gt;??? What does &lt;em&gt;the Earth&lt;/em&gt; have to do with that? Ah! A light bulb goes on! Go back to the beginning of the garden path that led you the wrong way, and start decoding all over. This is probably the primary reason why such sentences are not valid in English. Other languages can employ other devices, applying case, gender such that &lt;em&gt;safe and clean&lt;/em&gt; cannot deictically refer back to the subject himself, or a morphosyntactic marker to mark &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; as transitive so that the recipient of the speech expects the object, or other tricks; all this to avoid breaking down the sense late in a sentence, but the general this &lt;em&gt;maxim of the least surprise&lt;/em&gt; holds across many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="674" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T21:56:46.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27675" CreationDate="2018-04-13T01:12:51.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to find out what category an expression is in?  How to decide? When to worry about it?  Who to ask?  When to accept a proposed answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since expressions of the same category can be coordinated, where to seek evidence, how we should construct examples, and why not to doubt their significance seem relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T01:12:51.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-13T05:59:55.767" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know in english we have a whole bunch of terms like this, do other languages have something similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21753" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T09:26:59.847" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T09:26:59.847" Title="Are there words for &quot;second cousin twice removed&quot; in other languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-13T11:42:49.383" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the languages I’m familiar with, the first-person plural pronouns (e.g., “us”, “we”, “ours”) apply regardless of whether the listener is included in the group. It seems to me that this often produces ambiguity. For example, I recently wanted to say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; meet before &lt;strong&gt;our&lt;/strong&gt; committee meeting next week?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but, since “we” would mean “you and I&quot; while “our” would mean “belonging to other people and me”, this construction would have been confusing. The best I could do with English pronouns was: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could &lt;strong&gt;you and I&lt;/strong&gt; meet before &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; committee meeting next week?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which conveys the needed distinction but is unparsimonious and requires substituting a singular pronoun (&quot;my&quot;) where I wanted a plural one (&quot;us-not-you&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there languages that draw this distinction?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21748" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T11:42:49.383" Title="Are there languages that distinguish &quot;us-not-you&quot; from &quot;us-including-you&quot;?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-04-13T12:10:02.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27698" CreationDate="2018-04-13T16:42:07.863" Score="1" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please provide a simple explanation of element theory for someone who knows nothing  about it? If you could help me answer the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is element theory? What are elements?&#xA;How does it differ from feature theory and other forms of representation?&#xA;How are elements involved in phonological processes such as harmony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been having trouble understanding some resources and would really appreciate if someone could help shed light on this topic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20490" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T04:26:28.283" Title="Explanation of Element Theory?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-04-15T15:46:56.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11550" CreationDate="2018-04-13T18:21:57.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; is a literary or legal term that doesn't enter into the spoken language much, so you can practically depend on its having weird syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; is a transparent polymorphemic word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;[not-  [[with-  stand]  -ing]]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; based on the present participle of the verb &lt;em&gt;withstand&lt;/em&gt;; it's treated as a verb in this word by using &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;- instead of &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;- as the negative prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, the etymology of this particular &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;- prefix does not come from the preposition &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; meaning 'together', but rather from a different preposition we no longer have in English that meant 'against' -- pretty much the opposite of 'with'. German still has that preposition (&lt;em&gt;wider&lt;/em&gt; 'against', which takes an Accusative object), and it also has the verb &lt;em&gt;widerstehen&lt;/em&gt; 'to resist, withstand', formed with the German verb &lt;em&gt;stehen&lt;/em&gt; 'stand'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, the noun phrase that's marked by &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; in either position functions as the subject of &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt;. I.e, if the sentence is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding, &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then  &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is the subject that did &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; stand against (and thus disqualify) &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt;, and therefore &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; can be ignored from now on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a word as big and transparent as &lt;em&gt;notwithstanding&lt;/em&gt; is likely to become an adverb indicating the importance of a particular piece of evidence, and like most adverbs, its position is subject to the whims of the speaker and can certainly modify a verb phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the presenting question, no, there's no consistent difference between the phrases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; notwithstanding.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(both of which can occur at either the beginning or the end of a sentence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T17:38:26.153" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T17:38:26.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-13T20:42:32.230" Score="1" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was beginning to study some Esperanto, it immediately became clear that the language used the same morphemes without significant modification. Therefore, on further research, concluded that it was agglutinative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside the feature of agglutinative languages having numerous affixes, are there additional properties I have overlooked? And may English be considered somewhat agglutinative or fusional? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Csx12" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T21:05:09.887" Title="What are the main features of an agglutinative language?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27694" CreationDate="2018-04-13T21:54:58.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Element Theory is an autosegmental theory of phonology coming from Government Phonology promulgated by Kaye, Harris, Lindsey, Rennison and others. The essential difference between a feature and an element is that a feature is not pronounceable on its own, but an element is. For example, [+low] cannot be pronounced by itself, but the element that sort of corresponds to [+low], namely A, can be – it's [a]. The three vowel elements, as far as I know, are A (&quot;nonhigh&quot;), I (&quot;front&quot;), U (&quot;round&quot;), and three of the consonant elements are H (&quot;aspirated, voiceless&quot;), N (&quot;nasal, voiced&quot;, ʔ (&quot;occluded&quot;), and when not combined with anything, they are [a i u h n ʔ]. The combination of I and A is pronounced [e], [U] and [I] is [y]. Similarly, [p] is [U.ʔ.H]. There may also be an element &quot;@&quot; i.e. [ə], formerly called &quot;the cold vowel&quot;, which is something like a neutrino (it doesn't interact with other things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory also includes a concept of &quot;headedness&quot; (usually indicated by underlining but notated here with italics), so that &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;.I is [ɛ] and [A.&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;] is [e] (essentially, the head properties are stronger than the no-head properties). I belive that the difference between [ts], [tʃ] and [tç] is that [ts] is [&lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;.I.ʔ.H], [tʃ] is [A.I.ʔ.H] and [tç] is [A.&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;.ʔ.H]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T04:26:28.283" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T04:26:28.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T00:29:14.893" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;My wife questioned me if there's a subject that I cannot teach effectively (per my standards of making the students salivate for more). I mentioned my weakness at teaching languages, English for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; English from a mechanical/rote POV, but I've found it hard to be fascinated by it (let alone light a kid's curiosity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I didn't know English (or any language) and I had to articulate my ideas, how would I do it?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This piqued my interest in linguistics and how it has to do with syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, grammar etc., Given such a POV of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; having language and then coming up with one piqued my interest in learning English more effectively (and perhaps using that for teaching, if at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question - hypothetically, is it possible to create a language in a classroom setting, piece by piece?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And use that as a guide to talk about language constructs to better understand the &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; for them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd want to experiment this on myself and was wondering if there are any references that &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; the linguistic aspect via language construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I'm looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a list of phonemes and the next step is coming up with words/numbers and rules of building words vs. random sounds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word Composition i.e., very simple sentence formation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammar: What doesn't sound &quot;good&quot; and what does? What is considered 'valid' and what exceptions are allowed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tenses, plurality would be good, but it'd be asking too much from this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21758" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T00:29:14.893" Title="(How) Can one create a language in a classroom setting?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27712" CreationDate="2018-04-14T05:55:12.107" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem statement is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3P7ZS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3P7ZS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Problem Statement&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;  Indicate which translation goes with each Maasai sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My current approach:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word {word1}  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zZmf0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zZmf0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; appears a total of 8 times in the Maasai sentences given and the word &lt;em&gt;warrior&lt;/em&gt; appears 8 times in the given English sentences. So {word1} matches to &lt;em&gt;warrior&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word {word2} &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dmwp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dmwp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the word {word3} &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8CxAR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8CxAR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; appears a total of 3 times. Since {word1} matched to a noun, I assume {word2} and {word3} also would match to nouns and thus can correspond to &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sentences (2) and (7) do not contain the word {word1}. Similarly, sentences (H) and (J) do not contain the word &lt;em&gt;warrior&lt;/em&gt;. So these two pairs must correspond to each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proceeding in a similar manner, we can make out that {word2} would correspond to &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; and {word3} would correspond to &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Now we are left with pronouns and verbs. Proceeding with some assumptions and in a similar manner as above, we might get some results, but that involves &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; of assumptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this, I am not able to proceed forwards, maybe because I am not being able to categorize the pronouns in &lt;em&gt;first person&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;second person&lt;/em&gt;, and/or &lt;em&gt;third person&lt;/em&gt;. Also, the verbs and pronouns in some sentences seem to be mixed in one(To me, the Maasai language appears to have the concept of &lt;em&gt;Sandhi&lt;/em&gt; like in &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/em&gt;, or maybe has the concept of affixes of morphemes, like in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me if I stumped somewhere and guide me how to proceed forward. Also, I am not able to find the answer key to this problem, so I cannot verify any solutions. Providing the same would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; Sorry for the inconvenience caused by using {word1}, {word2} etc. I could not post more than 8 image links here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21760" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T16:51:11.363" Title="How to proceed with this Maasai translation?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27705" CreationDate="2018-04-14T13:19:30.623" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a reasearch on light verbs and wondered if anyone could give some opinions on why people tend to use light verb cosntructions, such as &quot;take a shower&quot;, &quot;make a decision&quot; etc., over the simple/full verbs, for example &quot;shower&quot; or &quot;decide&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21247" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T08:20:29.103" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T08:20:29.103" Title="What functional motivations are there for the choice of light verb constructions over full verbs?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4801" CreationDate="2018-04-14T17:11:49.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take me seriously I would suggest you to try some third grade books in Arabic countries. For two important reasons :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A great pedagogical experts were involved in the preparation of such books&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They will ease tremendously your introduction into a completely new language's set of rules&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that you need to know that people have no magic at being able to guess words diacritics : you'll learn them almost unconsciously if you do one thing :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Listen, Listen, Listen to a lot of Arabic (formel of course) in the documentaries, news, radios, just avoid using local dialects because they are different and may confuse you. Seek mainstream Arabic audios instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, one rule that is general, is that there is a saying :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;العرب لا تقف إلا على ساكن&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;which means Arab stops at a non diacritics letter or a letter that has 'soukoun', if you don't understand it now don't worry it is not the first thing to be learned neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21761" LastEditorUserId="21761" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T10:02:43.653" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T10:02:43.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27701" CreationDate="2018-04-14T17:14:35.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per your request, this is only an opinion... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some speakers will align a question's construction pattern with an answer. The LVC question, &quot;Did you make a decision?&quot; Will result in the LVC response, &quot;Yes, I made a decision.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Single word imperatives like &quot;decide&quot; are often considered time-sensitive orders. From a pragmatics of politeness perspective, &quot;make a decision&quot; is considered more polite than &quot;decide&quot;. This is the brevity vs. loquacious argument, where indirectness is used to absorb burdens associated with questions or requests. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that other LVC's don't emphasize politeness, but they do attempt to hedge/diminish the concept:&#xA;&quot;I had a smoke&quot; (diminishes the &lt;strong&gt;action&lt;/strong&gt; related to smoking)&#xA;&quot;We took a loss&quot; (diminished the &lt;strong&gt;action&lt;/strong&gt; of lose)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the nominative form is much more common, and is the cognitively easy way to describe something:&#xA;&quot;I took a cab&quot; vs. &quot;I cabbed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some appear to be LVC's but either lack a reasonable paraphrase, or they put emphasis on the direct object. Hence, they're LVC out of necessity. &#xA;&quot;He took the gold&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some carry extra semantic content:&#xA;&quot;They made an entrance&quot; vs. &quot;they entered&quot;; &quot;She made a dash&quot; vs. &quot;She dashed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nominative form enables better counting:&#xA;&quot;He made a joke&quot; (count=1) vs. &quot;he joked&quot; (verb=past;aspect=singular, count=?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again - just my opinions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T17:14:35.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27701" CreationDate="2018-04-14T22:47:30.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is what I see. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by @jlawler above, such constructions are often considered alongside other periphrastic constructions. It is believed that the main purpose they serve is making speech more expressive. Hence, you need to consider the reasons why this necessity typically arises. I guess it has something to do with phonetic processes like reduction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It should be pointed out that LVC are very common to language learners. If the inflectional system of a language in question appears quite complex, at the first it is far more natural to learn a small number of light verbs by heart together with deverbal nouns (which, as all other nouns, are easier to memorize) to start talking. I admit that in some cases the LVCs can be calqued from the corresponding constructions in the first language. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The usage may also be explained by fashion or tradition. It happens when LVC are attributable to a certain functional style or a dialect (so-called &lt;em&gt;prestige form&lt;/em&gt;) which is to be used given the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The cause may be certain grammatical specifics of a given language. For example, in Russian there is no 1-Sg-Fut form of the verb &lt;em&gt;pobedit'&lt;/em&gt; - 'win', so instead of saying &lt;em&gt;ja pobediu&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ja pobezhdu&lt;/em&gt; - 'I will win' (see below)*, one would say &lt;em&gt;ja oderzhu pobedu&lt;/em&gt; - 'I will take victory'. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The reason for the absence is ceasing of a phonological process, which once obscured the alternation /di/~/zhd/ (metathesis from /dzh/)  whereby &lt;em&gt;pobezhdu&lt;/em&gt; lost its connection to &lt;em&gt;pobedit'&lt;/em&gt;. Furthemore, forms with &lt;em&gt;oderzhat'&lt;/em&gt; - 'take' are spreading to other persons and tenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T22:47:30.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27701" CreationDate="2018-04-15T01:15:48.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a circular answer, but light verbs are particularly prominent as a strategy in borrowing verbs from other languages, and that is because verbs are a more closed class than nouns. We use light verbs out of a slight reluctance to use novel full verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T01:15:48.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27713" CreationDate="2018-04-15T16:24:08.760" Score="-6" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;An administrator should delete this post as I don't see how it is useful to the community &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21769" LastEditorUserId="21769" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T19:40:45.810" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T19:40:45.810" Title="Translation request cursive" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-04-16T09:42:32.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-15T16:27:42.033" Score="2" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Noam Chomsky was a great man because of his work on &quot;universal grammar&quot;, but all the resources I've been able to find about it are very general and I can't find out exactly what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything tangible about universal grammar that can be understood? Like some examples or a detailed explanation of the universal grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the information I can find about it seems to be so wishy-washy and I wonder whether it's only pseudoscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21771" LastEditorDisplayName="user21771" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T03:21:01.867" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T03:30:49.940" Title="What's the deal with universal grammar?" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27700" CreationDate="2018-04-15T16:51:11.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, looks like I solved it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first assumption, as mentioned in the question itself, is correct. Thus, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rK0yf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rK0yf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; corresponds to &lt;em&gt;warrior&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my second assumption, there can be two cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case I:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y1D52.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y1D52.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;corresponds to&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/scXJr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/scXJr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;corresponds to&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proceeding on to my point 3 in the question with this assumption, we find that &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rKFB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rKFB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai prefix&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; prefix would correspond to &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Am6aA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Am6aA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai prefix&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; prefix would correspond to &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8JtQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8JtQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai verb&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; would correspond to &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVQgx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVQgx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai verb&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;sees(s)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we move on with the current assumption-based results, and try to decipher sentence 9, we would get an English translation with the keywords: &lt;em&gt;Warrior&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sees&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;, which could meaningfully translate to &lt;em&gt;I see the warrior&lt;/em&gt;, or unmeaningfully translate to &lt;em&gt;The warrior sees I&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second translation would be gramatically incorrect and we do not find the first translation in the English sentences given. Therefore, our assumption was wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case II:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y1D52.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y1D52.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;corresponds to&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/scXJr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/scXJr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;corresponds to&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proceeding in the same method as CASE I, we find the following results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rKFB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rKFB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai prefix&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   --&gt;&gt; &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Am6aA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Am6aA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai prefix&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;   --&gt;&gt; &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8JtQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8JtQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai verb&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;     --&gt;&gt; &lt;em&gt;see(s)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVQgx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVQgx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai verb&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;     --&gt;&gt; &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these results give a suitable translation for sentence 9, which is, &lt;em&gt;The warrior cuts me&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have these results, the problem becomes fairly easy to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The results would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nnIFn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nnIFn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Maasai Answers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21760" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T16:51:11.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27708" CreationDate="2018-04-15T18:40:45.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Hebrew speaker. It says: &quot;I love (a girl is loving) you, my dear Mika&quot; (Mika is a name).  In Hebrew: &quot;אני אוהבת אותך מיקה שלי&quot; (technically it says I love you my Mika (but saying my Mika in English in this context doesn't make sense, in Hebrew it's like saying my dear Mika in English)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21768" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T18:40:45.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-15T19:21:40.340" Score="3" ViewCount="1335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Americans and Canadians pronounce &quot;t&quot; with flap [ɾ] in unstressed syllables. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21618" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T00:50:12.350" Title="Why do Americans and Canadians pronounce &quot;t&quot; with flap [ɾ] in unstressed syllables in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T04:06:09.227" Score="5" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;Various dialects in all three of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Sonorants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_phonology#Further_notes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portuguese&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#Sonorants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch&lt;/a&gt; have accents that contain velarized L allophones, which are sometimes known as “dark L’s”, at the syllable coda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why is this?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two different L allophones: a “light L” [l] is pronounced more at the front of the mouth while a “dark L” [ɫ] is pronounced more at the back of the mouth.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some English dialects, the words &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt; [lʌɪt] and &lt;em&gt;lit&lt;/em&gt; [lɪt] have “light L’s” at the start, while the words &lt;em&gt;occult&lt;/em&gt; [əˈkʰʌɫt] and &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; [fʊɫ] have “dark L’s” at the end of the syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some Portuguese dialects, the words &lt;em&gt;ler&lt;/em&gt; [leɾ] ‘read’ and &lt;em&gt;libra&lt;/em&gt; [ˈliβɾɐ] ‘pound’ both start with light L’s, but the words &lt;em&gt;fácil&lt;/em&gt; [ˈfasiɫ] ‘easy’ and &lt;em&gt;mal&lt;/em&gt; [maɫ] ‘bad’ both end with a dark L in those Portuguese dialects that do this, although those same words in Spanish always have only a light L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia mentions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of languages, including most varieties of English, the phoneme /l/ becomes velarized in certain contexts, a sound often called &amp;quot;dark l&amp;quot;. Some languages, like many North American dialects of English, may not have a &amp;quot;clear&amp;quot; /l/ at all, or use it only before front vowels (especially [i]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The velarized alveolar lateral approximant (dark l) is a type of consonantal sound used in some languages. It is an alveolar, denti-alveolar, or dental lateral approximant, with a secondary articulation of velarization or pharyngealization. The regular symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨lˠ⟩ (for a velarized lateral) and ⟨lˤ⟩ (for a pharyngealized lateral), though the dedicated letter ⟨ɫ⟩, which covers both velarization and pharyngealization, is perhaps more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this phenomenon arise phonologically, and why do native speakers of languages in which this occurs not consider those distinct phonemes? Is this a property that the physical and acoustic characteristics of the buccal cavity lend themselves to naturally, or is it instead some sort of mental adaptation that occurs only in certain cultures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages that have both kinds of L — meaning alveolar or “light” or “clear” on the one hand versus velarized or “dark” on the other hand — as distinct phonemes with minimal pairs rather than as mere allophones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21618" OwnerDisplayName="Patrick Rhlius" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:29:36.653" Title="Why do so many languages have both an alveolar &quot;light L&quot; [l] and a velarized &quot;dark L&quot; [ɫ] allophone?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27714" CreationDate="2018-04-15T23:18:31.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common phonological process called &quot;lenition&quot;, from the Latin for &quot;weakening&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various causes posited for this, but the simplest can be summarized as &lt;em&gt;language speakers are lazy&lt;/em&gt;: we will generally use the least amount of articulatory &quot;effort&quot; to make ourselves understood. Producing a [ɾ] takes less &quot;effort&quot; (tongue and mouth movement) than producing a [t], so that's what we tend to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T23:18:31.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27710" CreationDate="2018-04-16T00:02:32.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the answer is &quot;no&quot;, that is, you can't be convincingly tangible and say &quot;This is UG&quot;. The essential and most widely-accepted idea of UG is that humans have non-learned (genetically-given) abilities which are specific to language. This is as opposed to the theory that all aspects of language are learned (on the basis of general cognitive abilities). The position that Chomsky was arguing against held that there are no special cognitive differences at all between humans and rats, so Chomsky's alternative was pretty persuasive in that context. The argument for UG is much tougher nowadays, given that it is generally recognized that rats and humans learn differently. I should also mention that many people decline to accept the idea of UG simply because they don't consider the evidence of universality and genetic givenness to be sufficiently established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At certain points in the history of studying the matter, it was held that there are some universal concepts like &quot;Noun&quot;, &quot;Verb&quot;, &quot;Adjective&quot;, &quot;Sentence&quot;; it was once held that there is a set of 42 universally-available properties that characterize language sounds. These specific claims seem to have fallen by the wayside over the past 60 years. There used to be a specific theory of what a &quot;rule of language&quot; could look like, both in syntax and phonology. Some time around the end of the 60's (Jlawler and Greg Lee probably have a better understanding of people's views at the time), people started to give up on Aspects model formalization of rules, though in phonology, the theory of rules survived with a few revisions into the mid-70's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is much more that can be said about UG as a general concept. However, a lot more can be said about specific areas of grammar, and certain time periods. If you narrow it down to, for example, &quot;What is UG, according to the Minimalist theory of syntax?&quot;, or &quot;What is UG, in 1977 version Autosegmental Phonology?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T00:02:32.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27714" CreationDate="2018-04-16T00:50:12.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation for flapping, which takes place between vowels within the stress foot, has to do with the general phonetic timing of English segments, and it is a consequence of factors that shorten /t/ in that position. It has been observed that there is a tendency for segment duration to be influenced by whether the stress foot has 1 syllable versus 2, so that the vowel [i] in &quot;seam&quot; is longer than in &quot;Simi&quot; (assuming you use [i] and not [ɪ] in that word). Consonants are likewise subject to this effect. In addition, as we know, voiceless consonants are aspirated in syllable-initial foot-initial position. The combined effect of these two factors is that in words like &quot;ha&lt;em&gt;pp&lt;/em&gt;y&quot;, &quot;lu&lt;em&gt;ck&lt;/em&gt;y&quot;, the stops are shortest, compared to &quot;a&lt;em&gt;pp&lt;/em&gt;eal&quot;, &quot;a&lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;oustic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flapping is the result of pushing this consonant-shortening tendency a bit further, whereby in order articulate the consonant within a very short window of time, you have to throw the active articulator at the passive one (tone to alveolar ridge). This is relatively easy to do with the tongue tip, doable with the tongue body (velars can flap), and somewhat doable with labials - the reasons have to do with the mass of the articulators and the nature of articulatory control (the human tongue tip is a serious marvel). North American (and NZ) English are at the stage with alveolars flap; analogous flapping in Efik, Ibibio and numerous related languages down to NW Congo extends to labials and velars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear what exactly pushed NA English that bit further in shortening /t/ in food-medial position. Perhaps there have been some revealing cross-dialectal studies of vowel and consonant durations in the &quot;happy&quot; context, which would fill in some of the missing information about this shortening trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T00:50:12.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27722" CreationDate="2018-04-16T01:35:46.370" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that some languages have more or less tenses, have a more or less complete vocabulary, and in these ways it seems they would allow a native speaker a more or less accurate understanding of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any scale that compares languages in this way? And what are other features of languages that can be used to compare them in this way? What would be some of the top languages on such a scale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does learning multiple languages give a more accurate understanding of reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21771" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T02:45:57.360" Title="To what extent do different languages allow different understanding of reality?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2018-04-16T01:41:16.743" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like you're native language is both of your parent's language. For example, a Bollywood actress named Katrina Kaif was born to a British mother and an Indian Father who was a business man in UK. So her native language is English (since her mother is originally from Britain) and Hindi or any language that her father speaks (since he speaks that language) both languages that her parent spoke and grew up with is her native language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21777" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T01:41:16.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27720" CreationDate="2018-04-16T02:45:57.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This gets into the question of &quot;linguistic determinism&quot;, also known as the &quot;strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&quot;. It's arguably the single most controversial idea in linguistics. And as a disclaimer, I don't accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was proposed by the linguist Benjamin Whorf (without any actual collaboration from Sapir), and now has two forms. The &lt;em&gt;weak&lt;/em&gt; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language &lt;em&gt;influences&lt;/em&gt; the way we think, and the &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language &lt;em&gt;determines&lt;/em&gt; the way we think. In other words, according to the strong version, we can't conceptualize something we have no words for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, actually, some evidence for the weak form. Berlin and Kay's research on color words is the most famous and always comes up in these discussions: they showed that people do actually categorize colors differently based on their native language. English-speakers, who distinguish &quot;pink&quot; and &quot;red&quot; on a fundamental level, will be good at telling the difference between shades of red/pink. On the other hand, English doesn't distinguish light and dark blue at the same level, so we'll be worse at distinguishing those shades than Russian-speakers who have the categories of &quot;sinij&quot; and &quot;goluboj&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the evidence doesn't go much further than that. The strong version of the hypothesis is the one which shows up in fiction all over the place, most prominently in Orwell's &quot;Nineteen Eighty-Four&quot;. And simple experiments can show that it's nonsense. Humans simply don't think in words. The fact that you can get caught with a thought &quot;on the tip of your tongue&quot;, with the thought fully formed but unable to be articulated, shows that your thoughts exist independently from the words describing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as an &quot;accurate understanding of reality&quot; goes, I personally don't believe the evidence is nearly strong enough to suggest any such thing. But you might look into Lojban, a logical and unambiguous language that was constructed to see whether it would improve people's thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Your comment on tenses deserves a bit more clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, for example, has only two &lt;em&gt;morphological&lt;/em&gt; tenses: past and non-past (&quot;walked&quot;, &quot;walk&quot;). All other tenses are formed by adding in other words (&quot;will walk&quot;, &quot;was walking&quot;). Adherents of strong Sapir-Whorf might suggest this means English-speakers can't think about the future, whereas a Latin-speaker would. But English certainly does have ways to talk about the future! You just need to add other words for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for other languages. Mandarin doesn't change the verb words in any way to indicate tense. But Mandarin-speakers can certainly talk about time without any difficulty. The difference is less in what languages &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; express, and more in what they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; express: tense in English, aspect in Ancient Greek, politeness level in Japanese, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T02:45:57.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27710" CreationDate="2018-04-16T03:13:27.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your question is phrased so broadly and there are tons of research on Universal Grammar (UG), I have to write a likewise broad answer, which is nevertheless technically correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Universal Grammar is the genetic component of the language faculty (Berwick and Chomsky 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernard Comrie (as early as Comrie 1989) noted that this research paradigm - whatever it is called now (is it the Minimalist Program or biolinguistics?) - is &lt;strong&gt;aprioristic&lt;/strong&gt;, which is legitimate. cf. &quot;Conversely, one can formulate a theory of UG as an abstract Platonic object with no claim whatsoever regarding any physical instantiation it may have&quot; (Roberts 2017).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it means it could be the case it is not &quot;potentially disconfirmable&quot; (Comrie 1989: 5). Because of its potential unfalsifiability, some linguists (nomina sunt odiosa) even went as far as to say that the theory of UG is not scientific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists will never agree on whether there is UG or not (for different reasons), but the generative paradigm is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; pseudoscience. Even though I am no longer actively involved in generative research anymore nor do I find it particularly enthralling, as it used to be in the good olde days, I still believe Noam Chomsky &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a great man and the most formidable linguist of our time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to understand the basics of Universal Grammar and if you don't have any formal training in linguistics, I would recommend something written for the general audience, perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Infinite-Gift/Charles-Yang/9781451612998&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Infinite Gift&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Charles Yang or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/mark-c-baker/the-atoms-of-language/9780786724567/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Atoms Of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules Of Grammar&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Mark Baker. Slightly more technical and better written (imho) is Chapter 4 &quot;Universal Grammar&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/foundations-of-language-9780199264377?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Foundations of Language&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Ray Jackendoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you might want to read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199573776.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199573776-e-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roberts 2017&lt;/a&gt; (open access!) in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199573776.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199573776&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar&lt;/a&gt;. I find this part very important and illuminating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Like any bold and interesting idea, UG has its critics. In recent years, some have been extremely vocal [...]. Again this is as it should be: all good ideas can and should be challenged. Even if these critics turn out to be correct (although I think it is fair to say that reports of the ‘death of UG’ are somewhat premature), at the very minimum the idea has served as an outstandingly useful heuristic for finding out more about language. But one is naturally led to wonder whether the idea can really be wholly wrong if it is able to yield so much, aside from any intrinsic explanatory value it may have.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T03:30:49.940" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T03:30:49.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27726" CreationDate="2018-04-16T05:55:31.180" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to analyse the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Building land is a plot of land in relation to which a construction permit has been issued.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and my question is - what type of subordinated clause is introduced by the phrase/conjunction &lt;code&gt;in relation to which&lt;/code&gt;? And is this conjunction somehow different from other subordinating conjunctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to read more about this specific phrase/conjunction, but I can not found any book or article about it, of course, there are a lot of articles and books about traditional subordinating conjunctions. I am interested both in semantics (better yet - categorial grammar, type logical, abstract categorial grammar) and syntax of this phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T07:01:48.083" Title="&quot;in relation to which&quot; - what type of subordinated clause and is this conjunction somehow distinct?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27725" CreationDate="2018-04-16T07:01:48.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a relative clause. &lt;em&gt;A plot of land&lt;/em&gt; is acting as the lexical head of the RC, and &lt;em&gt;in relation to&lt;/em&gt; was 'moved' to before the relative pronoun (not conjunction) &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; through the process of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied-piping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pied piping&lt;/a&gt;; you can see more examples on the Wikipedia page linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T07:01:48.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T10:33:54.910" Score="2" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the Hobbs Algorithm. I am able to follow the algorithm and solve tree walking questions to find the antecedent of a pronoun, but I do not get the intuition behind the rules defined in the Hobbs Algorithm. Can someone please help me in explaining the meaning of these rules ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Begin at the noun phrase (NP) node immediately dominating the pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go up the tree to the first NP or sentence (S) node encountered. Call this node X, and call the path used to reach it p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Traverse all branches below node X to the left of path p in a left-to-right, breadth-first fashion. Propose as the antecedent any NP node that is encountered which has an NP or S node between it and X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If node X is the highest S node in the sentence, traverse the surface parse trees of previous sentences in the text in order of recency, the most recent first; each tree is traversed in a left-to-right, breadth-first manner, and when an NP node is encountered, it is proposed as antecedent.If X is not the highest S node in the sentence, continue to step 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From node X, go up the tree to the first NP or S node encountered. Call this new node X, and call the path traversed to reach it p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If X is an NP node and if the path p to X did not pass through the Nominal node that X immediately dominates, propose X as the antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Traverse all branches below node X to the left of path p in a left-to-right, breadth- first manner. Propose any NP node encountered as the antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If X is an S node, traverse all branches of node X to the right of path p in a left-to- right, breadth-first manner, but do not go below any NP or S node encountered. Propose any NP node encountered as the antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go to Step4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have taken these rules from Jurafsky &amp;amp; Martin. These rules can also be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isi.edu/%7Ehobbs/PronounResolution.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21510" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T10:33:54.910" Title="What is the intuition behind the rules of Hobbs Algorithm?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28469" CreationDate="2018-04-16T15:28:16.740" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a feature in the macOS speech synthesizer (which takes written text and reads it aloud) for developers which lets you instead enter text and outputs the phonemes that it would read aloud in text format.  I'm not sure, however, how to read the format it outputs because the documentation is rather sparse.  Here's how it reads this first paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;~DEHr ~IHz ~AX _f1IYCAXr ~2IHn ~nAX _m1AEk=OW=1EHs _sp1IYC _s1IHnTIXsAYzAXr, ~w2IHC _t1EYks _r1IHtIXn _t1EHkst ~IXnd _r1IYdz ~IHt _AXl1AWd, ~fAOr _dIHv1EHlAXpAXrz ~w2IHC _l1EHts ~yUW _IHnst1EHd _1EHntAXr ~t2EHkst% ~AXnd _1AWtpUHts ~DAX _f1OWnIYmz% ~DIXt ~IHt ~wUHd ~r2IYd ~AXl2AWd ~2IHn ~t2EHkst _f1AOrmAEt. ~2AYm _n1AAt _S1AXr,[[ibot1792]] _hAW1EHvAXr, _h1AW ~tAXr ~r2IYd ~DAX ~f2AOrmAEt% ~IHt ~2AWtpUHts ~bIYk2UXz ~DIX _dAAkyIXmEHnt1EYSIXn ~IHz _r1AEDAXr _sp1AArs. ~h2IYrz ~h2AW ~IHt ~r2IYdz ~DIHs _f1AXrst _p1AErAXgrAEf:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you recognize this format?  Do you know what it's called?  I would like to be able to convert this format to IPA.  I know that I could try to create a key myself based on the output it gives me, but it would be a lot easier if I knew the name of this format and could look up a key (especially since I'm dealing with more than just English) (&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: never mind, the function appears to only work in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on the developer side, it's the &quot;phonemes&quot; function of NSSpeechSynthesizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21781" LastEditorUserId="21781" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T01:57:53.730" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T12:49:35.880" Title="What is this phonetic alphabet called?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T16:00:32.310" Score="-4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the NLP point of view. what are the major differences between words synonym, similarity, relatedness and association. With examples if possible. Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21782" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T08:18:37.213" Title="Similarity, Relatedness and Association" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-05-01T00:38:43.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T17:00:09.170" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this wiki on &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb_inversion_in_English#Structural_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Subject–verb inversion in English&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there are two approaches suggested to dealing with subject-verb inversion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Maintaining the traditional subject-predicate division of the clause (S → NP VP)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Rejecting the existence of the finite VP constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But neither is perfect, says the wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In approach (1), &amp;quot;one has to assume movement (or copying) on a massive scale.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In approach (2), &amp;quot;this analysis does not capture the obvious dependency between the main verb and the inverted subject.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what the latter exactly means, but this sounds like a drawback of the second approach. (Please enlighten me on this as well in your answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what if a verb phrase (VP) can be defined to include a subject?&#xA;Then, I think we should be able to analyze subject-verb inversion without (1) assuming movement (or copying) on a massive scale or (2) failing to capture the obvious dependency between the main verb and the inverted subject -- whatever that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[i] Under the bush crouched Bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ii] Bill crouched under the bush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sentence [i], for example, if &amp;quot;crouched Bill&amp;quot; can be defined as a VP that includes a subject &amp;quot;Bill&amp;quot;, then the sentence can be easily analyzed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S → PP + VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VP → V + NP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, this approach doesn't treat sentence [i] merely as an inversion of sentence [ii], but it treats sentence [i] as having a unique VP that includes a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this kind of approach ever been suggested?&#xA;If not, what do you think about it, compared to the other two approaches mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T18:57:06.397" Title="Can a VP be defined to include a subject in subject-verb inversion?" Tags="&lt;inversion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2018-04-16T17:32:47.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IBM Text to Speech also supports IPA per their docs here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/text-to-speech/SPRs.html#ipa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/text-to-speech/SPRs.html#ipa&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/text-to-speech/SSML-elements.html#phoneme_element&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/text-to-speech/SSML-elements.html#phoneme_element&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of SSML in ipa to generate audio for the word tomato:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;speak version=&quot;1.0&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;ipa&quot; ph=&quot;təˈmeɪ.ɾoʊ&quot;&amp;gt;tomato&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/speak&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21784" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T17:32:47.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27732" CreationDate="2018-04-17T01:53:55.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know of several theories which, in some sense, put subjects inside English VPs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English as a VSO language.&lt;/strong&gt; James McCawley proposed that in English deep structures, subjects immediately follow verbs.  His article appeared in &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case Grammar.&lt;/strong&gt; In Charles Fillmore's &lt;em&gt;Case Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, subjects arise through a transformation that moves one of the several &quot;deep case&quot; constituents that go with a verb into surface subject position.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2PSG&lt;/strong&gt; is my theory, based on some ideas of Relational Grammar.  The main parts of sentences are verbs with dependencies of various degrees of obliqueness.  Inversion constructions of the sort that interest you arise when an oblique verb dependency becomes less oblique than other verb arguments which, together with the verb, make up the VP. The least oblique dependency is that of root sentences, which is why inversions occur only in unembedded sentences. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;2PSG&lt;/a&gt; here (a deleted question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reply to a comment, here is a 2PSG example tree for the example [i] &quot;Under the bush crouched Bill&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;           [S0 under the bush crouched Bill ]  &#xA;                     /                   \  &#xA;        [S0 PP0 crouched Bill ]         [PP0 under the bush ]  &#xA;            /             \                    /           \  &#xA;      [S0 S1 ]   [S1 PP0 crouched Bill ]  [PP0 PP2 ]  [PP2 under the bush ]  &#xA;                   /            \                       /     \    &#xA;  [S1 PP0 crouch Aux1 Bill ]  [Aux1 ed ]   [PP2 under NP2 ]  [NP2 the bush ]  &#xA;              /              \                               /    \  &#xA; [S1 PP0 crouch Aux1 NP1 ]   [NP1 Bill]           [NP2 NP1 ] [NP1 the bush ]    &#xA;           | by Raising&#xA; [S1 NP1 crouch Aux1 PP2 ]  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forms in the derivation tree are either lexical or derived from forms below&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The derivational rule of Raising makes a variable less oblique&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other steps in the derivation are by the derivational rule of Substitution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Substitution substitutes a string of constants (phonemes) and variables for a variable. A tree node assigns the string as a value of the variable it replaces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A variable is a grammatical type (e.g., S, NP, PP, Aux) and a grammatical relation (e.g., 0 for speech acts, 1 for subjective, 2 for objective, 3 for indirect objects and other obliques). Grammatical relations are taken here to be levels of obliqueness (as in HPSG).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The counterparts of forms in other grammatical theories are context free phrase structure rules, or tree nodes in Categorial Grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T06:02:43.310" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T06:02:43.310" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2018-04-17T06:34:46.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another instance, though a sketchy one. At least one description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsakonian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Tsakonian&quot;&gt;Tsakonian&lt;/a&gt; (I think it's Scutt, C. A. 1912-13. The Tsakonian Dialect I. &lt;em&gt;The Annual of the British School at Athens&lt;/em&gt; 19. 133-173) commented that men's pronunciation of palatalised /r/ resembled &quot;the Czech &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The pronunciation would have been unstable even at the time (hence the sociolinguistic split of men vs women), and all subsequent descriptions say it is simply [ʒ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek-based practical orthographies of Tsakonian continue to write the sound as ρζ—just like the &amp;lt;rz&amp;gt; digraph in Polish, which appears to reflect a similar development. So &quot;justice of the peace&quot;, Stadnard Greek ειρηνοδίκης [irinoðicis], was rendered in Tsakonian as ρζινοδίτζη [r̝inoðitɕi].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T06:34:46.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27739" CreationDate="2018-04-17T10:22:26.957" Score="7" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by the comments to my answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27679/do-languages-generally-tend-to-avoid-palindromic-syllables&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there reversed affricates, i.e., fricatives ending in a homorganic stop, attested in any language of the world? What is the usual term for such kind of a sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T11:56:01.863" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T13:38:40.110" Title="Are there languages featuring &quot;reversed affricates&quot; as phonological segments?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27738" CreationDate="2018-04-17T15:34:38.997" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;One proposed name for a reversed affricate is &amp;quot;suffricate&amp;quot;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Whether suffricates exist seems to depend on what you think of as the defining characteristic of an affricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there have been proposals for analyzing certain sounds as such, but usually another analysis exists that is plausible enough that there is no unanimous consensus in favor of the &amp;quot;suffricate&amp;quot; analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that can be similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;onset clusters of [s] or a similar sibilant + a plosive — I've mainly seen this analysis in the context of Indo-European languages. Note that in the onset, fricatives followed by homorganic plosives, such as [st], usually behave similarly to fricatives followed by non-homorganic plosives, such as [sp], so all the analyses that I have seen that treat things like onset [st] or [ʃt] as suffricates also treat things like onset [sp] and [ʃp] as suffricates. Also, I forget whether any of these analyses treat coda [st] or [sp] as single segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pre-aspirated stops (typically, these occur after vowel segments). The realization of &amp;quot;aspiration&amp;quot; may involve friction that is more or less homorganic to the plosive part of a phoneme; e.g. a sound like [xk] may occur as the phonetic realization of something that could be analyzed phonologically as a segment /ʰk/ or a sequence /hk/. THe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant#Pre-affrication&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on affricates&lt;/a&gt; has a short section that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In rare instances, a fricative–stop contour may occur. This is the case in dialects of Scottish Gaelic that have velar frication [ˣ] where other dialects have pre-aspiration. For example, in the Harris dialect there is [ʃaˣkʰ] 'seven' and [əhʷɔˣkʰ] 'eight' (or [ʃax͜kʰ], [əhʷɔx͜kʰ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Citations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=EDNCEwG6GmYC&amp;amp;pg=PA175&amp;amp;lpg=PA175&amp;amp;dq=%22suffricate%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=fuAVE4kbbc&amp;amp;sig=wdwhCScpFr7UbC7gswR2HfFbVFs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiGt6zkzsHaAhUJ4IMKHeOODz4Q6AEIODAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22suffricate%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Syllable in German&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, Wiebke Brockhaus, in &lt;em&gt;The Syllable: Views and Facts,&lt;/em&gt; edited by Harry van der Hulst and Nancy A. Ritter, 1999. p. 175.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T16:05:38.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-17T17:06:43.573" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balinese_numerals#Basic_numerals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Balinese numbers&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;dependent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;independent&lt;/em&gt; forms are given as linked. I just need to verify the assumptions that I made about the (possibly reduplicated) derived, independent form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) if the first syllable has a &lt;strong&gt;CV&lt;/strong&gt; form, change it to &lt;em&gt;CV1CV2&lt;/em&gt; where if V2 is &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt; V1 is &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; otherwise if V2 is &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt; V1 is &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) if the first syllable starts with an optional &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; turns into a permanent vowel. (it sticks)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: thanks for the edit @user6726&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T06:02:04.313" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T06:02:04.313" Title="Balinese independent numerals partial reduplication" Tags="&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;reduplication&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-17T22:02:16.343" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd love an expert opinion on how to interpret &quot;as long as&quot; and &quot;so long as&quot; when doing logic (specifically, whether it's considered a necessary or sufficient conditional indicator). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'd appreciate advice on how knowing when those terms are not used as conditionals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;As long as I live, I'll love you&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;John can join us so long as he doesn't smell&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;As long as you keep hitting people, you won't make any friends&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;So long as you're here, you might as well stay at my place&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21791" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T11:27:22.980" Title="&quot;As long as&quot;, &quot;So long as&quot;, in logic (ambiguity?)" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27741" CreationDate="2018-04-18T11:27:22.980" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;As long as&quot; and &quot;so long as&quot; are considered discourse connectives. Our discourse analysis software labels it as: &lt;strong&gt;while(SomeCondition = true)&lt;/strong&gt;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;while(&quot;I live&quot; = TRUE), then (&quot;I love you&quot;);&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PDTB will show the SYNCHRONY label for some senses of &quot;as long as&quot;, however, I think this is odd. IMO, they conflate &quot;as long as&quot; with the sense of &quot;while&quot; that deals with &quot;at the same time&quot; (meanwhile, all the while, etc). See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb/PDTBAPI/pdtb-annotation-manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb/PDTBAPI/pdtb-annotation-manual.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you stick with the &quot;while(true)&quot; notion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T11:27:22.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27732" CreationDate="2018-04-19T03:14:21.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In generative syntax, the fronted PP, &lt;em&gt;under the bush&lt;/em&gt;, is usually analyzed as Spec,TP whereas the light subject, &lt;em&gt;Bill&lt;/em&gt;, is in situ in VP, because Spec,TP is already occupied by the fronted PP and it cannot move to SpecvP because &lt;em&gt;crouch&lt;/em&gt; is an unaccusative verb. The phenomenon is known as &lt;strong&gt;locative inversion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1010646417840&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Culicover and Levine 2001&lt;/a&gt; for further details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T18:57:06.397" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T18:57:06.397" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26955" CreationDate="2018-04-19T05:29:53.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is properly the domain of &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt; , but at least one actor  in Discovery (the one who played T'Kuvma) made a point of saying that he wanted his Klingon to sound African (&lt;a href=&quot;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/what-is-tkuvma-saying-in-the-trailer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/what-is-tkuvma-saying-in-the-trailer/&lt;/a&gt;, citing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/72v35m/i_transcribed_all_of_tkuvmas_speeches_to_get_a/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/72v35m/i_transcribed_all_of_tkuvmas_speeches_to_get_a/&lt;/a&gt; ). Different prosthetics are likely in play as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T05:29:53.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26852" CreationDate="2018-04-19T05:33:41.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @user6726 points out, IPA can be used for phonemes, and in fact is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA guidelines (at least the 1948 version) suggests that if you're using IPA for a broad transcription (and a phonemic analysis is broad), you should prefer the more familiar-looking, Roman glyph over the less familiar. So if you have a choice of &amp;lt;e&amp;gt; or &amp;lt;ɛ&amp;gt; for a phoneme, use &amp;lt;e&amp;gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T05:33:41.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27730" CreationDate="2018-04-19T07:20:24.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Synonymy means two words have the same meaning. An example would be words that are in the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; synset. It should be noted that WordNet is word-sense disambiguated, meaning words with multiple meanings are represented as completely separate entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarity measures the extent to which two words share meaning. For example, path similarity, Wu-Palmer similarity, and Leacock-Chodorow similarity all compute the similarity between WordNet synsets using the paths between them in WordNet's is-a heirarchy. If two words are in the same synset (i.e. they are synonyms), their similarity is generally 1. You can play around with these similarity scorers using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/howto/wordnet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK's WordNet implementation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common type of similarity is word embedding (Word2Vec, GloVe, etc.) similarity. This is generally computed as the cosine similarity between each word's vectors. In generally, word embeddings follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/Distributional_Hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distributional hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; that similar words occur in similar contexts. This means what you're actually measuring is subsitutability. For example, any sentence where you use the word &quot;dog&quot; (as in the animal), you can substitute it with the word &quot;puppy&quot;. Thus &quot;dog&quot; and &quot;puppy&quot; are similar. Interestingly, this means that word pairs like &quot;white&quot; and &quot;black&quot; are also very similar according to word embeddings, &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@timsears/the-opposite-of-hitler-5eb570346020&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even though humans generally consider them opposites&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally consider relatedness and association to be the same thing. Relatedness encompasses similarity but is much broader. Similarity measures the degree to which two words are the same, e.g. &quot;dog&quot; and &quot;canine&quot; describe the same concept. However, &quot;leash&quot; and &quot;dog&quot; are very different. One is an animal while the other is a long, thin, strong piece of cord or fabric. However, &quot;leash&quot; and &quot;dog&quot; are very related because dogs often are walked on leashes. Examples of related measures are less common but still exist. Good places to start are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/Pubs/ijcai03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Extended Lesk&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ef93/f02b1dc8be3779763cf99a9ed7d192809ea2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gloss Vectors&lt;/a&gt;. Both are implemented as part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://wn-similarity.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet::Similarity&lt;/a&gt; Perl library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I may self-promote, I'm actually developing a semantic relatedness measure based on word associations and I've seen some encouraging results on a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-4308&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humour recognition task&lt;/a&gt;. I've also developed an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1132&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;association strength prediction model&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1055" LastEditorUserId="1055" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T08:18:37.213" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T08:18:37.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-19T16:00:50.970" Score="-1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does corpora show any genre preferences for ending sentences with a nominal possessive? Does it occur more in spoken and informal written texts than in academic texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really appreciate your input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21105" LastEditorUserId="21105" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T15:55:36.837" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T15:55:36.837" Title="Is ending a sentence with a possessive considered informal?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-04-20T14:59:26.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27749" CreationDate="2018-04-19T18:34:21.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the number of times that each possessive pronoun appeared at the end of each sentence in the British National Corpus per million words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;        spoken  fiction magazine    newspaper   non-acad    academic    misc&#xA;hers    3.41    37.97   1.79        1.62        0.67        0.98        1.39&#xA;his     6.62    39.47   3.03        3.63        1.64        2.09        4.22&#xA;mine    39.14   38.97   6.33        4.20        4.85        1.17        6.82&#xA;yours   17.86   21.43   3.72        1.53        1.21        0.39        3.22&#xA;its     0.10    0.06    0.00        0.10        0.12        0.13        0.05&#xA;theirs  2.81    4.78    3.03        2.39        2.12        2.09        3.31&#xA;ours    10.74   5.15    3.44        2.58        2.36        1.30        2.93&#xA;'s      15.16   90.32   36.63       28.66       18.49       14.02       26.78&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, academic texts consistently do this less often than do other texts. On the surface, this seems to indicate that the question to your question is 'yes'. But is it really so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This table does not take into account one important factor: The prevalence of these possessive pronouns in the first place (irrespective of context). It turns out that possessive pronouns are less common in academic writing in the first place (I exclude his and its since they may not be pronouns):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;        spoken  fiction magazine    newspaper   non-acad    academic    misc&#xA;hers    18.87   115.47  7.30        5.73        3.39        3.07        5.47&#xA;yours   100.77  84.48   26.99       8.31        15.10       3.85        53.76&#xA;mine    196.71  115.53  41.17       28.57       41.41       10.11       39.98&#xA;theirs  14.65   13.39   10.74       7.74        7.94        6.65        10.80&#xA;ours    65.94   17.79   11.84       9.55        9.09        6.65        13.44&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By inspection, the ratios seem fairly consistent across the two tables, so there seems to be little basis for saying that the possessive pronoun is less likely to appear at the end of a sentence in academic writing. (If you're not convinced, I could do some statistical analysis later...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T19:15:48.637" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T19:15:48.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27752" CreationDate="2018-04-19T18:44:39.097" Score="4" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swaziland has been renamed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/19/swaziland-king-renames-country-kingdom-of-eswatini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kingdom of eSwatini&lt;/a&gt;, it is Swazi meaning &quot;place of the Swazi&quot;.  But I'm pretty interested in the lowercase &quot;e&quot; starting the proper noun of eSwatini. I know in the west we have this with many of our tech pronouns, most notably with apple products like iPhone. But I'm wondering if this is part of Swazi syntax and is common in the language, or that it is a new addition to their written language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21805" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T14:08:52.487" Title="Is the lowercase first letter of a proper noun common in the Swazi language?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27751" CreationDate="2018-04-19T19:33:38.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The common rule for Swati and all of the Nguni languages rule for proper nouns is that you capitalize the initial letter of the &quot;root&quot;, not the word. Sentence-initial capitalization on the other hand affects the first letter in the sentence. I put root in quotes because proper names can be formed from inflected verbs, which have subject prefixes, but those inflected verbs are treated as though they are autonomous roots. For example, &lt;em&gt;uSibadle&lt;/em&gt; from /si-ba-dle/ &quot;we will eat them&quot;. The initial vowel is called the &quot;augment&quot; in Bantu, and it is a feature of the noun class system, found in &lt;em&gt;u-m-fana&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boy&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ba-fana&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;e-ba-fana&lt;/em&gt; &quot;boys&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;eSwatini&lt;/em&gt;, this is a locative, formed by adding &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; to the un-augmented noun and suffixing -&lt;em&gt;ini&lt;/em&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;indvodza&lt;/em&gt; &quot;man&quot;, &lt;em&gt;endvodzeni&lt;/em&gt;. The suffix part is lexically omittable, e.g. &lt;em&gt;ebusika&lt;/em&gt; &quot;in winter&quot;, and is commonly left off of place names (&lt;em&gt;eMbabane&lt;/em&gt; (the capital)), but not always &lt;em&gt;eZulwini&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the heavens&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the history of spelling is concerned, Swati was more recently recognized as different from Zulu, and inherited writing practices from Zulu. Zulu has been written for longer: I don't know anything about the very earliest missionary works, and there are grammars from the mid 19th century. In Bryant's 1848 article &quot;The Zulu language&quot;, citation names are given as e.g. Umpandi, Unyokhana, and Grout 1849 &quot;The Zulu and other dialects of southern Africa&quot; likewise gives Untaba, Ubalekhile. This may reflect author idiosyncracy, but today's idiosynracy is tomorrow's policy. In other words, there is some reason to think that the proper name rule is a more recent development, but when exactly is beyond me. The history of this convention is expertly discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/27755/6726&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-20T14:08:52.487" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T14:08:52.487" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-19T21:27:53.083" Score="3" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there some languages that do not take their verbs and convert them into verbals (infinitives/participles/gerunds, et al.)? I noticed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on participles&lt;/a&gt; has a number of language groups noted, but most (though not all) are European in origin (and similarly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the infinitive page&lt;/a&gt;); specifically a number of African and Asian languages are not noted. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerund page&lt;/a&gt; notes a few others (e.g. Japanese, Korean), but still seems a bit lacking in certain language groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are there some languages that do not use verbs directly to form nouns, adjectives, or adverbs by means of transforming the verb into an infinitive, participle, gerund, or similar such aspect of speech that it keeps verbal properties along with the properties of the transformation? If so, what are some ways those languages express similar ideas? Do they have pure &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verbal nouns&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attributive verbs&lt;/a&gt; (this one notes Japanese and Bantu), etc. to convey similar ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My language background is English, Greek, Hebrew, and a very, very little German in high school. So I am totally unfamiliar with how other languages work (and really don't remember much about German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21799" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-20T04:22:32.427" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T20:51:54.117" Title="Are there some languages that do not have infinitives/participles/gerunds?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27756" CreationDate="2018-04-20T13:24:39.710" Score="5" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;Motivated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27751/is-the-lowercase-first-letter-of-a-proper-noun-common-in-the-swazi-language&quot;&gt;Is the lowercase first letter of a proper noun common in the Swazi language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zulu, and the other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguni_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguni_languages&lt;/a&gt; as user@6726 reports in his answer there, capitalise the root of proper nouns, and leave their prefixes uncapitalised; this results in camel-case like &lt;em&gt;isiZulu&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;uDavida&lt;/em&gt;. When and how was this convention introduced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T14:37:58.570" Title="When did Nguni languages like Zulu adopt capitalisation of proper noun roots?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;zulu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27755" CreationDate="2018-04-20T13:41:57.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/27752/17064&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/27752/17064&lt;/a&gt;, @user6726's answer to the related question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very earliest renderings of Zulu in Roman script, as @user6726 reports, used normal Roman capitalisation conventions. @user6726 reports that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Bryant's 1848 article &quot;The Zulu language&quot;, citation names are given&#xA;  as e.g. Umpandi, Unyokhana, and Grout 1849 &quot;The Zulu and other&#xA;  dialects of southern Africa&quot; likewise gives Untaba, Ubalekhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=5_MlAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Grammar%20Book%20by%20L.%20Grout&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjWlNvi2MjaAhUF8WMKHfs2CwwQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Grammar%20Book%20by%20L.%20Grout&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1859 grammar&lt;/a&gt; of Zulu by the American missionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Grout%2C%20Lewis%2C%201815%2D1905&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis Grout&lt;/a&gt; likewise still uses the older capitalisation: &lt;em&gt;Udavida&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;uDavida&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;David&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Bishop &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colenso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Colenso&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=G61C9mr2ouYC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammar written in the same year&lt;/a&gt; uses the modern camel-case convention. And little hints I see in Wikipedia and Google show that inconsistency in Zulu capitalisation persisted for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What seems to be an explanation occurs in the 1868 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=C4UBAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nursery Tales, Traditions, &amp;amp; Histories of the Zulus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Callaway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Callaway&lt;/a&gt;, which uses the older capitalisation, and rejects camel-case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two modes of writing—one adopted by Dr. Colenso and Dr.&#xA;  Bleek, in which a number of small words is run together; and the&#xA;  other, that adopted by the American missionaries and others, in which&#xA;  there is, perhaps, the opposite mistake of unnecessary division. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As regards the first, I am quite unable to see anything to recommend&#xA;  it, or even to conceive the reason of its adoption. Why should we&#xA;  write &lt;em&gt;ngabebabopa&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;they ought to bind them&quot;; and not &lt;em&gt;nga be ba&#xA;  bopa&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;ought they them bind?&quot; Why should we run the Zulu words&#xA;  together, when we write the English ones apart? (p. ii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A difficulty, too, has been felt as regards the capital letters; and&#xA;  we find consequently in printed books some ugly anomalies, such as  a&#xA;  capital in the middle of a word, and paragraphs beginning with a small&#xA;  letter. This has arisen apparently, in part, from the error of not&#xA;  regarding the prefix as an essential part of a noun, and so giving the&#xA;  nominal root an undue prominence; and, in part, from our not being&#xA;  accustomed to those &lt;em&gt;initial&lt;/em&gt; changes upon which grammatical&#xA;  inflection so much depends in the Zulu language. But to use the&#xA;  capital letters to distinguish nominal roots is a novelty in writing&#xA;  (p. iii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Grout wrote Zulu affixes as separate words, Colenso as affixes (something Callaway disagreed with). And (I assume!) Colenso also came up with the camel-case orthography, since he was in effect joining up what Grout had written as two words (&lt;em&gt;u Davida, n Kosi, isi Zulu&lt;/em&gt;) into single words (&lt;em&gt;uDavida, nKosi, isiZulu&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-04-20T14:37:58.570" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T14:37:58.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-21T06:56:18.790" Score="5" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fictional language Flaidish has this feature. But I recently found out about a natural language (Mixtec) where the present isn't the base form of a verb, its the future tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this surprising. Flaidish is of course fictional, but I never thought that there would be a natlang where the simplest tense wasn't the present. Though in Mixtec's case, many verbs are identical in the present and future tense (though not all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most languages of course, the other tenses are at least as complex as the present tense, if not more so (note how in English, past tense is marked with -ed or a stem change, while the present is mostly just the bare infinite, plus MAYBE the third person singular ending -s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T13:29:54.403" Title="Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;markedness&gt;&lt;marking&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27757" CreationDate="2018-04-21T16:55:09.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably this confusion is familiar within Indo-European linguistics. If we use the concept 'root' instead of 'base' we will understand this issue more accurately. In Indo-European languages, as far as I know, there is this notion of a root as a lexical entity: Root{reason}, can form: reasoning, reasonable, etc. In other languages with non-concatenative morphology like Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, etc) and Afro-Asiatic like Berber, things are different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This latter class, especially Berber, has sometimes one simple AFFIX as a root (for example, a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant alone means 'eat'). Sometimes Berber expresses future using the root itself without any morphological change. In relation to your question, observe the following data from Berber (spoken in Northern Morocco):&#xA;Root{adr} 'demolish'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PAST:           adr-x        'I demolished' the 'x' is 'I'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;PRESENT:        addr-x       'I'm demolishing'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;FUTURE:         ad- adr-x     'I will demolish' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can see the gemination of the intraconsonant in 'addr' deriving the present, but the PAST 'adr' is more similar to the root, i.e. more basic. The future also is marked, in this case, with 'ad' (will), becoming more complex. So Here the present is derived from the PAST not the other way around. Consequently, the PAST is more BASIC than other other forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T16:55:09.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27716" CreationDate="2018-04-21T18:47:59.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking for a functional explanation in the literature, and this apparently isn't a question that has been explored: &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is the change from clear to dark &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; so common? Dark l has a very low F2, and clear l has a higher F2, so it is unlikely that this is acoustically driven. I suspect that it is related to things necessary to articulate a lateral. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[l] would differ from [t] in that [l] has only a little bit of contact in the front, whereas [l] has contact going back to the molars. It has been observed that in the articulation of [l] (this is from Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson's &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;), the jaw is lower and the tongue is lower, making the lateral opening more possible. (There are other ways, and thus we have palatal [ʎ] as well, where the side cavity is in the front). Lowering the tongue encourages backing (there an empty space in the back where the tongue can easily go, and not much room in the front). So some degree of pharyngealization is probably a natural but not irresistible physiological consequence of what you have to do to achieve a side cavity while maintaining a short alveolar closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it is very difficult to model the degree of physiological necessity of this tongue lowering and backing: there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; certainly languages with clear &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;. What is empirically unclear, at the moment, is how laterals and plain alveolars compare, articulatorily, in languages which absolutely do not have l-velarization. A physiological comparison tongue retraction and backing in Spanish &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; vs. English clear &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; in maximally non-darkening environments would be informative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One further factor that is surely relevant is that the velarization effect is most prominent in the syllable coda. It may be that in the onset, duration of &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is shorter and there is a rapid transition to a more prominent vowel formant, whereas in the coda, what comes after &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is probably much less prominent acoustically, and the duration of &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is longer therefore potentially more noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T19:46:35.903" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T19:46:35.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-21T20:24:14.660" Score="0" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was reading The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen and there was a map that showed a mountain named “Machhapuchare”. So close to Machu Picchu that it made me stop and think. I have found that Andean and Tibetan peoples have similar physical features but had not, until seeing this notation, thought of linguistic connections. Where can I find more information.&#xA;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21818" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T02:50:56.183" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T14:41:12.537" Title="Are Andean and Tibetan languages connected?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27753" CreationDate="2018-04-21T20:51:54.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So are there some languages that do not use verbs directly to form nouns, adjectives, or adverbs &lt;strong&gt;by means of transforming the verb&lt;/strong&gt; into an infinitive, participle, gerund, or similar such aspect of speech … ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think isolating languages like Mandarin might fit this bill. Mandarin lacks extensive verbal morphology, such that a verb's function is more often determined syntactically. For example, &lt;code&gt;睡觉&lt;/code&gt; (pinyin: shui4jiao4) &quot;sleep&quot; can also function as &quot;sleeping/to sleep&quot;. Its function is only clear through sentence context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… what are some ways those languages express similar ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Chinese,  verb function is determined syntactically, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;我 喜欢  睡觉&#xA;I like sleep&#xA;&quot;I like sleeping/to sleep.&quot;&#xA;&#xA;我 睡觉 了&#xA;I sleep LE&#xA;&quot;I'm going to sleep.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Position in the sentence is the only way that these verbs differ from each other, in the first sentence, as an object, and in the second one, as the main verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if these apply to other isolating languages. I'm using examples from Chinese mainly because I've been studying it for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming here that when you say &quot;transforming&quot; the verb into other parts of speech, you mean changing a verb's part of speech through morphology. If this is what you mean, then I believe that Mandarin is one example of such a language that doesn't use morphology to change a verb's part of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20812" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T20:51:54.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27763" CreationDate="2018-04-21T21:27:18.093" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machu Picchu, from &lt;em&gt;machu pikchu&lt;/em&gt;, means &quot;old peak&quot; in Quechua, whereas Macha-puchare from Nepali माछापुच्छ्रे (माछा &quot;fish&quot; + पुच्छर &quot;tail&quot;) means &quot;fishtail&quot; (describing the double peak at the summit). Coincidentally, both words are applied to mountains. There is no evidence of genetic relationship between Tibetan and Quechua (or Aymara, which would however be irrelevant to Machu Picchu). Tibetan is one branch of the Sino-Tibetan phylum, and Quechua is a completely separate language group. The standard disclaimer is that we can't know that the languages are unrelated, we can just fail to have evidence that they are related. Moreover, the name of Machapuchare is Nepali, not Tibetan, and Nepali is an Indo-European language (as are Hindi, Greek and English). There is also no evidence for a linguistic connection between Indo-European and Quechua.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The morphological feature I think you're referring to regarding Tibetans and Andeans is the nose (long and narrow), which is actually environmentally influenced, in that cold dry climates encourage such noses. The relevant genes seem to be DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3 and PAX1, but it's more complicated. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178329/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; has some discussion of facial morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T21:34:39.297" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T21:34:39.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27757" CreationDate="2018-04-22T01:10:23.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it is important to be clear on what &quot;most basic form&quot; as described above covers. One notion is &quot;structurally simplest&quot;, that is, &quot;having the fewest added things&quot;. The other is &quot;phonologically best for predicting other variants&quot;. Mixtec seems to qualify as an example of the future being &quot;most basic&quot; because (a) the future has no prefixes or suffixes, (b) certain lexically specified change initial /k/ to [ʃ], and other change tone, in the present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Logoori, there are 4 future tenses and 5 past tenses; there is no &quot;simple present&quot;, there is a present progressive, and a habitual which is a construction build from a hard to gloss particle plus the progressive. The present progressive has a progressive aspectual suffix -a- (&lt;em&gt;a-gʊ́r-áa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he is buying&quot;), and the form does not actually mark the present (it marks the progressive, like English &quot;talk-ing&quot;), since that is how you form the future and past progressives as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All verb forms &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; the imperative have a subject prefix, many have a tense prefix, and all, including the imperative, have a final suffix, either /ɪ/, /i/, /aa/ or, in lieu one of the preceding, /a/. We can exclude the tenses with the special suffixes in the search for the most basic form, since  /ɪ/, /i/, /aa/ are non-basic. The candidates are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Indefinite future: a-ri-gʊ́r-á &quot;he may buy&quot;&#xA;Immediate future: a-ra-gʊr-a &quot;he is about to buy&quot;&#xA;Most immediate past: y-aa-kʊ-gʊr-a &quot;he just bought&quot;&#xA;Recent past: y-aa-ka-gʊr-a &quot;he bought&quot;&#xA;Remote past: y-áá-gʊ́r-a &quot;he bought&quot; (long ago)&#xA;Imperative: gʊr-a&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The imperative wins the competition for having the least morphology. Apart from obvious prefixes, the indefinite future and remote past also have special tone melodies; the imperative does as well, though it is not manifested in the toneless root class that includes /gʊr/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the imperative is usually classed as a mood rather than a tense, and assuming the question is about &quot;which tense&quot;, we could strike the imperative from consideration. It then appears that we have one tense that adds two things (the immediate future: a subject prefix and -ra-), and four that add three things (subject prefix and two prefixes, or subject prefix plus one prefix and a tone pattern). The competition seems to favor the immediate future as &quot;most basic&quot; (simplest) – however, this tense, unlike all other forms, cannot be used in a negative clause. With that competitor disqualified, we have a tie between the indefinite future and any of the past tenses, in terms of how many added things they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would favor using the tone-melody as a disqualifier, because tone inflection is really not just one thing, it's an abbreviation for a set of interrelated processes (deletion of the lexical tone, placing another tone somewhere). If we count tone melodies as &quot;more than one&quot;, we now have just two forms, the most immediate past and the recent past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T01:10:23.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27757" CreationDate="2018-04-22T13:29:54.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could say that in Proto-indoeuropean this might have been the case and there are indications of this in some later languages like Ancient Greek, however this is definitely debatable given the complex morphology and non-trivial rules of ablaut in PIE verbs, so take it more like &quot;it is possible&quot;, rather than &quot;PIE did this in a consistent manner&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We analyse the PIE word into its root, from which all other forms can be derived using extensive and complex set of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;present tense&lt;/strong&gt; is derived typically by expanding the root by infixed &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; (in sanskrit, this is called guṇa form). Sometimes it is expanded even further (e.g. n-infixation or reduplication) but let's not worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;aorist&lt;/strong&gt; (basically something like perfective past, not dissimilar to English past simple) is derived by prefixing a so called augment &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; (but in PIE, it is debatable whether the augment was really a prefix, a clitic or even a separate word) and the root remains in the non-expanded (zero-grade) form (of course, like with the present, there is a number of other affixes that can form aorist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples from Ancient Greek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;λ&lt;strong&gt;ε&lt;/strong&gt;ιπ-ω, λ&lt;strong&gt;ε&lt;/strong&gt;ιπ-ει - I leave, he leaves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ε-λιπ-ο-ν, ε-λιπ-ε-ν - I left, he left&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T13:29:54.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-22T17:13:41.530" Score="2" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following Spanish words, written in IPA (with their English translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OAyMg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OAyMg.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5iWl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5iWl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the same question for &lt;em&gt;middle position&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;final position&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My answer is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Initial position: Looking at the given words, I can deduce that if an &quot;R sound&quot; appears in an initial position, ̃r muse be used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For same reasons, ɾ must be used at the end of a word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for middle position, one can see that both of the consonants appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wgDvF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wgDvF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My answer is:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observing that only one consonant appear at the initial/final position and that changing one with another at middle position changes word's meaning (i.e. (1) and (10)), my conclusion is that ɾ and ̃r are two different phonemes &lt;em&gt;and not&lt;/em&gt; allophones of one phoneme. Is my analysis correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21434" LastEditorUserId="21434" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T18:24:23.233" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T20:21:48.650" Title="Deducing a rule out of set of examples" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-22T17:25:38.867" Score="-2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are liquids naturally present in nature, like water, blood, oil, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But gasoline, wine or milk shake are produced by humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thesauri, e.g. WordNet, don't classify later as artifacts, but why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T10:24:46.040" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T06:41:22.537" Title="Is gasoline, wine, coca-cola an artifact?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;ontologies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27769" CreationDate="2018-04-22T19:11:28.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot deduce anything from the data. You may conclude, but not all conclusions are deductions. To &lt;em&gt;conclude&lt;/em&gt; that there is or is not a contrast in initial position, you have to know the rules of the game. A possible (common) &quot;rule of the game&quot; is &quot;if there are minimal pairs distinguishing X and Y in a position, then X and Y contrast in that position&quot;. There are no minimal pairs in initial position in these. However, the minimal pair test is not the only rule of the game. An alternative rule of the game is based on whether there is a rule that derives X from Y in that context. In that case, you would also have to figure out what the rule would be deriving X from Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another rule-of-the-game problem (a veritable universal problem in the profession) is that if you have proof that two things contrast, you can say &quot;yes&quot;, but you can never say &quot;no&quot;, because the question isn't stated as being dataset-relative (i.e. &quot;&lt;em&gt;in these examples&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;). For all we know, the next word will present us with a minimal pair. If we assume that &quot;no&quot; is possible for the case where there is no evidence, then &quot;no&quot; would be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be proud of yourself for understanding the concept &quot;phoneme&quot; well enough to see that even though there are contexts where the contrast is neutralized, those sounds &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; distinct phonemes. I disapprove of the metaphor that using X vs Y &quot;changes the meaning&quot;: the word &quot;dog&quot; didn't start out meaning &quot;but&quot; and change (nor the converse), instead one phoneme occurs in one word (peɾo), and a different phoneme appears in another word (pero). Incidentally, &quot;dog&quot; is [pero], not [per̃o], which indicates a nasalized &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in IPA. The evidence that the data are in IPA is pretty much non-existent – an example like &lt;em&gt;rancho&lt;/em&gt; would clarify what system is being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elaborating on the alternative to requiring minimal pairs (&quot;can you write a rule predicting X from Y&quot;), here is a hypothetical dataset (because it's made up and I assert that these are different words, we don't need glosses). The question is whether [t] and [r] contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tima, tusa, tope, tada, temu, tumi, tiso, rino, raka, ropo, ramu, rapu, rodo, raga&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no minimal pairs: does that prove that these are separate phonemes? It does not, if you can provide rules that derive all cases of [t] from /r/ or vice versa. It may seem like deriving one from the other is impossible. However, [r] mostly appears before [a] and [o], never before [u] etc. More than one rule is necessary: t→r/_a plus non-coronal consonant; t→r/_in; t→r/_oCo. Given these rules, &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; can be treated as an allophone of /t/. A standard objection is &quot;But that requires a lot of rules&quot;, and the proper response to that is &quot;So how does that invalidate my analysis?&quot;. There is another rule of the game, to the effect that if you possibly can treat X as an allophone of Y, you should. I think that rule is bad, and you need something more than simply &quot;because I can eliminate that phoneme&quot; as a justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T20:21:48.650" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T20:21:48.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-22T19:23:06.127" Score="0" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the linguistic relationship, if any, between the Latin word luna and the biblical Hebrew word לבנה, which are phonetically similar and both mean &quot;moon&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T19:51:27.820" Title="Luna and לבנה, two similar ancient words for &quot;moon&quot;" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-22T19:40:52.687" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a source at which one can find out when and where a word first came into use/print? Especially interested in scientific discourse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T20:10:22.630" Title="Is there a source displaying when and where a word was first attested?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27772" CreationDate="2018-04-22T19:51:27.820" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Most likely they're unrelated.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;lūna&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;moon&amp;quot; comes from Old Latin &lt;em&gt;losna&lt;/em&gt; from PIE *&lt;em&gt;lowks-neh₂&lt;/em&gt;, derived from *&lt;em&gt;lewk-&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;bright, shining&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew &lt;em&gt;l'vaná&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;moon&amp;quot; comes from the feminine of &lt;em&gt;laván&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;white&amp;quot;. I'm unsure where that goes back to in Proto-Semitic, but it seems to be a native Semitic root because it also appears in Arabic &lt;em&gt;laban&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;milk&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not impossible that one influenced the other, but they seem to have unrelated etymologies. Interestingly enough, they both come from a feminine form of an adjective describing the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T19:51:27.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27769" CreationDate="2018-04-22T19:52:45.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a phonological rule of the language changes X to Y in a position, then X and Y do not contrast in that position.  Otherwise, they do contrast in that position.  So, the answer depends on what the phonological system of the language is, which you must know somehow (or at least guess at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing rr for the tilde-r (for convenience), your answer (which I agree with) is consistent with the phonological system having the rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;r -&amp;gt; rr word initially  &#xA;rr -&amp;gt; r word finally  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume these rules if there is no evidence against them, and there is no such contrary evidence in the forms that are listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good place to look for evidence for these rules is in loan phonology.  If word initial r in other languages is borrowed as rr and/or word final rr is borrowed as r, that would corroborate the above two rules.  If the language has prefixes or suffixes, those can also cause alternations between r and rr which could provide evidence for these rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In Natural Phonology, one would write &quot;process&quot; instead of &quot;rule&quot; in the above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T19:52:45.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27773" CreationDate="2018-04-22T20:10:22.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; quotes early attestations for most of the words in the dictionary. The latest edition is available online, but most of the entries require a payed subscription to access them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first edition is out of copyright and available for free at archive.org (links to each volume are given &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#1st_edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T20:10:22.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27781" CreationDate="2018-04-22T20:52:11.927" Score="2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a Unicode equivalent of an Arabic word featuring dotless letters FEH and NOON:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WbJI4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WbJI4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to mimic a handwriting style that doesn't use dots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/06a1/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ARABIC LETTER DOTLESS FEH (U+06A1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I can't find non-isolated (contextual) versions of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the normal (dotted) FEH has these five contextual forms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7cllo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7cllo.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the same but without the dot. Do they exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21829" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T14:58:49.397" Title="Unicode points for Arabic dotless letters" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27778" CreationDate="2018-04-23T10:16:21.650" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;By policy, UNICODE does not assign code points for contextual variants. Some contextual variants are in by exception—their purpose is to guarantee round-trip equivalence with some older legacy standards that were in existence before UNICODE. So you should go with the single code point for ARABIC LETTER DOTLESS FEH (U+06A1) and let the typesetting engine do the contextualisation. When the engine does not reproduce the handwriting faithfully, you can hint the contextual variant using one of the two characters ZERO WIDTH JOINER and ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: This means in particular, that you should not use the available contextual variants for encoding the Arabic script and treat them as deprecated or compatibility only characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T14:58:49.397" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T14:58:49.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27783" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27784" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" Score="0" Body="For questions about Unicode, a standard for all the characters of all writing systems of the world." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T15:18:27.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-23T21:40:44.753" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chomsky (2000,2001), the passive, along with unaccusative and other forms of participle object constructions, with the light &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is considered 'defective' because as Chomsky (2001:6) says: light &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; of a passives lacks:&#xA;1. The ability to assign Accusative Case;&#xA;2. This inability results from not having a phi-complete bundles, in fact only [person] is valued after the light &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; probes. That's why the DP object in passive sentences has to move for Nominative Case assigning in T and complete the phi-agreement features there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What remains mysterious for me is not this movement for Nom Case, neither the defective nature, but I have data in which both a Transitive Active &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; has the same phi-features exhibited on this 'defective' light &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; of the passive. Those who are familiar with Phase Theory in the minimalist program, please help me understand more this 'defectiveness notion' in the light of passives.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T21:40:44.753" Title="Why passive light v is defective?" Tags="&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27770" CreationDate="2018-04-24T06:41:22.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have checked on Wordnet, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?c=8&amp;amp;sub=Change&amp;amp;o2=&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=&amp;amp;o5=&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=&amp;amp;o3=&amp;amp;o4=&amp;amp;i=0&amp;amp;h=10000&amp;amp;s=Gasoline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gasoline&lt;/a&gt; is indeed listed as a substance, while &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=Wine&amp;amp;sub=Search%20WordNet&amp;amp;o2=1&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=1&amp;amp;o5=1&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=1&amp;amp;o3=1&amp;amp;o4=1&amp;amp;h=10000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wine&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=Milk&amp;amp;sub=Search%20WordNet&amp;amp;o2=1&amp;amp;o0=1&amp;amp;o8=1&amp;amp;o1=1&amp;amp;o7=1&amp;amp;o5=1&amp;amp;o9=&amp;amp;o6=1&amp;amp;o3=1&amp;amp;o4=1&amp;amp;h=0000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;milk&lt;/a&gt; are listed as food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordnet and other such ontologies impose taxonomies on the world, and the thing about taxonomies is, you can classify entities more than one way. If an artefact is understood as something that only exists in the world through human intervention, then you could argue that gasoline is an artefact. That argument probably does not hold for wine, which in fact originated without human intervention as accidentally fermented grape juice. That argument certainly does not apply to milk, which has existed as long as mammals have. The only human intervention applicable there is the industry around its commercial distribution, including pasteurisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet even in the case of pasteurized milk, or gasoline, or refined sugar, the specific form may have originated through human intervention, but the underlying substance is still natural. In any case, the prototypical notion of an artefact is something assembled or built, as a tool in the broadest sense (broad enough to include buildings). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship of people to substances and food stuff, on the other hand, is the same whether those substances are refined by humans or used as found in nature. And these taxonomies, as ways of understanding the world, are essentially relational and anthropocentric: the fact that we eat something is a more important relation than whether someone else manufactured that something or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T06:41:22.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T17:34:53.633" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we talk about a dimension neutrally, we usually say:&#xA;&quot;How large is it?&quot;&#xA;&quot;How long is it?&quot;&#xA;&quot;How many did you buy?&quot;&#xA;&quot;How tall is the cup?&quot;&#xA;&quot;How heavy is the box?&quot;&#xA;rather than &quot;small, short, few, low, light&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T17:54:04.000" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T17:54:04.000" Title="Why is it often the &quot;large&quot; one between the two words for a polar dimension that is marked?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T18:12:49.260" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've searched the site a bit for this topic, and I recognize that there's quite a bit of variability about the classification of phones like [w] and [j]. My primary understanding comes from Catford's &lt;em&gt;A Practical Introduction to Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, which, if my memory is correct, presents these in their guise as semivowels. In this context, he seems to define a semivowel as a momentary, rather quick move into and out of a vowel. He demonstrates by having the reader &quot;discover&quot; [w] as a momentary [u] by having the reader start by making a [aaaauuuuaaaa] sound and gradually reduce the length of the [uuu] portion until [aaaauuaaaa] becomes [aaaaauaaaa] becomes [aaaawaaaa]. Similarly, [j] can be produced by starting with [aaaaiiiiaaaa] and then shortening the [ii] portion until the sound is [aaaajaaaa].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all made a great deal of sense to me and has helped me find phones that are less familiar to me, such as [ɥ]. What isn't clear to me, however, is what exactly is happening when I make sounds where the semivowel is preceded or followed by the same vowel sound from which it's derived. For example, [ji] and [wu] are clearly different sounds to my ear than [i] and [u] alone (or [ʔi] and [ʔu]...?). If I try a similar Catford-esque experiment by making a [uuuuwuuuu] sound, it &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; like something is happening—perhaps more intense labialization—but I'm not sure. When I try to do the same thing with [iiiiijiiiii], I have trouble hearing as much difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if I strictly go by the first paragraph's understanding of a [w] sound as simply an abbreviated [u], then it seems that a sound like [wu] should be indistinguishable from [u] (and same goes for [ji] vs. [i]). Is there something wrong with my understanding of the [w] and [j] semivowels, or does one make some sort of &quot;extra&quot; distinction when a semivowel is surrounded by its corresponding vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T21:16:18.687" Title="What is the nature of the distinction when a semivowel is surrounded by its corresponding vowel?" Tags="&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T18:18:07.340" Score="-1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in &quot;eat &gt; eating&quot;, the meaning of the generated word would not make confusion, but if I make a word formation like &quot;lamp(N) &gt; *lamp(V)&quot;, it doesn't make sense, unless the generated word is lexicalized. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T19:45:41.577" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T04:20:02.643" Title="Why is it usually not ambiguous to nominalize a verb, but it is to verbalize a noun?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-05-04T06:39:05.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T18:28:04.663" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout history, it seems that the common vernacular has always overpowered the languages that had been taught to the more educated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable examples would be:&#xA;Greek in Rome, being the language of the educated, and Latin, being the language of the commonfolk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin was spoken as the language of kings and scholars in France, while French was the language of the commonfolk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In England, French was considered a sophisticated language, practiced by those with power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all these polished languages fell into disuse, with the language of the common people ultimately reigning supreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21839" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T18:28:04.663" Title="Why does common vernacular end up being the de facto way of speaking over-time?" Tags="&lt;transformations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27790" CreationDate="2018-04-24T19:12:46.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do strictly go by the first paragraph's understanding of [w], [wu] should be a somewhat longer version of [u], having whatever its reduced duration is plur that of [u]. It is not false to say that [w] is a rather short [u], but that is insufficient. Apart from duration, there is a small but visible difference in stricture of the vocoid, where the glides have a narrow constriction. The articulatory movement of [j,w] is more ballistic. This is mostly independent of the surrounding vowel (though [w] in [awa] vs. [uwu] are themselves different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T19:12:46.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27790" CreationDate="2018-04-24T21:16:18.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Catford has in mind the phonetician's distinction between a sound with a steady state and a sound without a steady state, the latter being a glide.  Looking at the sound spectrograms displaying formant transitions, one can distinguish between sounds where the formants are level for an appreciable time, which is a steady state, and others where steady states cannot be found, which are glides -- parts of diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm skeptical. At a normal rate of speech, steady state vowels may be difficult to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T21:16:18.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27791" CreationDate="2018-04-25T04:20:02.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first example you give, you're using a standard derivational suffix of English: &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt; attached to a verb forms a &lt;em&gt;gerund noun&lt;/em&gt;, that is, a noun referring to the action itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the second example, you don't use any standard verb-forming suffix. You just treat the noun as a verb. If you want to make an understandable verb, you can use a suffix like &lt;em&gt;-ify&lt;/em&gt;: while it sounds ridiculous, &quot;lampify&quot; clearly means to turn something into a lamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a less ridiculous-sounding example, shifting a problem to another subfield of linguistics might involve &lt;em&gt;semanticizing&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;morphologizing&lt;/em&gt; it. Both of those verbs (and the gerund nouns derived from them) are clear in their meaning, even though I just invented them on the spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T04:20:02.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T18:46:01.000" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In adjectives there are two main groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Group&lt;/strong&gt;: adjectives that their 3 grades (base, comparative and superlative) are changed whether regularly (nice &gt; nicer &gt; nicest) or irregularly (good &gt; better &gt; best).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second group&lt;/strong&gt;: adjectives that their 3 grades, are changed by adding &quot;more&quot; or &quot;most&quot; (e.g. &quot;more expensive&quot; or &quot;most expensive&quot; rather than expensivier or expensiviest)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then my question is how these two groups are distinguished terminologically? or in other words what are the terms for each of these two groups? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on some research, the terms &quot;&lt;strong&gt;synthetic&lt;/strong&gt; adjectives&quot; (=in the first group) and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;analytic&lt;/strong&gt; adjectives&quot; (in the second group) refer only to the comparative degree rather than to the all 3 grades together (positive, comparative and superlative adjectives) as a group. Isn't it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-26T03:13:50.353" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T03:13:50.353" Title="How can be these two types of adjective distinguished terminologically?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27805" CreationDate="2018-04-26T00:48:45.350" Score="0" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which is the direct object and which is the indirect object in the following sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The school has given David's proposal serious consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;David's proposal&quot; is the indirect object and &quot;serious consideration&quot; is the direct object. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this analysis correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21584" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T17:45:37.493" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T17:45:37.493" Title="direct object and indirect object" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-05-01T00:39:34.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27804" CreationDate="2018-04-26T00:58:49.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's correct. In English, a &lt;em&gt;ditransitive&lt;/em&gt; verb (one that takes both a direct and an indirect object) can usually have two different word orders: S V D to I, or S V I D. In other words, &quot;he gave the book to her&quot;, or &quot;he gave her the book&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, this is the SVID order: it could be rephrased as &quot;the school has given serious consideration to David's proposal&quot;, which makes it clearer that the proposal is the indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T00:58:49.837" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-26T12:04:34.240" Score="3" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tonal languages seem to be limited to southern China and southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and equatorial South America.  Click languages don't seem to exist outside southern Africa. Why do these types of languages have such limited distribution? Alternatively, why did non-tonal/non-click languages spread so widely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21746" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T07:57:06.183" Title="Distribution of Tonal and Click Languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27806" CreationDate="2018-04-26T15:19:04.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a preliminary matter, &quot;tonal language&quot; encompasses quite a number of prosodic types, and depending on how narrowly you define &quot;tone&quot;, you can make tone be a property with a very restricted distribution, by requiring the system to be &quot;like Chinese&quot; (languages that are &quot;like Chinese&quot; are Chinese and some adjacent languages). Otherwise, the geographical distribution of tone is very broad in the world. It is everywhere in Africa south of the Sahara: more specifically, it is lacking in Berber and Semitic. It is found in spots within Indo-European (Lithuanian, Scandinavian, Rhenish West Germanic; a number of languages of India and Pakistan), and in the European languages it is often labeled &quot;pitch accent&quot;. It's also in Basque. Ket is the odd case of a northern Aurasian tonal language, otherwise, tone is found throughout east Asia (from India to Japan, China and south, leaving out e.g. Austronesian and some other languages). It's found in New Guinea, North America (Athabascan, Tlingit, and numerous other phyla of North America, especially in Mexico; and in various places in South America that are well north of the equator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicks, on the other hand, are limited as a feature of ordinary language to a narrow region of Southern and Eastern Africa. They were borrowed into some Bantu languages, and otherwise exist in the &quot;Khoisan&quot; languages and Dahalo (Cushitic, adjacent to one of the northern Khoisan languages. Khoisan is not, however, a clearly established linguistic unit, and may be a set of typologically similar unrelated languages. The distribution of clicks is such that we can say that clicks are a really rare feature, but seem to be popular enough that if your neighbors have them, you might like to adopt them as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of sound-types that fall in the &quot;uncommon&quot; category, such as ejectives, implosives, breathiness and creakiness on vowels (hmmm, these have to do with laryngeal distinctions beyond just plain voicing); also uvulars, pharyngeals, and front round vowels. There is a tendency for sounds to group according to genetic phylum, which basically means that if a proto-language has a certain inventory of sound-types, daughter languages will tend to be more like that proto-language, and they don't randomly innovate masses of new sounds. Thus Austronesian languages are similar in the consonant and vowel systems, and they do not develop complex consonant systems of the type found in Caucasian languages, nor to they tend to develop tone systems. The key is &quot;tend&quot;, so indeed there are a handful of tonal Austronesian languages, such as Yabem, Ma'ya and Matbat. Indo-Aryan languages tend not to be tonal, but there are some languages in the northern IA are that have developed tone (all, as far as I know, from earlier consonant distinctions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that the geographical distribution of tone is due to the fact that tone is a less-common linguistic feature and is unlikely to just emerge from nothing. With sociolinguistic encouragement (if your neighbors speak tonally), you might dispose of some sound-structure feature (typically something about consonant phonation) and replace it with a related tonal feature. But this is unlikely in languages such as Hawaiian, Fijian, first because they don't have tonal neighbors that they may be inclined to sound like and second, because they have really simple consonant systems, and no fodder for creating tone from some other source. Tone distribution is governed by historical facts about the structure of the earlier languages, and contact facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click, on the other hand, are just plain weird, and it's a mircle that any language has them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T15:19:04.147" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27806" CreationDate="2018-04-26T15:20:25.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemic features which are strongly areal like the ones you mention, and a few others, such as labial-velar consonants &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/19A#2/19.5/152.8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as you see on this map&lt;/a&gt;, and ejective consonants. They are uncommon for some reason unknown to me. But they also spread easily from one language to another since they are easy enough to learn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wouldn't say that tone is that uncommon (but as you noted it is much more common in some parts of the world than others), but the reason they've turned up in Punjabi is because of transphonologisation from so-called murky consonants (aspirated voiced plosives). These are no longer aspirated, so the adjacent vowel gets a low tone. I don't personally know much about what went on in the Punjab and adjacent regions, but it is rather common for this kind of process to happen to many neighbouring languages at once. This is why we've got tone in Norwegian and in Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicks: although they are common in Bantu languages, apparently Proto-Bantu never had anything like a click. They were borrowed from Khoisan languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So click languages don't seem to exist outside southern Africa precisely because it is very rare for a language to evolve clicks. They just did once and spread like wildfire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T15:20:25.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27813" CreationDate="2018-04-26T20:24:32.513" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norse and Norwegian both, &lt;code&gt;hug&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;memory&quot;. Norse &lt;code&gt;hugsa&lt;/code&gt; and Nynorsk &lt;code&gt;hugse&lt;/code&gt; is &quot;to remember&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason that &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; was attached? I can't think of any other verbs derived from nouns in this way. How did &lt;code&gt;hugsa&lt;/code&gt; evolve to &lt;code&gt;huske&lt;/code&gt;, which is how it's written in Bokmål? Presumably that's some kind of metathesis, but I haven't seen that anywhere either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T09:41:51.123" Title="How did Norwegian &quot;huske&quot; derive from ON &quot;hugsa&quot;?" Tags="&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:15:32.577" Score="3" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question on Italian exchange, but I was told that this is more of a question about English terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a short summary of certain morphological characteristics of Italian for my Thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Italian has certain morphemes that are put between root and other markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the future is made by root+fut+person.number:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;am-er-emo&lt;/em&gt; “love-fut-2.PL” = we will love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now,  is “-er-“ an infix, an interfix or just a suffix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, how do I “parse” the word &lt;em&gt;am-er-emo&lt;/em&gt; “love-fut-2.PL”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“root-suffix-suffix”, “root-infix-suffix” or “root-interfix-suffix”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10832" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T05:42:30.670" Title="suffixes, infixes and interfixes: help with terminology" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27810" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:27:35.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general rule that I learned is: if it comes before the root, it's a prefix; if it comes after the root, it's a suffix; if it comes inside the root itself, it's an infix; if it comes both before and after, it's a circumfix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, your &lt;em&gt;am-er-emo&lt;/em&gt; would be root-suffix-suffix, even though one comes closer to the verb than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, this isn't universally consistent. In Swahili, for example, tenses are indicated by a verb prefix, and any prefixes that come between the tense and the root are instead called &quot;infixes&quot;. (&lt;em&gt;A-na-ye-penda&lt;/em&gt; 3SG-PRES-REL-love &quot;the one who loves&quot; is analyzed as prefix-prefix-INFIX-root.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, more and more linguists seem to be turning to the generic &quot;affix&quot; for all four cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As requested, a bit of explanation for infixes. The best example I know of is from Proto-Indo-European and several of its descendants. In PIE, an &lt;em&gt;-n-&lt;/em&gt; could be infixed before the last consonant of a verb stem to indicate the present tense. Latin, for example, has the verb root &lt;em&gt;vic-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to conquer&quot;, as in &lt;em&gt;veni vidi vici&lt;/em&gt;. In the present tense, however, it appears as &lt;em&gt;vi&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;c-&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;invincible&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, the root &lt;em&gt;scid-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cut&quot; appears as &lt;em&gt;sci&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;d-&lt;/em&gt; in the present. (There's actually one and only one instance of this nasal infix remaining in native English verbs: present-tense &lt;em&gt;stand&lt;/em&gt; versus past-tense &lt;em&gt;stood&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I forgot interfixes! Interfixes are entirely separate, they're not morphemes at all (in the sense of &quot;meaning-bearing units&quot;). Interfixes are sequences of phonemes that are inserted between two morphemes without having any meaning themselves. English doesn't really have these at all, but in German you see this with the /s/ added between elements of compound words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T05:42:30.670" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T05:42:30.670" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27806" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:58:39.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One theory is that &lt;strong&gt;climate plays an important role&lt;/strong&gt; on developing (or suppressing) features of languages local to a region. In other words, tonal languages arise in warm and humid regions (usually, with subtropical climate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question (and answers to it) may shed some light: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/14493/1009&quot;&gt;Influence of the climate and geography on the phonemes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/22956/1009&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; refers a work named &lt;strong&gt;„&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/strong&gt; by Caleb Everett, Damián E. Blasi and Seán G. Roberts. Here's an excerpt (highlight mine), which is self-evident:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, &lt;strong&gt;arid and cold ecologies&lt;/strong&gt; should be less amenable, when contrasted to &lt;strong&gt;warm and humid ecologies&lt;/strong&gt;, to the development of languages with &lt;strong&gt;phonemic tone&lt;/strong&gt;, especially complex tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic–linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T07:57:06.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27809" CreationDate="2018-04-27T09:41:51.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The addition of the letter s forms an iterative verb. There are more examples in Germanic languages, e.g. Low German &lt;em&gt;hoppen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to hop&quot;, High German &lt;em&gt;hopsen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to bounce, to lollop&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second step is called metathesis and this is again not an unusual process, for instance the English word &lt;em&gt;wasp&lt;/em&gt; is derived from &lt;em&gt;to weave&lt;/em&gt; (because of the nests that wasps build) with and s-suffix and metathesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T09:41:51.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27818" CreationDate="2018-04-27T15:25:43.553" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean the phenomenon that happens when a language borrows a word, but it gets replaced by a similar-sounding word that is already in the language like from Spanish &lt;em&gt;'aguacate'&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;'avocado'&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;'echeque mat'&lt;/em&gt; from French to &lt;em&gt;'check mate'&lt;/em&gt; in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21827" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T04:25:13.140" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T04:25:13.140" Title="What is it called when a new word is replaced by a more familiar one?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27814" CreationDate="2018-04-27T17:11:35.570" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're referring to a &quot;folk etymology&quot;, where the form or linguistic analysis of a word changes because people don't know the actual history of the word. Hence the original Nahuatl word for avocado &quot;ahuakatl&quot; → Spanish &lt;em&gt;aguacate&lt;/em&gt; is attested in 1697 as &quot;Avogato pear&quot;, subsequently avocato, avigato, avocado. &quot;Avocado&quot; is said to be influenced by Spanish &lt;em&gt;avocado&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lawyer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T17:11:35.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27814" CreationDate="2018-04-27T18:15:02.953" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called an &quot;expressive loan&quot;: when a loanword is reanalyzed to fit into the patterns of the new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an unfamiliar, archaic, or foreign word shifts into something &lt;em&gt;meaningful&lt;/em&gt; in the new language, such as expatriate → ex-patriot or Alzheimer's Disease → old-timer's disease, then that's called an &quot;eggcorn&quot;. And if the loanword keeps its original form but is given an incorrect etymology in the new language, that's a &quot;folk etymology&quot;. There's significant overlap between these three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T18:15:02.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27814" CreationDate="2018-04-27T19:50:18.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your examples are very different. While Spanish &lt;em&gt;avocado&lt;/em&gt; might be an instance of folk etymology (history of Spanish is not my area of expertise and I don't feel comfortable commenting on this based on the OED), I will argue English &lt;em&gt;checkmate&lt;/em&gt; is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure why you think one word replaces the other in the case of &lt;em&gt;checkmate&lt;/em&gt;. If we trust the OED, it says it was borrowed from Old French &lt;em&gt;eschec , -ek , -eq , eschac&lt;/em&gt;. Loss of Anlaut e- in English in French borrowings is a well-known phonetic change, cf. squire - Old French esquier, escuier; scarf - Old Northern French escarpe etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, what you’re trying to describe how a loan word may get changed is known as &lt;strong&gt;assimilation&lt;/strong&gt;, which occurs because of the differences in &lt;strong&gt;phonetic/phonological constraints&lt;/strong&gt; of the donor and recipient languages (this is &lt;strong&gt;standard&lt;/strong&gt; terminology). Sometimes a loan word gets &lt;strong&gt;morphologically reanalyzed&lt;/strong&gt; as well. All of those are different ways how a loan word may be integrated (or nativized) in the recipient language; cf. the screenshot below from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110218442/9783110218442.35/9783110218442.35.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haspelmath 2009&lt;/a&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/41172&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loanwords in the World's Languages:&#xA;A Comparative Handbook&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTgQj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTgQj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Apmi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Apmi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T21:25:20.353" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T21:25:20.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36820" CreationDate="2018-04-28T07:09:14.720" Score="9" ViewCount="2025" Body="&lt;p&gt;An abugida is a script where consonant and vowels form a unit of some form, and are typical in South Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the Korean script isn't related to those languages, of course. But the Korean script is also formed of characters which have parts representing consonants, and parts representing vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really familiar with any Abugida script, but I always wondered why Hangul isn't considered one. It's usually credited as an &amp;quot;artifical script&amp;quot;, which is true I guess, but feels like somewhat unrelated to the typical categorization of scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why isn't Hangul considered an Abugida?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21866" LastEditorUserId="13200" LastEditDate="2020-08-02T12:38:58.930" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T15:26:24.890" Title="Why is Hangul (Korean script) not considered an Abugida" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;korean&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-28T13:40:34.457" Score="5" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hungarian toponyms can be grouped grammatically according to whether they take the &quot;interior&quot; cases (inessive, illative, and elative) or the &quot;surface&quot; cases (superessive, sublative, and delative) to express static position, movement towards, and movement away, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rule is that words denoting places within Hungary take the surface cases, whereas places outside Hungary take the interior cases.  However, there are a number of exceptions. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Toponyms that end in &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ny&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-város&lt;/em&gt; take the interior cases.  (This rule is simple enough.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Places that have native names and that were formerly in Hungary (but no longer due to border adjustments) take the surface cases. (This rule requires rather detailed historical knowledge of the former borders of Hungary and when settlements were founded.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some (but not all) toponyms ending in &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt;, and which would otherwise satisfy the general rule or rule #2 above, take the interior cases. (I suppose these are completely arbitrary and must be learned by heart.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a small number of toponyms (&lt;em&gt;Győr&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pécs&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) that can take an entirely different set of cases—neither the surface nor interior ones. (Again, I think these are completely arbitrary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given a Hungarian-language toponym (say, a village located in Hungary and whose name ends in &lt;em&gt;-r&lt;/em&gt;), how can I verify whether it takes the surface or the interior cases?  Dictionaries don't tend to include toponyms, and those that do (or at least the ones I've checked) don't contain this information.  Is there an exhaustive list of all the toponyms that constitute exceptions to the general rule (i.e., all the toponyms within modern-day Hungary that take the interior or other cases, and all the toponyms outside modern-day Hungary that take the surface cases)?  Or failing that, is there a Hungarian-language gazetteer that lists the case rule for each entry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9370" LastEditorUserId="9370" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T09:41:14.990" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T09:41:14.990" Title="List of Hungarian toponyms by interior/surface case" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;&lt;toponyms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27819" CreationDate="2018-04-28T18:14:30.680" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one takes the arrangement of the Hangul jamos to syllables in square fields apart, it is a fully alphabetic writing system with separate and independent symbols for vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T18:14:30.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27013" CreationDate="2018-04-28T22:03:09.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to avoid &quot;survey/list&quot; questions like these to which there's no right answer, but here's one...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My aunt, a linguist and translator in Nepal, reports that the Indo-Aryan language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maithili_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maithili&lt;/a&gt; has a word that shares the meanings &quot;yesterday&quot; and &quot;tomorrow&quot;. In other words, it means &quot;one day removed&quot; and is qualified by a phrase like &quot;that is yet to come&quot; or &quot;that has already come&quot; to disambiguate the two (when the context doesn't make it obvious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, my grandma, who ran a school in Pakistan, said that Urdu works like that too. One dictionary seems to support that; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urduword.com/search.php?English=yesterday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yesterday&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urduword.com/search.php?English=tomorrow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tomorrow&lt;/a&gt;&quot; both yield کل &lt;em&gt;kal&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this &quot;bifurcated&quot; indexical constitutes an example of a &quot;non-standard&quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T22:03:09.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27825" CreationDate="2018-04-28T22:34:45.663" Score="2" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be widely accepted that Proto-Niger-Congo had ten vowels, with ATR harmony: /i-ɪ e-ɛ ə-a o-ɔ u-ʊ/. Similarly, it seems widely accepted that Proto-Bantu lost three of these vowels and maintained seven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sources differ on what those seven were: /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/, or /i ɪ e a o ʊ u/. (The phonetic details are lost to time, of course, but I'm interested in &lt;em&gt;which Proto-Niger-Congo&lt;/em&gt; vowels were continued.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia lists the second set, with /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, and that makes some sense: in Kiswahili, the &quot;second highest&quot; set frequently turned into semivowels, and ʊ → w, ɪ → j makes more sense than o → w, e → j. On the other hand, that &quot;second highest&quot; set did merge into /i u/, so even if it were originally /e o/ it might have passed through /ɪ ʊ/ on its way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I've found reconstructions of Proto-Bantu words written with /ɛ/ and /ɔ/, and this seven-vowel system is still found in Lingála. Furthermore, Lingála preserves vowel harmony with /ɛ a ɔ/ in one class and /e o/ in another, which would make sense as a remnant of the Proto-Niger-Congo system. (We know the PNC system survived into PB, because traces of harmony can also be found in the Kiswahili verbal modifiers.) But this new harmony could also have been a later development only in Lingála.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the scholarly consensus on this? Where should I look to find more information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T17:00:54.403" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T17:00:54.403" Title="What were the Proto-Bantu -ATR vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;&lt;niger-congo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27824" CreationDate="2018-04-29T05:21:03.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pool is small enough that the concept of &quot;consensus&quot; is mildly anomalous, but I think the consensus would be that we can't tell what the proto vowel system was phonetically. The standard view is that PB had 3 vowel heights. The first degree of height may be graphically represented as [i u, î û, i̧ u̧] (cedillas); the second is [ɪ ʊ, i u, e o] (although i u is not used if the highest vowels are written as i u); and the lowest vowels are written [e o, ɛ ɔ], again obviously not e o if the second degree of vowel is written as e o. Schadeberg's paper in &lt;em&gt;The Bantu Languages&lt;/em&gt; has a table comparing various systems of notation. More to the point, these are just ways of writing the contrasts, and one should not over-interpret use of symbols as constituting phonetic claims: there are three vowel heights, and that is all that is established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, the highest vowels are particularly high (Matumbi, Sotho-Tswana and Lomwe are examples of that type). In some other languages (Kuria, Sukuma, Kikuyu) the highest vowels sound like typical IPA [i u]. This is a detail that is generally glossed over, especially in IPA-compliant transcriptions. The earliest transcriptional practices (esp. Meinhof, Guthrie, and usually Meeussen) for proto-Bantu recognised this special property of the highest vowels by writing the highest vowels of the proto-language as [i̧,u̧] (cedillas) or [î,û]. This is a transcriptional reification of a spirantizing tendency of these vowels, that the highest vowels often cause a preceding vowel to somewhat spirantize (e.g. *ti̧→tsi, si; ku̧→fu), whereas the 2nd degree vowels don't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third degree vowels are generally pronounced closer to [ɛ ɔ] in all languages (5 and 7 vowel languages). The choice of symbols for the second-highest vowels is most variable, and in fact you can find competing practices in the same language, where some scholars transcribe the degree-2 vowels as [ɪ ʊ] and some select [e o]. You will find that in closely-related languages such as Kikuyu versus Kikamba, the degree-2 vowels are similar but noticeably and systematically distinct (in Kikuyu they more closely matches IPA [e o] and in Kamba they are between [e o] and [ɪ ʊ]). Within Logoori, some speakers use a more [e,o]-like pronunciation and some use a more [ɪ,ʊ]-like pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually important to inquire into the native language and linguistic training of the analyst in this matter, because anglophones favor [ɪ ʊ] and francophones favor [e o]. In other words, the phonetics of the degree 2 vowels is sufficiently problematic that we can't even decide, in a given language, which IPA letter is most appropriate. Therefore, only trust the numbers, and don't trust the letters. (Unfortunately, people usually don't report any numbers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Bantu-internal evidence is concerned, I don't think there are any particularly compelling arguments pointing to one of these phonetic interpretations over the other. I should point out that Swahili is a 5 vowel language, and it does not have [ɪ ʊ]. There is a general pattern in Bantu that the highest and second-highest vowels do, synchronically, become glides before another vowel, so both /CiV, CɪV/ → [CyV], regardless of the phonetic realization of the second-degree vowels. However: the whole story is a bit more complicated, because the full 7 vowels only contrast in the root-initial syllable, and otherwise /ɛ ɔ/ don't exist in prefixes or suffixes, except via harmony. If we would the highest two degrees &quot;acting together&quot; and excluding the lower degree, that would classically be evidence that those vowels have something in common, for example, they are [+high] (implying /i ɪ ɛ/). The same pattern is also consistent with /i e ɛ/: the highest vowels are [+ATR]. In the case of glide formation, not only can the target class be specified via a single feature no matter what the presumed vowel system, but there is no actual need to exclude any vowels from undergoing the rule. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935345-e-59&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; may assist you an an introductory level: it has a section on vowel harmony, and a pointer to Hyman 1999 which is, I would say, the best historical account of Bantu height harmony. &lt;a href=&quot;https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0088131&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This dissertation&lt;/a&gt; by Leitch presents the Congo Basin situation (covering Lingala inter alia). Some standard references on Bantu historical linguistics are Meinhof &lt;em&gt;Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen&lt;/em&gt;, Guthrie &lt;em&gt;Comparative Bantu&lt;/em&gt;, Meeussen &quot;Bantu grammatical reconstructions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the connection to Niger-Congo, it is generally accepted that Volta-Congo had 10 surface vowels and there is some suggestion that Atlantic-Congo might have as well (based on evidence for 10 vowel systems in Atlantic); see Williamson in &lt;em&gt;The Niger-Congo Languages&lt;/em&gt;. She points out that the vowels [ə e o] may be purely derived, via ATR harmony – a situation that exists in some Bantu languages as well (such as Kinande). The best work on reconstructions is done at the lower levels, such as Benue-Congo, and I think claims about Niger-Congo are premature (I would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say that the 10 vowel theory is widely accepted, rather, it is widely recognised as a possibility). Benue Congo, an ancestor of Bantu, almost certainly had a 7 vowel system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T15:39:05.287" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T15:39:05.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11863" CreationDate="2018-04-29T17:27:12.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the earliest Swedish written using the Latin alphabet, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:V%C3%A4stg%C3%B6talagen_blad_21.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Äldre Västgötalagen&lt;/a&gt; from about 1250, the word is spelt 'ok'. It seems to have changed to 'och' during the later middle ages or early modern period, when 'decorative spelling' (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekorativ_stavning&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dekorativ stavning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) became popular. One possibility is that the modern spelling is therefore a relic of decorative spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in contradiction to that, the Swedish Etymological Dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;http://runeberg.org/svetym/0628.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;states&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;&lt;em&gt;Stavningen&lt;/em&gt; och &lt;em&gt;bevarar minnet av ett forntida uttal med&lt;/em&gt; ach-&lt;em&gt;ljud&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&quot;the spelling &lt;em&gt;och&lt;/em&gt; preserves the memory of an ancient pronunciation using the &lt;em&gt;ach&lt;/em&gt; sound&quot; [that is, a velar or uvular fricative]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21873" LastEditorUserId="21873" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T09:50:01.387" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T09:50:01.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-30T02:00:02.400" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my semantics homework we are asked to test different verb phrases in different environments. I am asked to categorize the different verb phrases (on the basis of their distributions. I am not entirely sure what to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some sample test items would be like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X climb a mountain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X know French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X see a thing &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some possible environments would be: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will, episodic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present, episodic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present, habitual &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present, progressive, episodic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have gathered that something like: present, progressive, episodic (X is knowing French) doesn't seem to work. While saying: (X is climbing a mountain) is fine. How exactly am I supposed to figure out what the distributions of the verb phrases are? Not exactly sure what it means for verb phrases to have a certain distribution means, as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21877" LastEditorUserId="21877" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T02:10:09.867" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T04:16:26.993" Title="Help with distributional analysis of verb phrases" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27828" CreationDate="2018-04-30T02:56:58.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand the terms, the distribution of a VP would be the X and Y in a constituent [ X VP Y ].  However, affixes associated with auxiliary verbs might count as part of the X rather than part of the VP (looking before the affix-hopping transformation, that is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of things you call environments seem to me rather to be descriptions of verbs or VPs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T03:13:59.010" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T03:13:59.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27836" CreationDate="2018-04-30T12:08:52.353" Score="5" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dowty's (1979) classified predicates into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. States 'the woord is burning' ---Atelic&#xA;2. Activities 'Mary pushed the cart' ---Atelic&#xA;3. Accomplishments 'Mary melted the chocolate' ---Telic &#xA;4. Achievements 'Mary crossed the finish line' ---Telic&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question in relation to Dowty's classification is how the atelic/telic diagnostics are configured, are there tests? Or simply they are based on aspect?&#xA;I believe that the answer to the second question if indeed this is based on aspect properties (Aktionsart), it would not reveal why sometimes even during the Perfective/past [Finished Action] some predicates are atelic like in 2.&#xA;I have read in Borer (2005b) 'the normal course of events' on page 52, that there are some 'truth conditional tests' used to determine atelicity/telicity. But still the picture is always blurry for me. Could anyone here explain this please. Thank you.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: I'm not sure about the atelicity of (1), I was only assuming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T14:16:00.090" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T00:26:57.257" Title="(A)Telicity &amp; Events" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;aktionsart&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27013" CreationDate="2018-04-30T12:43:23.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Portuguese has some that, whether &quot;standard&quot; or not, do not match English indexicals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has three different words for &quot;there&quot;, &lt;em&gt;aí&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lá&lt;/em&gt;, the first of which refers to something close to the second person, and the other two to something removed from both first and second person (&lt;em&gt;lá&lt;/em&gt; conotes a longer distance than &lt;em&gt;ali&lt;/em&gt;). And, oh, it has a fourth word for &quot;there&quot;, &lt;em&gt;acolá&lt;/em&gt;, meaning more or less &quot;further there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has a word for the day before yesterday, &lt;em&gt;anteontem&lt;/em&gt;. And a word for the day before that, too: &lt;em&gt;trasanteontem&lt;/em&gt;, though this is much less used. It used to have a word for &quot;this year&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ogano&lt;/em&gt;, but it fell into disuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not sure that these are &quot;non-standard&quot; indexicals. How do we define the standard ones? (It can't be just &quot;I&quot;, I suppose: &quot;you&quot; and some third person pronouns would be necessary, too - but are plurals, gender forms, or exclusivity, &quot;standard&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T12:43:23.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27763" CreationDate="2018-04-30T13:14:59.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Superficial similarity is a very lousy index of etymological relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For intance, take these two pairs of English/Portuguese words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have / haver&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Knee / joelho&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the former two must be related, while the latter two must bear no kinship at all, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wrong. Have/haver is a coincidence; words that begin by an &quot;h&quot; in germanic languages correspond to words that begin by /k/ in Latin and its descent (&lt;em&gt;horn&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;cornu&lt;/em&gt;-, for instance). The Portuguese cognate of &quot;have&quot; is quite probably &quot;caber&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &quot;joelho&quot; is from the Latin diminutive for knee, &quot;genuculum&quot; (with the initial /g/ becoming &quot;soft&quot;, as usual in Romance languages (because most descend from vulgar Latin, in which that had already happened - /ʒenukulu/, probably later /ʒenuklu/ instead of Classic /genukulum/), the final &quot;culum&quot; becoming &quot;lho&quot; (/ʒenuʎu/, perhaps later /ʒenoʎo/), as in &quot;pediculum&quot; -&gt; &quot;piolho&quot; in Iberic Romance (contrast Italian &quot;pidocchio&quot;, where the /k/ sound is kept), the &quot;n&quot; going away in Galician-Portuguese/Old Portuguese (perhaps /ʒeuʎo/, later certainly /ʒeoʎo/) as in &quot;general&quot; -&gt; &quot;geral&quot; (contrast Spanish &quot;general&quot;, where the /n/ is preserved), and for some reason &quot;jeolho&quot; morphing into &quot;joelho&quot; (/ʒoeʎo/, later /ʒoeʎu/ or /ʒueʎu/ in Modern Portuguese)). If you look at the non-diminutive Latin word, &quot;genu&quot;, and bear in mind that in Classic Latin &quot;g&quot; always sounded as /g/ (and that that &quot;k&quot; in &quot;knee&quot; must have been pronounced at some point in history - probably up to early Modern English), you will notice the similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(edit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it could be said that &lt;em&gt;Machhapuchare&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;too&lt;/strong&gt; close to &lt;em&gt;Machu Picchu&lt;/em&gt; for any actual relation to be possible. Portuguese and Latin are separated by 1,500 years, during which /&lt;em&gt;genukulum&lt;/em&gt;/ became /&lt;em&gt;ʒueʎu&lt;/em&gt;/ in Modern Portuguese (and only morphing into /&lt;em&gt;ʒenukulum&lt;/em&gt;/ into Ecclesiastic Latin, because it is practically a congealed, written-only language). Tibetan and Andean languages are separated by at least a tenfold lapse of time, during which both, being non-written languages for the most part of the time, must have changed much more wildly. There is no way that any word would be recognisable after so long. It must be a coincidence, or either a loan - but then we would have to demonstrate that there was contact via Bhering or via Polinesian islands, which is contrary to known facts (and is unlikely since there are several unrelated languages geographically in-between, such as Eskimo-Aleut and Uto-Aztecan, or Polinesian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T14:41:12.537" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T14:41:12.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27830" CreationDate="2018-04-30T23:59:13.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just found my old notes from grad school. It's not quite clear if your interest in telicity is historical (e.g. how did Dowty 19XX understand telicity?); obviously, a lot has been done since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is based on Depraetere 1996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tests to distinguish boundedness from unboundedness and telicity from atelicity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15a) John drank beer. (atelic, unbounded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15b) John drank a glass of beer. (telic, bounded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Test 1.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounded – “how long does it take X to X?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unbounded – “for how long?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long did it take John to drink a glass of beer? John drank a glass of beer in half an hour. BOUNDED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For how long did John drink beer? John drank beer for half an hour. (caveat: the answer becomes bounded due to a for-adverbial insertion). UNBOUNDED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A non-progressive atelic sentence does not allow the use of an in-adverbial (17a), whereas a non-progressive telic sentence does (17b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(17a) I lived with her for two years/*in a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(17b) I did the exercise in 10 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Limitations of the test:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.  certain sentences can collocate with a for-adverbial as well as with an in-adverbial (zero-telic verbs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(18a) I mowed the lawn in half an hour. TELIC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(18b) I mowed the lawn for half an hour, then my brother took over. ATELIC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.  the test can only be used for (a)telicity if the sentence is non-progressive, as progressive telic sentences do not collocate with an in-adverbial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(19a) ?? He was pushing the cart into the barn in 15 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A for-adverbial is acceptable in this context but it has the effect of turning a telic sentence into an atelic one (cf. example 18b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(19b) He was pushing the cart into the barn for 15 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c.  might be problematic with non-progressive telic punctual situations; use ‘in one second’ instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(20a). The bomb exploded in one second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d.  not useful in sentences already containing a duration adverbial;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TEST 2.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unbounded – homogeneous situations, i.e. the situation remains the same throughout the time it holds. (subinterval property)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bounded – heterogeneous situations, “they cannot be broken down into smaller entities that can be indicated with the same name” (Declerck 1991: 264)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15a) John drank beer. (atelic, unbounded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(15b) John drank a glass of beer. (telic, bounded)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: applicable to (a)telic propositions only and not actual progressive sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TEST 3.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop+V-ing (atelic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finish+V-ing (telic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John stopped drinking beer. (atelic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John finished drinking a glass of beer. (telic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TEST 4.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one was verb-ing but was interrupted while verb-ing, has one verb-ed? If the answer is possible – atelic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If John was drinking beer and he stopped drinking beer, has he drunk beer? Yes. (atelic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If John was drinking a glass of beer and he stopped drinking a glass of beer, has he drunk a glass of beer? Not necessarily. (telic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depraetere, I. (1996). The tense system in English relative clauses: A corpus-based analysis. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T00:26:57.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-01T03:09:11.970" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;What language pairs are &lt;strong&gt;under-served&lt;/strong&gt; by current resources — like human translators, bilingual dictionaries, and parallel corpuses — relative to their linguistic importance, economic potential, or human necessity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is research on using machine learning techniques to construct bilingual dictionaries from monolingual corpuses using representations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word embedding&lt;/a&gt; models. These techniques seem flexible enough that one could use them to relate arbitrary language pairs. The research would maybe have a bigger impact if it targeted under-served language pairs first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, linguistic importance drives linguists to build resources. Economic potential motivates private industry. Cultural similarity or geographical proximity produces more humans who know related pairs of languages. But I suspect these effects aren't uniform. I'm interested in insight from linguists as to languages for which the tools don't measure up to the need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21887" LastEditorUserId="21887" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T09:06:29.790" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T09:06:29.790" Title="What language pairs are underserved, and would most benefit from machine-learned bilingual tools?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-01T03:23:18.737" Score="-1" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Mary to be accepted at Boston College would be great.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For Mary to be accepted at Boston College would be great&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21888" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T04:22:21.707" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T04:24:41.750" Title="Please explain the following contrast in grammaticality in syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-02T07:39:57.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27838" CreationDate="2018-05-01T05:56:21.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because in English, to-infinitivals with an overt subject always require a subordinator &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;. See Huddleston (2002, pp. 1178-1181). Here is another example but in complement position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) It would be strange for you to stop talking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) *It would be strange you to stop talking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huddleston, R. (2002). 'Non-finite and verbless clauses.' From Huddleston, R. &amp;amp; Pullum, G. K. et al., &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.&lt;/em&gt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: For the historical origin of the construction, please see my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/23092/how-do-you-assign-case-to-sentences-with-an-infinitval-clause/23093#23093&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T04:24:41.750" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27837" CreationDate="2018-05-01T08:48:21.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is very important and possible to answer empirically, however, words and concepts do not map 1:1 across languages so the mentioned assumption that bilingual dictionaries will have a great impact is speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative to what we might expect based on economic factors and inherent difficulty, machine translation quality lags for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;English to x&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major eng orgs tend to notice and fix x to English quality issues.  Funding and datasets from defence orgs like DARPA are also biased towards solving x to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User demand is actually in the other direction, because % of content in English (~1/2) is greater than the % of users who speak English (~1/4, and ~1/8 native).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;non-English pairs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pairs like Chinese-Spanish or French-Hindi have almost no support at all, despite being composed of major languages.  The relative exception is Chinese-Russian, and French-German, depending on whether we talk about products or research results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;closely-related pairs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a purely technical perspective it would be possible to achieve very very high quality on pairs like Portuguese-Spanish or French-Italian, however currently in all major production systems these pairs are via English, not direct.  Even Hindi-Urdu is via English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less closely related pairs like Korean-Japanese or Chinese-Vietnamese would also benefit from not going via English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T08:48:21.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4814" CreationDate="2018-05-01T13:31:16.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;עד &quot;witness&quot; is probably derived from עוד &lt;em&gt;ʕ-w-d&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5749.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to admonish, affirm, turn about&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, whereas עד &quot;forever&quot; is probably derived from the unrelated  עדה &lt;em&gt;ʕ-d-h&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5710.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pass on, advance&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explanation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there's no need to insert a ל to עד &quot;witness&quot; to form לעד when עד on its own is already a homonym meaning &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5703.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forever&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. The ל is a preposition that would yield something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;unto&lt;/em&gt; eternity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, another homonym is עד &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5708.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;filthy&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, derived from a root related to setting a period of time, seemingly connected to the menstrual cycle. I presume Biblical hermeneuticists aren't keen to hang all these meanings on the same peg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do we determine which homonyms are polysemous, i.e. extensions of a single root? One way when we have roots of only two letters is to find the three-letter root that it comes from. (This is an assumption made when studying Hebrew that can be questioned, but no need to here.) Roots where we can't see the third consonant are &quot;defective&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few ways to &quot;repair&quot; a defective root, i.e. determine the third consonant. One is to look for a weak consonant that's likely to disappear: the vowel-like ו &lt;em&gt;vav&lt;/em&gt;, ה &lt;em&gt;heth&lt;/em&gt;, or י &lt;em&gt;yod&lt;/em&gt;. One might come before, between, or after the two letters we can see, as in the common קום &lt;em&gt;q-w-m&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to rise&quot;. One set of reconstructions would thus be יעד &lt;em&gt;y-ʕ-d&lt;/em&gt; or עיד &lt;em&gt;ʕ-y-d&lt;/em&gt; or עדי &lt;em&gt;ʕ-d-y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also cases where a letter is commonly dropped from the beginning, e.g. the נ in נגד &lt;em&gt;n-g-d&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to tell&quot; or the ל in לקח &lt;em&gt;l-q-kh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to take&quot;, which are often missing in conjugations. But these cases are rare. And as I mentioned, looking for a lost ל at the start is pointless since the ל in לעד is a preposition, not part of the verbal root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can also look for a consonant that naturally assimilates into another. This typically happens with geminate roots, i.e. roots with two of the same consonant, such as רעע &lt;em&gt;r-ʕ-ʕ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to do evil&quot;. That would let us reconstruct maybe עדד &lt;em&gt;ʔ-d-d&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have some candidates you go look for attestations in your dictionary or the text itself. In the text, you can find parallel conjugations. For example, we know that &quot;middle-weak&quot; roots are conjugated a certain way. Do we have any examples of a verbal עד that are conjugated like קום? Or we know that geminate verbs are conjugated another way. Do we have any examples of a verbal עד that are conjugated like רעע ? And so on. Also key is to compare related languages in which the &quot;defective&quot; consonant has not disappeared. Is there an Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, or Akkadian root, for example, that corresponds to a hypothetical עדי ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having found viable candidates, you then try to match up meanings to establish a reasonable semantic derivation, which is where some disagreement might come in. Sometimes it isn't a purely semantic argument but the vowels of the noun can also give hints as to root it came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this has been done for many obscure words in the Bible, and to make a long story short, at least one source relates the different words spelled עד to the roots I noted at the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T15:01:51.577" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T15:01:51.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26785" CreationDate="2018-05-01T15:05:58.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ConceptNet has the &quot;is a type of&quot; relations stored, for example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://conceptnet.io/c/en/king&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://conceptnet.io/c/en/king&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've preloaded many great sources (Cyc, dbpedia, wordnet, etc). The issue is, the words aren't tagged by a word-sense key. So, using the &quot;king&quot; example, the kb doesn't distinguish between a 'monarch' or a 'chess piece'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people like the type system in Freeebase or dbpedia. You can find the list here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.textrazor.com/types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.textrazor.com/types&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'll leave the Roget outline here for other people,  as a resource:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Outline_of_Roget%27s_Thesaurus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Outline_of_Roget%27s_Thesaurus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T15:05:58.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20049" CreationDate="2018-05-02T03:29:03.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The frequency of a word/phrase has nothing to do with the origin of the word/phrase. 可爱 is a very common phrase in Chinese daily conversation, however, there are a lot of Chinese phrases also mean 'cute', so there are lots of options. Kawaii is used very frequently in Japanese daily conversation is probably because there aren't many substitutes for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another word '萌' which originates from Chinese and it means 'budding, germinate, sprouting'. But the young people nowadays in Japan use '萌え'(moe) to describe a genre of animes/games which contain a specific 'cuteness' element. And Chinese young people have been influenced by the Japanese anime/game culture adopted this term in Chinese to describe anything cute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many examples like these between Japanese and Chinese language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21892" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T03:29:03.773" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27847" CreationDate="2018-05-02T12:04:22.033" Score="5" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not asking for translations, but how the word itself is related to words in other languages and what those words have come to mean like how &quot;shit&quot; is related to &quot;science&quot;. I would really appreciate it if you could explain the reasoning behind why the words evolved in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21827" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T03:58:25.190" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:58:25.190" Title="What are cognates of &quot;fuck&quot; in other Indo-European languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27846" CreationDate="2018-05-02T12:26:20.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no really secure cognates outside the Germanic languages (see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wiktionary entry&lt;/a&gt; expressing the doubts about outer-Germanic relations). A maybe unexpected English cognate is &lt;em&gt;fidget&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GF04100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;lemid=GF04100&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can try to relate the f-word with Latin &lt;em&gt;pugnus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fist&quot;, &lt;em&gt;pugnare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to fight&quot; and German &lt;em&gt;fechten&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to fight, to fence&quot;, Greek &lt;em&gt;πυκτεύειν&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to fist-fight&quot;. With this, more cognates can be derived (e.g. German &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fist&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T08:55:53.570" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T08:55:53.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27846" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:31:43.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Oxford English Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Probably cognate with Dutch fokken to mock (15th cent.), to strike&#xA;  (1591), to fool, gull (1623), to beget children (1637), to have sexual&#xA;  intercourse with (1657), to grow, cultivate (1772), Norwegian regional&#xA;  fukka to copulate, Swedish regional fokka to copulate (compare Swedish&#xA;  regional fock penis), further etymology uncertain: perhaps &amp;lt; an&#xA;  Indo-European root meaning ‘to strike’ also shown by classical Latin&#xA;  pugnus fist (see pugnacious adj.). Perhaps compare Old Icelandic fjúka&#xA;  to be driven on, tossed by the wind, feykja to blow, drive away,&#xA;  Middle High German fochen to hiss, to blow. Perhaps compare also&#xA;  Middle High German ficken to rub, early modern German ficken to rub,&#xA;  itch, scratch, German ficken to have sexual intercourse with (1558),&#xA;  German regional ficken to rub, to make short fast movements, to hit&#xA;  with rods, although the exact nature of any relationship is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the suggested Indo-European etymology (and for a suggestion that&#xA;  the word was probably a strong verb during its earlier history in&#xA;  English) see especially R. Lass ‘Four letters in search of an&#xA;  etymology’ in Diachronica 12 (1995) 99–111.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the copious use of &quot;probably&quot;, &quot;perhaps&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T17:31:43.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T18:13:12.150" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;My running example is the sentence (from the VAT law of one country):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The building land is the plot in relation to which the building permit has been issued.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are possible at least two views on this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Natural view&lt;/strong&gt;: this sentence describes the plot in relation to which the special action has happened that is described by the full sentence &lt;code&gt;the building permit has been issued&lt;/code&gt;, so - the noun &lt;code&gt;plot&lt;/code&gt; has relation to the full sentence &lt;code&gt;the building permit has been issued&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;in relation to which&lt;/code&gt; acts as some kind of conjunction that relates noun with the sentence. I understand that this it somehow weird interpretation but it conforms to the axiom, that is taught in the secondary school, that subordinate clauses explains (ore replaces) some words in the main clause. My understanding is that such axiom is complete failure - see the next point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammatically correct view&lt;/strong&gt;: one should perceive &lt;code&gt;which&lt;/code&gt; as anaphoric pronoun and &lt;code&gt;in relation to&lt;/code&gt; as the adverb (and there is pied-piping) and the full subordinate clause then can be rewritten as &lt;code&gt;building permit has been issued in relation to which (i.e. plot)&lt;/code&gt;. So - actually - subordinate clause never explains (never can be attributable) to some word in the main clause. In reality the subordinate clause is just another full sentence which can refer to some word in the main clause only by (possibly implied) anaphoric pronouns. And &lt;strong&gt;anaphora is the only mechanism through which the subordinate clause describes some word in the main clause&lt;/strong&gt;. So - this should be the ultimate axiom of the compound sentences - &lt;strong&gt;compound sentences always can be separated as standalone clauses that are joined together by logical connectives&lt;/strong&gt; (conjunction, disjounction, implication - and only these) and there are no other kind of logical connectives that can serve for modelling subordination: i.e. &lt;strong&gt;subordinate clause is just free standing clause that adds or negates some more information (as a separate sentence/proposition (in logical terms)) about some word in the main clause (via anaphora)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - see point 2 for how I understand subordination. &lt;em&gt;Is my understanding of subordination correct (as stated in point 2)? And what about point 1 analysis? Maybe that is quite sound analysis? Maybe there are sentences that should be analysed in that way and maybe there are sentences in whom the full subordinate clause explains some word in the main clause (without anaphora)?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I am figthing this sentence for half a year (see my other questions - &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27725/in-relation-to-which-what-type-of-subordinated-clause-and-is-this-conjunctio&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;in relation to which&amp;quot; - what type of subordinated clause and is this conjunction somehow distinct?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27210/what-is-the-term-for-the-formation-of-word-groups-with-single-meaning-function&quot;&gt;What is the term for the formation of word groups with single meaning/function (e.g. &amp;quot;in relation to which&amp;quot;) in lingustics&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26755/formal-semantics-of-subordinate-clauses-compound-sentences-in-categorial-and&quot;&gt;Formal semantics of subordinate clauses (compound sentences) - in categorial and type logical grammars?&lt;/a&gt;) and just wanted to know - is this sentence really so weird and hard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T22:34:31.530" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T11:18:55.513" Title="Is it possible that whole relative clause refers/describes one word/phrase in the main clause (without anaphora)?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T18:28:13.253" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having an issue with a Praat script. I would like to define the labels I want to define the label I want to look for with a regular expression like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;if label$ = &quot;[AEIOU]..&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Praat chokes on this, it never applies the conditional to the appropriate regex (which I got from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Regular_expressions_1__Special_characters.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat's own help site&lt;/a&gt;). I have tried with single quotes, double quotes, and no quotes, all the same. It will do the conditional if I put a an actual vowel name in, like &quot;EH1&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some magic trick to get Praat to recognize its own documented regex, or is it broken? If it's broken, do I just have to put in every ARPABET vowel in a list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10889" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T18:28:13.253" Title="Praat will not recognize regular expressions" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T23:00:12.247" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partee has nice summary about the formal semantics of relative clause &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05Lec10.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05Lec10.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (subordinate adjectival clause). E.g. &#xA;&lt;code&gt;At least one boy who Mary loves is happy&lt;/code&gt; &#xA;has semantics &#xA;&lt;code&gt;∃x (boy(x) &amp;amp; loves(x)(Mary) &amp;amp; happy(x))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is - is it possible to represent adverbial clauses in such manner? AS far as I know, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10849-017-9246-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10849-017-9246-2&lt;/a&gt; is the most up-to-date analysis of adverbs but it does not include analysis of adverbial clauses which seems to be quite intricate thing: it seems to me that entire clause modifies the verb. E.g. &lt;code&gt;you can sit where you like&lt;/code&gt; - the entire clause &lt;code&gt;you like&lt;/code&gt; modifies the verb &lt;code&gt;sit&lt;/code&gt;. And it is big difference from relative clause - relative clause can be separated as standalone clause which has anaphoric pronoun and this separate clause can be added to the knowledge base. But it is quite different - it seems to me - with adverbial clause which is not understandable if it is taken as separate sentence. I.e. - what to do with the word &lt;code&gt;which&lt;/code&gt;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:37:06.660" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:37:06.660" Title="Formal semantics (Montague, type-theoretical) of adverbial clauses" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27852" CreationDate="2018-05-03T03:00:18.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see the problem.  If you know how to handle restrictive relative clauses, then you must know how to handle adverbial clauses.  The example &quot;you can sit where you like&quot; means &quot;you can sit in any place in which you like to sit&quot;. Except for some superficial syntax, the &quot;adverbial clause&quot; is a restrictive relative already.  (Jonnie and Mike Geis both wrote dissertations at the University of Illinois proposing this kind of analysis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what it would mean for an adverb clause to modify a verb. But anyhow, that's not what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T03:00:18.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2018-05-03T08:05:17.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pontic Greek&lt;/a&gt;, historically spoken in Northern Turkey, has acquired an animacy distinction on top of its inherited gender system; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/16114/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/16114/&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Human nouns have full grammatical agreement, and can be of any gender. &lt;em&gt;i mikresa i nifæ eton ki alo poniresa&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;the.FEM small.FEM bride.FEM was even more cunning.FEM&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inanimate nouns retain gender in their morphology; but any adjective or pronoun that aligns with them is in the neuter. &lt;em&gt;t asimenion o mastrapas pali kremete&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the.NEUT silver.NEUT the.MASC pitcher.MATCH still hangs&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Animate non-human nouns retain gender in their morphology; any adjective or pronoun that aligns with them is in the neuter. Masculine such nouns take masculine articles; but feminine such nouns take neuter articles. &lt;em&gt;ta katas eksenitepsan ki i pendiki xorevne&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;the.NEUT cats.FEM went.away and the.MASC mice.MASC dance&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption I've seen in older accounts was that this was triggered by language contact with Caucasian languages. The paper I've linked to seems to prefer internal causes, and places Pontic on a continuum with Cappadocian Greek (historical spoken in Central Turkey), which has lost gender agreement altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T08:05:17.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27850" CreationDate="2018-05-03T11:18:55.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, anaphora is always involved in a relative clause construction, because relative clauses have relative pronouns (not necessarily explicit), and relative pronouns are anaphoric.  The &quot;which&quot; of your example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The building land is the plot in relation to which the building permit has been issued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is coreferential with the definite NP in the main clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the plot in relation to which the building permit has been issued&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relative clause itself is from the &quot;if&quot; clause of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a building permit has been issued in relation to a plot of land, then `building land' is (refers to) this plot of land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T11:18:55.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T13:11:54.537" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partee has nice summary about the formal semantics of relative clause &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05Lec10.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05Lec10.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (subordinate adjectival clause). E.g. &#xA;&lt;code&gt;At least one boy who Mary loves is happy&lt;/code&gt; &#xA;has semantics &#xA;&lt;code&gt;∃x (boy(x) &amp;amp; loves(x)(Mary) &amp;amp; happy(x))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there similar formal semantics of noun clauses, e.g. formal semantics of the sentence &lt;code&gt;He told me that the match had been cancelled&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun clauses are the most mysterious clauses (from 3 types of clauses - noun, relative and adverbial), because there is no book about them (there are lot of books about adverbial clauses, although - none of them is about formal semantics) and no chapter in Sementics books (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/175240&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/175240&lt;/a&gt; has chapter about adverbial clauses but no chapter about noun clauses, although Chapter 68 &lt;code&gt;Copular Clauses&lt;/code&gt; contain some examples that seems to be noun clauses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe noun clauses is more widely known under different name that is used in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;code&gt;John took an object&lt;/code&gt; can be represented by &lt;code&gt;take_past(John, object)&lt;/code&gt;, but how can we represent &lt;code&gt;John said that the book was good&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;code&gt;say_past(John, full_sentence)&lt;/code&gt;? Is it possible the replace object/Noun in function &lt;code&gt;say_past&lt;/code&gt; with the full sentence? What kind of logical expression we get in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:36:24.513" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T02:36:24.513" Title="Formal semantics (Montague, type-theoretical) of noun clauses" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T15:01:26.350" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;The World Wide Web provides access to an extremely rich collection of written texts and transcriptions of dialogue from both current and historical sources.   But I often have trouble searching for specific things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encountered this recently when I was looking at the word &quot;so&quot;.   I was interested in two particular uses of &quot;so&quot;.  One of them was the ubiquitous use of &quot;so&quot; to start a sentence. The other was a one word sentence form of so:  &quot;So?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I couldn't come up with with any way to structure a search in Google to narrow it down that much.  Does Google have more precise search options that would let me do so, or are there other search engines that allow me to construct searches more precisely?   I'd be satisfied to structure a query saying &quot;Only show me uses of 'so' at the beginning of a sentence&quot;, which is adequate for my purposes even though I'd still have to weed out &quot;So.&quot; and &quot;So!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21901" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T21:29:38.997" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T21:29:38.997" Title="Search tool question" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11997" CreationDate="2018-05-03T15:53:37.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms predicator and predicate are meant differently from syntax and semantics points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From syntax point of view, predicate is that part of a sentence apart from the subject, in which predicator is the verb cluster including the auxiliary and the main verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the semantic point of view, a proposition of a sentence consists of arguments ( referring expressions) and predicator, which the the most important part of the remainder. A predicator can be realized by a verb, an adjective, a noun phrase ( not a referring expression), a pronoun and even a preposition.&#xA;Ex: He is in the garden. Arguments: He, garden. The remainder: is, in: of these two, &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; is more important than &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; in presenting the meaning. Therefore, &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; is the predicator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Predicate is a word or a phrase that can become the predicator of a proposition( in any sentence in ENglish). Then,  a verb, an adjective, a noun phrase ( not a referring expression), a pronoun and even a preposition can be the predicate. This means in one sentence, a verb can be the predicator, while in another sentence, an adjective can become a predicator ( Mr Brown is &lt;strong&gt;handsome&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope everything is clear to you now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21902" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T03:36:54.447" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T03:36:54.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27857" CreationDate="2018-05-03T16:16:28.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A web search engine isn't a good tool to answer your question. You need a large corpus of English text and a &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus Query Processor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the cqp Corpus Query Processor, the query for &lt;em&gt;So?&lt;/em&gt; looks like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[lemma=&quot;so&quot;] [word=&quot;\?&quot;]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this query finds &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning of a sentence (assuming that the previous sentence ends in a full stop, so the recall is not perfect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[word=&quot;\.&quot;] [lemma=&quot;so&quot;]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The queries can be refined to exclude unwanted hits, they are here for demonstration of the capabilities of cqp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are really great corpora for spoken English, both recent and historical. For example, there is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-246C-0000-0023-8CFB-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Bailey Corpus&lt;/a&gt; hosted at the CLARIN-D centre at Universität des Saarlandes for historical spoken English. More corpora can be found via the CLARIN Virtual language observatory, here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/?q=spoken%20English%20corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookmarked query for spoken English corpora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T20:03:52.100" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T20:03:52.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T17:22:11.607" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would be very interested if someone could provide me with a useful link to read Zellig Harris's text on the origin of the alphabet. The reference is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harris, Zellig S. 1933. “Acrophony and vowellessness in the creation of the alphabet”. Journal of American Oriental Society 53.387. [Summary of 1932 Univ. of Pennsylvania M.A. thesis “Origin of the Alphabet”.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find it, and since I am writing from Iberia at this moment, in site access to any US library is out of the question at this point in time for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21904" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T20:59:09.050" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T11:54:25.293" Title="Zellig Harris and the alphabet" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;writing&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2018-05-03T17:49:14.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No doubt IPA surpasses all existing writing systems as it not only provide specific symbols for phonemes and allophones on the segmental level, but it also provide varying degrees of stress patterns, linking and juncture (pause) features; I strongly suggest learners of a new language should practice its sound system through IPA. For those learning English could well benefit from IPA texts in phonetic transcription clips uploaded in YouTube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21905" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:49:14.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27864" CreationDate="2018-05-03T18:25:35.683" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;This probably seems like a strange question so I'll get to the point first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Main Point&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I essentially want to be able to take two input languages and create sentences by using vocabulary from both based on an algorithm. For example: take English and Spanish and decide that the sentence is going to be 80% English and 20% Spanish, a typical output might be &quot;Hello, my name es Tim&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an algorithm that essentially allows you to &quot;lerp&quot; between two languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Acknowledgements&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I acknowledge that such an algorithm wouldn't be perfect at appreciating the nuances between different languages, but to some degree this wouldn't be necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also acknowledge that this wouldn't necessarily be the correct community to ask this question in, but honestly I can't decide where it would go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21906" LastEditorUserId="21906" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T18:57:04.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T10:26:36.263" Title="Merging languages depending on arbitrary ratios (lerping between languages)" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27863" CreationDate="2018-05-03T20:18:14.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, there is probably no such thing because different languages tend to differ in word order and syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some solutions: Use handcrafted sentences which are word-aligned and then choose the word from language A with probability &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; or from language B with probability &lt;em&gt;p-1&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less precise: Take sentences from language A and replace the words with probability &lt;em&gt;p-1&lt;/em&gt; with words from language B. In this model, the underlying syntax is always from language A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in the project &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/?page_id=296&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;INCOMSLAV&lt;/a&gt; and their publications: They use (among other methods) interpolated mixes of Slavonic languages to test mutual intercomprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Instead of the probabilistic algorithm suggested above, one can also use a fixed pattern for the language selection, e.g., for 50% alternately selecting from languages A and B. This will lead to a more uniform distribution of the two languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T10:26:36.263" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T10:26:36.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27861" CreationDate="2018-05-03T20:46:27.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The journal you are looking for can be easily read online on JSTOR. Here is the link to the page of your interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/594233?seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jstor.org/stable/594233?seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's really just 4 lines abstract of Harris' paper. I don't think it's more useful than Wikipedia.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T20:46:27.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T06:22:12.280" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was working on creating a question answering system. Now I wanted to deal with incomplete or partial sentences. So the first step to this would be detecting whether the question entered by the user is complete or incomplete. How do I classify &quot;Who is Obama's Wife&quot; as complete and &quot;Obama's Wife&quot; as incomplete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15478" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T10:28:45.180" Title="What are the various approaches to detect whether a sentence is complete or not?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14629" CreationDate="2018-05-04T06:47:37.220" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, as Luciano Canepari pointed out, /i/ and /ɨ/ are two different phonemes (basically every Russian speaker can distinguish them; and there are instances of words starting with ы, although rare ones), and palatalised consonants are &quot;allophones&quot; (or should I say taxophones) for /Ci/, and in other positions, for /Cj/ (e.g. ось), particularly because a few regional accents make no distinction between palatalised consonants and non-palatalised ones, particularly in postnuclear positions (including a broad St. Petersburg accent): it's obvious that the quality of the vowel is more important&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll never get how phonologists are losing their minds in order to make things very complicated, when they are not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21907" LastEditorUserId="21907" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T07:33:59.870" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T07:33:59.870" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27867" CreationDate="2018-05-04T10:28:45.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For formal English anyway you can parse with spaCy and then iterate through the tagged tokens looking for a finite verb (&lt;code&gt;VerbForm=Fin&lt;/code&gt;, as opposed to &lt;code&gt;Ger&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Inf&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#rule-based-morphology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#rule-based-morphology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T10:28:45.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27861" CreationDate="2018-05-04T11:54:25.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;1933 Acrophony and vowellessness in the creation of the alphabet. J. Am. Orient. Soc. 53:387.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the sum total of the notice in the JAOS. He does not seem to have published it as an article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. ZELLIG S. HARRIS, of the University of Pennsylvania: Acrophony and&#xA;  Vowellessness in the creation of the Alphabet. Remarks by Professor &#xA;  Albright.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The existence of the acrophonic principle in the alphabet&#xA;  is shown  by the Serabit material. Vowellessness is explained from&#xA;  acrophony.  In Semitic no word begins with a vowel: no sign therefore&#xA;  came to  receive a vowel as its value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T11:54:25.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27874" CreationDate="2018-05-04T13:23:37.690" Score="10" ViewCount="1026" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20919/subtypes-of-standard-average-european/20939#20939&quot;&gt;Standard Average European (SAE)&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;Sprachbund&lt;/em&gt; centred around German and French and extending to almost all European languages. Haspelmath has examined Maltese for SAE features, but he did not examine Modern Hebrew (Ivrit). Since Modern Hebrew is not only a Semitic language, but is also heavily influenced by native speakers of SAE languages (like German, Yiddish, and Ladino) I am interested in the question whether some SAE features were adopted by Modern Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Related Questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/582/how-standard-average-european-is-esperanto&quot;&gt;How Standard Average European is Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/89/can-modern-hebrew-be-considered-an-indo-european-language&quot;&gt;Can Modern Hebrew be considered as a Indo-European language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T19:46:14.767" Title="How Standard Average European is Modern Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;sprachbund&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27872" CreationDate="2018-05-04T15:25:47.297" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his article &quot;Is Modern Hebrew Standard Average European? &#xA;The View from European&quot; (in &quot;Linguistic Typology&quot;, Volume 17; 2013) Amir Zeldes lists 13 typological features defining SAE. Modern Hebrew (similarly to Biblical Hebrew) exhibits 3 of them.&#xA;The article is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ru/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;url=https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/amir/pdf/LT_Hebrew_SAE.pdf&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiwk6m72OzaAhXmIJoKHS8aC2UQFjABegQIBxAB&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw3eR6JkJFdV0xLnu2DB0Yoi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="20034" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T18:42:41.700" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T18:42:41.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27872" CreationDate="2018-05-04T15:56:56.353" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Hebrew is not SAE by any stretch. Going through &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/20939/1270&quot;&gt;Haspelmath's criteria&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Definite and indefinite articles: Modern Hebrew (MH) has only a definite article (-ה), which is inherited from Biblical Hebrew (BH)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses formed by a relative pronoun: MH's relative clauses are formed by the particle ש- and not by a pronoun (inherited from BH)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Have&quot;-perfect: MH has no have perfect, nor does it have a way of distinguishing perfect from preterite (past-future tense is inherited from BH's perfect-imperfect aspect)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nominative experiencer: In some cases MH is like SAE (such as אני שמח &quot;I am happy&quot;), in other cases not (such as the dative subject in חם לי &quot;I am hot&quot;); note that while this is not SAE, these two ways exist in some European languages which are nevertheless considered SAE, and Haspelmath uses the arbitrary division of a ratio of &amp;lt; 0.8 to define SAE. (Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/amir/pdf/LT_Hebrew_SAE.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amir Zeldes' analysis&lt;/a&gt; from Aharon M. Vertmont's answer, MH does have a tendency towards the nominative experiencer, but that the same is true for BH.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Participial passive: Passive construction is a separate conjugation, inherited from BH&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anticausative prominence: Since Haspelmath's article measures this by percentage of lexicon I can't judge this one, but Hebrew has a separate conjugation for causative verbs which suggests it might meet this criterion. (Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/amir/pdf/LT_Hebrew_SAE.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amir Zeldes' analysis&lt;/a&gt; from Aharon M. Vertmont's answer once more, MH is in fact anticausative, and this is likely the same as BH.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dative external possessors: This does exist in MH (e.g. לקח לי &quot;he took from me&quot;) and is not inherited from BH&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Negative pronouns and lack of verbal negation: MH has the non-SAE NV + NI type described in the article (e.g. אף אחד לא בא &quot;no one comes,&quot; but literally &quot;no one doesn't come&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Particles in comparative constructions: The comparative is מ- which means &quot;from,&quot; inherited from BH&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relative-based equative constructions: This doesn't exist in MH, which uses &quot;X like Y&quot; instead of the SAE &quot;as X as Y&quot; and is inherited from BH&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject person affixes as strict agreement markers: This true in MH only in the present tense, whereas the past and future tenses are (like BH) pro-drop&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intensifier-reflexive differentiation: Reflexive pronouns such as עצמי &quot;myself&quot; (inherited from Mishnaic Hebrew) are not differentiated from intensifier pronouns&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In nearly all of these cases Modern Hebrew is unambiguously &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; SAE. If we follow the numerical analyses from Zelde's article, only features #4, #6 and #7 are SAE, for a total of only 3 SAE features. More importantly, the SAE features in #4 and #6 are also present in Biblical Hebrew, leaving only one feature, #7 as the product of SAE influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T19:13:48.530" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T19:13:48.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T01:39:35.397" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that most languages have some way of bounding quotations in written form. European languages have their apostrophe quotes and angle-brackets, while eastern Asian languages have those right-angle brackets. Do any languages have an analog in spoken form, though? Like how English speakers sometimes say &quot;quote&quot; and &quot;unquote&quot; before and after quotations, but more standard and common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21913" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T01:39:35.397" Title="Are there any languages that have words for open and closing quotation marks in speech?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T02:37:19.460" Score="1" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521431468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt; (p. 458, boldfaced emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We look first at the contrast between nominative and accusative case, where we find a considerable amount of variation and &lt;strong&gt;instability in the system&lt;/strong&gt;. There are a number of constructions where the nominative is associated with formal style, the accusative being strongly preferred in informal speech and writing. Because of the tendency of older prescriptive grammar to accept only formal style as 'grammatically correct', there has been a tradition of criticising the accusative alternants, and the stigmatism attaching to such accusatives has given rise to a certain amount of hypercorrection, with nominatives being used in constructions where the traditional rules call for an accusative. Or at least this is the situation with the personal pronouns and determinatives: with interrogative and relative who the reverse situation obtains, the accusative &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; being the case associated with formal style. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have a &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; idea of what they might mean by this 'instability', but I could be missing something, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the particular instability mentioned here is a &lt;strong&gt;synchronic&lt;/strong&gt;, as opposed to a diachronic, feature of English syntax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be (I think?) easy to understand what a &lt;strong&gt;diochronic&lt;/strong&gt; instability is: if there is some feature of language that is currently undergoing a change, then that feature is currently diochronically unstable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a synchronic instability should be a feature of language &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; a time. In other words, it should be something that can be described without referring to features of language at two different points of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of synchronic instability that I (think I) understand is described &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.ujc.cas.cz/miranda2/export/sitesavcr/ujc/zakladni-informace/pracovnici/files/Olinco_2013.pdf&amp;amp;sa=U&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjF3rThqu3aAhVBCsAKHVHeCRMQFggxMAk&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw2MXdc3R9qsrvu6awqdURiL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (p. 319):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the questions that naturally arises in the study of Anglicisms in Czech is whether the approximated forms reflect British (RP) or American (General American) pronunciation in the event that they differ for a given lexical item. The following six categories were considered:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b) alternation between [ɑː] and [æl: we found only one item of this kind in our sample: &lt;em&gt;bypass&lt;/em&gt; [ˈbajpaːs], which is based on the British pronunciation form. In other recent words, pronunciation may vary: &lt;em&gt;grant&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced uniformly as [ˈgrant], but &lt;em&gt;Hugh Grant&lt;/em&gt; (despite&#xA;  his British origin) is often realized as [ˈgrɛnt]. The usual pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;breakdance&lt;/em&gt; is [ˈbrɛjgdɛns];&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On the whole, approximated forms are based on British pronunciation variants, with the notable exception of rhoticity, which is always maintained. Out of the six categories, it is only the [ɑː/æ] difference which is likely to introduce &lt;strong&gt;instability in the system&lt;/strong&gt; of phonological approximation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; here the instability refers to the following: there are words in which the British English uses [ɑː] while the American English uses [æ], and there is no consistency as far as into which Czech vowel will this English vowel be turned once the word becomes a Czech Anglicism: sometimes the English vowel becomes [a], which is how Czech normally handles [ɑː], but other times the English vowel becomes [e], which is how Czech normally handles [æ]. The instability refers to this lack of pattern: sometimes it's one, sometimes the other, and there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason why it's one and not the other in any given case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of CGEL, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the instability also refers to a lack of rhyme or reason, this time as far as when to use the nominative and when the accusative. The pattern of usage is pretty fixed in time (i.e. it is not diachronic), but it is not predictible on any general grounds whether in any particular instance native speakers prefer the nominative or the accusative. At best one can talk about &lt;em&gt;tendencies&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that what CGEL means by &lt;em&gt;instability in the system&lt;/em&gt;, or am I misunderstanding it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question: is there a meaningful contrast between &lt;em&gt;variation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;instability&lt;/em&gt;, in their senses as they are used in the boldfaced sentence from CGEL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="11228" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T16:17:04.787" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T16:17:04.787" Title="What does CGEL mean by 'instability in the system' in their explanation of case?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T04:19:38.650" Score="9" ViewCount="1064" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found PIE roots described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/sources?ref=etymonline_footer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Heritage Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; are quite different. For examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;agō: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*ag-?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*ag- (Etymonline)&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;      &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82e%C7%B5%CA%B0-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₂eǵ- (Wiktionary)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;laxō: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*sleg-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*sleg- (Etymonline)&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;       *slǵ-so (Wiktionary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stō: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/*sta-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*sta- (Etymonline)&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;     &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/steh%E2%82%82-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*steh₂- (Wiktionary)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea which one is correct or recent, due to my lack of knowledge in PIE. Why are they different (in terms of source) and where the differences come from (in terms of form)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21916" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T13:53:07.723" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:05:41.733" Title="Why are the reconstructed forms of PIE root in Etymonline and Wiktionary different?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27881" CreationDate="2018-05-05T05:24:03.017" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European has gone through different stages of development historically, which represent higher levels of abstraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory&lt;/a&gt;, which dates from 1879 but which gained widespread acceptance only after it was used to make sense of Hittite in the 1930s, did away the reconstruction of long vowels and /a/ in Indo-European, by explaining them via laryngeals (h1, h2, h3). While the reconstruction of long vowels and /a/ is legitimate, they are held to represent a later stage in the development of Indo-European. (So /h₂e, eh₂/ &gt; /a/.) And even after the laryngeal theory gained general acceptance, references were slow to adopt it; Pokorny's influential dictionary dates from 1959, but still uses the older vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymonline reflects the older, pre-laryngeal understanding of PIE (which corresponds to a later stage of PIE). Wiktionary reflects the more recent, laryngeal understanding. In addition, Etymonline seems to be randomly dropping diacritics, reflecting bad transcription online; the differentiation between velar g and palatal ǵ has been in the reconstructions of PIE since the start. Nothwithstanding the usual cautions about Wiki sources, Wiktionary is by and large reliable for PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T05:24:03.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27889" CreationDate="2018-05-05T10:22:13.090" Score="3" ViewCount="777" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; states this on the Spanish consonants /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ʝ/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are realized as approximants (namely [β̞, ð̞, ɣ˕]) or fricatives in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or — in the case of /d/ — after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as voiced stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phoneme /ʝ/ is realized as an approximant in all contexts except after a pause, a nasal, or a lateral. In these environments, it may be realized as an affricate ([ɟʝ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the realization is thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+---------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+&#xA;| Letter                    |  b  |  g   |  d  |  y   |&#xA;+---------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+&#xA;| after a pause             | /b/ | /ɡ/  | /d/ | [ɟʝ] |&#xA;| after a nasal consonant   | /b/ | /ɡ/  | /d/ | [ɟʝ] |&#xA;| After a lateral consonant | [β̞] | [ɣ˕] | /d/ | [ɟʝ] |&#xA;| elsewhere                 | [β̞] | [ɣ˕] | [ð̞] | /ʝ/  |&#xA;+---------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any reason (historical or otherwise) why the approximant is chosen as the phonemic symbol for /ʝ/, but not for /b/, /d/, /ɡ/?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. it seems to me that it would be more intuitive to either choose the approximant for all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/β/, /ɣ/, /ð/, /ʝ/ &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or the plosive/affricate for all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/b/, /ɡ/, /d/, /ɟʝ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since these groupings of the allophones appear in similar environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T10:48:57.447" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T00:09:18.697" Title="Choice of phonemic symbol for /b/, /d/, /g/, /ʝ/ in Spanish" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27881" CreationDate="2018-05-05T10:52:54.680" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with these particular reconstructions is that the author of &quot;etymonline&quot; does not use diacritics. In fact, there is a very significant difference between *g and *ǵ (they develop differently in the “kentum” and “satem” languages), and also between *a and *ā (or, if you prefer, *h₂e and *eh₂). The reconstructions in “etymonline” are wrong, regardless of which particular school you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this: all reconstructions of PIE are hypothetical and there is substantial disagreement between specialists about nearly everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take one example: there is actually no direct evidence (for example from Hittite) for a laryngeal in *h₂eǵ-. It has been posited on the basis of the dogmas that no PIE word can begin with a vowel, and that there is no *a vowel in PIE. Without these two assumptions there is no strong reason not reconstruct *aǵ-. But *ag- (as mentioned) is definitely wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T11:18:34.660" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T11:18:34.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27881" CreationDate="2018-05-05T16:51:48.460" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To supplement Nick's excellent answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mainstream view of PIE now is that it had no /a/ vowel (in the oldest stages we can reconstruct). Instead, it had three(*) &quot;laryngeal&quot; sounds, which weren't actually particularly laryngeal, but the name has stuck. They're conventionally written *h₁ *h₂ *h₃ and there are various theories as to their actual pronunciation: personally, I like the idea that they were /h x ɣʷ/, but there's not enough evidence to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Some people suggest that there were four or even five, but this hasn't caught on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in every Indo-European language known at the time(**), these &quot;laryngeals&quot; never appeared directly. Instead, they only appeared as a &quot;color&quot; on the surrounding vowels. In other words, *h₁ *h₂ *h₃ first affected the surrounding vowels, then disappeared entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(**) Hittite was discovered after the laryngeal theory was proposed, and did actually show direct evidence of some laryngeals. Which adds quite a lot of evidence to the theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, *h₁ turned *e into *e (no change), *h₂ turned *e into *a, and *h₃ turned *e into *o. If the laryngeal came before the vowel, the result was short; if it came after the vowel, the result was long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Wiktionary is showing the (more modern) reconstruction of older PIE, while the laryngeals still existed, and Etymonline is showing the (older) reconstruction of later PIE, after Hittite split off and the laryngeals vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, as the others have said, that Etymonline is also ignoring several important distinctions in PIE: *ǵ and *g are separate phonemes in every reconstruction I've seen, and there's significantly more evidence for them than there is for laryngeals. (See the centum-satem division for examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T16:51:48.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27884" CreationDate="2018-05-05T17:09:51.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's for historical reasons, really.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were looking at that Spanish data in isolation, I would agree with you: I'd call the phonemes /b d ɟ ɡ/, then say that the stops became fricatives in certain environments (and that the palatal stop was realized as an affricate elsewhere, which is a very common thing for palatal stops to do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with Spanish, we aren't looking at it in isolation: we know what phonemes Latin and other Romance languages had/have, so we know the diachronic changes that led to today's Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, /b d ɡ/ come from Latin /b d ɡ/, which were almost always [b d ɡ] (indicated by Latin grammarians' descriptions, transcriptions into other languages, and what happened in other Romance languages). But /ʝ/ came from Latin /j/, which was (almost?) always [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it makes more sense to say that the approximant /j/ became a fricative /ʝ/ which sometimes becomes [ɟʝ], than to say that /j/ became /ɟʝ/ directly. In other words, [ʝ] is the &lt;em&gt;most conservative&lt;/em&gt; form, while [ɟʝ] is more innovative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T17:09:51.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27884" CreationDate="2018-05-05T17:42:19.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;/ʝ/ vs. /ɟ/&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, there is a lot of variability in the realization of the Spanish sound that Wikipedia transcribes as /ʝ/, both between dialects, and in some cases between different utterances made by the same speaker; and there seems to be some unconditioned as well as conditioned allophony (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&amp;amp;httpsredir=1&amp;amp;article=1000&amp;amp;context=spanfaculty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L2 perception of Spanish palatal variants across different tasks&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26683214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allophony of /ʝ/ in Peninsular Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2008/chang_wss4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Variation in Palatal Production in Buenos Aires Spanish&lt;/a&gt;). So it may not actually be of much pedagogical benefit to use a phonemic transcription that suggests that the realization of /ʝ/ is subject to conditional allophony in exactly the same way as /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/. (Then again,  it's also true that /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ don't have exactly the same patterns of allophony as each other, despite their similar transcriptions; nor is the allophony of these segments 100% conditioned by the phonetic context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at things from a phonological or morpho-phonological persepective, there seems to be a relationship between /ʝ/ and /i/ or /j/ in Spanish (probably, there could be arguments about the extent to which this relationship is diachronic vs. synchronic). For example, the word &lt;em&gt;rey&lt;/em&gt; /rei/ has the plural form &lt;em&gt;reyes&lt;/em&gt; /reʝes/. I would guess that this could be grounds for arguing that a plosive symbol is not the best choice for the underlying representation of this sound, although I have not seen any source that explicitly says this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the existence of a phonemic distinction in Spanish between /ʝ/ and /j~i/ seems to be disputed. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-Wx0RP0_cPwC&amp;amp;pg=PA103&amp;amp;lpg=PA103&amp;amp;dq=Spanish+phonology+j+%CA%9D&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=R-y-x50a-V&amp;amp;sig=djW6aQVBQLQkD0cTv0JMbRpwFcQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi25-XCiu_aAhUD6YMKHSLHAjI4HhDoAQg4MAU#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Spanish%20phonology%20j%20%CA%9D&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Phonemes of Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, in &lt;em&gt;The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; (2012), edited by José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea and Erin O'Rourke, says that /ʝ/ may be analyzed as &amp;quot;an allophone of the high vowel /i/&amp;quot; in syllable-initial position (p. 103, 4.2). The contrast between putative minimal or near-minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;abierto&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;abyecto&lt;/em&gt; can be explained in that case as consequences of different syllabifications. Campos-Astorkiza references work by José Ignacio Hualde that has more discussion of this topic. I also found a bit more information about this in the powerpoint for &amp;quot;The Dialects of Spanish and of Modern Greek – Natural Laboratories for the Generative Phonologist&amp;quot;, by Ellen M. Kaisse, which you can download by clicking on this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjl3ryGo-_aAhUH0IMKHUYKBrcQFggpMAA&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fcatalyst.uw.edu%2Fworkspace%2Ffile%2Fdownload%2F5d054330ff165f643e3f46a6b6d0bff9a2f6a866c2ffc60b92e737df8aeba11d&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0guwQ3qpV3ybEanOMRl_zr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dialects of Spanish and of Modern Greek&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;/b/ /g/ /d/ vs. /β/ /ɣ/ /ð/&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what analytical considerations are relevant for /b/ /g/ /d/ vs. /β/ /ɣ/ /ð/; note that the former set of transcriptions is easier to type and uses more familiar symbols (also, symbols that are used in the spelling system of the language), which may give it an advantage just on non-theoretical grounds. Note also that the Wikipedia page you linked to says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical phonological analyses of Spanish consider the consonants /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ the underlying phonemes and their corresponding approximants [β], [ð], and [ɣ] allophonic and derivable by phonological rules. However, approximants may be the more basic form because monolingual Spanish-learning children learn to produce the continuant contrast between [p t k] and [β ð ɣ] before they do the lead voicing contrast between [p t k] and [b d ɡ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section references Macken, Marlys A.; Barton, David (1980b), &amp;quot;The Acquisition of the Voicing Contrast in Spanish: A Phonetic and Phonological Study of Word-Initial Stop Consonants&amp;quot;, Journal of Child Language, 7 (3): 433–458. If you want to learn more about the relevant issues, perhaps you could read that or find some more recent source that cites it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sources I found in this way that seem relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/5212019/barlow130.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&amp;amp;Expires=1525552822&amp;amp;Signature=Dl7wQnNrk5SW5W%2BvPUUVC0l2LEs%3D&amp;amp;response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_stop-spirant_alternation_in_Spanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The stop-spirant alternation in Spanish: Converging evidence for a fortition account&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Jessica A. Barlow, 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.654.5506&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markedness Effects in the Acquisition of Voiced Stop Spirantization by Spanish-German Bilinguals&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Conxita Lleó and Martin Rakow, 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4682571/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acquisition of the stop-spirant alternation in bilingual Mexican Spanish–English speaking children: Theoretical and clinical implications&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Leah Fabiano-Smith, Trianna Oglivie, Olivia Maiefski, and Jessamyn Schertz, 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T00:09:18.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27893" CreationDate="2018-05-06T09:05:35.430" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have learned that English present participle suffix -ing and past participle suffix -ed came from PIE *-nt- and *-to- respectively. I have two questions about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)Were these also used to form present and past participles of PIE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)What were the origins of PIE *-nt- and *-to-?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1669" LastEditorUserId="1669" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T09:42:18.883" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T14:41:45.977" Title="The origins of PIE *-nt- and *-to-" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27891" CreationDate="2018-05-06T14:41:45.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answers are &quot;probably&quot; and &quot;we don't know&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE didn't have quite the same categories of participles that we have today, because its tense-aspect system was very different from English's. (The primary distinction was between perfective and imperfective verbs, like in some Slavic languages today.) And everything we know about it is reconstructed, so there's disagreement about what certain things actually meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But *-nt- did create a participle usually described as present active, and *-t- did create a participle usually described as past passive. These are the same participles that survived in Latin: from the stem &lt;em&gt;ama-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;love&quot; you get &lt;em&gt;amant-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;loving&quot; and &lt;em&gt;amāt-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;loved&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for where they came from…unfortunately, nobody is really sure. PIE is the oldest stage we're able to reconstruct with any certainty. There have been theories proposed about older versions of the language, but none are widely accepted. So PIE is about as far back as you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T14:41:45.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27898" CreationDate="2018-05-07T01:47:02.750" Score="4" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am native Swedish speaker and I have a problem that the language seems to have no grammar in some cases. For instance there is both &quot;en lag&quot; and &quot;ett lag&quot; meaning completely different things but the word &quot;lag&quot; is the same sound and same spelling, but the difference is in the meaning of the word. So you can't know from just the word &quot;lag&quot; whether it is &quot;ett lag&quot; or &quot;en lag&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems completely arbitrary whether you should say &quot;en lag&quot; or &quot;ett lag&quot; but the meanings are different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like there is no logic there or at least something I never saw in other languages i.e. the meaning of the word determines the case. It is the same difference in English in &quot;an&quot; or &quot;a&quot; and there it is the sound of the word which determines the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all other cases besides Swedish, you can know from the word itself what the gender or case should be e.g. English has &quot;a&quot; or &quot;an&quot;, German has &quot;der&quot;, &quot;die&quot;, &quot;das&quot; with very distinct clear rules so that you know, given a word, how to write the definite article. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T02:55:41.137" Title="&quot;Den&quot; or &quot;det&quot; in Swedish" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swedish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T02:16:21.497" Score="7" ViewCount="981" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Eskimo-Aleut and Ainu languages were historically spoken in the same region (near the Kamchatka Peninsula), and they share some features that are common in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleosiberian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paleo-Siberian languages&lt;/a&gt;, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;incorporation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also noticed that the native name of the Greenlandic Inuit language (Inuktitut) is similar to the name of the Ainu language (Aynu=itak). In both of these languages, these words means &quot;human language,&quot; although I do not know whether this is a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any comparative studies of the Eskimo-Aleut and Ainu languages to identify possible cognates between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2465" LastEditorUserId="2465" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T18:05:25.687" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T23:53:50.183" Title="Is there any evidence of language contact between the Inuit and Ainu languages?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;&lt;ainu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27896" CreationDate="2018-05-07T03:59:16.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have such an ambiguity built in. It's very common that you can't tell the morphosyntactic properties of a word or even its phonological interactions just from its form, even given certain generalizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In German if you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;Schlüssel&lt;/em&gt; on its own you don't know whether you have one key (&lt;em&gt;der&lt;/em&gt;) or multiple (&lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt;) keys.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In French if you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;grammaire&lt;/em&gt; you don't know whether it's the set of rules governing a language (&lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt;) or a book describing those rules (&lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In English if you encounter the name &lt;em&gt;Taylor&lt;/em&gt; without context you don't know know whether to make a subsequent pronoun agree as &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew if you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;אוכל&lt;/em&gt; /oχel/ you don't know whether it's the participle &quot;eating&quot; or the noun &quot;food&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish if you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;flor&lt;/em&gt; for the first time you can't guess the gender. If you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;mano&lt;/em&gt; for the first time and apply the usual rules you will guess wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In German if you apply a generalization about words ending in &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Bibel&lt;/em&gt; you will be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In English if you try to decide between &quot;a&quot; and &quot;an&quot; using the same rule for &lt;em&gt;hour&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;heel&lt;/em&gt; you will get one of them wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In French if you encounter the word &lt;em&gt;haricot&lt;/em&gt; for the first time you won't know whether the definite article is &quot;le haricot&quot; or &quot;l'haricot&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these is one example of large sets of ambiguous cases!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the entry in the lexicon presumably carries some of the information needed to settle these cases — not just the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T02:55:41.137" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T02:55:41.137" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T06:22:38.503" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has worked with programming knows that boolean logic is hard to express in english. Given the statement &quot;A and B must be false&quot;, with no context one can understand the statement to mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A must be true and B must be false&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The value of A and B must be false (Thus, A,B  or A and B must be false)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ambiguity in English is the source of lots of software bugs -- De Morgan's law is easy to remember but hard to apply when your native language doesn't require it, as are several other logical identities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was curious to know, are there any natural or constructed spoken languages (Not languages constructed for explicitly expressing boolean logic) where Boolean logic can be expressed without ambiguity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21928" LastEditorUserId="14934" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T13:25:37.830" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T20:32:31.910" Title="Do any spoken languages readily express boolean logic without ambiguity?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;logical-form&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27899" CreationDate="2018-05-07T12:07:47.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that by &amp;quot;Boolean logic&amp;quot; you mean &amp;quot;Formal logic&amp;quot;, and, moreover, let's restrict your question to the example you are commenting about, rather than to the whole logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A first, obvious, answer is no, since, by definition, no natural language is a formal language, and ambiguity is always to be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your question can be reformulated in a more linguistic fashion: is there any language distinguishing nominal conjunction from predicate conjunction? If attested, such a system could potentially express the difference between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(a &amp;amp; b)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(a) &amp;amp; P(b)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, such languages are effectively known to exist. Here you can see a map showing the world-wide distribution of languages where the two conjunctions coincide and of those where they do not:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/64A#2/25.5/149.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/feature/64A#2/25.5/149.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Famously, many of the oldest Indo-European languages did distinguish two types of conjunction. Thus, in Latin we have the conjunction &lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt; and the clitic conjunction &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; (often repeated). The former is more general, but is the only one possible with predicates (at least, to my knowledge). The latter is used preferably, perhaps exclusively, with nominals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; […] &lt;em&gt;hominum-&lt;strong&gt;que&lt;/strong&gt; ferarum-&lt;strong&gt;que&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;et&lt;/strong&gt; genus aequoreum&lt;/em&gt; (Vergil, &lt;em&gt;Georgics&lt;/em&gt;, III.242)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘the race […] of men and of beasts and the race of the see-animals’, possibly to be understood as: ‘(the race of (men &amp;amp; beasts)) &amp;amp; (the race of the see-animals)’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this amounts to a net distinction of P(a &amp;amp; b) from P(a) &amp;amp; P(b), is yet to be proven (and is effectively an interesting topic for an investigation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking more generally, your question regards the relationship between the logical form of a proposition and the superficial form of a sentence. The logical form of a proposition is an abstract object, while its symbolic representation depends on what symbolism you choose (e.g. think about the difference between &amp;quot;Polish notation&amp;quot; vs. classical notation of the predicates). However, we can empirically claim that no symbolic representation of the logical form coincides with the superficial linguistic form of the sentence. According to Chomsky's theory, there are even explicit grammatical rules translating from the former to the latter. Therefore, languages can differ as to the degree of logical ambiguity they introduce during this translation process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T20:32:31.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27881" CreationDate="2018-05-07T14:05:41.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to all the other excellent answers, there is a simple practical explanation of the proximal cause (the others explain well the academic reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking the sources of the two sets, there is a great amount of overlap. Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/sources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; list as sources Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European roots, Carl Darling Buck, A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages, and Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. These three all use the Pokorny style of writing (as others have mentioned describing a more recent PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Etymonline does not and Wiktionary does list Rix et al., Lexikon der Indogermanischen Verben (1998), which uses a more modern transcription, directed at an older PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the whole Wiktionary seems to use the latter Rix transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T14:05:41.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T14:11:08.947" Score="8" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example why did radio presenters roll the r on the BBC before the war and not after? Why did Brecht roll the r extensively? Why did Hitler roll the r extensively? My perspective is from the performance point of view but I am looking desperately for linguistic texts sources as it seems a common phenomenon? Any articles in research or conference papers you could help me with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21919" LastEditorUserId="4904" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T22:18:50.730" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T10:29:55.430" Title="Why did the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme /r/ change after the 2ndWW in public speech?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;rhoticity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27952" CreationDate="2018-05-07T14:52:10.770" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish has many words containing the diphthongs /au/, /eu/ and /iu/, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/26112/18348&quot;&gt;the only instances&lt;/a&gt; of words containing /ou/ (as a diphthong or in hiatus) are a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; small set of foreign loanwords:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;bou, proustiano, soul, noúmeno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or compound words of the form &lt;em&gt;...o&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;u...&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;estadounidense, estadounidismo, genitourinario, finoúgrio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neighbouring romance languages Portuguese and Catalan both have a large number of words containing /ou/,  &lt;strong&gt;is there a specific reason why Spanish doesn't?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There even seems to be a tendency to convert loan /ou/ to /o/, as in the Spanishised name of the Galician city &lt;em&gt;Ourense&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), and its associated demonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(My immediate thought was that all instances of Latin /ou/ became /oβ/ ~ /ob/ in Spanish, but this seems to be contradicted by the fact that /au/ and /eu/ remained in many words.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T09:42:02.127" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T11:13:54.303" Title="Absence of vowel combination /ou/ in Spanish" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27904" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T15:14:21.927" Score="2" ViewCount="700" Body="&lt;p&gt;this year I opted to study English syntax as a non native speaker and we arrived to the movements on the X-bar theory. We are studying DP and WH movements on sentences, and while I'm able to understand the examples given on the text book(Syntax a generative introduction) but then I'm stuck on the exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have been told that exam exercises will be harder than this ones, but I'm not able to even do those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think John has bought at the supermarket? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did not know which offer was rejected by the committee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could give me an overview of how those two sentences are drawn, I think I could understand where I'm lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21931" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:23:05.067" Title="X-bar Theory WH and DP movements" Tags="&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-05-08T21:40:19.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27902" CreationDate="2018-05-07T15:22:22.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the two quoted speakers of German, &lt;strong&gt;dialect&lt;/strong&gt; is an explanation. Brecht is Born in Augsburg (Bavaria) in an area where r's are rolled, and Brecht used &lt;em&gt;Süddeutsche Umgangssprache&lt;/em&gt; (Southern colloquial German) quite consciously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not so sure about Hitler who is born in Braunau (Austria) in an area where r's are rolled. But I suppose, he received some training on pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R's are still rolled in Bavaria, when you listen to German speakers from Bavaria and Austria today you will notice it. Rolling the r's is a requirement for professional speakers in the official Bavarian radio network (Bayerischer Rundfunk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T15:43:32.597" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T15:43:32.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23314" CreationDate="2018-05-07T18:25:34.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I imagine this happens to some extent in all languages with a prestige dialect and non-prestige dialects with distinctive realisations of phonemes. Some examples that come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ceceo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Andalusian Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_gorgia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tuscan gorgue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Florentine Italian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;alveolar trill/tap&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AYg0dNiOMzAC&amp;amp;pg=PA65&amp;amp;lpg=PA65&amp;amp;dq=stigmatised+meridional+french&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meridional French&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Th-fronting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in Cockney/Estuary English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_accent#Non-rhoticity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Non-rhoticity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of Boston English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T18:25:34.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T20:08:20.793" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there a set of English verbs that require a prepositional phrase? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The set &lt;strong&gt;consists&lt;/strong&gt; of A and B.&quot; = GOOD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The set &lt;strong&gt;consists&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; = BAD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this type of verb? They seem to be different than 'transitive' which relies on a direct object. To clarify, I'm not asking about verb-particle (phrasal verb relations); I'm only interested in verb-PP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T20:08:20.793" Title="English verbs requiring PP" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27903" CreationDate="2018-05-07T21:30:21.307" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- The words you have listed are not Spanish, but loans, adaptations from ancient words or neologisms based on modern languages, foreign surnames, etc. &#xA;2- Ourense was never a loan into Spanish. As a matter of fact, the artificial revival of Galician forced a Galician pronunciation in places which had already lost it. Having lived in multilingual Spain for many years in my childhood (the real multilingual areas, not what the propaganda and official story tells you), I can tell you noone said Ourense or A coruña back then, at a time in which you could hear Girona, Xixón por other place names. Spanish never reduced Ou to O in Ourense. That has nothing to do with, say, the reanalysos of (O) Porto as Oporto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-Yes, there is a specific reason: it is called monophthongisation in the phonological diachrony of the language. As simple as that. Or you can see it as an issogloss in dialectological terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21904" LastEditorUserId="21904" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T15:02:58.860" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T15:02:58.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27314" CreationDate="2018-05-07T21:37:00.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured I'd post an answer in case it helped anyone else in the future. I wound up installing &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/letter-to-phoneme/m2m-aligner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jiampojamarn's m2m-aligner&lt;/a&gt;, callable via the terminal, and it works great. I used this to preprocess all of grapheme/phoneme pairs in the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary prior to runtime, and saved the results in a custom &lt;code&gt;GraphemePhonemeAlignment&lt;/code&gt; Python class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One trick for anyone trying to get the m2m-aligner working on OSX: I had to delete the &lt;code&gt;lgcc_s&lt;/code&gt; requirement from the makefile in order to get the &lt;code&gt;make&lt;/code&gt; command to work. After that, the program ran like a charm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21380" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T21:37:00.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2751" CreationDate="2018-05-07T21:44:36.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for vowel harmony, as someone mentioned, it is in Andalusian varieties where you can find it, even with morphological content (for instance, the contrast between horroroso &quot;awful&quot; in singular, with closed o vowels and &quot;horroroso&quot; in plurar with open harmonized vowels. Since final -s is deleted in those varieties, harmony has become, in the case of o and e, the way to mark plurality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for metaphony (in synchronic productive terms, not as a factor in the history of the Romance languages), you should then go to Asturian (which is not a dialect of Spanish, but a system of its own, one of the primary Latin dialects in terms of Menéndez Pidal, which, by the way, suffers discrimination in Spain, as Aragonese does, when compared with Galician (but, again, all fascist rulers came from Galicia and built a mafia-system that pervades the whole economy of the Spanish language instruction, inside and outside the country).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Asturian, instead of perro for dog you have, after a medial stage perru &gt; pirru.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other Romance languages which something similar are some Italian varieties, I think Apulian was one of them, but I am talking by heart.......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, what the User Mechanical snail wrote is accurate and should suffice as basic explanation for the e / ie and o / ue alternations, which are stress-dependent in the history of the Romance languages......Nothing to do with vowel harmony. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21904" LastEditorUserId="21904" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T08:19:44.530" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T08:19:44.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12158" CreationDate="2018-05-08T06:42:24.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;thesis&lt;/em&gt; is Ancient Greek for &quot;setting (down), placing&quot;, and @user438 is completely correct that the connection is that someone &quot;sets down&quot; arguments and propositions. Other related indirect senses &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dqe%2Fsisp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentioned in the LSJ dictionary&lt;/a&gt; include &quot;instituting games&quot;, &quot;setting forth&quot; in legal form, monetary deposits, a &quot;general question&quot; (as opposed to the &lt;em&gt;hypothesis&lt;/em&gt;, lit. &quot;under-placing&quot;, the &quot;special case&quot;), a &quot;downbeat&quot; in music, and a stop in punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest attestation of the philosophical sense given in LSJ, &quot;thesis, position, assumed and requiring proof&quot; is in Plato's Republic, 335a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D335a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D335a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how &lt;em&gt;thesis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;placing&quot; is led up to in this excerpt by repeated use of the related verb &lt;em&gt;tithēmi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to put; (mediopassive) to take up a position&quot;—both in the same sense of &quot;taking up an intellectual position&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;καὶ μάλα, ἔφη, οὕτω συμβαίνει. ἀλλὰ &lt;strong&gt;μεταθώμεθα&lt;/strong&gt;: κινδυνεύομεν γὰρ οὐκ ὀρθῶς τὸν φίλον καὶ ἐχθρὸν &lt;strong&gt;θέσθαι&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;“Most certainly,” he said, “it does work out so. But let us change our ground [&quot;&lt;em&gt;change position&lt;/em&gt;&quot;]; for it looks as if we were wrong in the notion we took up about [&quot;&lt;em&gt;in positioning&lt;/em&gt;&quot;] the friend and the enemy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;πῶς &lt;em&gt;θέμενοι&lt;/em&gt;, ὦ Πολέμαρχε;&#xA;“What notion [&quot;how &lt;em&gt;did we position&lt;/em&gt;&quot;], Polemarchus?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;τὸν δοκοῦντα χρηστόν, τοῦτον φίλον εἶναι.&#xA;“That the man who seems to us good is the friend.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;νῦν δὲ πῶς, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, &lt;strong&gt;μεταθώμεθα&lt;/strong&gt;;&#xA;“And to what shall we change it now [&quot;&lt;em&gt;change position&lt;/em&gt;&quot;]?” said I. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;τὸν δοκοῦντά τε, ἦ δ᾽ ὅς, καὶ τὸν ὄντα χρηστὸν φίλον: καὶ περὶ τοῦ ἐχθροῦ δὲ ἡ αὐτὴ &lt;strong&gt;θέσις&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;“That the man who both seems and is good is the friend, but that he who seems but is not really so seems but is not really the friend. And there will be the same assumption [&quot;&lt;em&gt;position&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;thesis&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;] about the enemy.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T01:47:03.767" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T01:47:03.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27902" CreationDate="2018-05-08T11:28:42.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting discussion of Hitler's speech in Hubert's contribution to this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/40864/gab-es-einen-deutschen-posh-accent&quot;&gt;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/40864/gab-es-einen-deutschen-posh-accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is significant is that Hitler went out of his way NOT to speak with an Austrian accent, but to emulate as well as he could the &quot;deutsche Bühnensprache&quot;, one of the obvious features of which is (or rather was) the alveolar &quot;r&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T06:29:55.693" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T06:29:55.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27896" CreationDate="2018-05-08T12:55:55.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a problem that the language seems to have no grammar in some cases. For instance there is both &quot;en lag&quot; and &quot;ett lag&quot; meaning completely different things but the word &quot;lag&quot; is the same sound and same spelling, but the difference is in the meaning of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar is there, even if it's confused by something else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, in Swedish every noun is either &quot;ett&quot; or &quot;en&quot;. It's unpredictable sometimes, but this feature is inherent in the noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is &quot;lag&quot; sometimes &quot;en&quot; and sometimes &quot;ett&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; It's because actually there are two/three separate words here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One is &lt;code&gt;laget&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;the team&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One is &lt;code&gt;lagen&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;the law&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another is &lt;code&gt;lagen&lt;/code&gt;, the juice/brine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each has its gender; they are never mixed up. Swedish people never say &quot;en lag&quot; to mean &quot;a team&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems like there is no logic there or at least something I never saw in other languages i.e. the meaning of the word determines the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mostly arbitrary, like I said. But there are certain generalisations. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;living beings are mostly &quot;en&quot;. &quot;en häst&quot;, &quot;en fluga&quot;, &quot;en pojka&quot;, &quot;en främling&quot;, &quot;en svamp&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Masses, like water and slime are usually &quot;det&quot;: &quot;vattnet&quot;, &quot;slemmet&quot;, &quot;trädet&quot;. This is what explains &quot;laget&quot;, &quot;the team&quot;. I guess you'd expect &quot;juice/brine&quot; to fall under this category but for whatever reason it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns for humans/humanoids that are both genders are usually &quot;ett&quot;: &quot;ett barn&quot;, &quot;ett troll&quot;, alternative explanation for &quot;ett lag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nouns which are historically derived from verbs are almost always &quot;en&quot;. &quot;lag&quot;,  &quot;the law&quot;, comes from &quot;ligga&quot;. That's why it's &quot;en lag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, there is method to the madness. Not always a perfectly reliable method, but it's undeniably there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T12:42:32.347" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T12:42:32.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27904" CreationDate="2018-05-08T14:23:05.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How it cannot be a Head-to-Head movement because we are moving an entire phrase, there are several elements that have been moved. Firstly, the present tense on the higher T requires do-support and [+Q] triggers T→C movement. Secondly, from a V position [think] has been moved to the specifier position of CP [+WH]. The DP [John] has been moved from the specifier of the embedded VP to the specifier of the embedded TP. The DP [you] does the same in the higher clause. Finally, we have wh-movement, after moving first to the specifier of the embedded CP and then, on to the higher CP to check that C's [+WQ] feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21942" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:23:05.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27902" CreationDate="2018-05-08T14:31:35.500" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer to your question for both English and German is early twentieth century stage pronunciation, an artificial, overarticulated accent designed to project to the back rows of a theater before the routine use of microphones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 1920s recording of &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9iw9lR1lZCo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Gielgud reciting Othello’s speech from Act I, Sc. 3&lt;/a&gt;, the actor pronounces an alveolar trill [r] in &lt;em&gt;reverent, rude,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;greedy&lt;/em&gt;, more briefly in &lt;em&gt;dearest&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;around&lt;/em&gt;, an alveolar tap [ɾ] in &lt;em&gt;very, married, redemption, seriously,&lt;/em&gt; and in “linking r’s” in &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;. The rest are either dropped or vocalized as typical with non-rhotic BE or the regular postalveolar approximate [ɹ̠].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This over the top style of acting, especially the highly affected treatment of vowels to evoke great pathos, is long gone, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/v9XWTtxlYgE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gielgud and Olivier recall&lt;/a&gt; “singing” Shakespeare’s blank verse, the former with no small measure of embarassment as he remembers earlier performances delivered in that style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the few instances in Gielgud’s speech suggest, the trilled allophone was never a regular feature of either older RP or the stage, but an occasional means of adding emphasis or stress. The word &lt;em&gt;reverent&lt;/em&gt;, for example, comes quite early in the speech and functions almost like a drumroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trilled r copied from the stage was not a constant among newscasters. Earlier Pathé newsreels, even those where a certain gravitas and dramatic delivery might be expected, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishpathe.com/video/queen-mary-dies/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;death of Queen Mary&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishpathe.com/video/evacuation-of-dunkirk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;evacuation of Dunkirk&lt;/a&gt;, abound in tapped, but not trilled r’s. The first broadcast of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mBRP-o6Q85s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Queen’s Christmas message&lt;/a&gt; in 1957 offers another comparison: no trill and taps only on &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; (twice) and &lt;em&gt;American&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;German&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In April 1898, a conference of germanists and theater directors gathered in Berlin under the direction of linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Siebs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodor Siebs&lt;/a&gt; to hammer out a unified pronunciation for the stage. The results were published later that year as &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BChnendeutsch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deutsche Bühnenausprache&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (German Stage Pronunciation) and remained authoritative until supplanted in the post-war period. It was heavily oriented toward the written language and a northern pronunciation, that is, how High German was spoken in areas where local dialects were traditionally Low German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One southern feature, i.e., Austrobavarian, East Franconian, Allemanic, he did prescribe however was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/deutschebhnena00siebrich#page/30/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar trilled r&lt;/a&gt;, reduced in a few cases to the alveolar tap. The realizations of r most common today, the uvular trill [ʀ] and the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ], were not permitted in later editions of “the Siebs” &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BChnendeutsch#Three_acceptable_realizations_of_/r/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;until 1957&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hitler&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/KLbQ8Kx5tAw&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brief speech of April 1939&lt;/a&gt;, Hitler closely follows Siebs pronunciation, the only trace of his native Austria perhaps a slightly darker l. Even in medial and final position, the r is articulated as an explosive trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very few recordings of &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/tBJ27wWDilo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hitler’s normal speaking voice&lt;/a&gt;, but his accent shows far more traces of Austrobavarian than his speeches. In this recording, admittedly in poor quality, I heard only one alveolar trill, in &lt;em&gt;Arbeiter&lt;/em&gt; ‘worker’. The rest are either vocalized or flapped. Other features are monothongization of the &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt; diphthong, &lt;em&gt;Tag&lt;/em&gt; ‘day’ pronounced with a lenis d and g, final l umlauting the vowel in &lt;em&gt;Beispiel&lt;/em&gt; ‘example’, though the l is still pronounced. Today, one would call this accent Standard High German with an Austrian coloring (&lt;em&gt;Färbung&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brecht&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bertold Brecht&lt;/a&gt; — who didn’t leave his native Bavaria until he was 27 — recorded his own poems, he used a modified Siebs pronunciation with far more Bavarian features, including the alveolar trill, which was part of his native dialect anyway. To hear the difference between this accent and and that prescribed by Siebs, compare Brecht reading his poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m2rCM09ougk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“An die Nachgeborenen”&lt;/a&gt; (To Those Born After) to the interpretation &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeyBJQAyARY&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;of the same poem&lt;/a&gt; by actor Klaus Kinsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21936" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T10:29:55.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-09T06:47:16.680" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some languages, words are marked for more things than in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This affects &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; information must be included in a sentence or passage. For example, someone saying &quot;Do you want to come along with us?&quot; in Hebrew must mark the first or second word for gender and number (of the &quot;you&quot;), whereas in English the entire sentence can be said without any notice taken of gender or number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also affects &lt;em&gt;how soon&lt;/em&gt; information must be included in a sentence or passage. For example, someone saying &quot;I had two kittens&quot; in English can leave the number (plural) of kittens out until he gets to the predicate; thus, when he starts the sentence, he need not even know what it is that he had: that comes later on in the sentence. In Hebrew, it's &lt;em&gt;there-were to-me two kittens&lt;/em&gt;, so the speaker must know, as soon as he starts the sentence, what he's referring to at the end of it (or their number, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can theorize that, in languages that make you plan your sentences ahead more (because more words are marked for more things and must agree), the speakers are in general more likely to have their words ready before speaking. That might manifest itself in reduced midspeech or increased prespeech usage of words like &quot;um&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone researched correlation between markedness/agreement of words in a language and any other measure of having one's words ready before speaking? What has been found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am largely untrained in linguistics, so excuse my ignorance and, in particular, the imprecision or misapplication of any terms of art that I may use. I'd appreciate any edits that correct misuse of words, especially in the tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="228" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T11:12:50.540" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T11:12:50.540" Title="Words being marked for agreement, and prepared speech" Tags="&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;information-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27919" CreationDate="2018-05-09T08:22:27.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course there is lot of linguistic research on how speakers present information in sentences. To mention just two fields here,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Information structure&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;linguistic topology&lt;/em&gt; is about the order of information in a sentence (given–new)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Information density&lt;/em&gt; asks on the amount of information (in bits) that is added at each word, T Florian Jäger is a well-known researcher and pioneer in this field.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;um&lt;/em&gt; are called &lt;em&gt;fillers&lt;/em&gt; in linguistics, and there is ongoing research on the use of fillers based on spoken corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T08:32:40.577" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T08:32:40.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-09T12:17:41.847" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to implement a graph based dependency parser. Since I come from a computer engineering perspective, I have trouble finding the features. &#xA;Assuming that we have a (head,dependent) relation for (x,y), here are some features that I found to be helpful:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;&#xA;POS Tags of x&amp;amp;y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Direction of the relation(right or left)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Distance between words x and y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Word itself information(x&amp;amp;y themselves)&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I should enhance the accuracy of my parser and will appreciate any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21950" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T12:17:41.847" Title="What features are good for dependency parsing?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2018-05-09T16:35:14.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;None.&#xA;If by all human sounds you mean all sounds which have been distinguished (acoustically) and given a grapheme, by linguists, that's probably IPA. There's more sounds than IPA graphemes (say, between every two IPA vowel graphemes you can try to produce the 'middle' or 50%50% one and then you have created/found a new sound, for which there is no direct grapheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T16:35:14.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27924" CreationDate="2018-05-10T12:13:19.927" Score="4" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a (publicly available) dependency parser exist, that either preserves structural ambiguities in its output or that allows me to generate all possible parse trees for a given input?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in a parser for German specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21954" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T20:12:02.480" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T20:12:02.480" Title="Dependency parsing that preserves structural ambiguities?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27923" CreationDate="2018-05-10T15:15:18.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The top parsers like spaCy, Stanford and Google unfortunately only return one parse, although in many cases another parse is nearly equally probable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the always helpful Matt from spaCy explained to me in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/238&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/238&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; how to get the underlying options and even the probabilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import numpy as np&#xA;import plac&#xA;import spacy.en&#xA;&#xA;def get_scores(nlp, text, force_tag=None):&#xA;    probs = []&#xA;    tokens = nlp.tokenizer(text)&#xA;    nlp.tagger(tokens)&#xA;    if force_tag:&#xA;        tags = [force_tag] + [w.tag_ for w in tokens[1:]]&#xA;        nlp.tagger.tag_from_strings(tokens, tags)&#xA;    with nlp.parser.step_through(tokens) as state:&#xA;        while not state.is_final:&#xA;            action = state.predict()&#xA;            probs.append(max(state.eg.scores))&#xA;            state.transition(action)&#xA;    return tokens, probs&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;def main():&#xA;    nlp = spacy.en.English()&#xA;    toks, probs = get_scores(nlp, u'Communicate your ideas clearly.', force_tag='NN')&#xA;    print([w.tag_ for w in toks])&#xA;    print(min(probs), sum(probs))&#xA;    toks, probs = get_scores(nlp, u'Communicate your ideas clearly.', force_tag='VB')&#xA;    print(min(probs), sum(probs))&#xA;    print([w.tag_ for w in toks])&#xA;    toks, probs = get_scores(nlp, u'Communicate your ideas clearly.', force_tag='NNP')&#xA;    print(min(probs))&#xA;    print([w.tag_ for w in toks])&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;if __name__ == '__main__':&#xA;    plac.call(main)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Produces:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[u'NN', u'PRP$', u'NNS', u'RB', u'.']&#xA;(231.49497985839844, 2340.7755584716797)&#xA;(334.1315612792969, 2806.1406860351562)&#xA;[u'VB', u'PRP$', u'NNS', u'RB', u'.']&#xA;252.046356201&#xA;[u'NNP', u'PRP$', u'NNS', u'RB', u'.']&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This examples shows tags not dependencies, and the code has changed since then, but you should still be able to apply this basic solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spaCy supports German and about two dozen other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T15:15:18.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-10T20:33:45.513" Score="3" ViewCount="902" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always learnt it was pronounced the same as how 'e' is usually pronounced in German (in either its short or long forms respectively). But then the question is: why have a different letter for it? Surely the original sound must have been different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="416" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T10:37:25.527" Title="What was the original pronunciation of 'ä' in German?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27925" CreationDate="2018-05-10T20:51:42.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Until rather recently, &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt; represented the sound /ɛ/, also called &quot;epsilon&quot;. This is similar to the sound of &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; (conveniently written /e/), but with the tongue slightly lower: it's the vowel in English &quot;pet&quot;. Some German-speakers still use this pronunciation, but only when they're speaking carefully—that is, it takes conscious effort to get it &quot;right&quot;. In casual everyday speech, it's merged into /e/ over the last century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what the &quot;original&quot; sound was, but we can make a guess. The process of front-umlaut in German (and other Germanic languages) involved shifting vowels forward in the mouth in certain contexts. &lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt; /ø/ is &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; /o/ shifted forward, for instance, and the same for &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt; /y/ from &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; /u/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So based on this evidence, we could say that the &quot;original&quot; underlying phoneme for &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt; might have been /æ/, a low front vowel (the sound in General American &quot;cat&quot;). But this is nothing but an educated guess. The difference between the actual sounds [æ] and [ɛ] is rather small, and I don't know of any evidence that would tell us conclusively that it was originally pronounced [æ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T20:51:42.270" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-10T22:37:46.627" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all thank you all for taking the time to read me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been entrusted in the language course of the career I am studying to read the theory of the sign of Ferdinand de Saussure. My question is this: Is your theory neuroscientifically proven? My doubt is given that its publication is from the beginning of the 20th century. Is there any possibility that the allusions Mr. Saussure made to the interpretation of the individuals of the concepts and their associations with the brain in a cognitive way are proven?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again, greet you very attentively: Mr. Federico Ventura.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: I ran the question through Google Translate to bring it into English, as is required for this site. Check the revision history to see the original Spanish.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21959" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T02:53:28.353" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T02:53:28.353" Title="Linguistic theory of &quot;signs&quot;" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;semiotics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27925" CreationDate="2018-05-10T22:53:18.883" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Originally” is a problematic concept. The letter “ä” was not used in Old and Middle High German. The plural of gast is gesti in OHG and geste in MHG. In early New High German the letters ä, ö and ü (or rather: a, o, u with a small superscript “e”, but I cannot find these in Unicode) were used to indicate the umlauted forms of a, o and u, but the distinction between e and ä was dictated by etymology and not by pronunciation; ä was used where there are obvious cognates with a, as in Gast  &gt; Gäste. The spoken distinction between “e” /e/ and “ä” /ɛ/ is essentially a spelling pronunciation adopted in the standard “Bühnenaussprache”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T07:53:11.270" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T07:53:11.270" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27927" CreationDate="2018-05-11T00:50:27.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(First, an apology: I don't speak Spanish, and ran your question through Google Translate to understand it. So I may be misinterpreting things.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand right, what you're asking is: &quot;is there any neurological evidence to support Saussure's theory of the signifier and the signified?&quot; In other words, is there neurological support for the idea that we store words separately from the concepts they represent, with links between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any &lt;em&gt;neurological&lt;/em&gt; evidence, but there is some &lt;em&gt;psychological&lt;/em&gt; evidence for it. In particular, &quot;priming&quot; works on both levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone is shown a series of letters (or played a series of phones), and told to determine whether it's a valid English word or not, they'll react more quickly and more accurately if the word has been &quot;primed&quot; in their mind first. You can &quot;prime&quot; a word by saying something that sounds similar (a similar &lt;em&gt;signifier&lt;/em&gt;), or something with a similar meaning (a similar &lt;em&gt;signified&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually taken as evidence that we store words both by their sound and by their meaning: we have a section of our brain that stores sequences of phonemes, sorted in some way, and a section of our brains that stores semantic concepts (&quot;lemmas&quot;), sorted in some other way. And words are stored as links between these two data structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T00:50:27.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6313" CreationDate="2018-05-11T02:03:43.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer from @hippietrail's correspondent is pretty much on point, but the specifics have not quite been dealt with fully. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sabbat-ismos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sabbathism, sabbathisation, sabbathising&quot; is indeed a deverbal noun, arising from the verb &lt;em&gt;sabbatizo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to act in a way associated with the/a Sabbath&quot;, i.e. &quot;to observe the Sabbath&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some specific questions: Does it self contain any indication of an article (definite or indefinite)? in other words, of itself would it be &quot;a keeping of the Sabbath&quot; or &quot;the keeping of the Sabbath&quot; or do words using an -ismos ending depend on the surrounding text for any article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek nouns could be definite or indefinite in the absence of an explicit definite article: the definite article develops only gradually in ancient Greek, and even in Koine there are contexts where Greek does not use a definite article and English would. But without a definite article, the default assumption would be indefinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be the equivalent of a deverbal noun or gerund in English? Would it be &quot;keeping the Sabbath&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The &quot;ideology&quot; meaning is already around in ancient Greek (because the underlying verb suffix means &quot;act in a matter associated with&quot;, and can mean &quot;be a partisan of&quot;). But the point  of the noun suffix is to make the verb into an action noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it maintain any number/gender from its root-- &quot;(I keep the Sabbath)ing&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, no more than the gerund does in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T22:37:54.800" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T22:37:54.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-11T13:58:36.410" Score="-5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the origin of the pharsing since Macs are personal computers and PC stands for Personal Computers but is used to refer to windows-powered computers? I apologise if I used the wrong tag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21967" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T15:09:29.147" Title="Why say &quot;PC vs Macs&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-05-12T01:06:52.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27931" CreationDate="2018-05-11T15:09:29.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could probably find the answer yourself with some googling. I got this from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-call-computers-MAC-and-PC-while-PC-means-personal-computer-and-both-are-personal-computers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; after looking for about a minute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original IBM personal computer was branded as an IBM PC, so the&#xA;  personal computers were either IBM PCs or IBM compatibles.  But, over&#xA;  time IBM lost market share (or, more accurately the market grew and&#xA;  IBM didn't).  At that point &quot;IBM compatible&quot; meant less and they&#xA;  became &quot;PCs&quot;.  While the original meaning of PC was &quot;personal&#xA;  computer&quot; it became synonymous for &quot;IBM compatible&quot; meaning it could&#xA;  run DOS (and later Windows.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21968" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T15:09:29.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-11T15:38:58.930" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember coming across an interesting language where the first sounds out of a baby's mouth were not considered to be &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father,&quot; but were instead considered to be a curse word.  I want to say it was &quot;ke,&quot; but I'm not certain.  That culture viewed babies as effectively chaotic demons.  Parents did not raise their child at first, but it was taken to nearby relatives to be raised until the child was &quot;proper&quot; enough to be introduced to the parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to cite this fascinating language in a debate, but I am having trouble finding it again amidst all the parenting help sites that Google offers when talking about first words or children swearing.  But I'm hoping this is a famous enough case that someone can remember which culture and language this was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14515" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T15:38:58.930" Title="Language where baby's first word is a swear word" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-11T23:33:47.853" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;English and German have vestiges of an imperative followed by a subject pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ Be Thou My Vision &lt;em&gt;(archaic)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ Don't you talk back to me! &lt;em&gt;(colloquial)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ Bitte rufen Sie ihn. &lt;em&gt;(polite 2nd person)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;→ Fangen wir an. &lt;em&gt;(cohortative)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are consistent, as Draconis and fdb point out, but represent exceptional cases in view of the overall verbal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which is more common cross-linguistically: for an imperative to include the subject pronoun, or to omit it, as is most often done in the languages I understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do we know about the exceptional cases, as the above seem to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can we characterize the verb-subject inversion in these cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T04:38:46.730" Title="Imperative + pronoun" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27925" CreationDate="2018-05-12T09:22:50.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as modern Standard German (Hochdeutsch) is concerned, (1) &lt;strong&gt;'ä' is merely an orthographic device&lt;/strong&gt; whose sound value is the same as 'e' in the same position; (2) there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; some &lt;strong&gt;vacillation&lt;/strong&gt; among speakers when it comes to the long vowel; the short variant is always [ɛ] unless someone wants to sound comical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard pronunciation suggests to read long 'ä' as [ɛ:] as contrasted with long 'e' [e:], but this is &lt;strong&gt;not generally followed&lt;/strong&gt; except for a few isolated cases like the interjection 'äh' [ʔɛ:] (people often perform sounds in interjections that they'd otherwise claim not to say at all, like the click in E. 'tsk').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason standard pronunciation wants us to read 'ä' as [ɛ:] at all comes from the misunderstanding that where there's a separate way to write words, there should also be a separate way to read those words. Needless to say, this idea fails in many places, not least of which is the contrast of short 'ä' and 'e', which are undisputedly always [ɛ]. There's also some utility to keeping [e:] ~ [ɛ:] separate as there are a few minimal pairs that would otherwise sound the same, such as Beeren ~ Bären (berries, bears) and Ehre ~ Ähre (honor, ear of corn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do people not follow and keep [e:] ~ [ɛ:] separate? One, because it is &lt;strong&gt;artificially introduced&lt;/strong&gt;, phonetically &lt;strong&gt;not very salient&lt;/strong&gt; and, usage-wise, &lt;strong&gt;not very useful distinction&lt;/strong&gt; to be made, as only a handful of lexical items profit from the distinction. Also, there's a &lt;strong&gt;constant interference from the many dialects&lt;/strong&gt; that have only the one or the other vowel, or, when they have both, use them in ways that conflict with what the standard would have us do. As in other languages, most people do not natively speak the perfect standard natively; rather, it is an acquired dialect that is approximated from the sound-base of what one grew up talking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason why &lt;strong&gt;one should definitely not follow the folly and separate [e:] ~ [ɛ:]&lt;/strong&gt; is because it's at odds with the overall German vowel system. German has 7 simple full vowels, viz. /a,e,i,o,u,ø,y/ (plus schwa), all of which come in a short and a long variant. The short ones are generally laxer / more open than the tenser / more closed long ones, so [a, ɛ, ɪ, ɔ, ʊ, œ, ʏ] contrast with [a:, e:, i:, o:, u:, ø:, y:]. An extra [ɛ:] does not fit well into this symmetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There's yet another variant for each vowel that is used mainly in words of Latin or Greek origin; these are described as being a mixture of the short and the long ones in that the vowel quality is rather tense, but the quantity is short or half-long, which gives [aˑ, eˑ, iˑ, oˑ, uˑ, øˑ, yˑ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why an extra letter Ää was introduced into the spelling when it doesn't correspond to a sound of its own, well, that's a good question. On the one hand, using 'ä' to mark the Umlaut does tie related words together, so you can immediately see that 'Korn', 'Körner', 'Fluss', 'Flüsse' and 'Lachen', 'Lächeln' are related. OTOH we write a lot of words with 'ö' and 'ü' that do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have a modern counterpart with 'ä', 'o', 'u', ex. 'Öl' (*Ol), 'Süden' (*Suden), 'Ähre' (*Ahre). Worse, &lt;strong&gt;there are lots of historical Umlaut vowels that are not marked in the orthography at all&lt;/strong&gt;, ex. 'Gewitter' (&amp;lt;Wetter), 'Gebirge' (&amp;lt;Berg), and then there's a fair number of high-frequency words where usage has been &lt;strong&gt;non-uniform&lt;/strong&gt; over the past one or two hundred years, ex. 'ächt'-'echt', 'Ältern'-'Eltern', 'Stängel'-'Stengel', 'enbläuen'-'einbleuen'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16971" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T09:22:50.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28952" CreationDate="2018-05-12T14:20:50.707" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a tool that can replace text with smaller synonyms, abbreviations, and initialisms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &quot;Hello everyone, how are you all doing today? By the way, I'm leaving tonight.&quot; could become: &quot;Hi every1, how r yall doin today? Btw, Im leaving 2nite.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T11:16:38.360" Title="Is There A Text Reducing Tool Via Synonyms?" Tags="&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25582" CreationDate="2018-05-12T18:30:06.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your question. This example reflects a larger problem in grammaticizing language. Roughly speaking there are two approaches: &lt;em&gt;Generative&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt;. A parser is generative, presupposing that there are elementary and globally correct grammar rules whom all sentences in a language ideally abide by. Exceptions are accepted but are treated as “quirks” of the language without any further hidden rules.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To oversimplify the matter, lets suppose the parser categorizes words of a sentence as SUBJ, OBJ, VERB, etc. The parser would analyse the sentence &lt;em&gt;I told him a story.&lt;/em&gt; in the same way as &lt;em&gt;I told the story a water.&lt;/em&gt; as SUBJ + VERB + S.OBL + OBJ. The verb tell requires slots {SUBJ, OBJ, S.OBL*} to be filled.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(*indirect object = &lt;strong&gt;obl&lt;/strong&gt;ique, &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;ubsequent to direct object in the causal chain, “allative”)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yet &lt;em&gt;I told him the story.&lt;/em&gt; makes perfect sense while &lt;em&gt;I told the story a water.&lt;/em&gt; is nonsensical. This is to demonstrate that there are more fine-grained requirements and classifications, e.g. animacy, mass vs. count noun, etc. that have to be considered in speaking a language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Croft shows in the final chapter of his book &lt;em&gt;Verbs&lt;/em&gt; that on this level grammar gets messy. He postulates a usage-based model where instead of global and pervasive grammar rules and classes such as “A SENTENCE CONSISTS OF AT LEAST A PREDICATE AND A SUBJECT.” and SUBJ, NOUN, etc. there are &lt;em&gt;local&lt;/em&gt; rules for a small set of local words, e.g. verbs that have “idiosyncrasies”, or special requirements which are related not to the general grammar of the language but arise from certain semantic considerations and conventions. I think &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; is a very good example to demonstrate what this usage-based model tries to describe:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no clean-cut limits between grammar and logic/semantic.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;in praxi&lt;/em&gt; we do not speak grammatically but always experiment at the verge of intelligibility. (cf. interjections, ellipses, vocative, hiatus (e.g. introducing a complement), catena etc.)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammaticality is not a yes/no category but a quality that emerges from usage frequency (i. e. a phrase or utterance becomes grammatical when it has been said (and written) often enough by enough different people for long enough), i. e. becomes entrenched. (Of course within the loosely delimited terms of cognitive grammar.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Following this premises let me try to describe the “local” grammar of lassen which eludes a parser.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; is a verb that, by subjectification, has acquired a causative sense. The argument structure of lassen can be schematized in two ways (according to Talmy’s Force Dynamics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Causer causes an event.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[causer]   {event:     [causee]    [action]    }&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;SUBJ                    OBJ         INF(initive)&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The causer causes an event that is expressed by a clause which is subordinated by reducing its subject to an object and its predicate to a non-finite form in a process called reduced marking which was discussed in another question [&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27295/how-do-languages-with-case-deal-with-sentential-arguments/27574#27574][1]&quot;&gt;How do languages with case deal with &amp;#39;sentential arguments&amp;#39;?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;E. g.:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Der Fremde     floh. (caused event) + Der Wächter (causer) &amp;gt; Der Wächter ließ…&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;SUBJ           FINITE&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;…den Fremden   fliehen.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;OBJ            INF&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Causer exerts force on the causee that acts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;[causer]           [causee]    [action]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;SUBJ               OBJ         INF&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Der Wächter ließ   den Fremden fliehen.&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While (1) analyses sentences with &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; as multiclausal, (2) analyses them as a single clause with a ditransitive &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt;. Although I believe that the truth lies somewhere inbetween, I will consider both. What both analyses have in common is that they assume that lassen constitutes a contraction of some sort: (1) can be analysed as &lt;em&gt;B-raising&lt;/em&gt; of the causee and (2) as an &lt;em&gt;equivalent noun phrase deletion&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;equi&lt;/em&gt;) of the causee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; as a contraction due to B-raising of the causee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In B-raising, a clausal sentence that has a main predicate that is practically void in meaning but modifies the meaning of a subordinate verb, is contracted by raising the subject (SUBJs) out of the subordinate clause up into the main clause where it becomes an object (OBJm). Consider first A-raising, where the SUBJs becomes SUBJm:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;It seems that the clouds are gathering.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;seem {clouds, gather}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The clouds seem to gather.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;seem, clouds {gather}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The subordinate clause that remains is the subordinate predicate. It is tethered to the object, in some languages even by further nominalizing the verb to a gerund or participle that may even agree in case and gender with the raised SUBJs:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;*&lt;em&gt;The clouds seem gathering.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Die Wolken erscheinen sich sammelnd.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Nimbi parent coientes.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; as a contraction due to equi of the causee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In equi the causee is originally mentioned twice, once in the main sentence and once in the subordinate clause. If coreference is redundant for intelligibility, one reference (namely the one of the subordinate clause, since it is the one that needs reduced marking) is deleted. The original expanded sentence would be:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Der Wächter ließ den Fremden den Fremden fliehen.&lt;/em&gt; (Such as: &lt;em&gt;Der Vater ließ das Kind ein Eis kaufen.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(The transitive lassen without complement means “leave alone, let be”, from which obviously the other meaning evolved.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;Der Wächter ließ den Fremden   +   {Der Fremde floh.}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;-                      OBJm        =   SUBJs&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further description of the verb &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; has to address the special requirements of construction that have been previously referred to as &lt;em&gt;idiosyncrasies&lt;/em&gt; (syn. &lt;em&gt;cryptotypes&lt;/em&gt;), i.e. such restrictions that are not deducible from the general/generative grammar a parser employs. These idiosyncrasies reflect further understanding of the scene that &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; sets up, the relations of arguments that are not depicted in simple grammatical classes such as SUBJ, OBJ:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a.  lassen (as Sibutlasi has already pointed out) does not allow a passive in the subordinate clause.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b.  The causer has control over the caused event. The causer has hitherto blocked the realisation of the event.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c.  The causee has a tendency towards action that opposes the tendency of the causer towards stasis. (In Talmy’s terms: The causer is the antagonist with tendency towards stasis that is superior than the causee that has a tendency towards action.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;d.  &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; does not specify if the OBJ is the agent or the patient of the INF.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iconicity excuses the contraction that &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; coerces, inasmuch as that the contraction moves the causer closer to the event – profiling it as a direct agent in a seemingly uni-clausal sentence (cf. Vesterinen, &lt;em&gt;Direct, Indirect and Inferred Causation: Finite and Infinitive Complements of Deixar and Fazer&lt;/em&gt;). Cf. following examples:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(1) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ den Hund töten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(2) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ töten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(3) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ zu, dass der Hund [tötete/]getötet wurde.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(4) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ zu, dass der Hund [töte/]getötet werde.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(5) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ den Hund los.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(6) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ den Hund auf den Fremden los.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(7) &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ den Hund.&lt;/em&gt; (“The king let the dog be.”)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(8) *&lt;em&gt;Der König ließ es den Hund töten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sentence (1) implies more that (or necessitates to be understood as) the dog was actually killed, while (3) leaves room (iconically in form of morphemes, in “word distance” between the causer and the event) for the possibility that the dog eventually did not die, and (4) almost suggests that the dog survived, i.e. the likeliness that the dog survived gradually decreases over &lt;em&gt;Der König ließ zu, dass der Hund getötet werde.&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;…zu, dass der Hund getötet wurde.&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;…den Hund töten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Similarly in (5) a third event, namely that the dog might arrive at the foreigner, is made more likely, since it is squished into the same sentence as the king unleashing the dog; ergo the dog is more likely to have run off in (6) than in (5). Likewise the dog is more likely to have killed (or have become killed) in (1) than in (7). (Cf. the cogency of a subsequent utterance such as &lt;em&gt;Aber der Hund entkam.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Aber der Hund verschonte den Fremden.&lt;/em&gt;)&#xA;Every explicit link between the causer and the event could be weak and imply that the event eventually did not take place, inevitably suggesting alternative outcomes. Thus (a.) a passive is not allowed, since a passive alludes to an undefined agent: &lt;em&gt;Der Hund wurde getötet. – Von wem?&lt;/em&gt; But the agent is already defined: It was the causer all along (&lt;em&gt;Der König ließ den Hund töten.&lt;/em&gt;). Likewise an undefined agent, such as normally is expressed in German by a dummy agent &lt;em&gt;es&lt;/em&gt;, is not allowed either (cf. (8)).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This iconicity readily accepts ambiguities in the subordinate clause, but this is a general tendency in reduced marking. The dog may be the agent or patient of &lt;em&gt;töten&lt;/em&gt;, and likewise &lt;em&gt;sich&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;sich beeindrucken lassen&lt;/em&gt;. Whether the OBJ is conceived of (and understood) as a patient then only is a matter of semantics. Cf. following sentences:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ich lasse die Ziege schlachten.    /   Ich lasse das Reh jagen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ich lasse den Metzger schlachten.  /   Ich lasse den Jagdhund jagen.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The only cues left to define roles in the subordinate clause are the semantics of the OBJ and the INF (cf. &lt;em&gt;I told him a story.&lt;/em&gt;). A goat is rather the victim and a butcher rather the actor when it comes to slaughter.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In total, the rule “A SENTENCE CONSISTS OF AT LEAST A SUBJECT AND A PREDICATE.” may be rephrased in force-dynamic terms as “A SENTENCE EXPRESSES A UNITARY EVENT/UNITARY TRANSMISSION OF FORCE INVESTED/EXERTED BY AN AGENT AND/OR MANIFESTING ITSELF IN A TRANSITION OF STATE IN AN OBJECT.” Contracting &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; to such a sentence expresses the direct and immediate relation of cause and effect in an otherwise indirect relation, deleting aspects of the scene that might suggest otherwise (contribution/dissipation of causing force) (e.g. &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; also does not refer to &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; (= by which means) the king kills the dog).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T18:30:06.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15648" CreationDate="2018-05-12T21:01:30.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly what you're asking, but an Old English text reporting the journey of two Scandinavians through Finnish and Baltic territory uses the phrase &quot;Estland&quot; for the region on the east coast of the Baltic Sea (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oereader.ca/Wulfstanfram.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oereader.ca/Wulfstanfram.html&lt;/a&gt;). Since the text was supposedly transcribed from Norse visitors, we might assume that &quot;Estland&quot; was an Old Norse term borrowed by Old English scribes. This word is cognate to many modern Germanic words for Estonia, which might suggest that it does refer to the Finno-Ugric-speaking people living in the Baltic region that would later become Estonia, but not the Baltic people you are asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, the Old English text describes this territory as a vast region with many cities and rulers (&quot;Þæt Estland is swyðe mycel, and þær bið swyðe manig burh, and on ælcere byrig bið cynincg&quot;). Given this, it seems like the term might be vague enough to refer to the whole region and not just to the part inhabited by Estonians. This is made more plausible by the fuzziness of ethnolinguistic boundaries in early medieval times, especially to a foreign visitor to the Baltic region like the Norse narrator of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16764" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T21:01:30.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11729" CreationDate="2018-05-12T21:05:05.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the comprehensive answer above (I don't have enough reputation to comment), feminine names also often end in &lt;em&gt;-un(n)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples taken from the sagas and Norse mythology are Guðrún, Þorunn, and Iðunn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of names taken from early Icelandic written source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellipsis.cx/%7Eliana/names/norse/landnamabok.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/norse/landnamabok.html&lt;/a&gt;. See the section &amp;quot;Feminine Names&amp;quot; for some more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the declension pattern for these nouns is different than for standard strong feminine nouns, with a vowel stem (&lt;em&gt;u/i&lt;/em&gt;) manifesting in the oblique cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Nom&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Guðrún&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Þórunn&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Iðunn&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Acc&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Guðrúnu&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Þórunni&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Iðunni&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Dat&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Guðrúnu&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Þórunni&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Iðunni&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Gen&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Guðrúnar&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Þórunnar&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Iðunnar&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;" OwnerUserId="16764" LastEditorUserId="16764" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T23:31:05.427" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T23:31:05.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-12T22:25:56.083" Score="6" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a helpful page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English phonology&lt;/a&gt;: but there are two diphthongs in its table which I cannot identify: the close-mid diphthongs “&lt;code&gt;/oi/&lt;/code&gt;, developing into &lt;code&gt;/ui/&lt;/code&gt;” and “&lt;code&gt;/ei/&lt;/code&gt;, developing into &lt;code&gt;/i:/&lt;/code&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which words had these sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1Jjwm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;table of Middle English diphthongs&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21975" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T15:05:16.653" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T15:05:16.653" Title="Early Middle English diphthongs" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12417" CreationDate="2018-05-13T08:35:43.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to philosopher Alan Watts (e.g., in a talk &quot;Man in the Trap&quot; (ca. 1970) the word &quot;putare&quot; (and &quot;puta&quot;) are related to both &quot;to consider,&quot; and to eliminate (as in defecation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21977" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T08:35:43.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-13T14:47:01.677" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can the first letter of this word be represented in Unicode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4AcaR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4AcaR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Arabic word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this sign called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21829" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T09:10:47.040" Title="Unicode point for Alef with a cap above?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27948" CreationDate="2018-05-13T15:38:18.453" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: I noticed yesterday that in 'reheat' it is pronounced /i/ but in 'recollect' it is pronounced more like /ɛ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21827" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T20:28:30.080" Title="Is there vowel harmony in the way to pronounce re-?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;vowel-harmony&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27945" CreationDate="2018-05-13T16:33:19.853" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;آ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codepoints.net/U+0622&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;U-0622&lt;/a&gt;. It is called Alef with madda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T09:10:47.040" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T09:10:47.040" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27946" CreationDate="2018-05-13T17:41:56.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer, no - vowel harmony is a property of a language, not a subset of words. Even so, there are many counter-examples to show this doesn't occur with re- words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;require, research, resource, rely, relay, retrace, return, review... etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For words with a prefix 're-', the pronunciation falls into ~three categories with mostly predictable pronunciation of the first syllable. Your examples coincidentally happen to have the same vowel in their other syllables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;/ri/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;re + verb = redoing verb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;stress on second syllable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rebuff (v.) /riːˈbʌf/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recapture (v.) /riːˈkæptjʊɚ/&#xA;-redress (v.²) /riːˈdrɛs/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remake (v.) /riːˈmeɪk/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reunion (n.) /riːˈjuːnɪən/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;revisit (v.) /riːˈvɪzɪt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;/ri/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;stress on first syllable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remake (n.) /ˈriːmeɪk/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;/rɪ/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;re + verb = different from just redoing verb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;stress on second syllable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rebuff (v.) /rɪˈbʌf/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redact (v.) /rɪˈdækt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redress (v.¹) /rɪˈdrɛs/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;refect (v.) /rɪˈfɛkt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;resolve (n.) /rɪˈzɒlv/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;resounding (ppl. a.) /rɪˈzaʊndɪŋ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;retrieval (v.) /rɪˈtriːvəl/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;/rɛ/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;re + non-extant verb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;stress on third syllable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;resurrect (v.) /rɛzəˈrɛkt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;revolutionize (v.) /rɛvəˈl(j)uːʃənaɪz/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excluding French etc loanwords with non-nativised pronunciation (e.g. recherché, relevé etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See here for more info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181862/is-there-any-rule-for-pronouncing-words-beginning-with-re&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181862/is-there-any-rule-for-pronouncing-words-beginning-with-re&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/364388/doesnt-english-have-vowel-harmony&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/364388/doesnt-english-have-vowel-harmony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-05-13T20:28:30.080" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T20:28:30.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27943" CreationDate="2018-05-13T17:56:32.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually I found the (partial) answer in the same page: early /ei/, the result of e + a palatalized g, merged into /i:/ early. It was found in words like eye (OE ēage &gt; ēġe &gt; eye), to lie, meaning to deceive (OE lēogan &gt; lēġan &gt; to lie) and fly OE (flēoge &gt; flēġe &gt; fly)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t find out which words had /oi/, but I suppose it was just a transitional state of borrowed Oïl /oi/, before it was shifted to /ui̯/, and placed in table twice, by mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21975" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T17:56:32.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27925" CreationDate="2018-05-14T10:37:25.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading Siebs (19th printing, 2000—this edition introduced the notion of a relaxed &lt;em&gt;gemäßigte Hochlautung&lt;/em&gt;) again, here are some facts about High German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Standard German, there is no distinction between short &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt;, they are usually pronounced /ɛ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Standard German, there is a distinction between long &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt;, the former is pronounced /e:/ and the latter /ɛ:/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those two prescriptions are also in effect for &lt;em&gt;gemäßigte Hochlautung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pronuncing long &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt; as /e:/ is &lt;strong&gt;non-standard&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Siebs also makes a historical remark about German orthography: German orthography uses the letter &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt; when there is a related word with &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; otherwise, disregarding historical development and dialectal pronunciation. In fact, at least some German dialects make even more distinctions on the e-sounds, depending on when the &lt;em&gt;umlaut&lt;/em&gt; happened (&lt;em&gt;Primärumlaut&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sekundärumlaut&lt;/em&gt;). There are also words spelled with a long &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; that are dialectally &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt; words (e.g., &lt;em&gt;leben&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to live&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T10:37:25.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27903" CreationDate="2018-05-14T11:42:55.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems this was a combination of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'ou' being rare in Latin words and only in environments where vowels would undergo changes in the evolution to Spanish, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instances of vowel + consonant transmuting into vowel + u/w in the evolution from Spanish to Latin being lost with back vowels (like o):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/cons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8. Adjustments due to vowel syncope&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, syllable-final /b/ (realized as [β]) was generally semivocalized to [w], although this latter sound was later lost through assimilation if it followed a back vowel (see the codo example below):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;dēb(i)ta → [ˈdeβða] debda → [ˈdewða] deuda ‘debt’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;cap(i)tālem → [kaβˈðal] cabdal → [kawˈðal] caudal ‘money, river flow’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;cŭb(i)tum → [ˈkoβðo] cobdo → [ˈkowðo] → [ˈkoðo] codo ‘elbow’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;em&gt;absentia&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;ausencia&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;baptista&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;bautista&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rapĭdus&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;raudo&lt;/em&gt; etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the environments where /ow/ ~ /o.u/ existed in the past/exist in other romance cognates but don't occur in Spanish are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a) /o/ monothong stressed, /o/ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/vowels.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diphthongized&lt;/a&gt; to /we/  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;vum → h&lt;strong&gt;ue&lt;/strong&gt;vo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;vis → b&lt;strong&gt;ue&lt;/strong&gt;y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  n&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;vus → n&lt;strong&gt;ue&lt;/strong&gt;vo  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) /o/ monothong unstressed, /w/ → /β/  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bo&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;īnus → bo&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;ino&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a) /oβ/ → /ow/ diphthong, assimilates to /o/  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ˈk&lt;strong&gt;oβ&lt;/strong&gt;ðo] → [ˈk&lt;strong&gt;ow&lt;/strong&gt;ðo] → [ˈk&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;ðo]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) /ob/ preserved   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ob&lt;/strong&gt;caecāre → &lt;strong&gt;ob&lt;/strong&gt;cecar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T11:13:54.303" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T11:13:54.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2018-05-14T12:39:39.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish and Italian are both languages descended from Latin. As such, many of their words are cognate sharing a common Latin ancestor, but the sounds in these words evolved over time and evolved &lt;em&gt;differently&lt;/em&gt; in each language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, pl-, fl- and cl- generally became ll- (pronounced the same as Italian 'gl'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/cons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6.3 Latin initial pl-, fl- and cl-&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As regards /pl-/, /ɸl-/ and /kl-/, these have /ʎ/ as their normal reflex in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;plānum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;llano&lt;/em&gt; ‘flat’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;flammam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;llama&lt;/em&gt; ‘flame’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;clāvem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;llave&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; ‘key’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note, however, popular exceptions such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;plateam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;plaza&lt;/em&gt; ‘square’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;flōrem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;flor&lt;/em&gt; ‘flower’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;clavīc(u)lam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;clavija&lt;/em&gt; ‘peg’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(The sequences [pl], [ɸl] and [kl] also occurred in postconsonantal position, and in that case the reflex is the affricate /tʃ/, generally with loss of the preceding consonant if this is not a nasal: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;amplum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ancho&lt;/em&gt; ‘wide’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;inflāre&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;hinchar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; ‘to swell’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;masc(u)lum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;macho&lt;/em&gt; ‘male’ )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, the 'l' in these clusters became an 'i':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;planum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;piano&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;flammam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;fiamma&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;clavem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;chiave&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;plateam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;piazza&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;florem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;fiore&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;clavīc(u)lam&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;cavicchia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;amplum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ampio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;inflāre&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;enfiare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;masc(u)lum&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;maschio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Though Italian does have the occasional doublet of these words retaining the Latin consonants, these are invariably learned borrowings or loanwords via other Romance languages that didn't undergo these changes, e.g. &lt;em&gt;platea&lt;/em&gt; (borrowed); &lt;em&gt;caviglia&lt;/em&gt; (through Old Provençal), &lt;em&gt;clavicola&lt;/em&gt; (borrowed), &lt;em&gt;masculo&lt;/em&gt; (borrowed) etc. Such learned borrowings also occur in Spanish  e.g. &lt;em&gt;clave&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;inflar&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; • &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q6UgAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA204&amp;amp;dq=%22(shortened+from+ecclesiam)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Latin Alive:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (p204-205)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T12:40:35.273" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T12:40:35.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T01:22:06.693" Score="2" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a good introduction to phonology book with good examples of diverse languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21139" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T09:30:40.823" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T12:36:59.440" Title="What are the best books to study Phonology at an introductory level?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T06:09:20.990" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian, the conjunction corresponding to &quot;and&quot; can be used in imperative constructions for emphatic purposes, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;E smettila! ('And stop!', i.e: 'Do stop!').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the outcome of a diachronic process whereby the first clause preceded by the conjunction has come to be ellipsed: (Do this) and stop!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other languages in which the counterparts of &quot;and&quot; are used in incoordinated contexts (i.e. sentence-initially), be it in this function or in different ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21986" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T12:51:38.657" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T12:51:38.657" Title="Incoordination (sentence-initial equivalents of &quot;and&quot;)" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27954" CreationDate="2018-05-15T10:01:13.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More on the phonetics than phonology side, but Ladefoged’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1444334298,descCd-buy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vowels and Consonants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is very accessible and the author is a standard reference.  From there you should be able to follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Sounds+of+the+World%27s+Languages-p-9780631198154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sounds of the World’s Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for discussion on a wide range of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d also like to recommend, as a companion to whatever you choose, Catford’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/a-practical-introduction-to-phonetics-9780199246359?cc=de&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Practical Introduction to Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  This is an unusual book; it’s very short but intense, because it’s all about practical exercises to get you to &lt;em&gt;perform&lt;/em&gt; sounds of all kinds—including the more exotic things like ejectives and whatnot.  It will give you an entirely different kind of hand-on knowledge about the possibilities of speech.  Be warned that, while working on it, you &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; catch yourself unconsciously making funny noises in public and attracting attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T12:36:59.440" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T12:36:59.440" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T10:26:34.100" Score="-1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;First question here.&#xA;I found the word &amp;quot;uitsluitend&amp;quot; in Dutch language, and I was explained that it has two meanings, one is the present participle of uitsluiten (~excluding), and the other is an adjective, which means ~exclusive. Now, I would like to know, first, if this is exactly like this, and second, why the adjective has the opposite meaning than the participle, and if there other words with this feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text that made me question this has a table that reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paar, uitsluitend minderj. kinderen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paar, minderj. en meerderj. kinderen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paar, uitsluitend meeerderj. kinderen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so, as I was told, the second line for example, is all the couples that have minor children; this is why I say that the meaning is opposite, since to say &amp;quot;excluding&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;exclusively&amp;quot; here gives the opposite set of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21988" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T11:20:17.673" Title="&quot;uitsluitend&quot;, logic of its double meaning" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-15T16:25:54.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27957" CreationDate="2018-05-15T10:32:55.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is exactly as you say. &quot;uitsluitend&quot; is the present participle of uitsluiten, which means to exclude. Also it's an adjective meaning &quot;exclusive&quot;. I am sure you could find exactly this information in any dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't quite work out why you believe these meanings are opposite though. Obviously if you exclude something/someone, you are being exclusive. The meaning is identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T10:32:55.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T12:57:40.813" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my two-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis, I use &lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt; (Frisian, Dutch) and &lt;strong&gt;Category&lt;/strong&gt; (identical-cognates, form-similar cognate, non-cognate) as within subject variables. Sphericity is assumed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a significant interaction between Language and Category for one reading measure in the Test of Within-Subject Effects table. The Multivariate table shows that the effect of Category is significant only in the Frisian version, and not in the Dutch version. However, in LSD post hoc tests, both Frisian and Dutch show significant effects of Category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I report the multivariate table to show that the post-hoc results for Dutch should not be taken into account, since the effect of Category is only significant for Frisian? I have not seen any previous literature using the Multivariate table in their one-way repeated measures report, only the Pairwise comparisons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21991" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T12:57:40.813" Title="Can I report a multivariate effect in a two-way repeated measures ANOVA?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T13:15:09.900" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking to perform following normalization for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. Let's look at the examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;V její dlouhé historii bychom našli celou řadu důležitých dat a jedním z nich je určitě i 8. prosinec roku 1890.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hyp1:&lt;code&gt;V její dlouhé historii bychom našli celou řadu důležitých dat a jedním z nich je určitě i osmý prosinec roku osmnáct set devadesát&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hyp2: &lt;code&gt;V její dlouhé historii bychom našli celou řadu důležitých dat a jedním z nich je určitě i osmý prosinec roku tisíc osm set devadesát&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;A právě tady se našlo snad nejvíc stop po magdalenienských lovcích, kteří zde před 11-17000 lety tábořili.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hyp1: &lt;code&gt;A právě tady se našlo snad nejvíc stop po magdalenienských lovcích, kteří zde před jedenácti až sedmnácti tisíci lety tábořili.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dnes tu na 23 ha můžete vidět na 7000 druhů dřevin a bylin z 5 kontinentů.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hyp1: &lt;code&gt;Dnes tu na dvaceti třech hektarech můžete vidět na sedm tisíc druhů dřevin a bylin z pěti kontinentů.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tools and resources I have found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Czech + many other lang) &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/many-stop-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pypi.org/project/many-stop-words/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Relevant paper) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228861975_Normalization_of_Czech_vowels_from_continuous_read_texts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228861975_Normalization_of_Czech_vowels_from_continuous_read_texts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Not so relevant paper - uses stemming, lemmatization) &lt;a href=&quot;http://textmining.zcu.cz/publications/inscit20060710.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://textmining.zcu.cz/publications/inscit20060710.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/num2words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/num2words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kucharovic/czech-money-to-words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/kucharovic/czech-money-to-words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kslazarev/numbers_and_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/kslazarev/numbers_and_words&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21992" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T13:15:09.900" Title="What are the open-source tools available for Czech text normalization (for spoken transcription)?" Tags="&lt;tools&gt;&lt;czech&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29841" CreationDate="2018-05-15T17:16:09.193" Score="2" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diacritic restoration is a term for guessing the original form of a text, after it's been converted to ASCII in a lossy way. In Lingála, for example, writing in ASCII merges two pairs of vowels and removes all tone markings: the words &lt;em&gt;mɔ́tɔ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fire&quot; and &lt;em&gt;moto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;person&quot; aren't distinguished at all. (It doesn't always involve diacritics, as with the vowel letters here, but the name has stuck.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only diacritic restoration programs I've found for Lingála use a very simple statistical analysis: ASCII &quot;moto&quot; corresponds to &lt;em&gt;moto&lt;/em&gt; more often than &lt;em&gt;mɔ́tɔ&lt;/em&gt;, therefore all instances of &quot;moto&quot; are restored as &lt;em&gt;moto&lt;/em&gt;. But this isn't particularly satisfying: tones and vowel qualities separate thousands of minimal pairs in Lingála (for instance, certain verb tenses are distinguished only by tone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there systems out there, for Lingála or other languages, which can take context into account? What are the best models currently used? In other words, what's the state of the art here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T09:05:53.930" Title="What is the state of the art for diacritic restoration?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T20:23:33.910" Score="0" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am novice in linguistics but I have a keen interest in natural (spoken) languages. There is this concept in my mind called &quot;extreme-opposites&quot; or &quot;extreme-antonyms&quot;. The concept goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every word that describes some quality of a noun, has a by default* desirability attached to it. For example: punctual, honest, rude and sadist are qualities of a person, and their desirability is** as follows: desired,  desired, not-desired and not-desired respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of extreme-opposite is (what I think) &lt;em&gt;opposite of a quality such that desirability is kept unchanged&lt;/em&gt;. For example: &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; is a quality. Now opposite of &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; can be anything which is &lt;code&gt;not-obese&lt;/code&gt;, therefore &lt;em&gt;healthy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;skinny&lt;/em&gt; are both opposite of &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt;. Take the quality of  &lt;em&gt;healthy&lt;/em&gt; first, notice the desirability here, &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; quality is (generally) not-desired whereas being &lt;em&gt;healthy&lt;/em&gt; is desired. The qualities namely &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;healthy&lt;/em&gt; are opposite to each other but desirability of each of them is different, hence they are not extreme-opposites rather just-opposites. Now take the word &lt;em&gt;skinny&lt;/em&gt;, it is opposite of &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; and it is not-desired. Both &lt;em&gt;obese&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;skinny&lt;/em&gt; are opposite to each other, and both has same desirability i.e. not-desired. Hence they are extreme-opposites to each other. Other examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anti-national (not-desired)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just opposite: Patriotic (desired) or Nationalism (desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme opposite: Jingoism (not-desired) or Xenophobia (not-desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stubborn (not-desired)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just opposite: Cooperative (desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme opposite: Submissive (not-desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsocial (not-desired)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just opposite: Social (desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme opposite: Pry (not-desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serious (desired)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just opposite: facetious (not-desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme opposite: Humorous (desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soft-spoken (desired)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just opposite: Raucous (not-desired) or Cacophonous (not-desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extreme opposite: Stentorian (desired) or Deep-voiced (desired)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easier to find extreme-opposites of qualities that are not-desired, than the qualities that are desired (this is what I observed). One might argue that extreme-opposites of not-desired qualities are nothing but simply their just-opposites prefixed with &quot;too much&quot; or &quot;extreme of&quot;, for example: Submissive = too much cooperative, and Jingoism = extreme of nationalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which I say, yes there is a relationship but shouldn't we define new collective terms (or concepts) if they can make our life easier? For example: we have singulars and plurals, and there is a relationship among them i.e. add &quot;more than one&quot; as a prefix to a singular and plural is no longer needed (&lt;s&gt;mice&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;more than one mouse&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;many mouse&lt;/em&gt;). However we still have plurals because they make our life easier, always writing &quot;more than one&quot;, &quot;many&quot; or &quot;group of&quot; before a singular is cumbersome process. Same for extreme-opposites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A collective term for such a concept can help in making arguments like &quot;Listen Bob, if being X is not-desired then being Y is also not-desired&quot;, where X and Y are extreme-opposites of each other. It'll also help people to search what they are looking because then they can directly ask &quot;what is extreme-opposite of X?&quot; instead of explaining the entire concept of extreme-opposites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/370492/99543&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/58791/99543&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I want to ask&lt;/strong&gt; if there already exists a collective term for what I am proposing (in any language)? and if there isn't any shouldn't there be (at least in English)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*there must be some qualities that cannot be simply categorized as &quot;desired&quot; or &quot;not-desired&quot; (I can't think of one), but here we talk about those qualities which can be easily categorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**one can desire to be a sadist or a rude person but I take desirability in a very general sense. One can also say desirability is dependent on context, like in the above example, one can say pure honesty is not-desired in a spy. Hence whenever I talk about desirability, it is in very general sense and without any special hypothetical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21994" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T13:30:56.787" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T13:30:56.787" Title="A concept called extreme-opposites" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T21:20:54.330" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the syntactic tree notation supposed to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linear order preserving in general&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linear order preserving for English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generally linear order preserving for English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of the above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;linear order preserving&quot; I mean &lt;em&gt;for any sentence, producing a syntax tree where the order of leaves corresponds to one permitted in speech&lt;/em&gt;. I understand that this will depend on your syntactic theory, so I'm open to different proposals. In particular, I'm also interested in answers to the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which syntactic theories produce the most linear order preserving&#xA;trees?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T12:12:14.353" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T12:12:14.353" Title="Linear order preserving syntactic trees" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2018-05-15T21:40:07.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean full-blown natural languages, the answer is negative &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you introduce a notion of advanceness which will handicap some languages with respect to others (e.g. by setting (the length of) a written language tradition as a criterion) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean natural languages as such, the answer is affirmative. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pidgins&lt;/a&gt; are by definition less advanced than full-blown natural languages &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T21:50:38.050" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T21:50:38.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27934" CreationDate="2018-05-16T04:02:38.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German case you cite is separate from the English one. In Germanic languages in general, there never was any third-person imperative. But when German borrowed the T-V distinction from neighboring languages, the second person plural (&lt;em&gt;Ihr&lt;/em&gt;) took on a polite singular meaning. And later, when this stopped being polite enough, the third person plural (&lt;em&gt;Sie&lt;/em&gt;) took over that role. But German had no third person imperative, so the subjunctive was used instead. &lt;em&gt;Bitte rufen Sie ihn&lt;/em&gt; is syntactically a subjunctive, and thus the &lt;em&gt;Sie&lt;/em&gt; isn't optional (since German isn't pro-drop), unlike in &lt;em&gt;geh [Du] weg&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, however, and in informal German (using the original second-person pronouns &lt;em&gt;Du&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ihr&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Sie&lt;/em&gt;), the subject pronoun is usually &lt;em&gt;implicit&lt;/em&gt;. This is by far the most common case cross-linguistically, at least in my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;implicit&quot; I mean that the pronoun still there, but it doesn't appear on the surface. In a language like Ancient Greek, which marks person on the verb even in the imperative, this implicit pronoun still triggers second-person marking. And in English (and several other languages), the implicit pronoun still triggers reflexives: &quot;go let yourself out&quot;, not *&quot;go let you out&quot;. This would only be expected if there were an invisible subject pronoun there, C-commanding the reflexive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are, in fact, certain constructions that look like imperatives but &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have this implicit subject! My introductory linguistics professor would use &quot;bless you&quot; as his only example of this, but &quot;damn you&quot; and many other expletives fit also. See McCawley's paper under the pseudonym &quot;Quang Phúc Đông&quot; for the details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject-verb inversion here is particular to Germanic, and doesn't quite match any other construction in the language. For example, English negative imperatives use &quot;do&quot;-support even when the verb is &quot;be&quot;: &quot;Don't [you] be late!&quot; This doesn't happen in normal indicative sentences: *&quot;He doesn't be late&quot;. So the best I can say for this is, it's a special construction used only for imperatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T04:38:46.730" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T04:38:46.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27962" CreationDate="2018-05-16T13:28:33.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is certainly an interesting idea, but I doubt you can subsume your approach under the label of antonymy. As a matter of fact, the antonym of &quot;obese&quot;, whatever you might name it, needs to be located on the scale of weight. The fact that being obese is undesirable is derived from world-knowledge and has nothing to do with the word itself. Thus, I fear that one cannot set up any taxonomy of the kind you have in mind since every adjective triggers a vast range of associations of heterogeneous nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21986" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T13:28:33.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27970" CreationDate="2018-05-16T18:56:42.313" Score="22" ViewCount="2947" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a non-linguist, I am confused about the concept of &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt;.  What is its definition, as linguists use it?  Is it about the different forms that nouns/pronouns can take? Is it about the function of the noun in the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that the term &lt;em&gt;&quot;case&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is used rather inconsistently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Modern Greek, the ending of nouns changes with the case.  Different nouns may have different endings for the same case though, so &quot;case&quot; is not only about form (the ending), but also about meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, endings don't change.  English is said not to have cases.  But of course English can express the same meanings, even if this is marked in other ways than with endings, e.g. using prepositions or word order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian is said to have many cases, but as a native speaker, I really don't see the difference between the suffixes used by Hungarian and the prepositions used by English.  One comes before the word, the other comes after, but otherwise they communicate the same type of meaning. In both languages, they have the same form regardless of which word they're used with.  (To be accurate, in Hungarian the endings change slightly to respect vowel harmony. But this is not comparable to the wildly different endings that Greek uses for the very same case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Romanian schools, it is taught that Romanian has five cases.  However, there is no difference at all between the form of nouns in the nominative/accusative and dative/genitive pairs. When schoolchildren are asked to identify cases in exercises, the distinction between these pairs is done based on meaning (which may be deduced e.g. from word order) and not the ending/form of nouns.  The &quot;case&quot; couldn't be identified if the noun were not a part of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I listed these examples to illustrate where my confusion comes from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a precise and universal definition of &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt; in linguistics, or is it just a term of convenience that is applied differently to different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3582" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T03:07:08.043" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T18:59:21.557" Title="What is &quot;case&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27967" CreationDate="2018-05-16T20:02:36.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually a very well-thought out and interesting question, one that I have asked as well, as a non-linguist. In simple terms, a &lt;em&gt;case&lt;/em&gt; is essentially any change to the form of the word that changes its relationship with whatever it modifies in a sentence. So you are right to say cases also have to with meaning, not just form. After all, cases only carry meaning when they are used to relate two (or more) things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; mean that different cases always have to have different forms. Let's look at Sanskrit, known for its wildly complicated case system. In the dual number of a-stem nouns, the cases are the same for the following groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nominative/accusative/vocative (&lt;em&gt;-au&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instrumental/dative/ablative (&lt;em&gt;-ābhyām&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;genitive/locative (&lt;em&gt;-ayos&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure Greek also has many forms that are the same (see comments); that doesn't mean there is only one case. The case has to do with the meaning, the form used to mark a specific case is just an expression of that meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases don't have to be irregular either; for example, my native language, Hindi, has three cases (nominative, oblique, vocative) and they are always regular. Hindi also has postpositions (a preposition that is put after the head) that have replaced some of the earlier cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here again, there is some ambiguity as to what a case is. In many South Asian language, the original cases have been lost and replaced with &quot;suffixed postpositions&quot;. For example, in Hindi:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mujh&lt;/em&gt; (oblique form of the word for &quot;I&quot;) + &lt;em&gt;ko&lt;/em&gt; (dative postposition) → &lt;em&gt;mujhko&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to me&quot; (dative form)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word and the postposition are written as joined together in the Devanagari script. Many other Indian languages, such as Marathi and Nepali, don't have any obvious differences between cases and postpositions. So to answer your last question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a precise and universal definition of case in linguistics, or is it just a term of convenience that is applied differently to different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &quot;case&quot; is often a term of convenience. And remember, linguistics is an evolving scientific study, so linguists may have disagreements on what a &quot;case&quot; constitutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If a linguist would like to improve or fix my answer, please go ahead)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T23:36:16.290" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T23:36:16.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27967" CreationDate="2018-05-16T20:08:05.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to distinguish between case for encoding semantic roles (1) and structural case, which is related to prepositions (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Case encodes the role assumed by participants in events. At least in languages within the European area, the nominative (which is unmarked with regard to nominal affixation) is related to an agent, i.e. to someone or something that acts/does something, the accusative denotes the patient (someone/something that is affected by the action of the agent) and the dative a recipient or a beneficiary (someone who receives something or who is meant to acquire some advantage through the action undertaken by the agent). Note that this is a very sketchy account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Here, case assignment is arbitrary. For example, in German the preposition &quot;für&quot; ('for') requires the accusative, whereas &quot;mit&quot; ('with') requires the dative. There is no reason behind this selection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21986" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T20:08:05.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27967" CreationDate="2018-05-16T21:20:28.567" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple definitions of case, but the differences in conventional terminology between languages also just have a lot to do with different traditions for teaching grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Morphological case&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original concept of &amp;quot;case&amp;quot; dates back to Greek and Latin traditional grammar. In this context, it's strongly connected to the concept of a noun's (or an adjective's, since adjectives were considered a type of noun)  &lt;strong&gt;declension&lt;/strong&gt; or inflectional paradigm. A paradigm can be visualized as a table containing different inflected forms of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the concept of &amp;quot;inflection&amp;quot; (as opposed to derivation) has some complications of its own, in most cases it’s fairly straightforward, so I'm just going to assume in this answer that we're accepting the idea that &amp;quot;inflection&amp;quot; is a meaningful term. Inflection is considered to be a type of morphology, although the choice between different inflected forms of a word is often conditioned by the syntactic environment. A common phenomenon in morphology is &lt;strong&gt;syncretism&lt;/strong&gt;, which can be thought of in this case as a situtation where the inflectional paradigm of a word includes distinct but formally identical forms. E.g. in English, some nouns have identical singular and plural forms (&lt;em&gt;deer, sheep&lt;/em&gt;) and some verbs have identical past and present forms (&lt;em&gt;hit, shed&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can typically provide synchronic evidence for syncretism by looking at the overall morphological system of a language and seeing if some words show distinct forms, even if others don't. For example, in Latin, there are a number of third-declension nouns ending in &lt;em&gt;-is&lt;/em&gt; with identical nominative and genitive forms in the singular (e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/collis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;collis, collis m.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; 'hill') but many other nouns have different nominative and genitive forms in the singular (e.g. &lt;em&gt;puer, puerī, m.&lt;/em&gt; 'boy' and &lt;em&gt;puella, puellae, f.&lt;/em&gt; 'girl'). This constitutes evidence that Latin morphology as a whole has a nominative-genitive distinction, even if not all words have distinct nominative and genitive forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syncretism may be conditioned by some semantic feature of the word, or by the word's categorization in terms of gender or noun class; e.g. all Latin neuter words show syncretism between the nominative and accusative cases, but there are other nouns that show forms for the accusative case that are distinct from the nominative forms (e.g. &lt;em&gt;puer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;puella&lt;/em&gt; have the acc. sing. forms &lt;em&gt;puerum&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;puellam&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we're looking at a word that has syncretism in its inflectional paradigm, we may not be able to determine the case just from its form, but the syntactic context may make it clear that it is in a particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With languages like Romanian, it's a bit different. As you point out, the nominative and accusative case are never distinct for common nouns (they are, however, for pronouns). Saying that Romanian nouns inflect for nominative vs. accusative is basically a remnant of Latin grammatical analysis; there doesn't seem to be any synchronic evidence within the language of common nouns inflecting in this way. It could be argued I guess that this is a case of syncretism for particular classes of nouns (all the classes except pronouns) but pronouns are such a small category and behave differently enough from other nouns (often not being classified as nouns at all) that it seems unwise to assume that all other nouns have the same kind of inflectional paradigm as pronouns. (For comparison, in English the &amp;quot;irrealis&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;past subjunctive&amp;quot; construction uses a form distinct from the &amp;quot;simple past&amp;quot; form for only one verb, and only in the 1st- and 3rd-person singular: &amp;quot;were&amp;quot; (as opposed to &amp;quot;was&amp;quot;). This doesn't seem to be strong enough evidence to support the idea that every other English verb has a paradigm containing theoretically distinguishable, but actually identical &amp;quot;irrealis&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;simple past&amp;quot; forms. And of course English, like Romanian, also distinguishes &amp;quot;nominative&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;accusative&amp;quot; forms for (some) pronouns.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example of Hungarian just seems to be about how we determine if something is an affix or a separate word, a famous problem with no simple solution. For some discussion, see the related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1178/how-do-linguists-distinguish-between-case-endings-and-postpositions-especially&quot;&gt;How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Syntax&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, as you have indicated, a distinct concept of &amp;quot;case&amp;quot; (or, since it seems to often be capitalized, &amp;quot;Case&amp;quot;) used in modern syntax (I think it may specifically be used as a concept in “Generative Grammar”), but I have never studied syntax (aside from trying to read a few random papers) so I can't say much at all about this. It has something to do with the syntactic role of words or phrases. &amp;quot;Case&amp;quot; in this sense is some kind of abstract syntactic thing that doesn't necessarily correspond to the &amp;quot;surface&amp;quot; morphological case of a word, although there's maybe some kind of connection between syntactic case and morphological case in some circumstances (this part is very unclear to me, so I asked a question about it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/25848/are-there-any-universals-about-how-m-case-can-pattern-for-predicate-nps&quot;&gt;Are there any universals about how m-case can pattern for predicate NPs?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in Nico's answer, many sources draw a distinction between &amp;quot;structural case&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;non-structural case&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;lexical case&amp;quot;), but this dichotomy is apparently disputed by some linguists (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://org.uib.no/iecastp/tmp/barddal/Lexical.vs.Structural.Case.Final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexical vs. Structural Case: A False Dichotomy&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, JÓHANNA BARÐDAL). (The terminology seems to differ slightly between theorists; e.g. I found another article that gives the highest-level division as &amp;quot;structural case&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;non-structural case&amp;quot;, and then divides &amp;quot;non-structural case&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;lexical case&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;inherent case&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.umass.edu/ellenw/Woolford%20Lexical%20Case,%20Inherent%20Case,%20and%20Argument%20Structure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexical Case, Inherent Case, and Argument Structure&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;,&#xA;Ellen Woolford, 2006).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an article on &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_role&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Case role&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; that I find fairly confusing, but you might find some links to relevant sources there. There seems to be some connection to theta roles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been at least one earlier question on this site about syntactic theories of &amp;quot;Case&amp;quot; ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/947/are-there-any-recent-articles-on-the-current-state-of-case-theory&quot;&gt;Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?&lt;/a&gt;) that points to some (fairly) recent literature on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T01:42:54.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T12:38:19.620" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.g. The phrase 'I love you' is common. If the word 'love' was replaced by an unrelated word (i.e. 'radiator') then the sentence 'I radiator you' would be meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the word radiator was then used repeatedly and consistently instead of love (i.e. 'I was in radiator with him and he radiated me') it wouldn't be too difficult to understand what was being communicated. Ditto for other words and phrases and their variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any term or phenomenon that describes the ability to understand such disrupted communication based on our understanding of context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22008" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T12:38:19.620" Title="Phenomenon or phrase describing the understanding of words out of context" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T19:41:00.307" Score="6" ViewCount="730" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do people who grew up speaking multiple languages typically have a discernible foreign accent in one or more of their primary languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also do they tend to make the kinds of mistakes that non-native speakers do, subconsciously borrowing words, idioms or grammatical constructs from the wrong language and using them in another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T08:28:13.833" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T01:08:58.577" Title="Do natively bilingual people have accents in one or both of their languages?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T01:39:46.160" Score="2" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Node A c-commands node B if:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a) A =/= B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;b) A does not dominate B and B does not dominate A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;c) every X that dominates A also dominates B&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the bigger picture, but my non-linguistic brain fails to see the basic distinction between &quot;c-command&quot; and &quot;dominate.&quot; How can A &quot;c-command&quot; but not &quot;dominate&quot; B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T01:48:30.147" Title="difference between c-command and dominance" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27975" CreationDate="2018-05-18T01:48:30.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trick is that C-commanding effectively goes &lt;em&gt;up one level&lt;/em&gt; first, and then checks dominance. In other words, a node C-commands everything &lt;em&gt;dominated by its parent, and not by itself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this (very simplified) tree as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1AdqI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1AdqI.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Alex sees himself&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, NP1 &quot;Alex&quot; is not NP2 &quot;himself&quot;, and NP1 &quot;Alex&quot; does not dominate NP2 &quot;himself&quot;, or vice versa. But every node that dominates NP1 &quot;Alex&quot; (namely, the S) also dominates NP2 &quot;himself&quot;. Therefore, NP1 &quot;Alex&quot; C-commands NP2 &quot;himself&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important, because it seems to be how reflexives work in English: the NP &quot;Alex&quot; C-commands the NP &quot;him&quot;, which makes it change from &quot;him&quot; to &quot;himself&quot;. But if &quot;Alex&quot; is buried any deeper in the tree, as in &quot;the man who works with Alex saw &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then &quot;Alex&quot; no longer C-commands &quot;him&quot;, and so no reflexive happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T01:48:30.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1178" CreationDate="2018-05-18T14:36:10.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fundamental question in morphology that has consequences going far beyond the simple distinction between case endings and postpositions (which, by itself, is effectively quite thorny in many languages). I would say that it pertains to the problem of defining such notions as &lt;strong&gt;grammatical category&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;paradigm&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;fusional/flective typology&lt;/strong&gt; in general. Indeed, in order to postulate case endings for a language we should first assure that it has nominal paradigms, which, in turn, implies the existence of inflexional grammatical categories for the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how would we discriminate between flective languages (i.e. languages with paradigms) and, let's say, agglutinative languages (i.e. those without paradigms)? Some criteria can be suggested here, but the list can be easily emended or enlarged. For the sake of simplicity I am exemplifying every statement with facts from nominal inflexion, even if this approach is valid for the paradigmatic morphology in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammaticality implies obligatoriness: cases are &lt;strong&gt;obligatory&lt;/strong&gt; on all nouns in all instances. Such grammatical categories as case or number or gender can't be freely avoided by the speakers. In agglutinative languages this is not always the case: sometimes no grammatical marker is also an admissible option (this happens with Japanese postpositions, especially in the spoken language).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammatical categories imply the possibility of making a grammatical &lt;strong&gt;error&lt;/strong&gt;, since they are selected syntactically: if you say &lt;em&gt;many mouse&lt;/em&gt; it would be clearly an error that any speaker of English will be able to emend into the correct form &lt;em&gt;many mice&lt;/em&gt;, which fits better the syntactic context. The postpositions, on the other hand, are not selected strictly syntactically since they can vary according to the communicative intentions of the speaker. Therefore, there is no such thing as &quot;wrong postposition&quot; (if not stylistically).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammatical categories imply morphological &lt;strong&gt;variability&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;inflectional classes&lt;/strong&gt;. Indeed, in a language that don't vary its case endings, you basically can't tell the difference between cases and postpositions, since both will appear as grammatical morphemes without any variation. On the other hand, in prototypical flective languages, cases are instantiated by sets of allomorphs, which are either contextual (i.e. depend on the phonological form of the stem) or, importantly, non contextual (i.e. are lexically bound, forming inflectional classes, such as the five nominal declensions in Latin). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grammatical categories are better when they are &lt;strong&gt;semantically uniform&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. refer to a set of uniform meanings. Thus, cases can apparently convey many different meanings, but such meanings would not usually overlap with other semantic content, like gender or number or, say, tense (i.e. in languages with cases, no &quot;feminine&quot;, &quot;future&quot; or &quot;plural&quot; case would be, normally, attested). On the other hand, postpositions can bear many different functions, from syntactic relations to honorific connotations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases usually belong to &lt;strong&gt;cumulative morphemes&lt;/strong&gt; which also include gender, number and possibly some other grammatical categories; the postpositions, instead, are simple morphemes by definition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some minor features can be added: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;regularity of markedness (e.g. case do not usually allow markedness shifts: if the nominative singular case is unmarked in some nouns, then the dative plural or the instrumental dual cannot be unmarked in other nouns; however, this rule is less strict; contrariwise, let us think to the Japanese verbal transitivity markers: some verbs have unmarked intransitive form, while some others have unmarked transitive form, which strongly suggest that transitivity is a derivational category, rather than an inflectional one;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you usually cannot have multiple case markers at the same time; on the other hand, you can have serialisation of postpositions (think of such Japanese NP structures as N &lt;em&gt;ni&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;wa&lt;/em&gt;, N &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, N &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt;, and similar);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;case categorial values usually don't exceed a dozen; systems with up to 40 cases are obviously agglutinative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The labels &quot;flective&quot; and &quot;agglutinative&quot; may be as antiquate and outdated as you want; however, defining a prototypical flective language (vs. a prototypical agglutinative language), on the ground of the above mentioned criteria, provides a useful analytical tool. Thus, a prototypical flective language will have: rigid paradigms defined by the cumulative marking of two or more obligatory, error-provoking, syntactically selected grammatical values, with non contextual allomorphy, semantic uniformity, no shifts of markedness, no serialisation, no optionality, and with a limited number of grammatical values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T14:36:10.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27974" CreationDate="2018-05-19T01:08:58.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, no (but research does concur with my account, for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tB3zbSCY-zUC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=bilingualism&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjypOqKy5DbAhWlxVkKHXNfBG4Q6AEINTAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Handbook of Bilingualism&quot;&gt;Handbook of Bilingualism&lt;/a&gt; has many relevant chapters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been raised a native Hindi and English speaker from birth, and I have a General American accent in my English and a standard Delhi Hindi accent. I can use both languages idiomatically, but, as a commenter mentioned, code-switching is very common for bilinguals such as myself (in my own case &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hinglish&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T01:08:58.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-19T11:11:47.890" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discontinuous dependencies are a part of English syntatic rules and also are something which linguists are still trying to deal with. &#xA;My question: which other languages have this &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; and how does that language speakers deal with long spread discontinuous dependencies (as in big bulky noun phrases)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: An example of what I state as a &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; (of rearrangement)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a feature that when tried to fiddle with, gets problematic. She will easily put the clock down -&gt; she will put down the clock easily. Seems fine, but when the easily part gets bulkier it's tougher to rearrange for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;she stood up all those men who had offered her diamonds&lt;/em&gt; (Akmajian) . Will you not &quot;struggle&quot; a bit to arrive at &lt;em&gt;she stood all those men up who had offered her diamonds&lt;/em&gt; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T07:41:57.503" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T07:41:57.503" Title="Which other languages have discontinuous dependencies and how are cross or long ones managed in them?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-19T14:42:56.683" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing an exercise where I'm trying to formulate the phonological rules for adapting English words into Japanese ones using feature theory. I came across a problem early on where En. /æ/ turns into Jp. /a/, but I have no way to formulate this rule because [tense] doesn't apply to these two vowels, and they both seem to share the same feature (+syl -con +son -high +low -round). I found a resource that said that &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/deddingt/223/distinctive%20features%20chart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[a] lacks the [back] specification entirely&lt;/a&gt;, but that still doesn't help me. How should I go about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14860" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T15:54:28.020" Title="How to differentiate [æ] and [a] in feature theory?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27980" CreationDate="2018-05-19T15:54:28.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; has a pretty standard phonetic value, but the letter &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is quite ambiguous. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA standard&lt;/a&gt; is that [a] is a front open vowel (notice that [æ] doesn't fall in one of the quantal 'named' positions), but the letter is generally used for &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; single low (open) vowel in most languages. If a language has only one low vowel, it is usually written as &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, whether it is back, central or front. If there are two low vowels in a language, you have to use different letters, so you will find [a ɑ], [æ ɑ] or [æ a]. Norwegian, for example, has [ɑ a] (using proximity to received IPA value as the standard), although one could substitute [æ] for [a]. American English has [æ ɑ] though the vowel that isn't [æ] is also not as low or back as Norwegian [ɑ]. So bear in mind that the letters people use are an approximation, and if you are concerned with phonetic values, you have to dig deeper to see what the formant values are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of [tense] on low vowels is controversial, but I should point out that IPA [a] and [æ] &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be distinguished on the basis of tenseness, with [æ] being the lax version (under the SPE definition of what &quot;tense&quot; means). If you cannot negotiate on the value of [tense], then you cannot solve the problem using the feature system that you've referred to (this is classic SPE feature theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underspecification is one escape, which is somewhat outside that system, where you could leave Japanese &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; unspecified for back. You would need to spell out what the underspecified values are for vowels of English vs. Japanese. Japanese vowel are a proper subset of English vowels (if we ignore the actual phonetics of Japanese &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, as is traditional), so the matter mostly reduces to noting that English has more vowel contrasts than Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your proposed common features for the two letters omits the feature [back], which is clearly contrastive in English (hat and hot are different words, and the vowels only differ in backness). The standard account of æ→a presumes that &quot;a&quot; really represents a back vowel, perhaps better written as [ɑ], and the low front vowel of English becomes the low vowel of Japanese (the low vowel is always back, in Japanese). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T15:54:28.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-19T18:48:04.137" Score="5" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;My assumption: &lt;em&gt;English modal verbs are non-tensed&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. we don't say &lt;em&gt;should&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;em&gt;should&lt;strong&gt;ed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, in X' bar theory, modal verbs appear under the inflection node I', precisely where we find the inflectional morphemes &lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;-ed&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my assumption wrong, and modal verbs are actually tensed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my assumption still holds, why do modal verbs appear under I'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T13:06:16.947" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T05:26:22.947" Title="Are English modal verbs tensed or non-tensed?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-19T20:23:41.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say that modals are &lt;em&gt;I'&lt;/em&gt;: rather, I'd say that they're &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, a modal verb is syntactically an &lt;em&gt;inflection&lt;/em&gt;, not a full verb. (It's easy to see that modals don't act like &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt;s: they can't be put in non-finite contexts, like *&lt;em&gt;to should&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In X-bar theory, the &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is an inflection applied to the &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;Alex walked home&quot;, the &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;-ed&quot;, and the &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;walk&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;Alex should walk home&quot;, the &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;should&quot;, and the &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;walk&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trees for these two sentences are almost identical, except for the changed &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;. (The fact that &quot;-ed&quot; then goes off and affixes itself to &quot;walk&quot; is attributed to movement, or explained away by &quot;that's morphology instead, not syntax, so it's someone else's problem&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, this is the same place where &quot;do&quot;-support happens: the auxiliary &quot;do&quot; appears as an &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;. However, this is different from auxiliary &quot;be&quot; and &quot;have&quot;, which are actually &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully that clears it up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T20:23:41.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-19T20:55:01.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I start out with declaring my ignorance. I do not know what X’ theory is. I am a mere historical linguist. For me, the reason we do not say (in English) “*shoulds” is that in the Germanic languages “should” is a pretero-present verb: it is in form past tense, but in meaning present. Like “I will, he will”, not “*wills”. In many other languages (Indo-European or not) modal verbs are conjugated normally in the present  tense. But of course English is the unquestionable paradigm for linguistic “universals”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T09:52:26.577" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T09:52:26.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-19T22:09:14.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In current English, the common modals are paired up in a fashion similar to present/past pairs: &quot;will/would, can/could, shall/should&quot;, and sometimes &quot;could&quot; has the sense of a past tense &quot;can&quot;.  Of course, the &quot;-d&quot; occurs regularly as a past affix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &quot;would&quot; and &quot;could&quot; occur as past-shifted forms when direct discourse is shifted to indirect speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  He said &quot;I will&quot; --&amp;gt; He said that he would  &#xA;  He said &quot;I can help&quot; --&amp;gt;  He said that he could help&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I can't think of any reason to regard modals as tensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T22:09:14.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-20T02:51:28.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside X' theory¹, an easy thing to do, since it makes far too many invalid assumptions and doesn't work very well to start with, the question of whether English modals are tensed or not depends on what one means by &quot;tense&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, tense is a verbal inflectional category, like the Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit tenses. English has only two such, past and present, aside from defective verbs like &lt;em&gt;beware&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;born&lt;/em&gt;. English modal auxiliary verbs, as noted, are not inflected for tense or anything else, except for the special cases that Greg Lee mentioned in his answer, where the old preterite/present modal stems can still occur in that sense. But these are very rare and don't count as inflection, really, since it's simply an opposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many theories, however, require a tense marker on every verb (one of the invalid assumptions mentioned above), and so they put one there. Of course the marker is invisible (as well as inaudible), just a local variable that's needed to process the input and eventually disappears. Why go to all the trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹Pronounced &quot;X-Bar Theory&quot; by the cognoscenti, which gives you some idea about its degree of abstractness and contact with linguistic reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T02:51:28.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-20T15:42:17.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, what is tense? Take a look &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copied and pasted the following from &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; 2008 paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the classical Government and Binding Theory (Haegeman 1994, Haegeman &amp;amp; Guéron 1999) it was generally assumed that modal verbs were base-generated in the I-position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[CP [IP He [might [VP call me tonight]]]].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first instantiation of the Minimalist Program, modal verbs were believed to be inserted directly in T via Merge (following Chomsky 1999). However, this position was later revised and now there is a general consensus that &lt;strong&gt;modal verbs project into a separate functional category&lt;/strong&gt; (Adger n.d., Abraham 2002, Butler 2003, among many others), depending on the type of modality it expresses, root or epistemic, according to the Hierarchy of Projections (Adger 2003):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;T&gt; Neg&gt; Mod&lt;sub&gt;epi&lt;/sub&gt;&gt; Asp&gt; Mod&lt;sub&gt;root&lt;/sub&gt;&gt; v&gt; V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed the following feature checking mechanism for sentences containing modal verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mod intervenes between T and v, thus &lt;strong&gt;the Pronouncing Tense Rule (PTR)&#xA;will fail to apply in English&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since v is no longer the head of T’s sister, the PRT prohibits a&#xA;valued [uInfl:present] on v being pronounced;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do-support does not apply because the tense feature is valued on Mod.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T20:46:29.763" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T20:46:29.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-21T14:15:58.743" Score="7" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, nominalized verbs have only one form regardless of the thematic relation of its possessor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The robot's &lt;em&gt;destruction&lt;/em&gt; (of the city) terrified authorities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The robot's &lt;em&gt;destruction&lt;/em&gt; (by the authorities) saddened its creator.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), the robot is the agent whereas in (2), it is the patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which the nominalized verb has different forms depending on the thematic relation of its possessor? That would seem like a very useful distinction to be able to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22032" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T14:15:58.743" Title="Languages with nominalized verbs that specify the thematic relation of its possessor" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;thematic-roles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:18:04.020" Score="1" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John's book is blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the grammatical case of &quot;book&quot; here?&lt;/strong&gt;  The two obvious choices are nominative or genitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most information online suggests it is nominative, since the noun phrase &quot;John's book&quot; is the subject.  However, this doesn't seem right to me.  Within the phrase, &quot;book&quot; seems clearly possessed, and in e.g. Latin I'm fairly certain it would be declined as-such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm also interested in replacing e.g. &quot;John's&quot; with &quot;My&quot;.  I don't think (?) this changes the answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5302" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T08:46:13.907" Title="Grammatical Case for Noun Phrase in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27990" CreationDate="2018-05-21T18:55:02.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Case&lt;/em&gt; refers to a specific type of inflection of a word when used in certain syntactic environments. So for example, the words &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; are nomally thought of as being instantiations of the same word. Which one of them we find in a particular sentence depends on their grammatical relations within that sentence. We call the first ɴᴏᴍɪɴᴀᴛɪᴠᴇ and the second ᴀᴄᴄᴜsᴀᴛɪᴠᴇ, largely by virtue of the fact that the first inflection is associated with subjects and the latter one with objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English common nouns, however, do not inflect for case&amp;mdash;although noun &lt;em&gt;phrases&lt;/em&gt; can take a genitive clitic. When people talk about the case of common nouns (as opposed to pronouns) in English, they talk about them being ᴘʟᴀɪɴ ᴄᴀsᴇ. However, what this really means is that they are not a single word noun phrase with the genitive clitic 'S attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who have studied languages like Latin sometimes try to talk about the case of uninflected nouns when talking about languages that don't have case. What they are doing, though, is confusing the grammatical&amp;mdash;or semantic&amp;mdash;relations of a word with its (non-existent) case. So they relate the gramatical relations of a word with the case it would have in a language like Latin  and try to project that case onto the caseless word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People also, more reasonably perhaps, try to extend the case of a noun within a noun phrase to the case that it would have if it were a pronoun. So they might say (I know I myself have done this in the past, when I was fuzzier than I try to be today), that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;John ate the elephant&lt;/em&gt; is 'nominative' because a pronoun in subject position would be nominative. This is not a great idea though, because it makes it sound as if nouns actually have some kind of property, 'case', which they don't actually have. We are in reality just describing the grammatical relations when we try and pull tricks like this (saying that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is nominative just means that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is the subject, nothing more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore we cannot pull this kind of stunt with the Original Poster's example, because pronouns cannot funtcion as the head of NP's with possessive determiners. In other words we cannot replace &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; with a pronoun here and retain the same meaning (although we could play word games where we played with citations of a pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, in the Original Poster's example  the word &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; could be described as 'plain case' if one wanted to emphasise that it had no genitive clitic attached. However, it has no case in any meaningful sense of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T08:46:13.907" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T08:46:13.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27990" CreationDate="2018-05-21T22:20:26.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with what Araucaria's answer says: it's not really possible to say that English common nouns have &quot;cases&quot; like Nominative, Accusative etc. The &quot;genitive&quot; construction &lt;em&gt;-'(s)&lt;/em&gt; is used with common nouns, but its analysis is complicated since it may be realized as a &quot;clitic&quot; or &quot;edge affix&quot; that attaches to a noun phrase rather than to a noun. And regardless of whether the English &quot;genitive&quot; &lt;em&gt;-'(s)&lt;/em&gt; construction is ever a case, it's obvious that &quot;book&quot; in your sentence is not a &quot;genitive&quot; in this sense, because there is no following &lt;em&gt;-'(s)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you've misunderstood how case works in a language like Latin or Old English, though. Possessed nouns can absolutely be in nominative case.  The typical setup in an Indo-European language is to use a special case (genitive) for the &lt;em&gt;possessor,&lt;/em&gt; not for the &quot;possessum&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T22:20:26.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="27995" CreationDate="2018-05-22T04:12:51.760" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a morphologically rich language, it is quite common that a root might have multiple inflections, each representing a different morphological class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here multiple inflected word forms of a root might look the same as well. What do you call such words which have the exact spellings but differ in their morphological classes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7GYhm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7GYhm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the first, second and third person past tense of &lt;code&gt;arrive&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;arrived&lt;/code&gt;. Here all the three have different grammatical categories as person is differemt, but they still have the same inflected word form. HEre, we have same word form with the same meaning, but its grammatical functionality in each is different making them inflectionally different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they be called as homonyms?&#xA;If it is word level homonym isn't it necessary that the meaning is different&#xA;If it is affix-level homonymy, isn't it applicable only to derivational  affixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fist person and third person present tense of arrive are different  (arrive and arrives). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13696" LastEditorUserId="13696" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T05:04:17.033" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T07:56:13.157" Title="What does one call a similar inflections of a root with different morphological classes as?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27993" CreationDate="2018-05-22T05:45:34.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you call such words which have the exact spellings but differ in their morphological classes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;identical surface forms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also specify if they are morphological variants of the same lemma, as opposed to forms of distinct lemmata or distinct roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can they be called as homonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they are technically also homonyms, but it is not very specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T05:45:34.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27993" CreationDate="2018-05-22T07:56:13.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual term for this is &quot;syncretism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that there is a fair amount of debate about the best way to analyze cases like these, although I don't know how much of this is about splitting hairs. For example, I recently ran across the following abstract (unfortunately, I haven't gotten to read the paper yet):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The paper rejects the standard view according to which every tensed verb in English agrees with its subject in person and number. It argues that person is irrelevant to all verbs except BE, and that past-tense verbs and modals (other than BE) have no number agreement features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/subjectverb-agreement-in-english/9230339BB2A646F04D151121D96D9752&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Subject–verb agreement in English&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Richard Hudson,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; Volume 3, Issue 2 November 1999 , pp. 173-207&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a WALS chapter &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syncretism in Verbal Person/Number Marking&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (by Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown) that has a brief discussion of English in the &quot;Theoretical implications&quot; section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T07:56:13.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="27999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-22T19:49:42.273" Score="2" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;dark l&quot; sound in Proto-Germanic language and Proto-Indo-European language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21618" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T23:11:08.627" Title="When does the &quot;dark l&quot; sound in English date back to?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27999" CreationDate="2018-05-22T22:42:23.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some sound changes between Proto-Germanic and Old English that are taken as evidence for the existence of a &quot;dark&quot; (i.e. velarized, uvularized or pharyngealized) allophone of /l/ (and /r/) in the pre-Old English time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This period is estimated to be c. AD 475–900. This includes changes from the split between Old English and Old Frisian (c. AD 475) up through historic early West Saxon of AD 900:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Breaking of front vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Most generally, before /x, w/, and /r, l/ + consonant (assumed to be velarized [rˠ, ɫ] in these circumstances), but exact conditioning factors vary from vowel to vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Initial result was a falling diphthong ending in /u/, but this was followed by diphthong height harmonization, producing short /æ̆ɑ̆/, /ĕŏ/, /ĭŭ/ from short /æ/, /e/, /i/, long /æɑ/, /eo/, /iu/ from long /æː/, /eː/, /iː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Written &lt;em&gt;ea, eo, io,&lt;/em&gt; where length is not distinguished graphically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Result in some dialects, for example Anglian, was back vowels rather than diphthongs. West Saxon &lt;em&gt;ceald&lt;/em&gt;; but Anglian &lt;em&gt;cald&lt;/em&gt; &gt; ModE &lt;em&gt;cold&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English#Old_English_period&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological history of Old English&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: Old English period)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Old_English#Breaking_and_retraction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological history of Old English&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has a section &quot;Breaking and retraction&quot; that goes into a bit more detail. I can't personally vouch for its accuracy, but it mentions some details like &quot;breaking does not occur before &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt; produced by West Germanic gemination (the /i/ or /j/ in the following syllable prevents breaking)&quot; and &quot;Short /e/ [...] is broken before l only in the combination &lt;em&gt;lh&lt;/em&gt; and sometimes &lt;em&gt;lc&lt;/em&gt;&quot; that support the idea that vowel breaking was related to velarization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would seem that it's safe to say that &quot;dark l&quot; existed at some point in one of the ancestors of English spoken before the turn of the first millennium, but I don't know how detailed a picture we can give of how its use varied between dialects and changed over time within dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there is not much evidence for or against the existence of &quot;dark l&quot; as a phone in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European. We can find the phone in a number of other Germanic or Indo-European languages, but the rules for its distribution tend to vary between languages (just as they vary between different varieties of English). &quot;Dark l&quot; has a tendency to vocalize to /u/, /ɯ/, or /o/ (or non-syllabic equivalents) or to cause changes to the pronunciation of preceding vowels, but as far as I know, this is not an inevitable outcome, and I have the impression that it is not impossible for &quot;dark l&quot; to change to &quot;light l&quot; (even if the reverse change may be more common). For example, if I remember correctly, Latin &quot;l pinguis&quot;, which is typically interpreted as a &quot;dark l&quot; of some kind based on its effects on adjacent vowels, has &quot;light l&quot; as a reflex in some Romance languages in certain contexts. So I don't think absence of evidence for a &quot;dark l&quot; phone in a proto-language can be interpreted as definitive evidence against the existence of &quot;dark l&quot; as a possible allophonic realization of *l.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T23:11:08.627" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T23:11:08.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T11:01:51.977" Score="2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gunning Fog Index is used to estimate the &lt;em&gt;readability&lt;/em&gt; of a sentence. Is the website &lt;a href=&quot;http://gunning-fog-index.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gunning-fog-index.com&lt;/a&gt; reliable for academic research purposes? If not, what software should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2925" LastEditorUserId="2925" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T11:46:04.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T11:46:04.323" Title="Academically reliable calculator of Gunning Fog Index" Tags="&lt;software&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T12:32:23.050" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics there is a common hierarchy of words: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hypernym     (e.g. Colours)    &#xA;   |&#xA;   V&#xA;Hyponym     (e.g. Brown, yellow) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a hierarchy exist within phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13895" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:44:49.497" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T14:14:47.170" Title="Is there such thing as a 'hyperphrase'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28002" CreationDate="2018-05-23T12:36:54.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The website clearly does not fulfill the requirements of &lt;em&gt;Reproducible Research&lt;/em&gt;. The algorithm is not &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; and the implementation isn't available for inspection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Website can go away without prior notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The implementation of the algorithm may change without notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you cannot find an Open Source implementation of the Gunning-Fox index, do it yourself. After all, the formula is not overly complex (though counting sentences and counting &quot;complex words&quot; can be tricky).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T12:36:54.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28008" CreationDate="2018-05-23T15:06:48.163" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using spectograms like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Spectrogram/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrome Musiclabs Spectogram&lt;/a&gt;. I discovered that I can control my first formant by moving my tongue between front to back by consciously moving between the vowel [u] [ae] [a] [i] sounds. I further discovered that I could move between slightly different &quot;l&quot; sounds by pronouncing &quot;l&quot; while forcing a different vowel sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to just be an exercise on just the placement of the body of the tongue, so it leaves the middle and tip of the tongue relatively free to move, and naively, I would assume that I could also practice those movements to produce a variety of other sound effects that would be visible in a spectrogram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there reference materials on how various tongue movements will effect spectrogram readings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21059" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T15:36:48.867" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T09:45:06.127" Title="Learning control over formants and sounds energy distributions" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T06:14:53.087" Score="6" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many forms of 'suppletion' in English can be explained through simple sound changes. Like how the plural -s is voiced if the noun ends in a voiced consonant. Or how our stem-changes (and in other Germanic languages too) are a consequence of vowel harmony in the ancient past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I believe that would more properly be known as 'allomorphy'. What I'm more interested in, is the form of suppletion where one morpheme has multiple unrelated forms depending on its usage. Like English 'to go' vs 'went'. Or saying you 'got' something, rather than 'have' it. This form of suppletion is often rather logical. i.e. If you got(as in 'retrieved' or 'acquired') something, then that must mean you currently have it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what causes people to replace past tenses and plural forms with other morphemes like this? Why would people replace 'to have' with 'got'? There's already a present tense form of 'to have', so why replace it? There's no logical need to. What could incentivize people to do something so random? You see it everywhere, even in languages that are completely unrelated to each other. But there's also languages, I hear, that never do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T06:14:31.830" Title="What causes suppletion?" Tags="&lt;suppletion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28006" CreationDate="2018-05-24T06:43:54.123" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppletion is the result of a merger of two or more different words. Originally, there are multiple words with a distinct meaning. However, over time, the meanings converge. At some point, this leads to some forms dropping out of use. Which forms of what roots are left often has to do with subtle differences in nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-known example is from the romance languages, where &quot;to go&quot; is expressed using four different original roots, known from Latin. The example is worked out &lt;a href=&quot;https://everipedia.org/wiki/Suppletion/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and also discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/9442/17305&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wAaPw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sources are (1) &lt;em&gt;vadere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to advance&quot;, (2) &lt;em&gt;ire&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to go&quot;, (3) &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to walk, go around&quot;, (4) &lt;em&gt;fui&lt;/em&gt;, the itself suppletive perfective of &lt;em&gt;esse&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see that three of the five languages considered use &lt;em&gt;ire&lt;/em&gt; in the future, which is logical because &quot;to go&quot; has an ingressive use in many languages. &lt;em&gt;Ambulare&lt;/em&gt; is used by three languages in the infinitive by three languages, presumably from &quot;to walk around&quot; as the basic activity of walking. The exact reasons are of course more complex, and I don't know them exactly in this particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the example does not show (it is mentioned in the text though) is that French, for instance, also has suppletion in number: &lt;em&gt;je vais&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I go&quot; (1) but &lt;em&gt;nous allons&lt;/em&gt; &quot;we go&quot; (3). Here the idea is that &lt;em&gt;ambulare&lt;/em&gt; has some sense of plurality, i.e., &quot;to &lt;em&gt;continuously&lt;/em&gt; go about&quot; which causes it to be left in the plural forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be many different reasons, also to distinguish person (for instance if one root tends to have imperative nuances, it is more likely to be left in the second person). However, as you may expect the process is usually very, very slow, and it cannot be predicted which forms are left. Of course, it also (probably much more) frequently happens that a merger of two roots results in one dropping out of use and the other takes over completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if or why many languages are immune to suppletion, since it is such a general concept. Since the phenomenon is very rare and only occurs in high-frequency lexemes, it may be that some languages accidentally do not attest it. Also note that in some cases, suppletion cannot be recognized. For instance, in dead languages with a small corpus, you can never be sure if two related infrequent words, which have no overlapping forms, are suppletive or that both roots were still productive in the entire paradigm. If you are interested in this, and read German, you could see &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/31062888&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Ausbildung suppletiver Verbalparadigmen im Aramäischen und Hebräischen&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Holger Gzella in Jenni and Saur (eds), &lt;em&gt;Nächstenliebe und Gottesfurcht: Beiträge aus alttestamentlicher, semitistischer und altorientalistischer Wissenschaft für Hans-Peter Mathys zum 65. Geburtstag&lt;/em&gt; (2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T06:14:31.830" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T06:14:31.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28005" CreationDate="2018-05-24T09:45:06.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest the summary in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27666/what-is-the-first-formant-f1-dependent-on-in-reference-to-the-vocal-tract&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; as a starting point. One thing to pay attention to is that formants are also influenced by what you do with your lips, larynx (if you lower vs. raise it) and somewhat by constriction of the pharynx. This means that in experimenting with different tongue positions, you need to monitor the rest of your articulatory apparatus,to make sure you're not accidentally protruding your lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computation of formant values is not strictly a thing about linguistics and language, it is about physics and anatomy -- you are not limited to common vowel sounds. It may be instructive to engage in mildly bizarre articulations using the tongue (placing the under-side of your tongue on your soft palate) to see ow that affects formants, and then try to make sense of that given Johnson's explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T09:45:06.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T11:23:42.877" Score="13" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Russian Emperor Peter I famously &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#18th-century_changes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reformed the Cyrillic script&lt;/a&gt; in Russia, where, among other changes, he redesigned the letterforms to more closely resemble the look of the modern Latin script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what printed Cyrillic (set in the &lt;em&gt;Poluustav&lt;/em&gt; script) looked like in Russia in 1703, before the reform:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KNm4N.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KNm4N.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Maths textbook, 1703&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the first book printed using Peter I’s Civil Script, in 1708:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IGYoT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IGYoT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Geometry textbook, 1708&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://typejournal.ru/en/articles/Civil-Type&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Civil Type and Kis Cyrillic&lt;/a&gt; for a comprehensive analysis and history of the reform.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, this is the style of Cyrillic that has defined the script’s modern day look: вот пример современной кириллицы для печати русского языка. Though the traditional, &lt;em&gt;blackletter&lt;/em&gt;-esque script remains in use today, it’s reserved for liturgical texts and is considered antiquated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is: when did Slavic nations outside of the Russian Empire (e.g. Serbia, Bulgaria, etc.) adopt this new Latin-inspired look? Are there historical records documenting their transition, like the comprehensive accounts of Peter the Great’s controversial innovation in Russia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Poluustav&lt;/em&gt; letterforms could be found in pre-1700’s printed books for many varieties of Cyrillic. In fact this style of manuscript writing had been allegedly invented in the Balkan region before it found its way to what later became Russia. However, the only Cyrillic style that’s in use nowadays, across all nations that use Cyrillic, is the Civil Script-based reformed variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="664" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T09:54:20.007" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T09:54:20.007" Title="When did other slavic nations adopt the Latin-inspired look of printed Cyrillic pioneered in Russia?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;bosnian-croatian-serbian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T14:10:44.577" Score="0" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of any adpositions of any kind. I find it highly unbelievable that the language makes no use of such. It has a case system, but there's only 8 cases. Even Finnish with its massive 15 cases still makes use of some postpositions (if you can call them that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I know Wikipedia isn't the most reliable source of information, but you know, its hard to find free reference grammars online. I don't get why the article would omit something like that. Really, all the article gives is the language's seemingly innumerable declensions and conjugations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T13:55:27.473" Title="Doesn't Sanskrit use adpositions of any kind?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28010" CreationDate="2018-05-24T15:51:47.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit has prepositions, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Sanskrit_prepositions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary is a category for them&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T15:51:47.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28015" CreationDate="2018-05-24T17:52:14.920" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused on this, since &quot;-ish&quot; is a a derivational morpheme for forming adjectives meaning &quot;somewhat Adjective&quot;. Based on my knowledge, a comparative is made by the suffix &quot;-er&quot; and not &quot;-ish&quot;. Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19912" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T18:34:56.643" Title="Is longish an inflected form of long or a lexeme?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28013" CreationDate="2018-05-24T18:34:56.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really comes down to how you define derivation versus inflection. The line between these two categories tends to be incredibly fuzzy and difficult to determine. For instance, if your definition is that derivation changes the category of a word, and inflection doesn't, then how do you handle participles (inflected forms of verbs that act like adjectives)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are problems with most of the nice clean definitions of inflection and derivation, and the best that I've seen is &quot;derivation makes native speakers consider it a different lexeme&quot;. In this case, I'd say that &quot;longish&quot; is a fundamentally different lexeme from &quot;long&quot;, so I would consider it derivational. But others might disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best answer I can give is, &quot;the dichotomy between inflection and derivation isn't as clean as intro ling professors make it seem, and isn't particularly useful in practice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T18:34:56.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28017" CreationDate="2018-05-24T22:02:04.800" Score="2" ViewCount="1502" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a text classification project. Some properties of my data set:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Total number of samples: 33200&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Total number of classes: 1131&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Class distribution is highly skewed (about 35% of the classes have only one example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it's a highly multi-class classification problem as you can see. Secondly, the data set is not very big (so I don't want to throw away any data). Last but not least, significant portion of the distinct classes have one example. I want to synthesize some more sample data for these classes. So I was searching for data augmentation techniques. However, unlike computer vision, NLP does not seem to have many popular techniques in this regard. Synonym insertion can be one way to do it. Can anybody suggest some other techniques? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20288" LastEditorUserId="20288" LastEditDate="2018-05-25T13:53:00.070" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:51:50.223" Title="How can I do data augmentation for text classification?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28016" CreationDate="2018-05-25T06:31:08.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://noisemix.github.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NoiseMix&lt;/a&gt; is made for exactly this.  (Full disclosure: I am advisor to the project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It applies simple transformations to rows of text data while preserving labels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word-level perturbations are: &lt;code&gt;add_letter&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;repeat_letter&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;remove_letter&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;lowercase&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;remove_punct&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;word_swap&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;char_swap&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;flip_letters&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;typo_qwerty&lt;/code&gt;. The sentence-level&#xA;  perturbations are: &lt;code&gt;remove_space&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flip_words&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is still under construction, but the initial benchmarks included the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/supervised-tutorial.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StackExchange question tagging task from the fastText supervised tutorial&lt;/a&gt; with about 10000 training rows with 734 labels - similar to your task.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid false precision and a massive table and the nuances of precision and recall for multi-label, I will not quote exact results, but the improvements across tasks are significant, between 3% and 10%, reducing errors by one tenth to almost one half.  The exact results will depend on the parameter values you set in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/noisemix/noisemix/blob/master/noisemix/config.json&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;config.json&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noisification is not as effective when the dataset is already large and noisy, and of course training time increases are not a joke at scale.  The optimist way to spin diminishing returns is that noisification tends to be more effective on tasks where the dataset size is very small and the initial baseline results very bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get the NoiseMix code and required libs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git clone https://github.com/noisemix/noisemix.git&#xA;cd noisemix&#xA;pip install -r requirements.txt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have data in fastText format , then you can simply run:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;python noisemix.py train.ft.txt -format fastText&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will output a file &lt;code&gt;train.ft.txt.nmx&lt;/code&gt; in the same format but with one generated line from every original line, doubling the dataset size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To increase that, add &lt;code&gt;-versions 2&lt;/code&gt; to get two new lines from every original.  But the intuition from the initial results is that it is just as effective to increase the perturbations per line (&lt;code&gt;MAX_PERTURBATION&lt;/code&gt; in the config) as to increase the number of lines.  The lines look totally butchered, but it works, and trains faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only supported format is fastText (labels prefixed with &lt;code&gt;__label__&lt;/code&gt;), you can add other formats in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/noisemix/noisemix/blob/master/noisemix/formats.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formats.py&lt;/a&gt;.  You can add data for locales besides English / QWERTY in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/noisemix/noisemix/blob/master/noisemix/data.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;data.py&lt;/a&gt;.   Python 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also try using pre-trained vectors.  Conceptually realistic data augmentation is not too different, NoiseMix is just a bit more tuned for user-generated data, whereas fastText Wikipedia pre-trained vectors are a model of the standard formal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T17:49:20.477" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:49:20.477" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28016" CreationDate="2018-05-25T08:51:56.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A method for introducing variation in language data is round-trip translation to a different language and back. Shalom Lappin used machine translation for this purpose (and noted that Google translate is already too good for this purpose and he had to resort to a 2007 version of MOSES).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T08:51:56.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28010" CreationDate="2018-05-25T13:55:27.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding on to jknappen's answer, here is a relevant page on prepositions from MacDonnell's Sanskrit grammar available freely online on Wikisource: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ASanskrit_Grammar_by_Whitney_p1.djvu/442&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;. There are many other reference grammars for Sanskrit that you can find by Googling &quot;Sanskrit grammar pdf&quot; or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your actual question, Sanskrit has a few postpositions that are commonly used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;prati&lt;/em&gt; : towards [+acc]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;saha&lt;/em&gt; : with [+ins]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;vinā&lt;/em&gt; : without [+ins, acc, or abl]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the words in the Wiktionary category are actually preverbs or prefixes. Sanskrit doesn't really have true prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T13:55:27.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-26T04:55:42.560" Score="1" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a thought a few days ago while I was thinking about conlangs. If a language had a strict verb-final order, it could easily get away without using punctuation to show the end of a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German somewhat does this. Its sub-clauses are always SOV (simple sentences are normally V2 order). This means that the end of a sub-clause is marked by the verb, which makes center embedding rather easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are languages that really were written without punctuation in the past. East Asia didn't have punctuation until recently. And Latin, at least early on, didn't even put spaces between words. Of course, the far east has an advantage in that they use logographs heavily (though Korean has largely abandoned their use). Thus they don't need to use spaces to show word boundaries (and yes, I know Japanese has a syllabrary, but word boundaries are still pretty obvious most of the time since logographs have to always appear at the beginning of a word, thus a syllable followed by a logograph always indicates a word boundary). Also, both Japanese and Korean are SOV. Chinese, however, is SVO and configurational. I don't get how they could get away without marking sentence boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And note, this was all in the ancient past. There's probably a good reason why languages today all have punctuation. They at the very least will indicate the boundary between sentences, if nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T04:55:42.560" Title="Can a written language get away without punctuation marks?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27983" CreationDate="2018-05-26T05:18:31.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The infinitive would be a non-tensed form, and modal verbs don't have it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, if a form belongs within one or another node may depend on the particular theory; it matters whether a study reflects on the language reality, and we cannot have such a study without allowing for the mind of the speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There hardly would be anyone to have a verb use for &quot;timeless&quot;: though the form might not have some markers, we speak or write with some reference to grammatical time. This might be the reason to include the modal with the node. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may like to compare m-command&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-command&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-command&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastEditorUserId="13231" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T05:26:22.947" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T05:26:22.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-26T10:43:02.250" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi Everybody (please help),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m having trouble deciphering how to diagram a sentence with the adjunctive prepositional phrase at the front of the sentence. As from ‘The boy found the cat in the garden’ to ‘In the garden, the boy found the cat’ and other similar sentences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, how do I show this ‘movement’ using X-Bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any and all comments will be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22063" LastEditorUserId="22064" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T11:58:29.517" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T11:58:29.517" Title="Prepositional phrases ‘fronting’ a sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-27T19:21:14.517" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What type of error are missing diacritics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spelling error? Ortographic error? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22069" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T21:33:40.930" Title="What type of error are missing diacritics?" Tags="&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-29T01:09:28.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28027" CreationDate="2018-05-27T21:06:36.460" Score="2" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've run into a lot of sources that indicate [t͡s] is not in GA. While this might be true phonemically, I don't entire believe this to be true for the actual phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the definition of an affricate, a stop released as a fricative, I would argue that with the exception of the &quot;t&quot; and &quot;s&quot; being split across syllable boundaries, [ts] as a consonant cluster is might be rare. In words like &quot;cats,&quot; I find releasing the stop before pronouncing the sibilant a bit unnatural*. While releasing the stop as a fricative feels easier. The only difference I notice between this and languages that phonemically have /t͡s/ is the duration of the fricative release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is that in casual and &quot;lazy&quot; speech, some people contract &quot;its&quot; and &quot;it's&quot; to &quot;'ts&quot; (which oddly enough is unaspirated even at the beginning of a sentence). I think that &quot;'ts a car,&quot; would be phonetically written as [t͡s ə käɹ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*While I am a native GA speaker, I'm from British Columbia. The only differences from the GA dialect I can say I have conclusively are slight vowel shifts. I think it would be very unlikely that would cause people just outside the US border to speak with a unique phoneme, but I feel I should mention it all the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21754" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T21:30:01.310" Title="Is the voiceless alveolar affricate, [t͡s], phonetically present in General American?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28026" CreationDate="2018-05-27T21:30:01.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, [t͡s] does indeed exist in General American. In every dialect of English I'm familiar with, [t͡s] is the realization of /ts/, both within a syllable and between syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any sources that claim that [t͡s] doesn't occur in English. A more reasonable (and common) claim is that /t͡s/ doesn't exist. In other words, when [t͡s] appears, it's two separate underlying phonemes /t/ and /s/, and almost always across morpheme boundaries (&quot;cat&quot;+&quot;s&quot;, &quot;it&quot;+&quot;self&quot;, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ts/ [t͡s] is also forbidden in onsets in English, but that's not particularly noteworthy: English doesn't allow any consonants before /s/ in an onset, as a general rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T21:30:01.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28025" CreationDate="2018-05-27T21:33:40.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Orthography&quot; is simply the rules of writing a language, so it's not particularly distinct from &quot;spelling&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to draw a line between them, you could say that &quot;spelling&quot; is specifically the sequence of characters making up the word, while &quot;orthography&quot; also encompasses the details of individual characters, so that writing the letter N backwards is an orthographic mistake but not a spelling one. In this case, missing diacritics would be a spelling mistake only if letters with diacritics are considered separate letters of the alphabet (as in Polish, but not in French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T21:33:40.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-28T04:44:24.157" Score="1" ViewCount="3042" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally, the word &quot;tea&quot; was pronounced &quot;tay&quot;, which would suggest that a simple &quot;e&quot; is short (pronounced &quot;eh&quot;) and by adding the &quot;a&quot;, it becomes long &quot;ay&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we also have the diphthong &quot;ae&quot;, often found in Latin words which seems to be pronounced the same way, &quot;ay&quot;, like a long A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is this just two different diphthongs that happen to be pronounced the same way coincidentally, one coming from English and the other from Latin, or is there a subtle difference in pronunciation between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T07:36:05.223" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T11:23:54.277" Title="Are the diphthongs &quot;ae&quot; and &quot;ea&quot; essentially identical?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-05-29T14:05:52.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28029" CreationDate="2018-05-28T09:29:52.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; represented /ai̯~ae̯/ and monophthongized later to /e:/. The digraph simply &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; represented the sequence /ea/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old English &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; represented the vowel /æ/ or /æ:/, and &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; represented the diphthong /æɑ̯/ or /æːɑ̯/. In Middle English, /æ/ merged with /ɑ/ as /a/, and /æ:/ heightened to /ɛ:/ and was written &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read about vowels in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciation#Diphthongs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your observation that &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is short and adding &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; makes it long isn't exactly correct. The long version of &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; /e/ in Middle English orthography was &lt;em&gt;ee&lt;/em&gt; /e:/, and &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; was a separate long /ɛ:/ (historically from Old English /æ:/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that some English words spelled with &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; (such as &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt;) are pronounced with the vowel /eɪ/ has nothing to do with the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; as /e:/ in later Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T13:54:07.063" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T13:54:07.063" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-28T09:38:56.670" Score="8" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking about Esperanto's case system, if I saw that in a natural language, I would think it was rather odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto only has two cases: accusative and non-accusative. The non-accusative, on is own, is a subject form, while the accusative is a direct object. With prepositions, either of these cases can be used. The non-accusative form is the default form used with preopositions, while the accusative form is used to indicate motion. For such prepositions, the non-accusative is used to indicate location. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;en domo: in a house&#xA;en domo&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;: into a house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature is of course not that unusual. German uses its accusative and dative cases the same way (though some prepositions always use one and never the other, you have to memorize which case each preposition calls for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The odd thing is that the language only has 2 cases. I have a hard time imagining how such a system could develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages with such minimal case systems develop out of languages with more elaborate case systems. Over time, the various cases merge and you end up with a language that for some reason has a small number of surprisingly versatile cases. In the case of German, the reason they use the accusative for destination and dative for location is because these two cases merged with two other cases called lative and locative respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But imagining something like this happening with Esperanto is difficult. Why would the dative fuse with the nominative? There are languages with two-case systems, but the only ones I'm familiar with have one case for subjects and direct objects, and a second that doubles as a dative and possessive case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there really any natural language out there that uses a case system just like Espernato's? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T10:10:32.873" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T10:10:32.873" Title="Are there any languages with a case system like Esperanto's?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28035" CreationDate="2018-05-28T14:10:13.373" Score="2" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the relationship between the DARPA phonetic alphabet transcription into an IPA transcriptions?&#xA;Is it possible to map a transcription from one system directly into the other? Is it possible in one direction and not the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there software that does it in an automated way, so that I can map multiple words without having to do everything by hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2549" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T23:57:56.483" Title="How do I translate a DARPA phonetic alphabet transcription into an IPA transcription" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28034" CreationDate="2018-05-28T17:23:17.703" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U1WKc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U1WKc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular image what is the author referring to when he uses ordinary signs. Is he referring to previous stated definition of signs consisting of a pair words (with a signifier and the signified) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, then what would be the difference between an ordinary sign and a language sign ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;============== Context ================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Kracht/courses/ling20-fall07/ling-intro.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Kracht/courses/ling20-fall07/ling-intro.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22073" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T17:47:32.797" Title="What is does mean in the stated link when the author uses &quot;ordinary signs&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28033" CreationDate="2018-05-28T17:47:32.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author hasn't been very careful about &quot;ordinary&quot;. He just means &quot;non-linguistic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sign, as the chapter says, is a pair of things: a &lt;strong&gt;signifier&lt;/strong&gt; (what you sense by sight, hearing, etc.) and something &lt;strong&gt;signified&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A linguistic sign is one where the signifier is part of a language, usually a spoken or written word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;ordinary sign&quot;, then, the author means one where the signifier is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; part of language. The author gives the example of a clock. Say a clock face has the long hand pointing to 0 degrees (north) and the short hand pointing to 90 degrees (east).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lfsti.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lfsti.png&quot; alt=&quot;clock&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a sign with a straightforward relationship between signifier and signified. The arrangement of the hands is the signifier and the signified is that it's 3 o'clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signs like this, as the author says, are much more limited than language. The clock has a couple of possible meanings: perhaps it's 3 a.m. and not 3 p.m., and perhaps it's that time in Seoul rather than Los Angeles. But it can't do anything but tell you the time. Whereas (it is argued) language is a system of signs allowing you to express essentially any meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T17:47:32.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28032" CreationDate="2018-05-28T23:13:48.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no &quot;DARPA phonetic alphabet&quot;, at least not in widespread use. From the comments, you found the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929020.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and Microsoft's table seems to be giving examples of the ARPAbet, or ARPA phonetic alphabet (no D). I wonder if they care about errors in their documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPABET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a very nice table of ARPAbet and IPA correspondences&lt;/a&gt;. You want the two-letter codes; Microsoft is giving them in lowercase, separated by spaces. So a simple dictionary lookup can convert your text to IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating in the other direction is usually possible, but not always: the IPA contains all sorts of symbols that the ARPAbet doesn't (since they don't occur in the specific dialect of English that the ARPAbet is designed to transcribe). But if you limit yourself to the subset of IPA that the ARPAbet can recognize, then another dictionary lookup is all you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Looking at the examples in Microsoft's documentation, it seems like there's one other thing to keep track of: Microsoft's version of ARPAbet marks stress at the end of a syllable, while IPA marks it at the beginning. This complicates the process slightly, but only slightly, since the stress markings also divide the word cleanly into syllables. (By-book classic ARPAbet marks stress on the vowels, which means you have to divide up the syllables yourself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T23:57:56.483" LastActivityDate="2018-05-28T23:57:56.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T05:29:21.290" Score="5" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this paper on phoneme length in the Polish language, but I can't see to find anything like this for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polish Phoneme Length Paper:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dsp.agh.edu.pl/_media/pl:ltc-001-ziolko.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dsp.agh.edu.pl/_media/pl:ltc-001-ziolko.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22074" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T03:37:28.547" Title="Whats the average duration of English phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T08:17:27.120" Score="2" ViewCount="1062" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we know, most German vowels have a 'tense' (or long) pronunciation and a 'lax' (or short) pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, which pronunciation should be used can be determined by the context that that vowel appears in. Long vowels are doubled, followed by an H, or followed by a single consonant. Short vowels are followed by more than one consonant. E is pronounced short at the end of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, exceptions to this exist. In 'regnen' and 'Mund', the stem vowel is pronounced long even though the rules say it should be short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was just thinking: are there any minimal pairs for the lax/tense distinction? The German wikipedia article mentions spuken vs spucken. But all the other minimal pairs it mentions are for consonants. There is of course the Mann vs man distinction, but I can't think of any others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't minimal pairs for a vowel's lax/tense pronounciations, then why would they be considered separate phonemes? Without minimal pairs, they would be more akin to allophones, minus the fact that Germans are actually aware of the differences in pronunciation like they are for the different pronunciations of CH. German even has names for the two sounds of CH: the 'ich-laut' and the 'ach-laut' (Laut means 'sound').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorDisplayName="user19661" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T08:27:10.803" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T12:28:54.317" Title="Are there any minimal pairs for German lax/tense vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28037" CreationDate="2018-05-29T09:43:04.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between long and short vowels is historic, not merely orthographic. It goes back to proto-Germanic and in many cases to proto-Indo-European. As for minimal pairs, they are not rare. You can start with “Wolle” /ˈvɔlə/ versus “(zum) Wohle” (ˈvo:lə). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T17:58:30.870" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T17:58:30.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28029" CreationDate="2018-05-29T10:41:32.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As fdb said in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not diphthongs. They are digraphs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It probably is not too surprising that digraphs containing the letter &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; would be used to represent sounds in the area of [e] or [ɛ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any further connection than that seems like mainly a coincidence to me. Both of these digraphs have complicated histories involving many sound changes over the centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;AE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Latin had a sound spelled &amp;quot;ai&amp;quot;, whose pronunciation we reconstruct as something like [ai̯] or [aj]. In Classical Latin, this sound came to be spelled as &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot;, which may indicate that it had come to be pronounced as a diphthong with a final element somewhat opener than IPA cardinal [i]--something like [aɪ̯] or [ae̯]. In the Romance languages, the reflex of this sound is generally the same as the reflex of Latin &amp;quot;short e&amp;quot;, whose pronunciation is reconstructed as [ɛ]—this contrasts with the reflex of Latin &amp;quot;long e&amp;quot;, whose pronunciation immediately preceding the loss of vowel length is reconstructed as [eː] (after the loss of vowel length, the reflex of Latin &amp;quot;long e&amp;quot; merged with the reflex of Latin &amp;quot;short i&amp;quot; in the ancestors of most Romance languages to become *e). Based on this, it is thought that there was a progression from [ai̯] &amp;gt; [ae̯] &amp;gt; [ɛː]  &amp;gt; [ɛ] (and then on to various other reflexes in particular Romance languages). After &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot; was monophthongized, it often came to be replaced in spelling with &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; in Medieval Latin, but the modern tradition of writing Latin has returned to using &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot;, and English students who learn &amp;quot;Restored Pronunciation&amp;quot; are taught to use the English &amp;quot;price&amp;quot; vowel /aɪ/ as an approximation to the Roman pronunciation. English speakers who are using a pronunciation modeled after the &amp;quot;Ecclesiastical&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Italian&amp;quot; tradition of pronouncing Latin may use the &amp;quot;face&amp;quot; vowel /eɪ/ for &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot;, although written guides to Ecclesiastical Latin often recommend that English speakers use the &amp;quot;dress&amp;quot; vowel /ɛ/ instead. Word-final DRESS is foreign to English phonotactics, which may be one reason why even &amp;quot;Ecclesiastical&amp;quot;-influenced English speakers don't tend to use word-final /ɛ/ in the pronunciation of English words from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot; came to be pronounced as /iː/ because of the Great Vowel Shift, except for when it was shortened due to being in a closed syllable or a &amp;quot;trisyllabic laxing&amp;quot; context: then the reflex was /ɛ/. However, there was also a tradition (I'm unsure about how old it was) of using the &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; value /iː/ for &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot; in all positions, which has left its mark in the form of certain, chiefly British English pronunciations of some English words or names that were taken from Latin and that are spelled with &amp;quot;ae&amp;quot; (e.g. &amp;quot;aesthete&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Daedalus&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EA&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ba mentioned, the digraph &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; was used in Old English to represent both a long diphthong whose pronunciation is reconstructed as /æːɑ̯/, and a short diphthong whose pronunciation is reconstructed as /æɑ̯/. The letter &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; was used in Old English to represent both a short vowel /e/ and a long vowel /eː/. The letter &amp;quot;æ&amp;quot; was used to represent both a short vowel /æ/ and a long vowel /æː/, and the letter &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; was used to represent both a short vowel /ɑ/ and a long vowel /ɑː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we look at the Old English origin of the digraph &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot;, it's not a matter of &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; representing a &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; &amp;quot;eh&amp;quot; sound and &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; being added to make this a &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; &amp;quot;ay&amp;quot; sound. The association of those sounds with these written representations develops much later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time of Middle English, short &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; had merged with short &amp;quot;æ&amp;quot; and short &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; to become some single low vowel phoneme like /a/, typically written &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; (Middle English sound changes would lead to the development of a distinct lengthened phoneme /aː/), and long &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; had merged with long &amp;quot;æ&amp;quot; to become a single front mid-low vowel phoneme /ɛː/, which contrasted with mid-high /eː/, from Old English /eː/. My understanding is that Middle English continued to use &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; for both short /e/ and long /eː/, but the digraph &amp;quot;ee&amp;quot; was also used for long /eː/, as well as long /ɛː/. The digraph &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; was also used for long /ɛː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another important source of Middle English /ɛː/. In Middle English, a sound change occurred that affected the pronunciation of many vowels. I have seen this sound change variously described as open-syllable lengthening (in certain contexts) or as compensatory lengthening of a vowel in an open syllable when the following syllable lost a schwa sound. Whatever the exact nature of the conditioning factor, the result of the sound change was that short /e/ developed to long /ɛː/ in a number of words. These words with /ɛː/ could have the spelling pattern &amp;quot;eCe&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ee&amp;quot;, but for whatever reason, after the Middle English period the spelling pattern &amp;quot;eCe&amp;quot; became uncommon and the spelling pattern &amp;quot;ee&amp;quot; became more restricted to words with the higher vowel quality, so a number of words that originally had short /e/ in Old English ended up being spelled with the digraph &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; in modern English. An example is &amp;quot;meat&amp;quot;, from Old English &lt;em&gt;mete&lt;/em&gt; [mete], Middle English &lt;em&gt;mete&lt;/em&gt; [mɛːt(ə)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Great Vowel Shift&amp;quot; that is considered the boundary between Middle English and Modern English includes the sound changes /eː/ &amp;gt; /iː/ and /ɛː/ &amp;gt; /eː/; this resulting in the digraph &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; representing the quality /eː/. The subsequent development of this /eː/ varied between dialects: in English &amp;quot;RP&amp;quot;, it merged into /iː/ in all but a handful of words (like &lt;em&gt;great, steak, break&lt;/em&gt;); in some other dialects, it may have been regular for it to merge with the reflex of Middle English &amp;quot;long a&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ay~ai&amp;quot;, although there are also some arguments for certain dialects only having a &amp;quot;near-merger&amp;quot; of the &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;long a&amp;quot; sound. The merger of the &amp;quot;ea&amp;quot; sound with the &amp;quot;long a/ay&amp;quot; sound is the point where we get pronunciations like &amp;quot;tea = tay&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle English /ɛː/ was sometimes shortened instead, somewhat sporadically, which resulted in Modern English /ɛ/, as in &amp;quot;deaf&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dead&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T11:23:54.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28037" CreationDate="2018-05-29T12:16:25.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;denn/den&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zinn/ziehn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(dem) Sohne/(die) Sonne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the word Mond, it's not irregular as you guessed. That syllable is structured just like &lt;code&gt;gehst&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;klebt&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;onset  nucleus  coda  suffix&#xA;M      o        n     d       - Mond&#xA;g      eh       s     t       - gehst&#xA;kl     e        b     t       - klebt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic languages tend to have a rule that if the nucleus is long, then a coda is short, and if a coda is long&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; then the nucleus is short. So Grewendorf posits another slot at the end of the German syllable, the suffix. It's mostly occupied by flectional morphemes, but in the case of Mond (and some others, like Vogt) it's occupied by the last segment of the lexical morpheme. You could have a look at &lt;em&gt;Sprachliches Wissen&lt;/em&gt; by Grewendorf if you want to know more about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: (say, a consonant cluster, or, in the case of some other languages, a geminate consonant)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T12:28:54.317" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T12:28:54.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28031" CreationDate="2018-05-30T02:20:43.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Esperanto lexicographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Waringhien&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaston Waringhien&lt;/a&gt; (in his &lt;em&gt;Lingvo kaj Vivo&lt;/em&gt; collection of essays) nominated Old French as a language with a comparable case system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French#Nouns&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old French maintained a two-case system, with a nominative case and an oblique case, for longer than did some other Romance languages like Spanish and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distribution is not quite the same—the oblique in Old French was mandatory after prepositions, rather than indicating motion as in more case-rich languages; but Waringhien drew parallels between the use of the Esperanto accusative in adjuncts rather than direct objects, and the Old French oblique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the Old French oblique is a merger of all non-nominative Latin cases; so that kind of thing can indeed happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T02:20:43.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6682" CreationDate="2018-05-30T02:51:32.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it possibly a contributing factor to it falling out of use due to other writing systems contortion on users and how they entrain psycology and physiology interactions to fall within those preset writing contortion parameters.  Every writing system has its own contortions associated with direction.  Boustrophedon also has a unique contortion.  But having to learn two separate characters probably made it twice as hard in the long run as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22082" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T02:51:32.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28054" CreationDate="2018-05-30T03:51:19.850" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leo Messi, who lives next door, is the greatest football/soccer player in the world.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is &quot;who lives next door&quot; an &lt;em&gt;adjunct&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;modifier&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thinking goes like this.  If I isolate the non-restrictive relative clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;who lives next door&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my intuition tells me that there is no &quot;head&quot; to be modified, which makes this non-restrictive relative clause an &lt;em&gt;adjunct.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I assume that non-restrictive relative clauses have a &quot;head&quot; and that this &quot;head&quot; is &lt;em&gt;external&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;internal&lt;/em&gt; (meaning that the head in my sentence is &quot;Leo Messi&quot;), then the non-restrictive relative clause is a &lt;em&gt;modifier.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption, therefore, is that &lt;em&gt;modifiers&lt;/em&gt; are attached to a &quot;head&quot; (i.e. modifiers &quot;modify&quot; a &quot;head&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do linguists analyse non-restrictive relative clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T00:01:19.657" Title="Are non-restrictive relative clauses adjuncts or modifiers?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T04:45:09.893" Score="2" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a good book to study generative syntax from an introductory level to intermediate or advanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21139" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T16:45:25.293" Title="What are the best books to study generative syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T06:03:46.833" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have a formal background of linguistics, but I'd like to know how a sentence or paragraph becomes meaningful to a reader, and how one can construct that. I think it falls to the areas of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, lexicology or psycholinguistics, and I don't know which one I should read first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I want to gain more insight on my observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Striking quotes or proverbs &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; seems to have the form of contradiction. I know it is to create surprise, but I want to describe it linguistically. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Poincaré and an unknown poet) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Mark Twain) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a non-native English speaker, I find that sometimes simple words &quot;straightforward&quot; or &quot;warmhearted&quot; is more straightforward than advanced words like &quot;uncomplicated&quot; or &quot;benevolent&quot;, because they usually express that the writer has really understood how the language works (word formation, grammar, etc) and escaped the suffering of finding the correct or impressive words. The words are the right words and &quot;lightninged&quot;, but at the same time they feel like effortless and somewhat playful. So are &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/q/29035/19233&quot;&gt;hyponymous juxtapositions&lt;/a&gt; in Vietnamese languages, which I suspect is an influence of Taoism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine there is a heatmap for every article, then a good writer will know where to put the heat sources (i.e. the jargon/right words) concisely and accurately; the readers will be attracted to those points and start thinking. But a skillful writer will &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt; with it, cumulatively building up the tensions and make the &quot;drops&quot;, making the right words seem to be so natural and intertwine with other surrounding words, yet doing so in a manner of effortless and relatable. Of course it would require the author to know what the readers are expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My experience in explaining is to avoid starting explaining the term directly (e.g. the elephant is...), but move the term to define at the end of sentence or convert it to adjective or verb, and directly use the definitions of the terms build up it. This way you can explain an elephant to a blind men:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a thing that sometimes like a snake, sometimes like a tree, then we know that it's an elephant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every field seems to be so different, but in the end it's the vocabulary that make us understand each other. It all comes back to the idea of logicentricism or deconstructionism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know where should I start reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/448268/80007&quot;&gt;What is the word for a hard-to-solve solution spoken intuitively and relaxedly?&lt;/a&gt; in ELU.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T06:31:09.750" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T06:31:09.750" Title="How is a meaningful sentence or paragraph constructed?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28053" CreationDate="2018-05-30T06:37:02.980" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the distinction between phonemes and allophones, but why are phonemes considered as &lt;em&gt;mental&lt;/em&gt; objects and not &lt;em&gt;psychological&lt;/em&gt; objects? Isn’t everything mental also, in a sense, necessarily psychological? I wondered if there is a point to splitting mental from psychological stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:43:34.303" Title="Why are phonemes called “mental” objects" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28047" CreationDate="2018-05-30T12:37:48.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend Liliane Haegeman's 'introduction to government and binding theory'. This book is very useful at introductory levels, and she explains factual issues in language and linguistics in a very simplified manner. If you want another simpler introductory book try Andrew Carnie's 'syntax'. But I advise you to read the first. It will build your critical linguistic thinking.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T12:37:48.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28047" CreationDate="2018-05-30T16:45:25.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew Radford's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/transformational-grammar/47A6B24E28CED7D6684CE2EBAFFDFFF7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transformational Grammar, A First Course&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and Liliane Haegeman's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0631190678&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to Government and Binding Theory&lt;/a&gt;&quot; would be sufficient for numerous purposes. I can also recommend Gert Webelhuth's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0631180613&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Government and Binding Theory and The Minimalist Program&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and Andrew Carnie's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0470655313&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntax: A Generative Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, one should read Chomsky's major books on these topics. It is a must and very enlightening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21072" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T16:45:25.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T17:23:33.260" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the minimum size of a corpus that you need to cover substantially the grammar of a language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the limits of 'substantial' might be open to speculation. But imagine you wanted to describe the grammar of a speaker at the C2 level (from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), or, if you wish, full professional proficiency level. That is, the level of complexity you expect from an educated speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would, obviously dismiss texts that illustrate regional varieties, or structures that have become out of use (like 'must needs').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22086" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T17:23:33.260" Title="How broad should the corpora be to describe the grammar of a proficient speaker?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28049" CreationDate="2018-05-30T18:43:34.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemes are &quot;mental objects&quot; in the sense that they exist only in the mind: no matter how many recordings you make, and how many formants you analyze, you'll never find some distinctive label on a spectrogram that indicates &quot;this is a phoneme, and this isn't&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could equally well say that, since they only exist in the mind, they're &quot;psychological objects&quot;. But just like with different phonemes, the difference between &quot;mental objects&quot; and &quot;psychological objects&quot; is only meaningful in context, and I've never seen an important distinction made between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your final question, &quot;if there is a point to splitting mental from psychological stuff&quot;, I would say no. I've never seen such a distinction made in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T18:43:34.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28046" CreationDate="2018-05-30T22:37:21.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll refer you to, first, @BillJ's comment above, which I agree with, then to McCawley's analysis in the &lt;strong&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/strong&gt;, which makes restrictive relative clauses modifiers of N' (N-bar) and non-restrictive relative clauses as modifiers of sentences.  The syntactic relationship between a non-restrictive relative and the NP it goes with does not appear to have a counterpart in traditional grammar -- McCawley calls it an &quot;adposit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T22:37:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T04:05:37.810" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The introductory non-finite clauses below (in bold)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Speeding down the road,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Peter ran a red light.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discouraged by his losing record,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;the boxer quit boxing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what, if anything, do they modify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they modify the subject of each sentence (&quot;Peter,&quot; &quot;the boxer&quot;), the main verb (&quot;ran,&quot; &quot;quit&quot;), or the entire main clause (&quot;Peter ran a red light,&quot; &quot;the boxer quit boxing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do linguists analyze such introductory non-finite clauses? Are there reliable tests for it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And are such non-finite clauses actually relative clauses that have been (1) reduced by omitting the relative pronoun and linking verb, and (2) moved to the front of each sentence for greater focus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T04:05:37.810" Title="What do introductory non-finite clauses modify?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T12:01:35.380" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me draw a D structure tree for: Is the cake certain to have been eaten by the students?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you could explain the reasoning behind why its drawn like that so i could get some understanding &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22091" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T12:01:35.380" Title="Drawing D structure trees" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-31T14:51:32.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T15:00:19.153" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &quot;Introducing Phonetic Science&quot; by Michael Ashby and John Maidment and they say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Speech is &lt;strong&gt;the original channel for which human language evolved&lt;/strong&gt; and all written languages have (or once had) a spoken form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't make much sense to me. Isn't non verbal communication, like those used by other animal species, more original in the evolution of our language that pure sound speech? Is he just being lax in his words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22050" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T03:33:42.413" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T03:33:42.413" Title="If speech language was before written language, isn't non verbal before speech?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28059" CreationDate="2018-05-31T15:39:33.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, because we have no evidence of pre-speech language. We have lots of evidence for non verbal communication, but language is narrower than communication - it must have the capacity for abstract propositional idea exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The human brain is capable of using true signed languages, but the oldest sign languages we know of are only a few centuries old. It's possible the first human language was signed rather than spoken, but there's no evidence either way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T15:39:33.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28059" CreationDate="2018-05-31T15:43:47.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Claims about the evolution of language are all fairly speculative, but the statement is as accurate as any that are made about language. The distinction that you have to attend to is that between human &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; and generalized &lt;em&gt;communication&lt;/em&gt;. Human language is distinct from other systems in being learned and symbolic, which distinguishes it from primate facial gestures which are associated with a limited range of functions. Eventually, humans developed non-auditory means of encoding language symbols: but the auditory channel was the original means of encoding symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T15:43:47.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T16:10:15.453" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble drawing a syntax tree for 2 sentences and I would appreciate it if someone could help me.&#xA;The sentences are:&#xA;a.  Where will you put your car?&#xA;b.  Dave told Bill the rumor that John ran out the door&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22094" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T16:10:15.453" Title="how to draw a tree digram in syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-06-01T00:59:11.853" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28064" CreationDate="2018-05-31T16:42:17.463" Score="0" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I translate &quot;How to use something&quot; in Bing Translate to Chinese, it shows &quot;如何使用某物&quot;, but if I translate back, it will show &quot;How to use a thing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the hell? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'am translating other sentences, it is the same as the previous translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21993" LastEditorUserId="21993" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T23:41:24.977" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T21:35:42.093" Title="Bing Translate isn't same as the previous translation" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-31T23:20:44.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28063" CreationDate="2018-05-31T17:01:43.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Translating isn't a one-to-one process. For a simple example, consider the French words &lt;em&gt;si&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;oui&lt;/em&gt;, both of which can correspond to English &quot;yes&quot; in different contexts. Once you've translated them into English &quot;yes&quot;, you need to choose which one to use when going back into French. A human translator could use context to figure this out, but even cutting-edge machine translators generally aren't smart enough to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you got a human translator to translate to another language, and another to translate it back, the probabilities are close to zero for any non-trivial input that you'd get the exact same text back. Simply because there are so many different ways to express an idea in any given language. If you asked me to translate &quot;the book was written&quot; into Latin, I would say &lt;em&gt;liber scriptus est&lt;/em&gt;. But if I were asked to translate that sentence back into English, I'd make it active: &quot;someone wrote the book&quot;. Simply because the active voice is much more common in English than the passive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it seems that Chinese (like various other languages, including Ancient Greek) doesn't distinguish between &quot;something&quot; and &quot;some thing&quot; (= &quot;a thing&quot;). So when translating back to English, the translator has to guess which one you originally meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T21:35:42.093" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T21:35:42.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26845" CreationDate="2018-05-31T17:23:17.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no one-to-one correspondence between languages and their vocabularies. It is fundamentally different from translating A to B and translating B to A in any machine translation software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when I translate &quot;What is the nearby station?&quot; into Chinese with Google Translate, Google Translate translates this sentence to &quot;什么是附近的车站？&quot; and when I translate back, Google Translate translates &quot;什么是附近的车站？&quot; to &quot;What is a nearby station?&quot; instead of &quot;What is the nearby station?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because the word &quot;是&quot; has many different meanings in Chinese. It could mean &quot;a (一个 in Chinese)&quot; or &quot;the (该 in Chinese)&quot;, so both meanings are ok. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wrong word when I translate back to English is &quot;a&quot;. The correct word should be &quot;the&quot; and that's because the word &quot;是&quot; has many different meanings in Chinese, based on the second sentence of this answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct translation should be &quot;什么是该附近的车站？&quot;, and this would translate to &quot;What is the nearby station?&quot;. Google Translate translates &quot;What is the nearby station?&quot; to &quot;什么是附近的车站？&quot; instead of &quot;什么是该附近的车站？&quot;. It didn't clarify the word &quot;是&quot; by adding &quot;该&quot; to the front of &quot;是&quot;. You need to clarify the word &quot;是&quot; and this is because this word in Chinese has many different meanings, based on my second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By adding &quot;该&quot; to the front of &quot;是&quot;, this would clarify the sentence &quot;什么是附近的车站？&quot;, because the word &quot;是&quot; has many different meanings in Chinese, based on my fourth sentence at the end and my second sentence. Google Translate doesn't add &quot;该&quot; to the front of &quot;是&quot;, and this is why it is not the same as the first time you translate it. If Google Translate adds &quot;该&quot; to the front of &quot;是&quot;, it would be same as the first time you translate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21993" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T08:32:13.503" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T08:32:13.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T18:32:50.857" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verb &quot;keep&quot; can be used with a direct object and a prepositional phrase, as in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He kept a black book in his desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the grammatical role of the PP &quot;in his desk&quot;? Is it an adverbial adjunct, or is it a complement? (Or is it some third thing?) Semantically, it seems to describe the location of the direct object, so the meaning seems consistent with its being an &quot;object complement&quot;. However, my first thought was that it was an adverbial adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a list of tests for finding out if something is an adjunct or a complement on the following page: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gawron.sdsu.edu/syntax/course_core/lectures/comp_adj.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XBar Theory: Complements and adjuncts&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Linguistics 522, Jean Mark Gawron, San Diego State University. But even after going through them, I'm not sure if &quot;in his desk&quot; is an adjunct or a complement here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My attempt at applying the tests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Order: an adjunct cannot come between a head and a complement. The examples are in noun phrases, not verb phrases. The direct object &quot;a black book&quot; is not an adjunct, so this test is not applicable to the original sentence. I guess the sentence could be altered to make the test applicable if I tried to add an adjunct before &quot;in his desk&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do-so replacement: &quot;do so&quot; can replace &lt;code&gt;V'&lt;/code&gt;s (using the terminology of X-bar theory). I'm not sure whether &quot;Dan kept a black book in his desk, and Sally did so in her bag&quot; is ungrammatical: it sounds bad to me, but &quot;Dan kept a black book, and Sally did so also&quot; also sounds bad, and that second sentence doesn't even have any prepositional phrases involved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Coordination: it's ungrammatical to coordinate a complement with an adjunct. &quot;He kept a black book in his desk and despite my advice&quot; doesn't seem right to me, but I'm not sure if this is strong evidence that &quot;in his desk&quot; is a complement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Preposing: Apparently, &quot;verbs dont like having their complement PPs preposed&quot;. This test seems to point towards &quot;in his desk&quot; being an adjunct, because &quot;In his desk, he kept a black book&quot; seems acceptable and grammatical to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Araucaria's answer to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180520/is-this-adverbial-a-complement-or-an-adjunct&quot;&gt;Is this Adverbial a complement or an adjunct?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; on ELU seems to say that an adverbial adjunct  should be equally acceptable if a verb and direct object are replaced with &quot;do it&quot;, giving the example &quot;They played football in the park / They did it in the park&quot;. This suggests to me that &quot;in his desk&quot; is not an adjunct, because we can't say &quot;He did it in his desk&quot; to mean &quot;He kept a black book in his desk&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I been interpreting these tests correctly? Are there any other tests I should be using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T10:59:40.747" Title="&quot;He kept a black book in his desk.&quot; Is &quot;in his desk&quot; an adjunct or a complement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28059" CreationDate="2018-05-31T19:58:41.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-verbal communication definitely preceded speech, and some of that could be considered language, but he didn't say all language evolved &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; speech, but &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; speech. A broader question is whether auditory communication preceded visual. I do know humans can hear while still in the womb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12493" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T19:58:41.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28069" CreationDate="2018-05-31T20:20:55.017" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computational linguistics or in NLP, what does the value of average lemmatized length tells us about a document? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21453" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T06:13:47.080" Title="what does the average lemmatization length tell us about a body of text?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-06-02T22:23:28.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28068" CreationDate="2018-06-01T06:13:47.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The average length of lemmata in a corpus does not tell much definitively in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me if you are asking about absolute length or length relative to unlemmatised surface form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two corpora of similar size and structure differ in average absolute lemma length or average word length for that matter, it could be that they are in different languages, or that they are using very different registers of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two corpora differ in the average difference between lemma length and word length, then it could be that one is in a higher-morphology language or compounding language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are just correlations, without more context it is tea-leaf reading, and there are more straightforward ways to determine those features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T06:13:47.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-01T10:16:19.603" Score="6" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've tried looking at Wikipedia but it is extraordinarily vague. Is it even known at all? I ask about this because I'm working on a very informal hypothesis about a period of common development between the Germanic, Celtic and Italic languages, but I would need to know when, more or less, they were spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22084" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T17:39:23.647" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T15:14:42.163" Title="When was Proto-Italic spoken?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;italic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28070" CreationDate="2018-06-01T11:17:20.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at a few related wikipedia pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_peoples#Origins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italic peoples: Origins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to David W. Anthony, between 3100–2800/–2600 BCE, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna culture took place into the Danube Valley. These migrations probably split off Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic and Pre-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;David W. Anthony - &lt;em&gt;The Horse, The Wheel and Language&lt;/em&gt; pg.344&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations#Italic_and_Celtic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis of Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:&lt;sup&gt;23&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic (before 2500 BCE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;David Anthony, following the methodology of Ringe and Warnow, proposes the following sequence:&lt;sup&gt;26&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic (3000 BCE)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;23&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anthony 2007, pp. 56–58.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anthony 2007, p. 100.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T11:17:20.680" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28074" CreationDate="2018-06-01T12:15:59.737" Score="2" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish vosotros/tu is used in an informal conversation and usted(es) in an formal one.&#xA;Whereas in the majority of the countries in Latin America, usted(es) is used constantly.&#xA;The same goes with Portuguese, você is formal and tu informal but it's way more common in Brazil to use você in most of situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a coincidence that those countries use formal second person more frequently than the countries that colonized them ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without any deep knowledge into colonization of South America I suppose that colonies must have been taught to speak in a formal way to Spanish and Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we observe this elsewhere ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22100" LastEditorUserId="22100" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T13:00:44.473" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T15:20:09.480" Title="Do all colonized countries use formal second pronouns person in daily life?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28092" CreationDate="2018-06-01T12:45:32.370" Score="10" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people sing without knowing or using the text, they often sing as lalalala...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T09:00:42.557" Title="Why is [la] widely used as a substitution for singing? Is it a worldwide phenomenon?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28072" CreationDate="2018-06-01T15:20:09.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Québec, which originated as a French colony in North America, offers a very clear counterexample: it is well-known that speakers of Québécois French use &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; in many more situations and much more readily than speakers of European French do. And when Québécois French speakers start with &lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt;, they tend to shift to &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; more quickly than a speaker of European French would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Tu&lt;/em&gt; is French's second-person singular informal pronoun, analogous to Mexican Spanish &lt;em&gt;tú&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt; is French's second-person singular formal pronoun, analogous to Mex. Span. &lt;em&gt;usted&lt;/em&gt;, and also a second-person plural pronoun in all circumstances, analogous to Mex. Span. &lt;em&gt;ustedes&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22101" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T15:20:09.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28078" CreationDate="2018-06-01T22:35:56.007" Score="4" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;What (if any) are the structural similarities that all languages share that allows them to be taken in and learned by virtually all humans starting at a very young age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22103" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T15:04:43.513" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:04:43.513" Title="What are the structural similarities that exist common to all languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28077" CreationDate="2018-06-01T22:50:26.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For any specific property you suggest, there's probably a counter-example somewhere. However, the big one that's most often considered universal is &lt;em&gt;recursion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every known human language (*) has recursion: some way of embedding one clause into another one, to an arbitrary depth. In English, you can use relative clauses, like &quot;I saw the man who saw the woman who saw…&quot;, or complementizers, like &quot;I told Alice that Bob told Claire that…&quot;. And while the exact mechanics differ, every language has some way of doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(*) There's one often-cited counterexample, Pirahã. However, the work claiming that Pirahã lacks recursion is…controversial. Nobody except the original researcher has been able to check the evidence, and Pirahã is claimed to have quite a lot of properties that are unlike any other language on Earth. It seems more reasonable to treat it as a bad data point.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T22:50:26.907" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T01:46:42.590" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be qualified as a query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over what percentage of acceptance as idiomatic would normally be considered as felicitous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if 70% of native speakers agree a phrase is idiomatic, would it be regarded as an accepted use in that language? It may well vary, but what are commonly used guidelines if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T01:46:42.590" Title="Over what percentage of acceptance of a phrase is looked on as natural use?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28066" CreationDate="2018-06-02T10:59:40.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;em&gt;He kept it handy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;em&gt;He kept it in the drawer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, Huddleston &amp;amp; Pullum in CGEL pp. 257-8, note that there is a structural similarity between the predicative complement in [1] and the locative complement in [2], which suggests that assigning a  location to something is comparable to assigning it a property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They argue that one respect in which  locative complements resemble predicatives is that they too are oriented towards either the subject in intransitives (&lt;em&gt;The letter is on the table&lt;/em&gt;), or the object in transitives, as in [2].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They go on to say that, however, since there are numerous verbs which only take one or the other (PC or locative), they do not assimilate the locatives to the predicatives, but regard them as syntactically distinct kinds of complements that exhibit certain semantic resemblances.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T10:59:40.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T14:04:01.227" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is about what happens to phrases during the time of making them questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that the following sentence is a normal English sentence which is correct grammatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He found &lt;strong&gt;a friend to study with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold part in the sentence is a phrase and &quot;to study with&quot; refers to &quot;a friend&quot;. That's why it would be wrong to say &quot;To study with, He found a friend&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem starts here. While asking a question, we have to separate them from each other and according to many linguistics, phrases separated in a question form don't refer to each other anymore, and those questions are generally wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the following questions are correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who did he find to study with?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which friend did he find to study with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure but my English teachers (native) said that they were awkward.&#xA;Because there is &quot;to study with&quot; but there is no noun next to it. &#xA;Why do they consider these sentence structures incorrect only as questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here, I am sharing with you a link which prohibits those kinds of questions such as &quot;What did you sell a book about?&quot; because of the same problem.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch12.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/ch12.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22107" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T06:20:32.883" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T06:20:32.883" Title="Which friend did he find to study with?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;questions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T16:27:09.423" Score="3" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Studying some languages I noticed that many European languages have a first, second and third person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a philosophical sense, I was wondering how it shapes reality, but that's off topic here. What I want to ask is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any source or have an answer for the origins of those forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it can be traced back to Indo European languages but don't know anything about indo Languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21739" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T22:26:52.527" Title="Where do personal pronouns come from?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28082" CreationDate="2018-06-02T17:33:36.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as the personal pronouns in Indo-European languages go, we don't really know where they come from. They already existed in Proto-Indo-European, which is the oldest stage we can reconstruct with any certainty. Some people try to reconstruct further back, but none of these theories are widely accepted, and all the proposals I've seen include personal pronouns in those earlier stages too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, though, personal pronouns seem fairly common in the languages of the world. The Bantu languages of Africa have a person distinction that's very similar to the Indo-European one, for example, and I believe the Semitic languages do too. It's just plain useful to be able to talk about &quot;me&quot; versus &quot;you&quot; versus &quot;them&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One alternative, as found in e.g. Japanese and Vietnamese, involves having quite a lot of different words (or even an open class) that are usable as pronouns. But in practice, once a conversation is going, any individual speaker will tend to use a pronoun for &quot;me&quot; and another pronoun for &quot;you&quot;. And it's easy to see how this system could get reduced to a straightforward first person, second person, third person distinction over time (potentially with different fossilized levels of formality, as in German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another alternative is just using names everywhere. But this gets unwieldy, which is why pronouns were invented in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for where individual pronouns come from in any individual language: it depends! Sometimes they come from demonstratives: &quot;that man&quot; → &quot;him&quot;, for instance (as in Latin &lt;em&gt;is/ea/id&lt;/em&gt;). Sometimes they come from metonymy: the Japanese pronoun お宅 &lt;em&gt;otaku&lt;/em&gt; comes from a respectful phrase for &quot;your house&quot;. This is generally referred to as &quot;semantic bleaching&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-02T17:56:01.977" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T17:56:01.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2018-06-02T23:45:03.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A definition which appeals to what is being defined is recursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a phrase structure rule for coordination of sentences which defines an S using S in the definition, S -&gt; S &quot;and&quot; S (A sentence may consist of a sentence followed by &quot;and&quot; followed by a sentence), is recursive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible for a set of rules to be recursive, even no single one of the rules is recursive.  For example the set of rules S -&gt; NP V; NP -&gt; &quot;that&quot; S is recursive, because S must be interpreted in order to give a full interpretation of S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly in programming, a procedure is recursive when among the procedures which are called to complete some computation is that very procedure itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In mathematics, a definition which appeals to the term being defined is recursive.  For instance, &quot;positive integer&quot; can be defined as &quot;1&quot; or the successor of some positive integer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T23:45:03.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28089" CreationDate="2018-06-04T07:26:11.553" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have observed a good number of people muttering &quot;fuckfuckfuck&quot; under their breath when nervous. It somehow seems to vent the frustration out, and calm the person down. Why does this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a few articles such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/63921/what-the-f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; that describe how saying the word triggers parts of our brains and all that. But is there a any linguistic reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that saying euphemisms such as &quot;heck&quot; or &quot;fudge&quot; also helps, but not as much as the f-word itself. Does this have something to do with the combination of a fricative and a velar plosive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22115" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T03:58:15.077" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:58:15.077" Title="Why does saying the word &quot;fuck&quot; help vent frustration?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28101" CreationDate="2018-06-04T16:02:23.927" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am still ambiguous about the relationship between topics and speech acts/dialogue acts in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the topics selected as conditional on speech acts/dialogue acts (or vice versa) in a sentence? Or the both of topics and speech acts/dialogue acts occur simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22116" LastEditorUserId="22116" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T10:42:38.573" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T10:45:19.093" Title="Relationship between topics and speech acts/dialogue acts in a sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialog-acts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28087" CreationDate="2018-06-04T22:31:51.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is reported in research by Stephens, Atkins &amp;amp; Kingston and Stephens &amp;amp; Umland that swearing alleviates pain. At present it's a mystery why, but one chain of reasoning is that it results in release of adrenaline, because swearing triggers a fight-or-flight response. It has nothing to do with the phonetic shape of the word (did you know that &lt;em&gt;hooyada was&lt;/em&gt; is a swear? Not in English). Some uses may be quasi-conventionalized, especially the triplicated ones. S*3, F*3 crap*3 are relatively common in some (younger) circles, damn*3 maybe, but I've never heard C*3,B*3, MF*3, CS*3 or SOB*3. There may be an articulatory underpinning to the low or zero frequency of B*3, and length is no doubt at work in the fact that you don't triplicate SOB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T22:31:51.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28073" CreationDate="2018-06-05T09:00:42.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure why la is used widely as a non-lexical vocable (it could be an arbitrary selection that gained popularity), but I can tell you it is not a worldwide phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Indian Classical music, there is a segment called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alap&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alapana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alapana&lt;/a&gt;) which is non-rhythmic improvisation done without lyrics. Typically, the singer says &lt;em&gt;&quot;aaa...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; as he vocalizes (other vowels are used, albeit very rarely). In other variants such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomtom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nomtom&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tanam&lt;/a&gt;) use nonsensical syllables such as &lt;em&gt;nom, tom, na, tana, rana&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there is whole a class of (rhythmic) compositions called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taranas&lt;/a&gt;, which are entirely made up of meaningless syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22115" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T09:00:42.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T10:24:07.697" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please can someone explain to me what a 'parallel pattern in the verbal domain of French' mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19984" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T18:09:46.360" Title="Syntax- X-bar theory- verbal Domain" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-07T23:38:52.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T12:36:44.293" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a sentence which my Canadian professor today talked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1-) I see no reason to do these stupid things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Canadian English professor at the university said that we could put the part &quot;to do...&quot; at the beginning in order to emphasize what made us angry, why we were angry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-) To do these stupid things, I see no reason! (I see no reason. For what? To do these stupid things!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the sentence above to be unusual and asked my British teacher that question. He also agreed with my professor and said:&quot;Those sentences are OK even though they are not very natural.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they agreed with each other but I still want to ask you why the example 2 is correct grammatically/theoretically? &#xA;(After my objection, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also said:&quot;&#xA;We say: &quot;&lt;em&gt;We are too late to do something&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but, do we have to put &quot;to do smt&quot; at the end? No, we don't. To emphasize for what you are late, you can say: &quot;&lt;em&gt;To do something, we are too late!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22107" LastEditorUserId="22107" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T12:49:52.543" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T20:32:06.187" Title="Is there any theoretical explanation of putting infinitive clause at the beginning?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28095" CreationDate="2018-06-05T14:08:12.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shifting a word or clause to the beginning of a sentence is a way to add extra &lt;strong&gt;emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; on the said word/clause. That's what happens when instead of writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had no sooner arrived than the journalists bombarded him with questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you choose to write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No sooner had he arrived... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the specific, implicit rhetorical intention which justifies such sentences as : - To do such a thing would be a great mistake. Remember your Shakespeare : To be or not to be, that is the question. Apart from that (and the expression of purpose, as said above by Luke) the only way of justifying &quot;To do such things, I see no reason&quot; is to regard the second clause as &quot;second thought&quot;, an addition, &quot;improvised&quot; half-way through after a &quot;false start&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22124" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T20:32:06.187" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T20:32:06.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28093" CreationDate="2018-06-05T18:09:46.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not that I understand (or approve of) X-bar theory, perhaps the parallelism intended is between the structures of clauses and nominals.  This is the basis of McCawley's version of X-bar theory.  He argues that in nominalization, the structure of V-bar is parallel with the structure of N-bar, replacing &quot;V&quot; by &quot;N&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T18:09:46.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28105" CreationDate="2018-06-06T00:44:01.007" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyday we use words like &quot;although&quot;. I personally have never tried to define it as far as I can remember. One definition of although is &quot;even though&quot;, but what is an &quot;even&quot; though. Even is about numbers and though is, well, &quot;in spite of the fact that&quot;. But &quot;spite&quot; is about intentionally causing annoyance. When I say &quot;although&quot; or &quot;even though&quot; I am not thinking about annoyance, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if there are any linguistic concepts around this sort of stuff, these words we don't necessarily define but we know the meaning of (and how we know the meaning of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T07:45:05.500" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T17:54:41.803" Title="How do we know the definition and meaning of words like &quot;though&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28088" CreationDate="2018-06-06T08:03:51.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't familiar with dialogue acts, and from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26364/what-is-the-difference-between-speech-act-and-dialog-act?rq=1&quot;&gt;What is the difference between Speech Act and Dialog Act?&lt;/a&gt;, dialogue acts appear to be a construct favoured in computational linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech Acts are about what you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; with language, as a social action, through an utterance: making promises, giving instructions, expressing emotion. They are in the domain of pragmatics. Topics are about what subject matter an utterance relates to: they are in the domain of semantics (potentially narrowly truth-conditional semantics). If you go back to Austin's original formulation—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual&#xA;  utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and&#xA;  rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic&#xA;  aspects of any meaningful utterance; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;an illocutionary act: the&#xA;  pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its intended&#xA;  significance as a socially valid verbal action (see below); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;and in&#xA;  certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as&#xA;  persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise&#xA;  getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not&#xA;  (Austin 1962)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— the topic belongs to what Austin calls the rhetic act (producing a semantically coherent utterance), which is a subset of the locutionary act (saying something). It is on a different plane of analysis from the illocutionary act (what you intended to achieve by saying something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conveying meaning about topics is only one of the many possible speech acts, and having relevance to a topic is not a necessary condition for there to be a speech act. On the other hand, if your speech act is assertive, it is intended to convey meaning about some topic; so the existence of that topic is presupposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T08:03:51.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28104" CreationDate="2018-06-06T14:32:38.860" Score="6" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are generally accepted estimates on how many shades of grey (far less than 50!) or how many colours the human eye can distinguish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many different vowels can the human ear distinguish? To qualify as a vowel, the sound must be producible by the human vocal tract, synthesised sounds,  sounds of animals, and sounds of musical instruments don't count here. To make the distinction, the ear of a trained phonetician is the right instrument of measurement, lay people will often overhear finer distinctions that are noticed by an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these conditions, how many vowel sounds can a human ear distinguish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T00:21:51.730" Title="How many different vowels are there?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-06T14:36:00.550" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;University student, beginning to learn about corpora, developing a research question for an assignment. There may well be linguistic concepts and terminology that already cover this idea and that I am not aware of. I would appreciate any knowledge about this that you can give me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to use diachronic corpora to try to determine a usage threshold, or point of no return, below which words typically do not survive in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example:&#xA;Pronominal adverbs in English are mostly used as techinical jargon (e.g. herinafter), archaic (hereunto) or part of everyday English (therefore).&#xA;I analyzed these types of words in NGRAM viewer and noticed that, since the 1560s &quot;therefore&quot; has never fallen below the 1/100ths usage percent and hereunto has never risen above the 1/1,00ths. I'm aware NGRAM may not be the best corpus for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have any studies been published that suggest a usage amount that typically determines if a word will become archaic, or obsolete? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22132" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T14:36:00.550" Title="Is there a threshold of usage of a word, below which it will become an archaism?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28102" CreationDate="2018-06-06T15:23:13.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody knows, and it's an experiment waiting to happen. The first problem that has to be overcome is creating the stimuli (which is the main non-practical impediment to me doing this). For consistency, the stimuli should be synthesized, thus I disagree with the requirement that the stimuli must be produced by a human. You can synthesize things that can't be produced by the vocal tract, so there needs to be articulatory filtering, and needless to say the product has to be subjectively natural-sounding. (There is a separate question, which Ladefoged wrote his dissertation on, namely how much variation there is in expert phonetician production of the cardinal vowels: a follow-up study would be interesting. There is a lot of variation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also disagree with the requirement that trained phoneticians be the only subjects. First, the valid subject pool is quite small, in that trained phoneticians don't receive the level of ear training that they used to a half century ago. Second, limiting the subject pool is invalid given the question, though you could re-phrase the question so that it's not about the human ear (or mind) and make it a question about trained phoneticians. The task is relatively simple: present A, B and answer the question &quot;are these the same?&quot;. Since the question is not about phonemic classification, the training has to include A, A (i.e. actual token repetition) as well as A, B (with some difference). Anecdotally, (English-speaking somewhat naive linguistics undergrad) subjects &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; distinguish absolutely different stimuli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, the other problem is that you have to decide what parameters will remain fixed. Usually when people count vowels, they focus on formant patterns and not F0 differences, source spectrum, amplitude, or duration. As you can imagine, adding all of that on top of formant frequencies would make the project immense. But obviously, these are all (except amplitude) known to be potentially phoneme-defining properties, so not irrelevant to what it means to be &quot;a different vowel&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, &quot;what do you mean by 'distinguish'?&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T15:23:13.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28100" CreationDate="2018-06-06T16:16:52.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; The kind of words you're talking about are  defined not by their referent but by their function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Meta-words&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to draw an extremely rough continuum of word concreteness, it might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) Proper nouns&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;the Statue of Liberty&amp;quot;, where you could point at it directly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) Common nouns&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;dog&amp;quot;, where you could point at any dog as an example of the type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3) Abstract nouns&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;love&amp;quot;, where you could describe some situation in which it's active&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(n-1) Semantic operators&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;the&amp;quot;, that modify a set of referents&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(n) Syntactic operators&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. &amp;quot;although&amp;quot;, that connect units in the linguistic system itself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These last two sets contain meta items. There's no entity, concrete or abstract, to which &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; refers. Instead, it applies a rule to other elements. Similarly, no real-world entity corresponds to &amp;quot;although&amp;quot;. Instead, it's the marker for a certain logical relationship between other elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see in your profile that you're a JavaScript developer. In JS, the word &lt;em&gt;window&lt;/em&gt; refers to a particular entity. So does &lt;em&gt;window.document&lt;/em&gt;. But to what entity does the period &lt;em&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; we see refer? None. Rather, it's an operator that applies the rule &amp;quot;the next item is an attribute of the former&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we know what these words mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt there's a definitive answer to this question (no pun intended), but maybe someone else can speak to the psycholinguistic facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two cents is that as children we learn words for the relationships we perceive between entities and between propositions much as we learn words for everything else we perceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know intrinsically that there is a contradiction to the scenarios described by the propositions &amp;quot;Ahmed's car is in the driveway&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Ahmed is not home&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same way we gradually gather that &amp;quot;mom&amp;quot; refers to a person and &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; refers to a feeling for that person, we gather that &amp;quot;although&amp;quot; names the contradictory quality — though it takes longer cognitive development for us to perceive this relationship than something the eyes can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How we gather &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of those facts is a good question for those who study language acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the child has gathered the function of such a word, they easily abstract that function and use the word freely. For example, they know that &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; lets them contradict something even when they don't know what their objection is or even have an objection in particular. &amp;quot;But — but — &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we define these words?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, this question can be answered since it's a matter of convention! Yes, those words certainly are troublesome to define, being part of the system that is itself used to define things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every language native speakers without grammatical or linguistic training find this difficult. The usual behaviour when asked to define &amp;quot;although&amp;quot; is to give synonyms, often tending towards an (apparently) more atomic synonym like &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;. Once this atom is reached and its definition requested they give examples — contrastive examples with and without the word, if they have good instincts...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do dictionaries do? As noted in the TL;DR, they give not the referent but the function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-meta words like nouns and verbs tend to be defined by synonyms. For example, the OED defines &amp;quot;ship&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;large sea-going vessel&amp;quot;. You could substitute the one for the other in a given sentence and get comprehensible output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the difference in the entry for &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; is stark. Just about every one of the many definitions is a sentence or paragraph expaining the effect of using the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the OED's account of the meaning most people probably think of first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;25.&lt;/strong&gt; Introducing a statement of the nature of an exception, objection, limitation, or contrast to what has gone before; sometimes, in its weakest form, merely expressing disconnexion, or emphasizing the introduction of a distinct or independent fact, as the minor premiss of a syllogism: However, on the other hand, moreover, yet ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's easy to perceive what these words mean but laborious to define them. Although language can be made to describe how it itself is used, that's not the purpose it's best adapted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T17:54:41.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T01:55:40.897" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading about sound only because I like linguistics. I loathe, and have never taken any, physics. But I can do high school math, as I like statistics (not mathematical physics). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm too dumb to understand even the explanations of harmonics/overtones, resonance, formants in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1444334298&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vowels and Consonants&lt;/em&gt; (3rd Edition 2012)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1118505085&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonetics for Dummies&lt;/em&gt; (2013)&lt;/a&gt;.  Thus please recommend something readable that's more rudimentary?  Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No library near me owns &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sound-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198708440&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sound: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0805385657&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Science of Sound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; feels too advanced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T02:01:17.280" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T02:01:17.280" Title="What book introduces sound for laypeople trying to learn phonetics, but who loathe physics?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T10:21:03.737" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to find a common topic given a set of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, by giving the words: &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;red&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;green&lt;/code&gt;, the common theme would be &lt;code&gt;color&lt;/code&gt;, or from &lt;code&gt;beef&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;hamburger&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;salad&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sandwich&lt;/code&gt; I would get &lt;code&gt;food&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there are studies or tools to help with this word categorization&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22054" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T10:21:03.737" Title="Find theme or topic by a set of words" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T10:54:14.390" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have extracted data from a corpus that collected sentences with an antecedent and a next sentence with a pronoun or a stressed pronoun in subject position. Now, the anaphora can either refer back to a subject or an object antecedent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mary passes the book to Sally. She starts reading it.&quot;&#xA;(She can corefer both to Mary (suj) or Sally (obj)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I measure if the cooccurrence of, say, pronoun - subject antecedent is significant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also thought of making count, normalizing the result and compare the means (subject mean vs object mean). Comparing z-scores would be the adequat thing here, correct? But, how do I get the standard deviation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20944" LastEditorUserId="20944" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T09:51:40.087" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T09:51:40.087" Title="What statistical test is appropriate in a corpus analysis of pronoun resolution preferences?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28102" CreationDate="2018-06-08T00:16:12.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least twelve, as there are twelve different vowels in Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then English has a similar number of vowels, which in great part do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; overlap with Portuguese vowels. So, just considering those two languages (admittedly two cases of large vocalic repertoire), we would be close to twenty - and neither include the umlaut sounds that are common to French and German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now: some English vowels are close enough to Portuguese vowels that if they are used instead of the correct vowels, speech is still intelligible. This means that Portuguese speakers would consider those vowels merely different vocalisations of the same vowel: differente phones but not different phonemes, in other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels make up a continuum: if they are close enough, they become indistinguishable. But that &quot;close enough&quot; clause is cultural: there are languages that have only three vowels, /a/, /i/, /u/. To speakers of those languages, /o/ or /e/ are just /u/ and /i/ pronounced with a foreign accent. An Italian or Spanish speaker cannot distinguish the two &quot;e&quot;s of Portuguese; a Portuguese speaker cannot produce the Italian /e/ (wich is an intermediate between the two Portuguese sounds). A language with all those three sounds would probably be difficult, because they would be too close to each others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the answer to your question is probably the following: the number of different vocalic sounds that the human ear can distinguish (in normal conditions, ie, we are not talking about professional musicians or linguists, or poliglots versed in several languages) is variable and determined by the language the human in question speaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another problem: vowels usually differ in timbre (that is the difference between /a/ and /e/, or /i/ and /u/, for instance). But in some languages duration is phonemic, meaning that /i:/ is a different sound than /i/ (that's how Portuguese speakers will figure the difference between &quot;sheep&quot; and &quot;ship&quot;). So, are long and short &quot;i&quot;s different vowels? Still other languages have phonemic pitch, meaning that a high-pitch &quot;a&quot; contrasts with a low-pitch &quot;a&quot; (or more commonly an ascending &quot;a&quot; contrasts with a descending &quot;a&quot;): are those the same sound, or different ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have read that Danish has 32 different vowels - including differences in duration -; if this is true, then it must be close to the upper limit of what a language can feature as different vocalic sounds.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T00:21:51.730" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T00:21:51.730" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-08T10:46:34.790" Score="0" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few opportunities exist to get a better education in the U.S.(1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people said: &quot;&lt;em&gt;It is a correct sentence.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think so and will explain why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part &quot;&lt;strong&gt;to get a better education in the U.S&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; refers to the main verb &quot;&lt;strong&gt;exist&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, as you know, because, it doesn't refer to &quot;&lt;strong&gt;a few opportunities&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If they said:&quot;&lt;em&gt;A few opportunities to get a better education in the U.S exist&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, it would be OK, but right now, it has to refer to &quot;&lt;em&gt;exist&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the infinitive clause &quot;to get a better...&quot; has to function to specify a purpose in that sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that this sentence grammatically means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few opportunities exist because the reason why they exist is to get a better education. Their aim to exist is to get a better education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding &quot;for someone&quot; doesn't even solve that problem as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few opportunities exist for me to get a better education in the U.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems like they exist because their aim to exist is my getting a better education..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally,&#xA;It is easy to read and understand them but the sentence(1) is not a natural sentence, it has no meaning in English grammar.&#xA;It also proves that the questions &quot;&lt;em&gt;What opportunities are there to get a better education&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;What opportunities exist to get a better education&lt;/em&gt;&quot; are also not natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you agree with me? If you don't, could you please explain why? At what point I am wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22107" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T19:23:47.547" Title="One usage of infinitive clause" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28159" CreationDate="2018-06-08T11:30:26.170" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how on-topic this question is but this seemed like the most fitting stackexchange site to post it on. If this doesn't fit here, please let me know and I'll close this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On topic now: suppose a hypothetical scenario in which the Earth receives a radio signal from space that we discover is in fact digitally encoding information. We keep receiving a continuous stream of data from this signal for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given very long periods of time and huge exabytes worth of data over millions of years, constantly trying to decipher it, is it possible for us to be able to decode and understand their language and derive context from all that data (somehow extract information). Suppose that this stream of data are radio communications between aliens and it is unencrypted. However, the information is not encoded in Earth standards (like ASCII encoding or anything similar to what we use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible and, if so, how would we start trying to make sense of this data? I imagine statistical analysis of some sort, as well as some understanding of linguistics is required to at least attempt to decode the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that we never meet these aliens, nor do we observe them. The only thing we know about them is the existence of this signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there even a field of science that specializes in such decoding of info?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22140" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T13:12:47.193" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T19:38:29.793" Title="Deriving context from alien signal" Tags="&lt;analysis&gt;&lt;non-human-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28122" CreationDate="2018-06-08T19:59:16.787" Score="5" ViewCount="1174" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of years ago I started to learn Biblical Hebrew - I still only know the very basics. Lately I've been starting to learn Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often when I learn a new word in Arabic, I notice that it is cognate with a Hebrew word that I've already been exposed to. For example, &quot;al-Kitab&quot; and &quot;Ketovim&quot; (the book, books). This happens so often that I'm starting to get suspicious that the two languages are actually dialects of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I heard that phenomena such as syncretism and cultural influences cause languages to change greatly over even a few centuries. Based on two assumptions/observations -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modern Arabic is supposed to be close to Classical Arabic, perhaps due in part to the cultural influence of the Quran&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew was dead as a vernacular language between the 4th and 19th century. Modern Hebrew has dropped the distinction between certain tenses or inflections which are separate in Biblical Hebrew&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question - is Modern Hebrew still closer to Biblical Hebrew than is Modern Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the answer is the obvious - &quot;yes&quot; - then, can we salvage the question and ask, is there any significant way in which learning Arabic would benefit a hypothetical student of Biblical Hebrew, who already knows Modern Hebrew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T08:44:12.220" Title="Which is closer to Biblical Hebrew - Modern Hebrew, or Modern Arabic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-08T23:43:13.717" Score="4" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to linguistics (fresh off the boat) and am curious if there is some type of equation/field/sub-field that tries to quantify the conceptual similarity between distinct languages. &lt;strong&gt;Not&lt;/strong&gt; just the difference between the syntax itself, but how much the the concepts conveyed by each language differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What got me thinking about this is that some languages (say Chinese vs English) seem to have evolved somewhat independently from each other. Presumably they both try to represent the same world, but what I wonder is how much variability there is in this representation. In other words, can we quantify the degree to which distinct cultures have conceptualized the world differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a mod could tag this question, that'd be great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9160" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T23:43:13.717" Title="Calculating conceptual similarity of distinct languages" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28112" CreationDate="2018-06-08T23:44:08.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the example sentence is jarring because 'a few' can mean anything from 'only a small amount' to 'some'.  I would expect to read 'few opportunities exist' instead (although I would doubt its truth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb 'exist' is very nearly copular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An infinitive phrase can function as a compounding noun phrase attached to a noun, or as a subordinate verb controlled by another verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, indirect objects marked with 'to' (not to be confused with the infinitive marker 'to') are transposable adverbials -- they can appear before or after the direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, you are wrong about what is good/bad grammar, but keep trying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T23:44:08.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28109" CreationDate="2018-06-08T23:56:59.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences with ambiguous antecedents are called &lt;strong&gt;'Winograd schemas'&lt;/strong&gt;, and are useful as tests of strong A.I.  In this case, you must understand that possession of the book passed to Sally, so 'she' most likely refers to Sally when the verb is 'to read'.  The pronoun refers to either Mary or Sally -- there is no 'co-reference'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T23:56:59.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-09T02:18:55.050" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Take some example). Do other languages (than English) have means distinguish between their adjunct nouns and adjectives or is it a very complex/grammatical structure that cannot possibly be represented in any language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T04:33:38.280" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T04:33:38.280" Title="Are there languages which have ways to distinguish between an adjunct noun and an adjective?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28116" CreationDate="2018-06-09T12:36:18.110" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Hebrew is closer to Biblical Hebrew than modern standard Arabic is, by almost any measure of closeness.  Educated modern Hebrew speakers can read Biblical Hebrew, typically better than educated English speakers can read Old English which was written much later than Biblical Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Often when I learn a new word in Arabic, I notice that it is cognate with a Hebrew word that I've already been exposed to. For example, &quot;al-Kitab&quot; and &quot;Ketovim&quot; (the book, books). This happens so often that I'm starting to get suspicious that the two languages are actually dialects of the same language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vocabulary is not a good test of this, Kyrgyz and Urdu also have cognates of the same word.  Hebrew and Arabic are simply in the same sub-family, like English and Crimean Gothic, and in the same macro-family like English and Urdu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also classical Arabic was under heavy Aramaic influence as it expanded to what is now Jordan and Syria, and Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language like Hebrew, so there are reasons for similarities beyond strict phylogenetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if the answer is the obvious - &quot;yes&quot; - then, can we salvage the question and ask, is there any significant way in which learning Arabic would benefit a hypothetical student of Biblical Hebrew, who already knows Modern Hebrew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ashkenazi pronunciation lost some sounds and shifted some others.  Modern Hebrew sounds are roughly the intersection of the sounds of the diverse Hebrew pronunciations in the 19th century.  The Mizrahi or Sephardic pronunciations would have been more historically accurate but for various linguistic and sociological reasons they did not dominate in modern Israel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the sounds or contrasts that are not heard in modern Hebrew are heard in many other Semitic languages including modern standard Arabic.  So learning Arabic would help with some of those ancient pronunciations, but so would learning Mizrahi pronunciation, or, in the case of rolled r, just learning one of many other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are arguments that Maltese, Lebanese, western Syrian and urban Palestinian variants are not Arabic dialects, but in fact Canaanite languages with Arabic superstratum, ie closer to Hebrew (and Aramaic) than to Arabic, in vocabulary and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there would be some benefit to it, like with any related languages, but maybe there are more efficient ways to get that benefit than learning modern standard Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T08:44:12.220" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T08:44:12.220" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2018-06-09T14:03:53.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alain Pannetier answers this pretty comprehensively, but there are some other notable exceptions where the word for the colour &quot;orange&quot; is cognate to neither &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Portugal&lt;/em&gt;, nor &lt;em&gt;appelsien&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other fruits&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Arabic&lt;/code&gt; تُـرُنْج‎ (&lt;em&gt;turunj&lt;/em&gt;) / &lt;code&gt;Persian&lt;/code&gt; ترنج‎ (&lt;em&gt;toranj&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citrus_medica&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;citron&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Catalan&lt;/code&gt; taronja&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Turkish&lt;/code&gt; turuncu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofhaus01robiuoft#page/232/mode/2up/search/lemo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Arabic&lt;/code&gt; لَيْمُون‎ (&lt;em&gt;laymūn&lt;/em&gt;) , &lt;code&gt;Persian&lt;/code&gt; لیمو‎ (&lt;em&gt;limu&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hausa&lt;/code&gt; lemu, lemo &quot;lime, lemon&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Armenian&lt;/code&gt; գազար &quot;carrot&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Armenian&lt;/code&gt; գազարագույն (&lt;em&gt;gazaraguyn&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Catalan&lt;/code&gt; carabassa, carbassa &quot;pumpkin&quot; &lt;code&gt;(Valencia)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Portuguese&lt;/code&gt; abóbora &quot;pumpkin&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Spanish&lt;/code&gt; mamey &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammea_americana&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;mammee&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;(Dom. Rep.)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hebrew&lt;/code&gt; כתום (&lt;em&gt;katom&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;sub&gt;(the fruit is called תפוז (&lt;em&gt;tapooz&lt;/em&gt;) abbreviation of &lt;em&gt;tapuach&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;zahav&lt;/em&gt;, “golden apple”)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;red&quot; + yellow&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Welsh&lt;/code&gt; melyngoch &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;melyn&lt;/em&gt; (“yellow”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;coch&lt;/em&gt; (“red”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Cornish&lt;/code&gt; rudhvelyn &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;rudh&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;red&quot;) +‎ &lt;em&gt;melyn&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;yellow&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Faroese&lt;/code&gt; brandgulur &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;brandur&lt;/em&gt; (“fire”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;gulur&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;yellow&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Irish&lt;/code&gt; flannbhuí &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;flann&lt;/em&gt; (“blood-red”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;buí&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;yellow&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Misc.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/code&gt;  σανδαράκινος (&lt;em&gt;sandaràkinos&lt;/em&gt;) &quot;the color of the legs of birds&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The word for the fruit &quot;orange&quot; in the languages of Europe:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OYk8L.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OYk8L.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The spread of the word for the fruit &quot;orange&quot;:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rIBmr.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rIBmr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/7kyo3d/spread_of_the_word_for_orange_963733/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Errata:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In German &lt;em&gt;Pomeranze&lt;/em&gt; refers to the bitter/Seville orange. &lt;em&gt;Orange/Apfelsine&lt;/em&gt; is orange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Norwegian &lt;em&gt;oransje&lt;/em&gt; is the colour; &lt;em&gt;appelsin&lt;/em&gt; is the fruit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T18:45:47.397" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T18:45:47.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6171" CreationDate="2018-06-09T14:29:02.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use : &lt;a href=&quot;https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;It's practical and at first, it makes you understand what's what over there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22051" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T14:29:02.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28126" CreationDate="2018-06-09T17:07:34.757" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a non-native speaker who started using English about a decade ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is sometimes when I first encounter a new word, I fail to predict its correct prononciation. So, I check the dictionary to avoid learning it the wrong way. I like to tell myself that sometimes the pronunciation of some vowels is arbitrary; sometimes I just can't predict the exact pronunciation of words I've never seen, so I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I came across the word 'flaky'. I thought the 'a' could either be as in &#xA;'flashy' or as in 'flamy', meaning it is completely up to convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation correct? Could 'flaky' have been similar to 'flashy'? In other words, am I right in thinking there is no English phonological rule determining its pronunciation?&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5628" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T01:31:34.980" Title="Is the choice of /eɪ/ over /æ/ in 'flaky' arbitrary?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28125" CreationDate="2018-06-09T17:18:24.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the modern word had an /æ/, you would see it written &quot;flacky&quot;, since historically the lengths of vowels changed when followed by a single consonant versus a long consonant or cluster before certain suffixes (including -y, -ing, -ed). And after the Great Vowel Shift, the difference has been quality rather than quantity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds complicated, but it's the rule every English-speaker learns in school, in its simplest form: when you have a vowel, one consonant, and an E, the vowel becomes &quot;long&quot;. Consider the pairs rat/rate, pet/Pete, sit/site, rot/rote, cut/cute. Historically these pairs had actual long versus short vowels, but the Great Vowel Shift mixed them up spectacularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays &amp;lt;ck&gt; and &amp;lt;k&gt; are pronounced the same (just like &amp;lt;p&gt; versus &amp;lt;pp&gt; etc) and are only used to show the qualities of the surrounding vowels. This is why the borrowed verb &quot;to picnic&quot; has present participle &quot;picnicking&quot;: to show that it should be pronounced with /ɪ/ (historically /i/) rather than /aj/ (historically /iː/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T18:05:28.910" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T18:05:28.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-09T20:14:42.190" Score="12" ViewCount="2512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a book called &quot;A guide to the birds of Trinidad and Tobago&quot; and the author is named as &quot;Richard ffrench&quot; with a small &quot;f&quot;. The author's name is spelled the same way by the Library of Congress, with a lower-case letter starting the surname. What is the origin of this strange spelling? I would guess this &quot;ff&quot; is supposed to represent some special letter which is not a normal part of the Roman alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="15261" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T11:34:32.640" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T05:36:50.707" Title="The letter &quot;ff&quot; in the name “Richard ffrench”?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28127" CreationDate="2018-06-09T20:39:17.867" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Oxford English Dictionary's page for &lt;em&gt;F&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In manuscripts a capital F was often written as ff. A misunderstanding of this practice has caused the writing of Ff or ff at the beginning of certain family names, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; Ffiennes, Ffoulkes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/AJT8111.0001.001/1:3.3.7.4?rgn=div4;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The pilgrimage of the life of man, English by John Lydgate, A. D. 1426&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a manuscript where a lot of words were written this way, such as in &quot;[...] an holsomme Refuge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;whan they &lt;strong&gt;fflen&lt;/strong&gt; to the &lt;strong&gt;ffor&lt;/strong&gt; socour [...]&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T20:39:17.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-09T23:27:50.517" Score="6" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this unique to certain families of language or all verbal human language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22152" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:20:02.910" Title="Is there a universal basis for consonants vs vowels?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28130" CreationDate="2018-06-10T00:31:49.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question can be interpreted as asking a lot of different things, and it's not clear what exactly you mean by &quot;universal basis for consonants vs vowels&quot;. There a a number of schemes for describing speech sounds which purport to apply to all languages: basically, a number of feature theories, and the articulatory labels of IPA letters. IPA isn't a scientific theory, it's a convention, so it doesn't really make claims the way a feature theory would. The terminology used to describe vowels in the IPA is largely distinct from the terminology used for consonants. In that sense, IPA puts consonant and vowels on opposite sides of the fence, if what's what you mean by &quot;versus&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the realm of feature theories, the systems of Jakobson &amp;amp; Halle 1956 and Chomsky and Halle 1968 use a system of features that can apply to both consonants and vowels, although given the phonetic definitions of some of the features, certain values can't be assigned to vowels (for example neither [-continuant] nor [+anterior] can be assigned to a vowel). There have been many adjustments to feature theories, some modifications making vowel features and consonant features be more different while other make them be more similar. For example, for a while there was a distinction between &quot;dorsal&quot; and &quot;velar&quot;, the former being about tongue position in vowels and the latter being about velar consonants, which in Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle are governed by [back] and [hi].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interpretation of the question would be, &quot;can consonants and vowels always be distinguished in all languages&quot;, and the answer there is &quot;Probably not&quot;. The Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle system does not have a feature that corresponds neatly to &quot;consonant&quot; and &quot;vowel&quot;. It has a feature &quot;consonantal&quot;, but that is different from &quot;consonant&quot; since [j w ʔ h] are consonants but not [+consonantal]. There is a feature [syllabic], where all traditional vowels are [+syllabic], but there are also syllabic sonorants like [r̩ m̩] etc. which are [+syllabic], yet consonants in some sense. Moreover, there isn't always some grammatical fact that puts [p d m l w s h] on one side of the line and [i ɪ a o] on the other. If you can decide what things you want to call &quot;consonants&quot; (glide being the problem) and what you want to call &quot;vowels&quot; (syllabic sonorant being the problem), then you can usually construct a description of those two sets in your theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is &quot;is there a functional explanation for having consonants versus vowels?&quot;, given that languages don't tend to just pile up string of consonants, or string of vowels, to make words -- there is a tendency to alternate consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel. There is a subtle force that pushes things in the direction of alternating CV, which is that CVCVCV enhances ability to perceive individual segments. The problem with consonants is that they tend to have little or no acoustic energy so they are hard to distinguish. The problem with vowels is that your mouth is open and you're leaking air rapidly, and moving from one vowel articulation to another is very slow and smeary, so it's hard to keep track of which vowels were uttered in what order in something like [ieɔuaʌɛæi]. If you interleave consonants and vowels in a pattern like [piketɔlupasʌtɛkæni], there is a very rapid and easy-to perceive change from consonant to vowel, and you slow down the leakage of air so you can talk longer. (That's the really abbreviated version of the functional story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T19:20:02.910" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:20:02.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28125" CreationDate="2018-06-10T01:31:34.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Predicting the pronunciation of an English word from its spelling is fairly tricky, especially when you’re dealing with vowels. The “short vowel before a double consonant” rule is a lot more reliable than a supposed “double consonant after a short vowel” rule—many words, such as “body”, “copy” and “Spanish”, are pronounced with “short” vowels despite being spelled with single consonant letters between vowel letters. Usually, you do have to look up a word like this in the dictionary to be complete sure about its pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T01:31:34.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28142" CreationDate="2018-06-10T06:42:11.260" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D#Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;निस्·nis&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;out, forth, away&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A3#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nirvana&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;to blow out, extinguish; out of breath?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BF#Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;नि·ni&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;down, back, in, into&amp;quot; &amp;lt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%81%C3%A9n&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PIE *h₁én&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;in; down?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether these words are from the same PIE root? And If they are cognates, how does the meaning shift from &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;out&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: this is a post involving diachronic semantics, which I assume to be a subbranch of linguistics, so why did the close-voters vote &amp;quot;off-topic&amp;quot; option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T13:21:29.403" Title="Does Sanskrit निस् • (nis) &quot;out, forth, away&quot; come from PIE *ni- &quot;in; down?&quot; with meaning shift from &quot;in&quot; to &quot;out&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28141" CreationDate="2018-06-10T14:36:12.483" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/definiens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definiens - Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(semantics) The word or phrase that defines the definiendum in a definition.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the defining statement “A lake is a large, landlocked, naturally occurring stretch of water”, “large, landlocked, naturally occurring stretch of water” is the definiens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the term to describe “large&quot;, &quot;landlocked&quot;, &quot;naturally&quot;, etc? &lt;em&gt;Definiens&lt;/em&gt; also? All I know that if we have a definition &quot;An elephant is an animal&quot;, then &lt;em&gt;animal&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypernym&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;elephant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definition - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T04:34:57.557" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T14:55:22.323" Title="What is the term describing a word using in the definition of another word?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28137" CreationDate="2018-06-10T16:06:51.187" Score="0" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I write this Arabic word in Unicode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rq2dJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rq2dJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;word&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/06ba/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dotless noon&lt;/a&gt; (ں) but I got this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;اںاںلںس&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is rendered with dots on my PC:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lOpBj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lOpBj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I try combining multiple dotless noons, they get dots - all but the last one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ں&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ںں&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ںںں&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ںںںں&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this intended behaviour? How do I render the original word in Unicode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21829" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T20:14:10.557" Title="Dotless noon (ں) gets a dot in non-final positions" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-06-11T12:09:26.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2018-06-10T17:29:41.297" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hardly any language in modern times will have an entire verb lexicon to be a closed class (or more accurately, a finite set) semantically and pragmatically. Just like nouns, it's just not in the nature of verbs to be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Yorùbá, there is a closed class of cannonical verbs only identifiable by morphology, namely a CV structure (e.g. bà, bá, ge, sè, rí, kà, gbó, etc... note that [gb] is one sound, a voiced labio-velar plosive). Accounting for the tone on V and possible C+V combinations, they total 540 (Déchaine, 2015). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are probably the first ever predicates of basic states and events in the language from a diachronic point of view. They are highly and richly polysemous as well as combinatorial (with nouns, with other verbs in a serial verb construction, etc), which can cause a lot of headache for a foreign learner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with the Igbo language is totally wrong, as has been clarified for us by Chinedu Uchechukwu above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22156" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T00:05:40.870" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T00:05:40.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28135" CreationDate="2018-06-10T20:14:10.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes down to the way Unicode works: it encodes &lt;em&gt;semantic meanings&lt;/em&gt;, not actual glyph shapes. Some fonts might display &quot;a&quot; with a hook on top, while others might not, and neither is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the letter is used differently in different languages. Its official name is &quot;NOON GHUNNA&quot;, a letter used in Urdu to indicate nasalization &lt;em&gt;at the end of words&lt;/em&gt;. Since it's only used at the end of words, it's not expected to be used with another letter after it, and fonts generally reuse the glyphs they've already created for normal nūn instead of making new ones that will never be used in Urdu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Unicode has clarified that this is a bug: recent versions of the Standard suggest that NOON GHUNNA should be dotless in all four contextual forms (though it's not mandated). If you have a font with multiple versions (like Noto), see if you can use one built for Arabic instead of Urdu: when this letter is used in Arabic, it's always supposed to be dotless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/634&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this bug report&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T20:14:10.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30326" CreationDate="2018-06-10T20:42:51.250" Score="6" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hobby linguistic learner here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farsi naturally shares a lot of simple words with other Indo-European languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German for [daughter]: &quot;Tochter&quot; / &quot;doxtar&quot; (دختر)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English for [bad]: &quot;bad&quot;/&quot;bad&quot; (بد)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian for [thank you]: &quot;Spasiba&quot; (Спасибо) / sepasgozar (سپاسگزار*)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;Are&quot; (آره), the casual word used in northern Iran for [yes] doesn't quite sound the same as &quot;Ja/Yeah/Da (да)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farsi speakers from central Iran, especially small towns and villages, frequently use &quot;Ha&quot; (ها) instead of آره , and ها sounds &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; more like &quot;Ja&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did ancient or middle Persian use ها or maybe even &quot;xa&quot; (خوا) for [yes]? If yes, how did آری take its place with some speakers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what its worth, I think خوا was the original word. The verb &quot;to want&quot; in Farsi is خواستن, and the idea of agreeing or responding positively with &quot;yes&quot; carries connotations of positive wanting in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Also, is &quot;sepas&quot; (سپاس) an example of how Farsi lost the Middle Persian morpheme &quot;spa&quot;? Wikipedia mentions that the Sassanian name for Isfahan was &quot;Spahan&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19609" LastEditorUserId="12994" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T03:16:16.767" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T22:20:59.063" Title="Did modern Farsi lose its casual word for yes?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2018-06-11T00:23:25.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many languages wherein the part of speech category 'verb' (inflecting for person-number and TAM) is a closed class. These languages are common in north Australia, some having as few as five verbs and others up to 250. In New Guinea this is a common feature of languages of the Trans New Guinea language family, which typically have 60–150 verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs with closed verb classes make up for this lack by having large, open classes of complex predicates created by combining verbs with other parts of speech. Many north Australian languages have an open POS 'coverb' (sometimes called 'preverb'), which is a non-inflecting lexeme that combines with an inflecting verb to form a specific semantic unit. The Trans New Guinea language Kalam has an open class POS known as 'verb adjunct' which operates in a similar way to the north Australian coverbs, combining with inflecting verbs to provide specific meanings. Kalam also employs a rich system of serial verb constructions, which provide another way of representing events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lingsymp/Pawley_paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pawley (2006)&lt;/a&gt; provides an overview of complex predicates in Jaminjung (north Australia) and Kalam (Trans New Guinea family) and compares them with English, finding striking similarities in regard to the frequency and meaning of particular concepts expressed by inflecting verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T00:23:25.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-11T13:49:34.887" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about the use of scare-quotes in English speech, not the physical gesture so much as the intonation and prosodic features as the word or phrase is used in an oral statement.  What label is applied in linguistics to this speech phenomenon where a word is isolated and highlighted to indicate that it is being quoted, or perhaps quoted back at an interlocutor, or that it is being used with some caveat, or advisedly, or in some other special or unusual way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6857" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T12:02:32.707" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T12:02:32.707" Title="what is the (pan) linguistic term for &quot;scare-quotes&quot; intonation" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28134" CreationDate="2018-06-11T14:55:22.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;strong&gt;keyword&lt;/strong&gt; can be used if the context is clear that it doesn't refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguistic sense&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T14:55:22.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28133" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:07:43.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit ni “down” and niṣ “out” are two different words. The former is cognate with the first part of German “nieder”. The latter does not have any assured cognates outside of Indo-Iranian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:07:43.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14784" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:52:54.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a paper by Jiampojamarn and Kondrak: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P10-1080&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter-Phoneme Alignment: An Exploration&lt;/a&gt; that comes with software: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/letter-to-phoneme/m2m-aligner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;m2m-aligner&lt;/a&gt;. This can work on cmudict (but you need to reformat cmudict). I ran it without the emphasis markers and got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;j|u|l|i:e|      JH|UW|L|IY|&#xA;g|h|o:u|l|      G|_|UW|L|&#xA;r|o|b|e:r|t|    R|AA|B|ER|T|&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reproducibility&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I ran:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git clone --depth 1 \&#xA;    https://github.com/letter-to-phoneme/m2m-aligner.git&#xA;cd m2m-aligner&#xA;perl -pi -e 's/-lgcc_s//' makefile&#xA;make&#xA;curl -O \&#xA; http://svn.code.sf.net/p/cmusphinx/code/trunk/cmudict/cmudict-0.7b&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I converted the cmudict format to what m2m-aligner wanted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import re&#xA;f = open('cmudict.txt', 'w')&#xA;for line in open('cmudict-0.7b', 'r', encoding='latin1'):&#xA;    if not re.match(r'^[a-zA-Z\d\s]+$', line): continue&#xA;    word, phonemes = line.strip().split(' ', 1)&#xA;    if not re.match(r'^[a-zA-Z]+$', word): continue&#xA;    print(' '.join(word.lower()), '\t',&#xA;          re.sub(r'\d\b', '', phonemes.strip()),&#xA;          sep='', file=f)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I ran&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./m2m-aligner --delX --maxX 2 --maxY 2 -i cmudict.txt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output is in &lt;code&gt;cmudict.txt.m-mAlign.2-2.delX.1-best.conYX.align&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22163" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:52:54.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18890" CreationDate="2018-06-11T17:16:12.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those people who have ambitious aims for NLP. If you want to reveal secret insights from your corpus, you need to work on it. Supervised learning is mostly used for labeling your features. Then thanks to some ML algorithms you are creating model that is suitable for your work. At that point, you need someone/people to label your corpus. Annotators are taking stepping in that stage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22051" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T17:16:12.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28140" CreationDate="2018-06-11T20:14:09.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For verbs, under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_moods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_moods&lt;/a&gt; we find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;optionally sarcastic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admirative_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;admirative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;inferential&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a.k.a. &lt;em&gt;renarrative&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;oblique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubitative_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dubitative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could apply &lt;strong&gt;dubitative&lt;/strong&gt; to intonation or punctuation of other parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T20:14:09.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T09:42:44.277" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand this is a complex issue but I wonder if someone here can shed some light on the current understanding of this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a Portuguese father of two living in Germany. My wife is German. I have two children (aged 5 and 7). Both were born in England. Until ages 2.5 and 4.5 (while we were still in England) I talked to them in Portuguese, they would listen to English during their daily lives and my wife spoke German. They were trilingual in the sense that they understood Portuguese and German but they spoke mainly English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we came to Germany, since they lost any English connection I started speaking English to them, my wife kept speaking German but now they hear German in their daily lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that they mostly lost their Portuguese and their English is rather poor as I am their sole source of English. Their German is close to native now but I don't speak German properly, having trouble understanding what they say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for children to gain fluency in a language (in this case Portuguese) if I started speaking Portuguese to them (therefore dropping English), given I would be their sole source of Portuguese and as a full time worker I only spend weekends and evenings with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22165" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T09:42:44.277" Title="Language Acquisition in Children from single parent" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T12:49:33.567" Score="3" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for APIs for the &lt;strong&gt;detection of sentence stress&lt;/strong&gt;, also known as prosodic stress, &lt;strong&gt;based on input audio.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ideally, I was hoping for a library able to assess the level of prominence of a certain word compared to others in the same sentence, e.g.: on a 0 to 1 scale.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is currently no such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While word stress (syllable stress) is fairly easy to detect (e.g.: using a pronouncing dictionary and audio alignment), sentence stress detection seems to still have a long way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some of the challenges behind it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the likely evolution of the research on the topic within the next few years?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this is not too broad a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I'm looking for this information to automatically show people which word receives the most stress (and if possible which other words receive some degree of emphasis) in sentences with audio, in the context of teaching ESL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastEditorUserId="3548" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T07:39:39.637" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:51:24.807" Title="Sentence stress detection" Tags="&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18812" CreationDate="2018-06-12T20:11:13.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;oiwei&quot; comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&amp;amp;mode=Vernetzung&amp;amp;lemid=GA02630#XGA02630&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;alleweile&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Then the west-middle-Bavarian r/l-vocalization gives you &quot;oi&quot; from &quot;all(e)&quot; and the ending &quot;-l&quot; is dropped (I miss the proper term). East-middle-Bavarian would make monophtong from &quot;oi&quot; thus in Vienna you hear &quot;öwei(l)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12990" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T20:11:13.290" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T22:23:35.370" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about how writing systems like Burmese or Thai - the characters of which look to my untrained eye far more similar than Latin or Japanese characters - are distinguished by native readers, and non-native readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any studies done into whether the characters in certain writing systems are more or less &lt;strong&gt;visually distinct&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this I mean, many of the glyphs are easy to differentiate from one another, as opposed to &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;, for example, or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;シ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ツ&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to see whether anyone has come up with a way of comparing different writing systems according to their distinctiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T12:42:39.987" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T07:34:38.463" Title="Are the characters in some writing systems more or less visually distinctive than in others?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;readability&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T23:22:46.623" Score="6" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've already found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.0n0e.com/public/phoneme-synthesis/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tool from 0n0e.com&lt;/a&gt; but the problem is that it pronounces the words too quickly. Is there any other phoneme synthesis online which speaks a bit slower?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22172" OwnerDisplayName="Ender Look" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T13:24:20.287" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T13:24:20.287" Title="Online tool for IPA pronunciation synthesis" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28147" CreationDate="2018-06-13T04:14:07.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also don't know of any ready-made tool that does this. It would be very helpful to know roughly what you were hoping to use this for, since that would dictate exactly what kind of tool you would need to use. Praat of course has the ability to quantify many of the phonetic correlates of stress, such as pitch and volume, so if that's all you need then there you go. You did say you were hoping for something to give you some sort of score for the different words in a sentence and Praat won't be able to give you that alone. Unless somebody knows of something that somebody has already made, it's probable that you'd have to make your own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some difficulties that spring to mind are (1) that the phonetic correlates of &quot;stress&quot; vary from language to language, though my understanding is that sentence-level stress is more consistent cross-linguistically than say word stress, which isn't even necessarily a thing in some languages, e.g. tonal languages; and (2) that many suprasegmental phonetic cues change over the length of an utterance. E.g., speakers use more air at the beginning of an utterance because they have more air to use, not having spent as much talking yet. This leads to a gradual fall in pitch over the course of an utterance, meaning that often the &quot;stressed&quot; parts of an utterance will be high-pitch only relative to where the pitch would normally be at that point in the sentence, and lower-pitch in absolute terms to everything that came before it. I usually only work with word-level prosody, but I know that for example Mandarin's so-called &quot;rising&quot; tone (tone 2) is often realized with a flat pitch, while the &quot;flat&quot; pitch (tone 1) often falls at a normal rate for its position in the utterance, and its &quot;falling&quot; pitch falls faster (or simply starts lower). I can't say for sure, but I would assume something very similar happens for volume, and there's probably some effect on speech rate that would affect the duration of the stressed word as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T04:14:07.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T05:19:04.673" Score="2" ViewCount="863" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi my country's language is not in nltk in python. I have a wordlist that contains word and part of speech (noun, verd adj etc.) in excel. But I don't know how to build a corpus. My language is not in python nltk. How to build tag pos for my language in nltk in python?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22173" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T12:10:07.523" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T12:39:39.477" Title="How to tag_pos in nltk for a language that is not English?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28151" CreationDate="2018-06-13T06:53:53.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked page is prominently open source. You can probably download the sources to your own computer and tweak the parameters to make it speak more slowly. It links to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/&lt;/a&gt; which displays detailed controls for amplitude, pitch, speed, word gap, etc. The same controls are hardcoded into &lt;code&gt;mespeak.js&lt;/code&gt; in the fragment &lt;code&gt;$speed=175;$amp=100;$wordgap=0&lt;/code&gt; so you can probably simply edit that in-place. I have not looked into how hard it is to install required dependencies etc to make it actually run on your own web server (or even, gasp, in a local file with no server).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T06:53:53.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28113" CreationDate="2018-06-13T15:22:29.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could probably use some sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word embedding&lt;/a&gt; technique. This could detect semantical relations such as synonymy, antonymy and so on, but there's no way of knowing if they would correspond to our own semantic spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on how this embedding could be mapped to Earth languages see &lt;a href=&quot;http://ruder.io/cross-lingual-embeddings/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22177" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T15:22:29.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28147" CreationDate="2018-06-13T16:20:37.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching online returns quite a few results, some of which are quite tailored to your needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tepperman, J., &amp;amp; Narayanan, S. (2005, March). Automatic syllable stress detection using prosodic features for pronunciation evaluation of language learners. In &lt;em&gt;2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Proceedings&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 1, pp. I-937). IEEE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This paper presents a new technique for automatic syllable stress detection that is tailored for language-learning purposes. Our method, which uses basic prosodic features and others related to the fundamental frequency slope and RMS energy range, is at least as accurate as an expert human listener, but requires no human supervision other than a pre-defined dictionary of expected lexical stress patterns for all words in the system’s vocabulary. Optimal feature choices exhibited an 87-89% accuracy compared with human-tagged stress labels, exceeding the inter-human agreement commonly held to be about 80%. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.9566&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.9566&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imoto, K., Tsubota, Y., Raux, A., Kawahara, T., &amp;amp; Dantsuji, M. (2002). Modeling and automatic detection of English sentence stress for computer-assisted English prosody learning system. In &lt;em&gt;Seventh International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.&lt;/em&gt; (This seems closest to what you need)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We address sentence-level stress detection of English for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) by Japanese students. Stress models are set up by considering syllable structure and position of the syllable in a phrase, which will provide diagnostic information for students. We also propose a two-stage recognition method that first detects the presence of stress and then identifies the stress level using different weighted combinations of acoustic features. The modeling is coherent with conventional linguistic observations. The method achieves stress recognition rate of 95.1% for native and 84.1% for Japanese speakers. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~antoine/papers/icslp2002b.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~antoine/papers/icslp2002b.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ananthakrishnan, S., &amp;amp; Narayanan, S. S. (2005, March). An automatic prosody recognizer using a coupled multi-stream acoustic model and a syntactic-prosodic language model. In &lt;em&gt;2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Proceedings&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 1, pp. I-937). IEEE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this paper, we build a prosody recognition system that detects stress and prosodic boundaries at the word and syllable level in American English using a coupled Hidden Markov Model (CHMM) to model multiple, asynchronous acoustic feature streams and a syntactic-prosodic model that captures the relationship between the syntax of the utterance and its prosodic structure. Experiments show that the recognizer achieves about 75% agreement on stress labeling and 88% agreement on boundary labeling at the syllable level. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sail.usc.edu/publications/files/ananthakrishnanicassp2005.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sail.usc.edu/publications/files/ananthakrishnanicassp2005.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T16:51:24.807" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:51:24.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21479" CreationDate="2018-06-13T16:39:19.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a ligature of (ɔ + e) being used unofficially. maybe that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22178" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:39:19.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28113" CreationDate="2018-06-13T19:38:29.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without context, you have no way of deciphering this. Try to free yourself from your humanocentric view of sequential, audio-oral language transferring concepts that are familiar to you. There are just too many variables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The signal can encode video because the aliens communicate in sign language or by producing &lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.scoopwhoop.com/anj/Arrival/0435585b-a216-4d0c-9d9e-01de8f436d39.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ink patches that they telekinetically shape into signs&lt;/a&gt;. It may encode chemical structure for a smell based language, it may be a direct mind-to-mind telepathic signal not based on any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articulated elements&lt;/a&gt;. Or it may be a television signal, so speech accompanied by imagery. Or any combination of the above and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then of course you have no idea what the topic is... love poetry? Hatespeech to the fellow co-aliens? Concepts beyond anything we, pathetic meatbags can imagine because they are the dreams of energy based entities living in the heart of a star?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in a comment below the question - without any context, the signal is just noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T19:38:29.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T20:02:53.713" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find machine readable datasets for use in phylogenetic estimation? I am looking for anything---lexical cognate data, phonological data, morphosyntactic data---in any language family.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22179" LastEditorUserId="22179" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T05:31:14.073" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T05:31:47.413" Title="Where do I find datasets for linguistic phylogenetics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28160" CreationDate="2018-06-14T09:36:30.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a quick and dirty approach to phylogenetics, you can look for Swadesh lists for many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For doing something better, I am afraid you will have to vet your data carefully, use the best etymological dictionaries available, and prepare it on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T09:36:30.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28153" CreationDate="2018-06-14T12:28:46.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 5 of the online NLTK book&lt;/a&gt; explains the concepts and procedures you would use to create a tagged corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several taggers which can use a tagged corpus to build a tagger for a new language.  You will probably want to experiment with at least a few of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tagged corpus is better than just a list of words because many languages have ambiguities, and working with a large enough collection of representative samples allows you to cope with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, an English lexicon would simply tell you that &quot;to&quot; has two possible POS tags (infinitive marker or preposition) but given enough examples in context, training a tagger hopefully sorts out which reading is correct in which context.  The training might establish that &quot;to&quot; before an uninflected verb gets the &lt;code&gt;INF&lt;/code&gt; tag, and assign &lt;code&gt;PREP&lt;/code&gt; elsewhere (though reality is somewhat more complex than that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your language has a radically different orthography than the NLTK taggers are constructed to cope with, this is probably too simplistic, but assuming you are dealing with something resembling Latin or Cyrillic script, the examples in the book should be straightforward to apply to your language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/book/ch11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 11&lt;/a&gt; which focuses more on the collection and management side of the corpus process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastEditorUserId="1668" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T12:39:39.477" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T12:39:39.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-14T16:38:37.393" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gender, at least in romance languages (but generally in many SAE languages), can be described briefly as an intrinsic lexical property of nouns that trigger an agreement in its dependents : a noun belongs to one class, and its dependents (typically determiners and adjectives) must agree in gender with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in Spanish : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;la hija buena&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be glossed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'the.FEM daughter good.FEM'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the good daughter&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &quot;la&quot; and &quot;good&quot; are in the feminine because they're dependencies of a feminine noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages where such a system exists for other parts of speech ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example a language where adjectives would belong to one of two or more classes and trigger an agreement among their dependent adverbs ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such that a gloss could look like this, assuming that the adjective for &quot;young&quot; belong in class number II :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'very.II young'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T16:38:37.393" Title="Are there languages with agreement classes similar to gender but for other parts of speech?" Tags="&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2018-06-14T23:21:09.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question doesn't really have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, there is a contrast between the weak form of &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;recently,&lt;/em&gt; /dʒəst/, and the word &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt;, /dʒʌst/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use the weak form of &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; almost all the time, and the vowel is definitely different from the one I use in &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I perceive them as different phonemes. But many Americans pronounce them exactly the same, and these Americans would probably perceive them as the same phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1049" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T23:21:09.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28127" CreationDate="2018-06-15T03:45:21.713" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other theories: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(ff) was not word-initial, originally, and there was no uppercase for it; the doubling was to indicate that a short vowel preceded, within the same word (at the beginning of the word, there could not be a preceding vowel).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#F&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(f) came to replace digraph (ph)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#P&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#P&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping the &lt;em&gt;ff&lt;/em&gt; small might have been to mark off the difference from &lt;em&gt;phrene&lt;/em&gt;, if to derive &lt;em&gt;ffrench&lt;/em&gt; from &quot;de Freynes&quot; as here; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mysurna.me/surname.php?s=ffrench%20Beytagh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mysurna.me/surname.php?s=ffrench%20Beytagh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google translate would show the Danish &lt;em&gt;inferiore freniske arterier&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;inferior French arteries&lt;/em&gt;, even today. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YXZPd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YXZPd.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monks and scribes marked off a correlation with the Armenian small letter ben, բ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Armenian_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Armenian_script&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Armenian alphabet and Latin, Coptic, Georgian, as well as Cyrillic scripts were sister systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of earliest translations of the Bible was into Armenian, in the 5th-century (I do not know, if there were earlier in distribution; Wycliffe was XIV, Jakub Wujek was XVI century). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 18 century it became customary to capitalize digraph first letter, therefore the spelling &lt;em&gt;Ffrench&lt;/em&gt; is not incorrect, as well as the spelling &lt;em&gt;ffrench&lt;/em&gt; may be retained, for name histories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13231" LastEditorUserId="13231" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T05:33:24.650" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T05:33:24.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-15T04:39:51.887" Score="1" ViewCount="904" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Python, I have an input of list like following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[('S', ['NP', 'VP']),&#xA;('A', ['V', 'NP']),&#xA;('VP', ['V', 'NP']),&#xA;('NP', ['DET', 'NP']),&#xA;('N', &quot;'mouse'&quot;),&#xA;('NP', &quot;'mouse'&quot;),&#xA;('DET', &quot;'the'&quot;),&#xA;('V', &quot;'saw'&quot;),&#xA;('N', &quot;'Ron'&quot;),&#xA;('NP', &quot;'Ron'&quot;)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the result of the following CYK algorithm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;S -&amp;gt; NP VP&#xA;VP -&amp;gt; A NP | V NP&#xA;NP -&amp;gt; N N | DET NP | 'chocolate' | 'cat' | 'John' | 'Ron' | 'mouse'&#xA;DET -&amp;gt; 'the'&#xA;N -&amp;gt; 'chocolate' | 'cat' | 'John' | 'Ron' | 'mouse'&#xA;V -&amp;gt; 'saw' | 'bought' | 'ate'&#xA;A -&amp;gt; V NP&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The string that I want to match with is &quot;Ron saw the mouse&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to relate output like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S (NP Ron) (VP (V saw) (NP (DET the) (NP mouse))))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how the algorithm should be constructed especially with an ambiguous algorithm which may contain multiple outputs. &#xA;How should I construct code? Any suggestion what should be a better approach with/without recursion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I managed to get a single exact parse tree after adding extra parents and child nodes position values with the input list. But my problem doesn't solve with the ambiguous sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17322" LastEditorUserId="21993" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T18:28:29.963" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T18:28:29.963" Title="Python list to Parse tree" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-16T19:18:40.833" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know that infinitive clauses can sometimes refer to adjectives before nouns. I feel with what adjectives they can do that, but I don't have any reason for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can buy &lt;strong&gt;the best book to read&lt;/strong&gt;. = You can buy the book which is &lt;strong&gt;the best to read.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;enough money to go to Italy&lt;/strong&gt;. = I have money that is &lt;strong&gt;enough to go to Italy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I met &lt;strong&gt;a nice friend to hang out with&lt;/strong&gt;. = I met a friend who is &lt;strong&gt;nice to hang out with.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the sentences above are okay, why are the following ones wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If they are also correct, then there is no problem, but someone said they were wrong. I am not sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;strong&gt;the ready machine to run for 10 hours&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;=?&lt;/strong&gt; I saw the machine which is &lt;strong&gt;ready to run for 10 hours.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I met &lt;strong&gt;a motivated person to win the competition&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;=?&lt;/strong&gt; I met a person who is &lt;strong&gt;motivated to win the competition.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;an eager girlfriend to hang out outside&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;=?&lt;/strong&gt; I have a girlfriend who is &lt;strong&gt;eager to hang out outside.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22107" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T22:11:18.013" Title="Infinitive clauses referring to an adjective before a noun" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-22T08:52:53.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T03:08:13.600" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Oxford Dictionary of English 3rd edition (2010:90), discourse marker “as if” means, in informal style, “I very much doubt it.” Oxford English Dictionary 3rd edition explains that “as if” as discourse marker is “typically used as a sardonic response to a stated or reported suggestion.” Genius English-Japanese Dictionary 5th edition (GEJD5) (2014:123) presents the following example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) “Did you have a good flight?” “As if!” ( = It was definitely not a good flight!) (GEJD5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inoue (2017:459) states that “As if!” is similar to “Not!,” “Yeah, right!,” “No way!,” “Whatever!” and so on. Tunnicliffe (2013:11) states that it resembles “No chance!” Let me show you each usage and example of “As if!” and other similar discourse markers cited from dictionaries as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) “[As if! is] An expression of annoyance, to show disapproval of a suggestion, statement, explanation, etc.; “I’m going to take you out for a meal on Saturday” “As if! You’ve said that so many times before,  and never done it!”” (Manser (1983:9))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) “[Not. is] used as a humorous cancellation of what has just been said in jest: “Yeah, but you’ve got a boyfriend now.” “Not,” I said, emphatically, appropriating one of her more asinine pop phrases.”    (Dalzell and Victor (2013:1596))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) “[Yeah, right. is] used to say that you do not believe what sb [somebody] has just said, disagree with it, or are not interested in it: “You’ll be fine.” “Yeah, right.”” (OALDCE9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) “[No way. is] used for expressing disbelief at that which has just been said: “I suppose you have every reason to regard me as a certified nut case.” “No way.”” (Dalzell and Victor (2013:1599))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) “[Whatever! is] used as a dismissing retort to what has just been said: ELTON: I think we both know what it feels like to be lonely. CHER: Whatever.” (Dalzell and Victor (2013:2399))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) “[No chance! is] used as an emphatic negative, often scornful: MONICA: But it’s my chance, Johnny. It’s my only chance. JOHNNY: No chance.” (Dalzell and Victor (2013:1586))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I wonder what the radical difference between “As if!” and the others is. If you had lucid answers and explained to me, I would be glad. If you could afford to attach some linguistic references, I will appreciate your kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;【 References 】&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dalzell, Tom and Terry Victor (Eds.) (2013) &lt;em&gt;The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English Volume II: J-Z&lt;/em&gt;, 2nd edition, Routledge, London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Genius English-Japanese Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, 5th edition (GEJD5) (2014) Taishukan Shoten, Tokyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inoue, Tohru (2017) “Kantanshi toshiteno As If no Gohoo” (Remarks on Exclamatory As If), &lt;em&gt;The Seijo Bungei: the Seijo University Arts and Literature Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 240, 468-455, Seijo University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manser, Martin H. (1983) &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Contemporary Idioms&lt;/em&gt;, Macmillan LanguageHouse, London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English&lt;/em&gt;, 9th edition (OALDCE9) (2015), Oxford University Press, Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionary of English&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd edition (2010) Oxford University Press, Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd edition (2010-) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oed.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tunnicliffe, Luke (2013) &lt;em&gt;Igirisu no Surangu, Amerika no Surangu: Eigo with Luke&lt;/em&gt; (British Slang, American Slang: English with Luke), Kenkyusha, Tokyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T23:53:05.883" Title="What is the difference between &quot;As if!&quot; and other similar discourse markers?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;slang&gt;&lt;interjections&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T05:11:18.943" Score="1" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I've heard, most of the polynesian languages aren't in good shape. For most native speakers are rare at best. Some, like Hawaiian have lost huge amounts of their vocabulary. I've read that its not possible to learn Hawaiian beyond a beginner level, because there is simply nothing else preserved of the language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are any of them in good shape? I'm not exactly an expert on the family. I've never really studied them much since, well, so much has been lost. I don't believe I could possibly get a taste for what the polynesian languages once were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T05:11:18.943" Title="What is the best preserved Polynesian language?" Tags="&lt;polynesian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T13:59:43.197" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to use diachronic corpora to investigate the frequency of usage  for  words within  a word class of English that is mostly archaic today, how do I determine if the archaic words  were  ever considered to be a  part of everyday English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words,  if the pronominal adverbs &quot;therefore&quot; and &quot;whereby&quot;  show up in an Ngram Viewer  analysis as  having a 1/100ths  percentile of usage,  but other pronominal adverbs that typically only appear today as legal jargon have a 1/1000ths  percentile of usage,  how can I determine if they were ever used in everyday English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second question is  if it is possible to determine with accuracy when is the frequency of usage of a term so low,  that it is not considered to be apart of everyday language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22132" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T18:28:54.340" Title="When corpus data suggests a word is common in a language?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;n-grams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28173" CreationDate="2018-06-17T18:28:54.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any cutoff you use is going to end up being arbitrary, just by its nature. So pick one that seems to work well (based on the hit counts of sample words in a modern-day corpus) and take that as a given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the main part of the question, though, the best way is to choose your corpus carefully. If you have a corpus of nothing but transcripts of legal cases, that won't give you a good sample of casual colloquial usage. A selection of letters, on the other hand, or certain magazines, or social media in the last few decades, will give you a much better answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T18:28:54.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T23:55:26.303" Score="0" ViewCount="1909" Body="&lt;p&gt;so my teacher asked us to make the phonological rules like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*pinta → winta 'arm'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;answer : in rules expressing sound changes:  p &gt; w / #_ (initial [p] becomes [w])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I still confused with this Javanese dialect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*andɛk → cəndhɛk ‘short’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the rule I tried to write. please correct me if i am wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*andɛk → cəndhɛk &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*a &gt; c / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*a &gt; ə / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Ø &gt; h / d&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22193" LastEditorUserId="22193" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T04:04:18.420" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T23:35:28.337" Title="How to write phonological rules this words?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28203" CreationDate="2018-06-18T09:36:35.167" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;My hypothesis is that math jargon is more aliening than other academic fields, and I want to concrete that by an example of the average frequency of the word in these two definitions of &quot;representation&quot; in politic and math:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the activity of making citizens’ voices, opinions, and perspectives &quot;present&quot; in public policy making processes &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the homomorphism from an abstract algebraic object on a vector space&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't have an interest in purchasing a whole corpus, is there a free resource for me to find the word frequency? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordfrequency.info/100k_samples.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt; only provides 5000 random words, &lt;a href=&quot;http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngram Viewer&lt;/a&gt; is only about books, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikitionary&lt;/a&gt; doesn't provide a unique file to download. I guess I can find out with the googlefu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/PG/2005/08 &quot;keyword&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but is there a better way to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T13:23:20.243" Title="Which free resource to find word frequency?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-18T17:21:03.907" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the pronunciation of English word &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt; in General American accent? The normal sound [ˈfilɪŋ] or double the &quot;l&quot; sound, [ˈfiɫ lɪŋ] ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21618" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T19:16:11.527" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:59:38.267" Title="What is the pronunciation of English word &quot;feeling&quot; in General American accent? The normal sound [ˈfilɪŋ] or add the &quot;l&quot; sound, [ˈfiɫ lɪŋ]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:10:47.893" Score="0" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused as to the proper grammar when posing the following question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Who lives there?&quot;  &amp;lt;- seems to imply just one person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Who live there?&quot; &amp;lt;- seems to imply more than one person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this:&#xA;1. &quot;Who worships you?&quot;&#xA;2. &quot;Who worship you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would be grammatically correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under what conditions would each be considered correct? Or is one of them just outright wrong grammar-wise? According to my friend, the question with worship should by default use &quot;Who worship you?&quot; since worship is generally done my multiple people, but is this true? Sounds odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22202" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T19:29:22.610" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T03:16:10.857" Title="&quot;Who lives there&quot; vs &quot;Who live there?&quot;" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-15T08:13:57.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28179" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:13:10.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say it [ˈfiː.lɪŋ]. (Source: native GA speaker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's considerable variation within GA, and the only way to really be sure would be to record a lot of people saying the word several times, then look at the length of the [l] in the spectrograms, and compare it to the length of a reference &quot;short&quot; [l] in another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:13:10.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28180" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:23:42.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note: the relative &quot;who&quot; and the interrogative &quot;who&quot; have rather different grammatical properties. When I talk about the word &quot;who&quot; in this answer, I'm specifically talking about the interrogative.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages, the subject of a verb has some effect on the form of that verb. For instance, in Latin, &quot;the boy runs&quot; would be &lt;em&gt;puer curr&lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, while &quot;the boys run&quot; would be &lt;em&gt;puer&lt;strong&gt;ī&lt;/strong&gt; curr&lt;strong&gt;unt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. English still has some slight vestiges of this system by now: in the present tense of regular verbs and in all tenses of irregular verbs, the third person singular is marked differently from every other form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you had an explicitly singular subject, as in &quot;the old man lives there&quot;, you would use the -s on the verb. And if you had an explicitly plural subject, as in &quot;the old men live there&quot;, you would not use the -s. In Latin, you would do the same with &quot;who&quot; on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in English, unlike in Latin, &quot;who&quot; on its own &lt;em&gt;is always considered singular&lt;/em&gt;. You'd only use a plural form if something else in the sentence explicitly makes it plural. Otherwise, the singular is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if I knew there were multiple people involved, I (as a native English-speaker) would ask &quot;who &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; at this church today?&quot; rather than *&quot;who &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; at this church today?&quot;. (The star means that this sentence is ungrammatical to me.) It would only take plural marking if some other word, explicitly plural, were added: &quot;who were &lt;strong&gt;the parishioners&lt;/strong&gt; at this church today?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T03:16:10.857" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T03:16:10.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28177" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:52:45.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what you really want is Wiktionary's frequency list, you can get that by taking the various Wiktionary pages linked from the overview page and splicing them together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, be careful which corpus you're using. The idea of a &quot;universal&quot; corpus is generally a myth: comparing the frequencies of these words in TV scripts versus Project Gutenberg versus Twitter scrapes versus the local mathematics library will give quite different results. You'll need to decide what exactly you're going to take as representative of English as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the topic of your proposed usage, separate from choosing a word list itself…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to be wary of the definitions you're using. You've chosen a very common political word that everyone knows, and a fairly obscure mathematical term that someone in e.g. statistics would have no interaction whatsoever with. If you want a fair comparison between math jargon and political science jargon, you'll need to choose a word that's not used in the same sense outside political science. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Constitutional autochthony is the process of asserting constitutional nationalism from an external legal or political power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From Wikipedia.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, choose a form of the mathematical definition which is designed for outside audiences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A collection of objects &lt;em&gt;A, B, C…&lt;/em&gt; is said to &lt;em&gt;represent&lt;/em&gt; a collection of objects &lt;em&gt;1, 2, 3…&lt;/em&gt; if there is some consistent analogy you can make between A and 1, and between B and 2, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:52:45.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28179" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:59:38.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing you call &quot;double l&quot; is more generally known as &quot;dark l&quot;, and this topic has been researched (inconclusively) for decades. The classic study of the question is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/featgeom/sproat-fujimura93-L.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sproat &amp;amp; Fujimura&lt;/a&gt; 1993 &quot;Allophonic variation in English /l/ &#xA;and  its  implications  for  phonetic  implementation&quot;. One problem is that there isn't a well-defined and obvious boundary between dark and clear instances of /l/. It is now understood that there is a continuum of &quot;darkness&quot; realizations, dependent on context. The context for &quot;fee&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ing&quot; is more on the &quot;light l&quot; side, although bear in mind that this is derived from &quot;fee&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; which is on the dark side of &quot;l&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jiahong/publications/c06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Yuan &amp;amp; Liberman proposes a way of quantifying darkness, but does not address the specific word or similar words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonological considerations favor a &quot;short&quot; interpretation of /l/, in case you are hoping to look at duration and not darkness. A single intervocalic consonant phoneme immediately after a stressed lax vowel tends to get lengthened a bit, the rationale often being that stressed syllables in English cannot be just CV. This predicts a difference between &quot;feeling&quot; [fɪjlɪŋ] versus &quot;filling&quot; [fɪlˑɪŋ]. Consonant duration is not categorial in English, so as with darkness, the choice is not between &quot;short&quot; and &quot;long&quot;, it is a continuum ranging from &quot;shorter&quot; to &quot;longer&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:59:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28175" CreationDate="2018-06-18T20:02:57.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there's no good answer for this question without additional data. With only one data point, you could write a phonological rule like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;andɛk → cəndhɛk / #_#&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a rule that specifically changes this word and this word only. Such a rule is absurd, of course, but with only a single data point, can you prove it wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key will be getting more data. I would assume your assignment includes more data from this same Javanese dialect. Perhaps others show that /a/ turns into /cə/ at the beginnings of words. In that case, you could write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a → cə / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe /a/ turns into /ə/ before /n/, and then /c/ is inserted before vowels at the start of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a → ə / _n&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ∅ → c / #_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps /d/ turns into /dh/ (which I'm assuming is meant to be a breathy-voiced /dʱ/? though that doesn't really matter) only after /n/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d → dh / n_&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps it happens before /ɛ/ in particular, or even all front vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d → dh / _[+front]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe it just happens everywhere!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d → dh / _&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only by looking at more data can you figure out which of these, if any, are accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T20:17:12.777" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T20:17:12.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9541" CreationDate="2018-06-18T21:38:20.027" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typing these characters is fairly straightforward, if you have an appropriate keyboard (or can customize yours): they're simply the lowercase Latin letters &amp;lt;e a o&gt;, followed by the character &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/32F/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;U+032F Combining Inverted Breve Below&lt;/a&gt;. This second character can't be copied and pasted on its own, since it's combining, but it should be available in any decent IPA keyboard (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://ipa.typeit.org/full/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this online one&lt;/a&gt;). In TIPA (the standard way to type linguistic symbols in LaTeX), you can use the &lt;code&gt;\textsubarch&lt;/code&gt; macro (&lt;code&gt;\newcommand{\htwo}{\textsubarch{a}}&lt;/code&gt; or the like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for using these letters are a bit more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'll provide a basic summary of what the laryngeals actually are. (OP obviously already knows this, but it makes the answer more useful to others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's generally agreed that many Proto-Indo-European phonemes could appear as either consonants or vowels. In particular, *r *l *m *n *j *w could all appear in both ways. This is why it's sometimes claimed that PIE had only two vowels (*e *o) when various reconstructions appear with *i *u: the *i *u were the vocalic versions of *j *w, which are seen as consonants first and foremost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A PIE root, at its most basic, consists of two groups of consonants. For example, the root *&lt;em&gt;bʰ_r&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;carry&quot;, while the root *&lt;em&gt;l_jǵ&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;bind&quot;. In between these two consonants would be placed either a short vowel *e or *o (short grade), a long vowel *ē or *ō (full grade), or nothing at all (zero grade). And in the case of nothing at all, one of the consonants would often end up becoming vocalic to make it pronounceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But linguists found some roots which didn't seem to fit this pattern. Some of them had no consonant at the end, like *&lt;em&gt;d_&lt;/em&gt; &quot;give&quot;, while others had no consonant at the beginning, like *&lt;em&gt;_d&lt;/em&gt; &quot;eat&quot;. And the ones with no consonants at the end, didn't seem to follow the normal ablaut patterns. &quot;Give&quot;, for example, only ever appeared with *ō, which was never short or replaced with *e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current view is that these changes were caused by &quot;laryngeals&quot; (which have nothing to do with the larynx but the name has stuck). There were (at least) three of them (*), *h₁ *h₂ *h₃ = *e̯ *a̯ *o̯. When they appeared next to an *e, they would &quot;color&quot; it into their respective vowel. If they appeared after a vowel and before another consonant, they would also make the vowel longer. Then, in every language besides Hittite, they would all disappear. So the root for &quot;give&quot; wasn't actually *&lt;em&gt;d_&lt;/em&gt;, but *&lt;em&gt;d_h₃&lt;/em&gt; = *&lt;em&gt;d_o̯&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Some scholars say there were more, maybe as many as five, but this theory isn't widely accepted. I haven't seen any modern reconstruction with less than three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing the laryngeals as *e̯ *a̯ *o̯ certainly does seem more elegant, especially by analogy with *j *w sometimes being written *i̯ *u̯. But it's unclear how good this analogy is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the consonants *j and *w are left on their own (in the zero grade or for other reasons), they appear as *i *u. Other consonant-vowel pairs seem to have done the same. This is quite uncontroversial: for instance, *&lt;em&gt;nj-sd-os&lt;/em&gt; &quot;nest&quot; surfaces with an /i/ sound in most descendants (see Latin &lt;em&gt;nīdus&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the laryngeals were left on their own (i.e. with no adjacent vowels), they disappeared in almost all descendants. Greek alone shows the reflexes /e a o/. Latin, for instance, shows /a/ for any laryngeal left alone between two consonants, while &quot;proper&quot; PIE *e *o within roots survive. To me, this is convincing evidence that *h₁ *h₂ *h₃ were &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the consonantal equivalents of *e *a *o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that they did have vocalic equivalents (sometimes called the Schwa Indogermanicum and written *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃), but it's also possible that they didn't: the branch that eventually became Greek might have inserted some sort of epenthetic vowel next to laryngeals, which then got colored. But it seems clear that, if they did have vocalic equivalents, they were not the same as the vowels *e *a *o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I wouldn't recommend using these symbols. They're certainly more elegant and easier to read than *h₁ *h₂ *h₃, but the false analogy with *i̯ *u̯ seems too dangerous. Instead, they might perhaps be written *ĕ *ă *ŏ? But I don't believe this has ever been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T17:38:49.043" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T17:38:49.043" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28175" CreationDate="2018-06-18T23:35:28.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Draconis spelled out some of the problems in trying to decide what the specific rules are, given a lack of data. I'd like to address the question of whether there are rules at all. The teacher seems to have given a model of such a &quot;rule&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;*pinta → winta&lt;/em&gt; 'arm'. The use of the star tells me that this is historical change, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about phonological rules; the reconstructed form is &lt;em&gt;*pinta&lt;/em&gt;, and some set of sound changes gave &lt;em&gt;winta&lt;/em&gt;. The question is, what are those changes? If the exercise is about historical change, the rules of the game are very different from synchronic phonological analysis. A possible solution to a p-to-w change is &lt;em&gt;p→pʰ→φ→ʍ→w&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Javanese, there is a contrast between dental and retroflex, the latter  notated with an added &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;. If we assume that the reconstructed root is &lt;em&gt;*andek&lt;/em&gt;, there are four questions to be answered: what is the cause of the initial consonant, how did the stop become retroflex, why did the first vowel become schwa, and why did &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; become [ɛ] in a closed syllable (this is an actual phonological of Javanese)? We also have to know what dialect of Javanese this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a somewhat-open question as to whether proto-Austronesian has retroflex as well as alveolar consonants: therefore the assumption that the historical input has an alveolar cannot be made gratuitously. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pacling.anu.edu.au/materials/Blust2013Austronesian.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blust&lt;/a&gt; claims that it is common in Austronesian for &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; to be postdental and for &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; to be alveolar (he objects to calling the back linguals &quot;retroflex&quot;), where Javanese innovated the contrast by filling in voiced postdentals and voiceless alveolars (due to large-scale borrowing). The presence of a retroflex consonant in Javanese is often taken to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/122871/OL.50.2.adelaar.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;evidence of loanword status&lt;/a&gt;. The question &quot;how did d→ɖ?&quot; assumes, without evidence, that this is a sound change. But if this is a loan word, then the correlation has a different interpretation – ɖ is the ordinary re-interpretation of a &quot;foreign&quot; lingual voiced stop, upon borrowing into Javanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blust's book is an excellent starting for figuring our how these changes might have come about. But before trying to figure out how something happened, you need evidence that something did happen: reconstructions, like synchronic underlying forms, are not self-evident or God-given. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T23:35:28.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T02:28:47.633" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In phrases like &quot;force of arms&quot;, &quot;challenge our arms&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1551954/remarks-by-secretary-mattis-at-the-us-naval-war-college-commencement-newport-rh/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example:General Mattis recent speech&lt;/a&gt;), etc, the word &quot;arms&quot; is an example of metonymy, I think.  The phrases refer to war by referring to weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be accurate to say that the word &quot;arms&quot; includes definitions like &quot;war&quot;?  Or would it be more accurate to say that &quot;arms&quot; retains only the meaning &quot;weapons&quot; and is used to refer to war metaphorically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22204" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T02:54:30.813" Title="Does metonymy impart new definitions to words?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28188" CreationDate="2018-06-19T02:54:30.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! The unsatisfying answer is &quot;it depends&quot;. The more satisfying answer is &quot;yes, if you wait long enough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metonymy is generally a poetic device. Sometimes it's made up in a particular instance by the poet/writer/speaker, and sometimes it's fairly entrenched (like the &quot;force of arms&quot; you mention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, over time, metonymic meanings can become well enough established that they overtake the original, literal meaning of the word. For example, the Latin word &lt;em&gt;cancer&lt;/em&gt; originally meant &quot;cage&quot;. Through metaphor, it came to mean the claws of a crab, which close around something. And through metonymy, it came to mean the crab itself. By the Classical period, that was the primary meaning of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly standard type of semantic shift, which can be found in all sorts of well-established words if you look back far enough. Even something as straightforward as &quot;person&quot;, for instance, has a long history leading back to a word for &quot;mask&quot;, which changed to &quot;character&quot; by metonymy, and then &quot;personality&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while &quot;arms&quot; still means &quot;weapons&quot; more than it means &quot;war&quot;, in a few more centuries it's entirely possible that the &quot;war&quot; meaning will have displaced &quot;weapons&quot; and become the primary one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T02:54:30.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="675" CreationDate="2018-06-19T08:44:05.453" Score="-6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many flowers, the Forget-me-not is named for its color. For unbelievable folk-etymologies, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://symbolism.wikia.com/wiki/Forget-Me-Not&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://symbolism.wikia.com/wiki/Forget-Me-Not&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Google image search indicates that the color of this flower ranges from light blue to red-violet. The most common Hebrew word for purple is SeGoL סָגוֹל. In second place, it is @aRGaMoN אַרגָמָן, probably borrowed from Akkadian argamannu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many Hebrew nouns, the aleph which had been at the end of the word (but had lost its ancient northern GHT-sound) moved to the beginning of the word under the influence of Aramaic which used aleph as a suffix for the definite article. So moving the aleph in @aRGaMoN אַרגָמָן back to its original location makes the German name for this flower an excellent phono-semantic match for that Hebrew color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aRGa  Ma  Ni[GHT]&#xA;VeRGissMeinNiCHT&#xA;FoRGet  Me  NoT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German name was translated to French ne m'oubliez pas. The English name may have been independently transliterated from Hebrew or translated from French or German. Compare Yiddish Fargesnitl. Wikipedia thinks the English name was calqued from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22207" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T08:44:05.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28168" CreationDate="2018-06-19T16:42:53.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard way to make a parse tree using the CYK algorithm is to build a new tree node every time you would be storing &quot;true&quot; in the CYK table, and store that node in the table instead. The node should contain pointers to the array elements that produced it: that is, its eventual children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an ambiguous grammar, you can store &lt;em&gt;sets&lt;/em&gt; of nodes in the table instead. The child pointers will then point to these sets of nodes rather than individual nodes. For instance, in the classic ambiguous sentence &quot;I saw a man with a telescope&quot;, the root would have a child pointer to a set of two VP nodes: one of which has &quot;with a telescope&quot; modifying the verb, the other with it modifying the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another alternative is to use an Earley parser (a type of chart parser), and store tree nodes in your Earley items. If you allow Earley items to compare different when they have different tree nodes, you'll end up with entirely separate trees for all the possible parses. (Though be warned that this can lead to exponential runtime in the worst case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T16:42:53.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28201" CreationDate="2018-06-19T19:10:58.193" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the use of Walloon has decreased markedly since France's annexation of Wallonia in 1795. This period definitively established French as the language of social promotion, far more than it was before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However french control over Belgium only lasted from 1795 until 1814 (19 years). That seems like a very short time to successfully force a language over a population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the annexation was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belgium#French_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not well-received&lt;/a&gt;. How to explain that the people of Wallonia did not push back after being freed?&#xA;The revolution happened a few years later in 1830. Wasn't Walloon seen as the patriotic language (at least for part of the Belgian population)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22209" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T22:52:30.820" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T12:25:49.173" Title="How did French take over Walloon in Belgium?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28170" CreationDate="2018-06-19T22:11:18.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(the question should be on ELU or ELL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first group (both sides), the infinitive action is done by the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second group (right side), the infinitive action is done by the main object, so you can't put it at the end on the left side -- because it is ambiguous with an adverbial of the main verb (affecting the subject rather than the object).  You could, however, move the [participle] adjective to make it grammatical: &quot;I met a person motivated to win the competition.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T22:11:18.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28150" CreationDate="2018-06-20T10:34:40.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most confusing (lacking distinction among letters) writing system is the the oldest variety of the Arabic script, usually known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rasm&lt;/a&gt;, 7th - 11th centuries AD.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The modern Arabic script has 28 letter of which only 18 letters have their distinct shapes, the rest are distinguished by the diacritic dots, 1 to 3 of them either below (1-2 of them) or above (1-3) the letters.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the Rasm tradition, the letters were written without those dots, so, for example,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;code&gt;با&lt;/code&gt; [baː],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;نا&lt;/code&gt; [naː],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;يا&lt;/code&gt; [jaː],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;تا&lt;/code&gt; [taː],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;ثا&lt;/code&gt; [θaː],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;were written the same way, that is, without the dots, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QcT3m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QcT3m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite its ambiguity, the script was pretty legible, especially for the learned Muslim scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T07:34:38.463" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T07:34:38.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28196" CreationDate="2018-06-20T12:25:49.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are conflating two, very different things : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how a language acquires a place of social prestige and dominance, and how a language replaces another in the population. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course, a language which is associated with high-status in a society, is in a good position to replace a low-status language, but, as you point out, it takes a lot of time for one language to completely replace another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a language can win a higher status quite quickly in a period of social turmoil, such as the french revolution, during which the french society achieved an unprecedented amount of centralization, which brought unprecedented prestige to the already dominant Parisian standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it was at this time, too, that Wallonia came under the direct control of France. But it had been in the sphere of influence of the Kingdom of France for far longer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, once Belgium was separated from France in 1815, Europe was completely different from what it had been in 1795. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feodalism was dying slowly and the ideology of the nation-state was on the rise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of religious differences, Belgium soon seceded from the Netherlands and became independent in 1830, and in the new state, French speakers were socially dominant and remained so for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the Walloons actually did speak Walloon and not French in their everyday life, pretty much like everyone in every region of France actually spoke in their own dialect, but French was the prestigious written language of the elites, and the elites in Bruxelles and Wallonia gravitated towards it also.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so French replaced Walloon not over the course of the 19 years, but over a whole century, as mandatory instruction, increased population movements (especially from the country to the cities), and mass media progressively erased French dialects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's no coincidence that those that were closest to Parisian French suffered the most, because they were the ones that had the least chance to be recognized as different languages instead of just a low-register variety of the mainstream French. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T12:25:49.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28177" CreationDate="2018-06-21T13:23:20.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word frequency is only a proxy for word knowledge. For the English language, there are data available on &lt;strong&gt;word prevalence&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., on how many people know a certain word. You can find &lt;a href=&quot;http://crr.ugent.be/archives/2045&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Measures of word prevalence for 61,800 English words&lt;/a&gt; by Marc Brysbaert, Paweł Mandera, Samantha McCormick, and Emmanuel Keuleers in the link given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T13:23:20.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28206" CreationDate="2018-06-21T17:39:01.333" Score="1" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn how to read Arabic and I noticed that sometimes the letter Laam (ل) is either silent or takes the pronunciation of the following letter, as in this text from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As-salāmu ʿalaykum (Arabic: السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ‎ [asːaˈlaːmu ʕaˈlajkum]) is a&#xA;  greeting in Arabic that means &quot;peace be upon you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it looks like &quot;al-salamu ...&quot; and not &quot;as-salamu ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the general rule here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: This question is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17339/what-is-the-phonetic-reason-for-the-occurence-sun-and-moon-letters-in-arabic&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; about &quot;sun and moon letters&quot;. The body of that question answers this one, and builds upon it by asking the reason for the convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be little interest in reopening this question (which has already been answered to my satisfaction). I just wanted to reference my Meta Stack Exchange question that references this one and collects other examples of what I might consider &quot;false duplicate&quot; pairs: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312294/when-are-questions-which-build-upon-each-other-considered-duplicates&quot;&gt;When are questions which build upon each other considered duplicates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastEditorUserId="22144" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T16:04:29.537" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T16:04:29.537" Title="Why does Laam sometimes get pronounced as the next letter in Arabic words?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;articles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-06-23T02:01:17.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28205" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:10:34.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The /l/ of the definite article /al/ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assimilates&lt;/a&gt; with the next consonant when that consonant is coronal. The affected consonants are /t θ d ð r z s ʃ sˤ dˤ tˤ ðˤ l n/ (the letter &lt;em&gt;jim&lt;/em&gt; /dʒ/ is not included, because it was pronounced as /gʲ/ in Classical Arabic). They are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sun letters&lt;/a&gt; and the others are moon letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T08:43:42.860" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T08:43:42.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28205" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:10:41.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, s is a &quot;sun letter&quot;, and the &quot;l&quot; in the prefix &quot;al-&quot; therefore assimilates to it. The general rule is that if the initial letter of the word following &quot;al-&quot; is a &quot;sun letter&quot;, the &quot;al-&quot; assimilates to it; for &quot;moon letters&quot;, no such assimilation takes place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(found by Google Search on &quot;arabic language al assimilates to following consonant&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21746" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:10:41.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T20:47:28.813" Score="1" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a good, extensive &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;corpus&lt;/a&gt; that uses &quot;simple&quot; or &quot;basic&quot; English, in the sense that it should be easily understandable to people who are not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_proficiency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proficient&lt;/a&gt; in the English language. For examples, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basic English&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simple English Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. Do such corpora exist? Do you know where I can find a list of simple English corpora?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21393" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T21:36:42.303" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T22:20:59.967" Title="Corpus for simple or basic english" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T21:28:49.213" Score="3" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;When analyzing .wav files in Praat, total time duration and target speech segments are represented down to 6 decimals. For example: 154.900000 seconds (borrowed from a Google image screenshot). However, standards in linguistic studies on voice onset time and aspiration, for which precise time measurement is necessary, appear to only report data to the 3rd decimal, or down to the millisecond (ms=.001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: How certain are we that Praat is reliably representing/reporting/analyzing .wav speech data files down to this 6th decimal, or microsecond (.000001 seconds; .001 milliseconds)? Can I feasibly narrow down my speech data analysis to this temporal resolution, without rounding to milliseconds, while still maintaining validity and reliability? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, another way to frame this question: Can .wav files offer a method (but not the only method) to cross-check millisecond precision/accuracy as required for psychological software testing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also posting this question to Research Gate, so both will be linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22230" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T01:29:57.877" Title="Precise timing measurement in Praat / .wav files" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;phones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28211" CreationDate="2018-06-21T21:39:58.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A dump of the Simple English Wikipedia makes a good and freely available corpus for Simple English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Basic English, there is a downloadable &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.o-bible.com/bbe.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bible in Basic English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T21:39:58.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28212" CreationDate="2018-06-21T21:50:04.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to check the reliability of measurements made in Praat, you could use another computer programme that allows you to look at the waveform and/or spectrogram such as Audacity or ELAN and repeat the measurement there. You'll need some sort of landmark (e.g. zero crossing of first regular voicing period). I am not aware of any complaints about the reliability of temporal measurements made with Praat. Few linguists and phoneticians use anything else (some use Matlab to allow easier computation of measurements derived from the spectrum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I struggle to come up with a scenario where 0.001 ms would be meaningful. Rounding to a full or, at a stretch, one decimal of a ms should be enough. If the basis of the measurement is boundaries made by human annotators - nobody will be able to achieve that kind of accuracy, and inter- and intra-rater agreement is in most cases substantially worse than 1 ms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your measurements are automatic, I am not aware of features where anything beyond 0.1 ms would meaningful in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T21:50:04.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28212" CreationDate="2018-06-21T21:51:33.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Analysing speech data to time intervalls smaller than a few milliseconds is not very sensible: The fundamental frequency f0 of the adult human voice ranges from 100-300 Hz. This means, that one full vibration already takes 3–10 ms, to perceive it as such you need several full vibrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The higher frequency components in speech sounds are typically about 1kHz corresponding to a time inteval of 1 ms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ear of an adult can perceive sound upto a frequency of 10–20 kHz corresponding to time interval of 0.05–0.1 ms, this being the absolute limit of human perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T21:51:33.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21019" CreationDate="2018-06-21T23:09:32.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are using CoreNLP to generate dependency trees, a very nice way to tackle your problem would be to use the Tsurgeon library used to manipulate parse trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tregex.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tsurgeon&lt;/a&gt; is a (parse) tree transformation language. (Also check Tregex and SemGrex on the same link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T23:09:32.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28212" CreationDate="2018-06-21T23:46:28.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bottom-line positive answer is &quot;there's nothing to worry about&quot;. More specifically, though, a bit of background on digital technology will clarify how the question is somewhat misconceived. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that you have a sampled speech file containing 1024 bytes, where (counting from zero) bytes 5 and 987 are 255. The question is, what is the duration in time between those bytes? The answer is, who knows? You have to first specify how many bytes there are in a sample, and what the sampling rate is. If each byte is a sample and the sampling rate is 8000 Hz, then successive bytes (samples) are .000125 seconds apart, and the distance in time between the pulses is .12275 seconds. If samples are 2 bytes (16 bit samples, more common), then samples are still .000125 seconds apart, the pulses are .061375 seconds apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sampling rate defines a limit on time resolution. Although physical sound is continuous, digitized sound chops that continuity up into evenly-spaced values. If you think you have something happening at time 0.000625 sec. and something else happening at 0.001130 sec. representing a duration between events of 0.000505 sec., you have created an measurement artifact. In an 8K srate file, all samples occur at even multiples of .000125. The correct answer is 0.0005 sec (with the sampling rate telling you what the precision of the measurement is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat allows you to position the cursor at arbitrary positions -- it does not say &quot;Can't do that, the cursor has to be exactly on a sample boundary!&quot;. Whenever you position the cursor, you are always doing your best to line it up to where the actual sample / event &quot;is&quot;, that is, at the screen position that corresponds to where a sample is plotted, given the existing degree of zooming in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple visual technique for understanding the relationship between raw data and Praat displays is to create a plain text file with just a line containing &quot;000...&quot; i.e. just zeros, but with two other characters (e.g. 000Z00000Z00), separated by a known number of zeros. Open this as a &quot;special&quot; (Alaw) raw sound file, and you'll get a flat line with two blips. You can repeatedly try to select the portion between the centers of the blips, and can query the duration of the selection, and I predict that you'll get somewhat different durations nearly all of the time. It's not that Praat is in error, it's that there is a fixed time granularity determined by sampling rate, and a different granularity determined by screen resolution. Praat allows you to set the cursor in places that don't correspond to samples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add marginally to your concerns, I was talking only about reading the raw waveform. From the raw waveform, you can compute other functions, such as formant tracks, amplitude traces, pitch, and a spectrogram. Each of these is a &quot;windowed&quot; function, meaning that it take all of the data in a window of a certain size (number of samples of amount of time), and returns a value. That means if the analysis window is 0.001 seconds long, you can't get more time accuracy than 0.001. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more significant problem for your particular application would be detecting the end and beginning of the speech samples, which can add hundreds of milliseconds of uncertainty to your reaction time computations (depending on the nature of the utterances and the recording setup), as opposed to a fraction of a millisecond owing to uncertainty in time computations from Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T01:29:57.877" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T01:29:57.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-22T04:05:55.437" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading about &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.jhu.edu/cogsci/templates/images/pdf/people/gafos_dissertation-chapter_01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVs&lt;/a&gt; and I'm trying to figure out, how to convert their values to the corresponding articulation features like stop, palatal, unvoiced, bilabial, etc. Are there any ranges of values where the map is done? For instance, the perfect scenario for me will be something like this (arbitrary theory): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For TTCL, we know that the max and the min are 80 and 0 degrees respectively. In addition, for TBCL, we know that the max and the min are 180 and 87 degrees respectively. So, if TTCL ranges from 80 to 70 degrees and TBCL ranges from 180 to 170 degrees,  then we have a palatal articulatory feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any such researches have been done that show something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22231" LastEditorUserId="22231" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T14:01:47.537" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T14:01:47.537" Title="How to convert a vocal tract constriction variables (TVs) values to articulation features" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28222" CreationDate="2018-06-22T08:56:27.100" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether names of dishes are generally more prone to change when a power or language shift occurs in a society? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly, I am thinking of the Egyptian cuisine and the current names of various dishes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T11:31:24.477" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T11:31:24.477" Title="Are names of dishes more prone to name change due to power / language shift?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28220" CreationDate="2018-06-22T11:27:23.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of the names of Egyptian dishes (as opposed to raw materials like fūl) are borrowed from Ottoman Turkish and are found also in Levantine Arabic, Greek, Serbian and other languages. This is because the upper classes throughout the Ottoman Empire ate the foods served at the Ottoman court in Constantinople. You can start (literally) with meze &amp;lt; Turkish &amp;lt; Persian maza &quot;taste&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T11:54:12.053" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T11:54:12.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-22T11:45:45.790" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is obvious that, in English, the phrasal verb &quot;get up&quot; (meaning to awake and move out of bed) and the idiom &quot;raining cats and dogs&quot; (meaning rain strongly) have different depths of idiomaticity.  By that, I mean that the meaning of &quot;get up&quot; bears a different relationship to the normal meaning of its constituent parts than the idiom &quot;rain cats and dogs&quot;.  Why is that (something historical or intrinsic to the phrase?), how did it arise, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what theories of idioms address this kind of difference among idioms. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22204" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T11:45:45.790" Title="what theories of idioms cover depth of idiomaticity?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28211" CreationDate="2018-06-22T13:39:29.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;basic&quot; or &quot;simple&quot; corpus is actually very hard to define. It's something we all assume exists when we get started in NLP, but come to realize is usually not feasible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia idea is good. There's also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ciprian-chelba/1-billion-word-language-modeling-benchmark/blob/master/README&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google 1b dataset&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COCA&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every corpus has a purpose and a bias though. Make sure you're aware of these when using that corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: A new corpus was just released today,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://osf.io/pyb8s/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English grammaticality judgments from nearly 700,000 subjects, (around 50% non-native speakers)&lt;/a&gt;. Since you asked for &quot;simple&quot; English from less proficient speakers, you can filter by proficiency, e.g. number of years speaking English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T22:20:59.967" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T22:20:59.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-22T14:22:39.120" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about those two terms, but based on my understanding articulatory gestures are represented by the vocal tract variables and articulatory features include all units are involved in articulation, such as dental, lips, apical, etc. Also, the vocal tract variables can produce the articulatory features based on a certain model: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;|Vocal Tract Variables (articulatory gestures) | ---(MODEL)----&gt; | Articulatory features|&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct so far? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22231" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T14:22:39.120" Title="What's the difference between articulatory features and articulatory gestures?" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28226" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28227" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Polynesian languages, a subfamily of the Austronesian languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T17:15:17.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-23T12:26:15.493" Score="-1" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;if slang is part of sociolinguistics, can you give me some explanations about why slang is part of sociolinguistics? what is the relation between slang and sociolinguistics? Thank you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22240" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T14:08:53.877" Title="Sociolinguistics and slang" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;slang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-26T01:53:25.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-23T13:59:34.693" Score="7" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Russia&quot; is derived from the name &quot;Rus&quot;, the name of a Viking tribe originating from Sweden who ended up founding kingdoms in what is now Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, most notably the so-called Kievan Rus'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the Vikings probably spoke a variety of Old East Norse and even though they were eventually assimilated in the slavic majority, their language probably enjoyed a prestigious position for a while and may have had some influence over the languages of the Slavic subjects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the remaining traces of this superstrate influence in the East Slavic language, aside from the word &quot;Russia&quot; itself ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T16:12:02.660" Title="Is there any superstrate influence of Old East Norse left in East Slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;language-contact&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28230" CreationDate="2018-06-23T14:08:53.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As WavesWashSands points out, slang is a subset of language use, so it can be studied using any of the tools we use to study language in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can study the interesting phonological rules of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verlan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in French; the morphology of a simplified conjugation paradigm; the syntax of the various crystallized expressions; the semantics of antiphrasis (&quot;wicked&quot;, &quot;the shit&quot;); the pragmatics or history or psycholinguistics...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when you come to ask why people use slang, which people, where, when, and in what ways, and how it's been viewed by others, you're asking sociolinguistic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that one difficulty is defining slang in the first place. Is a dialect &quot;slang&quot;? Are written forms used only in texts &quot;slang&quot;? Are crass idioms &quot;slang&quot;? One &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; is any language used by a subgroup to &quot;establish identity, exclude outsiders, or both&quot;. That net will catch a lot of phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T14:08:53.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28239" CreationDate="2018-06-23T14:32:00.977" Score="2" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knew of a language (real or fictional!) that did not contain any double consecutive letters (like the double t in &quot;letters&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22243" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T20:59:17.293" Title="Any languages that don't have consecutive letters?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-23T15:16:23.360" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been listen to Andrea Bocelli's songs lately. A noticeable feature of his pronunciation while singing Spanish songs is that he constantly pronounces the plosives (especially at word-initial positions) with a puff of air. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is peculiar since in his native language, Italian, aspiration does not contrast and most of the time the plosives, namely p, t, and k are realized unaspirated. So I'm quite curious why would he alter the pronunciation if the phonology of the two languages are similar enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22244" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T15:16:23.360" Title="Andrea Bocelli Aspiration" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28238" CreationDate="2018-06-23T16:52:06.283" Score="3" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning Arabic, I see some examples of triliteral roots from which words with apparently different meanings are derived. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.quran.com/search.jsp?q=root:fTr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ف ط ر  (f-ṭ-r)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;to break apart or tear&quot;: فَطَرَ • (faṭara) (maybe cognate with Hebrew פתר (f-t-r) &quot;to solve&quot;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;to create&quot;: same word, فَطَرَ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://corpus.quran.com/search.jsp?q=root:smw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;س م و  (s-m-w)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;heaven, sky, firmament&quot;: سَمَاء‎ (samāʾ) (cognate with Hebrew שָׁמַיִם, &quot;heaven, sky&quot; or &quot;God&quot;?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;name&quot;: اِسْم‎ (ism)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples make me curious: &quot;break apart&quot; seems unrelated to &quot;create&quot;, and &quot;heaven&quot; seems unrelated to &quot;name&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, is it always the case that two words with the same triliteral root are etymologically related? Or for example is it possible that two words with different origins in an older language both got mapped to the same triliteral root? And are there any tricks for figuring out when this has happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T23:46:05.447" Title="Is it possible for two Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) words with the same triliteral root to have different origins?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28237" CreationDate="2018-06-23T18:24:08.173" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading up on the basics of segmental phonology and can't seem to wrap my head around it. So the normal association line indicated the connection between the tonal tier on top, and the segmental tier below. One vowel may carry more than one tone, leading to a contour tone. So what does the dashed association line mean exactly? It seems to be necessary to explain floating tones in some way, which happens when a vowel gets deleted but the tone remains and needs to be borne by an adjacent vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zPzhs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zPzhs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Yekhee example 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/neagV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/neagV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Yekhee example 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/56kcR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/56kcR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Generic example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14860" LastEditorUserId="14860" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T20:44:21.987" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T22:18:22.890" Title="tones in autosegmental phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28236" CreationDate="2018-06-23T19:00:37.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dashed lines in a rule means &quot;insert this line&quot;, or, in a shorthand derivation, it means &quot;this line was (just) inserted&quot;. In the example of &lt;em&gt;oke okpa&lt;/em&gt;, the vowel /e/ deletes and you have a floating tone as a result, as the part after the arrow indicates. On the next line, that H is associated to the vowel [o] of the second word. The problem that you are having is that the book was not correctly typeset: the last image should look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hEWg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hEWg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened is that in the printed version, the dashed line was attached to the first tone in the sequence, not the second tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case &lt;em&gt;òké òkpá → òkôkpá&lt;/em&gt;, the initial L and final H of the sequence are unchanged, because only the vowel and tones involved in vowel deletion changes (the first vowel deletes, the two tones of the V+V sequence merge into a falling tone). The vertical undashed lines represent unchanged associations (that's what &quot;undashed&quot; means); the (angled) dashed lines are the ones changed and, as it happens, &quot;angled&quot; is there to remind you that the tone came from elsewhere (though the angle of a line is theoretically meaningless). So the only errors are the point of connection on the tone tier for the dashed lines (at least, I think those are the only errors). The 4 added examples are correct: they mean &quot;L H becomes L Rise&quot;, &quot;H L becomes H Fall&quot;, &quot;H L becomes Fall L&quot; and &quot;L H becomes Rise H&quot;, depending on whether the first tone spreads to the right, or the second tone spreads to the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T22:18:22.890" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T22:18:22.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28235" CreationDate="2018-06-23T20:44:46.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your cited examples do not involve the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; roots in Hebrew and Arabic, they involve similar roots: [t] is not the same as [ṭ] and [f] is not the same as [p]. Semitic &lt;em&gt;šim-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;name&quot; appears in Arabic as &lt;em&gt;ism-&lt;/em&gt; and in Hebrew as &lt;em&gt;šem&lt;/em&gt;: these have the same historical origin, but the synchronic roots are not the same, they are just similar. &quot;Sky&quot; which is from Semitic &lt;em&gt;šamāy&lt;/em&gt; is indeed similar to &lt;em&gt;šim&lt;/em&gt; (though they mean different things, and don't have the same historical origin). If you change your standard of comparison from &quot;same&quot; to similar, that would be a case of two similar roots (of daughter languages) that come from different earlier roots. Then you can find similar roots with different meanings in one language (Arabic &lt;em&gt;qalb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;heart&quot; and &lt;em&gt;kalb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dog&quot;); when you look only at contemporary surface form and overlook some differences, it's easier to find roots in one or more languages that are &quot;the same&quot;, when their origins are quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic distinguished *ħ and *χ, *ʕ and *γ, which Hebrew neutralized to *ħ and *ʕ, so in principle two distinct roots in Semitic could get neutralized in Hebrew, and that is another source of similarity (or possibly identity) with different meaning. Semantic change is another way this can happen. Arabic &lt;em&gt;ṭaḥana&lt;/em&gt; and Hebrew &lt;em&gt;taḥán&lt;/em&gt; have a common Semitic root meaning &quot;grind&quot;, but Hebrew has an added meaning &quot;to talk incessantly&quot;; Hebrew &lt;em&gt;bar&lt;/em&gt; reflects multiple Semitic and non-Semitic roots meaning &quot;weight&quot; (from Greek), &quot;bar&quot; (from English), &quot;wilderness&quot; (Semitic), &quot;son&quot; (via Aramaic) and &quot;grain&quot; (dunno the source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T23:46:05.447" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T23:46:05.447" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28233" CreationDate="2018-06-23T21:40:38.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages don't allow consonants at the ends of syllables, which means that two of the same consonant will never be next to each other by chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these languages, some have long/geminate vowels/consonants, or the same vowel twice in a row, and write that with double letters (e.g. Japanese written in Roumaji). So those are no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others either write their geminates differently, like Māori (Polynesian, uses macrons), or don't have length contrasts, like Lingála (Bantu). So those will work for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Māori may actually have double vowels sometimes! See the comments for details. The point about Lingála stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T22:21:26.973" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T22:21:26.973" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28231" CreationDate="2018-06-24T02:37:46.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of North Germanic loans in the East Slavic languages is &lt;strong&gt;rather low&lt;/strong&gt; (the most critical estimate is around thirty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110197051/9783110197051-115/9783110197051-115.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Panzer 2002&lt;/a&gt; mentions 34 words (V. Kiparsky) or 30 words (Struminski 1996), such as кнут, селедка, шелк, ящик etc.; the other words are not very common in present-day Russian, e.g. варяг, витязь, стяг, ларь, пуд, ябеда etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Panzer further notes that some of those loans, e.g. акула, крюк, якорь, ящик, сельдь, скат etc. were borrowed from &quot;later stages of Swedish and Norwegian&quot; (after 1300 AD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re: some factually incorrect comments. The communis opinio is that OCS хлѣбъ most likely comes from Gothic hlaifs and not North Germanic (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/view/title/30168&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pronk-Tiethoff 2013&lt;/a&gt;), whose origin, in its turn, is rather murky/unknown. Overall, North Germanic has had almost no impact on the Proto-Slavic vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for акула, it is usually considered that the donor language in this case was Old Icelandic (&lt;em&gt;hakall&lt;/em&gt;), i.e. a western dialect of Old Norse. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110523874/9783110523874-008/9783110523874-008.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nedoma 2017&lt;/a&gt; reminds us that Old Icelandic is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; Old Norse per se, and that North Germanic (or &quot;classical&quot; Ancient Norse) was a &quot;dialect-free Trümmersprache&quot; that remained &quot;practically unchanged&quot; until the late 5th century (p. 877), later splitting into a number of Old Norse languages, Old Icelandic being one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T16:12:02.660" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T16:12:02.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28242" CreationDate="2018-06-24T11:28:32.900" Score="7" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the function of double (?) nasals in Lycian. Usually an /ñ/ is followed by /n/ and so does /m̃/ which is followed by an /m/. What was the function of this spelling in Lycian? Did they really try to produce both nasals or is it an attempt to render a nasal that has lacked a letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T03:00:52.107" Title="What was the function of the Lycian spelling m̃m and ñn" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;anatolian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28241" CreationDate="2018-06-25T02:33:30.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/kadm.2009.47.issue-1-2/kadmos.2008.011/kadmos.2008.011.xml?&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kloekhorst 2008&lt;/a&gt; writes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the difference between /n/ vs. /nn/ and /m/ vs. /mm/ is only relevant&#xA;  in initial and intervocalic position. In all other cases the ‘geminate’&#xA;  spellings with -ñn- and -m̃m- are automatic and directly comparable&#xA;  to the geminate spellings of the other consonants (p. 128).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also provides an extremely useful chart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rdfXP.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rdfXP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/abstract/title/30169?rskey=ybzmlN&amp;amp;result=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Melchert 1994&lt;/a&gt; correctly, this gemination could be viewed as &quot;continuants spreading across a syllable boundary&quot; (p. 265), e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm̃ma- = [arm.ma-] &amp;lt; /arma-/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such a cluster was in initial position, then an anaptycic vowel was insterted there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;km̃mi- [kəm.mi-] &amp;lt; /kmi-/ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T03:00:52.107" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T03:00:52.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-25T12:15:29.873" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, agent and patient always stay the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The bread (patient) is eaten.&#xA;Carol (agent) ate the bread (patient).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you had a causative clause, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Peter made Carol eat the bread.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;code&gt;Carol&lt;/code&gt; still the agent? Maybe it doesn't make much sense in English, but this question specifically came from looking at the Japanese causative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;　Peter ga Carol ni pan wo tabesaseru.&#xA;  I made him eat the bread.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21866" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:59:28.533" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:59:28.533" Title="What's the agent and patient in a causative clause" Tags="&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;valency&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28245" CreationDate="2018-06-25T20:16:17.610" Score="0" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t exist. I have the proof. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vOaHL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Look. It’s missing.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22256" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T00:38:06.000" Title="Why is there not passive imperative?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-06-26T09:55:13.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28244" CreationDate="2018-06-26T00:38:06.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly common gap for languages to have, though it's not universal. (Ancient Greek, for example, has regular imperatives in the active, middle, and passive voices.) So it's not surprising that Swedish lacks this form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason it's so commonly missing is because of the semantic oddness. Normally an imperative is commanding someone to do something, while the active voice represents someone doing an action: it fits well. In formal terms, you're giving a command to the agent, who has the power to do the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the passive represents something being done to someone. In formal terms, the subject of the sentence is not the agent. Since the person being commanded isn't the agent, the verb is generally not representing an action under their control. So it doesn't always make sense to use an imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T00:38:06.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-26T12:20:29.787" Score="9" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Icelandic has changed so little in the past 1,000 years that even millennium-old texts (such as the prose Edda) are still intelligible to modern people who speak Icelandic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this actually true? I admit, I believe I've also heard that this is partially thanks to a spelling reform that re-made modern Icelandic spelling in such a way that someone who was literate in modern Icelandic could make sense of really ancient texts written in an earlier version of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually fascinates me. If true, that means that I could actually learn to read an ancient text, in its original language, by simply learning a modern language that I would actually get some use out of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T00:01:48.297" Title="Can modern Icelanders really read the Prose Edda?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-27T05:31:00.700" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've often tried to find a few short sentences that encapsulate most of the features of a language, a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://learnxinyminutes.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learn X in Y Minutes&lt;/a&gt; for spoken languages, if you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim Ferriss, a Renaissance man of sorts known among other things for learning languages, suggested the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The apple is red.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is John’s apple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I give John the apple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We give him the apple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He gives it to John.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She gives it to him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must give it to him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to give it to her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a more standard set of &quot;reference sentences&quot; that, translated to other languages, are used as a standardized toolset for breaking down the structure and features of a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T15:04:12.347" Title="Is there a better series of sentences for observing features of a language?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-27T06:26:44.877" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there commonly accepted opinion on what lexemes &lt;em&gt;this/that&lt;/em&gt; are, determiners or pronouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in the following phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... can help you work these out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; seem to show some properties of pronouns more than that of determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;More generic question:&lt;/strong&gt; is there commonly accepted classification of the English closed class lexemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T06:26:44.877" Title="This/that: a determiner or pronoun?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-27T11:43:05.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28246" CreationDate="2018-06-27T09:30:13.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can modern speakers of English read Beowulf? Can modern speakers of Arabic read the Qur’an?  Yes, but only if they have learned it in school. Why can educated speakers of Modern Greek read (just about) Herodotus’s history of the Persian Empire, while educated speakers of Modern Persian cannot read the Old Persian inscriptions from the same period? It is because Ancient Greek is taught in schools in Greece, but Ancient Persian is not taught in schools in Iran. The situation is presumably similar in Iceland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T09:30:13.937" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-27T12:46:34.417" Score="7" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;One exciting way to track the evolution of our understanding of Proto-Indo-European is to look at the different versions of &lt;em&gt;Schleicher's fable&lt;/em&gt; from different years. The more time we spend studying the language, the more 'precise' our reconstructions get, even though they might still be quite far off compared to what PIE actually looked like at any given point in its history. The majority of the reconstructions deal with the 'Classical' stage of PIE (many mainstream versions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable#The_Sheep_and_the_Horses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), with some proposing versions of &lt;em&gt;Scheicher's fable&lt;/em&gt; in Late PIE (somewhat questionable variations on the theme &lt;a href=&quot;https://academiaprisca.org/indoeuropean/Schleicher-fable.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have enough information about the (hypothetical) ergative stage of PIE to, in theory, construct a simple, at least remotely plausible sentence in it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If yes, how old would that be? What would that sentence look like? Is there any even older language that fits the criterion, e.g. maybe Proto-Afro-Asiatic?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If not, what is the oldest stage of PIE that we can feasibly say something in? When would that approximately be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22262" LastEditorUserId="22262" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T15:25:40.277" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T15:40:03.767" Title="What is the oldest language that we know enough about to construct a plausible sentence in it?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28250" CreationDate="2018-06-27T13:30:39.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sumerian and Egyptian are attested in texts from about 3000 BC onwards. These are real languages, not reconstructed ones like PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T13:30:39.903" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-27T14:27:00.547" Score="2" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for examples like this pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian for 'grass snake' — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%83%D0%B6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;уж&lt;/a&gt;, [uʂ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Classical Latin for 'snake' — &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anguis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anguis&lt;/a&gt;, likely [ˈaŋ.ɡᶣɪs]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These word forms are both masculine nouns in the nominative, and they seem to derive from a masculine noun in the nominative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82%C3%A9ng%CA%B7%CA%B0is&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₂éngʷʰis&lt;/a&gt; or something like that.&#xA;So basically we can continuously trace them to a common origin, which is a word form of roughly the same type, with no restructuring, reanalyzing or borrowing along the way as far as we can tell. Yet looking at the transcriptions, [uʂ] vs [ˈaŋ.ɡᶣɪs] are staggeringly different, to the point where these words actually don't share a single sound and have different syllable structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some examples like this, but between two modern languages?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Word forms need to go back to the same word form, complete with suffixes and endings, always passing down through first language acquisition, i.e. no borrowings, and need to look and sound wildly different in their modern incarnations, but do not need to mean the same thing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22262" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T05:00:45.220" Title="What are some of the most divergent cognate word forms?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28247" CreationDate="2018-06-27T15:04:12.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're essentially describing the field-worker's script. In reality, such a list is an ever-growing project constructed on the basis of previous results (when e.g. you discover that you can't use the &lt;em&gt;-ááka-&lt;/em&gt; tense in questions, and have to figure out why). The problem with constructing a universal list of actual sentences to get is that you will either omit vast amounts of subtleties of the language that you didn't know about (the fact that &quot;he-adult&quot; is distinct from &quot;he-junior&quot;; &quot;they-two&quot; is different from &quot;they-three or more&quot;; &quot;you-female is different from &quot;you-male&quot;), or you will spend huge amounts of time asking all of those questions just to discover that there is no difference in status, gender or number for any pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat surprisingly, there is not much by way of elicitation plans in intro field methods books. The oldest &quot;guidance&quot; list is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire/lingua-descriptive_description.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lingua questionnaire&lt;/a&gt;. MPI has a series of links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaires.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;questionnaires&lt;/a&gt;, but these are rather advanced and not useful for the first 10 weeks. Questionnaires generally ask broad questions (and often vague ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T15:04:12.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28262" CreationDate="2018-06-27T17:59:11.813" Score="3" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any research or explanation for the (grammatical, typological) differences among Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of the fact that Chinese is classed as an Analytic, SVO language, Tibetan classed as an Agglutinative, SOV, Ergative language, Burmese, which I know much less about, seems to be Analytic, SOV. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to research this on my own, I have primarily found research on the genetic relationships among Sino-Tibetan languages, not so much on their respective developments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;My question can be phrased as: what is known (or widely believed) about the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and about how and why various branches changed? I would be interested in any research that addresses this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4714" LastEditorUserId="4714" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T21:07:35.433" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T19:58:20.577" Title="Differences among Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28250" CreationDate="2018-06-28T15:40:03.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen in one paper reconstructions of sentences in Proto-Uralic, and I was shocked how much that reconstruction resembled PIE. The most dfferences were in word order and kwe vs ke and the like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Proto-Uralic was so close to PIE, and the both had relatively free word order, one can imagine their common ancestor being very close as well, and those sentences very well resembling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a pity I cannot find that source again now. It had something about Proto-Uralic numerals or Proto-Uralic negative particle and word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="624" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T15:40:03.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28256" CreationDate="2018-06-29T10:23:40.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consensus is the Proto-Sino-Tibetan was SOV and that Sinitic is very innovative in this regard, moving toward SVO, possibly/probably due to language contact with Mon-Khmer / Tai-Kadai / Austroasiatic speakers (possibly linked to the Baiyue 百越). &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.637.1357&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This 2011 paper&lt;/a&gt; gives a nice overview of the origins of Sinitic, and supports the Baiyue 百越 coexistence/mixing hypothesis. SOV is still actually fairly common in Old Chinese, but you can see the tension between SOV and SVO structures while reading Classical Chinese, with a lot of flitting between the two. SVO had already become the &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; though in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.persee.fr/doc/clao_0153-3320_1997_num_26_1_1502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese of the oracle bones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The loss of agglutination gave rise to what seems to be fairly fixed inflection (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245362977_An_overview_of_Sino-Tibetan_morphosyntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 2017 paper&lt;/a&gt; for a nice overview) pattern in Old Chinese. This is pretty thoroughly lost by Middle Chinese, which has undergone tonogenesis and has monosyllables as the vast majority of its lexemes and morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I am much less familiar with the historical written record of the Tibeto-Burman languages, I can't really comment as much. I do know that Classical Tibetan starts in the 7th century, and so is roughly contemporary to Middle Chinese. It may be worth looking up how much its morphology has changed; modern Tibetan is well known for being quite agglutinative, but Classical Tibetan was relatively analytic. It's one of a few languages whose history has been documented to go from analytic to agglutinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burmese starts to be documented from the 12th century, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs21/Language/Jenny-2015-Foreign_influence_in_the_Burmese_language-en.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is suggested&lt;/a&gt; that it grew up with a lot of strong influence from Mon as well as Sanskrit and Pali. I'm unsure if this would have produced a push toward losing agglutination and adopting isolating morphology, but it's possible (Sanskrit and Pali are both synthetic languages, being Indo-European; Mon is from the Mon-Khmer family, SVO, and seems pretty analytic to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T19:58:20.577" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T19:58:20.577" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28264" CreationDate="2018-06-29T15:41:10.620" Score="3" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the current thinking on genetic affiliations of Songhay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My old texts confidentially place it as Nilo-Saharan. This places a likely proto-Songhay homeland back closer to the Nile, with its speakers following the Sahel to the Niger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that entire language family appears to be controversial now. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songhay_languages#Proposals_on_the_genetic_affiliation_of_Songhay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current Wikipedia page on the subject&lt;/a&gt; mentions alternate theories of it being related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berber Languages&lt;/a&gt; (which would make it Afro-Asiatic), or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mande_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mande&lt;/a&gt; (Niger-Congo). The obvious negative, that it is its own family, doesn't seem to have been mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like if it belonged to one of the three main large language families native to Africa, it ought to be fairly obvious which one it is. There shouldn't be different people separately arguing for all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So anyway, what is the current consensus on this? Is it really completely and utterly up in the air like WP is implying, or is there are clear majority opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8124" LastEditorUserId="8124" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T15:56:30.880" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T19:53:45.177" Title="What is Songhay's Family?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28263" CreationDate="2018-06-29T16:47:12.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very small field, where one abstaining scholar prevents reaching a consensus. I think one should discount any one-off pre-Greenbergian affiliation claims which have not been re-affirmed, since they were generally not well-founded save for lowest levels (such as &quot;Bantu&quot;, but not e.g. &quot;Nilotic&quot; insofar as it excluded &quot;Nilo-Hamitic&quot;). Dimmendaal's &quot;independent family&quot; position is the methodologically conservative one (disclaim any relationship if you're not positive what the relationship is). Bender maintained that it was Nilo-Saharan; so does &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Nilo-Saharan/Saharan/Saharan%20Songhay%20branch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blench&lt;/a&gt;. Heath, who has descriptively put the Songhai languages on the map, has as far as I know not expressed an opinion on the matter (presumably because weighing in would be pointless speculation, and he's more interested in the facts). Nicolai took a variant of Dimmendaal's position (&quot;Berber creole&quot;, essentially denying that it is part of any specific existing language family. The standard bacterial-reproduction model of language family assumes a continuous splitting from a single genetic source, whereas creoles have multiple parent, so that all three of the main African phyla may have been involved in the creation of Songhai, if the creole theory is right – even if the major contribution was from Berber). Nicolai also considers the question &quot;open&quot;. &#xA;Creissels supports Delafosse's (reputed) claim to a Mande connection.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexical items are easily borrowed across language phyla (and there is no systematic reconstruction of the claimed proto-language). There is relatively little grammatical structure proposed to be shared between NS and Songhai, and Creissels has actually amassed more morphological evidence for a Mande connection. By way of a summary evaluation, I agree with Heath's position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T19:53:45.177" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T19:53:45.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28266" CreationDate="2018-06-29T20:19:36.730" Score="5" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a discussion about if &quot;Lufthansa&quot; means air-Swan, inspired by the sanskrit word &lt;em&gt;hansa&lt;/em&gt; swan. Which is of course wrong as it has its origins in the old german word &lt;em&gt;hansa&lt;/em&gt; for group or fellowship. But inspired by the question I thought about which would be the sanskrit &quot;version&quot; of the word (in the sense of which one might have come from the same origin, I miss the term sry). My idea was &lt;em&gt;sangha&lt;/em&gt;, it means also group and the like and it would also match the s/k,h phonetic change as suggested by satem-kentum. My questions are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How far can we extrapolate the old german word &lt;em&gt;hansa&lt;/em&gt; back to pre-germanic languages how would it have sounded there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could it be that &lt;em&gt;hansa&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sangha&lt;/em&gt; have a common origin?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where comes Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;sangha&lt;/em&gt; from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am no expert for linguistics, so please apologize eventually wrong terms or conceptions, I am happy to learn about how to do it better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12990" LastEditorUserId="12990" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T20:51:59.287" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T16:41:09.907" Title="Possible extrapolation of old German word &quot;hansa&quot; to protogermanic and possibly common root with Sanskrit &quot;sangha&quot;" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28265" CreationDate="2018-06-29T21:32:39.740" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sangha is from Sanskrit *saṃ- (PIE *&lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/1686&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sem&lt;/a&gt;) &quot;together&quot; + *&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;han&lt;/a&gt;- (PIE *&lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/0753&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gʷʰén&lt;/a&gt;) &quot;strike, kill&quot;, and originally in Sanskrit meant &quot;struck, put together&quot;. Hansa (referring to the Hanseatic league) is reconstructed to Proto-Germanic *&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/hans%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hansō&lt;/a&gt;, and deeper relations are speculative. Germanic *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; would derive from either PIE *&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;k'&lt;/em&gt;; PIE *&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; becomes Skt. [k] and PIE *&lt;em&gt;k'&lt;/em&gt; appears as [ś] in Skt (*&lt;em&gt;š&lt;/em&gt; in the Iranian branch). If a Sanskrit word with [ś] were actually related to a Germanic word with *&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; (*&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;), we would have to conclude that at least one of the words was a borrowing from another language. For example, &lt;em&gt;path&lt;/em&gt; is clearly derived from IE *&lt;em&gt;pent&lt;/em&gt;, but the consonant phonology is wrong for native Germanic development, and it is hypothesized that the Germanic word comes through Iranian.&#xA;Despite the meaning similarities, the historical sound differences indicate that the words are unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T16:41:09.907" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T16:41:09.907" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28268" CreationDate="2018-06-29T23:17:21.427" Score="6" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that I will not use the right terminology here.  Apologies in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for the phenomenon in which speakers of a language treat two different sounds as equivalent, even though they can hear the difference between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One situation in which this occurs a lot is when speakers of the same language have different accents (e.g. from different regions, economic classes, etc.), and these accents pronounce some corresponding sounds differently.  The speakers can hear the difference, but they treat the sounds as equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For examples, certain dialects of Spanish pronounce the word &lt;em&gt;jamón&lt;/em&gt; (tr: ham) like xaˈmon, while others pronounce it like haˈmoŋ.  In other words both the initial and final sounds differ between the two versions.  Most native speakers can hear these differences, but they disregard them; that is, they treat xaˈmon and haˈmoŋ as the same word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this equating of sounds that are perceptibly different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the phenomenon I'm referring to here should not be confused with the case in which someone is unable to hear the difference between two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3363" LastEditorUserId="3363" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T00:03:09.610" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T13:09:47.163" Title="Sounds that are treated as phonetically equivalent" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28267" CreationDate="2018-06-30T00:32:31.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this term is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allophone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some background, briefly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A language has concept of &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;. It is a concept, &lt;strong&gt;not a sound&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People produce &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A listener then &lt;em&gt;maps&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; they hear to a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All different &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt; that a native speaker would map to the same &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; are called &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take English &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Unvoiced plosive consonants are usually aspirated in English, so many words would have &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; produced as &lt;code&gt;[kʰ]&lt;/code&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;cat&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, in some cases, it stays unaspirated &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;mark&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; can also undergo other transformations, like palatalization in &lt;em&gt;&quot;thank you&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People of different dialects produce same phoneme differently.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Furthermore, even the same person produces the same phoneme slightly differently every time. In addition, sound can be distorted significantly or frequencies can be cut off, like when using a broken telephone or handy loudspeakers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nevertheless, an English listener maps all mentioned phones to the &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the phenomenon of Allophone is strictly language-specific. Many languages, like&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Thai&lt;/strong&gt;, make a clear difference between &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[kʰ]&lt;/code&gt;, and they are never interchangeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T00:32:31.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28272" CreationDate="2018-06-30T19:49:30.490" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;While scrolling through a course in Polish, I saw the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wynikiem wyrażenia jest nowa relacja. -- *resultant (of the) expression is (a) new relation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time I notice this pattern, where the instrumental is used for the first noun clause instead of the last one. I know Polish word order is somewhat flexible, however my native French and my English are screaming to me that &lt;em&gt;wynikiem wyrażenia&lt;/em&gt; is the actual subject of the sentence here (the result of the expression is a new relation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's happening here? Am I being swayed by my other languages, and is &lt;em&gt;nowa relacja&lt;/em&gt; the actual subject here? Or is this a construction I'm unaware of? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22242" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T08:13:18.893" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T08:13:18.893" Title="Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;polish&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28267" CreationDate="2018-06-30T21:54:10.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens.  I don't know of a good word.  Assuming the SPE analysis for convenience, in English in a latinate word, at the end of an unstressed word-initial unstressed syllable, /e/ can often be either tense or lax.  Examples: &quot;eliminate&quot;, &quot;deliberate&quot; (v.), &quot;revise&quot;, &quot;preliminary&quot;, &quot;demonic&quot;. The difference in other contexts is phonemic, so presumably people can hear the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T21:54:10.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28270" CreationDate="2018-06-30T23:32:32.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Your assumption is correct, &lt;em&gt;&quot;the new relation&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the main subject, while &lt;em&gt;&quot;result of the expression&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the nominal predicate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; It's a remnant of the ancient Essive/Translative grammatical cases that existed in older languages, retained in some modern languages (Uralic family), but is obsolete (converted to Instrumental) in modern Slavonic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What's going on here?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first. The entire sentence translates to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The result of the expression is the new relation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sake of simplicity, let me simplify it to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;{The} result is {the} relation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking in a paradigm of Romance languages, one may think that &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; here denotes equivalence, hence &lt;em&gt;&quot;result is relation&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;relation is result&quot;&lt;/em&gt; are equivalent statements. This happens because the verb &lt;strong&gt;to be&lt;/strong&gt; in English has several &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/8939/1009&quot;&gt;essentially different meanings&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_existence, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_location, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_identity/attribute, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_possession, &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_to_mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the listed meanings, we see that only &lt;em&gt;identity/attribute&lt;/em&gt; satisfies our need, &lt;strong&gt;and the relation is not symmetric&lt;/strong&gt;: in &lt;em&gt;&quot;light turns red&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, only &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt; can be the direct subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; a Nominative-Instrumental switch for nonverbial predicates occurs only with dynamic &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;_identity verb. Consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ona jest nauczycielka — she is a &lt;strong&gt;teacher&lt;/strong&gt; — stative predication (if you really meant to imply that a profession is an integral part of a person) → Nominative;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ona jest nauczycielk&lt;strong&gt;ą&lt;/strong&gt; — she {currently} is a &lt;strong&gt;teacher&lt;/strong&gt; — dynamic predication (over a certain period of time) → Instrumental;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;she wants to become a &lt;strong&gt;teacher&lt;/strong&gt; — dynamic predication (transition) → Instrumental;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;she was a &lt;strong&gt;teacher&lt;/strong&gt; — dynamic predication (because it is associated with a certain period of time in the past) → Instrumental;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;she will be a &lt;strong&gt;teacher&lt;/strong&gt; — dynamic predication (same as above) → Instrumental;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning back to the original sentence, &lt;em&gt;&quot;the new relation&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the subject, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;the result of the expression&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (a compound nominal predicate) acts as a state from which &lt;em&gt;&quot;the new relation&quot;&lt;/em&gt; arises from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; the word order is irrelevant here. IMO, it's just a matter of stylistic: you put the cause first and the effect after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But why Instrumental, finally?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all examples above, the subject is (or temporary was, or becomes) in a certain state. Ancient languages had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Essive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Translative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; cases to denote this relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finnish and Estonian have retained it over the course of time, while others, including Polish, have lost these cases, and began using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Instrumental case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for encoding the dynamic relation of the Subject and its &lt;strong&gt;Nominal/Adjectival predicates&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I think I should add some references to academic works about the Nominative-Instrumental switch in Polish, but I can't recall any off the top of my mind (TODO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-07-01T16:22:52.350" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T16:22:52.350" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-01T02:07:55.043" Score="-1" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA for &quot;man&quot; in American English is mən. Arabic, however, doesn't have the vowel sound ə. So, what's the most related sound in Arabic? I know there are some short vowels (Harakat) but I don't think they include this specific sound. In addition, when Arabic speakers want to mimic this sound, they presumably sound odd a little bit. So, I was thinking to &quot;approximate&quot; this sound to one of the existing sounds in Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22231" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T01:41:25.900" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T01:41:25.900" Title="The closest sound to [ə] in Arabic" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28273" CreationDate="2018-07-01T04:32:22.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, American English &quot;man&quot; is [mæn], though I suspect that in some dialests it's really [man] (a lower version of [æ]). Second, a number of dialects of Arabic have [ə] (or close variants such as [ɨ]), though Classical Arabic doesn't. The Arabic vowel typically transcribed as &quot;a&quot; (fatḥah) is the IPA front vowel [a] which is pretty close to [æ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T04:32:22.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28277" CreationDate="2018-07-01T18:17:14.800" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples here. The clusters are marked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A law tha&lt;strong&gt;t st&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;tes th&lt;/strong&gt;at...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spend three mon&lt;strong&gt;ths th&lt;/strong&gt;ere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the be&lt;strong&gt;st str&lt;/strong&gt;ucture&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It refle&lt;strong&gt;cts th&lt;/strong&gt;ose differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that people reduces these pronunciations or combine them in some way in spoken language. What patterns are found in that? Is the manifestation of the clusters largely individually varied? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T19:01:36.253" Title="What books give a comprehensive analysis of intermorphemic consonant clusters in English?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28276" CreationDate="2018-07-01T19:01:36.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This pattern is well-known but the details are mostly ignored or factually misstated in the literature. It is often said that [t] &quot;deletes&quot;, meaning it is phonologically erased, and the basis for the claim is phonetic introspection by linguists. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR111/SR111_03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Articulatory Phonologists&lt;/a&gt;, however, have shown that in fact the closure gesture for the stop is modified, not obliterated: this is a problem of phonetic implementation, not phonological rule. The topic has to be approached experimentally via x-ray microbeam or electropalatographic technology, which is non-trivial. Unfortunately, the gadgetry required to detect such gesture reduction is (currently) discriminatory against the informal interview techniques that might tease out the social variables that govern when we do it and when we don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T19:01:36.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28326" CreationDate="2018-07-02T00:53:07.917" Score="4" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is a full stop, represented by the graphical character '.', a morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found a source either confirming or denying this, but the examples I've seen seem to indicate that the answer is no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T02:53:19.440" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T02:27:35.037" Title="Is a full stop a morpheme?" Tags="&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T07:10:27.233" Score="4" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know any cases of corpus linguistics tools or corpora, using JSON to &quot;mark&quot; or delimited linguistics units in morphology, syntax,semantics? It seems all marking systems use some kind of XML or derivative to mark text. I would like to know if there is an initiative using JSON instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22281" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T02:18:36.523" Title="JSON for corpora" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28278" CreationDate="2018-07-02T08:56:05.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Morphemes are sequences of phonemes that have meaning.  A full stop or period doesn’t correspond to any sequence of phonemes; so it’s not a representation of a morpheme.  It is however related to meaning, in a way.  This is because meaning in language doesn’t exist just at the level of morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punctuation is more or less related to linguistic features at the levels of syntax and prosody.  In the most basic case, full stops more or less correspond to the descending intonation used at the end of conclusive utterances.  Compare the difference in the pronunciation of “ Really? ” vs.  “  Really. ”; it's the same morpheme, but said out loud with different pitches, which colour the meaning in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one must put emphasis on that &quot;more or less&quot;. Punctuation has its own rules that are not quite the same as those of linguistic grammar.  There's a rough correlation between linguistic syntax/prosody and written punctuation, because punctuation was originally modelled on those. However, modern writing has long since evolved into its own system, which is more than merely a transcription of speech.  Geoffrey Nunberg discusses this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Sh-sruuKjJwC&amp;amp;lpg=PA67&amp;amp;vq=period&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Linguistics of Punctuation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, the unit called a &quot;sentence&quot; in texts isn't really the same as grammatical sentences.  Nunberg calls the former &lt;strong&gt;text-sentences&lt;/strong&gt;.  A text-sentence may contain several linguistic sentences…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The poor cried; Cesar wept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or may span less than one, in fragments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The L9000 delivers everything you wanted in a luxury sedan. With more power. At a price you can afford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And these cause various stylistic effects that should be intuitively clear to you.  The main function of the period is to mark the end of a text-sentence.  It is then something internal to text-grammar, the tacit (unconscious) knowledge we use when processing written language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T09:03:22.643" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T09:03:22.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28279" CreationDate="2018-07-02T10:31:01.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a lot of corpora and corpus tools, but none using JSON. The only alternative to an XML based format is &lt;em&gt;plain text&lt;/em&gt; coming in two flavours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vertical format: One token per line with annotations separated by TABs &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inline format: plain text with annotations appended to each token like this: &lt;em&gt;plain/ADJ text/NOUN with/PREP ...&lt;/em&gt; (the seperating character may vary, and there can be more than one layer of annotation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T10:31:01.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20039" CreationDate="2018-07-02T13:49:14.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, gerunds are lemmatised and counted as &lt;strong&gt;verbs&lt;/strong&gt; (and typically, there is just one tag like &lt;code&gt;VING&lt;/code&gt; for the ing-form of the verb, no matter how it is used in a sentence) in corpus linguistics. From the examples given, I think many taggers and human annotators will annotate &lt;em&gt;boring&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective despite the existence of a verb &lt;em&gt;to bore&lt;/em&gt;, and chances are good that &lt;em&gt;teaching&lt;/em&gt; in the example will be tagged as a noun. Both &lt;em&gt;asking&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;identifying&lt;/em&gt; will very probably tagged as verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of nouns only contains a few &quot;gerunds&quot; that are far enough removed from verbal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T13:49:14.660" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T15:35:56.520" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm kind of a beginner in the translation industry, and using different tools and talking to different people I find that they all use different terms to name the same things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is really confusing and I'm unsure which terms should I use regarding translation industry terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For example:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exact match/ context match/ in-context match&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TB/Glossary/ Termbase/ Term Base&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fuzzy repetition/ internal match/ homogeneity /internal repetition/  internal fuzzy match&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already seen several Glossaries prepared by the agencies, but still, those terms are specific for their companies, not all the industry uses the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here're some of the glossaries I've found:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.logos.net/translation-glossary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Logos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rixtrans.com/glossary-of-translation-industry-terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RixTrans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordawareness.com/terminology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word Awareness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there one approved glossary of translation industry terms?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22285" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:43:07.937" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:43:07.937" Title="Does an approved glossary of translation industry terms exist?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28252" CreationDate="2018-07-02T18:01:13.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Divergent cognates are going to be a feature of any language family (as pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/documents/where-do-mama2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;this paper&quot;&gt;this paper by Larry Trask&lt;/a&gt; used in the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/865/why-do-most-words-for-mother-across-languages-start-with-an-m-and-for-fa/869#869&quot;&gt;this question about &quot;mama&quot; and &quot;papa&quot; words&lt;/a&gt;), and because of this I think this question is incredibly open ended and subjective. However, I appriciate the opportunity to share some of my favorite etymologies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Afro-Asiatic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is estimated to be a fairly old language family and therefore has a large number of divergent cognates, I personally enjoy the divergence in my own name which I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&amp;amp;basename=%2Fdata%2Fsemham%2Fafaset&amp;amp;text_number=%20%2016&amp;amp;root=config&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; David, from &lt;strong&gt;Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt; דָּוִד (Tiberian &lt;em&gt;Dāwîḏ&lt;/em&gt;, originally &lt;em&gt;dōd&lt;/em&gt;), meaning &quot;beloved&quot;, but originally a kinship term meaning &quot;uncle&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mokilko&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;ʔândé&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;in-law&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tawllemmet&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;idda&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Dad&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all from Proto-Afro-Asiatic &lt;em&gt;*di/ad-&lt;/em&gt; with an unclear meaning but it was probably something like &quot;elder&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Indo-European&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; languages, as you and Michaelyus have pointed out, also have words with fun etymologies, and for some reason Armenian tends to show up a lot: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;birth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;fortūna&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;luck, fortune&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Armenian&lt;/strong&gt; -աւոր (&lt;em&gt;-awor&lt;/em&gt;), a suffix that forms adjectives, with the meaning “possessing, related to”, as in վտանգաւոր (&lt;em&gt;vtangawor&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;dangerous&quot;), from վտանգ (&lt;em&gt;vtang&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;danger&quot;) + -աւոր&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all from PIE &lt;em&gt;*bʰer-&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;to bear, carry&quot; (English &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; is also a decendant). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is kind of cheating, because it's a borrowing, but &lt;strong&gt;Japanese&lt;/strong&gt; 蜜 (&lt;em&gt;mitsu&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;honey&quot;) and English &lt;em&gt;mead&lt;/em&gt; are genetically related through &lt;strong&gt;Tocharian B&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;mit&lt;/em&gt; from PIE &lt;em&gt;*médʰu&lt;/em&gt;. They're all kind of similar looking, I know, I just think it's cool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't think anyone can discuss divergent cognates without mentioning &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.py/books?id=1p64hVM40-8C&amp;amp;pg=PT350&amp;amp;lpg=PT350&amp;amp;dq=peponwi%20aa&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=MPKT54Fn9V&amp;amp;sig=YK5PD1__fdL-zD4ZZF-DFA4Jo3I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwivvPSJ-oDcAhVDiZAKHdQ8BJ0Q6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=peponwi%20aa&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John McWhorter's famous comparison&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Algonquian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; words for &lt;em&gt;winter&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cheyenne&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;aa'&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;winter, to be winter&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ojibwe&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;biboon&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;winter, it is winter&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Proto-Algonquian &lt;em&gt;*pepo·nwi&lt;/em&gt;, also meaning &quot;it is winter&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, there are probably thousands more cognates with this level of divergence because languages do weird stuff all the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22284" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T18:01:13.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T20:02:34.790" Score="0" ViewCount="1697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic has many dialects, but in general the /R/ in Modern Standard Arabic is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_trills&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar trill&lt;/a&gt; (or is it not?) - like the Spanish &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perro_Voiced_alveolar_trill.wav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;perro&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - according to Wikipedia and it is also what I have heard from many native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I came across this teacher who seems to render it as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_and_alveolar_flaps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar flap&lt;/a&gt; (?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBYnYG2FumM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBYnYG2FumM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the correct /R/ in Modern Standard Arabic? In fact, I often hear such an alveolar flap from native speakers, especially in fluent speech. I think in Arabic there are no rules about it, it simply a matter of how much you try to stretch the /R/ - if it's quite short then it will only be a flap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this teacher says that this is the way to render it - whether you speak fast or slowly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then I came across this teacher&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/eryiUhSLjgA?list=PLpgw0XSlp306iQAXjkos67yawWV4_c6th&amp;amp;t=260&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/eryiUhSLjgA?list=PLpgw0XSlp306iQAXjkos67yawWV4_c6th&amp;amp;t=260&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the /R/ sounds like neither a trill nor a flap. What is it actually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it considered a more correct form of /R/ in Modern Standard Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are both these teachers refer to other dialects of Arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22286" LastEditorUserId="22286" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T20:11:26.577" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T21:01:52.950" Title="Arabic /R/ - correct pronunciation in Modern Standard Arabic" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T22:29:38.960" Score="4" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a natural language w/ &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; morphology (i.e. one that has neither inflectional nor derivational morphology -- in other words, no affixation whatsoever)? I've heard claims to the effect, but the (admittedly very few) candidates that I've looked at (viz. Yoruba, Cantonese, Vietnamese) still have some (either inflectional or derivational) morphology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T03:27:51.987" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T14:03:46.437" Title="Languages w/out morphology" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T03:23:36.170" Score="4" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;.  p. x Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Yet my impatience with the word fetish of typical popular treatments of The History of English is based in the fact that I happen to be a linguist. Etymology is, in fact, but one tiny corner of what modern linguistic science involves, and &lt;strong&gt;linguists are not formally trained in it [emboldening mine]&lt;/strong&gt;. Any of us sought for public comment are familiar with the public’s understandable expectation that to be a linguist is to carry thousands of etymologies in one’s head, when in fact, on any given question as to where a word comes from, we usually have to go searching in a dictionary like anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. xi &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Linguists are more interested in how the words are put together, and how the way they are put together now is different from how they were put together in the past, and why. That is, we are interested in what the layman often knows as “syntax,” which we call grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that Historical Linguistics is mandatory for any undergraduate (and graduate) Linguistics student. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't Historical Linguistics suffice to train someone in etymology?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T12:59:10.870" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T16:51:17.060" Title="Why aren't linguists formally trained in etymology?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T03:40:10.197" Score="2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 54 Bottom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  There is ample scholarly work on how &lt;em&gt;going to&lt;/em&gt; went from referring to locomotion to becoming a future tense marker, complete with statistical analysis, tables, and so &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 55 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;on. It’s great stuff, and it’s what a scholar of language change is trained in.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;However, charting how Celtic languages impacted English involves different strategies. It requires being a different brand of linguist. Often, that brand is language contact specialist.&lt;/strong&gt; That person has an eye on what sorts of features are common around the world and what sorts are not, is obsessed with not just one language family but with several, and has a native taste for history as well as linguistics. Such linguists are less tickled by things that sprung up in a language by themselves than by things that languages did to one another.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    As such, it’s as if scholars of The History of English are engaged in a lusty game of Monopoly when adherents of the Celtic idea bust into the room asking who wants to play a game of Clue. Or, some people are building things with an Erector set and someone pops in with a little car made of Legos. To the traditional specialist on how English got from &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Economist&lt;/em&gt;, drawing parallels between English and some other language is just Not What They Do, especially not at any length. That feeling is understandable, but the problem is that the language contact specialist’s analysis, in this case, squares with logic in a way that the same-old same-old analysis simply does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emboldened sentences imply that this brand of historical linguistics ('language contact specialist') is rare. But why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McWhorter insinuates that the traditional linguists of English's history don't operate under this brand. But isn't it irresponsible for a linguist who studies English's history to neglect other language families and 'things that languages did to one another'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T04:35:15.320" Title="Isn't it obvious that linguists must specialize in language contact to study the history of English?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4033" CreationDate="2018-07-03T03:55:48.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. I quote pp. 122-124 of McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;. He bruits that Icelandic changed less than other Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 122&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Comparison reveals what was going on even if no one at the time bothered to describe it. Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic &lt;em&gt;eddas&lt;/em&gt; in Old Norse written almost a thousand &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 123&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;years ago. Icelandic has three genders; most of those case endings and conjugations we saw in Old Norse are still used in everyday language in Reykjavík; and it’s got the “you mistake you” quirk, hithering and thithering, V2, a be-perfect, and most everything else the well-dressed Proto-Germanic descendant wears.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Icelandic shows that there is nothing inevitable about a language tossing off its suffixes and what linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir called “nuance” over time. Linguists call a language that has a way of holding on to what is passed down to it “conservative.” Ordinarily, languages’ grammars are rather conservative—like Latin, Greek, and Russian.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    In comparison, even the other Germanic languages besides Icelandic are less conservative. It surely isn’t an accident that they also, roiling around on the Continent, where populations have been mixing and conquering one another forever, have been learned by foreigners much more than Icelandic. This is why German, Dutch, and Swedish have shed a lot more of Proto-Germanic’s suffixes than Icelandic. However, that’s pretty much all. Suffixes—small and usually pronounced without stress (or, in the term more common among laymen, accent)—are uniquely fragile. But otherwise, these languages retain the other complexities of Proto-Germanic. Largely, their coexistence with other languages (including one another) has been a matter of linguistic equilibrium—stewing, but not boiling down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T03:55:48.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28289" CreationDate="2018-07-03T04:35:15.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Irresponsible? Sure. But also inevitable. After all,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did the tree model of language affiliation prevail over the wave model? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do we know more about the history of Cretan Greek than Pontic Greek?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do cross-disciplinary studies in general promise much and deliver little?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because studying two things in depth, and how those two things have interacted, is much harder than studying one thing in depth. Treating the history of English as a single flow, and studying that, is far less work than studying the history and structure of English in depth, studying the history and structure of Welsh in depth, and working out how they might have interacted. And those interacts are going to be far messier and multicausal than the language-internal interactions that an English-only specialist is able to track. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not about lack of diligence (or at least, not just about lack of diligence); that's about what it is tractable for a single scholar to study. Which is as much cultural as anything: the humanities have not had a strong model of scholarly collaboration, let alone team collaboration such as is seen in the positive sciences, and which this kind of problem requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the wave theory is acknowledged in theory and not in practice. We can grok lineal descent as readers, and we can construct lineal descent as historical linguists. The panspermia of the wave theory is a closer model to reality, and it's orders of magnitude harder to deal with. (And no smirking from the scientists. They're the ones who came up with the frictionless plane, and can't cope with the three-body problem. For exactly the same reason.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add that the more obscure or removed the donor language is from the concerns of the target language specialist, and the more intimate the contact has been, the harder that work is going to be. If you're writing a history of Cretan Greek, you need to be across Venetian Italian and Turkish as donor languages, and you need only bother with lexicon. It's not that hard. If you're writing a history of Pontic Greek, you need to be across a bunch of Caucasian languages as well as Turkish, and those Caucasian languages are going to be far less well documented than Turkish (and they won't be in Latin script). And you're looking at language influence not just in lexicon, but morphology and syntax and semantics as well. It's simply a much bigger task, and unsurprisingly, the historical linguistics of Pontic has lagged as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of scholarly teamwork that this kind of investigation requires has been happening for the last couple of decades; and anecdotally, linguists are strongly encouraged by grant authorities to pursue that kind of team investigation, because it's the model from the positive sciences that those authorities are more comfortable funding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T04:35:15.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28287" CreationDate="2018-07-03T04:47:22.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese has no affixation at all, though it does have syntax. New words can (in principle) be formed out of thin air, or borrowed from other languages: so word-formation is possible in Vietnamese, and many people equate morphology with &quot;word-formation&quot; (I don't: I use &quot;morphology&quot; only to refer to grammatical word formation). There is also reduplication, which is a kind of morphology i.e. it is in the grammar (as are ablaut, process, and prosodic-pattern means of word-formation), so Vietnamese may not be the language that you are looking for, depending on whether you really depend on &quot;affixation&quot; as the distinguishing criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chadic language Angas might come a little closer to having no morphology. It has two things that are just floating tones, which appear at the end of certain phrases in certain syntactic contexts (for example, an NP before a VP, a direct object NP before an indirect object). What is being marked is a grammatical relationship between higher-level phrases, and not some property of particular words. Syntactically, this is usually treated as the concatenation of a phrase-final marker and whatever word cones before it. However, it is phonetically realized as a change in the tone of whatever precedes it. So this could simply be syntax (positioning of a marker) plus phonology (realization of a floating tone within another word), and not morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it depends on what your criteria are for calling something &quot;morphology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T04:47:22.880" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28288" CreationDate="2018-07-03T05:09:41.747" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your presumption about mandatory historical linguistics (and whatever curricular assumptions you have about such a course) may be true in some specific instances, and are generally false. It is an error to assume that there is a universal set of required core courses for linguists at the undergraduate or graduate level, or to assume that the content of such courses necessarily covers (fill in your favorite topic). At most, you might assume a near-universal requirement for some course in a sound-related area, and a form-related area (&quot;phonetics and phonology&quot;, &quot;syntax and semantics&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The domain of historical and comparative linguistics (I have to insist that you not subsume comparative linguistics as a subcase of historical linguistics) is sufficiently broad that no single course at either the undergraduate level nor the graduate level can teach a student the art of etymology. Indeed, no two courses, or three courses can properly teach the art of evaluating historical relations between words. For example, it is purported that &lt;em&gt;hansa&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Lufthansa&lt;/em&gt; derives from an older German word that connects to &quot;Hanseatic&quot;, has some form in Old High German, and according to etymologyonline comes from some stage of French or Latin. The art of etymology involves, among other things, evaluating relatedness claims. 99% of linguists are in no position to critically evaluate these claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the art of etymology is not a trivial parlor trick that can be quickly mastered, just as semantics and phonology are not trvialities that can be pwned in a class or two. Instead, they require a serious intellectual commitment to get, properly. The typical mandatory classes for grad school don't even teach you enough syntax that you are trained to do syntax, or enough phonology that you are trained to do phonology. Instead, you get trained to do syntax if you chose syntax as your field, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T05:09:41.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T05:34:24.097" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first learned of this quote on p. 105 Bottom. McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/186/pages/page181.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Primary Source:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.&lt;/em&gt;  (1921)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 181&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another instance of the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of nuancing is the group &lt;em&gt;whence, whither, hence, hither, thence, thither&lt;/em&gt;. They could not persist in live usage because &lt;strong&gt;[1.] they impinged too solidly&lt;/strong&gt; upon the circles of meaning represented by the words &lt;em&gt;where, here&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;[2.] In saying &lt;em&gt;whither&lt;/em&gt; we feel too keenly that we repeat all of &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. That we add to &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; an important nuance of direction irritates rather than satisfies. We prefer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/186/pages/page182.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 182&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to merge the static and the directive (Where do you live? like Where are you going?) or, if need be, to overdo a little the concept of direction (Where are you running to?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can these now rare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_adverb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Locative Adverbs&lt;/a&gt; 'impinge' anything, when their meanings can be distinguished from 'here, there, where'? E.g., 'there' ≠ 'to there', obviously. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How exactly does &lt;em&gt;whither&lt;/em&gt; cause an Anglophone to feel 'we repeat all of &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;', when their meanings can be distinguished? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was Sapir being politically correct? Isn't the true reason laziness or uncouthness by lay Anglophones, who simply forgot the meanings of the rare locative adverbs? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T06:35:50.080" Title="What did Sapir intend to say when he wrote that 'whither' repeats all of 'where'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28295" CreationDate="2018-07-03T06:35:50.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To (1): They can impinge. That doesn't mean they must impinge. And in historical linguistics, the diagnosis of a causation is not predictive that the same change will always apply. It's something that historical linguists of yore weren't always careful to caveat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages that differentiate directional and static&#xA;    locatives morphologically; it is a slight difference, and one that recurrently&#xA;    disappears from languages that have them. That does not mean that it&#xA;    must always disappear, or that it can't reemerge. So the distinction disappeared in English, and in Modern Greek, because it's the kind of relatively fine distinction that is susceptible to disappearing; just as palatals tend to be unstable diachronically. But that does not guarantee that they will disappear in all languages that have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, (2) is a post hoc, Just-So explanation of the loss that I find unpersuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But so is (3). People don't affricate palatals because they are uncouth; they don't merge morphological categories because they are dull, and they don't avoid hypotaxis because they are brain-damaged. Or at least, they are no more uncouth, dull, and brain-damaged than speakers of language that happen to retain some categories they don't (but drop others). It's droll to contemplate that Germanophones are superior to Anglophones because they retain a &lt;em&gt;wo/wohin&lt;/em&gt; distinction; but it's also profitless; the couthness the Germans maintained in keeping &lt;em&gt;wohin&lt;/em&gt;, they squandered in dropping the /θ/ that English kept. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language changes because one of the forces operating on language is increasing ease for speakers of producing language; language change is unpredictable, because there are multiple different kinds of ease being pursued by speakers in language (phonological simplicity vs morphological transparency being one classic unstable equilibrium; ease of production vs ease of intelligibility being the other), and it isn't the only force at work in any case (so is for example social capital).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T06:35:50.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2018-07-03T07:17:15.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Romanian, I know of about 6-7 words that end in triple &lt;code&gt;'i'&lt;/code&gt; - last &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; represents the definite article; some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;copiii&lt;/em&gt; - the kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;viii&lt;/em&gt; - the living ones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;camionagiii&lt;/em&gt; - the truck drivers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22288" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T13:21:50.610" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T13:21:50.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28288" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:46:44.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Doesn't Historical Linguistics suffice to train someone in etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, and let's work through the context of McWhorter's remarks to explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern linguistics, since structuralism—in fact, since the neogrammarians—is about working out systems, and not just explaining particulars. It explains language as a system, through rules; that's what McWhorter is professing allegiance to. Etymology according to that mindset is a a throwback to the bad old days of the early 19th century, when linguists were not about the overall system but about the particulars; not about the forest but the trees. That's not how linguistics has worked for the past 150 years, and McWhorter finds no satisfaction in going through lots of minutiae about particular words, that are idiosyncratic and don't lead to a big systematic narrative. To him, it's sterile antiquarianism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see why McWhorter reacts that way. I think it's a self-defeating reaction, because of course the majority of contemporary linguists regard the &lt;em&gt;historical linguistics&lt;/em&gt; he practices as sterile antiquarianism. Historical Linguistics is far more popular with laypeople than with academic linguists, as I commented above. (Just as etymology is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So etymology's focus on the particular is not part of the modern linguistic narrative; and the modern linguistic narrative is overwhelmingly synchronic anyway. It is neither fashionable to teach etymology, nor ideologically sympatico.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's another reason why Historical Linguistics, even at a graduate level, is not enough to equip you for etymology. And it ties in to another question the same querent asked today: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28289/isnt-it-obvious-that-linguists-must-specialize-in-language-contact-to-study-the&quot;&gt;Isn&amp;#39;t it obvious that linguists must specialize in language contact to study the history of English?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language contact study requires deep knowledge of the history of both languages involved, to get all the details right: it is a cross-disciplinary enterprise. Etymology is even more cross-disciplinary: to get it right, you need to know not just several overlapping disciplines of linguistics (sociology, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and their diachronic counterparts), but also several overlapping disciplines of history: cultural history as well as big-picture history (population movements etc). Just as philology, the other discipline modern linguists like to dismiss as Old Hat (when they're even aware of it) is cross-disciplinary, involving history and literature studies as well as linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, contemporary linguists aren't trained in that kind of thing, and yes it is old-fashioned. But to dismiss it as a fetish and a tiny corner of your discipline is silly: it is in fact much &lt;em&gt;bigger&lt;/em&gt; than your discipline. And those scholars who did not stay in the confines of linguistics or history, and wrote those dictionaries we all end up looking up, linguist or not, deserve huge respect. Especially because they don't get formal training in that line of work. (What cross-disciplinary scholar does now?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T12:46:44.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28288" CreationDate="2018-07-03T13:13:33.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think etymology should be thought of as one of the results that can arise from an individual studying a group of languages for several decades. A regular linguistics education will probably give you the skills that are required: skills of observation, description, analysis, synthesis. But they can't give you the years of accumulating data and facts about multiple languages you need in order to start explaining the history of a language and the relationship it has with other languages past and present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a linguist tells me that word X in language A is descended from word Y in language B, then unless I have years of experience in both languages, I'd just have to take it on faith that they're right, just as any non-linguist would. The history of words and other linguistic changes is a series of individual quirks of history, and while a linguist can apply their skills of analysis to a modern language they don't know much about, there's much less they can say about its history without an extensive experience with it. Maybe technology will make it easier to study etymology with less personal experience, but a person will still need to be responsible, tools can't do everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T13:19:10.127" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T13:19:10.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28312" CreationDate="2018-07-03T15:33:38.907" Score="11" ViewCount="14581" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yeet (/ji:t/)&lt;/em&gt; is a recently coined verb in English that seems to have taken on the characteristics of a strong verb, as seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yeet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this hilarious urban dictionary definition&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the strong verb system is no longer productive and has almost completely disintegrated, but some American English speakers are back-forming strong verbs, such as &lt;em&gt;dove&lt;/em&gt; instead of dived and &lt;em&gt;snuck&lt;/em&gt; instead of sneaked (for me, a native American English speaker, dove and snuck sound more correct than dived and sneaked). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the same thing has happened with the verb &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt;. There is an ongoing discussion especially among younger people over whether &lt;em&gt;yeet's&lt;/em&gt; past should be &lt;em&gt;/ji:təd/, (&quot;yeeted&quot;)&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;/joʊt/, (&quot;yote&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Germanic strong verbs&lt;/a&gt; don't behave like this. The /i:/ to /oʊ/ ablaut is really weird, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9101/why-is-speak-a-class-4-strong-verb&quot;&gt;might mean the word was originally in class 5 but switched classes&lt;/a&gt;, and anyways means &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt; should be spelled &lt;em&gt;*yeat&lt;/em&gt;. Even more problematic is that in class 5 there is the word /it/ which in the past is /eɪt/, so perhaps &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt;'s past should be &lt;em&gt;yate&lt;/em&gt;?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this is a very interesting topic as it seems to be (at least to my knowledge) the first coined strong verb. Is the past tense really &lt;em&gt;yote&lt;/em&gt;, should it just be &lt;em&gt;yeeted&lt;/em&gt;, or does it fall into another category of irregular English verb entirely? Are English strong verbs sercretly productive in certain situations (such as only with relatively simple verbs phonologically like &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt;, or in American English only) or are they dead and gone? If there is a new strong verb system emerging, what does/should it look like? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22284" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T22:35:53.607" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T10:47:57.993" Title="What is the past tense of 'yeet'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;neologism&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-03T18:22:51.617" Score="1" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fascinated by questions of linguistic relation between Hebrew and the Romance Languages, but I feel here I may have stumbled on a false connection and would like to be properly put in my place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French for gold is &quot;or,&quot; the Hebrew for light is &quot;אור&quot; which is pronounced essentially the same. Is it possible they both share the same PIE root *h₂ews-? That etymology is given for French &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/or#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;. The PIE root would mean &quot;to dawn, become light, become red&quot; and thus align better with the Hebrew than &quot;gold&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately Wiktionary doesn't have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as much information&lt;/a&gt; on the Hebrew etymology. Still, it would be awesome to get a better sense of the dynamics here. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22293" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T00:21:37.700" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T11:27:26.397" Title="Gold in French, light in Hebrew" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28300" CreationDate="2018-07-03T21:55:41.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what you mean by saying &quot;might mean the word was originally in class 5 but switched classes&quot;. You have said that &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;recently coined&quot;. It doesn't seem to have an Old English etymology, so there is no possible history of &quot;switching classes&quot; between time periods like other verbs have done. I don't think imagining a history for it will help analyze it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've provided another example of a strong conjugation that doesn't fit into the usual paradigms in your question: &lt;em&gt;snuck&lt;/em&gt;. So apparently the statement &quot;Germanic strong verbs dont behave like this&quot; is an over-simplification. It's not uncommon for languages to have, alongside identifiable conjugation patterns, some verbs that have exceptional conjugations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the past tense really &lt;em&gt;yote&lt;/em&gt;, should it just be &lt;em&gt;yeeted&lt;/em&gt;, or does it fall into another category of irregular English verb entirely? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;really&quot; or &quot;should&quot; about it. If people form some consensus about what the past tense form is, then whatever that form is will become established. Before then, it's impossible to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't participated in the &quot;ongoing discussion&quot; that you say is going on, but I would imagine that many people just go with whatever they think sounds funnier. Word play and jokes don't have to follow &quot;rules&quot; that are just based on historical processes. I don't know if you're familiar with the trend of using irregular plural noun forms as a joke in English, but I would say that's a good example of how this kind of &quot;irregularization&quot; doesn't have to respect any historical principles: people say &quot;meese&quot; (sometimes, not always) even though the word &quot;moose&quot; did not come from Old English and never underwent the historical process of umlaut, and stick &quot;-ii&quot; on all kinds of words that don't come from a Latin word ending in &quot;-ii&quot; in the plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are English strong verbs sercretly productive in certain situations (such as only with relatively simple verbs phonologically like yeet, or in American English only) or are they dead and gone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a correct dichotomy. Strong verbs are clearly not dead: we see frequent and pretty consistent use of strong conjugations for certain words, such as &lt;em&gt;drive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sing.&lt;/em&gt; Not being dead isn't the same thing as being productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T21:55:41.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28301" CreationDate="2018-07-03T22:50:13.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a definitive connection but the American Heritage dictionary has a list of Semitic triples and their subsequent cognate English derivatives. And among many possiblities there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ahdictionary.com/word/semitic.html#%E1%B8%A5wr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ḥwr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Central Semitic, to be(come) white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;houri, from Arabic ḥūrīya, nymph, houri, from ḥūr, plural (also used as singular) of ʾaḥwar, feminine ḥawrāʾ, characterized by the quality ḥawar, intense whiteness of the sclera of the eye in contrast to deep blackness of the iris (compare ḥawira, to have this quality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look further there.  It's just a hint, not an attestation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there is a selection of supposed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/27182-Proto-Semitic-and-Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognate PIE and PS roots&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't find *ḥwr or *h₂ews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all pretty sketchy. From vague memory, I thought there were no PS/PIE cognates from the beginning (of course many outright borrowings) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T22:50:13.867" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28301" CreationDate="2018-07-03T22:58:35.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlikely in the extreme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew is not Indo-European, it is Afro-Asiatic. There are theories (such as Nostratic) in which AA and IE are sisters, but even if these are true (which is far from generally accepted) the time-depth, and the opportunity for sound-changes, is immense. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As the Wiktionary article you quote says, the change /z/ -&gt; /r/ happened within Italic. Even if they are related, why should the same change have happened in a distant branch? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know the etymology of  &quot;אור&quot;, but I observe that Arabic has &quot;nur&quot; and Akkadian &quot;nūru&quot; for &quot;light, lamp&quot;. It seems to me much more likely that it is derived from the same root as those. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that comparing the forms of words in two modern languages is, in general, of absolutely no value whatever in determining relatedness. You need to trace the words back to relevant earlier forms to make any sort of meaningful conclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T22:58:35.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28288" CreationDate="2018-07-04T00:05:36.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is ... fashion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently in the US (I can't speak to philology or linguistics in Europe or elsewhere), historical linguistics is almost always offered as a single specific class but also almost always &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a required one. In contrast, the required main subjects, phonology, syntax, semantics, in contrast have much longer, multi-class tracks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a large component of the linguistics faculty that is theoretical (meaning somewhat separate from particular languages). But there is a varyingly large part that is language specific. If the department of linguistics is separate from the language teaching faculty, there is still a lot of overlap, and linguistics graduate students are expected to know more than one foreign language and probably even teach one. And a language specific professor may well be a linguistic theorist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical linguistics is not just etymology. A linguistics faculty member, who happens to also be a language specific expert (i.e. not purely a theoretician) will probably be adept at many of the languages in the same family. Part of the expertise may well show itself in lexical history. But compiling, say, a comparative vocabulary of Polynesian and Australasian, while an important part of linguistic knowledge, is not a central topic in current linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T00:05:36.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28301" CreationDate="2018-07-04T11:27:26.397" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew root אור has cognates in Aramaic אור, Ugaritic &lt;em&gt;'r&lt;/em&gt;, Akkadian &lt;em&gt;ūru, urru&lt;/em&gt;, and Arabic &lt;em&gt;'awwara&lt;/em&gt; (reference from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/AComprehensiveEtymologicalDictionaryOfTheHebrewLanguageErnestKlein1987OCR/a%20comprehensive%20etymological%20dictionary%20of%20the%20hebrew%20language%20ernest%20klein%201987%20OCR#page/n29/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Hebrew &lt;em&gt;'ōr&lt;/em&gt; and Ugaritic &lt;em&gt;ar&lt;/em&gt; likely both came from an original Northwestern Semitic * &lt;em&gt;'ār-&lt;/em&gt;. Some of the others seem to be cognates of the homograph &lt;em&gt;'ūr&lt;/em&gt; &quot;flame.&quot; The etymology is transparent enough to indicate that it isn't connected to Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PIE root * &lt;em&gt;h₂ews&lt;/em&gt;, from which French &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; comes, does show up in Hebrew in the word אויר &quot;air,&quot; which is borrowed from Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%AE%CF%81#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἀήρ&lt;/a&gt; (apparently from an earlier version with a digamma).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T11:27:26.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28310" CreationDate="2018-07-04T11:36:23.097" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am completely new to linguistics (and have to write an essay linked to this topic) and have read about Merge, which seems to allow its outputs to be put back in as inputs. Would you say this shows how we can create infinite combinations of words? I remember reading some of Steven Pinker's work, and he was saying the fact that you can always add a prefix to a sentence (e.g. 'Roger said, &quot;...&quot;') means you can never have a longest sentence. I understand that, so I would like to know if this is essentially what Merge shows with recursion.&#xA;Sorry if this whole question is incoherent, I am a total novice and need educating! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22295" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T13:31:28.527" Title="Does the recursive capability of Merge demonstrate the productivity of human language?" Tags="&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28288" CreationDate="2018-07-04T13:00:44.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least two current uses of the word &quot;linguist&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one more restricted sense, used especially in America, &quot;linguistics&quot; refers to the Chomskian program to investigate the human faculty of language, especially through syntax. When they want to be more specific, its practitioners sometimes call it &quot;core&quot; or &quot;modern&quot; linguistics. It is by definition interested in language as it exists internally in the mind of an individual (&quot;I-language&quot;) and not in the sense of a social, historically-built construct shared between communities (&quot;E-language&quot;).  This strict definition considers historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, typology, philology, dialectology, forensic linguistics, second-language acquisition, functional linguistics, endangered language revitalization etc. as &quot;non-core&quot;, &quot;non-modern&quot; or &quot;tangential&quot; forms of linguistics, or even &quot;not linguistics&quot; (one prominent Chomskian calls such topics of study by a special neologism, &quot;languistics&quot;).  In my experience many Chomskians seem to engage in minor polemics of the form &quot;linguists aren't really interested in $topic, because syntax is so much more interesting&quot;, even as the International Linguistic Conference on $Topic is taking place next door—because what they really mean is &quot;(Chomskian) linguists aren't really interested in $topic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For researchers in those other areas &quot;linguistics&quot; is a wider term encompassing all paradigms of language research, of which the faculty of language is but one subfield among many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T16:51:17.060" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T16:51:17.060" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28267" CreationDate="2018-07-04T13:09:47.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a specific term for this, but Edward Sapir (1925) presents this situation in his &quot;C and D languages&quot;: two languages that are phonetically different but have a similar phonemic patterning. One can apply the same reasoning to two different dialects.&#xA; Here is an example taken from Dresher (2009:62)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xz4lV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xz4lV.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T13:09:47.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28307" CreationDate="2018-07-04T13:15:41.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think rather than saying that the recursive capability of Merge &quot;demonstrate[s] the productivity of human language&quot;, it would make more sense to say that it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the productivity that we see. The idea of &quot;Merge&quot; acts as a kind of explanation; I might be misunderstanding the wording of your question, but I don't think it makes sense to say that an explanation demonstrates or shows the phenomenon that it was introduced to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that linguists who believe in &quot;Merge&quot; think that it is responsible for the ability to create infinite combinations of words that is a feature of many well-known languages, such as English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the existence of &quot;Merge&quot; by itself doesn't establish that no human language could have a longest sentence. Clearly, languages use rules other than &quot;Merge&quot; to determine what sentences and syntactic structures are grammatical. For example, I believe some languages don't allow embedded genitive structures, like &quot;Alice's brother's car&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of &quot;recursion&quot; that is used in current Generativist literature seems to be equivalent to &quot;computable&quot;, plus maybe some other details, although you shouldn't take my word for that as I don't understand computability theory. I wrote an answer about it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26206/5581&quot;&gt;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26206/5581&lt;/a&gt; The brouhaha about the supposed absence of embedded clauses in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1515/does-pirah%C3%A3-syntax-contradict-the-principles-of-universal-grammar&quot;&gt;Piraha&lt;/a&gt; seems to have inspired a fair number of responses from Generative Grammar types that seem to say that the existence of &quot;Merge&quot; isn't expected to imply that all particular human languages will allow embedding, or the construction of an infinite number of sentences of indefinite length. My understanding is that in current theory, &quot;Merge&quot; is also supposed to be used in putting together words of different categories; e.g. it is &quot;recursive&quot; in the sense that after applying &quot;Merge&quot; to &quot;red&quot; and &quot;house&quot; to get &quot;red house&quot;, &quot;Merge&quot; is applied again to &quot;the&quot; and &quot;red house&quot; to get &quot;the red house&quot; and then again to &quot;the red house&quot; and &quot;is on the corner&quot; to get the sentence &quot;the red house is on the corner&quot;. So while the capability of constructing sentences of indefinite length in some languages may be taken as evidence for the existence of &quot;Merge&quot;, my impression is that contrived examples of the kind &quot;Mary said &quot;Roger said &quot;Sally said ... &quot; &quot; &quot; that show recursion in the sense of embedding phrases of the &quot;same&quot; category in one another don't seem to be such important examples as they are often made out to be. I don't know too much about the history of this area, though, so maybe there was some reason for choosing these examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more relevant info in the answers to the following question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/5875/whats-the-difference-between-recursion-and-embedding/5876#5876&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the difference between recursion and embedding?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty obvious that people don't just memorize a look-up table of sentences when they learn a language, but apparently there's some disagreement about how to describe and explain this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T13:31:28.527" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T13:31:28.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28322" CreationDate="2018-07-04T14:32:26.517" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two articles about fossilization from wiki are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossilization_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fossilization_(linguistics)&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlanguage_fossilization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interlanguage_fossilization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But especially first one is stub. what are all meaning of this term in linguistics and applied linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T22:18:08.543" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T19:23:02.510" Title="All usage of the term fossilization in Linguistics and applied linguistics" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28300" CreationDate="2018-07-04T16:02:52.550" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it may be tempting to look back towards Old English prototypes, one has to be aware of the time depth of any neologism. That's why finding the first occurrence is so important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interjection &lt;em&gt;yeet!&lt;/em&gt; and the noun &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt; (referring to the dance) is dated to 2014 on Vine, which came into more common use among teenagers about the end of 2017. It appears to me that the verb derives from the noun, through standard English zero derivation (&quot;verbing&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although strong verbs are basically non-productive, a small set of one-syllable verb neologisms end in stop consonants, thus having the phonological appearance of Germanic strong verb. To &quot;tweet&quot; is perhaps the most salient example; although &quot;tweeted&quot; is basically standard (based on the original standard verb), &quot;twote&quot; and (perhaps self-consciously) &quot;twat&quot; are attested. However, the limited numbers of verbs fitting this pattern suggests that this ablaut (vowel change)-based past tense is not productive and is not undergoing some kind of resurgence in 2018. That doesn't mean to say that there won't be exceptions. Sociolinguistic factors, including various forms of prescriptivism, jocular or otherwise, do have an influence on language, however limited it may be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is it &quot;yote&quot; and not &quot;yeet&quot; or &quot;yate&quot; that won out as the irregular &quot;joke&quot; past tense form? It is more fruitful to look at &lt;em&gt;analogy&lt;/em&gt; in dealing with neologisms, especially in web English. I think the strongest influence would probably be &quot;speak&quot;, past tense &quot;spoke&quot;. Has that /i:/ with a final non-nasal stop consonant. Also common enough to exert an analogical influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a side note, &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt; actually &lt;strong&gt;could be&lt;/strong&gt; a legitimate English verb with a long pedigree. It is an earlier variant of the more common &lt;em&gt;ye&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;to address with you/ye&quot; [similar to French &lt;em&gt;vouvoyer&lt;/em&gt; or German &lt;em&gt;siezen&lt;/em&gt;]. The OED dates the Middle English version to 1440.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T16:02:52.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28311" CreationDate="2018-07-05T01:22:30.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Within a given language&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the meaning I'm more familiar with. Fossilization, in this case, is a diachronic process (happening over time) within a single language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patterns within languages can be &lt;em&gt;productive&lt;/em&gt;, like adding -s to nouns to make them plural in English, or &lt;em&gt;non-productive&lt;/em&gt;, like adding -en to nouns to make them plural. Both are used: cat → cats, ox → oxen. But a productive pattern can still be applied in completely new cases, such as &lt;em&gt;wug&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;wugs&lt;/em&gt;, while a non-productive pattern won't: no native English-speaker would see the invented word &lt;em&gt;wug&lt;/em&gt; and pluralize it as *&lt;em&gt;wugen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fossilization is when a productive pattern stops being productive, but leaves some traces behind. In English, the plural in -en is no longer productive, but still appears in oxen, children, brethren, and a few other words. So the pattern, and those words in particular, are now said to be &amp;quot;fossilized&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Between languages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less familiar with this usage, so please correct me if I get any part of it wrong. But &amp;quot;fossilization&amp;quot; can also refer to something that happens in language-learning, when traits of the first language &amp;quot;stick around&amp;quot; into the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a native speaker of English (which has an SVO word order) might keep applying that word order in Japanese (which instead uses SOV). The SVO word order is then considered a fossilized trait: it's not proper Japanese, it's just a relic of them previously having learned English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T01:22:30.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2018-07-05T10:09:03.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend Colin Fine hasn't posted it as an answer, so I will: &lt;em&gt;ameliorative&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colin and I both know the term from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt;, but you can see it used applied to the Oceanic language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erromanga_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erromangan&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=gbpNAhsb3BQC&amp;amp;pg=PA140&amp;amp;lpg=PA140&amp;amp;dq=ameliorative%20suffix&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=TMIAqwIzQW&amp;amp;sig=TmzexhNyGkaJxWzFPKgAtLQXfQ4&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjt3qv52ofcAhWMgLwKHWgNCS8Q6AEwAnoECAIQAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Erromangan (Sye) Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T22:04:17.517" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T22:04:17.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2018-07-05T11:12:27.240" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meliorative: &quot;(Linguistics) giving or acquiring a more favourable meaning or connotation (opposed to pejorative)&quot; (OED, with lots of examples). The opposite of &quot;peior&quot; is &quot;melior&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T11:12:27.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28319" CreationDate="2018-07-05T12:19:19.463" Score="0" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have two forms of the pronoun &quot;we&quot;: an inclusive one and an exclusive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the examples I am aware of, there is just one inclusive we, meaning &quot;i/we and you (sg./pl.)&quot;. Are there languages having a more fine-grained distinction in inclusive pronouns, e.g., different forms for whether either the first person is singular or plural or the second person is so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there languages with different forms of the exclusive we depending whether the excluded you is singular or plural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T12:52:16.853" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T23:22:39.520" Title="Inclusive pronouns—can there be more than one?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28317" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28318" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" Score="0" Body="For questions about the distinction inclusive/exclusive made on the first person plural (mostly in pronouns, but also in verb forms)." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T12:53:32.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28316" CreationDate="2018-07-05T15:52:35.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are languages that have a dual/plural number distinction as well as an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first person, so there definitely could be separate inclusive first-person pronouns corresponding to &quot;[me] and [you (sing)]&quot; and &quot;[me] and [you (plural)]&quot;.  &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/39&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Michael Cysouw (Chapter 39 in the World Atlas of Language Structures) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many languages [with a 1st-person singular/inclusive/exclusive distinction] that also mark dual&#xA;  number in their pronouns. The basic and most common way to mark&#xA;  duality is exemplified in (4) by the pronouns from Lavukaleve&#xA;  (Solomons East Papuan; Solomon Islands). A special dual pronoun exists&#xA;  both for the inclusive and for the exclusive, both marked by a suffix&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;-l&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) Lavukaleve (Terrill 2003: 170) &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;ngai&lt;/em&gt; ‘I’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; ‘exclusive, exactly two’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; ‘exclusive, more than two’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;mel&lt;/em&gt; ‘inclusive, exactly two’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; ‘inclusive, more than two’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another strategy is to mark duality only in the inclusive (Plank 1996:&#xA;  130-131). In such paradigms, the dual inclusive aligns structurally&#xA;  with the singular pronouns, yet strictly speaking it is of course not&#xA;  singular in reference. The term minimal inclusive is used to refer to&#xA;  such a dual inclusive. Paradigms with a dual only in the inclusive are&#xA;  known as minimal-augmented structures (Thomas 1955). This lexical&#xA;  structure is exemplified in (5) by the pronouns from Southern Sierra&#xA;  Miwok (Penutian; California).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) Southern Sierra Miwok (Broadbent 1964: 93) &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;kan·i&lt;/em&gt; ‘I’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;mah·i&lt;/em&gt; ‘exclusive, two or more’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;ʔoti·me&lt;/em&gt; ‘inclusive, exactly two’&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;ʔotic·i&lt;/em&gt; ‘inclusive, more than two’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The opposite distribution of duality – dual in the exclusive but not&#xA;  in the inclusive – exists among the world’s languages, but it is&#xA;  extremely rare (Cysouw 2003: 221-222). In the present sample it is&#xA;  attested in the pronouns from Yagua (Peba-Yaguan; Peru; Payne and&#xA;  Payne 1990: 369-370). Just as exotic is the division attested in&#xA;  Gooniyandi (Bunaban; Australia). Here the inclusive dual is expressed&#xA;  by the same pronoun as the exclusive ngidi, but is different from the&#xA;  inclusive plural yaadi  (McGregor 1990: 167-173). There are more cases&#xA;  like this among the world’s language, but not many (Cysouw 2003: 93).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't heard of the other thing you mention (&quot;different forms of the exclusive we depending whether the excluded you is singular or plural&quot;) and it sounds a bit unlikely to me--I have read that no language has a clusivity distinction between things like &quot;you (all of whom I am addressing right now)&quot; and &quot;you (the ones I'm addressing right now and others that aren't here)&quot; and that distinction sounds a bit similar to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that despite the name, the &quot;exclusive&quot; element of the &quot;exclusive we&quot; isn't necessarily the most salient part of its use. Its meaning can be explained to a speaker of a language that doesn't have the distinction as &quot;we, excluding the second person&quot;, but I have the impression that a speaker of a language with the distinction would be just as likely or more likely to think of it in terms of &quot;first person + third person(s)&quot; rather than &quot;first person plural excluding (some specific) 2nd person(s)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, the third person pronouns also could be described as &quot;excluding&quot; the second person, but I haven't heard of languages that use different third-person pronouns depending on whether the addressed (and technically excluded) party is singular or plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually know whether any languages have this, though (pronouns that inflect based on the number of the listener, rather than or in addition to the number of the referent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T23:22:39.520" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T23:22:39.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:58:18.053" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get (in some automated fashion) the agentive noun of a given verb. For instance we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;buy, buy&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sell, sell&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;invest, invest&lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there is some resource that contains a mapping of verbs to their agentive nouns. I have looked around a bit in traditional resources like WordNet, VerbNet etc. but have not had any luck yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All suggestions are immensely appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1777" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T18:58:18.053" Title="Resource for getting agentive noun from verb automatically" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T19:09:22.547" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I've got the distinction between broad and slender consonants in Irish more or less down, but a few details keep eluding me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&#xA;What on earth is the difference in pronunciation between &quot;mar&quot; and &quot;mear&quot;? I have listened to soundbites, and they sound exactly identical to me. Theoretically, I understand &quot;mear&quot; should have a bit of a y-glide after the 'm', but I cannot hear it anywhere in the soundbites I have listened to. The pronunciation &quot;myar&quot; even sounds unnatural to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&#xA;Same question for &quot;fara&quot; versus &quot;fear&quot; (man): I cannot hear any y-glide in &quot;fear&quot; in any of the sound-bites. It sounds like the English word &quot;far&quot; to be, and I cannot make out what makes this a slender consonant… Help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.&#xA;I learnt in grammar class many years ago that a slender double n at the end of the word is pronounced like ñ in Spanish, so &quot;sinn&quot; sounds like &quot;shiñ&quot;. But then I learnt that a slender single n at the end of the word is slender, but without the y-glide, e.g. &quot;ansin&quot;. My question here is: well, if the y-glide is not there with a single slender 'n' at the end of a word, then what on earth distinguishes it from a broad 'n'??? Isn't the whole point that slender consonants have a y-glide? How does the '-n' in &quot;ansin&quot; sound any different from the '-n' in sean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go raibh maith agat!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yair MacClanahan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22300" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T22:58:00.473" Title="Three questions regarding the distinctions between certain broad and slender sounds in Irish" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28311" CreationDate="2018-07-05T19:23:02.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fossilization&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e1d8/dd74e3197e23b619ad7894bc1b2cbf06ee71.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;. What it means in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Fossilization_(palaeontology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paleontology&lt;/a&gt; (the source context) is the very rare gradual replacement of normally degradable biological material with non-degrading material. Typical is animal skeletal material replaced with rock, as in dinosaur digs (&lt;em&gt;fossil&lt;/em&gt; means 'dug up' in Latin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any linguistic context, this metaphor theme projects the dynamic aspect of something active becoming gradually less active and retarding change. Part of the DEATH frame, probably. The rocks are not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In historical linguistics, fossils are the non-productive but still detectable traces of vanished paradigms and syntagmas. These are not discovered as rocks, but as old junk still attached to some words, like fragments of plastic packing might adhere to a toy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2nd-language-learning terms, fossilization is the fixation of a given speaker at a certain level of competence in a foreign &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlanguage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interlanguage&lt;/a&gt;&quot; -- &lt;em&gt;interlanguage&lt;/em&gt; means what people actually learn as adults when they acquire a new language. &lt;em&gt;Interlanguage&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fossilization&lt;/em&gt; are coinages by my colleague and former teacher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Selinker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Larry Selinker&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Interlanguage theory essentially says that people get better and better at a language until they get good enough for their own purposes, and then they don't get much better after that. This is called &quot;fossilization&quot; at some level of competence, and the metaphor is one of gradual cessation because of inactivity, although what's being turned into a fossil is just the person's inclination to learn novel words and constructions in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T19:23:02.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28321" CreationDate="2018-07-05T21:22:03.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't exactly understand the question, but it sounds like this is in the real of &quot;I don't get it, what do I do&quot; problems. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This database&lt;/a&gt; has good word recordings in Connacht, Ulster and Munster Irish, which will allow you to hear differences side-by-side (with enough browser windows open). Unfortunately, they do not use the same speakers for a given dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you listen to enough of the recordings, it should be clear that there is more to it than just details of the consonant. For some speakers there is a subtle difference in the consonant, and for others, well I'll say that I don't hear anything on the consonant. If you can edit samples in Praat and get rid of the preceding vowel (most or all), then you might be able to focus on whatever difference there is in the consonant. The pair &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/sloinn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sloinn&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/slonn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slonn&lt;/a&gt; in the Ulster samples should be pretty clear (apologies if you still can't hear a difference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T21:22:03.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28321" CreationDate="2018-07-05T22:58:00.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The broad/slender contrast is one of (relatively) velarised vs palatalised consonants. Among native speakers, as far as I can tell, the entire consonant is either palatalised or velarised and any glides (on- or off-) are incidental, though often they're an important cue for us learners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re &quot;mar&quot; and &quot;mear&quot;, (listening to them on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teanglann.ie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.teanglann.ie&lt;/a&gt;) they are very similar but there is a difference with the former being slightly velarised. I would not however be surprised if a native speaker had trouble picking which is which when uttered in isolation. I think rather than trying to pronounce them with an off-glide on &quot;mear&quot; you would be better off pronouncing the &quot;m&quot; in &quot;mear&quot; slightly palatalised and the &quot;m&quot; in &quot;mar&quot; slightly velarised. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS838nvwlpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a youtube video&lt;/a&gt; that teaches (in an exaggerated way) how to produce a velarised &quot;m&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Kod6Y1KiI&amp;amp;frags=pl%2Cwn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's one&lt;/a&gt; that teaches how to produce a palatalised &quot;m&quot;. You might notice the effect on the following vowel as the velarisation/palatalisation persists briefly and changes the vowel quality slightly—for learners this can be an important cue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to be aware that native speakers will often not aim for a careful, precise articulation of every sound so the contrast may be very hard to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to &quot;fara&quot; vs &quot;fear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for doubled consonants, I understand these to be a holdover in the orthography from Old Irish and that they have largely lost their original function but can still indicate the quality of the preceding vowel, though this varies with dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T22:58:00.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T23:59:01.423" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional grammar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;synesis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; refers to inflection being determined by underlying semantics instead of morphological agreement; the most familiar instance in English is expressions like &lt;em&gt;The government are divided&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1935 &lt;a href=&quot;https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plena_Gramatiko&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference grammar of Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;, the term &lt;em&gt;sinetio&lt;/em&gt; is used. This is presumably the same word, possibly because the authors did not like the sound (or recognisability) of *&lt;em&gt;sinezo&lt;/em&gt;. (The Dutch and English entries in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.majstro.com/Web/Majstro/showEntryInfo.php?k=40385&amp;amp;t=epo&amp;amp;i=eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Majstro.com&lt;/a&gt; think so. On the other hand, the Spanish entry guesses it is derived from &lt;em&gt;synaetia&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;synesis&lt;/em&gt; &gt; *&lt;em&gt;synetia&lt;/em&gt;, and calques it as &lt;em&gt;concausa&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors (the French scholar Gaston Waringhien and the Hungarian scholar Kalman Kalocsay) use &lt;em&gt;sinetio&lt;/em&gt; in a sense related to &lt;em&gt;synesis&lt;/em&gt;, but much broader. They use it to refer to what traditional grammar discusses under syntax, but we nowadays would shuffle between morphology and semantics: it's the semantics and distribution of functional morphemes and words. So, what does conjunction X mean, when is the accusative used, how does the use of the past tense in subordination correlate with the tense of the main clause, etc. The kind of thing that traditional grammars of the free-word order Classical languages spend almost all their time discussing under &quot;syntax&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1935 is quite early for any post-traditionalist discussion of syntax, particularly among people who weren't professional linguists (Waringhien was a schoolteacher in his day job, Kalocsay a doctor), and so probably did not know what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bloomfield&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bloomfield&lt;/a&gt; was up to at around the same time. So I'm assuming that, even if they innovated in the morphology of &lt;em&gt;sinetio&lt;/em&gt;, they didn't innovate in its usage: that there was some precedent in traditional grammar in differentiating Classicist notions of syntax (&quot;the ethical dative, the subjunctive of intent&quot;) from syntax proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone found a similar extension of the usage of &lt;em&gt;synesis&lt;/em&gt; outside Esperanto? Or an attempt to differentiate semantics of functional morphemes from syntax before the structuralists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T09:33:17.593" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T09:33:17.593" Title="Extension of &quot;synesis&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;traditional-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28278" CreationDate="2018-07-06T01:25:11.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first answer I drafted was similar to what boiko ended up writing, but I abandoned it on realizing what you've confirmed by your comment: you're not asking about the linguistic status of the symbol &quot;.&quot; but about what that symbol represents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of asking this question might be, &quot;How do we know when a sentence ends?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my way of thinking, there are two possible directions to take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A distinct element in the sentence marks the sentence structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existing elements give clues as to the sentence structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question can now be understood as whether the symbol &quot;.&quot; represents a distinct element (hypothesis 1) or is purely conventional because there is no separate element (hypothesis 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 1&lt;/strong&gt; supposes that there's an element somewhere in the sentence carrying information about the sentence's endpoint. Normally this would indeed be a morpheme. For example, in the word &quot;runs&quot;, &lt;em&gt;run-s&lt;/em&gt;, the second morpheme &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; carries syntactic information: 3rd person singular simple present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem we run into is that there is clearly no segmental content to mark a sentence end; that is, there is no additional sound at the end of a sentence that we could say is the realization of such a morpheme. There isn't even a  segmental sound change (because some morphemes change the realization of nearby phonemes, such as German umlaut).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How deep a problem this is for our first hypothesis depends partly on what you think about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zero morphemes&lt;/a&gt;. But even if we were to assign a null realization to our sentence-ending morpheme, we would have a difficult problem in that zero morphemes are inferred through contrast with non-zero morphemes. But there is no separate segmental content for a sentence &lt;em&gt;continuation&lt;/em&gt; either.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 2&lt;/strong&gt; supposes that something about the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; elements in the sentence serves as our indication of where the structure is. Specifically, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprasegmentals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suprasegmental&lt;/a&gt; realization of the sentence. This term covers a broad range of phenomena from pitch to timing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this hypothesis, we should expect someone's intonation patterns to change when they come to the end of their sentence, and/or their volume to shift, and/or their vocal quality to shift (e.g. switching to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocal fry&lt;/a&gt;), and/or their pace to slow down or speed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Do those signs sound familiar? :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis 2 is the currently accepted one.&lt;/strong&gt; A direct answer to your question, then, would be &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, the full stop does not represent a morpheme, but a set of phenomena affecting the realization of the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; morphemes in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, we use all the ones listed and we use them to make a great number of contrasts. Just for fun, here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://unfamiliarplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/dog-intonation.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six different intonations&lt;/a&gt; of the same sentence (or fragment!): the same morphemes, but different prosody. How would you characterize the information conveyed by each variation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, it's probably because these syntactic clues are contained in the suprasegmental layer that so many orthographic signs have been added to the alphabet. How else can we capture that information? We try to get a few of them with skillful use of the period, the exclamation mark, the ellipsis, the question mark, the semicolon, the comma... and the correspondences between this conventional, fairly recent linguistic system to the natural acrobatics of the human voice is certainly a worthwhile thing to examine, but it's been the stylists, not the linguists, who've been doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 &lt;/sup&gt;A reply might be that we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have morphemes for sentence continuation: conjunctions like &quot;and&quot;, &quot;or&quot;, etc. While these do serve that function, suprasegmental information is both sufficient and overriding. The fact that people have to be taught by confused high school English teachers not to start a sentence with &quot;and&quot; or &quot;but&quot; suggests that, in fact, we have no problem ending a sentence as far as the intuitive cues are concerned and just using the conjunction to introduce the &lt;em&gt;next&lt;/em&gt; sentence.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T02:27:35.037" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T02:27:35.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-06T10:51:49.357" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is more probable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) there will be an established form of European English in the future that will differ slightly from British or American English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) the English dialects in the world will become closer due to the digital media?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T10:51:49.357" Title="Is it plausible there will be an established form of European English in the future?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28287" CreationDate="2018-07-06T12:47:04.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that this question has been asked somewhere, or maybe it's about monosyllabic languages. Anyways, while modern Mandarin Chinese is less isolating and indeed has words consisting of multiple syllables/with parts tucked on to some sort of inflectional effect (e.g. &quot;-了&quot; which is similar to the past tense inflection in English), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical Chinese&lt;/a&gt; is supposed to be purely isolating, i.e. each syllable in the text strictly forms a meaning unit, and there is no inflectional &lt;strong&gt;affixation&lt;/strong&gt; whatsoever, if that's what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the &lt;em&gt;oral languages&lt;/em&gt; of ancient China were purely isolating. Classical Chinese is more of a written form for formal documents/historical records etc. It's suggested that people could have spoken in a quite different way compared with how they wrote documents, or they could have pronounced what seems to be one character with multiple syllables, at least people of different regions. However this can hardly be corroborated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that if you're wondering about &quot;derivational morphology&quot;, then the way new words are derived in Classical Chinese is by combining a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;radical&lt;/a&gt; with a phonetic component. IMO this is just another form of derivational morphology, however from the perspectives of linguists who view the whole radical component + phonetic component as one single &quot;character&quot;, of course this cannot be morphology since morphology must occur across multiple characters/syllables. The whole idea of morphology is very much centered on western languages and when applied to ideographic languages there can be problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3625" LastEditorUserId="3625" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T14:03:46.437" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T14:03:46.437" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T00:16:42.177" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish has many different irregulars in its preterite tense (preterite is what we call it in Spanish class, I think the linguist term is simple past but I might be wrong), most of which involve a change in the stem of the verb, for example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hacer (to do): Haces  -&gt; Hiciste &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andar (to walk): Andas -&gt; Anduviste &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Querer (to want): Quieres* -&gt; Quisiste &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poner (to put): Pones -&gt; Pusiste  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these forms are in the second person singular, indicative mood, going from Present -&gt; Preterite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Querer is what is known as a “stem changer” in the present, if it wasn’t a stem changer it’s second person present form would be *queres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These irregulars take what are known as “irregular endings” which are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Sing.   Pl. &#xA;&#xA;1p   -e     -imos &#xA;&#xA;2p   -iste  -isteis &#xA;&#xA;3p   -o     -ieron&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is opposed to &quot;regular endings&quot; which are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (-ar infinitive)           (-er/-ir infinitive) &#xA;&#xA;     Sing.   Pl.                Sing.  Pl. &#xA;&#xA;1p   -é     -amos              -í      -imos &#xA;&#xA;2p   -aste  -asteis            -iste   -isteis  &#xA;&#xA;3p   -ó     -aron              -ió     -ieron &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the regular conjugation the 1st and 3rd person singular have syllable final stress, which in the -ar infinitive conjugation class is the only thing distinguishing it from the 1st person singular present (e.g., hablo vs habló). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It reminded me of Germanic strong verbs as the stem vowel is changing in each situation, but I know it’s a far chance for those two systems of inflection to be related. So what is the reason for this irregularity in the past? If this is expected from Latin (as comments suggest) then why did this discrepancy exist in Latin? Is it actually traceable back to PIE ablaut? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not asking about the verbs ser, ir, dar, or ver. Those are also irregulars (as in they do not have syllable final stress in the 1ps and 3ps) but do not follow this same pattern as they don’t take the irregular endings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22284" LastEditorUserId="22284" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T00:28:09.740" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T00:28:09.740" Title="Where did the irregulars come from in the Spanish preterite?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T04:28:38.290" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; person singular pronoun (&lt;em&gt;Lei&lt;/em&gt;) for formal speech, regardless of the gender of the 2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; person singular addressee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T–V_distinction#Italian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T12:18:48.820" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T12:18:48.820" Title="Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun for formal speech?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;register&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13006" CreationDate="2018-07-08T04:32:27.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you research the concept of &quot;semantic entropy&quot;. Check out this paper to start:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/82b8/9271245e4f813d2494c1c9f37ddfff991e50.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/82b8/9271245e4f813d2494c1c9f37ddfff991e50.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22307" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T04:32:27.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28333" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-08T09:34:35.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T09:34:35.457" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T09:34:35.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28334" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-08T09:34:35.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about pre-Structuralist Western understandings of linguistics, based in the Graeco-Latin tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_grammar" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T09:32:57.910" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T09:32:57.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-08T10:43:59.487" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question has been posed before, and I know also that there were different versions of putting it depending on models and different kinds of reasoning. &#xA;What I want to understand, is the main difference between Tense and Aspect (grammatical one), provided that some languages exhibit morphological tense only in the Aorist, and the past and present are expressed &amp;amp; (methodologically) referred to as perfective and imperfective respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the difference here between tense and aspect?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T10:43:59.487" Title="Difference between tense &amp; Grammatical aspect?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28340" CreationDate="2018-07-08T13:31:48.013" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm following this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki chart&lt;/a&gt; to map the English consonants into its corresponding place of articulation. I can see that some sounds in English like &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; they do not exist in that char. So, I'm confused whether it's bilabial, labiodental or velar. The description from the wiki page for this sound is &quot;voice labio-velar approximant&quot; I guess the place of articulation is labio-velar but does that mean this sound is velar and (bilabial or labiodental?)? Another example is &lt;code&gt;\n̩\&lt;/code&gt; like in &quot;button&quot; I can't find it there either. Is it treated like '\n\'? because other similar sounds (like &lt;code&gt;\ɳ\&lt;/code&gt;) has no existence in English sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I attempted to map the following sounds to their place of articulation, and I need your validation (I included the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPABET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ARPABET&lt;/a&gt; symbol at the beginning if the ARPABET symbol of that sound differs in IPA symbol ) I mapped them to the &quot;big picture&quot; which is the upper row in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki chart&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\w\&lt;/code&gt; : labial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\EN\&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;\n̩\&lt;/code&gt;: no clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\t\&lt;/code&gt; : coronal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\TH\&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;\θ\&lt;/code&gt;: coronal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\EL\&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;l̩&lt;/code&gt;: coronal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;\CH\&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;\tʃ\&lt;/code&gt; coronal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ultimate goal is to have a map for each consonant in English to its corresponding place of articulation. If any of you is familiar with programming, I'm looking to something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;'M':'bilabial',&#xA;'EM':'labiodental',&#xA;'P':'bilabial',&#xA;'F','labiodental',&#xA;......&#xA;}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the case of &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; does it has two &quot;mappings&quot; where it's a (bilabial?) and velar at the same time? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22231" LastEditorUserId="22231" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T15:14:52.490" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T15:10:42.877" Title="Mapping the pulmonic consonants in English to its corresponding place of articulation" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26268" CreationDate="2018-07-08T14:13:59.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cultural vector transmitting the quotation dash, I surmise, is French cultural prestige. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_1992_num_64_3_6063&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; on the history of the dash in Russian shows it came in directly from translations from French and German in the late 18th century, preserving the punctuation of the originals. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.persee.fr/doc/igram_0222-9838_2004_num_102_1_2562&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, the quotation dash is not that much older in French itself: it was first used by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Marmontel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marmontel&lt;/a&gt; in 1761, who had first proposed it in the form &quot;..&quot; in 1754. In fact, the article notes it was anticipated by the similar use of the dash in English, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/a&gt;, Vol I published in 1759. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotation dash prospered in French, and thence languages under French cultural influence, and not in English, even if Sterne used it in English first (by two years). That's just the randomness of memes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T14:13:59.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17354" CreationDate="2018-07-08T14:54:06.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ea    Rare, for /ɛː/ (see ee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ee    /eː/, becoming [iː] by about 1500; or /ɛː/, becoming [eː] by about 1500. In Early Modern English the latter vowel came to be commonly written ⟨ea⟩. The two vowels later merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;oa    Rare, for /ɔː/ (became commonly used in Early Modern English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surmise by @sumelic is what I've always assumed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the spelling  arose simply because /ɛː/ is halfway between /a/ and /e/ in vowel quality. It seems parallel to &amp;lt;oo&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;oa&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that what was an occasional Middle English spelling variant became prevalent in Early Modern English (just before it merged out of phonetic reality) suggests an increased concern with phonemic accuracy, coming about with the standardisation of spelling accompanying printing. Which sounds at odds with the chaos of Early Modern spelling; but Middle spelling was likely even more chaotic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T15:57:36.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17354" CreationDate="2018-07-08T19:29:10.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in a comment a while ago, the spelling &amp;#x3c;ee&gt; is just a doubled e. Doubled consonants have been used to represent &quot;long vowels&quot; in many languages. The spelling &amp;#x3c;ee&gt; does occur in Middle English (Chaucer uses it for example) although it can represent either /eː/ or /ɛː/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the spelling &amp;#x3c;ea&gt;, one thing I forgot to mention that may be relevant is that Middle-English /ɛː/ was sometimes the reflex of the Old English long diphthong /æ͡ːɑ/, which was typically spelled &amp;#x3c;ea&gt;. Another source of Middle-English /ɛː/ was Old English /æː/, which was spelled with the letter ash &amp;#x3c;æ&gt; or with the &amp;#x3c;ae&gt; digraph (my understanding is that these spellings were interchangeable in Old English, although I don't know what their relative frequencies were). So not only was /ɛː/ phonetically between /e/ and /a/, but the spellings of its antecedents in Old English did involve combinations of the letters &amp;#x3c;e&gt; and &amp;#x3c;a&gt; in many cases (although not necessarily in that order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T19:29:10.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28336" CreationDate="2018-07-08T19:38:15.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are about two different questions here. One is, &quot;what are the phonetic properties for classifying the English consonants?&quot;. In order to answer the question, you need a theory of phonetic descriptions. The second is, &quot;what are the phonetic labels associated with the IPA letters?&quot;. I will start by answering the second question: here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the IPA chart&lt;/a&gt;. IPA is an official standard, and that is a link to an official IPA chart. From this, you can see that the main table of consonants is labeled &quot;pulmonic&quot; (there are also clicks, implosives and ejectives which are labeled non-pulmonic). Other consonants are not labeled one way or the other, and that is where you will find &quot;w&quot;. Although &quot;w&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pulmonic in the ordinary (scientific) meaning of the term, it is not specifically labeled &quot;pulmonic&quot;. There may be no historical record of why the association did not apply the term &quot;pulmonic&quot; to the set of &quot;other symbols&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not clear, Wikipedia is a bad resource if you are interested in official and standard IPA: they throw terminology around &lt;em&gt;ad libitum&lt;/em&gt;. The term &quot;coronal&quot; is not used by the IPA. The voiced epiglottal fricative ʢ is not part of the main set labeled in IPA as &quot;pulmonic&quot;, it is in the &quot;other&quot; set along with &quot;w&quot;. The column that Wiki calls &quot;palato-alveolar&quot; corresponds to IPA &quot;postalveolar&quot;, and is called &quot;alveopalatal&quot; in standard linguistic usage. The Wiki descriptive labels are a highly variable merger of many trends in linguistics, standing sort of midway between IPA and feature theory (closer to IPA than to feature theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a standard phonetic feature set (20 features) for describing language sounds, set forth in Sound Pattern of English, which is the source of terms like &quot;coronal&quot;, but &quot;ʃ&quot; would be [+coronal,-anterior], that is, it decomposes sounds into atomic properties, whereas we normally speak in more &quot;molecular&quot; terms (like &quot;uvular&quot;, which is the result of 3 feature setting). There is a somewhat simple answer to your question based on that system, since using the letter &quot;p&quot; strictly according to IPA norms, we can specify its phonetic properties ([+consonantal,-syllabic,-sonorant,-voice,-coronal,+anterior...]). Each possible sound is an integer, each bit position represents + or - that Nth feature, all you have to do is set a standard order for features. For example, if bit 5 is &quot;voice&quot; then &quot;s,θ,h...&quot; have bit 5 off and &quot;z,ð,ɦ...&quot; on: and that translates trivially to &quot;voiced&quot; vs. &quot;voiceless&quot;. Terms like &quot;velar&quot; are special cases, where bits 12-15 have the pattern &quot;0010&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you want to stick with descriptive terms like &quot;velar&quot;, you have to pick some set of terms. The IPA has officially assigned terms to letters: &quot;w&quot; is  a &quot;Voiced labial-velar approximant&quot;, and &quot;ʍ&quot; is a &quot;Voiceless labial-velar fricative&quot;. Compositionally, diacritics can be added to letters and corresponding to the description, where &quot;w̥&quot; would be a &quot;voiceless (voiced) labial-velar approximant&quot;. This allows you to handle &quot;n̩&quot; which is a &quot;syllabic alveolar nasal (pulmonic) consonant&quot;. The problem is that IPA gives official descriptions of letters, but not rules for merging descriptions. This is evident in the fact that &quot;w&quot; is defined as &quot;voiced&quot;, the voiceless diacritic adds &quot;voiceless&quot;, but then you get a clash between &quot;voiced&quot; (from &quot;w&quot;) and &quot;voiceless&quot; (from the diacritic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that IPA calls &quot;w&quot; a labial-velar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Features and phonetic definitions are given in &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;: they hint at around 40 features but half of them received no uptake. The features that were adopted in the field were sonorant, syllabic, consonantal, coronal, anterior, high, low, back, round, distributed, nasal, lateral, continuant, delayed release, tense, voiced, strident, long, and stress: two others were proposed by Halle &amp;amp; Stevens shortly thereafter and adopted (spread glottis, constricted glottis), and one feature was renamed (Advanced Tongue Root, formerly &quot;covered&quot;). These features are still used in some textbooks, such as &lt;em&gt;Introducing phonology&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;More recently and inspired by &quot;feature geometry&quot;, there has been movement in the direction of using traditional phonetic labels with a plus sign, for example &quot;[+approximant]&quot;, but this trend has not standardized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T15:10:42.877" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T15:10:42.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-08T23:56:58.610" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following phrase tree from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phrase&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia has &quot;house at the end on the street&quot; as a noun phrase on the constituency side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SpJFi.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SpJFim.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;phrase tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wouldn't &quot;The house&quot; be a noun phrase in the same way as &quot;the street&quot; is? The only type of word that can go before &quot;house&quot; is a determiner such as &quot;a&quot;, &quot;the&quot;, &quot;my&quot;, &quot;that&quot;, etc., so I don't understand this structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it &quot;NP[D[the] NP[house at the end of the street]]&quot; and not &quot;NP[NP[the house] PP[at the end of the street]]&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a mistake? If it's correct, would someone explain it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Two-sentences-with-their-phrase-structure-trees-A-phrase-structure-tree-describes-how_fig3_250082824&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another diagram&lt;/a&gt; that makes more sense to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Two-sentences-with-their-phrase-structure-trees-A-phrase-structure-tree-describes-how_fig3_250082824&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rens_Bod/publication/250082824/figure/fig3/AS:298257147285507@1448121453647/Two-sentences-with-their-phrase-structure-trees-A-phrase-structure-tree-describes-how.png&quot; alt=&quot;Two sentences with their phrase structure trees&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows &quot;NP[the dress on the rack]&quot; as &quot;NP[NP[the dress] PP[on the rack]]&quot;, not &quot;NP[D[the] NP[dress on the rack]]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both analyses correct in different circumstances? Is only one of them correct? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T00:05:39.463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T00:05:39.463" Title="Can determiner/noun pairs not be noun phrases?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28375" CreationDate="2018-07-09T01:36:01.570" Score="3" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would have typed a clearer question in the title, but it would have been way too long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;static,&quot; I mean a word or phrase that refers to one object, and one object only. ex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Eiffel Tower&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The United States of America&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bill Gates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;dynamic,&quot; I mean something for which the closest analogy I can think of is a UNIX symlink. &#xA;ex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The current president of the US (sort of like a symlink to Donald Trump, where Donald Trump is a &quot;static&quot; noun)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The pen on the table (again, like a symlink. Unlike the above, there is no canonical name to refer to this object). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My phone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tonight (refers to a period of time, which in this case might be 20180708 190000 - 230000 EST)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this difference exist as a linguistic notion? Again, the best analogy I can come up with is comparing a UNIX file (of any type other than symlink) and a UNIX symlink. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="20034" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T19:36:09.943" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T19:36:09.943" Title="Is there a linguistic notion of a &quot;static&quot; vs &quot;dynamic&quot; noun?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T02:46:21.773" Score="8" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two famous, apparently related scripts now known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linear A&lt;/a&gt; (which encoded an as-yet undeciphered language) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancientscripts.com/linearb.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linear B&lt;/a&gt; (used to write Greek) were discovered on the island of Crete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why are these scripts known as &quot;Linear&quot;?&lt;/em&gt; Is there a story behind the etymology of the designation? While it is true that these scripts were written in lines, and that both scripts included some number of straight lines (along with curved ones), the designation does not seem very apt, as the (later) Semitic-derived &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek alphabet&lt;/a&gt; and Roman alphabet also include &lt;em&gt;those same features&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the designations of these scripts as &quot;Linear&quot; simply an arbitrary or historical artifact, or is there something pecularly &quot;linear&quot; about these scripts that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; shared by other writing systems of the Mediterranean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14005" LastEditorUserId="14005" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T13:21:31.950" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T19:31:05.227" Title="Why are the scripts of Crete known as &quot;Linear&quot;?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;undeciphered-writing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8332" CreationDate="2018-07-09T05:28:24.567" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The marginalisation of Franco-Provençal in favour of Standard French predates the modern French state. Franco-Provençal was coextensive with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Duchy of Savoy&lt;/a&gt;, and the Duchy adopted Standard French as its official language before France itself did, in 1536. Geneva was annexed to France in 1798, and only joined the Swiss Confederation in 1814, but Franco-Provençal was already being marginalised in Geneva in favour of French before then. And to the extent Franco-Provençal survives in the Val d'Aosta, it's via the notion that speaking Franco-Provençal makes the Valdostans French. (See my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-does-a-French-speaker-from-the-Val-DAosta-region-of-Italy-sound-like/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer on Quora&lt;/a&gt;, based on the MA by Genevieve Czarnecki which I cosupervised.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hegemony of Standard French over local Romance dialects was not the work of the French states alone; it was also the work of regimes outside of France, which wished to subscribe to elite French culture. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;By the 18th century, however, Geneva had come under the influence of Catholic France, which cultivated the city as its own.&quot;) Swiss policy was never going to be nationally consistent in driving out vs preserving dialect; and in the case of Suisse Romande, it did not need to be: that was a preexisting local alignment of the Romands towards France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T05:28:24.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="369" CreationDate="2018-07-09T14:11:55.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I proofread for publication a recent article on spoken Sanskrit: McCartney, Patrick. 2017b. Jhirī: A ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ village in Madhya Pradesh. &lt;em&gt;Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; 4, 2:167–209. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/34747538/Jhir%C4%AB_A_Sanskrit-speaking_village_in_Madhya_Pradesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pre-proofread version on academia.edu&lt;/a&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@psdmccartney/reflections-on-the-imagining-sanskrit-land-project-f4170c7de970&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medium summary by the same author&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To supplement the answer by @prash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neo-Sanskrit is not studied enough, clearly, and I'm happy that McCartney has been working on it. From his Medium article:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is an interdisciplinary blind spot related to spoken Sanskrit. Currently, I know of no other academic research into the ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ village phenomenon. Since Srinivas (1952, 1955, 1956, 1989), several works have been written on the topic of spoken Sanskrit. This includes: Nakamura (1973); Aralikatti (1989, 1991); Hock &amp;amp; Pandharipandhe (1976); Hock (1983, 1991, 1992); Pandharipande, (1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013); and Hastings (2004, 2008). Probably, however, the most cogent overview of the success and failure of spoken Sanskrit is Deshpande (2011).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Jhiri experiment may not have failed as such, but it's not as healthy as advocates like to think: maybe a dozen speakers with some fluency in a village of 600, plastered with emblematic Sanskrit slogans. And a lot of factionalism and bickering (that McCartney made a real effort not to get caught up in), and falling out with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samskrita_Bharati&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;national body&lt;/a&gt; about not being purist enough—the kind of thing all too familiar from the close cousin of these revival efforts, artificial languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is clearly and inevitably profound influence on spoken Sanskrit from the native languages of the speakers: Hindi and Malvi, in the case of Jhiri.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A living evolving Sanskrit is not the primary point of the revival: resacralising India is. And the internecine fights over purism make it clear that an evolving (i.e. &quot;degrading&quot;) Sanskrit would not be welcome to many advocates either; but it is to some.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:11:55.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T14:36:09.487" Score="9" ViewCount="555" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long ago, I thought about learning Slovianski (one of a family of auxlangs meant for speakers of Slavic languages), purely because I thought it may give me the ability to understand (to some extent) multiple Slavic languages. I never did so, though. Note that Slovianski has been merged with other 'interslavic' conlangs into a single conlang project. I think the new conlang is just called 'Interslavic'. Also note, if you do try to look up one of these conlangs, most of the sites are being made by the guy who made Slovio, who constantly makes websites lampooning other Interslavic projects (most of them teach a slight modification of his auxlang Slovio, which is really just Esperanto with a Russian-based vocabulary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like a more professional opinion on the usefulness of learning this language. I don't know much about the Slavic languages, other than their phoneme inventories and their huge number of inflections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would knowing one of these Interslavic conlangs actually let you understand some natural Slavic languages, or is it only really useful (or as useful as an Auxlang attempt can be) for native speakers of Slavic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorDisplayName="user19661" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T18:09:48.110" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T16:11:12.547" Title="Are any of the 'interslavic' constructed languages actually intelligible with any natural slavic languages?" Tags="&lt;slavic-languages&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;interslavic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26255" CreationDate="2018-07-09T14:38:32.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;ISO has codes for languages (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 639&lt;/a&gt;), and for scripts (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15924&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 15924&lt;/a&gt;); but it has no codes for transliterations, as you can see by perusing ISO's standards on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iso.org/ics/01.140.10/x/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writing and Transliteration&lt;/a&gt;. ISO adopts and standardises transliterations; but unlike languages and scripts, it has not catalogued them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using existing ISO codes, &lt;em&gt;zh-Latn&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;Chinese in Latin Script&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;zh-CN-Latn&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;Chinese in Latin Script, localised to China&quot;; but that just implies &quot;Pinyin&quot; (and what country would we attribute Hepburn to?) It is not a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find evidence that there are standard codes for transliterations anywhere else either. A 2011 &lt;a href=&quot;https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-falk-transliteration-tags-01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IETF RFC draft for transliteration codes&lt;/a&gt; went nowhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:38:32.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9261" CreationDate="2018-07-09T14:42:52.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AT&amp;amp;T text to speech wizard moved to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wizzardsoftware.com/text-to-speech-sdk.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.wizzardsoftware.com/text-to-speech-sdk.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22314" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:42:52.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T15:56:27.057" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;For every language there is a tense that is morphologically closest to the root, e.g. English present is more basic than perfect since perfect either adds a suffix &lt;em&gt;-(e)d&lt;/em&gt; or has ablaut as tense marker. Is there a language where some verbs (simplistically &quot;verbs with perfective semantics [VPS]&quot;) such as &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; are unmarked in preterite, the perfective tense, and marked in present, the imperfective tense; whereas other verbs, those &quot;with imperfective semantic tense&quot; (VIS) such as &lt;em&gt;search (for)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;walk&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;talk (about)&lt;/em&gt; are marked in the preterite and unmarked in present?&#xA;E. g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;nenden&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;walk&quot;) &gt; pres. &lt;em&gt;nen&lt;/em&gt;, pret. &lt;em&gt;nend&lt;strong&gt;ud&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;walked&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;niden&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;vanish, go away&quot;) &gt; pres. &lt;em&gt;nid&lt;strong&gt;un&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, pret. &lt;em&gt;nid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I suppose English has monosyllabic preterite forms for VPS such as &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cut&lt;/em&gt; for phonological reasons (unchanging ablaut of verbs with stem vowel &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;) not because the verbs are VPS. Ancient Greek had a very basic past tense in the aorist, arguably more basic with the VPS twin of verb roots such as &lt;em&gt;peithō&lt;/em&gt;, cf. &lt;em&gt;epithon&lt;/em&gt; (perfective: &quot;persuade&quot;) vs. &lt;em&gt;epeisa&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;woo&quot;).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T19:33:26.977" Title="Is there a language where semantic aspect determines which tense is unmarked in a verb?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2018-07-09T20:32:33.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is presented here is the standard view, but it might be partly otherwise. Nostratic might actually have been a dialectical continuum in a large area in the Middle East, without any language boundaries, but still with layers having distinct features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uralic and Altaic branches might have originated from early migrations form the north of that continuum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The southern Afro-asiatic languages possibly originated early from the southern parts of this continuum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indo-european and Semitic possibly developed developed by migrations from two adjacent mid levels in that continnuum at a later time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This picture explains that Indo-european in many respects is very Semitic-like and in other very Uralic-like. In this interpretation Afro-asiatic was nothing but the southern half of that continuum, and Eurasitic nothing but the Northern half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some very early period Nostratic was probably a more compact and homogenic language, but after developing into a dialectical continuum, several layers from south to north developed with many of the traits we can see today in the different sub-brtanches like Indo-european and Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2085" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T20:32:33.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26958" CreationDate="2018-07-09T22:15:36.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may have to do with the evolution of the pronunciation of certain letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J. A. Picton (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Allanson_Picton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;?&lt;/a&gt;) writes the following in &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; 7:4 (1887) p. 22, referring to the word &quot;jubilee&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our modern pronunciation is entirely out of accord with the ancient.&#xA;  It will be seen above that in our early English versions the initial&#xA;  letter is &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, representing the Hebrew &lt;em&gt;yod&lt;/em&gt;. This marks a transition&#xA;  taking place in the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;, which, being merely an&#xA;  initial &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, was intermingled in the old dictionaries with the&#xA;  vowel &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;. It is not easy to determine the precise period when the&#xA;  semivowel j, with the sound of initial &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, hardened into the palatal&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;. In Italian a change in the spelling took place. Lat. &lt;em&gt;justus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;jubilœus&lt;/em&gt;, became &lt;em&gt;givusto&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;giubeleo&lt;/em&gt;. In English we contented ourselves with altering the pronunciation, which, however, gave rise&#xA;  to some inconveniences. &lt;em&gt;Hallelujah&lt;/em&gt; is a poser to many rustic musical&#xA;  amateurs. I suppose, however, that we shall never get back to the&#xA;  Hebrew &lt;em&gt;yobel&lt;/em&gt; or the old English &lt;em&gt;iubely&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21985" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T22:15:36.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T23:25:53.017" Score="0" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've checked several dictionaries for the word &quot;stolen&quot; only to find it labeled a verb. Virtually all of the examples sentences use it in a manner that I would have considered an adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The stolen property was confiscated.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dictionaries use the past participle of steal as the sole part of speech, which seems incorrect. Am I missing something? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T04:07:12.003" Title="Stolen, part of speech" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T01:14:58.887" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this Government &amp;amp; Binding Theory book I'm reading, it is &lt;em&gt;assumed&lt;/em&gt; that &quot;to&quot; in to-infinitives corresponds to &lt;em&gt;verb inflection&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that in x-bar tree &quot;to&quot; appears under INFL, exactly where one puts &quot;tense&quot; markers (i.e. the suffix -ed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't quite follow in this &lt;em&gt;assumption&lt;/em&gt; is that &quot;to&quot; is not a suffix and it is not a tense, so I fail to see why it would be associated with &quot;verb inflection&quot; in x-bar theory. Then again, if you don't put &quot;to&quot; under INFL, where would you put it? But is that sufficient grounds for saying that &quot;to&quot; &lt;em&gt;corresponds&lt;/em&gt; to &quot;verb inflection&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this particular book dates back to 1991, and I wonder if its assumption/view still holds today, or if it has been modified/discarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T01:14:58.887" Title="Does &quot;to&quot; correspond to verb inflection in X-bar theory?" Tags="&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28352" CreationDate="2018-07-10T02:10:13.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Participles are verbs, not adjectives.  Test for verbs by modifying with &quot;very&quot;, which doesn't modify verbs, but does modify adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But sometimes &quot;adjective&quot; is misleadingly used to mean &quot;modifier of noun&quot;, and in that sense, both present and past participles can be counted as adjectives.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T02:10:13.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2018-07-10T02:53:59.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chance coincidences like this aren't uncommon. For example, there's an African language (whose name escapes me sadly, if anyone else can give the name it would be greatly appreciated) whose word for 'dog' is 'dog'. This is pure coincidence, the two words in fact have separate ancestries that just so happened to converge on each other over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's thousands of languages on this planet, but only a few hundred phonemes, and taking into account how humans tend to see some (though not all) foreign sounds as sounding like native phonemes, coincidences like this happen far more often than you think. For instance, in Japanese the word for 'name' is 'namae'. They aren't related, in fact, 'namae' is a compound word made from native roots. Also, the similarity is more in how its spelled in the Latin alphabet than its pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like others have stated, there is no evidence that the Semitic and Indo-european families are related. Some think there may have been loan words between the two proto-languages, but that's the closest to a relationship that anyone seriously thinks exists between the two language families. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's a number of suspected relationships that aren't (currently) accepted by the linguistic community. Some seriously argue that Japanese and Korean are related (both are accepted to be language isolates). This mostly comes from their striking similarities in grammar and the huge number of Chinese loan words they took in the past. There are a handful of native words in the two that look like they could be related, but again its generally accepted to be just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be considered related, you have to find far more words that look similar. If you want an example, go look at the evidence that shows that Hindi/urdu is part of the Indo-european family. You can find thousands of Hindi/urdu words that are obviously similar to English words with related meanings. Even their pronouns are obviously related! These are the kinds of similarities that linguists accept as indicating a relationship between two languages, not the few pieces of evidence that you suggest. Besides, if they were related you would expect to see far more words with similarities, rather than vocabularies where 99% of the words bear no resemblance what-so-ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could possibly consider them related if you assume that all current languages have a single common ancestor in the ancient past. But in reality, there's no way to confirm or deny this. We don't know if there was ever a single proto-language that all languages descend from. Language may have appeared in multiple different populations independently of each other. Really, the origins of language are impossible to determine, and its commonly accepted that its just something we'll never know due to the lack of written evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T02:53:59.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28352" CreationDate="2018-07-10T03:53:58.930" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Greg Lee indicates, participles are commonly considered to remain verbs, despite being used &quot;like adjectives&quot; in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the situation is a bit confusing because, as far as I know, all linguists recognize that participle forms &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; represent actual adjectives, not verbs. Greg Lee's answer mentioned the &quot;very&quot; test, which indicates that in sentences like &quot;I was very excited about the event&quot; or &quot;He had very swollen feet&quot;, the words &quot;excited&quot; and &quot;swollen&quot; are adjectives, despite being identical in form to participles. There are various terms for adjectives of this form; e.g. &quot;participial adjectives&quot; or &quot;departicipial adjectives&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of tests for distinguishing &quot;participles&quot; (verb forms) and &quot;departicipial adjectives&quot;, but different tests don't always agree with each other, and they usually only apply in very specific contexts. As far as I know, there is no way to show that &quot;stolen&quot; is either a verb or an adjective in that sentence. (There seems to be some disagreement in the literature about whether verbal participles can occur in prenominal/attributive position--see my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/366906/is-running-a-gerund-or-a-participial-adjective/366940#366940&quot;&gt;Is “running” a gerund or a participial adjective?&lt;/a&gt;--but to me, it seems like they can, so I don't think the position of &quot;stolen&quot; disambiguates its part of speech in &quot;stolen property&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking over the comments beneath my answer there, I just noticed that &quot;carefully&quot; is alleged to only work before participles, not before adjectives. So it seems we can be sure that the word &quot;stolen&quot; would be a participle in a phrase like &quot;the carefully stolen property&quot;. But the word &quot;carefully&quot; does not occur in your sentence in its original form, so I'm not sure that the &quot;carefully&quot; test gives us a conclusive answer for your exact sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of the word &quot;unstolen&quot; suggests that &quot;stolen&quot; can sometimes be an adjective, because the negative prefix &quot;un-&quot; typically does not attach to verbs (the homonymous &quot;reversative&quot; prefix &quot;un-&quot; does attach to verbs, but &quot;unstolen&quot; means &quot;not stolen&quot;; it isn't derived from some verb &quot;unsteal&quot;). Based on what I've read, &quot;stolen&quot; would also be considered to be an adjective in contexts like &quot;seem(s) stolen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T04:07:12.003" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T04:07:12.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T08:40:51.420" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the pronoun &quot;we&quot; to be lacking due to its ambiguity regarding whether or not the listener and/or a 3rd party is included. Are there languages which address this by having either multiple forms of &quot;we&quot; or other disambiguation solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22320" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T09:02:12.020" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T09:02:12.020" Title="Are there languages that have different forms of &quot;we&quot;?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-07-10T09:19:06.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T14:37:32.090" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 32 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Semantic drift has an especially visible effect on combinations&#xA;  of roots and prefixes or suffixes, and this effect, too, creates important differences between a language and the one it turns into. Our&#xA;  French sentence’s &lt;em&gt;admettez-le&lt;/em&gt; “ admit it” is a good example of this&#xA;  kind of development. &lt;em&gt;Admettre&lt;/em&gt; is composed of &lt;em&gt;ad-&lt;/em&gt;, a preservation of&#xA;  the full word or prefix for “to” in Latin, and &lt;em&gt;mettre&lt;/em&gt; “ to put.” This&#xA;  verb had an ancestor in Latin, but this Latin verb &lt;em&gt;admittere&lt;/em&gt; did not&#xA;  mean “ to confess,” which was conveyed with other verbs like&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;agnoscere&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, the main meaning of &lt;em&gt;admittere&lt;/em&gt; was the literal one&#xA;  of “ putting or sending into.” 'The “ confess” meaning of its French&#xA;  descendant arrived gradually by the same kind of hanging implication that created French’s &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;-perfect: &lt;strong&gt;to admit something is to give&#xA;  it entree into—that is, “put it into”—your acknowledged awareness. [My emboldening]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that « admettre » originally signfied 'put to', but how did it generalize to: put to 'your acknowledged awareness'?  The author doesn't expound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'put to' itself doesn't suggest 'your acknowledged awareness'. One can 'put to' many other things, if this makes sense. So what narrowed 'put to' to 'your acknowledged awareness'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T22:23:32.010" Title="How did « admettre » semantically generalize to signify 'confess'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28358" CreationDate="2018-07-10T16:10:15.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say the Latin verb &lt;em&gt;admitto&lt;/em&gt; had already in classical times acquired a sense fairly close to the modern French/English sense. Cf.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;quid ego tantum sceleris admisi miser?&quot; — Terentius, &lt;em&gt;Heautontimorumenos&lt;/em&gt; 5, 2, 83&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why have I, wretched one, admitted such a great crime (to myself)&quot;: by this, the exact modern sense is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; intended: the admission is not a confession, it is not the expression of one's guilt in words. Instead, it is the 'letting the guilt of a crime come upon oneself'—incurring a moral debt, so to speak. It is, causing oneself to become morally blameworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, it is probably a fairly small step to the modern French/English sense &quot;saying that one is guilty of [a crime]&quot;. So I'm not too surprised that French &lt;em&gt;admettre&lt;/em&gt; should have this final sense, especially considering that educated Frenchmen knew Latin: they may very well have been influenced by Latin &lt;em&gt;admitto&lt;/em&gt; when establishing (or changing) the sense of this newly invented French word &lt;em&gt;admettre&lt;/em&gt;. That is not to say that the author's general point doesn't stand: I'm quite willing to believe that French should have combined affixes inherited or adopted from Latin in different ways than did the Romans or other speakers and writers of Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the entry (with my ellipses as &quot;...&quot;) from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/dict?name=ls&amp;amp;lang=la&amp;amp;word=admitto&amp;amp;filter=CUTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis &amp;amp; Short&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (see especially sense &lt;em&gt;II C&lt;/em&gt;), so that you may follow the semantic development in classical Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ad-mitto, mīsi, missum, 3, v. a. ..., orig.&#xA;  to send to; hence with the access. idea of leave, permission (cf.:&#xA;  aditus, accessus), to suffer to come or go to a place, to&#xA;  admit....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I. Lit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. In gen.: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B. Esp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of those who admitted one on account of some business; and under the emperors, for the purpose of salutation, to allow one admittance&#xA;  or access, to grant an audience (the t. t. for this; v. admissio,&#xA;  admissionalis; &quot;opp. excludere&quot;, Cic. Cat. 1, 4, 10; Plin. Pan. 48;&#xA;  cf. &quot;Schwarz ad h. 1. 47, 3): ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of a harlot: &quot;ne quemquam interea alium admittat prorsus quam me ad se virum&quot;, Plaut. As. 1, 3, 83; Prop. 3, 20, 7.—Also of the breeding&#xA;  of animals, to put the male to the female (cf.: &quot;admissarius,&#xA;  admissura, admissus)&quot;, ...—Also used of&#xA;  the female of animals, ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Admittere aliquem ad consilium, to admit one to counsel or consultation: &quot;nec ad consilium casus admittitur&quot;, Cic. Marc. 2, 7:...—Hence: &quot;admittere aliquem ad honores, ad officium&quot;, to admit him&#xA;  to, to confer on, ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of a horse, to let go or run, to give loose reins to (cf.: remittere, immittere, less emphatic than concitare; usu. in the part.&#xA;  perf.): ...&#xA;  &quot;Considius equo admisso ad eum accurrit&quot;, came at full speed, ...—Hence of the hair, to let it flow loosely:&#xA;  &quot;admissae jubae&quot;, Ov. Am. 2, 16, 50 al.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;II. Fig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. Of words, entreaties, etc., to permit a thing to come, to give&#xA;  access or grant admittance, to receive: &quot;pacis mentionem admittere&#xA;  auribus&quot;, Liv. 34, 49; &quot;so 30, 3: ...—Hence also absol.:&#xA;  &quot;admittere precationem&quot;, to hear, to grant, Liv. 31, 5 Gron.; Sil. 4,&#xA;  698: tunc admitte jocos, give admittance to jesting, i. e. allow it,&#xA;  Mart. 4, 8.—So also: &quot;aliquid ad animum&quot;, Liv. 7, 9: &quot;cogitationem&quot;,&#xA;  Lact. 6, 13, 8.—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B. Of an act, event, etc., to let it be done, to allow, permit (fieri&#xA;  pati, Don. ad Ter. Eun. 4, 6, 23).—...—Hence, in the&#xA;  language of soothsayers, t. t. of birds which give a favorable omen, =&#xA;  addīco, to be propitious, to favor: &quot;inpetritum, inauguratum'st,&#xA;  quovis admittunt aves&quot;, Plaut. As. 2, 1, 11: ... (hence: ADMISSIVAE: aves,&#xA;  in Paul. ex Fest. p. 21. Müll.).—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. Of an unlawful act, design, etc., to grant admittance to one's&#xA;  self; hence, become guiliy of, to perpetrate, to commit (it thus&#xA;  expresses rather the moral liability incurred freely; while committere&#xA;  designates the overt act, punishable by civil law, Herz. ad Caes. B.&#xA;  G. 3, 9; freq. and class.), often with a reflexive pron., in me, etc.&#xA;  (acc.): &quot;me hoc delictum admisisse in me, vehementer dolet&quot;, Ter. Ad.&#xA;  4, 5, 48: &quot;ea in te admisisti quae, etc.&quot;, Cic. Phil. 2, 19, 47: &quot;tu&#xA;  nihil admittes in te formidine poenae&quot;, Hor. Ep. 1, 16, 53: &quot;admittere&#xA;  in se culpam&quot;, Plaut. Trin. 1, 2, 61; Ter. Phorm. 2, 1, 40: &quot;scelera,&#xA;  quae in se admiserit&quot;, Lucil. 27, 5 Müll.: &quot;quid umquam Habitus in se&#xA;  admisit, ut, etc.&quot;, Cic. Clu. 60, 167: &quot;quantum in se facinus&quot;, Caes.&#xA;  B. G. 3, 9.—And without such reflexive pron.: &quot;cum multos multa&#xA;  admĭsse acceperim&quot;, Plaut. Mil. 4, 7, 4: &quot;quid ego tantum sceleris&#xA;  admisi miser?&quot; Ter. Heaut. 5, 2, 83; so, &quot;si Milo admisisset aliquid,&#xA;  quod, etc.&quot;, Cic. Mil. 23 fin.: &quot;dedecus&quot;, id. Verr. 1, 17: &quot;commissum&#xA;  facinus et admissum dedecus confitebor&quot;, id. Fam. 3, 10, 7: &quot;tantum&#xA;  dedecus&quot;, Caes. B. G. 4, 25: &quot;si quod facinus&quot;, id. ib. 6, 12:&#xA;  &quot;flagitium&quot;, Cic. Clu. 128: &quot;fraudem&quot;, id. Rab. 126: &quot;maleficium&quot;, id.&#xA;  Sext. Rosc. 62: &quot;scelus&quot;, Nep. Ep. 6: &quot;facinus miserabile&quot;, Sall. J.&#xA;  53, 7: &quot;pessimum facinus pejore exemplo&quot;, Liv. 3, 72, 2: &quot;tantum&#xA;  dedccoris&quot;, id. 4, 2; so 2, 37; 3, 59 al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-07-11T22:23:32.010" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T22:23:32.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T21:55:34.047" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of head-final languages where everything precedes the noun except for the number (Japanese is one example). But are there any that do the reverse? Is there a language where number precedes the noun while all the other elements (such as adjectives and adjectival clauses and whatnot) always come after?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorDisplayName="user19661" LastEditDate="2018-07-11T04:39:30.040" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T04:39:30.040" Title="Are there any languages that mark plural before the noun, while everything else comes after?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28363" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28364" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" Score="0" Body="For questions about fillers, i.e. non-words inserted into spoken language like huh or hmm." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:55:55.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28362" CreationDate="2018-07-10T22:18:12.720" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;WALS is a great tool to answer questions like this. With &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/combinations/87A_89A_33A#2/24.9/153.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this combined view of three features&lt;/a&gt; I find Zapotec and Sre as languages with the following features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Plural prefix / Noun-Adjective / Numeral-Noun &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T22:18:12.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27156" CreationDate="2018-07-11T02:10:51.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ISRLN website says nothing about who is behind it. It in fact says nothing about who is behind it so loudly as to cast the whole enterprise into doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISLRN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elra.info/en/dissemination/elra-events/elra-nlp12-meeting/paris-declaration/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Language Resources Network&lt;/a&gt; pages in ISRLN do given an answer for at least the first question. The 12 organisations that got together in Paris in 2013, to establish the ISRLN, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), COLING Committee (ICCL), European Data Forum, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT), International Committee for the Coordination &amp;amp; Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (COCOSDA), International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), Oriental COCOSDA, Language Resource Management Agency (RMA) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACL, COLING, and the LDC are real enough to encourage some confidence. The portal was &quot;Set up by ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ISRLN is being used in the ELRA's catalogue of language resources: &lt;a href=&quot;http://catalogue.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/training-and-test-data-for-arabizi-detection-and-transliteration/e2080666699611e8886702b3f1438bcb8e338a7b921a4a858d7dc4be3b92580d/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://catalogue.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/training-and-test-data-for-arabizi-detection-and-transliteration/e2080666699611e8886702b3f1438bcb8e338a7b921a4a858d7dc4be3b92580d/&lt;/a&gt; =&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.islrn.org/resources/986-364-744-303-9/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.islrn.org/resources/986-364-744-303-9/&lt;/a&gt; ; so there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dogfooding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions of persistence for Yet Another Persistent Identifier are always appropriate, and I'm astonished myself that they didn't just go with DOI as an identifier. But notwithstanding how uninformative the ISRLN website is, the enterprise is for real, and does have some institutional backing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T02:10:51.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9062" CreationDate="2018-07-11T03:45:16.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know, and Pausanias' Just-So story likely means nothing at all. (You've already pointed out, @midas, the implausibility of your namesake finding any anchors in Ankara.) FWIW, this is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevan_Ni%C5%9Fanyan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sevan Nişanyan&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://nisanyanmap.com/?y=ankara&amp;amp;t=&amp;amp;lv=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Index Anatolicus has to say on the etymology&lt;/a&gt; (running via Google Translate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Amkuwa in the Kaniş Karum documents of the period 2000-1800 BC and Ankuwa / Ankuwaş in the Hittite sources in the imperial period are probably Alikar village of Yozgat Sorgun, 200 km east of Ankara. It is unknown how the name of this city, which is one of the most important settlements of the Bronze Age, is transferred to Ankara. In ancient times there are at least four Ánkyras in Anatolia and the Balkans. The meaning and source of the word is not clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Nişanyan at least identifies Ankara with a Hittite toponym (even if it that toponym wasn't a toponym of Ankara itself; if the Greek Ankyra applied to more than one town, I guess, so could the Hittite Amkuwa.) If that is correct, then even if Ankyra meant something more like &quot;basin&quot; in Phrygian, that could be no less a folk etymology of the name than the Greek &quot;anchor&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T03:45:16.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11577" CreationDate="2018-07-11T04:54:17.717" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aristophanes (&lt;em&gt;Knights&lt;/em&gt; 21–26), much earlier than the Philogelos, punned on repeating &lt;em&gt;molōmen auto, molōmen auto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;let us go, that&quot; ending up sounding like the taboo &lt;em&gt;automolōmen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;let us desert&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, Aristophanes in &lt;em&gt;Frogs&lt;/em&gt; mocks Euripides for adopting new-fangled notions from the sophists, like &quot;word&quot;. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=5lcTDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA289&amp;amp;lpg=PA289&amp;amp;dq=language%20aristophanes%20thesis&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=_04qnd-myk&amp;amp;sig=sn5j583y-fRifnVgdUkqEQipWQg&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi3zevrnpbcAhWBlZQKHf5HDAAQ6AEIYjAG#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=verse&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Willi's monograph on Aristophanes' language&lt;/a&gt; points out (can't find it, but it'll be around p. 58), only Euripides uses the word &lt;em&gt;lexis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;word&quot; in the play. The old-fashioned &lt;em&gt;epos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;utterance&quot; was good enough for Aristophanes' hero in the play, Aeschylus; and an utterance could be as short as a &quot;huh&quot; and as long as... an epic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ignoring word boundaries in word play was the status quo ante.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T04:54:17.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25627" CreationDate="2018-07-11T09:39:05.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Not all Calabrian is the same&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calabrian (it: &lt;em&gt;Calabrese&lt;/em&gt;) is the name given to the romance dialect continuum spoken in Calabria. It is commonly divided into two different language groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the southern two-thirds of the region, the Calabrian dialects are more closely related to Sicilian, grouped as &lt;strong&gt;Central-Southern Calabrian&lt;/strong&gt;, or simply &lt;strong&gt;Calabro&lt;/strong&gt;, and are usually classified as part of Extreme Southern Italian (&lt;em&gt;Italiano meridionale-estremo&lt;/em&gt;) language group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the northern one-third of the region, the Calabrian dialects are often classified typologically with Neapolitan language (it: &lt;em&gt;Napoletano-Calabrese&lt;/em&gt;) and are called &lt;strong&gt;Northern Calabrian&lt;/strong&gt; or just &lt;strong&gt;Cosentino&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your description is accurate of the Sicilian varieties spoken in the south of Calabria, but as you go further north, the influence of Neapolitan shows a gradual difference in the treatment of vowels, where unstressed &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt; are pronounced as a schwa &lt;code&gt;[ə]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The artist in your song is &lt;em&gt;Otello Profazio&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rende&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rende, Cosenza&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, as things go this is relatively northern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFUv8m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFUv8m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwKYYm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwKYYm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/scn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/scn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/nap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ethnologue.com/language/nap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetti_calabresi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetti_calabresi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Calabria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Calabria&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_language#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_language#Vowels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language#Characteristic_sounds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language#Characteristic_sounds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T11:49:54.290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T11:49:54.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32247" CreationDate="2018-07-11T12:16:29.833" Score="13" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak 4 languages, and I have the least exposure to my native language, since I have never lived in the region where it's spoken. My only exposure to it is speaking to my parents, and some TV. I grew up speaking 1 other language as an infant, and 2 more since Kindergarten. I'm quite fluent in these 3 languages, as I have a lot of exposure. (National language, regional language, and English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I speak my native language very fluently with my parents and a handful of other people. I can start speaking fast and effortlessly off the bat, like with the other 3 languages. But if any other person starts conversing with me in my native tongue, I'm caught off guard. I stammer, fumble a lot for the right words, don't get the pronunciation right, and take help of English a lot. It takes me anywhere between 2 days (if I'm in constant company of that person) and &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; to start speaking fluently like I do with my parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I'm selectively fluent, like selective mutism, although google doesn't have any results for it. Is this a thing? Is there a proper term for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: This handful of people I mention have been around on and off since my childhood. They're uncles and aunts and cousins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22323" LastEditorUserId="22323" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T02:17:08.913" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T02:17:08.913" Title="Selective fluency - is it a thing?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28349" CreationDate="2018-07-11T13:02:50.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To stick with your Greek example: present πείθω, strong aorist ἔπῐθον, perfect πέποιθα reflect the stems peith, pith, poith. I do not see that any of these is unmarked or that any other of them is marked. This is regular ablaut gradation with e, o, and zero grades. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T13:02:50.980" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18802" CreationDate="2018-07-11T14:57:26.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always thought it was an affricate (I'm puzzled at the notion it could be a fricative), and in fact I've always imitated Ernie by producing a lateral affricate; [tɬ]. (And that was long before I learned Klingon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T14:57:26.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18802" CreationDate="2018-07-11T16:17:04.033" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is kinda possible to analyze &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; sound phonetically: the real question is whether we should. It is beyond doubt that we can indeed analyze any sound physically (in terms of the resulting acoustic waveform, or in terms of the mechanism creating the waveform). The real question is whether phonetics is more specialized than general acoustics: does it focus on sound properties of human language? For example, can you give a phonetic analysis to the sound of blowing out a candle, &quot;wh&quot; which you could transcribe as [w̥ʊ̥ʔ]. Since laughter or candle-blowing are not linguistic units, under the view that phonetics is about language, you can't give such sounds a phonetic analysis. But we have no way of scientifically determining what the scope of phonetics &quot;really&quot; is, and I can't tell you that it is self-evident that phonetics is restricted to human language sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T16:17:04.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-11T17:04:32.867" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's difference between free-phrase and fixed phrase? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because for some linguist differentiate phraseme (fixed phrase) into 3 part, vollidiomatizität, teilidiomatizität und nichtidiomatizität.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21560" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T17:04:32.867" Title="Phraseology definition" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28342" CreationDate="2018-07-11T18:31:44.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the philosophy of language and modal logic, the conceptions you label &quot;static&quot; and &quot;dynamic&quot; are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_designator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rigid designator&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rigid_designator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;flaccid designator&lt;/a&gt; respecively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T18:31:44.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28349" CreationDate="2018-07-11T19:33:26.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is true for many old Indo-European languages because the present stem was often extended with infixed &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; (see the answer from @fdb with Greek p&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;ith-o, e-pith-o-n, pe-p&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;ith-a), but sometimes even with infix &lt;em&gt;-n-&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. Latin &lt;em&gt;li&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;qu-o&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;I leave&quot;) with the past &lt;em&gt;liqu-i&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;I left&quot;) or Vedic present &lt;em&gt;yu&lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/strong&gt;j-m-i&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;I join&quot;) vs past &lt;em&gt;a-yuj-a-t&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;He joined&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T19:33:26.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28415" CreationDate="2018-07-12T11:43:25.977" Score="4" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_conditional_sentences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Conditional Sentences in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I liked parties, I would attend more of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it rained tomorrow, people would dance in the street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The past tense (simple past or past progressive) of the condition clause is historically the past subjunctive. In modern English this is identical to the past indicative, except in the first and third persons singular of the verb be, where the indicative is &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; and the subjunctive &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It implies that subjunctive mood is used in counter factual protasis in English.&#xA;On the other hand, in French, imperfect indicative rather than imperfect subjunctive is used there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) How can this difference between English and French be explained?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) How can the use of past verb forms for counter factual meaing be explained in French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1669" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T17:54:16.747" Title="Difference between English and French in the use of subjunctive mood in counter factual protasis" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28379" CreationDate="2018-07-12T12:41:13.470" Score="2" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a Hebrew speaker, and in Modern Hebrew, there is a distinction between /ʁ ~ ɣ/ and /x/.&#xA;When I hear French, I recognize that 'r' isn't always pronounced as /ʁ/ but in many times, as /x/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to think of a mechanism to this and I noticed that in many times the 'r' is pronounced as /x/, it's after a consonant, while most of the times 'r' is pronounced as /ʁ/ it's after a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I've always heard &quot;tres&quot; (very) as /txe/ and never as /tʁe/, while &quot;amour&quot; is always pronounced as /amuʁ/ and never as /amux/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite strangely, French accent in Hebrew is usually identified immediately since French speakers tend to merge /ʁ/ to just /x/ (meaning that /xatsotsʁa/ - a trumpet, is pronounced by French speakers as /xatsotsxa/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when is 'r' pronounced as /x/ and when is it pronounced /ʁ/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19889" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T17:30:45.170" Title="French - when is 'r' pronounced as /x/ and when is it pronounced /ʁ/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28378" CreationDate="2018-07-12T13:05:39.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today in northern France, /r/ is commonly pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ], and voiceless [χ] after a voiceless consonant by assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R#French&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ʁ] is the standard consonant. Although the voiceless [χ] is pronounced before or after a voiceless obstruent or at the end of a sentence...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T17:30:45.170" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T17:30:45.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T13:11:23.780" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28102/how-many-different-vowels-are-there&quot;&gt;How many different vowels are there?&lt;/a&gt; but with a different twist: here I am not interested in the minimal difference between two vowels that can be heard, but in reliable and reproducable annotatability, meaning that the number of potential vowels is reduced by this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From anecdotal evidence, I have two data points: A scheme using only the cardinal vowels can be used with good inter-annotator agreement. On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuthonista&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theutonista&lt;/a&gt; is too fine grained (it essentially allows for 25 shades of each cardinal vowel) and even the same annotator cannot annotate the same sample consistently when he re-annotates it some weeks later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T13:25:25.737" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T13:25:25.737" Title="How many different vowels can be reliable annotated?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T14:55:35.560" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some languages, there's a very prevalent distinction between different meanings of the English word &quot;&lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as in &lt;em&gt;&quot;These two items are the same&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. For example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;em&gt;dasselbe&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;das gleiche&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek: &lt;em&gt;το αυτόν&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;το ίδιον&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese: &lt;em&gt;同一個&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;一樣的&lt;/em&gt; (not entirely sure how much this is observed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first word would mean that the two items are identical and actually the same item. The second word applies when they are the same in the sense of merely indistinguishable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every language seems to make this distinction explicitly, so my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did these distinctions come about and is it possible to identify a historical / cultural necessity of their existence which is present in some languages and others not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22326" LastEditorUserId="13944" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T11:47:32.920" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T11:47:32.920" Title="Why do some languages distinguish between &quot;identical&quot; and &quot;indistinguishable&quot;, and others don't?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28381" CreationDate="2018-07-12T16:09:19.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction is not as clear cut as it seems, in fact native speakers of German are notorious for not getting the distinction &lt;em&gt;dasselbe / das gleiche&lt;/em&gt; right. This happens both for spoken language and written language, and language critics (from Karl Kraus to Wolf Schneider) have a point there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something artificial and prescriptionist in this distinction that is not followed in spontaneous speech production by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T16:09:19.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7247" CreationDate="2018-07-12T19:09:39.837" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If KAND is from altaic origin, there must ctys in Altay with KAND. But al of the citys with the name KAND ara in Iranian influence area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22330" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T19:09:39.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T20:30:45.503" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon works also on the cluster &lt;code&gt;ls&lt;/code&gt; and thus it becomes &lt;code&gt;[lts]&lt;/code&gt;. Both examples are alveolar sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epenthesis does not occur universally, but often works on &quot;eins&quot; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to occur in English and Danish, so how is the &lt;code&gt;/n/&lt;/code&gt; in coda in German different from the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T21:59:18.997" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T21:59:18.997" Title="Is there any epenthesis in German by which &quot;eins&quot; sounds like &quot;eints&quot; and how frequent is the phenomenon?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26255" CreationDate="2018-07-12T20:44:55.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;ISO has some standard romanization systems listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_romanizations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_romanizations&lt;/a&gt;. Pinyin is &lt;strong&gt;ISO 7098&lt;/strong&gt;, but unfortunately no other systems of Chinese romanizations have been given ISO codes so you may not find this useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:44:55.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22740" CreationDate="2018-07-12T20:49:33.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that Arabic أفيون &lt;em&gt;ʾafyūn&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed into Hindi-Urdu and later remodelled on the English &lt;em&gt;opium&lt;/em&gt;, explaining the final &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;afīm&lt;/em&gt;. This would also make sense historically since the British presence in South Asia brought widespread commercial opium cultivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14907" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:49:33.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28381" CreationDate="2018-07-12T21:29:55.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Speculation on what drives decay of this lexical distinction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will offer some observations and delete when something more substantial is posted. I am a native speaker of Greek and German and an intermediate learner of Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If sticklers (correctly) remark that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sie fahren das gleiche Auto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means „the same model“, instead of the same physical car, opponents will say that the definitive article speaks against this and that plural exists to facilitate that meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sie fahren gleiche Autos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek, where (sadly) το αυτόν is practically dead, we will say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;το ίδιο αυτοκίνητο&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while actually meaning the very same. For the true meaning of ίδιος we will resort to singular or plural, both without article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οδηγούν ίδιο αυτοκίνητο/ίδια αυτοκίνητα&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might indicate that plural and article tended to make the lexical  distinction unnecessary. Although my Ancient Greek is rusty, I am very sure the distinction was pretty much alive then. I SPECULATE it might be associated with the fact that the definite article could often be omitted compared to modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to my impression, my mandarin speaking friends assure me the distinction is observed by most people. It might have to do with the absence of the above grammatical features. You can not afford confusing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;喜歡同一個人/romantically like the same person&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;喜歡一樣的人/like the same kind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was fervently assured the last sentence would not be misunderstood for the one before it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reasons for necessity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The necessity of the distinction will occur in every culture with lawyers, even if rarely. It is therefore my belief that every modern language facilitates it, the question being just how common it is and whether it occurs lexically or by other means (Grammar, syntax).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US you can be convicted twice for the same kind of crime (für das gleiche Verbrechen/για ίδιο αδίκημα) but not twice for the very deed (für das selbe Verbrechen/για το ίδιο αδίκημα).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My roommate and I may use the same type of toothbrush (gleiche Zahnbürsten/ίδιες οδοντόβουρτσες/一樣的牙刷）, but hopefully not the same one （Die selbe Zahnbürste/την ίδια οδοντόβουρτσα/同一個牙刷）!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of a criminal investigation involving shooting there will always be interest in whether two killings occurred with the same type of bullet (mit den gleichen Kugeln/με ίδιες σφαίρες), or with the very same bullets (mit den selben Kugeln/με τις ίδιες σφαίρες) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My brother and I pay the same insurance fee. We are entitled to the same kind of beds in hospital, but not in the very same bed to be shared!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T22:10:37.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28389" CreationDate="2018-07-12T22:18:07.023" Score="7" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imperative tends to be the simplest verb form, cf. Latin &lt;em&gt;dic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fac&lt;/em&gt;. English is not very inflecting, so other verb forms can be just as simple as the imperative. Nevertheless, is there a language, where another verb form, e. g. 3 sg present or past, is more basic (more similar/closer to the bare root) than the imperative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21583" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T08:18:08.130" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T16:13:02.567" Title="Is there a language where another verb form is simpler/more basic than the imperative?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28388" CreationDate="2018-07-13T01:46:00.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Classical Arabic may provide an example: see section 6.1.3 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/brame70.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brame 1970&lt;/a&gt;. His account is that the affirmative imperative is formed by truncating the subject prefix &lt;em&gt;ta-&lt;/em&gt; from the 2nd person jussive, and then other rules may apply as appropriate (notably, epenthesis of a harmonizing vowel if the stem has an initial cluster, so /ta-ktub/ → &lt;em&gt;ktub&lt;/em&gt; → [ʔuktub] &quot;write!&quot;, but /ta-wṣil/ → &lt;em&gt;ta-ṣil&lt;/em&gt; → [ṣil]). The imperative would then be a bit more complex than the jussive, in that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the jussive plus a few added steps. Similar analyses could be given to &lt;a href=&quot;https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nordlyd/article/viewFile/9/8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norwegian imperatives&lt;/a&gt;, which may derive by a truncation of the infinitive suffix (if any), subject to complications when the result would end in an impossible cluster. All such cases that I know of involve deriving the imperative from something else, by chopping off an affix from that other form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T01:46:00.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28388" CreationDate="2018-07-13T13:16:20.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the German language there is a form called &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflektiv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erikativ&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Inflektiv&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is just the isolated verb stem. It is arguably simpler than the imperative singular because for some strong verbs there is a vowel change in the imperative singular (e.g., &lt;em&gt;treten, tritt&lt;/em&gt;, stem &lt;em&gt;tret&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to kick&quot;; &lt;em&gt;geben, gib&lt;/em&gt;, stem &lt;em&gt;geb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to give&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Erikativ is predominantly used in Comics, but it has also entered computer mediated communication (like chats or blogs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T13:16:20.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8972" CreationDate="2018-07-13T13:25:31.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may find some study of such phenomena in &lt;em&gt;Applied linguistics&lt;/em&gt; where &lt;em&gt;terminology&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., study of terms), &lt;em&gt;translation studies&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;controlled languages&lt;/em&gt; are subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T13:25:31.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T06:13:55.637" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers and comments beneath &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28066&quot;&gt;my question about the sentence “He kept a black book in his desk”&lt;/a&gt; seemed to agree that “in his desk” acts as a complement and not as an adjunct in that sentence. But what about a sentence like “In his desk, he kept a black book” or  “In his desk he kept a black book” (both punctuation styles seem possible to me; I don't know if that's significant, or if other people would have the same judgement)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web page “&lt;a href=&quot;https://gawron.sdsu.edu/syntax/course_core/lectures/comp_adj.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Complements and Adjuncts&lt;/a&gt;” says that a PP complement to a verb cannot be preposed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;John decided on the boat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;On the boat, John decided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notice the first example is ambiguous. It either means (a) that John's decision took place on the boat, or (b) that of two alternatives John was considering (say, a boat or a coat hanger), John chose the boat-alternative. The second example has only the (a) reading. We usually explain this by saying that on reading (b) the PP &lt;em&gt;on the boat&lt;/em&gt; is a complement, and that verbs don’t like having their complement PPs preposed. This is a well-accepted test, but it only works reliably for verb heads and PP modifiers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, “In his desk, he kept a black book” meets the criteria for this test: it has a PP modifier and a verb head. So why can “in his desk” be placed at the start? I don't see a contrast in meaning between this sentence and the one with the other word order; in both sentences, it seems to me that “in his desk” describes the location of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really a &quot;well-accepted test&quot;? If so, is there some relevant exception to this test for certain types of complements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T06:20:11.867" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T15:33:57.600" Title="&quot;In his desk(,) he kept a black book.&quot; Is &quot;in his desk&quot; a preposed complement here?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17394" CreationDate="2018-07-15T06:35:40.797" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Malayalam is like an intermediate language between Tamil and tulu but still more similar to Tamil than its to tulu considering overall aspects of the language. I'm not a linguist but this is my personal. And u know the nambudiris of Malayalees are usually called tulu Brahmins. So tulu or old or Porto tulu may have influenced the Tamil dialect spoken in Kerala. I may be wrong anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22336" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T06:35:40.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T11:37:14.070" Score="0" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was interested in understanding the origin and meaning of the word &quot;genocide&quot; and went to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/genocide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; where it says that &quot;The proper formation would be genticide.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why would the proper word-formation be genticide and not genocide?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this type of word-formation have a name in linguistics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edit: This question has been &lt;em&gt;wrongfully&lt;/em&gt; closed as off-topic. This question has absolutely &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; to do with &quot;Language-specific grammar and usage&quot;. It's about word formation and etymology. For which there are tags. It seems this community is not strong enough to correct the mistake of 5 guys. &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; text can be removed &lt;em&gt;if and only if&lt;/em&gt; the question is reopened. Until then, enjoy the censorship and drama of Linguistics Beta. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22302" LastEditorDisplayName="user22302" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T23:27:25.197" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T23:27:25.197" Title="Genocide vs. genticide" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2018-07-16T09:38:42.063" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28401" CreationDate="2018-07-15T12:12:07.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the stem of the Latin word it is formed from is &lt;em&gt;genti-&lt;/em&gt; (nominative &lt;em&gt;gens&lt;/em&gt;, genitive &lt;em&gt;gentis&lt;/em&gt;). So its combining form in Latin would be &lt;em&gt;genti-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;geno-&lt;/em&gt; form appears to have been formed by analogy with many other Latin and Greek compounds where the elements are joined by &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt;; but not obviously from other &lt;em&gt;-cide&lt;/em&gt; words, which are nearly all in &lt;em&gt;-icide&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;suicide&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;patricide&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fratricide&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;regicide&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;insecticide&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fungicide&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: the OED says that this is from Greek γένος, as some of the comments have said. It remains the only word I've been able to think of in &lt;em&gt;-ocide&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T10:55:59.580" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T10:55:59.580" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T13:36:09.667" Score="1" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I know, stress can only be assigned at the level of the word (as in English) or the level of the sentence (as in French). Can any natural language assign it syntactically, e.g., &quot;the first syllable of every verb is stressed&quot;? It doesn't seem like this should be impossible but I didn't manage to find anything with some preliminary googling. I found an article from 2013 titled &quot;Some evidence for syntactic stress in Hittite&quot;, but it's not publicly available (nor am I sure if it's even talking about the same thing that I am).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14860" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T20:57:33.460" Title="Does syntactic stress exist?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T14:41:37.710" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: are there any theories developed (or simply thoughts put on paper) by language/linguistic theorists as to the aesthetical aspect of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What criteria must a language satisfy for it to be considered &quot;rich&quot;? Which phonemes don't go well together? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just a couple of silly examples of questions that I'd like to read someone's answers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22337" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T14:41:37.710" Title="Language aesthetics" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-23T18:13:31.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28403" CreationDate="2018-07-15T16:02:40.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, word stress can be computed with reference to syntactic properties, so &quot;the first syllable of a verb is stressed&quot; (as opposed to perhaps the penult in nouns) is perfectly possible. This may be outside the scope of what you're looking for, since stress assignment would not refer to properties of other words, it would refer to morphological information about a word that relates ultimately to syntax. I suggest as a starting point that &quot;sentence stress&quot; has to crucially involve properties of two words. And then you have to sort out the problem of clitics, which are usually treated as separate syntactic words which are phonologically dependent on a host word (typically meaning that they don't get their own stress; they may or may not affect the position of stress within the host word), or be stressable themselves when attached to a word. Given the typical analysis where a clitic &quot;attaches&quot; to a host, the clitic may or may not be visible when word stress is assigned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one well-established sense of &quot;sentence stress&quot;, name intonational phenomena, where citation stress patterns change under phrasal concatenation. For example, &quot;thirteen&quot; in American English usually has final stress, but in phrases like &quot;thirteen men&quot;, stress is on the first syllable. The classical phonological analysis of this is that there are degrees of stress, thirteen has secondary stress on the first syllable and primary stress on the final. When combining thirteen+men, stress is shifted to the first syllable. But another analysis is that stress is &lt;em&gt;erased&lt;/em&gt; from the final, leaving the initial stress the most prominent. There are many theories for dealing with intonation, one of them being the class of &quot;tonal&quot; accounts where intonemes like H and L are &quot;aligned&quot; to stressed syllables, and other elements of a sentence. In such a theory, what might seem to be movement of stress at the phrasal level actually reduces to variable positioning of these intonational elements. In that sense, the phenomena can be analyzed without invoking the notion &quot;sentence stress&quot;. (As you can see, this is becoming a problem of the type &quot;what do you mean by 'syntactic stress'?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages which have what is best termed phrase-positional prominence, for example, in many Bantu languages (Mwiini and Chewa are most widely discussed), the penult of the phrase (not the word) is &quot;prominent&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2009/Hyman_Penult_Length_PLAR.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Hyman surveys the topic, noting that the typical exponent of stress in these languages is lengthening. The first step in accounting for these languages is syntactically determining what word-combinations constitute a phrase: typically, in &quot;verb plus noun&quot;, that combination constitutes one phrase; in V N N, that is usually parsed as (V N) (N). Then, the rule is, &quot;the penult of the phrase is stressed (prominent, lengthened, or whatever you want to say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that Durnford's analysis reduces to an example of this latter type, that is, phrasal grouping. Claims about &quot;stress&quot; in Hittite are even more conjectural than such claims about Shona. The premise that stress is relevant is argues in the prior paper by McNeil, assuming that metric systems can be divided into quantitative vs. stress-based, and since (it is argued) it's not quantity, it must be stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T16:02:40.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T19:52:58.553" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to become acquainted with the language (hah) of linguistics (specifically speech perception, from the perspective of auditory signal processing), so that I can write and converse about the subject in a precise way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be correct in linguistic terms to say that an accent defines the mapping between phones and phonemes? Just to clarify, I'm not asking whether that is a complete description of the term accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: if &quot;accent&quot; is not the term for this, is there a linguistic term that roughly means &quot;the allophonic rules that say how a phoneme is pronounced in a certain dialect?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22338" LastEditorUserId="22338" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T20:46:49.023" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T20:46:49.023" Title="Correct to say that accent defines the mapping between phones and phonemes?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28403" CreationDate="2018-07-15T20:57:33.460" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most widely known analysis of English stress is that proposed in Chomsky and Halle's &lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;.  There, stress is assigned both to words and other constituents.  For discussions and proposals, google &quot;nuclear stress rule&quot;. I am skeptical of the supposed opposition you mention between English word stress and French sentence stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T20:57:33.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28393" CreationDate="2018-07-15T21:36:58.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think a simple binary distinction between adjunct and complement can distinguish between those phrases which can be preposed and those that cannot.  Your example &quot;He kept a black book in his desk&quot; can be extended to provide a &quot;trajectory&quot; or path to follow for where in the desk the book is to be found -- &quot;a black book taped to the bottom of the third up in the second row of drawers to the left of the desk's well&quot;. Scrambling the order of the points in this path will make the sentence harder to understand, but I think there is no exact cutoff point.&#xA;There is a brief discussion of trajectories from John Ross somewhere in the collection of Ross's work on John Lawler's web site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T21:36:58.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28406" CreationDate="2018-07-15T23:17:25.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, &quot;accent&quot; is a technical construct roughly equivalent to &quot;restrictive tone system&quot;, for example &quot;accent&quot; in Serbo-Croatian, Kyungsang Korean, Lithuanian. It is also used to refer to typographic elements (grave accent, circumflex accent). Other uses of &quot;accent&quot; are popular uses, which might be used casually by linguists. The most comment usage refers to interference with a second language, for example &quot;He talks with a Kikuyu accent&quot; meaning that he pronounces things the way a Kikuyu speaker would. Related to that is using &quot;accent&quot; to refer to a dialect, for example &quot;He has a southern accent&quot;, usually meaning that his dialect is identifiable from the South.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;phone&quot; is &quot;just before&quot; the physical realization of a language sound, that is, it is how something is pronounced, but using letters that can somewhat standardly be related to acoustics and articulation: basically, it is an analysis of what is actually pronounced, without regard for what the language in question is. &quot;Phoneme&quot; is another analytic construct, which groups phones together, attempting to capture the notion &quot;the same sound &lt;em&gt;in this language&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, when the physical sound is different. The classical example of that is that in American English, [t, tʰ, ɾ] are different phones but they represent a unified thing, the phoneme /t/. &quot;Accent&quot; has little to do with that relationship, except that the phonological rules of one dialect (&quot;accent&quot;) may differ from the phonological rules of another. Some of those rules may be the allophonic rules that say how a phoneme is pronounced in a certain context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T23:17:25.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-16T01:09:42.830" Score="0" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;English, I've heard, is rather odd for not leaning one way or another towards a head-final order, or a head first. Verbs gravitate towards the beginning of sentences and it uses prepositions, which are both head-first traits. But in our noun phrases, most of the elements precede the noun, with the exceptions of the plural marker and adjectival clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that most languages tend to gravitate heavily towards a head-final order or a head-first order. But how common is it for languages to have this strange mixed word-order like English? I know its common within the Germanic family, but what about languages outside the family? Obviously, its not unusual for related languages to share multiple features, even if they're rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T21:44:41.847" Title="How common is it for languages to be head-first as often as they are head-final?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20" CreationDate="2018-07-16T04:43:37.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt; expounds this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;, p. 125 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Another example is how languages mark subjects when the&#xA;  topic has to do with experience rather than action. When we learn&#xA;  Spanish, one construction we have to pause to wrap our heads&#xA;  around is that &lt;em&gt;I like books&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Me gustan los libros&lt;/em&gt; “the books please me”&#xA;  rather than what we would “ expect,” “Yo gusto los libros.” In Spanish, you say not that you like something but that it “ pleases to you,”&#xA;  and thus “ to me please the books.” This is not a mere random&#xA;  quirk— it follows from a distinction in types of object that English&#xA;  just happens not to mark explicitly very much.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    We get a handle on the distinction in question with the gustar&#xA;  case: technically speaking, &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;I like books&lt;/em&gt; is an “ object.” But&#xA;  book is an object in a different way in &lt;em&gt;I like books&lt;/em&gt; than in, say, &lt;em&gt;I read&#xA;  books&lt;/em&gt;. To like a book is not really to do anything to it-in contrast&#xA;  with reading a book, you can like a book without touching it; if you&#xA;  say you like a book, then you are actually describing a sentiment,&#xA;  not an action. It is not accidental that Spanish has the “ to me” construction with &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;, a verb describing a kind of experience, and not&#xA;  with, say, &lt;em&gt;drive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1592406254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Language Is&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xFQbHnvLonkC&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=%22robust+in+its+germanic+relatives%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=o61SulUblG&amp;amp;sig=mqVqkEkgOK5-LwTrwsKB6tnmJrs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi51o6vouHbAhXCmVkKHQ2FDeAQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=manzanas&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 24 Middle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  For an English speaker, for example, something always a &#xA;  nuisance in Spanish is how to say &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;. It comes out as that some-thing &quot;pleases to you&quot;: &lt;em&gt;I like apples&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Me gustan las manzanas&lt;/em&gt;, &#xA;  &quot;to-me please the apples.&quot; It's a very &lt;em&gt;specified&lt;/em&gt; thing about Span-ish, attending to the technicality that while to eat something is &#xA;  to do something to it, to like it is to experience it—i.e., for some- &#xA;  thing to happen &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;. The way an English speaker would like &#xA;  it to go is something like &lt;em&gt;Yo gusto las manzanas&lt;/em&gt;, to bring it into &#xA;  line with our way of rendering liking, a less specified way of put- &#xA;  ting it. It's a typical Spanish-class mistake. But because a stu- &#xA;  dent has a teacher coaxing him out of it, &lt;em&gt;Yo gusto las manzanas&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;  goes by the wayside pretty fast for someone in a Spanish class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T04:43:37.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28410" CreationDate="2018-07-16T05:03:55.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on what you mean by &quot;heavily&quot;, the idea that &quot;most languages tend to gravitate heavily towards a head-final order or a head-first order&quot; might be wrong. (Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1007/head-directionality-parameter-and-adpositions-in-finnish&quot;&gt;Head directionality parameter and adpositions in Finnish&lt;/a&gt;) In any case, languages with both head-final and head-first constructions like English certainly don't seem to be rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the WALS chapter &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Adjective and Noun&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Matthew S. Dryer writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The order of adjective and noun is often claimed to correlate with the order of object and verb. Dryer (1988a, 1992) argues against this, however, claiming that AdjN order occurs as often in VO languages as it does in OV languages. It has been known since Greenberg (1963) that many OV languages are NAdj. What Dryer (1988a, 1992) argues, however, is (i) that NAdj order is even more common among OV languages than had been realized, AdjN order being more common only in Eurasia; and (ii) that AdjN order is more common in VO languages than previously thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be more support for correlations between certain &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; &quot;head-final&quot; or &quot;head-first&quot; constructions. For example, Dryer says in the chapter &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/chapter/83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Order of Object and Verb&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OV languages tend to be postpositional (see Chapters 85 and 95), genitive before noun (see Chapter 86), adverb before verb, complementizer at end of clause, and standard-marker-adjective order in comparative clauses, while VO languages tend to exhibit the opposite orders. The patterns are sometimes more complex than this.  For example, while VO languages almost exclusively place relative clauses after nouns, both orders of relative clause and noun are common among OV languages (see Chapter 96).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T21:44:41.847" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T21:44:41.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-16T08:31:25.447" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering whether the nominal associate of expletive &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; gets nominative, accusative or dative case in clauses with exceptional case-marking in other languages, since case isn't visible outside the pronoun paradigm in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want there&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;TP&lt;/sub&gt; t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; to be sandwiches&lt;sub&gt;NOM/ACC/DAT?&lt;/sub&gt; at the party]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:35:46.780" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T15:07:37.447" Title="Case of Nominal Associate in Clauses with Exceptional case-marking" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7004" CreationDate="2018-07-16T10:05:25.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The apt technical term for formerly different languages developing common features is &lt;em&gt;sprachbund&lt;/em&gt;. And yes, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund#Indian_subcontinent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sprachbund on the Indic subcontinent&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T10:21:14.513" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T10:21:14.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28377" CreationDate="2018-07-16T17:54:16.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially, regarding &lt;em&gt;irrealis conditionals&lt;/em&gt;, it is French that has changed &amp;quot;further&amp;quot; than in English in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical Latin, both the protasis (the if-bit) and the apodosis (the consequence) would both be subjunctive, either imperfect or pluperfect depending on tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nam nisi multorum praeceptis multisque litteris mihi ab adulescentia &lt;strong&gt;suasissem&lt;/strong&gt;, ... numquam me pro salute vestra in tot ac tantas dimicationes atque in hos profligatorum hominum cotidianos impetus &lt;strong&gt;obiecissem&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Cicero, Pro Archia&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For unless &lt;strong&gt;I had persuaded myself&lt;/strong&gt; from my youth with the teachings of many, and by many books, ... then &lt;strong&gt;I should never&lt;/strong&gt;, for the sake of your safety, &lt;strong&gt;have subjected&lt;/strong&gt; myself to so many and such great struggles and to the daily attacks of desperate men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems Vulgar Latin / Common Romance went with what &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the pluperfect subjunctive and had it replace the &lt;em&gt;former&lt;/em&gt; imperfect subjunctive, and named it... the imperfect subjunctive. They then (mostly) dropped the subjunctive from the apodosis and replaced it with a new form, cobbled together from the infinitive with the imperfect indicative of (whatever became of) &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;have to&amp;quot;, in its extended meaning of &amp;quot;must&amp;quot;), which became known as the &amp;quot;conditional&amp;quot; mood. [Note: Standard Italian ended up using the derivative of the Latin perfect indicative, which became the Italian &lt;em&gt;passato remoto&lt;/em&gt;, usually called the &amp;quot;preterite&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;past historic&amp;quot;. Old Tuscan did use the imperfect indicative of &lt;em&gt;avere&lt;/em&gt; though.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New compound tenses were based on this paradigm. Hence, modern Spanish (with pluperfect subjunctive and conditional perfect):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Si no lo &lt;strong&gt;hubiésemos explicado&lt;/strong&gt; antes de la foto/ , no &lt;strong&gt;habría resultado&lt;/strong&gt; sencillo saber qué imagen se correspondía con algo bueno para Neymar. (&lt;em&gt;El País&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we &lt;strong&gt;had not explained&lt;/strong&gt; it before the photo, it &lt;strong&gt;would not have been&lt;/strong&gt; easy to know which image corresponded with something good for Neymar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old French also did this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Car la &lt;strong&gt;tenisse&lt;/strong&gt; en France et Bertrans si i &lt;strong&gt;fusset&lt;/strong&gt;, / A pis ed a martels &lt;strong&gt;sereit aconseüde&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Pélerinage&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As if I &lt;strong&gt;had kept&lt;/strong&gt; it in France, and if Bertrand &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; there / With pikes and hammers (she) &lt;strong&gt;would have been attacked&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this coexisted with the same construction as Classical Latin (subjunctive in both clauses):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Se je ne &lt;strong&gt;fusse&lt;/strong&gt; en tel prison, bien &lt;strong&gt;achevaisse&lt;/strong&gt; cest afere. (&lt;em&gt;Le Vair Palefroi&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; not in such a prison, I &lt;strong&gt;would put an end to&lt;/strong&gt; this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and with what Modern French would do, which would be with imperfect &lt;em&gt;indicative&lt;/em&gt; with the conditional present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Et se je &lt;strong&gt;pooie&lt;/strong&gt; amander la mort don je n'ai rien mesfet, je l'&lt;strong&gt;amanderoie&lt;/strong&gt; sanz plet. (&lt;em&gt;Yvain&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; pay death which I have never wronged, I &lt;em&gt;would pay&lt;/em&gt; her without complaint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 11th century, the conditional tense was replacing the subjunctive in the apodosis, but the indicative replacing the subjunctive in the protasis took longer, persisting into early Classical French of the 17th century. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dPG0SbzYV0wC&amp;amp;pg=PA356&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;One idea&lt;/a&gt; is that it naturally emerged in Late Latin where the Latin imperfect subjunctive was disappearing and hence they needed something for this present counterfactual construction, with the fact that it was more &amp;quot;present&amp;quot; being allocated to the imperfect indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as one forum discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/si-what-tense-and-why-not-subjonctif.2021723/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explains&lt;/a&gt;, the disappearance of the imperfect subjunctive from the protasis is the major thing that needs explaining. One &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2917162.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article from 1901 suggests&lt;/a&gt; that the imperfect subjunctive fell out of favour because the endings &lt;em&gt;-asse/-asses/-assent&lt;/em&gt; (all pronounced /as/ in IPA) ended up sounding &amp;quot;coarse&amp;quot; because of its relation to the derivational suffix -asse (those who know their French swearwords will testify to this). Interesting theory, but not necessarily satisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened then to the past subjunctive in English? It seems to be me that it was swept up in the general reduction of endings, and then the replacing of constructions using the past subjunctive conjugation with auxiliary verbs like &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;. The bulk of this change happens in Middle English. But the past subjunctive persists very clearly in Middle English, as Middle French translations from the period attest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Old English does not seem to use the subjunctive forms in conditionals, and it is Middle English &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anglisztika.ektf.hu/new/content/tudomany/ejes/ejesdokumentumok/2010/Kovacs_2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that appears to innovate this&lt;/a&gt; (in both factual and counterfactual), with past subjunctive in both protasis and apodosis in counterfactual conditions, although normally the apodosis uses a modal auxiliary in past subjunctive (e.g. &lt;em&gt;sholde&lt;/em&gt;). Old English does use subjunctive forms a lot more as a whole though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; a pope/ Not oonly thou, but every myghty man,/ … &lt;strong&gt;Sholde have&lt;/strong&gt; a wyf;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; a pope, not only you but every mighty man &lt;strong&gt;would have&lt;/strong&gt; a wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor that seems to keep the subjunctive in Middle English is the use of &lt;em&gt;inversion&lt;/em&gt; to signal the protasis, instead of explicit conjunction &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt;. This persists into modern English, in relatively set phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Were&lt;/strong&gt; he still here, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conditional sentences, there is a moribund distinction drawn between indicative and subjunctive in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he/she &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; singing, you would have certainly appreciated it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he/she &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; singing, you would have certainly appreciated it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... relating to counterfactuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any meaningful comparison to be drawn here? It doesn't seem like it to me - there is a completely different set of constructions that the two languages have charted to produce counterfactual conditional statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T17:54:16.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28417" CreationDate="2018-07-16T18:01:42.360" Score="1" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was there voiced aspirated alveolar trill in Ancient Greek? It was written in some sites in Russian that all Ancient Greek words which began with &quot;rho&quot; pronounced with the sound [rʰ], but it was written in English Wikipedia that such words pronounced with the voiceless alveolar trill. &#xA;In addition, can you send the example of the sound [rʰ], please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22342" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T20:59:34.147" Title="Voiced aspirated alveolar trill" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28416" CreationDate="2018-07-16T20:59:34.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no phonetic difference between voiceless aspirated vs. unaspirated trill, and phonologically speaking, voiceless trills (and other sonorants) behave like they are aspirates. The distinction between trill and tap has to do with the number of hits. It is likely that Ancient Greek initial &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; (ῥ) was not a fricative and was voiceless, but it would take impossible-to-obtain phonetic data from a speaker to make any more specific claim about the phonetics of that sound. Recordings of Ancient Greek are, needless to say, not derived from native speakers. You can listen to initial &quot;hr&quot; in Icelandic on Forvo. The speakers who recorded &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/hrista/#is&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hrista&lt;/a&gt; &quot;shake&quot; differ, where &quot;bjarkibjarki&quot; produces a credible voiceless trill, likewise his rendition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/hrist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hrist&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T20:59:34.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19142" CreationDate="2018-07-17T07:02:34.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do arbitrary coinages happen in language? Yes, but they appear to be rare, especially if we also remove onomatopoeias and sound symbolism from consideration (which OP has not done). FWIW, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=%22arbitrary+coinage%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=%22arbitrary+coinage%22&lt;/a&gt; lists 6 instances of &quot;arbitrary coinage&quot; for English; two (&lt;em&gt;jillion&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zillion&lt;/em&gt;) are clearly analogical, which leaves three brand names (&lt;em&gt;Piggly-Wiggly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Kodak&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pyrex&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;sylph&lt;/em&gt;, which the dictionary concedes is likely a portmanteau of &lt;em&gt;silva&lt;/em&gt; &quot;forest&quot; and &lt;em&gt;nymph&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brand names do appear to be the one area where completely arbitrary coinages are common—and the emergence of brand names as a phenomenon of consumerism makes this a late phenomenon in language. And of course, brand names are not completely arbitrary either; sound symbolism and connotative family resemblances go into them, as shown in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brandnewmeaning.com/6/kodak/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this account of &lt;em&gt;Kodak&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I devised the name myself. The letter “K” had been a favourite with me — it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with ‘K.’ The word ‘Kodak’ is the result.” (System Magazine 1920s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@vin pondered in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was just pondering origin of words to identify things and describe ideas and it seemed to me that languages (or speakers rather) stopped inventing the former kind long back and began using those as the basis to make new words of the second kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the genesis of language presumably did involve wholesale arbitrary coinage, rather than reuse of existing language stock. Well, maybe, though I wouldn't underestimate the role of sound symbolism in any initial genesis of language. But Uniformitarianism makes it the default assumption that people have been reusing existing language stock, rather than inventing new words from whole cloth, for as long back as language has been recognisable as such. We wouldn't expect any difference in that regard between Early Modern English (pre-consumerism) and Sumerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T07:02:34.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17057" CreationDate="2018-07-17T08:13:44.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Greek has &quot;have under view = to be aware of&quot;, έχω υπ' όψιν and &quot;take under view = to consider&quot;, λαμβάνω υπ' όψιν; the morphology is Ancient. The phrase is classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharevousa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Puristic&lt;/a&gt;, but it appears to be mediaeval in origin, rather than calqued French or German (as was typical of such Puristic shibboleths). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 11th century historian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Attaleiates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Attaliates&lt;/a&gt; used the variant &quot;to bring down to view&quot;, μὴ κατ’ ὄψιν αὑτὸν ἀγαγών; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9fNlAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA134&amp;amp;dq=%22%CF%85%CF%80%27%20%CE%BF%CF%88%CE%B9%CE%BD%22&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj-3cmp0qXcAhULnpQKHbTkCH0Q6AEILjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22%CF%85%CF%80&amp;#39;%20%CE%BF%CF%88%CE%B9%CE%BD%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 1875 commentary&lt;/a&gt; mentions &quot;bringing under/down to view&quot;, ἄγω κατ’/ὑπ’ ὄψιν, as an idiom already in use in 4th century AD Church Fathers; e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Nyssa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gregory of Nyssa&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Cc4TgIdERnYC&amp;amp;pg=PA66&amp;amp;dq=%22%CF%85%CF%80%27%20%CE%BF%CF%88%CE%B9%CE%BD%22&amp;amp;hl=el&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiMn8W_06XcAhVMjJQKHYC3AP04PBDoAQgnMAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22%CF%85%CF%80&amp;#39;%20%CE%BF%CF%88%CE%B9%CE%BD%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contra Eunomium I.130&lt;/a&gt;: πῶς ἄν τις ὑπ’ ὄψιν ἀγάγοι τὸν καινὸν ἐκεῖνον ἀγῶνα, &quot;how could anyone bring under view that new struggle&quot; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/290101.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Advent translation&lt;/a&gt; treats it fairly literally: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;None could describe his contempt of danger, so as to &lt;strong&gt;bring before the reader's eyes this new combat&lt;/strong&gt;, which one might justly say was waged not between man and man, but between a Christian's firmness and courage on the one side, and a bloodstained power on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the metaphor &quot;bring before one's eyes&quot; transforming into the fixed expression &quot;to take before one's eyes = to consider&quot; and &quot;to have before one's eyes = to be aware of&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see a Mediaeval Greek idiom, used by eminent theologians, being studiously copied by translators into other languages professing Eastern Christianity (like, say, Armenian and Russian), and becoming part of their written and formal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't proof; but if there's no comparable idiom nearby in Europe, I'd think it's plausible. And given mediaeval history, Greek is much more plausible than Latin for explaining a fixed phrase in Armenian and Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T08:13:44.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19142" CreationDate="2018-07-17T09:44:03.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is definitely yes, although really new coinages are rare beasts. The example that comes to my mind, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blurb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blurb&lt;/a&gt;, is already more than a century old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T09:44:03.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18993" CreationDate="2018-07-17T12:47:28.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this question and wanted to give this input that might interest you. Even for Indic (Indo-Aryan) languages, the debate whether development of retroflex sounds was due to contact with Dravidian or an internal development is still open. The internal development account claims that the palato-alveolar sibilant underwent a context-free change to a retroflex sibilant. This introduced the retroflex manner feature, leading to the development of the stop series. My intuition is that the contact-based account makes more sense since there are other features (such as affixal conjunction, quotative complementizer) whose timeline matches with the retroflex sounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22346" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T12:47:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T13:49:32.023" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In VerbNet, each frame has a semantic representation like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cause(Agent, E) manner(during(E), directed motion, Agent)&#xA;  !contact(during(E), Agent, Patient) manner(end(E),forceful, Agent)&#xA;  contact(end(E), Agent, Patient)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a reference that lists all the possible functions, parameters and values that are possible in VerbNet. I've looked at the papers listed on the VerbNet publications page, but the ones I found that covered semantics didn't have any comprehensive list. I also saw &lt;a href=&quot;http://verbs.colorado.edu/verb-index/vn/reference.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but it only lists out all the possible values without explanation of how they fit into the 'argument structures', and indeed what the 'argument structures' for each predicate are. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:39:42.183" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:39:42.183" Title="Is there any detailed documentation of VerbNet's semantic representation?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;verbnet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19338" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:09:41.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excellent question. I'm sure you don't dispute the &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; for a larger vocabulary at the expense of a smaller one. If you go into a hardware store, you better be able to express the difference between a nail and a screw with some kind of words, maybe not with those two but with longer sentences that will involve vocabulary that will end up distinguishing them. A technical vocabulary that covers more ground than the common set of words is necessary in many areas in order to communicate both more efficiently, by collapsing a lot of nuances into single words, and more accurately, by limiting vagueness in the technical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think you are finding trouble with is that there seem to be a lot of, as you say, erudite words, words which seem to obscure rather than clarify. Academics and those that aspire tend to use more obscure words, not just as direct technical communication but as a sign of social status; using big fancy words can be used as a sign of superiority. They're acting like gate-keepers; people who don't know the silly arbitrary language can't get in. These words don't &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; anything more, it feels like its just a separate language to hide behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may well be true, or it may just come out of other things. English is well know for it, but other languages have a similar layered vocabulary. They have a base vocabulary from the far past, but then either invaders or a strong neighbor or religion encouraged acceptance of a lot of new vocabulary (French terms in English, Arabic terms in Turkish and Persian). And literacy and education can add many words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So often there are informal words and more formal variants for the same things. Agreement/consensus, go/proceed, pee/urinate/micturate, and on and on. Why use the more obscure words when the easy ones already work just fine (and this would save a lot of time in learning too)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone famous, was it Feynman? Einstein? Twain? said that if you can't explain a concept to an eight-year old then you don't understand it well enough. To which someone like Voevodsky probably replied, if you can explain it to an eight-year old then you don't have anything interest. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Munroe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Randall Munroe&lt;/a&gt; in his 'Thing Explainer' takes a large number of scientific concepts and literally translates them to the 1000 most frequent terms in English (which presumably doesn't include the Latinate scientific terms at all), all in order to show that you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; communicate without the obscure obfuscating terminology. There are examples of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Math/Milnikel/boolos-godel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gödel's incompleteness proofs explained in words of one syllable&lt;/a&gt;. Read it and you can judge for yourself. These attempts are very entertaining for those who already understand the concepts and can map the informal terms to the formal terms they already know. Whether it is informative to those not in that situation has never been addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there are invented languages, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toki Pona&lt;/a&gt; which attempt to give small axiomatic elements that combined produce all concepts. So you only have to learn a minimum of pieces, from which anything you want can be expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To attempt to answer your question directly though, new words are useful.&#xA;Why don't we circumcise our language until everyone is able to understand everything? One could say that limiting oneself to basic vocabulary is literally dumbing down the language, limiting the language encourages limiting thought. Concepts are complex and giving single labels to those complex things makes the concepts easier to remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you don't learn the new word, then you won't be able to communicate or understand. For any given word, you're not really going to know whether it is common or rare or if the user is showing off or if it really does help in understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:09:41.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28413" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:45:05.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the Wikipaedia article suggests, the objective case is typical for such nominals. In Latin and Greek, for example, the accusative case is used—although neither language normally has this expletive &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; expressed as a special word, the below is semantically identical to using English &lt;em&gt;there is/are&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dicit &lt;strong&gt;viros&lt;/strong&gt; adesse [acc. mascl. plural]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He says men to be present = He says that there are men (there/present)&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the same in Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the objective case is used in similar constructions (though without your sense of &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is there --&amp;gt; I want &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is a teacher --&amp;gt; I want &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; to be a teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that *&lt;s&gt;I want he to be there&lt;/s&gt; is unacceptable. Both these examples and your example are historically the same construction in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the same in Dutch, with the sense of &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; you are looking for (&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hij was er --&amp;gt; Ik zag &lt;strong&gt;hem&lt;/strong&gt; er zijn [note that the construction is a little bit contrived with this particular sense of the verb and the pronoun combined, but it's possible].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He was there&amp;quot; --&amp;gt; &amp;quot;I saw him there be = I saw him be there&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T15:07:37.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28427" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3179808/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VerbNet&lt;/a&gt; is a broad-coverage verb lexicon developed at Univer.sity of Pennsylvania (UPenn). It a well-known and widely used resource in Computational Linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28428" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" Score="0" Body="For question related to VerbNet, a semantic resource on English verbs." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:45:06.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T15:34:01.900" Score="1" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not expert in typology, but I wonder if it’s possible for a language to ban t+S sequences but have a phoneme č. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of an example of one such language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:12:21.133" Title="Are there languages that ban t+S (esh) sequences but have a č phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28393" CreationDate="2018-07-17T15:57:09.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original example is already somewhat ambiguous, I should say. Cf.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of their possessions had to be sold, but it was difficult to decide on which. On the Rolls Royce, John decided immediately. &lt;strong&gt;On the boat&lt;/strong&gt;, he decided later; he just couldn't bring himself to say goodbye to her at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To counter this, it could be argued that &lt;em&gt;decided on the boat&lt;/em&gt; is not a complementary relation. But I believe even those phrases that are incontestably complements can still be preposed, such as direct objects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her mother was a darling, but &lt;strong&gt;her father&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it makes more sense to say  1.) not only, as Greg does, that the boundary between complements and adjuncts is gradual and never absolute, 2.) but also that complements are merely &lt;strong&gt;less likely&lt;/strong&gt; to be preposed despite being generally preposable just like adjuncts, circumstances permitting. So preposability would not seem to be a good absolute test for complementarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T15:33:57.600" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T15:33:57.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28388" CreationDate="2018-07-17T16:13:02.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that, in Latin, the normal imperative is e.g. &lt;em&gt;mitte&lt;/em&gt;, where the first person singular is &lt;em&gt;mitto&lt;/em&gt;. So at least for some verbs the first person singular is as simple as the imperative. But, generally, yes, imperatives are among the simplest forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greek, it depends on the verb. For most verbs, the imperative is short. But there are verbs where the imperative is considerably less simple than the past third person singular, notably in the aorist, where the latter can be the bare root/stem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ΓΝΩ : &amp;quot;he knows / knew / has come to know&amp;quot; (aorist third person singular indicative without augment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ΓΝΩΘΙ : &amp;quot;know!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;you must know&amp;quot; (aorist second person singular imperative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that this imperative ending -ΘΙ found favour at some time because it made it easier to distinguish those two forms. But I don't know: perhaps this -ΘΙ is in fact a very old imperative ending that was in continuous use from Proto-Greek or Proto-Indo-European. This might be a good question to ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://latin.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;, where Ancient Greek is also on topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T16:13:02.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T16:18:02.373" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to annotate a recording of a language that has both velar k and uvular q. It’s tricky because I can’t always distinguish the two phonemes by ear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What features may I see in a spectrogram that could help me distinguish a /k/ from a /q/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T21:49:30.270" Title="What are the features that distinguish a velar /k/ from an uvular /q/ in a spectrogram?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28429" CreationDate="2018-07-17T16:41:27.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is a prime example, but that is a matter of analysis. One problem with the question as asked is that it mixes alphabets, contrasting tS (IPA tʃ) and č. The letter č is not IPA, so to normalize the letters into IPA, the question would presumably be about the cluster t plus ʃ versus the single segment t͡ʃ. Polish  czysta and trzysta, sometimes transcribed as [t͡ʃɨsta] versus [tʃɨsta], is an example of a contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English on the other hand does not have a contrast. The question then is whether the thing in &quot;church&quot; should be analyzed as a cluster, or as a single segment. It is generally believed that it should be treated as a single segment, on the grounds that treating it as a cluster would complicate the rules for constructing syllable onsets. Stop-plus-fricative onsets are generally not found, and treating &quot;ch&quot; as a cluster would require a complex additional rule, which can be avoided be treating &quot;ch&quot; as a single consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, we have to also see if there are any complications introduced by the single consonant analysis. &quot;ch&quot; does not combine with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; consonant in the onset, so *&lt;em&gt;chmee&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;chrowl&lt;/em&gt;. This is similar to the restriction on ʃ, as long as you exclude (German and) Yiddish words like shmatte and Schweppes. However, there is one well-attested and unavoidable ʃC cluster, ʃr as in shrimp, shrove etc. One approach to this is to say that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; /s/ can appear as a fricative in an onset fricative+C cluster, and treat [ʃ] in [ʃr] onsets as /sr/ (note the gap that there are no words like *[srɪmp]). If you accept the argument thus far, then it's simply a matter of also excluding the segment /t͡ʃ/ from onset clusters. (I am delaying the problem of &quot;Toronto&quot; being pronounced [t͡ʃranə] in said city, and &quot;tree&quot; being something like [t͡ʃri] in various parts of North America). The claim would be, specifically that [-anterior] coronals cannot appear in the onset with another consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large problem with this account is that it depends on there being an independent principle outlawing preconsonantal alveopalatal sibilants in the onset. While etymologically speaking all ʃC clusters derive from another language, that doesn't make them &quot;not part of English&quot;. It is extremely unlikely that anyone pronounces the name Schwartz as [swɔrts], and Schwarts / sworts is probably a minimal pair for [ʃ,s] for people who know the word &quot;sworts&quot;. So actually, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have ʃC clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem might be avoided by restating the relevant onset restriction: [-anterior] coronal &lt;em&gt;stops&lt;/em&gt; are prohibited, but there is no ban on fricatives at the place of articulation. (Note that affricates &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; single consonant are classically treated phonologically as stops). The problem is that the motivation for treating &quot;ch&quot; as a single segment is that treating it as a cluster requires adding otherwise unnecessary exceptional rules (exceptionally allowing t+ʃ). Alas, we need an otherwise unnecessary exclusion, to rule out [t͡ʃC].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of problematic onset clusters would be [t͡ʃw] and [t͡ʃr]. Stop plus obstruent is generally banned, likewise stop plus nasal, which leaves stop plus glide or liquid. There is also a ban on coronal stop plus [l], and you don't get [j] after alveopalatals... reducing the possibilities to [t͡ʃw] and [t͡ʃr]. As for [t͡ʃr], some speakers do pronounce initial &quot;tr&quot; something like that, so for them, it is possible that &quot;tree&quot; is /t͡ʃri/, and there is no gap. I say [tri], so for me there would be an unexplained gap. There is no independent rule that would rule out [t͡ʃw].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that invoking surface co-occurrence as the diagnostic for phonological analysis is a double-edged sword. In lieu of a Polish-type argument from contrast, the question is, how do you establish that a certain apparent CC sequence is a single consonant, versus a cluster? Analogous issues arise in the treatment of &quot;prenasalized consonants&quot; (NC clusters), &quot;glottalized consonants (C+ʔ clusters), &quot;rounded / palatalized consonants&quot; (Cj and Cw clusters). Indeed, there are treatments of &quot;sp, st&quot; where these are &quot;prespirantized stops&quot; (Fujimura's CD model). Obviously, nothing can be concluded in a complete theoretical vacuum, but I find that it's extremely difficult to find nearly-universal agreement on the theoretical primitives pertaining to the problem of onset cluster vs. complex segment analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T16:49:23.403" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T16:49:23.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28429" CreationDate="2018-07-17T20:51:36.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many languages that wouldn't permit a sequence like /t/ + /ʃ/ because it involves either coda /t/ (in the case of heterosyllabic /t.ʃ/ or a tautosyllabic stop-fricative complex coda /tʃ./) or a stop-fricative onset cluster, and it's not that unusual for a language to ban both of these things, while still allowing affricates like /t͡ʃ/ to occur as onsets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As user6726's answer pointed out, it's actually a bit difficult to establish based on other parts of the phonology that a language bans stop-fricative onset clusters, but onsets like [tʃ] are conventionally analyzed as affricate phonemes rather than as stop-fricative clusters unless there is clear evidence that they are two phonemes rather than one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Japanese has [tɕ] as a possible onset, which can be analyzed as an affricate phoneme /č/ (I think there are other possible more abstract analyses, like an allophone of /t/ or /tj/, but my impression is that this is typically only considered to be the diachronic or morphological source of /č/). Japanese doesn't have coda /t/, nor any contrasting sequence of /t/ + a sibilant fricative. It does have a distinct phoneme /t/, as well as something that is probably a phoneme /š/ (as with /č/, the analysis is a bit complicated because /š/ originated from conditioned palatalization of /s/, and there are still some neutralizations and morphological alternations between Japanese š and s that could be understood as indicating that š is &quot;underlyingly&quot; something like /s/ or /sj/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Chinese&lt;/a&gt; has [ts], [tʂ], [tɕ], [tsʰ], [tʂʰ], [tɕʰ] as onsets, but doesn't have coda /t/ or any (other) stop + fricative sequences as onsets, so these are analyzed as affricate phonemes. Chinese does have /t/, /tʰ/ and /s/, /ʂ/, /ɕ/ phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nick Nicholas brought up the example of Tsakonian in a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example I thought of since posting this answer is standard Italian: it has č, t and š as phonemes, but no tš clusters, because coda consonants and consonant clusters are fairly limited in the native vocabulary of standard Italian. There is geminate čč. It is phonetically realized not with a double release like [tʃtʃ], but with greater duration of the pre-release portion, something like [tːʃ], but Italian speakers seem to perceive this as phonologically involving coda /č/ rather than coda /t/, and may transcribe it phonologically as /t͡ʃt͡ʃ/. The consonant /š/ behaves a bit interestingly as it is one of the &quot;intrinsic geminate&quot; consonants that always occurs as a geminate when it is in intervocalic position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think word-final /t/ can occur in Italian in loanwords from English, but I don't know too much about the way this is typically realized phonetically, and I'm not sure whether loanwords should be included in a discussion of this kind of phonotactic &quot;ban&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T03:12:21.133" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T03:12:21.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18993" CreationDate="2018-07-17T23:04:01.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;/ll/ &gt; /ɖː/ in several Italian dialects (and, under Calabrian influence, in Calabrian Greek): &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ḌḌ— The -ll- sound (in words of Latin origin, for example) manifests itself in Sicilian as a voiced retroflex stop with the tip of the tongue curled up and back, a sound rare in the Romance languages. [...] The sound itself is not /d/ but rather [ɖ]. For example, the Italian word bello [ˈbɛllo] is beḍḍu [ˈbɛɖʊ] in Sicilian. This sound [ɖ] also evolved from Latin -ll- in Sardinian, to an extent in Asturian, elsewhere in Southern Italy, and in many northwestern Tuscan dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Southern Calabrian is a branch of Sicilian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it does in fact happen in Romance; and in fact, it doesn't sound like retroflexes are that much more common in Germanic than in Romance. As for why some language features occur more in one language family than in others, it can be any of (a) areal diffusion (hence Calabrian Greek); (b) common inheritance; (c) coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T00:08:50.907" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T00:08:50.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6692" CreationDate="2018-07-18T02:44:03.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Misleading to refer to &lt;em&gt;abbreviation&lt;/em&gt; in this context. If we leave out words in a fixed expression, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Watergate affair&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;Watergate&lt;/em&gt;, that's &lt;a href=&quot;http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-ancient-greek-language-and-linguistics/truncation-SIM_00000543&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sometimes referred to as &lt;strong&gt;truncation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;—though I agree with the dictionary there that it's confusing to do so: truncation usually refers to dropping bound morphemes, not words. Though it too is ambiguous, &lt;strong&gt;ellipsis&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;elliptical construction&lt;/strong&gt; would be more readily understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the underlying process you're alluding to here is not a syntactic one (&lt;em&gt;differential and integral calculus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;gt; &lt;em&gt;calculus&lt;/em&gt;), but a semantic one (&lt;em&gt;calculus&lt;/em&gt; = &amp;quot;calculation&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;the Newton and Leibnitz kind of calculation&amp;quot;). I'm assuming people didn't routinely rattle off the phrase &lt;em&gt;differential and integral calculus&lt;/em&gt;, after all (outside of textbook names), for them to be forced to shorten the expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic process involved is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/semantic-narrowing-specialization-1692083&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semantic narrowing&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;specialisation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; See also in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typology by Bloomfield (1933)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, &lt;em&gt;skyline&lt;/em&gt; formerly referred to any horizon, but now in the USA it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typology by Blank (1999)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specialization of meaning: Downward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., &lt;em&gt;corn&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;grain&amp;quot; → &amp;quot;wheat&amp;quot; (UK), → &amp;quot;maize&amp;quot; (US).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ellipsis: Semantic change based on the contiguity of names, e.g., &lt;em&gt;car&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;cart&amp;quot; → &amp;quot;automobile&amp;quot;, due to the invention of the (motor) car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T14:08:57.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3492" CreationDate="2018-07-18T05:29:10.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Onomatopoeia is non-arbitrary, but that doesn't mean it's immune to the normal processes that happen to any arbitrary word—including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arbitrary historical choices of onomatopoeia (like @acattle commented about &quot;ribbit&quot; above; copy-pasting):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Incidentally, frogs make a wide array of sounds. Only a single species actually goes &quot;ribbit&quot;, the Pacific Treefrog indigenous to the US west coast. Despite this, &quot;ribbit&quot; is the frog onomatopoeia of choice for most English speakers around the world. The reason is because &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frog-shots.com/Who_says_RIBBIT_.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;early Hollywood movies used the frog's distinctive call as a stock sound effect&lt;/a&gt;. This explains why English's frog onomatopoeia is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias#Frog_croaking&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;noticeably different from other languages'.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inheritance through language families, like any other cognate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There looks to be a pan-Slavic &lt;em&gt;[h]am [h]am&lt;/em&gt; onomatopoeia for &quot;eating food&quot;, for example (English &lt;em&gt;nom nom&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;yum yum&lt;/em&gt;), which doesn't appear elsewhere in the Wikipedia list (although Turkish &lt;em&gt;ham hum&lt;/em&gt; is close.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compliance with language-specific phonotactics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish takes *&lt;em&gt;mjau&lt;/em&gt; for &quot;meow&quot;, and ends up with &lt;em&gt;miyav&lt;/em&gt;. A lot of languages don't have initial /mj/ clusters; Turkish seems to make that official even for meowing. (Turkish doesn't have initial /m/ at all natively, admittedly; but /mj/ is a bigger hurdle than just /m/.) The final -av is another concession to Turkish phonotactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;areal diffusion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Modern Greek sneeze, for example, /apsu/, is pretty obviously borrowed from the Turkish (and more onomatopoeic) /hapʃu/; dropping /h/ and /ʃ/ &gt; /s/ is just fitting /hapʃu/ to Modern Greek phonotactics. I have heard, to my profound shock, my cousin-nephew in Athens spontaneously utter /auts/ &quot;ouch&quot;, when the Greek exclamations I knew were /ax, ox/. The fact that /twit/ for bird noises is shared between English and Dutch, but not German, points to either common heritage, or English influence on Dutch via comics (which I suspect for Finnish &lt;em&gt;tviit&lt;/em&gt; and Tagalog &lt;em&gt;twit&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only realised the Greek/Turkish link of /apsu/ last year, and I was shocked, because I assumed onomatopoeia was completely non-arbitrary. But there you have it. Onomatopoeia does get culturally conventionalised, and is subject to the same borrowing and diffusion as any meme, let alone any lexeme. Just like kids drawing houses with chimneys, even if they've never seen a chimney. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not that I'm equipped to answer your final question, but if you pressed a bilingual in Greek and English like me, I would not be able to tell you that Greek [ɲau] is more or less authentic a realisation of a cat's vocalisation than the [mjau] that occurs just about everywhere else. (Latvian in any case is happy to use both: &lt;em&gt;mjau, ņau&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T06:35:02.947" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T06:35:02.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27180" CreationDate="2018-07-18T07:18:53.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's worth noting that 'vowels are not as&#xA;relevant as consonants in the interpretation of lexical distinctions' (Nespor, Peña &amp;amp; Mehler, 2003). Apart from there being more consonants than vowels, consonants also tend to become more distinctive within a lexeme, while vowels tend to lose distinctiveness (vowel harmony, vowel reduction e.g. English schwas). Roots often consists of consonants alone, e.g. Semitic languages, whereas it's rare for roots to consist of vowels alone. Experimentally, it was famously demonstrated than when shown the word &lt;em&gt;kebra&lt;/em&gt; and asked to change it to a real English word by altering a sound, people tend to say &lt;em&gt;cobra&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;zebra&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that vowels are more easily changed in word recognition. All these imply that consonants play a greater role in identifying words, hence censoring just vowels will generally enhance recoverability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nespor, M., Peña, M., &amp;amp; Mehler, J. (2003). On the different roles of vowels and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition. &lt;em&gt;Lingue e linguaggio&lt;/em&gt;, 2(2), 203-230.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T07:49:21.960" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:49:21.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28444" CreationDate="2018-07-18T09:33:07.617" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s standard doctrine that “pitch is perceived f0”, and that f0 is phonetic and corresponds to pitch which is phonological ... no problem there. (Even if this is a simplification) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder if there are examples of cases in which pitch doesn’t correspond to f0. Maybe, for example, in tone. Is there e.g. a language where speakers may perceive a tone as “rising” even if phonetically the f0 is falling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never found such an example. Probably I just haven’t read enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone point me to an example of case where f0 doesn’t correlate to pitch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T16:20:42.717" Title="What’s a good example a language phenomena in which f0 is NOT correlated to pitch?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4486" CreationDate="2018-07-18T09:56:47.773" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This kind of construction occurs in multiple languages (e.g. Irish, Cantonese, Modern Greek); it is called Devil Negation, or Rude Negators. Comments above expressed confusion about the examples from OP; in American English, the usual form is &lt;em&gt;like hell he did&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the hell she did&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is distinctive about it is that the negation is not expressed overtly; it is implied by the presence of an expression of anger or exasperation, as a reaction to the clausal content. &#xA;Doing some googles, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something I didn't know before  googling: the construction was already identified by Jespersen in 1917 (referring to the dialectal use of &lt;em&gt;devil&lt;/em&gt; in English): &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cu31924026632947#page/n35/mode/2up/search/devil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/stream/cu31924026632947#page/n35/mode/2up/search/devil&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-262.html#3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-262.html#3&lt;/a&gt; is the start of a discussion thread on Linguist List in 1993, identifying the construction and calling it &lt;em&gt;Rude Negator&lt;/em&gt;. The thread identified a long list of instances cross-linguistically, as well as some of the syntactic properties of the English construction. His summary of the thread is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-277.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-277.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://babelafial.webs.uvigo.es/pdf/07/art01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://babelafial.webs.uvigo.es/pdf/07/art01.pdf&lt;/a&gt; from 1998 mentions devil negation as a Hibernicism (it also occurs in Irish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.2018.56.issue-2/ling-2017-0041/ling-2017-0041.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.2018.56.issue-2/ling-2017-0041/ling-2017-0041.xml&lt;/a&gt; is a recent paper analysing the construction in German.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/docserver/15665844/v6n1_s6.pdf?expires=1531887386&amp;amp;id=id&amp;amp;accname=guest&amp;amp;checksum=40C182A32182D15758E997FE6F49D4AE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/docserver/15665844/v6n1_s6.pdf?expires=1531887386&amp;amp;id=id&amp;amp;accname=guest&amp;amp;checksum=40C182A32182D15758E997FE6F49D4AE&lt;/a&gt; is my paper on the construction in Modern Greek, from a pragmatics perspective. (I also wrote a paper on the construction in English around 2004; I never got it published.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T22:15:48.193" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T22:15:48.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28441" CreationDate="2018-07-18T16:20:42.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linguistic proxy for pitch is tone. As far as I know there are no languages where a tone distinction is not at all implemented via F0 differences, but there are very many where the distinction includes things other than F0. The best-known examples of that are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jkirby/docs/brunelle2016tone-preprint.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SE Asian tone languages&lt;/a&gt; like Vietnamese, where tonal differences involve amplitude, phonation and durational properties (sometimes vowel place distinctions) as well as F0 differences. In some languages such as the Western Nilotic ones, fully phonemic phonation distinction is an autonomous and orthogonal vowel property, and in those language they do not (by tradition) call the breathy / modal distinction a &quot;tone&quot; difference, whereas the SE Asian bundle of properties is just called &quot;tone&quot; (there is also mention of &quot;register&quot; in the literature). Phonatory concomitants are probably the most common, though they are under-reported since F0 is trivial to detect and report, and is most salient in perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about speakers perceiving a tone as rising is an instance of a pretty common fact about people who speak tone languages, that they don't use technical linguistic terms the way we do (and more often, they use other terms). I have found, in a number of African languages, that when speakers &quot;discover&quot; a contrastive parameter of their language via a minimal pair, they will often say that you &quot;drag&quot; one of the vowels (I've found little consistency in what &quot;drag&quot; means). Or they might say that a vowel is &quot;light&quot; (or &quot;heavy&quot;). I have never heard a speaker spontaneously refer to something as &quot;rising&quot; although one guy (not an average Joe) did learn what &quot;downstep&quot; and &quot;fall&quot; referred to. In other words, naively used terminology is usually incorrect, anyhow. Given that caveat, it is nearly universal that people's beliefs about the F0 path of a given vowel are incorrect to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T16:20:42.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-18T21:20:43.907" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a sentence has 2 prepositional phrases, how I can determine whether the second prepositional phrase is a complement of the first prepositional phrase or it's an adjunct to the whole sentence? Like the sentence &quot;I designed a car for humanity with a separated brake system&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22357" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T22:02:02.687" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T22:02:02.687" Title="How to differentiate between adjuncts and complements? Specifically when the sentence has two prepositional phrases" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;&lt;complement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-19T10:05:19.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28432" CreationDate="2018-07-18T21:49:30.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat surprisingly hard to determine. The best study on the topic that I know of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/39596/PDF/1/play/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Denzer-King's study of Tlingit&lt;/a&gt;. The basic strategy is to compare the frequency and amplitude of higher formants in the release. A very quick synopsis is that the frequency separation of F2 and F3 may be much greater in uvular compared to velars; F2 may be higher for velars compared to uvulars, but F3 may be higher for uvulars compared to velars. This assumes that the following vowel is the same. I say &quot;may&quot; because there isn't a solid basis of acoustic studies to make a strong claim. There is also a general energy-distribution measure described in the thesis, but I don't understand how you compute it, and that seems to be more relevant for fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to bear in mind that there is a &quot;quantal boundary&quot; between velars and uvulars; and sometimes things called &quot;uvulars&quot; are called &quot;postvelars&quot;. In Kenyang, there are (allophonic) uvulars, which might also be called &quot;lowered velars&quot;, but which are not as retracted as is [q] in Arabic, Lushootseed or Chechen. A propos Chechen, the Forvo collection has a number of words ([q] is Cyrillic кх, [k] is к).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T21:49:30.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28449" CreationDate="2018-07-18T21:51:26.063" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the best ways to store expressions for NLP from an exercise I received&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following two expressions, which have the same value.&#xA;Which one will typically be more relevant in NLP? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Monty Python&amp;quot;[6:12]&#xA;[&amp;quot;Monty&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Python&amp;quot;][1]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural Language Processing with Python&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/book/ch01.html#tab-brown-types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ch1&lt;/a&gt; from Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion it is the second one because the first ones refers only to letters whereas only words are meaning and can be meaningful for NLP. But this is only a preconceived opinion and I was therefore wondering what would be a more canonical answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22358" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T01:10:46.050" Title="What are the most relevant ways to store expressions in NLP?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28448" CreationDate="2018-07-19T01:10:46.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, from the perspective of that manual the second answer is the right one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;2.1 Lists&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is a text? At one level, it is a sequence of symbols on a page such as this one. At another level, it is a sequence of chapters, made up of a sequence of sections, where each section is a sequence of paragraphs, and so on. &lt;strong&gt;However, for our purposes, we will think of a text as nothing more than a sequence of words and punctuation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sequence of words, not a sequence of characters. (Each punctuation mark is normally tokenized as a separate word in the NLTK, hence &quot;words and punctuation&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly, it certainly is within the realm of NLP to decide how to tokenize a list of characters, and the NLTK even gives you different options. In fact, as you work with texts you will probably get them as a single string of characters, meaning it's up to you to apply a tokenizer. But this manual is, as you guessed, asking you to look at it from the place where more interesting theory applies — after tokenization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T01:10:46.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1077" CreationDate="2018-07-19T01:18:41.240" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By giving the Sanskrit Equivalent, I wanted to show you the Etymology of  Nordri, Sudri, Austri, Vestri- with Sanskrit Shudra,kShatri, Veshya .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is Sanskrit stands to be the oldest Indo-European language .&#xA;PIE  is not a language rather a hypothesis.PIE was never a language and not even one word belonging to PIE has been found.&#xA;Isn't it time that  the objective philologist  start paying attention to the antiquity of Sanskrit,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14715" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T01:18:41.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28451" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28452" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" Score="0" Body="For questions related to constructed languages that are designed to be a common language for speakers of slavonic languages. One of those languages is actually named Interslavic, but there are more of them." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T10:08:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28346" CreationDate="2018-07-19T12:38:36.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Slavic languages are famous for their degree of mutual intelligibility, and there are ongoing scientific studies on this question. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any studies throwing constructed languages like Slovianski in the mix of studied languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in the project &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/?page_id=296&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;INCOMSLAV&lt;/a&gt; and their publications; they use only existing Slavic languages and some artificial mixtures of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T12:38:36.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T20:35:08.897" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;A holds the 'sibling-in-law' relation to B only in the case when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) A is a sibling of C and C is married to B; or&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (2) A is married to C and C is a sibling of B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is common to (1) and (2) is that they both involve a complex relation, i.e. a relation composed of two relations, &lt;strong&gt;is a sibling of&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;is married to&lt;/strong&gt;, but that one is substituted for the other, keeping their arguments constant. But then one may wonders why use a single notion i.e. 'sibling-in-law' (as is the cas in at least English, French, Italian, and countless natural languages) to refer to individuals when it makes quite a difference to those individuals' identity, whether the order of two subrelations is (1) or (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence this question: Is there a plausible hypothesis as to why many natural languages mark no lexical distinction between sibling-in-law as determined by (1) and sibling-in-law determined by (2)? And does it even make sense to assign sibling-in-law what seems to be a disjunctive meaning, i.e. either (1) or (2)? Are there known examples of the same phenomenon in the category of common nouns denoting individuals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: I just noticed that some dictionaries add another condition, (3): A has a spouse who has a sibling who has a spouse B. This does not affect the point or the question above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22362" LastEditorUserId="22362" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T10:01:10.637" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:20:16.070" Title="'sibling-in-law' constructions: Why the polysemy/vagueness?" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T22:23:35.873" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I. Let us say we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabary&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symbols&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;II. Let us have three ways or methods of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transliterating&lt;/a&gt; a text written using the symbols of the syllabary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first method considers the syllabary as consisting of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;n−1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabograms&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider#Space&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;space&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;delimiter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second method has the same parameters as the first one, but every syllabogram can be considered as a complete &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable#Coda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coda&lt;/a&gt;-less &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllable&lt;/a&gt;, with 0 to 5 possible codas. That is, a syllabogram X can be read as X or X1, X2, X3, X4, X5 (that is up to 6 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliterating&lt;/a&gt; syllables) The overall frequency &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;F(non-X)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of X representing X1, X2, X3, X4 or X5 is considerably lower than the frequency &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;F(X)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of X representing the simplex X. Thus, its value is known.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third method differs from the first one in that it considers the above-mentioned delimiter-like character as a (non-empty) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcard_character&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wild card character&lt;/a&gt; representing up to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; different &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonants&lt;/a&gt;. Now, while in the first and second methods, there is a clear delimiter showing word boundaries, as mentioned above, in this method, there is none, because the symbol used for delimiting words in the other two methods is here used just as another sound (a consonant) either in the middle or at the end of a word. Hence, whoever tries to interpret or read the text in this way has to &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt; where words &lt;strong&gt;begin&lt;/strong&gt; and where they &lt;strong&gt;end&lt;/strong&gt;. The segmentation is thus arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specific examples of all three methods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a-me-li-ka &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; bi &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; a-me-li-ka i bi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a-me-li-ka &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; bi &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; a-me-li-ka i(s) bi(g) &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;America is big&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;America, I be!&lt;/em&gt; :-) )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a-me-li-ka &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;|&lt;/strong&gt; bi &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; a me-li ka-bi(n) bi &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;A merry cabin bee&lt;/em&gt; etc. ;-) ) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, how can I quantify which of the three methods leads to more uncertainty, and by how much? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one, at least, seems pretty straightforward and leads to minimum uncertainty (in comparison to the latter two). So, my question really is, how can I compare no. 2 and no. 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks for any advice or help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: A more specific example then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us have two competing scholars proposing two competing hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of them have the same text before them, written using the same syllabic script. The two scholar differ, however, as to how the script should be transliterated/read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&#xA;Scholar X assumes one of the characters marks word boundaries.&#xA;Scholar Y assumes the very same character is a wild card character that can represent up to 15 different consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&#xA;Scholar X assumes the underlying language is Language X.&#xA;Scholar Y assumes the underlying language is Language Y (different from X). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.&#xA;Scholar X segments the text into words using what he believes are word delimiters, checks the vocabulary of Language X to see if it contains such words.&#xA;Scholar Y goes through the vocabulary of Language Y to see if they can spot any of the words in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, it seems scholar X's method is more rigorous and does not allow too many alternatives. Scholar Y's method, on the other hand, appears to provide so many alternatives that, to me it seems it's almost impossible not to find at least something resembling Language Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuition aside, are there any ways to (dis)&lt;strong&gt;prove&lt;/strong&gt; that scholar X is more likely to be right than scholar Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T17:33:53.960" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T17:33:53.960" Title="How to quantify and compare different ways of segmenting and transliterating (reading) a text in terms of uncertainty/leeway?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28455" CreationDate="2018-07-20T03:03:31.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The expression of family relations does not occur in a social vacuum: it is tied up with the cultural norms surrounding those relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you live in a society where the dominant norm is the nuclear family, then the distinction between (1) and (2) is socially fine print: as an adult, you interact with a sister and her husband as a nuclear unit, and with your wife's sister and her husband as another nuclear unit. The difference between (1) and (2) has little consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the norm for the majority of societies has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrilocal_residence&lt;/a&gt;. The gender of the in-law makes a huge difference as to where they fit in with you socially: the brothers stay in the household, the sisters moved to their husbands' household.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Greece, there is a stigma to being a &lt;em&gt;soɣambros&lt;/em&gt;, someone who is more closely associated with his father in-law's household than his father's (&lt;em&gt;soɣambros&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &amp;quot;in-house brother-in-law&amp;quot;). It is no surprise that the language acting as a vehicle for such a society would differentiate between a &lt;em&gt;ɣambros&lt;/em&gt; (1) and a &lt;em&gt;badzanakis&lt;/em&gt; (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that OP has also asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does it even make sense to assign sibling-in-law what seems to be a disjunctive meaning, i.e. either (1) or (2)? Are there known examples of the same phenomenon in the category of common nouns denoting individuals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Family relations which English would regard as utterly disjunctive are certainly unified in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian Aboriginal kinship systems&lt;/a&gt;. For example, taking examples that have made it into variants of Aboriginal English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In south-east Queensland, &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt; is used to refer to any woman of one's great-grandparents' generation. This is due to the cyclical nature of traditional kinship systems and mirrors usage in many Australian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Father&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; include any relative of one's parents' generation, such as uncles, aunts, their own cousins and in-laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Son&lt;/em&gt; can refer to any male of the next generation, such as nephews, just as &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt; can refer to any female of the next generation, including nieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, the large number of languages which differentiate parallel cousins from cross-cousins, paternal cousins from maternal cousins, or first cousins from second cousins, would regard the English use of &lt;em&gt;cousin&lt;/em&gt; as just as disjunctive. (Similar points have already been made by other commenters. And I don't think it is defensible to claim that &amp;quot;any female of the next generation from X&amp;quot; is any more disjunctive than &amp;quot;any female that X has sired or given birth to.&amp;quot; As that definition shows, even &amp;quot;parent&amp;quot; is disjunctive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:20:16.070" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-20T11:39:38.327" Score="1" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always wondered whether there is a clear distinction between (speech) sounds and segments. The two words appear to be used interchangeably in some places while in others they are considered to be different.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22364" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T14:03:53.267" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:02:53.357" Title="Difference between sounds and segments" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28462" CreationDate="2018-07-20T14:49:47.523" Score="8" ViewCount="1093" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of my work has been done in Hebrew where describing a spelling as &quot;defective&quot; is common and accepted. Is this wording current in other areas of linguistics or would something like &quot;(not) spelled phonetically&quot; be better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22366" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:23:31.550" Title="Is calling a spelling &quot;defective&quot; acceptable in the linguistics of languages other than Hebrew/Aramaic?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28467" CreationDate="2018-07-20T15:52:56.523" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;How complete is their description for the Spanish language? Is it missing something out? Here is the description  &lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_spa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_spa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22360" LastEditorUserId="22360" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T16:15:21.500" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:08:46.550" Title="Do the WALS chapters cover the core grammatical structure of Spanish?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28460" CreationDate="2018-07-20T15:55:32.093" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;defective&quot; spelling in Hebrew is one without &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;matres lectionis&lt;/a&gt;. This term exists in Hebrew because Hebrew is an abjad which doesn't always mark vowels, and consequently, words can be spelled either plene (with matres lectiones) or defective (without).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;defective&quot; is also used of an orthography that can't represent all of its phonemes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;defective script&lt;/a&gt;). For example, English spells both /θ/ and /ð/ as &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;. It would be correct to say that English has a defective orthography, but not that &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a defective spelling for not distinguishing the two dental fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, words that aren't spelled phonetically aren't usually called &quot;defective.&quot; For example, the English word &lt;em&gt;busy&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced /ˈbɪzi/ (as opposed to */bʊzi/), but it would be incorrect to call this non-phonetic spelling &quot;defective.&quot; /ˈbɪzi/ is also not a case of a defective orthography, because English is capable of writing &lt;em&gt;bisy&lt;/em&gt;, but spells it differently for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/busy#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymological reasons&lt;/a&gt;, so it could be called an etymological spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T16:23:31.550" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:23:31.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28458" CreationDate="2018-07-20T16:02:53.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although this is a &quot;usage&quot; question, it's about a potential technical distinction. There is no technical distinction between &quot;a sound&quot; and &quot;a segment&quot;, and the thing is most often referred to in the phonological literature as a segment. On the other hand, outside of linguistics, the concept of &quot;segment&quot; is alien, instead people talk about &quot;sounds&quot;. This means that there is some tendency for non-technical writing by linguists to use &quot;sound&quot; rather than &quot;segment&quot;, to cut down on the amount of arcana that has to be introduced to the general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Segment&quot; has a somewhat technical connotation, just as &quot;atom&quot; is a technical term in physics, in that an atom is not onlyelectrons, protons and neutrons, it also involves relations between these primitive units. In older SPE phonology, a segment was the totality of features delimited by the first feature &quot;segment&quot;, and in autosegmental accounts, it more or less corresponds to &quot;everything dominated by a single Root node&quot;, but in fact the existence of the segment as a special representational unit was not universally accepted (see for example &lt;em&gt;Grounded phonology&lt;/em&gt;, and similar decompositional efforts by Steriade and Selkirk). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;sound&quot; is more widely used by phoneticians, probably because &quot;segment&quot; has certain ontological implications that phoneticians may not want to commit to. However, when phoneticians approach the problem of cutting up continuous speech into discrete units, they talk of segmenting an utterance and the results will be segments (though their choices are often different from those made by phonologists, who are not traditionally concerned with segment-internal structure, such as closure versus release).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T16:02:53.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28466" CreationDate="2018-07-20T16:19:22.903" Score="7" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;How often are the etymologies in dictionaries incorect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes when reading a dictionary I see a derivation of a word which contradicts my intuition. For example I read that &quot;ball&quot; comes from Proto-Indo-European *bʰel- &quot;to inflate&quot;, cognate with Ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%BB%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;φαλλός • (phallós)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;penis&quot; when I had thought it would rather be related to Ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B2%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%BB%CF%89&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;βᾰ́λλω • (bállō)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;I throw&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or that &quot;zero&quot; comes from Arabic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%B1#Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;صِفْر • (ṣifr)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;zero&quot;, believable enough, which supposedly comes from Sanskrit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF#Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;शून्य • (śūnya)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;zero&quot;, which supposedly comes from &quot;Proto-Indo-European *ḱówH-, related to Latin cavus ('hollow')&quot;. In this case the meanings are all clearly related, but I don't understand the phonological relationship between &quot;ṣifr&quot; and &quot;śūnya&quot; and &quot;*ḱówH-&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for me is that when I get confused about things like this, I don't know where to look for more information; there are no citations. Presumably the primary sources are scattered across many documents. But who compiled them, and was the compilation ever questioned or debated? Where should I go for more certainty? And how much error, in general, should I expect to exist in dictionary accounts of word etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T17:04:09.577" Title="How often are dictionary etymologies wrong?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28464" CreationDate="2018-07-20T17:03:47.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't really determine whether an etymology in a dictionary is &quot;correct&quot; or not since we don't know the ground truth to compare. But the editors of etymological dictionaries have taken a great job in preparing them. You can tell good etymological dictionaries by two features&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Admitting sometimes that the etymology of a certain word is unclear or completely unknown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presenting different theories of the etymology on some words with some evaluation by the dictionary author (e.g, telling which one is preferable or which one is considered outdated or probably wrong).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your first example is indeed rock-solid, there are lots of correspondences between Greek φ and Germanic b, leading to the reconstruction of *bʰ. The Greek word for &quot;to throw&quot; is just a chance coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your second example, the Arabic word is &lt;em&gt;calqued&lt;/em&gt; from Sanskrit, i.e., it is a &lt;em&gt;loan translation&lt;/em&gt;, extending the meaning of a root formerly only meaning &quot;void&quot;. In a calque, there is no phonetic similarity preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T17:03:47.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28464" CreationDate="2018-07-20T17:04:09.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to describe the situation in Modern Greek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Modern Greek, you will get good etymologies in the the contemporary dictionaries, Babiniotis' and Triantafyllidis', both of which date from the 90s. The current etymologist of the former, Moysiadis, has written a textbook on etymology; the original etymologist of the latter, Petrounias, has written extensively on the subject as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they have not done is give citations. If you want citations, you go back to Andriotis' etymological dictionary done in the 1950s, which does give citations, and where you'll realise that there was controversy around a lot of the proposals; Andriotis gives proposals that have been rejected, as well as those that have prevailed. If you go to Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek (started in 1968, now up to sigma), you'll see more up-to-date etymologies for words that attested before 1669, again with details of proposals and counterproposals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the etymology is not in Kriaras or Andriotis, well, you're out of luck. Etymological work is being published to this day in Greece, usually in squibs in journals like &lt;em&gt;Hellenika&lt;/em&gt;; and if you're not someone like Moysiadis, you're not going to be able to keep up to date with it readily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymological proposals cited in Andriotis and Kriaras are scattered all over the place. Much of the proposals cited in Andriotis' earlier dictionary is the work of only a handful of scholars working between 1880 and 1910 (Hatzidakis, Filindas, Meyer-Lübke), and they argued with each other quite acrimoniously. Luckily, those scholars' collected works have been compiled into single sets of volumes. So you can usually track Andriotis' sources down, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Modern Greek etymology is a much smaller field than the etymology of English, let alone Indo-European; but you can already see that you have to hop between three or four generations of opinion, that the literature is scattered, and that the contemporary dictionaries are at best tertiary sources when it comes to etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... So where do you look for more information about English etymologies? The OED tends to have detailed discussion, but it does not cite sources; you want specialist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymological dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; for that (which have &lt;em&gt;Etymological&lt;/em&gt; in their title); Skeat and Onions for English, for example. You're asking about Indo-European; you'll want to look at the etymological dictionaries of Proto-Indo-European, and of the language families within Indo-European. It's not for the faint hearted, but it is feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T17:04:09.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28461" CreationDate="2018-07-20T18:08:46.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with Spanish, but to be honest, I don't think WALS can cover the core grammatical structure of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language. WALS only looks at grammatical phenomena that are of interest in cross-linguistic studies. There are many features of language that are largely historical accidents and aren't really interesting in a cross-linguistic perspective (e.g. preposition stranding in English), and therefore would not be coded for in WALS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I've read about Spanish (admittedly not a lot), the Spanish subjunctive, for example, doesn't seem to be covered despite its importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you'd like to know about the grammar of Spanish, an actual grammar like those cited in WALS would be much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:08:46.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23042" CreationDate="2018-07-21T04:06:16.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Alex Clough: this symbol (ฯ) is a Thai symbol that demonstrates that the word(s) before it has been abbreviated; for whatever reason, the lexicologists/orthographers working with the text recognition software and the decision of what characters to include in the creation of the keyboard for their product decided that this character was recognizable enough and used by enough people to warrant inclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first website explains it very concisely, the second one isn't quite as clear but gives several examples of how it isn't necessarily restricted to just the previous word, but also the phrase (to some degree, I can't be entirely sure, I don't speak Thai).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1264953.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1264953.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1458563.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1458563.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this was helpful!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22373" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T04:06:16.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27729" CreationDate="2018-07-21T12:49:35.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Converting comment &gt; answer for posterity&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bespoke system of phoneme symbols for North American English developed by Apple for use with the MacinTalk synthesizer. A mapping of symbols to example letters in words can be found here (table B1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/Phonemes/Phonemes.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004365-CH9-SW1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/Phonemes/Phonemes.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004365-CH9-SW1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this you can extrapolate the IPA phonemes (though it has two additional symbols, &lt;code&gt;%&lt;/code&gt; (silence) and &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt;(breath intake)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T12:49:35.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17049" CreationDate="2018-07-22T05:56:14.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt; expounds this, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dMlku.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dMlku.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T05:56:14.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28475" CreationDate="2018-07-22T14:18:21.390" Score="2" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the following phrase in a description of German pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The basic rule is that voiceless obstruents are always voiceless, but voiced obstruents are not always voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...which makes absolutely no sense to me.  (In general, &quot;&lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is not always &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, is equivalent to &quot;sometimes, &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but &quot;&lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is always nonsense.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could the excerpt possibly mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3363" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:51:21.507" Title="Trying to make sense of &quot;...but voiced obstruents are not always voiced&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T14:47:52.553" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that most words that children say contain /b/ or /m/ is that just a coincidence or there is a reason behind that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22380" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:18:32.947" Title="Why do the most common words children say contain bilabial consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28473" CreationDate="2018-07-22T15:25:13.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic rule is that players from Shirtless Team are always shirtless, but players from Shirt Team don't always wear shirts.  Sometimes, at the end of the day, it gets too hot and they take off their shirts.  They are still players from Shirt Team, but &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt; they’re shirtless, and look just like players of the other team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, if you see a player wearing a shirt, you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; they’re from Shirt Team; but if you see a shirtless player, you can’t be sure.  They may be from either team.  You have to rely on some other information (e.g. which side of the field are they playing on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: The word &lt;em&gt;Tage&lt;/em&gt;, “days“, is made from the phonemes /ˈtɑːɡə/.  The third one is a voiced obstruent, /ɡ/.  You’ve seen that voiced obstruents can be (=sometimes are) voiceless; in German this happens, for example, in word-final position.  So take away the plural &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;, making &lt;em&gt;Tag&lt;/em&gt; “day”, and now it’s pronounced [tɑːk].  Left alone at the end of the word, the /ɡ/ “takes off its shirt”, so to speak.  But it’s still a Team Voiced player.  How can you tell? Well just add a vowel and you’ll see its voiced form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the word &lt;em&gt;Volk&lt;/em&gt; /fɔlk/ “folk; people”.  Its plural form is &lt;em&gt;Völker&lt;/em&gt;, /ˈfœlkɐ/.  Between /fɔlk/ and /ˈfœlkɐ/, the /k/ never changes shape.  That’s why it makes sense to say that Voiced consonants can be voiceless (sometimes), but Voiceless consonants are never voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(What I am trying to convey with capital letters and with the &quot;team&quot; metaphor is the difference between phonemes and phonetic realization, as pointed by Jeremy Needle above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T15:25:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28474" CreationDate="2018-07-22T19:18:32.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a well-known similarity across languages that words for &quot;mother&quot; tend to be similar to &quot;mama&quot; and words for father tend to be similar to &quot;baba&quot; (or &quot;dada&quot;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/25763/6726&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; starts with child physiological development (refining motor control of articulators), and these exercises are interpreted by adults as speaking words, whereupon adults decide that mother is &quot;mama&quot; and father is &quot;baba&quot;. However, this explanation has extremely limited scope, and there is no general tendency for children to favor words containing labial consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:18:32.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28473" CreationDate="2018-07-22T19:51:21.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quote is from C. Hall &lt;em&gt;Modern German Pronunciation: An Introduction for Speakers of English&lt;/em&gt;, p. 27. He is referring to the well-known fact that German &lt;em&gt;b d g&lt;/em&gt; are not fully voiced (not voiced at all) except between phonetically voiced segments. He gives examples like &quot;habe&quot;, with a graphic indicating that &quot;b&quot; is voiced, and compares that to &quot;Bad&quot; where the initial segment is half-voiced (voiced on the half before the vowel) – this he writes as &quot;b̥&quot;. He says &quot;When using the term 'voiced', then, we musty be aware that these sounds are often not fully voiced&quot;. Also note that he transcribed &quot;Bad&quot; as [b̥atʰ], where traditional &quot;final devoicing&quot; is phonetically realized as aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two approaches to the German obstruents, one where &quot;bdg&quot; are voiced and &quot;ptk&quot; are voiceless, and the other where &quot;bdg&quot; are unaspirated and &quot;ptk&quot; are aspirated&quot; ([+spread glottis]). &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ac0c/fcbb3ff8aeaabd3155b467e94d423e55d774.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Jessen &amp;amp; Ringen summarizes the controversy, and provides evidence in support of the aspiration theory over the voicing theory. The argument is, essentially, that phonetic voicing when it exists can be attributed to passive voicing (semi-automatic acquisition of vocal fold vibrations when an unaspirated sound is surrounded by voiced segments, such as vowels), and otherwise &quot;bdg&quot; are phonetically not voiced. This same analysis has also been given to English, given that for many speakers, initial [bdg] are voiceless unaspirates, although they are still distinct from [ptk] as they occur after [s]. Hall's use of scare quotes around &quot;voiced&quot; indicates that he is aware of and does use the term &quot;voiced&quot; because it is traditional, but he does not actually believe that &quot;bdg&quot; are voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:51:21.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T21:17:31.243" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emic unit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, one may view the word 'meaning' to sort of mean a &quot;language sufficient to express all ideas.&quot; In this sense, a &quot;meaning&quot; may be defined in terms of such an abstract language. Thus, a &quot;function into the set of meanings&quot; really means a function into the set of valid expressions in this hypothetical language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer to a partial function because there may be certain sequences of ____ which are invalid. The domain of definition of this partial function may thus be considered to be the set of expressions which are &quot;grammatically correct.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question.... has to have an answer. The one characteristic common to all languages is that there exists a notion of sequence. Information has to be presented in a totally ordered fashion. Perhaps one day this will not be the case, but for now, we may assume this to be true. Thus, I don't believe this question has made any arbitrary choices. Being so fundamental, it must have an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what word goes in the blank? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T05:42:15.423" Title="For X to be considered a language, it must possess a partial function from sequences of _____ to meanings. What word goes in the blank?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-07-23T18:13:56.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28478" CreationDate="2018-07-23T05:42:15.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;double articulation&lt;/a&gt; is the fact that the answer to your question is both phonemes and morphemes, with morphemes being inherently meaningful units (so that the mapping to meaning is at least partly compositional), and phonemes being not inherently meaningful. The mapping of phonemes to meaning, of course, goes via morphemes, so it's not as interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Wikipedia article points out, sign languages can be argued to do less double articulation than oral languages, since there are more sign language phonemes and they map more closely to sign language morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequencing is indeed an important design criterion of language, although you might argue that the sequencing of phonemes into morphemes is more critical than the sequencing of morphemes into sentences (dependency vs constituency grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T05:42:15.423" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26652" CreationDate="2018-07-23T10:34:40.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may add to Wilson's very good answer; another reason may occur when a Deaf person has also been educated orally. One of my Auslan teachers was educated orally and only learned sign language in her mid-20's. She says this is why when she signs, she almost always mouthes the words too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22381" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T10:34:40.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28483" CreationDate="2018-07-23T13:23:02.643" Score="2" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand how representing chunks works by facing this question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The IOB format categorizes tagged tokens as I , O , and B . Why are three tags necessary? What problem would be caused if we used I and O tags exclusively?&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/IT%20Various/natural_language_processing_with_python.pdf#page=309&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ch7, Extracting Information from Text, &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural Language Understanding with Python&lt;/em&gt;,S. Bird, E. Klein, and E. Loper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In IOB scheme,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each token is tagged with one of three special chunk tags, I (inside), O (outside), or B (begin). A token is tagged as B if it marks the beginning of a chunk. Subsequent tokens within the chunk are tagged I . All other tokens are tagged O .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why would it be an issue to only have inside and outside tags, we would still have chunks which is the main purpose of this method, no ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22358" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T14:55:09.413" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T14:58:10.093" Title="Why are three tags necessary for the IOB format? What problem would be caused if we used I and O tags exclusively?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28482" CreationDate="2018-07-23T14:58:10.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lingpipe-blog.com/2009/10/14/coding-chunkers-as-taggers-io-bio-bmewo-and-bmewo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blogpost on LingPipe&lt;/a&gt; gives a fine overview over chunk encoding. It says explicitly over the IO encoding (that is IOB without B)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The simplest encoding is the IO encoding, which tags each token as either&#xA;being in (I_X) a particular type of named entity type X or in no entity&#xA;(O). This encoding is defective in that it can’t represent two entities&#xA;next to each other, because there’s no boundary tag.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T14:58:10.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-23T20:12:44.770" Score="4" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-most-letters-in-its-alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems&lt;/a&gt; there's no neurolinguistic limit on how many letters can a language's alphabet have (it varies a lot between languages), the IPA is a huge &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; alphabet, As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics and four prosodic marks in the IPA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22289" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T06:10:22.190" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T06:10:22.190" Title="Is it possible to read the narrow IPA transcription of one's native/fluent language as effortlessly and quickly as its conventional orthography?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28486" CreationDate="2018-07-24T04:24:49.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We simply do not know: this is an empirical question, and nobody has done the study. The problem with writing in IPA is that you have to understand what the various letters &quot;mean&quot;. It's easy for Saami speakers to learn that the letter č &quot;means&quot; (in IPA) the phoneme /tʃʰ/ and ž &quot;means&quot; the phoneme /tʃ/, and the don't need to worry about low-level details. In earlier practice, you had to attend to more phonetic details as opposed to the phonemic system, and it was harder to read. The problem with teaching IPA is that subjects do not have a solid reference framework: you can't get the average person to solidly learn what &quot;ɬ&quot; means, and many linguists don't really have a reference framework for &quot;ɤ,ɜ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal is to enable a person to at least recognize most variant transcriptions of words, you will need to train them on the myriad consonant and vowel qualities encountered in the language. For example, they would need to know that English [flæ] is spelled &quot;flour&quot; and [flaʊə] is spelled &quot;flower&quot; (depending on dialect), and they would need to know that [ɺeoba:d] and [lɛpɹ̩d] are the same same word in different dialects (when presented orally, American English speakers do not recognize the first pronunciation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A narrow transcription involves lots of &quot;adjustment&quot; letters, possibly indicating that the phoneme /e/ in some context is a bit higher and further forward in some context, so you'd have to train the subject on the distinction between [ɪ] and [e̝̟] which if you can't see it involves the advanced and raised diacritics. The most efficient way to do this is to tell people to ignore all of the flyspeck, and teach them some simple rules like &quot;ɾ is t or d, you just have to guess&quot;, &quot;ɺ is either r or l&quot;, &quot;turn [ħ] into [h], [ɓ] into [b]...&quot;. The problem is that you could not get willing but &quot;statistically valid&quot; experimental subjects to put up with this. You could perhaps perform the experiment on a set of graduate students in phonetics, which would tell you about graduate students in phonetics, but not people in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T04:24:49.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28486" CreationDate="2018-07-24T09:40:43.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any studies of reading fluency (e.g., can people read fraktur better than antiqua?) boil down to the trivial: One reads best what one is used to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also known that we skip a lot of information encoded in the writing, e.g., we don't notice a lot of typos or printing errors because the redundancy in the written language is that large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given a standardised phonetic transcription and enough reading practice, I see no reason why one shouldn't be as fluent as in orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T09:40:43.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27738" CreationDate="2018-07-24T13:38:40.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found that the term &lt;em&gt;reverse affricate&lt;/em&gt; that I created &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; is actually used in the literature. Here is a citation: Daniel Silverman, On the rarity of pre-aspirated stops, J. Linguistics &lt;strong&gt;39&lt;/strong&gt; (2003), 575–598. DOI: 10.1017/S002222670300210&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper also mentions the term &quot;reverse of a fricative&quot; used by Michelson 1910 (Michelson calls an affricate fricative, and what we now call fricative is a spirant in his terminology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T13:38:40.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2124" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:47:49.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question hasn't been updated in a while. Google also released a 1 Billion Word Benchmark Corpus: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/lm_1b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/lm_1b&lt;/a&gt;. It has a vocabulary size of about 800k, as reported on the repo. The corpus was collected from English language newswire services from all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've processed the unigram frequency of the corpus, available on github here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/langcomp/lm_1b/blob/master/evaluation_code/lm1b-1gram.tsv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/langcomp/lm_1b/blob/master/evaluation_code/lm1b-1gram.tsv&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure why Google says a vocab of 800k, because my unigram frequency has about 2.4 million tokens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T19:47:49.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28493" CreationDate="2018-07-25T07:45:49.037" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an academic writing in English, but as a non-native speaker, I feel lacking of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a word has its origin in the Chinese language, we use the term 'Sino-' such as Sino-Korean or Sino-Japanese. And I wonder if there is such a thing for English-originated? I'd like to refer to some loanwords from English but in accordance with the 'Sino-'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17400" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T16:12:56.947" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T16:12:56.947" Title="Is there any specific term for &quot;English-originated?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T08:03:11.803" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Works which focus on differences in place of articulation of stops (like Sundara 2005, 2006) usually use spectral measurements (COG, skewness, SD, kurtosis) and relative burst intensity. It is not clear, however, in which interval do the compute these measurements: many of them divide the burst from the VOT (like Sundara 2005, 2006), whereas others do not declare this. So, it happens that in some works scholars talk about 'relative burst intensity', but it seems that their measurement is somehow taken at the middle of the VOT. I think that this could derive from Harrington's (1999) definition, in which he says that &quot;the duration of the burst is also known as voice onset time, which is the principal acoustic parameter for  distinguishing be tween voiced stops and their voiceless counterparts in syllable-initial position in  English&quot;. &#xA;Now, if I compute my measurements taking ALL the VOT interval, is it not too much / too late for investigating stops place of articulation? Is it possible that, in declaring this, they intend to move the cursor just after the boundary and assuming that they are computing burst measurements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22395" LastEditorUserId="22395" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T08:28:11.367" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T08:28:11.367" Title="How to analyse stops place of articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;stops&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28491" CreationDate="2018-07-25T15:15:47.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An Anglicism is a word or construction borrowed from English into another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, more prosaically (and more common), &lt;em&gt;English loan&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP asks for a counterpart to Sino-, which as @boiko points out, is Anglo-. But as a prefix in &lt;em&gt;Sino-Korean&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sino-Japanese&lt;/em&gt;, Sino- has a connotation of hybridisation, or at least deeply enmeshed bilingualism (&lt;em&gt;Sino-Korean&lt;/em&gt; = Chinese as spoken in Korea, Sinicised Korean). The counterpart to that with &lt;em&gt;Anglo-&lt;/em&gt; is, if anything, Anglo-Norman: Norman French as spoken in England (and itself a source of loans into English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anglo-Korean&lt;/em&gt; would not work: it implies routine codeswitching and bilingualism. The connotation is much too strong for the present-day loans from English into Korean, which does not involve the same level of influence as &lt;em&gt;Sino-Korean&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T15:15:47.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1354" CreationDate="2018-07-25T16:08:08.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of Swedes represent this phoneme as [x], but there are a variety of other phonetic renderings as well.  In addition, there are something like 40 ways to spell it, especially in foreign words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2668" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T16:08:08.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28495" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28496" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" Score="0" Body="For questions about the relation between geographical features like altitude or humidity and linguistic features." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T17:06:29.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T17:43:05.730" Score="1" ViewCount="629" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read many descriptions of the lenis/fortis distinction, but they don't make any sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched in vain for minimal pairs (preferably with audio/vidoe) illustrating the difference between an unvoiced consonant and the &quot;unvoiced&quot; version of its &quot;voiced counterpart&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of such material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; The book I'm working with says (my italics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even when they are fully devoiced, there is a difference between voiced obstruents and their voiceless counterparts, i.e. [b̥,] is not the same as [p], [z̥,] is not the same as [s], etc.  The reason for this is that &lt;em&gt;in German (and English, but not in many other languages, e.g. French) voiceless obstruents are pronounced with greater force and muscular effort than voiced ones&lt;/em&gt;.  The voiceless obstruents are said to be &lt;strong&gt;fortis&lt;/strong&gt; or strong, and voiced obstruents correspondingly to be &lt;strong&gt;lenis&lt;/strong&gt; or weak.  Because of the frequent devoicing of German obstruents, in many situations &lt;em&gt;it is the distinction between fortis and lenis articulation which actually distinguishes pairs of consonants like&lt;/em&gt; [s] &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; [z̥,], [p] &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; [b̥,], &lt;em&gt;etc., and it seems that for obstruents this distinction is more important than that between voiced and voiceless.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book then goes on to provide a grand total of &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; examples of all of the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not yet managed to find a single illustration of the claims at the end of the paragraph above, whether recorded or in writing.  Such illustrations is what this question is after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3363" LastEditorUserId="3363" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T00:45:08.683" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T05:02:07.707" Title="Looking for minimal pairs showing lenis/fortis distinction (preferably for German pronunciation)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28511" CreationDate="2018-07-25T20:48:09.470" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1627794719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words on the Move&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.coma/books?id=vKqTCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA73&amp;amp;ots=2xIbBLOtDF&amp;amp;dq=%22it&amp;#39;s%20easy%20to%20see%20how%20one%20gets%20from%20yelling%20to%20crying%22&amp;amp;pg=PA73#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 101.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  So, one answer to the observation &quot;But wasn't it nice to &#xA;  have a way to express that concept?&quot; is: not really, and &#xA;  anyone who wants one anyway has it at the ready. One &#xA;  can say &quot;reduce by a tenth.&quot; Hopefully one will do so in &#xA;  comfort with the knowledge that &lt;em&gt;reduce&lt;/em&gt; once had a different &#xA;  meaning—while &lt;em&gt;comfort&lt;/em&gt; was once &quot;to make strong,&quot; and &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; once meant &quot;narrow&quot; [mine]&lt;/strong&gt;! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change#Typology_by_Blank_(1999)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auto-antonymy&lt;/a&gt;, correct? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please expound this auto-autonymy? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/strong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/view/Entry/191802?rskey=rL7qNp&amp;amp;result=2&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; don't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T05:47:19.417" Title="How did 'narrow' semantically shift to mean 'strong'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-26T10:34:44.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28519" CreationDate="2018-07-25T20:54:00.383" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1627794719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words on the Move&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.coma/books?id=vKqTCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA73&amp;amp;ots=2xIbBLOtDF&amp;amp;dq=%22it&amp;#39;s%20easy%20to%20see%20how%20one%20gets%20from%20yelling%20to%20crying%22&amp;amp;pg=PA73#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 105 Bottom.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have already seen that there is a theme of weakening signals in how &#xA;  words &#xA;  move through time. The firmly objective meaning becomes more elusively subjective: the command of &lt;em&gt;You must be up by seven o’clock&lt;/em&gt; becomes the &lt;strong&gt;internal surmise&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;That must be the woman I saw the other day&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the emboldened noun phrase signify? I emailed McWhorter several times, but haven't heard back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I don't have the book with me. If more context helps, please LMK, and I'll reborrow it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T11:37:01.293" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T14:45:45.270" Title="What does John McWhorter intend to say by 'internal surmise'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28497" CreationDate="2018-07-25T21:00:26.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &quot;fortis&quot; and &quot;lenis&quot; in linguistics date back at least to the 19th century, and the best you can do is translate the terms as &quot;strong&quot; versus &quot;weak&quot;. Consonants are never fortis, or lenis, in an absolute phonetic sense (whereas aspiration, nasalization and so on can be assessed absolutely), instead, this refers to a phonological opposition where one sound is phonetically &quot;stronger&quot; and the other is &quot;weaker&quot;. Ejectives are typically termed &quot;fortis&quot;, but &quot;fortis&quot; does not entail ejective&quot;. Aspirated voiceless consonants are fortis compared to unaspirated voiceless consonants, but unaspirated voiceless consonants are fortis compared to voiced consonants. The terms fortis and lenis are a useful way to deter to a two-way phonological distinction without committing to any phonetic claims. James Foley in his strength-based theory of phonology extensively exploits the concepts of stronger and weaker, devoid of specific phonetic commitments. So one reason why the difference between &quot;fortis&quot; and &quot;lenis&quot; may not make sense is that these are not actually concrete phonetic terms, but we are accustomed to understanding descriptions of sounds in terms of phonetic properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terminological conflict regarding the use of &quot;voiced&quot; in German, specifically, was explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/28477/6726&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The author is equivocating between popular use (where &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is voiced=stimmhaftig) and technical phonetic description (where they are unaspirated as opposed to &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; which is aspirated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the claim about &quot;pronounced with greater force and muscular effort&quot;, this cannot be meaningfully demonstrated with any audio or video, except perhaps via an unscientific cartoon. There is no meaningful way of quantifying comparative force or muscular effort behind consonant articulation, and it is not something that can be seen, visually. Nor can you hear a difference in force or effort. In principle you could look at x-ray or ultrasound video of the articulation of different phonemes in some context, but I don't think there are any such videos. The articulatory claim is not based on direct investigation, it is based on an old idea (embodied in the names) that fortis consonants are &quot;stronger&quot; which is widely interpreted as relating to &quot;effort&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T23:01:04.790" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T23:01:04.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28508" CreationDate="2018-07-25T21:04:43.050" Score="-1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1627794719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words on the Move&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 190 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;World began as &lt;em&gt;wer-eld&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;wer&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 191 Top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;was that &quot;man&quot; word and &lt;em&gt;eld&lt;/em&gt; meant &quot;old,&quot; as in age. &lt;em&gt;Wer-eld&lt;/em&gt; meant 'man's age,&quot; as in &quot;the age of man,&quot; as in &lt;strong&gt;man's time on earth [mine]&lt;/strong&gt;. Gradually, via implication, it came to mean the earth itself: hence, today's &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly did “man’s time on earth” shift to signify “earth itself”? This feels unnatural; humans are obviously mortal in the short run, but the earth feels (spuriously) immortal, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Germanic speakers&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't have known  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Theories_about_the_end_of_the_universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;20th-century theories on the fate of the universe&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why refer to something spuriously immortal (earth), by something mortal (man)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T16:04:54.957" Title="How did 'man's time on earth' semantically shift to mean the 'earth' itself?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28507" CreationDate="2018-07-25T21:16:31.167" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1592400167&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doing Our Own Thing&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;. pp. 16 Bottom - p. 17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  One of my favorites is that as late as the 1800s, many stewards of &#xA;  &quot;good English&quot; considered a sentence like &quot;A house is being built over &#xA;  there&quot; wrong, with &quot;A house is building over there&quot; being correct. &quot;The &#xA;  book is being printed&quot; was &quot;vulgar, &quot; &quot;The book is printing&quot; was &quot;right.&quot; &#xA;  The year after Gettysburg, one grammarian was groaning about this par- &#xA;  ticular &quot;inaccuracy&quot; that had &quot;crept into the language, and is now found &#xA;  everywhere.&quot; In 1883, &lt;em&gt;Harper's Weekly&lt;/em&gt; presented a &quot;joke&quot; in which this &quot;inaccuracy&quot; impeded communication across the generations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Gentleman&lt;/strong&gt;—Are there any houses &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; in your village? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Young Lady&lt;/strong&gt;—No Sir, there is a new house &lt;em&gt;being built&lt;/em&gt; for Mr. Smith, &#xA;    but it is the carpenters who are &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, har har!—there's wit for the ages. Or not—the joke is opaque to us &#xA;  and anyone now alive (imagine it as a quick blackout exchange between &#xA;  Artie Johnson and Goldie Hawn on &lt;em&gt;Laugh-In&lt;/em&gt; followed by them breaking &#xA;  into &quot;The Swim&quot; to that bouncy, saxy music!). This is because now &quot;The &#xA;  house is being built&quot; is ordinary and &quot;The house is building&quot; sounds like &#xA;  something from the same Martian who would regale us with &quot;I and Billy &#xA;  went to the store.&quot; Language changes whether we like it or not. What &#xA;  look like rules from on high within our lifespans are always, in grand &#xA;  view, rationalizations that we superimpose upon language for impres-sionistic reasons, just as we think of a tomato as a vegetable instead of a &#xA;  fruit. Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln probably sensed &quot;The house &#xA;  is being built&quot; as newfangled, but now we don't—life went on and, &#xA;  really, we have bigger things on our plates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R.L. Trask, Robert McColl Millar. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change&lt;/em&gt;? (2010 Rev. ed)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 8 Top. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  A good place to start is the &lt;em&gt;progressive passive&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;My house is being&#xA;  painted&lt;/em&gt;. This form seems wholly unremarkable, but in fact it is a recent&#xA;  introduction into English. Until only a few generations ago, this form did not&#xA;  exist and could not be used. A speaker had to say instead either &lt;em&gt;My house is&#xA;  painting&lt;/em&gt;, a form which now seems strange or worse, or &lt;em&gt;My house is painted&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  which exists for us but has an entirely different meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    In 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary &lt;em&gt;I went to see if any play was&#xA;  acted&lt;/em&gt;. The intended sense is &lt;em&gt;… was being acted&lt;/em&gt;, but this form was impossible&#xA;  for Pepys. About 1839, Charles Dickens wrote in his novel &lt;em&gt;Nicholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;[H]e found that the coach had sunk greatly on one side, though it was still&#xA;  dragged forward by the horses&lt;/em&gt;. The intended sense is &lt;em&gt;… still being dragged&#xA;  forward&lt;/em&gt;, but Dickens, who would have known the new usage, obviously could&#xA;  not bring himself to use it. Indeed, we know that many people of the time&#xA;  considered it ‘vulgar’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These books don't expound why the Passive Present Progressive was judged unbecoming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T04:02:00.463" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T04:02:00.463" Title="Why was the Passive Present Progressive judged vulgar compared to the Active Present Continuous?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-07-29T09:29:16.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28497" CreationDate="2018-07-25T23:46:19.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that in German, the &amp;quot;lenis-fortis&amp;quot; distinction is realized differently in different dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Standard German makes use of aspiration to distinguish syllable-initial /p t k/ from /b d g/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other accents of German do not have aspiration, but may have a contrast in duration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difference between &amp;quot;b̥&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;p&amp;quot; may be something like the difference between [p] vs. [pʰ] in a language like Icelandic or Chinese, or it may be something like the difference beween [p] and [pː].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Examples of word-initial German &amp;quot;b&amp;quot; from forvo: &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/bad/#de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forvo.com/word/bad/#de&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Examples of word-initial German &amp;quot;p&amp;quot; from forvo: &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/paar/#de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forvo.com/word/paar/#de&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between &amp;quot;z̥&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; may be something like the difference between [s] and [sː].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in some varieties of German that have two series of plosives contrasting in duration but not aspiration, such as Swiss German, the contrast is said to be inaudible in word-initial position when the preceding word ends in a  consonant, even though speakers do distinguish between singleton and geminate plosives in production in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there may also be a relationship between the lenis/fortis status of a consonant and the duration of a preceding vowel, in the same direction as in English (vowels tend to be shorter before &amp;quot;fortis&amp;quot; obstruents than before &amp;quot;lenis&amp;quot; ones), although it's not clear to me how important this cue is for German-speakers' perception of the &amp;quot;lenis-fortis&amp;quot; consonant contrast. In a paper about &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bodowinter.com/papers/winter_rottger_IN_grazer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incomplete neutralization&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in German, I read that the duration of the vowel in the final syllable of a German word may be different on average before an underlyingly voiceless/fortis and an underlyingly voiced/lenis stop, but in terms of perception, German speakers don't seem to be able to reliably distinguish these kinds of rimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Durational differences in the same direction are also supposed to exist for vowels before word-medial obstruents; I don't know if the difference in vowel duration is more consistent or more perceptually salient there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Minimal pairs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why you want to find minimal pairs specifically (standard German obviously has a contrast between &amp;quot;p t k&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;b d g&amp;quot; in some contexts, regardless of how it is realized phonetically, or how important it is for distinguishing words), but if you want them, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CheIAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA117&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (by Charles Russ, 1994) gives the examples &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Paar : bar; Tier : dir; Kasse : Gasse; finden : winden&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (p. 117).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T14:41:34.337" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28503" CreationDate="2018-07-26T01:15:46.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;McWhorter doesn't expound why the Passive Present Progressive was judged unbecoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is in the text: because it was a grammatical innovation. Grammatical innovations are routinely seen as unbecoming by the communities that the innovation did not originate in, because they are perceived as a repudiation of their formerly shared linguistic norms. Whether the innovation makes sense or not has nothing to do with it. (We now regard the old passive &quot;is building&quot; as illogical, because it has no overt passive morphology, unlike other passives in English; that's why the form originated in the first place. But it was still an innovation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T01:15:46.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28502" CreationDate="2018-07-26T01:49:02.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually think the more interesting meaning shift is from &quot;era&quot; to &quot;habitat&quot;. (This is of course a reprise of the perennial Lakoffian metaphor TIME IS SPACE.) Ancient Greek usage of &lt;em&gt;aeon&lt;/em&gt; seems to have undergone a similar shift, in philosophy (Plato: the eternal world of ideas); Christianity and Gnosticism (this age = the &quot;mortal&quot;, physical universe; the next age = &quot;heaven&quot;, the divine universe, by extension of Plato).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that cosmology appears to underlie &lt;em&gt;were-eld&lt;/em&gt; as well. In a Platonist, Christian, and for all I know Odinist world-view, the physical world is not immortal at all: immortality is the exclusive preserve of the Gods, who are outside of this world. The guys who came up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnarök&lt;/a&gt; had such a world-view, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T01:57:01.510" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T01:57:01.510" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28525" CreationDate="2018-07-26T03:45:34.303" Score="-1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/159240720X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Language Is&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xFQbHnvLonkC&amp;amp;pg=PA88&amp;amp;lpg=PA88&amp;amp;dq=%22there%E2%80%99s+no+use+even+trying+to+get+a+sense+of+a+single+meaning%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=o62LvmVhmB&amp;amp;sig=CQRQ042uum0E80-5kFWsXXF8ogg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjEpuX_6bvcAhVM04MKHTfnDT4Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 87-88&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ZTCh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9ZTCh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both McWhorter overhead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/for-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; avouch no single semantic notion that can underlie all of &lt;em&gt;for-&lt;/em&gt;'s meanings. But I'm not convinced that they looked hard enough? If a single semantic notion can underlie a conjunction as polyfunctional as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/83435p/cmv_no_semantic_notion_explains_and_underlies_the/dvf4zzd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;as&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, then can't there be one for &lt;em&gt;for-&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T04:42:11.847" Title="Is there truly no semantic notion that underlies the prefix 'for-'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28499" CreationDate="2018-07-26T05:47:19.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This is Auto-antonymy, correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because the antonym of &quot;strong&quot; is not &quot;narrow&quot;, it is &quot;weak&quot;, and the antonym of &quot;narrow&quot; is not &quot;strong&quot;, it is &quot;wide&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can someone please expound this auto-autonymy?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in, what kind of a semantic change explains &quot;narrow&quot; &gt; &quot;strong&quot;? &lt;strong&gt;Metonymy&lt;/strong&gt; (in Traugott's sense): a sense which is contextually associated with the main sense takes over as the new meaning. The contextual lens applied to &quot;narrow&quot; is &quot;constriction&quot;. If constriction results from deliberate activity (like say someone squeezing or pulling on an aperture to narrow it), then the constriction involves the exercise of strength: the stronger the agent doing the squeezing, the narrower the aperture. The deliberate activity of constriction by someone strong is then metaphorically extended to inanimate narrow apertures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strong&lt;/a&gt;, the transition happened in proto-Germanic: PIE &lt;em&gt;*strengʰ-&lt;/em&gt; (“pulled tight, straight, constricted”), &lt;em&gt;*strenk-&lt;/em&gt; (“taut, stiff, tight”) &gt; Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*strangaz&lt;/em&gt; (“tight, strict, straight, strong”) (so &lt;em&gt;*strangaz&lt;/em&gt; has been reconstructed as having both meanings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T05:47:19.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28516" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sprachbund&lt;/a&gt; (German: [ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt], &quot;federation of languages&quot;) – also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have common features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;em&gt;sprachbünde&lt;/em&gt; have their own tags:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/standard-average-european&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;standard-average-european&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;standard-average-european&lt;/a&gt;, a sprachbund covering Germanic, Romance, and Slavonic languages as well as Hungarian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/indian-languages&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;indian-languages&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;indian-languages&lt;/a&gt;, a sprachbund covering the Indo-Arian and Dravidian languages on the Indian subcontinent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Balkan sparchbund comprising Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Makedonian and their neighbouring languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;South-East Asia comprising Sinitic, Thai-Kadai, Miao–Yao, and Mon-Khmer languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28517" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" Score="0" Body="For questions about the convergence of formerly unrelated languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T12:16:51.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22760" CreationDate="2018-07-26T12:29:49.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Yellow Sky says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/22760/is-hand-etymologically-related-to-five-in-many-world-languages#comment50146_22760&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, many Austronesian languages use the same word or close cognates (all ultimately from Proto-Austronesian, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Austronesian/lima&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*&lt;em&gt;lima&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;Language&lt;/code&gt; hand, five&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Cia-Cia&lt;/code&gt; lima (을리마), lima (을리마)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hawaiian&lt;/code&gt; lima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hiligaynon&lt;/code&gt; lima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Paiwan&lt;/code&gt; lima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tolai&lt;/code&gt; lima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Rapa Nui&lt;/code&gt; rima, rima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Tongan&lt;/code&gt; nima, nima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ilocano&lt;/code&gt; ima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Itawit&lt;/code&gt; ima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Limos Kalinga&lt;/code&gt; ima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Lubuagan Kalinga&lt;/code&gt; ima, lima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T20:41:50.677" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T20:41:50.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28500" CreationDate="2018-07-26T14:45:45.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter is talking about the semantic shift of modals like &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its strong sense, &quot;must&quot; signifies obligation: &quot;You must be up by 7&quot; means &quot;You are required to be up by 7.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its weak sense, &quot;must&quot; signifies the conclusion of some reasoning. &quot;That must be her&quot; means &quot;The evidence leads me to conclude that that is her.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the &quot;command&quot; becoming a &quot;surmise&quot;, i.e. a reflection or speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also ambiguous cases, like &quot;The technology must be highly accessible.&quot; Is this a design specification being stated, or is it a conclusion based on seeing some feature it has?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this particular classification of &quot;strong&quot; and &quot;weak&quot; is coherent is not clear to me, but whether the chronology he proposes is true can likely be verified using the OED, which lists senses chronologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T14:45:45.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28497" CreationDate="2018-07-26T18:45:42.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is about High German (no dialects). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard pronunciation prescribes a clear contrast voiced/voiceless in initial and medial position, neutralisation only occurs at the word final position. It is hard to come up with kind of minimal pairs here, my pick is &lt;em&gt;Wald&lt;/em&gt; [vald̥] &quot;forest&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;walt&lt;/em&gt; [valt] (imperative of &lt;em&gt;walten&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to rule&quot;). My guess is that German may make a distinction here in extremely careful speech, but not in general. At least, &lt;em&gt;Wald&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kalt&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cold&quot; are accepted rhyming words despite the lenis/fortis thing involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is example &lt;em&gt;Waldzwerg&lt;/em&gt; [vald̥·tsvɛrg̥] &quot;forest dwarf&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;Walzwerk&lt;/em&gt; [valts·vɛrk] &quot;steel mill, rolling mill&quot;, this one is mentioned in handbooks of careful pronunciation for singers, but the main contrast is not fortis/lenis but the juncture in the middle of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Additional information (using the 19th printing of Siebs)&#xA;In &lt;em&gt;reine Hochlautung&lt;/em&gt; (the purest form of High German) there are no lenis consonants. The contrast is always voiced &amp;amp; not aspirated vs. voiceless &amp;amp; aspirated. Final stops are completely voiceless. In &lt;em&gt;gemäßigte Hochlautung&lt;/em&gt; (relaxed High German) the lenis consonants are allowed in final position and in initial position for speakers with a Southern German accent [b̥] and [g̥] are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: Unlike the creators of the Standard German orthography, the creators of Deutsche Bühnenaussprache were linguistically informed by the standards of their time (late 19th century). At this time there wasn't anything close to a supra-regional standard. Gemäßigte Hochlautung is an attempt to come closer to a Gebrauchsstandard by the current maintiners of Siebs. But it is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: The Gebrauchsstandard is only there because of Siebs' prescriptionism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T14:07:10.130" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T14:07:10.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-26T20:38:09.090" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;So [n] becomes similar to [ŋ], as in &quot;on&quot; and &quot;-ion&quot;. What is the phonetic phenomenon and in what languages becomes /ŋ/ separated diachronically from /n/ affected by the vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T12:01:25.983" Title="Why is [n] easy to be velarized efter a back rounded vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28527" CreationDate="2018-07-27T05:27:25.163" Score="-1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;. pp. 226-227.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to replicate the format on the para. on p. 227 on Old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IH0hW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IH0hW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't spot the red underline overhead before, but I now agree with McWhorter that it feels illogical to say &quot;what one didn't see was anything&quot;, to express nothing as anything or something, or &quot;that one saw nothing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why have this illogical weirdness persisted? Why have humans acclimated to this illogical syntax, rather than a more logical alternative? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:00:16.640" Title="'What one didn't see was anything' is weird. So why has it persisted?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28526" CreationDate="2018-07-27T05:36:58.867" Score="2" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Left to its own devices, Standard English would most likely&#xA;  allow double negation as an emphatic strategy, along the lines that&#xA;  Falstaff used it. “ This year’s fashions” shunted the dialect away&#xA;  from its natural evolution. Non-Standard English speakers everywhere embrace it— Cockneys, Appalachians, colloquial Singapore&#xA;  English (“ Singlish” ) speakers, black Americans, Brits from the Midlands— but as Standard English gradually makes inroads on nonstandard dialects in English and the United States, diluting their&#xA;  most prominent “ nonstandard” features, single negation of the &lt;em&gt;I&#xA;  don’t see anything&lt;/em&gt; variety takes on an increasingly large role in the&#xA;  speech of nonstandard speakers as well. Thus single negation, originally a mere optional ripple in the grammar of some English&#xA;  dialects, spreads throughout the English-speaking population like&#xA;  Sargasso weed, while the French, apparently following the old dictum that “ Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” can declare&#xA;  that &lt;em&gt;Ce qui &lt;b&gt;n’&lt;/b&gt;est &lt;strong&gt;pas&lt;/strong&gt; clair &lt;b&gt;n’&lt;/b&gt;est &lt;strong&gt;pas&lt;/strong&gt; français&lt;/em&gt; (“ What isn’t clear isn’t&#xA;  French” ) by actually &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; an “illogical” double negative twice and&#xA;  can moreover even wallow happily in &lt;em&gt;triple&lt;/em&gt; negatives (&lt;em&gt;Je &lt;b&gt;n’&lt;/b&gt;ai&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;jamais&lt;/strong&gt; vu &lt;strong&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; “I have never seen anyone” ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 228–229)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted as &quot;ever&quot; and &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;person&quot;? If so, then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;J'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;. = I have ever seen a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then McWhorter's sentence overhead would have only 1 negator, &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;, whose scope of negation is &lt;em&gt;'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T07:38:30.110" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:59:46.217" Title="Does &quot;Je n’ai jamais vu personne&quot; truly have triple negatives? Isn't 'ne' the only negative?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28510" CreationDate="2018-07-27T07:30:43.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My thanks to @ukemi for pointing out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for-#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for-#English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is metaphor and hyperbole at work here diachronically, and I'd argue we can't meaningfully posit a single unifying synchronic meaning. Moreover, the three meanings listed in Wiktionary are not synchronically productive; even less motivation to seek a single unifying synchronic meaning now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Middle English &lt;em&gt;for-, vor-&lt;/em&gt;, from Old English &lt;em&gt;for-, fer-, fær-, fyr-&lt;/em&gt; (“far, away, completely”, prefix), from the merger of Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*fra-&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;away, away from&amp;quot;; see fro, from) and Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;*fur-, *far-&lt;/em&gt; (“through, completely, fully”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(no longer productive) Meaning &amp;quot;far&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;away&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;from&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;out&amp;quot; e.g. &lt;em&gt;forbid, forget, forsay; forbear, fordeem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(no longer productive) Meaning &amp;quot;completely&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;to the fullest extent&amp;quot; e.g. forbreak; superseded by combinations with &amp;quot;up&amp;quot; in senses where no upward movement is involved, e.g. forgive = give up (one's offenses), forgather = &amp;quot;gather up&amp;quot;, forbeat = &amp;quot;beat up&amp;quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(dialectal) Very; excessively. forolded (“very old”), fornigh (“very near”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two meanings, &amp;quot;far&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;completely&amp;quot;, are not even etymologically identified, but a merger of distinct but similar looking words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a metaphor that can be invoked to explain &amp;quot;far&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;quot;completely&amp;quot;; in fact, Latin &lt;em&gt;per-&lt;/em&gt; has both meanings, and I'm not seeing a claim that they are etymologically distinct. (For all I know, &lt;em&gt;*fra-&lt;/em&gt;  and &lt;em&gt;*fur-, *far-&lt;/em&gt; are also cognate). That metaphor is COMPLETION IS A JOURNEY (which is yet another variant of the localist standby, TIME IS SPACE). The further you have gone on a journey, the closer to complete your journey is. A Modern English counterpart to that metaphor is &lt;em&gt;all the way&lt;/em&gt;: literally it refers to a completed journey, metaphorically it refers to any completed task (&lt;em&gt;I read the book all the way through&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's a metaphor that's added to the meaning of &amp;quot;far&amp;quot;: farness has the primary meaning of a long distance, and the notion of a journey being complete is external to it (unlike &lt;em&gt;all the way&lt;/em&gt;, which indicates completeness both literally and figuratively). For that reason, you could not argue a synchronic meaning in common to &lt;em&gt;for-&lt;/em&gt; = &amp;quot;far&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;for-&lt;/em&gt; = &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot; at any stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;very&amp;quot; meaning relates to &amp;quot;completely&amp;quot; as hyperbole, comparable to the modern meaning of &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;I am &lt;em&gt;fornigh&lt;/em&gt; = completely near&amp;quot; is literally impossible, and a hyperbole for &amp;quot;I am very near&amp;quot;, just as &amp;quot;I am literally right there&amp;quot; when you're not there yet. Again, a hyperbolic use of a term cannot be conflated in truth-conditional semantics with the literal sense of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T04:42:11.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28524" CreationDate="2018-07-27T07:32:23.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;one negator&quot; interpretation would be a &quot;historical&quot; way of looking at it. There are a couple of problems with using that analysis for present-day French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;J'ai jamais vu personne&quot; does not actually mean &quot;I have ever seen a person&quot;. It would be understood as meaning &quot;I have never seen anyone&quot;, because &quot;ne&quot; is optional in non-formal spoken French.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Jamais&quot; and &quot;personne&quot; can be used with a negative meaning without &quot;ne&quot; even in non-informal registers of standard French. For example, &quot;jamais&quot; can be used as a single-word response (like English &quot;never&quot;). This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/jamais-ever-or-never-in-french-1368060&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article by Camille Chevalier-Karfis&lt;/a&gt; gives another example, &quot;&lt;em&gt;C'est maintenant ou jamais.&lt;/em&gt; It's now or never.&quot; Even though &quot;jamais&quot; can sometimes be translated as English &quot;ever&quot; rather than as English &quot;never&quot;, it clearly can have a negative meaning when &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; is not present.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it's a somewhat arguable point since words like &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rien&lt;/em&gt; certainly have notable non-negative uses in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T05:30:21.930" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T05:30:21.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28523" CreationDate="2018-07-27T08:00:16.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think McWhorter is exaggerating his point a bit to try to make English speakers who are used to prescription against &quot;double negatives&quot; rethink their possible prejudices. As far as I know, the use of a word like &quot;anything&quot; in a negative clause is not actually that unusual, and I don't think it makes any more sense to think of it as &quot;illogical&quot; than it does to think of negative concord as illogical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/18532901/On_the_typology_of_negative_concord&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the typology of negative concord&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Johan van der Auwera &amp;amp; Lauren Van Alsenoy, negation constructions like &quot;I saw nothing&quot; (with a special negative word, like the negative pronoun &quot;nothing&quot;, but not the usual clause negator) are actually more unusual than negative constructions like &quot;I didn't see anything&quot; (with the usual clause negator--the negative word &quot;don't&quot;--and a negative polarity indefinite word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A wide variety of languages apparently make use of &quot;negative polarity&quot; indefinite words or neutral indefinite words in negative contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T08:00:16.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28522" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:14:41.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some dialects of German (notably Ripuarian (Kölsch) and Moselfränkisch) show this phenomenon. Here words like &lt;em&gt;Balkon&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced /balkoŋ/ and also &lt;em&gt;schön&lt;/em&gt; becomes /ʃɛŋ/. I don't know what diachronic process is underlying this development, but I suspect an influence from French: A French nasal vowel is replaced with vowel+ŋ in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's a map on &lt;em&gt;Balkon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Karton&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;http://atlas-alltagssprache.de/r10-f9ab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlas Alltagssprache&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T11:40:55.500" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T11:40:55.500" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T12:34:28.713" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing text processing with Google Cloud Language and sometimes the returned lemmas don't match my expectations.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lemma of &quot;determining&quot; is &quot;determine&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lemma of the adjective &quot;determined&quot; is &quot;determined&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd expect them both to have the same lemma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the full results returned by Google for the two words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  {&#xA;   &quot;text&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;content&quot;: &quot;determining&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;beginOffset&quot;: -1&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;partOfSpeech&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;tag&quot;: &quot;VERB&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;aspect&quot;: &quot;ASPECT_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;case&quot;: &quot;CASE_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;form&quot;: &quot;FORM_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;gender&quot;: &quot;GENDER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;mood&quot;: &quot;MOOD_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;number&quot;: &quot;NUMBER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;person&quot;: &quot;PERSON_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;proper&quot;: &quot;PROPER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;reciprocity&quot;: &quot;RECIPROCITY_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;tense&quot;: &quot;TENSE_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;voice&quot;: &quot;VOICE_UNKNOWN&quot;&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;dependencyEdge&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;headTokenIndex&quot;: 0,&#xA;    &quot;label&quot;: &quot;ROOT&quot;&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;lemma&quot;: &quot;determine&quot;&#xA;  }&#xA;&#xA;  {&#xA;   &quot;text&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;content&quot;: &quot;determined&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;beginOffset&quot;: -1&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;partOfSpeech&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;tag&quot;: &quot;ADJ&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;aspect&quot;: &quot;ASPECT_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;case&quot;: &quot;CASE_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;form&quot;: &quot;FORM_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;gender&quot;: &quot;GENDER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;mood&quot;: &quot;MOOD_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;number&quot;: &quot;NUMBER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;person&quot;: &quot;PERSON_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;proper&quot;: &quot;PROPER_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;reciprocity&quot;: &quot;RECIPROCITY_UNKNOWN&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;tense&quot;: &quot;PAST&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;voice&quot;: &quot;VOICE_UNKNOWN&quot;&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;dependencyEdge&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;headTokenIndex&quot;: 0,&#xA;    &quot;label&quot;: &quot;ACOMP&quot;&#xA;   },&#xA;   &quot;lemma&quot;: &quot;determined&quot;&#xA;  }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20456" LastEditorUserId="20456" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T14:20:47.363" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:31:31.510" Title="Why do &quot;determining&quot; and &quot;determined&quot; have different lemmas?" Tags="&lt;lemmas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32015" CreationDate="2018-07-27T14:34:45.663" Score="21" ViewCount="1977" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Turkish people speak to children, they often address them with the kinship term that the child is supposed to use for the speaker. For example a mother may call her child &quot;anneciğim&quot; (&quot;my dear mother&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been told that something similar exists in Arabic, Italian, Greek, and Russian, at least for the word &quot;mother&quot; (in Turkish it works with many kinship terms). But, to my knowledge, it doesn't exist in English or French for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this phenomenon? How common is it? Is it confined to a geographical region? In short, how can I find more information about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T16:59:10.987" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T12:51:20.580" Title="Reversal of kinship terms when speaking to a child" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T18:38:58.047" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have encountered a lot, some Romanian infinitives ending in -a (-a ending group) stick to the &amp;quot;-ez&amp;quot; suffix for indicative present tense conjugation. I know basically and normally we should eliminate last vowel of the verb stem and conjugate using each person's normal suffixes in order to conjugate; but what about those additional suffixes such as &amp;quot;-ez&amp;quot; for -a ending verbs? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dirija (to direct) : 1-dirijez 2-dirijezi 3-dirijeză 4-dirijăm 5-dirijați 6-dirijeză&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;salva (to save, preserve, rescue) : 1-salvez 2-salvezi 3-salvează 4-salvăm 5-salvați 6-salvează&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for some others there would be only the verb stem without -ez suffix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;regreta (to regret): 1-regret 2-regreți 3-regretă 4-regretăm 5-regretați 6-regretă&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;săruta (to kiss smb.'s cheek): 1- sărut 2-săruți 3-sărută 4-sărutăm 5-sărutați 6-sărută&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does someone know when to add &amp;quot;-ez&amp;quot; suffix and when to not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10866" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T18:38:58.047" Title="The background reason of the way of conjugation of Romanian verbs (indicative present tense) for -a ending verbs" Tags="&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T21:00:44.597" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to help somebody with research on the influence of Middle Low German on Middle Norwegian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that purpose, a number of documents from the Norwegian Corpus ([Diplomatarium Norvegicum]) are examined, especially documents from Bergen between 1350 and 1550.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are about 20 sentences (from different documents) on which we need help translating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have any links to a dictionary for the middle-Norwegian from that time-periode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Update: 28/7/18)&#xA;Here are a couple of sentences. Perhaps this can help determine what dictionary can be used for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;oc thet thennom aff ingen beffallingsmendt eller nogen anden haffuer&#xA;formeint veriit før end nu y høst forledenn at forne fru Sophie vden&#xA;all rett rettergang low dom eller nogen redelig arsage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;och schall ether nade ingen twiffuel haffue att ether nade schall&#xA;bliffue forsømmett wdj nogenn the maade som i myn forstandt eller&#xA;macht er.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;att ingen landbo nødgas schall aff hans landråtte på nogen långsam&#xA;reese vten han thet wælwilleligh gøræ will men dogh skulle alle&#xA;landboor pliictuge ware fløte&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T08:43:46.667" Title="dictionary middle norwegian" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28537" CreationDate="2018-07-28T06:06:24.413" Score="3" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;Optimality theory is a theory of phonology that drops Chomskyan replacement rules in favor of a set of ranked constraints. It can lead to much more elegant analyses in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't understand how optimality theory can deal with phonological opacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, Isthmus Nahuatl. (This example comes from an old textbook of phonology, but any errors are most likely my own.) In rule-based phonology, it is said to have two relevant rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[-cons] → ∅ / [+voice +sonorant] _ #&#xA;[+voice +cons +sonorant] → [-voice] / _ #&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, word-final vowels after voiced sonorants are deleted, and word-final sonorants become devoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But notably, the first rule doesn't feed the second: given the underlying form &lt;code&gt;/ʃikakíli/&lt;/code&gt;, we get the surface form &lt;code&gt;[ʃikakíl]&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;*[ʃikakíl̥]&lt;/code&gt;. In rule-based phonology, this is handled through rule orderings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this phenomenon be explained in optimality theory? Forms like &lt;code&gt;/tájoːl/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[tájoːl̥]&lt;/code&gt; indicate that the &quot;no final voiced sonorants&quot; constraint is highly-ranked; why does this constraint mysteriously fail to apply when another constraint would apply as well? Any ranking of &quot;no final voiced sonorants&quot; and &quot;no final vowels after voiced sonorants&quot; would seem to produce &lt;code&gt;*[ʃikakíl̥]&lt;/code&gt;, which is not observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T21:36:42.927" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T21:36:42.927" Title="How does optimality theory handle opacity?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;&lt;nahuatl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28286" CreationDate="2018-07-28T06:20:21.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hrpub.org/download/20141001/LLS2-19390082.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sabir and Alsaeed 2014&lt;/a&gt; as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arabic/Arabic_sounds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikibooks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology#cite_note-31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (*), the underlying phoneme is considered to be an alveolar trill /r/, with the flap being a very common realization (especially in Egypt and the Levant). The same variation is seen in Italian and several other Romance languages which preserved the Latin trilled /r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Admittedly, none of these are particularly authoritative sources, but I haven't turned up anything more scholarly yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T06:20:21.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28529" CreationDate="2018-07-28T11:15:46.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions of this flavour have been asked before, but usually from the theoretical linguistic perspective.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28352/stolen-part-of-speech/28356&quot;&gt;Stolen, part of speech&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20039/when-analyzing-a-set-of-corpora-are-there-any-standard-practices-with-regard-to/28283&quot;&gt;When analyzing a set of corpora, are there any standard practices with regard to the classification of gerunds?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1360/english-words-which-are-both-verbs-and-adjectives&quot;&gt;English words which are both verbs and adjectives&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Present and past participles can function like nouns, adjectives or verbs.  There are clearly some examples where the non-lemma form has taken on a life of its own.  For example the adjective &lt;em&gt;strapping&lt;/em&gt; where the verb is obsolete or has no obvious semantic relation to the verb &lt;em&gt;to strap&lt;/em&gt;.  Then there are the cases like &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt;, which is related to &lt;em&gt;to learn&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; still has a dictionary entry and is part of many fixed expressions like &lt;em&gt;machine learning&lt;/em&gt;.  And then there are those which do not have much currency but can be derived productively, for example &lt;em&gt;Tweeting&lt;/em&gt;.  This issue can definitely be milked for multiple PhD theses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the practical perspective though, &lt;strong&gt;that's just how those examples were tagged in the training data&lt;/strong&gt;, and the major POS taggers Google Cloud Language API, spaCy, Stanford NLP are generally trained on the same training data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/u/pos/VERB.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Universal Dependencies VERB doc&lt;/a&gt; is very clear on this arbitrariness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that participles are word forms that may share properties and usage of adjectives and verbs. Depending on language and context, they may be classified as either VERB or ADJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to deal with it would be to add an additional field for the original part of speech, and for the models to learn both and their APIs to expose both.  That would not be too hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part for such systems, because the combinations may appear less in the data and it can require real intelligence to disambiguate, is to distinguish the noun use from the adjective use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example inside of a noun phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H9FcW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H9FcW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are holes with regard to noun use versus verb too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PBbfz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PBbfz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N, N, N... and then V, whether we try the Google service or the open-source spaCy library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T08:31:31.510" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:31:31.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28533" CreationDate="2018-07-28T16:05:33.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, this issue has plagued OT since its inception a quarter century ago. One issue is defining exactly what &quot;problem&quot; is: my own view is that the relevant question should not involve reifying a phenomenon (opacity), it involves comparison of analytic devices (ordering versus...). The term &quot;opacity&quot; was introduced by Kiparsky in 1971, but has received various definitions. The classical definition essentially said that allophonic rules (those satisfying the biuniqueness condition) are transparent, and nonallophonic rules (any neutralization or deletion) are opaque. Kiparsky was not proposing anything about the theory of grammar, the utility of the concept lies in its function in language change. In short, it's not clear what the limits of &quot;opacity&quot; are. However, counterfeeding as you pointed to is the most prominent form of problem case subsumed under &quot;opacity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rules, Constraints, and Phonological Phenomena&lt;/em&gt; (Vaux &amp;amp; Nevins, eds.) has a paper &quot;Ordering&quot; that addresses some of the devices available (ca. 2000) for emulating ordering in OT. Briefly summarized and including other developments...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Containment. Originally, segments were not deleted, they were simply &quot;unparsed&quot;. That means that the winning candidate is [ʃikakíl(i)] with an unsyllabified &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;; because that vowel is still there, &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is not really final.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) 2-level constraints. It has also been proposed that constraints can refer to properties of the input (remember that a tableau has the input in the NW corner, so this is conceptually an obvious possibility). The whole class of IO Faithfulness constraints exploits this possibility. So the constraint could refer to &quot;whether the sonorant is final in the input&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Constraint Conjunction: &quot;you cannot both X and Y&quot;. You can delete a vowel, you can devoice a sonorant, but you cannot both delete a vowel and devoice a sonorant&quot; (within a given substring). Deletion of a vowel violates Max, devoicing a vowel violates Ident, you cannot violate both constraints in a substring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Sympathy constraints. Faithfulness is extended to include a &quot;sympathetic&quot; candidate (the flower candidate), which is the best candidate that satisfies a particular constraint (such as Max). Then there is the sympathetic-candidate faithfulness constraint that says that the actual output has to be faithful to the flower candidate with respect to some property, in this case, the voicing of the flower candidate. The flower candidate is the best candidate (the underlying form, as it happens) that satisfies Max (which is in fact violated in the output). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Operational domains. This is popular in the Optimal Domains Theory variant and used sometimes in mainstream versions (especially for reduplication). Basically, you can bracket a string various ways, and state constraints with respect to that bracketing. Maybe the devoicing rule requires the sonorant to be adjacent to the bracket &quot;}&quot;, which is assigned to the end of the word but not inside CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) Limited serial derivation. Lexical phonology versions of OT have multiple passes through the phonology. Final vowel deletion could be assigned to a different stratum, and constraint ranking can be different across strata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(7) Candidate chains. This is whole nother kettle of fish, and I have to admit that I don't understand all of the details of how it is implemented. The idea is very simple, though, and was necessary in order to implement Sympathy theory without actual derivations. The problem in ST is that the evaluation of candidate A with respect to sympathy constraint Z depends on identifying flower candidate B, which requires evaluating all candidates for all constraints. That's a serial derivation, or looks like one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be solved by generating not just a &quot;phonetic&quot; candidate, but also a proposed &quot;sympathetic&quot; candidate. So for example, if you need /niduura/ to generate the flower candidate &lt;em&gt;nduura&lt;/em&gt; to guide selection of the phonetic candidate &lt;em&gt;ninuura&lt;/em&gt;, you simply pair {ninuura, nduura} as well as many others like {ninuura, niduura} and so on – the first member of the n-tuple is the one pronounced, the second is the flower candidate. The pairing is simply the Cartesian product of the candidate set with itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be extended to have longer n-tuples of candidates such as {dosk'a, do:sk'a, du:sk'a} – this is a Yawelmani form, where &lt;em&gt;o, o:&lt;/em&gt; trigger rounding of /a/, but surface [o] can derive from /u:/, and such an [o] does not condition harmony. Candidate chains amounts to selecting the correct n-tuple with the desired phonetic form, and that chain of candidates that leads to the phonetic form. There are various complications involving &quot;Prec&quot; constraints (&quot;all violations of Max must precede any violations of Dep&quot;), plus a limit on Gen, where adjacent candidates within a candidate n-tuple differ in &quot;one thing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &quot;Harmonic serialism&quot; has gained ascendancy these days. In essence, rule ordering is back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/498-0202/498-0202-BYE-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissertation by Bye&lt;/a&gt; also proposes a theory of &quot;virtual phonology&quot; to handle opacity, f.y.i.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T16:05:33.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28533" CreationDate="2018-07-28T18:55:05.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking the problem to be to explain why the final [l] of [ʃikakíl] does not devoice, my best guess is that that [l] is long, or at least has some fortis articulation that prevents weakening it to voiceless [l].  I do see that this is not consistent with the facts as given, since it is transcribed as just a single final [l], not *[ʃikakíll], yet sometimes such phonetic details escape mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were correct, the example would not be relevant to the choice between replacement rule vs. optimality theory, neither of which, in any case, appears to offer any explanation of what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T18:55:05.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28543" CreationDate="2018-07-28T19:49:02.887" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of semantic useful words, Minimal English lists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Foods:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;corn (yams, etc.)&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flour&#xA;&lt;li&gt;meat&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rice&#xA;&lt;li&gt;salt&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sugar&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sweet&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wheat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Technology And Transport:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bicycle&#xA;&lt;li&gt;boat&#xA;&lt;li&gt;car&#xA;&lt;li&gt;engine&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phone&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pipe&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plane&#xA;&lt;li&gt;radio&#xA;&lt;li&gt;road&#xA;&lt;li&gt;telephone&#xA;&lt;li&gt;television&#xA;&lt;li&gt;train&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wheel&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1:&lt;/strong&gt; I don't understand the relationship between corn and yams. If the relationship is just about being vegetables and/or fruits, why not list that first, then include examples in parentheses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ex.:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fruits/vegetables (corn, yams, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2:&lt;/strong&gt; Why does it list both &quot;phone&quot; and &quot;telephone&quot;? Isn't that redundant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T15:06:27.393" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T15:06:27.393" Title="Minimal English: Lack Of Clarity And Redundancy" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28286" CreationDate="2018-07-28T21:01:52.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ThePhoneticsOfArabic-W.H.T.Gairdner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/ThePhoneticsOfArabic-W.H.T.Gairdner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;arguably still the best book on Arabic phonetics, gives a detailed description of /r/ on pp. 21 sqq. There is even a picture of the correct tongue position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T21:01:52.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28539" CreationDate="2018-07-29T13:23:30.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cbM4DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=phone&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cbM4DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=phone&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm flabbergasted that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Semantic Metalanguage&lt;/a&gt; people have actually gone there, and tried to reinvent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basic English&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage#Minimal_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minimal English&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not surprised &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Goddard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cliff Goddard&lt;/a&gt; is behind the effort; he's always been an evangelist for NSM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, the list of words that derives from is a list of candidates for inclusion in the Minimal English vocabulary, rather than the definitive list of semantic primes that precedes it; and you can tell: it clearly has not been rigorously defined or cleaned up. Goddard admits that the list is a grabbag. I think the inclusion of &lt;em&gt;telephone&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; is just poor editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for corn/yams, the list in context is: &lt;em&gt;meat, rice, wheat, corn, (yams etc.)&lt;/em&gt;; I surmise the actual intent is &quot;any number of starchy staples, which could be expanded by region&quot; (so &quot;yams etc.&quot; are an extension of the set &quot;rice, wheat, corn&quot;). Again, this is a thrown-together list of candidate words, so they don't seem to have felt the need to pare it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T13:23:30.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-29T16:29:00.700" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I am on my phone, so linguistic symbols are not intuitive to type, so I typed out phone names in prose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello, apologies if this is a dumb question, but I'm reading through Bruce Hayes' &quot;Introductory Phonology&quot;, and he provides an example of complementary distribution of the allophones of English /l/; he provides four allophones for analysis: l, velarized l, [voiced l followed by voiceless release] and [velarized l with dental articulation]. He posits that these allophones, being in complementary distribution, are realized  in unique environments:&#xA;[voiced l followed by voiceless release]: after voiceless C&#xA;[velarized l with dental articulation]: before interdental C&#xA;Im a footnote, he adds that word-final and after voiceless C are environments that DO NOT overlap since English has no words which end in a voiceless consonant followed by a word-final /l/. However, what of words like &quot;apple&quot; or &quot;tackle&quot;, which I understand to be [æp(velarized syllabic l)] and [t^hæk(velarized syllabic l)]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words seem to put /l/ word finally AND after a voiceless consonant. Is this due to a light unstressed [ə] prior to the /l/ which prevents the environments from overlapping? Is Hayes' claim an oversimplification? Does it have anything to do with the syllabic nature of /l/ in these environments? Or perhaps rule ordering? Any assistance appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22418" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T18:05:20.710" Title="/l/ environments in English and Introductory Phonology by Bruce Hayes" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28544" CreationDate="2018-07-29T17:46:20.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The transcription of English words in the profession is extremely variable, because we don't agree on how narrow to transcribe. If you look at the transcriptions of English that he uses, he does not transcribe syllabic sonorants for reduced VR syllables in English, and in &quot;dreadful, crucible&quot; on p. 44 he writes syllabic &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; with [əl], not [l̩]. With respect to his transcriptions, the claim is probably not an oversimplification, and it is due to the supposed schwa in words like &lt;em&gt;apple, crucible&lt;/em&gt;. I would not transcribe those words with [əl], but I speak a mildly different dialect, so I would accept that as a correct statement about his pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative is that he also actually says [æpl̩], and this illustrates the point that a phonetic transcription is always a work in progress, if you are trying to provide a narrow transcription. I assume (as many people do) that syllabic sonorants in English derive from reduction of &lt;em&gt;əR&lt;/em&gt; sequences, so the proffered generalization could be correct at that point, but then there is further reduction, which messes up the generalization. The underlying question is, or should be, what are his generalizations generalizations about? Actual pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Hayes does not talk about (and at the level of introductory textbooks, this is universal) is that there are two things mushed together under the rubric &quot;allophone&quot;. One is where you have a true phonological rule which categorically changes one sound (&quot;set of distinctive features&quot;) into another categorically distinct one (flapping is an example). And, there is also phonetic implementation, where a physical feature of a segment is realized continuously within a range. For example, the amount of nasal air flow in English words like &quot;rant&quot; varies from speaker to speaker and context to context. In that case, we are filling in values of a physical parameter for a single unit, not selecting between units. There is reason to believe that, in fact, pronunciation of /l/ is so variable that some of it should be treated in continuous phonetic terms. Specifically, ostensive devoicing of /l/ is actually the result of overlap of glottis spreading from the preceding consonant and a following sonorant (it's just more salient in the case of /l/ because of the spit that [ɬ] generates). L-darkening is a well-known rule that applies &quot;to a degree&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T17:46:20.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28544" CreationDate="2018-07-29T18:05:20.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two theories of how words like &quot;apple&quot; work in English. One says that there's a syllabic consonant: &lt;code&gt;/æ.pl̩/&lt;/code&gt;. The other says that there's an underlying schwa, &lt;code&gt;/æ.pəl/&lt;/code&gt;, and a phonological rule that turns resonants syllabic between schwa and a syllable boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Hayes is using the theory with the schwa, and saying that the syllabic &lt;code&gt;[l̩]&lt;/code&gt; is a phonetic detail, not a phonological one. In other words, &quot;apple&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/æ.pəl/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[æ.pl̩]&lt;/code&gt;. With these assumptions in place, it is indeed true that you can never have a voiced consonant immediately preceding &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T18:05:20.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28549" CreationDate="2018-07-30T03:44:36.367" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional linguistics literatures there is a clear separation between words and non-words. Words are basically what you'd find in a dictionary. But in todays world you find all kinds of word-like &quot;things&quot; in tweets and other social media, such as you could imagine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'm so excited, yay!!ah!!woooohoo:):):Dboom&#xA;I've been w#ndreeeng what this means.&#xA;I don;t knw if this &amp;lt;asdfasdfasdf&amp;gt; sense.&#xA;Maybe the wordsarestucktogeth ...er.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;yay!!ah!!woooohoo:):):Dboom&lt;/code&gt; is basically enthusiasm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;w#ndreeeng&lt;/code&gt; is &quot;wondering&quot; with a sort of sounded out part (reeeng) and the &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; for playfulness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;don;t&lt;/code&gt; is misspelled&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;knw&lt;/code&gt; leaves out some letters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;asdfasdfasdf&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; can be interpreted as &quot;makes&quot; for &quot;makes sense&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words are stuck together&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But also split apart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just the top of my head. But I am wondering how to structure them linguistically. Such as, calling them just &quot;words&quot;, but that doesn't make sense. Calling them &quot;things&quot; is too general. Maybe &quot;clauses&quot;, but that is usually a set of words. So wondering if there are any formalisms around this sort of stuff. Wondering how to treat them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also have more normalized &quot;non-word&quot; structures such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is a #hashtag.&#xA;This is a https://linguistics.stackexchange.com link.&#xA;This is a @username.&#xA;This is an example.domain.com.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what those types of things are called when they are found in text/writing/language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T15:53:29.087" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T15:53:29.087" Title="Terminology around non-word, but word-like, structures" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26711" CreationDate="2018-07-30T09:59:11.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify the question: You mean something like &quot;bank&quot; - of a river, a place to store money or &quot;to bank&quot; as a verb. The reason why it is hard to think of a word which fits the description &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be because the language is inherently built so that words quickly morph based on context. Which also implies that there is a lot of meaning packed into non-noun words unlike German and English. Germans can combine different nouns like &lt;code&gt;Esstischreparaturausbildungslizenzbehörde&lt;/code&gt; (dinner table repair training licence authority) though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Eszik - [He/She/It] eats.&#xA;Ehetetlen - Inedible.&#xA;Ehetetlenség - Inedibility (does not exist in English). &quot;The inedibility of wood is rather displeasing.&quot;&#xA;Ehetetlensége - [His/Her/Its] inedibility.&#xA;Ehetetlenségének - For his/her/its inedibility (as of referencing it).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that these words make too much sense - however they are grammatically correct and understandable, just as the German example. Another point is that the sound of words is strictly bound to how they are written. The letters reflect exactly how to pronounce them, thus the requirement for 3. should be basically impossible to ever be fulfilled in Hungarian. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bor - Wine (alcoholic beverage).&#xA;Bőr - Skin/Leather.&#xA;Sor - Line.&#xA;Sör - Beer.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am actually not an alcoholic. The letters are always adjusted to match the different sound of the word with a different meaning, so it's different than English, where you have to know or figure out the pronunciation of words (&lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; can have at least 2 ways to be pronounced based on the word following up on it). And I myself recognized that I would have difficulties to recognize what is meant if somebody mistakes letters like o, ó, ő, ö, even though I speak 3 languages (if you don't count programming languages). So I blatantly assume it may be a rather common issue for people understanding foreigners trying to speak Hungarian who make pronunciation errors. But when reading, it's often rather clear what is meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this being said, exceptions apply as the comments below pointed out: &lt;code&gt;házszám&lt;/code&gt; for example makes it ambiguous how to pronounce it, as it's a compound of two words: &lt;code&gt;ház&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;szám&lt;/code&gt;. Another example is &lt;code&gt;szám&lt;/code&gt; - which means both &quot;number&quot; and &quot;my mouth&quot;, however the pronunciation is identical. And then there is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homof%C3%B3n_magyar_szavak_list%C3%A1ja&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not too excessive list of rare exceptions on Wikipedia for homophones&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22419" LastEditorUserId="22419" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T14:43:43.710" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T14:43:43.710" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28547" CreationDate="2018-07-30T10:26:16.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those things are considered special parts-of-speech in corpus linguistics. There are several &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/12994/9781&quot;&gt;lists for parts-of-speech&lt;/a&gt; in general use, and in Universal Dependencies they are called &quot;Symbols&quot;. Some of them may also be classified as Interjections, Particles, Other, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T10:26:16.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T12:27:54.757" Score="12" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many modern languages have single words for &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; (e.g. English), and some have more than a simple pair (e.g. French), while others have no word for &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; (e.g. Latin and Irish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; have at least two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, you are correct&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, the positive of what you said&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no, you are incorrect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no, the negative of what you said&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not your dog, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is. (&lt;em&gt;Oui&lt;/em&gt; in French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Si&lt;/em&gt; in French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't. (&lt;em&gt;Non&lt;/em&gt; in French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages also have a word for &amp;quot;You are correct, the negative of what you said&amp;quot;, i.e. &amp;quot;Yes, it isn't&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest form in Irish is to repeat the verb in either the positive or negative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not your dog, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested that all languages I know of have at least an opposite pair of &amp;quot;yes/no&amp;quot; or none at all. Are there any languages with a word for &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; but not &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T13:29:22.810" Title="Are there any languages with only one of &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28550" CreationDate="2018-07-30T18:07:26.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Finnish has particle words for &quot;yes&quot;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Kyllä&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (formal) and &lt;em&gt;&quot;joo&quot;, &quot;juu&quot;, &quot;jep&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (very colloquial), but no such words for &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one generally responds to questions with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_answer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;echo response&lt;/a&gt; (as in Irish, Latin, Chinese and Japanese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For negative responses, the negation verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en#Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;en/et/ei/enme/ette/eivät&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is used (conjugated for person and number).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Positive response to question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Tuletteko kaupungista?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Are you coming from town?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Tulemme.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;We are coming.&quot;) / &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Kyllä.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Yes&quot;) / &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Joo.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Yes&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Negative response to question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Tunnetteko herra Lehdon?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Do you know Mr Lehto?&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;En tunne.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;I don't know.&quot;) /  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;En.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;I don't.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the response to &quot;Does &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; know Mr Lehto?&quot; would be conjugated &quot;Ei.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#Related_words_in_other_languages_and_translation_problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#Related_words_in_other_languages_and_translation_problems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T13:29:22.810" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T13:29:22.810" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2018-07-31T04:58:51.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic there is the verb تترك (ta-tar-ra-ka), which means &quot;to be/become/act like the Turks&quot;. This verb, when conjugated in the second person singular form, becomes تتترك (ta-ta-tar-ra-ka) &quot;you become Turkish&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this letter &quot;ت&quot; is repeated only in writing, not phonetically. This is possible because in Arabic the majority of short vowels aren't written so usually a letter will represent a consonant-vowel combination. If you're looking for a &quot;triple sound&quot; you won't find any. For more about syllable structure in Arabic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology#Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's the Wikipedia page.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14178" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T04:58:51.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T05:56:10.810" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_prefixes&amp;amp;from=B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of English prefixes&lt;/a&gt; and remember learning in school about Latin and Greek being helpful for learning words in English based on prefixes/suffixes. I'm wondering though if there is a way to learn &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the English prefixes and suffixes by learning a set of languages or just a part of them or whatnot. If not all, then most of them. Basically I'm wondering if there is a system for learning the patterns of the prefixes / suffixes so that you could understand novel words without previously knowing their definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T05:56:10.810" Title="Pattern to Prefixes and Suffixes in English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;prefixes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2018-07-31T06:30:41.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't uncommon in Tamil, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;பற்றற்றான், அப்பப்பா, திதததத்தத்&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-are-words-of-any-language-containing-three-of-the-same-letter-in-a-row&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/What-are-words-of-any-language-containing-three-of-the-same-letter-in-a-row&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-only-English-word-with-three-consecutive-repeated-letters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-only-English-word-with-three-consecutive-repeated-letters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-word-any-language-that-contains-4-same-letters-in-the-row&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-word-any-language-that-contains-4-same-letters-in-the-row&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/words-with-same-letter-three-times-in-a-row/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/words-with-same-letter-three-times-in-a-row/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T06:30:41.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T06:33:27.120" Score="2" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what it takes to parse a sentence with incomplete knowledge. That is, take a sentence like &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51606629/wrong-use-of-javascript-setinterval&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; timeout I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;call&lt;/strong&gt; again my function at the end of the execution of the callback of timeout (like I'm &lt;strong&gt;doing&lt;/strong&gt; right now). If something &lt;strong&gt;goes&lt;/strong&gt; wrong, my callback will never &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt; called again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I spotted the verbs all correctly. But I can find them because I know what those words mean from experience. I'm wondering though if there are hints in the structure of these sentences (that is, hints in the structure of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; sentence, these just being one example) that tell you when something is a verb. For example, maybe verbs typically come after &lt;code&gt;I &amp;lt;verb&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;something &amp;lt;verb&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Wondering if there are any patterns here, so if you weren't familiar with the language, given some bare minimum knowledge, you could identify the verbs. If so, wondering what the bare minimum knowledge would be, and what the patterns typically are (or where I should look for further search).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T13:50:46.977" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:35:29.473" Title="How can you know that a word in a sentence is a verb?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28556" CreationDate="2018-07-31T09:14:36.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, with &lt;strong&gt;probabilistic parsing and part-of-speech tagging&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing#Human_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing#Human_languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_window_based_part-of-speech_tagging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_window_based_part-of-speech_tagging&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/stat-parsing.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/stat-parsing.shtml&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#pos-tagging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#pos-tagging&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T14:55:51.660" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T14:55:51.660" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T09:28:46.640" Score="0" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very new to linguistics, and am trying to transcribe the word 'courage' into IPA. I have come across a few different transcriptions, but I think the correct one might be &quot;kʌrɪdʒ&quot;. Is this correct? &#xA;I have also come across &quot;kʌɹɪdʒ&quot; (is this the American version, whereas the &quot;kʌrɪdʒ&quot; is British?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assistance would be very much appreciated!&#xA;Thank you :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22425" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T09:13:50.207" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T09:13:50.207" Title="How to transcribe 'courage' in IPA" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28558" CreationDate="2018-07-31T15:54:26.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no one right answer, because it depends on what you are transcribing, and what conventions you are assuming. As a narrow transcription it is almost certainly not correct for any dialect of English spoken north of the Equator, because &quot;c&quot; is [kʰ] and &quot;r&quot; is [ɾ] or [ɹ,ɹʷ]. Assuming that this is a broad, i.e. phonemic transcription, you have to decide (know) what the phonemes are of the particular dialect, and that is very tricky. For example, there is one tradition where the vowel of &quot;sit&quot; is [i] (and the vowel of &quot;seat&quot; is [i:]); another where these words are [sɪt, sit], also [sɪt, si:t], and [sɪt, sɪjt]. The vowels [ʌ] and [ə] are in complementary distribution with [ʌ] only appearing in a stressed syllable: so you could use either [ʌ] or [ə] to represent the phoneme, since it is an abstraction from phonetics, anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In American English, there are two other pronunciations, [kɹ̩ɹɪdʒ] and [kɹ̩ʷɹɪdʒ], that is, with a syllabic velarized rhotic approximant which is either rounded or not. The presence of a non-syllabic [ɹ] before [ɪ] is not mandatory, so [kɹ̩ɪdʒ] and [kɹ̩ʷɪdʒ] are just a good and easier to type (less stuff). When you get into the analysis, deriving surface forms from underlying forms, it is actually somewhat &quot;simpler&quot; to assume [kɹ̩(ʷ)ɪdʒ], but that simplicity depends on a particular theory of rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version with [ʌ] is also used (phonetically realized) in the US, though not my dialect (I think it's more East Coast). But: it is common to analyze &lt;em&gt;kɹ̩ɪdʒ&lt;/em&gt; as deriving from &lt;em&gt;kʌɹɪdʒ&lt;/em&gt;, so that syllabic sonorants can be removed from the phonemic inventory (reducing the inventory is a commonly assumed goal of analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T15:54:26.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15151" CreationDate="2018-07-31T16:47:12.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:6631.mcgregor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;कुछ&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kuch&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;something&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/mcgregor_query.py?qs=%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;क्या&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kyā&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;what?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are examples of inanimate pronouns&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in Hindi (as opposed to the animate &lt;a href=&quot;http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.0:7095.mcgregor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;कोई&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;koī&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;someone; anyone&amp;quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/mcgregor_query.py?qs=%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8C%E0%A4%A8&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;कौन&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kaun&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;quot;who?&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Specifically, the inanimate singular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;indefinite&lt;/a&gt; and interrogative pronouns.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ooH5VfLTQEQC&amp;amp;pg=PA62&amp;amp;lpg=PA62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hindi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Yamuna Kachru (p.62)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T14:23:45.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20924" CreationDate="2018-07-31T18:18:15.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are regional variants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jJzvD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jJzvD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ux--OWgWvBQC&amp;amp;pg=PA213&amp;amp;lpg=PA213&amp;amp;dq=devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Numerical Notation: A Comparative History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen Chrisomalis (p.198, 199, 211)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://software.sil.org/downloads/r/annapurna/AnnapurnaSIL-features.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://software.sil.org/downloads/r/annapurna/AnnapurnaSIL-features.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hindawi.com/journals/acisc/2015/193868/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hindawi.com/journals/acisc/2015/193868/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T18:18:15.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28564" CreationDate="2018-07-31T23:55:05.430" Score="6" ViewCount="1552" Body="&lt;p&gt;English [ɹ] has two realizations: apical and bunched (aka molar). ExtIPA (extensions to the IPA) thus recommends the use of [ɹ̺] and [ɹ̈] to differentiate the two. But I also often see English /r/ transcribed as retroflex [ɻ] rather than [ɹ], especially for American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the term &quot;retroflex&quot; can mean either subapical palatal or apical postalveolar (this is even more complicated when it comes to fricatives), but since it is quite difficult to curl the tongue up so much that the underside of the tongue is placed against the hard palate but not close enough to cause frication, I assume [ɻ] symbolizes an apical postalveolar articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But [ɹ̺] is also apical postalveolar. So why go all the way to bring cumbersome diacritics to differentiate apical and bunched r's, when using just [ɻ] and [ɹ] can do the job? But the fact phoneticians still use [ɹ] (or some other symbol that's not [ɻ]) when describing an apical r tells me that they do feel the need to distinguish something that cannot be accomplished by simply using [ɻ] and [ɹ]. So what is the difference between an apical [ɹ̺] and a retroflex [ɻ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MRI images of apical and bunched /r/ from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isr.umd.edu/Labs/SCL/publications/conference/t_zhou_etal_icslp_07.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zhou et al. (2007)&lt;/a&gt;, via &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xfIHAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (2010: 95)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u3mC9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;MRI images of apical and bunched /r/, from Zhou et al. (2007), via Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (2010: 95)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T09:45:38.967" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T09:45:38.967" Title="Apical postalveolar approximant [ɹ̺] and retroflex approximant [ɻ]: What is the difference?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28563" CreationDate="2018-07-31T23:55:05.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ɹ̺] and [ɻ] are on a continuum and there is little difference between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zxKCbu536Z8C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laver (1994)&lt;/a&gt;, [ɻ] is &quot;used as a pronunciation of /r/ in a number of American accents of English and of rhotic accents of Southwestern England&quot; and &quot;has the tip of the tongue more curled than is the case in the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ], and presents the tip of the tongue or even the underside of the tip/blade to the palato-alveolar part of the hard palate&quot; (p. 299). Then he proposes [ɹ&lt;sup&gt;⊢&lt;/sup&gt;] or [ψ] be used as the transcription symbol for the bunched/molar r. So presumably the justification there for a new symbol, rather than simply switching between [ɹ] and [ɻ], is that [ɹ] stands for the prototypical form of /r/ in non-rhotic British English, which is an apical postalveolar approximant with little to no retroflexion, and therefore a dedicated symbol for the bunched r is called for. But this assumption is false because &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/bunchedmolar-r.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wells&lt;/a&gt; is a non-rhotic Anglo-English speaker yet uses a bunched r. (Besides, how could one assume the distribution of the apical and bunched variants is a regional one when there is virtually no auditory difference?) So I still don't find the argument for a notational distinction between the apical [ɹ] and retroflex [ɻ] convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hbiOAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA59&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rogers (2014: 59–60)&lt;/a&gt; makes no distinction between the apical [ɹ] and retroflex [ɻ], and refers to the variant supposedly common in Britain as simply &quot;the retroflexed version&quot;. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.577.2440&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiede (2007)&lt;/a&gt; succinctly describes, /r/ is realized with varying tongue shapes but is broadly categorized into &quot;retroflex&quot; (apical constriction) and &quot;bunched&quot; (dorsal constricution). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699206.2017.1326169&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ball (2017)&lt;/a&gt; proposes, using existing IPA/extIPA symbols and diacritics, a transcription capturing four degrees of apicality/bunching: [ɻ, ɹ̺, ɹ̺̈, ɹ̈]. So it seems to me, if only two degrees (i.e. apical/retroflex vs. bunched/molar) are desired to be distinguished, the use of [ɻ, ɹ] is just enough, not only because there is no other contrasting sound that could be represented by these symbols in English but also because it doesn't require extra diacritics, unlike the extIPA recommendation [ɹ̺, ɹ̈].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reveals not only that the difference between [ɹ] and [ɻ] is negligible as far as apical variants are concerned, but also that [ɻ] may have an even stronger basis for denoting an apical /r/ than [ɹ] if [ɹ] can also stand for a dorsal variant. However, to use [ɹ] for a dorsal is obviously not accurate because the primary place of articulation is not coronal but pre-velar according to Laver (p. 302). Hence its more accurate representation might be, perhaps surprisingly, [j̻], [ɰ̟], or what have you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.577.2440&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiede (2007)&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KrFgG.png&quot; alt=&quot;From Tiede (2007)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T23:55:05.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28568" CreationDate="2018-08-01T03:51:54.490" Score="16" ViewCount="3474" Body="&lt;p&gt;In french, there are many female given names that are derived from male given names. Those names are often obtained by adding &quot;ine&quot;, &quot;ette&quot;, &quot;e&quot; or &quot;a&quot; at the end of the male name. Examples include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bérnard -&gt; Bérnadette&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claude -&gt; Claudine, Claudette&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charles -&gt; Charline, Charlotte&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul -&gt; Pauline, Paulette&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gérald -&gt; Géraldine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martin -&gt; Martine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jean -&gt; Jeanne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aléxandre -&gt; Aléxandra&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick -&gt; Patricia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be mistaken in assuming that the male name came first for some of the above exampless. Consider also &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sylvain -&gt; Sylvie, Sylvaine, Sylvette.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Sylvain is not the &quot;ancestor&quot; of the female counterparts but all descend from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.behindthename.com/name/silvanus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silvanus&lt;/a&gt; who is a male name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it appears easy to find female names that derive from male names, I could not find any example of a male name that derived from a female name. &lt;strong&gt;In romance languages, are there examples of male given names that derive from female given names?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3663" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T17:44:31.860" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T13:23:12.870" Title="In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-01T04:05:56.790" Score="2" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Language Hoax&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 56 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyq9H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyq9H.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak no Estonian. 1. But how does the preposition 'like' conveys the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translative Case&lt;/a&gt;? E.g., an encyclopedia looks 'like a book', but encyclopedias are not becoming or changing to books, as they aren't intended to be read cover-to-cover like books.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;translative case&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;List of glossing abbreviations&quot;&gt;abbreviated&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;TRANSL&lt;/strong&gt;) is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Grammatical case&quot;&gt;grammatical case&lt;/a&gt; that indicates a change in state of a noun, with the general sense of &quot;becoming &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;change to &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't 'like a book' befit the Essive Case (see green arrow) more? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T13:21:49.270" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:06:15.517" Title="How does 'like a book' befit the Translative, and not Essive, Case?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28566" CreationDate="2018-08-01T04:15:30.067" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing I thought of was names derived in antiquity from the names of ancient Greek goddesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the French male name &lt;em&gt;Hercule&lt;/em&gt; is ultimately from the name of the Greek goddess Hera (&lt;i&gt;Ἥρα&lt;/i&gt;) (it's not just a masculinized form of the name, though, obviously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artemio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; seems to be used in Italian and Spanish; I believe it comes from the Latin form &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.name-doctor.com/name-artemius-meaning-of-artemius-47186.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artemius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the Greek male name &lt;em&gt;Αρτέμιος,&lt;/em&gt; which seems to be based on the name of the goddess Artemis (&lt;em&gt;Ἄρτεμις&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment,  A. M. Bittlingmayer pointed out that &lt;em&gt;Demetrius&lt;/em&gt; is similarly derived from the name of the Greek goddess Demeter. &lt;em&gt;Demetrio&lt;/em&gt; seems to be used as an Italian form of this name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any recent examples, or productive processes for deriving male names from female names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T12:08:13.400" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T12:08:13.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28571" CreationDate="2018-08-01T04:55:02.883" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;The max valency I ever read about is trivalency. However, hypothetically, can't valency extend to an arbitrily length? To extrapolate on this point, for trivalency, Wikipedia gives examples of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I bet him 5 quid on &quot;The Daily Arabian&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I bet you 2 dollars it will rain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could extend these through meta means, or just by adding details though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I bet him 5 quid that her bet on &quot;The Daily Arabian&quot; would win.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I bet you 2 dollars it will rain on her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would these qualify as more than trivalent or not? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T22:10:29.560" Title="Is There A Limit To Valency/Transitivity?" Tags="&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;valency&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28566" CreationDate="2018-08-01T05:47:09.273" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian there are a number of historically female names which are occasionally used as male names, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Celeste, Amabile, Fiore, Diamante&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many Romance languages the female name &lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;/em&gt; (or some variant thereof) has historically been used in male names, either standalone or as part of a compound name, though this practice has generally declined with time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Language&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Male name&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Spanish&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mar%C3%ADa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José María&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Portuguese&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;José Maria&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Medieval French&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Marie&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;French&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Le_Pen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean-Marie&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Jean_H%C3%A9rault_de_S%C3%A9chelles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marie-Jean&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Pierre_K%C5%93nig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marie-Pierre&lt;/a&gt; etc&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Italian&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Antonio Maria (middle name) etc&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The female names &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Guadalupe#Usage_notes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Guadalupe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Inés&lt;/em&gt; are also sometimes given as a second name to males in Spanish e.g. &lt;em&gt;José Guadalupe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In%C3%A9s_Palafox_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;José Inés Palafox Núñez&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Often abbreviated to &lt;em&gt;José Mari&lt;/em&gt;, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José María Romero Poyón&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mari_(footballer,_born_1987)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José María Martín Bejarano-Serrano&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mari_Garc%C3%ADa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José Mari García&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mari_Bakero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José Mari Bakero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T13:23:12.870" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T13:23:12.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28569" CreationDate="2018-08-01T06:55:43.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;bet&lt;/em&gt; has a valency of four. The roles are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The bet maker &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The stake of the bet &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The situation bet about &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We call these the arguments of the verb. While most arguments are nouns, they can also be prepositional phrases, verb phrases, or whole embedded sentences. So the situation argument can be a long complex embedded sentence. Here's an example with a doubly embedded situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adam bet Beth $10 that [Carol would lose the bet she made with David that [Evelyn would win the marathon this year]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even though the bet is so complicated, the base valency of &lt;em&gt;bet&lt;/em&gt; still remains four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some sentences the base valency can be increased or decreased. For example, it's very natural to leave out the stake argument in long sentences about bets. I couldn't say for sure that four is the maximum valency, but I don't remember seeing examples of verbs with more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T07:01:35.710" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T07:01:35.710" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28567" CreationDate="2018-08-01T09:01:42.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't speak Estonian either, but I can grab the first Google link that comes up: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.colanguage.com/translative-case-estonian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.colanguage.com/translative-case-estonian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Estonian cases, like all cases, can develop idiosyncratic usages that are somewhat tenuously related to the prototypical meaning of the case. They are, after all, cases and not mere postpositions -- although postpositions can develop just as idiosyncratic meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the link, the translative is also used to express nouns acting as purposes; for example, getting someone a book &lt;em&gt;as a present&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still express such purposives in English with &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;, and not &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;, and I don't see anything in the linked article that corresponds more closely to English &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that the linked article is not exhaustive. Or it may be that McWhorter is once again being sloppy in a popular exposition, doesn't particularly care about the nuances of Estonian, and arbitrarily changed the gloss of the translative so as not to coincide with the essive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T09:01:42.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28566" CreationDate="2018-08-01T10:11:44.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few examples from Germanic names: &lt;em&gt;Deolindo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Teolindo&lt;/em&gt; are derived from &lt;em&gt;Deolinda&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Teolinda&lt;/em&gt; (modern German cognate: &lt;em&gt;Dietlind&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T11:41:50.703" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T11:41:50.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28566" CreationDate="2018-08-01T11:04:14.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;French Toussaint &quot;All Saints' Day&quot; is feminine, but as a personal name it is masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T11:04:14.300" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28567" CreationDate="2018-08-01T11:11:14.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The glosses look approximately reasonable to me, but the English glosses themselves are arguably ambiguous and don't summarize well what kinds of situations the cases are used in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't speak Estonian, but I do speak Finnish, which is closely related, so I'm taking the liberty to use Finnish examples instead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translative case is used when something becomes something else; &quot;he turned to stone&quot;, &quot;hän muuttui kiveksi&quot; (the root word is &lt;em&gt;kivi;&lt;/em&gt; but of course the English &quot;into something&quot; is generally and literally translated with the illative case, so if I drill a hole into a piece of rock, &quot;poraan reiän kiveen&quot;).  It is also used e.g. for metaphors; &quot;for a stone this one is soft&quot;, &quot;kiveksi tämä on pehmeä&quot;.  Also, &quot;for example&quot; is &quot;esimerkiksi&quot;.  Maybe a better gloss would be &quot;for a book&quot; but it's no less misleading and opaque than the given gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essive case is used when something is in a particular place, position, or attitude. If I dress up as a book, I go to the costume ball &quot;kirjana&quot;.  If I am really in a hurry my hair flies back like a horn, &quot;tukka torvena&quot; and I move like my head was my third foot &quot;pää kolmantena jalkana&quot;.  When I am at home I am literally &quot;kotona&quot; (the base word &lt;em&gt;koti&lt;/em&gt; means home; though native speakers who start thinking about this phrase will often find the construction somewhat archaic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1668" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T11:11:14.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28579" CreationDate="2018-08-01T13:00:55.317" Score="2" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to have heard from films, shows and other japanese programs that there is a kind of vowel deletion in certain contexts which triggers a consonant change which might be allophonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://user.keio.ac.jp/~kawahara/pdf/AMP2017ShawKawahara.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; seems to cover the phenomenon, although I am interested in something specific&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have not studied japanese linguistics, I would need someone who has to help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a consonant followed by a high vowel follows /r/, does it always become a trill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;CV(+high) /ɾ/ -&amp;gt; C [r]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; is a consonant that is not /r/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are trills only allophonic in Japanese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9416" LastEditorUserId="9416" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T18:09:38.893" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T03:31:21.603" Title="Vowel Deletion and Allophone variation in Japanese High Vowel Clusters?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28576" CreationDate="2018-08-02T01:30:25.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Labrune (&lt;em&gt;The phonology of Japanese&lt;/em&gt;) does not report any such allophonic rule. She does report a trill realization as a social variant, typifying street thugs. It should be noted that while the standard IPA symbol for an alveolar flap or tap is [ɾ], people commonly write [r], in case there is no contrast. It may be that if your data is from movies, the actors may have been affecting a yakuza accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T05:01:16.870" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T05:01:16.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T04:52:31.493" Score="1" ViewCount="894" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the IPA spelling of various words, I have often come across versions that use full stops and colons.&#xA;E.g. I have seen 'county' spelled /kaʊnti/ and also /kaʊ.nti/&#xA;and 'courage' as spelled /kʌrɪdʒ/ as well as /kʌr.ɪdʒ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that It represents the break between syllables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22425" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:34:15.883" Title="What do full stops represent in IPA?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28576" CreationDate="2018-08-02T05:03:23.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the only syllable-final consonants in Japanese are /N/, a nasal whose place always assimilates to the following consonant, and /Q/, which geminates the following consonant, and there are no complex onsets (except for /Cj/), and a devoiced vowel is still considered phonologically/prosodically present (and often articulated as a puff of air), Japanese doesn't have a lot of phonological processes that involve adjacent consonants. Most geminates originate in a historical process akin to what you describe (e.g. /ɡaku/ + /koː/ → /ɡakkoː/, 'school'), but /r/ does not geminate.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are trills only allophonic in Japanese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Not only that, Japanese has only one liquid phoneme, i.e. doesn't contrast rhotics and laterals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a consonant followed by a high vowel follows /r/, does it always become a trill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/rosettaproject_jpn_phon-2#page/n1/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Okada (1999)&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ɽ/, which corresponds to 'r' in Romanization, is postalveolar in place rather than retroflex and mainly occurs medially. Initially and after /ɴ/, it is typically an affricate with short friction, [d̠ɹ̝̆]. A postalveolar [l̠] is not unusual in all positions. Approximant [ɹ] may occasionally occur in some environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/951955/filename/the_phonology_of_japanese_r_pre_final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Labrune (2014)&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The voiced apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] is generally assumed to be the prototypical realization of the liquid consonant in contemporary Japanese [...] Outside of [ɾ], the following phonetic (social or regional) realizations are widely attested: [l], [ɭ], [r], [rː], [d], [ɽ], [ɮ]. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The short and long apical trills, [r] and [rː] are socially marked variants, characteristic of the popular speech of males from the Tokyo region. The higher the number of trills, the more socially marked the rhotic will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although she specifies Tokyo, my empirical impression is that it's not confined to a particular region and may be heard from a speaker from anywhere (usually male indeed), though it might not connote vulgarity in the same way it does in Tokyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* There are a few loans with /rr/, such as &lt;em&gt;arrā&lt;/em&gt; ('Allah'), but it's usually pronounced as something like [ʔɾ]. [araː] would probably be perceived as /araː/, not /arraː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T03:31:21.603" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T03:31:21.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28578" CreationDate="2018-08-02T05:13:33.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;P. 183 of the Handbook of the IPA (1999) lists the character and identifies it as a syllable break. The latter example illustrates the well-known fact that syllable breaks are higher level phonological abstractions rather than direct phonetic observations. Many people maintain that the syllable break in &quot;courage&quot; is before the rhotic, and many people maintain the contrary position that the break comes after it. The former transcription with &quot;.nt&quot; is, uh, rather anomalous but maybe someone has a syllabification with [nt] in the onset. I can't say I've ever seen that, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slashes and brackets are not phonetic elements, they are notations signifying kind of analysis. They too are identified, p. 175, as enclosing phonetic (&quot;[]&quot;) versus phonemic (&quot;//&quot;) transcription. IPA does not posit a theory of the difference between phonetic versus phonemic. Actual usage is highly variable, where slashes might mean &quot;underlying&quot; or &quot;some derived pre-phonetic representation&quot;, and brackets mean &quot;any non-underlying representation&quot;. To understand an author's use of brackets and slashes, you have to understand their theory of representational levels (and the rules of the journal that they are publishing in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T15:34:15.883" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:34:15.883" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28569" CreationDate="2018-08-02T08:16:31.887" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, whether a nominal is a complement or an adjunct of the verb makes a big difference as to whether it should be counted in valency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The artificial logical languages Loglan and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwil9e7Q8s3cAhXJVbwKHX0zANoQFjAAegQICBAB&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLojban&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw3IUdjXMDsgYaaZ5ZuL2znQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; permit five arguments for their semantically primitive predicates. (Lojban at least permits more arguments in compounds with subscripted case markers, but it's doubtful that has happened in practice.) Yes, it is artificial, and idiosyncratic in what it deems a predicate argument; but the listing does rely on some semantic analysis of valency, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjy9dGk8s3cAhVHgrwKHZ2vCW8QFjABegQIBhAB&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lojban.org%2Fpublications%2Fwordlists%2Fgismu.txt&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0Nifwd3YDvSRUh4uwlvXJK&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban list of predicates&lt;/a&gt;, 18 predicates have five places. The arguments of Lojban predicates are things that I think most linguists would regard as adjuncts in natural language, and the list includes what languages would typically realise as nouns; so it's not unproblematic as a comparison. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;boxna&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wave&quot;: wave, medium, wave-form, wave-length, frequency (not particularly natural, and nominal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cilre&lt;/em&gt; &quot;learn&quot;: learner, propositions (things learned), subject matter, source, method (&quot;V learned W about X from Y through Z&quot;: Z would typically be analysed as an adjunct and the distinction between W and X does not have to be modelled as two distinct arguments)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;plipe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;jump&quot;: agent, destination, origin, height reached, propulsion (not clear that the height and propulsion are essential arguments).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the list, the strongest candidates for 5-valent predicates that I see are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;benji&lt;/em&gt; &quot;transfer&quot;: agent, object, receiver, origin, means/medium&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bevri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;carry&quot;:  agent, object, receiver, origin, path (via)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;klama&lt;/em&gt; &quot;go&quot;: agent, destination, origin, route, means/vehicle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;fanva&lt;/em&gt; &quot;translate&quot;: agent, source text, target language, source language, translation text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;karbi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;compare&quot;: observer, comparatum, comparandum, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertium_comparationis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;property of comparison&lt;/a&gt;, result of comparison (though natural language would not express it this way)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;karbi&lt;/em&gt; is pedantic, and &lt;em&gt;benji/bevri/klama&lt;/em&gt; all involve a route or vehicle (or both), which is arguably an adjunct. The strongest of them all, even if it is a verb of literate culture, is &lt;em&gt;fanva&lt;/em&gt; &quot;translate&quot;: &quot;V translates W from X into Y as Z&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:16:31.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20039" CreationDate="2018-08-02T08:27:57.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Present and past participles can function like nouns, adjectives or verbs.  There are clearly some examples where the non-lemma form has taken on a life of its own.  There are some which have currency and their own dictionary entry but are still essentially semantically logically derived from their theoretical lemma.  And there are those which do not have much currency but can be derived productively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/u/pos/VERB.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Universal Dependencies VERB doc&lt;/a&gt; considers it arbitrary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that participles are word forms that may share properties and usage of adjectives and verbs. Depending on language and context, they may be classified as either VERB or ADJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They forgot NOUN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28352/stolen-part-of-speech/28356&quot;&gt;Stolen, part of speech&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1360/english-words-which-are-both-verbs-and-adjectives&quot;&gt;English words which are both verbs and adjectives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28529/why-do-determining-and-determined-have-different-lemmas&quot;&gt;Why do &amp;quot;determining&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;determined&amp;quot; have different lemmas?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:27:57.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28567" CreationDate="2018-08-02T12:14:19.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A nice question, especially when having considered the implications of non-static &#xA; -- that is, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, since it is often related to verbs -- vs static -- &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; --&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarly.com/blog/like-vs-as/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dichotomy in English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike in English semantics, the Estonian pairs of Translative VS Essive include not just static/non-static, but also evident / non-evident dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.colanguage.com/translative-case-estonian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The semantics of the Estonian cases&lt;/a&gt; are indeed similar to those of Finnish, with the exception of the modal meaning. Cf. the examples as found in the link given by Nick Nicholas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Est. Translative:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Ta peab mind targa&lt;strong&gt;ks&lt;/strong&gt; = He considers me (to be) smart.&#xA;             Õpetaja oli meile eeskuju&lt;strong&gt;ks&lt;/strong&gt; = The teacher was a model figure for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finn. Essive:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;     Hän pitää mua fiksu&lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;                  Opettaja oli meille esikuva&lt;strong&gt;na&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general difference between Translative and Essive is that of 'Non-Static and Evident' Translative vs 'Static and Non-Evident Essive', cf Finnish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Liikemiehenä olen samaa mieltä.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; = As a businessman, I agree. (The state of being a businessman is not evidential to an addressee)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hänkin tulee liikemieheksi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  = He is to become a businessman, too. (The state or possibility of becoming a businessman is evident to a speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Estonian seems to follow the same rules, except that 'Modal Essive' in Finnish -- [to be regarded or to be considered as] -- has become the Estonian 'Modal Translative'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Estonian case semantics seem to be more verb-driven as compared to those in Finnish, cf. Estonian &#xA;                              Ta tuli esimese&lt;strong&gt;ks&lt;/strong&gt; ((S)he arrived first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the Finnish phrase&#xA;                             Hän tuli ensimmäise&lt;strong&gt;nä&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my intuition is that the author has been referring mainly to that particularly Estonian, 'modal' semantics of the Translative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1686" LastEditorUserId="1686" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T15:06:15.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T15:06:15.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9070" CreationDate="2018-08-02T12:41:35.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some general differences in pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+-------+---------+------+---------+&#xA;| Hindi | IPA (h) | Urdu | IPA (u) |&#xA;+-------+---------+------+---------+&#xA;| ङ     | /ŋ/     |     |          |&#xA;+-------+---------+      |         +&#xA;| ञ     | /ɲ/     | ن   | [n]      |&#xA;+-------+---------+      |         +&#xA;| ण     | /ɳ/     |      |         |&#xA;+-------+---------+------+---------+&#xA;|       |         | س    | [s]     |&#xA;+ ष     | /ʂ/     +------+---------+&#xA;|       |         | ش    | [ʃ]     |&#xA;+-------+---------+------+---------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, sounds incorporated from foreign loanwords are often pronounced with different realisations if the words are not well established in a certain dialect (e.g. Persian sounds in Hindi, Sanskrit sounds in Urdu):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɳ/&lt;/code&gt; ण   ڻ (Sanskrit)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ʒ/&lt;/code&gt; झ़  ژ (Persian, English)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt; फ़  ف (Persian, English, Portuguese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt; ज़  ز (Persian, English, Portuguese)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt; क़  ق (Persian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; ख़  خ (Persian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɣ/&lt;/code&gt; ग़  غ (Persian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some non-urban dialects of Hindi, &lt;code&gt;/f, z, ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; are realised as &lt;code&gt;/pʰ, dʒ, s/&lt;/code&gt;, though this is considered 'nonstandard'&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The maintenance of &lt;code&gt;/f, z, ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; is characteristic of all sociolects of Urdu however.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise &lt;code&gt;/ʒ/&lt;/code&gt;, though present in English loanwords as well as Persian, is extremely rare and as such often assimilated to &lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/dʒ/&lt;/code&gt; by Hindi speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other sounds which only exist in Persian loanwords are often pronounced with native realisations in Hindi&lt;sup&gt;1 2&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt; क़ ق (sometimes substituted for &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; (क) in Hindi)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; ख़ خ (sometimes substituted for &lt;code&gt;[kʰ]&lt;/code&gt; (ख) in Hindi)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ɣ/&lt;/code&gt; ग़ غ (sometimes substituted for &lt;code&gt;[ɡ]&lt;/code&gt; (ग) in Hindi).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vvuP8sD1wloC&amp;amp;pg=PR5&amp;amp;lpg=PR5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Primer of Modern Standard Hindi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Motilal Banarsidass&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=J3RSHWePhXwC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Indo-Aryan Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Colin Masica&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T12:41:35.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T13:03:26.387" Score="0" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have problems with the linguistic terms. I did not find satisfactory explanation&#xA;about &quot;referentiality&quot;. On the other hand, what are the differences between &quot;case&quot; and &quot;referentiality&quot;? If there is, I want to learn their features. Can you explain me with some examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22454" LastEditorUserId="22454" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T13:18:44.177" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T23:00:30.057" Title="What does &quot;referentiality&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28588" CreationDate="2018-08-02T16:50:59.023" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Peruvian friend informed me that a lemon is called &quot;lima&quot; in Peru while a lime is called &quot;limón&quot;. This contrasts with some other Spanish dialects that use the word &quot;limón&quot; for lemon and &quot;lima&quot; for lime. Is there a word for this phenomenon? Additionally, what are some examples in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the two words are from the same dialect, then what I'm describing is a pair of homonyms that have the same definitions—or more accurately, a pair of homonyms that have at least 2 definitions in common—but I don't know if this phenomenon is prevalent/important enough to have a word for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22457" LastEditorUserId="22457" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T15:50:41.903" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T15:50:41.903" Title="Is there a term when two words have swapped definitions in one language or dialect compared to another?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28587" CreationDate="2018-08-02T20:00:45.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there is a specific term for this, but it could be described as a cognate mutual pair of cognate &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26683/20700&quot;&gt;false friends&lt;/a&gt; (since both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lima#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;lima&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lim%C3%B3n#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;limón&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; derive from Arabic لَيْمُون‎ (&lt;em&gt;laymūn&lt;/em&gt;, “lemon, lime”)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/1999/272638&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; on ELU has a number of British/American English examples, but none that come in mutual pairs unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These wikipedia pages offer a more complete list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_having_different_meanings_in_American_and_British_English_(A%E2%80%93L)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of words having different meanings in American and British English (A–L)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_having_different_meanings_in_American_and_British_English_(M%E2%80%93Z)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of words having different meanings in American and British English (M–Z)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial example that comes to mind is Asian/Oriental:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Asian&lt;/code&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Br. En. From the Indian subcontinent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am. En. From East Asia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Oriental&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Br. En. From East Asia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am. En. From Asia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T20:33:52.783" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T20:33:52.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T21:18:40.360" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i say [va] will the vocal folds be continuously vibrating through the [v] or will they start vibrating at the initial onset of [v], lower in amplitude, and then start again at [a]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2831" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T22:13:43.253" Title="is voicing continuous in a voiced fricative?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28589" CreationDate="2018-08-02T21:53:15.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are asking about the magnitude of the source waveform, not the mouth output (acoustics). You'd need to hook yourself up to the machinery to find out for sure. The chances are reasonable that there is an initial voiceless period during the fricative. I don't know of any systematic studies of amplitude-dip within the fricative. There is a bit of a problem in defining &quot;at [a]&quot;, since the vocal tract opens continuously. Before the mouth is fully open, it is half-open, and a quarter-open (etc.) all of which affects the acoustic waveform and the oral pressure (which affects the ability of the vocal folds to vibrate). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper &quot;Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of voicing in fricatives and fricative clusters&quot; (JASA 91, 2979 by Stevens et al.) does attempt to estimate the amplitude of voicing from the amplitude of H1, but does not include initial context. In intervocalic contexts, there are multiple rates of decrease and increase of amplitude. The little vertical ticks are the points where amplitude has decreased by 10 db, which they use to define the interval &quot;duration of glottal vibration within the fricative&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9JcB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9JcB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T22:13:43.253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T22:13:43.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28587" CreationDate="2018-08-03T03:15:21.833" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the U.S., lemons and limes are similar, except limes tend to be smaller.  The -on at the end of &quot;lemon&quot; appears to be an augmentative form, so it might mean &quot;big lime&quot;.  For the term &quot;augmentative&quot;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.123teachme.com/learn_spanish/augmentative_terminations_theory_b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish diminutive and augmentative terminations&lt;/a&gt;, which gives an example &quot;una mujer - woman ---&gt; un mujerón: a big, strong woman&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not claiming anything about the actual etymologies, but just pointing out that it makes some sense to call a lemon a big lime.  Also, I've seen some rather large fruits called &quot;lima&quot; in Brazil, so I think there may be some confusion about what to call these similar fruits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt there is anything general or interesting going on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T03:15:21.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-04T00:22:05.120" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, some nasals don't seem to require nasal aspiration. For example, [m] and [n] seem to just involve oral occlusive voicing. I can plug my nose and still make such sounds. It surely sounds odd with a plugged nose, but the consonants are still distinguishable to me. If nasal passages aren't required, then is it really right to refer to them as &quot;nasal consonants&quot;? Or, am I missing something and the nasal passages are still required to seem degree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T15:55:36.770" Title="Do Nasal Consonants Require Nostrils?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28593" CreationDate="2018-08-04T05:22:16.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plugged nasals still involve the nasopharynx, even if air does not flow through the nares. The term &quot;nasal&quot; refers to a class of normal speech sounds where air does indeed flow through the nostrils, and doesn't refer to sounds produced by putting a cork in your nose. Our terminology is based on facts of normal speech.&#xA;Languages simply don't use plugged-nose &quot;dasals&quot;, so we don't have a term to refer to them. A dasal® is acoustically distinct from both an oral stop and a nasal. Nasals and dasals have a nasal side-cavity (and corresponding antiresonance), but the side cavity for a nasal is a tube open at both ends whereas the side cavity for a dasal is a tube close at one end, which changes its resonance frequency. You can probably identify the dasal based on the distinctive resonant pattern on surrounding dasalized vowels in plugged &quot;ama&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0kmJd9mUCWl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This recording&lt;/a&gt; contains [aba], and [aMa] where &quot;M&quot; is dasal [m]. In [aMa], the consonant is across-spliced from a dasal utterance of &lt;em&gt;ama&lt;/em&gt; – the point is that the similarity between nasal [m] and dasal [M] comes from the vowel context, not the consonant itself. By cross-splicing a nasal versus dasal consonant into an oral vowel context, you control the perceptual effect of the effect on vowels. If the utterances sound the same, that supports the view that the acoustic properties of the consonant are themselves fairly irrelevant (what matters in their effect on other sounds). If the utterances sound different, that would indicate a perceptual role for the subtle acoustic differences in the consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the acoustics of the consonant itself is not the main source of the perceptual distinction between oral and nasal consonants, you also predict that cross-splicing [m] into an oral versus versus nasal context ([aba] versus [ama]) would still maintain the difference between &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;. That is the &quot;different sound same context&quot; condition. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0GwuvTQ96bh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this recording&lt;/a&gt;, we have ordinary [m] spliced into the vowel context of &quot;aba&quot; and &quot;ama&quot;: that is the &quot;same sound different context&quot; condition. If the two utterances sound the same, that would support the view that the acoustics of the consonant itself plays an important role in perception, and if they sound different that supports the view that the consonant acoustics is relatively unimportant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T15:55:36.770" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T15:55:36.770" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-04T11:21:37.603" Score="4" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a diction/vocal issue from birth so I can not speak on the &quot;right rhythm&quot; of my tongue. My speech seems always slow and boring at my native language so that I have a huge difficult to verbally communicate with people. In portuguese I feel like words are extensive and I have to twist my lips so much to pronounce. Curiously when I talk in english I feel words flow out of my mouth much more naturally and quick almost like I had not any issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Would that be any kind of cultural disassociation syndrom? Or just a fact english is indeed an easy language to pronounce so that It help out on my issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22462" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:36:55.093" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:36:55.093" Title="Why do I speak more accurately in English rather than my native language?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;speed&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28595" CreationDate="2018-08-04T18:16:07.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-talkers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fast and slow languages&lt;/a&gt;, measured in syllables per second. I don't know about Portuguese, but Spanish is a fast language while English is a slow language. There is a correlation between the complexity of allowed syllables and slowness of a language: The more complex a syllable is, the slower the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe the syllable complexity of English is not an issue for you and the slowness of English comes just right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T15:30:51.220" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T15:30:51.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28605" CreationDate="2018-08-05T01:40:16.433" Score="8" ViewCount="685" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dental fricatives (/θ/ and /ð/; spelled with &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;) often present a challenge to non-native learners of English. Depending on the speaker's native language, different phonemes may be substituted. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indian accented English&lt;/a&gt;, the dental fricatives are replaced with some variation of /t/ or /tʰ/; native Mandarin speakers substitute /s/ or /z/. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4732/7dad6066a0a6aa1e37a83b5ac8a5d236a583.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is surprising because both Hindi and Mandarin have consonants close to /s/, /z/, /t/, and /tʰ/. What causes Hindi and Mandarin speakers to replace /θ/ with different sounds then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2726" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T10:47:03.387" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:28:00.530" Title="Why is the English phoneme /θ/ pronounced like /t/ in Indian accents but /s/ in Chinese accents?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28598" CreationDate="2018-08-05T10:46:26.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting the paper you link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particular sound which does not exist in the native language can therefore pose a difficulty for the second language learners to produce or some times to try to substitute those sounds with similar ones in their mother tongue. These sounds include both vowels and consonants. For example, there are no vowels like /æ/, /au/, and /ɛə/, etc. or &lt;strong&gt;no such consonants as /ð/, /θ/.&lt;/strong&gt; Therefore learners have trouble first of all in perceiving these sounds, and consequently &lt;strong&gt;try to find nearest equivalents to substitute those new sounds. A typical example will be the substitution of /s/ or /z/ for the English /ð/,&lt;/strong&gt; /ai/ or /e/ for the English /æ/ as in the word ‘that’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4732/7dad6066a0a6aa1e37a83b5ac8a5d236a583.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study of Pronunciation Problems of English Learners in China&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is simply that in each language, these sounds are perceived to be closer to the English sounds than other sounds available in their inventory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/θ/&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; are &lt;em&gt;dental fricatives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[z]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(the common mandarin realisations)&lt;/sub&gt; are &lt;em&gt;alveolar fricatives&lt;/em&gt;, so that which is different is the &lt;strong&gt;place&lt;/strong&gt; of articulation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[t̪ʰ]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;[d̪]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(the common hindi realisations)&lt;/sub&gt; are &lt;em&gt;dental plosives&lt;/em&gt;, so that which is different is &lt;strong&gt;manner&lt;/strong&gt; of articulation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8yDEH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8yDEH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T10:46:26.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28566" CreationDate="2018-08-05T12:53:26.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Derivation and inflection are different processes. Several proper nouns in Romance languages inflect for gender; in French, such inflection may be easily mistaken for a derivation, because the masculine gender usually takes a 0-desinence, while the feminine form takes an -e: Jean - Jeanne, Dominic - Dominique. But in other Romance languages, the difference is clearer: Paolo - Paola, Carlos - Carla, Alonzo - Alonza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is a common trend (more intense in French than in the other languages) to derive feminine proper names from masculine ones, often as diminutives (Charles - Charlotte, Carlos - Carlota) or generic adjective-forming suffixes (Giuseppe - Giuseppina), or even random feminine-looking endings (Carlos - Carlene, probably by analogy with Marlene).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reverse is much rarer. In Portuguese, I would point to &quot;Mariano&quot;, which while etymologically related to Marianus (and consequently Marius), is usually interpreted as as &quot;related or belonging to Maria&quot; (and in several cases, such as emancipated slaves, orphans, or illegitimate boys, may have been actually intended as that). Another example could be several Brazilian Portuguese names ending in &quot;ildo&quot;, which are etymologically related to germanic (and feminine) &quot;Hilde&quot;: Hildo, Arildo, Brunildo, Leovigildo (sometimes already as fancy constructions such as Josenildo, Marildo, or Jacildo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:53:26.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28569" CreationDate="2018-08-05T13:21:47.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;To carry&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[John] carried [two tons of steel] [from London] [to Manchester] [by truck].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a five-valency verb (and so is, at least, &quot;to bring&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T13:21:47.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-05T22:33:48.257" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Pedagogical grammars (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7533034&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Learner's Pocket Grammar&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(linguistics)#Predicative,_subject_and_object_complements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possible simple sentence structures&lt;/a&gt; are divided into the categories presented below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SV      subject, verb&#xA;SVO     subject, verb, object&#xA;SVC     subject, verb, subject complement&#xA;SVA     subject, verb, adverbial&#xA;SVOO    subject, verb, indirect object, direct object&#xA;SVOC    subject, verb, object, object complement&#xA;SVOA    subject, verb, object, adverbial&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also these kind of grammars say that we can add extra adverbials to the clause structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In generative grammar which terms cover the Pedagogical term adverbial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T22:33:48.257" Title="Pedagogical term &quot;adverbial&quot; is covered with which terms in generative grammar?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28598" CreationDate="2018-08-06T07:42:58.263" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Y14-1035&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a paper&lt;/a&gt; that's addressed a similar phenomenon of the different realizations of /θ/ between Cantonese and Sichuanese speakers, both of which are dialects of Chinese and share similar phonetic inventories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper conducted production and perception comparisons between Cantonese and Sichuanese native speakers as to explore the reason for different choices of realization for /θ/ in English as L2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The production tests came out somewhat insignificant. However, in perception tests, Cantonese speakers showed a significantly lower accuracy rates of discrimination between /θ/ and /f/ than Sichuanese speakers, and Sichuanese speakers between /θ/ and /s/, which aligned with their respective choice of realizations as discovered in a pilot test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the author argued with comparisons of the &lt;strong&gt;function load&lt;/strong&gt; of different phonemes in two dialects that different outputs for one L2 from different L1 speakers are rather frequency-motivated than markedness-motivated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18547" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T07:42:58.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2018-08-06T13:27:29.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of answers deal with regular orthography, but triple letters are often and colloquially used in non-standard spellings to express emotion or emphasis, e.g. German &lt;em&gt;Ich hab sich sooo lieb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I love you sooo&quot; or English &lt;em&gt;boooring&lt;/em&gt;. I am sure other languages have examples of this, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T13:27:29.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28610" CreationDate="2018-08-06T20:39:54.870" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tones in a tone language have values marked by 1 to 5. If a sound change happens by which tone values become lowered in some cases, e.g. the standard value of a tone in Mandarin is 214, while the second phase, raising to a high pitch, is often dropped and even always dropped in Taiwan Mandarin and the value becomes thus 21. The value of another tone seems lowered from 35 to 23.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tone system can be divided into two types: register tone system and contour tone system. Mandarin belongs to the latter one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in the register system the tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other, so the tones can't be all low and would always make high-low contrast. I assume thus if the tones values are lowered in a so large scale, some low tones will become the high, similar to a push chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While if the low-ization of tone values happens in a large scale in a languege with contour system, what will happen then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T20:53:55.077" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T12:56:02.233" Title="What impact does it bring if the tone values of a tone language are generally lowered?" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28607" CreationDate="2018-08-07T11:33:15.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are picking up on several features here, which I will attempt to disentangle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is the &lt;em&gt;allocation of tone numbers in IPA versus &quot;reality&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Tone &quot;letters&quot; were proposed in the IPA by the most illustrious linguist in Chinese in the 20th century, Yuen Ren Chao, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jacksonllee/chao1930/blob/master/chao1930-original.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 1930.&lt;/a&gt; The numbers were assigned later. One can see that it's particularly adapted for the multiple-(pitch) register contour tones of the Chinese varieties. In general, it fits into the schema (I hesitate to call it a theory) of High, Mid, Low that is intuitive to most people. The key here is &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what is the difference in actual frequency between 3 and 5, or 1 and 5? Everyone is different, and it is true that studies can vary (sometimes wildly). E.g. the studies of the Eastern Min dialect of Fuqing vary in their description of their tones (whether there are &lt;em&gt;that many&lt;/em&gt; falling tones or whether some of them are level pitch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mandarin Chinese has had its standard version reinforced through pedagogy for the best of 50 years (and perhaps longer) now, and so the 55 vs 35 vs 214 vs 53 has been trotted out so much to become a paradigm for a contour tone language in general. Does this really represent how actual Mandarin speakers speak now? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings us onto the second issue, documenting &lt;em&gt;variation&lt;/em&gt;. There have actually been studies on this between Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin. Most natives as well as learners (on both sides of the strait) will characterise Beijing Mandarin as having a much higher and wider pitch range, with Taiwan Mandarin much less. This is borne out by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1641&amp;amp;context=etd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; (figure 4.6 is particularly wonderful, although it doesn't show contour). We can see fairly clearly nonetheless that there is a variation in absolute frequency. However, is &lt;em&gt;relative frequency&lt;/em&gt; affected? I'd say that only tone three (historically 上聲 / 上声) is actually different to 213 (should be 21 in Taiwan, all the time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us to another aspect of variation: variation of context. It is well documented that Mandarin tone three changes to pitch level 35 (same as tone two) before another tone three (tone sandhi). But additionally, it is not really pronounced as 213 in connected speech anyway, but as 21 in connected speech (before other tones). Hence the functional load on the contours is somewhat lower in Mandarin than one might expect from looking at the tones in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally then, we have the issue of &lt;em&gt;diachronic tone  change&lt;/em&gt;. Bangkok Thai has had undergone relatively substantial changes to its citation &quot;high&quot; tone, where older female speakers have a &quot;hook&quot; in the tone such that there is a final falling section, whereas younger female speakers have a terminal rise, making the high tone concave (see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/research/WorkingPapers/wp-kanjana.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2009 paper&lt;/a&gt;, specifically figure 8). That makes the &quot;high&quot; tone the same shape as the &quot;rising&quot; tone, just at a higher pitch, for the younger speakers. Older speakers are thus likely to confuse the younger speakers' &quot;high&quot; and &quot;rising&quot; tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changsha Mandarin, a different branch of Mandarin from Standard Mandarin, is switching one of its 去声-derived tones (phonetic value 21) to the other (phonetic value 45) under the influence of Standard Mandarin (the tonal categories for related words are split differently). These changes in a single tone, merging with another tone, are more likely to be noticed than a simple register change across everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Fuqing dialect of Eastern Min, tone sandhi affecting both characters of a binomial sandhi domain has evolved, one of which includes a generalisation of rising tone. Fuqing is known for having no rising tones in isolation at all, but one high rising tone (35) emerging in tone sandhi. The newer generation (as of 1992!) in the Rongcheng variant (big city bit of Fuqing) has expanded the use of the sandhi rising tone to more sandhi pairs. Again, this has replaced whichever tones would have been used in sandhi by the older generation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in direct answer to your question: &lt;em&gt;anything could happen&lt;/em&gt;. But those two factors conditioning any phonological change still apply: 1) ease for the speaker; 2) ease for the listener.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T12:56:02.233" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T12:56:02.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6026" CreationDate="2018-08-07T12:46:58.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Classical Tibetan was toneless, just as modern Amdo Tibetan is, the classification into masculine / feminine / neuter (= common) [sorry to all those who are used to Scandinavian / Dutch noun gender] / very feminine / sub-feminine (barren) / nameless (= neuter) is based not on tone, but on the original type of consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Masculine = unaspirated voiceless&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neuter/Common = aspirated voiceless &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Feminine = voiced (but not nasal or liquid)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Very feminine = nasal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sub-feminine = liquid, h, vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Genderless/Neuter = semivowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The status of the sibilants ཤ /ʃa/ and ས /sa/ is disputed; some say feminine, some say neuter/common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this is not directly correlated to tone, the tone of the letter is easy predicted from the original type. However, there are further gradations. This is the most basic (and oldest)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Masculine = high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neuter/Common = mid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(all the) feminine = low&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more modern (where mid has more or less vanished, becoming merged with high)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;unaspirated voiceless = Masculine = high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;aspirated voiceless = Neuter/Common = high &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;voiced (not liquid or nasal) = (Simple) Feminine = low &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nasal = Very feminine = low&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;liquid = Sub-feminine = low&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sibilants = (Simple) feminine or Neuter/Common = high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;h = Sub-feminine = high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vowel = Sub-feminine = high&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;semivowel = Genderless/Neutral = low&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for tone sandhi, again there is no direct correlation between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T12:46:58.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-07T13:09:10.260" Score="15" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the possible exceptions of constructed languages, languages seem to evolve. As a real-world example, we note that Latin has evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What defines the transition between an ancestor language and a descendent language? At what point do we say &quot;These people in the Italian peninsula are no longer speaking Latin; they are speaking Italian&quot;? Similarly for the other Romance languages, and for the split between Spanish and Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carrying that further, at what point does Puertoriqueño cease to be a dialect of Spanish, and take on its own identity as a language? Similarly for Brazilian vs Portuguese, or the other various dialects of Spanish in Latin America, or even English/England vs English/Australia vs English/North America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: I'm interested in, for lack of a better term, the linguistic constraints that define the difference, rather than the politico-geographical factors that influenced the development of those constraints. For the historical developments of $ModernRomanceLanguage from Latin, or Portuguese from Spanish, I'm also curious about the &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21746" LastEditorUserId="21746" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T11:04:27.583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T18:19:11.293" Title="At what point does a language become its descendant?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28612" CreationDate="2018-08-07T15:59:02.313" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a difficult question. Greek is perceived as &lt;em&gt;one language&lt;/em&gt; despite the fact that Classical Greek is no longer intelligible for a native speaker of Modern Greek without exposure to the classical language. For the Romance language, the split into several &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; descendants (Italian, Provençal, French, Spanish ...) surely helped to form different identities and not seeing Italian as kind of &quot;popular Latin&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese is seen as &lt;em&gt;one language&lt;/em&gt; mainly for political reasons, although different &quot;dialects&quot; of Chinese are not mutually intelligible as spoken languages. On the other side, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin are considered different languages for political reasons, and there are ongoing language-planning activities to tear the languages further apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, the perception of one language or two language is not governed by linguistic criteria, but by political and cultural criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T15:59:02.313" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28616" CreationDate="2018-08-07T16:16:39.467" Score="2" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are possible diachronic developments of th sounds? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I am aware of th-stopping /ð/,/θ/ -&gt; /d/ and of th-fronting/θ/ -&gt; /f/. Are there other developments of ð/ and /θ/ attested in the evolution of natural languages? I am not interested in borrowing and loanword pronunciation, but in internal developments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T19:16:55.283" Title="Possible diachronic developments of th sounds" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28615" CreationDate="2018-08-07T16:46:36.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *ϑ becomes /ϑ/ in (classical) Arabic, /t/ in Aramaic and some Arabic dialects, /ʃ/ in Hebrew, /s/ in Amharic, /f/ in some Arabic dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Semitic *δ becomes /δ/ in (classical) Arabic, /d/ in Aramaic and some Arabic dialects, /z/ in Hebrew, Amharic and Akkadian, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Persian /ϑ/ becomes /h/ in Middle and New Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Iranian *d becomes *δ and then /l/ in Bactrian, Pashto and a few other Eastern Iranian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T16:57:50.643" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T16:57:50.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28615" CreationDate="2018-08-07T16:49:59.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lateralization to &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; is also attested in Algonquian and Hawrami Kurdish (questions regarding voicing are not beside the point: in Hawrami the fricative is indeed ð, and in Algonquian it's just the fact that voicing is not contrastive that drives the choice of θ over ð). In North Saami, θ becomes [s] and rumor has it [x], depending on dialect, and this also happened in Spanish. In New Jersey, θ→t̪ which contrasts with t (probably not prestige dialects). Swapping to various fricative places takes place in Athabascan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T16:49:59.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28615" CreationDate="2018-08-07T19:10:49.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/search?q=%CE%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searchable version of the &lt;em&gt;Index Diachronica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (courtesy of chridd), I found some other possible developments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Algonquian to Kennebec River Abenaki:&#xA;&lt;br&gt;*θ → n / #_&#xA;&lt;br&gt;*θ → s / _k&#xA;&lt;br&gt;*θ → r &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Siouan-Iroquoian to Proto-Siouan:&#xA;&lt;br&gt;*θ → *r&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it certainly doesn't seem implausible from a theoretical standpoint that an interdental fricative could develop to a rhotic. Unfortunately, both examples of *θ → r in the &lt;em&gt;Index&lt;/em&gt; involve reconstructions; I'm not sure if there are any known examples of this sound change being observed more directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T19:16:55.283" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T19:16:55.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8847" CreationDate="2018-08-08T14:31:58.880" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;a bit outdated, but look up intonation only languages!&#xA;Basically they all are free to lengthen vowels independantly from prosody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22487" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T14:31:58.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-08T16:01:27.467" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning about &lt;a href=&quot;https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED113735&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hunt's (1965)&lt;/a&gt; system of parsing writing into T-units (minimal terminable units) and clauses.  In this system, a T-unit is &quot;one main clause with all the subordinate clauses attached to it [if any]... An &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; between two main clauses would always go with the second clause, beginning it just as coordinating conjunctions so often begin the sentences of mature writers&quot;(p. 20), while a clause is &quot;a structure with a subject and a finite verb (a verb with a tense marker). If subjects were coordinated, they merely lengthened the clause, and if any part of the verb phrase was coordinated, that also merely lengthened the clause&quot; (p. 15).  This system is useful for breaking up the writing of children, who often write long compound sentences connected by &quot;and&quot;.  Hunt provides this example of an essay written by a fourth grader:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the movie we saw about Moby Dick the white whale. The captain said if you can kill the white whale Moby Dick, I will give this gold to the one that can do it, and it is worth sixteen dollars. They tried and tried but while they were trying they killed a whale and used the oil for the lamps. They almost caught the white whale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Hunt transcribes this into T-units (each on its own line), with clauses split by slashes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I like the movie / we saw about Moby Dick the white whale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The captain said / if you can kill the white whale Moby Dick / I will give this gold to the one / that can do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) And it is worth sixteen dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) They tried and tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) But / while they were trying / they killed a whale and used the oil for the lamps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) They almost caught the white whale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand why there is a slash after &quot;But&quot; in T-unit 5--&quot;but&quot; does not contain its own noun-verb pair, and it seems to me that this &quot;but&quot; does not have a very different function than &quot;and&quot; (in T-unit 3).  Is there some finer point of grammar that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22489" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T01:04:40.680" Title="Why would &quot;But&quot; function as its own clause in Hunt's (1965) T-unit and clause system?" Tags="&lt;subordination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28598" CreationDate="2018-08-08T19:35:55.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question without a clear answer. People have struggled to find the answer since the 1970s:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-linguistics-revue-canadienne-de-linguistique/article/role-of-perception-in-differential-substitution/C38C4DDB31314C0A9F9BA1F9750886F6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my 2002 paper&lt;/a&gt; with many references listed in Appendix A. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/13053107/The_Perception_and_Production_of_Interdental_Fricatives_in_Second_Language_Acquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my dissertation&lt;/a&gt; on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many cases of two languages or two dialects with the same or similar phonological inventories (the same phonemes), which substitute different sounds in place of /θ/, usually either [t, f, s]. The consonant [t] appears to be the most frequent substitute, and this is usually attributed to it being the &quot;unmarked&quot; consonant (most frequent cross-linguistically, easy to articulate).&#xA;Researchers have proposed many different solutions, but as far as I know, there is little consensus. Some have proposed that different dialects have different grammars (e.g. Weinberger 1988, Brown 1998, Lombardi 2003). Others say that it depends on &quot;functional load&quot; (e.g. Hancin-Bhatt 1994): The functional load of a given feature value (e.g. +continuant) is equivalent to the number of times it is specified in the phonemic inventory divided by the total number of phonemes. Note that this approach does not account for different substitutions in two dialects with the same phonemic inventory (e.g. France French [s] vs. Québec French [t]). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still others say that it is not the phonemic inventory that is important, but instead it is the phonetic implementation that matters (e.g. Brannen 2002, 2011). For example, the actual pronunciation of /t/ can be different from one dialect to another, e.g. English has an alveolar /t/, but many languages have a dental /t/ (closer to the place of articulation of [θ] which would make dental [t] a good substitute.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is clear from the research however is that this is not simply a production phenomenon: speakers of languages that do not have [θ] misperceive this sound differently, and it depends on their native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brown, C. (1998). &lt;em&gt;The role of the L1 grammar in the L2 acquisition of segmental structure.&lt;/em&gt; Second Language Research , 14, 136-193. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hancin-Bhatt, B. (1994b). &lt;em&gt;Segment transfer: A consequence of a dynamic system.&lt;/em&gt; Second Language Research , 10 (3), 241-269. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lombardi, L. (2003). &lt;em&gt;Second language data and constraints on Manner: Explaining substitutions for the English.&lt;/em&gt; Second Language Research , 19 (3), 225-250. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Weinberger, S. H. (1988). &lt;em&gt;Theoretical Foundations of Second Language Phonology.&lt;/em&gt; PhD Dissertation . University of Washington.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T10:35:18.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T10:35:18.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28628" CreationDate="2018-08-08T21:12:01.343" Score="7" ViewCount="824" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always assumed that the English word &quot;Garden&quot; was similar to the German &quot;Garten&quot; due to the Germanic roots of English. &#xA;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language#Characteristics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Garden&quot; in English is related to the French &quot;Jardin&quot; through the Norman &quot;Gardin&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, why are the English word and German word so similar?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T22:07:50.923" Title="Does the English &quot;Garden&quot; come from the French &quot;Jardin&quot; or the German &quot;Garten&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28625" CreationDate="2018-08-08T22:18:53.833" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I am not a native speaker so forgive me any spelling and grammar mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to approach this question from a comparative etymological point of view which is sadly often seen as more speculative than scientific. I use it to gain more understanding when the usual methods fail to give more insight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All words Garden, Garten, Gaard, Gardin and Jardin stem from the same source. The source is the description of what a Garden is in the context of a piece of land. It is locked, guarded, surrounded. In comparative etymology you could compare these words with words expressing the same idea but in a different context like ‘curtain’ and ‘karton’ (cardboard in Dutch) but also ‘guardian’, ‘tracheas’, ‘cigarette’ and even the Mesopotamian Ziggurat. The easiest way to explain the roots forming ‘garden’ is comparitive: ‘cheri’ the transliteration of the Greek word for  ‘hand’ is cognate to the ‘gr-‘ root in words like ‘grip’, ‘grab’, ‘greifen’. One of the functions of the hand is to ‘enclose’ which shows the comparative similarity between garden and hand (grab/grip). The ‘-den’ ending seems a root cognate to the Dutch word ‘tuin’ meaning ‘garden’ and English ‘town’ meaning an ’enclosed settlement’ leading back to an earlier form meaning ‘rising’ or go up/build up, Maybe initially ‘laid down’ or settles down. This is still seen in the similar spelling of the near homophone ‘down’ by which the vertical meaning was preserved, unlike in the word town. So all garden translations mentioned express a descriptive idea: ‘enclosed piece of land’ which can be specified as ‘enclosed settlement’ if there are buildings involved (town) or merely the garden enclosed by a fence, hedges, stone or mud walls either for defensive purposes against humans and animals and/or as a markation of possession before map making. &#xA;Conventional etymology will not take this approach though, probably linking it to PIE as can be seen here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/%C7%B5%CA%B0%C3%B3rtos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ǵʰórtos&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But language is culture and aGRiculture is too. Gardens contain agriculture (agri-cul-ture roots meaning ‘hand-sky-earth’ which must be interpreted as ‘sown grown down’. It is no coincidence that these three words end with ‘-own’; a root found in ‘un’-der, ‘no’ and ‘dawn’ (the low (down) position of the sun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more thing about the famous Garden of Eden. Eden means ‘time’ as Garden of Eden means the enclosure of time. Adam (earth) and Eve (sky) show a transition from the hunter gatherer style of living to agriculture as Cain (the farmer!) kills Abel (the shepherd). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘garden’ can be traced back to the very metaphorical root of civilization. And since agriculture was invented in the Levant, it is no wonder that such a powerful invention as agriculture created the gardened society we live in today. The Anglo-Saxons (originally Germans) kept the German spelling but adopted the softer French ‘d’ probably in the period where English royalty spoke French as a status symbol. American English adapted Yard (meaning garden) from French Jardin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My apologies this answer got so long. But it is one of my favorite words and a comparative jewel in Pandora’s etymology box. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T22:07:50.923" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T22:07:50.923" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28612" CreationDate="2018-08-08T22:31:09.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The philosophical answer that it is a continuüm is correct, but natural borders like seas, rivers, mountain ranges and even city limits have their influence on languages. It is not only political and cultural, but also natural that changes in languages and mingling with other languages or not create enough differences that you can at a certain point get away with calling it a different language. In the most extreme case it could be said about two groups speaking an identical language with one of them having a word the other group does not use. That said a language is different when it has its own word base that differs from the language it mostly came forth from. Put the line wherever you wish, as long as it is founded. Even within city limits...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T22:31:09.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28625" CreationDate="2018-08-09T04:00:32.213" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First of all, a warning: all these etymologies are to some extent hypothetical. Especially when it gets back to Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, there's no actual proof of how the language worked; it's all reconstructed by linguists. But these reconstructions are generally quite informative, even if we can never be 100% sure they're right. Reconstructed words are marked with a star.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version: the English and French words are related more closely than the English and German words, though they all go back to the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in Proto-Indo-European, the oldest reconstructible ancestor of English, there was a root *&lt;em&gt;gʰ-rdʰ-&lt;/em&gt; meaning &amp;quot;enclose&amp;quot;. One form of this word was *&lt;em&gt;gʰ-ó-rdʰ-os&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;enclosure&amp;quot;. This led to a great number of words across Eurasia, such as Russian &lt;em&gt;górod&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;town&amp;quot;, Latin &lt;em&gt;hortus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;garden&amp;quot;, and Welsh &lt;em&gt;garth&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;hill&amp;quot;. But we're only interested in one specific descendant from this stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the branch of Proto-Indo-European from which English and German and Icelandic (and several other languages) descend, this eventually became *&lt;em&gt;garđô&lt;/em&gt;, still meaning &amp;quot;enclosure&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here, the line of descent splits!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old High German&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German wasn't affected much by Frankish or the Romance languages, compared to English and French. The Proto-Germanic *&lt;em&gt;garđô&lt;/em&gt; led to Old High German &lt;em&gt;garto&lt;/em&gt;, Middle High German &lt;em&gt;garte&lt;/em&gt;, and finally Modern German &lt;em&gt;Garten&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old English&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old English, *&lt;em&gt;garđô&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;ġeard&lt;/em&gt;, which led to Middle English &lt;em&gt;yeard&lt;/em&gt;, and thus Modern English &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;em&gt;yard&lt;/em&gt; is actually the &amp;quot;purest&amp;quot; English cognate to German &lt;em&gt;Garten&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old Frankish&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the other languages descended from Proto-Germanic is called Frankish. It's now died out, but it was spoken in what is now France. In this language, *&lt;em&gt;garđô&lt;/em&gt; became *&lt;em&gt;gardō&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Vulgar Latin&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Vulgar Latin spoken at the time borrowed the Frankish word as an adjective &lt;em&gt;gardinus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;pertaining to gardens&amp;quot;. This definitely came from *&lt;em&gt;gardō&lt;/em&gt;, but the &lt;em&gt;-in-&lt;/em&gt; might be a Vulgar Latin diminutive or adjective-forming suffix, or might be from a different form of the Frankish word: without more information on Frankish we can't really be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And the line of descent splits again.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old French&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old French the Vulgar Latin word evolved into &lt;em&gt;jardin&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;garden&amp;quot; quite regularly. This stayed the same all the way to Modern French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Anglo-Norman&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another branch of what we now call French ended up coming to England with the Norman conquest. In this branch, the word stayed &lt;em&gt;gardin&lt;/em&gt;, without the first consonant changing. This became Modern English &lt;em&gt;garden&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T04:06:07.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T13:47:00.343" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently i'm trying to understand what Distributed Morphology (DM, as introduced by Halle&amp;amp;Marantz 1993) is about.&#xA;One of the basic operations belonging to this framework is &lt;strong&gt;fission&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, i'm not sure if i understand the idea of fission. Let me demonstrate this by presenting the following &lt;strong&gt;made up paradigm for a personal pronoun&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NcpN6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NcpN6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also alreay decomposed the features into binary features (there might be more sophistcated ways to do this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EmG6k.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EmG6k.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that we only have &lt;strong&gt;one morphem initially&lt;/strong&gt; available for insertion, one could introduce the following rule of fission to explain the syncretisms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[±Obj, ±1, ±2, ±Sg] -&gt; [[±1, ±2][±Obj, ±Sg]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this rule is not supposed to have any restrictions, so the fission applies to every form of the pronoun. &lt;strong&gt;By applying this fission, the features are seemingly rearranged in a certain order&lt;/strong&gt; which will determine the order later when we insert the vocabulary items, at least that's the idea.&#xA;What bothers me is that this whole process seems rather &lt;strong&gt;arbitrary&lt;/strong&gt;. To me it looks like the order of the brackets after fission could easily be reversed. But let's proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need rules for the insertion of the vocabulary items:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/fa/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [+1]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/sa/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [+2]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ta/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/re/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [+Sg, -Obj]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/si/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [+Sg]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ro/ &amp;lt;-&gt; [ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a proper analysis?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On first sight, it looks like it could be. For example, for the first slot in case of &lt;em&gt;1st Pers Sg. Nom.&lt;/em&gt; ([+1][-Obj, +Sg]), &lt;em&gt;/fa/&lt;/em&gt; is the most specific item which would fit. And since the features reflecting Person are in the first slot exclusively, &lt;em&gt;/fa/&lt;/em&gt; would be inserted at this spot correctly. But again, this looks a bit &quot;too easy&quot; to me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Anoter irritating aspect to me is, that we have two vocabulary items here without any context (&lt;em&gt;/ta/&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;/ro/&lt;/em&gt;). One is only supposed to be inserted in the first slot, the other one into the second slot obviously. Again i'm not sure if this is a valid approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that actually i'm currently trying to analyze a much more complex paradigm coming from a real language. But to ask my question in a more straightforward way, i decided to make up an example for the sake of simplicity. I'm also reading the original papers by Halle, Marantz etc. but i'm having a hard time understanding them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL,DR:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In Distributed Morphology, can fission determine the order of morphems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22476" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T13:47:00.343" Title="Fission in Distributed Morphology - how does it work?" Tags="&lt;distributed-morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T18:05:30.843" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there is this semantics/psycholinguistics concept called mental-priming, which says for a concept called 'red' nearby concepts like apple, color, danger etc. 'light up' . Can we teach Mary, what Red is like by explaining the other concepts that are nearby for normal people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T22:44:35.913" Title="Can we use the reverse of mental priming to get out of the 'Mary's Room' problem?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-08-22T17:32:10.503" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28633" CreationDate="2018-08-09T22:37:16.413" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there distinct phonemes for labiodental fricatives articulated with the upper teeth touching the lower lip from the inside (like in English /f/) and ones that are articulated with the tip of the upper teeth placed on the lower lip (like biting your lip only gentler)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise for dental fricatives between phonemes articulated with the tip of the tongue touching the teeth (like in English /θ/ ) and one articulated with the front of the tongue between the teeth (like biting tour tongue)? And for the tip of the tongue pressed against the upper teeth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all these are the distinct phonetic symbols or are they just represented by the symbols for the standard positions marked with diacritics (like θ̟ and θ̝)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22496" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T09:23:14.277" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T09:23:14.277" Title="Dental and labiodental fricatives with different relative positions of the articulators" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28632" CreationDate="2018-08-09T23:26:41.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such contrasts are not attested in any known language. In the case of the two kinds of labiodentals, the distinction would be auditorily unlearnable since the acoustic consequences are negligible. However, dental versus interdental non-sibilant fricatives have been observed, but never found to contrast. Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt; mention Spanish vs. Tamil as examples of interdental vs. dental fricatives, and California English vs. UK English as illustrating the same difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will not be a distinction in symbols until the difference is shown to be phonemic in some languages; until then, you can use diacritics (and even then, it has to be officially proposed and voted on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T23:26:41.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28625" CreationDate="2018-08-10T04:35:02.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I always assumed that the English word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt;arden&lt;/em&gt; was similar to the German &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt;arten&lt;/em&gt; due to the Germanic roots of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, then it's obviously a duck ... right ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us take a look at the following English-German list, and see if we notice something :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;da&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; - Ta&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;e&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;e - Au&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;e, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;hone&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt; - Hon&lt;strong&gt;ig&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;ester(day) - &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;estern, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we were to take the German word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt;arten&lt;/em&gt;, and a list of English synonyms for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;arden&lt;/em&gt;, could we find there a word that relates to it in the same way as above ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this is the case, why are the English word and German word so similar ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Similarity&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;irrelevant&lt;/a&gt; !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22dog%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Mbabaram word for &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt; is the same as in English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the Romanian &lt;em&gt;iubire&lt;/em&gt; looks nothing like the English &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;, yet they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;related&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; See :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stephen Anderson&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Languages: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, page &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=A9AnPjrEB_EC&amp;amp;pg=PA36&amp;amp;dq=dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;36&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;R. M. W. Dixon&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker&lt;/em&gt;, pages &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=W4ENheIuPG8C&amp;amp;pg=PA107&amp;amp;dq=dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;107&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/books?id=W4ENheIuPG8C&amp;amp;pg=PA129&amp;amp;dq=dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;129&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; The Romanian &lt;em&gt;iub&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; comes from the Slavic &lt;em&gt;ljub&lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is related to the German &lt;em&gt;lieb&lt;strong&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, itself a cognate of the English &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;. (Why is &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; connected to &lt;em&gt;lie&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; ? For the same reason that &lt;em&gt;li&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; relates to &lt;em&gt;le&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;star&lt;strong&gt;v&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ster&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastEditorUserId="5534" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T12:58:37.570" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T12:58:37.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T12:01:23.960" Score="3" ViewCount="1771" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does syntactic (structural) ambiguity always come with semantic ambiguity, or is semantic ambiguity always due to syntactic ambiguity? Or are both statements correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T23:51:34.110" Title="Syntactic and semantic ambiguity" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T12:13:05.340" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently joined a discussion in which some of the participants insist that if one doesn't understand the nature of the difference between two or more words (the ones discussed by us are synonyms or near-synonyms, but it could be a more general problem) at a particular synchronic level, they can resort to etymology to figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have expressed my doubts, because I don't believe etymology can do that. I believe etymology can be used to explain how such differences may have &lt;strong&gt;arisen&lt;/strong&gt;, but if we actually want to &lt;strong&gt;grasp&lt;/strong&gt; them at all, we need to study their &lt;strong&gt;synchronic&lt;/strong&gt; properties in &lt;strong&gt;synchronic&lt;/strong&gt; contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody possibly provide me with some arguments (and/or examples) that could either &lt;strong&gt;confirm&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;refute&lt;/strong&gt; my opinion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've only been able to come up with the imperfect example of English '&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;arm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' and Czech '&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;rameno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;': If we only knew the meaning of the Proto-Indo-European root they both come from, but didn't know their current meanings, we wouldn't be able to determine those meanings, would we? There would be no way of knowing that the latter actually means '&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;shoulder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;' in contemporary Czech, not '&lt;em&gt;arm&lt;/em&gt;' (and vice versa). Only &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; we have learnt their current meanings could we use etymology to explain how the differences may have come into being, am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks for any ideas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T21:12:04.180" Title="Can we use etymology to determine the nature of synchronic semantic and morphosyntactic differences between (near-)synonyms?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28637" CreationDate="2018-08-10T13:36:17.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yNjM75ItNKAC&amp;amp;pg=PA59&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the etymological fallacy&lt;/a&gt; is easily disproved with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;false friends&lt;/a&gt; that have the same etymological root. Your claim is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, English &lt;em&gt;embarassed&lt;/em&gt; and Spanish &lt;em&gt;embarazado/a&lt;/em&gt; (which means &lt;em&gt;pregnant&lt;/em&gt; in English). Charting the evolution of the derivative of Latin &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; and some kind of Ibero-Romance word &lt;em&gt;baraça&lt;/em&gt; (possibly from Celtic) is very interesting. But you are still taking data points from each occurrence of this combination across the centuries, and having to work out the meaning at each occurrence, not just at the &quot;root&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that it's useless of course, as you rightly point out. Etymology can strongly inform us of how things changed, and point to extra connections (cf. Spanish &lt;em&gt;encinto&lt;/em&gt; and Italian &lt;em&gt;incinto&lt;/em&gt;, pointing to a perceived connection between pregnancy and rope/noose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T15:32:37.923" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T15:32:37.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T23:19:52.417" Score="6" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, words like &quot;second&quot;, &quot;third&quot; etc. (also &quot;next&quot;, I guess) can be used with a superlative to count down from the maximum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some dictionaries call &quot;second&quot; an adverb in this context (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/second&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MW&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=second&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AHD&lt;/a&gt;) but the OED covers this usage under its entry for the adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not obvious to me how to analyze it. It does seem plausible to me that it is an adjective that modifies &quot;most common problem&quot; in a specialized way: (second (most common problem). This seems to be the structure given by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/link/construct-page-4.cgi#submit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link Grammar Parser&lt;/a&gt; by Davy Temperley, Daniel Sleator and John Lafferty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    +--------------------------Xp--------------------------+&#xA;    |              +---------------Ost---------------+     |&#xA;    |              |   +--------------Ds-------------+     |&#xA;    +---Wd---+-Ss*b+   +---L--+      +--EA--+----A---+     |&#xA;    |        |     |   |      |      |      |        |     |&#xA;&#xA;LEFT-WALL this.p is.v the second.a most common.a problem.n . &#xA;&#xA;Constituent tree:&#xA;&#xA;(S (NP This)&#xA;   (VP is&#xA;       (NP the&#xA;           (ADJP second)&#xA;           (ADJP (ADVP most)&#xA;                 common)&#xA;           problem))&#xA;   .)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it also seems kind of like &quot;second&quot; is an adverb that modifies the meaning of &quot;most common&quot;: ([second (most common)] problem). Of course, &quot;the second most common&quot; can be used without any explicit following noun, but I don't know if this is relevant, since I guess that could be analyzed as a kind of ellipsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility that seems to feel right to some people (although I don't really get why) is &quot;([(second most) common] problem)&quot;. I don't know if the fact that some people say things like &quot;the most and second most important reason(s)&quot; would support this analysis. I feel like the existence of phrases like &quot;second oldest&quot; or &quot;second highest&quot; counts as evidence against this analysis, because these examples show that &quot;second&quot; can be used with superlatives that don't contain the adverb &quot;most&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any published linguistic work that analyzes the syntax of this construction? If not, could someone post an answer that presents an analysis based on linguistic principles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-13T18:07:13.817" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T02:01:26.747" Title="What is the syntax of &quot;second&quot; in phrases like &quot;the second most common problem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28636" CreationDate="2018-08-11T01:44:06.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntactic ambiguity &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; imply semantic ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— He caught the bird in his pyjamas.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;— What was the bird doing in his pyjamas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Where does the preposition phrase attach?)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whether you can have syntactic ambiguity &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; entailing semantic ambiguity may depend on how you'd represent the sentence semantically. Here's one intuitive example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— I was rafting down a fast flowing river...&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;— Wait. A fast-flowing river, i.e. a river that flows fast?&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;— No, a fast, flowing river, i.e. a flowing river that is fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logical representation of those two options would show the difference, but could they ever pick out (&quot;mean&quot;) different set of entities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a more extreme example, here the scope of the adjective is ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Richard brought edible candles and food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposing that we define food as what is edible, here even the logical representation might show no difference: if food is all X such that X is edible, then the ambiguity about whether to add the predicate &quot;X is edible&quot; to food may be defined as redundant in the language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, however, it's very easy to have semantic ambiguity without syntactic ambiguity thanks to polysemy. Similar to TKR's suggestion in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're finished!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence clearly has only one tree (per theoretical framework ), but the meaning is also a function of the identity of the constituents, so whether this is &lt;em&gt;finished&lt;/em&gt; &quot;done your work&quot; or &lt;em&gt;finished&lt;/em&gt; &quot;done for&quot; is ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T01:44:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28658" CreationDate="2018-08-11T05:22:01.417" Score="5" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Ptolemy's Geography&lt;/strong&gt;, two people are mentioned by the name of &lt;code&gt;Thamyditai&lt;/code&gt; (6.7.4, pg 402 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=qL1AAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;Oaditae&lt;/code&gt; (6.7.21, pg 406 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.nl/books?id=qL1AAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the scanned mention of &lt;code&gt;Thamyditai&lt;/code&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ityV0.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ityV0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the scanned mention of &lt;code&gt;Oaditae&lt;/code&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qi732.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qi732.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, since &lt;code&gt;-tai&lt;/code&gt; seems to be common to both, what does it signify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The original names of these two people in their native tongues are Thamud and 'Aad &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2910" LastEditorUserId="2910" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T08:03:54.113" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T11:41:13.463" Title="Meaning of suffix -tai in Greek" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28642" CreationDate="2018-08-11T07:06:20.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like those ethnicons belong to Semitic people and the Greek plural -ai has been added to them. So if the native name of a single person was Thamidit, the Hellenized plural in Greek would be Thamiditai. Alternatevely, a -it- suffix has been added to a native name Thamid-, which is sometimes used as an agent suffix, origin, ethnicons etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are Greek ethnicons which have similar ending. For example &lt;em&gt;Πενταπολῖται&lt;/em&gt; (Pentapolitai) which is a composite word from &lt;em&gt;pente&lt;/em&gt; 'five' and &lt;em&gt;polis&lt;/em&gt; 'city'. The word for citizen in Greek is πολίτης where the suffix is actually -&lt;em&gt;itēs&lt;/em&gt; and the plural is πολίται with a suffix -ιται.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T10:01:47.333" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T10:01:47.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28646" CreationDate="2018-08-11T14:14:16.463" Score="6" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;affirmative action&quot; does not tell you what it is about. Even though the literal meaning of this phrase can be very broad (in theory it could be referring to affirmative action of achieving anything), but it is commonly used to refer to a very specific kind of affirmative action. What really matters is the specifics, which is the core meaning of the phrase but not captured within the phrase. For someone who does not know the context of the discussion, the phrase can be very confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is kind of like using the word &quot;dog&quot; refer to a specific kind of dog. And then in the whole public discussion of that specific kind of dog, it never has a specific name, just called &quot;dog&quot;. This is not a good example, but hope you know what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistic term for this kind of phenomenon? What are the other examples of this kind of usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22500" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T20:12:51.997" Title="What is the linguistic explanation of the phenomenon in &quot;affirmative action&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28645" CreationDate="2018-08-11T14:32:54.277" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialization_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specialization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a process in which a lexical term decreases in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are five basic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grammaticalization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; processes that you may find interesting to learn about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite often, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Euphemisms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; use neutral or generic words to mask taboo topics or profanity. Quoting the Wikipedia article linked above,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Affirmative action&lt;/em&gt;, meaning a preference for minorities or the historically disadvantaged, usually in employment or academic admissions. This term is sometimes &lt;em&gt;said to be a euphemism for reverse discrimination&lt;/em&gt;, or in the UK positive discrimination, which suggests an intentional bias that might be legally prohibited, or otherwise unpalatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Specialization can be combined with the adoption of a loanword. One example is that in Ukrainian, we have a generic word for &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/sobaka/&lt;/code&gt;. However, a certain breed of dogs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great&amp;nbsp;Dane&lt;/a&gt; (plus several others) are called literally &lt;code&gt;/dog/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-08-11T20:12:51.997" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T20:12:51.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-12T06:57:05.690" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that realization of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_orthography#S_and_Z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian /s/&lt;/a&gt; is not fully systematic and there are some exceptions. Is there any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_rule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonological rule&lt;/a&gt; for possible realizations of Italian /s/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T07:46:47.213" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:57:12.687" Title="Phonological rule for realizations of Italian /s/" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28639" CreationDate="2018-08-12T11:59:36.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary question was for a reference to scholarly treatment of the problem. Until somebody can deliver this, I might as well try to provoke it with a moon shot. You ask for an analysis based on indefinite &quot;linguistic principles&quot;. As there is no agreement on definite &quot;linguistic principles&quot;, the question is too open and cannot yield a correct answer, only opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From descriptive stand point, the construction is ambiguous. Ambiguity serves a purpose, because it increases understanding across different speakers so that parsing in multiple ways works without change in meaning. This is especially important for language acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From prescriptive point of view, consider number words in a special grammatical category, e.g. the numerals. Words like &quot;none&quot; and &quot;all&quot; in various contexts are even dubbed determiners or pronouns.&#xA;I don't see why this would be different for ordinals as opposed to cardinals. If there was a proper adverb, it would have to be &quot;secondly&quot;. Why isn't it, here? You might as well wonder for the syntax of &quot;bi-&quot;, which is just a morpheme, not even a particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare &quot;the second most common.&quot; (nominal adjective) or &quot;the second most common problem&quot; (noun phrase) the difference is minimal. It's primarily a question of processing, not production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand it as &quot;the second of the most common problems&quot;, in which second is a noun. Expanding on the idea, &quot;second&quot; denotes the depth of recursion, in &quot;the most common problem of the problems that are not the most common problem ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering number words, where &quot;two&quot; is simply described as numeral - not as adjective, as I do not see plurality listed in the order of adjectives, but &lt;em&gt;size&lt;/em&gt; leads the list and numerals would typically come before even that (e.g. &quot;one small rambling answer&quot;) - number words may belong in their own syntactic category indeed. There is a difference between ordinals and cardinals in mathematics, though, and hence in grammar, too. I really do not like the frequent one-catch-all word class of the adverbs without further distinguishing. Adverbs may well be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; first most fundamental word class. That's still an open issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opposite to your opinion, I find that &quot;second &lt;em&gt;superlative adjective&lt;/em&gt;&gt;&quot; is the shortest analysis of the question, disregarding the rest of the sentence, so it's the general answer, but poses the question of the &quot;most &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt;&quot; superlative. That's the real problem here. So a treatment of &quot;second most&quot; alone would be incomplete. Whereas there is little difference between ((second most) common) and (second (most common)). By definition there cannot be a second of the most common, because the most common is either singular, or an unordered set. But it still may work that way for you - well, I'm guessing - because from that contradiction you infer that something else is meant, you understand it in the first bracketing, but rebracket to fit your common model and employ some weird ad-hoc rational (sorry), that you are not even sure about and come here asking for, which might be (second [in the order of] (most common (problem[s]))) or even better, because it's reminiscent of naive set theory, s=max{x \in P: x \not = max(P)}, which translates to: second = (most common (problem)) of the problems that are not the most common). I cannot think of a rendering that keeps a linear structure without introducing ellipses or repetition ... except if using the initial &quot;second most&quot;. But that may be due to confirmation bias, as I am a speaker of German where &quot;zweitmeist&quot; is readily lexicalized. So we have to go deeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French &quot;le plus grand&quot; (the biggest) is completely natural except for a few idiomatic superlatives like &quot;le meilleur&quot; (the best). Whereas in German, this is not very common. If taking &quot;der bekannteste&quot; (&lt;strike&gt;the knownst&lt;/strike&gt; the most famous) the superlative does denote an increase not in quality, but quantity - how many people know the person. Otherwise &quot;bekannt&quot; is not comparable. I may know a book better, but not more than another. I may know more _ and better _, though. I know &quot;meist befahrene Straße&quot; (most traveled road), but I also know that &quot;meist&quot; means &quot;mostly&quot; next to &quot;most often&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &quot;Meister&quot; - master, we can deduce, with some suspense of disbelieve, that &lt;em&gt;meist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; are in the loosest sense intensifiers. Some disbelieve is necessary as Latin &lt;em&gt;magister&lt;/em&gt; is the most commonly assumed primary source for the term, from &lt;em&gt;magis&lt;/em&gt;, which is a doublet of &lt;em&gt;maior, maius&lt;/em&gt;. All these are derived from proto-indo-european *megH- (&lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt;), whence also &lt;em&gt;mega&lt;/em&gt;, with a suffix *-is, from *-yos. Whereas the &lt;em&gt;-most&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;utmost, foremost&lt;/em&gt; etc. is from different morphemes, *-umo- (which is somewhat obscure) plus *-istaz (related to the former *-is?), both are superlative forming suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if you understand second-most as &quot;secondest&quot;, I can completely agree with your objection. Although, given &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, it seems to be somewhat regular, maybe rather &quot;seconder&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T18:59:52.073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T18:59:52.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28612" CreationDate="2018-08-12T14:47:09.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(edited to reflect sumelic's comment below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point a language changes so much that it becomes another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a difficult question, that probably can only be answered in hindsight. At no moment in the convoluted history of Romance languages, anyone woke up and realized, &amp;quot;gee, this thing I am speaking is not Latin, it is, wow, French&amp;quot;. People just spoke the language of their time and place, or one or more of the languages of their time and place (in France, likely, Vulgar Latin and Frankish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time in history, people certainly distinguished Latin - the language in which the priest said the mass, which was mostly incomprehensible to them - from the language they actually spoke, which was, for lack of a better word, generally called &amp;quot;Vulgar&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Vernacular&amp;quot;, and quite certainly didn't constitute a unified language - it was different in Lisbon or Catania, Nice or Santander. When in contact with people of different places, people would recognise that those from other places spoke a different language - sometimes so far apart as to be unintelligible, sometimes close enough to be described like, &amp;quot;those damn Genoese and their ridiculous and wrong way of speaking&amp;quot;. But contact with foreigners was rare, and probably most accessible to people who could manage some Latin - Medieval Latin, already quite different from Classic Latin, but that remained the language of high culture throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Romans conquered Western Europe, there were already several differences between the language spoken by the Roman elite and the Roman populace, to which most of the conquering soldiers belonged. It is this variant of Latin - Vulgar Latin - that originated the several Romance languages (with the exception, I think, of Sardinian, which is more related to Classic Latin). To the extent that Romans were conscious of this dichotomy between their standard language and the language effectively spoken by common people, the divide is very old. Ciceron probably knew his language was different from the language of his servants, though he probably framed this as &amp;quot;proper Latin&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;debased&amp;quot;, Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vulgar Latin then evolved differently at the different parts of the Roman Empire/influence area. At some point in history, the differences were big enough that we can no longer speak of &amp;quot;Vulgar Latin&amp;quot; as one language. Unfortunately, this was mostly an undocumented process: people actually changing the language were illiterate, so they didn't write their language; and literate people wrote in Medieval Latin, not in Vulgar, and weren't really interested in writing about the commoners' language(s). But at some point the language spoken in the Iberic Peninsula was Iberic Romance rather than Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the scant documentation, we can use comparative method to understand such changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, here we have the history of a single word, from Classic Latin to Modern Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classic Latin: genu- (/genu/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classic Latin (diminutive of the former): genuculu- (/genukulu/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vulgar Latin: genuclu (/dʒenuklu/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western Romance: genuclu (/ʒenuklu/) (while Southern Romance kept the /dʒ/, as in Italian &amp;quot;ginocchio&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iberic Romance: *genollo (/ʒenoʎo/) (while Western Romance in the area that is now France saw a different evolution, which gave us French &amp;quot;genoux&amp;quot;, I suppose with the &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; originally pronounced, and then gone mute in Old or Modern French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Portuguese: jeolho (/ʒeoʎo/) (while the Spanish cognate, which would be something like &amp;quot;jenojo&amp;quot;, with the &amp;quot;j&amp;quot; pronounced as /x/, unfortunately (or fortunately, if you think in euphonic terms) being dropped in favour of the unrelated &amp;quot;rodilla&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Portuguese: joelho (/ʒoeʎu/ or /ʒweʎu/))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we know that the order of the changes is that, first /g/ to /dʒ/, then /kl/ to /ʎ/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from documentation (we have Old Portuguese texts with the word &amp;quot;jeolho&amp;quot;, for instance), we know that Medieval Latin has /dʒ/, and not /g/, so this sound must have changed very early and was probably done in Vulgar Latin; we know that all Romance languages have changed /kl/ into something different, so that it must have happened later, when Vulgar Latin was morphing into several different Romances; we know that Portuguese alone dropped intervocallic &amp;quot;n&amp;quot; (compare Portuguese &amp;quot;geral&amp;quot; to Spanish &amp;quot;general&amp;quot;, so that must have been even later, when Iberic Romance was dividing into Galician-Portuguese and Castillian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process then intertwined with the political process of the formation and unification of modern nation-States. At this point, the local elites of Portugal, Spain, France, decided that they would be better served by making their local languages literate than by trying to repopularise Latin, as it would help in constructing the borders, and in creating a national ideology that could justify the existence of the nation-State. At that point we have the earliest literature in those languages. This process was unfortunate for several Romance languages that didn't correspond to the political boundaries - Mirandese, Occitan, Catalan, Leonese, etc. And it originates the saying, &amp;quot;a language is a dialect with an army&amp;quot;, from which it is often deduced that the differences between languages is more political than linguistic (but notice, the army, and the State in general, are, besides obviously political entities, also &lt;em&gt;glossopoietic&lt;/em&gt; entities: military terms are coined by the army (and navy), and courts, police, universities, public schools, also coin a huge vocabulary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of Italy, the political process of unification of the nation-State happened much later, only in the 19th century, which favoured the permanence of several different local languages - Venetian, Sardinian, Sicilian, Tuscan, Neapolitan, Emilian, Lombard, Piedmontese, Calabrian, etc. - not all of which even belong to the same Romance branch (Sardinian is Insular Romance, Venetian is Western Romance, while most of the others are Southern Romance). So things in Italy are even more complicated than in Portugal, France, or Spain: while those have had national languages from the end of the Middle Ages, Italy chose Tuscan its national language, or based its national language on Tuscan (mainly due to the literary and cultural importance of Dante), only in the 19th century, much after everyone in the peninsula was very sure that what they spoke was not Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at what point we say &amp;quot;These people in the Italian peninsula are no longer speaking Latin; they are speaking Italian&amp;quot;? At no point. They stopped speaking Classic Latin at the end of the Antiquity, when cultured Latin evolved into Late Latin (which in turn evolved into Medieval Latin later), while popular Latin evolved into Vulgar Latin. At the Middle Ages, they were speaking several different languages, which can be linguistically grouped into three different &amp;quot;families&amp;quot;, Western Romance in the North, Insular Romance in Sardinia, and Southern Romance in most of the Peninsula and in Sicily. &amp;quot;Italian&amp;quot; as we know it was one of these Southern Romance languages, namely Tuscan, and spoken by a very small minority of the population up to the 1860, when Italy became a unified nation-State, and its State deliberately choose it as the national language, and enforced via public education (and active repression of the local languages, which became collectively know as &amp;quot;dialects&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But there certainly was some point in history, much before this, when people in Italy would listen to the mass and realise it was not the same language they used to speak. Probably as early as the 7th or 8th century, I would venture.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;the split between Spanish and Portuguese&amp;quot; (which is really the split between Castillian and Galician-Portuguese), it happened in the High Middle Ages, certainly before the split the &lt;em&gt;Condado Portucalense&lt;/em&gt; and the Kingdom of Spain. But then the political split reinforced the linguistic divide, making the languages further evolve apart from each other (and sparing Portuguese the fate of the minoritary languages of Spain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;at what point does Puertoriqueño cease to be a dialect of Spanish, and take on its own identity as a language? Similarly for Brazilian vs Portuguese, or the other various dialects of Spanish in Latin America, or even English/England vs English/Australia vs English/North America?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point in time it is impossible to know. Modern communication doesn't favour the division of languages - and, so, the process is bound to be slower, possibly much slower, than the split of Latin into several languages. Unless, of course, there is a collapse of modern civilisation, that breaks the communication system apart, so that people in Puerto Rico, Brazil, or Australia, are no longer in touch with Spain, Portugal, or England (which, as a second thought, is what happened to the Roman Empire too, so the odds are, if there is a civilisation collapse, in half a millenium, when finally Venezolans rediscover Spain, people in Latin America will be unable to understand Spaniards, and conversely). At what point in linguistic terms, when the spoken varieties of those languages become mutually incomprehensible (text is more conservative, and may allow for the fiction of linguistic unity, perhaps useful for political purposes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T01:17:30.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28612" CreationDate="2018-08-12T17:11:13.913" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One keyword here is holotype. E.g. Carl von Linne used his brother as type specimen for the Homo Sapiens, and the first Archaeopterix finds were all named differently because the relation among them wasn't clear. Definitions for familiar relations are based on a set of similarities. You could even have a phylogenetic tree of clade systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical Latin had Cicero, Ancient Greek had Homer, Standard High German has the guy in the evening news, the Queen's English is well received and so on. So far this is easy, but language depends on communication and dialogue, not a single person. Hence groups of speakers are compared. The biggest, accepted grouping is the language family, for example Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic. Some go even further and assume all extent languages developed from a common source. Hence I assume &lt;em&gt;proscription&lt;/em&gt; to some extend means &lt;em&gt;what was said for the first time&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt; is copying, and &lt;em&gt;prescription&lt;/em&gt; is what was said before. So a language changes by faulty description and other proscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is, what is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; language. My take is, language is uncountable, dialect is individual, and the plural, languages, is a multitude of instances of using the language. Which is a fuzzy set (see references e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FuzzyLogic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mathworld/fuzzy_sets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the small scale, even a single individual will make use of code switching for example, make up new sentences everyday and learn new words. The pressing question is how even a single word is learned, defined and produced, reinterpreted, and reproduced. Impressions left by a forbearer are as important, in the simple case, as much as imagination is in the big picture, from baby speech to high poetry. Hence I don't completely subscribe to the &lt;em&gt;single-mother hypothesis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T18:19:11.293" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T18:19:11.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28623" CreationDate="2018-08-12T17:25:34.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with this system and didn't follow your quotes, but, and I say this from a subjective point of view, this construction seems familiar. See where the comma is placed? The &quot;but&quot; relates to the phrase after the interjection. I'm not sure that is correct, but I will post it, while I need the rep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel even keen to put emphasis on the pause I would make. But! Until now I always decided not to and at best would use a colon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T17:25:34.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26758" CreationDate="2018-08-12T20:05:24.147" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to the previous answer by @luke-sawczak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How about glad, gland, glutton, glacier, glitch, globe, gloat, and glob, which have nothing to do with light or vision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glad: compare German glänzen, glatt. This is known.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gland: from a word meaning acorn. Sounds like folk etymology. With penis glans and Ger. Penis-Eichel taboo would likely obscure the origin. Acorns are yellow berries (cp. Ger. gelb, from same root as glad; compare jello, too?) and glans secretion may be shiny if healthy. The Penis glans may be smooth and shiny, too, not yellow, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glutton: I don't know, but compare Ger. &quot;schmierig&quot;, &quot;aalglatt&quot; (smudgy, of a person); reconstructed as from gulat-, throat. related to glosse? cp gloss? Again difficult because of taboo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glacier: obviously shiny and icy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glitch: compare Ger. glitschig (slippery, glibberish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;globe: a well polished pearl shines. the PIE root is comparable to the one for glad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gloat: same root as glad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glob: see glitch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then compare Ger. Glut, glühen, glow. Wiktionary has many reconstructions for Proto Indo European. But there it stops. Further back it's speculative. The question would be why these roots are so strong. There are many more gl- words, one has to wonder about their relation to this. Glück - luck; Glaube - believe; Gladiator; Glatze - bald-head; gleiten - glide; glib; glove; Further, copious amounts of words in German begin in gel-, but derivatives would be obscured by the prefix ge-, e.g. geliebt, Gelingen, Geländer, Gelage, geläutert, genau (gelle?!) ... the ablaut may differ actually, so Galgen, Gallien, Galiere, galant ... g can become y in English as in yell, yellow, (y)liver (choleric is indeed akin to yellow, though I'd expect cole, Glut in there) ... may also correspond to Ger. sch- in schlau, schländern, schlacke, Schelle, schlehe, schleichen, schlecken ... One PIE root for light is *lewk. For to lick it's * leygh, *lik. I'm heavily biased because I don't know languages outside of germanic, but link to PIE roots and I have often no idea how biased those are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very simple fact I observed: To produce the onset /l/ in lick an actually licking motion is made, of course highly reduced. This is not exactly new knowledge. Whereas for a shiny fire sense I would look further at Mongolian galt, sanskrit jvala, icelandic fjall. The later means mountain, recons. PIE *pels-, but I found all three from translations for volcano, literally compounds for fire mountain. For Icelandic I suppose a certain significance of those. Edit: And if that's from *pels, you should take note of Hawaiian lua pele - volcano. More directly, compare Pelz, Fell - pelt (fur); from *pel- (&lt;em&gt;skin, hide; to cover, wrap&lt;/em&gt;) and fur *peh₂- (“to protect, guard, graze, feed”); Fließ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Did @luke pick the examples on purpose? If the words all come from the same root, that's a simple explanation requiring no Sound symbolism. But of course (in reply to the comment on synchronic analysis): The origin might still be an influence to this day. On the other hand, cognates in other languages changed the phonetics and one has to wonder why, whether symbolism can be gleamed from it (Rus. &quot;xlat&quot; - cold e.g. relating to harsh conditions, but that's just fantastic speculation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T04:40:39.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T04:40:39.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28636" CreationDate="2018-08-13T14:11:17.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want, there could be scenarios where a syntactic ambiguity makes no difference in meaning, if you think of the syntactically ambiguous expression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1+1+2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which could mean both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1+1)+2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1+(1+2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and thus is syntactically ambiguous - but both readings evaluate to the same result (4), and thus are semantically not ambiguous, in a sense (in the sense where one identifies &quot;meaning&quot; with &quot;extension&quot;). This is because addition, although a binary operation, is associtative: &lt;code&gt;(a+b)+c = a+(b+c)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(One could make up a more linguistic examples with e.g. &quot;and&quot;, but then it's less clear that 1) associativity really holds and that 2) the conjunction is strictly binary and could not be viewed as ternary which would not yield this ambiguity.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the statement that semantic ambiguity must always be due to syntactic ambiguity is certainly untrue: The two different readings of &quot;He's mad&quot; that TKR provides in their comment are due to the semantic ambiguity of the lexical item &quot;mad&quot; - this is called &lt;strong&gt;lexical ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt; - while the syntactic structure is completely identical.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes yet another kind of ambiguity called &lt;strong&gt;scope ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt; is distinguished: The sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every child sang a song  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could be read as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For every child it holds that it sang some song (but possibly different ones among the children)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a particular song that was sung by every child (all children sing the same song)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which differ w.r.t. the scopal relations of the quantifiers &quot;every&quot; and &quot;a&quot; (scope = the part of the sentence that is under the influence of the operator) and thus differ in meaning, while the underlying sentence is (in terms of linguistic surface syntax with IP, VP etc.) structurally unambiguous and doesn't contain any lexcially ambiguous items either.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T23:51:34.110" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T23:51:34.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28647" CreationDate="2018-08-13T15:17:06.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vanoostendorp.nl/fonologie/italian.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the link in ukemi's comment&lt;/a&gt; gives a good description of the rules governing S-voicing, the main question here has a simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes in (standard/Tuscan) Italian.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is shown by (near-)minimal pairs such as &lt;em&gt;cosa&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ko.sa/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;matter&quot; and &lt;em&gt;sposa&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/spo.za/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;bride&quot;. Both of these come directly from single Latin words, so the rules laid down by Oostendorp don't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EDIT: Michaelyus has provided a true minimal pair: &lt;em&gt;presento&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/pre.zɛn.to/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;I present&quot; versus &lt;em&gt;presento&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/pre.sɛn.to/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;I foresee&quot;. Much obliged!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many environments, this distinction is neutralized: in fact, everywhere except between vowels within a single mono-morphemic word. In most dialects it's even neutralized in this environment—in the north they merge into /z/, while in the south they merge into /s/. So in the (relatively) near future, Italian will likely have only a single dental sibilant phoneme, just as Latin did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:57:12.687" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:57:12.687" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-14T05:57:05.743" Score="4" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AHD-IER&lt;/a&gt; (Watkin, 2011) P93 gives PIE *tn̥-yā- for Gk. ταινία:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suffixed zero-grade form *tn̥-yā‑&lt;/strong&gt;. taenia; polytene, from Greek tainiā, band, ribbon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while EDG (Robert Beekes, 2010) P1444:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Probably ultimately related to τείνω, &lt;strong&gt;but the details are rather&#xA;  unclear&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a convicing derivative of PIE *ten- &quot;to stretch&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T01:25:39.630" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T01:25:39.630" Title="How did Gk. ταινία &quot;band, ribbon&quot; come from PIE *tn̥-yā- &lt; *ten- &quot;to stretch&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28656" CreationDate="2018-08-14T09:46:59.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulty with the derivation of ταινία from *tn̥-yā- is the diphthong in the first syllable. This is why Beekes calls it &quot;rather unclear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T09:46:59.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28642" CreationDate="2018-08-14T12:26:18.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ptolemy’s Thamyditai are almost certainly the Thamūd mentioned in the Qur’an and also in epigraphic material. It is a Greek derivative with the suffix -ītēs, plural -ītai. Whether his Oaditai are the Qur’anic ʻĀd is however debatable. If they are the same name the initial O of the Greek form will require explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T11:41:13.463" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T11:41:13.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28656" CreationDate="2018-08-14T16:01:57.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically, the connection is clear: when something stretches across a long distance, it becomes quite thin. PIE &lt;em&gt;*t-n-&lt;/em&gt; also underlies English &quot;thin&quot; via Germanic and &quot;tenuous&quot; (stretched almost to the breaking point), &quot;tense&quot; (stretched out), &quot;tent&quot; (canvas stretched over poles) via Latin via French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty isn't in the semantics, but in the phonology. Proto-Indo-European *n̥y generally turns into /anj/ and later /ajn/ in Ancient Greek, and (as fdb points out) there isn't a solid explanation of where the extra /i/ in the second syllable could have come from: the known rules would predict /tajna/ ταίνα. These are the unclear details Beekes is referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T19:54:39.487" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T19:54:39.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28637" CreationDate="2018-08-14T20:52:37.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One day I came across a discussion about what the Latin translation for 'village' will be. That question arose, apparently, due to the presence of at least three synonyms: &lt;em&gt;pagus, villa, vicus&lt;/em&gt;. One of the participants suggested to look up the etymology to determine if such-and-such a word is appropriate. As for me, I would agree, and I do sometimes resort to this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language displays a certain conceptual system, or a worldview, and its concepts consist of multiple sorts of information, part of which etymological information might be. I want to add, though, that &lt;em&gt;folk etymology&lt;/em&gt; is even more likely to serve this purpose, although it surely depends on every particular usage and every particular culture. It should be borne in mind, then, that to grasp the differences between the words, you have to know that conceptual information. Etymology, again, may not be part of the worldview, but, on a pair with the synchronic contexts you mention, does often reflect it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Latin, the etymology can be relevant, due to the fact that Latin was mostly a literary language, rather well-studied, whence the higher probability that those who would write texts in it knew some etymology and based some of their acceptability judgements on that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthemore, if, based on etymology, you can imagine how those differences have arisen (i.e. you know the mechanisms of metaphor, metonymy, etc.), then you may predict what the actual differences are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="20034" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T21:12:04.180" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T21:12:04.180" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4477" CreationDate="2018-08-15T11:48:37.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Areal features are often under-appreciated, especially the more subtle structural and semantic ones, as opposed to the more superficial lexical and phonological ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the contact between Slavic and Germanic was certainly significant, and started before the written record, which therefore makes it difficult to fully understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are more commonalities between Slavic and German phonology than chance alone would yield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the concrete example you give is provably &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an example of Slavic influence on German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Kühe' as 'Kihe', 'Süden' as 'Siden', 'Höhle' as 'Hehle'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entlabialisierung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entrundung&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, is widespread in the Southwest too, including Alsatian in France, far away from Slavic influence.  Quoting Wikipedia: &lt;em&gt;Im Deutschen gilt Entrundung der mittelhochdeutschen Umlaute „ö“, „ü“ und „eu/äu“ zu „e“, „i“ und „ai“ &lt;strong&gt;in den meisten Dialekten des Oberdeutschen und des Mitteldeutschen&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's also why Yiddish has it.  The reason Polish and Czech have it for loanwords like &lt;em&gt;Miller&lt;/em&gt; is because of local learned convention, perhaps based on the dialects with which they were in contact.  Other Slavic languages like Russian and Bulgarian work differently, they tend to palatalise instead, so &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ö&lt;/em&gt; become &lt;em&gt;ju&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;jo&lt;/em&gt;.  Some Slavic languages take the &lt;em&gt;entrundung&lt;/em&gt; approach for German and French loanwords but just drop the umlaut for Ottoman ones, which again suggests a learned convention.  Also note that in no Slavic language is there &lt;em&gt;entrundung&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt; (to &lt;em&gt;aj&lt;/em&gt;) like in German dialects or Yiddish.  And this pattern is not unique to Slavic languages - in Armenian and Georgian it is like in Russian and Bulgarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, German dialects vary much more North to South than East to West, historically and today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also that there were third groups, notably Baltic and Celtic, which were absorbed en masse into both Slavic and Germanic, which could explain some commonalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T15:13:16.980" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T15:13:16.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T17:47:03.330" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a variety of ways to form casual address terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using family terms is common ('brother'), shortening/modifying a given name ('Teddy' from Theodore), or something based on the person's characteristics ('Shorty').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What idea do we have of what people did in the past?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of our sources are official, and less likely to have informal names. But what info DO we have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. General trends for a culture, or specific examples, are both appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSS. I'm most interested in the Early Medieval/Post-Classic period - 500AD-1200ADish. And/or in the Americas, India, SE Asia, Eastern Africa, Japan, Ireland, and the Middle East. But any and all anecdotes/facts would be appreciated. Onomastics is fascinating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21757" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T17:47:03.330" Title="Nicknames in Various Historical Cultures" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;names&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28639" CreationDate="2018-08-16T02:01:26.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the constituent tree you quoted.  Here is my attempt, also using a parenthesis notation with indentation showing substructure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S (NP This)&#xA;   (VP is&#xA;      (NP the&#xA;           (ADJ  &#xA;              (ADV  &#xA;                 (ADV second)  &#xA;                 most&#xA;              )  &#xA;              common&#xA;           )&#xA;           problem  &#xA;      )  &#xA;   )  &#xA;)  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the parentheses match up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T02:01:26.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1171" CreationDate="2018-08-16T21:01:02.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two languages have a similar set of sounds, and both have even intonation.  But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Armenian has two r, one of which is soft, Georgian r is always the hard one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Armenian has k and q but no &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%A7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qʼ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Georgian words often end in -o, in Armenian it is rare at the end of a word or sentence, other than nicknames.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certain vowel combinations like -au- and -eu- are uncommon in Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certain stop words, function words and elements like -bili or -uli or -utyun or -akan are specific to Georgian or Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rhythm is noticeably different.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can be more specific, but every dialect sounds a bit different, and in Georgia both Eastern and Western dialects are spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22532" LastEditorUserId="22532" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T19:27:06.730" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:27:06.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-16T22:42:11.993" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this article (dlibra.umcs.lublin.pl/Content/21626/czas17868_30_2_2012_4.pdf), cognitive grammar is an approach to grammar which takes into accounts broad perceptual principles, including Gestalt psychology, but this approach doesn’t really reify syntax and makes it subservient to semantics.  We probably could start a long conversation about whether such a statement about cognitive grammar is accurate, but I’m particularly interested in whether the phenomenon of syntax can be related at all to the principles of Gestalt psychology.  I’d be interested in answers that apply specifically to the linguistic domain, or answers that take a more broad or formal approach to the definition of syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T02:33:56.990" Title="Does Gestalt theory tell us anything about syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28671" CreationDate="2018-08-17T12:24:57.753" Score="3" ViewCount="1680" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages (especially Hebrew in which I work), words can appear in a special form called the construct form in which you can expect that word to be attached to another word. I would like to know that what is the term used for the opposite of a construct form? Meaning, a word which is self-standing and independent, and not attached to another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;The word צור means rock. &#xA;The phrase צור החלמיש means &lt;em&gt;chalamish&lt;/em&gt; rock, with the word צור appearing in the construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had the word צור with the modifier, what is that form of the word called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10448" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T13:09:05.890" Title="What is the term used for the opposite of a construct form?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28670" CreationDate="2018-08-17T13:09:05.890" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Semitic linguistics it is customary to refer to the &quot;absolute state&quot; and the &quot;construct state&quot;, or their Latin equivalents &quot;status absolutus&quot; and &quot;status constructus&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T13:09:05.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28673" CreationDate="2018-08-17T17:45:19.857" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistics term for when an acronym is the same in more than one language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;RIP&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Requiescat in pace.&lt;/em&gt;) in Latin is the same acronym as &quot;RIP&quot; (&quot;Rest in peace.&quot;) in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:29:30.703" Title="Term for when acronyms are the same in more than one language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;acronyms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28672" CreationDate="2018-08-17T22:00:08.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there's no standard term for this. But depending how they came about, these matches might be cases of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cognate acronyms&lt;/em&gt; (acronyms in related languages being the same or similar because the words in those languages are the same or similar)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;False cognate acronyms&lt;/em&gt; (acronyms that look the same by pure coincidence, and are actually unrelated)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Expressive loans&lt;/em&gt; (an acronym is borrowed from one language and words in the new language are chosen to match it: RIP falls into this category)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expressive loans (aka phono-semantic matching) are particularly fun, and many examples can be found online. My favorite is the English &quot;club&quot; loaned into Japanese as 倶楽部 &lt;em&gt;kurabu&lt;/em&gt;: the individual characters mean &quot;together&quot;, &quot;fun&quot;, and &quot;place&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say RIP counts as an example of this, since it originated with the Latin &lt;em&gt;requiescat in pace&lt;/em&gt;. While &quot;in&quot; and &quot;peace&quot; are cognates of the respective Latin words, &quot;rest&quot; is not: it coincidentally started with the same letter, and was chosen in the English version to keep the acronym the same (instead of, say, &quot;sleep&quot;, which is an equally valid translation of the Latin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:29:30.703" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:29:30.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2018-08-18T11:18:04.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a Sound Symbolism sense, &quot;high&quot; contains a high pitch vowel, &quot;low&quot; a low pitch. Therefore, Ger. &quot;hell&quot; (&lt;em&gt;bright&lt;/em&gt;) is a better translation than &quot;hoch&quot; (&lt;em&gt;high&lt;/em&gt;), and &quot;dunkel&quot; (&quot;dark&quot;) fits better than &quot;tief&quot; (&quot;deep&quot;) (although, make no mistake, most cognates have o and u vowels - Ain't talking about dub).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;young&quot; and &quot;alt&quot; voice brought up in a comment is ironic, because Lt. &quot;&lt;em&gt;alto&lt;/em&gt;&quot; means &quot;&lt;em&gt;high, deep&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Alto is the lowest female register, above tenor (cp. &lt;em&gt;tension&lt;/em&gt;) and below soprano (cp. &lt;em&gt;super&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to the flute analogue brought up before, a string instrument produces high pitch when gripping close to the head, and a low pitch when gripping close to the base. Perhaps that's why it's called Bass (Lt. &quot;&lt;em&gt;bassus&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &lt;em&gt;thick, fat, stumpy, short, low, base&lt;/em&gt;; Agr. &quot;&lt;em&gt;βᾰ́σῐς&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;básis&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - step, rhythm, foot, foundation, base), but perhaps, as the Agr. glosses indicate, it related to drums, cp. &lt;em&gt;base-drum&lt;/em&gt; (which may explain the etymology of &lt;em&gt;vase&lt;/em&gt;; even Ger. &quot;Fass&quot;, &quot;Gefäß&quot;; &quot;tonne&quot; is close to &quot;tone&quot;, too, but that's only superficial, so far, and besides the point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Thick&quot; and &quot;thin&quot; in turn would have to relate to the thickness of the instrument's strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lowest formant of a sound is also called the &lt;em&gt;fundamental frequency&lt;/em&gt;. The imagery is quite strong. In musical theory, the baseline is the foundation of a melody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analogy to the movement of the larynx up and down is rather obvious, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T11:18:04.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24453" CreationDate="2018-08-18T13:24:03.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try Open source Julius Decoder:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/julius-speech/julius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/julius-speech/julius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22537" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T13:24:03.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T19:57:25.483" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, while natural languages aren't completely context-free, you can get a good approximation of a specification of English in Backus-Naur form, in that if you look at a given sentence, you can usually parse it into a tree described by the context-free grammar the BNF entails.  On the other hand, I haven't been able to find any sample specifications for dependency tree grammars.  Are there any specifications of dependency grammars for English?  To be honest, I'm not sure what such a specification would even look like, but I'm defining it as something, like a BNF, which can be easily used to produce sentences which are (mostly) syntactically correct given a list of word-POS pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T19:57:25.483" Title="Specification of Dependency Grammar" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28683" CreationDate="2018-08-18T20:32:13.283" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian, one can ask &quot;там холодно?&quot;, literally &lt;em&gt;is it cold there?&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;там&quot; is assumed to refer to outside (unless a suitable referent is in the context). The construction can be used in other weather-related questions and statements, e.g. &quot;там снег&quot; &lt;em&gt;it is snowing outside&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;). This question is specifically about там meaning &quot;outside&quot; rather than &quot;there&quot; in situations when it has no referent in context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked with a native and could not get her to accept non-weather-related sentences with this construction, e.g. &quot;там много людей&quot; &lt;em&gt;there are many people outside&lt;/em&gt; (it can be used when там has a referent). She also rejected &quot;там будет снег сегодня?&quot; &lt;em&gt;will it snow today?&lt;/em&gt; (also can be used with a referent), so the construction is really rather restrictive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be tempted to analyse this as a case of degrammaticalization: там is a deictic adverb, but gets used non-deicticly, &quot;outside&quot;. It is perhaps also worth noting that other translations for &quot;outside&quot; are complicated in some sense: на улице &lt;em&gt;on the street&lt;/em&gt; has four syllables (not sure if this would be a reason for там to take over functions) and снаружи &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; can only be used when you are in a closed space (i.e. not when the windows are open).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that degrammaticalization is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization#Counterexamples_(degrammaticalization)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rare&lt;/a&gt;. And I must admit to poor knowledge of Russian. I do not know the origins of там. Is there something to say for an analysis of degrammaticalization in this case? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T04:57:01.213" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T12:02:49.680" Title="Is Russian &quot;там [холодно]&quot; a case of degrammaticalization?" Tags="&lt;russian&gt;&lt;grammaticalisation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T21:12:50.650" Score="-4" ViewCount="953" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etiology as the origins study in linguistics is meant here to find the origin for the European words for the Egyptian pyramids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems there is no acceptable answer to this question, leaving a lot of room for imagination. If the pyramids were pharaoh tombs, would that not be the origin for the Greek word? The Ancient Egyptian (AE) word for a pyramid transliterates to MR. I agree with I.E.S. Edwards, quoted later by Mark Lehner quoted again himself in the book Land of Osiris, that the Ancient Egyptians did not name it a pharaoh tomb but “place of ascension” which Edwards gives as an etymology for MR. He had doubts whether this was correct. I think pyramid as “pharaoh tomb” is not found in AE writings as that would mean the AE would acknowledge that the pharaoh was dead; something culturally inconceivable, because he was believed to ascend to heaven and live (see Pyramid texts). But foreigners considered the pharaoh human and his burial site was thus not called a ‘place of ascension’ by foreigners, but a ‘pharaoh grave’ (Modern Hebrew: pr3h mt) or ‘pharaoh tomb’ (AE pr maHat or maHat pr). So what is the etiology of the word ‘pyramid’? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T18:01:23.157" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T18:01:23.157" Title="What is the etiology of the word for ‘pyramid’" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28630" CreationDate="2018-08-18T22:44:35.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take it that this refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knowledge argument&lt;/a&gt; proposed by Frank Jackson, in which scientist Mary is locked in a black and white room from birth but learns everything about the physics and neuroscience of color.  The question is then whether Mary learns something new when she leaves the room and experiences actually seeing color for the first time.  The argument is that she does, because she did not know &lt;em&gt;what it is like&lt;/em&gt; to experience red, i.e., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qualia&lt;/a&gt; corresponding to seeing red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the assumption is that she learns &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; about the neuroscience of color perception, she in fact &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; know which nearby concepts light up in normal people.  Could she perhaps &lt;em&gt;induce&lt;/em&gt; in herself what it is like to perceive red by simultaneously priming all those concepts in herself?  I doubt it, because for her those concepts are different; for a normal person, &quot;apple&quot; may be associated with phenomenally perceiving red, but not for her.  It's also not clear what the qualia (if any) of having certain concepts primed are, but in any case those seem different from those of perceiving color...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question might also fit under philosophy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22541" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T22:44:35.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28680" CreationDate="2018-08-19T03:33:15.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;InB4 Downvote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec#page/n974/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The entry on &lt;em&gt;pyramís&lt;/em&gt; in Chantraine's Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek&lt;/a&gt; cites two senses of &lt;em&gt;pyramís&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;pyramid&quot;, and &quot;grilled wheat grain cake mixed with honey&quot; (Ephippus, cited in the Etymologicum Magnum); the usual form for the cake is &lt;em&gt;pyramoûs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymology:&lt;/em&gt; In the sense of &quot;cake&quot;, the word is formed based on &lt;em&gt;pyrós&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wheat&quot;, by analogy with &lt;em&gt;sēsamís, sēsamoûs&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sesame cake&quot;. Diels, &lt;em&gt;KZ&lt;/em&gt; 47, 1919, 193 hypothesised that the Pyramids were so called because they looked like the cake (whose shape we know nothing of), cf. Kretschmer, &lt;em&gt;Gl.&lt;/em&gt; 10, 1920, 243. The hypothesis that it derives from an Egyptian loanword, &lt;em&gt;pr-m-us&lt;/em&gt; &quot;height&quot;, which goes back to Brugsch, &lt;em&gt;Z. f. aegypt. Spr.&lt;/em&gt; 1874, is worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T03:33:15.723" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28679" CreationDate="2018-08-19T18:34:13.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand you correctly, you are interested in там in the sense of &quot;outside/outdoors.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are more examples for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talking about the weather:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Там идет снег? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Там идет дождь?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Там такая гроза. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the examples above, там refers to a specific, limited space (in close proximity to the speaker). It basically means &quot;not here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Non-weather&quot; situations:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Там так шумно.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Там так много людей. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &quot;на улице&quot; (meaning &quot;outside&quot;) is verbose. Сегодня на улице так хорошо.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general methodological remark. You should never give sentences in isolation to language informants, nor should they really know what construction you're interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T12:02:49.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T12:02:49.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28679" CreationDate="2018-08-19T23:10:30.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked and thus suppose &quot;&lt;em&gt;там&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; is akin to German &quot;&lt;em&gt;dort&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. That is more comfortable for me to deal with as I don't speak any Balto-Slavic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, &quot;&lt;em&gt;dort&lt;/em&gt;&quot; may be replaced with &quot;&lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in many dialects. &quot;&lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt;&quot; converged from different Old German roots and therefore means &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; in certain contexts, e.g. &quot;ich bin da&quot; (&quot;I am there, here&quot;, but cannot substitute &quot;come here&quot;). That reading would make sense for your example, too. A temporal sense was also attested (but let's not get into that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, another parallel would be &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt;. So, let's have a look at the roots: *so, *seh₂, *tod - gendered demonstrative pronouns, reconstrions for Proto Indo European, whence also Latin &quot; &quot;&lt;em&gt;tum&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &lt;em&gt;tam&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which are glossed as &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt;, derived via *tóm and *téh₂m, but a definition is difficult for these particles, as is the reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, &quot;outside&quot; is an interpretation. Different readings are possible, as suggested in the comments, too. The question remains why the construction is as specific. It's a &lt;em&gt;fossilized&lt;/em&gt; idiom, as far as your description goes. The question must be, when did it become fossilized and how was it understood before, specifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know nearly enough about PIE or later developments to be able to tell how it came about. A simple explanation would not involve &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, but time - &quot;then&quot;, Ancient Greek τῆμος (têmos, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt;) and Rus. тогда́ are ultimately from the same root. Future tense was not inflected per se in PIE and still English, French and German, at least, use auxiliary verbs for simple future constructions. That is, the question &quot;will it rain, be cold&quot; seems much more plausible then a reference to the present. Hence, &quot;&lt;em&gt;там будет снег сегодня?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;will it snow today?&lt;/em&gt;) would be redundant, if там was used to construct a future tense (which may be more complicated, this is just a sketch of an idea).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was degrammaticalization (?), I suppose that would involve the other word. The syntax is opaque to me, but &quot;it rain!&quot;, &quot;you comin'?&quot; &quot;me so cold&quot;, &quot;so, rain then, huh?&quot; and the like would not be unheard of. It's confusing at least, because снег is a noun, as far as I can tell, but холодно is predicative and a &quot;simple&quot; form of an adjective at that. There was some argument about how to translate хла́дный, by Dan Polansky et al, by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's not merely fossilized, but simple on purpose. &lt;em&gt;Any rain&lt;/em&gt; err &lt;em&gt;questions?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T23:18:40.090" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T23:18:40.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28680" CreationDate="2018-08-20T00:04:58.117" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose it means temple, sacred place, similar to harem (cg. haram - forbidden). Then pyr mihjt relate to pure and fire. The cake sense would mean a creme brule. The tower sense named on wiktionary would relate to lighthouse. That is to say, your architectural &quot;in&quot; reading isn't convincing as far as I can tell, but the tomb idea is neat. I'd see mous (au chocolat) in the cake sense, but that may be later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something about muscat and hiding, seclusion, about nuts and the seat of power, vital force, and something that doesn't check out about the common etymology for muscle. There's something about fire implying power and protection, too. There's something about wheat and power, and about wheat and purity afger having been threshed. The gloss reap for amao in the cake sense also has something of defeating. That sounds a tad too negative though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T00:04:58.117" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T10:03:39.907" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nice book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Type-Logical-Grammar-Categorial-Logic/dp/0792332261/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Type-Logical-Grammar-Categorial-Logic/dp/0792332261/&lt;/a&gt; that considers both Montague grammar (type logical grammar (TLG)) in chapters 1 and 2 and combinatory categorial grammars (CCG) in chapter 3. Both grammars have such categories as S (sentence), NP (noun phrase), N (noun). But it is quite strange, that CCG does not have separate category for verbs (verb phrases and so on) as the first class category. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anaphora-Logical-Grammar-Trends-Logic/dp/9048169925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anaphora-Logical-Grammar-Trends-Logic/dp/9048169925&lt;/a&gt; p.36 it is said, that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will furthermore abbreviate the category of VPs, np\s, as vp&#xA;  wherever it is convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while TLG have full spectrum of categories, the CCG has some derived categories like verbs are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is connection between categories of TLG, CCG, are there mappings among them, are there good work that considers such issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T02:38:49.330" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T22:39:01.423" Title="Connections between categories of type logical grammar and categories of combinatory categorial grammar?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;montague-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T14:03:43.173" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/110&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wals chapter 110: Periphrastic Causative Constructions&lt;/a&gt; coded German as &quot;sequential but no purposive&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an example of periphrastic causative constructions in German?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22546" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:53:39.033" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:15:30.190" Title="Does German have periphrastic causative constructions?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T20:51:51.797" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several taxonomies for describing relations between rhetorical/discourse components in prose text (PDTB, RST, etc).  Has anyone tried to describe the sort of relationships between elements of discourse that exist in poetic texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T20:51:51.797" Title="Discourse/Rhetorical structure in poetic writings" Tags="&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T03:48:01.687" Score="4" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/%E1%B8%B1%C3%B3m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European/&lt;strong&gt;ḱ&lt;/strong&gt;óm -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology&#xA;Perhaps from *ḱe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adverb&#xA;*ḱóm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;beside, near, by, with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AHD-IER&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kom Beside, near, by, with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the initial consonant a plain k or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T21:18:48.417" Title="PIE *kom 'with, side by side' or PIE *ḱóm?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28691" CreationDate="2018-08-21T04:03:25.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that the AHD doesn't seem to use accents to mark the &quot;palatovelars&quot; in its head entries for PIE roots. For example, the entry for the root that is the ancestor of English &lt;em&gt;he/his&lt;/em&gt; is given as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‌‌ko-&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Stem of demonstrative pronoun meaning &quot;this. &quot; Oldest form &lt;em&gt;*k̑o‑&lt;/em&gt;, becoming &lt;em&gt;*ko‑&lt;/em&gt; in centum languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think it's right to read the AHD's transcription &quot;kom&quot; as making a positive claim that the initial consonant in this root was &quot;plain&quot; rather than &quot;palatal&quot; k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the AHD doesn't seem to transcribe PIE accent/stress, so the difference between &quot;o&quot; and &quot;ó&quot; doesn't seem like it necessarily represents a difference in reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an Indo-Europeanist, but based on the Wiktionary entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/%E1%B8%B1%C3%B3m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ḱóm&lt;/a&gt;, it looks like the relevant data from the satem languages is Balto-Slavic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Lithuanian: sù (with unexpected depalatalization of *ś)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Slavic: *sъ(n)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(both of which apparently mean &quot;with&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Draconis's answer says, it doesn't seem to be 100% clear that the Balto-Slavic &quot;with&quot; words come from the same source as Latin &lt;em&gt;cum,&lt;/em&gt; etc. Using Google, I wasn't able to find any recent literature that presents arguments for or against this etymology (maybe someone else will know more). They do seem to be a close match semantically. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an additional complication, there seems to have been a Proto-Slavic preposition that Wiktionary gives as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/k%D1%8A(n)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*kъ(n)&lt;/a&gt; with the meaning &quot;to, towards&quot;. Wiktionary indicates that this would come from a PIE non-palatal velar or labiovelar stop (&quot;From Proto-Indo-European *kom or *ku, *kʷom&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek &lt;em&gt;(k)sun,&lt;/em&gt; which has a similar meaning, seems to have an unclear etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T21:18:48.417" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T21:18:48.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28691" CreationDate="2018-08-21T05:43:26.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the answer is: we aren't exactly sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easy answer is that it had a &lt;code&gt;*ḱ&lt;/code&gt;, as listed on Wiktionary. As sumelic points out, the AHD (and many other sources) don't mark &lt;code&gt;*ḱ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt; separately for the most part: their PIE reconstructions are thus from a later stage, after the Centum-Satem Split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the hard evidence either way is lacking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crucial difference between &lt;code&gt;*ḱ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt; is that &lt;code&gt;*ḱ&lt;/code&gt; turned into &lt;code&gt;*s&lt;/code&gt; in the Satem languages, while &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt; did not. (In the Centum languages, the two merged together.) There is a reconstructed Proto-Slavic word &lt;code&gt;*sъ(n)&lt;/code&gt; which could have come from &lt;code&gt;*ḱom&lt;/code&gt;, but it could also have come from the well-attested root &lt;code&gt;*sem&lt;/code&gt; &quot;one, whole&quot; (as seen in &quot;simple&quot;)—and there's also a Proto-Slavic &lt;code&gt;*kъ(n)&lt;/code&gt; &quot;toward&quot; which has no clear etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/indogermanisches02pokouoft#page/612&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pokorny's dictionary&lt;/a&gt; lists &lt;code&gt;*kom&lt;/code&gt; without the &quot;palatal&quot;; this work is fairly old (pre-laryngeal) but for the consonants generally quite solid. I don't have access to a more up-to-date resource yet but will check De Vaan and Beekes when possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, Pokorny also mentions Proto-Slavic &lt;code&gt;*sǫdъ&lt;/code&gt; &quot;judge&quot; as an example, but this could be traced back to &lt;code&gt;*sem&lt;/code&gt; just as easily. Ancient Greek &lt;code&gt;ksyn&lt;/code&gt; &quot;with&quot; might be from either &lt;code&gt;*kom&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;*sem&lt;/code&gt; also, but the &lt;code&gt;ks&lt;/code&gt; is hard to explain either way, and I've never seen a convincing derivation of it; there might be an extra element prefixed on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T05:43:26.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28695" CreationDate="2018-08-21T13:58:49.430" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there is a finite set of tussenvoegsels. If so can someone please point me to the list? For example in the name &lt;code&gt;Alice van Herk&lt;/code&gt;, the tussenvoegsel &lt;code&gt;van&lt;/code&gt;. Wikipedia lists common tussenvoegsels but not all of them. I'm wondering if there is a rule to allow me to parse out the tussenvoegsel. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22549" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:19:21.057" Title="Are the set of Dutch tussenvoegsels finite?" Tags="&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28694" CreationDate="2018-08-21T15:32:39.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens (RVIG) maintains &quot;table 36&quot; with tussenvoegsels (they call them voorvoegsels): &lt;a href=&quot;https://publicaties.rvig.nl/Landelijke_tabellen/Landelijke_tabellen_32_t_m_60_excl_tabel_35/Landelijke_Tabellen_32_t_m_60_in_pdf_formaat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://publicaties.rvig.nl/Landelijke_tabellen/Landelijke_tabellen_32_t_m_60_excl_tabel_35/Landelijke_Tabellen_32_t_m_60_in_pdf_formaat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this on the Dutch Wikipedia page, perhaps you were looking at the English one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to parse tussenvoegsels, it's probably easiest and most accurate to do it with a dictionary of the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T15:32:39.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28694" CreationDate="2018-08-22T00:44:10.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ja, ze zijn beperkt. Meest tussenvoegsels zijn lidwoorden en voorzetsels.&#xA;(Yes, they are finite. Most tussenvoegsels(tussen = between + voeg =insert, add) are articles and prepositions describing the link between the first name and the last name.&#xA;Examample:&#xA;Jaap van Hoofd(Jaap of Head)&#xA;Monique de Jong(Monique the Young) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a list of 333:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vernoeming.nl/alle-333-voorvoegsels-tussenvoegsels-in-nederlandse-achternamen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.vernoeming.nl/alle-333-voorvoegsels-tussenvoegsels-in-nederlandse-achternamen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T00:44:10.723" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12998" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:01:36.050" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ik dacht dat Jan Piet Marie zag helpen lezen.&quot; This is not a correct sentence in Dutch. Jan Piet Marie seems to be one name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Dutch grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ik dacht dat ik zag Jan Piet, Marie helpen lezen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:01:36.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T04:35:00.550" Score="0" ViewCount="1080" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a class C, we may append it with the literal &quot;group&quot; to obtain a class of sets whose elements are instances of C, and which are related in some way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not super familiar with object oriented ontology, using the class &quot;car&quot; as an example, a &quot;car group&quot; is a set of related cars. The 2018 Toyota Camry is a car. The set of all cars designed in 2018 is a car group. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An operating system group. The set of UNIX-like operating systems is an operating system group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A food group. The grains are a food group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: what part of speech, linguistically, is played by the word 'group'? It is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_modifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modifier&lt;/a&gt;, as it cannot be removed and have the sentence remain syntactically valid. However, it also can be appended to any class and will &quot;act on&quot; the class in some way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T16:31:47.727" Title="What part of speech is &quot;group&quot; when used in a construct like &quot;people group,&quot; or &quot;product group&quot;" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28698" CreationDate="2018-08-22T16:31:47.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: it's a noun, plain and simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In certain cases, English allows a noun to modify a following noun, like an adjective would: &quot;grocery store&quot;, &quot;radio station&quot;, &quot;guitar music&quot;, &quot;laundry basket&quot;. That's what's happening here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the modifier remains a noun and not an adjective, syntactically: you can't have a *very grocery store or some *extremely guitar music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, the two nouns end up merging together into a single one over time: department stores are fairly recent, but bookstores are older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T16:31:47.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4178" CreationDate="2018-08-22T20:41:51.593" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Norman spoke French as well as every elite in the world, France has many versions of its language, as many as it has region and you can still take it as test to finish high school. I am a Norman, since Rollo became Duc of Normandy and gave his allegiance to the French king. my familly was at the battle of Hastings and became Duc of Normandy later around 1830 under the bourbon restauration. Normans came from Rollo Viking descent that gave his allegiance to the French king (the simple, I think), technically they became part of what France was at that point by allegiance. it is a classic king move to re-enforce and stabilize his kingdom. Willian the conqueror did not speak a word of English and spoke French only, the French Norman version of it, but everyone in France has a different French dialect depending on its historic affiliation, so it is not a valid point to say that it was not French, especially it is as close as it gets to modern French. Even people from Paris have their own dialect called L'Argot. Now at the time of Rollo and William and probably because of them, France went from Carolingian to Capetian, which is known to be the first established kingdom. The French language was spoken in every countries elite for one main reason: Print did not existed and the only one deciphering, translating Latin and writing books were??????? French priests and they did it at a very high pace and very well, so at that time and for a long time if you wanted to learn, be educated and read books you had no choices beside French or Latin, and French was easier and more practical because of business. Actually France legal system from Bonaparte are still in place all over the world, even in the USA in which 2 states use the Dalloz code for civil law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22556" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T20:41:51.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18795" CreationDate="2018-08-22T21:27:03.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Liaison exists in Danish but only in few words by inflections and word formation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mand&lt;/em&gt; [ma̝nˀ] &quot;man&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;mandig&lt;/em&gt; [ma̝ndi] &quot;manly&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;valg&lt;/em&gt; [va̝lˀ] &quot;choice&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;valget&lt;/em&gt; [va̝ljð̠ˠ̞] &quot;the choice&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;valg&lt;/em&gt; is also sometimes heard as [ˈvalˀj], implying the &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; is not yet totally latent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such rules have a certain universality, i.e. &amp;lt; nd &gt; + -ig and the latent &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; which is pronounced followed by such an ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth to mention that a [k] can appear after [ŋ], because this may exist in other languages but often ignored. An experiment below shows that the [k] is latent. Some participants were asked to add a verbalization suffix &lt;em&gt;-ere&lt;/em&gt;, which starts with a vowel, to a word ending with &amp;lt; ng &gt; [ŋ], to form a new word. Most participants add a [k], so [pɛŋˀ] becomes [pɛŋkeːˀɐ] with the ending. This case is pretty as similar as the mentioned example of &amp;lt; nd &gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T21:27:03.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T21:46:43.037" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any language that have both of these characteristics? I am not sure but I assume that contour tone is unnecessary and uneconomical to be used in every syllable of a language with complex consonant clusters, neither for vowels nor for sonorants as independent syllable. It is widely assumed that the emergence of Chinese tones is caused by the pre-existing consonant clusters, that is, different consonant clusters trigger different tones, and then they are not crucial any more to distinguish the meaning and then dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T22:36:27.917" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:36:27.917" Title="Are contour tone system and complex consonant clusters compatible in phonotactics?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29111" CreationDate="2018-08-22T22:52:41.620" Score="0" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take an example of the English word 'just'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it means 'morally fair' in &quot;a just social system&quot;, it also means 'a little' in &quot;just less than 8%&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a myriad of colourful meanings of 'just', &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bing.com/search?q=just%20meaning&amp;amp;qs=n&amp;amp;form=QBRE&amp;amp;sp=-1&amp;amp;pq=just%20meaning&amp;amp;sc=8-12&amp;amp;sk=&amp;amp;cvid=1043C208213D43B9B7B878746D28E192&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;check Bing&lt;/a&gt;. A portion of it is below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GzidH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GzidH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Why and how do such words come to mean so different, unrelated things?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. I am a native Hindi speaker. I also know Marathi and Sanskrit. Such words are too rare in Indian languages, if any. So, I want to know if this phenomenon is  present only in English (and some other languages) or is it common to a large number of languages (with different origins and history).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. What does the fact that this phenomenon is common in some languages and not others, tell us about the evolution of those languages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22553" LastEditorUserId="22553" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T04:06:46.773" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T04:06:46.773" Title="Why and how do some words come to mean multiple completely unrelated things?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T23:08:20.523" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to measure the causal coherence of text documents using NLP techniques to test a hypothesis (as far as I understand, there are different types of coherence in text but I am focusing on causal coherence, specifically.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the meaning of causality and causal relation. But I am trying to figure out what the exact definition of causal coherence is? I see in the literature that people, like Mulder, G. (2008), use &quot;causal coherence relation&quot; but I am not sure if I understand the different between causal coherence and causal coherence relation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My approach for measuring the causal coherence for now is mainly based on extracting the causal relations (only explicit relations) in a sentence or two adjacent sentences. I basically mark any sentence(s) in which I could find a causal relation as causally coherent. But I am wondering if it is a correct definition for causal coherence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4770" LastEditorUserId="4770" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T04:15:27.980" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T04:15:27.980" Title="What is the definition of a causally coherent text?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28704" CreationDate="2018-08-23T00:36:39.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends largely on what you mean by &quot;complex syllable structure&quot;. I would take English to have &quot;complex syllable structure&quot;, having onset and coda clusters of many kinds. Many African languages have (N)C(G) onsets, which is probably why Angas is put in the list of languages with &quot;complex syllable structure&quot; (incidentally, it does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have lexical contour tones, though it has phrasally-created contours arising from grammatical floating tones). If you take &quot;has obstruent clusters in the onset / coda&quot; as the minimum criterion for complex syllable structure, some of the WALS &quot;complex tone/ syllable&quot; languages will drop from the list. Amuzgo would probably survive, see Bauerschmidt 1965; Zapotec languages would be on the list (they aren't in the WALS sample). Dizi may qualify, since it has coda obstruent clusters though no onset clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to come up with clear examples of languages with contour tones and complex syllables, using a reasonably restrictive characterization of &quot;complex syllable&quot; – and I suspect that one faces the same problem looking for the combination of tone (dropping the contour requirement) plus complex clusters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T00:36:39.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28709" CreationDate="2018-08-23T01:50:45.160" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a followup question of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11212&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that I asked 3 and a half year ago. So based on what I could gather there, &quot;descriptive&quot; grammar comes after a language, hoping the rules are best describing the language itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense, how could people say someone's grammar was &quot;wrong&quot; (or grammatically incorrect)? Because that someone was definitely speaking a language and whenever a language exists, grammar comes with it. Language &quot;is&quot; grammar. Saying someone's grammar was &quot;wrong&quot; is saying someone was not speaking any kind of language? Then what defines a language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are talking about most of the natural languages here, not those artificial languages where grammar rules were defined first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8045" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:04:34.387" Title="Does it make any sense when saying someone's grammar was wrong?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28708" CreationDate="2018-08-23T02:09:39.207" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists frequently describe utterances as &amp;quot;ungrammatical&amp;quot;, and in the context of linguistics, this is a fairly meaningful, objective and well-defined statement (although what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; it means depends on the linguist). I think most linguists would disagree with the statement that &amp;quot;Language 'is' grammar&amp;quot; if we define &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; as all utterances of any kind that anybody makes, for whatever reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists have various opinions about grammar, but typically, &amp;quot;descriptive&amp;quot; grammarians think that there are rules (in the sense of &amp;quot;scientific laws&amp;quot;, not in the sense &amp;quot;things that you'll be punished for breaking&amp;quot;) underlying language. They don't think of grammar as just being an after-the-fact summary of the different utterances that people have made, but as some kind of system, &lt;em&gt;underlying&lt;/em&gt; speech, that can be studied by linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of descriptivism is that descriptive linguists expect any grammatical rules that are proposed to be useful for explaining linguistic data. Other criteria may also be applied (e.g. restrictions on the kind of rules that are allowed to be in the grammar) as long as they are motivated by a theory of how language works, rather than by a theory of how language &amp;quot;should be&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many theories of how language work distinguish a grammatical component from some other components that contribute to the phenomenon of language; e.g. the limitations of human memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from there being limitations on language that aren't based in grammar, it's also the case that people can draw on resources other than the naturally acquired grammatical system of their native language to form utterances. For example, an utterance like &amp;quot;Dost thou thinketh that I beeth a fool?&amp;quot; isn't a grammatical modern English sentence, but the ungrammatical parts (&amp;quot;thinketh&amp;quot; etc.) may be intentionally used to produce a certain effect. This isn't a matter of idiolects, either: as far as I know, nobody has an idiolect where  &amp;quot;Dost thou thinketh that I beeth a fool?&amp;quot; is actually grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously words like &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;incorrect&amp;quot; look like value judgements, which is why I've mainly used the word &amp;quot;ungrammatical&amp;quot; in the preceding parts of this post. But in the context of descriptive linguistics, &amp;quot;grammatically incorrect&amp;quot; can be used as a synonym of &amp;quot;ungrammatical&amp;quot;. Saying that an utterance is &amp;quot;grammatically incorrect&amp;quot; doesn't mean that it's &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; from a moral or rational standpoint. It just means that it's not consistent with—or not a valid product of—whatever grammatical system you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Linguists and non-linguists don't mean the same thing by &amp;quot;grammatically incorrect&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When non-linguists say that someone's grammar is &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;, they usually mean something different, and more complicated to define. (Since clothing is frequently used an an analogy to the social aspects of language, compare the concept of &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; fashion.) The meaning of &amp;quot;incorrect grammar&amp;quot; as used by a non-linguist isn't entirely meaningless, but it's typically a value-based judgement where part or all of the meaning being expressed is &amp;quot;I don't like this usage&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I think this usage is socially inferior&amp;quot;. If that's who you're talking about when you say &amp;quot;how could people say someone's grammar was &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; (or grammatically incorrect)?&amp;quot;, then you're right to say that these people are making an essentially arbitrary and subjective judgement in regarding the rules of non-prestige dialects as &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:04:34.387" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28708" CreationDate="2018-08-23T03:32:56.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Descriptivism certainly allows for a sentence to be ungrammatical!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to (natural) language is a shared underlying set of rules, that a group of speakers can use to communicate with each other. If someone deviates from these rules, we say that their utterance was ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I maybe move can around words the in sentence my (maybe I can move the words around in my sentence) and say that. But any English-speaker would say the syntax there is entirely wrong. I've deviated from the mental rules that English-speakers share, and thus that sentence is not valid English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism is that prescriptivism tries to define the rules according to some universal standard of correctness, whereas descriptivism tries to define them according to how the native speakers use them. Any English speaker can say that my example sentence was utterly wrong; even if I suddenly claim it's right, the consensus among millions and millions is that it's wrong. So a descriptivist would agree that it's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T03:32:56.297" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28706" CreationDate="2018-08-23T03:53:08.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For &quot;causal coherence relation&quot; check the abstract of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Understanding Causal Coherence Relations&quot; Mulder, G.&#xA;(2008) LOT, volume 172 (Dissertation)&lt;/em&gt;. That's one web search away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it the term means relations explicated e.g. by logical connectives. This goes deeper when the book goes on about such relativizors (?) on different levels of discourse. It seems an interesting topic so thanks for mentioning it. My first impulse is to see an equivalence to the bare causal relations in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A text is causally coherent, I guess, if it's fully relatable. That depends on your priors, not just on the text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is subjectivity and objectivity - a text is objectively wrong, if the coherence relations are contradictory, otherwise the subjective semantics of terms comes into question - including that of the connectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;extracting the causal relations (only explicit relations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would see a simple NP as explicit relation, not the least because &quot;(A and B) or not A&quot; is called &quot;implication&quot; (with some confusion around logic- and material-implication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T03:53:08.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T10:00:44.437" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a way to prevent Intelligent Agents with Reading Comprehension and Question Answering abilities to answer question from documents from &lt;a href=&quot;https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a given dataset&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After dependency parsing we try to match &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; root of the question to all the roots and sub-roots of the sentence. Since there are multiple verbs in a sentence, we can get multiple roots. If the root of the sentence is contained in the roots of the question, then there is an higher probability that the question is answered by that sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, thanks to SpaCy dependency parsing, we got a set of relations w&lt;sub&gt;a&lt;/sub&gt;, r, w&lt;sub&gt;b&lt;/sub&gt; between tokens of a paragraph, which are usually words or a group of words. A set of relations eventually create a tree from any paragraph p&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; or question q&lt;sub&gt;ij&lt;/sub&gt;. Consequently I used to take &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; root token w'*&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt; that dominate the relations of a given question and we try to match it to any root token w&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; of a sentence that is equal to w'*&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt;. It would gave us the location of the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance with the question &lt;em&gt;To whom did the Virgin Mary allegedly appear in 1858 in Lourdes France?&lt;/em&gt; :  appear would be the root w'*&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt;. We would have the following graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q13UH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q13UH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the following sentence of a paragraph &lt;em&gt;It is a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, France where the Virgin Mary reputedly appeared to Saint Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.&lt;/em&gt; would give:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0aWpM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0aWpM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therefore this sentence would be chosen as the answer of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also tried with taking &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; root token w'&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt; relations of a given question and we try to match it to any root token w&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; of a sentence that is equal to w'*&lt;sub&gt;j&lt;/sub&gt;. It would gave us the location of the answer. And it gives us better results, up to 7,5%. &lt;strong&gt;Why does matching any root question with any root token of a sentence gives better results ?&lt;/strong&gt; My idea was that we better understand the context with this method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22358" LastEditorUserId="22358" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T12:40:26.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T12:40:26.517" Title="Why does matching any root of a question to any root of potential answers gives better text understanding results?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28689" CreationDate="2018-08-23T13:53:24.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a native speaker of German and I am aware what causatives are. Apart from some fossilised causatives like &lt;em&gt;fallen, fällen&lt;/em&gt; there are no grammaticalised causatives in Modern German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest construction I can think of is the construction &lt;em&gt;machen&lt;/em&gt; + present participle that sounds biblical and archaic, e.g., in the following example from the Luther Bible translation &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bibleserver.com/text/LUT/Psalm146%3A8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Der HERR macht die Blinden sehend&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:15:30.190" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:15:30.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28714" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28715" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" Score="0" Body="For questions about the causative of a verb. Depending on the language, it can be expressed by a derivation, a periphrastic construction, or an entirely different verb." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:57:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T16:06:59.870" Score="-1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have questions regarding German phonology. my first question is the example required for minimalist approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Plank, the consonant phoneme counts for Standard German varies between 17 and 25 (items of contention are the affricates, the velar nasal, &lt;code&gt;/Z/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/Ã/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;the glottal stop). The WALS value is “average” (22 ± 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemic minimalists would prefer “moderately small” (15–18) – assuming the inventory maps&#xA;are about something like phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now IPA has the inventories in accordance with the maximalist approach! Can someone provide the inventories for minimalist approach for these languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Turkish&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;German&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or at least one of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22546" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T11:27:17.657" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T11:27:17.657" Title="What are the inventories for minimalist approach?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-09-01T00:48:39.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28716" CreationDate="2018-08-23T17:14:00.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &quot;no&quot;, until you spell out the requirements of the &quot;minimalist&quot; approach that you have in mind. One problem dealing with major national and international languages is that they aren't uniform, especially French. West African French has fewer phonemes than Parisian French, for instance. A second problem is that you have to select an analytic standard for abstractness, since a more abstract analysis can reduce the number of phonemes. An example is the treatment of &quot;r&quot; in German, which is often not a phonetic rhotic, it's a vowel. A related issue is that you can eliminate phonemes by positing structure (for instance, vowel length and branching coda are in complementary distribution in Norwegian). Length, in particular, is a property that can be structurally analyzed (to eliminate phonemes) or featurally analyzed (long versus short vowels and consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, contemporary theories of &quot;minimalism&quot; do not count letters, they at most count the defining features. That is, if only 9 features are needed to analyze an inventory under analysis A and 10 or 11 features are needed under analysis B, then A is more minimal and judged to be better. Generative analyses don't assign any value to counting phonemes, instead they assign value to not requiring rules and to not specifying underlying feature values (e.g. vowels are all voiced, so you don't have to specify vowels as being voiced). Government Phonology is one brand of fairly minimalist phonology, which exploits structure more and relies on &quot;inventory&quot; less: see Charette 1991 (&lt;em&gt;Conditions on phonological government&lt;/em&gt;) and works by Wiebke Brockhaus and Markus Pöchtrager for German (the latter may have also written on Turkish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the goal is to lower the count of segments (which is the product of some arrangement of features – you're not interested in the composition of segments), you can take the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard German consonant inventory&lt;/a&gt; and chip away. You could eliminate [ŋ], as was classically done. All of the parenthesized segments can be eliminated since they are marginal or predictable. The affricates can be treated as clusters. Ich-laut and ach-laut can be reduced to one phoneme. Whether or not that give you a terrible analysis depends on your underlying theoretical axioms, so maybe saving three phonemes is a sufficiently large benefit that it compensates for the complexity it adds elsewhere (in stating the rules for syllable structure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T17:14:00.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T17:15:03.157" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a logician new to linguistics. I am curious if there has been any work on using the formalism of directed graphs (as opposed to, say, lambda-calculus or first-order logic) to represent LF of natural languages. I am proposing this because, in the philosophy literature, it appears that theorists have been struggling to account for the fact that &quot;Romeo loves Juliet&quot; and &quot;Juliet loves Romeo&quot; express two different propositions, but &quot;1=2&quot; and &quot;2=1&quot; express the same propositions. One intuitive thought I had is that this could be solved by representing relations as edges with directionality (as opposed to encoding their symmetricity/asymmetricity using the order of appearances of relata). But this might just be my ignorance of what LF is supposed to accomplish... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22560" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T02:29:39.037" Title="directed graph representation of LF" Tags="&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;logical-form&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28694" CreationDate="2018-08-23T18:19:21.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, finite set of voorvoegsels in names, allright, with some mini-syntactic structure, which forms a potentially infinite set of complex names:&#xA;1) 'van' is a common prepositional voorvoegsel in names, e.g. Jan van Putten, means from or of.&#xA;2) ' van der' is another common, composed one, e.g. Johanna van der Sluis, here 'der' is genitive case - yes, good old case remnant in Dutch - and the preposition 'van' must precede 'der', as *'der van' would be ungrammatical.&#xA;3) 'ter' is less common simple case inflected one, meaning to or towards, directional dative, I guess (not much of a case expert)&#xA;4) there are rather more complex compositions in often blue blood names, like &#xA;'van Heerdt tot Eversberg' ('tot' means to as in limit), and 'van Tuyll van Serooskerken' or ones with French names like in 'Collot d'Escury' or 'd'Aulnis de Bourouill' - some are believed to date back to the 15th century, but it was Napoleon in 1811 who required everyone to have a last, family name.&#xA;Lots of records of names on Wikipedia...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13312" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:19:21.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T19:38:21.397" Score="-2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word Fotze (cunt) has the irregular spelling Votze, which is usually explained as a reference to the denotated part. But comparing Vater (father), I don't know any reason why hat wouldn't be Fater. In many cases, word initial V is homophone with F. While Vogel (bird) may be in reference to the simplified drawing of a bird, too (hence Vogel-Vau as mnemonic for the letter). Otherwise initial V exists only in loanwords, I guess. Vagina (sheath) is decidedly not pronounced Fagina (though the allusion to lips might lend itself to a word play on eating ...), perhaps (sound-)symbolic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why is V such a very &lt;em&gt;vveird&lt;/em&gt; letter in German, for lack of a better word?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:51:11.503" Title="The letter V in German, its sounds and visual symbolism" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-08-27T11:37:12.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28718" CreationDate="2018-08-24T02:29:39.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_pair_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arc pair grammar&lt;/a&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T02:29:39.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T06:42:36.043" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and many common languages nowadays, punctuation marks are used to introduce direct speech. This makes it possible to start direct speech without lexical clue, as in the second example here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary asked, &quot;Could you come here for a minute?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Could you come here for a minute?&quot; asked Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (mostly ancient?) languages without punctuation, the second example would not contain any clue that direct speech starts, which presumably makes a text harder to narrate (as the narrator would need these clues to use different intonation or the like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biblical Hebrew did not have punctuation for a long time, and direct speech rarely occurs without marking. However, the marking is part of the sentence (i.e., pronounced when read out loud, as in example 1 above). It seems then that a language like this lacks freedom to describe dialogue creatively (and indeed, BH dialogue often feels boring to us with a lot of &quot;and he said&quot; &amp;mdash; although a native might not have found this to be a problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realising this I'm wondering if there are languages that commonly use direct speech &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; marking (either lexical, i.e. pronounced, or with punctuation) and if so how they deal with the problem that a narrator needs these clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T06:42:36.043" Title="Are there written languages that commonly start direct speech without marking?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28727" CreationDate="2018-08-24T08:17:27.153" Score="7" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak English and Norwegian and a little German and a little Dutch and I discovered a pattern while thinking about words which are obviously cognate. The pattern is wherever English, Norwegian and Dutch have &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, German often has &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also example of almost the opposite case too, where German has &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and Norwegian has &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;t&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and English has &lt;em&gt;voiceless&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;th&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. Dutch in this case seems to have &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;d&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, the same as German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;English    Norwegian    Dutch    German&#xA;day        dag          dag      Tag&#xA;door       dør          deur     Tür&#xA;dance      dans         dans     Tanz&#xA;middle     midten       middel   Mitte&#xA;think      tenke        denken   denken&#xA;thatch     tak          dak      Dach&#xA;through    trenge?      deur     durch&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Norwegian gloss &quot;midten&quot;, it's pronounced as &lt;code&gt;/t:/&lt;/code&gt; but I believe it was historically voiced as evidenced by the spelling.&#xA;And I'm not so sure that &lt;code&gt;trenge&lt;/code&gt; is cognate with &lt;code&gt;through&lt;/code&gt;. But that word can mean &quot;squeeze through&quot; or &quot;force one's way into&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some counter-examples which I cannot explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;English    Norwegian    Dutch    German&#xA;though     dog          toch     doch&#xA;there      der          daar     da&#xA;salad      salat        salade   Salate&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found especially puzzling is that the voicedness seems to have flipped over in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So have I spotted a correspondence of some sort here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T11:27:23.323" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T11:27:23.323" Title="Why did German &lt;d&gt; and &lt;t&gt; flip over?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28725" CreationDate="2018-08-24T15:38:05.713" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a few different correspondences here; I'll go through them individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;day ~ dag ~ dag ~ Tag&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the &lt;em&gt;second German consonant shift&lt;/em&gt; (or the &lt;em&gt;High German consonant shift&lt;/em&gt;). Among other things, voiced plosives at the start of words turned voiceless in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;think ~ tenke ~ denken ~ denken&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is due to &lt;em&gt;Germanic dental fricative loss&lt;/em&gt;. Some people consider it part of the second German consonant shift, but it affected languages other than German, so I consider it separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, late Proto-Germanic had two dental fricatives &lt;code&gt;*þ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*ð&lt;/code&gt;, created through Grimm's Law. They started as allophones but eventually split in many languages. In English and Icelandic, they persisted all the way to the present. But in most (all?) other Germanic languages, they merged into either &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt;. In German and Dutch the result is always &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt;; in Norwegian it keeps the original voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;there ~ der ~ daar ~ da&#xA;though ~ dog ~ toch ~ doch&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same as above; Norwegian preserves the voiced-ness of the original &lt;code&gt;*ð&lt;/code&gt;, while German and Dutch use &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt; exclusively. (Dutch used to have &lt;em&gt;toch&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;doch&lt;/em&gt; alternating freely; &lt;em&gt;doch&lt;/em&gt; is the expected form etymologically.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;salad ~ salat ~ salade ~ Salat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unrelated to the others, and doesn't come from Proto-Germanic: it stems from Italian &lt;em&gt;(in)salata&lt;/em&gt;. Some languages got it through French, which voiced the &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, while others didn't. (Also note that German &lt;em&gt;Salate&lt;/em&gt; is plural, with an extra morpheme added; the root is &lt;em&gt;Salat&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:38:05.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28721" CreationDate="2018-08-24T15:51:11.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with many natural languages, German has an orthography that evolved over several centuries into what it is today. In the process it's ended up with some inconsistencies that don't make any logical sense and only exist for historical reasons. (Compare how English &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; generally denotes &lt;code&gt;/dʒ/&lt;/code&gt; before front vowels, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; in words stemming from Old Norse, like &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;get&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternation between &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is one of those. In Old High German (as in Latin), &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; was synonymous with &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, but in Middle High German, &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; were in free variation: you'd see &lt;em&gt;Fater&lt;/em&gt; but also &lt;em&gt;Valke&lt;/em&gt;. Eventually, words tended to fossilize with one or the other, mostly depending on which was used by some influential source: whether that was the official documents of the Holy Roman Empire (which tended to prefer &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;), or Luther's vernacular Bible (which tended to prefer &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nowadays, whether a native German word is spent with &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; usually comes down to historical accident instead of any logical system. The spellings must simply be memorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:51:11.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22595" CreationDate="2018-08-25T02:13:02.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is expounded in R.L. Trask, Robert McColl Millar's &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change&lt;/em&gt;? (2010 Rev. ed)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eVgc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eVgc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T02:13:02.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-25T02:24:00.537" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a good tool to grab all example sentences used in a paper so they could be processed via an NLP pipeline?  I have udpipe in mind especially: I'd like to take sentences from one or more linguistics research papers (or position papers, and so forth) and use them as input to the udpipe parser.  I'm experimenting with adding fields to some udpipe data structures to retain a references to the page and other info where the sentences is extracted from the linguistics text, so that one could click back to the discussion from the (CoNLL-U, say) output.  The rationale is that it would be interesting to see formal parse notations alongside discussions of those specific sentences -- unlike sentences drawn from most corpora, linguists introduce example sentences specifically to make a point or demonstrate a claim.  I use a specific LaTeX command to typeset example sentences in my own work, so I know it's possible in principle to have example sentences automatically indexed in a PDF file, but I don't know if there's any standard practice in this regard.  Currently I'm working in data set preparation in several fields (including linguistics) so I'm also exploring how example sentences (perhaps along with parsing data) can be published as data sets accompanying the main paper.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22568" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T20:38:28.623" Title="How to extract example sentences from linguistics papers" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;latex&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-25T14:27:22.300" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching a documentary on the hungarian population in Slovakia. At one point in the documentary,they interviewed a lady from the village of Ipeľské Predmostie. When they asked her a question about the relationship between hungarians and slovaks,she answered by saying that they're absolutely friendly and the hungarians and slovaks living there speak both languages. This got me thinking:is there a sort of pidgin,formed by the mix of the slovak and hungarian languages?How do these different ethnic groups communicate with one another in daily life?And also,if anyone knows about influences of the hungarian language in the slovak speech near the border,a clarification would be highly appreciated. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T19:30:28.210" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T20:24:34.387" Title="Hungarian and Slovak language border pidgin" Tags="&lt;hungarian&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28739" CreationDate="2018-08-25T14:36:29.873" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there some database on the internet that contains generative grammar of the English language / or any natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are many artificial languages like EBNF those can be formalized as generative grammars, but I think this is a lot harder for a natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can be Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22573" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T22:56:11.830" Title="Does a generative grammar of the English language exist?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-25T19:04:44.327" Score="5" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the latest paper on Thracian by C. Brixhe (on the latest Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics) and I am really baffled by the conclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the 6th century this language is surprisingly close to Greek. And, since the particularly&#xA;  close relationship of Greek and Phrygian has been long since proven, it is not&#xA;  toward a prehistoric Thraco-Phrygian unity (cf. 3) that these new documents point.&#xA;  Rather, in the period between Proto-Indo-European and the emergence of Greek, Thracian,&#xA;  and Phrygian, it is probably necessary to posit a linguistic conglomerate to which&#xA;  the populations which were later to develop into Greeks, Phrygians, and Thracians belonged.&#xA;  They must have arrived in the Balkans in the same migratory wave at a period&#xA;  when they were linguistically still relatively undifferentiated (Brixhe 2006a: 141−142,&#xA;  2006b: 57). From this it appears that Thracian may well &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have belonged to the satem&#xA;  group of Indo-European languages (4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider Brixhe a legendary linguist on the field of Greek dialectology, Phrygian and Thracian. However, it feels like the material found in Zone has not been assesed by anyone else (correct me if I'm wrong). There seems to be a number of inscriptions held behind locked doors and the only we get are some examples of dedications to Apollo and Bendis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we have been so wrong about Thracian in the past? Considering that those new inscriptions come from the southmost part of what is called Thrace, is it possible that we are rather dealing with a different IE language, than what was spoken in the Bulgarian Thrace? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T19:04:44.327" Title="Do we have to revise what we know about Thracian?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;phrygian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28733" CreationDate="2018-08-25T20:24:34.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot say about those regions of Slovakia specifically, but in other areas which after Trianon became part of other states there are no Hungarian-based pidgins.  In Vojvodina, Transylvania, Banat and around Sopron and Bratislava today, I have not heard nor heard of such a pidgin or creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually minorities, whether at the national level or the local level, are the better linguists.  But one other way this can work itself out naturally is that both groups speak in their own language but understand the other at least passively.  If there is sufficient good will neither takes offence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically there was a pidgin in Austro-Hungary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Slavic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Army Slavic&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Armee-Slawisch&lt;/em&gt;.  Both German and Hungarian were dominant and thus lingua franca at times, it varied by the exact region and era.  But because of the linguistic landscape of the wider region, solid knowledge of common Slavic is very useful even today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite being from very distinct families these languages actually have many common words anyway, especially in the dialects and for the things used most in daily life in these places.  Hungarian loanwords are very dominant in culinary lexicon.  On the other hand Hungarian has many loanwords from Slavic, and many loan translations from German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T20:24:34.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28759" CreationDate="2018-08-25T20:49:23.483" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a paper about Donald Trump's speaking style and he frequently says sentences like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;They wanna be in the United States of America. &lt;strong&gt;That’s where they wanna be&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We’re gonna send you reinforcements and we’re gonna send them to you quickly. &lt;strong&gt;That’s what we’ll do&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the correct linguistic term to describe the sentences in bold? I figure they are some kind of cleft construction, but I'm not sure and would be very happy if somebody could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22575" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T20:18:22.870" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T10:18:26.690" Title="What is this sentence structure called?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-25T21:35:49.140" Score="-2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Feature/Map 4: Voicing in plosives and fricatives (by Ian Maddieson)&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;WALS&lt;/em&gt; value for German: “in both plosives and fricatives”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comment: Owing to final devoicing, voicing contrasts in Standard German&#xA;  are limited to syllable onsets; but such positional limitations are ignored for &lt;em&gt;WALS&lt;/em&gt; purposes. In Upper High German dialects, in particular Bavarian, only velar plosives /k, g/ and labial fricatives /f, v/ contrast in onset position, &lt;strong&gt;while there is no corresponding voicing contrast in labials and alveolars, nor does voice contrast in velar+liquid clusters /gl, gr/; but such patterns which are not only not across-the-board, but indeed only involve a minority of the relevant consonants, would also suffice for a positive value&lt;/strong&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;WALS&lt;/em&gt;, “voicing in both plosives and fricatives” in actual fact means “voicing in at least one pair of plosives/fricatives corresponding in place of articulation, not necessarily in all such pairs”. Fair enough, but phonologists would perhaps have appreciated&#xA;  finer-grained feature values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/for_download/publications/150_Plank_2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS values evaluated&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Frans Plank)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest of the paragraph, the examples have been provided by the essay provided by jknappen, but I cannot find any example for gl and gr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22546" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T18:58:47.643" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T09:14:24.963" Title="german phonology" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-08-26T21:19:52.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28734" CreationDate="2018-08-25T22:56:11.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there has never been a truly complete description of English (or any natural language) in generative terms—or in any formal system, in fact. Such a thing would be wonderfully useful, but all that exists at present are effectively fragments, covering a small subset of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T22:56:11.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28767" CreationDate="2018-08-25T23:49:41.457" Score="2" ViewCount="1028" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering how we pronounce words. I feel like I learned this when I was a kid in school with all the language rules, but now I can't remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to think about how we pronounce words. How we actually mentally parse the letters and &quot;sound it out&quot;. It seems a bit difficult, because it doesn't just move from left to right as you might imagine. From first look it seems we have to &quot;look ahead&quot; to figure out the sound of the current letters, even to the point of having to look at the entire word to figure out the sounding out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &lt;code&gt;phase&lt;/code&gt;. We know what &lt;code&gt;ph&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; sound. But &lt;code&gt;ase&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;aze&lt;/code&gt;, like &lt;code&gt;haze&lt;/code&gt;. So we only know this &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; because it is the word &quot;phase&quot;, and that's how the whole word is pronounced. Or maybe it's because the word &lt;code&gt;face&lt;/code&gt; already takes up that sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;chase&lt;/code&gt; has the &lt;code&gt;face&lt;/code&gt; sound. So &lt;code&gt;chase&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;phase&lt;/code&gt; have a &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; vs. a &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are other words like &lt;code&gt;tie&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;field&lt;/code&gt;. There are lots of &lt;code&gt;ie&lt;/code&gt; words that are pronounced &quot;fear&quot; or &quot;tear&quot;, &quot;pierce&quot;, &quot;fierce&quot;, &quot;field&quot;, &quot;siege&quot;, etc. But &lt;code&gt;tie&lt;/code&gt; is like &quot;I&quot;. You only know this because the word is short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't see the rules for pronouncing words. I imagine there are a lot of rules, but still, I am wondering what they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, if there is a resource to look at that outlines the rules for sounding out words, or if it is purely a learned thing that there are too many rules to write down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe instead of all the specific rules (like &lt;code&gt;ph&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt;, etc.), just the algorithm for moving through the word and applying the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are words like &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt; which have two pronunciations! &lt;code&gt;teer&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;tair&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T20:05:05.220" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:11:25.110" Title="Algorithm for figuring out the pronunciation of a word" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28741" CreationDate="2018-08-26T00:10:15.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, any algorithm for determining the pronunciation from its spelling would be rife with special cases and exceptions. That's simply the nature of our spelling system. In the distant past (Old English) it was fully regular, but many, many things have changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some general rules, certainly, which can be found in resources for teaching English pronunciation (either materials for children or for ESL learners). But an unfortunate number of exceptions simply need to be memorized. For just a few of these, see the famous poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chaos&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T00:10:15.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28745" CreationDate="2018-08-26T02:03:52.283" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm terribly sorry if this is considered off-topic, but I couldn't find a more appropriate community to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about Summer Linguistic Institutes, in particular, the one held in 2019 in UC Davis. I'm new to linguistics, and I couldn't find any information on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lsa2019.ucdavis.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official website&lt;/a&gt; regarding the two things. First of all, is it suitable for a linguistics newbie? According to the list of courses, they are introductory, but does it mean that one can feel comfortable with having no background in linguistics? Second of all, regarding the financial aspect. In some non-linguistic areas, most workshops are free and provide financial support for participants. What about this Institute? Is the admission free? Is there any financial support available? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T03:05:59.093" Title="On the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute" Tags="&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28744" CreationDate="2018-08-26T03:05:59.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went to 5 or so of these institutes as a student; was an administrator at one in 1969; taught phonology at one.  Should be fun.  I wouldn't worry about being unprepared, since there is such a variety of students there, instructors (who are from all over) know they can't count on any particular shared background in their classes.  If you don't know anything, be prepared to do some extra reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I glanced over your web reference.  It looks like they are just getting organized, so exactly who will teach what is probably still up in the air.  I didn't recognized any linguists' names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there will be some opportunities for financial aid.  You should check that with your home institution, as well. You might think about not actually being admitted formally as a student, but just going to classes and hanging out (as I did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would not be interested in attending an Institute with a methodological slant, as this one promises to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T03:05:59.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28749" CreationDate="2018-08-26T03:33:12.717" Score="0" ViewCount="2185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is a list of all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt; sound combinations and how to pronounce them. Searching brings up a bunch of partial and not too well done lists, so wondering if there is a standard or good resource on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, not even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists the sounds for &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; that I can find. There is &lt;code&gt;ay&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;ah&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;uh&lt;/code&gt; perhaps, and &lt;code&gt;at&lt;/code&gt;. There's probably many other subtle &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; sounds in other languages I would like to learn about. I would like to just see a list of all the sounds if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps if there was a place that had audio recordings of the sounds that would be neat too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:56:14.840" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:56:14.840" Title="Complete list of sounds in all languages (IPA)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28741" CreationDate="2018-08-26T05:16:29.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on which word, and what person. At the most basic level, you have learned the various rules of English (subjects before verbs, adjectives before nouns, and so on), and also the morphemes of the language, like &quot;cat&quot;. When you learn &quot;cat&quot; you learn the pronunciation ([kæt]) and the real-world referent of the word. If you grew up speaking English, you did that as a child, by age 3. If you learned English as a second language, then I'd have to ask a bunch of questions. You did not learn the word &quot;phase&quot; the same way you learned &quot;cat&quot;. You probably learned the verb &quot;tear&quot; and the noun &quot;tear&quot; the same way you learned &quot;cat&quot;, though later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of vocabulary is only marginally picked up from ordinary speech (&quot;phase&quot; might be), and certain words (&quot;hammamelidanthemum&quot;) are almost always learned from writing. Some of these words are so infrequent in speech that there is no one common pronunciation. There are at least two ways to pronounce that word (həˈmæmələˌdænθəməm ~ ˈhæməmæləˌdænθəməm). There are strategies that English speakers acquire for converting spelling into pronunciation, but they are highly variable (e.g. is &quot;Pegnataro's&quot; pronounced [pɛgnəˈtɛroz] or [pɛnjəˈtɑroz]? – depends on whether you know any Italian). It would be an interesting research project, to try to sort out a system of rules that computes the probability of a given pronunciation given a spelling. Although those rules would be complex, I think they could reduce the seeming chaos, if the conditioning factors were make explicit. The difference [həˈmæmdələˌdænθəməm] versus [ˈhæməmæləˌdænθəməm] stems from treating the word as bi-morphemic in the former case (hammamelid-anthemum) and as a very long root in the latter (with alternating stress). Ultimately, there will be completely arbitrary cases such as the fact that &quot;Sequim&quot; is pronounced [skwɪm], but I actually think the completely arbitrary part of spelling-to-pronunciation is not huge. So for example, &quot;horse&quot; vs. &quot;worse&quot; may seem like random chaos, unless you look at other words with &quot;wor...&quot; like &lt;em&gt;work, wort, worry, worm&lt;/em&gt; – there is a sub-generalization that makes &quot;worse&quot; regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T21:55:13.820" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T21:55:13.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28746" CreationDate="2018-08-26T14:18:54.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speakers of a given language can, by dint of speaking that language, pronounce the sounds of the language, so a Norwegian speaker can pronounce &lt;em&gt;do, du, dy&lt;/em&gt; for you. If you ask a Finnish speaker to pronounce &lt;em&gt;dy&lt;/em&gt;, you won't get the same thing. The association (IPA) has not sanctioned a specific set of recordings as the official standards for the letters of the IPA, and probably never will. For the moment, you can use demonstration charts constructed by recognised experts in the area. Peter Ladefoged's version is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. John Esling had an analogous chart, but it seems to be missing in action. (Aha: it crossed the ocean, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipachart/display.php?chart=1&amp;amp;datatype=1&amp;amp;speaker=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; you can also see various visualizations and two speakers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can't be a list of all IPA sound &lt;em&gt;combinations&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;ɓa, ɓɪ, ɓla, ɓlɪ, ŋɓa, ŋɓɪ...&quot;, since the set is infinite. I'm pretty sure that you are not looking for IPA combinations when you ask about &quot;ay, ah, uh, at&quot;, instead you mean the IPA equivalents of some dictionary spelling system. Probably, &quot;ay&quot; represents the non-consonant of &quot;may&quot;. There are a number of ways to represent that using IPA: [meɪ, me, me:, mɛɪ, mɛj, mej]. This is partially because there are competing phonemic analyses of the tense (long) vowels of English, and partly because the pronunciation differs – I go for [mɛɪ] as closest to my pronunciation, but people from The North (of England) are closer to [me:].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could create a table of IPA-to-orthography correspondences using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CMU dictionary&lt;/a&gt; plus a near infinite supply of programming skill, since the dictionary lists very many putative words of English and their phonemic equivalents. (It includes numerous foreign words especially names, presumably because they appeared in some corpus; I don't know where they got their pronunciations from and I disagree much of the time). It uses a special coding where every phoneme is a string of blank-deletimited letters (&quot; TH &quot;) so you could convert that into IPA letters pretty easily. The hard part would be getting the orthographic correspondences, probably best attacked by anchoring consonant-to-consonant first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T00:18:23.610" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T00:18:23.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T15:15:07.643" Score="0" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about doing just that. I've been looking at agglutinating languages like Korean and Hungarian. Problem is, I've never managed to truly learn a language unless I had a use for it. I've only ever learned German well, because I used to listen to NDH metal all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really like to get a deeper understanding of how these languages work, but I don't see myself being able to actually learn a language that I have absolutely no use for. I can't even complete a German course on Duolingo because that site's lessons are the only thing I ever use German for anymore! I never speak it or write it, and I rarely ever hear or see it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning languages &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; increase your linguistic knowledge. German, for instance, helped me to understand how a case system is used. I don't know if I could ever have understood a Latin-like case system if I didn't know German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do professional linguists do stuff like this? Note that I don't have a degree, I'm entirely self-taught. I've been studying all I can on linguistics for over a decade now, but I've mostly focused on phonology (I got into linguistics so I could make an auxlang, I've since given up on that goal). Recently I've been trying to focus more on grammar, but like I said, I don't see myself being able to truly understand some things when I can't see examples of how its used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T19:39:31.013" Title="Do linguists ever learn another language just to increase their own knowledge of linguistics?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28750" CreationDate="2018-08-26T18:34:09.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends on what you mean by &quot;learning&quot; the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a common misconception that all linguists are fluent in a great number of languages, in the sense of being able to read or speak with native-like proficiency. While some linguists can speak five languages fluently, many others can't, and some highly-respected linguists speak only a single language with any fluency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, linguists do tend to &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; many other languages that they aren't fluent in: investigating certain aspects in greater detail, such as the phonetics of the nasal vowels, or the morphology of the noun class system, or even certain metaphors in the semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, my current work is on the morphology of Lingála. I could tell you all sorts of details about the noun class/gender system or how verbs are &quot;extended&quot; to adjust their meaning. But if you dropped me into the middle of the Congo, I couldn't even find a bathroom on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While learning additional languages can be helpful for a linguist, most linguists don't take all the languages they study to the point of fluency. Instead, they learn about the specific aspects they're interested in working with, and don't pay much attention to the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T18:43:43.027" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T18:43:43.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28738" CreationDate="2018-08-26T18:52:22.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't actually able to find out which exact dialects of German Plank is talking about. The Wikipedia article on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bavarian language&lt;/a&gt;&quot; lists /p b/ and /t d/ as phonemes alongside /k ɡ/, and says that &quot;Some dialects, such as the Bavarian dialect in South Tyrol, realise /k/ as an affricate [kx] word-initially and before /m, n, l, r/&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I understand the quoted material to be saying that some dialects of (Upper High) German have no contrast between /p/ and /b/ or between /t/ and /d/, but do have a contrast between /k/ and /g/, which is however neutralized before /l/ and /r/ (it doesn't say whether in favor of [k] or [g]). It may also be relevant that in many German dialects, the contrast between the two series of plosives is a so-called &quot;lenis-fortis&quot; distinction (sometimes realized in the form of an aspiration or duration contrast) rather than primarily being a true voicing distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other similar things&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found some possibly relevant information on p. 163-164 of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00437956.1983.11435742&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Swabian voiceless vowel&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by T. D. Griffen (1983):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the combination of ge- with [r, l, m, ŋ, w, s, š, f] in western Swabian results in the tenuis, as in [kriəft] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;gerüefet&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;gerufen&lt;/em&gt;) 'called' (Kauffmann 1890: 199). While Kauffmann does note that this process has generalized in his dialect areas to yield such forms as [kras] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;gras&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;Gras&lt;/em&gt;) 'grass', it is clear in the presentation that even he considers this to be the result of analogy or some other historical process, because the generalized changes are included under the basic combinatory rule involving the prefix &lt;em&gt;ge-.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover, this Anlautsverhartung is at odds with other developments&#xA;  in the same word-initial environment. As also noted above, this&#xA;  very same environment (as it stands after syncope) leads to a weakening&#xA;  in other western dialects, as we find in [grafd] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;kraft&lt;/em&gt; (NHG&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Kraft&lt;/em&gt;) 'power' (Bohnenberger 1928a:27), [grọ̃mẹ] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;krumme&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  (NHG &lt;em&gt;Krume&lt;/em&gt;) 'crookedness' (Dreher 1919:15), and (grankhuǫit] &amp;lt;&#xA;  MHG &lt;em&gt;krankeit&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;Krankheit&lt;/em&gt;) 'sickness' (H. Moser 1937:57). To&#xA;  these examples from Baden and Württemberg, we can also add [bloî] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;plâge&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;Plage&lt;/em&gt;) 'plague' from the more western Baden&#xA;  (Heimburger 1888:236) and even a regular sound law in the eastern&#xA;  dialect of Lechrain by which [pl) &gt; [bl] and [kl] &gt; [gl), yielding such&#xA;  forms as [breisə] &amp;lt; MHG &lt;em&gt;preis&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;Preis&lt;/em&gt;) 'cost' and [glagə) &amp;lt; MHG&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;klage&lt;/em&gt; (NHG &lt;em&gt;Klage&lt;/em&gt;) 'complaint' (Haag 1898:33). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether the sound changes that Griffen mentions exist in any dialects that furthermore lack a distinction between /t/ and /d/ as well as /p/ and /b/, as in Plank's description. I wasn't able to find a description of the phonology and phonotactics of Bavarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Alsatian has a native plosive inventory of [b̥ d̥ ɡ̊ kʰ]&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alsatian&lt;/a&gt;, which is a High German dialect, apparently has an sound inventory that contains the plosives [b̥ d̥ ɡ̊ kʰ], as well as the affricates [pf ts tʃ]. This isn't exactly a pure voicing contrast (based on the rest of the phonology, I wonder a little whether [kʰ] might be realized like [k͡x]), but it seems similar to the situation that Plank described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that [kʰ] occurs only &quot;at the beginning of a word or morpheme, and then only if followed immediately by a vowel&quot;, and transcribes &lt;em&gt;klai&lt;/em&gt; 'little' (cognate to Standard German &lt;em&gt;klein&lt;/em&gt;) as [ɡ̊laɪ̯].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonation#State_of_the_glottis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonation&lt;/a&gt;&quot; says that Alsatian /b̥/, /d̥/, /ɡ̊/ &quot;contrast with both modally voiced /b, d, ɡ/ and modally voiceless /p, t, k/ in French borrowings&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T09:14:24.963" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T09:14:24.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28755" CreationDate="2018-08-26T19:35:58.600" Score="1" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like a rolling &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;, if there is a rolling &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; like gurgling in any language. There is a rolling &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; like &lt;code&gt;ħ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;sh&lt;/code&gt;, if there is a &lt;code&gt;psh&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;bjsh&lt;/code&gt;, like &lt;code&gt;booj&lt;/code&gt; but shorter. Likewise, a &lt;code&gt;gsh&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;gj&lt;/code&gt; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T21:17:27.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T21:17:27.680" Title="If there is a rolling `g`, or a few other sounds, found in any language" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28750" CreationDate="2018-08-26T19:39:31.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, it is not common for professional linguists to study languages in the sense of general language acquisition study (as opposed to focused technical research). By &quot;study&quot; I mean &quot;study with some diligence&quot; equivalent to let's say equivalent to 75 classroom hours, as opposed to &quot;show up for a couple of weeks and give up&quot;. By &quot;professional linguist&quot;, I mean a person who makes (made) his living in linguistics -- not translation or language teaching, but scientific linguistics. For example, a linguistics professor taking Saami language classes so that he can speak Saami (for whatever reason). Reviewing the known behavior of professional colleagues that I know, the dominant form of language-learning type behavior by linguists is &quot;technical field working&quot;, where one studies the structure of Bilin by working with a speaker of Bilin. This is sufficiently unlike general language learning that it's outside the scope of what I am making claims about (and I suspect outside the scope of the OPs interest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most common form of general language-learning by linguists that I am aware of is &quot;tool language&quot; acquisition where you learn one language in order to study another, for example learning Portuguese so that you can do field work in Mozambique. Before becoming a professional linguist (before completing the dissertation and getting that job), it's reasonably common for students of linguistics to acquire research-tool languages, and this often defines the course of postgraduate research for that person. Once you're working as a full time linguist, it's hard to get the spare time to take a language class, or pursue some self-teaching program. I know only a few people who did that, and in fact I only studied 4 languages &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; general speaking languages in the post-dissertation phase (3 of them as &quot;tool&quot; languages). Even rarer are those who study a language purely as the direct object of linguistic interest, for example learning Arabic because you want to understand the structure of Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third category of language self-teaching of interest, namely the person who focuses on a single language to the point that they gain general ability to speak the language from elicitation, and can start to elicit in the language. Academic linguists sometimes do this; missionary linguists do this quite frequently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T19:39:31.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28753" CreationDate="2018-08-26T20:14:36.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;rolling &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;&quot; I assume you mean the &lt;em&gt;alveolar trill&lt;/em&gt;, written &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; in the IPA. It's possible to have trilled sounds at other places in the mouth, such as the bilabial trill (with the lips, like English &quot;brrr&quot;), IPA &lt;code&gt;/ʙ/&lt;/code&gt;, and the uvular trill (with the uvula, like the French trilled R), IPA &lt;code&gt;/ʀ/&lt;/code&gt;. You can also do an epiglottal trill deep in the throat, as you pointed out, but very few languages distinguish between an epiglottal/pharyngeal trill/fricative, so it's generally written &lt;code&gt;/ħ/&lt;/code&gt; (officially the symbol for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;trilled &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;&quot;, or velar trill, is generally considered impossible. There just isn't enough flexibility in that part of the mouth to really get anything vibrating properly. Similarly, a &quot;tapped &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (velar tap/flap) is considered impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound written &quot;ch&quot; in English is IPA &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt;: a &quot;t&quot; sound releasing into a &quot;sh&quot; sound. You can certainly have other sounds release into a &quot;sh&quot; or a &quot;zh&quot; in the same way: they would be written as &lt;code&gt;/pʃ bʒ kʃ gʒ/&lt;/code&gt; in the IPA. The last two of these are actually found in English: listen to the &quot;x&quot; in &quot;sexual&quot; and &quot;luxurious&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all four of these are significantly less common than &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt;, because &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; are pronounced very close to each other in the mouth, so it's very easy for a &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; to develop a bit of &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; fricative sound at the end, especially around palatal consonants or high front vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T20:14:36.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28753" CreationDate="2018-08-26T20:44:08.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the velar trill, I think it is physically impossible. A trill involves a piece of meat flapping rapidly in the speech airstream, thanks to the Bernoulli effect. This can be done with the tip of the tongue, lips, or uvula, but the tongue blade is massive, and cannot be made to &quot;trill&quot; using ordinary speech airflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Affricates like [ts, tθ, tʃ, pf, kx, qχ] are single phonological segments, usually at a single place of articulation, composed of a stop component then a fricative component. Sesotho has &quot;affricates&quot; of the type [pʃ] -- which might be what you are looking for. The problem is that arguments for &quot;single segment&quot; vs &quot;two segment&quot; status tend to be theory-bound and rely on certain idealizations, for example the affricate [ts] in German could be treated as a cluster and not a single segment. The counter-argument is that German doesn't &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; have stop-plus-fricative onsets e.g. *&lt;em&gt;kseit&lt;/em&gt;, *&lt;em&gt;pxeffer&lt;/em&gt; -- the idealization is that a language should not have a condition on clusters &quot;must be homorganic&quot;. There is subtheory of phonology which disposes of ordered individual segments in the syllable onset, which says that the single segment &quot;pf&quot; and the cluster &quot;pf&quot; are just notational variants and are not linguistically distinct. It is almost true that clusters and analogous affricates don't contrast in languages, except that Polish contrasts the cluster [tʃ] (&quot;trzy&quot;=three) and the affricate [ʧ] (&quot;czy&quot;=whether).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T20:44:08.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T22:06:50.267" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of trying to understand how we mentally parse and understand text requires understanding how far ahead we look, which is what this question is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how we understand how to interpret words that have multiple totally unrelated meanings and/or pronunciations. Words such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;read (red, reed)&#xA;tear (tair, teer)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see a sentence like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;And the tears were many.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's ambiguous. You have to &lt;em&gt;backtrack&lt;/em&gt; a few times and try out different meanings of &lt;code&gt;tears&lt;/code&gt;. If it was part of more text, then you could maybe figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;They fell hard and ruined their clothes. They were running so fast. It was in the middle of the night. The tears were many.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;They fell hard and ruined their clothes. The tears were many.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;They fell hard and ruined their clothes. The tears on their clothes were many.&#xA;// or&#xA;The clothes were shredded. The tears were many.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we can finally see that it is &quot;tairs&quot;. The crazy thing is how we can read that out loud and get it right. The question is, how can we pronounce that right in the first case, where the meaning is clarified &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the word is used, and in the second case, where the meaning is clarified &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is as if we see a &lt;em&gt;box&lt;/em&gt; of text, a window of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Then we can finally see that it is &quot;tairs&quot;. &#xA;     _____________________________&#xA;The |crazy thing is how we can rea|d that out &#xA;    |                             |&#xA;loud| and get it right. The questi|on is, how &#xA;    |                             |&#xA;can |we pronounce &lt;b&gt;that&lt;/b&gt; right in th|e first case, &#xA;    |                             |&#xA;wher|e the meaning is clarified _a|fter_ the &#xA;    |                             |&#xA;word|is used, and in the second ca|se, where &#xA;     ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾&#xA;the meaning is clarified _before_.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current word there would be &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;, and it's like we can interpret that far in advance, or more, to determine how to say the current word. But this doesn't seem to act in parallel, but instead just happens in series really fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, if there is any research or formal approaches that explain how this process works in humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T06:06:17.327" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T06:21:32.583" Title="How far ahead we look when parsing and understanding text" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;word-sense-disambiguation&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;polysemy&gt;&lt;natural-language-understanding&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28757" CreationDate="2018-08-27T00:23:51.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A well-known and popular formal model for human language is CFG (meaning &quot;context free phrase structure grammar&quot;) described by Chomsky in the '50s.  CFG is my own personal favorite grammatical theory for human language. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Language-and-Grammar.html#Language-and-Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a useful document describing how look ahead works in a standard C-language parser, &lt;em&gt;Bison&lt;/em&gt; (developed from the classic &lt;em&gt;Yacc&lt;/em&gt;) works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T00:23:51.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28737" CreationDate="2018-08-27T07:54:51.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;X is wh-relative clause&quot; is an inverted pseudo-cleft: &lt;a href=&quot;https://glossary.sil.org/term/pseudo-cleft-sentence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://glossary.sil.org/term/pseudo-cleft-sentence&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The X is itself a sentential anaphor, and the relative clause predicate restates the previous statement predicate; so the whole sentence is a restatement of the preceding statement, and does not introduce any new information (something uncharacteristic of cleft constructions). You could call it a pseudo-cleft tautology, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T07:54:51.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28737" CreationDate="2018-08-27T10:18:26.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at these sentences from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;figures of speech&lt;/a&gt; point of view, one may call this structure a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm#Syntactic_pleonasm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syntactic pleonasm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T10:18:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T11:08:14.057" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume an alien has landed on Earth and wants to learn English with the help of an English Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He looks up the meaning of &quot;the&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning of &quot;the&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;denoting one or more people or things already mentioned or assumed to be common knowledge&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now he searches the individual meaning of each and every word of the above sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he continues to do this infinitely, he will land on many words. The words uncovered may be referred to by visiting the dictionary manually 1 by 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in this exercise, there would be nothing but circular references of word meanings. To resolve this issue, we may declare few words as &quot;axioms&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would those sets of words which would be axioms be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these set of words only(or predominantly), one could understand every other word in the English dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22586" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T11:08:14.057" Title="Axioms in English: If we try to find the root meaning of every English word in the dictionary,which word will we land on the most" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;research&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-08-28T04:25:21.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28757" CreationDate="2018-08-27T15:33:09.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are more or less like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word-sense disambiguation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(linguistics)#Anaphora_resolution_%E2%80%93_centering_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anaphora resolution&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreference#Coreference_resolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;co-reference resolution&lt;/a&gt; examples in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge#Winograd_schemas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winograd Schema Challenge&lt;/a&gt; and generally in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural language understanding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How far ahead do we look when parsing and understanding text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you essentially show in your examples where the necessary information is not in the sentence, the information needed for understanding can be &lt;strong&gt;arbitrarily far&lt;/strong&gt; away, and not necessarily ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in the article headline &lt;em&gt;The Pope's Baby Steps on Gays&lt;/em&gt; [1], where and when did you find pieces of information you use to decide that &lt;em&gt;Steps&lt;/em&gt; is N not V?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why these tasks are arguably AI-hard and inarguably require a lot of local and global context as input, although we can get much of the way with cruder methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;any research or formal approaches that explain how this process works in humans&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unsolved.  The examples require logic and reasoning.  If we knew how it worked and could describe it formally, we could implement full AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the top literature on this cluster of problems from the computer science perspective, I have not found any direct reference to linguistic or biological research.  We tend to take human intelligence as a given. But it could be that if you follow the references they themselves make reference to such research in other fields.  There is research on biological neural networks, usually focussed on low-level functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - example stolen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU_A-EgB38s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chris Manning's 2016 talk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T06:21:32.583" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T06:21:32.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T15:49:18.130" Score="0" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if animal sounds have any formal classification or linguistics symbols like the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qa9YDgtcaM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicken sounds (pretty awesome, done by a human)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHZm52nvBB4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cat sounds&lt;/a&gt; (purr, like trilled t, or growl like trilled h).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dogs growl like trilled g&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Horses neigh like trilled n&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sheeps bah like trilled a&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duck sound like squeezing air out of the side of your mouth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bird sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering because we can make these sounds, so it seems like we should have labels for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:04:45.823" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T01:18:44.600" Title="Do animal sounds have linguistic symbols or classifications?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;non-human-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28769" CreationDate="2018-08-27T17:55:32.597" Score="4" ViewCount="1148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching &quot;the number of languages&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shows&lt;/a&gt; about ~7,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Google Translate only has ~100 languages listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fF8aR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes me wonder if the languages have a lot of overlapping/duplicated elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested to know if languages can instead be broken down into &quot;characters sets&quot;. For example, English would have &lt;code&gt;a-zA-Z0-9(). -+?!...&lt;/code&gt;, while spanish would have &lt;code&gt;a-zñA-Z0-9(). -+?¿!¡...&lt;/code&gt;, and french would have &lt;code&gt;a-zç...&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unicode has everything. But I'm wondering if there is a list of either (a) the character sets per language (just the 100 languages on Google Translate, since all ~7,000 would be a monumental task), or a more broad character set classification that groups them somehow into hierarchies, so for example there are the &quot;lowercase letters&quot;, which belong in english, french, latin, etc., then there is &lt;code&gt;¿¡&lt;/code&gt; which spanish adds to the lowercase letters, etc. Basically wondering what sort of classification systems exist for language symbols other than unicode. Or if not that, &lt;em&gt;a database or website that lists the characters for different language so it doesn't have to be aggregated from a bunch of places&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T09:51:57.043" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:01:35.857" Title="&quot;Character sets&quot; for top 100 languages (as opposed to Unicode)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28741" CreationDate="2018-08-27T22:07:11.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So my question is, if there is a resource to look at that outlines the rules for sounding out words, or if it is purely a learned thing that there are too many rules to write down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that the rules can't be written down, not exactly because there are too many of them, but because it's too difficult to ensure that the rules account for all the possible rare words and variant pronunciations. Any set of rules that you can find or make will probably have some accidental omissions. And of course, as you pointed out, there are words like &lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt; that simply have ambiguous spellings: there just isn't enough information in the spelling alone to completely determine the pronunciation of the word. Situations like this are fairly common in English (e.g. the digraph &quot;ow&quot;/&quot;ou&quot; also has two pronunciations, so &quot;cow&quot; does not rhyme with &quot;crow&quot;, and there's no way to figure this out without just memorizing it or memorizing the etymology of these words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glib answer to your question about a resource for this would be &quot;a pronouncing dictionary&quot;. A lot of people are fond of stressing the irregularities of English spelling (no offense to people who like it, but I've grown tired of seeing people recommending the poem &quot;The Chaos&quot; as a supposed description of what English spelling is like) and it's true that there are a lot of specific words with unpredictable pronunciations. And this isn't only a feature of high-frequency words. For example, I only learned a few months ago about the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/456419/77227&quot;&gt;geoduck&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; which is pronounced &quot;GOO-ey duck&quot;: there isn't any practical way to know this other than memorizing the spelling and pronunciation of this particular word. So any time you are faced with an unfamiliar word, there is a chance (although not a very large one) that it will have a pronunciation that just doesn't follow the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think user6726 is right to say that many spelling–pronunciation pairs that seem unpredictable are not actually completely arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of good books that give an overview of the most common spelling–pronunciation patterns in English (not a comprehensive description), and these patterns cover the pronunciation of most words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend Greg Brooks' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/325&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary of the British English Spelling System&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; which you can read for free online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another similar resource is &lt;em&gt;A Survey of English Spelling,&lt;/em&gt; by Edward Carney (1994).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T06:11:25.110" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:11:25.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T22:33:36.097" Score="0" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to get a sense of what a complicated language sounds like, all the different pronunciations possible. Wondering if one could link to one of the most complicated spoken languages today. I just read that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese writing system&lt;/a&gt; is considered one of the most complicated. I'm not sure if it is in terms of sound. Wondering what the sound / spoken language equivalent would be. If there are a few, would be interested to know what the top are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean in terms of accents. I mean in terms of actual letters or consonants that go into words, or mora (which I am just being introduced to). But not accents, of which there could be a huge range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T09:56:44.167" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T09:56:44.167" Title="The language with the most sounds or variation" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28766" CreationDate="2018-08-27T22:42:43.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://r12a.github.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Ishida&lt;/a&gt; has a ton of online tools related to unicode and orthography.  The most useful one for your purposes is probaby the &lt;a href=&quot;https://r12a.github.io/app-charuse/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Character Usage Lookup&lt;/a&gt; tool.  Not a database, but you might be able to figure out a way to get what you want by looking at his source code, or asking him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T22:42:43.170" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28768" CreationDate="2018-08-27T23:47:35.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of senses of &quot;complicated&quot; that can be invoked for languages. There are two  kinds of complexity often applied to sound systems, one being the number of segmental units (often divided into consonants versus vowels), and the other being the degree of sequential unpredictability. An example of the first kind is the Khoisan language Taa (ǃXóõ), which has a lot of consonants and vowels -- around 140, though you can't take such numbers at face value because they are influenced by analysis. Likewise, the Caucasian language Ubykh had a massive inventory of consonants. An example of how analysis affects the count is that Taa has been claimed to have &quot;prevoiced&quot; consonants, but another analysis is that they have clusters of voiced plus voiceless consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sequential unpredictability gives you languages with &quot;complex&quot; combinations of consonants and vowels. Polish allows things like &lt;em&gt;wstrząs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;krnąbrność&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie&lt;/em&gt;. In languages with really simple syllable structure, you know that what follows a consonant is a vowel, and what follows a vowel is a consonant; in English you know that what precedes &lt;em&gt;p,t,k&lt;/em&gt; in the syllable is &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. Georgian has some odd onset clusters such as &lt;em&gt;bg&lt;/em&gt;, known as the harmonic clusters, which either constitute examples of &quot;complexity&quot; in diverging from the syllable architype CVCVCV... or which constitute complexity in being additional complex consonants (analogous to &quot;prevoiced&quot; consonants in Taa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third sense of &quot;complex&quot; not implied by your question (which seems to take the word to be a given, rather than the product of a computation), which is the complexity of computing a given form. Classical Arabic is a good example of that kind of complexity, because the system of rules for deriving a given form (e.g. 1 pl. imperfective jussive 1st measure of the root /wḍʕ/) are complex – there are many rules. The complexity of Japanese writing arises not just from having a lot of graphic primitives, but also from the rules for using graphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T23:47:35.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28774" CreationDate="2018-08-28T04:33:09.770" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if punctuation is necessary for written languages. I can't quite tell if in spoken languages we use &quot;punctuation&quot;. It seems like &quot;we say multiple words without pauses, breaks, or other gaps; and yet somehow, we can translate it to written text by adding things such as: commas, spaces, semicolons, and and periods.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;question marks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclamation marks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;periods&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;colons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;semicolons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spaces&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;single quotes for don't, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems Chinese doesn't have spaces, but that they use [mostly] Western punctuation like ? and ! (not sure what they had before). I am not sure about other languages, wondering if any languages don't have punctuation at all, or there are none, if it is even necessary (and what it's goal serves). Maybe German from what I've seen doesn't have spaces in some places, since it seems like they combine letters into long combinations for complex meanings, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="17064" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T05:17:22.543" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T05:17:22.543" Title="Is punctuation necessary in written language?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28773" CreationDate="2018-08-28T04:37:30.317" Score="2" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are any languages that are basically just streams of basic sound blocks, like letters or syllables, and they don't have words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:02:21.417" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:02:21.417" Title="Do any languages not have the concept of &quot;words&quot;?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28772" CreationDate="2018-08-28T04:57:14.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This raises the question, &quot;what is a word?&quot; Perhaps surprisingly, linguists don't have a solid answer to that question. The most common definition cross-linguistically is &quot;a unit that's useful to describe how this particular language works&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all languages have &lt;em&gt;morphemes&lt;/em&gt; (groups of sounds that have meaning), and in a language with no real distinction between groups of morphemes (like in Chinese) these would probably be considered words in and of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: the concept of a &quot;word&quot; doesn't have a hard and fast definition, so it'll be defined in whatever way is most useful for any given language. If nothing else, a word can be defined to be a morpheme, which is a unit that exists in every language without exception. (Without morphemes, you don't have a language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T04:57:14.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28771" CreationDate="2018-08-28T05:02:25.100" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not necessary. We know this because punctuation is actually a relatively recent invention: Classical Latin, for example, was often written without punctuation or spacing of any sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while it's not necessary, it's &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;. Quotation marks allow us to avoid the repetition of &quot;then he said…&quot; that you find all over the place in e.g. Biblical Hebrew, representing the pause and change of inflection that a speaker would use out loud. Question marks and exclamation points indicate a speaker's intonation, which isn't otherwise marked. Spaces divide up words so that they can be read more easily. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, punctuation is probably here to stay. In text messaging (which combines the informality of conversation with the missing intonation of writing) it's become even more important than in standard book English: there's a difference between the messages &lt;code&gt;okay&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;okay.&lt;/code&gt; (and &lt;code&gt;okay :)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;okay~&lt;/code&gt; and…) that would be much more difficult to express without punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T05:02:25.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28757" CreationDate="2018-08-28T06:19:42.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you seem to be interested in reading, you may find the following overview of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The science of word recognition&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (written in 2017, by Kevin Larson) to be an interesting read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larson says that the best supported model of how words are read is parallel recognition of multiple letters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larson also talks about the phenomenon of eye &quot;saccades&quot;, which provides experimental support for non-linearity in the way people read sentences/paragraphs. I don't know if the distinction you mention between &quot;parallel&quot; and &quot;in series really fast&quot; is actually important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For information about theories about how people read aloud, one relevant article is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pitt.edu/~perfetti/PDF/Coltheart%2005.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modeling Reading: The Dual-Route Approach&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Max Coltheart. Coltheart says that words with &quot;irregular&quot; spellings are read aloud more slowly than words with regular spellings. Frequency also has an effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T06:19:42.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28766" CreationDate="2018-08-28T07:45:08.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These rules are a bit subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you did not include &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish although &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt; probably occurs as much in formal Spanish corpora as &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;.  You did not include &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt; in English, although it occurs in a few recent loanwords just like &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; occurs in Spanish.  Standard German has &lt;em&gt;ß&lt;/em&gt;, but Swiss Standard German does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for most applications I would avoid the prescriptivist rules-based approaches and tend towards the descriptivist statistical approaches like those used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_identification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language identification&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it becomes a question of choosing the 1) corpus (eg newspapers, or Wikipedia), 2) pre-processing and 3) a frequency threshold.  That scales to many languages and will force you to be more conscious of the subjective choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a direct answer to your question, but Unicode has character &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blocks&lt;/a&gt; for scripts, which is useful for some languages which are written in one unique script, but as others noted, scripts and orthographies do not map to languages 1:1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T07:51:37.017" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T07:51:37.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T09:03:32.393" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages provide ways to express:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ordering&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Temporal (yesterday, today), Spatial (above, below, before, after, inside, outside, ...), Quantitative (larger, smaller,...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relationships&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spatial (composed of), Social / hierarchies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specifiers (?) (this, that, other)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions / uncertainty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possession (?) (Mine, yours, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the terminology that is used to refer to these things? Are they finite (?). Is there any form of catalogue that lists languages versus what these languages can express?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation is to apply these to understanding &quot;constrained&quot; languages that are trying to convey specific concepts and therefore have to be composed of specific distinct parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2894" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T09:03:32.393" Title="What are the &quot;expressive&quot; parts of a language actually called?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28766" CreationDate="2018-08-28T09:50:52.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cldr.unicode.org/index/charts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLDR - Unicode Common Locale Data Repository&lt;/a&gt; that contains beside locale settings also additional information on many languages, e.g., the exact character set used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:01:35.857" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:01:35.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28779" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the relation between the sound of words and their meaning is arbitrary in general, there are some known correlations between sound and meaning, e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bouba kiki effect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can also find a correlation between the &lt;em&gt;anlaut&lt;/em&gt; and the meaning of words in a given language. An example from English are words beginning with /gl/ (glitter, gleam, glow, glisten, etc.) pertain to light reflection but [gl] on its own has no meaning nor does every other word with /gl/ refer to light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28780" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" Score="0" Body="For questions about the relation between sounds and meaning." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:11:05.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28765" CreationDate="2018-08-28T11:14:32.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA is actually for describing the sounds we can make with our vocal tracts, and which also are part of human language. As such, it's inappropriate for describing animal sounds, just as it's inappropriate for describing a belch or a scream. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are unable to make animal sounds, but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;because of how our brains process sounds&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;because humans seem to drill their young on onomatopoeia associated with  animals&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we think we can make animal sounds. But have you ever actually heard a pig say &quot;oink&quot;? A pig doesn't even have the necessary anatomy to make that sound. So the way you have described animal sounds, actually I perceive them differently and wouldn't describe them the way you did, since it's so subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now as @user6726 pointed out in a comment, spectrograms (something like a soundwave plotted on the paper I think) might fit the bill though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T12:26:21.037" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T12:26:21.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T13:39:01.053" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please excuse the fact that I'm not an academically trained Linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a computer program with example sentences and their equivalents in different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea I am trying to explore is that by compiling a list of example English sentences that encapsulate common speech patterns, &#xA;having a native of another language add their language equivalents will give us a list of foreign sentences that encapsulate the same meta-grammar concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English &amp;lt;-&gt; Turkish&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;grammatical categories: present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joe is coming &amp;lt;=&gt; Joe geliyor     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;grammatical categories: present tense, with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm walking with her  &amp;lt;=&gt; Onunla yürüyorum        &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;grammatical categories: present tense, with, together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am doing it together with Kayla &amp;lt;=&gt; Kayla'yla beraber yapıyoruz     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;grammatical categories: present tense, interrogative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you running?  &amp;lt;=&gt; Koşuyor musun?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been using  &lt;a href=&quot;https://glossary.sil.org/term/grammatical-category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://glossary.sil.org/term/grammatical-category&lt;/a&gt; as a reference, but it's not quite what I'm after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm getting stumped very easily. For example, I don't know what to call the grammatical categories appearing in these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ders çalışmak zor &amp;lt;=&gt;  It is hard to study         &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bulmak kolay  &amp;lt;=&gt;  It is easy to find      &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gitmek zor  It is hard to go&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What I naively refer to as grammatical categories, am I using the&#xA;right term, or is there a more suitable academically recognised&#xA;title for such an idea? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you suggest any tips or ideas on how I&#xA;can identify the grammatical categories in a sentence pattern?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22589" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T14:09:29.713" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T10:25:46.367" Title="How can I identify Grammatical Categories in a sentence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28782" CreationDate="2018-08-28T14:15:00.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very broad question, and a difficult one, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult, because languages differ in the grammatical categories that are obligatorily expressed, and they differ in how the categories are exactly defined. For a cross-linguistic approach, I suggest reading something about &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.github.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;, a currently hot proposal for unified tags across different languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have digested that, you can probably come up with more specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T10:25:46.367" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T10:25:46.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28788" CreationDate="2018-08-28T14:33:09.647" Score="3" ViewCount="1313" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It&lt;/a&gt; says that morphemes include &lt;code&gt;un-&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-ed&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-ness&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;re-&lt;/code&gt;, in addition to words like &lt;code&gt;town&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;chair&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;computer&lt;/code&gt;, words that can't be broken down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/computer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;computer&lt;/a&gt; comes from &lt;code&gt;compute&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;-er&lt;/code&gt;. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/compute?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compute&lt;/a&gt; comes from &lt;code&gt;com-&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;with, together&quot;) and &lt;code&gt;putare&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;to reckon,&quot; originally &quot;to prune&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/chair#etymonline_v_8391&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chair&lt;/a&gt; comes from the word chaere, old french &lt;code&gt;chaiere&lt;/code&gt; &quot;chair, seat, throne&quot;. From Latin &lt;code&gt;cathedra&lt;/code&gt; &quot;seat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a sense, these words can be broken down further. Even the morpheme &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/-ness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-ness&lt;/a&gt; can be broken down or derived:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;word-forming element denoting action, quality, or state, attached to an adjective or past participle to form an abstract noun, from Old English -nes(s), from Proto-Germanic *in-assu- (cognates: Old Saxon -nissi, Middle Dutch -nisse, Dutch -nis, Old High German -nissa, German -nis, Gothic -inassus), from *-in-, noun stem, + *-assu-, abstract noun suffix, probably from the same root as Latin -tudo (see -tude).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to get a better sense of what a morpheme is. Wondering if one could point to a good resource. I can break down the words further using etymologies, so not quite sure what they mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T16:09:45.253" Title="What exactly a morpheme is" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28784" CreationDate="2018-08-28T14:40:02.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right that historically, those words are made up from separate units. &lt;em&gt;Morpheme&lt;/em&gt; could be used in a historical sense; but it is usually used synchronically. &#xA;In present day English, &lt;em&gt;compute&lt;/em&gt; does not break down into separate units - we cannot use &lt;em&gt;pute&lt;/em&gt; on its own, and related words such as &lt;em&gt;impute&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;repute&lt;/em&gt; do not share any discernable element of meaning. So &lt;em&gt;compute&lt;/em&gt; is a single morpheme in present-day English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you regard &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt; as one or two morphemes is to some degree a matter of choice. Historically, it was formed from &lt;em&gt;compute&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, but it is not clear to me whether in the psyche of present-day English speakers it is analysed in that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T14:40:02.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28741" CreationDate="2018-08-28T15:41:51.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You write: &quot;I feel like I learned this when I was a kid in school with all the language rules, but now I can't remember.&quot;  But your feeling about this must obviously be wrong, since people knew how to pronounce words before there were schools.  And even today, many people who never went to school can pronounce words perfectly well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite a puzzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T15:41:51.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28784" CreationDate="2018-08-28T16:09:45.253" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important fact about &quot;morpheme&quot; is that it is a claim about the state of a language as it exists at a specific time; it is a concept of synchronic analysis, not diachronic analysis (etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been numerous attempts to &quot;define the morpheme&quot;, i.e. give a succinct statement allowing you to know that this is a morpheme and that is not. One problem is that definitions of &quot;morpheme&quot; rely on the notion of &quot;word&quot;, but &quot;word&quot; itself is a controversial concept. A typical definition of &quot;morpheme&quot; is that it is the minimal meaning-bearing unit of language, which presupposes that a morpheme can be assigned a particular meaning. If you take that definition to be axiomatic, then it means that &lt;em&gt;invert, convert, pervert, subvert&lt;/em&gt; are all monomorphemic, because &lt;em&gt;vert&lt;/em&gt; can't be assigned a meaning, even if it has an etymology. Some people are okay with imposing strong semantic requirements on word-composition, others are not. Our analytic methodology is not so refined that it's clearly right or wrong to call &lt;em&gt;subvert&lt;/em&gt; monomorphemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;minimal meaningful unit&quot; definition does cover the majority of cases where people agree &quot;that is a morpheme&quot; – provided that you have a generous enough definition of &quot;meaning&quot;. Iranian languages commonly have a morpheme &lt;em&gt;-i~-e&lt;/em&gt; called Ezafe / Izafe (and other things), which serves as a syntactic linker between words within the noun phrase: it's a bit of a stretch to say that it has a &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;, but it certainly has a function. Indeed, you could define morphemes in terms of function rather than meaning, as long as you can appropriately define &quot;function&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does seem to be agreement that we don't want to define &quot;morpheme&quot; in such a way that &quot;pl&quot; is a morpheme in English, attested in &quot;place, play, please, plow...&quot;. The intuition is that even though &quot;pl&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a linguistic unit of these words (it's a syllable onset), it is not a &quot;grammatical&quot; unit. This raises the question of the scope of  &quot;grammar&quot;. As a phonologist engaged in research into the theory of grammar, specifically phonological computations, I will simply point out that defining &quot;grammar&quot; as &quot;anything that isn't about phonology of phonetics&quot; is just terminological hijacking. Even then, defining &quot;morpheme&quot; as &quot;the minimal unit of grammar&quot; simply re-packages the problem of &quot;subvert&quot; – does the grammar combine two elements to give &quot;subvert&quot;, or is it a grammatical primitive? All we did in shifting the definition from being meaning-based to being &quot;grammar&quot;-based is remove one of the accessible diagnostics for dividing a string into substrings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept &quot;morpheme&quot; has little technical utility in modern linguistics, even though it is a well-known term and we teach it in intro linguistics all the time. If you are interested in that intro-linguistics concept, it's a minimal meaningful unit of (synchronic) analysis, and I've pointed to some of the problems with the intro concept. I don't expect that clarity on the concept will be achieved within my life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T16:09:45.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28077" CreationDate="2018-08-28T17:10:52.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;, also SIL's list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://glossary.sil.org/term/grammatical-category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatical categories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22589" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T17:10:52.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T17:15:22.580" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought the term was 'periphrase', but looking that up it that apparently isn't the case. I don't know how I got my terms mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 'words made from a sentence', I mean such words as 'forget-me-not' (name of a flower), and 'hand-me-downs'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall that highly synthetic languages like to do this a lot. But when I tried to look up more information about this, I can't find it because it would seem that I have forgotten the proper terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T17:16:08.687" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T17:19:48.463" Title="What is the term for a word made from a sentence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28790" CreationDate="2018-08-28T17:19:48.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am only aware of the German term &lt;em&gt;Satzwort&lt;/em&gt; (literally &quot;sentence word&quot;) but I don't have an English translation of it. Examples for a &lt;em&gt;Satzwort&lt;/em&gt; in German are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Kiekindiewelt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kiekindiewelt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Stoerenfried&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Störenfried&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T17:19:48.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28796" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:25:43.247" Score="5" ViewCount="1103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseless_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tenseless languages&lt;/a&gt;, such as Chinese. But I'm interested to see what this looks like and/or means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, wondering if one could write a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#Possible_tenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tenseless sentence&lt;/a&gt; in English and explain how it solves the past/present/future problem without using grammatical tenses like &quot;they will do x&quot; or &quot;they did x&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partly what I'm wondering about is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent past, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, you could accomplish that by saying &quot;Way back in the day, we &lt;strong&gt;used to do&lt;/strong&gt; x...&quot; for remote past, and &quot;We &lt;strong&gt;just did&lt;/strong&gt; x...&quot; for recent past. Then for today-near-future, you might say &quot;I'm about to go to x&quot;, when answering the question &quot;what are you up to today&quot;. So I am wondering if these sort of features (like asking about your day) &lt;em&gt;establishes context&lt;/em&gt; of tense of some sort. And so in a language like Chinese, you don't need to have tense built into the grammar. You would just instead do something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Way back in the day, we do x.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do x a few minutes before now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I go to school after this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if that's sort of how it is, or if one could provide better examples to demonstrate how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get confused, wondering how to write sentence without past tense verbs and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I &lt;b&gt;saw&lt;/b&gt; a cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see a cat in the past. (Not sure if this is how it's done).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see a cat in a time before now. (Or like this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I step into the past. I see a cat. I step back to the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun &lt;b&gt;went&lt;/b&gt; down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun goes down &lt;em&gt;in the past&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun, in the past, goes down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the past the sun goes down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure which one would be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun &lt;b&gt;will go&lt;/b&gt; down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun goes down in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun, in the future, goes down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the future the sun goes down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these seem to accurately capture the original English sentence, so I'm curious to see how you approach this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T21:06:52.700" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:39:52.053" Title="Example of a tenseless sentence" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28730" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:38:28.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to Linguistics SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the efforts to crawl linguistic papers for interlinear glossed texts (IGT) was  &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODIN Project&lt;/a&gt;. Among the publications, there are papers that briefly describe how they parsed and looked for IGT in papers.&#xA;See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://faculty.washington.edu/wlewis2/papers/ODIN-eH06.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;. There is a repository for an IGT extractor from the related project, XIGT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/xigt/igtdetect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/xigt/igtdetect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, that this is by no means a straightforward process. Extracting &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; structured from a PDF is always a painful process, and since there are multiple ways to generate documents with glosses (there are at least two packages in LaTeX to do that, moreover some papers are written in MS Word/OO Writer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ODIN, authors used regular expressions to detect IGTs in text, and then tried to extract the example in the detected areas, and they report low recall with very high precision (or medium recall and medium precision).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding you second question, about publishing datasets, I have encountered several possibilities, although not a single one of them is a silver bullet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Providing a LaTeX source or a compiled PDF: the most portable way, but provided data is very raw.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Providing a dataset as a Toolbox / FLEx / Exmaralda corpus: this is the most common way in a lot of linguistic communities, but there are limitations on the examples, for example, there is no semantic way to mark an example ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using an XML-based format &lt;a href=&quot;http://xigt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XIGT&lt;/a&gt; which is now used for ODIN data. As far as I know, this is the most adaptable and extensible format at the moment, but documentation is not that thorough.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="873" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T20:38:28.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28795" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:40:27.267" Score="2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I identify the theta role of &quot;It&quot; in &quot;It seemed that there was no escape.&quot;? I understand theta roles such as THEME, AGENT, LOCATION, GOAL, FORCE, EXPERIENCER etc. However, I cannot work out what &quot;It&quot; would be in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22595" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T20:43:39.080" Title="What is the Theta Role of &quot;It&quot; in &quot;It seemed that ...&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28794" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:43:39.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, it has none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theta-roles are semantic concepts. But this &quot;it&quot; doesn't exist on the semantic level: it only appears because syntactically, English doesn't allow a verb without a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the &quot;it&quot; exists only on the syntactic level and lower, not the semantic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T20:43:39.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28792" CreationDate="2018-08-28T20:48:27.623" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common saying in linguistics is, languages don't vary in what they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; express. They only vary in what they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; express.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, it's morphologically impossible to have a finite verb without specifying when it happened/happens/will happen (*). In Chinese, that's not an issue: the default state of a verb has no information about the timing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; specify the time of an event by using extra words. &quot;I went to the store&quot; in English could be translated into a tenseless language as &quot;I go to the store&quot; or &quot;I go to the store in the past&quot; or &quot;I go to the store yesterday&quot;, depending on how much information is directly relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For another example, English doesn't have morphological evidentiality: we don't use a different verb form for things we heard secondhand. Some languages do, and you can't use a finite verb without specifying how you know about the event. But in English, we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; still express that distinction, we just need extra words: for example, &quot;I heard that…&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(*) Non-finite verbs, like infinitives and modals, are untensed in English: the &quot;will&quot; in &quot;he will go&quot; has no tense of its own, for example, nor does the &quot;to go&quot; in &quot;he wants to go&quot;. But English on the whole is still a strongly-tensed language, because most semantically important verbs are finite.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T15:30:17.913" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:30:17.913" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T21:58:41.207" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am struggling to find a term for an ideographic reading of the hieroglyphic language. I am using an Arabic ideographic reading of hieroglyphics as an example but the term should be applicable to other examples too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind I am giving an example which I am looking into, but I am asking for a term for the phenomenon, not whether the example is true or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My example is the Egyptian geographical name Abu Rawash. This is the name of the site of the Pyramid of pharaoh Djedefre. As ‘Abu’ could be understood as ‘father’ my guess the name Rawash is an ideographic reading of the hieroglyphs in the name Djedefre read in the Arabic reading direction. So Ra-Wa-Sh would originate from Djed-F(snake)-R(Ra sun disk) which ideographically in Arabic could give; ‘S-Hawa-Ra’, which almost perfectly anagrams Rawash. Alan B. Lloyd: Herodotus, book II mentions the name of Djedefre as “Rhauosis”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it is an analogy, because that would imply hearing a name and interpreting it as words in the language of the hearer. What is the correct term, if it exists if not an analogy or misreading? It also does not seem to be a loan word because Rawash was most probably not the Ancient Egyptian phrasing of the name. And this is not a case like Dutch Breukelen becoming English Brooklyn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically what do we call Rawash in relation to Djedefre?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T10:06:14.417" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:15:50.590" Title="What is the correct term for reading hieroglyphs ideographically in a different language (if there is a term for it)?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28797" CreationDate="2018-08-29T09:22:29.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gershevitch coined the term &quot;alloglottography&quot; in his article &quot;The alloglottography of Old Persian&quot;, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1979. It is about writing in one language and reading it as another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1979.tb00856.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1979.tb00856.x&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T13:15:50.590" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:15:50.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28797" CreationDate="2018-08-29T09:24:28.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually a common theme in the history of writing. Allow me to broadly outline a process (which is not necessarily correct in all cases):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an ideographic script becomes a logographic script&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are both phonemic components and semantic components&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a single grapheme can have a phonemic and a semantic reading (&quot;polyvalency&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a graphemic construct (a written &quot;word&quot;) is originally one way in a phonemic reading, but is reinterpreted differently (either later on in the continuation of the same language, or in a different context with a different language). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, we have inversion, then phonemic &gt; semantic reading for the middle glyph [f &gt; snake &gt; wa], then semantic &gt; phonemic in the last glyph [pillar &gt; sh].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most familiar with the East Asian sprachbund / Chinese character-centred world, where this kind of thing would simply be called the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;original reading&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; vs &lt;strong&gt;&quot;derived reading&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. However, more specific terms would be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Japanese system, step 4 of the above has a clear distinction, interpreted as a phonemic reading (音読み &lt;em&gt;on'yomi&lt;/em&gt;) [closer to the original Chinese] or reinterpreted as a semantic reading (訓読み &lt;em&gt;kun'yomi&lt;/em&gt;) [based on the native Japanese meaning]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have a looser set of readings for Japanese compounds (当て字 &lt;em&gt;ateji&lt;/em&gt;) where it is in essence a phonemic reading, but does not exist in the original Chinese. There are also a subset of semantic reading-based compounds (熟字訓 &lt;em&gt;jukujikun&lt;/em&gt;) where the several kanji have to be read as one unit, completely separately to the on'yomi and kun'yomi of the individual kanji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Chinese topolect world, there is a similar issue with different terminology. E.g. the lexeme for meat 肉 is hypothesised to have been pronounced *k-nuk or *njug back in Old Chinese. In the Min Nan topolects (stretching from southern Fujian to Chaozhou in Guangdong and across to Taiwan), the derivatives &lt;em&gt;jio̍k / lio̍k / he̍k / hia̍k&lt;/em&gt; correspond to *njug from Old Chinese, but they are not the usual word for meat, which is instead &lt;em&gt;bah / mah&lt;/em&gt;, with an unclear and possibly non-Old Chinese etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first &quot;regular&quot; derivative is considered the &quot;literary reading&quot; (文读) whilst the more common but possibly unconnected is considered the &quot;colloquial reading&quot; (白读). The distinction is important for reading compounds the right way, and is better suited to cases where the tradition of reading is more or less uninterrupted, based on the same script, but also within the same language system. Less likely to fit your case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closer to your (Semitic language) world, Sumerian to Akkadian had a very similar relationship with Old/Middle Chinese to Old/Middle Japanese. E.g. the cuneiform for &quot;cow&quot; in Sumerian, pronounced &lt;em&gt;ab&lt;/em&gt;, was used in Akkadian for &quot;cow&quot;, pronounced &lt;em&gt;littu&lt;/em&gt;, and for the sound &lt;em&gt;ab&lt;/em&gt;, but then also for the sound &lt;em&gt;lit&lt;/em&gt;. This is called &quot;graphemic polyvalency&quot;, and occurs in Old Japanese (the man'yōgana 万葉仮名 system) too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mayan hieroglyphs adopted into Nahuatl (of the Aztecs) and Zapotec also show similar polyvalency. However I'm not familiar with those spoken languages at all, so I won't comment beyond the existence of the phenomenon there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T09:29:51.317" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T09:29:51.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2905" CreationDate="2018-08-29T13:25:50.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are related &lt;em&gt;scripts&lt;/em&gt; historically used for related &lt;em&gt;languages&lt;/em&gt;, which also used other writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both used the levantine number system, described in detail in the fantastic book/thesis by Chrisomalis Alex B. recommends in the comments above. To say it (very) crudely, it looks like a mixture of Roman numbers with some base 20 under 100, and “number as spoken” above 100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your source is Unicode codecharts, you can check what the Unicode standard says about them. The relevant section of chapter 10 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/ch10.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;) sends back to table 10-3, which contains lots of examples in the related imperial Aramaic script system. A more detailed source of information is, as usual the proposal to encode the the script in Unicode (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07207r-n3286r-parthian-pahlavi.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;): it contains lot's of examples of numbers explaining the details of encoding, as well as some actual historical documents using them (figures 7 and 12.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us see ho it works encoding the number 2905 (this question number) in an ASCIIfied, left-to-right version of this number system, where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 to 4 encoded as repetition of I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10 as X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;20 as T&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;100 as C&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1000 as M&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 2905 = 2×1000+(3+3+3)×100+4+1, it would be II M III III III C IIII I. For an example usig the “digit” 20 (T), one can take 6798, which is attested in Inscriptional Pahlavi. We have then III III M IIII III CTTTTX IIII IIII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, according to the proposal, several decomposition are attested for 5 (IIII I or III II), 6 (III III or I II III) and  7 (I III III or III IIII).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T13:25:50.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28802" CreationDate="2018-08-29T15:09:43.407" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if the translation of languages such as Chinese and Japanese into Romanized versions is accurate. That is, it doesn't &lt;em&gt;lose&lt;/em&gt; information. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanization of Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, they say there are &lt;em&gt;variations in pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;. So what I imagine is when it is Romanized, you can't necessarily go back and translate it back to the original Chinese. Wondering if that is correct. If so, wondering how much information you generally lose, and where you loose it. If not, well that's great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically wondering if the &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; translation of non-sound-based languages (e.g. logographic ones for example) is accurate, or how much information is lost (preventing reverse translation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T15:58:40.250" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T17:01:24.340" Title="If the Romanization of Logographic (and other) Languages is Fully Accurate" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28801" CreationDate="2018-08-29T15:44:20.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of a good romanization is to represent the phonemic distinctions of the language accurately, so that a native speaker who understands the romanization can get the same information from the romanized words as they would from those same words spoken aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if English were just being romanized now (from some other writing system), the romanization would ideally not have any silent E's, double consonants, or other irrelevancies: it would represent the pronunciation accurately, so that a native English-speaker would be able to pronounce an unfamiliar word accurately just from its romanized form. (While &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shavian&lt;/a&gt; isn't a romanization, it's a good example of how these principles would be applied.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, such a romanization would lose information! For example, &quot;your&quot; and &quot;you're&quot; would be written the same in such a system. But the key is, it's clear that English-speakers can always tell the difference from context: after all, spoken English doesn't make any distinction between those words, and we can understand spoken English perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flipside, such a romanization wouldn't necessarily represent all the details of the pronunciation in the way an IPA transcription would. For example, it might represent the vowels in &quot;trap&quot; and &quot;bath&quot; with the same symbol, even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap-bath_split&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some speakers pronounce them differently&lt;/a&gt;. Or it might represent the &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;kit&quot; and &quot;skit&quot; with the same symbol, even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there's an objective difference in pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;. The key is that these differences aren't seen as &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt;: they're predictable from the context and don't need to be represented explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Many modern romanizations aren't actually perfectly phonemic; it's a balance. But that would be the ideal.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while a good romanization can indeed lose information, and can indeed fail to represent all the details of pronunciation, the key is that &lt;em&gt;it contains the same information as the spoken language&lt;/em&gt;. Since languages tend to be spoken first and foremost, with writing as a secondary concern, this is generally considered the ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:44:20.443" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28807" CreationDate="2018-08-29T15:54:25.780" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a dataset which contains a list of subject-verb-object triplets or adverb-verb/adjective-noun pairs that occur within a certain (large) corpus?  If not, what would be the most efficient way to extract this information given a large corpus in text format?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T17:05:57.350" Title="Dataset of subject-verb-object/adverb-verb/adjective-noun pairs" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28804" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28805" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" Score="0" Body="For questions about writing languages (either unwritten or using a different script) with the Latin script." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:03:21.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28801" CreationDate="2018-08-29T17:01:24.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A theoretical issue arises in Japanese, in that 箸 'chopsticks' and 橋 'bridge' are Romanized as &lt;em&gt;hashi&lt;/em&gt; but have different pronunciations (the accent is on a different syllable), likewise 今 'now' and 居間 'living room' = &lt;em&gt;ima&lt;/em&gt;; 牡蠣 'oyster', 垣 'fence', 柿 'persimmon'; 鮭 'salmon' = &lt;em&gt;kaki&lt;/em&gt;, 酒 'alcohol' = &lt;em&gt;sake&lt;/em&gt;. It may also be necessary to put the words in context to get a difference in pronunciation, putatively in the case of 'chopsticks' vs. 'bridge': this depends on dialect as well. Writing systems typically omit tone diacritics (but may include consonant work-arounds as in the Romanized Popular Alphabet for Hmong or the Chao Romanization). The situation as I understand it is that tones are not normally marked in Pinyin except in language teaching materials (whereas my Japanese textbooks don't bother with any accent marking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extent of accentual significance in Japanese is fairly minimal, and normally people can distinguish persimmons from oysters in the grocery store, so signage could probably be all Romanized. Such information about word choice as is not conveyed in the spelling can usually be reconstructed heuristically. Chinese without tones is more challenging. The ultimate test of information loss is that comprehension problems arise in one writing system that are avoided in another. Since Pinyin has not replaced Chinese characters, I doubt that the question can be put to the test. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T17:01:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28803" CreationDate="2018-08-29T17:05:57.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use a parsing library like spaCy to parse sentences and then just look in the resulting syntax tree for your desired subtrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes the corpus is mostly in English or another language supported by spaCy and reasonably clean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach would be to build n-grams and then pass the n-grams to a parsing library, but there are some problems with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T17:05:57.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28792" CreationDate="2018-08-29T17:47:06.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Draconis's answer, I would like to say something about tenseless infinitival clauses in English. These are complements of verbs known as &lt;em&gt;implicative&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;aspectual&lt;/em&gt;, such as &lt;em&gt;try, forget, begin, manage&lt;/em&gt; and many others. They are tenseless as they cannot contain any tense indicating adverbs, which can occur in other infinitival clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He tried to translate a text (*tomorrow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. He decided to translate a text (tomorrow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the complements of these verbs do not have tense altogether. By the way, they have a lot of other peculiarities, which are due to their lacking of &amp;quot;activated&amp;quot; Tense, Aspect, Mood projections. For instance, they strongly resist finiteness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I tried that he translate a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. I decided that he translate a text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is Small Clauses, whose tense, likewise, must match that of the matrix clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seemed honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. your intuitions about how to express tense without resorting to inflection are right. You confusion seems to be due to the mere possibility of expressing tense in the given contexts, of which you are aware. However, there are constructions in which there cannot be any tense whatever, in any language. Imagine how you were to express tense in those. Without tense markers the clause tense either matches the tense of the adjacent clauses, or gets some neutral, maybe gnomic, general interpretation. I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20034" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T18:51:26.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28810" CreationDate="2018-08-29T18:31:42.920" Score="1" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in Spanish and other languages there are accents like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;café&#xA;tú&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in Chinese there are tone shifts as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/section/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this graphic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/section/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5GP1F.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tones are accounted for in English / Romanization by adding accent marks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. mā&#xA;2. má&#xA;3. mǎ&#xA;4. mà&#xA;5. ma&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Spanish case, the accent is for &lt;em&gt;emphasis&lt;/em&gt; (like giving more force or focus to the sound), while in Chinese the accent is for &lt;em&gt;tonality&lt;/em&gt;, or the &lt;em&gt;curve&lt;/em&gt; in your tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are these two features I'm referencing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasis/focus/oomph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tonality curving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there are any other language features along the lines of these. Not sure if the umlaut would count. (I'm not talking about &lt;em&gt;accent marks&lt;/em&gt; in the written language, of which there are all kinds of examples, I'm just talking about &lt;em&gt;variations in the sound&lt;/em&gt;). I would just consider the umlaut another flat sound, since all the sounds already vary in the way your mouth is shaped. So I guess the list could expand some more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasis/focus. (Spanish café)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tonality curving. (Chinese má)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mouth shape. (All languages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tone. (Not in English at least, only in music does tone count).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duration. (How long the sound is held. Also not in English, not sure about other languages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if one could expand this list with the other &quot;sound-based&quot; features of different languages as a whole, and for the ones I listed that don't exist in English (Tone and Duration), if any examples could be provided of these in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if these other features are captured in the written languages as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:48:51.327" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:48:51.327" Title="Types of Sound Variations (Like Accents and Tones) in Languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28809" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:26:49.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These types of variations are generally called &lt;em&gt;distinctive features&lt;/em&gt;, and some theories of phonology like to specify all features of a phoneme using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main ones for vowels are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frontness/backness: where is the tongue closest to the roof of the mouth? &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; is back, while &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; is front.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Height: how close is the tongue to the roof of the mouth? &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; is high, &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; is low.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rounding: are the lips rounded or not? &lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt; (German &lt;code&gt;ü&lt;/code&gt;) is rounded, &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; is unrounded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Length: how long is the vowel pronounced for? In English, the vowel in &lt;code&gt;bat&lt;/code&gt; is short, while the vowel in &lt;code&gt;bad&lt;/code&gt; is long.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pitch: what frequency is the vowel spoken at? This is how tones and pitch accents work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nasality: is air escaping out the nose? This is most commonly associated with French words like &lt;code&gt;blanc&lt;/code&gt; by English-speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laryngealization: can the individual vibrations of the vocal folds be heard? Common among young female English-speakers and widely derided by prescriptivists; phonemic in Danish, where it's called &lt;em&gt;stød&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ATR: in theory this has to do with the position of the root of the tongue, though in practice it tends to be used to shoehorn unrelated effects into the system of distinctive features. Some analyses of English use this for the &quot;long&quot; vs &quot;short&quot; vowels (bat/bate, cut/cute, rot/rote, etc).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are many others as well, and many of these are continua instead of binaries: for example, you can have a low vowel or a high vowel, but also a mid vowel in between (like &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T20:26:49.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28809" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:32:10.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Accent&quot; is a term that applies to writing systems, i.e. acute, grave, circumflex accept. Unfortunately, it is also a term used to refer to a specific phonetic property (Japanese is claimed to have it, likewise Norwegian). That sense of the term &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be used to refer to what we do in English, called &quot;stress&quot;, i.e. the stress is on the last syllable in the verb progress, and on the first syllable in the noun progress. Your question seems to be about the linguistic uses of these accent diacritics. Before addressing that, I need to point out that there is an essential sameness to Chinese tones and Spanish stresses, that they are realized as pitch modulations. The abstract phonological treatment of the physical signal is, however, different (though in some case it's not at all obvious that there is a substantial difference, as in the case of &quot;pitch accent&quot; in Norwegian and Japanese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These accents are extremely useful for writing languages. For example, &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt; in North Saami (Sámi) denote a shorter back vowel vs a longer front vowel, respectively. They indicate long (accented) vowels in Hungarian and Czech vs short (plain). Many languages which are tonal use them to mark tone; Sotho (which is tonal) uses them to note vowel quality (tone is ignored, because they already have too many vowels to conveniently mark). Many other languages mark stress with accents. Italian uses acute and grave to indicate stress and vowel quality: pèsca = [ˈpɛska] &quot;peach&quot;, pésca= [ˈpeska] &quot;fishing&quot;. Catalan likewise uses accepts to indicate vowel qualities. They are also used on consonants in Polish to indicate palatalization. A number of languages also use the circumflex and inverted circumflex for consonants, thus N. Saami &lt;em&gt;ž&lt;/em&gt; = [dʒ]. I'm not aware of a complete-ish compendium of uses of accent diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T20:32:10.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:43:04.523" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of a constructed language experiment I am trying to write phrases with clause structure of [noun supersedes noun] as just two words. For example, “death before dishonor” or “freedom over tyranny.” I do not think the ablative case would make sense in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose this could also apply to a clause like [noun, not noun] or [verb this, not that].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T09:53:47.857" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T09:53:47.857" Title="Is there a grammatical case indicating displacement?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28814" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:53:01.957" Score="0" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a difficult question to answer but I'm curious as to the reason for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;película&lt;/code&gt; in Spanish is &lt;code&gt;pe-LEE-cu-la&lt;/code&gt;. It has an accent to mark how to say the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;peninsula&lt;/code&gt; in English is pronounced &lt;code&gt;pen-IN-su-la&lt;/code&gt;. But it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; have an accent mark. It seems like we simply learn how to pronounce this word at one point in our lives, and then from then on out, the written word reminds us of the pronunciation. (I don't think the pronunciation is inherent in the way the word is spelled, similar to how &lt;code&gt;worse&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;horse&lt;/code&gt; are pronounced differently, or &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt; has multiple pronunciations for different meanings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like accents are a bit repetitive. It seems that you could just put together a dictionary of pronunciations, and then learn the word pronunciation &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt; from the dictionary, and then this makes the writing a little easier, since you can omit the accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the idea of a written word is simply a helper or tool to invoke a memory of the pronunciation. You already have to remember the &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; of the word (it's not like the definition is written next to every word you read). Likewise, the accent marks can be omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason I can see accent marks being useful is when it is not your first language and you need that extra help all the time to remember how to say things. Or perhaps the accent marks like in Spanish serve to standardize how the population speaks. I'm not sure. Wonder what the history of accent marks was in Latin. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script_in_Unicode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They seem to have a lot&lt;/a&gt;, but maybe that evolved and there is some history to it. Anyway, that's probably a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T21:25:50.777" Title="The reason some languages write down the accents while others don't" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28813" CreationDate="2018-08-29T21:25:50.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages have some sort of &quot;stress&quot;, which might be realized in a number of different ways phonetically. English, Spanish, Classical Latin, and Ancient Greek all have/had this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some languages, like Classical Latin, the stress was completely predictable (even if the rules are a bit complicated). The same is true in Modern French: words are always stressed on the last syllable. Similarly in Old Norse, words were always stressed on the first syllable of the root (ignoring any prefixes); in Swahili, words are always stressed on the second syllable from the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, like Ancient Greek (for nouns in particular), the stress is utterly unpredictable. There's no way to know which syllable it should fall on. So Ancient Greek is nowadays (i.e. since Hellenistic times) written with diacritics, the acute, circumflex, and grave, to indicate where the stress falls. For example, &lt;em&gt;ἄνθρωπος&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;ánthrōpos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;human&quot; is stressed on the first syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In yet other languages, like Spanish, the stress is usually predictable but sometimes irregular. So in Spanish, an acute accent is used to mark the stressed vowel only in the irregular cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is most like Ancient Greek in that there's no solid rule for predicting stress. But unlike Ancient Greek, we don't mark the stressed vowels in any way. This is really just a historical accident; English has been very averse to changing its writing system even as the spoken language changes around it, which is how we've also ended up with silent letters and our mess of &quot;five&quot; vowels. Russian has similarly unpredictable stress and also doesn't generally mark it, except in dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, Classical Latin used only one diacritical mark, the &lt;em&gt;apex&lt;/em&gt; (which evolved into the acute accent, and is nowadays normally replaced with a macron). But there's a vast number of languages which use the Latin &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;, including English, Spanish, Swahili, and many others. Many of these have a need for some diacritics that others don't. So Unicode has ended up with quite the collection of them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T21:25:50.777" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28792" CreationDate="2018-08-30T02:44:18.833" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may construct sentences moving the verb into predicate position requiring the infinitive:&quot;I like &lt;em&gt;to talk&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In &quot;@Aharon &lt;em&gt;explains&lt;/em&gt; it better&quot;, there is no tense either. As a foreign speaker my use of the present progressive is sometimes off, but I don't think it is preferable there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand it may be helpful to look at participle -ing constructing nouns from verbs. So the &quot;I go to the store (in the past)&quot; may be thought of as &quot;I have going to the store&quot;. It should be instructive to look at future tenses: English doesn't inflect it and uses auxiliary constructions with &quot;will&quot; or &quot;going to&quot;. Similarly, past constructions with &quot;have&quot; as shown are somewhat figurative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doe not say much about chinese, but that would be too specific anyhow, while other examples need to be compared. Indeed, I showed that english is such an example, with the future tenses. This should be comparable across Indo European languages. It is not clear how much these shared with Proto Sino Tibetan for example. The mainstreem does not know any such connection and the &lt;em&gt;typology&lt;/em&gt; is no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably not helpful to think of &quot;I going shop&quot; as a collocation of nouns, comparable to primitive sign language without any morphology (although I'd be interested in such typology). What does seem helpful is expression of tense encoded in prepositions by convention, so e.g. &quot;(I will go) to the shop&quot; may express direction and &quot;(I was) in the shop&quot; may express spatial-temporal aspects - and hardly ever the other way around, if I'm any judge (I nean, &quot;was to&quot; is unuasual, though not unheared of). That is, somewhere the morphologic morphemes need to stem from. I have a hunch, this kind of contextual prepositioning may be one possible origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked at PIE morphology before - will update answer when I will have did :) After all, &quot;pre&quot; may express time and/or locality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T03:28:31.993" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T03:28:31.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28821" CreationDate="2018-08-30T08:10:46.230" Score="0" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is such thing as a language without an accent. This is probably naïve, but to me as an English speaker it feels like I can tell when someone has an accent or not, myself included. For example, the people on the news typically &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have an accent (even though they talk in a &quot;tv broadcaster&quot;-like way). Their voices sound &lt;strong&gt;plain&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;straight&lt;/strong&gt;. They don't seem &lt;strong&gt;slanted&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;gnarled&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't typically talk that way, I say some words in &quot;slanted&quot; ways. A few examples of accents in American English are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chicago accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Minnesota accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New York accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Southern accent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then outside of the US there is the Canadian accent, the British accent, etc. And then pretty much all non-English-as-a-first-language speakers have an accent unless they pick it up early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the more subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ones I'm interested are the American English accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First question I guess is, if there is such thing as &quot;speaking a language without an accent&quot;, like it feels like the news broadcasters do. Or if it's instead a nurture thing, i.e. you are raised to think a certain way of speaking a language not only &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &quot;without an accent&quot;, but also &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; without an accent. I feel like we can &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; a language &quot;is without an accent&quot;, but later realize we have an accent. However, I feel like we can recognize what a language should sound like &quot;without an accent&quot;. For example, when I hear native Spanish speakers, or other native language speakers, I feel like I can tell when they have a &quot;good&quot; accent; an accent that a news broadcaster would have in their language. The words are &lt;strong&gt;clear&lt;/strong&gt;, the words are &lt;strong&gt;straight&lt;/strong&gt;, the words are not &lt;strong&gt;slanted&lt;/strong&gt;. Those are the best words I can currently come up with to describe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But who knows, maybe it is all nurturing, and the sound of a &quot;news broadcaster &lt;em&gt;without an accent&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is something you're raised to admire. But I would hope its not. A counter point is when I first heard the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6WO5XabD-s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;click language&lt;/a&gt;. I have no idea if it sounds like a news broadcaster would do it. I can't tell if it's &quot;without an accent&quot;. At first at least. I'm guessing what I would do then is listen to a few more examples of speakers, and identify with the speaker, and learn to like &quot;their voice&quot;. And whatever voice &quot;sounded most appealing&quot; would be the ideal, and that would be the one &quot;without an accent&quot;. I have no idea which is why I'm asking the question here, the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in some ways it seems like the &quot;without an accent&quot; sound is whatever &quot;sounds best&quot; using that languages set of rules. By &quot;sounds best&quot;, I have no sense of how to clarify that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given that there is a sort of &quot;ideal&quot; in the language, the one that we recognize as &quot;without an accent&quot;, I'm wondering what this means. Assuming we can say it is a product of nurturing that desire for that sound, then the question is what we are nurturing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I'm wondering if there is a way to speak all languages &quot;without an accent&quot;, and how you would do that. You can't just pronounce every other language like an English news broadcaster. It's like you have to adjust your vowels and consonants slightly, as well as the durations and snappinesses of how you pronounce stuff, to get &quot;the accent of that language&quot; (relative to your own) right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to the question title, &quot;How to remove an accent from a language.&quot; Wondering if I can hear a speaker of a foreign language and say &quot;yes there is an accent to it, relative to that language&quot;, or not. If not, what I must do in order to learn the &quot;best way&quot; of speaking the language &quot;without an accent&quot;. And finally, if there is such thing as &quot;no accent&quot; period, across languages. That relates to the news broadcast example, and the reason why I can call a speaker's use of a language &lt;strong&gt;straight&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;slanted&lt;/strong&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T16:29:06.437" Title="How to remove an accent from a language (and what an accent actually is)" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28812" CreationDate="2018-08-30T09:52:48.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a constructed language, you are free to do what you want, and you can create a case with case inflections for this use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether this kind of case occurs in any natural language and whether it has been named by linguists before, but in Finnish there are two cases, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essive_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Essive&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translative_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translative&lt;/a&gt; case that come close to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T09:52:48.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28816" CreationDate="2018-08-30T11:18:29.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will all make more sense if we replace &lt;em&gt;accent&lt;/em&gt;, which is a relative term used mostly by non-linguists, with &lt;em&gt;pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if there is such thing as &quot;speaking a language without an accent&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not for any languages that has varying accents (pronunciations), which more than covers all the languages in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a multi-dimensional space, where each feature is represented by a dimension and each pronunciation is represented by some point.  Some point are less assignable to any major cluster, but that point still represents a pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages you mention are polycentric so the average pronunciation is in some sparse area of the distribution and thus perceived as a different pronunciation ie as an accent by almost all speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ihAM8.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ihAM8.png&quot; alt=&quot;clusters&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;news broadcasters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we are conflating two variables: pronunciation and careful enunciated speech would could be applied to any dialect's pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So-called General American and Received Pronunciation were selected by sociopolitical dynamics, but there is no consensus on their definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artificial standards like Latin American television Spanish and Bühnendeutsch have been intentionally developed but still have variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to remove an accent from a language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above examples make clear that we should be careful about cause and effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People perceive those pronunciations as they do because they are used in certain contexts, but those pronunciations are used in certain contexts because of how people perceive them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:17:48.583" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:17:48.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2018-08-30T13:39:08.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may not be a single origin; who knows. But the Greek word used is marked, and that does suggest a more explicit connotative meaning than what @Mitch described in his answer. Here's how I've described it elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/gtage-the-tsipras-edition-part-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/gtage-the-tsipras-edition-part-2/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Students of Ancient Greek, and particularly students of Koine, pay a lot of attention to the distinction between χρόνος and καιρός, since Ancient Greek uses both, and English usually just uses &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt; for both. The distinction the pair makes is between time in general, and the time &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; something, the right time to do something. English has ways of expressing the latter that don’t involve the word &lt;em&gt;time&lt;/em&gt;, though it’s not as consistent about it as Greek: &lt;em&gt;opportunity&lt;/em&gt;, for example, or &lt;em&gt;occasion&lt;/em&gt;. Or in archaic English, &lt;em&gt;season&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction persists in Modern Greek, although χρόνος is now learnèd, and fixed expressions tend instead to use ώρα “hour” as a mass noun. So there is a subtle distinction made in the two ways of saying “I don’t have time to see you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;δεν έχω ώρα να σε δω “I don’t have hour to see you = I don’t have enough free time to see you”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;δεν έχω καιρό να σε δω “I don’t have occasion to see you = There isn’t a right time for me to see you”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;έχεις ώρα για καφέ; “Do you have any free time for a coffee?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;έχεις καιρό για καφέ; “Is any time good for you to have a coffee?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a traditional agrarian society, the right time to do something will immediately bring to mind the right time to do agrarian work. Hence &lt;em&gt;season&lt;/em&gt; in English turns from the proper occasion for something (&lt;em&gt;To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven&lt;/em&gt;), to the season of the year: spring is the season for sowing, autumn is the season for harvesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek underwent a similar transition, but at a more granular level: it permitted the right time for agrarian work to vary day by day. καιρός thus acquired the meaning “weather”: a sunny day is the occasion/season for working outdoors, a rainy day is the occasion/season not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T13:39:08.543" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28792" CreationDate="2018-08-30T14:29:17.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Draconis explained quite clearly, English is a tense language, which requires finite verbs (in matrix clauses) to be gramatically tensed to specify its temporal conditions. And I'd like to talk more about Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say Chinese is a tenseless language means that modern Chinese lacks grammaticalized tense which overtly inflects verbs in different temporal settings. Instead, modern Chinese deploys aspectual markers, temporal adverbs and contextual reasoning to determine the temporal relations (ie tense and aspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at these examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wo dapo  yige huaping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  break a   vase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a isolated sentence like this, since there's no contextual reference supplied by discourse or temporal adverbs, it simply provides the information that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; am the agent for the action of breaking the vase. Therefore we cannot know when the event take place even though its English translation is in simple present tense. Hence such sentences are rarely independently uttered in communication in Chinese since it yields not much useful information. By comparison, these sentences are more often used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zuotian   wo dapo  yige huaping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I  break a    vase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wo dapo-le yige huaping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I break-REAL a vase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;REAL above denotes &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;, the aspectual marker of realization in Chinese. Not going into messy details, we can simply treat &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt; here as a perfective (also defaultly in the past) marker. However, combined with atelic verbs or added future adverbs (or clauses), &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt; can also yields a continuative or future reading, which is why it's better called realiaztion marker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;, Chinese relies heavily on aspectual markers such as &lt;em&gt;guo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zhe&lt;/em&gt;, modal verbs such as &lt;em&gt;hui&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;jiang&lt;/em&gt; to specify its temporal relations, even though, it's not uncommon to see Chinese sentences such as those OP raised which only uses temporal adverbs to supply the information of even time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more complicated clauses, things like definiteness status or scope of DPs can also alter the temporal interpretations of clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jo-wang Lin has written a few papers concerning the 'tenseless' feature of Chinese. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffh033&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is one of the more comprehensive ones in case you are interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:39:52.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28816" CreationDate="2018-08-30T16:29:06.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accents, in this sense, are the result of there being dialects of languages, where the rules of pronunciation differ, depending on the dialect. People say that you have an accent, when your pronunciation diverges noticeably from what is considered standard. I have an American accent, which is considered &quot;accented&quot; from the standard of posh UK dialects, but is not noticeably distinct from standard US English (I do have some hardly-noticeable features that phonetic dialectologists have mentioned to me, plus retention of [ʍ] which normal people can actually notice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes the standard can be an ever-moving target. If there is an official language academy for a nation, that definitely helps to define the  standard. There is no such standard in the US, and the norm for &quot;standard&quot; US pronunciation is wider (includes more variants). If you grow up speaking a rural Floridian dialect, you can take classes to squelch your dialect if you want. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44740700/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/why-do-news-anchors-all-talk-same/#.W4gTWLgnbso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newscasters take classes&lt;/a&gt; in talking head diction, and to the extent that the target dialect is the same (in the US), that helps to define the social standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two competing international standards for English, American and British (South African and Australian English are not standards to which people across the globe aspire, though they are influential regionally). Whether you learn American vs. British English as a foreign language depends on personal, historical and sociopolitical factors. If your plan is to move to London and be employed in a white-collar position, it would be mildly counterproductive to eliminate your posh UK dialect in favor of American English. Usually, foreign language classes don't teach you socially marked pronunciations. French classes in the US will usually teach standard Parisian French, not Quebecois; they usually teach standard Mexican Spanish, not Castillian and certainly not Highland Ecuadorian rural. In the UK, however, they seem to teach Castillian and not Mexican pronunciation. If you have learned Mexican pronunciations and then hear Castillian, you can notice &quot;an accent&quot;, because you're somewhat learned one standard. I suspect, if you don't know any Norwegian, that you won't be able to detect a Finnmark or Bergen &quot;accent&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The odds of a language having no &quot;accents&quot; is pretty low, at least if there are more than a dozen speakers. Even then, in the waning years of Lushootseed, there was the Muckleshoot accent and the Skagit accent...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T16:29:06.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T21:18:09.710" Score="1" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Starting to learn the IPA and having a few questions. One is about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L sound&lt;/a&gt;. Here are the L sounds I've seen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;l&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;l̥&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ɬ&lt;/a&gt; (No language uses this).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ɫ: both velarization and pharyngealization&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_lateral_approximants#dark_l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lˠ&lt;/a&gt; (velarized lateral).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lˤ (pharyngealized lateral).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ɫ̪&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sidenote: Wondering how the l̥ is pronounced in English. If it is just a whisper with your mouth in the L position.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand any of them except the first one. I can sort of hear the difference of the dark ɫ, but it doesn't seem like enough to mean a different letter sound, just a different way of saying L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the shape of the L means putting the tip of your tongue at the front roof of your mouth, not touching the teeth. Then you voice it, and press air around the the tongue. But if you just left it at that it sounds barely different than a &lt;code&gt;hmm...&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;nggg...&lt;/code&gt;. So you finish it off by whipping your tongue off the roof to say &quot;lah&quot; or &quot;luh&quot;. That gives it (to me at least) the &quot;L sound&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are, if there is a way to pronounce the L without that last &quot;finishing it off&quot; part (giving the aspirated &quot;lah&quot; or &quot;luh&quot;). It seems that &lt;em&gt;by itself&lt;/em&gt; you can't not aspirate it, but when it is part of a word like &lt;code&gt;hello&lt;/code&gt; it doesn't get aspirated and instead is just basically a transition between two vowels. But the &quot;clicking&quot; or &quot;snapping&quot; of the L seems to play a part in the L sound. So wanted to see if there is a name for that snappiness, and the terminology around the part that: you aspirate when saying the letter by itself, but don't aspirate it when it's part of a word like &lt;code&gt;hello&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is, if it is related to the S or T or D sounds. I've seen T and D related as the same mouth shape yet just voiceless vs. voiced. It seems S is the same mouth shape but your tongue never touches the roof of the mouth. Then it seems L and D are almost exactly the same, but it just seems that with the L you are &lt;em&gt;rolling&lt;/em&gt; the tongue off the roof, while in the D it is more of an air-pressured snap (an ejective, voiced T perhaps, I'm wondering). So I'm trying to name the L and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative#Voiceless_alveolar_sibilants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S&lt;/a&gt; relative to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_stops&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T&lt;/a&gt;. I understand their IPA terminology (voiceless avioloar). But it's like: L = approximant, S = sibilant, T = stop. Also L has the word &quot;lateral&quot; in the IPA description. I guess the difference between approximant and sibilant is that the L doesn't produce &lt;em&gt;turbulence&lt;/em&gt;, while the S does. Also, the L is a &quot;lateral consonant&quot;, so the air goes to the sides, while the S it goes down the middle. Let me know if there are any other major differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final part of the question is if there are any &quot;equivalent&quot; sounds to the L in different parts of the mouth. Similar to how there is the &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; sounds in different parts that are similar (voiceless, popping sounds). Maybe the &lt;code&gt;ng&lt;/code&gt; is one of them. Would be interested to know the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:31:06.337" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:31:06.337" Title="The anatomy of the L sound" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28822" CreationDate="2018-08-30T23:09:57.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronouncing &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; without the &quot;finishing off&quot; part: I'm not sure what your native language is, but aspirated approximants are very rare in general, so I doubt your &quot;finishing off&quot; is aspiration. If you are referring to English, the phoneme /l/ is realized as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;velarized&lt;/a&gt; [ɫ] in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable#Coda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coda position&lt;/a&gt;: so that would be the difference between the /l/ in &quot;hell&quot; [hɛɫ] and the /l/ in &quot;hello&quot; [hɛloʊ]. It's possible to pronounce an unvelarized /l/ in the coda of a syllable. You could try listening to /l/ in other languages if you want to practice it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The difference between [l] and [s] and [t] is manner of articulation. [t] is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stop&lt;/a&gt;, meaning it stops the airflow completely for a moment. [s] is a (sibilant) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricative_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fricative&lt;/a&gt;, so it pushes the air through a narrow space. [l] is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approximant&lt;/a&gt;, which is similar to a fricative but leaves more space open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be looking for non-alveolar lateral approximants. Wikipedia has a list &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_consonant#Approximants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The IPA has symbols for the palatal lateral approximant [ʎ] and the velar lateral approximant [ʟ].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T07:24:56.963" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T07:24:56.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28822" CreationDate="2018-08-30T23:59:19.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to pronounce various kinds of lateral without any vocalic release (the &quot;aspiration&quot; thing -- aspiration actually means something else in phonetics, though it's similar), though without practice, it may seem more natural to say [lə] rather that just [l̩]. Perhaps if you say &quot;bottle&quot; very slowly and just prolongate the &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; part, and then leave off everything before the &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, you can get an &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; without a following vowel, but then what you have is closer to [l̩]. The thing that's pretty much impossible to do is just say [l], not [l̩], with no preceding or following vocalic sound. The same does for [m,n]. In general, we can't just pronounce single consonants as they would occur in real speech for example &quot;low&quot; without the &quot;ow&quot;. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s17qu92NfNsr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listen to recordings&lt;/a&gt; of [l, m, g] with the vowel part edited out from &quot;low, mow, go&quot; – this isn't something that can be done in normal speaking. These consonants have a duration of 40-50 msc, which is really short, and it's impractical (maybe impossible) to articulate an isolated consonant that is so short. Thus the vocalic support that you get with &quot;luh&quot; i.e. isolated &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, as well as &quot;guh&quot; and so on, is there because you want to make the consonant sound &quot;snappy&quot; like it would be in &quot;lift&quot; etc. when it is in the syllable onset. You could just make a really long 500 msc [l], but then it sounds like syllabic [l̩] (or [m̩, n̩]). The same goes for the stops [p,b] and so on, only more so because being stops, you don't get any sound without that vocalic support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't understand the second question. In words like &quot;lip, dip, tip&quot;, [l, d, t] are very similar in having tongue-tip contact with the alveolar ridge, but they differ in whether they are voiced ([l,d]) or not ([t]); or whether there is complete closure involving the tongue ([t,d]) versus a lowering of the tongue at the sides ([l]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T23:59:19.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28826" CreationDate="2018-08-31T03:17:38.823" Score="0" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what the most complex examples are of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tonal languages&lt;/a&gt;, and what its features are. In Chinese there are 4 or 5 tones, but they are relatively simple (&lt;em&gt;contour&lt;/em&gt; changes, move up, down, down then up, etc.). Wondering if there are any that are fully musical like having absolute pitch, or if any have relative musical scales (like you would start at any random pitch, but then do a major third or whatnot). Wondering what an example of a tone is in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;African register tonal languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T05:21:54.293" Title="Most complex examples of tones in tonal languages" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;register&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28825" CreationDate="2018-08-31T05:21:54.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we don't have a musically-informed theory of tonal phonetics, and there is very little literature which applies notions like &quot;major third&quot; etc. to pitch relations. Indeed, the literature on the acoustic phonetics of tone is rather restricted, given how many tone languages there are. We do have a reasonable understanding of the basic contrastive types of tones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, a tone can be defined in terms of discrete levels. It's a bit problematic that there are as many as 6 levels employed in the language Chori, and 5 levels in a number of other languages like Bench Non and Trique (we theoretically expect there to be a power of 2 levels). Second, tone levels can be combined on a single vowel, so a Falling tone can be decomposed into the combination of High and Low. Theoretically that allows very rich inventories where a vowel could have the profiles 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 24, 43, 42, 41 etc (where 1 is the lowest pitch and 4 is the highest pitch). Some languages have three-element contours (though always involving a 'change in direction') such as 132, 423.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, additionally, two global operators, upstep and downstep. The aforementioned levels are defined within a given pitch range (determined non-grammatically based on general social values e.g. &quot;how high should your voice be&quot;, and individual factors (&quot;don't expect me to say that at 400 Hz, I can't go that high&quot;). Normally, people use a certain subrange of comfortable talking pitch, so a H tone would be at the top of the range, a L at the bottom, and M in the middle. However, that subrange can shift upwards and downward: if you have a &quot;downstep&quot;, the pitch range is lowered (all tones get lowered), and &quot;upstep&quot; involves raising the pitch range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of what the correct featural analysis of tone is remains an unresolved matter. The main problem is that most tone languages have 2 levels, few have 4 levels, very few have 5, and only 1 has six. Without a more robust sample of multi-level languages, it's really not possible to make proper generalizations &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; claims about how human language works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complexity of tone systems really is not about the inventory of elements, it is about how tone plays a role in grammar, e.g. as a marker of tense or syntactic relations, and how underlying tones change radically in surface representations (for example, the tone of this word shifts into the next word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T05:21:54.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28822" CreationDate="2018-08-31T09:51:37.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a partial answer to the second question whether there is a relation between l and the coronal stops (t, d):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes there is a connection, and historically sound shifts like d -&gt; l (lambdacism) are attested. They occurred sporadically in Latin, e.g., lingua &amp;lt; dingua &quot;tongue&quot; or lacrima &amp;lt; dacrima &quot;tear&quot; and on a more regular basis in Finno-Ugric languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Turkic languages, there are lir and shaz languages with mutual sound correspondences l &amp;lt;-&gt; sh and r &amp;lt;-&gt; z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The l sound also relates to n, in Ancient Egypt all Proto-Afroasiatic l's became n's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T18:24:17.760" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T18:24:17.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T12:54:50.830" Score="1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;German vowel charts used in the wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard German phonology&lt;/a&gt; do not locate vowels with great details. For example German [e] is a bit higher than the IPA [e] (something like what is shown in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Positions-of-German-vowels-in-the-pronunciation-system-the-i-sound-Rausch-Rausch_fig1_280978405&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this vowel chart&lt;/a&gt;) or tense vowel [e:] is not produced exactly in the same location of its allophone short vowel [e]. the wikipedia charts are phonemic oriented for example [e:] and [e] are grouped together as &quot;e(:)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T20:14:24.937" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T20:14:24.937" Title="German vowel charts with phonetic accuracy" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28842" CreationDate="2018-08-31T19:24:16.243" Score="0" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are languages in which there are 2 words, 1 containing letter (a) and the other containing letter (b), such that they sound &lt;em&gt;pretty much&lt;/em&gt; the same, yet they mean different things. The pairs of words are formed from these &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sound pairs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(a) (b)&#xA; k   q&#xA; ɲ   ŋ&#xA; n   ɳ&#xA; ŋ   ɴ&#xA; ɡ   ɢ&#xA; d   ɖ&#xA; β   v&#xA; ɸ   f&#xA; ʒ   ʐ&#xA; ʃ   ʂ&#xA; ʐ   ʝ&#xA; ħ   h&#xA; h   ɦ&#xA; ɣ   ʁ&#xA; ɣ   ɰ&#xA; ɹ   ɻ&#xA; v   ʋ&#xA; ɾ   ɽ&#xA; ʀ   r&#xA; ʜ   ħ&#xA; ʜ   h&#xA; ɬ   ʃ&#xA; ɮ   ʒ&#xA; ɭ˔̊  ʃ&#xA; ɭ   ʟ&#xA; l   ɭ&#xA; ɺ   l&#xA; t   ʈ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sounds sound almost identical to me, even though they are produced differently anatomically. Pretty much it boils down to these sounds to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;k&#xA;n&#xA;ng&#xA;g&#xA;v&#xA;f&#xA;z&#xA;ʒ&#xA;ʃ&#xA;t&#xA;h&#xA;r&#xA;l&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other ones seem too subtle to be used to make different words. Wondering if they are actually used for that purpose, or what purpose they serve. I'm just wondering if &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the pairs could be used this way, not necessarily all of them since that would be a lot :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are words used from these two letter pairs that have different meanings in some language, I'm wondering how you get to understand the different sounds so well to distinguish it easier (sort of thing). Maybe the before/after letter around the letter makes it easier to distinguish or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:48:05.973" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:48:05.973" Title="If these letter pairs are used to distinguish two words in any language" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:25:54.153" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's imagine that for some reason we had to create an artificial language from scratch and we wanted this language to be both &lt;strong&gt;simple&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;efficient&lt;/strong&gt;. By that I mean that the language was &lt;em&gt;easy to learn&lt;/em&gt; for everyone and that it needed &lt;em&gt;very little words (and sounds)&lt;/em&gt; to communicate any message. What characteristics would this language have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22608" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:59:56.777" Title="How would a simple efficient language look like?" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28856" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:35:47.553" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if any languages take into account musical timing or rhythm. I know in English, we stress certain vowels &quot;long&quot; or &quot;short&quot;, but we don't say &quot;let this vowel be 2x the length of these consonants&quot; sort of thing. That is, we don't write like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is a sentence.&#xA;&#xA;|---------------------------|&#xA; Th--is  is--- a sen--tence.&#xA;       ^&#xA;       |&#xA;       gap&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;code&gt;Th--is&lt;/code&gt; is like &lt;code&gt;Thhhis&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;is---&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;issss&lt;/code&gt;. That is, we don't write the exact timing of the phrasing when we write English. We only do that with music, writing the lyrics inline with tablature, for example. But my question is, if there are any languages that do write it down using timing information of some sort. Maybe it's not as robust as a full on time &lt;em&gt;plot&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;chart&lt;/em&gt;, but maybe they add hints to the duration of the phonemes or something like that. Haven't seen anything like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically wondering if any languages &lt;em&gt;write down&lt;/em&gt; some sort of timing metrics information in their written language. Maybe the ancient Greek hexameter did this, but I can't tell from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. It looks like they organized their syllables and such into timing measures, but I'm not sure what sort of annotations they put on the text (if there were actually written bars like &lt;code&gt;word1 word2 | word3 word4 | ... | ... | ...&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T20:48:16.923" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:47:03.587" Title="Most complex examples of timing in written or spoken languages" Tags="&lt;syllable-timing&gt;&lt;rhythm&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28833" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:41:24.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long question! Here is a partial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages that have /q/ also have /k/ as a distinct phoneme. As you’ve suggested, the distinction may be realized in part on surrounding sounds: uvular consonants like /q/ tend to lower high vowels and back low unrounded vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A velar/uvular distinction is uncommon for voiced consonants, fricatives or approximants, but is certainly possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Uvular nasals are rare, and as far as I know can usually easily be analyzed as allophones of either a non-uvular nasal, or a non-nasal uvular consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T22:40:44.113" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:40:44.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28835" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:51:21.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not seen any writing system that uses such kind of timing notation for everyday language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the analysis of poetry, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_%28poetry%29#Feet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feet&lt;/a&gt; are annoted with macrons and breves above the written representation of the language, creating a kind of tabulature. Not every poetry can analysed like this, but the system works well for classical Latin and Greek poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is &quot;analysis mode&quot;, usually the poems are just set in plain text broken into lines according to the verses without hinting at the rhythm: The reader of the poem is supposed to add this information on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T20:51:21.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28833" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:05:26.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can self-answer your questions by using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple interface to the UPSID database&lt;/a&gt;. You can play with the query interface (it is not really tuned to find pairs of given sounds, but you can search for languages having at least two consonants with the common features (voiced stops, voiced fricatives, nasals, etc) and skim through the results, or you can download the full database and search for your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:05:26.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:17:14.320" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if the following sounds have written transcriptions / annotations in IPA or any other system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Snooring sound (breathing &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;hoooonk&quot; is a trill of some sort, then the breathing out &quot;shoo&quot; is already transcribed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s7c8FkS9M#t=14s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Screaming sound&lt;/a&gt;. The raspiness in the voice. If the raspy h is transcribed (), maybe this is too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Female &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6A5lMgdisQ#t=1m58s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grunty/grungy&lt;/a&gt; (the &quot;whoawhoawhoawhoa&quot; there) singing sound (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0egNtYs44gE#t=26s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christina Aguilera does when she says &quot;not&quot; right here&lt;/a&gt;, as well as others).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;~huh!&quot; sound when you get scared and breath &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; really quickly. It is voiced and a little raspy, deep in the larynx I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vibratto (singing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cough sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stick tongue out and rattle, like &quot;nany-nany-nany pthththththt&quot; stick your tongue out at someone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;ks ks&quot;, the sound when you suck in air in the side of your mouth, stick up your thumbs, (maybe snap), then point at some one, like &quot;yep, you got it, right on.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eP_1QmFYq4#t=18s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rain drop sound when flicking the side of your mouth&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;monster voice&quot; where you talk so low that it vibrates at the bottom of your throat, seemingly without &quot;voice&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whistle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sounds that can be transcribed are &quot;hmmm...&quot;, and &quot;psh!&quot;, and &quot;hahaha&quot;. So wondering if these things can be also. A scream is typically just &quot;ahhhh!&quot; or something like that. But it doesn't include the &lt;em&gt;raspiness&lt;/em&gt; in the voice, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s7c8FkS9M#t=14s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linkin Park's scream&lt;/a&gt;. Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;click&quot; sound is transcribed&lt;/a&gt;, which is cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:24:40.053" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:09:09.377" Title="If any of these stranger human voice sounds have IPA annotations" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;sound-symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28840" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:30:18.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lateral consonants&lt;/a&gt; attested in human languages, the best known example is the common and frequent lateral approximant /l/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lateral consonants can be voiced or voiceless, and besides approximants there are also lateral fricatives, affricates, flaps, and ejective affricates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A special subgroup are the lateral clicks present in the Khoisan languages and some Bantu languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T13:25:18.980" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T13:25:18.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28841" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:30:18.447" Score="0" Body="For questions about the lateral consonants." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T21:30:18.447" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:30:18.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28833" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:31:38.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically you're asking if each of these distinctions is &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a partial answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; k   q    Arabic and Biblical Hebrew&#xA; ɲ   ŋ    Swahili, Mapos Buang&#xA; n   ɳ    Sanskrit&#xA; ŋ   ɴ    This distinction is rare, but occurs in Mapos Buang&#xA; ɡ   ɢ    This is an even rarer distinction&#xA; d   ɖ    Sanskrit&#xA; β   v    Also rare, but occurs in casual Swedish (where [β] is /b/)&#xA; ɸ   f    Some dialects of Spanish (where [ɸ] is /b/)&#xA; ʒ   ʐ    Polish, depending on analysis&#xA; ʃ   ʂ    Polish, depending on analysis&#xA; ʐ   ʝ    /ʝ/ is very rare, but usually acts velar-ish while /ʐ/ acts alveolar-ish&#xA; ħ   h    Arabic, Hebrew&#xA; h   ɦ    Zulu, Lamé&#xA; ɣ   ʁ    Southern Dutch&#xA; ɣ   ɰ    Not sure this distinction is phonemic anywhere&#xA; ɹ   ɻ    /ɹ/ is very rare in general&#xA; v   ʋ    English in some parts of London, where [ʋ] is /r/&#xA; ɾ   ɽ    Warlpiri, though their &amp;lt;r&amp;gt; is usually a trilled /r/&#xA; ʀ   r    Provençal Occitan&#xA; ʜ   ħ&#xA; ʜ   h    Iraqi Arabic, where [ʜ] is /ħ/&#xA; ɬ   ʃ    Biblical Hebrew&#xA; ɮ   ʒ    Zulu&#xA; ɭ˔̊  ʃ&#xA; ɭ   ʟ&#xA; l   ɭ    Toda&#xA; ɺ   l&#xA; t   ʈ    Sanskrit&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T22:21:16.287" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:21:16.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28839" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:35:05.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an extension of IPA called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extIPA&lt;/a&gt; for disordered speech that cover a lot of the things you have asked for. Those extensions are also added to the Unicode standard and available on the computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:35:05.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8596" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:56:44.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book of Siebs, &lt;em&gt;Deutsche Aussprache&lt;/em&gt; (19th printing 2000) contains a list of relevant minimal pairs and some almost minimal pairs that define the different phonemes of standard High German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T21:56:44.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28834" CreationDate="2018-08-31T22:59:56.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that by &quot;very little words&quot;, you mean &quot;very few&quot;, and not &quot;very short&quot;. Every language is completely easy to learn as a first language, and no language is universally trivial for everybody to learn as a second (adult) language. Since all languages are the same as first languages, I assume you mean &quot;easy to learn as an adult&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be easy to learn, there should be few rules (which doesn't mean that things are chaotic, it means that the &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; of rules is simple, not involving lots of very specific rules and obscure rule-interactions). The best way to achieve the desideratum of &quot;easiness&quot;, the rules should be maximally surface-true. For example, if the verb is always the second word in the sentence, that rule should really be true, and not complicated by something like &quot;unless the subject is a question word&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any form of grammatical marking within words adds complexity, so there won't be any morphology – it will all be syntax. In other words, more like Chinese or Vietnamese, except not as hard to pronounce. The biggest challenge is constructing vocabulary. Suppose that you determine that there have to be at least 30,000 nouns and 10,000 verbs. If you have 12 consonants and 5 vowels, and if syllables can have up to 2 consonants at the beginning and at the end, you can easily get over 100,000 single-syllable words, which is a substantial number. However, this will probably require you to have word like [pdakp], [dmikn] and so on, and this will most likely cause problems for the majority of people. So words should have only one consonant at the beginning and end of the syllable. But then if you want to have 100,000 words and you stick with the CVC formula, 12 consonants and 5 vowels, you'd need words up to 16 syllables long in order to get 100,000 words – I think people would have trouble with such long words. If you increase the count of consonants to 20 and vowels to 7, you might manage keep words to no more than 8 syllables, but that is still pretty substantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One approach followed by people inventing languages is to simply cap the number of words in the lexicon at something small like 10,000 and then you can have an inventory of about 14 consonants and 5 vowels. But 10,000 words is unrealistic for general use that would include words like &quot;fox&quot;, &quot;raccoon&quot;, &quot;husky&quot;, &quot;panda&quot;, &quot;malamute&quot;, &quot;bear&quot;, &quot;poodle&quot;, &quot;seal&quot;, &quot;skunk&quot;, &quot;jackal&quot;, &quot;weasel&quot;, &quot;walrus&quot;, &quot;wolf&quot; and so on. People attempt to eliminate the need for many words by using phrases, calling the jackal &quot;fox dog&quot; and raccoon &quot;trash panda&quot;, but eventually these end up become arbitrary learned combinations that function like words (if seal is &quot;water dog&quot;, what is &quot;walrus&quot;? And shouldn't fox be something like &quot;cat dog&quot;, so jackal should be &quot;cat dog dog&quot;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English consonant inventory is not particularly difficult, except perhaps [θ ð], though the phonetic value of &quot;r&quot; is a bit of a nuisance. Perhaps a consonant inventory of [p t k tʃ b d g dʒ f s ʃ v z ʒ m n l r w y] would cause the least inconvenience for the most people. We probably have too many vowels and should not go beyond [i e ɛ a ə ɔ o u]. We could get near 100,000 words with this inventory if you can tolerate 7-syllable words. Or, you could complicate syllable structure by allowing at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; CC onsets – but that will cause problems for some speakers. In other words, there's no way to compute an ideal &quot;maximal benefit for most&quot; system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, if you factor in the number of speakers of different languages (so that the billion and a half speakers of English get a certain vote against adding pharyngeals, and the few hundred speakers of Piraha get a certain vote against adding [e, l] which don't exist in their language), you will probably find that the simplest and most efficient language is Mandarin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T22:59:56.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28849" CreationDate="2018-08-31T23:20:11.933" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;More specifically, I'm wondering if languages can put into 1 word what in English takes multiple words. For example, in English you can say &quot;Speak!&quot; to say basically &quot;You speak!&quot;. In Spanish you can get more complex with &quot;¡Dámelo!&quot; to say &quot;Give it to me!&quot; in one word. I'm wondering what some of the more complex examples of using 1 word to say a complete sentence in another language looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, maybe you can say &quot;I go to the store&quot; in one word in some language, or &quot;I went to the store&quot;. Maybe it can get more complex than &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;subject&amp;gt; &amp;lt;verb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;object&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; though. Maybe more like, &quot;I watch a movie &lt;b&gt;at&lt;/b&gt; the park &lt;b&gt;with&lt;/b&gt; my friend &lt;b&gt;in&lt;/b&gt; the past.&quot; Or using grammatical tense, &quot;I watched a movie &lt;b&gt;at&lt;/b&gt; the park &lt;b&gt;with&lt;/b&gt; my friend.&quot; In English as one word you could potentially build &quot;moviedaparkndate&quot; lol. That's not really a thing to do in English, but I tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are languages where you can build arbitrarily-long complex words (I think someone told me German had large words like this), then I'm wondering how you would decide to divide &quot;strings&quot; up into individual words, but will save that for another question perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to get a sense of how much you can cram into a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also not looking for predefined idioms or things in which it is just a norm to say something in one word but it is a complete sentence. Looking instead for complete sentences constructed purely out of the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T23:28:28.963" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T00:11:11.697" Title="Complex example of a language with a word that is a complete English sentence" Tags="&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28847" CreationDate="2018-08-31T23:28:39.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what some of the more complex examples of using 1 word to say a complete sentence in another language looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A very popular Turkish agglutination is&lt;/em&gt; Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız, &lt;em&gt;meaning &quot;You are said to be one of those that we couldn't manage to convert to a Czechoslovak&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I go to the store&quot; in one word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word boundaries are defined by orthography but in any case I do not know of a language where this is possible by my definition of word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjects or even objects can be implied by a verb, but then they are more like pronouns, not NPs like &lt;em&gt;the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;arbitrarily-long complex words... German&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a sentence needs a verb, then noun compounding alone cannot yield a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T23:28:39.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28847" CreationDate="2018-09-01T00:11:11.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polysynthetic languages&lt;/a&gt; come close to what you seem to be looking for since apart from marking multiple grammatical functions in one word, they allow a word to combine both noun and verb. Examples are West Greenlandic &lt;em&gt;Aliikkusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli&lt;/em&gt; &quot;However, they will say that he is a great entertainer, but...&quot; and Yupik &lt;em&gt;tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq&lt;/em&gt; &quot;He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting objects and verbs together is a common pattern, within this uncommon type of word formation. I don't think there is a language where you can incorporate full NP objects and subjects plus verbs, thus rendering &quot;My oldest child cooked many potatoes&quot; into a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T00:11:11.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28858" CreationDate="2018-09-01T01:12:16.670" Score="-2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering why you write a sentence like this, with the word &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;b&gt;The&lt;/b&gt; person went to &lt;b&gt;the&lt;/b&gt; store.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;La&lt;/b&gt; persona fue a &lt;b&gt;la&lt;/b&gt; tienda.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why that extra word needs to be there. It could just say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Person went to store.&#xA;&#xA;Persona fue a tienda.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, why the word &lt;code&gt;to&lt;/code&gt; even needs to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Person went store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering why that word is in English, and if all languages have this feature or some of them do it like the last example. Not sure exactly the purpose &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; serves, and if it is used in every language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I play sports.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we don't say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I play &lt;b&gt;the&lt;/b&gt; sports.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I throw &lt;b&gt;the&lt;/b&gt; ball.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I throw ball.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why we don't put &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; in front of verbs either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The person the go the past the store.&#xA;&#xA;The person the went the store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia it sounds like Chinese doesn't use &quot;definiteness&quot; or determiners like &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;. I'd be interested to know what their sentence equivalents look like for above, translated to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Man is human.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't use &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; there, maybe because it's a concept rather than an instance of a specific person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The man is human.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is for &quot;the person you are thinking about&quot; I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sky is blue.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say that in English to refer to the sky, since there is only one we really are probably referring to. Even though there's probably lots of other &quot;skies&quot; in the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The Amari is here.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Amari is here.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there could be many Amaris everyone knows, so I don't see why we don't use &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; there as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other weird examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+ Amari is in the house.&#xA;- Amari is in house.&#xA;+ Amari is here.&#xA;- Amari is the here.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But refer to a place, a specific place. But one uses &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; and the other doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+ Amari got here the moment we left.&#xA;- Amari got here moment we left.&#xA;+ Amari got here just now.&#xA;- Amari got here just the now.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+ They referenced Man.&#xA;- They referenced the Man.&#xA;+ They referenced the concept of Man.&#xA;- They referenced concept of Man.&#xA;+ They referenced StackOverflow.&#xA;- They referenced the StackOverflow.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;Man&lt;/code&gt; is a concept. But a &lt;code&gt;concept&lt;/code&gt; is also a concept. We say &lt;code&gt;the concept&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;Man&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are &lt;em&gt;joking&lt;/em&gt; you can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The Amari is here.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And everyone knows who you are talking about. Or even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Humanity is here.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referencing some person as a joke. Basically I don't see the exact rules on how to use &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;, and why it's necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T06:45:28.303" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:36:28.873" Title="Why languages have the concept of &quot;the&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T05:14:44.547" Score="-1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to understand what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_and_postposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preposition&lt;/a&gt; is. Wikipedia gives some hints (&lt;em&gt;adpositions&lt;/em&gt; are the general case of preposition/postposition/circumposition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Adpositions are classed as syntactic elements....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Adpositions are among the most frequently occurring words in languages that have them....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Many simple adpositions are derived from complex forms (e.g., with + in → within, by + side → beside) through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammaticalisation&lt;/a&gt;....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Adpositions typically have noun phrases as complements....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Adpositions can be used to express a wide range of semantic relations between their complement and the rest of the context. The relations expressed may be spatial (denoting location or direction), temporal (denoting position in time), or relations expressing comparison, content, agent, instrument, means, manner, cause, purpose, reference, etc....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...Most common adpositions are highly polysemous (they have various different meanings)....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;...In some contexts (as in the case of some phrasal verbs) the choice of adposition may be determined by another element in the construction or be fixed by the construction as a whole. Here the adposition may have little independent semantic content of its own, and there may be no clear reason why the particular adposition is used rather than another. Examples of such expressions are: ...dispense &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt;, listen &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;, insist &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;, proud &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt;, good &lt;strong&gt;at&lt;/strong&gt;....&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, sometimes the rules for how you combine a preposition with another word, like &lt;code&gt;listen to&lt;/code&gt;, is arbitrary. Wondering if it is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; arbitrary, or if there is some history to it or evolution of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;on&#xA;in&#xA;to&#xA;by&#xA;for&#xA;with&#xA;at&#xA;of&#xA;from&#xA;as&#xA;about&#xA;towards&#xA;in spite of&#xA;with respect to&#xA;except for&#xA;by dint of&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen, there doesn't seem to be a clear definition of what a preposition actually is. As opposed to nouns (things), and verbs (actions). It has been very hard to try and figure out what exactly is meant by the word &quot;of&quot; in &quot;My friend of many years&quot; or &quot;to&quot; in &quot;I went to the store&quot;, or even &quot;from&quot; in &quot;The food from the store&quot;. I mean, I get the &lt;em&gt;basics&lt;/em&gt;, I get the definition of it and that &quot;to&quot; references a place, and &quot;of&quot; is some relationship. But I don't get what it means a deeper level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are languages &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; prepositions (and what that looks like when translated to English), or if not, how they got there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sidenote, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is confusing, &lt;code&gt;verb&lt;/code&gt; in Latin means &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt;, so I guess I need to adjust my definition of verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T05:26:23.747" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:25:17.607" Title="Latest research on the meaning of prepositions" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28850" CreationDate="2018-09-01T06:10:36.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Person went to store.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian &lt;code&gt;Человек пошел в магазин&lt;/code&gt;, in Turkish &lt;code&gt;Kişi mağazaya gitti&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wondering why that word is in English, and if all languages have this feature or some of them do it like the last example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/37&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAb8Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAb8Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T06:10:36.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28835" CreationDate="2018-09-01T12:08:06.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many written languages that cleary distinguish between long and short vowels or consonants. One example is Finnish, where long vowels and long consonants are indicated by doubling the relevant letter. Another example is Arabic (in its fully vocalised form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T12:08:06.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28851" CreationDate="2018-09-01T14:40:56.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best resource I have found on prepositions is The Preposition Project, see: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.clres.com/prepositions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.clres.com/prepositions.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It will be a tremendous resource to help you understand how prepositions are disambiguated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are confused about prepositions vs particles, and their use in phrasal verbs, consider the following ESL book: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1438009747&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/dp/1438009747/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_2oQIBbTRMCC1V&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T14:40:56.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28835" CreationDate="2018-09-01T14:50:05.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at Japanese (when written in kana instead of kanji) for a good example. Japanese is a &lt;em&gt;mora-timed language&lt;/em&gt;, which means each syllable contains a certain number of morae (&quot;beats&quot;), and every mora is pronounced for approximately the same length of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing in kana, each character represents one and only one mora, whether that's a CV syllable (カナ &lt;code&gt;ka.na&lt;/code&gt;, two morae), consonant gemination (キッタ &lt;code&gt;ki.t.ta&lt;/code&gt;, three morae), vowel lengthening (オーサカ &lt;code&gt;o.o.sa.ka&lt;/code&gt;, four morae), or a coda consonant (センパイ &lt;code&gt;se.m.pa.i&lt;/code&gt;, four morae).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the number of characters in a word is exactly the number of morae in it. For example, the word &lt;em&gt;sekken&lt;/em&gt; &quot;soap&quot; has only two syllables, but the kana spelling セッケン &lt;code&gt;se.k.ke.n&lt;/code&gt; makes it clear that it has four morae, and thus takes four &quot;beats&quot; to pronounce. This is in fact how most Japanese poetry works: &lt;em&gt;haiku&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is based on the number of morae per line instead of syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that none of these words would normally be written in quite this way; I'm doing the equivalent of putting all the words in italics. But this way of writing isn't wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T15:47:03.587" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:47:03.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28851" CreationDate="2018-09-01T15:25:17.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A preposition is a non-phrasal syntactic element which precedes a nominal phrase. A postposition is a non-phrasal syntactic elements which follows a nominal phrase. It differs from a prefix in being a separate word, but the criteria for calling something a prefix versus a word are language- and theory-specific (best dealt with as a separate question). The function of a preposition is to express a relationship between the nominal phrase and some other elements. There are many languages without prepositions, for example Japanese and Quechua. There is nothing deeper to prepositions, in general. One can, of course, ask focused questions about the syntax or semantics of a particular preposition in a specific language. You can read about prepositions and postpositions in North Saami &lt;a href=&quot;http://oahpa.no/sme/gramm/pp.eng.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (in the examples, they put the preposition / postposition in quotes, rather than type-face shifting, for computational reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:25:17.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28850" CreationDate="2018-09-01T15:36:28.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As A. M. Bittlingmayer pointed out, this concept is far from universal: languages like Russian, Turkish, Latin, and Swahili have no articles at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in languages that have definite articles (some equivalent to &quot;the&quot;), how they're used varies widely. French uses the definite article for abstract concepts, where English wouldn't: &lt;em&gt;la mort&lt;/em&gt; = literally &quot;the death&quot;, but English &quot;death&quot;. Ancient Greek uses the definite article for people's names, but only when the person is considered definite: &lt;em&gt;Sōkratēs&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;someone named Socrates&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;ho Sōkratēs&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;the Socrates&quot;, means &quot;the specific person named Socrates, you know who I'm talking about&quot;. In English we leave off the article on &quot;God&quot; to refer to the single Abrahamic deity (while &quot;the god&quot; would be one of many), while in Ancient Greek it's the opposite: &lt;em&gt;theos&lt;/em&gt; on its own would mean one of many gods, while &lt;em&gt;ho Theos&lt;/em&gt; (literally &quot;the God&quot;) means YHWH in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, in languages that don't have articles, the definite article tends to arise from a demonstrative (French &lt;em&gt;le/la&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;ille/illa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;that&quot;), while the indefinite article tends to arise from a word for &quot;one&quot; (German &lt;em&gt;ein&lt;/em&gt;) or &quot;some/something&quot; (Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;tís&lt;/em&gt;). There's not always a clear line between these categories: &quot;one&quot; can be used somewhat like &quot;a&quot; in English, and &quot;that&quot; somewhat like &quot;the&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:36:28.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-02T13:11:45.740" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Master's thesis dedicated to the conception field &quot;business&quot; in Modern English Language.  The definition of &quot;concept&quot; and &quot;conceptional field&quot; is greatly discussed by Russian linguists, there are a lot of works dedicated to this theme. Could you please advise me the latest works on this subject in the English language? Probably some of you can name the researchers who explore this subject? Your help will be highly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22620" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T13:11:45.740" Title="Definition of &quot;concept&quot; and &quot;conceptual field in cognitive linguistics" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28741" CreationDate="2018-09-02T18:07:32.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This article attempts to explain the rules of mapping a spelling onto pronunciation in English. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/spell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.zompist.com/spell.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22622" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T18:07:32.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-02T20:02:31.777" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;By 'relative tenses', I mean a form of tense that is independent of the main tense that indicates when an event occurred relative to the past or future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples in English would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spoke.&#xA;I will speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative Past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had spoken.&#xA;I will have spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative Future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to speak.&#xA;I will be going to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, obviously the 'past-in-the-past' tense would be called a pluperfect, but isn't there any names for a 'relative tenses' on its own? They obviously exist, but the only place I've heard about them is in Tagalog (though those were originally misinterpreted as simple tenses rather than relative tenses, for example their 'past' can mean either 'this happened' or 'this will have happened').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastEditorDisplayName="user19661" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T00:27:10.810" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:04:32.430" Title="Is there a term for 'relative' tenses?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28863" CreationDate="2018-09-03T06:04:32.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the word &quot;relative&quot; already expresses what you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When specifically describing English, the perfect vs. non-perfect distinction has been described as a &quot;secondary&quot; tense system (as opposed to the &quot;primary&quot; tense system, the simple past vs. non-past distinction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the Glottopedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Huddleston_and_Pullum%27s_(2002)_analysis_of_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huddleston and Pullum's (2002) analysis of tense&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which also mentions the term &quot;non-deictic past tense&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:04:32.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28839" CreationDate="2018-09-03T06:09:09.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More extensive than extIPA are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_Quality_Symbols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voice Quality Symbols&lt;/a&gt; which build on them; they still don't meet all of OP's requirements, but there's some amusement to be had with e.g. {И} &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolarynx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;electrolaryngeal&lt;/a&gt; phonation or {V!} &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harsh_voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;harsh voice&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Harsh voice includes the use of the ventricular folds (the false vocal cords) to damp the glottis in a way similar to what happens when a person talks while lifting a heavy load, or, if the sound is voiceless, like clearing one's throat.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17064" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T06:09:09.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28872" CreationDate="2018-09-03T06:29:04.880" Score="5" ViewCount="1093" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen in a few places such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jtmanker/Morphological%20Typology%20-%20Spring%202016%20-%20Ling%20100%20Guest%20Lecture.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-902-language-and-its-structure-ii-syntax-fall-2015/lecture-notes/MIT24_902F15_Class16.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; this sort of notation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;el-ler-imiz-in (Turkish)&#xA;&lt;b&gt;hand-plr.-1st plr.-genitive case, ‘of our hands’&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kapi-ja-u-lau-nngit-tuq&#xA;&lt;b&gt;stab-PASS-be-PST-NEG-3S.INTR.DECL&lt;/b&gt;&#xA;‘It was not stabbed.’&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nanuq kapi-ja-u-lau-nngit-tuq angunasukti-mut&#xA;&lt;b&gt;polar bear stab-PASS-be-PST-NEG-3S.INTR.DECL hunter-OBL&lt;/b&gt;&#xA;‘The polar bear was not stabbed by the hunter.’&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indiana.edu/~l303/Finnishstructure.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;or&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;iso|i|ssa  auto|i|ssa in (the) big cars&#xA;&lt;b&gt;big.ADJ‐def‐in car.N‐def‐in&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like &lt;code&gt;it.is.dot.separated&lt;/code&gt; to some degree, alternating between words and some sort of keywords. But I'm not totally sure, and don't know what the keywords mean in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering (a) what this notation is, and (b) what are all the labels that can be used and their meaning (or a resource that lists these out). This way I would be able to interpret better the meaning of what they are saying. Maybe there is a standard format to it to, or the abbreviations are standard or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically looking for a list that says what the pieces are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADJ: Adjective&#xA;def-in: ...&#xA;PASS: ...&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not just the ones listed here but any that I may encounter. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T16:20:50.780" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T00:39:48.340" Title="Where this notation comes from and what it means" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;notation&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28870" CreationDate="2018-09-03T07:19:41.660" Score="3" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;In learning about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA consonants&lt;/a&gt;, a big distinction is between voiced and unvoiced consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When whispering however, we use no &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (I think). Yet, I feel like I can still hear these voiced sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;d&#xA;b&#xA;m&#xA;n&#xA;l&#xA;r&#xA;z&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as the vowels. That is, we are able to whisper in English no problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what &quot;voiced&quot; means in this context. Because my vocal chords aren't vibrating. Wondering if what I'm hearing in a whisper is more based on my memory of words rather than on the actual sounds. For example, when one whispers &lt;code&gt;very&lt;/code&gt;, I don't hear &lt;code&gt;fairy&lt;/code&gt;, but whispering &lt;code&gt;fairy&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; is slightly less harsh than the &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt; so I can hear &lt;code&gt;fairy&lt;/code&gt;. Same with &lt;code&gt;dare&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;tear&lt;/code&gt;, I can hear the difference. It sounds like the &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; &quot;pops&quot; more than the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, but I'm not sure if this is accounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering also where I can find more information on whispering in terms of linguistics and IPA notation, if there is anything on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:47:23.597" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:47:23.597" Title="If we can say the following sounds when whispering" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28869" CreationDate="2018-09-03T07:46:32.467" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the voiced plosives you mentioned, that is b, g, d, and also affricates, such as j (as in jar, the unvoiced counterpart is ch in char)these are distinguished from their unvoiced counterparts by aspiration&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as well as voicing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your brain doesn't notice since the entire segment stream is unvoiced, so the contrast is just as noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for the continuants, say /z/ versus /s/, I'm not sure there are enough minimal pairs for it to be a problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: Unvoiced plosive consonants tend to be aspirated in English, except in pre-nuclear consonant clusters and possibly other phonemic contexts where English has no voiced/unvoiced minimal pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T07:46:32.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28876" CreationDate="2018-09-03T08:02:00.823" Score="5" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's certain non-filled places in the IPA chart because we physically can't pronounce them. For example, a velar trill or glottal trill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using computers, is it possible that we could simulate how these sounds would sound? Has this already been done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21788" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T10:21:33.087" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T17:30:45.983" Title="Can we simulate the pronunciation of sounds that we can't make?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28868" CreationDate="2018-09-03T08:09:17.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of your examples have switched the roles of dots and of hyphens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems like &lt;code&gt;it.is.dot.separated&lt;/code&gt; to some degree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's right. We want to use spaces to mark word boundaries, so we need some other way to mark morpheme boundaries. The dots are suggesting boundaries between morphemes. I say suggesting, since it's not always clear where they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;gås (Norwegian)&#xA;goose.SING&#xA;&#xA;gjess (Norwegian)&#xA;goose.PL&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that example, by attached &lt;code&gt;.SING&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;.PL&lt;/code&gt;, I showed that the grammatical number is encoded as part of the word. If I said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;cikap (Ainu)&#xA;bird&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;cikap utar (Ainu)&#xA;bird  PL&#xA;&quot;birds&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by writing the &lt;code&gt;PL&lt;/code&gt; separately I show that those are separate words. Another your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;kapi-ja-u-lau-nngit-tuq&#xA;stab-PASS-be-PST-NEG-3S.INTR.DECL&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That morpheme &lt;code&gt;-tuq&lt;/code&gt; (I think it's usually spelled &lt;code&gt;-toq&lt;/code&gt;?) really does mean &lt;code&gt;3S.INTR.DECL&lt;/code&gt;, third person singular, intransitive, declarative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically looking for a list that says what the pieces are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're after a definitive, complete list, I could be wrong but I don't think there is such a thing. That's because for singular/singulative, I've sometimes seen &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt;, sometimes &lt;code&gt;SG&lt;/code&gt;, sometimes &lt;code&gt;SING&lt;/code&gt;.  There is also no definitive and complete list of all grammatical features. So these tokens are kind of ad-hoc or not formally specified. But in my opinion, a good book will have a glossary at the end explaining what you need to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an incomplete list here&lt;/a&gt; should help you through a lot of the parsing you'll want to do. And a knowledge of the language the gloss is in is of course a big help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T08:47:07.923" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T08:47:07.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T13:12:42.613" Score="-1" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just learning about agglutinative languages so I don't have much experience with them. I am looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;longest words&lt;/a&gt; for example words in a language like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnish&lt;/a&gt;, but not sure yet if those would count as agglutinative. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It looks like&lt;/a&gt; Hungarian, Turkish, and Japanese are also agglutinative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am mainly interested in how a large word is processed, and how a listener understands its meaning. I am just going to make up a hypothetical word to demonstrate the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we might say &quot;They walked onto the dry, green grass in the middle of the day.&quot;. It is a bunch of words stringed together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an agglutinative language, my understanding is there are variations. Some of them allow flexible word placement, others fixed word placement. But agglutinative differ from polysynthetic in that they don't modify the affixes when joining to a word. That is, agglutinative languages have easily identifiable morphemes in large words, whereas polysynthetic ones don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, you have a list of morphemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;they&#xA;dry&#xA;walk&#xA;green&#xA;grass&#xA;middle&#xA;day&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure exactly how it is done yet, but it sounds like you have a root and affixes. So let's say the root is &lt;code&gt;walk&lt;/code&gt;, then it might be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;walk.they.grass.green.dry.day.middle&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere in there there might be ~particles~ (not sure I'm using that word correctly yet), basically things to add the &quot;&lt;em&gt;in the&lt;/em&gt; middle &lt;em&gt;of the&lt;/em&gt; day&quot; sorts of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's at least how I have seen similar things written when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glossing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering though, given this made up example, is how the sentence/word is &lt;em&gt;understood&lt;/em&gt;. Because when it is written in that gloss form, it sounds like it would be an English sentence like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Walk they grass green dry day middle.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically it sounds like something you would tell a machine. It doesn't have that &lt;em&gt;prose&lt;/em&gt; feel to it like the original English sentence. It feels like a bunch of words chained together. So I keep wondering if they are basically &quot;parsing&quot; this chain, and integrating it into a full picture, sort of thing. As an English speaker it's difficult to comprehend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is why I'm wondering, &lt;em&gt;how it is heard&lt;/em&gt; by a native speaker. If it is, in fact, heard as a chain of words, but since they are used to it it sounds normal. Or if it sounds differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I'm trying to grasp intuitively what it feels like to comprehend an agglutinative language. It seems like it changes the way you would comprehend meaning, and so trying to get at what that actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one could provide a realistic example (long) word, and it's gloss/glossing, as well as it's English prose translation, and then explain how it is understood, that's pretty much what I'm hoping for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T17:06:58.450" Title="How agglutinative languages affect comprehension" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;agglutinative-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28874" CreationDate="2018-09-03T14:24:28.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English we might say &amp;quot;They walked onto the dry, green grass in the middle of the day.&amp;quot;. It is a bunch of words stringed together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an agglutinative language,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example will not tell us much.  Plenty of agglutinative languages will have roughly the same set of words for this sentence as English has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Turkish it will be &amp;quot;Günün ortasındaki kuru yeşil çimenlere yürüdüler.&amp;quot;.  That is roughly &amp;quot;Day-to middle-in-ly dry green grasses-to (they) walked.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exotic bits here for an English speaker are the postpositions, case endings, verb endings, pro-drop and of course the flexible word order, any of which can be found in non-agglutinative languages like Spanish or German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T17:06:58.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28871" CreationDate="2018-09-03T15:52:31.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For vowels, the chart actually shows a continuous space, with height, backness, and rounding corresponding to values we can measure (and synthesize): the formant positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For consonants, the chart isn't actually a perfect representation of how the mouth works. Some things, like the place of articulation of plosives and fricatives, are actually continuous: a human can make a palatal fricative, or an alveolar fricative, or a fricative anywhere in between, for example. And a computer can do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other things on the chart aren't continuous in the same way. Trills, for example, can only exist at certain places of articulation, because only certain parts of the mouth are flexible enough to trill. And there's not really anything acoustic in common between them, except that they're trill-like: there's not some clean measurable value that's highest for bilabial trills, in the middle for alveolar trills, and lowest for uvular trills, for instance. If there were, we could interpolate between the alveolar and uvular to make a velar trill, but unfortunately there's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, clicks at different places of articulation involve entirely different processes, so there's no way to &quot;fill in the gaps&quot; and figure out what impossible clicks (like the velar click) would sound like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sounds are considered &quot;impossible&quot; because they're exactly the same as other sounds. For instance, a glottal trill is marked impossible. That's not because there can't be any vibration down in that part of the larynx, but because there's already a name for when the vocal folds vibrate and nothing else is articulated: we call it [ə] (in other words, the most central, mid, neutral vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; some impossible sounds we can create using computers! For example, we can simulate a vowel that's higher and further to the front than [i], which is as high and front as the human mouth can go. Or we can go lower than [a], or farther back than [u], or any combination of these. I'm not sure if anyone's ever researched how people would perceive these impossible sounds: if they'd sound unnatural and unlike any other vowel, or if they'd just be perceived as [i], [a], [u]. That would be an interesting experiment to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T15:52:31.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28874" CreationDate="2018-09-03T16:01:06.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're curious about agglutination, look at English derivation. For example, suppose you'd never heard the word &quot;unapproachable&quot; before. You could quite easily break it down into un-approach-able. In other words, it describes something that you can't approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agglutinating languages do the same thing, but for purposes that we'd relegate to syntax. Honestly, the main difference between agglutinating and isolating languages is what they consider to be &quot;words&quot; (and thus whether they're explained better by morphological theories or syntactic ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T16:01:06.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28868" CreationDate="2018-09-03T16:10:13.787" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wilson's answer is great, but I'd like to clarify one point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, hyphens separate morphemes &lt;em&gt;in the source language&lt;/em&gt;, and dots separate morphemes &lt;em&gt;in the target language&lt;/em&gt; that aren't separate in the source language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, take the Latin word &lt;em&gt;amō&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;I love&quot;. I would gloss it as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;am-ō&#xA;love-1P.SING.PRES&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the single morpheme &lt;em&gt;-ō&lt;/em&gt; here indicates first person, singular number, and present tense. Since they're all part of the same morpheme &lt;em&gt;in the source language&lt;/em&gt;, I separate them with dots instead of hyphens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard authority for glossing is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;. As they put it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Segmentable morphemes are separated by hyphens, both in the example and&#xA;  in the gloss. There must be exactly the same number of hyphens in the&#xA;  example and in the gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a single [source language] element is rendered by several […] elements (words or abbreviations) [in the gloss], these are separated by periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example they give is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;çık-mak&#xA;come.out-INF&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Leipzig rules also give a full list of &quot;standard&quot; glossing abbreviations, which are the ones you'll generally find without explanation. Anything not on that list will usually be explained thoroughly by the author. While not all linguists follow the Leipzig rules, most major publications do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As Dannii points out in the comments, the first example has the abbreviation &lt;code&gt;plr.&lt;/code&gt; with a period, which is decidedly non-standard and goes against the Leipzig rules. Just ignore the period in that example; it adds nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T00:39:48.340" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T00:39:48.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T17:06:32.347" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know many languages don't have the word &quot;to be&quot; (e.g. Hawaiian), but I don't know how they form &quot;to be&quot; imperatives. I'm not asking specifically about Hawaiian, though that is welcome as well. Mostly, I am interested whether all languages can form imperatives with adjectives denoting emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any info is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22627" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T16:11:05.183" Title="Are there languages where the imperative of &quot;to be&quot; (as in &quot;be happy&quot;) is non-existent or achievable through vastly different means?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28871" CreationDate="2018-09-03T17:30:45.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is not possible to accurately model the acoustics of the impossible sounds. The greyed-out impossible cells are cases judged to be incompatible with human physiology (as opposed to the clear blank cells which are &quot;not attested&quot;). In the case of existing sounds, we can observe their actual articulatory state and derive a tube model where you can compute the resonance and airflow properties of the sound in question. If the articulatory state is impossible, it's hard to model that state and derive an acoustic output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of the impossible labiodental and bilabial laterals is fairly obvious, in that &quot;lateral&quot; pertains to air flow over the (raised) tongue and labiodentals and bilabials don't raise the tongue. This likewise covers glottal laterals. Trills require aerodynamic vibration which depends on having a low-mass articulator in a narrow (high-velocity) stream of air. A uvular trill is possible because the uvula is not very massive, but the tongue body is quite massive and can't be made to &quot;trill&quot;. (&quot;Glottal trilling&quot;, however, is very common – that's essentially what voicing is, so there we have a different name for that physiological state). In the case of a pharyngeal nasal, it's not that the articulatory state can't be formed, it's that nasalization would have no acoustic consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that we can't make up some sound that has a relation to the imagined articulation (except in the case of a meaningless articulation like &quot;labio-lateral&quot;), so we could form a ballpark idea. &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0uEvILgfv7f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is an example&lt;/a&gt; that's in the same county as the ballpark containing a velar trill. Some of the simply unfilled but possible cells don't even need fancy computer modeling, you can just record a &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s1TdtUlLvlHk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;labiodental stop&lt;/a&gt;, though it could be a challenge to leard to distinguish it from a bilabial stop. Some of the gaps are simply attestation gaps, such as the retroflex lateral fricative. The bilabial trill [ʙ] wasn't added to the IPA until there was a successful campaign showing that it has phonemic status in a couple of languages. I think the case of the uvular tap is like that: it is a sound in a number of languages near the Niger delta, but it has not been shown to be irresolutely phonemic. The sound can be symbolically approximated as [ɢ̆].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels, however, are a continuum: they don't have cells, they have neighborhoods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T17:30:45.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28885" CreationDate="2018-09-03T20:28:32.137" Score="0" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ian Roberts, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britac.ac.uk/users/professor-ian-roberts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prof. of Linguistics, Univ. of Cambridge&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1316604411&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wonders of Language&lt;/em&gt; (2017 1 ed)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 27 Middle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be sure to get your terminology right: phonetics is the study of the speech sounds themselves; phonology is the study of how languages organise speech sounds into structured systems. To the extent that everyone has the same organs of speech (and the same perceptual apparatus, something we did not really go into in the previous chapter), phonetics is the same everywhere. But different languages may well deploy the same sounds differently, so English phonology and French phonology may be, and in fact to a fair extent are, somewhat different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 82 Top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As we’ve seen, phonetics is about the sounds of language, phonology is about how those sounds pattern in linguistic systems [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that phonetic transcriptions often contain redundant information. E.g., for English, /r/ is a semivowel ([ɹ]), which we don't need to distinguish from a trilled /r/ ([r], which doesn't exist in English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still don't understand why this redundancy warrants phonemic transcription? Isn't it easier to stick to phonetic transcription and stomach the redundancy? I don't know why, but I prefer phonetic transcriptions, as they spare me the extra step of contemplating which phone fits a phoneme in a particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T23:34:46.517" Title="Why are phonemic transcriptions necessary, when phonetic transcriptions are more detailed (and more helpful for language learners)?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28879" CreationDate="2018-09-03T22:06:39.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean is unusual in that its &amp;quot;adjectives&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;stative verbs&amp;quot;) behave like full-fledged verbs.  (Imagine, instead of &amp;quot;He is happy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a happy person&amp;quot;, you say &amp;quot;He happies&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a happying person&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard Korean used to disallow imperatives for adjectives, so, for example, instead of saying &amp;quot;행복해라 Be happy&amp;quot;, you would use &amp;quot;행복해져라 Become happy&amp;quot; or other similar construction.  However, these days, many adjectives are used with imperatives freely, though I think it's still frowned upon by prescriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One place imperatives are still not allowed is actual copula &amp;quot;-이다 ida&amp;quot;, which attaches to a noun.  E.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;그는 행복한 사람이다.  He is a happy person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;geu-neun haengbok-ha-n saram-i-da&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He-topic [happiness-(adj making suffix)]-(modify following noun) person-be-(sentence ending)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot change it to &amp;quot;Be a happy person&amp;quot;, so instead you will need a different verb, such as &amp;quot;Become a happy person&amp;quot;, or maybe &amp;quot;Live happily&amp;quot;, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T22:06:39.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28881" CreationDate="2018-09-03T23:34:46.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are conflating two issues, namely symbolic representation vs. continuous recording; and the question of redundancy. Speech output, the stream of speech sounds themselves, is continuous. You can perform various phonetic computations on those waveforms without any segmentation. The claim is, though, that human language handles &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; symbolically, so [præŋk] is a discrete symbolic representation that can stand for innumerable instances of the word &quot;prank&quot; in English. I presume that you don't need to be told why this transduction from continuous physical waveforms to discrete symbolic representations is necessary. As a reminder, though, we don't memorize the acoustics of a word when we learn the word, so we don't speak in a high pitched voice if we say a word that we learned from a female. Language (as opposed to speech) presupposes symbolic representations, that is, transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the phonemics / phonetic distinction is concerned, you'll need stronger evidence that you've found to show that Roberts has a particular view of the nature of the surface representation. The distinction between a phonemic vs. a phonetic transcription is kind of a red herring in contemporary linguistics. The more important question is, what is the ontology of these objects? Generative grammar (Roberts being an exemplar of the field) holds that a &quot;transcription&quot; is a mental representation, and not a heuristic device. There are competing non-mentalist theories of language where a transcription is simply an operationally defined output. Classically, the taxonomic approach assumes the now fictitious front-end of a perfect transcriber (exemplified by the late Peter Ladefoged and Ian Catford), who could listen to speech and produce a symbolic recording of what appears in that token – they convert actual speech to sequences of phones (sequences of symbols). You can then perform a distributional analysis on those symbols and arrive at a phonemic transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generative account does not in principle mandate an information-compression step of removing predictable information, though historically we were wedded to the idea of eliminating redundancy. We were definitively not wedded to the spurious phonemic / phonetic distinction of taxonomic theory. But we were certainly wedded to the idea that the output of the syntax can be modified by phonological rules. I presume you don't need to be told why we need phonological rules. In short, your question contains a false presupposition, at least from the generative perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T23:34:46.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T01:26:58.867" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;We could create a dense written language with 1 symbol for every word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say that it is read by a computer aloud or translated into normal language.(Like a QR code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that QR code does something similar, but they represent data with ones and zeros instead of whole words and is very limited in the information capacity. We can't put a whole book in a QR code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that currently the most dense written language is mandarin, but it is meant to be read by a human, so less physically compact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did somebody already did that ? If no, why would you think it is not done ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22628" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T02:30:32.673" Title="Does a written language exist with 1 symbol for every word?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T02:11:00.407" Score="0" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English pronunciation seems a peculiar to me, /lɑdʒɪk/, compared to the Greek λόγος, /ló.ɡos/ root, Latin legere carries the hard &quot;g&quot; with only the first vowel sounding different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English pulls it's rules from differing sources but something about /lɑdʒɪk/ (particularly the /ɑ/ and /dʒɪk/ parts) that sounds to have almost a Slavic or Turkic sound to me. I tried digging deeper on wiktionary or etymonline for at least the PIE root and other related forms but found nothing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This inquiry doesn't have a lot of foreknowledge or expertise behind it, I'm not a scholar or anything, just a curious person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15632" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T13:06:20.447" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T13:06:20.447" Title="What is the story behind the pronunciation of Logic?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-09-04T13:18:09.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28887" CreationDate="2018-09-04T02:18:47.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In multiple languages, including French, Old English, and Italian, &lt;code&gt;/ɡ/&lt;/code&gt; generally palatalizes to &lt;code&gt;[dʒ]&lt;/code&gt; before a high vowel or palatal sound. This is where the &quot;soft G&quot; in English comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Latin &lt;em&gt;logica&lt;/em&gt; became Old French &lt;em&gt;logike&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;code&gt;/ɡ/&lt;/code&gt; predictably palatalized. It was then borrowed into English with the &lt;code&gt;[dʒ]&lt;/code&gt; sound. (In French, the &lt;code&gt;[dʒ]&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;[ʒ]&lt;/code&gt;, giving modern &lt;em&gt;logique&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first vowel comes from a vowel shift in English which turned short &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;[ɒ]&lt;/code&gt; Compare &quot;not&quot;, also written with an &quot;o&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T02:23:59.297" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T02:23:59.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28886" CreationDate="2018-09-04T02:30:32.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, having a single symbol for every word wouldn't be particularly useful. For starters, there would be no way to create new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you allow putting words together to make new words (basically making it one symbol per &lt;em&gt;morpheme&lt;/em&gt;, or shifting your definition of what a word is), then that's basically what the Han logography (most notably used for Mandarin) is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make it computer-readable, Unicode (and various other encoding systems which encompass Han characters) does that: the character &lt;code&gt;四&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;four&quot;) is represented in Unicode by the number 0x56DB, for example. This can be represented as a QR code, bar code, or any other computer-readable means of representing numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T02:30:32.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28887" CreationDate="2018-09-04T03:40:27.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE isn't particularly relevant, because &lt;em&gt;logic&lt;/em&gt; is a borrowed word, not a word that has been transmitted to English by inheritance from PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for the noun &lt;em&gt;logic&lt;/em&gt; is from 1362 (with the spelling &amp;quot;logyk&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives the etymology as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology: &amp;lt; French &lt;em&gt;logique&lt;/em&gt; (13th cent.), &amp;lt; medieval Latin &lt;em&gt;logica,&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Greek &lt;em&gt;λογική&lt;/em&gt; (first found in Cicero; elliptical for &lt;em&gt;ἡ λογικὴ τέχνη,&lt;/em&gt; rendered in medieval Latin by &lt;em&gt;ars logica&lt;/em&gt;) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The consonant sound used for the letter &amp;quot;g&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mention, the pronunciation of the letter &amp;quot;g&amp;quot; in Classical Latin before &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; is reconstructed as a velar plosive [g], so we would expect &lt;em&gt;logica&lt;/em&gt; to be pronounced in Classical Latin as something like [ˈlogika] (or possibly, with a more narrow transcription of the vowels, [ˈlɔgɪka]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the pronunciation of Latin changed over time: note that the OED entry talks about &amp;quot;medieval Latin&amp;quot; and not Classical Latin. The &amp;quot;palatalization&amp;quot; of velar consonants is a common feature of many traditions for pronouncing Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French &amp;quot;logique&amp;quot; appears to be a learned adaptation of Latin &lt;em&gt;logica&lt;/em&gt; (in inherited French vocabulary, Latin intervocalic singleton plosives were lenited).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#To_Late_Old_French,_c._1250%E2%80%931300&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; indicates that the de-affrication of [dʒ] in French is thought to have occurred sometime in the second half of the 13th century, so the loan into English may have occurred before this French sound change, or so soon after it that English speakers still were familiar with the use of the sound [dʒ] as a feature of French pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the word has been in English for many centuries, and established English words tend to develop more assimilated pronunciations. It seems possible to me that the word might once have been pronounced with [ʒ] by some speakers under the influence of the de-affricated pronunciation that came to be used in French, but if so, that pronunciation must have been lost over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The vowel sound used for the letter &amp;quot;o&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems fairly clear that the use of an unrounded low vowel [ɑ] for the &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; sound in (most accents of) American English is a fairly recent development: the &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; vowel was originally rounded, as it still is for many British English speakers (which is the reason that British English transcriptions typically use the symbol &lt;strong&gt;ɒ&lt;/strong&gt;, although some phoneticians such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoff Lindsey&lt;/a&gt; have argued that for certain British accents, the symbol &lt;strong&gt;ɔ&lt;/strong&gt; would be more phonetically accurate, and more in line with cross-language usage of IPA symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Middle English pronunciation of the &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; vowel is reconstructed as a rounded back vowel closer than [a]. (As far as I know, there isn't total certainty about whether it was closer to IPA cardinal [o] or IPA cardinal [ɔ]: Middle English did not have multiple &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; sounds of varying heights, although there was a height contrast for &amp;quot;long o&amp;quot; in Middle English. That said, the standard transcription seems to be &lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;, and since this would also suffice as a broad transcription for [ɔ], I will use [o] in the next paragraph to represent the Middle English &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; sound.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French and Latin &amp;quot;o&amp;quot; sounds usually correspond to Middle English &amp;quot;short o&amp;quot; (ME [o], Modern AmEng [ɑ]) or &amp;quot;open long o&amp;quot; [ME [ɔː], Modern AmEng [oʊ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; value rather than the &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; value in this word is a bit tricky to explain, and I don't know enough to give a confident summary of its history. From a synchronic perspective, the use of a &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; vowel here is regular because this is an &amp;quot;-ic&amp;quot; word, and these words show a strong tendency to have penultimate stress and a weaker tendency (apparent in words like &lt;em&gt;manic, lyric&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;static&lt;/em&gt;—contrast &lt;em&gt;mania, lyre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stasis&lt;/em&gt;—but violated in many words like &lt;em&gt;basic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;psychic&lt;/em&gt;) for a single vowel letter in the stressed syllable to be &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; (unless it is &amp;quot;u&amp;quot;, in which case the rule that &amp;quot;u&amp;quot; is always &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; in orthographically open syllables takes precedence). The historical origin of this rule about the modern English pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;-ic&lt;/em&gt; words may be influence from the so-called &amp;quot;traditional English pronunciation&amp;quot; of Latin forms like &lt;em&gt;logicus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;logica&lt;/em&gt;: according to this system, the vowel in the first, stressed syllable of these words is pronounced &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; because it is followed by two other syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T05:33:37.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20081" CreationDate="2018-09-04T06:33:10.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; standard method for transcribing Ainu (both in Latin alphabet and in &lt;em&gt;katakana&lt;/em&gt;) being used today is the one proposed in &lt;em&gt;Akor Itak&lt;/em&gt;, a textbook published by the Hokkaido Utari Association (now Hokkaido Ainu Association) in 1994. It is often referred to as “(nearly) phonemic transcription” ((簡易)音素表記 in Japanese).&#xA;What makes it different from some of the older romanization methods (e.g. the one devised by Batchelor in his &lt;em&gt;Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;) is the usage of ⟨c⟩, ⟨s⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨w⟩, where others would use ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨u⟩ respectively (the last two rules only apply in syllable-final position, after a vowel). For example, the words transcribed as “ikkeu” and “kamui-chep” by Batchelor are written as “ikkew” and “kamuycep” in modern dictionaries. Apart from that, the equal sign “=” is used to indicate personal affixes (e.g. “ci=nukar”, rather than “chinukar”).&#xA;For more examples, you may refer to the following resources (all of them apply the romanization standard described above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://db4.ninjal.ac.jp/ainutopic/dictionary/en/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Topical Dictionary of Conversational Ainu&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ainugo.ainu-museum.or.jp/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ainu Language Archive&lt;/a&gt; – the website is in Japanese, but one of the dictionaries they have (by Suzuko Tamura) includes English translations;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ainucorpus.ninjal.ac.jp/corpus/en/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glossed Audio Corpus of Ainu Folklore&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22630" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T06:33:10.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T09:22:37.390" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Q1. Can we divide phonemes which are specific to a language into some more fundamental entities same across all languages ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2. Will this help us in achieving language independent acoustic modelling ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3. What are the challenges, If any in above technique ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q4. Is there any project using this stuff currently ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22631" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T14:01:20.303" Title="Finding fundamental particles of sound In ASR systems?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28893" CreationDate="2018-09-04T11:32:45.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can we divide phonemes which are specific to a language into some more fundamental entities same across all languages ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the spectrogram (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram&lt;/a&gt;), maybe that is more fundamental than you wanted.  The raw datasets are just .wav or .mp3 files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that is specific to language.  The language-specific part is really the transcription and language model on the output side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will this help us in achieving language independent acoustic modelling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, end-to-end approaches (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#End-to-end_automatic_speech_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#End-to-end_automatic_speech_recognition&lt;/a&gt;) make it easier to train and launch models into more languages, and also to train models for macro-languages like Chinese or Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the challenges, if any, in above technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should we begin?  Data, data, data, machines, fundamental challenges of human language like ambiguity and mixed language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any project using this stuff currently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of them now use deep learning, (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#Deep_feedforward_and_recurrent_neural_networks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#Deep_feedforward_and_recurrent_neural_networks&lt;/a&gt;), for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://research.mozilla.org/machine-learning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://research.mozilla.org/machine-learning/&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are experiments with universal models and the fundamentals are in favour of it but to my limited knowledge most of the models in production today are still specific to a language.  UI or spoken language identification system routes a live input to the hopefully right model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T11:32:45.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T17:05:57.600" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to obtain a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List, that has 2 words per row&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each 2 words are not collocates (or collocations) of each other (ie: are not found within the same phrase inside the entire text corpus, or other collocates finding method).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The list contains words that are really common (high frequency) but are not stop words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The list is sorted by the rows that have the highest frequency words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, the idea is to find two words that are really common but are almost never used together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22633" LastEditorUserId="22633" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T19:30:03.170" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T19:30:03.170" Title="Words with the hightest frequency that are not Collocates of each other (inside a text corpora)" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28895" CreationDate="2018-09-04T17:37:44.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you know a programming language, you can count the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bi-grams&lt;/a&gt; yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example for Python you can install the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SignalN/language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language&lt;/a&gt; package with &lt;code&gt;pip install language&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in Python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import language.ngrams as ng&#xA;ngrams = ng.word_ngrams(text, n=2)&#xA;&#xA;import collections&#xA;counts = collections.Counter(ngrams)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this will not give you the truly least frequent 2-grams: those which never occur even once, the vast majority of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now do a sanity check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;counts.most_common()&#xA;len(counts)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are a few ways to get the least common, the best way depends on the size of your dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;least_frequent = sorted(counts, key=counts.get, reverse=False)&#xA;least_frequent[:10] # first 10&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However my guess is that what you want is more like a language model, which can tell you which common words make uncommon n-grams, or what are the most uncommon n-grams given a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T17:37:44.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T20:30:35.873" Score="1" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've mostly heard that its a ɯ sound. But I've also heard that its an 'endo-labial close back rounded vowel'. By 'endo-labial', I mean that its a rounded vowel that's pronounced without protruding the lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what is the actual phoneme that the Roman letter 'u' signifies in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I should note, is I just watched the video for Freeze by Aural Vampire. In that, she's obviously pronouncing a 'u' sound (and by that, I mean the rounded close back vowel). Even looking at her lips she appears to be pronouncing a 'u' sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T21:24:08.230" Title="What exactly is the Japanese 'u' sound?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28898" CreationDate="2018-09-04T21:24:08.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The labelling of phonemes is fairly arbitrary: we say English has an &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt; phoneme, for example, but it may not ever be realized as a true perfect IPA &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;. Reconstructed languages often have phonemes not named after any IPA symbol, such as Proto-Indo-European's &lt;code&gt;/*ǵ/&lt;/code&gt; (what would it even mean to put a high-tone mark on a velar plosive?) or Proto-Slavic's &lt;code&gt;/*ъ/&lt;/code&gt; (not even a Latin character). Some reconstructions (such as Alice Kober's early analysis of Linear B) have even just given each phoneme a number, to avoid committing to any ideas of what it might have sounded like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the phoneme in Japanese is usually written &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ɯ/&lt;/code&gt;, whichever the individual doing the analysis prefers. Neither is wrong: you could just as well call it &quot;vowel number three&quot; and write it &lt;code&gt;/3/&lt;/code&gt;, and that wouldn't be wrong either. What's important is just that readers understand what phoneme you mean, and neither &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; nor &lt;code&gt;/ɯ/&lt;/code&gt; (nor even &lt;code&gt;/3/&lt;/code&gt;) is likely to be mistaken for any other phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, the most consistent features of Japanese &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; is that it's high and non-front. It sometimes moves as far forward as central &lt;code&gt;[ɨ]&lt;/code&gt; after palatals, and might have the lips rounded, unrounded, or compressed (&lt;code&gt;[ɯ̟ᵝ]&lt;/code&gt;). The version used in the prestige dialect of Tokyo in careful, formal speech tends to be more like &lt;code&gt;[ɯ̟ᵝ]&lt;/code&gt;, so we might well call the phoneme &lt;code&gt;/ɯ̟ᵝ/&lt;/code&gt;, but that's just too annoying to write over and over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T21:24:08.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28879" CreationDate="2018-09-05T02:39:19.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thai is somewhat similar to what jick described for Korean in that its adjectives are stative verbs but cannot be used as imperatives, so the phrase &quot;be happy&quot; would be achieved by one of any number of circumlocutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the most interesting one is that even though Thai has no imperative suffix or particle, it does have an auxiliary adverb อย่า (yàa) which is used to convert an imperative sentence to negative--i.e., it essentially translates as &quot;don't&quot;. For whatever reason, อย่า at the beginning of a sentence seems to make speakers comfortable using stative verbs as imperatives, perhaps because in that position it feels like อย่า is actually the main verb of the sentence (just my speculation there). In any event, a Thai speaker could creatively achieve a stative imperative by using อย่า followed by the antonym of their desired adjective. Thus, despite the impossibility of directly saying &quot;be happy,&quot; a Thai speaker would have no trouble directly saying &quot;don't be sad&quot; (lit. &quot;don't sad&quot;): อย่าเศร้า (yàa sâo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18580" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T02:39:19.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-05T03:12:45.523" Score="3" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at this video about Japanese Kanji on youtube, and found a discussion where people were talking about learning too many languages. Several claimed that they started to forget English because they had to invest so much time into Kanji. Some people were reporting the same problem from just trying to pick up too many. Others made claims like they started to get the languages and/or alphabets they knew mixed up, or they would start speaking English in a foreign accent, or they now seriously have an easier time speaking languages OTHER than English. And these are coming from people who only know 3 or 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard stories of highly gifted people knowing over a dozen languages (and actually being fluent in 5 or more of them too). But how many can the average person seriously know? From what I've seen its rare for someone to know more than 2, but of course I'm American, its hard to find anyone here who isn't monolingual (aside for the Hispanic immigrants, but even a few of them are monolingual). I know my German teacher knew English, French, and German (her native language). She also taught a Spanish class, so I'm guessing she also knew at least some Spanish. She also claimed she knew Latin, but couldn't speak it fluently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, how many languages can the average person know? I myself already know German up to an intermediate level (though I struggle to form my own sentences now, but I've been trying to find a way to correct that). I would like to learn as many as possible, but I don't know how many I can handle. I did have an issue when trying to study Japanese while I was taking a Spanish class (specifically my issue was both languages have an adposition called 'de', which means different things in the two languages), of course that was because I was trying to study two languages simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T01:53:33.790" Title="How many languages can a person reasonably know?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28901" CreationDate="2018-09-05T06:28:32.250" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limiting factor for the average person is really the society, the environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We humans are lazy or, from another perspective, efficient - most of us try to learn only the minimum needed to function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just like there are certain societies where knowing two languages is totally normal and expected, there are societies where knowing three is normal, and even four or five.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, average middle- or upper-class people raised in Lebanon almost all know Lebanese dialect, Standard Arabic, French and English.  They know them all fluently and functionally.  Nobody said that they know them all perfectly or equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lebanese dialect is the main language on the street and in the home, Standard Arabic is used in school, French and English are learnt as foreign languages but very dominant in product packaging, news and now social media, technology and certain business domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not as if door bell buttons, television menus or internet addresses always have Arabic letters.  Vehicle registration plates have both Arabic and Latin.  Reading Latin letters is necessary to function, if reading Chinese were as necessary to you to function you would know the basics of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then within Lebanon and western Syria there are small communities like the Cretan Muslims or the Armenians who often know their own languages - Greek and Armenian - usually in addition to all of the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be very clear, such people are obviously not all geniuses, not all good students, not all hard-working.  Each language is just added per its daily necessity or usefulness, often from an early age, keeping in mind that adding similar languages is easier.  (From a Semitophone perspective, and even from a Grecophone or Armenophone perspective, English and French are very similar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar conditions exist for many people in Europe for example in Belgium, Switzerland, South Tirol, the Basque Country, the Banat, Transylvania, Moldova, Luxembourg, Georgia, Armenia, Slovenia, Åland and among the Romani and various other traditional or modern linguistic minority milieus, and for specific families or individuals.  And they are common in many places in Asia - notably India - and many places in Africa and a few places in the Americas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked about atrophy or interference.  Well, yes, it happens.  But if it is happening in roughly equal measure to everybody around you too, then nobody hears it, it just becomes a feature of the dialect.  All of that is a separate question though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the concrete integer?  There are individuals who know twenty languages but I do not know of any environment where twenty languages are actually necessary or at least useful to average people in their daily lives.  So we do not know that it is possible, but &lt;strong&gt;we do not know&lt;/strong&gt; that it is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T09:22:18.190" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T09:22:18.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28905" CreationDate="2018-09-05T09:43:02.537" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are concrete (like tree, dog) and abstract concepts (like war, love etc.).&#xA;I see that concept is expressed as a noun, but what about other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, etc.)? Are they abstract concept or they became a concept when are changed to noun ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;know/knowing &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;black/blackness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these 4 words above concepts or only those which are noun ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T11:39:49.960" Title="Are words in form of verbs and adjectives abstract concepts" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28895" CreationDate="2018-09-05T09:57:27.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are focussing on &lt;em&gt;texts&lt;/em&gt; and not just pairs of words occurring in sequence, I suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;topic modelling&lt;/a&gt; as a tool to analyse your texts. The different topics have some overlap in the words occurring there (mainly stop words), but word from different topics tend to to avoid each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T09:57:27.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28903" CreationDate="2018-09-05T10:08:09.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abstract vs concrete or figurative vs literal is a function of a word and its context, not of a dictionary entry lemma, a surface form or string literal like &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dog&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if we point to a tree in front of us and say &quot;This tree grows all over the world&quot;, we do not literally mean this concrete tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many tree concepts in mathematics and computer science, as well as books and other works by the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, we can say &quot;His love smashed his car in an act of revenge&quot; and then &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; is rather concrete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we cannot without context say that a noun like &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; is concrete or abstract, we cannot without context say that a verb or adjective like &lt;em&gt;to know&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; is concrete or abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T11:39:49.960" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T11:39:49.960" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-05T15:39:23.077" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dictionary definition of a syllabary is &quot;a set of written characters representing syllables and (in some languages or stages of writing) serving the purpose of an alphabet.&quot; I would personally tweak this definition to &quot;representing syllables or parts of syllables.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I have been able to determine, there are at least three different subtypes of syllabary based on their inventory. My go-to examples would be Japanese/Greek/Mayan/Ojibwe (graphemes for syllable body, rarely coda), Sumerian/Akkadian (graphemes for syllable body and rime), and Bopomofo/Khitan/Kommadam (graphemes for onset and rime). These form a rough continuum from &lt;strong&gt;body(/coda)&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;body/rime&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;onset/rime&lt;/strong&gt;. There does not seem to be any widely established terminology for these and I have not been able to find much discussion of these differences in the sources I perused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13348" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T16:11:25.733" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T23:23:31.093" Title="Is there distinct jargon for syllabaries depending on their inventory?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28879" CreationDate="2018-09-05T16:11:05.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Riffian language, adjectives are not associated with a copula, but this latter appears when the imperative is used :  d-ameggwed = he is fearful,  ili d-ameggwed = to be fearful.  It also comes out in the interrogative and the negative modalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22635" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T16:11:05.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28913" CreationDate="2018-09-05T19:00:05.173" Score="0" ViewCount="1367" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is any sort of list either across languages or for individual languages, either complete or partial, that list the sequences of vowels and/or consonants used in that language. If no comprehensive list exists, then just looking for one for English or other main languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically just looking for sequences that appear in the language, either vowel sequences, consonant sequences, or vowel-consonant/consonant-vowel sequences. Or perhaps maybe just vowel &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; sequences. I think knowing the IPA sound sequences might be more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see which ones are the most and least common, as well as just see the scope of each language, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1978.11435661&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what's possible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English that list might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ay&#xA;ai&#xA;ou&#xA;ow (vowel sound like cow)&#xA;oo&#xA;aia&#xA;...&#xA;ask&#xA;isk&#xA;is&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T21:55:48.420" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T00:49:39.110" Title="List of vowel and consonant sequences across languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28908" CreationDate="2018-09-05T19:48:52.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sequences of sounds allowed are called the &lt;em&gt;phonotactics&lt;/em&gt; of a language. This is generally written in an abbreviated way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Japanese syllable structure is &lt;code&gt;(C(j))V(N|Q)&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;/ji/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/wu/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/wi/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/we/&lt;/code&gt; are disallowed. &lt;code&gt;/Q/&lt;/code&gt; must precede a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks complicated, but it's explaining what a syllable in Japanese looks like: the onset is optional and always takes the form &lt;code&gt;C(j)&lt;/code&gt; (in other words, a consonant, optionally followed by &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;), the nucleus is mandatory and always takes the form &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; (a vowel), and the coda is optional and always takes the form &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Q&lt;/code&gt; (the specific phonemes &lt;code&gt;/N/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/Q/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;/Q/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/N/&lt;/code&gt; are special phonemes in Japanese, the exact details don't matter here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what vowel sequences are allowed? Well, you can have as many &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; syllables in a row as you want, and this description doesn't say that any vowel sequences are disallowed, so you could string any vowels you want together. If you wanted you could write them all out, but this probably wouldn't be particularly useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What consonant sequences are allowed? The longest consonant sequence you can get, phonemically, is &lt;code&gt;/N/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/Q/&lt;/code&gt; from the coda of one syllable, followed by &lt;code&gt;/Cj/&lt;/code&gt; in the onset of the next, for any consonant &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;. So for every &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; you have the potential sequences &lt;code&gt;/NCj/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/NC/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/N/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/QCj/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/QC/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/Cj/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/C/&lt;/code&gt;. You could write all of them out if you really wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T21:46:28.587" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T21:46:28.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28908" CreationDate="2018-09-05T21:10:46.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly we should clearly separate pronunciation of languages and orthography of written languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in written languages then you basically just want &lt;strong&gt;character-level &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;n-grams&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list trained on a real text corpus will likely be too noisy to be readable, you want a frequency-ranked list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your intuition is correct that every language has a signature, which is the basis of the most common approach to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_identification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language identification&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T21:10:46.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28908" CreationDate="2018-09-05T21:57:26.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in letter sequences and are interested in any non-zero frequency of attestation, you may be able to find such tables for a particular language. I suspect that you can't find such a table for Luganda or Kven, and for most languages such a table would be impossible (or meaningless) since the languages aren't extensively-enough written that the tables could be constructed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in sound combinations, the available data becomes more scarce, and probably involves translation from written language to phonemic transcription. This is not too challenging for a language like North Saami where there exist programs to map written form to IPA, also for Luganda (and probably Kven) where the writing system is phonetically transparent, but for languages like English with suboptimal spelling systems, you may have to rely on a specially-created lexicon with a transcription (which exists for English). In the case of Tibetan, it's not clear what it would take to come up with such a mapping. What Tibetan and English have in common is that they have been written for hundreds of years (unlike Luganda, or North Saami in the current orthography).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a linguistic concept of &quot;phonotactics&quot;, which refers to putative rules governing co-occurrence of segments within a syllable or word. There is no end of controversy over the validity of some or all phonotactic rules. The controversy arises because there is no clear and accepted criterion for saying that a given pattern is to be &quot;allowed&quot; or is &quot;disallowed&quot;. For example, it is an absolute fact that no syllable of English begins with the sequence [sʃ] (a good candidate for exclusion); many syllables begin with [sp] (a good candidate for inclusion); and then there are sequences like [ʃp] which also don't exist in English as long as you exile words like &lt;em&gt;shpiel, shpritz&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also claims to the effect that certain nonadjacent sequences may be phonotactically excluded, for example the onset and coda consonants in Cantonese can't both be labial. It is claimed that English excludes [sCVC] where the consonants are the same (&quot;skick, spip, snan&quot; aren't words). The problem is that we have not managed to convincingly distinguish between &quot;is forbidden&quot; and &quot;is not attested&quot; or &quot;is very uncommon&quot;. There is thus a strong tendency in modern non-computational phonology to set aside claims about co-occurrence, unless there is compelling evidence that the pattern is part of the grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T00:49:39.110" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T00:49:39.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28923" CreationDate="2018-09-05T22:31:21.717" Score="2" ViewCount="2434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people say that &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; Chinese is a difficult language to learn because the characters don't have any relation to the &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; of the word, like in English and other languages, even Japanese. But I've read so far that &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@adrieng/a-simple-explanation-of-chinese-characters-50f922ebe4e6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese characters are composed out of basic building blocks&lt;/a&gt;. This led to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of Chinese radicals&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/voKhu.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the list there are 214 radicals, with the last one containing 17 strokes. The first few have 1 stroke, then 2, then 3, ... etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you would assume from that that every single Chinese character could be derived from that. Similar to how every English word can be derived from the set of characters in the alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But right off the bat, I noticed that the 2-stroke characters aren't even derivable from the 1-stroke characters. I would've thought they built on each other. For example, the 2-stroke 人 is supposed to be derived from the 1-stroke 丿. You can see that it is 丿 plus the &lt;em&gt;mirror image&lt;/em&gt;. So I guess technically it can be said to be derived from that. But it's not explicit. Then another 2-stroke character is 冂. But this isn't visibly derivable from any of the 1-stroke characters from what I can see: 一, 丨, 丶, 丿, 乙, 亅. Maybe 1, 2, and 5. 丨一亅, but that would be 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-to-recognize-Chinese-characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-to-recognize-Chinese-characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5pudl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two concepts combine into a third concept, and the symbols &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt; compose into the bigger symbols. But not exactly. The box in the &quot;elder brother&quot; symbol is slightly skewed, seems to use slightly different strokes, the legs are a little more stretched as well, etc. So it's not as if you compose words from letters, and the letters are just shrunken. I'm not very familiar with Chinese, but it seems that the exact position of the strokes is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/chinese-characters-that-look-alike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EYZZE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/chinese-characters-that-look-alike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOuOC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this means that there is no exact system for determining the meaning of a character by constructing it out of smaller components. The best you can do is get a &quot;rough idea&quot; of what the symbol might mean from what your &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; is at the components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wanted to learn more about this, and confirm/deny that perspective. Wanted to ask if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in fact a system for learning some basic components in Chinese (basic strokes and shapes), and then combining those into more complex shapes, such that you can easily learn the gist of any new character you encounter. Because from what I've seen, there isn't such a system, and you just need a dictionary to interpret any new symbol you find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T05:20:42.230" Title="If there is a pattern to Chinese characters" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28906" CreationDate="2018-09-05T23:23:31.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;syllabary&quot; is used in a lot of ways (the term is hundred of years old, so that's no surprise). So it partially depends on what your criteria for calling something a &quot;syllabary&quot; are. If we take a syllabary to refer to a language where each primitive graphic unit represents exactly a syllable, then there are not many syllabaries. Linear B is not a syllabary, for example, because &quot;ai-ku-&lt;strong&gt;pi&lt;/strong&gt;-ti-jo&quot; uses a &quot;syllable&quot; grapheme (pi) to represent a part of the syllable – there is no grapheme for the entire syllable &lt;em&gt;gup&lt;/em&gt;. Cherokee comes close, because most syllables in the language are open; but, in fact, there is a grapheme for coda &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, which is not a whole syllable (the other problem is that Cherokee simply glosses over some distinction such as ka / ga; vowel length is ignored as is coda h). Japanese katakana likewise doesn't actually have a system where each grapheme is a complete syllable (the single syllable &lt;em&gt;kjoo&lt;/em&gt; is represented as きょう with three graphemes, and so on). Cree and Ojibwe writing are similar, with the added quirk that the graphic primitive could be deemed to be the Ca shape with orientation and the length diacritic overriding intrinsic [a]. Plus, as with other supposed syllabaries, coda consonant are in fact separate letters. Devanagari is in some ways similar to Ojibwe, in that the &quot;primary&quot; graphic elements represent Ca (with add-ons to indicate &quot;no vowel&quot; or &quot;another vowel&quot;). Such systems are in fact called &quot;abugidas&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broadest notion of syllabary refers to something like &quot;a writing system where the syllable is a basic organizational unit&quot;, and there are very many languages like that. When the initial consonant of the syllable defines the fundamental shape and vowel choice is indicated by a diacritic-like addition, we call that an &quot;abugida&quot;, also &quot;alphasyllabary&quot;. In other words, the terminology is not particularly precise or subtle, and therefore there aren't a lot of terms for referring to different distinctions that could be made. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T23:23:31.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T03:34:21.333" Score="3" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because I stumbled upon what I believe is a Dutch copy of The Brothers Grimm at a used book store. I initially thought it was archaic German and looked over it to see if I could make sense of it (I know German). I was able to make sense of the few sentences I looked at, before I realized that what I was looking at couldn't be German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about buying the book, purely for the amusement of being able to make sense of a book written in a language I've never learned a word of. But is there any point in me doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I should note that I've been studying linguistics for over 10 years now (I'm entirely self-taught), so I can make sense of a lot of ancient texts I've never actually studied (I can make a lot of sense out of Latin, for instance). So it may just be me. I've noticed also that I can recognize a lot of Danish in writing, thought not spoken. Also, Swedish and Norwegian look far more alien to me for some reason. I was able to understand Grendel's speech in the Beowulf film, though I'm not sure if a monolingual English speaker would've been able to or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user19661" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T12:00:33.607" Title="How intelligible are German and Dutch to each other?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T07:46:16.573" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching a documentary about North Korean escapees living in China. It mentioned that some of these escapees were worried that their &quot;North Korean&quot; accent when speaking Mandarin would give them away and lead to their deportation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a Mandarin speaker really be able to tell the difference between a North and South Korean accent in Mandarin? Is there any literature about Korean accents in Mandarin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3362" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T07:46:16.573" Title="Do North and South Korean accents in Mandarin differ significantly?" Tags="&lt;accent&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4112" CreationDate="2018-09-06T10:40:40.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;from &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; by David Christal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;exponence&lt;/strong&gt; (n.) A concept in a hierarchical linguistic analysis,&#xA;  referring to the relationship of correspondence between linguistic&#xA;  units at a higher level of analysis and units at a lower level. For&#xA;  example, words can be said to have phonological units (such as&#xA;  phonemes) as their exponents, and the exponents of the latter are&#xA;  phonetic features. The term representation is equivalent. In this&#xA;  sense, abstract units are expounded by other abstract units or by&#xA;  physical units. &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;An alternative emphasis restricts the application of&#xA;  the term to the physical expression of any abstract unit (i.e. at any&#xA;  level)&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. a morph being the exponent of a morpheme, a phone of a&#xA;  phoneme, a particular &lt;strong&gt;formative&lt;/strong&gt; (such as -s) of a syntactic category&#xA;  (such as ‘plural’), the item going of the lexeme go. There are plainly&#xA;  many possible types of exponence relationships (e.g. to handle the&#xA;  ‘fusion’ or ‘overlapping’ of exponents). This sense of the term&#xA;  receives a specific technical status in Hallidayan linguistic theory&#xA;  (see systemic grammar), referring to one of the scales of analysis&#xA;  which interrelates the categories of the theory, viz. the relationship&#xA;  postulated between these categories and the raw data. For example, the&#xA;  lexical item table is an instance of (an ‘exponent’ of) the class of&#xA;  nouns. Other scales in this approach are labelled rank and delicacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21628" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T10:40:40.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T11:32:07.467" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been asked before (here is the link &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3514/phonological-ambiguity-that-changes-the-syntactic-structure&quot;&gt;phonological ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;). In relation to this question, I came across some data in which two different syntactic structures (with the same phonological structure) are polysemous in the sense that the first is encoded in the active voice and the second is encoded in the passive voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active:   X  dug   a small well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passive:  X  dug   a small well &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X in the active voice refers to the Agent (doer of the action), but it refers to the object in the passive (a small well). The structures in (1) are transliteration of the sentences in (2) below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ACTIVE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;t.Rza                 t.anu.t&#xA;&#xA;3rd.F.SG.*dig*.PRF   (a small) well&#xA;'She has dug a small well.' &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PASSIVE &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;t.Rza                     t.anu.t&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3rd.F.SG.&lt;em&gt;dig&lt;/em&gt;.PRF        (a small) well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'A small well has been dug.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the literature of Distributed Morphology, Borer (2005a, 2005b, 2013) argues that ONLY words can be polysemous, but not STRUCTURES. I am not sure of any work which considers syntactic structures polysemous in this sense of 'voice syncretism', and I am not sure about their existence in other languages too, if anyone knows more about this issue please tell me. Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:34:32.083" Title="Can 'syntactic structure' be 'polysemous'?" Tags="&lt;polysemy&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28917" CreationDate="2018-09-06T11:40:42.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the metric here?  42% of words?  &quot;Somewhat intelligible&quot;?  Some formula given parameters like years*7 + km*0.01 + difficulty*3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch and German are different languages &lt;em&gt;mit an armey un flot&lt;/em&gt; on a somewhat fragmented and evolving dialect continuum.  Modern Dutch emerged about half a millennium ago, before standard German was created, and long before it was widely spoken, which was really only recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers of German dialects can hardly understand each other if they are just listening in without context, even speakers of dialects within the same subgroup like Alemannic.  If someone actually speaks real dialect on television there are usually subtitles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your anecdote is undoubtedly true and not surprising but a very flawed experiment because 1) you definitely know English, and Dutch is between German and English 2) you presumably know at least passively the stories of the Brothers Grimm, which is anyway a restricted and archaic domain for which you have some priors 3) it's written not spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Theory&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important concepts here are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abstandsprache&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ausbausprache&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dachsprache&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstand_and_ausbau_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstand_and_ausbau_languages&lt;/a&gt; - concepts inspired by this set of languages and dialects - and Ctrl+F-ing for &lt;em&gt;Dutch&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, the ausbau languages may be so different that they also constitute abstand languages. Examples include Dutch versus German,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Approximately at the same time, Dutch started to replace Low German as a roof of the Low German dialects in the Netherlands that form today's Dutch Low Saxon group, and most Central German dialects went under the &quot;roof&quot; of the evolving High German.  Low German ceased to be spoken on the eastern rim of the Baltic Sea. Today, its dialects surviving in northern Germany have come under the roof of Standard German.[20] Local Low German dialects spoken in the Netherlands have come under the roof of Dutch.[19] This happened despite the effect of notable migration streams in both directions between the Western (Dutch) and Eastern (Prussian, now mainly Polish and Russian) areas of the region of the Low German languages, motivated by both religious intolerance and labour need. In several spots along the Dutch–German border, identical dialects are spoken on both sides, but are deemed to belong to different roofing according to which side of the border they are on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you can read German you should also read the German version of that article.  (Since you can read Dutch too I would recommend the Dutch version but there is none.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Real world&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exposure is everything, and in the real world, exposure is unevenly distributed.&lt;/strong&gt;  Knowledge of one does not imply instantly understanding of the other upon exposure.  Knowledge of one just implies much faster learning of the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/29974/12412&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/29951/do-germans-understand-the-dutch-language&quot;&gt;Do Germans understand the Dutch language?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, not in practice. By default, German speakers understand only occasional Dutch words, phrases in context, most written signs and the gist of simple texts like Wikipedia articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It depends less on the inherent distance of the languages - about the same as to Swiss dialects - and more on other variables: how much Dutch has one been been exposed to (and how much English, Frisian and French), whether the Dutch is written or spoken, what the topic is and situation are, how much background noise there is... And last but not least there are some delicate questions of attitude and intra-European protocols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those context variables are why the Dutch are usually much better at German than the Germans at Dutch. Smaller peoples are doomed to be more talented. Some German may report that he communicated with a Dutchmen, but that was only because the Dutchman was desperately re-activing the German he learnt in school, and due to the accent and other mistakes, the German thought that it was Dutch that he was understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a German villager from Transylvania were trapped on a desert island with a truly monolingual Dutchman - a rare species - they would understand each other within days to weeks, for the purposes of life on the island. After a year or so they would be speaking some sort of Platt or Kölsch, the exact mix would depend on their personalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But until then... Dutch is as effective at encrypting communication from German speakers as French is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intelligibility is not always symmetric.  How easily can Dutch speakers understand German having had no exposure?  Well, standard German grammar is more conservative than standard Dutch grammar, in terms of gender and especially case, concepts frequently reported by language learners as physically painful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T12:00:33.607" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T12:00:33.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28914" CreationDate="2018-09-06T14:03:33.053" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chinese characters have not only a pattern, but many, many patterns. But First to clear up some confusion. Radicals are not usually composed of eachother, but are unanalysable. By analogy, a radical is like a morpheme (it's compositional, it's there for a reason semantic or otherwise), and a stroke is like a phoneme (it's just there so that you've got something to put on the page, or perceive when you're reading, and is void of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; semantic significance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But right off the bat, I noticed that the 2-stroke characters aren't even derivable from the 1-stroke characters. I would've thought they built on each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not characters, they're radicals (radicals are combined to form characters). Like letters of an alphabet, they're not (necessarily) derived from each other. There is a repertoire of 214 radicals (by some analyses sometimes less or more), and these are put together to form a character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, the 2-stroke 人 is supposed to be derived from the 1-stroke 丿. You can see that it is 丿 plus the mirror image. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right-hand leg of 人 is not the mirror image of 丿. 人 is also not derived from any of the radicals in your list (the left-hand leg is also not the radical 丿). If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_character_strokes.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_character_strokes.html&lt;/a&gt; you can see numbers 4 and 5, these are the strokes that make up 人.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then another 2-stroke character is 冂. But this isn't visibly derivable from any of the 1-stroke characters from what I can see: 一, 丨, 丶, 丿, 乙, 亅. Maybe 1, 2, and 5. 丨一亅, but that would be 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at that site again, it's number 3 and 10. which make up 冂.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radicals, being like morphemes, have not only a surface form, but also it usually has a meaning. Observe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;女 is a woman.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;姐 is a sister.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;她 means &quot;she&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all have that same component, 女. It's there to provide a clue about the meaning of the character. Similarly, 说 (talk), 话(speech), 语(language) , 读(read), and many many more, all have the same left-hand side, which is derived from the character 言, meaning speech. &lt;strong&gt;This is a pattern, the Phono-semantic compounding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related issue is that maybe a character contains something with is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a semantic clue. It could be a phonetic clue. Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;饿 (hungry)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;鹅 (goose)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;莪 (some kind of plant ...?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;俄 (Russia)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;我 (me)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all contain 我. These are all pronounced in very similar ways. (In many dialects, with an initial /ŋ/ and some sort of back vowel or schwa). &lt;strong&gt;This is another pattern, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/phonetic_series&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonetic series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The box in the &quot;elder brother&quot; symbol is slightly skewed, seems to use slightly different strokes, the legs are a little more stretched as well, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier I introduced the phoneme/morpheme analogy, and I did that to explain this phenomenon. Just like the same English morpheme may be spelled &quot;in-&quot; or &quot;im-&quot;, depending of its phonemic context, that box 口 (not really a mouth) might get munched up a bit. It is just reacting to its environment, just like that English prefix did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To me this means that there is no exact system for determining the meaning of a character by constructing it out of smaller components. The best you can do is get a &quot;rough idea&quot; of what the symbol might mean from what your guess is at the components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's right, just like how you cannot know exactly how to write a word from just knowing how to pronounce it, you always don't know how to pronounce or interpret a word from its spelling. Not really any different from English in that sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;your examples 己, 已, 巳&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are not related, they just look a bit like each other. Like the English words &quot;rite&quot;, &quot;rota&quot;, and &quot;Rita&quot; they actually have nothing to do with each other. Same deal with 土 and 士, or &quot;interior&quot; and &quot;inferior&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Looks like a pattern but is not one.&lt;/strong&gt; The exactness does matter yes, but just like most human communication, there's enough redundancy that many actual mistakes are just subconsciously corrected by the receiving end without noticing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wanted to ask if there is in fact a system for learning some basic components in Chinese (basic strokes and shapes), and then combining those into more complex shapes, such that you can easily learn the gist of any new character you encounter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no system, but many patterns. So people who know Chinese better than me, if they encounter a character they do not know, but they do know the word that character is depicting, then they will often by hunches and educated guesses read it correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because from what I've seen, there isn't such a system, and you just need a dictionary to interpret any new symbol you find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To read and write Chinese needs a steep learning curve, for the reasons you mentioned. But if you know Chinese well, then it's not really a problem in practise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T15:26:03.270" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T15:26:03.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T15:19:26.063" Score="1" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#List_of_tonal_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tone&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia page, I get the gist of it. Basically there are &lt;em&gt;register&lt;/em&gt; tone systems (like Bantu languages) and &lt;em&gt;contour&lt;/em&gt; tone systems (like Mandarin Chinese). In contour tone systems, the shape of the curve of the tone of a syllable is what creates a distinct sound (phoneme if I understand correctly). In register systems it's the &lt;em&gt;relative pitch&lt;/em&gt; as you &lt;em&gt;move between&lt;/em&gt; sounds/phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all makes sense for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The register systems I've seen have basically &lt;code&gt;tone up&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tone down&lt;/code&gt;, and perhaps &lt;code&gt;tone neutral&lt;/code&gt;. So you just move up and down or stay the same. This leads to systems with 2 or 3 tones. That makes sense (it seems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a lot of the systems with 5 or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouyei_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt; &quot;tones&quot; seem to be &lt;em&gt;contour&lt;/em&gt; systems, so that makes sense. You can have an arbitrary number of contours theoretically, as opposed to register systems which can pretty much just go down and up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm confused about is 4 or 5-level register systems. For example, Kuteb has 4 or 5 tones: low (unmarked), mid (¯), high (´), falling (ˆ), and rising (ˇ). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~kuangj/Papers_files/tone_dispersion_kuang_prefinal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5 seems to be the limit for register systems&lt;/a&gt;. I don't understand how you can have more than 3 tones in a register system (up/down/neutral). Wondering what the other two are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could demonstrate in English what a short phrase might look like if it involved 5 register tones. Maybe along the lines of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We all went to the store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the base sentence. But then we can add some register tones like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; + +    -    -   +   -&#xA;We all went to the store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that &lt;em&gt;you can go up twice&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. the &lt;code&gt;+ +&lt;/code&gt;) before coming down, in a 5-tone register system. But that doesn't seem right, seems like an arbitrary limitation. It also seems like you can get messed up if you &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Word_tones_and_syllable_tones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spread the tone changes across words&lt;/a&gt;, in that you might end the sentence without having gotten back down to neutral. So I'm confused there as well, how do you &quot;resolve&quot; the tones (i.e. they can't go up forever, they can't go down forever, they need to hover around some middle tone, but I don't see how to guarantee you always get back there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So wondering if one could demonstrate a contrived English example showing how a 5-tone register system might work across multiple words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:46:54.947" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:46:54.947" Title="Understanding 5-tone register systems" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28924" CreationDate="2018-09-06T16:40:32.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunate that the Wikipedia page promulgates the dubious distinction between register systems and contour systems. Mandarin Chinese has two tone registers (ergo the high-rising and low-rising tones); many Bantu languages have contrasts in level, rising and falling tones, but also don't employ downstep and have only two lexical registers. You may want to read Ken Pike's book &lt;em&gt;Tone Languages: A Technique for Determining the Number and Type of Pitch Contrasts in a Language, with Studies in Tonemic Substitution and Fusion&lt;/em&gt;, which sets for the distinction based no what he knew at the time. But I don't deny that the terminology historically was used, and we just have to deal with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of register does two things for tonal analysis. First, it is used to organize primitive levels. For example, Ewe has 4 tone levels (and has no contour tones), which we can label (from lowest to highest) L, M, H, R (R standing for 'raised H'). These tones phonologically organize so that L,M are 'a group', and H, R are 'a group'. There is a rule where M→R when between H,R tones. The analysis is that these tones basically organize into L versus H tones, but there is also a lower register vs. a higher register, so L in the lower register is called 'L' and L in the higher register is called 'H'; H in the lower register is called M and H in the higher register is called R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing that register does is define global shifts in reference pitch. In some languages, you can bounce back and forth between L and H tone and the Ls are more or less at the same level, and the Hs are more or less at the same level: L and H are computed relative to a single reference value. This is the case, for example, in Lingala (one guy's dialect), and Matumbi. But there are also languages like Shona where in an utterance with the sequence L H L H L H, every time you make the transition L H, you redefine that reference value, so numerically if we use 1 as the highest value, the pitch sequence of the above would come out something like 3 1 4 2 5 3 (this is probably the most common system in Bantu, with a caveat that the languages often also have 'downstep', q.v.). This phenomenon of automatic global lowering is known as 'downdrift'. The concept 'register' is involved based on the premise that H and L are defined relative to a reference value – the register – and the register can be lowered by rule. There is no principled limit to how many times pitch register can drop, though there are practical considerations on how low you can go (speakers plan ahead; speakers sometimes have to reset).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aforementioned feature 'downdrift' is phonetically transparent, since it is triggered by an overt L; but many (maybe most) languages with this feature do not require an overt L, and then you can get lowering between phonologically identical tones. This is called 'downstep', and is traditionally marked with a raised exclamation mark (or the symbol ꜜ). It is actually not possible to tell by simple listening whether a language has three levels (H, M, L) or two levels plus downstep. The concept of downstep was thus introduced by Winston in a paper on the so-called mid tone of Efik. There is an analogous property of register raising which is attested in exactly one language, Acatlan Mixtec, where tones can recursively (and contrastively) increase register value (thus the basic tones go up, up, up and not down, down, down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is obviously some redundancy in this way of conceptualizing tones, because L is 'step down from H', but downstep is ‘step down’. Without knowledge of Acatlan Mixtec, we might say that 'basic tone' can involve both 'step up' (L to H) and 'step down' (H to L), but register only involves 'step down'. In fact, though, step up and step down are operations both at the register level and at the level of basic tone. There have been (distinct) theories by Keith Snider and Mary Clark which attempt to have a single raising vs. lowering operation. You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RKiVhlX9YIUv3Or7FgaBfg_FKyUPd2mu/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; for an overview that focuses on African tone systems and points to some of the less-frequent patters regarding basic levels and downstep operations. The point is that there is a phonological distinction between lexical level, where a given syllable can, in isolation, have one of 2 levels in a 2-level language like Shona, 3 levels in a 3-level language like Yoruba, and so on, up to 6 attested levels in Chori.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that the question of whether a language also has contour tones is synchronically orthogonal, although we know from comparative studies that languages like 5-level Kuteb (which does have rising and falling tones) and 6-level Chori developed these extra levels by flattening out earlier contour tones (however, that is not the only source of level-splits, which also arise because of properties of preceding consonants). There is probably a perceptual tradeoff that it is really hard to distinguish 5 levels of tone &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; maintain all of the possible rises and falls that 5 tones allow, and thus the number of contours is usually fewer than the number you would predict by free combination of levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T18:54:30.810" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T18:54:30.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-07T00:00:26.143" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt; (2017 7 ed)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VF4nDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT87&amp;amp;lpg=PT87&amp;amp;dq=%22Many+speakers+also+curl+the+apex+into+a%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=oZ_tABr23r&amp;amp;sig=Zes023xJb_SC-FnGpvK4U34e724&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOq4LWyKfdAhUg3YMKHanrC5MQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Many%20speakers%20also%20curl%20the%20apex%20into%20a%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 74-75&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TAuF6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TAuF6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;gt;[![enter image description here][1]][1]&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do the sentences marked by my red and blue arrows refer to 2 different manners of articulation? To wit, the paragraph in the screenshot presents 3 different manners of articulation? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes to 1, is there any picture for the blue articulation? Or can someone kindly draw one? I tried to phonate it, but my phonation doesn't sound like [ɹ].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T23:58:09.910" Title="To phonate [ɹ], is there a picture for pressing tongue tip against the lower gum and raising tongue's blade to the mouth's roof?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28926" CreationDate="2018-09-07T00:54:11.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of those variants are variants within the same manner, which is &quot;approximant&quot; (central approximant, not lateral). They refer to more precise characterizations of &quot;place&quot; including secondary articulation. On p. 235 of &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt; there is a drawing of the articulation of [ɹ] for 6 American English speakers, and you can see that it is quite variable in articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T00:54:11.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28942" CreationDate="2018-09-07T01:40:07.823" Score="2" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering why &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolar_affricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;d͡z&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is not considered two consonants. Same with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_labiodental_affricate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;p͡f&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;code&gt;t͡s&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T00:13:19.227" Title="Why d͡z is not considered two consonants" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28937" CreationDate="2018-09-07T01:49:29.203" Score="0" ViewCount="766" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is a diagram similar to the following one, but that lists all of the mouth configurations such as for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ʃ&lt;/a&gt; and everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulation_(phonetics)#/media/File:Places_of_articulation.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eq1lk.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T03:40:03.273" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T16:04:03.937" Title="Diagram of all IPA sound places" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28934" CreationDate="2018-09-07T01:53:10.103" Score="-4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Page 5 of (R.L. Trask, Robert McColl Millar's) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change&lt;/em&gt;? (2010 Rev. ed)&lt;/a&gt;, expounds that 'grammar' originally didn't mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3484/whats-the-difference-between-syntax-and-grammar?rq=1#comment9662_3484&quot;&gt;its linguistical meaning&lt;/a&gt;  (quoted at the bottom): no surprise, as linguistics is a recent discipline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see the titled question. Why worsen the ambiguity of 'grammar', rather than embrace some other word?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZKIzg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZKIzg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt; (2017 7 ed)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VF4nDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT87&amp;amp;lpg=PT87&amp;amp;dq=%22Many+speakers+also+curl+the+apex+into+a%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=oZ_tABr23r&amp;amp;sig=Zes023xJb_SC-FnGpvK4U34e724&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOq4LWyKfdAhUg3YMKHanrC5MQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Many%20speakers%20also%20curl%20the%20apex%20into%20a%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8Rhg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8Rhg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T07:23:29.433" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T07:23:29.433" Title="Why was 'grammar' chosen to signify the model of linguistic competence, when 'grammar' was already strikingly polysemous?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28929" CreationDate="2018-09-07T01:55:51.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is basically the meaning of the tie-marker. If you write [d͡z], you are explicitly claiming that it is a single consonant (commonly known as an affricate); if you write [dz], you're not saying that explicitly, so you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be saying that it is a cluster (or, you're just not bothering with the diacritic). There are a few cases where there is a contrast in the language, such as Polish &lt;em&gt;trzy&lt;/em&gt; &quot;three&quot; with a cluster and &lt;em&gt;czy&lt;/em&gt; &quot;whether&quot; with an affricate. Since such contrasts are rare, it is rarely necessary to use the diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T01:55:51.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28931" CreationDate="2018-09-07T02:51:41.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key, I guess, is &quot;&lt;em&gt;the crudest level of description&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - it's a descriptive view of grammar. Traditionally grammar had been a prescribed model - is my interpretation of your remark. But that's a false dichotomy, because prescription is in essence descriptive, but of a very narrow set of speakers (with the supposition to generalize it) - therefore it's abstract and restrictive while the master classical grammarian would still understand the grammar deemed incorrect, which recent theorists try to incorporate in the model instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first quoted paragraph on glamour is somewhat confusing and does gloss over complicated developments of words that seem polysemous only because we write a bunch of related words all as one homophone but for ease of reading. For what it's worth, compare Ger. &quot;&lt;em&gt;Schreibe&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - attributive noun of the verb &quot;&lt;em&gt;schreiben&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&quot;to write&quot;) of the same discriminated *skr- root, or so they say, which also derives a &lt;em&gt;score&lt;/em&gt; of other words &lt;em&gt;sharded&lt;/em&gt; into different topics of which we can only &lt;em&gt;scratch&lt;/em&gt; the surface which is &lt;em&gt;scary&lt;/em&gt; complicated and prone to &lt;em&gt;circular&lt;/em&gt; reasoning and visual language that is very &lt;em&gt;graphic&lt;/em&gt;. In essence, taking in Dutch &quot;&lt;em&gt;begrip&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, Ger. &quot;&lt;em&gt;begriefen&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Begriff&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Grips&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Graben&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Gravur&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and En. &quot;&lt;em&gt;gravitas&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;grave&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (ie. &lt;em&gt;strength&lt;/em&gt;) should give an original sense like &lt;em&gt;impart&lt;/em&gt;. Compare further Old English &lt;em&gt;gren&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;split&quot; and Lt. &quot;&lt;em&gt;cerno&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &quot;certain&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;crino&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &quot;think&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;creat-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; ... further &quot;cran-&quot; ... and &quot;crane&quot; compared to Ibis the totem animal of &lt;em&gt;Thot&lt;/em&gt; in Egyptian mythology,, a diety related to wisdom writing and weighing judgement. Further compare OE &lt;em&gt;dael&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;deal&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tole&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. *Zahl, &lt;em&gt;Erzählen&lt;/em&gt;, to separate the wheat from the shaft. The &lt;em&gt;-m&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;gram-&lt;/em&gt; needs explanation, still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditional grammar tries a &lt;em&gt;strict&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;structure&lt;/em&gt;, but it takes different &lt;em&gt;strokes&lt;/em&gt; for different folks, &lt;em&gt;strongly&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;strung&lt;/em&gt; together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T06:10:51.310" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T06:10:51.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28931" CreationDate="2018-09-07T04:50:34.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic reason is that the contemporary meaning of words is not inextricably chained to their etymologies. The technical theory of &quot;grammar&quot; espoused by Chomsky in &lt;em&gt;Aspects&lt;/em&gt; and similar publications adds a little bit to the existing notion of &quot;grammar&quot;. In fact, he is clear that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; two senses of grammar, namely a system of mental rules, and a description of a system of rules. All that Chomsky has really added is that language is the product of mental rules, so it is appropriate to extend the term &quot;grammar&quot; to the mental object. Previously, there was not much attention paid to the question of the mental status of rules of grammar. But people have been writing descriptive grammars for decades, and by etymological standards this was not what Plato was referring to when he spoke of γραμματική. Similarly, the term &quot;logic&quot; nowadays is not used to refer to the same thing as λογικός did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, words refer to certain kinds of things when the things and terminology are first invented or identified, and then as new, similar things are discovered and invented, they are subsumed under the same term. For example, &quot;freedom of the press&quot; used to literally refer to press that pushed pieces of lead onto paper, but technology has expanded to the point that &quot;the press&quot; doesn't just refer to promulgating printed words using a specific technology. Perhaps if some new discovery or invention is substantially different to the point that one has to invent a new concept, then a new term will be invented. In light of how broad the term &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; actually is, Chomsky's claim that there is a mental object for computing language is pretty mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glamour is a red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T04:50:34.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-07T12:16:55.907" Score="2" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grammatical/functional morphemes are generally defined as morphemes that modify meaning, as opposed to lexical/content morphemes which supply a root meaning. In my intuition, a pronoun – although its meaning differs depending on context – supplies a root meaning of its own, which would make it a lexical/content morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, then, does it seem that pronouns are generally categorized as grammatical/functional morphemes? Is there a reason to consider it incorrect to see them as lexical/content morphemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22643" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T13:30:52.000" Title="Why are pronouns considered grammatical (functional) morphemes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28935" CreationDate="2018-09-07T13:30:52.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pronoun is an interesting animal, isn't it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Content?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly makes one uneasy as regards one of the tests of functional words: like a noun, it seems to supply content and can serve as a head of a phrase. In fact, it can do most things a noun can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One intuitive resolution to that idea that it serves its own content, though, might be to compare it with variables in programming. A variable is generally not a literal, i.e. it isn't itself a value but a rule for how to look up a value. However, you can substitute it anywhere that you can use a value:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; multiply(5, 3)&#xA;15&#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; x = 3&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; multiply(5, x)&#xA;15&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; has no meaning &quot;on its own&quot;. If we hadn't supplied a referent for &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;, the second-last line would cause an error since it's a language-level operation requiring existing content. That's a pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Closed class?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to linguistics, another test is whether the class is open or closed. Can we add to the class of pronouns? Can we derive new words from them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical answer is no: there's a finite set of roles distinguished in English and we already have a pronoun for each of them. We also have a fixed correspondence between pronouns and derived forms (&lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; :: &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), and this relationship is immutable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here, too, pronouns do display some noun-like qualities. For example, some members of my family say &quot;youse&quot; to distinguish second person singular and plural. For consistency we'll say that's a nonstandard dialect. Then if I borrow their usage, am I code-switching or have I expanded the set of pronouns in my dialect? It sure seems easier to do than to create a new conjunction...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Okay, but that's because there's a lacuna in English's paradigm. It's still a finite set.&quot; This brings us to the modern debate! If pronouns distinguish by gender, and we define the set of genders as non-finite, don't pronouns become an open class? Suddenly linguistics is politicized. Do we revise our categorization of pronouns, or do we say that words like &lt;em&gt;xhe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;xe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;xir&lt;/em&gt; are really nouns? Could the attempt to use them as pronouns account for some of the resistance (without their actually knowing why it's a hurdle to use them naturally)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, pronouns do in one sense fulfill a functional rather than a content role, as seen above, but they exhibit strange behaviour for function words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raise these questions without knowing how they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; resolved by those who study this area specifically, and would be interested to read more in another answer or comment!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T13:30:52.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28930" CreationDate="2018-09-07T16:20:11.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, for a couple of reasons. First, this is not an diagram of a language sound (it's an open mouth), but there are such drawings, in the old days known as cutaway Sammy, purporting to be particular sounds. &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/articulation/describing-consonants.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a page&lt;/a&gt; with various places of articulation being sketched. Such drawings, when not made from whole cloth, are based on xray, MRI or ultrasound imaging of articulation, and such data is hard to come by. So there are gaps in coverage, especially when it comes to &quot;unusual&quot; sounds (ones not found in major national languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a diagram only shows one perspective (the sagittal plane), and assumes a single moment in time. A lot of the interesting details of language sounds would require animation and 3-D, and for that, we really do not have the data. So you will have to live with that limitation. But: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipachart/display.php?chart=1&amp;amp;datatype=1&amp;amp;speaker=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a useful resource. This provides animations, MRI and ultrasound (depending on what's available) of the IPA chart, produced by two professional phoneticians (depends on what's available). The warning is that these are not productions in a language, they are theoretical articulations of IPA letters. In some cases (such as [ħ]) you can compare the individuals and observe that one person's performances are very different and, if you are familiar with languages having the sound, one is better than the other. Unfortunately, the clicks are sort of &quot;cut-and-paste&quot; inserted into the vowel frame, and one would need pictures from a real speaker to get real click articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are infinitely many mouth configurations, so clearly we can't have infinitely many diagrams, but we might at least cover the letters of the IPA, using theoretical articulations, as that web page does. If you want something more like &quot;all mouth configurations&quot;, I quasi-recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://dood.al/pinktrombone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pink Trombone&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't assign letters to the vocal tract configuration that you create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T16:20:11.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26330" CreationDate="2018-09-07T18:13:08.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some markers can have as origin a preposition, but it is a misuse of language to use interchangeably these concepts as in Spanish or French (preposition: I/Je come/viens from/de Paris ## genetive: The/le wine/vin of/de Paris). Particule is a subclass of the morpheme, it contrasts with morphemes that have a long connected speech, so you can use it to speak of prepositions or markers if they are morphemes that is composed of one or two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22635" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:13:08.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28929" CreationDate="2018-09-07T18:25:19.587" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because you need to make the difference between the phonology and the phonetic. The affricates represent one phonological unity despite they have two different articulatory sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22635" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:25:19.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26330" CreationDate="2018-09-07T18:41:06.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing is that part-of-speech is something linguists assign to a certain word form and this assignment depends on the underlying analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the class &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; is already a kind of container for &quot;everything else, that was not previously sorted into other categories&quot;. Differentiating &lt;em&gt;particle&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;marker&lt;/em&gt; as two separate classes for part-of-speech is rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, one word form can have different part-of-speech depending on its use in a sentence, e.g., the English word &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; is a particle in the infinitive construction &lt;em&gt;to work&lt;/em&gt;, but a preposition in the phrase &lt;em&gt;I go to work at 8 o'clock&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, it is very difficult to define even basic parts of speech cross-linguistically. One might come up with a set of tests that work well in one language, but are completely meaningless in another one. So there is always a language dependence in a set of parts of speech. There are lots of tries to unify sets of part-of-speech cross-linguistically, and a currently hot one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/u/pos/all.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T18:41:06.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28929" CreationDate="2018-09-07T22:09:39.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It really comes down to, what keeps the theory simple while still explaining all the data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (Kenyan) Swahili, for example, there are affricates &lt;code&gt;/t͡ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/d͡ʒ/&lt;/code&gt;. We could just as easily call them clusters &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/dʒ/&lt;/code&gt;. But is there any advantage to having them be individual? We never find a &lt;code&gt;/ʒ/&lt;/code&gt; on its own, and there are places in the syllable structure where you can either have a single consonant or one of these affricates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory becomes much simpler if you treat the affricates as single consonants instead of pairs: in this case you don't have to explain why &lt;code&gt;/ʒ/&lt;/code&gt; can never stand on its own, or why the specific pairs &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/dʒ/&lt;/code&gt; can be in positions that normally only allow a single consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In fact, I prefer to call those sounds &lt;code&gt;/c/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ɟ/&lt;/code&gt;, palatal plosives, because it makes some of the symmetry nicer. But as always, the naming comes down to whatever is most useful and clear: &lt;code&gt;/c/&lt;/code&gt; doesn't tell you its most common pronunciation, while &lt;code&gt;/t͡ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; does.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T22:09:39.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28926" CreationDate="2018-09-07T22:56:15.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage you provided describes two (not three) &lt;em&gt;realizations&lt;/em&gt; of the English phoneme /ɹ/. You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; call them two &quot;manners of articulation&quot;, but they aren't &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manners of articulation&lt;/a&gt; as a technical term in phonetics. The manner of articulation, in the technical sense, of both realizations is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approximant&lt;/a&gt; (may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricative_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fricative&lt;/a&gt; when devoiced, e.g. in &quot;price&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are MRI images of the two variants of English /ɹ/ (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isr.umd.edu/Labs/SCL/publications/conference/t_zhou_etal_icslp_07.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zhou et al. 2007&lt;/a&gt; via &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xfIHAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (2010:95)&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u3mC9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;MRI images of apical and bunched /r/, from Zhou et al. (2007), via Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (2010:95)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two variants technically differ in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;place&lt;/em&gt; of articulation&lt;/a&gt;, the one postalveolar and the other somewhere between palatal and velar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zxKCbu536Z8C&amp;amp;pg=PA302&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laver 1994:302&lt;/a&gt; calls it &quot;pre-velar&quot;), but since they sound virtually identical and an articulatory investigation such as MRI or ultrasound would be required to tell you which, the distinction is rarely made and they are both usually treated as postalveolar and transcribed as [ɹ]. Some authors treat the apical variant as a retroflex approximant [ɻ]. Also note that the lip rounding and the retraction of the tongue root which your source describes (none, either, or both of which may accompany either realization as far as I can tell) are technically secondary articulations (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labialization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;labialization&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pharyngealization&lt;/a&gt;, repsectively), but they are often disregarded in literature for the sake of simplicity or because they are allophonic (i.e. optional).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, there are various shades of articulation between them (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.577.2440&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiede 2007&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KrFgG.png&quot; alt=&quot;From Tiede (2007)&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To produce the &quot;bunched&quot; (dorsal) variant, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bEViAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catford (1988&lt;/a&gt;:170; via &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/bunchedmolar-r.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wells 2010&lt;/a&gt;) recommends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Produce a uvular trill. Note that in order to do this you have to form a longitudinal furrow in the tongue within which the uvula vibrates. Now move the whole body of the tongue slightly forward, while retaining precisely that deeply furrowed configuration. The result should be a close approximation to the typical American ‘&lt;em&gt;bird&lt;/em&gt; vowel’, for which the phonetic symbols [ɝ] and [ɚ] have been used—both representing a central vowel with an &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;-like modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question &amp;amp; answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28563&quot;&gt;Apical postalveolar approximant [ɹ̺] and retroflex approximant [ɻ]: What is the difference?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T23:58:09.910" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T23:58:09.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28929" CreationDate="2018-09-08T00:05:42.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no clear boundary between an affricate and a sequence of a stop and fricative of the same place of articulation. So the distinction most often comes down to the purpose of the analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, English /ts, dz, tr, dr, tθ, dð, pf, bv/ are phonetically realized like affricates in many environments, but these combinations are usually not considered distinct phonemes because their distribution is restricted to one or two of word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions. /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, however, can appear in any of the three and appear to be morphologically inseparable, unless in the middle of a compound (e.g. &lt;em&gt;lightship&lt;/em&gt;). For a more thorough reasoning, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kXzMAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA186&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cruttenden (2014: 186–8)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're making a phonetic (as opposed to phonological) observation, it is well within reason to treat affricated realizations of English /ts, dz, tr, dr, tθ, dð, pf, bv/ as affricates and transcribe them with tie bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Sounds+of+the+World%27s+Languages-p-9780631198154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (1996&lt;/a&gt;: 90) said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Affricates are an intermediate category between simple stops and a sequence of a stop and a fricative. It is not always easy to say how much frication should be regarded as an automatic property of a release; some places of articulation seem to be often accompanied by considerable frication ... At the other extreme, a combination of a stop and fricative that both happen to have the same place of articulation do not necessarily form an affricate. Phonological considerations must play a part in any decision as to whether a stop and a following homorganic fricative is to be regarded as an affricate which is a single unit, or as two segments (or two timing slots), forming a sequence of a stop and a fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T00:13:19.227" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T00:13:19.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28947" CreationDate="2018-09-08T00:54:37.027" Score="0" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering why long vowels are not treated as simply two letters, for example. So &lt;code&gt;eː&lt;/code&gt; becomes &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T01:18:35.987" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T01:54:04.753" Title="Why long vowels are considered vowels and not 2 vowels" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28946" CreationDate="2018-09-08T01:17:24.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; considered to be two vowels. This is discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rb1b6qyabdQ3fDvsG2jw7RXfXPUe8W_L/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Representation of Vowel Length&lt;/a&gt;, but the really short answer is that long vowels are typically considered to be a single segment with two &quot;timing units&quot;, hence the two-ness. There is a rich literature noting that sometimes, &quot;long&quot; segments behave like there are two of them, and sometimes they act like there is one of them. There has been a bit of a puzzle trying to figure out exactly what processes will treat a long thing like one thing, and what will treat a long thing like one thing. For instance, a rule that rounds a vowel next to a labial consonant (such rules exist) will round the entirety of a long vowel. Charles Pyle and Michael Kenstowicz wrote on this topic in the early 70's, and Pyle wrote his dissertation on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The view that has been pretty much universally accepted since 1978 is that a long segment is &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; a single segment with special suprasegmental structure (most usually, these days, &quot;a mora&quot;, sometimes &quot;a skeletal slot&quot;. However, there are languages that actually contrast &quot;long vowel&quot; from &quot;identical vowel cluster&quot;, so there is a difference between [o:] and [oo], where [o:] is a single syllable long vowel, and [oo], better notated as [o.o], is a two-syllable sequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T01:54:04.753" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T01:54:04.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28895" CreationDate="2018-09-08T02:53:58.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an answer to your question &lt;em&gt;find the pair of words that never appear together, and have the highest individual frequency (the sum of them)&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/19970614160127/http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Treebank&lt;/a&gt; as a text corpus, the top 10 pairs are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA; (8090, 'the', 'the'),&#xA; (6364, 'the', 'of'),&#xA; (6209, 'the', 'to'),&#xA; (5923, 'the', 'a'),&#xA; (5923, 'a', 'the'),&#xA; (5617, 'the', 'in'),&#xA; (5556, 'the', 'and'),&#xA; (5168, 'the', '*-1'),&#xA; (5168, '*-1', 'the'),&#xA; (5144, 'the', '0')&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result should be quite intuitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;import nltk, string&#xA;from collections import Counter, defaultdict&#xA;&#xA;nltk.download('punkt')&#xA;nltk.download('ptb')&#xA;&#xA;tokens = nltk.corpus.treebank.words()&#xA;ct = Counter(tokens)&#xA;tokens_high_freq = [x for x in ct if ct[x]&gt;10 ]&#xA;bigrams = nltk.bigrams(tokens)&#xA;bigram_dict = defaultdict(list)&#xA;for a,b in bigrams:&#xA;    bigram_dict[a].append(b)&#xA;&#xA;bigrams_never = [(ct[a]+ct[b],a,b) for a in tokens_high_freq for b in tokens_high_freq &#xA;                 if b not in bigram_dict[a] and a not in string.punctuation and b not in string.punctuation]&#xA;print(sorted(bigrams_never, reverse=True)[:10])&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Edit --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corrected a coding mistake, thanks to @FrédéricGrosshans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22647" LastEditorUserId="22647" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T16:45:55.000" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T16:45:55.000" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28951" CreationDate="2018-09-08T08:10:46.773" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a bit about sign language, and apparently they have different grammar from the local spoken language. Why would they need this? Doesn't it complicate things to have to learn 2 languages instead of 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20512" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T10:13:46.713" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T00:51:53.790" Title="Why is sign language different from spoken language?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28950" CreationDate="2018-09-08T10:11:08.350" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sign languages are true natural human languages, so the first misconception to overcome is that anyone has the power to control it like the question suggests. We can set conventional spellings in a written language, but we can't tell people what words to say (or write.) Asking why American Sign Language needs to have a different grammar to American English is like asking why English needs to have a different grammar to Mandarin Chinese - it &quot;needs&quot; to have a different grammar because it's fundamentally a different language! Yes it's more complicated to have a country's sign language not be related to its spoken language(s), but it's also complicated when there are multiple spoken languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As they are natural human languages, they change over time. Suppose one sign language initially began with the same grammar as the local spoken language. Because the two languages would have different speech communities, the languages would change in diverging ways.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sign languages have particular historical origins. For a sign language to really become established and stable it needs a fairly large speech community, and many of the present sign language families seem to have arisen after the industrial revolution in the larger cities it prompted. The largest sign language family is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language_family&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Sign Language family (LSF)&lt;/a&gt; which arose in the 17th century. As people started schools for the deaf they often taught a pre-existing sign language. The LSF family was imported and taught in many countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, including many places where French itself was not spoken. One of those was the USA, where LSF turned into American Sign Language (ASL). Although English speakers from the UK and the US speak essentially the same language (with a few regional differences) British Sign Language and ASL are mostly unrelated, with only 31% of signs in common. Other sign languages arose as creoles, and at least one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; apparently arose spontaneously. All of these situations resulted in sign languages being used with no connection to the local spoken language(s).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spoken languages are linear and one dimensional, you can only say one thing at a time. This is not true for sign languages, whose speakers will sometimes sign a few things simultaneously. Many sign language grammars use classifiers, a system some spoken languages use, but often not the local spoken language. To try to bring sign and spoken languages together would be to remove many of the advantages that sign language speakers like.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some spoken languages have been turned into signed languages, these are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_coded_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manually coded language&lt;/a&gt;. But these 'languages' often function sort of like pidgin languages, and have been used more for communication between deaf and non-deaf people rather than to be used as the primary language of a deaf community. The parallel with pidgin languages goes further, as some studies have shown that some non-deaf users of a manually coded language (such as a school teacher) might often cut out function words, and do so inconsistently, meaning that a deaf student trying to use a manually coded language to learn the grammar of the spoken language would be unable to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T00:51:53.790" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T00:51:53.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27937" CreationDate="2018-09-08T11:16:38.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are precisely what I was looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tiny.tw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tiny.tw/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apps.techglimpse.com/tweetshort/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://apps.techglimpse.com/tweetshort/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T11:16:38.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28956" CreationDate="2018-09-08T11:50:32.003" Score="3" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a philology test next week. One of the questions will be to &quot;translate&quot; an indoeuropean word into a germanic word, like: i.e. Agros -&gt; germanic Akraz (i.e. &quot;g&quot; --&gt; germ. &quot;k&quot; for Grimm's Law, excetera). I understood that there are some exceptions to this law, like the Verner's law. Are there other exceptions or can i say that every i.e. &quot;p&quot; turns ALWAYS into &quot;f&quot;, or that every i.e. &quot;b&quot; turns ALWAYS into &quot;p&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22650" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T14:13:58.807" Title="Germanic Philology: &quot;translate&quot; a word from indoeuropean language to the germanic language" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-08T12:12:35.243" Score="2" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;My textbook mentions three: laminal prepalatal, dorso prepalatal and postalveolar palatalized. If we take each name strictly, they'll surely denote different gestures. I'm okay with this, what troubles me is that online all recordings I can find over alveolo-palatal fricatives sound relatively the same. Now, how can that be? I don't know how to detail the difference in the auditory effect between a laminal or dorso prepalatal, but one thing is sure, each palatalized sound include a sort of [j] acoustic warping, and I didn't get that in any of my hearings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="22651" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T22:11:54.050" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T18:00:54.000" Title="How many ways are there to produce alveolo-palatal fricatives?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9663" CreationDate="2018-09-08T13:13:23.270" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That it's possible to create a language (within a short time, in one's study), Esperanto being the best-known of these little-known phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22652" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T13:13:23.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28953" CreationDate="2018-09-08T15:48:22.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verner's Law is not an &lt;em&gt;exception&lt;/em&gt;, since Germanic did not emerge in one sudden leap from PIE, it is a &lt;em&gt;complication&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. there is another law that has to be factored in. Grimm's Law happened, and then Verner's Law also happened. You can't say &quot;except for further developments under Verner's Law, &lt;em&gt;p t k&lt;/em&gt; always become &lt;em&gt;f θ x&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, because there are other complications. PIE *&lt;em&gt;steigh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;climb&quot; shows up in OE forms such as &lt;em&gt;gestīgan&lt;/em&gt;, Icelandic &lt;em&gt;stíga&lt;/em&gt; and do on – there is another complication (GL does not apply after a fricative). Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;téjate&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be sharp&quot; and OE &lt;em&gt;sticca&lt;/em&gt; are related, which illustrates another kind of complication (not an exception) – this IE root illustrates the phenomenon of &quot;variable &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, that &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; just sort of shows up sometimes. You could say that the Germanic (Greek etc) form reflects the root &lt;em&gt;steig&lt;/em&gt; and the Indo-Iranian forms reflect the root &lt;em&gt;teig&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. the reconstructed root itself is not totally fixed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;path&quot; seems to correspond to Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;path-&lt;/em&gt;, constituting what looks like a serious exception to the claim that PIE &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; turns into Gmc. &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;. It is, however, thought that this word was borrowed from some Iranian language into Germanic, thus escaping the effects of GL. The word &lt;em&gt;kitchen&lt;/em&gt; likewise corresponds to PIE &lt;em&gt;pekʷ&lt;/em&gt;, exemplifying an extreme &quot;irregularity&quot;, except the Germanic word is borrowed from Latin, cf. &lt;em&gt;coquīna&lt;/em&gt;. That is, sometimes words are borrowed. There are also &quot;exceptions&quot; (though I cannot remember a specific one) where a word is iconic / onomatopoeic, and the correspondences seem to be off (the expected sound change does not happen). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been a virtual axiom in historical linguistics that sound change is regular, but recognizing that regularity requires knowing all of the complicating factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T15:48:22.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28961" CreationDate="2018-09-09T12:50:12.873" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, the following is grammatically correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I going to the cinema today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the assertion that this is true is grammatically correct only with the first two words reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am going to the cinema today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this phenomenon have a name, and is it linguistically common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22655" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T12:16:31.777" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T12:16:31.777" Title="Transposition of words in questions" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;inversion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28960" CreationDate="2018-09-09T18:56:41.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is generally called &lt;em&gt;subject-auxiliary inversion&lt;/em&gt;: it's a syntactic phenomenon (i.e. having to do with how words are put together) that's best-known from English but also appears in other Germanic languages (cf Standard German &lt;em&gt;Du bist ein Amerikaner&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you are an American&quot; vs &lt;em&gt;bist Du ein Amerikaner?&lt;/em&gt; &quot;are you an American?&quot;), and it's started to spread from the Germanics to other languages of Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The reason it's called &lt;em&gt;subject-auxiliary inversion&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;subject-verb inversion&lt;/em&gt; is because when you have an auxiliary along with the verb, only the auxiliary moves: &quot;you &lt;strong&gt;have been&lt;/strong&gt; to Europe&quot; vs &quot;&lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; you &lt;strong&gt;been&lt;/strong&gt; to Europe?&quot;, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of Europe, it's not particularly common for questions, but switching the order of phrases is used for other things: in Lingála (a Bantu language of the Congo), for instance, the subject and verb can switch places to indicate a relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T18:56:41.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28968" CreationDate="2018-09-09T22:00:38.103" Score="17" ViewCount="4271" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a basic question but I am confused about how mouth shapes for vowels, at a deeper level, are producing different sounds. Wanted to see if one could demonstrate with another instrument like a pipe, how you could create the vowel sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, IPA divides the sounds into front and back of the mouth/tongue blocking airflow, and open/closed-ness of the air passage by the tongue. This produces the &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; sound, the &lt;code&gt;oo&lt;/code&gt; sound, the &lt;code&gt;ah&lt;/code&gt; sound, the &lt;code&gt;oh&lt;/code&gt; sound, and everything in between. But I'm wondering how it actually works. How the shape of the mouth actually produces these sounds. For example, I don't know if we can just hear a recording of an &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;in the middle of its pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;, and tell it's an &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; sound. Maybe we can only tell they are the vowel sounds because of their &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; sound in relation to each other, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further demonstrate my confusion, take for example a hose. If you squeeze the hose, the water comes out faster. That makes sense. Because there is less space for the water to come out of. There is a complete explanation there. Likewise, when an ambulance passes by and you hear the doppler effect, that is because the sound waves are compressed as they come toward you, and expanded as they move away. That gives a complete explanation of why the sound changes as the ambulance passes by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a vowel sound like &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; doesn't make sense just by saying &quot;the shape of the mouth is x&quot;. Why does the shape of the mouth produce that sound, and what is the sound it is producing. I'm wondering if it is because &lt;a href=&quot;https://dood.al/pinktrombone/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the mouth cavity is curved&lt;/a&gt;, or because the sound wave is a complex shape (would be nice to see what the vowel sound waves look like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I try to describe the &quot;ah&quot; sound, and say it's because the &quot;mouth is shaped like x, and the tongue is placed here...&quot;, that doesn't explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; that is producing the &quot;ah&quot; sound vs. the &quot;ee&quot; sound. Something that would fully explain it is by saying &quot;the open cavity in the mouth produces a sound wave that is shaped in what we hear as an &quot;ah&quot; sound &quot;. Or &quot;the ee&quot; is two sine waves in this formation&quot; sort of thing. Also, for the &quot;oo&quot; sound, I don't see how &quot;rounding the lips&quot; produces that sound. I'm wondering what it does to the sound waves to give it that &quot;O&quot; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if one can describe how the basic vowel sounds get their distinct &quot;sound&quot;, or what that sound even is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reference, I understand how &lt;em&gt;tone&lt;/em&gt; (musically) can be expressed, because it's defined by the sound waves. Same with loudness / amplitude. But vowel sounds, I don't fully get yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="22664" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T16:17:13.793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T04:59:31.367" Title="Why vowels sound different from each other" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28965" CreationDate="2018-09-09T22:18:40.550" Score="0" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a pretty good intro to the IPA sounds, even some of the &quot;click&quot; sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they don't include &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the IPA sounds. Maybe they just haven't gotten to them yet. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalized_click&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;glottalized clicks&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_click&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nasal clicks&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nasal vowels&lt;/a&gt; aren't in there. There are a few others that aren't in there as well, don't remember which ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is an audio library for all the IPA sounds somewhere in one place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:45:40.567" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:45:40.567" Title="Audio library for all IPA vowels and consonants" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28963" CreationDate="2018-09-09T23:19:20.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem for many of these is the &lt;em&gt;combinatorial explosion&lt;/em&gt;: a fairly small number of components, when they can be combined, can lead to enormous numbers of possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on that vowel chart you linked, there are thirty-two symbols with associated sound files. (In theory there could be far more, since the vowel space is continuous, but I don't know of any vowel phoneme in any language that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; encompass at least one of those thirty-two.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you want to add in nasalization, that's thirty-two more, for sixty-four total. Add in breathy voice? Now you're up to 128. Pharyngealized? 256. Tones? Far, far more. And so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So most resources for vowels specify the pronunciation of each part individually (mouth position, nasalization, breathy voice…) and count on the user to combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicks pose a similar problem, since they have &lt;em&gt;so many dimensions&lt;/em&gt; compared to pulmonic consonants: place of back articulation, place of front articulation, nasality, aspiration, voicing…this is the reason why the IPA doesn't attempt to assign a new symbol to each click consonant, instead relying on combinations of existing symbols and diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T23:19:20.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28971" CreationDate="2018-09-09T23:33:56.270" Score="0" ViewCount="1262" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28929/why-d%CD%A1z-is-not-considered-two-consonants&quot;&gt;sometimes&lt;/a&gt; consonants in a sequence can be called single consonants (e.g. &lt;code&gt;d͡z&lt;/code&gt;), or consonant &quot;clusters&quot;. But the main reason for calling &lt;code&gt;d͡z&lt;/code&gt; a single consonant is because it &quot;functions as a single slot in a word&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to learn beyond the simple &quot;any single character not a vowel is a consonant, and any unbroken sound is a syllable&quot; mindset, I'm wondering how the following words can be broken down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strength&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cheap&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sheep&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cloud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;code&gt;sheep&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; isn't a long sound (I don't think), I don't think it counts as a diphthong. The sound &lt;code&gt;sh&lt;/code&gt; is one sound in IPA &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt;. So really it is like &lt;code&gt;ʃip&lt;/code&gt;, 3 &quot;~sounds~&quot;, but 5 letters in English. And also 1 syllable. But I'm wondering if the concept of &quot;slots in a word&quot; come into play here in any way. For example, if this is a 3-sound-slot word, where &quot;sh&quot; is the first sound, &quot;ee&quot; is the next&quot;, and &quot;p&quot; is the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;code&gt;cheap&lt;/code&gt; is pretty much the same, but if you break apart &quot;ch&quot; into &quot;tʃ&quot;, then it is &lt;code&gt;tʃip&lt;/code&gt;, so 4 sounds, but with 3 sound slots, and 1 syllable. But really, &lt;code&gt;tʃ&lt;/code&gt; is one &quot;slot&quot;, so it would be better represented as &lt;code&gt;t͡ʃ&lt;/code&gt;. I assume the weird spelling of &lt;code&gt;ea&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; is just an English thing, not really too concerned about that atm, unless that would be called a diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &lt;code&gt;strength&lt;/code&gt; is 7 letters but 1 syllable. But has 2 consonant clusters, &lt;code&gt;str&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ngth&lt;/code&gt;. Wonder what those are called, and what the timing information / structure is around how this word is said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the word &lt;code&gt;cloud&lt;/code&gt; has a diphthong I think, &lt;code&gt;ou&lt;/code&gt;, since the mouth changes over two vowels to produce that sound. And it has 1 consonant cluster &lt;code&gt;kl&lt;/code&gt;, so &lt;code&gt;kl-ow-d&lt;/code&gt;. I'm not sure if there is terminology around the fact that, even though there are 2 sounds in the &lt;code&gt;ou&lt;/code&gt; sound, it only takes up 1 position in the timing of the word. Also, since cloud has 3 &quot;chunks&quot;, but only 1 syllable (and one of the chunks is a diphthong), not sure if there is terminology around that. Like, the syllable has a diphthong in it, as well as consonant clusters. And these clusters like &lt;code&gt;kl&lt;/code&gt; could be considered one &quot;slot&quot;, such as with &lt;code&gt;d͡z&lt;/code&gt;, like &lt;code&gt;k͡l&lt;/code&gt;. Just as &lt;code&gt;str&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ngth&lt;/code&gt; could be considered one &quot;slot&quot;, like &lt;code&gt;s͡t&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ŋ͡ð&lt;/code&gt;. I don't see when to consider the consonants a single unit or slot, vs. separate consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically trying to learn the terminology around this stuff a little better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T23:44:50.820" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T16:25:44.563" Title="The breakdown of the word &quot;strength&quot; or &quot;cheap&quot; or &quot;sheep&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28962" CreationDate="2018-09-09T23:35:59.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you are asking about is &quot;what exactly &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a vowel sound?&quot; (and eventually you'd like to know how to compute that answer from knowing what the lips and tongue are doing&quot;. Here's a short answer, aimed at explaining how to design a kind of vowel synthesizer. Voiced sounds start with a sound source created by vocal fold vibrations, let's say 100 Hz. This gives you a complex wave with components at 100Hz, 200Hz, 300Hz etc, and you specify the amplitude for each component. Overall, the amplitude slopes downward as frequency increases, so that there is basically nothing at frequencies above 7000 Hz. There are &quot;resonances&quot;, i.e. frequency bands, where the amplitude is higher, so that a band of about 6 harmonics centered around 400 Hz, the amplitude will be higher, then is falls off, and then around 2000 Hz there is another increase in amplitude, and again at 2400 and 3500. These are the formants (F1, F2, F3, F4). By fiddling with the frequency where these amplitude peaks occur, you can make different-sounding vowel noises. You can also make some strange noises that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; sound like possible human vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is that you compute sine waves at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, and magnify the basic sine function by a coefficient representing an appropriate amplitude; then sum up all of the sine waves. (Then convert to a wav file and play). Use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt; to view waveforms and get spectral analysis. There are fancier ways of synthesizing vowels, but I believe that simple &quot;adding the components&quot; is the best way to get your head around the conceptual nature of complex waves. And use &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1405194669&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson's book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T04:37:23.137" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T04:37:23.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28962" CreationDate="2018-09-09T23:39:56.520" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! This comes down to &lt;em&gt;formants&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any periodic sound (from a violin, a trumpet, a guitar, or a human voice, among many many others) can be written as the sum of a whole bunch of sine waves at different &quot;pitches&quot; (frequencies). The mathematical details are too complicated to include here, but if you're interested, look into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;harmonic series&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fourier transform&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lowest of these pitches is called F&lt;sub&gt;0&lt;/sub&gt;, the &quot;fundamental frequency&quot;, and that's what people normally mean when they talk about the pitch of a sound. But the other pitches above it, called &quot;harmonics&quot;, are what make a violin sound different from a trumpet, even when they're playing the same fundamental pitch (the same note). The human vocal chords produce harmonics a bit like a violin's: a sawtooth wave. And while we can change the fundamental frequency, we don't really have enough control of the vocal chords to change the harmonics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, there's more to our vocal tract than just the vocal chords!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, pronouncing a vowel basically involves constricting the mouth and throat at various different places. And where exactly the constriction happens affects these harmonics, applying a &quot;filter&quot; to the sound from our vocal chords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the constrictions create &quot;formants&quot;: groups of harmonics that are louder than others. And using the Fourier transform, we can plot exactly where these formants lie. It turns out that F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, the first formant, corresponds quite elegantly to vowel height (how high the tongue is in the mouth), F&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; to vowel backness (where exactly the tongue is closest to the roof of the mouth), and F&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; a bit less elegantly to rounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9GE3E.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9GE3E.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram of formants&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a diagram from some of my own research: the blue line shows the amplitude of each harmonic, the red line is the &quot;envelope&quot; (a way of describing the filter effect), and the peaks are the formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/mark/vowels/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can even create recognizable vowels with a plastic tube&lt;/a&gt;. If you use a more flexible tube, you can even change the vowel while &quot;playing&quot; it, by squeezing in appropriate places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T04:59:31.367" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T04:59:31.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28966" CreationDate="2018-09-09T23:47:06.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're trying to do is break the words down into &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;. This is different from the number of &quot;distinct&quot; sounds that appear on the surface!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;strength /strɛŋθ/ [stʃɹɛŋkθ]&#xA;cheap /t͡ʃip/ [tʃip]&#xA;sheep /ʃip/ [ʃip]&#xA;cloud /klawd/ [kɫɑʊ̯ːd]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, there are sounds on the surface (like the &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;strength&quot;) that don't correspond to any phoneme. In other cases, like &lt;code&gt;button /bʌtən/ [bʌʔn̩]&lt;/code&gt;, there are phonemes that don't correspond to any sound on the surface. The whole field of phonology is generally concerned with how exactly these underlying phonemes map to sounds on the surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to deciding when two &quot;distinct&quot; sounds are actually a single phoneme comes down to how they're distributed. In English, &lt;code&gt;/t͡ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; doesn't act like &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; followed by &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt;, so it's useful to call it its own phoneme. But &lt;code&gt;/kl/&lt;/code&gt; always just acts like &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; followed by &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt;, so treating that combination as a single phoneme just makes the theory messier without explaining anything better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T03:13:51.757" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T03:13:51.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28966" CreationDate="2018-09-10T00:20:47.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to start with well-grounded assumptions of what you are modeling. The most fundamental concept that you're dealing with is the &lt;em&gt;segment&lt;/em&gt;. The claim is / has been that what we produce and hear in speech is some set of segments. These are, in fact, technically known as &quot;phones&quot;. As far as &quot;sheep&quot; is concerned, you have to start with what's &quot;given&quot;, namely actual sound. If you carefully look at / listen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0bff99FVjNo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a recording&lt;/a&gt; of the pronunciation of &quot;sheep&quot;, you can identify portions of the waveform that correspond to particular sounds, so you find the &quot;sh&quot; part, the &quot;p&quot; part, and the &quot;ee&quot; part. Looking at the vowel part, you actually see that the vowel formants of the vowel change: F1 lowers and F2 rises. You can likewise look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0rOVbhtdNgQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;shape&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The first thing you have to do then is convert the physical waveform into something discrete and symbolic, which is where a transcription comes in. Having gone through extensive training in phonetics, you determine that what is said is [ʃɪjp] and [ʃɛjp], and also  &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0ktb1f2CDIB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;ship&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is [ʃɪp].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also end up with sequences of phones like [pʰɪt], [spɪt], [pʰɪjk], [spɪjk], and eventually you want a more compact representation since it seems strange to sat that there are two kinds of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in English. An analysis of distribution may then suggest that there are rules which govern where particular phones can appear, since for example you can't say [pi], [pɪ], [pʰɪ] as a speaker of English (at least, not &quot;speaking English&quot; – anybody can learn to make sounds, with some training). From the set of phones, you can compress them down to a set of phonemes, which are the more basic sound that characterize a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you have to address in analyzing phones is, what is the best analysis of the word &quot;shape&quot;. One theory is that this is the long vowel [e:]. Another is that it is the tense vowel [e] (these theories treat the vowel as a single thing). A third theory is that this is a diphthong -- two things, a vowel an another vocalic sound -- which could be represented as [ɛɪ, ei, ej, ɛj] and a few others. It is often difficult (sometimes impossible) to decide what system of phonemes underlies the individual phones of a language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a widespread belief that a given set of facts is consistent with only one grammatical analysis. There is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a widespread belief that form of a grammar is to some extent indeterminate, and even when the raw data is the same across speakers, some speakers may opt for an /ɛɪ/ analysis, others may opt for an /ei/ analysis. Analytic ambiguity is a mechanism of grammatical change. Credit to Jlawler for directing my attention to this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T16:25:44.563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T16:25:44.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28953" CreationDate="2018-09-10T02:46:48.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to briefly add more info on how consonant clusters were affected by Grimm's law (based on a number of sources, e.g. Arsenieva et al. 2003; Ringe 2017, vol. 1 etc.). All the Proto-Germanic reconstructions are from Ringe. All of the exceptions below are well-known and usually studied in undergrad (at least, that was in my case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;s followed by an obstruent&lt;/strong&gt; (crucially, this is not only restricted to s-mobile):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gothic stairno, OE steorra &amp;lt; PGmc *sternan- &amp;lt; PIE *h&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;stēr-s (cf. Latin stella)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gothic fisks &amp;lt; PGmc *fiskaz &amp;lt; PIE *pisk- (cf. Latin piscis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;two obstruents:&lt;/strong&gt; only the first obstruent - if it's a stop - is affected:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gothic ahtau, OE ahta, eahta &amp;lt; PGmc *ahtōu &amp;lt; PIE *h&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;(e)ḱtéh&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; (cf. Latin octo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE nift, Old High German nift &amp;lt; PGmc *niftī &amp;lt; PIE *h&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;nep-t-iH (cf. Latin neptis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the coronal cluster *tst&lt;/strong&gt; becomes ss:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OE sess &amp;lt; PGmc *sessaz &amp;lt; PIE *sedstós &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;geminates&lt;/strong&gt; pp, tt, kk (often explained with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kluge%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kluge's law&lt;/a&gt;, if you accept it)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;miscellanea:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gothic fidwor, OE fēower (PGmc *fedwōr) seems to defy Grimm's law, cf. PIE *kʷétuōr &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several proposals have been put forward, analogy (Ringe) or /kʷ/&gt;/p/&gt;/f/ (Krahe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word-initial PIE *gʷʰ &gt; PGmc *b&lt;/strong&gt; (Ringe 2017: 127-128), Gothic banja, OE benn, cf. PIE *gʷʰen-; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE *gʷʰ followed by a nasal was not affected: Gothic siggwan, ON syngva, cf. PIE *sengʷʰ -&#xA;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T14:13:58.807" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T14:13:58.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28974" CreationDate="2018-09-10T04:39:55.490" Score="3" ViewCount="963" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; sound I can create (a) without moving my tongue (after it is put into place), and (b), without closing the mouth cavity entirely. Like &lt;code&gt;rrrr...&lt;/code&gt;. To me then it seems like a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt;, it is basically an unvoiced vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;code&gt;w&lt;/code&gt;, it made by rounding my lips, like &lt;code&gt;one&lt;/code&gt;. In that sense it seems like a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering why they are considered consonants instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T05:13:50.767" Title="Why r, h, and w aren't vowels" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28973" CreationDate="2018-09-10T05:09:14.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The International Phonetic Alphabet draws a very arbitrary distinction between consonants and vowels, and categorizes them completely separately. But in truth, there's not any major phonetic difference between &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[u]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In actuality, the main difference between &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; is the nucleus of a syllable, &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; isn't&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, every syllable is a &quot;vowel&quot; in the middle, potentially with some &quot;consonants&quot; on either side, and this is the only thing that reliably distinguishes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature is called &lt;em&gt;syllabicity&lt;/em&gt;, as in, &quot;vowels&quot; are syllabic, &quot;consonants&quot; aren't. Many languages have both a syllabic and a non-syllabic version of the same sound: if you speak General American English, you have six such pairs, &lt;code&gt;m n r l j w&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA encodes five of these pairs with separate letters: &lt;code&gt;j~i w~u ʕ~ɑ ɰ~ɯ ɥ~y&lt;/code&gt;. For all the rest, you can mark the consonant with a line (&lt;code&gt;m̩&lt;/code&gt;) or mark the vowel with a curve (&lt;code&gt;e̯&lt;/code&gt;) to switch its syllabicity on or off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T05:09:14.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28973" CreationDate="2018-09-10T05:13:50.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letters [r,w,h] conventionally refer to &quot;consonants&quot;, specifically, non-syllabic segments, whereas [r̩,u] refer to syllabic segments (&quot;vowels&quot;). Similarly, [j] is a consonant, [i] is a vowel – but [j,i] are the same &lt;em&gt;except for&lt;/em&gt; that difference (and also, [m,n] are non-syllabic, [m̩,n̩] are syllabic). [h] is a bit of a problem because it has no unique syllabic variant that can be articulated on its own, nut in a sequence like [ha, hi], [h] is phonetically a voiceless version of the following sonorant segment, so you could transcribe &quot;ha&quot; as [ḁa], &quot;hi&quot; as [j̥i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms &quot;consonants&quot; and &quot;vowel&quot; are confusing since they are used in multiple ways. Sometimes, &quot;consonant&quot; vs &quot;vowel&quot; refers to syllable structure pattern, in which case [h,r,j,s,l,p...] are &quot;consonants&quot; and [a,r̩,i,l̩] are &quot;vowels&quot; (usually nobody calls [l̩] a vowel but [r̩] is often called a vowel, in English). But if you are talking about the decree of constriction in a sound, then the terminology changes. This is recognized in some theories of phonological features sucha s the SPE theory, where &quot;consonantal&quot; refers to a particular degree of constriction and &quot;syllabic&quot; refers to syllable-structure function. So [h,j,w] are non-consonantal, but non-syllabic; [a,i,u] are non-consonantal and syllabic; [m,l,p,s] are consonantal and non-syllabic; finally, [m̩,n̩,l̩] are sonsonantal and syllabic. The standard definition of &quot;consonantal&quot; is &quot;a segment with more mid-sagittal constriction that that of [j]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versions of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; add one other complication. American English &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is generally an approximant [ɹ] and not [r], and it is non-consonantal which can be syllabic or not. In other languages like Serbian, Croatian and Sanskrit, there is a syllabic version of [r], thus [r̩]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T05:13:50.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13192" CreationDate="2018-09-10T08:14:38.580" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check Appendix B in The Tree of Language by B. Pelletier at Amazon Look Inside. It's all there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T08:14:38.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24472" CreationDate="2018-09-10T08:34:02.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be Hittite, as it is the most archaic IE language and the best attested of the Anatolian languages. It or Anatolian in general is the root in the taxonomies of Hamp from 1990, Ringe et al from 2002, Rexova et al from 2003, Starostin from 2004, and the Bayesian analysis of Gray et al from 2011. The living language most like PIE is probably Armenian, because it's the most primitive of the living languages of IE in both the cladistic analysis of Rexova et al from 2003 and the Bayesian analysis of Gray et al from 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastEditorUserId="22659" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T08:48:21.403" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T08:48:21.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2018-09-10T09:03:20.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;3 of the 4 macrophylums have been streamlined. Khoi-San is now Khoe-Kwadi, Kordofanian has been removed from Niger-Congolese, and some have removed Omotic from Afro-Asiatic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T09:03:20.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14905" CreationDate="2018-09-10T09:44:43.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a phylogeny of all languages, and it's by Merritt Ruhlen, who recognizes 12 groups (A Guide to the World's Languages, p. 390), and there is also what comes close to it in Shevoroshkin and in Harold Fleming, the latter includes Borean, but the higher level groups are not widely accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is evidence IE and AA are related, but not directly, and the group is of course Nostratic, and the evidence is in regular sound correspondences, reconstructions, and lexical similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22659" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T09:44:43.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28993" CreationDate="2018-09-10T11:35:19.273" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;When saying someone 'was killed' in Spanish in the passive voice, &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt;, the past participle of &lt;em&gt;morir&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to die&quot;) is used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;«Selicho &lt;strong&gt;fue muerto&lt;/strong&gt; a golpes por sus propios funcionarios»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Galeano &lt;em&gt;Días&lt;/em&gt; [Ur. 1978]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RAE (la Real Academia Española) gives contradictory information on whether this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;suppletion of the regular past participle of &lt;em&gt;matar&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to kill&quot; (&lt;em&gt;matado&lt;/em&gt;) by the irregular &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; (borrowed from &lt;em&gt;morir&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Para construir la pasiva de matar se emplea más habitualmente &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt;, aunque este sea formalmente el participio de morir...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;To construct the passive of &quot;matar&quot; it is more common [than using the regular &quot;matado&quot;] to employ &quot;muerto&quot;, though this is formally the participle of &quot;morir&quot;...&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lema.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=kvCJWyXYED6KELmebz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: &lt;strong&gt;matar(se). 1.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;just the verb &lt;em&gt;morir&lt;/em&gt; itself, taking on an uncommon causative meaning in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.&lt;/strong&gt; tr. p. us. matar (‖ quitar la vida). U. solo en la voz pasiva. &lt;em&gt;El toro fue muerto a la tercera estocada.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;Transitive, little used. &quot;To kill&quot;. Used only in the passive voice.&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dle.rae.es/?id=PppPsdZ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diccionario de la lengua español: &lt;strong&gt;matar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which is correct? Do different speakers analyse this use differently?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;In either case, the RAE claims this use of the form &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; is due to an old meaning &lt;em&gt;morir&lt;/em&gt; had in Medieval Spanish - of to actively take the life of. This polysemy can still be seen more clearly in the cognates in Catalan and Portuguese &lt;em&gt;mort/morto&lt;/em&gt; which are used in the active perfect: &quot;to &lt;em&gt;have killed&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T15:46:05.353" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:46:05.353" Title="Suppletion of Spanish &quot;matar&quot; (to kill) by &quot;morir&quot; (to die) in the passive" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;suppletion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28962" CreationDate="2018-09-10T16:46:42.247" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just wanted to add this diagram which shows the subjective vowel sounds as they correspond to the combination of F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; and F&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; formants in a two-dimensional chart. The chart is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/filter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page of the National Center for Voice and Speech's website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SZLio.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SZLio.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; is typically generated at the front of the mouth and F&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; typically in the throat or back of the mouth, both controlled mostly by placement of the tongue. These vowel sounds can be further shaped by rounding of the lips (F&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;), though that isn't as distinct in English as it is in some other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The formant frequencies as they are called are basically filters that apply to the fundamental frequency which is set up by the vocal cords. The fundamental frequency F&lt;sub&gt;0&lt;/sub&gt; does not carry linguistic signals and can be varied, for example when singing, or when adding intonation (considered a metalinguistic signal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, in fact, simulate vowel sounds on a synthesizer by filtering a base oscillator using two band pass filters set at F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; and F&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; formant frequencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1905" LastEditorUserId="22671" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T10:32:24.510" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T10:32:24.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2376" CreationDate="2018-09-10T17:05:47.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These mnemonic devices can help to memorize the inventory of English vowel sounds. From top to bottom the front vowels can be remembered with the phrase: m(ea)n w(o)men m(a)ke m(e)n m(a)d. And the back vowels with: L(u)ke t(oo)k n(o) (awe) in m(o)ps. Plus there is the lax central vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1905" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T17:05:47.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-10T19:06:33.103" Score="5" ViewCount="1134" Body="&lt;p&gt;An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are normally written, is the opposite possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've recently discovered that English actually has far more vowel-sounds than we have vowel characters (namely ~20) this is very similar to the number of consonant sounds (~24) so it seems to me that a writing system with only vowel should lose about as much information about word pronunciation as a writing system with only consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obviously you would need more symbols for describing many different vowel-sounds rather than the English approach of ~ 5 vowel symbols&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there something i'm missing here which would prevent an anti-abjad from developing or is it viable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22667" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:39:51.107" Title="Is a vowel only writing system possible?" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28985" CreationDate="2018-09-10T19:15:44.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This conlang seems to fit the bill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Qohenje writing system is a &quot;reverse abjad&quot; (like the logical opposite of the Arabic or Hebrew writing systems, for example), with the dominant symbols being those showing vowels (+ tones), and with consonants shown by diacritics written above or below the vowel (see below). The vocalic core is considered the “main” part of the syllable (or more precisely the &quot;glyph&quot;, see below), which accounts for the range and complexity of the Qohenje vowel inventory: there are 90 vowel symbols in Qohenje!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cjh.pagesperso-orange.fr/qohenje/orth/orth.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cjh.pagesperso-orange.fr/qohenje/orth/orth.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also be interested in vowel based abugidas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Vowel-based abugidas&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a few abugidas, the vowels are basic, and the consonants secondary. If no consonant is written in Pahawh Hmong, it is understood to be /k/; consonants are written after the vowel they precede in speech. In Japanese Braille, the vowels but not the consonants have independent status, and it is the vowels which are modified when the consonant is y or w.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyd%27s_Syllabic_Shorthand&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Braille&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese Braille&lt;/a&gt; – Japanese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahawh_Hmong&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pahawh Hmong&lt;/a&gt; – Hmong&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems#Vowel-based_abugidas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems#Vowel-based_abugidas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T19:15:44.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28985" CreationDate="2018-09-10T19:47:47.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a natural human language? Almost certainly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just having a similar number of vowels and consonants does not mean that vowels and consonants carry the same amount of information. That depends on a many other factors, like relative frequency of use. In English, for example, even though we have a large number of vowel phonemes, mst f thm dn't crr mch nfrmtn. You can mutate or drop vowels quite freely in speech and in writing and still be understood. O e oe a, eai ou ooa ae i ioeeie. (On the other hand, leaving out consonants makes it incomprehensible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, different languages put different functional loads on their vowel vs. consonant inventories. Some languages really do stuff a lot of information into vowels. And vowel-centered abugidas are certainly possible, with core characters representing vowel sounds and consonants added as diacritics. But, to the best of my knowledge, there are no natural languages where the vowel stream is actually &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; distinctive than the consonant stream, and all those natural language abugidas still require writing the consonants! (Which is why they are called abugidas, and not reverse-abjads, in the first place.) While this sort of thing is still an open area of research in psychoacoustics, cross-linguistically it &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; that vowels are more important for carrying intonation contours that help identify phrase and sentence boundaries, while at the word level consonants tend to be more informative, largely because consonants are more reliably distinguishable than large inventories of vowels--and that intonation contour information that is uniquely suited to being carried by vowels is precisely the sort of information than tends to be left out of writing systems, or indicated with punctuation, anyway, so whether or not you write the vowels doesn't actually matter as far as that goes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it may be possible to &lt;em&gt;design&lt;/em&gt; a functional, comprehensible language which puts the majority of its contrasting information in the vowel stream, such that consonants can be recovered by context, analogous to recovering vowels in the consonant stream of an abjad from discourse context... but it probably won't be practical for any natural human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6750" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T19:47:47.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28985" CreationDate="2018-09-10T22:09:49.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible that by asking this question, you have increased the probability that someone will make omission of consonants be a feature of their next conlang. If you are looking for plausible future writing systems for natural languages, such a system would be unlikely. A writing system that omits useful information is less likely to develop compared to a system that includes that useful information. Typically, languages have more consonants than vowels, so if you are going to drop all consonants, or drop all vowels, you are more likely for messages to be difficult to interpret if you stop the consonants, compared to dropping the vowels. That is, the overall informational value of consonants is higher than that of vowels. The most likely outcome would be that a new writing system will be alphabetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that a new writing system would be invented based on an existing and culturally relevant writing system. For example, writing for Evenki in Russia is based on Cyrillic, and in China it is written in Latin and experimentally in Mongolian: it is not written in Arabic, because there would be no cultural motivation for that. To the extent that a new writing system is based on existing language writing systems (and none mark only the vowels), it is unlikely that a new writing system would mark only vowels. Alternatively, a new alphabet could be made up from scratch, as in the case of Vai writing. The most common quasi-modern ex-nihilo writing systems are syllabaries, suggesting that script-inventors prefer system that retain information about the pronunciation of words, rather than throwing it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ai a oo eao o ie a ai-aa, e ae i a ea o oie o eai a e ii e, i i uie a a e a a ooa ou ee e aoe. Lacking a good reason to invent an anti-abjad, when faced with a wealth of choices for creating a new writing system, it is unlikely that a system that lacks consonants would ever be adopted. I predict that a new writing system invented by an illiterate person would be a syllabary. Of course, fictional systems can be really strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T09:39:51.107" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:39:51.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28990" CreationDate="2018-09-10T22:51:03.737" Score="3" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a comprehensive list but just a few snippets from languages that have a few consonants that sound pretty much the same to me. I wanted to ask how I can learn to hear the difference between them. Also, I am interested to know if either (a) it is just an &quot;accent thing&quot;, meaning &quot;&lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;&quot; might be pronounced &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; after some sounds, while pronounced &lt;code&gt;ɖ&lt;/code&gt; after others, &lt;code&gt;d̪&lt;/code&gt; after still others, and &lt;code&gt;d̪ʱ&lt;/code&gt; after others, but they all mean &quot;&lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt;&quot;, or (b) these are actually conceptualized as totally distinct sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuxalk&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;pʰ ⟨p⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;tʰ ⟨t⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;t͡sʰ ⟨c⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;cʰ ⟨k⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Labialized_voiceless_velar_plosive.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;kʷʰ ⟨kʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;code&gt;qʰ ⟨q⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;qʷʰ ⟨qʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;qʼʷ ⟨q̓ʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Circassian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto Circassian&lt;/a&gt; has a lot, but won't go into that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Preaspiration &lt;code&gt;ʰt&lt;/code&gt; still figuring out.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uyghur&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;k vs. q&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsez_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tsez&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsez_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;k vs. kʼ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odia&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;t̪ ʈ t̪ʰ ʈʰ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;d̪ ɖ d̪ʱ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naxi&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;/k/ vs. /kʰ/ k&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/cʰ/ vs. /tʂʰ/ ch&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindustani&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;(ʂ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;(ʐ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ʒ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ɣ)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main ones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;/kʰ/ k&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;kʼ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/cʰ/&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;/tʂʰ/ ch&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;kʷʰ ⟨kʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;qʷʰ ⟨qʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ʂ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ʐ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ʒ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ɣ)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the technical pronunciation difference between &lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt;, but I can't hear a difference, especially if two words were said that mean totally different things but sound roughly the same, like &lt;code&gt;kar&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;qar&lt;/code&gt;, I couldn't tell the difference. Wondering if you need to be able to distinguish the two sounds in order to understand the language, or it's more of a context/accent thing (way of pronouncing the &quot;k&quot; sound in a certain context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for &lt;code&gt;kʷʰ ⟨kʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;qʷʰ ⟨qʷ⟩&lt;/code&gt;, just slightly different variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Naxi they have &lt;code&gt;/cʰ/&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;/tʂʰ/ ch&lt;/code&gt;, which both sound the same to me as well. Wondering the same for this, if it's required to distinguish between these two sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hindustani they have &lt;code&gt;(ʂ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;(ʐ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ʒ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;(ɣ)&lt;/code&gt;. I can kind of tell the difference between &lt;code&gt;/ʂ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;ʂ&lt;/code&gt; is a little deeper sounding. But all of these sound similar to each other roughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically just wondering if you need to be able to clearly distinguish and pronounce these sound pairs/sets in order to speak and understand the language properly, or really there is just one underlying sound, and multiple ways of producing it (like &lt;code&gt;(ʂ)&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt;). And if it needs to be understood at a deeper level, wondering if you have suggestions on how to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T23:26:29.223" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T08:34:57.693" Title="How these close sounds are distinguished in native language" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28989" CreationDate="2018-09-10T23:36:26.810" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean &quot;what can I do to learn the distinctions&quot;, you need repeated and varied exposure to the sounds in question, and you need some method of telling if you're correct in your hearing and pronunciation. For instance, you might learn the difference between [k] and [q] in the context of learning Arabic. In that case, you would be given many words (indeed minimal pairs) involving those sounds, you could be given dictation exercises where you have to write words that you don't know, and your instructor guides you in correct pronunciations. In other words, practice, practice, practice, based on data, data, data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of normal child language acquisition, this just happens with no instruction. If you grow up in a Lushootseed-speaking environment, you'll speak Lushootseed (or if everybody is speaking related Nuxalk, that's what you'll learn -- their segmental inventories are very similar except apparently for &quot;k&quot;). However, if you try to learn these sounds as an adult, you may never learn them. The extent to which it is mandatory to learn native-like pronunciations is very hard to determine. I do know that you can map Lushootseed consonants onto English consonants (eliminate ejectives, q→k, kʷ→k, x,χ→h, ɬ→ʃ), and the instructor can still understand you. It would be an interesting experiment to reduce all of the clicks of Taa to [k], and get rid of tone, phonatory adornments and nasalization on vowels, to see if you could still be understood (Taa is much less redundant compared to Lushootseed). Some of the distinctions that you mentioned are marginal anyhow, for example &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; in Uighur. There is a 3-way contrast in Norwegian (dialect 1) between [ʃ, ʂ, ç] which are all pronounced as [ʃ] in dialect 2, and I don't think anyone even notices the neutralization. If the goal is &quot;be minimally comprehensible&quot;, you can probably forgo the obscure sounds, but if you aspire to more native control over the sound system, you need practical experience with these sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, once you've gotten control over a certain sound in some language, like palatal [c] in Hungarian, you have to start over when you try to learn Saami, since [c] in Saami is pronounced somewhat differently. Ejectives in Salishan are different from ejectives in Ethiopian Semitic. Then you have to start to acquire various &lt;em&gt;variants&lt;/em&gt; of [ʈ,c,q,ħ,ʕ] and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a specific sound that's causing a problem and if you can hack the writing system, you might try forvo.com, where you can find recordings (of varying quality) of words in the language. The North Saami collection is very well done, for example. Their Naxi collection is, shall we say, sparse. I find getting suitable recordings to be the biggest challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T23:56:53.547" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T23:56:53.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-11T02:23:43.023" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterography_and_homography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homophonic heterograph&lt;/a&gt; the correct term? I know that it doesn't restrict them to this question's only target: chance overlaps. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt; (2017 7 ed)&lt;/a&gt;, p. 306.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In&#xA;  establishing genetic relationships among languages, then, one must exclude words that may have been borrowed and are therefore not part of a&#xA;  common inheritance. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Chance Overlap in Sound and Meaning&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fact that languages often have similarities in sound structure and&#xA;  have words for common objects yields a significant probability that there&#xA;  will be accidental overlaps in sound-meaning correspondences between&#xA;  them. For example, all languages have a low vowel (such as &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;), and most&#xA;  have &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and/or &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; vowels; most languages have &lt;em&gt;t, k&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; and the nasal&#xA;  consonants &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where can I find such lists: see my red &quot;side highlight&quot; beneath? It's from&#xA;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 226-227.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K01KM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K01KM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T05:26:22.393" Title="Where can I find lists of homophonic heterographs that overlapped accidentally?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28981" CreationDate="2018-09-11T13:30:40.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CFxACgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA98&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fue muerto: Suppletion in Spanish Analytic Passives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (p.96-112) analyses this very question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors come to the conclusion that it is indeed suppletion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We claim that there are three areas that provide more solid evidence for treating &lt;em&gt;mat-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mor-&lt;/em&gt; as competing members of a list accessed by the same numeric index. The first is that &lt;strong&gt;past participles of &lt;em&gt;mat-&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;matado&lt;/em&gt;, 'killed') and &lt;em&gt;mor-&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt;, 'dead'), in the contexts of active perfects and eventive passives,&lt;/strong&gt; have been in overlapping distribution in the history of the language and, &lt;strong&gt;for many modern speakers, demonstrate blocking effects typical of suppletive forms.&lt;/strong&gt; In Old Spanish, the past participle of &lt;em&gt;matar&lt;/em&gt; in both active (17a) and passive (17b) contexts surfaced as &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; (Corominas &amp;amp; Pascual, 1980-91). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ol start=&quot;17&quot;&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; Capitulo.xxxj. que muestra commo auariça &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ha muertos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;amp; condepnados grandes omnes (&lt;em&gt;Libro de las donas&lt;/em&gt;, 1448)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'Chapter 31 shows how avarice &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;has killed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and condemned great men' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; En el obispado de Nicaragua fueron prelados: primero, D. Fr...dominico, que &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;fue muerto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; por los dos hermanos Contreras (&lt;em&gt;Historia eclesiástica indiana&lt;/em&gt;, 1596)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'In the bishopric of Nicaragua there were prelates: first, D. Fr. Dominico, who &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was killed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by the Contreras brothers' &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In modern Spanish, &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; does not productively appear in active perfects (18a), but &lt;strong&gt;continues to be, for the vast majority of speakers, the only way of passivizing &lt;em&gt;matar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (18b). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ol start=&quot;18&quot;&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; He muerto una liebre&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; (Archaic entry from the DRAE)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    I have died a hare&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'I have killed a hare' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; Un ciclista fue {muerto/%matado&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;} en la calle&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    A cyclist was died/killed in the street&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'A cyclist was killed in the street'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; We use % to indicate variable acceptability. Some speakers reject &lt;em&gt;matado&lt;/em&gt; completely while others find it marginally acceptable. Others may accept both &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;matado&lt;/em&gt; with no intuitive difference in meaning. Additionally, some speakers have communicated that there is a difference in meaning between the two but have trouble saying exactly what that is. We feel that in this latter case there might simply be a sense in which they mean different things because they are different forms and speakers sometimes attempt to link different meanings to different forms oven if they don't exist. There is much to investigate here, but we will limit ourselves to a description and analysis of the grammars that use &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;matado&lt;/em&gt; in passives as a first step in a more complete characterization of the phenomenon. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This claim is corroborated by the results of a comparison of active perfects and passives of &lt;em&gt;matar&lt;/em&gt; in a corpus of modern newspaper Spanish. This is a corpus we compiled of modern journalistic prose from the past five years that included the Spanish news-paper &lt;em&gt;El País&lt;/em&gt;, the Mexican newspaper &lt;em&gt;El Universal&lt;/em&gt; and the Argentine newspaper &lt;em&gt;La Nación&lt;/em&gt;. A summary of the data is provided in Table 1. The participle &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; is virtually excluded from active perfect constructions meaning 'have killed', yet it is overwhelmingly preferred in analytic passive constructions 'be killed.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xUlwR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xUlwR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to include other genres besides journalistic prose, we consulted &lt;em&gt;El Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual&lt;/em&gt; (CREA), which includes a wide variety of both written and oral genres. Data from the CREA corpus further support the idea that &lt;em&gt;muerto&lt;/em&gt; is the most widely used form in analytic passives meaning 'be killed.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ol start=&quot;19&quot;&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; Example of '&lt;em&gt;fue muerto&lt;/em&gt;' search (CREA) - 113 hits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    del asesinato del mahatma [Gandhi, que &lt;strong&gt;fue muerto&lt;/strong&gt; por un fanático] que lo acusaba de haber permitido la dimisión del territorio&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'Gandhi, who was killed by a fanatic'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    (ORAL - Informe semanal 3/11/84 - TVE-1, CREA search 4/20/2013)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; Example of '&lt;em&gt;fue matado&lt;/em&gt;' search (CREA) - 8 hits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Gaudí, cuyo estilo sinuoso, sensual y revolucionario puede ser visto por toda Barcelona (él la convirtió en su ciudad) &lt;strong&gt;fue matado&lt;/strong&gt; por un tranvía ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    'Gaudí... was killed by a streetcar'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    (Carlos Fuentes, &lt;em&gt;El espejo enterrado&lt;/em&gt;, CREA search 4/20/2013) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The data in (18) - (19) and Table 1 indicate that the connection between &lt;em&gt;mat-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;mor-&lt;/em&gt; extends beyond the causative alternation and constitutes an empirical reality in the realm of participles from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. Diachronically, it appears that &lt;strong&gt;the syntactic environment of past participles&lt;/strong&gt; (active perfects and eventive passives) &lt;strong&gt;commonly blocked the presence of the vocabulary item &lt;em&gt;mat-&lt;/em&gt; while synchronically it is the combination of past participle and unaccusative syntax that blocks &lt;em&gt;mat-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;5. Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this paper we have tackled the controversial issue of whether suppletion, or root allomorphy, exists in human language. &lt;strong&gt;We have shown based on a grammatically-conditioned alternation between the words typically associated with the meanings KILL (&lt;em&gt;matar&lt;/em&gt;) and DIE (&lt;em&gt;morir&lt;/em&gt;) that suppletion is an empirical reality in Spanish&lt;/strong&gt; and we provided an analysis of it using new insights by Harley (2014). This particular analysis, if on the right track, adds support to a broad view of grammar in which words are not atomic units that are opaque to syntactic operations but rather are products of syntactic operations that must be interpreted at the interfaces, which is encompassed by many frameworks such as Borer's (2013) &lt;em&gt;exo-skeletal&lt;/em&gt; model, DM, and Nanosyntax (Caha, 2009; Fábregas, 2014; Starke, 2009). Beyond this, the details discussed in Section 3 add credence to the idea that roots are not individuated phono-logically or semantically in the syntax, which is a point of debate among practitioners of these various models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T15:44:01.333" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:44:01.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="28999" CreationDate="2018-09-11T19:47:05.413" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard this used in speech, not written language, and specifically in South Asian languages like Bengali/Hindi/Urdu (or in English by South Asian people who know English as a second language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples in English include &quot;jacket facket&quot; or &quot;watch totch&quot; or &quot;piano fiano&quot;. I think the replacement consonants are usually f-, t-, or sh-, although this is purely observational. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22676" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T14:18:00.073" Title="Is there a term for when a word is repeated with a different starting consonant?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28995" CreationDate="2018-09-11T19:52:13.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is also the shm- reduplicating prefix in American East-Coast English, originally from Yiddish. A good general designation would be &quot;rhyme formations&quot; or &quot;echo words&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T19:52:13.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29000" CreationDate="2018-09-11T20:38:50.967" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I extract a matrix of LPC coefficients and frames from a created LPC object using a Praat script? (Or, if I can figure it out using the menu buttons, I can figure out how to script it..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gotten as far as using &lt;code&gt;To LPC (burg): 16, 0.010, 0.005, 50&lt;/code&gt;, but I don't know how to extract the actual coefficients. I tried &lt;code&gt;Down to Matrix (lpc)&lt;/code&gt; but I don't see any menu item that would let me export the coefficients themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T21:11:10.513" Title="Extracting LPC coefficients in Praat" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="28999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28995" CreationDate="2018-09-11T21:03:11.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &quot;echo reduplication&quot;, for example Hindi &lt;em&gt;jānā-vānā&lt;/em&gt; &quot;going etc.&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ālū-vālū&lt;/em&gt; &quot;potato etc.&quot; or in Tamil &lt;em&gt;tummi kimmi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sneezing etc&quot;. More generally (outside Indian linguistics) in the theoretical literature it is known as reduplication with fixed segmentalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="14907" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T14:18:00.073" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T14:18:00.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28998" CreationDate="2018-09-11T21:11:10.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With an LPC object selected, you can Save as text file, likewise with a Matrix object created by Down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T21:11:10.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T04:25:29.963" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's clear that in the production of many vowels air isn't free to go to every available space in the oral cavity once it leaves the pharynx. Our tongue even touches the molars in [i]. That's just an irrefutable proof, yet again and again I read the definition I presented at the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without parting from the subject I can even mention the &quot;central oral resonant&quot; name use. Some authors use it when referring to vocoids but it's not like we could apply the laterality paramater in all of them, the same for orality (they could be nasalized). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T10:22:58.487" Title="Why are vowels said to be segments produced with no obstruction whatsoever?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28954" CreationDate="2018-09-12T07:38:52.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;By those three descriptions Catford (2001) doesn't introduce three articulations but three designations. He only describes one way of articulating [ɕ]. It is how to describe it using existing terminology that is tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what he actually says on p. 91:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you get some kind of dorso- or lamino-prepalatal fricative noise into the sound, try to slacken off the prepalatal constriction somewhat. The result should be a lamino-prepalatal fricative [ɕ] or voiced [ʑ]. The same result can be arrived at by starting with a lamino-postalveolar type of [ʃ] and then contriving to get more palatal constriction into it: saying lamino-postalveolar [ʃ] while 'thinking [ç] or [i]'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of lamino- or dorso-prepalatal fricative is the Polish ś, which is sometimes called, quite reasonably, a 'palatalized [ʃ]'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he is simply saying that you can arrive at [ɕ] by raising the dorsum while producing a postalveolar [ʃ]. As you can see in the illustration on the same page, the constriction of [ɕ] involves both the blade and the anterior part of the dorsum, and some articulations of [ɕ] may involve more the dorsum and others the blade, so neither to say it's laminal or dorsal would be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gmrNg.png&quot; alt=&quot;Diagram of Lamino-prepalatal [ɕ]&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T17:04:51.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29008" CreationDate="2018-09-12T10:48:51.120" Score="1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia entry for 'Lexeme'&lt;/a&gt; but I wasn't able to make out a clear answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in knowing the answer for both related and unrelated senses of a word. I'm under the impression that the different parts of speech that a word could take on would be different lexemes but if that's not the case I'd like to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22677" LastEditorUserId="22677" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T20:40:19.200" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T12:01:25.650" Title="Is each definition of a word a separate lexeme?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29001" CreationDate="2018-09-12T13:30:54.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think any linguists would define vowels as strictly being produced with &lt;em&gt;absolutely no obstruction whatsoever&lt;/em&gt;. If any do, it's an exaggeration. There aren't any such clear cut distinctions - there's a gradual opening of the mouth from stops through fricatives, approximants, and vowels. This is what is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonority hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia gives a simple table there showing how various terms relate to each other. One thing it points out is that vowels are syllabic: they form the centre of syllables. But this isn't a hard distinction. While most consonants are non syllabic, in some languages some consonants are analysed as being syllabic, including in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mouth does have to actually produce different sounds, so anything other than the most open vowel ([a]) has to be less open because of the physical limitations. What distinguishes the vowels from the approximants is largely a matter of convention. We consider both how sonorant and turbulent the sound is, as well as the phonotactics of each language. The cross-language generalisations we produce are only that, generalisations, not hard rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thought: some languages probably have situations in which allophones cross the divide between vowels and consonants (though I can't remember of any examples.) Analysis of allophones and which is considered the 'default' is tricky at the best of times, so it's just another thing which you can expect to see in individual language's phonologies. But these edge cases don't mean that it's not useful to still have the basic categories of vowel and consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T13:30:54.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T14:30:52.033" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it fair to say that a pictograms are a subset of ideograms which are a subset of logograms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is an example of an ideogram that is not a logogram or pictogram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22679" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T15:04:49.877" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T15:04:49.877" Title="Ontology of logogram, pictogram and ideogram" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29001" CreationDate="2018-09-12T14:59:43.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what extent the term &quot;obstruction&quot; is elevated to technical status in phonetics, but it is traditional for phoneticians to speak of a consonant obstruction and a vowel constriction. The distinction, as I understand it, pertains to how radical the narrowing is, and the fact that the oral tract is still aerodynamically open with vowels. In the case of a consonant, the narrowing is sufficient that it hinders or stops airflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T14:59:43.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28954" CreationDate="2018-09-12T16:51:12.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Addressing the point that &quot;online all recordings I can find over alveolo-palatal fricatives sound relatively the same&quot;, there are two problems in auditorily distinguishing such sounds. One is a common problem that what you find online is unregulated, and in particular, Wikipedia entries, which anyone can write, can be just plain wrong. The best practice is to rely on more authoritative claims made in professionally-vetted publications, such as the works of Ladefoged, Maddieson, Catford, Esling and other such luminaries. Using such a filter, one can identify Toda as a language (discussed in &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt; as having laminal alveolar, apical post-alveolar, laminal post-alveolar and sub-apical palatal fricatives); they also mention Ubykh as having laminal denti-alveolar, laminal closed post-alveolar, laminal post-alveolar and apical post-alveolar. So the problem may be that someone was simply wrong in assigning a label (because they didn't do a detailed articulatory study).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is the &quot;sample&quot; problem, which is that you need a large sample in order to perceive &quot;similar yet different&quot;. Online materials frequently do not include the dozens of tokens from multiple speakers that would be necessary to learn the difference between [ʃ] and [s̠] or [ŝ]. I find this problem to be especially noticeable with respect to the &quot;ATR&quot; distinction, that you cannot find a sufficiently rich supply of good utterances of Akan, Somali, Nandi and Mongolian (with multiple speakers so you know you're not listening to an individual-speaker property) that allows you to say &quot;these are the same; these are different&quot;. The distinctions you are referring to are extremely rare, and finding abundant materials on the acoustics of these consonants will be a challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T16:51:12.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29003" CreationDate="2018-09-13T02:20:15.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After looking around more on Wikipedia, the answer appears to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the same sequence of graphemes can serve as different parts of speech (e.g. the noun 'run' vs. the verb 'run'), those &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; separate lexemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If, within a single part-of-speech, the sequence of graphemes has multiple etymologically-separate possible meanings, those &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; separate lexemes.  Homonyms are separate lexemes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If, within a single part-of-speech, some group of definitions for a grapheme sequence are very closely related in meaning and also etymologically closely related, then those different definitions &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; constitute separate lexemes, but are instead considered different &quot;senses&quot; within a single polysemous lexeme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexeme&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category&lt;/strong&gt;, has a certain meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntactic category&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A syntactic category is a type of syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. &lt;strong&gt;Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homonym&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A distinction is sometimes made between true homonyms, which are unrelated in origin, such as skate (glide on ice) and skate (the fish), and polysemous homonyms, or polysemes, which have a shared origin, such as mouth (of a river) and mouth (of an animal). (...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A further example of a homonym, which is both a homophone and a homograph, is &lt;em&gt;fluke&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Fluke&lt;/em&gt; can mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A fish, and a flatworm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The end parts of an anchor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The fins on a whale's tail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A stroke of luck.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These meanings represent at least three etymologically separate lexemes&lt;/strong&gt;, but share the one form, fluke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polysemy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related senses. (...) The difference between homonyms and polysemes is subtle. &lt;strong&gt;Lexicographers define polysemes within a single dictionary lemma, numbering different meanings, while homonyms are treated in separate lemmata.&lt;/strong&gt; Semantic shift can separate a polysemous word into separate homonyms. For example, check as in &quot;bank check&quot; (or Cheque), check in chess, and check meaning &quot;verification&quot; are considered homonyms, while they originated as a single word derived from chess in the 14th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lemma (morphology)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of words (headword). In English, for example, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with 'run' as the lemma. 'Lexeme', in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and &lt;strong&gt;lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22677" LastEditorUserId="22677" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T12:01:25.650" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T12:01:25.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31338" CreationDate="2018-09-13T04:10:13.897" Score="9" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a couple years since I've taken a syntax class, and I've forgotten - what tests can you use to check whether a speaker uses a word as a conjunction? I seem to remember something about testing where the speaker can attach different clauses in the sentence, but I don't remember the details. I'd appreciate any explanations, or links to published papers discussing this topic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22682" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T10:02:50.433" Title="How can you test whether a word is being used as a conjunction?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28992" CreationDate="2018-09-13T05:26:22.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have provided one such list, from McWhorter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zompist.com/chance.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; gives another set of Quechua-Semitic chance correspondences. &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.ku.edu/~pyersqr/Ling107/history.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; are some Algonquian-Scots pairs, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.cam.ac.uk/li11/li11_lecture13.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some Hawaiian-Classical Greek pairs&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;Homophonic heterograph&quot; does not seem to refer to what you intend, and isn't a term in linguistics: these are called &quot;chance correspondences&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T05:26:22.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2018-09-13T15:36:14.230" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At most cases,the make up model of language is structured by the sounds pf pronunciation n tone articulated during either talking,speaking and or telling. Tge variety differs in speed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22687" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T15:36:14.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-13T18:50:22.253" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;For how many years after 1066 did we speak French in England? I tried looking this up on many sites, but I couldn’t find anything. I'm hoping someone knows their history and can tell me when people stopped speaking French in England after 1066. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22690" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T07:42:35.817" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T07:42:35.817" Title="Language in England during 1066" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29017" CreationDate="2018-09-13T19:02:26.443" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been becoming increasingly aware of words between English and Spanish that look so alike that they seem like they must be translations, and even Google Translate provides them as such. However, looking at the definitions, they're different. Sometimes slightly, other times completely. Sometimes, when asking native speakers of either language, they can't come up with closer translations on hearing the differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, these are completely different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Condescending: having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Condescendiente: tends to accommodate to the likes and wishes of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have a slight but important difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fallacy: The use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or &quot;wrong moves&quot; in the construction of an argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Falacia: False argument that appears true to trick or cause error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In other words, in Spanish it means it must be intentional while in English it doesn't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Affectation: A show, pretense, or display. Behavior that is assumed rather than natural; artificiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Afectación: Something that affects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine definitions shift with the different usage in different cultures. As I notice these, I become increasingly uncertain that I'm using the words I know correctly, because I usually learn them in one language and then try to apply them in another by using common translation tricks (&quot;tion&quot; -&gt; &quot;ción&quot;, etc.). I often verify they exist, but hardly ever compare the definitions to ensure they match completely. I wish to search these like &quot;common _ between English and Spanish&quot; on Google, but I don't know what to call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just remembered a funny one. It had to be explained to me when I said &quot;that's so exciting!&quot; in spanish and everyone looked at me weird, seemingly wondering if I really meant what I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exciting: causing great enthusiasm and eagerness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Excitante: sexually arousing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my defense, on looking at the definitions online, both words mean both things, but the prevailing meaning in colloquial usage differs. They explained to me that I wanted to use the word &quot;emocionante&quot; which in English (&quot;emotional&quot;) is not quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16991" LastEditorUserId="16991" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T20:25:03.110" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T20:25:03.110" Title="Is there a word that describes when supposed word translations have different meaning?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29014" CreationDate="2018-09-13T19:16:25.140" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on who &quot;we&quot; are. French (or rather, Anglo-Norman French) was never the universal language of England, but it was the first language of the ruling class. The kings were first-language speakers of French, but Henry IV was the first king to take the oath in English. For the elite, French became a second language by the end of the 15th century. However, the written language was Latin for a couple of centuries. Bits of French persists to this day, in a fashion, &lt;a href=&quot;http://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/userfiles/other/5850855-43.Baker.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in legal language&lt;/a&gt;, though in common law, French was not banished until 1731 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_in_Courts_of_Justice_Act_1730&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;4 Geo. II, c. 26&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T19:16:25.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29015" CreationDate="2018-09-13T19:42:52.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are called &quot;false friends&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;False friends are words in two languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. An example is the English &lt;em&gt;embarrassed&lt;/em&gt; and the Spanish &lt;em&gt;embarazada&lt;/em&gt; (which means &lt;em&gt;pregnant&lt;/em&gt;), or the word &lt;em&gt;sensible&lt;/em&gt;, which means &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; in English, but &lt;em&gt;sensitive&lt;/em&gt; in French and Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Nice when you meet someone who's both sensible and &lt;em&gt;sensible&lt;/em&gt;, isn't it?!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, the article claims that the title originated from a book calling them the false friends of the hapless translator, not of each other, which is what I always assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the article notes, the phenomenon can be caused by actual cognates diverging semantically in the different languages, or from loanwords borrowed without all their applications (or an altered application), or from coincidental homonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use this term (as the French &lt;em&gt;faux amis&lt;/em&gt;) with my students daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T19:42:52.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2018-09-13T21:35:33.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;, SPE, a feature +/- syllabic, attributed to work by C.-J. Bailey, is used to distinguish [+syll] sounds which make for a syllable from [-syll] sounds, which do not make for a syllable.  Or at least this is my interpretation of SPE. &quot;Make for a syllable&quot; means that the number of [+syll] sounds in a form will always be the same as the number of syllables in the pronunciation of the form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, using this feature, glides are distinguished as [-syll], and diphthongs are characterized as combinations of syllabic and non-syllabic sounds.  Rising diphthongs are [-syll][+syll], and falling diphthongs are [+syll][-syll]. In this conception, the difference between glide and diphthong is phonetic, and concerns whether a form has a syllable or not.  A diphthong has a syllabic sound, but a glide does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T21:35:33.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T03:29:42.680" Score="-1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently is common, so I wanted to know just how much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T16:10:04.827" Title="With how much certainty can we say that all languages have at least one word with a secondary stress?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29074" CreationDate="2018-09-14T07:12:25.607" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one lexeme has a word form &quot;goes&quot;, and another lexeme has a word form &quot;goes&quot;, are those two word forms considered by linguists to be the same?  In other words, is a word form defined solely by its grapheme sequence?  Or is it also defined by its relation to a particular lexeme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22677" LastEditorUserId="22677" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T07:27:15.340" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T14:31:14.473" Title="Is a word form defined solely by its grapheme sequence? Can two lexemes have a shared word form?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17394" CreationDate="2018-09-14T09:29:06.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Malayalam, I don't understand Tamil aside from few words. I have been to Tamil Nadu regions especially Chennai. Tamil is very different from Malayalam although they do share some vocabularies since they belong to Dravidian Family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatically speaking, Tamil is much more closer to Kannada and Telugu than Malayalam. Malayalam is far more alienated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike other Dravidian languages including Tamil, Malayalam lacks subject-verb agreement. Here is an example below from Malayalam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jhan pokunnu (I am going), Nee pokunnu [You (informal) are going], Avan pokunnu (He is going), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;pokunnu&quot; is applied for all of the forms in the present tense. So verb conjugations in Malayalam is easy and also very different from other dravidian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, subject verb agreement is absolutely necessary. Here is an example in the below link from Tamil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?&amp;amp;D1=50&amp;amp;T1=t%C4%93r&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?&amp;amp;D1=50&amp;amp;T1=t%C4%93r&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference between Malayalam and Tamil has to do with definite article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me use the word for bird which is found in both Malayalam and Tamil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malayalam - Parava (Singular), Paravakal (Plural)&#xA;Tamil - Paravai (Singular), Paravaikal (Plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It must be noted that Malayalam spoken by Muslims has Arabic influences while Malayalam spoken by Christians has Aramaic (or Syriac) influences. Malayalam spoken by Hindus has more Sanskrit and Tamil influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22691" LastEditorDisplayName="user22691" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T10:42:25.747" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T10:42:25.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29020" CreationDate="2018-09-14T09:29:35.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can definitely happen. I have not example from English ready, but the Latin word form &lt;em&gt;laudes&lt;/em&gt; can belong to two different lexemes: It can be the second person singular present tense subjunctive of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laudo#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laudare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to praise, to laud&quot; or it can be the nominative or accusative plural of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &quot;praise, accolade&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T09:36:12.577" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T09:36:12.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29024" CreationDate="2018-09-14T10:35:08.897" Score="5" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have linguistics found any evidence that Semitic languages influenced Germanic languages or vice versa (in ancient times)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BACKGROUND: I suggested to a forum of linguists that a certain Semitic word (attested to in Hebrew and Aramaic) is the basis for a similar-sounding Germanic word which essentially means the same thing. They rejected my proposal on the grounds that they know of no early interactions between Semitic and Gemanic peoples, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jewish-languages/uOetab9ewjg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10448" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T13:58:44.863" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T20:56:12.897" Title="Have linguistics found any evidence that Semitic languages influenced Germanic languages or vice versa (in ancient times)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29023" CreationDate="2018-09-14T10:53:13.443" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some very controversial theories by the German linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Vennemann&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theo Vennemann&lt;/a&gt; postulating a contact between Phoenician and proto-Germanic in the 6th to 3rd century BCE. The evidence for such contact is very thin and most linguists don't follow Vennemann.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific question on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2229/the-origin-of-the-word-god?rq=1&quot;&gt;origin of the word God&lt;/a&gt; was asked here before, and the consensus is that the word God derives from proto-Indogermanic and is not a loan from Hebrew or Aramaic. Such chance coincidences occur very often between any pair of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T14:55:04.160" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T14:55:04.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T11:13:35.863" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suposed vibratory cycle (one open and one closure) of a normal adult male: 100Hz&#xA;Video discrediting the statement: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/v9Wdf-RwLcs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/v9Wdf-RwLcs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T17:18:30.727" Title="In phonation vids the vocal cords don't close completely or very fast, but according to authors they're suposed to. Why this difference in data?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;production&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T14:27:50.530" Score="-1" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know &lt;strong&gt;translations, transcription and etymology of the translations of&lt;/strong&gt; a word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Egg&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer to have answers given in the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transcription&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Etymology (&lt;em&gt;if known&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One&lt;/strong&gt; translation-transcription-etymology &lt;strong&gt;per answer&lt;/strong&gt; is preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: The user @jknappen provided me with link on Wiktionary which contains bunch of information on the subject. &#xA;If anyone has relevant information on the cases of languages not included under link of Wikionary it would be wonderful to have it accessible.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22692" LastEditorUserId="22692" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T15:19:40.797" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:06:51.167" Title="Etymology of a word &quot;Egg&quot; in different languages" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-09-22T22:25:13.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29026" CreationDate="2018-09-14T14:43:00.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of of answering your question directly I will give you a guided tour to some answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The starting point of this tour is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/egg#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the English word egg in the wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. The entry has an etymology section, and the next stop by is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82%C5%8Dwy%C3%B3m&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indogermanic root *h₂ōwyóm&lt;/a&gt;. It has an internal possible etymology in the proto-language, and, most relevant to the question, a section of descendants. So you have a lot of words meaning &quot;egg&quot; in different Indogermanic languages at one glance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to our starting point, we now look for translations of &quot;egg&quot; into other languages. For this tour, I choose Finnish, a language from a different language family, and go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/muna#Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnish word &lt;em&gt;muna&lt;/em&gt; &quot;egg&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Again, there is an etymology section pointing to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Uralic/muna&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Uralic *muna&lt;/a&gt;, and again, there is a large descendants section giving a lot more etymologies, including Hungarian: (obsolete) &lt;em&gt;mony&lt;/em&gt;. It has a references section pointing to &lt;a href=&quot;http://uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?id_eintrag=561&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry № 561 in Uralonet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this little tour can help you to discover more etymologies of &quot;egg&quot; on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T14:43:00.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29019" CreationDate="2018-09-14T16:10:04.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people talk of sentential intonation as a kind of &quot;stress&quot;, but Í would never do thàt. Still, including that phenomenon under the umbrella of stress, all languages have many degrees of &quot;stress&quot;. Standardly, &quot;stress&quot; is a property of words, and excludes sentential intonation. Although many languages have some kind of stress (lengthening and pitch modulations are the basic phonetic exponents of stress), not all languages do. Some examples of languages without any degree of stress are Gen, Shua, Guerze and Matumbi: these are tone language. There has been a contrary belief that stress and tone are mutually incompatible properties, but there are enough languages documented with some form of &quot;stress&quot; (typically durational manipulations) that we can say that Zulu, Shambaa and various dialects of Chinese have both tone and stress. Demonstrated &quot;stress&quot; in a tone language is uncommon, and since up to a third of the world's languages are tonal, that would be a substantial source of possibly no-stress languages. French is the best-known examle of a language with neither tone nor word stress, though some people interpret the language as having final stress; Tigre is a similar less-known case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, it takes a fancy phonetic study to demonstrate that a language &quot;has secondary stress&quot;, though you do find cases like English where it is a contrastive property and is easy to document (noun &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;vomit&lt;/em&gt;). In Finnic languages, there does seem to be secondary stress (on every other syllable – it's rule-governed). But there is no evidence for secondary stress in quite a number of other languages, for example Kurdish, Arabic, Sundanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also languages which have multiple stresses within a word (a prerequisite for having primary versus secondary stress), but where no syllable is more prominent that the other. Tübatulabal and Waorani are described as having regular alternating stress but no difference in phonetic prominence between primary and secondary stresses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T16:10:04.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29025" CreationDate="2018-09-14T16:34:17.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot detect the dynamics of vocal fold vibration using standard 30 frame per second video, since they vibrate (in that individual) a dozen times per frame. This is actually a nice demonstration of the logic behind the Nyquist rate and the need to filter signals for digitization. What happens is that a camera can detect a change in glottal configuration at most once every 1/30 of a second, and in between frames, you can't tell if the vocal folds have opened and closed one entire cycle, or two cycles, three cycles, and so on. In the case of sound, you have to remove any sound component that is above 1/2 of the sampling rate; if you don't, then components will &quot;wrap around&quot;. With a SR of 10K, a component at 9.5K is mathematically the same as a 500Hz component. With video, there's no way to filter out motion, so you have to guarantee that your frame rate is high enough to detect complete cycles of motion, which is why they use high speed cameras for observing vocal fold dynamics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of complete closure, that is indeed a variable and potentially contrastive property of the voice. There is a distinction in some languages (Dinka, Mazatec, Hmong) between modal-voiced and breathy-voiced vowels. In breathy voiced vowels, the vocal folds are closed for a relatively short period of time, compared to modal-voiced vowels. Also, the folds separate and make contact continuously, that is, they don't instantly transition from &quot;complete contact&quot; to &quot;no contact&quot;, so there are degrees of openness and closedness. Moreover, we only see 2 dimensions of vocal fold vibration in such films, but in fact the tops of the folds and the bottoms of the folds kind of vibrate independently (like two separate masses with a connecting spring).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T17:18:30.727" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T17:18:30.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T18:13:35.613" Score="1" ViewCount="2290" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm trying to learn the vowel sounds of the IPA, and I'm looking at the words &quot;temerity&quot; and &quot;moment&quot; in AmE. What is especially confusing is that first word, where wiktionary lists the pronunciation as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/təˈmɛɹəti/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However when I hear or say the word, the first /ə/ sounds like a very different sound compared to the second one. The second /ə/ sounds like it should be /ɪ/ or at least something closer to that sound. Similarly &quot;moment&quot; is shown as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ˈmoʊmənt/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I hear the /ə/ as /ɪ/. And I know I'm not saying it wrong because the audio file on wiktionary, and all the ones on Forvo are what I say and hear other people say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it right to conclude that maybe the /ə/ sound covers a small range of sounds bigger than I thought previously? Or is wiktionary wrong, or is it using another notation or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22515" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T20:08:53.633" Title="When should I use /ə/ or /ɪ/ and why does it seem like they're not used correctly?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29030" CreationDate="2018-09-14T18:32:41.307" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's true that the symbol &quot;/ə/&quot; is used to transcribe a range of sounds that includes sounds close to [ɪ], so there may is overlap between the range of vowel qualities used for &quot;/ə/&quot; and &quot;/ɪ/&quot;. In particular, in American English, the &quot;schwa&quot; sound tends to be realized as a fairly &quot;high&quot;/&quot;close&quot; vowel that may sound similar to /ɪ/ or /ʊ/ when it is not word-final. In word-final position (as in the word &quot;comma&quot;), the &quot;schwa&quot; phoneme tends to be realized as a more open/low vowel that might be close phonetically to [ɐ] or [ʌ], so it might sound like the phoneme /ʌ/ or even /ɑ/. Here is a relevant chart from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/flemming/www/paper/schwaphonetics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The phonetics of schwa vowels&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Edward Flemming (2007) (I edited the copy on the right to circle the area covered by non-final schwa):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SOYsg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SOYsg.png&quot; alt=&quot;schwa chart &quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that may be causing confusion in the case of &lt;em&gt;temerity&lt;/em&gt; is dialectal differences in the phonemic identity of reduced vowels. In some dialects, the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;temerity&lt;/em&gt; would standardly be transcribed as /tɪˈmɛɹɪti/: this is the pronunciation given by the OED, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The identification of reduced /ɪ/ with /ə/ is known as the &quot;weak vowel merger&quot;, and it tends to be a feature of American English (although it seems to exist in various degrees, not as a single yes-or-no sound change: the fact that you think of the pronunciation as being &quot;/təˈmɛɹɪti/&quot;, with the first but not the second reduced vowel being identified with the schwa phoneme, seems like a good example of this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from its position in the word (final vs. non-final), another thing that influences the pronunciation of schwa is the surrounding sounds. The vowel in the first syllable of &quot;temerity&quot; occurs in the context &quot;/t_ˈmɛɹ&quot; while the vowel in the second-to-last syllable occurs in the context &quot;ˈmɛɹ_ti&quot;. It may be relevant that the later vowel is right before a syllable containing the high vowel [i].  Flemming discusses the influence of surrounding sounds on the pronunciation of schwa, but I haven't spent enough time looking at the article to be able to summarize his findings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&quot;Moment&quot; and other words traditionally transcribed with final /ənt/&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a standard accent without the &quot;weak vowel merger&quot; such as &quot;RP&quot; English, the word &lt;em&gt;moment&lt;/em&gt; has /ə/, not /ɪ/, in the final syllable. But if you speak a dialect that does have the merger, you might hear the merged sound here as sounding like /ɪ/ because it is a non-final schwa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the /n/ following the sound transcribed &quot;/ə/&quot; in this word might contribute to making it be pronounced in a way that you hear as &quot;/ɪ/&quot;. It's well known that the sequence transcribed &quot;/ən/&quot; has a pretty wide range of possible phonetic realizations that vary between accents of English. E.g. some speakers, such as John Wells, report that there is a salient phonetic difference for them between a vowel-consonant realization [ən] and a syllabic consonant realization [n̩], and that these two pronunciations are distributed according to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-syllabic-consonants.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fairly well-defined set of rules&lt;/a&gt; (my understanding is that according to Wells's rules, &lt;em&gt;moment&lt;/em&gt; would have to be pronounced with [ən] and not [n̩], because the preceding nasal consonant /m/ is supposed to inhibit a syllabic nasal realization of /ən/). I myself find it difficult to notice any categorical difference between [ən] and [n̩] in my own speech; I don't know whether I actually consistently distinguish these variants &lt;em&gt;in production&lt;/em&gt; according to some rule that I am unaware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't yet found any linguistic sources that describe a tendency for any of the variant pronunciations of &quot;ən&quot; to be realized with phonetic [ɪ] or to be identified with the phoneme /ɪ/, but some speakers apparently at least &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;perceive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; other speakers' pronunciations of (traditional) &quot;ənt/n̩t&quot; as involving some kind of front vowel: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelore.net/2015/01/19/desyllabication-of-n-in-consonant-clusters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; where an older speaker says that the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt; used by &quot;the younger generation of [American English] speakers&quot; sounds to him like it includes the vowel [ɛ]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;American English in the last decade or more has manifested a phonetic change whereby what was previously a syllabic /n/ in the clusters /dnt/ and /tnt/ at the end of words has instead developed an epenthetic [ɛ] preceding it. Accordingly, whereas the older normative pronunciation of words like &lt;em&gt;student, hadn’t, didn’t,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;patent&lt;/em&gt; typically had no vowel before [n], now the younger generation of speakers inserts an unstressed open mid-vowel [ɛ] before it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;Desyllabication of /n/ in Consonant Clusters&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Language Lore,&lt;/em&gt; by Michael Shapiro, 2015)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am somewhat doubtful about Shapiro's identification of this vowel as the &quot;open mid-vowel [ɛ]&quot;, and also, I don't think that this is an actual phonemic sound change involving the vowel phoneme /ɛ/. But it does seem to be at least a valuable piece of data about possible alternative perceptions of words that are traditionally transcribed as ending in /ənt/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similar perceptions are also brought up in the comments to the Language Log article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ask Language Log: Trend in the pronunciation of Clinton?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Mark Liberman (2016):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ken Miner said,&#xA;  July 30, 2016 @ 2:53 pm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I began to notice the [ǝn]/[ɪn] phenomenon in the 50s, when my then best friend, from Long Island, consistently pronounced ‘button’ [ˈbʌɾǝn]. Nowadays ‘didn’t’ as [ˈdɪɾɛnt] and so on I hear everywhere. Apparently not regional, but always from young people, I believe [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Steven Hartman Keiser said,&#xA;  July 30, 2016 @ 8:11 pm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was probably about 5 years ago that I first noticed this vowel variant in Midwestern speakers 20 years and younger (i.e., my own children), in words like &quot;important&quot; and &quot;button&quot;.&#xA;  The vowel sounds to me a bit closer to [ɪ] than [ə].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;KarlG's answer to the ELU question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/430384/pronunciation-of-boggling-and-similar-ing-words&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of boggling and similar *ing words&lt;/a&gt;&quot; also suggests that some speakers use a front rather than a central unstressed vowel in the context _nt#, saying that there is a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tendency of some native speakers not to pronounce vocalic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in contractions such as &lt;em&gt;didn't, wouldn't,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt;, instead inserting a schwa or lately even a fronted vowel before the &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, or in words ending in &lt;em&gt;-ant&lt;/em&gt; where vocalic &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; would otherwise be expected, like &lt;em&gt;important&lt;/em&gt;. (Take that, Ezra Klein! See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNsI0MvEYfk&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;amp;t=1m40s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video at 1:40 mark&lt;/a&gt;) While this particular pronunciation puts my teeth on edge, enough educated elites use it in their podcasts that calling it an error rather than a new variation seems ill-advised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant Language Log post by  Mark Liberman is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5523&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clipping McDonald's&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (2013), where he expresses skepticism of the idea that some dialects clearly distinguish different weak vowels in unstressed syllables (like /ɪ/ in &lt;em&gt;Alice&lt;/em&gt; vs. /ə/ in &lt;em&gt;Dallas&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T07:42:28.870" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T07:42:28.870" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29030" CreationDate="2018-09-14T18:47:09.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn the vowels of the IPA, the best approach is to consult a definitive expert source. John Esling, former president of the IPA and a well-known phonetician, has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web page&lt;/a&gt; with demonstrations of the IPA. Peter Ladefoged &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does too&lt;/a&gt;. Even the experts do not produce the vowels exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A representation like /təˈmɛɹəti/ is not necessarily a claim about phonetics, it could be a phonological analysis. Square brackets are supposed to indicate a phonetic transcription and slashes are something else (phonemic or underlying, depending on theory), but in fact conventions on bracket use are not strictly observed. You can probably count on the lack of aspiration in the transcription as evidence that this is supposed to be a claim about phonemic representation. The one problem though is that there is no contrast between schwa and wedge, but wiktionary gives the word &amp;quot;abut&amp;quot; as /əˈbʌt/, which is phonemic overdifferentiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having re-listened and looked at the wiktionary sample again, I am skeptical that this represents American English. The speaker affricates /t/, a feature of UK dialects, and does not flap (he somewhat aspirates) the /t/ in the the final syllable. Although the second purported schwa sounds different from the initial schwa, exact identity is irrelevant. The question is, which vowel is &lt;em&gt;closest&lt;/em&gt;. F1 of the two vowels is comparable, and not as low as that for high vowels, which argues against &amp;quot;ɪ&amp;quot;. F2 in the center of the vowels is similar, with the second vowel being about 150 Hz higher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, the phonetic value of that vowel is pretty variable, being influenced by preceding and following consonant and vowel context. There isn't a contrast between &lt;em&gt;ə&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ɪ&lt;/em&gt; in that context (foot-medial), so the question of what the best symbol is to notate that sound is driven by theory. If the question is &amp;quot;what is this vowel closest to, phonetically&amp;quot;, I think based on selecting just the 45 msc that seem to correspond to the vowel and playing it, the phonetic value is closest to [ɘ]. Phonetically, schwa is all over the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T20:08:53.633" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T20:08:53.633" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29023" CreationDate="2018-09-15T10:56:55.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No - however that doesn't mean semitic words which described man-made goods did not enter the Proto-germanic wordstore when that good was traded - words such as this are known as 'Wanderwörter' or 'wandering words'.&#xA;The Akkadian (the oldest known semitic language spoken in Babylon) word for silver was 'kaspum'. When refining was discovered refined silver was known as 'kaspum ṣurpum' ('ṣarāpum' meant 'to refine') or just 'ṣurpum'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'ṣurpum' seems to have been the source for the proto-germanic word '*silubra' from which comes English 'silver' and German 'Silber'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I can see no good reason to suggest that the word 'god' is such a Wanderwort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T10:56:55.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-15T18:20:59.273" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the natural language &lt;em&gt;formalisms&lt;/em&gt; that, roughly speaking, do away w/ syntax as a separate level of description? Cf. Steedman's &quot;The Syntactic Process&quot; (2000):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...syntactic structure is merely the characterization of the process&#xA;  of constructing a logical form, rather than a representational&#xA;  level...&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. at least his Combinatory Categorial Grammar qualifies. So the question is about exclusively semantics-driven formal theories of NL parsing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T19:48:42.343" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T19:48:42.343" Title="Complete NL formalisms w/out syntax" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13148" CreationDate="2018-09-15T21:40:37.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming back to my own question posted a few years ago, I have had a lot of sucsess with faseAlign. Here is a link to the documentation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fasealign.readthedocs.io/en/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;faseAlign Documentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T21:40:37.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-15T23:12:07.557" Score="7" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Huddleston and Pullum's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (CamGEL or CGEL) is widely considered a 'successor' to a previous 'great English grammar': Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Comprehensive_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ComGEL or, sometimes, also CGEL); see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/culicover.1/Publications/CGEL_Review.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ComGEL was published in 1985; CamGEL, 17 years later, in 2002. Well, next year it will have been 17 years since the publication of CamGEL (&lt;em&gt;#&lt;strong&gt;try&lt;/strong&gt;not&lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;feel&lt;strong&gt;old&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;). Does anyone know if anything similar in scope is in the works, sort of a successor to CamGEL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As explained in CamGEL's preface, its production took more than ten years. There was a Board of Consultants composed of many eminent linguists, including Barry Blake, Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, Edward Finegan, John Lyons, Peter Matthews, Keith Mitchell, Frank Palmer, John Payne, Neil Smith, Roland Sussex, and James D. McCawley. During the first six years, 'workshops were held regularly in Brisbane and Sydney to develop ideas for the framework and content of the grammar'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, CamGEL was a massive undertaking involving many, many people. Any 'successor' to it would have to be similarly massive—and therefore it is unlikely to be any sort of a secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone heard or noticed anything that would point to the existence of a currently ongoing project whose scope and purpose are similar to those of CamGEL? I did some googling, but so far have found nothing. However, I am not a linguist; I don't go to linguistics talks and conferences, and I don't read linguistics journals. Presumably many other people here do, and perhaps they may have heard or seen something relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is 'no', then why do you think that is? Surely lots has happened in the study of English grammar in the past (nearly) two decades?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the commenters are saying that perhaps not enough has happened in the field of descriptive English grammar to warrant a new effort on the scale of CamGEL. For all I know, this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about at least a &lt;strong&gt;second edition&lt;/strong&gt; (probably revised and expanded) of CamGEL itself? There are a bunch of things that are all but guaranteed to need to be revisited. Some examples:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;1. Effects of looking at expanded corpora&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the authors themselves say at the CamGEL &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/cgelerrata.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Errata page&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[T]his is as good a place as any to state a general warning that a few lists of lexical items that are claimed not to have some property are longer than they should have been — they get shorter each time we look at a larger corpus. One example is the list of strictly transitive verbs, those take a truly obligatory object (see section (b), &lt;strong&gt;Selective obligatoriness,&lt;/strong&gt; on page 246). We include the verb &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as strictly transitive; but in connection with illegal drugs an objectless use has developed (&lt;em&gt;Amy is using again&lt;/em&gt;). It looks as if verbs that have truly obligatory objects are extremely rare, especially if one considers secondary forms (occurrences in non-finite clauses like infinitivals or participials).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example is the list of monosyllabic adjectives that do not inflect for comparison (see page 1583, [9]). Inflected forms of the adjectives we list there (&lt;em&gt;cross, fake, ill, like, loath, prime, real, right, and worth&lt;/em&gt;) are certainly very rare; but &lt;em&gt;crosser&lt;/em&gt; definitely occurs (and was more frequent in British writing about a century ago); &lt;em&gt;faker&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;iller&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;realer&lt;/em&gt; can occasionally be found; and so on. &lt;em&gt;&amp;#42;Worther&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&amp;#42;worthest&lt;/em&gt; do not appear to exist at all; but in general, monosyllabic adjectives that absolutely never take comparative or superlative inflectional forms are very scarce indeed; we only list ten, and even that is a few too many. We should probably have listed just &lt;em&gt;worth, loath,&lt;/em&gt; and perhaps &lt;em&gt;prime&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Twenty years is long enough for there to be detectable changes in the language itself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is even implied in the quotation above, on the example of &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;. The most authoritative grammar of the English language should keep up with these changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. The authors had a lot of time to rethink things&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is very nearly impossible that the authors haven't, in the almost 20 years since the original publication, thought of some things they could have or should have done differently—and &lt;strong&gt;would&lt;/strong&gt; do differently if they had to start over. A second edition would give them a chance to do it. And one reason why they probably have been thinking about these things is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. The authors must have received lots of feedback and suggestions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even a grammar hobbyist like myself has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) spotted places where CamGEL potentially doesn't make sense or at the very least should be rewritten so that it is easier to understand (e.g. see my discussion with user deadrat following &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/318641/155553&quot;&gt;his answer to a question of mine&lt;/a&gt;); &lt;br&gt;&#xA;(b) come across constructions that were covered in ComGEL but that don't seem to be covered at all in CamGEL (unfortunately this was at the now-defunct Grammarly Q&amp;amp;A site, so I can't link to it);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(c) come across issues about which some further input from professional grammarians is sorely needed, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/380113/in-the-pp-near-here-why-is-near-the-head&quot;&gt;this question and the answers to it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm just a hobbyist; I can only imagine what Huddleston's and Pullum's professional colleagues might have uncovered over the last 17 years. In short, it is simply not believable that, in a work of CamGEL's scope and size, there aren't quite a few places and aspects in which it could and should be improved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11228" LastEditorUserId="11228" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T14:33:07.640" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T14:33:07.640" Title="Does anyone know if there are plans for a 'successor' to Huddleston and Pullum (CamGEL or CGEL)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29042" CreationDate="2018-09-16T04:05:59.957" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes phonologies have symbols that I haven't seen in the IPA, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nganasan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ᵘa&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;code&gt;k͜xʰ&lt;/code&gt;. Wondering how I go about finding out what these mean, and/or why they don't use the IPA symbols. Wondering if this means the IPA is missing some stuff so they had to use something custom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T05:14:11.760" Title="Missing IPA symbols" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29041" CreationDate="2018-09-16T04:10:03.207" Score="2" ViewCount="1183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why some symbols in phonology charts are put in parentheses or brackets, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;(z)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chara_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ɲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and why there is a tilde &lt;code&gt;~&lt;/code&gt; in some places, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandawe_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;dz [dʒ ~ dz]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Wondering what that means exactly, if it just means that the sound represented by their alphabet &lt;code&gt;dz&lt;/code&gt; is within the range between &lt;code&gt;dʒ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dz&lt;/code&gt; in IPA terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T04:48:12.043" Title="What parentheses and tildes mean in IPA / phonology chart" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29040" CreationDate="2018-09-16T04:48:12.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all symbols used in phonological and phonetic descriptions are letters of the IPA. The symbol &quot;~&quot; typically means &quot;alternates with&quot;, for example &quot;a~æ&quot; could be that either &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; would be possible in a given context (i.e. the sounds are in free variation). It also can be used to refer to contextual variation, for example &quot;The plural suffix, &lt;em&gt;s ~ z ~ ɨz&lt;/em&gt;...&quot;. Square brackets canonically refer to phonetic values, so [dz ~ dʒ] would be that the thing in question (perhaps phonemic /dz/) is realised either as phonetic [dz] or as phonetic [dʒ]). It does not mean &quot;some value intermediate between&quot;, it means &quot;either this value or that value&quot;. There is no notation for talking of ranges of realization that are finer-grained than two similar transcriptions. If the realization of a sound was &quot;anything between [dz] and [dʒ]&quot;, you would have to say that in words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parenthesis has two different meanings. In a list of phonemes, it implies that there is something marginal about the item in parentheses, for example one might list &quot;(x)&quot; in a phoneme chart of English, since there are a few words which some people pronouns with the velar fricative [x] (Bach, loch, Chanukah, chutzpah, Khalil). However, in writing a rule, it means &quot;0 or 1 occurrences of&quot;, so &quot;a→b/_(c)d&quot; means &quot;a becomes b when followed by d with zero or one occurrence of c intervening&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T04:48:12.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29039" CreationDate="2018-09-16T05:14:11.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;k͜xʰ is completely standard IPA, you just have to note the other parts of the chart that indicate diacritics like ʰ, ʲ and the use of the tie bar. Other superscripted letters such as raised vowels or fricativesare outside of sanctioned IPA practice. They are used because they denote the same kind of fact that writing [pʰ, pʲ] denoted: there is a sequence of articulations, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; plus &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;, which are phonologically unitary – they are a single segment. IPA allows the encoding of that segmental unitariness in some cases, and raised vowels and fricatives extend the logic of raised-letter diacritics, without official sanction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T05:14:11.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29046" CreationDate="2018-09-16T18:22:22.617" Score="0" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does there exist a phonetic english alphabet constructed from standard english letters plus diacritical marks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;code&gt;fine&lt;/code&gt; might be written &lt;code&gt;fínė&lt;/code&gt;, such that &lt;code&gt;í&lt;/code&gt; = &lt;code&gt;aɪ&lt;/code&gt; and a letter with a dot is silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I envisage using such an alphabet to give pronunciation hints while preserving standard english spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22706" LastEditorUserId="22706" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T18:46:51.500" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T21:13:29.790" Title="Phonetic english alphabet using diacritical marks?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3668" CreationDate="2018-09-16T18:53:10.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why can't semantics be the input to Syntax? Illustrate with&#xA;  examples&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question is about &quot;the input&quot;, I suppose the meaning is &quot;the only input&quot;. Take e.g. word order. It's a syntactic phenomenon, and if semantics were the only input, there would be no reason to wind up will all possible permutations of {S,V,O} in the world's languages (as it is widely agreed upon that semantics is universal). The very existence of the permutations is a witness of some other factors besides semantics contributing to syntax. The permutations are contingent on something but if they were contingent &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; on semantics, word order would be the same in all languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T18:53:10.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29043" CreationDate="2018-09-16T19:52:56.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I remember seeing some system of this type. I forget which system it was, but Wikipedia has some examples here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English#Pronunciation_without_respelling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English#Pronunciation_without_respelling&lt;/a&gt; Here’s another example from some web page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tysto.com/articles04/q1/20040226ara.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.tysto.com/articles04/q1/20040226ara.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many proposed systems for indicating the pronunciation of English words from the spelling, but very few are well known. You could probably just use a system of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T19:52:56.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29043" CreationDate="2018-09-16T21:05:33.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're looking for is precisely what dictionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries did, before there was IPA and phonetic theories had developed. Its remnants are still seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/application/resources/misc/pronkey.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcription system of the &lt;em&gt;American Heritage Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The now-seldom-used system is described in detail in unabridged editions of Webster's Dictionary, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/webstersnewinter00webs#page/n54/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yu5kI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yu5kI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gxroZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gxroZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is debatable how practical such a system would be. It must prove a formidable task for anyone to remember what each combination of a letter and diacritic represents and when a letter without a diacritic is pronounced and when it is silent. Even then, many words would still require respelling, particularly words with silent letters like &lt;em&gt;knit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;honest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to adopt a respelling system, be it &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/help/phonetics.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/application/resources/misc/pronkey.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AHD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/pronunciation-key&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, or an &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt; system like &quot;pruh-nun-see-AY-shun&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T21:13:29.790" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T21:13:29.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29026" CreationDate="2018-09-17T16:53:45.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Riffian and some other Berber languages: tamellalt &amp;lt; the white (fem.). Other varieties say : tasdelt &amp;lt; del (verb) = blanket. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T16:53:45.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-17T17:42:42.907" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm generally curious about how the brain manages multiple languages and dialects, and in particular, how it manages to switch rapidly between them in real-time conversations.  I'm sure most people have had the problem of entering a new language environment (i.e., comprehending what others are saying and formulating a response) but when they speak, the language of the previous environment comes out.  For example, suppose that you just got off the phone with your mother from Italy, and you were both speaking Italian.  Then your wife comes home, with whom you speak German, and you know you want to greet her, but you continue in Italian instead of switching &quot;cleanly&quot; to German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this happen?  And is there a way to improve the brain's ability to switch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22713" LastEditorUserId="22713" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T15:14:49.357" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T15:14:49.357" Title="Why is there a &quot;delay&quot; when changing registers, and how to minimize it?" Tags="&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;&lt;code-switching&gt;&lt;register&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29052" CreationDate="2018-09-17T19:15:24.297" Score="2" ViewCount="656" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering why English is missing some phoneme &lt;em&gt;sequences&lt;/em&gt;. By that I mean, I understand English doesn't have some more typologically unusual phonemes like /χ/, but I'm wondering about &lt;em&gt;sequences&lt;/em&gt; of phonemes, not sure if there is a better term for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But an example is something like /ɡaʊv/, pronounced like &quot;couch&quot;. Maybe it's because it is too close to /ɡalv/ as in &quot;galvanize&quot;. And there is /aʊp/. The word &quot;out&quot; exists, which is similar, but I don't know if I've heard of an &quot;oup&quot; or &quot;owp&quot;. There is &quot;cloud&quot; and &quot;clout&quot; too, but no &quot;cloup&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if the reason for this is one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It just happens to not be there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has a sound that English doesn't like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are ~strict~ rules preventing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It sounds too much like other sounds in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general wondering why English doesn't have certain phoneme sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T22:17:07.347" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T22:17:07.347" Title="Why English is missing some phoneme sequences (/aʊv/ or /aʊp/)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29051" CreationDate="2018-09-17T19:29:02.907" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's 3 or 4. Any rule that exists is not particularly &amp;quot;strict&amp;quot; (see the various kinds of counterexamples listed below). The diphthong /aʊ/ does sound similar to /æl/ or /ɑl/, but it's hard for me to imagine how this could have influenced the distribution of the sound /aʊ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 seems the closest, although a different, more diachronic-rules-oriented spin that you could put on it is &amp;quot;there happen not to have been any processes that historically acted to create (tautosyllabic) /aʊm/, /aʊp/, /aʊb/, /aʊf/, /aʊv/ sequences in modern English&amp;quot;. The reason for this is actually an exception to a historical sound change that otherwise changed /uː/ to /aʊ/: depending on how you analyze it, the existence of this exception could be seen as something that supports 2 (there is something about the English sound system that &amp;quot;doesn't like&amp;quot; these sequences—or at least, that &amp;quot;didn't like&amp;quot; these sequences at some point in history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The gap can be described in terms of /aʊ/ + a labial consonant in the same syllable&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; rule that sequences of the diphthong /aʊ/ + a labial (or labiodental) consonant don't exist in English vocabulary. Certain di- or polysyllabic words are exceptions to this rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;compound words such as &lt;em&gt;cowpox&lt;/em&gt; /ˈkaʊˌpɑks/, where /aʊ/ and /p/ belong to separate syllables (other examples include &lt;em&gt;cowpoke, cowpea, cowpie; cowbell, cowboy, cowbird; cowfish&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;endowment,&lt;/em&gt; where /aʊ.m/ occurs across syllable boundaries because of the presence of the unstressed suffix &lt;em&gt;-ment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to make a generalization that acknowledges the existence of the above words, we could say more specifically that /aʊ/ is not followed by a labial consonant &lt;em&gt;in the same syllable&lt;/em&gt; in any English word. I don't know of any exceptions to this form of the generalization in &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; English vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Would a &amp;quot;foot&amp;quot;-based rule be preferable? It's not clear to me, but there seem to be some counterexamples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, in all of the above examples, /aʊ/ is separated from the following labial consonant not only by a syllable boundary, but also by a &amp;quot;foot&amp;quot; boundary. (The exact definition of a &amp;quot;foot&amp;quot; is a bit complicated, but it can be thought of as a unit in a language's &amp;quot;metrical&amp;quot; system: in English, this is related to stress. Compound words like &lt;em&gt;cowpox&lt;/em&gt; have a kind of stress on the second element, which is shown by the presence of an unreduced vowel in the second syllable; also, the voiceless plosive /p/ is likely to be aspirated in this context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure whether it would make sense to argue for the slightly stronger generalization that /aʊ/ is not followed by a labial consonant &lt;em&gt;in the same foot&lt;/em&gt; (assuming we allow for HL feet; if not, I think this generalization would just be a restatement of the previous syllable-based one). There might be theoretical reasons to prefer this formulation of the generalization, but I know of several apparent counterexamples (all fairly marginal or obscure, though, unlike the first set of examples):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the uncommon blend word &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cowfeteria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cowfeteria&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which can be analyzed as starting with the trochaic HL foot /ˌkaʊfɪ/ or /ˌkaʊfə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the mispronunciation of the surname &amp;quot;Cowper&amp;quot; as /ˈkaʊpər/, which Greg Lee mentioned in the comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The jocular name &amp;quot;Cowvin&amp;quot; (presumably pronounced as /ˈkaʊvɪn/ or  /ˈkaʊvən/) which is attested in various web documents: e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cowvin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;The official name of the GarageSaleCow.com cow mascot: &lt;em&gt;Cowvin the Cow enjoys going to garage sales.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), various sites mentioning the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stickyfingersbakery.com/shop/cowvin-cookies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cowvin Cookie&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (which apparently was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicornlove.com/blog/2008/1/17/holy-cowvin-a-good-cookie-which-happens-to-be-vegan.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;named after a real calf that was given the name &amp;quot;Cowvin&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;), &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://poj.org/problem?id=2139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Six Degrees of Cowvin Bacon&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we follow the principle of maximizing syllable onsets, then these would not be counterexamples to the syllable-based generalization about the gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it's significant or just a coincidence that many of the exceptions start with the word &amp;quot;cow&amp;quot; (or in the case of &amp;quot;Cowper&amp;quot;, just the letters C O W).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English speakers don't show any particularly strong tendency to avoid pronouncing /aʊ/ + a labial consonant in new words that they encounter&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not there is a rule in the sense of &amp;quot;active constraint&amp;quot; in the phonology of modern English against sequences like /aʊm/ and /aʊp/ is kind of disputable. Clearly, it's not that difficult for most English speakers to perceive and pronounce sequences like /aʊm/, /aʊp/, /aʊf/ in new vocabulary words that they encounter: various German words with these sequences are used and commonly pronounced with /aʊ/ by English speakers, such as &lt;em&gt;Lebensraum,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hauptmodul,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Aufbau&lt;/em&gt; in &amp;quot;aufbau principle&amp;quot;. I think the surname &lt;em&gt;Baum&lt;/em&gt; (of German origin) is typically pronounced /bɔːm/ or /bɑːm/, but this can fairly easily be explained as a spelling-pronunciation, rather than some kind of synchronic phonological adaptation of German /aʊm/ to English /ɔːm/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think English speakers would intuitively feel that words containing sequences like /aʊm/ or /aʊp/ don't sound very &amp;quot;native English&amp;quot;, but such a feeling might arise from the absence of native words that are pronounced this way, even if there is no current &amp;quot;rule&amp;quot; per se against these sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An explanation of the gap in terms of historical sound changes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a certain standpoint, this gap can be explained by looking at the historical sound changes that created the modern English /aʊ/ diphthong. Most instances of /aʊ/ in English originated from Middle English /uː/ via the &amp;quot;Great Vowel Shift&amp;quot;, and for some reason, this change of /uː/ to /aʊ/ was inhibited before labial consonants. So, for example, Old English &amp;quot;dūn&amp;quot; corresponds to Modern English &lt;em&gt;down&lt;/em&gt; /daʊn/, Old English &amp;quot;rūm&amp;quot; corresponds to Modern English &lt;em&gt;room&lt;/em&gt; /ruːm/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that this exception to the sound change can probably be explained at least in part on articulatory grounds. I'm not sure exactly how to formulate an explanation like this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't see a similar effect &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; labial consonants—modern English has /aʊ/ after onset /m p b f v/ in words like &lt;em&gt;mouth, pouch, about, found, vow.&lt;/em&gt; The /aʊ/ in &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt; is known to come from Old English [uː] (in &lt;em&gt;mūþ&lt;/em&gt;). So an articulatory explanation would have to account for why coda labial consonants had this effect on a preceding /uː/, but onset labial consonants did not similarly affect a following /uː/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be relevant that the rounded portion of the diphthong /aʊ/ is at the end, but I'm not sure exactly how to formulate an explanation that makes use of this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/linguistics/KPL/3_2001/KPL_2001_kubozono.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Markedness of Diphthongs&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Haruo Kubozono, references a discussion of the historical development of this sound in Ekwall 1965/75: 53 (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Historische neuenglische Laut- und Formenlehre.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, English translation by A. Ward 1975. &lt;em&gt;A History of Modern English Sounds and&#xA;Morphology.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;/aʊ/ also doesn't occur before coda velar consonants&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen it noted that /aʊ/ also does not occur before a tautosyllabic velar consonant in modern English (we don't see words with /aʊk/, /aʊg/ or /aʊŋ/). The historical explanation for the absence of /aʊ/ + velar sequences seems to be a bit different than the explanation for the absence of /aʊ/ + labial sequences. In the case of /aʊg/, it fits with the general absence of /g/ after &amp;quot;long vowels&amp;quot; or diphthongs in native English words; the historical explanation for this is that native English &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt; was vocalized after a vowel except for when it was a geminate or &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; consonant (which shortened the preceding vowel). Likewise, the absence of /aʊŋ/ can be explained in terms of the origins of /ŋ/ from the heavy cluster /ng/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of /aʊk/ in modern English seems to be the strongest candidate for another gap (aside from the /aʊ/ + labial gap) that could be accounted for by a rule that specifically involves /aʊ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The history of the /aʊk/ gap&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there does not seem to be as much data about the historical evolution of the relevant back vowel sounds before /k/ as there is about the historical evolution of Middle English /uː/ before labial consonants. The absence of /aʊk/ looks almost (but not quite) accidental: I have only been able to find a small number of words where we might expect to see /aʊk/ in present-day English. All of them have shortened vowels before the /k/ instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the verb &lt;em&gt;brook&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; OE &lt;em&gt;brūcan&lt;/em&gt;). The Oxford English Dictionary says that &amp;quot;The phonetic history is unusual&amp;quot; and describes the modern English form as a descendant of &amp;quot;a Middle English brōken, found already, as a by-form, in Layamon&amp;quot; (this form is also supposed to be the source of &amp;quot;Scots bruik&amp;quot;). In this case, the short /ʊ/ in present-day English would be derived from earlier long [uː] from Great-Vowel-Shift raising of Middle English long [oː].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the verb (and noun) &lt;em&gt;suck&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; OE &lt;em&gt;sūcan&lt;/em&gt;). Spellings with &lt;em&gt;ou/ow&lt;/em&gt; existed in the Middle English period. The OED doesn't give any detailed explanation of the development of this word's pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the noun &lt;em&gt;duck.&lt;/em&gt; The Oxford English Dictionary says that the length of&#xA;the vowel in Old English is uncertain, and that already in Middle English&#xA;we find the three &amp;quot;types&amp;quot; dukke/duk, dōke/dook, and douke/dowke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the obsolete verb &lt;em&gt;tuck&lt;/em&gt; and related noun &lt;em&gt;tucker&lt;/em&gt; from Old English &lt;em&gt;tūci(ġ)an.&lt;/em&gt; Some Middle English examples of &lt;em&gt;touker&lt;/em&gt; are mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.snsbi.org.uk/Nomina_articles/Nomina_28_Kitson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Kitson's review of Gillis Kristensson's &lt;em&gt;Survey of Middle English Dialects...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (p. 145).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a word “louk” &amp;lt; OE &lt;em&gt;lūcan&lt;/em&gt; (now obsolete or dialectal) which as far as I can tell has been pronounced with /aʊk/. It seems to me that there aren't really enough examples to establish a clear generalization for the development of OE ūk / Middle English /uːk/, but there does seem to be some support for the idea that /aʊk/ was somehow avoided by the application of various sound changes to words that would otherwise be expected to have /aʊk/—or possibly in some cases by the loss of words where this sound sequence would have developed (the OED has an entry for an obsolete/dialectal word for body &lt;em&gt;bouk&lt;/em&gt; from Old English &lt;em&gt;būc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The remaining consonants that /aʊ/ does combine with are all coronal&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of /aʊ/ + velar consonant may be relevant for certain theories about the phonology of modern English because it means that the coda consonants that /aʊ/ &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; combine with can be described as those that belong to a particular phonological class: they are all &amp;quot;coronal consonants&amp;quot;.&#xA;Namely, /t, d, n, θ, ð, s, z, tʃ, dʒ/ (as in &lt;em&gt;shout, loud, gown, mouth (n.), mouth (v.), house, rouse, couch, gouge&lt;/em&gt;) as well as /r l/ (as in &lt;em&gt;hour, owl&lt;/em&gt;) for speakers without pre-rhotic or pre-lateral breaking of /aʊ/. The &amp;quot;coronal&amp;quot;-based rule for the distribution of /aʊ/ is given in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=j8UcBQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA105&amp;amp;lpg=PA105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beginning Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Laurie Bauer, 2012 (p. 105).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some theories, coronal consonants may be expected to have some kind of special status that allows them to occur more freely than other kinds of consonants at the end of words (or syllables). For comparison, English also has one (not too infrequent) word that ends in /aɪnt/—&lt;em&gt;pint&lt;/em&gt;—but no words that end in /aɪmp/ or /aɪŋk/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T06:16:09.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29054" CreationDate="2018-09-17T20:01:09.303" Score="-1" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have seen a few tonal languages, such as Thai, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/ref/tones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1PBcu.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/section/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/srEKN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://clevercantonese.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/cantonose-tones-part-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNYee.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not too familiar with which other languages have tonal features. But I'm wondering if there are any alternatives to these tonal features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rising tones (Mandarin 2nd tone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Falling tones (Mandarin 4th tone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Constant tones (Mandarin 1st tone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rise then fall (seems like Thai's falling tone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fall then rise (Mandarin 3rd tone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are any other patterns to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_contour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;contour-based&lt;/em&gt; tonal systems&lt;/a&gt;, such as (F = Fall, R = Rise, C = constant):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FRF&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RFR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RCR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FCF&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RCF&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FCR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;RFRF&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also wondering if there are any examples of tones on consonants rather than vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically wondering how complex it gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T20:26:48.867" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T20:44:00.833" Title="How complex contour tones get in languages" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29053" CreationDate="2018-09-17T20:44:00.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the phonetic level, nobody really know how complex it &quot;can&quot; be. As you presumably know, F0 is a windowed function, and if we take a standard window of 10 msc., you can get a huge number of integer vectors for durations up to 400 msc. But it's physically impossible to change F0 from 100 Hz to 400 Hz within the course of 10 or 20 msc. There are also very many sequences of pitch-difference which people cannot distinguish (e.g. 100-101-100 versus 100-100-100).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard theory of tone contours is that a tone begins at some level, and then goes up or down when a new level specification is encountered. For example, the sequence bábàbābȁ has the levels H, L, M and XL, in that order, and each on a separate vowel &quot;a&quot;. A contour the same w.r.t. the tonal points, the difference being that there are two or more levels specified on a single vowel. Thus a (simple) falling tone would be a sequence H+L on one vowel and a rising tone would be L+H on one vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many languages have more than just two levels, so combinations like L+H vs L+M, M+L vs H+L and so on are also well attested. If there are 5 levels, then you can get 20 contours (sequences of two distinct tone levels). We also know from observation that contours can have 3 defining points so 80 contours is a theoretical possibility. At this point, one might insist that a contour can only have 3 defining levels. I know of one counterexample, Lomongo, which is said to have 4-element contours, and will not commit to the veracity of the claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with a limit of 3 defining points, no language comes close to attesting that level of complexity. One generalization that seems to hold of known 3-tone complexes is that there is always a change in direction, that is you don't just &quot;go up a little then go up a lot&quot;, instead contours are of the form &quot;go (up, then) down, then up, then down...&quot;, and there can be distinctions in how far on goes up or down. Using numeric values for levels with 1 being the lowest, you may find 1-2-1, 1-3-2, but not *1-2-5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, anything is computationally possible, but once you factor in perception, very many distinctions are not and cannot actually realized in languages, because they are not reliably perceptible. Even though computers can compute F0 in a very narrow window, we use a much wider window for speech perception. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants can also have tone. This is fairly common in the case of sonorants (especially in the syllable coda), not so common but attested in the case of voiced obstruents, for example Logoori and Luganda. Phonologically speaking though not phonetically, even voiceless obstruents can have tone (as in Logoori and Luganda), but the evidence is indirect, being based on what the tones do to pitch of surrounding voiced segments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T20:44:00.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29051" CreationDate="2018-09-17T20:56:23.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a gap which as far as I know escapes explanation, and that is the &quot;blort-generalization&quot;. The rule is that there are no root syllables with CLV̆LC, where V̆ is a short / lax vowel, C is a consonant, and L is a liquid &lt;em&gt;l,r&lt;/em&gt; or. Examples of such a sequence would be &quot;flæl, blɔrt, slɪlm, krɛlm...&quot;. &quot;Blurt&quot; = [blɹ̩t] does not have that pattern, since it lacks a vowel-plus-liquid sequence. I do not know if such sequences existed in Proto-Indo-European and were mutilated in some fashion, or does this reflect a gap in the PIE lexicon. There are certainly ample numbers of CL onsets and LC codas: with respect to grammar and mental representation of language, I favor analysis 1 – there just aren't any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T20:56:23.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29058" CreationDate="2018-09-17T23:08:56.303" Score="2" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;With &lt;code&gt;x V y&lt;/code&gt; structure, you divide the (potentially) long nouns/adjective phrases into parts separated by the verb, so mentally you can group everything pretty quickly. But if it is &lt;code&gt;V x y&lt;/code&gt;, or even &lt;code&gt;x y V&lt;/code&gt;, then it seems like it would be more difficult to mentally keep track of all the adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in English you might have a sentence like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The icy-cold, free-flowing, crystal clear river with lots of fish&#xA;and few plants was wider than the warmer river that had all the &#xA;trees growing right next to the edge, where we saw that bird that &#xA;one time early in the morning.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In VSO it might look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Was wider than&#xA;the icy-cold, free-flowing, crystal clear river with lots of fish and few plants&#xA;...(something)...&#xA;the warmer river that had all the trees growing right next to the edge, where we was that bird that one time early in the morning&#xA;...(something)...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In SOV it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The icy-cold, free-flowing, crystal clear river with lots of fish and few plants&#xA;...(something)...&#xA;the warmer river that had all the trees growing right next to the edge, where we was that bird that one time early in the morning&#xA;...(something)...&#xA;was wider than&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's almost as if VSO, VOS, SOV, OSV are more &quot;computational&quot; structures than the SVO or OVS forms, since you have to essentially place a delimiter in there somewhere to distinguish between the two things (at least it seems). In that sense maybe it is even easier to comprehend than SVO/OVS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it seems more like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stack&lt;/a&gt;, which would require more memory resources to handle, since you collect the data and finally plug them into the verb (in the OSV / SOV forms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, without having grown up in alternative-to-SVO-as-the-base forms of language, I can't tell if it's harder to keep track of the current context in the alternative forms. So basically, when we introduce the first noun-adjective group, we then introduce the verb, so we know we are about to do something with it. But if the object comes next instead, then it seems like it could be misinterpreted as a list temporarily, until finally the verb arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what your thoughts are or if there is any advantage conceptually between the different forms. Plus, how these complex chains of adjectives and such are handled in non-SVO languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T02:56:53.140" Title="How VSO or SOV languages deal with nouns with lots of adjectives" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;svo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29065" CreationDate="2018-09-18T01:38:32.707" Score="2" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there exist any direct Native American or other Indigenous people's transcript of a story or a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; something in their language. By indigenous I mean those living in the Amazon, New Guinea, or Arctic regions, for example. Even Mayan, Aztec, or Incan would work too (in the native language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most linguistic examples from these languages are snippets or perhaps as much as a single phrase or sentence, but I haven't seen complete stories multi-sentence structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Native American stories here&lt;/a&gt;, and click into one of the texts (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/yat/yat03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yana Texts&lt;/a&gt;), but it seems like an English retelling of stories &lt;em&gt;heard&lt;/em&gt; from indigenous peoples. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/inu/eft/eft08.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Same with stories from the Inuit&lt;/a&gt;. Basically looking for a written transcription (either a Romanization or in their original language like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics&lt;/a&gt;) of some story or content from an indigenous language, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; written in English but instead written in the native language (or Romanization of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to see something like what follows (but for any Native/Indigenous language), but even longer and more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kDL7j.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that most (all perhaps) indigenous languages didn't have writing until it was invented in the 1800's or 1900's or so, so Romanizations work well too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some I have since encountered a while later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quechantribe.com/documents/documents/Stories-Quechan-Oral-Literature.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quechantribe.com/documents/documents/Stories-Quechan-Oral-Literature.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quechantribe.com/documents/documents/Xiipuktan_(First_of_All).pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quechantribe.com/documents/documents/Xiipuktan_(First_of_All).pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uwgb.edu/oneida/Texts.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.uwgb.edu/oneida/Texts.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://soda2.sou.edu/awdata/030124c1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://soda2.sou.edu/awdata/030124c1.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mingolanguage.org/texts/tom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.mingolanguage.org/texts/tom/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1gx6543n/qt1gx6543n.pdf?t=noidx4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pub-jschol-prd.escholarship.org/uc/item/1gx6543n&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pub-jschol-prd.escholarship.org/uc/item/1gx6543n&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jspence/wailaki/wailaki-lexicon.php?mode=browse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jspence/wailaki/wailaki-lexicon.php?mode=browse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_crk_book-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_crk_book-1/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/28287/9789087280109-Text.pdf?sequence=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/28287/9789087280109-Text.pdf?sequence=4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T21:14:15.287" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T21:14:15.287" Title="Transcripts for Languages with Few Resources (Such as Native American Languages)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29056" CreationDate="2018-09-18T02:56:53.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main ways that such languages deal with this problem. I'll be focusing specifically on SOV languages, since they're more common and I know more of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first solution is what Latin uses: mark noun case explicitly. In other words, in the sentence &lt;em&gt;domin&lt;strong&gt;us&lt;/strong&gt; bon&lt;strong&gt;us&lt;/strong&gt; servum ferit&lt;/em&gt;, the adjective attaches to the subject, and in &lt;em&gt;dominus bon&lt;strong&gt;um&lt;/strong&gt; serv&lt;strong&gt;um&lt;/strong&gt; ferit&lt;/em&gt;, it attaches to the object. More generally, explicit case makes it clear what's the subject and what's the object when the verb doesn't fall between to separate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second solution is what Japanese uses (in addition to case-marking particles, which fall under the previous point): fix the order of words in a noun phrase. Japanese is strongly head-final in its syntax, and as the head of the noun phrase, the noun itself always comes at the end; adjectives always precede the nouns they modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know of any language which is SOV without any sort of case marking at all, which is telling. The second solution is used alongside the first one, not instead of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T02:56:53.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-18T05:16:53.777" Score="6" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Variation_among_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interesting read&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain adjectives or determiners, and their development is often a sign of languages becoming more analytic instead of synthetic, perhaps combined with the loss of inflection as in English, Romance languages, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Torlakian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joseph Greenberg in Universals of Human Language describes &quot;the cycle of the definite article&quot;: Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could elaborate on this. I don't quite understand the second paragraph what some example sentences would look like for each stage. In this context, not sure what a demonstrative would be, vs. a generic article, definite/indefinite context, and noun markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand what follows as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definite articles typically arise from demonstratives meaning &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. For example, the definite articles in most Romance languages—e.g., el, il, le, la, lo — derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine), illa (feminine) and illud (neuter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English definite article the, written þe in Middle English, derives from an Old English demonstrative, which, according to gender, was written se (masculine), seo (feminine) (þe and þeo in the Northumbrian dialect), or þæt (neuter). The neuter form þæt also gave rise to the modern demonstrative that. The ye occasionally seen in pseudo-archaic usage such as &quot;Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe&quot; is actually a form of þe, where the letter thorn (þ) came to be written as a y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a definite article is something like &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;. This derives from a demonstrative like &lt;code&gt;that&lt;/code&gt;. The demonstratives in Latin are listed above for example (&lt;code&gt;ille&lt;/code&gt;, etc., not sure how many there are, if they are huge in number with conjugations like verbs, etc.). So that gets us [from Stage 0] to Stage 1. But not sure what Stage 2 and 3 are. Wondering if one could explain this in more depth. Hopefully from that it will provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt; of words like &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T06:19:23.240" Title="Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language" Tags="&lt;articles&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;&lt;particles&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29057" CreationDate="2018-09-18T10:13:06.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest indigenous writing uses the Mayan script. The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mesoamerican literature&lt;/a&gt; gives links to has a list of the different codices (the respective articles have links to images).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;site you linked to&lt;/a&gt; omits the transcriptions of the native language, but the transcriptions are part of the original books. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/yat/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yana texts&lt;/a&gt; can also be found in the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/yanatexts00sapirich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which includes transcriptions. You can try searching for the other books on archive.org if you're interested in the texts in the native languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T10:13:06.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29062" CreationDate="2018-09-18T11:00:09.503" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29059/understanding-the-purpose-of-determiners-articles-demonstratives-in-language&quot;&gt;Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language&lt;/a&gt;, wondering why not just use demonstratives everywhere instead of determiners. It looks like &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; is the most popular word in English, and according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, demonstratives are lower on the evolutionary hierarchy than determiners. In English, there are only 4 demonstratives from what I've seen, &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;that&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;these&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;those&lt;/code&gt;. So instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The person went to the store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This person went to that store.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the two sentences don't mean the same thing in current English, but I'm wondering what if they did. Wondering if there are any languages that just stick to determiners. That's probably what &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/feature/37A#2/25.5/148.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is showing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering why the need for determiners, why didn't it just stay demonstratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T00:44:41.853" Title="Why not just use demonstratives instead of determiners" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29061" CreationDate="2018-09-18T15:10:34.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't consider it easy to justify the distinction between demonstratives and determiners, since as far as I can tell, syntactically at least, there is none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your example sentences show exactly why English has all these words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The person went to the store&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good sentence to use in a context where there really is one obvious candidate for &quot;person&quot;, and one obvious candidate for &quot;store&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This person went to that store&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good sentence to use in a context where there might be more than one person and/or more than one store. I'm sure you can agree that the cognitive load is (at least somewhat) higher when trying to parse this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Obviously the two sentences don't mean the same thing in current English, but I'm wondering what if they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt; meant &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; and we didn't have the word &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;, then some other construction would come about to fill the gap left by &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt;. Something like &lt;code&gt;this here&lt;/code&gt;, which would probably contract and turn into something like &lt;code&gt;thisser&lt;/code&gt;. But this is all very speculative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe &quot;meaning&quot; isn't the best word to use to describe these words, since they don't refer to objects, actions or anything else. Their use is more a discourse marking tool. The distinction between &lt;code&gt;a/the&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;this/that/these/those&lt;/code&gt; is useful for giving a hint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;the person&lt;/code&gt; - I expect you know which one I mean&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;this person&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;that person&lt;/code&gt; - I am explicitly telling you which person.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;a person&lt;/code&gt; - I don't expect you to know which one because this is new information to you&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pointed out that there is cognitive load associated with your second sentence above. It's efficient to reduce cognitive load, isn't it? so in the commonest case, &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; are used. And that gives the listener a lot of what s/he needs to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:11:31.887" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:11:31.887" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29059" CreationDate="2018-09-18T15:58:45.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I explained the &lt;em&gt;why it's useful&lt;/em&gt; in your other question so if you're asking about the process as curiousdannii said, that is you are asking about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycle.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the grammaticalisation cycle&lt;/a&gt;, I could explain a little about the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Latin has a rich case system allowing free word order which is used as as a discourse marker; words encoding new or salient information tend to go at the end of the sentence)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For unrelated reasons, the case system collapses, so that word order becomes more rigid, which means there's pressure to find another way to solve the problem which was solved by the flexibility in word order before. Demonstratives are a natural candidate&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of demonstratives weakens because they are now being used much more. So they are generally phonetically unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We now have unstressed morphemes adjacent to semantically loaded lexemes. These have a strong tendency to cliticise, which is what happened in Romanian and others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar story goes for Germanic languages too, and probably other language families. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T06:19:23.240" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T06:19:23.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29057" CreationDate="2018-09-18T17:09:26.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me exactly what your criteria are: the most stringent version that I can reasonably imagine would be substantial (2-page?) narratives in written form, composed by a native speaker in the language and written in the language by a native speaker. That would exclude translations of texts from other languages – however, if you do include translations, then there are myriad Bible translations performed by native speakers (the contemporary standard for Bible translation is that the linguists assist in developing a writing system but the native speakers do the translating). &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebible.org/pdf/zpmNT/zpmNT_all.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is an example of the Bible in Zapotec&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are stories in &lt;a href=&quot;https://tulaliplushootseed.com/sy%C9%99y%C9%99hub-stories/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lushootseed&lt;/a&gt; which may qualify. For example, the story &lt;a href=&quot;https://tulaliplushootseed.com/sy%C9%99y%C9%99hub-stories/bear-and-ant/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sčətxʷəd ʔi tsiʔiɬ ƛ̕aƛ̕ac̓apəd&lt;/a&gt; &quot;by&quot; sʔadacut is available. This is a traditional story, so it would be more accurate to say that he told the story, rather than composing it. However, it is not clear who did the transcribing/writing. In light of the fact that he died in 1973, I suspect that the written version is based on the recorded telling of the story (which is available in that link). It is highly likely that some of the stories from tsi siʔab &lt;a href=&quot;https://tulaliplushootseed.com/dx%CA%B7s%C9%99hubtx%CA%B7-story-tellers/vi-taq%CA%B7s%C9%99blu-hilbert/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taqʷšəblu&lt;/a&gt; are written by her, since she did write in Lushootseed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://tulaliplushootseed.com/sy%C9%99y%C9%99hub-stories/her-first-basket/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This story&lt;/a&gt; is attributed to her, although the recording is not of her voice. I don't have a copy of the book, but she published a collection of stories, &lt;em&gt;Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound&lt;/em&gt;: but it is possible that these are just translations and they do not have the original texts. It is probably also unclear which stories were written down by taqʷšəblu, and which were written by Tom Hess, the main linguist involved in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T17:09:26.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29057" CreationDate="2018-09-18T17:43:01.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mayan society transcribed a large part of its literature into the Latin alphabet shortly after the conquest in the 16th century. Some of the surviving literature is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.famsi.org/research/bolles/PostConquestMayanLit.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous (and quite complex) example of Mayan litterature is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popol_Vuh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Popol Vuh&lt;/a&gt;, which was written in Quiché (and translated in Spanish) in the early 18th century. You will find a 300 page edition with line by line translation in English in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PV-Literal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T17:43:01.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29069" CreationDate="2018-09-19T00:30:29.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="2672" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to tell the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_glottal_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[h]&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ħ]&lt;/a&gt;. I get the technical difference of pharyngeal vs. glottal, but I don't see how it's possible to control those two regions of your anatomy separately. To me it all feels like one thing. So then the only difference I can see between the two is that [h] is quieter than [ħ], but that can be produced by other means. Maybe then it would simply be [hʱ] vs. just [h].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering partially too if there is a technique or way to learn how to distinguish between these two sounds, how to produce them, etc. I don't think I am anatomically producing two different sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then [ɦ] would even just be [hʱʱ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T04:29:48.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T04:29:48.373" Title="The difference between [h] and [ħ]" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29068" CreationDate="2018-09-19T01:22:47.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to teach the futility of language acquisition via anatomical instruction, by teaching students (in words) how to produce the ejective [p'], which nobody could so, and then I said &quot;Do this&quot; and pronounced [p'ə], and probably half of them could do it. The point is, you need a preferably interactive model using a real language and a speaker thereof. Hearing and mimicking examples of [h] versus [ħ] in Arabic is the easiest way to get the difference, because there are a fair number of Arabic speakers out there. Plus, Arabic has both [ħ] and [h]. I would even recommend finding a bunch of speakers from different places, so that you can extract the &quot;sameness&quot; that underlies individual differences in pronunciation. (That could backfire, however).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you might branch out and get examples from speakers of Somali. However, you are likely to discover that &quot;ħ&quot; is not uniform across speakers and languages, and IPA in fact recognizes two different sounds, ʜ (the epiglottal trill) and ħ (the pharyngeal fricative). There is phonetic literature on the production of the Arabic consonant, and Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson observe that they are actually epiglottals, not pharyngeals. If you can locate a speaker of the Burkikhan dialet of Agul, you ought to be able to get suitable training in the difference between pharyngeal and epiglottal fricatives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning to hear the difference should be easier, by listening to minimal and near-minimal pairs. Since this distinction plagues Arabic language teachers, finding materials, there should be training materials out there &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;. In the interim, you can use Forvo to get samples to listen to (search for ح and it will return words with ħ somewhere, search for ه and you will get h which unfortunately includes a bunch of final h's that are not pronounced). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T01:22:47.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29084" CreationDate="2018-09-19T01:44:14.840" Score="3" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29059/understanding-the-purpose-of-determiners-articles-demonstratives-in-language&quot;&gt;Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language&lt;/a&gt; suggested that case systems break down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For unrelated reasons, the case system collapses, so that word order becomes more rigid, which means there's pressure to find another way to solve the problem which was solved by word order before. Demonstratives are a natural candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what this means, what it looks like, and why it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T15:20:15.247" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T15:20:15.247" Title="How &quot;the case system collapses&quot; in e.g. Latin" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T06:23:54.370" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;On another question a linguist told me that linguists define word forms by their phoneme sequence rather than their grapheme sequence.  This makes me wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the spoken words &lt;em&gt;going&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;goin'&lt;/em&gt; the same word form?  (The former ending with an &lt;em&gt;NG&lt;/em&gt; phoneme and the latter ending with an &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; phoneme.)  If not, what is the term for how they relate?  Calling them synonyms seems to not capture the closeness of the relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the spoken words &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt; different word forms if the former is pronounced with an &lt;em&gt;AO&lt;/em&gt; phoneme (rhymes with &quot;or&quot;) and the latter is pronunced with an &lt;em&gt;AA&lt;/em&gt; phoneme (rhymes with &quot;odd&quot;)?  If they are, what's the term for how these two word forms relate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22677" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T15:14:26.933" Title="Are alternative pronunciations (with or without alternative spellings) different word forms from each other?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29070" CreationDate="2018-09-19T09:02:43.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What it means: the language changes in such a way that cases become indistinguishable, so that they cannot be used to express information any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't comment on the process in Latin, but the case system of North-West Semitic collapsed in two branches, Aramaic and Canaanite (Hebrew, Phoenician and some Transjordian languages), due to sound changes. The original endings are usually reconstructed as &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; for the singular. Both Canaanite and Aramaic dropped these final short vowels. After this sound change, the cases are indistinguishable, and grammatical functions need to be indicated through other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These other means to indicate grammatical functions can be various. In Latin, sentence structure became more rigid so that subject and object can be distinguished. However, in Aramaic and Hebrew, sentence structure is already determined by information status and objects can be marked with an object marker (though not obligatorily so). The Aramaic object marker developed from a preposition; the origins of the Hebrew marker are unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the question why it happens: sound change continuously happens (the extent to which it influences grammar varies), as a result of noise in the language acquisition process. (But this is really the topic for a different question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course, these are also slow and partially intertwined processes. Loss of short final vowels as discussed above is possible when they are less and less clearly pronounced, which happens in part because they are less and less relevant to meaning. Thus, things as object markers are already available in some contexts, get expanded, leading to a weaker need for case endings, leading to weaker articulation, leading to more usage of those object markers, etc. The process reinforces itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T14:59:39.727" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T14:59:39.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29020" CreationDate="2018-09-19T09:55:01.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, words (and therefore word forms) are not made of graphemes. They're made of phonemes; either the kind of phoneme spoken as sound (as in English) or the kind of phoneme gestured with the hands (as in American sign language).  No human infant learns to speak with graphemes; we learn either with sounds, or with gestures.  So human languages are shaped with sounds, or with gestures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing is simply a technology to &lt;em&gt;represent&lt;/em&gt; words in graphical form.  By the time that writing arrives, the words were already &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;.  Writing can represent words in infinitely varied ways (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reforms_of_the_English_language#Spelling_reforms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cf.&lt;/a&gt;).  You could represent English words with Arabic or Devanagari or Tengwar characters if you wanted, or make up your own; it would still be the same words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general when studying language it pays off to distinguish language from writing, and to set writing aside unless you're dealing with writing-specific phenomena.  Words and word forms exist in the domain of language, not of writing.  If you want to understand words, first forget all about writing, and concentrate on the words themselves. You can later deal with the question of how they're conventionally graphed in a given culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's consider the definition of “word form”.  Technical terms can be tricky because they can have more specific meanings than the same terms would have in general language.  For example, we refer casually to our &quot;weight&quot; in kilograms, but in the technical language of physics, that would be our &quot;mass&quot;; the &quot;weight&quot; is a different property, dependent on local gravity and measured in Newtons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, no one would blame you for using &quot;word form&quot; to mean, in a casual way, &quot;the form of a word&quot;.  A word is an association between a sequence of phonemes (its form) and a meaning.  So if you use the expression &quot;word form&quot; to mean &quot;this particular sequence of phonemes&quot;, then sure, many words will share the same form.  That's the common phenomenon of homophones.  For example, &quot;matches&quot; in &quot;I brought matches to make a fire&quot; and in &quot;he matches the criminal description&quot; are the same form (the same sequence of phonemes), even though they're different words (different form/meaning pairs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when linguists talk of &quot;word forms&quot;, they're not just talking about forms of a word in a general way.  Let's consult the &lt;em&gt;Routledge Dictionary of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; to see a technical definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;word form&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The concretely realized &lt;strong&gt;grammatical form&lt;/strong&gt; of a word in the context of a sentence. The word in the surface structure that corresponds to the lexeme as the (unalterable) abstract base unit of the lexicon is realized &lt;strong&gt;according to grammatical categories (such as tense, number, case, person, and so on) in altered ‘word forms,’&lt;/strong&gt; cf. &lt;em&gt;picture, paint&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Interesting pictures were painted.&lt;/em&gt; [emphases mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of things implicit in this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some languages, some words can have multiple forms.  Earlier I said that a word is a pairing of form and meaning.  The notion of &quot;word forms&quot; complicate this definition a little bit; now there are several possible forms which we consider as belonging to &quot;the same word&quot;, in some sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These word forms can be conceptualized as &quot;alterations&quot; of a basic (or &quot;citation&quot;) form.  The most common alterations are affixes (walk→walked) and internal sound changes (sing→sang), though in some cases the forms are totally different (be→was).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The criteria to consider these alternate forms &quot;the same word&quot; are &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;; that is, they depend on the role of the word within the sentence.  In English, for example, verbs will change for the past tense (though not for the future); so the past tense requires its own word form in this language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is how we can tell that &quot;was&quot; is a word-form of &quot;be&quot;; because it fulfils the same grammatical function as &quot;walked&quot; or &quot;sang&quot; do in a similar context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the technical definition of &quot;word form&quot;, it makes no sense to say that &quot;(the) matches&quot; is the same word form as &quot;(he) matches&quot;.  They're the same &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt;, but for different &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;; and a word-form is a grammatical variant of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to understand the motivation for the technical definition is to consider what we use this concept of word-forms &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;.  You might be doing some corpus analysis, for example.  Suppose you want to calculate the frequencies of common verbs, something very useful for language learners.  But you don't want to count all verb inflections as different items to learn (you don't want to count &quot;learn&quot; and &quot;learning&quot; and &quot;learned&quot; as different objects); you want to count the verbs as lexemes (because, after some instruction, learners can derive their own word forms according to context).  So when you run your algorithm, &lt;code&gt;I match&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;I'm matching&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;he matches&lt;/code&gt; all should increase the occurrence counter of the verb &lt;code&gt;TO MATCH&lt;/code&gt;.  But &lt;code&gt;the matches&lt;/code&gt; should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be counted, because it's a different word.  It doesn't matter that it has the same surface form as the verb &lt;code&gt;matches&lt;/code&gt;; it's still a different word, so it's not a hit of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;matches&lt;/code&gt; word-form &lt;em&gt;that belongs to&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;TO MATCH&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T10:03:35.740" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T10:03:35.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29020" CreationDate="2018-09-19T11:50:10.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to @jknappen I want to point out that modern linguistics tends to distinguish between representation and idea, for lack of a better word, so the difference between phoneme and grapheme is irrelevant. Going by a recent question for the definition of &quot;word&quot;, there is no generally accepted answer. In information theory the smallest unit of exchange is a bit, in Computer Science, continuing the idea, a word is a fixed size bit sequence. In detail, there is a difference between phonemics and phonetics. Phonetically, @boiko's &quot;matches&quot; are not the same, the a in matchstick matches is longer - probably due to stress and place in sentence - though the broad phonemic descriptions are equivalent. So context is important, the word forms are not the same, the written description is broad and loose, and homophones are often enough related by etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: What a word-form exactly should be, depends on context, too. When searching for the term, I do see it used a lot in Computer Vision, so the written form does matter to some. There are results for developmental research on speech acquisition, too (check for example &quot;&lt;em&gt;Lexical exposure and word-form encoding in 1.5-year-olds&lt;/em&gt;&quot; by Swingley et al. They use the more specific term &quot;sound form&quot; once but otherwise use &quot;word form&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T14:31:14.473" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T14:31:14.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29070" CreationDate="2018-09-19T12:07:54.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The collapse of the case system in Latin was caused by sound shifts that made the case endings indistinguishable for many nouns. Already in Classical Latin, the accusative singular endings -am and -um started to loose the /m/ (first, the final vowel was nasalised, and later this nasalisation was also lost). I haven't the other details at hand, but the whole process is well-documented. By &quot;majority rule&quot; most words in Modern Romance languages are derived from the oblique cases and not from the nominative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:07:54.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2786" CreationDate="2018-09-19T12:46:03.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam Webster lists Dition as an obsolete middle french word from the Latin dicion or dicio, a command word related to Dominion or Rule: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dition?utm_campaign=sd&amp;amp;utm_medium=serp&amp;amp;utm_source=jsonld&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dition?utm_campaign=sd&amp;amp;utm_medium=serp&amp;amp;utm_source=jsonld&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex - meaning &quot;out of&quot; or &quot;from&quot; / &#xA;ped - on foot  / &#xA;Dition - to rule or claim dominion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this expresses far better the difference in connotation the word expedition has held historically from the word expedite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22724" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:46:03.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29078" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29079" CreationDate="2018-09-19T12:47:25.713" Score="1" ViewCount="3274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been doing some intense research on &lt;strong&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; and am becoming more and more confused as to what the distinction between them is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could &lt;em&gt;describe&lt;/em&gt; both concepts and then &lt;em&gt;highlight&lt;/em&gt; their similarities and differences, that would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22723" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:22:22.320" Title="Difference between sociolinguistics and pragmatics" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29078" CreationDate="2018-09-19T13:22:22.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sociolinguistics&lt;/strong&gt;, broadly defined, is the study of language use across demographic lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interested in how this group speaks differently from that group. Gender, socioeconomic status, age, ethnicity, geographic location, and so on are all possible dividing lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also interested in how these changes come about and how they interact with sociological phenomena (see e.g. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40492846?mag=young-womens-language-patterns-at-the-forefront-of-linguistic-change&amp;amp;seq=10#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peaks Beyond Phonology: Adolescence, Incrementation, and Language Change&lt;/a&gt;&quot; investigating the classic finding that women tend to lead language change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also interested in the effects that language use &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; on society. One trivial example is politician soundbites. Never &quot;misunderestimate&quot; the power of a quotable word or phrase!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt;, broadly defined, is the study of language use in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interested in the functions of language beyond the mere conveyance of semantic data (though of course that's one of the functions). For example, language can perform certain tasks: the phrase &quot;I vow&quot; is not simply a statement but also an entry into a binding contract with consequences, though maybe less so nowadays...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interested in how information is signalled non-literally and what motivates choices about how to do so. For example, you cook a meal for your spouse, the main course being a steak but also with carrots and potatoes. &quot;How did you like it?&quot; you ask. They reply, &quot;...The potatoes were just perfect.&quot; You now know their opinion of the steak. How did that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interested in how context affects meaning. How does a conversational structure work such that the statements are all related to each other (or not — how does a topic change)? How can we formalize our understanding of word-variables such as pronouns and demonstratives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is certainly overlap,&lt;/strong&gt; not least because social phenomena often involve context-embedded uses of language. For example, if language is restricted or taboo for one group (sociolinguistics), they may depend more on implicit discursive structures to communicate (pragmatics). If a word gains a particular value for one group in terms of its social symbolism (sociolinguistics), they may use it performatively, e.g. saying it in a certain context is a declaration of allegiance (pragmatics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can also see that there is a lot of non-overlap available in the two fields. Also, if we're laying out branches of linguistics along a continuum from most basic blocks of meaning to biggest, pragmatics also overlaps &lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt; with semantics, not only &lt;em&gt;forwards&lt;/em&gt; with sociolinguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T13:22:22.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29082" CreationDate="2018-09-19T14:07:23.497" Score="0" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Danish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish vowels&lt;/a&gt;, it came up with this translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a   hat&#xA;ɑ   art&#xA;ɑː  father&#xA;ʌ   off&#xA;ɒ   og&#xA;ɒː  dog&#xA;æ   bet&#xA;æː  bed&#xA;e   face&#xA;ɛ   ?&#xA;eː  phase&#xA;ɛː  ?&#xA;i   leaf&#xA;iː  leave&#xA;o   oak&#xA;ɔ   thought&#xA;oː  go&#xA;ɔː  ?&#xA;ø   nurse&#xA;œ   ?&#xA;ɶ   ?&#xA;øː  fur&#xA;œː  ?&#xA;ɶː  ?&#xA;u   boot&#xA;uː  food&#xA;y   cute&#xA;yː  feud&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Standard_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard German&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a   father, but short&#xA;aː  father, but long&#xA;ɛ   bet&#xA;ɛː  hair&#xA;eː  mate&#xA;ɪ   sit&#xA;iː  seed&#xA;ɔ   off&#xA;oː  law&#xA;œ   hurt&#xA;øː  heard&#xA;ʊ   push&#xA;uː  food&#xA;ʏ   cute&#xA;yː  few&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Norwegian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norwegian&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ɑ   art&#xA;ɑː  car&#xA;æ   trap&#xA;æː  mad&#xA;e   set (I thought this was &quot;ay&quot; sound)&#xA;eː  save&#xA;i   hill (I thought IPA was &quot;ee&quot; sound)&#xA;iː  need&#xA;ɔ   off&#xA;ɔː  dog&#xA;ø   Burt&#xA;øː  bird&#xA;u   put (Thought this was the &quot;oo&quot; sound)&#xA;uː  fool&#xA;ʉ   choose&#xA;ʉː  goose&#xA;y   hit&#xA;yː  leave&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these words are used in multiple places, and some of them just seem wrong. The Norwegian one seems very wrong, especially the IPA sounds. Wondering if one could correct this final list using General American English words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;letter  word     standard&#xA;------- -------- --------&#xA;i       free     +&#xA;y       few      +&#xA;ɨ       rude     -&#xA;ʉ       choose   -&#xA;ɯ       goose    -&#xA;u       boot     +&#xA;ɪ       ?&#xA;ʏ       foot     -&#xA;ɪ̈       good     -&#xA;ʊ̈       good     -&#xA;ɯ̽       hook     -&#xA;ʊ       hook     +&#xA;e       may      +&#xA;ø       bird     -&#xA;ɘ       nut      -&#xA;ɵ       foot     -&#xA;ɤ       long ago -&#xA;o       go       +&#xA;e̞       let      -&#xA;ø̞       bird     -&#xA;ə       Tina     ~&#xA;ɤ̞       plus     -&#xA;o̞       thought  -&#xA;ɛ       bed      +&#xA;œ       bird     -&#xA;ɜ       bust     +&#xA;ɞ       but      -&#xA;ʌ       gut      +&#xA;ɔ       thought  +&#xA;æ       cat      +&#xA;ɐ       nut      -&#xA;a       hat      -&#xA;ɶ       ?&#xA;ä       cot      +&#xA;ɒ̈       lot      -&#xA;ɑ       hot      +&#xA;ɒ       not      -&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, most of these vowel sounds don't have a General American English equivalent. Trying to find a reference point where I can learn the vowel sounds without having to learn a lot of new languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T15:44:21.053" Title="General American English words for IPA vowel sounds" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29071" CreationDate="2018-09-19T15:14:26.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attempts to rigorously define &quot;word&quot; as distinct from other word-like combinations of morphemes have not been successful in the field. So the short answer is, there's no way to tell; the slightly longer answer is that it depends on your criteria for calling something a word. Or, since you ask about word forms, what is the difference between &quot;two words&quot; and &quot;two word forms&quot;? And more to the point, how would you validate a given definition of &quot;word&quot; or &quot;word form&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your underlying interest seems to be about the contribution of phonological differences in defining &quot;same word (form)&quot;. The conventional view is that &quot;a word&quot; is some combination of morphemes, which serves as the input to the phonology. Rules of the phonology act on that input, and you get a pronunciation. If all phonological rules were obligatory, there would be only one pronunciation of a given input: but not all phonological rules are obligatory, which means that there can be two or more pronunciations of some words. For example &quot;winter&quot; can be pronounced as [wɪ̃ntɹ̩] or as [wɪ̃ɾɹ̩], but both come from the same input, /wɪnt(V)r/ and differ in whether deletion of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; happens (the rest is automatic). By that definition, the two pronunciations would not be different words. &quot;Winter&quot; and &quot;winters&quot; would be, though, because the latter has an inflectional morpheme lacking in the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear whether the &quot;-in'&quot; affix is a distinct morpheme from the &quot;-ing&quot; affix. Perhaps there is one affix /ɪŋ/ which optionally changes to [(ə)n], or perhaps there are two underlying affixes, /ɪŋ/ and /ən/. The questions that we would ask are, are the two affixes distributed identically or does one appear in a position where the other cannot (and does that matter)? and, does it matter that there are no general phonological rules of English that turn /ɪŋ/ into [(ə)n] or vice versa. As a phonologist, I tend to favor making such differences be part of the input to the phonology (not complicating the phonology with arbitrary rules), and I imagine syntacticians favor dumping the problem into the phonology and keeping the syntax clean. This is why a &quot;readjustment component&quot; has been posited. There is no clear answer to the question about the analysis of -ing vs. -in', in terms of 'one thing or two'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for two pronunciations of &quot;daughter&quot;, I don't know why there would even be two pronunciations of the word. Let's take the word [kɔt], which can also be pronounced [kat]. For some people, [kɔt] is the past tense of &quot;catch&quot; and [kat] is a thing you sleep on; for others, these are slightly different ways of pronouncing the words &lt;em&gt;caught&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cot&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Caught&quot; and &quot;cot&quot; are generally considered to be different words, and for some people they are actually pronounced the same. I'm one of the &quot;pronounced the same&quot; speakers, but I know that my vowel is somewhat different from the vowel used by some (younger) speakers in Central Ohio who use a backer vowel but still pronounce the two words the same. So turning to &quot;daughter&quot;, my pronunciation of the word would be different from that of those speakers. Does that mean that there are different inputs to the phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yes, in fact I pronounce the word &quot;daughter&quot; the same way as my brother, and those are different words because my /datr/ is in my grammar, and my brother's /datr/ is in his grammar. As you can tell, I'm reflecting the viewpoint that a grammar is a fact of individual psychology and not a social object. If you consider concepts of &quot;word&quot; from a social viewpoint, where we are attempting to characterize all forms of English, then you could come to the conclusion that two dialectal pronunciations of &quot;daughter&quot; are different phonological outcomes for the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it depends on how you define &quot;same word&quot; and &quot;same morpheme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T15:14:26.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29080" CreationDate="2018-09-19T15:44:21.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially in the case of vowels, the concept of an &quot;equivalent&quot; is a misconception. At the phonetic level, the Norwegian table is rather wrong, and at the phonological level it is meaningless. But note that they call these things &quot;nearest equivalent&quot;, which would mean &quot;thing that is acoustically closest&quot;. For example Norwegian &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; is really IPA [a] and not [æ], whereas American &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; is [æ] (though elsewhere it can be [a]). Norwegian short &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is a short diphthong [ɛə̆] or thereabouts, etc. The explication of &quot;u&quot; and &quot;y&quot; is not useful. What would be useful is audio samples of words containing particular vowels. And in the case of Scandinavian languages you need a suggested transcription, because spelling is a bit challenging (the letter &quot;o&quot; can represent a number of different vowel phonemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using English words as a reference point for the phonetics of another language is roughly like trying to understand Java by looking for a Fortran equivalent. If you rely on the authoritative cardinal vowels as promulgated by Daniel Jones, that gives you a standard by which other vowels can be measured. You could also use my pronunciation of vowels as the standard, but Jones' productions are the gold standard in this business. I would point you to &lt;a href=&quot;http://audiufon.hum.uu.nl/data/e_primary_long.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this repository&lt;/a&gt;, except that it's got 404 disease. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter9/cardinal/cardinal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This collection&lt;/a&gt; is probably more stable. One thing you will note is that there aren't any standards for the vowels &quot;on the inside&quot;, such as [ɪ]. (You can also compare pronunciations of IPA symbols including Ladefoged's versions of the whole IPA alphabet, and you can compare three phoneticians performing the vowels &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), which reveals some variation in the standard pronunciations (listen to [a, æ]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T15:44:21.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29070" CreationDate="2018-09-19T16:26:01.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I may follow up on Keelan’s remarks on Semitic: The ancient Semitic languages distinguished three cases in the singular (with suffix /u/ for the nominative, /i/ for the genitive, /a/ for the accusative) and two each in the dual (nominative /ān/, gen./acc. /ayn/) and the plural (/ūn/ and /īn/). In many languages the loss of all final short vowels means that the cases are no longer distinguished in the singular, but case distinction disappears also in the dual and plural, where only the old oblique endings survive. This shows that the loss of cases cannot be explained entirely by the loss of endings. It is more likely that the loss of the singular case endings weakened the case system to the degree that case came to be seen as redundant in the plural as well. It is as if the speakers suddenly realised that they could survive without cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T16:36:42.883" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T16:36:42.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29070" CreationDate="2018-09-19T17:52:22.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jknappen says, it came down to sound shifts in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A portion of the Latin case system (first and second declension singular) looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Fem   Masc&#xA;Nom  -a    -us&#xA;Gen  -aj   -i:&#xA;Dat  -aj   -o:&#xA;Acc  -am   -um&#xA;Abl  -a:   -o:&#xA;Voc  -a    -e&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that this is IPA phonemic transcription, not Latin orthography. Basically, Nom = subject, Gen = possessive, Dat = indirect object, Acc = direct object, Abl = object of a preposition, Voc = person being spoken to directly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical times, final &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; started to disappear, nasalizing the previous vowel (like in French). Then in Later Latin, the fourteen Classical vowels simplified down into seven, and this nasalization vanished. Now we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Fem   Masc&#xA;Nom  -a    -o&#xA;Gen  -e    -i&#xA;Dat  -e    -o&#xA;Acc  -a    -o&#xA;Abl  -a    -o&#xA;Voc  -a    -e&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point the case system is significantly less useful! In particular, the nominative and accusative look exactly the same, so word order started to take their place: the verb was placed in the middle, with the subject before it and the object after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the cases stopped being so useful, these last few vestiges faded away too: the prepositions &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt; &quot;toward&quot; and &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt; &quot;for&quot; took the place of the dative, &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; &quot;down from&quot; took the place of the genitive, and so on. And thus you end up with their descendants in modern (Tuscan) Italian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     Fem   Masc&#xA;Nom  -a    -o&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this simplification happened before Late Latin/Romance split apart into what would become French, Spanish, Italian, and so on. That's why Romance languages for the most part have no cases on their nouns. But this process &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; affect personal pronouns, which were already fossilized in Classical Latin and used different inflection patterns, so those retained case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT: fdb has pointed out that Old French preserves a case distinction in third-declension nouns, a type that isn't covered here. He's completely right! My bad. So the complete loss of cases in general was after the Romance split.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT 2: Romanian, Dalmation, and I think maybe Sardinian do preserve some of the cases. Mea culpa.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T14:51:26.160" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T14:51:26.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29087" CreationDate="2018-09-19T18:29:30.697" Score="-2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;can someone please help me how to write the pronunciation for the word &quot;Midva&quot; that English speaking people will understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Slovene it is [ˈmiːdva]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22728" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T19:51:53.300" Title="How to write IPA for a slovenian word Midva?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-10-09T13:55:36.720" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29057" CreationDate="2018-09-19T19:49:08.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Common Crawl, Wikipedia, the Bible and the UN Declaration of Human Rights are all popular default corpora.  Here is a list of Wikipedias by language family:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;indigenous&quot; criterion is very unclear - a language is indigenous to a place, not in the abstract, and more or less all languages are indigenous to some place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Americas, the largest are Quechua, Nahuatl, Navajo and Aymara.  You mention New Guinea.  Do the indigenous languages of Hawaii and Eastern Island qualify?  And if so, then why not Indonesian or Malagasy, which is in the same macro-family?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a definition of &quot;indigenous language&quot; that includes those languages but does not include, say, Georgian, Basque, Chechen, Japanese, Lithuanian, Celtic, Ukrainian, Igbo, Tamil or Amharic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T19:49:08.890" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29085" CreationDate="2018-09-19T19:51:53.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sine you already have the IPA, I assume you are really asking how to write the pronunciation of the word so that an English speaker who doesn't know IPA might approximate the Slovene pronunciation. And you want a written form, not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/midva/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recording of the Slovene word&lt;/a&gt; that people can listen to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like &quot;Mead-Vah&quot; might do it. The word &quot;mead&quot; already exists and is close enough to the [mi:d] part of the Slovene, so you're half way there. There will be more problems getting the correct vowel in the second syllable, and people are likely to reduce it to schwa, unless you stress it. The proposed spelling makes it look like a compound, where the second member will have secondary stress (so not reducing to schwa). I think &quot;Vah&quot; is more likely to generate a vowel closer to [a] than &quot;Vaugh&quot;, which is likely to be closer to [ɒ]. I don't see any hope for getting the pitch pattern correct (I don't know what model you have in mind). Also, English speakers will use [v] and not [ʋ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T19:51:53.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T20:34:49.707" Score="-3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are anaphonic antonyms regarded as chance by many linguistic historians, if this could be regarded as an Ancient mnemonic method of creating a logical and easy inverted spelling of antonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anaphone I would define as “A word that spelled backwards shows an antonym” (I regard near anaphones (the spelling backwards is nearly identical) as valid too if the antonymous relation exists in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare:&#xA;Growth/groot/Gross versus:&#xA;Dwarf/Dwerg/Zwerg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we would not regard this as chance, what could we call such a phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it a bit more complex:&#xA;Compare:&#xA;Cloud/de wolk versus:&#xA;Claw/walk&#xA;Soul versus sole (of the shoe)&#xA;What do we call such phenomenon if the relation is not antonymous, but contains an identical root (in the example the same root can be found in the word ‘ciel’ which shows an antonymous relation to ‘leg’ and ‘lig’ but the root is used in different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could invent ‘antocrypt’ but some brilliant mind must have found a name for this already...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T03:30:45.047" Title="Why are anaphonic antonyms regarded as chance by many linguistic historians" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T21:14:07.360" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I extract specific vowels in a phoneme tier within a word in the word tier? I'm not sure how to limit my search to just the words I found previously in the word tier. Is it possible? Thank you! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22731" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T04:03:55.413" Title="Looking for vowels (in phoneme tier, 2) within specific words(in word tier, 1) in Praat textgrid" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29091" CreationDate="2018-09-20T00:41:21.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;welcome to the Linguistics StackExchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (or someone you work with that is familiar with praat scripting) should be able to accomplish this with &#xA;a praat script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following script should be easily adapted to fit your needs. In fact, on line 60 you can see that it asks the user for a targets file which would be the words that you have already identified. Assuming you have a p2fa-like aligned text grid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jmriebold/Praat-Tools/blob/master/Arpabet-Vowel-Analyzer.praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jmriebold/Praat-Tools/blob/master/Arpabet-Vowel-Analyzer.praat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T00:41:21.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29095" CreationDate="2018-09-20T03:10:01.073" Score="1" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering the different ways you can nest verbs, and what is technically allowed from a mental perspective, not necessarily from a grammatical perspective b/c I imagine it would vary significantly across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure what it means to write nested verbs either, in English at least. I would like to know if it is even possible to nest verbs. These are some of the examples I could think of that seem like they are nested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I bought farmed food. (&quot;I &lt;b&gt;bought&lt;/b&gt; food &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; &lt;b&gt;farmed&lt;/b&gt;.&quot; That seems like an equivalent sentence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ate purchased cooked farmed food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ate store-bought cooked farmed food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had hand-made clothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ran walked paths. (Trying to say &quot;I ran paths that were well walked.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I slept curled up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ate standing. (Not sure if standing is the verb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;am&lt;/em&gt; eating standing. (&quot;am&quot; is also a verb I guess, so 3 here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those are just basic sentences where the verbs seem to be nested but the verbs follow directly after each other. Maybe these words like &lt;code&gt;farmed&lt;/code&gt; are not actually verbs but nouns, or perhaps adjectives, I'm not sure. &quot;To farm&quot; is definitely a verb, and &lt;code&gt;farmed&lt;/code&gt; is past tense of that, but maybe I'm confusing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &quot;verb nesting&quot; that doesn't make any sense (and why it makes me think maybe verb nesting isn't a thing) is illustrated with these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I walked ran to the store. (Actually maybe that is a thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I walked biked to the store. (Can't do these two things at once).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I circled walked chatted observed with my friend. (Walking in a circle, chatting and observing stuff, it seems to need to chain them rather than nest them, but I don't know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I drank blinked kicked turned. (All at once). Rather you would say, &quot;I drank, blinked, kicked, and turned all at once&quot;. But I don't see why you can't nest them and if there are cases where something like this is possible in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm partly wondering too if you can separate the verbs by a few words and still technically have &quot;verb nesting&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I &lt;b&gt;bought&lt;/b&gt; delicious &lt;b&gt;farmed&lt;/b&gt; food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I &lt;b&gt;ate&lt;/b&gt; at the dinner table &lt;b&gt;standing&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partly the reason I'm asking is because there is such thing as &quot;action nesting&quot; in the real world. Take for example this story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every day I make dinner. While I eat dinner I sit at the table. While sitting at the table I use my hands and utensils. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the day that starts and ends&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eating dinner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grabbing the utensil&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using your arms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using your muscles&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you paint this picture in the sentences outlined above, rather than in this nested structure. So the other part I'm wondering about is the difference between &quot;verb nesting&quot; and actual action / information nesting in the content of the sentence. So this question just focuses on the verb nesting part. I'm trying to see if there is any nesting going on at the verb level, or if it occurs elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If English is a primitive example, I'd be interested to know what languages have complex examples of verb nesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a different example of nesting is in these sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I &lt;b&gt;ate&lt;/b&gt; the food they &lt;b&gt;farmed&lt;/b&gt; after they &lt;b&gt;built&lt;/b&gt; their farm &lt;b&gt;using&lt;/b&gt; their hands and after they &lt;b&gt;invested&lt;/b&gt; in some crops that they later &lt;b&gt;planted&lt;/b&gt; in the soil that &lt;b&gt;was&lt;/b&gt; already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like this is the nesting structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            ate&#xA;           /&#xA;        farmed&#xA;       /      \&#xA;  built       invested&#xA;  /             /&#xA;using         planted&#xA;                \&#xA;                was&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't tell. Maybe it is really a flat structure of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I call that last one nesting is because the verb &lt;code&gt;farmed&lt;/code&gt; isn't &quot;complete&quot; until all the rest of the sentence is said. Likewise, the verb &lt;code&gt;built&lt;/code&gt; isn't complete until it gets past &lt;code&gt;using&lt;/code&gt;, etc.. So in some sense they seem nested. But it wouldn't make sense to write the sentence like this sort of VSO form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ATE (I) (the food FARMED (after they BUILT(their farm USING(...))))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Adding&lt;/b&gt; something &lt;b&gt;is changing&lt;/b&gt; its value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;adding -&amp;gt; is -&amp;gt; changing&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T03:44:11.177" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T22:06:52.833" Title="How Nesting Verbs Works (and if it is Even Possible)" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29088" CreationDate="2018-09-20T03:30:45.047" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some that aren't chance! For example, an &lt;em&gt;emordnilap&lt;/em&gt; is a word that gains a new meaning when it's written backward; the term was coined by flipping the existing word &quot;palindrome&quot; (a word that has the same meaning when written backward). Or in electrical engineering, the unit of conductance is the &lt;em&gt;mho&lt;/em&gt; (the unit of &lt;em&gt;resistance&lt;/em&gt; being the &quot;ohm&quot;). The technical term for these is &lt;em&gt;ananyms&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of these examples are fairly straightforward. Anyone who sees the word &quot;emordnilap&quot; with its  will know it's not an inherited English word, and probably look for deeper meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the ananyms I know of come from languages that already have a writing system. Written language requires breaking words up into units which you can then rearrange freely, but this isn't at all an obvious step for people who don't write. For example, ananyms in Japanese and Korean tend to reverse the &lt;em&gt;syllables&lt;/em&gt; instead of the phonemes, while the English example &lt;em&gt;emordnilap&lt;/em&gt; would be pronounced something like /ə.ˈmord.nɪ.læp/ rather than /mwoɹd.nɪl.ˈæp/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to think of this is: what does it mean to reverse a word? Until we had record players we couldn't actually reverse the waveform; a human vocal tract certainly can't. Reversing the phones? That requires a clear way to draw a line between phones, which even with modern spectrograms we can't do. Reversing the phonemes? If you asked a person on the street to reverse the sounds in the word &quot;pineapple&quot;, they most likely wouldn't be able to do it: at best they'd write down the word backward and repronounce it according to English spelling rules. Even in your examples, you're relying on the spelling rather than the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Flipping words around simply doesn't seem to be part of human language; we simply don't have a mechanism for it (unlike, say, reduplication, which people can do trivially). As such, we don't see any examples of ananyms until the origin of writing—and even then, they tend not to really catch on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T03:30:45.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29093" CreationDate="2018-09-20T04:03:04.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have three distinct phenomena here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I bought farmed food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Farmed&quot; here is a &lt;em&gt;participle&lt;/em&gt;: an adjective formed from a verb. You can use it anywhere you could use an adjective: &quot;this food is farmed&quot;, &quot;the farmed food is good&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ate the food [which] they farmed after they built…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Nesting&quot; isn't a bad name for this phenomenon, but I would call it &lt;em&gt;embedding&lt;/em&gt;. Syntactically, you start with a complete sentence (=IP) like &quot;they built [the house]&quot;, then embed that into &quot;they farmed the food after they built [the house]&quot;, then embed that into &quot;I ate the food [which] they farmed after they built [the house]&quot;, and so on. (This last embedding has some movement involved, but the details will depend on your particular theory of syntax.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adding something is changing its value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time &quot;adding&quot; and &quot;changing&quot; are &lt;em&gt;gerunds&lt;/em&gt;: nouns formed from verbs representing the action as an abstract concept. You can use them anywhere you could use a noun: &quot;I like &lt;em&gt;swimming&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;adding&lt;/em&gt; is better than &lt;em&gt;changing&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To be clear, &quot;swimming&quot; and such can also be a participle: &quot;he sees the swimming children&quot;. It's an unfortunate coincidence of English that these two forms look exactly the same, but this isn't universal: in Latin for instance the gerund would be &lt;em&gt;natandum&lt;/em&gt;, while the present participle would be &lt;em&gt;natans&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T18:26:06.137" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T18:26:06.137" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29112" CreationDate="2018-09-20T05:28:24.007" Score="0" ViewCount="1587" Body="&lt;p&gt;After looking through some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb%E2%80%93subject%E2%80%93object&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VSO languages&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that the &quot;most VSO centric&quot; one I could find (using Google Translate) is Hawai'ian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest example sentence is (1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hele au i ka hale kūʻai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Hele&lt;/strong&gt;: Go, &lt;strong&gt;au&lt;/strong&gt;: I, &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;: i, &lt;strong&gt;ka&lt;/strong&gt;: the, &lt;strong&gt;hale&lt;/strong&gt;: house, &lt;strong&gt;kūʻai&lt;/strong&gt;: purchase, &lt;strong&gt;ka hale kūʻai&lt;/strong&gt;: the store)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;Go I the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now making it a little more complicated (2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My friend and I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ua hele māua me kaʻu hoaaloha i ka hale kūʻai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Ua&lt;/strong&gt;: Has been, &lt;strong&gt;hele&lt;/strong&gt;: go, &lt;strong&gt;māua&lt;/strong&gt;: us, &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt;: along with, &lt;strong&gt;kaʻu&lt;/strong&gt;: get on, &lt;strong&gt;hoaaloha&lt;/strong&gt;: friend, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;[PAST] go my friends and I the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we still have &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;verb&amp;gt; &amp;lt;subject&amp;gt; &amp;lt;object&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, but the verb is preceded by the PAST marker (or not sure what it's called. So already we are getting more complicated in scope than what Wikipedia has as examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go more complicated than that, make the subject really complicated (3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My really nice friend and I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;ʻO koʻu hoaaloha maikaʻi loa&lt;/strong&gt;: My best friend, &lt;strong&gt;ua hele au i ka hale kūʻai&lt;/strong&gt;: and I went to the store).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;My best friend [PAST] go I the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are out of the realm of VSO for the most part, just barely seeing it in the &lt;code&gt;go I the store&lt;/code&gt; at the end. But the adjectives added to &lt;code&gt;my friend&lt;/code&gt; made it shift part of the structure to before the verb, so it is almost like SVO form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the behavior I found for most of the other languages. For example, with Welsh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Es i i'r siop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;Went I the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My friend and I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aeth fy ffrind a minnau i'r siop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;Went my friend and I the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My really nice friend and I went to the store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fy ffrind neis iawn a minnau i fynd i'r siop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;My friend nice okay and me went the store&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we are totally in SVO territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagalog shows this for examples 1, 2, and 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pumunta ako sa tindahan. (Literally: &lt;em&gt;Go I the store&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nagpunta kami sa tindahan ng kaibigan ko.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ang ganda talaga kong kaibigan at nagpunta ako sa tindahan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same behavior here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is a Google Translate thing. But I'm wondering why they are calling these languages &quot;VSO&quot; languages when they are falling back to SVO in more complex examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of this I'm wondering if there are any examples on what a complex sentence (like example 3) would look like in VSO form, &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; falling back to SVO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, wondering if there are general rules or any documentation on VSO that describes rules for how you move things outside of the verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another Tagalog example is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before I leave the house I eat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bago ako umalis sa bahay kumain ako.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Literally: &lt;em&gt;Before I leave the house eat I&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here there is mixed SVO (I leave house) and VSO (eat I). I would like to see an example where it is all VSO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:43:46.137" Title="How VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) works" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-10-09T13:57:12.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29109" CreationDate="2018-09-20T10:46:10.080" Score="2" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I look up a transcription for a word containing [o], it's either an [oɪ] diphthong or an [oʊ] diphthong. Is it not possible to pronounce [o] without gliding through [ʊ] too? Is it possible, but English simply doesn't do it? Or, do monophthong [o] words actually exist in English, and I simply haven't been able to find them?&#xA;EDIT: This question regards any dialect of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="20901" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:16:40.540" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:29:08.133" Title="Are There Any Monophthong [o] Words in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29103" CreationDate="2018-09-20T10:52:31.777" Score="1" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;If two subcultures use the same realization (pronunciation) of the same word form  (particular inflection of a word) but spell it differently, what is the technical term for the alternative spellings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example: apparently in the old days when the word &quot;ye&quot; would show up in books it was actually meant to be pronounced &quot;the&quot;, as the &quot;y&quot; was used to stand in for the thorn character (&quot;þ&quot;), which represented the &quot;th&quot; (voiced fricative) sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modern example I can think of is &quot;leet speak&quot;, where words are spelled with numbers and other non-alphabetic symbols.  So &quot;speak&quot; could be represented as &quot;5|&gt;34|&amp;lt;&quot;, and both the meaning and pronunciation of the word form remain the same as &quot;speak&quot;, with only the written representation changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a term that captures the fact that the two written representations share the same pronunciation, inflection, and meaning.  The terms &quot;alternative spelling&quot; or &quot;alternative grapheme sequence&quot; seem like they could serve my purpose but I'm wondering if linguists have decided on some other term instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22677" LastEditorUserId="22677" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T12:01:47.627" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T20:13:52.960" Title="What is the technical term for alternative spellings?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29093" CreationDate="2018-09-20T11:13:30.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are also very common examples of nesting in other languages, especially ones with a SOV word order, such as latin. In latin, because of the fact that the subject and object come before the noun, a sentence can be made up of &quot;SO, SOV, V&quot;, where the nested verb is often just a participle. In English, this would be written in this word order as, &quot;Bill the food, the cutlery using, was eating&quot;, or as we would write it, &quot;Bill, using the cutlery, was eating the food&quot;. There is a story of some ancient teacher giving a lecture on verb nesting, where the entire lecture was nouns and adjectives, ending with a string of verb, as &quot;SO, SO, SO, SO, SO, SO, ... , V, V, V, V, V, V.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting topic to do with nesting which another answer addressed is that of recursion. It was touted by the &quot;father of modern linguistics&quot;, Chomsky, as the basis of language, the universal grammar. However, there is a controversial counter theory, from Daniel Everett, who claims to have found a tribe in the Amazon, with a non-recursive grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22733" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T11:13:30.113" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29098" CreationDate="2018-09-20T11:36:18.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the table in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_pronunciation#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary Appendix:English pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; words like &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced using ɒ,ɔ or ɒ and words like &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced using ɔː, oː  oɹ, ɔɹ similar to words like &lt;em&gt;horse&lt;/em&gt; (depending on the dialect of English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you require &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; and do not allow &lt;code&gt;ɔ&lt;/code&gt; there is still the possibility of the long &lt;code&gt;oː&lt;/code&gt; or the &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; before an &lt;code&gt;ɹ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T11:36:18.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T11:37:05.707" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can the sentence &quot;That professor is a syntactician,&quot; in which the DP &quot;a syntactician&quot; is the predicator, be parsed like a normal sentence, using x-bar theory, the Predicate Shell and the DP Hypothesis? Why would a syntax tree not grow properly with this kind of sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22595" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T11:37:05.707" Title="Parsing a sentence with the noun as the Predicator" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29099" CreationDate="2018-09-20T11:52:50.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dealing with historical texts, we talk about &lt;em&gt;spelling variants&lt;/em&gt; (of a word or a personal name). For those modern innovations in the writing system, I know the term &lt;em&gt;non-standard spelling&lt;/em&gt; or, for the whole system, a &lt;em&gt;non-standard variant&lt;/em&gt; (e.g., of English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T11:52:50.663" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29119" CreationDate="2018-09-20T13:22:31.307" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say for example some plant names. We have an &lt;code&gt;orange&lt;/code&gt; which we easily know is a fruit, but is also a color. We have &lt;code&gt;green&lt;/code&gt; which is a color, and &lt;code&gt;greens&lt;/code&gt; which is plants, or money, or I could imagine it being a sports team like the Red Sox, but even if we didn't capitalize it we would know the red sox is a team, not red [x].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For plants we have &lt;code&gt;poison oak&lt;/code&gt;, which is a type of plant, not &quot;poisoned&quot; oak. But you could have poison greens, which are actually poisoned. I don't see how we tell the difference. Poison is also a band, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_(disambiguation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a bunch of other stuff&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other plant names like &lt;code&gt;sage&lt;/code&gt;. But a &quot;sage&quot; is a type of person as well. It's also a seasoning, and incense. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sage has a ton of disparate meanings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what is the process I am going through to realize the meaning of these words which have multiple totally different meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They went to the forest and walked by some sage, holding some sage next to the sage [their friend]. They saw some poison oak and poison greens in the greens, but not Poison or green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &quot;context&quot; is an important factor. But I don't quite see &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; context exactly is coming into play when I read these sentences or see some words. There is punctuation as in &lt;code&gt;Poison&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;poison&lt;/code&gt;. There is adding extra description as in &lt;code&gt;sage [their friend]&lt;/code&gt;. But other than that, there is not much literally there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see &lt;code&gt;coffeeberry&lt;/code&gt;, I don't think &quot;coffee&quot;, even if I don't know what it is. It has &quot;berry&quot; in the name so maybe it's a fruit like boysenberry. Turns out it's a plant. So perhaps I couldn't guess what it is without &lt;em&gt;learning it's meaning explicitly&lt;/em&gt;. When I read &lt;code&gt;dogwood&lt;/code&gt; I don't think &quot;dog&quot;, maybe because I would probably see that related to some botany event. I kind of think of a band when I hear that name, like Fleetwood Mac and Three Dog Night, so &lt;em&gt;somehow&lt;/em&gt; my brain is trying to make sense of the new input. But I don't see how it's doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can get more complex than just using nouns, and start converting these words in verbs too! Dual formed words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can say &quot;They greened the landscape.&quot; to mean they planted lots of plants covering the landscape. Then we can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to use my green to green the landscape with some greens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to use my money to plant some plants on the landscape&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There it is again, &lt;code&gt;plant a plant&lt;/code&gt;. &quot;I want to plant a plant in the plant&quot;. (Indoor plant/factory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am wondering how we are able to determine the meaning and form of these words whose meaning is totally different in different places in the sentence. As an extreme example, say we converted the word &quot;I&quot; to a verb. And then we have 10 different things we've called &quot;I&quot; (like how &quot;Sage&quot; has like 50 things called sage). Say we even created 10 or so verbs called &quot;I&quot;, similar to how &quot;plant&quot; as a verb has multiple meanings (plant a plant, lay something on the ground). So we have this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I I I I I I I I I I I I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this doesn't make any sense because we created &lt;em&gt;too many same-named words&lt;/em&gt;. So there is a balance of some sort. But I would like to know what the balance is, when we are allowed to map new meanings to existing words (that is, create new words using existing words as their name). When too much is too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I don't understand how it's possible for us to understand these sentences. I would've assumed that every word has to have exactly one meaning in order for a thing to be understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, if there is some sort of way to tell if adding new meanings to a word (i.e. repeating a word's name with different meaning) will make it easier or harder to comprehend a sentence. Related to this but probably a bit too lengthy is how we go about understanding the meaning of these words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also familiar with the ideas of sentence structure like having SVO and how we can use that to help figure out the meaning of words. So no need to explain any of that :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T23:53:07.547" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T03:07:28.323" Title="How can we use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish the senses so easily?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29104" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:38:12.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest answer is that context is stronger and contains more clues than you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you seen IBM's Watson play Jeopardy? Check out, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; around 45 seconds in. The prompt is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kathleen Kenyon's excavation of this city mentioned in Joshua showed the walls had been repaired 17 times&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watson correctly answers &quot;Jericho&quot;, but interestingly, we get to see the other words it had in mind with their percentage of probability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jericho 97%&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Jerusalem 42%&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Lachish 7%&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this supercomputer generally models language quite differently from how we think humans parse it, this particular strategy is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;priming&lt;/a&gt;. In us, too, the presence of related words triggers associations — but not just one. Instead, it seems that, like a good search filter system, cues from the context cumulatively narrow and weaken the likelihood of some candidates to let others float to the surface, close to the docks where you stand with your fishing line...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classic finding, for example, tests the interpretation of the word &quot;port&quot;. Quick: define that word!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're like most people, you probably read that word and gave a definition like &quot;harbour&quot; because of the last sentence of the previous paragraph. If instead I had used a metaphor involving words like &quot;sweet&quot; and &quot;intoxicating&quot;, you would instead have said it was a kind of wine. That's the effect of priming. However, it isn't black and white, as we've noted. You can easily make the Gestalt shift between the two if new information comes in, re-ranking the relative percentages. (Thank goodness this process is automatic!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason A.M. brings up double articulation is to help distinguish between the building blocks (meaningless but distinctive) and the significant elements. On the most basic level, this is a model of how phonemes like /k/ and /b/ have no meaning in themselves but permit us to distinguish between the meaningful items &quot;cat&quot; and &quot;bat&quot;. On another level, the one we're interested in, there are lots of cues in the overall discourse that are not themselves the topic but permit us to distinguish between topics. Or syntactically, the places of the words in the syntactic structure is not the meaning but permits us to distinguish the meaning. For example, in &quot;plant a plant&quot; it's unambiguous that the same phonemes must first be the verbal lexeme and then the nominal lexeme. And the first one is already working, from the moment you hear it, to narrow down the second one so that you probably imagine a green, growing thing instead of a factory, since we don't &quot;plant&quot; that kind of &quot;plant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples closer to the edge, like your &quot;sage&quot; sentence, have a different answer. How do we distinguish them so easily? We don't; they are indeed harder than usual contexts! And the extreme example with the homonymous &quot;I&quot;s is far worse. In theory it's not impossible, since people can eventually parse &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but the relationships between the items are so disguised and the range of meanings so unfamiliar that it's a chore. Another type of case where the terms are syntactically undistinguishable and require special knowledge is slang, like the compliment &quot;Your teacher is &lt;em&gt;bad!&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Even then, tone, gestures, and discursive context can help clue in an observant person to the suspicion that &quot;bad&quot; doesn't have its usual sense, but when these cues are missing, as in text-only communication, the system comes up with the wrong answer.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, we also prime based on phonology, and this is one of the proofs that there is some reality to non-atomic blocks such as the syllable: syllables shared between words have a stronger priming effect than arbitrary sequences of phonemes shared between words. And by the way, &quot;coffeeberry&quot; and &quot;dogwood&quot; &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; prime words related to &quot;coffee&quot; and &quot;dog&quot;, but the head of the compound has the stronger effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Of course, even Watson gets it wrong &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Xnxjq63Zg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sometimes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T22:59:19.860" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T22:59:19.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29098" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:53:40.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;load, go, row&lt;/em&gt; are sometimes treated as having the phonological vowel /o/. That is a phonemic analysis of the where vowels are tense or lax, so we have the opposition i/ɪ, e/ɛ, u/ʊ, o/ɔ. Phonetically, it is usually recognized that the mid vowels are diphthongs, written as [ei], [ɛɪ] or [ɛi] among others. I think the phonetic facts support [ɛɪ, ɔʊ] over the competitors. The quality [ɔ] also occurs before [ɹ] as in &quot;core&quot;. There are American and British dialects (spoken in the north, in both cases) where &quot;goat&quot; is [go:t]. I can't say that there isn't a dialect where short &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;got, rot, sop&lt;/em&gt; is phonetic [o], but I haven't heard of one. I would say that short monophthongal [o] is non-existent in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:53:40.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:56:15.510" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for some corpora containing emails or chats in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22735" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:21:26.533" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T03:54:26.450" Title="Looking for Spanish email or chat corpora" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29026" CreationDate="2018-09-20T16:06:51.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Modern standard Arabic the word is (baidhah) بيضة plural is بيض (baidh) &#xA;Etymology: from the color ‘white’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22736" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:06:51.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29098" CreationDate="2018-09-20T16:08:55.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Standard American English and Standard British English, no. /o/ is always realized as a diphthong, primarily [oʊ], or [o] may appear in other diphthongs, e.g. [oɪ] although this is usually closer to [ɔɪ]. In some dialects of English, notably Indian English and I believe some types of Caribbean English too, /o/ can be realized as a monophthongal [o].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastEditorUserId="22737" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:29:08.133" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:29:08.133" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29117" CreationDate="2018-09-20T16:21:05.080" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;After considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29104/how-we-can-use-the-same-word-in-multiple-different-ways-and-distinguish-it-so-ea/29105#29105&quot;&gt;How we can use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish it so easily&lt;/a&gt;, I'm wondering now how complex it can get. I'm wondering what an example is from any language that demonstrates &lt;em&gt;a single verb with the most completely disparate meanings&lt;/em&gt;. That is, a single verb that has several totally distinct meanings that have nothing to do with each other. I'm only considering verbs here, no nouns, because there are lots of verbs that also have unrelated noun forms with unrelated meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one verb in English that has two &lt;em&gt;kind of&lt;/em&gt; disparate meanings is &quot;play&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I play, yet play them I don't play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;play: have fun, perform fun activities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;play: trick someone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One that is a little better is &quot;click&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click: make a sharp sound&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click: press a mouse button (related because it makes the clicking sound)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click: connect two things (like a seatbelt) (makes clicking sound)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click: snap your tongue (makes clicking sound)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;click: become suddenly understandable (like the connecting two things)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It all clicked when I made a click sound by clicking my tongue, clicking the mouse, clicking the seatbelt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still not that good, because the verbs all relate to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some others are &quot;train&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;train: teach someone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;train: aim something at something&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;call&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;call: use your voice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;call: give a name (related to use your voice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;call: pay a brief visit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;call: cause (a subroutine) to be executed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really find any more examples actually. So it seems that it's pretty uncommon in English to have a single verb with multiple unrelated meanings. The ones with multiple meanings all relate back to the core concept the verb is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you count these examples above as having different unrelated meanings (so click would have 5), that is only 5 different meanings, as opposed to nouns &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can have dozens of different meanings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are any better examples for English, or any other language, for verbs with many distinct meanings. Wondering if a language could have, say, 20 different unrelated meanings for a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T22:54:34.800" Title="The most different meanings a verb has been found to have" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28705" CreationDate="2018-09-20T16:25:51.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of mechanisms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Phonological changes: two (or more) words with unrelated etymologies which were not homophones may merge due to a series of sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semantic drift/semantic change: an example is the word your provided, &quot;just.&quot; Both come from French &quot;juste&quot; and ultimately from Latin &quot;iustus.&quot; This is not an uncommon or unusual semantic shift. In the original sense, &quot;just&quot; meant &quot;morally upright, righteous in the eyes of God; justifiable; equitable, impartial, fair; conforming to rules.&quot; This transforms into the sense of &quot;marked or characterized by precision; exact, having correct dimensions&quot; and this in turn becomes &quot;exactly, precisely, punctually.&quot; All of these sense of the words have been maintained in modern English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without concrete data, we don't have much reason to believe that such words are rare in Marathi or Sanskrit. You may just not be aware of them. In general, native language speakers do not pay much conscious attention to different meanings of different words, while a lexicographer (who composes a dictionary) &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; pay attention to even the most subtle differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The sense evolution of &quot;just&quot; may be a culturally-specific phenomenon, so I can see how it may not be so obvious to people from other cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastEditorUserId="22737" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:32:55.237" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:32:55.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29096" CreationDate="2018-09-20T16:43:46.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word order is never an absolute phenomenon crosslinguistically. English may be generally considered an &quot;SVO&quot; language, but that doesn't stop us from forming rule-governed expressions which flout the word order, or using certain set expressions. Examples include questions which invert the order (&quot;What did you do?&quot;) and OSV in &quot;topic-fronting,&quot; usually done for emphasis (&quot;I can't see Mary. But Bill I can see.&quot;). Many languages, e.g. Latin are even more flexible with word order because of elaborate grammatical systems (e.g. case) which make it possible to decipher the grammatical role of a word with little or no reference to where it is located in the sentence. On the other hand, some languages, like Mandarin, are even more strict about word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus classifying a language  as strictly one word order type is fraught with complications. Judgements are made &lt;em&gt;on balance&lt;/em&gt; and based on the &lt;em&gt;prevailing pattern&lt;/em&gt; of word choice across the language, not just individual utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Also, you're using Google Translate, which has minimal to no validity here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:43:46.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29099" CreationDate="2018-09-20T20:13:52.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Allographs&lt;/strong&gt; is the technical term for the graphic variants of an abstract grapheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21628" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T20:13:52.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29023" CreationDate="2018-09-20T21:11:02.460" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I concur with @Ned - e.g. Matasovic in &quot;Areal Typology of Proto‐Indo‐European: The Case for Caucasian Connections&quot; mentions trade between Sumerian folks, North Caucasians and Yamana culture. In my humble opinion an important objective of trade was slavery, so even if the trade was indirect through intermediaries, language would have been brought along anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, for gada you might want to take a look at Egyptian &quot;dd&quot; - &lt;em&gt;stability&lt;/em&gt;, common Anglicization &lt;em&gt;Djed&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a current theory for &quot;god&quot; as from a Lombardic &quot;godan&quot;, variant of &quot;Odin&quot;, a Germanic deity, also &quot;Wotan&quot;, which wiktionary gives derived from *weh₂t-. Compare that to &quot;veda&quot; and above &quot;mwt&quot;. That's not comprehensive nor coherent, but mighty interesting. Note *weh₂t- is linked to Old English ƿoþ /woːθ/ - sound, noise, cry, '''speech''', articulation, eloquence, song, poetry, voice. But more so Ger. &quot;Wut&quot; - strong emotion; cp. &quot;rush&quot;, &quot;rage&quot; with &quot;rushes, reeds&quot; and &quot;papyrus&quot; and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T20:56:12.897" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T20:56:12.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T21:21:45.297" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any references of natural languages lacking morphology in the &lt;em&gt;scientific literature&lt;/em&gt;? I suppose there should be, given the topic's importance and the popular opinion on this, but so far all I've found is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thai-language.com/resources/muansuwan-verb-complexes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (clearly insufficient). This question is related to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28287/languages-w-out-morphology&quot;&gt;previous one&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="363" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T23:00:52.603" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T23:00:52.603" Title="References to languages lacking morphology in scientific literature" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29110" CreationDate="2018-09-20T22:54:34.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English verb &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt; is often considered to be one of the most polysemous verbs. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/document/163620334/Set#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED entry for the verb&lt;/a&gt; runs to 169 pages. Now we may disagree with their lexicographic methodology, and they may split many subsenses we would combine, but however you'd analyse it &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt; is going to have a lot of senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nitty gritty details of how you analyse each word means it's not possible to objectively determine the word with the most senses from out of all the world's 7000 languages. Even determining it for one language is difficult. But I think it's likely that &lt;em&gt;set&lt;/em&gt; is up there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T22:54:34.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29104" CreationDate="2018-09-21T03:07:28.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of words humans produce are 'just enough' to allow you (and hopefully another party) to disambiguate the content. We don't stop speaking, or writing until we believe we've disambiguated the thought. If we communicate something that we believe is ambiguous... we just keep talking/writing. Sense disambiguation uses a ton of little clues that logically reduce a set of a polysemous word to a single sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We use the 'topic area' as our initial clues; they reduce the set of senses to a limited, specialized lexicon. If we're watching baseball, we know what they mean by 'strike' or 'ball'. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We use words in the surrounding clauses (before and after). If I say &quot;I got an extension but was surprised to see how much my taxes were.&quot;, you still know that 'extension' was a 'tax extension'. To my computational linguist friends, note the window extends beyond the traditional colocation boundaries. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We use grammar as clues. Part of speech, compound nouns, coordinating conjunctions, etc. If I see &quot;He ate apples and bananas&quot;, &quot;and bananas&quot; helps me to group it with apples (fruit) not computers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We use common sense as clues. If I see, &quot;the man ate an orange.&quot;, I know that &quot;ate&quot; as a verb, and &quot;orange&quot; as a direct object, is a common pattern for 'consumption of edibles'. Better yet, don't think of it as &quot;common&quot; sense, think of it as &quot;frequent&quot; sense, (as in a frequency count). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everything else. Morphology, possession, type of determiner preceding a noun, type of argument complementing a verb, quantifiers preceding partitives, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of 'Word Sense Disambiguation' is an old problem; it's easy for humans and (historically) difficult for computers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New senses are added by either defining them inline (appositives, etc.) or by using a pattern. If I say, &quot;The Yankees &lt;em&gt;winked&lt;/em&gt; the Red Sox 10-1.&quot; You'd recognize the pattern of {Team-1 &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt; Team-2 Team-1-score Team-2-score} enough times to recognize that &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;beats&quot;. Suddenly, you're wondering if &quot;winks&quot; has another sense, meaning &quot;beats&quot;. You might be skeptical, but you see it a few more times. Later, you start using &quot;winks&quot; as a synonym for &quot;beats&quot;, and alas, we have a new word sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T03:07:28.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29107" CreationDate="2018-09-21T03:54:26.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística, part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México has a WhatsApp corpus of undergraduate students. They have a paper that introduces it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-3501&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-3501&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have their own web-based corpus management tool &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corpus.unam.mx/geco/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.corpus.unam.mx/geco/&lt;/a&gt; but I don't see the WhatsApp corpus on there, so you might have to reach out to them and ask for permission if you would like to use it for your research. They have an active FB page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T03:54:26.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-21T05:49:38.710" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can have two words which describe a similar concept but have different parts of speech, for example &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; V, &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt; N.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I live well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically similar or arguably equivalent construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My life is good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those two words describing two different concepts or not? Can words with different parts of speech constitute one concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question came to my mind during reading the book &lt;em&gt;Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; by Rene Dirven, Marjolijn Verspoor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T10:29:06.980" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:44:38.360" Title="Relationship of senses across parts of speech" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29121" CreationDate="2018-09-21T10:59:23.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are related by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;derivation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  In each case, one of the parts of speech was first.  Then others were created from one or more of its senses, but can then take on a semantic life of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In English it is very subtle because the surface forms are identical or, in your &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt; N / &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; V / &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; ADJ example, very similar and the derived by a process that is no longer productive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of constant semantic shift, the senses are hardly ever 1:1 even on day one, so it is dangerous to define concepts as if they are logical and orderly, not fuzzy and tangential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; ADJ is in the same semantic field as &lt;em&gt;television&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;concert&lt;/em&gt;, but in some other languages &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &lt;em&gt;television&lt;/em&gt; is literally &lt;em&gt;direct ether&lt;/em&gt;, and literally &lt;em&gt;alive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;living&lt;/em&gt; is only used for &lt;em&gt;in-person performance&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to something remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In English it's a bit hard to make this distinction, so for example in a café full of screens showing the Eurovision final in real time, it's &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hints at us that this sense of &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; is not very tightly bound to &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; V, and, in fact, upon thought it's true, &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;concert&lt;/em&gt; have nothing special to do with &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; V or &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt; N, nor with &lt;em&gt;lifer&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;leave&lt;/em&gt;, which are also derived from the same root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another proof of this is that with enough derivations, we can get back to the same part of speech, yet they are not equivalent.   &lt;em&gt;lively&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;alive&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;enliven&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;liveliness&lt;/em&gt; is not the same as &lt;em&gt;life&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So dictionaries like Wiktionary take the safe route by listing a flat representation.  (A lemma can have multiple senses, a sense can only have one lemma.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T19:44:38.360" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:44:38.360" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29138" CreationDate="2018-09-21T18:15:01.097" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the sentence &quot;It's not it&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew it's &quot;זה לא זה&quot; (lit. it no it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French C'est n'est pas ca &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the languages I'm familiar with, in order to say &quot;It's not it&quot;, one needs at leat three words - one specifying the object we're talking about, another word in order to specify the object we compare with, and at least one word to make the negative predicate happen. Obviously different languages may decorate these three words with more words, because the grammatical construct requires it  (just like in French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is : is there a language where we can say &quot;it's not it&quot; with &lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; than three words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19889" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T15:50:41.853" Title="Can &quot;It's not it&quot; be expressed in any language in less than 3 words" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-21T18:39:12.580" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just noted that [tja] and [tʲa] sound exactly the same. It seems that [ʲ] would only be relevant in classrooms when having isolated pronunciations such as  [tʲ], [kʲ], [dʲ] due to the fact we don't take [j] to be syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="22651" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T18:44:44.113" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T19:28:57.540" Title="Why have we come up with symbols for secondary articulation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3833" CreationDate="2018-09-21T18:52:14.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some Berber languages, we can find 4 sorts of trill : [r], [rˤ], [ʀ], [ʀ̥]. But it is not certain that it may be considered phonemes (for some Berber varieties it can be true whereas for others obviously it is not the case). These sounds can be, respectively, the surface forms of : geminated tap, pharyngalized geminated tap, geminated voiced uvular fricative, geminated voiceless uvular fricative. Despite that, I have provided this information because the phonemic reality cannot be only determined with a contrastive relation. Sometimes it can be hard to know with certainty if there are phonemes or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T18:52:14.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29125" CreationDate="2018-09-21T19:28:57.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, [tja] doesn't even sound exactly the same across languages. There are theoretically three ways to notate a &quot;palatalized t&quot; in IPA: [tja, tʲa, t͡ja]. The options [tʲa, t͡ja] commit one to the claim that this is a single segment, and [tja] does not have that commitment. There are various reasons to want to be able to indicate that a supposed bit of sound is a single segment versus a set of segments, the most powerful one being contrast (if a language contrasts the sequence [tj] and the single segment, which could be written as either [tʲa, t͡ja], though usually people write [tʲ]. The main idea is that in a sequence [tj], the sequence of gestures defining [t] vs [j] would overlap a bit but they would not be simultaneous, whereas in [tʲ] they would be simultaneous. However, simultaneity is hard to document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of labiovelars in Lushootseed, there are phonemes [kʷ, gʷ, xʷ, qʷ, χʷ] which seem to satisfy criteria for phonetic and phonological unity. They appear in the coda and the preceding vowel is strongly coarticulated with the following lip rounding, for example in &lt;em&gt;šəgʷɬ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;path&quot;, the lip-rounding of &lt;em&gt;gʷ&lt;/em&gt; is quite audible in the middle of &lt;em&gt;ə&lt;/em&gt;. Analyzing these as clusters would make the rules of syllable structure more complex, since glides are generally not found between consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is typically difficult to come up with good arguments for the treatment of postconsonantal glides. Distributional arguments generally support a sequence analysis of [tw] in English, whereas in Mandarin, I can't say that I've seen a compelling argument to support the [kw] vs [kʷ] analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T19:28:57.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29129" CreationDate="2018-09-21T19:54:21.550" Score="-2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Verbs like &lt;em&gt;animate&lt;/em&gt; become a noun &lt;em&gt;animation&lt;/em&gt;, and others like &lt;em&gt;graduate&lt;/em&gt; become &lt;em&gt;graduation&lt;/em&gt;. But then there are verbs that are just straight converted into nouns, like &lt;em&gt;capture&lt;/em&gt; the verb and a &lt;em&gt;capture&lt;/em&gt; the noun. You can't say &lt;em&gt;Let's create an animate&lt;/em&gt;, you say &lt;em&gt;Let's create an animation&lt;/em&gt;. Likewise, you don't say &lt;em&gt;Let's go to the graduate&lt;/em&gt;, you say &lt;em&gt;Let's go to the graduation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still others are converted into -ing nouns like the verb &lt;em&gt;render&lt;/em&gt; is converted into a &lt;em&gt;rendering&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;renderation&lt;/em&gt;. Just as that is awkward, you don't have &lt;em&gt;generate&lt;/em&gt; become a &lt;em&gt;generating&lt;/em&gt;, it is a &lt;em&gt;generation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the last one I can think of is adding -er, as in &lt;em&gt;scavenge&lt;/em&gt; becoming &lt;em&gt;scavenger&lt;/em&gt;, but that seems different, where -er makes the verb into an &lt;em&gt;actor&lt;/em&gt; performing the action. Whereas -tion and -ing convert the verb into the action itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what the rules are for determining if a verb becomes a noun action by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;leaving it as is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appending -tion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appending -ing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also wondering if there are any other straightforward examples of suffixes to verbs that make them nouns, in addition to -tion and -ing, or if these 3 above are the only cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also wondering why it's not just one system, like every verb gets suffixed with -tion. Would be good to know if this is just because of the fact that English is messy, or there is some other reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T20:59:19.740" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T20:59:19.740" Title="Why some verbs have -tion while others don't, when being nounified" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29128" CreationDate="2018-09-21T20:23:51.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would be good to know if this is just because of the fact that English is messy, or there is some other reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because English is messy.  The -tion examples are of course all Romance, although there are a few native English words with -tion and other Romance suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, even without the mess (messiness?) there are different types of derivational morphemes to the same part of speech - -ness, -er, -ling, -dom... - for different purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like this in all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T20:23:51.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-21T20:28:20.957" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the moment I am just considering adjectives and adverbs as the same sort of thing, basically modifiers for the noun or verb. I will probably only focus on nouns here for simplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of noun modifiers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) The big red car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) The big red green car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) The reasonably sized rainbow colored sports car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) The reasonably sized rainbow colored extremely high performance car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(5) The somewhat reasonably sized rainbow slash what seems like arbitrarily colored extremely high performance on the edge futuristic super car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't add commas because in spoken speech we don't have punctuation other than micro pauses potentially in how we say it. Maybe that is enough to transfer some sort of information about how the adjectives are &quot;grouped/nested&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering how we mentally are able to parse sentences like these. At some point, we stop nesting and chaining the adjectives, and instead separate it out into separate chunks/clauses. Something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The somewhat reasonably sized car, the one with that rainbow slash what seems like arbitrary coloring; the one with extremely high performance, which is on the edge; what I would say is futuristic, a super car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you see noun phrases (I guess they're called) that mostly don't have any commas. You see stuff like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(6) Super mega store&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) All you can eat buffet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) Yellow spotted sea turtle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't see this in titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(9) Yellow spotted oddly shaped rough sea turtle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...One that lists &lt;em&gt;multiple separate adjective chunks&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yellow spotted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;oddly shaped&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rough&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point it's too hard to tell what is nested into what:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(10) Oddly shaped dark yellow spotted rough long living sea turtle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not sure if the turtle is &quot;long&quot; or &quot;long living&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not sure if it is &quot;dark&quot; or a &quot;dark yellow&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems there is a limit to how complex we can so-called &quot;nest&quot; or &quot;embed&quot; these adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to understand is what the syntactic structure is for these sorts of thing. If adjectives take other adjectives as arguments, or if it is considered an adjective chain. That is, if it is a structure such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oddly(shaped), dark, yellow(spotted), rough, long(living), sea(turtle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what it means when you have these nested adjectives. That is, what the components are called in this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seriously(oddly(shaped)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a limit to how much we can nest and chain adjectives without causing confusion (or without making titles ugly), then I don't see why we don't do it more like Spanish, and have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;turtle &amp;lt;of the&amp;gt; sea &amp;lt;which is&amp;gt; shaped &amp;lt;as&amp;gt; odd &amp;lt;which is&amp;gt; dark &amp;lt;which is&amp;gt; spotted &amp;lt;with&amp;gt; yellow ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would give more freedom and ability to nest stuff. But perhaps it would make it even more confusing, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the terminology is for the components in something like &lt;em&gt;Seriously(oddly(shaped))&lt;/em&gt;, which seems like a nested set of adjectives. Likewise, what the components are in something like &lt;em&gt;Yellow spotted oddly shaped rough sea turtle&lt;/em&gt;, which is a &lt;em&gt;chain&lt;/em&gt; of nested sets of adjectives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why English doesn't have this more Spanish like form (the one I just listed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T04:09:24.340" Title="Terminology for chained, nested adjective anatomy" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29093" CreationDate="2018-09-21T21:59:51.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I was looking for: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_verb_construction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serial verb construction&lt;/a&gt;. That came from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese Grammar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also looks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compound Verbs&lt;/a&gt; might be related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The English lexicon contains a few true compound verbs, such as stirfry, kickstart and forcefeed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would still like to see what it would look like to have a verb chain of more than 2, as these examples only show 2 verbs together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Musa bé lá èbi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Musa came took knife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Musa came to take the knife.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kofí trɔ dzo kpoo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kofi turn(pfv) leave(pfv) quietly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Kofi turned and left quietly.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hena nihiwawaka nu-tšereka nu-yaka-u abi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;neg go(1sg) speak(1sg) mother(1sg) with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I am not going to talk with my mother.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T22:06:52.833" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T22:06:52.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-21T22:52:10.247" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;[l] is lenited in some languages like English (dark L), and in Polish (Ł). How is [lʲ] developed further if it does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T23:31:33.313" Title="What is the articulatory nature of [lʲ] and how is it normally lenited world wide, especially compared to [l]?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29132" CreationDate="2018-09-21T23:31:33.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency to develop into a palatal approximant, for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/cons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Spanish&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;ʎ&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;ʒ&lt;/em&gt; and eventually &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;; there is also a modern shift of &lt;em&gt;ʎ&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; whence &lt;em&gt;ʒ&lt;/em&gt; and similar outcomes especially in Latin American Spanish. There is a parallel development in Quechua where earlier [lʲ] as preserved in Cuzco Quechua becomes [ʒ] in Imbabura Quechua. Other languages with the historical change of [ʎ,lʲ] to [j] include Hungarian and French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T23:31:33.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29130" CreationDate="2018-09-22T04:09:24.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, we hyphenate adjectives that modify adjectives (compound adjectives) when they come before the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An oddly-shaped dark-yellow-spotted long-lived rough sea turtle&quot; (or however you need to group them) -- each hyphen represents a '(' in your nesting scheme, and each space closes the open nestings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T04:09:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29139" CreationDate="2018-09-22T10:24:20.413" Score="6" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the moment I am reading Guy Deutscher's &quot;The Unfolding of Language&quot;, in which he hypothesises that modern human language began as sequences of individual words (e.g. &quot;girl run climb tree&quot; or &quot;do work give master&quot;) without anything like what we might consider as &quot;grammatical structures&quot; or function words that do not refer to content. Over time, humans gradually develop function words and grammatical structures (e.g. in &quot;do work give master&quot;, the word &quot;give&quot; eventually develops into the preposition &quot;for&quot;(just as the word 给 in Chinese is both used as a verb &quot;give&quot; and a preposition &quot;for&quot;).  I am happy to accept this hypothesis (language had to come from somewhere). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also come to accept what seems to be effectively a rule in Linguistics in that all languages are equally as &quot;good&quot; as one another in terms of expressing ideas (since any argument about a particular language being &quot;better&quot; or &quot;worse&quot; is going to be based on a subjective and arbitrary idea of what is &quot;good&quot;). Languages do not get better or worse over time; they just change. We could say therefore that despite all the change that has taken place, speakers of PIE could just as effectively express ideas (the ideas that they needed to express, at least) as English or Latin or Greek or Chinese speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seems to me to be a huge contradiction between the two ideas that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: modern languages had to evolve from something that was not as sophisticated and therefore as effective at expressing ideas as itself (e.g. &quot;girl run climb tree&quot; is not as sophisticated as &quot;the girl runs to the tree and climbs it&quot; for example&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: all languages over time and space are equally as good as each other in terms of expressing ideas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point did the evolution of &quot;grammar&quot; stop and all languages throughout time became as &quot;good&quot; as each other? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not sure how all this relates to the idea of innateness. The earliest human speech proposed by Deutscher obviously did not have any sort of recursion in it. If we (for argument's sake) accept that language is innate, did this evolution in our DNA take place at the same time as our language was evolving, which then allowed languages to use recursion? Did this evolution of our &quot;language faculty&quot; then stop (which allows us now to claim that every attested human language is equally expressive as all of the others)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22746" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T16:57:33.833" Title="How can all languages be considered equally &quot;good&quot; at expressing ideas when language had to evolve from something more primitive?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29136" CreationDate="2018-09-22T12:55:42.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with Deutscher’s theory is that it posits the exact opposite of what we can observe in real languages across time. If we look at the long-term development from Latin to Romance; from Sanskrit and Old Iranian to modern Indo-Aryan and Iranian; from Ancient to Modern Greek; from Old Aramaic to Modern Aramaic; from Classical Arabic to modern Arabic dialects; even from Old English to modern English – what we observe everywhere is the shedding of inflections, the abandonment of complex morphological structures, and the movement towards an “isolating” typology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “isolating” language like Chinese is not more and not less capable of expressing complex ideas than highly inflected languages like Sanskrit or Greek. What does make a difference is whether any given language has the technical vocabulary needed to express such ideas. You cannot talk about mathematics without having a copious and clearly deliminated battery of mathematical concepts. These can be borrowed from other languages (as mainly happens in English), or newly formed from native elements (as in Greek and Chinese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T12:55:42.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29123" CreationDate="2018-09-22T15:50:41.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jick mentioned, there are languages where it's natural to drop the &lt;code&gt;it&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Turkish, it's even more natural to drop it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bu o değil. (This is not that.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Değil. (It isn't/It isn't it.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the word &lt;code&gt;değil&lt;/code&gt; already specifies that the pronoun is &lt;code&gt;it&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;değilim&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;I'm not&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;değilsin&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;you're not/you aren't&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;değil&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;code&gt;it isn't/it's not&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to change &lt;code&gt;it&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;this, that&lt;/code&gt; in order to give natural feel. You can think of it like &lt;code&gt;O değil&lt;/code&gt;. This is an issue with Turkish, but since you ask that is it possible to use &lt;code&gt;subject + negation + object&lt;/code&gt; less than three words, I need to come up with an another sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bu o at mı? (Is this the horse (that you mentioned)?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Değil (It's not it)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bu bir at mı? (Is this a horse?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Değil (It's not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;code&gt;değil&lt;/code&gt; word can mean &lt;code&gt;it isn't, it isn't it&lt;/code&gt; regarding the question. Also, it can't be used in meaning of simply &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bu o at mı? (Is this the horse (that you mentioned)?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hayır (No.) - This one is &lt;strong&gt;correct.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bu at koşuyor mu? (Is this horse running?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Değil (It isn't.) - This one is &lt;strong&gt;incorrect.&lt;/strong&gt;, right negative answer would be &lt;code&gt;hayır&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's meaningless to use all the pronouns in Turkish. &lt;code&gt;O o değil.&lt;/code&gt; I have never heard that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22750" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T15:50:41.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29136" CreationDate="2018-09-22T16:57:33.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take the following to be the central question: “At what point did the evolution of &quot;grammar&quot; stop and all languages throughout time became as &quot;good&quot; as each other?”. The question contains a few important premises, one of which is that the evolution of grammar &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; stopped. In biology, the term “evolve” is traditionally used to refer to changes in heritable characteristics. Some linguists reject the notion that there is a heritable cognitive faculty of language (as distinct from general human cognitive abilities), and therefore it is not a foregone conclusion that “grammar”, specifically, has evolved in the biological sense. I don’t know of anyone who denies that there has been evolution of general cognitive abilities in hominids, so we might safely substitute “cognitive evolution” for “grammatical evolution”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, linguists tend to use the term “evolve” in a broader sense, usually simply meaning “change”.  Using this broader sense of “evolve”, we can say that Modern English evolved from Old English, or American English evolved from various extant dialects of British English spoken 400 or so years ago. But that is not a change in a heritable characteristic of the species. If you compare a hypothetical and speculative “cognitive characteristics of &lt;em&gt;hominini&lt;/em&gt; some millions of years ago” to modern human cognitive characteristics, there will surely be some heritable evolution. The question is, what is it and who did it affect? It is not know whether there &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been any heritable changes to the human language faculty, during the course of human evolution. (By comparison, we know from the fossil record that there have been numerous biological changes in “humans”, whether that be &lt;em&gt;homo erectus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;homo sapiens&lt;/em&gt; or various extinct intermediaries such as &lt;em&gt;h.s. idaltu&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using “evolution” in the broader sense “has changed”, without the genetic implications, grammars are always changing, and the assumtion that evolution has stopped is false. Using the term to refer to genetic change, the premise that there has been evolution &lt;em&gt;within the time-span of “humans”&lt;/em&gt; is unsupported. It is beyond doubt that there has been cognitive evolution in hominids, but there is no evidence that the basis of language has genetically evolved since the emergence of “humans” as distinct from other hominini. The development of the language faculty in its current form may indeed be the defining criterion by which “humans” can be distinguished from other animals.&#xA;We need to examine the premise that “modern languages had to evolve from something that was not as sophisticated and therefore (not) as effective at expressing ideas”. In the biological sense, this is probably true in that before there was human language, there were pre-human cognitive abilities which did not include the conceptual faculty of modern (or pre-paleolithic) humans. Human cognition evolved to the point that open-ended systems of concepts like “girl”, “boy”, “person”, “ape”, “tree”, “leaf” could be formed and manifested via distinctive sounds – chimpanzees still don’t do this. The conceptual faculty also developed so that propositions could be formed. When and how this happened is pretty much anyone’s guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not unreasonable to think that the first human languages had the general capacity to form a hierarchy concepts and to express propositions, and that there was little by way of learned structural baggage. We know that the order of words in an utterance is not genetically predetermined, and we know that morphologically complexity is not genetically mandated. We could therefore assume that the first human language had no polymorphemic words, and word order was free, so maybe Proto-Human sentences were like “girl tree climb” ~ “climb girl tree” ~ “tree climb girl” and in princple the messages might have been confusing. The adoption of a conventional rule “put the actor before the verb” and “put the theme after the verb” could have emerged and been learned by subsequent generations, without the need for any biological evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for changes in sophistication of language (genetic or otherwise), there is no objective measure of “sophistication”, indeed I don’t even understand what it means for a language to be “unsophisticated” as opposed to being “sophisticated”. There is also no efficiency metric for the expression of ideas. In Logoori, you can express very complicated ideas in a single word, for example &lt;em&gt;rwávataakakʊ́ʊ́ndaamiɲɪrá&lt;/em&gt; which we require well over a dozen words to express in English – ‘when they (humans) did not make you curse for me, four days ago or further in the past’. Logoori is so sophisticated and efficient that you can say &lt;em&gt;yaakadééka&lt;/em&gt; to mean ‘he cooked, this is just general information’ versus – with a change in the tone of the word – you can say &lt;em&gt;yáákadééka&lt;/em&gt;  ‘we have been waiting for him to cook, and he has finally finished the cooking’. Unfortunately, the language requires verbose story-telling methods to express the difference between ‘He bought a car’ and ‘He bought the car’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim that earliest human speech did not have recursion is literally question-begging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T16:57:33.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-22T19:54:13.693" Score="-1" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Subject is defined as the argument which agrees with the affixes of the verb. But if a language does not have inflectional affixes, can you state that this particular language does not have syntactic functions ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T21:08:20.413" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T21:08:20.413" Title="Is a language without inflection a language without subject?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;declension&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29140" CreationDate="2018-09-22T20:18:42.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Subject&quot; is not defined as the argument which agrees with the affixes of the verb. Sometimes, &quot;subject&quot; is defined as that argument which verbs agree with. In the modern era, you might start with the paper by Ed Keenan, &quot;Towards a universal definition of “subject”&quot;, in Li (ed) 1975 &lt;em&gt;Subject and topic&lt;/em&gt;. Keenan had about 30 properties that he associated with subjecthood, which are not all necessary or sufficient. There is a methodological problem with the concept of &quot;definition&quot; in linguistics, that we don't have a theory of what a &quot;definition&quot; is, so one might present &quot;a fundamental characteristic of a thing&quot; as part of the definition of the thing. Or, one might present identificational diagnostics as part of the &quot;definition&quot; of a thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T20:18:42.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29144" CreationDate="2018-09-22T21:04:43.423" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what the languages have the most bells and whistles added to latin characters. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pinyin&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;code&gt;ǘ&lt;/code&gt; which has the umlaut and the acute accent (just 2 additions). But I'm wondering if there is anything that adds more to this, such as &lt;em&gt;umlaut&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;acute accent&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;tone&lt;/em&gt; (I understand in pinyin the acute accent is for tone). Or some other combination of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way I could see that working is like this: &lt;code&gt;ǘ̖&lt;/code&gt;. But maybe it could even get as complicated as this: &lt;code&gt;ṳ̖̈́&lt;/code&gt;. Or perhaps even more complicated than that. Wondering if there are any examples of such a thing in real languages. It would count, too, to have &quot;extra features&quot; on the base Latin letters such as the h-bar like &lt;code&gt;ħ&lt;/code&gt; or the l-with-curly &lt;code&gt;ɬ&lt;/code&gt;. Like this has 5 extra features: &lt;code&gt;ɬ̤̖̈́&lt;/code&gt;. Not very readable but just an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;code&gt;ḏ̣&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but that's just 2 modifications as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, wondering what some other complicated examples like the pinyin one might be. Trying to figure out how complex transliteration gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T22:29:52.937" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T22:29:52.937" Title="Example of a language with tones, stress, and umlauts all in one (or something more complex)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29154" CreationDate="2018-09-22T22:06:46.453" Score="0" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if there is a resource which lists the mappings between phonemes in different English accents? e.g. a given phoneme in RP maps to this phoneme in Liverpool, that phoneme in Newcastle, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this hopelessly simplistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22753" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T15:01:33.163" Title="Phonetic mapping between English accents" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29142" CreationDate="2018-09-22T22:27:19.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examples of three diacritics on a letter arise in phonemic transcriptions of languages when you have e.g. nasalization plus tone plus something else like breathiness, creakiness, or some place-or-articulation property that is notated with a diacritic (for example the centralization diacritic in Vietnamese cf. ơ or the tense-lax diacritic of Yoruba as in ẹ – though these may be implemented as unitary characters in Unicode, rather than sequences). Taa would be a candidate for such a language, since it has some really exotic vowel sounds. However, the orthography of that language abjures diacritics, and they use sequences like &quot;ah&quot;, &quot;aq&quot;, &quot;aqh&quot;, &quot;ô'hõ&quot;. In general, official adopted orthographies avoid the piling up of diacritics. You can find three-component letters in Ancient Greek, for example ᾤ, ᾆ. However, this does not represent the writing practices of Ancient Greeks, and it is more like the case where a linguist might use a pile of diacritics in a transcription. If you are looking for a generally-adopted Latin-based orthograpic system, I think you are limited to 2, as exemplified by Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T22:27:19.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29147" CreationDate="2018-09-23T00:57:01.653" Score="8" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;In discussions of AAVE, people frequently bring up the &quot;habitual be&quot;, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) He be working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, they use this as an example of something that Standard English doesn't have. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, for example, notes that this is a &quot;habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) He works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is habitual. To me, this sentence unambiguously implies a habitual aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I of course agree that AAVE and Standard English represent the habitual aspect differently, I don't understand what other difference there is between AAVE and Standard English. Am I misunderstanding what habitual aspect is, or am I misunderstanding how sentence (2) functions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22754" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T03:54:38.513" Title="habitual aspect in english" Tags="&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;aave&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29149" CreationDate="2018-09-23T01:18:09.397" Score="0" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there is such thing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stress&lt;/a&gt; on a consonant, e.g. &lt;code&gt;t́&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ĺ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ḿ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ś&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ʃ́&lt;/code&gt;... If so, what the example language would be. I haven't seen any on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tone&lt;/a&gt;, I haven't seen any tones specified for consonants, only vowels. So using pinyin, maybe like &lt;code&gt;ť&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;š&lt;/code&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T04:56:52.187" Title="Example of stress or tone on a consonant" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29145" CreationDate="2018-09-23T01:32:30.393" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saying that a language or language variety marks a grammatical category of &quot;habitual aspect&quot; implies that there is some construction that is &lt;em&gt;dedicated&lt;/em&gt; to expressing habitual actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He works&quot; uses the English &quot;simple present tense&quot; construction, which has perfective as well as habitual interpretations. Even if in practice &quot;he works&quot; would typically be understood as referring to a habitual action, this isn't because the verb is marked for habitual aspect specifically: this interpretation is based on a combination of the inherent meaning of the verb &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; (I think &quot;Aktionsart&quot; is a relevant concept) and the meaning of the progressive aspect, which could have been used but wasn't (that is, &quot;works&quot; is an explicitly &quot;non-progressive&quot; form, contrasting with the progressive form &quot;is working&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First of all, he exhibits a &quot;wonder&quot; by dividing Jordan; then &lt;strong&gt;he works&lt;/strong&gt; a miracle of mercy, by healing the bitter waters; thirdly, by his curse, he brings about a miracle of destruction...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Yy5cCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT4130&amp;amp;lpg=PT4130&amp;amp;dq=%22then,+he+works+a+miracle.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=gy-UIOAK0A&amp;amp;sig=OP6IMHdGmkPdfNZzfKblxFTOQMM&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjqtMHk_M_dAhVhilQKHbtCABwQ6AEwA3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22then%2C%20he%20works%20a%20miracle.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Complete Pulpit Commentary&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Henry D.M. Spence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He works&quot; in this context does not refer to a habitual action, but to an action that took place at one particular point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;simple present&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has a habitual sense in Standard English, but it has several other uses that make it inappropriate to call the &quot;simple present&quot; a dedicated &quot;habitual aspect&quot; construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For certain categories of verbs that are not widely used in the progressive (e.g. verbs of perception), non-habitual uses of the &quot;simple present&quot; form are fairly common: &quot;I see a spider&quot;, &quot;I feel the wind on my face&quot;, &quot;I hear a bird calling over there&quot; don't refer to habitual situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T03:28:04.847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T03:28:04.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29146" CreationDate="2018-09-23T01:33:24.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends what you mean by &quot;consonant&quot;. In Swahili you can see stress on nasals, as in &lt;em&gt;mtu&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ˈm̩.tu/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;person&quot;. In Cantonese, similarly, you see nasals with tone: 五 &lt;em&gt;ng5&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ŋ˩˧/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;five&quot; versus 悟 &lt;em&gt;ng6&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ŋ˨/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;to realize&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this only applies to &lt;em&gt;syllabic nasals&lt;/em&gt;: nasals that can form the core of a syllable. And one common definition of &quot;vowel&quot; is &quot;syllabic sound&quot; or &quot;sound that can form the core of a syllable&quot;. So by this definition, the first sound in &lt;em&gt;mtu&lt;/em&gt; is actually a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, stress and tone apply to &lt;em&gt;syllables&lt;/em&gt; rather than to individual phonemes. So in a word like English &quot;ample&quot; &lt;code&gt;/ˈæm.pəl/&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; can be called &quot;stressed&quot; just as much as the &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt; is: there's no instantaneous drop in loudness and pitch once the vowel is finished and the consonant begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T01:44:30.123" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T01:44:30.123" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29146" CreationDate="2018-09-23T01:49:09.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of tone on an obstruent is Logoori [kʊ̀.d́.dèè.kà] 'to cook it (class 11)'; [d́ꜜ.díi.dʒi] 'wall', where acute accent is H tone and grave is L tone. I should point out though that from a theoretical perspective, stresses and tones are not &quot;on&quot; segments, they are on prosodic elements which may be exhaustively characterized by some string of segments, including the case where a syllable or mora only has one segment. The argument that [kʊ̀.d́.dèè.kà] is syllabified that way and not [kʊ̀d́.dèè.kà] is based on the two-mora limit on syllables in the language and the fact that a moraic consonant can follow a long vowel (does not cause shortening).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T04:56:52.187" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T04:56:52.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T03:43:14.787" Score="0" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a someone interested in Linguistics, after I leave school I would like to pursue this interest into my later life, as a career, but the majority of my nearby universities only teach the more scientific study of linguistics, where I would more like to explore the more historical form of linguistics, compounding my interest in archaeology and classical languages. The only courses I have found are overseas, especially the Linguistics and Classics course at Edinburgh University. But this is a big life commitment to undertake, especially in pursuit of a career many people say will have not many opportunities for employment. I am hoping that there will be opportunities, because even though I am at a stage most people don't know what they want to do with their lives, I think I have a very real passion for this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22733" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T03:43:14.787" Title="Jobs in Historical Linguistics" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T05:15:21.863" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say &lt;em&gt;carrot&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;a shade of orange&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose &lt;em&gt;carrot&lt;/em&gt; is not used for the color and I wanted one to describe the vegetable's color. So, I revive the displaced &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; for the color. What do you call such revival?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22758" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T13:14:39.023" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T06:47:22.527" Title="What do you call the revival of an obsolete word for a new meaning" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17201" CreationDate="2018-09-23T05:56:27.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comerlo and comerla, the gender in not part of the conjugation! These are enclitic forms, where the object pronouns (lo, la,...) are written attached to the verb, but you can actually detach them and write it using a different word order: &quot;Voy a verla&quot; = &quot;La voy a ver&quot;. This can, in principle, be done with all verbs, provided the pronouns are compatible, but only with infinitives and present participles. &#xA;Semitic languages perfect example for what you're after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22759" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T05:56:27.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29143" CreationDate="2018-09-23T14:40:44.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;phonemes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Received Pronunciation is pretty much the only English accent for which transcription conventions have been established and widely accepted (but even then there are minor variations). So if you look for the list of phonemes of a dialect, the chances are you will find the same list as RP's except for a few additions/subtractions and modifications. For example, if you compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/D4AFF0A7118E7081ACF7C7586FF87590/S0025100304001768a.pdf/british_english_received_pronunciation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this description of RP&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/992DEF3999B0F2F20952870B188A77A5/S0025100307003180a.pdf/liverpool_english.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this description of Liverpool English&lt;/a&gt;, you'll notice that /ʌ, eə, ʊə/ are missing and a few symbols are different (/ɜː/ → /eː/, /uː/ → /ʉː/, etc.). But this does not necessarily tell you the exact realizations or the distribution of the phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For realizations, different authors employ different conventions and different levels of narrowness so just looking at the IPA symbols may not offer you as much realizational information as you need. For example, in the diagram in the RP description, /ʌ/ is much more fronted than the IPA [ʌ], while in the Liverpool one, /ɑː/ is more fronted than the RP's even though they use the same symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For distribution, going with the same examples, in Liverpool, what corresponds to the RP phonemes /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ is just one phoneme, /ʊ/. This one is easy: RP /ʌ/ corresponds to /ʊ/, as does /ʊ/. But Liverpool English also uses &#xA;/a/ (which corresponds to RP /æ/) in words like &lt;em&gt;bath, dance&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;grass&lt;/em&gt;, in which RP uses /ɑː/. These kinds of differences, i.e. the distribution of the phonemes, cannot simply be explained by &quot;Phoneme A in accent X corresponds to phoneme B in accent Y&quot;. To account for such differences, what are called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical sets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have been devised and adopted, so that example can be explained as &quot;RP has the same phoneme as PALM, /ɑː/, in BATH, while LE has the same phoneme as TRAP, /a/, instead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, note that the standard lexical sets devised by John Wells are based on the differences found in RP and General American. Some varieties of Scottish English, for instance, distinguish the vowels of &lt;em&gt;fir, fur&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;fern&lt;/em&gt;, which are all realized the same in RP and GA, and therefore not accounted for by the standard lexical sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than &quot;mappings between phonemes&quot;, I suspect what you are actually looking for is mappings of &lt;em&gt;realizations&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of phonemes across dialects, which are usually described by the means of the standard lexical sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such descriptions can be found in &lt;em&gt;Accents of English&lt;/em&gt; (1982) by John Wells, the very book which introduced the standard lexical sets, although it has some outdated elements and is restricted by the 1979 IPA, which lacked some vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more recent book which attempts at a comprehensive coverage of the phonologies of English varieties using the lexical sets is &lt;em&gt;A Handbook of Varieties of English&lt;/em&gt; (2004), vol. 1. With respect to your purpose, however, it suffers from being an anthology book in that the authors vary in their approaches (narrowness, scope, etc.) to transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With those caveats (authors use various transcriptions; lexical sets may not account for all differences) in mind, you'll probably find what you need in descriptions of accents based on lexical sets. Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles about English dialects on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;  have such lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T15:01:33.163" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T15:01:33.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29156" CreationDate="2018-09-23T15:12:03.987" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to take other acoustic measurements (voicing, F0, RMS, tilt) at the same time as the frames of my LPC coefficients. Is there a way to extract the exact times that Praat is using to find the LPC coefficients? The time step is set at 10ms frames with 5ms overlap, so I guess I could just write a for loop as well, but I'm not sure how that would work the leftover time (if the sound isn't divisible by 5). I've also looked at the long and short text files, and I can't find anything that would indicate the times of these frames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T16:19:28.080" Title="Extract time from frames in LPC objects" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29155" CreationDate="2018-09-23T16:19:28.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the answer is, &quot;it's about in the middle&quot;. The LPC listing gives you a value for x1 which might be 0.02548848046722024, given a selected window length of .025. xmax might be .800962012144737 and should be the total length of the selection. With 151 reported frames and a time step of .005, that .755 sec. is 0.04596201214 less than the total duration. Given an offset of x1 by 0.02548848046722024, that implies that there is an un-analyzed tail of about 0.02047353167. So frame &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; starts at (n*step)+x[1]. I do not know why x1 is not offset a little less, so that the bits at the beginning and end are not more equal. Perhaps the best way to look at this is that there is a limit to the precision of your time computations: you could ask the authors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T16:19:28.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29161" CreationDate="2018-09-23T17:23:05.517" Score="-1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_writing_system#Latin_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;languages that use the Latin script&lt;/a&gt;, not sure if the version of the Latin script they are using is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of something else, or if that is actually what the people who speak the language use to &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt;. I'm wondering if one could say if these resources are accurate representations of the selected languages that use the Latin script (that is, this is how each language would be written, at least the symbols part, not necessarily the grammar):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/f/xhosa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xhosa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/f/zulu.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zulu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/f/swahili.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swahili&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/h/danish.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/56/GEN.1.EAB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basque&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://baibala.org/cgi-bin/bible?e=p-1off-01994-bible--00-1-0--01994v2-0--4--Sec---1--1en-Zz-1-other---20-docoptions-search-browse----011-01994v1--210-0-1-escapewin&amp;amp;a=p&amp;amp;p=frameset&amp;amp;d=NULL.2.1.1&amp;amp;exp=1&amp;amp;toc=0&amp;amp;gg=text&amp;amp;bibleyear=1994&amp;amp;vv=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hawai'ian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/94/GEN.1.MRI1952&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maori&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/1098/GEN.1.NVJOB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navajo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/667/MAT.1.QVENT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quechua&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/207/GEN.1.BM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yoruba&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/329/GEN.1.BNET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welsh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/751/GEN.1.NCHBI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nahuatl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/1496/MAT.1.NTKE58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lokele Kele&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/bible/841/GEN.1.ESP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esperanto&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if these linked texts are actually how the respective languages are &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; (or if they are some undesirable variation). That is, if all the diacritics and whatnot are what is actually used in the common language (or at least in the formal written language). That way I would know if it is a good resource for learning the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason I am getting confused is after having looked through the IPA for languages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Nguni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xhosa&lt;/a&gt;. They have all those click consonants, yet from what it looks like they are actually using the Latin script to write it down. This means that the Latin Script letters take on different meaning. And I'm not sure if what that link shows, such as [gq] for [ǃʱ], or [ngc] for [ǀʱ̃], or simple [c] for [ǀ] or [x] for [ǁ] is literally how they write it. Selecting a random word from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/f/xhosa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; such as [wesixhenxe], here is how I would write it: &lt;code&gt;/uesiǁʰenǁe/&lt;/code&gt;. Which is why I'm asking this question, I don't know if these texts map accurately to the transliterations suggested throughout Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if there are any better resources for these languages I would love to know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I am asking is because there is just so many variations I've seen of the orthographies. I want to find one that is &quot;standard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T00:36:24.710" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T03:13:26.900" Title="Verifying these resources are accurate written representations for each language using Latin script" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T17:55:33.340" Score="-3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;After looking through a few translations of texts, I started wondering how people go about actually doing the translation. For example, translating between Chinese and English. They have very different structures, and it's almost like you can get down to the level of a &quot;sentence&quot; (or string of words) being simply a chain of concepts. So instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I went to the store and bought some food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is more like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[self] [go] [past] [determiner] [store] [conjunction] [buy] [past] [quantity] [food]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's at least how it feels when learning a new language. So then you have to translate that into Japanese lets say. So you swap around some nouns and verbs, reorder some adjectives, etc. But it's more than that. You want to make it sound &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; in the language. So somehow you have to get the &lt;em&gt;essence&lt;/em&gt; of what the person is saying (basically experiencing what they are saying, or painting the picture in your mind), and then transcribe that into the text as the translation. But then you try to balance that with keeping close to the original grammatical structure, so it's not completely different. Like, you don't want to just retell the story from scratch, otherwise it doesn't really fit into the concept of a translation and it is more a &lt;em&gt;retelling&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if there are any general techniques to do this. It's probably a very complicated topic, so if that's too much, just wondering what some good starting points (resources) are to learn more about this would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T19:01:08.160" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:57:01.530" Title="Techniques for translating a text" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-09T14:17:44.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="486" CreationDate="2018-09-23T19:06:38.780" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP has &quot;they don't know why is that&quot; which is not a natural word order to me as UK Southern-received. More expected, if not 'natural', would be &quot;they don't know why that is.&quot;.   This would suggest to me that the OP has some gaps in syntatical fluency which may make native speakers aware that they are dealing with a non-native, thus increasing the likelihood that accent and pronunciation generally would be picked up as variant.  All in all, though, I think the OP should stick with it and get exposed to as much native speech and writing as possible to clear away these few remaining issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22043" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T19:06:38.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29157" CreationDate="2018-09-23T20:54:20.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about the current state of Kele, but the odds are good that this is how the language is currently written (it is a relatively recent translation). Likewise, Navajo. In general, these are representative of the actual spellings. As for your concern about (Zulu and) Xhosa, those sources are as accurate as any orthographic sources in the languages. They fail in the domain of prosody, which is left out of the spelling system; there are breathy sonorants not indicated in Zulu spelling. But as materials in standard spelling, they are okay, and can be augmented with parallel recordings. There is a particular writing style to Bible translations which is not representative of normal speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T20:54:20.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29157" CreationDate="2018-09-23T21:12:39.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Xhosa, Zulu, Swahili, Yoruba, Kele, and the vast majority of other Bantu (and Niger-Congo) languages are written in the Latin script. The ones in the south that have clicks tend to use the &quot;spare&quot; letters like C, X, and Q for them, rather than the vertical bars that the Khoi-San languages prefer. The Latin orthographies tend to be slightly defective (e.g. Swahili's doesn't indicate aspiration, which is phonemic in some conservative dialects) but are generally designed specifically for each language and function quite well. Yoruba in particular uses acutes, graves, and underdots to indicate distinctions that the English alphabet can't handle, while Kele uses extra letters like Lingála does—both of these workarounds tend to be ignored in day-to-day usage, simply because they're hard to type and a lot of software won't accept them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Danish, Basque, and Welsh, like the majority of languages in Europe, have never used anything except the Latin alphabet to write their modern forms. These scripts evolved instead of being specifically invented or developed, so they're full of quirks and eccentricities you wouldn't expect in a fully new orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hawai'ian and Māori both have official Latin scripts used more often than anything else. However, many books leave off the rather important length marks and glottal stops: the Hawai'ian translation you linked includes them, for example, while the Māori one does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Navajo, Quechua, and Nahuatl have Latin-based writing systems that have evolved under strong influence from English and Spanish, and as such tend to be somewhat defective (not indicating certain phonemic differences). Navajo at least has reformed its orthography fairly recently to mark vowel length and tone properly. Nahuatl is sometimes written in &quot;scientific&quot; style, with long vowels and glottal stops marked, but more often is written in &quot;Spanish&quot; style without them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esperanto's orthography was invented at the same time as the language, and no alternative has ever really caught on, though people have proposed a few (such as a variation on Shavian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to actually learn one of these languages, talking to native speakers or (better still) taking a class from them will be far more effective than looking at a single document! Even Esperanto can be learned better by speaking it than by reading through the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T03:13:26.900" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T03:13:26.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3420" CreationDate="2018-09-23T21:17:17.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;PS has the advantage that it can name the structures (NP, VP, etc.) below each node.  If you don't need those names then it is easy to shorten one edge of each branch.  Shorten to zero and you've halved the number of edges.  Sound familiar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the differences between PS and D matter if they both have their heads on backwards regarding nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I apologize for sounding opinionated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T21:17:17.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T22:31:56.793" Score="3" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two of my textbooks said it was the former, while one pointed it was both. No further details about the truthfulness of these affirmatives were given. I personally think is auditorily and articulatorily, after all we don't just guide ourselves in sound or articulation alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T15:10:33.677" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T22:00:38.217" Title="Is Daniel Jones' cardinal vowel system auditorily or articulatorily based?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29167" CreationDate="2018-09-23T23:20:41.603" Score="1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to write (orthography) words in a distinct way to capture the essence of these pronunciations (I'll try to use IPA but probably will do it wrong so adding another variation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hip /hɪp/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hipo /hɪpo/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hippo /hɪpo/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hip'po /hɪpʔpo/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hip'p /hɪpʔp/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hip'p'po /hɪpʔpʔpo/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure I'm doing the glottal stop here, so maybe it is just:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hip'p'po /hɪp'p'po/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is pretty straight forward. But in English we write &lt;code&gt;hippo&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;hipo&lt;/code&gt; for some reason. But in some language somewhere I am sure there is a case where you want to pronounce the two &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; sounds separately, as in &lt;code&gt;hip'po&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more subtle case is where the letters are different, as in &lt;code&gt;comb&lt;/code&gt;. You can pronounce it these ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/kom/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/komb/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or even /komb'/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not even sure the IPA is capturing what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to explicitly pronounce that &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;. Like &lt;code&gt;coambuh&lt;/code&gt;, but not aspirated just popped. Similar to how you would pronounce the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sift /sɪft/ (not sure that IPA is capturing the poppingness of the t though)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I need to write it like this: /sɪft'/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;code&gt;attempt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʌtɛmt/ or /ətɛmt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʌtɛmpt/ or /ətɛmpt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ʌtɛmp't'/ or /ətɛmp't'/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I pronounce it like (2) with /ʌtempt/, but what I'm wondering about is how to properly write it so that you pronounce all of the consonants either &lt;em&gt;partially&lt;/em&gt; (as in 2), or fully as in (3) with /ʌtemp't'/ or &lt;code&gt;uhtɛmp't'&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally there is &lt;code&gt;tent&lt;/code&gt;. Wondering what this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tĕnʔ/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tĕnt/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/tĕnt'/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I don't use the glottal stop when I pronounce &quot;tent&quot;, and I don't make the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; pop, so I think I do (2) here as well. But it doesn't seem IPA captures the essence of this. That is, the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in these two words are pronounced differently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sift&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;sift&lt;/code&gt; is popped, while the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;tent&lt;/code&gt; is not. More specifically, it's almost as if the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;sift&lt;/code&gt; is an extra syllable, &lt;code&gt;sift-t&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to annotate the difference between the last &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;sift&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;tent&lt;/code&gt;, so that you say it either does or doesn't &quot;pop&quot;. It's almost like the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;tent&lt;/code&gt; is a &quot;stop&quot;, while the &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;sift&lt;/code&gt; is an ejective or something. But maybe it doesn't need to be annotated and it is just a side effect of the specific letter combinations we are making. Even so, I would still like to know how to annotate it better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to annotate the combination of multiple consonants, so that you either do or don't pronounce them both. So for &lt;code&gt;hip'po&lt;/code&gt;, both &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; sounds are made, or /ʌtɛmpt/ vs. /ʌtɛmp't'/, where in /ʌtɛmpt/ the consonants &lt;em&gt;blend&lt;/em&gt;, while in /ʌtɛmp't'/ they more &lt;em&gt;pop&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same with /kom/ vs. /komb'/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a corollary to annotating the &quot;popping&quot; sound, the question is how to annotate the non-popping sound, or &quot;flowing&quot; sound (flowing from one consonant to the next).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T23:28:14.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T23:54:36.943" Title="How to annotate &quot;popping&quot; vs. non-popping sounds of sequential consonants" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29166" CreationDate="2018-09-23T23:54:36.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feature that you're apparently referring to is &quot;release&quot;. In American English, final /t/ in &quot;hit&quot; (and similar words) is usually unreleased and glottalized, and may even be changed to glottal stop. In &quot;hip&quot;, final /p/ is more likely to be somewhat released. At the end of a syllable after a fricative, the voiceless stops tend to be more released, though I've encountered speakers that had no audible release in words like &quot;rasp, mask&quot;. I have never encountered a speaker who uses an ejective anywhere. IPA has a diacritic [p̚] for notating the fact of being unreleased, and one can use the aspiration diacritic to indicate the released version of [pʰ].  There is an unofficial diacritic for notating release, &quot;˹&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that &quot;tent&quot; is [tɛ̃ʔ], but other American speakers may say [tɛnt̚]. I would however say [læmp] or [læmp˹]. I say [sɪft˹]; it may be that in UK dialects there is enough release stuff that you would notate that pronunciation [sɪftʰ]. As a service to the reader, I think it is nice to indicate how you pronounce words, if you can, and not just give bare phonemic distinctions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;hippo&quot;, there is only one &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;, despite spelling – or perhaps, &quot;because of spelling&quot;. We need a way to indicate that the preceding vowel is short, so we usually double letters to do that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T23:54:36.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29169" CreationDate="2018-09-23T23:59:40.093" Score="-2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in first learning the IPA I went through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consonants&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vowels&lt;/a&gt;. This is confusing because in the consonants chart you see stuff like [d̪] or [ʎ̥˔]. At first I thought these were just some extra consonants. But then I saw in some different phonologies such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Mandarin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, symbols like [pʰ] or even [ɡ̊eːˀ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I ran into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA#Diacritics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X-SAMPA diacritics&lt;/a&gt;, which helped explain what was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;_&quot;    ̈ centralized&#xA;_+    ̟ advanced&#xA;_-    ̠ retracted&#xA;_/    ̌ rising tone&#xA;_0    ̥ voiceless&#xA;_&amp;lt;      implosive (IPA uses separate symbols for implosives)&#xA;=     ̩ syllabic&#xA;_&amp;gt;    ʼ ejective&#xA;_?\   ˤ pharyngealized&#xA;_\    ̂   falling tone&#xA;_^    ̯ non-syllabic&#xA;_}   ̚  no audible release&#xA;`     ˞ rhotacization in vowels, retroflexion in consonants (IPA uses separate symbols for consonants, see t` for an example)&#xA;~     ̃ nasalization&#xA;_A    ̘ advanced tongue root&#xA;_a    ̺ apical&#xA;_B    ̏ extra low tone&#xA;_B_L  ᷅  low rising tone&#xA;_c    ̜ less rounded&#xA;_d    ̪ dental&#xA;_e    ̴ velarized or pharyngealized; also see 5&#xA;&amp;lt;F&amp;gt;   ↘ global fall&#xA;_F    ̂ falling tone&#xA;_G    ˠ velarized&#xA;_H    ́ high tone&#xA;_H_T  ᷄  high rising tone&#xA;_h    ʰ aspirated&#xA;_j    ʲ palatalized&#xA;_k    ̰ creaky voice&#xA;_L    ̀ low tone&#xA;_l    ˡ lateral release&#xA;_M    ̄ mid tone&#xA;_m    ̻ laminal&#xA;_N    ̼ linguolabial&#xA;_n    ⁿ nasal release&#xA;_O    ̹ more rounded&#xA;_o    ̞ lowered&#xA;_q    ̙ retracted tongue root&#xA;&amp;lt;R&amp;gt;   ↗ global rise&#xA;_R    ̌ rising tone&#xA;_R_F  ᷈  rising falling tone&#xA;_r    ̝ raised&#xA;_T    ̋ extra high tone&#xA;_t    ̤ breathy voice&#xA;_v    ̬ voiced&#xA;_w    ʷ labialized&#xA;_X    ̆ extra-short&#xA;_x    ̽ mid-centralized&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen some of those other ones around like [ˠ], [ ̪], [ ̟], [ˤ], and [ʷ], but I haven't seen many of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering (a) where I can learn about each of these symbols in more depth (perhaps some encyclopedia about IPA diacritics, Wikipedia only has links to some of them), and (b), if these are somewhat repetitive in certain cases. That is, it seems that, for example, [ɱ] is a labiodental thing, but you could also do [m̪]. Same with &quot;velarized&quot; things (ˠ), it seems to me those are already covered by the velar consonants like [ŋ] or the similar looking [ɣ]. For example, doesn't seem like you'd ever do [ɣˠ], but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Irish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you see [bˠ], even [ɾˠ]. (Interested to learn what all these symbols mean). Same for pharyngealized (ˤ), implosive (IPA uses separate symbols for this), etc. Some pharyngealized ones are found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Berber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, such as [dˤ] or [ðˤ]. Labialization is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Amharic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, such as [gʷ], not sure what that means (hoping some aggregated resource has all this somewhere). For the voiceless stuff ( ̥), the IPA had a few consonants listed in the chart, such as [ʎ̥˔], so seems a bit duplicated (not sure if the meaning is the same). In addition, they already have symbols for a whole range of voiceless consonants (ɸ, f, θ, s, etc.), so seems like duplication as well. Wondering if these &quot;super/subscripts&quot; like [ˠ] or [ ̥] are used for some specific purpose that is required outside of these voiceless/velarized/etc. symbols in the consonant chart. Perhaps it was a later invention. The rest of these symbols I haven't really seen, so not sure what their status or use is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically just wondering where I can learn about all of these things, and if this duplication I am pointing out is real or I am missing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T00:46:14.197" Title="If diacritics cause duplication in IPA" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29168" CreationDate="2018-09-24T00:39:46.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Kiel_2015.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The official IPA chart&lt;/a&gt; does label what every diacritic means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also has a thorough description of the IPA, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Diacritics_and_prosodic_notation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has a table&lt;/a&gt; which links to explanations of almost all the diacritics. The few that aren't, like the voiceless dental fricative release, are pretty self explanatory (especially as you can compare to the nasal release, which does have an article explaining it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is redundancy in the IPA. Because there are diacritics for voiced and voiceless there's technically no need to have separate voiced and unvoiced letters. But that would be so ugly and cumbersome. Just like in language itself, redundancy is not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the way most linguists &lt;em&gt;take advantage&lt;/em&gt; of the redundancy is to try to use a plain symbol without diacritics for a base phoneme and its most common realisation. For allophones it makes sense to then add modifying diacritics where possible. But there are some languages where the phonemes can only be distinguished by diacritics. People debate about extensions to the IPA to add more symbols for some of those situations. Or some will introduce their own custom symbols, or borrow another IPA symbol for their language, which can be confusing, but that's why you always read their nomenclature first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T00:46:14.197" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T00:46:14.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29174" CreationDate="2018-09-24T02:59:14.873" Score="5" ViewCount="2103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to understand the difference between regular consonants and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllabic Consonants&lt;/a&gt;. Two examples are from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Danish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ð̩] &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/skinnede/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skinnede&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[l̩] &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/solen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start (for some context), the way I would naturally pronounce &lt;code&gt;solen&lt;/code&gt; is &quot;só-lin&quot;, but hearing the pronunciation above, it is more like &quot;soul-lán&quot;, with a sort of pausing/lengthening around the l, and the l seems to occur in both syllables (end of one and start of another), not sure if that's relevant. For &lt;code&gt;skinnede&lt;/code&gt; I hear &quot;skinew&quot;, I don't hear the d (ð̩) as in &quot;the&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From reading about syllabic consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[It] is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle, or is the nucleus of a syllable, like the r sound in the American pronunciation of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand &lt;code&gt;rhythm&lt;/code&gt;, since it's like &lt;code&gt;rhyth-m&lt;/code&gt;, two syllables basically (more like &lt;code&gt;rhyth-thm&lt;/code&gt;, where the first syllable &lt;em&gt;starts&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt; sound, and the next syllable finishes it. Same with &lt;code&gt;button&lt;/code&gt;, it's like &lt;code&gt;but-n&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;bottle&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;bot-l&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So wondering if one could better explain what a syllabic consonant is by providing a comparison with regular consonants. For example, comparing &lt;code&gt;solen&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;golen&lt;/code&gt; or some other random word (just made that up). Something close but that demonstrates a non-syllabic consonant. Also knowing how syllabic consonants relate to the nucleus would help make it more understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T04:44:55.117" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T09:46:13.963" Title="The difference between a regular consonant and a syllabic consonant" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29170" CreationDate="2018-09-24T03:28:02.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of &quot;syllabicity&quot; comes down to &lt;em&gt;syllable structure&lt;/em&gt;. Every known language has some sort of prosodic unit that we can call a &quot;syllable&quot;, usually (but not always!) smaller than a whole word and larger than a single phoneme. In languages with morae, like Japanese, syllables are also larger than morae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in particular, every syllable seems to be built around a nucleus, potentially with other things before and after it. This nucleus is always something that can be extended to an arbitrary length (so usually not a plosive—but even a plosive nucleus is attested in certain African languages!) and it's always there, never entirely missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This nucleus is said to be &lt;em&gt;syllabic&lt;/em&gt;, since it's the core of a syllable. And anything that's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a syllable nucleus is &lt;em&gt;non-syllabic&lt;/em&gt;. Vowels by default are syllabic, and consonants are not. But this is a very arbitrary distinction that the IPA chooses to draw, rather than any real phonetic property! While &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; is a &quot;voiced palatal approximant&quot; and &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; is a &quot;high front unrounded vowel&quot;, the only real difference between the two is that &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; is syllabic and &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; is not. So [dai] is two syllables unless otherwise specified, while [daj] is one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to tell the difference between them is that a syllabic sound can stand on its own, while a non-syllabic one can't. Try saying &lt;code&gt;[m]&lt;/code&gt; without a vowel next to it, then the same for &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt;. This is a hint that that in English, &lt;code&gt;[m]&lt;/code&gt; can be syllabic while &lt;code&gt;[b]&lt;/code&gt; can't. Or, look for words where that sound is a syllable nucleus: that's the only way to really be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T03:28:02.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29188" CreationDate="2018-09-24T03:35:56.000" Score="0" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29166/how-to-annotate-popping-vs-non-popping-sounds-of-sequential-consonants&quot;&gt;this question about consonants&lt;/a&gt;, I'm wondering how you annotate with IPA (or any other system if IPA doesn't support it) the difference between &lt;em&gt;blending&lt;/em&gt; vowels together (morphing between multiple vowels) and &lt;em&gt;discretely shifting&lt;/em&gt; between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &quot;wow&quot; is really like 3 different vowel sounds from what it seems. So I would maybe do /ʊɛʊ/. But this is &lt;strong&gt;blending&lt;/strong&gt; the sounds together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different way to do it to demonstrate non-blending is to use glottal stops, /ʊʔɛʔʊ/, or &quot;ʊ'ɛ'ʊ&quot;. But that is essentially putting a pause between the sounds which is the extreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the middle, in between blending and putting pauses between the sounds, is just shifting from one to the next without blending. A way to replicate this is to pronounce each long, and transition to the next quickly, so &quot;ʊʊʊʊʊʊʊɛɛɛɛɛɛɛɛɛʊʊʊʊʊʊʊʊ&quot;. If you do this quickly but not so quickly as to &lt;em&gt;morph&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;blend&lt;/em&gt; them together, then it's not a glottal stop and not a blend, so it's a ________ I don't know, a &lt;strong&gt;discrete shift&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering how to annotate this in IPA. It seems then there are 3 types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blending&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;discretely shifting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glottal stops&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering how to write all 3. If there are more ways to do it than these 3 types, that would be good to know too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T00:19:25.693" Title="How to annotate the difference between blended vowels and non-blended vowels" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29170" CreationDate="2018-09-24T03:39:22.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A syllabic consonant is a term for when the nucleus of a syllable is a consonant &lt;strong&gt;and not a vowel&lt;/strong&gt;. Normally, vowels form the nucleus of a syllable because they are the most sonorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&#xA;in the word, &quot;Alabama&quot; [æ.lə.ˈbæ.mə] there are four syllables separated by the &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt;symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see how each syllable has a vowel (as its nucleus, in fact)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, it is common to form words that contain syllables &lt;strong&gt;which have no vowels at all&lt;/strong&gt;, as in &quot;rythm&quot; [ɹɪ.ðm̩]. So, we say that the [m] in the second syllable of the word &quot;rythm&quot; is a syllabic consonant because it forms the nucleus of the syllable. In IPA, the diacritic that you use to mark a syllabic consonant is a small vertical line (placed underneath the syllabic consonant, see example). Some languages, like Spanish, don't permit syllabic consonants (an exception being Mexican Spanish beacuse of the -tl suffix from nahuatl)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't make sense, you should read some introductory phonology, I recommend the book &quot;Introductory Phonology&quot; by Bruce Hayes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastEditorUserId="9847" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T04:23:08.457" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T04:23:08.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29170" CreationDate="2018-09-24T05:25:04.417" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to get a better grasp of the phonetics of syllabic consonants is to listen to a minimal pair in a language that has them, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s1nA9K5ZmKuz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This is the pair [mbááŋgàà m̩̀bááŋgàà] (in that order) meaning &quot;I am arranging&quot;, &quot;you pl. are arranging&quot;, in Logoori. Phonologically, the difference is that [m̩] is an entire syllable, and [m] is just a consonant which has to be followed by a vowel (&lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; could come between &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; and the vowel). Because [m̩] is a syllable, it has a tone (every syllable has some tone), but [m] has no tone. Phonetically, the most obvious clue that you have a syllabic &lt;em&gt;m̩&lt;/em&gt; is duration; preconsonantal [m] is very short, under 60 msc, and syllabic [m̩] is about 140 msc long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not recommend Danish as the best exemplar of syllabic consonants, since Danish phonetics is extremely complicated and theoretically fraught. If you are interested in Danish, I recommend Hans Basbøll's &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Danish&lt;/em&gt;, which mercifully gives phonetic transcriptions. The claim about syllabic ð̩ is about &quot;some pronunciations&quot;, not necessarily the one you got on Forvo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T05:25:04.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29170" CreationDate="2018-09-24T06:46:19.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Except for rapid speech, a syllabic sound has a steady state, during which there is no appreciable change in the position of articulation for that sound. [This is just my own attempt to characterize the practice of phonologists -- others will probably disagree.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T06:46:19.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29152" CreationDate="2018-09-24T06:47:22.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a single term for this specific combination of operations, but this seems like multiple operations: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learned_borrowing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;learned borrowing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; + x, where x is the usual process by which &lt;em&gt;x-coloured&lt;/em&gt; was substituted with &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A word or other linguistic form borrowed from a classical language into a modern language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the Wiktionary category &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Learnedly_borrowed_terms_by_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Learnedly borrowed terms by language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A learned borrowing could be from any classical language, not necessarily from an earlier stage or nominal ancestor of the language in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in some languages, especially those that undergo a revival or tend to use neologisms instead of loanwords for new concepts, like Icelandic, French, Armenian and Hebrew, it is common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDX0W.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDX0W.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a neologism &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.am/search?q=&amp;quot;neosemantism&amp;quot;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;neosemantism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and its cognates, with very limited currency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T06:47:22.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29170" CreationDate="2018-09-24T09:46:13.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a minimal pair in English: &quot;Lightening&quot; - to reduce weight, with a a syllabic 'n', and &quot;Lightning&quot; - electrical discharge. At least they are distinct when I say them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17404" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T09:46:13.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29182" CreationDate="2018-09-24T11:26:15.457" Score="0" ViewCount="4092" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what are all the different kinds of &quot;stress&quot; (so to speak) in any language. I just found out about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)#Prosodic_stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosodic Stress&lt;/a&gt; which is pretty cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's cool because it totally changes how the sentence works, just by the way you stress the different words. That's really different from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;acute accent&lt;/a&gt; like used in Spanish &lt;code&gt;película&lt;/code&gt;. But that type of stress makes sense too. In this case it changes the meaning of the word, but we use this all the time in English it seems to just help with the understanding of words (disambiguating and other things I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Secondary Stress&lt;/a&gt; which I don't know much about. Glancing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#Stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; too, I don't get it yet. But it is said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most languages have at most one degree of stress on the phonemic level. That is, each syllable has stress or it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can think of it where you have (EXTRA FORCE) stress (acute accent type stress), and (sh) stress, or quieting stress / de-stress, relative to some normal level, sort of like low vs. high vs. normal tones. Wondering if anything like that exists in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the exclamation mark ! for kind of adding some sort of stress-ish thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question mark ? seems like it could be called a type of stress as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is &lt;em&gt;print&lt;/em&gt; stress, like &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt; kind of accomplishes prosodic stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is quote &quot; stress, in which (in addition to meaning the grouping of quoted content) you might change your tone of voice to reflect a character of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that means there are potentially these kinds of stress at least:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lexical stress (acute accent).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prosodic stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondary stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;De-stressing perhaps.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exclamation stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quote stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Italic stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bold stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If all of these things could be considered &quot;stress&quot; (or what a better name would be for it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are any others across any other language that are important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are any orthographies for any other types of stress (perhaps like if there is a &quot;mood&quot; stress in some language or something).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T15:42:07.000" Title="Types of &quot;stress&quot; in language" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17591" CreationDate="2018-09-24T14:33:36.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_accommodation_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(see wikipedia page)&lt;/a&gt; is when people change their speech to either sound more like their interlocutor (convergence) or less like their interlocutor (divergence). Suppose a British person moves to the US and wants to sound more &quot;American&quot; so that she can fit in, sociolinguists would say that she is accommodating to the new American dialect or converging. Moreover, suppose an American moves to the U.K, but doesn't want to seem &quot;British&quot; so he exaggerates his American accent, in this case he is not accommodating, he is diverging. CAT is really complicated and has to do with many complex factors like identity and social networks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sociolinguistic prestige, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(see wikipedia here)&lt;/a&gt; on the other hand, has to do with the value that speakers in a certain speech community give to a specific way of speaking. Overt prestige is like prestige &quot;out in the open&quot; which is usually given to the variety spoken by the by people with socioeconomic resources in a given speech community (like RP in British English). Covert prestige refers to the fact that even though a certain way of speaking in a speech community is widely stigmatized, some speakers may indeed find solidarity with those ways of speaking. For example, it's well known that Spanish is a stigmatized way of speaking in the United States (see Ofelia García), however, in certain situations in the U.S, by speaking Spanish, it may be advantageous, like at a party with other Spanish-speakers, in this situation, we would say that Spanish has covert prestige. You can also think about prestige for specific sociolinguistic variables (like the &quot;r&quot; in Lavov's 4th Floor Study)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These terms are quite different. CAT is more of a micro phenomenon referring to the actions of individuals, while prestige has to do with the attitudes of speech communities. Though they can be used together, for example, many individuals either converge or diverge to the prestige variety in a given speech community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T14:33:36.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29164" CreationDate="2018-09-24T14:57:28.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was originally thought of as articulatorily based, but now it serves as auditory yardsticks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the 20th century, Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel theory thinking that the tongue made equal movements from each cardinal vowel to the next. Each CV in the vowel diagram represented the highest point of the tongue during the production of the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jones' original theory has long been debunked, beginning in as early as the late 1920s, with x-ray photographs contradicting Jones' claims. Jones later adjusted the theory to stating that at least the extreme [i a ɑ u] were based on tongue positions and that each CV represented values equidistant &lt;em&gt;in perception&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the cardinal vowels, especially the mid [e ø ɛ œ ʌ ɔ ɤ o], now serve as somewhat arbitrary reference points rather than as values based on any articulatory or acoustic findings. This is why the cardinal vowel system is now regarded as an &amp;quot;auditory&amp;quot; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=33BSkFV_8PEC&amp;amp;pg=PA11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handbook of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt; (1999: 11–2)&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]wo fully front vowels [e] and [ɛ] are defined between [i] and [a] so that the differences between each vowel and the next in the series are auditorily equal; and similarly, two fully back vowels [ɔ] and [o] are defined to give equidistant steps between [ɑ] and [u]. The use of auditory spacing in the definition of these vowels means vowel description is not based purely on articulation, and is one reason why the vowel quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction and not a direct mapping of tongue position. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the primary cardinal vowels outlined above differs slightly from that of the English phonetician Daniel Jones who first defined them, but is in accord with a widespread conception of them today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-vowel-space/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a fairly accessible critique of the cardinal vowel system by Geoff Lindsey. For an extensive discussion of the background, development and legacy of Jones' theory, see Collins &amp;amp; Mees's biography, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/4183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), which I highly recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T22:00:38.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29179" CreationDate="2018-09-24T15:42:07.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main types of &quot;stress&quot;. The first is what we still call stress, which refers to word stress, sometimes called lexical stress. The position of the stress may be completely predictable by surface-oriented rule, or may involve a mix of rules and lexical specifications such as in English &quot;callow&quot; vs. &quot;allow&quot;. Within the set of such stresses, language may distinguish between primary and secondary stress (as well as lack of stress). In Odawa and Finnish for example one syllable in the word (the first) has a higher degree of phonetic prominence and other syllables are either unstressed or secondarily stressed. The pattern in Finnish, for instance, is ˈcvcvˌcvcvˌcvcvˌcvcv... There are some languages such as Waorani said to have multiple (alternating) stresses where all stresses are phonetically equivalent. In English, we have differences like the verb proˈgress, the noun ˈproˌgress, and the noun ˈtigrĕss illustrating the stress patterns &quot;none+main&quot;, &quot;main+secondary&quot; and &quot;main+none&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the phonological level, it appears that languages can be described in terms of saying (a) which syllables are stressed and (b) which if any of the stressed syllable has the highest prominence. It is unclear to what degree (b) is actually part of the phonology of a language. Of course, people &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; historically posited much richer kinds of distinctions of stress, but these distinctions have not proven to be phonologically necessary or even experimentally validatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other half of the &quot;stress&quot; picture arises when you combine multiple words into larger syntactic groups, and this gives rise to infamous differences such as between &quot;blackboard eraser&quot; (used to erase blackboards), &quot;black board eraser&quot; meaning a board-eraser which is black. While this was historically treated as being the same substance as word-stress, giving rise to an infinity of stress integers, the &quot;received opinion&quot; is that in fact this is the result of some kind of phonetic overlay on top of basic lexical stressed. The typical account of this overlay of intonation is that there are quasi-tonal elements such as &quot;H&quot;, &quot;L&quot;, &quot;M&quot; which are somehow lined up with syllables. The beginning of this kind of analysis was Mark Liberman's 1977 dissertation &lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/27376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Intonational System of English&lt;/a&gt;. Since then, myriad sub-theories and notations have emerged, so that you may find thing like &quot;+H*&quot;. Such systems have been worked out that handle a fair amount of the intonational realization of English and Dutch, and the notional is constantly being applied to new languages. There has recently been some interest in enriching the system to account for the fact that pitch-modulations are not the only components of intonation, so that lengthening or shortening, breathiness or creakiness can also play a role in intonational systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two kinds of word-stress: primary and secondary. We have little idea how many kinds of intonational combinations there are. The problem with intonation has been identifying a non-phonetic correlate of a supposed intonational property. There are infinitely many ways to modify a given phonetic form by dynamically modulating pitch, messing with phonatory properties, changing duration patterns, fiddling with amplitude... what we need is a system for distinguishing various &quot;kinds&quot; of implementations of &quot;then ˈI saw ˌher&quot;, and saying that &quot;Tokens A and B are used the same way&quot;, &quot;Tokens A and C are used different ways&quot;, since the premise is that we are looking for categories, not continuous phonetic measurements (and what kind of thing does a &quot;category&quot; represent?). &lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; roughly, intonations categorize some kind of semantic-pragmatic information, such as &quot;contrast&quot; or &quot;focus&quot;. Creaky voice is used dialectally to convey disdain, etc. Progress is slowed by the inherent difficulty of mastering both the phonetics of disdain and the pragmatics of disdain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T15:42:07.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3806" CreationDate="2018-09-24T16:56:57.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would definitely recommend using AntConc &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(download here)&lt;/a&gt; for the purpose you have described because AntConc is free, you are indeed able to copy and past concordance lines into a spreadsheet, and there are many tutorials and publications available about specifically using AntConc for language learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would highly recommend this book which was published recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liu, D., &amp;amp; Lei, L. (2017). Using Corpora for Language Learning and Teaching. TESOL International Association. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tesol.org/read-and-publish/bookstore/using-corpora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to Publisher's Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to point out the the differences between &quot;Indirect&quot; and &quot;Direct&quot; Uses of Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching (discussed in Liu and Lei p. 5) because your question seems to suggest you are looking for direct uses . Direct use of language corpora in language teaching would be having student's use the corpus themselves, that is, the students would be preforming queries, analyzing concordance lines, generating frequency lists, etc. I think this can be very helpful for advanced and technically savvy students as corpora can act as native speaker informants available 24/7 (as mentioned by Römer 2011: p.215, cited in Liu and Lei: p. 6). Indirect use of corpora refers to anytime corpora are used in the preparation and planning of pedagogical materials for language learning (for example, the teacher creates vocab lists before class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, learning to use a corpora can be cumbersome for language learners, and, as you suggest  doing error-analysis of learner corpora might be challenging. I would recommend you consider using indirect methods L2 error analysis, you can find common errors and prepare materials for the students themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9847" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T16:56:57.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3806" CreationDate="2018-09-24T17:32:40.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of thought that goes in the design of a learner corpus, and the tools follow from the design, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The corpus should be sharable among researchers, therefore you need the consent of the learners to publish the corpus (anonymised, of course!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to collect some metadata on the learners (at what level are the learners, maybe measure learning success, sociological data, other learning experiences)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need a scheme for annotating errors and good solutions (don't forget about them!) that you and potential co-annotators/co-correctors can apply consistently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think of research questions to be answered by your corpus and how to answer them. Are your data and metadata sufficient?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, you are not the first one to prepare a learner corpus. You can take advantage from other people and groups who have built learner corpora before you, here is a reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/24012369/Presentation_of_the_KOPTE_Corpus_and_Research_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrea Wurm, Presentation of the KOPTE Corpus and Research Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T17:32:40.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29159" CreationDate="2018-09-24T19:57:01.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's at least how it feels when learning a new language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; how it feels when already knowing both languages at a high level or even just fluently.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the translation happens effortlessly and without thinking, and &gt; 90% of the mental effort goes into translation &amp;lt; 10% of the words or phrases.  Translators and interpreters not only know both languages well, they have training and practice translating or interpreting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To repeat my comment &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/28874/how-agglutinative-languages-affect-comprehension#comment60279_28874&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Learning a few foreign languages to a moderate level builds a good immunity against certain types of assumptions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:57:01.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-24T20:13:59.113" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about the articulation of the sounds with diacritics [sʰ sʲ lʲ] and so on, since [s] is originally aspired; [sʲ] could be taken as [ɕ] in some documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any books or texts describing diacritics in detail? So I can know the precise articulation of each combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T22:02:35.617" Title="How can we get the precise articulation resulted from adding diacritics?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29186" CreationDate="2018-09-24T22:02:35.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An introductory textbook in phonetics will give an elementary description of the phonetic properties denoted by diacritics. This should include some information about how a &quot;palatalized&quot; consonant is produced. A more advanced treatment would come from Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson's &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;, where you would look up an articulatory term and see what they have to say about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this has limited applicability, in that you can look up articulatory facts about Archi but not Lushootseed – it just depends on what experimental work has already been done on a particular language. As far as I know, nobody did any articulatory studies on Lushootseed, so you can't know any articulatory details about Lushootseed &lt;em&gt;qʷ&lt;/em&gt;. You especially cannot validly conclude that because someone wrote a particular sound as [sʲ] or as [ɕ], the sound  has articulatory properties A vs B. You might be able to reasonably say that &quot;since Ian Catford wrote this sound of Chechen as [ɕ] just as he did for Adyghe and Kabardian, and he conducted articulatory experiments on Adyghe and Kabardian establishing that those phonemes are pronounced in that manner, we believe that the Chechen sound is articulated the same as the Adyghe and Kabardian sounds&quot;. In fact, letter-plus-diacritic combinations do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have a uniform articulatory status across languages, they have at most a range of possible articulations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can observe certain phoneticians articulating certain IPA sounds &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipachart/display.php?chart=1&amp;amp;datatype=1&amp;amp;speaker=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, though these are not sounds of languages, they are IPA performances. Unfortunately, none of the diacritic are included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T22:02:35.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29172" CreationDate="2018-09-25T00:19:25.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of ways that the IPA can annotate such differences.  The first is a tiebar: u͡a (unicode 0361) or u͜a (unicode 035C).  Use of a tiebar is usually taken to indicate &quot;these two vowels are part of a single phoneme&quot; (i.e., they form a diphthong), which technically indicates something about their behavior in the phonological patterns of the language, but usually also means they are pronounced more &quot;blended&quot; (to use your term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A way to indicate that the vowels are more &quot;discrete&quot; is to explicitly mark them as members of separate syllables, using a period (as in /a.u/, or if the second syllable is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prominent&lt;/a&gt;, /aˈu/ or /aˌu/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third way one might (ab)use the IPA to denote a &quot;blended&quot; vs &quot;discrete&quot; vowel sequence would be to mark one of the vowels as an onglide or offglide, using /j/ (in place of /i/), /w/ (in place of /u/) or /ɰ/ (in place of /ɯ/).  Personally I don't think that's a very good approach, for a couple of related reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technically those symbols represent consonants, not vowels, and so /aj/ ought to be considered a V-C sequence, which makes it no longer just a vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In speech the glide-vowel or vowel-glide transition is often quite &quot;blended&quot; and may be indistinguishable from a diphthong solely on auditory or acoustic grounds. In other words, the question of whether English &quot;pie&quot; is transcribed as /pa͜i/ (two phonemes, CV) or /paj/ (three phonemes, CVC) depends more on larger-scale patterns of how the [aɪ] sound(s) behave in different contexts, rather than on how blended or discrete the sounds are (e.g., if English &quot;pie&quot; follows a phonological rule that is followed by other words that are unambiguously CVC and not by words that are unambiguously CV, you might argue on that basis that /paj/ is correct).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final aside: when vowels are adjacent in speech with continuous voicing, they will never be fully &quot;discrete&quot;. There will always be a period of transition in the vowel quality, because when the jaw/tongue/lips move to make the second vowel gesture, the size and shape of the air mass in the oral cavity changes too, and that change is never instantaneous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T00:19:25.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29263" CreationDate="2018-09-25T00:46:54.883" Score="-2" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think normally concrete noun is member of abstract noun (membership in set theory), but it is not always true. For example, &quot;Socrates&quot; is a person, but it is not member of mankind (abstract noun). &quot;Socrates&quot; is member of &quot;all men&quot;. Is &quot;all men&quot; also abstract noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastEditorUserId="22765" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T02:32:04.220" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T08:40:20.210" Title="Is concrete noun member of abstract noun" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-10-05T07:37:25.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29193" CreationDate="2018-09-25T03:05:38.597" Score="0" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like Navajo has a very difficult-to-tease-apart verb morphology, as seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unusually for a natively North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional due to its complex and inseparable verb morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what languages are the most difficult to find standard structure in. Where everything seems irregular or difficult to classify. Or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T04:27:04.470" Title="The languages with the most complicated grammars" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-10-08T11:04:04.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29194" CreationDate="2018-09-25T03:21:27.757" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what the best (free) resources are for learning about grammar &lt;em&gt;generically&lt;/em&gt; across languages. I have seen a lot of &quot;Guide to the X grammar&quot;, but not &quot;Guide to grammar in general&quot;. Would like to find a resource that describes grammar cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T18:38:31.360" Title="Complete guide to cross-language grammar" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-09-25T18:05:32.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29191" CreationDate="2018-09-25T04:27:04.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One rule of thumb in linguistics is that no (modern) language is more or less complex than any other. Certain aspects might vary in complexity—Mandarin Chinese has almost no morphology, for example, while Classical Latin has almost no syntax—but simplicity in one area always corresponds to complexity elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two main areas generally referred to informally as &quot;grammar&quot; are syntax and morphology: syntax is anything bigger than a single word, while morphology is anything smaller. And if one of these is especially complex, the other tends to be especially simple. Navajo, like Classical Latin, is a fusional language: it has dense little morphemes containing lots of information each, and a large number of verb aspects and modes. However, its syntax is relatively simple, with many sentences not being so much a tree as a single node. And while the verbs are immensely complex, the noun morphology is even simpler than in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for languages with lots of irregularities in particular, look for ones in the middle of some sort of transition. Ancient Greek, for example, has annoyingly unpredictable verb morphology as it's in the process of transitioning to a more fusional model. Classical Latin is further along in the process, and modern Italian has mostly completed it, simplifying the verbs into a nice regular system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T04:27:04.470" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29192" CreationDate="2018-09-25T05:26:27.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume your question can be paraphrased along these lines. &quot;I would like to study the structure of a lot of languages, and I would like to know what kinds of things languages 'do'&quot;. In other words, I think you're looking for a comprehensive compendium of grammatical features across languages. There is no single compendium like that: such a work would be monstrously huge and take forever to write. Payne's &lt;em&gt;Describing morphosyntax&lt;/em&gt; is, however, a fairly good book that presents some of the range of variation found in at least certain kinds of constructions. This will introduce you to some of the range of certain grammatical constructions. There are a number of other good works of that type, including ones that focus on coherent grammatical subdomains such as &quot;agreement&quot;. I will also mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; as a standard reference for looking things up, e.g. if you want to know about word order or definite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want to know how the (integrated, full) grammars of languages work, the best approach might be to investigate the full details of the grammar of a half-dozen specific typologically-distinct languages. For example, Ancient Greek, Swahili, Chinese, Tamil, Inuit (this is an illustrative suggestion: you could probably substitute Sanskrit for Greek. The goal was to pick 6 unrelated, typologically-divergent languages and swapping Chinese for Japanese thwarts the latter desideratum). Obviously, the more languages you investigate, the better. The difference in method that I'm pointing to is that the &quot;many languages very narrowly&quot; approach teaches you more about how languages differ in one specific area, and the &quot;learn 6 languages approach&quot; emphasizes the necessity of understanding all of the parts of a single language, so that you know &quot;the grammar&quot; of some language (not &quot;a bit about the grammar&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third possible answer in case you mean &quot;I would like to investigate the structure of languages by grammatical elicitation with native speakers of languages: how do I proceed&quot;. I hate to say, there is no good textbook for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T18:38:31.360" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T18:38:31.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26976" CreationDate="2018-09-25T06:27:09.537" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sort of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that the uvular R of, say, German and Dutch is probably in origin an independent development from the French uvular (as it is in Northumbrian English.) It is true that the eventual rise of the Parisian uvular is what helped it to spread. Were it not for the rise of the Parisian /ʀ/ in the 19th century, uvular Rs throughout Continental Europe might well be consigned to low-prestige accents and dialects today, as they still are in Northern England and seem to have been before 1800.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continental uvularization — although it is traditionally assumed to have simply spread from 19th century Parisian French by prestige influence — is a complex process, and its early stages are probably quite old. It almost certainly has multiple inputs and sources, even if Parisian uvularization helped it along in the 1800s by offering a sudden source of high prestige which allowed uvulars throughout western Europe a chance at competition with the apical trill in polite society. Runge &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Proto_Germanic_r.html?id=krVbAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in his book&lt;/a&gt; gives several examples of references to uvular or velar /r/ in German well before 1800, and proves fairly convincingly that it existed as a stigmatized variant. The uvular /r/ of Eastern Yiddish seems to predate large-scale migration of Ashkenazim into Eastern Europe (and therefore predate Parisian uvularization by a wide margin) and raises the strong possibility of a uvular /r/ (presumably submerged in lower sociolects) in varieties of Middle High German. Van Bezooijen&lt;a href=&quot;https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/173277&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; brings to light the possibility of a Dutch uvular at an early date in his discussion of Montanus' Spreeckonst (1635), an early Dutch orthoepic work which unambiguously describes an apical trill as normal, but refers mysteriously to another, low-prestige type of R used by some. The term Montanus uses for this other type of R, reminiscent of the sound of crows and ravens, is kraekletteren &quot;creaky letters.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tempting though it might be to look for some kind of connection between these multiple, and seemingly independent, early sites of uvular /r/ in low prestige European speech, none of this is actually very surprising. Uvular [ʀ] is a common independent innovation in many languages that have apical trilled [r] and there isn't anything peculiarly European about it. Low-prestige uvular rhotic realizations are attested in medieval Arabic dialects of Mesopotamia, and survive today in the nearly moribund traditional Christian and Jewish dialects of Baghdad. Add to this the morphophonemic alternations in Akkadian which suggest a uvular rhotic, the [ʀ] allophone of /r/ attested in Tiberian Hebrew, and by implication the phonology of the Aramaic dialects underlying the latter, and uvulars appear to have an extremely long history of coexisting with apical trills in Mesopotamia and the Levant, just as they do in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is that although uvulars may be cross-linguistically rare, and although their wide adoption in prestige accents in 19th century Western Europe is likely not entirely coincidental, the innovation of a uvular [ʀ] as a variant of an apical trill is not exactly a bizarre or unusual occurrence in the world’s languages and one shouldn’t read too much into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22770" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T06:27:09.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6433" CreationDate="2018-09-25T14:49:53.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on Bhaldraithe's description, I would transcribe it as &lt;strong&gt;[d͡ɹ̝̆ʲ]&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;[d͜ð̠̆ʲ]&lt;/strong&gt;. One may call it a palatalized alveolar tapped affricate. (This is a narrow transcription. The tie bars and diacritics [˘ ˔ ˗] are better omitted in ordinary transcriptions to avoid clutter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ɾ] represents a coronal tap or flap, which means the tongue briefly touches the roof of the mouth. Albeit brief, it usually implies a complete occlusion, so the raised diacritic [˔] doesn't really make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T14:49:53.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26976" CreationDate="2018-09-25T18:37:00.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A perceptual proximity can explain how two sounds with different articulatory features can be related diachronically. The perception is also an element to take into account in the evolution of the languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T18:37:00.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29128" CreationDate="2018-09-25T20:22:04.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that there are a number of well known patterns. They're not perfect, but they usually work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bow8m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bow8m.png&quot; alt=&quot;Morphology Patterns&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's likely 50 common patterns and another 150 that are less common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T20:22:04.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29201" CreationDate="2018-09-25T20:44:14.170" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering if a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllabic Consonant&lt;/a&gt; can be a plosive such as &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt;. Maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuxalk&lt;/a&gt; has this feature, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically if you would say something like /p't'p't'/ (where &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; is for explosive), wondering what the syllables are there, and if each &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; would be considered a syllabic consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also would just like to verify that if you did /p's̩t'/ (like &quot;psst, over here&quot;), that the &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; is in fact a syllabic consonant. It makes sense that non-plosives can be used as syllabic consonants because they can be arbitrarily lengthened. But I wonder about the plosive consonants. I understand that something like the &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://learn101.org/swahili_grammar.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;mbele ya&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; might be a syllabic consonant (better yet, the &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;rhythm&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the plosive consonants &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be syllabic, wondering why not, and instead what you would call them in the structure above, /p't'p't'/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T21:43:30.960" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T21:01:57.283" Title="If a syllabic consonant can be a plosive" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29200" CreationDate="2018-09-25T21:49:23.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00382862/document&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Ridouane which argues that in Tashlhiyt, stops can be syllable peaks (are syllabic), for example [tb̩.dg̩] 'it is wet'. This question has been addressed in the literature: the advantage of this paper is that it is written with full knowledge of that preceding literature. I would also recommend Bagemihl's paper &quot;Syllable Structure in Bella Coola&quot;, because it engages a number of alternative theories of syllabification for the Nuxalk facts: obstruents are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; syllabic in Nuxalk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through especially Bagemihl's paper, it should be clear that good argumentation establishing how consonants in a big sequence are sylabified can be made based on phonological patterns, but it is very difficult to make that argument, and it may not be possible. Since &quot;psst&quot; isn't a word of English (it's a sound conventionally made by English speakers), similar to &quot;pfffft&quot;, &quot;d'oh!&quot; and [txŇʔn̥] (the nasally-released snort), there's nothing in the grammar that you can call on to decide if these things are syllables or what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of Ridouane's evidence, I would say that the reason why [t] is not a syllable peak in English is that that's the way the rules of syllabification in English work. Some languages allow sonorants to be syllable peaks, some don't; some only allow liquids to be syllable peaks, others are less restrictive. There are functional explanations that say why usually, only vowels are syllable peaks, but the specific patterns of individual languages have to be specified in the grammar of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T21:49:23.853" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29061" CreationDate="2018-09-25T22:15:37.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, articles are used to mark definiteness and often number, demonstratives are used to distinguish a particular entity between multiple entities (adding deixis to definiteness and number), and both are considered determiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages mark definiteness with articles or demonstratives, and some mark it morphologically. Some don't mark it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what makes things like definiteness useful without deixis is the same kind of thing that makes having a &quot;generic&quot; you useful. When information is not known, necessary, or desired, it is generally omitted. When using narrative voice, it makes more sense to use articles rather than overspecify before the frame of reference has even been established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, I would argue that demonstratives add complexity and additional flexibility but articles came straight from numbers, e.g. &quot;an&quot; from &quot;one&quot;, and were where we started. So we wouldn't have &quot;stopped&quot; at demonstratives on the way to articles. Articles didn't grow from demonstratives and provide the ability to not reference information that has not yet been provided. Demonstratives are inherently referential, and language has a need to accommodate non-referential information, by either specifying it to a lesser degree or dropping all determiners altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22774" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T22:15:37.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-25T22:33:31.030" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;In considering words with &lt;code&gt;-er&lt;/code&gt; ending like &quot;quandary&quot; /ˈkwɑːn.dəɹɪ/, it seems like to me there is no difference between that IPA /ˈkwɑːn.dəɹɪ/ and /ˈkwɑːn.d.ɹɪ/, or &quot;quand-ree&quot;. The [r] is like &quot;rrrr&quot; straight from the [d], as in &quot;drrr&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between those and &quot;quandry&quot;, like &quot;foundry&quot;, where the &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;blend&lt;/em&gt; together. But I don't know if there is a difference between /ˈkwɑːn.dəɹɪ/ and /ˈkwɑːn.d.ɹɪ/ (&quot;quand-ree&quot;). That [ə] seems like it is purely an &lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt; thing, which is spilling over into the IPA structure. But it is a silent a/u/e in the different words it appears in in English IMO, like &quot;hurry&quot; or &quot;worry&quot;, those are basically &quot;hrry&quot; and &quot;wrry&quot;. A word like &quot;very&quot; you actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have an extra vowel between the &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt; and the other letter, /ˈvɛɹi/ with &quot;ai-rr&quot; in there, not just a straight &quot;rrrr&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the [ə] is added in the IPA purely because of the rules for syllabification in English perhaps (which I don't know much about), because if [h], [r], and [y] aren't vowels, then &quot;hrry&quot; can't be a grammatically correct word. But phonologically speaking, to me there is not actually an [ə] in between the [d] and [r] in &quot;quandary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there also seems to be a few subtle variations in the way you could pronounce &quot;quandary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;quan-dery&quot;, with the d separated from the first syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;quand-ery&quot;, with the d as part of the first syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), it seems clear there is no [ə] between the [d] and [r], but at the same time it is not a strait &quot;drrr&quot; &lt;em&gt;blend&lt;/em&gt;. Instead there is a &lt;em&gt;shift&lt;/em&gt; between the [d] and [r].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (2), it seems it could go either way. You are essentially starting a fresh word by saying &quot;errr&quot;. The question is if it is &quot;errr&quot; or &quot;rrr&quot;. If I forcefully pronounce &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rrr&quot;, it starts of &lt;em&gt;smooth&lt;/em&gt;. If I pronounce the more natural &quot;errr&quot;, then it starts of with a &quot;pop&quot;. The &quot;pop&quot; it seems is the reason for the [ə].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But instead of the [ə] you could do some sort of thing that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29172/how-to-annotate-the-difference-between-blended-vowels-and-non-blended-vowels&quot;&gt;intermediate between a &lt;em&gt;blend&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;glottal stop&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which I don't know how to properly do with IPA. But maybe it would be like &quot;'rrr&quot;, instead of &quot;ʔrrr&quot; or &quot;ərrr&quot;. So the scale of pausing between the [d] and [r] would be &lt;code&gt;drrr -&amp;gt; d'rrr -&amp;gt; dʔrrr&lt;/code&gt;, the &quot;dʔrrr&quot; being something that isn't really related to the &quot;quandary&quot; word. So then it would be /ˈkwɑːn.d'ɹɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is if that [ə] in fact doesn't exist in the pronunciation, and it is instead carried over from the spelling/orthography of English words. And instead it is just some sort of &lt;em&gt;syllabification&lt;/em&gt; of the [r], as well as a micro &lt;em&gt;separation&lt;/em&gt; between the [d] and [r]. It seems that instead of &quot;'rrr&quot;, you could do just the same writing it /ɹ̩/, or perhaps /'ɹ̩/ to capture both the &quot;start r with a pop&quot; and the syllabification. So we end up with /ˈkwɑːn.d'ɹ̩ɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if this is true, or what I am missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the [ə] was &quot;really&quot; there, then I would pronounce it &quot;quand-uh-rrrr-ee&quot;, like &quot;quanduhrry&quot;, because the pronunciation of the [ə] is different from a straight &quot;rrr&quot; sound, or even from the pop at the beginning of the &quot;errr&quot; sound. It would be more like &quot;uhrrrr&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another word that seems to have this feature is &lt;code&gt;significant&lt;/code&gt;. In speech you might pronounce it &quot;sgnificant&quot;, or even &quot;sgnificnt&quot;, or yet! &quot;sgnifknt&quot;, where there is no vowel really between the [s] and [g], it's more like /sg/. Here since they &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; blend (doesn't seem possible), you don't even need the pop symbol, as in /s'g/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;elementary&quot; doesn't even have this feature, it is more like &quot;foundry&quot;, as in &quot;elementry&quot;, but you can pronounce it if you want as &quot;element'rry&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T06:55:01.387" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T03:06:39.097" Title="If there is really an /ə/ between /dəɹ/ in &quot;quandary&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29203" CreationDate="2018-09-25T23:29:45.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really is, or really isn't, depending on the speaker. The OUP entry indicates that the schwa in &quot;quandary&quot; is optional for both UK and US English. The US token is pronounced with no schwa, the UK token is pronounced with one. Two versions of Jones' dictionary indicate a vowel, the Macmillan dictionary writes obligatory schwa but the recorded (US) token has no schwa, and the Websters site writes optional schwa, and the associated recording is hard to tell (those speakers over-articulate: it's not different from &quot;laundry&quot;). Similarly, some people have a schwa between &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;athlete:, and some don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to carry a recorder with you at all times (wear a sign saying that you are taping everything, so as to not run afoul of the law), and later transcribe a day or two's worth of spontaneous speech. You may learn that 1 out of 5 tokens of your pronunciation of &quot;quandary&quot; has a schwa. On the other hand, everybody is capable of speech errors, so it's hard to know if an unusual token is an error or a rare variant. In this case, I think there is a US/UK factor to the difference. But it is not strict: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/quandary/#en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo repository&lt;/a&gt; suggests that it's random. It's actually rather amazing how variable pronunciations of words are even within US English and not including known dialect features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T23:29:45.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29203" CreationDate="2018-09-26T00:10:29.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my dialect of American English, [r] becomes an obstruent (fricative) after [t], [d] in the same syllable, as in &quot;dream&quot;, &quot;drive&quot;, &quot;trick&quot;, &quot;trivial&quot;. This does not happen when schwa precedes the [r], or when the [r] is syllabic (which is approximately the same thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, listen to the &quot;r&quot; in &quot;quandary&quot;.  If it's a fricative (and your dialect is like mine), that suggests there is no schwa intervening between [d] and [r]. Otherwise, there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also be interesting to observe the roundness of the [r], since [r] in the onset of a syllable is ordinarily rounded, suggesting there is no schwa, but in the offset of a syllable and unstressed, [r] is unrounded, suggesting there is a preceding schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T00:22:21.763" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T00:22:21.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T00:31:54.713" Score="2" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which tools are worthwhile for aligning sentences from pairs of paragraphs of source and target languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22775" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T15:40:22.627" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T17:01:45.290" Title="What are the best NLP sentence alignment tools?" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29211" CreationDate="2018-09-26T05:52:03.460" Score="0" ViewCount="1502" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/31454/if-pinyin-or-other-romanization-can-be-translated-back-into-chinese-characters&quot;&gt;pinyin can't be reversed back to Chinese characters&lt;/a&gt;. However, I keep seeing images like the ones below for different languages (the images below are for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi&lt;/a&gt; and Japanese, but there are others). Basically they show (in some cases) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abugidas&lt;/a&gt; (consonant/vowel pairs), or just consonants/vowels separately like the Latin alphabet. So these are sound-based scripts, as opposed to Chinese which is image based. That makes sense then why pinyin wouldn't directly map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm basically wondering if there is a 1-to-1 mapping, then, between the romanized spelling of say a Japanese or Hindi word, vs. the spelling in the native script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because it seems that English isn't actually a sound-based language. Or more specifically, it is only partially sound-based. You can have two words sound the same, like &lt;code&gt;brake&lt;/code&gt; (1 primary meaning) and &lt;code&gt;break&lt;/code&gt; (2 primary meanings, break something, and take a break). So you have 1 phonological spelling with IPA that maps to 2 different English orthographic spellings, and a bunch of different meanings. This creates a problem similar to Pinyin, in that you have to disambiguate which &lt;em&gt;spelling&lt;/em&gt; you are considering. &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/31468/the-max-number-of-characters-that-map-to-a-single-pronunciation/31477#31477&quot;&gt;Chinese has almost 100 meanings for /yi4/&lt;/a&gt;. You also have patterns like &lt;code&gt;horse&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;worse&lt;/code&gt; which are the same orthographically but different phonologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if these other languages have this same problem. That is, if languages like Hindi, Japanese, even Inuktitut, or other languages &lt;em&gt;that have their own script, yet are sound-based&lt;/em&gt;. That is, the pronunciation of the word can map to multiple symbols in that language. Or perhaps that's a benefit of these languages, that they have a direct 1-to-1 mapping between the romanized &lt;em&gt;pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; and the native script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages I'm particularly interested in are any with custom scripts (Sanskrit/Hindi, Japanese, Tamil, Inuktitut, Amharic, etc.), or even those with Latin script (Swahili, Malaysian, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YbnLE.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YbnLE.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9lQ5.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9lQ5.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRh6y.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oRh6y.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T06:28:50.727" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T19:22:31.523" Title="If romanization can be reversed (back to original script) in some languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T06:40:12.527" Score="2" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember having a side discussion with a professor in college and he told be about a nearly extinct language; the closest thing I can remember to its name is &quot;Freeze&quot;. Apparently its spoken on some island around the English channel, and I believe it's supposed to be &quot;pure&quot; old english, not contaminated by other languages. However, I haven't been able to find this language by googling. Can you help me find it? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2080" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T10:21:13.930" Title="What is this &quot;Freeze&quot; language?" Tags="&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29207" CreationDate="2018-09-26T07:26:59.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory there could be a lossless representation, but, in practice, yes, they almost all have the same problem that no, it is not a 1:1 mapping nor otherwise trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In natural language processing and generally machine learning this task is known as &lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt;, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://yerevann.github.io/2016/09/09/automatic-transliteration-with-lstm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, although in some sense it is de-transliteration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transliterating from one script to another is usually lossy, a one-way function, because scripts do not have the same characters, and thus cannot fully &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; unambiguously represent other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digraphs&lt;/a&gt; is a good hint at possible ambiguity (1:2 mapping).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing special about converting Latinisations back to other scripts.  For example, write &lt;em&gt;how are you, Mr Thoreau?&lt;/em&gt; in Russian Cyrillic, and then try to convert it back by generic rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions - the only cases where it is mostly doable by rules rather than intelligence or statistical model - are for example conversions between two versions of the same language like Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3VBTY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Balkan font&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SPvPm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Balkan font&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even there it is not 1:1 - see љ, њ џ - and there are caveats since the Latin text could contain URLs and so on that should remain in Latin, and the Cyrillic text could contain a Russian word with a character not in the mapping, or a Cyrillic URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are Indic scripts that are structurally the same and essentially only stylistic variants of each other, similar to Antiqua and Fraktur, or Nuskhur and modern Georgian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T18:25:22.320" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T18:25:22.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T07:29:44.437" Score="3" ViewCount="1166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are European Union parallel multilingual texts - regulations, directives, especially the debates of European parliament - ideal for machine learning of machine translation, e.g. with neural networks? My guess is that they are ideal, but I have not seen they to be used in actual research papers. If not, then - why they can not be ideal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am specifically interested in the grammar induction as the by-product of the machine translation learning a la &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10850&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10850&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastEditorUserId="14372" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:54:37.497" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:54:37.497" Title="Are European Union parallel multilingual texts ideal for machine learning of machine translation?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;computer-science&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29212" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:22:35.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Europarl &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a classic corpus for research papers, used at the main conference - WMT - and by some of the top people in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HB4Bx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HB4Bx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be useful for training a translation system specifically for European parliament domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Europarl, like any domain-specific corpus, is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ideal for training a production-strength open-domain machine translation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many times do the top queries like &lt;em&gt;how r u&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ai eu se te pego&lt;/em&gt; in the corpus?  To say nothing of &lt;em&gt;laham taz-ziemel&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;gradient descent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:22:35.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29243" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:46:22.460" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen &quot;mood&quot; a lot in linguistics articles, have read about it a few times, but it never seems to click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_modality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistic modality&lt;/a&gt;. I have come across &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modal Logic&lt;/a&gt; which basically adds to Propositional Logic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;possibility (&quot;Possibly, p&quot;, &quot;It is possible that p&quot;), necessity (&quot;Necessarily, p&quot;, &quot;It is necessary that p&quot;), and impossibility (&quot;Impossibly, p&quot;, &quot;It is impossible that p&quot;), ... modalities of time (notably, &quot;It was the case that p&quot;, &quot;It has always been that p&quot;, &quot;It will be that p&quot;, &quot;It will always be that p&quot;), deontic modalities (notably, &quot;It is obligatory that p&quot;, and &quot;It is permissible that p&quot;), epistemic modalities, or modalities of knowledge (&quot;It is known that p&quot;) and doxastic modalities, or modalities of belief (&quot;It is believed that p&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sort of understand that, but don't have a firm grasp yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says about mood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, grammatical mood (also mode) is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (e.g. a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality, that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflexion of the verb itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concepts are little over my head though, and so wondering if one could explain mood in simpler terms. When I hear &quot;mood&quot; I think of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mood&lt;/a&gt;, an emotional state. Like I am happy or angry or something. So when I hear grammatical mood I think of somehow expressing that you are happy with something, but it doesn't seem that that is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see stuff like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-tu(q): &lt;b&gt;indicative&lt;/b&gt; third-person singular (in fact a nominal form)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood#Indicative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The indicative mood, or evidential mood, is used for factual statements and positive beliefs. &lt;b&gt;It is the mood of reality&lt;/b&gt;. The indicative mood is the most commonly used mood and is found in all languages. Example: &quot;Paul is eating an apple&quot; or &quot;John eats apples&quot;. All intentions that a particular language does not categorize as another mood are classified as indicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It is the mood of reality&lt;/em&gt; doesn't make sense to me with the ingrained interpretation of mood being an emotional state. I don't see how you can say &quot;I am feeling &lt;em&gt;reality&lt;/em&gt; today, quite reality.&quot;. So I have a hard time (1) interpreting what that actually means (what the indicative mood is), and (2) how to apply it (to understanding where mood is used in sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could explain what mood is, and what the range of moods are, in laymen terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T10:47:27.163" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T05:15:18.707" Title="Explaining Grammatical &quot;Mood&quot; for the Laymen" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29206" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:48:26.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/danielvarga/hunalign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hunalign&lt;/a&gt; available from github. It is the current standard tool for multilingual aligned corpora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:48:26.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29207" CreationDate="2018-09-26T10:12:57.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This touches the issue of &lt;em&gt;transcription&lt;/em&gt; (may be and is often lossy) and &lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt; (that aims at losslessness). The system shown in the question for Hindi is lossless as long as you are ignoring the ligatures which are optional in Hindi orthography and not noted in the transliteration. For Hindi, the use of the letter &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; in digraphs creates not ambiguity, because a consonant immediately followed by an h always fuses to the appropriate aspirated consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system for Hiragana is a transliteration for Hiragana, but unfortunately in the Japanese writing system there is more than just Hiragana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Losslessness in transcription is typically a feature of scientific writing and rendering, practical transcriptions prefer a system that is more intuitive for the end user at the cost of some ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T10:12:57.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29210" CreationDate="2018-09-26T10:21:13.930" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the Frisian language—actually, there are three Frisian language: West Frisian spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland with capital Leeuwarden, East Frisian spoken by very few people in three villages around Friesoythe in Northern Niedersachsen, Germany, and North Frisian spoken on the North Frisian Islands and Helgoland, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a myth that Frisian is &quot;pure Old English&quot;, it was a separate, but closely related language even at the time when Old English was actually spoken. It has evolved since that time, and the different Frisian languages were heavily influenced by their big neighbours (Dutch for West Frisian, Low German for East Frisian and North Frisian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T10:21:13.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T16:12:14.040" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;We kick ass and take names.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running this sentence through Google's dependency parser gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dc4TB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dc4TB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, &quot;we&quot; is tagged as the subject of &quot;kick&quot;. However &quot;we&quot; is not tagged as the subject of &quot;take&quot;. In order to extract this fact from the above graph, I would have to deduce it from the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;take&quot; is a conjunct of &quot;kick&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;take&quot; does not have its own subject, and so must share the subject of &quot;kick&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the above deduction have a name in computational lingustics, in the vein of named entity recognition or coreference resolution? I'd like to learn more about the process and see if there are any libraries that do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And if you know of any libraries, please tell me :))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22782" LastEditorUserId="22782" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T20:55:21.497" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T20:55:21.497" Title="What do you call the process of resolving the subject of a conjunct?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T16:54:28.233" Score="9" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;And if not, is there a term, accepted by both the Deaf and linguistic communities, that includes both spoken and signed language, in contrast to written language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reputable linguistic sources, including common introductory textbooks (Language Files, for example), frequently make the distinction between writing and speech, or written and spoken language, rarely mentioning sign explicitly in that discussion. However, the same sources often distinguish between spoken and signed language. It is my understanding that signed languages can also be described in terms of articulators and phonemes, but introductions to phonetics and phonology usually concentrate on &amp;quot;speech sounds.&amp;quot; My students have found this confusing at best, and dismissive of the Deaf community and signed languages at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoken_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia entry for &amp;quot;spoken language&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; expresses this ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;spoken language&amp;quot; is sometimes used to mean only vocal languages, especially by linguists, making all three terms synonyms by excluding sign languages. Others refer to sign language as &amp;quot;spoken&amp;quot;, especially in contrast to written transcriptions of signs.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spoken_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talk page for the same article&lt;/a&gt; expresses the confusion this can generate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present version of the article seems to have a POV in discounting the language of deaf people: the phrase &amp;quot;Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as the natural or the primary medium of human language for some obvious reasons&amp;quot; is particularly strange and I will delete it. --Mathew5000 20:16, 26 March 2007 (UTC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they meant spoken as opposed to written, not oral as opposed to sign. It's now clear that that is what the stub is about. — kwami (talk) 04:33, 1 June 2012 (UTC)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a phonetician or ASL scholar, but I do often teach introductory linguistics courses. To me, a term for &lt;em&gt;performed&lt;/em&gt; language seems necessary to avoid excluding sign in discussions of non-written language; for example, when we say that &amp;quot;written conventions generally follow spoken language, not the other way around,&amp;quot; it is unclear whether this statement includes or excludes non-vocal language production. If such a term already exists, it would be very helpful if authors of commonly used linguistic resources could make the distinction clear. At the very least, I'd like to know what terminology I can use in my classes that accurately represents this contrast and respects the Deaf community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: while tagging this article, I noticed that the tag &amp;quot;spoken-language&amp;quot; is described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modality of language, contrasted with written language, whistled language, or sign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21075" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T18:00:05.973" Title="Does (or should) the terms &quot;spoken language&quot; and &quot;speech&quot; include signed language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29222" CreationDate="2018-09-26T17:08:02.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming from a very specific point of view, namely writing high quality metadata for language resources, I think that &lt;em&gt;spoken language&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a different modality from &lt;em&gt;signed language&lt;/em&gt;, and should be interpreted as such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know a cromulent term that comprises both spoken and signed language as such, maybe something like &lt;em&gt;spontaneous speech production&lt;/em&gt; captures the gist of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T17:08:02.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29226" CreationDate="2018-09-26T17:16:41.587" Score="0" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering how to accurately represent stress. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA&lt;/a&gt;, stress, is marked with ˈ◌. But in languages like Spanish (don't know of other languages that use acute accent, other than Ancient Greek), you have &lt;code&gt;película&lt;/code&gt;, which also demonstrates the stress. It seems you might write that in IPA as &lt;code&gt;peˈlicula&lt;/code&gt;. More accurate would be to surround the syllable in some way, such as &lt;code&gt;pe{li}cula&lt;/code&gt;. That's all pretty straight forward, because in Spanish for the most part (from what I can remember) it's usually simple consonant/vowel pairs chained together, as opposed to complex vowel sequences like in English with &lt;code&gt;gaia&lt;/code&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more complex example of stress that gets me confused is with words like &lt;code&gt;round&lt;/code&gt;. When I pronounce that, I stress at the beginning: &quot;RROUnd&quot;. So in IPA it might be like &lt;code&gt;ˈround&lt;/code&gt;. But I would like to get more specific than that and mark off where exactly the stress is occurring, which I can't completely figure out at first. It seems like &lt;code&gt;{rou}nd&lt;/code&gt; I would say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that gets me to the question about the acute accent like used in Spanish. If I were to to try to place that on &lt;code&gt;round&lt;/code&gt;, it could be in one of 3 places perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ŕou&lt;/code&gt; (this seems to be the most accurate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;róu&lt;/code&gt; (but this may be more like &quot;err-OOU-nd&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;roú&lt;/code&gt; (but this would be more like &quot;rou-OO-nd&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;code&gt;verse&lt;/code&gt;, it is like &lt;code&gt;{ver}se&lt;/code&gt; or /ˈvr.s/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;code&gt;fantastic&lt;/code&gt;. If it were Spanish you might do &lt;code&gt;fantástic&lt;/code&gt;. But in reality it is like &lt;code&gt;fan-TAS-tic&lt;/code&gt;, the whole syllable is stressed. Wondering if the acute accent in this case is just shorthand for marking the whole syllable as accented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the acute accent (like in Spanish) can accurately represent stress in all cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a better way of representing stress and how long it lasts over a few sounds/letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is actually being stressed, in detail, in different complex words. Basically, even though there is the IPA and Spanish way of marking stress, it would be helpful to know about a good resource that goes into more depth on what is actually occurring during stress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also would be interested to know any other ways different languages represent stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T19:10:35.670" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T01:49:52.697" Title="Accurately representing stress" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T18:50:05.050" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question: What ways do you know to encourage people to come up with different ways of saying the same thing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I'm working on a project where my goal is to get variants of utterances as a way to quickly gather speech data on dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My challenge is to find a way to overcome priming effects. For example, I don't want to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you ask to go to the garden?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and get &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Let's go to the garden&quot; or &quot;Want to go to the garden?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to prompt the participants about going to the garden and get &quot;Want to take a walk in the patio?&quot; or &quot;Time for a stroll in the plaza&quot; or something like that. Basically, I don't want the participants to use the same phrasing I used but use their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's why I'm wondering if you know of studies that faced similar challenges? Or any insight/pointer into linguistic fieldwork of this type would be super helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I'm trying to get people to come up with variations on everyday things like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lend me that book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Take me to James' house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, thanks for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22783" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T04:08:07.517" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T04:08:07.517" Title="What ways do you know to encourage people to come up with different ways of saying the same thing?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29224" CreationDate="2018-09-26T19:36:03.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to first point out that &quot;represent&quot; is ambiguous in linguistics: it could refer to a mental object, such as &quot;the representation of tone in the (mental) grammar of Chinese&quot;, or it could refer to writing practices – how to &lt;em&gt;notate&lt;/em&gt; a thing. I take it that you are asking about notation rather than the underlying mental thing. Even so, there is a difference between linguist conventions and official orthographic practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the realm of linguists practices, IPA has a notational convention, but it doesn't carry any strong ontological commitments. If you write [peˈlikula], you are just saying that there is a stress in an approximate location. IPA does not embody a theory of what things have stress or what stress is, although there are such theories (for example, &quot;stress is a property of a syllable&quot;, the standard theory of stress since the late 70's). There is a common practice in IPA transcriptions that the stress mark is positioned at the beginning of the syllable, but it's not an absolute requirement of the notational system. (Some phoneticians dispute the existence of syllables). The transcription [pe.ˈli.ku.la] is a notational variant of [pe{ˈli}kula], using devices already in the IPA (plus, not inventing a notation &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for delimiting the domain of stress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is as far as we can go with questions of linguist notations, but there are still (theoretical) questions about the facts of &quot;stress&quot;. Most prominently, we can still ask &quot;what thing 'has stress'?&quot;. Using the range of things available in most phonological theories, that would be the syllable, the mora, the segment and the syllable rime. The discussion could then turn to the question of whether a language might put stress on individual moras. So far, there is no evidence for a more fine-grained distinction in what things are stressed. Languages do not distinguish syllables where the stress is on the first consonant, or the first vowel of a diphthong versus the second. If a language &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; contrast monosyllabic [rˈau] and [raˈu] then it would be inaccurate to represent both the same way. Since that situation doesn't arise, the current system is good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In transcriptions, use of an accent mark to indicate stress violates IPA conventions (they notate tones, not stress) so the question of accuracy is meaningless in that context. With other transcription conventions it is pretty standard to use acute accent for primary stress and grave for secondary stress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language orthographies do not adhere to IPA conventions, even if they employ letter also used in the IPA. There might be orthographic differences between e.g. &amp;lt;ráu&gt; and &amp;lt;raú&gt;, which in that language denotes the difference [ˈra.u] versus [ra.ˈu]. In terms of accurately representing the contrasts of a language within an orthographic system, such a use of accent marks is reasonable. Languages which actually mark stress in their orthographies are not very common, and in the case of Spanish, marking a vowel in a two-vowel doesn't necessarily indicate positional difference in stress (it marks syllabicity, apart from those cases where it isn't used to mark anything phonological, like in &lt;em&gt;cuál&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;cual&lt;/em&gt;). Modern Greek is a little unusual in regularly marking stress. More often, accents are used for stress, but only idiosyncratically, such as the pair &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;én&lt;/em&gt; in Norwegian to distinguish &quot;a&quot; and &quot;1&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T01:49:52.697" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T01:49:52.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29242" CreationDate="2018-09-26T20:59:26.980" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sandhi is a common Linguistic feature in many languages, which happens at word boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assimilation is feature progressively/regressively affecting the other segment boundary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ðɪs ʃɪp becomes ðɪʃ ʃɪp and ðiːz ʃɪps becomes ði:ʒ ʃɪps&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that , sort of sandhi or assimilation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T05:00:27.733" Title="Sandhi vs Assimilation?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T21:26:22.590" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noted that to make the sound the sides of the tongue make an occlusion in the laterals, this would mean the point of greatest constriction isn't just in the alveolar ridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:57:58.843" Title="Are alveolar stops really alveolar stops?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29240" CreationDate="2018-09-26T21:47:09.010" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;All linguistics I've seen breaks sentences into tree structures like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/NeatSummaryOfLinguistics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2sT1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t2sT1.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gloss&lt;/a&gt; is sort of a more flattened, chain-like structure, but it is much less formal than the syntax tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zbd56.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zbd56.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if there are any linguistics theories that focus on the &lt;em&gt;sequential&lt;/em&gt; aspect of a sentence or stream of content rather than its (theoretical) tree structure. For example, they would formalize concepts differently than Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase, which leads to the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related to this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/22816/is-a-language-possible-without-verbs-or-without-nouns&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There many languages for which the European classification of words into parts of speech simply doesn't apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T22:03:52.953" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:54:13.833" Title="If there is a version of linguistics that doesn't break sentences into tree structures" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T21:55:17.907" Score="1" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen people mention that some theoretical linguists even dispute the idea of syllables. Maybe, too, it is related to the problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuxalk&lt;/a&gt; poses to the theory of syllables, since they can have large chains of consonants. Plus there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllabic consonants&lt;/a&gt;. Not sure if Nuxalk features this, but I have yet to see any linguistic resource demonstrate how to handle /p't'p't/, where it is [p] and [t] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ejective consonants&lt;/a&gt; chained together. Each one is, so to speak, a syllable. But syllables are supposed to have vowels (at least that's my primitive understanding). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, maybe it's not possible to have a consonant by itself, a plosive consonant at least, since it is such a discrete thing that always ends with some air transitioning in the mouth. So maybe there is always a mini vowel. Maybe [h] is considered a vowel by some. These are just some of the questions around the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's not too complex and diverse, it would be interesting to know a quick summary of what the linguists say who are against the concept of syllables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What a good resource is for learning about what those who are against the syllable concept have to say.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T21:21:18.283" Title="The Theory Against Syllables" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29207" CreationDate="2018-09-26T22:27:17.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some counter-examples to showcase where the mappings are not 1-1 in some of the scripts/romanisations you mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hindi: Devanagari / Hunterian system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;औ → au → औ, अउ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ऐ → ai → ऐ, अइ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese: Hiragana / Hepburn romanisation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;あな → ana → あな, あんあ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;おお → ō → おう, おお&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T19:22:31.523" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T19:22:31.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29234" CreationDate="2018-09-26T22:34:15.240" Score="-3" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering about languages with stress that don't mark it orthographically. For example, the only two languages I know of that actually mark stress are Ancient Greek and Spanish. It seems that marking stress with things like acute accents is the edge case instead of the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-languages-like-Spanish-need-accent-marks-but-some-don%E2%80%99t-like-English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why do some languages (like Spanish) need accent marks, but some don’t (like English)?&lt;/a&gt;, I am wondering if there are any examples of languages that (a) have stress when speaking, where (b) the stress changes the meaning of the word, and yet (c) they don't annotate it orthographically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean that there could be one &lt;em&gt;written form&lt;/em&gt; of a word, yet multiple different meanings. I know &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/31468/the-max-number-of-characters-that-map-to-a-single-pronunciation&quot;&gt;Chinese maps written words to multiple meanings&lt;/a&gt;, and we have that too in English with &lt;code&gt;plant&lt;/code&gt; meaning at least two different things. But while we do have stress in English, we don't annotate it, and we don't have (at least from my understanding) any cases where there is a word that is pronounced like &lt;code&gt;fubár&lt;/code&gt; and another pronounced &lt;code&gt;fúbar&lt;/code&gt;, such that they mean different things. If we did have that, then I'm not sure how you would figure out from context (when reading) that this case of &lt;code&gt;fubar&lt;/code&gt; is supposed to be pronounced &lt;code&gt;fubár&lt;/code&gt; while that case is supposed to be pronoucced &lt;code&gt;fúbar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering though if any language does have this problem. That is, phonologically they have stress on a word, yet orthographically they don't annotate it, &lt;em&gt;and yet&lt;/em&gt; the stress causes the word to mean different things. Wondering what some of those languages are, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T23:36:19.267" Title="Languages without orthographic stress marks that still have words that differ based on stress" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29225" CreationDate="2018-09-26T22:44:50.890" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether this will meet your needs, but my colleague &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alton_L._Becker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pete Becker&lt;/a&gt; used to do a little trick to generate descriptions. He wanted to underline the point that there were an infinite number of ways to describe anything (a point which he carefully did not mention to his audience before the trick).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He would say, to the audience, usually a class, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm going to say 'Start', and then I'll do something. When I'm done, I'll say 'Stop'. You pay attention to what I do and when I say 'Stop', you write down what I did on a sheet of paper.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When everybody's done, we'll collect the papers. Ready?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he'd say &quot;Start&quot; and do something simple like put a book on a table, then say &quot;Stop&quot;, wait,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and collect the papers. When he read them aloud to the class, he would always find that every description was different; he told me he'd never seen a word-for-word duplicate. I've tried it a few times and agree; people are &lt;strong&gt;immensely&lt;/strong&gt; variable in how they use their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T20:01:19.810" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T20:01:19.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29232" CreationDate="2018-09-26T23:35:57.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from English (progress (V) vs. progress (N); permit (V) vs. permit (N)), Russian has contrastive stress e.g. [ˈmuka] &quot;agony&quot;, [muˈka] &quot;flour&quot; spelled мука. As far as I know stress is not written in ordinary writing, but may be indicated in dictionaries (as we do in English). German has examples like ˈumschreiben (&quot;rewrite&quot;) vs. umˈschreiben (&quot;paraphrase&quot;). There are cases such as modern Arabic dialects where there are minimal pairs like [kaˈtabit] &quot;I wrote&quot; vs. [ˈkatabit] &quot;she wrote&quot; (from the Palestinian dialect Brame worked on). I think one would write كتبت in both cases, but that brings us to the question of what form of Arabic is being written, when one writes. The stress difference is predictable, if you know which vowels are underlying and which are epenthetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T23:35:57.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29232" CreationDate="2018-09-26T23:36:19.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for is languages with phonemic stress that don't mark it as part of their orthography. Although English doesn't mark stress orthographically, it is phonemic and there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt;: for example, the verb &lt;em&gt;import&lt;/em&gt; /ɪmˈpɔrt/ vs. the noun &lt;em&gt;import&lt;/em&gt; /ˈɪmpɔrt/ (source and other examples &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogjam.name/?p=9151&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Hebrew also has minimal pairs such as /ˈoxel/ &quot;food&quot; vs. /oˈxel/ &quot;eat,&quot; both spelled אוכל.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T23:36:19.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29230" CreationDate="2018-09-27T00:25:18.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am against syllables as linguistic primitives.  Using the SPE feature system, syllables arise through the interaction of syllabicity, [+/-syll] or V/C for short, and stress, [+/-stress]. In traditional terminology, the closest correspondent notion to stress, covering both vowels and consonants is &quot;strength of articulation&quot;, or fortis/lenis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be surprising, but the SPE feature system does allow for consonants to be both stressed and unstressed, since one of the universal markedness conventions of chapter 9 assigns [-stress] as the unmarked value of stress for consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A  virtual syllable is defined (by me) as a syllabic sound preceded by a longest sequence of stressed non-syllabic sounds and followed by a longest sequence of unstressed non-syllabic sounds. So we do still have the means of understanding the traditional notion of syllable in a modern feature system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the single feature stress applies to both syllabic and non-syllabic sounds, one would expect to find phonetic changes of unstressed non-syllabics becoming stressed before stressed syllabics and changes of stressed non-syllabics to unstressed before unstressed syllabics.  Both these things happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a variation on an idea from the Cours de linguistique générale, where Saussure proposes a segmental feature of [+/-] explosive to describe increasing oral aperture in the onset of syllables and decreasing aperture (called implosive) in the offset of syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T20:32:56.980" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T20:32:56.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-27T01:25:52.293" Score="2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what I've found so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun&#xA;Hindi: मुस्कान f (muskān) &#xA;Russian: усме́шка (ru) f (usméška)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb &#xA;Indo-Iranian: *smáyati&#xA;Proto-Slavic: smьjati (*smijàti) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE: *(s)meyh₂-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: Smile&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22785" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T16:07:45.380" Title="Are Hindi: muskān and Russian: usméška cognates? (Noun smile)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29230" CreationDate="2018-09-27T01:42:38.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim that there are no syllables is based on the lack of evidence that the syllable is necessary, so this is an Occam’s Razor argument. If no language presents sufficient evidence that syllables exist, we cannot legitimately say that syllables exist, and that is the claim (i.e. that no language has been shown to have such evidence). However, all current theories have things that do part of what a syllable does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would help to say what a “syllable” is in linguistic theory: it is a grouping of some number of segments. That is about all one can say without getting into matters of controversy, or definition by exemplification. Syllables have one peak, though not all theories of syllables actually notate something as a syllable peak. A sequence like [lado] will not be parsed as one syllable, it will be two syllables, but [lao] might be one syllable or two (whence the need to insert syllable boundaries on occasion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No phonetic definition or diagnostic of syllable has been uncovered, and John Ohala is a well-known phonetician who is &lt;a href=&quot;http://courses.washington.edu/lingclas/451/ohala2008.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skeptical about the syllable&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;However, he does not deny that there are important modulations in the speech stream. Phonologists have a certain disinclination to embrace entities which cannot be clearly diagnosed in terms of the speech signal, thus we believe in segments because we can hear them and they can contrast, and we don’t easily believe in syllables because we can’t hear them as such and they don’t contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing on phonological considerations, what persuades most phonologists of the existence of the syllable is its utility for explaining phonological facts. One such fact is the pattern of consonant co-occurrence in many / most languages. In English, words can start with s+C or C+L (L= &lt;em&gt;r,l&lt;/em&gt;) but not two stops, e.g. [*pka], and not a liquid plus stop (*[lpa]). This is not just a fact about word beginnings, it’s a fact about syllables, the standard analysis says: syllables cannot begin with [*pk, *lp]. Words (and syllables) also can’t end with [*pk, *kp] nor with [*pl]. (I will comment on the question of whether English has any syllables ending in &lt;em&gt;pl&lt;/em&gt; below). You can’t just say that the phoneme sequences &lt;em&gt;lp, pk, pl&lt;/em&gt; are blocked (&lt;em&gt;help, napkin, applaud&lt;/em&gt;), but if you put an obstruent before &lt;em&gt;lp&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;pk&lt;/em&gt;, you have an impossible sequence. The explanation is that obstruent+[l] or obstruent+[p] can’t go at the end of a syllable, and &lt;em&gt;lp&lt;/em&gt; cannot go at the beginning of a syllable, so there is no possible parsing of obstruent+&lt;em&gt;lp&lt;/em&gt;, obstruent+&lt;em&gt;pk&lt;/em&gt; into syllables. Thus the syllable has utility is explaining this kind of gap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is uncontroversial that English does not have surface word-final [Cl] apart from [rl], but there are syllabic liquids, so [æpl̩] is a word. The existence of [æpl̩] does not automatically invalidate the segment-sequence argument for the syllable, especially since syllabic sonorants derive from &lt;em&gt;əC&lt;/em&gt; anyhow (thus [æpl̩]←/æpəl/). It is possible to derive [æpl̩] from /æpl/, where final sonorants are forced into a syllable regardless of the preceding consonant – and then they are made syllabic. However, this ploy would not be available for *&lt;em&gt;nakpkin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that this sequencing argument doesn’t necessarily diagnose the syllable, it really diagnoses the onset and the coda (an onset cannot contain &lt;em&gt;lp&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;pk&lt;/em&gt;, a coda cannot contain &lt;em&gt;pk,kp&lt;/em&gt;). If we have the structural units “onset” and “coda”, is the syllable really necessary as well? Hyman in his book &lt;em&gt;A theory of phonological weight&lt;/em&gt; expresses skepticism regarding the syllable on the grounds of non-necessity, in light of other phonological units that are motivated, in his case, the weight unit (now known as the mora), and he has an account of syllabicity without having syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most powerful argument for the full power of the syllable that I know of is the constituency argument set forth by Clements &amp;amp; Sezer, that in Turkish, a velar palatalizes if it is in the same syllable with a front vowel. You get palatalized &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; in [nekʲ.tar, ʃykʲ.ran, fa.kʲir, kʲir, dikʲ, kʲyrkʲ], and not in [uk.te, ak.rep, ok, i:.kaz, fark, zamk, bok.sit], where in the latter contexts, the velar is not in the same syllable (as onset or coda) as a front vowel. The syllable cannot be avoided by requiring the target and trigger to be adjacent (see kʲyrkʲ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m a bit puzzled at why this argument hasn’t been cited universally as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; knock-down argument that Turkish, at least, must have syllables, which makes me wonder if there is a factual issue. It is true that [kʲ] is a marginal phoneme (there are pairs like [kar] &quot;snow&quot;, [kʲar] &quot;profit&quot;, but generally [kʲ] is predictable. One could legitimately dispose of [kʲyrkʲ] by positing that it is underlying /kʲyrkʲ/ or /kyrkʲ/. However, it is widely assumed (gratuitously, in my opinion) that predictable feature specifications should not be included in underlying forms, so positing /kyrkʲ/ is an unlikely alternative analysis in the theoretical milieu where the Clements &amp;amp; Sezer analysis was posited. So I don't think we can explain the silence over Turkish based on thinking that there is a self-evident alternative that avoids mentioning the syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave untouched the theoretical question of whether we can posit that all languages have syllables if it can be shown that at least one language has syllables. The anti-syllable claim is, simply put, that no language has been shown to require syllables, as well as requiring smaller multi-segment groupings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T21:21:18.283" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T21:21:18.283" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29237" CreationDate="2018-09-27T02:47:03.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have answered your own question! To our current understanding, yes, they are cognates, also cognate with English &quot;smile&quot;, &quot;smirk&quot;, and (less directly, via Latin via French) &quot;admire&quot; and &quot;miracle&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This PIE root is quite well-attested, and has direct descendants in many different Indo-European languages. I don't know enough about Hindi to talk about the derivation there, but in Russian, &lt;em&gt;-шка&lt;/em&gt; is a productive noun-deriving suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T02:47:03.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29229" CreationDate="2018-09-27T04:54:13.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: I've never heard of such a thing, but it's hard to prove a negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer answer: every linguistic theory I know of agrees on a few fundamental points, which are sometimes called &lt;em&gt;linguistic universals&lt;/em&gt;. These are features that appear in every single language in the world; if you believe in universal grammar, these are part of it. It seems fairly clear that these features also have specific mechanisms in the brain: look into Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia (or ask another question here if you prefer!) for details on how we know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these features are almost trivially straightforward: for example, every language has a set of lexical items (words, morphemes, etc), and every language divides these lexical items into different classes that follow the same general patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one feature that isn't as straightforward, and according to Hofstadter might be tied in to the basis of consciousness itself, is recursion. In other words, every language in the world has the ability to take a thing of type X and a thing of type Y and put them together to make a thing of type Z. And in particular, recursion involves the ability to combine an X and a Y to make another X. This seems to be a fundamental property of language, and possibly built into the way our brain handles language at the most basic level. &lt;em&gt;(*)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a concrete example, consider the phrase &quot;the gazebo&quot;. Some theories call it an NP, while others call it a DP, but the label doesn't matter. Now consider the phrase &quot;the pineapple&quot;. You can combine these with the word &quot;and&quot; to make the phrase &quot;the gazebo and the pineapple&quot;, which has the same general type as both of the phrases making it up: you can use it in the same place in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you can put together an X and a Y to make a Z lends itself well to a tree structure. That's simply what trees &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;. There are several different ways to make the tree: phrase structure grammar talks about it in terms of &quot;X + Y = Z&quot;, while a dependency grammar talks instead about the relationship between the X and the Y, and a lambda-calculus based model like you see in semantics will talk about a function taking a tuple (X, Y) and returning a Z. But no matter how you phrase it (pun intended), there's some sort of tree structure at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have to draw it as a tree? Not at all. You could use commas and brackets instead, like the function-y theories do. But it expresses the same basic model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to think about it as a tree? Nothing forces you to. But linguists have found that trees are an exceptionally useful model for this, which may come down to the innate way our brains actually process language. So no modern theory without trees of any sort has really caught on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(*) Some people claim that one obscure language from South America, Pirahã, lacks recursion. But the evidence on this is somewhat lacking, only one researcher has the data to back up this claim, and there are some reasons to question his data and methods. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I haven't seen enough evidence to justify &quot;this language is different from literally every other language we've ever seen on Earth&quot;. So I'm disregarding it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:54:13.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29228" CreationDate="2018-09-27T04:57:58.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As aml has pointed out in the comments, a stop consonant involves stopping the airflow entirely (hence the name). For stops made using the tongue, this means the tongue needs to block off the entire mouth, so there will always be contact both along the sides and in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the sides of the tongue do pretty much the same thing in an alveolar stop versus a palatal stop versus a dental stop, we choose to ignore them: they simply don't give us any useful information. Instead we focus on where the tip of the tongue is, since that varies more and is much easier to measure. That's what determines the &quot;official&quot; place of articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T04:57:58.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29227" CreationDate="2018-09-27T05:00:27.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither term would be wrong. They aren't mutually exclusive: sandhi is broadly defined as a phonological process crossing word boundaries, while assimilation is broadly defined as a phonological process making things more similar. So if a process makes things more similar across word boundaries, it's both sandhi and assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T05:00:27.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29216" CreationDate="2018-09-27T05:15:18.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First, a bit of background: &quot;mood&quot; in this sense is borrowed from *modus*, the Latin word used in certain ancient grammars. But then *modus* was also borrowed as &quot;mode&quot; via French, and now the two are used interchangeably. There's no relation to &quot;mood&quot; as in emotion, which comes from Germanic. You'd think the scientists studying language would be some of the most precise in their terminology, but that's not the case; we're stuck with both of them now. I'll use &quot;mode&quot; here to reduce confusion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its simplest, grammatical mode indicates what the speaker intends by their statement. Is this a statement of fact (indicative/telling mode)? Is it something that they wish would happen (optative/wishing mode)? A direct command, telling the listener to do something (imperative/commanding mode)? Perhaps it describes something that's likely to happen but isn't actually fact (tentative/potential mode)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most of these modes have complicated Latinate names—again, borrowed from the Latin grammarians. The English translations like &quot;wishing&quot; are simpler but also unfortunately less common.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, we tend to use auxiliary (aka &quot;modal&quot;—this is where the name comes from!) verbs to indicate these. For example, &quot;I eat&quot; is indicative, while &quot;I should eat&quot; is optative, and &quot;I could eat&quot; is potential. Whether or not these actually count as distinct modes is debatable; some linguists only use the term &quot;mode&quot; with languages like Ancient Greek, where the forms are morphologically distinct (indicative &lt;em&gt;édō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I eat&quot;, optative &lt;em&gt;édoimi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I should eat&quot;). But the meaning is the same, it just comes down to different formal definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T05:15:18.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-27T05:37:53.597" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a term to describe expressing an idea in many different forms yet the meaning remains the same in each rendition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Australians, Australians, the Australian people, the people of Australia, Australia's people etc.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the phrases above virtually express the same thing yet they are all different, lexico-grammatically speaking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;synonym&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; does not work here. I have also come across the idea of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;periphrasis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; but that also has a restrictive definition that does not include my example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22723" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T12:03:41.227" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T15:53:30.633" Title="Metalanguage to describe expressing an idea in many different ways" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29244" CreationDate="2018-09-27T12:05:16.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In translation studies, I encountered the term &lt;em&gt;variation&lt;/em&gt; for this phenomenon. It is a pretty generic term with lots of other uses, but I don't know a better one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For usage of the term see, e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-246C-0000-0023-8CDB-A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VARTRA (Variation in Translation)&lt;/a&gt; corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T15:53:30.633" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T15:53:30.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29250" CreationDate="2018-09-27T13:19:07.900" Score="1" ViewCount="712" Body="&lt;p&gt;I speak Dutch natively and wondered this ever since I visited Norway. When I was there a new friend told me Norwegians understand Swedish up to a level and he could not explain how much of it. So I try to compare it to my own language and my own scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say Dutch and Flemish are 99% similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And German and Dutch more like 30-40% similar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would Norwegian and Swedish compare on this scale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: even with the other question's answer I have no idea how they compare as Flemish is not even on that map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22790" LastEditorUserId="22790" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T14:13:03.393" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T19:41:38.753" Title="How similar are Norwegian and Swedish compared to Dutch and Flemish / German?" Tags="&lt;swedish&gt;&lt;mutual-intelligibility&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29244" CreationDate="2018-09-27T13:34:03.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are different 'linguistic forms' pointing to the same referent, so the term 'periphrases' (generated through grammatical transformations) seems the correct one. Instead, Frege used the term 'sense' (german &lt;em&gt;Sinn&lt;/em&gt;) to describe cases such as 'disciple of Plato' and 'tutor of Alexander' to refer to Aristotle, intended as 'different ways of presenting itself' (german 'Art von Gegenbenseins'), though one from a cognitive POV would name them 'conceptualizations'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21628" LastEditorUserId="21628" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T20:58:24.773" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T20:58:24.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2018-09-27T14:12:37.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have much knowledge on the language, but the Arapaho language is the only language I have ever seen without any low (/a/) vowels. There is still a four vowel system, but whereas Central Algonquian languages like Ojibwe and Cree have /a e i o/, Arapaho has /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22791" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T14:12:37.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29247" CreationDate="2018-09-27T19:36:06.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tang &amp;amp; van Heuven 2009 &quot;Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested&quot; address this kind of question experimentally for Chinese dialects. They do not come up with percentages like you're looking for, but in principle such a computation could be done, though you also have to decide &quot;in what respect&quot; (words? sentences?). Interestingly, they they discovered that e.g. Xiamen is only 39% mutually intelligible with Xiamen, though Chaozhou is 68% mutually intelligible with Chaozhou. The worst case seems to be Xiamen - Changsha, which are only 12% mutually intelligible for word-identification. The study at least provides a methodology for objectively answering the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a book by &lt;a href=&quot;http://portal.research.lu.se/ws/files/5905032/625654.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Delsing &amp;amp; Lundin-Åkesson&lt;/a&gt; which studies mutual intelligibility of Norwegian, Swedish and Danisk among the young. Sect. 4.2.1 starts to present experimental results (though I confess that I didn't work through the methodology: they found that the Danish video test was the easiest and the Norwegian one was the hardest (the Norwegians understood the Swedish better than they understood the Norwegian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, additionally, the large problem that people don't speak the literary standards of Norwegian. I understand that Skrutvold dialect of Norwegian may be harder to understand for a speaker of Finmark Norwegian, so the test would presumably be of e.g. Oslo Norwegian vs. Stockholm Swedish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T19:41:38.753" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T19:41:38.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29252" CreationDate="2018-09-27T22:44:01.323" Score="7" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every sound is equally as capable of being performed by the human mouth, and I (correct me if I'm wrong) remember my psychology teacher telling me that infants go and say every sound babbling - even ones that aren't used by their soon-to-be native tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads me into my question: If all humans are from birth equally capable of producing all sounds, why is it that only some are &quot;likely&quot; to be in any given language? For example, /p/ is found in many more languages than /θ/. Is there explicit reasoning for this? Are some sounds just generally &quot;harder&quot; to pronounce than others, and if so, what makes certain languages evolve to use these &quot;difficult&quot; sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22793" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T00:52:00.377" Title="What makes certain sounds linguistically &quot;rarer&quot; than others?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29251" CreationDate="2018-09-28T00:52:00.377" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is correct that all sounds which can be part of a language can in principle be produced by any human. It is a bit of an overstatement that infants practice all of the possible human language sounds, but it is true that babbling infants make sounds that they do not hear in the language of their environment. There are odd combinations of phonetic properties which might not ever be attested in an infant's repertoire, for example an implosive labiopalatalized breathy voiced retroflex stop. In fact it is likely that sounds which require complex timing of gestures are not part of the set of generally-babbled sounds. But I am not presently inclined to attribute anything to infant motor skills and difficulty of articulating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of explanation which seems to curry the most favor in the field is an appeal to those factors that disfavor the creation of rare sounds, and which favor the creation of common sounds. Here is an example. &lt;em&gt;t, s&lt;/em&gt; are very common sounds, and the interdental ejective affricate &lt;em&gt;t͡θ'&lt;/em&gt; is rare. It occurs in Halkomelem, and as far as I can tell (I have limited exposure to the language) it derives from proto-Salishan *&lt;em&gt;t͡s'&lt;/em&gt;, which is *&lt;em&gt;t͡s'&lt;/em&gt; itself is a relatively rare phoneme. The sound &lt;em&gt;t͡θ'&lt;/em&gt; also appears in Tahltan (coincidentally, also spoken in British Columbia but far enough away that contact is not a reasonable explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fricative &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; is at a perceptual disadvantage compared to &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, that is, it is harder to distinguish &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; from other similar sounds than it is to distinguish &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; from other similar sounds. The reason for this is the acoustic structure of &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;, which has a very flat low amplitude spectrum, and it is difficult to distinguish it from simple noise. The fricative &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand has a distinctive spectrum that concentrates energy at a perceptually-optimal frequency. It is easier to hear &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; that it is to hear &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever event caused the shift in Salishan fricatives in the development of the infrequent sound &lt;em&gt;t͡s&lt;/em&gt; into  &lt;em&gt;t͡θ'&lt;/em&gt; was perceptually dysfunctional, taking a sound that was reasonably easy to perceive and making it harder to perceive. Such a change is, on general evolutionary ground, less likely to be successful. Now we can reframe the question as, what would make it likely that a language would have &lt;em&gt;t͡θ'&lt;/em&gt; as a sound? Modern Halkomelem has it because pre-Modern Halkomelem has it, and so far, no sound change has wiped it out of existence (or perhaps it has in dialects). How did pre-Modern Halkomelem get this sound? Through an unlikely change applied to an uncommon sound. The historical changes that would give rise to that sound are simply unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many natural sound changes will result in the stop &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;. It often arises from &lt;em&gt;d, tʰ, dʰ, ɗ, t'&lt;/em&gt; by eliminating the laryngeal flourishes that distinguish those segments. It also arises from eliminating place of articulation distinctions among lingual consonants, where &lt;em&gt;ʈ, t̪, t&lt;/em&gt; reduce to plain &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;. Voicing and glottalization of consonants involve extra articulatory gestures that incur an aerodynamic penalty (voicing of stops is difficult, compared to not voicing them; glottalization messes with the normal flow of air through the vocal tract). If there is to be some elimination of distinctions in &lt;em&gt;d, tʰ, dʰ, ɗ, t', ʈ, t̪, t&lt;/em&gt;, these factors favor &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; as the outcome, rather than &lt;em&gt;ᶑ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, people say that it is &quot;hard&quot; to pronounce certain sounds, which is cognitively true (they don't know how to do it), but not physiologically true. There are aerodynamic or acoustic (perceptual) explanations for the asymmetry between various phonetic properties, and that seems to be what &quot;hard to do&quot; comes down to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T00:52:00.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29254" CreationDate="2018-09-28T08:51:29.527" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading an introductory book on syntax and one of the exercises says to discuss the interpretations which the italicized expression can have in the given sentences and to give an appropriate paraphrase for each interpretation. Now I'm not sure about the following example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is easy to recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how this sentence is ambiguous, it could be because English is not my native language. I would paraphrase this sentence as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is easy to recognize John. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me see another way to interpret this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T11:58:24.467" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T11:58:24.467" Title="Different ways to interpret stressed words in a sentence" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;focus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29253" CreationDate="2018-09-28T11:57:58.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stress in English often marks &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Focus&lt;/a&gt;, often some kind of contrastive focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your paraphrase is what would be meant by a neutral version of that sentence with no emphasised words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John is easy to recognise = It is easy to recognise John&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is emphasised we listeners are to understand that &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; has focus and that what is being said may be counter to our expectations. In this situation one interpretation is that while John may be easy to recognise, someone else isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; is easy to recognise = It is easy to recognise &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; [but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Emily].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/258653/59258&quot;&gt;See this question at the English site&lt;/a&gt; for an exploration of how an eight word sentence can have eight separate meanings depending on what is emphasised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T11:57:58.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29257" CreationDate="2018-09-28T12:05:24.153" Score="1" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://realpython.com/python-speech-recognition/#the-effect-of-noise-on-speech-recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The effect of background noise on speech recognition&lt;/a&gt; is not good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally language-agnostic or tuned for the top 100+ languages, fast enough for real-time, callable from Python or NodeJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T06:26:22.397" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T23:16:59.647" Title="Libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25658" CreationDate="2018-09-28T12:12:33.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is partial answer, only for Korean.&#xA;As Donny Frank mentions in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/25684/22794&quot;&gt;coment&lt;/a&gt;, there is lua module on Wiktionary for Korean: Module:ko-pron.&#xA;I made python version of it which does not require any additional dependency and just converts hangul into 6 different representations, among which IPA presents. &#xA;Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/ko-pron/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to ko-pron on PyPI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22794" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T12:16:09.060" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T12:16:09.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29255" CreationDate="2018-09-28T12:31:13.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://2hz.ai/api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2Hz Noise Suppression API&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's language-agnostic and is a REST API so you can use it from any programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently the API isn't designed for real time however this will be added down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(full disclosure - I work at 2Hz)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22795" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T12:31:13.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29237" CreationDate="2018-09-28T16:07:45.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. Hindi muskān cannot derive from the Sanskrit root SMI; the vowels do not match. Turner derives it from a hypothetical ancestor *muss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/soas_query.py?qs=muss&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/soas_query.py?qs=muss&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T16:07:45.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29261" CreationDate="2018-09-29T17:21:48.817" Score="5" ViewCount="988" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encounter difficulties when drawing a syntax tree for a sentence of expletive contruction. Should I mark the dummy subject &quot;there&quot; as a noun? Thx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22802" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T18:56:45.477" Title="How do you draw a syntax tree for a sentence with a dummy subject?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29259" CreationDate="2018-09-29T18:56:45.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! It depends on the details of your sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentences like &quot;it is raining&quot; or &quot;there is a rhinoceros&quot;, the dummy subjects &quot;it&quot; and &quot;there&quot; act for all (syntactic) intents and purposes like noun phrases. Basically, English syntax doesn't allow a finite verb without a subject, so it adds one at the syntactic level that doesn't exist at the semantic level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentences like &quot;eat the tuba&quot;, there's no subject visible on the surface, but it's clear that one actually exists on the underlying level: for example, look at &quot;mail the pineapple to &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Reflexive forms like &quot;yourself&quot; only show up when there's something else referring to the same thing, in a specific place in the syntax tree. So there must be a &quot;you&quot; in the underlying model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sentences like &quot;damn you&quot; or &quot;bless you&quot; (or harder expletives if you prefer), it seems like there's no syntactic subject at all—even an implicit one. For details, see the legendary paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://aflang.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/Lx19/Documents/QPhD_English_wo_subject.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &quot;Quang Phuc Dong&quot; (James D. McCawley), which points out that these expletives don't act at all like normal verbs and proposes an different analysis. (Basically, these are &quot;quasi-verbs&quot; which don't even form standard sentences at all: they only appear in the single production &quot;Epithet → Quasi-verb NP&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T18:56:45.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-29T20:22:47.710" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there treebank search software that can locate a &lt;a href=&quot;https://isidore.co/forum/index.php?topic=6#msg14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllogism&lt;/a&gt;, identifying its major and minor premises and terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;cf. Eyal Mozes, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/Zotero/storage/B25M2X2Z/Mozes%20-%201989%20-%20A%20deductive%20database%20based%20on%20aristotelian%20logic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Deductive Database Based on Aristotelian Logic&lt;/a&gt;,” &lt;em&gt;Journal of Symbolic Computation&lt;/em&gt; 7, no. 5 (May 1, 1989): 487–507.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastEditorUserId="12995" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T15:37:09.893" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T15:37:09.893" Title="Software for finding syllogisms in treebank data?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29189" CreationDate="2018-09-30T08:40:20.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concrete nouns and abstract nouns do not intersect (unless polysemous).  They are a binary division of nouns (dividing 'things' into physical and non-physical).  'Mankind' and 'men' are concrete nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T08:40:20.210" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29266" CreationDate="2018-09-30T17:06:01.710" Score="3" ViewCount="1018" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An apple that my mother bought yesterday&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example, &quot;An apple&quot; is a noun phrase and &quot;that my mother bought yesterday&quot; is a complementiser phrase. Are the noun phrase––&quot;An apple&quot;––and the complementiser phrase––&quot;that my mother bought yesterday&quot;––immediately dominated by the noun phrase––&quot;An apple that my mother bought yesterday&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22802" LastEditorUserId="22802" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T08:57:52.287" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T12:00:04.623" Title="Syntax relative clause" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29264" CreationDate="2018-10-01T02:16:13.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English has two distinct meanings of &quot;that&quot;, with different syntax. So for syntactic purposes I find it easiest to think of them as coincidental homophones (they just happen to look like each other by random chance), even though that's not historically true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first version, as you mention, is a complementizer. It takes a full sentence (a TP or an IP or an S or something else depending on your theory), and turns it into a complement for a verb, as in &quot;I know &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; penguins are good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OLIIY.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OLIIY.png&quot; alt=&quot;simple example of a tree with &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; complementizer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second version is a pronoun, as in &quot;I see &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YBiQR.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YBiQR.png&quot; alt=&quot;simple example of a tree with &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; pronoun&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way a sentence like yours is generally analyzed, it has an &quot;invisible complementizer&quot; (shown with ∅ here), and the relative pronoun starts out exactly where you'd expect a normal pronoun to go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YU3xw.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YU3xw.png&quot; alt=&quot;simple example of a tree pre-movement&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then &quot;that&quot; moves up to a position right under the CP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tRlAl.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tRlAl.png&quot; alt=&quot;simple example of a tree post-movement&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This movement is very similar to what's seen in WH-questions (&quot;I wonder &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; apple &lt;strong&gt;my mother bought&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;), so the two are usually analyzed as being different forms of the same phenomenon. If you want to learn more, look into the term &quot;WH-movement&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T02:16:13.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25654" CreationDate="2018-10-02T02:13:11.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a plain old pleonasm. For example German &quot;weißer Schimmel&quot; is the prime example of pleonasm to the point that it is the vulgar name for the concept. In english it's a &lt;em&gt;white white horse&lt;/em&gt; but Schimmel, to my surprise may also be a &lt;em&gt;grey horse&lt;/em&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;white grey horse&lt;/em&gt; is just a different shade of grey while white is an ideal that doesn't exist. Your view on the issue may be obscured because you see mountain-bike as two words. As a German writing compoundnouns fused together, I see it differently and I might suggest that bike is a compound of two onesylablewords, all the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, absent technical terms, the prime example is often taken as a namesake for the phenomenon. I lack a better example, but this kind of pleonasm would then be &lt;em&gt;guest's bicycle mountain bike&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit after your update:&lt;/em&gt; (n N) = NP, N = NP; Hence (a NP) = (a N). If you parse (bicyclic mountain) as constituent, you'd have to wonder what that would be, and the phrase would be nearly ungrammatical, if (mountain bike) wouldn't be a lexical item. Constructions where the adjective can apply to both (n) and (N) are prefarable, &quot;brown chocolate bar&quot;. A chocolate bar of brown chocalate covered in white sugar coating would not fulfil that requirement. It is and isn't a brown chocolate bar. A rectangular chocolate bar does fulfill the requirement. It is pleonastic for (N), but not for (n). Hence a favourable reading may be applied that doesn't presume the speaker were an idiot. Conversely, a round chocolate bar would be a contradiction for (a N), a round bar, but makes sense for (a n), round chocolate; For (n N), it depends, and so the meaning of &quot;bar&quot; could change over time. This works because chocolate is polysemous (substance, piece, the experience &quot;I had chocolate&quot;, I like [to eat] chocolate&quot;, a certain product).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T16:25:46.610" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T16:25:46.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26049" CreationDate="2018-10-02T19:42:54.317" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Cardinaletti &amp;amp; Starke 1999, there is in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weak:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I see ya.&#xA;*I see ya and her.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I see you.&#xA;I see you and her.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T19:42:54.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T20:09:03.510" Score="-1" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us take the verb 'get', we can say both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- Someone gets to take something &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- Someone gets someone to take something &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1st sentence, 'get' is a modal morpheme, but in the other sentence 'get' is a causative morpheme. This case is not only found in English, in Riffian there is also this confusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- i-ga ad i-ksi ci (he-did FUT he-take something)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- i-ga x-k ad t-ksi-d ci (he-did on-you FUT you-take something)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it possible that a morpheme can be either causative or modal ? Can we speak of &quot;ambi-auxiliarity&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T08:58:53.510" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T08:58:53.510" Title="Is it a causative morpheme or a modal morpheme?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;&lt;valency&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29270" CreationDate="2018-10-02T21:10:55.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words can mean different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know this answer is terse but I'm not sure what else you expect. There's no rule that says &quot;Languages can't have homophonous morphemes.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T21:10:55.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29274" CreationDate="2018-10-02T23:15:22.960" Score="1" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out what the meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to&lt;/a&gt; is. By that I mean, what is it's &lt;em&gt;deeper&lt;/em&gt; grammatical structure. Knowing that it is a &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt; (a pre-position), an infinitive marker, or an adverb isn't very helpful. That doesn't tell you as clearly as calling something a noun or verb does, even though those too don't have crystal clear definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to get at the internal structure of &quot;to&quot;, I'm wondering what languages don't use their own form of &quot;to&quot;, and what they do instead. That is, say Chinese doesn't use it. I'm wondering how they would write these sentences/phrases/structures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To eat. (infinitive)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to eat. ([verb] to [verb])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went to the store. ([verb] to [noun])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It went up to the ceiling. ([adverb] to [noun])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another way to put it is... ([noun] to [verb])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ten to ​six ([noun] to [noun])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not just wondering for Chinese, but across languages. Knowing a few languages I could check out further would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to put it is, how they would write those example sentences, with a gloss of what it looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be interested if there are any papers or books that go into more detail on the word &quot;to&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another note about &quot;to&quot;. In &lt;em&gt;I went to the store&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to&quot; feels like it is all about &lt;em&gt;direction&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; moves &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the store. But in &lt;em&gt;I want to eat&lt;/em&gt;, there is not as much direction there. So I am not sure how to interpret this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T00:16:35.463" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:12:56.187" Title="What languages do without &quot;to&quot;" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29273" CreationDate="2018-10-03T00:21:30.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;to&quot; in English basically has three different unrelated uses. Historically they're not entirely unrelated, but it's easiest to think of them nowadays as homophones instead of the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is as a particle. (&quot;Particle&quot; is short for &quot;it doesn't fit into any other category in the syntax but it's still important&quot;.) When followed by an uninflected verb, it turns that verb into an infinitive. We call it a separate word because the verb and the &quot;to&quot; can move around separately in the syntax, you can stick things in between, move one but not the other, and so on. But its only meaning is &quot;the verb after this is infinitive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, there doesn't have to be a word for this. Kiswahili uses the prefix &lt;em&gt;ku-&lt;/em&gt; to mark infinitives: &lt;em&gt;ku-soma&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to read&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ku-ruka&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to jump&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ku-tembea&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to walk&quot;. Classical Latin uses the suffix &lt;em&gt;-re&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;lege-re&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to read&quot;, &lt;em&gt;salī-re&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to jump&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ambulā-re&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to walk&quot;. Some languages don't mark the infinitive at all, it's just the bare verb form without any other inflection on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second meaning is a preposition, indicating movement toward something. It's pretty common for languages to use an adposition for this, but you can also use case marking like Latin does: &lt;em&gt;eō Rōma-m&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I am going to Rome&quot;. Or you can mark the verb specially like Russian does: &lt;em&gt;xodit'&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;walk&quot;, &lt;em&gt;do-xodit'&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;walk to&quot;. If you just don't want a preposition, you can use a postposition like in Japanese: &lt;em&gt;Tōkyō e iku&lt;/em&gt; &quot;go to Tokyo&quot;. This is exactly like a preposition except it goes after instead of before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third meaning is an adverb, and it's extremely rare in my dialect. For example, someone might say &quot;push the door to&quot;, but they'd be more likely to say &quot;push the door closed&quot;, or &quot;close the door&quot;. So even English doesn't use this meaning much any more; all of your examples fall under one of the first two meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T18:53:27.483" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T18:53:27.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29273" CreationDate="2018-10-03T00:30:01.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can access the Oxford English Dictionary, you can see a vast number of meanings of &quot;to&quot;, just looking at their &quot;prep., conj., and adv&quot; entry. Thus, &quot;Expressing motion directed towards and reaching: governing a noun denoting the place, thing, or person approached and reached&quot;; &quot;Expressing direction: In the direction of, towards&quot;; &quot;Indicating the limit of a movement or extension in space&quot;; &quot;Expressing the relation of contact or the like&quot;; &quot;Indicating the full extent, degree, or amount&quot; (the list continues for many pages, covering 35 prepositional senses). Then some 22 verbal-clause senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that rather than looking at precise syntactic frames as in your question, you look at the prepositional and verbal uses as though they are unrelated, then pick a language and ask &quot;How do they convey sense 2 of prepositional 'to', how do they convey sense 15...&quot;, and then also ask similar questions about the verbal senses. Although I say they are unrelated, there is actually a connection (which perhaps someone else understands better than I do). In Bantu, the directional locative &quot;to&quot; is in fact the same as the infinitive prefix on verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T00:30:01.893" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29277" CreationDate="2018-10-03T02:27:13.023" Score="8" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ancient Romans had a three name system (&lt;em&gt;tria nomina&lt;/em&gt;): praenomen, the birth/given name; the nomen, like a family name but marking the person as belonging to a specific &lt;em&gt;gens&lt;/em&gt;; and the cognomen, of which there could be several, and which described personal characteristics, heroic feats, places of origin, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this left any impact on the naming conventions of any language communities since the fall of the Roman Empire, and if so, what impact? How did this system evolve and die out on a linguistic level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T15:11:24.413" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T15:11:24.413" Title="What linguistic impact, if any, has the the Roman three name naming system left on modern Romance and European languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29276" CreationDate="2018-10-03T03:32:08.757" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;None, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: the &lt;em&gt;tria nomina&lt;/em&gt; were dead before the empire was, so pre-Romance times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version: The &lt;em&gt;tria nomina&lt;/em&gt; system is the most famous used in ancient Rome, but it wasn't by any means universal. It had already started to fade out in the first century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around this time, the upper classes started using multiple &lt;em&gt;nomina&lt;/em&gt; to indicate extra familial relationships, both through the female line and through adoption. This quickly got to ridiculous levels: one second-century consul was named Quintus Pompeius Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sextus Iulius Frontinus Silius Decianus Gaius Iulius Eurycles Herculaneus Lucius Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicius Sollers Iulius Aper Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus Silius Valens Valerius Niger Claudius Fuscus Saxa Amyntianus Sosius Priscus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that &lt;em&gt;nomina&lt;/em&gt; were getting used so much, &lt;em&gt;praenomina&lt;/em&gt; started fossilizing: they just weren't that relevant. Everyone in the same family would get the same &lt;em&gt;praenomen&lt;/em&gt; for official purposes but it would never really be used in day-to-day life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in the third century, the emperor Caracalla gave citizenship to all freedmen in the entire empire. And all those freedmen, by custom, gained the &lt;em&gt;praenomen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Marcus&quot; and &lt;em&gt;nomen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Aurelius&quot;. So now neither of those was very useful unless you were from an old family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point people just used &lt;em&gt;cognomina&lt;/em&gt; if they had them, or took on nicknames (&lt;em&gt;signa&lt;/em&gt;), since the official names were basically useless for their original purpose. And this trend continued steadily until the end of the empire, when people gave up on the official names entirely and just used their &lt;em&gt;signa&lt;/em&gt; for everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T03:32:08.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29264" CreationDate="2018-10-03T08:38:03.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: Originally, OP's question was &quot;Does NP -&gt; NP CP exist? Can a noun phrase immediately dominate both another noun phrase and a complementiser phrase?&quot; The following consitutes an answer to this question, so I'll leave it here even after the question having been edited.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about something like &lt;em&gt;the claim that the accusations were wrong&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is a complementizer that takes a full sentence, and not just a relative pronoun that enters the C position through wh movement, as in your apples example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following Draconis' syntax style:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B0N5N.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B0N5N.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T12:00:04.623" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T12:00:04.623" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29287" CreationDate="2018-10-03T17:03:06.343" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned for the first time from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZSCGZphjq0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WIRED video about movie accents&lt;/a&gt; (at 4:30) that American English has multiple possible places of articulation for the &quot;S&quot; sound. I was able to find terms for these articulations used by speech therapists; if your tongue blade points to the alveolar ridge, you are a &quot;tipper&quot;; if it points down below your bottom teeth, you are a &quot;dipper&quot;. Apparently an articulation in the middle also occurs in some speakers, but I did not see any specific terminology for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard &quot;S&quot; used in IPA is specified as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative#Voiceless_alveolar_sibilant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voiceless alveolar fricative&lt;/a&gt;, which I presume is what a tipper pronounces. What are the proper phonetic terms for the two other common &quot;S&quot; pronunciations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T23:21:42.657" Title="proper terms for tipper and dipper S articulation" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19062" CreationDate="2018-10-03T21:00:29.377" Score="-6" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A superfamily requires exchange to stabilize the tree. Any australian language would be an offshot not a contender or equal sibling and the older the connection the harder to tell (however I do not want to discount the idea of at least some exchange). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inarguably, the aboriginal travelers settling australia brought language with them. The result of such language changing might not count as provably related languages in most linguistic senses compared to the old languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the hunter-gatherers came in waves over time they would introduce different languages and with austronesian languages to compare there is no reason to think these would all be dravidian. That's unlikely, to say the least, and needs strong evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a late minority I wouldn't discount the possibility. But, as was pointed out above, the answer so far is negative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to bring to your attention the &quot;&lt;em&gt;Kangaroo&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, the great grey kangaroo - &quot;&lt;em&gt;gangurru&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in Guugu Yimidhirr, recorded by cptn. Cook in northern queensland. &quot;&lt;em&gt;guru&lt;/em&gt;&quot; appears to be significant when &quot;&lt;em&gt;kara~kala&lt;/em&gt;&quot; means &lt;em&gt;black, dark&lt;/em&gt; in such a wide variety of languages that an old link should be expected. Although, any inference based on a single word would be sketchy at best and would be dismissed for coincidental chance. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/black#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;black&lt;/a&gt;, Proto-Dravidian *kar-. The spiritual &quot;guru&quot; (venerable, teacher) is said to be from a root that means (heavy) cognate to &quot;&lt;em&gt;gravitas&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but folk etymology has it that &quot;gu&quot; stands for &lt;em&gt;dark&lt;/em&gt;. In &quot;Gujarati&quot; it is speculated to stand for &lt;em&gt;enemy&lt;/em&gt; - the allusion from &lt;em&gt;great, dark&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;enemy&lt;/em&gt; ... to &lt;em&gt;powerful, devine&lt;/em&gt; presents itself. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T11:55:21.730" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T11:55:21.730" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-03T23:41:02.713" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2017 7 ed). p. 225 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Semantics has not always enjoyed a prominent role in modern linguistics. From World War I to the early 1960s semantics was viewed,&#xA;  especially in the United States, as not quite respectable: its inclusion&#xA;  in a grammar (as linguists sometimes call a scientific description of a&#xA;  language—see Chomsky 1965) was considered by many as either a sort&#xA;  of methodological impurity or an objective to be reached only in the distant future. But there is as much reason to consider semantics as a part of&#xA;  grammar as syntax, morphology, or phonology. It is often said that a&#xA;  grammar describes what fluent speakers know of their language—their&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;linguistic competence&lt;/em&gt; (recall chapter 1). Given this, then the description&#xA;  of meaning is a necessary part of the description of a speaker’s linguistic&#xA;  knowledge (i.e., the grammar of a language must contain a component&#xA;  that describes what speakers know about the semantics of the language)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was startled to read this, as it feels obvious that “meaning” is crucial to any subject that deals with language, like philosophy or literary theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If linguistics from 1910-1960 truly disregarded semantics, then did linguistics students never learn about semantics? Or did they at least study philosophy of language? Or did linguistics belittle philosophy of language too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T21:00:38.053" Title="How did students learn semantics, if it were belittled from 1910-1965?" Tags="&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29284" CreationDate="2018-10-04T00:40:42.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in that quote which suggests that semantics, or philosophy of language, was “belittled”, any more than observation of the nature of contemporary linguistics “belittles” comparative Indo-European linguistics. Areas of linguistics rise and fall in popularity and technical success. It is accurate to say, as the extract implies, that semantics has risen as a discipline, to the point that many graduate programs actually have multiple courses in semantics (whereas when I was a graduate student, there were none).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be pointed out that in the referenced time period, there were very few linguistics departments. None at Ohio State, Illinois, Washington, not even MIT. Chicago, Yale and Harvard had linguistics departments (Chicago was the first, starting in the mid-30’s, though Yale had an interdepartmental program before that). In that context, the nature of graduate study is extremely idiosyncratic, depending on the specializations of the founding faculty. The nature of Berkeley linguistics was strongly shaped by the fact that it was carried out in Anthropology. I suggest looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lx.berkeley.edu/about/history-berkeley-linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;history of Berkeley linguistics&lt;/a&gt; page to understand the interests of linguists at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question “How did students learn ____” can be asked about many domains and time periods in linguistics: comparative IE linguistics; Semitics; psycholinguistics; formal language theory; phonological theory; stylistics; morphology; historical linguistics; discourse analysis; sociolinguistics; acoustic phonetics; lexicography; computational linguistics; forensic linguistics; second language acquisition; first language acquisition; syntax; language description. The answer is, simply, that students don’t learn every imaginable area of linguistics, and what counts as a “core” area changes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem obliquely referred to in the quote is that given the scientific frameworks within which linguistics of the period was embedded, it was very hard reduce meaning to behavior, which meant that linguistic methods could not obviously be applied to meaning. With a change in methods, meaning became more obviously within the purvue of linguistics. Even now, linguistics is not defined as the study of everything about language. Semantics succeeded as a discipline because it was possible to show how meaning &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be studied scientifically, using the methods of linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me add that the question is misdirected. If you want to understand the development of semantics in the history of linguistics, you ought to be asking how semantics developed in linguistics – e.g. what were those meaning properties that played a role in early linguistic theories. What view of semantics did Katz and Fodor, or Lyons, or Lakoff and McCawley, start with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T05:13:04.053" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T05:13:04.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29279" CreationDate="2018-10-04T01:15:09.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The technical terms in articulatory phonetics for &quot;tipper&quot; and &quot;dipper&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apical_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apical&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminal_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laminal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are both voiceless alveolar fricatives (IPA: [s]), but since &quot;alveolar&quot; only describes the passive place of articulation, voiceless alveolar fricatives can take many forms, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; you linked to discusses in detail. Whenever the distinction is desired, they are called &quot;apico-alveolar&quot; and &quot;lamino-alveolar&quot; (or simply &quot;apical alveolar&quot; and &quot;laminal alveolar&quot;) instead of just &quot;alveolar&quot;. The apical and laminal [s] can be narrowly transcribed in IPA as [s̺] and [s̻], respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Sounds+of+the+World%27s+Languages-p-9780631198154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (1996&lt;/a&gt;: 146), &quot;there is considerable disagreement among authorities as to which is the most common articulation&quot;, and &quot;the apical-laminal distinction [is] not of particular importance in the characterization of the general, cross-speaker, properties of English &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T23:21:42.657" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T23:21:42.657" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28901" CreationDate="2018-10-04T01:53:33.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got great answers so far, but I may contribute somewhat. I'm a language learner myself, with a grasp of 3 languages - English, Italian and Portuguese. Recently, I realized I wasn't so good in any of them, so my wanting, as the ambitious person that I am, was to reach fluency on all. What an omg moment I had. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might not look at first, but each natural language is an enormous body of infornation, with thousands of rules, constructions and we can't forget all the different ways of thinking imbedded within it. We obviously don't need to know all that but the sheer amount that we must know in order to communicate well in most stances is still considerably big. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, answering your question; we cannot say. As I've shown, normally, mastering a language requires a great deal of effort, but if you are naturally gifted or simply do what it takes in order to learn and keep the languages inside of you alive, you can learn many. I personally think 3 languages suffice me, but if I ever need to learn a fourth for whatever reason, I'd consider it to be right next to my hinge of maintainability, if not sligtly above it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T01:53:33.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T02:02:03.873" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2017 7 ed). p. 370 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strategies for Indirect Communication&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We can now supplement the existing direct strategies with strategies for&#xA;  indirect communication. The &lt;em&gt;Indirect Strategy&lt;/em&gt; says: from step 6 or 60, infer steps 7 and 8. The augmented system of strategies is shown in figure&#xA;  9.6.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Looking back at (15c), we see an example of communication that has&#xA;  both a direct and an indirect component. The direct component in this&#xA;  case is nonliteral, however, in that the speaker does not really mean that&#xA;  the cat likes having its tail pulled. In this case communication is successful only if the hearer first applies the Direct Strategy and the Nonliteral&#xA;  Strategy, then the Indirect Strategy. That is, the hearer must first reach&#xA;  step 6':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Step 6')&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Nonliteral&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The hearer recognizes what the speaker is communicating nonliterally&#xA;  and directly—in particular, that the speaker is nonliterally and directly&#xA;  claiming that the cat does not like having its tail pulled.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, since the direct act would be conversationally inappropriate if&#xA;  it was the only communicative act being performed, the hearer infers&#xA;  step 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Step 7)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Contextual inappropriateness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hearer recognizes that it would be contextually inappropriate for the&#xA;  speaker to be speaking merely directly—in particular, merely claiming&#xA;  that the cat does not like having its tail pulled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see the italicized Step 6' overhead: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how can communication can be direct and nonliteral?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I understand how 15(c) (see beneath) is nonliteral: but how's it direct? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pp. 368 Bottom - 369 Top&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(15)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. The door is over there. (used to request someone to leave)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. I want 10 gallons of regular. (used to request 10 gallons of regular)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c. I’m sure the cat likes having its tail pulled. (used to request the hearer&#xA;  to stop pulling the cat’s tail)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Notice that indirect acts can be performed by means of either literal or&#xA;  nonliteral direct acts. Examples (15a) and (15b) are cases of indirect acts&#xA;  being performed by means of literal direct acts—the speaker really does&#xA;  mean what is said, but also means &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;. In case (15c) this is not so; the&#xA;  speaker does not, presumably, really mean that the cat likes having its tail&#xA;  pulled. Instead, the speaker is being sarcastic—she means directly, but&#xA;  nonliterally, that the cat does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like having its tail pulled, and she wants&#xA;  the hearer to conclude that he should stop it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T02:02:03.873" Title="How can communication can be direct and nonliteral?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T02:30:06.377" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2017 7 ed). p. 386 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0F9R.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0F9R.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see paragraph signaled by the two arrows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did Grice claim that the implicature is not “a part of what is said”?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did Grice rebuff those readers who reckon that the parenthesized material in (43) IS a part of what is said?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T23:23:44.670" Title="Why did Grice claim that the implicature is not “a part of what is said”?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29296" CreationDate="2018-10-04T02:36:44.300" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/026253326X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2017 7 ed). p. 551 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phone&lt;/strong&gt; A speech sound. This term is generally used to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;avoid making any claim&#xA;  about the phonemic or allophonic status of the sound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see the italicized phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to claim something &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;about the phonemic or allophonic status of the sound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;? Any  human speech sound must be represented by some phoneme, but I know that it may not be an allophone. E.g., in Spanish, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Rhotics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[r] and the alveolar tap [ɾ]&lt;/a&gt; match /r/ and /r/ that aren't allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why'd anyone avoid or prefer making any such claim? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T12:53:19.097" Title="What does it mean to claim something about the phonemic or allophonic status of a speech sound?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29273" CreationDate="2018-10-04T02:51:19.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly, it is possible that the only language that does not do without &quot;to&quot; is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we discard what are obvious quirks of the language, such as its use as an infinitive marker (as in, &quot;I want to eat&quot; - compare Spanish &quot;Quiero comer&quot; or French &quot;Je veux manger&quot;). As user6726 says, there are several different prepositional senses of the word; it can express many different kinds of relations between words, which the average user manages without a second thought, but may be totally misterious for someone whose first language is different, for there is little logic in the cluster of senses of &quot;to&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, this trivial English sentence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am going to London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be translated in two different ways into Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eu vou a Londres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eu vou para Londres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The latter implies the speaker is moving to London, while the former implies a quick trip.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which is the &quot;to&quot; of Portuguese? &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the quite anarchic nature of the set of prepositional sences of &quot;to&quot; (and most other English propositions), and the fact that other languages have equally anarchic prepositional systems (why English distinguishes between &quot;at&quot;, &quot;in&quot; and &quot;on&quot;, where Portuguese does so well with only &quot;em&quot;? Why does English use &quot;on&quot; as a synonym of &quot;about&quot;, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/52399/on-the-possible-obsolescence-of-research-paper-titles-starting-with-on-the&quot; title=&quot;On the possible obsolescence of research paper titles starting with &amp;#39;On the …&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, while in Portuguese this would be &quot;sobre&quot;, which can be &quot;about&quot;, but also &quot;over&quot;?), the chance there is a language with a word that can be univocally mapped into &quot;to&quot; is infinitesimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently, as we move to other languages, with even less relation to English, the confusion can only grow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in principle, all languages, except English, do without &quot;to&quot;: they either use different prepositions corresponding to each of &quot;to&quot; senses, or they use other syntactic devices, as noted in other answers and comments: adverbs, verbal affixes, nominal affixes, word order, different verbs, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA glosses for your examples, in Portuguese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To eat. (infinitive) - &lt;strong&gt;Comer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to eat. ([verb] to [verb]) - &lt;strong&gt;Quero comer&lt;/strong&gt; (it is just an infinitive, too).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went to the store. ([verb] to [noun]) - &lt;strong&gt;Fui à loja&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;à&quot; is the contraction of preposition &quot;a&quot; with article &quot;a&quot;) (&quot;to&quot; = &quot;a&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It went up to the ceiling. ([adverb] to [noun]) - &lt;strong&gt;Subiu no teto&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;no&quot; is the contraction of preposition &quot;em&quot; with article &quot;o&quot;) (&quot;to&quot; = &quot;em&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another way to put it is... ([noun] to [verb]) - &lt;strong&gt;Outra maneira de dizer é...&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;to&quot; = &quot;de&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ten to ​six ([noun] to [noun]). &lt;strong&gt;Dez para as seis&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;to&quot; = &quot;para&quot;). Alternatively, &lt;strong&gt;Seis menos dez&lt;/strong&gt; (no &quot;to&quot;; literally, &quot;six minus ten&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aditionally, European Portuguese uses the prepositon &quot;a&quot;, which expresses some of the relations &quot;to&quot; expresses in English, as a marker... not of infinitive, but of what could be called a &quot;composite gerund&quot;: &quot;Estou a comer&quot;, &quot;I am eating&quot;, though literally &quot;I am to eat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="14083" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T19:12:56.187" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:12:56.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29294" CreationDate="2018-10-04T04:21:34.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists talk about &quot;phones&quot; when they have a definite sound, but don't want to claim anything about what phoneme it corresponds to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose you're documenting a recently-discovered language and taking recordings of native speakers. You hear one of your informants say &lt;code&gt;[y]&lt;/code&gt; during an utterance. This isn't enough information on its own to say &quot;&lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt; is a phoneme&quot; or &quot;&lt;code&gt;[y]&lt;/code&gt; is an allophone of &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt;&quot;. All you can say is that &lt;code&gt;[y]&lt;/code&gt; occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that make &lt;code&gt;[y]&lt;/code&gt;? Simple: it's a phone. Not a phoneme or an allophone, just a phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T04:21:34.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29293" CreationDate="2018-10-04T04:42:19.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grice claims that implicature is separate from what is said, since it can only come from a surrounding context: sarcasm, for example, can't be understood in a vacuum. Others say that the dichotomy between &quot;what is said&quot; and &quot;what is not said&quot; in this case is a false one, since &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; can be understood in a vacuum: there is no &quot;true meaning&quot; of the words outside of how people use them, and all the metaphors and implicatures woven into that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T04:42:19.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29294" CreationDate="2018-10-04T05:08:23.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your assertion that any human speech sound must be represented by some phoneme jumps the logical gun. The ubiquitous fact that cannot be denied is that humans make speech sounds. The claim that such things are &quot;represented&quot; (which is a mental claim) is built on that fact: what does it mean to say that sound is &quot;represented&quot;? The essence of that claim is that humans have various sound concepts, mental abstractions that represent classes of physical objects, assigned to one symbol. Those symbols include [k], [p], [g], [kʰ] and so on. The name (or, one name) for those symbols is &quot;phone&quot;. Another is &quot;segment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phones have all sorts of imaginable relationships. [p,t] have a certain relationship of phonetic similarity, [b,p] have a different relationship of phonetic similarity, similarly [p,pʰ], and so on. One of those relationship is the &quot;allophonic&quot; relationship, which distinguishes relations between phones in a certain way – [p, pʰ] are allophones, [p,b] are not allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cogent reason to not make a claim about a relationship being phonemic vs. allophonic is that you do not know whether that relation holds between the two sounds in question. And a very cogent reason to not make that claim is that you don't know what distinguishes allophones from phonemes. That uncertainty arises because there are multiple definitions of phoneme vs. allophone, and multiple criteria for analyzing sounds one way or the other. So if you are not strongly committed to the taxonomic phonemic definition of phoneme, then you may not wish to say, for example, that [t] and [ɾ] are &quot;allophones&quot; in English (some people think they are, but that is not possible given the taxonomic theory). Still you will want to talk about the sounds, and &quot;phone&quot; is the term we use to talk about sounds without specifically committing to the derivational claim embodied in saying &quot;phoneme&quot; versus &quot;allophone&quot;. Insofar as the criteria for calling something a &quot;phoneme&quot; vs. &quot;allophone&quot; are at this point as solid as the criteria for calling sounds &quot;marked&quot; versus &quot;unmarked&quot;, avoiding dubious distinctions is a reasonable choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T05:08:23.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29293" CreationDate="2018-10-04T06:11:06.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a &quot;logical&quot; definition of &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;therefore,&lt;/em&gt; the sentences could be true even if the &quot;conventional implicatures&quot; were false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of classical logic, &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/9096/the-logical-and-psychological-differences-between-the-conjunctions-and-and-bu&quot;&gt;&quot;but&quot; and &quot;and&quot; seem to have the same meaning&lt;/a&gt; (in that they have the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137263544_16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;truth tables&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, in classical logic, a word like &quot;therefore&quot; would traditionally be understood as indicating a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;material conditional&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which as the linked Wikipedia says does not require any causal relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider &quot;what is said&quot; to refer only to the logical statements that are communicated by an utterance, then the contrast between poverty and honesty, and the idea that being an Englishman causally contributes to bravery, is not part of &quot;what is said&quot; in the quoted example sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems a bit dubious to assume that the underlying structure of English grammar is built on the same principles as classical logic. I assume this is why some people disagree with this distinction between what is said and what is implicated in sentences like these. I don't know how Grice &quot;rebuffed&quot; counterarguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T06:16:34.543" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T06:16:34.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29294" CreationDate="2018-10-04T12:53:19.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phones&lt;/strong&gt; are physical phonetic data.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Phonemes&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;allophones&lt;/strong&gt; are theoretical constructs, specific to one language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when the quotation talks about making a &quot;claim about the phonemic or allophonic status of the sound,&quot; what's meant is that there are no theoretical presuppositions involved, and the phone is represented by IPA symbols, in square brackets, because these are universal and don't refer to any particular language, nor any particular analysis of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is essentially the difference between &lt;strong&gt;phonetics&lt;/strong&gt;, which has phones and is universal,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;and &lt;strong&gt;phonology&lt;/strong&gt;, which has phonemes and allophones and is particular to a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T12:53:19.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29293" CreationDate="2018-10-04T13:30:21.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grice was writing in the 1950s and '60s and he was a philosopher, not a linguist. Thus his views of &quot;what is said&quot; are not linguistic ones, and indeed they're not all that clear to his readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, in fact, a problem with talking about &quot;what is said&quot; that emerges as soon as the description goes beyond the sounds uttered, because anything beyond the physical and physiological data require human interpretation, and that varies. Grice's intuition, I think, was that while &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; is logically equivalent to &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, there is something more involved when you say &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;, and it refers to the emotion associated with the clause introduced by &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When one says &lt;em&gt;He was a politician, but he was honest&lt;/em&gt;, one signals some surprise, as if that combination of propositions were not something one would expect. However, it's not part of the logical meaning, because whatever that &quot;something more involved&quot; is when we say &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;, it has no effect on the truth of the two propositions.  That is, in both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That company makes bagels, and they're not kosher.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;That company makes bagels, but they're not kosher.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is true that that company makes bagels, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; that the bagels are not kosher. That is to say, logically they are identical. The difference is the presupposition, which accompanies &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;, to the effect that bagels are, or ought to be, or are expected to be, kosher. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the decades following Grice, the concept of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Presupposition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; has emerged to deal with the problems of &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;, as well as a host of other semantic/pragmatic problems. Presuppositions are considered to be a part of pragmatics, while logic is considered semantics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In philosophy, &quot;semantics&quot; is usually limited to logic; hence the motto &lt;strong&gt;Semantics underspecifies&lt;/strong&gt;, which refers to all the things that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/logicguide.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;logic&lt;/a&gt; doesn't deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T23:23:44.670" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T23:23:44.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23060" CreationDate="2018-10-04T13:51:17.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question already has an approved answer, but here are downloadable mp3s for every sound: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-chart-audio/mp3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-chart-audio/mp3/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22833" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T13:51:17.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29306" CreationDate="2018-10-04T18:44:19.300" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was taught that the vowels in Spanish are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; pronounced the same in contrast to the English language. For this reason, I always pronounced &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;pan&quot; as the same as &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;papa&quot;—this is very similar to the pronunciation of &quot;father&quot; in English. However when I listen to the pronunciation on &quot;pan&quot; here (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/pan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/pan&lt;/a&gt;), it sounds very close to the English word &quot;pan&quot;; yet &quot;papa&quot; sounds like the way I pronounced it (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/papa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/papa&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an article (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology&lt;/a&gt;) that touches on the idea that the vowels in the Spanish language are associated with various allophones. Are my auditory senses deceiving me, or is &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;pan&quot; being pronounced differently than &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;papa&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a rule that I should learn that aids me in determining the &quot;correct&quot; way to pronounce &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; in a word? For example, if &lt;code&gt;/n/&lt;/code&gt; follows &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;, then pronounce &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; similar to the way I'd pronounce the &quot;a&quot; in &quot;pan&quot; in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22457" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:15:01.047" Title="Is the phoneme /a/ in Castilian Spanish pronounced differently in &quot;pan&quot; than in &quot;papa&quot;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T18:47:28.127" Score="-2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a character in any writing system or even a known symbol (more common is better) that would roughly look like the Greek theta θ, but with two lines in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is none, it could also be similar to an H, but with two middle lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything like that out there? I've been scrolling through the unicode list, but could not find anything like there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22834" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:48:56.627" Title="Looking for a character like the greek theta, θ, but with two middle lines" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29304" CreationDate="2018-10-04T19:15:01.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Online teaching-type materials for pronunciation unfortunately are often distorted, and don't always reflect natural pronunciations. Listening to just those two recordings won't give you an accurate impression of how words are pronounced. In this case, there are problems with recording quality (peak-clipping), but the formants of the two stressed &quot;pa&quot; syllables are not different. The pitch is radically different (&lt;em&gt;papa&lt;/em&gt; has a rise from 233Hz to 381 but &lt;em&gt;pan&lt;/em&gt; falls minimally from 217 Hz to 199). There appears to be a difference in glottal source properties where &lt;em&gt;pan&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat creaky voiced. If you compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/pap%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;papá&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/tan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tan&lt;/a&gt;, I presume you will see that they are all similar in basic ways. No two utterances are ever exactly the same, so there will be &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; difference in any two recording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language teachers mean when they say that the vowel or consonant is &quot;always pronounced the same&quot; is something totally different: the letter &quot;a&quot; represents a single phoneme, unlike the case in English where vowel letters represent many different phonemes. But Spanish phonemes can have allophones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:15:01.047" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29305" CreationDate="2018-10-04T19:43:14.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the &quot;theta with two middle lines&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shapecatcher.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shapecatcher&lt;/a&gt; recommends GURMUKHI URA ੳ. You can also use a normal theta plus a combining stroke character: θ̶ or θ̵.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an &quot;H with two middle lines&quot;, try the letter Barred H (or H With Stroke as Unicode calls it): capital Ħ, lowercase ħ. It's used in some languages to represent an epiglottal or pharyngeal fricative, but the lowercase is better-known from physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T01:43:09.757" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T01:43:09.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29305" CreationDate="2018-10-05T02:27:41.737" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both of those letters did at one time contain two interior lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heta (the consonantal Eta) is traced back to ancient Egyptian, where it looked like a fence.  Multiple 'pickets' remained through Phonecian, archaic Greek, and Etruscan.  {The unicode?? is called Greek_Eta_2-bars.}  Some versions have slanted pickets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theta started out containing a cross (+ or X) (sorry, not =).  Some variants contain just a dot or isolated dash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T15:48:56.627" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:48:56.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29316" CreationDate="2018-10-05T08:55:28.537" Score="0" ViewCount="4045" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulties in determining the heads of phrases/sentences. I know that the head&#xA;determines the syntactic function of the whole phrase and I understood some simple examples but in the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: What will the rebel ministers do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: &lt;em&gt;They will vote against government plans to privatize hospitals.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why is &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; the head of the sentence B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T07:25:27.907" Title="Determining the head of the sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T16:11:14.433" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if researchers working on textual entailment using explicit modelling tools (mathematical semantics / logic /formal semantics) have an explanation of recent success of neural networks in textual entailment (&lt;a href=&quot;https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GLUE Benchmark&lt;/a&gt;)? Any links would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="15327" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T17:00:24.493" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:00:24.493" Title="Neural Net advances in textual entailment and mathematical semantics/logic view on it" Tags="&lt;logic&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;entailment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2575" CreationDate="2018-10-05T18:06:09.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking up the parameter &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/treebanks/la_ittb/la_ittb-feat-VerbForm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VerbForm in the Index Thomisticus treebank in Universal Dependencies&lt;/a&gt; I find &lt;em&gt;Ger&lt;/em&gt; for Gerund, &lt;em&gt;Gdv&lt;/em&gt; for Gerundive, but a tag for Supinum is missing.The &lt;a href=&quot;http://universaldependencies.org/treebanks/la_proiel/la_proiel-feat-VerbForm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PROIEL treebank&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;em&gt;Sup&lt;/em&gt; for Supine (for strange reasons, only the Supine in &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; is found there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T18:06:09.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T22:19:10.533" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this assignment to do and it has to with automatic and non automatic secondary articulators. This is my first time. I checked books at my disposals including Wikipedia, but none discussed anything about automatic and non automatic secondary articulators. &#xA;Is that the title doesn't exist or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22846" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T23:30:19.027" Title="Automatic secondary articulator" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29314" CreationDate="2018-10-05T23:30:19.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Articulator&quot; refers to a piece of anatomy, and an articulator could be active or passive (the tongue tip is active, the teeth are passive). Consonants are typically analyzed in terms of their &quot;primary&quot; place of articulation (defined by active and passive articulators), for example &quot;labio-dental&quot; ([f]). &quot;Secondary articulation&quot; refers to additional, typically vocalic articulations, such as palatalization or rounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a phenomenon of coarticulation, having to do with the fact that the movement of an articulator may precede (or follow) the segment that triggers that articulator, so in &quot;stool&quot;, the lips start protruding during [s], before the segment ([u]) which phonologically has rounding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only an action can be automatic vs. non-automatic, and a piece of anatomy (an articulator) can't be automatic. No piece of anatomy (articulator) is intrinsically secondary, but in combination with other articulations, one articulator could be used for secondary articulations. We don't say that it is therefore a secondary articulator. The best I can suggest is that you are supposed to be doing something with &quot;automatic vs. non-automatic secondary articulations&quot;. The problem is figuring out what &quot;automatic&quot; could possibly mean in this context. Russian is an example of a language with &quot;non-automatic&quot; secondary articulations, because it has palatalization as a secondary articulation on consonants, and it is not always assigned by rule (it is not &quot;automatic&quot;). The problem is establishing that there is such a thing as an automatic secondary articulation. I &lt;em&gt;suspect&lt;/em&gt; that the secondary coarticulation where in &quot;stool&quot; the lips protrude at some point before the vowel is an example. Necessarily, it takes some time to protrude the lips for the vowel [u], so it seems that that has to happen before you finish the consonant [t]. The &quot;automatic&quot; part would mean &quot;this is what unavoidably happens, as a result of human physiology&quot;. But some languages have this kind of coarticulation and it starts much earlier that is absolutely physically necessary – there is a grammatical rule. So we don't know what the boundary is between &quot;automatic, physically necessary&quot; versus &quot;language specific&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So another possibility is that the instructor means &quot;the result of a rule&quot; as opposed to &quot;the result of a lexical specification. In that case, an example could be Russian, which has both lexically specified palatalization but also rule-governed palatalization before /-i/. However, Russian palatalization is a kind of third-rail topic because palatalization is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; totally automatic except in the case of velars (as far as I know, nobody disputes that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is a puzzle: &quot;automatic secondary articulator&quot; is at the very least non-standard terminology in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T23:30:19.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29310" CreationDate="2018-10-06T07:25:27.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They will vote against government plans to privatize hospitals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right. The head determines the category of the phrase, though not the function. The head of a clause is a verb phrase, and the head of a verb phrase is a verb -- thus it follows that the head word of a clause is a verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example, the main clause is the entire sentence, which has the verb phrase &quot;will vote against government plans to privatize hospitals&quot; as its head. The head of this verb phrase is the finite verb &quot;will&quot;. The other verbs in the sentence, &quot;vote&quot; and &quot;privatize&quot;, are heads of embedded subordinate non-finite clauses, not the main clause (the sentence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T07:25:27.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29057" CreationDate="2018-10-06T12:38:57.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not one of the areas in the examples you listed, but you can get some Ainu texts online today. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukie_Chiri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yukie Chiri&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00DU06M0Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Song the Owl God Sang&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is available in the original Ainu &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001529/files/44909_29558.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (parallel with Japanese text). It's a collection of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yukar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T12:38:57.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29324" CreationDate="2018-10-07T15:08:42.163" Score="9" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;For languages without written alphabets, wondering how a linguist goes out in the field and determines, &quot;hey, these are the core sounds of the language&quot; and defines an alphabet in terms of those phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have seen languages with phonemes such as &quot;dsh&quot; or &quot;tshʰ&quot;, etc., things which could be broken down into smaller components such as &quot;d + sh&quot; for example. But instead they end up with an &quot;alphabet&quot; (not sure if that's the correct terminology) of let's say around 50 phonemes, many of which could be constructed from more primitive phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is related to the general question about how a phonology is constructed -- a complicated one such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubykh phonology&lt;/a&gt;, with ~84 consonants. Not sure if an &quot;alphabet&quot; (unwritten) is the same thing as a phonology, but basically I'm just wondering how a linguist determines that &quot;these are the base sounds&quot; in a language. They then use that system to &lt;em&gt;write down&lt;/em&gt; the words and such in the language for their book or other thing. So they may determine that &quot;mb&quot; is the annotation/transcription for the &quot;nasalized [b] sound&quot;, and &quot;tshʰ&quot; for the aspirated [ch] sound, etc. And then they spell their words out like /mbatshʰe/ for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would basically like to know how they determine what should be at the lowest level. What goes into their thinking, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T21:34:19.953" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T21:34:19.953" Title="How linguists select phonemes to construct an alphabet for a language" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29323" CreationDate="2018-10-07T16:25:14.793" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should not be surprised if I tell you that the process is highly variable. Very roughly speaking, you start by eliciting a bunch of words and writing them down. Linguists have varying degrees of experience with phonetic symbols and what they stand for, and this introduces the first layer of variability. The ideal is that there is a set of standard reference sounds (expert IPA renditions) and actual language instantiations across languages, so that you can decide whether the vowel in question is [a] or [æ]. There is no such reference source, so we make do idiosyncratically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, you would write down what was actually said, not concerning yourself with whether [a] or [æ] are contrastive – making that decision comes after you have the data. In fact, people approach languages (after the first couple of hours) with at least a weak ideological bias. If you have encountered 100 tokens of [a] and 4 tokens of [æ], you will be biased in favor of rejecting [æ] as error or a conditioned variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common that linguists (outside of students in a field methods class, who may be deprived of the opportunity to “cheat”) seek guidance from prior knowledge, so, if you start working on a new language, e.g. Guerze, you might figure out what has been written on the language already, or what languages it is related to and therefore what phonemes this language is likely to have. This can backfire, of course, but still, doing this can give you hypotheses that can be tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the mythical pure methodology, you assemble a large enough corpus of (narrow) phonetic transcriptions, and then do a distributional analysis of the individual sounds. The analysis is almost or actually always done heuristically and not computationally, that is, you look at similar segments and phonetic properties that are attested in the corpus, and determine for a given pair ([a] vs. [æ], [t] vs. [tʰ]…) whether the contexts where the two sounds appear overlap, or are those contexts disjoint. This bit of analysis is the most common form of phonological analysis that the public encounters when they hear about “phonology”, and innumerable textbooks teach about allophones and complementary distribution, trying to impart the analytic skill required to discover that in this language, [a] and [æ] are in complementary distribution, and [t] vs. [tʰ] are not. I will simply say that it is both simple and difficult to understand the method, and the reason is that too much emphasis is put on looking for minimal pairs. A complete dissection of the method of analyzing for complementary distribution is beyond the scope of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you know that the sounds [a] and [æ] are in complementary distribution, one has license (or an obligation, depends on your ideology) to say that these are allophones of one phoneme: now you have to decide what that phoneme is. This too becomes a complex and ideology-riddled process. The basic question is, do you say that /a/ becomes [æ] somewhere, or do you say that /æ/ becomes [a] somewhere? The typical reasoning is remotely based on the rules involved to express the respective changes, so are the required rules turning /a/ into [æ] more complex than those turning /æ/ into [a]? In order to answer that question, you have to have a theory of what a “rule” is/can be. Often people appeal to “environment counting” i.e. does one sound appear in more environments than the other (the idea being that the most general environment is the context where there is no rule and the most restricted environment is where there is a specific rule). However, “an environment” is not an obviously quantifiable fact. People may appeal to a priori notions of naturalness, for instance [a] might be seen as a more “natural” vowel  compared to [æ] so you might decide based on naturalness. At any rate, if [æ] only appears after palatalized /tʲ/, you would say that the phoneme /a/ becomes [æ] after /tʲ/, and no other rule changes /a/, so that explains why the vowel is usually pronounced [a]. One way around this is to use “elsewhere” in the rule (effectively, every rule of allophonic distribution becomes an n-tuple of rules with “elsewhere” always in the mix. You can say “/æ/ becomes [æ] after /tʲ/; /æ/ becomes [a] elsewhere”, and now you can claim that the phoneme is /æ/, even though [æ] is token-infrequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of cluster vs. unit-phoneme is a pretty advanced one which is not easily resolved by the field linguist. One person may decide that [mbwa] “dog” has three segments in the syllable onset, and another person may decide that it has one pre-nasalized rounded segment. 95% of the time, there isn’t compelling phonological evidence to chose between these accounts (and some phonological theories don’t even allow the possibility of making such a distinction). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of practical orthography is even more vexing. There are actually two kinds of orthographies: the orthography used by the linguist for talking to linguists, and something devised for speakers of the language. The linguist-orthography may perform simple mappings from IPA to more convenient letter, where &lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt; may represent [ŋ] and &lt;em&gt;ngg&lt;/em&gt; represents [ŋg] (and so on). The popular orthography is (these days) based on community ideas, where a council of elders may like the idea of writing [í, ì] – or they may dislike it. Often, the decision is based on sentiments like “We won’t write [ĩ] like our enemies do” vs. “we will write [ĩ] like our brothers do”. The general rule is, avoid strange symbols, hence Taa and Shona orthographies avoid the obscure phonetic letters that would be necessary in an IPA transcription; also, not everything that is phonemic gets included in practical spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also point out that some linguists think of phoneme letters like /a, ø/ as “the lowest level”, but others further analyze sounds into defining features such as [+low,–rd] or [–back,–hi,–lo,+round].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T16:31:39.707" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T16:31:39.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29326" CreationDate="2018-10-07T17:14:22.553" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a blue hypergiant in my universe that is called &quot;Kochav David&quot;. (yeah, I took it up literally). Thing is, the star functions like a planet, and people live there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &quot;terrestrial&quot; Hebrew word for hypergiant is &quot;היפר-ענק&quot; (hiper-anak), where the prefix is straight borrowed. The supergiant would be &quot;על-ענק&quot; (al-anak), so what hypergiant would be if it was a Hebrew word proper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22857" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T17:42:01.453" Title="Authentic, native word for a &quot;hypergiant&quot; in Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-10-08T08:10:46.890" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29325" CreationDate="2018-10-07T17:42:01.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hyper&quot; and &quot;super&quot; are actually cognates, and originally meant exactly the same thing in Ancient Greek and Latin. (&lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; regularly turns into &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; at the beginning of a word before a vowel in Ancient Greek, and &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; turned into &lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt; over time.) In English, they generally mean exactly the same thing, and the choice of which one to use is arbitrary: see &quot;hyper-active&quot;, which uses the Greek prefix on a Latin root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, there's only one &quot;native&quot; prefix with this meaning, &lt;em&gt;ʕal-&lt;/em&gt; (sometimes a suffix &lt;em&gt;-ʕal&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;maħshabh-ʕal&lt;/em&gt; &quot;supercomputer&quot; instead). So the easiest way to get another one is to do exactly what English did and borrow it from another language. That's where your &lt;em&gt;hiper-ʕanaq&lt;/em&gt; comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option would be to use the prefix and the suffix with different meanings: &lt;em&gt;ʕal-ʕanaq&lt;/em&gt; &quot;supergiant&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ʕanaq-ʕal&lt;/em&gt; &quot;hypergiant&quot;. But I don't know of any actual Hebrew terms that do this, and it's liable to cause confusion. Or you could use an entirely different prefix, like &lt;em&gt;rabh-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;many&quot;, but this feels like forcing a square peg into a round hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T17:42:01.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29328" CreationDate="2018-10-07T18:24:03.100" Score="1" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the basics of what a nasal sound is. I understand that /m/ and /n/ are nasal sounds because you are letting air come out of your nose. But I don't quite get a few other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the &quot;nasal sound&quot; sounds like, or if there is such thing as a &quot;nasal sound&quot; (other than the /n/ and /m/ sounds). I'm referring to nasal vowels here for the most part, like the French vowel /ɑ̃/ (I've only read about that sound).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The types of nasal sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the &quot;nasal-ness&quot; comes before, during, or after (or all three) the &quot;main&quot; sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I just saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalapa_Mazatec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ᵐb  ⁿd̪ ⁿd̪ʲ  ᵑɡ  ᵑɡʷ/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I see things like the nasal vowels, as well as these things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nasal clicks like in Zulu: /nq, nx, nc/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/m n ng/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ṽ  ð̃  s̃  z̃  ʃ̃  ʒ̃/ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricative_consonant#Nasalized_fricatives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nasal fricatives&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could either link to a video or audio clip demonstrating what the &quot;nasal sound&quot; is, or sort of roughly explain what it sounds like. Also, in terms of the examples above, I'm wondering about the positioning of the nasal-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the way I understand it. A &quot;nasal vowel&quot; is sort of &lt;em&gt;forcing&lt;/em&gt; extra air out of your nose when you say the vowel (it feels sort of weird to do, unnatural). So wondering where I'm going wrong there. But this nasal sound happens &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the main vowel sound. On the other side, a &quot;nasalized /b/ sound&quot; might be like /mb/. Since a /b/ is instantaneous, you can't do the nasal-ness &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the /b/ sound, so it occurs &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the /b/, so it's like /mmm-b'/. That's the best example of a nasal sound that I have found. But to me that is really just an /m/ sound followed by a /b/ sound. To call it &quot;a nasal /b/&quot; seems like it's not quite right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how you could do a nasalized click, unless it is also like the nasalized /b/, in that you basically do the /n/ or /m/ sound (or &quot;ng&quot; /ŋ/ sound, those 3 seem like the only possibilities) before the click. This seems to get at what the symbolism behind /ᵑɡ/ means, that nasal sound comes &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have seen examples elsewhere showing stuff like /dⁿ/, instead of /ⁿd/, so the nasal-ness seems like it is coming &lt;em&gt;afterwards&lt;/em&gt; (on release perhaps). So it would be like /d'nnn/, but that also feels weird. Wondering how that works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the nasalized fricatives like /z̃/ seem like they would work like the vowels, so you would somehow add a nasally sound to the fricative (but I'm not sure how that sounds or how to do it properly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoping to better understand this concept, because it seems important in languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T12:49:20.740" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T12:49:20.740" Title="Where the nasal-ness comes in" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;nasals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29327" CreationDate="2018-10-07T19:22:08.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a terminological distinction made between “a nasal” like [m n ŋ], and “a nasalized sound” which has a tilde over it (ã,r̃). Your question seems to be more about nasalized sounds. A nasalized vowel is said to be one with air flowing through the nasal passages during its production. (This is true enough for normal understanding, but not literally true: a nasalized sound is one where the nasal cavities serve as a side resonator). Any sound that has an oral cavity that is only partially constricted can be nasalized, for example, a vowel, a liquid, a glide… fricatives later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact timing of velum-lowering during the production of a nasalized sound is variable, depending on the phonetic rules of the language, but a good enough approximation is that “a nasalized vowel” means that the velum is lowered during the time when the vowel articulation is maintained. Now we can some to cases where the timing is more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is the notion of a “prenasalized” (or post-nasalized) sound like [ᵐb] or [bᵐ]. First, there may be a phonological claim that such-and-such is “a sound”, and not a sequence of sounds, [mb, bm]. The existence of such pre- and post-nasalized units is controversial, although there are enough languages where /bã/ is pronounced [bᵐã] that we are inclined to at least say that the rules of phonetic implementation can specify that velum-lowing may start within the preceding stop (hence /bã/ → [bᵐã]). Sometimes voiced stops are associated automatically with nasalization, so every /b/ is automatically a bit nasalized. This could be teleologically to make it easier to maintain voicing of a stop, or phylogentically because voiced stops historically come from /nt,mp/ and the language remembers a bit of that history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most convincing putative case of a contrast between prenasalized consonant and a sequence is Sinhalese, which however has been argued (shown, IMO) to actually relate to syllable stricture differences and specifically moraicity of consonants (“ᵐb” is [.mb] and “mb” is [m̩.b]). Swahili has this as well, [m̩buni] ‘coffee tree’ versus [mbuni] ‘ostrich’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a problem with “nasal clicks” in the Nguni languages, that they (may, depends on the language) have both “nasalized clicks” and “sequences of nasal plus click”, or, “prenasalized clicks”. A nasalized click is essentially analogous to [n] and a prenasalized click is like [nd] (entirely nasal vs. nasal at the beginning only). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nasal fricatives are a semi-problem because nasalization works counter to the aerodynamic requirements of fricatives (the nasal escape path means that you can’t have the turbulent air flow required to sustain the fricative). However, you can produce a fricative in the midst of an all-nasal stream, where there will be some nasal airflow during the pronunciation of the fricative. A detailed aerodynamic analysis of such things would be nice to have. You would have to look into the details of a particular language to see why the author says that the fricative is the source of the nasalization, but I think the claim for Kwangali is credible, as long as we don’t think that it means that the velum drops down and tightens up rapidly to be times with the fricative’s articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to nasalized vowels, you should first turn to non-nasalized vowels. A non-nasalized vowel has a characteric resonance pattern which we talk about in terms of formants. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/28593&quot;&gt;This Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; about plugged noses and nasals sketches the notion of a side cavity and an antiresonance: a nasal vowel has an antiresonance which makes then sound difference from oral vowels. It’s actually somewhat difficult to talk about nasalized forms; the nasal side branch ends up affecting the frequencies of the oral formants, and it also “erases” energy (we call this an antiformant). &lt;a href=&quot;https://depts.washington.edu/phonlab/resources/nasals-laterals.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is some acoustic tech on nasals and nasalization. Here are some pronunciations of words in Yoruba with nasalized vowels (written vowel+n): &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/ibukun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/tunde/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W2&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/oyin/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%C3%ACb%C3%A0d%C3%A0n/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/funfun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%E1%BB%8Dm%E1%BB%8Dbinrin/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/m%E1%BA%B9rin/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W7&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%E1%BB%8Dj%E1%BB%8D%CC%81_%C3%ACs%E1%BA%B9%CC%81gun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W8&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/o_ti_kun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W9&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%C3%A0%E1%B9%A3et%C3%A1n/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T19:51:56.077" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T19:51:56.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29333" CreationDate="2018-10-08T02:20:07.450" Score="-3" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the tilde used on the top vs. the bottom means different things (nasal vs. creaky voice). This got me wondering if the [ ̥ ] ring means anything differently when it is on the top as seen here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ŋ̊&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/IPA_chart_2018.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA chart&lt;/a&gt; says when it's on the bottom it means voiceless, but wanted to clarify and see if it meant anything different when on the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I saw these small superscript symbols: [ᵐ ᵑ ᶮ ʱ]. Wondering what [ᵐ ᵑ ᶮ] are for, if they are just some variant of nasalization or if they are something different. [ʱ] I assume is for breathy voice, but I don't see why they don't follow the IPA doc and use diaeresis below like [a̤]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_symbols_in_Unicode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonetic symbols for unicode&lt;/a&gt; lists quite a few symbols that aren't found in the IPA doc: [ʳ ʴ ʵ ʶ] (r-coloring or r-offglides). These also I'm not sure where they fit in: [ʹ ʺ ʻ ʼ ʽ ʾ ʿ ˂ ˃ ˄ ˅ ˆ ˇ ˈ ˉ ˊ ˋ ˌ ˍ ˎ ˏ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I saw these in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Estonian phonology&lt;/a&gt;: [pː] [tː] [tʲː] [kː]. I'm not sure how those can be long since they happen in an instant. They also show [fː] [sː] [sʲː] [ʃː] [hː] which is the first time I've seen it otherwise not on vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuki_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yuki phonology&lt;/a&gt; has a voiceless t with [ t̥ ], but I thought [t] was already voiceless so this just has me wondering if I am missing something, or they are just getting extra specific on saying the [t] can't become a [d] and be voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are two different unicode symbols for pharyngealization: [ˁ ˤ]. They look the same but find/replace shows they are different. Wondering if that is just a glitch or if there are two different meanings that I can't quite see because of how small it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also saw [ ˀ ] in unicode (the reverse of the pharyngealization symbol, i.e. the glottal stop symbol, but small), wondering what that's for. The Yuki phonology has it in [ˀm]. Wondering if that is just the same as doing /'m/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mam_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mam phonology&lt;/a&gt; has [ ɑ͍ ] which has the &lt;code&gt;͍&lt;/code&gt; two-way arrow beneath which I haven't seen in the IPA doc. Wondering what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize, these are the things I've seen that aren't in the IPA sheet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ ɑ͍ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ ˀ ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ᵐ ᵑ ᶮ ʱ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʳ ʴ ʵ ʶ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʹ ʺ ʻ ʼ ʽ ʾ ʿ ˂ ˃ ˄ ˅ ˆ ˇ ˈ ˉ ˊ ˋ ˌ ˍ ˎ ˏ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could explain what these mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T04:05:19.070" Title="Some questions on pieces missing from the IPA sheet" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-10T21:22:58.670" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29331" CreationDate="2018-10-08T03:13:34.850" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please try to find answers &lt;strong&gt;yourself&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't have been hard to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicelessness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page for voicelessness&lt;/a&gt; which says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and modally voiced pairs of consonants (the obstruents), such as [p b], [t d], [k ɡ], [q ɢ], [f v], and [s z]. Also, there are diacritics for voicelessness, U+0325  ̥ COMBINING RING BELOW and U+030A  ̊ COMBINING RING ABOVE, which is used for letters with a descender. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiced sounds, such as vowels and sonorant consonants: [ḁ], [l̥], [ŋ̊].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;strong&gt;very page&lt;/strong&gt; you linked to (and therefore should have at least partially read) for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_symbols_in_Unicode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonetic symbols in Unicode&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;explicitly&lt;/strong&gt; says that's it's not all IPA!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for pharyngealization&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Unicode characters ⟨ˤ⟩ (U+02E4) and ⟨ˁ⟩ (U+02C1) look graphically similar. The IPA Handbook[1] lists U+02E4 (IPA Number 423) as the only unambiguous pharyngealization marker. The superimposed tilde (U+0334, IPA Number 428) denotes either velarization or pharyngealization, and the IPA Handbook does not mention U+02C1 at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which doesn't explain why U+02C1 exists, but at least it's clear which is the official character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Estonian phonology page&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;you linked to&lt;/strong&gt; explains: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like the vowels, most consonants can be inherently short or long. For the plosives, this distinction is reflected as a distinction in tenseness/voicing, with short plosives being voiced and long plosives being voiceless. This distinction only applies fully for single consonants after stressed syllables. In other environments, the length or tenseness/voicing distinctions may be neutralised ... In addition, long consonants and clusters also have two suprasegmental lengths, like the vowels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrow diacritic in Mam is interesting. I haven't seen that symbol used and haven't yet found a reference to it. But don't ask what it means! The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mam_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; (which again &lt;strong&gt;you linked to&lt;/strong&gt;) clearly says that it's for long vowels. If you want help to ask a good question we'll help you in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Meta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't look into the others, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also had easily located answers. We don't mind basic questions, even homework questions here, but we expect that question askers respect question answerers by asking &lt;strong&gt;after having attempted in good faith to find an answer themselves&lt;/strong&gt;. A reminder of what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/conduct&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask&quot;&gt;How do I ask a good question?&lt;/a&gt; page say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you’re here to get help, make it as easy as possible for others to help you.&#xA;  Follow our guidelines and remember that our community is made possible by volunteers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you &lt;strong&gt;thoroughly searched for an answer&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also don't ask questions about symbols divorced from the context you saw them in. If you've seen a symbol you should be able to give us a link or reference to where you saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, one question at a time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T03:23:52.620" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T03:23:52.620" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29331" CreationDate="2018-10-08T03:57:57.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ring means the same thing above or below. Some consonants go up and some go down, and linguists found it easier to read if they stuck the ring on the opposite side. The reason the trema has different meanings above and below is a historical accident, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superscript nasals are used to indicate prenasalization. Generally, a superscript IPA letter means &quot;beginning/ending like this other sound&quot;. So &lt;code&gt;[ᵐb]&lt;/code&gt; starts like &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; and ends like &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;, while &lt;code&gt;[pʰ]&lt;/code&gt; starts like &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; and ends like &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt;. It's a bit clunky, but a lot more versatile than adding more diacritics, since it can indicate that a sound is &quot;kind of like&quot; another in all sorts of different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breathy-voiced consonants are written like &lt;code&gt;[bʱ]&lt;/code&gt;, while breathy-voiced vowels are written like &lt;code&gt;[a̤]&lt;/code&gt;. Another historical accident—the IPA isn't always particularly systematic in how they do things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of those symbols aren't official IPA. Unicode encodes various phonetic symbols that aren't IPA: my favorite one is &lt;code&gt;ᴝ&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;lowercase U on its side&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the ones that are actual IPA, the superscripts are for the &quot;begins/ends sort of like this&quot; usage mentioned above, the curved apostrophe is for ejectives, and many of the others are tone markers. The IPA has two different official ways to do tone, and the diacritics are less favored nowadays, but they're still around and you'll see them a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants can be lengthened, just like vowels. Continuants continue the sound for the whole time, while oral stops just have a period of silence in the middle. Compare English &quot;pot on&quot; vs &quot;pot top&quot;; the latter has a lengthened &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt;. Italian also has contrastive consonant length, marked with double letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the pairs like &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; are used for voicing, and sometimes for &quot;fortis-lenis&quot;, which is often the fancy linguistic way of saying &quot;there's a distinction here and we're not exactly sure what it is&quot;. If you're using &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; for the fortis version, then &lt;code&gt;t̥&lt;/code&gt; is specifically fortis &lt;em&gt;and devoiced&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two symbols are basically equivalent. In theory one is smaller than the other, but I've never seen a font where they look different. Unicode also has certain idiosyncrasies that can't be fixed any more due to the policy of never changing or removing existing code points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrow underneath is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extIPA&lt;/a&gt; symbol for spread lips. Some linguists needed symbols for things that the IPA didn't have, so they made up new ones; those are all collectively known as &quot;extIPA&quot;, for Extended IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T04:05:19.070" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T04:05:19.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T04:00:09.623" Score="2" ViewCount="696" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a real distinction in say, a spectrogram, between unaspirated voiceless stops and their voiced counterparts before a (voiced) vowel? For example, /ka/ and /ga/. Are they actually different phonetically? And if so, how different.... picoseconds of voicelessness? Or is it significant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question comes from noticing that in Zulu, an aspirated /k/ often becomes non-aspirated when there's a nasal preceding it I believe (e.g., inkukhu (chicken) instead of inkhukhu), and it sounds very close to a /g/.... particularly when followed by a vowel. So, my hypothesis is that the two sounds become so similar, that they probably lose their ability to be distinct in that environment. Anyone know any specifics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22862" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T04:01:22.523" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T18:42:53.577" Title="non-aspirated voiceless stops versus their voiced counterparts before a vowel" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;&lt;zulu&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29334" CreationDate="2018-10-08T04:13:13.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, the main theory I've heard is that voiced/voiceless/aspirated consonants are distinguished by &lt;em&gt;voice onset time&lt;/em&gt;. VOT is the time delta between when the consonant stops and when the vocal folds start vibrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the VOT is positive, then there's a gap between the consonant ending and the vowel beginning. This is aspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the VOT is close to zero, then the consonant ends and the vowel begins right after. This is a &quot;tenuis&quot; (= &quot;normal&quot;) consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the VOT is negative, then the vocal folds are vibrating during the consonant itself. This is a voiced consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, aspirated — tenuis — voiced are all different points on a continuum. Some languages have all three as distinct, like Ancient Greek, while others have only two. And the ones with two categories can choose different places to draw the line: French has strongly voiced &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt; and barely unvoiced &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt;, while English has strongly aspirated &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt; and barely voiced (or even not voiced at all!) &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible for an aspirated consonant to become unaspirated or voiced after a nasal—nasals are generally voiced, so this is straightforward assimilation. However, it's also possible for the opposite to happen! In Swahili, for example, tenuis stops became aspirated after nasals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T04:13:13.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29334" CreationDate="2018-10-08T05:16:51.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Zulu is there is a contrast between aspirated voiceless, unaspirated (weak) ejective, and ostensively voiced stops. Aspirated consonants deaspirate after a nasal, so /izim-phaphe/ → [izim-paphe] 'feathers', cf. /izim-pete/ → [izim-pete] 'knock-kneed person'; see also your example &quot;chicken&quot;. While /k, kh/ neutralize, /g/ remains distinct. However, distinguishing &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; (especially) but also &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; is difficult. The voiced obstruents cause breathy voicing on the following vowel, and in fact they may be entirely devoiced during the closure if not preceded by a nasal. The main phonetic correlate of voicing of obstruents in Zulu (Xhosa, Swati) is causing breathiness on the vowel. There are a few contexts in Swati and Zulu where breathiness is not conditioned by a consonant (e.g. the first syllable of &lt;em&gt;yebo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;yes&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long voice onset time is sufficient to identify aspirated stops. Breathy voicing and related pitch-lowering should be enough to distinguish &lt;em&gt;b,d,g&lt;/em&gt; from unaspirated &lt;em&gt;p,t,k&lt;/em&gt;, in case ejection is weak for a speaker / token. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T05:16:51.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T15:10:00.610" Score="3" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both considering L1 speakers and L2 speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It becomes a bit tricky involving L2 speakers. While a phoneme is defined as one of the units of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language, it's not necessary that every aspects can satisfy for an L2 speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person was taught that /θ s/ are different sounds in English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person can distinguish /θ s/ by ear only carefully, e.g. distinguish &lt;em&gt;sink&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; pronounced alone and clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person can't pronounce them differently h'self.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other possibilities for the above factors. Can we argue the existence of a grey area or continuum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About L1, is /u/ and /w/ an example, if there is no difference in their sound quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T19:41:44.917" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T19:41:44.917" Title="Is it possible to talk about two different phonemes if they always have the same manifestations?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29339" CreationDate="2018-10-08T15:45:42.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This (strong absolute neutralization) is theoretically possible although has not yet been shown to exist. The closest case is Yawelmani, where the phonemes &lt;em&gt;u:, o:&lt;/em&gt; are realized as [o:] everywhere. There is a well-known argument justifying the distinction, related to vowel harmony. However, the neutralization only applies to long &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, and there are stem-forming shortening rules where /u:/ becomes [u] but /o:/ becomes [o], so the two phonemes are not realized the same way absolutely everywhere – there is a context where they are distinct. (There is also closed-syllable shortening where &lt;em&gt;u:&lt;/em&gt; surfaces as [o] – shortening of &lt;em&gt;u:&lt;/em&gt; to [u] only occurs as part of stem-formation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As applied to second-language learning, this raises a question as to abstract competence versus concrete performance, and is analogous to the first-language acquisition problem that children may hear a certain distinction in phonemes but don't necessarily produce a distinction. This has proven to be difficult to verify experimentally, although anecdotally it is &quot;verified&quot; by the fact that adults seem to think that child English &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced as [w] (at least, it sounds to adults less like proper adult &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and more like &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;). There was a study (citation lost in the void) where it was shown that among the subjects that seemed to have &lt;em&gt;r→w&lt;/em&gt; by adult judgment, articulation of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; was nevertheless distinct. Anecdotally, some students of Lushootseed neutralized &lt;em&gt;ɬ&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt;, so that &lt;em&gt;ʃəgʷɬ&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced &lt;em&gt;ʃəgʷʃ&lt;/em&gt; (others may pronounce it &lt;em&gt;ʃəgʷθ&lt;/em&gt;, keeping the phoneme distinct by mapping it to a different English phoneme). They did seem to know the spelling difference between &lt;em&gt;š&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ɬ&lt;/em&gt;; maybe their articulation of š-cum-ɬ different from that of regular &lt;em&gt;š&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T15:45:42.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29343" CreationDate="2018-10-08T17:02:08.367" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found out the problem in my German recording. I knew I had to open my mouth a bit more when I pronounce an /e/ than in /i/, and I did so. But when I analyzed them in a spectrum, they got all together in the upper-left corner of the vowel chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also tried to pronounce an [i] when I open my jaw so much as well as in [a] and analyzed it with a normal [i] in spectrum and I found the formants same. And of course, they are perceived the same by ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can pronounce an [a] even if they clench their teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T17:36:55.000" Title="What factors can be involved and make a compensation when different heights don't make difference among vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29341" CreationDate="2018-10-08T17:36:32.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot determine where your tongue is by looking at formants, you have to use a more hi-tech physiological method like ultrasound. Formant frequencies are the result of complex physical factors which include the length of various resonating cavities, which can be determined by the position of the tongue, lips and larynx, as well as jaw position which affects where everything is. The notion that tongue height determines formants (F1) is true enough for normal articulation, but you may have to redefine what you mean by tongue height for &quot;alternative&quot; articulations. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/27668&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; discusses what determines formant values. Whether or not radically different articulations of a vowel are &quot;perceived the same&quot; depends on the experiment that you conduct to establish that conclusion (what proves that X and Y are &quot;perceived the same&quot;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T17:36:32.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29341" CreationDate="2018-10-08T17:36:55.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Height doesn't depend on how open or closed the jaw is, but on how close the tongue is to the roof of the mouth. Try pronouncing &lt;code&gt;[a]&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; with your mouth wide open, then again with your teeth clenched. You'll feel in both cases that the &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; has your tongue very high up, while the &lt;code&gt;[a]&lt;/code&gt; has it very low down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T17:36:55.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29368" CreationDate="2018-10-09T00:25:14.970" Score="-2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today, I was talking about swearing in other languages with some friends (this is a serious question, bear with me), so I decided to look up some lists of Spanish swear words for fun.  This initially went over my head, but I noticed that the swear words in Spanish translated to swear words in English. For example, fuck in English translates to Joder in Spanish and shit in English translates to Mierda in Spanish, and both Joder and Mierda are commonly used swear words from what I've seen in Spanish YouTube and Twitch streams.  I genuinely want to know why both English and Spanish swear words mean the same thing.  For example, why isn't &quot;padre defacador&quot; (Father Shitter) a common swear word instead of the Spanish swearword &quot;puta madre&quot;, which is again similar to an English expression, or instead of &quot;mierda&quot;? Do other languages have swear words meaning the same thing as in English?  Is this just as simple as &quot;poop&quot; is a funny and/or offensive word so the language has a swear word for it?  This is a legitimate question I am curious about, so thanks if you can help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22869" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T22:02:58.770" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T22:02:58.770" Title="Why do swear words mean the same thing in both English and Spanish (possibly more languages)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7171" CreationDate="2018-10-09T06:04:45.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it's two different languages and one simply cannot translate a concept word by word from one language to another. Otherwise,  you just sound dumb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22870" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T06:04:45.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25553" CreationDate="2018-10-09T09:20:15.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You were basically studying the standard, 'literary' language. And then, you were mostly focused on your version of Serbo-Croatian [SC].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were at least 4 versions. They were called 'Western', 'Eastern', 'Ekavian', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You weren't systematically studying all these versions. Very few people did learn systematically - in school - differences such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mrziti&lt;/em&gt; ≠ &lt;em&gt;mrzeti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;grijati&lt;/em&gt; ≠ &lt;em&gt;grejati&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;brijati&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;brijati&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;komentirati&lt;/em&gt; ≠ &lt;em&gt;komentarisati&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;definirati&lt;/em&gt; ≠ &lt;em&gt;definisati&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;trenirati&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;trenirati&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that nobody was learning this in school, for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/G2YJr5JNnnM&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/G2YJr5JNnnM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you understand all of it? I had really problems with some words. Is it the same language? Is he singing in SC? Or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another problem, a very practical one. In Croatia, spelling &lt;em&gt;naprimjer&lt;/em&gt; 'for example' is acceptable. In Serbia, it's not, you can only spell it with 2 words (&lt;em&gt;na primer&lt;/em&gt;). So imagine a teacher in school who has to prove to a student that &lt;em&gt;naprimjer&lt;/em&gt; is acceptable. There has to be a book which proves it, an orthography manual. What will be written on the cover of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SC orthography? But it would describe only spellings acceptable in Croatia. &lt;em&gt;Croatian SC&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;em&gt;Standard Croatian Serbo-Croatian&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since laypeople usually equate 'language' with 'proper spelling' and 'standard language', the only option is to write &lt;em&gt;Croatian&lt;/em&gt; on the cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistically speaking, one can say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is spoken in Zagreb, Split and Belgrade is not the same, but it's similar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people can still understand each other without misunderstandings, but there are funny moments once a while&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dialects don't follow political or ethnic borders, except in a small number of situations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something more. People who were born and raised in Serbia or Bosnia-Herzegovina often underplay actual diversity of speech. I, living in Zagreb, can sometimes only barely understand people living in a village (in Croatia!) 40 km from Zagreb. They might be speaking Slovak, as far as I am concerned. What are they speaking? Is it the same language? Or we call it a dialect? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina often don't think dialects are important in the everyday life. Now listen to the YouTube link again. Dialects are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; important in Croatia, and many people actually consider their native dialect &quot;the true language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, depending on your view, there is maybe only one language with many dialects and variants (some incomprehensible to you), or 4 or 10 languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5112" LastEditorUserId="5112" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T09:29:30.340" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T09:29:30.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-09T09:29:24.363" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to extract words that are similar between several documents. I would then like to extract the 'average' of the similar words &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Input&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Document 1               Document 2             Document 3       &#xA;now                      news                    now&#xA;elephantine              wheelbarrow            grass&#xA;great                    greet                  groat&#xA;inow                     newsy                  now&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Desired result&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nows&#xA;&#xA;great&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done this so far by using Levenshtein distance to extract words that are sufficiently similar but what process can I use to get the average result (note that I have assumed that this is the average result but happy to accept any result given a method to calculate an average).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just ascribe an index to each letter and then average that index with the aligned letter in the next word but occasionally the letters do not align eg. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;inow&#xA;newsy&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there another established way preferably using java- but any solution with the terminology to look up for this kind of problem will do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T17:43:31.557" Title="How to find the 'average' of a word" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-10T21:25:19.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29347" CreationDate="2018-10-09T10:08:06.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are pretty close to the expected result. The remaining steps left to make are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;build a weighed graph containing all words of a group (the edge weight is the Levenshtein distance); and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find the word having &lt;strong&gt;minimal sum of edge weights&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will, obviously, only include &lt;strong&gt;words that exist&lt;/strong&gt; in the original corpus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you, however, need your code to &quot;invent&quot; non-existing words, you would need to generate a whole (huge) list of possible transmutations and see if any newly-invented transmute word, being &lt;em&gt;infused&lt;/em&gt; to the graph, has a smaller sum of edge weights than any of the existing ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems to be possible to &lt;strong&gt;reduce the list of transmutations&lt;/strong&gt;. Levenshtein distance, by definition, is the number of atomic permutations, and each mutation stand for a newly-invented word. So, one can remember these permutations while computing the original Levenshtein distance between each pair of words and subsequently use it as a list of candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T17:43:31.557" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T17:43:31.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29334" CreationDate="2018-10-09T18:42:53.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference between [k] and [g] is situated at the level of vocal folds. When [g] is pronounced the vocal folds vibrate, but not in the case of [k]. This situation is easily distinguishable on a spectrogram. [g] has what it is called a voice bar which does not appear on the spectrographic representation of [k]. Here a course which evokes the voice bar: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ec-concord.ied.edu.hk/phonetics_and_phonology/wordpress/learning_website/chapter_3_consonants_new.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ec-concord.ied.edu.hk/phonetics_and_phonology/wordpress/learning_website/chapter_3_consonants_new.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T18:42:53.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="35177" CreationDate="2018-10-09T19:30:39.600" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;A math professor mentioned that the final segment of Fermat's name would probably have been pronounced [t] because of &quot;where he was from.&quot; She didn't clarify further but I looked up where he's from and he was Gascon and a speaker of that language (sometimes considered a dialect of Occitan). Could someone confirm that this would have been the case in the Occitan of his day? I searched around and couldn't find anything attesting to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T12:33:38.100" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T12:33:38.100" Title="Pronunciation of Fermat in Gascon/Occitan" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;&lt;catalan&gt;&lt;occitan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23314" CreationDate="2018-10-09T21:23:50.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'd be better off asking what languages &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have such a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from New York City English is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Coil%E2%80%93curl_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curl-coil merger&lt;/a&gt;, which pronounces curl/coil, verse/voice, loin/learn as homophones. In all of these words, the vowel becomes [ɜɪ] (without rhoticity). While once characteristic of NYCE, this feature has been so stigmatized that it has nearly disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T21:23:50.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29353" CreationDate="2018-10-09T21:43:47.947" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm assuming the consonant equivalent of a diphthong is a consonant cluster. I'm wondering if these can be interpreted as consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ˀm = ʔm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dʰ = dh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dʱ = dɦ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dⁿ = dn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ⁿd = nd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ᵑd = ŋd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ᶮd = ɲd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ᶯd = ɳd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ᵐb = mb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ᵗʃ = tʃ (I saw this along with tʃ as two different elements of a phonology somewhere I think)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;q͡χ = qχ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;t͡ɬ = tɬ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ʈ͡ʂ = ʈʂ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ɖ͡ʐ = ɖʐ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;t͡ʃ = tʃ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d͡ʒ = dʒ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see single symbols such as ʣ, which I assume exist because the consonant cluster [dz] is so common. Please correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see these things like [dʰ] sometimes have orthography like &quot;dh&quot;, but I'm wondering if the sound would be equivalent to just having a &quot;dh&quot; sound. Same with d͡ʒ = dʒ. The arc there tells me they always appear as a cluster, but wondering if the sound would be equivalent to the two next to each other without the arc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, wondering what the difference is between the superscript and non-superscript versions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T21:57:30.917" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T00:08:53.893" Title="If these superscripts can be considered consonant clusters" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29352" CreationDate="2018-10-09T22:03:02.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, there's a theoretical difference between coarticulated consonants like &lt;code&gt;/gʲ ⁿd pʰ/&lt;/code&gt; and clusters like &lt;code&gt;/gj nd ph/&lt;/code&gt; rather than a practical one. It's the same as the difference between &lt;code&gt;/t͡ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt;. Namely: in the phonological theory, are these single phonemes, or clusters of phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both Japanese and Swahili, for example, we see something that looks like &lt;code&gt;[mb]&lt;/code&gt;. In Japanese, this seems to be two separate segments &lt;code&gt;/mb/&lt;/code&gt;, since the &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; for all intents and purposes attaches to the previous syllable, while the &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt; attaches to the following one. But in Swahili, it acts like a single segment &lt;code&gt;/ᵐb/&lt;/code&gt;: it appears in places where only a single segment can be, and when you end up with &lt;code&gt;/m/&lt;/code&gt; followed by &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt; in a different morpheme, that's recognized as a different sound (with minimal pairs like &lt;em&gt;mbuni&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/ᵐbuni/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;ostrich&quot; versus &lt;em&gt;m-buni&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/mbuni/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;coffee tree&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with most things in phonology, it all comes down to which choice makes the analysis simpler and cleaner. There's no one right way to do it, only different analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T22:03:02.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29355" CreationDate="2018-10-09T22:15:29.263" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I see things &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaminawa_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sharanawa has /ɸ/ instead of /β/, and Shanewana has a labiodental fricative /f/ instead of /ɸ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the table shows [β] as the symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, along with other examples like the dental t [t̪] and such, I'm wondering how the linguists actually figure out the details of how the sound is pronounced. I personally can't hear (yet perhaps) the difference between [t] and [t̪]. I can sort of hear the difference between [β] and [f], but it sounds like sometimes it can be difficult to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if they just do all this by ear and tape recording, or if they actually sit down with someone and say &quot;show me where your tongue is when you make this sound&quot; type of stuff. Or &quot;are you closing your epiglottis to do that or is your tongue touching your soft palette.&quot; Like for the [ʂ] sound found in Hindi, I can sort of hear the difference between that and [ʃ], but you can just do an [ʃ] with a deeper sound without shaping your mouth that way, and the sound is identical to [ʂ] (at least from a hearing perspective, maybe not with a graph, I don't know). So in these types of cases I wonder how they disambiguate, if they are actually examining a speakers anatomy and having them demonstrate, or if it is just an educated guess. Also would like to know how many different people they include in the study, if it is just one or two, or like 10 or 20 or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, wondering if a linguist sits down, and, in addition to eliciting a bunch of words and stories, they try to elicit all the sounds from the IPA charts, or at least try to get the speaker to perform each of their languages sounds &lt;em&gt;individually&lt;/em&gt; somehow, all the while examining their anatomy. Maybe they try [θ] and the speaker shakes their head &quot;No.&quot;, &quot;Okay, how about this one: [ʂ], see my tongue here -^&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The figure below also demonstrates how the analysis can lead to different results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatar_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tM1Jv.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T03:05:34.940" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T03:05:34.940" Title="How linguists determine the sounds a speaker is performing" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29354" CreationDate="2018-10-09T22:50:43.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is the proverbial $64 question. Ideally, there is a standard and rigorous training course that all linguists take where they get ear-training to hear the various sound distinctions made by languages. The reality is that this does not happen, so some degree of skepticism is warranted, especially if a source simply asserts a particular phonetic value. Most of the time, assertions about articulation are based on the premise that a certain sound is caused by a certain articulation, and if you have been well-trained in epiglottals versus pharyngeals, then the claim may be correct, but otherwise you have to take articulatory claims with a grain of salt. Reconstructing articulation based on acoustics can be accurate up to a point, but only to the extent that the linguist is trained in the myriad sub-variants of now retroflex consonants are produced, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes one can directly measure articulation – you can look to see what the lips are doing. Typically, if a study has an actual articulatory underpinning, the source publishes those results. (Wiki pages are, of course, not scholarly publications and are usually assembled by other people based on a publication). In the case that you mentioned, the Wiki page claims to get the data from a Berkeley inventory database, who in turn claim to have gotten their information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/25/40/97/25409718165761403707379795679194848129/slp51.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Faust&amp;amp;Loos Gramática del idioma yaminahua&lt;/a&gt;, which miraculously is actually online. However, what you get from that source is a list of sounds and very little discussion of phonetics – no articulatory evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people do attempt to elicit speaker intuitions about articulation, but I have found that to be usually unreliable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T22:50:43.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29352" CreationDate="2018-10-10T00:02:28.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Draconis' answer excluding the details of the claim for Swahili. The fundamental question is whether in Swahili &lt;em&gt;mb&lt;/em&gt; 'acts like' a single consonant or like a cluster. The problem is that there is nothing in the grammar of Swahili that clearly diagnoses being a single consonant versus a cluster. There are various clusters of non-Bantu origin like &lt;em&gt;bustani&lt;/em&gt; 'garden', &lt;em&gt;γafla&lt;/em&gt; 'suddenly', &lt;em&gt;arði&lt;/em&gt; 'agriculture', &lt;em&gt;posta&lt;/em&gt; 'post (mail)'. Apart from that, there are C+w sequence, &lt;em&gt;mb, nd, ng&lt;/em&gt; (also &lt;em&gt;mbw, ndw, ngw&lt;/em&gt;) and any sequence of syllabic [m̩] plus C. There is a commonly-invoked &quot;slot&quot; type argument for dealing with supposed consonant clusters, of the form &quot;There are otherwise no clusters of consonants in the onset / coda of the syllable, so if we do X, we can eliminate these putative examples&quot;. So, we could say that onsets cannot have any clusters, but then we have to say that the language has added phonemes (ⁿd, ᵐb, mʷ, ᵐbʷ...). So arguments of this type need to be scrutinized carefully, to evaluate the total &quot;cost&quot; of one analysis over the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, in Swahili if you have m+C, &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; is syllabic when C is non-homorganic (&lt;em&gt;m̩tu, m̩levi, m̩geni&lt;/em&gt;) or voiceless (m̩pishi). The orthographic sequence &lt;em&gt;mb&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous, hence the pair &lt;em&gt;mbuni&lt;/em&gt; 'ostrich' vs &lt;em&gt;m̩buni&lt;/em&gt; 'coffee plant', both spelled the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;mbuni&lt;/em&gt; is a class 9 noun, and class 9 has a prefix /N/, meaning that it is a nasal which always agrees with the following consonant. I would argue that it is specifically /ɲ/, since that is the prevocalic form of the class 9 prefix (&lt;em&gt;ɲeupe&lt;/em&gt; 'white-9', cf &lt;em&gt;mweupe&lt;/em&gt; 'white-1', from /mu-eupe/). The word &lt;em&gt;m̩buni&lt;/em&gt; 'coffee plant' derives from &lt;em&gt;mu-buni&lt;/em&gt;. We see the stem in the plural &lt;em&gt;mi-buni&lt;/em&gt; 'coffee plants'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main source of syllabic &lt;em&gt;m̩&lt;/em&gt; in Swahili is reduction of /mu/ to [m̩]. The other source is in short words having an initial NC cluster: &lt;em&gt;m̩-bwa&lt;/em&gt; 'dog', &lt;em&gt;m̩-bu&lt;/em&gt; 'mosquito'. These are class 9 nouns with the prefix /ɲ/, and their nasals become syllabic because otherwise the word would be monosyllabic, and the rules of Swahili avoid that outcome, somewhat. So the nasal becomes syllabic in these words, and then it receives regular penultimate stress (&lt;em&gt;ˈm̩bwa, ˈm̩bu&lt;/em&gt;). This in fact creates two other syllabic nasals, [n̩] and [ŋ̩] as in [ˈn̩tshi] 'land', [ˈŋ̩ge] 'scorpion', and while /ɲ/ deletes before voiceless stops (&lt;em&gt;pana&lt;/em&gt; 'wide-9' ← /ɲ-pana/, cf. &lt;em&gt;mbaya&lt;/em&gt; 'bad-9' ← /ɲ-baya/), it does not delete when it becomes syllabic in [ˈm̩pya] 'new-9' (also 'new-3').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence is pretty strong that non-syllabic clusters in words like &lt;em&gt;ndevu, mbuni, ngano&lt;/em&gt; has a bisegmental source: the class prefix /ɲ/ plus a stem consonant. The difference between 'ostrich' and 'coffee plant' lies not in whether there is a prefix, but in what the prefix is and what process creates the CC cluster. My analysis of Swahili is that there are syllabic versus non-syllabic nasals; syllabic nasals are all derived by rule, via (a) reduction of /mu/ or (b) syllabification of a nasal in otherwise monosyllabic words. This is actually consistent with the claim, if one insists on it, that all pre-consonantal nasals which are not syllabic merge with a following consonant, so the clusters &lt;em&gt;nd, mb&lt;/em&gt; convert to single segments [ⁿd, ᵐb]. But there is no independent evidence for such a reduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that positing [ᵑd] is rather unconventional as a claim about what &quot;a segment&quot; is, since it has differing primary places of articulation. Most people agree to [pl, sp] are consonant clusters, but Osamu Fujimura does not: he claims these are lateralized labials and prespirantized labials. A segment like [ᵑd] challenges the notion of &quot;segment&quot; in the same way. Such challenges are no a priori wrong, but they demand extra scrutiny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T00:08:53.893" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T00:08:53.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19880" CreationDate="2018-10-10T02:42:22.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The overall implementation looks good. I have few suggestions here. First of all, the equation of Bigram (with add-1) is not correct in the question. In Laplace smoothing (add-1), we have to add 1 in the numerator to avoid zero-probability issue. So, we need to also add &lt;code&gt;V&lt;/code&gt; (total number of lines in vocabulary) in the denominator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After doing this modification, the equation will become,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;P(B|A) = (Count(W[i-1]W[i]) + 1) / (Count(W[i-1]) + V) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irrespective of whether the count of combination of two-words is 0 or not, we will need to add 1. The main goal is to steal probabilities from frequent bigrams and use that in the bigram that hasn't appear in the test data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the given python code, I am assuming that &lt;code&gt;bigrams[N]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;unigrams[N]&lt;/code&gt; will give the frequency (counts) of combination of words and a single word respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the add-1 smoothing equation, the probability function can be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import math&#xA;&#xA;def getAddOneProb(unigrams_count, bigrams_count):&#xA;    return(math.log(bigrams_count + 1) - math.log(unigram_count + V))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to count the log probability, then you can also remove &lt;code&gt;math.log&lt;/code&gt; and can use &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The another suggestion is to use &lt;code&gt;add-K&lt;/code&gt; smoothing for bigrams instead of &lt;code&gt;add-1&lt;/code&gt;. In most of the cases, &lt;code&gt;add-K&lt;/code&gt; works better than add-1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22874" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T02:42:22.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29366" CreationDate="2018-10-10T05:19:26.360" Score="1" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there are voiced/voiceless stops and fricatives in many languages, but I'm wondering if there are the same sort of voiced/voiceless distinctions for nasals / approximants / trills / flaps / affricates / vowels / etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[l̥] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[r̥] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[n̥] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[m̥] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[w̥] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ȷ̊] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ẙ]  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɥ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɻ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɹ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʁ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʎ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʟ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʋ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɰ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɳ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɲ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ŋ̊]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɴ̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ḁ]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[e̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[i̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[o̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[u̥]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I am wondering what they sound like. A voiceless &quot;r&quot; sounds still like an &quot;r&quot;, while a voiceless &quot;z&quot; sounds like an &quot;s&quot;, a different letter. Maybe that is just because of my background. So wondering if other languages have the feature of the above letters being contrasted with their voiced equivalents (and what some of the languages are for more info). I have seen just a few languages with perhaps [w̥], but I don't think I've seen any with voiceless vowels, while many seem to have nasal vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize, I am looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages that have any of the above as voiceless versions. Primarily [l̥], [ɹ̥], [n̥], [m̥], [ʁ̥], [ŋ̊], or any of the vowels. To me these just sound like whispered versions of the sounds, as opposed to s/z which sound like different sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Languages which &lt;em&gt;contrast&lt;/em&gt; any of the above listed voiceless sounds with their related voiced sound. By contrast I just mean they use both in constructing their words. This is the bigger part of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T06:04:25.870" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T07:43:41.847" Title="If any phonologies / languages make a distinction between voiced/voiceless nasals, approximants, vowels, trills, or flaps" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29359" CreationDate="2018-10-10T10:51:56.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I'm wondering if there are the same sort of voiced/voiceless distinctions for nasals / approximants / trills / flaps / affricates / vowels / etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These exist, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29251/what-makes-certain-sounds-linguistically-rarer-than-others&quot;&gt;they are rare because they're hard to distinguish audially or something&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Languages that have any of the above as voiceless versions. Primarily [l̥], [ɹ̥], [n̥], [m̥], [ʁ̥], [ŋ̊], or any of the vowels. To me these just sound like whispered versions of the sounds, as opposed to s/z which sound like different sounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh has [ɹ̥], [m̥], [n̥], [ŋ̊].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheyenne and Okinawan both have unvoiced vowels. But as far as I know, in neither of these languages does voicedness on vowels form a phonemic contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26527/13420&quot;&gt;There is a language spoken in California, possibly Yokuts&lt;/a&gt; which has voiceless vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okinawan devoices a vowel if it is high, short, word-final and follows a voiceless consonant. IIRC, Cheyenne devoices a vowel depending on syncope and if it's a certain number of syllables from the beginning or end of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Languages which contrast any of the above listed voiceless sounds with their related voiced sound. By contrast I just mean they use both in constructing their words. This is the bigger part of the question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh has voiceless continuants, as I mentioned earlier, and it contrasts these phonemically with the voiced counterparts. This is is part due to its consonant mutation scheme. Here's (almost) a minimal pair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;fy ngalon&lt;/em&gt; /ə'ŋa:lɔn/ - my song (mutated form of calon, a song)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;fy nghalon&lt;/em&gt; /ə'ŋ̊alɔn/ - my gallon (mutated form of galon, a gallon)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T21:51:19.520" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T21:51:19.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29364" CreationDate="2018-10-10T12:39:09.113" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reverend John Batchelor who recorded some early Ainu literature had a peculiar orthography, where he records word-final vowels where phonemically there is none. Words like &lt;code&gt;kor&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;mosir&lt;/code&gt;, he spells &lt;code&gt;koro&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;moshiri&lt;/code&gt;, appearing to reduplicate the vowel before the last consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Reverend John Batchelor writes about the necessity of taking care to transcribe Ainu very carefully in the preface to his dictionary cum grammar reference. That's why he eschews using Japanese or Cyrillic writing systems. So I suppose that he would have a good reason for including these &quot;doofus vowels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did earlier variants of Ainu actually pronounce these vowels, and did they vanish later on as a result of some sound change? (Unlikely, else we'd probably expect a similar change in possessive suffixes, -aha, -ehe, -uhu, etc). Or was he expecting to see these vowels there, under influence from Japanese syllable structure (unlikely, or else he wouldn't've written so vehemently about transcribing Ainu &lt;em&gt;correctly&lt;/em&gt;)? Or was there perhaps some problem with his elicitation methods (maybe his informants were &quot;speaking different&quot; since that's what the &lt;em&gt;sisam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; do?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1:&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sisam&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; a foreigner; a non-Ainu; this word applies to Japanese and round-eyes alike&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T12:50:53.657" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T19:26:21.817" Title="Why does John Batchelor record these vowels for Ainu?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;&lt;ainu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28112" CreationDate="2018-10-10T14:02:52.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course their existence is necessited by their use. In some cases the opportunity might not have been created under that expectation. But their existence &lt;em&gt;within the scope of the sentence&lt;/em&gt; is puerly defined by them being opportunities for a better education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might come up with different examples where such reasoning does not work. Still, the only difference is a comma before &quot;to&quot;, giving enumeration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a comma (set before &quot;to&quot;, to create an enumeration, to avoid repitions, to compress the sentence, ...). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comma might otherwise be similar to the one before &quot;too, also, though&quot; and other such modifiers at the end of a sentence, which would &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; fit another position in the sentence, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &lt;em&gt;point-free style&lt;/em&gt; in FP syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T14:24:07.693" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T14:24:07.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29361" CreationDate="2018-10-10T17:04:33.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious what explains the divergence of reports, and this does have implications for the broader question of evaluating data and claims about languages. Methodologically, the first step would be to establish a fact about the modern language, for example that there is a word pronounced [mosir] meaning &quot;X&quot; (&quot;every? land?&quot;). Given the current state of the language and its geographical distribution, you would want to verify that the word is (or is not) uniformly pronounced [mosir], by which I mean &quot;the narrow phonetic transcription is unambiguously [mosir]&quot;, and not &quot;the phonemic analysis currently assigned to the word is /mosir/&quot;. I don't know if that much has been clearly established (I don't do Ainu). To the extent that there are materials for now-extinct dialects of the language, we would want to compare the form of suspect words across sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the realm of comparing sources, one would want to look at competing transcriptions that dated back to roughly the period when Batchelor wrote, such as Dobrotvorsky's 1875 &lt;em&gt;Ainsko-Russkiŭ Slovar&lt;/em&gt; [sic.]. I would not be surprised if this has already been done in Refsing's work &lt;em&gt;Early European writings on the Ainu language&lt;/em&gt;. Batchelor gives some reason to consider the hypothesis that there are dialect differences. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=aBISAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The language, mythology, and geographical nomenclature of Japan viewed in the light of Aino studies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; starting p. 77, he gives details of the phonology, noting for example that &quot;erum&quot; is pronounced &lt;em&gt;eremū, érem, erúm, erum, endrúm&lt;/em&gt; depending on location, illustrating the claim that there is &quot;considerable uniformity&quot; but &quot;many words are variously pronounced in different villages and districts&quot;. He also notes that &quot;There is a great tendency all over the country to confound the simple letter 's' with the combination 'sh'&quot; (a propos the &lt;em&gt;mosir ~ moshiri&lt;/em&gt; issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will add anecdotally that I occasionally face problems correctly parsing Norwegian words with r+labial, such as &lt;em&gt;Skærvøy, orm&lt;/em&gt; where I hear a bit of a vowel after the rhotic – some people pronounce the tap with enough vigor that it sounds like a vowel. If the issue is limited to final &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, then maybe one can entertain the hypothesis that he mis-analyzed the final vocoid as being an actual vowel. He does observe that &quot;ra, ro, and ru become n before n and t&quot; and and notes a similar process affecting &lt;em&gt;ro&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;t, chi&lt;/em&gt;. It is not plausible to maintain that he just imposed Japanese syllable structure on Ainu, since he give many examples of coda obstruents. I would search for examples provided by him that indicate a contrast between final &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; with a copy vowel &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; a contrastive vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to recall that the practice of removing redundant information from transcriptions is a modern theoretical practice. If you look at field work based records of that era, such as early &lt;em&gt;Handbook of American Indian languages&lt;/em&gt; sketches (Bogoraz &quot;Chukchi&quot; etc.) you will notice a lot of phonetic detail that a modern work would suppress. Although Batchelor does not employ HAIL-style micro-phonetic transcription practices, it is plausible that he simply adopted a different theory of how to &quot;phonemicize&quot; certain sequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T19:26:21.817" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T19:26:21.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28112" CreationDate="2018-10-10T19:23:47.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example sentence is okay, and in his comments, Lawler has explained why.  To restate the matter, you have assumed the continuity of the parts of your example.  It is usually a good assumption to assume that all the parts of a construction occur next to one another, but there are exceptions, and your example is one of them.  The subject is a &lt;em&gt;discontinuous constituent&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;a few opportunities ... to get a better education in the U.S.&quot;  That is the subject of the sentence's predicate, &quot;exist&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for moving part of the subject to the end is to keep simple the earliest parts of a construction.  (Notice that I have just done this by moving &quot;the earliest parts of a construction&quot; to the right of &quot;simple&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T19:23:47.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29359" CreationDate="2018-10-10T19:28:54.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; had an unvoiced allophone &lt;code&gt;[r̥]&lt;/code&gt;, which was written as &lt;em&gt;rh&lt;/em&gt; in Latin transcriptions (see &quot;rhino&quot;, &quot;diarrhea&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Norse had phonemic &lt;code&gt;/l̥ r̥ n̥/&lt;/code&gt;, which contrasted with &lt;code&gt;/l r n/&lt;/code&gt; in initial position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English used to have phonemic &lt;code&gt;/w̥/&lt;/code&gt;, and some dialects still do: it's written &quot;wh&quot;. A minimal pair is &quot;wine&quot; vs &quot;whine&quot;. Mostly because it shows up in English, this one even gets its own IPA symbol: &lt;code&gt;ʍ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard Japanese has allophonic voiceless high vowels: they're voiceless between two voiceless consonants, or a voiceless consonant and a word boundary, and voiced elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In General American English, &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; is usually realized as a voiceless vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if any languages actually have phonemic voiceless vowels, but the fact that I haven't heard of any might be some indication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T19:28:54.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T01:10:34.263" Score="4" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I observed that both colloquial Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese show some inconsistencies in the way they use the second person pronoun (or its conjugation) and would like to know if my observations are right and how these inconsistencies originated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me first describe how I think it regularly would be based on what I know of the language and how things developed in similar languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are 4 second person pronouns. The informal ones (tu, vós) are conjugated in the second person and the formal ones (você, vocês) are conjugated in third person. In combination with second person pronouns one uses (te, a ti, contigo | vos, a vós, convosco) and with third person pronouns one uses (o(s), a(s), lhe(s)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start with what I observed in Brazilian Portuguese because there are a lot of things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switching between tu and você but always using the third person conjugation &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using você mostly with second person pronoun (te) and not (o/a, lhe)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But doing it right by using third person (se) when its reflexive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using você in combination with contigo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using você but still using second person imperative conjugation (fala/mostra) instead of (fale/mostre)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did você lose its formality and why are there still parts of tu used in combination even though second person conjugation only survived in imperative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's come to European Portuguese. Vós seems to have almost disappeared in both dialects. So vocês is used, no matter if it's formal or not. The thing is, some of the stuff I observed in Brazilian Portuguese in singular seem to appear again in plural in European Portuguese, and interestingly only in EP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are still people that use vós in Portugal and they use it without any inconsistencies, but those that use vocês seem to do following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use it in combination with atonic pronoun (vos) instead of (os, as, lhes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use it in combination with convosco&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be grateful if someone could give me some background on why this is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22881" LastActivityDate="2020-01-23T19:08:54.953" Title="Portuguese: Inconsistencies in use of second person pronouns and conjugation" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29344" CreationDate="2018-10-11T04:40:19.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Puta Madre is more like shitty whore, doesn't it? Maybe motherfucker is analogous, though, if madre is an allusion to matre. Swear words are taboo and thus are hard to grasp in historic linguistics because of a lack of records. Nevertheless its cultural and associated with practices that are likewise taboo. So it is a question best left unanswered. There are other layer of insults, not related to human orifices or misdeeds. Such about animals (donkey, dog), basic religion (devil, demon, heretic, disbeliever), social status or bodily ability exist as well in Arabic for example. Idiomatic colocations from attributes would tend to be stable but the roots are hard to trace if a blunt curse has to be painfully obvious to be effective, and could be derived independently from a common theme. Whereas underhanded insults require creativity to skirt the taboo. They could be memorilized in poetry and jokes with a long beard, translated and reinterpreted repeatedly. Alas I have no specific example in mind. You can find terms of degredation in Egyptian for example the formulaic dirt under the pharao feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T04:40:19.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29373" CreationDate="2018-10-11T05:06:19.637" Score="-2" ViewCount="1825" Body="&lt;p&gt;A made-up language used for the following examples. Please describe the environment in which the following sounds occur and write a rule (in prose or linguistic notation, whichever you’re more comfortable with) to describe the sound patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following words show the distribution of nasal consonants [n] and [ŋ] in Malowak:&#xA;a. [kina]       “cat”               e. [kiŋk]   “mouse”&#xA;b. [lint]       “dog”               f.  [liŋg]  “puppies”&#xA;c. [ləns]       “child”             g. [ləŋk]   “children”&#xA;d. [pændg]     “friend”             h. [pæŋgg   “friends” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following words show the distribution of alveolar consonants [t] and [ɾ] in Malowak:&#xA;a. [bət]        “hug”               e. [bəɾə]   “test”&#xA;b. [pit]        “kiss”              f. [piɾi]       “jump”&#xA;c. [lætp]       “twirl”             g. [læɾæp]  “walk”&#xA;d. [tot]        “French fry”        h. [toɾo]   “miss”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22883" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:22:28.563" Title="Please describe the environment in which the following sounds occur and write a rule to describe the sound patterns" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-22T13:36:54.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T08:19:06.323" Score="8" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an Italian PhD student in linguistics and I am interested in the analysis of the expression of Manner.&#xA;I went throught the works of Lakoff, Talmy and Wierzbicka recently and their event semantics raised some questions in me which I am not sure to be able to answer.&#xA;So, I would ask to the semanticists on this forum: in your opinion, what is the difference between Talmy's semantic components &lt;em&gt;Move&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Figure&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ground&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Path&lt;/em&gt; and  Wierzbicka's semantic primes MOVE, I/YOU/THIS, WHERE/HERE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just a terminological difference? Both authors seem to assert that these semantic &quot;elements&quot; are universally shared and not further decomposable. Am I wrong? Could you make some clarification? Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22877" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T10:20:28.473" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:13:23.857" Title="How similar are Talmy and Wierzbicka's theories of semantic primes?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T08:01:55.687" Score="0" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m very fascinated in learning new languages. I want to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to decipher and learn how to talk in a ancient language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to decipher at home any ancient language? Such as &lt;strong&gt;Ancient Chinese&lt;/strong&gt; language. I want to learn how they used to speak and write, discover their meanings to each word and it’s grammatical. Practically, my wish is to bring back to life some forgotten ancient languages if it possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22886" OwnerDisplayName="Alex A" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T20:26:33.893" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T22:16:24.260" Title="I have some questions about deciphering an ancient language" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29371" CreationDate="2018-10-11T09:06:00.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Truly, you have a great ambition. Don't give up!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you cannot learn to talk an ancient language just from the way it is written. Heck, you cannot learn how any language is spoken from the way it is written, though maybe Korean comes as close as any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That aside, decipherment of ancient scripts is very worthy. But to decipher a new ancient language needs a huge amount of ability in languages, knowledge and frankly probably a lot of &quot;luck&quot; as well. (How about just learning to read a language that has already been deciphered? There is a tremendous need for readers of the different languages written in cuneiform.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For personal suitability, you need to ask are you generally good at languages, are you fluent in more than one language? Do you have a flair for puzzles, especially linguistic puzzles? Are you willing to spend many years struggling over a conundrum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't want to put you off entirely, but have you read the first few sentences of the Wikipedia for Jean-François Champollion?  Not all decipherers were quite so brilliant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for books, I recommend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Story of Writing&quot; by Andrew Robinson (Thames &amp;amp; Hudson, London, 1995)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Reading the Past - Ancient Writing from cuneiform to the Alphabet&quot; with introduction by J.T. Hooker [authors: V.B.F. Walker (cuneiform); W.V. Davies (Egyptian Hieroglyphs); John Chadwick (Linear B); John F. Healey (The Early Alphabet); B.F. Cook (Greek Inscriptions); Larissa Bonfante (Etruscan)].&#xA;From Hooker's intro:- &quot;The six books brought together in this volume explore in detail specific stages in the story of writing, with special emphasis on the decipherment of ancient scripts...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot find where to buy it I got my copy of this and &quot;The Story of Writing&quot; from the British Museum, London (but that was quite a few years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very recent noble example of decipherment (without leaving your living room!) is: &quot;The World's Oldest Alphabet - Hebrew as the language of Proto-Consonantal Script&quot; by Douglas Petrovich (Carta Jerusalem, first published 2016) - but note Doug Petrovich has acclaimed expertise in multiple relevant fields (&quot;epigraphy, palaeography, lexicography, and comparative linguistics and literature&quot; from introduction by Eugene Merrill) (NB This book will set you back 50 British sterling.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for what it's worth, &quot;New Tribes Mission&quot; and &quot;Wycliffe Bible Translators&quot; both specialise in teaching Christian students how to learn a new tribal language (which no one outside the tribe knows and has no written form) and how to produce the written form, together with a written grammar and dictionary (e.g. an English/new language dictionary), and then how to write the Bible in the new script; and then how to teach the tribe to read.  (I guess some anthropologists must hate them.)  If you are interested in that then the biography &quot;In Search of the Source&quot; (by Neil Anderson with Hyatt Moore) gives a beautifully written example of the outworking of such training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22887" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T22:16:24.260" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T22:16:24.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29369" CreationDate="2018-10-11T16:22:28.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a mechanical procedure for answering these questions, which is to partition the data into &quot;cases with A&quot; versus &quot;cases with B&quot;. So you put the words with &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in one column, and those with &lt;em&gt;ŋ&lt;/em&gt; in another, then you replace &lt;em&gt;n,ŋ&lt;/em&gt; with a dash and you get {ki_a pæ_dg lə_s li_t} for [n] versus {li_g ki_k pæ_gg lə_k} for [ŋ]. Now you inspect the lists and see of you find the same string in both sets. If you do, you declare that you have a minimal pair and that the two sounds are separate phonemes. If you don't, then you have the contexts, and you present your rule, using whatever makes you feel comfortable. One approach is to arbitrarily pick one list and say &quot;[n] appears in the context {ki_a, pæ_dg, lə_s, li_t} and [ŋ] appears elsewhere&quot; (you could state the rule in terms of the other context and make [n] be &quot;elsewhere&quot;). You can even dispose of the rule for &quot;elsewhere&quot; by saying that the sound in question starts out as specifically being &lt;em&gt;ŋ&lt;/em&gt;, or else as &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, and write just one rule (if the rule doesn't apply, the basic value is what appears).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is technically known as &quot;the dumb solution&quot;, and the hint is that the instructions say that you can write the answer in prose (if you are able), but in &quot;linguistic notation&quot; (if that's all you can manage). We actually have a theory of linguistic notation which depends on you &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; being able to describe the rule in prose. The idea of writing the rule in prose is to find some common factor that characterizes the [n] set versus the [ŋ] set, and describe that property in prose. That means, use a general concept, not a list of letters. A typical approach (warning, this will eventually fail but it works for this problem) is to only consider the segment that precedes the nasal, or only the segment that follows the nasal. Again, you are looking to see if there is overlap in the two sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you start by looking at what comes before the nasal and ask &quot;does the same sound precede?&quot;, and what comes after the nasal. The ideal is that you should find that the two sounds can be described in terms of either &quot;what comes before&quot; or &quot;what comes after&quot;. This will massively simplify your rule, so that you don't need a rule with 13 letters in it. (The dataset is well-cooked, kudos to the instructor – there are 13 letters in both sets). Once you know where to look, you try to figure out &quot;what do these sounds have in common?&quot;, and what do &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; sounds have in common?&quot;. That is, you're looking for something higher-level than just a list of letters – seek a phonological property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to solving the problem is selective focus, and the mechanical method of copy and erasure is not necessary, in fact can (as I said) eventually get you in trouble. What you need to do is try to characterize the phonological property of the class of sounds that appear before and after each of the sounds and ask &quot;is there anything in common here, which distinguishes the A set from the B set?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:22:28.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29371" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:03:23.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is theoretically possible to decipher an undeciphered language, such as Linear B (Mycenean Greek). Old Chinese did not require decipherment (&quot;Bone oracle script&quot; did), but it did require a bit of fancy work to figure out how the individual characters were probably pronounced. There are a handful of undeciphered scripts, such as Linear A (associated with the Minoan civilization). It might be useful to read up on the historical accounts of various &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment#Ancient_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;decipherments&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps read the paper &quot;Methods of Decipherment&quot; by Gelb &amp;amp; Whiting in &lt;em&gt;Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society&lt;/em&gt; (1975).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to talk in some ancient languages, in case there are reasonable speakers around: Sanskrit and Latin are the most obvious examples. There are actually communities of Sanskrit speakers (in India): but there are no communities of Hittite speakers. Hittite was written in an adapted form of Old Assyrian cuneiform which was adopted from earlier Sumerian cuneiform. Older works will provide a transliteration of cuneiform symbols into approximate phonetic equivalents so you will see things like &quot;iš-ḫa-a-aš, e-ku-ud-du&quot;, but this is not the actual pronunciation. For Hittite there are conventions which allow you to actually read word as e.g. &quot;pišnaš&quot;, and maybe &quot;e-ku-ud-du&quot; was pronounced [ɛ́kʷtːu]. This is similar to learning Ancient Greek, where there are conventions that you will probably learn allowing you to pronounce&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων,&#xA;  οὐκ οἶδα· ἐγὼ δ' οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπ' αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπελαθόμην,&#xA;  οὕτω πιθανῶς ἔλεγον. Καίτοι ἀληθές γε ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οὐδὲν εἰρήκασιν.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(which involves more that knowing how individual letters are pronounced). The discipline of figuring out probable pronunciations of ancient languages and how that relates to their writing systems is a profession in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:03:23.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29376" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:06:51.363" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ا (alif) and و when used as orthographic signs without phonetic  significance are not represented in romanization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;fa‘alū فعلوا &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ulā’ika أوقية  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ūqīyah أولائك&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/arabic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ALA-LC guide&lt;/a&gt; to Arabic romanization (rule 4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was under the impression that in many ways, Arabic script is very phonetic. Yes, it is an (impure) abjad, so written words do not always reflect pronunciation precisely, and yes, Arabic has many regional variations of phonemes—but I never would have anticipated that its orthography would have features that are not at all reflected in the spoken language itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In what ways does Arabic use such letters as orthographic signs without phonetic significance?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: As an aspiring linguist, Arabic is of significan interest to me, though I do not know much about the elevated rules to forming Arabic sentences, inflecting nouns, etc. However, I can easily understand these concepts if they are outlined, regardless if I can emulate it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22469" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T18:24:08.910" Title="In what ways does Arabic use letters as orthographic signs without phonetic significance?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29375" CreationDate="2018-10-11T18:24:08.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to understand this statement is to ask, why is فعلوا not pronounced [faʕalawā] (or various other possibilities like [fiʕalawā, faʕulawā, fiʕlawā]...). This omission of short vowels including the practice of leaving out sukun (no vowel) is one known non-phonetic aspect of the spelling system. As a speaker of Arabic, you would just know this. Wright's &lt;em&gt;A grammar of the Arabic language&lt;/em&gt; provides a detailed account of orthographic conventions. If you are to write &quot;ðū&quot;, it has to be distinguished from &quot;ðaw&quot;, and if you don't include the short vowel marks, you need some other convention. ا is essentially a diacritic, which can support hamza = ʔ but can also indicate length (ā) as in حاب &lt;em&gt;saḥāb&lt;/em&gt; and (ū) فعلوا. It is &quot;non-phonetic&quot; in the sense that it is used indirectly to indicate something else phonetic, as opposed to س which represents [s], period (though whether there is a vowel after it is another matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T18:24:08.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12096" CreationDate="2018-10-11T18:46:19.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is something like that in Berber, see: Destaing, E., « Interdiction de vocabulaire en berbère», Mélanges René Basset, Paris, Leroux, 1925, p.177-277. You can read it here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/document/114584799/Interdiction-de-vocabulaire-en-berbere-E-Destaing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.scribd.com/document/114584799/Interdiction-de-vocabulaire-en-berbere-E-Destaing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T18:46:19.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29371" CreationDate="2018-10-11T19:33:55.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to search for information on the &lt;strong&gt;Meroitic&lt;/strong&gt; language, a language which was spoken and written in today's Sudan around 300 B.C. This is a language where research of the kind you suggest is actually taking place at the moment, and you might find ways to contribute, or at least find out how it is done, from this example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2124" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T19:33:55.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T19:36:25.777" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a rogue question but my father loves languages and when on holiday in Holland was trying to tell me about the two vowel (or constant? Shifts) changes that occured, and so why English and German vowels are different - but he could remember very little from his linguistics module! I would love some suggestions for books on the subject I could get him for his birthday - any suggestions would be fantastic!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks so much,&#xA;Matt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22890" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T19:36:25.777" Title="Vowel Change in Europe Book" Tags="&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;standard-average-european&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T20:55:57.717" Score="0" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to think things through regarding case and passive verbs, within the framework of Government and Binding Theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As starting point, I'll use this statement/principle (based on what I've read): &lt;em&gt;passive verbs do not assign case.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Active verbs assign case (i.e. &lt;em&gt;They ate the cookies,&lt;/em&gt; where &quot;the cookies&quot; gets &lt;em&gt;accusative case&lt;/em&gt; from the active verb). In passive, I can't say &quot;were eaten the cookies&quot; because passive verbs don't assign case. What happens then (unless I'm mistaken) is that &quot;the cookies&quot; moves out of that position and is promoted to subject (i.e. to the left of &quot;were eaten&quot;) where &quot;The cookies&quot; gets &lt;em&gt;nominative case&lt;/em&gt; by INFL. This leftward movement satisfies the basic principle that all finite verbs require subjects: &lt;em&gt;The cookies were eaten.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, from the active &lt;em&gt;They gave her cookies&lt;/em&gt; (where &quot;cookies&quot; gets accusative case), we get the passive &lt;em&gt;She was given cookies (by them).&lt;/em&gt; In the passive version, &quot;her&quot; is promoted to subject, and &quot;cookies&quot; remains in place, which means that passive &quot;given&quot; assigns accusative case (right?). This, however, violates my original statement/principle that &quot;passive verbs do not assign case.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the statement/principle &quot;passive verbs do not assign case&quot; actually viable in English? Or does it need to be revised? If so, how? Saying something like &quot;passive verbs don't assign case, unless they assign case&quot; doesn't seem productive/rigorous (it's like saying &quot;x doesn't do y, unless x does y).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the very notion of &quot;case&quot; not really applicable to English (English being morphologically weak)? Accordingly, we don't need to bother with terms such as &quot;accusative&quot; and &quot;nominative&quot; (though I see that such terms are commonly used).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, I wonder how linguists approach such issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22016" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T23:29:49.813" Title="Do English passive verbs assign case? (Government and Binding Theory)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;grammatical-object&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26416" CreationDate="2018-10-12T14:53:34.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native-speaker I can provide only non-scientific explanations to your questions, but still it may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So, is there any difference between the sentence in (1) and the one in (4) from the semantic point of view?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that in (1) &quot;I am writing a letter to mother&quot; which literally means that I am a sender and mother is a receiver of this letter. On the contrary, in (4) &quot;I am writing a letter on behalf of my mother&quot;, in other words I am &quot;helping&quot; and writing the letter which she wanted to write herself, and the receiver is not mentioned here at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And if (1) and (4) have the same meaning,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they have different meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;can I also use the Objective Version in persons other than the 3rd?&#xA;  In other words, could a verb form such as მიწერ &quot;you write (it) to me&quot;&#xA;  actually exist?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly there are two versions in case of &quot;you&quot; and &quot;me&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;შენ მე წერილს &lt;strong&gt;მ&lt;/strong&gt;წერ - You write a letter to me (I am a receiver)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;შენ მე წერილს &lt;strong&gt;მი&lt;/strong&gt;წერ - You write a letter on behalf of me (so that I can send it later)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past perfect the difference becomes more clear (or complicated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(მე) წერილი დედას &lt;strong&gt;მივ&lt;/strong&gt;წერე - I have written a letter to mother (where &lt;strong&gt;მი&lt;/strong&gt; denotes direction to some other point)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(მე) წერილი დედას &lt;strong&gt;დავუ&lt;/strong&gt;წერე - I have written a letter on behalf of mother (I helped her or did her job)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to say that I have written a letter (without mentioning anybody else), it would be - (მე) წერილი &lt;strong&gt;დავ&lt;/strong&gt;წერე (without &lt;strong&gt;უ&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;შენ მე წერილი &lt;strong&gt;მომ&lt;/strong&gt;წერე - You have written a letter to me (where &lt;strong&gt;მო&lt;/strong&gt; denotes direction towards me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;შენ მე წერილი &lt;strong&gt;დამი&lt;/strong&gt;წერე - You have written a letter on behalf of me (you helped me, or did a job for me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why it is like that, or what grammar construct it is I will have hard times to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22901" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T14:53:34.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-12T23:21:39.760" Score="-2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an earlier question here I used an example of animal names versus words (often verbs) that have rather similar spelling and can be linked by observations of behaviour or the functional use to humans.&#xA;The reactions to the example differed from nonsense to coincidence, while I see a clear pattern with a logical explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again some examples:&#xA;A hound hunts&#xA;A dog digs&#xA;A sheep is shaven (for its wool) compare German Schaff)&#xA;A cat catches (rodents)&#xA;A cow chews (grass a lot with 4 stomachs...)&#xA;A fly... flies&#xA;A rabbit is rapid&#xA;A squirrel secures (this relates to the hiding of food in the ground for the winter.)&#xA;A sparrow (passerine bird) which appears and passes on forraging for food; French ‘il se apparu’ meaning ‘he appeared’&#xA;A wasp (French il va se poignez (Va-se-p...) meaning ‘he is going to be poignant (sharp/fierce))&#xA;An otter in the water&#xA;A beetle: voir cette bête aller&#xA;An owl flies at night: vole (la nuit)&#xA;A worm morrows (anagrammic antonym)&#xA;A bug (bukken means ‘to bend’ in Dutch. The name seems to indicate bending to the earth to see what kind of bug it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does nonsense or coincidence become a pattern in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T21:03:09.267" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T21:03:09.267" Title="Do animal names correspond with verbs that have to do with their use to humans or their observed behaviour?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ClosedDate="2018-10-13T11:22:26.300" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29386" CreationDate="2018-10-13T00:58:28.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, coincidences and nonsense become a pattern when you can show a consistent rule that can explain a significant amount of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historical linguistics offers many such patterns. One of the first noticed (which led to historical linguistics becoming a thing in the first place) was that &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; in Latin and Greek corresponds to &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt; in Germanic: pisc- ~ fish, pod- ~ foot, pater ~ father, pyr ~ fire, and many more. This is now known as (one component of) Grimm's Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there's no regularity to the correspondences you've proposed. For otter~water, you're relying on rhyming in certain dialects of English—in RP, for example, they have different vowels. Sheep and shaven, on the other hand, have the same first phoneme and a labial somewhere after that, owl and &lt;em&gt;vole&lt;/em&gt; have the same final sound in two different languages and vaguely-related meanings, and wasp corresponds rather tenuously to an entire phrase in a different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the general standard is: if you can show a consistent pattern that can make predictions, rather than having to come up with separate explanations for each instance, then it'll be considered a pattern rather than a series of coincidences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T00:58:28.793" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-13T03:34:09.013" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding to drawing a syntax tree, &quot;there&quot; and &quot;everything&quot; in linguistics is a &quot;pronoun&quot; or &quot;noun&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &#xA;1. There is an apple.&#xA;2. It is not everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22853" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T21:33:06.973" Title="&quot;there&quot; and &quot;everything&quot; in linguistics is a &quot;pronoun&quot; or &quot;noun&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29388" CreationDate="2018-10-13T11:21:36.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;'There' is a spatial deictic as that, this. Traditional grammar considers them adverbs. As for 'everything', it is an indefinite pronoun. It is different from other pronouns (object, indirect object, ...), because it does not share with them any kind of person deixis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T11:21:36.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29391" CreationDate="2018-10-13T11:46:37.427" Score="0" ViewCount="2470" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like in the title, are concepts expressed only by some parts of the speech:&#xA;nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs ? In sentence: &lt;strong&gt;The cat ate food&lt;/strong&gt; - all words are concepts or only the noun ? All those words have its own meaning. Is concept equal to meaning ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about expressions with prepositions, in sentence: &lt;strong&gt;The keys are on the floor&lt;/strong&gt;, 'on the floor' phrase has a meaning, is this the concept or does it describe concept of 'position' ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5137" LastEditorUserId="5137" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T16:59:15.267" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T16:59:15.267" Title="What's the difference between 'concept' and 'meaning'?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29390" CreationDate="2018-10-13T16:40:16.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on how you define &quot;concept&quot; and &quot;meaning&quot;. Which is to say, neither term is uncontroversially and unambiguously defined, even limiting the discussion to technical linguistic usage. (Or, &quot;especially if you limit the inquiry to technical linguistic usage&quot;). The most difficult part is figuring out what a &quot;concept&quot; is. We clearly have to avoid the senses exemplified in expressions like &quot;I really like open concept&quot; (home renovation), &quot;Whadda concept!&quot; (general talk). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/concept&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; philosophical definition is a reasonable definition (not theory of) &quot;concept&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An idea or mental image which corresponds to some distinct entity or&#xA;  class of entities, or to its essential features, or determines the&#xA;  application of a term (especially a predicate), and thus plays a part&#xA;  in the use of reason or language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a deeper understanding of &quot;concept&quot;, I would recommend a scholarly philosophical treatment of the term, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standford Encyclopedia entry&lt;/a&gt;, especially section 1 on the ontology of concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would need to inspect the linguistic literature to see how the word &quot;concept&quot; is used, qua technical term. The Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics punts, by pointing &quot;concept&quot; to &quot;notion&quot; which it defines as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Idea which is conceived through abstraction and through which objects&#xA;  or states of affairs  are  classified  on  the  basis  of  particular &#xA;  characteristics  and/or  relations.  Notions  are   represented by &#xA;  terms. They can be defined like  sets:  (a) extensionally, by an&#xA;  inventory of  the  objects  that  fall  under  a  particular  concept;&#xA;  and  (b)  intensionally,  by  indication  of   their  specific &#xA;  components.  The  current  equating  of  ‘notion’  with  ‘meaning’  or&#xA;  with   Frege’s  ‘sense’   (‘Sinn’)  rests  upon  an  intensional &#xA;  definition  of  ‘notion.’  (also definition, intension)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That constitutes one vote that meaning and concept are the same, if we assume that concept and notion are indeed equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that &quot;concept&quot; is a technical term in linguistics, any more than &quot;sound&quot; is one. To determine whether &quot;concept&quot; and &quot;meaning&quot; are really the same thing, one would devise substitution frames to see if the terms are interchangeable. The syntax of the terms is different, of course: you would say something like &quot;The concept of 'liberty' refers to ...&quot;, but &quot;The meaning of 'liberty' is...&quot;. At the level of sentences, it is clearest that meaning and concept are not the same. You can say &quot;The meaning of 'All of the arrows didn't hit the target' is that ...&quot;, but you would not say &quot;The concept 'All of the arrows didn't hit the target' refers to...&quot;, because a sentence is not / does not (re)present a concept, it represents a &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proposition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Keys are on the floor&quot; is ungrammatical, but &quot;The keys are on the floor&quot; does not contain any pronouns. &quot;On the floor&quot; has a meaning, which relies on at least two concepts (the relational one &quot;on&quot; and the referential one &quot;floor&quot;). The relational concept behind &quot;on&quot; is a specific kind of positional concept, which includes &quot;in&quot;, &quot;by&quot;, &quot;under&quot; and so on. &quot;On the floor&quot; does not describe the concept &quot;position&quot;, it exemplifies one kind of position relationship. &quot;Cat ate food&quot; is ungrammatical (unless this is the person &quot;Catherine&quot;), but &quot;The cat ate food&quot; is okay. It is a proposition which relies on at least three concepts, namely &quot;cat&quot;, &quot;food&quot; and the action &quot;eating&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T16:40:16.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29388" CreationDate="2018-10-13T17:45:13.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is an apple&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous in writing, but not in speech.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (This is normal for English sentences)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's pronounced with stressed &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, it refers to the &lt;strong&gt;location&lt;/strong&gt; of an apple, presupposed to exist in context.  If it's pronounced with stressed &lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt;, however, it refers to the &lt;strong&gt;existence&lt;/strong&gt; (in context) of an apple, with no information about its location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, one can say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is an apple here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a sentence where &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; clearly does not indicate location (because &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; does).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about what to call these words. There are names, but they're not important. Besides, I bet they didn't give you a complete list of terms or how to distinguish them; they never do. Grammar books and teachers who go on about &quot;parts of speech&quot; just waste your time; learn the constructions and you can call the chunks anything you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you think of English grammar as &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt;, you're sunk; grammar has little to do with words -- it's all constructions. That's one reason you can't learn grammar from a dictionary, which deals with words one at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2018-10-13T21:33:06.973" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T21:33:06.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T05:39:37.753" Score="6" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if there is any database similar to The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)(&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/&lt;/a&gt;). In the case that it is specifically more geared towards phonological aspects of languages, more specifically vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22911" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T12:03:53.177" Title="Dataset/Database similar to WALS in Vowel/Phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13183" CreationDate="2018-10-14T06:11:26.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I don't know too much about phonetics, so this answer is mainly about phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, there is a difference between the pronunciation of &amp;lt;nt&gt; in the two words &quot;ninety&quot; and &quot;seventy&quot; and the pronunciation of &amp;lt;nt&gt; in words with regular spellings, like &lt;em&gt;entertain, center, winter, twenty.&lt;/em&gt; In words with regular spelling-pronunciation correspondences (which I suppose should be analyzed as having /nt/ phonemically), I can have /ɾ̃/ or /nt/ (or just nasalization followed by /t/, probably), but not [nd].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;ninety&quot; and &quot;seventy&quot;, I feel like I have [nd], which I would analyze as /nd/, not as /nt/. (I say &quot;feel like&quot; because I would imagine that I actually sometimes produce these words without any phonetic plosive [d], but these pronunciations are not salient or obvious to me the way that the possible pronunciation of &quot;twenty&quot; without a [t] is.) I would guess that the use of /nd/ is somehow based on analogy with the pronunciation of other &quot;-ty&quot; words, although I don't know exactly in what way. Perhaps, based on the /t/~/d/ alternation in &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;-suffixed words, words like &lt;em&gt;fifty&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sixty&lt;/em&gt; were misperceived as having an underlying /d/ that was only voiceless because of the preceding voiceless fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For evidence that some other people use these special pronunciations of &lt;em&gt;seventy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ninety,&lt;/em&gt; see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3wff8k/in_american_english_is_the_word_ninety_pronounced/cxvrnws/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reddit thread&lt;/a&gt; (which also mentions the word &quot;carpenter&quot; as a possible candidate for /nd/, which I guess I would agree with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T19:24:29.547" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T19:24:29.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29393" CreationDate="2018-10-14T11:38:20.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHOIBLE Online&lt;/a&gt; is a database compiled from sources describing various languages' phonological inventories and is searchable by language, source, or phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T11:38:20.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29393" CreationDate="2018-10-14T12:03:53.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the famous UPSID database: &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/sales/software.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/sales/software.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T12:03:53.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T23:25:30.393" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using it to represent phones is of course bonkers, it would make much more likely for an unitary language to be split apart. When we are dealing with phonemes that problem is inexistent in my opinion, yet this use is also criticized in my textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T02:26:22.093" Title="Would anything bad happen if we made our alphabet represent the phonemes more accurately?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29001" CreationDate="2018-10-14T23:53:15.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's described like that because there is no significant difference in intra-oral pressure with vowels, from with normal breathing. However you shape the tube of the oral tract, or narrow, enlarge or squash it, there is no stricture narrow enough to create audible turbulence (at least whilst there is vocal fold vibration). There is also no characteristic obstruction diverting the air from leaving centrally through the mouth. Whether any air leaves through anywhere else, i.e. the nasal cavity, is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T10:22:58.487" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T10:22:58.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29401" CreationDate="2018-10-15T00:44:51.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the appropriate question is, would things be net better or worse if..., and not, would &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; bad happen. Regularizing the spelling would mean that you couldn't tell from spelling that &lt;em&gt;amoeba&lt;/em&gt; is from Greek, and would make the semantic relationship between &lt;em&gt;hymn, hymnal&lt;/em&gt; less obvious. Spell-checkers would have to be totally rewritten. A somewhat more earth-shattering consequence would be that (if we take 2020 as the year for imposing spelling reform), texts written before 2020 would need to be orthographically translated or consigned to the same historical dustbin that Middle and Old English are in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;phonetic&quot; spelling would not be viable, not even one that represented each phoneme in a standard way (as contrasted to the current myriad ways of spelling [i], [ai] and so on). That is because the phonemic form of words is not uniform across dialects of English. At the minimum, there would have to be a couple dozen national standards for spelling, if we want a pronunciation-based spelling system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More modest reforms could be somewhat viable. For example, writing [i] as &quot;ee&quot;, [ai] as &quot;igh&quot;, [ɪ, ɛ] as &quot;i,e&quot; could be a first step. Igh think thuh apropreeuht question is, wood things bee net betuhr or wurs if wee startuhd wrighting lighk this, and whuht wood wee gain in dooing soa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T00:44:51.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29401" CreationDate="2018-10-15T01:33:51.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Anything bad&quot; is a really broad category. There are various objections to phonemic spelling. (I wonder a bit why your textbook did not mention any of them.) Justin B Rye has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://jbr.me.uk/ortho.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web page&lt;/a&gt; giving what I consider to be a good overview of possible objections to spelling reform, along with potential counter-arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, a note: there is a difference between making an orthography &quot;more&quot; accurate at representing phonemes and making an orthography correspond 100% to the phonemes (and all other possible phonological distinctions, like contrastive stress and tone) of a language: as far as I know, almost no writing system in the world reaches the latter extreme, but many writing systems are more phonemic than standard English orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find some people who maintain that the standard orthography of present-day English orthography is in some way &quot;ideal&quot; or &quot;optimal&quot;. Unless this is taken as an unfalsifiable statement of opinion, I think it's pretty hard to defend this in its most extreme form: I don't think there's any convincing way to argue for the optimality of every inconsistency along the lines of &quot;dec&lt;strong&gt;ei&lt;/strong&gt;ve, dec&lt;strong&gt;ei&lt;/strong&gt;t, deception&quot; vs. &quot;rec&lt;strong&gt;ei&lt;/strong&gt;ve, rec&lt;strong&gt;eip&lt;/strong&gt;t, reception&quot; and every isolated quirky spelling like &quot;&lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;tarmigan&quot; or &quot;b&lt;strong&gt;ass&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the less extreme claim that English spelling can be considered &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;-optimal&quot; in terms of some coherent, definable set of criteria is not so obviously false. Although I think that this claim has been advanced more because of its provocativeness than anything else, there are linguistic sources like Chomsky and Halle's &lt;em&gt;Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; that argue that English spelling actually has some kind of underlying systematicity that we wouldn't get with a purely phonemic spelling system. It is well known that some aspects of English spelling show morphological relationships; e.g. the words &lt;em&gt;observe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;observation&lt;/em&gt; both start with the same letters &amp;lt;observ&gt; even though they start differently in pronunciation (for me and many other speakers, /əbˈzərv/ vs. /ˌɑbsərv/). (A somewhat common term that seems to be based on a similar viewpoint is &quot;deep&quot; orthographies, as opposed to &quot;shallow&quot; orthographies.) If you think that it's important for a spelling system to show these kinds of relationships, then this is one area where &quot;something bad&quot; would happen if we shifted to using phonemic spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the following Faculty of Language blog post for some more discussion of the concept of morphology-based orthography and whether standard English spelling is actually very good at it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/chomsky-was-wrong.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/chomsky-was-wrong.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from highly theoretical arguments like this, I think the most common objection is that different dialects of English have different phonologies, not just different phonetic realizations of the same set of phonemes. In principle, this is not such an insurmountable objection as it's often made out to be, because it is possible to design &quot;diaphonic&quot; orthographies that represent multiple sound systems at once, or some compromise between them. But practically, it would be difficult to design and standardize a single diaphonemic orthography for English that would be found acceptable by a majority of speakers from every region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T02:26:22.093" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T02:26:22.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29460" CreationDate="2018-10-15T03:02:21.090" Score="0" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an example of ambiguous syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;John likes Adam more than Eve.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a construction could mean that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Comparing Adam and Eve, John likes Adam more.&#xA;&#xA;Compared to Eve's liking of Adam, John likes Adam more.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list anywhere of common distinct ambiguous English syntax?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've edited this to note that I'm just looking for a list of common syntax ambiguities. I'm not expecting a complete list, for I know that there's not a finite quantity of syntax ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="20901" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T05:46:12.270" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:45:01.430" Title="List Of Common English Syntax Ambiguities?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29405" CreationDate="2018-10-15T05:35:43.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, no such list can exist. According to standard models, language is infinite and recursive, and there are infinitely many different ways a sentence can be made ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, imagine the structural rules &lt;code&gt;NP → NP and NP&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;NP → NP 's NP&lt;/code&gt;. (Or &lt;code&gt;DP&lt;/code&gt; instead depending on your theory, but calling it an &lt;code&gt;NP&lt;/code&gt; here is simpler.) With only these two, you can already create an infinite number of ambiguous sentences: &quot;my brother's dog and cat&quot;, &quot;my brother's dog and cat's name&quot;, etc etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T05:35:43.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29405" CreationDate="2018-10-15T05:43:45.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[partial answer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example has elision (ellipsis) ambiguity.  The best paraphrases simply add the missing words that the listener is expected to assume: (rather than change the existing syntax as you did in your interpretations) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John likes Adam more than [John likes] Eve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John likes Adam more than Eve [likes Adam].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elision can also cause (polysemous) transitivity errors: &quot;He is running [for office].&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other ambiguities arise from polysemous words, which can cause parsing of the wrong Part-Of-Speech or choosing the wrong idiom: &quot;They can fish.&quot;  &quot;The cat is on the TV again.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T05:43:45.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T22:31:53.173" Score="3" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given both the word and the corresponding IPA equivalent, is there any &lt;em&gt;stable&lt;/em&gt; algorithm for mapping the letter of each word to the IPA letter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, given &lt;code&gt;close-quote&lt;/code&gt; and IPA &lt;code&gt;kloʊzkwoʊt&lt;/code&gt; -- I'd want to create a mapping along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;c -&amp;gt; k&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;l -&amp;gt; l&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;o -&amp;gt; oʊ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;s -&amp;gt; z&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;e -&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;q -&amp;gt; kw&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;uo -&amp;gt; oʊ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;t -&amp;gt; t&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;e -&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very much open to different representations of the mapping, but this is at least the gist of the question. Ad-hoc matching of vowels etc. haven't given me a lot of luck in the general case... Any tips for doing this, or pointers on how to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22921" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T11:30:04.823" Title="Given both a word and the corresponding IPA, how to match/map the letters together?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-16T05:10:05.113" Score="-1" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find best way to get a syntax tree for this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Planting seeds helps you grow your farm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;          -------- S1 ---------&#xA;          |                  |&#xA;     --- NP ---          -- VP --&#xA;     |        |          |   |   |&#xA;     N        N          V1   NP  S2&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;          -------- S2 ---------&#xA;          |                    |&#xA;          VP              -- NP --&#xA;          |               |       |&#xA;          V2              Det     N&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  S1 is: Planting seeds helps you&#xA;  S2: grow your farm&#xA;  N's: Planting, seeds, garden&#xA;  V1 : helps&#xA;  V2 : grow&#xA;  Det : your&#xA;  NP (=N): you&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this tree make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22917" LastEditorUserId="22917" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T20:22:19.030" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T08:54:58.600" Title="Syntax tree for this sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-10-17T16:45:50.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29408" CreationDate="2018-10-16T11:48:44.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is an algorithm and even a readily available tool for this task. The tool is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/KitWiki/HfstHome&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helsinki Finite State Transducer&lt;/a&gt;. I have seen an application of it to historical linguistics and determining proto-languages and sound changes from cognate lists (for uralic languages), but in principle it should also do alignment of spelling and IPA representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T11:48:44.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29416" CreationDate="2018-10-17T06:09:28.977" Score="6" ViewCount="2168" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/NTpdf/mat27.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew 27:46&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/NTpdf/mar15.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark 15:34&lt;/a&gt;), Jesus says &quot;Eli, Eli, lama &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/greek/4518.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sabachthani (σαβαχθανί)&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which is translated &quot;My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this supposedly Aramaic word transliterated into Greek as σαβαχθανί, with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chi (χ)&lt;/a&gt;, rather than as σαβακθανι with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kappa (κ)&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Aramaic word is said to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%91%D7%A7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;שְׁבַק&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;to leave, depart; abandon; permit&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/OTpdf/dan4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel 4:23&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/OTpdf/ezr6.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezra 6:7&lt;/a&gt;). Is there any other example of the Hebrew letter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qoph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qoph&lt;/a&gt; (ק) being transliterated into Greek which could support this convention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read it, it suggests the Hebrew &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%91%D7%97#Hebrew&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;שיבח \ שִׁבֵּחַ&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;to praise&quot;), with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heth&lt;/a&gt;, (presumably?) cognate with Arabic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%AD#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;سَبَحَ&lt;/a&gt; &quot;to swim, to float; to praise, to glorify&quot;. About the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasbih&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tasbih&lt;/a&gt; it is said &quot;The phrase often has the connotation of praising God for his total perfection&quot;. So Jesus could be asking why he was praised, glorified, or perfected. Not that this makes sense, because in the aforementioned New Testament verses it is later translated as the Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/greek/1459.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;εγκατέλιπές&lt;/a&gt;, meaning &quot;abandoned&quot;; obviously the listeners in the crowd heard it as a different word. I guess I'm just curious about the choice of transliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T10:46:42.713" Title="Why is &quot;Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani&quot; transliterated with a Chi in Matthew and Mark?" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-17T07:04:16.920" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They can both speak French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can &lt;em&gt;French&lt;/em&gt; be the complement of the V-bar &lt;em&gt;speak French&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following definition of the complement: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A constituent X is the complement of a head H if X and H are sisters and the mother of X is a projection of H.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, I don't see how &lt;em&gt;French&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;speak French&lt;/em&gt; are sisters. Isn't &lt;em&gt;French&lt;/em&gt; the daughter of &lt;em&gt;speak French&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:04:16.920" Title="Understanding the property of complementhood" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29409" CreationDate="2018-10-17T08:40:16.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WXqxw.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WXqxw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;1]&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simplified tree diagram of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Planting seeds helps you grow your farm.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T08:54:58.600" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T08:54:58.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29411" CreationDate="2018-10-17T08:59:28.567" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Aramaic word שבקתני would probably have been pronounced /ʃabaqtani/. Usually, as you note, the /q/ of Aramaic is transliterated as κ, so σαβακθανι /sabaktʰani/ would be expected. However, in Greek, the cluster χθ &lt;a href=&quot;https://koine-greek.com/2010/01/09/consonant-clusters/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;was pronounced&lt;/a&gt; /ktʰ/, so the spelling σαβαχθανι is only an orthographic convention for the same pronunciation /sabaktʰani/ by putting two aspirated letters next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your connection to the Arabic word سَبَحَ is problematic, because χ is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew ח only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heth#Hebrew_%E1%B8%A4et&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;when it was pronounced&lt;/a&gt; /x/, not /ħ/. The Arabic cognate sound is written خ /x/, not ح /ħ/. Furthermore, the root שבח in Aramaic is used in the &lt;em&gt;pa''el&lt;/em&gt; form, so we should expect gemination. The proper Greek transliteration of שבחתני would probably be something like σαββαθανι.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T09:16:32.740" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T09:16:32.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-17T09:35:35.133" Score="0" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to discuss language changes among social sites. I'm using internet linguistics as a theoretical framework, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; one of my questions related to social aspect-gender... &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;internet linguistics&lt;/a&gt; deals with internet as the main resource for language changes, but I am arguing that also social aspect can play a role in internet language changes. Does the theory of &quot;internet linguistics&quot; consider social aspects as causes for internet language changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22928" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T15:16:45.120" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T15:16:45.120" Title="In &quot;internet Linguistics&quot; theory, does David Crystal include sociolinguistic patterns as affecting language changes?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29420" CreationDate="2018-10-17T18:57:54.147" Score="3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I understand the ejective consonants, but even after listening to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_consonant#Description&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia audio clips&lt;/a&gt;, I am not sure I would be able to distinguish them from the corresponding &quot;regular&quot; consonant, like &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;p'&lt;/code&gt;. Would be helpful to have an array of audio clips to compare and contrast them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/381/can-you-give-me-some-tips-on-how-to-pronounce-ejective-consonants&quot;&gt;Reading a bit more on ejective consonants&lt;/a&gt; still leaves me in the same position. Maybe a secondary resource in which a person speaks a language with ejective consonants, so I can learn better to distinguish the. A quick YouTube search on Georgian yields &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqvGJERHbOY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but I don't hear any ejective consonants lol. Maybe it's because I am just starting. This individual speaking &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zQSfU5HkUc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mayan&lt;/a&gt; I can hear the &lt;code&gt;ch'&lt;/code&gt; ejective consonant sound I think, but that's it so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related note: Same with the labialized consonants, I imagine for &lt;code&gt;kʷ&lt;/code&gt; just creating a &quot;k&quot; sound with rounded lips, but I can make that same sort of &quot;deeper&quot; sound in other ways anatomically (like just lowering my voice), so I'm not sure I'm doing it right. If the audio clips happened to include distinctions between aspirated and breathy voiced consonants, too, that would be nice, but I think I understand those. Also, if it included clips of contrasting normal/dental, normal/apical, normal/velar, normal/palatal, etc. that would be useful but not necessary for this question. Basically, where the best places are to find audio clips in this area other than Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T19:07:04.880" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T17:19:18.860" Title="Good audio resources for the ejective consonants" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29419" CreationDate="2018-10-17T20:52:19.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best reference source is the UCLA phonetics collection, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/index/sounds.html#Anchor-Ejectives-47857&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (you will notice a lot of other interesting sound categories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have strong reservations about using Wiki exemplars which are not produced by a person natively uttering words in languages with the sound in question. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bilabial_ejective_plosive.ogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bilabial ejective&lt;/a&gt; is, in my opinion, misleading in that the performer does correctly control the timing of the release on the labial and glottal closures. It does not sound like ejectives which I have heard in Lushootseed, Tigre, Sotho, Gitonga, Chopi, Chechen, Shua, (Cuzco) Quechua (languages that I've had more extensive contact with). There is a general problem (not limited to ejectives), that good quality recorded material is hard to find. Kichwa, in the Cuzco or Bolivian variants, are is taught frequently enough that there might actually be teaching materials, since the aspiration / ejection contrasts are hard for English speaking students. (Quechua is a language family all called &quot;Quechua&quot; in some form, only some dialects have ejectives; the southernmost dialects are often taught, and they have then. However there is a dearth of audio materials online). This &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagedescriptions.github.io/Shwakhwe/Lexicon/lexicon%20database.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; has some words in Shua, including some ejectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T17:19:18.860" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T17:19:18.860" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29424" CreationDate="2018-10-18T05:02:57.833" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in English the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hi&lt;/a&gt; sounds like &lt;code&gt;/haɪ/&lt;/code&gt;, but can be spelled &quot;hi&quot;, &quot;high&quot;, etc. So if you wanted to define the word &quot;high&quot; in English you would have to write two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;high&lt;/code&gt; (the spelling/orthography)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/haɪ/&lt;/code&gt; (the pronunciation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas let's say there is an English word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yay&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/jeɪ/&lt;/code&gt;) which only has one spelling. If English didn't have a written form, then you could just write it &lt;em&gt;and include the pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; in one swoop:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/jeɪ/&lt;/code&gt; (the spelling/orthography &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the pronunciation in one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages that get closer to this sort of system are ones such as some of the Native American romanizations such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfoot_language#Latin-based_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Blackfoot orthography&lt;/a&gt; which adopt some of the IPA symbols as well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_language#Orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cheyenne orthography&lt;/a&gt; is probably a better example. In Cheyenne, you get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/tahpeno/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tȧhpeno&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA and the orthography are pretty much the same, just basically stylistic differences, no real structural differences. As opposed to English &lt;code&gt;yay&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/jeɪ/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/haɪ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;high&lt;/code&gt; are pretty different stylistically as well as structurally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, if there is any system in Linguistics to add some metadata or something to the IPA pronunciation that says &quot;this is how you spell it as well&quot;. Obviously you can just put two different versions of the word like the first example above (&lt;code&gt;high&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/haɪ/&lt;/code&gt;), but maybe there is an alternative syntax that is like &lt;code&gt;{h}{aɪ=igh}&lt;/code&gt; sort of thing, where the spelling and the pronunciation are intermingled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if anything like that exists. Essentially then you could have a pronunciation system that you provide extra metadata to in order to spell it out in the form you want, but you would only have to initially spell the sound of it (sort of thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:32:37.087" Title="System for intermixing IPA with Orthography" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29422" CreationDate="2018-10-18T05:28:49.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common convention is to use angle brackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics, there are three different forms of a word (lexical item) that you'll commonly see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In angle brackets, it's the orthographic/written form: &lt;code&gt;⟨high⟩&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In slashes, it's the phonological/underlying form (always a broad transcription): &lt;code&gt;/hi:/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In square brackets, it's the phonetic/surface form (usually a narrower transcription): &lt;code&gt;[haj]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some people also use pipes, &lt;code&gt;|like this|&lt;/code&gt;, to indicate a morphophonemic form, but that's much less common. Other sources use curly braces &lt;code&gt;{like this}&lt;/code&gt; to mean a variety of different things but I'm less familiar with that notation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these forms is relevant depends on the context. If you're discussing formants and frequencies, you'll want the surface form; if you're listing words for a language without an orthography, on the other hand, you'll want the underlying form. The choice of bracketing makes it clear exactly which one you're giving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T10:32:37.087" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:32:37.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29422" CreationDate="2018-10-18T07:59:15.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what Draconis said, it is not uncommon to embed a phonetic or phonemic transcription within an orthographic representation, as in &quot;&lt;em&gt;tom&lt;/em&gt;[eɪ]&lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tom&lt;/em&gt;[ɑː]&lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, to highlight the relevant portion of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T07:59:15.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26685" CreationDate="2018-10-18T10:24:43.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German you can either use &lt;em&gt;von&lt;/em&gt; (actor) or &lt;em&gt;durch&lt;/em&gt; (agent) for the actor, so your premise is wrong. Still, German speakers mostly rely on word order to determine the actor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Die Kiste wurde von einer Windböe von der Ladefläche geworfen. &lt;em&gt;(preferred)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Die Kiste wurde durch eine Windböe von der Ladefläche geworfen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The crate has been thrown from the truck bed by a wind gust.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course there are still cases with ambiguity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Die Kiste wurde &lt;strong&gt;durch&lt;/strong&gt; ein Missgeschick durch/von eine/einer Windböe von der Ladefläche geworfen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The crate has been thrown from the truck bed by a wind gust &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; accident.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22933" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:24:43.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29430" CreationDate="2018-10-18T11:45:36.843" Score="2" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages it seems are pretty much phonetic. (I'm only focusing on alphabet languages, so not Chinese for example). From what I've seen, Spanish is phonetic, Cherokee too, Finnish, Inuktitut, and Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only one that doesn't seem phonetic is English where you essentially have to memorize a bunch of different spellings. Wondering what some other major languages are that (like English) don't have a predictable 1-to-1 mapping of pronunciation to spelling. Not sure if Ancient Greek or Ancient Latin are phonetic, so English is the only example I can really think of atm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;phonetic&quot; I don't mean an exact IPA transcription, but at least there is a 1-1 mapping of the IPA to the orthography for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T13:34:04.943" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T17:43:25.767" Title="Other languages like English whose orthography is &quot;not quite&quot; phonetic" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20933" CreationDate="2018-10-18T13:43:22.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an easy answer which is to check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_the_Irish_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the wikipedia page on &lt;strong&gt;the status of the Irish language&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. But the following is what I found with and outside the wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistic maps of Ireland show only the areas in the extreme west of the Gaeltaecht as having native Irish speakers. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-many-Irish-in-the-19th-century-came-to-the-US-with-Gaelic-as-a-first-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, I realize that the nominal definition of 'the Gaeltaecht' is 'where people speak Irish all day', but that is vague and is changing but I take it to mean 'the far (including the extreme) west of Ireland where you're more likely to hear Irish in the streets. I know, still vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0EpF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0EpF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Decline of native Irish speakers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proportion who say they &lt;strong&gt;can speak&lt;/strong&gt; Irish (as first or second language not specified). Note that the color range may be misleading; the second darkest shade of green is 40-70%. Self reporting has many social biases involved (desire to say yes out of pride, tendency to say no out of disparagement, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcE2f.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcE2f.png&quot; alt=&quot;from wikipedia: Proportion of respondents who said they could speak Irish in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland censuses of 2011.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a very similar map showing the percentage of those who &lt;em&gt;do speak&lt;/em&gt; Irish (&lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; of the education system, presumably day to day). Unfortunately leaving out the counties of Northern Ireland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8FIg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8FIg.png&quot; alt=&quot;from wikipedia: The percentage of respondents who said they spoke Irish daily outside the education system in the 2011 census in the Republic of Ireland.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to consuming mass media, there is the national Irish language radio station RTE. I could not find its listenership numbers &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The national Irish language TV is TG4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 2015 TG4 reported that overall it has an average share of 2% (650,000 daily viewers) of the national television market in the Republic of Ireland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find the viewership numbers for the other stations to compare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of all this data (and commentary around it) is that native (family learned) Irish speaking is near or at least heading to extinction in the Gaeltaecht and rural areas, but that the language policies (secondary schooling) has been very successful in reviving and keeping fluency alive in the more educated bigger cities. In Ireland. Because of political issues and much less secondary education, Irish in Northern Ireland will be limited to an academic subject (similar to Provencal in southern France). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is still the practical motivation of all this. How likely is it that someone from Mars who learns Irish from books and tapes will run into someone on the street in Ireland with whom they can converse fluently in Irish? Ballparking it, I'd say 100% in the extreme west, but dropping off to 20% until you get to a big city (Dublin, Limerick, Cork), where it'll go back up to 50%. My reasoning? TG4 seems to have no problem finding fluent Irish speakers at random to interview at car accidents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T13:56:25.823" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T13:56:25.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29428" CreationDate="2018-10-18T14:00:00.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Few languages have a true one-to-one mapping of letter to phoneme. Spanish, for instance, has a pretty clear orthography, in that the spelling usually reflects the pronunciation, but the orthography isn't one-to-one: The most obvious example is the letters &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;, which are pronounced /k/ and /g/ before back vowels, but /θ/ (or /s/ in Latin America) and /x/ before front vowels. This also renders quite a few letters and digraphs redundant: &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; /k/, &lt;em&gt;gu&lt;/em&gt; /g/, and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; /θ/ (and &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; /s/ in Latin America), &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; /x/, &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; /x/. Redundancy in an orthography means that orthography, however consistent it may be, isn't one-to-one. However, Spanish orthography is still easier to learn than English orthography, because there are fewer rules and exceptions you need to memorize to understand how to pronounce it. (A comparable case is modern Greek, in which all of ι, η, υ, ει, οι, υι are pronounced /i/, and yet the pronunciation is usually predictable from the spelling.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French would be an extreme example of a (mostly) phonemic orthography that requires knowledge of a lot of rules. French orthography is mostly phonemic if you understand those rules (e.g., final unaccented e always being silent, etc.), but there are still exceptions that have to be memorized, such as &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt; /fam/ (not */fεm/), &lt;em&gt;eu&lt;/em&gt; /y/ (not */ø/). English is also &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; phonemic, in that the pronunciation is usually predictable from complicated rules, but there are many more exceptions than in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many languages without a one-to-one mapping of orthography to spelling that are still mostly phonemic. However, most leave out some phonemic information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, for example, there is no written difference between /a, i, y/ and /a:, i:, y:/. In Homeric Greek there was a phoneme /w/ that isn't indicated in the text of Homer that came down to us. Both /ei̯/ and /e:/ were written &lt;em&gt;ει&lt;/em&gt;, and both /ou̯/ and /o:/ were written &lt;em&gt;ου&lt;/em&gt;, despite being distinguished in pre-Classical Greek (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_diphthong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spurious diphthong&lt;/a&gt;). Tone stress is also not distinguished in early inscriptions and manuscripts. Latin doesn't distinguish any vowels by length; &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; can represent any of /i, i:, j/ and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; can represent any of /u, u:, w/ (in later texts, /j/ is written &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; and /w/ is written &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All abjads, by design, totally leave out information about vowels, and so languages that use them naturally aren't phonemic with regard to vowels. For example, in Hebrew, /a/ can be represented either by א or ה as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;matres lectionis&lt;/a&gt;, or by no letter at all. Hebrew is also ambiguous about consonants in the letter ש, which can be pronounced either /ʃ/ or /s/ (going back to an older ambiguity between /ʃ/ and /ɬ/ alongside ambiguity between /ħ/ and /x/, /ʕ/ and /ɣ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some languages that use syllabaries, such as Akkadian, have symbols with ambiguous phonemic values, because they can either represent a syllable or an ideogram. The symbol DINGIR in Akkadian could mean any of: the stem &lt;em&gt;il-&lt;/em&gt;, the god Anum, the word &lt;em&gt;šamû&lt;/em&gt;, the syllables an and il, a preposition meaning &quot;at&quot; or &quot;to&quot;, or a determinative indicating that the following word is the name of a god (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), and of course the phonetic value would vary (or be absent) accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are some languages that are closer to an ideal one-to-one orthography. Finnish has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_orthography#Velar_nasal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nearly one-to-one&lt;/a&gt; orthography. The same is true of many languages whose orthographies were standardized recently. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also has a list of languages which it describes as having a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence, which includes Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T17:43:25.767" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T17:43:25.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29432" CreationDate="2018-10-18T14:26:53.390" Score="1" ViewCount="1690" Body="&lt;p&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31zzMb3U0iY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; explains clearly how to do the 3 Xhosa clicks &lt;em&gt;at the same time as each vowel sound&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant#Notation_and_sound_description&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; also shows clearly how to produce those 3 clicks as well, independent of any vowel sounds. So just &lt;code&gt;c [ǀ]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;x [ǁ]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;q [ǃ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, then I listen to the alphabet &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/xhosa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS2aS2pxmi8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt;, and they get to &quot;c&quot; and it sounds nothing like the first two links above as they sound out the &lt;code&gt;[ǀ]&lt;/code&gt;. I notice that the Wikipedia for Xhosa lists &lt;em&gt;18&lt;/em&gt; clicks (instead of just the 3 demonstrated in the first two links):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kǀʼ] c &#xA;[kǀʰ] ch    &#xA;[ɡ̊ǀʱ] gc     &#xA;[ŋǀ]  nc &#xA;[ŋǀʱ] ngc   &#xA;[ŋǀˀ] nkc &#xA;&#xA;[kǁʼ] x  &#xA;[kǁʰ] xh &#xA;[ɡ̊ǁʱ] gx&#xA;[ŋǁ]  nx  &#xA;[ŋǁʱ] ngx &#xA;[ŋǁˀ] nkx &#xA;&#xA;[kǃʼ] q   &#xA;[kǃʰ] qh &#xA;[ɡ̊ǃʱ] gq&#xA;[ŋǃ]  nq   &#xA;[ŋǃʱ] ngq &#xA;[ŋǃˀ] nkq   &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Connecting &lt;code&gt;[kǀʼ] c&lt;/code&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS2aS2pxmi8#t=6s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alphabet video&lt;/a&gt;, it seems like that sound is a &lt;code&gt;[g]&lt;/code&gt; and the click &lt;code&gt;[ǀ]&lt;/code&gt; at the same time or something, but I can't quite tell. Maybe they are doing a &lt;code&gt;[ɡ̊ǀ]&lt;/code&gt; sound. For the first part of the question, wondering if one could identify what sound that is, and if I am correct in my understanding that they are to be pronounced at the same time (not sure how this is possible atm so probably not doing it right yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second part, I'm wondering in general how to make the rest of the click sounds. Basically there are 3 prefixes in the IPA version, &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;[ɡ̊]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[ŋ]&lt;/code&gt;. But I'm not sure if they should actually occur &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the subsequently annotated click sound, e.g. &lt;code&gt;[ŋǀ]&lt;/code&gt;. Wondering if one could clarify if it goes before or during the click. So then I just want to know if it works like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kǀʼ] c     = k + click sound at same time&#xA;[kǀʰ] ch    = k + click sound at the same time, aspirated at the end&#xA;[ɡ̊ǀʱ] gc    = silent g + click sound at same time, aspirated at the end&#xA;[ŋǀ]  nc    = humming ŋ + click sound at same time&#xA;[ŋǀʱ] ngc   = humming ŋ + click sound at same time, aspirated at the end&#xA;[ŋǀˀ] nkc   = humming ŋ + click sound at same time, followed by glottal stop before next sound&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky part about these 18 clicks is that the k/g/ŋ sounds are all produced by closing the back of the mouth, while the clicks occur by closing the front of the mouth, so it doesn't seem possible at first, it's like &quot;I can only close my mouth in one place not two&quot; sort of thing. I can do the clicks with the prolonged vowel sounds no problem, just not what the IPA is showing with the other 18 versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-18T14:37:46.720" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T15:59:52.183" Title="How to do the Xhosa clicks" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29431" CreationDate="2018-10-18T15:59:52.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first video is the best exemplar of the three, The wiki page isn't even Xhosa, it's hypothetical articulations by an unknown person who doesn't speak those languages, and lacks the professional phonetician cred of John Esling and Peter Ladefoged. It primarily produces real words of Xhosa, which is a good model for how the clicks sound in that language. He does produce a few samples of &quot;just the click&quot;, but does add something unnatural (from the perspective of Xhosa) in his isolated sample of &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;, which is that he nasalizes the release vowel. The alphabet video would have been better if the sound has be produced with a following vowel [a].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with [ŋǀˀ] and so on is that there are not symbols for each separate click, analogous to how we notate &lt;em&gt;p,t,b,d,m,n&lt;/em&gt;. The convention has been adopted that the manner of articulation (apart from aspiration) is notated with the initial letter. You have to consult a real physiological study of a particular language to get the dynamics of click articulation – the articulation of clicks in Khwe languages is different from that of the Nguni languages. The pre-letters &lt;em&gt;k,g,ŋ&lt;/em&gt; carry the information that the click is voiced or nasal, but these are not the independent phonemes [k], [g], [ŋ]. The choice to use these letters is based on the fact that clicks have a non-distinctive back (velar) closure as well as a front (lingual or labial) closure, and from an aerodynamic-acoustic perspective, only the back closure has acoustic consequences until the front closure is released. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1300&amp;amp;context=theses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This study&lt;/a&gt; (an MA thesis) has ample scholarly citations, lays out the issues, and provides some new acoustic data (duration measurements). Physiological studies are, unfortunately, not easy to carry out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the most effective way to control production of these clicks is to ignore IPA spelling, and listen to and mimic a native speaker. There are some commercial courses with audio CD produced for Zulu and Xhosa – I don't have any of those materials so I can't make a recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T15:59:52.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29434" CreationDate="2018-10-18T21:18:49.303" Score="-2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to think of examples where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/IPA_chart_2018.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA symbols&lt;/a&gt; get really complex, and find phonologies with those symbols. I'm not quite there in understanding all the aspects of IPA, but I wanted to see if these examples (a) can occur, and (b), what the IPA does to handle the diacritic overload.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[d̪̊ʼ]&lt;/code&gt; voiceless, dental, ejective consonant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[d̪̊̃ʼ]&lt;/code&gt; voiceless, dental, nasal, ejective consonant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[d̪̤̊ʼ]&lt;/code&gt; voiceless, dental, breathy, ejective consonant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[d̪̤̝̊ʼ]&lt;/code&gt; voiceless, dental, breathy, raised, ejective consonant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[e̤̝̋̃]&lt;/code&gt; toned, breathy, raised, vowel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I'm wondering if (a) they are just ignoring these possibilities because the IPA orthography gets too messy, or (b) these combinations never occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another complicated example would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1) more rounded, (2) advanced, (3) nasalized, (4) breathy, (5) raised, (6) short.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the IPA annotation system would break down in these cases, and so they are simply ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering if one could shed light on this situation, if these types of combinations do occur and if they are documented and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T01:38:19.753" Title="What IPA does in these complex cases" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29433" CreationDate="2018-10-18T22:17:32.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA chart only lists the atomic letters, and not the possible combinations, except that some of the letters are diacritics, meaning that they always combine with a free-standing letter so they have to include some combinations. They don't list all of the possible combinations of the ejective diacritic plus a basic consonant letter. A voiceless dental ejective would be [t̪ʼ], combining the dental and ejective diacritics with the basis non-retroflex lingual consonant letter. A rounded voiceless dental ejective would be [t̪ʷʼ] – I don't think they prescribe an order for the diacritics on the right. The problem with [d̪̊ʼ] is that the circle diacritic really represents a devoiced &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; – there is more to [d] versus [t], in English, than vocal fold vibration. Ejectives are voiceless, not voiced, so &quot;dʼ, bʼ&quot; is a bit of a conceptual anomaly (though it's a fine way to spell [ɓ, ɗ] if you're aiming to reduce the number of special letters in a writing system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Breathy ejective&quot; describes a physical contradiction, since breathy means that the vocal folds are abducted, and ejective means that they are constricted. &quot;Nasal ejective&quot; is an aerodynamic impossiblity, since an ejective requires pressure buildup in the oral cavity, and making a sound nasal means that air pressure will be instantly reduced to atmospheric pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing horridly wrong with [e̤̝̋̃]. Tone, nasalization, and breathiness are all contrastive properties in some language – Jalapa Mazatec has oral and nasal vowels in three phonation types (modal, breathy, creaky) – and it is a tone language. &quot;Raised&quot; is not (it's a &quot;phonetic detail&quot;), which is why you don't often see that diacritic. Similarly, more rounded and less rounded, raised and lowered, or advanced and retracted are phonetic detail properties, not basic phonological categories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T01:38:19.753" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T01:38:19.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29411" CreationDate="2018-10-18T23:36:17.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like everything in the Bible, this is the subject of an enormous mass of scholarly and non-scholarly literature. The question at issue here is whether Jesus is supposed to be speaking Hebrew or Aramaic, and if the latter, what sort of Aramaic. In Middle Aramaic (e.g. Syriac) one would expect šβaqtān (as it is in the Pshitta of Matt. 27:46:  ܫܒ݂ܰܩܬ݁ܳܢܝ), but this is obviously not what underlies σαβαχθανί. Klaus Beyer argues that final unstressed long vowels were lost in all forms of Aramaic around 100 BCE. σαβαχθανί looks rather like a Hebraising spelling of šβaqtān. The writing with χθ suggests a form with the assimilation of -qt- to -qṭ-. (In the oldest stratum of Semitic loan words in Greek ϑ and χ are used for the emphatic stops ṭ and q, while in later borrowings they are used for aspirated non-emphatic t and k respectively.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T06:17:44.243" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T06:17:44.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29442" CreationDate="2018-10-19T07:29:37.357" Score="2" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm pretty sure I understand labialized [ʷ] and some of the other superscripts, but I don't fully understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(phonetics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palatalized&lt;/a&gt; [ʲ]. An example of palatalized is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abkhaz&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkup_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selkup&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulgarian&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanesha%27_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yanesha&lt;/a&gt;. The way I imagine the [ʲ] to work is you put the tip of your tongue on the hard palette while you make whatever sound, like the image below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start it looks like I got that wrong, it is the &lt;em&gt;middle&lt;/em&gt; of the tongue that should touch the hard palette:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In technical terms, palatalization refers to the secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Pure&quot; palatalization is a modification to the articulation of a consonant, where the middle of the tongue is raised, and nothing else. It may produce a laminal articulation of otherwise apical consonants such as /t/ and /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in those phonologies above, they palatalize these consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[mʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[nʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[kʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[tʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[pʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[βʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[lʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ɡʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[χʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ʁʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[qʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[zʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[sʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[vʲ]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are nasals, stops, approximants, and fricatives in there. Placing the middle of my tongue on the hard palette while doing a [qʲ] or [ʁʲ] or [ɡʲ] feels difficult, basically I am just pressing my tongue from back all the way to the middle, but trying to avoid touching the velar area, but I don't see how sound can escape in both places the tongue is touching. Wondering if this is &quot;double articulation&quot; sort of thing, or how to do it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then for the [lʲ], I can do the normal [l] and just press the middle of my tongue up to the hard palette, but it doesn't really change the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [tʲ] (when I do it) sounds sort of like either [tc] or [tɕ] or [tʃ]. Then [pʲ] sounds sort of like [pɕ], so I guess that is a different sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't see how [nʲ] can be any different than [ɲ]. And I don't see how [mʲ] will have any effect since the mouth is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, when I try to do it, only [tʲ] and [pʲ] seem (a) possible and (b) make any obvious sound difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what I am doing wrong or what I should be looking for, and if my assumptions and such are missing things. I'm also wondering if the &quot;ʲ&quot; aspect is occurring &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the main sound being created, or before/after. I assume the effect it is trying to achieve is happening &lt;em&gt;during&lt;/em&gt; the main sound. But I dunno, maybe you could write [pʲ] as &lt;code&gt;pç&lt;/code&gt; in some orthography. Though that might work for stops, not sure what the non-stops would look like, maybe &lt;code&gt;[s͡ç]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dood.al/pinktrombone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aeJQO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T07:52:50.683" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T20:11:42.117" Title="What the palatalized [ʲ] means" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29476" CreationDate="2018-10-19T13:06:10.430" Score="0" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;In considering the ways tone might work in languages, I am looking at diagrams of 5 rows (registers I'm guessing) in which you can create tones that shift up and down the registers. Some examples of the movement might be like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;--x------------x-----------------x------&#xA;   \          /                 /&#xA;----x-----------------------------------&#xA;            /                 /&#xA;----------o-----------------------------&#xA;                            /&#xA;----------------------u-----------------&#xA;                       \  / &#xA;------------------------x---------------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That looks good &lt;em&gt;in principle&lt;/em&gt;, because you have 5 rows and you shift up and down like on a ladder. But in reality, people don't really have perfect pitch and so they aren't going to realistically be attaching their tones to the rungs of the ladder perfectly. So this gets me confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand how you can, given a current position, move either up or down in the tone. That makes sense. But I don't understand how you can say &quot;from this position I am going to go to the high tone&quot;, where you may have left off the last tone at level 4, but now are going to go from 3 to 5 in a glide. I don't see how you can gauge that you are at the desired register level, like shown in the standard Mandarin tone chart/graph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if one could plot out an example sentence or two (made up, doesn't have to be a real language) showing how the tone changes like the chart above. Then it would be helpful if you could explain how the speaker can jump from position to position in the chart/graph, to perform the tone changes. At each point, like at the &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; in the chart above, I am wondering how the speaker knows they are moving down 1 register (from the first tone slide down, to the start of &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt;), and then how they know what the distance is to go to the &quot;highest&quot; tone. Then to go from there to to the &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt; in the diagram, that is jumping 4 levels down, it's hard for me to imagine how they could know they didn't accidentally go to the &quot;lowest&quot; level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does make sense to me is if it's all &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt;. Somehow the communicators know that the person speaking has a &quot;base&quot; tone level, or reference point. It's not out there in the world, it's just something they &lt;em&gt;default back to&lt;/em&gt; after doing some tone shifts. So perhaps it would be the place where the most time is spent speaking. Then from there you can move up or down. If you move up, you stay there for a little bit, and then can move up or down again. If you move up, then now you are pretty far removed from the initial reference point, so wondering how the reference point is reestablished. If instead you moved down &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt;, below the original reference point, then you would know (because of working memory) that you are in a lower level register. So you are constantly hovering around the neutral point, only occasionally shooting off a tone here or there and then coming back. In this way, it doesn't need to be very exact, you can just move up and down &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt; coming back to the central place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the way the diagrams I've seem make it look is that you can, like a computer, jump from one register to the next:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;5 -&amp;gt; 4&#xA;4 -&amp;gt; 3&#xA;3 -&amp;gt; 5&#xA;5 -&amp;gt; 2&#xA;2 -&amp;gt; 1 -&amp;gt; 5&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get distracted, no problem, let me just jump back to 2 and continue where I left off (type of thing). That seems unrealistic. But that's what these IPA symbols convey:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;˥&#xA;˦&#xA;˧&#xA;˨&#xA;˩&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do like &lt;code&gt;˨˥˦&lt;/code&gt; or any sequence you want. But it doesn't seem like it would actually work like that when speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not having experience in tonal languages (it would take a while to get the hang of it I imagine), I am just wondering if one could demonstrate the sequence of events a speaker goes through when performing tone shifts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T11:10:46.780" Title="How tone shifting actually works - How a speaker navigates the register space" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28246" CreationDate="2018-10-19T14:18:42.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is true, apparently Icelandic is the most archaic language in Europe or so I have heard. It has changed almost nothing in the last 1000 years, so anyone who has a decent grasp of the language can read the old texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the edda and understand most with the exception of dead words, that are no longer used in modern Icelandic, and changes to meaning from old Icelandic to what is spoken today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22942" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T14:18:42.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29507" CreationDate="2018-10-19T14:34:20.593" Score="1" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to train a german embedding and need to split text into sentences. That is not easy since &quot;z. B.&quot; and &quot;Dr.&quot; are not endings of a sentence. Does anybody know a tool to do that for german texts? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22941" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T14:43:30.197" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T18:50:58.583" Title="Looking for tool to split german text into sentences" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29440" CreationDate="2018-10-19T14:42:46.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just searching for &lt;code&gt;tokenizer german&lt;/code&gt; I came up with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/~dipper/resources/tokenizer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stefanie Dipper's tokenizer for German&lt;/a&gt;. It comes with a somewhat non-commercial license (read it before download).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T14:42:46.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29436" CreationDate="2018-10-19T16:01:39.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Palatalization is basically superimposing the tongue position of the vowel [i] on any other consonant, and is as you now understand. The actual timing of the i-like articulation with respect to the main consonant articulation varies from language to language and context to context; palatalization is most often realized and perceived as a feature of the consonant release and transition to the next vowel. If you reach satisfaction with [pʲ] but not [mʲ], that is probably because the nasal does not have the kind of noisy release that [p] has, so the difference will sound subtle (thus the perception that [pʲ] sounds like [pɕ]. Embedding the sound in the frame [a_a] maximizes the chances of hearing a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that [nʲ] (abstractly) sounds like [ɲ] – that is, some people may write [ɲ] for the same physical sound as others would use [nʲ] for. The same goes for [kʲ gʲ xʲ] versus [c ɟ ç]. Deciding between the two notations is usually more informed by phonological pattern rather than phonetic fact. For example, Russian has a lot of palatalized consonants, and general rules of palatalization which argue for writing [nʲ] as a palatalized [n], rather than [ɲ]. The choice of symbols may be influenced by a phonetic fact, that the exact timing and degree of palatal coarticulation can vary across languages, and writing [ɲ] rather that [nʲ] may indicate a greater overlap of palatality with the consonant. The same goes for [kʲ gʲ xʲ] versus [c ɟ ç].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abkhaz is a special problem since [qʲ, ʁʲ, ɡʲ] there involve tongue raising and fronting simultaneous with tongue backing and lowering: a contradiction. I do not know what the argument is for such phonemes, and what supports that analysis over other analyses. One possibility is that this is related to the impoverished vowel inventory (only two vowels), and really there are more vowels and fewer consonants. Or, [Cʲ] may be a consonant cluster, [Cj]. I don't have access to Hewitt's grammar or Catford's unpublished book, so I don't know what the phonetic and phonological evidence is for that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I should add that there is no IPA symbol for an alveo-palatal nasal, for which reason &lt;em&gt;ɲ&lt;/em&gt; is pressed into service for a number of languages like Swahili or Saami).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T20:11:42.117" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T20:11:42.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29440" CreationDate="2018-10-19T18:41:36.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;spaCy&lt;/strong&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_boundary_disambiguation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sentence boundary detection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;sentence segmentation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sentence breaking&lt;/em&gt;).  It also supports German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/api/doc#sents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spacy.io/api/doc#sents&lt;/a&gt; for an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rtiqa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rtiqa.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T18:41:36.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29597" CreationDate="2018-10-19T22:09:45.223" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to exploring &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creole languages&lt;/a&gt;, after seeing them &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riau#Riau_Malay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compared to &quot;Riau Indonesian&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dialect of Malay spoken in Riau Province is considered by linguists to have one of the least complex grammars among the languages of the world, apart from creoles, possessing neither noun declensions, temporal distinctions, subject/object distinctions, nor singular/plural distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Wikipedia says Creoles possibly develop from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pidgin&lt;/a&gt;, which is a language for getting two different languages to communicate with each other. I have never really had to communicate with someone (where we didn't share any of the same languages) for long enough to need to do more than hacked together hand gestures and grunts basically. But I can imagine like in a shipping/trading/agriculture scenario, you eventually might need to start getting more detailed than just grunts and points and start speaking. So then I imagine a Pidgin starts developing (don't know anything about them yet). There is some basic grammatical structures that just happen about and you can get your points across. Then when new children come to learn to speak, they get whatever is simplest first, which becomes standardized eventually into a &quot;Creole&quot;. That's at least (it seems) one suggestion of how Creoles start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if that's the case, that a Creole is basically the simplest grammar a child needs to communicate (or at least is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; simple grammar), I wonder why we don't all just speak Creole, and why there is instead these &quot;more complex&quot; grammars like the Indo-European languages or the other non-Creole languages of the world (I guess you could call them &quot;more formal&quot;, but that doesn't seem right either). Not sure if there is a clear distinction between Creole and non-Creole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is why we don't speak Creole instead of these non-Creole languages (at a high level). If Creole is simpler it seems it would be better. I wonder if one could briefly outline what is lacking in Creole languages that are not lacking in non-Creole languages. That is, why there needs to be (or ends up being if that's the case) non-Creole languages. If this is a really complicated topic, knowing of a good resource or paper to look into would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin#Common_traits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; on common traits of Pidgins, they basically sound like isolating languages like English or Chinese, so it makes me wonder if Chinese could be comparable to a Creole (even though it doesn't seem to have arisen by merging two other languages), and same with English. It also makes me wonder why things like tense and conjugation evolve if they are more complicated rules to the language and don't start off in the Pidgin. So this applies to the reasons why non-Creoles develop, and what benefits or simplifications they have that the Creoles lack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also just thinking, maybe it's partly because, while Pidgins/Creoles may be much simpler than non, they aren't as efficient, so you end up not being able to express as much as quickly, or things like that. Just maybe a reason why non-Creole languages arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T22:36:55.450" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T16:01:27.363" Title="Why Creole languages aren't the default" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29463" CreationDate="2018-10-20T03:00:23.457" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for stranger particle-like things, like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nihonshock.com/2010/02/particles-the-difference-between-wa-and-ga/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese &lt;code&gt;wa&lt;/code&gt; particle&lt;/a&gt;, or determiners like &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;. So wondering if there are any cases of pluralizing or changing to past/future tense that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an affix of some kind, and also is not just an expression made out of words like &quot;... in the past&quot;. So basically instead of having &quot;The paper&lt;b&gt;s&lt;/b&gt; are new&quot; or &quot;I walk&lt;b&gt;ed&lt;/b&gt; to the store&quot;, it would be more like &quot;The paper &lt;b&gt;PLURAL&lt;/b&gt; are new&quot; or &quot;I walk &lt;b&gt;PAST&lt;/b&gt; to the store&quot;. Those caps tokens would be basically &lt;em&gt;modifiers&lt;/em&gt; of some kind, that are separate from the other words (they are standalone instead of affixes). This could also work for gender perhaps, so instead of &quot;&lt;b&gt;He&lt;/b&gt; walked by&quot; it would be &quot;They &lt;b&gt;MAN&lt;/b&gt; walked by&quot;. Wondering if this sort of thing appears in any language not just English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T05:24:22.447" Title="If there are cases of tense or plural as separate words like particles" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T04:43:24.327" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, sentences are constructed like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Compared to Joe, he looks similar.&#xA;Compared to Joe, he looks different.&#xA;Compared to Joe, he looks handsome.&#xA;Compared to Joe, he looks ugly.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, when it comes to &quot;same&quot;, a sentence would be considered ungrammatical if it was written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Compared to Joe, he looks same.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, it should be written as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Compared to Joe, he looks the same.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason for this quirk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the &quot;why&quot; of this topic. I wonder if this peculiar treatment of &quot;same&quot; developed due to functors that are synonymous with &quot;same&quot;, such as &quot;as&quot;. Just as functors are somewhat special in grammar, I wonder if that inclined special use of &quot;same&quot; in grammar too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="20901" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T20:22:53.020" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T13:16:46.640" Title="Why Do We Say &quot;The Same&quot;?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T19:15:07.843" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowel chart of female is boarder than that of male. Are the two systems overlapping regardless of scale, i.e. by dividing by a number? If not, what are the differences and what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T13:40:32.117" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T13:40:32.117" Title="Are the vowel charts of male and female the same regardless of scale?" Tags="&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29408" CreationDate="2018-10-20T19:38:30.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might get somewhere with some languages, but I doubt you'll have &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; success with this in English, for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason is that English has many words for which there is no single pronunciation, but a variety of different pronunciations depending on the enviroment of the word. So, for example, in British English, the word &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; could be any of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ə/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ər/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɑ:/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/ɑ:r/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one you get depends on  whether the word is stressed or not, or stranded or not, plus whether it is followed by a vowel or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly,  there is the problem of silent letters. How could we  meaningfully  map the E at the end of &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;? How about CH in &lt;em&gt;yacht&lt;/em&gt; or T in &lt;em&gt;listen&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another complication you have is discontinuous spelling rules. So, for example take the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tome /toʊm/ (American English)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you cannot really just map the O onto the /oʊ/. It is represented in the orthography by the O and the E occurring on either side of a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you might be able to get &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; a long way. It also depends what exactly the mapping is for, and what you mean by mapping phonemes onto letters. For example suppose you have the noun &lt;em&gt;minute&lt;/em&gt;, in what sense does the U map onto /ɪ/? (And again what are you doing with the E there?) In some sense maybe, but it's not clear - or maybe it's just not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T19:44:53.240" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T19:44:53.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29451" CreationDate="2018-10-20T19:56:46.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because females typically have a shorter vocal tract compared to males, one might expect that you can normalize formant frequencies to factor out differences owing to physical differences. &lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00764811/document&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; suggests, contrarily, that gender-based formant differences are grammaticalized and language specific. If formant differences in vowels were the result of otherwise identical gestures with vocal tracts of different lengths, all formants would be affected. In fact, F1 does not differ between male and female Parisian French speakers, but F2 and F3 differ (those formants are significantly higher for females, compared to males). Moreover, that expected difference with F1 &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; found with (Northeastern) American English male vs. female speakers. It is also reported (citing Johnson 2005 &quot;Speaker normalization in speech perception&quot;) that gender differences are small in Danish and large in Russian. &lt;a href=&quot;http://pnrsolution.org/Datacenter/Vol5/Issue1/22.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This study&lt;/a&gt; of Marathi suggests that the different ratios can be vowel-specific within a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T22:08:43.413" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T22:08:43.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29461" CreationDate="2018-10-20T20:05:48.690" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say, the situation is intervocalic, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ata] &gt; [aða]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences of the two sounds are whether the tongue touches the palate and voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I assume voicing happens first, the problem becomes thus that in some languages do voiced plosives not exist, so it is implausible to suppose this step happens first. If I assume the other one happens first, it's also implausible since it would ben an unvoiced [ð̥].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how would such a sound change exactly happen? Can they take place the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T21:05:55.500" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T22:49:10.700" Title="In the sound change [t] to [ð], what steps would normally take place in which order?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34525" CreationDate="2018-10-20T20:36:11.693" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an undergraduate linguistics student, and I'm currently reading this chapter by Coon &amp;amp; Preminger (2015) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.umd.edu/assets/publications/Coon-Preminger-17-SplitErgativity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ling.umd.edu/assets/publications/Coon-Preminger-17-SplitErgativity.pdf&lt;/a&gt;), which describes aspect- and person-triggered split ergativity as resulting from changes in clausal structure. It's assumed that structural cases are assigned configurationally (i.e., case follows from the specific syntactic position of an argument). The portion of the chapter on aspectual splits in ergativity makes sense to me, but I'm struggling with the section in which the authors describe how &quot;specificity&quot; affects configurational case assignment in nominative-accusative languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this section, they explain that in Sakha (Turkic), specific objects move out of the VP and receive accusative case, while non-specific objects stay within the VP and are 'bled' from accusative case (example uploaded below). They state that this is because the accusative case is assigned configurationally, and it can only be assigned in a position local to the subject and outside of the VP. This explains why the specific object in (12a) receives accusative case while the non-specific object in (12b) does not. (The -*(y) in (12a) indicates that it's ungrammatical to ommit the accusative suffix &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt;, it took me a few minutes to figure out what that was trying to communicate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6JOyi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6JOyi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sakha accusative case assignment specific vs. non-specific objects&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense to me, if it's true that accusative case is assigned somewhere outside of the VP. However, this is not an idea that I have ever encountered before. I'm aware of nominative case being assigned configurationally in Spec,TP, but I had always learned in my syntax classes that accusative case was configurationally assigned &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the VP (in its complement). But the authors seem to be suggesting just the opposite: (12a) is assigned accusative case precisely because it is outside of the VP, while (12b) cannot be assigned accusative case because it still within the VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, assuming a configurational theory of case (since that's what the authors I'm trying to understand have assumed), where is accusative case actually assigned? I had always assumed it was assigned by the Vº, but that can't be consistent with what the authors are saying here, unless I'm interpreting their work incorrectly (which is perfectly possible, I'm still an undergraduate). Any clarification would be much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The specific term the authors use to describe this accusative is 'dependent accusative'. Is a 'dependent accusative' different from other types of accusative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22938" LastEditorUserId="22938" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T20:55:36.807" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T21:24:59.990" Title="Configurational assignment of accusative case?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;ergativity&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;morphosyntactic-alignment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29675" CreationDate="2018-10-20T20:36:32.280" Score="5" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Huh&quot;, or some variant of it, is universal.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://huh.ideophone.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://huh.ideophone.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, I see no word for forming a question in the list of semantic primes. There's &quot;when/time&quot;, &quot;where/place&quot;, but no &quot;huh&quot; or &quot;what&quot;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone addressed how to form questions with semantic primes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T23:00:07.523" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T11:10:43.733" Title="No Semantic Prime For Forming A Question?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;questions&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29370" CreationDate="2018-10-20T21:13:23.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compared to Wierzbicka, Talmy's notions are more general and more variable due to being contingent on cognitive perception. For example, in the sentence, &quot;The bike is near the house&quot;, &quot;bike&quot; would likely be the Figure and &quot;house&quot; would likely be the Ground. That's because you're likely to perceive the bike's position in relation to the house, rather than vice versa. In contrast, Wierzbicka's semantic primes cover concepts that are universal across languages. The English concept of &quot;move&quot; as in &quot;change position&quot; is found in all languages. These concepts are quite specific, and they aren't going to vary much, if at all, in terms of perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:13:23.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29462" CreationDate="2018-10-20T21:30:15.130" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I would like to learn how to construct a grammar from scratch. In order to do this the first step is collecting data, primarily texts, and compiling a dictionary. I think this can be simulated for a language like Xhosa by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://xh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphepha_Elingundoqo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xhosa Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; as the corpus, and then we already have the phonology and orthography spelled out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The only other resource missing is the definition of the words, like you would get from field recordings by having the speaker show you things and whatnot. We can simulate this by going to Google Translate and getting the translation of some words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now without referencing any other external resources, especially any grammars, I would like to simulate what a linguist sort of does and figure out the grammar of the language. As if I was out in the Amazon and just got back from recording a bunch of speakers, and transcribed it into an orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what you do at a high level. How to go about figuring out the grammar. From my understand this means basically figuring out the &quot;morphosyntax&quot;, which means the morphology, or word structure, and syntax, or basically sentence structure. So figuring out verb and noun classes, prefixes and suffixes, and patterns and irregularities and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wondering what that takes. How to begin. I would just like to get a sense of what it takes and how to do it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://udel.edu/~pcole/fieldmethods2010/CatchingLanguageFelixKAmekaAlanCharlesDenchNicholasEvans2006book/Grammaticography-%20The%20art%20and%20craft%20of%20writing%20%20grammars%20%20Ulrike%20Mosel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; suggests a 500-800 page reference grammar takes ~5-10 years to complete, so I don't plan on doing anything like that. But I would like to know better what you do to at least figure out the patterns in the language, I am not much interested atm in actually writing a grammar. I am more interested in the techniques used to figure out the patterns in the language. About as rich as my understanding goes so far is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;get dictionary of words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify patterns in words&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify affixes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify word classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify patterns in sentences&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look for orderings of word classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;identify sentence templates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a lot of parts seem to be missing there, as it's still unclear what exactly doing that stuff would look like at a high level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T23:36:21.483" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T16:00:37.947" Title="How to construct a grammar given a text and a dictionary" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29405" CreationDate="2018-10-20T21:45:01.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found what I was looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/ai/ambiguity.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/ai/ambiguity.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T21:45:01.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29455" CreationDate="2018-10-20T22:49:10.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the sound change &lt;em&gt;t→ð/V_V&lt;/em&gt; is common enough that we can make claims about what is the normal development of the change. I also think that the question of pre-existing contrasts matters. For example, in a number of languages in and around the Niger Delta (Efik, for example), final voiceless stops lenite to [β r γ] between vowels: but /β r γ/ are not underlying phonemes in these languages. Moreover, there is no contrast between voiced and voiceless obstruents finally (underlyingly or on the surface), although the languages do otherwise contrast voicing in obstruents. In this case, since the outcome for the coronal consonant is [r] and not [ð], you may wish to exclude such examples. Numic languages (Shoshoni, Paiute, Comanche) tend to have intervocalic lenition, and the output is usually or always a voiced spirant, and this results in &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in Shoshoni and &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in Southern Paiute. Again, this is an allophonic process (possibly neutralizing in light of modern loans), so there is no contrasting /θ, d, ð/ that earlier &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; merges with. One possibility is that &lt;em&gt;t→ð&lt;/em&gt; does not arise when there is a contrasting /d,θ,ð/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can rule out such a strong statement, since there are languages that contrast voicing and spirantize voiced and voiceless stops. Florentine Italian is reported to have lenition where &lt;em&gt;p t k&lt;/em&gt; become voiceless fricatives or frictionless approximants (and &lt;em&gt;b d g&lt;/em&gt; likewise becomes voiced fricatives / approximants), but these are non-neutralizing (i.e. there is no underlying &lt;em&gt;φ θ β ð&lt;/em&gt;). Berber also lenites stops, &lt;em&gt;t→θ&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;d→ð&lt;/em&gt;. In both cases, the output is an allophone of a stop. The situation with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/homes/patrick/livlen.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liverpool English&lt;/a&gt; on this point is unclear to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trimming out intermediate processes, there are three plausible paths for getting this change. (1) &lt;em&gt;t→θ,θ→ð&lt;/em&gt;; (2) &lt;em&gt;t→d,d→ð&lt;/em&gt;; (3) &lt;em&gt;t→ð&lt;/em&gt; (one step). There is an account of such lenitions where the sound change is simply shortening of the intervocalic consonant, which results in a &quot;quick fricative&quot; plus passive voicing (see Kirchner &lt;em&gt;Effort-based approach to consonant lenition&lt;/em&gt;). You might rule out (1) and (2) in a particular instance if the change did not carry along the hypothesized intermediate output, if it existed as a phoneme. For instance, if you have Ursprache &lt;em&gt;t,θ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;t→ð&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; did not also become &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt;, we could rule out (1) in that language. It may not be an accident that &lt;em&gt;t→ð&lt;/em&gt; doesn't arise in languages with &lt;em&gt;d,θ,ð&lt;/em&gt;. The shortening theory depends on there being no &quot;need&quot; to distinguish &lt;em&gt;t̆&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;d,ð,θ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T22:49:10.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29459" CreationDate="2018-10-20T23:17:20.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a first step, I propose that you cannot do both: &quot;I would like to simulate what a linguist sort of does and figure out the grammar of the language&quot;, and &quot;construct a grammar given (only) a corpus&quot;. Instead, I suggest you have to do two things, in this order: (1) Understand how a linguist figures out the grammar of a language and (2) Understand how a linguist figures out the grammar of a language with suboptimal data. The second task presupposes the ability to do the first thing, and just makes the job much harder. It is possible that you absolutely could not figure out the grammar of the language, for example if you only have reams of monolingual text and no or little clue what they are about. If you pick the right language and only impose the condition &quot;I won't work with a native speaker of the language&quot;, then you might well be able to do it (for example, Whitney did not elicit data from a native speaker of Sanskrit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Xhosa, it is maybe a little too easy: gather up all of the descriptive material on the language, and read it. There are already reference grammars of the language and copious sources. The same goes for Zulu, Sotho, Tswana – but not Khoekhoe or Lushootseed.  For Xhosa (or any other language with a decent grammatical tradition), the conclusions are already systematized, so that you would be told what the phonemes are, what a noun class is, and what the noun class markers are. In live field work, you discover these facts somehow (a book could and probably should be written on that topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps then a compromise would be to rely only on texts and their translations, and not grammars. A dictionary of Xhosa already contains a certain amount of grammatical information, for example it analyzes verbs down to roots (which never appear as such), and it will encode information about what kind of word &lt;em&gt;indoda&lt;/em&gt; is (not just a noun, but its noun class). You might be able to reconstruct the grammar if you have sentences containing &lt;em&gt;indoda&lt;/em&gt; where you notice that those sentences also contain the word &quot;man&quot; in the English version, and other sentences contain &lt;em&gt;amadoda&lt;/em&gt; and the English word &quot;men&quot;. This is actually a somewhat standard exercise in introductory linguistics classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assembling the corpus and corresponding English translation would be the biggest impediment. &lt;em&gt;DO NOT USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE&lt;/em&gt;, unless you only want to learn how Google Translate works (or not) and don't care about the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the premise that your only materials are a text and an English translation, you could start today with a Bible translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ekuqaleni, kungekadalwa, wayeselekho uLizwi. ULizwi lo wayekunye&#xA;  noThixo, naye ngokwakhe enguThixo ≈ In the beginning was the Word, and&#xA;  the Word was with God, and the Word was God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not calling on any other resources, I look for recurring pieces and correlations between the two texts, eventually (based on more text) concluding that uLizwi or ULizwi means either &quot;God&quot; or &quot;Word&quot;, and noThixo or enguThixo means the other thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next verse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yena wayekunye noThixo kwasekuqalekeni. ≈ He was with God in the&#xA;  beginning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;makes me believe that noThixo or enguThixo means &quot;God&quot;. Expanding the search a lot more, I figure out that the choice between uLizwi and ULizwi is conditioned by syntactic position (the first letter of any sentence is capitalized). elsewhere I encounter the forms UThixo which correlates with the English &quot;(sent) from God&quot;, and bakaThixo correlating to English &quot;children of God&quot;. This continues for weeks of analysis, and based on examples like uYohane, uKrestu, uMoya I discover a rule that you prefix &lt;em&gt;u-&lt;/em&gt; to a proper name. Ultimately I have a first pass parsing of the text that has resulted in some factual generalizations, and this leads me to question whether my analysis A is correct, or perhaps B works as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem is that my analysis B could predict the possibility of a form &lt;em&gt;lekaThiko&lt;/em&gt;, but the fact that I don't encounter the form in the corpus does not mean that the form does not exist in the language. I will also never be actually correct w.r.t. the actual language, since (unbeknownst to me) the spelling system omits contrastive features of pronunciation (tone). But you could at least use this method to gain some insight into the structure of the language. The bonus is that at the end of the project, you can check existing linguistic research to see how close you came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T16:00:37.947" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T16:00:37.947" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29447" CreationDate="2018-10-21T00:40:31.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;English future tense is a separate word, as in &quot;he &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; be here&quot;. English only distinguishes past/non-past with morphology; all other TAM distinctions use auxiliaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin also lacks certain tenses in its morphology, and uses &lt;em&gt;periphrasis&lt;/em&gt; (sequences of multiple words) to fill in the gaps. In these cases, the tense distinctions are marked with auxiliaries: &lt;em&gt;locūtus sum&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I spoke&quot;, &lt;em&gt;locūtus eram&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I had spoken&quot;, &lt;em&gt;locūtus erō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I will be speaking&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, using auxiliaries to express tense distinctions isn't rare—you see it in many European languages, but also in e.g. Bantu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For plurals, look at Mandarin. What exactly counts as a &quot;word&quot; in Mandarin (and, honestly, in general) is up for debate, but their plural marker 们 &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; is often considered separate. For example 我 &lt;em&gt;wǒ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;me&quot; → 我们 &lt;em&gt;wǒ men&lt;/em&gt; &quot;us&quot;, 朋友 &lt;em&gt;péng you&lt;/em&gt; &quot;friend&quot; → 朋友们 &lt;em&gt;péng you mén&lt;/em&gt; &quot;friends&quot;. Mandarin in general doesn't use pluralization much—&lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; is only usable with a certain class of words, and can always be left off if you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T00:40:31.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29465" CreationDate="2018-10-21T02:30:02.670" Score="-1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what a good example language is where, when you combine &quot;prefixes&quot; or &quot;suffixes&quot; to a base, it (a) changes the phonetic form of the word in certain places, and (b) this specific pattern only applies to a few instances of verbs, which means (c) that there are lots of patterns for verbs (or nouns or other word classes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about orthography, in which case maybe French would be a good example candidate. I am specifically talking about phonetically, which could result in orthographic changes too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for asking is because in coming from a language like Spanish, you get the sense that all these verbs were constructed in advance with the goal of creating this &quot;uniform&quot; system or pattern that all verbs follow. There are 6 slots to fill in with different values. Then with nouns there are the two genders with &lt;code&gt;o&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; in a lot of cases. In Spanish there are the &lt;code&gt;-ar&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;-er&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;-ir&lt;/code&gt; verbs, with a few irregular ones here and there. But the pattern applies to a lot of verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I am not too sure how natural this is, i.e. how often it would evolve into a system like this. The first grammar I looked at didn't follow this pattern and instead it was as if there were 50 different verb patterns that each applied to only 20 or so verbs max. That's what I mean by &quot;lots of agglutination/fusion/inflection without a lot of regularity&quot;, there aren't really patterns that apply across broad swaths of word classes. Instead there are just many small patterns that apply to a few things, it seems because they are tailoring the phonology differently in each case, as one reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T18:01:12.153" Title="Example of language with lots of agglutination/fusion/inflection without a lot of regularity" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29464" CreationDate="2018-10-21T04:12:43.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at verbs in Ancient Greek, the older the better (since it regularized over time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, affixes on the stem indicate tense, voice, and mood. For example, &lt;em&gt;e-le-ly-k-ei&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;he had released it&quot;: I'd gloss it as &lt;code&gt;PAST-PERF-release-ACT-3P.SG&lt;/code&gt;. Except it's not quite this straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are multiple affixes with the same meaning, and the choice of which to use is unpredictable and different verbs do different things…and &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; one verb will use both, with very slightly different meanings. Sometimes there will be two entirely different patterns: the &quot;first aorist&quot; and &quot;second aorist&quot; are different ways of marking the same tense-aspect combination, which not only use different sets of affixes, but change which set of affixes the person and number marking can use. Many verbs are &quot;defective&quot; (missing certain forms). Some verbs mark the present tense explicitly with an infix, while for others the present tense has a null affix. And so on and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, these verbs are learned with a list of six &quot;principal parts&quot;, which can be used to construct all the other forms. Each tense-aspect-mood combination is learned on its own as a single &quot;tense&quot;, since the individual affixes often aren't interchangeable between them: the present aorist and past aorist take totally different person-number suffixes, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, this system regularized out. Latin developed in a slightly different direction but you can basically see it as a later stage in the regularization process, putting most verbs into four fairly-regular conjugation patterns and requiring fewer principal parts. But those principal parts are still necessary to know, for instance, whether the past aoristic is formed with &lt;code&gt;-s-&lt;/code&gt;, with &lt;code&gt;-v-&lt;/code&gt;, with reduplication, or by some other means—you can't always predict this without knowing the specific verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish has gone further and reduced these four to three, as you mention, with no principal parts required—the stem and the conjugation pattern are all you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T18:01:12.153" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T18:01:12.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-21T09:06:47.783" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Peter sang a song to Julie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the verb &quot;sang&quot; selects the preposition, but to Julie is optional. And if we apply it to an X' Schema, how shall we do it? To Julie is the dependent of sang a song? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22957" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T22:08:06.950" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T22:08:06.950" Title="&quot;Peter sang a song to Julie&quot;, Is &quot;to Julie&quot; is an adjunct or complement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;adjuncts&gt;&lt;complement&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20323" CreationDate="2018-10-21T15:38:39.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only language to preserve both is Sanskrit: &lt;em&gt;dáśa-&lt;/em&gt; 'ten' ~ &lt;em&gt;daśát&lt;/em&gt;- f. 'a set of ten; decade'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar form is Lith. &lt;em&gt;dešimtìs&lt;/em&gt; which reflects a Balto-Slavic consonant stem, as shown by gen.pl. &lt;em&gt;dešimtų̃&lt;/em&gt;, gen.sg. &lt;em&gt;dešimtès&lt;/em&gt;, dat.sg. &lt;em&gt;dešimti&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ponas … pasirodo dešimti savo apaštalams.&lt;/em&gt; 'The lord appeared to his ten apostles.' (Bretke, Postilla II, 35)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the OLith. and dial. indeclinable form &lt;em&gt;dešim̃s&lt;/em&gt; probably represents a fossilized nom.sg. *deḱm-t-s. The Lith. form is therefore identical to the Sanskrit one. The same formation is found in Old Prussian &lt;em&gt;dessimpts&lt;/em&gt; (II) 'ten'. Standard Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;dẽšimt&lt;/em&gt; could be from *deḱm with -t- on the basis of this form (dial. &lt;em&gt;dešim̃&lt;/em&gt; 'ten' is actually attested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gm. *tehun has restored -n- on the basis of ordinal *tehunþas. PIE *deḱm should have given *tehu with a lost *-m, a Verner variant of which, *tegu is preserved in the suffix fif-&lt;em&gt;ty&lt;/em&gt;, OE -&lt;em&gt;tig&lt;/em&gt;, OHG -&lt;em&gt;zig&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that IE *deḱm was an indeclinable numeral like *penkʷe, *sueḱs, etc., while *deḱm-t- was a derived feminine t-stem, possibly meaning 'a group or set of ten', cf. the Sanskrit meaning, which developed into a cardinal number in Baltic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The t-suffix is also found in the decades, cf. *penkʷe-dḱomt- &gt; Skt. pañcāśát- f., Gr. πεντήκοντα 'fifty'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any cases where a t-suffix has a collective function, however the function of the suffix here is rather nominalizing, i.e. *deḱm 'ten' vs *deḱmts 'a ten'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22959" LastEditorUserId="22959" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T20:39:49.963" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T20:39:49.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4673" CreationDate="2018-10-21T21:35:27.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word for 'wasp' does not require a laryngeal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle Persian &lt;em&gt;wpz&lt;/em&gt;, Lat. &lt;em&gt;vespa&lt;/em&gt;, Welsh &lt;em&gt;gwychi&lt;/em&gt;, Old English &lt;em&gt;wæfs&lt;/em&gt;, Lith. dial. &lt;em&gt;vapsà&lt;/em&gt;, Russian &lt;em&gt;osá&lt;/em&gt; are all compatible with *uobʰs-h₂-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason to reconstruct a laryngeal is if you assume the word is derived from 'to weave' (seeing wasps as 'weavers' of their nests), but this is not evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word for 'weave': The evidence for a *h₁ in this word the Mycenean future participle &lt;em&gt;e-we-pe-se-so-me-na&lt;/em&gt; 'that must be woven', attested once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pa-we-a₂ e-we-pe-se-so-me-na  WOOL  20 'twenty woolen cloaks to be woven'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative interpretation as 'to be well boiled' is highly improbable (see Beekes 1969: 67).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence for *h₂/₃ is presumably the connection with Hitt. &lt;em&gt;huppai-zi&lt;/em&gt; 'to blend', however this is not possible due to the fortis -&lt;em&gt;pp&lt;/em&gt;- in Hittite, which implies IE *p, and the semantics are not that strong, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once again, this is only relevant if wasps were seen as 'weavers', which is rather a speculative conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22959" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T21:35:27.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T00:46:32.147" Score="1" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is it different from a loanword? One example given was &lt;em&gt;mitkind&lt;/em&gt; created on stimulus of English sibling. Does this mean &lt;em&gt;mitkind&lt;/em&gt; is a new word but with a foreign sense? Is there such thing as loaning a sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22964" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T09:05:42.620" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T09:05:42.620" Title="What is a loan creation?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T01:49:27.237" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Core Syntax by Adger and there is an exercise to analyze the following data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The dragons were slain all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*The Greeks arrived all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know the phenomena of floating quantifiers comes from quantifiers being stranded after movement from the specifier of the vP to the specifier of the TP. Yet I don't understand how to show that the above sentences are ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22965" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T01:49:27.237" Title="Misunderstanding quantifier floats" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29474" CreationDate="2018-10-22T05:09:23.893" Score="3" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to better understand the meaning of the concept of &quot;words&quot;, I'm wondering if signed language has the concept of words, or if not, what their concept is for the &quot;signs&quot; they create (maybe they are just called signs instead of words, or &quot;symbols&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also would be interested to know what their equivalent of sentences are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T08:54:47.747" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T11:20:06.557" Title="Do sign languages have words?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29473" CreationDate="2018-10-22T08:42:03.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wondering if sign language has the concept of words,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of &quot;wordhood&quot; is fluid enough that we can make either of the following claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a sign is equivalent to a word&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a sign translates to a word, or a word translates to a sign (so then a word would be something that doesn't directly apply to sign languages)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a word consists of signs&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a sign consists of words&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these notions are mutually exclusive, some are not. But, (and this goes for under-researched languages generally), importantly, what we're lacking is a precise definition of &quot;word&quot;. And a precise definition of &quot;sign&quot; is lacking too. (that's not a shortcoming of your question, mind you!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what their concept is for the &quot;signs&quot; they create (maybe they are just called signs instead of words, or &quot;symbols&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the English word &quot;champion&quot;. In Chinese, that's 擁護者, which is a verb, 擁護, and an agentive suffix 者. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ASL that's two signs, &lt;code&gt;champion&lt;/code&gt; and an agentive suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hang on, is it two signs? Well it's two morphemes, &lt;sub&gt;just like that Chinese word,&lt;/sub&gt; and it's certainly two syllables, but we could easily say it's one word because agentive suffix can't stand on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the English word &lt;code&gt;interrogate&lt;/code&gt;. In Czech, that's &quot;vyslýchat&quot;, and that's three morphemes. &quot;vy-&quot; means &quot;out&quot; (here in the sense of &quot;extract&quot;, &quot;-slých-&quot; is to do with listening, and &quot;-at&quot; is infinitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could render that in ASL as &lt;code&gt;ask ask ask ask ask ask ask ask&lt;/code&gt; (I'm being serious!).&#xA;That's definitely one word, and I suppose it's one sign as well, just reduplicated, alternating between left hand and right hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the English phrase &quot;to get on a bicycle&quot;. In ASL, that might be &lt;code&gt;bicycle get-onto-an-upright-vehicle&lt;/code&gt;. You could say that's two words, with the first one being &quot;bicycle&quot;, and the second one being &quot;getting onto an upright vehicle&quot;. But that second word/sign could be broken down further: The upright vehicle is a classifier (do this with your left hand) and getting on is a verb (do this with your right hand). And that's not the end of it: with your face you'll usually be indicating a tense or nominalisational morpheme, and you could be showing a perspective with your shoulders as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just want to know if people who speak sign language actually use the terminology &quot;word&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only sometimes, and only loosely. And only hesitatingly, because &quot;word&quot; is a term which applies more readily to a typographical word (one which has letters in a row, and usually a space on either side). So not really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So I hope I have shown you:&lt;/strong&gt; signs are not words, nor are words signs. They don't translate directly to each other. But at least some of this is because we have a hard time pinning down exactly what a word or sign is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also would be interested to know what their equivalent of sentences are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is much easier to answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence (as a discourse unit) is the same thing in all kinds of languages, spoken or signed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In defining sentence as discourse unit, I'm including utterances like &quot;well yeah...&quot; and &quot;hey! hey you!&quot; and &quot;why did the chicken cross the road?&quot; Sign languages have exactly the same thing, and they are easily called sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T11:20:06.557" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T11:20:06.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T09:36:13.020" Score="1" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the most prototypical exemplars of bird is &lt;code&gt;robin&lt;/code&gt;, the least ones are &lt;code&gt;ostrich&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;penguin&lt;/code&gt;. But since it rejects the classical theory (aka the necessary and sufficient conditions), I think it should talk about conditions instead of exemplars to avoid comparing apple with orange. So for example, &lt;code&gt;fly&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;animal&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;eating worm&lt;/code&gt; are the most prototypical conditions, and &lt;code&gt;running fast&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;living in Antarctica&lt;/code&gt; are less prototypical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why doesn't the prototype theory talk about features? I agree that the theory is meant to describe the reality that regular thinking isn't about features or boundaries, but being able to discuss with features is also convenient as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advantages of using features can be seen in polysemy, meaning shift, or metaphor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In polysemy there is a basic sense that is frequently used than others. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEWTCzK_hUU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A course in Cognitive Linguistics: Polysemy&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 1980s, most people in the United States would consider a &quot;family&quot; consisted a legally married heterosexual couple and a child. Without a child they are just a couple, and without a legally marriage they just cohabit. Now the definition/understanding/perception/attitude is more flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When we say an argument is like a war, we don't think much about typical arguments, but about features of &lt;code&gt;argument&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;war&lt;/code&gt;. Only with features that we can map from the source domain to the target; a list of exemplars of argument is hard to map to a list of exemplars of war. Comparing a fiery debate between John and Mary with World War 2 sounds odd.&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fF6BY.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T04:41:11.713" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T04:41:11.713" Title="What is the view of prototype theory regarding features?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;prototype-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29438" CreationDate="2018-10-22T11:10:46.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a speaker of Mandarin Chinese, one of the most commonly studied and taught tonal languages with non-level tones, I can give you a few native intuitions as well as pedagogy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So lets define a few terms and clarify a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) A tone is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a set frequency level (pitch, to musicians). A frequency is a physically measurable, quantifiable property of sound. A tone is something perceived by the listener within the system of the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) A tone is a &lt;em&gt;pattern&lt;/em&gt; across the frequencies. This is especially true if the tone is non-level. But this isn't as exotic as it sounds; vowels in general are patterns of frequencies too. The vowel equivalent of a non-level tone is a diphthong (if we want to get technical, the frequency formants change as the vowel shifts from one position to another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Most people do not consciously think about what tone they are using, just as most people do not consciously think about whether they are using a closed vowel in the word &lt;code&gt;LOT&lt;/code&gt; or an open vowel in the word. Pragmatics and semantics are more likely than phonology to be in the forefront of a speaker's mind when they are speaking, although it is possible (accent and intonation can be sociolinguistic markers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;em&gt;Relative frequency perception&lt;/em&gt; is a thing. Men have lower voices than women on average. Children have higher voices than adults on average. Nobody says Mandarin tone 1 = 444 Hz. So listeners adjust what their perceptions are based on what the speaker is producing. However, this is not exclusive to tonal languages: non-tonal language listeners use the same pitch information from the speaker when processing intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Chinese varieties have &lt;em&gt;contour tones&lt;/em&gt;, where the tone patterns are different from each other. Mandarin is an extreme version, where every single tone of the four is a different shape to the other (in practice though, tone 3 is usually low level or low falling in actual speech rather than the canonical falling-rising, and there is also tone neutralisation). Cantonese has more &lt;em&gt;register tones&lt;/em&gt;, with a low level, mid level and high level, as well as contour tones in addition to that. Yoruba on the other hand is primarily composed of register tones: high, low and mid, and any perceived rises or falls are allophonic variations of these register tones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean for your question? It means that people &lt;em&gt;just learn it&lt;/em&gt; depending on the system. Natives simply have to learn it through exposure. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5581918/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speaking practice&lt;/a&gt; helps native children (in HK Cantonese at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention tones going 5-4, 4-3, 3-2. If you are referring to several phonemic tones, this sounds like several slightly falling tones, which sounds to me like a very difficult set of contrasts for the listener to perceive. I don't personally know any language like this (Fuqing dialect probably closest, although it has more contrasts on top), but I don't see anything mechanically difficult with producing several falling tones like these (a high falling, mid-falling, mid-low falling). After all, just as an /a/ feels different in the mouth to an /i/, a high falling feels different in the throat to a low falling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T11:10:46.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29471" CreationDate="2018-10-22T12:58:41.327" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original German term was &lt;em&gt;Lehnschöpfung&lt;/em&gt; that was calqued into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three beasts to distinguish here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The loan word (German &lt;em&gt;Lehnwort&lt;/em&gt;) that is directly borrowed from the donor language with minor adaptions to the target language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The calque (German &lt;em&gt;Lehnübersetzung&lt;/em&gt;) that is formed from morphemes in the target language following a model in the donor language (example: German Aus-stellung from Latin ex-positio)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The loan creation (German &lt;em&gt;Lehnschöpfung&lt;/em&gt;) is a new word in the target language filling a perceived semantic gap triggered by a donor language. The way that word is formed has no relation to the donor language. Yiddish &lt;em&gt;mitkind&lt;/em&gt; is a great example, other classical examples are newly introduced religious terminology after the adoption of a new religion (typically Christianity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. A really well written and even more detailed answer can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Concerning-German-linguistic-terminology-what-are-the-differences-and-relations-among-Entlehnung-Lehnpr%C3%A4gung-Lehnbedeutung-Lehnbildung-Lehn%C3%BCbersetzung-Lehn%C3%BCbertragung-Lehnsch%C3%B6pfung-and-Scheinentlehnung&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Concerning-German-linguistic-terminology-what-are-the-differences-and-relations-among-Entlehnung-Lehnpr%C3%A4gung-Lehnbedeutung-Lehnbildung-Lehn%C3%BCbersetzung-Lehn%C3%BCbertragung-Lehnsch%C3%B6pfung-and-Scheinentlehnung&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T14:00:26.413" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T14:00:26.413" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29448" CreationDate="2018-10-22T13:16:46.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually there is something interesting with &quot;same&quot;. In Old English, it was (almost?) invariably part of the construction &lt;code&gt;swa sama&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;in the same way&quot;. It has thus always been &quot;bound&quot; to something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its use after the definite article &quot;the&quot; or the determiners &quot;this&quot; or &quot;that&quot; moved &lt;code&gt;same&lt;/code&gt; into the environment of Old English &lt;code&gt;self&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ilca&lt;/code&gt;, as &quot;intensifiers&quot; by the time of Middle English: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;the same&lt;/strong&gt; Salomon seith that ‘he that travailleth and bisieth hym to tilien his land shal eten breed...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And that same Salomon said that ‘he who works and keeps himself busy to work his land will eat bread...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Melibee&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, G. Chaucer (~1400)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can even find examples of &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;ilca&lt;/code&gt; having coalesced into one new determiner, and have &lt;code&gt;same&lt;/code&gt; after it. Hence the following remark of Bremark (2010) concerning Middle English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In these examples, &lt;em&gt;the same&lt;/em&gt; is as a unit used as a sort of personal pronoun signalling anaphoric relations of identity within the text, equivalent to the endophoric uses of &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;, and to a lesser extent &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T13:16:46.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T13:17:12.230" Score="3" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the theoretical reasons for treating the preposition as the head of a prepositional phrase? (Noun as head of NP sounds fine intuitively, but the same does not apply to prepositions in prepositional phrases. I have never seen a theoretical justification for this treatment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22971" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T06:50:05.093" Title="Why is the preposition treated as the head of a prepositional phrase?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T15:22:38.523" Score="2" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and WALS, as well as Wikipedia, treat both English prepositions and Japanese postpositions (particles) as belonging to 'adpositions' (although CGEL prefers to avoid the word 'adposition'). This seems curious because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the functions of Japanese postpositions resemble those of cases rather than prepositions,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;European languages that have prepositions often use them &lt;em&gt;in conjunction with cases&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. German zu + dative), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prepositions in English are not used solely as 'adpositions'; they can also function as adverbs and particles ('up the river', 'go up', 'it was up', 'drink up'), which are unthinkable for Japanese postpositions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22971" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T04:42:12.620" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T04:42:12.620" Title="Should Japanese postpositions be treated as belonging to the same category as English prepositions?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;adpositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29481" CreationDate="2018-10-22T16:14:35.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how the question can be answered, without some additional theoretical context. The main problem is that &quot;the same category&quot; sort of suggests a theory of unique categorization of morphemes. If you had asked &quot;is there &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; conceivable category of linguistic units that includes English prepositions and Japanese postpositions&quot;, the answer would be an easy &quot;yes&quot;. Instead, it sounds like you have in mind a specific theory of categories, without saying what the defining factor is (for example, various syntactic relation versus certain kinds of functions). Defined in terms of word order, the two sets are clearly different categories (though this consideration is irrelevant for a theory that speaks of &quot;adpositions&quot;, a deliberately order-independent term). However, they might be &quot;the same&quot; in some syntactic theory, as a non-head (modifier, complement or some such term). They might be &quot;the same&quot; in one sense, and &quot;different&quot; in another (for example, the syntactic structure might be the same, by some metric, but the semantic function might be different, by some other metric).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A narrower question would be &quot;is the English word &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the same category as Japanese &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; (whatever word you want to put in there)&quot;. Even narrowing the scope of the English word to pre-NP uses, is &quot;just&quot; a different POS from &quot;with&quot;? That is, how do you justify unifying two morphemes under a single type, in one language? Then, are types the same across all languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T16:14:35.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29486" CreationDate="2018-10-22T16:35:09.817" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A man loves Mary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lambda notation of the determiner '&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;' is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;λY.λX.∃z.Y(z)∧X(z)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the general determiner 'a'? Is the lambda notation the same? or it should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;λX.∃z.X(z)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22975" LastEditorUserId="22975" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T16:49:20.493" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T17:10:42.483" Title="The determiner &quot;a&quot; in lambda form" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29485" CreationDate="2018-10-22T17:01:19.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &quot;a&quot; is an ambiguous reduced form derived from either (any) or (some). Thus &quot;A man loves Mary&quot; could be from either &quot;Any man loves Mary&quot; or &quot;Some man loves Mary&quot;.  Note the ambiguity of &quot;Mary doesn't love a man&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see lambda notation as being germane to the relationship between (some) and (any).  If there are two senses, we'd obviously need two lambda representations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T17:10:42.483" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T17:10:42.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T17:57:33.417" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In machine learning on text data (aka natural language processing), it's common to apply a stemming or lemmatization algorithm to the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes you want to go a step further. For example, these algorithms (e.g. the Snowball stemming or WordNet lemmatization algorithms) will not conflate &lt;code&gt;dentist&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dentistry&lt;/code&gt;. From my limited linguistics/NLP knowledge, this is because they are &lt;em&gt;morphologically&lt;/em&gt; different words, despite being very close etymologically and semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia tells me that the core word &lt;code&gt;dentist&lt;/code&gt; would be a &quot;secondary root&quot; shared between &lt;code&gt;dentist&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dentistry&lt;/code&gt;. Is there an algorithm for finding these secondary roots in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;flash&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;flashy&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;flash&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;wait&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;waiter&lt;/code&gt; -&gt; &lt;code&gt;wait&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am not very knowledgeable in this are, so this could well be an XY problem, or a matter of not knowing the right search terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this was discussed in a few places on Freenode. User dmiles on #nlp offered his own algorithm, which was to strip off common prefixes and suffixes (like &lt;code&gt;-ly&lt;/code&gt;), then match words against a large database of nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, to process &lt;code&gt;electricity&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strip off &lt;code&gt;-ity&lt;/code&gt; to obtain &lt;code&gt;electric&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strip off &lt;code&gt;-ic&lt;/code&gt; to obtain &lt;code&gt;electr&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No more suffixes. Stop.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result, &lt;code&gt;electr&lt;/code&gt;, nicely reflects the Latin &lt;code&gt;electrum&lt;/code&gt; from which it derives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, to process &lt;code&gt;wordy&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strip off &lt;code&gt;-y&lt;/code&gt; to obtain &lt;code&gt;word&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No more suffixes. Stop.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems serviceable in a lot of cases, and can be implemented somewhat efficiently in computer code with the right data structures. But it also seems pretty inelegant, and my linguistics knowledge falls far short of taking care of the many edge cases that are sure to arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;code&gt;premonition&lt;/code&gt; came to English with the &lt;code&gt;pre-&lt;/code&gt; already attached, so stripping it off might be considered an overreach of the algorithm. Whereas &lt;code&gt;prefab&lt;/code&gt; almost certainly should have its &lt;code&gt;pre-&lt;/code&gt; removed, to share a root with &lt;code&gt;fabricate&lt;/code&gt; (remove &lt;code&gt;-ate&lt;/code&gt;, then remove &lt;code&gt;-ic&lt;/code&gt;). You could probably handle this by checking against the database after each suffix-stripping pass, stopping at the longest match. But there might be problems with that method too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tl,dr: one guy on Freenode has an ad-hoc method that works for him (and apparently he's been refining it for decades), but I'd still hope to find something more principled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9177" LastEditorUserId="9177" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T23:00:15.357" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T23:00:15.357" Title="Algorithm for identifying &quot;secondary roots&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29480" CreationDate="2018-10-22T18:02:34.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The head of a phrase ought to affect the category of that phrase.  In turn, we can estimate whether phrases are of different categories by examining facts of verb subcategorization. Paradigms like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   He fell into the hole&#xA;  *He fell the hole.  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suggest that &quot;into the hole&quot; and &quot;the hole&quot; are of different categories, which will be true if the preposition &quot;into&quot; is the head of the complement of &quot;fell&quot;, but not necessarily otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T18:02:34.027" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29493" CreationDate="2018-10-22T22:02:30.290" Score="2" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Motivation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EL&amp;amp;U&lt;/a&gt;, I pretty often encounter the claim, under a question of some usage or other, that certain usages are the consequence of &quot;lazy speakers&quot;, who &quot;would otherwise&quot; use some (fuller, more complex, more difficult to pronounce, longer, whatever) construction, but in order to save effort or energy, they use a (shorter, simpler, elided, contracted, phonetically compressed, whatever) construction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Theorem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I am asking about theories that these (typically) native speakers know what the proper thing to say is, but consciously choose to say something else because it's &quot;easier to pronounce&quot;. This is not attributed to their dialect or sociolect or some other group-level account, but to individual speakers saving energy or effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two recent questions on EL&amp;amp;U where this theory was raised spring to mind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first exchange was under question related to the usage of &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;, where the relevant part of the comment chain between a commentator (&lt;em&gt;C1&lt;/em&gt;) and myself (&lt;em&gt;M&lt;/em&gt;) went:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;C1&lt;/em&gt;] Some say that the virtual demise of &quot;whom&quot; is yet another example of the 'dumbing-down' of the language, and that it's no wonder the French think we're nits (or is it nuts?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;M&lt;/em&gt;] Pretty sure people have been caviling about the &quot;dumbing-down&quot; of English since Chaucer, or before. It's a perennial myth. As for the French, which is more nuts, accepting the world is what it is, or trying to legislate evolution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;C1&lt;/em&gt;] What's evolution got to do with it? &lt;strong&gt;It's lazy speech&lt;/strong&gt;, simple as that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more recent exchange (with a different party, &lt;em&gt;C2&lt;/em&gt;) was under a question by a non-native speaker asking about the idiomaticity of &lt;em&gt;explain me&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;explain &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; me&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;C2&lt;/em&gt;] Consider that &lt;strong&gt;most people are lazy in their speech, but some lazier than others&lt;/strong&gt;. It takes considerable effort to say &quot;Explain to me ...&quot;, but is much easier (and more natural sounding) to say &quot;Explain tuh me ...&quot; From there it's just a short step to &quot;Explain duh me ...&quot; or &quot;Explain t'me ...&quot; The &quot;duh&quot; or &quot;t'&quot; sound is very easy to say and very easy to shorten almost (but not quite) into nonexistence. It's actually harder to say &quot;Explain me&quot; than it is to say &quot;Explain d'me&quot;, so it's rare that the remnants of &quot;to&quot; are completely eliminated, just chopped down to near nothingness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;M&lt;/em&gt;] This concept that there exist &quot;lazy speakers&quot; has apparently gone viral; the pathogen is spreading out of control. People who say &quot;explain me&quot; are not taking shortcuts; they're taking the wrong path, misled by signs in their own language. If there are native speakers who use it in their dialect, it is just that: their dialect. Not &quot;lazy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;C2&lt;/em&gt;] You miss the point. They feel that they are saying &quot;Explain to me&quot;, they're just not making an effort to enunciate clearly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to be clear, I don't find it implausible that this &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; happened at some point in time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am skeptical that &quot;lazy speech&quot; can be used &lt;em&gt;as an account&lt;/em&gt; for a &lt;em&gt;regular pattern&lt;/em&gt; of speech, where the non-native OP can expect to meet, in his life, some meaningful number of native speakers who drop the &quot;to&quot; &lt;em&gt;consistently&lt;/em&gt; because they are &quot;speaking lazily&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, to put it mildly, skeptical of such accounts for usages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct, as a non-linguist, is that if a native speaker uses some pattern at odds with the standard or prestige dialect, it is almost certainly part of their local dialect or sociolect; it's not an individual conscious or unconscious decision to conserve energy or streamline phonotactics: they are simply &lt;em&gt;imitating the speech to which they've been exposed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I don't find it sensible to describe a speaker substituting &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; where &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt; would have been used a decade before they were born as lazy, simply &lt;em&gt;they haven't encountered &quot;whom&quot; in those contexts, so they haven't been trained to use it so&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I off the mark?  What is the general disposition of the linguistic community towards the concept of &quot;lazy speech&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there established linguistic theories which or at least prominent linguists who incorporate &quot;laziness&quot; of individual speakers as a feature? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is &quot;lazy speech&quot; a &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5609" LastEditorUserId="17345" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T09:28:24.087" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T09:28:24.087" Title="Are there established linguistic theories which incorporate the concept of &quot;lazy speech&quot;?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29489" CreationDate="2018-10-22T23:06:03.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, linguists as well as others appeal to laziness in describing many phonetic changes in conversational speech.  Very often, however, laziness is not a sufficient explanation, for there is an element of conventionality connected with the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree (if I understand you) that the loss of the word &quot;to&quot; in &quot;explain to&quot; would not likely result from the loss of the &quot;t&quot; due to laziness and then the &quot;o&quot;, for the same reason, even though in other examples both those things might happen.  Instead, &quot;explain me that&quot; for &quot;explain that to me&quot; would be interpreted as a syntactic variant, like the loss of &quot;to&quot; after a verb in certain indirect object or benefactive constructions: &quot;explain that to me&quot; -&gt; &quot;explain to me that&quot; -&gt; &quot;explain me that&quot;.  This latter change has nothing to do with phonetic laziness, so far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T23:06:03.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29255" CreationDate="2018-10-22T23:16:59.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removing noise usually corrupts the speech and harms the performance. It is frequently more accurate to decode noisy speech than noise-cleaned speech, in particular because recognizer does noise cleaning or noise compensation by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other cases except speech recognition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/rnnoise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rnnnoise&lt;/a&gt; is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3068" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T23:16:59.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29489" CreationDate="2018-10-23T00:45:31.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving to the side the question of how these so-called &quot;lazy&quot; constructions arise, once they exist in a person's dialect they are free to use them. More than that, they are often expected to be used due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cooperative principle&lt;/a&gt; (also known as the Gricean maxims). Rather than being lazy, the cooperative principle says that in most contexts, and as long as everyone shares the specific dialectal constructions, then everyone benefits through efficient clear speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maxim of manner&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Supermaxim: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Be perspicuous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Submaxims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Avoid obscurity of expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Avoid ambiguity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Be orderly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T00:45:31.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29489" CreationDate="2018-10-23T00:58:57.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never seen any publication in linguistics where a fact about language data is attributed to laziness. There is no linguistic concept of laziness. When a person uses &quot;who&quot; rather than &quot;whom&quot;, &quot;ain't&quot;, or &quot;me&quot; in a conjoined NP (&quot;Me and Bob went swimming&quot;), we do not attribute this to laziness, we attribute this to grammar differences. The closest you will come is that some linguists refer to the concept &quot;ease of articulation&quot;, whereby one might hope to legitimize the judgment of laziness. However, this phenomenon is not about laziness, it is about resolving conflicting requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with &quot;ease of articulation&quot; is that nobody knows what it actually refers to. The most common use of that way of talking about speech pertains to foreign language sounds, for example the Arabic consonant ħ is &quot;hard to pronounce&quot;. This is not technical parlance and would almost certainly (hopefully) get filtered out of serious academic publications, but I bet you can find a number of informal uses of that kind. What it means is, &quot;I have a hard time pronouncing ħ&quot;, which is probably because the person needs more practice, that is, the problem is cognitive and not physiological. There is no measured sense in which Arabic &lt;em&gt;ħ&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; differ in the number of microjoules expended in articulation: ħ is as easy to pronounce as θ, if you know how to pronounce them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are articulatory or aerodynamic scenarios within a language which can conflict with the goal of a certain acoustic output. For example, in pronouncing the word &quot;phonebook&quot;, the tip of the tongue theoretically raises first for &quot;n&quot; and then the lips approximate for &quot;b&quot;. But speaking this way requires deviation from the normal articulatory plan. Consequently, lip closure may actually precede tongue raising, so the word often sounds like &quot;foambook&quot;. Starting to form &quot;b&quot; in the oral cavity at the same time as the &quot;n&quot;, or starting &quot;b&quot; just a little after &quot;n&quot;, makes &quot;n&quot; sound like &quot;m&quot;. You may have to substantially retard the normal rhythm of English speech in order to avoid this articulatory overlap: you have to do something more than you normally do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attributing natural phonetic evolution to &quot;laziness&quot; is a negative value judgment: saying that your neighbor is lazy because he is reading a book rather than cutting the grass means that he chooses to not do the thing that he should do, because it takes less effort to do the other thing. An alternative term that could be applied to an action requiring less effort is &quot;efficient&quot;. Linguists don't (or shouldn't) make value judgments about what form of language people should use, we simply describe what form of language they do use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T00:58:57.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29447" CreationDate="2018-10-23T05:24:22.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cebuano &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tawo&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; man &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;pl&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;mga tawo&lt;/em&gt; (mga + tawo ) or &lt;em&gt;katawhan&lt;/em&gt; (ka- + tawo + -han)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22978" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T05:24:22.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25608" CreationDate="2018-10-23T15:10:51.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My father was born in Puerto Rico, and due to my initial informal education in the language I actually thought it was a hard V sound and spelled it accordingly (saves), and is how my family (and myself) tend to pronounce it to this day. It might be more of a rural thing though, as my father's family comes from a small farm on the coast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T15:10:51.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T17:26:09.610" Score="1" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;English being a great mess of multiple languages such as French and Old Norse, would it be safe to consider the language that came about a creole? Obviously, most would not consider English a Germanic/Romance creole, but my question is how this distinction can be clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between Haitian Creole and Spanish (the Arabic influence) is obvious, yet how about such languages like Maltese and English, that are a mix of multiple languages?&#xA;I also understand the idea of partial-creolization, yet would still like where you draw the metaphorical line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T18:23:49.420" Title="What is the full distinction between creoles and other natural languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T18:06:11.293" Score="4" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;My accent is from New York City, yet I wonder which area has the most or least sounds in their phonemic inventory. While one may have the most vowels and another the most consonants, I would like to hear that as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T15:43:35.530" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T15:43:35.530" Title="Which dialect/accent of English has the most/least sounds?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25608" CreationDate="2018-10-23T18:14:23.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found in the abstract of a presentation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sccur.org/sccur/fall_2016_conference/oral_talks/237/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exford 2016&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Native Spanish speaking college students in San Juan, Puerto Rico that are bilingual in English to some degree are interviewed to perform audio-recorded speaking tasks. Results show that labiodentals are undoubtedly produced for Spanish phoneme /b/, but are done so exclusively for orthographic &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;. On average, grapheme &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced as a labiodental 56% of the time. Grapheme &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; was never pronounced as a labiodental. In addition to orthography, the results speculate that labiodentals are also conditioned by speech style or formality, as labiodental frequency reduced when tasks became more informal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So [v] for /b/ spelled &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; does seem fairly common in Puerto Rican Spanish. The author suggests it may be an effect of hypercorrection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T02:44:25.257" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T02:44:25.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T18:21:55.397" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that in the 90's and early 2000's, expert systems and logical rules dominated the field of natural language processing/computational linguistics, but that for the last 10 years, researchers have increasingly turned to neural/statistical methods.  Is there any significant research still being done in using logic programming languages for real nlp/nlg systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T18:21:55.397" Title="Are there any computational linguists who still use prolog?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29502" CreationDate="2018-10-23T18:23:49.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A creole is usually defined as a specific form of socially-influenced language change, one where a pidgin language was spoken, and it gained sufficiently wide-spread usage to the point that it was acquired as a native language by children. A pidgin language is a simplified communicative system created by two or more adult populations who do not have a language in common. The question, then, is whether a pidgin arose given contact between Saxons and Vikings, or later English speakers and Norman invaders. However, the domain of &quot;creole&quot; is expanded by some linguists (&lt;a href=&quot;http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/pidginCreoleLanguage.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mufwene&lt;/a&gt; for example) to include cases of significant contact induced influence, without the pidginization requirement. So it would really depend on how you define &quot;creole&quot;, and how you distinguish it from other forms of contact-induced language change (such as Arabic influence on Spanish, or English influence on Korean). There is no independent metric of whether a language should be called a creole versus something else. Rather than expanding the definition of creole to include all forms of language contact (leaving us with no distinction between cases like Kituba or Haitian versus Korean), we could leave the definition of creole alone, and construct a different terminological category for Louisiana French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T18:23:49.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29440" CreationDate="2018-10-23T18:50:58.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this here to be the best solution for my problem:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tsproisl/SoMaJo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tsproisl/SoMaJo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I compared it to spaCy and NLTK but SoMaJo was better quality in sentence splitting the german texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22941" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T18:50:58.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11957" CreationDate="2018-10-23T22:25:24.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;GT is SRILM's default. In fact, I think using -addsmooth 0 just gives you default GT smoothing (unfortunately?). To directly use GT discounting, simply include no discounting argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number at the end of the discount argument (-kndiscount1, etc.) is the n-gram order to apply that discounting method to. Using -kndiscount alone tells ngram-count to use it for all orders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Review the manual for more on this command: (speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/manpages/ngram-count.1.html)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="657" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T22:25:24.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29512" CreationDate="2018-10-24T00:30:04.547" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;For years I've understood via my native speaker intuition and my interest in languages and linguistics that the preposition &quot;with&quot; can carry the semantic meaning of the verb &quot;to have&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man who has a big nose walks by.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man with the big nose walks by.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But today I'm bringing up this topic with others and wanted to point them to some material they can read rather than just take my word on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my usually good Google skills are not finding anything at all. Perhaps because the two keywords are just too common and have too many meanings and uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T05:27:04.253" Title="Where can I find an analysis of the semantic overlap of English &quot;to have&quot; and &quot;with&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;possession&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29511" CreationDate="2018-10-24T05:27:04.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My MA thesis in 1967 was about that.  It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.osu.edu/sites/linguistics.osu.edu/files/workingpapers/osu_wpl_01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The English preposition WITH&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T05:27:04.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-24T12:48:58.667" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for basic linguistic properties of Indo-European languages that provide a purely statistical description of the phoneme-aspect of the language. I am looking for any of the following data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phoneme inventory set&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phoneme distribution (per language, per word, per syllable, per syllable-part)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syllable count distribution per word&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phoneme count per syllable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distribution of initial/terminal phonemes or other positional information (i.e. phoneme appears only in coda of syllables)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;transitional probabilities of phonemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accent position distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any such database or other source (book, paper, etc.) that provides comprehensive data on more than one language and in a comparable way?&lt;/strong&gt; Please provide one source per answer and take the time to add a brief description of the capabilities and properties of the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the following sites that do provide a subset of the above statistics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UPSID&lt;/a&gt; (mostly inventories with some very simple distributions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phoible.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHOIBLE&lt;/a&gt; (contains UPSID data)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, that I am strictly interested in the characteristic distributions of phonemes (sounds) and not letters (characters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorUserId="1141" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T10:00:52.783" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T06:57:00.343" Title="Sources on statistics of phonological properties of languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;online-resources&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29513" CreationDate="2018-10-24T15:26:31.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you did not mention it in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS)&lt;/a&gt; contains some of the data you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, you can find information on the size of consonant and vowel inventories, consonant-vowel ratio, the presence or absence of some specific types of consonants, the presence or absence of front rounded vowels, the presence of rare consonants, the absence of common consonants, syllable structure, stress, and tone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T10:14:06.390" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T10:14:06.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29513" CreationDate="2018-10-24T16:56:27.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look to Typological Database System (TDS): &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelink.let.uu.nl/tds/main.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://languagelink.let.uu.nl/tds/main.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T18:10:06.183" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T18:10:06.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29519" CreationDate="2018-10-25T10:13:22.530" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three sets of verbs to point out the location of stress, which are: (&lt;strong&gt;Bold&lt;/strong&gt; implies stress)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;xit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B =&gt; e&lt;strong&gt;xist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C =&gt; im&lt;strong&gt;prove&lt;/strong&gt;, surp&lt;strong&gt;rise&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C - consonant / V - Vowel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this data, the rule between &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; is that if the verb ends with &lt;strong&gt;CVC&lt;/strong&gt; pattern, stress is on the penultimate syllable; if it is &lt;strong&gt;CVCC&lt;/strong&gt; pattern, then the stress is on the last syllable. Further on, for &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;, a rule was given  which is, if the last syllable of a verb (even if it's CVCC) contains a &lt;strong&gt;long vowel&lt;/strong&gt; (tense vowels and diphtongs), stress is placed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how it is so? The vowels may as well become &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; because they're stressed (rule implies that they become stressed because they're long). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22750" LastEditorDisplayName="user22136" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T10:14:03.137" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T10:14:03.137" Title="The rule of location of stress in English verbs" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29518" CreationDate="2018-10-25T10:32:49.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thin you're right to bring up this point. As far as I know, there are alternative ways of looking at the rules for English stress and vowel quality/reduction, and I don't think the matter has been definitively settled yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that hasn't been mentioned in the data that you give (where did you get it from, by the way?) is the apparent relevance of morphological structure: &lt;em&gt;astonish&lt;/em&gt; ends in &lt;em&gt;-ish,&lt;/em&gt; which can be identified as a verb suffix or at least as an ending that shows up on a number of verbs (consider &lt;em&gt;pub-lish, pub-lic; pun-ish, pun-itive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fin-ish, fin-al&lt;/em&gt; for some possible evidence for the existence of &lt;em&gt;-ish&lt;/em&gt; as an identifiable suffix, although none of these are productive patterns), whereas &lt;em&gt;improve, combine, believe, collapse, exist, resent, revolt, insist&lt;/em&gt; all start with prefixes (from an etymological perspective, at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some prefixed disyllabic words, the surface form ends in CVC but the second syllable is still stressed: &lt;em&gt;emit, omit, reset, refit, repel, dispell, compress, impress, redress.&lt;/em&gt; These can be analyzed as having an &quot;underlying&quot; form ending in a &quot;virtual&quot; geminate (see the previous question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17365/english-stress-abstract-analysis?rq=1&quot;&gt;English stress, abstract analysis&lt;/a&gt;), but this makes the situation less simple than the originally stated rule implies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless we adopt a &quot;virtual geminate&quot; hypothesis (or something similar), this class of words would also pose a problem for your alternative hypothesis that &quot;The vowels may as well become long because they're stressed&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One paper you might be interested in reading is &quot;Rethinking English vowel alternation&quot;, by Jonathan B. Alcantara (1994).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T13:18:50.617" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T13:18:50.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29513" CreationDate="2018-10-26T06:57:00.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The arrangement of phonemes within syllables and words, which is what much of your question appears to be about, is known as 'phonotactics'. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World phonotactic database&lt;/a&gt; would therefore be likely to hold some of the answers you're seeking. This database holds phonotactic data for over 4000 languages, so it covers a good proportion (perhaps a majority) of the world's languages. It  is coded for a large set of possible features, which can be browsed across various features by map or statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with this, the previously mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt; database is probably relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T06:57:00.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-27T13:46:56.063" Score="-2" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;English: Mother/mom, Russian: mama, Chinese: ma, Nepalese: (m)ama.&#xA;Is there a language that doesn't have some sort of &quot;ma&quot; for mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear. I am not asking if there is a language that has word for mom that doesn't sound like mom. In English you can say female parent. I am asking if there is a language that doesn't have any form of mom at all for mother. Looking for an answer from a native speaker, not just someone using Google Translate and discovering that the most common way to say mom is say &quot;haha&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: this is not a duplicate. That question asks &quot;why are these words similar&quot; (answer : &quot;because...&quot;). My question asks &quot;which languages have the least similar word&quot; (answer : &quot;Japanese&quot;, though &quot;haha&quot; is still pretty close). Even deda follows the same pattern. Some sort of Pferdeleistung would be a good hit, but this is just horsepower, not mom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23006" LastEditorUserId="23006" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T12:29:24.310" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T12:29:24.310" Title="Are there languages that don't have &quot;mom&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29523" CreationDate="2018-10-27T16:13:31.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are quite a few examples: Japanese &lt;em&gt;haha&lt;/em&gt;, Yoruba &lt;em&gt;iya&lt;/em&gt;, Cebuano &lt;em&gt;inahan&lt;/em&gt;, Uzbeck &lt;em&gt;ona&lt;/em&gt;, Hmong &lt;em&gt;niam&lt;/em&gt;, Turkish &lt;em&gt;anne&lt;/em&gt;, Finnish &lt;em&gt;äiti&lt;/em&gt;, Sundanese &lt;em&gt;indung&lt;/em&gt;, Somali &lt;em&gt;hooyo&lt;/em&gt;, North Saami &lt;em&gt;eadni&lt;/em&gt;. What is not clear in all cases is whether there is also an &quot;informal&quot; endearative word that children use to talk to their mothers. I suspect there isn't in the case of Somali and Saami, but even then infants may well utter &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt; without that being a word of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T16:13:31.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-27T17:05:41.097" Score="2" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do &quot;charm&quot; and &quot;чары&quot; share a common etymological root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB: &quot;чары&quot; is a Russian plural noun meaning &quot;magic&quot; or &quot;charm.&quot; Also note that the English noun &quot;charms&quot; has historically meant magic or enchantment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the OED, &quot;charm&quot; originates (through French) from Latin &lt;em&gt;carmen&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;song&quot;), which is believed to originate from the Proto-Indo-European verb *keh₂n- (&quot;to sing&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And according Wiktionary, &quot;чары&quot; is from &quot;Proto-Slavic *čarъ, from Proto-Balto-Slavic *ker- *kēr-, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷer-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, the similarities in sound and meaning of the two words seems too great to just be a coincidence...does anyone have any other info about their origin and possible etymological links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23001" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T10:26:16.683" Title="Are the English word &quot;charm&quot; and Russian word &quot;чары&quot; etymologically related?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;russian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-27T19:00:50.960" Score="7" ViewCount="2091" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, is &quot;Donald&quot; a morpheme of the English language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see reasons for and against. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows us to say stuff like &quot;a language is a function from sequences of morphemes of it to meanings&quot;. If &quot;Donald&quot; is not a morpheme of English, then how does English assign a meaning to the phrase &quot;Donald Trump is president of the USA&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons against:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is extremely arbitrary. If someone decides to name their kid some name that had never been given before, is it suddenly a new morpheme of English? That seems way too arbitrary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T19:52:30.597" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T22:59:31.503" Title="Are people's names considered morphemes of a language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29526" CreationDate="2018-10-27T19:49:26.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to want to ask whether &quot;Donald&quot; is a lexeme (though Gaston Ümlaut notes that lexemes can also be considered morphemes). There is a category of words that includes names: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proper nouns&lt;/a&gt; (or proper names). Proper names have meaning, and they behave like other English nouns in that you can make them possessive (&lt;em&gt;Donald Trump's presidency&lt;/em&gt;) or even plural (as in Dr. Seuss' story &lt;em&gt;Too Many Daves&lt;/em&gt;). Grammatically, it behaves similarly to other lexemes. However, proper names are usually not included in lexicons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is extremely arbitrary. If someone decides to name their kid some name that had never been given before, is it suddenly a new morpheme of English? That seems way too arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All words are arbitrary, in that there is no relation to the sound of any particular word to what it represents. New words, and also new proper names, are invented all the time. If you decided to invent a new name and put it in a sentence in place of an existing proper name, you would still be understood. Inventing a word or name would indeed add a lexeme to English; but since language is a medium of communication, it only works if it becomes part of the vocabulary of the community of speakers. No individual can change others' language until the others adopt the change. See Saussure on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/courseingenerall00saus/page/70&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immutability and mutability of the sign&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T22:59:31.503" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T22:59:31.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29526" CreationDate="2018-10-27T20:24:40.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your definition of morpheme.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cowgill.ling.yale.edu/sra/morpheme_final.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;S. Anderson&lt;/a&gt; cites an 1880 characterization by Baudoin de Courtenay (Stankiewcicz translation) that a morpheme is &quot;that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reason not further divisible. It consequently subsumes such concepts as the&#xA;root (radix), all possible affixes, (suffixes, prefixes), endings&#xA;which are exponents of syntactic relationships, and the like&quot;. This is different from Bloomfield's definition as &quot;'a linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form' i.e. a form that contains no sub-part that is both phonetically and semantically identical with a part of some other form&quot;. However, in both cases, a root is a morpheme (and a proper name is a root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then is whether there is some way to empirically determine whether a root is in fact a morpheme. This is analogous to trying to determine whether a particular sound is &quot;marked&quot; – how do you determine that one definition is correct and the other is wrong? Indeed, it is not obvious that &quot;morpheme&quot; is a necessary technical concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement in linguistic theory that the set of roots be closed, though they might be in some language. In English, they class &quot;noun&quot; is certainly open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T20:24:40.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-27T22:41:05.973" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emotional responses to certain words is often argued to be a result of nurture(acquired through development), while emotional responses to Tone is largely attributable to nature(born with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't there be words/phrases that universally trigger an emotional response or at-least words/phrases that largely seek to trigger an emotional response in American culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example #1: &quot;That man is 'untrustworthy'.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;emotional response #1: distrust&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example #2:&quot;You are disgusting for stealing candy from a baby&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;emotional response #2: the person being told they are disgusting feels ashamed (or is meant to)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does American culture have words/phrases that trigger feelings like &#xA;(fear, happiness, disgust, or pity)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23012" LastEditorUserId="23012" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T10:53:34.150" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T10:53:34.150" Title="Triggering emotions with language" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29530" CreationDate="2018-10-28T02:55:32.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key is that words and phrases are always learned. If I were talking to someone who spoke no English, the word &quot;untrustworthy&quot; wouldn't mean anything at all to them. People have to learn what the word means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T02:55:32.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-28T13:24:02.353" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;While drawing syntax trees for &lt;em&gt;spoken language&lt;/em&gt; and not ideal languages, how does one handle conjunctions and other particles appearing initially in sentences like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And&lt;/em&gt; that is that. (After a long story)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also&lt;/em&gt;, you must not forget to go to the practice today!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T20:52:30.057" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T20:52:30.057" Title="How does one deal with sentences starting with a connective?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-28T15:54:40.997" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The natural semantic metalanguage gives definitions of common words in terms of semantic primes, as can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/schools-departments/natural-semantic-metalanguage/semantic-explications&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious, however, as to how the NSM deals with proper names (or does it?) For example, does the NSM have an explication for the expression `Donald Trump'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T22:22:59.797" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T22:22:59.797" Title="How does the Natural Semantic Metalanguage deal with proper names?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29539" CreationDate="2018-10-28T15:57:59.940" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is metathesis initially just a speech error?And,if so,how does a metathesised word become the standard form of that word?I can't understand how such a shift could happen,because it is so different from other forms of linguistic changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T19:26:57.007" Title="Question about metathesis" Tags="&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29537" CreationDate="2018-10-28T16:53:03.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not just a speech error. Depending on the language, it brings grammatical/semantic changes too, checkout the language -&gt; Saanich's use of metathesis.&#xA;i.e for some language it might bring a change in the meaning of the word or it might change the gender, number , tense , aspect etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checkout this wiki page's examples for starters -&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing more on the speech error side, if the error makes it easier to pronounce or distinguish from some other word or has become more popular (because of a hashtag maybe! ;) ) in the same language then the &lt;em&gt;changed&lt;/em&gt; version becomes more and more acceptable, it's actually like any other change Linguistics, 'for the ease of its native speakers'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this is some food for thought and helps you...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T16:53:03.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29537" CreationDate="2018-10-28T19:26:57.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no one answer, because there are multiple types of metathesis and therefore multiple causes. My understanding of the history of Straits Salishan metathesis (Saanich, Klallam, Lummi and so on: example &lt;em&gt;mtəqʷ&lt;/em&gt; (non-actual aspect) ~ &lt;em&gt;mətqʷ&lt;/em&gt; (actual aspect) &quot;put in water&quot;) is that it is the result of differential stress assignment depending on aspect, and syncope of the unstressed vowel. Some Palestinian Arabic dialects similar have (apparent) metathesis exemplified by &lt;em&gt;yiktib&lt;/em&gt; 'he writes', &lt;em&gt;yikitbu&lt;/em&gt; 'they write', which again reflect an interaction between syncope, epenthesis and vowel harmony (as discussed by Kenstowicz in &quot;Vowel Harmony and Metathesis in Palestinian Arabic&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maltese (Arabic) likewise has a metathesis process affecting /CV-CRVC-V/ imperfectives where R is any sonorant, see (&lt;em&gt;ni-tlob ~ ni-tolb-u&lt;/em&gt; 'I/we pray' contrasted with &lt;em&gt;nikteb ~ ni-ktb-u&lt;/em&gt; 'I/we write'). In this case, a regular rule would otherwise delete &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; in underlying /ni-tlob-u/ resulting in *&lt;em&gt;nitlbu&lt;/em&gt; (a sonorant trapped between consonants). The exact sound change path for this example of metathesis is lost in history, but probably involves an interaction between vowel harmony (which exists in Maltese anyhow) and reduction, where a demi-vowel is phonetically inserted before the sonorant in intermediate &lt;em&gt;nitV̆lŏbu&lt;/em&gt; (where &lt;em&gt;ŏ&lt;/em&gt; is extremely reduced, and coarticulatory harmony then turns indistinct V̆ into phonological [o]). The underlying premise of this kind of analysis for VC metathesis is that since the features of vowels and consonants are typically disjoint, there can be intermediate states with reductions in vowels gestures, and insertions of generic vocalic gestures (releases), where phonetic coarticulation is responsible for giving the inserted vowel the features that the &quot;doomed&quot; vowel has. For this kind of metathesis, segment movement is not a renumbering of segments, it is a barely perceptible and historically continuous shifting of vowel place gestures, which overlap consonants to varying degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another kind of metathesis involving sibilants in clusters, exemplified by Faroese &lt;em&gt;fɛsk-ʊr ~ fɛks-t&lt;/em&gt; 'fresh (masc, neut)', where /fɛskt/ → [fɛkst]. The above barely-perceptible gesture shifting scenario doesn't seem plausible in this kind of change. The consequence of metathesis is that &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; is in a perceptually somewhat better position (after a vowel, where it can be identified by V-to-C formant transitions), and &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; doesn't suffer any (sibilants between consonants are not hard to identify. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples of non-systematic metathesis in language change, for example where 'ask' comes out as [æks], but 'mask' does not come out as *[mæks]. Such examples might originally have been errors in the sense of being misperceptions of standard pronunciations. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/gasla/9/paper1623.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; discusses child and adult language acquisition and metathesis, such as Japanese children metathesizing &lt;em&gt;nezumi&lt;/em&gt; → [nemuzi]. I think a better understanding of patterns of metathesis across languages in child language acquisition would help to understand the basis for metathesis as a sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T19:26:57.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29541" CreationDate="2018-10-28T20:08:32.663" Score="6" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which modern IE language is most conservative in noun inflection and in this aspect is most similar language to PIE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T22:43:38.400" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T01:00:10.497" Title="Noun inflection in which IE language is close to PIE noun inflection?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29540" CreationDate="2018-10-29T01:00:10.497" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simply approach to the question is to find which language (if any one language can be determined) has the most similar noun paradigm to PIE. The phonology of the suffixes can also be concidered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PIE noun paradigm inflects nouns based on case, number, and gender. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case: There is some disagreement over how many noun cases exactly PIE had, but it probably had 8. (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental [and maybe allative seen only in hittite])&#xA;In the plural nom/voc are identical, as are dat/abl resulting in 6 cases. In the dual it is simplified into just 4 cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gender was once thought to be Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter as in many ancient (and modern) IE languages, but was most likely simply Animate and Inanimate with animate later splitting into masc. and fem. (no modern IE language has this feature, so I'd say the more recent M.F.N. split is the closest we can get.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Number was singular, dual (exactly two), and plural.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These nouns were also grouped into 5 declensions based on the vowel stem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a comparison of a few candidates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Cases&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; (3 [nom. acc. gen.] in pronouns e.g. he/him/his), &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Gender&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt; (3 m. f. n. in pronouns i.e. he/she/it), &lt;em&gt;Number&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Farsi:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Cases&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. acc.), &lt;em&gt;Gender&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;0&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Number&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) plural only in definite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hindustani:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Cases&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; (direct, oblique, vocative), &lt;em&gt;Gender&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f.), &lt;em&gt;Number&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Cases&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. acc. gen. dat.), &lt;em&gt;Gender&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f. n.), &lt;em&gt;Number&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) with very few remnants of the dual from Old Norse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Cases&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. voc. acc. gen.), &lt;em&gt;Gender&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f. n.), &lt;em&gt;Number&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) with evidence of the dual in Mycenean Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting closer, but still no good match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases: &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. acc. gen. dat. instrumental, prepositional) instrumental performs the function of ablative and prepositional the locative Old Russian had vocative also.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f. n.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) Old Russian had dual, but it is only found in very few situations, where it is reanalyzed as a genitive suffix.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Declension: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Slovenian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases: &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. acc. gen. dat. loc. instr.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f. n.) masculine is subdivided into animate and inanimate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number: &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; singular, dual, and plural. (s. d. pl.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Declension: &lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt; (7 regular)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latvian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases: &lt;strong&gt;7&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. voc. acc. gen. dat. loc. ins.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) (Old Latvian had the dual. some dialects retain it for certain body parts)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Declension: &lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt; (3 m. and 3 f.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cases: &lt;strong&gt;7&lt;/strong&gt; (nom. voc. acc. gen. dat. loc. ins.) another, allative is found only in adverbs and is an innovation since PIE. genitive performs the function of the ablative in other languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gender: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (m. f.) There is no neuter gender and no animate and inanimate nouns in Lithuanian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number: &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; (s. pl.) (It has also a dual, which is almost unused, except a few words that retain their dual forms)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Declension: &lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt; (of which numbers IV and V are very rare)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this (and other languages I checked out) I would conclude that the modern language closest in noun inflection to PIE is either Slovenian or Lithuanian/Latvian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian has the closest noun case system its 7 cases almost perfectly matching the 8 of PIE with the ablative lost. But vocative is still in use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian has only 2 genders (m. f.) while Slovenian has the three (m. f. n.)&#xA;while PIE had 2, they were animate and inanimate, not masculine and feminine. So &#xA;arguably Slovenian represents the older form which is closer to PIE, the extant neuter &#xA;being the analog to the inanimate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian has only singular and plural, losing the dual and the complications that come with it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lithuanian 5 declensions match the 5 in PIE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovenian has 6 cases, loss of the vocative and ablative mirrors the PIE plural where nom/voc and dat/abl are identical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovene subdivision of the masculine into animate and inanimate complicates things. because it is an innovation not related to the PIE genders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovene is one of the only IE languages that still has the dual in frequent use as part of its noun paradigm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slovene has 10 declensions, not quite as close as Lithuanian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a comparison of the actual forms that the cases take, for the masculine noun &#xA;*wĺ̥kʷos (“wolf”)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzfPF.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hzfPF.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/strong&gt; seems to match more closely, despite the lack of the dual. That and its declension system, almost identical cases, extant vocative, use of the dual as recently as the 19th century seem to trump Slovene's more closely matching gender and number paradigms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lithuanian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23022" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T01:00:10.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29523" CreationDate="2018-10-29T18:36:28.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Riffian, the singular for mother exists (imma = mother), but not the plural. It is the same for father (baba = father).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T18:36:28.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2018-10-29T19:19:30.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me add to these already great answers what I read in a paper (I cannot recall, which): m is a nasal sound that can be produced while suckling on the breast, and suckling involves both lips (hence m is a bilabial nasal). I am not sure if the argument goes &quot;They can utter the word for 'mom' while suckling&quot; (unlikely) or &quot;They associate the movement and the sound they produce while suckling with the person&quot;. Anybody came across this paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23029" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T19:19:30.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8385" CreationDate="2018-10-29T21:43:03.327" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how this is possible, but Kannada has the same word &quot;gundu&quot;... I came across another word that is very similar. &quot;Yeradu&quot; in Kannada means two, and I learnt it is &quot;Yeraku&quot; in Armenian. I don't believe in the language family classification anymore. There are also many things in common between Sanskrit(Indo-European) and Kannada(Dravidian). There is, in fact, a book in Kannada that debunks the language theory formulated. I wish I remembered its name exactly. Maybe this leads to some ground-breaking discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23031" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T21:43:03.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29549" CreationDate="2018-10-29T22:42:26.207" Score="2" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between the two? They seem the same to me, c.f.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Fußball spielten    die Kinder  vor der Schule  im Park.&#xA;&#xA;Football played    the kids    before school   in the park.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(sentence from wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T03:39:19.083" Title="What's the difference between V2 word order and OVS word order?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29548" CreationDate="2018-10-29T22:52:23.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;OVS word order means that the object comes before the verb and the verb comes before the subject. It's not very common, for reasons relating to branching direction. But in an OVS language it doesn't matter what else is on the left side of the sentence: you can put prepositional phrases there, or adverbs, or anything else you feel like. The object just has to be somewhere before the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V2 word order means that the verb comes &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt;, without specifying what comes first. In German (and Old English and some other Germanic languages), &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; can go first, whether that's a prepositional phrase, or the subject, or the object. What's important is just that it's &lt;em&gt;one and only one phrase&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote another example from the same Wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Die Kinder spielten vor der Schule im Park Fußball.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [SUBJECT] [VERB] [PREP PHRASE] [PREP PHRASE] [OBJECT]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wouldn't be grammatical in a purely OVS language, since the subject comes before the verb, and the object after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if we take a sentence in imaginary &quot;OVS German&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vor der Schule Fußball spielten die Kinder im Park.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [PREP PHRASE] [OBJECT] [VERB] [SUBJECT] [PREP PHRASE]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be grammatical in &quot;OVS German&quot;, but not in actual V2 German, because the verb isn't second: it's third. Two things come before it, and that's not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T03:39:19.083" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T03:39:19.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29551" CreationDate="2018-10-29T23:06:21.167" Score="14" ViewCount="1234" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English (for example), we say &quot;I go/went/was going/etc.&quot;, inflecting the verb for tense and aspect while leaving the subject of the sentence unchanged. But are there any languages that would instead inflect the noun/pronoun? For example, suppose English were to have a nominal inflectional mark &quot;-tu&quot; indicating past tense: &quot;Shetu go&quot; instead of &quot;she went.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are there at least languages where the noun must agree with the verb and not the other way around? So, using the made-up inflectional marker from earlier, we might say &quot;Shetu went&quot; instead of either &quot;Shetu go&quot; or &quot;She went.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if not, why not? It seems particularly strange (or &quot;asymmetric&quot;) given that (in many languages), nominal inflectional categories like person or number affect the inflection of the verb (via concord).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T05:20:26.980" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T12:47:53.400" Title="Are there any languages which inflect the noun for morphosyntactic categories normally reserved for verbs (e.g. tense, aspect, etc.)?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;tense-aspect-mood&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29550" CreationDate="2018-10-29T23:43:02.040" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a relevant Wikipedia article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_TAM&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nominal TAM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fair amount of literature that mentions the existence of languages that mark tense on nouns; the first result I found on Google was this paper by Judith Tonhauser, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/tonhauser.1/papers/sub9tonhauser.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Towards an Understanding of the Meaning of Nominal Tense&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (2005), about Paraguayan Guaraní. Depending on the language, the meaning of a past-tense-marked noun may be along the lines of “an ex-/former [noun]”. Here is Tonhauser's first set of illustrative examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) a. Kuehe     a-hecha pa’i-pe.&#xA;       yesterday I-see   priest-PE&#xA;      ‘Yesterday I saw the priest.’&#xA;    b. Kuehe     a-hecha pa’i-kue-pe.&#xA;       yesterday I-see   priest-KUE-PE&#xA;      ‘Yesterday I saw the former priest.’&#xA;    c. Kuehe     a-hecha pa’i-rã-me.&#xA;       yesterday I-see   priest-RA-PE&#xA;      ‘Yesterday I saw the seminarist/future priest.’&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tonhauser actually argues that &lt;em&gt;-kue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-rã&lt;/em&gt; mark nominal aspect, not tense (§1.1), although I would guess that, as with the English &quot;perfect&quot; construction, this is an area where different theorists may use different classifications. The similarity to English &quot;temporal adjectives&quot; such as &lt;em&gt;former&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; is mentioned in section 2 (p. 484); however, apparently there are some contexts where the Guarani constructions are not semantically equivalent to these English constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also languages that use different “subject pronouns” for different tenses of the associated clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it’s common for clausal tense to be marked on a non-pronominal noun in the clause. The Wikipedia article has a section &quot;Clausal nominal TAM&quot; where it mentions marking clause TAM on subject pronouns, definite articles, or though different kinds of case-marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:58:29.990" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:58:29.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T05:56:19.653" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an idea on how fast a Dutch speaker speaks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;130 wpm = medium&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;160 wpm = fast&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 wpm = slow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to have that same knowledge about other languages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list somewhere that contains these kind of statistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23032" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:35:37.540" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:35:37.540" Title="Words per minute - language list?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;speed&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" Score="0" Body="For questions about the speed of speech and its relation to other linguistic features." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T09:37:54.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29557" CreationDate="2018-10-30T12:46:15.203" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;People can discern wether a plosive is /p t k/ by formant transition of a vowel. While how do people discern them, if it is a consonant cluster of few plosives without any voicing, as [pt] or even some voiceless random sequences such as [ptkpktpkpt]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T21:16:42.577" Title="How do people discern different plosives without formant transition?" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29550" CreationDate="2018-10-30T12:47:53.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese it is possible (and very usual) to conjugate adjectives to the past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, to say something like &quot;Tanaka was strong&quot;, the construction has the form: &quot;As for Tanaka, [strong-past].&quot; (There is no verb &quot;to be&quot; in Japanese, and instead this is the usual construction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using hepburn transliteration, strong is &quot;tsuyoi&quot; and its past tense is &quot;tsuyokatta&quot;, and the whole sentence becomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tanaka wa tsuyokatta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without transliteration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tanaka: 田中&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Strong&quot;: 強い&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Strong&quot; conjugated to the past: 強かった&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;田中は強かった。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the sentence above probably does not feel natural to a native speaker, because I omitted the &quot;politeness markers&quot; usual in Japanese for brevity and in order not to drift away from the topic in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14186" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T12:47:53.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29555" CreationDate="2018-10-30T14:25:12.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.ucla.edu/images/stories/wright.1996.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Wright discusses this&lt;/a&gt; w.r.t. Tsou, which has a number of initial stop clusters, e.g. &lt;em&gt;pka:ko&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to escape&quot;, &lt;em&gt;tpihi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mend cloth&quot; (and other kinds of clusters, but stop clusters are the most challenging). There are a number of strategies for making consonants without vowel transitions perceptible, and in the case of stop clusters, there is a high-amplitude release burst between the consonants, which carries sufficient information to allow identifying the pre-consonantal consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T14:25:12.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T20:23:34.350" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to differentiate the abbreviations for &lt;em&gt;preposition&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prepositional case&lt;/em&gt; in interlinear glossing?&lt;/strong&gt; It’s both &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PREP&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; and still very dissimilar, yet both appear mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interlinear gloss really helps me in language studies, but in some instances, where prepositions and prepositional case appear equally (yet unrelated) frequently, I’m regularly struggling with their respective abbreviations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, wherein the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; lie, it’s just the same (&lt;em&gt;Präposition↔Präpositiv&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one has to rely soley on context, it’d somewhat foil the &lt;em&gt;raison d’être&lt;/em&gt; of interlinear gloss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;Is there any resolution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;to this ambiguity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or: Is there a reason I seem to be the only one with this issue, like not getting the actual point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;… like alternative, unambiguous abbreviations like&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PREADPOS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PREPCASE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23041" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T20:23:34.350" Title="How to differentiate the abbreviations for preposition and prepositional case in interlinear glossing?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29555" CreationDate="2018-10-30T21:16:42.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The burst intensity and duration can be features that can be discriminating. There is also the number of bursts that can be taken into account. [k] has generally multiple bursts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T21:16:42.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11868" CreationDate="2018-10-31T11:55:37.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, unlike English , in Spanish [z] is only a realization of /s/ (where s becomes before voiced consonants), and appears nowhere else in the language. So it’s only an allaphone of the phoneme /s/ ; whereas in English, existance of minimmal pairs such as “sip” amd “zip” proves /z/ to be a distinct phoneme from /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23042" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T11:55:37.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-01T09:35:57.730" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language has some very typical melodic patterns and I've been wondering is there some sort of a global repository collecting and comparing such patterns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23051" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T13:31:46.533" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T13:31:46.533" Title="Online collection of the world languages' melodic patterns?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29573" CreationDate="2018-11-01T15:49:53.100" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to diagram this sentence for a personal project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everything I touch with tenderness pricks like a bramble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, &lt;strong&gt;Everything&lt;/strong&gt; is the subject, and &lt;strong&gt;pricks&lt;/strong&gt; is the predicate with &lt;strong&gt;like a bramble&lt;/strong&gt; being an adverbial phrase modifying pricks. I cannot tell what &lt;strong&gt;I touch&lt;/strong&gt;'s place is in this all, however. I think it is modifying &lt;strong&gt;Everything&lt;/strong&gt;, but I don't know how to classify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23055" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T17:38:44.060" Title="What is the proper terminology for &quot;I touch&quot; in this sentence?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29571" CreationDate="2018-11-01T17:05:11.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I touch&quot; is nothing, that is, it is not a unit of linguistic analysis. &quot;I&quot; is a subject / pronoun and &quot;touch&quot; is a verb&quot;; the two words are part of a relative clause &quot;I touch with tenderness&quot;. Actually, it is a sentence, which in this context functions as a relative clause. That relative clause is modifying something – the word &quot;Everything&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T17:05:11.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29571" CreationDate="2018-11-01T17:38:44.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's tripping you up is a relative clause with an &quot;invisible relative adjective&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, start with your outer sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everything pricks like a bramble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come up with a diagram of this, using whatever theory you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now look at the first part again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everything [that] I touch with tenderness…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relative clause seems to be a sentence of its own!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…I touch [that] with tenderness…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a sentence (an S or a TP or an IP or whatever your theory calls it), embedded into an adjectival phrase, which modifies the noun &quot;everything&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T17:38:44.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29575" CreationDate="2018-11-01T20:28:55.013" Score="-1" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would the symbol look like, and how would it sound like? E.g. a long rhotacized nasalized vowel with tone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23056" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T21:16:19.940" Title="What is the maximum number of IPA diacritics that can be added on a vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29574" CreationDate="2018-11-01T21:16:19.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA doesn't set a limit. For example, an overlong breathy nasalized creaky high-tone rhotacized mid central vowel would be &lt;code&gt;ə̰́̃˞ːˑ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the symbols quickly become unwieldy when you're applying too many diacritics. Look at &quot;Zalgo text&quot; for an extreme example. So most if not all linguists would pull off at least one of these diacritics, e.g. by using a tone letter instead of the acute accent: &lt;code&gt;ə̰̃˞ːˑ˦&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T21:16:19.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-02T02:40:27.707" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book The Japanese Copula: Forms and Functions there's a passage that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The existence of an &lt;strong&gt;adverbial copula&lt;/strong&gt; is expected when we consider the fact that adjectives inflect to end form, the pre-norminal form and the adverbial form without the help of the copula &lt;em&gt;ar-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to wrap my head around what is an adverbial copula, I realized the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, you can move a verb to before a noun to create a subordinate adjectival clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;castle SUB to move&#xA;城     が  動く&#xA;The castle moves.&#xA;&#xA;to move castle&#xA;動く     城&#xA;A castle that moves. A moving castle.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copula is a verb, so you can do the same with it, except that な is the adjectival version and だ is predicative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;country SUB peaceful COP&#xA;国      が  平和      だ&#xA;The country is peaceful.&#xA;&#xA;peaceful COP country&#xA;平和     な   国&#xA;The country that is peaceful. A peaceful country.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this mean that every na-adjective in Japanese technically introduces a new clause? Because な is a copula. A copula is a verb. You can't have two verbs in a single clause. So every time there's a な there must be a new clause, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     COP-ADV&#xA;平和 に       生きる&#xA;To live peacefully.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If に is an adverbial copula, that means 平和に is a subordinate adverbial clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22646" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T02:40:27.707" Title="Does each Japanese copula, だ, な, に, introduce a new clause?" Tags="&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;copula&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-02T19:59:15.377" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In second language learning is there any evidence that fluency cannot be achieved without immersion among native language speakers?  If 'yes', what is the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23065" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T19:59:15.377" Title="Second language learning and immersion among native speakers" Tags="&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3006" CreationDate="2018-11-03T01:21:54.467" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting and detailed list. Another great reference site with spoken samples is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.omniglot.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23067" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T01:21:54.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29584" CreationDate="2018-11-03T02:46:34.653" Score="-1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it's potentially a bit of an odd question, but I am working on an app that needs to analyze text that can be written in any of the most common languages. What I need to know is what punctuation/special characters are used within words among the most common languages? For example apostrophes are used in English (eg. I'm) within words, particularly for contractions. Are there any other characters I should know about? Hyphens perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23068" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T14:56:01.973" Title="What are all of the possible punctuation that are used within words in the majority of languages?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-03T06:15:57.187" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how in English we say &quot;I can&quot; and &quot;I can not&quot; &#xA;the negative is the longer one, in terms of morphemes, but is there any language where the negative is the default and the positive is the longer construct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22315" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:37:40.837" Title="Language where negation is the default" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29581" CreationDate="2018-11-03T12:12:45.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you want to do is &lt;a href=&quot;http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode text segmentation&lt;/a&gt;.  Look into the &quot;Word Boundaries&quot; section.  If you can't understand it, read a Unicode manual first—Unicode's own book is free and easy to understand.  You can use a ready-made Unicode library like &lt;a href=&quot;http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;libicu&lt;/a&gt;, rather than coding the Unicode algorithms yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not be lazy and try to avoid this with a hacky regex or something.  The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way to properly support languages in text processing (for example, to locate &quot;words&quot; in text in a language-independent way) is by understanding Unicode and its algorithms.  If you ignore this, you &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; mishandle something for a user somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="200" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T14:56:01.973" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T14:56:01.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-03T17:46:22.110" Score="5" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would the NSM explicate the word 'left'? As in, 'the table is to my left'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just cannot think of any way to do it using the current 65 primes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T23:48:14.833" Title="NSM explication for 'left'?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29582" CreationDate="2018-11-03T17:55:55.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think such a language exists. It seems to be a language universal, that positive is default. It's for the same reason that a language may lack a word for &quot;bad&quot;, but may not lack a word for &quot;good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T17:55:55.257" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29582" CreationDate="2018-11-03T19:37:40.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This happens in some Dravidian languages. Specifically, in these languages, positive verbs have a tense marker and a person marker; negative verbs differ from them only in lacking the tense marker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A set of examples from Old Kannada (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/publications/miestamo-negwithoutneg-web.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miestamo 2010&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;no:ḍ-uv-eṃ see-FUT-1SG ‘I will see’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;no:ḍ-id-eṃ see-PST-1SG ‘I saw’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;no:ḍ-eṃ see-1SG ‘I do / did / will not see’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the negative is formed simply by omitting the tense marker (with the result that it's ambiguous for tense); there's no explicit marker of negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:37:40.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-04T00:28:51.797" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Adger's book Core Syntax and am having trouble with one of the sentences in the last exercise in the &lt;em&gt;Functional Categories&lt;/em&gt; chapter. The task is to draw and annotate the tree (bar level and phrasal level, we can leave out selectional and case features) of DP's and sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence in question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our discussion of previous students' failures in exams traumatized every nervous student in the class yesterday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also making the assumption that adjectives are also adjoined lower down than PP adjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this assumption how would we construct the tree? I would also love an explanation of the derivation as well (I'm still having trouble grasping syntax trees as a whole).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22965" LastEditorUserId="22965" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T18:26:12.720" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T18:26:12.720" Title="Drawing trees for DP's and Sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-04T12:29:23.157" Score="2" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a weird theory stating that some countries, language groups and nationalities are more or less explicit about statements of conversations. It's called &quot;high context and low context theory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia states: &quot;High&quot; and &quot;low&quot; context cultures are typically defined by language group, nationality, or regional community. i.e. geographical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not geographical because the shared culture varies by familiarity of the topic, travel, morality, finance, safety, accountability, family. In a country with unreliable weather, all weather related topics will require lots of planning. In a country with unreliable transport, that will require more context than weather conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do serious social scientists generalize context theory by country?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't any bipolar geographical cultural theory confusing to students as an example of black and white general simplicity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21979" LastEditorUserId="21979" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T09:42:23.337" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T11:17:07.610" Title="Over generalization of high context and low context culture theory" Tags="&lt;body-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29598" CreationDate="2018-11-04T13:25:03.400" Score="5" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been looking at a Thai vowel in Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several exponents from native speakers, though only one of them is male.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The female plots all show four formants. The male plot shows five formants, but F2 and F3 are quite close together (1580Hz and 1820Hz). Image files of the male plot and a typical female plot are attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I try to approximate the vowel myself, my own (male) plot also shows five formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I take the native speaker plots at face value, the male F3 seems far far too low - but if either F3 or F2 is just ignored, the plot does look like the female plots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if I assume that the female speakers have managed to align F2 and F3 perfectly, so that their plots are really showing F1, F2&amp;amp;3, F4, F5, all of the male formants match the pattern established from the female plots. In other words, both F2 and F3 are within the F2 range derived from the female plots, F4 is within the F3 range, and F5 is within the F4 range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a plausible interpretation, and is there a better one?&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ioPOr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ioPOr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Typical female speaker&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lZqP4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lZqP4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Male speaker&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T09:57:31.397" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T21:36:32.463" Title="What might account for different numbers of formants in plots of male and female speakers pronouncing the same vowel?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29446" CreationDate="2018-11-05T16:01:27.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why aren't Creole languages the default?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the same reason that many (most? all?) living creatures have more than one eye. They live in environments which select for plurality of eyes, so natural selection means that's what they get. The same thing happens in language! We get intricate and beautiful and useful language, because the diverse environments we live in calls for that, and because we easily have the capacity to learn to use intricate and beautiful and useful languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is basically the simplest grammar a child needs to communicate (or at least is a simple grammar)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right; Creoles have, by some measure at least, simple grammars. And sometimes, there arise situations that call for that. For example, for some reason, for example trade, people are brought together who have no language in common. A simple, usually isolating grammar is going to be easier to learn, so a new language is innovated which has these features. Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russenorsk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinook Wawa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nicaraguan Sign Language (and I mean the very very early stages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That is, why there needs to be (or ends up being if that's the case) non-Creole languages.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I gave Nicaraguan Sign Language as an example. Deaf children from all over Nicaragua were brought together who had no language in common, which put pressure on them to innovate a language quickly. The language they made up was made from simple gesticulations and had a very simple grammar, since the environment was selecting for anything which enabled someone to get even basic ideas across. And it had I think an alphabet for fingerspelling Spanish words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See? Now the environment is different, because they have a language in common. Now there are different pressures, which are selecting for different features. The pressure is now to increase the efficacy of the language. This could happen by sound change (for example systematic contractions like &quot;wanna&quot; or &quot;won't&quot; in English) or by creating or deriving more nuanced vocabulary and constructions. For example, NSL now has a feature called perspective, which is essentially turning your torso one way or the other, or doing the mirror image of a sign, for reported speech. A way to say he said/she said, which is more convenient and more nuanced than a simple gloss &lt;code&gt;HE SAY&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;PERSON THERE SAY&lt;/code&gt;. And that alphabet I mentioned earlier has persisted, since it's still really handy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, and the reason I'm describing a little about the evolution of NSL is, that these features are not really anything anyone associates with pidgins. It's a fully-fledged language now, and the reason is that it can be. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTPGmKoDk0Y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;There is a fascinating talk on the evolution of NSL if you're interested&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As for your quote about Riau&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's a language that &quot;possess[es] neither noun declensions, temporal distinctions, subject/object distinctions, nor singular/plural distinction&quot;. This language is in an environment that selects for &quot;something that's easy to pick up&quot;, since it's used as a lingua franca. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in our society, and in whatever you or I would consider a &quot;default&quot; society, it seems like those distinctions would be useful to be able to make, succinctly and not clunkily, doesn't it? And that's why most societies end up with a language that does that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T16:01:27.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29594" CreationDate="2018-11-05T17:39:34.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional account is that formants frequencies are based on tube length, with resonances being at those frequencies corresponding to 4L, 4/3L, 4/5L, 4/7L... Formants shift up or down as the tube is shortened or lengthened. (Adding a constriction for [i] vs [a], for example, gives you the complex F1,F2 pattern that we pay attention to: for the moment, just assume an open tube). A person with a shorter tube length is predicted to have higher, more closely spaced formants than a person with a longer tube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tube length is the distance from the lips to the glottis, and females typically have almost 3 cm shorter tubes. This also does not include the length differences that arise from raising and lowering the larynx. Vertical displacement of the larynx is known to be connected to phonatory differences in vowels as well as F0 control, and Thai has a complex interaction between F0 and phonation in its tone system. Now the question that needs to be addressed is what the sociophonetics of male vs. female speech is in Thai: it would not be surprising if there is a sociolinguistic &quot;lengthening&quot; effect in male speech and a &quot;shortening&quot; effect in female speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the above formant tracks at face value, there is a mystery that the 4th and 5th formant frequency of these examples diverge quite substantially. The bottom picture (which I take to from be a male speaker) shows a 5th formant at around 3750 Hz, which is surprising since that is in the neighborhood of a predicted 4th formant. The top picture only shows 4 formants, F4 being at around 4750, which is not inconceivable for a short-tubed speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the proposed interpretation is that there's no mechanism whereby female speakers can manage to align F2 and F3 perfectly. An alternative to consider is that this is a formant-tracking problem, and that F2 and F3 are not so closely spaced. LPC analysis is really great when it works, but there can be problems (&lt;a href=&quot;https://depts.washington.edu/phonlab/resources/measuring-formants.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read this&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5d2d/f15f728fd5bc1fb852742b1d321607db16ff.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which is a fairly technical read). Automated LPC coding makes sometimes invalid assumptions about bandwidth and acoustic zeros which can arise with distinctive phonation, as arises especially in SE Asian languages. Nasalization also opens a side-branch which contributes anti-resonances, so there might be a phonetic nasalization difference (not a contrastve property of Thai, but something that might characterize an individual's speech). The old-fashioned way of measuring formants is to look at a spectrogram: the dark patches and the red dots don't match, there's your problem. Increasing the number of formants (number of LPC coefficients) from 5 to 6 may also remove problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can put the wav file up somewhere, a more detailed diagnosis might be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T21:36:32.463" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T21:36:32.463" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-05T22:29:45.077" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find an old (Old English) word meaning &quot;a place in a river where the water overflows a natural stone or rocky obstacle situated across the entire watercourse&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the picture below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SKT79.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SKT79.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Autor: Витольд Муратов – &amp;lt;span class=&amp;quot;int-own-work&amp;quot;&amp;gt;Fotografie je vlastním dílem&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;a title=&amp;quot;Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0&amp;quot; href=&amp;quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&amp;quot;&amp;gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10954377&amp;quot;&amp;gt;Odkaz&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23085" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T22:29:45.077" Title="Is there an Old English word meaning RAPIDS or RIFFLE (a rocky shoal causing a rapid)?" Tags="&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-11-14T08:47:44.443" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29601" CreationDate="2018-11-05T23:39:17.333" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;When speaking rapidly, it doesn't seem that I make a schwa at all when saying a phrase like, say, &quot;the bus.&quot; It seems like I'm saying [ð̩.bʌs]. Is this a documented phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T01:30:15.410" Title="Does English have syllabic fricatives (allophonically)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29600" CreationDate="2018-11-06T01:30:15.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well documented that a schwa can be very reduced, and significantly decreased in duration so that it is under 20 msc. The amplitude of the vowel is significantly greater than that of preceding [ð], which gives you a diagnostic for identifying a remnant of a vowel. The test would be to look an numerous tokens of &quot;the bus&quot; to see if the vowel is ever completely gone (while [ð] is maintained). Of course you can easily get a trained linguist to say [ðbʌs], so the question has be be something like &quot;does it naturally happen in speech?&quot;, and not &quot;is it possible to pronounce it this way?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to set up contrasts if you are willing to embed the phonetic frame of interest in something else – namely, ...VðəCV... versus  ...VðCV..., for example &quot;bathe Robin&quot; versus &quot;pay the robber&quot; (one would spend more time cooking up suitable pairs). This might allow you to answer the question &quot;does the vowel ə ever go away completely?&quot;. However, it cannot tell you whether [ð] is syllabic, because that isn't a measurable property. That is, only fairly abstract phonological analysis can tell you whether you have [ðbʌs] versus [ð̩bʌs], and there aren't any facts of English phonology what would make that decision for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T01:30:15.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-06T11:26:28.770" Score="-1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people say it can be, which very much changes the meaning of the chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23088" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T21:54:58.000" Title="Can the Hebrew word translated &quot;made&quot; in Genesis 1 be translated as prepared or used?" Tags="&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-11-08T16:41:28.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-06T15:33:30.523" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the linguistic phenomenon of a word in language or dialect &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; with two or multiple meanings that have individual translations in language or dialect &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;? For example, &lt;em&gt;escada&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese may refer to a &lt;em&gt;ladder&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;stairs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is very common, but I'm wondering if there's a technical term for it, especially when it involves common nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23089" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T18:03:43.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T18:03:43.933" Title="Word with separate translations in another language" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29602" CreationDate="2018-11-06T19:14:09.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear which word you're referring to. Genesis 1 is an entire chapter, comprising close to 400 words, and different translations translate the same word differently. Given that the chapter generally deals with the creation of the world, it uses many forms of words concerned with making and creating. The most common ones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) בָּרָא &quot;create, make, form, shape&quot; – used in verse 1 of heaven and earth, in verse 21 of sea creatures, in verse 27 of man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) עָשָׂה &quot;do, make, create, prepare, produce, use&quot; – used in verse 7 of &quot;the firmament&quot;, in verse 11-12 of plants bearing seeds and trees bearing fruit, in 16 of God making &quot;the two great lights&quot;, in 25 of the animals of the earth, in 26 of man, in 31 of &quot;all&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're thinking of the latter one, yes, it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;use&quot;, but that's a rather rare sense of the verb. And that particular verb really has quite a lot of senses. It takes up more than thirty pages in the comprehensive The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew by David Clines. I've attached the index page to that verb so you can see the senses for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jdAkC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jdAkC.png&quot; alt=&quot;entry for the word עָשָׂה in The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew by David Clines&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastEditorUserId="19744" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T21:54:58.000" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T21:54:58.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29593" CreationDate="2018-11-07T10:35:00.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These terms are used mainly in global marketing studies, and have more to do with the weight of explicit contracts versus informal deals than with Linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of analyzing languages directly, it studies communication as a whole, especially the number of things that &lt;strong&gt;aren't being said&lt;/strong&gt;. It's not about grammar features, the level of usual formality, or the number of words for certain things, but the entire context surrounding a conversation and agreement, like all the cues and &quot;rituals&quot; people are expected to follow and assume from context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common example of low-context culture is the German one, where people are usually expected to be relatively &quot;blunt&quot; and say exactly what they mean, especially in business situations, and also be specific about all kinds of contracts and agreements. You don't need to guess much to know what a German wants from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you have high-context cultures like Brazil and Japan, where people avoid saying negative things directly and expect you to assume a great deal of things from context and get vague cues shared by their broader culture. Your subjective human relationship with your potential business partner may help you more than saying everything directly and having the most rational and detailed contracts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple practical example is that when Brazilian colleagues tell you to &quot;come over for dinner&quot; or that &quot;you ought to hang out some time&quot;, they might likely be just being polite and end up never making real plans with you. The outgoing Brazilian culture in general makes people say things like that just to avoid conflict and not to be seen as antisocial. If a German tells you things like that, though, he likely is serious about it and sincerely wants to have your company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've said, these generalizations aren't scientific rules. Germans aren't robots and have all the same feelings as the Japanese and Brazilians. Also, culture &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; may be seen as higher or lower context depending on your own point of view. Brazil itself is a huge country that has different regions with their own societal norms and different &quot;context heights&quot;. The same can be said about states within regions, specific cities and even neighborhoods within cities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generalizations, though, help you classify people into groups and find out what is the best strategy to target the &lt;em&gt;majority&lt;/em&gt; of your potential clients and partners. In an ideal world, everybody would be seen as individuals, but generalizations are needed when you need quick answers and guidelines to cover segments of millions of people, especially in international trade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23098" LastEditorUserId="23098" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T11:17:07.610" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T11:17:07.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29607" CreationDate="2018-11-07T13:35:04.937" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to listen to authentic Thai for very long to realize that comparatively few words are pronounced with the dictionary tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the learning material out there seems to be focused on helping people produce individual words with the supposedly correct tone - but this is only half the picture as I now see things. You also need to understand how the tone system works at sentence level. So far, I have not found anything on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've noticed myself is that while many syllables are not given their dictionary tone, this doesn't mean that they default to mid/neutral tone, or that their tone is arbitrary. The overall system seems to be that some words have greater weight within the sentence, that those words are given their dictionary tone, and that the tones of the intervening words - I've been calling them interstitial tones for now - are mainly a matter of setting up or recovering from the tonal gestures required by the heavier words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if that's right, it's important to know which are the heavier words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure this subject must have been investigated before and was wondering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there is something better than 'interstitial tones' that I could use as  search term;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much of a parallel there is between a word being given its dictionary tone in Thai and a word being stressed in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T13:46:59.073" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T17:17:32.743" Title="'Interstitial' tones in Thai" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;stress&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29606" CreationDate="2018-11-07T17:17:32.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone sandhi&lt;/strong&gt; is the term you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone sandhi&lt;/strong&gt; is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this question and my answer for it (pay attention to the links within):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/26878/&quot;&gt;How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T17:17:32.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29609" CreationDate="2018-11-07T23:23:49.083" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;One difference between Mandarin Chinese and Japanese is that the former likes to translate foreign terms, while Japanese prefers to transcribe them to Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Basketball:&#xA;Mandarin Chinese: 篮球 (lanqiu); Japanese: バスケ (basuke [from &quot;basket&quot;])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such tendencies can be made across languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hong Kong Chinese does much more transcribing than Mandarin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;France likes to translate as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German almost always transcribes, or even uses the foreign pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there is some spectrum here, with adopting words unchanged on one hand, and retranslating them on the other. I wanted to ask whether there were terms to describe such tendencies of languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21866" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T02:08:09.327" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T02:17:38.577" Title="How do you call a languages tendency to adopt foreign words rather than translate them to their language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29608" CreationDate="2018-11-08T00:29:47.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language purism&lt;/a&gt; is the tendency to avoid &quot;foreign&quot; words and innovations in general. It is the exception. Accepting new words from different sources is the natural flow of human communication and doesn't need a label. You can learn all the descriptive terms from this chart, though: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword#Linguistic_classification&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword#Linguistic_classification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check this out too: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gairaigo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gairaigo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23098" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T00:29:47.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29608" CreationDate="2018-11-08T02:17:38.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowing is common because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most people in the world are bi- or multi-lingual and so they may already be using the word in another language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;many of the words being borrowed have no parallel. How do you translate &quot;kangaroo&quot; into a language with no similar animals?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;language academies often lag behind natural borrowings, and face an uphill battle against de facto usage which often becomes established before the academy can tell people what the &quot;proper&quot; word is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of the alternatives to borrowing is to form a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calque&lt;/a&gt; where you translate each individual morpheme/word in a compound, but this can produce some weird results because words don't map perfectly between languages, and words which go naturally together in the source language may feel (subjectively) really weird next to each other in the new language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T02:17:38.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-08T16:36:42.067" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does phonemic variation in vowel quantity (but not quality) work in e.g. songs? For example, there is a variety of Yiddish that has both /a/ and /aː/. They must differ in quantity but do not seem to differ in quality. How would one distinguish them e.g. if they were in the same place in a particular melody, or in rapid speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23108" LastEditorUserId="23108" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T17:26:58.617" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T20:51:54.027" Title="How does phonemic variation in vowel quantity (but not quality) work in e.g. songs?" Tags="&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29614" CreationDate="2018-11-08T16:57:32.240" Score="0" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the German and French languages, along with English, evolved from the same roots. This is reflected in some of their words and grammatical structures. So then why are the pronunciations of both languages so different? Why is German so harsh with more emphasis on rough sounding letter combinations (st, sh, tz, ch) as compared to French (which I know is a Romance Language but have no clue as to what it means)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23109" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T17:52:12.423" Title="Stark differences in French and German" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29613" CreationDate="2018-11-08T17:52:12.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is, sounds change really fast. Compare different regional accents in English (Southern, East Coast, Australian, Indian)—outside of Britain, all of these differences have arisen in the past two hundred years or so. Or look at some of Shakespeare's rhymes, like &quot;love&quot; and &quot;prove&quot;, or &quot;wind&quot; and &quot;kind&quot;, which rhymed perfectly in his day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long answer is, it's been a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; time since the family tree of French and German split apart. By most estimates, their last common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European) broke apart &lt;em&gt;over five thousand years ago&lt;/em&gt;. One branch became Germanic which eventually evolved into German (and Dutch and Icelandic and English and…), while another became Italic, evolving into Latin, then French (and Spanish and Romanian and Italian and…).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, French and German are spoken in close proximity, and so they're having an effect on each other—but they've been close for a relatively small amount of time. It's entirely plausible that in time Standard German will gain nasal vowels and Standard French affricates, but at present that hasn't happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the &quot;harshness&quot; or &quot;roughness&quot; of a language is very difficult to measure. You say the &quot;sh&quot; sound is harsh, but what makes German &lt;em&gt;Schiff&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ship&quot; any harsher than French &lt;em&gt;chat&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cat&quot;? They start with the same sound. A lot of it comes down to individual perceptions rather than anything quantifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T17:52:12.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29612" CreationDate="2018-11-08T17:52:58.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Songs are special since melody and rhythm dictate the length of a note. A lot of contrasts that are made in speech are neutralised in songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules for singing German songs prescribe only &quot;pure vowels&quot; (a, e, i, o, u, ø, y),&#xA;the phonemes ɛ, ə, ɔ, ɪ, ʊ, œ, and ʏ are to be replaced with the closest pure vowel. Vowel length is also not marked in sung German. Note that these rules apply to composed songs (&lt;em&gt;Kunstlied&lt;/em&gt;, choruses) but are relaxed in pop songs: Xavier Naidoo uses a very long ɪ: in the chorus of the song &quot;Ich kenne nichts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T17:52:58.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-08T18:20:06.413" Score="0" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I remember reading once that cross linguistically, at least in &quot;normal&quot; spoken or written language, verbs almost never take more than ~4-5 obligatory arguments. This seems to be true in my native language, English. Does anyone know of a study showing that this (soft) constraint holds up cross-linguistically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22540" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T19:14:22.053" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T19:14:22.053" Title="Cross-linguistic study of distribution of number of verbal arguments" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;valency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28556" CreationDate="2018-11-08T20:45:03.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A word is a verb if it is used as a verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will gribicaluate you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, &lt;code&gt;gribicaluate&lt;/code&gt; is not a valid word but it is used as a verb, so it is a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more realistic example is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let me google it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here google is used a verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how we can figure it out, the above answer answers this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23111" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T20:45:03.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29612" CreationDate="2018-11-08T20:51:54.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not actually sure what you are asking about – &quot;phonemic variation in vowel quantity (but not quality) work in e.g. songs&quot;. Indeed, &quot;long&quot; vs &quot;short&quot; vowels in Germanic are typically associated with quality differences. But in many languages (Bantu languages, Japanese, Finnic and Saamic languages) length isn't indirectly expressed by quality differences. The phonetic difference between long and short vowels in those languages is one of duration (I take it that by &quot;phonemic variation&quot; you are referring to the fact that length is phonemically contrastive): long vowels are longer than corresponding short vowels by some amount (we do not have a particularly rich database of phonetic studies that established the ratio of long to short, but languages do differ in how much longer a long vowel is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean by &quot;e.g. song&quot; – other domains for looking at vowel length include metrical structure, tone assignment, syllable structure... Ross &amp;amp; Lehiste &lt;em&gt;The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs&lt;/em&gt; investigate the question for Estonian which has contrastive vowel and consonant length. Regrettably, I don't have a copy of the book, but my understanding is that the requirements of metrical structure for the &lt;em&gt;runo&lt;/em&gt; match the foot structure of the spoken language, so for example a long vowel will not be in a metrically weak position (non-initial within the foot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T20:51:54.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2018-11-08T22:41:26.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no rule that says Mandarin unaspirated stops CAN'T be voiced. The point is that there are no minimal pairs between voiced and unvoiced unaspirated stops. The actual phonetic realization- in particular, the voice onset time- can and will vary by speaker, dialect, time, circumstance, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T22:41:26.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2018-11-09T17:43:07.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've probably figured out, often the swiftest way to get an etymology of a Latin word is to think of an English derivative and look it up in the online etymology dictionary , e. g. ,  if I want to know where Latin equus comes from, I look up equine and find that equus comes from PIE root *ekwo- &quot;horse”          &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23115" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T17:43:07.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28556" CreationDate="2018-11-09T18:44:57.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word, if you don't know, you have to &lt;strong&gt;guess&lt;/strong&gt;, then try to verify your guess.  You will probably use some heuristics (that is, rules of thumb) to guide your guesswork.  At least, as a linguist, that's what I do, and I think it is a plausible model for what any hearer does in figuring out what is being said. Your first guesses will lead to further guesses about the structure of an expression you've heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A technical term for this process is top-down parsing, which means that deciphering the tree structure of an expression, you proceed from the top of a structure tree, with the root, and work your way down to lower branches, and eventually to leaves (which will be morphemes, or perhaps phonemes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, as I said, I think this is a plausible idea of how language understanding works, using it as a conscious strategy in grammatical analysis, is not very intuitive, and is something that has to be taught to beginning syntax students, who are more naturally led to bottom up parsing, as an alternative model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In bottom up parsing, you start with phonemes and morphemes, look those up in a mental dictionary of what you know of the language, and work your way up the tree, winding up with a complete analysis of structure only at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, for figuring out where English verbs are, in bottom up parsing, perhaps you could look for /d/s and /t/s at the ends of words as a clue, with the idea that they might be past tense suffixes, which would identify words as finite verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In top down parsing, however, if the communicative context were that someone is giving you instructions, you might guess that the first words of sentences are verbs, since English imperatives start with verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-11-10T18:35:29.473" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:35:29.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29626" CreationDate="2018-11-10T15:27:08.060" Score="13" ViewCount="930" Body="&lt;p&gt;A silly what-if question that sounds a bit mad: I am curious as to why the letter &quot;H&quot; in English and some other European languages is used as a modifier to make diglyphs represent a single phoneme (ch, sh, th, dh, kh, gh etc.).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I cannot figure out what is the technical term for a letter used as modifier in diglyphs, which is half the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of H is not universal in Latin script languages: some opt for diacritic marks and others for other letters. In Polish, the letter &quot;Z&quot; is used as a modifier like an H. In Italian CI is used as /ʧ/. While in Czech and Slovakian a caron diacritic is used instead of a H. While a dot above was used in Irish, but now an H due to foreign-made typewriters.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In runic alphabets, dots or marks within the letters were used. I understand that Germanic language orthographies were not translitterated from runes, but there were some borrowings, say wynn and thor, which survived in English despite French influence. So I would have predicted diacritics would have ended up being used...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mirrored C means &quot;con&quot; in Latin, while I am pretty sure I read that some script used rotated printing types for some phonemes. Which also seems more logical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the use of H seems arbitrary. H is rare, but so are Q, X, Y, Z. And before printing presses, there were all sorts of symbols we don't use (9=orum, long esse etc.). Any of them could have been used.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I made my logic of why I don't understand why 'H'...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23120" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:41:59.073" Title="Origin of h as a modifier letter" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29625" CreationDate="2018-11-10T18:31:17.547" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, it comes from &lt;code&gt;TH&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;PH&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, there were &quot;aspirated&quot; consonants written &lt;code&gt;Θ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Φ&lt;/code&gt;, which literally sounded like &quot;t followed by h&quot; and &quot;p followed by h&quot;. So when words with these consonants were borrowed into Latin, which didn't have these sounds natively and thus lacked special letters for them, they were respelled as &lt;code&gt;TH&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;PH&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then sound changes happened, and the sounds written &lt;code&gt;Θ&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Φ&lt;/code&gt; in Greek changed to be pronounced like modern English &quot;th&quot; and &quot;f&quot;. But they were still (usually) written as &lt;code&gt;TH&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;PH&lt;/code&gt; in Latin, because that was the established convention. That's how we end up with words like &quot;phone&quot;, with the &quot;ph&quot; representing &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt;: it comes from a Latinized Greek word that originally had &lt;code&gt;Φ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when Germanic languages with that same &quot;th&quot; sound (written &lt;code&gt;/θ/&lt;/code&gt; in the International Phonetic Alphabet) started being written in the Latin alphabet, scribes needed to find a way to represent this non-Latin sound. Some borrowed a runic letter, &quot;thorn&quot; (&lt;code&gt;Þ&lt;/code&gt;), which is still used in Icelandic. But others looked at Greek, and the conventions for spelling Greek words with that same &lt;code&gt;/θ/&lt;/code&gt; sound, and wrote it &lt;code&gt;TH&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the idea of putting an &lt;code&gt;H&lt;/code&gt; after a letter to change its sound had been introduced, and it caught on. In English, which at one point had an alternation between &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/t͡ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; (both written &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;), they started putting an &lt;code&gt;H&lt;/code&gt; after the second one to make &lt;code&gt;CH&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is all, as you can see, basically an accident. Polish uses &lt;code&gt;Z&lt;/code&gt; instead because that was Latin's most common affricate-marking letter. Italian uses &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; because that's the same way they represent &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;, and their &lt;code&gt;[t͡ʃ]&lt;/code&gt; is historically and perhaps underlyingly &lt;code&gt;/kj/&lt;/code&gt;. Hebrew uses a slash-like stroke after the letter just because it's unambiguous. And so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:31:17.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29625" CreationDate="2018-11-10T18:41:59.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;main&quot; letter of a digraph is called the base, and I have never heard &quot;the other letter&quot; being given a name, though modifier seems most appropriate. As to &quot;why H?&quot;, I think one should start with &quot;when H?&quot;. The Latin alphabet derives from the Greek alphabet via a chain of historical modifications. Crucially, the Latin alphabet modifies the Etruscan alphabet: Etruscan is said to have aspirated versus unaspirated stops, and their alphabet was a version of the western Greek alphabet. So in Etruscan,  represented [kʰ],  represented [tʰ] and  represented [pʰ]. When the Etruscan alphabet was adapted to Latin, these letters were dropped because Latin did not have aspiration as a feature of consonants (no point in retaining letters that you have no use for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use for some means of indicating aspiration arose when the Romans found need to learn Greek. There is a natural phonetic relationship between the consonant [h] and aspiration, thus φ was rendered as &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. The thing to bear in mind is that at the relevant stage, Greek φ θ χ were aspirated stops. However: their pronunciation in Greek changed so that they became affricates and then fricatives, hence &quot;ph&quot; came to be associated with the pronunciation &quot;f&quot;. This gets the ball rolling. &quot;Rh&quot; similarly arises from the fact that initial &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in Greek was voiceless and written in Greek with the aspiration diacritic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, the letters of the Latin alphabet were fixed (sort of), which meant that any novel sound had to be represented as a multigraph. &quot;H&quot; has an advantage because it was already used as a modifier in Latin. The spelling of Italian multigraphs is influenced by its historical phonology: [tʃ] is represented as &quot;ci&quot; because [tʃ] arose from palatalization of &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; (spelled &quot;c&quot;). The specific history of &quot;h&quot; as a modifier is very complex, and depends on the particular writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:41:59.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-10T23:44:31.070" Score="-6" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of history is clear. That which is in the past. Is the cultural use of the word ‘history’ a corrupted ‘yesterday/gisteren/gestern’ descriptive for ‘the day before the stars (compare Dutch Gesternte Dag (stars day)) Or is it a cognate of ‘yesterday’? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how does the word ‘future’ relate to ‘tomorrow’? It seems cognate with a phrase ‘vue terre’ (earth view) as if relating to someone seeing coming towards* you. It seems both words relate to darkness (stars-history) and light on earth (vue-terre-future). *Dutch ‘toekomst’ (compounded toward-coming) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just some ideas I have, but are there answers by historians, philosophers or linguists about this issue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" OwnerDisplayName="Ajagar" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T06:13:15.360" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T22:35:35.940" Title="What is the history of ‘history’?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29628" CreationDate="2018-11-11T01:07:24.963" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;history&quot; comes (via French) from the Latin &lt;em&gt;historia&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;historía&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;narration&quot;. In Greek this goes back to the verb &lt;em&gt;historé-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;research&quot;, from the noun &lt;em&gt;histōr&lt;/em&gt; &quot;expert&quot;, from earlier &lt;em&gt;wistōr&lt;/em&gt;, which probably goes back to PIE *&lt;em&gt;w-yd-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;see, know&quot; (so cognate with German &lt;em&gt;Wissen&lt;/em&gt;, English &quot;wise&quot;, and Latin derivatives like &quot;vision&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The linguistic processes involved are quite well-attested: initial &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; tends to turn into &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; or disappear in Ancient Greek; the ending &lt;em&gt;-st-&lt;/em&gt; is like English &quot;-ist&quot;; &lt;em&gt;-ds-&lt;/em&gt; turns into &lt;em&gt;-s-&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Yesterday&quot; on the other hand seems to go all the way back to the PIE word for, well, &quot;yesterday&quot;. Cognates include German &lt;em&gt;Gestern&lt;/em&gt; and Latin &lt;em&gt;hesternus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, the linguistic processes are well-attested: Old English turned &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; next to front vowels, for example, which is why we see English &quot;e&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;e&quot; next to German &lt;em&gt;Au&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Future&quot; comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;futūr-&lt;/em&gt;, which is the future participle of the verb for &quot;to be&quot;, from the PIE root for &quot;to become&quot;. This PIE root also led to the forms of English &quot;to be&quot; that start with a letter B: be, been, being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And once again, the phonological processes here are quite solidly attested: the sound that PIE scholars call *&lt;em&gt;bʰ&lt;/em&gt; turned into &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning of words in Latin, but turned into &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; in Germanic languages like English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T22:35:35.940" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T22:35:35.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T01:32:31.750" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the sentence, 'I saw the new play by Smith last week' is the noun phrase consisting only of a proper noun 'Smith' a constituent of the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instinctively I think that it is not a constituent, for it is already a part of the prepositional phrase 'by Smith' (which is a part of the noun phrase 'the new play by Smith', which in turn is a part of the verb phrase 'saw the new play by Smith', I believe). Additionally, I cannot move 'Smith' to any other part of the sentence grammatically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I Smith saw the new play by last week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) I saw Smith the new play by last week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) I saw the new play by last week Smith. and so on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I try these tests for constituency, I'm having difficulty telling if they're grammatical or not. They don't sound terribly wrong, but they don't sound very natural, either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) It was Smith I saw the new play by last week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Whom did I see the new play by last week? Smith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my attempt at a tree, by the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                        S&#xA;                                    /        \&#xA;                                   NP        VP&#xA;                                   |     /        \&#xA;                                   PN    VP       AdvP&#xA;                                  'I'   /    \'last week'&#xA;                                     Vt    NP  &#xA;                                   'saw' /    \ &#xA;                                       Det    NP&#xA;                                      'the' /    \&#xA;                                           AP    NP&#xA;                                           |   /    \&#xA;                                           A  NC    PP&#xA;                                         'new''play' / \&#xA;                                                    P  NPR&#xA;                                                   'by' 'Smith'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23123" LastEditorUserId="23123" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T02:03:17.170" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T02:06:06.463" Title="Is this noun phrase a constituent of the given sentence?" Tags="&lt;constituents&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29631" CreationDate="2018-11-11T02:02:00.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A constituent is one or more words that functions as a group within a syntactic structure. For example &quot;house&quot; is a constituent of the NP &quot;The house&quot;, because it is a part of that higher NP. &quot;The house&quot; is also a constituent of &quot;sell the house!&quot;. In these examples, &quot;house&quot; is an immediate constituent of the NP, and &quot;the house&quot; is an immediate constituent of &quot;sell the house&quot;. Usually, we speak of the dominance relations of the nodes, so that NP immediately dominates N, and VP immediately dominates NP (also V). &quot;Immediately dominates&quot; is a special case of &quot;dominates&quot;, where &quot;dominates&quot; means &quot;is above&quot; (using the graphic metaphor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the sentence &quot;The old dog likes sleeping on the rug&quot;. S dominates every node in that sentence – S is ultimately at the top of the tree. S dominates the N which is realized as &quot;rug&quot;. S dominates the NP &quot;the rug&quot;. S dominates the PP &quot;on the rug&quot;, and it dominates the VP &quot;sleeping on the rug&quot;; and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smith is a constituent in all of your sentences. Every word is a constituent of its sentence (there are some words that people just stick in the middle of sentences that are not part of those sentences, e.g. epenthetic &quot;uh,&quot; or &quot;like,&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with your constituency test is that there is no rule that says &quot;you can move any constituent to anywhere else&quot; whereby unmovability to a position is evidence that something is not a constituent. Those tests at best work for determining if a string of two or more words are, together, a constituent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T02:06:06.463" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T02:06:06.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T05:49:02.457" Score="7" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generally the grammar related to the numbers in Arabic is considered to be the most complicated thing about the language. In fact, it is considered so complicated that many teachers argue that not even Arabs use it correctly.&amp;nbsp;.&amp;nbsp;.&amp;nbsp;. &lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;http://allthearabicyouneverlearnedthefirsttimearound.com/p3/p3-ch3/arabic-numbers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;All the Arabic You Never Learned the First Time Around&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who are unfamiliar with Arabic (like me), skimming through the article linked above as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar#Cardinal_numerals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; reveals the elaborate system of case, gender agreement, part of speech and definiteness as well as frequent irregularities within that system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, some specific intriguing examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gender polarity for 3 through 10&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specific case forms for 12 but not other teens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unitary numbers from 20 on inflecting only as nouns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;20 through 90 dictating the case of their associated noun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The patterns I cited do not only apply to the listed numbers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely a system of this sophistication has an interesting history associated with it. The only reason I could suggest for why its nuances arose is that the cardinals of the Arabic language were derived from words which predated the language’s inflection system and were not accommodated into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone shed light on this system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22469" LastEditorUserId="22469" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T22:34:29.390" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T22:34:29.390" Title="How did the complexities of Arabic cardinals arise?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T05:55:33.540" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been mulling over the idea that articulatory gestures should be looked as excursions from a home base that varies according to language and accent, and that defining sounds just in terms of the target of the gesture leaves out something important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the basic set up in French seems to have more tension somewhere than the basic set up in English. French speakers are not moving from the same place, or do not have the same perception of where neutral is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm thinking along the right lines here, how can home base / the neutral position be characterized? What variables would define it for a given pronunciation system, and is it possible to put values on them by analyzing recorded speech (or would you need to make direct physiological measurements)? In a language like English, which has weak forms of certain vowels, can you locate home base by drawing lines from the strong forms through the weak forms and seeing where they cross / come closest? Otherwise, could it be identified by looking at non-verbal utterances that might otherwise be language-independent (I mean the sounds people make when they are excited, hurt themselves are hesitating etc. etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T05:55:33.540" Title="Is there such a thing as an articulatory home base for a given language, and how could it be characterized?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29633" CreationDate="2018-11-11T17:59:28.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The system of gender polarity is broadly identical in all ancient Semitic languages, such as Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic and Geez. It is not an Arabic innovation. The origin of it is shrouded in the prehistory of Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:59:28.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T22:23:32.447" Score="2" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Adger's Core Syntax book and am having a tough time with Exercise 1 of the functional categories chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exercise is about gerunds. Gerunds are specified by the form of suffixing -ing to verbs. Let's assume that adding -ing in English is ambiguos between being a little n containing the [of] case feature and a little v with the [acc] case feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exercise is asking to draw a tree, completly specified with case features for each of the phrases in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The reading of Shakespeare&lt;/strong&gt; satisfied me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reading Shakespeare&lt;/strong&gt; satisfied me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing right off the bat that we see is that the phrases bolded have to be DP (given that they are in the subject position). Usually a PP is headed by a P, and has its DP complement, like above the table or near my foot. So, if this is parallel (and we don't have anything in the specifier of P), then the PP here would be of Shakespeare. (One could make an argument for reading being in Spec P, but that'd be a bit different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tree I came up with is: DP[D[the], nP[[me], NP[read n[ing] of Shakespeare]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone help me out with the tree drawing+case feature agreement? I'm having a rough time trying to come up with a syntax tree that makes sense. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22965" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T03:39:02.080" Title="Drawing case specified trees for english gerunds" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T23:11:13.230" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description is found in a paper about the German fricatives&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/labphon.2014.5.issue-1/lp-2014-0005/lp-2014-0005.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/labphon.2014.5.issue-1/lp-2014-0005/lp-2014-0005.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do the three sound differ from each other in a spectrogram? Do diachronic sound changes from [ʃ] to [ç] or reverse generally have an intermediate stage of [ɕ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subjectively (if can be generalized to other people, acoustically) I perceive the sound is something between [s] and [ʃ], though the description is &quot;...have simultaneous alveolar and palatal articulation&quot;. Do different people have different perception of articulation place of the sound [ɕ]? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T23:11:13.230" Title="Is it appropriate to say that [ɕ] is an intermediate form of [ʃ ç]?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29640" CreationDate="2018-11-12T00:30:13.557" Score="3" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a trivial question, but it seems to me that certain unvoiced example pronunciations for IPA sounds resemble the voiced one. For example, on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bilabial plosives &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; seem indistinguishable for me—they both sound like a voiced consonant; however, other pairs such as &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt; are clearly distinguishable for me—&lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; is unvoiced and &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt; is voiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just me who somehow can't tell the difference between the &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; pair? Perhaps it's just a characteristic of plosive consonants that the unvoiced sounds like a voiced consonant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23128" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T14:57:55.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T14:57:55.680" Title="IPA Pronunciation of Unvoiced Consonants Seems Like Voiced" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29639" CreationDate="2018-11-12T00:53:43.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, when a person cannot hear a difference between a voiceless stop and a voiced stop, as pronounced according to IPA principles, that is because the voiceless stop is unaspirated, and the person listening is a speaker of English. In English, syllable-initial pre-stress /p,t,k/ are aspirated. Furthermore, voiced stops in that position are not fully voiced and for many speakers are actually unvoiced. So a phonetic transcription of &quot;pin&quot; would be [pʰɪn], and &quot;bin&quot; would be [pɪn]. The consonants in those performances are not pronounced as English consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to hear those sounds &quot;conceptually&quot;, that is by categorizing the sound as &quot;p&quot; or &quot;b&quot;, and your reference point is English, what you are hearing is not English &quot;p&quot; or &quot;b&quot;, and they both sound close enough to &quot;b&quot; that you think they are the same, namely &quot;b&quot;. An alternative approach would be to compare that IPA performance of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and ask, do these really sound exactly alike? I would also suggest using &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this chart&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/consonants1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this chart&lt;/a&gt;, which are performed by acknowledged phonetic experts. If you absolutely can't hear any difference in [ata] and [ada], that's an interesting problem – usually people can hear that they are different, the problem is just how to classify what you hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers of other languages have different experiences. For example, speakers of Hindi typically have no problem getting the distinction since their language has unaspirated and fully voiced stops. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T00:53:43.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29639" CreationDate="2018-11-12T01:07:59.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many native English speakers have the same reaction as you, because they use the fortis/lenis (strong/weak) articulatory difference to distinguish [pa]/[ba], not the unvoiced/voiced difference. This leaves them free to devoice the [b], which in fact they often do, since it is less effort.  So, it is likely that your pronunciation of &quot;bah&quot; has a devoiced &quot;b&quot;, which makes it [pa], really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason /b/ tends to be phonetic [p] is that there is no easy way to maintain the voicing of [b], because the air that must continue to escape through the glottis has no way to get out of your mouth.  One thing you can do, which I refer to as the Bing Crosby maneuver, is to loosen the muscles of your cheeks to let them puff out, so the oral cavity has room to contain the extra air for the brief time the [b] needs it.  Otherwise, the increasing air pressure in the mouth will choke off the voicing in the glottis by slowing the flow of air there.  Dropping the jaw or the larynx has a similar effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="21961" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T14:56:42.273" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T14:56:42.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29637" CreationDate="2018-11-12T03:39:02.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't answer your question.  I hope remarks below help, somehow.  The coherence of your question is questionable, because (as best I can understand) you're asking about case assignment in gerund constructions, but the example you want case assignment for (A below) is actually not a gerund construction.  Your example B &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a gerund construction, but case assignment in B seems straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  A. The reading of Shakespeare satisfied me.  &#xA;&#xA;  B. Reading Shakespeare satisfied me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many discussions here of gerunds.  They're tricky.  A number of syntactic characteristics show that &quot;reading&quot; in your example A is a noun, as against &quot;reading&quot; in example B, which is a verb.  Distinguishing characteristics include occurrence with articles, modifiability by adjective vs. adverbs, taking direct objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gerunds are verbs, even though they are heads of what you call &quot;DP&quot; (and what others call &quot;NP&quot;).  Believe it or not, it's true.  Thus, case assignment in example B is straightforward: a transitive verb takes an accusative direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how in detail the cases work in examples like A, where a verb in a nominalized sentence has been converted to a noun, but it has nothing to do with gerunds (which are &lt;strong&gt;verbs&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T03:39:02.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-12T06:25:00.533" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;hyponym&quot; an antonym to the word &quot;hyperonym&quot;? In the sense of the terms themselves, this is true, but does the difference in terms apply to antonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subset that defines the hyponym and the superset defined by the hyperonym can be thought of as antonyms, but can one call the termins hyponym and hyperonym directly antonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, subset &amp;amp; superset - antonyms.&#xA;Hyponym &amp;amp; hyperonym - ?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23132" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T17:48:23.227" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T17:48:23.227" Title="What could be the antonym to the word &quot;hyperonym&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-12T15:51:49.463" Score="1" ViewCount="1112" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of mutual intelligibility is interesting, yet due to how the Urnfield culture that spoke proto Celtic just north of the Italian peninsula (and inside modern Bologna, Venice, and Milan) how intelligible could these languages have been? Some interesting cognates being,-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Léigh - leggere (to read)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can - cantare (to sing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creid - credere (to believe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corp - corpo (body)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A More Expanded list of Cognates, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/8156398/Interesting-similarities-between-Irish-and-Italian-words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/8156398/Interesting-similarities-between-Irish-and-Italian-words&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T11:34:39.040" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T19:01:25.183" Title="How different were proto Italic and proto Celtic?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;&lt;italic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29643" CreationDate="2018-11-12T17:24:14.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Antonym&quot; is a bit of a weird term, because it's hard to define precisely. For example, take &quot;subset&quot;. Is its antonym necessarily &quot;superset&quot;? A mathematician might say its antonym is &quot;not a subset&quot;, which is very different from &quot;superset&quot;. So it comes down to what subjectively feels right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in general English usage, I'd say &quot;hyponym&quot; and &quot;hyperonym&quot; are antonyms, just as &quot;subset&quot; and &quot;superset&quot; are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T17:24:14.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T08:43:22.130" Score="2" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/regional-voices/grammatical-variation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library&lt;/a&gt; site, the use of nonstandard forms of past tense expressions like “&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;we was&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;” are common in some English dialects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The verb 'to be' has two simple past forms in Standard English - I/he/she/it was and you/we/they were. Apart from the special case of you, the distinction is, therefore, between singular was and plural were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some regional dialects, however, this pattern is not observed. In some parts of the country, speakers use was throughout, while speakers elsewhere use were exclusively. There are also dialects where the two different forms are used for the opposite function - singular were and plural was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22we%20was%22&amp;amp;lr=lang_en&amp;amp;safe=strict&amp;amp;tbs=lr:lang_1en&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;prmd=ivn&amp;amp;ei=cdrpW_ECyYuXBPjpgHg&amp;amp;start=10&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;biw=768&amp;amp;bih=984&amp;amp;dpr=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Usage examples&lt;/a&gt; are not hard to find in print:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) What we was after was a couple of noble big di'monds as big as hazel-nuts, which everybody was running to see. We was dressed up fine, and ... - From &lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) And we was in the lifeboat —I'd say about nine days. While we was in the lifeboat a German submarine surfaced. That's why I thought we might've got torpedoed too. - From &lt;em&gt;Merchant Marine Survivors of World War II: Oral Histories of Cargo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) We was on the come up. We all brought cars with the money we had stashed and the money we was making off the coke we was moving. - From  &lt;em&gt;Lust, Money, Envy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but probably the more memorable usage was by George Harrison in the song titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Was_Fab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When we was fab.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) where in the UK is this dialectal usage present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) what is the origin of this usage? An old usage survived from Middle English for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) is the above usage present also in dialectal forms of AmE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23142" LastEditorUserId="23142" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T19:29:52.017" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T19:29:52.017" Title="“We was” and other dialectical variants" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29647" CreationDate="2018-11-13T09:04:35.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) where in the UK is this dialectal usage present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think mostly in the South-East; Kent, London, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) what is the origin of this usage? An old usage survived from Middle English for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, older forms of English regularly distinguish plural and singular forms in the verb conjugation paradigm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the grammaticalisation cycle taking its course. Because the pronoun is obligatory, a verb conjugation is redundant. So a language will tend to remove it, especially if the phonetic difference is slight. This has not only happened in English though! In the closely related languages, Afrikaans and Norwegian, this process has completed, and verbs simply are not conjugated, even in the standard language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) is the above usage present also in dialectal forms of AmE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English/Verbs/Copula&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AAVE has this feature&lt;/a&gt;. And who knows, maybe the process will continue, and eventually be standard in English as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T09:04:35.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29656" CreationDate="2018-11-13T19:33:50.923" Score="1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to write a paper on French phonology for my Phonology class so I was wondering if you could give me some advice on where to start? I'm mainly looking for textbooks either in English or in French but online resources are also fine. In each book I've opened, it seems like every author has their own classification of vowels and consonants and I don't know which classification would be the most accurate from the phonological point of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T07:47:19.130" Title="Textbook suggestions for French phonology" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29652" CreationDate="2018-11-13T20:23:06.363" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it a worldwide phenomenon found in many languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give an example here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have heard several times in spoken Chinese that people say [t͡ʃaʊ̯˥˩] with the meaning &quot;gotten/found&quot;. This is a nonsense word and has no other cause for emergence besides a mix of [taʊ̯˥˩] and [t͡ʃaʊ̯˧˥], both with the meaning &quot;gotten/found&quot; and they are freely interchangeable in this context. It seems the new formed expression gets the tone from one and the consonant from the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T21:04:58.717" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T22:15:36.307" Title="What calls the phenomenon that the sounds of two synonyms mix together and form an expression with the same meaning?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29650" CreationDate="2018-11-13T21:33:23.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call this a type of &quot;eggcorn&quot;, or &quot;intra-language phono-semantic matching&quot; if you want to be pretentious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An eggcorn is a word or phrase that's been modified to more closely match something else in the same language. Usually the result uses more common or familiar words than the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Expatriate&quot; → &quot;ex-patriot&quot; (as they're a former resident of a country)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Praying mantis&quot; → &quot;preying mantis&quot; (as it preys on other insects)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;In cahoots&quot; → &quot;in cohorts&quot; (because they're in a group together)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Due diligence&quot; → &quot;do diligence&quot; (as it's something you do)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The name, by the way, comes from an early example: &quot;acorn&quot; → &quot;egg corn&quot;, because it's shaped like an egg.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T22:09:18.153" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T22:09:18.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29650" CreationDate="2018-11-13T22:15:36.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say it is a kind of redundancy. In Berber, we find that mainly in the grammatical morphemes, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In kabyle:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;am = as + zun(d) = as &gt; amzun(d) = as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Riffian:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tt = imperfective morpheme + gemination = imperfective morpheme &gt;  ttsemmah = forgive.imperfective aspect ( smah = forgive.perfective aspect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T22:15:36.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T22:21:02.187" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they sound so similar, does it mean that they have a larger chance to be free variants of a phoneme and even become the other in a sound change. Do they play different or similar role in sound changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T15:42:02.810" Title="Why do retroflex and postalveolar fricatives sound so similar despite the quite different positions of the tongue?" Tags="&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29649" CreationDate="2018-11-13T22:33:52.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer largely depends on what you mean by &quot;phonology&quot;. Since you specifically mentioned &quot;classification of consonants and vowels&quot;, I assume your main interest is in taxonomic of the segmental inventory. In that case, accuracy is not really a relevant consideration, since classifications are rarely &quot;inaccurate&quot;. Classifications differ because one follows theory A and another follows theory B, and the dispute is really over the classificatory framework. So for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1949.11659496&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jakobson &amp;amp; Lotz 1949&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Notes on the French phonemic pattern&quot; presents one analysis of French phonemes. You can compare that to Schane 1968 &lt;em&gt;French phononology and morphology&lt;/em&gt;, Fougeron &amp;amp; Smith in their French Illustration of the IPA, and there is also a general book by Fagyal et al. &lt;em&gt;French: a linguistic introduction&lt;/em&gt; where you can an analysis of the inventor; Charette 1991 &lt;em&gt;Conditions on phonological government&lt;/em&gt; will contribute a different theoretical perspective. &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dcwalker/PronCF.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C.D. Walker&lt;/a&gt; also analyzes French phonemes, in standard and Canadian French. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.1987.25.issue-5/issue-files/ling.1987.25.issue-5.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vol 25 issue 5 of &lt;em&gt;Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was a special issue of French phonology and phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T07:47:19.130" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T07:47:19.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29655" CreationDate="2018-11-13T23:35:03.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the retroflex and postalveolar fricatives are sibilants and are therefore &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibilant#Acoustics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;louder than other consonants&lt;/a&gt;. /ʃ/ and /ʂ/ are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postalveolar_consonant#Postalveolar_sibilants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two lowest pitched among sibilants&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Urdu inherited Sanskrit /ʂ/ as /ʃ/ (Hindi is also sometimes described as having /ʃ/ rather than /ʂ/). The phonemes /ʂ, ʐ, tʂ, dʐ/ of Serbo-Croatian are realized as /ʃ, ʒ, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ/ in Croatian and some Bosnian dialects (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbo-Croation phonology&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia). The postalveolar set of consonants in Slovak is &quot;often pronounced&quot; as retroflex (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slovak phonology&lt;/a&gt;), so this might be one case of free variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T08:44:38.823" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T08:44:38.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14417" CreationDate="2018-11-14T01:38:56.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are few good links from wikipedia&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pronuncian.com/sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pronuncian.com/sounds/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23150" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T01:38:56.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29655" CreationDate="2018-11-14T01:39:11.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The positions of the tongue are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; all that different in these sounds. They are only somewhat different, and that similarity in production is why they sound similar. 2 sounds do not have a larger chance of being free variants, or of one becoming the other, in an absolute sense – such a comparison only makes sense given a third &quot;foil&quot;. For example [ʃ,ʂ] are more likely to be in free variation than [ʃ,θ] or [ʂ,θ] are (likewise, for one to derive from the other via historical change). Restricting the investigation to the realm of sh-like sounds, you would be looking for perceptual closeness relations among [ʂ ʃ ɕ ç] plus the &quot;whistling&quot; fricative of Shona which does not have a unique IPA letter (close to ʂ, but not the same). A three-way contrast in this set is rare, or non-existent ([ʂ] in Norwegian is best treated as an allophone of /rs/). If you simply mean &quot;are [ʂ,ʃ] perceptually closer than either is to [s θ f χ]&quot;, the answer is &quot;yes&quot;. Otherwise, there is no way to test the claim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T01:39:11.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-14T14:23:47.433" Score="4" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that they were once the same language, Proto Italo-Celtic, however with the descendants of Latin and the remaining Celtic languages, which Romance Language retains the most influence from the Celtic languages they displaced? Obviously, none of them retain enough words to allow any amount of mutual intelligibility, yet the amount of a language remaining after over a thousand year reign and suppression is interesting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar case would be how French and English are somewhat intelligible when reading, despite a thousand year gap and hundreds of years of rule/ influence, despite how we still retain a decent amount of Germanic vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T16:46:18.140" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T17:57:10.057" Title="Which Romance Language retains the most words from Celtic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29649" CreationDate="2018-11-14T16:53:36.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the most recent, comprehensive and descriptive works in English about the phonology and phonetics of Modern French are &lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/catalog/silv.11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonological Variation in French: Illustrations from Three Continents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ed. Gess, Lyche &amp;amp; Meisenburg, John Benjamins, 2012) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781552380338&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;French Sound Structure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Walker, University of Calgary Press, 2001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/jp/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/european-language-and-linguistics/french-linguistic-introduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;French: A Linguistic Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Fagyal, Kibbee &amp;amp; Jenkins, Cambridge University Press, 2006) also covers phonology and phonetics at some length. Dialectal variation of French around the world is documented in great detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/varieties-of-spoken-french-9780199573714&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Varieties of Spoken French&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ed. Detey, Durand, Laks &amp;amp; Lyche, Oxford University Press, 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T16:53:36.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29660" CreationDate="2018-11-14T17:03:41.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a modern Romance language shows some influence of a Celtic language it replaced it is a consequence of language contact and not of common inheritance. It is generally hold that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhaeto-Romance&lt;/a&gt; languages (Romansch, Ladin, and Friulian) show the largest Celtic substrate influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T17:03:41.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29649" CreationDate="2018-11-14T22:19:06.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for the phonological inventory, here some French literatures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MARTINET, André / WALTER, Henriette, Dictionnaire de la prononciation française dans son usage réel, Paris : France Expansion, 1973.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;WALTER, Henriette, La dynamique des phonèmes dans le lexique français contemporain, Paris : France-Expansion, 1976.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;WALTER, Henriette, La phonologie du français, Paris : P.U.F., 1977.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gougenheim Georges, 1935, Éléments de phonologie française, Étude descriptive des sons du français au point de vue fonctionnel, Strasbourg, Public. de la Faculté des Lettres.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T22:19:06.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29655" CreationDate="2018-11-14T23:12:15.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone that comes from Mandarin, retroflex and postalveolar fricatives sound quite different to my ears. The fact is that they are both fricatives and are produced at about the same location in the mouth, so it makes sense that they'd be similar. It sounds to me that the difference is mainly in the way it affects surrounding vowels, and the way it affects the resonance, but I'd have to do some fact checking on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin#Hokkien-influenced&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taiwanese Mandarin&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;the retroflex sounds (zh, ch, sh, r) from Putonghua tend to merge with the alveolar series (z, c, s), becoming more retracted version of alveolar consonants like [t͡s̠ʰ][t͡s̠][s̠][z̠].&quot; This is probably true in various other dialects/accents as well. Note, though, that they are still considered separate phonemes here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if they have a &quot;larger chance&quot; to merge. Certainly, a larger chance than two incredibly different sounds, and most sounds in general, but to what extent I couldn't say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23162" LastEditorUserId="23162" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T15:42:02.810" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T15:42:02.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T02:29:37.893" Score="1" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the ASL fingerspelling alphabet, the letters U, V, W, Y, and Z all look  similar to the printed English letters. But the sign with the fingers in a &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; shape is R, and the letter X uses a different shape. Is there a reason for this or a known story behind how it got that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23158" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T08:36:27.183" Title="Why does the ASL fingerspelling sign shaped like an 'x' represent R, not X?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29666" CreationDate="2018-11-15T07:59:22.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ASL manual alphabet is derived more or less directly from the French manual alphabet. Here, the shape of &lt;code&gt;R&lt;/code&gt; is again as you describe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is shaped a little differently though; it's like the American one but extends both the middle and index finger, bending them in the way you know. This shape is reminiscent of the handwritten &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which is formed by first writing the left hand part &lt;sub&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;code&gt;)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;, and then the right hand part &lt;sub&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;code&gt;(&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ca5Hx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ca5Hx.png&quot; alt=&quot;French manual alphabet letter X&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="23158" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T08:36:27.183" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T08:36:27.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29666" CreationDate="2018-11-15T10:07:17.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of using hand shapes to communicate seems to have been borrowed from native Americans by early Spanish explorers.  In 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet published a manual alphabet in which you can recognize most of the hand shapes of modern AMA (American Manual Alphabet); however, the 'R' was originally formed by bending only the middle finger. This sign is difficult to make without also bending the ring finger.  &lt;strong&gt;I don't know&lt;/strong&gt; if that was a reason, but after the French adopted the Spanish shapes, 'R' had changed to the slightly crossed index and middle fingers.  The 'X' shape (hooked index finger with others curled) came first.  Thomas Gallaudet brought the French shapes to America (back to where the concept had originated).      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T10:12:42.267" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T10:12:42.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T13:58:26.447" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll be teaching an introductory course on the morphology and syntax (and perhaps phonetics/phonology, though perhaps not) of English to undergrads in a large public, urban college in the US. I could use some suggestions for a good textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for something that balances rigor with clarity. If the past is any guide, my students will have no background in linguistics at all, and will likely be stymied by basic parts of speech all semester long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also looking for something that is not &lt;strong&gt;too&lt;/strong&gt; expensive. My students tend to have limited budgets, and a $100 textbook is a textbook that won't be purchased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am open to a textbook that introduces linguistics generally (like Fromkin, et al.) as long the chapters on morphology and syntax are sufficient. A few semesters ago, I used Curzan &amp;amp; Adams, but it was not rigorous enough. Clearly written and engaging, but just not enough detail. A more detailed one might work. General introductions, however, tend to be more expensive than intros to grammar and are often pitched a bit higher than I think my students would be ready for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about Kolln, but her choice to pepper the book with Reed-Kellogg diagrams instead of constituency trees annoys me. If I'm going to make my students diagram sentences, I'd rather not use a system that is more or less obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I've looked at this question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3344/textbook-suggestions-for-syntax-semantics-pragmatics-and-phonetics-phonology&quot;&gt;Textbook suggestions for syntax, semantics/pragmatics and phonetics/phonology&lt;/a&gt;. The OP was asking for introductory texts suitable for a potential graduate student. I'm asking for something suitable for an undergrad who aims to teach English Language Arts in a public middle or high school. This will be their first linguistics class, and for many their last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13793" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T13:58:26.447" Title="Textbook suggestion for undergrad intro to (phonetics/phonology,) morphology and syntax course" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T17:45:50.293" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many diachronic processes of language change appear to derive from synchronic errors in linguistic performance. How do generativists account for this if performance and competence are separate? If errors in linguistic performance are not considered part of &quot;language,&quot; how do they cause changes in language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22737" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T04:38:26.477" Title="How do generativists account for apparent diachronic processes that cause errors in linguistic performance to become cemented as competence?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;language-competence&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29660" CreationDate="2018-11-15T17:50:57.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to supplement jknappen's excellent answer, we don't see a lot of inherited vocabulary shared between Italic and Celtic, simply due to the timescales involved. When there are cognates between the two, they usually come all the way from PIE, or were loaned at a later point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main evidence for Proto-Italo-Celtic comes from certain grammatical features common to Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic, but not found in other Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, PIE didn't really have tense distinctions, so when its daughter languages created a past tense, they did so in different ways. Both Italic and Celtic—and no others that I'm aware of—took two particular unrelated forms (the PIE perfect and aorist) and gave them the same meaning. So some verbs form their past tense with reduplication of the first consonant (the PIE perfect), while others use a suffix &lt;code&gt;-s-&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;-t-&lt;/code&gt;, or a lengthened vowel (the PIE aorist). There are also some innovations common to the two families, such as a vowel &lt;code&gt;-ā-&lt;/code&gt; marking the subjunctive (compare Latin &lt;em&gt;ferat&lt;/em&gt; and Old Irish &lt;em&gt;bera&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;he/she would carry&quot;, versus Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;phérēi&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question remains whether there was actually ever a &quot;Proto-Italo-Celtic&quot; language, or whether these features spread through language contact, or are sheer coincidence. To my knowledge, the jury's still out on that: there's much less evidence for this than for, say, Proto-Germanic, which is uncontroversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T17:57:10.057" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T17:57:10.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29670" CreationDate="2018-11-15T17:58:59.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic performance &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; part of &quot;language&quot;, in the E-language sense. Generative theory is a theory of the computational mechanism, which underlies human speech output. So the grammar say &quot;Do X&quot;, but a speaker does not always follow those rules, or, the rules may produce an output which is under non-optimal conditions (i.e. normal conditions) indistinguishable from a different output. The grammar is induced on the basis of the ambient data (a grammar cannot be directly transmitted from mind to mind), so to the extent that the data diverges from what the grammar would compute, the language will change. This is discussed extensively in Mark Hale's &lt;em&gt;Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T17:58:59.833" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29503" CreationDate="2018-11-15T21:16:10.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are asking about the greatest number of phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know which variety of English has the most phonemes, but my guess is that it may well be so-called Standard British (also called Southern Standard British English, or Recieved Pronunciation, RP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a several reasons for thinking this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is non-rhotic, meaning that there is no /r/ in syllable codas. This in turn means that it has several vowels which only occur in environments where syllable final /r/ has been lost. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was subject to vowel splits such as the TRAP/BATH split, which do not occur in many other regional varieties of English.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It has not undergone vowel mergers such as the &lt;em&gt;Mary/marry/merry&lt;/em&gt; merger, which have occurred in other Englishes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It currently retains distinction between voiced &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, /ð/, and /v, d/. It also retains the distinction between voiceless &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, /θ/, and /f, t/. Both of  these have been lost in some British and other Englishes. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all the differences in numbers of phonemes&amp;mdash;that I know of&amp;mdash; between Standard British and other varieties involve Standard British having more distinct phonemes than its cousins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea about which variety or varieties have the least phonemes. However, I would guess that it is a rhotic variety which has lost its dental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, and which has both been subject to various vowel mergers and not experienced many of the vowel splits seen in other varieties. It is unlikely that there will be any significant difference in the inventory of consonant phonemes bewteen different varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T02:02:38.443" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T02:02:38.443" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T22:12:19.930" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any instances in any language where a finite clause can be nominalised?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gerunds in English are non-finite CPs and deverbal nouns lack an inflectional layer altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rome wants [CP to destroy Carthage]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[DP Rome&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; 's [nP destruction&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; [vP t&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; t&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; of Carthage]]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain scholars say that complementiser &lt;em&gt;yang&lt;/em&gt; in Malay can function as a nominaliser. In (1), the constituent &quot;yang telah mati&quot; is said to be a clause that's been nominalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[Yang telah mati] tidak boleh kembali.&#xA; COMP PERF  die   NEG   can   return&#xA;Those who have died cannot return.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my doubts because aspectual markers can occur in such &quot;nominalised clauses&quot;. Although finiteness is not marked in Malay in any way, the occurrence of aspectual markers can be taken as a diagnostic for finiteness because they can't occur in clauses which one would typically analyse as non-finite, e.g. control clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(*Telah) memenangi pertandingan adalah syarat    untuk peserta     (*akan) menerima hadiah&#xA;(*PERF)  win       competition  COP    condition for   participant (*PROS) receive  prize&#xA;To have won the competition is a condition for a participant to receive the prize&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, (1) can be said to be a headless relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Orang)  yang telah mati tidak boleh kembali.&#xA;(Person) COMP PERF  die  NEG   can   return&#xA;People who have died cannot return.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns in Malay can be deleted if they're given, and this should be the case with (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A: Saya suka kucing yang Ali sedang pegang itu.&#xA;   1.SG like cat    COMP Ali PROG   hold   DIST&#xA;   I like the cat that Ali is holding.&#xA;&#xA;B: Saya suka yang sedang bermain itu.&#xA;   1.SG like COMP PROG   play    DIST&#xA;   I like the one that's playing.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noun heading the relative clause is deleted because it can be recovered from context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T12:06:25.607" Title="Finite Nominalised Clauses" Tags="&lt;infinitive&gt;&lt;gerund&gt;&lt;nominals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29457" CreationDate="2018-11-16T00:00:58.413" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because &quot;huh&quot;, and some other interjections and formulaics are considered by many linguists to be at a cross-road between body language and spoken/mental language. Thus, even if some interjections or formulaics are universal, many linguists don't consider them to be traditional words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ref.:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_855720/component/file_855719/content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_855720/component/file_855719/content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastEditorUserId="20901" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T11:10:43.733" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T11:10:43.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29670" CreationDate="2018-11-16T04:38:26.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A younger generation mistakenly takes their elders' errors to be rule-produced.  So they have to make up new rules to explain what they hear.  We wouldn't have this problem if the rules could be codified and taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T04:38:26.477" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29680" CreationDate="2018-11-17T02:42:16.667" Score="3" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure where to ask this question. I hope this is the right place... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is a little more complicated than the title suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wanting to read the Epic of Gilgamesh in the ancient Babylonian/Sumerian. I'm wondering if I learn Akkadian or Ugaritic, will I be able to read the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh? Which one (if either) would be better to learn? Or is Sumerian totally (or mostly) unrelated and I should learn it itself? Honestly, I know so little about these three languages and how they are related, I'm not sure exactly where to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also wondering if it is easier to learn one first and then the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight on this would be much appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T16:18:12.880" Title="What language(s) should I learn to read the Epic of Gilgamesh?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29678" CreationDate="2018-11-17T03:00:46.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sumerian is a language isolate: no other language is known to be related to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Akkadian and Ugaritic, on the other hand, are Semitic languages: they're related to each other (as well as to Hebrew, Arabic, etc), though not very closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main connection between them is the basic principle of their writing system (cuneiform), which was also shared by Hittite and a few others (*). But if you're hoping to read Sumerian, learning Sumerian is the best route to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(*) In particular, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite used variants of the same cuneiform script, which may have been borrowed and reinterpreted by Ugaritic; or Ugaritic might have just made something similar/inspired by Sumerian, like Cherokee to English. They're not identical.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T16:18:12.880" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T16:18:12.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29678" CreationDate="2018-11-17T07:16:37.853" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for &quot;Gilgamesh&quot;), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BC). These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the &quot;Old Babylonian&quot; version, dates to the 18th century BC ... Only a few tablets of it have survived. The later &quot;standard&quot; version dates from the 13th to the 10th centuries BC ... Approximately two thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the diverse sources found, two main versions of the epic have been partially reconstructed: the standard Akkadian version, or &lt;em&gt;He who saw the deep&lt;/em&gt;, and the Old Babylonian version, or &lt;em&gt;Surpassing all other kings&lt;/em&gt;. Five earlier Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh have been partially recovered, some with primitive versions of specific episodes in the Akkadian version, others with unrelated stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you want to read what is typically termed the Gilgamesh Epic, you need to learn Standard Akkadian or Old Babylonian, not necessarily Sumerian. Standard Akkadian is a later stage of Old Babylonian. Old Babylonian is highly regular which makes it a good starting point; from there you can learn Standard Akkadian by learning about the developments. The other direction is more complicated. Still, the Gilgamesh Epic is a literary work and it will take time before you can read it; in my university students of Old Babylonian start with the Codex Hammurabi. You can read the texts in transcription, or else you need to learn the cuneiform signs, which also differ per period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sumerian is a language isolate that had a lot of language contact with the precursor of Old Babylonian (cuneiform is originally Sumerian). It is perfectly possible to learn Akkadian without knowledge of Sumerian, but if you are interested in the Sumerian poems you clearly need to learn it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Akkadian is an East Semitic language, Ugaritic is a North West Semitic language, as far as I know not directly related to the Gilgamesh epic. It is genealogically closer to Ancient Hebrew and Old Aramaic or even Arabic than to Akkadian (although, like Akkadian, it features nominal cases which Hebrew and Aramaic do not). Perhaps you thought it is related because it is also cuneiform? But cuneiform is a generic term for writing incised on clay tablets. The cuneiform of Akkadian of different periods uses different signs, and like that Ugaritic is yet another writing system, with the most important difference that Ugaritic writing is alphabetic while Akkadian is syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know if you want textbook suggestions and if so for what. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T07:16:37.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T12:19:57.450" Score="-1" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am deciding on a spelling of &quot;tessellation composed of tetrahedra&quot; to use in my thesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four choices I know of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tetrahedralization&lt;/strong&gt; with 3,530 results on Google Scholar and 25,800 on Google. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tetrahedrization&lt;/strong&gt; with 1,130 and 10,300.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tetrahedronization&lt;/strong&gt; with 155 and 4,520.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tetrahedration&lt;/strong&gt; 118 and 420.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it, the parts of the words are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tetra&lt;/strong&gt;, meaning four,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-hedron&lt;/strong&gt;, referring to faces, and it's corresponding adjective form &lt;strong&gt;hedral&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-ize&lt;/strong&gt;, verb-forming suffix, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-ation&lt;/strong&gt;, a suffix forming a noun out of an action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I like &lt;strong&gt;tetrahedrization&lt;/strong&gt; the most, as it's shorter and still reasonably widely used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question therefore is whether &lt;strong&gt;tetrahedrization&lt;/strong&gt; is correct with respect to how we modify words coming from greek/latin, especially relative to the correctness of all the other choices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a secondary question - the fact that &lt;strong&gt;tetrahedration&lt;/strong&gt; is so uncommon surprised me, as I would otherwise prefer it due to its short length. Is there anything about it that's less suitable than the other candidates? Perhaps the fact that &lt;strong&gt;-ation&lt;/strong&gt; would require something like &lt;strong&gt;tetahedr-&lt;/strong&gt; to be an action, which would explain the rare occurence of &lt;strong&gt;tetrahedronization&lt;/strong&gt;, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23175" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T16:08:42.810" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T08:02:59.600" Title="Does &quot;tetrahedrization&quot; make sense?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29682" CreationDate="2018-11-18T08:02:59.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever the merits of the other options, I'd advise against anything beginning &quot;tetrahedron-&quot;, because the &quot;-on&quot; is merely the Greek word's morphological suffix. Compare the following, where English borrows the Greek word complete with final &quot;-on&quot;, but, when English adds suffixes, it drops that &quot;-on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;phenomen&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; but phenomenal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;skelet&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; but skeletal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;panthe&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; but pantheistic, pantheism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO the notion of &quot;tetrahedron&quot; is recognisable without the final &quot;-on&quot; -- after all, we have &quot;tetrahedral&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T08:02:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4038" CreationDate="2018-11-18T15:12:35.193" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Semitic language family include: Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic to name a few. Hebrew predates others, and can be traced back to present day Israel. To say that Arabic &quot;originated&quot; in Saudi Arabia, or going back farther to a proto-language is to misunderstand how languages evolve, and the specific nature of Arabian nomadic tribes that spoke Semitic dialectal offshoots more than 4500 years ago. In terms of time, that is a beginning benchmark: approximately 3000 BCE. In terms of place, many present day Middle Eastern countries (as far as tribal regions can be recorded / connected to civilizations) do establish a historical context for claiming early Arabic was spoken in place y, at time x. I would be hard-pressed to accept a claim of origin simply based on dates and townships; the living word is far more organic, and accents are too geographically lucid to be pinned down by an x-y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical &amp;amp; pre-Islamic Arabic were fundamentally changed by the revelation of the Quran. No doubt, it was into that highly refined oral society - which had indeed established and perfected a standard of Arabic - that Quranic verse was recited to and received by the public. This dramatically changed the way Arabic dialects would give reverence to the scripture forever. It also gave one of the clearest breaks for periodizing an historical linguistic evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23181" LastEditorUserId="23181" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T15:27:14.593" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T15:27:14.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29644" CreationDate="2018-11-18T23:01:12.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The languages were probably very close and most likely mutually intelligible at least to some degree, which is why we postulate the Italo-Celtic branch of IE languages. Of course neither of these language states are attested but what we reconstruct shows many similarities. Compare the declensions as listed by Wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Italic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Italic_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;n. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-s&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;g. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-sjo/agr-i&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d. &lt;em&gt;agr-ō-i&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-ū-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ac.&lt;em&gt;agr-o-m&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;v. &lt;em&gt;agr-e&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-e&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;l. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-i/agr-e-i&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-e-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ab.&lt;em&gt;agr-ō-d&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-ū&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;n. &lt;em&gt;agr-ō-s/agr-o-i&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;g. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-m&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-is&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-bos&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ac.&lt;em&gt;agr-o-ns&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-ū-s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;v. &lt;em&gt;agr-ō-s/agr-o-i&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-i&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;l. &lt;em&gt;agr-o-is&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-bis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ab.&lt;em&gt;agr-o-is&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;makkʷ-o-bis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, there are fewer differences in endings than between dialects of my own mother language (Czech). You can find corresponding similarities on the side of verbal conjugations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the vocabulary, again even if you compare the reconstructed proto-celtic words with Classic Latin, you will find many striking similarities, so the proto-italic must have been even closer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kanō&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;canō&lt;/em&gt; - sing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ɸatīr&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;patēr&lt;/em&gt; - father&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;berō&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;ferō&lt;/em&gt; - carry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;rīgs&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;rēgs&lt;/em&gt; - king&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dānom&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;dōnum&lt;/em&gt; - gift&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kaikos&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;caecus&lt;/em&gt; - blind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bous&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;bos&lt;/em&gt; - cow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;gnātos&lt;/em&gt; X &lt;em&gt;(g)nōtus&lt;/em&gt; - known&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13878" LastEditorUserId="13878" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T18:50:49.200" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T18:50:49.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29674" CreationDate="2018-11-19T08:38:05.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only answer for your general question. If we define the difference between a finite clause and a non-finite clause by the fact that the non-finite clause does not include subject whereas for the finite verb, it is necessary. In consequence, I can state in Riffian finite clause can occupy the object position of a main clause. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;xs-egh ad a3ya-agh tcamma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;like-I FUT play-I soccer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like playing soccer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some dependent clauses in Riffian use finite verbs as well (see the example below). So it is not specific to nominalized finite clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sedj-egh utcma te-wta ijjen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;heard-I my_sister she-struck someone &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard my sister strike someone &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have also the case where an adjective can be a finite clause, as here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zri-gh aqzin i-mgher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;saw-I dog he-was_big&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw a big dog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, no particle is used with finite clause to nomalize it where we expect a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T08:38:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2018-11-19T09:36:01.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistic description of Berber languages does not mention the clusivity as phenomenon that exists in Berber. However, according to me, such particularity is present in Riffian at least for the inclusive. This form is generally considered a imperative form, but it is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inclusive &quot;we&quot; is only used in the future tense and is constructed like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a n-ecc-et = you and me are going to eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a(d) = Future&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;n- .... -t = we inclusive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ecc = eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, we inclusive is a circumfix that is formed with n- and -t which are morphemes coming from other paradigms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a n-ecc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fut we-eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will eat/ are going to eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ecc-et &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eat-you.plur.IMP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we can see, we inclusive is the combination of two different grammatical persons (first-person plural and second-person plural) and two different moods (indicative and imperative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T09:36:01.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4038" CreationDate="2018-11-19T11:27:34.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, the oldest attested form of the Arabic language, evolved on the territory of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nabatean kingdom&lt;/a&gt; comprising parts of the territory of the following modern countries: Egypt (Sinai), Israel, Palestine territories, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi-Arabia (the northwestern corner). The capital city of the Nabatean kingdom was Petra, Jordan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the original question mentions Yemen: There, a different group of semitic languages called Old South Arabic was spoken. The Old South Arabic languages aren't the predecessors of modern Arabic (and not even the predecessors of Modern South Arabic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T14:53:05.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T14:53:05.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29691" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29692" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Italic languages, a branch of the Indogermanic languages comprising Latin, Faliskan, Umbrian, and Oscian and some more languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T11:36:09.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-19T14:48:15.487" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that for front vowels, the cavity behind the lips (I think this must correspond to the space between the lips and the hump of the tongue) is F3, whereas for back vowels it is F2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, what dictates F3 for back vowels? Is it the space between the hump of the tongue and the pharanx, with the space between the hump of the tongue and the lips becoming F2 (because it is the smallest of the three spaces in this configuration)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does F4 correspond to, and does this vary depending on whether the vowel is front or back? Is there a fourth resonator / airspace somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a vowel with formants 335, 1515, 2680, 3350 Hz be considered a front vowel or a back vowel? By the criteria I have found it is between the two - so I am not sure what F2 - F4 represent. Specifically, in a vowel with approximately those formants, how can F3 be raised without also raising F2 (or how can F2 and F3 be pushed apart)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T17:28:54.960" Title="Formants - beyond F2" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29697" CreationDate="2018-11-19T15:35:17.567" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether there is any practical way to tell whether differences in formant intensity are due to different harmonics in the source or different formants in the filter. Is there any data out there on what the actual harmonics are? I know that for an ideal string, they are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, but the vocal cords are not ideal strings. Can anyone point me to any research on what the actual series of harmonics is, and what affects it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T17:04:54.040" Title="Interpreting formant intensity" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29695" CreationDate="2018-11-19T17:04:54.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One factor influencing intensity is subglottal pressure, which is immaterial at the segmental level (you can say a word or phrase loudly that way, but you can't limit the increased loudness to a phoneme). The second pertains to the shape of the glottal source wave, and people studying linguistic phonation types focus on that. There are various languages (Hmong-Mien, Western Nilotic, Otomanguean, San) with distinctive breathiness and creakiness associated with vowel. The overall production picture is that with creaky voicing, the vocal folds remain in contact for the longest time and with breathy voice, they are in contact the shortest time. At the breathy end of the phonatory continuum, most of the acoustic energy is in the fundamental, so H0 is high and subsequent harmonics fall off rapidly. At the creaky end of the continuum, energy falls off more gradually. Therefore one classic acoustic diagnosis of phonatory difference is to compare harmonic intensity, for example comparing the first two harmonics. The intensity difference H2-F0 would be in the direction of a large negative number for breathy, and in the direction of a positive number for creaky. One problem that has to be controlled is the interaction between phonation and formants: you need to look at vowels where H2 is further from a formant peak (so, not a high vowel). There is an extensive literature from UCLA looking at how to quantify breathiness: measures have included F0-H2, F0-F1 and H0-F2. The point is that if the upper harmonics are low amplitude compared to the fundamental, this points to the glottal source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vocal tract resonances also affect measured amplitude of harmonics. Those resonances (formants) are not precise-frequency &quot;all or nothing&quot; filters, they have a bandwidth where intensity is highest at the resonance frequency, and is a bit lower a bit away from that frequency etc. A narrow bandwidth concentrates most of the energy at that frequency, and a broad bandwidth &#xA;means the energy is spread out more. Bandwidth is one of the things that you can get in Praat from LPC formant analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea behind analysis of the glottal source is that the source is &quot;caused&quot; by glottal airflow (which is determined by glottal opening). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/PointProcess__To_Sound__phonation____.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; from Praat may help make this clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T17:04:54.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29694" CreationDate="2018-11-19T17:28:54.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/27668/6726&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; about a similar question for F1, i..e &quot;it's complicated&quot;. F3 is not well understood, although it plays a role in distinguishing American English &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;. F4 is an engineering mystery. You can manipulate F4 all you want, and it has little if any effect on vowel quality (whereas lowering F3 to something around 2100 Hz or less will have an rhoticizing effect). Fant's &lt;em&gt;Acoustic Theory of Speech Production&lt;/em&gt; will lay out his theory of how formants arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T17:28:54.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-20T04:41:47.453" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;How might a constructionist approach to Imperative sentences respond to a Generative frammework in regards to an implied subject (;subject-less' sentences. &#xA; (Based on the focus point from the Generative Framework that suggests in Imperative sentences, subjects are present but not phonologically realized (they are null).  What would the argument be in response to the Generative Framework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20026" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T04:41:47.453" Title="Generative vs Constructionist POV on Imperative's null subject" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7280" CreationDate="2018-11-20T06:24:19.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is the science of language (as Max Muller proposed).  What is important in science is the truth, not (as the question implies) how economical illustrative diagrams can be made. Reducing the number of nodes in structure trees is utterly irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T06:24:19.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-20T10:55:37.857" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently reading an article by David Embick (2004) in which he makes a ternary distinction among passive participles: 1. stative 2. resultative 3. eventive, contra. Wasow (1977) who distinguishes only adjectival from verbal passives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Embick belives that resultatives are telic but he does not show exact criteria or tests to differenciate them from statives.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Are there any syntactic tests/criteria used to distinguish statives from resultative passive participles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T18:48:23.987" Title="criteria to distinguish resultative from stative participles?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;participles&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;statives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29709" CreationDate="2018-11-20T13:14:29.367" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;To illustrate what I mean, hypothetically, Russian could borrow the word &quot;peak&quot; from English and transliterate it as &quot;пеак&quot;, while still pronouncing it according to the English pronunciation [piːk]. Alternatives would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing &lt;em&gt;пеак&lt;/em&gt; and pronouncing [pʲɛɐk], where only the spelling is kept;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writing &lt;em&gt;пик&lt;/em&gt; and pronouncing [piːk], where only the pronunciation is kept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For languages written in the Latin alphabet, it is common to borrow English words with their spelling and rough pronunciation both maintained. It would be interesting to know if there are languages written using non-Latin alphabets that behave similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example is made-up. Hope someone can supply a real example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T01:34:46.210" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T01:34:46.210" Title="How common is it for languages using non-Latin alphabets to borrow English words while keeping both (transliterated) spelling and pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29706" CreationDate="2018-11-20T17:52:21.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659654&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; indicate that English words borrowed into Greek are borrowed on the basis of pronunciation, not spelling, and that is generally the situation, as I am aware of it, for borrowings that require a change of alphabet. Here are examples from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Russian/Loanwords#Words_from_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian&lt;/a&gt;; this paper addresses (Egyptian) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/A27013/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt; although the details are a bit slim, so see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://awej.org/images/AllIssues/Volume8/Volume8number3September/25.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; on Modern Standard Arabic borrowings; Thai &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Thai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In general, you compute the pronunciation according to the rules of the source language based on whatever the actual source would be, render that pronunciation in the target alphabet. It may be difficult to determine the actual source, since a word etymologically from English may enter a language via another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T17:52:21.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-20T20:34:32.110" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a variety of Yiddish where /ɛ/ can be raised to [e]? If not, is it too weird to have /aj/ and /ɛ/ with no [e] or [ej] in between?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23208" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T20:34:32.110" Title="Is there a variety of Yiddish where /ɛ/ can be raised to [e]?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;yiddish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-20T23:34:13.920" Score="0" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed my former trainer from Estonia, fellow students from Poland and Italy, even Khabib from UFC who comes from Dagestan speak with this accent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOV7DKQKI3s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a video of khabib from remote dagestan speaking with same accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNwgwysmLqA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a video of  European Parliment leader who speaks with similar accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23210" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T00:47:39.900" Title="Is there a General European English Accent?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29712" CreationDate="2018-11-21T00:47:39.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those people just happen to have accents that sound similar to your ears. Features common to several European languages but not your native English stand out to your ears. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd make sense to consider a General European English only if there were a conscious effort to teach it, or if Europeans were very unified culturally and developed it naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not the case. Schools all over attempt to teach General American and/or Received British pronunciations, and most people just interact and are exposed to only their own local accents and native speakers' accents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be interested in this, though: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_english&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International English&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T00:47:39.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-21T07:08:32.360" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;how would the deep structure looks like for a sentence that has multiple raising verb like 'Tom happens to be believed to have wanted to like linguistics' ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23215" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T11:54:24.087" Title="multiple raising verb in a sentence" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29716" CreationDate="2018-11-21T11:54:24.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[[someone believe [Tom Past want [Tom like linguistics]]] happen]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T11:54:24.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17409" CreationDate="2018-11-21T17:35:41.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lexical distance (based on methods as Levenshtein distance) serves to determine the linguistic distance. It is the first step to elaborate a classification of linguistic varieties (they can be displayed as tree). So lexical distance is tied to linguistic distance. Without that we can use other linguistic facts (phonemes, syntactic order, ...) in order to elaborate other kinds of distance (for example phonemic distance, based on their distinctive features). But the morpheme is the linguistic fact the most used, that is why lexical distance is often associated with linguistic distance. Now, the discipline that studies the linguistic distance is called dialectometry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T12:59:40.860" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T12:59:40.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29727" CreationDate="2018-11-21T23:33:21.747" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is an adjectival prepositional phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I like the girl &lt;strong&gt;next to him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I know this is an adverbial prepositional phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went &lt;strong&gt;to the store.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the term for this? It's a prepositional phrase that involves a verb that modifies a noun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want him &lt;strong&gt;to run.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T11:16:12.927" Title="Term For A Prepositional Phrase With A Verb?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29721" CreationDate="2018-11-22T02:34:00.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what is called &quot;infinitival to&quot; and it's not consider a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21139" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T02:34:00.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29480" CreationDate="2018-11-22T06:43:47.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heads are useful for understanding deep structure, but they can be hard to identify in surface structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heads are closed-class words -- they are difficult to coin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heads have default values, which can often be elided if doing so will not confuse the delineation of other phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Languages are pretty consistent about whether heads append to the beginning or end of phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, nouns would not be the heads of phrases.  The head of an NP would be a quantifier, but it can be omitted if the noun is proper, or the quantity is '[all]', or the quantity has been mentioned (definite). That is why some theories use DP instead of NP (and determiners don't have to also be pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Temporal nouns used adverbially don't need a head (preposition) because it can be assumed ('Sunday' = '[at] Sunday' = 'on Sunday') or it has already been grafted onto the noun ('today').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs are headed by auxiliary verbs, unless those are omitted for the default (habitual/present tense or irregular verbs) or have been morphed onto the verb (regular past tense). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T06:50:05.093" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T06:50:05.093" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29721" CreationDate="2018-11-22T07:30:27.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want him to run.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;To&quot; is not a preposition here but a subordinator that serves as a marker of &lt;em&gt;to-&lt;/em&gt; infinitival clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Want&quot; is a catenative verb and this is a catenative construction where the subordinate infinitival clause &quot;to run&quot; is catenative complement of &quot;want&quot;. &quot;Him&quot; is the direct object of &quot;want&quot; and the understood (semantic) subject of &quot;run&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Him&quot; is called a 'raised' object because the verb it relates to syntactically is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I would say that in your other two examples &quot;next to him&quot; is a PP modifying &quot;girl&quot;, and &quot;to the store&quot; is a PP serving as complement of &quot;went&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastEditorUserId="13403" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T11:16:12.927" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T11:16:12.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29731" CreationDate="2018-11-22T15:09:42.447" Score="-1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin from which French evolved has duo, duorum/duarum, duos, and so on, while the contemporary French pronunciation also omits the 'x'. Why did Middle French spell deux with an x? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9353" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T16:18:02.510" Title="Why is there an x in French deux?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29729" CreationDate="2018-11-22T15:58:13.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It comes from the Latin accusative plural masculine: duos. The oldest spellings in French are duos and deus, then deux, with x as an alternative spelling for final /s/, as in dix, yeux, and many other words. It is not true that the contemporary French pronunciation &quot;omits the x&quot;; the x is still pronounced (as /z/) in liaison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/deux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/deux&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T15:58:13.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29729" CreationDate="2018-11-22T16:18:02.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is due to a confusion. In the middle age, the custom was to abbreviate the words ending by -us into -x. So &quot;deus&quot; was written &quot;dex&quot;, this tradition was kept, but, afterward, it was added a 'u' into &quot;dex&quot;. For further information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abr%C3%A9viation_m%C3%A9di%C3%A9vale#X_(-us)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abréviation_médiévale#X_(-us)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T16:18:02.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T00:13:59.960" Score="4" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the explanation behind the /p/ to /h/ phonological change from Halegannada to Kannada?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23222" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T10:36:12.490" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T12:14:56.303" Title="Halegannada/Proto-South Dravidian Phonological Changes" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;dravidian&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29732" CreationDate="2018-11-23T10:35:43.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kannada is not unique in this. Indo-European *p becomes h in Armenian, as in hair &quot;father&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T10:35:43.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29732" CreationDate="2018-11-23T15:41:49.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @fdb already noted, this sound change is not rare cross-linguistically. It is typically not a one step process but a chain of sound shifts /p/ -&gt; /pʰ/ -&gt; /f/ or /ɸ/ -&gt; /h/ (and finally /h/ -&gt; nothing; as observed in the evolution of the Celtic languages from Proto-Indogermanic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the steps are frequently attested in isolation, e.g., /p/ -&gt; /f/ from Proto-Semitic to Arabic, or from Proto-Indogermanic to Proto-Germanic;  /f/ -&gt; /h/ for Spanish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T15:41:49.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29732" CreationDate="2018-11-23T15:48:55.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called debuccalization. Generally, this phonetic mutation is contextual. For example, in Berber (see Chenwi language) or Germanic (e.g.: hundred), it occurs in word-initial position. These debuccalized sounds had generally a primary or secondary posterior articulatory. So, maybe, your 'p' is not just a [p], but an aspirated consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T15:48:55.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-24T01:48:11.413" Score="5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;In traditional English grammar, we're taught that phrases like those boldfaced below are &quot;indirect objects&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to Ted&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I gave &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this appears to be based on semantics (namely, Recipient role) rather than syntax. In (1), &lt;strong&gt;to Ted&lt;/strong&gt; is a prepositional phrase, which by most definitions means it can't be an object of any kind. In (2), &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't seem to be syntactically any different from other objects: such arguments use the objective form where this is distinct (&lt;em&gt;I gave him the book&lt;/em&gt;), and they can serve as the subject in a corresponding passive construction (&lt;em&gt;Ted was given the book&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, &quot;indirect object&quot; is sometimes used to refer to an obligatory argument that appears in an oblique case, as in German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ich helfe &lt;strong&gt;dem Mann&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;I help the man-DAT&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there is syntactic justification for regarding this argument as something different from a regular object (different morphology, also can't be a passive subject), yet still regarding it as an object of some kind (given that it's an NP subcategorized for by the verb). But this is a different situation from that of English, and I can think of yet other ways that languages might treat NPs as somewhat-but-not-completely object-like (e.g., an NP that's cross-referenced by an agreement marker on the verb, but doesn't pass some syntactic test for objecthood).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a coherent syntactic definition for &quot;indirect object&quot; in English, in other languages, or cross-linguistically? Do syntacticians and typologists use this term at all anymore, and if so what do they mean by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T18:49:13.053" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T18:49:13.053" Title="Is &quot;indirect object&quot; syntactically definable or useful, in English or generally?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28300" CreationDate="2018-11-24T05:38:15.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's yeeted, as in Rosa Parks got yeeted to the back of the bus. Used at 0:23 in this video: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRtk8kvI7GQ&amp;amp;list=PLoKfsvRDJYt3FdoXx48UBvvqIyt_z_YQ4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRtk8kvI7GQ&amp;amp;list=PLoKfsvRDJYt3FdoXx48UBvvqIyt_z_YQ4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23234" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T05:38:15.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29738" CreationDate="2018-11-24T08:55:56.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have different manners to define syntactic functions. There are the syntactic position and the morphological marking. These markedness' can be combined or opposite. Moreover, nothing restrains a syntactic function to one markedness. Finally, the syntactic function is determined in relation to other arguments too. So that being said, English I.O. has two markings that are used in complementarity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, when IO is placed in the third position and is not marked by a morpheme: S V IO O.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, when IO is placed in the fourth position and is marked with to-: S V O to-IO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conditions are sufficient not to confuse the arguments. Everything is well discriminated, because the Object, here, has other marks opposite to the Indirect Object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other languages, there is WALS website where you can find more informations: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/105&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T12:14:07.860" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T12:14:07.860" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29745" CreationDate="2018-11-24T11:48:11.727" Score="5" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymologists tend to categorize the probability of theories under formulaic labels. These range from &quot;uncertain&quot; over &quot;tentative&quot; or &quot;not convincing&quot; to &quot;established&quot;, &quot;accepted&quot; or &quot;nonsense&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;P values&lt;/a&gt; (or anything else to that effect) are not used, as far as I know, although chance similarities are argued for on quantitative grounds. Stochastic methods are used at least in recent computative mass comparison studies. So quantifying results is possible in principle, it's just not commonly done, although historic linguistics is full of unknowns. The basic question is:  Is that unscientific? In the past it was not feasable, maybe, but does it need to continue like that? The underlying question is: How uncertain are most &quot;established&quot; etymologies, e.g. &lt;em&gt;hundred&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PGmc *hundaradą &amp;lt; *hundą &amp;lt; PIE *ḱm̥tóm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps accademia.SE would be a better place to ask, if the question is tangential to other fields, e.g. history. But the question is specificly about the hindrences in etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T14:50:23.817" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T18:08:25.607" Title="Statistical Methods in Etymology" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;methodology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-24T14:42:50.860" Score="6" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;What it says on the tin. The closest thing that I'm aware of is in Tok Pisin, a creole language which involved English in its creation, which distinguishes “we without you” (&lt;em&gt;mipela&lt;/em&gt;) from “we with you” (&lt;em&gt;yumipela&lt;/em&gt;). Is there any variety of English proper that introduced the same distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14652" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T13:26:48.123" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T13:26:48.123" Title="Is there any dialect of English with clusivity?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;clusivity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29743" CreationDate="2018-11-24T18:08:25.607" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may want to look at D. Ringe's &lt;em&gt;On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison&lt;/em&gt;, which lays out some of the problems. I believe that uncontrolled variables are the greatest impediment to subjecting word-relatedness questions to valid statistical testing. Moreover, the idea that one could ever compute a p-value that a given word of a modern language is the result of ... (what?) from a hypothesized earlier word is a conceptual abuse of what a p-value is. It is mathematically possible to cook data so that a program will return a p-value: the question is, what reality does the number represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of an uncontrolled variable, we might conjecture that &lt;em&gt;bandanna&lt;/em&gt; derives from the same PIE root as &lt;em&gt;bind&lt;/em&gt;, and could enter both words in a PIE-to-English table of pairs that would also contain 'father; hound; wheel' and corresponding PIE roots. In doing this, we will have failed to control the fact that 'bind, father, hound, wheel' are words transmitted Genetically through (West) Germanic into modern English, but 'bandanna' is recently borrowed from Hindi. Uncertainty is created because etymological claims usually mean &quot;following this transmission path&quot;, yet &quot;bandanna&quot; does not follow that path (instead, the path is via Indic then recently by contact between Indic and English).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor that has to be controlled in constructing etymologies is meaning. When doing etymologies in Bantu (a relatively shallow time depth proto-language), the meanings of words from a given root are usually the same, so various descendants of *&lt;em&gt;bón-&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;see&quot;. However, some of the words mean &quot;find&quot; or &quot;acquire&quot;, thus you have to allow imprecision in semantics, to allow including the entire set of words derived through normal historical transmission from Bantu *&lt;em&gt;bón-&lt;/em&gt;. We impose regularity-of-correspondence conditions on our etymological n-tuples, when it comes to the segments of the words – a Bantu word of the form &lt;em&gt;cimb-&lt;/em&gt; does not go into the etymological database along with &lt;em&gt;puk-&lt;/em&gt; just because the words mean &quot;dig&quot; (no set of historical changes turns &lt;em&gt;puk-&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;cimb-&lt;/em&gt;). Rigorous semantic laws mapping classes of meanings of proto-languages to daughter languages are uncommon (to say the least – non-existent, as far as I know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim that English &quot;path&quot; is a descendant of a PIE root that resulted in Latin &lt;em&gt;pōns&lt;/em&gt;, Greek πόντος, OPrus. pintis, and O. Armenian &lt;em&gt;hun&lt;/em&gt; would be excluded on the grounds of sound-change irregularity (the predicted regular outcome is something like &quot;find&quot;), but we can supplement the rules for admitting examples into the etymological database by positing (as we obviously must) that not all transmission paths are from parent to child – there are also borrowings. We might conjecture that English &quot;path&quot; is borrowed from some other language, such as Proto-Iranian. While this is very reasonable, it introduces an element of uncertainty. Subjectively, the uncertainty is not enough to render some alternative more plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the philosophical front, your question asks the fundamental epistemological question, &quot;what is 'certainty'?; what is a theory of knowledge?&quot;. In history and philosophy of science, you are asking &quot;what is 'probability'?&quot; (there are different combinatoric, frequency and evidentiary senses). In statistics, where the really heavy lifting would be done, the problem is conceptualizing the question in a statistically valid way, taking care to understand what &quot;the population&quot; is, what the hypotheses would be, how independent variables are coded, what a &quot;random sample&quot; is, and what a p-value is. The concept of p-value simply is not applicable to the hypothesis that &quot;hundred&quot; derives through normal transmission from IE *&lt;em&gt;ḱm̥tóm&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T18:08:25.607" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30178" CreationDate="2018-11-24T19:24:28.893" Score="3" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read about different theories but now I'm kind of confused between the different theories and the differences between structural case, non-structural, lexical/morphological case, inherent case, and abstract case. What is the state of the art in the case theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21139" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T23:24:05.663" Title="Which is the most accepted case theory from a generative syntax perspective?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20771" CreationDate="2018-11-25T20:28:06.913" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indo-Eurpean languages are also realted to Semitic languages, here a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;EARTH &amp;lt; ארץ AReTS, earth&#xA;PALSY &amp;lt; פלץ PaLaTS, to tremble or shake&#xA;PANE &amp;lt; פני  PiNaY, “face&quot; or the &quot;surface of&quot; the waters&#xA;(EN)CASE &amp;lt; כסה Ka$aH, to cover, conceal, encase &#xA;ENDOW &amp;lt; נדב NaDa(V), to donate&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more than 23K English words related to Edenic (Proto-Hebrew). Please refer to this blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://isaacmozeson.blogspot.com/2013/08/unscrambling-pretend-indo-european-roots.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edenic Posts by Isaac Mozeson&lt;/a&gt; or refer to the site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edenics.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edenics.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23242" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T20:28:06.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-25T22:49:55.597" Score="9" ViewCount="2841" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change?&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/a&gt; by R. L. Trask. pp. 5-6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; Our story moves now to Scotland, where the word &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; underwent a&#xA;  small change of pronunciation to &lt;em&gt;glamour&lt;/em&gt;, reflecting the awkwardness of&#xA;  having two instances of /r/ in one word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody please help me sympathize? &lt;em&gt;grammar&lt;/em&gt; isn't awkward for me to pronounce. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-09T13:34:05.617" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T19:16:56.903" Title="Why are &quot;two instances of /r/ in one word&quot; awkward?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29752" CreationDate="2018-11-25T23:23:37.090" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only sensible interpretation of that claim that I can see is that having two instances of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in a word poses a special articulatory challenge. However there is no evidence to support that claim. A more plausible explanation is that the cause is perceptual. First, we may assume (there is some evidence) that &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; has a subtle long-distance effect in words, lowering of F3. In a word with two rhotics, it may be difficult to tell what the source of the general rhotic flavor of the word is, so listeners filter out one of the rhotics as being a phonetic side-effect of the other. This occurs in other languages including Georgian, Yimas and Sundanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T23:23:37.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-26T00:59:00.143" Score="4" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change?&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/a&gt; by R. L. Trask. p. 13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  Changes in pronunciation can happen with considerable speed. Consider&#xA;  /hw/. Historically, English had a number of words beginning with the sequence&#xA;  of consonants /hw/, curiously spelled &amp;lt;wh&amp;gt; since the Middle Ages. This&#xA;  sequence was pronounced very differently from plain /w/, and so &lt;em&gt;whine&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  sounded different from &lt;em&gt;wine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;whales&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Wales&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;witch&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  from &lt;em&gt;wear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wheel&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;weal&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't /hw/ spelled, more straightforwardly,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288707/how-do-you-show-words-surrounded-by-angle-brackets&quot;&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/a&gt;hw&amp;gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm uncertain if &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/84179/325696&quot;&gt;this answer at ELU answers this question&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T16:21:41.123" Title="How did /hw/ become spelled &lt;wh&gt;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29799" CreationDate="2018-11-26T04:59:29.573" Score="-4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0521546931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Do Languages Change?&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librarything.com/author/traskrl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R. L. Trask (1944-2004)&lt;/a&gt;. pp. 138, 139.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This habit of retaining French spellings in English contributed to another&#xA;  prominent feature of modern English spelling. This feature is called &lt;em&gt;morphemic&#xA;  spelling&lt;/em&gt;, and the label means that an element is spelled in essentially the same way even when its pronunciation changes greatly as a result of the addition of suffixes. For example, we took from Norman French such pairs as &lt;em&gt;nature&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;medicine&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;medicinal&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;physic&lt;/em&gt; (an archaic word for ‘medicine’) and &lt;em&gt;physician&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;oblige&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;obligation&lt;/em&gt;, and our decisions about how to spell these pairs have made morphemic spelling the norm in the elevated and technical part of English vocabulary. &lt;strong&gt;Compare the quite different policy followed in the native English part of the vocabulary, where the words are typically so short that morphemic spelling would be hard to maintain: &lt;em&gt;deep/depth&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;gold/gild&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;bake/batch&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;long/length&lt;/em&gt;; and so on.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can pronounce *deepth, *length effortlessly?  Thus how does the shortness of the words hinder morphemic spelling of these words from Old English? I can pronounce *deepth, *longth effortlessly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree though that &lt;em&gt;bake&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tch&lt;/em&gt; is cumbersome to pronounce. *baketch would shift to &amp;lt;batch&amp;gt;, as [a] would be palatized.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T06:42:41.613" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T00:42:28.467" Title="How are words in native English part of the vocabulary typically so short to forestall morphemic spelling?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-26T05:40:08.030" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to normalize the result of Jiang &amp;amp; Conrath similarity measure by dividing it by the maximum value(normally should be when both synsets are the same). I am using the implementation of Jiang &amp;amp; Conrath similarity in wordnet. when I use two same synsets for example slap.jcn_similarity(slap, brown_ic) the answer is 1e+300. How should I deal with it to normalize the results?  what is the range of Jiang &amp;amp; Conrath similarity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in this website(&lt;a href=&quot;http://maraca.d.umn.edu/similarity/measures.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://maraca.d.umn.edu/similarity/measures.html&lt;/a&gt;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two special cases that need to be handled carefully when computing relatedness; both of these involve the case when jcn_distance is zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, we have ic(synset1) = ic(synset2) = ic(lcs) = 0. In an ideal world, this would only happen when all three concepts, viz. synset1, synset2, and lcs, are the root node. However, when a synset has a frequency count of zero, we use the value 0 for the information content. In this first case, we return 0 due to lack of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, we have ic(synset1) + ic(synset2) = 2 * ic(ics). This is almost always found when synset1 = synset2 = lcs (i.e., the two input synsets are the same). Intuitively this is the case of maximum relatedness, which would be infinity, but it is impossible to return infinity. Insteady we find the smallest possible distance greater than zero and return the multiplicative inverse of that distance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually could not figure out the first case exactly. Is this happen when a word is not available in the corpus for example the word &quot;wwsds&quot;?&#xA;How should we deal with these two cases in python programming? I would be grateful if anyone can explain any python program for dealing with these cases.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23246" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T11:48:59.477" Title="Jiang &amp; Conrath when two words are the same" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29770" CreationDate="2018-11-26T08:12:29.723" Score="5" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Nahuatl language, the word &quot;altepetl&quot;, which means a city-state, comes from the combination of &quot;atl&quot; and &quot;tepetl&quot;. But according to the word combination rule in the Nahuatl grammar, the suffix -tl (and -tli) of the preceding word would be omitted (such as tepetl + yacac = tepeyacac). Why doesn't the word &quot;altepetl&quot;  obey this rule (being &quot;altepetl&quot; &#xA;instead of &quot;atepetl&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Here is my speculation: Maybe the word &quot;altepetl&quot; was one of the early words that Spanish heard from the Nahuas (think about how they talked about cities at the very beginning of the contact) and possibly at this time it was actually spelled as &quot;atepetl&quot;. But because it was the very beginning of the Spanish-Nahuas contact, the Spanish was less careful about the correct transliteration of Nahuatl words resulting in the misspelled &quot;altepetl&quot;. The misspelled &quot;altepetl&quot; then learned by the subsequent Spanish, and then entered dictionaries and grammars textbook written by Spanish scholars without correction. Not so long after the conquest, reversely, the Spanish taught Nahuatl to both local and remote indigenous peoples so it ended up that the spelling &quot;altepetl&quot; is preserved through generations and no one notice it. Can my theory be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23248" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T21:36:14.980" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T21:36:14.980" Title="Why we use altepetl in Nahuatl, not atepetl?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;nahuatl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29738" CreationDate="2018-11-26T09:57:29.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am by no means a lingustics expert, just fluent in German (native), English (native-level) and Spanish (native-level). As you observed, German retains enough case markers to distinguish four cases much like they existed in (say) Latin. To take up your example '1. I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to Ted&lt;/strong&gt;' / '2. I gave &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; the book', in German it would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich gab &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; das Buch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is equivalent to your number 2. Here, &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; is in the dative case but you wouldn't know that from looking at the word, since names don't get inflected in German (except in genitive case). It helps to add an article (this usage is quite colloquial, and you wouldn't usually see it in written/formal language):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich gab &lt;strong&gt;dem Ted&lt;/strong&gt; das Buch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the dative case is clearly visible due to the article 'dem.' Grammatically, 'dem Ted' is the indirect object in the dative case, 'das Buch' is the direct object in the accusative case (here identical to the nominative case since 'das Buch' is neuter). For emphasis or other purposes, you can freely switch the word order around without affecting the inherent meaning of the sentence, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ich gab das Buch &lt;strong&gt;dem Ted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English you no longer have a case marker to distinguish between dative and accusative case, therefore you need either a convention about where in the sentence you find the direct object, and where the indirect object, or you need to add a preposition (or another morphological marker) to distinguish the two, and make it possible to change word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Without the article, the sentence is 'Ich gab das Buch &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt;.' While correct, it sounds awkward, and most Germans would insert a preposition like in your sentence number 1, making it 'Ich gab das Buch &lt;strong&gt;an Ted.&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are the objects called direct and indirect? That is because the direct object ('das Buch') will turn into the subject of the corresponding sentence in passive voice, while the indirect object ('Ted') stays in the dative case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Das Buch wurde &lt;strong&gt;dem Ted&lt;/strong&gt; (von mir) gegeben.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Not pertinent to the question but as an aside, there is also a passive voice using 'bekommen' as the auxiliary verb which will turn the indirect object into the subject while leaving the direct object in the accusative case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Der Ted&lt;/strong&gt; bekam das Buch (von mir) gegeben.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of an equivalent construction in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; As far as the 'ordinary' passive goes, your sentences transform as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to Ted.&lt;/strong&gt; =&gt; The book was given &lt;strong&gt;to Ted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I gave &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; the book. =&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Ted&lt;/strong&gt; was given the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, 'the book' is transformed from an object of the active voice to the subject of the passive voice, therefore 'the book' is the direct object in the active voice sentence. 'Ted'/'to Ted' remain in object position, and are therefore indirect objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since English is in essence a Germanic language, I suppose linguists felt inclined to take the terminology that existed for German (or for Latin), and apply it to English even though it lacks syntactical markers to make sense of the distinction between direct and indirect object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23251" LastEditorUserId="23251" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T11:55:09.470" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T11:55:09.470" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29752" CreationDate="2018-11-26T11:45:34.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if that helps you because I am German, but I find two r awkward mainly because to me it doesn’t sound like a legit syllable. In the German language, there is no letter that sounds like the English r, so to me it doesn’t even sound as if I am speaking at all, but rather as if I was imitating a roaring lion or a large toad. I also struggle with words that, unlike rural, have a consonant between the two r (like grapefruit). Sadly, we also use the word Grapefruit in Germany as there is no real translation (some people call it a Pampelmuse, but that’s technically a different fruit). &#xA;Also, again that probably doesn’t contribute 100% to your question as it refers to another language, but there are examples of words or names with two r that are changed or pronounced differently when they find its way into our language (like the character roronoa Zorro from the manga/anime One Piece, whose name is the same in English, but in German he is called lorenor zorro which has only one spoken r.) it also apart from the th the most difficult to pronounce for most English language learners and I‘ve often heard people pronouncing words like „rapper“ more like wapper (whatever that is). For a native English speaker, this barrier obviously isn’t there because they are used to it, but probably the „this r sounds like a toad coughing something up and two r make it sound totally awkward“ stays the same? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23254" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T11:45:34.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29276" CreationDate="2018-11-26T22:29:29.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Draconis has given an impressive account of the evolution of the Roman naming system, I want to focus on a different aspect: Although the system of the &lt;em&gt;tria nomina&lt;/em&gt; completely disappeared, a lot of the names are preserved in Western culture as given names. The preserved names are of all types from the Roman naming system, &lt;em&gt;praenomina&lt;/em&gt; like Marcus (Mark), Titus, and Tiberius; &lt;em&gt;nomina&lt;/em&gt; like Julius or Julia, Junius or Junia, Antonius (Anthony), Naevius (Nevio, specially in Italy); &lt;em&gt;cognomina&lt;/em&gt; like Caesar; and derivations like Julianus (Julian), Constantin, and many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T22:29:29.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2018-11-27T00:33:03.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; has etymology entries going back to Old French, Latin, and Proto-Indo-European (PIE), e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bleu#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bleu#Etymology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21154" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T00:33:03.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-27T06:27:48.240" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maharashtri Prakrit is the antecedent southern zone language to all insular Indic languages. What are some characteristics, morphologically speaking, which differentiate these insular languages from their continental counterparts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23222" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T19:01:30.130" Title="In what ways did the Insular Indic languages morphologically diverge from Maharashthri Prakrit?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29772" CreationDate="2018-11-27T13:05:39.923" Score="2" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French, some speakers differentiate between the pronunciation of  &lt;em&gt;maître&lt;/em&gt; /mɛ:tʁ/ and &lt;em&gt;mettre&lt;/em&gt; /mɛtʁ/ - that is, in the first case the /ɛ/ is long and in the second it's short, but that differentiation is not mandatory. Is this an example of free variation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastEditorUserId="13248" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T15:14:32.477" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T21:44:21.257" Title="Free variation in French" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;french&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29768" CreationDate="2018-11-27T13:14:34.850" Score="4" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably a silly question, but why are there no nasal vowels in IPA charts? Should we assume that nasal vowels are placed in the same position as the corresponding oral vowels in the vocal chart? So for example /ɛ̃/ is where /ɛ/ is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T11:07:04.907" Title="Question about nasal vowels in IPA" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29767" CreationDate="2018-11-27T14:08:55.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/ɛ̃/ is where /ɛ/ is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generic IPA charts don't show you where phonemes are; they show you where phones are. The standard convention would be that the phone [ɛ̃] is in the same &quot;place&quot; as the phone [ɛ]: an open-mid front unrounded vowel. (I don't know enough about phonetics to say whether nasalization causes any predictable distortions to the first and second formants of a vowel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not mean that the phonetic realization of the phoneme transcribed /ɛ̃/ and the phonetic realization of the phoneme transcribed /ɛ/ are in the same &quot;place&quot; for any particular language. French, one of the most well-known languages with nasal vowels, does not have a straightforward equivalence between the qualities of the nasal vowel phonemes and the qualities of the oral vowel phonemes that are transcribed with the &quot;same&quot; letters. In a typical Parisian accent, /ɛ̃/ is often opener than /ɛ/ (I've read suggestions that an accurate phonetic transcription would be [æ̃]). The French nasal vowel that is typically transcribed as /ɔ̃/ can reportedly have a phonetic value more like [õ] for many speakers in France, and the nasal vowel that is typically transcribed as /ɑ̃/ may apparently be realized with some degree of rounding, so something like [ɒ̃] (or perhaps even raised to [ɔ̃]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Nasal_vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Quebec French, two of the vowels shift in a different direction: /ɔ̃/ → [õ], more or less as in Europe, but /ɛ̃/ → [ẽ] and /ɑ̃/ → [ã].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T11:07:04.907" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T11:07:04.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29758" CreationDate="2018-11-27T17:27:41.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word was probably not an actual compound, rather it was a conventionalized collocation, similar to English &quot;kick the bucket&quot;. Andrews in his &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Classical Nahuatl&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the absolutive marker &lt;em&gt;-tl&lt;/em&gt; is not used in the first member of a compound, so &lt;em&gt;nene-tl&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;pil-li&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;nenepilli&lt;/em&gt;. Karttunen in her dictionary comments for the specific word &lt;em&gt;āltepētl&lt;/em&gt; that &quot;[w]hen possessed, the elements of the compound generally separate, with the possessive prefix attaching to each one&quot;, and (under  &lt;em&gt;tepē-tl&lt;/em&gt;) notes the form &lt;em&gt;totāuh totepēuh&lt;/em&gt;, where each noun bears case separate case and possessive marking. Since it's not actually a compound, the elements would each retain their case marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change &lt;em&gt;ātl tepētl&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;āl tepētl&lt;/em&gt; does not seem to represent a general phonological rule per se, since /tˡt/ clusters do not seem to arise word-internally, but it it not a surprising phonological change, in that is eliminates a difficult-to-parse elements from syllable-final segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T20:02:03.380" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T20:02:03.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29767" CreationDate="2018-11-27T17:42:06.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good catch. Since its inception, one of the IPA's core principles has been that each phoneme in languages around the world should be given a separate IPA letter. The first of the original 1888 principles stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There should be a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you pointed out, this would mean that nasal vowels, aspirated plosives, affricates etc. must also be assigned separate letters because they certainly are distinctive in many languages. But they have never been given separate letters (save for some obsolete letters for affricates), and to do so would have cluttered the alphabet considerably. Although the 1888 principles stated &quot;The alphabet should consist ... as few new letters as possible being used&quot;, this apparent discrepancy was not explicitly addressed by the Association until the 1989 overhaul of the alphabet and its principles. At the Kiel Convention of 1989, the IPA revised the principles, which said in part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It  is  not possible  to  dispense  entirely  with  diacritics.  The  International  Phonetic Association recommends that their use be limited as far as possible to the following cases:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (i)  For denoting length, stress and pitch.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (ii)  For representing minute shades of sounds.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (iii)  When the introduction of a single diacritic obviates the necessity for designing a number of new symbols (as, for instance, in the representation of nasalized vowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there. Creating a separate symbol for each phoneme ever found in any language of the world would very soon render the IPA chart pretty unwieldy. So in general, the IPA has, since the 1979 revision,  opted for a more simple and efficient set of symbols and diacritics, disposing of superfluous and/or seldom-used letters and diacritics like [ƾ] ( = [ts]) and [ɼ] ( = [r̝]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T17:42:06.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29766" CreationDate="2018-11-27T18:01:03.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is not an example of free variation but loss of an opposition (a phonological merger).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free variation is a situation where two or more options are available and &lt;strong&gt;interchangeable&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, pronouncing the English word &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; as /ˈspiːsiːz/ as opposed to /ˈspiːʃiːz/ or vice versa would not convey any difference in meaning, but almost all English speakers are capable of both pronunciations and accept both as grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, those who don't differentiate between /mɛːtʁ/ and /mɛtʁ/ are &lt;strong&gt;incapable&lt;/strong&gt; of making (and, in many cases, of perceiving) that distinction, whereas those who do differentiate &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; make the distinction. In linguists' terms, for the former group of speakers, the phonemic &lt;strong&gt;opposition&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt;) between /ɛː/ and /ɛ/ is said to have been &lt;strong&gt;lost&lt;/strong&gt;, and therefore the phonemes /ɛː/ and /ɛ/ are &lt;strong&gt;merged&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T07:14:18.260" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T07:14:18.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25535" CreationDate="2018-11-27T18:35:28.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a wiki &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographic_acronyms_and_initialisms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of geographic acronyms and initialisms&lt;/a&gt; for this (I should know, since I compiled it) but only a few (if any) qualify as being a replacement name for the longer term. Perhaps sometime in the future New Orleans may officially be changed to NOLA. And I'm unsure if Soweto (South West Townships) and Nemato (Nelson Mandela Township) were originally known by the longer names. There's a couple merged cities in Ontario (Walden and Kenora) that are acronyms of the predecessor cities. Those might qualify. If you count those, there's a section with more merged cities in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographic_portmanteaus#Merged_towns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of geographic portmanteaus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: Soweto does not qualify. There was a contest in 1959 to name the communities and the judges selected Soweto as a neutral name. (some of the names were quite racist.) So while the name is an acronym, it wasn't of the previous name of the area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23266" LastEditorUserId="23266" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T23:19:58.443" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T23:19:58.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29757" CreationDate="2018-11-27T20:35:11.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can rewrite Jiang &amp;amp; Conrath similarity by: 1 / log(jcn_distance). If jcn_distance is equal to 0, then by adding 'log' the result will be 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T07:01:55.610" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T07:01:55.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25535" CreationDate="2018-11-27T23:20:44.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The UK&quot;, &quot;The US&quot;, &quot;The USA&quot;, &quot;The EU&quot; are all more common than the unabbreviated versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T23:20:44.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T11:51:21.743" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are they able to understand each other using gestures and symbols only? despite of their differences in language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23272" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T10:32:06.663" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T10:32:06.663" Title="Can Native Americans of different linguistic background still communicate using sign language?" Tags="&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29752" CreationDate="2018-11-28T16:34:39.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there was a question in the comments about the existence of the phenomenon I have searched the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdl.handle.net/21.11119/0000-0002-43F3-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Late Modern English Texts&lt;/a&gt; for short words of the pattern C[rl]V+[rl]e? with the corpus query processor. The phenomenon clearly exists on a statistical level, with two l's close to each other being the most deprecated combo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Combo  tokens types  sample words &#xA; Cr_r     1856    25  prayer, prior&#xA; Cl_l       16     1  flail&#xA; Cr_l     4561    20  cruel, trial&#xA; Cl_r     7931    35  clear, floor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pattern for the search was &lt;code&gt;[word=&quot;[b-dfgk-npqstvwxz]l[aeiouy]+re?&quot;]&lt;/code&gt; (for the last query).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T16:34:39.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29777" CreationDate="2018-11-28T17:14:45.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can read about it, or one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indian_Sign_Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Plains Indian Sign language is purportedly still known by about 75 people predominantly among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, and was employed roughly in the Great Plains area of North America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T17:14:45.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29752" CreationDate="2018-11-28T18:25:30.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When there is a homorganicity phenomenon, there is generally a tendency to distinguish the phoneme from its twin (dissimilation) or to fusion them in a same phoneme (assimilation). That can occur even though those phonemes are far away from each other (like in Latin, see aris/alis). So, phonetic is not at stake, it is a phonological phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T18:25:30.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29785" CreationDate="2018-11-28T19:17:43.523" Score="-3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should the &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;[Hornby][1]&lt;/code&gt; be pronounced,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;as the &lt;code&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;I'm,&lt;/code&gt; or as the &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;honey-bee&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the English rule that governs the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23137" LastEditorUserId="23137" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T18:31:44.127" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T18:31:44.127" Title="How should the `y` in `Hornby` be pronounced" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-11-29T09:39:52.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29777" CreationDate="2018-11-28T19:45:10.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even assuming you're only talking about North America, the answer is no. There are about 300 indigenous languages reliably attested (depending how you count them), some of which are related but many of which aren't (to the limits of our evidence). There's never been a common language, spoken or signed, that was understood by all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were/are sign languages used by certain groups; user6726 mentions Plains Sign Language, which is the most widespread to my knowledge. But nowadays, Native Americans with different mother tongues would probably use English or Spanish to communicate with each other; through colonization and forced assimilation, those languages are more widespread than any sign language has ever been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T19:45:10.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29782" CreationDate="2018-11-28T19:46:44.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither: it's like the final &quot;y&quot; in &quot;Bobby&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name &quot;Hornby&quot; is a place name which ends with the element &quot;-by&quot;, which originally meant &quot;farmstead&quot; [1]. This element is generally pronounced as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.viking.no/e/england/danelaw/epl-danelaw.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.viking.no/e/england/danelaw/epl-danelaw.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastEditorUserId="13643" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T20:13:31.243" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T20:13:31.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29782" CreationDate="2018-11-28T21:13:41.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a canonical example of a subjective, normative question that is off topic here. You can pick any of these pronunciations, and there is no linguistic principle that says that it is wrong to select any particular one of those pronunciations. It might be on topic for one of the English SEs. There is no factual basis for saying that [baɪ] is right and [bi] is wrong, or the opposite. I will say that [baɪ] is factually incorrect for my dialect, but you may not speak (or be aiming to speak) my dialect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible linguistic question on the topic would be a socio-numeric question – &quot;which pronunciation is more common?&quot;, although that can also be a pure opinion question, if not paired with actual research. My opinion is that [baɪ] is rare and [bi] is common, but given the nearly billion speakers of English, I don't really know who would win the vote, were there a vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposal that &quot;by&quot; in Bobby is pronounced different from &quot;bee&quot; in honey-bee is not without merit, but introduces a false supposition (that they are always pronounced different). Some people do, and some people don't (I don't). If you identify a particular dialect that the question is about, it may be that in that dialect it's pronounced e.g. [bɪ] and not [bi].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential quasi-linguistic question would be what the English orthographic rules are for pronouncing the letter &quot;y&quot;, which could lead to some probability that the word is pronounced one way vs. the other. The problem is that English spelling is so messed up that linguists don't usually mess with such rules. The (historical) morpheme in question is pronounced [baɪ] in &quot;by-law, by-election&quot;, but as [bi] in most if not all Germanic-derived compound place names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T21:13:41.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29766" CreationDate="2018-11-29T12:26:10.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not agree with Nardog’s answer. The distinction of long and short vowels is a feature of the formal sort of French taught in schools and codified in the prescriptive dictionaries (that is: virtually all French dictionaries). Most forms of spoken French (especially in Paris) have abandoned this distinction, for example pronouncing patte and pâte identically. It is not an issue of not being able to produce this difference. Most speakers will fluctuate between the two styles of speech depending on circumstances. This is not free variation; it is code-shifting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T12:26:10.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T13:34:34.390" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if I am using the wrong terminology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am starting a pet project using R to determine the associations for a Proper Noun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I would like to see all the associations with the name 'Putin' expecting the associations to be everything from Russia, president,father and any other noun-based associations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this called ontological or semantic association and if so is there a specific terminology I could be directed to so I can look this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastEditorUserId="17091" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T15:36:04.043" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T15:36:04.043" Title="How to determine entity relationships for a proper noun" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;&lt;ontologies&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29754" CreationDate="2018-11-29T16:21:41.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was originally written &amp;lt;hw&amp;gt;, such as in the Old English &quot;hƿær/hwær&quot; (where). It reversed its orthographic order in Middle English, but as far as I can tell there are no certain reasons for its doing so. One reason I've seen proposed is that because English employed many digraphs with &amp;lt;h&amp;gt;, Middle English speakers mistook &amp;lt;hw&amp;gt; to be a typo (or its pre-typing equivalent) and took it to be another h-digraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23269" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T16:21:41.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T16:30:48.117" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I teach some students who are not native English speakers and commonly make this mistake in their writing: They often combine two complete sentences without any punctuation or break between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &quot;The activity was interesting we learned a lot.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Are there any languages where this sort of grammar meets standard formal writing rules? By &quot;this sort of grammar&quot; I mean a sentence of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Ind. Clause A] [Ind. Clause B]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; punctuation or conjuction between the two clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23282" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-11-29T18:01:08.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T18:01:08.933" Title="Do any languages allow merging of two sentences without punctuation?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29766" CreationDate="2018-11-29T17:07:28.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nardog is right, but it depends about which variety we are talking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at ALF: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/cherche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/cherche&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;maître: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/seadragon.jsp?carte=CarteALF0802&amp;amp;width=4880&amp;amp;height=5908&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/seadragon.jsp?carte=CarteALF0802&amp;amp;width=4880&amp;amp;height=5908&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mettre: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/seadragon.jsp?carte=CarteALF1627&amp;amp;width=6156&amp;amp;height=3665&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/seadragon.jsp?carte=CarteALF1627&amp;amp;width=6156&amp;amp;height=3665&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that the pronounciations used were very heterogeneous. Some pronounced in a similar way, others made differences. Currently, what is it the situation? I am not aware of studies discussing on this topic, then we cannot say for sure that the pronounciations have changed. Maybe, this regional distribution is still present or more homogeneous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, effectively, it is not a free variation, but a dialectological variation. Because those individuals don't belong to the same linguistic community. I have read on Wikipedia that the dialectological variation is considered a free variation. This affirmation cannot be defended because that will lead to consider that, in France, one linguistic system exists, there are not varieties. This conception cannot be supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that there is a sociological variation (in the way of Labov, variationist sociolinguistics), as Fdb raises it. Some, desiring to respect the norm, adapt their pronounciation depending on social circumstances. However, is there a study supporting this hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T21:44:21.257" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T21:44:21.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29793" CreationDate="2018-11-29T17:16:10.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Berber, the coordinating conjunction &quot;and&quot; between utterances doesn't exist (A part from some varieties). They say: I ate, I watched TV yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T17:16:10.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29793" CreationDate="2018-11-29T18:00:07.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no punctuation in spoken languages (ignoring constructed languages like Lojban with spoken punctuation). It is debatable whether punctuation is a feature of language at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in written language, punctuation is rather young. Older inscriptions and manuscripts (e.g., in Classical Greek or Latin) often did not feature any punctuation at all. So at that time, writing without punctuation met the standards of literacy. Our punctuation system evolved basically in the last 500 year since the invention of the printing press. It turned out to be useful and is part of our codified writing system right now, but the ancient examples show that is is not really necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T18:00:07.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29756" CreationDate="2018-11-30T00:18:58.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what Trask meant in this passage, so I can't explain it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would actually disagree with the statement that English follows &quot;quite different&quot; strategies of spelling in French/Latin vocabulary and native English vocabulary, with morphemic spelling being &quot;the norm&quot; in the former and typically absent in the latter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even learned vocabulary has a number of non-morphemic elements: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one of the most pervasive is &quot;silent e&quot; deletion (we write &lt;em&gt;natural, medicinal, obligation&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;natureal, medicineal, obligateion:&lt;/em&gt; unless you argue that &lt;em&gt;nature, medicine, oblige&lt;/em&gt; are all non-simple forms ending in some morpheme represented by -&lt;em&gt;e,&lt;/em&gt; it is not morphological to have the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in the spelling of the base word but not in the derived word)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, Latin spelling was phonetic/phonemic rather than morphological, and the English spelling (also pronunciation) of many words is based on Latin allomorphy: e.g. the same prefix is spelled four different ways in &lt;em&gt;immature, innocent, irreverent, illegal.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;We also see such changes affecting the spelling of roots in suffixed words like &lt;em&gt;permission&lt;/em&gt; (vs. &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt;),  &lt;em&gt;compulsion&lt;/em&gt; (vs. &lt;em&gt;compel&lt;/em&gt;), or &lt;em&gt;transcription&lt;/em&gt; (vs &lt;em&gt;transcribe&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the spelling (and pronunciation) of the more basic word shows more influence from French pronunciation changes than the spelling of the suffixed word: e.g. &lt;em&gt;destroy/destruction, deceive/deception, pronounce/pronunciation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some miscellaneous things based on English spelling oddities: e.g. the alternation between &lt;em&gt;-ke&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-c-&lt;/em&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;revoke, revocation,&lt;/em&gt; or  &lt;em&gt;-l-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ll-&lt;/em&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;repel, repellent,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;vary, variation; glory, glorious; territory, territorial.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm taking the &quot;silent e&quot; deletion and &quot;transcribe/transcription&quot; examples from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aclweb.org/anthology/N/N15/N15-1056.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English orthography is not “close to optimal”&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Garrett Nicolai and Grzegorz Kondrak, 2015 (mentioned in the following Faculty of Language blog post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/chomsky-was-wrong.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/chomsky-was-wrong.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, native English vocabulary has some elements that could be considered morphemic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The suffixes &lt;em&gt;-ed, -s,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-'s&lt;/em&gt; have multiple pronunciations that are not indicated in the spelling (aside from the phonologically conditioned spelling variant &lt;em&gt;-es&lt;/em&gt; for the /ɨz/ allomorph of &lt;em&gt;-s,&lt;/em&gt; and the use of &lt;em&gt;-t&lt;/em&gt; in the spelling of a few irregular verbs such as &lt;em&gt;slept&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;learnt&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced differently in the (diachronically, at least) related pairs of words &lt;em&gt;steal/stealth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;heal/health,&lt;/em&gt; but the spelling is the same. &lt;em&gt;Ou&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced differently in &lt;em&gt;south/southern.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ng&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced differently in &lt;em&gt;strong, long, young&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stronger, longer, younger,&lt;/em&gt; but the spelling remains the same (this is maybe a bit questionable since English does't have any regular way of representing the distinction between [ŋg] and [ŋ] in spelling)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit hard to find examples, but this could partly just be because there isn't a lot of inherited native English morphology where &quot;pronunciation changes greatly as a result of the addition of suffixes&quot; (productive inherited English suffixes such as &lt;em&gt;-ness&lt;/em&gt; generally don't change the pronunciation of the base). I'm not sure I would agree with the implication that &lt;em&gt;bake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;batch&lt;/em&gt; are morphologically related at all from a purely synchronic perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not hard to imagine how English orthography could be made even more morphemic if its spelling were revised for this purpose: a spelling like &quot;deepth&quot; would have a fairly unambiguous meaning, even if it wouldn't accurately indicate the pronunciation /dɛpθ/ of the word that it is supposed to represent. In German, the morphological changes caused by the phonological process of umlaut are represented in writing by adding the ¨ diacritic to a vowel letter: we could do this in English to get something like &lt;em&gt;man/män, goose/gööse, mouse/möüse, guld/güld, long/löngth.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T01:51:32.227" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T01:51:32.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-30T05:04:08.033" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we assume a TP/IP projection for the syntax of a tenseless language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23284" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T05:04:08.033" Title="Do we assume Tense head for tenseless languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-30T13:42:55.747" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this beautifully organized text for my students to analyze in terms of thematic progression. I'll also ask them to provide a transitivity analysis of some of its clauses, but there's that expression that caught me off guard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it's a relational process 'be' followed by the carrier 'that' (which is already odd).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we get to 'as it may'. Would you say it's a conjunctive adjunct followed by a carrier and an elliptical attributive process (may be)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other way to interpret it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23288" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T16:03:58.380" Title="From a systemic functional approach, what would a transitivity analysis of 'be that as it may' show?" Tags="&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2018-11-30T15:36:12.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK Consider a paragraph of sentences, discourse analysis looks how the sentences are glued together while pragmatics looks on meanings that are not encoded in the sentences!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g The teachers allowed the children to play because they are busy in some work!&#xA;      The teachers allowed the children to play because they are too tired to listen to classes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the word &quot;they&quot; means different in the above two sentences which requires external world knowledge!&#xA;It appears to me that pragmatics is a deeper branch of discourse analysis!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23289" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T15:36:12.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29803" CreationDate="2018-11-30T15:50:26.000" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;be that as it may&quot; starts with a subjunctive &quot;&#xA;be that&quot;, which can be paraphrased as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; that is&quot;. &#xA;The next phrase is a fragment, paraphrased as &quot;as it may &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; ('as' is a conjunction here, meaning 'like').  The copulas in each phrase are empty, so the 'be' is existential (the complement is its existence, or truth; therefore a full paraphrase would be &quot;if that is true, as it may be true&quot;.  The author is trying to explain something without admitting that what was stated is true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="10734" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T16:03:58.380" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T16:03:58.380" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8500" CreationDate="2018-11-30T23:15:28.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some constructed languages with such a case. In Ithkuil (a constructed language with an excessively large case system) the case is called &lt;strong&gt;Referential case&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also conjectured that such a case exists in Tolkien's language Quenya, and several names are suggested for it including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respective_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Respective, Dedative, and Relative&lt;/a&gt; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T23:15:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T06:08:47.837" Score="0" ViewCount="659" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like &quot;domain&quot; is a broad categorization of context (e.g. workplace, academia) and register is the specific set of rules which are expected by those speaking in a certain domain. Is this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23291" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T19:48:12.317" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T19:48:12.317" Title="What is the difference between &quot;domain&quot; and &quot;register&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-12-15T03:37:06.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8500" CreationDate="2018-12-01T16:48:19.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Riffian, &quot;about&quot; is translated by a morpheme that was originally the preposition &quot;on/over&quot;. Then, your oblique case can derive from such a preposition. Natural languages are conditioned by the principle of linguistic economy, so they only do the necessary. It is more economical to reuse one than to create a new morpheme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T16:48:19.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T22:33:34.047" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying top work out what the correct terms are to use in the below scenarios. I've heard of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clitics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;affixes&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not clear on the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cat - cat&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; (noun, plural -s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cat - cat&lt;b&gt;'s&lt;/b&gt; (noun, singular, possessive -'s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cats - cats&lt;b&gt;'&lt;/b&gt; (noun, plural, possessive -')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eat - eat&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; (verb, third person singular)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the correct terms for each of the examples? Have I missed any related examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you explain the basic difference between a clitic and an affix in a simple way? It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, as long as it gets my understanding started. Once I can distinguish them in most situations, I'll be able to refine my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T21:50:14.333" Title="Classification of -s added to English words" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29828" CreationDate="2018-12-02T00:13:17.010" Score="6" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just recently, I believed that spaces between words were first invented with the Carolingian minuscule, invented by the English scholar Alcuin of York. As I just discovered, spacing wasn't first ever used with Alcuin's Carolingian minuscule. Apparently, before Alcuin, Irish monks in the early Middle Ages had (re?)invented spacing between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I then came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=ShxlVB46l5cC&amp;amp;pg=PT111&amp;amp;dq=irish%20monk%20word%20space&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi5w9n5z__eAhXJ5IMKHVyQCSsQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=irish%20monk%20word%20space&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; academic monograph which said that one of the reasons Irish monks developed spacing is because they were copying Syriac Bible's, and &lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; already had spacing between words (the source was Paul Saenger's &lt;em&gt;Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading&lt;/em&gt; though I have no access to the relevant part of this monograph to check). I'm aware that Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. Suddenly, this information is starting to get a bit confusing and the sources I'm looking for aren't completely clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wanted to ask: what was the first alphabet to actually use spacing between words? I'm not talking about word-separation with points and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct#In_written_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interpuncts&lt;/a&gt;, rather, the practice of placing an empty space to separate two words (Carolingian minuscule being an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be thankful to be pointed to the scholarly literature on exactly this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23301" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T05:15:28.630" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T10:32:10.013" Title="Which alphabetic writing system first had spaces between words?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29813" CreationDate="2018-12-02T00:19:35.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;An affix is a morpheme added to some structure within a word, for example -&lt;em&gt;ing&lt;/em&gt; is a suffix (post-root affix) and &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; is a prefix (pre-root affix). An affix is an exponent of some form of inflection or derivation added to some word category. A clitic is more like an independent syntactic unit (i.e. a word on its own), except that it is always &quot;dependent&quot; in some sense on some other word. The literature of the past half century has not established that &quot;clitic&quot; is a coherent category, and many people hold that clitics are really something else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain kinds of clitics are so analyzed because they have to go in second position in the sentence, for example the Lushootseed pronoun clitics &lt;em&gt;čəd&lt;/em&gt; '1s', &lt;em&gt;čəxʷ&lt;/em&gt; '2s' which come after the first word in the sentence.  These &quot;words&quot;, if they are words, can't be used alone (there are instead independent words &lt;em&gt;ʔəca, dəgʷi&lt;/em&gt;) – in this sense, clitics are like affixes. But an affix typically goes on a certain kind of word, such as a noun, whereas clitics typically go in a syntactically-defined place and don't care what kind of word they go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distribution of possessive &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; in English is sort of a problem for many theories. It is glued on to the end of some word, but that word can be anything, because it goes at the end of the phrase marked &quot;possessor&quot;. It appears on a noun in &quot;The child's hand&quot;, a verb in &quot;The child who ran's hand&quot;, a direct object pronoun in &quot;The child who saw me's hand&quot;, and so on. And yet it is subject to a morphological restriction that it can't be added to a word with the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;-plural (&quot;The dog's paws&quot; and &quot;The dogs' paws&quot; referring to 1 dog vs. plural dogs are pronounced the same). One theory of &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; is that it is &quot;a clitic&quot;, and another theory is that it is a &quot;phrasal inflection&quot;, i.e. just another kind of affix (one with a peculiar distribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question suggests that &quot;plural possessive&quot; is a formally distinct albeit homophonous suffix, just as the verbal 3rd singular present -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is formally distinct from the nominal plural -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;, which you might argue for, but is not the only solution. Leaving out the possessives, the verb ending and the noun ending are both instances of affixation, and the difference between the affixes is what properties trigger insertion of one vs. the other (likewise, what properties trigger insertion of the suffix &lt;em&gt;-d&lt;/em&gt; in verbs, what triggers the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ing&lt;/em&gt;, and so on). When the form and function are clearly distinct, we have no problem saying that there are two suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When two or more functions seem to have the same form, it becomes more problematic to say &quot;clearly there are two affixes&quot;. Most people accept the existence of a verbal inflectional suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; and a nominal inflectional suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; because their functional properties are pretty much disjoint. Analysis in terms of functional properties is very dependent on the theoretical framework that you are using. You could assume some set of features for words like noun, verb, singular, plural, possessive, 3rd person and so on. One framework might take it as obvious that &quot;plural possessive&quot; is an inflectional category of English, and another might conclude that it isn't, and that there is another explanation for the lack of double-suffixation. Without a more specific theoretical framework for syntax and morphology, it's impossible to say how one should handle the plural-possessive problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T21:50:14.333" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T21:50:14.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-02T00:47:37.357" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken *&quot;Where did you move from Paris to?&quot;, while &quot;Where did you move to from Paris?&quot; as well as both &quot;You moved from Paris to London&quot; and &quot;You moved to London from Paris&quot;(at least with the proper context and intonation) seem okay. How does this contrast arise? (I'm mostly interested in an explanation in term of Chomskian generative grammar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T01:51:35.287" Title="Why is *&quot;Where did you move from Paris to?&quot; ungrammatical?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-02T09:51:53.727" Score="0" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is true, but it seems to me that the point of articulation of the tongue tip against the roof of the mouth for the alveolar tap varies depending on the kind of sound that precedes and follows the tap. &#xA;If I were to say &quot;ara&quot;, I find the tongue tip hitting my alveolar ridge. &#xA;On the other hand, if I were to say &quot;oro&quot;, it feels like the point of articulation is further back. Can't say if it is post-alveolar, but it is pretty close I think. &#xA;Does such a variation change the sound and nature of the tap in general, or is the alveolar tap a sound that allows variation in general? Just want some insights and feedback on this thought of mine since I've been told that the alveolar flap always hits the alveolar ridge, not post-alveolar. Thank you! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23304" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T16:26:12.013" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T19:19:59.790" Title="Is there a variation in the point of articulation for the alveolar tap depending on word?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29818" CreationDate="2018-12-02T11:14:54.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we say &quot;the alveolar this&quot; or &quot;the velar that&quot;, we're seldom talking about a sound with absolutely only one possible articulation but a whole class of similar sounds whose differences are not considered relevant in whatever context it is. So what falls under &quot;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; alveolar tap&quot; is dependent on context, e.g. the phonological system of the language under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjacent sounds are &quot;coarticulated&quot; in some way or another, with gestures that anticipate what comes next. /k/ in &lt;em&gt;key&lt;/em&gt; is made further front in the mouth than in &lt;em&gt;cough&lt;/em&gt;, and less so in &lt;em&gt;come&lt;/em&gt;. In the beginning of &lt;em&gt;quick&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cool&lt;/em&gt;, it often accompanies lip rounding. But we call all these sounds a voiceless velar plosive because those differences are not distinctive in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In North American English, [ɾ], the intervocalic allophone of /t/ and /d/, indeed varies in articulation depending on phonetic context. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236824975_Individual_variation_in_English_flaps_and_taps_A_case_of_categorical_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Derrick &amp;amp; Gick (2011)&lt;/a&gt; devise four classifications: alveolar tap, down-flap, up-flap, and postalveolar tap (found in &lt;em&gt;autumn, Berta, otter,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;murder&lt;/em&gt;, respectively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T19:19:59.790" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T19:19:59.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-02T16:34:10.763" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any tree diagram drawer software for English sentences which shows all features of nodes, all movements (and other things which happen like feature checking by c-command)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13970" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T17:05:19.653" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T17:05:19.653" Title="Verbose tree diagram drawer for MP" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12419" CreationDate="2018-12-02T22:00:35.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there's any connection between the PIE root *ked- and the Sematic root &quot;K.D.M&quot; (Hebrew קדם; Arabic قديم).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Hebrew, and there this root (KDM) creates a lot of words that actually mean &quot;opposite&quot; ideas. And to understand them, I think you need to think what's the origin of the words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in ancient times, before the age of compass, people didn't align themselves to the north, but rather to the east - where the sun came out of. This direction was called Kadma (קדמה). And so (one can speculate that) the notion of advancement became connected with the movement of the sun. That's why the word &quot;forward&quot; is Kadima in Hebrew (קדימה). As forward is what follows what is here (position wise) or now (time wise). What came after in time is also called &quot;progress&quot; or Kidma (קידמה). You can get forward in social status, i.e. you can get a promotion, or Kidum (קידום). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the idea can also be in reverse - the sun moves, and you can focus on where its going to (go forward) or where it came from (backward). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so what comes before is in Hebrew Kodem (קודם). What is ancient is Kadum (קדום) or Kadmon (קדמון). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, and not for the first time, the same word, or root, can mean opposite ideas, depending on your point of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with that, maybe it's a bit easier to understand how the movement of the sun can on one hand imply activeness, &quot;going&quot; somewhere, advancing; and on the other hand it can also imply passiveness, &quot;yielding&quot;, leaving something behind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope it might help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22403" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T22:00:35.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29816" CreationDate="2018-12-03T01:51:35.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example is okay if you get the stress right. There is some tendency to put the main sentence stress on &quot;Paris&quot;, taking the focus to be &quot;Paris&quot;, but that gives a bad result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Where did you move from &lt;strong&gt;Paris&lt;/strong&gt; to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the focus is the object of &quot;to&quot; or the prepositional phrase &quot;to where&quot;, and in that case, the main stress has to on the logical object of &quot;to&quot; or on what is left of the prepositional phrase after the question word has been fronted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt; did you move from Paris to?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Where did you move from Paris &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T01:51:35.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29814" CreationDate="2018-12-03T13:11:31.063" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we allow abjads, Imperial Aramaic in Aramaic script was one of the first to consistently use spacing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/27925416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the mid-7th century BCE&lt;/a&gt;. This might have been due to the influence of Akkadian cuneiform orthography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that cursive Hebrew on the ostraca tend to omit dots, and we see here a simplification of dots to spaces the more cursive the writing is. However, cursive Aramaic tended to simplify its spaces to nothing (&lt;em&gt;scriptio continua&lt;/em&gt;), which then became standard in Phoenician (and hence Greek, Etruscan, Roman etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clear example of whitespace for word division can be seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2013/cyrus-cylinder/cyrus10.jpg?mw=893&amp;amp;mh=520&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 5th century&lt;/a&gt; Aramaic ostracon probably found in Egypt. Later on, many of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dead Sea Scrolls&lt;/a&gt; in Hebrew use whitespace. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that spacing pre-dates the introduction of special final (plus initial and isolated) forms in the Hebrew alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link between Classical Syriac and Imperial Aramaic is well-established, with the former language being the 1st century CE formal version of the latter. The use of whitespace in Classical Syriac Bibles such as the &lt;em&gt;Peshitta&lt;/em&gt; is thus not surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting that the book you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=w3vZaFoaa3EC&amp;amp;pg=PA83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentions&lt;/a&gt; a link between Syriac Bibles and Latin Bibles copied in Ireland - I'd like to see more evidence of this claim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual explanation (which Saenger does also mention in his book) is that the Irish, English and Welsh monks of the late 7th century CE were more aware of the fact that the text of the Latin Vulgate was not vernacular to them than their continental counterparts. Hence they were more careful about making sure that all the inflections found in the Latin text were read aloud correctly, and spacing was found to aid that. As continental Romance-speakers felt their language was simply the modern version of that in the Vulgate, it was easier for them to mentally process Latin in &lt;em&gt;scriptio continua&lt;/em&gt; than for their &quot;insular&quot; counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T10:32:10.013" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T10:32:10.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29837" CreationDate="2018-12-03T15:37:18.970" Score="4" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m a freshman who is taking Introduction to Language classes at my college. I’m struggling to answer a question but my mind gets confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: When the word “secret” becomes another word “secrecy” (or when vacant becomes vacancy), there is an insertion of “s” as far as I can see. However, when the word “modest” becomes “modesty” there is no insertion or what so ever. What is the rule behind the derivation of these words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23314" LastEditorUserId="23172" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T00:17:36.630" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T06:38:15.677" Title="Morphophonology of changing adjectives to nouns" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29829" CreationDate="2018-12-03T15:48:13.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't just the insertion of an /s/, it is the change of /t/ to /s/. This change is &lt;strong&gt;conditioned&lt;/strong&gt; by the preceding sound(s); it does not happen for /st/, and it happens for /Vt/ (where V is an arbitrary vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T15:48:13.500" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29829" CreationDate="2018-12-03T16:04:53.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, it's morphophonology question. Secondly, there is no insertion, that you realize there is &lt;strong&gt;fricativization&lt;/strong&gt;, in other words [t] → [s]. Thirdly, don't take it granted that there is a definite rule for that in English. Your teacher wants you to analyze the data given, not to find out the general grammatical rules of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the data given, well, you have not written them down in here. I came up with some data myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;secret /sikrət/ → /sikrəsi/&#xA;private /praɪvət/ → /praɪvəsi/ (US)&#xA;pirate /paɪrət/ → /paɪrəsi/&#xA;vacant /vekənt/ → /vekənsi/&#xA;decent /disənt/ → /disənsi/&#xA;celibate /sɛləbət/ → /sɛləbəsi/&#xA;&#xA;might /maɪt/ → /maɪti/&#xA;modest /madəst/ → /madəsti/&#xA;honest /anəst/ → /anəsti/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the data given, one could come up with the result that if alveolar voiceless plosive is preceded by a schwa or alveolar nasal and proceeded by high front tense vowel, it turns into a fricative one. Elsewhere, it stays the same. The category including both schwa and [n] is called sonorant, but since it also includes [ɪ] this wouldn't explain it. If the data given doesn't have &quot;mighty&quot; as an example, one could say fricativization occurs in the environment of sonorants preceding the [t] in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T16:04:53.437" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-03T17:10:33.270" Score="1" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there phoneme sequences (&quot;pairs&quot;) that have &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; been found in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; natural language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine there are some number of sequences that are physically impossible, but also some that are physically possible for humans to produce but which, either due to chance or to some more interesting reason, have not appeared in any known natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9933" LastEditorUserId="657" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T22:23:21.593" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T22:23:21.593" Title="What fraction of compound phonemes actually exist in natural language?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;&lt;natural-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29832" CreationDate="2018-12-03T17:40:39.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a word about what a phoneme is: a phoneme is &quot;a sound&quot; which a language uses as one of its primitive elements for constructing utterances. For instance /p/ in &quot;paper, spit&quot;. It turns out that there are physical differences between the three kinds of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; in those words, and those physical differences are excluded when coming up with the list of phonemes of a language. In other words, a phoneme is an abstraction from actual speech, omitting certain kinds of differences. Also note that this is about pronunciation and not spelling, so &quot;rough, fish, phylum&quot; all contain the phoneme /f/. Some examples of phonemes in English are /p, b, t/. Some physically-different sounds that exist in English which are not phonemes include [k kʰ kʲ kʲʰ], that is, these are physical variants of a single phoneme, /k/. (They are called &quot;allophones&quot;). Some examples of phonemes in Hindi are /p pʰ b bʰ/. English physically has &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pʰ&lt;/em&gt;, but there is a rule telling you when you use one versus the other, so the difference is not primitive. English simply does not have &lt;em&gt;bʰ&lt;/em&gt;. A list of phonemes is always &quot;in language X&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;pair of phonemes&quot; would then be &quot;any two phonemes in the language&quot;. For example /f, s/ or /m, æ/. The notion of &quot;pair of phonemes&quot; is not a useful notion in language, since it is arbitrary. However, there are some kinds of &quot;pairs of phonemes&quot; that could be useful, for example the three pairs /d, n/, /b, m/, /g, ŋ/ exemplify English sounds which differ in a single, unified way (presence of absence of nasal airflow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;pair of phonemes&quot; you mean &quot;any two-member subset of the set of phonemes in language X&quot;, then it follows that &quot;all pairs of phonemes exist&quot;. Since /bʰ/ is not a phoneme in English, /p, bʰ/ is not a pair of phonemes in English – we fail on the &quot;phonemes in language X&quot; criterion. This definition of &quot;pair of phonemes&quot; is constructive – you can always construct all of the two-member subsets of any set containing more than 1 element. You may want to know that all languages have at least 2 phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;No, by definition&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OTOH, if the question is about sequences of phonemes in a specific order, then the trick is to find really low-frequency (of occurrence) sounds, and scanning the grammars of languages that have such sounds. Clicks are low frequency of occurrence. In no language with clicks do you ever find two consecutive clicks. That's probably a sample problem arising from the extreme rareness of clicks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T18:05:57.703" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T18:05:57.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29829" CreationDate="2018-12-04T00:07:02.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Modest&lt;/em&gt; ends in /st/, unlike &lt;em&gt;vacant&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;secret&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that &lt;em&gt;secrecy, vacancy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;modesty&lt;/em&gt; all contain one derivational suffix (the same for each), along with one base morpheme each (the adjectives &lt;em&gt;secret, vacant&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;modest&lt;/em&gt; respectively), and that the form of each of these three nouns is given by some morphological rule, then the most likely explanation is that &lt;em&gt;modesty&lt;/em&gt; ends in /ti/ rather than /si/ because of the presence of the consonant cluster /st/ at the end of the base &lt;em&gt;modest.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the answer you are supposed to give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Challenging some assumptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumptions mentioned in the first paragraph may be a bit problematic.  English has more than one morpheme used for deriving nouns from adjectives: this is shown by the existence of multiple nouns that correspond to the same adjective such as &lt;em&gt;falsehood/falsity/falseness.&lt;/em&gt; And even when we're dealing with nouns that are formed from adjectives by suffixing the same derivational morpheme, there is no guarantee that there will be a reasonable rule that accurately predicts the phonological form of all of the nouns based on the phonological form of the adjective. For example, for many speakers the nouns &lt;em&gt;clarity&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sincerity&lt;/em&gt; do not rhyme, even though the corresponding adjectives &lt;em&gt;clear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sincere&lt;/em&gt; do rhyme: there is no way of explaining this by phonological rule (unless you resort to something &lt;em&gt;ad hoc&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The historical basis of these forms (which is almost certainly not the same as any synchronic rule that could be used to explain these forms)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a diachronic perspective, /t/ is present in &lt;em&gt;modesty&lt;/em&gt; but not in &lt;em&gt;secrecy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vacancy&lt;/em&gt; because of a postclassical Latin sound change that turned &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; into the affricate [ts] before [j], except for when the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; was in a &lt;strong&gt;st&lt;/strong&gt; cluster. As far as I know, this was (at this point) a purely phonologically conditioned process. The effects of this process are also seen in various English words ending in &lt;em&gt;-tion, -tious, -tial, -tian&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ce&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;relation, nutritious, partial&lt;/em&gt;); note that we see different pronunciations for words ending in &lt;em&gt;-stion, -stial, -stian&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;question, bestial, Christian&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that English does not have any purely phonologically conditioned process like this that changes the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;em&gt;secret&lt;/em&gt; to /s/ in &lt;em&gt;secrecy.&lt;/em&gt; There are many examples of /ti/ in English, including after schwa or /n/ (e.g. &lt;em&gt;ability, puberty, maggoty, certainty&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question brings up the topic of &quot;morphophonological&quot; rules. As far as I know, the exact meaning of &quot;morphophonology&quot; is a bit unclear, but we can say that it involves both morphology and phonology. In particular, &quot;morphological&quot; rules are often described as only applying in &quot;derived environments&quot;, which would allow us to ignore words like &lt;em&gt;certainty&lt;/em&gt; where the /ti/ sequence occurs within a single morpheme (the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ty&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;em&gt;Maggoty&lt;/em&gt; has /ti/ in a derived environment, but there are other parts of morphological theory that I think could be used to explain away this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't try to pursue this in more depth though because even though it seems theoretically possible that English has a synchronically active morphological rule that turns &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; into /s/ in &lt;em&gt;secrecy&lt;/em&gt; based on some aspect of the phonology of the suffix &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt;, it seems unlikely to me. I just don't think there's that much evidence for the existence of such a rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, in its surface form “secrecy” does not contain /j/ after the /s/. We also see /s/ that is word-final (on the surface, at least) in words like &lt;em&gt;silence.&lt;/em&gt; So the conditions that applied for this sound change in Latin do not apply on the surface in English. We could try to formulate some very abstract analysis that derives both &lt;em&gt;secrecy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;silence&lt;/em&gt; from &quot;underlying&quot; forms containing /j/, but it's not straightforward to come up with appropriate underlying forms, and it might not really be &quot;worth it&quot; in terms of the amount of explanatory power such an analysis provides. See user6726's answer to my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26350/what-are-current-perspectives-on-analyzing-word-final-i-in-english-words-like&quot;&gt;What are current perspectives on analyzing word-final /i/ in English words like &amp;quot;potency&amp;quot; as synchronically derived from /j/?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it would be simpler to just say that in the morphological system of Modern English, the phonological form of the (assumed) suffix &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; is unrelated to the fact that it selects for the /s/-final allomorph of &quot;secret&quot; (and &quot;vacant&quot;, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The nominalizing suffix found in &lt;em&gt;secrecy&lt;/em&gt; is not very productive in modern English, and the fairly recently coined example of &lt;em&gt;normalcy&lt;/em&gt; (along with the standard spelling of &lt;em&gt;bankruptcy&lt;/em&gt;) suggests that some people think of &lt;em&gt;-cy&lt;/em&gt; as a suffix. This raises the possibility of an alternative morphophonological analysis where the /s/ is part of the suffix, and the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; is deleted rather than palatalized. That's not the diachronic origin of the form, but as a synchronic explanation, it seems fairly plausible (consider that many &lt;em&gt;-cy&lt;/em&gt; words are &lt;em&gt;-ncy&lt;/em&gt; words, and the contrast between /nts/ and /ns/ is neutralized for many English speakers). See Greg Lee's answer to this English SE question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/279239&quot;&gt;What are the rules to pronounce the suffix “-tion” in English, “/-tʃən/” or “ʃən”?&lt;/a&gt; If this explanation is correct, than there is no need for a rule that turns &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt; to /s/ before &lt;em&gt;-y.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not totally sure how to explain &lt;em&gt;modesty&lt;/em&gt; according to this model; one option might be to say that it has been reanalyzed as containing the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ty,&lt;/em&gt; which is historically the source of the &lt;em&gt;-ty&lt;/em&gt; in the similar-looking word &lt;em&gt;honesty&lt;/em&gt; (from Latin &lt;em&gt;honestas&lt;/em&gt;/Old French &lt;em&gt;honesté&lt;/em&gt;). Or we could just say that it has &lt;em&gt;-y,&lt;/em&gt; since there are still words like &lt;em&gt;recovery&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;villainy&lt;/em&gt; that show &lt;em&gt;-y&lt;/em&gt; as a nominalizing suffix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem for the t-deletion analysis as well as the t-fricativization analysis is the existence of the word &lt;em&gt;baronetcy,&lt;/em&gt; with /ts/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T06:38:15.677" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T06:38:15.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T03:05:47.190" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, in natural language, &quot;or&quot; is slightly different from logical OR, &quot;some&quot; is slightly different from logical EXISTS, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of the belief that these discrepancies are actually imperfections of natural language -- that if we all spoke in the language of a formal system, everything would be much better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T07:51:02.743" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T07:51:02.743" Title="Name for the view that ambiguities in natural language are imperfections of it?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27961" CreationDate="2018-12-04T09:00:44.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic approach described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/atpaino/deep-text-corrector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/atpaino/deep-text-corrector&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://yerevann.github.io/2016/09/09/automatic-transliteration-with-lstm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://yerevann.github.io/2016/09/09/automatic-transliteration-with-lstm/&lt;/a&gt; is still the state of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recipe is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generate data&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a. Build a corpus of unlabelled raw text in the target language&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. Convert each line to the source language using hand-built rules&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c. Flip the sides, so that the source language just output is now on the input side&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Train a model&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Train a model to convert from source language to target language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above assumes that 1b is possible - but it need not be perfect, it is fine to generate source never seen in the wild - and that context helps disambiguate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main advances from 2016 to 2018 are in the architecture used in training the model.  The state of the art would be some flavour of sequence-to-sequence - implementations like Fairseq or Sockeye - with &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attention&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07909&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;byte-pair encodings&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ch/search?source=hp&amp;amp;ei=IEMGXLe8DpPVsAHs2oPIDw&amp;amp;q=arxiv+machine+translation+reversed+source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reversed source input&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond state of the art would be transfer learning - training a single model that does the conversion for multiple languages - and various approaches with target-side language models - boosting accuracy with unlabelled raw text in the target language.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://deepchar.github.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://deepchar.github.io/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T09:05:53.930" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T09:05:53.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29844" CreationDate="2018-12-04T12:29:36.203" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do understand that a lookup tagger is one of the simplest ones to implement as it is able to map each word a single POS. Why shouldn't we use it compared to bigram tagger? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22917" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T17:25:32.750" Title="Why not use a Lookup taggers?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29859" CreationDate="2018-12-04T17:07:46.943" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what would it mean that the merge operation is asymmetrical? Would this mean that the order of merged objects is important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T09:08:48.270" Title="Minimalism - a question about a property of merge operation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29842" CreationDate="2018-12-04T17:25:32.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put, they're just not as good. Lookup taggers can't deal with the fact that words can have multiple parts of speech: look at &quot;project&quot; in English, which can be a verb or a noun. A lookup tagger can't distinguish between those two and will always choose whichever was most common in its training corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N-gram taggers try to deal with this problem by adding context. But they quickly run into the Combinatorial Explosion: given all the possible ways words can be combined, it's easy to find N-grams in the wild that never appeared in the training corpus. So N-gram taggers tend to fall back to smaller and smaller values of N if they can't find the whole thing, eventually resorting to N=1: a lookup tagger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T17:25:32.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-05T12:01:07.530" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries offer no etymogy on the word, &quot;own.&quot;  A search for etymogy of the word comes up wanting.  Does anyone know the etymology of &quot;own&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23329" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T12:26:39.967" Title="What is the etymology of the word, &quot;own.&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-12-05T18:38:16.750" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29847" CreationDate="2018-12-05T12:26:39.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word is related to German &lt;em&gt;eigen&lt;/em&gt;, Norwegian &lt;em&gt;egen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eie&lt;/em&gt; etc. In Proto-Germanic it has been reconstructed as *aiganaz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T12:26:39.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20451" CreationDate="2018-12-05T22:57:23.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought a shorter answer might help some people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;actor&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;agent&lt;/em&gt;) performs the action (upon the &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt; is what the &lt;em&gt;predicate&lt;/em&gt; gets filed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a verb in &lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt; voice, the subject will be the agent, and (if used) the direct object will be the patient and the indirect object will be the recipient.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;active:   S V [I] [O] == a V [r] [o]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a verb in &lt;em&gt;passive&lt;/em&gt; voice, the subject will be the patient or the recipient, and (if used) the direct object will still be the patient and an adverbial will supply the agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;passive:   S V [I/O] [D] == o V [r] ['by' a] .or. r V [o] ['by' a]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T22:57:23.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29851" CreationDate="2018-12-06T01:05:13.623" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the difference between these 2 is:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;classifier = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d)&#xA;&#xA;d1 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:500]))*100&#xA;d2 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:600]))*100&#xA;d3 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:700]))*100&#xA;d4 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:800]))*100&#xA;d5 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:900]))*100&#xA;d6 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:1000]))*100&#xA;d7 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:1100]))*100&#xA;d8 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:1200]))*100&#xA;d9 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:1300]))*100&#xA;d10 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier,train_d[:1400]))*100&#xA;dvd_results = [d1,d2,d3,d4,d5,d6,d7,d8,d9,d10]&#xA;&#xA;df1 = pd.DataFrame(list(zip(sample_sizes,dvd_results)),columns=[&quot;Sample Size&quot;,&quot;Accuracy&quot;])&#xA;display(df1)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gives me the results:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Sample Size    Accuracy&#xA;0   500     99.400000&#xA;1   600     99.500000&#xA;2   700     99.285714&#xA;3   800     99.000000&#xA;4   900     99.111111&#xA;5   1000    99.100000&#xA;6   1100    99.181818&#xA;7   1200    99.250000&#xA;8   1300    99.153846&#xA;9   1400    99.071429&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison to what I would have thought would be the same:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;classifier_d1 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:500])&#xA;classifier_d2 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:600])&#xA;classifier_d3 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:700])&#xA;classifier_d4 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:800])&#xA;classifier_d5 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:900])&#xA;classifier_d6 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:1000])&#xA;classifier_d7 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:1100])&#xA;classifier_d8 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:1200])&#xA;classifier_d9 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:1300])&#xA;classifier_d10 = NaiveBayesClassifier.train(train_d[:1400])&#xA;d1 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d1,train_d))*100&#xA;d2 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d2,train_d))*100&#xA;d3 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d3,train_d))*100&#xA;d4 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d4,train_d))*100&#xA;d5 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d5,train_d))*100&#xA;d6 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d6,train_d))*100&#xA;d7 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d7,train_d))*100&#xA;d8 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d8,train_d))*100&#xA;d9 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d9,train_d))*100&#xA;d10 = (nltk.classify.accuracy(classifier_d10,train_d))*100&#xA;dvd_results = [d1,d2,d3,d4,d5,d6,d7,d8,d9,d10]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gives me the results:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Sample Size Accuracy&#xA;0   500     50.000000&#xA;1   600     50.000000&#xA;2   700     50.000000&#xA;3   800     60.142857&#xA;4   900     88.000000&#xA;5   1000    93.500000&#xA;6   1100    93.785714&#xA;7   1200    96.428571&#xA;8   1300    97.428571&#xA;9   1400    99.071429&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly can't see what the difference is between the 2 chunks of code, as they're both already trained by classifier, and it is simply getting the accuracy where it seems to be messing up. Also if someone could fill me in on a reason for why my accuracy would only be 50% for sample sizes 700 and below! Partly because of this I'm going to assume that the 1st chunk is the correct way to do it whilst the 2nd chunk I've just messed up with the classifier. Alas I do not know why!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23331" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T02:27:18.230" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T02:27:18.230" Title="Differences in Naive Bayes Classifier NLTK, same code, different answers?" Tags="&lt;nltk&gt;&lt;python&gt;&lt;classifiers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29850" CreationDate="2018-12-06T01:23:36.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first case, you're &lt;em&gt;training&lt;/em&gt; with the entire data set, then &lt;em&gt;testing&lt;/em&gt; on different chunks of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, you're &lt;em&gt;training&lt;/em&gt; with chunks of the data set, then &lt;em&gt;testing&lt;/em&gt; on the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably don't want to be doing either. You want to train on as much data as possible, but you &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; want to test on the same data you trained with (if you do, you'll get incorrectly inflated results).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try breaking the data into a training set and a test set (a common split is somewhere around 80% training, 20% testing). Train on the entire training set, then test on the entire testing set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T01:23:36.010" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T09:01:51.177" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on document similarity using WordNet, though I have no idea how to apply the IDF weighting at this point in my code. I'm sure this weighting is one of the most simple things out there, but all information online just seems to be fairly confusing. I'm trying to get to the point where I can use the cosine similarity though I am lost at the moment, any help is appreciated. I've got the 2 corpus into separate bags, and counted the frequencies, so is that the TF part complete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def make_bow(somestring):&#xA;    rep=word_tokenize(somestring)&#xA;    rep=normalise(rep) &#xA;    rep=stem(rep)  &#xA;    rep=filter_stopwords(rep) &#xA;    dict_rep={}&#xA;    for token in rep:&#xA;        dict_rep[token]=dict_rep.get(token,0)+1 &#xA;    return(dict_rep)&#xA;&#xA;wsj=WSJCorpusReader()&#xA;rcr=ReutersCorpusReader()&#xA;&#xA;collectionsize=50&#xA;collections={&quot;wsj&quot;:[],&quot;rcr&quot;:[]}&#xA;&#xA;for key in collections.keys():&#xA;    if key==&quot;wsj&quot;:&#xA;        generator=wsj.raw()&#xA;    else:&#xA;        generator=rcr.raw()&#xA;    while len(collections[key])&amp;lt;collectionsize:&#xA;        collections[key].append(next(generator))&#xA;&#xA;bow_collections={key:[make_bow(doc) for doc in collection] for key,collection in collections.items()}&#xA;print(bow_collections)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It ends up printing (both bags):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{'wsj': [{'pierre': 1, 'vinken': 1, 'NUM': 2, 'year': 1, 'old': 1, 'join':         &#xA;1, 'board': 1, 'nonexecutive': 1, 'director': 1}, {'vinken': 1, 'chairman': &#xA;1, 'elsevier': 1, 'dutch': 1, 'publishing': 1, 'group': 1}, {'rudolph': 1, &#xA;'agnew': 1, 'NUM': 1, 'year': 1, 'old': 1, 'former': 1, 'chairman': 1, &#xA;'consolidated': 1, 'gold': 1, 'field': 1, 'plc': 1, 'wa': 1, 'named': 1, &#xA;'nonexecutive': 1, 'director': 1, 'british': 1, ......&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23331" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T09:01:51.177" Title="How to apply TF-IDF on my bows after generating frequencies" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;python&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2018-12-06T11:27:46.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Vietnamese, we don't change a noun's form when talking about plurality. We just add the number before the noun. &#xA;For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EN: a cat   --- VN:         mèo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EN: 5 cats  --- VN: 5 (con) mèo  (con: a unit of measurement used for animals)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to check if other languages have a plural noun form or not, you can use this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ejoy-english.com/extension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eJOY extension&lt;/a&gt;. Eg, Chinese, &#xA;+ a cat &#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wyBrz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wyBrz.png&quot; alt=&quot;a cat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5 cats&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwT2e.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwT2e.png&quot; alt=&quot;5 cats&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23335" LastEditorUserId="23335" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T11:38:55.623" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T11:38:55.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-06T15:03:33.397" Score="-3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across this exercise in my studies and I do not know how to challenge, I've tried to follow examples though I can never find anything online that truly is symmetrical to what I'm trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;For each word occurring in the Reuters corpus, write code to find how many senses it has according to WordNet. Print a list of the 10 most frequently occurring words with 2 senses.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone could point me in the right direction of where to start!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just hate even flipping the page if I haven't fully understood the entirety of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23331" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T00:09:38.257" Title="For each word in a corpus, find how many senses it has according to WordNet" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;python&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-12-07T19:11:38.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29854" CreationDate="2018-12-07T00:09:38.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given your tags, I assume you're using the &lt;code&gt;nltk&lt;/code&gt; library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First you'll want the Reuters and Wordnet corpora:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from nltk.corpus import reuters, wordnet&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, get your words from the Reuters corpus however you like: you probably don't want the entirety of &lt;code&gt;reuters.words()&lt;/code&gt;, so you should narrow it down by field, file, dataset, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, find how many senses each one has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def count_senses(word):&#xA;    return len(wordnet.synsets(word))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/howto/wordnet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the NLTK documentation on Wordnet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T00:09:38.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2018-12-07T02:46:14.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Cebuano:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;usa ka iro&lt;/em&gt; - one dog (&lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; connects the number to the noun)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;duha ka iro&lt;/em&gt; - two dogs&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ang iro&lt;/em&gt; - the dog &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ang mga iro&lt;/em&gt; - the dogs&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ang bata&lt;/em&gt; - the child&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ang mga bata&lt;/em&gt; - the children (both plural or collective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;em&gt;alternatively&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;em&gt;ang kabataan&lt;/em&gt; - (ka- + bata + -an) (both plural or collective) (also means &lt;em&gt;the youth&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23343" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T02:46:14.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29843" CreationDate="2018-12-07T09:08:48.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not precisely (for the order implications see Kayne 1994 - The antisymmetry of syntax - but note that the work is not uniformly accepted within Minimalism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merge is asymmetrical because one of the merged constituents (commonly called head though the term can be misleading) projects all its features to the resulting constituent - hence &quot;David's brothers&quot; is a plural constituent despite &quot;David&quot; being singular (and, vice versa, &quot;Davids' brother&quot; is singular despite &quot;Davids&quot; being plural) - whereas the other usually projects (&quot;percolates&quot;) none of them (or, in some versions, only those which do not have features of their type in the &quot;head&quot; constituent - see, e.g., my term paper if you can read Russian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23345" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T09:08:48.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-07T15:45:17.850" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to have a systematic understanding on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_field#cite_ref-6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic field&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_semantics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical semantics&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic change&lt;/a&gt;. Skimming at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Semantics-Palgrave-Modern-Linguistics-Kearns/dp/0230232302&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kate Kearns' &lt;em&gt;Semantics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that its focus is more about formal semantics, with topics like logic, quantifiers, predicates, tenses and thematic roles. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/semantic-relations-and-the-lexicon/C73E2724BE0DC7C7CFA69792EAAC49F3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M. Lynne Murphy's &lt;em&gt;Semantic Relations and the Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; fits my interest, but it seems to a little bit advanced for me. Is there a intermediate textbook that fits my needs? I have read cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, and have an introductory understanding on syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastEditorUserId="5400" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T04:41:06.787" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T04:41:06.787" Title="What books to read about lexical semantics?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-07T16:04:12.060" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write my thesis sociolinguistically about a new linguistic phenomenon, but the main contribution to my study is to solve speaking anxiety.. my thesis will include a question, after explaining the phenomenon from the sociolinguistic perspective, about &quot;how this phenomenon solve the problem of anxiety&quot;&gt;...&#xA;*MY QUESTION IS: does this type of research refer to sociolinguistics or to Language learning and teaching????&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22928" LastEditorUserId="22928" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T16:32:19.227" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T04:47:29.137" Title="Can sociolinguistic research contribute in solving L2 learning problem?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-12-13T03:46:02.820" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29875" CreationDate="2018-12-07T21:10:12.113" Score="5" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the sentence: &quot;I am a scribe, skillful of fingers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is typically stated in Middle Egyptian using the 'm' of predication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z1Jyc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z1Jyc.png&quot; alt=&quot;iw=i m sš iqr n(y) ḏbaw&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;iw=i m sš iqr n(y) ḏbaw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is correct, and 'm' of predication is used when the relationship between the topic and the comment is extrinsic or temporary, such as an occupation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is this translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHqDa.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHqDa.png&quot; alt=&quot;ink sš iqr n(y) ḏbaw&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;ink sš iqr n(y) ḏbaw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a nominal sentence, which usually implies an intrinsic connection (&quot;I am your father.&quot; vs. &quot;I am a scribe.&quot;), necessarily incorrect, or contrary to the spirit of the language, in this type of statement, when expressing an occupation (but also the intrinsic fact that I am &quot;skilled of my fingers&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23347" LastEditorUserId="23347" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T15:40:32.663" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T22:05:25.563" Title="'m' of predication vs. nominal sentence in Middle Egyptian" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T11:17:03.197" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;When writing software in some cases we are not allowed to use Turkish characters so we use U, G, S, I, i, O, C characters instead of Ü, Ğ, Ş, İ, ı, Ö and Ç since some computer systems might not support Turkish character set. So in our software we use simple mapper to replace those characters with equivalent one. My question is how would you call this process? Transcription, transliteration or something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23354" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T22:25:39.540" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T22:25:39.540" Title="How to call Turkish to Ascii character conversion?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29861" CreationDate="2018-12-08T15:07:50.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following your comments: Code-switching can absolutely be construed as a sociolinguistics phenomenon and there are possible links to decreasing anxiety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, perceptions of code-switching have undergone a profound shift in the last 40 years. It used to be considered substandard — a term you should have no difficulty associating with sociolinguistics concepts such as the effects of class, ethnicity, affluence, and so on. But more recently, a partly empirical, partly theoretical shift has led to its being considered normal multilingual behaviour (keyword: compound bilingualism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is indeed considerable overlap with second language acquisition, and especially with learning English as a second language (TESOL), which is fraught with sociolinguistics questions such as the power dynamics of English. How do you build an immersive classroom for the target language without seeming to devalue the &quot;underdog&quot; native language?. In the last five years the concept of plurilingualism and translanguaging has sprung up as well and begun to erode support for monolingual classrooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much more could be said, but why don't I just start you off with a few references you can branch out from. Note that since your question is not very detailed, not all may be applicable, and I don't have a lot of experience with the anxiety part especially. That said, I hope some of these will lead you down interesting paths if you follow the citations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hall, G., &amp;amp; Cook, G. (2012). Own-language use in language teaching and learning. &lt;em&gt;Language Teaching, 45&lt;/em&gt;(3), 271-308. doi:10.1017/S0261444812000067&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kupske, F. F. (2015). Second language pedagogy and translation: The role of learners’ own-language and explicit instruction revisited. &lt;em&gt;Brazilian English Language Teaching Journal, 6&lt;/em&gt;(1), 67-81.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Liebscher, G., &amp;amp; Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2005). Learner code-switching in the content-based foreign language classroom. &lt;em&gt;The Modern Language Journal, 89&lt;/em&gt;(2), 234-247. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00277.x&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brooks-Lewis, K. (2009). Adult learners’ perceptions of the incorporation of their L1 in foreign language teaching and learning. &lt;em&gt;Applied Linguistics, 30&lt;/em&gt;(2), 216-235. doi:10.1093/applin/amn051&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Piccardo, E. (2013). Plurilingualism and curriculum design: toward a synergic vision. &lt;em&gt;TESOL Quarterly, 47&lt;/em&gt;, 600-614. doi:10.1002/tesq.110&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cummins, J. (2007). Rethinking monolingual instructional strategies in multilingual classrooms. &lt;em&gt;Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10&lt;/em&gt;(2), 221-240.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2018-12-31T04:47:29.137" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T04:47:29.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29864" CreationDate="2018-12-08T18:07:35.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general usage, &lt;em&gt;transcription&lt;/em&gt; involves going from the sounds of a language to written symbols, and &lt;em&gt;transliteration&lt;/em&gt; involves going from one set of written symbols to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're starting with written symbols (in Unicode) and converting them to other written symbols (in ASCII), this would be transliteration. If you want to be more specific, call it &quot;ASCII transliteration&quot;, or &quot;lossy transliteration&quot; (since it removes distinctions like &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;ı&lt;/code&gt; that the original writing preserved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T18:07:35.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T21:48:54.853" Score="6" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a basic example of the French word oui, and the English word we. Phonetically these words are pronounced identically (okay some French speakers may put emphasis on the oo sound in oui, but you know what I'm talking about)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if there are any 2 languages such that there is a sentence in language A and a sentence in language B, which when spoken sound identical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23357" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T14:33:49.597" Title="Does a coherent sentence which is a cross language homophone exist?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-09T00:04:22.747" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you only want a limited number of examples, I figure that one will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a known wordplay between an Italian sentence, and a somewhat contrived Latin sentence, which are spelled the same way except for punctuation and capitalization (which wasn't used in classical Latin, and excluding the fact that V and U weren't distinguished), and pronounced the same way if you use the pronunciation of Latin taught in Italy (classical pronunciation was different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Italian sentence is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I vitelli dei romani sono belli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning &quot;The Romans' calves are nice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin sentence would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I, Vitelli, Dei Romani sono belli!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning &quot;Go, o Vitellius, by the war call (sound) of the Roman God!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T00:04:22.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-09T05:30:12.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've wondered this myself! I think you are probably right that it is quite uncommon for meaningful sentences in different languages to be completely homophonous, especially if you take the more restrictive definition of homophone which requires that the words differ in origin, in which case LjL's (impressive) example doesn't quite work (to the best of my knowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best effort:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jerry, shut the door.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cheri, je t'adore.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't think those are close enough to be considered true homophones (and I don't know about the status of contractions as fair game.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23358" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T05:30:12.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T06:16:38.920" Score="0" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;When discussing politics, politicians use trigger words to insinuate a specific meaning or topic. Ex. urban-blacks, middle eastern-muslim... Are there any specific theories that focuses on (or how words are used for) propaganda, fear mongering, connotations or how words become attached to definitions other than their literal ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23320" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T05:02:55.587" Title="Linguistic theoretical frameworks" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T14:34:21.023" Score="0" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I know that there are on the one hand &lt;em&gt;pitch-accent languages&lt;/em&gt; (like South-Slavic languages, Greek, Norwegian, etc.) where the accentuated syllable is indicated by a particular pitch contour/tone rather than by stress, and on the other hand &lt;em&gt;languages with dynamic accent&lt;/em&gt; produced by an increased intensity in articulation of the stressed syllable (such as in German or Czech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, am I right in thinking that French has a dynamic accent? I didn't see this stated explicitly anywhere where I looked so I just want to check.&#xA;I did however find that French lacks lexical stress entirely which I suppose means that you can't distinguish two identical words just by using a different accent on them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for my English, I hope everything is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T17:35:36.123" Title="What type of stress does French have" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;pitch-accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29871" CreationDate="2018-12-09T17:35:36.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between dynamic stress and pitch accent describes types of word-level &quot;stress&quot; distinctions. So French has neither (and it also is not a tone language). In addition to word stress, tone or simply nothing, a language can (observationally, always does) have a system of intonation superimposed. There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281318484_Chapter_3_Intonational_Phonology_of_French_Developing_a_ToBI_system_for_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; which proposes a ToBI-paradigmatic account of French intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T17:35:36.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29807" CreationDate="2018-12-10T07:00:34.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your use of 'domain' and 'register' is meaningful, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communication choices are made to fit a &lt;strong&gt;diatype&lt;/strong&gt;, which consists of &lt;em&gt;field&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tenor&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt;.  Your 'domain' corresponds to the 'field' (situational context), and your 'register' corresponds to the 'tenor' (style based on roles).  The 'mode' is the communication channel (speech, writing, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Register' can refer to either the entire diatype, or just the tenor.  &lt;em&gt;Tenor&lt;/em&gt; can be called &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; instead.  It once equated to the level of formality (inverse of intimacy), but has been expanded to include other emotional motives such as humor or derision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T07:00:34.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29862" CreationDate="2018-12-10T12:46:11.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nominal construction without the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; of predication is attested in Old Kingdom texts, even with professions. E.g. Hatnub 11, Anthes (pl.14,5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ink sš iqr&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am an excellent scribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hatnub 14, Anthes (1964: pl. 17,3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ink ḫtmw iqr ḥsy n nb=f&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am an excellent seal-bearer, one praised of his lord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; of predication is used quite frequently for what is usually not extrinsic, e.g. &lt;em&gt;ny-sw.t&lt;/em&gt; &quot;king&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the analysis of the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/statements_of_identity_and_the_m_of_predication.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tomb of Hezi at Saqqara (Sixth Dynasty) by FD Scalf (2008)&lt;/a&gt;, the answer &quot;may lie not in semantics but in syntax&quot;. The argument boils down to the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; of predication is used in main clauses when there are certain syntactic constructions, e.g. the use of &lt;em&gt;iw&lt;/em&gt; with nouns and subject pronouns suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Demotic and Coptic, it survives as a &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in subordinate clauses. In Coptic, it is paired with &lt;em&gt;eire&lt;/em&gt; (as &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;) to mean &quot;act as&quot;. This is an evolution of the syntactic environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt; of predication often selects for the extrinsic interpretation of polysemous nouns, even in Coptic, as reported by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/43075495&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shisha-Halevy (1987)&lt;/a&gt;. The use of the &lt;em&gt;o n-&lt;/em&gt; construction in Coptic with the loanword &lt;em&gt;parthenos&lt;/em&gt; forces the interpretation of &quot;chaste&quot;, as opposed to the intrinsic &quot;maiden&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T22:05:25.563" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T22:05:25.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29878" CreationDate="2018-12-10T16:05:22.357" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find and Indo European root for this word. I'm not even sure if it has indo european origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T18:16:55.547" Title="What is the etimology of the ancient greek word &quot;εὑρίσκω&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29876" CreationDate="2018-12-10T17:26:10.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The authors of this website consider that it comes from the reconstructed root: *u̯er&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/2165&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/2165&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T17:26:10.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29876" CreationDate="2018-12-10T18:16:55.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to say. According to Beekes Etymological dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the perfective meaning of εὑρίσκω, the aorist εὗρον is probably old. An old perfect seen in εὕρη-κα probably existed next to it. After this, εὑρήσω arose, and the latest member of the paradigm (beside εὑρεθῆναι) was the present εὑρίσκω (quantity of the ι unknown). The aorist εὗρον may be a thematic root formation standing for the augmented ind. *ἔ-ϝρ-ον; on this form, see Vara Emerita 61 (1993): 177-9. The aspiration is perhaps secondary after ἑλεῖν etc. Alternatively, was it a reduplicated aorist *u̯e-u̯r-e/o- from *ue-urh1-e/o-, with dissimilatory loss of the anlauting ϝ- and secondary aspiration, in which case, according to Beckwith Glotta 72 (1994): 24-30, the root-final laryngeal was lost in a reduplicated formation? &#xA;  A reduplicated formation is also found in the OIr. preterite -fúar 'I found' &amp;lt; IE *ue-ur- (pres. fo-gabim ); the pass. -frīth 'inventum est' agrees with *ϝρη- in -ϝέ-ϝρη-κα (&gt; εὕρηκα) as IE *urh1-to-. IE *ureh1-t- has also been supposed in OCS ob-rětъ 'I found'. A full grade * uer- is seen in Arm. gerem (with secondary aorist gerec'i ) 'take prisoner'. Taillardat RPh. 34 (1960): 232-235 assumes *suer-, with *sesure &gt; εὗρε.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appart from that, he puts a question mark on the origin of the word. In other words, the present IE suggestions are not conclusive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T18:16:55.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28623" CreationDate="2018-12-10T20:54:52.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The slash was placed here to stand in for the comma. Those commas between &quot;but&quot; and &quot;they killed&quot; are markers which point out that all the sentence includes between those commas is a explanatory phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T20:54:52.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29870" CreationDate="2018-12-11T04:50:16.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about historical linguistics, but from a NLP standpoint, determining the semantics of words falls under the subfield of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pragmatics&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of particular interest in your case is &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implicature&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else&quot;. For example: saying &quot;maybe&quot; when you mean &quot;no&quot;, or asking &quot;Can you do this?&quot; when you mean the directive &quot;Do this.&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic12/14cp1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grice's Maxims&lt;/a&gt; outline an approach to &lt;em&gt;cooperative conversation&lt;/em&gt;, but these maxims are often violated or flouted for the purpose of misdirection, irony, sarcasm, or more generally &quot;extra meaning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23366" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T04:50:16.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T07:46:16.043" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the English &quot;Woe&quot; and the German &quot;Wo&quot; related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just heard a colleague say, &quot;Wo ist mein ...&quot; and I thought of the band &lt;em&gt;Woe is me&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these words just false cognates... or is there some common root? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23368" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T10:44:26.270" Title="Are the English &quot;Woe&quot; and the German &quot;Wo&quot; related?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;roots&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29881" CreationDate="2018-12-11T08:44:43.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They have nothing to do with eachother, except that they kind of sound similar. But consider similar words with similar meanings!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Woe =&gt; German Weh&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German Wo =&gt; English Where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two are pairs of words which are historically related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the phrase &quot;&lt;em&gt;Woe is me&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, one German translation could be &quot;&lt;em&gt;Weh mir&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. And in the closely related Yiddish, &quot;vey iz mir&quot; is sometimes heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T08:44:43.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29881" CreationDate="2018-12-11T10:15:22.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Wilson's comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English /oː/[oʊ̯] in indigenous words is derived from a Proto-Germanic diphthong that is reconstructed as pgm. *ai (pgm. *ai &gt; Old English ā &gt; modern /oː/). The same diphthong is the root of German /aɪ̯/(usually spelled ⟨ei⟩) and /eː/ (can be spelled ⟨eh⟩). That's why German &lt;em&gt;Stein&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt; are cognates as well as &lt;em&gt;weh&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;woe&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Where&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wo&lt;/em&gt; are not as easy to explain. By also considering Dutch &lt;em&gt;waar&lt;/em&gt; you can reconstruct a Proto Germanic *hwē¹r &gt; West-Germanic *hwār.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;hwār&lt;/em&gt; must have been palatalized in English. In German a long /aː/ became /o:/ in some dialects. This seems to be a problematic case overall, since there is a short vowel in the Norse cognate. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/wo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.dwds.de/wb/wo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="23365" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T10:44:26.270" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T10:44:26.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T10:55:20.220" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project that explores how imperative mood varies in 'intensity'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, one can 'soften' the tone of a directive by including the speaker in the command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Let's&lt;/strong&gt; go to school&quot; is 'softer' than &quot;Go to school&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or by starting with the verb 'Try':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Try&lt;/strong&gt; working harder&quot; is 'softer' than &quot;Work harder&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other quantifiable ways of influencing the tone of a directive, either way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23371" LastEditorUserId="23371" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T10:51:28.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T10:51:28.590" Title="Markers that affect intensity of the imperative mood" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;mood&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14606" CreationDate="2018-12-11T12:16:43.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sometimes corresponds to orthographic &amp;lt;ie&gt; for reasons unclear to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;well, at least in the case of &lt;em&gt;thief&lt;/em&gt; this shouldn't be from Old English /ē/ but from /ēo/ (not to be confused with the breaking as in &lt;em&gt;eorth-&lt;/em&gt; that corresponds to Old Norse &lt;em&gt;jǫ&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T12:35:15.210" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T12:35:15.210" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29892" CreationDate="2018-12-11T11:23:45.213" Score="3" ViewCount="4196" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Catford (1978) divides the shift in translation into two major types, level/rank shift and category shift. Level/rank shift refers to a source language item at one linguistic level that has a target language translation equivalent at a different level. In other words, it is simply a shift from grammar to lexis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t quite un­der­stand what the word ‘lev­el’ in &lt;em&gt;lev­el shift&lt;/em&gt; refers to.&#xA;Lev­el of what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The on­ly ex­am­ples I have found so far use present con­ti­nous or per­fect&#xA;con­struc­tions, such has &lt;em&gt;have been&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to be + ‑ing&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp;c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there oth­er class­es of ex­am­ples of lev­el shift to be had?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ex­am­ple,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: Elle est intelligente&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: She's intelligent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in french, the adjective &lt;em&gt;intelligent&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; in the end of it because its gender, but in english there's no system like that.&#xA;So does that count as lev­el shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Al­so in this ex­am­ple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: les fleurs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English: flow­er&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The re­sult­ing trans­la­tion used sin­gu­lar not plu­ral like the source &#xA;lan­guage did. Should this al­so to be con­sid­ered a lev­el shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also, for anyone who understand this in Bahasa Indonesia, i have another example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French: Ils sont devenus trop grands&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indonesian: Mereka jadi kebesaran&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the adjective &quot;grand&quot; has &quot;-s&quot; in the end because it follows the subject but there's no such thing as that in Indonesian. does it also considered as a level shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22349" OwnerDisplayName="user8930" LastEditorUserId="22349" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T18:23:38.880" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T22:35:44.850" Title="What ex­act­ly is “lev­el shift” in trans­la­tion the­o­ry by Cat­ford?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T18:19:33.100" Score="1" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that the runes of the Younger Futhark alphabet had names such as hagall and bjarkan, I also understand that these rune names had meanings, such as hail and birch. I also understand that these runes were sometimes ligatured together to form bindrunes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were rune names ever spelled out with other runes in Old Norse or were the runes themselves considered the words of their rune names as D and S are considered words? When these runes were joined as ligatures as bindrunes, I understand that these bindrunes are considered one individual glyph. was this glyph considered one rune or one word in Old Norse or did these bindrunes have any names themselves or were they read as two separate runes even though they are one glyph? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, the Bluetooth logo is a bindrune of hagall and bjarkan, the initials of Harald Bluetooth, when the two are separated they are read as two initials “hagall” and “bjarkan”. When they are joined are they still read separately or is this glyph read as hagallbjarkan as one word in Old Norse? When are the words hagall and bjarkan used to write the initials, and are the runes alone used? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i7EVT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23378" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T13:35:30.460" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T15:54:01.597" Title="How are bindrunes read?" Tags="&lt;old-norse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-11T18:30:38.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One internet-famous example is between Japanese and Polish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;daisuki&lt;/em&gt; (大好き): I like [it, you, him…] a lot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;daj suki&lt;/em&gt;: give [me] the bitches&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are reasonably coherent sentences, if short. Without context, &quot;I like you a lot&quot; and &quot;give me the bitches&quot; are the most likely readings; &lt;em&gt;suki&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;bitches&quot; as in &quot;female dogs in heat&quot; but also &quot;overly domineering women&quot; or &quot;police vans&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T18:43:12.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T18:43:12.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12414" CreationDate="2018-12-11T22:13:35.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they are complete homonyms/homophones a split through a sound change would be next to impossible, because sound changes occur regularly. But I have an idea, how it could still happen.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one of the words were for example a function word it might have weaker stress, resulting in a reduction of the vowel to schwa or the reduction of a consonant cluster to a single consonant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another thing that could split the homonyms would be analogy – a different word form could influence one of the homonyms. (This wouldn't be a sound change)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T18:19:18.553" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T18:19:18.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29887" CreationDate="2018-12-11T22:35:44.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here, level refers, if I am understanding correctly, to the syntactic category. A same seme depending on language can be encoded by either a grammatical morpheme or a lexical morpheme. For example between French and English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je suis &quot;en train d'&quot; écrire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writ &quot;ing&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The progressive seme is encoded differently in these two languages. In French, an adverbial phrase is used (so belonging to the lexical category) whereas in English, a verbal inflectional morpheme is used (so belonging to the grammatical category). Then, there is a syntactic category shift in the way where this aspect is encoded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T22:35:44.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29894" CreationDate="2018-12-12T00:12:02.040" Score="3" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/q/7698/406&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; on Latin.SE asks about the &quot;elliptical dual&quot;, a construction where the dual number doesn't mean &quot;two X&quot; but instead &quot;X and one other&quot;. For example, in the Iliad, &lt;em&gt;Aíant-e&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;Ajax-DUAL&lt;/code&gt; means not &quot;the two Ajaxes&quot; but &quot;Ajax and Teucer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly (from the answers and comments on that question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;ahanī&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;day-DUAL&lt;/code&gt; &quot;day and night&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;Castor-ēs&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;Castor-PLURAL&lt;/code&gt; &quot;Castor and Pollux&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic &lt;em&gt;al-qamarāni&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;the-moon-DUAL&lt;/code&gt; &quot;the sun and moon&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my rudimentary knowledge, Japanese also seems to have a similar construction: &lt;em&gt;Yuki-chan-tachi&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;Yuki-DIM-PLURAL&lt;/code&gt; &quot;Little Yuki and her friends&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious how widespread this phenomenon is. In English we don't seem to use the plural like this, but are we the outliers? Some of the examples here seem to come from Proto-Indo-European, but Arabic and Japanese certainly don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T04:18:19.807" Title="How common is the &quot;elliptical dual&quot; (or plural) cross-linguistically?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29893" CreationDate="2018-12-12T04:18:19.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there are more languages with dedicated plural forms than there are with dedicated dual forms, this phenomenon is probably more common with plurals. I'm more familiar with constructions like Japanese &quot;-tachi&quot; being called &quot;associative&quot; plurals: there is a WALS chapter about this grammatical feature (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Associative Plural&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Michael Daniel and Edith Moravcsik) which indicates that it is actually relatively widespread. Some languages have a distinct form used for associative plurals, but this appears to be less common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T04:18:19.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29889" CreationDate="2018-12-12T09:38:42.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bindrunes, or ligatures, are rather rare in ON. They are far more common in neo-pagan uses for runes, but that's nothing to do with Linguistics. So this answer will focus on attested, historical use of bindrunes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kragehul_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kragehul I&lt;/a&gt;. This is in the Elder Fuþark, not the Younger Fuþark, but the principle is exactly the same. Here the text begins&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ek e⸗rila⸗z asugisalas m⸗uh⸗a h⸗aite &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;code&gt;⸗&lt;/code&gt; means a ligature of the adjacent letters, for example &lt;code&gt;e⸗r&lt;/code&gt; is a bindrune of &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how is that read in Old Norse? Someone who reads that text will just read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ek erilaz asugisalas muha haite&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as though there were no ligatures. That's because &lt;code&gt;e⸗r&lt;/code&gt; is not read in isolation. It's not &lt;code&gt;*ehwaz-raido&lt;/code&gt;, because it's part of running text, so it's just the phonemic sequence of &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;r&lt;/code&gt;. It's the syllable, &lt;code&gt;er&lt;/code&gt;. It's just a convenient short hand, if you want to reduce the labour of chiselling the letters onto the writing surface, that's all. And this means, that they are not seen as independent letters, so they don't have names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example with &lt;code&gt;h⸗b&lt;/code&gt; is not really how runes were used in Old Norse. They didn't really abbreviate people's names to initials like we do, so Haraldr Blátǫnn would have really been written straight-forwardly as &lt;code&gt;haraltr blatan&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that these bindrunes are considered one individual glyph, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really, it's more like a graphical variant of a sequence of two runes. Kind of like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;typographical ligatures&lt;/a&gt; for sequences &lt;code&gt;fi&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ffi&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;fl&lt;/code&gt; etc in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;was this glyph considered one rune or one word in old Norse &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, one bindrune is really several runes, just a little different visually since it's munched up into one shape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;or did these bindrunes have any names themselves or were they read as two separate runes even though they are called one glyph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had no names, as I have shown. Also they are read as two separate runes, because that's truly what they are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T15:54:01.597" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T15:54:01.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1789" CreationDate="2018-12-12T11:03:18.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For sound changes that happened after ca. 1000 there are some candidates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;th-stopping: Essentially all continental Germanic languages stopped their th's to d's, including Frisian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unrounding of umlauts vowels: /y/ -&gt; /i/ and /ø/ -&gt; /e/ happened in English, Yiddish, and is frequently encountered in German dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;apocope of final e/schwa: Still an active process in German dialects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;diphthongisation of long vowels: /hu:s/ -&gt; /haus/ and /mi:n/ -&gt; /main/ happened independently in High German and English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T11:03:18.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1789" CreationDate="2018-12-12T14:29:46.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, since 1000 CE... That makes it a lot more difficult. I'm not sure if any of these changes may have happened earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa. Happened in English, Dutch, Low Saxon, German and more languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loss of gemination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the diphthongisation of long vowels that jknappen mentioned: That happened in Dutch too (didn't happen in Low Saxon, Limburgish/Ripuarian Frisian(except open syllables), most Alemannic German).&#xA;mîn- en /maɪ̯n/ de /maɪ̯n/ nl /mɛi̯n/, lûs- en /laʊ̯s/ de /laʊ̯s/ nl /lœy̯s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:29:46.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T16:18:04.580" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mais il me faut quelques volontaires bien décidés.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in that sentence, &lt;em&gt;décidés&lt;/em&gt; is considered as an adjective right? So does the phrase &lt;strong&gt;bien décidés&lt;/strong&gt; an adjectival phrase or adverbial phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22349" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T21:12:45.857" Title="Is &quot;bien décidés&quot; an adjectival phrase?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29900" CreationDate="2018-12-12T16:54:50.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are separate words belonging to different syntactic classes. &quot;bien&quot; is an adverb here that determines the adjective &quot;décidés&quot;. &quot;bien&quot; can be substituted for another adverb as &quot;très&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;bien&quot; can be an adjective also, then it could be possible to consider that &quot;bien décidé&quot; could be an adjectival phrase as &quot;bien portant&quot;. But, in your case, they don't form a phrase (according to the French terminology &quot;locution&quot;). An adverbial phrase with the word &quot;bien&quot; might be &quot;particulièrement bien&quot;, &quot;fort bien&quot;, &quot;bien entendu&quot; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you are looking for the dependency between the words, then you are considering the word &quot;phrase&quot; as the equivalent of the French word &quot;syntagme&quot;, in that case, &quot;bien décidé&quot; is an adjectival phrase. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T21:12:45.857" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T21:12:45.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29900" CreationDate="2018-12-12T18:33:09.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;bien décidés&quot; qualifies &quot;quelques volontaires&quot;, which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;noun phrase&lt;/a&gt;, as its head is the noun &quot;volontaires&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phrase that qualifies a noun phrase would typically be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjectival phrase&lt;/a&gt;: this is, similarly to the noun phrase, because its &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; is the adjective &quot;décidés&quot; (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;past participle used as an adjective&lt;/a&gt;). The fact that &quot;bien&quot;, which in turn qualifies &quot;décidés&quot;, is an adverb doesn't change the natural of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;bien décidés&quot; is an adjectival phrase that depends on the noun phrase &quot;quelques volontaires&quot;. Since it's dependent on it, if you take the larger phrase &quot;quelques volontaires bien décidés&quot;, that is also a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T18:33:09.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29905" CreationDate="2018-12-12T19:29:30.840" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know reconstructed homophones in Proto-Germanic or where I could look them up? I am interested in clear homophones, not polysemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T22:28:45.733" Title="Homophones in Proto-Germanic" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29903" CreationDate="2018-12-13T07:27:20.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Set wiktionary's search to reconstruction namespace and search for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic &amp;quot;etymology 2&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=Germanic+%22etymology+2%22&amp;amp;title=Special:Search&amp;amp;profile=advanced&amp;amp;fulltext=1&amp;amp;searchengineselect=mediawiki&amp;amp;advancedSearch-current=%7B%22namespaces%22%3A%5B118%5D%7D&amp;amp;ns118=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;try if the link retained the settings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A few examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*hringaz&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ring, circle; curve.&#xA;From earlier *hrengaz (compare Proto-Finnic loanword *rengas), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)krengʰ-, extended nasalized form of Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to turn, bend”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sound, ring.&#xA;From Proto-Indo-European *(s)kreg-, *(s)kArg-, *(s)kArk- (“to caw, crow, croak, pipe, shout”). Cognate with Lithuanian krañkti (“to caw, cough, croak”).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/hringaz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/hringaz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*fōdrą&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fodder.&#xA;From Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to protect, guard, graze, feed”). Possibly cognate with Latin pānis (“bread, food”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sheath.&#xA;From Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to protect, guard, graze, feed”) +‎ *-þrą (“tool suffix”).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/f%C5%8Ddr%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/f%C5%8Ddr%C4%85&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*aldiz&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;age, generation; lifetime.&#xA;From *alaną +‎ *-þiz.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;human being; person; man.&#xA;From *alaną +‎ *-þiz.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/aldiz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/aldiz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;*armaz&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arm.&#xA;From Proto-Indo-European *h₂ermos, *h₂ŕ̥mos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;poor, miserable; pitiful, pitiable.&#xA;From Proto-Indo-European *h₁erm- (“poor, ill”). Cognate with Hittite  (erman, “sickness”). Alternatively[1], from Pre-Germanic *h₃orbʰmos, with loss of -b- before -m-, from Proto-Indo-European *h₃erbʰ-; compare the Norse variant aumr, as from *arbmaz with no loss of -b-, which mirrors the dissimilation of Old Norse haustr from *harbistaz.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/armaz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/armaz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T22:28:45.733" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2018-12-13T20:48:24.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29907" CreationDate="2018-12-13T20:52:17.783" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't even know what my problem is called, so I can't research literature on it. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. &#xA;I have a little experience with sentiment analysis, but what I want to do is more specific. Rather than evaluating the general sentiment of a body of text, I want to evaluate the sentiment about a particular subject in a body of text. For example, let's say I have an article about President Obama. One sentence says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;President Obama arrived in Florida and saw the horrific destruction left behind by the hurricane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the general / overall sentiment of this sentence would like be negative, Obama is spoken about fairly neutrally. This is what I mean by about-sentiment. I want to evaluate (with a computer) how positively or negatively the text speaks &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; a specific subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this called? Is there literature on it? How can I proceed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23395" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T21:25:21.933" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T21:25:21.933" Title="What is about-sentiment called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29906" CreationDate="2018-12-13T21:10:08.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google NLP and others call this 'Entity Sentiment Analysis' (versus document sentiment analysis). Also see &quot;aspect based sentiment', e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.07043.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.07043.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;Finally, look at OpenAI's approach. It isn't entity/aspect oriented but the sentiment shifts as it reads: &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.openai.com/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.openai.com/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T21:10:08.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9443" CreationDate="2018-12-14T13:46:18.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they're opposites in terms of voice onset, which would make them mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, that is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sound that can be produced is a murmured plosive (they are sometimes called voiced aspirated). Whilst an aspirated consonant has the phonation type of a [h] a murmured consonant has the phonation of a [ɦ]. They are similar in that murmured voice let's more air escape than modal voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T13:46:18.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28497" CreationDate="2018-12-14T19:18:12.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Rat&quot; (council), &quot;Rad&quot; (wheel), &quot;Bürger-Rathaus&quot; (village center, mayor's office), &quot;Fahrradhaus&quot; (bicycle house), &quot;Ratschlag&quot; (hint, tip), &quot;Radschlag&quot; (wheel [gymnastics]). The name Conrad supposedly derives from Rath (Con either from coen &quot;king&quot; or from kühn &quot;wise, courageous&quot;; cp. Cohn, cone etc &quot;yewish council, priest&quot;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Rand&quot; (rim), I guess, gave &quot;ranzig&quot; (rancid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bund&quot; (binding [of flowers] union [of countries etc]) and &quot;bunt&quot; (colorful) are so hard to distinguish I'm not sure how to spell &quot;Bun?metall&quot; (wiki says colorful, but since Buntmetalle are ligaments [cf. Legierung] like bronce, abounding in a certain assortment of metalls, there's a mixup I'd say).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Berg&quot; (hill, mountain), &quot;Werk&quot; (work, product), &quot;Bergwerk&quot; (mine, shaft) but &quot;bergen&quot; (to unearth) &quot;werken&quot; (to work). g/k can be reduced to a glottal stop Ber' and Wer', loosing the distinction. Berg can be lenited to Berch, in one (my own hodgepotch) dialect, but not so for Werk. There's yet a difference between weich (soft) and Weigel (a name) that didn't go to *Weichel but rather *Weiyel (voiced velar fricative [ɣ̞]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Berliner Ick, Icke seems to retain an old variant over ich (I, ego).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In gucken/kucken the standard couldn't overcome the dialect so kucken is regarded as standard alternative (or alternative standard?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;weg (way, long e) weg (away, short e)--A broad way and a quick away, so to speak--Zweck (purpose) Wecke (bread; southern dialect; surely Weck' somewhere where it's in use, also Weckerl').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hagen (a name; a kind of place) hager (slim; cp. mager - meager, lean) Haken (hook) haken (to jam) hence poetic hag' and hak'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mag (I may, like) mögen (to like) vermögen (to be able) mach (I make, do) machen (to make) machte (I did) möchte (i want, would like) -- it almost seems as if möchte was a subjunctive preterite(?) of machen (cp. might, Macht) and mögen a backformation when möchte were reanalyzed as its own verb. Additionally complicated by meiern (to lead, produce, set into motion), mayor and Lt. mega.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Birken&quot; (birch trees), &quot;wirken&quot; (to effect, work) shows that birch fortified (or vice-versa?). &quot;Henkel&quot; (cup-handel etc.) vs &quot;hängen&quot; (to hang), &quot;Henker&quot; (executer), similarly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May overlap or clearly differenciated in g/k: Angst (angst, fear) dankst (2. p. sg. to thank) denkst (2. p. sg. to think) langst (2. p. sg. to long) längst (yet; for the longest time). Especially lang (long) may be &quot;lank&quot; in the extreme case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tang, Tank shows a clear difference, as do Zange (pliers) and zanke (1. p. sg. to twist, brawl, complain) except in noisy environments, but zankt (3. p. sg.) and *zangt (made up verbalisation of Zange, instead of zwingen (to force, obligate) zwicken (pinch) or whatever) not so clearly. The point is that ng can be stretched, but k not really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nagt (he gnaws) and nakt (naked) show lengthening of the vowel and subvocal. Nacken (neck) nagen (to gnaw) are fully separated, but I have no clue how to spell nackend [or nakend?] (to be naked, as if participle of a nonexistend verb?). Nagel (nail) and Makel (flaw, blemish) where Makel gave Macke, because Makel invariably sounds shorter than Makel unless specifically stressed as if *Maakel. However, as pointed out in the comments below, Nagel has aspirated (voiced) g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genick (neck) and genug (enough) show barely any difference in termination. Neither do gesund (sound and healthy) and Stralsunt (that harbor near Denmark).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mus (mousse) and Fuß (foot) are specifically differentiated in writing but not audibly so, to me; Muse (muse) /z/ is voiced, Muse (mousses) /s/ isn't. Likewise, Rus (but Russe) Bus (bus, as if *Buss, also Busse) aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knabbern is colloquial and might, sometimes, as well be transcribed knappern, I suppose (to gnaw, ie. on fingernails), cp. knapp (short), Knabe , Knappe (boy, cnave; difficult etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Topf (pot) may be Topp, short o; toben (to play wild, to storm) 1. p. sg. tobe, tob', long o. That shows the fortition accross the whole word, where a voiced ablauting Toppe became fricative (if I say so myself), cp. Töpfer (potter). Schuppen (shed, shop) may be compared to Schub-lade, Schub (drawer), the later apparently from schieben (push, not pull nor draw) Schub (boost), schubsen (to shove, nudge), but both are compartments so maybe there's a closer relation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knabbern is colloquial and might as well be transcribed knappern, I suppose (to gnaw, ie. on fingernails), cp. knapp (short), Knabe , Knappe (boy, cnave; difficult etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staub (dust) and stopp (stop!) Stab (staff); cp. stopfen (to jam, plug) Stubbel (stub) Stoppel (bristle) Stumpf (stub, trunk) stumpf (blunt) Stube (living room, stove) steif (stiff) Stippe, stippen (dunk, touch) Stepp-Decke (woven blanket) Step-Tanz (step dance). So you can compare your own native stab step stop strobe (if you are native English speaking). Try saying stab-stab-stab quickly like a traicherous villain and stop-stop-stop in return (to reduce the lengthening of the a). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dieb (thief) Dip, dippen (dip, related to stippen) Tipp, tippen (tip, hint; to tap). You will hardly find minimal pairs because they tended to dissimilate, e.g. tief (deep), long ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T05:02:07.707" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T05:02:07.707" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29914" CreationDate="2018-12-14T19:52:14.400" Score="13" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;When whispering in English all (segmental) phonological distinctions can – as far as I am aware – still be made, which may be due to redundancy (or simply because voicing is optional). I even pronounce whispered homorganic fricatives like /v : f/ differently.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as we know, some languages employ either pitch (tonal languages like Chinese) or more than two types of phonation (like Hindi with an opposition of modal voice, murmured voice, voicelessness and aspiration).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it common to whisper in such languages as we do? And are there any particular strategies to uphold the distinctions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T23:07:45.323" Title="Whispering in languages heavily dependent on pitch or phonation distinctions" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T22:25:45.243" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of my research, I extract causal (cause-effect) relations from natural text. Sometimes, there are words in the text that signal a causal relation like &quot;&lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;since&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; And, some other times, there are some &lt;em&gt;nouns&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;verbs&lt;/em&gt; (or words with other part of speeches) that signal such relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if you think &quot;&lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; signals a causal relation (based on your knowledge of language and semantic)? For example, when we say &quot;&lt;em&gt;x helped y to happen,&lt;/em&gt;&quot; can we infer that x is the cause for y to happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A real world random example, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;UBR4 helps neurons divide in the brains of children.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; In this case, can we say &quot;&lt;strong&gt;UBR4&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is somehow the cause for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;neurons to be divided&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, with a different but similar verb, &quot;The roar was caused by the injection into the aircraft’s four afterburners of the fuel which provided the extra thrust that it needed to take off.&quot; can we conclude that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;provide&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; signals a causal relation and &quot;&lt;em&gt;the injection into the aircraft’s four afterburners&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is the cause of &quot;&lt;em&gt;the extra thrust?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I am trying to figure out if I can use &quot;help&quot; or &quot;provide&quot; as signals for causal relations in text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4770" LastEditorUserId="4770" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T06:00:04.857" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T06:00:04.857" Title="Is &quot;help&quot; a causal verb?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29911" CreationDate="2018-12-14T23:07:45.323" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whispering excludes voicing from the linguistic inventory. Quite naturally, the decrease of the ability to comprehend a whispered speech depends on the language's original set of phonetic tools. Marc Ettlinger, linguistics PhD at Berkeley, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-hardest-language-to-whisper-in/answer/Marc-Ettlinger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;shows&lt;/a&gt; that languages that intensively use voicedness and lexical tones are the most difficult to whisper in (from the point of the listener, not the speaker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Replacing the Tools&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gao, M., 2002: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/1208167/Tones_in_whispered_Chinese_Articulatory_features_and_perceptual_cues&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tones in Whispered Chinese: Articulatory Features and Perceptual Cues.&lt;/a&gt; (MA Dissertation, the University of Victoria) comes to the conclusion that Chinese speakers used several techniques to overcome the natural limitation of whispered sounds and to aid the audibility of tonal contours (highlight mine):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the laryngeal sphincter mechanism is found to be a principal contributing&#xA;physiological maneuver in the production of whisper, &lt;strong&gt;emphasizing the vertical&lt;/strong&gt; rather than the horizontal &lt;strong&gt;component of the laryngeal source&lt;/strong&gt;; (2) male speakers tend to &lt;strong&gt;lengthen vocalic duration&lt;/strong&gt; and female speakers tend to &lt;strong&gt;exaggerate the amplitude contours&lt;/strong&gt; of Tone 3 and Tone 4; (3) these two special behavioral maneuvers and two temporal envelope parameters &lt;strong&gt;contribute to tone recognition in whisper&lt;/strong&gt;, but the phonetic context is shown to be a distraction; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other works come to the different conclusion. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Li Jiao et al.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281610643_Perceptual_cues_of_whispered_tones_Are_they_really_special&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perceptual cues of whispered tones: Are they really special?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper reports our initial findings on whether Mandarin Chinese has developed effective strategies to convey tonal information in whispered speech. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Results showed that, once turned into amplitude-modulated noise, originally phonated and whispered speech had similar perceptual patterns, and that these patterns resembled those of whispered tones. The acoustic analysis showed that properties corresponding to tonal contrasts in whispered speech already existed in the phonated tones, and there was no evidence of enhancement of these properties in whispering. Overall, therefore, Mandarin &lt;strong&gt;may not have developed highly special strategies to enhance tonal contrast in whispered speech&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A Practical Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASMR&lt;/a&gt; is one technique that intensively use whispering to achieve relaxation and positive feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ASMR/whisper videos available in languages with lexical tone, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/2tgTWqQ05v8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thai&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/l3lmSkJRw-E&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please take a look at the latter one. The host gives Chinese names to people, and all these names are listed in the description below the video, providing with an easy-to-read transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the lexical tone is inaudible when whispering, it is still possible to grasp the tone, even for a non-native speaker. As far as I perceived it, she indeed exaggerates the duration of Tone 3 plus she intensively uses facial expression and mimic (this, however, can be a part of ASMR technique).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last, but not the least, &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt; is everything. Many languages have homonyms, and speakers pick the right one by excluding words that don't belong to the context of the discussion or speech. Similarly, the whispered speech introduces more &amp;quot;pseudo-homonyms&amp;quot;, but many of them can be safely skipped knowing the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/26878/&quot;&gt;How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T23:07:45.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29915" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Constructed languages are languages for human communication. There are constructed languages with different scopes, e.g., international auxiliary language like &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/esperanto&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;esperanto&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;esperanto&lt;/a&gt;, languages created for fictional cultures like Klingon, or philosophical languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Constructed Languages stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; where a wider variety of questions about constructed languages of all kind is on-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29916" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" Score="0" Body="For linguistical questions about constructed languages." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T23:34:47.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29920" CreationDate="2018-12-15T05:35:29.067" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the subjunctive (what I learned in school as &quot;Konjunktiv 2&quot;) Ger. &quot;wäre&quot; (&quot;&lt;em&gt;Ich wäre gern ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - &lt;em&gt;I'd like to be&lt;/em&gt; ...) cognate to &quot;were&quot; even for singular person (&quot;*als ob ich sicher wäre &quot; - as if I were sure)? It's not as easy to search for as I'd like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or did that happen only after &quot;thou&quot; fell out of use (I had to ask why &quot;you&quot; needed plural inflection, although it's so obvious, that stem from &quot;you&quot; being originally plural only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a overlap with ell.stackexchange, if I wonder whether I better had use &quot;would&quot; constructions or &quot;was&quot; (the same way I used &quot;needed&quot; not just as past-tense above) instead. Sorry, let's focus on the etymology of 1. p. sg. subjunctive &quot;to be&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T17:36:51.693" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T17:36:51.693" Title="Why &quot;were&quot; for subjunctive?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29919" CreationDate="2018-12-15T10:47:13.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be a cognate because the stems of the past subjunctive/Konjunktiv irrealis/II forms are the stems of the old preterite plural(and 2nd singular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the obsolete paradigm of &lt;em&gt;sterben&lt;/em&gt;: ich starb, du stürbest, er starb, wir sturben, ihr sturbet, sie sturben. &gt; the second stem + an originally different ending (causing the umlaut) lead to &lt;em&gt;ich stürbe&lt;/em&gt;. The new paradigm became: ich starb, du starbst, er starb, wir starben... ich stürbe.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the Konjunktiv forms are the same in every person and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: as jknappen suggested, here's more about the two stems–&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There used to be two stems for the preterite past of strong verbs differing in &quot;ablaut&quot; (a Proto-Indo-European vowel alternation further complicated by German(ic) sound changes)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;st&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;rben, st&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;rb, st&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;rben.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In New High German [either the 1st or the 2nd stem] fell out of use and [one of the stems]. was used for every person and number. This lead to a clearer relationship of form and function, since the same tense and mood now had the same stem. But [when] the second stem [didn't survive in the indicative, it] sometimes survives in the Konjunktiv preterite mood with an Umlaut: &lt;em&gt;stürbe&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit2&lt;/strong&gt; – Oh, I just remembered that it wasn't always the stem of 1./3.sg that was kept. For example &lt;em&gt;reiten, ich reit, wir ri(t)ten&lt;/em&gt;. Here the second stem survived. In English and Scandinavian, though, the first stem survived &lt;em&gt;rode, re(i)d&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="23365" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T14:05:47.423" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T14:05:47.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26830" CreationDate="2018-12-15T17:04:25.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just going along the mediterranean cost there is a nice chain of dialects from Roman, Tuscan, Ligurian, Provençal, Langedoc, Catalan, Southern Castillian to Portuguese. Maybe there is a break between Southern Castillian and Portuguese and you have to make a detour to the North of Spain via Madrid, Leon (Leonese), and Galicia (Galician) to have a real dialect continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with Southern Spain and Portugal is that the historic dialect continuum was disrupted by the Islamic invasion of Spain. During the reconquest, dialects from the north spread southward. There is still a considerable mutual intelligibility between Spanish (Castillian) and Portuguese, but I am not sure whether it is enough to count as a dialect continuum in Southern Spain. On the other hand, there is a dialect continuum between Portuguese Galician and Leonese closing the path through the north of Spain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T21:47:14.410" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T21:47:14.410" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21325" CreationDate="2018-12-15T17:29:24.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since transcriptions of GA usually write short vowels, where I wouldn't, I put length markers in parentheses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Merry, marry, Mary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/mɛɹi : mæɹi : mɛːɹi/ RP(English standard)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/mɛɹi/ GA(American)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;stork, stalk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/stɔːk/ RP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/stɔɹk : stɔ(ː)k ~ stɑ(ː)k/ GA (~ Cot-Caught merger)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;father, bother&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/fɑːðə(ɹ) : bɒðə(ɹ)/ RP (not a minimal pair)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/fɑ(ː)ðəɹ : bɑ(ː)ðəɹ/ GA  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cot, caught&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/kɒt : kɔːt/ RP&lt;br&gt;&#xA;/kɑ(ː)t : kɔ(ː)t ~ kɑ(ː)t/ GA (~ Cot-Caught merger)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;writer, rider are a minimal pair in some Canadian and Northern American accents but I think the differing vowels might not be phonemes (yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list could be continued, but minimal pairs are not always the very best way to compare the varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T17:29:24.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-15T18:08:59.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an old joke: 'What is the motto of the French Navy?  &quot;A l'eau, c'est l'heure!&quot; (&quot;to the water, it's time!&quot; in French, but read similarly to &quot;'Allo, sailor&quot;).  As tradition dictates, I'll get my coat...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22043" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T00:49:02.533" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T00:49:02.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21068" CreationDate="2018-12-15T18:48:55.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a very interesting question. Even though the question is very hard to answer, I don't quite agree with the statements about the Germanic side.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you're taking into account Low German, then you could also research the mutual intelligibility of German and Dutch because it should be very similar. (In some ways Dutch and German are more alike (raising of *ō and *ē  to /uː/ and /iː/, *eu &gt; ie &gt; /iː/ diphthongisation of î/ij and û,ü/ui) and in some ways German and Low German (many umlauts)). The reason why Low German is sometimes seen as a German dialect is partially political. Apart from &quot;Überdachung&quot; (Dachsprache) by the High German standard language Low German has the same relationship to German that Dutch has. (Here you can easily see that the lexical distance map groups together varieties that shouldn't be grouped together while keeping others seperate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility&lt;/a&gt; doesn't even list partial intelligibility between German and Dutch. But for example &quot;Russian: Belarusian and Ukrainian (both partially)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Speakers of languages within the same branch[of the Slavic language family] will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially, but they are generally unable to across branches&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_languages&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the information is consistent and comparable that would allow us to estimate that Low German and German are more different than Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian but less so than Russian and Polish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;[Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: They might even be more different than Belarusian/Ukrainian and Polish, because Wikipedia also mentions considerable difficulties in the mutual intelligibility of spoken Dutch and German, whilst for &lt;strong&gt;spoken&lt;/strong&gt; Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian partial intelligibility is listed again.&lt;strong&gt;]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;And I should add that while there are no High German dialects quite as different from Standard German as Low German, you could probably make the same argument for many High German dialects.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Comparing the information on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility again, you could estimate that Luxembourgish is as different from Standard German as Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian are. That would exemplify that even High German dialects (here Luxembourgish is only in so far different as it is standardized) are as different as Slavic languages. (In case you are confused by my usage of the term &quot;High German&quot;, consider looking it up.)&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I've decided that I should post the &lt;strong&gt;comments I made to lemontree's answer&lt;/strong&gt; as an individual answer, since it offers a different perspective than the other answers and since lemontree's answer already has so many comments that very few people would read them:]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lemontree: &quot;I would argue that even a Bavarian and a speaker of Low German can understand each other if they want, although of course this might not be as simple as, say, between a Swabian and a Badensian.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that is only true if they know Standard German or don't actually speak true Low German or Bavarian. Since the former is practically always true, you can't compare the similarity of the dialects via mutual intelligibility because the speakers know a third language that helps with the intelligibility.&#xA;If we still had the situation that people only spoke their home towns' dialect in Germany, it would need a lot of exposure for them to understand each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I've often heard the statement that German and Dutch aren't mutually intelligible. If that's true then that would be proof that Bavarian and Low German aren't mutually intelligible. I have no doubt that spoken German and Dutch are more similar than Low German and Bavarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are good reasons not to consider Low German a variety of &quot;German&quot; (I would even argue that the Bavarian dialect isn't a variety of &quot;German&quot;. It is a High German dialect, sure, but it's relationship to German might be the same that Scots has to English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't have any other source at hand: &quot;By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South […] to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift.&quot; (wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages#Middle_Ages) And I would say Alemannic is closer to Low German than Bavarian (/yː, øː/, no i-,u-diphthongisation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="23365" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T18:17:11.073" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:17:11.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29927" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:21:48.303" Score="15" ViewCount="13400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told by somebody who has lived near Hungary that she thought that Hungarian and Turkish were related, and that their languages are very similar. A brief google search seems to support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that article does say that this grouping is &quot;criticized by some contemporary linguists&quot; and the article doesn't seem to be linked from the main Turkish language page (it is on the Hungarian one though). The main consensus seems to be that Hungarian is more related to Finnish than Turkish as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, are these considered related languages in terms of origin? And which is Hungarian really closer to, Finnish or Turkish? (Hungary seems ethnically closer to Turkey but it's not quite geographically close to either)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23398" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T17:43:36.040" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T04:16:11.317" Title="Are Hungarian and Turkish related?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30325" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:25:07.090" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there NLP applications (either natural language understanding or generation) which make use of the Construction Grammar framework?  On a related note, does there exist a logically organized list of constructions in English which could be applied to an NLG task, or a method of obtaining such a list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T01:05:51.497" Title="Computational applications of construction grammars" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29925" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:41:57.383" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish and Hungarian are &lt;em&gt;typologically&lt;/em&gt; similar: They are both agglutinating languages with vowel harmony and rather rich vowel inventories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are, to our best knowledge, not genetically related. Hungarian belongs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uralic language family&lt;/a&gt; including Finnish, Estonian, Sami, and about a dozen languages spoken in Russia. Turkish belongs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkic language family&lt;/a&gt;. Many linguists in the past and in the present have speculated about larger language families comprising both Uralic and Turkic, but no demonstrable regular correspondences have been found so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T09:43:29.067" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T09:43:29.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29925" CreationDate="2018-12-15T20:48:43.353" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hungarian belongs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugric_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ugric subgroup&lt;/a&gt; of the Uralic language family, while Turkish belongs to the controversial &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Altaic language family&lt;/a&gt;. Nevertheless, Hungarian has had some kind of contact with Turkic languages, hence the influence in its vocabulary. However language relationship cannot be based on loanwords and contact based influence, but systematic correspondences in phonology (regular sound laws) and grammar. So, Hungarian is undoubtedly closer to Finnish as a member of the same language family, but not closer than what Spanish is to Welsh (both Indo-European languages in different subgroups). Hungarian is closer to other &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/new100/oug.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ugric languages&lt;/a&gt; which like Finnish and Estonian belong to the Uralic language family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T20:57:06.163" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T20:57:06.163" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26830" CreationDate="2018-12-16T12:15:44.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dialect continuum does not mean necessarily a continuum where there is inter-intelligibility. It is when linguistic facts change in relation to spatial distance, in sum, the linguistic distance has to be proportional to spatial distance. When such observations are noticed, we consider that there is a dialect continuum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some works concerning the Romance area. The most known are those of Hans Goebl. The field studying the dialect continuum from quantitative data is the dialectometry. Generally, a linguistic continuum is an universal fact, which is observed for any language family, so that includes the Romance too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One linguistic fact taken aside can not follow a continuum for example a word can be found used in opposed geographical spaces and it will not be used elsewhere. But if we take completely the linguistic system into account, we observe what I have mentioned before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T14:44:35.357" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T14:44:35.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-16T17:18:44.357" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know of a natural language in which the kinship terms used for parents and children are governed not by the gender of the individual but whether or not the two people in the relationship are of the same gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean that a son would call his father &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; but his mother &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;, a daughter would call her father &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; but her mother &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, a father would call his son &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; but his daughter &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; and a mother would call her son &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; but her daughter &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of clarity I have schematised this below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Child–parent relationship:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;son → father: &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;son → mother: &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;daughter → father: &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;daughter → mother: &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parent–child relationship&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;father → son: &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;father → daughter: &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mother → son: &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mother → daughter: &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2020-03-21T17:04:27.727" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T17:04:27.727" Title="Parent–child kinship terms for same- or different-sex relationships" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-16T17:56:57.650" Score="4" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about the possible existence of a branch of the Indo-European family that combines features of several branches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a branch that is something in between the Germanic and the Balto-Slavic one. It might be a strange question to ask, but this piqued my curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T19:24:27.963" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T11:29:17.100" Title="Is the existence of a mixed branch of Indo-European plausible?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29932" CreationDate="2018-12-16T18:54:16.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, depending on your definition of &amp;quot;combining features&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#/media/File:IndoEuropeanTree.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;'s a good 'tree' of many languages in the Indo-European category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See how many languages there are? And this doesn't even have many dialects on it (for example, it has Irish but not subdivided into Connacht, Munster, Ulster, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider that this is just one possible organization. There are many languages that include words/grammar generally associated with one language family but not another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo-Celtic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italo-Celtic&lt;/a&gt;. Italo-Celtic is a proposed grouping of the Italic (Latin and other Romance languages mostly) and the Celtic (Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, etc.) languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are completely different groups, so why are they considered similar? They share some of the same characteristics, such as a long i (ī) in the genitive (2nd declension for Latin, female 2nd for Irish), similar superlative suffixes (ismo, em), and a merging of the aorist and perfect tenses. There's also some vocabulary, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42817/is-there-a-relationship-between-the-words-night-and-eight&quot;&gt;similar words aren't quite as convincing&lt;/a&gt; as grammar and morphology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;This likely is the result of a Proto-Italo-Celtic language that both of the subgroups descended from.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Italo-Celtic is more a supergroup than an in-between group. Are there any real &amp;quot;in-the-middle&amp;quot; branches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no under the current classification scheme, mainly due to the fact that that makes no sense. The goal of a classification is for everything to fit neatly into a category, so the categories are pretty broad. You won't find anything that's quite in-between groups, though there are plenty of languages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albanian&lt;/a&gt; that are grouped in their own category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, when linguists find related languages that aren't quite the same, they group them into another Indo- group. Indo-Iranian (containing Indo-Aryan and Iranian groupings) and Balto-Slavic (with Baltic and Slavic groupings) are good examples. Instead of having languages that are part of both groups, they subdivide the groupings closer and call them 'cousins'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This goes to show that all of our beautiful classification scheme is only mortal and not infallible. With the way languages work, any geographically close languages may undergo some mixing. Linguistic categories today aren't necessarily the same in a couple centuries, or millennia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, mixed branches definitely exist, but it all depends on what time period you're in and what classification scheme you're using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T23:39:32.577" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29936" CreationDate="2018-12-16T19:13:43.423" Score="34" ViewCount="11731" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are some of the historical reasons why the orthographic symbol ß is not used in Swiss Standard German and “ss” is used instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23416" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T14:17:27.300" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T02:41:12.793" Title="Why is “ß” not used in Swiss German?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29934" CreationDate="2018-12-16T20:05:48.073" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Swiss government has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bk.admin.ch/dam/bk/de/dokumente/sprachdienste/sprachdienst_de/rechtschreibleitfaden-2017.pdf.download.pdf/rechtschreibleitfaden-2017.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; on p. 18. One contributing factor is typography, namely the rise of use of the Antiqua font, which was claimed to not include ß. I have no evaluation of the truthiness of that claim, for the relevant historical period, i.e. prior to 1901. It is certainly the case that its shape in Antique was not uniform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rules for using the letter&lt;/a&gt; have been complicated and much of the 1996 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German spelling reform&lt;/a&gt; was about rules for &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;. As to why Switzerland was earlier and more radical in eliminating ß, this may be a cultural matter. Pairs like Flosse (fin), Floße (rafts), Buße (penance), Busse (buses) are rare and contextually not likely to lead to confusion.&#xA;One predicts that Masse (mass), Maße (dimensions) might still be distinguished with ss/ß.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T13:49:27.463" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T13:49:27.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29934" CreationDate="2018-12-16T20:40:49.787" Score="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is because of the typewriter. A Swiss typewriter needs to support three languages: German, French, and Italian. Therefore on the Swiss typewriter, there was no ß key. It also has only lowercase umlauts ä, ö, and ü. A picture of a Swiss typewriter can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTZ#/media/File:QWERTZ_swiss.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of that key has led to a subsequent deprecation of the ß overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="21961" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T00:48:13.303" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T00:48:13.303" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29932" CreationDate="2018-12-16T21:26:09.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, it looks like all major branches of Indo-Germanic came into existence out of a language continuum at one time. All proposals for subgrouping (except the well-established groups Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic) have little to no support. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#/media/File:Indo-European_isoglosses.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This picture&lt;/a&gt; shows some overlapping features between different branches of Indo-Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the existence of a now extinct branch of Indo-Germanic that lies between two established branches is totally plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T21:26:09.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-16T23:18:28.647" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bangortalk.org.uk/speakers.php?c=siarad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siarad&lt;/a&gt; corpus is a corpus of spoken Welsh (~40 hours, all transcribed, glossed and translated!). I want to analyze some conversations using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat&lt;/a&gt;. Praat uses the TextGrid format, but the Siarad corpus has CHAT files, so I need to convert these to TextGrid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried &lt;a href=&quot;http://dali.talkbank.org/clan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLAN&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;code&gt;chat2textgrid&lt;/code&gt; but for some reason it outputs only the metadata. Am I not using it correctly? Does it work for you? I tried the Linux version (UnixCLAN).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did manage to convert individual files manually by importing the CHAT files into &lt;a href=&quot;https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ELAN&lt;/a&gt; and exporting TextGrid files. It is OK for my needs, but I’m sure there is a way to do this automatically in a batch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3132" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T03:39:28.627" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T03:39:28.627" Title="How to convert CHAT to TextGrid in a batch?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;welsh&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T00:08:09.003" Score="0" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do relatively simple alphabets (Rotokas, Hawaiian) limit the complexity of written ideas? Example: could Rotokas be used to write a technical manual for the space shuttle? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23419" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T01:13:54.477" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T01:31:02.323" Title="Alphabet size affects complexity of written ideas?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29925" CreationDate="2018-12-17T00:27:36.077" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hungarian belongs to Uralic language family. Turkish belongs to Altaic language family. Both language groups belong to super Uralic-Altaic language family. Uralic-Altaic languages have many commonalities;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suffix oriented&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vowel harmony&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No genders like he, she or it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No plural form after numbers, like five cow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Special words for people older than you&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both languages are Asiatic, they have originated from close locations. There are cultural similarities as both are from almost same steppes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23420" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T00:27:36.077" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29939" CreationDate="2018-12-17T00:53:17.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple writing systems for languages with simple and small phoneme inventories are a perfect match - such writing systems could convey anything which the language can say, and are very suitable for highly complex technical manuals (though the language may need to borrow many technical words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any writing systems are less ideal for technical manuals I would guess that it would be the hieroglyphic or logographical ones, as each logogram must be learnt essentially by rote, and though there are some strategies to try to identify the meaning of new symbols, it is very likely most readers will not know at least some of the symbols for the technical language, even if they know how to pronounce the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T00:53:17.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29939" CreationDate="2018-12-17T01:12:45.183" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most certainly. The number of different symbols in a writing system has nothing to do with what can be expressed in it. When it comes down to it, this answer is being represented inside your computer with only two &quot;symbols&quot;: a transistor switched on, and a transistor switched off. Yet it can express whatever ideas you like, whether that's a philosophical treatise or the plans for the Space Shuttle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Dannii said, the only thing that really affects this is the amount of technical vocabulary in the language. Hawai'ian, for example, has no native word for &quot;transistor&quot;. But there's an easy solution for this: it borrows the word from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T01:12:45.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29939" CreationDate="2018-12-17T01:31:02.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thousands of languages use the Latin alphabet – for example, Rotokas, Hawaiian, English, Shona. This also includes French, Spanish, German and Norwegian, since the Latin alphabet has been expanded to include letters like &lt;em&gt;æ, á, ü&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; which are not part of the writing system used by the Romans. What distinguishes Rotokas and Hawaiian from Shona and English is that the former languages have relatively few phonemes in their sound inventory, and the latter have a lot more sounds (they all use the Latin alphabet). In fact, Shona has more sounds that English (they have even more digraphs that English does), but don't use &lt;em&gt;l,x,q&lt;/em&gt;. English doesn't use the letters &lt;em&gt;ü, æ, ñ&lt;/em&gt; and so on, and Rotokas doesn't use the letters &lt;em&gt;b,c, d, y...&lt;/em&gt;. This is not a fundamental limit on what you can do with the language, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Switching from space shuttle manuals to phonology textbooks, the main problem that a translator would face in writing a phonology textbook in Rotokas is that you have to come up with terminology for grammar, underlying form, phoneme, rule, epenthesis, metathesis, association line... An analogous situation is that Norwegian doesn't use the letter &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, and yet in technical discourse, they may need to write about &lt;a href=&quot;https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;xylitol&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;xenon&lt;/a&gt;, so they actually can use the whole Latin alphabet. They also don't use &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;, except when they talk about &lt;a href=&quot;https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaraounsj%C3%B8en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lake Qaraoun&lt;/a&gt;. In the would-be Rotokas phonology book, &lt;em&gt;metathesis&lt;/em&gt; could be spelled &lt;em&gt;metatesis&lt;/em&gt;, using an otherwise unused letter of the Rotokas alphabet (which actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used for Matthew, etc: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://worldbibles.org/language_detail/eng/roo/Rotokas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, likewise attesting use of &lt;em&gt;j, h, y&lt;/em&gt; and other letters not supposedly available, just on the first page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A technical manual for a space shuttle exists in English and Russian, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't exist in Rotokas or Norwegian. But there is no linguistic reason why such a thing could not be created, and it is certainly not because the languages in question don't have enough sounds. In fact, the Khoisan languages such as ǃXóõ are written with an augmented Latin alphabet and have huge inventories of sounds, but also no space shuttle manual. The only impediments that relate to language are the lack of well-established technical terms for things like interocitor or asymptote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T01:31:02.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-17T03:06:32.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an entire work, named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Mots d'heure: Gousses, Rames'&lt;/a&gt;, qui est le réinterpretionde 'Mother Goose Rhymes' en français. Pas un traduction, mais phonétiquement transmogrifié à mots français qui, quand  , pourrait entendus comme des sens anglais. One good examples is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots07-jacques.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques s'apprête&lt;/a&gt; (or Jack Sprat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit of a stretch sometimes: the French doesn't always make the best sense, and it sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish_Languish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anguish Languish&lt;/a&gt; (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.docflash.com/lrrh.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladle Rat Rotten Hut&lt;/a&gt;) versions in English. But there are several entire poems done in this manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T03:06:32.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16919" CreationDate="2018-12-17T10:27:31.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonemes don't come in isolation, they form an inventory in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are indeed similarities between phoneme inventories between different languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vowel systems&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vowels tend use the vowel space in a kind of optimal way. A three vowel system will have /a/, /i/, and /u/ most probably, and it will never be /e/, /o/, and /ə/. Five vowel systems look typically like /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ forming a nice triangle in vowel space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonants also have preferences, there are very common consonants like /m/, /n/, /t/, /k/, /s/ and there are more rare segments like /q/ or /ð/. Consonant systems also have an internal structure, when there is a certain contrast (like voiced/unvoiced) in one point of articulation, it is probably also found at another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T10:27:31.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30106" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:14:42.157" Score="8" ViewCount="1923" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears like Romanian has only 5 inflected/conjugated tenses (excluding imperative), while all other Romance languages have much more. For example, in Spanish, French and Italian, there are 7(8) tenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indicative: Present, Imperfect (Imparfait / Imperfetto), Preterite (Passé Simple / Passato Remoto), Future, Conditional&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subjunctive: Present, Imperfect*, [Future*]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, in Iberian languages, there's a subjunctive future tense which is presumably derived from Latin subjunctive active perfect. (Spanish has 2 tables for subjunctive imperfect tense, this is occasionally seen in other Iberian languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, Romanian has only 5 tenses: Indicative present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, plus a subjunctive present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to word inflection, an extra word &lt;em&gt;să&lt;/em&gt; is introduced to form the subjunctive present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The future tense is notably absent in Romanian, and it's instead constructed with a modal verb &lt;em&gt;vrea&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;eu voi / tu vei&lt;/em&gt; etc.), which makes me feel like I'm looking at a Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After further research, I noticed that the &quot;modal verb&quot; &lt;em&gt;vrea&lt;/em&gt; comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;volo&lt;/em&gt;, which is different from all other Romance languages that use &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; (prefix in Sardinian, suffix elsewhere). The latter appears to be directly related to a late Latin construction that uses &quot;infinitive + &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to express a near future. Similarly, there is &quot;infinitive + &lt;em&gt;habebam&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for future perfect, which later turned to conditional. This is interesting in Romanian: The conditional &quot;tense&quot; preserved the word &lt;em&gt;habebam&lt;/em&gt; but put it before the infinitive of verb, while replacing &lt;em&gt;habeo&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;volo&lt;/em&gt; for future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that should be noticed is that perfect and pluperfect are formed with word inflection, instead of using auxiliary verbs. Compare RO &lt;em&gt;eu vrui&lt;/em&gt;, FR &lt;em&gt;j'&lt;strong&gt;ai&lt;/strong&gt; voulu&lt;/em&gt; and IT &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ho&lt;/strong&gt; voluto&lt;/em&gt; (and ES &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; querido&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the history behind this vastly different tense system and its conjugation tables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23435" LastEditorUserId="23435" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T08:41:10.107" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T19:30:14.057" Title="Why is the Romanian tense system so &quot;simple&quot;, compared to other Romance languages?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26471" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:38:16.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to your question about Chinese: Chinese writing actually is to a large part phonetic, in the sense that many charaters carry a phonetic component (some websites claim this is true for about 80% percent of all characters, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/&lt;/a&gt; ). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this is roughly the second thing a learner of Chinese will be told about Characters: that the 马 &quot;horse&quot; component in 妈妈 &quot;mum&quot; is not there because of some similarity betweens mothers and horses, but because of phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal impression is that these phonetic hints make both learning to read and to write considerably easier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that there are few other ideographic writing systems left in use, and even Chinese characters have lost considerable ground in recent centuries, e.g. in Korea, Vietnam and also, to some degree, Japan. If ideographic writing was as useful as phonetic writing, one would expect the situation to be less clear-cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. in response to the question in the title: I think one could use the Chinese example to illustrate that in practice, there are few cases where the pronunciation really is not relevant for writing or reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23437" LastEditorUserId="23437" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:53:14.750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:53:14.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T17:54:32.917" Score="3" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a list of minimal pairs in Thai where the only difference is an accent mark/diacritic. One example would be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ห่าง (far)  =/= ห้าง  (store)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there someplace to find this? My Thai knowledge is limited, I need these examples for a research project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23441" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T19:08:20.593" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T03:31:40.417" Title="I need a list of common minimal pairs in Thai" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;thai&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29959" CreationDate="2018-12-17T18:28:44.187" Score="4" ViewCount="640" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;maximal onset principle&quot; says that, in many (most) languages, consonants will attach to a syllable onset rather than a coda when given the choice. For example, &quot;walking&quot; &lt;code&gt;/wakɪŋ/&lt;/code&gt; in English is syllabified as &lt;code&gt;wa.kɪŋ&lt;/code&gt;, even though &lt;code&gt;wak&lt;/code&gt; is a valid syllable, because the &lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; prefers to be in an onset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's article on Turkish, however, says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Turkish syllabification in multisyllable words follows maximal coda rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never heard of a &quot;maximal coda rule&quot; before, and the examples in the same Wikipedia article don't seem to show one clearly. However, it's easy to imagine how it would work, and I'd readily believe it happens in some language—I've just never come across it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: is the &quot;maximal coda principle&quot; real? If so, what languages does it appear in? If not, is there a theoretical reason why it can't, or is it an accidental gap (&quot;that's just the way it is&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T10:42:46.627" Title="Is there a &quot;maximal coda principle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T12:52:39.167" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is pragmatics a waste basket？ this sentence is abstracted from the study of language of Yule.  I want to know why this statement comes into being( pragmatics is a waste basket.)&#xA;And is it really true?  Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23303" OwnerDisplayName="JuJu Pig" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T18:47:19.700" Title="Is pragmatics a waste basket？" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T19:37:39.860" Score="9" ViewCount="465" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, Latin had a word-initial accent for some time of its history after losing the Indo-European accent. I am wondering why Latin then switched to an ante-/pen-ultima stress pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T09:06:38.220" Title="How did Latin get its stress pattern?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29950" CreationDate="2018-12-17T22:08:57.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll say yes there is, at least if you assume OT. In fact, there is some credibility to the notion from Saami languages, as argued by &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/757-0705/757-BYE-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bye&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://s-space.snu.ac.kr/bitstream/10371/86461/1/2.%202223071.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baertsch&lt;/a&gt; argues for an approach that has something akin to Coda Mazimization (as opposed to just Ons and *Coda). Oda in &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cd00/e47e23e0115ee0d9d796b5a92f22f822a971.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; argues for coda maximization in a non-OT functional phonetic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument from N. Saami is not trouble-free, but the basic fact is that /beajsku/ → [beajsˑ.ku] 'vermin (acc.)', where &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; has to be in the coda, even though [sk] is a legal onset. &quot;Coda Maximization&quot; would then tilt the scales in favor of parsing &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in the coda, where otherwise one would expect the longest possible string of Cs to go into the onset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, there is a competing parse of &quot;walking&quot; as [wɑk.ɪŋ]. It is often said that stressed syllables have to be heavy in English, and that parse is one way to satisfy that requirement. And the aforementioned Saami fact is about stressed syllables (where much of the phonology of the language is about maximizing stressed rhymes and minimizing unstressed rhymes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine the (former) Turkish claim is simply wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T22:08:57.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T00:16:13.973" Score="2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;A direct-inverse language, Wikipedia claims, is one which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;involve[s] different grammar for transitive predications according to the relative positions of their &quot;subject&quot; and their &quot;object&quot; on a person hierarchy, which, in turn, is some combination of saliency and animacy specific to a given language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First person generally outranks second person, and these two outrank non-speech participant arguments. When the subject outranks to the object, the verbs are generally unmarked. Thus, in a language with free word order, without case marking, and without the marking of verbal arguments on the verb, one would expect the gloss&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1SG 2SG killed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to translate as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I killed you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gloss of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1SG 2SG killed.INV,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with &quot;killed&quot; morphologically marked for an &quot;inverse voice&quot; of sorts, would, in turn, correspond to the non-prototypical situation in which the lower ranking argument acts on the higher ranking one. In this case, the expected translation would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You killed me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the literature I've seen investigates languages in which the inverse morphology appears on the verb. Nonetheless, inverse marking on the verbal arguments seems at least conceptually sound to me. In a hypothetical language with this sort of alignment, there would exist an &quot;inverse case&quot; slapped onto, let's say, the subject if it is lower ranking than the object. In such a language the former gloss would remain as it is, but the latter would be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1SG 2SG.INV killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the &quot;inverse alignment&quot; typologically absent? Is there something incoherent about the very idea, is it an accidental gap, or is it a result of broader typological tendencies found among the direct-inverse languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23446" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T00:16:13.973" Title="Direct–inverse marking on the noun, or the possiblity of inverse alignment" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;&lt;morphosyntactic-alignment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T01:21:02.420" Score="5" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if any studies have been done in corpus linguistics which look at word length (number of phonemes per word) as a function of the word's frequency of use? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Never mind, Zipf wrote about it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22938" LastEditorUserId="22938" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T02:22:33.547" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T23:11:04.727" Title="Word length as a function of word frequency?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29952" CreationDate="2018-12-18T01:31:10.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid the most satisfying answer I can give is, these things just change over time, without a solid reason. It's like asking why the vowels in Middle English chain-shifted so dramatically: vowels just tend to shift, and there's no universal pattern to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old Latin, in particular, the stress had already shifted from the complex rules of Proto-Indo-European to something much simpler: the accent was always on the first syllable, no matter what. This may have been an areal feature, since the same rule happens in Etruscan, but unfortunately we don't know enough about Etruscan's history to say which language affected which here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere around the time of Plautus, this started to shift. The first change only affected words of four or more syllables: in these words, the accent drifted forward until it was &lt;em&gt;no more than three from the end&lt;/em&gt; (that is, on the antepenult). I don't know why this happened, but it also happens in modern English: less than a century ago, four-syllable adjectives like &quot;despicable&quot; and &quot;lamentable&quot; were accented on their first syllable, but now the stress has shifted more toward the center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately, but around the same time period, another rule took effect. If the accent came right before a &quot;heavy&quot; syllable (a syllable with a long vowel and/or a coda consonant), it shifted forward onto it, as long as this wouldn't push it onto the last syllable. This isn't uncommon cross-linguistically: as TKR put it, heavy syllables tend to &quot;attract&quot; stress to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thus, by the time of Cicero and Caesar, the famous stress rules of Latin were established: never accent the last syllable (the ultima), accent the one before that (the penult) if it's heavy, otherwise accent the one before that (the antepenult).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T05:17:49.860" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T05:17:49.860" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23041" CreationDate="2018-12-18T01:57:13.743" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is an old post so you might not need an answer anymore, but I thought I'd give one since I encountered this same terminological problem  when I was doing research on &quot;non-Bakerian&quot; patterns of noun incorporation a few years back. I believe this term is idiosyncratic to Michael Fortescue's 1984 grammar of Kalaallisut; he might have borrowed it from other writers on Yupik-Inuit languages, I'm not sure. In any case, it's not a term used by linguists outside of the grammatical description of Yupik-Inuit languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he's describing with &quot;half-transitivity&quot; is antipassivity. This is when a lexically transitive verb (which ordinarily takes transitive morphology + an accusative- or absolutive-marked internal argument) appears in a configuration with &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt; morphology and with the internal argument marked in an oblique case. In other words, it's a construction where a lexically transitive verb is realized in such a way that it is grammatically, syntactically, and morphologically intransitive. English doesn't use the antipassive voice productively, but there's a few quaint examples. &lt;em&gt;The cow is chewing cud&lt;/em&gt; means nearly the same thing as &lt;em&gt;The cow is chewing on cud&lt;/em&gt;, but syntactically, the sentence without &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; is transitive and takes a direct object, while the sentence with &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; is intransitive and takes no direct object (the internal argument is instead realized as a prepositional phrase, &lt;em&gt;on cud&lt;/em&gt;). Kalaallisut does this all the time, and it's a fully productive pattern. In a lot of languages (including the Inuit languages), the antipassive voice indicates that the internal argument is &quot;less specific&quot; than its correspondent in the active voice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use an example from Inuktitut: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ilisaji niuviq-tuq saa-mik uujaujar-mik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;teacher.ABS.SG. buy-3SG.SUBJ. table-OBL.SG. which.is.green.-OBL.SG.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The teacher bought a green table.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject (&lt;em&gt;ilisaji&lt;/em&gt;) is absolutive; the verb (&lt;em&gt;niuviqtuq&lt;/em&gt;) is morphologically intransitive; and the internal argument (&lt;em&gt;saamik uujaujarmik&lt;/em&gt;) is marked in the oblique case. Semantically, it has a transitive meaning, but grammatically, it's intransitive. Fortescue would call this a &quot;half-transitive&quot; construction, but to most linguists, it's called an antipassive construction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to its active voice counterpart: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ilisaji-p niuviq-taa saa uujaujaq&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;teacher-ERG.SG. buy-3SG.SUBJ.3SG.OBJ. table.ABS.SG. which.is.green.ABS.SG.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The teacher bought the green table.&quot; (notice &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, instead of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject (&lt;em&gt;ilisajip&lt;/em&gt;) is ergative; the verb (&lt;em&gt;niuviqtaa&lt;/em&gt;) is morphologically transitive; and the internal argument (&lt;em&gt;saa uujaujaq&lt;/em&gt;) is absolutive. Grammatically and semantically, this sentence is transitive, and it's in the active voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this very, very late answer helped! (I've only used this site a few times so I don't know if answering old questions is allowed, please forgive me if not.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22938" LastEditorUserId="22938" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T22:52:05.673" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T22:52:05.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29960" CreationDate="2018-12-18T04:18:36.913" Score="6" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29921/10559&quot;&gt;According to jknappen&lt;/a&gt;, there's a dialect continuum stretching from Rome to Lisbon without interruption. This is a wonderfully interesting piece of trivia that I wouldn't have believed before seeing the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there longer dialect continua anywhere in the world? &quot;Longer&quot; can mean either geographical distance, or dissimilarity between the languages at its endpoints—or preferably both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T14:36:39.137" Title="What's the longest extant dialect continuum?" Tags="&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29950" CreationDate="2018-12-18T05:45:22.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quoted sentence from the Wikipedia article isn't very clear, and I wouldn't be confident that the author knew what they were talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syllables and syllabification rules are very theoretical topics. I think most theories that recognize the syllable as a unit of analysis do include reasons for the supposed &quot;maximal onset principle&quot; (or some similar rule). But because it's such a theoretical concept, it doesn't necessarily correspond in any simple way to all of the data that we have access to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Arrernte_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrernte&lt;/a&gt; is an example (fairly well-known, I think) of a language that has been analyzed as containing only &quot;VC(C)&quot; syllables. You can see an alternative analysis invoking the concept of &quot;moraic onsets&quot; here: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enl.auth.gr/staff/topintzi/papers/Arrernte_Leiden2014.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrernte moraic onsets: stress and beyond&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Nina Topintzi and Andrew Nevins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Nardog said in a comment, &quot;V.CV&quot; in Turkish is obviously a counterexample to the supposed tendency to maximize codas. As far as I can tell, the actual situation in Turkish is simply that complex onsets are not usual (something that the article itself points out in the same section), so we have &quot;VC.CV&quot; not because of some principle of &quot;maximizing the coda&quot; of the preceding syllable, but just because the alternative syllabification &quot;V.CCV&quot; would go against the tendency/historical constraint/whatever is behind Turkish not having complex onsets outside of loanwords. Turkish apparently tolerates complex codas in at least some circumstances (e.g. &lt;em&gt;kent&lt;/em&gt; &quot;city&quot;), so you could look at how sequences like &lt;em&gt;kenti&lt;/em&gt; (the definite accusative form of &lt;em&gt;kent&lt;/em&gt;) are syllabified for more evidence about whether Turkish actually follows any sort of &quot;maximal coda rule&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that syllabification in modern Hebrew follows a similar pattern. Biblical Hebrew is described as having no word-initial consonant clusters (and also, I believe, no complex onsets in any position). Modern Hebrew does have word-initial consonant clusters, not only in borrowed vocabulary but also in native vocabulary (because of schwa loss in certain conditions), but my understanding is that word-internal VCCV in Hebrew is still considered to be syllabified as VC.CV (at least usually; I don't know if there might be some exceptions). From an Optimality Theory perspective, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/23-0894/23-0894-SHARVIT-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the&#xA;Modern Hebrew Verbal System: Alignment Constraints in Verb Formation&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Yael Sharvit (1994) lists &quot;*COMPLEX: No complex onsets or codas&quot; as a constraint on Hebrew syllable structure (taken from Prince &amp;amp; Smolensky (1993)); I would guess that this could also be postulated as a constraint that is active in Turkish syllabification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T10:42:46.627" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T10:42:46.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29958" CreationDate="2018-12-18T10:40:28.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For geographical distance, I think a Slavonic dialect continuum from the westernmost dialects of Czech via Slovak, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Southern Russian, and Russian up to Vladivostok cannot be beaten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Slavonic languages are still relatively close to each other, it can probably be beaten in terms of linguistic distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T14:36:39.137" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T14:36:39.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29932" CreationDate="2018-12-18T11:29:17.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest there are probably many historical languages which combined characteristics of various modern language groups, and this wouldn't even need to be the result of mixing, it would simply be that those languages either died out, or changed into modern language groups. As a Biologist, I'll give a Biological example: dinosaurs combined characteristics of modern reptiles and modern birds (e.g. - feathers and teeth), not because they were the result of breeding between ancient birds and ancient reptiles, but because all three groups shared an ancestor. So, to continue with the example of Italo-celtic used by other answers, I don't see why there couldn't have been a historical language with a mix of modern Italic and modern Celtic features. A real example is that Latin contains features found in modern German, such as the three grammatical genders, which are not found in modern Italic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23453" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T11:29:17.100" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29975" CreationDate="2018-12-18T14:41:31.573" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the noisy channel model, for a given input sentence &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; we are given a set of possible translations &lt;code&gt;A1, A2, A3, .., Ai, ..&lt;/code&gt;. We want to pick the best possible translation, hence &lt;code&gt;argmax(P(Ai|D))&lt;/code&gt;. When maximizing the probability, we use the formula for conditional probability: &lt;code&gt;P(Ai|D) = P(D|Ai)*P(Ai)/P(D)&lt;/code&gt;. We then omit the &lt;code&gt;P(D)&lt;/code&gt;, because it is constant and doesn't affect the &lt;code&gt;argmax&lt;/code&gt; result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this follows &lt;code&gt;argmax(P(Ai|D)) = argmax(P(D|Ai)*P(Ai))&lt;/code&gt; and thus we try to get the best translation using the second form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &lt;code&gt;P(Ai)&lt;/code&gt; is easier to predict, but why is &lt;code&gt;P(Ai|D)&lt;/code&gt; harder to model than &lt;code&gt;P(D|Ai)&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23457" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T15:17:10.603" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T09:33:55.807" Title="Noisy channel model explanation" Tags="&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30022" CreationDate="2018-12-18T16:30:58.643" Score="2" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some historical linguists include Hurrian words in the reconstruction of Proto-Indogermanic. However, cognates between Hurrian and Indogermanic languages are mainly restricted to Greek and to the Anatolian branch, and for Greek a non-Indogermanic substrate is a plausible explanation of the Hurrian cognates. Also for Anatolian branch a substrate relation is plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the current thinking of the relation between Indogermanic and Hurrian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;BTW, In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/25522/what-is-the-contribution-of-tocharian-to-the-reconstruction-of-proto-indogermani#comment52112_25522&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; I have explained my preference of the term Indogermanic over Indoeuropean.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T21:48:24.423" Title="Hurrian and Indogermanic" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;hurrian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29964" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurrian language&lt;/a&gt; is a now extinct language spoken and written between 2300 BCE and 1000 BCE in Mesopotamia. Together with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urartian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uratian language&lt;/a&gt; it forms the Hurro-Uratian language family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29965" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the Hurrian language." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T16:36:47.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29955" CreationDate="2018-12-18T23:11:04.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whoops, didn't know I was allowed to answer my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zipf wrote about exactly this! I knew that he'd formulated Zipf's Law (the relative frequency of a word in a language is inversely proportional to its rank in frequency, so the most common word is used twice as much as the second most common word, three times as much as the third most common, and so on), but I wasn't aware that he also addressed the question of length as a function of frequency: the more frequent a word is in usage, the shorter its length will typically be (as measured in number of phonemes). Greenberg described the same thing with his feature hierarchy Singular &gt; Plural &gt; Dual, where the most frequent forms (singular) are on average expressed with a smaller number of phonemes than the less frequent forms (plural and dual, with dual on average being the least frequent and expressed with the highest number of phonemes). Rosch made a similar observation that 'basic level categories' have the highest semantic generality and are typically shortest in length (e.g. 'dog' is shorter than 'greyhound'). Hawkins takes the correlation between length and frequency as evidence for his parsing constraint Minimize Forms, which he argues is used by the speaker to select the most &quot;efficient&quot; (a concept he defines and quantifies) utterance among competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the sort of finding I expected and it makes a lot of intuitive sense, but I wasn't sure if anyone had actually formally described the phenomenon. Turns out several people have! Zipf and to a lesser extent Hawkins are the only sources I've found which gather empirical and statistically testable data about it, but it's been at least noted by several linguists. I'd really love to see what kinds of generalizations can or cannot extend to polysynthetic languages, where the number of unique words in performance data is lower than in more analytic languages, but I can't find any information on that question, sadly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources I've found which explicitly describe length as a function of relative frequency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg , J. H. (1966), &lt;em&gt;Language Universals, with Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies&lt;/em&gt; (The Hague: Mouton).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hawkins, J. (2004), &lt;em&gt;Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars&lt;/em&gt; (New York: Oxford University Press)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rosch , E. (1978), ‘Principles of Categorization’, in E. Rosch and L. L. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 27–48.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zipf , G. (1949), &lt;em&gt;Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort&lt;/em&gt; (New York: Hafner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22938" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T23:11:04.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28246" CreationDate="2018-12-18T23:55:45.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not an Icelander but I do speak Icelandic proficiently and I’ve read the Grœnlendingasaga in Old Icelandic. It’s true to an extent, but it’s an exaggerated claim. As you mentioned, modern editions of the Sagas and Eddas are printed using a standardized orthography which is designed to look like Modern Icelandic, but the actual manuscripts are not comprehensible at all. The orthography is completely different in manuscript: there’s lots of ligatures, vowel length isn’t marked, and there’s no standardized spelling. Scribes wrote things mainly as if they were writing in Latin with a few special tweaks (like þ and ð). Also, modern editions purposefully ignore phonetic details which were present in Old Icelandic but absent in Modern Icelandic: nasal vowels aren’t marked, no distinction is made between /ɛ/ and /e/ or /œ/ and /ø/, and so on. Basically, the answer is “Yes, sort of, only because modern editors have changed the texts’ spelling system to look like the modern language.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This claim is only taking things like spelling and morphology into account, which are mostly the same between Modern (Standard) Icelandic and modern editions of the Sagas and Eddas. Vocabulary is harder, because a lot of words no longer exist or don’t mean the same thing as they used to, or they reference things which had specific cultural meaning at the time of writing which get “lost in translation” to the modern culture. I don’t think a lot of people know enough about medieval Norse seafaring to know what an “öndvegissúlur” is, for example (a type of wooden pillar in Norse boats). Syntax is even more divergent between Old Icelandic and Modern Icelandic, and it really takes a lot of doing to get used to the older syntactic system which permitted a much greater range of stylistic variation. This is pure speculation, but I think this idea probably came about during the 19th century independence movement, when Icelanders started looking backwards and identifying themselves with the medieval past to establish an independent national character from Denmark, and when interest in Old Icelandic language and literature really started coming to the fore as a matter of national pride and identity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22938" LastEditorUserId="22938" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T00:01:48.297" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T00:01:48.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2515" CreationDate="2018-12-19T03:21:09.043" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess you could call those &lt;em&gt;relics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about relics or other sacred symbols shaped like a helix, that reminds me of a picture of coiled stripes of silver from sumer used as payment. I wasn't aware of the analysis as Latin &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;linquo&lt;/em&gt; (leave behind), but only with that info does &quot;money&quot; kind of make sense, as something left behind (for insurance). I'm not sure &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; is the correct analysis there, but much less so that *wel- is the root for helix. The established theory is simpler, and I'd have to come up with something dense to explain why an *r (not a Latin 'r', obviously) should have became a rough breathing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some fricative realization of /r/ overlaps with /ħ/ or /x/ and some realization of /h/ might overlap with /x/ as well. That's not really problematic. What's problematic is that, as usual, if setting out with a crazy idea, there will be no shortage of apparent leads. There are too many words with too little information available (on wiktionary at least), that need to be compared. If coincidences abound, there's reason to remain skeptic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No cognates are mentioned neither at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/wel-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*wel-&lt;/a&gt; nor at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%95%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BE#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἕλιξ&lt;/a&gt;, and if there were, these would need to be distinguished from loan words (like, literal debt). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greek χρήμα, χρήματα &quot;money, currency&quot;, etc. lead to χρή &quot;have to, ought, should&quot;, where the trail ends. That Onset fits my phonetic hypothesis. Also, I just today learned that &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; replaced OE/ME &lt;em&gt;ream&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greek λεφτά &quot;money, wealth&quot; offers no explanation, links a variant &lt;em&gt;lepta&lt;/em&gt;, and we can find &lt;em&gt;lepto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;minute, cent&quot;, too. Latin &lt;em&gt;lepto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;thin, small&quot; links to AGr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CE%B5%CF%80%CF%84%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;λεπτός&lt;/a&gt;, quote: &quot;From λέπω (lépō, “I peel”), from Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ- (“break off, rind”).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course &lt;em&gt;lefta&lt;/em&gt; reminds a lot of En. &lt;em&gt;left, leave&lt;/em&gt;, and indeed of Agr. λείπω (leípō) &quot;to leave, lack&quot;. A quick overview of near homophones is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CE%AF%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;λίπος&lt;/a&gt; &quot;fat&quot;. &lt;em&gt;leave&lt;/em&gt; is at least as complex to compare. The established etymologies don't agree with my idea, however ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lack&lt;/em&gt;, in turn needs to be compared to &lt;em&gt;leak&lt;/em&gt;, and Ger. &lt;em&gt;lecken&lt;/em&gt; &quot;leak, lick&quot;: That a cow licked ice until a man emerged, as the Eddas have us believe, instead of a cow &lt;em&gt;leaking&lt;/em&gt; milk to foster mankind, that's just, I don't even ... Maybe the En. &lt;em&gt;leaven&lt;/em&gt; &quot;starter&quot; has to do not just with dough, but cheese making, too--cp. Ger. &lt;em&gt;Lab&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rennet&quot;. Even better, &lt;em&gt;rennet&lt;/em&gt; is explained as cognate with &lt;em&gt;to run&lt;/em&gt;, cp. Ger. &lt;em&gt;gerinnen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;coagulate&quot; and, while I find that quite surprising, it sure reminds of &lt;em&gt;currency&lt;/em&gt;, from Lt. &lt;em&gt;curra&lt;/em&gt; (currant? Korinthen?), *kers- &quot;to run&quot;. So far, that's only coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agr. &lt;em&gt;leipo&lt;/em&gt; and Lt. &lt;em&gt;linquo&lt;/em&gt; link *leykʷ- &quot;to leave&quot;. What do we find there? AGr ἔλῐπε (élipe, “he left”), from *likʷ-e-t (thematic root aorist) ... that rough breathing, where's that from? It also derives Proto-Indo-Iranian *ráyknas &quot;property left, inheritance&quot;, &quot;Cognate with Proto-Germanic *laihną (“loan, fief”)&quot;. An 'r', now wait a minute. That seems to be a regular sound change, because Sanskrit doesn't have word initial /l/. But it opens a possibility for loans, perhaps from Persian, if we want to suppose a *relix. It's hard to tell whether &lt;em&gt;ellipse&lt;/em&gt; should be from the same root, but the gloss ἐλλείπω (elleípō, “to fall short, omit”) fit's perfectly to my expectation about calqued Ger. &lt;em&gt;ausgelassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;omitted&quot;. Via &quot;ausgelassen feiern&quot; a sense of &quot;wealthy&quot; might be gleamed, although a derivation as &quot;freely, wild, omitting restraints&quot; would be amendable; cp. &lt;em&gt;Nachlass&lt;/em&gt; (inheritance), &lt;em&gt;sich auslassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to vent anger, let it out&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Anlass&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ocassion, event, festivity&quot;, &lt;em&gt;anlassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to start&quot;, &lt;em&gt;an lassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to leave on&quot;, &lt;em&gt;verlassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to leave&quot;, &lt;em&gt;veranlassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to cause, set into action&quot;, &lt;em&gt;lassen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to let&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*likʷ-e-t reminds so much of &lt;em&gt;liquid&lt;/em&gt;, which reconstructs *wleykʷ- (“to run, flow”). I read a translation of the Codex Hammurabi that said &lt;em&gt;liquidate&lt;/em&gt; (of a contract or other tablet), however I can't seem to find it again now and other translations don't say so. Anyhow, the relation of financial &lt;em&gt;liquidity&lt;/em&gt; to water strikes me as rather obscure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ger. &lt;em&gt;Flucht&lt;/em&gt; (n. to flee, ie. to try to leave) reconstructs *plewk- &quot;to fly&quot; instead. I'm not convinced. It could point to *wleykʷ-~*leykʷ- instead (why not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ger. &lt;em&gt;Geld&lt;/em&gt; &quot;money&quot; reconstructs *gʰeldʰ- (“to pay”). *gʰ can go to *w sometimes, I believe (where?).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;δραχμή (Drachme) is of pre-greek origin, according to Beekes, because of variants &lt;em&gt;darkhma&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;darkhna&lt;/em&gt;. Can we go a step further and see &lt;em&gt;-khram&lt;/em&gt;, for χρήματα, with &quot;dar-&quot; perhaps related to &lt;em&gt;drag&lt;/em&gt;, *ter-?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;khre&lt;/em&gt; (viz. *khrema &quot;money&quot;) Links related &lt;em&gt;khron&lt;/em&gt;. The origin of Chronos is of course mysterious. Time is money, they say. And Cream rules everything around me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;compare &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;valere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be strong, worth&quot;, showing two different roots: PIE *walh₂- (“to be strong”) [red link, unsourced] or *h₂wl̥h₁éh₁yeti, from *h₂welh₁- (“to rule, be strong”). Well, well, well. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where's &lt;em&gt;roubel&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the Russian currency&quot; from? If this is indeed cognate with руби́ть (rubit) &quot;to axe, fell&quot; and Polish &lt;em&gt;rąbać&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to chop, hew&quot;, then compare Ger. &lt;em&gt;Rabatz machen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Welle machen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to muck up&quot;. The idea is that it's a cut of &lt;em&gt;grivna&lt;/em&gt; (the currency of Ukraine), also &lt;em&gt;hryvnia, hryvna&lt;/em&gt;, that from Proto-Slavic *grivĭna 'necklace' from Proto-Slavic *griva 'neck, nape, mane. Now compare &lt;em&gt;lace&lt;/em&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;laqueus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;nouse, snare, gin, trap&quot;. I am of course alluding to &lt;em&gt;linquo&lt;/em&gt;, *leykʷ-; wiktionary says: &quot;From Proto-Italic *lakw- (“to ensnare”), with no certain cognates in any other Indo-European languages; possibly Proto-Indo-European *lēk- (“string, twig, tendril”).&quot; There is a semantic gap, but come on. Cp. &lt;em&gt;linger&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to hang around&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, allusions to servitude, like &lt;em&gt;lackey&lt;/em&gt; come to mind, frequently. Owning slavse meant wealth and &quot;rings&quot; were so significantly connected that the symbolism still appears in Persian words related to slavery (I don't quite know how).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is patently weird. After all, I'm running out of time and thinking, well, helix might be from *wel- after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look at &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt;; From PIE *wret-, a metathetic alteration of *wert- (“to turn”). Not only does that remind twofold of Ger. &quot;Gegenwert&quot; (...-value)--besides &lt;em&gt;Gegenwart&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the present&quot;, &lt;em&gt;gegenwärtig&lt;/em&gt; &quot;current, present&quot;--but surely reminds somewhat of *wel-, too? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like *wel- could need an update or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe also compare &lt;em&gt;gain, again&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vulva in my mind needs comparing to 'bulba', though I'm not sure whether I read that somewhere or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix: &lt;a href=&quot;http://sumerianshakespeare.com/mediac/450_0/media/e4d51691c8074389ffff8361ffffe417.jpg]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient valuta&lt;/a&gt; (not sure about the copyright status)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T03:54:19.657" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T03:54:19.657" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29952" CreationDate="2018-12-19T04:28:36.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don't think that there is any known satisfactory explanation. &amp;quot;Why&amp;quot; questions can be difficult to answer even for well-documented linguistic phenomena, and I have the impression that we don't even know much about when and how the penultimate/antepenultimate stress pattern of Classical Latin developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;There's not much evidence about Latin accent (and changes over time)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is little good evidence about Latin accentuation. It was not marked in the writing system, and I don't know of any visible effects the later (non-initial) stress patterns had on other aspects of Latin pronunciation, except for in post-Classical time periods (note that the Latin SE question &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7328/did-classical-latin-stress-impact-any-sound-changes&quot;&gt;Did Classical Latin stress impact any sound changes?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; didn't get any answers with examples from before the Romance, or at earliest proto-Romance time period). There are some descriptions of Latin accentuation in ancient grammarians, but their accounts are considered unreliable for reasons that I discuss in &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/6397/9&quot;&gt;my answer to a Latin SE question about the accentuation of adverbs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People also have argued about what exactly Latin accent was (e.g. stress vs. pitch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, even the idea of a word-initial-stress stage in preclassical Latin is disputed (something I didn't know before writing this post): see Pultrova 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ideas about stress in Plautus (~200 BC)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people try to get evidence about early Latin accentuation patterns from the works of Plautus, but what I have read gives me the impression that this is a really difficult task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Ictus&amp;quot; = stress?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a concept of an &amp;quot;ictus&amp;quot; which debatably could have corresponded to accent or stress, but  Fortson (2008) says &amp;quot;There is great disagreement about its nature and whether there even was such a thing in Plautine poetry at all&amp;quot; ( p. 30) and Christenson (2000) says &amp;quot;the ictus about which modern scholars still debate, often along national lines -- may be entirely anachronistic.&lt;sup&gt;201&lt;/sup&gt; [...] 201 The arguments of Gratwick (1993) 40-8, 59-62 are followed closely here&amp;quot; (p. 69).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;brevis brevians&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;iambic shortening&amp;quot; conditioned by stress?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon of &amp;quot;iambic shortening&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;brevis brevians&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;BB&amp;quot;) is often supposed to have only affected unstressed syllables (or in some theories, specifically syllables in weak position in a foot). But I don't know how strong the evidence for this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christenson (2000) says (in a section on &amp;quot;iambic shortening&amp;quot;) that &amp;quot;Disyllabic forms of &lt;em&gt;ille, iste&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ipse&lt;/em&gt; were originally accented on the last syllable and so we find, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Am&lt;/em&gt; 270 &lt;em&gt;quid ĭllíc,&lt;/em&gt; 415 &lt;em&gt;et ĭpsús&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (p. 63).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Fortson (2008) indicates that there may be some challenging counterexamples to the idea that BB was affected by accentuation. Fortson acknowledges that BB is &amp;quot;not supposed to have affected tonic syllables&amp;quot; (p. 207), but then goes on to say that &amp;quot;the aggregate of evidence that BB could affect the second syllable of trisyllables is far too great to be easily dismissed [...] Cross-linguistically, while tonic syllables resist syncope, they are not immune to shortening and other reduction processes; we must simply try to recover the conditions (if any) under which this was possible in Plautine Latin&amp;quot; (p. 208).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Preantepenult stress in Plautus&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen several sources that say that LLLσ quadrisyllables in Plautus could have initial stress. As with BB, I don't know how we know this;  Pultrova 2011 suggests that it is based on the controversial idea of the &amp;quot;ictus&amp;quot; corresponding to the stress accent (p. 224).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found one example in &lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.middlebury.edu/plautus/files/2015/09/scanning-Plautus1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this PDF&lt;/a&gt; (which is also the source that pointed me to Christenson): &lt;em&gt;stultitia&lt;/em&gt; is the example given (I don't know what's up with the first syllable apparently being light here: while I have read that some consonants that were codas in Classical Latin did not always make a preceding syllable heavy in Plautus' work, I'm not sure why that would happen in this case). Another source I found that gives this as a rule is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rQuCrzn3-f8C&amp;amp;pg=PA212&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MacCary and Willcock (1976)&lt;/a&gt; (p. 212).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find a paper that discusses this phenomenon in more depth and that confirms that apparently, we only see this phenomenon when the pre-antepenult syllable is light: &amp;quot;Why preantepenultimate stress in Latin requires an OT account&amp;quot;, by Haike Jacobs. Unfortunately, so far I've only been able to access it partially, through &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=SVbvMZDHv9wC&amp;amp;pg=PA395#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, all of these sources do say that the accented long penult rule was active by the time of Plautus, so if they're correct, then weight-based stress rules apparently became a part of Latin's prosodic system &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; the &amp;quot;stress window&amp;quot; had become absolutely restricted to the last three syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Theoretical analyses of the Classical Latin stress pattern&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a ton of literature about how to analyze the Classical Latin stress rule according to various phonological frameworks/theories, but I thought I'd add a brief, simplified description of just the main theoretical concepts that I've seen applied, since some of the comments have brought up some theoretical topics/terms. If you have further questions about some aspect of metrical theory or comparative typology of metrical systems, I'd encourage you to ask a separate question so that people can post more detailed answers focusing on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much all of theories that I'm familiar with recognize moras, syllables and feet as separate kinds of units that all have relevance to Latin prosody. If you're not familiar with these theoretical concepts, you can ask a separate question about how they are applied in analyses of Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an Optimality Theory (OT)-type account, the Classical Latin stress pattern is thought to emerge from a number of &amp;quot;violable constraints&amp;quot; on foot structure and the parsing of syllables into feet. Here is a non-technical summary of the kinds of things that these constraints are often thought to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Extrametricality&amp;quot; of word-final syllables.&lt;/strong&gt; The last syllable of a word is assumed to be unfooted. Of course, monosyllables would have to be an exception to this. Disyllables (specifically, ones where the first syllable is light) are also problematic and often said to be exceptions to final-syllable extrametricality. But the extrametricality analysis is supposed to make it easier to explain the stress pattern of trisyllables and longer words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Parsing of the non-extrametrical syllables in a word proceeds from right to left.&lt;/strong&gt; Parsing of syllables into feet is not always exhaustive: for example, LLLσ words are as far as I know uncontroversially analyzed as having (in Classical Latin) the structure L(LL)σ, with an unfooted initial syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latin foot structure is &amp;quot;binary&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; There is some debate about what kinds of feet are permitted in Latin (I think a lot of this is part of more general theoretical debates about &amp;quot;foot binariness&amp;quot;), but it seems to be pretty generally held that Latin has (LL) and (H) feet, but not (L) feet. That is, there are no monomoraic feet. (LH) feet seem to exist in  disyllables at least; I'm not sure how their existence is accounted for. The extent to which Latin made use of (HL) feet seems to be debated; Mester (1994) argues that HLσ words were parsed as (H)Lσ rather than as (HL)σ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disyllabic feet have a &amp;quot;trochaic&amp;quot; stress pattern.&lt;/strong&gt; Somewhat confusingly, in this context, &amp;quot;trochaic&amp;quot; is used with the modern English meaning, not with the classical meaning—it is not about length, but about stress falling on the first syllable of the foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Primary stress falls on the last foot in a word.&lt;/strong&gt; In a word with a heavy (bimoraic) penultimate syllable, the penultimate syllable by itself would constitute the last foot, while in a word with a light penultimate syllable, the last foot would consist of the antepenult along with the penult (or possibly just the antepenult, if we interpret Latin feet as being maximally bimoraic and say that a light penult is allowed to be &amp;quot;unfooted&amp;quot; when it is preceded by a heavy antepenult).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see some specific examples of constraint sets given in various OT papers, like Apoussidou and Boersma (2004). If you think that violable constraints like the ones listed in that paper represent something real about what was behind the phonological system of Classical Latin, then you might try to identify how a change in their relative rankings might have caused a transition from word-initial stress to weight-sensitive stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Works cited&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apoussidou, Diana and Boersma, Paul. 2004. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/746-0605/746-APOUSSIDOU-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comparing Two Optimality-Theoretic&#xA;Learning Algorithms for Latin Stress&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christianson, David. 2000.  &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-8bzPyyz-iUC&amp;amp;pg=PA69#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amphitrvo&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fortson, Benjamin.  2008. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=RYWW_2EcJ3YC&amp;amp;pg=PA281&amp;amp;lpg=PA281&amp;amp;dq=Mancini,+Marco+1997+Latin&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=DWQ8RRmOnB&amp;amp;sig=tQhrDjCj2Lvb9cLG6iTdMrW5tFM&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjVj6Cs0ejaAhWrmuAKHRgGCEsQ6AEILzAE#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=accent&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and Diachronic Studies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MacCary, W.T. and Willcock, M.M. 1976. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rQuCrzn3-f8C&amp;amp;pg=PA212#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casina&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mester, R. Armin. 1994. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.461.8123&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Quantitative Trochee in Latin&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pultrová, Lucie. 2011. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ics.cas.cz/upload/__files/LFtext134_Pultrova.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the Proto-Indo-European to the Classical Latin Accent&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T09:06:38.220" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-19T05:59:12.037" Score="0" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get to the bottom of the difference between (1) and (2) below, and how the intended meanings would be reflected in a phrase structure tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;If you think that $100 is too little you could give $150 just as well&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) ? &lt;em&gt;If you think that $100 is too little you should give $150 just as well&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue seems to be that &lt;em&gt;just as well&lt;/em&gt; is within the scope (I am not sure of the right terminology here) of &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Could&lt;/em&gt; admits more than one possibility, so that’s fine, but &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; does not, so to express the intended meaning the &lt;em&gt;just as well&lt;/em&gt; must be set off in its own clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;If you think that $100 is too little, you should give $150; that would do just as well.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) would presumably look quite different from (2) on a phrase structure tree, but where would &lt;em&gt;that would do just as well&lt;/em&gt; attach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I think the tree would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTnrf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kTnrf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (2) and (3) are equivalent in a given language, could this be accounted for by saying that in (2), &lt;em&gt;just as well&lt;/em&gt; attaches to a different node in the tree than it does in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I now think that (1) and (2) may be parsed like the tree above in Thai, which puts the &lt;em&gt;just as well&lt;/em&gt; outside the scope of the modal in both cases, meaning that it doesn't matter whether it is restrictive like &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; or unrestrictive like &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's right, the question is whether it is the same phenomenon as in serial verbs. They both seem to be cases of backing up and attaching something higher up the tree without much in the way of an explicit instruction. In the sentences above, if you want the &lt;em&gt;just as well&lt;/em&gt; to attach higher up in EN, you have to signal that explicitly, as in (3). Similarly, if the verb phrases in serial constructions like &lt;em&gt;go [and] see&lt;/em&gt; are sister nodes, the difference is that EN won't let you get away with more than two without an &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; to signal that you need to go back up and branch across (rather than building downward) whereas in TH you can carry on to your heart's content. The idea that these two things are linked is only a hunch for the time being, as I haven't yet got to the bottom of whether the VPs in serial constructions are in fact sister nodes, or whether they cascade down (or whether the presence / absence of &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; makes any difference). I posted about that &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29973/phrase-structure-trees-for-serial-verb-constructions&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T06:19:19.007" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T06:19:19.007" Title="Phrase structure trees for different languages" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29949" CreationDate="2018-12-19T07:48:08.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it really the diacritic you are interested in, or are you looking for words that differ only in tone (and if so, does it matter whether the spoken tone differs from the written tone)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe have a look at these examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;สู้ to fight&#xA;สู่ preposition (in)to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;เสือ tiger&#xA;เสื้อ shirt / blouse&#xA;เสื่อ mat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These word sets differ only in the diacritic / tone. As you can see the second set contains three words - I'm not sure how literally to take 'pair'. There are five tones, so there will be a few cases where you have more than two words differing only in tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ใกล้ near&#xA;ไกล far&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there is an additional difference in that a different character is used for the vowel (it's the same vowel though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;มา to come&#xA;ม้า horse&#xA;หมา dog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the ห is silent - it acts like a diacritic in that it forces a rising tone, but it's not really a diacritic. You might need to decide whether to count it. The same thing can happen where the written forms differ in that one uses a high class consonant while the other uses a low class equivalent, e.g:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ขาว white&#xA;คาว to smell bad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ข and ค have the same pronunciation (kh) but ข is a high class consonant (resulting in a rising tone in this example) whereas ค is a low class consonant (resulting in a mid tone in this example). IOW the spoken forms differ only in tone, but you can't really say that the written forms differ only in terms of diacritics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that the diacritics you have in mind relate to tone (bearing in mind the example you gave) but be aware that there are other diacritics, notably one used to shorten some vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: thanks for your comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like you are not counting pairs of words with different diacritics but are looking for one with and one without, so not counting the first pair I suggested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't come across a list of words like that, but you could try the forums at thai-language.com and thaivisa.com. You can join thaivisa.com easily enough and ask there. Those guys are mainly western expats living in Thailand. If posting I would use the term 'tone marker' - or maybe just ask for a list of words that differ only in tone. You would then need to check the spellings to confirm that they are the same except that one has a diacritic - this is by no means guaranteed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the assumption that you need one word not to have a diacritic, you have 2 or 3 above (depending on whether you use เสือ twice) - how many do you need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some others that occur to me are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ตัว body (the squiggle on top is a vowel, not a diacritic - same for เสือ above)&#xA;ตั๋ว ticket&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;เขา third person pronoun (written with rising tone, pronounced with high tone)&#xA;เข้า to enter (written and pronounced with falling tone)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ขาว white&#xA;ข้าว rice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;วาง to set something down&#xA;ว่าง to be free (i.e. not busy, of a person; vacant, of a building plot etc - unoccupied)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;พอ enough&#xA;พ่อ father&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;เดียว single (just one) again the squiggle over the second character is part of the vowel, not a diacritic&#xA;เดี๋ยว (in a) moment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T03:31:40.417" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T03:31:40.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29962" CreationDate="2018-12-19T09:33:55.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we take into account only P(D|Ai), the probability is similarly wrong/right as P(Ai|D). Since both are taken from the double-language corpora and thus not really good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because in the right side of the equation we have also the P(Ai) availabel we gain much more realiable result. P(Ai) is much more representative since it is from single-language corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus P(Ai|D) derived from a double-language corpus does not equal to P(D|Ai)*P(Ai). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23456" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T09:33:55.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-19T10:49:35.247" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a set of N English terms that maximally express the 'space of meaning' that all words are encapsulated within. I don't know the correct nomenclature to describe what I'm looking for so I'll try my best to articulate with an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two novels. One is upbeat, spritely, happy and fun. The other is sombre, violent, turbulent and upsetting. How could I build a lexicon of maximally different terms such that these two books would occupy two obviously distinct clusters within the lexicon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would look to discover or implement &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; such that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;(2) may produce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Good&#xA;Bad&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;(50) may include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Light&#xA;Dark&#xA;Good&#xA;Bad&#xA;Close&#xA;Far&#xA;Thought&#xA;Speech&#xA;Hot&#xA;Cold&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;(Infinity) would include all words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to describe what I'm looking for: If meaning could be expressed as an N-dimensional space, then I'd like for my function to return a set of terms that are evenly distributed within that space. I believe this is virtually impossible, but I'm wondering if a heuristic algorithm exists that could approximate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies for the ambiguity of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23468" LastEditorUserId="23468" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T11:05:11.003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T11:05:11.003" Title="Maximally dissecting lexicon according to meaning (heuristically)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29978" CreationDate="2018-12-19T15:34:00.563" Score="3" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Sanskrit नक्ति (nákti) &quot;night&quot;, PIE *nókʷts, not participate in the kentum-satem split? Why? Is it a loan? There are at least two synonyms, if that makes any difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no actual reason to assume it should have undergone Satemization, unless that's what affected अष्ट (aṣṭá) &quot;eight&quot;, PIE *oḱtṓw. Is that wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, why did these two roots develop differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T16:08:30.613" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T17:37:00.040" Title="Why does Sankr. नक्ति (nákti) not show Satemization" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29977" CreationDate="2018-12-19T16:13:31.537" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three different series of guttural sounds reconstructed for Proto-Indogermanic, that are usually represented by *k' (the k that gets satemised), *k (plain k that stays k), and *kʷ (that has many different developments in the different languages, the outcomes include p (Ancient Greek ποῖος (poîos) from *kʷoyo), kw or kv, or plain k.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the reconstructed form shows, *nókʷts has a non-satemising *kʷ. This is consistent with other satem languages: Lithuanian: &lt;em&gt;naktis&lt;/em&gt;, Latvian: &lt;em&gt;nakts&lt;/em&gt;. Russian: &lt;em&gt;ночь (nočʹ)&lt;/em&gt; seems to be inconsistent, but here a series of sound changes has taken place *kt -&gt; *t' -&gt; čʹ with complete elimination of the original k. Note that Spanish noche has undergone similar sound changes independently (and we know the Latin precedent &lt;em&gt;nox, noctis&lt;/em&gt; in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T17:37:00.040" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T17:37:00.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29977" CreationDate="2018-12-19T17:04:20.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As commonly reconstructed, PIE had three different types of &quot;velar-ish&quot; plosives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Palatal velars&quot; (probably plain velar): &lt;code&gt;*ḱ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*ǵ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*ǵʰ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Plain velars&quot; (probably uvular): &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*g&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*gʰ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Labial velars&quot; (probably labial-something): &lt;code&gt;*kʷ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*gʷ&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;*gʷʰ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not sure exactly how they were pronounced; I believe the distinction was probably velar/uvular/labiovelar rather than palatal/velar/labiovelar, but the terminology has stuck, and there's no hard proof either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;centum&lt;/em&gt; languages, the &quot;palatal&quot; and &quot;plain&quot; series merged together. For the classic example that gave the phenomenon its name, &lt;code&gt;*ḱm̥tóm&lt;/code&gt; &quot;hundred&quot; &gt; Latin &lt;em&gt;centum&lt;/em&gt;, with a &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;. The &quot;labial&quot; series stayed distinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;satem&lt;/em&gt; languages, the &quot;plain&quot; and &quot;labial&quot; series merged together, and the &quot;palatal&quot; series turned into various sibilants, so &lt;code&gt;*ḱm̥tóm&lt;/code&gt; became Avestan &lt;em&gt;satem&lt;/em&gt; (and Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;śatam&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this root had a &quot;labial&quot; &lt;code&gt;*kʷ&lt;/code&gt;, it merged into &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt; in the satem languages rather than becoming a sibilant. That's what you see in Sanskrit. (Slavic languages do seem to have satemized it, as jknappen points out, but that's a later development due to the consonant cluster.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT TO ADD: As TKR points out, when I say things like &quot;probably uvular&quot;, that's very far from certain or uncontroversial. Many linguists think that the sounds were uvular, but many others think they weren't, and there are solid arguments on both sides. Such are the perils of reconstructing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T01:30:37.127" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T01:30:37.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2427" CreationDate="2018-12-19T17:41:06.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if English is the only language where a trailing letter modifies the pronounciation of previous vowels (excluding stress-only changes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, these pairs of words only differ in the trailing E, but previous vowels pronounce differently, even if they spell the same (without the E):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mad / made&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cut / cute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bath / bathe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slid / slide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;breath / breathe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes even more vowels are affected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sever / severe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(maybe more?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23435" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T17:41:06.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-19T19:45:59.040" Score="3" ViewCount="799" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Germanic languages are according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Germanic_languages&amp;amp;oldid=874155887&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; subdivided into North Germanic languages and West Germanic languages (historically, there also existed East Germanic languages). The most important (by number of speakers) examples of these two branches are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;North Germanic languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (sometimes subdivided into Bokmål and Nynorsk), Icelandic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;West Germanic languages: English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans (sometimes also considered as a dialect of Dutch)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for my question: As a native speaker of German, I (gut)feel that German is linguistically much closer to the listed North Germanic languages (except for Icelandic) than to English (but as far as I know Icelandic is also linguistically significantly away from the other North Germanic languages). If this were true, this would imply that this classification is somewhat dubious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Why is in this classification German put together with English into the same branch (West Germanic languages) while the Scandinavian Germanic languages (that I feel are much closer to German) are put into a different branch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23013" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T17:49:54.827" Title="Why are English and German West Germanic languages while Scandinavian Germanic languages are an own branch" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29997" CreationDate="2018-12-19T20:52:27.907" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a number of major Western European languages, there are some fairly straighforward correlations between the pronunciation of given names and the biological gender these names are assigned to. E.g. given names that end with -a or (in German) -e tend to be female names, while names that end with -o tend to be male. I have noticed this kind of correlation is absent (or at least much less obvious) in some other languages I have tried to learn, e.g. Chinese or Mongolian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also noticed that most major Western European languages have a grammatical gender and that the language that I know best has some fairly straightforward correlations between pronunciation and grammatical gender. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are the above-mentioned correlations between pronunciation and biological gender for given names something that is typical for languages with a grammatical gender and much less typical for languages that have no grammatical gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I just found a similar question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1634/gender-based-name-endings-are-they-common&quot;&gt;Gender-based name endings: Are they common?&lt;/a&gt; . If we take that question as a base, my question might be rephrased as &quot;Gender-based name endings: Are they common in languages with a grammatical gender, and uncommon in languages without?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: Since this has been brought up in the comments: I am using &quot;biological gender&quot; here as a shorthand for the distinction between women and men, or between girls and boys. I know that &quot;biological&quot; is just an approximation and the distinction between male and female may sometimes be made on other grounds. I still would argue that this shorthand is justified by hypothesising that the correlation between social and biological gender is fairly strong in most speech communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23437" LastEditorUserId="23437" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T22:39:15.507" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:20:27.390" Title="Correlation between pronunciation of given names and gender" Tags="&lt;gender&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;natural-gender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29981" CreationDate="2018-12-19T22:25:43.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classification in in terms of historical development, and not similarity of the contemporary languages. The traditional claim is that at the earliest stages (2000+ years ago) Germanic had split into three branches: West, North, East. Later, West Germanic further split (likewise North Germanic), and ultimately you developed the contemporary languages. Rather than compare English, German and Norwegian, one should compare Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse, and Gothic. Modern English seem rather different compared to the rest of Germanic because it has changed a lot, but Old English is not so terribly different from Old Saxon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:25:43.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29981" CreationDate="2018-12-19T22:26:46.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that these groupings are not based on present-day similarities, but on a genetic relationship, i.e. a common ancestor. In the case of the Germanic languages, this is Proto-Germanic (an unattested, reconstructed proto-language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subgroups of the Germanic languages are based on shared innovations, compared to the proto-language. Wikipedia lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Linguistic_developments&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few of them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example would be the ending of the 2nd person singular past of strong verbs, such as &lt;em&gt;to bear&lt;/em&gt;. Old Norse has &lt;em&gt;bar-t&lt;/em&gt; where Old English has &lt;em&gt;bǣr-e&lt;/em&gt; and Old Saxon and Old High German have &lt;em&gt;bār-i&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:26:46.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2018-12-19T23:17:59.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mongolian, there are a number of strictly neutral names, e.g. names derived from planets, names derived from rivers, or &quot;bad&quot; names or &quot;non-names&quot;*. There are also names that have a strong tendency towards a certain gender, e.g. anything with &quot;strong&quot; or &quot;steel&quot; or &quot;hero&quot; in it for males, or &quot;light&quot; and &quot;chrystal&quot; for females. And there are names that are somewhat in-between&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also used to be common to give boys female names, and even dress them up as girls when they are small, if previously a boy had died in the family. This was/is done in order to confuse evil spirits - but this is not really related to names having an associated gender or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(bad names or &quot;non-names&quot; were often given if another child had died in the family, in order to make the new child less of a target for evil spirits. Typical examples are &quot;Nameless&quot;, &quot;Not this one&quot;, &quot;Ugly&quot; and so on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23437" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T23:17:59.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T09:18:25.570" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across a paper, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.461.8123&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Quantitative Trochee in Latin&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (by R. Armin Mester, 1994) that seems to argue that feet in Latin were &quot;strictly&quot; bimoraic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arguments that Mester gives for parsing HLL words as (H)LL rather than as (HL)L seem relatively convincing to me (although it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zpCG8HdpDY0C&amp;amp;pg=PA385#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lahiri, Riad and Jacobs (1999)&lt;/a&gt; argue that Mester's analysis is incorrect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if trimoraic feet are completely unallowed in Latin, as Mester seems to say, then how can we account for the existence of LH words? The paper has a long discussion of &quot;Brevis Brevians&quot;, which operated to replace LH with LL, but Mester acknowledges that it &quot;was always an&#xA;optional rule&quot; (p. 12) and &quot;was lost as a productive process in the later classical language&quot; (pp. 12-13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about how Mester (or someone else who views Latin feet as maximally bimoraic) would account for the existence of LH words. Mester describes (LH) feet as &quot;a gross violation of the quantity-prominence relations that are characterized in universal foot theory&quot; (p. 14); but are they nevertheless supposed to have been tolerated in this particular context? If so, why exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4.1., on enclitics, proposes that stress may have been assigned to unfooted syllables in Latin in certain special contexts (words with enclitics), but that seems like a pretty &quot;last resort&quot; kind of analysis to me, and even Mester seems to treat it as somewhat dubious, saying that the &quot;Mūsáque&quot;-type stress pattern in Latin, even if it really existed, may have been artificially induced by contact with Greek (p. 54).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T11:25:08.300" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T11:25:08.300" Title="How are LH words assigned stress in Latin if we assume maximally bimoraic feet?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31422" CreationDate="2018-12-20T09:53:23.900" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed, for example if I would like to express &quot;the dichotomy of truth and falsehood&quot; in one word. Obviously, the construction need not exist in English. I got this idea from the verb from 6 in Arabic, which is to express the reciprocal تقتاتل، تكاتب etc, i.e to correspond with each other, to kill one another.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T10:40:05.203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T20:22:29.117" Title="Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2526" CreationDate="2018-12-20T10:46:12.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon for a sequence like /dj/ to develop to something else through palatalization of the /d/. That seems to have happened here in both Latin and Greek, but with different ultimate results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there is a phonological rule in Proto-Greek where d + yod =&amp;gt; zeta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Cerberus Sep 5 '12 at 16:42&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anlaut (word-initial) PIE *dy corresponds to Latin i (Sihler 2008: 189). A notorious exception is the word &amp;quot;dies&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Alex B. Sep 5 '12 at 20:29&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T10:46:12.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23313" CreationDate="2018-12-20T13:17:34.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seriously doubt that the claims in the Wikipedia article are true: They don't cite scholarly papers but some strange Baidu site whose reliability I cannot assess at all. It seems very unlikely that such kind of anachronism really happened, one matching punctuation sign would be a big surprise already, but two of them with the same semantics sound like a hoax to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T13:17:34.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29867" CreationDate="2018-12-20T14:33:49.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of examples of homophonic English/Hindi sentences in Shashi Tharoor's book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=QLs0AwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT51&amp;amp;lpg=PT51&amp;amp;dq=%22there+was+a+cold+day%22+%22there+was+a+banned+crow%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=7bWXzTAl39&amp;amp;sig=Ao5IGo6_uFMfCDorguO1wc2pVMo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwibirbmxq7fAhVEcCsKHdFIBHwQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22there%20was%20a%20cold%20day%22%20%22there%20was%20a%20banned%20crow%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Great Indian Novel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a cold day. → darwaza khol de. (Tr. Open the door.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a banned crow. → darwaza band karo. (Tr. Close the door.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the right intonation, they sound pretty darn similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T14:33:49.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26902" CreationDate="2018-12-20T15:06:52.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/?page_id=296&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;INCOMSLAV&lt;/a&gt; looked at the mutual intercomprehensibility of Slavic languages using many different methods including the intercomprehensibility of spoken language. You may be interested in their publications on how they did that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:06:52.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2018-12-20T17:39:43.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say, /l/ in specific Latin clusters was simply &lt;strong&gt;vocalized&lt;/strong&gt; in Italian. That means the consonant became a vowel, which is not all that uncommon for a sound like this. Take for example &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;-vocalizations in German &lt;em&gt;wer&lt;/em&gt; /veːɐ̯/ and English &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; /bɛːə̯/. /l/ has been vocalized in Cockney, I think, &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; [fiu̯], in Dutch &lt;em&gt;goud&lt;/em&gt; 'gold' and Bavarian German varieties &lt;em&gt;spui&lt;/em&gt; german 'Spiel'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In an &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;-sound some part of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth but [!] lets the air escape at the sides[!]. If a speaker does not do this, what remains is a vowel because the air stream is unhindered. This can sometimes facilitate the articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="23365" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T18:14:14.033" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:14:14.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29981" CreationDate="2018-12-20T17:49:54.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with fdb. There are estimations that about half of the Scandinavian words were borrowed from Middle Low German in one way or another. For example &lt;em&gt;bli(v)&lt;/em&gt; from nds. &lt;em&gt;bliven&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;betala&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;betalen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is more, English has diverged much from the continental West Germanic languages because of the French loan words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T17:49:54.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29982" CreationDate="2018-12-20T18:20:27.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main patterns where sex of the referent correlates with facts of pronunciation: overt grammatical gender marking on nouns, and &quot;incidental&quot; affixation (not reflecting grammatical gender in the language). Japanese does not have grammatical gender, but the diminutive clitic -&lt;em&gt;ko&lt;/em&gt; is often found in female names. Luo also does not have grammatical gender, but personal names are sex-marked, for example &lt;em&gt;ɔ-jwɔ̂k, o-môlo&lt;/em&gt; are male names and &lt;em&gt;a-jwɔ̂k, ə-môlo&lt;/em&gt; are female names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if a language explicitly marks noun gender at least for masculine and feminine, then it will probably add that marker to male versus female names. For example, in Khoekhoe, nouns referring to males have the suffix &lt;em&gt;-b&lt;/em&gt; and those referring to females have the suffix &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt;, and names follow suit (male names Moseb, Johaneb, Andreab, Simon Petrub; female names Marias, Ruts, Evas, Esters,  Eunikes). Spanish male vs. female names similarly exhibit a sound-sex correlation that reflects masculine versus feminine marking on nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English female names with final -&lt;em&gt;ette, -etta&lt;/em&gt; etc. are analogous to Japanese female names with &lt;em&gt;-ko&lt;/em&gt;, having a historical diminutive suffix. The high correlation between female name and final &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; likewise reflects grammatical gender marking, both Indo-European feminine -&lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt; or Semitic feminine &lt;em&gt;-a(h~t)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:20:27.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T18:43:51.070" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a natural/constructed language which allows us to express hyponyms from hypernyms or hypernyms to hyponyms. For example, pigeon to bird or bird to pigeon, both don't have any relation to them in the morphological sense. So an example bird_1, bird_2, bird_3 ... bird_n, the abstract is bird. bird_1 represents pigeon, bird_2 represents parrot, bird_3 represents owl and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23473" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:43:51.070" Title="Morphology to generate hyponyms or hypernyms" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="29999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21324" CreationDate="2018-12-20T19:49:29.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Grammatical number&quot; Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, there are languages with dual and trial numbers, as well as forms that contrast small numbers with big numbers. The article contains a... number of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To talk about what I know, Proto-Indo-European is assumed to have dual inflections, as many of its daugther languages did, and some still do. So, at least a dual number isn't particularly uncommon among languages that have grammatical number in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T19:49:29.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21324" CreationDate="2018-12-20T20:05:59.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common form of this involves having a &lt;em&gt;dual&lt;/em&gt; number, used for exactly two things, and a &lt;em&gt;plural&lt;/em&gt; number, used for any more than that. You'll find this in older Indo-European languages and modern Inuit and Semitic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic: &lt;em&gt;kitaab&lt;/em&gt; &quot;book&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kitaabayn&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[two] books&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kutub&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[more than two] books&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Biblical) Hebrew: &lt;em&gt;yōm&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;, &lt;em&gt;yomayim&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[two] days&quot;, &lt;em&gt;yāmīm&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[more than two] days&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Epic) Greek: &lt;em&gt;anthrōpos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;human&quot;, &lt;em&gt;anthrōpō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[two] humans&quot;, &lt;em&gt;anthrōpoi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[more than two] humans&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inuktitut: &lt;em&gt;matu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;door&quot;, &lt;em&gt;matuuk&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[two] doors&quot;, &lt;em&gt;matuit&lt;/em&gt; &quot;[more than two] doors&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages also have a &lt;em&gt;trial&lt;/em&gt; number, used for three things; the trial only exists in languages that also have a dual, and has never been documented to exist in nouns, only in pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others, instead of dual/plural, have a &lt;em&gt;paucal/plural&lt;/em&gt; distinction. The paucal is used for &quot;a few&quot; of something, that is, any small number. I'm less familiar with this one, but something similar does exist in Russian, only in the genitive case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1, 2, 3, 4 &lt;em&gt;kamnja&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of stones [few]&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5, 6, 7, etc &lt;em&gt;kamnej&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of stones [many]&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T20:05:59.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30006" CreationDate="2018-12-20T20:46:32.213" Score="6" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have linguists measured the rate of evolution of a language by analyzing the rate of change of the language's words' usages over time? Is there a term for this sort of measurement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose a language has N words (or usages of a word) W&lt;sub&gt;0&lt;/sub&gt;, W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;, …, W&lt;sub&gt;n&lt;/sub&gt;. For each W&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; one could associate a rate of increase or decrease R&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt; (e.g., determined with &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.google.com/ngrams&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's N-grams&lt;/a&gt; or, better, using some other smarter means which can distinguish usages). Then the rate of change of the language could be estimated by taken some kind of average of all the W&lt;sub&gt;i&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T04:01:52.627" Title="How is the rate of evolution of a language measured?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T21:06:07.693" Score="9" ViewCount="3302" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek, &lt;em&gt;πνεῦμα&lt;/em&gt; (pneuma) can mean &quot;breath&quot; as in &quot;a breath of air&quot; (literal) or &quot;divine breath of inspiration&quot; (figurative); it can also mean &quot;life&quot;, &quot;spirit&quot;, and &quot;vitality&quot; as demonstrated in ancient medicine as well as philosophical doctrines such as that of Stoicism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, nouns like &lt;em&gt;anima&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;spiritus&lt;/em&gt; have similar properties, with the verb &lt;em&gt;spiro&lt;/em&gt; meaning both &quot;to breathe&quot; and &quot;to be alive&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sanskrit (and Hindi), similarly, the noun meaning &quot;breath&quot;, &lt;em&gt;प्राण&lt;/em&gt; (prāṇa), also carries the meaning of &quot;life&quot;, &quot;spirit&quot;, &quot;soul&quot;, etc.; this second meaning is described in &lt;em&gt;Upanishads&lt;/em&gt;, and is also frequently invoked in Hindu philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, a word of comparable nature is &lt;em&gt;רוּחַ&lt;/em&gt; (rúach). This one is particularly interesting as it shows up in the Bible in Genesis 2:7 in the form of the phrase &quot;breath of life&quot; (נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Classical Chinese, the character 氣 (pinyin: qi4; Baxter-Sagart: /*C.qʰəp-s/) takes a variety of meaning including both &quot;breath&quot; and &quot;life&quot;, especially in a philosophical context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without listing more examples, I would like to know how this phenomenon came to be -- despite some obvious connections (such as those between Greek and Latin words), most of these words have clearly different etymological origins, yet the way they communicate a shared idea of &quot;breath of life&quot; strikes me as extremely similar. Is it related to certain primitive animist beliefs that commonly attribute the origin of life to &quot;breath&quot;? If so, what are the earliest textual evidences testifying these beliefs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23477" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T17:42:15.383" Title="Why are there words meaning both &quot;breath&quot; and &quot;life/spirit&quot; in so many languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2018-12-20T21:07:47.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just my observation but it's in favor of this hypothesis. In songs for example where the meter clashes with the natural stress of a word containing a schwa, I have observed that the stressed schwa becomes /ʌ/, even when the spelling of the specific word does not indicate that there ever was a /ʌ/ in this position. (Maybe I'll be able to recall an example later.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to that I would call the articulation of /ʌ/ the most similar to /ə/ from all English phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T21:07:47.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30005" CreationDate="2018-12-21T01:24:35.247" Score="-1" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Character based language seems like such a wonderful concept; Instead of describing concepts in multiple symbols using an alphabet, and decode the symbol based on sounds(then throw in a bunch of context based exceptions, to throw us off and effectively make the words useless unless you already know them, so we end up reading them in familiar blocks anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can theoretically just encode the meaning into single characters and decode them at constant time from a single glance if we already know them, which is nice since we have a limited eye focus, and longer words take longer time to recognize and decode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefits are obvious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Less ink is needed to print text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Text takes up less space, so we need less page thrashing in the event that an idea gets split up across multiple pages and we need to look back/forward multiple times to make sense of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The symbols are language independant, in that any language can replace any of their alphabet-words that they find they use too often, and end up taking too much space, with the character, and then people from any language can decode the symbol if they have learnt what it means. You don't need to know what it sounds like to know what it is. There's no reason in English that we can't replace the word &quot;language&quot; with 语, which definitely takes up less ink, and it's possible to simplify it further by finding another unique character that uses up less ink.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The symbols are easier to recognize if you already know it, since our focal point is fairly small, so instead of having to take in multiple focal points of text, we can take up as much information as possible out of a single focal point of text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing these advantages, I have two questions(and a less relevant third one);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) why do many translators/dictionaries translate &quot;语言&quot;/language, &quot;餐饮&quot;/food, &quot;随机&quot;/random, &quot;商业&quot;/business,  when there are single-character symbols for them already - 语, 馈, 乱, 勾 respectively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) why are there some words that are really useful that are not in any online translator/dictionary I've seen so far, for example the color &quot;cyan&quot;/青色 is a very important color that is the compliment of red, yet does not seem to have a single-character chinese symbol for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) does there exist a character set that overcomes these limitations, or is Chinese the best we got so far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I wanted an existing system of characters to encode some commonly used longer words(mostly colors, directions, terms), and due to these two reasons, it gets really tricky to do such mapping without getting into situations where I have to invent new characters(how would one go around inventing a symbol for cyan or magenta?), or decide which of the characters better fits what I want to encode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparent Observations and side-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One part of the reason is that Chinese characters are not as&#xA;  language-independent as you think and do, in fact, represent Chinese&#xA;  pronunciation. That is why you have a &quot;horse&quot; 马 component in the&#xA;  yes/no question marker 吗 (which in itself shows that Chinese&#xA;  characters are also tied to Chinese grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[question 1]. Does 马 and 吗 have the same or similar pronunciation among all dialects, or is this a case of it only making sense at a radical level to the &quot;primary/majority dialect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[question 2]. Is it known why the way the character sounds was emphasized by the character rather than its' meaning? Is there really no inherent relationship between 马 and 吗 other than sound hint?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would translate 乱 as disorderly or chaotic (with rather negative&#xA;  connotations) and cyan as 青 (but then 青 and 青色 can be anything between&#xA;  blue and green and 青 can also mean &quot;young&quot;). This is part of the&#xA;  reason why two-character words are also preferred in written Chinese -&#xA;  because single characters tend to be too ambigious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[question 1]. Is this negative/positive connotation preserved among different dialects, or do different dialects and regions using same dialect decide the connotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[question 2]. Is this case of 青 meaning ambiguity of young/cyan/green/blue preserved among different dialects or regions using the same language, or does it vary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[question 3]. Is this ambiguity in meaning of single-character words based on phonetic collision, or overloaded/multiple meaning based on context?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14501" LastEditorUserId="14501" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T03:07:14.003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T10:52:13.723" Title="why does chinese have multi-symbol words and often seem to lack single-symbol word synonyms?" Tags="&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30004" CreationDate="2018-12-21T01:52:25.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One part of the reason is that Chinese characters are not as language-independent as you think and do, in fact, represent Chinese pronunciation. That is why you have a &quot;horse&quot; 马 &lt;em&gt;mǎ&lt;/em&gt; component in the yes/no question marker 吗 &lt;em&gt;ma&lt;/em&gt; (which in itself shows that Chinese characters are also tied to Chinese grammar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that you get two-character responses is that this is how Chinese use their language (both written and spoken) nowadays - i.e. lots of two-syllabic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I would translate 乱 as disorderly or chaotic (with rather negative connotations) and cyan as 青 (but then 青 and 青色 can be anything between blue and green and 青 can also mean &quot;young&quot;). This is part of the reason why two-character words are also preferred in written Chinese - because single characters tend to be too ambigious &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;-wise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been hinted at in the comments, the reason for the many two-syllabe words in spoken Chinese is probably that monosyllabic words would be to ambiguous phonetically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re. questions in the comments: Chinese characters were not really invented, but developed over several millenia. A reasonably recent and very large developmental step character simplification in the PRC in the 1950s. But also this step tried to preserve the internal logic of the script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What apparently happened a lot is that there was a need to write down stuff that is not easily shown in simple pictures, like the question particle above or feelings. In such cases, it was easy to use phonetic helpers, e.g. fear &lt;em&gt;pa&lt;/em&gt; as the feeling that sounds somewhat similar to &lt;em&gt;bai&lt;/em&gt; white (怕 and 白). I would assume Japanese found this confusing and that is the reason why Kanjis have both Japanese and Chinese readings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am writing this as someone who has spent some time lesrning Chinese - I am neither a native speaker nor a linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23437" LastEditorUserId="23437" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T10:52:13.723" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T10:52:13.723" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30001" CreationDate="2018-12-21T04:01:52.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert B. Lees devised a &quot;glottochronological constant&quot; in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert B. Lees, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/Zotero/storage/CQSZ6LBH/Lees%20-%201953%20-%20The%20Basis%20of%20Glottochronology.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Basis of Glottochronology&lt;/a&gt;,” &lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt; 29, no. 2 (1953): 113–27.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is shown that a linguistic dating system can be set up on the basis of several explicit assumptions about morpheme decay. Thirteen sets of data, presented in partial justification of these assumptions, serve as a basis for calculating a universal constant to express the average rate of retention k of the basic-root-morphemes: k = 0.8048 ± 0.0176 per millennium, with a confidence limit of 90%. Finally an expression is derived for the sampling-error to be expected in the calculated time-depths of related dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12995" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T04:01:52.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21324" CreationDate="2018-12-21T06:50:41.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a partial answer because I don't remember details, sorry for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Russian noun can have up to 4 numeral endings (including the singular forms). The first is its &quot;original form&quot; and is used only for 1. The second form is used for 2, 3 and 4. The third form is used for 5 to 10. These three forms also apply to (21, 31, 41...) / (22, 23, 33, 44...) / (25, 36, 47, 58, 69 ...). A fourth form exists for 11 to 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also heard that something similar exists in Polish, but I know nothing about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23435" LastEditorUserId="23435" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T06:57:33.967" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T06:57:33.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30009" CreationDate="2018-12-21T09:34:46.907" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language and dialect distinction is very simple when &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; is phonetically different. Do (read:can) tones carry the same weight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take one extreme: two languages share the same words &amp;amp; grammatical properties, &lt;em&gt;phonetically&lt;/em&gt; speaking words are the same but the two languages (if you will) have two different tonal systems. The differences in the two different tonal systems could make it so certain words sound like other words, when communicating among the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do differences in tonal systems make enough of an argument to distinguish between languages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T16:04:01.363" Title="How much weight do tones carry in differentiating languages/dialects?" Tags="&lt;tonal-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30008" CreationDate="2018-12-21T12:27:49.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;em&gt;it depends&lt;/em&gt;, just like any other phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes in tonal system are fairly common, and examples of &quot;speech varieties&quot; that are still considered (more or less) the same &lt;em&gt;by their own communities&lt;/em&gt; include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Southern Vietnamese has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.casl.umd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/THE-UPS-AND-DOWNS-OF-VIETNAMESE-TONES-2009.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;merged&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;em&gt;hỏi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ngã&lt;/em&gt; tones (to my ears the merged tone has characteristics of both, but is closer to &lt;em&gt;ngã&lt;/em&gt;), and Southern Vietnamese has a noticeably different contour for the &lt;em&gt;nặng&lt;/em&gt; tone which sounds like the Northern &lt;em&gt;hỏi&lt;/em&gt; tone (low falling-rising).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Fuqing dialect (a variety of Min Dong / Eastern Min, one of the Sinitic family) has undergone a change (through the 70s-00s?) where the &quot;younger generation&quot; (ill-defined, but more or less modern generation) have a new pattern of tone sandhi where for certain combinations &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; earlier and later lexemes change tone. The &quot;older generation&quot; have the more common pattern where only non-final syllables change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zhongshan Cantonese (including the native one of Macau) &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/10708/macau-cantonese-any-differences-from-hk&quot;&gt;merges&lt;/a&gt; the 2nd and 5th tones into one rising tone, although the 2nd tone (higher rising tone) reappears in certain lexically derived phonemes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with phonemic mergers as the &lt;em&gt;marry-merry-Mary&lt;/em&gt; merger in English or the nasal vowel shift in Metropolitan French vs Quebec French, or distinción/seseo/ceceo in Spanish. The perception of a whether something is a different language also requires a lot more than a shift in sounds, whether that sound change is a tonal system or consonants or vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's much data describing speech varieties with a tone &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; change but without a large scale change in other phonological features. I would posit that the nearest situation to that would be the local dialects of Mandarin: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the four tone system of Beijing (and hence Standard Mandarin); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the five tone system (where one is actually a glottal stop) is quite common in the Jianghuai region (Lower Yangtze, basically around Nanjing) and in conservative varieties of Southwestern Mandarin;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;three tone systems (usually with the historical 平 píng tones merged) exist in the far western reaches of Central Plains Mandarin e.g. in Gansu.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Neutral tones also come into play, and they differ too, but there's a deep grammatical interaction there.) However, a lot of these have distinct differences in vowels and consonants too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even between Beijing and Tianjin, both ostensibly four-tone systems with relatively similar phonologies but different realisations of tones, but also very different tone sandhi systems, are perceived as different &quot;speech varieties&quot; with some but limited mutual intelligibility. Then again, lexis differs too; there's also very different phonological reduction processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the question as it stands is a little bit too theoretical to be answered in any meaningful way. But the evidence (at least in the East and SE Asian sprachbund) suggests that there's not much difference to any other phonemic system change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T15:57:43.880" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T15:57:43.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-21T14:53:04.363" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a supplemental noun phrase and a absolute clause? In these examples and in general. Is it just the non-finite nature of the second example ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He won at his favourite sport, the long-jump, and brought another medal home for the U.S, &lt;strong&gt;the most fitting &lt;em&gt;conclusion&lt;/em&gt; to his brilliant career in track and field.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun phrase functioning as a supplement/ syntactically separate element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He just stood there, &lt;strong&gt;his face clearly revealing his disappointment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolute clause: called absolute because it serves no grammatical function in the sentence. It just adds supplemental information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23480" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T14:53:04.363" Title="Noun Phrase/absolute clause distinction" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-21T15:21:19.170" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about how a &quot;b̃&quot; is the same thing as an &quot;m&quot; and a &quot;s̪&quot; is the same thing as a &quot;θ&quot;. Maybe the same applies to ŋ͡͡j and ɲ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23481" LastEditorUserId="23481" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T15:50:50.670" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T15:50:50.670" Title="What is the difference between ŋ͡͡j and ɲ?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-12-29T20:21:22.827" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30008" CreationDate="2018-12-21T16:04:01.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two ways of looking at the &quot;weight&quot; of tone: significance imputed by linguists doing an analysis, and degree to which it interferes with comprehension, for speakers. Based especially on African tonal systems, I have concluded that tonal differences are perceptually less important, compared to segmental differences. Another way to put this is that groups tend to differentiate in terms of tone more than they do in terms of segmental phonology. As an example, there are dozens of dialects of Makua, and what defines the dialect differences is predominantly tonal. In the Luyia languages, researchers commonly find that every speaker defines a tonal &quot;dialect&quot; even when the rest of the grammar is the same. So tonal differences are an extremely common form of dialect difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a tendency by linguists to disregard tone, where variation in whether a proto-phoneme is pronounced &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;θ&lt;/em&gt; is more likely to be noted and analyzed in terms of &quot;the features of dialect X&quot;, but analogously simple tonal differences are disregarded and not considered to be important enough to define a dialect difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T16:04:01.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30015" CreationDate="2018-12-21T18:59:46.060" Score="5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Merritt Ruhlen, over 50% of occurrences of phonemic labialization are applied to dorsal (velar and uvular) consonants, while coronals are usually left out. There are a few families where this doesn't apply because labialization results from historically rounded vowels, such as the Northwest Caucasian languages, but it appears to exist most of the time. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23269" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T16:55:17.617" Title="Why is phonemic labialization often found only on dorsal consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2241" CreationDate="2018-12-21T20:51:55.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two disclaimers: It's been a long time ago that I read Halliday, and (secondly) I don't know that anyone agrees with me here.  But to my mind, it's not a real theory.  He constructs a descriptive framework which tells us how to describe languages, but not why not to describe them some other way.  It's not science -- it's language appreciation.  His framework is not vulnerable to counter-evidence.  I find this boring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with Chomsky's theories.  These, you can, so to speak, get your teeth into. There's plenty to disagree with and find evidence against.  Now, that's fun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T20:51:55.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30013" CreationDate="2018-12-21T21:17:58.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation is based on phonetics. A back (velar or uvular) constriction causes the second formant to be low, as does rounding. Together, labiovelars have a very low F2, and that results in a very distinctive sound. A coronal consonant on the other hand has a high F2, but adding rounding lowers F2, so the resulting sound is perceptually less distinctive. Ohala &amp;amp; Lorenz &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/story_of_w.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;the story of w&quot;&lt;/a&gt; explains the acoustic basis for labiovelar preferences (though not including [tʷ] compared to [t])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T16:55:17.617" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T16:55:17.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-21T21:50:50.127" Score="2" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“attachment ambiguity” is when a constituent could be legally attached to more than one parts of a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“coordination ambiguity” is when a modifier could be attached to an entire conjunction or to just a single component of the conjunction.  Ex: “delicious cookies and milk” could mean ⓐ “delicious cookies” + “milk”, or ⓑ “delicious cookies” + “delicious milk”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are treated separately in the articles I've seen, but “coordination ambiguity” seems to be a subset (kind) of “attachment ambiguity”.  Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23483" LastActivityDate="2018-12-21T21:50:50.127" Title="Is “coordination ambiguity” a subset of “attachment ambiguity”?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30018" CreationDate="2018-12-22T02:31:23.443" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of this letters can be seen in the word וכשלהתמרמרויותינו&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the וכש at start mean &quot;and during to&quot; (the entire word means &quot;and during to our grumblings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23484" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T03:18:13.577" Title="Are the hebrew prefix letters (משה וכלב) considered a form of agglutination?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;agglutination&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30017" CreationDate="2018-12-22T03:18:13.577" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;These morphemes (&lt;em&gt;ve&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kshe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;when&quot;, etc.) are in linguistic terms actually not prefixes, but proclitics. You can read more about the distinction between affixes and clitics &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Agglutination generally refers to affixes, not clitics, so most linguists would probably not speak of agglutination in this case. (That said, the distinction between affixes and clitics can be rather fuzzy, as can that between agglutinative and other types of languages, so there may be some room for argument here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T03:18:13.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30026" CreationDate="2018-12-22T08:07:36.410" Score="3" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was seeing a video of a parrot speaking Korean, &#xA;and I thought the way the parrots distinct between aspiration.&#xA;As I am not Korean, I really do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of distinctions a parrot can make in the speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they speak voiced/unvoiced, aspirated/non apsirated, tonal, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T00:04:47.663" Title="Limitations of the parrot speech?" Tags="&lt;korean&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;tonal-languages&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30013" CreationDate="2018-12-22T14:41:55.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Labialisation has nothing to do with a low F2. If it was the case laryngeal and pharyngealised consonants, which have also a low F2, will know in the same manner a high frequency of labialisation. But such observations have not been noticed, the perception is not at stake here. So we have to explain that in another way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to me, the answer is probably a articulatory problem. The sequences [ku] / [kw] or [gu] / [gw] cannot stand together, because they are homorganic (same place of articulation: dorsal). In consequence, a coalescence or a assimilation phenomenon will occur more easily, facilitating the labialisation of these consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point, as the rounding posterior vowels and velar consonants are more frequently found among the world languages, so, automatically, labialised velar will be statistically more representative in comparison to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T14:41:55.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29963" CreationDate="2018-12-22T18:17:49.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arnaud Fournet &amp;amp; Allan R. Bomhard did a joint effort on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/642012/The_Indo-European_Elements_In_Hurrian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European elements in Hurrian&lt;/a&gt;. I am not aware of any other attempt to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European/Proto-Indo-Germanic by including Hurrian into the equation. The idea is nevertheless controversial and has no wider support. Consider therefore this suggestion a minority view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are however other theories regarding non-Indo-European words found in Germanic languages and Celtic that have exclusive cognates only in Greek (within IE). This peculiar (Non-Indo-European/Pre-Greek/Pre-Germanic) vocabulary is related to agriculture and marine animals, therefore has led in turn several scholars to suspect a source near Greece, Asia Minor and the Near East where Hattic, Hurrian, Urartian and Minoan were once spoken. Since agriculture spread into Europe from Anatolia, through Greece, it is possible that early Indo-Europeans came in contact with those early farmers and adopted those terms. Of course, the current material is very scarce to prove this, but its a better shot explaining the presence of such vocabulary instead of trying to fit non-Indo-European words into Indo-European reconstructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details I suggest the following works (in order of relevance):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kroonen, G., 2012. Non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic: evidence&#xA;  in support of the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis. A linguistic map&#xA;  of prehistoric Northern Europe, pp.239-260.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Schrijver, P. C. H. (2011). 'La langue hattique et sa pertinence&#xA;  possible pour les contacts linguistiques préhistoriques en Europe&#xA;  occidentale'. Contacts linguistiques dans l’Occident méditerranéen&#xA;  antique, 241-255.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Schrijver, P.C.H., 2007. Keltisch en de buren: 9000 jaar taalcontact&#xA;  (pp. 1-32). Utrecht University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kroonen, G.J., 2012. On the etymology of Greek ἄγλῑς and γέλγις&#xA;  'garlic': an Akkadian loanword in Pre-Greek. Journal of Indo-European&#xA;  Studies, 40, p.289.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tardivo, G., &amp;amp; Kitselis, 2017, P. Prometheus or Amirani part 2. An updated&#xA;  study on the Pre-Greek substrate and its origins, Palaeolexicon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T18:27:49.287" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T18:27:49.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17427" CreationDate="2018-12-22T20:51:10.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak French very well, but I would assume that in the language memory of French speakers, along with the base form of the word, one stores the consonant that one uses in liaison. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same way that English speakers know that the past tense of &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;took&lt;/em&gt;, while the past tense of &lt;em&gt;bake&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;baked&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;book.&lt;/em&gt; The past and perfect forms of irregular verbs are somehow associated with the verbs in our memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact, there aren't that many things you have to remember. In modern French, liaison does not apply to (most) consonants on the end of singular nouns; these are forbidden liaisons. Thus, all one has to know is the ending for adverbs, adjectives, verbs, function words, and plural nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plural nouns have the liaison consonant /z/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The endings of verbs are regular, because the conjugated forms end in predictable consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonants to use for liaison on the ends of adjectives are closely related to the feminine form of the adjective. For example, &lt;em&gt;gros&lt;/em&gt;, whose consonant for liaison is &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;, has the feminine form &lt;em&gt;grosse&lt;/em&gt;, where the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is still pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most adverbs end with &lt;em&gt;-ment&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are not all that many function words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One wonders whether this is the reason that liaison at the end of (most) singular nouns is forbidden in modern French—people couldn't remember which consonant went with which noun, so they stopped pronouncing them. These liaisons do seem to have been made in the past; there are a few frozen expressions where one still uses liaison after nouns, for example &lt;em&gt;fait accompli&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1049" LastEditorUserId="1049" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T21:53:57.933" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T21:53:57.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-22T22:27:11.407" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I started learning Portuguese years ago, all the books I used at the time told me that when using possessive adjectives you also have to put the corresponding definite article in front of the possessive adjective. For instance, &quot;my name&quot; should be translated as &quot;o meu nome&quot;; &quot;his house&quot; as &quot;a sua casa&quot; etc. Is this rule still in practice in Portuguese? And is there a difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese in using the definite article with possessive adjectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23490" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T12:23:52.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T04:16:35.583" Title="Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30019" CreationDate="2018-12-23T00:04:47.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think issue has been explored in a systematic way, and it's not clear how it could be. Theoretically, one might record human language contrasts like &lt;em&gt;tal, thal, ttal&lt;/em&gt; uttered by a parrot (how do you decide that the parrot intended to utter &lt;em&gt;tal&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;thal&lt;/em&gt;?), and present them to human speakers of the language, to see if (without training) they correctly identify intended &quot;tal&quot; utterances vs. &quot;thal&quot; vs &quot;ttal&quot;. I assume that Georgian speakers can make sense of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcGlNMbni0w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chiko&lt;/a&gt;; if you edit it down to just one word so that you can't rely on context – and where phonetic precision of necessary to distinguish words of the language – &#xA;It is pretty clear that they have at best approximate skills in reproducing human sounds (they are kinda small, so it's physically impossible for them to sound like an actual human). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y3VX8VU9kI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This bird&lt;/a&gt; is pretty good; but focusing on the bird's actual output and not the owner's suggestions, it's a little less impressive. at 47 sec in &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0TfoYecl56C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is a word&lt;/a&gt; which is potentially one member of a minimal pair (initial voicing) and I wondered whether I would perceive it as voiced or voiceless. As you can see, it doesn't actually sound like speech. You can compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s1b7C1xh5WtD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;go&quot;&lt;/a&gt; at 60 sec and &lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s0yWDRIirPUO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;clover&quot;&lt;/a&gt; at 78 sec, again looking for evidence of control over voicing. Of course, this is cute animal tricks on Youtube, not a controlled scientific experiment, but I think it indicates some of the problems with performing the experiment, especially in a way that the test was about the parrots and not the humans making judgments about the parrot sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T00:04:47.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29963" CreationDate="2018-12-23T07:12:06.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(The &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30022/6793&quot;&gt;answer from Midas&lt;/a&gt; is correct and more authoritative, here I will answer with a different focus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current thinking on the classification of Hurro-Urartian is still that it is a primary language family, with no phylogenetic relation to Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were generally rejected attempts by Diakonoff to connect it to the Northeast Caucasian family of Lezgic and Vakh, which as far as I know were based on coincidences or loanwords or other features that one might expect after thousands of years of contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no direct relationship.  There are three main points of contact between Hurro-Urartian and Indo-European:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contact between Hurro-Urartian and ill-fated Indo-European languages like Luwian and Hittite, which was a very dominant language across the region.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contact between Hurro-Urartian and Iranic languages, over which little is written, but from the times and dates we know must have been significant.  It includes Cimmerian from North of the Black Sea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contact between Hurro-Urartian and Armenian and proto-Armenian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter was intensive.  &lt;em&gt;Armenia&lt;/em&gt; was originally a translation of &lt;em&gt;Urartu&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Ararat&lt;/em&gt; - the Semitic and then European cognate of &lt;em&gt;Urartu&lt;/em&gt; - is still generally synonymous with the Armenian highlands.  Hurro-Urartian languages were still widely spoken in Armenia in the first millennium BC, the language shifted to Armenian only gradually.  Unsurprisingly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Old_Armenian_terms_derived_from_Hurro-Urartian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurro-Urartian substrate in Armenian&lt;/a&gt; is significant and mostly in those words for native concepts.  There are also speculations about structural influence, certainly Armenian while typically Indo-European in some ways has areal features, for example lack of grammatical gender, and arguably post-positions, and phonology, for example consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, there is some less direct contact between Hurro-Urartian and the ancestors of other living Indo-European languages, for example via Hittite with Greek, via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hattic&lt;/a&gt; or via Semitic, which was very dominant.  Note that there is a growing view that Armenian, Greek and Albanian split a bit later than the rest, that Armenian was related to Phrygian, and that the proto-Armenian language moved eastward, but this is not the only view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are notably Wanderwörter from the region of unknown origin or considered simply substrate, for example &lt;em&gt;cherry&lt;/em&gt;, and ancient loans like &lt;em&gt;wine&lt;/em&gt;.  But of course historically there has been too much focus on vocabulary and even pronunciation and strict trees and not enough on deeper mechanics and possible fusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anatolian hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;.  Personally I find it implausible but accept that the overall story may be complicated, clearly multiple waves of Indo-European languages were attested in the Armenian highlands and Mesopotamia even back when nearly all civilisational output was in the other direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longer and more intense the contact, the more the languages bleed together, and the more tempting it becomes to purposefully or foolishly re-construct a pseudo-scientific phylogenetic relationship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T20:14:38.977" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T20:14:38.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-23T13:38:43.810" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the main differences between Pre-Hilalian Tunisian dialects ( or any other Maghrebi dialects ) and the Hilalian ones ( Pronunciation , vocabulary ... ) . &#xA;Let’s take the dialect I speak as an exemple : The /q/ is maintained , “Enti” (you) is used for both male and female , interdentals are maintained , no diphthongs ( “lil” for night , although my grandma , whose from Bizerte , says “leyl” with the diphthongs maintained) , there are many worlds of latin origin : kayyes ( trig/triq in other dialects , from the latin word callis ) , qattus ( cat ) , kurda ( rope ) , karrusa ( carriage from latin carrus ) , kalsita ( sock from latin calcia ) ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23493" LastEditorUserId="23493" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T20:34:53.707" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T20:34:53.707" Title="Pre-Hilalian Hilalian dialects comparaison" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17427" CreationDate="2018-12-23T18:12:31.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Illiterate French people have learned it the same way every literate person has. It doesn't have anything to do with the written language. No, they don't know the spelling because they are illiterate –you could say per definition. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once they have heard a word in a context where liaison occurs, they can learn that the lexeme (word) has a consonant in final position. If they then hear the same lexeme without the final consonant in a position before a vowel, they have to learn that some different lexemes do not cause liaison. This is the case in words beginning with the so-called &quot;aspirated h&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T18:12:31.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28138" CreationDate="2018-12-23T20:17:26.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you know it's not like there aren't synonyms in Persian. Look: &lt;em&gt;Ari&lt;/em&gt; (آری) and &lt;em&gt;bali&lt;/em&gt; (بلی) are totally formal and you can find them in old Farsi books (but you can't find &lt;em&gt;hA&lt;/em&gt; there).&#xA;Farsi is an Indo-European language but it doesn't mean that all the words in Farsi should have an Indo-European root. &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ari&lt;/em&gt; (آری) changed to &lt;em&gt;Are&lt;/em&gt; (آره), and Are is less formal. &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Bali&lt;/em&gt; (‌بلی) changed to &lt;em&gt;bale&lt;/em&gt; (بله) but &lt;em&gt;bale&lt;/em&gt; is formal and proper to use. Note that we still use &lt;em&gt;Ari&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bali&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;hA&lt;/em&gt;, it's just used in spoken Farsi and has the same meaning as &lt;em&gt;Are&lt;/em&gt; (آره) (used to express agreement) but it does have other meanings like &quot;what&quot; (when you don't understand what someone's talking about). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for خوا, there is no such word as خوا but there is خا.&#xA;The latter is totally informal and used in spoken Farsi only, it's also kind of rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also know that &lt;em&gt;Are&lt;/em&gt; (اره) isn't used exclusively in the Northern part of Iran. It's used everywhere just like hA (ها).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23495" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T22:20:59.063" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T22:20:59.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29926" CreationDate="2018-12-23T23:55:27.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert on this, but plan on writing my dissertation on something similar. Since no one has answered yet, here are a couple of resources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~miriamp/fillmore-tribute/slides/Collin_Baker.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~miriamp/fillmore-tribute/slides/Collin_Baker.pdf&lt;/a&gt; - This talks about some NLP applications of FrameNet, which is based on CG&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fcg-net.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fcg-net.org/&lt;/a&gt; - Fluid CG, which is an instantiation of CG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to hear about more, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T23:55:27.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30025" CreationDate="2018-12-24T00:26:42.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rule is different. It only applies when the possessive pronoun is substantive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Este é meu livro, &lt;strong&gt;o seu&lt;/strong&gt; é o outro. (This is my book, &lt;strong&gt;yours&lt;/strong&gt; is the other one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most other contexts, the use of the definite article is optional, not mandatory, and I don't think there is any difference between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese in this regard. In this it is actually different from English, Spanish or French, where the possessive pronoun excludes the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The my house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*La mi casa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Le mon frère&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demonstrate that the article is not mandatory in other situations, here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.santabarbara.sp.gov.br/biblioteca/caic/m_titulo.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of books beggining with &amp;quot;M&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;; it features titles such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu amigo canguru (Pinto, Ziraldo Alves) (My friend the Kangaroo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu caro H (Thomaz, Samir) (My dear H)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu corpo (Finifter, Germaine) (My body)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu Filho tem medo (Schachter, Robert) (My son is afraid)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu livro de ciências (Souza, Anna Maria Alves de) (My Science book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu livro de Folclore. (Azevedo, Ricardo) (My Folklore book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu livro de Pesquisas (Guimarães, Décio Gonçalves Ribeiro) (My Research book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu livro de saúde. (Lamare, Dr. Rinaldo de) (My Health book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu mundo Adolecente (Zezinho, Pe. S.C.J.) (My teenage world)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu primeiro dicionário. (Tersariol, Solange Feletto) (My first dictionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu primeiro namorado (West, Callie) (My first boyfriend)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meu suposto namorado (Winfrey, Elizabeth) (My supposed boyfriend)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meus três namorados (Page, Alexis) (My three boyfriends)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minha escola e meu bairro (André, Julierme) (My school and my neighbourhood)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minha irmãzinha é um monstro (Brezina, Thomas) (My little sister is a monster)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minha Primeira Paixão (Bandeira, Pedro) (My first passion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minha profissão é andar (Pecci, João Carlos) (My business is to walk)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minha vida de menina (Morley, Helena) (My life as a girl)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those are even school text books, so these are not cases of slang or informal use of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it would have been perfectly possible for those titles to be accompanied by the appropriate definite article, giving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O meu amigo canguru.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O meu filho tem medo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be used in most contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A minha casa&lt;/strong&gt; fica lá detrás do mundo,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aonde eu vou em um segundo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quando começo a pensar. (Lupicínio Rodrigues, &lt;em&gt;Felicidade&lt;/em&gt;) (My home is there, behind the world,/ where I go in a second/ when I start to think.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some contexts in which the article cannot be used, though. One that is quite obvious is in vocatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Você chegou atrasado, meu velho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Você chegou atrasado, o meu velho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14083" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T04:16:35.583" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30002" CreationDate="2018-12-24T08:40:18.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three possibilities, basically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A shared origin,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Semantic loans,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Independent innovations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All 3 in a symbioses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shared origin would be most exciting and more likely than independent innovation, if it is so succeptable, but only if a common origin of the world languages can be assumed -- which is not at all established--and if the innovation occurred before the divide. Semantic loans and independent innovation could still help to persist the metaphor. However, whole languages could be independent innovations, we really don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic loans are a possibility. All the languages mentioned in the question must  have been in contact, eventually indirectly, as early as the spread of agriculture and metal work attests to, and as late as the bible (loaning from indo iranian in the first place?), unless those were individual innovations. German &quot;Lebensatem&quot; e.g. is a direct analog to the Hebrew. An equation of &quot;Luft&quot; (air, sky) and &quot;Leben, Leib&quot; (life, body) on the other hand seems intangible. Nevertheless, wind odin and odem are significant in Germanic myths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar metaphors like seeing/knowing, juice/power arm/strength abound. Especially Greek humor-theory with parallels in Chinese, or the four elements, is notable, and perhaps Egyptian Ka and Chinese Qi, too. As regards far spread, diverse believes about soul, that's &lt;em&gt;too broad&lt;/em&gt; as a question of comparative religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For fully separate innovation, its pretty easy to see that &quot;doesn't breath&quot; equates to &quot;doesn't live&quot; and that the latter requires euphemism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T22:13:31.870" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T22:13:31.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2018-12-24T23:33:40.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for (a random) curiosity  :D : &#xA; Latin pl, cl and fl bacame [ʃ] in portuguese (written ch). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;planum &gt; chão (doublet of &quot;plano&quot;)&#xA;plattus &gt; chato (doublet of &quot;prato&quot;)&#xA;plenum &gt; cheio (doublet of &quot;pleno&quot;)&#xA;clamare &gt; chamar (doublet of &quot;clamar&quot;)&#xA;clave &gt; chave (&quot;doublet of &quot;clave&quot;)&#xA;flama &gt; chama (doublet of &quot;flama&quot;)&#xA;flor &gt; chor (later replaced by the relatinazed word &quot;flor&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except in words that entered later in the language, in this case, pl, cl, fl etc became pr, cr, fr etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exemple:&#xA;plata &gt; prata &#xA;plato &gt; prato &#xA;claro &gt; craro (later replaced by the relatinazed word &quot;claro&quot;)&#xA;flecha &gt; frecha (later replaced by the relatinazed word &quot;flecha&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T23:33:40.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17377" CreationDate="2018-12-25T21:22:11.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;em&gt;Following TKR's comment bellow, the raccoon came to be known to Europe only in the 17th century, when the name was adopted via&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;calque of the old taxonomic name Ursus lotor&lt;/strong&gt; (now Procyon lotor) to other languages -- Lt. &lt;em&gt;lotor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wash&quot;, cp. *lotion**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to D. Ringe, &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; comes from the root *ǵʰwer- (“wild animal”). In another interpretation, it goes to a meaning &quot;brown&quot;. Either way it is not specific to &lt;em&gt;Ursus&lt;/em&gt;. (Edit: e.g. &lt;em&gt;antbear&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Aardvark&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another Proto-Indo-European root for &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; is *h₂ŕ̥tḱos (Greek &lt;em&gt;arktos&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;ursus&lt;/em&gt;, Albanian &lt;em&gt;ari&lt;/em&gt;, Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;ṛ́kṣa&lt;/em&gt;, Old Persian &lt;em&gt;xers&lt;/em&gt;, Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;irštvà&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;bear's den&quot; &amp;lt; *h₂r̥tḱweh₂&quot; ...) which looks to me a lot like &lt;em&gt;rex&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &quot;king [of the forest]&quot; (which would fit in line so well for a comparison with &lt;em&gt;Kratos&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ruler&quot;, *kret- &quot;intelligence, strength&quot;, cp. demo-crat; It probably doesn't derive &lt;em&gt;Heretic&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;&lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt;-er [of witness]&quot;, but how about that?). At any rate, it seems unlikely that two proper nouns for the bear were in use then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piotr Gąsiorowski has pondered the derivation of &lt;em&gt;to bear&lt;/em&gt; and connected it, tentatively, with the &lt;em&gt;bee-bear&lt;/em&gt;, sorry, &lt;em&gt;beaver&lt;/em&gt; (Ger. &quot;Bieber&quot;) &lt;a href=&quot;http://langevo.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-root-question-why-ber.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at langevo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I may say so, the white parts of fur may have attributed to a sense &quot;shiny&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Raccoon&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand means &quot;the one that scratches with its hands&quot;, which I imagine involved gesticulation to convey the meaning in translation that was not unlike scratching/washing oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T21:52:46.403" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T21:52:46.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20229" CreationDate="2018-12-26T06:05:48.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was in Galicia in 1999.  I read that the last speaker of a Celtic language died around the 1600's.  I believe he lived in the Ourense area.  Galicia and Northern Portugal were one in the same until about 900.  There are tens of words in Gallego and Portuguese that are of Celtic origin.  Obviously, vulgar Latin came to become the main language under Roman rule, so by 200 AD most inhabitants were speaking that form of Latin, but that does not mean many Celtic words died out or were no longer used.  I suggest that the local people of ancient Gallaecia were probably code switching and creating an inter-language for many centuries after Roman control through to the time of the Germanic invasions, much like Spanglish in the USA, a mix of Spanish and English that many Mexican-Americans speak.  Eventually the Latin root words and later the Arabic influences from the invasion of the Moors probably leveled this out, though Muslim control in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula was only for a few centuries, and never did they control Austurias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23509" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T06:05:48.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20688" CreationDate="2018-12-26T14:06:51.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature or lack thereof is common enough across language families.  Besides Hungarian, Turkish and Georgian, it also occurs in Armenian, Persian and apparently Hindi, which are of course Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But questions about popularity are very subjective as it requires us to decide what is a language and how to weight each language, for example Luxembourgish or some dialect of Bengali with far more speakers.  Moreover the way the feature works varies a bit, so the classification is not perfectly binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature is not necessarily about number in the languages mentioned above, but any modifier that implies a plural, including &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a few&lt;/em&gt;.  And often redundant pluralisation is theoretically allowed, but just very emphatic or otherwise marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Finnish and Estonian there are some nuances, in theory the form after a number is a singular form, but by the strict test they do not have the feature, the form used after &lt;em&gt;2&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; is different than that used after &lt;em&gt;1&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases there is simply a specific word which does not require the plural, for example Italian &lt;em&gt;qualche&lt;/em&gt;.  English &lt;em&gt;nil&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; also have some nuances.  In other cases there are certain scenarios which do not require the plural, so for example in English one says &lt;em&gt;fourteen stone&lt;/em&gt;, in German &lt;em&gt;eine Million Euro&lt;/em&gt;, one orders &lt;em&gt;zwo Bier&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;drei Stück Flammkuchen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;viermal&lt;/em&gt; if necessary.  In Slavic languages &lt;em&gt;21, 31... 101... 121...&lt;/em&gt; and so on agree like &lt;em&gt;1&lt;/em&gt;.  But we would not consider this to be a feature of Italian, English, German or Slavic in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More happily, this set of features is relatively practical to test for with machine translation.  Even if not completely reliable for each language, it can answer the question about the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Google Translate is to be believed, it is not really correlated with agglutination or other features like lack of gender, as it occurs in Hindi but not in Tamil.  The feature seems if anything areal and unstable, that is, it varies between closely related languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T14:06:51.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30043" CreationDate="2018-12-26T16:03:25.720" Score="1" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6604/22504&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. I wondered whether &lt;em&gt;bod&lt;/em&gt; in the Beti language translates &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt; and/or &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; just because it's reminiscent of &lt;em&gt;body&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt;. Then I remembered &lt;em&gt;Bantu&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;; Portuguese &lt;em&gt;bunda&lt;/em&gt; &quot;butt, ass&quot; is related to some Bantu dialects' &lt;em&gt;mbunda&lt;/em&gt; (?). This one is strange, because the dialect's name &lt;em&gt;Kimbundu&lt;/em&gt; and its branch &lt;em&gt;Umbundu&lt;/em&gt; contain this root, as if comparable to &lt;em&gt;Bantu&lt;/em&gt;, but Portuguese dictionaries claim the Kimbundu as source and gloss the source likewise with &quot;butt&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, other parallels catch the eye, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Atiñ 1&lt;/em&gt; &quot;article 1&quot;. Looking for a dictionary I only found an appendix of a dissertation about a related language, in which &lt;em&gt;ŋkúŋ&lt;/em&gt; (ngkung) &quot;king&quot; exists [1]. Also, &lt;em&gt;gbúŋ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mountain&quot;, reminds me of Ger. &quot;Umgebung&quot;, if I try hard enough, which is patently absurd, to be honest. Nevertheless an influence due to colonization is thinkable, especially on the related pidgin language (Ewondo populair, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beti_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wp&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are there enough parallels that contamination was proposed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a typological comparison (paywalled) that acknowledges similarities, but without genetic perspective (&quot; ... providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure ...&quot;) [2]. That kind of implies that a systematic influence were inconceivable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcgood/Mve-2013-Fang.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aspects of the phonology of Fáŋ&lt;/a&gt;, p. 145, p, 151.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1075/la.131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bantu–Romance Connection:&#xA;A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T01:39:33.113" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T23:36:38.377" Title="European loans in Bantu" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30025" CreationDate="2018-12-26T16:04:13.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a complete answer, but to the question on variations in different standards and dialects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese#Definite_article_before_possessive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese#Definite_article_before_possessive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W82AS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W82AS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Portuguese version says that both standards allow both variants, but that there are perceptions that the definite article is used less in Brasil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugu%C3%AAs_brasileiro#Artigo_definido_antes_do_possessivo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Português_brasileiro#Artigo_definido_antes_do_possessivo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4D9fn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4D9fn.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T16:04:13.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20688" CreationDate="2018-12-26T16:20:55.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most Berber languages (In Riffian, a numeral does not agree with a noun), agreement for numerals concerns the number and the gender. The noun agrees in number with the numeral and, inversely, the numeral agrees in gender with the noun. An example from Kabyle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yiwen n wergaz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one GEN man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sen n yirgazen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two GEN men&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two men&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sen-t n tillawin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two-F GEN women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two women &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leads to another issue, which is the head? In Berber, numerals are included inside a genetival construction. The numeral behaves as the head of a standard genetival construction, but it agrees as a modifier (because it agrees in gender with the noun). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A discussion about this issue in WALS: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/89&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T16:20:55.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30039" CreationDate="2018-12-26T17:55:52.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The underlying idea as reflected in the book which you mention is that all human languages a similar in certain ways. There is no specific claim of historical special relatedness of contact between the languages, instead, there was a recognition by some Bantuists and Romance-ist that it would be fruitful to combine research efforts to understand those similarities (in three specific areas – clitics and pro drop, DP structure, and topic/focus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly are some borrowings from European languages, for example Ntumu (one of the Beti-Fang languages) has &lt;em&gt;kusínâ&lt;/em&gt; 'kitchen', &lt;em&gt;sɔ́bɔ̂&lt;/em&gt; 'soap'. There are also words that just look like loans, for example Lingala &lt;em&gt;bwato&lt;/em&gt; 'canoe' which is /bo-ato/ does not derive from French &lt;em&gt;bateau&lt;/em&gt;. There are also fanciful relation such as Ntumu &lt;em&gt;aki&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;egg&quot; (the root, widely distributed in Bantu, is -&lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; is a noun class prefix in Ntumi that makes the word look more like &quot;egg&quot;). It is impossible to find any Bantu language that has no borrowings from another language; though as far as I can tell, there are no French loan words in the Luyia languagages (plenty of Swahili and English words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T17:55:52.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30039" CreationDate="2018-12-27T00:37:10.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There absolutely are loanwords from Indo-European in most (if not all) Bantu languages, mostly from the days of colonization. Many of them have been naturalized to the point that it's no longer obvious they're loanwords: Lingála &lt;em&gt;bo-nané&lt;/em&gt; &quot;New Year's Day&quot; has the class prefix &lt;em&gt;bo-&lt;/em&gt;, for example, which masks the fact that it's loaned from French &lt;em&gt;bonne année&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, &lt;em&gt;mo-tokaa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;car&quot; has the class prefix &lt;em&gt;mo-&lt;/em&gt;, but is loaned from English &quot;motor car&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, the biggest source of IE loanwords is English: the Kiswahili spoken in the cities of Kenya and Tanzania tends to be mixed with a large amount of English, for example, which has led to the creation of blended codes like Sheng. Even in &quot;standard&quot; Kiswahili more and more English has been bleeding in, such as the loan &lt;em&gt;Januari&lt;/em&gt; displacing native &lt;em&gt;mwezi wa kwanza&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;first moon&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one especially amusing example, the word for &quot;people&quot; in Kiswahili is &lt;em&gt;wa-tu&lt;/em&gt; (from PB &lt;em&gt;*ba-ntu&lt;/em&gt;, as Kiswahili has lost prenasalized voiceless consonants, and initial &lt;em&gt;*b&lt;/em&gt; lenited). But the word &quot;Bantu&quot; has now been borrowed back from English as &lt;em&gt;wa-Bantu&lt;/em&gt; (with the class prefix for groups of people). So the same word has two forms of the same morpheme, one from the current language and one from the reconstructed proto-language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T23:36:38.377" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T23:36:38.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30062" CreationDate="2018-12-27T09:05:24.577" Score="1" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hindustani language got influenced by West Asian languages like Persian, Arabic, Turkish etc. I wanted to know apart from the West Asian languages which other languages influenced the Hindustani language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;I have updated my question to which languages influenced Hindustani other than the West Asian languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23514" LastEditorUserId="23514" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T19:23:54.593" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T13:04:04.087" Title="Which languages influenced the Hindustani language spoken in India as of today other than the West Asian languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;&lt;urdu&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30050" CreationDate="2018-12-27T10:03:00.757" Score="5" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can click consonants arise from non-click consonants?Or are they an original feature of all languages that was lost in the majority of them and only retained in few?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T17:20:38.373" Title="Click consonant development" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30048" CreationDate="2018-12-27T11:28:56.963" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the words sound similar and have similar meanings so my presumption is that they are derived from one or other or have a similar origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a slight difference in meaning as per my knowledge. The Bengali word 'স্বাধীনতা' pronounced 'sba-dhee-no-ta' means 'freedom' or 'liberty' where as the Hindi word 'स्वाधीनता' pronounced 'svaa-dhee-na-ta' means 'independence'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23515" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T12:09:38.803" Title="Is it possible to trace the origin of words 'স্বাধীনতা' in Bengali and 'स्वाधीनता' in Hindi?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30047" CreationDate="2018-12-27T11:34:43.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are both loanwords (tatsama) from Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/platts_query.py?qs=%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87%D9%8A%D9%86%DB%8C&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/platts_query.py?qs=%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87%D9%8A%D9%86%DB%8C&amp;amp;searchhws=yes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T12:09:38.803" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T12:09:38.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11" CreationDate="2018-12-27T13:25:16.717" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the following link, ( and try by putting your hand on your throat) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-language/voiced-and-voiceless-sounds-of-english-english-language-essay.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-language/voiced-and-voiceless-sounds-of-english-english-language-essay.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23517" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T13:25:16.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30046" CreationDate="2018-12-27T17:20:38.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no known case where click consonants developed by regular sound change from some type of non-click. One can speculate that it could happen from extreme velarization of a language consonant, where the back tongue stricture  in [tˠ] becomes a complete closure. In the case of the Khoisan languages, we have no idea where the clicks came from. Indeed, despite the implication of the name, Khoisan is not a demonstrated language family and the various sub-groups of Khoisan may not be genetically related at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do know that the various Bantu languages of southern Africa plus Cushitic Dahalo of Kenya have borrowed clicks via contact with languages that have clicks. Once clicks are in the inventory, they can be freely used as sounds of the language. In quite a number of cultures (including English-speaking), clicks are used as bare noises for various expressive purposes, such as &quot;tsk!&quot; as the ideophone of disapproval. Clicks are also employed in Damin, which is a now-extinct ritual language used by Lardil speakers. As described by Hale &amp;amp; Nash in &quot;Damin and Lardil phonotactics&quot;, the Damin clicks (which are nasal) do not contrast with non-click nasals. Damin is not a regular genetically-transmitted language (was not learned by children picking up the surrounding language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T17:20:38.373" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30054" CreationDate="2018-12-27T20:15:51.710" Score="5" ViewCount="2584" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages like Japanese have different pronunciations for each character (in the kanji system in this case) , a kanji character can have up to 20 different pronunciations depending on the the word it is in. Is there or was there any language where each character is pronounced differently depending on the word it's in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T01:27:55.287" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T14:27:13.653" Title="Is there any language where each character is pronounced differently depending on the word it's in?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30051" CreationDate="2018-12-27T21:09:59.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the case in French. Such a differentiation is due to two distinct phenomena: assimilation &amp;amp; polyphonic letters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of assimilations in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;shop is transcribed in French &quot;magasin&quot; and is pronounced [maɡazɛ̃], but the word &quot;oursin&quot; is pronounced [uʁsɛ̃]. So the letter s can be pronounced [s] or [z].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of polyphonic letters in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;garage&quot;, meaning garage, is pronounced [gaʀaʒ]. This example shows that the letter g corresponds to two sounds [g] and [ʒ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can be generalised to other languages with old written traditions as English, Spanish and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us add, ideograms (such the Kanji) are not an alphabetic writing system. Then, there is not relation between the characters and the signifier, instead the symbols are tied to the signified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T21:25:54.797" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T21:25:54.797" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12558" CreationDate="2018-12-27T21:59:35.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To understand this in a non-mathematical way: Think of &quot;sapmle&quot;, whether read or heard. You are likely to understand its meaning from context, because the order of the symbols doesn't matter much as long as the symbols are all there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When talking about the frequency domain, you simply take a &lt;em&gt;sample&lt;/em&gt; that spans a certain length of time, derive the frequency spectrum (by magic, if you will) and throw away the temporal information. The word may become difficult to comprehend without that information, because there's little difference between &quot;my&quot; and &quot;I'm&quot;. Hence, you might want an infinitely small window, down to a point, so that you can look at the frequency domain for every point individually, in sequence. Such a sequence can be plotted over time. If you chose an alphabetic character representation, that looks more or less just like writing does. With sound, you care about the volume (attenuation, velocity) of each individual frequency (or frequency bands, lumping ranges of close frequencies into a single bucket).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically this becomes quite complicated, but the terms &lt;strong&gt;wavelength, frequency, sample-frequency&lt;/strong&gt; (or sample-size) and &lt;strong&gt;band-width&lt;/strong&gt; are need-to-know. frequency is the inverse of wavelength [Hz]=[1/s]. The thing with the bandwidth is rather fundamental, it comes up in the &lt;em&gt;sampling-theorem&lt;/em&gt;. You need to watch a signal for twice the length of the wavelength you are interested in (that is, low pitch has a longer wavelength). That's an irrelevant technical detail perhaps. But consequently, you need to know your sampling frequency. You cannot record an infinite amount of sample points, so you need to look at points in certain intervals that are shorter than half the wavelength of the highest frequency that you are interested in. You need enough samples to cover the wavelength of the lowest frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beauty of it is that periodic signals (like a long &quot;aaaaaaaaaaa&quot;) can be freely transformed between time and frequency domain. The two domains are not &quot;independent of one another&quot;, as you put it. It's only a matter of representation. For non-periodic sounds, we can still say that the signal can be approximated by a sum of periodic waves across the spectrum. A bell's gong e.g. has a very low fundamental frequency that determines how long it takes to quiet down (I guess?). Obviously, a bigger bell has a darker tone and takes longer to quiet down because you have to put in more energy to get it to the same average velocity. We can't hear frequencies below or above a certain frequency (ca 20Hz to 20 kHz), but surely we can hear volume change with lower frequencies (hence called low-frequency-oscillation). This is easier to see in a 2D diagram plotting velocity over time and easier to think about in terms of multiplication rather than summation of wave forms (which gives an effect called &lt;em&gt;enveloping&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sin(x%2F100)*sin(x)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see&lt;/a&gt;). To catch a glide (like in &quot;eye&quot;), as a beginner, you need a spectrogram across time, most likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to look for is &lt;em&gt;phase shift&lt;/em&gt;, which is another way to describe shifts in frequency eg. known from the Doppler shift effect (e.g. the changing sound of a passing ambulance's siren).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can test a lot of this for good fun with musical synthesizers, filters and a spectrograph. That's important when cleaning up speech recordings, not so much when analyzing, except if you want to filter for a certain phoneme, or synthesize speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T02:45:59.973" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T02:45:59.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30051" CreationDate="2018-12-27T22:59:34.443" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely that in some language's writing system, each and every character is pronounced differently depending on the word it's in. For that to be true, it would mean that every character has at least two pronunciations. The implication of &quot;what word it is in&quot; is that what determines the pronunciation is the word, and not the general context (for instance, the Devanagari letter त is pronounced differently when it is combined with the letter ि). Kanji may have multiple readings, for example 明 can be &lt;em&gt;myō&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;mei&lt;/em&gt;. Chinese also has multiple readings for a character. But not all characters are like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A candidate for such writing is the Phoenician alphabet, which (originally) only marked consonants, though of course the language did have vowels. So &quot;&quot; could represent [la, li, lu, l] and you would just have to know what the word is. But this is quite different from the situation with readings for Chinese characters. Still, it might be the kind of thing you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T22:59:34.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12558" CreationDate="2018-12-27T23:12:40.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two &quot;domains&quot;, time and frequency. If you are using seconds as the units of measurement, the analysis is in the time domain. If the unit or measurement if Hz, the analysis is in the frequency domain. You are not supposed to analyze one domain as independent of another, indeed &quot;frequency&quot; can only be defined by reference to a unit of time (it recurs this number of times within a unit of time). Cepstral and spectral are not different domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T23:12:40.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30051" CreationDate="2018-12-27T23:25:23.547" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, as a matter of fact!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuneiform (&quot;wedge-shaped&quot;) was a writing system originally developed for the Sumerian language, then adapted for Akkadian, Hittite, and many other languages. But the adaptation process was not particularly consistent. Take this Sumerian glyph for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L2LRq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L2LRq.png&quot; alt=&quot;DIŊIR glyph&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It originally meant the words &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;heaven&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;An&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;An, the god of the sky&quot;. But through synecdoche it could also mean &lt;em&gt;diŋir&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;deity&quot;. And when cuneiform started being used for sounds instead of words, it also meant the syllable &lt;code&gt;/an/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the Akkadians started using the writing system. In Akkadian, this sign was used for the words &lt;em&gt;il&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;god&quot;), or &lt;em&gt;šamû&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;heaven&quot;), taken straightforwardly from the Sumerian meanings. &lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;, it could still be used for the syllable &lt;code&gt;/an/&lt;/code&gt; from Sumerian, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; now for the syllable &lt;code&gt;/il/&lt;/code&gt; from Akkadian!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, some signs, including this one (&quot;DIŊIR&quot;, written in capitals to indicate the sign as opposed to any particular interpretation) could also be used as &lt;em&gt;determiners&lt;/em&gt;, and not pronounced at all! When written before a name, this sign indicates that it's the name of a deity. This is mostly used for clarifying the huge mess of homophones created by this system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T04:17:27.330" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T04:17:27.330" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12558" CreationDate="2018-12-27T23:47:03.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since human perception is based on frequency analysis, as an aid to the intuition, you can just forget about time domain analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T23:53:22.233" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T23:53:22.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30286" CreationDate="2018-12-28T06:53:01.643" Score="2" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about the name of Bruges, Belgium. In Flemish, Bruges is called &quot;Brugge&quot;, and in French, it's called &quot;Bruges&quot;. Despite the city being part of the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium, we call it &quot;Bruges&quot; in English. It seems that this has been the English name for at least a few hundred years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did this name become convention and what is the most likely reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23363" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T09:34:29.157" Title="Why is the English name for Bruges the same as the French despite that it's a Flemish city?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T07:24:20.823" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sentence like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He had joined up for no other reason than to escape, [blank] hated army life.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would use the conjunction &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;. In the equivalent Thai sentence, though, it seems that native speakers would use &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, the first clause makes clear that he didn't really want to join up in the first place, and there's no opposition between that and hating army life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, that clause does state that he joined up, and if you focus on that then there is the same opposition as there would be in &lt;em&gt;he joined up but hated it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should mention that the sentence is in a context where it's definitely not news that the guy in question had joined the army, and isn't really news that he joined up because he felt he had to, not because he really wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I express this difference in more linguistic terms? Can I say that EN looks at the pragmatic meaning of the complex clause as a whole, whereas TH looks at the proposition that appears highest in its structure tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples of this kind of difference, possibly between (other) European languages and other Asian languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T15:05:45.630" Title="Conjunctions between complex clauses - which items do they coordinate?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30051" CreationDate="2018-12-28T14:51:51.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bring you: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The strange case of Mexican &lt;em&gt;'x'&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letter 'X' in Mexican Spanish has &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; different sounds, and it takes some time for a non-native speaker to learn the nuances... Mostly, it's a matter of knowing the right pronunciation for each word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X can sound as you expect, /ks/ in words like &quot;excluir&quot; (exclude) or &quot;extraño&quot; (strange).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Things start to be interesting when you pronounce &quot;Mexico&quot; in Spanish: you need to say /Méjico/ (say /Méksico/ and you may as well wear a T-Shirt saying &quot;I'm a foreigner&quot;). Same goes for &quot;Oaxaca&quot; and &quot;Mexicali&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It starts to get weird when you say &quot;Xochimilco&quot; (a borough in Mexico City): the &quot;X&quot; here has the sound /s/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And finally, if you say &quot;Xola&quot; (a metro station and a neighborhood in Mexico City), the &quot;X&quot; must sound /sh/ (don't say /sola/, which is the female form of &quot;alone&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this is an example of what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am Mexican. I live in Mexico City. I know what I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23526" LastEditorUserId="23526" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T14:27:13.653" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T14:27:13.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30059" CreationDate="2018-12-28T17:43:36.783" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; does not work well here, because.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot transpose the sentence without potentially changing the meaning: &lt;em&gt;He had joined and hated army live for no other reason ...&lt;/em&gt;; Unless that's exactly what you are trying to say. It doesn't work in principle, if transposed, because the tenses aren't in agreement (&lt;em&gt;he had hated army live&lt;/em&gt;?). That's not usually a problem, and not directly the question. One could assume that &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; binds the whole preceding sentence. Then we might transpose: &lt;em&gt;He hated army live, and he had joined for no other reason than ...&lt;/em&gt;. That works, but it's still slightly ambiguous whether &lt;em&gt;he joined for no other reason&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I say that EN looks at the pragmatic meaning of the complex clause as a whole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could say that &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; does not add to the meaning (or gives a sense that is unlikely) and is simply ignored. The sentence thus remains &lt;em&gt;underspecified&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your reluctance to use &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; may stem from the assumption that it would be redundant, because the meaning is strongly implicit already from your personal context. You still concede that it's not explicit, but merely not contradicted (&quot;there's no opposition between that and hating army life&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare also &quot;Monday is the worst (of all) weekday(s)&quot;. Small morphemes are frequently redundant and ignored. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say there is no notable difference at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just ran across &lt;em&gt;I'm no mathematician, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't understand the quantum mechanics talk&lt;/em&gt;. Of course there's no contradiction between a mathematical and a quantum mechanical understanding. The author seems to imply that mathematics were not a strict prerequisite for such a talk, contradicting but the lecturer, who seems to think otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T21:28:54.753" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T21:28:54.753" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30045" CreationDate="2018-12-28T21:31:56.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hindustani language is Hindi-Urdu dialect continuum. It is derived regularly from older stages of Indo-Aryan (like Sanskrit). You have already noted the influence of Persian (which was a major one because it was the official language of the Moghul empire), Turkish (which was minor and mainly through Persian transmission), and Arabic (both through Persian transmission and directly through the influence of Islam on Hindustani, the influence is bigger for Urdu than for Hindi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other major influences to Hindustani are the Western languages, first Portuguese and later English. Hindi is also influenced by learned borrowings and calques from Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T16:03:14.803" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T16:03:14.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3816" CreationDate="2018-12-28T21:40:58.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd call this thing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prefixoid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prefixoid&lt;/a&gt;, i.e., an element with some but not all features of a prefix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T21:40:58.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30051" CreationDate="2018-12-29T01:41:03.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking about a writing system, which is artificial. Even though language is learnt, it is considered natural. Language has meanings, and spoken language uses sounds to communicate those meanings. Written language converts the meanings to marks. One writing system may be used for multiple languages (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin variants&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari&lt;/a&gt;, etc.), and one language may have multiple writing systems (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindhi_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sindhi&lt;/a&gt; is written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, Devanagari, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gujarati&lt;/a&gt;, as well as other historical scripts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is not so much about language, but a combination of language and writing. Language does not naturally have characters, but writing systems do. English is probably a good candidate language for its writing system. All &quot;characters&quot; and digraphs have at least two different pronunciations, although some may be viewed as being foreign, and not (yet) naturalised. As time goes on, this number could increase. English has been written for a long time and has had no spelling reforms, only standardisation. If we reformed English spelling, only people familiar with the old spelling would be able to read current English unchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a - various: /æ/ cat, /ɑ/ father, /ə/ apply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b - /b/: bee, baby; silent: lamb, plumber, climb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c - /k/: cat, coffee; /s/: city, cyan; (both in one word: success); silent: muscle; /ʃ/: liquorice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ch - /t͡ʃ/: child; /ʃ/: cache; /x/: loch; /k/: school&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;d - /d/: dog; /t/: jumped; /ɾ/: paddle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e - various&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;f - /f/: fish; /v/: of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;g - /ɡ/: gate; /d͡ʒ/: age; silent: gnome&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gh - /ɡ/: ghost; /f/: rough; silent: through&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;h - /h/: hat; silent: hour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i - various&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;j - /d͡ʒ/: jet; /i/: fjord; /j/: Jugoslavia; /h/: Julio; /xw/: Juan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;k - /k/: kite; silent: knight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;l - /l/: lamp; /ɫ/ felt; silent: palm, walk; /j/: guillotine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;m - /m/: man; silent: mnemonic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;n - /n/: nose; silent: autumn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;o - various&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;p - /p/: pet; silent: psalm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ph - /f/: phone; /p/: diphthong, Phuket&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;qu - /kw/: queen; /k/: plaque&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;q - /k/: burqa; /t͡ʃ/: qi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;r - /ɹ/: red; silent: nurse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;s - /s/: stop; /z/: dogs; /ʃ/: sure; /ʒ/: unusual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sh - /ʃ/: shop; /s.h/: mishap&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;t - /t/: tap; /ɾ/: butter; /ʃ/: motion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;th - /θ/: thing; /ð/: this; /t/: Thames, Thailand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;u - various&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;v - /v/: vain; /f/: Tchaikovsky&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;w - /w/: wet; silent: write, sword, two&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wh - /w/: what; /h/: who&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;x - /ks/: excel; /gz/: exit; silent: faux&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;y - /j/: yellow; /i/: city&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;z - /z/: zoo; silent: rendezvous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these sound differences could be described as nuances, some seem quite different. It depends how different &quot;different&quot; is. Most letters have a primary sound, and a lifetime of exposure means an English speaker can correctly guess the pronunciation of unfamiliar words with a plethora of rules that are applied subconsciously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;b&quot; is usually silent after &quot;m&quot;. &quot;c&quot; is usually pronounced /s/ before the vowels &quot;e&quot;, &quot;i&quot;, and &quot;y&quot;. &quot;d&quot; and &quot;t&quot; may be pronounced as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_and_alveolar_flaps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/ɾ/&lt;/a&gt; in quick speech (as opposed to careful speech), but is that different enough, or do you consider that sound to be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allophone&lt;/a&gt; of /d/ and /t/? As an example, Sinhala has a letter &quot;ව&quot; that supposedly represents the sound /ʋ/. However, native speakers pronounce it as either [v] or [w] depending on the word, and consider both sounds to be the same, even though they can be different in other languages, such as English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A writing system where &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; word had to be learnt independently, would take a long time to learn. There would need to be a lot of pressure from some source to prevent it from simplifying or being replaced. It is said that Vietnamese writing is now a lot easier to learn now that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing_in_Vietnam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the writing system is based on Latin letters instead of Chinese characters&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you've said in a comment that your motivation for asking is wanting to write a story, perhaps you should check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="3571" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T03:25:19.877" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T03:25:19.877" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-29T04:38:02.610" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: I have no background in linguistics, I just had a question that I thought of today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote this to someone: &quot;I think old women from the 60's put their cigarettes in it.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I was thinking about the sentence more and I was confused on a few things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm saying that old women from the 60's &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to put their cigarettes in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not that they used to put their cigarettes in it and now they don't, it's just that they're dead. but from the structure of the sentence alone, what if someone couldn't infer that if they were old in the 60's they'd likely be dead now? So then they're left imagining that some ancient woman is choosing to not put the cigarettes in it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I actually say this out loud, the different kinds of emphasis on the word &quot;put&quot; is what makes me be able to figure out what tense I'm speaking about. Is this just me imagining something or is there some linguistic basis for it. Is it just a matter of incorrect grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could say &quot;I think old women from the 60's used to put their cigarettes in it when they were alive&quot; or something like that to clarify it but I just wanted to know if I had a valid question on not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21891" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T04:38:02.610" Title="Cases when past or present tense are the same in writing but convey the tenses while speaking" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-14T17:52:46.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30072" CreationDate="2018-12-29T12:58:17.417" Score="7" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific reason for which diphthongs in German and English words like &quot;mein&quot; and &quot;like&quot; arose? It seems to be a pretty common phenomenon, but somehow it seems to be limited to Germanic languages. The same question could apply to &quot;Haus&quot; and &quot;House&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T10:33:39.480" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T10:33:39.480" Title="Development of diphthongs" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30068" CreationDate="2018-12-29T13:17:25.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;True. The other long vowels were raised but  /iː/ and /uː/ can't be raised further. The diphthongization was surely partly a strategy to differentiate the raised /eː : oː/ from /iː : uː/ (chain shifts/ push/pull chain). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why these whole significant vowel shifts happened though is a good question. It seems that vowels in Germanic languages are very unstable, which leads to the Germanic languages having very many vowel qualities. This may be related to the Germanic word stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T13:17:25.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30068" CreationDate="2018-12-29T14:26:48.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Diphthongs are not limited to Germanic languages. It is pretty common in the languages of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can cite four phonetic aspects that lead to the outbreak of diphthongs. First of all, there are the diphthongs stemming from long vowels. This diphthongization is found in English (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/courses/lx310/handouts/handouts-09/ringe/gvs-revised.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/courses/lx310/handouts/handouts-09/ringe/gvs-revised.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other origin comes from the fall of a consonant. This lost consonant has allowed two vowels to merge together and if they have different qualities, they became diphthongs. This consonant can also be vocalized bringing about the same thing. Such a evolution can be found in Riffian (see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/29199244/Tarifiyt_Long_Vowels_and_Diphthongs_Independent_Phonemes_or_Simple_Phonetic_Variants_of_the_Basic_Amazighe_Vowels_2004_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.academia.edu/29199244/Tarifiyt_Long_Vowels_and_Diphthongs_Independent_Phonemes_or_Simple_Phonetic_Variants_of_the_Basic_Amazighe_Vowels_2004_&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third case is when a vowel is stressed, a breaking vowel can occur. This process existed in old French, the stressed Latin vowels had been broken (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00365006/PDF/vaissiere_1996_from_latin_to_modern_French.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00365006/PDF/vaissiere_1996_from_latin_to_modern_French.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last phenomenon corresponds to the assimilation or coalescence. When two sounds are adjacent, in this case a vowel next to a consonant or vowel, and where one takes a feature from the other, that leads to a diphthongization. Hausa is a language where this kind of assimilation have been observed (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/21060/HausaDiphthongs.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/21060/HausaDiphthongs.pdf?sequence=1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T14:57:32.820" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T14:57:32.820" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30074" CreationDate="2018-12-29T15:28:35.390" Score="-1" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could Latin &lt;em&gt;niger&lt;/em&gt; &quot;black&quot;, of uncertain origin, come from *negʷ- &quot;bare, naked&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an analogy, compare &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;blank&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;blanco&lt;/em&gt; &quot;white, argent&quot;, and their roots PGem *blakaz &quot;burnt&quot;, PGem *blankaz &quot;white, bright, blinding&quot;, PIE *bʰleg- and *bʰleyǵ- respectively, both “to shine”. &lt;em&gt;bleak&lt;/em&gt; in OE could mean &quot;shiny&quot;, from PGem *blaikaz &quot;pale, white&quot;, also from PIE *bʰleyǵ-. All taken from wiktionary, none sourced but often taken from LIV or Pokorny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least &lt;em&gt;bleak&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;niger&lt;/em&gt; both have negative connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ger. &lt;em&gt;Blanker&lt;/em&gt; is short for &lt;em&gt;blanker Hintern&lt;/em&gt; &quot;naked butt&quot;; &lt;em&gt;blankes Kabel&lt;/em&gt; is an exposed, unisolated wire, perhaps not dull (oxidized) so as to be conductive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposing there was the slur *nig- or *neg- &quot;slave, dark skin&quot; (cp. &lt;em&gt;nigger&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;negro&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Neger&lt;/em&gt;) or something close, which should be hard to falsify, the idea is it would have been formative for &lt;em&gt;niger&lt;/em&gt;, because one common justification for enslavement, not just &quot;Negroes&quot;, was incivility, and that would stereotypically include nakedness. Also, slaves would have to appear naked at auctions and often cater to sexual submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison &lt;em&gt;maurus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Moor, Mauritanian, African&quot; is comparable to Ancient Greek μαυρός (mauros) &quot;dark, black, dim, weak, ...&quot;, which is uncertain but might derive from the name of the Moors. (Edit: notes of unyielding comparisons removed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I'm too pessimistic, and downright paranoid about not being pessimistic enough about the darker parts of history. So, any input would be appreciated, in comments. Although, an answer should focus on publications on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;em&gt;maurus&lt;/em&gt;, I wonder, can a comparison &lt;em&gt;Nubian&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;nudus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;nude&quot; be fruitful? &lt;em&gt;nudus&lt;/em&gt; is derived from PIE *nogʷedós through *gʷ &gt; Lt. &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; (thanks @TKR), but &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt; is not unknown in Latin (cp. &lt;em&gt;bellum&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;duellum&lt;/em&gt;). The etymology of &lt;em&gt;Nubia&lt;/em&gt; is unclear to me, not Egyptian apparently, unless from &lt;em&gt;nwb&lt;/em&gt; &quot;gold&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A term encountered in Roman ideas about slavery is &lt;em&gt;social death&lt;/em&gt;. Hence including &lt;em&gt;necro&lt;/em&gt; in the comparison might be helpful. The negation marker *ne should be considerable. Insofar the actually used word was &lt;em&gt;mortis, mors&lt;/em&gt;, cp. &lt;em&gt;maurus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T14:51:04.203" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T14:51:04.203" Title="Latin &quot;niger&quot; from *negʷ-?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30068" CreationDate="2018-12-29T16:43:35.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The kind of diphthongization found in Germanic as exemplified by &quot;like&quot; and &quot;mein&quot; (or the reverse order of elements, as in a rising diphthong) is extremely common in Germanic, but not limited to Germanic. It also arises in the history of Spanish and Italian (dialects), Old French and Quebec French; Finnish (dialectally) and the Saami languages; Sakha (Turkic); Slovak; Guerze; Kɔnni; Yokuts, and Lama. Except in the puzzling case of Lama and possible some other Gur languages where only short vowels diphthongize, it happens to long vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We typically notice these processes when they are firmly established some hundreds of years after the diachronic tendencies have started, but I think it is possible for linguists to document these tendencies now and see how they work out in a few centuries. For example, from the nature of the North Saami diphthongizations, comparison with corresponding processes in other Saami languages, and an investigation of the realization of the excrescent vowel attested in &quot;extra-long&quot; consonant clusters (bár(ə)tni), a good case can be made that [uo, ie, ea, oa] are a development from [uə iə eə oə], earlier [u: i: e: o:]. There is is a similar process ongoing in Norwegian where [e] is not pronounced as a monophthong, it is a phonetic diphthong somewhere in the range of [ɛa] or [ɛə]. Although it is known that American English [ɪ,ʊ,ɛ,ɔ] are usually realized as phonetic diphthongs, this is a low-level detail of pronunciation that doesn't yet enter into the phonology, so it is often ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely that this is a recurring instance of &quot;gesture alignment&quot;, where the articulatory gesture characterizing a kind of sound is aligned more to the left, or to the right, within its domain. This is quite well known in the case of pitch, where the most common trend is displacement to the right. Applied to a vowel, if the articulatory gestures characterizing [i] are more timed towards the beginning of the syllable, you will tend to get an [iə]-like output and if they are more timed towards the end, you will get an [əi]-like output. The correlation with long vowels is explained by the fact that they have longer duration and therefore more time within which a perceptible distinct vocalic articulation can be realized. I do not know why Bantu languages so resolutely avoid long-vowel diphthongization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T20:29:37.043" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T20:29:37.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30045" CreationDate="2018-12-29T16:53:06.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that you are assuming that Hindustani was “spoken in India before any West Asians invaded it”. The fact is that Hindi/Urdu does not emerge as specific language before the 13th century. By this time India had already been invaded by many West Asians, beginning with the Achaemenid Persians, and later by Persian and Turkic speaking Muslims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T18:57:21.027" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T18:57:21.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30071" CreationDate="2018-12-29T20:13:05.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically it seems easier to start from PIE *negʷ- &quot;dark&quot; (the source of the word for &quot;night&quot; in many languages), though of course it's possible that this and the &quot;naked&quot; root are actually the same -- a semantic link doesn't seem impossible. Such an etymology for &lt;em&gt;niger&lt;/em&gt; has in fact been suggested by Frisk, specifically from *negʷ-ró- (with the common adjectival suffix *-ró-); cf. Arm. &lt;em&gt;nerk&lt;/em&gt; &quot;color&quot;. The only formal difficulty with this etymology is the vowel change: though there are sporadic cases of *e &gt; &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; in Latin, it doesn't seem to have been a regular change. (As for *gʷ, though it regularly gives Latin &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, there is an exception before &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, so that *gʷr &gt; &lt;em&gt;gr&lt;/em&gt;.) Though this is a problem, it isn't a huge one and I'm surprised that de Vaan, the most recent etymological dictionary of Latin, doesn't even mention this idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T21:15:54.923" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T21:15:54.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30080" CreationDate="2018-12-29T20:18:55.327" Score="1" ViewCount="793" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence I mention is from Quran (written at least 14 centuries ago) verse 89:5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full phrase is : هل في ذلك قسم لذي حجر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sahih International: Is there [not] in [all] that an oath&#xA;[sufficient] for one of perception?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pickthall: There surely is an oath for thinking man.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yusuf Ali: Is there (not) in these an adjuration (or evidence) for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;those who understand?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shakir: Truly in that there is an oath for those who possess&lt;br&gt;&#xA;understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Muhammad Sarwar: Is this not a sufficient oath for intelligent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;people?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;hajar&quot; means stone, &quot;mahjoor&quot; means abandoned, &quot;hijra&quot; means immigraiton, how could &quot;hijr&quot; mean &quot;intellect&quot; or similar in this context? Is there a root word for that meaning and are there derivatives for it? Or it's just a meaning shift throughout centuries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10141" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T12:57:54.807" Title="How can the Arabic word &quot;Hijr&quot; be translated as &quot;perception&quot; or &quot;understanding&quot; or &quot;intellect&quot;" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-23T22:39:38.387" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30045" CreationDate="2018-12-29T21:00:26.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perhaps obvious answer, if we speak of the ancestors of today's Indic languages relative to other Indo-Iranian and Indo-European languages, is that they were greatly influenced by the languages that existed there before them, that is, substrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some debate as to what the substrate languages actually are.  The Dravidian languages and other local languages like Munda apparently had less influence than one might expect.  The Indic names for local flora and fauna may be from some long extinct local languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substrata_in_the_Vedic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substrata_in_the_Vedic_language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T21:00:26.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-30T01:23:16.847" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can [1.] and [2.] (coloured in grey beneath) be distinguished? Doesn't 1 entail 2? How can &quot;the remembering &lt;s&gt;is&lt;/s&gt; [be] something that happens to you&quot; (2), if &quot;you are [not] idly recalling a past image of yourself&quot; (1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand McWhorter's explanation beneath of why some verbs are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_verb#Inherent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronominal reflexive&lt;/a&gt;, which means that the reflexive pronoun &quot;is an inherent part of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaccusative_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Unaccusative verb&quot;&gt;unergative&lt;/a&gt; reflexive or reciprocal verb with no meaning of its own, and an obligatory part of the verb's lexical entry&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 98&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  For example, I said [on p. 87 Bottom] that &lt;em&gt;You mistake you&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;You’re mistaken&lt;/em&gt; from the wacky English example would be germane &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 99&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to the Viking issue. What I meant was that the misled Portuguese gentleman thought of &lt;em&gt;you mistake you&lt;/em&gt; as normal because &lt;em&gt;you mistake yourself&lt;/em&gt; is the way you put it in French (&lt;em&gt;Tu &lt;strong&gt;te&lt;/strong&gt; trompes&lt;/em&gt;) and Portuguese (&lt;em&gt;Tu &lt;strong&gt;te&lt;/strong&gt; equivocas&lt;/em&gt;) (both meaning “You ‘yourself’ mistake”).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    This is a quirk common in European languages, that often you do things “to yourself” which in English you just do. It tends to be with verbs having to do with moving and feeling. So in English, &lt;em&gt;I have to go&lt;/em&gt;, but in Spanish, &lt;em&gt;Tengo que ir&lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (“I have to go ‘myself’”). With moving, this makes a kind of sense to an English speaker, although it seems a little redundant to us to have to specify that I am exerting the act of &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;-age upon &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt;. But the ones involving feelings are something else: &lt;em&gt;I remember&lt;/em&gt; in English, &lt;em&gt;Me acuerdo&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish (“I remember myself”), meaning &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[1.]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; not that you are idly recalling a past image of yourself, but &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;[2.]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that the remembering is something that happens to you, thus affecting not something or someone else, but you. While about the only Modern English versions of these are &lt;em&gt;behave yourself, to perjure yourself, and to pride yourself (upon)&lt;/em&gt;, many European languages mark hundreds of verbs in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T20:28:33.110" Title="How does McWhorter explain Pronominal Reflexive Verbs by distinguishing 'remembering something' vs. 'remembering is something that happens to you'?" Tags="&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-30T11:59:01.967" Score="5" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific auditory reason for which a labiovelar such as &quot;kʷ&quot; becomes a &quot;p&quot; sound?This could also be applied to the change in Latin from &quot;duellum&quot; to &quot;bellum&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="22572" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T12:44:56.983" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T12:44:56.983" Title="Change from labialized velar to labial" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30078" CreationDate="2018-12-30T12:35:58.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say you hear the labialization (I think a lower F2) and you hear the plosion. These features are shared with [b] and [p]. The lack of voicing of [k] is further shared with [p] and the voicing of [d] is shared with [b].  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T12:35:58.593" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30075" CreationDate="2018-12-30T12:57:54.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are confusing two different sounds ħ/ح and h/ه. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mahjur, hijra are pronounced with the sound [h].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hajar, hijr are pronounced with the sound [ħ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, why is the root hjr associated with the meanings stone and intellect, it is something cultural, almost arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Riffian, it is the opposite, the word stone is also used to refer to an idiot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T12:57:54.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30082" CreationDate="2018-12-30T13:25:52.710" Score="1" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question came as I analyzed the origin of the english words &quot;happy&quot; and &quot;happen&quot; and after my research i found the reconstructed proto-germanic root &quot;hampijaną&quot;. However i found that this root only appears in the North Germanic languages and was probably adopted into english from Old Norse. Is it common for some roots to be adopted only in one of the germanic branches?How come it completely disappeared in western germanic languages such as German,Dutch,Low Saxon etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T16:24:59.817" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T16:31:36.057" Title="Question about the proto-Germanic root hampijaną" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30081" CreationDate="2018-12-30T15:15:14.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words die out and become replaced by neologisms at any time. When it happens shortly after a major fork into branches we see only one branch retaining the original word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not really uncommon to find attestations of a certain word only in some sub-branch of a language family, both North Germanic and West Germanic have words that are absent from the other branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For the definition of a branch, shared innovations (neologisms, sound shifts, grammatical innovations) are necessary. Therefore we see new words (of whatever origin, e.g., composition, loan words, new inventions) in each of the branches as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T16:31:36.057" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T16:31:36.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30081" CreationDate="2018-12-30T15:54:40.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Happy” and “happen” were both formed within English from the noun “hap” (good fortune). The OED (Oxford English Dictionary, on-line version) indicates the etymology of “hap” as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology: Probably &amp;lt; early Scandinavian (compare Old Icelandic happ&#xA;  (neuter) chance, good luck, success (Icelandic happ), and Norwegian&#xA;  happ, Swedish regional happ, both masculine), cognate with Norwegian&#xA;  heppa to happen, Old Danish hap (adjective) lucky, Swedish hampa&#xA;  (reflexive) to happen (by chance), (regional) happa, habba to happen,&#xA;  succeed, Danish happe, and further with Old English gehæp (adjective)&#xA;  suitable, convenient, gehæplic (adjective) convenient, orderly,&#xA;  probably &amp;lt; the same Indo-European base as Early Irish cob victory&#xA;  (rare) and Old Church Slavonic kobĭ destiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Celtic and Slavic parallels are correct, it follows that this root is not restricted to North Germanic, but has to be ascribed to proto-Indo-European. Obviously, it has not been preserved in all branches of IE, or even all branches of Germanic. But this is the way that languages work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T15:54:40.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30077" CreationDate="2018-12-30T20:28:33.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two seem quite distinct to me. Remembering is something which happens to me - I am involved in it - &lt;em&gt;irrespective of whether the content of the memory is in any way associated with me or not&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember that you once fell downstairs, I am not involved in that memory, so I will be a participant only in sense 2, not in sense 1. (It is true that originally I must have become aware of this in some way, but that need not be part of the memory. I know (speaking for myself) that there are events I know about, that I can no longer remember whether I witnessed them or was told about them: so the part of the memory that relates to my knowing has been lost, but I still have the memory of the event not involving myself). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T20:28:33.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26298" CreationDate="2018-12-31T06:23:31.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trade goes back to the 5th century BCE between India and the east coast of Africa. Under such circumstances, loan words occur between languages that are otherwise unrelated. A possible example: The word &quot;sangha&quot; in Sanskrit refers to &quot;community&quot;, as does the word &quot;sanga&quot; in the Shona language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23550" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T06:23:31.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30179" CreationDate="2018-12-31T08:41:39.560" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working with discourse data that has a lot of dirct quotes in it. There are a lot of examples look like the following (this is a translation of a part of the discourse):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they said, ‘‘What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a&#xA;  candle.’’   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was dark; one doesn’t usually birth in the daytime;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘‘Bring acandle; light a candle.’’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘‘Look, it’s a boy baby!’’   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘‘I’ve given birth to a baby boy.’’    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After awhile the baby cried wawa waa waa waa waa waa waa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would those quotations be represented syntactically? As complements? I'm having a hard time finding literature on the matter. I've found some things on parenthetical, but are quotes like these parenthetical? Please point me towards relevant literature if you know of any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14709" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T19:50:51.643" Title="Is a quote a kind of parenthetical? How do we deal with direct quotes in syntax?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-31T11:48:35.030" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is it explained that the sound sequence /uːx/ &lt;em&gt;-ough&lt;/em&gt; has developed so differently in different words?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not-dipthongized in &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt;, shortened and unrounded and retained fricative in &lt;em&gt;tough&lt;/em&gt;, lowered in &lt;em&gt;though&lt;/em&gt;, as you would expect in &lt;em&gt;plough&lt;/em&gt;. (also a bit different in &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there regular sound shifts, do they stem from different dialects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T11:48:35.030" Title="*through* vs. *tough*: ME*-ough* /uːx/ &gt; –? How are the sound shifts from ME -ough explained?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30236" CreationDate="2018-12-31T17:02:18.343" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize there are many different instantiations of Construction Grammar (CxG), and I'm not necessarily tied to any particular version yet. I was curious if there are experiments that support CxG, or if evidence of serial (as opposed to hierarchical) processing is considered sufficient? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T01:41:50.160" Title="Experimental support for construction grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;construction-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9063" CreationDate="2018-12-31T18:26:52.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: of course, word order matters in Latin but differently from languages like English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technical answer: rather than being vaguely classified as a free word order language, Latin is often referred to as a &quot;discourse configurational language&quot;. Latin word order is strongly driven by so-called &quot;information structure&quot; (involving notions like &quot;old information&quot;, &quot;new information&quot;, &quot;focus&quot;, &quot;emphasis&quot;, etc).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take an introduction into the topic, I recommend you to take a look at the chapter on &quot;Word order&quot; in &quot;Latin Grammar&quot; by Panhuis (NB: this author wrote a doctoral dissertation on the pragmatic functions of Latin word order). After that, you can take a look at the more recent extensive monographs by Devine &amp;amp; Stephens (generative perspective) and by Spevak (functionalist perspective). Good luck! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23551" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T18:26:52.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30093" CreationDate="2018-12-31T18:38:00.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming there is a grammatical category for the root clauses described by Joseph Emonds in his dissertation &lt;a href=&quot;http://sils.shoin.ac.jp/~jeemonds/book3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, we can describe direct quotes grammatically as being in that category.  I have myself proposed a extension to the theory of Relational Grammar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), which extends its &quot;term relations&quot; 1, 2, 3 by adding a relation 0 for speech act relevant expressions and applying this categorization to clauses as well as NPs (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;vertical dimension&lt;/a&gt;).  Direct quote clauses, then, are of the category S0, speech act relevant clauses, as compared with S1 (declaratives), S2 (infinitivals), S3 (derived nominalizations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful if you refer to my own theory, since so far as I know, no one accepts it besides me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T18:38:00.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29704" CreationDate="2018-12-31T18:48:23.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Embick (2004), you could take a look at this paper by Alexiadou &amp;amp; Anagnostopoulou, whose title is &quot;Structuring participles&quot;, downloadable at www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/26/paper1653.pdf&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After that, you could procede to take a look at the chapter 5 on adjectival passives, included in his recent (2015) monograph on &#xA;External Arguments in Transitivity Alternations &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/external-arguments-in-transitivity-alternations-9780199571949?cc=es&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/external-arguments-in-transitivity-alternations-9780199571949?cc=es&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;#&lt;/a&gt; . &#xA;Good luck! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23553" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T18:48:23.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30104" CreationDate="2019-01-01T15:50:47.070" Score="4" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does it happen? What motivated latin &quot;parabola&quot; to change into Spanish &quot;palabra&quot; and why does english &quot;ask&quot; is often changed to &quot;aks&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastEditorUserId="22198" LastEditDate="2020-01-24T05:51:04.700" LastActivityDate="2020-01-24T05:51:04.700" Title="How does Metathesis work?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;metathesis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30103" CreationDate="2019-01-01T17:02:17.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a partial answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think metathesis is often explained in terms of perceptual similarities between the variants. Additionally, sometimes we can say that one form has a &quot;preferred&quot; phonotactic structure. But in general, metathesis is known to be a difficult thing to explain in terms of linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spanish case is complicated because Romance languages are known to have processes of lambdacism/rhotacism that aren't metathesis-based (as amegnunsen mentioned in a comment; although I don't know of any specific Latin-to-Spanish sound laws that would be relevant here), and also processes of liquid dissimilation (&quot;pelegrino&quot; is attested as a variant form of &lt;em&gt;peregrino,&lt;/em&gt; from Latin &lt;em&gt;peregrīnus&lt;/em&gt;). So at first glance, it isn't entirely obvious that &lt;em&gt;palabra&lt;/em&gt; is best analyzed as a case of long-distance metathesis. It's probably necessary to look carefully at the details of how this word and similar words developed in Spanish to determine whether it is a true case of metathesis (and if so, why/how the consonants metathesized). Unfortunately, I have not done this, so I can't say anything certain about the situation here. Ukemi's answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26564/5581&quot;&gt;How did 'cocodrilo' originate from 'crocodile'?&lt;/a&gt; gives other examples of liquid metathesis in Spanish (and also of other changes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes between &lt;strong&gt;sk&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ks&lt;/strong&gt; have been somewhat common in the history of English, and can also be seen in Romance in various words, but I don't know what explanation would account for the presence of metathesis in the word &lt;em&gt;ask.&lt;/em&gt; As mentioned in the Language Log post &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2734&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leaf-blower metathesis?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, we see &lt;em&gt;-ks&lt;/em&gt; variants in Old English, at a stage where the consonant cluster was intervocalic (as far as I can tell, in all forms of the word). In some languages, such as Faroese and apparently also Lithuanian, we see a process of metathesis of -sk- to -ks- before certain consonants that are added by inflection (the details differ between the languages; see &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/492-0202/492-0202-HUME-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metathesis: Formal and Functional Considerations&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Hume 2001, for descriptions), but that doesn't seem relevant in the case of English &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt;; I don't know of any dialect of English that has a paradigm like /ask, asks, akst/. English speakers may show cluster simplification of the three-consonant word-final sequences /sks/, /skt/ or /kst/, but I don't think that's very similar to what we see in Lithuanian or Faroese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes between &lt;strong&gt;sp&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ps&lt;/strong&gt; are also known to occur; e.g. in the word for &lt;em&gt;wasp.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we analyze the &lt;em&gt;ask~aks&lt;/em&gt; variation as a example of synchronic metathesis in English, it's probably related in some way to the position of the -sk sequence in the coda of the syllable in the plain form &lt;em&gt;ask.&lt;/em&gt; I don't think that any appreciable amount of English speakers produce /ks/ instead of /sk/ at the start of words. The only other example of /sk/~/ks/ variation at the end of a word that I can think of is &lt;em&gt;asterisk,&lt;/em&gt; which has a (fairly stigmatized) variant pronunciation ending in /ks/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-01-01T17:37:29.250" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T17:37:29.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30103" CreationDate="2019-01-01T17:15:27.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a sound change, there are very many ways for it to happen. In the case of &quot;ask&quot;, the cause is lost in history. The OED indicates that forms like &lt;em&gt;achsian, acsian&lt;/em&gt; are attested in Old English, and in Middle English gained popularity in the south and the midlands, but was considered vulgar. But this isn't a regular sound change, and in current English this example stands alone. Metathesis as a sporadic process in child language acquisition has been observed in Japanese; lateral metathesis presumably is related to the &quot;localization&quot; problem which also underlies lateral dissimilation, namely it is perceptually hard-ish to localize &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; in the speech stream, and the &quot;surface template&quot; (if there is such a thing) is that the lateral should be first, thus liquid dissimilation tends to favor l...r. The idea behind the perceptual account is that a listener knows that there are liquids but isn't entirely sure what order they are, and they default the the order &lt;em&gt;l...r&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-01T17:15:27.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29946" CreationDate="2019-01-01T17:44:14.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer: centuries of use of Old Church Slavonic instead of Latin or Romanian as a written language BUT note there is a tendency towards analytic tenses in spoken languages across Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions of the form &quot;Why?&quot; in historical linguistics are not necessarily answerable, but we can try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One theory could be that there was some difference in Vulgar Latin dialects at the time of the split, and there may have been, for that we would need the comparative method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another theory is that there was some factor since the split, however we define it, some time in the first millennium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we know, the other major Romance languages, and even many of the now minor ones, were essentially in constant contact with written Latin as they evolved from Vulgar Latin.  So the orthography and prescriptive grammar of the standard languages have always lagged behind the vernacular languages, and conversely, the standard languages remained an influence on the vernacular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, Latin was a liturgical language, and a bureaucratic one, and for this reason the lexicon, semantics and grammar in those spheres evolved less.  An obvious example is Spanish &lt;em&gt;espíritu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jesús&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dios&lt;/em&gt;, which, if the normal shifts that occurred between Latin to Spanish had been applied, would by now be something like &lt;em&gt;*espirito&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;*Jeso&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*deo&lt;/em&gt;, like Romanian &lt;em&gt;zeu&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of continued legacy is the mismatch of orthography and pronunciation in modern French, as extreme as that in English, if more predictable.  That only happened because the literary class were continuously writing Latin, then Old French, generally dragging their heels at every step.  It would have never happened had the French woken up one morning and decided to write their language for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, in Dacia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The oldest surviving written text in Romanian is a letter from late&#xA;  June 1521,[101] in which Neacșu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of&#xA;  Brașov about an imminent attack of the Turks. It was written using the&#xA;  Cyrillic alphabet, like most early Romanian writings. The earliest&#xA;  surviving writing in Latin script was a late 16th-century&#xA;  Transylvanian text which was written with the Hungarian alphabet&#xA;  conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the 18th century, Transylvanian scholars noted the Latin origin of&#xA;  Romanian and adapted the Latin alphabet to the Romanian language,&#xA;  using some orthographic rules from Italian, recognized as Romanian's&#xA;  closest relative. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually&#xA;  decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially&#xA;  regulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1521 is very very recent, given that the Roman province of Dacia was founded in 106.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Romanised Dacians, of course, ended up Christians and as literate as any others over the centuries, the liturgical language, however, was Old Church Slavonic, with a bit of Greek, and the political language was also often Slavic, or even Magyar or Turkic, hence &lt;em&gt;voivoda&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cneaz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ban&lt;/em&gt; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both other Romance languages and Romanian have masses of doublets, borrowings from earlier or parallel branches of Romance in addition to inherited words, but the Romanian ones happened mostly during a sudden and short but massive wave in the late 19th and early 20th century, whereas the borrowing into the other languages was more continuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suddenly prescribing grammar, as opposed to lexicon, is much more difficult, it sort of works if there is continued passive literacy in the standard language, but suddenly introducing new structures top-down sounds hard, and I am not aware of many examples of it.  In any case, the nuances of parse trees and morphology do not appeal to political and cultural forces the way that lexicon and pronunciation do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is a language which is both more divergent in some ways with regard to Latin, and more conservative in other ways, especially with regard to Vulgar Latin, in lexicon, and in grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The future tense is notably absent in Romanian, and it's instead constructed with a modal verb vrea (eu voi / tu vei etc.), which makes me feel like I'm looking at a Germanic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can theorise, certainly Romanian is part of the Balkan Sprachbund, but there is also plenty of Romance influence on the non-Romance languages of the Balkans, and, moreover, a tendency towards fewer and more analytic tenses is observable in languages across Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-use of &lt;em&gt;to want&lt;/em&gt; as a future auxiliary specifically is a feature of Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian and Albanian, but in Bulgarian and Albanian it is an indeclinable particle, exactly like &lt;em&gt;o să&lt;/em&gt; in Romanian, and it is a feature of Yiddish, and English, but not modern Standard German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Romanian mirrors nearly exactly the situation in South Slavic, right down to the incomplete shift to the indeclinable particle, but keeping in mind of course that this is not Slavic per se, as this is not seen in East or West Slavic, so Slavic is not obviously causal here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic_grammar#Future&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic_grammar#Future&lt;/a&gt; is not very explicit, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic#Basis_and_local_influences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic#Basis_and_local_influences&lt;/a&gt; claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Periphrastic compound future tense formed with the auxiliary verb 'хотѣти' (&lt;em&gt;xotěti&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to want&quot;), for example 'хоштѫ писати' (&lt;em&gt;xoštǫ pisati&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;I will write&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T16:34:23.487" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T16:34:23.487" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-02T03:04:21.883" Score="3" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ie, I am &lt;em&gt;assuming&lt;/em&gt; that they are both ultimately deriviative of PIE *sem-/*som-. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how are they derived from this, in terms of morphemes, and their meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;em&gt;skimmed&lt;/em&gt; through both Ringe and Beekes. Excellent books, that I want to go through properly in the near future, but this question has been bugging me - the etymology at a later point in time was asked as part of a paper, and it annoyed me that I could not give a full explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these two books be the best for getting a coherent understanding of theorised derivation processes and, in particular, PIE verbs? I've had some trouble wrapping my head around what can be said to be diachronic and what synchronic at times, fex when what processes were actively occurring, how salient the underlying analysis of &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; was, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to add sources/references/bibliographical details, I've read around a lot of related literature but not a lot on PIE &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23560" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T21:35:49.373" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T21:35:49.373" Title="Could someone illuminate for me how PGmc *suma and *sama(n) were derived?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30108" CreationDate="2019-01-02T05:01:29.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are indeed both from the same PIE root, which however is reconstructed with a laryngeal, *semH-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PGmc *sama- &quot;same&quot; is a thematic derivative from the o-grade of this root, *somH-o-, found in many other IE languages (Gk. ὅμος, Skt. sama-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PGmc *suma- &quot;someone&quot; is a thematic derivative from the zero grade of this root, *smH-o-, also with cognates e.g. Gk. ἁμο- &quot;any&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: presumably this *semH- is the same root as the *sem- &quot;one&quot; you mention; the *-H- appears to be a &quot;root extension&quot;, which is basically a way of saying there's an extra consonant at the end of the root that we don't know how to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Kroonen, &lt;em&gt;Proto-Germanic Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastEditorUserId="2411" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T20:21:40.833" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T20:21:40.833" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-02T11:54:15.160" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm recently listening this replacement a lot on youtube, it's as if the practice is on the rising. Is it?  what conditions such occurrence? Where in the US is it happening? And how did it all begin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-03T10:34:28.473" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T10:34:28.473" Title="About [s] being replaced by the voiceless postalveolar fricative in the US" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30111" CreationDate="2019-01-02T12:18:12.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you observing it in the south/ in Texas for example? I would assume that you are actually noticing a retracted [s̠] that I usually notice in a Texas accent, Dutch, European Spanish, Icelandic... It's actually an old &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; sound presumably the kind of &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; that many medieval European languages had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T12:18:12.183" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30120" CreationDate="2019-01-02T13:32:37.030" Score="5" ViewCount="1058" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many languages use the &lt;strong&gt;plural&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;em&gt;respected mood&lt;/em&gt; for a &lt;strong&gt;singular&lt;/strong&gt; (even English use &quot;you&quot; which is basically a plural form of thu). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is: based on what those who started to speak in plural for singular assumed that it is respectful to speak that way? In other words, what does make the &lt;strong&gt;plural form&lt;/strong&gt; more respected when talking to him plurally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12668" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T17:51:17.103" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:30:02.863" Title="Plural form as respect form - based on what?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;&lt;formality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30115" CreationDate="2019-01-02T14:49:13.063" Score="6" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand if some terms can be considered as distinctly American or British. So for example I was studying the term &quot;aubergine&quot; and the normalized frequency in the American corpus is of 409 while in British ENglish it is of 3637. I normalized the frequency by making the larger corpus of the same size of the smaller one which is of 34 billion words (since it's my first time using corpora I hope that This is the right process to normalize frequencies: multiply the raw F. by the desired size of the corpus and later divide the end result by the real size of the curpus). Now, what I am trying to understand is if a LL of 2959 is high enough to say that the term aubergine is a key word in British English or not. In the book that I am studying the author uses a cut-off of 50 but since the corpora that I am using are much larger than his I would like to know what cut-off I should use. I am really sorry if I haven't made myself clear but I am very confused because as I said I never used corpora before and also English is not my first language, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23566" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T13:43:38.317" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T13:43:38.317" Title="How can I know if a log-likelihood score is high enough?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30114" CreationDate="2019-01-02T16:14:10.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the purpose of &lt;strong&gt;normalisation&lt;/strong&gt;, you should use a formula such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;normalised_frequency_per_million_words = raw_frequency / corpus_size * 1,000,000&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This formula can be adjusted to normalise, for example, per 100,000 words - just replace the 1,000,000 in the formula by 100,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When calculating &lt;strong&gt;log likelihood&lt;/strong&gt; for a comparison of the frequency of a linguistic item (e.g. a word) in the two corpora, you should use the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;raw frequency&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the linguistic item and the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;exact size&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of the corpora. Do &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; use the normalised figures in the formula. For the interpretation of log likelihood, &lt;a href=&quot;http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Rayson&lt;/a&gt; gives the following guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;95th percentile; 5% level; p &amp;lt; 0.05; critical value = 3.84&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99th percentile; 1% level; p &amp;lt; 0.01; critical value = 6.63&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99.9th percentile; 0.1% level; p &amp;lt; 0.001; critical value = 10.83&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;99.99th percentile; 0.01% level; p &amp;lt; 0.0001; critical value = 15.13&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides information on the &lt;strong&gt;statistical significance&lt;/strong&gt; of the difference - basically the question of whether with a new corpus you would get a similar result. However, in order to decide if the difference is meaningful, you need to rely on &lt;strong&gt;effect size&lt;/strong&gt;. Is the linguistic item 20% more frequent in corpus A than in corpus B? Or twice as frequent? Whether you consider 20% or even 5% meaningful or not is up to you to decide based on your research question. When comparing two varieties of a language I would not consider a 5% difference to be particularly meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T13:12:32.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" Score="0" Body="For question about formality in linguistics, e.g., in personal pronouns (T-V-distinction) or verbs." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T17:52:40.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30125" CreationDate="2019-01-02T18:27:02.717" Score="1" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;All that is gold does not glitter&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Not all that is gold glitters&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first phrase appears in Lord of the Rings, modified from Shakespeare, and contextually implies that &quot;Aragorn is vastly more important than he looks&quot;[1], suggesting a meaning more in line with the second phrase. But taken together literally, the two phrases above are contradictory. What gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_is_gold_does_not_glitter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_is_gold_does_not_glitter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23568" LastEditorUserId="23568" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T20:02:41.100" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T21:20:01.940" Title="All that glitters is confusing!" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2019-01-02T18:37:11.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that, under the common influence of French, and maybe the capitalisation from German, Russian follows the same paradigm as most if not all the Slavic languages, like Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Scandinavian languages, including Finnish, although they are shifting towards using it less anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not actually clear if Russian formal &lt;em&gt;вы&lt;/em&gt; is always letter-case, certainly for some of the other languages it is technically not the case, not for Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer mentioned German, which is essentially correct, but it is easy to form a misconception about the role of letter-case pronouns in German - that it specifies the formality, like T-V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that there is also a letter-case &lt;em&gt;Du&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Gross-oder-Kleinschreibung-von-duDu-und-ihrIhr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Gross-oder-Kleinschreibung-von-duDu-und-ihrIhr&lt;/a&gt; explains well when it can be and should be letter-cased: for direct address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just happens that the informal &lt;em&gt;sie&lt;/em&gt; is inherently never a direct address, as it is 3rd person, and formal &lt;em&gt;Sie&lt;/em&gt; always is, as it is, functionally, 2nd person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even after the spelling reform, this differs slightly from case for pronouns in Russian, and there is no corresponding Russian &lt;em&gt;Ты&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, &lt;em&gt;lei&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;loro&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;voi&lt;/em&gt; and even &lt;em&gt;ella&lt;/em&gt; can be used as formal forms, and as formal forms of direct address they can be lowercase or letter-case, and so can &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;, but in practice the formal forms are usually letter-case, even as clitics, and the informal usually lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems Spanish &lt;em&gt;usted&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ustedes&lt;/em&gt; are usually lowercase regardless of politeness, but their abbreviations &lt;em&gt;Ud&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Uds&lt;/em&gt; are letter-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T10:39:42.687" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T10:39:42.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30113" CreationDate="2019-01-02T19:09:00.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a good summary of the T-V distinction&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; the various strategies used across different languages.  The singular-plural distinction is just one strategy, and not the most common one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to emphasize a distinction or distance between speaker &amp;amp; listener. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a person with more social power may be addressed in the plural, since plural is more &quot;powerful&quot; than singular, using the metaphor of multiplicity = power. This leads to forms like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_personal_pronouns#The_second_person&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'royal' &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a more powerful person may be addressed in third person (&quot;your Grace&quot;) since that increases distance. This leads to forms like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Usted&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;vuestra merced&lt;/em&gt; 'your grace'*; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senhor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portuguese&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;o senhor / a senhora&lt;/em&gt; 'sir, madam' &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;senior&lt;/em&gt; 'elder'; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorifics_(linguistics)#Polish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polish&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;pan / pani / etc.&lt;/em&gt; 'Lord'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These strategies change over time to reflect changing social norms. A desire to de-emphasize power differences might lead to diminished use of formal pronouns, or to the reverse: the application of formal pronouns to all listeners - in most varieties of English, &quot;thou&quot; is no longer part of the lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T19:09:00.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3747" CreationDate="2019-01-02T19:31:03.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: the usual caveats of asking&lt;/em&gt; why &lt;em&gt;about language change apply.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the answers making some social theory about T-V, social class, bibles and so on fail to explain why these factors would not apply to every other language and society with T-V, social class and bibles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the rise of &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; - the 2nd person &lt;em&gt;accusative&lt;/em&gt; - to replace &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;thee&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ye&lt;/em&gt; is far more compatible with &lt;strong&gt;the broader loss of case and morphology in English&lt;/strong&gt;, obviously not total, but enough to make English fundamentally different than Old English and most other Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we see here, the collapse of the 2nd-person singular and plural went hand-in-hand with the collapse of the 2nd-person nominative and objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mPawQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mPawQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; seems to have an exact parallel in Dutch, and also in Haitian Creole - a Romance language - and the accompanying use of word order like SVO.  And indeed there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English creole hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, and systematic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_Dutch_declension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loss of case in Dutch&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument can also be made that there was collapse happening in Dutch, Old French, Old English even earlier, because French subject and object forms are collapsed for 1st and 2nd person plural, and Vulgar Romance and English accusative and dative collapsed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is, by the way, still ongoing in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Scots&lt;/a&gt;, one of the languages most closely related to English.  Another somewhat similar case is that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/voc%C3%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;você&lt;/a&gt; in Brazilian Portuguese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-03T20:19:02.287" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T20:19:02.287" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30118" CreationDate="2019-01-02T19:43:15.507" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Before the Question was edited:]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Logically, they are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; equivalent. 1. means that there is nothing that is gold and glitters.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. means that there is something that glitters and is not gold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[After the Question was edited:]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well, then 1. means that if it is gold it doesn't glitter. x is gold → x does not glitter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, could you specify your question? The 2nd is based on the assumption that value is easily seen and states that, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, you can't always see the value of something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The 1st statement is more drastic in that it says you can &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; see the value of something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[gold could be seen as the metaphor(/ possibly metonymy) for the highest value there is]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Another Edit:]&#xA;Nuclear Wang's post made me realize that 1. may be ambiguous. I stand by my interpretation but in very poetic speech the sentences could mean the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23365" LastEditorUserId="23365" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T20:43:52.313" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T20:43:52.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30118" CreationDate="2019-01-02T20:17:16.020" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two phrases mean the exact same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not all that is gold glitters&quot; means that not every gold item glitters, or in other words, there are things with great value that may not appear so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;All that is gold does not glitter&quot; means the same, that not every gold item glitters. Some are parsing this sentence differently, suggesting it means that all gold items do not glitter. This interpretation is an outright falsehood, however, and doesn't fit at all within the context of a prophetic verse. Given the context, it should be interpreted that not all gold items glitter, not that all gold items do not glitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of the poem, the phrase suggests that some people have hidden virtue. It does not suggest that all virtuous people outwardly appear otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21466" LastEditorUserId="21466" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T21:20:01.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T21:20:01.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30118" CreationDate="2019-01-02T20:29:35.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first example has potentially two interpretations, with either &quot;not&quot; in the logical scope of &quot;all&quot; or &quot;all&quot; in the logical scope of &quot;not&quot;.  There is no authority to appeal to who can tell us which is proper in English. I find that my own judgement fluctuates.  Logicians sometimes use linear order to distinguish the two interpretations, but probably more often use grouping symbols to tell one structure from the other.  Linguists can use trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T20:29:35.760" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30118" CreationDate="2019-01-02T20:37:37.510" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What gives is that there's a quirk in the logical interaction of &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; which, in the first sentence, gives rise to two opposed interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretation 1: &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is only negating &lt;em&gt;glitter&lt;/em&gt;, and isn't applying to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;. Then the reading is &quot;For all X, if X is gold, then X does not glitter&quot;. This is the interpretation that's contradictory with your second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretation 2: &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; is, despite its position, actually applying to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;. This may seem illogical, but if you put some stress on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;, it sounds more likely: &quot;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; that is gold doesn't glitter, only &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; gold things do&quot;. This interpretation (which is the one intended in Tolkien) is synonymous with your second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T20:37:37.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30111" CreationDate="2019-01-02T21:01:45.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This retraction happens when [s] is in a consonant cluster with a following [ɹ] (as in the video you linked, &quot;ju&lt;em&gt;st str&lt;/em&gt;aight up&quot;). The reason is articulatory: the retroflex gesture of the [ɹ] is anticipated, so the [s] becomes retroflex/postalveolar too. It's an assimilation. This is pretty common in US English: I associate it with Southern and African-American speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T21:01:45.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30131" CreationDate="2019-01-02T22:46:41.950" Score="4" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was always my understanding that Hittite borrowed the cuneiform script from the Sumerians via Akkadian. This would prevent Hittite from borrowing lexemes from Sumerian unless Akkadian borrowed them as well. Now, in Akkadian, logograms are understood to be Sumerian writings that are pronounced in Akkadian (e.g., DUMU.MEŠ would be pronounced mārū/mārī; &quot;sons&quot;). I don't know Hittite, but this is consistent with the brief description of Hittite cuneiform &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In round one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nacloweb.org/naclo2016.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2016 edition of NACLO&lt;/a&gt; (North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad), Hittite is used in exercise F (&lt;a href=&quot;http://nacloweb.org/resources/problems/2016/NACLO2016ROUND1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;, start on p. 15). They give a &lt;strong&gt;phonetic&lt;/strong&gt; rendering of a Hittite cuneiform passage, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dumumeššu (line 5; &quot;his sons&quot;; written [DUMU.MEŠ-&lt;em&gt;ŠU&lt;/em&gt;])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dingirmešša (last line; &quot;and the gods&quot;; written DINGIR.MEŠ-&lt;em&gt;ša&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I added the writing from the edition of the larger context given by Beckman in &lt;a href=&quot;https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2304-the-anatolian-myth-of-illuyanka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JANES 14 (1982), 11–25&lt;/a&gt;. The words are found in lines Bi9' and Bi17' of that edition [§10 and 12].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now these words are clearly from the Sumerian DUMU.MEŠ &quot;sons&quot; and DINGIR.MEŠ &quot;gods&quot;. But how is that possible, if in Akkadian these sign sequences are pronounced mārū/ī and ilū/ī, respectively, and Hittite did not have direct contact with Sumerian? Where is the fault in my reasoning? Or is the &quot;phonetic rendering&quot; given in the NACLO exercise incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T23:13:06.250" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T03:44:13.353" Title="(How) did Hittite borrow words from Sumerian?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;sumerian&gt;&lt;hittite&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2019-01-02T23:35:51.290" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The resemblance between &quot;Barary&quot; and &quot; Prairie&quot; is striking and there is no wrong in European languages borrowing words from Arabic. It happened in so many other words, also in English like &quot;admiral&quot;, &quot;alchemy&quot;, &quot;algebra&quot;, &quot; cotton&quot;,...etc.&#xA;But in the case of the word &quot;prairie&quot;, I think we should dig deeper since there is a word from Latin origin- &quot;partum&quot; -which means meadows, that may have been reformed and coined centuries later and became the current &quot;prairie&quot; we know now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23570" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T23:35:51.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30127" CreationDate="2019-01-02T23:52:20.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;dumumeššu and dingirmešša are not Hittite, nor are they Sumerian. They are Sumero-Akkadian heterograms for Hittite words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T23:52:20.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30127" CreationDate="2019-01-03T03:44:13.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, even though Sumerian had died out by the time Hittite was spoken, the Akkadian priesthood kept using it for religious purposes, and so they would have preserved some knowledge of its pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question lies elsewhere, however. The words represented in the Olympiad questions as »dumumeššu« and »dingirmešša« are not &quot;proper&quot; Hittite words. Rather, as fdb points out, they are transcriptions of logograms. The word forms »dumumeššu« and »dingirmešša« do not in fact aim to represent actual Hittite pronunciations and so are not really phonetic renderings, even if most of the text is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the same reason these words are written in capitals in the source you found – something that the creators of the Olympiad questions likely found would be unnecessarily confusing and therefore dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, since the word for &quot;son&quot; in Hittite was &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; written with the Sumerogram DUMU, as opposed to being written phonetically, the actual pronunciation of the word for &quot;son&quot; in Hittite is unknown. The word for &quot;deity&quot;, on the other hand, is known to be »šiuš«, so we may hypothesize that DINGIR.MEŠ-ša was pronounced something along the lines of »šiuešša« (or in later times »šimešša«).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T03:44:13.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20368" CreationDate="2019-01-03T04:28:46.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that the opposite of a silent letter is a ghost letter.  A letter that is pronounced even though it's not in the word.  Examples would include the invisible;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/B/&lt;/code&gt; Sometimes in Thespian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/CH/&lt;/code&gt; in Culture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/W/&lt;/code&gt; in words like One and Once&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/N/&lt;/code&gt; in Personal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/J/&lt;/code&gt; in Modular&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/R/&lt;/code&gt; in Colonel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/SH/&lt;/code&gt; in Action&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23572" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-01-03T07:33:07.747" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T07:33:07.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30111" CreationDate="2019-01-03T05:32:28.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without specific examples, it's hard to say what exactly you're hearing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different languages (or accents) have different boundaries for what exactly counts as /s/ vs. /ʃ/, so it's possible that the speakers you are hearing do not really &quot;replace&quot; their /s/ with [ʃ], but just use a pronunciation that sounds more like [ʃ] to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's also possible that they really are using [ʃ] (possibly even /ʃ/) where a typical reference English accent would have /s/. It is known that English /s/ can have retracted pronunciations; I haven't personally read a lot of the literature about this topic, but there seems to be a decent amount (maybe some of the references here would be helpful?: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-variation-and-change/article/variability-in-american-english-sretraction-suggests-a-solution-to-the-actuation-problem/D6840CEF6519F47CC2611F87839F188B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Variability in American English s-retraction suggests a solution to the actuation problem&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this happens in environments where the contrast is neutralized by English phonotactics; the most well-known examples I think are the word-initial consonant clusters /str/ (as TKR says) and /stj/ or /stʃ/ (the cluster at the start of &quot;student&quot; in a typical southern British English accent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glain (2013)&lt;/a&gt; says that /st/ followed by a vowel, as in &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;start,&lt;/em&gt; also has a variant pronunciation that sounds like [ʃt]. I don't know that much about this, but this indicates that s-retraction is not restricted to the context of str-, although it may have started out there and subsequently spread to certain other s-initial clusters. I haven't heard of s-retraction occurring outside of consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;German Phonetics and Phonology: Theory and Practice&lt;/em&gt; (By Mary Grantham O'Brien and Sarah M. B. Fagan, 2016), says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[s-retraction] has in fact been documented in the English of speakers from the United States, Great Britain, and New Zealand (Rutter 2011:27). It appears to be spreading, not only by being characteristic of the speech of more and more speakers, but also in the environments where it occurs. Janda and Joseph (2003:212) have documented the [ʃ] pronunciation of /s/ in a number of environments other than the sequence /str/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;(6) [ʃ] in English clusters other than /str/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;a. with r preceding: under[ʃ]tand, thunder[ʃ]storm&#xA;      &lt;br&gt;b. before [r] alone: di[ʃ]respect&#xA;      &lt;br&gt;c. before a plosive other than /t/, with /r/ following it: [ʃ]prinkler, [ʃ]creen&#xA;      &lt;br&gt;d. before a plosive, with no /r/ involved: [ʃ]till, [ʃ]chool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=oXvsDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT431&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 431&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T05:32:28.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29732" CreationDate="2019-01-03T12:14:56.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before listing possible reasons for the change, below mentioned facts should be considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) We can't pronounce words with /p/ much louder compare to /h/ (Try shouting Pogu and Hogu and observe  the difference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Not all the /p/ to /h/ phonological change occurred in Kannada.&#xA;-Rarely used words are not changed (ex: Pashana(means poison)).&#xA;-Words used in literatures are not changed (ex: Panditya, Prakara, Prashamse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Labour class people using common words are mainly changed (Haru, Hattu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) Other Dravidian language still retain /p/ instead of /h/ changes.&#xA;-Tulu, Tamil and Malayalam still retain /p/ in same words (ex: Pola/Po instead of Hogu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Reasons:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geographical terrain plays major role in change behind /p/ to /h/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Kannada speaking area is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayalu_Seeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bayalu Seeme&lt;/a&gt; which means plain ground, this area is surrounded by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Ghats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Western ghats&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Ghats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eastern ghats&lt;/a&gt; and hence difficult to maintain communication with surrounding Tamil, Malayalam and Tamil people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-In large agricultural ground area need to speak in louder with someone in longer distance(Now also construction workers from Bayalu seeme speak loudely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22374" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T12:14:56.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T02:20:28.163" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that relative clauses simply go in the noun phrase containing the noun they modify, but what about adverbial clauses and free modifiers? How do you represent a clause containing an adverbial clause or a free modifier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, how would you represent the sentence: &quot;The earth, when it shook, glorified God.&quot; or the sentence: &quot;They spoke to the king, warning him of the coming army.&quot; as syntax trees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19616" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T02:20:28.163" Title="How are clauses containing adverbial clauses and free modifiers represented in syntax trees?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11749" CreationDate="2019-01-04T07:28:42.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am simply quoting etymonline.com which has the following under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/castor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;castor&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It has been assumed that the hero's name was given to the animal because he was a noted healer and the odorous reddish-brown secretions of the inguinal sacs of the animal (Latin castoreum), were used medicinally in ancient times, especially for women's diseases. But the animal did not live in Greece in classical times (the closest beavers were north of the Black Sea), and the name probably was borrowed from another language, perhaps influenced by the hero's name. The Greek word replaced the native Latin word for &quot;beaver&quot; (fiber).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23580" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T07:28:42.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T14:03:02.360" Score="0" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across an essay title asking us to critique the evidence of language being processed as either “abstract phonemes” or “surface exemplars”. (Specifically in phonology)&#xA;Is this a rewording of the debate between OT vs RBT? Rules vs. constraints? Generativism/Chomsky vs. ? ? &#xA;I feel lost with what to plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone clarify the actual “standard” names of the relevant theories or point towards any particular papers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone be able to outline the two opposing sides? There seem to be so many different terms thrown around that it is difficult to split everything into two opposing sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any input you have, as I have been searching for literally weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T18:16:44.173" Title="Phonology: Exemplars vs. Abstract Phoneme Theory" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T14:39:09.170" Score="7" ViewCount="3503" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for words that are monomorphemic in English – preferably basic words describing things in nature such as star, water, tree, grass, etc. – but polymorphemic in other languages. It would be great if you could then also name the individual morphemes of the words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why am I interested in this? I'm currently writing a paper in which I want to criticize Jerry Fodor's thesis that there is a &quot;language of thought&quot; (call it &quot;Mentalese&quot;) that is universal to all humans and prior to all public languages. He upholds a kind of linguistic atomism in which the meaning of a phrase (or in this case, a thought) is derived from the meaning of its basic constituents (in this case, its basic concepts). Fodor argues that basic concepts are those concepts that are expressed by monomorphemic names for individuals and kinds (like the above examples). He exclusively uses English as an example, however. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can provide some examples of words that would be monomorphemic in English and thus very good candidates for being basic concepts, but are formed out of multiple morphemes in other languages, then I can argue that Fodor either cannot say anything substantial on what basic conepts are, or that he must admit that the language we speak shapes the way we think, a thesis he admantly rejects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I only know German and English, I would be very thankful for examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23584" LastEditorDisplayName="user23398" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T05:46:06.547" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:51:50.833" Title="Examples of words that are monomorphemic in English, but polymorphemic in other languages" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30141" CreationDate="2019-01-04T15:31:40.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One easy source for this is words that used to be polymorphemic, but fossilized by the time they reached English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;desire&quot;, &quot;depend&quot;, &quot;destroy&quot;, &quot;descend&quot;, and &quot;delete&quot; are irreducible in English: there are no verbs *sire, *pend, *stroy, *scend, and *lete. However, in Latin, &lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt; was a productive derivational prefix meaning &quot;down, from, away&quot;, and all those words can be analyzed further: the base morphemes mean &quot;star&quot;, &quot;hang&quot;, &quot;build&quot;, &quot;climb&quot;, and &quot;smear&quot;, respectively. All of these came from Latin through Romance to French and then to English, and by the time they reached English their original derivation was lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many recent loanwords are the same way, though those don't illustrate your point as well. For example, &quot;Inuit&quot; and &quot;Bantu&quot; both mean &quot;the people&quot;, and can be decomposed into &quot;person&quot; plus a plural marker (&lt;em&gt;inuk&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-it&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ba-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ntu&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Well, okay, &quot;sire&quot; is an English verb, but it's unrelated. The point stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It seems there are also archaic verbs &quot;pend&quot; and &quot;scend&quot;; however, I've never heard a native speaker use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T15:03:52.763" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T15:03:52.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30141" CreationDate="2019-01-04T15:55:05.437" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example that springs to mind: English &quot;love&quot; vs. Danish &quot;kærlighed&quot;, which is actually tri-morphemic, consisting of &quot;kær&quot; (dear), &quot;-lig&quot; (derivational morpheme creating adjectives, thus &quot;kærlig&quot; = &quot;loving&quot;)  and &quot;-hed&quot; (derivational morpheme creating nouns from adjectives, like English &quot;-ness&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T15:55:05.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30140" CreationDate="2019-01-04T17:26:00.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the terminology that you propose is &quot;the same&quot; in fundamental ways that make those theories distinct from Exemplar Theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part for you will be figuring out what &quot;exemplar theory&quot; says, as applied to phonology. Outside of exemplar theoretic approaches (there are many of them), &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; has &quot;abstract phonemes&quot;, that is some kind of mental representation of sound. In fact, an exemplar is also a mental representation (the only thing that isn't abstract is an actual waveform, and you don't have them in your head); it's just claimed to be &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it is not clear that exemplar approaches are &quot;phonology&quot; in the same sense that OT or rule-based theory is, that is, it may not be a theory of how to compute Arabic verb inflection (Arabic has an interestingly complex set of alternations, often called &quot;morphophonology&quot; because it is phonology connected to morphological differences such as the different effects of adding the endings /t,na/ versus /at,aw/ to /bana/: [baneet, baneena] vs. [banat, banaw]). Exemplar theory seems to address the question &quot;how are you likely to actually pronounce this word&quot;, rather that &quot;what is the form of the 3rd pl perfective of 'build'?&quot;. That is, EP and generic computational theories of phonology with phonemes are about different things. EP focuses on things like child language acquisition, accommodation to dialect and individual differences and production variation. Grammatical theories may indeed embrace those sorts of phenomena. Frequently, people point to some fact of child language or slips of the tongue to support their claimed generalization. Some people e.g. Hale and Reiss and numerous others distinguish between facts about grammar – phonology – versus speech and performance – phonetics, maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the best reference for applying exemplar theory to phonology is &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2005/Johnson_decisions289-311.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper by Johnson&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T18:16:44.173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T18:16:44.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30141" CreationDate="2019-01-04T17:50:56.187" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand your interest, you don't need the relationship to be English (monomorphemic) to Other (polymorphemic), it works just as well if you have English being the polymorphemic example and Other being the monomorphemic example. North Saami [gabba] is &quot;all-white reindeer&quot; – there are other words for various coloring, sexes and ages of reindeer, also numerous terms describing states of snow. This is described in a paper &quot;Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer, snow, and ice&quot; by Ole H. Magga which used to be out there in the wild but is now behind the paywall. He also &lt;em&gt;jievja&lt;/em&gt; 'light, nearly white', &lt;em&gt;čuoivvat&lt;/em&gt; 'yellowish grey', but also &lt;em&gt;čáhhpat&lt;/em&gt; 'black', which is actually polymorphemic (the root &quot;black&quot; is /čáhhpV/ – you would need to investigate proposed examples, but &lt;em&gt;gabba, jievja, čuoivvat&lt;/em&gt; are good enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless we declare that English is The Basic Language, &quot;all-white reindeer&quot; is a basic concept in human language which then implies, given Fodor's general theory, that humans have genetic knowledge that there are reindeer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T17:50:56.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30140" CreationDate="2019-01-04T18:10:13.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear tell that young children sometimes get mad at adults who talk to them in child speech, because they can tell they're being made fun of.  Adult says &quot;And do we hear the fwoggy cwoaking?&quot;, and child betrays signs of irritation: &quot;No, it's not fwoggy.  It's fwoggy!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens, it suggests that we don't even hear surface exemplars, usually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T18:10:13.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:25:48.660" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there is a site or resource that will take an Esperanto word and diagram the different components. For example, given &quot;malsanulejo,&quot; the &quot;diagrammer&quot; would return something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mal-: prefix meaning &quot;opposite&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-san-: root meaning &quot;healthy&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-ul: suffix meaning &quot;human&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-ej: suffix meaning place&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-o: suffix forming a noun  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23587" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T22:22:38.067" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T00:00:23.453" Title="Is there an online Esperanto word stem &quot;diagrammer?&quot;" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T20:26:01.483" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking a course in generative grammar and I've reached a point where I don't know what's happening because I missed one class. Anyway, last time my tutor drew tree diagrams that I found a bit confusing. First of all they included labels such as vP and v' (so lowercase) which I'm not familiar with, and after each object there would be something like [nN] or [N]  which I later found out denoted c-categorical features. The most confusing part of all was that verbs from the bottom of the tree would be put between &amp;lt; &gt;  and moved up the tree. The explanation was that they were deponents verbs. I would include a picture of this but I don't think that would help since English is not my first language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any idea what this method of drawing syntax trees would be called and what it represents?  I couldn't find anything similar on this site and I would just like to find some online resources that explain what this is all about.&#xA;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T20:26:01.483" Title="What is this method of drawing syntax trees?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30147" CreationDate="2019-01-04T22:23:54.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saying it linguistically, you are looking for a tool that does morphological analysis for Esperanto. There is a great variety of such tools around and I remember that some of them were also trained and tested for Esperanto, but alas, I don't have the details (how the tool was named and whether it is available under a free licence) ready&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search for &quot;Esperanto morphological tool&quot; brought up a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tguinard/EsperantoWordSegmenter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theresa Guinnard's Esperanto Word Segmenter&lt;/a&gt; on GitHub, I am sure there are more tools outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T22:31:56.943" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T22:31:56.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T22:56:35.077" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this question, but we have to classify if each word-final -s or -er is not a suffix or if it is an inflectional or derivational suffix. I specifically don't understand the wording &quot;word-final.&quot; I put that, for example, that in the word kiss, the &quot;word-final -s&quot; is not a suffix where-as the &quot;word-final -s&quot; in the word &quot;brings&quot; is an inflectional suffix. Is that correct? When is the word-final -s not inflectional if it is a suffix? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23590" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T01:06:11.270" Title="Identify the status of the word-final -s" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30150" CreationDate="2019-01-05T00:16:12.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, that would be when word-final -&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; as a suffix is derivational, not inflectional. Examples would be &lt;em&gt;forwards, backwards, sideways, besides&lt;/em&gt;. Also there is an endearative use in &lt;em&gt;pops, toots&lt;/em&gt; (although &lt;em&gt;toot&lt;/em&gt; = [tʊt] is not used by itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T01:06:11.270" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T01:06:11.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30141" CreationDate="2019-01-05T10:46:38.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see from earlier answers that you're after words of the same &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;. It wasn't clear to me from the OP that that's how the English and other words are to be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German word for &quot;glove&quot; is &quot;Handschuh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T10:46:38.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T08:05:26.230" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages, apart from those in the indo-european and semitic language families, that have synthetic-fusional morphologies?  It seems that the synthetic-agglutinative morphologies are much more common (eg. uralic, altaic, caucasian, basque, hurrian, sumerian, etruscan) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23602" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T12:41:59.657" Title="Synthetic fusional morphology" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T11:32:06.747" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this statement in a work (Ph.D. Dissertation, p.158) by Asier Alcázar Estela in which he assumes that the Past Participial Relatives are the source of the Participial Adjectives. And he provides the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the recently arrived train &amp;lt; the train [recently arrived]&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't see how this example can stand as an argument for his assumption. &#xA;If anyone has an idea, please help.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T11:32:06.747" Title="Past Participial Relatives are the sourse of Participial Adjectives, why?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30154" CreationDate="2019-01-06T11:45:49.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WALS website enumerates and classifies some languages having a fusional morphology: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/20&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still on WALS, some statistics are given about the degree of exponence of a few languages: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/21&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, from this sample, it seems agglutinative morphology is much more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T12:41:59.657" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T12:41:59.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30164" CreationDate="2019-01-06T12:05:18.040" Score="7" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) attempts to reduce the semantics of all lexicons down to a restricted set of semantic primitives. But in NSM, colors are not semantic primitives. How then to define words like &quot;blue&quot;? More generally, how to define word representing qualia (i.e. individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6871" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T18:29:31.860" Title="How to define colors in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;nsm&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30157" CreationDate="2019-01-06T12:36:08.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This theory considers that colours are not an universal concept, so they are not included as semantic prime. But, another conceptual tool, which takes into account cultural categories as the colour, is used, it is called semantic molecule. Yet, they don't go further in the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an article &quot;Why there are no ‘colour universals’ in language and thought (Wierzbicka, 2008)&quot;, this author proposes to sweep the colour concept aside and instead to retain as concept the visual semantic. By doing this, the semantic prime SEE can be used to describe these meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you are not satisfied by their proposal, you can offer your own description. Thus, you can choose a language or languages which have a wealthy vocabulary about colours and consider them as your enters for other languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Riffian: azeggwagh azeggwagh azegza azegza&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: red red green blue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French: rouge roux vert blue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this example, you can see that French is much more accurate than English and Riffian. So French should serve to elaborate your primitives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also choose to use codes which describe the colour spectral such as RGB, HEX, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, If you mean by &quot;primitive&quot; the colour concepts shared by all the languages of the world, so there are only two which are found everywhere and which are: light/white &amp;amp; dark/black. Others argue that there are six universal colours: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/132&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/132&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comparative method is the only one which can help you to determine your primitives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T18:29:31.860" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T18:29:31.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T20:36:26.223" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am a software developer, not a computational linguist and I am not super familiar (though I am mildly familiar) with the field. Happy to learn and be corrected though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My use-case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to analyze a text in Chinese, and have grammar rules printed out (in English) based on what appears in the text. These would be simple sentences describing the grammar rule in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have explored several statistics-based parsers (Stanford, SyntaxNet, and SpaCy) and I am looking into how rule-based processing works and I'm somewhat lost - I'm not sure what the right approach is here. It seems that what I want (my guess) is a rule-based approach, and then just mapping that into plain text language - but I don't know what I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally a solution would be made for Python as that's the language the rest of the application is being done in with the anticipation that most language tools will be available for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am certainly open for using a tool in a different language or even a different approach entirely if that's the best idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;人们都穿上了很厚的衣服。 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would generate, for example, this grammar rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verb / Verb Phrase + 了 - Expressing that an action has been completed with &quot;Verb / Verb Phrase + 了&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to detecting 了, as long as this character was being used in that particular grammatical way above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically it would look for certain characters, see how they are being used in a sentence, and then spit out a plain text English language rule based on that (presumably based on some mapping of the grammar rules to plain text English that I would write)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of computational linguistics is somewhat limited (I am a layman, though I am reading heavily every day) so I am trying to understand the best way forward for this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8072" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T21:35:52.460" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T04:13:45.207" Title="Rule-based or Statistics-based approach for generating plain language grammar rules from a text" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30157" CreationDate="2019-01-07T06:39:37.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You simply have to build up phrases from prior phrases, beginning with semantic primitives, to define new terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colors are in principle defined through the objects that bear the color, &lt;em&gt;sky blue&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;blood red&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;leave green&lt;/em&gt; etc. So first you need to define those, which is out of scope for the question. There are the primitives &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;, so it may very well be possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@amegnunsen's answer implies a &lt;em&gt;semantic molecule&lt;/em&gt; for colors was proposed, however I have no access to the books to see and confirm an example sentence defining colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T06:39:37.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-07T10:22:21.787" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Why do I have trouble deciding what is a proper name and how can I find a reasonable set of rules to follow when deciding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m a member of a team responsible for the National Photocorpus of the Polish Language, where we are trying to confirm the earliest existence of any given Polish word in print (within certain period).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have recently reviewed some of those we have rejected or marked as problematic, and turns out that the lemmata I had treated as proper names are considered common names by my colleagues. I don't know the literature in this particular field, and I find it problematic to generate a consistent rule set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having in mind that proper names in principle name singular objects, we have cases like Ford (a company) and Ford (each of that company’s cars). So that's one problem. Another problem is derivation—it's much richer in Polish, so it doesn’t always translate well, but let me try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;PL: Nowy Jork → Nowojorczyk&#xA;&#xA;EN: New York → New Yorker&#xA;&#xA;PL: Anglia → Anglik&#xA;&#xA;EN: England → Englishman&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here both are treated as proper names. But in Polish it’s easy to make a name of an employee or member of an institution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;PL: PPS (Polish Socialist Party) → pepeesowiec (its member)&#xA;&#xA;EN: IRS → *IRSian, *IRSer&#xA;&#xA;EN: Google → Googler&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My colleagues say that such a person is now described with a common name. But why? It is still derived from a proper name and refers to multiple units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that should directly transpose itself onto Byronian (enthusiast of his works) or Francophobe (hater of the French); at the very least, I would see a third, middle-ground category: &lt;em&gt;proper name-derived common names&lt;/em&gt; with semantics somewhere in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14049" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T10:22:21.787" Title="How to formalize rules on what's a proper name?" Tags="&lt;derivation&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30157" CreationDate="2019-01-07T12:10:56.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anna Wierzbicka wrote a chapter in her 1996 text &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0198700032&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semantics: Primes and Universals&lt;/a&gt; on the semantics of colour terms. In this chapter she presents a theory where colours are understood according to their similarity to exemplars (a type of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prototype theory&lt;/a&gt;). For example, here are two explications for the English colour terms &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;yellow&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is red. =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  when one sees things like X one can think of fire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  when one sees things like X one can think of blood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is yellow. =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  when one sees things like X one can think of the sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These explications are not fully reduced to the NSM primes, but use semantic molecules (fire, blood, sun, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She first considers individual languages' colour terms, showing that the exemplars of each colour are language specific. For example, although all of these colour terms overlap, they are not equivalent, and have different exemplars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is niebiski (Polish) =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  at some times people can see the sun above them in the sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  when one sees things like X one can think of the sky at these times&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is blue (English) =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (a) at some times people can see the sun above them in the sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when one sees things like X one can think of the sky at these times&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) in some places there is a lot of (very much) water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when people are far from these places&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    they can see this water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when one sees things like X one can think of this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is aoi (Japanese) =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (a) at some times people can see the sun above them in the sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when one sees things like X one can think of the sky at these times&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) in some places there is a lot of water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when people are far from these places&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    they can see this water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when one sees things like X one can think of this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (c) in some places things grow out of the ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    at some times there is water in those places&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    when one sees things like X one can think of this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the chapter she considers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berlin and Kay's research on the proposed hierarchy of basic colour terms&lt;/a&gt;, and whether there could be a universal basis to colour terms. For the first level binary division she hypothesises that light, the sun, and fire could be the basis of the &quot;macro-white&quot; and &quot;macro-black&quot; concepts. For the secondary level base colours of &quot;macro-red&quot; and &quot;grue&quot; (cool/blue/green) she suggests that reddish colours are focused on fire and to a lesser extent the sun (but not blood, even though it is an important part of the definition of the English colour &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;), and, contrary to expectation, &quot;grue&quot; is not actually focused on either the sky or vegetation, but is instead negatively defined as &quot;not-red&quot;. This is because at that time &quot;grue&quot; had never been identified as being focused in the intermediate blue-green region, but was only found to have blue and green focal regions. This cross-linguistic exploration of possible colour universals is quite tentative though, and Wierzbicka and other NSM proponents may have changed their models substantially since the chapter was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T12:10:56.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-07T17:12:00.887" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John only had the Ferrari for three months, but while he had it, he drove &lt;strong&gt;the hell out of&lt;/strong&gt; it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm pretty sure I aced &lt;strong&gt;the hell out of&lt;/strong&gt; that test.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That last stuff you got us, we smoked &lt;strong&gt;the hell out of&lt;/strong&gt; it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works like most other intensifiers: &quot;X Y'd the hell out of Z&quot; means roughly &quot;X Y'd Z intensely/rapidly/immediately/determinedly&quot;, or, for that matter, &quot;X fucking Y'd Z&quot;. But &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; does it work like that? (&quot;The hell out of&quot; is clearly not any kind of syntactic constituent that can head a phrase, unlike the paraphrases…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this is different from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The hell&quot; in wh phrases (What the hell is that?), which has been studied quite a bit (and which has a relevant question on this site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/7156&quot;&gt;What &quot;the hell&quot; is this?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The hell&quot; in non-sentential utterances (The hell you say!), which I think I've seen covered in passing a few times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The hell&quot; as a specifier on a particle or preposition (We got the hell out), which I've only seen a tentative blog post on, but seems relatively simple.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably there are connections of some kind (and the last one can rarely be ambiguous with this one&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;), but this clearly isn't the same construction as any of those, and, in particular, there's a major syntax-semantics mismatch here that doesn't exist in any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, &quot;he drove the hell out of his car&quot; seems to be identical in form to a transitive resultative, like &quot;he drove his car into town&quot;—&quot;the hell&quot; is a normal NP complement/direct object, and &quot;out of his car&quot; is a normal PP complement.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Wh-movement, topicalization, passivization, pronouns, etc. all work the way you'd expect.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But semantically, it's very different. The verb subcategorizes for a patient as the direct object, but instead it gets &quot;the hell&quot;. The preposition demands a location but instead gets the verb's patient, and wants to describe a path but instead has its semantic content bleached out or ignored.&lt;sup&gt;5, 6&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think &quot;the hell&quot; can be replaced by any the-hell-NP that works in the particle-specifier case (#3 above), so at least there's no mystery there.&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verb seems to have to be one that normally takes a patient as an (obligatory or optional) direct object and has no other obligatory complements; there may be more restrictions to it than that.&lt;sup&gt;8&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have no idea what cross-language parallels there are, if any, or any dialect variation,&lt;sup&gt;9&lt;/sup&gt; or even how much variation there is in acceptability among speakers beyond the handful I quizzed on a tiny corpus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question is how this can be analyzed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In mainstream Chomskyan grammar, I have no idea how you'd even begin to move things into the right position to get the LF and PF right. Or, for MP instead of GB/P&amp;amp;P, I assume the movement happens before case marking, and there's a whole chain of leapfrogging jumps, but I have no idea what constraints could trigger any of that to happen, or what the original form is. (There's no little-n/abstract-N akin to Larson's account of verbs, and, even if there were, the apparent movement here is entirely out of the NP/DP/whatever.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, I can imagine the basic idea a lot more easily, along similar lines to the way he handles, e.g., light verbs. But I'm not sure what kind of constraints in the lexical entry could restrict unification properly without something&lt;sup&gt;10&lt;/sup&gt; that isn't necessary for any of his worked examples.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly, in most Construction Grammar variants, how to staple the verb and patient to the construction is obvious, but how to license only the right set of entries… I have no idea (unless it's by listing the cartesian product of every the-hell-able verb and every valid the-hell phrase as individual constructions, which seems implausible).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's been studied in some other formalism, that's fine, but I'd appreciate a pointer to an introduction, along with the study of this construction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Failing that, if there are parallels with other, better-studied constructions, that would be helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… or, if nothing else, at least a solid description without any attempt at analysis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Whatever analysis you like for &quot;right&quot; as a left modifier on Prt/P/PP/whatever, it should straightforwardly apply to &quot;the hell&quot;, especially given &quot;right the hell out/*the hell right out&quot;. If I'm missing something that makes it tricky, let me know and I'll ask a separate question on that…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Most blatantly, &quot;I flunked history 301&quot; and &quot;I flunked out of history 301&quot; are near-synonyms. You can the-hell-out-of the former, and you can the-hell-intensify the particle from flunked-out, and either way you get &quot;I flunked the hell out of history 301&quot;. I think the first one may actually be invalid here, because this transitive sense of flunked doesn't take a patient (the other does, of course, so &quot;the teacher flunked the hell out of John&quot;), but there may well be cases that are perfectly acceptable as either.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. I know there's some dispute about &quot;out of it&quot; in the first place—PP with a compound P, PP with a particle or adverb specifier, nested PP… I don't think it makes a difference; whatever analysis you give normal uses works the same here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. That isn't quite true, but I think the exceptions are all caused by register or other pragmatic violations. For example, pied-piping never sounds good with blatantly colloquial constructions except in, e.g., ironic butler-speak, and the same is true here: &quot;Out of whom did the young master beat the hell?&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. But notice that the PP sounds weird with a specifier, unlike the particle-specifier case: &quot;We got out of there&quot; can be double-intensified to &quot;We got right the hell out of there&quot; just fine, but double-intensifying &quot;We smoked it&quot; to &quot;?We smoked the hell right out of it&quot; is questionable. (In fact, from a quick survey, it sounds British to Americans, and American to Brits, for whatever that's worth…), and you definitely can't use a the-hell specifier in a the-hell-out-of VP, as in &quot;*We smoked the hell the hell out of it&quot; or &quot;We smoked the fuck the hell out of it&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. Of course &quot;out of the car&quot; is a path, but that sense doesn't seem to appear in the meaning at all—John is literally driving the car, not causing something to take a path out of the car, even metaphorically.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;7. For example: He drove the hell/*hell/the nine hells/*nine hells/the heck/the H-E-double-hockey-sticks/the fuck/the fudge/the shit/the sugar/*the shoot/the flaming hell/the all-time fuck of all fucks/every last fuck/*all the shit/*the bastard out of it, which is the same distribution in We got the hell/*hell/etc. off his land.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;8. Some verbs are tricky. Besides the &quot;flunk out&quot; case above, there's a whole class of verbs beat/kick/whip/etc. that have an open idiom &quot;beat the tar/stuffing/etc.&quot; out of. And you can stretch that idiom to some extent to other contact verbs, even positive ones like kiss/screw/etc. So, is &quot;I beat the hell out of him&quot; a the-hell-out-of of &quot;I beat him&quot;, or the &quot;beat-the-N-out-of-NP&quot; idiom with &quot;hell&quot; as the N?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;9. For example, some British speakers can use a much wider range of words as intensifiers the way Americans use &quot;fucking&quot;. They can at least arsing drive a manual twatting transmission, but can they drive the twat or arse out of a car the way Americans drive the fuck out of it?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;9. A second-order lambda that …???&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T17:40:30.467" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T09:21:45.713" Title="Can we parse the hell out of this construction?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29586" CreationDate="2019-01-07T23:48:14.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I've seen several NSM researchers discuss the concepts of &quot;left&quot; and &quot;right&quot; in relation to the semantic prime SIDE, I haven't seen any give a full explication for them. I don't think it's really that complex though, so I'll give it a go. I'll use a few semantic molecules; you can see how &quot;hands&quot; can be defined using primes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286033897_1_Natural_Semantic_Metalanguage_The_state_of_the_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Natural Semantic Metalanguage: The state of the art&quot; by Goddard, page 24&lt;/a&gt;. To start, I'll define left and right hands using three prominent actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;right hand =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (a) someone can use one hand to write&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few people use the other hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) someone can use one hand to pick up a small thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few people use the other hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (c) someone can use one hand to eat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few people use the other hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;left hand =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (a) someone can use one hand to write&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use the other hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (b) someone can use one hand to pick up a small thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few  people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use the other hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (c) someone can use one hand to eat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    a few people use this hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    many people use the other hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in English/modern Anglo culture writing, picking up, and eating are probably the most salient images for our hands, but in other cultures maybe the hand you hold your weapon in, or the hand you use for defecating is more significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from these definitions for the left hand and right hand, we can derive the definitions for the sides/directions themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is on my left side =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  my left hand is on one side of me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  X is on the same side of me as my left hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And further extensions to general relative directions are possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;X is on the left of Y =&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  X is on one side of Y&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I see that X is on the left side of Y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T23:48:14.833" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-08T10:26:54.280" Score="-1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Participles, among the non-finite verbal inventory, most often appear to be taken by linguists as being tenseless or having the feature [-tense]. This is due to their interaction only with the Aspect layer, meaning that the TP layer should not be projected. If the TP layer was not projected, then we would account for the absence of phi-features agreement with the subject [person, number, gender].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is this the case, why TP layers are not projected in the participial clauses?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T11:19:42.313" Title="Why is participial clause tenseless?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;participles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30169" CreationDate="2019-01-08T11:19:42.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who are these linguists? What language are they talking about? In Sanskrit, Greek, Latin (to name but a few) participles have tense and agree with their antecedent in gender and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T11:19:42.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4196" CreationDate="2019-01-08T14:12:22.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;in my idea, these two concepts are different from each other. As Corder (1971a) cited, there are instances where a language user produces a form that is grammatical,(i.e. conforms to the norms of the code) but this may not be the form preferred by native speakers of the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23615" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T14:12:22.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-08T17:51:30.407" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on sentiment analysis and currently struggling with egoistical emotion detection on a phrase level. So far, I detect the following phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm the best&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm rich/powerful/beautiful/important/special/clever&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm too good for/at&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I know better than someone...&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I'm not an average Joe&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me with the other phrases that come to your mind that can help to recognize egoistical people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20421" LastEditorUserId="20421" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T15:12:28.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T23:56:44.623" Title="Detect egoistical emotion" Tags="&lt;phrases&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;set-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-01-23T22:41:29.517" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-08T19:52:52.267" Score="-2" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having trouble translating this word into English if anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23617" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T20:43:10.647" Title="ɔθɛntɪket translating from IPA to English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-09T09:50:10.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30194" CreationDate="2019-01-08T20:20:28.580" Score="5" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of French is very rudimentary, but one common theme I noticed in English words borrowed from French is that their meaning becomes so much more intense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give just a few examples,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;ancienne&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; vs English &lt;em&gt;ancient&lt;/em&gt; = very, very old.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;sauvage&lt;/em&gt; = wild (e.g. &lt;em&gt;fleurs sauvages&lt;/em&gt; = wildflowers) vs English &lt;em&gt;savage&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;French &lt;em&gt;marche&lt;/em&gt; = walk vs English &lt;em&gt;march&lt;/em&gt; (like the soldiers).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this situation come about, and why do English words borrowed from French often tend to become so much more intense in their meaning?  Someone told me that the words of French origin are just more literary, but my impression is that their meaning is amplified manyfold.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3582" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T20:59:30.113" Title="Why do French words tend to become so much more intense in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30173" CreationDate="2019-01-08T20:43:10.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word is &lt;em&gt;authenticate&lt;/em&gt;. That transliteration isn't so good though, I would suggest /ɔˈθɛntɪkeɪt/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T20:43:10.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-08T21:33:02.470" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the linguistic term for re-writing a written text from non-standard dialect to standard dialect of the same language?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_(disambiguation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translation&lt;/a&gt; is the conversion of text from one &lt;strong&gt;language&lt;/strong&gt; to another.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we keep the same language, and just change the dialect, I would rule out &lt;em&gt;translation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transliteration&lt;/a&gt; is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that &lt;strong&gt;involves swapping letters&lt;/strong&gt; (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways (such as α → a, д → d, χ → ch, ն → n or æ → e).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We stay in the same script and don't swap letters, so this doesn't seem to fit either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a separate term at all, or do linguistics use a broader definition for &lt;em&gt;translation&lt;/em&gt; in such a case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17351" LastEditorUserId="17351" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T08:38:54.493" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T08:38:54.493" Title="What is the linguistic term for re-writing a dialect text to standard language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30176" CreationDate="2019-01-09T02:27:56.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &quot;language&quot; and &quot;dialect&quot; isn't always clear. See, for example, the Mandarin and Cantonese &quot;dialects&quot; of Chinese, which are far more distinct than the Serbian and Croatian &quot;languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I'd use &quot;translation&quot;, whether it's dialects or languages involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T02:27:56.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29747" CreationDate="2019-01-09T02:34:58.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking a number of different questions here, that range from simple &#xA;description of surface features to theory-internal ideas from specific frameworks (and asking about two different frameworks), so I think you may want more of an overview rather than direct answers to your specific question. If you don't want to read a textbook, the Wikipedia articles on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;case&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_role&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;case role&lt;/a&gt; look like a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, most of these terms have multiple conflicting meanings. Lexical case assignment, in the lexical-vs.-inherent sense, is non-structural in the structural-vs.-non-structural sense, but it's part of the structural case subsystem in the structural-vs.-morphological sense, not to mention that lexical-vs.-inherent is a distinction that's only made in structural case theories in the other structural-vs.-non-structural sense. Meanwhile, the morphological case subsystem connected to the structural case subsystem may be either lexical or morphological in the lexical-vs.-morphological sense—which of course has nothing to do with whether the case assignment was lexical or inherent or structural. Confused? You won't be, after this week's episode of Syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this answer will cover many, but not all, of your separate questions. (The one in the title, in particular, I don't have an answer to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexical vs. morphological case&lt;/strong&gt;: In Japanese, the NP that's the direct object of the verb is followed by the separate word 'o'; that's &lt;strong&gt;lexical&lt;/strong&gt;, because it's using a word. In Latin, the NP that's the direct object of the verb instead has the accusative version of the N, like 'dominum' instead of 'dominus', as its head; that's &lt;strong&gt;morphological&lt;/strong&gt;, because it's (depending on your theory) either changing a word, or selecting a different form of a word.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Structural vs. non-structural case&lt;/strong&gt;: In most theories within Chomskyan transformational grammar, case assignments happen automatically in certain syntactic positions, and that's what accounts for at least some case assignment (and is also one of the major things that motivates and/or constrains movement&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;). For example, the V in a VP always marks its complement (the direct object) with the accusative case. This is &lt;strong&gt;structural case assignment&lt;/strong&gt;, and theories that rely on it are &lt;strong&gt;structural case theories&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Theories that have no structural case assignment are &lt;strong&gt;non-structural case theories&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Structural vs. non-structural case&lt;/strong&gt;: Even within (some) structural case theories, some cases aren't determined (entirely) by the structural position. For example, in many languages, ditransitive sentences ('I gave her the book') always assign dative case to the indirect object—but in some Germanic languages, they assign dative case if the indirect object is a semantic goal, accusative case otherwise. Since the case depends on the thematic role, it's &lt;strong&gt;non-structural&lt;/strong&gt;. Similarly, in some Germanic languages, decausative sentences ('The plank broke' vs. 'I broke the plank') assign accusative case to the subject if it's a patient, instead of the usual (nominative) structural case assignment for subjects.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexical vs. inherent case&lt;/strong&gt;: Most non-structural case assignment is regular: the structure and semantic role together determine the case. This is &lt;strong&gt;inherent case&lt;/strong&gt;. But that isn't always true. In Icelandic, decausative verbs usually assign accusative case to patient subjects—but some specific verbs assign other cases, like 'Bátnum hvolfdi' ('The boat-DATIVE capsized'). This distinction has nothing to do with the position, so it's not structural, or with the role (the subject of 'capsized' has the same patient role as the subject of other decausatives like 'sink' and 'drift'), so it's not inherent. It's an irregular special case that has to be memorized as part of the verb 'capsize'—hence it's &lt;strong&gt;lexical&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Structural vs. morphological case&lt;/strong&gt;: Take the Latin sentence 'Video dominum'. The syntactic system only cares that 'dominus' is marked with accusative case. All the stuff the morphological system has to do (see that 'dominus' is second-declension, look up the second-declension accusative ending '-um', attach it to the stem 'domin', and do whatever fixup is necessary to turn that into the complete word 'dominum') is &lt;strong&gt;morphological&lt;/strong&gt; case; the &lt;strong&gt;structural&lt;/strong&gt; case is just 'accusative'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract vs. concrete case&lt;/strong&gt;: The idea that every language has a structural case system is &lt;strong&gt;abstract case theory&lt;/strong&gt;. English nouns need to get marked the same way as Latin, Swedish, or Japanese nouns, and V always marks its complement with accusative case, and that's why English direct objects are VP complements. Within abstract case theory, &lt;strong&gt;abstract case&lt;/strong&gt; is also sometimes used to distinguish this assigned case from the &lt;strong&gt;concrete case&lt;/strong&gt; representation. This is not the same as the structural vs. morphological distinction above—concrete case is still in syntax (so structural), but it's the thing that connects up to morphology.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Covert vs. overt case&lt;/strong&gt;: The obvious distinction between case you can't see and case that you can. In theories without abstract case, there's no covert case; e.g., English nouns just don't get case-marked. But in abstract case theories, they do get case-marked, it's just that the case is covert. Within some theories, there's even a distinction between covert case vs. overt (concrete) case that just gets spelled out as zero at the phonological level.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case vs. case&lt;/strong&gt;: Case with a capital &quot;C&quot; means the marking of dependent nouns (purely) by syntax. It also means the system that defines such marking. This term is used only within the GB and MP frameworks, where it means essentially the same thing as structural (as opposed to morphological) case, and also contrasts with (semantic) case roles: Capital-C &lt;strong&gt;Case&lt;/strong&gt; realizes case roles, and licenses morphological &lt;strong&gt;case&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. This implies that word-vs.-affix and NP-vs.-N distinction go together, but that turns out not to be true. For example, Basque suffixes the last noun in the NP, not the head, but it's clearly a suffix. You can even see this in English (if you consider the English possessive to be genitive, which is contentious): 'John from over the hill's sister/*John's from over the hill sister'. Things get even more fun with, e.g., Finnish, which marks the determiner, the head noun, and immediate adjectives of most but not all types, which is clearly NP-marking (or DP-marking), but of a very different kind from Japanese or Basque. One way to handle this is to say that all languages mark the NP, but different languages have different case concord systems within the NP, so, e.g., Latin ends up marking the head, Basque the last noun, and Finnish a bunch of components. Another way is to say that Finnish really is just marking the head like Latin, but it has a case concord system that then requires the other parts to agree with the noun.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. The core idea is that every noun needs to get all of its features marked somehow, and it does that by moving through positions that can structurally mark them. There may be different ways of doing that, and that's how you end up with (in one set of theories) two different S-structures with the same D-structure.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. This system connects up closely with the semantic theory of case roles. For example, the transitive verb 'break' has a patient that it needs to get mapped to accusative case in simple active transitive statements, which is why it ends up as the direct object. The details of how case roles and cases connect up are one of the major things that motivate different theories, so it's hard to say more in theory-neutral terms.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. Most non-transformational theories are non-structural in this sense. Some of them end up realizing the exact same relationships as constraints in the opposite direction, but those constraints still aren't usually called structural case systems.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. There are tests that can distinguish between structural and non-structural case assignments based on, e.g., whether the case is retained when the NP moves—or, for non-movement-based theories, based on correspondence between two structures that license the same NP in different locations, or whatever. So, these same terms are sometimes used even in theories that aren't based on a structural case mechanism. And even in theories where &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; case is structural, they still have to deal with the same two classes; they just explain apparent non-structural case in terms of structural case—e.g., a decausative's patient subject, unlike other intransitive subjects, is originally an object, gets marked there, and then moves to the subject position, and it's this first movement that makes it act differently on any subsequent moves.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. In a theory which trivially maps abstract cases to concrete cases, this may seem pointless, but not all of them do. For example, you can arguably simplify the mapping of semantic case roles to syntactic cases by suggesting that all languages have the same three major abstract cases: ERG, ACC, and NOM. But how does that match up with the fact that nearly all languages have only two major cases, and different languages have different pairs? In Latin, ERG and NOM map to the concrete case nominative, ACC to accusative; in Basque, ERG maps to ergative and NOM and ACC to absolutive. It's the concrete cases that the morphological system sees.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T23:24:05.663" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T23:24:05.663" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30093" CreationDate="2019-01-09T04:49:36.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Avoiding getting into any specific theoretical framework…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Say&quot; takes a mandatory complement, which the quotation is clearly able to fill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Then they said.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then they said that the baby was born.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then they said something I didn't catch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then they said, &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can throw more tests at it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle&quot;, in a strange voice. (Comes before adjuncts.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?They said ominously, &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot; (It can come after light adjuncts, but sounds weird without the usual heavy-shift prosodic changes.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle,&quot; they said. (Topicalizes.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did they say? (Can be wh-questioned.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What they said was, &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot; (Can be pseudo-clefted.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What they said in a strange voice was, &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*How they said &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle&quot; was in a strange voice. (Cannot be stranded by pseudo-clefting, unlike the adjunct.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*They wanted to say, and say they did &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot; (Cannot be stranded by VP-preposing.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;??They said &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle,&quot; and we did it/so/the same with &quot;Sez you.&quot; (Cannot be do-so contrasted.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle&quot; in a strange voice and we did so/the same in an ironic voice. (Can be do-so elided.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this shows that the quotation is a VP-complement (a &quot;primary complement&quot;, in theories that distinguish things that way).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is it &lt;em&gt;internally&lt;/em&gt;? From the first batch of examples, the verb &quot;say&quot; seems to want an NP or S (or a DP or CP, or whatever your theory uses) as its complement.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And at first glance, it sure looks like an S, not an NP. But that can easily be shown to be illusory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said, &quot;The baby was born.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said, &quot;The baby.&quot; (Looks like an NP.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I missed the start of it, but at the end, they said &quot;was born&quot;. (Looks like a VP in some systems, but in, e.g., Chomskyan frameworks where the subject is a child of the inflection, this isn't any kind of valid component.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I missed the start of it, but at the end, they said &quot;-by was born&quot;. (Clearly a fragment of an S that can't be parsed as-is.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said, &quot;No hablo ingles&quot;. (An S in Spanish, but not in English; surely the outer sentence is just as valid for monolingual English-speakers as for bilingual speakers, right?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said, &quot;No ah blue in glass?&quot; (Nonsense that you can probably work out is a misquote of a Spanish S by someone who doesn't speak Spanish, but you surely don't parse it as an clause of the outer sentence.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They said, &quot;Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!&quot; (Pure nonsense.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So really, the quote acts as if it were a single word.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which doesn't answer the &quot;NP or S&quot; question. The way it's used seems more NP-like than S-like, but I can't make a good case for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, how can that quote be the head of an NP? Whether you want to say the quote has been &quot;lexicalized&quot; as an N, or that the head constraint is defeated here and instead we have an undifferentiated Utterance heading an NP, depends on your theory of choice—but it doesn't seem to be significantly different from any other case of weird things as objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last case looks basically the same as the first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After a while the baby cried wawa waa waa waa waa waa waa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After a while, the boy said, &quot;I was at the store.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you didn't put it in quotes is obviously just a matter of orthography. Pragmatically, it might imply that it's a paraphrase rather than an exact quote, but I think syntactically you're still offering a direct quotation (as opposed to an indirect quotation: After a while, the boy said he was at the store), so it should be analyzed the same way as the first example. (Also compare spoken &quot;After a while, the boy was like 'I was at the store'&quot;, which, at least for some speakers, also pragmatically implies paraphrase while still acting like a direct quote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The middle case is very different; the quote is clearly not a complement. &quot;One doesn’t usually birth in the daytime&quot; is already a complete sentence without anything after it, and the tests immediately fail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*What did one doesn’t usually birth in the daytime?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*What one doesn't usually birth in the daytime is &quot;Bring a candle; light a candle&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you can't even attach an adjunct after the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was dark; one doesn’t usually birth in the daytime; &quot;Bring a candle; light a candle&quot;, under normal circumstances.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is it? I think that depends on how you'd analyze the sentence without the quote. The quotation affects the first clause in a way pretty similarly to the second, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that the second clause is a parenthetical adjunct to the first. In that case, the quote could possibly be another parenthetical adjunct. (If not, it's parataxis, so move to the next paragraph, do not cross Go.) However you prefer to analyze parenthetical sentence adjuncts like the second clause, you can do the same with the quote (e.g., &lt;code&gt;[S …s1… [AdvP [S s2]] [AdvP [Utterance quote]]]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other possibility is that you just have two independent sentences paratactically combined (and the implied causal relation is purely pragmatic). In that case, the quote is just another thing paratactically grafted on. Even if you want to treat parataxis as syntactic adjoining of like XP categories (&lt;code&gt;[S [S s1] [S s2]&lt;/code&gt;), that doesn't really make much difference (&lt;code&gt;[S [S s1] [S s2] [S [Utterance quote]]&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. However, consider this: '&quot;What kind of baby&quot;, they said, &quot;did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot;' That seems valid. What happened? We're not topicalizing part of the quote (or topicalizing the whole thing and then focusing part of it), as can be seen with an embedding test: You can say &quot;I was surprised when they walked into the room&quot; and &quot;I was surprised when into the room they walked&quot;, and you can say &quot;I was surprised when they said, 'What kind of baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.'&quot;, but you can't say *&quot;I was surprised when 'What kind of baby', they said, 'did she give birth to? Bring a candle.'&quot;. You could try to argue from this that, say, quoting is actually a case of simple parataxis, which leaves the entire sentence not an actual S, which is why it can't be embedded. But that raises the question of why it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be embedded when the entire quote appears in normal position. Nor does it explain why we're allowed to build an invalid sentence with &quot;say&quot; missing its object in the first place, to then paratactically adjoin the quote. So, I think the answer is still that the quote is the direct object, and when you do normal syntactically-valid things to it they work in normal ways—but there's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; some rule that lets you cut off a chunk of it and paratactically adjoin it to the first of the sentence (with the remainder still serving as the object), and, only if you exercise that option, you end up with a not-a-S that can't be embedded. But I wouldn't bet too much on that analysis.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. I think with the right discourse setup you might be able to give it a PP or SC complement (that isn't acting surreptitiously as a quote), in which case (unless you like theories where such PP complements are actually S in disguise with lots of movement and deletion) things are more complicated, but I'm going to ignore that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Of course you can (and presumably do, as a normal human listener) go inside the utterance and parse the quote. But the fact that the parse succeeds for &quot;What kind of a baby did she give birth to? Bring a candle.&quot; and fails for &quot;Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!&quot; seems to have no effect on our grammatical judgment of the outer sentence, or on what we can do with it. If you, as a grammatician, want to &quot;subparse&quot; the quote, you could invent some kind of bracketing to show how it fits inside the outer sentence, and I don't think anyone would complain.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T19:50:51.643" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T19:50:51.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-09T08:09:59.153" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there a Leipzig standard to gloss a suffix like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“1st person subject, second person object, past tense”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.S.2.O.Past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then what if it’s first person exclusive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.EXCL.S.2.O.Past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks really clunky, but maybe it’s proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t see anything in the Leipzig standards on this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T08:09:59.153" Title="What’s the standard way to gloss a morpheme that provides subject, object and tense?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-09T13:47:43.537" Score="0" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for a DP like &quot;three times&quot; to act as an AdvP (&quot;He read the book three times.&quot;)? How would such a constituency tree look like? How does the DP modify the verb? Conversely, would the same thing apply to constructions in Dutch such as &quot;twee keer&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23618" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T21:05:37.807" Title="DP acting as AdvP?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11577" CreationDate="2019-01-09T14:45:47.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the first recorded occurrence of a pun in written text was around 2100 BC, in the language of the Sumerians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the epic of Gilgamesh when Utnapishtim warns the ruler of his city about the flood, he does so by saying that the sky will rain &quot;kibtu (corn)&quot; and &quot;kukku (sound of kernels hitting the ground)&quot; as a pun on &quot;kibitu (misery)&quot; and &quot;kukkû (suffering)&quot; in Sumerian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Penguin Classics English translation, he instead hides his warning as though he is forecasting a bountiful harvest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20689" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T14:45:47.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-09T16:34:56.340" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=gradable+absolute&quot;&gt;multiple questions on ELU&lt;/a&gt; and in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/273112/is-using-more-correct-a-grammatical-faux-pas&quot;&gt;this recent question about 'correct'&lt;/a&gt;, I wonder whether French has the similar concept of gradable vs absolute adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that some qualities are either the case or not. For example, if something is 'unique', only one thing can be that (otherwise, logically, it isn't unique). This is called 'absolute'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then other qualities can afford degrees; this is called 'gradable'. One thing can be red, and another in comparison can have a higher value of red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what this means for grammar is that a gradable adjective allows the syntactic formation of comparative and superlative (redder/reddest), but absolutes do not (*'more unique').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is whether this concept is universal across languages. Do all languages have some adjectives (or modifiers) that are syntactically not allowed with comparative constructions? Are there &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; ways of managing comparison syntactically (partially gradable? absolute but with a middle 'not either' syntactic marker?) etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like Indo-European languages would disallow comparatives with semantically absolute qualities, but maybe Chinese, with bǐ and zuí comparatives may. I can't tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this distinction purely a semantics or pragmatics issue? The Chinese comparative construction is more predicate based rather than around a modification of an adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, in English absolutes are used all the time in comparatives, but almost always in a jocular (or thoughtless) manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T16:56:23.920" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T23:22:24.050" Title="Is gradable vs absolute a universal distinction?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11577" CreationDate="2019-01-09T19:23:05.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One piece of ancient wordplay is the statement attributed to the oracle at Dodona:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_redibis_nunquam_per_bella_peribis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ibis&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://latindiscussion.com/forum/latin/ibis-redibis-nunquam-per-bella-peribis.8820/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;redibis&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/history-fragments/ibis-redibis-nunquam-peribis-7a8a6ff8bea6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nunquam&lt;/a&gt; per bella peribis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which, depending on how you group the words, can be taken to bear either of two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will go, you will return, never will you die in battle&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will go, you will never return, you will die in battle&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13643" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T19:23:05.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T04:02:25.560" Score="8" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is wikipedia wrong when it suggests that the hebrew schwa/shva has never been pronounced as 'ə'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at these two wikipedia links&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;The word schwa is from the Hebrew word shva (שְׁוָא  IPA: [ʃva], classical pronunciation: shəwāʼ  [ʃəˑwɒːʔ]), designating the Hebrew niqqud vowel sign shva (two vertical dots written beneath a letter): in Modern Hebrew, it indicates either the phoneme /e/ or the complete absence of a vowel. (The Hebrew shva is also sometimes transliterated using the schwa symbol ə, but the schwa vowel has never been pronounced that way, neither in Modern Hebrew nor in any earlier pronunciation, such as the Tiberian vocalization.&#xA;&quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shva&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shva&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&quot;It is transliterated as &quot;e&quot;, &quot;ĕ&quot;, &quot;ə&quot;, &quot;'&quot; (apostrophe), or nothing. Note that usage of &quot;ə&quot; for shva is questionable: transliterating modern Hebrew Shva Nach with ə or ' is misleading, since it is never actually pronounced [ə] – the vowel [ə] does not exist in modern Hebrew – moreover, the vowel [ə] is probably not characteristic of earlier pronunciations either (see Tiberian vocalization → Mobile Shwa = Shwa na').&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't it the case that Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim,  pronounce it as (ə)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern israeli hebrew might pronounce it as (e)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples that come from audio records of somebody reading from the Torah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is ashkenazi one is sephardi but it doesn't matter because either way I think it makes my point that they do a vocal shva like a shwa (ə).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples come from Genesis chapter 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://clyp.it/5mlbt1wv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://clyp.it/5mlbt1wv&lt;/a&gt;   Yehee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The word has two syllables, Yuh-Hee  The first syllable has the hebrew shva/shwa.  I put it to you that the sound you hear there listening to that first syllable, is (ə) the IPA Schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://clyp.it/w0qzxcba&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://clyp.it/w0qzxcba&lt;/a&gt;  Pnei Tehoim&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here we have two words, Pnei, then Tehoim.  The first word Pnei, has two syllables, Puh-Nai   There is a hebrew shva on the first syllable. I put it to you that the sound on the Puh of Puh-Nai, is (ə) the IPA Schwa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The second word Tehoim, has two syllables, Tuh-hoim  The first syllable has a hebrew shva. I put it to you that again, the sound there on the first syllable of tehoim, is (ə) the IPA Schwa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(source- &lt;a href=&quot;https://torahreading.dafyomireview.com/cd/torah-ashkenaz/01-Bereshit-01-PBereshit-Part01.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://torahreading.dafyomireview.com/cd/torah-ashkenaz/01-Bereshit-01-PBereshit-Part01.mp3&lt;/a&gt; )  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://clyp.it/l0qg1kq3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://clyp.it/l0qg1kq3&lt;/a&gt;  Mrachefet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here we have a word Mrachefet,  the first syllable has a vocal shva, and same as all my other examples, it seems to me that that first syllable has the sound  (ə) the IPA Schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia could be trying to say that the hebrew shva isn't pronounced as (ə) in any pronunciation, not modern hebrew , not earlier than modern hebrew.  Or it could be saying it's not modern and not ancient, but is not denying that ashkenazi and sephardi/mizrahi pronunciation is as (ə).   But it seems to me to suggest that it's not pronounced like that and is just a wrong transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look on google books at a classic book on biblical hebrew &quot;A grammar of biblical hebrew&quot; by Paul Joüon (Author), T. Muraoka (Author)  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oJY06MoeEb4C&amp;amp;pg=PA47&amp;amp;lpg=PA47&amp;amp;dq=sound%20mobile%20shva&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=zecp48gOTN&amp;amp;sig=UEI0eKDGnfXHZzWTT_89k3OfyUU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=sound%20mobile%20shva&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;here&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;We see that it says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 47  $8 the authors write &quot;The vocalic shva usually transliterated with either [small superscript e] or [upside down e], something like the 'a' in english about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on page 50, the end of $8, marked f, it says &quot;In Contemporary Israeli pronunciation there is no phonemic distinction between slient shva and vocal shva pronounced e, the latter being a positional and non-obligatory allophone. Thus [gdolim] is perfectly normal and acceptable alongside [gedolim] for גְּדוֹלִים Similarly, e is heard as a rule at morpheme boundaries, e.g.  מְדבר [medaber], יְדבר [yedaber], בְּספר [besefer], וְגָדוֹל [vegadol]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that book says no doubt talking about how the shva na (vocal shva) is pronounced, that it's pronounced  &quot;something like the 'a' in english about.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And funnily enough the wikipedia article on shwa admits that is how shwa is pronounced &quot;'a', as in about &lt;code&gt;[əˈbaʊt]&lt;/code&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough there is a shva/shwa on the first syllable of the word shva/shwa(the hebrew vowel / half vowel known as shva/shwa), and wikipedia describes the pronunciation of shva/shwa as   &lt;code&gt;[ʃəˑwɒːʔ])&lt;/code&gt; in &quot;classical pronunciation&quot;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for wikipedia to say &quot; the schwa vowel has never been pronounced that way, neither in Modern Hebrew nor in any earlier pronunciation&quot;  seems wrong and even contradictory. If by earlier it means earlier than modern.  If by earlier wikipedia means pre classical thus simply it isn't stating about ashkenazi and sephardi/mizirahi pronunciation of shva, and it's trying to suggest that they have deviated from an original/earlier pronunciation .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also since that grammar book by Muraoka says &quot;In Contemporary Israeli pronunciation ........Thus [gdolim] is perfectly normal and acceptable alongside [gedolim] for גְּדוֹלִים &quot;   it seems it's saying that in modern hebrew, guh-dolim i.e. with the ə is acceptable and normal, alongside e(apparently modern israeli pronunciation pronounces vocal shva as eh like the e in 'bed').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is wikipedia wrong on that, and have I got that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20333" LastEditorUserId="20333" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T10:29:41.850" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T04:25:24.540" Title="Is wikipedia wrong when it speaks of the hebrew shwa not being pronounced ə?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30187" CreationDate="2019-01-10T07:10:15.390" Score="6" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that in some (all? most?) languages, ordinal for 1 and 2 are completely different (i.e., not derived) from corresponding cardinals: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;One/Two/Three vs First/Second/Third&lt;/em&gt; is a bad example, because &quot;second&quot; is a loanword; and in other German languages, only first one is different: Dutch: &lt;em&gt;Een -&gt; eerst, twee - tweede&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: &lt;em&gt;odin, dva, tri -&gt; pervyi, vtoroy, tretiy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Estonian: &lt;em&gt;üks, kaks, kolm -&gt; esimene, teine, kolmas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any research been done into it? I wonder what this condition could imply about proto-languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5689" LastEditorUserId="5689" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T11:36:44.930" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T15:52:01.107" Title="Why do some (usually, first ones) ordinal numbers seem completely different from corresponding cardinals?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30186" CreationDate="2019-01-10T13:21:52.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was indeed extensively studied in linguistic typology and a high level summary of results can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/53&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS chapter 53&lt;/a&gt;. It gives a good overview of possible systems of ordinal numbers (no ordinals at all, ordinals are the same as cardinals, ordinals are completely regular, special word for &quot;first&quot; only, special words for &quot;first&quot; and &quot;second&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages with an independent word for &quot;second&quot; are concentrated in Europe and rare in other parts of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T15:52:01.107" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T15:52:01.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30185" CreationDate="2019-01-10T14:11:27.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is correct that the Masoretic pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; was [ă], not [ə̆]. The fact that &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced with the quality [ε] or [e] across all the European variants of Hebrew (and Israeli Hebrew, in which it is [e] when pronounced) and [a] in Tiberian allows for the possibility that they might have both derived from a vowel quality [ə], but that is not unambiguous evidence for (or against) such a pronunciation as a phoneme at any specific point of time before the Masoretic pronunciation. However, to say the vowel was &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; pronounced [ə] is a more extraordinary claim that is hard either to support or falsify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Masoretic pronunciation of the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; is the best-documented of the early pronunciations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_ben_Moses_ben_Asher&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aharon ben Asher&lt;/a&gt;'s description (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=38509&amp;amp;st=&amp;amp;pgnum=53&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dikduke Hatte'amim&lt;/a&gt; par. 11-14) is the primary source. This is briefly his description of its pronunciation (since the question is about vowel quality, I leave out the cases where the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; is unpronounced, since that is a matter of orthography, not phonology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, pronounced [ă] (he treats it as an orthographic variant of &lt;em&gt;chataf pattach&lt;/em&gt;). The exceptions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;as the first vowel in a word, pronounced [ɛ] (his example: בְּרוּךְ [bɛ̆rux]), unless marked by a &lt;em&gt;ga'ya&lt;/em&gt; (בְּֽבוֹא [băβo])&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;before a glottal or pharyngeal consonant, pronounced like the following vowel as the first vowel in the word (בְּהֹנוֹת [bŏhonoθ], תְּאֵהֲבוּ [tĕʔehăβu] or after a geminate consonant (וְנִבְּאוּ [wɛ̆nibbŭʔu], נִדְּחֵי [niddĕħe]), but not in the middle of a word after a non-geminate consonant (פִּינְחָס [pinăħɔs])&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;before [j], pronounced [i] (בְּיוֹם [bĭjom])&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So [ə] was not the Masoretic pronunciation of the vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secunda_(Hexapla)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; does give /ə/ as a phoneme for the Secunda's version of Hebrew, but I didn't read its source. From the data on Greek transliterations of Hebrew in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/23503646&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, the Secunda usually transliterates the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; with either α, ε, or both alternately (כְּרוּב for which both χερουβ and χαρουβ are attested), or nothing (כְּסִיל χσιλ, בְּסֻכָּה βσοχχα). There are also a few cases of duplicating the following vowel (מְהֵרָה μηηρα), or preserving a non-reduced vowel (כְּמָרִים χωμαρειμ, cf. singular כֹּמֶר). &lt;a href=&quot;https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/63387/KANTOR-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This dissertation&lt;/a&gt; about the Hebrew of the Secunda (p. 311 and following) argues that the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; was possibly phonologically a null vowel that could be realized phonetically as [ə~ε] in certain cases. If so, [ə] would be an allophone of the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the provenance of your recordings is, but modern audio recordings aren't a good source for older pronunciations than the Tiberian vocalization. [ə] exists as pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt;, if nothing else, by students who were taught to pronounce it that way. Simialrly, I have heard Americans pronounce the &lt;em&gt;shva&lt;/em&gt; as what seems to me to be [ɨ] (apparently also reflected by transliterations such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=yirushalayim&amp;amp;nfpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;yirushalayim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for ִיְרוּשָלַם). Both pronunciations exist  (the latter seems to be from the influence of English, which has [ɨ] as a reduced vowel), but this isn't to say that they are heirs of an older reading tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="19744" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T20:24:05.677" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T20:24:05.677" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30186" CreationDate="2019-01-10T14:14:06.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Germanic language the word “other” (or a cognate) has often been used as an alternative for “second”, also in Dutch as can still be seen in the relic word “anderhalf” (for one and a half): there used to be a ordinal based system of “half cardinals” where “derdehalf = two and a half (literally the third half: 1/2 is just half, 1 1/2 the second half, 2 1/2 the third half etc.) The system is still used in West Frisian (Frysk)  e.g. “fjirdel” is just 3 1/2 (from “fjirde heal” = fourth half) and 1 1/2 is “oardel” also containing “oar” = other = second. Also Danish uses “anden” (other) as second and I believe it’s more common in Scandinavian languages. As you know in Dutch and in English also “third” is not regular, but does derive from “three” (“derde” in Dutch is a fossilised form of “drie + de” in a way). I think the low ordinals are used far more frequently than the higher ones and as such it’s well-known that higher frequency items are more prone to keeping irregularities that historically arose, because of easier learnability, in a way. So this way, the irregular lower ordinals have persisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3317" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T14:14:06.580" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T15:01:16.093" Score="0" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out how to draw a syntax tree for this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sue reminded Mary to water the plants.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is object control, and should be analyzed this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sue [IP -ed [VP remind [DP Mary] [CP PRO [IP to win the race ...&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I draw the syntax tree? &lt;em&gt;remind&lt;/em&gt; takes two internal arguments: a DP and a CP. So this seems like a double-object construction, which requires a vP (little v) shell, I think. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23623" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T15:01:16.093" Title="Syntax tree for object control construction" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;control&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T16:10:25.537" Score="0" ViewCount="2109" Body="&lt;p&gt;While going through a course book on pragmatics, I came across this novel and seemingly interesting concept. I was intrigued to know what a wastebasket has to doin pragmatics, but it is still an enigma for me. Can anyone please unfold this mystery for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23624" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T06:38:39.083" Title="Pragmatics Wastebasket" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30191" CreationDate="2019-01-10T16:18:30.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pragmatics wastebasket&quot; may refer to the view that there is no legitimate field of pragmatics, but rather calling a phenomenon &quot;pragmatic&quot; is just used by some grammarians as an excuse for not giving any real explanation for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T16:18:30.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30174" CreationDate="2019-01-10T17:03:02.547" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because of a generalized phenomenon where loans generally have a narrower, more specific meaning in their destination language than in their original language. &#xA;The best example is in my opinion the inuktitut word &lt;em&gt;ᐃᒡᓗ iglu&lt;/em&gt; which simply means &quot;house&quot;, whereas english &lt;em&gt;igloo&lt;/em&gt; means a special kind of house, made of ice, such as is made by inuit people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples include &quot;Schnaps&quot;, which simply means &quot;liquor&quot; or &quot;spirit&quot; in German, but is used to mean specifically german spirits in French and in English, &quot;safari&quot;, which is a swahili word meaning &quot;journey&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that not all loans are affected by such semantic narrowing. Indeed, sometimes it goes in the sense of a semantic broadening, and take on a more general meaning in the destination language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2105" LastEditorUserId="2105" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T20:59:30.113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T20:59:30.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4650" CreationDate="2019-01-10T17:59:42.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any language that has this sort of metathesis &lt;em&gt;in vowels&lt;/em&gt; other than Hellenic, and since this has gone unanswered for over five years, I suspect there may not be one. But there are a few related phenomena which are worth mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Compensatory lengthening&lt;/em&gt; is a process that happens in several languages (including Ancient Greek): when a consonant is lost for any reason, the vowel before tends to be lengthened. For example, English &quot;night&quot; originally had a short &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;; when the &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; after it was lost, the vowel lengthened, giving &lt;code&gt;/i:/&lt;/code&gt; (which became &lt;code&gt;/aj/&lt;/code&gt; in the Great Vowel Shift).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More relevantly, &lt;em&gt;the Littera law&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;inverse compensatory lengthening&quot;) is a sound change that happened in Latin in the early centuries BC. It's named after the word &lt;em&gt;littera&lt;/em&gt; &quot;letters&quot;, from earlier &lt;em&gt;lītera&lt;/em&gt;; in certain environments, the sequence &lt;code&gt;V:C&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;VC:&lt;/code&gt;. This happened with sonorants as well as plosives, such as &lt;em&gt;flāma&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;flamma&lt;/em&gt; &quot;flames&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T17:59:42.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30165" CreationDate="2019-01-11T09:21:45.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading a bit more Jackendoff and Culicover, I think I understand how this works in Parallel Architecture. But (a) I still have a remaining sub-question at the end, and (b) I'd still love to know the MP or GB analysis. So, I'm answering my own question, but leaving it open for someone else to do (a) or (b) or anything else that seems better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: PA can handle all of the selection issues in terms of whether the words can be coerced at the Conceptual Structure (semantics) level, so the construction doesn't need to specify them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oversimplifying, PA is basically a Construction Grammar framework, but one where constructions are explicitly made up of parallel Phonology, Syntax, and Conceptual Structure (and maybe some other stuff, but not relevant here) trees, with links between the components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this construction might look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P(honology): […]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; […]&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; [out of]&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; […]&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S(yntax): [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; V&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; NP&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;PP&lt;/sub&gt; P&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; NP&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C(onceptual)S(tructure): F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;(PATIENT&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;, MANNER&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the particular example &quot;drive the hell out of the car&quot;, you get something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CS: DRIVE(PATIENT:the car, MANNER:intensely-as-hell)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm ignoring the subject and the tense here and just dealing with the VP.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, this is just like the CS you get from &quot;drive the car quickly&quot;, except with a different MANNER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can't just use any NP that can be coerced into expressing a MANNER. It has to be definite, and its head has to be one of those all-purpose-nounish-swear-words. I don't think all such NPs express the same fixed MANNER; the different shades of &quot;drive the hell out of the car&quot; vs. &quot;drive the everloving fuck out of the car&quot; must come from the semantics of &quot;hell&quot; vs. &quot;everloving fuck&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P: […]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; […]&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; [out of]&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; […]&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S: [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; V&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; … N&lt;sub&gt;5&lt;/sub&gt; …; definite]&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;PP&lt;/sub&gt; P&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; NP&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CS: F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;(PATIENT&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;, MANNER:all-purpose-nounish-swear&lt;sub&gt;5&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it plausible that we have a class like &quot;all-purpose-nounish-swear&quot; that includes &quot;hell&quot; and &quot;fuck&quot; and &quot;fudge&quot; but not &quot;shoot&quot;? Definitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construction doesn't constrain the verb at all. And that's fine—if you try it with a verb that can't take a PATIENT and a MANNER, and there's nothing in the discourse that will lead you to coerce it appropriately, it fails semantically. For example, you can't normally play the hell out of the book, but if you come up with the right context where you can play the book, or play the book quickly (maybe the book is a Fighting Fantasy gamebook), you can play the hell out of it. You can even give the hell out of the book with the right context (there's a textbook donation drive, and you're giving lots of copies of the same one), even though give normally wants a BENEFICIARY and THEME, not a PATIENT. But you can't sleep the hell out of the book, for the same reason you can't sleep the book quickly, or just sleep the book, because I don't think there's any context that would let you coerce SLEEP to take a PATIENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question about how to specify a construction that only applies to verbs with the right argument structure is simple: you don't bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, it doesn't constrain the MANNER at all, even though it seems to always be an intensifier. I think that's also fine. It seems reasonable that every word in that all-purpose-nounish-swear category includes, as part of its lexical entry, some vague measure of intensity (and all of them are positive intensity). Or maybe something else (a measure of rudeness?) can be coerced to intensity. Otherwise, how could we know that &quot;drive the fuck out of the car&quot; is more intense than &quot;drive the heck out of the car&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could some of them also include something &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; coercible to a manner, that competes with their intensity? Maybe. But actually, I'm not sure there &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; actually such a shading to the meaning. If you compare &quot;drive the shit&quot; vs. &quot;drive the hell&quot;, I think the former does seem to connote poor driving as well as intense, and the latter, rebellious as well as intense. If I'm wrong, then presumably we need some kind of operator that forcibly coerces through INTENSITY rather than just on the best path to MANNER: CS: F&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;(PATIENT&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;, MANNER:INTENSITY(all-purpose-nounish-swear&lt;sub&gt;5&lt;/sub&gt;))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;drive the squirrel out of the car (CS something like FORCE(EVENT:MOVE(AGENT:squirrel, GOAL:out of the car)))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?drive the stink out of the car (interpreted like 1, but odd because a stink isn't animate)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;drive the hell out of the car&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;drive the cruk out of the car (interpreted like 3, inferring that &quot;cruk&quot; is an all-purpose-nouny-swear)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what drives people to interpret 2 and 4 the way they do (assuming I've guessed right)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this gets into performance details: the the-hell construction is pretty low-activation, so it usually doesn't compete with the normal one, but hearing a general-purpose-nouny-swear primes it (and, presumably, the what-the-hell-question, indifferent-what-the-hell, the-hell-you-say, and any other constructions). When you hear a non-word like &quot;cruk&quot;, well, it &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; like a made-up swear word. In fact, many sci-fi swear words (most infamously &quot;frak&quot;) do. And in the production direction, trying to express &quot;really intense&quot; also primes the various hell constructions (or just primes the words, which prime the constructions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about this made-up swear word from &lt;em&gt;Hitchhikers Guide&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;drive the Belgium out of the car&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, that sounds like a perfectly good hell-intensifier. But however you define &quot;sounds like a swear word&quot;, surely &quot;Belgium&quot; isn't even close. It sounds French/Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon, it's multisyllabic, it has a soft coda, and, worst of all, it's already a real word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is that people who haven't seen the TV version of &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker's Guide&lt;/em&gt; and/or read the US version of the book &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; interpret this like &quot;cruk&quot;, and instead reject it for similar reasons to 2, so there's no issue here. But if not, then there's a problem that I don't have an answer for. (And possibly the very thing that I felt was missing when I first read &lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt; but could never nail down…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T09:21:45.713" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T12:08:08.007" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not Allophones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, when the same phoneme looks different in different places (has the same IPA representation, but look different on spectrograms) (regarding to speech analysis): (like the following)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tilt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Duration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intensity of speaking etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does one call these, are they still the same phoneme, on a finer level of analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T11:45:23.870" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T18:24:08.340" Title="What do you call the same phoneme that behaves a little bit differently in particular environments?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30201" CreationDate="2019-01-11T15:08:01.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Researchers speak of &lt;strong&gt;Segmental Variability&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Density of Phonetic Encoding&lt;/strong&gt; in this respect, see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025/full&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zofia Malisz, Erika Brandt, Bernd Möbius, Yoon Mi Oh, and Bistra Andreeva,Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T17:45:56.427" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T17:45:56.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30183" CreationDate="2019-01-12T00:05:24.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a distinction here, and it's cross-linguistic—but your example falls on the wrong side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most English adjectives (that aren't already in comparative/superlative form—&quot;*more best&quot;) are comparable. But a handful are not, such as &quot;only&quot;, &quot;galore&quot;, &quot;additional&quot;, and maybe &quot;daily&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; And &quot;unique&quot; is not in that small category. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is more annoying/unique/*only/*galore/*additional/*daily than Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &quot;*more only&quot; is blatantly ungrammatical, and &quot;more unique&quot; is clearly different. If you want to correct someone's usage of &quot;more unique&quot;, you have to get them to think consciously about the logic. Which is a good sign that this isn't a rule of grammar—unless you want to stretch the grammar to rule out, e.g., &quot;John is taller than both Mary and Susan, but shorter than both Bill and Susan&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why are we taught that &quot;more unique&quot; is ungrammatical? Because English pedagogy isn't based on linguistics, it's based on pedantry. If &quot;only&quot; and &quot;unique&quot; both translate Latin &quot;unicus&quot;, they must be in the same class, so &quot;more unique&quot; must be just as wrong as &quot;more only&quot;. Also, if &quot;most unique&quot; is logically incoherent, it must be grammatically incoherent, if only kids these days would learn to think grammatically (or, at least, if only kids in the past hadn't broken English so it's not logical like Latin). As a matter of style, you shouldn't say &quot;more unique&quot; unless you're making an ironic point or jokingly being illogical or whatever, but that doesn't mean it's not grammatical English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably &lt;em&gt;logic&lt;/em&gt; is universal. So, in any language, using a comparative construction with an adjectives whose meaning includes being singular, like &quot;unique&quot;, will lead to an illogical sentence. Which implies that any language that has a community of prescriptive grammarians like English's will probably have a similar prescription. But how universal such communities are, that's a sociological question, way outside of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're just interested in &quot;more unique&quot; and not &quot;more only&quot;, you can probably stop here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what makes actually uncomparable&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; adjectives uncomparable? I think it's that they're not predicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is tall/annoying/unique/*only/*daily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is taller/more annoying/more unique/*onlier/*more only/*dailier/*more daily than Mary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note,&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; beyond not being predicable, most of the uncomparable adjectives are weird in at least one other way—and in different ways from each other. &quot;Only&quot; acts almost as if it were already a superlative: &quot;John is the *tall/*taller/tallest/only doctor in town.&quot; And &quot;daily&quot; seems to be restricted to nouns formed from verbs (not just gerunds; nouns formed by semi-regular morphology work too): &quot;John is a daily drinker/competitor/?doctor/*man.&quot; And &quot;galore&quot; and &quot;aplenty&quot; are mandatorily postnominal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hypothesis is that cross-linguistically, any predicable adjective is grammatically comparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &quot;unique&quot; is a comparable adjective in the Romance languages, just as in English,&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; with the same &quot;if you think about it consciously, it's illogical&quot; result. And they do have truly uncomparable adjectives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John es más alto/molesto/único/*sólo/*diario que Mary. (John is more tall/annoying/unique/*only/*daily than Mary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… which also aren't predicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John es alto/molesto/único/*sólo/*diario.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those languages are still cousins of English. What about farther afield? I think the same holds true. In fact, I think there are many languages where &quot;anything predicative is comparable&quot; is a grammatical rule, or at least tautologically follows from the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in Japanese, while I am far from a fluent speaker (and invite correction here), you can turn any predicative sentence into a comparative sentence without needing to do anything to the adjective: just add a comparand with the &quot;than&quot; particle,&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; or add a sentence-adverb for a bare comparative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa segatakai. (John topic-particle tall-as-verb: John is tall.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa Mari yori segatakai. (John topic-particle Mary than-particle tall-as-verb: John is taller than Mary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa motto segatakai. (John topic-particle sentential-more tall-as-verb: John is taller.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same works with desu-copula sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa aka desu. (John topic-particle red-as-noun is: John is red.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa motto aka desu. (John topic-particle more red-as-noun is: John is redder.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa Mari yori aka desu. (John topic-particle Mary than-particle red-as-noun is: John is redder than Mary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… even when the predicate is a noun, which couldn't be used attributively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa shoonen desu. (John topic-particle boy is: John is a boy.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa motto shoonen desu. (John topic-particle more boy is: John is more of a boy.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa Ken yori shoonen desu. (John topic-particle Ken than-particle boy is: John is more of a boy than Ken.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa yuniiku desu. (John topic-particle unique is: John is unique.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa motto yuniiku desu. (John topic-particle more unique is: John is more unique.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jon wa Mari yori yuniiku desu. (John topic-particle Mary than-particle unique is: John is more unique than Mary. Notice that &quot;yuniiku&quot; is a recent borrowing from English &quot;unique&quot;, but it's a noun.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's take that insight back to English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John is more man than Ken will ever be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that can be a predicate can be compared, not just adjectives, even in English?&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a little odd to at least some speakers (see the comments), and may even invite an account based on either deleting &quot;of a&quot; or reducing the adjective &quot;manly&quot; or something similar. But look at examples where the contrast is between two predicates over one entity, rather than two entities over one predicate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She's more woman than child.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's more machine now than man.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tyrell Corporation: more human than human.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One tricky test:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;?Jon wa Mari yori mainichi desu. (John topic-particle Mary than-particle every day is: ?John is more every-day than Mary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's semantically very odd in English, but in the right context I think still acceptable: &quot;Do John and Mary come here every day? No, but John is more every-day than Mary.&quot; And I think the same is true in Japanese. So, this is still a different class of &quot;wrong&quot; from using &quot;more only&quot; in English.&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a &quot;more only&quot; class in Japanese, or many other languages. Uncomparable adjectives are words that act attributively like adjectives (and, in inflected languages, agree like adjectives when doing so), but can't be predicated; English and Spanish have a few, but Japanese has none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for a real test, you'd want to raise a child as a native &lt;a href=&quot;https://lojban.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; speaker and see whether they accept the direct translation of &quot;John is more unique than Mary&quot; as a grammatical sentence.&lt;sup&gt;8&lt;/sup&gt; I'll bet they will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few English and Spanish adjectives, like &quot;additional&quot;, are not predicates, and they're not comparable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A few English adjectives, like &quot;galore&quot;, have weird syntactic features that get in the way of the usual comparison constructions, and they're not comparable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There seem to be no English adjectives that are predicable and syntactically regular and can't be compared.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese has no non-predicable adjectives and no syntactically-irregular adjectives, and all of its adjectives as comparable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It looks like even non-adjectival predicates can be compared, in both English and Japanese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;uncomparable&quot; reduces to &quot;either not predicable, or syntactically irregular in a way that blocks using them in a comparison construction&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Of course most of these are polysemous. For example, &quot;only&quot; is an adverb, &quot;John is only dancing&quot;, and an adjective of restricted distribution, &quot;John is an only child/*guy/*tall guy&quot;, and another adjective of free distribution, &quot;John is the only doctor/guy/tall guy in town&quot;. Let's ignore the first two senses here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Oddly, many prescriptivists use &quot;incomparable&quot; to describe adjectives like &quot;unique&quot;. Someone should tell them that &quot;incomparable&quot; means &quot;beyond compare&quot;, not &quot;unable to be compared&quot;, so they're really saying that these are superlatively excellent words…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. I'm not sure it really is a side note. If, say, these words are also stored—and primarily accessed—as partial constructions, like [N aplenty] as an N' meaning &quot;having sufficient N&quot;, that would explain why they're resistant to being thrown into normal A constructions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. I think it's a modern (not just as opposed to Norman, but after early modern English) borrowing from French; if so, this isn't surprising.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. I'm ignoring the fact that &quot;yori&quot; can also be used more like &quot;from&quot; than &quot;than&quot;, which should pull all the &quot;yori&quot; sentences toward a second interpretation, because I think the comparative interpretation is much stronger here, enough to avoid the ambiguity. But I could be wrong, especially with the last one—&quot;??John is every day from Mary&quot; isn't much odder than &quot;?John is more every-day than Mary&quot; in English, after all.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. This implies that the usual gloss of &quot;more&quot; as an adverb is just wrong. But then we've already got &quot;The more I read, the more I like it&quot;, and various other constructions, that are even harder to explain (outside of a construction grammar or similar framework).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;7. Notice that if I translate &quot;mainichi&quot; in its more usual gloss as &quot;daily&quot;, it's much more unacceptable in English. Maybe because it's now taking the form of one of English's small class of non-predicable adjectives, so it's not just a matter of fixing up the semantics with discourse/pragmatic context, but overriding a grammatical judgment?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;8. There's no Lojban word meaning &quot;to be unique&quot;, but that's fine; Lojban is designed to let you productively invent new compounds. So, &quot;la djan zmadu la maris cizra pamei&quot; (&quot;proper-name John is-more-than proper-name Mary (in-the-property-of) to-be-some-contextually-determined-compound-having-to-do-with-weirdly/distinctly/especially-singular&quot;) is a perfectly legitimate sentence in Lojban grammar. And, if your previous discourse (or a native Lojban community…) has established &quot;cizra pamei&quot; as here meaning &quot;to be unique&quot;, what it legitimately means is &quot;John is more unique than Mary&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T23:22:24.050" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T23:22:24.050" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30208" CreationDate="2019-01-12T01:52:39.987" Score="-3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is an question I haven't tried to answer/solve too much before posting, mainly because it's more of a game and exercise in creativity and wanted to have many opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clearly this task of universalizing all languages if it were to be accomplished would be done not by any human or group of but by some insane AI of the future. However if we attempted to solve at least some basic questions like &quot;Can it actually be done?&quot; or &quot;What would this blended grammar be chosen to best represent most languages&quot; it would make me happy :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify some stuff I mean a mix of all existing languages and not a word more. So I feel like excluding dead languages from this is essential simply due to the fact that including all the evolutions of a single word between year -500 and 1500 would already be a mess. Maybe even excluding unwritten languages if it makes it too complicated to transcribe them. Also for simplicity a word would be pronounced like in the original language(s) and if its meaning is different in those languages, the context or pronunciation would provide clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence might be like &quot;волк Il φοβισμένος dass人类اقتله ແມ່ນ&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally &quot;wolf the scared thathumanskillit is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course no one would use so many languages in the same sentence but it would be a 100% correct one and so would be the same sentence with &quot;wolf&quot; replacing &quot;волк&quot;. However the random grammatical choices here, like a left to right sentence and spaces between some words, already make me doubt the feasibility of a harmonious or at least permissive composition of the most average worldwide grammar rules, but not too much :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to me the biggest obstacle is the grammar, can we make a grammar so that every language can use its words within it and still make sense? Must we use a grammar so permissive in its rules that all the particle words of all the languages with particles are/can be usefully used? Because that's a prerequisite of this all encompassing language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what would be the obstacles and workarounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for not dismissing this as silly, cheers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19858" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T06:52:30.460" Title="What would be the obstacles to creating a language composed of all the words of all the human languages existing today?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;non-human-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-01-16T14:43:34.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30191" CreationDate="2019-01-12T03:09:02.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Metaphorically, the &quot;pragmatics wastebasket&quot; is where you toss things that are (just) pragmatics rather than (real) linguistics.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The implication is that linguistics is amenable to scientific study, while pragmatics is meaningless stuff that the philosophers of language can go bicker over as long (as it keeps them off the streets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern use of the term is almost always ironic.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; If you say, &quot;I'm tossing that question in the pragmatics wastebasket&quot;, you're jokingly saying &quot;That question is just pragmatics, and therefore not worthy of scientific study&quot;, but what you really mean is, &quot;That question is definitely worthy of scientific study, but too hard to deal with right now&quot; or at least &quot;… but would take us too far afield.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original use of the term was critical.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; I think it was invented in 1970 or so by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehoshua_Bar-Hillel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yehoshua Bar-Hillel&lt;/a&gt;, to argue that someone needed to &quot;clean the wastebasket&quot; and come up with a serious study of pragmatics. After using the term in a few papers, he held a symposium to kickstart that study, and compiled the results in a book called &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-94-010-1713-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pragmatics of Natural Languages&lt;/a&gt;, which popularized the term even farther.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. This distinction is much older than the wastebasket metaphor. I think it goes back to Jerry Fodor's work in the early 1960s.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Well, obviously there are some unironic uses. If I'm talking about the history of the field and refer to the early attempts to empty the pragmatics wastebasket, I'm using the wastebasket metaphor seriously. But you know what I mean. (And explaining how you know what I mean, that's just pragmatics.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. In this original use, the metaphor was also a bit wider. Pragmatics being a wastebasket implies not only that it's a pile of garbage, but also that you can root through the garbage and cherry-pick bits that aren't garbage. People were just beginning to study things like discourse structure that had previously been &quot;just pragmatics&quot;. The implication at the time was that doing a formal study of discourse structure rescued it from the &quot;just pragmatics&quot; trash and turned it into a part of &quot;real linguistics&quot; instead. That's no longer an issue; when people do formal studies of discourse structure, they're seen as studying a part of pragmatics (the same way people study information structure as part of semantics, or prosody as part of phonology). So, that facet of the metaphor isn't as relevant today.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T06:38:39.083" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T06:38:39.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30204" CreationDate="2019-01-12T06:52:30.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages are more than just collections of words, and you're going to run into many problems at many levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's pick one really obvious problem: What counts as a word? The single Yupik word &quot;tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq&quot; crams an entire clause into it. The root &quot;ssur&quot; just means &quot;to hunt&quot;, but after attaching 6 affixes, the full word means &quot;He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer.&quot; Surely you don't want every possible Yupik clause to be a word in your language. But if you want each Yupik lexeme to be a word, then how do they incorporate, or attach to, non-Yupik lexemes that don't follow the same rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even the niggling details will be problems. Do adjectives go before nouns (like English) or after (like Hebrew)? As long as you pick one, that's fine; you can handle all adjectives and nouns from English, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian… but what about Romance adjectives? Some come first, some go second, and some can go on either side and have a different meaning each way. How do you get both the pre-noun and post-noun meanings of &quot;grande&quot; in your language? But you can't just use the Romance system, because that would make phrase boundaries too ambiguous to parse, were it not for the extremely restricted set of word endings in each Romance language (which will, of course, not be true for your language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think there's a more tractable version of your problem that might still be interesting (depending on what interested you in the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real languages borrow words all the time, but they don't do it exactly. Look at French &quot;tenez&quot; (you-plural hold!) to English &quot;tennis&quot; (the familiar racket game) to Japanese &quot;tenisu&quot; (the same game). You can see that the phonological, semantic, and morphological changes are sometimes tiny, sometimes huge (&quot;tenisu&quot; and &quot;tennis&quot; are almost perfect synonyms, but &quot;tennis&quot; and &quot;tenez&quot; aren't even the same part of speech, or about the same kinds of things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all of this works just fine. The borrowed word takes on a life of it own in its new language. So, if you could simulate realistic borrowing, and then just feed in every word from every language…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But can you simulate realistic borrowing? Depends on how realistic. The rules for how borrowing works are partly regular (e.g., the same English syllables usually map to the same Japanese syllable sequences), but only partly. More seriously, most of those rules are well below conscious accessibility. And most of them involve both the local context (why someone felt the need to borrow that word), and language-internal context (what existing words it has to fit into its new lexicon with). But you don't need to exactly model what would happen if a real community of X-speakers felt the need to borrow word Y from language Z, just to come up with an algorithm (probably randomizing a lot of the details) that &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; realistic, &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt;, and (depending on your intended goal) that may be more than interesting enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You still have to solve the &quot;what is a word&quot; problem, but now you can solve it with just &quot;morphemes are words&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given that the existing lexicon you're borrowing into is part of what affects borrowing, you probably want to iterate over all of the words of all of the languages in random order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Function words and morphemes like &quot;the&quot; and past-tense &quot;-d&quot; are almost certainly going to end up distorted to the point of unrecognizability by any borrowing algorithm—maybe that's acceptable, or even fun, or maybe you just skip them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost every part of the core design of your original language will affect how much things get distorted. (Think of the way Japanese has to insert &quot;u&quot; into closed syllables, import most adjectives as nouns, etc.) But this is something you can—and probably want to—play with, not a problem to surmount.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think really makes it infeasible in practice is just sourcing the lexicons of all of the world's languages. You can't just &quot;use a dictionary&quot;, unless you work out how to parse dictionary-style definitions (in every language in the world, and mostly written in an unusual style that would confuse general-purpose parsers like the ones Google has trained up…) into the kind of representation you need (look at, e.g., an HPSG lexical entry, for something closer to usable by a plausible word-borrower algorithm).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But fortunately, you don't need to do 100% of the world's words to have something interesting. Just manually creating entries for a few hundred words from a dozen languages is probably already enough to start playing with your algorithm. If that's then so promising/exciting/whatever that it's worth embarking on a decade-long dictionary-parsing project, great; if not, go as far as you want to go with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T06:52:30.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T09:31:02.160" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English wh raised from, or in situ in, a direct object or prepositional object, you can almost always use &quot;who&quot; at least as well as &quot;whom&quot;,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and in some cases you can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; use &quot;who&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who/whom did you meet?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who/whom were you talking to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To who/whom were you talking?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I asked her who/whom to talk to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I asked her who/?whom she met.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I asked her who/whom she was talking to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did you give to who/whom?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You gave it to who/*whom?!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I already told you about what to talk about to who/whom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I already told you about what to talk about, to who/whom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I already told you about what to talk about, and to who/whom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there seems to be at least one case where whom is actually required: when pied-piping a to-adjunct out of a relative clause, or at least an infinitive one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I already told you about the man to *who/whom to talk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any principled reason for this one construction to be different from all the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, is there any way to account for it in mainstream generative grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, all of the examples above are usually explained by the fact that &quot;who&quot; is marked with (abstract) accusative/ACC or oblique (depending on your favorite flavor of Case theory), but modern English allows realizing accusative &quot;who&quot; as either &quot;who&quot; or &quot;whom&quot;, or similar. But then why does it &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow it in this one sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, alternatively: In a construction grammar it's easy to account for: the pied-piped infinitive relative clause construction just overrides whatever is inherited from the parent construction(s), so that it requires &quot;whom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But such an unmotivated idiosyncrasy should eventually die away.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And &quot;whom&quot; has had a long time to do so, and all the other uses of whom are well on their way, but this construction seems to be stubbornly insisting on it without exception, even today. So, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess—which seems like a pretty bad guess—is the very minor phonological infelicity of &quot;to who to&quot;, which doesn't appear in any of the other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. At least by actual speakers of English—even in formal writing. Most prescriptive grammar writers claim it's incorrect, but then they also mandate hypercorrecting to &quot;whom&quot; even in instances that are clearly nominative, like the infamous &quot;Whom shall I say is calling?&quot; And of course most of them don't allow wh-raising without pied-piping in the first place, so half of these examples can't even arise for them.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Also, of course any CxG framework will leave room for a few nuts that just don't crack right, because languages don't have to be perfect. But that's a last resort fallback, not the default assumption.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T18:17:33.743" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T18:17:33.743" Title="&quot;To whom&quot; in pied-piped infinitive relative clauses" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;&lt;wh-words&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30215" CreationDate="2019-01-12T11:44:23.150" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it becomes harder to find the start and end of phonemes due to co-articulation. I want to know about other problems that co-articulation causes in speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23638" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T19:00:46.923" Title="What problems does co-articulation cause in speech recognition?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;coarticulation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T11:44:42.263" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;evidentiality&lt;/a&gt; being a feature of Quechua languages, and I (perhaps naively) think that it may be a useful feature for whatever language is being used to convey scientific information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there been cases where scientific information (textbooks, peer-reviewed papers, or the like) have been written in either a natural language, or conglangs, that has evidentiality, and if so, has there been any research on whether such a feature is beneficial for conveying scientific information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T15:21:27.040" Title="Languages with evidentiality as a language of science" Tags="&lt;evidentiality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30201" CreationDate="2019-01-12T17:38:07.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO this is a classical terminological question. In some views, &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; it is an &quot;allophone&quot;. The phones are the detailed surface sounds, a symbolic representation of speech without prejudice to what language the sound occurs in. Thus, a very narrow phonetic transcription. Given that [k, kʰ, kʲ, kʲʰ] etc. may all occur in complementary environments and there may be some functional unity to the various k-like sounds, we have the concept of &quot;phoneme&quot; that unifies phones into phonemes (and the relation between phone and phoneme is that of &quot;allophone&quot;). This would in principle include durational facts, amplitude etc. So if you say &quot;not allophones&quot;, then you have a different theory of what a phoneme is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things that you are talking about are not typically viewed by phoneticians as being categories. There is, in some languages, a categorial distinction in &quot;length&quot; which is significantly correlated with duration. Some practices (Finno-Ugricist especially) extend the typical analysis in terms of &quot;long/short&quot; into multiple categories (under-short, short, over-long etc), where no language exploits all of those length categories contrastively; still, they manage to reduce the durational continuum to more categories. Phoneticians instead would look at the measurable correlates of some categorial distinction, for example the duration of a long vowel in a stressed syllable as contrasted with that of an unstressed syllable. So you could say &quot;we will investigate vowel duration as a function of the length contrast and the stress contrast&quot;: but phoneticians don't reify that kind of correlation with a categorial phonological label like &quot;phoneme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When two things are measurably different but are transcribed the same way, you simply have encountered the limit on how precisely speech can be reduced to symbols. You can expand your list by including different formant transitions patterns being transcribed with the letter [ɪ]. Transcriptional tools for notating spectral tilt, amplitude and duration are pretty limited. The reason for this is that IPA has a strong prejudice in favor of not adding symbols for every phonetic fact – the system explicitly favors contrastiveness as a desideratum for inclusion in the alphabet. Since tilt (per se, as opposed to breathiness as a category) is not contrastive, it isn't included in a transcription (and frankly, you can't hear the computed value H1-H2, you have to measure it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T17:38:07.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30217" CreationDate="2019-01-12T17:59:58.083" Score="1" ViewCount="999" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia's article on the NATO spelling alphabet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The IPA form of &lt;em&gt;Golf&lt;/em&gt; implies it is pronounced &lt;em&gt;gulf&lt;/em&gt;, which is neither General American English nor British Received Pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a fairly-close-to-General American English speaker, &lt;em&gt;gulf&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;golf&lt;/em&gt; are homophones for me. I've only heard them distinguished in English accents, never American ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, then: which dialects of English distinguish these two words? Is it a peculiar merger that's only happened in my narrow dialect, for instance, or is Wikipedia using a different definition of General American?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T05:50:50.093" Title="Which accents distinguish &quot;golf&quot; and &quot;gulf&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30211" CreationDate="2019-01-12T18:44:51.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern data-driven approaches to speech recognition are ignorant about but robust to this one of many aspects of orthography that are not fully phonetic but occur relatively consistently in the training data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, it is more an issue of mapping n:1 (different realisations of one set of characters), whereas challenges for speech recognition generally revolve around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1:n (ambiguity):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;homophones like &lt;code&gt;doe&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;dough&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;see&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;sea&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;wreck a nice beach&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;recognise speech&lt;/code&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;meta language like &lt;code&gt;contact at priceline.com&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;contact@priceline.com&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;anneal-&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;Anil Dash&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;He told me quote unquote I will kill you&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;He told me &quot;I will kill you.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, acronyms&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;shift vis-a-vis the training data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;out-of-domain and domain-specific words  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;variations in accents and dialects  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a foreign language or mixed language&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;background noise&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the fact that users don't really want a literal transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;I'ma, um, I'ma call you on, um, Saturday&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;I'm going to call you on Saturday&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T19:00:46.923" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T19:00:46.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30214" CreationDate="2019-01-12T19:25:34.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.icao.int/Meetings/anconf12/Document%20Archive/AN10_V2_cons%5B1%5D.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Their transcriptions&lt;/a&gt; (p. 58) probably do not represent any actual dialect. For example, [ˈælfa] probably isn't an actual pronunciation in North American English. [ˈtʃɑ:li] indicates a non-rhotic dialect (thus excluding General American); the contrast [noˈvembə] vs. [ho:ˈtel] suggests that they are randomly using phonetic notations since there's no difference in the initial vowels. Noting that ICAO is located in Montreal and they transcribe Quebec as [keˈbek], you may suspect an Eastern Canadian substratum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say that I've ever encountered a speaker of GAE who pronounces the words the same. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6DVYDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT104&amp;amp;lpg=PT104&amp;amp;dq=gulf%20golf%20homophone&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=dNA_BWfzlw&amp;amp;sig=MdUnhGBLfde_BbykusZZsCY_8Ks&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjgqLyW9-jfAhVKHDQIHYGHBbg4ChDoATAAegQIChAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gulf%20golf%20homophone&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ogden reports&lt;/a&gt; that they are homophones for some speakers of Melbourne English, and there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/l/#From_Golf-gulf_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki chat&lt;/a&gt; that suggests that it's an Australian thing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121222074648AAPzCch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This (unnamed) person&lt;/a&gt; claims that they are homophones, so it's a credible claim. According to Cambridge, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/golf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;golf&lt;/a&gt; is pronounced differently from &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gulf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gulf&lt;/a&gt;. If you think the words are more like [gɔlf] rather than [gʌlf], I would conjecture that you're from the Midwest (I'm from the West). There is a lowering going on in the Midwest where my [tʊr] &quot;tour&quot; is pronounced [tɔr].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T19:25:34.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30214" CreationDate="2019-01-12T19:35:01.623" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s quite common to distinguish the pronunciations of &quot;golf&quot; and &quot;gulf&quot;. Historically, they had the different vowels that the spelling would suggest: a “short o” (&quot;lot&quot;) sound in golf and a “short u” (&quot;strut&quot;) sound in gulf. In American English, the “short o” sound has typically been rounded to the “cloth” vowel when it comes before /l/ followed by another consonant (or followed by the end of a word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/l/#Other_mergers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, a general merger of /ʌl/ and /ɔːl/ (“strut” + l and “cloth~thought” + l, as in &quot;hull&quot; and &quot;hall&quot;) is known to occur in some accents of American English, but it is not a mandatory feature of “standard” pronunciation and I don’t think it’s very common. I've heard of speakers having the merged vowel be /ɔ/, in which case this could be seen as a kind of rounding change, maybe similar to the one that produced /ɔl/ from what would have otherwise been /ɑl/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, in the specific context of a following voiceless obstruent (which causes the preceding syllable nucleus to become shortened or &quot;clipped&quot;), &quot;strut&quot; + l does sound somewhat confusable with &quot;lot~cloth~thought&quot; + l, but not to the extent that I would say that I have a merger. For context, I have the lot-cloth merger, so phonemically I have /ɑlf/ in &quot;golf&quot; and /ʌlf/ in &quot;gulf&quot;. It seems plausible that some speakers with accents similar to mine might have something like &quot;Canadian raising&quot; here that turns former /ɑlf/ into something that sounds more like /ʌlf/, just as /aɪf/ in words like &quot;wife&quot; is turned into [ʌɪf]. There was a post on ELU relatively recently by a speaker who perceived &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/461539/why-do-i-have-a-different-vowel-in-scarf-than-i-have-in-scarves-and-how-com&quot;&gt;/ʌ/ rather than /ɑ/ in the word &quot;scarf&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (but not in &quot;scarves&quot;), which seems similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T14:52:37.753" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T14:52:37.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30212" CreationDate="2019-01-12T19:39:00.307" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, evidentiality is not a grammatical category in English. But English has other means to express evidentiality when needed, e.g., vocabulary choice. In scientific and scholar publications you will often see &lt;em&gt;hedging language&lt;/em&gt; to express doubt or uncertainty about some conclusions. Expressing different degrees of evidentiality can be beneficial for scientific discourse and it is done so in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T19:39:00.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30209" CreationDate="2019-01-12T22:42:06.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by sumelic in the comments, my corpus is woefully incomplete, and I missed the important generalization. The preposition doesn't matter: &quot;I already told you about the man to/with/about *who/whom to talk.&quot; The only reason all the examples I found used &quot;to&quot; is that most of the examples of pied-piped who/whom happen to use &quot;to&quot;. So, obviously, my wild guess about phonotactics is completely wrong. Most other variables, like which position you extract from, don't matter either. The main thing that matters is pied-piping, but it's not quite that simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go through the catalog in Ivan Sag's 1997 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/rel-pap.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Relative Clause Constructions&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; trying to cram a who/whom into every possible (non-subject) position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The constructions (actually construction/site pairs, not separate constructions, at least in Sag's terms) that require focus stress (although Sag doesn't get into that) prefer who, and the in-situ one requires it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One other (seemingly arbitrary) construction at least slightly prefers who.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The constructions that pied-pipe prefer whom, and the infinitival one requires it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everything else accepts either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strongly implicates register, as sumelic suggested. &quot;You gave it to WHO?!&quot; is the kind of thing people say in the schoolyard, and &quot;I already told you about the man to *who/whom to talk&quot; is the kind of thing people say in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But pragmatics would only explain the generalizations, not the idiosyncrasies. Plus, even if you imagine a lawyer using the in-situ stressed question in court, she still can't say &quot;whom&quot; without it sounding weird. So, the pragmatic register distinction has been grammaticalized—some feature of each construction is involved in the pronoun choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes perfect sense from a Construction Grammar view of synchronic language (good but not perfect generalization from &quot;syntactic nuts&quot;) and a Goldbergian view of language evolution (pragmatics, and the drive to generalize, cause &quot;whom&quot; to die out faster in some constructions than others in a way that's pretty predictable, but not perfectly so). Especially considering Luke Sawczak's point about cliches in comments—e.g., most learners have probably heard the fixed &quot;to whom it may concern&quot; far more than any other phrase in the same construction. I don't know how to fit it into the Chomskyan MP paradigm (even though I think Chomsky originally invented the &quot;grammaticalized pragmatic&quot; idea…), but that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. If you're interested in the actual construction hierarchy and the explanation for it, not just the catalog, skimming Peter Culicover's 2013 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/grammar-and-complexity-9780199654604?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammar and Complexity&lt;/a&gt;, he seems to improve on Sag. I suspect Thomas Hoffman's 2011 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/preposition-placement-in-english/B581AA139DAACC450F5E6F623C4A7978&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preposition Placement in English&lt;/a&gt; improves it in different ways—including explicitly taking register (and dialect) into account—but I haven't got a copy. On the other hand, Sag is a relatively short paper available as a free preprint, as opposed to a whole book.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T01:02:32.413" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T01:02:32.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30212" CreationDate="2019-01-13T00:32:43.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any empirical studies on this, but I'd be willing to be it would have no effect at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidentiality distinctions languages make are things like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, and I have direct evidence that X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, as I can infer from indirect evidence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, as hearsay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, according to an authority.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… and not things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, with statistical significance p &amp;lt; 0.05.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X, controlling for all of the potential confound factors mentioned in the previous discourse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidential classes actually expressed are sometimes helpful, but when they are, it's obvious, and people already express them, in whatever language. If I write &quot;According to Chomsky,&quot; you don't need me to also mark the verb with a particle saying that it's authority-based. If I write &quot;The data suggest,&quot; that not only tells you what kind kind of evidentiality we're dealing with, but also tells you that the data only &quot;suggest&quot; rather than &quot;confirm&quot; the hypothesis I'm about to give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably what you're looking for is encouraging people to deal with evidentiality when it &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; obviously relevant, so they don't make mistakes and propose things they don't actually have sufficient/appropriate evidence for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those are exactly the cases where you'd need the evidential classes specific to science, that don't exist in any natural language. When you're reading a paper, there's almost never a question of whether the scientist observed this effect, or just heard about it in the hallway. You know she observed it, and the question is, e.g., whether she did sufficient trials while doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you created a conlang that &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have at least part of such an system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if you believe in a very strong version of Sapir-Whorf, and you're willing to raise children to speak that conlang as a first language, it's conceivable that they &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; end up paying more attention to significance tests while writing, and therefore be less likely to make unwarranted jumps. I'm pretty skeptical of strong Sapir-Whorf (and I think there are better ways to train people to be scientists than raising them in a language no other scientist speaks…), but again, this is at least conceivable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while I don't think it would have much effect on the quality of the science being done, I can imagine that it might give us useful insights into philosophy of science, and maybe into linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, where is the line between &quot;direct evidence&quot; vs. &quot;infer from indirect evidence&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand things, when a scout looks ahead and sees the characteristic swirls of a fast current pushing past slow eddies, she'll say &quot;There are-with-direct-evidence rapids ahead&quot;, not &quot;are-inferred&quot;. Presumably, this tells us that &quot;rapids&quot; doesn't mean a definition in terms of average water velocity (which she didn't directly observe), but some kind of feature collection that includes a mental image of what rapids look like visually (which she did directly observe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what if that same scout, trained as a physicist, is looking at cloud chamber photos to measure kaon decay asymmetricity. When she sees the distinctive twisty trail that almost always means a kaon was created and decayed, will she say &quot;This run produced-with-direct-evidence kaons&quot; or &quot;This run produced-inferred kaons&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to that would probably give us a different window into her mental model than, say, asking her whether she's (consciously) a realist about subatomic particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T15:21:27.040" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T15:21:27.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30235" CreationDate="2019-01-13T00:48:49.390" Score="3" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter &quot;esh&quot; (ʃ) is well-known from the IPA, and is also used in some languages' orthographies. Because of this second use case, Unicode includes a capital esh at U+01A9 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH (Ʃ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do any modern orthographies use this unicode character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:02:14.800" Title="Do any modern orthographies use capital esh?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30223" CreationDate="2019-01-13T01:19:26.747" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned the word &quot;dub-dub&quot; the other day meaning &lt;code&gt;moron&lt;/code&gt; in Amharic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a couple of searches I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://swearcentral.com/amharic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Duhduhb = Moron&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried having a stab at how it might be written, properly, in Amharic based off of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Alphasyllabary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alphasyllabary&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia and came up with something like: ዱዱቧ. But, it seems I'm way off base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3595" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T01:36:09.020" Title="How is &quot;duhduhb&quot; written properly in Amharic?" Tags="&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30222" CreationDate="2019-01-13T01:36:09.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;uh&quot; here is meant to represent the phoneme &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt;. Nobody can really agree on how to transcribe Ge'ez-script vowels, but I've most often seen it written &lt;em&gt;ä&lt;/em&gt;, and this is what Wikipedia uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the word is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amharicdictionary.com/Home/Index/%E1%8B%B3%E1%8B%B3%E1%89%A5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dädäb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, ደደብ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T01:36:09.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30221" CreationDate="2019-01-13T02:27:01.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U32-0180.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode code chart&lt;/a&gt; has the note &quot;African&quot; next to U+01A9. It most likely refers to the 1928 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Africa Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esh_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]n 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is unlikely that it is still used in a modern orthography, perhaps aside from literary IPA transcriptions like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.evertype.com/books/alice-en-fonipa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T02:27:01.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30239" CreationDate="2019-01-13T02:42:09.913" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background: I am a software dev who doesn't really know much about linguistics but I am trying to learn some of it for an application I'm making&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand Feature Grammar syntax, and I've sorta got it (this is the best tutorial I've found: &lt;a href=&quot;http://courses.washington.edu/ling471/lab2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://courses.washington.edu/ling471/lab2.html&lt;/a&gt; but I have read several others as well)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main issue is not really understanding where there are certain index values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://delph-in.github.io/delphin-viz/demo/#input=%E6%88%91%20%E6%98%AF%20%E4%B8%80%20%E4%B8%AA%20%E5%85%B5&amp;amp;count=1&amp;amp;grammar=zhong-uw&amp;amp;tree=true&amp;amp;mrs=true&amp;amp;dmrs=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://delph-in.github.io/delphin-viz/demo/#input=%E6%88%91%20%E6%98%AF%20%E4%B8%80%20%E4%B8%AA%20%E5%85%B5&amp;amp;count=1&amp;amp;grammar=zhong-uw&amp;amp;tree=true&amp;amp;mrs=true&amp;amp;dmrs=true&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, each index value seems to be made up of an alphabetic component, and a numeric component. However I'm not sure exactly what these values are implying, at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;h0 is presumably the first header handler&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is e2? x3 (I assume this is a &quot;normal&quot; variable?), i12?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked everywhere for a definition of exactly what these values are. Some of them, such as x3 in the included sample, I can hover over and they highlight a word (or character, in this case), others, such as x8, I hover and they show nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone explain exactly what these index values are and why they're named this way, or point me towards a resource I can read about it? I've been reading about feature grammars for several days now and this concept just isn't clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read it sounds like they could be arbitrary, but that still doesn't explain the naming convention. Even if the variable can be named any arbitrary name, there still seems to be a naming convention implying something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8072" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T02:23:27.223" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T03:24:12.553" Title="Understanding Feature Grammar syntax" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;feature-structures&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30212" CreationDate="2019-01-13T06:46:55.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not so sure about evidentiality, but I think we can draw a parallel with English articles.  As we all know, English has indefinite &amp;amp; definite articles.  And a lot of math is done in English.  As a result, mathematicians have devised a clever convention to co-opt articles to help reading some mathematical statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if someone says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hence x is &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; solution of Equation (A) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then we can infer that x is not necessary the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; solution of A, and either there are more, or there &lt;em&gt;might be&lt;/em&gt; more, or we simply don't care if there are more or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if one says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hence x is &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; solution of Equation (A) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then we can infer that x is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; solution, i.e., it is a unique solution and (from previous discussion) it should be obvious that there cannot be any other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a rather subtle art of conveying hints to aid understanding (just like articles in everyday speech), and if you are not a native English speaker it may take you some time to get the hang of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, does this help English speakers do math?  Maybe.  But as you can see, the effect is pretty marginal.  People do mathematics in Japanese just fine, and Japanese mathematicians have no problem discussing the uniqueness of solutions when they need to.  They may just need to write a few more words when things have to be explicit, and also need to ask a native English speaker to proofread their submissions to English-speaking journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suspect evidentiality would have a similar effect.  &lt;em&gt;Once codified by scientific convention&lt;/em&gt;, it may help scientists speaking language X to communicate with each other slightly more efficiently, but the effect will be marginal, and the most visible effect could be tripping up English speakers who need to talk at a conference held in language X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T06:46:55.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T07:52:03.183" Score="-2" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51427/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-top-of-the-morning-to-you&quot;&gt;Top of the morning&lt;/a&gt; got me thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most west european words for &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt; are akin, said to be influenced by Latin &lt;em&gt;hodie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. But Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;adja&lt;/em&gt;, from * PIE *h₁e-dy-és, *h₁é (“this”, and then) + &quot;day&quot;, follows the same scheme, and *h₁é &quot;this, and then&quot;, *ḱe- &quot;this&quot;, does not seem to make much of a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That disconnect alone would warrant a question. It does seem to be a proper Proto-Indo-European term, perhaps with dialectal differences. What's the problem between *ḱ and *h₁, isn't this just evidence that a voiceless palatal stop and that laryngeal, that could be anywhere between a glottal stop [ʔ] and &quot;an h sound [h]&quot; (e.g. a voiceless glottal fricative), were, for lack of a better word, pretty close, not to say rather variable (I mean a stop is in principle not phonetic, so the phonemic realization might vary easily, unless it's contrasting)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points if &quot;ahoy-hoy&quot; belongs here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ger &lt;em&gt;heute&lt;/em&gt;, OE &lt;em&gt;hēodæġ&lt;/em&gt;, from PGmc *hiz &quot;this&quot; + &lt;em&gt;dagaz&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;, *hiz from PIE *ḱe; The Nordic &lt;em&gt;i dag&lt;/em&gt; variants probably belong here to, I presume.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Welsh &lt;em&gt;heddiw&lt;/em&gt; from PCelt *so-~se- &quot;this&quot; + &quot;day&quot; (surely from PIE *ḱe?);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ru &lt;em&gt;сего́дня&lt;/em&gt; (sevodnja), from PSlav *sь &quot;this&quot; + *dьnь &quot;day&quot;, *sь from PIE *ḱe;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agr σήμερον (sḗmeron), first part from PIE *ḱe&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fr &lt;em&gt;hui&lt;/em&gt; Sp &lt;em&gt;huy&lt;/em&gt; from Vulgar Latin *oie, from Latin &lt;em&gt;hodie&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hoc&lt;/em&gt; &quot;this&quot; + &lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;, &lt;em&gt;hoc&lt;/em&gt; from PIE *ḱe.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;y&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T11:00:23.623" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:00:23.623" Title="PIE Etymology of Ger *heute* &quot;today&quot; vs Lt *hodie*, Sanskr *adja* etc" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T10:31:20.317" Score="1" ViewCount="1222" Body="&lt;p&gt;My teacher drew this diagram in the class. He seperated the sentence as NP and S2 but it doesn't seem true. Can somebody help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9sCO0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9sCO0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;tree diagram&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23648" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T21:31:04.050" Title="Relative Clause Tree Diagram" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;relative-clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="835" CreationDate="2019-01-13T11:13:24.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is NLTK .NET wrapper. You will be needed to install IronPython to make it work.&#xA;Instructions are there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nrcpp/NltkNet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nrcpp/NltkNet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23649" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T11:13:24.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30230" CreationDate="2019-01-13T16:53:11.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to tell from your picture, because some of the lines are not really visible. But I'm pretty sure your confusion comes from the fact that your teacher is wrong, in multiple, fundamental ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[which belonged to the old sailor] is modifying (part of) the object NP. You saw [a gray horse which belonged to the old sailor]. So that S2 needs to be inside the NP, as a sibling of what it's modifying. That's the whole point of relative clauses, and, more generally, of modifiers. Your teacher seems to have drawn it as a sibling of the subject, which would mean &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, not the horse you saw, belonged to the old sailor. It's also apparently a child of the outer sentence, which makes no sense—what component of the sentence is it supposed to be? This sounds like the part you're asking about, and you're right to ask, because it makes no sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even more fundamentally: that object NP (including the relative clause) needs to be inside the VP (traditionally, as the direct sibling of the V). Objects are arguments of verbs; arguments go inside the phrase. I'm not sure where your teacher has put it; it seems to be not even linked into the sentence at all, which is never right for &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; fundamentally: [S NP-subj VP] is the basic starting point for what a sentence is, and your teacher seems to have missed even that, and left the VP (with nothing in it but a V) floating around unattached.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[gray horse] is definitely not an AdjP. It acts noun-ish, not adjective-ish, and it clearly means a kind of horse, not a kind of gray, so it's some kind of projection of the head [N horse], not [Adj gray].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[old sailor] has the exact same problem as [gray horse].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not theory-specific stuff; it's part of the basic pre-theoretic model of the simple (surface) structure of sentences that different theories try to explain and represent in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a first approximation, try this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[S [NP [Pronoun I]] [VP [V saw] [NP [D a] [AP [A gray]] [N horse] [S [C which] [VP [V belonged] [PP [P to] [NP [D the] [AP [A old]] [N man]]]]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2uSUl.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2uSUl.png&quot; alt=&quot;I saw a gray horse which belonged to the old man&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, that diagram comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mshang.ca/syntree/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syntax Tree Generator by Miles Shang&lt;/a&gt;; you can just go to the web page, paste a bracket-notation tree, and it gives you the equivalent graphical tree. There are dozens of such programs, so I'm not specifically endorsing this one; you might, e.g., prefer one that lets you drag things around in the tree instead of forcing you to get the brackets right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T16:53:11.580" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30201" CreationDate="2019-01-13T18:18:41.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe phonologists often don't make a distinction between allophonic and non-allophonic variation in the realization of phonemes, but, when they do, it goes something like this: allophonic variation is discrete, driven by a distinction that can be captured as a simple rule, maps to a plausible (and usually independently attested) binary distinction in articulation (and usually in acoustics), and often maps closely to a distinction that is phonetic in other languages (especially ancestral, or at least related, ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the difference between the two /k/ sounds in kill and skill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The range in English /k/ sounds looks like two distinct blobs, one centered around a paradigm aspirated /k/, the other around a paradigm unaspirated /k/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you measure articulatory physiology instead of acoustics, you get much the same results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many languages—including relatives like Hindi—distinguish /k/ and /k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ sounds on the basis of a +aspirated feature, and in fact the sound cluster for English /k/ is pretty close to the union of the clusters for Hindi /k/ and /k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/k/ may even be the result of a historical merger between separate /k/ and /k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/ phonemes in an ancestral language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The variation can be described by simple rules, like aspirated when it's the first sound in the onset, unaspirated when it's internal to an onset cluster.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now try the same thing with the /s/ sounds in sill and skill. You get one big amorphous blob, caused by multiple continuously-ranging articulatory differences, none of which match up well with a well-attested phonetic feature used in any language. You can sort of explain why skill is usually less hissy because the tongue moves toward a stop in the middle, but it's hard to make a well-principled phonological rule like &quot;onset = +aspirated&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course nothing is ever that perfect. For example, aspiration isn't really binary; you can aspirate harder or softer, and continue aspirating further or less far into the stop, and so on. And the cluster of English /k/ sounds is &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt; to the union of Hindi /k/ and /k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;/, but not &lt;em&gt;identical&lt;/em&gt; to it. But I think that's the distinction you're looking for: /k/ in kill vs. skill is the paradigm example for allophones, while /s/ in sill vs. skill is arguably (but it probably depends on a specific definition/theory) not allophonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you call variation like the hissiness of the /s/, or like your examples? There are all kinds of variation that have different names, but I don't think there's a name that covers all of the various kinds that aren't allophonic. I think what you're looking for is something like &quot;(various axes of) non-allophonic variation in phoneme realization&quot;, or &quot;non-allophonic (phonetic/segmental) variability&quot;, etc.; there is no simpler term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T18:24:08.340" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T18:24:08.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30181" CreationDate="2019-01-13T20:21:33.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible for a DP like &quot;three times&quot; to act as an AdvP (&quot;He read the book three times.&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're confusing terminology here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DP loosely &quot;acts as an AdvP&quot; in the sense that it's modifying the VP, but that isn't because it's actually acting as an AdvP. It's because AdvP and DP can both adjoin to a verb to modify it according to the semantic function they carry. When you adjoin a DP, it doesn't become an AdvP, or act as one; it just becomes an adjunct and acts as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you consider PP adjuncts—which you probably already know about—it's exactly the same thing. A PP doesn't become an AdvP when it's an adjunct instead of an argument. Neither does a DP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would such a constituency tree look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on your favorite theoretical analysis of adjuncts. Presumably you're looking for an MP analysis, given that you're asking about DP rather than NP. But whatever you like, draw your favorite version of the tree for &quot;He read the book repeatedly&quot;, then just sub the DP in for the AdvP, and you're done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example (ignoring whatever is above the VP, and whether it has anything in spec), if you analyze [VP^ read the book [AdvP^ repeatedly]] like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ejOqy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ejOqy.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;[VP [V&amp;#39; [V&amp;#39; read [DP^ the book]] [AdvP^ repeatedly]]]&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… then you analyze [VP^ read the book [DP^ three times]] like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1CUlX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1CUlX.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;[VP [V&amp;#39; [V&amp;#39; read [DP^ the book]] [DP^ three times]]&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Conversely, would the same thing apply to constructions in Dutch such as &quot;twee keer&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know Dutch, but if this is a valid sentence (Google seems to think it is):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hij las het boek drie keer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… then yes, the VP is presumably structured the same way: [DP het book] is the complement of the verb, and [DP drie keer] an adjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you can go way beyond close relatives to English and find DP adjuncts as frequency modifiers. (That's what makes people think that adjunction is part of Universal Grammar in the first place.) For example, in Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;彼はその本を三回読みまです。&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kare wa so-no pon o san-kai yon desu.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He topic-particle that-genitive-particle book accusative-particle three-occurrences read do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He read the book three times.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [DP san-kai] doesn't take the -ku ending (sort of similar to English -ly, but fully regular and productive) that an adjective/adverb would take here, so it clearly isn't an AdvP, but it is adjoining and modifying the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T20:43:47.147" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T20:43:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30221" CreationDate="2019-01-13T21:41:50.100" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I designed the fc fonts for use with TeX I researched character usage by African languages and found at least one language using a capital esh. I saw good quality specimens in printed matter and the capital Esh is in some sense smaller than its lowercase conterpart, it has the height of a normal capital letter and no descender. It was integral shaped. I did not find evidence for contemporary use of a Sigma-shaped capital Esh then (early 1990ies), but is was used historically in now obsolete orthographies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full list of languages I inspected is:  Akan, Bamileke, Basa (Kru), Bemba, Ciokwe, Dinka, Dholuo (Luo), Efik, Ewe-Fon, Fulani (Fulful), Gã, Gbaya, Hausa, Ịgbọ, Kanuri, Kikuyu, Kikongo, Kpelle, Krio, Luba, Mandekan (Bambara), Mende, More, Ngala, Nyanja, Oromo, Rundi, Kinya Rwanda, Sango, Serer, Shona, Somali, Songhai, Sotho (two different writing systems), Suaheli, Tiv, Yao, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can now confirm that it was Gã, I have found my old notes again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T11:02:14.800" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:02:14.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30095" CreationDate="2019-01-13T22:04:28.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, one big thing you're going to run into, almost no matter who you read: Most people in CxG focus their arguments against Chomskyan transformational grammar and other major competing approaches,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; not against non-hierarchical grammar or purely statistical approaches or other things that far outside the theoretical linguistics mainstream. For example, &lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (mentioned below) does have some argument for why syntax can't be totally flat (and can't be parasitic off semantic structure), but it has a lot more argument for, e.g., why semantics also has to be hierarchical, or why syntax can't be as complex as current Chomskyan theory implies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I don't have a complete answer here, but… since the Parallel Architecture came up in the comments, and it also happens to be the CxG-style approach I'm most familiar with, I can give a partial answer, focusing on PA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the &quot;parallel&quot; in the name is not about parallel vs. serial real-time processing (despite what the comments imply). It's about constructions being comprised of three parallel, independently &quot;generative&quot;, structures: semantics, syntax, and phonology.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; PA was developed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ray Jackendoff&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/culicover.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Culicover&lt;/a&gt;, starting with their 2005 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpler_Syntax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. While that's a pretty solid book, you might prefer to start with either Jackendoff's 2010 &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/meaning-and-the-lexicon-9780199568888?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meaning and the Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which gives a lot more historical overview, or Culicover's 2013 &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/grammar-and-complexity-9780199654604?cc=us&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar and Complexity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is more up-to-date and more rigorous—and also much more firmly in the CxG camp.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the intended goals of PA was to come up with a theoretical grammar framework that can actually connect up to psycholinguistics, unlike mainstream Chomskyan grammar. For example, Culicover argues that the hard competence/performance divide (going back to 1950s Chomsky) needs to go away, and shows how it can. All three books mentioned above contain references to a variety of experimental work, as do other papers and books within the PA framework by both authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jackendoff has also, since the late 2000s, been collaborating directly with psycholinguists to gather experimental work that's specifically relevant to his theoretical framework. I don't know much about any of those papers, but you can see the Experimental Articles section of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/recent.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his recent publications page&lt;/a&gt; for pointers. Also, I believe Gina Kuperberg has done some independent psycho-/neurolinguistic work that's relevant, and probably some of the other co-authors have as well. Taking a quick look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/Wittenbergetal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Processing and Representation of Light Verb Constructions&lt;/a&gt;, it looks like this is relevant work, if not exactly what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good starting place is Adele Goldberg, maybe the 2006 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199268525&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Constructions at Work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. She has her own CxG approach, different from PA. Like Jackendoff and Culicover, or probably even more so, one of her major focuses has been working out how to connect formal linguistics to theories of real-time processing, language acquisition, and language evolution. And her papers, like theirs, tend to contain references to experimental results. For example, her original paper on statistical preemption&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; goes into detail about what kinds of testable predictions it makes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last point: Most of the arguments are pretty indirect. Let me give an example: Various pieces of evidence (e.g., timing tests and distraction tests) show that there's a higher cost to processing whatever-is-going-on with linking wh words to gaps when the gaps are in subjects rather than in objects (in English). And there's some evidence implies that topicalized objects act like subjects in this regard. That isn't prima facie evidence for CxG. However, under Culicover's CxG-based model of real-time processing, the explanation is obvious, if a bit involved (I won't go into it, but see, e.g., chapter 5 of &lt;em&gt;Grammar and Complexity&lt;/em&gt;); there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a similar explanation in a linear processing theory, or in transformational grammar, etc., but it's not &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; (at least not to someone who specializes in CxG…), and nobody's yet offered one. So, that's some sort of evidence for a CxG approach. But how strong? What if many of the alternative theorists haven't even read Culicover's work (which is entirely plausible), so they don't even know they've been challenged to explain these results? What about frameworks that only have a handful of people working on them, so they can't be fairly expected to answer every challenge they hear about?&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. And, as another unfortunate side effect, they expect you to know some of the arcane Chomskyan terminology.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Most other approaches, both CxG and otherwise, have a single core generative structure (usually syntax, but sometimes semantics, as in some cognitive grammar approaches), and the others are assumed to be isomorphic to it, or parasitic off it in some other way.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. &lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt; is careful to try to avoid any prior theoretical commitment to CxG, and draws on predecessors ranging from HPSG to Chomskyan GB, even though ultimately the conclusions are pretty CxG-flavored. Subsequent work, by both authors, draws much more on SBCG, HPSG, and other CxG and closely-related frameworks.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. I can't remember the name of the paper—but the idea is covered in the 2006 book, so you probably don't need it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. And that's effectively the case for almost every alternative except mainstream (Minimalist Program) transformational grammar.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T01:41:50.160" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T01:41:50.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T23:02:00.897" Score="-2" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize if the following question is off-topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, I was sitting at a table in a cafeteria/canteen. A few tables away, I saw someone I knew. This person also saw me and patted on the chair beside her while still looking at me. To me, it was clear that she was asking me to move over and sit with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how, where and why did this gesture get the meaning to &quot;come over&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23652" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T18:02:50.547" Title="Hand gesture - Patting" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;body-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30225" CreationDate="2019-01-14T00:56:32.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a quote of the syntax for what I was asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://moin.delph-in.net/ErgSemantics/Basics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://moin.delph-in.net/ErgSemantics/Basics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are three types of variables in MRS, event(ualitie)s (of type e), instances (of type x) and labels or handles (of type h). Of these, the latter serve a formalism-internal role, i.e. assuming a suitable variant of predicate logic as the object language, MRS labels do not map onto logical variables. Eventualities and instances, on the other hand, prototypically correspond to verbal and nominal expressions, respectively. In addition to these most specific variable types, there are underspecifications as follows: i (for individual) is a generalization over eventualities and instances; p (the half-way mark in the alphabet between h and x) is a generalization over labels and instances; and u (for unspecific or maybe unbound) generalizes over all of the above. Note that Copestake et al. (2001) use individual for what is called instance here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8072" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T03:24:12.553" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T03:24:12.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30225" CreationDate="2019-01-14T02:10:29.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to understand in detail how the formalism (Minimal Recursion Semantics) works is simply to have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/copestake.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original paper&lt;/a&gt; by Copestake et.al. You may want to skip the motivation and formal definitions and focus on the representation and the implementation into feature structures/HPSG.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Maybe this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~keberle/Underspecification/Presentations/Handout.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary&lt;/a&gt; helps for an overview, although it focusses more on the semantic underspecification mechanism and not on the representation in a feature structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The naming of the variables follows a specific pattern. Each index is a combination of a letter and a number (continuously numbered; numbering independent between different letters). The letters are abbreviations for certain types (this is already explained in the tutorial you linked to in the answer you gave yourself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is an &lt;strong&gt;indivdiual argument&lt;/strong&gt; in an &lt;strong&gt;elementary predication (EP)&lt;/strong&gt;. An elementary predication consists of a relation symbol with its associated arguments, e.g. &lt;code&gt;see(x1, x2)&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;x1 sees x2&quot;), where &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; is the relation and &lt;em&gt;x1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;x2&lt;/em&gt; are arguments. An individual may be e.g. Peter, or the pen which lies on my desk. A difference is made between scopal and non-scopal arguments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; stands for for &lt;strong&gt;eventuality&lt;/strong&gt;. An eventuality may be the event &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; is a generalization over eventualities and individuals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; stands for &lt;em&gt;handle&lt;/em&gt; and is used for handles and labels. A &lt;strong&gt;handle&lt;/strong&gt; is a tag which  links up a scopal argument position with the (conjunctions of) EPs that fills it, and a &lt;strong&gt;label&lt;/strong&gt; identifies an EP as belonging to a particular tree node. E.g., we could give the EP &lt;code&gt;see(x1, x2)&lt;/code&gt; the handle &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;, written &lt;code&gt;h1: see(x1, x2)&lt;/code&gt; and later reference that EP inside another EP by using its handle; in this usage the handle is called a label.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual magic about these variables happens in how they are used together (&lt;strong&gt;coindexation&lt;/strong&gt;: If two slots are filled/indexed by the same variale, then this means that the same thing (which is denoted by that variable) fills in both of the roles indicated by the two different slots), and (peculiar to this particular framework, not a universal thing in feature structures) in the equality constraints listed under &lt;code&gt;HCONS&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;HCONS&lt;/strong&gt; = handle constraints; &lt;strong&gt;qeq&lt;/strong&gt; = equality modulo quantifiers).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go through the example you linked step by step:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The top handle, i.e. the head of the entire thing is &lt;code&gt;h0&lt;/code&gt;. The first equality constraint in the &lt;code&gt;HCONS&lt;/code&gt; list states that &lt;code&gt;h0&lt;/code&gt; is qeq-equal to &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;. So the top of the entire sentence that is denoted by the variable &lt;code&gt;h0&lt;/code&gt; is equal to the thing denoted by the label &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;. Now what is the thing denoted by &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;? It's precisely the element which has the value &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt; in its &lt;code&gt;LBL&lt;/code&gt; (label) feature. This is the relation &lt;code&gt;是_v_cop⟨2:3⟩&lt;/code&gt;, i.e., via conindexation between the two uses of the variable &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt; together with the equality between the variables &lt;code&gt;h0&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;, the top of the entire tree is the verb - an observation which matches up with the dependency analysis (the thing with the arrows) given in the lower picture (here, the concepts top/head/root are roughly the same).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The verb, which we briefly reference by its handle &lt;code&gt;h1&lt;/code&gt;, has three arguments: An eventuality argument &lt;code&gt;e2&lt;/code&gt;, and two individual arguments &lt;code&gt;x3&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;x8&lt;/code&gt;. So let's track these variables:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The variable &lt;code&gt;e2&lt;/code&gt; is used as the index (more precisely:&lt;code&gt;e2&lt;/code&gt; is the value to the attribute &lt;code&gt;INDEX&lt;/code&gt; in the feature structure) of the whole thing. The index corresponds to a distinguished normal (non-handle) variable. So the variable for the eventuality which is denoted by the verb serves as the variable for the eventuality denoted by the entire structure, which makes sense because the core meaning of the sentence lies in the event that the verb expresses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The variable &lt;code&gt;x3&lt;/code&gt; is also used (coindexed) as the &lt;code&gt;ARG0&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;code&gt;pron&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;pronoun_q&lt;/code&gt;. So coindexation of variables tells us that whichever individual is the first argument (presumably the subject) of the verb is the same that is referred to by the ordinary pronoun and the question pronoun (I suppose that's what the abbreviations mean).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A similar reasoning applies to the variable &lt;code&gt;x8&lt;/code&gt; which is referenced in the relations &lt;code&gt;card⟨4:5⟩&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;_个_x⟨6:7⟩&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;_兵_n_1⟨8:9⟩&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;exist_q⟨-1:-1⟩&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Let's now look at the existential quantification, i.e. the relation &lt;code&gt;exist_q⟨-1:-1⟩&lt;/code&gt;. In the elementary predication &lt;em&gt;There is a pig which snores&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;A pig snores&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Some pig snores&lt;/em&gt;, all treated equivalently), the scopal argument &lt;em&gt;pig&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;strong&gt;restriction&lt;/strong&gt; and the scopal argument &lt;em&gt;snore&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;strong&gt;body&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;nuclear scope&lt;/strong&gt;) of the quantifier &lt;em&gt;there exists&lt;/em&gt;. In the predication &lt;em&gt;All happy children laugh&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;happy children&lt;/em&gt; is the restriction and &lt;em&gt;laugh&lt;/em&gt; the body of the quantifier &lt;code&gt;all&lt;/code&gt;. The restriction of this particular existential quantifier in use has the label &lt;code&gt;h14&lt;/code&gt;. This variable serves as a placeholder for whatever is to be inserted as the restriction of the quantication. The handle constraints in &lt;code&gt;HCONS&lt;/code&gt; tell us that the variable &lt;code&gt;h14&lt;/code&gt; is quantifier-equal to the relation denoted by the label &lt;code&gt;h9&lt;/code&gt;. If we now search for this label among the list of relations, we find that it is the handle to the predication &lt;code&gt;card⟨4:5⟩&lt;/code&gt;. So the predication &lt;code&gt;card⟨4:5⟩&lt;/code&gt; fills in the role of being the restriction of the existential quantification predication &lt;code&gt;exist_q⟨-1:-1⟩&lt;/code&gt; .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I don't speak any Chinese so I can't give an explanation with reference to the precise meaning, but I hope you get the idea. &lt;strong&gt;It's pretty much like a paper chase&lt;/strong&gt;: You start tracking where else the variable you are interested in is being used, in addition (particular to the MRS framework) follow the path through the equalities that link different variables together, and the semantics of each variable is precisely the combination of places where it is used to fill a particular position in the feature structure. This is the crucial point of coindexation, which is one of the key ideas of feature-based grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T10:34:31.050" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T10:34:31.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T02:42:52.553" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading several books dealing with morpheme/semanteme, etc...But some of them are a few decades old and don't deal exclusively with the subject in the scope of Lexicology. So I would like to ask for references to contemporary books that are currently considered an authoritative reference and generally consensual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23653" LastEditorUserId="23653" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T02:55:13.260" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T02:55:13.260" Title="Modern authoritive textbook for morpheme analyses" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T04:10:44.147" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several frameworks that have been built by both linguists and computer scientists to deal with the problem of semantic representation of sentences, most notably Abstract Meaning Representation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://amr.isi.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://amr.isi.edu/&lt;/a&gt;), Framenet(&lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/&lt;/a&gt;), PropBank.  However, AMR explicitly only provides representations of sentences, and PropBank deals with the sort of predicate-argument structures which effectively are bound within a sentence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has also been research in NLP in determining basic relationship categories between sentences - whether one entails, paraphrases, or contradicts another one.  However, most paragraphs contain sentences with much richer relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone come up with a way of reasoning about the semantics of a paragraph, as opposed to a sentence, that lends itself to developing annotation tools and datasets?  For instance, let's say I perform AMR parsing and then have a list of graphs, each of which represents a sentence - is there any other data structure I could transform this into which would be more useful than just a list of graphs which I know are somehow related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess a more theoretical question would be - are paragraphs semantically just the union of all the propositions in each sentence, or is there more internal structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T10:46:01.650" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T23:49:09.433" Title="Computational/Formal Approaches to Paragraph-Level Semantics" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30242" CreationDate="2019-01-14T10:12:48.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised you don't mention &lt;strong&gt;DRT (Discourse Representation Theory)&lt;/strong&gt;. DRT is a semantic framework that developed, amongst others, from the need to account for anaphoric references (pronouns) across sentence boundaries. As you already suspect, a discourse (roughly what you mean by &quot;paragraph&quot;) is seen as a conjunction of individual propositions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;DRT is not so much concerned with relations between sentences such as entailment, but mostly with the treatment of variables and their interpretation in context as discourse referents (= the individuals that are being referred to in the propositions), e.g., the question which entity introduced by a previous sentence a pronoun like &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; can refer to, and which links are not possible. A very typical question that DRT would attempt to answer is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the sequence of sentences &lt;code&gt;Peter walks in the park. He whistles.&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;  how can we formally account for the fact that by &lt;code&gt;he&lt;/code&gt; in the second&#xA;  sentence we mean the same individual as by &lt;code&gt;Peter&lt;/code&gt; in the first&#xA;  sentence - and what is semantically wrong with the syntactically&#xA;  similar looking sequence of sentences &lt;code&gt;Peter doesn't have a wife. * She knits.&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if that's something you'd be interested in.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A very accessible introudction to DRT (which, however, presuposses knowledge of first-order logic - available in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/publikationen/softcopies/Blackburn:1997:RIN.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first volume&lt;/a&gt;) can be found in the first chapter of &lt;a href=&quot;http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/butt/main/material/bb-drt.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P. Blackburn &amp;amp; J. Bos: Representation and Inference for Natural Language, Vol. 2&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/archiv/kamp/files/2011.kamp.van.genabith.reyle.discourse.representation.theory.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I am not sure if at all or to what extent this theory is used in modern NLP. It has mostly been of theoretical interest and can be neatly implemented in Prolog (as introduced in the remaining chapters of Blackburn &amp;amp; Bos Vol. 2).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related to DRT is &lt;strong&gt;Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL)&lt;/strong&gt;, also sketeched in the introductory chapter of Blackburn &amp;amp; Bos Vol 2 and discussed in more detail e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/1971390/27375_dpl.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (And just to give credit to the beautiful title of the work, I should also mention Paul Dekker's dissertation captioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4549/aee44ef91a37c95e0fb7d4760074c55bc8d4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Transsentential Meditations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). This provides a yet more formal account of discourse semantics, although I can hardly imagine it has actual applications in nowadays NLP, and is probably not as intuitive to get into as the boxes employed in DRT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T23:49:09.433" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T23:49:09.433" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30237" CreationDate="2019-01-14T15:29:32.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not knowing enough of English or American culture to make a claim for that, but in German culture the gesture is known as well. It comes from a popular game a children's birthday parties or a Kindergarten. The children are sitting in a round of chairs with one free chair. The left neighbour of the free chair pats the chair and calls out &lt;em&gt;&quot;Mein rechter, rechter Platz ist leer, ich wünsche mir &amp;lt; insert name of a child &gt; her&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. The called child now tries to change places, but the neighbours can try to hold it back. The game continues this way for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that such kind of gestures are arbitrary and culture dependent, don't expect them to mean the same thing in other places of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T17:53:29.107" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T17:53:29.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T17:18:02.873" Score="4" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any statistic on how accuracy the automated (program/machine) transition from one language to another language of the same language family?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example from turkey to azerbaijan, uzbek, turkmen etc (turkic langs)&#xA;They all have same logic (suffix addition order etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23655" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T11:15:50.037" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T12:18:35.460" Title="Accuracy of automatic (machine) translation of two languages in same language family" Tags="&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T21:41:01.817" Score="-2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;pals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know any advanced book(s) in Phonology of English and could give me a title/the titles, please?&#xA;I am studying English Philology (so English is my 2nd language) and we've just finished April McMahon's 'An Introduction to English Philology' and I want some more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23656" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T02:01:50.533" Title="Advanced book for English Phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30229" CreationDate="2019-01-15T00:22:45.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no evidence that &quot;today&quot; is a PIE term, and plenty of evidence that it isn't. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different IE languages have contracted different roots to make their &quot;today&quot; words. That's already enough to rule out common descent.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact, the roots often don't even all have the same semantics: about half of them are &quot;this+day&quot; like German, about half are &quot;preposition+day&quot; like English, and maybe a few oddballs here and there. The ones that use prepositions often use different ones, like English &quot;to+day&quot; vs. Dutch &quot;from+day&quot; vs. Danish &quot;in/on+day&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And these differences are clearly not at all distributed based on descent; Sanskrit and German are certainly not more closely related than German and Low German.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These contractions appear long after the languages had diverged, which again is usually enough on its own to rule out common descent.&lt;sup&gt;2, 3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many non-IE languages have constructions that are semantically just as close as to &quot;today&quot; and &quot;heute&quot; as they are to each other, like Japanese &quot;honjitsu&quot; and Arabic al-yawma.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if they're independent coinages, why do some of them look so similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it looks (see Arabic, Japanese, etc.) like forming &quot;today&quot; as a contraction is the kind of obvious thing that many languages will hit on once the host culture reaches a point where it needs a word like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only so many things you can plausibly contract to get &quot;today&quot;: &quot;to+day&quot;, &quot;on+day&quot;, &quot;this+day&quot;… And if two different IE languages both contract their words for &quot;this+day&quot;, those words are often going to be cognates, so the result will often look similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, notice that many of them are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cognates, and it seems to be almost random which ones are. Which is exactly what you'd expect from different IE languages developing their words independently, but out of a small and mostly-shared pool of inputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do etymologists mean when they say OHG &quot;hiutu&quot; is a contraction of &quot;hiu+tagu&quot; &lt;em&gt;possibly influenced by Latin hodie&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you asked in the comments why Latin would affect German in the first place. That's easy. When people were speaking OHG, Latin was the language of their religion, diplomacy, civil administration, and (if you include vulgar Latin) much of their trade. Almost any OHG speaker who was literate was literate in Latin. And Latin influence on Germanic languages even goes back long before that—the Romans were hiring Germans as mercenaries, resettling them all over Europe, and converting them to Christianity centuries before Charlemagne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, notice that some of the Germanic languages ended up with a direct calque of the Latin contraction, but others are &quot;phonocalques&quot;—contractions that stretch the Latin semantics a bit further, but sounds a lot more like the Latin, especially with &quot;heute&quot;. That &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be a coincidence, but it certainly makes influence look even more plausible. I don't know exactly how compelling that argument is, but remember, the etymological dictionaries only say &quot;possibly influenced&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Some as late as modern times—Norwegian rejected &quot;idag&quot; as an invalid new coinage in the 1938 reforms. Obviously the Latin and Greek aren't &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; new, but they appeared well after the start of historical writing, which is still millenia after the breakup of PIE.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Also, some languages coined the same idea multiple times. Low German &quot;vandage&quot; (&quot;from+day&quot;) replaced &quot;hiudu&quot; (&quot;this+day&quot;) in historical times. (Earlier, &quot;hiudu&quot; apparently replaced &quot;hi(u)digu&quot;, which is formed from the same roots, but contracted differently. But it seems plausible to me that &quot;hiudu&quot; could be a borrowing from OHG &quot;hiutu&quot; rather than a re-coinage, so let's ignore it.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T08:11:50.337" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T08:11:50.337" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30246" CreationDate="2019-01-15T01:13:45.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/a&gt;, with the cautionary note that it is advanced in the sense that it should be read critically, without necessarily accepting the theory that it advances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T01:13:45.553" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30242" CreationDate="2019-01-15T03:20:01.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we implemented our software for 'paragraph analysis' it ended up looking like a 'union of propositions' with two minor changes. 1. paragraphs were often preceded by headings which we used to set the context of the paragraph (like a topic model/domain) 2. We used a modification of this simple framework: &lt;a href=&quot;http://depts.washington.edu/pswrite/Handouts/Paragraphs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://depts.washington.edu/pswrite/Handouts/Paragraphs.pdf&lt;/a&gt; to tag 'paragraph intents'.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We found very little information on the paragraph as the unit of analysis in the literature. Frameworks like AMR, DRT, Framenet were better at describing the sentence elements and discourse connectives. It's really odd that there isn't more written on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T03:20:01.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T06:18:36.057" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was pondering about English ditransitive verb phrases. Say we have the following: &lt;em&gt;Sofia the candle&lt;/em&gt;. I can assume the phrase structure VP -&gt; V NP NP, which is not a binary production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clue, how can we parse this ditransitive with the CKY algorithm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22917" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T06:18:36.057" Title="English ditransitive verb phares in CKY algorithm" Tags="&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30245" CreationDate="2019-01-15T06:36:38.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right to suspect that the accuracy can potentially be very good, but, in practice, unfortunately, as of 2019, most of the major systems - those from Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex, Facebook, Amazon, DeepL and so on - use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bridging&lt;/a&gt; via English for almost all pairs, even closely related ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is simply pragmatic.  Those systems support 100+ languages, and thus there are 10000+ pairs.  Most of those pairs, like Tamil-Basque, are not in high demand, and there is not much training data for them anyway.  That's even true for pairs of related languages like Romanian-Galician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engineering-wise, even if one could create data for, train and evaluate all those pairs, it is also just a lot of effort to deploy and maintain 10000+ systems in production at scale, even with NMT - end-to-end models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, incredibly, even very closely related major languages are not translated directly, but via English.  You can easily test this, for example for Spanish-Portuguese, which are almost as close as Turkish and Azerbaijani, and have much much more training data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/diXeZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/diXeZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, &lt;em&gt;He was killed by a bat&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous in English - it's not clear if the flying mouse or the wooden stick is meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you use machine translation API and are interested catching such casualties of bridging and other errors, you can try machine translation risk prediction like &lt;a href=&quot;https://modelfront.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ModelFront&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish-Azerbaijani is actually one of the lucky pairs that does have a direct system in at least one direction on Google Translate.  Let's test it.  &lt;em&gt;bat&lt;/em&gt; doesn't work as well in Turkish since they basically just say &lt;em&gt;baseball stick&lt;/em&gt;, so we can use the T-V distinction as an example of something that English cannot represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jcYSh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jcYSh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CQuWK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CQuWK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've confirmed that a translation via English would probably lose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uXId.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uXId.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, yes, Turkish-Azerbaijani still works as it should.  So we can conclude it's direct.  (Although note that the bridging could pass along some hints, so we should test this really well before making strong conclusions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason for this approach is that it would be hard to get the accuracy for English-Azerbaijani.  There is simply much more English-Turkish and Turkish-Azerbaijani data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, about the accuracy, well it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; potentially be one of the best pairs, but it needs more data and more work than has been put into it.  As far as I know, English-Portuguese outperforms for example English-Dutch and even English-Frisian on all major engines, even though Frisian is probably the language closest to English supported by any major system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blocker here is really that most societies are not home to a major technology company.  The major systems are made in the US, China and Russia, without exception.  The rest of the world just does not produce much.  The closest candidates are Systran, which is not very competitive in recent decades, and DeepL, which only covers European languages, and still focuses on pairs with English, English being the lingua franca of Europe.  Turkey and Azerbaijan inflicted braindrain on themselves throughout the 20th century, and show no signs of stopping, so my bet is that Yandex will be the first to build direct systems for more obscure Turkic pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more context see my answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Which-languages-are-Google-Translate-best-at-translating/answer/Adam-Bittlingmayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Which languages are Google Translate best at translating?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Which-two-languages-is-machine-translation-worst-at-translating-between/answer/Adam-Bittlingmayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Which two languages is machine translation worst at translating between?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T12:18:35.460" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T12:18:35.460" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T14:38:48.967" Score="1" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused by the terminology regarding bound/free pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are free pronouns, those not bound to the verb, like 'we' in &lt;code&gt;'we like beer'&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does free mean they are not bound to previous elements? Like &lt;code&gt;'I told Tom that he...'&lt;/code&gt;, 'he' here is bound to Tom, not something previously mentioned in the text. 'I', on the contrary, is not connected to previous elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13153" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T14:38:48.967" Title="Type of pronouns, bound/free" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T14:41:59.270" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wondering what features of language or writing that languages across the world transcribe into so-called &quot;punctuation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify what I mean, I don't mean a list of every punctuation character in every language (though that would be neat). I instead mean this. In language &lt;strong&gt;generally&lt;/strong&gt;, there are certain things we can consider &lt;em&gt;punctuation&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the colon &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt; I just used (start of a list or hmm, I'm not sure exactly what this means at a deeper level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the space (word separator)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; (end of sentence)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt; (list item separator)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;&lt;/code&gt; (quotation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; (compound word joiner)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; (question)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;!&lt;/code&gt; (exclamation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;()&lt;/code&gt; (sidenote)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;$&lt;/code&gt; (money sign, different in each culture)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; (fairly new, digital address perhaps)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; (number marker)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt; (archaic &quot;and&quot; sign)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[]&lt;/code&gt; (footnote or citation perhaps)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about all I can think of &lt;em&gt;in English&lt;/em&gt;. But I can think of potential other ones that might use a symbol (plus, markdown gives us some options too):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;-&lt;/code&gt; (vertical list item marker)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;|&lt;/code&gt; (table column)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;italics for emphasis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bold for a lot of emphasis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe even some others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;something for a &lt;em&gt;joking&lt;/em&gt; phrase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;something for a code block&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I'm wondering what other languages do for punctuation here. Not necessarily the symbols they use, but the things they punctuate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T14:41:59.270" Title="All the punctuation features across languages" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2169" CreationDate="2019-01-15T15:11:20.340" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, all agglutinative languages are simple to learn as a new language because of a very logical grammar (each suffix has only one meaning) and they have almost no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alphabet&lt;/em&gt; (at least Turkic and Uralic have a Latin alphabet and several specific letters)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt; (not so hard)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar&lt;/em&gt; logical grammar (each suffix has only one meaning) and they have almost no exception.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a list of some agglutinative languages:&#xA;* Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages)&#xA;* Mongolic languages&#xA;* Turkic languages (Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Turkmen, Tatar, Kyrgyz, Sakha (Yakut), Bashkir, Chuvash, Afshar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that esperanto is also an agglutinative language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23655" LastEditorUserId="23655" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T22:20:04.393" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T22:20:04.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T15:49:32.150" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any statistics on how similar any two languages are?&#xA;For a whole language (lexical and structural) or maybe just a comparison of two dictionaries (vocabulary)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23655" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T15:49:32.150" Title="Are there any statistic how similar are any two languages?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-16T14:42:51.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30275" CreationDate="2019-01-15T17:26:21.577" Score="-1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the reason behind this? Do the noun and the verb have different derivations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T20:51:42.420" Title="Why is &quot;index&quot; as a noun pluralized as &quot;indices&quot; while the present tense verb is &quot;indexes&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-01-23T22:43:40.750" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6339" CreationDate="2019-01-15T17:40:18.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So here are some examples from Ecuadorian Quechua. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, Aikhenvald (2004: 43) classes the Quechua language family as having a B1 Evidential system, meaning there are three evidential distinctions: direct (visual), reported, and inferred. Direct, represented by -mi is used to indicate that the speaker was an eyewitness to the event specified. Reported, or indirect -shi is taken to mean hearsay or secondhand information, or that the speaker is removed from the source of the information. The final evidential, the inferential -cha, can invoke a sense of any of the following: probability, doubt, and uncertainty. This is usually translated as “probably” or “perhaps”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible.com/es/bible/98/JHN.1.MTDS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.bible.com/es/bible/98/JHN.1.MTDS&lt;/a&gt; are 2 versions of the Bible in Ecuadorian Quechua (Kichwa/Quichua). In John 1 which begins with the &quot;In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all three versions the segment 'the word was with God' the constituent 'with god' is marked with the direct experience evidential -mi:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rimashca Shutica Taita Dioshuan&lt;strong&gt;mi&lt;/strong&gt; carca&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chai Shimica, Taita Dios-huan&lt;strong&gt;mi&lt;/strong&gt; carca&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LIT. &quot;The word father god-with was&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the translators chose the direct evidential because they think of the book being written by John, and therefore from John's perspective and since John is thought of by most Christians as a saint or apostle or whatever, he presumably would have 'directly witnessed' such events through visions or some other kind of divine manifestation, and thus could use the &quot;eyewitness&quot; evidential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it's important to point out that while most native Quechua speakers today are Christians (Catholic or Protestant), the concepts of Abrahamic religions are still imported concepts. Pre-Colombian South Americans (whose languages developed these evidential categories) didn't have the same ideas about religion and philosophy that have since been imposed on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work with some Quechua dialects in the Amazon in Ecuador, most Quechua speakers there are Christians but they still have a lot of beliefs and ideas about things from pre-colombian times. And the idea of having a consistent &quot;canon&quot; isn't necessary. You'll find 'amazonianized' versions of bible stories like Adam and Eve and Noah's ark and they often conflict with each other in terms of 'canon' but that's not important. Anyway the overall point here is that the system of evidentiality they have may not be the best fit for western ideas about religion, evidence, and canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, looking a traditional non-Christian myth, we see that the reportative evidential -shi is used quite a lot and the direct evidential -mi only occurs in quotations as speech from specific characters in the narrative. These examples come from a 'beginning times' narrative about a woman who never died but regenerated her body every time she became old by bathing with a certain root. The narrator uses the reportative evidential -shi to talk about the events in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alli warmi&lt;strong&gt;shi&lt;/strong&gt; ag ashkara&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LIT. &quot;good woman be-r was being&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;She had been a pretty young woman&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chasna&lt;strong&gt;shi&lt;/strong&gt; akchata armasha waktarisha&lt;strong&gt;shi&lt;/strong&gt; shamushkara shullata anchu-chi-gri-sha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LIT. &quot;like that hair washing hitting she came drops shaking&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Having washed her hair, she was shaking the water from it as she headed for home.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site seems to be down at the moment, but you can create a free account at AILLA and access the Janis B. Nuckolls Quechua Collection and download the whole glossed and translated text which is titled: How people came to grow old and die - Como gente vinieron a ponerse viejo y morirse (QVZ003R001I001.pdf). (Content advisory: the text contains incest and rape).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quechua Collection of Janis B. Nuckolls. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, ailla.utexas.org. Access: public. PID ailla:119502&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also recommend Nuckoll's 2014 paper on Quechua evidentials: 'From quotative other to quotative self: Evidential usage in Pastaza Quichua' which breaks down what the more specific functions of the direct evidential -mi is. She departs somewhat from Aikhenvald's descriptions, the direct evidential need not be from an eye witness perspective only, modality and perspective are the more salient elements in defining evidential usage in that language. A speaker may tell someone else’s story and though they were not an eyewitness to the events they may still use -mi in their role as the narrator, thus possessing personal knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think whether the translator intended that John was an eyewitness or not to the beginning time events, it may not be unprecedented to use the direct evidential. Or perhaps it wouldn't be natural to do so at all on the part of the translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14709" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T17:40:18.413" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30263" CreationDate="2019-01-15T19:56:50.930" Score="7" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;The outcome of Romance velar palatalization in French depends on the voicing of the consonant: Lat. &lt;em&gt;ankilla&lt;/em&gt; → OFr. [antsele] but Lat. &lt;em&gt;argilla&lt;/em&gt; → OFr. [ardʒile]. This is also reflected in words borrowed into English (&quot;cent&quot; with [s], &quot;gentle&quot; with [dʒ]). Is there any other language where historically or synchronically, the place of articulation of only one of /tʃ, dʒ/ changes. Framed more generally, where else does voicing affect place of articulation in alveopalatals? Either sound changes or synchronic rules are relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T20:58:49.163" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T17:30:47.433" Title="Apart from French, does any language have voicing-dependent change of place of articulation?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30260" CreationDate="2019-01-15T20:27:03.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not quite parallel but at least similarly asymmetrical: in Ancient Greek, *ky &gt; [tt] / [ss] depending on dialect, while *gy &gt; [zd] / [dz]. Presumably both went through an affricate stage of some kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the French situation has to do with the lesser cross-linguistic frequency of [dz] vs. [ts].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2411" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T20:27:03.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30260" CreationDate="2019-01-15T23:40:14.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's at all common for alveolopalatal and/or sibilant consonants to undergo place changes that are &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; conditioned by the presence or absence of voicing: French doesn't actually seem to be an example of this (see below) and I can't think of any actual examples, except for the disputed case of Proto-Semitic *z, which if pronounced [z] may have evolved differently from its voiced counterpart [s] in some Semitic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it's more likely for voice to act as the condition for a change in manner of articulation, which in turn conditions a change in place of articulation. French, Greg Lee's example of rhotacism, and amegnunsen's example of Zenete [ʃ] and [j]/[ʒ] all look compatible with &amp;quot;two-part&amp;quot; sound changes like that. (&amp;quot;Two-part&amp;quot; in theoretical, not necessarily chronological terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Analyzing the French example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that the difference between the French reflexes of Latin* &lt;strong&gt;kʲ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;gʲ&lt;/strong&gt;  wasn't due to a change  [t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ] &amp;gt; [t͡s, d͡ʒ], but rather because Latin &lt;strong&gt;kʲ&lt;/strong&gt; developed a sibilant pronunciation earlier than &lt;strong&gt;gʲ&lt;/strong&gt;: the data seems consistent with &lt;strong&gt;gʲ&lt;/strong&gt; first passing through a stage where it was lenited to something like [j~ʝ] in all contexts, and then syllable-initial [j~ʝ] was fortited to [d͡ʒ], presumably after the voiceless sound had already been fronted to [t͡s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That at least is what the Wikipedia article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French#To_Early_Old_French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonological History of French&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; says, although it doesn't have many citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it might be something like [anˈkɪlla], [arˈgiːla] &amp;gt; [anˈcel-], [arˈɟi-] &amp;gt; [anˈcel-], [arˈʝi-] &amp;gt; [anˈt͡ʃel-], [arˈʝi-] &amp;gt; [anˈt͡sel-], [arˈʝi-] &amp;gt; [anˈt͡sel-], [arˈd͡ʒi-].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Greek dialect fronting of velars/palatals&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TKR's answer mentioned Greek, which is a language that has shown various forms of palatalization, fronting or affrication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some discussion of variations of the development of fronted consonants from historical velars in modern Greek varieties in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://efe.lis.upatras.gr/index.php/mgdlt/article/viewFile/2599/2836&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Velar Fronting in Modern Greek Dialects&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Io Manolessou and Nikolaos Pantelidis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Table 1 shows some specific examples that indicate that fronting of &lt;strong&gt;ɣ&lt;/strong&gt; to a sibilant is less common in Greek than fronting of &lt;strong&gt;k&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt; is historically from /nk/ or /ng/) to sibilant affricates. This seems like it might be relevant to the situation with French. The table also indicates a few Greek dialects that are supposed to have a sibilant affricate realization for the voiceless but not the voiced plosive, but I don't know the exact situation with these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pronouncing &amp;quot;velars&amp;quot; as &lt;em&gt;nonsibilant&lt;/em&gt; palatals before front vowels is extremely common: it's mandatory in standard Greek, and the paper says that exceptional dialectal forms are &amp;quot;rare&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Semitic [z] and [s]? [g] and [k]?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#Fricatives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fricatives in Semitic languages&lt;/a&gt; seems to be unclear and disputed, but there definitely have been some place changes. Depending on what viewpoint you take, voiced &amp;quot;z&amp;quot; may not have behaved the same as its voiceless counterpart. This seems like anything but a clear example, as the place of articulation of the Proto-Semitic voiceless sibilants is disputed, and there are also arguments about which, if any, of the sibilants were actually affricates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another odd thing about voicing and POA in Semitic is the unconditional fronting of *g but not *k in standard Arabic, although there are different developments of these sounds in Arabic dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In this answer, I'll use the symbols &lt;strong&gt;kʲ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;gʲ&lt;/strong&gt; to represent the sounds that in Latin were spelled as &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt; before a front vowel. They aren't meant to be IPA transcriptions of the exact phonetic quality, which might have been something that would better be represented by some other symbols, e.g. [c] and [ɟ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T03:58:59.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30265" CreationDate="2019-01-16T01:55:58.123" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any particularly simple examples of circular tone sandhi known? For instance, is there an example of a rule in which two tones swap places but the rest are unaffected? Or an example of circular tone sandhi in a language with fewer tones overall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Hokkien&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taiwanese Hokkien&lt;/a&gt; in its section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Hokkien#Tones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tones&lt;/a&gt; shows an example of circular tone sandhi, reproduced here in an ascii diagram for convenience. This example is the simple tone sandhi case in the southern dialects (northern dialects have an arrow from 5 to 3 rather than from 5 to 7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;              ʔ&#xA;1 &amp;lt;----- 2 &amp;lt;----- 4&#xA;|        ^        ^&#xA;|   5    |        |&#xA;|  /     |        |ptk&#xA;v &amp;lt;      |    ʔ   v&#xA;7 -----&amp;gt; 3 &amp;lt;----- 8&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding of the article, the different box diagrams are schematic representations of different &lt;em&gt;sandhi rules&lt;/em&gt; that can be triggered under different circumstances, such as &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being the final syllable in a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between the tones 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 is phonemic since they can all appear on syllables that do not end in &lt;code&gt;/ʔ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;. 4 and 8 are entering tones. I'm not sure why syllables ending in &lt;code&gt;/ʔ/&lt;/code&gt; can bear tones 2 and 3 in addition to the entering tones. The article is not explicit about whether the final &lt;code&gt;/ʔ/&lt;/code&gt; is deleted when a syllable changes from bearing an entering tone to bearing a non-entering tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the given sandhi rule when restricted to tones 1, 7, 3, 2 permutes them cyclically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any simpler examples of circular tone sandhi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastEditorUserId="13573" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T18:27:04.387" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T18:27:04.387" Title="Simple example of circular tone sandhi?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;tone-sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30264" CreationDate="2019-01-16T03:02:55.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/27/paper1858.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; analyzes Xiamen tone sandhi; this is the Southern Min dialect of Quanzhang, and is much simpler than what is given in that Wiki page. This is also the case most widely discussed in the phonological literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T03:02:55.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30257" CreationDate="2019-01-16T08:27:53.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin noun 'index' has plural 'indices' (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-flexion.php?parola=index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-flexion.php?parola=index&lt;/a&gt;). For English usage of noun 'index' and verb 'to index', see this SE thread: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61080&quot;&gt;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/61080&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23251" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T08:27:53.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30273" CreationDate="2019-01-16T08:31:57.627" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;We get a significant number of emails from people who seemingly use &quot;their&quot; in place of &quot;your&quot;, which leads us to believe that the mails are machine translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know which language would cause this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand that I am part of Group A but I have not had more Hits available for my Mturk account I feel disgusted the truth is that I like to do their job I hope and you can help me to access this job&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to know what was the reason that they blocked me if I did not have any rechasado I would like to keep doing their hit I love those polls I like it a lot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sorry for the inconvenience caused in the hit, I will be more careful therefore I want to give me another opportunity to make their hit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to participate in your lot, but unfortunately I have it blocked. I really enjoy doing their job and there are few like this one in Mturk, I would like to participate again thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23662" LastEditorUserId="23662" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T10:24:47.053" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T14:06:39.803" Title="Which original language would cause &quot;your&quot; to be translated to &quot;their&quot; in English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-01-16T14:46:21.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T08:38:52.633" Score="5" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on letter case&lt;/a&gt; says this without citing any references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but the difference between the two variants was initially stylistic rather than orthographic and the writing system was still basically unicameral: a given handwritten document could use either one style or the other but these were not mixed. European languages, except for Ancient Greek and Latin, did not make the case distinction before about 1300.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When was the first bicameral script developed, in the sense of using different cases to mark important words or the beginning of sentences (and not just a stylistic choice for the whole document)? And is it true that after bicameral scripts were developed for Greek and Latin, it was only from 1300 that bicameral writing became common for other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T12:13:31.877" Title="When was the first bicameral script developed?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30268" CreationDate="2019-01-16T09:20:25.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a lot about writing systems and typography in the last month or three. While I don't have any sources off the top of my head right now, my summary takeaway is this: Latin originally used the letters we now know as capitals exclusively. Over time, in order to write faster, scribes developed other styles, one of which eventually became known as the Carolingian minuscule, and spread due to the expansion of the Carolingian empire and its successors. Capital letters were not used in this script, except in highly decorated form at the start of paragraphs or pages. This way of using capitals eventually spread to the beginning of sentences, then to the beginning of certain words or word classes (such as the capitalization of all nouns in German), along with a decrease in decoration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how much of similar developments in Greek and Cyrillic scripts was parallel to the development in Latin scripts, modelled upon it, or perhaps adapted when printing spread from central/nothern Europe eastwards, I don't know for sure at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, almost no other script has a similar distinction between capital and small letters. However, scripts such as Arabic have different letter shapes depending on where in a word a letter occurs (Arabic in particular has word-initial, mid-word, word-final, and isolated shapes for most letters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23251" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T09:20:25.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T09:40:57.800" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some words, like run, get, advance, etc... are &quot;deep&quot; in semantic structure. Other words (mostly names) like Japanese, French, tapir, strychnine, etc... are &quot;shallow&quot; in semantic structure. And some words, like &quot;water,&quot; have properties of both deep and shallow words: water is a name  like ethanol, strychnine, dimethylmercury, but it can be used as a deep word: watery, waterlike, aquatic, are derivations (conceptually) from water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this dichotomy exist, and has anyone wrote something about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22266" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T09:40:57.800" Title="Partitioning concept space: deep-shallow dichotomy" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30268" CreationDate="2019-01-16T12:13:31.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically &lt;em&gt;bi&lt;/em&gt;cameral scripts are actually limited only to a few around the world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armenian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coptic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adlam&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warang Citi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cherokee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Osage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of having specifically two cases seem to have first been codified in the Carolingian miniscule, from c. 800 CE. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/332/when-did-the-latin-alphabet-become-bicameral&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on the Latin StackExchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T12:13:31.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30267" CreationDate="2019-01-16T13:53:01.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see now… &lt;em&gt;what was the reason that they blocked me if I did not have any rechasado&lt;/em&gt; would seem to come from (Latin American) Spanish (&lt;em&gt;rechasado&lt;/em&gt; not being translated because it should be written with &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;; Latin Americans get this wrong because &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; both sound like /s/, unlike in Peninsular Spanish, where &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; sounds like /θ/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original expression would be something like &lt;em&gt;qué fue la razón que me bloquearon&lt;/em&gt;; here, &lt;em&gt;me bloquearon&lt;/em&gt; can either mean &lt;em&gt;ellos me bloquearon&lt;/em&gt; = they blocked me, or &lt;em&gt;ustedes me bloquearon&lt;/em&gt; = you (pl.) blocked me; apparently the translator used picked the former meaning, even if the latter would be more appropriate here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to &lt;em&gt;their job&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;your job&lt;/em&gt;, the cause is the same: just as &lt;em&gt;ellos&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ustedes&lt;/em&gt; use the same 3rd person plural verb forms, they command the same 3rd person possessive pronouns. Therefore &lt;em&gt;su trabajo&lt;/em&gt; = their work, or your (pl.) work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23251" LastEditorUserId="23251" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T14:06:39.803" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T14:06:39.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3783" CreationDate="2019-01-16T15:54:45.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers have hit the highlights, going so far as to suggest that it is impossible in principle. Contrariwise, I argue that it could be done in principle, as long as you don't overstate what IPA does. IPA is a conventional system (conventions can be voted in or out) for grouping a range of acoustic events to letters, with a coarse enough granularity that letter-to-sound mappings are not one-to-one – but they also aren't any-to-any (i.e. arbitrary). The letters are arranged into an secondary articulatory scheme, but we can still distinguish [tʃ] from [ŋ] without having to inspect the x-ray record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA, with or without a transcribing AI, does not force a transcriber to select between [e, e:, ej, ei, ɛi, ɛɪ, ɛj, ɛ:] as possible transcriptions of English &quot;great&quot; (for any subset of English speakers). It does tell you that as a narrow phonetic transcription for my (West Coast GA) speech, [e:] is wrong, and for certain northern UK dialects [ɛɪ] is wrong. But IPA is not limited to use as a narrow transcription. At most, one could hope for automated narrow transcriptions. A phonetician can't tell you whether that thing you heard is narrowly phonetic [eit] or [ejt], so a program can't do it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acoustic referents of IPA letters are somewhat ephemeral, in that expert training in IPA transcription (not just for English, but for the entire IPA) is a niche skill not widely practiced, and there is no large corpus of productions. To the extent that there is professional agreement on what [ʊ] refers to and what [u] refers to, one could measure the formants in a corpus of professional reference productions and devise a standard against which other sounds could be compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most significant problem of principle is the same one faced by expert transcribers, which is that a decision about whether a certain vowel is [ʊ] has to be made not only with reference to some external standard, but with reference to other tokens on the target language. Suppose the standard formants of [o] are 360, 640, those of [u] are 250, 595, and those of [ʊ] are 305, 615. Then suppose you encounter a vowel that measures 325, 630. At the level of narrow transcription, [u] would be out because the measured formats are closer to those of [ʊ, o] than those of [u]. That vowel is &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; [ʊ] and [o]. But the IPA also includes adjustment diacritics to indicate &quot;somewhat higher&quot; or &quot;somewhat lower&quot;. The algorithm might decide that a certain vowel token has the vowel [ö̝]. Other tokens could point to a vowel [ʊ], [ʊ̞], [u] and so on. It takes phonological analysis to decide &quot;these are all free / contextual variants of [u]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody has gathered the skilled performances that are necessary to create the underlying acoustic database. If that were done, then it would become more possible to construct an IPA-transcribing program, at least one that produces narrow phonetic transcriptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T15:54:45.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30257" CreationDate="2019-01-16T20:42:23.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, notice that many (possibly even most) English speakers use &quot;indexes&quot; as the plural. But let's ignore that, because many people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; say &quot;indices&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin noun &quot;index&quot; is third-declension, so its plural is &quot;indices&quot; in both nominative and accusative case. The English noun &quot;index&quot; sounds almost identical, it's spelled exactly the same, and its meaning is pretty close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, there's a semi-regular rule in English that Latinate &quot;-x&quot; nouns often keep their Latin &quot;-ices&quot; plurals.&lt;sup&gt;2, 3&lt;/sup&gt; So, we don't need to say anything implausible, like that English borrowed both &quot;index&quot; and &quot;indices&quot; separately, or that anyone who says &quot;indices&quot; is applying Latin declension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, there is no Latin verb &quot;index&quot; to be borrowed. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a first-conjugation verb &quot;indicare&quot;, of course, and the Latin noun &quot;index&quot; was derived from the verb's first singular present &quot;indico&quot;, but it wouldn't conjugate to &quot;indices&quot;. And at any rate, we don't have the verb &quot;indicare&quot;; we say &quot;to index&quot;, &quot;I index&quot;, &quot;I indexed&quot;, not &quot;to indicare&quot;, &quot;I indico&quot;, &quot;I indicavi&quot;. So of course we also say &quot;he indexes&quot;, not &quot;he indicat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the English verb &quot;index&quot; was formed by verbing the already-borrowed noun, not by borrowing a verb. It seems to be pretty recent—dictionaries from a century ago (e.g., the 1911 &lt;a href=&quot;http://triggs.djvu.org/century-dictionary.com/cent2jpgframes.php?volno=04&amp;amp;page=3056&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Century Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; call it &quot;rare&quot; or &quot;nonstandard&quot; or &quot;American&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is full of verbs created out of nouns like this—and the verb's conjugation isn't affected by whether the noun is irregular. So, &quot;index&quot; is conjugated like any other English verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Looking at a handful of dictionaries, they all list both forms. Most list &quot;indexes&quot; first, but nobody says &quot;indices&quot; is obsolete or variant or anything like that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. One good way to spot a semi-regular rule is to look for people overgeneralizing it. And there are plenty of examples. For example, people (young learners, insecure hypercorrectors, literate word-players making a joke, …) sometimes say &quot;prefices&quot;. It's common enough that it's even listed as a nonstandard plural in many dictionaries. The noun &quot;prefix&quot; is borrowed from French, and the closest Latin is &quot;praefixus&quot; which pluralizes to &quot;praefixi&quot;, it does end in &quot;-x&quot; and certainly &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; Latinate, so people apply the rule inappropriately.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. You can get into theoretical arguments about whether there's a morphosyntactic rule that turns &quot;index&quot; + &quot;-s&quot; into &quot;indices&quot; on the fly, a rule &quot;in the lexicon&quot; that forms the word &quot;indices&quot; out of &quot;index&quot;, or just a word &quot;indices&quot; that's part of an semi-regular pattern that extends by analogy, but that isn't really important.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T20:51:42.420" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T20:51:42.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T21:36:36.583" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need a publically available one-to-one speech conversation dataset recorded over the microphone, e.g., interview scenario or enquiry or call centre call answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23669" LastEditorUserId="2680" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T20:37:15.830" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T20:37:15.830" Title="One-to-one speech conversation dataset (Recorded over microphone)" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30276" CreationDate="2019-01-16T22:22:03.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; maintained by the European &lt;a href=&quot;https://clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN ERIC&lt;/a&gt; is the way to go. Enter &lt;code&gt;conversation spoken&lt;/code&gt; in the search slit and narrow down the search using the facets (e.g., by chosing a language). Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/search?q=conversation%20spoken&amp;amp;fqType=languageCode:or&amp;amp;fq=languageCode:code:eng&amp;amp;fqType=modality:or&amp;amp;fq=modality:spoken&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookmarked query&lt;/a&gt; on the VLO giving a lot of resources for English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T22:22:03.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30172" CreationDate="2019-01-16T23:56:44.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; such a thing as &quot;egoistical emotion&quot; that can be detected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A huge part of the problem here is confusion between &quot;egoistical&quot; and &quot;egotistical&quot;. All of your existing examples are looking to detect whether someone things/feels/etc. that she's superior to other people. That's a sign of &lt;em&gt;egotism&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Egoism is a tendency to act selfishly, or without considering the needs of others. It has nothing to do with thinking you're superior to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Egoism is a behavioral tendency, not an emotion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it doesn't even have any obvious emotions, or emotional surface signs, that it consistently correlates with. So, what would &quot;egoistical emotion detection&quot; even mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you drop the &quot;emotion&quot; part, egoism is probably not easily detectable by language use. Egoistical people&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; often tend to talk as if they were as altruistic as anyone else, and just don't act the way they talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Arguably only a secondary sign even for egotism; as suggested by Adam Bittlingmayer and amegnusen in the comments it might be better to just look for things like excessive use of first person to detect egotism. But that's beside the point, because neither of those has anything to do with egoism.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Except for those who are egoistical out of commitment to an egoistic ethical philosophy, such as Randian Objectivism. That probably &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be detected by them openly describing themselves in selfish terms—although it might be easier to just look for Randian jargon…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T23:56:44.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30287" CreationDate="2019-01-17T00:14:10.107" Score="10" ViewCount="1069" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a student learning languages who is interested in linguistics! In trying to keep myself organized with my own study sheets, I wanted to know, do all languages have the same basic verb tenses? I'm currently studying German and Albanian. While on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thegermanprofessor.com/german-verb-tenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a German grammar site&lt;/a&gt;, the verb tenses were listed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simple past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Present perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Past perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Future perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Passive present&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Passive simple past&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Passive present perfect&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to Google this for Albanian and couldn't seem to find much (there aren't a whole lot of resources for the language anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would all European languages have these 9 tenses? Or all languages in general? If not, what cases are standard in most languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not so much concerned about a few exceptions with extra verb cases (if they exist). More whether or not most languages seem to have those 9. Or rather, what the common cases are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23670" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T19:19:41.890" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T19:19:41.890" Title="Do most languages have the same basic verb tenses?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;tense&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30327" CreationDate="2019-01-17T00:36:19.943" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to typeset syntactic trees in a way that will achieve the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;straight spine when there is no label on the nonterminal node&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;obtuse angle at each (binary) branch (so the tree is not too tall)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble making &lt;code&gt;forest&lt;/code&gt; or (&lt;code&gt;tikz-&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;code&gt;qtree&lt;/code&gt; to achieve this easily. Surely there is someone with a solution to this problem out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I want to achieve this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nT601.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nT601.png&quot; alt=&quot;what I want&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but what I get with &lt;code&gt;tikz-qtree&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QpO3t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QpO3t.png&quot; alt=&quot;qtree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I got using the following code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\usepackage{tikz,tikz-qtree-compat}&#xA;    \tikzset{baseline=0pt,level distance=20pt,sibling distance=0pt}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;    \Tree [.CP [.who ] [ [.$\lambda_1$ ]&#xA;        [.IP [.$t_1$ ] [.registered ] ] ] ] &#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, with &lt;code&gt;forest&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBZrz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBZrz.png&quot; alt=&quot;forest&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using the following code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\usepackage[linguistics]{forest}&#xA;\newcommand{\tree}[1]{&#xA;    \begin{forest}&#xA;        for tree={&#xA;        inner sep=0pt,&#xA;        % where n children=0{font=\itshape}{},&#xA;     %    calign=fixed edge angles,&#xA;        parent anchor=south,&#xA;      },&#xA;      before typesetting nodes={% page 52: example (81)&#xA;        where content={}{% shape=coordinate gives an error if used here but this is *almost* right - it just leaves a little, tiny gap&#xA;          text width=.001pt,&#xA;          inner sep=0pt,&#xA;          before drawing tree={% here we make sure that the tiny gap disappears so only the size is not quite dimensionless&#xA;            shape=coordinate,&#xA;            typeset node,&#xA;          },&#xA;          for parent={&#xA;            for children={&#xA;              anchor=north,&#xA;            }&#xA;          }&#xA;        }{}&#xA;      }&#xA;      #1&#xA;    \end{forest}&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;    \tree{&#xA;        [CP [who] [ [$\lambda_1$] &#xA;        [IP [$t_1$] [registered]]]]&#xA;    }&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an easy way of getting nice trees like in the first image (where not all nonterminals have labels, but some do, and the spine is nice and straight, but the trees are not too tall?  I'd be happy to learn there's an easy way of doing this... thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14599" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T03:48:39.497" Title="trees with nice straight spines and not too vertical" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;latex&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-17T00:51:29.863" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's have an English phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;let's have&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the Czech equivalent &lt;em&gt;&quot;mějme&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps, at some point in the past, someone was translating a math textbook and didn't know how to translate &lt;em&gt;&quot;let's have&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the sense &lt;em&gt;&quot;assume&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and thus translates the phrase literally as &lt;em&gt;&quot;let us all possess&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. But when Czechs get used to this &quot;mathematical use&quot; of the words, they start to form a phrase that could even force out the Czech word for &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;&quot;předpokládat&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably just a construct but I have a hypothesis that by this very mechanism, bilingualism might lead towards unifying the meanings of the set of words used in a vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a tendency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found out the literal translation is called a calque but I'm asking for the process of merging vocabularies. Is there a name for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10641" LastEditorUserId="10641" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T14:52:03.660" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T14:05:51.250" Title="Do grammatically close languages tend to begin to use literal translations of some words in other senses in that other language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30280" CreationDate="2019-01-17T01:38:38.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't answer your question, but as someone who worked for several years on code to format tree diagrams, I can maybe give some perspective.  I found that the biggest problem, which I did not solve, was how to keep trees from getting too wide (not too tall).  The method that worked well for simple trees did not extend well to complicated trees, because the complicated ones tended to overlap the left and right page boundaries (or screen boundaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that I could fit fairly large trees on a page by hand coding an individual tree by trial and error, making some descending branches longer so that leaves to the left and right did not run into one another, but getting the program code to do this automatically was a problem that I didn't manage to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T01:38:38.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30058" CreationDate="2019-01-17T02:26:18.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like it's not just an exception for Flanders. It occurs with some other European places, so it might be the same reason why English says (or said):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rome, Aix la Chapelle (traditional English), Cologne, Munich, Nuremberg, Danube, Prague, Belgrade, Milan, Florence, Turin, Naples...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and not   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Roma, Aachen, Köln, München, Nürnberg, Donau, Praha, Beograd, Milano, Firenze, Torino, Napoli...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4717" LastEditorUserId="4717" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T09:34:29.157" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T09:34:29.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30290" CreationDate="2019-01-17T05:14:16.597" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a name for the phenomenon whereby some languages like to put chains of words together that mean the same thing, while others don't - just some terminology that would help me search for relevant material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English for example, &lt;em&gt;sports athlete&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;work colleague&lt;/em&gt; sound wrong to me (although I realise &lt;em&gt;colleague&lt;/em&gt; doesn't always mean someone you work with), as do constructions like &lt;em&gt;the reason is because&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the price is expensive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;it doesn't weigh that heavy&lt;/em&gt;. I can see that these are not exactly the same, but there is a family resemblance IMO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My language of interest (Thai) seems to like to do this kind of thing (e.g. &lt;em&gt;because I X, I therefore Y&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;in my opinion, I think&lt;/em&gt; X)  so I am trying to get a better handle on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the answer and comments, it's clear that &lt;em&gt;pleonasm&lt;/em&gt; is a relevant term. I agree it doesn’t follow from the fact that word meant &lt;em&gt;superfluous&lt;/em&gt; in ancient Greek that it means the same in modern English, but even so, if the Wikipedia page is anything to go by, the basic idea is that we taking a sentence that is already complete and adding something that doesn’t really belong. Most of the Wikipedia article therefore looks at cases where this can be justified by special pleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the basic difference I have been reaching for could be that, whereas most of the English examples are cases of duplicating something that is already present, the Thai examples are cases of expressing something that would otherwise have been implied. That does not involve duplication, so wouldn't it be appropriate to distinguish the two types of case, and maybe reserve &lt;em&gt;pleonasm&lt;/em&gt; for the first type?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, no one seems to have any trouble with &lt;em&gt;oak tree&lt;/em&gt;, so why is &lt;em&gt;tuna fish&lt;/em&gt; discussed so much? Is the difference to do with the meaning of the modifier? Maybe in the first example, &lt;em&gt;oak&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;(of a tree or its wood) of the oak variety&lt;/em&gt;, whereas in the second, &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;a fish of the tuna variety&lt;/em&gt;. It could be that Thai modifiers tend to be more like our &lt;em&gt;oak&lt;/em&gt; than our &lt;em&gt;tuna&lt;/em&gt;. I don't know whether there's any established terminology that captures this difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T11:36:22.010" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T21:55:35.440" Title="Concept / function duplication" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30058" CreationDate="2019-01-17T05:53:35.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;when&quot; is actually pretty easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, up to at least 1052, we see spellings like &quot;Brycge&quot;, which look like anglicized versions of the Flemish name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Norman and post-Norman records, back to at least 1089, we see spellings like &quot;Brugis&quot;, which look like gallicized (or anglicized-from-gallicized) versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem is that, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30284/23611&quot;&gt;jilliagre's answer&lt;/a&gt; demonstrates, many English names for places all over the world are gallicized, and many of these come from the era when French was the language of international diplomacy (roughly the 17th century to WWII). So, it's possible that Bruges went back to a &quot;native&quot; name, and then went back to a French name later, and we need to rule that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;why&quot; is always a trickier question. Why the French-speaking Normans used a French name is obvious, of course. But why their English-speaking successors kept the French name, when there are plenty of other places where they didn't, is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are three good reasons to believe that—and to explain why—Bruges (and Flanders—notice it's not Vlaanderen&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) goes back to the 11th century. But I'll say right off the bat that I haven't done any real research on this, and it's at best educated supposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Bruges isn't just some random foreign city. Starting in the 11th century, it's possibly England's most important trading partner until the late 14th century, it's the major city of one of England's most important allies until at least the 15th, and it remains important in English history even beyond that (e.g., as the site of Charles II's government in exile). If people were talking about Bruges constantly in England for half a millennium, that's a lot more chance for its name to be firmly established than for most cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Bruges was part of (West) Flanders, which was a French County—in fact, one of the original 12 peerages of France—up until 1529. The rulers of Flanders thought of themselves as French Counts (even if they happened to be, e.g., son of a Danish King, even if they happened to be at war with the French King at the moment), and they spoke French (when they didn't speak Latin) at court. So, as far as their allies across the Channel were concerned, the native name of the city was Bruges, Flandre, not Brugge, Vlaanderen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, even after Bruges did leave France in 1529, Flemish still wasn't an official language until… I'm not sure when, but I think the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, in 1815? Customary foreign names for the major polities in Europe were all pretty well established by 1815. If the Dutch (or, later, Belgian) Kings had wanted people to start using Flemish names, they would have had to make a major effort (in French, of course…), and they had much more important things to spend their diplomatic capital on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. But also notice that Vlaanderen isn't actually a native Flemish/Dutch/Franconian name like Brugge; it's probably borrowed from Frisian Fländra…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T06:11:40.020" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T06:11:40.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30279" CreationDate="2019-01-17T06:31:20.977" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Not at all! Some languages only have two: past and non-past (English, Japanese). Others have past, present, and future (Ancient Greek). Still others have separate &quot;recent&quot; and &quot;distant&quot; past tenses (Lingála, Swahili). And some have no tense at all (Proto-Indo-European, Mandarin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer: There are two important things to note here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that every language can &lt;em&gt;express&lt;/em&gt; all of these tenses, and more besides—no language has a special verb marking for &quot;on January 13th&quot;, for example, but we can easily say &quot;on January 13th I went out to the bar with Alex&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is instead which parts are mandatory: in English you can't have a verb without a tense, while in Mandarin you can. And in English, that special mandatory marking that's incorporated into the verb (that is, the &lt;em&gt;morphological&lt;/em&gt; part) has only two types: past (&quot;walked&quot;) and non-past (&quot;walk&quot;). The future, and any other distinctions, involves bringing in extra words like &quot;will&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing to note is that the question's list combines three different things together: &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aspect&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tense, simply put, is when something happened. Past, present, future, recent, distant, January 13th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aspect is how that time is measured: &lt;em&gt;imperfective&lt;/em&gt; aspect means it's ongoing, for example, while &lt;em&gt;aoristic&lt;/em&gt; means it happened at a single moment, and &lt;em&gt;perfective&lt;/em&gt; means you're talking about the endpoint, it's over and done with. That's where your &quot;perfect&quot; tenses come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice is the weird one. It's whether the &quot;subject&quot; of the sentence is the person doing the action (&lt;em&gt;active&lt;/em&gt;), or the person the action is done to (&lt;em&gt;passive&lt;/em&gt;), or both (&lt;em&gt;reflexive/middle&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are &lt;em&gt;moods&lt;/em&gt; (is this something that really happened, or something you want to happen, or a general truth everyone knows, or something that'll happen if another thing happens?) and &lt;em&gt;evidentialities&lt;/em&gt; (did you see this firsthand, or hear it from someone?) and all sorts of other interesting markings that interact with tense, aspect, and voice in too many ways to possibly list here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages mark all of those, like Ancient Greek, which has a whole convoluted matrix of tenses, aspects, and voices that you can mix and match. Others don't: English needs extra words to say anything about aspect at all. Lingála has a special &quot;ultimate&quot; tense-aspect combination for things that have happened and are now irreversible; my professor calls it the &quot;dead&quot; marking because it's often seen on the verb for &quot;die&quot;. (He's joked that the New Testament in Lingála spoils the twist way too early, because when Jesus dies, that marking is missing!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Language is complicated! All languages can express all of these things, but not all languages &quot;have&quot; them in the sense of mandatory morphological marking. Some &quot;have&quot; more, some &quot;have&quot; less, some &quot;have&quot; none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T07:07:38.233" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T07:07:38.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-17T08:17:31.600" Score="10" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;Onsets of stop+liquid are very common, but it seems like /tl/ and /dl/ are much rarer than other stop+liquid onsets, like /gl/ or /pr/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are /tl/ and /dl/ especially rare compared to other stop+liquid onsets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that they're as common as any others, but just not in the set of languages I'm more familiar with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="314" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T12:52:18.643" Title="Are /tl/ and /dl/ rare onsets worldwide?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30285" CreationDate="2019-01-17T08:20:33.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you're asking for is covered under a cluster of different terms, but mainly &lt;strong&gt;pleonasm&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;strong&gt;pleonasm&lt;/strong&gt; is the use of redundant words, and &lt;strong&gt;a pleonasm&lt;/strong&gt; is a phrase or construction that uses redundant words.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some specific subcases, &lt;strong&gt;tautological&lt;/strong&gt; is sometimes used instead of pleonastic. For example, using a modifier attributively when the thing being modified already contains the sense of the modifier—as in &quot;sports athlete&quot;—is tautological attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every language (or dialect, or sociolect; whatever) has specific—and different—constructions where pleonasm adds emphasis or intensity or some other meaningful connotation. For example, in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reason Raid's advertisements say &quot;Raid kills bugs dead&quot; instead of just &quot;Raid kills bugs&quot; is that the pleonastic resultative construction &quot;kills… dead&quot; connotes more intensity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple negation, like &quot;There ain't nothing wrong here&quot;, connotes intensified negation in any English dialect that allows it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know if this has a name, but compare &quot;The store is located at 123 Main St.&quot; to &quot;The store is at 123 Main St.&quot; Adding the pleonastic adjective/participle &quot;located&quot; strengthens the adjective's usual connotation, implying in this case that the location is more precise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tautological attribution, like &quot;sports athlete&quot;, connotes nothing in English. Why? It's not logically substantially different from the resultative case above; it's just the way English happens to be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also specific cliches or idioms that are pleonastic. For example, in English, even though the construction of tautological attribution is meaningless, many specific cases of it are not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Tuna fish&quot; is (at least to Americans) the same thing as &quot;tuna&quot;—except that it implies the cheap stuff in a can, not the stuff they sear at a fancy restaurant. This doesn't work for &quot;trout fish&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Safe haven&quot; is the same thing as &quot;haven&quot;—except that it implies something rich people, companies, or countries use to shelter assets, not, say, refugees. This doesn't work for &quot;safe sanctuary&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Null and void&quot; is the same as &quot;void&quot;—except in legal jargon, there's case law established around &quot;null and void&quot;, and nobody wants to write the first contract that tests whether that case law applies to &quot;void&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a pleonasm when the construction has no inherent connotation and the words don't form a cliche usually sounds redundant. A good enough writer/rhetoricist/whatever can sometimes push a new connotation (think of Shakespeare's famous &quot;most unkindest cut of all&quot;). And tolerance for meaningless pleonasm in song lyrics is much higher than in rhetoric. But in general, meaningless pleonasm often sounds not just pointless, but weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's the effect you're asking about. And the reason the same sentences in Thai sound fine is that Thai presumably has a different set of meaningful pleonastic constructions from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, you raised the question of whether these really are cases of pleonasm. Well, it's really a matter of definition. We've got these things that at first glance appear redundant and meaningless, but when you look more carefully, language finds meaningful uses for them. Do we want to say that really isn't pleonastic, because there really isn't any redundancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really a matter of definition. And this isn't a case where we've got an everyday meaning of the word. Nobody but linguists and lexicologists ever says &quot;pleonasm&quot;, and anyone else who hears it has to look it up to know what it means. And when they look it up, they're going to see a definition that matches the use of &quot;tuna fish&quot; and &quot;kills… dead&quot; in English (usually even giving &quot;tuna fish&quot; as the example). So, why shouldn't that be the definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that the literal meaning of the ancient Greek word &quot;pleonasmós&quot; is &quot;something superfluous&quot;, and this doesn't quite fit. But so what? People were already using the word 1500 years ago (obviously in Latin, not English) to mean &quot;effective use of redundancy to score rhetorical points&quot;. We're not speaking ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. But be careful. In formal syntax theory, pleonasm has a slightly different meaning. For example, in the sentence &quot;It's raining&quot;, the word &quot;it&quot; is required by English, so it's not at all pleonastic in the ordinary sense—but it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required by &quot;universal grammar&quot;, or by the general need to map form to meaning, so it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pleonastic in the syntactic-theory sense.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T05:41:17.093" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T05:41:17.093" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30281" CreationDate="2019-01-17T11:28:51.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the two alternatives, &lt;em&gt;mějme&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;předpokládat&lt;/em&gt; it is pretty clear that, given the relative frequency of the expression, the shorter one wins over the longer one. Only language purists complain, this is the way language change works in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In translatology, features of the source language appearing in the target language after translation are named &lt;strong&gt;shining through&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. Teich, E. (2003), Cross-Linguistic Variation in System   and Text: A Methodology for the Investigation of Translations and Comparable Texts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.). Shining Through is one of the most salient features of Translationese, the variety of (a) language produced by translation from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T14:05:51.250" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T14:05:51.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-17T13:15:43.237" Score="2" ViewCount="790" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the Theta Criterion violated in the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I saw  [the tall kid]]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;provided that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; theta marks [the tall kid]--&lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; is the main predicate (V).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt;  theta marks [kid] -- &lt;em&gt;tall&lt;/em&gt; is the embedded predicate (ADJ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is Theta Criterion (an argument is assigned one and only one theta role, and a theta role is assigned to one and only one argument), violated here? Because it seems that that the DP [the tall kid] is assigned two theta roles?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T23:28:54.917" Title="Theta Criterion Violation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;theta-role&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30281" CreationDate="2019-01-17T13:19:05.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This obviously happens, but it's not necessarily from grammatically similar languages, rather from culturally close or simply influential ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, a calque /kælk/ or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_loan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_loan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, very similar to the formation of calques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example in Slavistics would be a word like Russian &lt;em&gt;впечатление&lt;/em&gt;, which came from Latin &lt;em&gt;inpressio&lt;/em&gt; via French and German, not via a grammatically close language like Ruthenian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science and maths, being relatively international fields, have a very great proportion of such loans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the proportion of such lexical and structural loans reaches significant proportions, then we can speak of a Sprachbund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sprachbund (German: [ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt], &quot;federation of languages&quot;) – also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have common features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_contact&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_contact&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-01-17T16:02:52.133" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T16:02:52.133" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2019-01-17T16:43:58.293" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question cannot be answered beyond reasonable doubt. The two words &lt;em&gt;egg&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt; have different roots, as far as we can see, but we cannot see indefinitely far back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#overview&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivation for &lt;em&gt;egg&lt;/em&gt; can be found in wiktionary as from Proto-Indo-European &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82%C5%8Dwy%C3%B3m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₂ōwyóm&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot;, what @Anixx gives as *a̯ōu̯iom and @fdb as *ōiom. The wiktionary entry is well sourced at least. It notes that the reconstruction does not account well for all forms, and relates the theory that it derives from *h₂éwis &amp;quot;bird&amp;quot;, perhaps from *h₂ew-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*h₂ew-, derives quite different senses, importantly &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;to perceive, see, to be aware of&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (deriving e.g. *ear* via *h₂ṓws, &lt;em&gt;audio&lt;/em&gt; via *h₂ewis-dʰh₁-, Sanskr &lt;em&gt;avis&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;before the eyes, openly, manifestly, evidently&amp;quot;). Therefore, the relation between eyes and eggs has to be reconsidered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand I don't have that much to say. In wiktionary it's derived from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%83ek%CA%B7-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₃ekʷ-&lt;/a&gt;. The state of the art doesn't know a comparison between *h₃ekʷ- and *h₂ew-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eggs and eyes compare well at least in shape and color. Another sense given for *h₂ew- is &amp;quot;to dress, clothe&amp;quot;, which (is not sourced, but) might be comparable to *(s)kewH- &amp;quot;to cover&amp;quot;; What I'm getting at is the egg-shell, of course, which is reasonable if Ger. &lt;em&gt;Schale&lt;/em&gt; appears in &lt;em&gt;sich in Schale werfen&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to dress fine&amp;quot;, and if the Proto-Germanic root *skal glossed &amp;quot;testicles&amp;quot; is to be believed--eggs is a euphemism for the nuts in many languages. In general, egg is a figurative name for things bearing creation (the female ova, the philosopher's egg?). I did at first assume that *h₂ōwyóm in fact meant &amp;quot;chicken egg&amp;quot;, but I have no clue where *-yóm alone came from. Even if it was in fact a productive suffix, I would consider that the suffix had to come from somewhere. I suppose that *-yom relates to *oyn- &amp;quot;1&amp;quot;, perhaps as clitic pronoun. But I also think &lt;em&gt;oinkology&lt;/em&gt; rather refers to pigs &lt;em&gt;oink oink&lt;/em&gt; (´・(oo)・｀) so ymmv&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;coming up empty for derivation and phonology&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no conusion, simply because the comparative method can only reconstruct the latest form of PIE to the exclusion of irregular developments and thus to the exclusion of spurious substrata and early adstrata, which have to be expected however for aggriculture and pastoralism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superficial similarities in the notation are less pronounced if opting for @fdb's and @Anixx's preferred forms, anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T12:44:08.643" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T12:44:08.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9536" CreationDate="2019-01-17T18:18:37.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a synthesis of a few other answers, since I haven't seen any that cover all of the details (and in particular how we ended up with &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Lucian says (in his excellent and detailed answer), &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;/g/&lt;/code&gt; in German often corresponds to &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; in English, particularly next to a front vowel (&lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. This is why the 'g' in &lt;em&gt;Auge&lt;/em&gt; corresponds to the 'y' in &lt;em&gt;eye&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;egg&amp;quot; isn't an inherited Germanic word&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. English is an interesting case because it mixes lots of words from different languages together. In most cases, when you see a 'g' next to an 'i' or 'e' in English, it was borrowed from somewhere else—even for such common words as &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;, borrowed from Norse (and displacing the inherited &lt;em&gt;yive&lt;/em&gt;)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Egg&amp;quot; also comes from the Norse side of the Germanic family tree, which kept 'g' next to 'e' (and sometimes even stuck it in where it didn't used to be), and for a while it co-existed with the inherited word. William Caxton, the first person to use a printing press for English, complained about that word in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym we.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certaynly it is harde to playse every man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Modernized:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in particular [the merchant] asked for &amp;quot;eggys&amp;quot;. But the good wife answered that she couldn't speak French. And the merchant was angry, for he couldn't speak French either, but wanted &amp;quot;egges&amp;quot;, and she didn't understand him. And then at last another person said he wanted &amp;quot;eyren&amp;quot;. Then the good wife said that she understood him well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should a man write these days, &amp;quot;egges&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;eyren&amp;quot;? Certainly, it's hard to please everyone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once again, the inherited word has a 'y'! The &lt;em&gt;-ren&lt;/em&gt; is a plural marker, like in &amp;quot;child-ren&amp;quot;; the singular was &lt;em&gt;ey&lt;/em&gt;, which looks very much like the German. But &amp;quot;egges&amp;quot; won out—due to Caxton's printing, partially—and &amp;quot;eyren&amp;quot; faded into oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's also possible that &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot; won because &amp;quot;ey&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;eye&amp;quot; were too similar, and that got confusing! See for example how &amp;quot;ink pen&amp;quot; is displacing &amp;quot;pen&amp;quot; in American dialects that merge &amp;quot;pin&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;pen&amp;quot;. But that's speculation, nothing more.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as others have said, the similarity of these words is a complete coincidence. If they're related, it's farther back than we can reconstruct, back before Proto-Indo-European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T15:05:32.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30260" CreationDate="2019-01-17T19:56:57.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Berber, it is supposed diachronically that some varieties, named Zenete, changed the sounds *k and *g respectively by [ʃ] and [j]/[ʒ] (see Kossmann 1999).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Palatalisation affects also laterals. In Riffian, *lː is become [ʤː]. In other Berber languages, it is the simple lateral that has evolved into [j]/[dz] (Kabyle) or [ʒ] (Middle Atlas/ Mauritania). This feature also is present in Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should notice also that, in synchrony, in Zenete languages, some geminated palatalised consonants do not stay palatale consonants, but are plosive. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ujur (*ugur)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leave.PERF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gːur &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leave.IMPERF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T19:56:57.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30260" CreationDate="2019-01-17T21:06:07.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rhotacization of z (not s) in Germanic, Latin (honos, honoris).  This is pursuant to the Law of Similarity, according to which sounds which are most similar to their surrounding sounds are the first to be affected by a change.  In this case, the change is from obstruent (z) to sonorant when the obstruent has the same voicing as surrounding sounds (vowels, which are both sonorant and voiced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T21:06:07.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30260" CreationDate="2019-01-17T21:12:25.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spanish shifted Latin /f/ to /h/ but /v/ to /β/, ending up at different points of articulation. The Celtic branch of Indogermanic shifted *p to nothing, but kept b and b&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt; in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T21:12:25.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30292" CreationDate="2019-01-17T23:18:38.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start with standard GB theta theory. In your sentence &quot;I saw the tall kid&quot;, &quot;the tall kid&quot; is an NP,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; with &quot;kid&quot; as the head. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an AP here, as you suggest, but it consists of nothing but the head A &quot;tall&quot;, and it's attached as an adjunct to the N. Something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2yTwQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2yTwQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;[NP [D the] [N&amp;#39; [AP [A&amp;#39; [A tall]]] [N kid]]]&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjuncts don't assign theta roles to their heads. Theta assignment is the mapping of roles from a theta grid onto argument position in the tree, and adjuncts don't have arguments.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way, from closer to the semantic side of things, the way &quot;tall&quot; functions here is attributively, not predicatively. Attributive modifiers don't assign theta roles. So, even if &quot;tall&quot; does have a theta grid, there's no theta assignment by &quot;tall&quot; here.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Therefore, no double assignment to &quot;kid&quot;, and therefore no violation of the theta criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, from your comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This sentence is taken from Naoli (1989) 'Predication Theory: a case study for indexing theory', p. 76, she assumes that there's an embedded predicate in this sentence with a lexical head ADJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently, Napoli is arguing for some theory where attributive modification is actually predication in disguise—not just at the semantic level (as many have argued), but syntactically. We really have a syntactic clause, built out of an AP instead of a VP. I don't know if that CP is instead of the NP, or inside the NP, or inside the N', or what, but however you work it out, presumably &quot;tall&quot; ends up in a position to assign a theta role to &quot;kid&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if there's really an A-headed clause with &quot;tall&quot; as the head, then &quot;kid&quot; is no longer the head of an NP in VP-complement position in the outer sentence. So &quot;see&quot; can't assign a theta role to &quot;kid&quot;, so there is no double assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then where &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; the theta role assigned by &quot;see&quot; go? An unassigned theta-role would be a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; theta criterion violation, but it's just as bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's hard to answer without some picture of how Naoli analyzes &quot;the tall kid&quot; here. I could invent my own structure and come up with an argument for it, but the chances that it will be the same as Napoli's are pretty slim, and therefore it isn't likely to help you at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in general terms, just compare it with &quot;I saw that the kid was tall&quot;: see has [&lt;sub&gt;CP&lt;/sub&gt; that the kid was tall] as an argument, &quot;kid&quot; doesn't get theta-marked by &quot;see&quot;, and there's no theta criterion violation. So, if &quot;I saw the tall kid&quot; has a covert CP either as or inside the argument for &quot;see&quot;, it's essentially the same, even if the details are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you look at things from a phrase-marking rather than head-marking perspective: &quot;see&quot; can assign a theta role to the CP or NP-with-a-CP-in or whatever [the tall kid]. But that isn't a problem, because &quot;tall&quot; isn't assigning a theta role to [the tall kid], it's assigning a theta role to [kid], an NP deep inside that CP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's hard to get into details without knowing Napoli's theory, but again, compare any other case with an embedded clause: [I saw [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; the boy [&lt;sub&gt;CP&lt;/sub&gt; that ate the chips]]. The fact that &quot;see&quot; marks [the boy that ate the chips] while &quot;eat&quot; also marks [the chips] isn't a theta criterion violation just because [the chips] happens to be inside [the boy that ate the chips].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Or it's a DP, with &quot;the&quot; as the head, and various things get more complicated, but the end result is the same, so let's ignore that here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Well, they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; have arguments &lt;em&gt;internally&lt;/em&gt;, as in &quot;the taller-than-average kid&quot;. But let's not get into that. They don't have &lt;em&gt;external&lt;/em&gt; arguments: &quot;kid&quot; is not an argument of &quot;tall&quot;; &quot;tall&quot; is an adjunct of &quot;kid&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. In the original version of theta theory, only verbs had theta grids; &quot;tall&quot; has no theta roles to assign, so there's no issue at all. That causes problems with, e.g., Japanese &quot;Jon wa segatakai&quot; (&quot;John topic-particle tall-adjective-as-predicate&quot;: &quot;John is tall&quot;), where &quot;segatakai&quot; is an adjective, which moves to I position to head the sentence, so presumably it has to be the thing assigning a theta role to the subject (well, topic, but forget that). So then maybe even in English &quot;John is tall&quot;, the adjective &quot;tall&quot; is assigning the theta role through the copula in some way possibly involving lots of complicated movement. Under such theories, theta grids are only &lt;em&gt;expressed&lt;/em&gt; by predicates in a &quot;relational head position&quot;, like head of VP or IP, rather than being expressed by anything that has them. So &quot;tall&quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a theta grid, but it's ignored when &quot;tall&quot; is the head of an AP that adjoins to an N', because it's never in a relational head position.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. For example, maybe it's essentially the same way &quot;segatakai&quot; theta-assigns in the previous footnote.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T23:28:54.917" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T23:28:54.917" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30289" CreationDate="2019-01-18T06:01:42.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to be obvious that /tl/ and /dl/ are especially rare compared to other kinds of stop + liquid onset clusters, so I would be wary of phonological theories or hypotheses that assume or require this to be a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best discussion that I have found so far is in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/Images/Programs/Linguistics/Juliette%20Blevins/KL-TLchangeslity-13-2-267.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KL &gt; TL sound change in Germanic and elsewhere:&#xA;Descriptions, explanations, and implications&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Juliette Blevins and Sven Grawunder (2009), which suggests that even though the absence of /tl/ and /dl/ onsets in English (and also in various other IE languages) seems to be a systemic and not just accidental gap, there doesn't seem to be a universal preference against these clusters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Universal constraints of the form *TL have [...] been proposed, in order to express the crosslinguistically marked status of these clusters and to instantiate&#xA;  the fact that “homorganic clusters of this kind are avoided in many languages”&#xA;  (Gouskova 2004: 220). Despite the many analyses of TL gaps, and explanations for their marked status, we are unaware of any typological quantitative&#xA;  study demonstrating that initial TL clusters are underrepresented in the world’s&#xA;  languages. In Section 4.2 we offer preliminary typological findings within and&#xA;  across language families which suggests that they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(§4.1., p. 287 (the page breaks in the linked doc are preliminary, so I don't know whether the published version is slightly different.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to clusters &quot;of this kind&quot; might be alluding to things like the gaps in English of onset /pw/, /bw/ (not strongly enforced: it could possibly be considered completely accidental, since borrowings like &quot;pueblo&quot; or &quot;bwana&quot; are typically pronounced with /pw/ and /bw/) and /tʃj/, /dʒj/, which can also be seen as being motivated by avoidance of clusters that are in some way overly homorganic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some long comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tl&quot; and &quot;dl&quot; onsets may be analyzed as unitary phonemes rather than clusters. (Actually, I think I remember seing mono-phonemic analyses for even &quot;pl&quot;-type onsets in some language, but I forget which.) This is the usual analysis for Classical Nahuatl: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; transcribes its &quot;tl&quot; sound as a phoneme /t͡ɬ/. As abarnert's comment and the name of language indicate, this sound can occur word-finally. Wikipedia indicates that Classical Nahuatl is not analyzed as having any complex onsets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Indo-European languages, the main context where I am familiar with /tl/ and /dl/ being gaps in the inventory of stop + liquid onsets, there seems to also be a weaker dispreference for clusters like /pl bl kl gl fl/ when compared to /pr br kr gr fr/. Or at least, I have the impression that /pl bl kl gl fl/ are less stable than the obstruent + /r/ clusters. For example, Portuguese historically changed l to r in onset clusters in certain words like &lt;em&gt;branco&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; Latin &lt;em&gt;blancus,&lt;/em&gt; although this is no longer an active change and modern Portuguese does have obstruent + l clusters. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/cons.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt; changed /pl kl fl/ to /ʎ/ word-initially and to /tʃ/ after consonants, although again we do see these clusters in modern Spanish as a result of borrowing or dialect mixing. Even though &quot;r&quot; and &quot;l&quot; are both liquids/approximants, I know that in some IE languages such as English, /l/ has been analyzed as being less &quot;sonorous&quot; (in terms of the &quot;sonority hierarchy&quot;) than /r/ (the evidence in English for this is stuff like the existence of word-final /rl/, e.g. &lt;em&gt;snarl,&lt;/em&gt; but not word-final /lr/).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are IE languages that have /tl/, or /tl/ and /dl/.  Blevins and Grawunder mention Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Irish, and Pashto (§4.2., (3)), and have more detailed discussion of the different ways languages can get words with these clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat differently, [tl, dl] are known to be relatively confusable with [kl, gl] for speakers of many IE languages, and apparently there has been a shift of /kl, gl/ to [tl, dl] (unclear to me whether phonemic or just phonetic) in various languages, including dialects of English! (discussed in Blevins and Grawunder)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although I, like jknappen, am unaware of any consonant cluster inventory databases, I found a paper that mentions various examples of languages with complex syllable structure and that summarizes the types of clusters: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&amp;amp;httpsredir=1&amp;amp;article=1052&amp;amp;context=ling_etds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Highly complex syllable structure: a typological study of its phonological characteristics and diachronic&#xA;development&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; by Shelece Easterday (2017).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief search for &quot;complex onset&quot; in this document turned up mentions of the following languages that are described as having complex onsets where the second consonant may be /l/:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[gym] NGÄBERE Chibchan, Guaymiic (Panama) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[mji] KIM MUN (VIETNAM DIALECT) Hmong-Mien, Hmong-Mien (Vietnam)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[pac] PACOH Austro-Asiatic, Katuic (Vietnam) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could check to see whether these or any other of the listed languages have /tl/ or /dl/ clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T12:52:18.643" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T12:52:18.643" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30304" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:37:51.193" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the number in the purple box (0.4649) indicate? I always thought it was a measurement of amplitude, but when I get the RMS amplitude of the highlighted selection, Praat returns a value of 0.2208 Pascal. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VllpH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VllpH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T17:48:32.293" Title="Number in the upper lefthand corner of Praat soundwave" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30302" CreationDate="2019-01-18T17:45:31.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that this is the maximum and minimum &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2008/ling520/lab1/lab1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;air pressure level&lt;/a&gt; within the window (where the link says &quot;There are two numbers shown on the left side&quot;). The corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/sound_pressure_calibration.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat manual&lt;/a&gt; on sound pressure calibration explains how the integer values are normalized, and how you might calibrate recordings to get true sound pressure level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T17:45:31.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30302" CreationDate="2019-01-18T17:48:32.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You was thinking correctly, it is just that this value is the highest amplitude of your visible signal on the window. Whereas RMS (Root Mean Square), like its name indicates it, takes into consideration the average of the amplitudes of your signal. So the RMS value will be always between the highest and the lowest amplitude found in a given interval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact formula of RMS is: √ { 1/(t2-t1) ∫t1t2 x2(t) dt }.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T17:48:32.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30285" CreationDate="2019-01-18T21:55:35.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edited question raises some further points that I think can only be covered by putting forth a speculative theory of how English speakers understand tautological attribution, which doesn't really fit into my already-too-long initial answer, so I'm going to do that here. I have little theoretical justification and no empirical justification for this theory; it's more just to show how you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; explain these facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a salient difference between &quot;tuna fish&quot; and &quot;oak tree&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Tuna&quot; is a kind of fish or fish meat; &quot;oak&quot; is a kind of tree or tree wood. Not much difference there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both &quot;tuna&quot; and &quot;oak&quot; can be used in ways that feel like noun compounding: &quot;tuna melt&quot;, &quot;oak grove&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both can be used in ways that feel more like adjective attribution, but with the sense of &quot;tuna-like&quot; and &quot;oak-like&quot;: &quot;tuna flavor&quot;, &quot;oak finish&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only &quot;oak&quot; seems to have uses that feel adjective-y, while also using the &quot;of oak&quot; rather than &quot;oak-like&quot; sense. In fact, even &quot;oak finish&quot; can mean &quot;a finish that's oak-colored because it's made of oak wood&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what difference could this make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we seem to be happier to extend &quot;X tree&quot; to new trees a lot more than &quot;X fish&quot; to new fish. If you've never heard &quot;beechnut tree&quot; or &quot;trout fish&quot; before, I suspect you'd accept the former while marking the latter as weird. This is something that could be tested by gathering a bunch of speakers and a bunch of examples—you could even do psycholinguistic surprise-measure tests. Of course I haven't done any such tests, but let's assume that it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what could explain it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with Peter Culicover's Construction Grammar-style view of the lexicon and semantic processing, as described in the books ''Simpler Syntax'' and ''Grammar and Complexity''.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you hear &quot;oak tree&quot;, the syntax-semantic interface ends up activating the generic attribution construction in the lexicon, which applies &quot;oak&quot; to &quot;tree&quot;, and flags it as redundant. But, at the same time, &quot;oak tree&quot;, as a cliche, has its own node in the lexicon, which isn't flagged as redundant, and which overrides the generic construction. So, you understand it as a perfectly normal bit of English, and don't notice any redundancy (unless you think about the words consciously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens when you hear &quot;beechnut tree&quot;? The same generic attribution construction activates the same way. There is no &quot;beechnut tree&quot; cliche to override it. But memory isn't a hash-table-style exact associative lookup, it works by analogy. And &quot;beechnut tree&quot; is similar to &quot;oak tree&quot; and &quot;ash tree&quot; and a bunch of other things, similar enough to activate them to some tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the total activation of this cluster is strong enough, your brain sees &quot;beechnut tree&quot; as something that should have an analogous node: this is an English cliche that you just didn't know. If it isn't, as with &quot;trout fish&quot;, the generic construction takes effect, and you get a &quot;redundancy asterisk&quot; in your conscious understanding of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why would this happen for &quot;beechnut tree&quot;, but not for &quot;trout fish&quot;? The difference isn't really a rule, it's the result of a process similar to the kinds of determinations that a multi-level neural network makes.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; So, factors like how &quot;nice&quot; of a pleonasm &quot;oak tree&quot; is, how &quot;adjective-y&quot; the &quot;beechnut&quot; node is, how many &quot;X tree&quot; cliches you have stored, how often you hear them, etc. all come into play in an analog computation that either does or doesn't reach a sufficient threshhold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, the clusters of related cliches that languages grow will be partly just a matter of chance, and partly a matter of non-linguistic factors (do English speakers have reason to talk about kinds of trees more often than kinds of fish?), but also partly determined by linguistic factors—the fact that &quot;oak&quot; can be used adjectivishly more easily than &quot;tuna&quot; only matters because English has an adjective+noun construction that's more productive than noun+noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you'd expect both the nonlinguistic cultural factors and the linguistic factors to be different for Thai speakers than for English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I know little about Thai, but let's compare Japanese and Spanish to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, nouns being used as modifiers need a special particle—but it's a fully productive construction. Plus, many words that tend to be adjectives in other languages are nouns in Japanese, even ones rarely used outside the modifier construction. So, the fact that &quot;oak&quot; is sort of adjectivish shouldn't matter at all, and all tautological attribution cliches should be very &quot;nice&quot;, so it should be much easier for the pattern to spread to new idioms. It might even generalize to the level where we'd call it a semi-regular construction, or even to a productive one that can be applied anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, on the other hand, you can't modify nouns with nouns except for a very restricted, non-productive set. Instead, you're usually forced to use prepositional constructions (like &quot;the fish of the tuna&quot; as opposed to &quot;the tuna fish&quot;). Those are less likely to be stored as idioms, so you'd expect Spanish to have fewer &quot;tuna fish&quot;-style cases, and to be much more resistant to forming new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I haven't done any research to see whether these expectations are true, but let's pretend I did, and they are. So then, you could look at Thai and make some predictions about how freely it accepts &quot;tuna fish&quot; style pleonasms, and see if those predictions are right. You could then apply similar reasoning to other pleonastic constructions. If it all works out, instead of a vague sense that &quot;Thai seems to allow more redundancy than English&quot;, you'd have a catalog of the kinds of pleonasm that Thai and English each tend to allow, and how freely each language allows them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, I haven't done all that work. All I can do is show that it makes sense for English and Thai to differ in the kinds of pleonasm they allow and how freely they allow them, for (at least partly) linguistic reasons. And that it's at least plausible that the contrasts you were asking about are real, and can be explained, but don't have a single simple explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Of course at the bottom level, your brain &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; such a neural network. But this is probably a few levels higher than that, and we manifestly do have rule-like as well as network-like reasoning at that level. In particular, the syntax-semantic interface that gives us &quot;modifier + modificand&quot; and the semantic processor that therefore applies the modifier to the modificand are rule-like.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T21:55:35.440" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-19T21:55:29.603" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Apologies if this question is not specific enough.) I am researching parsing strategies in noisy environments, and how noise changes these strategies. Ultimately I would like to understand how noise changes the predictions of a language model. One place I want to start my research is in ASR, and understand what adjustments these systems make to deal with noise. What are these general strategies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T23:05:01.020" Title="How do ASR systems cope with noise?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30314" CreationDate="2019-01-20T20:38:45.453" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have searched by corpus and found variant results for the same number above. People also hesitate with these numbers and make different sortation. Is there any research about any psycolinguistical or other kinds of factors which effect the agreement with these numbers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks comment, different comprehension of a number can give different agreement, like &quot;zero point five&quot; or &quot;one half&quot; imply different numeral agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I supply some examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;measurement, e.g. &lt;em&gt;degree&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;centimetre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;object, e.g. &lt;em&gt;cake&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;others like &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-1 doesn't make sense for some of them, while does in intended speech, mathematical works or word play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="21742" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T22:20:33.133" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T18:03:03.807" Title="What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-21T07:06:01.300" Score="1" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern Hebrew, כרוב means &quot;cabbage&quot;, besides the biblical meaning &quot;cherub&quot;. Are these meanings related in any way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23686" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T02:07:12.790" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T18:54:20.423" Title="Which word came first: 'cabbage' or 'cherub' in hebrew?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30309" CreationDate="2019-01-21T09:24:00.927" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pair of modern Hebrew words homonyms &quot;כְּרוּב&quot;, meaning &quot;cherub&quot; and &quot;cabbage&quot;, have completely unrelated etymologies. And the first meaning is much older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;כְּרוּב&quot; for cherub of course goes back to the Biblical Hebrew &quot;כרוב&quot;, probably pronounced something like /kəˈruːv/. That word is 3000+ years old,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and derives from a proto-Semitic root which means roughly &quot;one who blesses&quot;, with cognates like Akkadian &quot;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;ka-ru-bu&lt;/em&gt;), so the root is thousands of years older still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no Biblical Hebrew word for cabbage, because cabbage was brought to the Levant by the Romans.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The name the Romans used for it was &quot;brassica&quot;, but almost nobody ended up with that name;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; almost all near Eastern cultures ended up borrowing Greek κράμβη (/ˈkram.be/, assuming it was borrowed via Ptolemaic Egypt). And that's where the modern Hebrew word pronounced /ˈkʁuv/ ultimates comes from.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. It's in the Yahwist portions of Genesis, after all.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Of course there are significantly older cultivars of the same species, and wild varieties are even older. But those aren't &quot;cabbage&quot;; we have different—and unrelated—names for them, like &quot;kale&quot;, and so did the Romans, Greeks, Celts, etc.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Even the Romance languages mostly use words descended from a different Latin word that meant &quot;stalk&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. The direct source is Aramaic &quot;krb'&quot;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30312/23611&quot;&gt;fdb's answer&lt;/a&gt; explains.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T18:54:20.423" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T18:54:20.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30309" CreationDate="2019-01-21T12:50:22.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To complement abarnert’s answer: The Modern Hebrew word for “cabbage” is borrowed from Aramaic krbʼ (occurs at least twice in the Talmud, and frequently in Syriac).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T12:50:22.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11577" CreationDate="2019-01-21T18:16:16.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is purely a fun/informative answer based on the question title, since you've already got an answer (from an older text), and the nature of the wordplay below doesn't involve ambiguous syntactic boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple in &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; (this is Stephen Mitchell's translation and I'm just reporting his notes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, he knows that the cyclops' cries for help will be ignored since he's given his name as &quot;No-man&quot; (&lt;em&gt;outis&lt;/em&gt;), so that Polyphemus shouts to his friends, &quot;No-man has tried to kill me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And they went away, and I laughed to myself at how&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;my &lt;strong&gt;cunning&lt;/strong&gt; little cognomen had fooled them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitchell: The Greek for &quot;cunning/shrewdness&quot; is &lt;em&gt;mētis&lt;/em&gt;, a homonym of &lt;em&gt;mē tis&lt;/em&gt;, which is a variant of &lt;em&gt;outis&lt;/em&gt;. (&quot;No-man/cognomen&quot; replicates the pun.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Odysseus is recounting the story of his birth, and reports this speech of his maternal grandmother's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Autólycus said to them, &quot;Daughter and son-in-law,&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;here is the name you should give him. Since I have been&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;odious&lt;/strong&gt; to so many women and men&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;throughout the wide world, let him be named Odysseus.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitchell: The Greek for &quot;odious&quot; here is &lt;em&gt;odussamenos&lt;/em&gt; (similar sound to &lt;em&gt;Oduseus&lt;/em&gt;), from a verb meaning &quot;to be angry with&quot;; it can be parsed here as a passive participle: &quot;after having been the object of many people's anger&quot; (citing R.B. Rutherford's 1992 commentary of books XIX and XX).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Hebrew Bible&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we're at it, this kind of after-the-fact folk etymology of names is also common in the Hebrew Bible, leading to wordplay in a similarly broad sense. Especially with the often hard-to-trace names in Genesis 1-11, there are various attempts by the author or editor to explain a name, such as &quot;Noah&quot; explained by Lamekh's use of נחם &lt;em&gt;n-h-m&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to comfort&quot; (despite clearly lacking the third consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bible also plays with words for the sake of symbolic imagery. In 1 Kings 18:35-37, for example, Elijah has just asked that the altar he wants God to light on fire be soaked with pails of water. The water &quot;runs around&quot; סבב the base of the altar. He then prays that God will &quot;turn around&quot; the hearts of Israel, using סבב again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T19:21:46.663" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T19:21:46.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30308" CreationDate="2019-01-21T19:42:44.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Michaelyus in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30308/#comment65259_30308&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, this is covered for two languages (English and French) in the 2003 paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wayne_Lawrence2/publication/308260220_On_the_semantic_range_of_the_plural/links/57e0a96608ae3f2d793eb67b/On-the-semantic-range-of-the-plural.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Semantic Range of the Plural&lt;/a&gt; by Wayne P. Lawrence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, English and French have different rules: English plural (despite prescriptive rules to the contrary) means &quot;not 1&quot;, while French plural means &quot;2 or more&quot;. However, Lawrence runs through many cases, showing that it's not quite as simple as even that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English, singular is used for the number 1 only.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a prescriptive rule that &quot;plural means more than one&quot;. But even in publications that try to enforce this rule, you find many exceptions like &quot;0.278 cubic metres&quot; and &quot;zero kilometres per hour&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zero is plural. Lawrence implies that this may be due to analyzing it as &quot;no&quot; rather than as a number, but doesn't actually argue for that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fractions where the numerator is 1 usually take singular when read as fractions: &quot;one half second&quot; or &quot;a third of a second&quot;. There's one half, so it's singular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decimals follow the same rule for many speakers. But some speakers use singular for decimals less than 1 whose last digit is 1: &quot;0.31 degree&quot; but &quot;0.3 degrees&quot;. Presumably they're analyzing it as [[0 point 3 1] degree], treating 1 as the &quot;head&quot;, but Lawrence doesn't get into the explanation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negative numbers other than -1 are plural: &quot;-1.9 degrees&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;-1 is sometimes singular, sometimes plural. Singular seems more common, but Lawrence points out that people have spontaneously said things like &quot;It feels like minus one degrees.&quot; The difference seems to be whether you analyze &quot;-1 foot&quot; as [minus [one foot]] or &quot;-1 feet&quot; as [[minus one] feet]. It's not mentioned in the paper, but plural seems much more common when read as &quot;negative one&quot; than when read as &quot;minus one&quot; (which fits—it's harder to get the analysis [negative [1 foot]]).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imaginary numbers work like negative numbers: &quot;2i feet&quot;. Although Lawrence doesn't mention whether i itself is plural or singular, to me, &quot;i foot&quot; sounds just wrong; &quot;1i foot&quot; is not as bad, but &quot;1i feet&quot; is still more natural. He also doesn't mention complex numbers, but I think it's pretty clearly &quot;√2+√2i feet&quot;, even though the magnitude is 1; presumably we just analyze it as &quot;√2 plus √2i&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural seems to be the semantic default: indefinite numbers are plural, as in &quot;Schools Attended&quot; on forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In French, singular is used for numbers less than 2.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unlike the English prescriptive rule, this seems to be the native French understanding of number.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zero is singular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decimals less than 2 are singular—even in cases like 2•10&lt;sup&gt;-7&lt;/sup&gt; newton.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notice &quot;1,6 million homme&quot;, where &quot;million&quot; is singular (because there are fewer than 2 millions), and then &quot;homme&quot; agrees with that. But, although Lawrence doesn't mention it, it's usually &quot;1,6 million d'hommes&quot;: less than 2 millions, but more than 2 men.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negative numbers are usually plural if -2 or lower. So it's the absolute value that follows the &quot;2 or more&quot; rule. Lawrence suggests that these are always analyzed as [minus []], which is why the sign doesn't matter. Lawrence doesn't say whether the same applies to imaginary numbers (or complex, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plural seems to be the semantic default, used for unknown/indeterminate number, as in &quot;n années&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper only briefly mentions other languages, and other number systems like singular/dual/plural. At the end, Lawrence argues that it's unlikely that any languages use a rule that sets a boundary that's not on a whole number (e.g., by rounding rather than truncating). But he doesn't tell us whether, e.g., there are languages that extend the French model (so singular=[0, 2), dual=[2, 3), plural=[3, ∞)) and others that extend the English (singular=1, dual=2, plural=everything else). So there's plenty of room for further data gathering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are obviously many things here that could be psycholinguistically tested, but Lawrence doesn't discuss that, except for one point: The number systems of English and French predate the understanding of negative numbers (not to mention imaginary numbers) as numbers, which explains the pull of the [minus [one degree]] reading over [[minus one] degrees]. So why do some English speakers in some cases say [[minus one] degrees]? That &quot;may reflect a more 'advanced' stage of the development of the speaker's understanding of negative numbers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the case of French &quot;2•10&lt;sup&gt;-7&lt;/sup&gt; newton&quot; is even more interesting. That clearly requires a plural in English. Are the French really analyzing a number in scientific notation as a quantity at the grammatical level, even though for -1.5 they analyze the &quot;minus&quot; as outside the quantity? It should be easy to test processing time, distraction errors, etc. between English and French speakers here, but I don't know of any attempts to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T19:42:44.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12360" CreationDate="2019-01-22T05:15:44.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this is an oldish question with some existing good answers, I think there's something fundamental missing from all of them: &quot;Universal grammar&quot; is both ambiguous and vague, and people who &quot;don't believe in UG&quot; are usually not even talking about the same thing as people who &quot;believe in UG&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core notion of UG is pretty uncontroversial: there is something specific to linguistic structure that's unique to humans, universal across humans, and indispensable to language as we know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The controversial part—the part people believe or don't believe—is what that &quot;something&quot; is.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; And it depends on who you ask—and when you ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 2002, Noam Chomsky's position has been that UG is just recursion.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Many people have argued against that, but the argument is usually that there's obviously &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; to language than just recursion, not &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who argue against UG are instead arguing against Chomsky's early 90s position, which required UG to be a whole lot more heavy-duty, but which nobody believes anymore. Briefly, his paradigm at the time, Principles &amp;amp; Parameters/Government &amp;amp; Binding, strongly implied that UG included a large set of pretty complicated, language-independent principles like &quot;no wh-movement outside an island.&quot;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since around 1993, GB has been replaced by the Minimalist Program,&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; which implies that many of those principles don't have to be specifically built into some language organ; they follow automatically from the idea that language picks the most optimal path to get from sound to meaning.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; Exactly what ends up as still part of UG is hard to say, and doesn't really matter. If pressed, I suspect most people would say they don't know, but it's probably more than just recursion and much less than GB required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In non-mainstream theoretical grammar approaches, almost everyone has learned that arguing from first principles gets them nowhere but ignored. They need to argue that their theory covers more of the data, or can be used to build an efficient parser (as demonstrated by writing the code for one), or can make psycholinguistic predictions that can be tested in the lab, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, who &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; care? Mainly people working in neighboring fields, like computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, or philosophy of mind. And to them, UG still means the version implied by the 1980s theory, or one of its predecessors.&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; They sometimes even have pragmatic reasons for arguing against it.&lt;sup&gt;8&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those people even &quot;linguists&quot;? If they are, does not believing in 1980s UG mean they don't believe in UG, or that they're defining it wrong? Who cares?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, back to the question: Does the majority of linguists accept universal grammar? It depends on who counts as a &quot;linguist&quot;—but, even more, it depends on what exactly &quot;universal grammar&quot; includes. And no good answer to this question is particularly useful.&lt;sup&gt;9&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. There's also a lot of baggage attached to the idea that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; controversial, such as the idea that UG is so different from every other mental module that it couldn't have evolved the same way. But let's ignore all of that baggage, because it's not actually part of UG.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. The classic article is &lt;a href=&quot;http://science.sciencemag.org/content/298/5598/1569&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Faculty of Language&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. One of the authors, Hauser, has argued that UG is hooking up recursion to language. Chomsky himself has seemed to imply that UG is just recursion itself, and everything else we do with recursion is based on language, but it's not entirely clear. Also, Chomsky has gradually switched to talking about &quot;the language facility, narrow&quot; instead of &quot;universal grammar&quot;. If you're interested in the debate on this, the back-and-forth exchange between HCF and Pinker and Jackendoff on most of the substantive issues is &lt;a href=&quot;http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002422.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explained pretty well on Language Log&lt;/a&gt;, with links to the papers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. I should probably mention the whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous-dispute/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pirahã mess&lt;/a&gt; here. At first, both sides characterized that as a fierce debate about UG. But soon, the only thing the two sides agreed on is that recursion just means &quot;Merge can combine things larger than words&quot;—an individual language might restrict it so Merge can't combine an S inside another S or an NP inside another NP, but it's still recursive. Unless you believe there are languages with no sentences longer than three words, you're not arguing against LFN/UG. That doesn't mean the two sides stopped fighting, just that the fight wasn't about UG. And it leaves UG as something nobody can really argue against (except from the opposite direction—that there's more to language than recursion).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. Most of the complexity is inside the technical definition of what an &quot;island&quot; is, so I don't want to explain it here. Just trust me, it's not trivial.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. Explained in Noam Chomsky's 1995 book &lt;em&gt;The Minimalist Program&lt;/em&gt;, but you're not going to understand that without a lot of background. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article&lt;/a&gt; isn't great, but maybe it works as a starting point.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. Does that sound fishy? I'm not going to argue in favor of it. But it is certainly true that if you accept that the mind can feasibly do what MP requires, it doesn't need a heavy-duty UG anymore.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;7. Basically, if you're building parser programs or modeling lexical storage in a neural net or whatever, Chomsky 1995 doesn't give you any useful tools that Chomsky 1986 or even Chomsky 1965 didn't. So there's really no reason to keep up to date. There are also some sociological factors not worth getting into here. Meanwhile, some of the alternative frameworks have gone out of their way to provide tools to the neighboring fields, but they don't expect you to first learn all of MP so you can unlearn it to pick up HPSG.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;8. For example, you need to justify why you're not using the state of the art theory, or why you're using a minority theory instead of the mainstream one, having a good argument against P&amp;amp;P in terms of the UG it implies being impossible can get your manager/professor/committee/whatever off your back…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;9. Of course in a few decades, when all of the relevant fields have caught up to the point where they can join up, then the question of &quot;OK, exactly what should we consider part of UG (or 'Language Facility, Narrow', or whatever)&quot; will be a good question. It may even have a good answer. But we're not there yet.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T20:01:05.450" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T20:01:05.450" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30328" CreationDate="2019-01-22T17:18:48.817" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning about minimalism at the moment. I'm not sure if I understand the move operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I understand that in English the move operation takes place when you want to formulate a question. E.g. She has gone. --&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Has&lt;/strong&gt; she gone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, does move operation occur in affirmative sentences? My tutor says yes. At least in my native language (Slavic). This is something I don't understand at all though he's tried to explain it to me. Something to do with causative verbs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, my question is this also true for English? Does movement happen in affirmative sentences? If so, can you explain it with an example or point me to some resources? That way I could maybe understand how it works in my language too. Thanks so much. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T17:18:54.543" Title="Question on move operation" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T11:47:54.043" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;My mother tongue doesn't distinguish 3.SG.F and 3.SG.M in speech. In some cases I feel the redundancy of it and the need for ambiguity of the grammatical person when I speak a language which distinguishes them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I don't know the gender of a mentioned person in a conversation, but I have to choose one from &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, since It's is right troublesome to always say the phrases &lt;em&gt;he or she, his or her&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;him or her&lt;/em&gt; all the way in a conversation. Sometimes I really don't know the gender of a person, e.g. an author, a heard person whose gender is unclear, so I need to do a research about it in advance to know the gender of the author and thus use the correct form of grammatical person.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I mention a person in a conversation, but don't want to disclose the gender. Otherwise the other side would say: &quot;Wow! Do/don't you have a girlfriend/boyfriend?!&quot; which can be undesired for me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My language distinguishes 2.PL.INCL and 2.PL.EXCL, which doesn't make problem for me. I think there must be situation where the ambiguity is needed, but I myself can't really feel the need in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do English speakers feel the redundancy of the distinguish between 2.SG and 2.PL in a language that distinguishes them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T13:34:41.820" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T00:11:02.663" Title="Can the need for ambiguity lead to merge of grammatical person, or other semantic merge?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30319" CreationDate="2019-01-23T13:33:16.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different strategies employed by gendered languages for this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, many European languages have the notion of a &lt;em&gt;default gender&lt;/em&gt; that coincides with the masculine gender. This has been criticised heavily over the last few decades, and therefore nowadays different strategies are employed, like using an epicene (gender-neutral) pronoun (English &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; with singular or &lt;em&gt;E&lt;/em&gt; [Spivak pronoun], Swedish &lt;em&gt;hen&lt;/em&gt;) or reformulating sentences to avoid pronouns at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. English speaker seem to feel the pressure to distinguish singular and plural you even in a monolingual context since plurality is a deeply ingrained category in English, as forms like &lt;em&gt;y'uns&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;you ones&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;em&gt;y'all&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;you all&lt;/em&gt;) show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T13:33:16.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19664" CreationDate="2019-01-23T16:21:41.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you need to start with language change, rather than a question of complexity. One might &quot;lose&quot; some lexical complexity on the one hand, but introduce ambiguity which brings more cognitive complexity on the other hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope these general pointers are helpful: &#xA;From what I have learned, the reasons for language change are many. Some drivers are easier to identify because they have been documented.&#xA;The introduction of a new technology, for example, can lead to changes in format, therefore in message time/contraints/functional needs. Equally, it can lead to an increase in contact with another language or another dialect.&#xA;Socio-economic influences are also well documented drivers of language change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23705" LastEditorUserId="23705" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T10:07:20.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T10:07:20.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30323" CreationDate="2019-01-23T22:49:31.740" Score="-1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, what I am wondering about is what I should look up to study the following. From my understanding, there is a limited number of ways languages are implemented. That is, there is a set of abstract constructs which languages utilize. For example, declensions, tenses, moods, etc. Those are then either implemented in a language in a certain way or thrown out altogether. In the latter case, the language somehow makes do without it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to study is this grammar in the general sense, without necessarily being attached to a particular language. However, I then plan to use those things in the study of some languages. To give you an idea, after this study, I would know exactly what Acusativus, sg. means and so on. I actually already do know what it means because we have six noun declensions in Russian. But two of them all but disappeared, when compared to, say, eight original declensions found in vedic Sanskrit. Hence, some of them I am not necessarily familiar with. The goal would be to study this abstract grammar first, know what these concepts are and then be able to use them in the study of languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know any books on this or at least what the area of study is called, I am all-ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23399" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T23:33:48.457" Title="Universal Grammar or Other Area of Study" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30322" CreationDate="2019-01-23T23:33:48.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a theory of language which has the concept of Universal Grammar, but that refers simply to &quot;Whatever is necessarily available to all human languages&quot;. It does not include such things as &quot;accusative&quot; or particular tenses and moods. There is no &quot;specification&quot; for Universal Grammar written up, whereby you can see what is supposed to be in UG -- there's no &quot;rference grammar of UG&quot;. There are many publications about things thought to be part of UG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like you are more interested in Indo-European historical grammar, i.e. the fact that Indo-European had a richer inflectional system than Russian does, and Vedic Sanskrit is much closer to that that Russian is. You might then want to look at &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. The problem is that if you study PIE and become conversant with its structure, you won't be in particularly good shape for studying Sinhalese, which has changed substantially from the Ur-Sprache. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if you are not just interested in Indo-European linguistic reconstruction, and you want to know what kind of things various languages of the world do, you may want to delve into linguistic typology, and books like &lt;em&gt;Introducing Language Typology&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Linguistic Typology&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Describing Morphosyntax&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax&lt;/em&gt;. Unfortunately, these surveys are necessary superficial. If it becomes relevant to you, there is plenty written about noun class systems, but you won't learn that kind of detail from such books -- you probably will learn what &quot;noun class&quot; means, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T23:33:48.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30319" CreationDate="2019-01-23T23:38:02.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's a matter of direction—going to a language that makes extra distinctions being harder than going to one that leaves them out. Rather, it's a matter of how often the distinction you're gaining/losing is… I'm not sure how to put it, maybe &quot;unexpectedly grammatically salient&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going from English to a language without gendered pronouns can definitely be a problem. Consider these English examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was telling me about Mary. He said… (&quot;He&quot; is clearly John.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was telling me about Mary. She said… (&quot;She&quot; is clearly Mary.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was telling me about Bill. He said… (&quot;He&quot; is clearly John.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was telling me about Bill. ??? said… (There is no pronoun that can refer to Bill.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native English speaker, I don't consciously think about the fact that (2) only works when John and Mary are different genders. So when I speak a language without gendered pronouns,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; without thinking about it, I may start trying to form a sentence like (2) and then have to correct myself when I realize I'm in the same situation a (4). It comes out something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John was telling me about Mary. He/she said—I mean he/she Mary, not he/she John—he/she said…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine (although I don't have any research, or even anecdotal evidence) that this is an even bigger problem for native speakers of languages with more distinctions,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; or that make even more grammatical use of them.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why aren't you tripped up by losing a 2.sing vs. 2.pl or 1.pl.excl vs. 1.pl.incl distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, how many sentences or discourses have &quot;just you&quot; in one role and &quot;you and John&quot; in another role, or &quot;me and you&quot; in one role and &quot;me and Mary&quot; in another? It &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; happen, but nowhere near as often as having a male in one role and a female in another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going in the other direction, I'm rarely thrown off by having to add such a plural or clusivity distinction, either. It feels like (yeah, I know, real scientific… but I'll bet there's actual psycholinguistics on this) I apparently have that information readily at hand and can plug in without thinking, even though I generally don't need it in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But adding a gender distinction is harder. Why? Because there are plenty of cases where you clearly &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have that information readily at hand. You're talking about a generic person—or, worse, about a specific person whose gender is unspecified or unknown. As an English native, I'm used to dealing with that all the time, so I know going into the sentence that I'm going to have to deal with he/she. As a second-language speaker, you're not, so it hits you by surprise halfway through producing the sentence, and you're stuck with &quot;I saw you talking to someone last night. What did… um… he/she?… say&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;4,5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. In practice, many languages aren't as pronoun-happy as English; it's more idiomatic to repeat names than in English, or to use descriptions or titles in place of pronouns, etc., in which case I can just say &quot;John was telling me about Mary. The woman said…&quot; But that's not true for all languages.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. For example, with a native language with 13 noun classes instead of 2 genders, or first-second-proximate-obviate person instead of first-second-third, or with whole extra axes like honorific, presumably you'd run into that repair situation more often than I do, and in more second languages, too.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Consider the way Bantu languages use noun-class agreement on the verb to distinguish subject and object, allowing relatively free word order in all sentences except those where the subject and object have the same class. Presumably, native speakers don't think about that any more than I think of when I do or don't have an extra pronoun distinction to use. And trying to repair a sentence where you intended to topicalize the object, but instead turned it into the subject… you probably have to scrub the whole sentence after you're more than halfway through and just start over.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4. English being pronoun-happy is probably relevant here, too.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5. And look at finer grammaticalized distinctions here. Proximate vs. obviate is rarely a problem to come up with on the fly, but when it is, it probably trips you up badly. Noun classes are &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt; a problem, especially in a language that doesn't have a simple generic fallback class. &quot;Whatever you have in your back, let me see… oops, I don't care whether it's a long thing or a round thing or a flat thing, but I have to pick a class anyway, so… um… let me start the sentence over and structure it completely differently so I can omit that word, OK?&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T00:11:02.663" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T00:11:02.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29926" CreationDate="2019-01-24T01:05:51.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not at all up-to-date on theory-driven NLP, but…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &quot;Construction Grammar&quot; (CxG) isn't a framework; it's a family of distinct (sometimes &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; distinct) frameworks or approaches that share the same core idea. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even sticking to the ones that are most theoretically aligned (usage-based, unification-driven, etc.), you can't take a set of constructions from Adele Goldberg in her CxG and mix and match with a set of constructions from Charles Fillmore in Berkeley Construction Grammar (BCG), without doing a lot of careful work to translate.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also some question about which frameworks are &quot;really&quot; CxG, and some of the most useful work is in those borderline frameworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious example is Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). While HPSG was originally designed by people outside the CxG universe, and described as a unification-driven bottom-up generative PSG, not a CxG—but it turns out to be very CxG-like in practice. In fact, it's easier to translate data between Berkeley Construction Grammar (BCG) and HPSG than between BCG and some other CxGs. So, is HPSG really a CxG after all? Or a hybrid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't care about the answer to that question, then there's a ton of NLP work driven by HPSG—projects like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.delph-in.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DELPH-IN&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/Projects/CoreGram.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoreGram&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/~stefan/Babel/Interaktiv/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babel&lt;/a&gt;, and the theoretical and data-collection work behind them—which could be directly useful to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if it matters to you (and you don't believe that HPSG qualifies as a CxG), then you can't use any of that work. Some of it has translations to or successors in Sign-Based Construction Grammar, which is definitely a CxG, and can be seen as sort of a merger of BCG and HPSG, but definitely not all of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Correlating two CxG frameworks &lt;em&gt;informally&lt;/em&gt; is usually pretty simple—Goldberg can write a paper with Ray Jackendoff that fits into both of their frameworks, with only a few footnotes to explain where the rough edges are. But doing so &lt;em&gt;formally&lt;/em&gt; is not so easy.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T01:05:51.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28138" CreationDate="2019-01-24T03:41:37.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you seem to be starting from the assumption that all words that are similar between Persian and other IE languages must be cognates. But that's not true; there are three distinct reasons two words can be similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actual cognates. In your first example, &quot;Tochter&quot; and &quot;دختر&quot; (&quot;duxtar&quot;) are both direct descendants of PIE *dʰugh₂tḗr.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pure accident. Your second example, &quot;bad&quot; and &quot;بد&quot; (&quot;bad&quot;), is actually the standard example of this, but your &quot;Спасибо&quot; example might be more fruitful. The Russian word is a relatively recent contraction from &quot;съпаси богъ&quot; (&quot;sŭpasi bogŭ&quot;, &quot;save us God&quot;), which has nothing to do with the PIE root *speḱ &quot;to see&quot; that the Persian and various other words for gratitude ultimately derive from. For actual western words related to &quot;سپاسگزار&quot;, you have to turn to things like German &quot;spähen&quot;, which you'd never guess were connected at first glance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrowing. Armenian &quot;վատ&quot; (&quot;vat&quot;) sounds a lot like Persian &quot;بد&quot; (&quot;bad&quot;) because it descends from a word that late Classical Armenian borrowed from Old or Middle Persian. (There are of course also borrowings into Persian from other IE languages.) If you tried to reconstruct &quot;վատ&quot; back to PIE following the rules of Armenian sound change, you'd get garbage, even though it actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an IE word—because the first half of its evolution happened in Persian, not in Armenian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what about your question? I don't know much about modern Farsi, but I think it's more likely that it didn't have a casual word for &quot;yes&quot; until one was invented, not that it had one, lost it, and invented a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to guess a priori what root an unattested word might have come from is a mug's game. You're expecting to find &quot;yes&quot; in a word for &quot;to want&quot;—but the actual roots IE languages' &quot;yes&quot; words (both modern and ancient) come from have meanings like &quot;already&quot;, &quot;to see&quot;, &quot;itself&quot;, &quot;this&quot;, &quot;that&quot;, and &quot;therefore&quot;. Or they're contractions originally meaning things like &quot;so may it be&quot; or &quot;this is&quot;. Or they're borrowed from neighboring families and can't be reconstructed natively (try to work out what Romanian &quot;da&quot; could derive from in Vulgar Latin…). None of this is anything that could have been guessed; it all has to be found, or reconstructed by the comparative method. (You &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to guess a few of the colloquial words that derive from &quot;hail&quot;-type interjections. But then you'd find dozens of false positives for every correct hit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most IE languages' modern words for &quot;yes&quot; were coined or borrowed relatively recently. Other than the Germanic and Slavic languages, most IE languages answered in the affirmative by repeating the verb, as in Latin, or modern Irish. Of course these languages did all have words with some kind of positive/affirmative meaning, but they couldn't be used as casual &quot;yes&quot;. And they aren't related to modern casual &quot;yes&quot; words—e.g., Latin's &quot;enim&quot; (&quot;truly, so&quot;) is related to all kinds of things, like Baltic &quot;anas&quot; (&quot;that&quot;), but not to any modern Romance word for &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germanic *ja and Slavic *da are cognate—both come from PIE *yē, which means &quot;already&quot;, and has descendants all over IE like Latin &quot;iam&quot; and the Iranian family of *hyáh- relative pronouns. Exactly how *ja and *da are related beyond that isn't clear, but obviously Iranian languages never used those *hyáh- words as a casual &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, your proposal kind of contradicts itself. For example, you propose a lost Iranian word that isn't related to &quot;ja&quot;—and then, to argue for it, you point out that there's a modern dialect word that isn't related to your own proposed word, and that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; sound like &quot;ja&quot;? That would be an argument &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; your theory, not &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T03:41:37.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30280" CreationDate="2019-01-24T03:48:39.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer from TeX stackexchange has a working example that does what I was looking for:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/471489/19048&quot;&gt;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/471489/19048&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14599" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T03:48:39.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30318" CreationDate="2019-01-24T05:01:03.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me get the usual caveats out of the way: MP is a program, not a theory. It tells you what kinds of questions to ask about syntax, and guides you in comparing the answers from competing theories. And so on. But in practice, what you're learning is the theoretical framework that everyone in MP uses. You may later learn why they think MP leads to that framework, but not until later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm learning about minimalism at the moment. I'm not sure if I understand the move operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I understand that in English the move operation takes place when you want to formulate a question. E.g. She has gone. --&amp;gt; Has she gone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's how 1960s transformational grammar worked: you started with a &amp;quot;deep structure&amp;quot;, and applied &amp;quot;transformations&amp;quot; for things like questioning, passive, etc. until you got to &amp;quot;surface structure&amp;quot;. For simple sentences, the deep structure is the same as the surface structure, so you don't need to move anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But MP doesn't start with a deep tree and transform it into a surface tree; it starts with an empty tree, and builds things up node by node out of the Merge and Move operations. Simple sentences get built the same way as questions, passives, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could a tree be built entirely with Merge, with no Move? Technically, yes—but if the sentence has any words which require &amp;quot;feature checking&amp;quot;, no, and all sentences do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Feature checking&amp;quot; is how, for example, a noun gets its Case—how it goes from &amp;quot;he-or-him (missing case, so I can't speak it)&amp;quot;, to &amp;quot;he (nominative case, so I can)&amp;quot;. If you can't speak that &amp;quot;he-or-him&amp;quot;, you can't speak the sentence. And in MP, feature checking only happens when you move a node to a position that can check it, so that &amp;quot;he-or-him&amp;quot; is going to have to move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to do with causative verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Causative verbs are part of the argument for why, even without any of the theoretical assumptions from MP, we need VP shells and abstract verb movement. If you want to explain why an earlier theory like GB also always had movement even when it's not obvious, causatives are an important example. But in MP, there's always movement, so the whole bit about causative verbs is just an extra confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take the simple sentence &amp;quot;Mary left&amp;quot;, and let's simplify the hell out of the theory, because it's still pretty complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't start with a deep structure tree, you start with a bag of words and an empty tree. At each point, the only things you can do are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pull a word out of the bag (which makes a trivial tree out of it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge two trees together, making one of the head.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move a node from one part of the tree to another. You're only allowed to do this to check features.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are no words left in the bag and no overt features left to check, &amp;quot;spell out&amp;quot; the tree to phonology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are no covert features left either, &amp;quot;interpret&amp;quot; the tree to semantics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put [Mary +needscase], [leave +needstense +hasnomcase], [+past +hastense] in a bag. (This is a nonstandard notation that I invented on the fly. I'm using a much simpler set of features than real MP, and I think using the standard notation could be misleading here. But the idea should be clear: we have, e.g., a word with the meaning &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; and the phonology /meiri/ and the feature &amp;quot;this word needs to get case before it can be pronounced&amp;quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make [+past +hastense] the root of the tree: [+past]&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;/sub&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge that tree with [leave +needstense +hasnomcase], with the T as head: [&lt;sub&gt;T'&lt;/sub&gt; [+past hastense]&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;/sub&gt; [leave +needstense +hasnomcase]&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move the &amp;quot;leave&amp;quot; from the complement to the head. The +hastense and +needstense cancel out, so we end up with just [&lt;sub&gt;T'&lt;/sub&gt; [leave+past +hasnomcase]&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;/sub&gt; 0&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge the &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; with the T', leaving the T' as the head, so now you have [&lt;sub&gt;TP&lt;/sub&gt; [Mary +needscase]&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;T'&lt;/sub&gt; [leave+past +hasnomcase]&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;/sub&gt; 0&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;]].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can't move [Mary] to [leave+past], because &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;leave&amp;quot; are both actual words, so they have incompatible features; you'd end up with some monstrosity like &amp;quot;gMaryo&amp;quot;. Fortunately, a T can case-mark the specifier in a TP. Which means we screwed up; we should have merged Mary into the VP specifier before moving anything! So, let's backtrack and do that.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Now, after moving the subject from the VP spec to the TP spec, we've got [&lt;sub&gt;TP&lt;/sub&gt; [Mary +nom]&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;T'&lt;/sub&gt; [leave+past]&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; 0&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt; 0&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;]].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no more overt features that need to be checked—all those +needstense and +hasnomcase and so on have cancelled out. So, we can pass the tree to spell-out. English morphophonology turns [Mary+nom] into /meiri/, [leave+past] into /left/.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no covert features that need to be checked either. So, we can immediately pass it to interpret too, and get something like PAST(LEAVE(MARY)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I had to insert [leave] as a complement of the T, then move it from V to T, and I had to insert [Mary] as a specifier of the V, then move it to the specifier of the T. That's the absolute minimum amount of movement in the simplest possible MP theory. A realistic MP theory will have even more structure and more movement (and Case is more complicated…), but this is enough to show why there's always movement, never just merging.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. This is where actual Minimalism comes in: It tells us that any properly minimalist theory wouldn't have done the last few steps and backtracked; it would instead always stick the subject in the VP-spec position before moving the V.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. This is why they often teach people GB first: Maybe it was &lt;em&gt;conceptually&lt;/em&gt; more complicated, but the &lt;em&gt;practice&lt;/em&gt; was a lot simpler.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T17:18:54.543" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19664" CreationDate="2019-01-25T03:34:53.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I don't think English really &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; get simpler, it just moved its complexity into other parts of the language. Less inflectional morphology, but more complicated word order rules, and many more complicated constructions (e.g., the various similar but not at all identical resultative constructions). And if you look beyond just syntax, look at the tense/lax vowel system and the destressing rules that go with it; that's certainly not a simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These scenarios, would be different from just creolisation, since as far as I know creolisation involves merging of features of two languages or assimilating one to another, while the cases that I am writing about involve, just as I wrote before, changing by imperfect, unnatural acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're describing isn't creolization, it's mixed languages. Briefly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A mixed language is something like Ma'a, with (roughly) Bantu grammar and Cushitic vocabulary. They tend to arise when the mixed community has a lot of bilingual speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A pidgin is something like Pidgin Hawaiian (as opposed to Hawaiian Pidgin, which is the misleading name of the creole that's supplanted it…), with a defective grammar that can't express things like relative clauses, causatives, etc. They tend to arise when there's a mixed community where most of the L2 learners don't get a chance to learn the lexifier language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A creole is something like Haitian, with a grammar spontaneously invented by the children of pidgin speakers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your proposal is actually a lot closer to creolization than you think it is, which is why people keep suggesting that English really is a creole. But English is clearly missing the two-step part, going through a pidgin, which is why most people reject the creole-English theory. But still, the process you suggest and the pidgin/creolization process have enough parallels that it wouldn't be surprising if there were similar effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, unlike mixed languages, which tend to have a grammar very close to one of their parent languages, most creoles have highly analytic grammars, no matter what any of the parents had. There are many theories that try to explain why this might be true; it's at least plausible that whatever explains creole grammar also explains English moving in the same direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, English is also often used as a paradigm example of the step toward analytic (or grammaticalized or isolating or whatever) in &quot;grammaticalization cycle&quot; theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within languages, there are many cases of individual words where, e.g., a content word becomes a function word, which becomes a clitic or particle, which becomes part of the inflection system, and eventually it disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, a language is turning lots of things into morphological systems; at other times, it's losing lots of morphological distinctions and creating lots of new function words or syntactic constructions to make new distinctions. This can drive a language (or family) around in a circle from, e.g., analytic to agglutinative to fusional and back to analytic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to some people, this analytic-&gt;agglutinative-&gt;fusional-&gt;analytic cycle, or something else similar, is common to most languages. They have different theories on why it's true and what drives it. One thing they all have in common is using English as a prime example of the -&gt;analytic step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if there really is some general process that drives language change in this way (and English really is a good example and not just a coincidence), that would imply either that your theory is wrong, or that your theory is actually one of the common drivers of the -&gt;analytic step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of anyone who's proposed the latter, but it does seem like an interesting possibility, and definitely worth looking into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the article you linked seems to be (indirectly) arguing against any such general process even existing. (After all, if only English and the Romance languages ever made the -&gt;analytic change, then any general theory that predicts that most languages should go through such a stage must be wrong…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, I think you need more than two examples (English and Persian) and one counterexample (Greek) to even start asking what the general pattern is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially since in some ways English and Persian went in different directions. For example, Persian simplified its vowel system. And, while they both complicated their word order constraints, Persian's is a lot less like the typical creole than English's. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article you linked seems to be suggesting that there really &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; no examples besides English and the Romance languages. But you can find plenty of other people offering other examples. Japanese's inflection system is much simpler than Old Japanese, and it's turned its non-inflection affixes into particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it might also be worth looking into the examples that people find harder to fit into universal theories, like the developments from Classical Chinese to Mandarin, or Ottoman Turkish to Turkish. I don't know much about the details of why these are hard to fit into people's theories, but, given the Mongol and Manchu influence in China and the Persian and Arabic in Turkey, it seems like they might be very relevant to your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T03:34:53.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30335" CreationDate="2019-01-25T16:04:41.190" Score="-3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the movie &quot;pursuit of happiness&quot; this particular exchange happens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Martin Frohm: What would you say if man walked in here with no shirt,&#xA;  and I hired him? What would you say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chris Gardner: He must have had on some really nice pants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take it in context, it means &quot;How can I give job to a man in such poor condition&quot;. I feel that Chris was thinking out of context when he responded.  What is this kind of thinking called? What would be the accurate word for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23727" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:38:26.147" Title="what is out of context thinking called" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2019-01-27T21:19:22.620" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24478" CreationDate="2019-01-25T19:40:23.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same thing occurs in Berber. The Arabic definite article is often borrowed with the noun. The Arabic word &quot;al xadma&quot;, meaning &quot;the work&quot;, is used in Riffian and is pronounced &quot;lxedmet&quot; while this language does not have articles in its linguistic set (see Kossmann 2013).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon can be also found when the borrowing is made between French and Berber, thus the syntagma &quot;la police&quot; (=the police) will be used with its article in Riffian &quot;lpulis&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T19:40:23.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24478" CreationDate="2019-01-25T19:52:31.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cases like this don't even require borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider English &quot;newt&quot;. This is a native English word, but it's got half an article stuck on it. Old English &quot;efte&quot; became Middle English &quot;ewte&quot;, but later, &quot;an ewte&quot; was reanalyzed a &quot;a newte&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same thing also happens in the opposite direction: Old English &quot;naedre&quot; became Middle English &quot;naddere&quot;, but later &quot;a naddere&quot; was rebracketed as &quot;an addere&quot;, hence modern &quot;adder&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Middle English speakers weren't unfamiliar with Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does that demolish your guess, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/24487/23611&quot;&gt;Draconis's answer&lt;/a&gt;? Not at all. It's pretty clear that this kind of rebracketing is much more common in Arabic-&gt;Spanish borrowings than in language-internal evolution. There are a handful of cases like &quot;newt&quot; and &quot;adder&quot;, but many dozens of cases like &quot;alcohol&quot; and &quot;algorithm&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes people hear unfamiliar words even in their own language.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; This is especially true for words with dialectal variation.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; It isn't that common that a rebracketing or similar error spreads through the language, but it happens occasionally. Now consider a Spanish trader with a little Arabic&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;—it's a lot easier for him to mishear something, and there's a lot less pressure from other Spaniards correcting the error, so it's much more likely that his reanalysis will spread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the reasons you suggest, English-Polish borrowings don't have most of the same factors as Arabic-Spanish borrowings that make this kind of reanalysis more likely. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/24482/23611&quot;&gt;Adam Bittlingmayer's answer&lt;/a&gt; suggests further differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, consider that many modern borrowings from English are triggered by exposure through TV, movies, music, games, etc. If you mishear something from a trader who comes to your village, you're probably the only one who heard it; if you mishear something from a TV show broadcast at prime time, half your friends saw the exact same TV show. And, even if you all mishear it, a good chunk of the larger Polish-speaking community also saw it, so it's less likely to propagate from your group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many Poles who speak English are also literate in English, and in fact read quite a bit of English (internet forums, game on-screen prompts, etc., even if they don't sit around reading Dickens all day). It's a lot harder to mix up &quot;an ewte&quot; and &quot;a newte&quot; in writing than in speech. That's even more true given English's orthographic convention of clearly separating words. Especially since Polish has the exact same convention. And even more so when 99% of what you're reading is digital or typeset, where the spacing is perfectly regular. Compare all of that to a medieval Spanish monk reading Arabic calligraphy, and it seems obvious that your literacy should counter rebracketing a lot more than his did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For extra fun, look at &quot;orange&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Going from Dravidian to Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic &quot;naranj&quot;, there was surprisingly little change, so where did English lose the &quot;n&quot;? It looks like a case of Arabic-Spanish article rebracketing, and it also looks just like English &quot;adder&quot;, but it's actually neither. While Italian and Occitan both rebracketed it, losing the &quot;n&quot;, Spanish borrowed it as &quot;naranje&quot;, and French borrowed it from Spanish, not its nearer neighbors. But then, French calqued Italian &quot;mela arancia&quot; as &quot;pome narenge&quot;, and then reanalyzed the &quot;n&quot; away and ended up with &quot;pome orenge&quot;. And &quot;orenge&quot; is what got borrowed into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Dutch did the exact same thing with the same word, but Frisian, even closer to English, did not, and ended up with &quot;njirre&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. There are other ways it can happen. For example, one theory on &quot;naunt&quot; was that people jokingly pretended to misunderstand &quot;mine aunt&quot; as &quot;my naunt&quot;, it spread as slang, and eventually it became a perfectly normal colloquial word (although a few centuries later it was lost, at least in standard English).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126611.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caxton's famous case with &quot;egg&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for a good illustration.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. Again, this isn't the only possibility. Consider a Spanish monk reading Arabic and Greek treatises in parallel, who's rarely heard Arabic spoken aloud.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. Some steps of this are disputed, and I might be pushing a now-discredited theory at some point along the way… but whatever happened is interesting.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T19:52:31.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30331" CreationDate="2019-01-25T20:38:26.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; what you're looking for here is that, in Gricean terms, Chris is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature#Floutings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;flouting&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of_relation_(or_relevance)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;maxim of relation&lt;/a&gt;, which here means that you don't make an analogy unless that analogy is relevant to the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surface context is an implicit assumption that Martin wouldn't normally hire someone with no shirt. Chris is certainly accepting that much—his reply makes no sense otherwise, but it makes perfect sense given that assumption: If Martin wouldn't normally hire someone with no shirt, but he hired a guy with no shirt, there must be some compensating factor—maybe the guy had really nice pants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's more going on: Martin is offering the story of the guy with no shirt for a reason, as an analogy to something about Chris's condition. And, given the maxim of relation, that analogy must be relevant to the situation. So, Chris should interpret it as an explanation for why Martin isn't going to hire him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chris presumably understands that, and facetiously appears to ignore it. Facetious replies often involve flouting a maxim like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this isn't just a joke. At the same time he's flouting the maxim of relation, he's relying on the same maxim to make a point. His extended version of the analogy is meant to be relevant to the situation. So he's implying that he's not like a guy with no shirt who Martin would never hire, he's like a guy with no shirt who Martin &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; hire, because he had really nice pants. Therefore, Martin should hire him, because he has… well, he hasn't implied &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; he has, only that it's something that compensates for the surface reason to reject him.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. I don't know this movie, and I don't know the context—but I think it's a Will Smith movie, and I know how Will Smith characters usually talk, so I can take a solid guess…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. If this is a sales job, that something could even be his facility for turning things around this way. The way Will Smith characters tend to converse is a lot like the way successful salesmen convince people to buy things.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:38:26.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30160" CreationDate="2019-01-26T00:18:42.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, so I've got a basic example in code - I'll ultimately write my algorithm to be more efficient and right now it is only written for the one use-case (I haven't generalized it/made it so that you can have multiple daughters under a rule yet), but right now I'm just writing it out for one single rule to show an example of what I ultimately want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a more efficient way to do what I am doing, &lt;strong&gt;PLEASE&lt;/strong&gt; tell me, as I don't know what I don't know on this subject. I am using PyDelphin for the analysis. &lt;strong&gt;EDITTED WITH NEWEST VERSION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from delphin.interfaces import ace&#xA;zhs = 'zhs.dat'&#xA;&#xA;grammar = zhs&#xA;&#xA;parse_string = '我 看 了 猴子 的 雪白 雪白 的 小小 的 猫'&#xA;&#xA;print(&quot;PARSE STRING: &quot; + parse_string)&#xA;&#xA;with ace.AceParser(grammar,&#xA;                    cmdargs=['-n', '50']) as parser:&#xA;                        tree = parser.interact(parse_string).results()[9].derivation()&#xA;&#xA;# Maybe reverse mapping so that long form POS is key?&#xA;pos_mapping = {&#xA;    'j': 'adjective',&#xA;    'pfv': 'perfective aspect',&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;def redup_post_processing(phrase):&#xA;    phrase = phrase.replace('々', phrase)&#xA;    phrase = phrase.replace('々', &quot;&quot;)&#xA;    return phrase&#xA;&#xA;def pos_generate(node):&#xA;    pos_level = node.preterminals()[0].entity&#xA;    TAG = pos_level.split(&quot;_&quot;)[1]&#xA;    POS = pos_mapping[TAG]&#xA;    return POS&#xA;&#xA;def grammar_rule_gen(node, data):&#xA;    POS = pos_generate(node)&#xA;    phrase = node.terminals()[0].form&#xA;    if 'postprocess' in data.keys():&#xA;        phrase = data['postprocess'](phrase)&#xA;    print(data['text'] + POS + ' ' +  phrase)&#xA;&#xA;functions = {&#xA;    'redup-olr': {&quot;function&quot;: grammar_rule_gen, &quot;text&quot;: &quot;Expressing reduplication with the &quot;, &quot;postprocess&quot;: redup_post_processing},&#xA;    '了_pfv': {&quot;function&quot;: grammar_rule_gen, &quot;text&quot;: &quot;Expressing completion with the &quot;},&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;def tree_parse(tree):&#xA;    if hasattr(tree, 'daughters'):&#xA;        daughters = tree.daughters&#xA;        for daughter in daughters:&#xA;            if hasattr(daughter, 'entity'):&#xA;                if daughter.entity in functions:&#xA;                    functions[daughter.entity]['function'](daughter, functions[daughter.entity])&#xA;            tree_parse(daughter)&#xA;&#xA;tree_parse(tree)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now when I run this, it accurately gets me the rule in question that I want - here is my output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;PARSE STRING: 我 看 了 猴子 的 雪白 雪白 的 小小 的 猫&#xA;NOTE: parsed 2 / 2 sentences, avg 45873k, time 0.22833s&#xA;Expressing completion with the perfective aspect 了&#xA;Expressing reduplication with the adjective 雪白雪白&#xA;Expressing reduplication with the adjective 小小&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the original rule in the grammar (々 is a Japanese character used in Chinese on occasion to represent reduplication - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%80%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%80%85&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;redup-olr :=&#xA;%suffix (* 々)&#xA;redup-lex-rule.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the 了 rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;了_pfv := pfv-marker &amp;amp;&#xA;  [ STEM &amp;lt;&quot;了&quot;&amp;gt;,&#xA;    SYNSEM.LOCAL.CAT.HEAD.CHAR [ FCHAR &quot;了&quot;, LENGTH one ],&#xA;    SYNSEM.LOCAL.CAT.VAL.COMPS &amp;lt; [ LOCAL.CAT.HEAD.LZG le ] &amp;gt;,&#xA;    TRAITS native_token_list ].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it would be awesome to just apply these rules as the text was processed - but that would require me writing an extension for ACE or a custom parser (which I guess on some level, I am sorta doing, but nowhere near as complex), and that feels &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt; more complicated than what I am doing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the most efficient way to do what I want to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt; a solution to my problem, but I am not sure if it is the most elegant, or computationally cheap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8072" LastEditorUserId="8072" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T04:13:45.207" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T04:13:45.207" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30279" CreationDate="2019-01-26T18:35:33.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not really because some even have no tenses like Mandarin Chinese, where it doesn't seem to have those at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean is that the Mandarin Chinese language has verbs with no tenses, in fact all of them so Mandarin Chinese doesn't have any tenses at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can also see that English only has past, non-past tenses.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only just some have those. Those are just the special languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20912" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T15:14:21.100" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T15:14:21.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-26T21:40:38.907" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a student starts learning syntax,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; how common is it to first teach them GB (or a stripped-down, GB-flavored approach), and then teach MP once they've got the hang of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was obviously the way things were taught in the 90s, but I get the impression that it's still common, maybe even near-universal, today—much like physicists are taught Newton and Maxwell before learning relativity and quantum field theory. And I can think of good pedagogic rationales for it, not just &quot;professors teach the way they were taught&quot; (although I'd like to hear what actual professors' rationales actually are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an objective answer to this—maybe someone has surveyed the syllabi of different departments, or even written a paper on the best ways to teach (Chomskyan) syntax? Or, if not, is there at least an answer based on a deeper pool of anecdotal data than I have access to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Assuming a Chomskyist linguistics department with the presumed ultimate goal of the students learning MP and being able to contribute to current research in mainstream generative grammar. Obviously a department that focused on teaching people, say, SBCG wouldn't start with MP, for completely different reasons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T21:40:38.907" Title="How often is MP taught by teaching GB first?" Tags="&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;pedagogy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-27T11:29:41.987" Score="7" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;In biology, ring species is a population of subspecies in a geographically ring-shaped region, where individuals are close (in terms of interbreeding) if they live close to each other, but between the two &quot;ends&quot; they don't get along. Below is the distribution map of birds &lt;em&gt;Phylloscopus trochiloides&lt;/em&gt;, where western subspecies (blue) and eastern subspecies (red) went too diverse to interbreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uH7D.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4uH7D.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious linguistic equivalent should be dialect continuum, a population of language(s) with spectrum of mutual intelligibility. But for the &quot;ring&quot; part, it should be a ring-shaped region where the speakers from both &quot;ends&quot; don't understand each other even though they are geographically close each other. Is there such one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1204" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T11:41:20.463" Title="&quot;Ring species&quot; as dialect continuum?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30346" CreationDate="2019-01-27T15:39:08.733" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find the &lt;em&gt;likelihood&lt;/em&gt; of a sequence of characters (the test data), given two unigram models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequence (test data) is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A B C B B&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The models are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;       Model 1       Model 2&#xA;P(A)     0.3           0.4  &#xA;P(B)     0.4           0.5  &#xA;P(C)     0.3           0.1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I would like to know the likelihood, and if I can make a prediction as to which model the sequence belong and the underlying assumptions. I understand that given any unigram language model, the likelihood (or probability) of any sequence of characters is p(sequence of characters|Model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have done so far was to find the MLE for each character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P(A) =1/5 ; P(B) = 2/5 ; P(C) = 1/5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how to compute p(sequence of characters|Model). Should I multiply these to find the likelihood and establish which model it came from? How to handle the model probabilities given?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22917" LastEditorUserId="22917" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T17:23:55.950" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T18:32:11.180" Title="Likelihood for a test data (sequence of characters) given unigram models" Tags="&lt;n-grams&gt;&lt;language-models&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30344" CreationDate="2019-01-27T18:32:11.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unigram models tend to rely on the &lt;em&gt;naïve Bayes assumption&lt;/em&gt;: that is, they assume that every character is independent of everything else around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this assumption, the likelihood of &lt;code&gt;A B C B B&lt;/code&gt; is just the product of the individual probabilities for each letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumption, as it turns out, isn't a very good one—which is why we move up to more powerful &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;-gram models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T18:32:11.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30343" CreationDate="2019-01-27T21:26:39.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; there are any ring languages, and I can explain why it's unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that language evolution is only &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt; the same as biological evolution, and the line between languages is only &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt; the some as the line between species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One big difference is that there just aren't nearly as many living languages as there are extant biological species, by orders of magnitude. Since the classic example of ring species is the Larus herring gulls, let's look at them as an example. There are many Arctic bird species. A few of them cover the whole circle. Of those, one, the Larus gulls, form at ring species. By contrast, there are only a handful of Arctic languages, and the widest-distributed small family is Eskimo-Aleut, which doesn't go any farther than from the Russian Aleutian Islands to eastern Greenland. So there's no opportunity for a ring language to form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many species share the same environment, in different niches, but languages are mostly all competing for the same niche. The fact that herrings spread around the Arctic means it's more likely for herring gulls to spread into the same territory. By contrast, fact that Samoyedic languages spread around the Arctic means it's &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; likely for Tungusic languages to spread into the same area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the most widespread language family around the Arctic ends up being Eskimo-Aleut, which only goes from the Russian Aleutian Islands to eastern Greenland. (In Siberia, where there's more competition, the continuua are much narrower than that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are places where you can find smaller rings of species, like your Himalayan example, but the same factors, and others, make it less likely to find rings of dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at an example that superficially looks promising: Scandinavia. Finnmark Nordnorsk and Far Norrlander Swedish dialects are not mutually intelligible. But there is a chain of pairwise-intelligible Norwegian dialects all the way down and around the coast of Norway, and a chain of mutually-intelligible Swedish dialects all the way down the coast of Sweden. At the bottom, the southern varieties of Standard Norwegian are pretty close in intelligibility to Scanian Swedish, to the point where (if you wanted to annoy a lot of people) you could almost claim they were dialects of Danish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as soon as you look beyond the coasts, you'll see that the traditional inland northern Swedish and Norwegian dialects share features with each other. When species send out branches into thinly-populated areas, they tend to lose contact and diverge, but when languages do, they're carried by people who move back and forth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's a constant pull on both dialects by their respective standard varieties—especially strong in recent times—which is part of the reason they're as divergent as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some of the Finnmark dialects aren't divergent just because Nordnorsk speakers keep moving farther north; much of the change comes from other people (mostly Sami) learning Norwegian as a second language, a kind of &quot;horizontal transmission&quot; that you don't see in higher animals in biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a ring seems likely to form only if the center of the ring really is nearly uninhabitable, if the language doesn't have writing and mass media, and if there's nobody else in the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a situation could arise somewhere in, say, the highland Trans New Guinean languages. But it would happen a lot less often than with biological species. And, even if it did, there's a good chance we'd never find out—the only way we could detect a highland TNG ring would be if we discovered and classified all of the languages before contact changed the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T21:26:39.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T01:32:33.830" Score="0" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the spelling of a morpheme changes depending on how it's inflected. For example in English, &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; sometimes needs an extra &amp;quot;t&amp;quot;, and &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; sometimes needs its &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inflections of &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; (verb):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hat: &lt;strong&gt;hat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hats: &lt;strong&gt;hat&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hatted: &lt;strong&gt;hat&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-ed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hatting: &lt;strong&gt;hat&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-ing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inflections of &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; (verb):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hate: &lt;strong&gt;hate&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hates: &lt;strong&gt;hate&lt;/strong&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hated: &lt;strong&gt;hate&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-ed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hating: &lt;strong&gt;hate&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;strong&gt;-ing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These morphemes are completely regular in spoken English, however. They're only (slightly) irregular in written English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way of recording changes to a morpheme in orthography or pronunciation? For example &lt;em&gt;teeth&lt;/em&gt; is the plural of &lt;em&gt;tooth&lt;/em&gt;. I think &lt;em&gt;teeth&lt;/em&gt; is an inflection of &lt;em&gt;tooth&lt;/em&gt;, and not a separate morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tooth: &lt;strong&gt;tooth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;teeth: &lt;strong&gt;tooth&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;-oo-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-ee-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you record these differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:29:04.757" Title="How to record differences in irregular morphemes" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30350" CreationDate="2019-01-28T01:48:39.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a matter of recording anything. If you can spell &quot;hatter&quot;, it can be recorded. It could be a matter of &lt;em&gt;predicting&lt;/em&gt; something – on what basis can we predict that &quot;hat&quot; yields &quot;hatter&quot; but &quot;hate&quot; yields &quot;hater&quot;? In other words, what are the rule for spelling English words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That question is way to broad to attempt to fully answer. What is relevant for the issue that you are pointing to is that there is a distinction between &quot;long vowels&quot; and &quot;short vowels&quot;, and since we don't use accents to mark that difference, we use a different and more complicated system, involving double letters and &quot;silent e&quot;. In &quot;hate&quot; (hɛit) we have a long vowel, as signaled by the &quot;silent e&quot;. In &quot;hat&quot; (hæt), the basic short value shines through. When we make the agent noun or progressive, the vowels do not change, so the spelling of &quot;hate&quot; has to change -- drop the silent &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; because -ing, -er supply an orthographic vowel and the rule &quot;long before CV&quot; is obeyed. In &quot;hat&quot;, we have to double-write the consonant in order to indicate that the preceding vowel is short, not long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T01:48:39.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30350" CreationDate="2019-01-28T04:33:14.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;user6726 gave an excellent and correct answer, but I'm going to elaborate on this a bit and put it in a more mathematical-esque framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is, &lt;em&gt;what's written isn't necessarily the underlying form&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying form of &quot;hat&quot; could be written as &lt;em&gt;hăt&lt;/em&gt;, marking a &quot;short vowel&quot;, while the underlying form of &quot;hate&quot; could be written as &lt;em&gt;hāt&lt;/em&gt;, marking a &quot;long vowel&quot;. (The difference used to actually just be length, but now they're pronounced with different &quot;qualities&quot; too; I'm using these informal symbols instead of the official IPA ones to make it clearer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we've got &lt;em&gt;hăt&lt;/em&gt;. How do we write it? Well, the rule in English is that a vowel followed by a consonant and the end of a word, is short. So we can just write &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; and we're good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for &lt;em&gt;hāt&lt;/em&gt;, we need a way to mark that it's long. But English to the rescue again! English has two relevant rules here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; after a consonant at the end of a word isn't pronounced&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A vowel before a consonant and another vowel is long&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these two, we can see that &lt;em&gt;hate&lt;/em&gt; is the form we're looking for: the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; makes the previous vowel long, and then isn't pronounced itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now let's add an &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; to the end. Now we have &lt;em&gt;hăter&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hāter&lt;/em&gt;. What happens now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, with &lt;em&gt;hăter&lt;/em&gt;, we need a way to mark that the vowel is short. We can't rely on the end of the word, but in English, a vowel before &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; consonants becomes short. So we can double the &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, giving &lt;em&gt;hatter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;hāter&lt;/em&gt;, though, we can just write it &lt;em&gt;hater&lt;/em&gt;: as before, the &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; is before one consonant and a vowel, so it becomes long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trick is, none of these rules about adding &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;s and &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;s and such are built into the roots &quot;hat&quot; and &quot;hate&quot;. Instead, they're properties of the English spelling system. If you know the underlying forms &lt;em&gt;hăt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hāt&lt;/em&gt;, you can figure out all the rest from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way of analyzing this is in terms of change rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a short vowel before a single consonant and another vowel, double that consonant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a long vowel before a single consonant and the end of the word, add an &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this model, you start with the underlying form, follow all the rules, and end up with the finished product. This is called the &lt;em&gt;traditional model&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;linear model&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way is in terms of &lt;em&gt;constraints&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't have a short vowel before a single consonant and another vowel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't have a long vowel before a single consonant and the end of the word.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can add a final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; or double a consonant at very low cost (that is, the constraints &quot;don't add final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;don't double consonants&quot; are very weak ones).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this model, you tweak and twist your underlying form until it satisfies the constraints as well as possible. This is called the &lt;em&gt;optimality model&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both schools have their adherents, though these models are generally used for &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt; (how words are pronounced), not &lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt; (how words are written). But, English orthography is basically lots of little relics of its historical phonology, so the models work for both! It's up to you which model you find more convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T04:33:14.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T13:39:16.700" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of works on case theory in generative syntax GB (Vergnaud, 1985; Chomsky, 1981, 1986, among others) and in MP (Chomsky, 1995, et seq; Gallego, 2010; Hornstein, 2011, among others) assume the following: [Nominative] Case is assigned: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br/&gt; 1. In GB by a tensed head of IP (I=+tense) under government;&lt;br/&gt; 2. In Phase Theory (Minimalist Syntax) by probing of T to value the {NOM} in Spec,&lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;*P.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never come across any assumption that a {nominative} case can be assigned by a lexical head Preposition (which, in most cases, assigns Oblique Case, and may be another type of case in other languages, but never Nominative). There are data, however, that show that a lexical head P assigns or 'values' in minimalist terms the {Nominative}: &#xA;&lt;br/&gt; (1)&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;y.ufa u.yaz a.ghrum &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;find  NOM.man ACC.bread &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;'The man.nom found a bread.acc'          &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (1), there's no problem, because no preposition was added into the constructions. Imagine we add another PP phrase like 'on the road' as in (2): &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;(2) &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;y.ufa u.ayaz .a.ghrum ig u.brid &lt;br/&gt; &#xA;find man.NOM bread.ACC on road.NOM &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;'The man.nom found the bread.acc on the road.nom' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;: is the ACCUSATIVE MARKER &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;: is the NOMINATIVE MARKER &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ig&lt;/strong&gt;: is a preposition meaning literally 'with' and translated as 'on'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something odd, or there're other languages that allow nominative assignment under P?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="20155" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T13:48:29.850" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T23:49:49.500" Title="Problem with [NOMINATIVE] Case in GB &amp; Phase Theory (MP)" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30358" CreationDate="2019-01-28T18:24:40.240" Score="3" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;While searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labialization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;labialization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on the Wikipedia, it is easy to find these statements: '&lt;strong&gt;Labialized&lt;/strong&gt; sounds involve the lips &amp;lt;...&amp;gt; When vowels involve the lips, they are called &lt;strong&gt;rounded&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, as in many other languages, there is a rounded vowel [u]. It is very typical of Russian people, who learn English, to pronounce English labialised (~rounded) [w] with the same state of the lips, look at the picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpRsU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpRsU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when these Russian speakers come to a teacher who tells them not to use their lips at all and pronounce [w] in a 'smiling' manner, a question arises: if both sounds are labialised, why cannot one use his/her lips in the same way as in pronouncing [u]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, what is the difference between the state of the lips while producing [u] and [w]?  Why both sounds are 'labialised/rounded', but do not really resemble one another in terms of the lips' state? Is there a more useful recommendation on how to hear/see the difference between [w] and [u]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T11:49:08.133" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T05:15:21.350" Title="The difference between [w] and [u] (especially between the states of the lips)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T18:51:46.713" Score="0" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am performing some large-corpus analyses in Praat and have been extracting formant (F1, F2, F3) values at every 10% interval for my textgrids, but have decided that a much more even-handed measure would be to extract these parameters once every half-second or so in each of my intervals, but I can't seem to figure out how to automate this. I am trying to pull relatively randomized formant samples from my intervals as the corpus is far too large to reasonably annotate each vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know how to script this in Praat (specifically just the time-series)? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference this is how I've been sampling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    .time [1] = start + 0.1*(end-start)&#xA;    .time [2] = start + 0.2*(end-start)&#xA;    .time [3] = start + 0.3*(end-start)&#xA;    .time [4] = start + 0.4*(end-start)&#xA;    .time [5] = midpoint&#xA;    ....&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23747" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:29:07.573" Title="Praat: Automatic Formant Extraction by time step" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30356" CreationDate="2019-01-28T19:14:14.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sounds [u] and [w] really do resemble each other, just as [u] and [o] resemble each other: resemblance is weaker than identity. I don't know what the actual problem is that Russian language teachers are addressing, but given that Russian does not have [w], I assume it's sometimes challenging for speakers to produce appropriate English outputs; perhaps [wi] is produced more like [ŭi]. Both [w] and [u] involve protruded lips (rounding, a form of labialization), and [v] is labial, but is not labialized and not rounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lip difference between [u] and [w] is primarily one of timing and secondarily one of degree. That is, [w] involves a more ballistic (rapid) gesture that gives a greater construction, and [u] is slower and less constricted (depending on dialect it is also fronted and/or diphthongized). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T19:14:14.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T19:18:21.853" Score="3" ViewCount="1716" Body="&lt;p&gt;The clusters /pr/, /br/, /kr/, /gr/, /tr/, /dr/, /pl/, /bl/, /kl/, /gl/ are all pretty common. But why are /tl/ and /dl/ missing? Is there any linguistic or historical explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23748" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T06:23:04.940" Title="Why are the word-initial consonant clusters /tl/ and /dl/ absent in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;consonant-clusters&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30355" CreationDate="2019-01-28T19:25:26.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short, oversimplified answer is that Berber languages merge their &quot;oblique&quot; and &quot;nominative&quot; in much the same way that English merges its &quot;oblique&quot; and &quot;accusative&quot;. Plenty of other languages do something similar, like most of the Northwest Caucasian languages. There's nothing magical about oblique and accusative that forces them to be merged when coming up with a two-overt-case system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a quick search, as I understand it, Berber is at least sometimes considered ergative-absolutive, not nominative-accusative, or at least more like E-A than N-A. While it doesn't match the facts of, e.g., Basque exactly, simple constructions give one case (&quot;ergative&quot;) to transitive subjects, and the other (&quot;absolutive&quot;) to both objects and intransitive subjects. And the objects of most prepositions get the &quot;ergative&quot; case. (There are even analyses that insist that Berber's &quot;cases&quot; aren't even really cases, although that seems to be a minority view.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, however you analyze the &quot;subject case&quot; in Berber, the one that occurs on the subject of most simple transitive sentences, there's no reason that can't be the same as other cases. English assigning what looks like accusative case to the objects of most prepositions is hardly universal. Whether you prefer to describe English as having created an objective case that subsumed accusative, dative, and oblique, or as having merged accusative and dative into oblique, that's not the only way to get to a two-case system. And patterning transitive subjects with objects of (some) prepositions is one of the many other ways, attested in multiple languages (although mostly E-A languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't think Berber is usually analyzed as having case &lt;em&gt;prefixes&lt;/em&gt;. Your &quot;a-&quot; and &quot;u-&quot; prefixes only work for the first class of nouns; you can't describe the other classes (&quot;tarbat/terbat&quot;, &quot;iles/yiles&quot;, and &quot;taddart/taddart&quot;) with the same prefixes. What you called the &quot;accusative&quot; is considered the base form (&quot;free state&quot;), and the nominative or ergative or whatever (&quot;construct state&quot;) is described as formed by vowel alternation rules (different ones for each class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly how you handle all of that in Case theory depends on how you handle ergative languages and how you handle case mergers. A system that can't handle anything but English just won't work for Berber languages. Obviously a system that always assigns NOM to the subject position won't work for ergative languages unless there's a second layer than can then map NOM to ergative in transitive sentences and absolutive in intransitive sentences. But a system that can assign ERG in some languages and NOM in others, or that moves subjects to different locations (one ERG-assigning, one NOM-assigning) in different languages, doesn't need that. Whatever you do there, you can do a simpler version of for prepositions assigning case in various different languages. It's impossible to answer for all of the Case theories proposed for every version of GB and MP, but should be easy for any specific theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T23:49:49.500" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T23:49:49.500" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30350" CreationDate="2019-01-28T20:36:14.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's important to separate out spelling. You don't have to go to the hardcore &quot;written language isn't part of language at all&quot;—it's at least plausible (and empirically testable) that literate people store spellings as part of their lexemes in the same way they store phonology, class information, meaning, etc., and that they store orthographic rules in the same way they store morphosyntactic rules. But the spelling is still secondary, not primary. When you're learning new words, you generally learn the word first, then learn or work out its spelling,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and the same goes for new coinages getting into the language.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's start by ignoring spelling, and dealing only with the spoken English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;hat&quot; and &quot;hate&quot; are both perfectly regular. In both cases, just as with any other root ending in the /t/ phoneme, the 3.sing.pres suffix is pronounced /s/, the past suffix is pronounced /id/ or /əd/, etc. And the exact same goes for &quot;hate&quot;. And the same goes for the noun sense of &quot;hat&quot;—the plural phoneme is pronounced /s/ after any root ending in /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that words with different final phonemes handle these suffixes differently. For example, &quot;dog&quot; takes a /z/ for 3.sing.pres, &quot;axe&quot; takes a /əz/. The rule isn't quite as simple as &quot;add /s/&quot;, but it's still pretty simple, and these words all follow the rules regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;tooth&quot;, on the other hand, is irregular—to pluralize it, you don't add the /s/ phoneme, you change the last vowel. Historically, many nouns pluralized this way, with regular but somewhat complicated rules. The same goes for verbs like &quot;sing/sang/sung&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, this is treated as nothing more than history. When you learn modern English, you just learn that &quot;tooth&quot; has a plural form &quot;teeth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you try to construct &quot;tooth + -s&quot;, something called &quot;suppletion&quot; happens—you remember &quot;teeth&quot; and it blocks &quot;tooths&quot; from being constructed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same happens for other historically productive classes, like &quot;child + -s&quot; being suppletively blocked by &quot;children&quot; (notice that this has an unusual suffix, and &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; has a vowel alternation in the root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some theories instead insist that quasiregularity is a real thing in our language, not just a historical fact. For example, why did most American dialects convert the past tense of &quot;dive&quot; from &quot;dived&quot; to &quot;dove&quot; if there isn't some &quot;strong verb&quot; rule, or some process of analogy, or something like that, active in our minds/society/whatever? Why can we jokingly make plurals like &quot;moose/meese&quot; and every native speaker knows what we're doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get to spelling, there are different ways to handle things. Some languages try to spell things as phonetically as possible, but English instead tries to spell things as morphologically as possible. So, we don't write &quot;cats, dogz, axiz&quot; because they all have different phonetic endings, we write &quot;cats, dogs, axes&quot; because they all have the same morpheme. English is far from &lt;em&gt;perfect&lt;/em&gt; in this, but it's a general tendency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can make the spelling rules somewhat complicated. For example, to get &quot;hatted&quot;, you need a rule something like &quot;when adding -ed to a word ending in a short vowel and a single consonant, double the consonant&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &quot;hat&quot; and &quot;hate&quot; are perfectly regular in their spelling. The rules are more complicated, but they can not only be written down, they can be, and are, taught to millions of children, who learn to apply them.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; We don't have to memorize &quot;hatted&quot; and thousands of other past-tense spellings for verbs ending in a short vowel and a &quot;t&quot;, they all work the same way. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have to know which single-letter vowels really are &quot;short vowels&quot; to know when to apply this rule, but that's something we already need at least roughly in our heads in order to pronounce them. And then, we only have to memorize the small number that break the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;tooth&quot; is just as quasiregular in its spelling as in its pronunciation. We don't have a rule that tells us how to spell the vowel alternation, so you have to memorize that &quot;teeth&quot; is the spelling of &quot;teeth&quot;. But we do usually handle this kind of irregularity by keeping as much as possible the same (notice that &quot;children&quot; keeps the whole root spelled the same despite pronouncing it differently) and spelling the irregular bits as… something like the paradigm spelling for the sound (but a few centuries out of date), so the vowel in &quot;teeth&quot; is spelled &quot;ee&quot; because that's how &quot;long e&quot; is usually spelled, and the suffix in &quot;children&quot; is &quot;ren&quot; because syllabic &quot;r&quot; is usually spelled with an extra &quot;e&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this quasiregularity part of our actual spelling system, or just a historical fact? The question is pretty close to the one for spoken language. After all, anyone who hears &quot;meese&quot; as the jocular plural of &quot;moose&quot; would spell it that way, and anyone who sees that spelling would interpret and pronounce it that way. But, on the other hand, it's definitely not a &lt;em&gt;rule&lt;/em&gt; that can be applied regularly, like the &quot;plural is spelled with s except in these cases where it's spelled -es dropping the final vowel letter if …&quot; that just always works unless it's suppleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, to work out a rule to transform any English noun into its plural, there are two approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first approach is to stay purely within orthography: take the rules that are taught to children about when to double consonants, etc., and then just add in special cases for the irregular words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second approach—the one most linguists would probably instinctively pick—is to go from orthography to spoken language, apply the simpler and more regular (and better studied) rules there, then spell the result. Unfortunately, that may actually be a lot more complicated in English—going from orthography to speech and back may add a lot more to the problem than using the simpler rules subtracts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And either way, you have a choice for how you want to handle quasiregularity. For example, you can just treat &quot;sing&quot;, &quot;sink&quot;, and &quot;stink&quot; as sui generis irregular verbs and store the full pattern for each one. Or you could have a &quot;subroutine&quot; that does i/a/u vowel alternation and just store that &quot;sing&quot;, &quot;sink&quot;, and &quot;stink&quot; use that pattern.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; It doesn't really matter what English &quot;actually does&quot; for your purposes; whatever's easiest to record, whatever makes the most usable record, or whatever you can turn into code, or… whatever the most important thing is for your end goal, decide based on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Cases of precocious readers certainly do happen, of course. Plenty of 80s kids read Dungeons &amp;amp; Dragons books and learned all kinds of uncommon words that they knew how to spell, and could use perfectly well in a written sentence, but had no idea how to pronounce. But it's not the way &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; words are learned.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Again, this is just the usual case, not the universal case—people were writing LOL for years before anyone pronounced it as a word rather than an acronym. But it's still clearly the usual case.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. How this regular rule relates to the much more general but only quasiregular rule about double consonants for short vowels is up for debate, but let's ignore that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. Although you probably want something aimed at a complete description, rather than a pretty-close learnable-by-children description. Without checking (I don't have a copy handy), I'd bet that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGEL&lt;/a&gt; probably covers the spelling rules, and that if it does so, it does a great job.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. And then, is &quot;sting&quot; a verb that uses that pattern but suppletes &quot;stang&quot;? Or are there two patterns that share part of the table?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T21:29:04.757" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:29:04.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30357" CreationDate="2019-01-28T21:22:03.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rest of the script is there: &lt;a href=&quot;http://praatscriptingtutorial.com/filesExtendedExample&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://praatscriptingtutorial.com/filesExtendedExample&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't tested this script and my answer in Praat, so I cannot ensure that it will work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# We had made a variable intNum, now&#xA;# we'll use that as the counter variable&#xA;for intNum from 1 to numIntervals&#xA;&#xA;    ###### Get F1 and F2 from midpoint&#xA;&#xA;    selectObject: tg&#xA;&#xA;    #Get its label&#xA;    label$ = Get label of interval: tierNum, intNum &#xA;&#xA;    # If not blank&#xA;    if label$ &amp;lt;&amp;gt; &quot;&quot;&#xA;        beg = Get starting point: tierNum, intNum&#xA;        end = Get end point: tierNum, intNum&#xA;                    length = end - beg&#xA;                    if length &amp;gt; 0.5&#xA;                    repeat&#xA;        midPoint = beg + 0.5&#xA;&#xA;        selectObject: formantObj&#xA;        # First argument is formant number&#xA;        f1 = Get value at time: 1, midPoint, &quot;Hertz&quot;, &quot;Linear&quot;&#xA;        f2 = Get value at time: 2, midPoint, &quot;Hertz&quot;, &quot;Linear&quot;&#xA;                    f3 = Get value at time: 3, midPoint, &quot;Hertz&quot;, &quot;Linear&quot;&#xA;&#xA;        # Format the values and convert to string, &#xA;        # to make it easier to write to the spreadsheet&#xA;        f1$ = fixed$: f1, 0&#xA;        f2$ = fixed$: f2, 0&#xA;                    f3$ = fixed$: f3, 0&#xA;&#xA;                    beg = midpoint&#xA;&#xA;                   until midpoint &amp;gt;= end&#xA;&#xA;              endif&#xA;&#xA;  endfor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further information about loops method in Praat: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Scripting_5_4__Loops.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Scripting_5_4__Loops.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T21:29:07.573" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T21:29:07.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29756" CreationDate="2019-01-29T00:42:28.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Morphemic spelling&quot; is a quality of English &lt;em&gt;orthography (spelling)&lt;/em&gt;, not of English &lt;em&gt;morphology&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt;. It's not about why English pronounces &quot;obligation&quot; differently from &quot;oblige&quot;, but about why English &lt;em&gt;spells&lt;/em&gt; them the same despite &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; pronouncing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ˌɑbləˈɡeɪʃən/ is spelled &quot;obligation&quot;, even though that's not what you'd get from the &quot;default&quot; spelling rules (/ʃ/ is spelled &quot;sh&quot;, short vowels are followed by two consonants, etc.), because it's built from the morphemes /əˈblaɪdʒ/ and /eɪʃən/, and those morphemes are spelled &quot;oblige&quot; and &quot;-ation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can pronounce *deepth, *length effortlessly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not relevant here. English patterns /diːp/ to /dɛpθ/, so that word, /dɛpθ/, needs to be spelled. The fact that you can just as easily pronounce /diːpθ/ (and that in an alternate history, that might have even ended up as an English word) doesn't matter; it's not a word, so we don't need to spell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is how English chooses to spell the word /dɛpθ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A (roughly) phonetic way to spell it would be to spell the short /ɛ/ as a single &quot;e&quot; rather than a doubled &quot;ee&quot;, to get &quot;depth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A morphemic way to spell it would be to combine the spellings of the two morphemes &quot;deep&quot; and &quot;-th&quot; to get &quot;deepth&quot;. Notice that this &quot;deepth&quot; would still be pronounced /dɛpθ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is Trask right that English avoids morphemic spelling in short morphemes, and that's why most derived native words end up spelled phonetically? I don't know. Trask's examples aren't entirely compelling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Depth&quot; could easily have been spelled as &quot;deepth&quot;, and &quot;length&quot; as &quot;longth&quot;; the fact that they're one syllable and 4-5 letters isn't an obvious problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with &quot;gild&quot;, the problem isn't that the root morpheme is too short—it's that there is no suffix to spell. You'd have to invent a silent morpheme that doesn't exist, just to give it a spelling (say, &quot;goldt&quot;),&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and then make sure that it didn't collide with other morphemes (after all, you can add all kinds of suffixes to &quot;gild&quot;, and they all need to be spelled; that's trivial with &quot;gild&quot;, but not with &quot;goldt&quot;). Many of the inherited derivational systems are pure vowel alternation, like &quot;gild&quot;, but borrowed systems aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29799/23611&quot;&gt;sumelic's answer&lt;/a&gt; demonstrates, there are already plenty of examples where we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; apply morphological spelling to native words, and they work just fine on words even shorter than &quot;depth&quot;—like &quot;ads&quot; instead of &quot;adz&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it actually has much more to do with the most influential spelling standardizers and reformers thinking in terms of &lt;em&gt;etymology&lt;/em&gt;, than (consciously or otherwise) deciding between morphological or phonetic spelling. (In fact, it looks like that's exactly what Trask was talking about before this paragraph, since it starts with &quot;This habit of retaining French spellings…&quot;) To people who cared enough about spelling to want to force everyone else to do it their way, it was important that we be able to see the Greek, Latin, and French roots in our spelled words. That means using a spelling that closely matches the parent language in all derived forms. Sometimes our derived words pattern the same way as the parent language, so it ends up looking phonetic; sometimes, they pattern differently, so it ends up looking morphemic.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; The latter happens more often, but that's just because of the contingent fact that an originally-umlauting language was borrowing from a mainly-suffixing language rather than vice-versa.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; So, we ended up with morphemic spelling for most derivations of most borrowed words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. As sumelic points out, we could borrow the German umlaut diacritic, and spell &quot;gild&quot; as &quot;göld&quot;, even if that isn't actually how ¨ works in German or any of the other Germanic languages. But I don't think that would be substantially different from inventing a new silent suffix.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Of course it's possible that if things had been the other way around—say, if England had ended up speaking a French dialect with lots of Old English borrowed into it—that etymological spelling wouldn't have looked as attractive a few centuries later?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Also notice that, e.g., &quot;-ment&quot; is itself borrowed from French, while &quot;-th&quot; is not just native, but so old it's no longer productive. So, &quot;-th&quot; is much less likely to be applied to borrowed words than &quot;-ment&quot; is, so the idea of needing to preserve the etymology of &quot;depth&quot; is less likely to occur to anyone.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T00:42:28.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30359" CreationDate="2019-01-29T00:58:48.030" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation is that Proto-Indo-European did not have words with resolute initial *&lt;em&gt;tl,dl,dhl&lt;/em&gt;, and there were no sound changes that created such clusters in most of our dialects (there are dialects where &lt;em&gt;kl&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;tl&lt;/em&gt;, but they aren't well-known). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question is whether there is anything in the grammar of English that reflects this gap. It is also claimed (Clements &amp;amp; Keyser 1983) that English has a syllabification filter that prevents [tl,dl] in the onset – thus no words with initial &quot;tl,dl&quot;. Actually, there are some, sort of, taken from other languages. In a small handful of cases, we are presented with &quot;tl,dl&quot;, the best known example being Tlingit (the initial consonant is ɬ); other examples are Tlaxcala, Dlugos or Dlugosz, tlayuda. I believe that it is traditional Alaskan English to pronounce Tlingit as [klɪŋkɪt] (every traditional Alaskan that I know does so), but I believe that you have at least a 50% chance that other speakers of English would pronounce one of those tl-words with tl and not an epenthetic vowel or conversion to [kl]. I also suspect that this is because of Nahuatl influence, and does not apply equally to &quot;dl&quot;. By way of contrast, English speakers cannot handle initial [ŋ] as in Nguyen, nor initial [nd, nt, nk, ng, mb, mp] where a vowel is inserted (Nkomo → [ɪnkomo, nəkomo]). The &quot;can you say it?&quot; test is at best weak support for a synchronic syllabification constraint (since &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; speakers may pronounce Tlaxcala with [kl]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is better evidence that there is an active constraint against [tl] onsets in English. In words like &quot;atlas&quot;, /t/ is glottalized or even reduced to [ʔ], depending on dialect, following a rule that affects /t/ in syllable-final position. The syllabification [æt.ləs] is to be contrasted with [mæ.trəs] &quot;mattress&quot;, likewise &quot;gently&quot; versus &quot;gentry&quot;, with glottalization in the formwe and not the latter. The reason for the difference is that given an intervocalic consonant cluster in a stressed-unstressed frame, the longest possible sequence of consonants becomes an onset, so &lt;em&gt;tr&lt;/em&gt; becomes an onset. Under the hypothesis that [tl] is not an allowed syllable onset, we predict that only [l] can go in the onset of the syllable, and [t] must be relegated to the coda of the preceding syllable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T00:58:48.030" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30359" CreationDate="2019-01-29T05:54:26.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cited &lt;a href=&quot;http://gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/Images/Programs/Linguistics/Juliette%20Blevins/KL-TLchangeslity-13-2-267.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blevins and Grawunder (2009)&lt;/a&gt; in a recent answer (to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30289/are-tl-and-dl-rare-onsets-worldwide&quot;&gt;Are /tl/ and /dl/ rare onsets worldwide?&lt;/a&gt;), and I think that this source has some relevant things to say that I will summarize here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Diachronic absence seems &quot;accidental&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, in terms of history, Blevins and Grawunder say that Proto-Germanic lacked *tl and *dl onsets (p. 284). Proto-Indo-European had sequences of *t or *d + syllabic lateral (examples given: &quot;*dl.h1ghós ‘long’, *tl.-né-h2- ‘lift.present’ &quot;), but a vowel was inserted before syllabic resonants in Proto-Germanic. Blevins and Grawunder also mention the possibility of &quot;rare&quot; *tl onsets, &quot;as in *tl@-ro- ‘high’(Orel 1998: 214)&quot;  (p. 289). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be any particular historical change that we can identify as being responsible for the absence of onset /tl/ and /dl/ in inherited English vocabulary; e.g. I don't know of a class of native English words that used to have tl- or dl- which became something else through a sound change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, there is fairly clear evidence in Italic languages for various sound changes that got rid of tl or dl. This is only directly relevant to English in that a substantial portion of English vocabulary is borrowed from Latin or a descendant language; if Latin or French did have tl or dl onsets, they might have been introduced to English by such borrowings, but since they didn't, that couldn't have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Word-initial /tl/ in borrowings&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word-initial /tl/ does exist in a few Ancient Greek words/names, and my impression is that it may be used on the rare occasions when people pronounce these in English; e.g. the initial &quot;t&quot; in the name &lt;em&gt;Tlepolemus (Tlepolemos).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;user6726's answer mentions other languages that have served as recent sources of tl-initial words in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possible explanations for a synchronic rule&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of possible synchronic explanations, see page 287 (bold parts are summaries of information from that source, non-bold parts are my own commentary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blevins and Grawunder say that the Obligatory Contour Principle could play a role: this is where the idea of a dispreference of some kind for clusters of consonants with the same place of articulation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously not all such consonant clusters are prohibited in English, but I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30359/why-are-the-word-initial-consonant-clusters-tl-and-dl-absent-in-english/30365#comment65456_30364&quot;&gt;user6726's comment&lt;/a&gt; isn't particularly convincing as an argument against the relevance of this concept. The clusters sn- and st- start with s, which is known to show special behavior in combining unusually freely with a following consonant in English. The clusters dr and tr are indeed homorganic, so they seem more relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is a separate idea that /l/ in English is less sonorous than /r/, which could help explain why /tr/ and /dr/ onsets are allowed but /tl/ and /dl/ are not (Blevins and Grawunder cite Moreton 2002:&#xA;56–57 for this point).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sonority&quot; by itself doesn't seem to explain why we still see &lt;em&gt;pl, bl, kl, gl, fl&lt;/em&gt; clusters, though.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is perceptual similarity between /tl/ and /dl/ clusters and /kl/ and /gl/ clusters.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not super convinced by that last point: it seems a bit circular to me, since the perceptual confusion seen in studies of e.g. French and English speakers is certainly influenced by the phonotactics. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Word-medial /tl/ and /dl/&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, /tl/ and /dl/ do exist word-medially in English. Whether or not they are onsets depends on how you divide a word into syllables; unfortunately, there are a lot of different approaches to English syllabification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In native English vocabulary, word-medial /tl/ and /dl/ arises at morpheme boundaries; e.g. in suffixed words such as &lt;em&gt;wit-less, wet-ly, ghost-like&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;heed-less, friend-ly, child-like,&lt;/em&gt; or in compounds such as &lt;em&gt;land-lord, wet-land.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also words where these sequences have arisen from syncope of a vowel in a word-medial unstressed syllable. This syncope is optional in synchronically inflected forms of verbs that end in /əl/, such as &lt;em&gt;battling, settling, huddling.&lt;/em&gt; The word &lt;em&gt;butler&lt;/em&gt; is historically derived from syncope, but can only has /tl/ in modern pronunciation. The &quot;t&quot; in &quot;butler&quot; can be glottalized, which may imply the syllabification &quot;but.ler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Word-medial /tl/ in classical vocabulary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morpheme-internal intervocalic /tl/ is encountered in some words in the learned stratum of vocabulary that come from Greek. The example in user6726 's answer, &lt;em&gt;atlas,&lt;/em&gt; falls into this category. Because of issues relating to how stress interacts with syllabification, I think a more relevant set of words for a discussion of English onset constraints is &lt;em&gt;Atlantis, Atlantic, Atlanta&lt;/em&gt; (all stressed on the second syllable): as far as I know, no native English speaker pronounces these words/names with a tl- onset in the second syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might show a constraint against tl- as an onset, although it might just be accidental. English syllabification does not always maximize onsets, even before stressed vowels. For example, English clearly has pl- as an onset, but there may be speakers who use /p.l/ in the word &quot;haplology&quot;: the American Heritage Dictionary gives the syllabification &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=haplology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hap.lol.o.gy&lt;/a&gt;, although Merriam-Webster gives the syllabification &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/haplology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ha.plo.lo.gy&lt;/a&gt;. (The distinction between medial /.pl/ and /p.l/ would be realized phonetically in terms of greater aspiration, or greater devoicing of /l/, in /.pl/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T06:23:04.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T06:23:04.940" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30369" CreationDate="2019-01-29T10:54:03.687" Score="1" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I understood what complementary distribution and defective distribution mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a definition that complementary distribution is an automatic, i.e. obligatory positional variation of a certain phoneme that always occurs in a certain position. I'm not completely sure what defective distribution is though. I found that defective distribution is when a certain phoneme occurs only in some contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take for example that in English, word-initial stops are always aspirated: e.g. pin [pʰ] as opposed to spin [p],&#xA;then, would this be an example of complementary distribution or defective distribution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in thinking this is complementary distribution? It can't be defective distribution since aspirated stops don't occur &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; word-initially. They can also occur inside words, e.g. po&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;a&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;o.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T16:38:21.353" Title="Complementary distribution and defective distribution" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;compl-distribution&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30371" CreationDate="2019-01-29T15:12:11.010" Score="0" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is to be applied on any language; why do I find for instance two versions of the same word written in the same IPA symbols pronounced differently, in case of different accents for example. Or, two or more words with similar IPA, but the IPA in each is pronounced differently?&#xA;Isn't the IPA made to tell EXACTLY how a given sound is pronounced?&#xA;ex: This word in 'Cambridge' online dictionary:&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/solicit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/solicit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I'm still an absolute beginner in learning IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23734" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T22:25:14.383" Title="Why are two versions of a word written in the same IPA pronounced differently?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30367" CreationDate="2019-01-29T16:08:54.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA is not meant to tell you exactly how a word is pronounced. Each letter represents a range of pronunciations centered around an exemplar. To the extent that IPA subsumes the Jones cardinal vowel system and we have reference recordings of [e] versus [ɛ], we have a good idea what [se] should sound like, but there is still a lot of room for variation. However, something that is clearly [si] should not be written as [se]. In addition, transcriptions can omit details of pronunciation, so in English people rarely transcribe aspiration of /t/ in [tʰuθ], because it is predictable by rule. There are a number of diacritics that can be added to a transcription to create a narrow transcription, one that aims to give the phonetic details and not just the phonemic contrasts (as in the &quot;solicit&quot; example). Compare the minor &quot;actual pronunciation&quot; differences in &quot;solicit&quot; to the different-phoneme differences of &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bath&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bath&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T16:08:54.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30366" CreationDate="2019-01-29T16:38:21.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Complementary distribution is really mutual defective distribution of a set of sounds. You have complementary distribution if a sound does not appear in a specified environment X. If sound A appears everywhere but context X (defective distribution 1) and B only appears in context X (defective distribution 2), we say that A and B are in complementary distribution. (In your potato example, only the first &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; is aspirated: the distribution of aspiration is actually not in terms of word position, it's in terms of stress-foot position, but typically the intro linguistic story is that it's only about word-initial vs. elsewhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T16:38:21.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30367" CreationDate="2019-01-29T19:20:21.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are generally speaking two ways to transcribe an utterance using IPA, broad and narrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds that are predictable from their surrounding are not written down in broad transcription, this is the way dictionaries use the IPA. Another way to look at it is that broad transcriptions only write down the phonemes, they make no direct reference as to what specific allophone (the actual phonetic pronunciation of a phoneme) is to be used for any one phoneme. Phonemes are by their very nature abstract, so a non-native speaker probably won't pronounce a word correctly by looking at a broad transcription without having some knowledge of English phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Narrow transcription on the other hand do write down predictable information. For example broad transcription for the English word 'dart' would be /dɑːt/ for British English. Using a more narrow transcription for the same word would lead to: [dɑt], [dɑɹt], [dɑɻt], [dɑɻʈ], [dɑɹˤt̚], [daːt], [daːʔ]. These are only a small handful of phonetic realizations that you can hear throughout the British Isles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IPA is a great tool to distinguish between all the possible sounds that could contrast in human language, but even with the most narrow of narrow transcription, you're still not going to be able to capture the precise articulation of a speaker. There are too many infinitesimally small variations of even a single sound like [t], even in the same speaker. If you really wish to capture the acoustic output perfectly, you'll need to look at a spectrogram (which will also capture additional information such as the speaker's pitch, intonation, speech rate, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that the broad-narrow distinction is a continuum, not a dichotomy; you can almost always specify more information in a transcription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples taken from &lt;em&gt;A Critical Introduction to Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14860" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T19:20:21.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30367" CreationDate="2019-01-29T19:27:35.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason is that you're looking at &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; transcriptions. IPA can be used for both; the way you usually distinguish is that you use slashes for phonemes, brackets for phones.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; So your linked example, /səˈlɪs.ɪt/, is phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phoneme isn't a sound, it's an equivalence class of phones used by a particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the English phoneme /k/, as pronounced in &quot;kit&quot; /kɪt/ and &quot;skit&quot; /skɪt/. The first is an aspirated voiceless velar plosive, [k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;]; the second is an unaspirated voiceless velar plosive, [k]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are these considered the same phoneme? Technically, it's because there's no English pair of words that's distinguished by one having [k] and the other having [k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;]. But the intuition that the technical definition is trying to explain is pretty simple: Native English speakers don't even think of them as different sounds. It's hard to hear the difference unless you stop listening for speech and start listening for raw sound, and it's hard to pronounce [kɪt] instead of [k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;ɪt] even after you recognize the distinction.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in many other languages, like Hindi, they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; separate phonemes, because there are words that are distinguished by having /k/ vs. /[k&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;]/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is called &quot;allophony&quot;, and it's just one of the reasons the same phoneme can have two different sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accents are another reason the same phoneme can sound different. The usual dramatic example is John Lennon pronouncing &quot;bottle&quot;. All English accents allophonically vary /t/ intervocalically, but some Northern English accents vary it to [?], which to speakers of many other accents &quot;doesn't sound like a t&quot; or sometimes even &quot;doesn't even sound like a consonant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less obvious reasons include things like pitch. Some languages (e.g., Cantonese) have syllabic tones, which are usually considered part of the phonemic representation. But in most languages where pitch &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; mean tone, it means something else—something that varies across words, or phrases. For example, in English, questions are distinguished by rising tone in the last word, which affects the sounds exactly the same way Cantonese tones do, but isn't considered part of the phonemes.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course even a phone isn't a sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is most obvious from the fact that a person with a high-pitched version and a person with a low-pitched voice can both say /skɪt/, and they're both recognizably saying [skɪt], but they sound totally different.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Alternatively, depending on context, slashes are used for the broadest phonetic transcription and brackets for a narrower phonetic transcription. The details are different, but it's easier to explain the categorical difference and then ask you to extend it in the obvious way to the degree difference, than to explain the continuous degree difference first.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. For example, you may have to hold your hand in front of your mouth so you can feel the difference, until you can finally recognize what you're doing and control it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Famously, stereotypical girls of the previous generation used the same pitch contour even on many non-questions, which drove lots of older people to grumble about the kids today. Now those kids are grown up and grumbling about why their kids use vocal fry in all kinds of places it doesn't belong. It never takes much to get one generation to grumble about the next one's language.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. To understand how they can both be heard as saying [ɪ], you just need to learn about formants; it's not as complicated as you might expect.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T22:25:14.383" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T22:25:14.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T04:59:22.637" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my friends has started using the word 'vying' more and more these days. He did not know the word before a certain date and there was a clear event which caused him to &quot;acquire&quot; it into his lexicon. Is there a formal term for this phenomenon? What is it called when someone suddenly starts using a word? English is his first language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23753" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T16:56:10.037" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T16:56:10.037" Title="A term for the process of building a form which has never been used before" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T11:56:09.213" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the Hebrew letter 'daleth' originates from the word for 'door', indeed the Modern Hebrew word for door is 'dalet'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an Arabic word for door from this same root - d-l-t or d-l-th? Do we find it in the Qur'an or other Islamic literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T18:03:20.333" Title="Arabic word for door from root d-l-t or d-l-th" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T15:37:59.883" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;How relevant is WordNet (both the original Princeton's and all other WordNets) as a tool for researchers now, decades later? &#xA;Do researchers consider it valuable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does the general research community still actively work on improving individual WordNets (my faculty does)? Or do they consider it not worth the time? I mean, some WordNets have way more entries than others...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23752" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T15:37:59.883" Title="How relevant is WordNet nowadays?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;wordnet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T16:02:53.160" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Working on ASR models, I have encountered several datasets which have distributions where a small amount of speaker make a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; part of the actual dataset. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following image shows the extracted time spoken (log) per speaker from the Voxforge (de) dataset:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d38ET.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/d38ET.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extreme cases where the top 2% of speaker make up over 50% of the time spoken are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether, or how much, this may impact the model's performance. How important is it to balance the dataset and which factors are most important (age, gender, total time spoken, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23757" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T22:27:45.250" Title="How important is speaker-balance for speech recognition models?" Tags="&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30377" CreationDate="2019-01-30T18:03:20.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: I don't know of any, and haven't been able to find any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer answer: the Hebrew word is דלת (&lt;em&gt;d-l-th&lt;/em&gt;), pronounced &lt;em&gt;délet&lt;/em&gt; in Modern Hebrew. Strong derives it from a root דלה (&lt;em&gt;d-l-h&lt;/em&gt;) meaning &quot;to swing&quot;; Wiktionary doesn't link it to a root and instead says it goes back to Proto-Semitic *&lt;em&gt;dalt&lt;/em&gt; &quot;door&quot;. It seems to be cognate with Akkadian &lt;em&gt;daltu&lt;/em&gt; and Aramaic &lt;em&gt;dalthā&lt;/em&gt;, which means regardless of anything else it's probably inherited rather than loaned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic equivalent of Hebrew &lt;em&gt;d-l-th&lt;/em&gt; would be &lt;em&gt;d-l-t&lt;/em&gt;; Hebrew lost the Proto-Semitic &lt;code&gt;/θ/&lt;/code&gt; (merging it into &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt;) and then gained it back through a sound change called &quot;begadkefat spirantization&quot;. Arabic on the other hand kept almost all the original consonants and didn't do begadkefat spirantization. Long story short, a &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; in Hebrew (without exception?) corresponds to a &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I've never heard of an Arabic word with the consonants &lt;em&gt;d-l-t&lt;/em&gt;, and searching for دلت shows nothing relevant. If Strong is right, the root was actually &lt;em&gt;d-l-h&lt;/em&gt;, but a search for that shows nothing relevant either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I feel relatively confident in saying that this root did not survive in Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T18:03:20.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T19:47:45.733" Score="0" ViewCount="907" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working through Heim and Kratzer's 1998 textbook 'semantics in generative grammar' (Blackwell), which I understand is fairly standard for university level courses on semantics, but I can't find any solutions to the problem sets.  Does anyone know where I can find these? Alternatively, if there's some sort of online database where I could find solutions to problems like the ones I'm here encountering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here are a couple of the problems I could use some help with.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hk7NQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hk7NQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;problems&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23760" LastEditorUserId="23760" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T16:35:18.090" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T16:35:18.090" Title="Problem Set Solutions to 'Semantics in Generative Grammar' (Heim &amp; Kratzer)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T22:23:13.770" Score="4" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the French &quot;A-t-il soif ?&quot; there are several (inflected) lexemes (&quot;A&quot;, &quot;il&quot;, &quot;soif&quot;), and an empty morph &quot;t&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The morph &quot;t&quot; has no meaning which is why it's an empty morph; it's there purely for the purpose of euphony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is an empty morph such as &quot;t&quot; also considered a lexeme? If not, is there a super group that includes both morph(eme)s and lexemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T18:47:39.993" Title="Is an empty morph a lexeme?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-31T00:06:04.110" Score="0" ViewCount="893" Body="&lt;p&gt;What percent of languages have the same (primary) word for hello and goodbye?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware that this might be an ill-formed question, but I figured I'd throw it out there and refine/revise it with the help of the community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also not sure hot to tag this appropriately. Please advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23763" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T02:08:25.757" Title="Percent of languages with the same word for hello and goodbye" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30383" CreationDate="2019-01-31T00:18:49.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a theory-neutral term for the &quot;super group&quot; you're looking for—and I think the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; there isn't is that no such term would help the way you want it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pre-theoretically, I don't think there's a problem. Presumably French people just think they're putting the words &quot;a&quot;, &quot;t&quot;, and &quot;il&quot; together, right? It's only when you try to rigorously define what they mean in some theoretical framework that &quot;hold on, 't' has no semantics, so it can't be the same kind of thing as 'a'&quot; even comes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most definitions, morphemes are just the indecomposable parts of lexemes. But what are lexemes? That's the tricky part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In many theories, it's not a problem for lexical entries to have null semantics—&quot;it&quot; in &quot;it's raining&quot; is pleonastic, but still a lexeme, and there's no reason &quot;-t-&quot; in your example couldn't be the same. (Of course &quot;-t-&quot; is also the sole morpheme in that lexeme, but you don't need your super group here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other theories, lexemes have to have semantics, so what you actually have is a whole bunch of separate lexemes that have all have that &quot;-t-&quot; in the middle, which are &quot;produced in the lexicon&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes that just means that it's part of morphosyntax rather than phrase syntax, so there is clearly a &quot;-t-&quot; morpheme that all of those lexemes can be built from on the fly. So here, but really only here, your proposed super group would be useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In other versions (including the original sketch by Chomsky), if &quot;-t-&quot; isn't in the lexicon, it isn't being used by morphosyntax. There is no such thing as a &quot;-t-&quot; morpheme,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; or any &quot;-t-&quot; thing anywhere in the language, so no super group could help here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many theories that reject &quot;-t-&quot; as a lexeme aren't doing so because it has no semantics, but because (they claim) it has no independent existence.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a Steven Pinker-inspired &quot;words vs. rules&quot; treatment, what you have is a euphony rule—which lives in your &quot;rules engine database&quot;, not your &quot;lexicon&quot;—that inserts the /t/ phoneme without having to grab anything out of the lexicon. There is no &quot;-t-&quot; lexeme, and no &quot;-t-&quot; morpheme, anywhere in the language. I don't know of a good word for &quot;phoneme clusters embedded in rules&quot;, but they're definitely not morphemes, and there's no supergroup that will include them and lexemes together.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a constructional approach, instead of a &quot;euphony rule&quot; stored in a separate rules engine, you have a construction (or family of constructions) stored in the lexicon, right alongside the words. For example, in Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, there's no lexeme &quot;-t-&quot;, but there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a lexical entry we can call &quot;euphonic α-t-β&quot;, a construction which includes phonological and syntactic information and interface constraints&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; but nothing semantic&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;. Could you call &quot;-t-&quot; a morpheme in their treatment? Maybe,&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; but even if you can, I think it misleads more than it helps to try to talk about morphemes and simple lexical entries as a group, rather than constructional and simple lexical entries as a group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably other theoretical approaches to morphosyntax that I haven't covered here, but that should be enough to explain why there's probably no term that applies to all of them that gives you what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. I'm taking your analysis for granted here. I think if pressed, most people who supported this kind of theory would insist that there must actually be some semantics for &quot;-t-&quot; so it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be a lexeme, to avoid this conclusion.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Of course you could still call &quot;-t-&quot; a morpheme in the diachronic history of each of the separate lexemes that uses it. But it isn't a morpheme in the language as a language, so that's more misleading than helpful. And the same goes for some of the other treatments below, including the next one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Although they may use the fact that it has no semantics to &lt;em&gt;argue&lt;/em&gt; that it must not be an independent lexeme, that's at the metatheoretical level.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. There's the /t/ sound, probably some prosody information, the linear ordering, both euphonic and morphosyntactic constraints on what can be inserted in the two variable slots…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. This is badly oversimplified, more like Culicover's earlier treatment than like actual PA, but it gets the idea across.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. Any good instantiation of their system (which hopefully includes the human brain) is surely going to use (both regular and quasiregular) commonalities to optimize storage and lookup of different constructions that, e.g., all stick a /t/ in the middle. So there &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be a generic &quot;-t-&quot; that &quot;euphonic α-t-β&quot; inherits from, which you could easily call &quot;the '-t-' morpheme&quot;. But there could just as well be some kind of implicit associative analogy storage that doesn't have anything you could point to as &quot;the '-t-' morpheme&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T00:32:38.743" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T00:32:38.743" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30384" CreationDate="2019-01-31T02:08:25.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a raw percentage of all existing languages, maybe you can just throw out all the major languages. Out of the thousands of languages in the world, the majority are spoken by one tribe and only internally to that tribe, and most of them may have clear answers to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But assuming that isn't interesting to you, I think most of the major languages have at least one arguable &quot;hello/goodbye&quot; word—those that didn't invent one have usually borrowed or calqued at least one of &quot;hey/hej&quot;, &quot;ahoy&quot;, &quot;ciao&quot;, &quot;shlamah/shalom/salaam&quot;, &quot;servus&quot;, &quot;salveo&quot;, &quot;good day/g'day/goddag&quot;, &quot;aloha&quot;, etc., and use them both ways even when the source language didn't. But it's really impossible to decide which way to count each language without making a bunch of arbitrary choices. And, after doing so, the count just tells you about the arbitrary choices you made, not anything interesting about languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, is &quot;hello&quot; really the primary English word for &quot;hello&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;hi&quot; is used a lot more. And &quot;hello&quot; is certainly not etymologically or historically primary.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The only reason to think of it as &quot;primary&quot; is that it tends to be the first greeting L2 learners are taught—but that's because it's the most &quot;safe&quot; word to use across formality and other situational factors, not because it's the word most people usually use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many other languages have the same issue. For example, look up &quot;hello&quot; in an English-Danish dictionary and it'll say &quot;hallo&quot;, but you mainly only hear that word as a phone greeting. I think most commonly, people use &quot;hej&quot; in informal situations, and &quot;god dag&quot; in formal situations, and they just don't have a neutral word for all situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dialects are also a huge issue. Probably &quot;g'day&quot; is primary in Australian English, as opposed to &quot;hi&quot; in American English. So, which of those is &quot;primary in English&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's not peculiar to English. Greeting words seem to vary between dialects (and sociolects) more than almost anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not even entirely clear which words can mean both &quot;hello&quot; and &quot;goodbye&quot;. For English &quot;hello&quot; or Hawaiian &quot;aloha&quot;, it's pretty obvious. But what about Australian English &quot;g'day&quot;, Danish &quot;god dag&quot;, or Arabic &quot;Salaam&quot;? They're all words that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;goodbye&quot;, but are used more often for &quot;hello&quot;, and, out of context, imply &quot;hello&quot;. Are they &quot;hello/goodbye&quot; words or not? What rule would you use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some languages distinguish between different kinds of greetings—the one you use when being introduced to someone can't be used when you run into an acquaintance, etc. So, are those not even &quot;hello&quot; words, or do you just have to match &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the uses of &quot;hello&quot; and &quot;goodbye&quot; to count, or &lt;em&gt;some specific use&lt;/em&gt;, or…?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course these complications all interact with each other. In some Upper German dialects, &quot;tschau&quot; is very common as a greeting, but rare as a farewell; in eastern dialects of SHG, it's only a farewell. And in Central European languages, I can never remember from town to town whether &quot;servus&quot; is just &quot;hello&quot; or both, whether it's highly informal or stuffy for anyone under 70, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I don't think this is even just a modern problem. For example, Hebrew and Arabic both apparently borrowed from Aramaic the idea of using their &quot;shlamah&quot; (&quot;peace&quot;) cognates as a greeting, but Hebrew ended up using it freely as &quot;hello&quot; and &quot;goodbye&quot; and Arabic primarily just as &quot;hello&quot;. And of course &quot;shalom&quot; and &quot;salaam&quot; didn't enter an empty niche in the languages, they had to compete with other greetings. And things were different from dialect to dialect. Just like today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. It was a coinage for various specialized greetings in the 19th century and only became a generic greeting word later—I'm guessing after the telephone use took off.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T02:08:25.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3167" CreationDate="2019-01-31T10:34:35.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I built a sentence segmenter that works excellently on unpunctuated or partially punctuated text too. You can find it at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bedapudi6788/deepsegment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bedapudi6788/deepsegment&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This models is based on the idea that Named Entity Recognition can be used for sentence boundary (i.e: beginning of a sentence or ending of a sentence). I utilised data from tatoeba for generating the training data and trained a   BiLSTM+CRF model with glove embeddings and character level for this task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23767" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T10:34:35.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30383" CreationDate="2019-01-31T10:58:35.953" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatical Particle&lt;/a&gt; and for sake of the argument assume a rather broad meaning for grammatik (ie. &lt;em&gt;that which is well said or written&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one sense it's a &lt;strong&gt;clitic&lt;/strong&gt; like the &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;it's raining&quot;, if you admit that &quot;it raining&quot; is well meaningfull and understandable, though the grammar be needing some getting used to. At least it's a Noun Phrase though the grammatical status of participles as verbs or nouns is indecicive. Surely the sound is rather important here, it just flows better with a hiss. You don't want a glottal stop or worse a cluster &quot;training&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it's a, umm, a filler, of course, like &quot;of course&quot;. One cannot argue whether it's of semantical importance when the semantics are rather low level, like signaling group identification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T11:29:40.113" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T11:29:40.113" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30403" CreationDate="2019-01-31T11:16:44.883" Score="5" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; has the &lt;strong&gt;neuter gender&lt;/strong&gt; disappeared from almost all the modern Roman languages? It was completely common in Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; exactly did this happen? Did it happen in Latin itself, or only after Latin split into multiple languages and the phenomenon occurred in each of the languages separately and independently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastEditorUserId="3475" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T12:50:13.653" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T20:01:41.150" Title="Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Roman languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;gender&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29963" CreationDate="2019-01-31T11:50:19.820" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As regards my proposal that Hurro-Urartian is a heretofore unrecognized branch of the IEan family, I would say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that my theory is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that my joint draft with Bomhard is somehow insufficient and needs to be both updated and given more muscle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently still working on Hurrian, and a new comprehensive etymological dictionary of Hurrian should appear soon (before end 2019).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've submitted a new paper on this issue of the relationship between PIE and Hurrian, and we'll see how the Academic world reacts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hurrian contains some comparanda with NE Caucasic, but I think the primary connection is with IEan languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T21:48:24.423" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T21:48:24.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30391" CreationDate="2019-01-31T12:01:25.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neuter in Latin differed from Masculine only for Nominative and Accusative cases.&#xA;When case-endings began to collapse in early Proto-Romance, Neuter singular was reassigned to masculine and some Neuter plural ending in -a became feminine singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T12:01:25.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25522" CreationDate="2019-01-31T12:21:31.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases, Tocharian has provided new insights.&#xA;For example, it has long been held that the word &quot;sheep&quot; was **H3owi-, but Tocharian showed *H2owi- is better, as it must derive from *awi not *owi.&#xA;But, on the whole, I would say that Tocharian is not an easy IEan language to handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T12:21:31.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30435" CreationDate="2019-01-31T12:36:15.663" Score="1" ViewCount="1042" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone said that there is a sound beginning [z], turning into [s] at the end of words like &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe, this is just a recommendation on how to pronounce English consonants correctly, but if it is not only, then how is this process called in phonetics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T01:09:28.843" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T02:13:19.403" Title="Cause: [z] --&gt; [s] at the end" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30399" CreationDate="2019-01-31T15:30:32.893" Score="9" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, what the etymology of Latin infinitive verb endings &lt;em&gt;-are&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ire&lt;/em&gt; was. I assume they are Indo-European, but I haven't found any information about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T16:21:48.987" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T17:15:45.027" Title="Etymology of Latin infinitive verb endings" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29525" CreationDate="2019-01-31T16:15:11.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it was mentioned in the comments, you have already given an answer. But let us make it more obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian &lt;em&gt;чары&lt;/em&gt; has a convincing Proto-Slavic reconstruction *čarъ (this word has many Slavic cognates) and also seems to have the same root as Avestan &lt;em&gt;kǝrǝnaoiti&lt;/em&gt; 'means', Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;kẽras&lt;/em&gt; 'magic', etc. (&lt;em&gt;Чары&lt;/em&gt; 'charm' was taken as a means of reaching one's aim.) So, there should have been something like *kʷēr-: *kʷer- in PIE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;charm&lt;/em&gt; is derived eventually from Latin &lt;em&gt;canere&lt;/em&gt; 'to sing' ('with dissimilation of -n- to -r- before -m- in intermediate form *canmen (for a similar evolution, see Latin germen &quot;germ,&quot; from *genmen),' www.etymonline.com), which does not correspond to PIE *kʷēr-: *kʷer-, look: there are IE cognates such as Greek &lt;em&gt;ήι-κανός&lt;/em&gt; 'cock' (it &lt;strong&gt;sings&lt;/strong&gt; early in the morning), Breton &lt;em&gt;cana&lt;/em&gt; 'to sing' (it is easy to see that there is no /r/), etc. which give us grounds to reconstruct something like *k(h₂)n-e- in PIE. The precise reconstruction is not important as much as the fact that it includes no /r/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there are no 'great similarities in sound and meaning' between &lt;em&gt;charm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;чары&lt;/em&gt; as you probably can see. These words do not share the same root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T10:26:16.683" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T10:26:16.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30397" CreationDate="2019-01-31T17:15:45.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin infinitive verb endings -are, -ere and -ire can be analyzed as the thematic vowels of the verbs -a-, -e- and -i- plus -re &amp;lt; *-s-e(y), with rhotacism r &amp;lt; s.&#xA;The same morpheme *-s- exists in Greek -ein &amp;lt; *e-s-en with intervocalic loss of s.&#xA;You should find more detailed information in manuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T17:15:45.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30395" CreationDate="2019-01-31T17:46:32.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; is really a good example for the process, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English usually keeps final voicing and it is a phonemic distinction in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is more probably that the s becomes voiced in word forms like &lt;em&gt;causes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;causing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;caused&lt;/em&gt; (again, for English). Intervocalic s often becomes voiced in modern English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the process is called &lt;em&gt;final devoicing&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Auslautverhärtung&lt;/em&gt; and it is frequently seen in many languages. German shows it (but not orthographically), Turkish shows it (also in orthography), many other languages have it. Just English isn't among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T17:46:32.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30404" CreationDate="2019-01-31T18:14:09.837" Score="3" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why and how did Italian lose the final s consonant in words,while some romance languages like spanish and portuguese retained it?(e.g. spanish &quot;pues&quot; and italian &quot;poi&quot;).Is this phenomenon related to the loss of final consonants in french?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T21:28:16.523" Title="Loss of final s in Italian" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30383" CreationDate="2019-01-31T18:29:16.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Morphemes are subdivised into lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only lexical morphemes are considered lexemes. It is not a question about meaning or not. Grammatical morphemes have meaning but they are not lexemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of a morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit. So we should ask ourself if a empty morpheme, which doesn't have meaning, is really a morpheme or an epenthesis instead, especially if there is only one phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of French &quot;t&quot; appearing in the third person of interrogative sentences, it can be analysed as an epenthesis phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean that an epenthesis is the same as an empty morpheme. They are two different concepts. But sometimes in some writings what can be viewed as an epenthesis is described as an empty morpheme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some empty morphemes cannot be regarded an epenthesis, because several phonemes are part of the empty morpheme. Moreover, it shouldn't be categorised as a full morpheme though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T18:47:39.993" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T18:47:39.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30391" CreationDate="2019-01-31T18:55:02.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that even in Latin, we see some variability in the declension of words as neuter or masculine. Sometimes the use of the masculine where neuter would be expected is attributed to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=G-sfAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA421&amp;amp;lpg=PA421&amp;amp;dq=Latin+neuter+masculine+personification&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personification&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. So the fall of the neuter seems to have been a long and at least somewhat gradual process. I will update this post if I find more detailed information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some reasons to think of the neuter gender in Latin as being less robustly distinguished formally and semantically than the masculine and feminine genders, although this might just be hindsight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would guess that form was more important than semantics, since in some Germanic languages we can see a different tendency to go from three to two genders by merging the former masculine and feminine into a &amp;quot;common&amp;quot; gender and maintaining a distinction between &amp;quot;common&amp;quot; and neuter gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The neuter as a distinct form (and its loss)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Arnaud Fournet said, neuter gender nouns in Latin were in most grammatical cases declined the same way as masculine nouns. The neuter-masculine distinction was made in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) the nominative and accusative plural, where neuters had a characteristic &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; ending. Because &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; was also used as a feminine singular ending, Latin neuter plurals in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; could end up as feminine nouns in Romance languages, as mentioned in Fournet's answer. I know of two ways this happened. As Fournet said, neuter plural nouns ending in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; could be reinterpreted as feminine singular nouns. Additionally, there is still a remnant of &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; as a plural ending in some Romance languages, such as Italian; the examples given on &lt;a href=&quot;https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/us/italian-easy-learning/making-nouns-plural&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; are &lt;em&gt;il dito, il uovo, il lenzuolo&lt;/em&gt; with the plurals &lt;em&gt;le dita, le uova, le lenzuola&lt;/em&gt;. You can see that plural &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; nouns in Italian take feminine plural agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) the nominative singular, where masculine nouns mostly ended in &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; while neuter nouns mostly did not. In most Romance languages, Latin nominative singular forms were either mostly lost or heavily remodeled in a way that caused the distinction between masculine and neuter nominative singular nouns to become less relevant. Sound changes like the loss of word-final &lt;em&gt;-m,&lt;/em&gt; or often of &lt;em&gt;-s,&lt;/em&gt; and the addition or loss of word-final &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; after consonants played a role here. There are a few Romance languages that have a distinction between &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt;-final words, but their distribution is different from that of Latin masculine and neuter nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) the accusative singular for a few kinds of words, such as third-declension nouns ending in &lt;em&gt;-alem&lt;/em&gt; m. vs. &lt;em&gt;-ale&lt;/em&gt; n. But with the loss of word-final &lt;em&gt;-m,&lt;/em&gt; those forms would have merged as &lt;em&gt;-ale.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the accusative singular of &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;-stems, a very common category of masculine or neuter nouns, the masculine and neuter forms were identical already in Classical Latin, both ending in &lt;em&gt;-um.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The semantics of the neuter overlapped substantially with the other two genders&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The masculine and feminine genders in Latin both had clear semantic &amp;quot;cores&amp;quot; of male and female animates, respectively. While many nouns were masculine and feminine without belonging to these semantic categories, the association was productive and has been maintained to the present day in Romance languages with gender (we can see the continued relevance of semantics to gender assignation most clearly when dealing with gender agreement for proper names or pronouns that refer to human beings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neuter gender, in contrast, wasn't associated with any one particular semantic domain. It included some, but by no means all, nouns that were neither semantically male nor female. The lack of a clear distinction in meaning corresponding to the distinction in form between masculine and neuter nouns may have contributed to the eventual loss of the neuter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Romance languages with an &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; distinction that I mentioned above, words fall into one category or the other not on the basis of their gender in Latin, but rather based on semantic criteria, like being a mass noun vs. a count noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T20:01:41.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30401" CreationDate="2019-01-31T19:00:49.697" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian did not lose the final &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;: it turned it into a [j] (what English speakers call &quot;the y sound&quot;). So for example, the Latin word &lt;em&gt;post&lt;/em&gt; lost the final &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in proto-Romance, becoming **pos*, that became &lt;em&gt;pues&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish, &lt;em&gt;poi&lt;/em&gt; in Italian and &lt;em&gt;puis&lt;/em&gt; in French, all quite regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is less apparent due to the subsequent reduction of diphtongs (e.g. unstressed [aj] becoming [e]), but it is still visible, if you know where to look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of this process are all across the Italian lexicon: you can see it in the plurals: &lt;em&gt;canes&lt;/em&gt; &gt; **canei* &gt; &lt;em&gt;cani&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;capras&lt;/em&gt; &gt; **capraj* &gt; &lt;em&gt;capre&lt;/em&gt; (although this was likely influenced by the nominative plural of the second declension). You can also see it, maybe less evidently, in the second personal singular ending of verbs: &lt;em&gt;sedes&lt;/em&gt; &gt; **sedej* &gt; &lt;em&gt;siedi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;amas&lt;/em&gt; &gt; **amaj* &gt; &lt;em&gt;ame&lt;/em&gt; (that got later regularized into &lt;em&gt;ami&lt;/em&gt;). However compare with &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;dai&lt;/em&gt;: the stressed diphtong has been preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, this has nothing to do with the loss of final consonants in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source:&lt;/em&gt; Maiden, M. (2014). &lt;em&gt;Linguistic History of Italian&lt;/em&gt;, A. Routledge, section 2.12&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastEditorUserId="20335" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T21:28:16.523" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T21:28:16.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26845" CreationDate="2019-01-31T23:14:49.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we just restrict considering to the vocabulary, the cause of the discrepancy between the source and the source translated to a target then bak to the source is from two three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words have many meanings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even if context could choose the correct meaning out of many, enough context isn't always specified in the source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the first problem, it's easy to see that on the translation from source to target, there are many possibilities, but then from those many possibilities back to the source language, there are that many more possibilities increasing the likelihood of missing the original. The second problem prevent limiting the possibilities to one in each translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we include now add syntax to the context, it may reduce the possibilities, but in some sense a syntactic pattern (like an implication or tense/aspect) in one language doesn't always translate exactly to that in another, so it is almost like a polysemic vacabulry item itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T23:14:49.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30432" CreationDate="2019-02-01T14:42:18.737" Score="4" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some years ago I had read an interesting article about how much information chinese people could put in one tweet of 140 characters. But I cannot find again this article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in having numbers to compare how much more information can be encoded with fewer signs/characters, like in Chinese, and Korean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know of a thorough study (maybe statistics?), or in which direction should I search: Is there a field in semantics that goes in this direction ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. in Chinese: 6 sinograms &lt;code&gt;中囯大, 日本小&lt;/code&gt; can encode the same information as 22 latin letters in English &lt;code&gt;China is big, Japan is small&lt;/code&gt; or even 31 in French &lt;code&gt;La Chine est grande, le Japon est petit&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to search things about &quot;Semantics Density in Chinese&quot; on google, but search results were not obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in Korean, because the accumulation/contraction of syllables to make words/signs feels similar in the end to a ready-made chinese sinogram (it's my feeling, I have only learned some &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; limited beginner notions of Korean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like these numbers so as to illustrate the interest of a computer programming language based on signs and symbols, so as to convey as much information as possible for the reader/programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T18:33:06.403" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T16:22:00.577" Title="Density of information/semantic of Chinese and Korean language versus european languages" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T23:36:05.643" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can manipulate lightning, mist, and wind; traffic with air creatures; and are resistant to electricity damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks at first glance like a perfectly normal conjunction. It reads a bit clunky, but we have no problem understanding the meaning. We have three verb phrases (whether VP, vP, IP/TP… I don't think it matters here, but I could be wrong) being conjoined with an &quot;and&quot; complementing the auxiliary in the same way a single one of them could be. But the third VP &lt;em&gt;couldn't&lt;/em&gt; be a complement of &quot;can&quot;. You can come up with similar examples with NP or PP complements, or complements of P instead of V, etc.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that students are routinely given tests like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/en/quiz/jeu-quiz-parallel-structure-eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; implies that even noticing that something is wrong isn't automatic for native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's flatly ungrammatical. People produce these sentences because kids today are stupid and lazy and don't speak proper English.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; And if you think you understand them, well, if you were properly educated, you'd properly fail to understand them. I think this answer is obviously wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's like syllepsis. According to some definitions, this actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; syllepsis (and/or zeugma),&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; but as far as I know, theoretical treatments that explain syllepsis use definitions that don't fit this example.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; But maybe one of those explanations can be broadened to cover all cases of failed parallelism? Something like this: the sentence &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; ungrammatical, but we don't &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt; that until we've already parsed and mostly understood the sentence (or produced it aloud or in writing), at which point all that judgment can do is add the feeling of clunkiness. The problem is that this way seems to contradict how grammar is supposed to work in most theories.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Not noticing that your parse required the same verb to be used in two different senses is one thing; not noticing that you couldn't even parse the sentence is very different.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is really a nested coordination: a list of two predicates, one of which is itself a list of two things you can do: [You [[can [manipulate…, traffic…]] and [are resistant…]]]. That certainly parses, and makes sense. And you can even explain why it's clunky: there's a null conjunction on the inner coordination (which is legal but often awkward or ambiguous), and the prosody (in speech) or punctuation (in writing) is misleading.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; The problem with this interpretation is that I don't think it's what people are actually thinking when they produce and process these sentences; I think we interpret it as a list of three things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The list isn't really the complement to &quot;can&quot;, it's a level above that. The actual parse is something like [You [[can manipulate…]; [_ traffic…]; and [are resistant…]]], where the &quot;can&quot; fills the gap in the second coordinate, and there is no gap to fill in the third one, and that's fine.&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; This works, but feels fishy for some reason I can't put my finger on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's ungrammatical, but we routinely repair ungrammatical utterances into grammatical sentences, and don't consciously notice it in many cases. Which is fine, but… what's the grammatical sentence we repair this into? (And, if the answer is the one from (3) or (4), why do we even need to evoke repair here?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time coming up with examples that would rule out possibilities 3 and 4, but it seems like they probably exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe there's a better explanation than any of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. I opened up a stack of textbooks and RPG manuals to random pages and quickly found multiple examples. I chose this one because it's obviously not a part-of-speech problem: &quot;are resistant to electricity damage&quot; is a VP/IP/TP, just not one that can come after the auxiliary &quot;can&quot;, and removing the tense doesn't &quot;correct&quot; it, but instead ruins the meaning. Unfortunately, I stupidly didn't take notes on where the examples came from—but on further searching, I think I've found it. Almost exactly this sentence appears in the Pathfinder core rules PDF (page 41), but with commas instead of semicolons. So I presumably got it from the printed book with the same rules (different revision, so maybe they changed the punctuation at some point to match house style guides). Anyway, the sentence is describing the &quot;granted powers&quot; of clerics who specialize in air, and it clearly means that the cleric &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; resistant to electricity, not that he might be, or can choose to be, or anything like that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. And if it's even more common in professional formal writing than colloquial speech, well, professional writers must be stupid kids too. And if most copy editors don't correct it, they all need to be fired. And if it's been common for centuries, we need to get Doctor Who off the air so kids today can't use time machines to ruin our language retroactively.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Most dictionaries say they're synonyms, but most usage guides, etc. disagree—and then give completely contradictory distinctions. &quot;Syllepsis is semantic, zeugma is syntactic&quot; and &quot;syllepsis is grammatical, zeugma is logical&quot; are nearly opposites. And then there's the Oxford guide and their literary dictionary, which say that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; parallel coordination is zeugma, and syllepsis is zeugma gone wrong, with a part-of-speech mismatch. The last does seem to be what Johnson meant by &quot;zeugma&quot;, but nobody but Oxford seems to use it that way in the 20th century and beyond. Anyway, I don't want to get into that discussion here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. In particular, I mean explanations for the pun-like cases where you use a different sense of the same governing verb, or cases like Thurber's &quot;I was losing weight, my grip, and my mind&quot;. One explanation is that these problems don't come up during parsing, only during later stages of… whatever happens in semantics, or maybe even after. So we understand the sentence, then notice that the incongruity, which makes the sentence strikes us as funny or powerful (or, when poorly done, clunky). That explanation doesn't immediately seem to work for &quot;You can are resistant to electrical damage&quot;, which is just flat-out ungrammatical, not grammatical-but-requiring-a-conflicting-reading.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. Not just Chomskyan theories. (In fact, they can just say this is a performance rather than competence problem, or that whatever's going on here is part of the periphery, not the core…) It's just as bad for constraint PSGs, CxGs, etc. Any theory that says that we understand sentences by building (or unifying) a parse tree is going to have trouble explaining how we can understand this sentence even though you can't build a valid tree for it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. The processing-cost factor of holding both the outer and inner sub-trees in your head until you get to the end of the sentence and can finally disambiguate things could also contribute to clunkiness.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;7. Possibly not using a gap when you have something in position to fill the gap is legal but marked, which is part of what makes this clunky?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T04:23:48.133" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T07:59:41.773" Title="Parallel coordination failures" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30408" CreationDate="2019-02-02T00:44:09.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a study on the question you're asking, but I do have some information to add—and possibly a better way to approach the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem&quot;&gt;X in your XY problem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's look at your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in Chinese: 6 sinograms &lt;code&gt;中囯大, 日本小&lt;/code&gt; can encode the same information as 22 latin letters in English &lt;code&gt;China is big, Japan is small&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of sinograms in an average literate Chinese native is somewhere in the ballpark of 8000, while English only has 26 letters (plus a few symbols, in both cases, but let's ignore symbols and spaces, as you already have). This means that, in information theoretic terms, each sinogram represents about 13.0 bits, each letter about 4.7. So we're really talking about 78 bits vs. 103 bits here, which is not nearly as dramatic as 6 vs. 22 characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the total information is important to production and processing costs. You can see this in other ways, too—the sinograms have much more relevant visual detail; it's presumably more costly to distinguish &quot;大&quot; from &quot;小&quot; than &quot;g&quot; from &quot;l&quot;. This also means that people often double-width characters and/or larger fonts for reading Chinese on the screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Chinese writing tends to be more ambiguous than Latin writing. Partly this is inherent to the way Chinese writing is used,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; But also, there aren't enough sinograms in common use to avoid homographs and other forms of ambiguity as much as English orthography does. For example, &quot;中国大&quot; can also mean &quot;Chinese University&quot;, while the English string &quot;China is big&quot; obviously can't. This is presumably not an accident: Chinese writing strikes a pretty good balance for writing Chinese (and Japanese and Korean), but the same balance probably isn't right for a programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think your intuition may be misleading you here. It's still worth looking for research into the information density of the two orthographies (which, again, I don't have), but I don't know that it will tell you as much as you think it will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, since your actual goal is to produce a &quot;computer programming language based on signs and symbols&quot;, you may be better off looking at programming languages in the first place, instead of trying to draw analogies with natural languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting close to where you're already looking, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_BASIC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese BASIC&lt;/a&gt;, a family of variants of Applesoft BASIC using Chinese instead of English characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Applesoft BASIC, each BASIC keyword is stored in-memory as a single-byte token, but displayed, and entered, as a word like &quot;PRINT&quot; or &quot;INPUT&quot;. Variables can be as many letters as you want, but only the first two characters are significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese BASIC, each keyword is displayed and entered as a single sinogram like &quot;印&quot; or &quot;入&quot;. That obviously takes a lot less room on the screen than 5 letters, and is arguably easier to process. And, while you only have a few hundred sinograms for variable names, you can still pack in a lot more useful information than 2 letters can—especially since there are good variable names beginning with most of those sinograms, but not many good variable names beginning with, say, &quot;QX&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is purely anecdotal, but as a kid who didn't even speak Chinese, I flipped my Acer switchable Apple ][ clone over to the Chinese ROM quite often. In part that was about saving keystrokes,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; but being able to find a character that looked like what it meant while only taking up less valuable real estate (remember, this was a 40x24 screen) was also definitely part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think you'll find more research around Ken Iverson's language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APL added custom symbols for operators and functions. This allowed people to use actual mathematical symbols like &lt;code&gt;÷&lt;/code&gt; instead of having to map them to whatever's lying around in ASCII, but it also allowed a much larger number of operators and functions to be written as a single symbol. And adding the idea of &quot;inflections&quot; (which roughly parallel written Japanese verbs, written with a kanji root followed by zero or more kana) allows a huge number of things to be written with just a couple of symbols. For example, things that would take a nested for loop in FORTRAN may just take an extra &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; character in APL. The Wikipedia article has some good examples (picking 6 lottery numbers with &lt;code&gt;x[⍋x←6?40]&lt;/code&gt;, finding primes in quadratic time with &lt;code&gt;(~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓ιR&lt;/code&gt;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APL was mainly about array processing. Another way to make languages terser comes from functional programming. John Backus's language &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP_(programming_language)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FP&lt;/a&gt; had similar single-symbol, non-ASCII operators for composing functions, lifting functions, etc., allowing what in modern terms is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point-free&lt;/a&gt; style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this terseness has costs in comprehensibility, not just benefits. But let's pretend it's pure benefit. How much of that benefit comes from the extra symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A later language by Iverson (and Roger Hui), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J&lt;/a&gt;, merges APL and FP into a single language, giving you array-processing and functional conciseness and convenience in a single language. But J dropped APL's symbols. The most common operators and functions are a single ASCII character, but the rest are two characters. To make this work, they added a lot more inflections. Adding &lt;code&gt;/&lt;/code&gt; to any symbol still means to fold that symbol's function, but you can also add, e.g., &lt;code&gt;:&lt;/code&gt;, with a meaning that extends the symbol in a way that's only quasi-regular. (For example, &lt;code&gt;=:&lt;/code&gt; turns equality into assignment, while &lt;code&gt;/:&lt;/code&gt; turns folding into sorting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how much research went into making this decision. I don't even know why it was made—whether Iverson believes J is easier to comprehend, or that it's a bit harder but still a good tradeoff (so much easier to input, transmit over ASCII channels, typeset for printing, etc.). But there's probably a lot of information out there if you search for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. It's why the same string can represent a Mandarin sentence, a Cantonese sentence, and even almost a Japanese sentence (it's missing particles and inflection, but a Japanese reader could easily get &quot;China big, Japan small&quot; out of that).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Computers like the Sinclair ZX81 and calculators like the HP 48S let you enter a full keyword with two keystrokes. The Apple ][ made you type all five letters and a space, but in Chinese mode, you could enter &quot;印&quot; as two keystrokes (using the Canjie input method), just like a Sinclair or HP.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T23:20:01.970" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T23:20:01.970" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30416" CreationDate="2019-02-02T04:06:24.140" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a language can have several words for the same notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long such a situation can last?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it good for a language to have it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should language bearers and linguists do something about it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a context I describe an example which inspired me to ask this question. In Ukrainian, we have two words for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rose&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;троянда&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;роза&lt;/em&gt;. They both point to the same flower. &lt;em&gt;Роза&lt;/em&gt; has additional meanings, but in case you want to name this flower, they are totally interchangeable, using any of them doesn't bring any additional meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23784" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T15:27:50.683" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T15:27:50.683" Title="How long in a language several words for the same notion can coexist?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30415" CreationDate="2019-02-02T04:32:51.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every language is chock full of synonyms—hundreds or thousands of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, those synonyms have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; difference. They might:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… have slightly different connotations (usually &quot;baby&quot; includes toddlers, but &quot;infant&quot; doesn't),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… be usable in different sets of constructions (compare &quot;eat&quot; and &quot;consume&quot;—only the latter requires an object), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… be in different registers (compare &quot;hello&quot; and &quot;hi&quot;), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… differ only in euphony (one sounds better next to certain words but worse next to others),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… differ only when speaking across dialects (to an English speaker whose dialect has both &quot;eggplant&quot; and &quot;aubergine&quot;, they're identical—but having both lets you talk to someone from Los Angeles who only knows &quot;eggplant&quot; and to someone from London who only knows &quot;aubergine&quot;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;… etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they're still clearly &quot;words for the same notion&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How long such a situation can last?&lt;/em&gt; Well, not quite &lt;em&gt;forever&lt;/em&gt;, because no word lasts forever with the same meaning. Eventually one of the two synonyms will probably shift in meaning until they're no longer synonyms, or die out, or the language itself might die out… but certainly for centuries. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it good for a language to have it?&lt;/em&gt; Probably. Otherwise, language evolution would presumably work harder than it does to eliminate synonyms. It's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that this is just a defect in the human &quot;language organ&quot;, or in human society, but it doesn't seem likely. (Also, consider that having a pair of synonyms gives the language the raw material to adapt one of them in a new need arises, without losing the other one.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should language bearers and linguists do something about it?&lt;/em&gt; Definitely not. It's not up to linguists to try to forcibly change languages. As for normal speakers, they can &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;, but (a) there's no good reason to, and (b) it almost never works.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. If you're wondering why I said &quot;almost&quot;, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; at least one counter-example: Ataturk's modernization of Turkish. But there were a lot of special circumstances there, like the fact that the official language they were modernizing wasn't actually spoken by anyone but the elites.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T05:20:01.817" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T05:20:01.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30415" CreationDate="2019-02-02T09:34:37.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A semantic field with many synonyms is genital body parts: penis, testicle, vulva, vagina. A least several words can exist: either medical or vulgar, either adult or infantile. Think about how many words exist for &quot;penis&quot; in English.&#xA;About your questions: &#xA;Q1 How long such a situation can last? =&gt; it seems that such a situation can last very long, if not for ever.&#xA;Q2. Is it good for a language to have it? =&gt; people seem happy about it.&#xA;Q3. Should language bearers and linguists do something about it? =&gt; it's probably impossible to do something about it. Usage rules the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T09:34:37.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30373" CreationDate="2019-02-02T10:55:06.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s called ‘reconstructability’ of language (Russian достраиваемость языка, the term of S. Burlak). In a nutshell, nobody remembers every single word of a language. For example, one may be acquainted with the verb ‘vie’ but he or she has never heard any forms of it. If one is a fluent English speaker, then one is pretty well aware of the model of constructing -ing forms, e.g. &lt;em&gt;pick, bite, invent&lt;/em&gt; get -ing in contexts like “He is ___ my door.” It doesn’t matter whether one has ever pronounced ‘vying’ or not—all the mentioned factors make one capable of forming ‘vying’: “They are vying in swearing at me.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works with almost every other word: if there is an information about how to build -ing (plural, -ed, etc.) forms in one’s mind, one will be able to do it at any moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The previous version of this answer contained the description of &lt;em&gt;nonce words&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;neologisms&lt;/em&gt; as they are really close to the topic. The main difference between the phenomenon in question and neologisms and nonce words is that the latter are used to describe brand new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T00:09:49.837" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T00:09:49.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21239" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:48:48.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough Spanish to comment on why Spanish decided not to go this route, but Italian usage is certainly derived with Latin usage, and it has no relation to English uncountable nouns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might be confusing you is that Italian has two similar words: &lt;em&gt;frutto&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Frutto&lt;/em&gt; is the name for a single fruit. &lt;em&gt;Un frutto&lt;/em&gt; could be an apple, an orange, etc. It derives from the Latin word &lt;em&gt;fructus&lt;/em&gt;, it is masculin and it regularly forms the plural as &lt;em&gt;frutti&lt;/em&gt;. From what I can tell this is the equivalent of Spanish &lt;em&gt;fruta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Frutta&lt;/em&gt;, instead, is a descendent of the late Latin neuter plural &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt; (note that &lt;em&gt;fructus&lt;/em&gt; was masculine, &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt; is the plural of &lt;em&gt;fructum&lt;/em&gt;, a medieval word constructed by analogy with &lt;em&gt;pomum&lt;/em&gt;). In Latin neuter plural nouns were often used as collective nouns, to denote a mass of things. In Italian they went through various developments: some of them became feminine plurals (e.g. &lt;em&gt;ossa&lt;/em&gt;, bones), but in some cases they got recasted as feminine singular nouns, and sometimes even endowed with their own plural. This is the case of &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt; was originally a neuter plural which became, as many neuter plurals did, the collective name for fruit. So, in Italian you can say either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ho molta frutta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ho molti frutti&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the latter is slightly unidiomatic. But be careful: &lt;em&gt;frutta&lt;/em&gt; only refers to the biological entity. if you want to talk about the &quot;fruits of your labour&quot; you need to speak of &quot;i frutti del tuo lavoro&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:48:48.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30422" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:56:37.693" Score="10" ViewCount="3659" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have noticed in many of Shakespeare's poems that he used apostrophes in places where we don't usually see them now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Example: In the poem 'Fear No More' the first line is &quot;Fear no more the heat &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;o'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the sun', why wasn't of used instead of o'? Also in another poem- &quot;It is the star to every &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;wand'ring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; bark&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Why were apostrophes used so vaguely in these Early Modern English poems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23790" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T18:26:33.613" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T03:02:35.297" Title="Why was apostrophe so vaguely used in Early Modern English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30420" CreationDate="2019-02-02T14:06:03.400" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used the apostrophes for actors to not pronounce the left out letters so it would resemble spoken language of the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actors reading it would know what to leave out, possibly also to show or help them express social class through informal speech or make the plays more accessible to the audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 1 the possessive seems to omit ‘hi’ in William’s from ‘William his’ or in the female case ‘her’ from ‘Anna hers’ to Anna’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 4 learned does not use an apostrophe there. It is an accent grave, not pronounced in English which would change the meaning to something ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T23:12:32.333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T23:12:32.333" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30420" CreationDate="2019-02-02T16:28:03.620" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;(First, a note: this isn't Old English, but Early Modern English. Old English looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hƿæt. Ƿe Gardena in geardagum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's much older.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's use of the apostrophe isn't vague or arbitrary: it's marking where certain letters shouldn't be pronounced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the word &lt;em&gt;wandering&lt;/em&gt; can be pronounced with either two syllables (&quot;wan-dring&quot;) or three (&quot;wan-der-ing&quot;). By replacing the E with an apostrophe, Shakespeare is telling the actor to use the two-syllable pronunciation. If you try it with the three-syllable pronunciation there, you'll see it messes up the iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:28:03.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30424" CreationDate="2019-02-02T16:47:01.930" Score="5" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;i.e. λήθη: a noun meaning oblivion or concealment, and Λήθη: a proper noun referring to a river in Greek myth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: is this noun a reference to the mythological river, or was the name of the river borrowed from the pre-existing noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23791" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T00:11:48.113" Title="Which came first in Greek: λήθη, or Λήθη the proper noun?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30423" CreationDate="2019-02-02T17:41:02.987" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately we have no hard evidence one way or another, because Homer uses both, and that's the oldest Greek we have. (Mycenaean inscriptions sometimes help us go farther back, but they're no help here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can make a very good guess. There's a well-attested Ancient Greek verb &lt;em&gt;lanthánō&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to escape notice&quot;; the extra &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; comes from a present-tense marker inherited from Proto-Indo-European (it comes from *&lt;em&gt;lh₂-n-dʰ-&lt;/em&gt;, from *&lt;em&gt;l-h₂-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be hidden&quot;). In non-present tenses, you see the stem &lt;em&gt;lēth-&lt;/em&gt; (*).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this verb clearly comes from a PIE verb (it has things like the nasal infix that weren't productive in Greek), and there isn't evidence of the river Lethe in other Indo-European mythologies, it's most likely that the verb &lt;em&gt;lanthánō&lt;/em&gt; came first, the noun &lt;em&gt;lěthē&lt;/em&gt; came from the verb, and the name &lt;em&gt;Lěthē&lt;/em&gt; came from the noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The caron on &lt;em&gt;ě&lt;/em&gt; indicates a rising tone, which is written with an acute accent in the original Greek. (e ē é ě ê = ε η έ ή ῆ)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) This is called the &quot;nasal infix&quot;, and it's one of the ways Proto-Indo-European indicated the present tense: sticking an &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in the middle of the word. It died out in every Indo-European language I know of, but you can see fossils of it: for example, English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vic&lt;/strong&gt;tim&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in&lt;strong&gt;vinc&lt;/strong&gt;ible&lt;/em&gt; both come from the Latin word for &quot;conquer&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;in&lt;strong&gt;vinc&lt;/strong&gt;ible&lt;/em&gt; came from the present (and thus had an &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;) while &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vic&lt;/strong&gt;tim&lt;/em&gt; came from the past (and had no &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one and only one instance of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in a native English word, rather than a borrowing. That one instance is present-tense &lt;em&gt;stand&lt;/em&gt; next to past-tense &lt;em&gt;stood&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T00:11:48.113" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T00:11:48.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30420" CreationDate="2019-02-02T19:40:22.637" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used apostrophes the exact same way we do—to signal that a sound is omitted.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing vague about his usage. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30422/23611&quot;&gt;Draconis explains&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;wand'ring&quot; makes it clear that the vowel spelled by the missing &quot;e&quot; between &quot;d&quot; and &quot;r&quot; is to be omitted.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Usually, as here (but not with &quot;o'&quot; for &quot;of&quot;), this results in an entire syllable being dropped, which changes the scansion of the line, which is of course very important in metric verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In formal written English today, we mostly use apostrophes only in fixed contractions—e.g., &quot;don't&quot; for &quot;do not&quot; and &quot;she's&quot; for &quot;she is&quot;. But they're used exactly the same way. &quot;Don't&quot; signals that the &quot;o&quot; sound in &quot;not&quot; (and therefore a whole syllable) is omitted.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem that there are so few of these contractions that we just learn each one as a separate word, and no longer have an &quot;apostrophe rule&quot;. But a moment's reflection proves that can't be true. You can contract &quot;is&quot; or &quot;has&quot; onto almost any noun: &quot;John's coming later&quot;, &quot;The dog's got a bone&quot;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, outside formal writing, people still use apostrophes in other locations, like writing &quot;drinkin' and thinkin'&quot; to signal the normal colloquial pronunciation instead of the one with a &quot;g&quot; at the end&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;—exactly as Shakespeare does with &quot;o'&quot;. In every case, it works the same way for us as it did for Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In poetry (and sometimes song lyrics and other similar things) where scansion is important, people even still use apostrophes in exactly the same locations Shakespeare did. The only reason this doesn't come up in plays as often as in Shakespeare's day is that most plays aren't written to strict meter anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few cases that may seem strange, such as frequent &quot;'d&quot; for &quot;ed&quot; on the ends of words. What's going on there? Well, think of &quot;I learned of a learned man&quot;—the first &quot;learned&quot; is one syllable, the second is two.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; This distinction was more widespread in Shakespeare's day, so many &quot;-ed&quot; forms that can only be monosyllabic to us were ambiguous to him. So he spelled them with &quot;'d&quot; to force the monosyllabic pronunciation, exactly as with &quot;wand'ring&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. There are, of course, other uses of the apostrophe—possessive &quot;William's&quot; doesn't omit anything, nor does the disambiguating plural marker in &quot;p's and q's&quot;, nor do borrowed words that were spelled with apostrophes in their native language, except when that native language used apostrophes for omission. But that's also the same today.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Of course you need to know enough about English orthography and pronunciation to know how to omit the sound properly—in this case, that &quot;wandering&quot; can be pronounced as both &quot;wan-dring&quot; and &quot;wan-der-ing&quot;, so the apostrophe tells you to select the former. But that's not unique to apostrophes; all English spelling works that way.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. And again, the rest is up to your existing knowledge. In fact, notice how much more &quot;don't&quot; changes from &quot;do not&quot;, compared to &quot;wand'ring&quot; from &quot;wandering&quot;. Which one would you call more &quot;vague&quot;?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. Of course there's not actually a /g/ sound at the end. But native English speakers &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; there's a /g/ sound at the end, so when you're writing plays, poems, lyrics, etc., using the apostrophe to signal a native speaker to &quot;drop the g&quot; (or just writing &quot;eye dialect&quot; in a novel), the signal works.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. British spelling today usually distinguishes them as &quot;learnt&quot; vs. &quot;learned&quot;, while a few generations ago they instead used &quot;learned&quot; vs. &quot;learnèd&quot;. But Americans spell them indistinguishably, which makes for a better example here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T03:02:35.297" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T03:02:35.297" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30395" CreationDate="2019-02-02T20:30:55.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's some confusion here. I don't think the process you describe in the question itself is a general phenomenon. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; special cases where something like that happens, which I'll get to below, but from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30395/30427#comment65566_30395&quot;&gt;the comments&lt;/a&gt;, it sounds like you're just trying to understand why &quot;cause&quot; and &quot;course&quot; sound different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;well, I'm not sure but, for example, when one pronounces 'of course' there is no such [zs] sound. Btw, this is not the observations of mine, I was told that 'of course' and 'cause' have different sounds at the end &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with any [zs].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite both being spelled with &quot;-se&quot;, &quot;course&quot; ends in the /s/ phoneme, and &quot;cause&quot; in the /z/ phoneme. This is the same for both the nouns and the verbs, and even under inflection—&quot;courses&quot; is /'kɔrsəz/ while &quot;causes&quot; is /'kɑzəz/; &quot;coursed&quot; is /kɔrst/ while &quot;caused&quot; is /kɑzd/; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these are two distinct phonemes, most accents pronounce them with different sounds, [s] and [z]. Even in an accent with Boston-style intrusive R and ɑ/ɔ merging, you'd get [kɔɹs] vs. [kɔɹz].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many native English speakers are misled by the spelling into not consciously realizing that they're pronouncing two completely different phonemes here, but that doesn't stop them from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there cases where &quot;cause&quot; does end in [zs]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is at least one accent that sometimes produces [zs] sounds from final /z/, the Midwestern US accent that pronounces &quot;The Bears&quot; as [də bɛɹzs], as heard in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBnnon_iZOM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a famous Saturday Night Live sketch&lt;/a&gt;. I don't know how this accent pronounces &quot;cause&quot;, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it were [kɑzs].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30395/30427#comment65569_30400&quot;&gt;as LjL explains in a comment&lt;/a&gt;, cross-syllablic assimilation in cases like &quot;cause to&quot; can lead to something like [kɑzstu].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in either of these cases, it's still not the [zs] that makes &quot;cause&quot; differ from &quot;course&quot;. It's the /z/ vs. /s/ that makes them different; the /z/ being realized as [zs] actually makes them a little &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T20:30:55.277" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T20:41:05.110" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are all kinds of videos showcasing &quot;talking&quot; dogs like huskies jabbering away, but I'm curious: In theory (in a world where dogs could have human brains) what would they physiologically be capable of saying? What syllables would be limited or impossible due to their physiology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23794" LastEditorUserId="23794" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T01:37:09.417" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T01:37:09.417" Title="What would be the hypothetical phonological range of canines based on their physiology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30395" CreationDate="2019-02-02T20:48:09.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest an alternative question: &quot;Some guy told me that that in English there is a sound [z], turning into [s] at the end of words like cause. What in the world is he talking about?&quot;. To be sure, you'd have to ask the guy, but assuming that guy was speaking in a non-technical way (and possibly assuming that he speaks Russian or some other language that doesn't have these spelling problems that afflict Germanic and Romance), I assume he is referring to the fact that the sound (pronunciation) is &quot;z&quot; but it is spelled &quot;s&quot;. If you think that the sound &quot;z&quot; should be spelled &quot;z&quot; (I can't argue with that), then there is something additional involved in the spelling/pronunciation of &quot;cause&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, he might be an experimental phonetician who knows about this quirk of pronunciations in English (cessation of vocal fold vibration), but since &quot;bus&quot; and &quot;buzz&quot; are pronounced differently most people aren't aware of such details, and I doubt that anybody other than a phonetician would comment on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T20:48:09.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30428" CreationDate="2019-02-02T21:01:58.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Huskies are phonologically incapable of forming anything (phonology is about the grammar of sound systems). They are phonetically capable of things that might vague resemble speech sounds. It is an interesting and under-studies quirk of the breed that they are closer to parrots in their vocal abilities. I believe that the differences are actually brain-based and not based on articulatory anatomy, since their anatomy is not radically different from bark-only breeds. Basically, they can produce a range of voiced vocoids, with some laryngeal and back-tongue trilling. We love to interpret their outputs as human language sounds, but most of that comes from our interpretive efforts and not what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T21:01:58.207" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19534" CreationDate="2019-02-02T22:59:24.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;People like Ray Jackendoff and Adele Goldberg like to talk about &quot;alternative generative grammar theories&quot;. The &quot;alternative&quot; part is obvious—it means they're not (Chomskyan) mainstream generative grammar.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; But what does &quot;generative&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a (non-exclusive) list of AGGs thrown out by Jackendoff in one instance: his own PA (Parallel Architecture, aka Simpler Syntax), GPSG (General Phrase Structure Grammar) and its successors, BCG (Berkeley Construction Grammar) and its successors, LFG (Lexical-Functional Grammar), Autolexical Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar. What do these all have in common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there's a purely historical/sociological meaning: Every AGG theory arose as a reaction to MGG (or recursively arose from an earlier AGG, where ultimately the first ancestor was a reaction to MGG).&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you could almost define &quot;generative grammar theory&quot; as &quot;theory from someone who accepts the basic abstract from Chomsky's &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structure&lt;/em&gt;, but rejects at least one of the foundational ideas from the frameworks that followed&quot;. But that doesn't really add much to the openly historical definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an useful meaning for &quot;generative&quot; that can be extracted? Yes, per Jackendoff:&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A generative model is a model that produces a combinatorial structure (like a tree) that isn't just derived from some external structure. It doesn't matter whether you build the tree bottom-up instead of top-down, whether you use unification or analog constraint optimization, or even whether you build a cyclic graph instead of a tree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A generative grammar theory is a theory that has at least one component on the path between sound and meaning and vice-versa that requires a generative model. It doesn't matter whether that component is syntax (MGG, and many alternatives), semantics (Generative Semantics), or functional structure (LFG), or whether there are multiple independently-generative components (PA).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not exactly the definition Chomsky originally gave, but it still fits the word, and it covers all of the present and historical theories people want to call &quot;generative&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this actually what &quot;generative&quot; means, or is the historical definition the real meaning, and this is just a (presumably not coincidental, but still metaphysically contingent) feature of all GG theories that happens to fit the pre-theoretic meaning of the name &quot;generative&quot;? I don't know if Jackendoff has ever said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I brought up Jackendoff,&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; he also argues that generativity is inextricably tied two other ideas—both also from Chomsky, but separable from MGG:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GG theories are (at least methodologically) mentalistic: they study language as it's instantiated in the mind, not in society or Platonic space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GG theories are all driven by methodological minimalism toward universal grammar.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Even if a theory's &quot;UG&quot; is just a toolkit of ways to build language-specific constructions rather than anything like P&amp;amp;P's set of hardcoded structural principles, and the theory strikes a radically different balance in what to minimize than Chomsky's, and the author would vehemently disagree with your contention that she's trying to minimize UG, any generative grammar theory is still ultimately trying to minimize UG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do either of these have to do with &quot;generative&quot;? Nothing directly. It's probably not a coincidence that (at least according to Jackendoff) they're true of all GG theories, but the same is true for other features he doesn't bring up, like neutrality between production and perception. So, I think this contention can be completely separated from the definition of &quot;generative&quot;. But others might disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Which can be equated with the set of theories derived from Chomsky's successive frameworks from &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt; to the Minimalist Program.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. So GG is a theory family. The fact that &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structure&lt;/em&gt; didn't fully describe its theory just means that Proto-GG has to be reconstructed from &lt;em&gt;Aspects&lt;/em&gt; and its 1960 alternatives through laws of regular theory change. :)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. This is all covered, at least to some degree, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/simpler-syntax-9780199271092&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and all of Jackendoff's later books. Based on my vague memories, I think the most detailed treatment of all of these ideas is in book &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/meaning-and-the-lexicon-9780199568888&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Meaning and the Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;—but I unfortunately don't have a copy of that at hand, so I'm not positive on that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. And &lt;em&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/em&gt;, which actually spends a lot more time on these issues than on generativity per se.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. As you can probably guess, using the terms &quot;UG&quot; and &quot;minimalism&quot; led to a lot of confusion. Jackendoff's later works have backed off from that a bit, but as far as I know, he hasn't really come up with any good terminology to replace it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:59:24.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30408" CreationDate="2019-02-02T23:05:11.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is really about Chinese vs. English, minimally. But the different valuable comments and the previous answer made me consider the problem differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explained below, I arrive to a ratio between 1/7 and 1/2 when comparing Chinese and English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would make me states that the Chinese writing systems conveys between 2 and 7 more information than written English. I'm not sure if I can call this ratio &quot;semantic density&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can be a concrete example, an insight to express the power of existing meaning-oriented writting systems compared to existing phonetic-oriented systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;HR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First impression is that sheer information theory is much too large, in the sense that it explores all given possibility to encode information through one expression system (if I understood correctly). I prefer to restrict on existing and commonly used systems such as human languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The references to information theory however made me think about average length of words in languages, and how much words are needed to express a given information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers I have grasped so far are really rough approximations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;from this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ravi.io/language-word-lengths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;: average length of English words is 8.2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.proz.com/forum/business_issues/53938-character_to_word_ratio_for_chn_jpn_and_kor_to_english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;: most chinese words are 2 characters/signs long. But also those two estimations which differ greatly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 Chinese signs = 170 english words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;170-210 Chinese signs = 100 English words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can roughly says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 * 2 = 200 chinese characters for 170 x 8.2 english words = 1400   =&gt; ratio 1/7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;200 * 2 = 400 chinese characters for 820 english words              =&gt; ratio 1/2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to refine those estimation. But I will use these numbers merely for illustration anyway. Because I'm sure I could be asked why I've chosen to base the core fundations of that programming language on 1-char signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These signs corpus has to be limited, because like Chinese, you have to know the signs so as to understand them. It's a real cognitive cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T16:22:00.577" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T16:22:00.577" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28524" CreationDate="2019-02-03T00:46:20.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't make much sense to analyze “&lt;em&gt;je n'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” as a triple negative. It's either a single negative &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; qualified by &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt;, or two negatives &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt; with the reinforcement &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;. Negation in French is currently evolving from the first model to the second model. In both models, the word &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; has a different role from &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, negation in French followed the same principles as other Romance languages, with &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; being the main negative particle. Negation could sometimes be qualified by a noun or adverb, e.g. “&lt;em&gt;ne … jamais&lt;/em&gt;” = “not … ever”, “&lt;em&gt;ne … personne&lt;/em&gt;” = “not … anyone” (literally: “not … [a] person”), etc. French acquired a peculiarity that it gradually became mandatory to qualify all negations, even for yes/no statements. If there was no “natural” qualifier, &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; would do, and then around the late 19th century to early 20th &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; became the default qualifier. This is not a double negation, since the qualifier itself does not convey negation, but a single negation in two parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This model allows for more than one qualifying adverb. For example, “&lt;em&gt;je n'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” = “I have not ever seen anyone” has a single negation &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; with both a temporal qualification and an animate quantification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, French is going through an evolution where &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; can be dropped and the sentence still has a negative meaning. From the perspective of early modern French, this is in some sense the opposite of a double negation — you could call it a nullary negation, since negation is expressed without a negative word. In fact, the adverbs that once had a positive meaning have acquired a negative meaning of their own. For example, &lt;em&gt;rien&lt;/em&gt; was originally a noun meaning “thing”, but it now almost always means “nothing”. &lt;em&gt;Personne&lt;/em&gt; still means a person when used as a noun, but means “nobody” when used on as a pronoun or adverb. In modern colloquial French, you can say “&lt;em&gt;j'ai vu personne&lt;/em&gt;”, meaning “I haven't seen anyone” (this is common spoken French but not considered correct in formal contexts when written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you analyze formal French negation by the lights of colloquial French, you could say that “&lt;em&gt;je n'ai vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” is a double negation with negative meaning. It's possible to combine multiple negative adverbs other than &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt;, as in “&lt;em&gt;je n'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;”, and the sentence remains negative. You could thus say that “&lt;em&gt;je n'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” is a triple negative. In colloquial French, “&lt;em&gt;j'ai jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” is a double negation with negative meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; works differently. &lt;strong&gt;If you put &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; in a sentence, it negates other negative adverbs&lt;/strong&gt;. This is not standard French: in standard French, you can't combine &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; with another negative adverb. But if you say something like “?&lt;em&gt;je n'ai pas vu personne&lt;/em&gt;” or “?&lt;em&gt;j'ai pas vu personne&lt;/em&gt;”, it's like “I haven't not seen anyone”: a double negative in the sense that the negation is negated, i.e. I have seen someone and I'm saying so in a whimsical way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt;, and the other qualifying negatives work in three different ways makes it problematic to count one &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; and two qualifying negatives as three. They just don't add up in this way. Standard formal French has a single negation &lt;em&gt;ne&lt;/em&gt; which can't be repeated. Standard colloquial French has multiple negative words which can be sorted in two categories: &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt; which can't be repeated or combined with another negative, and others (&lt;em&gt;rien&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;personne&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;jamais&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) which can be combined together but not with &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt;, forming double (or more, e.g. “&lt;em&gt;j[e n]'ai plus jamais vu personne&lt;/em&gt;”) negations with a negative meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/20096/should-the-2nd-negative-particle-be-defined-positively-only/20097#20097&quot;&gt;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/20096/should-the-2nd-negative-particle-be-defined-positively-only/20097#20097&lt;/a&gt; for more a bit more details about negative adverbs in French and their evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T00:46:20.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30395" CreationDate="2019-02-03T01:39:43.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and many other languages, notionally voiced obstruents (in other words &lt;em&gt;lenis&lt;/em&gt; obstruents) are subject to assimilatory processes involving voicing. More specifically, the 'voiced' obstruents in English - the plosives /b, d, g/; the affricate /dʒ/; the fricatives /v, ð, z/ and /ʒ/ - all undergo devoicing when adjacent to unvoiced sounds, including when next to silence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may sometimes be fully devoiced all the way through. However, they tend to be devoiced at the beginning of the consonant if preceded by an unvoiced sound or at the end if followed by an unvoiced sound. In the parametric diagram below the line for vocal fold vibration (voicing) is flat when there's no voicing and wavy when there is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6oRuA.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6oRuA.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the word &lt;em&gt;bond&lt;/em&gt; said in isolation, we can see that the beginning of the /b/ and the end of the /d/ are both devoiced. In a more detailed parametric diagram, we might put the little circle currently under the b and the d as a superscript to the right or left of the consonant to indicate which side is devoiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the consonant is at the end of a word but followed by a voiced sound there will be no devoicing. This type of devoicing is an assimilatory effect, meaning that the consonant is taking on qualities from the sounds next to it. If there is no voiceless sound next to the consonant, it won't normally become devoiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a specific case-study of English [z]. Have a look at the waveform below for the words &lt;em&gt;news items&lt;/em&gt; taken from a BBC radio news broadcast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIrgx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DIrgx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the dark black fuzz that we see at 3 and 4 (the red numbers on the diagram) shows voiceless sound. The kind of wavy (periodic) line that we can see from the beginning of the word up till the beginning of 2, is voiced sound. That kind of regular repeating pattern there is what gives us the impression that a sound has musical pitch. This, essentially,  is what voicing is. Now the transcription for &lt;em&gt;news item&lt;/em&gt; is like this: /njuz aɪtəmz/. Notice that there are two /z/s here/. The first is in between two vowel sounds. The second, at the end of the second word, precedes silence. Now, if you look at 1 on the the diagram you will see that the first z is voiced all the way through. That wavy pattern carries on going all the way through the z section. However, if you look at 4, which represents the z at the end of the word next to silence, you will see that it is a messy smudge of black. This is because it is nearly entirely devoiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the Original Poster's question, then. For the word &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; said in isolation, there is likely to be considerable devoicing of the final [z] because of the adjacent silence. This means that, auditorily, the [z] will likely be voiced at the beginning, but end with an [s]-like quality. Would we want to use an [s] in the transcription here? The answer is no. The segments [s] and [z] do not only have different voicing&amp;mdash;they also have different durations, have slightly different articulations, require different amounts of effort in their production, have different intra-oral pressures, different 'pitches' even absent vocal fold vibration, different effects on surrounding sounds and so on and so forth. Even when a lenis consonant becomes devoiced it retains its other lenis qualities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, even though we wouldn't transcribe the word &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; said in isolation as ending in an [s], the final [z] segment is likely to start with vocal fold vibration, but end without any. It will therefore arguably start as a normal [z] and end with a sound which has an [s]-like quality. This ype of effect is known as &lt;em&gt;assimilation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The parametric diagram is from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogjam.name/sid/?page_id=4478&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Speech Internet Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The waveform is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://swphonetics.com/praat/tutorials/understanding-waveforms/speech-waveforms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Swphonectics.com&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Courtesy of both Sydney Wood and SWPhonetics.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Both were originally accessed on 21 November 2015.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T02:13:19.403" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T02:13:19.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30438" CreationDate="2019-02-03T04:55:17.613" Score="9" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, presumably, at some point during of after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin became a dead language. Or, at least no longer used outside of the Church or science. When that happens to a language, does that stop the process of borrowing words?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23772" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T00:45:59.187" Title="Do dead languages borrow words?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30436" CreationDate="2019-02-03T05:33:24.707" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, borrowing still happens—in both directions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Latin is dead in that nobody speaks it as their first language, it's still used for official purposes by scientists and the Vatican. When they need a word for a new concept, they have to either create or borrow one, just like for any language. For example, &quot;internet&quot; in modern Latin is &lt;em&gt;interrete&lt;/em&gt; (calqued from English), and the Pallas cat has the biological Latin name &lt;em&gt;Otocolobus manul&lt;/em&gt; (from Mongolian &lt;em&gt;manuul&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, words are still borrowed from Latin for all sorts of purposes, despite its death. &quot;Television&quot;, for example, comes from Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;tēlē&lt;/em&gt; + Latin &lt;em&gt;visio&lt;/em&gt;, and was borrowed long after the fall of the Roman Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T05:33:24.707" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T12:00:10.767" Score="1" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out what the Livonian character ȱ sounds like. As far as I can tell, it's a long mid-high unrounded back vowel. In IPA it seems to be written as &lt;code&gt;/ɤː/&lt;/code&gt; but that seems to be a non-standard IPA form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23804" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T17:33:48.943" Title="What does a long mid-high unrounded back vowel sound like?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30439" CreationDate="2019-02-03T12:33:57.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The symbol [ɤː] is the correct one for the sound you describe and is a standard IPA symbol (although it's not a super-common vowel in the world's languages, but does crop up here and there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the &lt;em&gt;near-high&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to &lt;em&gt;high-mid&lt;/em&gt;) back rounded vowel [ʊ]; perhaps this is what you were expecting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what these sound like, have a look at this website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ipachart.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ipachart.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T12:33:57.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4372" CreationDate="2019-02-03T14:49:37.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual pronunciation in Chinese is yao4 with falling tone.&#xA;As Chinese and Thai are not closely related, this is probably just a chance coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:49:37.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19416" CreationDate="2019-02-03T14:52:59.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to be made of two questions. Q1 is about the outcome of Latin u/u: in French. Q2 is about ü [y] versus u or i.&#xA;Implicational universals have it that a language with ü should first have u or i. There is no language with ü and i but no u, u and ü but not i. This is how &quot;tend to&quot; should be handled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:52:59.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28524" CreationDate="2019-02-03T14:59:46.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personne as a pronoun is always negative.&#xA;Colloquial y'a personne = thezz nobody&#xA;Jamais can sometimes have a positive meaning as in: &#xA;si jamais quelqu'un vient, etc = if ever somebody should come, etc.&#xA;But usually, jamais is negative.&#xA;NB: j'ai pas vu personne is dialectal and popular. It means the same as j'ai vu personne. Multiple negative words do not turn the clause into positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:59:46.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30446" CreationDate="2019-02-03T15:29:34.040" Score="12" ViewCount="3374" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes schwa so special? On my phonology exam my tutor phrased the question something like: Why is schwa the ruler/king of vowels? I don't know what he meant by this but I suppose it's got something to do with the fact that all vowels tend to reduce to schwa before they disappear... &#xA;What are your thoughts on this? How would you answer this question? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T08:48:58.377" Title="Why does schwa have a special place among vowels?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30444" CreationDate="2019-02-03T16:27:21.623" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I pronounce this vowel, I would say it is the only one where there is absolutely no contraction of any muscle (except vibrating vocal chords) or any change in the mouth/throat/larynx/pharynx, and the tongue is simply relaxed. I just open the mouth and it's the sound that comes naturally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose it is justified that it has the central place in the IPA diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wSCjQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wSCjQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This central place corresponds to the vowel with the least alteration, the softest, the most relaxed: it is the most lenient vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T08:48:58.377" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T08:48:58.377" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30444" CreationDate="2019-02-03T16:33:50.677" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a framework-dependent question. My guess is that he is referring to the representation of schwa, and the premise that it is &quot;featureally empty&quot;. That is, front vowels have a frontness property, back vowels have a backness property, and round vowels have a rounding property. Schwa has none of these. That brings us down to the central unrounded vowels [ɨ ə ɐ] (and some other ancillary letters). The proper treatment of vowel height has been inconclusive, but it seems clear that the first cut is between high and non-high, and the low central vowel can be excluded as having an additional lowering feature. There is a line of reasoning that mid vowels are &quot;more marked&quot; than high vowels which would suggest that really [ɨ] is that special vowel that has no features at all. A typical caveat about &quot;schwa&quot; is that, many times, people use the letter &quot;ə&quot; when the vowel in question is in fact closer to [ɨ]. The claim that strict IPA [ə] is structurally special is untenable, on formal phonological grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One phonetic story is that the formants of the vowel schwa are closest to those predicted for a uniform tube, with no constrictions. A second one is that it is extremely short (though there is a chicken-egg question here whether we call a vowel schwa because it is extremely short, or does being extremely short yield the formant quality associated with schwa?). In English for example it has less than half the duration of stressed [ʌ], and in a number of Austronesian languages (with no length contrast) it is also very short. There are certainly schwa-like vowels that are not highly reduced, what is not clear is whether by professional IPA standards those vowels are [ə] or [ɜ ɘ ɤ ə̹]. You can compare Ladefoged's performance of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ipaSOUNDS/Vow-20a.AIFF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ʌ]&lt;/a&gt; with his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ipaSOUNDS/Vow-15a.AIFF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ə]&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ipaSOUNDS/Vow-18c.aiff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ɜ]&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ipaSOUNDS/turned%20e.aiff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[ɘ]&lt;/a&gt;, and then match those standards against supposed schwa in some other language. I don't know of any IPA doctrine that says that &quot;ə&quot; can only be used for extremely short vowels, but it is a widely reported property attributed to &quot;schwa&quot;, presumably based on ignorance of languages where a schwa-like vowel is of equal prominence to other vowels of the language. In the case of non-rhotic pronunciations of &quot;bird&quot;, it is generally held by phoneticians that this is [bɜːd], not [bəːd]. I don't have a candidate for long schwa where the quality is IPA [ə] as performed by Ladefoged and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim that schwa is the king of vowels is a cute metaphor for something, good luck figuring out what. I would say that it is the meekest vowel, if I were inclined to talk that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T00:18:17.233" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T00:18:17.233" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30444" CreationDate="2019-02-03T17:41:58.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends if you're talking about phonology or phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In articulatory phonetics, &quot;schwa&quot; is often used as the name for the completely relaxed vowel with no particular constriction in the vocal tract. (Whether this actually corresponds to &lt;code&gt;[ə]&lt;/code&gt; on the IPA chart is up for debate: the IPA vowel chart predates spectrograms, so it's defined in terms of &quot;what things sound like&quot; rather than formant frequencies we can measure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it's special in that it's the center point that you define all vowels in relation to. &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; has a lower first formant, while &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; has a higher second formant, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In phonology, &quot;schwa&quot; is generally used as the name for a reduced vowel of any sort. The name itself comes from the Hebrew marking for an &quot;extra-short&quot; vowel (comparable to Slavic ь and ъ). So the idea that all vowels reduce to a schwa is kind of a tautology. When a mid central vowel &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; just something else reduced, the phonologists tend to give it another name: that's why &quot;butt&quot; is transcribed with &lt;code&gt;/ʌ/&lt;/code&gt; in most English traditions, even though the vowel is not particularly low or back: because it's not a reduction, and therefore &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;schwa&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T17:41:58.420" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30436" CreationDate="2019-02-03T22:18:10.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key is that &quot;Or, at least no longer used outside of the Church or science.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a language is actually dead—not being spoken or written by anyone—then there's no way for it to borrow words. However you choose to define what &quot;language&quot; means, there's no speech or text that will use the new words, no speaker who will ever think them…&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But medieval and post-medieval Latin was only dead as a vulgar language—as you said, it continued to be used in the Church, and in science (and in other areas, like international diplomacy and often even internal bureaucracy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theologians, scientists, engineers, etc. were obviously coming up with new ideas that hadn't occurred to the Romans. So, how did they express those ideas in the Romans' old language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always use circumlocutions to avoid needing new words. But when you're talking about the same concept over and over, that gets annoying fast. So, what do you do? Invent a new word. You can try to invent it from first principles as you think a native Latin speaker would have, or you can calque a German or French word into Latin, or you can just borrow the word. All of these happened in Latin, just as they did in, say, French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borrowing into Latin isn't &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same as borrowing into French. Most borrowings into French are probably colloquial, and may spread to a sizable subset of the French-speaking community before anyone even stops and takes notice. Most borrowings into Latin, on the other hand, are done consciously, and explained directly in the paper that first borrows them, and spread by people being consciously convinced of the coinage's value. But they're both borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Even this isn't quite true. In theory, even a totally dead language could be resurrected. I don't mean just cases like Modern Hebrew (which is usually considered a different language from the older languages it was constructed from), but people who have taught themselves to, e.g., speak Old Franconian fluently, the same way others have taught themselves Klingon. They may have very small speech communities, and no L1 speakers—but if they're actually using the language at all, they could end up borrowing words. At that point, do we say that Old Franconian has borrowed a word from Modern Dutch, or do we say they're actually speaking a new language, Zombie Franconian? Or does it only count if they raise their kids speaking L1 Old Franconian, and their kids borrow words? I think it's really just a question of definitions, not facts. If cases actually arise that push the borders of our definitions, we'll come up with new definitions, or new words (and then they can borrow them into Zombie Franconian).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T22:18:10.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30436" CreationDate="2019-02-04T00:45:59.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a language community is borrowing words into their language, then I can't see how there would be any way that it should legitimately be considered a dead language. If languages which people are productively using and developing can still be called &quot;dead&quot; then language death is meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T00:45:59.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28612" CreationDate="2019-02-04T04:25:28.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At what point do we say &quot;These people in the Italian peninsula are no longer speaking Latin; they are speaking Italian&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There used to be an official answer to this: Italians were taught that Dante's standardization of the literary Florentine dialect is &quot;when the language became Italian&quot;. But that's a completely arbitrary answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dante's time, people in much of Italy outside of Tuscany were speaking languages that weren't mutually intelligible with his, or with modern Italian. Those languages were only gradually replaced with &quot;Italian&quot; over the course of centuries (finally completed over a few generations from Napoleon to the final unification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course his Florentine (and likewise all those other dialects/languages that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; direct ancestors of modern Italian), was already unintelligible with Latin much earlier. Bishops were complaining that the laypeople couldn't understand the Church Latin Mass, advanced students had to be taught international medieval Latin as a foreign language, etc. And meanwhile, there are pre-Dante poems that are reasonably easily intelligible to modern Italians. In fact, there are documents that go back to the 10th century that Italian university students might struggle to read, but they're still clearly much much more like Italian than it is like Latin.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, clearly, they picked the wrong year to divide Latin and Italian, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is no right year. Latin became Italian over the course of several centuries, so any year you pick is going to be arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this continuity problem isn't something specific to the Romance languages, and it's not there only because we have so little documentation of the intermediate steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at Ottoman Turkish changing to (modern, aka Istanbul) Turkish. This took place over a single generation in the last century, but it's just as impossible to pick any non-arbitrary point &quot;when the language became Turkish&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ataturk ordered the reform process started in 1927. Every step in the process was planned out by TDK or other committees, and documented in detail. By 1942, TDK reported that many children&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; of Ottoman-speaking families&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; couldn't understand Ottoman Turkish.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; By 1963, Ataturk's 1927 declaration was so incomprehensible that it had to be translated for anyone to follow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unintelligibility is our best characterization of &quot;different languages&quot; vs. &quot;just dialects&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; So, we can say that Ottoman Turkish became Turkish between 1927 and 1942. But exactly at what point during that 15 years did it happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like the children born before 1 January 1938 00:00:00 grew up natively speaking Ottoman and the children born a nanosecond later, modern Turkish. All of the children during that period learned a language that was somewhere between the two. And at any given point during that 14 years, some of the children were speaking a more Ottoman-like language than others. Even looking at a single child at a time, most of them were speaking more Ottoman-like languages early in their acquisition and less-Ottoman-like later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There just is no answer. It happened over the course of a generation, in the same way Italian happened over the course of a few centuries. If you want an answer, you can arbitrarily pick the first language reform law in 1928, or the founding of TDK in 1932, or TDK's progress report in 1942, or anything else you want, so long as you realize that it's arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. See the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placiti_Cassinesi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Placiti Cassinesi&lt;/a&gt;, which conveniently shows the original text with Latin and Italian translations.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Of course there's a &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; answer; I think a bill declaring a new Turkish language was passed in 1932. And most Turkish laypeople would probably say 1928, because that's when the alphabet was switched. But you're asking about actual linguistic criteria.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Of course many children were bilingual, even for generations after 1942. But the fact that there were &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; monolingual speakers is the point.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. As an aside, outside of the urban elites, most of the country didn't speak Ottoman Turkish in the first place. And outside the cities, it took longer for everyone to switch from their regional languages to modern Turkish. But that isn't really relevant here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. And it's not just the different vocabulary (and orthography). For example, monolingual Turkish speakers have to learn a whole new set of morphological rules to be fluent in Ottoman Turkish.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. It should be obvious that there's a continuum issue there as well…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T04:25:28.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30456" CreationDate="2019-02-04T09:32:18.403" Score="4" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it like the trace is the result of movement and has to be in the chain with the head, while PRO is just a null duplication taken the position but with no phonetic realization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23813" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T12:39:46.473" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T12:39:46.473" Title="What is the difference between trace and PRO?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30455" CreationDate="2019-02-04T11:33:37.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both PRO &amp;amp; Trace have no phonetic realisation, they belong to empty categories (null elements). I see that you took 'trace' in general, you have to specify which trace: (i) wh-tace or (ii) NP trace. Anyways, PRO is not a result of Movement like the trace, because in GB, PRO is taken to be a DS element (a pre-movement/transformation phase). &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PRO has also a distinct theta role (even if it's coindexed). If an element is co-indexed with another element, it forms a chain. As you may know, empty categories are another requirement of grammar, i.e. Projection Pricniple, so traces and other empty categories guarantee the preservation of semantic information of either the: (i) moved elements (like NPs) or (ii) the in-situ elements like PRO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T11:33:37.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-04T12:43:25.030" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies that have asked people to draw whatever first comes to mind for a particular word? If so, have any of those studies compared such prototypical drawings across genders, ages, or societies?&#xA;It's be interesting to see if there are significant average differences across demographics for prototypes of &quot;mom&quot;, &quot;dad&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T12:43:25.030" Title="Demographic Prototype Differences?" Tags="&lt;prototype-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30465" CreationDate="2019-02-04T16:41:38.273" Score="7" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an ASL learner, I've noticed that there are groups of words with similar meanings, where the only difference is an initialized handshape. For example, the sign FAMILY has the two hands move outward tracing two halves of a circle, with an F handshape. Changing the handshape refers to other collections of people, like G (GROUP) or C (CLASS). Another example is the sign LAW, which uses an L handshape and can be changed to mean REGULATION with an R handshape or ETHICS with an E handshape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never learned a term for this and I can't think of a direct analogy in English. The handshape and movement aren't really like a root and suffix; it's more like the different signs are just related concepts. Is there a recognized way of referring to these groups of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second question: I've been taught that unnecessary initialization is sometimes seen as undesirable in the Deaf community. Does that still apply to words like this, where initialization is the only way of distinguishing them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23158" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T15:09:00.783" Title="Is there a term for ASL signs for related concepts that share the same motion and are distinguished by initialization?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30463" CreationDate="2019-02-04T19:19:52.860" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Program and programming language don't have a known translation in Arabic. برمجة and برنامج are used, even though they aren't Arabic.&#xA;Is there a native word that can be used instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23818" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T20:06:04.133" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T20:09:56.007" Title="&quot;program&quot; Equivalent in Arabic" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-02-16T00:45:28.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30461" CreationDate="2019-02-04T20:05:15.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;barnāmaj is a loan word from (Middle) Persian; barmaja is a remodeling of the same word according to an Arabic pattern. Although of foreign origin, these are long established Arabic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T20:05:15.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30461" CreationDate="2019-02-04T20:09:56.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Program&quot; in English originally meant a structured list of things to happen (and it came from French from Latin from Greek for &quot;edict&quot; but that's not relevant). A computer program is a list of things for a computer to do, so the word was borrowed for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common Arabic word for a structured list of things to happen is, to my knowledge, بَرْنَامَج &lt;em&gt;barnāmaj&lt;/em&gt;. This was borrowed from Persian somewhere around 1500 years ago; while it might not appear in the Qur'an, it's been in Arabic longer than &quot;program&quot; has been in English. This then got verbed in Arabic just like &quot;programming&quot; did in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a pure Arabic form, you could potentially use something like جدول أعمال &quot;itemized list of actions&quot;. But this would sound strange, like calling a computer program a &quot;computer agenda&quot; in English. I'd recommend sticking to the Persian words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T20:09:56.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30185" CreationDate="2019-02-05T04:25:24.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah I think it's wrong, based on Blau, based on the second audio, and based on itself..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's not to say that every pronunciation pronounces it as shwa/(ə). Just to say that some pronunciations pronounce it as (ə). (Infact I think it's pretty common)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinner commented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Joshua Blau in his &quot;Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew&quot; from&#xA;  2010 writes concerning the pronunciation of the mobile schwa (שוא נע):&#xA;  &quot;The mobile šwa, according to Modern (Sephardic) Hebrew and as it is&#xA;  taught at the universities, is a neutral (ultra-)short vowel (ə). It&#xA;  seems likely that this is its original pronunciation, and in this book&#xA;  we have transcribed it accordingly. According to the Tiberian&#xA;  Masoretes its basic pronunciation is ă, identical to ḥaṭaf pataḥ&#xA;  [...]&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinner also points out regarding the audio sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the three clips you give, I think the first one has [ɛ], the&#xA;  second one has [ə] and the third one could be either. That's my&#xA;  impression at least, but I'm no phonetician. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms my thoughts re wikipedia's wrongness.  I learnt pronunciation of hebrew from an Ashkenazi, and learnt vocal shva pronounced as &lt;code&gt;[ə]&lt;/code&gt;.  And the second audio (pnei tehoim), is Ashkenazi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while Blau only mentioned (ə) in Modern Sephardi,   it's very common in &quot;Modern&quot; Ashkenazi too. I say &quot;modern&quot;, but my late barmitzva teacher, trained chazzan and weekly baal koreh, was born in the 1920s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A pronunciation of כְּבַר&#xA;  without a vocal schwa is unproblematic; [kvaʁ] is a perfectly possible&#xA;  pronunciation. Even if an initial consonant cluster like [kv-] may be&#xA;  difficult to people whose native language doesn't allow for such&#xA;  initial consonant clusters, there's nothing per se difficult about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather like the English word Staff. The IPA of it has no Shwa  It's a consonant cluster of s and t.&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/staff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/staff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So somebody might say Breishit as opposed to Buh-raishit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the quotes in the question mention [gdolim] which may be a bit ambiguous 'cos it may not always clear if they mean (ə) or a consonant cluster. But Blau is pretty clear re (ə). And some of the audio presented in the question is clear on the (ə).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So wikipedia definitely contradicts Blau and what we hear in that pnei tehoim clip, and makes a sweeping statement that I don't think anybody here would support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And,as the questioner(myself) notes, I suppose wikipedia contradicts itself too in that same article, since it itself says &lt;code&gt;&quot;classical pronunciation: shəwāʼ [ʃəˑwɒːʔ])&quot;&lt;/code&gt;.  So it's recognising a vowel of shwa in the word shwa!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note- b.a. does seem to give a good description for what is the Tiberian masoretic pronunciation, (he said masoretic, there are of course tiberian, jerusalem and babylonian masoretes,  but he meant specifically tiberian masoretic), his source being dikduk hateemanim. And he points out that in the Tiberian Masoretic pronunciation, the view is that it wouldn't have been ə, but I was aware of that. The quote I gave from wikipedia does mention the tiberian pronunciation and I wasn't suggesting wikipedia was wrong on tiberian pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T04:25:24.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30459" CreationDate="2019-02-05T10:03:25.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never learned a term for this and I can't think of a direct analogy in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of word formation is much more productive in ASL (and in sign languages generally) than in English (and spoken languages generally). I've listed the examples you gave, and a few more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[T]rigonometry, [A]lgebra, [C]alculus, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Y]ellow, [B]lue, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[F]amily, [G]roup, [C]lass, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[L]aw, [R]egulation, [E]thics, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] week ago, [2] weeks ago, [3] weeks ago, (etc., all the way up to nine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] month, [2] months, (etc., all the way up to nine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a recognized way of referring to these groups of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language_grammar#Frames&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frames&lt;/a&gt;. A frame is, in all the examples up there, the way the hand moves, plus non-manual features, but is not a complete sign (and so does not have a &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot; meaning). The sign is completed by adding a handshape. The examples in the Wikipedia link are completed by adding the handshape from another ASL word, but the examples up there are completed by adding the handshape from [the initial letter of] an English word or a numerical digit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it's called &amp;quot;frame&amp;quot; in some literature about sign languages, it could also be called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transfix&lt;/a&gt;. These are well known from some languages of Africa and the Middle East (most famously, Arabic, Hebrew, ...) and it's a similar approach to word formation. Some examples from Arabic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sayyāra (a car)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ḡassāla (a washing machine)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ṯallāja (refrigerator)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, consonant + a + consonant doubled-up + vowel + consonant + a, is kind of like a template, one which roughly means &amp;quot;machine which ...&amp;quot;. And you plug in three consonants: &amp;quot;s-y-r&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;something to do with travelling or movement&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;ḡ-s-l&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;something to do with cleaning up&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;ṯ-l-j&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;something to do with snow&amp;quot;. You can see many other words derived from these &amp;quot;three consonant roots&amp;quot;, but these, and that template, are absolutely &lt;em&gt;impossible to pronounce on their own&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just thought of an example in English as well. English has some words which pairwise either are nouns or are verbs or adjectives depending on if the stress is on the first or second syllable. These are words like &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt;mit and per&lt;em&gt;mit&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;en&lt;/em&gt;velope and en&lt;em&gt;vel&lt;/em&gt;ope. So you could say that &amp;quot;stress placement&amp;quot; is a similar kind of bound morpheme; one that is not concatenated, but transfixed onto the root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, for &lt;code&gt;x weeks ago&lt;/code&gt;, the non-dominant forearm is held horizontally, and the dominant hand moves from the elbow toward the non-dominant fingertips, and then turns upward and over the shoulder. That whole thing is also kind of a template, which you plug in some more phonemic content to produce an actual word. You can see that this too is &lt;em&gt;impossible to enunciate on its own&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. without your right hand actually having a handshape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been taught that unnecessary initialization is sometimes seen as undesirable in the Deaf community. Does that still apply to words like this, where initialization is the only way of distinguishing them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't apply here, because without the initial, you'd just be left with the &amp;quot;frame&amp;quot;, which is impossible to produce in isolation!, and which would not carry enough meaning by itself anyway. The sign you know for family, really is the entire sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T15:09:00.783" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T15:09:00.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T14:53:03.487" Score="5" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;People state that Romanian is closest in some aspects (grammar mainly), and that to learn a romance language studying latin may give you a leg up (which in my opinion just study the language), but for what language would this be uniquely bad for? &#xA;For example, for which language has either the furthest grammar, vocabulary/cognate set, or has such a different sound set from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French or Portuguese have nasal vowels for an easy example; or some other criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T19:33:02.090" Title="Which Romance Language is the least similar to Latin?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T15:06:06.873" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess another way of asking this is: are cultures with written languages more likely to exhibit diglossia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm listening to John McWhorter's course &quot;The Story of Human&quot; language on audible and he's going over the concept of diglossia.  I can see how in modern societies how the 'standard' language of government, media and the courts would engender a situation where regional, social and ethnic local dialects flourish.  The languages &quot;on the street&quot; would be living, dynamic phenomena while the standard would be relatively slow moving due to historical documents, media...etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we know if diglossia was a feature of pre literate cultures?  Did the speakers of PIE, for instance, have two different ways of speaking?   Is diglossia endemic to all cultures? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23772" LastEditorUserId="23772" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T16:02:35.483" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T22:52:54.253" Title="Did advent of writing increase the tendency for diglossia?" Tags="&lt;diglossia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T16:40:51.750" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) and in Derivation by Phase (DbP) (Chomsky, 2000, 2005, 2008), call it Phase Theory, features enter narrow syntax with &lt;strong&gt;predefined values&lt;/strong&gt;, these values are &lt;strong&gt;binary&lt;/strong&gt; (- or +). I'm aware that Chomsky resorts to Checking Theory (1995), meaning that the functional heads like T, &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; as well as the lexical elements that enter into &lt;strong&gt;Agree&lt;/strong&gt; relation with like subject &amp;amp; object DP, so that these features are valued ({-values} are deleted at Spell-out). &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;This way, we get the following features (not all of them): &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T: {+EPP/D}, {-phi} &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Subject DP (in Spec,&lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;P): {+phi}, {-NOMINATIVE}; &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt;: {-phi}, {+EPP/D} 'for overt object shift languages' &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Object DP: {+phi}, {-ACCUSATIVE}; &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the T probes the goal Subject to value (match, delete..) the features, and so does the &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; probes the goal object to value the features. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far so good, my &lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; questions are: &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'how are the values {-NOMINATIVE}, {-ACCUSATIVE}, {-phi}, etc. are set? Is it in the lexicon, as the checking theory (Chomsky, 1995) assumes? Or in the syntax as other views elswhere believe (Borer, 1998, 2005, 2013), Baker (1985), among others?  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is exactly the opreation DELETE at intefaces? is it that only {-values} are deleted (as I think) or there is more to that? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T16:40:51.750" Title="Feature values [+/- interpretable], how these values are set?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;feature-structures&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2019-02-05T17:10:08.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that de Vaan's Etymological dictionary of Latin only includes the words that are considered of Indo-European origin. So it's incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T17:10:08.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T17:55:30.427" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know conditionals can be classified in different ways. In english there are indicative, predicative,implicative, counterfactual, casual, subjunctive,zero, first second, third, mixed conditional, material implication.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; I would like to make some clarity on this classification beacuse there are too many and it's really a mess for a non native speaker.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd love if someone can point out similiarities or relations between them in a way that can link them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23826" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T00:03:10.990" Title="What are the relations between the different conditionals?" Tags="&lt;conditionals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T19:04:04.383" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are conflicting views regarding how Haitian Creole is classified in relation to its lexifier--French. I am trying to give a good description of Haitian Creole in terms of its morphology. Is Haitian Creole considered to be fusional in its morphological structure? I know that many have argued that its morphosyntax and other properties are more closely aligned with West African languages, such as Fongbe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23827" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T21:47:49.433" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T21:47:49.433" Title="Is Haitian Creole morphology fusional?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T19:29:49.080" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, words like &lt;em&gt;cleanliness&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;breakfast&lt;/em&gt; have preserved an older vowel than those in the free forms &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt;.  In Japanese, compound noun accent tends to match between dialects, even though the individual components differ unpredictably (and moreover, the common compound position matches Ramsay’s reconstruction of Middle Japanese tones, so it’s likely to be a remnant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general phenomenon where bound forms are relatively more resistant to sound change than free forms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T01:10:50.637" Title="Are bound forms in compounds more resistant to sound changes?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;compounds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30472" CreationDate="2019-02-05T20:23:02.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that bound forms tend to resist sound changes in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bound forms might in some cases provide more information about the historical form of a word because they occur in a different phonological environment than free forms. For example, if a language has a sound change that eliminates word-initial or word-final consonants, than bound forms in compounds might show the historical presence of a consonant that was lost in the free form of the morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about Japanese, so I'll only address the English example. I don't think that it strongly supports the idea that bound forms are more resistant to sound changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;cleanliness&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;breakfast&lt;/em&gt; actually don't entirely preserve what is thought to be the historical value of the vowel: &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt; are supposed to have had long vowels in Middle English, something like /ɛː/. But &lt;em&gt;cleanliness&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;breakfast&lt;/em&gt;* have the &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; vowel /ɛ/ in present-day English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are examples of a somewhat more general pattern where a morpheme may show a short vowel when it is used in compounds but a &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; vowel when it is used as a free form (and that in turn is part of a more general pattern in English where the frequency of &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; vowels relative to &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; vowels is higher in shorter words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other examples of shortening of an etymologically long vowel in compounds are &lt;em&gt;vineyard, shepherd,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;holiday&lt;/em&gt; (the last could be seen as an example of &amp;quot;trisyllabic&amp;quot; shortening, but the exact nature of that is a  bit complicated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other examples of a &amp;quot;short&amp;quot; word having a long vowel while a related longer word has a short vowel: &lt;em&gt;know, knowledge; south, southern; goose, gosling; please, pleasant; zeal, zealot.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the values of short vowels seems to have changed less than the values of long vowels/diphthongs in the history of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*With &lt;em&gt;break,&lt;/em&gt; the Middle English /ɛː/ was derived from &amp;quot;open syllable lengthening&amp;quot; of earlier short e, but I don't think that is directly related to the modern English pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;breakfast.&lt;/em&gt; The OED's first citation for &lt;em&gt;breakfast&lt;/em&gt; is from 1463 (&amp;quot;brekfast&amp;quot;), and I think that open syllable lengthening had already occurred by that time, although I'm not 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Examples of compounds being more conservative morphologically&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked about resistance to &amp;quot;sound changes&amp;quot;, but I wonder whether the different development of the position of the accent in compounds vs. non-compounds in Japanese could possibly have arisen from some kind of morphology-mediated effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether it's relevant, but there seem to be some examples from Ancient Greek and modern Russian of compound adjectives being more morphologically conservative than simple adjectives. I learned about them from the discussion in this WordReference thread started by Scholiast: &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/another-classical-greek-oddity.3550094/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another classical Greek oddity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that in Classical Greek, prefixed adjectives are more likely to show an older declension pattern where the feminine form is identical to the masculine, as an o stem, rather than having a distinct stem ending in ā.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In post #2 in that thread, ahvalj compared this to a phenomenon in modern Russian where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;derived simple adjectives always have a suffix, but compound adjectives often lack it, so that e. g. &amp;quot;four-footed&amp;quot; is &lt;em&gt;четверо·ног·ий/četvʲero·nogʲ·ij,&lt;/em&gt; without a suffix, while a non-compound &lt;em&gt;**ногий/nogʲij&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;footed&amp;quot; is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T01:10:50.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T23:40:40.783" Score="-2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot; b. Ha-yeladim kul-am zarku ʔavanim. &#xA;the children all-3MPL threw stones &#xA;‘The children all threw stones.&quot;&#xA;In this example, what does '3MPL' mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23828" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T03:34:09.547" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T03:34:09.547" Title="What does 3MPL refer to?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30474" CreationDate="2019-02-06T03:20:12.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sentence is glossed (sort of—not completely) according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Glossing Rules&lt;/a&gt;. The appendix lists the most common abbreviations, and indeed, everything here is in that list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;3&lt;/code&gt; = third person&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; = masculine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;PL&lt;/code&gt; = plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more standard glossing would be &lt;code&gt;3.M.PL&lt;/code&gt;, with dots between the abbreviations. And a full gloss would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ha=yelad-im kul-am zarku ʔavan-im&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The=child-PL all-3.M.PL threw stone-PL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew verb morphology is complicated (and breaks a lot of Euro-centric models of morphology) so I would probably just leave &lt;em&gt;zarku&lt;/em&gt; as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T03:20:12.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="35663" CreationDate="2019-02-06T03:33:37.270" Score="9" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Standard&quot; glossing (following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Leipzig rules&lt;/a&gt;) uses a linear model of breaking down words into morphemes. In other words, it assumes you can draw lines between all the morphemes to separate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what do I do when these assumptions break down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Arabic word كتب (&lt;em&gt;kataba&lt;/em&gt;) means &quot;he wrote&quot;. It consists of two morphemes: the root &lt;em&gt;k-t-b&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;write&quot;, and the pattern &lt;em&gt;_a_a_a&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;3.M.SG.PERF&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could gloss this following Rule 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;k-a-t-a-b-a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  write-3.M.SG.PERF-write-3.M.SG.PERF-write-3.M.SG.PERF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or following Rule 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;k&amp;lt;a&gt;t&amp;lt;a&gt;b&amp;lt;a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  write&amp;lt;3.M.SG.PERF&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or following the optional Rule 4D:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kataba&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3.M.SG.PERF/write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of these seems particularly satisfying. What is actually used &quot;in the wild&quot;, and what do linguists find most useful when they're trying to actually study a Semitic language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T13:26:29.673" Title="How do I gloss a Semitic verb?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-06T12:39:33.657" Score="9" ViewCount="7038" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, French, Italian and Spanish are listed as SVO languages, along with English and Chinese. (However, Latin is listed as SOV.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am highly confused about such statement. In those languages, we say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je te connais&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yo) te conozco&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Io) ti conosco&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Eu) Ti-cunosc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all above examples, the word order is SOV. It's the same for, say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tu l'aimerais&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Tú) me gustas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Io) gli dicevo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I came up with the question in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem agreeing that English has SVO order, say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I&lt;sub&gt;s&lt;/sub&gt; love&lt;sub&gt;v&lt;/sub&gt; you&lt;sub&gt;o&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23435" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T18:16:22.287" Title="Why are French, Italian, Spanish etc. listed as SVO languages?" Tags="&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;svo&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30477" CreationDate="2019-02-06T13:26:58.743" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;French, Spanish and Italian use SVO in clauses with non-pronominal arguments. Many languages make use of more than one kind of word order; the &quot;canonical&quot; order used in simplistic categorizations of entire languages as &quot;SVO&quot; vs. &quot;SOV&quot; etc. has to be based on some particular subset of clauses in the language in cases like that. English isn't SVO in all circumstances either: &quot;What do you want?&quot; is either OSV or OVS, depending on whether &quot;V&quot; is interpreted as being the auxiliary or the lexical verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few reasons for preferring to base categorizations on clauses with non-pronominal arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) pronominal arguments are often optional (in Romance, this is mainly the case with subjects, but I believe objects may be dropped in some other languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) pronominal arguments are not uncommonly expressed as affixes (in fact, there are some arguments about whether French object, and even subject markers are more like prefixes than they are like separate words)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T14:43:31.053" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T14:43:31.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30477" CreationDate="2019-02-06T16:06:15.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;French has all three patterns SVO if O is a noun, SOV if O is a pronoun or even OVS if O is a relative pronoun.&#xA;ex: les émissions que regardent les gens, dont parlent les gens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T16:06:15.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30466" CreationDate="2019-02-06T16:12:38.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;French is a good candidate for the most evolved form of Latin.&#xA;Very little has remained unchanged, and the situation would probably be worse if the French Académie had not relatinized French in the 17-18th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T16:12:38.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30467" CreationDate="2019-02-06T22:19:38.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written languages tend to be more stable and uniform than their spoken counterparts.&#xA;Besides, written languages cannot be separated from the issue of who is in power. The standard language is usually the sociolect of the upper layer of society.&#xA;As regards PIE, we may expect a difference between the most learned and the lowest component of the society (probably foreign-born slaves in fact ...).&#xA;Besides, it is not infrequent that males and females do not have the same language in traditional societies. This may have been the case in PIE, even if we cannot prove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T22:19:38.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30488" CreationDate="2019-02-06T23:08:07.427" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone tried to invent a code where they simply replaced every English word with another word, the code could be cracked (given a large enough sample) by comparing frequencies of English words to the frequencies of the code words.  For example, since &quot;the&quot; is the most common English word and if a code-breaker were able to figure out that &quot;dragef&quot; is the most common code word, the code-breaker could know that &quot;dragef&quot; means &quot;the.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frequencies of each word in the code language will be the same as the frequencies of their corresponding words in English.  So, I wonder, is the same true for other real languages?  I realize that, because a word from one language rarely has an exact equivalent in another language, the frequencies won't be as exact as the code language's.  But in general, do the frequencies of most words in English match up with the frequencies of their corresponding words in most other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How close are the frequencies of corresponding single words across multiple languages?  How close are the frequencies of corresponding pairs of words (for example, the frequency of &quot;John walks&quot; in English and it's equivalent in another language) across languages?  Could one theoretically learn a language by comparing the frequencies of words and words in context to that of a known language (mixed with a bit of trial and error in trying to find a definition for each word that fits every context)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23835" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T20:22:21.240" Title="Are Word Frequencies Cross-Lingual?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3706" CreationDate="2019-02-07T00:17:59.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguist John McWhorter has in &lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; suggested that there may have 100,000 languages at the time of the dawn of agriculture, ~10K y.a., based on estimates of world population and the observation of linguistic density among hunter gatherer groups, which is much higher than among agrarian groups.  Admittedly that's a popular not a scholarly book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23836" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T00:17:59.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30489" CreationDate="2019-02-07T05:05:07.527" Score="3" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;Snake and serpent mean exactly the same thing. But they're different words when they're treated as derivations. The obsolete brass instrument is a serpent but cannot be called a snake. The plumber's tool is a snake but cannot be called a serpent. (Source: Mark Rosenfelder)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any kind of known rules for these kinds of derivations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22266" LastEditorUserId="22266" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T16:38:17.823" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T22:12:35.707" Title="Is there a theory of word polysemy? Case of snake versus serpent" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;words&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30484" CreationDate="2019-02-07T05:26:37.110" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, we know about this aspect of language.  The basic idea is that of the dictionary.  Part of our understanding of language is our understanding of words.  Words have derivative properties from their composition from morphemes and phonemes, but also they can have idiosyncratic properties, as your clever example shows.  We know about words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T05:26:37.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30484" CreationDate="2019-02-07T09:16:52.643" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no derivation in the example you gave. A derivation, in Linguistics, is when a morpheme is added to another morpheme to produce a new meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case you are talking about can be analysed as a case of polysemy. The morphemes Serpent and Snake are polysemic and share synonym semes at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This polysemy is due in your case to a semantic change/shift. Probably, the spring of this shift comes from a cognitive operation such as the metaphor or the metonymy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T09:16:52.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30482" CreationDate="2019-02-07T10:09:25.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question about word-for-word encoding is similar to letter-for-letter encoding. Each European language has its own frequency of letters, so a naive cryptographic encoding (like shifting the alphabet by n letters) is easily cracked by looking at the frequency profile of the encoded text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule, in European languages, the most frequent words are those with a high grammatical role, like be, of, the, I, me, you, in, out, etc. then come those with more semantic and lexical contents. I've not read frequency surveys of sinograms. Chinese is peculiar because the vocabulary is componential and grammar is minimal. So I don't know how different Chinese would appear in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your last question is related to the idea of pivot language. For example, it's obvious translate.google uses English as its pivot language (which causes some distorsion as English does not distinguish P2sg from P2pl). The main problem is that &quot;John walks&quot; is not necessarily translated in real languages as a Noun+Verb sentence. Arabic would say &quot;John walking&quot; with a participle, here in masculine form, and Irish would say &quot;Is John a-walk&quot; with an infinitive. I'm afraid your proposed method would seriously fail ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T10:09:25.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30482" CreationDate="2019-02-07T11:25:34.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to take a few examples: The most frequent word in English is the definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;, but there are languages (e.g., Russian or Chinese) with no definite article at all, and other languages (e.g., German, Italian, French, and Spanish) where the definite article has several different forms according to number, case, and grammatical gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one: Arabic basically uses just one word for all kinds of saying repeating all over, while in English it is customary and considered good style to vary the word &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;reply&lt;/em&gt;, even &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T11:25:34.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30484" CreationDate="2019-02-07T16:57:31.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of a huge project conducted by Borer (2005a,b; 2013), a major part of it is dealing with word polysemy. However, her project is not purely morphological per se, since you requested theories that deal with polysemy, I believe, from a syntactic point of view, that even some types of polysemy (especially systematic) are dealt with in the syntax (narrow syntax precisely). I recommend reading her last book published in 2013 (Structuring Sense Volume III). &lt;br/&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory being developed in Borer's project is purely constructionalist (contra lexicalist positions). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T16:57:31.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30467" CreationDate="2019-02-08T06:19:53.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;PIE had a three way division of society, farmers, warriors, priests, if not more (cp. the Indic cast system). Arguably, these might be accompanied with respective sociolects, figures of speech and surely overlap through common metaphors. PIE was likely a dialect continuum so exchange across isoglosses, later branches and then isolation of new languages would be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="23769" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T22:52:54.253" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T22:52:54.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30484" CreationDate="2019-02-08T12:06:21.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snake and serpent mean exactly the same thing. But they're different words when they're treated as derivations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &lt;em&gt;derivation&lt;/em&gt; is a misnomer has already been pointed out, so let's ignore that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence still sounds weird to me. It seems to imply hat &lt;em&gt;serpent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt; would be the same word if their meaning was identical in every context. But they can't be, as their phonological form is different, and words are complex units, made up of phonological, grammatical and semantical properties. (Regarding grammatical properties: In languages other than English, nouns might belong to different declensions or have different genders.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the words are always distinct because of their phonological (and possibly their grammatical) properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming their meanings were identical at some point in time: If a plumber invents a new tool and says 'I dub thee snake', synonymy would be gone (as soon as the term passes into general usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the facts you outlined in your question, you either have to assume that the meanings of &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;serpent&lt;/em&gt; are not identical because one can be used to refer to a plumber's tool and the other can not; or that there are actually two words &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, with the second one referring to the plumber's tool and &lt;em&gt;serpent&lt;/em&gt; merely being synonymous with the first one (referring to certain reptiles).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T12:06:21.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26677" CreationDate="2019-02-08T16:57:16.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not true that the &lt;strong&gt;phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is not original in Czech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not even the &lt;strong&gt;grapheme&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is not &quot;original&quot; in Czech. However, it was used for a different phoneme (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography#Voicing_assimilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography#Voicing_assimilation&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For historical reasons, the consonant [ɡ] is written k in Czech words like kde ('where', &amp;lt; Proto-Slavic *kъdě) or kdo ('who', &amp;lt; Proto-Slavic *kъto). This is because the letter g was historically used for the consonant [j]. The original Slavic phoneme /ɡ/ changed into /h/ in the Old-Czech period. Thus, /ɡ/ is not a separate phoneme (with a corresponding grapheme) in words of domestic origin; it occurs only in foreign words (e.g. graf, gram, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt; is a normal original Czech phoneme (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fonetika.ff.cuni.cz/en/czech-phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fonetika.ff.cuni.cz/en/czech-phonetics&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Czech consonantal system has 26 phonemes, but in total at least 31 speech sounds are commonly found as their realizations. This is partly due to the fact that Czech has a very rich system of &lt;strong&gt;regressive voicing assimilation&lt;/strong&gt;, which applies both within words and across the word boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Czech speakers cannot pronounce two consecutive consonants which one is &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt; and the other &lt;em&gt;voiceless&lt;/em&gt; - one is always assimilated to the other. And here often &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; becomes [g].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;em&gt;kde&lt;/em&gt; [gde], &lt;em&gt;kdo&lt;/em&gt; [gdo], &lt;em&gt;leckdo&lt;/em&gt; [ledzgdo]; also listen to the audio example &quot;5) alveolar affricates [t͡s d͡z] – cena, leckdo&quot; on the same site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More detailed description is also in &lt;em&gt;N.S. Trubetzkoy&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.cz/books?id=M5w94-Yx1gAC&amp;amp;pg=PA274&amp;amp;lpg=PA274&amp;amp;dq=czech+assimilation+of+voice+kde+gde&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=DjcZdP5PtQ&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3WRQ-Ud8U7ber_gC1idhERa9McwQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiY6buLyKzgAhWCFiwKHXkjBiMQ6AEwAnoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gde&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.cz/books?id=M5w94-Yx1gAC&amp;amp;pg=PA274&amp;amp;lpg=PA274&amp;amp;dq=czech+assimilation+of+voice+kde+gde&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=DjcZdP5PtQ&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3WRQ-Ud8U7ber_gC1idhERa9McwQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiY6buLyKzgAhWCFiwKHXkjBiMQ6AEwAnoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gde&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqecy.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqecy.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase your question, I have no clue why you feel like the alternate form of “g” should be “dz” :) &quot;Mádzích* a &lt;em&gt;tadzích&lt;/em&gt; sounds just... &lt;em&gt;quite funny&lt;/em&gt; (in both the meanings of the word), but not Czech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T16:57:16.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26677" CreationDate="2019-02-08T17:14:58.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sound changes in different languages do not always fit into a regular pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the effect of palatalisation on Latin /k/ and /g/ (written 'c' and 'g')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, they are /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ - these are parallel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, they are /s/ and /ʒ/ - note that these are not parallel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, they are /s/ or /θ/ (depending on the dialect), and /x/ (with some variation, I think) - again, not parallel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not the first to complain that some aspect of a particular language is irregular or illogical; but languages are what they are, not what somebody thinks they should be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T17:30:00.370" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T17:30:00.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30484" CreationDate="2019-02-08T22:12:35.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snake and serpent mean exactly the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that really true? Of course they both denote the same class of animals, but that doesn't mean they mean &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same thing. They have slightly different connotations, as well as different word usage patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the latter, because it's simpler. First, there's a very slight difference in register. Centuries ago, only educated people usually said &quot;serpent&quot;. Nowadays, most speakers have both words, but &quot;serpent&quot; still sounds a tiny bit more formal and classy. Also, even after music was no longer described in Latin, it was described in Italian, so &quot;serpent&quot;, being a Romance borrowing, sounds a bit more &quot;music-ish&quot;. And finally, there are some contexts where one just sounds better than the other—the most obvious being metrical poetry, where the difference between one and two syllables matters. Third, they differ in derived forms—&quot;serpentine&quot; is a common word; &quot;snakelike&quot; feels like an ad-hoc compound that you should maybe spell with a hyphen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also, pairs of synonyms almost always have different connotations. People don't always consciously know what the connotations are, and a dictionary (especially a small one) may not even mention them, but they're there, and usually consistent across most speakers of the language, and they can be teased out. For example, if someone, for no apparent reason, suddenly betrays you, you might yell &quot;You snake!&quot;, but you probably wouldn't yell &quot;You serpent!&quot; Compare enough distinctions like this, and the picture starts to arise: Both snakes and serpents are treacherous, but for a serpent, being devious and subtle is central, while for a snake, subtlety isn't even required, and dangerousness is central. Where do those connotations come from? It might be centuries of different word-use choices, or register differences, or sound symbolism, or the influence of common idioms and cliches… But regardless, they are there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these factors affect metaphorical extension. When you're only using the shape in the extension, it's probably more about the register than about connotations: a plumber's tool uses the lower-register word and an orchestral instrument uses the higher-register, and more-Italian-sounding one. (It may also be influenced by the military serpentine, a kind of cannon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, even if two synonyms really &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; 100% interchangeable, which metaphorical extensions take hold in widespread use is largely arbitrary. Sure, maybe either one of them &lt;em&gt;could have been&lt;/em&gt; extended to mean the plumber's tool, but so could dozens of other words, and &quot;snake&quot; is the one that happened to stick. And, once it has, that makes it even &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; likely for &quot;serpent&quot; to be extended the same way, because we already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a name for the tool, so there's no need to coin a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T22:12:35.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T02:38:41.010" Score="0" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;word-based&quot;, I mean typical Indo-European languages (plus Uralic) where there are only tens of characters (e.g. &quot;A to Z&quot; (Latin) or &quot;А to Я&quot; (Cyrillic)), and a character alone has no meaning, unless it happens to be a complete word (&quot;I&quot; in English is both a single letter and the nominative first person singular pronoun).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;character-based&quot;, I mean languages like Chinese and Japanese, where any single character has its specific meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have wondered that, how would a word-based language to exist with absolute zero word inflection. A word inflection is like the plural form of a noun, or noun declension by case (Latin, German, Icelandic, Finnish etc.), or verb conjugation (Romance languages, East Slavic), or affix-based adjective and adverb distinction. Periphrastic affection doesn't count (e.g. Perfect &quot;tenses&quot; in English, which is constructed with auxiliary verb &quot;have&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, there's absolutely zero word inflection. Nouns do not have plurals or declension, verbs do not vary by tense or person, and they don't even have participles. This, IMO, relies heavily on the fact that Chinese is a character-based language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, AFAICT, is the language with the least word inflection features among all Indo-European languages. Nouns have at most 2 forms, and verbs have at most 5 forms (except &quot;be&quot;). Adjective only has one inflection (-ly turns into adverb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would such a language be, if word inflection fades away utterly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23435" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T19:06:34.337" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T14:16:27.897" Title="Is it possible to have a word-based language completely without word inflection?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;isolating-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30495" CreationDate="2019-02-09T02:49:38.993" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such categorization of languages as &quot;word-based&quot; vs. &quot;character-based&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all Chinese speakers are literate. Standard Chinese has certainly been affected by the character-based writing system, and this affects how people speak, but linguists generally don't consider the paucity of inflection in Chinese to rely heavily on the existence of characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/28292/5581&quot;&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; is currently written with an alphabet, but it doesn't seem to have any more inflection than Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hawaiian seems to have no verb inflection, even though it is not written in characters, and I can't find much sign of any other word category being inflected either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having some amount of inflection seems to be pretty common, and the amount/types of inflection that we see in a language seems to be influenced somewhat by the region. The type of writing system that a language has is strongly influenced by its region: writing is only thought to have originated independently a small number of times. East Asia is a linguistic area where low levels of inflection are common, and Han-character-based writing systems have historically been used. This is not enough data to make a conclusion about whether there is a causal relationship in either direction between character-based writing systems and lack of inflection. There is no obvious linguistic obstacle to a language having no inflection and no character-based writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T03:46:07.490" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T03:46:07.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30495" CreationDate="2019-02-09T03:02:09.240" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is, things like &quot;word-based&quot; vs &quot;character-based&quot; as you put it (the standard words are &lt;em&gt;alphabetic&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;logographic&lt;/em&gt;) apply to writing systems, not languages. Languages, both historically and even nowadays, are spoken more often than they're written—you can find people who speak English, or Chinese, or almost any language, perfectly well, even though they can't read or write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right that inflection and logographies don't fit together well. But languages can be (and often are) written in systems that aren't at all suited for them: look at the lengths English goes to, to represent 40-some phonemes with 26 letters, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the chaos&lt;/a&gt; that results. Japanese used to be written entirely with Chinese characters, which weren't a good fit for all its verb inflection—modern Japanese has repurposed a small subset of these characters into phonetic &quot;kana&quot;, in an attempt to fix that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the line between derivation (making new words) and inflection (changing the same word) isn't always a clear one. English has, at most, eight inflections: two on nouns, four on verbs, two on adjectives. Things like &lt;em&gt;-ly&lt;/em&gt; are almost always considered derivation, not inflection. But what about &lt;em&gt;-est&lt;/em&gt;? Is &quot;largest&quot; a new adjective, or just a form of &quot;large&quot;? Is &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; an inflection or an enclitic? How do you even decide what counts as the same word and what doesn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unfortunately, the best answer I can give is: this question can't be answered in its current state. It is probably true that Chinese kept a logography because it doesn't have inflection, while the Egyptian logography slowly turned into the Latin alphabet (via Semitic and Phoenician and Greek) because all those languages have more inflection. But this is a case of the language affecting the writing system, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T03:02:09.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30495" CreationDate="2019-02-09T10:05:13.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by some other answers, your question confuses the features of the language and the features of the writing system used for it. Being written in alphabets or syllabaries has little to do with having a rich or minimal morphology (inflection is your word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, your claims on Chinese are a bit superficial. It is true that Chinese is close to the zero-morphology asymptote. But Mandarin for example has developed a r-suffix that can nominalize verbs: for example zuo3 &quot;to sit&quot; =&gt; zuor3 &quot;seat&quot;. This is written by combining the original sign for zuo3 with a small er2 sign in the lower right corner. This feature is clearly a colloquial innovation of the area around BeiJing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T10:05:13.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T18:28:38.250" Score="1" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Altaic&quot; languages&lt;/a&gt; have similar words for &quot;language,&quot; but I do not know whether this is a coincidence, or due to historical language contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;kieli&quot; in Finnish is similar to &quot;khel&quot; in Mongolian and &quot;dil&quot; in Turkish. All three of these words mean &quot;language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the original source of this word been identified in any historical linguistic studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2465" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T21:50:11.753" Title="From which language was the Finnish word for &quot;language&quot; derived?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;mongolian&gt;&lt;uralic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30501" CreationDate="2019-02-09T18:56:57.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact nature of the relationship between Uralic and &quot;Altaic&quot; languages has so far remained quite obscure. Most specialists of these languages tend to be negative, though this might be a bit too severe.&#xA;Finnish &lt;em&gt;kieli&lt;/em&gt; has good comparanda in the rest of Uralic and indeed somehow looks related to Mongolian. Turkic &lt;em&gt;dil&lt;/em&gt; is obviously another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T18:56:57.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30495" CreationDate="2019-02-09T19:05:48.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a variety of Chinese, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungan&lt;/a&gt;, spoken by Muslims now living in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, that is written alphabetically using the Cyrilic script. It is still typologically and genetically very close to Mandarin Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this language counts as an answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-25T14:16:27.897" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T14:16:27.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T19:29:43.683" Score="-5" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between taurus and bovine? Both words are from Latin and both words refers to cows or the cow family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10448" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T21:18:38.333" Title="What is the difference between taurus and bovine?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-02-09T23:06:53.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30504" CreationDate="2019-02-09T20:54:10.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taurus is a proper name with little synchronic connection to cattle apart from usage of Latin in English for biological nomenclature and astrology, but bovine is an adjective which plainly means &quot;related to cattle&quot;. Latin &lt;em&gt;taurus&lt;/em&gt; probably derives from Greek ταῦρος, and is taken unmodified from Latin into English, whereas bovine is a fully nativized English word borrowed from French which got it from Late Latin &lt;em&gt;bovinus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T21:18:38.333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T21:18:38.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-10T11:38:43.890" Score="-2" ViewCount="1046" Body="&lt;p&gt;The roots of English words, as we all know, mainly come from Greek and Latin. There is no doubt that knowing the Latin or Greek roots of English words greatly helps in memorizing them. For instance, &quot;poly&quot; means &quot;many&quot; in Greek, which makes remembering the meaning of words like &quot;polyglot&quot; or &quot;polygraph&quot; much easier. As it happens, both German and English are deeply influenced by Latin and Greek culture, so I want to know know whether they share some of the same word roots, and if yes, how many; will this make it easier to learn German?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23858" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T23:05:57.443" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T00:19:23.580" Title="Do German and English share the same word roots?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30506" CreationDate="2019-02-10T15:12:23.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;English and German are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Germanic languages&lt;/a&gt;. This means that their grammar and core vocabulary originate from Proto-Germanic, which is also at the root of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin and Greek are not directly related to English or German, although Latin, Greek, English and German are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Words with Latin or Greek origins are many in English (there are especially many words that come &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;from French&lt;/a&gt;, because French was the language of the elites in England for some centuries), but English does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; come from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are words of Latin and Greek origin in German, too, but not nearly as many as in English. You will often notice there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English#List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;multiple English words referring to the same concept&lt;/a&gt;, at least one from French, and another from Germanic (they won't necessarily have the same meaning, and they will often be used in different registers, the French root usually belonging to a higher register). In many of these cases, German only has the corresponding Germanic word. Nevertheless, since both English and German are Germanic, knowing English will help you make sense of a few German words: these will often be more basic, core words than the ones that come from Latin or Greek, so they may be more useful in everyday speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T15:25:29.697" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T15:25:29.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30506" CreationDate="2019-02-10T17:47:19.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're counting by pure number of words, it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be true that English has more roots from Latin or Greek than from any other languages, just because of the sheer number of scientific coinages—e.g., the names of the vast majority of biological taxa, and even many of the equivalent common names.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Most of those words are shared across many languages, including German. So, a dictionary of every word ever used in English and an equivalent one for German might actually have a lot of common Latin- and Greek-derived entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're counting by usage, it's very different. How often do you use the word &quot;protostome&quot;? Even if you're a zoologist, probably nowhere near as often as the word &quot;and&quot;, which is a native word inherited from English's ancestors all the way back to proto-Germanic. Or &quot;the&quot;, which is an Old English coinage, but derived from a root (&quot;se&quot;) that again goes back to proto-Germanic. The same is true for many everyday words: &quot;everyday&quot; is a Middle English coinage from &quot;every&quot; and &quot;day&quot;, which both go back to proto-Germanic roots, as does &quot;word&quot;. Your own examples, &quot;polyglot&quot; and &quot;polygraph&quot;, may be more common than &quot;protostome&quot;, but nowhere near as common as &quot;everyday&quot; and &quot;word&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In between these two extremes of &quot;panarthropod&quot; and &quot;the&quot;, English &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a lot of borrowings. And, while many of those borrowings are from Old Norse (like &quot;root&quot;),&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; which ultimately goes back to the same proto-Germanic as English, many are from Norman French and Middle French, like &quot;native&quot; and &quot;extreme&quot;, which ultimately go back to Latin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are much less common in German (because Germany didn't have a Norman Conquest). So, knowing those words—or knowing their Latin roots—will rarely help you with German. In fact, most French-derived English words sit alongside Germanic synonyms, or at least similar words—and it's those Germanic words that will help you understand German, while the French words just get in the way. For example, knowing &quot;cow&quot; is going to help you a lot more with German &quot;Kuh&quot; than knowing &quot;beef&quot;, or the ultimate Latin root &quot;bos&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few exceptions—e.g., English &quot;state&quot; and German &quot;Staat&quot; are both ultimately borrowed from French. But even there, what you want to know is the English word &quot;state&quot;, or the French word &quot;etat&quot;, or the Old French word &quot;estat&quot; that all three ultimately come from. Going back even farther than that, to the Latin root &quot;status&quot;, makes it less useful, not more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're reading a lot of scientific papers in German, knowing the Latin and Greek roots will help a lot—and, best of all, it will especially help with the hard words. But if you're reading newspapers, personal email, etc.? Not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. Consider &quot;Hypsibius dujardini&quot;, &quot;Eutardigrada&quot;, &quot;true tardigrade&quot; or &quot;water bear&quot;, &quot;Tardigrada&quot;, &quot;tardigrade&quot;, &quot;Tactopoda&quot;, &quot;tactopod&quot;, &quot;Panarthropoda&quot;, &quot;panarthropod&quot;, &quot;Ecdysozoa&quot;, &quot;ecdysist&quot;, &quot;Protostomia&quot;, &quot;protostome&quot;, &quot;Nephrozoa&quot;, &quot;nephrozoan&quot;, &quot;Bilateria&quot;, &quot;bilateral&quot;, &quot;Eumetazoa&quot;, &quot;true animal&quot;, &quot;Animalia&quot;, &quot;animal&quot;—every root in that chain of clades except &quot;true&quot;, &quot;water&quot;, and &quot;bear&quot; comes from Latin or Greek.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. Also some from Dutch, another Germanic language, especially for nautical terms.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. Unless you're able to reconstruct a common root between proto-Indo-European &quot;*gʷṓws&quot; and &quot;*h₂uksḗn&quot;… but if you can do that in your head just from hearing the words &quot;cow&quot; and &quot;beef&quot;, you really shouldn't need any help understanding German…&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T21:25:19.260" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T21:25:19.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2019-02-10T19:33:21.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had success with the conversation transcripts provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.uncc.edu/?q=conversation%20site%3Ansv.uncc.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UNC Charlotte&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23861" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T19:33:21.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30506" CreationDate="2019-02-10T20:22:28.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you are interested in seeing the relation more clearly between English and German while learning German: I ULTRA recommend the German Language courses by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michel Thomas&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He explains the similarities through the different way the languages evolved, with a very little limited set of phonetical variation. The similarity between English and German is clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. with the variation German &amp;lt;-&gt; English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;t &amp;lt;-&gt; d&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;g &amp;lt;-&gt; y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we can clearly see :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tag == day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sag == say&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tun == do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the link at the beginning of his course where he concentrates on the similarities, and namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/h4ATNfqsdL4?t=359&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the shift of consonants&lt;/a&gt; which I was refering to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;group: d - t - th - s - z&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;group: b - p - ph - f - v - w &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;group: g - gh - c - ch - k - ck - y - g&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It made it much easier for me to learn or recognize german words associated to their English counterpart. I had found this &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, as a foreign English speaker, I refer to this simple rule (&lt;strong&gt;which, like all exaggeratedly simple rules, is not entirely true&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English words of 1 or 2 syllables come from Anglo-Saxon languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English words of 3 or more syllables come from French&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once speaking about this rule, I have been indicated that the Roman invasion had also left its heritage of Latin words into English also. e.g . these are words related to battle, weapons and fight, if I remember correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The influence of French comes both from the Normans invasion, that ruled over England, which gave English words associated to nobless and feudalism. (It's one of the reason of having &quot;pork&quot; as cooked &quot;pig meat&quot;, as Norman lords were served by english servants). And later because French was the language of the European Monarchies: e.g. much words dealing about the way to lead a state comes from French influence of these times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T00:19:23.580" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T00:19:23.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18929" CreationDate="2019-02-11T01:05:08.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question is not really about linguistics, but about rhetoric, especially after this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I added more context, which will make it more apparent that, 'exaggerations', was the classification I was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, exaggerations can be almost any part of speech, any class of word or phrase, any syntactic position. Your examples include two adverbs and one noun phrase. They're all used as adjuncts modifying the verb or verb phrase—but an idiot can come up with an example where the subject of the sentence is an exaggeration, as I just did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, exaggerations can likewise come from almost any category. Your examples are all temporal/frequentive quantifiers, but again, that isn't true for &quot;an idiot&quot; above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But rhetorically, there is a good answer: All of your examples are cases of &lt;strong&gt;hyperbole&lt;/strong&gt;: the use of exaggeration as an intensifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; mean is that the friend you're discussing is &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; late. But you also want to get across the fact that you have strong feelings about him being often late. Saying that he's &quot;always&quot; late when that isn't literally true is one good way to do that; your listener will understand that you're complaining about your friend's habitual tardiness rather than just stating it as a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how hyperbole works as an intensifier, compare &quot;He's late so damn OFTEN&quot;. Adding &quot;damn&quot;, stressing &quot;often&quot;, and focus postposing are all intensifiers, and the rhetorical effect is similar to &quot;He's always late.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when I say &quot;an idiot can come up with an example&quot;, I don't literally mean that; only a normally-intelligent native speaker with at least a bit of relevant education could do so. But using hyperbole intensifies the point: it's not even &lt;em&gt;close&lt;/em&gt; to true that only temporal-adverb-like adjuncts can be exaggerations.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. But, as with all rhetorical devices, there's a risk of being misconstrued. The exact same exaggeration could be used to imply that you should have figured this out for yourself and not asked this question. I obviously didn't intend at all—if I didn't think you had a good question that deserved an answer, I wouldn't have written one—but without that context, you might not have had any way of guessing that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T01:05:08.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25497" CreationDate="2019-02-12T07:00:16.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For British Sign Language I know of the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Linguistics of British Sign Language: An Introduction&quot; by Rachel Sutton-Spence and Benzi Woll.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The grammar section in the introduction to &quot;Dictionary of British Sign Language/English&quot; published by the British Deaf Association.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these will help you very much if you haven't already studied BSL for at least a year, preferably two or three years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 1 above has too few pictures of signs, so it will identify signs by their English translation, but many words in spoken English have several possible translations into BSL, some being regionalisms, others just plain synonyms, so when the authors say &quot;the sign for &quot;PEOPLE&quot;&quot;, you really don't  know which of the various signs they are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 2 above has photographs for nearly all the signs it refers to, so the reader can see the signs being talked about. However, it is a thick, heavy book and is a serious attempt to be very thorough with its description of BSL, although it is the first such attempt ever undertaken in BSL and is necessarily not complete. It is primarily a dictionary rather than a book of grammar, but the introduction is helpful on the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13203" LastEditorUserId="13203" LastEditDate="2019-10-01T20:09:01.433" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:09:01.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T09:34:44.240" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I heard that L2 language learners make a surgery on their tongue in order to gain better pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://saundz.com/south-korea-tongue-operations-for-better-english-pronunciation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://saundz.com/south-korea-tongue-operations-for-better-english-pronunciation/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8695371/British-student-has-tongue-lengthened-to-speak-Korean.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8695371/British-student-has-tongue-lengthened-to-speak-Korean.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it this necessarily true that they achieve better pronunciation after the surgery? Or is it just a difference between the pronunciations of each language that people achieved via childhood that hinders the L2 learners from achieving the correct pronunciation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is there any side effect regarding the language skill, such as worse pronunciation of your L1, after the surgery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is about the adult surgery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T19:53:40.620" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T19:53:40.620" Title="Does a surgery on your short tongue give you benefits on gaining the correct pronunciation in L2?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T10:41:23.423" Score="2" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it orthography in general, maybe punctuation, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23734" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T20:17:19.077" Title="Which part of linguistics concerns/is responsible for &quot;capitalization&quot;?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30524" CreationDate="2019-02-12T12:45:20.673" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_orthography#Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the letter &lt;code&gt;Ng&lt;/code&gt; is listed as one of the 28 letters of the Filipino alphabet. However, when I click on the link to go to &lt;code&gt;Ng&lt;/code&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(digraph)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;, I get to a list of digraphs. I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know a digraph is a sequence of two letters whose pronunciation is different from the 'regular' sound of the sequence of the two, e.g &lt;code&gt;sh&lt;/code&gt; in English or &lt;code&gt;sch&lt;/code&gt; in German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the difference between &lt;code&gt;Ng&lt;/code&gt; as a letter or a digraph in this regard? I'm trying to find &lt;code&gt;Ng&lt;/code&gt;'s Unicode number, but to no avail. Aren't letters (as opposed to, perhaps, digraphs) expected to have a Unicode number? Especially letters from languages as widely spoken as Filipino/Tagalog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23871" LastEditorUserId="23871" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T14:05:17.580" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T14:05:17.580" Title="The letter &quot;Ng&quot; in Filipino/Tagalog and its Unicode value" Tags="&lt;unicode&gt;&lt;tagalog&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30520" CreationDate="2019-02-12T12:56:25.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics itself isn't really concerned with orthography at all, because linguistics aims at describing how natural languages work as they are (&lt;strong&gt;descriptivism&lt;/strong&gt;), while orthography is usually understood as imposing rules on how written language &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; work (&lt;strong&gt;prescriptivism&lt;/strong&gt;) - of course, as abarnert points out, the real-life application of orthography could also be studied descriptively, but de facto most discussions about orthography revolve around the question how things should be spelled and not on how they are spelled, and that's just what linguistics normally wants to do. Besides that, linguistics primarily focusses on the study of spoken rather than written language; sounds rather than letters are seen as the primary units of language and subject of interest. The comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/18824/13238&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19012/13238&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; discuss some reasons why.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the field of orthography, capitalization is certainly not part of punctuation, but would probably constitute its own category, alongside&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;general rules for the phonemes-to-graphemes (sounds-to-letters) mapping&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exceptions/specific spelling of individual words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;punctuation (where to set commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;separate vs. hyphenated vs. compound spelling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;heuristics for the representation of foreign words and proper names&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and maybe others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which precise categories would be seen as basic depends on the language - punctuation is likely a relevant question in pretty much all written languages, whereas e.g. separate vs. compund spelling or capitalizaton is less of an issue in English than it is in German or so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T18:25:31.650" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T18:25:31.650" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30522" CreationDate="2019-02-12T13:12:49.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of this is more a technological than linguistic question. My understanding is that in general, Unicode doesn't have numbers for letters that are composed of characters used for other letters. A special case is Ĳ, for Dutch, but according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)#Encoding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; even that is only present as a legacy encoding. W also has its own number, probably because of the influence of English and German speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other languages treat these kinds of things as &quot;letters&quot; for the purposes of the alphabet: e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hungarian alphabet&lt;/a&gt; has letters like cs, sz, zs, ty, gy, ny, ly. Whether something is called a &quot;letter&quot; or a &quot;digraph&quot; is not really a technical classification as much as it is a cultural one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T13:17:53.133" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T13:17:53.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30528" CreationDate="2019-02-12T13:32:01.620" Score="8" ViewCount="693" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wondering about the Swiss (exclusively, I think) suffix in place names like Opfikon, Oerlikon or my favourite Pfäffikon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the origin of the &lt;code&gt;-ikon&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;-likon&lt;/code&gt; ending? It seems particularly with Zürich area but maybe I'm not familiar enough with the rest of German-speaking Switzerland &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23872" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T22:14:46.447" Title="Swiss suffix -ikon in place names" Tags="&lt;geolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30525" CreationDate="2019-02-12T15:10:41.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's from German &lt;em&gt;Hof&lt;/em&gt;, through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_(Ortsname)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suffix &lt;em&gt;-ighof&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in German-speaking Switzerland. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://likemag.com/de/das-bedeutet-die-endung-ikon-am-ende-vieler-schweizer-ortsnamen/529686&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LikeMag.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zwischen dem 9. und 11. Jahrhundert, als die Alemannen sesshafter wurden, hängten sie oft die Endung -hofen an und schlossen damit alle ein, die zu einem Hof oder einer Grundherrschaft gehörten. Aus &quot;Ditingen&quot; konnte so &quot;Ditighofen&quot; werden. In der Mundart wurden die Endungen dann zu &quot;-iken&quot;, &quot;-ken&quot;, &quot;-gen&quot; oder eben &quot;-ikon&quot; verschluckt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is related to the settling of the Alemanni between the 9th and the 11th centuries, when the addition of the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ighof&lt;/em&gt; represented all those belonging to a court or a manor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T15:10:41.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30519" CreationDate="2019-02-12T15:53:56.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lingual phrenectomy is performed to correct &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankyloglossia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ankyloglossia&lt;/a&gt;. Whether or not ankyloglossia has any negative consequences for speech is controversial. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165587600003591?via%3Dihub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This study&lt;/a&gt; surveys physician opinions of whether the condition can sometimes cause speech problems (only 23% say yes). It appears that there is a popular belief in Korea that a phrenectomy will &quot;help&quot;, but no clinical evidence to support the belief. It is also generally understood that the problem is not that Koreans can't speak Korean because of ankyloglossia, instead it is limited to L2 learning by Korean speakers, as indicated by the fact that ethnic Koreans raises in an English-speaking environment cannot be auditorily distinguished from their non-Korean peers. It's not the hardware, it's the existing software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T15:53:56.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T18:52:47.603" Score="13" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in 1999, there was a great paper co-authored by anti-Altaicist Stefan Georg with some Altaicists that gave the history of the Altaic theory, gathered up all of the evidence, and tried to work out what the substantive questions were and who was trying to answer them: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/1160404/Telling_general_linguists_about_Altaic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Telling general linguists about Altaic&lt;/a&gt; (also on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16743114144472136448&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, the debate has changed quite a bit—as I understand it, Starostin completed his system and published an etymological dictionary and basically nobody follows Poppe anymore; Japanese is now central to the theory (so the various alternative Japanese classification theories now directly oppose Altaic); Vovin set out to systematically answer all of the old criticisms by Dörfer that had been mostly ignored; etc. (Also, Martine Robbeets' &quot;Transeurasian&quot; seems like an alternative to Poppe and Starostin that's &#xA;roughly equivalent to Altaic, and didn't even exist in 1999.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But trying to look at any of the publications, they're more like flame wars than scientific papers (especially after Vovin switched sides).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone written anything like Georg's survey, but updated to cover the last 20 years? Even if there's not a paper, a solid blog post would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few related questions on this site which aren't being automatically picked up by the Related sidebar, so I'll link them directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/21405/&quot;&gt;What are arguments for and against a common origin of Korean and Japanese?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20428/&quot;&gt;Why is Korean considered a language isolate?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/12391/&quot;&gt;Origins of Turkic language family? Alternatives to Altaic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one links to a no-longer-available 2014 blog post; digging it up &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170529053239/https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/are-japanese-and-korean-altaic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Wayback&lt;/a&gt;, it gives a brief summary of the issues, but not at the depth I'm looking for. It also has links to a number of papers—including Georg 1999, and some of the more recent flame-war papers I mentioned, and Starostin's actual primary research data—but none of them are what I'm looking for. Which implies that, at least as of 2014, there probably &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no answer to this question. But I'll leave it open out of optimism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T21:09:46.533" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T13:01:05.150" Title="Is there a modern survey on the Altaic theory?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;altaic-hypothesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30520" CreationDate="2019-02-12T19:48:15.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Capitalization is &lt;em&gt;part of&lt;/em&gt; &quot;orthography in general&quot;. Which is usually not considered part of linguistics at all,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; but can at least be studied in similar ways.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any formal division of orthography into different areas, but I think in general you'd treat capitalization as a top-level area of study, alongside punctuation, spelling, letter forms, etc., not as part of one of those areas.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there will always be some overlap between the different areas, and some questions where it's not clear where they fall. But let's look at some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are &quot;ares&quot; (the plural of &quot;are&quot;) and &quot;Ares&quot; (the god of war) homographs? That seems to be a spelling question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which words are capitalized wherever they appear? In English, it's proper names and &quot;I&quot;; in German, it's both common and proper nouns and &quot;Sie&quot;.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; That &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a spelling question.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are titles capitalized? English capitalizes everything but a closed class of &quot;small words&quot;;&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; Spanish treats titles like sentences. That's clearly at a different level than spelling (roughly, phrases, rather than words).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How are digraphs (that are considered a single letter) capitalized? At first this seems like just a question of letter forms—Dutch has a capital form &quot;IJ&quot; to go with &quot;ij&quot;; Croatian has &quot;Nj&quot; to go with &quot;nj&quot;. But when you look at Czech, which capitalizes &quot;ch&quot; as &quot;CH&quot; in some contexts and &quot;Ch&quot; in others, it's clear that there's something else going on here—again, at a higher level than individual letters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that shows that capitalization really is separate enough from other areas of orthography that it's worth treating as its own thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. There are both philosophical and methodological reasons that linguistics studies only, or at least primarily, spoken language, which are too deep to get into here. At any rate, orthography seems to be on-topic for this site, even if it isn't on-topic for many academic linguistics departments.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. As with (spoken) language, it can be studied descriptively—working out the actual rules people use in practice, rather than trying to work out some set of rules from first principles and then prescriptively teaching people to follow those rules. In fact, lexicographers often do an emic descriptive study of the prescriptive rules of both language and orthography; I'm pretty sure Geoffrey Pullum has a good blog post on that somewhere, but I don't remember where.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. For what it's worth, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says: &quot;Orthography is largely concerned with matters of spelling, and in particular the relationship between phonemes and graphemes in a language. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.&quot; So, they treat capitalization as one of the top-level areas. But it seems weird that they don't separate out the question of which (variant of which) script a language uses from the question of how phonemes are mapped to graphemes in that script. Wikipedia has articles on the Roman alphabet, the set of CJK characters, etc. independently of articles on individual languages' orthography, and it seems like it would be mad &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to do that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4. But that's an oversimplification, and in fact the actual rules literate Germans use are not identical to the rules published in the &lt;em&gt;Reform der deutschen Rechtschreibung von 1996&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;5. You can just say &quot;I&quot; is spelled with a capital &quot;I&quot;, and &quot;me&quot; is spelled with lowercase &quot;m&quot; and &quot;e&quot;. But what about &quot;the lord God&quot; vs. &quot;the god of the hearth&quot;, or &quot;President Trump&quot; vs. &quot;a past president&quot;? Unless those are actually separate words, there's more going on than just how each word is spelled.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;6. … except that there are some cases where people capitalize &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the words. For example, album titles almost always do this: &lt;em&gt;Beat This! The Best Of The English Beat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Classic Rock Best Of The Year 2018&lt;/em&gt;, etc. So the rule is more complicated than what you learned in school, and might be worth studying to tease out what it actually is. Which is exactly the same kind of thing linguists do to discover the actual syntactic, etc. rules that speakers use, even if it's not linguistics.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastEditorUserId="23611" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T20:17:19.077" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T20:17:19.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2019-02-12T22:47:32.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a supplement to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3750/23611&quot;&gt;MGN's great answer on CxG in general&lt;/a&gt;, there's a closely related approach by Ray Jackendoff and Peter Culicover called &quot;Parallel Architecture&quot; that I think is relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks whether syntax determines/constrains semantics, semantics determines/constrains syntax, or neither. But there's a fourth possibility: both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntax is inherently tree-structured; that's presumably uncontroversial. And semantics is also inherently tree-structured: PAST(LIKE(John, PROPERTY-OF(Mary, smile))) doesn't make sense unless the argument to PAST is the whole liking, and one of the arguments to LIKE is Mary's smile. There are also both syntactic and semantic mechanisms for coreference. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way PA handles this is to treat each construction as having not a syntactic structure with dependent semantics, or a semantic structure with dependent syntax, but instead both a semantic structure and a syntactic structure, plus an interface between the two that determines how components are linked up (and possibly adds additional constraints).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at a fixed idiom construction, like MGN's &quot;kick the bucket&quot;, you get a simple semantic structure with a nonsimple syntax:&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cognitive structure: DIE&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntactic structure: [&lt;sub&gt;VP&lt;/sub&gt; kick&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;NP^&lt;/sub&gt; the bucket]]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, at the syntactic level, we have a perfectly normal verb phrase, but the verb, noun head of the complement, etc. aren't attached to any meaning; rather, the entire verb phrase is attached to a meaning (that's what the coindexed subscript represents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, for an idiom with a &quot;variable&quot; in it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cognitive structure: SUPERLATIVE(x&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntactic structure: [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; the&lt;sub&gt;D&lt;/sub&gt; mother&lt;sub&gt;N&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;PP&lt;/sub&gt; of&lt;sub&gt;P&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; all&lt;sub&gt;D&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;N'&lt;/sub&gt; a&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; -s]]]&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, both semantics and syntax are compositional, but with different structures. The &quot;a&quot; inside the syntactic construction is linked to the &quot;x&quot; in the semantic construction, and the entire syntactic tree is linked to the entire semantic tree, but, e.g., the PP syntactic subtree isn't linked to anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which tree do you &quot;build first&quot; when producing or processing a sentence? Neither. As you go along, you select constructions that have both syntax and semantics and assemble them into larger compositions that also have syntax and semantics, following constraints on both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, all of the things that traditional generative grammar considers &quot;rules&quot; are like this—the simple active sentence construction is just an idiom with more, and more complicated, variables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course often both syntax and semantics are perfectly compositional, and coindexed in the obvious way, like this construction:&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cognitive structure: PROPERTY-OF&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;(x&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;, y&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syntactic structure: [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;DP&lt;/sub&gt; [&lt;sub&gt;NP&lt;/sub&gt; a&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;] -'s] b&lt;sub&gt;N, 3&lt;/sub&gt;]]&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… but that's just a very common feature of many constructions, not actually a rule that applies everywhere, as it would be be in a syntax-first or semantics-first theory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you could show that in every case, the semantic structure can be derived from the syntactic structure (as traditional generative grammar holds), or vice-versa (as Generative Semantics claimed), then this whole mechanism would just be extra complexity for no real purpose. But Jackendoff and Culicover argue that can't be done. Their book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Simpler_Syntax.html?id=We0TDAAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simpler Syntax&lt;/a&gt; is a reasonably approachable introduction to their argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. In fact, there's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a phonological structure, and there's interfaces between all 6 pairs. For example, that's how you handle the altered prosody that goes with topicalization, or syntactic effects of phonological weight in cases like heavy NP shift.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2. The &quot;standard&quot; way to draw things is with two trees, and arrows between nodes in the trees, because using &quot;bracket trees&quot; and indexes gets hard to follow as soon as you try to deal with large phrases or anything nonlocal like anaphora or coordination. But I'll try to keep things simple enough that we can stay with brackets.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;3. This is oversimplified; &quot;Mary's&quot; is probably a separable component at the semantic level as well as the syntactic level, and &quot;-'s&quot; probably has an inherent meaning that the &quot;x's y&quot; construction relies on rather than duplicating. And I've left out most of the semantic constraints on all of these trees—for example, as drawn, there's no reason you couldn't use these constructions to build a phrase like &quot;John's mother of all Marys kicked the bucket&quot;, which you obviously can't. But I think this is enough to show the idea.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23611" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T22:47:32.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30530" CreationDate="2019-02-13T12:48:59.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with &quot;Altaic&quot; is that the most competent people in the relevant languages have all become hostile to the idea of an &quot;Altaic&quot; genetic group.&#xA;Vovin is competent on Japanese and Korean, and considers &quot;Altaic&quot; to be a religious [sic] issue, not a scientific one.&#xA;Georg is competent on Mongolian and considers Mongolian unrelated to Turkic.&#xA;So what we have now is a deadlock. The mainstream communis opinio is thoroughly if not dogmatically hostile. So no progress can be expected in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T12:48:59.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T13:06:07.343" Score="1" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;The diphthong /aʊ/ doesn't really make sense to me as a transcription. I'm a Southern British English speaker, and when I say and hear 'how' it sounds to me like /hæɒw/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/a/ doesn't seem to exist as a monophthong on it's own in English, but I imagine that this sound is pronounced like a short version of /ɑː/ as in 'f&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ther', because that's the first vowel sound in the diphthong /aɪ/. And /ʊ/ is the vowel sound in 'b&lt;strong&gt;oo&lt;/strong&gt;k'. If I put those two sounds together (short f&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ther and b&lt;strong&gt;oo&lt;/strong&gt;k) when I say &quot;how&quot;, it sounds like a Belfast &quot;haoo&quot; - it doesn't sound anything like my British pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does /aʊ/ transcribe the sound in 'how'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T18:21:23.047" Title="Why do we transcribe the vowel sound in 'how' as /aʊ/?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1678" CreationDate="2019-02-14T00:45:51.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to R. Huddleston &amp;amp; L. Bauer in &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language&lt;/em&gt; ,&lt;em&gt;bitter-sweet&lt;/em&gt; is a coordinative compound, where the component bases are of equal status. In, for example, the noun &lt;em&gt;secretary-treasurer&lt;/em&gt;, the adjective &lt;em&gt;bitter-sweet&lt;/em&gt;, or the verb &lt;em&gt;cook-chill&lt;/em&gt;, neither component is dependent on, subordinate to, the other. Coordinative compounds can normally be glossed with &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;secretary-treasure&lt;/em&gt;r is someone who is both &lt;em&gt;secretary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;treasurer&lt;/em&gt;, not (or not just) a kind of treasurer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples such as &lt;em&gt;Alsace-Lorraine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Austria-Hungaria&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bosnia-Herzegovina&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Rank-Xerox&lt;/em&gt; are called &lt;em&gt;dvandva compounds&lt;/em&gt;, a term taken from &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/em&gt; grammar. &lt;em&gt;Dvandva&lt;/em&gt; compound nouns in English are mainly proper nouns referring to the combination or union of the referents of the component parts- territories, businesses. &#xA;The coordinative compounds differ from the dvandvas in that the components apply individually as well as jointly. &#xA;&lt;em&gt;She is a secretary-treasurer of the society&lt;/em&gt; entails &lt;em&gt;She is secretary of the society and she is the treasurer of the society&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;She was born in Alsace-Lorraine&lt;/em&gt; does not entail &lt;em&gt;She was born in Alsace and she was born in Lorraine&lt;/em&gt;- on the contrary, she can't have been born in each of them separately. Similarly with the business names: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;I bought it from Hewlett-Packard&lt;/em&gt; does not entail &lt;em&gt;I bought it from Hewlett and I bought it from Packard&lt;/em&gt;. (R. Huddleston &amp;amp; L. Bauer) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23886" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T00:45:51.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30540" CreationDate="2019-02-14T07:48:51.660" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;During assimilation of voice, voiced consonants become voiceless and vice versa: &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cats ([ts])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dogs ([ɡz])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;missed ([st])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whizzed ([zd])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these sound pairs &lt;em&gt;different phonemes&lt;/em&gt;, or are they just &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt; of the same phoneme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example of an allophone is assimilation, in which a phoneme is to sound more like another phoneme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in English /s/ and /z/, or /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes, you will easily find a minimal pair in the meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme#Minimal_pairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme#Minimal_pairs&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;sip&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;zip&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tip&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;dip&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/16929/3475&quot;&gt;How do allophones become distinct phonemes?&lt;/a&gt; but I cannot find the answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3475" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T09:26:53.430" Title="Does assimilation of voice produce different phonemes, or just allophones?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;assimilation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30538" CreationDate="2019-02-14T08:37:51.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;allomorphs&lt;/a&gt;. It refers to phonological variations of a same morpheme. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph#In_English_suffixes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In English suffixes&lt;/a&gt; section of the given wikipedia article. It gives an example of the past tense morpheme &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The /t/-/d/ and /s/-/z/ distintion of your example is surely of different phonemes. Any English speaker will naturally &quot;recognize&quot; the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23880" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T08:37:51.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30538" CreationDate="2019-02-14T08:38:53.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no clear answer to the title question in general; it may depend on the sounds, or the language. (Well, unless you define &amp;quot;assimilation&amp;quot; in such a way as to explicitly refer to a process that changes one phoneme to another.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples like these are part of the reason why people have come up with concepts like &amp;quot;archiphonemes&amp;quot; (although I have the impression that the archiphoneme concept isn't used much in current theories of phonology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English &amp;quot;cats&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;missed&amp;quot; are usually transcribed with /s/ and /t/&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within frameworks that use the concept of &amp;quot;phoneme&amp;quot;, the most common analysis that I have seen treats English plural [s] and plural [z] as different phonemes, /s/ and /z/. These could be analyzed as both corresponding to underlying &amp;quot;z&amp;quot;, but that underlying &amp;quot;z&amp;quot; would be changed into the phoneme /s/ in a word like &lt;em&gt;cats.&lt;/em&gt; (I used quotation marks around &amp;quot;z&amp;quot; because I'm not sure what kind of phonological entity it would be treated as.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason for supposing that the [t] in words like &amp;quot;missed&amp;quot; is the phoneme /t/ is that there is no audible contrast with a word like &lt;em&gt;mist.&lt;/em&gt; And &lt;em&gt;mist&lt;/em&gt; is typically analyzed as ending with /t/ rather than /d/ (there are various reasons for this, among them native speaker intuition, spelling, and etymology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are non-standard variant spellings of the &amp;quot;-ed&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;-(e)s&amp;quot; suffixes that provide limited support for either analysis; e.g. &amp;quot;gript&amp;quot; as a variant spelling of &amp;quot;gripped&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flipz.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flipz&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bratz&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; as brand names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Transcriptions of languages with &amp;quot;final obstruent devoicing&amp;quot; often use the symbols for voiced consonant phonemes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation in languages with systematic &amp;quot;final obstruent devoicing&amp;quot; like Dutch, German, or Slavic languages may be a bit different. There is a body of research suggesting that the contextual neutralization of voiced and voiceless obstruents in some of these languages may be &amp;quot;incomplete&amp;quot; at the phonetic level: even though the sounds are close enough that a listener cannot reliably distinguish voiced phonemes from unvoiced ones, apparently speakers may produce slight differences on average between words with underlying voiced and voiceless sounds. For German, the differences are supposed to show up in the duration of the vowel in the syllable ending in the &amp;quot;devoiced&amp;quot; consonant. Here is an article about the alleged phenomenon of &amp;quot;incomplete neutralization&amp;quot; in German: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bodowinter.com/papers/winter_rottger_IN_grazer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nature of Incomplete Neutralization&#xA;in German: Implications for Laboratory&#xA;Phonology&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Bodo Winter and Timo Röttger, 2011. However, they &amp;quot;argue that IN can be explained even without recourse to the phoneme, making almost no theoretical assumptions&amp;quot; (p. 63), so you'd probably have to look at other literature for detailed accounts of how to reconcile this kind of data with theories that deal with phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I mentioned German together with Slavic languages, there are actually notable differences in their treatment of voicing. German, like English, has a so-called &amp;quot;fortis-lenis&amp;quot; contrast where phonologically voiceless/fortis plosives are aspirated at the start of a syllable, and phonologically lenis/voiced plosives are unaspirated and &amp;quot;weakly&amp;quot; voiced (or not phonetically voiced at all). There is no regressive assimilation from voiced obstruents to preceding voiceless ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Slavic languages (also Dutch, if I remember correctly), contrast tenuis voiced stops with fully voiced stops, and do show regressive assimilation of voicedness. I don't remember seeing literature about any possible &amp;quot;incomplete neutralization&amp;quot; effects in the context of regressive assimilation to voicedness, but I haven't tried to look for it yet. One argument for treating this assimilation as phonetic rather than phonemic would be that there are some circumstances where it would create otherwise-unattested phonemes: for example, Russian phonology is typically analyzed as containing a phoneme /t͡s/ but not a phoneme /d͡z/, and regressive assimilation can create [d͡z].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a thesis that I found (I only skimmed it) that transcribes &amp;quot;devoiced&amp;quot; obstruents in Russian using the symbols for voiced phonemes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&amp;amp;httpsredir=1&amp;amp;article=3385&amp;amp;context=etd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voicing and voice assimilation in Russian stops&lt;/a&gt;, by Vladimir Kulikov, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T09:26:53.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T12:41:27.413" Score="-1" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Grand&lt;/em&gt; is used in a specialized sense in kin terms like &lt;em&gt;grandmother&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;grandson&lt;/em&gt; to indicate a further degree of lineal distance beyond that expressed in the head. Such forms can themselves be modified by &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt; (with the same meaning) in a morphological construction that is recursive: there is no linguistic limit on how many &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt;'s are permitted in compounds like &lt;em&gt;great-great-great-grandmother&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; (G.K.Pullum &amp;amp; R. Huddlestone, 2002) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example is very good explained, however, what I could not understand is if we should consider the word &lt;em&gt;grandmother&lt;/em&gt; as a compound or not. Since &lt;em&gt;grand&lt;/em&gt; is attached to other bases, I thought that the option to consider &lt;em&gt;grand&lt;/em&gt; as a prefix should not be avoided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23886" LastEditorUserId="23886" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T18:46:23.527" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T19:14:30.903" Title="Is *grandmother* a compound?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;word-formation&gt;&lt;analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25997" CreationDate="2019-02-14T12:59:03.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should check out this link:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-core-difference-between-Anusv%C4%81ra-%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0-vowel-and-Anun%C4%81sika-%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95-consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-core-difference-between-Anusv%C4%81ra-%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0-vowel-and-Anun%C4%81sika-%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95-consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will paste it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AnusvAra as the word itself explains is &quot;giving voice to&quot; following the vowel, the full and complete pronunciation of म् in अम्, कम् etc., &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In anunAsika the term tells you that it is a letter-pronunciation that is aided by the nose. Consider the Panini Sutra मुखनासिकावचनोऽनिनासिकः (पा.सू.1-1-08).मुख-नासिका-आवचनः = मुखनासिकावचनः सः अनुनासिकः | This is the definitional sutra for anunAsika. The standard explanation goes thus. मुखसहितानासिका= mouth(the oral cavity) together with the nose(the nasal column) ईशद्वचनम् आवचनम् = slightly pronounced. That means the anunAsika which represented in scripy by chandra-bindu the vowel must be nasalized. In fact in Paninian Grammar the nasalized vowel is one distinct entity in 18 basic forms of vowels. Thus the vanrgAnta(last letters of the vargIya-vyanjanas are the anunAsikas referred to by the pratyAhAra-sutra ञमङणनम् | This sutra collects all the anunAsikas together. These letters singly are best pronounced and correctly so by Malayalis. In snadhi formed usages like भवाँल्लुब्धैः(=भवान् + लुब्धैः) the long vowel आ is just nasalized. &#xA;Whatever you have written about the representation of anuswAra in script if correct and in line with Panini's recommendations. &#xA;How should the anuswAra in संस्कारः, संस्कृतम् be prononced? For in places where the anuswAra is followed by a vargIya-vyanjana the &quot;process&quot; of pronunciation &quot;naturally&quot; forces you to correctly pronounce the auswAra rightly. It is when anuswAra is follwoed by non-classed consonants that you get into trouble. You can see a variety of pronunciations of the anuswara in thses cases. It varies from pronouncing it as न् in northern states, somewhat like औँ in Maharashtra and North Karnataka and as well-intoned  म् down south(South Karnataka, Andhra, Kerala and Tamilnadu). Which is in line with Panini? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to do that in an edit. Till then ruminate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23888" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T12:59:03.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T15:19:06.737" Score="4" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remembered reading somewhere about a language that its speakers believe the written words are sacred (or some other reasons) they chose to refrain from putting spoken words into written forms even though they do have a writing system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess my question is, most of the languages with very few or no written scriptures were due to the lack of a writing system or being forced to abandon one. Is there a speech community that voluntarily refrains from writing things down due to their belief system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23885" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T09:46:43.050" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T09:46:43.050" Title="Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30543" CreationDate="2019-02-14T16:24:12.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may have heard this about Turoyo, though the situation is slightly different from what you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turoyo is a Neo-Aramaic language, mostly spoken by Syriac-Orthodox Christians. In the 1970s, Turoyo-speaking immigrants in Sweden obtained governmental support for promoting Turoyo as a minority language. They developed a writing system (previously, Turoyo was unwritten) based on the Latin alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Turoyo is similar to Syriac which is used by the Church. This language has its own script. To some people, Turoyo felt as a corrupt form of Syriac, and the identity of the church was intertwined with the Syriac writing system. Therefore, the Church and some other organizations opposed the developments in Turoyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about this in S. Bednarowicz (2017), &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-3800-6_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Translation as Corpus Planning: The Little Prince in the Neo-Aramaic Minority Language Turoyo'&lt;/a&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;Moving Texts, Migrating People and Minority Languages&lt;/em&gt;, specifically sections 3 and 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the beginning, the Swedish project for the Turoyo language gained acceptance and great interest among Turoyo speakers. However, there were also critics of this initiative. The main opposition was on part of the Church and some national organizations (Arnold 2005: 86–87). The Church promoted using the Syriac language as the only literary medium. Although it supports the modernization of vocabulary and regularly organizes Suryoyo courses in church schools, for many churchmen Turoyo was nothing else but a corrupt form of Syriac. The use of the Latin script was another factor that discouraged the Church from supporting the Swedish project, since the Syriac script (especially serto) is considered to be an integral part of Church identity (Talay 2002: 74). As far as the national organizations are concerned, they perceive the emergence of the new language as an attempt to divide the nation. There are currently two main national movements among Turoyo speaking Christians, that is Assyrians and Arameans,4 and they are in state of permanent struggle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T16:24:12.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T20:37:23.570" Score="-2" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just started learning Norwegian (focusing on Bokmål). My dad didn't, still doesn't I believe, know the difference between Bokmål and Nynorsk - I don't even think that he knows that there are two written versions of Norwegian. So, being the good willed person that he is he decided to aid me in my process of learning a language that isn't exactly popular. He bought me book - which I absolutely love. It has the English version of the text on the top and a Norwegian version on the bottom. The only problem is that the book is on Nynorsk. I haven't told him, and not planning on doing it, so I have a question of whether or not translating words on Nynorsk into Bokmål will be alright. Is it okay to translate from Nynorsk to Bokmål - word by word or by sentences? Because I found a website that does it and I'm just wondering if it is correct and if it is possible at all. Or should I just leave the book and move on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for all your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23889" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T15:22:53.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T15:22:53.680" Title="Learning Bokmål Norwegian through a book on Nynorsk" Tags="&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-02-19T03:53:34.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30545" CreationDate="2019-02-14T21:15:02.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to translate from Nynorsk to Bokmål, or Nynorsk to Chinese, or any other arrangement you want. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/12025/1/paper5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; discusses machine translation between Nynorsk and Bokmål.&#xA;It is also possible that a particular translating website can be wrong (e.g. Lingojam). A word-by-word translation is guaranteed to be wrong some of the time, because there is more to the Nynorsk/Bokmål distinction than &quot;what is the word for X&quot;: but it might be right some of the time. The languages differ in the syntax of passives and position of possessive Ns in the NP (X's N → N til X). If the goal is to maintain a firm grasp on the literary standard and not let &lt;em&gt;ikkje, æ, ka&lt;/em&gt; slip into your Norwegian, it would be best to not mix in Nynorsk or machine translations of X to Bokmål. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T21:15:02.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30541" CreationDate="2019-02-14T21:30:58.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grandmother is indeed a a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-for-students.com/Compound-Words-G.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compound word&lt;/a&gt; coming from the French &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/grandmother&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grandmère&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/grand-?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grand&lt;/a&gt; means &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a generation older than&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less a generation removed from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the compound would translation &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A generation older than mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22868" LastEditorUserId="22868" LastEditDate="2019-02-15T19:14:30.903" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T19:14:30.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30543" CreationDate="2019-02-15T10:18:45.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read about an Amerindian tribe in Quebec, for which linguists had designed a written orthography for their language. But apparently, the speakers are not interested in writing or reading their language. I don't know if it's religious, but in all cases, these people are not interested in having a written form of their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T10:18:45.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30545" CreationDate="2019-02-15T20:17:05.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nynorsk&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Bokmål&lt;/em&gt; are just two different forms for writing the same language (or at least its dialects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bokmål&lt;/em&gt; (book language) is based on the Danish writing system. Of course, it is not exactly Danish -- e.g.: dan. &lt;em&gt;dage&lt;/em&gt; and nor. (bokmål) &lt;em&gt;dager&lt;/em&gt; , both meaning &quot;days&quot;. It is more used in Norway than nynorsk (although I think that everyone learns both in school).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nynorsk&lt;/em&gt; (new norwegian) was created by making an &quot;average&quot; of norwegian dialects. Aasen, its creator, favoured, in practice, the dialects that were more archaic, thus closer to old west norse. He changed a few things to make it closer to the norwegian phonology, such as turning the example above &quot;&lt;em&gt;dager&lt;/em&gt;&quot; into &lt;em&gt;dagar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences between &lt;em&gt;bokmål&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nynorsk&lt;/em&gt; are fairly small, generally. I think you should see which system works better for you, because if you learn one, the other will become naturally easier to understand. They are not different languages that need to be translated, just different standardized ways of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of grammar, &lt;em&gt;bokmål&lt;/em&gt; is closer to Swedish and, of course Danish, both east norse languages, making it easier to understand these two other languages. On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;nynorsk&lt;/em&gt; is based on spoken norwegian itself, so it is closer to west norse tongues like faroese and Icelandic, however, those languages were way more conservative than norwegian in their grammars and features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it was really useful, but hope it helps you in your studies! :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T20:17:05.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-15T23:11:09.657" Score="4" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to obtain a proper etymology for the name &quot;Tarim&quot; and found it rather difficult. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tar%C4%B1m#Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; page only lists the modern Turkish word tarım meaning agriculture, so was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_River#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page that briefly describes the meaning of the word without providing any citations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word tarim is used to designate the bank of a river that flows&#xA;  into a lake or that is not able to be differentiated from the sands of&#xA;  a desert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I turned my attention to the Turkish word tarım. The Wiktionary page links its origin to Old Turkic &lt;em&gt;tarı-&lt;/em&gt;, which it provides with two meanings: &quot;to sow&quot; and &quot;river delta&quot;. I was able to confirm the first meaning on &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Calt%5Cturcet&amp;amp;first=1&amp;amp;off=&amp;amp;text_proto=*TAr%C9%A8-&amp;amp;method_proto=substring&amp;amp;ic_proto=on&amp;amp;text_meaning=&amp;amp;method_meaning=substring&amp;amp;ic_meaning=on&amp;amp;text_rusmean=&amp;amp;method_rusmean=substring&amp;amp;ic_rusmean=on&amp;amp;text_atu=&amp;amp;method_atu=substring&amp;amp;ic_atu=on&amp;amp;text_krh=&amp;amp;method_krh=substring&amp;amp;ic_krh=on&amp;amp;text_trk=&amp;amp;method_trk=substring&amp;amp;ic_trk=on&amp;amp;text_tat=&amp;amp;method_tat=substring&amp;amp;ic_tat=on&amp;amp;text_chg=&amp;amp;method_chg=substring&amp;amp;ic_chg=on&amp;amp;text_uzb=&amp;amp;method_uzb=substring&amp;amp;ic_uzb=on&amp;amp;text_uig=&amp;amp;method_uig=substring&amp;amp;ic_uig=on&amp;amp;text_sjg=&amp;amp;method_sjg=substring&amp;amp;ic_sjg=on&amp;amp;text_azb=&amp;amp;method_azb=substring&amp;amp;ic_azb=on&amp;amp;text_trm=&amp;amp;method_trm=substring&amp;amp;ic_trm=on&amp;amp;text_hak=&amp;amp;method_hak=substring&amp;amp;ic_hak=on&amp;amp;text_shr=&amp;amp;method_shr=substring&amp;amp;ic_shr=on&amp;amp;text_alt=&amp;amp;method_alt=substring&amp;amp;ic_alt=on&amp;amp;text_khal=&amp;amp;method_khal=substring&amp;amp;ic_khal=on&amp;amp;text_chv=&amp;amp;method_chv=substring&amp;amp;ic_chv=on&amp;amp;text_jak=&amp;amp;method_jak=substring&amp;amp;ic_jak=on&amp;amp;text_dolg=&amp;amp;method_dolg=substring&amp;amp;ic_dolg=on&amp;amp;text_tuv=&amp;amp;method_tuv=substring&amp;amp;ic_tuv=on&amp;amp;text_tof=&amp;amp;method_tof=substring&amp;amp;ic_tof=on&amp;amp;text_krg=&amp;amp;method_krg=substring&amp;amp;ic_krg=on&amp;amp;text_kaz=&amp;amp;method_kaz=substring&amp;amp;ic_kaz=on&amp;amp;text_nogx=&amp;amp;method_nogx=substring&amp;amp;ic_nogx=on&amp;amp;text_bas=&amp;amp;method_bas=substring&amp;amp;ic_bas=on&amp;amp;text_blkx=&amp;amp;method_blkx=substring&amp;amp;ic_blkx=on&amp;amp;text_gagx=&amp;amp;method_gagx=substring&amp;amp;ic_gagx=on&amp;amp;text_krmx=&amp;amp;method_krmx=substring&amp;amp;ic_krmx=on&amp;amp;text_klpx=&amp;amp;method_klpx=substring&amp;amp;ic_klpx=on&amp;amp;text_sal=&amp;amp;method_sal=substring&amp;amp;ic_sal=on&amp;amp;text_qum=&amp;amp;method_qum=substring&amp;amp;ic_qum=on&amp;amp;text_reference=&amp;amp;method_reference=substring&amp;amp;ic_reference=on&amp;amp;text_any=&amp;amp;method_any=substring&amp;amp;sort=proto&amp;amp;ic_any=on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StarLing&lt;/a&gt;, which lists the Proto-Turkic root *TArɨ- meaning &quot;to cultivate (ground)&quot;. However, I was not able to find a reference validating the second meaning, which I suspect to be a more likely candidate if it's indeed etymologically connected to Tarim River/Basin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime I decided to look for possible connections in Tocharian, knowing that the Tocharians themselves were long-time inhabitants of this region. I noticed the Tocharian word for &quot;road, path, way&quot;, ytār in Tocharian A and ytārye in Tocharian B, which seem to be at least superficially similar to &quot;Tarim&quot; to some extent. Obviously I do not have the knowledge to draw any conclusions, but I am very curious about whether there was indeed a connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up, my question is two-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the etymology of the word &quot;Tarim&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the word has any connections with Tocharian?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23477" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T22:29:10.593" Title="What is the etymology of &quot;Tarim&quot; as in &quot;Tarim Basin&quot; and does it relate to Tocharian?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;tocharian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22746" CreationDate="2019-02-15T23:25:03.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am bilingual in Korean and English. I have always held the view that the difference between 'ㅂ' and 'ㅍ' is not aspiration -- they are both aspirated as you have observed. However, the uniqueness of the 'ㅂ' is that it is a &lt;em&gt;voiced&lt;/em&gt;, aspirated, bilabial plosive as oppsed to the &lt;em&gt;unvoiced&lt;/em&gt; 'ㅍ', which is 100% identical in sound to the English 'p'. However, no such equivalent sound exists in English for the Korean 'ㅂ', and neither is there a Korean equivalent for 'b'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea of voiced &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; aspirated consonants also occurs in the Korean 'ㄱ','ㅈ','ㄷ', and 'ㅅ'. If you listen carefully, you will notice that they do not sound like the English 'g', 'j', 'd', and 's' consonants. Here is my classification of various Korean consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㄱ - voiced, aspirated, velar, plosive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㄷ - voiced, aspirated, alveolar, plosive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅂ - voiced, aspirated, bilabial, plosive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅅ - unvoiced, aspirated, alveolar, fricative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ㅈ - voiced, aspirated, palatal, approximant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is difficult to accept that aspiration can occur simultaneously with voicing, then I would propose that these consonants are unvoiced and aspirated with the difference being that the voicing comes much sooner than their normally unvoiced counterparts (the English 'k', 'd', 'b', 'j' sounds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linguistics/Phonetics#Articulatory_phonetics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linguistics/Phonetics#Articulatory_phonetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23895" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T23:25:03.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T02:53:58.460" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages, adjectives have some sort of noun-like inflection. In Latin (Indo-European) and Lingála (Bantu), just off the top of my head, adjectives are marked to agree with the nouns they modify, taking on that noun's gender and number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both of those languages, though, there's a curious feature about numbers: small numbers (1-3 in Latin, 1-5 in Lingála) show inflection, while large numbers (anything larger) do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a common pattern (or even a &quot;universal&quot;), or just a coincidence that happened to happen in Indo-European and Bantu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T08:48:59.090" Title="Is &quot;small numbers inflect, large numbers don't&quot; a universal?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30554" CreationDate="2019-02-16T08:48:59.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In French and Russian, numbers show inflection.&#xA;So I doubt it's a universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T08:48:59.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T10:36:08.910" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do anyone know where to find the full Maltese Swadesh list with the phonetic transcription (IPA) ?. I found such list in Wikipedia but without IPA transcription  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23893" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T12:27:35.993" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T12:27:35.993" Title="Maltese Swadesh list with IPA" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;swadesh-list&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T11:25:21.007" Score="-2" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the Old Slavonic interrogative particle &quot;еда (ʲeda)&quot; and verb &quot;быти (byti)&quot; to be related in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on the basis of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existence the following present forms of the verb:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;есмь (ʲesm'), еси (ʲesi), есть (ʲest') &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existence the Old Slavonic alternating consonants rule д-&gt;с (d-&gt;s):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;я&lt;strong&gt;д&lt;/strong&gt;ь -&gt; я&lt;strong&gt;с&lt;/strong&gt;ти;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;во&lt;strong&gt;д&lt;/strong&gt;ити ве&lt;strong&gt;с&lt;/strong&gt;ти;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;бро&lt;strong&gt;д&lt;/strong&gt;ити бре&lt;strong&gt;с&lt;/strong&gt;ти &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;constructing an interrogative sentence by analogy with european languages (putting on an auxiliary verb at the beginning of a sentences):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hath&lt;/strong&gt; the LORD indeed &lt;strong&gt;spoken&lt;/strong&gt; only by Moses?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Est&lt;/strong&gt;-ce seulement par Moïse que l'Éternel &lt;strong&gt;parle&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Еда&lt;/strong&gt; ли моисию единому &lt;strong&gt;глагола&lt;/strong&gt; господь?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existence the conjugation parrallel with the verb &quot;ясти&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun ядь; verb ясти&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Conjugation:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;я ямъ ты я&lt;strong&gt;си&lt;/strong&gt; мы ямы вы я&lt;strong&gt;сте&lt;/strong&gt; он я&lt;strong&gt;сть&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun еда? (in the Old Slavonic, second meaning); verb быти&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Conjugation:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;я есмь ты е&lt;strong&gt;си&lt;/strong&gt; мы есмы вы е&lt;strong&gt;сте&lt;/strong&gt; он е&lt;strong&gt;сть&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23897" LastEditorDisplayName="user23897" LastEditDate="2019-02-17T19:43:44.830" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T15:05:06.117" Title="Are the Old Slavonic interrogative particle &quot;еда&quot; and verb &quot;быти&quot; to be related in any way?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="24" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T17:07:12.627" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Geoffery Leech, Chapter 4, Semantics The Study of Meaning, It is written that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The third function of language is the directive function whereby we aim to influence the behaviour and attitudes of others. The most straightforward instances of the directive function are commands and requests. The function of social control places emphasis on the receiver's end, rather than the originator's end of the message; but it resembles the expressive function in giving less importance on the whole to conceptual meaning than to other types of meaning, particularly affective and connotative meaning.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the directive function give less importance to conceptual meaning? When we give an instruction aren't we passing on information that is supposed to be executed in its literal sense? What is the difference between directive function and informational function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23638" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T17:07:12.627" Title="What is the difference between directive function and informational function of a language?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T18:00:54.270" Score="3" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been listening to the song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Vq0k5mCgk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dinata Dinata&quot; by Antique&lt;/a&gt;, and I noticed something. You see, I'm a Native Hungarian speaker, and my native language contains gemination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what did I notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this song, I heard instances of geminated /pː/, /vː/, /zː~ʒː/, /lː/, /nː/ and /gː/. I am well-aware that Modern Greek does not have gemination. Yet I heard these geminated consonants in the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is this? The female vocalist is ethnically Greek, but was born and grew up in Sweden &lt;em&gt;(and probably still lives there)&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe it's a Swedish accent that introduces the geminated consonants after short vowels? Or is it just a music thing? &lt;em&gt;(Like how vowels by necessity become long in long notes)&lt;/em&gt; If it's a Swedish accent, it might also explain why I heard lots of voiced velar plosives, which are supposed to be rare in Greek &lt;em&gt;(with the voiced velar fricative preferred)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14374" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T21:35:13.190" Title="Gemination in languages not supposed to have gemination? (especially Greek)" Tags="&lt;greek&gt;&lt;gemination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T18:33:02.107" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;My wife and I just watched the movie &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Country_for_Old_Men_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;No Country for Old Men&lt;/a&gt;, which is set in West Texas ca. 1980, and I couldn't help feeling that the screenwriter was laying it on a little thick with the regional dialect, to the point where it seemed distracting and felt fake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we single out a particular time and place like this, and people with a certain background and level of education, can we find data about how people would really speak? E.g., in the movie, Carla Jean Moss says &quot;knowed&quot; rather than &quot;knew.&quot; Is there some way to tell whether this is realistic or not? Another example from the movie is that everyone replies to negative questions by saying &quot;yes,&quot; and then the negation, as in &quot;Yes, we have no bananas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it would be difficult to get accurate data. For one thing, people will probably adjust their register of speech when they're being interviewed by someone from outside the area. And people differ a lot, e.g., my wife and her sister both grew up in Buffalo, but my wife pronounces &quot;man&quot; with a generic newscaster's accent, but her sister says it with a very strong regional &quot;a.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kind of data only available in paywalled academic publications, as case studies for specific times and places? Or are there books like &quot;Atlas of 20th century American speech,&quot; or &quot;A writer's guide to American dialects?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12663" LastEditorUserId="12663" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T18:56:14.517" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T18:56:14.517" Title="Data on how people really talk in, for example, West Texas?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30564" CreationDate="2019-02-16T20:44:44.723" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The statement that Greek &quot;doesn't have&quot; gemination is really just a shorter way of saying that gemination is not phonemic in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phonemic status&lt;/em&gt; of a feature in a language is an indication of whether that feature &quot;makes a difference&quot; in that language: so to say that gemination is not phonemic doesn't necessarily mean that gemination &lt;em&gt;doesn't occur&lt;/em&gt;, but just that whether a consonant is geminated has no bearing on the phonemes contained in the utterance, which in turn means, roughly, that the consonant being geminated instead of simple isn't perceived by speakers of that language as a &lt;em&gt;different language sound&lt;/em&gt;, but merely as a &lt;em&gt;different way of producing the same sound&lt;/em&gt; (it doesn't make a word different). The usual way to determine phonemic status is to check for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;minimal pairs&lt;/a&gt;, which means answering the question &quot;Are there two words in this language that are the same, except for this one feature?&quot;. In Greek, there aren't any words that differ only in that one has a geminated consonant, and the other doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a given feature doesn't have phonemic status in a language, it could well be that it never occurs in the language, but it could also be the case (and I think it often is, though I have no hard data) that it occurs allophonically. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allophones&lt;/a&gt; are sounds that are perceived by speakers of a given language as &quot;the same&quot; sound, just with pronunciation differences that have no bearing on the direct meaning. It doesn't necessarily mean one is &lt;em&gt;free to choose&lt;/em&gt; any allophone among a set of sounds, either: often, there are discernible rules underlying the way an allophone is chosen, which can be rules that pertain to which sounds are nearby, or rules that have to do with higher-level features of an utterance, such as its prosody or the emphasis a speaker is trying to convey on certain parts of the utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible that Greek, for example, tends to geminate consonants that come right before a stressed vowel: that would not surprising, as in many languages, vowels become longer in stressed syllables, even if vowel length isn't considered to have phonemic status. Gemination is simply lengthening of consonants, and in this case, consonant length and vowel length wouldn't be seen as features of their own, but as parts of what concurs to forming the &quot;stress&quot; feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be that this only happens when the speaker is trying to impart a particularly strong &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)#Prosodic_stress&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sentence stress&lt;/a&gt; to the word: again, this is similar to how when one wishes to stress a word in English or other languages, they may pronounce the stressed vowel(s) in it longer and/or louder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, allophones can be purely in free variation: in the case of gemination, this means that a language that doesn't feature it phonetically will have consonants of different lengths in a random way, simply because the speakers &lt;em&gt;won't be paying attention&lt;/em&gt; to the length of their consonants: it's not something that matters in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just hypotheses I'm using as examples, as I don't really know when gemination occurs in Greek, although the hypotheses I gave roughly correspond to my suspicions, and in particular I feel that unvoiced stops, nasals and liquids lengthen when they occur at the onset of a stressed syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do know is that I also hear gemination occurring when I hear Greek (my native language being Italian, which does have phonemic gemination, like Hungarian), but that it doesn't occur phonemically, which, to reiterate in simpler terms, means that whether it occurs or not is irrelevant to the literal meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've provided this answer without listening to the song, because I'm not a speaker of Greek and it probably wouldn't help to give my subjective impressions. I've listened to it now, and since I've heard Greek a few times before, and I can read it and understand it very superficially, for the little it's worth, I can say this doesn't sound like Greek with a Swedish accent to me, but just like regular Greek, with non-phonemic gemination in unsurprising places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T21:35:13.190" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T21:35:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T01:58:58.807" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some languages there are absolute constructions like the Genitive Absolute in Greek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Καὶ &lt;strong&gt;ἤδη ὥρας πολλῆς γενομένης&lt;/strong&gt; προσελθόντες αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ ἔλεγον ὅτι ἔρημός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος καὶ ἤδη ὥρα πολλή·&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the genitive phrase (in bold) is grammatically independent from the rest of the sentence and is translated as a dependent clause (&quot;When it had already become late...&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English as well there are absolute constructions like, &quot;All things being equal,&quot; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for a construction that is actually a part of the main clause but is nevertheless seemingly unaffected by the grammatical rules? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of instances of compound subjects and objects that do not get inflected (in some speakers' speech) for case, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My dad got tickets to the premiere of the new Star Wars tickets for &lt;strong&gt;he and I&lt;/strong&gt;! Early birthday gift!!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please stop asking what happened out of respect for &lt;strong&gt;she and I&lt;/strong&gt;. Just know it’s over.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask not for whom it tolls. It tolls for &lt;strong&gt;he and she&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing’s gonna change not for &lt;strong&gt;we and you&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of these cases (all of which were recorded from statements made online) it looks like the compound objects are unaffected by the prepositions that proceed them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems unlikely that the speakers of these sentences would say, &quot;My dad got tickets to the premiere for he&quot; or &quot;Please stop asking out of respect for I&quot; or &quot;Nothing's gonna change for we.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like it's a function of being in the compound object that renders the constituent parts impervious to the requirements of the sentence structure. In this way, it's like an absolute but is still nevertheless part of the main clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23905" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T09:01:30.183" Title="Is there a name other than “absolute” for this kind of construction?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;coordination&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2019-02-17T09:36:11.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, two different sequences of four identical letters can occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;וווו. This is a word on its own. It means &quot;and his hook&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ממממ. This sequence occurs in words such as ממממן (from a financier), ממממנו (from his financier) and other similar forms. In addition, it occurs in words such as ממממש (from an implementer), ממממשו (from his implementer) and other similar forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fun fact, in ממממנם (from their financier) and ממממשם (from their implementer), the final letter ם is actually just the letter מ in its 'final form'. So these 6 letter words contain the letter מ five times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23871" LastEditorUserId="23871" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T08:32:56.223" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T08:32:56.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T10:10:35.960" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, “faster” is “high” (speed) whereas slower is “low” (speed). Similarly, &quot;longer&quot; is &quot;high&quot; and &quot;shorter&quot; aligns with &quot;low&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7996" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T09:30:45.487" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T09:30:45.487" Title="Is there a database which tags the &quot;high/low&quot; sense of comparative adjectives?" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29530" CreationDate="2019-02-17T11:00:05.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only words are learnt. But also &lt;strong&gt;the connotation&lt;/strong&gt; behind words change, and it is linked to emotion. c.f. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Theseus Ship paradox&lt;/a&gt;: the identity of a person is an illusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example after learning Zen, the word &quot;liar&quot; for me has become no longer an insult or an attack to my &quot;integrity&quot;. It is a diagnostic, which can be more or less severe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no one knows everything, so all our statements are biased limited view of the universe, and thus are lies. Even when we say something close to the be the truth for us, we are occulting far too many things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not an answer willing to dig in the prinicple of truth, universal or partial&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm only illustrating how a word really close to an &lt;strong&gt;insult&lt;/strong&gt; has lost absolutely all negative emotional charge now for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the word &quot;liar&quot; remained the same (during my life time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chose liar, because it had the same impact on me as untrustworthy, or unloyal had. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit provocative here, (something inherited from the Zen) : untrustworthy can be a great quality indeed, here the life of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sophie Scholl&lt;/a&gt;, untrustworthy under the Nazi Regime. She is a &lt;strong&gt;Traitor&lt;/strong&gt;... may History remember the Traitors like her!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-17T15:57:34.550" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T15:57:34.550" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T19:33:36.707" Score="-1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an etymological link between the word parabens in English (ex. Soap without parabens) and parabéns (congratulations) in Portuguese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23907" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T19:44:46.100" Title="Parabens vs. parabéns" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-03-08T15:22:51.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30574" CreationDate="2019-02-17T19:44:46.100" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, English paraben is from &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt;-hydroxy&lt;em&gt;ben&lt;/em&gt;zoic acid, and Portuguese parabéns is from para + bem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For chemical compounds, &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt; comes from Greek παρά (pará) 'besides', and &lt;em&gt;benzoic&lt;/em&gt; has its root in Arabic. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/benzoin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two components of the Portuguese words are both from Latin. Here, &lt;em&gt;para&lt;/em&gt; is from Latin &lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ad&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Per&lt;/em&gt; is not related to Greek παρά (pará), but to Greek περί (perí).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23880" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T19:44:46.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29061" CreationDate="2019-02-18T00:44:41.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the actual question should be phrased like this: why articles at all, why not using demonstratives when you really need to say &quot;this person, not that one&quot;, and otherwise, just &quot;person&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to natively speak a language which has no articles whatsoever, and never felt there's a hole in grammar. Most languages, it seems, have no definite article. When speaking and writing in English, I frequently omit &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we know PIE had no articles. However, some languages developed them, as far as I can tell, the first one was Greek, then Germanic languages. But why? How do you switch from having no need for them (and omitting them when you speak a language which has them) to having &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; as the most frequent word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is &quot;we don't know&quot;, but it seems to be a common path in language change, and an areal one (look at the map).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WALS: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definite articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5112" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T00:44:41.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8382" CreationDate="2019-02-18T02:56:58.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon called 'phonetic accommodation' happens when people change the way they speak due to their interlocutors' speech.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, 'assimilation' is a phonological process that occurs when a phoneme adopts some features of its neighbouring sounds (regressive/progressive assimilation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23909" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T02:56:58.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-18T07:19:22.343" Score="-1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to generate a similar sentence by a given sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by given &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mike, this is an apple.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can generate &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tom, this is a pear.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which software can I use for such generation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Only English is OK for me and any hardware/program platform is OK for me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23910" LastEditorUserId="23910" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T07:54:14.517" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T09:16:38.977" Title="How to generate similar sentence by given sentence?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30569" CreationDate="2019-02-18T08:47:44.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the phrase &quot;ablative absolute&quot;, absolute (= Latin absolutus) means &quot;self-standing&quot; and is derived from *sol- &quot;alone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe in your examples is in my opinion hypercorrection, that is to say incorrect and paradoxical constructions that are originally designed to avoid incorrection. In theory, &lt;em&gt;you and me are human beings&lt;/em&gt; is incorrect, me (subject) should be I. But in phrases like &lt;em&gt;for you and I&lt;/em&gt;, I is obviously incorrect and should be me (prepositional). Now, some people may deliberately say &lt;em&gt;for you and I&lt;/em&gt;, but this amounts to pedantism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T08:47:44.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30578" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:55:16.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any software based on CFG (Context Free phrase structure Grammar) would easily describe the relationship among constructions produced by substitution within a grammatical category, since this is basic to the CFG theory. For instance, the Unix Yacc program parses CF languages (mostly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to use such a general purpose program, you would have a lot of work to do to describe a large enough part of English to the program to get any interesting results.&#xA;Perhaps someone else can suggest a tool that is already set up to deal with English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:55:16.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30559" CreationDate="2019-02-18T15:05:06.117" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will translate my &lt;a href=&quot;https://rus.stackexchange.com/a/448547/178412&quot;&gt;Russian answer&lt;/a&gt; as there is a chance that here it is more likely to be discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, these words are not related.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, if some forms are included in the same paradigm it does not really mean that they share one root. &lt;em&gt;Быть&lt;/em&gt; has a present form &lt;em&gt;есть&lt;/em&gt; and this form is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;suppletive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (it is not cognate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these reasons, &lt;em&gt;быть&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;еда&lt;/em&gt; 'particle' are not related. But the next question is if &lt;em&gt;есть&lt;/em&gt; 'pres. of &lt;em&gt;быть&lt;/em&gt;' and еда 'particle' are cognate. And the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ед&lt;/strong&gt;а&lt;/em&gt; we probably see the same &lt;em&gt;*ed-&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ед&lt;/strong&gt;иный&lt;/em&gt; 'single' which is of IE origin (compare Latin &lt;em&gt;ecce&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *ed+ce 'yes, look!', NHG &lt;em&gt;etwas&lt;/em&gt; 'something, &lt;em&gt;etlich&lt;/em&gt; 'some'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ref. Этимологический словарь русского языка (ЭСРЯ), V. 1, Issue 6, p. 246.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T15:05:06.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30588" CreationDate="2019-02-18T19:11:42.600" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering that how was the pronunciation of the word &quot;about&quot; in 16th century England. I know that it is different now and is this difference occurred because of The Great Vowel Shift? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23314" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T23:51:07.550" Title="16th Century English" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-18T19:48:25.283" Score="-3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could Old Slavonic nouns “шкурка” (shkurka) and “корица”(koritsa) be derived from Italian “scorza”(En. peel)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already looked them up in M. Vasmer's &quot;Etymological dictionary of Russian language&quot; and got no result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23897" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T18:41:36.217" Title="Are Old Slavonic “шкурка” and “корица” related to Italian “scorza”?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30586" CreationDate="2019-02-18T23:43:08.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Derived&lt;/em&gt; from Italian? Almost certainly not. Old Slavonic fossilized long before modern Italian came about, so I wouldn't expect loanwords from modern Italian to appear. The words you cite are also Russian forms, and I can't find any evidence of them being the same in Old Church Slavonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these words do all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, to the best of my understanding. PIE had a root *&lt;em&gt;k-r&lt;/em&gt; meaning something like &quot;cut&quot;; you sometimes see it with an extra *&lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt; stuck on the beginning, which is a common PIE phenomenon called &quot;S-mobile&quot;. The version with the *&lt;em&gt;s-&lt;/em&gt; is the ancestor of English &quot;scrape&quot;, &quot;sharp&quot;, and &quot;(in)scribe&quot;, all through different paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, many I-E languages derived their word for &quot;skin&quot; from this root. In Latin, that word was &lt;em&gt;scortum&lt;/em&gt;; in Slavic, both &lt;em&gt;kora&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;skora&lt;/em&gt; appear (one meaning &quot;bark&quot;, the other meaning &quot;skin&quot;). Italian &lt;em&gt;scorza&lt;/em&gt; comes from the former, Russian &lt;em&gt;korica&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;škurka&lt;/em&gt; from the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. &lt;em&gt;škurka&lt;/em&gt; seems to have come through Polish on its way to Russian, and gained an extra diminutive &lt;em&gt;-ka&lt;/em&gt;; the native Old Church Slavonic form was &lt;em&gt;skora&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T02:02:05.933" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T02:02:05.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30585" CreationDate="2019-02-18T23:51:07.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main change happening at this time was, as you mentioned, the Great Vowel Shift. Before the GVS, the second vowel in &quot;about&quot; was &lt;code&gt;/u:/&lt;/code&gt;; this went through something like &lt;code&gt;[ou]&lt;/code&gt;, to &lt;code&gt;[əu]&lt;/code&gt;, before turning into modern &lt;code&gt;/au/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 16th century, it would probably be somewhere between &lt;code&gt;[ou]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[əu]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This diagram (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Vowel_Shift.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) might help, though it writes the diphthongs a bit differently than I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtShY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtShY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Diagram from Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T23:51:07.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T07:09:15.977" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Esperanto you can construct many new words from a relatively low number of root-word. Example, with from &lt;em&gt;arbo&lt;/em&gt; (tree) and &lt;em&gt;aro&lt;/em&gt; (set) you can build &lt;em&gt;arbaro&lt;/em&gt; (forest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is three folded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this phenomenon (building vocabulary from a relatively small number of root words) called?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a metric or it in quantitative linguistic? What is its name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a table with a comparison for different languages, included non-natural ones?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23919" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T18:32:11.283" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:32:11.283" Title="Statistic for root-efficiency in languages" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2019-02-19T08:21:37.637" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realise this is an old thread however, Sunny makes a good point in that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The I1 group is most closely related to what today are the semitic people (group J: arabs, jews etc.) and are believed to have migrated already a while ago from the area of israel/iraq/syria etc. to europe.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When trying to trace obscure roots etho-linguistics is very useful. Adding in DNA evidence bolsters the inductive reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by the DNA, linguistics and ethnicity e.g. culture, heraldry etc. we can clearly see that some of the Israelite diaspora have ended up in Europe. As Sunny pointed out, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot; it seems logical that the I1's slowly adopted the indo-europen language as they mixed in. However we still find some traces in the german languages that remind us of the semitic heritage of part of the germans.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already noted, the DNA studies point to a Semitic origin which tends to explain the presence of seemingly Afro-Asiatic root words. This, coupled with the plethora of township coat of arms, family crests etc. bearing the Tribal symbols of Israelite peoples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. eagle of Dan, wolf of Benjamin, donkey/ass of Issachar, unicorn of Ephraim, arrows of Manasseh, stag of Naphtali to name a few, it's clear that due to the multitudes of even just Israelites in Europe, there is a definite influence of a Semitic speaking people on Germanic languages, to say nothing of Arab travellers/traders/slavers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23920" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T08:21:37.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30578" CreationDate="2019-02-19T09:16:38.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/simplenlg/simplenlg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SimpleNLG&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Lexicon lexicon = Lexicon.getDefaultLexicon();&#xA;NLGFactory phraseFactory = new NLGFactory(lexicon);&#xA;Realiser realiser = new Realiser(lexicon);&#xA;&#xA;List&amp;lt;String&amp;gt; addressees = Arrays.asList(new String[] { &amp;quot;Mike&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Tom&amp;quot; });&#xA;List&amp;lt;String&amp;gt; objectHeads = Arrays.asList(new String[] { &amp;quot;apple&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pear&amp;quot; });&#xA;&#xA;addressees.forEach(a -&amp;gt; {&#xA;    objectHeads.forEach(h -&amp;gt; {&#xA;        NPPhraseSpec o = phraseFactory.createNounPhrase(&amp;quot;a&amp;quot;, h);&#xA;        SPhraseSpec c = phraseFactory.createClause(&amp;quot;this&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;be&amp;quot;, o);&#xA;        c.addFrontModifier(a);&#xA;        c.addFrontModifier(&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;);&#xA;        DocumentElement s = phraseFactory.createSentence(c);&#xA;        System.out.println(realiser.realise(s).getRealisation());&#xA;    });&#xA;});&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which results in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike, this is an apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike, this is a pear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom, this is an apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom, this is a pear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T09:16:38.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30592" CreationDate="2019-02-19T10:21:11.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is about derivational morphology. There are mainly three strategies to create new words: 1. add affixes to a stem (as in your example), 2. combine stems (as in Chinese), 3. modify the vowels (as in Semitic). Purely agglutinative languages only apply strategy1. Indo-European languages tend to apply a mixture of all three strategies, for example in German. Latin (and Romance) mostly applies 1 and 2 (strategy3 is fossilized in Latin). Note that Esperanto also applies strategy 2, but not strategy 3, as far as I know. Semitic applies a mixture of strategy 1 and 3, as in maktub &amp;lt; ktb, but not strategy2. I'm not sure it's possible to make quantitative surveys of these phenomena. It's more about typological tendencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T10:21:11.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2019-02-19T12:56:47.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most European female names end in &quot;a&quot; whether they are older or modern.&#xA;The reason for this is the way Indo-European languages create gender in nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By analyzing the grammatical gender of the nouns and names ending in a &#xA;we can see a clear correlation: the gender of the common nouns reflects &#xA;on the gender of names.&#xA;For example the Spanish has approximately 89% feminine nouns with an a ending and &#xA;98% given names with the same ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog-en.namepedia.org/2015/11/why-most-european-names-ending-in-a-are-female/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Why most European names ending in A are female&quot;&lt;/a&gt; shows statistical &#xA;data to support this theory for the Latin languages, Slavic, Illyrian, Germanic, &#xA;Baltic and Celtic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oOfun.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oOfun.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23921" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T12:56:47.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30586" CreationDate="2019-02-19T18:41:36.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could Old Slavonic nouns “шкурка” (shkurka) and “корица”(koritsa) be derived from Italian “scorza”(En. peel)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;  All these words independently came to the languages in question from PIE (through different stages, of course). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the history of Russian &lt;em&gt;шкура&lt;/em&gt;, there are some discussions on that. Some scholars say that it has not been borrowed and looks like a phonetic transformation скора &gt; скура &gt; шкура (N. Shansky), others suggest this path: шкура &amp;lt; скора &amp;lt; Proto-Slavic *съкора &amp;lt; verb *съ-чер-ти 'cut off' (A. Shaposhnikov; probably, which is called groundless by Vasmer: &quot;Реконструкция праформы *съкора (Соболевский, РФВ 67, 212 и сл.) не является обоснованной.&quot;) and, in the end, we have Vasmer's supposition that it is a Polish loanword as /о/ -&gt; /у/ (/o/ -&gt; /u/) is difficult to explain using Russian phonetic proccesses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, Russian &lt;em&gt;шкурка&lt;/em&gt; is derived right from Russian &lt;em&gt;шкура&lt;/em&gt;. This is a really regular and productive model, compare: &lt;em&gt;каша — кашка, картина — картинка&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, Italian and Russian words are IE cognates (PIE *(s)ker-: *(s)kor-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T18:41:36.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T19:22:58.197" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In doing some poking around in etymologies, I noticed that while &quot;odd&quot; in the sense of &quot;odd number&quot; is attested as early as c.1300 (and is in fact the original sense of the term), &quot;even&quot; in the sense of &quot;even number&quot; isn't attested until the mid-16th century. Do we have any examples of what terms were used to describe even numbers during that gap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23923" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:22:58.197" Title="What term predated &quot;even&quot; when referring to numbers?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-02-21T21:20:12.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T21:56:48.737" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;SPE of Chomsky and Halle entails far more than I can handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T19:37:29.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T19:37:29.177" Title="In need of a simple book on English phonology - recommendations?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-02-20T05:21:49.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30600" CreationDate="2019-02-20T05:14:35.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=dDVR_zh5wkMC&amp;amp;pg=PA62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roach (2009: 64)&lt;/a&gt; recommends Cruttenden's &lt;em&gt;Gimson's Pronunciation of English&lt;/em&gt; (2008; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kXzMAgAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;last edn. 2014&lt;/a&gt;) and Kreidler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=i8jKGdOtqQsC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Pronunciation of English: A Course Book&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/a&gt; for in-depth descriptions of English phonotactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T05:14:35.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30605" CreationDate="2019-02-20T10:13:21.517" Score="12" ViewCount="6377" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking to learners of my mother tongue, Swedish, I've sometimes had to explain how using too polite language can be taken as rude or insulting, as it creates a certain distance between the speakers.&#xA;I guess this is a mechanism in many languages/cultures. Is there a linguistic term for this phenomena?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23926" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T15:43:19.493" Title="Rudeness by being polite" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30603" CreationDate="2019-02-20T10:58:38.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the person feel as though you're politeness is to create distance instead of being friendly the person you're talking to might take it as sarcastic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23012" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T10:58:38.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30603" CreationDate="2019-02-20T12:22:14.887" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the exact theoretical framework used and the exact nature of the language's politeness / rudeness system, but following Brown and Levinson's 1987 framework, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378216695000143&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Culpeper's 1996 &lt;em&gt;Towards an anatomy of impoliteness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; provides a few answers. I think what you are referring to is (unintentional) &lt;strong&gt;mock politeness / sarcastic rudeness&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, depending on the usage, it can be perceived as &lt;strong&gt;positive impoliteness&lt;/strong&gt; or as a &lt;strong&gt;positive face-threatening act&lt;/strong&gt;. This is paralleled in the use of inappropriate &lt;em&gt;vouvoiement&lt;/em&gt; in most French-speaking communities, but especially salient in African French. This study on &lt;a href=&quot;http://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/1956/5919/PhD_Thesis_J_%20Avodo.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cameroonian French&lt;/a&gt; breaks this down into the &lt;em&gt;vouvoiement de distanciation&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;vouvoiement de discrimination&lt;/em&gt;, where one makes the hearer feel &quot;distant&quot;, and the other makes the hearer feel &quot;discriminated against&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other categories as categorised by function are &lt;strong&gt;negative impoliteness/face-threatening acts&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;withholding politeness&lt;/strong&gt;. However, all these categories can be very fuzzy, and one feature can have components of than one category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different way of looking at these impoliteness &quot;strategies&quot; is via form, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t6pENk1abl0C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bousfield (1998)&lt;/a&gt;. These would split them down into &lt;strong&gt;on-record&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;off-record&lt;/strong&gt; impoliteness, which correspond to explicit vs implied impoliteness. Even so, categorising a &lt;em&gt;form of address&lt;/em&gt; into explicit or implied can be trickier than it first appears, especially when the impoliteness is accidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T12:27:49.453" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T12:27:49.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30603" CreationDate="2019-02-20T14:59:32.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a Swedish saying/quote, &quot;du är inte Ni med mig&quot;, or translated: &quot;you are not You(formalized) with me&quot;. It's basically saying that you think they are trying to be too formal for your taste.&#xA;I think this mostly comes down to the law of Jante that most Swedes live by, which states that noone should think they are more special than anyone else. Everyone should be equal. And it can be considered rude if someone is being very posh towards you, when you're not in that mindset yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23931" LastEditorUserId="23931" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T15:06:09.110" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T15:06:09.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30603" CreationDate="2019-02-20T15:00:45.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of the perceived rudeness might very well be that overly polite language often seems subservient, and unless there is a good reason (e.g. the speaker is apologising for sth), the excessive submissiveness conveys a context of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/passive-aggressive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passive-aggressiveness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and concealed hostility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Wouldn't You, Good Sir, agree that this might be the reason?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Even though I wrote that sentence as an example only, and even though it is outwardly very polite in form, I think I'd better apologise for my language in advance; that's how rude it sounds to my ear, at least.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23930" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T15:00:45.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30603" CreationDate="2019-02-20T15:43:19.493" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, overly polite language could be perceived as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/patronize&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;patronizing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or characterized by condescension via insincere kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23932" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T15:43:19.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30614" CreationDate="2019-02-20T16:46:18.167" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;When in the history of the english language did the consonants begin to be pronounced as a glottal stop? I notice this phenomenon is more prevalent in American English at the end of words but sometimes I notice it in British English, in the cockney pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;bottle&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt; and slightly less frequently at the end of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this something that happened also in Middle English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T17:32:58.427" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:40:05.480" Title="Pronunciation of final consonants in the history of English" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21275" CreationDate="2019-02-20T18:08:44.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very difficult question to answer on documentary evidence. A quotation from Schrijver (2014) &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MUVJAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 123:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]t is unclear when Dutch lost aspiration. The absence or presence of aspiration in Dutch &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; is not indicated in spelling, nor has it ever been. We know about non-aspiration only by listening to present-day spoken Dutch and by studying modern dialect descriptions that care to mention this feature, which do not go back in time beyond the twentieth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives us too wide a band - could aspiration have been lost in contact with late Latin in the first few centuries CE, or with Old French around the 10th century CE, or with Early Modern French in the 17-18th centuries? Schrijver also then goes onto mention the band of Westphalian German dialects which also lack an aspiration contrast in their fortis-lenis pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, using dialectal evidence of &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;-umlaut vs &quot;spontaneous&quot; fronting across the some but not all of the many modern dialects of Dutch and Frisian (spontaneous fronting being a feature of &quot;Western&quot; Dutch, on which modern Standard Dutch is based), most notably the &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.620.5893&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fronting of long u: to /y/&lt;/a&gt;, as well as similar vowel patterns across Picardian, East Walloon and West Walloon (all Langues d'Oïl), Schrijver comes to the conclusion that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spontaneous fronting accordingly is an Old French substratum feature in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Picardian in the Middle Ages is fairly well attested, it gives a later bound of the 11th century, and the Romance-to-Germanic shift of the population adopting is put at 8-9th centuries CE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the lack of the High German Consonant Shift (HGCS) also put in a later bound, sometime around the 9th century (from when the earliest identifiable manuscripts in High German are dated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the tale concerns dialect mixing and levelling of the fronted vowels, which is incidental to [and happens presumably after] the loss of aspiration as these Romance-speakers adopt a Germanic form of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:08:44.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30592" CreationDate="2019-02-20T18:31:23.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the second question, I think measures of morphological productivity are what you're looking for. If you search around, you should be able to find information on productivity measures easily, e.g. this overview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baayen, R. H. (2009). 43. Corpus linguistics in morphology: morphological productivity. &lt;em&gt;Corpus linguistics: An international handbook&lt;/em&gt;, 900-919.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:31:23.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30609" CreationDate="2019-02-20T18:40:05.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One has to divide the phenomenon of glottalisation into its different forms. Intervocalic T-glottalisation is the classic defining feature of a whole host of English varieties, mostly from Britain, and there are several candidates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;East Anglia, specifically Norfolk. Studies done in the 1950s on local residents born in the &lt;strong&gt;1870s&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s1CeDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA132&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggest that&lt;/a&gt; the T was glottalised back then. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cockney. Very influential, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.essex.ac.uk/16806/1/PhD%20Thesis_Library%20%28Badia%20Barrera%29.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;possibly &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; driver&lt;/a&gt; of the modern trend towards glottalisation across urban areas across Britain, although its influence might be hyped. This is well attested in the &lt;strong&gt;mid-19th century&lt;/strong&gt; through the eye dialect of certain famous novels. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Glasgow. Glaswegian English is stated to have used the glottal stop &lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.leeds.ac.uk/392/1/LSE_1999_pp181-204_Stuart-Smith_article.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;since&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;19th century&lt;/strong&gt; in word-medial and word-final positions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;final&lt;/em&gt; glottalisation, that's something less well explored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Barbados seems to have developed it separately, as it &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8sDLCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA584#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;only affects /t/ in final position&lt;/a&gt;, and in the Caribbean it is identified with Barbados exclusively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New York glottalises /t/ at the ends of syllables but not intervocalically. 19th century intervocalic glottalisation &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8sDLCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA515&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;was reported&lt;/a&gt;, but does not seem to have survived intact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen any reports on Middle English glottalisation, and it's not altogether clear whether Shakespeare used it, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73645/rhyme-in-elizabethan-sonnets&quot;&gt;there are possible indications&lt;/a&gt; that the Original Pronunciation movement like to pick up on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T18:40:05.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-20T19:12:16.423" Score="2" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I initially thought that it was because allophones happened in the physical world in place of phonemes, that couldn't, but that proved to be wrong when I read this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The segment [pʰ] is an allophonic variant of the phoneme /p/, reason why in a phonemic transcription the word pin is written as [pɪn] and not [pʰɪn]&quot; -  Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Jacobs (2011: 131) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors seem to insinuate [p] is not an allophone itself but something else and I don't get why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T09:58:27.430" Title="Why are allophones called variants of a phoneme?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30615" CreationDate="2019-02-20T19:26:36.467" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be wrong, but I think it was an error. The right sentence is probably &quot;...reason why in a phonemic transcription the word pin is written as /pɪn/ and not /pʰɪn/&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T19:26:36.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30615" CreationDate="2019-02-20T20:19:07.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to think of allophones is as different variants of phonetically realizing the same underlying phoneme, so you are right in saying that &quot;allophones happn in the physical world in place of phonemes&quot;. The text doesn't contradict this. /p/ is a phoneme with two allophonic variants: [p] and [pʰ] - &lt;strong&gt;[p] it itself an allophone of the phoneme /p/&lt;/strong&gt;; your conclusion that this were not the case is incorrect. The point that probably gets you stuck is that term &quot;allophonic variant&quot; might suggest that only alternative realizations and not the underlying phone itself are considered, but this is not the case: &quot;allophone&quot; is to be understood to include the phone that corresponding to the underlying phoneme (i.e. the phone [p] is among the allophonic variants of the phoneme /p/).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The point that the authors are trying to make is that &lt;strong&gt;[pʰ] is more of a secondary varaint and the more basic realization is [p]&lt;/strong&gt;, which is why /p/ is declared to be the underlying phoneme rather than /pʰ/; what is the underlying form is usually determined by which of the possible realizations is the most frequent one, or the one that involves the least complexity of phonological rules. In English, the more common realization to /p/ happens to be [p], which is why we take /p/ and not /pʰ/ as the underyling phoneme, and consequently why &amp;lt; pin &gt; is transcribed as [pɪn] and not as [pʰɪn]. But that [p] is the default realization while [pʰ] is a variant of it doesn't mean that [p] isn't an allophone of /p/ as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T20:59:12.473" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T20:59:12.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30615" CreationDate="2019-02-20T20:44:24.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A phoneme is an abstract entity deduced from the distribution of phones (actual sounds) in a language. It is typically transcribed with the symbol that represents the most common sound (allophone) of that phoneme, or rather the one that represents the &quot;intersection&quot; of the features the phoneme is considered to have in the present analysis. The second clause of the current Principles of the IPA reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The IPA is designed to be a set of symbols for representing all the possible sounds of the world's languages. The representation of these sounds uses a set of phonetic categories which describe how each sound is made. These categories define a number of natural classes of sounds that operate in phonological rules and historical sound changes. The symbols of the IPA are shorthand ways of indicating certain intersections of these categories. Thus [p] is a shorthand way of designating the intersection of the categories voiceless, bilabial, and plosive; [m] is the intersection of the categories voiced, bilabial, and nasal; and so on. The sounds that are represented by the symbols are primarily those that serve to distinguish one word from another in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So each letter of the IPA represents not a rigidly defined set of articulatory configurations (because there are theoretically infinite shades of sounds between each category) but an abstract class of sounds, which may then be applied to represent an actual sound, or at least a narrower set of sounds, for more physically oriented purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, [p] and [pʰ] are co-allophones of the phoneme /p/ (that is, no pair of words are found to be different just in [p] vs. [pʰ]). The letter 〈p〉 is chosen for the phonemic representation because aspiration or lack thereof is not distinctive in English, and therefore the categories &quot;voiceless&quot;, &quot;bilabial&quot; and &quot;plosive&quot; are considered enough to identify these sounds, which make up a category of mutually non-distinctive sounds, i.e. a phoneme. And since writing e.g. &quot;voiceless bilabial plosive + high front lax vowel + alveolar nasal&quot; to phonemically represent the word &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt; each time takes considerable time and space, we write /pɪn/ as a shorthand for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T20:54:22.470" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T20:54:22.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30615" CreationDate="2019-02-21T00:56:50.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest reading the text of Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Jacobs (2011: 131)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you look up the pronunciation of a word in a dictionary, you will&#xA;  find it is normally given in phonemic transcription. In this type of&#xA;  transcription, an English word like pin is transcribed [pɪn], not&#xA;  [pʰɪn]. This is because the segment [pʰ] is an allophonic variant of&#xA;  the phoneme /p/, and as such has no place in a phonemic transcription.&#xA;  Clearly, the dictionary’s phonemic transcription defines a level of&#xA;  representation which is more abstract than the surface level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both [p] and [pʰ] are allophonic variants of /p/. [pʰ] is not a variant of [p], nor the converse. The original text is clear enough, as far as I can see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T01:30:09.593" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T01:30:09.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30628" CreationDate="2019-02-21T03:48:06.680" Score="1" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the great linguistic similarities between Hebrew and Arabic, it is noteworthy that their definite articles are completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_definite_article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic definite article&lt;/a&gt; talks about the theory that the Hebrew definite article ha- (ה־) and the Arabic definite article al- (ال־) both evolved from a common proto-Semitic particle. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are three major possibilities regarding the form of the proto-Semitic particle that is the putative antecedent of al-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;hal;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ha;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;‘a;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;David Testen and Jacob Weingreen state that [hal] هل۔/הל־ hal is the correct antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, why put the &quot;ha&quot; and the &quot;al&quot; in that order, if we reverse it we get very close to the word for &quot;a god&quot; in both languages: Hebrew אֱלוֹהַּ (elóah) or Arabic إِلٰه (ʾilāh). Vowels being relatively fluid...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be more definite than a god? Why not suppose that the Hebrew and Arabic definite articles both evolved from the concept of deity, with Hebrew dropping the first syllable and Arabic dropping the second? Is there any less support for this hypothesis than, say, for the &quot;hal&quot; hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T06:37:45.310" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T19:33:18.747" Title="What about the hypothesis that the Hebrew and Arabic definite articles both evolved from a proto-Semitic word for &quot;god&quot;?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30621" CreationDate="2019-02-21T13:10:57.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Definite articles are usually drawn from deictics or anaphorics. It's the case in Romance: Latin ille, illa &gt; French le, la, in English this, that &gt; the, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Semitic article is derived from *hal, whereas &quot;god&quot; is *'il. These two words have nothing in common, except *l&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid your question is motivated by some esoteric or kabbalistic nonsense. In all cases, from the linguistic, typological, etymological, semantic and phonetic points of view, your question makes about no sense at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T17:17:31.730" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T17:17:31.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T14:57:39.347" Score="-1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need help in experiment design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, lets take English: I want to test if speakers can distinguish between the the word &quot;red&quot; and &quot;read&quot; if listening to recordings of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to do this with a forst choice task, where participants have to listen&#xA;to a recording and decide either for &quot;red&quot; or &quot;read&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I decide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many participants should do the test?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many items do they have to listen to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many different recordings should they listen to?&#xA;e.g. 40 x &quot;read&quot;/&quot;red&quot; produced by 1 speaker&#xA;    10x &quot;read&quot;/&quot;red&quot; produced by 4 speakers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I design the experiment in a way that it has enough power&#xA;to draw any reasonable conclusions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23951" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T15:55:43.433" Title="Experiment design: forced choise test for auditory recognition" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30621" CreationDate="2019-02-21T15:02:44.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Arabic divine name allāhu does indeed contain the article al-, it being (according to the generally held view) a contraction of al + ʼilāhu. The Biblical divine names Yahweh and Elohim do not contain an article, though (Orthodox) Jews of the present time do refer to their god usually as hash-shem “the name”, which does contain the Hebrew article, of course. But in both cases the divine name is formed from an article plus a common noun. The article is not abstracted from the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sorry about the non-scientific transcription of the Hebrew. There is limit to the number of diacritics one can type in any given day.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T15:02:44.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20500" CreationDate="2019-02-21T15:20:02.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/phonetics-definition-1691622&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonetics&lt;/a&gt;, and someone who does this is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/phonetician&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonetician&lt;/a&gt;. It does not imply that you know what you are saying. It simply means you can pronounce what you see written before you accurately. I have this capability with Spanish. I can read it, write, speak it, flawlessly, but understanding it is whole different thing to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23953" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T15:20:02.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30623" CreationDate="2019-02-21T15:55:43.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You main concern is how many variables there are in need of control. Suppose your stimuli are one recording each of &quot;It was read&quot; and &quot;It was red&quot; played once each, in random order, the task is to match the recording to the spelling, and you find that some subjects get make errors (I have no no particular pattern in mind: right-wrong, wrong-right and wrong-wrong might occur). In running this test, you also have to control demographic variables, because behavior might correlate with some &quot;other&quot; factor. Your subjects might be 10 people over 80 and 10 people under 20, and you might find that the under-20 population has a lower instance of right-right responses. Subject age is a variable that needs to be controlled. Maybe also females and males perform differently on this task, with the underlying generalization being that females get the answer right more often. Now you have two independent variables, i.e. four demographic factors to control. Just to add one more demographic factor, you also have to control for subject dialect, in case it turns out that speakers from Washtupunanca never correctly identify &quot;It was read&quot; (in that dialect, participle &quot;read' a.k.a. Standard English [rɛd] is pronounced [rɪd] and that is different from &quot;red&quot; [rɛd]). Now you have eight cells to fill. If you have 21 subjects, one from Washtupunanca and the rest not, and the remaining 20 are evenly distributed w.r.t. age and sex, you have minimum coverage of age and sex as variables, and not for dialect – you need more speakers from Washtupunanca. If you have a balanced population of 40 speakers, you've covered those three variables, but you didn't do anything to address other variables, such as whether subjects know how to spell the color vs. the participle of [rid]. So you may need to include some kind of spelling pre-test, which introduces another variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that the order in which you present the stimuli makes a difference: so you need to increase the subject pool so that some number of experimental conditions are &quot;read-red&quot; and some number are &quot;red-read&quot;. You actually should also include &quot;red-red&quot; and &quot;read-read&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario, you're only testing an extremely narrow hypothesis (no idea what you really are hoping to accomplish). The pair &quot;led&quot; and &quot;lead&quot; (the metal) would fit that paradigm nicely. Maybe red/read is difficult and maybe led/lead is easy: you'll never know if you don't include tokens of both. Also, the guy who pronounces the stimuli might affect the results, so you could have 5 readers and test whether the choice of reader affects the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of linguistically-relevant variables to control: the point is you need to know what those variables are. If you know that, it's a non-linguistic statistical question of how well-filled the 2**n matrix needs to be to still have a valid test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T15:55:43.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30621" CreationDate="2019-02-21T19:33:18.747" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The present answers are in principle correct, but do not explain the fundamental issues with this idea. In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;God&quot; lexeme is relatively infrequent to develop into a definite article.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comparative evidence from Ugaritic and Aramaic suggest that the developments must have taken place largely independently, which makes such an unlikely derivation even more unlikely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An origin in deictic markers (common cross-linguistically) can also account for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Arabic indefinite marker &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Aramaic definite marker &lt;em&gt;-ā&lt;/em&gt; (the &quot;emphatic state&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30622/17305&quot;&gt;is mentioned&lt;/a&gt;, it is &lt;strong&gt;cross-linguistically common for definite articles to develop from deictic markers&lt;/strong&gt;, which are eventually reanalysed as markers of definiteness. The idea is that the (noun+deictic marker) combination is common; at some point sound changes occur which obscures the distinct building blocks; later the combination is reanalysed as (noun+definite marker+deictic marker); this allows the new definite marker to spread to other configurations. (Of course, the relative positions of these markers can differ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process is much more likely to occur with frequent lexemes. Although &quot;God&quot; is common in the Ancient Hebrew and Arabic texts &lt;em&gt;we have&lt;/em&gt; (though surely still not as frequent as deictic markers), this is a feature of the types of texts that were considered worth copying; it is unreasonable to assume that &quot;God&quot; really occurred that frequently in common spoken language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is still not enough evidence, here is the main issue as far as I'm concerned: Arabic and Hebrew split relatively early (after Central Semitic). After Arabic split off, the Hebrew branch (Northwest Semitic) developed several other languages: Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Canaanite (which contains Hebrew, Phoenician, and some other small-corpus languages). Since Aramaic has suffixed &lt;em&gt;-ā&lt;/em&gt;, for which it would be rather far-fetched to assume an origin in &lt;em&gt;'ilāh&lt;/em&gt;, and Ugaritic has no definite article, &lt;strong&gt;a large part of the development of the Hebrew and Arabic articles must have been independent&lt;/strong&gt;. This is reasonable when the origin is common cross-linguistically, but an already unlikely development from &quot;God&quot; happening twice makes this even less likely. We would also expect the Aramaic article to be closer to the Hebrew one, since it split off later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common derivations of the definite article in Hebrew and Arabic &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; account for the Aramaic one as well. A good source is Thomas Lambdin, 'The Junctural Origin of the West Semitic Definite Article' (&lt;em&gt;Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright&lt;/em&gt;, 1971, pp. 315–333). He posits the following stages for &lt;strong&gt;Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;malku&lt;/em&gt; 'a king'; &lt;em&gt;malku ð-(baḥarū)&lt;/em&gt; 'the king whom they chose'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Close juncture between the noun and postposed words: &lt;em&gt;malku + ð&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;malkuðð&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loss of final short vowels before open juncture leads to &lt;em&gt;malk&lt;/em&gt; 'a king', but &lt;em&gt;malkuðð&lt;/em&gt; remains.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; syncope allows this to be analysed as &lt;em&gt;malk&lt;/em&gt; 'a king'; &lt;em&gt;malakīm&lt;/em&gt; 'kings'; &lt;em&gt;malk hazzi&lt;/em&gt; 'this king'; &lt;em&gt;malakīm ha´´illay&lt;/em&gt; 'these kings'. In the latter two we recognize &lt;em&gt;ha-&lt;/em&gt; prefixed to the deictic markers &lt;em&gt;zi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;´illay&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This spreads to adjectives, ordinal numbers, etc., and eventually to nouns as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Arabic&lt;/strong&gt;, the development is similar. Arabic retained final &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. &lt;em&gt;malikun&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;malku&lt;/em&gt; in stage 1). This final nasal assimilates to the first consonant of the deictic marker in the close juncture. This explains why definite words in Arabic have no final &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., why &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; is the indefinite article). The definite article becomes analysed as &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt; because &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; before some consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aramaic&lt;/strong&gt; differs from Hebrew in stage 4. Lambdin posits that its speakers shortened &quot;this-x and this-y&quot; to &quot;this-x and -y&quot;, i.e. &lt;em&gt;malkaððin(āh) wagabraððin(āh)&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;malkā´ wagabraððin(āh)&lt;/em&gt;. This prevents the reanalysis in Hebrew stage 4 and leads to the postfixed definite article &lt;em&gt;-ā&lt;/em&gt; (the &quot;emphatic state&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves &lt;strong&gt;Ugaritic&lt;/strong&gt; to be explained: why no definite article here? The timespan of the Ugaritic corpus is relatively short, maybe simply not long enough to develop a definite article. This may also have stylistic reasons: the definite article is very infrequent in Hebrew poetry which may indicate it was considered not good style for in literature. But also see Na'ama Pat-El, 'The Development of the Semitic Definite Article: A Syntactic Approach' (2009: &lt;em&gt;Journal of Semitic Studies&lt;/em&gt; 54:1, 19–50), who argues that Ugaritic displays a premature state of definiteness marking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T19:33:18.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T20:03:48.050" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or are they in a revised version (My copy is 2015)?  I've seen &quot;ANIM&quot; and &quot;INAN&quot; - is this the de-facto standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23206" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T20:03:48.050" Title="Why aren't &quot;animate&quot;, &quot;inanimate&quot; in Leipzig glossing rues?" Tags="&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T23:58:47.447" Score="-1" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it really impossible for two different languages to have the exact same set of phonemes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that somewhere and wanted to know if it was true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T02:30:52.967" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T02:30:52.967" Title="Is it really impossible for two different languages to have the exact same set of phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30631" CreationDate="2019-02-22T01:50:06.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of two languages with exactly the same phonemes is Zezuru and Karanga, which are Shona languages. The same can be said about Skagit, Snohomish and Puyallup. These can be called &quot;dialects&quot;, or separate languages, depending on your criteria: they pass the test of mutual intelligibility, but there are various non-inventory differences. It does depend on how you define &quot;the same&quot; in terms of a phonemic system. Usually people mean &quot;same segments with the same phonetic values&quot;, which is what allows inventories to be compared across languages. In substance-free theories, features for classifying sounds (i.e. the phonemes) are not phonetically based, so the idea that two sounds could be &quot;the same&quot; versus &quot;different&quot; is meaningless. So it would also depend on what your definition of &quot;phoneme&quot; is, and what the basis for comparison across languages is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;North Pare and South Pare have the same phonemes, except that the voiceless lingual fricative in NP is pronounced [θ] and in SP is is pronounced [s]. In terms of abstract analysis, they are not different and there is no reason in either language to say &quot;This phoneme is [+strident] (or [-strindent]) in this language&quot;. If you define phoneme properties in abstract relational and functional terms, they are the same; if you define them in terms of pronunciation, they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T01:50:06.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11624" CreationDate="2019-02-22T02:10:01.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Equally as ambiguous is the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://ambiguousness.askdefine.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ambiguousness&lt;/a&gt; which refers to the property of a word's ambiguity. In effect a word's ability to be ambiguous. After reading the linked the article, I feel that ambiguousness would aptly be the most suited word to describe the measurement of ambiguity a word or phrase would have. Granted you would say that a word or phrase that is more ambiguous than any other was simply that, &lt;code&gt;more ambiguous&lt;/code&gt; that is in and of itself the &lt;code&gt;ambiguousness&lt;/code&gt; of that word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23953" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T02:10:01.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30631" CreationDate="2019-02-22T02:45:54.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends what you mean by &quot;the exact same&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemes tend to be named with IPA characters, but they're really just algebraic symbols, representing mental objects that we can't poke and prod at directly. That's why you see symbols like &lt;code&gt;/ḱ/&lt;/code&gt; (PIE) and &lt;code&gt;/ḥ/&lt;/code&gt; (Semitic) and &lt;code&gt;/ƀ/&lt;/code&gt; (Germanic) and &lt;code&gt;/ъ/&lt;/code&gt; (Slavic) that aren't anywhere on the IPA chart. Alice Kober, who laid the groundwork for deciphering Linear B, famously used numbers for all the phonemes (like &lt;code&gt;/2/&lt;/code&gt;) so as not to bias anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot is that, while languages may have phonemes with the same symbol, they may not be pronounced at all alike. PIE and its daughter Proto-Germanic both have a &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, but it's pretty clear that the two sounded nothing alike. Or for a living example, English &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; and Brazilian Portuguese &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt; tend to sound completely different: in English it's an alveolar approximant, while in Brazilian Portuguese it's sometimes a glottal fricative!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want two languages that have to have the same phoneme names/symbols, well, those symbols are arbitrary. All you have to do is pick languages with the same number of phonemes and rename them to match. Nothing's stopping you from using &lt;code&gt;/$/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/&amp;amp;/&lt;/code&gt; as phoneme names, and non-IPA symbols can be neutral about how exactly the phonemes were realized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want two languages that have exactly the same allophones and realizations of every phoneme, that's going to be impossible. Take two speakers of English from different areas, and I guarantee their phonetic realizations will be different in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when linguists say &quot;English and Japanese both have &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;&quot;, they're making a compromise, saying that English and Japanese both have phonemes that are &quot;close enough&quot; in their realization: English &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; can't be &lt;code&gt;[ts]&lt;/code&gt;, and Japanese &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; can't be &lt;code&gt;[ʔ]&lt;/code&gt;, but they're vaguely similar enough to be called &quot;the same&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T02:45:54.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31252" CreationDate="2019-02-22T15:24:27.350" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to get to the bottom of Thai constructions which I can only gloss along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;Because of the fact that her friends helped her escape prevented the soldiers from catching her&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Because she was angry, she therefore refused to return it to him&lt;/em&gt; (where &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; just refers back to the fact that she was angry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One explanation that occurs to me is that the words glossed as &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; do not express a relationship between clauses (and therefore are not conjunctions). Instead, they express the roles involved in a causative relationship, or in other words flag their respective clauses as causes or consequences. This makes it easy to infer the relationship without actually encoding it, which means that while you can just flag the cause and leave it to whoever you are speaking to to link it to the consequence via a process of causation, it is also open to you - while still flagging the cause - to use a causative construction to express the process itself (as in 1) or to flag the consequence separately (as in 2). Logically you may also be able to flag the cause, use a causative construction and flag the consequence, but I haven’t yet found out whether that’s the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that’s the right analysis, I don’t know what to call the words glossed as &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt;. Would they be prepositions? If so, are there any other instances of the object of a preposition doing double duty as the subject of a verb, which seems to be what is happening in (1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this has been bumped I'd like to update the Q:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the back of BillJ's comment I discovered CEGL and the arguments that H&amp;amp;P make for regarding words like &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; as prepositions. As interesting as that is, it doesn't solve the basic problem in (1), which is that the verb &lt;em&gt;prevented&lt;/em&gt; needs to take the complement of &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; as its subject if the sentence is going to make sense, and EN does not permit that - in EN the subject can only be the whole PP... so the real question is, what linguistic mechanisms could enable the verb to take just the complement of the preposition as its subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recovery of the subject from within a dependent clause looks to me a bit like raising, and there is another similarity in that the connection between the derived subject and the verb seems less direct than in the expanded version, as can be seen by comparing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because of the fact that her friends helped her, that prevented the soliders from catching her&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because of the fact that her friends helped her, the soliders were prevented from catching her&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me the first of these is marginal but the second is OK - the difference seems to be that in the second version, the direct relationship between the (understood) subject and verb is broken. That seems to parallel the fact that in a raised object construction, the direct relationship between verb and object is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for (2), &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; is a connective adverb and it just seems to be one of its peculiarities that it cannot take a subordinated element as antecedent - compare &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; in, &lt;em&gt;although he was tired, he nevertheless went on working&lt;/em&gt;, where the antecedent is just &lt;em&gt;he was tired&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T09:56:36.407" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T09:56:36.407" Title="When is a conjunction not a conjunction?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9242" CreationDate="2019-02-23T03:14:13.487" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;*Is very interesting your post although it isn´t a discussion board I will give my opinion. Firstly, I think the learning depend of the student´s motivation, if he wants to learn a new language will do everything to achieve it. Second, is important to have study habits (adult learners) to learn out  of classes and to dedicate many hours to the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there are many strategies and methods to teach and learn a L2 and currently the technology advances give us many tools to self manage our learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the psycholinguistic areas that explain the acquisition of language. Based on their conceptual baggage and researches about that, teaching and learning strategies are developed and improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of &quot;total immersion&quot; is great but difficult ´cause the context influences a lot, but as much as possible we can seek to be in contact with the language we are trying to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23961" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T05:55:29.167" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T05:55:29.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30638" CreationDate="2019-02-23T07:05:04.243" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native speaker of English, but I have the feeling that your sentence (1) &quot;Because of the fact that her friends helped her escape prevented the soldiers from catching her&quot; makes sense only if it is segmented (1a) &quot;Because of the fact that her friends helped, [comma here] her escape [subject] prevented the soldiers from catching her. Otherwise, this sentence sounds agrammatical and ill-construed. So basically, you could just as well say (1a) Because her friends helped, her escape prevented the soldiers from catching her. So both sentences are parallel. &lt;em&gt;Because of the fact that&lt;/em&gt; is a heavy substitute of &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;. Another solution would be to erase &lt;em&gt;because of&lt;/em&gt; (1b) The fact that her friends helped her escape prevented the soldiers from catching her, where the whole clause &lt;em&gt;The fact that her friends helped her escape&lt;/em&gt; is the subject of &lt;em&gt;prevented&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T07:05:04.243" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30644" CreationDate="2019-02-23T07:09:37.783" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30628/22144&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;it is cross-linguistically common for definite articles to develop from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deictic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deictic&lt;/a&gt; markers&quot;; &quot;deictic&quot; referring to words such as &quot;I&quot; or &quot;here&quot; whose meaning is dependent on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example mentioned is French &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/le#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;le&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and Italian &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/il#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;il&lt;/a&gt;&quot; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ille#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin &quot;ille&quot; or &quot;illum&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Then there is English &quot;the&quot; which seems to relate to &quot;this&quot; and &quot;that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, since Latin has no definite article, it seems natural to conclude that the evolution went in the hypothesized direction. Is the case so clear with English? What about other languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, are definite articles really so distinct from relative pronouns that we can talk meaningfully about one evolving into the other? For example, does &quot;ille&quot; not behave a bit like a definite article in Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22144" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T15:51:27.610" Title="Why is it thought that definite articles develop from deictic markers, and not the other way around?" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;definiteness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T08:03:51.940" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there theories that can predict, at least for modern English, how a complex word will be realised phonologically and graphically i.e. how it will be pronounced and spelled, given the  spelling and pronunciation of the input / component morphemes? (please consider derivational, inflectional and compounding. if possible, please consider specialist languages especially medical terms)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23964" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T13:49:11.253" Title="Theories that can predict the spelling and pronunciation of complex words" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30642" CreationDate="2019-02-23T13:40:40.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They aren't really &quot;theories&quot; in the scientific sense, but there are definitely patterns to the ways that complicated/derived words in English are spelled and pronounced. In fact, such words tend to have more &quot;regular&quot; spellings than shorter and more common words—I suppose that could be seen as a specific example of the general principle that frequent words are more likely to be irregular (which is most often applied to the topic of English verb inflection, rather than spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stedman's Medical Dictionary has sections that touch on the pronunciation of Greek and Latin-derived words in medical terminology. A chapter about this used to be freely available online, but it looks like now you have to pay for it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stedmansonline.com/webFiles/Dict-Stedmans28/APP04.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://stedmansonline.com/webFiles/Dict-Stedmans28/APP04.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciation_of_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Traditional English pronunciation of Latin&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is quite long, but contains a fair amount of information that is relevant to the pronunciation of medical terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One complication is that medical students themselves don't necessarily receive detailed instruction in pronunciation &quot;rules&quot; like this, so there isn't always consistent usage of the theoretically regular pronunciation. For example, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/382282/the-pronunciation-of-buccinator&quot;&gt;ELU poster&lt;/a&gt; said that &quot;some medical instructors use /ks/, others use /k/ and a few of them use /s/&quot; in the word &lt;em&gt;buccinator.&lt;/em&gt; Another irregular pronunciation I have noticed in use is &lt;em&gt;me-DOOL-a&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;medulla.&lt;/em&gt; You can see more variable words mentioned in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1wogow/tomayto_tomahto_duodeenum_duoddinim_idiosyncratic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit thread&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, you can only count on the pronunciation to be predictable from the spelling if the people who use the terms expect the pronunciation to be predictable from the spelling; otherwise, some people will just guess, which leads to variation, especially in things like the position of stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T13:49:11.253" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T13:49:11.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30641" CreationDate="2019-02-23T15:51:27.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For English in particular, we have older stages of the language attested: Shakespeare, Chaucer, whoever wrote Beowulf. And we can see that in Beowulf &quot;the&quot; had the force of a demonstrative, but through Chaucer and Shakespeare to the modern day it lost that force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, though, the process of a common word losing its semantic force and turning into a grammatical marker is common: it's called &lt;strong&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;semantic bleaching&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms like &lt;em&gt;ille&lt;/em&gt; in Latin had real semantic value: there was a significant difference between &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the man&quot; and &lt;em&gt;homo ille&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; man&quot;. You wouldn't insert &lt;em&gt;ille&lt;/em&gt; unless you meant it. But in Later Latin and Romance, that changed. &lt;em&gt;Ille&lt;/em&gt; lost more and more of its force until it was just an article: it marked definiteness, and nothing more. If you wanted to specify &quot;&lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; man&quot;, you would need to add an additional word (for example, Italian &lt;em&gt;quell' uomo&lt;/em&gt;, from something like *&lt;em&gt;ecce ille homo&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;behold, that man&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this process happens all over the place in linguistics. It's a sort of a cycle, as commonly-used words become weaker and weaker in meaning until they're just grammatical, then new words are added in to get the stronger meaning, and so on. If you're interested in this, you might look into &quot;Jespersen's Cycle&quot;, which describes how this happens for negation markers in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opposite process—a commonly-used grammatical word suddenly gaining semantic meaning—basically never seems to happen. Instead, you see what happened in Italian with &lt;em&gt;quello&lt;/em&gt;: an extra word is added in, giving it an even stronger meaning (&quot;behold! that one!&quot;), and then that stronger meaning weakens to a common/simple meaning (&quot;that one&quot;). In a few millennia, it's entirely possible that &lt;em&gt;questo&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;quello&lt;/em&gt; will have evolved into a new article in Italian, with the existing articles being lost or turning into case/number/gender markers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T15:51:27.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30648" CreationDate="2019-02-23T19:13:39.240" Score="1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a praat script to segment a file, but also add padded boundaries. When I use the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;start = 9.17&#xA;paddedStart = fixed$(start - 0.200, 3)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the error&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;Found a string expression instead of a numeric expression&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but if I try&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;paddedStart = fixed$(number(start), 3)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the error &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;The function &quot;number&quot; requires a string, not a number.&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I used the &lt;code&gt;fixed$&lt;/code&gt; function to limit the number of decimal places in a number?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T06:25:48.263" Title="Praat fixed$ function" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9976" CreationDate="2019-02-23T19:53:08.430" Score="-7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me. Greek is actually called Hellenic and the name of the country is call Hellas or actually hEllas (h substituted an ancient toning system of middle ages). Ελλάς is made of El and las ie the land/nation of El. Sounds too Hebrew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew is found in Bible yet it also has its Greek word HObreos that became Hebreoos. Again the H is a tone. Obrios Οβριος was actually means “the above waters sent by Zeus” as Dias the ....God of gods in mythology was the god that gave the flood and the living rain. Sounds too Greek?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally main Greek words like truth , αλήθεια al-ethos combines the divine Semitic  Lamda aleph and Greek ethos which means both «the appearance or the character “ So for Hellenic alethia/truth means the appearance of the divinity or the ethics of El. Even sacred words and mysteries (ELefsinean) use L even the Sun in Greek is Helios ie El-ios where again Semitic L comes as the light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line is Greek and Hebrew have too many things in common that modern nationalist linguistics do not want to either admit or mention as if we are two different people. We are not. We are more connected that one can today imagine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23969" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:53:08.430" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30645" CreationDate="2019-02-23T21:26:39.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;fixed$ takes only 2 arguments, so you should realise your calculations outside the function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The variable start has only 2 digits after the decimal point, so it is meaningless to propose 3 digits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;start = 9.17&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;start2 = start - 0.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;paddedStart = fixed$(start2, 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;paddedStart2 = number(paddedStart)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T06:25:48.263" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T06:25:48.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30645" CreationDate="2019-02-24T00:25:37.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured it out. &lt;code&gt;fixed$&lt;/code&gt; creates a &lt;strong&gt;string&lt;/strong&gt;, not a number. So, if you use the &lt;code&gt;number&lt;/code&gt; function, a number is returned. Ex: &lt;code&gt;number(fixed$(start - 0.200, 3))&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T00:25:37.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-24T01:52:02.413" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common construction in some foreign languages, but seemly not in English, is to use a noun where we would use an adjective. The two forms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A: PRONOUN &quot;BE&quot; ADJECTIVE&#xA;B: PRONOUN &quot;HAVE&quot; ∅-DETERMINER ATTRIBUTIVE-NOUN&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used &quot;PRONOUN&quot; for simplicity, although it could equally be a noun phrase. Note that even in French where determiners before nouns are usually mandatory, there is no determiner in the (B) grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (A):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; hungry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (B):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;heeft&lt;/strong&gt; honger&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (B):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; faim&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (A):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; thirsty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (B):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;heeft&lt;/strong&gt; dorst&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (B):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; soif&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (A):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; intelligent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; intelligent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;est&lt;/strong&gt; intelligent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (A):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; strong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; sterk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;est&lt;/strong&gt; fort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (A):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; ugly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; lelijk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (A):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;est&lt;/strong&gt; laid&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one foreign language uses the (B) form instead of the (A) form, it seems likely that the others will too. This seems to indicate that it's something about the meanings of the words, not the grammar. Although it's not idiomatic, we could say each of these in the (B) form in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; hunger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; thirst&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; intelligence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; strength&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; ugliness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to make these partitive changes their meaning. &quot;He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; X[ATTRIBUTIVE-NOUN]&quot; means roughly &quot;He &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; X[ADJECTIVE]&quot;. I'm not sure if English has any idiomatic (B) constructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference I can see is that the (B) form denotes a short-term state, whereas the (A) form denotes a long-term state. I seem to remember something about Spanish having two nouns for &quot;to be&quot; that roughly correspond to short and long-term attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with the partitive construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;C: PRONOUN &quot;HAVE&quot; (DETERMINER) NON-ATTRIBUTIVE-NOUN&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;English (C):&lt;/strong&gt; He &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt;) milk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Dutch (C):&lt;/strong&gt; Hij &lt;strong&gt;heeft&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;wat&lt;/em&gt;) melk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;French (C):&lt;/strong&gt; Il &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt; lait&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Dutch and French have all the constructions (A), (B), and (C), whereas English only has the (A) and (C) constructions idiomatically (as far as I know), with (B) being understandable but (mostly?) unidiomatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it about these nouns that causes them to be used instead of adjectives? Why don't they take determiners in the (B) construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T01:52:02.413" Title="Behaviour of attributive nouns in foreign languages" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4143" CreationDate="2019-02-24T03:41:46.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each word is classified by what is permissible in the instances in which it appears. In English, &quot;three&quot; can be a noun, an adjective, a pronoun, or a numeral. I will use French as the second language in my examples. If a word can be replaced by another word without changing the grammar of the sentence, the two words have the same grammatical class &lt;em&gt;in that instance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Noun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a &lt;strong&gt;(playing) card (with the value three)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai un &lt;strong&gt;trois&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai une &lt;strong&gt;carte (à jouer) (avec la valeur trois)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adjective (English)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; cats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;small&lt;/strong&gt; cats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Determiner (French)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai &lt;strong&gt;trois&lt;/strong&gt; chats. (I have &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; cats.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai &lt;strong&gt;des&lt;/strong&gt; chats. (I have &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; cats.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adjective (French)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai les &lt;strong&gt;trois&lt;/strong&gt; chats. (I have the &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt; cats.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J'ai les &lt;strong&gt;petits&lt;/strong&gt; chats. (I have the &lt;strong&gt;small&lt;/strong&gt; cats.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pronoun&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Three&lt;/strong&gt; are eating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They&lt;/strong&gt; are eating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trois&lt;/strong&gt; mangent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ils&lt;/strong&gt; mangent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Numeral&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, &lt;strong&gt;four&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Un, deux, &lt;strong&gt;trois&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Un, deux, &lt;strong&gt;quatre&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &quot;numeral&quot; can be hard to differentiate from the other classes. It doesn't work if you replace &quot;three&quot; with a word from a different class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, &lt;strong&gt;three&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, *&lt;strong&gt;card&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, *&lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, *&lt;strong&gt;small&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, two, *&lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;three&quot; isn't a noun, an adjective, a pronoun, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; a numeral at the same time, it is only one of those at a time. You should now be able to apply the same process in Portuguese to work out when numbers are nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to your question about the &lt;em&gt;declination&lt;/em&gt; of numbers (i.e. whether they are invariable, can be singular or plural, etc.), note that some nouns are invariable (in certain contexts), and some have to be declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am drinking milk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am drinking *a milk. (allowable if &quot;a milk&quot; is the ellipsis of &quot;a &lt;strong&gt;serving&lt;/strong&gt; of milk&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am drinking *milks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems from your question that in Portuguese, &quot;ten&quot; is invariable, while &quot;million&quot; can be singular or plural. This doesn't change the grammatical class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T03:41:46.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9242" CreationDate="2019-02-24T04:37:40.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my own experience as an English teacher, I'd like to share that I've thought using both methods: Teaching without giving any grammar structures and teaching guided by grammar, and the outcomes in both situations haven't been good enough. In the first case the students were given a lot of vocabulary per class, but they didn't know how to use it in the right way, on the other hand when I taught following grammar points, the students learned in a mechanical way, that's way I think the best way to learn another language is doing it following a natural approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23972" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T04:37:40.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="568" CreationDate="2019-02-24T04:57:28.350" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good night! &#xA;I find all the contributions very useful. Thanks a lot for sharing.&#xA;I suggest you to check the following links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=gPbQyRdnM18C&amp;amp;hl=es-419&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=gPbQyRdnM18C&amp;amp;hl=es-419&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=pxJGet3pKdoC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=introduction+to+semantics&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=0ItVU5rAFeWb3AXCtYCYDA&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=introduction%20to%20semantics&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=pxJGet3pKdoC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=introduction+to+semantics&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=0ItVU5rAFeWb3AXCtYCYDA&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=introduction%20to%20semantics&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23972" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T04:57:28.350" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-02-24T04:57:28.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30656" CreationDate="2019-02-24T10:42:57.230" Score="1" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a new Turkic etymology dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want something like Nişanyan which all Turkic words are Sogdian or Persian origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want something that analyses the words using true rules not only because for example word X is in Avesta, then it is Persian or because word X is in Sogdian Inscriptions, so it is Sogdian without any doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Centuries before Avesta or Sogdian Inscriptions, Turks and Persians/Sogdians were neighbors so it is not true that we come and say because the word exists in Avesta it is 100% Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23547" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:05:23.373" Title="Turkic etymology dictionary" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30655" CreationDate="2019-02-24T12:17:03.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words are not cited as Persian or Avestan loans just because they are attested in texts. Iranic languages have loans as well. If an Iranic word (e.g. birādar 'brother' &amp;gt; Turkish biradar) is without a doubt Indo-European, that is to say it has cognates in Celtic, Greek, Latin, Baltic etc then there is no doubt it is a loan into Turkic. If you're looking to debunk Iranic languages as a source of loans in Turkic languages, then you won't find any help in etymological dictionaries. In most cases, you will find that the attributions are based on rules (regular sound laws) and well known Indo-European vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, not all suggested loans are Iranic. There are times where an Iranic source is &lt;em&gt;suspected but not certain&lt;/em&gt;. What you can do then is to look at dictionaries covering Turkic languages and see if the word appears consistently in all of them. If the proposed Iranic source has no Indo-European parallels, then the chances are greater. However, there is a possibility that a word attested in both Turkic and Iranic languages has a third source e.g. Uralic or Yeniseian. Then things become even more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am facing these problems quite often and in those cases there are three books I am using to get an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oztopçu, Kurtulus, et al. Dictionary of Turkic Languages. Routledge, 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starostin, Sergei A., et al. Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages. Vol. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wenthe, Mark. Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 41. Walter de Gruyter GmbH &amp;amp; Co KG, 2017. (&lt;strong&gt;the parts of the book regarding Proto-Indo-Iranic&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that the Altaic theory is in a stalemate and very controversial. It can be very hard to argue for a word being Turkic based on Altaic reconstructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T07:25:26.567" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-24T12:33:07.670" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Tocharian word empreṃ 'truth' is often marked as being of unknown etymology. I cannot find a lot of commentary on it except from that it could be a middle Iranian word meaning 'confidence'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my first question is if there's any good proposal on a PIE root for this word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second question is more like checking the validity of my idea that the word might derive from PIE *per- 'cross, pass through'. The reason I am suspecting this is because Greek has πεῖρα ‘test, research, experience’ deriving from the same root. If that semantic development occurred in Greek, then truth, test and experience are very relevant to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T14:53:19.170" Title="Is there any commentary on the etymology of the Tocharian word empreṃ?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;tocharian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30657" CreationDate="2019-02-24T14:53:19.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is highly technical. You implicitly quote Adams' dictionary (1999:92). Apparently, Adams rejects that emprem. could derive from *en+bher an intensive particle (*en) + to bear (*bher). As far as I understand Adams, the particle normally surfaces as e-, rather than em-. Now, coming to your idea, how do you explain Tocharian B emprem. with *en and *per? What's the pre-form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T14:53:19.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-24T15:23:32.013" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the phenomenon where people object to &quot;illegal&quot; as though it is inaccurate because the person implied by &quot;immigrant&quot; cannot be illegal in merely being a person. While moral and legal objections may be harder for those in society to come to a definitive conclusion about, I'm pretty sure that purely linguistically speaking, there are plenty of cases (even prescriptively accepted ones) where an adjective is accepted as modifying the noun, particularly one with a clear relationship to a verb (&quot;immigrate&quot;) where the modification is more as an adverb of the verb from which the noun may be derived rather than of the noun itself (e.g., &quot;illegal immigrant&quot; need not be understood as &quot;immigrating illegal person&quot; but instead simply as an &quot;illegally immigrating person&quot;). Is there a linguistic term for this kind of indirect qualification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also be interested in an exposition about this discussion extending to adjective + nouns where the adjective is even more indirectly acting as a kind of adverb for a verb implicit in the noun--such as &quot;illegal alien&quot; (where &quot;illegal&quot; describes the manner by which someone is or became an alien).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a bonus question, it'd be nice to have a few more examples that are similar, even if having nothing to do with social issues. I can think of &quot;hard worker&quot; where &quot;hard&quot; describes how hard the person works, and not that the person who works is hard-hearted or has tough skin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23238" LastEditorUserId="23238" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T00:19:51.583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T00:19:51.583" Title="Name for adjectives modifying the verb within a noun rather than the noun itself (as in &quot;illegal immigrant&quot;)" Tags="&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30662" CreationDate="2019-02-24T17:08:06.860" Score="5" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some dictionaries source attestation and try to go for the earliest quotes they can find. How do they find them? Without electronic indexing this must have been impossibly difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm asking is that many answers on Stack&amp;nbsp;Exchange often conclude earliest attestation and imply earliest use, instead of the logical &lt;em&gt;used at the latest in ...&lt;/em&gt; That's a slightly different issue to frame the question, not to make it too broad. To be fair, no inference is made because of this in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="23976" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T01:33:47.040" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T13:10:36.120" Title="How do dictionaries source attestation?" Tags="&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30661" CreationDate="2019-02-24T18:31:09.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your assumption that the date of the earliest &lt;em&gt;recorded&lt;/em&gt; usage of a word does not necessarily correspond to the earliest usage of a word, since words may have been in circulation in spoken language before they were first used in publications, and many old publications have simply not survived. I touched upon this issue in my answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/178/2191&quot;&gt;How many of Shakespeare's words in his plays were new?&lt;/a&gt; on Literature Stack Exchange: a number of words that are first attested in Shakespeare's plays may have circulated earlier, either in the spoken language or in writings that have not survived (or both).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before there were digital corpora and digital texts, lexicographers had to read physical books to find usage examples. The editors of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (which started their work in 1857 or 1858) asked thousands of volunteer readers to submit usage examples, in what was an early example of crowdsourcing. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150703041454/http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/a-brief-history-of-crowdsourcing-infographic/12532&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crowdsourcing timeline&lt;/a&gt;, which says that 800 volunteers contributed to the first fascicle alone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the description of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/page/reading/Reading$0020Programme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED's Reading Programme&lt;/a&gt;. James A. H. Murray set this up in 1879; its focus was not specifically on finding the earliest examples of words and phrases. In addition, the first edition &quot;relied heavily on a small number of authors (notably, of course, Shakespeare) for its coverage of Early Modern English (1500-1700)&quot;. This selection was possibly too narrow to find the earliest surviving examples of words and phrases. For this reason, the current Historical Reading Programme looks at a broader spectrum of texts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today, readers systematically survey a much broader spectrum of texts from this and other periods. A separate Historical Reading Programme has been created to serve this function. Readers participating in this programme supply material specifically for the revision of the OED; usually these are earlier examples of words or phrases that are already included in the Dictionary. These readers check their findings against the Oxford English Dictionary to ensure that only significant items are filed, such as earlier examples of words and meanings or terms that have not yet been registered in the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, before the digital era, finding early usage examples required a lot of reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13805" LastEditorUserId="13805" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T21:52:25.567" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T21:52:25.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30665" CreationDate="2019-02-24T19:15:51.030" Score="7" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know who is the first person that introduced the tree of phrase structure in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastEditorUserId="22765" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T03:22:13.037" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T03:22:13.037" Title="Who is credited for the syntax tree in synthetic linguistics" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30661" CreationDate="2019-02-24T20:12:13.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, you don't ever really know for certain that you have the earliest example. Or even the earliest &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; example. It's just the best &lt;em&gt;so far&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a person who frequently writes answers to etymology questions on ELU, I try to make this clear. &quot;According to the OED&quot;, &quot;according to my own research&quot;, &quot;dates at least back to X&quot; are all things I say, but I sometimes get sloppy and don't do this all the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some exceptions. We can be very certain that &quot;cromulent&quot;, for example, was coined in 1996 (or '95 depending on when the episode of the Simpsons was written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How etymological research is done has varied through time. In the case of the &quot;New English Dictionary&quot; (the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary), work started on it in 1857. Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]n January 1859, the Society issued their 'Proposal for the publication of a New English Dictionary,' in which the characteristics of the proposed work were explained, and an appeal made to the English and American public to assist in collecting the raw materials for the work, these materials consisting of quotations illustrating the use of English words by all writers of all ages and in all senses, each quotation being made on a uniform plan on a half-sheet of notepaper, that they might in due course be arranged and classified alphabetically and by meanings. This Appeal met with a generous response: some hundreds of volunteers began to read books, make quotations, and send in their slips to 'sub-editors,' who volunteered each to take charge of a letter or part of one, and by whom the slips were in tum further arranged, classified, and to some extent used as the basis of definitions and skeleton schemes of the meanings of words in preparation for the Dictionary.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/history/archives/april-1879-appeal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public to Read Books and Make Extracts for The Philological Society's &lt;em&gt;New English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Reading Programme&quot; is still used by the OED, although the methodology is different. The books are still read all the same but here's what happens next according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/blog/reading-for-the-oed/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a freelance researcher for the OED&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I then consult &lt;em&gt;OED Online&lt;/em&gt; to determine whether the word or phrase is in the Dictionary: if it is not, I submit it as a ‘not-in’, and if it is, I decide whether its form or context is important enough to warrant its submission. If it does qualify, I enter the information into tagged fields in an electronic file that has been set up in a standard format. When I have finished the reading, I submit the file to Oxford or New York, where the records are incorporated into OED‘s working database for consideration by the editors, along with thousands of paper citation slips, as they proceed through the current revision. Yes, some of my finds are still submitted as paper slips—a reminder of OED‘s long heritage—but, electronic or paper, I can hardly imagine a better job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotations were collected in a machine readable format for the first time in &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.oed.com/history/reading-programme/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1989&lt;/a&gt;. The 1990 UK Reading Programme captured material electronically. (Note that the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1989.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, the OED now utilizes several online databases of texts, such as  &lt;a href=&quot;http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Early English Books Online&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gale.com/intl/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eighteenth Century Collections Online&lt;/a&gt;, and some newspaper databases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do your own research with databases (many people use the free Google Books), it's often easy to find antedatings for pages that haven't been updated for the third edition of the OED. Updates to the OED3 started in 2000 and continue to this day: it's a huge dictionary and updating takes time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OED: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/public/researching/loginpage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Researching the Language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22150" LastEditorUserId="22150" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T13:10:36.120" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T13:10:36.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30663" CreationDate="2019-02-24T21:44:35.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tree&quot; has been a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thing in mathematics&lt;/a&gt; for some time. &quot;Phrase structure&quot; is a particular mathematical theory of syntax introduced by Chomsky. As far as I know the first phrase structure tree is on p. VI-205 (268) of &quot;The logical structure of linguistic theory&quot; (1955: &lt;a href=&quot;http://alpha-leonis.lids.mit.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/chomsky_LSLT55.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original version&lt;/a&gt;), where he explains the &quot;Q-derivation&quot; (VI-203a) with a diagram, recognizable as the derivation of some strings (words could be used by he used &quot;c1 c2 c3 c4&quot; etc). The same analysis is given in his dissertation &lt;em&gt;Transformational analysis&lt;/em&gt;, a reduction to essentials of part of LSLT. It depends on whether you mean &quot;both tree, and PS analysis&quot;. Tree diagramming is older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T21:44:35.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-24T21:50:47.083" Score="1" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Azerbaijani: &lt;strong&gt;çün&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Persian: çun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Means: because&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Origin: Persian  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Azerbaijani: &lt;strong&gt;üçün&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;üç+ün&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;old-Turkic: uçun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Means: because of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Origin: old-Turkic  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can somebody explain how this is possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More Explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not possible that &lt;strong&gt;üçün&lt;/strong&gt; has been made using üç+ün&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We don't have ün/un suffix in Turkic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think it was like &quot;O çun&quot; means &quot;because of that&quot; and cause of accent transformed to &quot;üçün&quot;, cause you know in Turkic we can't have O and Ü together in one word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23547" LastEditorUserId="23547" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T23:00:08.260" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T05:01:05.060" Title="How &quot;üçün&quot; is Turkic but &quot;çün&quot; is Iranic?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-24T21:54:17.753" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that English has a set of aspirated consonants, the allophones [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] of /p/, /t/, /k/, respectively. Are there other consonants with aspirated allophones? In which cases do them occour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking it because /d/ in the beginning of words like &quot;dance&quot; or &quot;doctor&quot;, I hear what looks like a small aspiration almost like [dʰ] or even a very subtle [d͡z], the difference is really clear if you compare with the /d/ in italian &quot;dottore&quot; or portuguese &quot;doutor&quot;, where it sounds lika a plain [d]. I am a Portuguese native speaker and it really sounds like a different phone to me and I could not find any answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T02:43:10.960" Title="Are there other aspirated phones in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30661" CreationDate="2019-02-24T22:51:30.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not uncommon to detect word usage that predates the earliest attestation noted in the OED, for example in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/corpus-of-early-english-correspondence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus of Early English Correspondence&lt;/a&gt; such earlier attestations were found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, when really every written document from the past is digitised this process comes to an end unless some old writings are newly discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T22:51:30.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11180" CreationDate="2019-02-24T23:56:28.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Translate uses machine learning. Unlike human translation, it uses parsing of simple text and other stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Google's corpora is not enough to make the translation the same as how people translates. This becomes a challenge and MT will not really get through the field where it's almost the same as how a human translates by spending years of improvement just to make it a little bit better each time but still trying to get to the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still possible to make it better always but not to when it is good to replace human translators.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20912" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T23:56:28.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30667" CreationDate="2019-02-25T00:26:03.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from the fact that English &lt;em&gt;p,t,k&lt;/em&gt; are aspirated, &lt;em&gt;b,d,g&lt;/em&gt; are also different from &lt;em&gt;b,d,g&lt;/em&gt; in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese in not being &quot;as voiced&quot;, in initial position – often, they are produced as voiceless unaspirated stops, especially &lt;em&gt;d,g&lt;/em&gt;. But &quot;unaspirated&quot; means &quot;very short delay between release of the constriction and the start of voicing&quot;. So &lt;em&gt;d,g&lt;/em&gt; will not sound like Portuguese &lt;em&gt;d,g&lt;/em&gt;. Beside that, I have observed occasional weak affrication of &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; from some speakers, which may be what you are hearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T00:26:03.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30667" CreationDate="2019-02-25T00:52:03.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the &quot;fortis&quot;/&quot;voiceless&quot; plosives /p t k/, aspiration is supposed to occur with the &quot;fortis&quot;/&quot;voiceless&quot; affricate /t͡ʃ/. (In some linguistic theories, I believe affricates like /t͡ʃ/ are phonologically analyzed as sibilant plosives/stops.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English &quot;lenis&quot;/&quot;voiced&quot; plosives like /d/ are not expected to have any aspiration in word-initial position. They are less voiced than Italian voiced plosives, but the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;voice onset time&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is supposed to be around zero at most, not notably positive (aspirated stops have positive voice onset time, and fully voiced stops have negative voice onset time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T01:15:40.870" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T01:15:40.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30663" CreationDate="2019-02-25T04:12:57.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French linguist Lucien Tesnière also used trees (called stemmas if I remember well). He has nothing to do with Chomsky, and is possibly older. I don't know if he inherited the idea of stemmas from somebody else. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Tesni%C3%A8re#Stemmas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Tesni%C3%A8re#Stemmas&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T04:12:57.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2019-02-25T08:43:57.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interlingua. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With very few exceptions: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rudhar.com/lingtics/intrlnga/cgi-grep/modempia.htm#SoloASCII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://rudhar.com/lingtics/intrlnga/cgi-grep/modempia.htm#SoloASCII&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23979" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T08:43:57.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T10:32:50.240" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Estonian, &quot;in London&quot; is translated as &quot;Londonis&quot;. Now if we want to apply natural language understanding to this, then should I tokenize &quot;London&quot; and &quot;is&quot; separately? Or should I lemmatize &quot;Londonis&quot; to &quot;London&quot;? Ofcourse both approaches might be possible, but I'm asking for the rational and recommended approach. The issue with words with suffixes is that the sequence tagging statistical model for named entity recognition is not detecting words with suffixes. And I don't speak Estonian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23981" LastEditorUserId="23981" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T12:57:12.683" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T12:57:12.683" Title="Should Estonian word endings be tokenized or lemmatized for natural language understanding?" Tags="&lt;lemmas&gt;&lt;natural-language-understanding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30667" CreationDate="2019-02-25T11:22:49.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're hearing as &quot;a small aspiration&quot; is probably the friction during the release phase of a plosive. A plosive phoneme in an onset may be in realization essentially an affricate, but since [t, d] and [ts, dz] do not contrast in onsets, it is usually analyzed and referred to as a plosive. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Sounds+of+the+World%27s+Languages-p-9780631198154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson (1996&lt;/a&gt;: 90):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In almost every case, as a stop is released the articulators will pass briefly through a position in which the constriction is narrow enough that it will cause turbulence in the air at the constriction site. This transitory friction is usually considered a part of the release burst of the stop. Affricates are stops in which the release of the constriction is modified in such a way as to produce a more prolonged period of frication after the release. As with many of the types of sounds we have discussed, the class of affricates has no sharp boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that, in addition to the difference in the timing of voicing, English stops are usually apical alveolar while in Portuguese and Italian they are usually dental (laminal denti-alveolar), which may be part of why you're hearing a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T11:22:49.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30666" CreationDate="2019-02-25T12:17:30.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkic üçün is a postposition meaning “because of, on account of”. It is undeniably Turkic; see Clauson, Etym. dictionary of pre-13th-century Turkish, p. 28 seq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Persian čūn is a conjunction meaning “when, since” and a preposition meaning “like, as”. It has an impeccable Iranian etymology:  Old Iranian či-gauna “what colour” &gt; Middle Persian čiyōn &gt; New Persian čūn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superficial similarity of the two is accidental. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T12:17:30.793" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T13:39:26.627" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the form with the &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; vowel was kept only in High German. All other germanic languages use the form with &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;,such as Dutch and English. Why is that?Is this the result of some sort of sound change? The existence of two alternative forms with such different vowels seems really strange to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="22572" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T19:00:44.600" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T12:46:13.067" Title="What's the reason behind the aternation of vowel in the Proto-Germanic suffix &quot;-ungō&quot;/&quot;-ingō&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T17:18:24.203" Score="2" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was just writing a sentence along the lines of &quot;...the sales person will not enter the information....&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went back and wrote it as  &quot;...the sales person &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;will not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; enter the information....&quot; to make sure we don't lose track of the key bit. If I were speaking that phrase, I would emphasize the 'not'.  [I'm guessing there's a linguistic word describing how one stresses some important point in a sentence. I just don't know it.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also understand that not all languages have a grammatical construct such that negation is a separate word and/or used in that particular word order.  Does that mean a language with &quot;not&quot; as a suffix stresses the suffix to underscore a point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, do all languages use what I'm calling &quot;stress&quot; or &quot;emphasis&quot; to underscore points?  Is that the same thing as asking if all languages of some sort of tonality?  Are there languages with zero stress in this regard but use some other means like word order or syntax or some other bit I can't even think of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this phenomenon is indeed universal, does that say something about the genetic proclivity for language?  If not universal, does it suggest the opposite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23772" LastEditorUserId="23772" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T19:49:06.310" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T20:37:02.873" Title="Do all languages use emphasis to communicate importance?" Tags="&lt;stress&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30680" CreationDate="2019-02-25T17:33:47.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;More or less by definition, &quot;emphasis&quot; &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; &quot;communicating importance&quot;. In spoken language there is a common method of signalling importance, via &quot;intonation&quot;. Written forms of languages can do the same thing, using capital letters, bold face, underlining, italics, and other combinations. Not all languages are written, so not all languages use graphic methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intonation is a thing that exists in all spoken languages, and the extra lung power, louder and higher pitch thing appears to be universal as a possibility, although as a cultural matter there it is not conventionally implemented the same way (just as people differ in the extent to which they shout in interwebs posts). It is not limited to language, and there are analogs to emphatic speech in music; pounding on a table has an analogous effect and isn't about language. Since it's not just about language, it's not evidence of anything specific to language. However, there may be grammar-specific methods of signalling what vocal emphasis signals, and that stuff is not universal (it's learned on a language-specific basis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested to get data on cross linguistic analogs in signed languages (not just ASL, but that would be a good start).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T17:33:47.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:12:02.437" Score="4" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard about about the critical period hypothesis and how that applies to things like accents and stuff, but is there a critical period for reading, writing, and listening? After a certain age or period, can that person never be able to read, write, and listen to a level of a native? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a topic of interest because I started learning English when I was about 7. I am fluent and I have pretty much forgotten most of my mother tongue (Korean), however I cannot help but wonder if I started learning English earlier, that I could read faster for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23983" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T23:12:02.437" Title="Critical Period for reading, writing, and listening?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;critical-period&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:54:57.147" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In other words, any symbols (ideograms) used to convey emotions that fit the description of &quot;ancient emoji&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly interested in ancient and medieval attested symbols, but anything from before XX century will be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23984" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T16:12:08.130" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T16:12:08.130" Title="Are there examples of symbols similar to modern emoji or emoticons that were used before 20th century?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30680" CreationDate="2019-02-26T08:53:40.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More generally, do all languages use what I'm calling &quot;stress&quot; or &quot;emphasis&quot; to underscore points? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, they do not all do that. Some languages prefer to use word-order. For example Swahili,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;gari langu nzuri&#xA;car  my    good&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;my good car&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;gari nzuri langu&#xA;car  good  my&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;my &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; car&quot; (not the other one I own). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This second phrase will usually be spoken with no difference in tone or loudness, and the text will not need any formatting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T09:41:48.597" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T09:41:48.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30679" CreationDate="2019-02-26T12:46:13.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feminine suffix variants *-ingō/-ungō correspond to the masculine *-inga-/-unga-, which go back to PIE *-en-ko-/-n̥-ko- (see Krahe 1969 'Germanische Sprachwissenschaft III' p. 206). The relationship between *-en- and *-n̥- is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ablaut&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="105" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T12:46:13.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30689" CreationDate="2019-02-26T17:31:41.073" Score="12" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;Venetian (the Italo-Romance language spoken in the area of Italy roughly corresponding to the Veneto region) has a weird sound which is usually called &lt;em&gt;l evanescente&lt;/em&gt; (evanescent l). It varies geographically (from a completely normal /l/ to mute), but its most distinctive form has been described by Lepschy in &lt;em&gt;Fonematica veneziana&lt;/em&gt; (pg 18-19) as (my translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an articulation where the air passes through a depression in the central part of the top of the tongue, lifted towards the palate, while the two sides of the top of the tongue are in contact with the sides of the crown of the upper teeth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/t%C3%B2%C5%82a/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The pronunciation of toła by ness1&lt;/a&gt; in Forvo provides a fairly characteristic realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ferguson, in his &lt;em&gt;A Linguistic History of Venice&lt;/em&gt; claims it has no IPA representation, so I assume it is a rare sound. He also reports it has been described as «an unrounded prevelar semi-vowel».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any other language containing this sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T15:53:03.397" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T15:53:03.397" Title="Is there any other language containing the sound of the &quot;evanescent l&quot; in Venetian?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-26T17:57:24.893" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello to everyone who read this! And sorry for my English...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a discussion on some particular internet forum which is now about a languages. In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saying that all languages have basically the same ability to describe something. In example English speaker can hypothetically understand any thoughts and cultural things of a China speaker, but with a different language (in this case English) and my opponent saying to me that sometimes translation is impossible and I am saying that translation is a more stub term than 'description' and means basically finding a proper 'shortcuts' which have same or similar meanings.&#xA;Please help me to understand which of us is speaking truth and if it possible with some academic writings or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for the future answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P. S. I am a far from linguistic science, so please explain more simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23992" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T17:53:23.147" Title="Helping to compare 'descriptive power' of languages" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-26T18:39:15.197" Score="9" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nowadays all the leading works on historical linguistics consider Proto-Slavic (you can put here anything you wish but I will talk about Slavonic studies) &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt; as a fact (yes, there can be said something like, 'It is a hypothetical language,' but that is not serious). There are explanations of phonetical processes in this language, hypotheses on how the infinitive form appeared, etc.—so the scholars take the proto-language as something obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there were some linguists who disagreed with the reconstructing of proto-languages for the majority of IE (and other) languages. One of them, as I suggest, was Vittore Pisani. In his work 'L'etimologia: storia questioni metodo' he writes (here comes my translation from &lt;em&gt;Russian&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding 'the Germanic language', it is necessary to remember that it has never been the same as Classical Latin in which common to individual linguistic acts isoglottic lines were rather numerous and well known; 'the Germanic language' was sooner a branch of dialects (just like Vulgar Latin) with a far lesser number of isoglottic lines which are not regulated by a strict tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;...&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the process of the forming of these [Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic, etc.] linguistic unities, every dialect or even every linguistic tradition could save or develop some ancient characteristics which probably had been its [of the dialect or of the linguistic tradition] isoglottic lines that are common for the dialects which then became a part of other unities. This shows how erroneous and fraught with delusions the idea of the evolution of language is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, my question is how modern historical linguistics can answer to this 'accusation'? Why actually the model of proto-languages has been taken and is being developed now by modern scholars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T20:03:03.307" Title="Why proto-languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30686" CreationDate="2019-02-26T19:17:40.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_language#Phonology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki page on Venetian&lt;/a&gt; proposes that it may be phonetically [ɰ], also Ø, but that does not match the Forvo sample which is closer to [j]. In lieu of a solid phonetic study, it's not really possible to assert what this sound &quot;is&quot;, so comparing the properties of that sound to ones in other languages is not really possible. You can compare two pronunciations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%C5%82%C3%A9ngua/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;łéngua&lt;/a&gt;, one with no initial C and the other with initial [l], likewise &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/%C5%82una/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;łuna&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/word/ci%C3%A0co%C5%82e/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ciàcołe&lt;/a&gt;. We would need to have examples from the same individuals with [l,j,Ø] in comparable environments as we find &quot;ł&quot;, to see if this is an individually-distinct sound, as opposed to a sound that may have formerly been phonetically distinct. &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/vec/9/96/Manual_Gramatica%C5%82e_Xenera%C5%82e_de_%C5%82a_%C5%81%C3%A9ngua_V%C3%A8neta_e_%C5%82e_s%C3%B3_varianti.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This grammar&lt;/a&gt; (in Venetian) might be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: based on the minimal pair provided in the comment, from the same speaker, if this pattern is sustained (not a quirk of tokens), this seems to be a somewhat problematic sound. The measured F1,F2 in the area corresponding to the glides are &lt;em&gt;impałà&lt;/em&gt; = 614, 1535 and &lt;em&gt;impajà&lt;/em&gt; = 416, 1970. This closely matches the F2-F1 difference of [ɯ]; but F1 is more like [ɛ] and F2 is more like [ɶ]: subjectively, the 75 msc in the middle of &quot;ł&quot; is like [ɛ]. One problem with the letter &quot;ɰ&quot; is that it covers a very wide range of sounds. Ladefoged provides an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/ipaSOUNDS/Con-53b.AIFF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA reference performance&lt;/a&gt;, which does not sound like this &quot;ł&quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki article&lt;/a&gt; on the voiced velar approximant doesn't give any clear examples (i.e. there are numerous disclaimers like &quot;some speakers&quot;, &quot;certain dialects&quot;, &quot;optional&quot;). IMO this is a novel sound, deserving of an in-depth phonetic investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T20:56:22.807" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T20:56:22.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20036" CreationDate="2019-02-26T20:10:45.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would be the results for an automated lexical comparison of the constants for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elinguistics.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beaufils № 18&lt;/a&gt; word list; &lt;em&gt;Eye, Ear, Nose, Hand, Tongue, Tooth, Death, Water, Sun, Wind, Night, Two, Three, Four, I, You, Who &amp;amp; Name&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|AI|CB|ID|JV|MY|TG|TS|MR|SA|TA|CC|CM|TB|BU|GL|BY|LO|SH|TH|VN|KH|KN|ML|TM|TL|&#xA;|00|75|89|80|74|78|78|84|85|84|81|93|89|85|84|70|77|79|77|86|68|79|79|73|81|Ainu&#xA;|75|00|63|47|65|24|19|69|65|74|75|88|80|84|79|73|77|77|78|79|76|85|88|85|85|Cebuano&#xA;|89|63|00|52|62|60|58|75|77|76|83|87|87|81|90|81|82|84|86|79|86|81|86|88|83|Indonesian&#xA;|80|47|52|00|52|44|52|65|68|79|85|86|84|83|81|73|76|73|74|78|85|79|86|82|83|Javanese&#xA;|74|65|62|52|00|60|68|66|66|73|78|76|79|65|89|73|74|76|77|78|83|78|79|82|78|Malagasy&#xA;|78|24|60|44|60|00|35|67|64|75|81|88|79|82|79|75|79|76|76|80|79|83|86|84|81|Tagalog&#xA;|78|19|58|52|68|35|00|73|72|77|79|89|79|85|82|74|81|80|76|73|76|85|88|87|84|Tausug&#xA;|84|69|75|65|66|67|73|00|20|47|91|89|89|81|78|80|90|89|89|80|91|89|93|92|90|Maori&#xA;|85|65|77|68|66|64|72|20|00|51|89|86|90|82|71|80|82|82|83|79|88|91|97|96|93|Samoan&#xA;|84|74|76|79|73|75|77|47|51|00|86|88|87|79|87|86|90|87|87|84|89|92|93|92|90|Tahitian&#xA;|81|75|83|85|78|81|79|91|89|86|00|41|64|69|94|89|75|77|72|83|72|84|81|83|81|Chinese_(Cantonese)&#xA;|93|88|87|86|76|88|89|89|86|88|41|00|67|80|96|95|84|86|81|88|80|88|83|82|91|Chinese_(Mandarin)&#xA;|89|80|87|84|79|79|79|89|90|87|64|67|00|55|98|83|77|79|81|85|87|91|90|89|93|Tibetan&#xA;|85|84|81|83|65|82|85|81|82|79|69|80|55|00|96|77|66|67|70|82|85|82|83|83|82|Burmese&#xA;|84|79|90|81|89|79|82|78|71|87|94|96|98|96|00|45|75|74|73|88|90|89|90|88|86|Gelao&#xA;|70|73|81|73|73|75|74|80|80|86|89|95|83|77|45|00|59|59|60|77|83|89|88|83|79|Buyang&#xA;|77|77|82|76|74|79|81|90|82|90|75|84|77|66|75|59|00|19|17|82|90|87|92|90|93|Lao&#xA;|79|77|84|73|76|76|80|89|82|87|77|86|79|67|74|59|19|00|22|87|90|88|91|89|92|Shan&#xA;|77|78|86|74|77|76|76|89|83|87|72|81|81|70|73|60|17|22|00|77|84|85|84|82|85|Thai&#xA;|86|79|79|78|78|80|73|80|79|84|83|88|85|82|88|77|82|87|77|00|68|83|85|87|80|Vietnamese&#xA;|68|76|86|85|83|79|76|91|88|89|72|80|87|85|90|83|90|90|84|68|00|78|76|73|76|Khmer&#xA;|79|85|81|79|78|83|85|89|91|92|84|88|91|82|89|89|87|88|85|83|78|00|27|33|29|Kannada&#xA;|79|88|86|86|79|86|88|93|97|93|81|83|90|83|90|88|92|91|84|85|76|27|00|26|23|Malayalam&#xA;|73|85|88|82|82|84|87|92|96|92|83|82|89|83|88|83|90|89|82|87|73|33|26|00|42|Tamil&#xA;|81|85|83|83|78|81|84|90|93|90|81|91|93|82|86|79|93|92|85|80|76|29|23|42|00|Telugu&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an in depth analysis, but rather an automated comparison of words that work very well to determine relationships in Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lower the number the closer the two languages are. &lt;em&gt;Thai&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Shan&lt;/em&gt; with |22| would be comparable to &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Norwegian&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;em&gt;Burmese&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Tibetan&lt;/em&gt; |55| would be similar to &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Slovakian&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Thai&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Tagalog&lt;/em&gt; |76| would be the equivalent of &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Kurdish&lt;/em&gt;. Whereas the higher the number the more inexact this comparison is, the more likely there is a random correlation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T20:10:45.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30680" CreationDate="2019-02-26T20:37:02.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily, some languages (like my native), express importance by repetition in the discourse. For example: &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did that woman die?  [tmmut temghat nni] [tmmut]? 'Berber Language'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of repetition is only visible in interrogative senteneces.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T20:37:02.873" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30667" CreationDate="2019-02-27T02:43:10.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comment is not that of an expert and I can't cite any source but I still feel like confirming your guess: /d/ can be aspiratedly realized in English - in the british variant that is. I've heard some brits speaking and some - those who are said to have a very strong british accent, seem to put more air out when pronouncing consonants, /d/ included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T02:43:10.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T02:44:04.793" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell based on recordings of languages such as Spanish and Hebrew, the phonemes /e i o u/ or /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/ tend to &quot;slip&quot; freely between being [e i o u] and being [ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ]. Is this true, and, if so, is it universal among languages that don't distinguish the two phoneme sets? I would think yes for the first question, no for the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23997" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T15:04:01.607" Title="Do these vowel sounds &quot;slip&quot; in languages such as Spanish and Hebrew?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9242" CreationDate="2019-02-27T02:59:57.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning grammar in the beginning is a great idea. It's true, we before learning any formal grammar can be great in our native languages but didn't you ever notice that after learning grammar our communicative abilities get even better? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, fluency of a language means expressing your thoughts in words as exactly as possible and without knowing well the rules that govern the usage of the words you cannot reach that goal. Then again you can learn some rules unconsciously, as you learn constructions that are common in the language but in this way your mastery of the rules is limited simply because speech is a much more active activity than most people think - we have to be (consciously) aware of the rules to explore them the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't mean to say that you should learn grammar first and vocabulary after. It's just that grammar doesn't and shouldn't be completely left out as the guy from your video suggested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T02:59:57.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30693" CreationDate="2019-02-27T03:56:36.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that there is no phonemic contrast between /e i o u/ and /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/ in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less familiar with the phonology of Hebrew, but the variety described by the Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Hebrew phonology&lt;/a&gt;&quot; also has no contrast between /e i o u/ and /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Exact_number_of_allophones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Spanish phonology&lt;/a&gt; suggests certain conditions for /e i o u/ to have opener or closer realizations. Based on literature I remember reading, I think that there is some disagreement about these kinds of conditions, though. Wikipedia says &quot;There is no agreement among scholars on how many vowel allophones Spanish has&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the amount of variability that is found in Spanish is actually pretty common for a language with an /a e i o u/ vowel system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the impression that the IPA phonetic values of [ɪ ʊ] are not very definitely defined. The linked Wikipedia article uses transcriptions [i̞, u̞] instead. IPA isn't really an effective tool for communicating detailed information about vowel qualities. Something like formant frequencies plotted on a vowel chart would probably be a better way of presenting information about this kind of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T04:01:52.340" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T04:01:52.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30688" CreationDate="2019-02-27T08:03:24.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to keep in mind that the comparative method means several steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;step1 is collecting comparanda: for example, Latin pater, mater, frater vs English father, mother, brother.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;step2 is creating a formal equation, then proposing a pre-form that synthesizes the equation: here for example *pater, ma:ter, bhra:ter (at a naive level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;step3 is projecting the equations *pater, ma:ter, bhra:ter into the past and postulating that these equations are words in the proto-language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, people are so routinely applying the comparative method that they jump to the conclusion, without explicit reference to step1 and step2&#xA;Basically, a proto-language is a set of formal equations that synthesize the similarity between sets of comparanda and are projected into the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T08:03:24.010" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30700" CreationDate="2019-02-27T10:57:32.993" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had my eyes on The Phonology of Spanish by Iggy Roca but I can't find the book in any store, neither it's ISBN or even it's cover! Evidence indicates that it wasn't even published but it pertained to a series called The Phonology of The World's Languages and the phonology book I'm looking for would more or less follow the structure of those of this series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T15:52:29.947" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T15:52:29.947" Title="What informative and yet easy-to-read introductory books in English are there for Spanish Phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30688" CreationDate="2019-02-27T11:08:09.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of a proto-language stands and falls with a tree model of language evolution. While the tree model of language evolution can be successfully applied to many language families leading to widely accepted reconstructed proto-languages, it is not the only possible model of language evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a situation where there is a polycentric dialect continuum with innovations spreading from different places, a wave model may be more appropriate to describe language evolution. Pisani is a well-known proponent of a wave model of language evolution so he denies the reconstructability of a unique proto-language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T11:08:09.643" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30707" CreationDate="2019-02-27T11:32:06.530" Score="3" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most languages I know of make use of 'active' more than 'passive'. It appears that the passive is derived from the 'canonical' active. &#xA;Are there any languages that use more passive than active? Or can a language with only the passive form exist without a canonical active? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T22:31:48.177" LastActivityDate="2019-03-02T22:31:48.177" Title="Is there a language which uses 'passive voice' more often than 'active' one?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30697" CreationDate="2019-02-27T13:00:34.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hualde, José Ignacio, 2005, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FUCRR4c-KuMC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sounds of Spanish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Cambridge University Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macpherson, I. R., 1975, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=9VrpAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spanish Phonology: Descriptive and Historical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Manchester University Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harris, James, 1969, &lt;em&gt;Spanish Phonology&lt;/em&gt;, MIT Press (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12999&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original thesis&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dalbor, John B., 1997, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=qYh7QgAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spanish Pronunciation: Theory and Practice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 3rd ed., Holt, Rinehart and Winston&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cressey, William Whitney, 1978, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xMBCMh3GETsC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spanish Phonology and Morphology: A Generative View&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Georgetown University Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Canfield, D. Lincoln, 1981, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=G8ZY3dVGF7cC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spanish Pronunciation in the Americas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, University of Chicago Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Penny, Ralph, 2000, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=h7Qhxv_BZ-8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Variation and Change in Spanish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Cambridge University Press&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JIPA articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio, Ana Ma. Fernández-Planas &amp;amp; Josefina Carrera-Sabaté, 2003, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/39B1C556856D62AF8FC53D3F22435750/S0025100303001373a.pdf/castilian_spanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Castilian Spanish&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt;, 33(2), pp. 255–259&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avelino, Heriberto, 2018, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C35C97AE9A19C9C222FD614D2D4125AA/S0025100316000232a.pdf/mexico_city_spanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Mexico City Spanish&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt;, 48(2), pp. 223–230&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coloma, Germán, 2018, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ucema.edu.ar/u/gcoloma/ArgentineSpanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Argentine Spanish&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt;, 48(2), pp. 243–250&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monroy, Rafael &amp;amp; Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, 2015, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/75BD116FA03DFECFCF294B632467613C/S0025100314000231a.pdf/murcian_spanish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Murcian Spanish&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt;, 45(2), pp. 229–240&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-02-27T14:18:49.583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T14:18:49.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23312" CreationDate="2019-02-27T14:19:30.567" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, 1000 CE would be the very early Song dynasty (the Northern Song 北宋) in China, with the Liao (遼朝) / Khitan state still holding sway in the northern regions. The capital of the Song in this period was Bianjing (汴京), now the city of Kaifeng (開封) in Henan Province. In the words of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=qBvsXylluO4C&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PP11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pulleyblank (1991)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, evidence for the language of Northern Song and its northern and southern successors, Jin and Southern Song, is sporadic and fragmentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is enough long-lasting data (i.e. books and records) for our 21st century language learning purposes, such that it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be reconstructed. But it depends on what you are reconstructing, and what you think your reconstruction represents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the language of the Song Dynasty is conventionally known as Late Middle Chinese (晚期中古漢語), dated rather vaguely to the 10-12th centuries CE (hence including the late Tang). Caveats about topolect and time periods / generations apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phonology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of segmental information inherent in the non-alphabetical system of Chinese characters makes it challenge to reconstruct sound. However, phonological research was at an (all-time?) peak through this period, as a consequence of the imperial examination and the cultural love of poetry, and the exposure to Buddhism and hence Indian lingustics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, some very precious sources have been passed down to us, enough for a good set of reconstructions of Middle Chinese to flourish. The primary one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qieyun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Qieyun (切韻)&lt;/a&gt;, dated to the early 7th century, in the Sui dynasty (隋朝), which gives us a very good base for Early Middle Chinese. More relevant to the Song dynasty is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangyun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Guangyun (廣韻)&lt;/a&gt;, which is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctext.org/library.pl?if=en&amp;amp;res=77357&amp;amp;by_title=%E5%BB%A3%E9%9F%BB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available digitally&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added to these, what I would call &quot;the key to unlocking the dictionaries&quot;, are the rime tables, most notably for the Song dynasty &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunjing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Yunjing (韻鏡)&lt;/a&gt;, which is one of the oldest ones. By classifying the tones (which are the easiest to understand!), rimes (= medial glide + vowel nucleus + final consonant) into a table, with the names of the initial consonants classified too, it makes understanding the older dictionaries &lt;a href=&quot;http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1773/traditional_chinese_phonology_gj_libre.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;much easier&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fanqie system employed across historical Chinese linguistics is perhaps not the most intuitive for a modern language learner, and there are long-term debates in some of the medials (e.g. &quot;What are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongniu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chongniu (重紐)&lt;/a&gt;?&quot;), but it is enough to know how virtually any of the characters &lt;em&gt;could be reasonably pronounced&lt;/em&gt;. Major systems include Baxter's and Li's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lexicon &amp;amp; grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing lexis and grammar simply depends on having a good body of data. However, &quot;good&quot; means different things to different people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This something that Classicists also struggle with. Do we really think that &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; spoke like Cicero? Or that the language on the streets of Athens was &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; the same as Attic? How realistic was Caesar's speech in the &lt;em&gt;Campaigns&lt;/em&gt; as a reflection of his own daily tongue? Was Paul of Tarsus's use of Koine Greek equivalent to its use in the communities he visited? These questions all have parallels across any historically documented language, even as recent as the Victorian Age for English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the strongly diglossic situation across all of the East Asian sprachbund, caused by the much more culturally and administratively centralised nature of education and literacy of the Confucian canon, the difference between what one of the Song dynasty literati wrote and what he spoke would have been rather large. The dominance of Literary Chinese was probably not challenged throughout the period, as VH Mair's entry for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lPdgDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA156&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004)&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mainstream Confucian literati never accepted anything other than Literary Sinitic as a legitimate medium for writing. To them the vernacular was crude and vulgar, beneath the dignity of a gentleman to contemplate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, literacy was not limited to the literati, and so vernacular forms of Middle Chinese were not unknown in this era. As Qing dynasty chronicler Jiang Fan (江藩) &lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/149321/1/Content.pdf?accept=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;stated&lt;/a&gt; in the  《國朝宋學淵源記》, on the subject of Chan (Zen) Buddhists and Song dynasty Confucians:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;禪門有語錄，宋儒亦有語錄，禪門語錄用委巷語，宋儒語錄亦用委巷語&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Chan School had &lt;em&gt;Yulu&lt;/em&gt; and Song Confucians also had &lt;em&gt;Yulu&lt;/em&gt;; the Chan School used vernacular language in their &lt;em&gt;Yulu&lt;/em&gt; and Song Confucians also used vernacular language in their &lt;em&gt;Yulu&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Yulu&lt;/em&gt; are collections of sayings, and hence for the Buddhists were strongly inclined towards the vernacular (lit. street language). Perhaps surprisingly, the Neo-Confucians also had substantial vernacular influence too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pedagogy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since most of the literature is in essence a form of Literary Chinese, one would be learning a Middle Chinese reading of Literary Chinese. Again, whether this is &quot;authentic&quot; Late Middle Chinese depends on your definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is very different to the Mediterranean Classicists is that good primers are more commonly available in Chinese than in other European languages (although I've heard good things about Japanese and Korean primers of &lt;em&gt;kanbun&lt;/em&gt;), and that oral reading is in the modern language of Mandarin, Cantonese (or Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese). But they do exist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's even &quot;living language&quot; versions now, where Literary Chinese is treated much like a modern foreign language guidebook rather than the grammatical primer style, starting with greetings and culture rather than the first declension and conjugation / the subject pronouns and the most common final particles. I've digitally misplaced my copy however - will update when I find it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T14:19:30.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30722" CreationDate="2019-02-27T15:52:17.123" Score="4" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; sound often becomes a plosive sound in &lt;em&gt;Appalachian English&lt;/em&gt;. When and how did this phenomenon start?The only case I know where this happens in the british isles is &lt;em&gt;Irish&lt;/em&gt;.Does it also happen in other dialects on the island of Great Britain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T18:42:20.437" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T09:26:59.107" Title="The &quot;th&quot; sound as a plosive in British dialects" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dental-fricative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30687" CreationDate="2019-02-27T17:53:23.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a basic distinction between &quot;literal meaning&quot; and &quot;communicative intent&quot;. A sentence like &quot;The tea is in the cupboard&quot; seems like a very simple statement of fact referring to a well-known thing, an piece of furniture, and a spatial relation. The communicative intent behind a person saying this is very complex, to the point of being unknowable. In some cases, communicative intent gets tangled up with cultural conventions so that the sentence &quot;There is tea in the kitchen if you want some&quot; literally says something bizarre, that the actual existence of tea in a certain location depends on the wishes of the addressee. In terms of intent, it is said with the intent of communicating that &quot;There is tea in the kitchen, and you may have some if you want it&quot;. The specific constructions used in this way are culture specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person who is truly bilingual in e.g. English and Chinese is able to find culturally-appropriate ways of communicating in English, or Chinese, depending on what language / culture they are &quot;in&quot;. That person is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; guaranteed of being able to &quot;translate&quot; from English to Chinese, or vice versa. Translation requires introspection about the circumstances and comparing different expressions to see if sentence A is appropriate for &quot;this circumstance&quot; – they have to have a clear understanding of what constitutes an specific &quot;circumstance&quot;, and usually people are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; conscious of all of those factors. The problem of translating is that you need a theory of why you say things one way vs. the other (you're not just saying things using your native-speaker knowledge, you're computing metalinguistically). Of course you might translate acceptably in many cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you set aside the goal of translation, then you might ask &quot;Are there any thoughts that cannot be expressed in some language, because of the structure of that language?&quot;. The problem with such a question is that the notion of &quot;a thought&quot; needs to be carefully studied – nobody knows what &quot;a thought&quot; is. A vague emotional state is not a &quot;thought&quot;, and you probably cannot string together a sentence that encapsulates that state. If it's specific enough that you have an actual proposition, then it is already in a specific linguistic form (I claim: this is a point of controversy). There are some notions in the literature that there is an unknowable secret &quot;language of thought&quot; which everybody knows, and the task of the linguist (semanticist) is to find the translation from &quot;language of thought&quot; to English, or Chinese. I don't know if this idea is held by linguists anymore: I'm denying that there is a universal underlying &quot;language of thought&quot;, instead, actual thoughts are in a language (but not all mental impressions constitute &quot;thoughts&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T17:53:23.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30699" CreationDate="2019-02-27T17:54:01.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Passive is not a universal feature of human languages. Indo-European languages have always had passive constructions, of one sort or another. It's used to allow different kinds of noun phrases to become subjects; to express different ways of describing something. Every language has this need. But this doesn't mean every language uses &quot;active&quot; and &quot;passive&quot; to fulfill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Indo-European languages can have more voices than active and passive. Sanskrit and Greek (and Proto-Indo-European) had three voices -- Active, Middle, and Passive -- which were distinct in use and meaning, and varied quite a lot from verb to verb. Many verbs had only passive or middle forms, with no active, or active and middle with no passive, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside Indo-European, one finds ergative language families, like Mayan or Caucasian, which don't even have a concept of &quot;subject&quot; -- and therefore no concept of &quot;passive&quot;, which relies on &quot;subject&quot;. There is often a so-called &quot;antipassive&quot; construction in ergative languages, but the details vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in Austronesian languages, there is usually a three-way contrast between intransitive subject, transitive subject, and direct object, with a variety of rules, constructions, and affixes to swap one for another. Malagasy has six or seven constructions called &quot;passive&quot; that promote various kinds of noun phrases to subject position in different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T17:54:01.240" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30688" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:21:42.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off: One should not make the mistake and equate ancient languages with today's. There is an important difference between having a) the bigger half of the population live in remote areas with changing rulers every full moon, with a tremendous analphabetic rate; and b) having a reporter every evening read the prestige dialect or standard form over the air in a stable country. Anyhow, remote areas still exist, so comparison in situ is surely done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The struggle for a unified language is very real today for Serbo-Croation for example--or not, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. However, from a historic perspective, for the most part, the winner will leave the majority contribution to the imprint of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth is, that language consists of &lt;em&gt;idiolects&lt;/em&gt; per person that can change somewhat over time. That's of course beyond impossible to work with, though dialect research is a thing, of course, so researchers necessarily have to simplify. This is not quite so bad under the assumption that a native speaker will operate from a rather inert core--that's why L2 accquisition is so diffficult passed a young age (and that's why writing has to simplify. Therefore the trunk of a languages development is supposed to be reconstructable quite easily, even if taking stats for only one semester just barely passing. The branches, fruits and everything else is rather difficult;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discovery of a common Indo European family is barely two centuries old. The field always adds disclaimers, for good reasons. It's work in progress, few people have the prowess to engage, little is certain. Traditional etymology is littered with false etymologies that have become part of the language and need to be separated, religious or nationalistic nutters are trying to contribute, scientific rigor and interconnected exchange are kind of a new thing, too. The biggest showstopper is always the homeland questions, that requires experties outside of the field, and evidence that is burried or lost. That means, I fully agree with the sentiment of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to understand the reconstructions, one has to learn them like any language, that makes it feel very real. However, there is no &lt;em&gt;one proto language&lt;/em&gt;; The ideas differ like idiolects do, except for a common core. The core words of an idiolect, like most any words as well as the reconstructions are symbolic. If concensus emerges from the words, then they have become defined. For a research language, that means  these words reflect sensible relations. We can call that a language, because the concensus on the definition of a language is rather weak! Just ask a linguist what &lt;em&gt;a word&lt;/em&gt; is and you will get many &lt;em&gt;opinions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption that there was at least one cohesive language is simply necessary. There can't have been zero, after all. Whether there were more is an interesting question, and slight differences at common joints may be worthwhile to consider. However, potato, potatoe, is just seen as an aspect of realization. Alternative spellings, if one can call it that, are given due to different results. Focusing on just one restrictive theory can be a real problem, but it's also the goal. That's the real problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language needs to be locally and temporally bound, thus a working theory needs to try to stay within the bounds. Nobody makes strongly specific claims to the extent of the boundaries. In mathematical topology, disjoint areas can still be treated as a unique set. In that sense, the boundaries could be quite complex. Nobody is really talking about a single point, it's just an abstraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graded dialect continuums are not unheared of in the field (e.g. for PIE in Gramkrelidze &amp;amp; Ivanov; I have no idea about Slavic specifically). The possibillity of Substrate Languages has caused various speculations, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T19:24:53.233" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T19:24:53.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30699" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:28:49.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You clarified in a comment on another answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I meant by more occurencs is the degree of tolerance in the usage. English, French, German allow freely verbs to passivize (with very few exceptions), as do Hebrew and Arabic, but Berber (my native) does not allow verbs to pasivize freely. I can say in statistical terms that only 26% of verbs are allowed to passivize. This is why I thought there might be another language that goes in the other direction, i.e. doesn't allow active occurence more often, and prioritizes the passive. This is why I raised the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with this clarification, the answer is: &lt;strong&gt;yes!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek had three voices: active, middle, and passive. The middle and passive were identical in almost all forms, so I'm just going to refer to them as &quot;mediopassive&quot; here, even though there are some differences between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike in English, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; Ancient Greek verbs can take mediopassive forms—even the intransitive ones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this gives the verb a sense of &quot;…for one's self&quot;, as in &lt;em&gt;ᾄδ-ω&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I sing&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;ᾄδ-ομαι&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I sing for my own benefit&quot;.&#xA;Other times it emphasizes the subject's role, or has a different meaning altogether, like an idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other times, the verb has no active forms at all: it can only ever be mediopassive! For example, &lt;em&gt;ἔρχ-ομαι&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;I go&quot;, but there is no active *&lt;em&gt;ἔρχ-ω&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some verbs can be either active or mediopassive in the present, but only mediopassive in the future, such as &lt;em&gt;ἀκού-ω&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I hear&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ἀκού-ομαι&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I am heard&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ἀκού-σ-ομαι&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I will hear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Ancient Greek seems to prefer the mediopassive over the active, morphologically. I can't think of any verb that's actually &lt;em&gt;forbidden&lt;/em&gt; to have mediopassive forms, while many verbs (the deponents and semi-deponents) can never be active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T19:28:49.083" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:39:04.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A complete 100% one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes is Serbian language. In serbian there are two scripts Cyrilic and Latin but only in Cyrilic is one letter-one phonem. We have 30 letters and therefore 30 phonemes. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić reformated language in 1814. making ideal phonemic orthography. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24001" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T19:39:04.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T20:21:16.107" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm certain there's a better way to entitle this question, so maybe someone can edit it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the word the word &quot;we'll&quot;.  My understanding of the Fill-Feel Merger means &quot;we'll&quot; could end up sounding like &quot;wheel&quot;.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I've heard that pronunciation in a southern and/or Black English.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that does become the prominent pronunciation, does that imply that the pronunciation of &quot;wheel&quot; will change?  I imagine there are other examples of homonyms developing in this way.  Does one word typically &quot;win&quot; over time and keep its pronunciation longer?  I guess I'm asking if homonyms change at a greater rate than other words; and, of so, is there a pattern to it like: the more frequently used word &quot;wins&quot; or is more resistant to change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23772" LastEditorUserId="23772" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T15:25:43.440" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T15:25:43.440" Title="Are homonyms inherently unstable?" Tags="&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2019-02-27T21:33:54.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you insist on a strict reading of &quot;one-to-one correspondence between sound and written symbol&quot;, there are actually very few, if any, well-known languages that qualify. Italian certainly doesn't: its writing system uses the letter H in words like &quot;ho&quot; and &quot;hanno&quot; where it doesn't correspond to any sound. German also certainly does not qualify: among other things, voiceless /f/ can correspond to either the letter V (as in &lt;em&gt;Vater&lt;/em&gt;) or the letter F (as in &lt;em&gt;Fall&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages with contrastive stress/pitch often leave that out, but it's a bit more arguable whether that qualifies as a violation of the principle of &quot;one-to-one correspondence between sound and written symbol&quot;, since stress/pitch could be seen as a &quot;non-segmental&quot; element of pronunciation. Serbian, mentioned in Jelena's answer, apparently has phonemically contrastive vowel length that is not indicated in the spelling, which interacts in some way with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-Serbian-a-tonal-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonological pitch accent system&lt;/a&gt; (which also seems to be left out in the spelling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you relax the criteria, you get more of a spectrum. It is well known that for French, it's easier to predict pronunciation from spelling than it is to predict spelling from pronunciation. English is pretty tricky in both directions, but there are significant patterns. The elements of spelling systems that have less clear correspondences to pronunciation usually tend to be older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T00:35:15.443" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T00:35:15.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30715" CreationDate="2019-02-27T21:35:42.937" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that when a phrase (particularly, a multi-word name)  is used often, the way it's said changes slightly. For example, when talking about the television show &quot;The Good Place&quot;, the way the title is said in conversation is different than if you were just saying 'the good place over there', or some other, non-proper-noun usage of the phrase. In particular, I notice the difference in the placement of the emphasis on the syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23758" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T11:00:57.197" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T11:00:57.197" Title="What is the term for the pronunciation change that occurs with overuse of a phrase or noun phrase?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30716" CreationDate="2019-02-27T22:59:45.547" Score="1" ViewCount="2607" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt; is derived from the Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;πυρ&lt;/em&gt;. My question is: how did the plosive become a fricative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;em&gt;pyre&lt;/em&gt; is also derived from &lt;em&gt;πυρ&lt;/em&gt;; why is it that &lt;em&gt;pyre&lt;/em&gt; didn't also undergo this &quot;fricativisation&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23791" LastEditorUserId="23791" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T09:27:39.633" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T16:19:53.813" Title="How did Ancient Greek 'πυρ' become English 'fire?'" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;fricatives&gt;&lt;plosives&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30712" CreationDate="2019-02-27T23:23:48.747" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt; is not derived from Greek &lt;em&gt;πυρ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;πυρ&lt;/em&gt; come originally from the Proto-Indo-European root &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/roots.aspx?type=Indo-European&amp;amp;root=pa%C9%99wr%CC%A5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;*paəwr̥&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek simplified the &lt;em&gt;*aəw&lt;/em&gt; vowel sequence to /ū/, but kept the consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proto-Germanic was &lt;em&gt;*fūr&lt;/em&gt;, similar to Greek, but all Germanic voiceless stops like &lt;em&gt;*p&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;became homorganic fricatives like &lt;em&gt;*f&lt;/em&gt; as part of the group of consonant changes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;known as &amp;quot;Grimm's Law&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern English &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt; comes from Old English &lt;em&gt;fȳr&lt;/em&gt;, which was produced by fronting the Proto-Germanic  &lt;em&gt;ū&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;ȳ&lt;/em&gt;, a natural process called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/77866/15299&quot;&gt;Umlaut&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which is very common in Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T16:19:53.813" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T16:19:53.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30711" CreationDate="2019-02-28T01:39:28.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's fairly difficult to formalize rules for the position of stress in English phrases. There can be variability between speakers or depending on the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stronger stress on the initial element of a noun phrase is often interpreted as a sign that the phrase has become a compound, but that interpretation isn't always unproblematic (we have to define what exactly we mean by &quot;a compound&quot;). A previous question on this site that you might find of interest is &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4781/stress-rules-in-english-adjective-noun-combinations&quot;&gt;Stress rules in English adjective-noun combinations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T01:45:07.493" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T01:45:07.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30712" CreationDate="2019-02-28T01:43:56.073" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;As jlawer says, English &quot;fire&quot; doesn't actually come from Greek &lt;em&gt;pŷr&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Pyre&quot; does, but that's a borrowing (via Latin), and it's pretty clear how it happened. Instead, English and Greek share a common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European), which split into Pre-Proto-Germanic and Proto-Hellenic (and many other branches) several thousand years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words for &quot;fire&quot; looked something like *&lt;em&gt;peh₂-wr̥&lt;/em&gt;. The *&lt;em&gt;h₂&lt;/em&gt; was probably a velar fricative, like in &quot;lo&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, but there's not a strong consensus on that part. (Compare, as Arnaud Fouret suggests in the comments, the Hittite form &lt;em&gt;paḫḫur&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Hellenic &gt; Ancient Greek, the *&lt;em&gt;eh₂w&lt;/em&gt; in the middle simplified to give something like *&lt;em&gt;pūr&lt;/em&gt;; then the &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; fronted to &lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt;, and a bit of tone funkiness happened, giving &lt;em&gt;pŷr&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germanic (the branch of Indo-European containing English), a process called &quot;Grimm's Law&quot; happened, which changed voiceless stops (p, t, k) at the beginning of words into fricatives (f, th, h).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel in the middle went through some strangeness involving a collective form, but the branch that would become English eventually simplified it into something like *&lt;em&gt;fuir&lt;/em&gt;; the &lt;em&gt;ui&lt;/em&gt; merged into &lt;em&gt;ȳ&lt;/em&gt;, which English then turned into &lt;em&gt;ī&lt;/em&gt;. Spelling conventions then turned &lt;em&gt;fīr&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt;, and the Great Vowel Shift gave it its modern pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T21:09:31.500" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T21:09:31.500" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T04:07:23.987" Score="3" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this simple question on Kiswahili, a Bantu language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know in english, we can not always define morae. it's completely different from Japanese morae system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I learn Swahili, sometimes there appears the term morae for the explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is swahili (and many other Bantu languages) actually mora-counting language??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, I wonder if we can always define morae consistently in Swahili or not...&#xA;It seems like the concept of morae is required to describe accent patterns in swahili, in my opinion. &#xA;But how do you guys think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24002" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T06:05:45.330" Title="Is Swahili a Mora-counting language like Japanese?" Tags="&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;&lt;african-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30717" CreationDate="2019-02-28T04:44:28.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In essence, Swahili stress has two rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the word is shaped like &lt;code&gt;NC(C*)V&lt;/code&gt;, the first nasal is syllabic, and stressed. (For example, &lt;em&gt;ḿbwa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;dog&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ḿtu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;person&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, the stress is on the second vowel from the end, and there are no syllabic nasals. (For example, &lt;em&gt;kusóma&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to read&quot;, &lt;em&gt;nitazibembeléza&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I'm going to pet them&quot;, &lt;em&gt;kondóo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sheep&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to analyze this, like you said, is morae. Nasals before other consonants count as one mora, and every vowel written down gets one mora. The stress goes on the second mora from the end, and if a nasal takes the stress, it turns syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you could also handle this without mora-counting at all. &quot;Nasals before other consonants&quot; are always either stressed and syllabic, or can be analyzed as prenasalization rather than as consonants of their own. So you might analyze &lt;em&gt;mtu&lt;/em&gt; as being underlying &lt;code&gt;/mətu/&lt;/code&gt;, perhaps, with a rule that makes schwa disappear (and &lt;code&gt;NC&lt;/code&gt; sequences become prenasalized) whenever it's not stressed. This would also explain all the data nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, short version: as with everything in linguistics, there's no hard-and-fast right answer. Use whichever model you think explains the data most accurately and elegantly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T04:44:28.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30717" CreationDate="2019-02-28T06:05:45.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;mora counting&quot; has a specific technical meaning, based on the connection between duration and certain linguistic units (moras, syllables, stress feet). In a so-called syllable-timed language, the duration of an word best correlates with the number of syllables in the word. In a mora-timed language it correlates best with the number of moras. The difference between the two is evident only when there is a difference between the number of syllables in a word and the number of moras -- which means, you have to have long vowels or some reason to posit moraic coda consonants. Neither of these conditions holds in Swahili, so it is impossible to determine if the language is syllable-timed or mora-timed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: the claim for there being &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mora-counting&quot; Bantu languages is dubious. The implication of mora-counting is that a 4-mora word has twice the duration of a 2-mora word and half the duration of an 8-mora word. Instead, Bantu languages tend reduce duration of long vowel preceding the penult or antepenult (sometimes resulting in actual phonological shortening). This is more like a stress-timed system (there is at most one stress, on the penult, so the last two syllables tend to be a length unit and the stuff before – regardless of the number of syllables – tends to be a length unit, which can stretchto very many syllables)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not very good evidence in Swahili for the mora, since there is no vowel length, and it does not have a mora-counting tone system. The evidence for vowel length in orthographic &lt;em&gt;kondoo, njoo&lt;/em&gt; is not strong: vowel doubling in spelling is a way of indicating final stress. The alternative is to say that in some words the stress is final (or antepenult, e.g. &lt;em&gt;barábara&lt;/em&gt;). This is in contrast with many (don't know about most) Bantu languages which do provide ample evidence for the concept of mora. There is some confusion out there about the status of &quot;moraicity&quot;, since there are surface-contrastive syllabic nasals in Swahili, and these are frequently called &quot;moraic nasals&quot;. But that is simply driven by a particular theory of syllables and syllabicity, where &quot;syllabic&quot; i.e. &quot;being a syllable peak&quot; is taken to be defined as &quot;being moraic&quot;. If you don't insist on that equation (I don't), then there is no evidence for &quot;moraic nasals&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/elanguage/sal/article/download/1319/1319-1939-1-PB.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngunga and Hyman&lt;/a&gt; have a paper illustrating the problem, from Yao (a language with excellent evidence for the concept of mora).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T06:05:45.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3840" CreationDate="2019-02-28T08:31:29.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that Esperanto is one of those languages. I don't remember a change in pronouciation possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception maybe being the commonplace use of letter x, but this is due to limitation of computer keyoards about accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ŝ, ŭ&lt;/code&gt; can be more easily written &lt;code&gt;cx, gx, hx, sx, ux&lt;/code&gt; knowing that the letter x is not exisiting at all in the normal esperanto alphabet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chinese PinYin:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if that count as a writting system since it is not the main one used in everyday life for chinese people. But the pinyin writting system, for transcribing pronunciation of Mandarin/Han Chinese, has a one-to-one correspondance between sounds and written form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spanish:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about spanish: What you can read, you can pronounce it. &#xA;But as a comment rightly highlighted there are &lt;strong&gt;much more&lt;/strong&gt; exceptions in pronunciations than what I thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exception with letter &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may be pronounced &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; like letter &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt;  or &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; like letter &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt;, according to a fixed rule on the following vowel. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also letter &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt; which becomes another sound when doubled into &lt;code&gt;ll&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T08:50:13.097" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T08:50:13.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30702" CreationDate="2019-02-28T12:36:52.037" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Th-stopping&lt;/a&gt; has always been a distinctive feature of Irish English, where the phonological distinction between [t] and [t̪], [d] and [d̪] is mostly maintained. It is not characteristic of most varieties of English in either England or Wales; urban and working-class English speech in southern England prefers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;th-fronting&lt;/a&gt; instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, young urban English in England, not limited to modern Multicultural London English (MLE), is tending more towards a complete merger of /θ/ into [t] and /ð/ into [d], conventionally called &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XhcwDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA36&amp;amp;lpg=PA36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;th-alveolarisation&lt;/a&gt; but often subsumed under the above. The effect is stronger with the definite article &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt; and determiners &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;that&lt;/code&gt;, and is usually attributed to Caribbean and AAVE influence on MLE and the speech of other English urban areas, and is becoming more common among &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303549511_Word_initial_th-stopping_among_urban_British_youth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speakers of different ethnicities&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rural Irish accents also have this complete merger, and this may have been the source of th-stopping/alveolarisation for many English phonologies across the North American continent, notably in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WO6qBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newfoundland English&lt;/a&gt;, where it is attested from the late 18th-century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Scotland, th-stopping is mainly found in Glasgow and in rural communities (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://orca.cf.ac.uk/38673/1/SmithDurhamAmericanSpeech.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shetlands&lt;/a&gt;), and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FJ7dAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA48&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attributed&lt;/a&gt; to Irish/Ulster influence; th-fronting is more common overall; th-debuccalisation (where /θ/ and /ð/ become [h]) is distinctive to Scotland. This is most probably the source of th-stopping/alveolarisation in Appalachian English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=--y1kBBiPlIC&amp;amp;pg=PA203&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ulster Scots&lt;/a&gt;, although there are relatively few historical records of the speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is to be mentioned that th-stopping has been a tendency for a long time - at least since the first few centuries CE in Germanic (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift#/%CE%B8/_%3E_/d/_(phase_4)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second High German Consonant Shift&lt;/a&gt;): across Dutch, Low and High German and continental Scandinavian, but not Icelandic or English (Faroese lost it subsequently and separately). Compare German &lt;code&gt;der&lt;/code&gt; with English &lt;code&gt;the&lt;/code&gt;, German &lt;code&gt;Dorn&lt;/code&gt; with English &lt;code&gt;thorn&lt;/code&gt;, German &lt;code&gt;Tod&lt;/code&gt; with English &lt;code&gt;death&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in Early Modern English of the early 17th century, the tendency to merge into /t/ and /d/ was ever present, such that certain mergers were accepted into the standard, e.g. English &lt;code&gt;murder&lt;/code&gt; vs Icelandic &lt;code&gt;morð&lt;/code&gt;, English &lt;code&gt;burden&lt;/code&gt; vs Icelandic &lt;code&gt;byrði&lt;/code&gt;. Shakespeare himself used the &quot;th&quot; variant in Othello in 1622 (Act I, Scene 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet do I hold it very stufe of Conscience&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To doe no contriu'd mur&lt;strong&gt;th&lt;/strong&gt;er&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but in the 1623 printing, it is uses mur&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;er. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the 18th century, the th-alveolarised form in this case has won out in London at least. From &lt;em&gt;The Beggar's Opera&lt;/em&gt; (1728):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You never had a finer, braver set of Men than at present. We have not had a Mur&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;er among them all, these seven months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; is always tricky in diachronic studies, and I think articulatory phonetics does play a role, but it's often hard to pin down what &quot;effort&quot; means. There is also the auditory/perceptual phonetics - somewhat less well-studied. Language contact is also a major factor, and cross lingustically /θ/ and /ð/ are pretty rare (and not really found in modern Standard Irish nor in Ulster Gaelic - it was lost after Old Irish via debuccalisation, but the modern orthography of Irish still makes reference to it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T09:26:59.107" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T09:26:59.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T15:37:34.507" Score="5" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that the umlaut vowels were also written as &lt;em&gt;ae&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;oe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ue&lt;/em&gt;, and this orthography shows the process of assimilation with a high vowel. But were these vowels ever actually pronounced as a diphthong, before they became fronted? For example &lt;em&gt;schön&lt;/em&gt; being pronounced as &lt;em&gt;schoen&lt;/em&gt;, with both vowels being pronounced separately as a diphthong? I think there must've been some sort of intermediate stage of pronunciation between Old High German &lt;em&gt;sconi&lt;/em&gt; and Modern German &lt;em&gt;schön&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="2381" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T10:03:40.617" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T10:03:40.617" Title="Pronunciation of umlaut vowels in the history of German" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30723" CreationDate="2019-02-28T16:25:13.000" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Umlaut itself—as in the process, not the dots—was a sort of vowel harmony that was productive for a long time in Germanic. The thing you're asking about specifically is called &lt;em&gt;i-umlaut&lt;/em&gt;; there was also &lt;em&gt;a-umlaut&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;u-umlaut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way it's generally understood (in Proto-Germanic), when there was a back vowel in one syllable, and an &lt;code&gt;*/i/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;*/j/&lt;/code&gt; in the next syllable, the back vowel shifted forward in the mouth. Phonetically, this is quite reasonable: these sorts of harmony processes (where vowels shift forward or back to match the syllables around them) are common, and you also see them in e.g. modern Turkish and Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The back vowels in Proto-Germanic were &lt;code&gt;*/a o u/&lt;/code&gt;, which would have had front allophones &lt;code&gt;*[æ ø y]&lt;/code&gt;. In the earliest written records, this allophony isn't written: it was fully predictable from the context, and &lt;code&gt;*[æ ø y]&lt;/code&gt; didn't show up anywhere else, so there was no ambiguity. The front allophones were used if &lt;code&gt;*/i j/&lt;/code&gt; were in the next syllable, the back allophones otherwise. Nice and straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, sound changes happened, and certain suffixes started disappearing. For example, the plural of *&lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt; &quot;man&quot; used to be *&lt;em&gt;manniz&lt;/em&gt;, with a nice predictable &lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt;. But when that suffix disappeared, the early Germanics were left with *&lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;mænn&lt;/em&gt;. The umlaut had become phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, how to write this? The Latin alphabet didn't have letters for these sounds! So different languages improvised in different ways. Old English used &lt;em&gt;æ, oe, y&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;code&gt;/æ ø y/&lt;/code&gt;. The Germans used &lt;em&gt;ae, oe, ue&lt;/em&gt;, which developed into &lt;em&gt;ä, ö, ü&lt;/em&gt; through abbreviation. In Norway, they used &lt;em&gt;æ, ø, y&lt;/em&gt;. But by comparing the developments in different languages, it seems clear that these all represented the same phonemes, and that they were monophthongs, not diphthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. English ended up losing all these fronted vowels, merging them into other phonemes. You can see some of their descendants in &lt;em&gt;man~men&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;foot~feet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mouse~mice&lt;/em&gt;. There was also a vowel length distinction that I'm ignoring here for simplicity: for full details, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut#Outcomes_in_modern_spelling_and_pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a nice chart&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.P.S. Old English was originally written in the Futhorc alphabet, which did have specific runes for &lt;code&gt;/æ ø y/&lt;/code&gt;. But then the Latin alphabet took over, so they had to make do with ligatures and digraphs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T00:18:17.187" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T00:18:17.187" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30723" CreationDate="2019-02-28T17:35:45.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is no. The German umlauted vowels were never diphthongs. In early New High German they were written as a, o, and u with a small superscript e. Later, this “e” was reduced to two dots. The spellings with ae, oe, and ue are merely typographical attempts to deal with the miniature “e”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T17:35:45.260" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-02-28T18:45:13.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the existence of a critical period in life to learn a language that extends from early childhood to puberty and affects both the acquisition of the first language and the acquisition of the second language according to (Penfield and Roberts, 1959).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion both cases are examples of bilingualism and what changes is the form of acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regarding simultaneous bilingualism, it is known that at the beginning it tends to mix both languages and create initial confusion, but once fluidity is acquired in both, they can be used interchangeably, even changing from one to the other automatically. In this situation two things can happen depending on the exposure to the language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) One of them can become dominant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Have an indifferent use of the two in different contexts, achieving a perfect bilingualism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On sequential bilingualism is the one that is learned after acquiring a mother tongue usually when you have to attend school, this language L2 becomes the main and dominant, for its academic use. The reverse situation can occur at home if the parents are not responsible for vehicular L1 since the linguistic structures may be more deficient.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the two types of bilingualism have nuances depending on the family and the social context. Going further, I believe that the ability to understand, write, read and speak should be separated. Use of spoken language even within schools produces rejection in sequential bilinguals because they are considered (themselves) disadvantaged with respect to the simultaneous ones. This point would deserve a good analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24014" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T08:01:28.737" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T08:01:28.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30688" CreationDate="2019-02-28T20:47:40.177" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could equally well ask: why languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you raise, that &quot;Proto-Germanic&quot; was a huge, blurry-edged mass of dialects and variations rather than a single standardized language, is a valid one. But that's a problem that also exists for modern languages. You can trace dialect continua &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29921/10559&quot;&gt;from Rome to Lisbon&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29960/10559&quot;&gt;from Prague to Vladivostok&lt;/a&gt;, without ever crossing a hard line of mutual unintelligibility. Why do we say that one village speaks Spanish and another speaks Portuguese, when they can understand each other just fine? Why do we draw these hard-edged lines between languages, when they don't reflect any objective fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is, to put it simply: because the idea of a language is &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in places where no government is standardizing things, it's &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to set up an artificial model and say &quot;this is General American English&quot;, or &quot;this is Literary Lingála&quot;, or &quot;this is Proto-Germanic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone actually speak perfect General American English? Almost certainly not. But GA turns out to be a wonderfully useful model for studying English. For any given idiolect, we can figure out how it's the same and how it differs from our GA model (do you have the pin-pen merger?), and we can extrapolate from the model to idiolects with good enough accuracy to be useful (you don't speak perfect artificial GA, but I'm willing to wager you use DO-support).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like anything in linguistics, languages and proto-languages are models. Arguably, anything except a native speaker's mental intuition is only a model. And like all models, they have flaws. But they've proven to be wonderfully useful, and so we continue to use them. For a final example, even if nobody speaks perfect Literary Lingála, this artificial model was used to develop the writing system for all Lingála idiolects. Its phonology is only a model of the way any given person in the Congo actually speaks, and it's simplified, missing all sorts of phonetic details and allophones. But it's &quot;good enough&quot; to represent the language unambiguously, and that's what matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T20:03:03.307" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T20:03:03.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30729" CreationDate="2019-02-28T21:50:29.157" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;My goal is to take simple sentence such as &lt;code&gt;Grass is green&lt;/code&gt; and convert it to Prolog rule/fact. It does not have to be Prolog, but any other functional programming language with which I can perform semantic reasoning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;http://moin.delph-in.net/LkbTop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LKB&lt;/a&gt; allows to do it. But I am not sure how to use it. I am reading guide to LKB by its original developer Ann Copestake &quot;Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars&quot;, but it looks very involved. Is there shorter illustration? Or maybe another tool for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T11:01:56.353" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T11:01:56.353" Title="Get Prolog (other functional programming language) rules/facts from LKB or similar system" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30728" CreationDate="2019-03-01T00:20:52.237" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will likely not find a program that &quot;converts&quot; natural language sentences into plain Prolog code like &lt;code&gt;Green(X) :- Grass(X).&lt;/code&gt; because natural language is &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; too involved to be accuarately expressed as facts and rules when taking the linguistic predications directly as logic programming predications. For example, how would you represent mass nouns (does it really make sense to treat &quot;grass&quot; as a predicate which ranges over a set of individuals - what would those individuals be?), questions, adverbs (like &quot;quickly(run)&quot; - this is a a property of a property and thus not directly first-order definable!), quantifiers like &quot;more than&quot; (again, not first-order definable), ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you actually want is a parser that understands the syntax of a natural language sentence converts it into some representation language, like typed feature structures, which can then be encoded in Prolog. Using such a representation language rather than trying to express natural language expressions directly as logical formulas solves many of the above mentioned problems; for example event semantics (which is usually expressed in a more or less formal language that's roughly predicate logic with lambdas, but with a specific sets of constants and special predicates) can treat adverbs. You can model lambda terms in Prolog, e.g. &lt;code&gt;abstr(x,appl(f,x))&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;λx.f(x)&lt;/code&gt;, but at that point the predicate and function symbols in your program involve expressions of the representation language (like &lt;code&gt;abstr&lt;/code&gt; for abstraction and &lt;code&gt;appl&lt;/code&gt; for application in the language of lambda calculus) and no longer consist of (just) the natural language expressions,which is what I mean by not doing a direct mapping from natural language to logic programs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get an idea of how formal semantics can be done in Prolog, Patrick Blackburn &amp;amp; Johan Bos offer a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.let.rug.nl/bos/comsem/software1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software package&lt;/a&gt; that goes along with their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.let.rug.nl/bos/comsem/book1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt;; you could have a look into that. They provide Prolog encodings for representations like lambda calculus or hole semantics (used to represent quantifier ambiguities) with a basic parser for English.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's nice for educational purposes or to play around with in order to get an impression of how natural language can be treated in Prolog, but not at all suited for real-life NLP applications. The program fails at comparatively simple sentences like &quot;Every man or a woman sleeps&quot; (the hole semantics converter outputs readings which are logically impossible) and deals only with an extremely limited subset of English - it's more of a toy grammar to demonstrate how such things can be done in Prolog principially, not something that intends to be used professionally.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more stable systems which are able to deal with a larger lexicon and variety of linguistic phenomena, you will have to dive into more complex theories and representation devices. The most prominent one is presumably HPSG (= head-driven phrase structure grammar, which is heavily based on typed feature structures), which has been implemented in Prolog in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://milca.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/A4/Course/trale/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TRALE system&lt;/a&gt;. This tool is very powerful, but a mess to get into. But that's the deal: You keep it very simple but can then only deal with a tiny textbook examples snippet of actual language, or you attempt to give an accurate description of anything that natural language allows to express but then the formalism explodes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Systems like slot grammar, which has implementations in Prolog that are actually still being used in the industry (although this being very much of a niche), are, although sometimes guided by additional semantic information, more about syntactic parsing and even further away from semantics than e.g. HPSG is (and as I understad it's the linguistic-semantic representation, i.e. a language-to-program &quot;translation&quot; you are interested in, not parsing techniques).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, noone really does compuational semantics like this anymore. Modern NLP uses sophisticated statistical models and methodology from linear algebra, neural nets and whatnot, sometimes combined with lexical information from databases like WordNet, to perform semantic reasoning. But if you are genuinely interested in computational semantics with logic programming, try starting with the Blackburn &amp;amp; Bos implementation, it's the simplest I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: Prolog is not a functional programming language: Predications allow in principle for more than one possible output for any given input - of course, particular instances of a predicates applied to a tuple of arguments may only have one solution due to their semantics, but the programmming language does not express this syntactically in a way that there would be a distinguishable construction for functions which have unique output values. A one-place function f(x) = y is expressed as a two-place relation &lt;code&gt;f(x,y)&lt;/code&gt; (functions are special relations). The relation f(x,y) captures the fact that y is a value of f at argument x, but does not exclude the possibility that there may be other z such that f(x,z). This is different from functions, for which there is always one unique value, which is why we can write ... = y, and nest applications of functions into each other - this is not in possible for relations. Facts and rules in general express relations rather than functions, so Prolog is &lt;em&gt;relational&lt;/em&gt;. Function symbols do exist, but function terms are not evaluated, more treated like constants. These distinctions might seem a bit hair-splitty, and compared to programming languages that work completely differently (say, Java) some concepts might seem very similar (for example, programming languages that are well-suited for representing propositions will probably fall under the declarative paradigm), but if you compare Prolog to a classic functional programming language like Haskell, the differences are striking. The definition even of simple function like Fibonacci looks quite different in a relational language than it does in a purely functional one, and just as different is the way in which these programs are evaluated under the hood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T01:53:44.663" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T01:53:44.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30731" CreationDate="2019-03-01T03:31:22.857" Score="3" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not competent in Praat scripting and am wondering if someone could help me with what I believe should be a pretty simple task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to extract &lt;code&gt;.wav&lt;/code&gt; and TextGrids for all tokens of a given word in a directory of recordings (tier 1 is phone, tier 2 word). Ideally, I'd also like to include whatever word follows the word of interest in this extraction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a script that would be able to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24018" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T08:02:54.253" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T10:04:13.913" Title="Praat script to extract .wav and corresponding TextGrid for all tokens of a specific word" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30730" CreationDate="2019-03-01T09:40:12.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will not write all the script. I will steer you towards two different scripts. You will can mix them to achieve your aim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try this script: &lt;a href=&quot;https://lennes.github.io/spect/scripts/save_selection_to_sound_and_textgrid.praat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lennes.github.io/spect/scripts/save_selection_to_sound_and_textgrid.praat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;numberOfTiers = Get number of tiers&#xA;&#xA;for i to numberOfTiers&#xA;&#xA;#determine number of intervals of current tier&#xA;&#xA;numberOfIntervals = Get number of intervals: i&#xA;&#xA;#loop through all intervals of current tier and extract labels one by one&#xA;&#xA;for j to numberOfIntervals&#xA;&#xA;label$ = Get label of interval: i, j&#xA;&#xA;appendInfoLine: label$&#xA;&#xA;endfor&#xA;&#xA;endfor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T10:04:13.913" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T10:04:13.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17733" CreationDate="2019-03-01T12:40:51.360" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The indonesians called the dutch &quot;belanda&quot; because when they heard people say &quot;hollandia&quot; they thought it was b-e-l-a-n-d-a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24026" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T12:40:51.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-01T16:40:02.107" Score="12" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through &quot;meme culture,&quot; young people are inventing all sorts of new linguistic constructions purely because they think they sound funny. The interesting thing is that these jokes don't end at a definite point. What makes a joke a &quot;meme&quot; is that it continues to be repeated. When among their friends, they'll continuously intersperse the language they use with them to make it more engaging, and perhaps even more clear. It seems very likely to me that this &quot;memery&quot; will eventually end up pushing some real linguistic change in our language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not only happening in English. My native Dutch language is perhaps even more affected by it. Kids are deliberately picking out interesting mannerisms and repeating them to comic effect. A very strong example of this is the popular &quot;Kud&quot; YouTube animation channel and their more recent video game streaming channel &quot;Lekker Spelen.&quot; Both names are already instances of what they're more generally up to. &quot;Kud&quot; changes a letter of the obscene exclamation &quot;kut&quot; to jokingly give themselves some plausible deniability. &quot;Lekker spelen&quot; appropriates the adjective &quot;lekker&quot; into their brand, which directly translates to &quot;tasty,&quot; but is strangely applied to a very broad range of things in Dutch. One thing they'll do in their program is use other words like &quot;sappig&quot; (&lt;em&gt;juicy&lt;/em&gt;) and &quot;knapperig&quot; (&lt;em&gt;crunchy&lt;/em&gt;) in analogous ways, which isn't done in ordinary language. Kids are copying these mannerisms not only in the Netherlands, but also in Belgium, where they aren't at all usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether this is a new mechanism. One argument I could see for this case is that it requires social media in order to take hold. You need a degree of linguistic self-awareness to joke in this way, and that might not have existed before the mass communication enabled by the internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the case that it isn't new can be made as well. After all, there have always been special individuals deeply aware of the way language is generally used. William Shakespeare certainly belonged to this group, cleverly manipulating language to make people laugh. No one has been more influential on the English language than him. Another popular example I'd cite is Cockney rhyming slang. It seems evident to me that this is a very funny self-aware kind of dialect. Maybe I'm wrong on that. The fact that I can't find many sources discussing this aspect kinda shocks me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about a linguist's take on all this. Is humor becoming a driving force in linguistic change? Has this always happened or is it something new? Are there any established linguistic theories describing this kind of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24027" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T20:09:33.860" Title="Is linguistic change pushed by humor?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;evolution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30741" CreationDate="2019-03-02T12:16:23.987" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sankt Goar line crosses the german town of Sankt Goar and separates the dialects that have &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in words like &lt;em&gt;wat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt; and the dialects that have &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; in the corresponding words &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;. Is this change abrupt? Does the consonant literally change from one side of the line to the other,does it happen gradually through slightly different pronunciations or do the dialects that are spoken near the line use both forms,slowly fading into just one of them the further away they are from the isogloss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="22572" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T19:42:41.940" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T20:08:18.487" Title="How does the Sankt Goar isogloss work?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30739" CreationDate="2019-03-02T17:10:24.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isoglosses are generally drawn as these nice, hard-edged lines on a map. On one side of the Sankt Goar line, you have &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;, and on the other side, you have &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, nothing in linguistics is ever this clear-cut. Even the boundaries between languages are fuzzy: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29921/10559&quot;&gt;you can walk from Rome to Lisbon without ever crossing a hard line between two languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So isoglosses are a sort of &quot;good enough&quot; approximation. &lt;em&gt;In general&lt;/em&gt;, someone on this side is more likely to use &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;, and someone on that side is more likely to use &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt;. But if you went to Sankt Goar itself, you wouldn't find half the people using &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt; and half of them using &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt;: more likely, the people near the line use both versions, maybe interchangeably, maybe in a sort of diglossia (using &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt; in some registers and &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt; in others). And as you get further away from the line, the probability that you'll hear one instead of the other increases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-02T17:10:24.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-03T12:37:14.300" Score="0" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important part of language change is surely phonological variation. I'd assume that phonological changes happen involuntarily, driven mainly by articulatory mechanisms, and then slowly spread to other speakers under the influence of social factors. My question is: why aren't these phonological changes corrected when they first happen? I think that in any language, when some sort of phonological &quot;mistake&quot; happens , it's merely a source of amusement, but I cannot comprehend how this can turn into a permanent phonological alteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T19:51:46.643" Title="Phonological changes and how they spread" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30742" CreationDate="2019-03-03T15:16:33.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason is that language acquisition does not operate on the basis of correction, and nothing overt in the signal indicates that a pronunciation is a mistake vs. intended. Children are exposed to data from a lot of people and use that to induce generalizations about &quot;how people talk&quot;, so if a child grows up in a community split between Floridians, Minnesotans, and Central Valley speakers, they get &quot;mixed&quot; data, and the concept of &quot;mistake&quot; isn't applicable, at least not until/unless they are formally instructed in school about &quot;proper pronunciation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can study sound changes that are already in progress, but we don't know how to catch that first moment when some change gets started. For example, the development of glottalized &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; in some dialects (e.g. &quot;can't&quot;) probably depended on syllable-final non-release of voiceless consonants, but that is widely-enough distributed in English that we don't know when this first started to happen (so we didn't watch as it first emerged). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T15:16:33.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30742" CreationDate="2019-03-03T19:51:46.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily, sound changes are corrected. The corrections, however, consist in teaching children not to apply the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, many children change word final obstruents to voiceless (because voiceless ones are easier to say), but in order to acquire English, children have to stop doing that.  Normal adult English does have word final voiced obstruents, so normally adult English speakers have been successfully corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If at some time in the future these corrections during language acquisition are no longer effective, English will come to be like German, and word final obstruents will be devoiced even in adult speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T19:51:46.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30739" CreationDate="2019-03-03T20:08:18.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this particular change is aprupt. There are no intermediate forms between &lt;em&gt;wat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; (like *wats) nor &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;. There may be places where you can find speakers who you either form, maybe separated by age. After all, at least in Saarland &lt;em&gt;Rheinfänkisch&lt;/em&gt; (the dialect with &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;das&lt;/em&gt;) is spreading into formerly &lt;em&gt;Moselfränkisch&lt;/em&gt; (the dialect with &lt;em&gt;wat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dat&lt;/em&gt;) territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T20:08:18.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-03T21:41:06.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are to compare between a person who went through simultaneous bilingualism and another one who went through sequential bilingualism, we'd be better off starting with their main characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simultaneous bilingualism&lt;/strong&gt; refers to learning two languages at more or less the same time, which means that those children will have two separate speech perception systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sequential bilingualism&lt;/strong&gt; refers to children acquiring a second language in stages that'd go from home language use to a nonverbal period followed by a formulaic usage of L2 with a final product of successful language use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having all those facts in mind, we can clearly see that they differ in how and when they start using a second language clearly and effectively. A simultaneous bilingual will start at a very early age whereas the sequential bilingual at a later period in their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This takes me to the second question here about who may be the better speaker of the two languages and to answer that, we must remember that from the sequential bilingualism perspective, they should be better at using both languages because they learned their mother tongue first and then, with that control of grammar structures and language in general, they proceeded to learning a second language, which gives them a clear advantage over simultaneous bilinguals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one may argue that simultaneous bilingual children have a better use of both languages because they have been doing that from a very early age and that might be true, but it is a fact that people always tend to favor one language over any other one when they are bilingual or even trilingual, which would go in detriment of the other languages spoken by them, especially because when a child starts using a second language more than their first language, language loss will definitely take place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24036" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T21:41:06.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-04T10:49:48.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the discussion I think that the simultaneous bilingualism refers to a person that learns two languages or more at the same time. For example, I am Basque and in the Basque country we speak Spanish and Basque, so I learn in a simultaneous bilingualism way because I learn Basque and Spanish at the same moment. However, the sequential bilingualism refers to learn the second language but only when the first is learned. &#xA;There are different type of bilingualism but only in the process because the result is the same they have learn two languages, so the difference consist on that. &#xA;In my opinion, both options are valid and there are going to become better speaker in both types of bilingualism. I men I don't think that choosing one of the two types of bilingualism will make you a better speaker, there are different situation so I can't compare them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24040" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T10:49:48.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30756" CreationDate="2019-03-04T14:42:28.600" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if you can justify the development of most/all morphemes to regular phonological processes if you argue that diachronically those environments existed and have just been lost in modern language? Additionally but in the same vein, can you count analogy as being (in a sense) a phonological process and thus explain the spread of certain morphemes to new but related environments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24043" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T17:21:21.800" Title="Is morphology always attributable to phonological processes?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;diachronic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T15:35:17.743" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a sister question of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26302/did-romance-languages-evolve-in-north-africa&quot;&gt;Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?&lt;/a&gt;, I would like to ask what was the situation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pannonia&lt;/a&gt; was there a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pannonian Romance Language&lt;/a&gt; and what research is there to it's existence? At least parts of the romanized populations along the Danube stayed after the Romans ceded some parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pannonia&lt;/a&gt; to the Huns in 433. The Huns later conquered more of Pannonia before their empire collapsed. The control of the area was unstable with the Goths, Gepids, Lombards, Avars, Franks, Bulgars and Magyars seizing control. The Franks documented, around 800, after their victory against &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Avar_campaigns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Avars&lt;/a&gt; that there was a Latin population in Pannonia with priests that had no hierarchy or guidance from Rome. The Magyars (Hungarians) list Roman pastoralists as one of the populations in the areas when they took control in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesta_Hungarorum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gesta Hungarorum&lt;/a&gt;. Is there any more thorough analysis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pannonian Romance&lt;/a&gt;? Texts? Word lists? Research?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13931" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T15:35:17.743" Title="Did Romance languages evolve in Pannonia?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-04T15:45:21.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience the better speaker is the simultaneous bilingualism. When the child acquires 2 languages simultaneously being raised by bilingual parents. I know there are many articles that support sequential but I think the greater advantage is simultaneous. I think one can be bilingual with sequential learning as well but I think that simultaneous bilingualism will allow more depth of knowledge. I think the child will have an easier time with the language coming more naturally and fluidly to mind than sequential. I also think that the use of slang and jokes come more easily to the simultaneous bilingual as opposed the sequential. I think the most important thing to remember is exposure. Even though both languages are acquired during the critical age is the exposure the same between simultaneous and sequential? In general the exposure amount would be greater through simultaneous as opposed to sequential.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24044" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T15:45:21.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-04T15:56:24.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simultaneous and sequential bilinguals differ in regards to the time a second language was introduced, but it does not necessarily determine which language will become dominant. Assuming both languages are learned during the critical age, the dominant language will be determined not by when the language was introduced, but by where, and how often, the languages are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a child that is born to Japanese and Spanish parents that will go on to attend school where Spanish is spoken, Spanish will become the dominant language. Most of the child's life will be conducted in Spanish outside the household. A child born to Japanese parents that is introduced to Spanish during the critical period, and then goes on to attend Spanish school, will also use Spanish as a dominant language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An individual's dominance in a language is not determined by early exposure, but by the dominance of use. Only by ensuring an environment in which both languages are used equally would we truly see the difference between sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were any difference, perhaps the simultaneous bilingual would have a better grasp of concepts than the sequential bilingual, as a simultaneous bilingual would have had to learn every concept can be defined using more than one word at a critical age in cognitive development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24045" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T15:56:24.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T16:47:37.127" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to find corpus with technical language to train my model, but I cannot find it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do you know if there are any tagged PoS corpus in English related with technical language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24060" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T14:24:57.730" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T19:55:58.333" Title="PoS tagger - technical corpus" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30751" CreationDate="2019-03-04T17:21:21.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you are asking e.g. &quot;why do we have a suffix -s for the plural&quot;, &quot;why do we have a prefix un- for negatives&quot;, etc. The alternative would be to mark the function with a separate word like &quot;not, no&quot;. The alternation would then be two or more word forms. There is a sub-theme connected to this, seen rampantly in German and a bit in English, namely &quot;umlaut&quot; where a grammatical difference is signalled not with an identifiable affix, but with a change in sounds of the word (e.g. &lt;em&gt;goose ~ geese&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is historical process where independent words become affixes. For example, Norwegian has definite suffixes that historically developed from demonstratives. We have examples in English such as the negative inflections &lt;em&gt;won't, don't, can't&lt;/em&gt; which arose from and still alternates with two-word sequences &lt;em&gt;will not&lt;/em&gt; etc. This is known as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammaticalization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; *that is, these are examples of grammaticalization but not all grammaticalizations are phonological reanalyses of separate words). One might assume that all affixes in all languages historically derive from separate words, but that's asserting more than we have evidence for (even if it is likely to be true at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; level of historical depth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internal-change types of morphology are essentially regular morphology interacting with regular phonology, and then something changes to mess up the phonological context for the rule. The &lt;em&gt;goose~geese&lt;/em&gt; alternation used to be regular phonology. &quot;Geese&quot; derives from earlier &lt;em&gt;gansiz&lt;/em&gt; by regular phonological rules, but then the triggering suffixes were lost through other sound changes. There was a bit of an attempt especially by Ted Lightner to preserve the historical origins of alternations in modern grammars, but it is typically recognized that children do not have sufficient basis for reconstructing the earlier form of words, when (if) the alternation was regular phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a protracted and frankly pointless terminological skirmish in the literature over the question of phenomena that might be called &quot;morphological&quot;. What happens in &quot;goose~geese&quot; is that there is an alternation of vowels, so there is a phonological event. The conditioning factor is not a phonetic factor, it is a grammatical property, so the conditioning is morphological (if it is not actually syntactic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, affixes often develop from word combinations via application of phonological rules. Affixation makes possible certain phonological processes (in Germanic, vowel fronting only applies to sequences within the word). The phonological properties of affixes can be changed while the triggering changes are retained, leaving the language with a morphological (grammatical) distinction that is realized via some phonological process without recoverable phonological conditioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T17:21:21.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30760" CreationDate="2019-03-04T21:26:26.347" Score="1" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/33124/if-you-can-use-chinese-nouns-as-verbs-or-vice-versa&quot;&gt;If you can use Chinese nouns as verbs, or vice versa&lt;/a&gt;, I am wondering if you can treat nouns as verbs or verbs as nouns in languages such as these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inuktitut&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hebrew&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hindi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in any one of these languages, following along with the post above, I'm wondering what to do if you have a noun and want to use it as a verb, or have a verb and want to use it as a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English the word &quot;mark&quot; has both a noun form (&quot;The mark on the paper&quot;) and a verb form (&quot;Mark the paper&quot;). In addition, you can make nouns into verbs by &quot;verbifying&quot; it. &quot;Paper me, please&quot;, meaning &quot;to pass the paper&quot;. No actual change happens to the word structure. On the other hand, it seems to transform verbs into nouns, some change happens. For example, &quot;to happen&quot; becomes not &quot;a happen&quot;, but &quot;a happening&quot;. Or &quot;to write&quot; becomes not &quot;a write&quot; but &quot;a writing&quot;. If you were, in a programming sense, to try to create an object called a &quot;write&quot; as in &lt;code&gt;class Write&lt;/code&gt;, which symbolized a document, then at first that would seem &lt;em&gt;jarring&lt;/em&gt;. But it is something that could be gotten used to, as we have things like &quot;writs&quot; which are pretty close to that concept (at least in my mind). If you think of a writing as a writ, then a write is just a writ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I guess my initial question scope is simply about &lt;strong&gt;converting nouns into verbs&lt;/strong&gt;, not necessarily converting verbs into nouns. In English, it seems you can convert any noun into a verb without changing its form. You could even say &quot;hippopotamus me&quot; when talking from vet to vet about helping in giving birth to a hippopotamus. It's not as if you need to say &quot;hippopotamus-lia me&quot; or some other prefix/suffix thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my main question is what you must do in these languages above, some illustrative example languages to see what it's like across languages. That is, if you can treat a noun as a verb &lt;em&gt;without any change to its form&lt;/em&gt; in all of these languages, or you must add a prefix/suffix/modifier to the noun, or you must use a completely different form for each (as in Chinese &quot;mark&quot; 痕 vs. 标). To elaborate further, from a programming perspective, if you have a noun in one of these languages called &lt;code&gt;foo&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;ᐊᐳᑦ&lt;/code&gt; or whatever, if it is acceptable/understandable/interpretable, or instead if it is jarring/weird/confusing, to use that same word as a &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; name, or if you must use some alternative verb form for the function name. This just helps clarify the concept even more, by seeing what a programming language would enforce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T05:27:33.927" Title="If you can use nouns as verbs for different languages" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T22:08:50.873" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in words, from any language, whose etymological origin 'exposes' superstitious or scientifically obsolete beliefs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the English &lt;em&gt;disaster&lt;/em&gt; comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;dis-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;astro&lt;/em&gt;, meaning literally bad star or ill-starred. This 'exposes' Roman astrological beliefs. Similarly, the English &lt;em&gt;lunatic&lt;/em&gt; comes from the Latin &lt;em&gt;luna&lt;/em&gt;, meaning moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is the English &lt;em&gt;malaria&lt;/em&gt; from Italian &lt;em&gt;mala&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;aria&lt;/em&gt;, meaning bad air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples of words like this, where evidence of ancient beliefs is embedded in everyday words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23791" LastEditorUserId="23791" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T13:38:41.850" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T18:13:00.517" Title="Words which originate in superstition/myth" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-03-08T14:50:54.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30757" CreationDate="2019-03-05T05:27:33.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're asking about is called &lt;em&gt;zero derivation&lt;/em&gt;. Derivation is when you apply some process to a word to turn it into a new word: in English, for example, you can put &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt; on a verb to make a new noun. Zero derivation is when nothing obvious changes in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, zero derivation can be applied from adjectives to nouns, and from nouns to verbs. The former is pretty common in languages with &quot;noun-like adjectives&quot;, and isn't generally worth commenting on. The latter is much rarer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Inuktitut, Hebrew, Japanese, Greek, and Latin, verbs have special morphology that nouns simply don't. For example, in Latin, verbs take markings for person, number, tense, voice, and mood that can't simply be left off. All verbs have these markers, and no nouns do, so any derivation process will involve adding them. So I could say, &quot;zero derivation is utterly impossible&quot;. But this is a boring answer, so I'm going to ignore those markers and focus on roots only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Inuktitut, Ancient Greek, and Latin, this type of zero derivation doesn't really happen. There are plenty of ways to derive verbs from nouns, but they involve affixes of some sort. In Japanese, verbs are a closed class, so making new verbs isn't easy or regular at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, it's…complicated. A Semitic root can be readily used as a verb or a noun, and the changes in pattern that mark this could easily fall under the &quot;verb-exclusive morphology&quot; that I said I was ignoring. You can see this especially clearly when nouns are borrowed as new and productive roots, like &lt;em&gt;√s-m-s&lt;/em&gt; &quot;text message&quot; or &lt;em&gt;√g-g-l&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Google&quot;. Both of these came from English nouns, and can be productively used as either nouns or verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As for Hindi, any dialect of Chinese, or Modern Greek, I have no idea: I don't speak any of those languages well enough to comment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T05:27:33.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-05T07:04:28.133" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know adverbs are multifarious, but I’d like to find out just how farious they are. I’m trying to work out what properties they can have by looking at variations in the way different ones can be used. I’m especially interested in how they relate to conjunctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find (1) below perfectly natural, whereas (2) hurts my ears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;Although he was sick, he nevertheless went in to work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Because he was sick, he therefore stayed at home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure at this point whether the problem [that I perceive] with (2) is syntactic or semantic, but I’d like to understand the syntax better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Although&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; are both subordinating conjunctions, so it seems reasonable to expect them to behave in the same way. On that basis any syntactic issue must be to do with &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; is an adverb that modifies a clause by flagging that whatever it expresses might be unexpected given whatever has just been said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Therefore&lt;/em&gt; is an adverb that modifies a clause by flagging that whatever it expresses is a consequence of whatever has just been said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I take out &lt;em&gt;although&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;, the two adverbs seem to behave in more or less the same way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was sick but nevertheless went into work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was sick and therefore stayed at home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was sick; nevertheless, he went in to work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He was sick; therefore, he stayed at home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference I can really find is that &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; demands a comma if it is moved to the end, whereas &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; is happy without one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Therefore&lt;/em&gt; has been described as a connective, but I think that must also be true of &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt;, which has to refer back to whatever it is that sets up the expectation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that they are both connectives but that they connect different syntactic units? It feels as though, in (2), the referent of &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; includes &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt;, whereas, in (1), the referent of &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; does not include &lt;em&gt;although&lt;/em&gt;. I do not know how I could describe that in linguistic terms, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have a vague feeling that there is a determiner or quantifier hiding in &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; but not in &lt;em&gt;although&lt;/em&gt;. I can't really articulate it any better than that so don't know how to test this idea. Perhaps it's just another way of saying that the scope of the referent is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T11:01:45.180" Title="Characterising adverbial constructions" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-05T08:47:39.540" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, some verbs are said to take raised objects as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I believe &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; to be seriously mistaken.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the verb &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; takes &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as a raised object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the same be said about prepositions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, can a preposition take a raised object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, please give me some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T08:47:39.540" Title="Can prepositions take raised objects in English?" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="23" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30767" CreationDate="2019-03-05T09:43:59.513" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does any language have a word for the situation when somebody frequently uses the pronoun &quot;We&quot; in &quot;I&quot; stead in his speach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By analogy with the german pronoun du(thou) -&gt; duzen (use the informal form of address/call someone by their first name) or with the russian pronoun &quot;ты&quot;(thou) -&gt; тыкать (use the informal form...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23897" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T11:09:43.860" Title="Frequent use of the pronoun &quot;We&quot; in &quot;I&quot; stead" Tags="&lt;multilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30763" CreationDate="2019-03-05T11:09:43.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English this is commonly called the &lt;em&gt;royal we&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;nosism&lt;/em&gt; more formally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23791" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T11:09:43.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30768" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31836" CreationDate="2019-03-05T12:50:27.680" Score="7" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;At university, we have been looking into language change, and seeing how for example &quot;one&quot; was used as the singular indefinite article, which changed into &quot;a&quot;, but a question arose about whether or not there exists a language with a dual indefinite article, and if this would then come from &quot;two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a language with a dual indefinite article? And does it use the number two or come from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23933" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T04:36:38.720" Title="Is there a language with dual indefinite articles?" Tags="&lt;grammatical-number&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30758" CreationDate="2019-03-05T13:01:42.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you accept hyphenation, then there is sun-worshipper, a word that is now used for someone who enjoys sunbathing, but arguably this meaning would not have gained currency had it not been originally used for someone who worships the sun as a deity. (Definitions from Collins online).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24051" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T13:01:42.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30758" CreationDate="2019-03-05T13:35:44.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Plenty of medical words (and not just in English, I think). Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hypochondria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Humo(u)r&lt;/em&gt;, and more specifically &lt;em&gt;sanguine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phlegmatic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;choleric&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;melancholy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T13:35:44.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30777" CreationDate="2019-03-05T15:35:27.090" Score="3" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is a legitimate question to ask,but I noticed this sound change in a few germanic languages, such as Old English and German. How did it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T17:55:43.957" Title="Shift from /sk/ → /ʃ/" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30758" CreationDate="2019-03-05T16:49:51.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as medical words, there are words from other sciences, such as chemistry. Names of elements come from various sources but some are related to religious or mythological beliefs, the most 'everyday' being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Titanium&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Titans of Greek mythology, denoting their strength;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uranium&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Plutonium&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Roman gods Uranus and Pluto;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vanadium&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Thorium&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Norse goddess, Vanadis (Freya) and god Thor;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cobalt&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Nickel&lt;/strong&gt;, their ores are found with silver and copper ores respectively but were not considered by the old miners as having the same value; they believed that the silver and copper had been tainted by kobolds (goblins) or by Nick, the devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24051" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T16:49:51.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12960" CreationDate="2019-03-05T17:06:50.827" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for digging up this old question but we finally have an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/80279/real-life-puzzle-unknown-alphabet-or-shorthand&quot;&gt;reposted this question to puzzling stackexhange&lt;/a&gt; thinking they would be better equipped to solve it. Surely enough, within fifteen minutes of my posting, the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/2630446/deusovi&quot;&gt;Deusovi&lt;/a&gt; recognized the script as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ccelian.com/ElianScriptFull.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Elian script&lt;/a&gt; and deciphered the first few lines. Later, I spent some time to fully decipher it (except the first line):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;park nre renr&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the c programming langua#ge!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i really want my pen!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  create a cetter [=better?] interface for reports&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  hey mr flava! flava&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i reall#y should practice my elian s#cript more&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the d language is fun to use indeed!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  i really should practice my elian script&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mayby [=maybe?] # i should  standerdiz ze [=standardize?] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;{ changes pens }  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;testing this pen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it writes # mu#a [=much?] faster  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="805" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T17:13:51.570" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T17:13:51.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30773" CreationDate="2019-03-05T17:55:43.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;palatalization&lt;/a&gt;, a very common process across languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, /k/ fronts and spirantizes to /ç/. In isolation it often goes further, to /tʃ/, but after /s/, /sç/ may coalesce to /ʃ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, in particular, Italian, where an original Latin 'c' (/k/) before a front vowel has usually become /tʃ/ ('ci'), but after 's' it has become /ʃ/ ('sci'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T17:55:43.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30758" CreationDate="2019-03-05T18:13:00.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example in Riffian is Taslit n unzar meaning rainbow, but literally it means The fiancee of Anzar. Anzar was a rain-god in the old Berber mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T18:13:00.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T01:15:30.777" Score="9" ViewCount="1055" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt; alphabet and all of its child systems such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/t/latin-inscription-roman-emperor-trajan-s-monument-pedestal-imperial-forum-s-p-q-r-caesar-nerva-best-67130032.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Roman&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/bible/images/760-text.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Wulfila_bibel.jpg/235px-Wulfila_bibel.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gothic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are conventionally left-to-right writting systems. But why is that, considering it comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancient.eu/img/r/p/750x750/5215.jpg?v=1485682184&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phoenician&lt;/strong&gt; alphabet&lt;/a&gt;, which is a right-to-left system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, you would expect a child system to follow its parent's essential traits, such as order, as &lt;strong&gt;Phoenician&lt;/strong&gt; child's &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Stele_Salm_Louvre_AO5009.jpg/220px-Stele_Salm_Louvre_AO5009.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aramaic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which is the parent of &lt;strong&gt;Hebrew&lt;/strong&gt; and other arab right-to-left languages) does; however Greek is different. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/AsokaKandahar.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt; you can see the &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt; alphabet (top hemisphere) and &lt;strong&gt;Aramaic&lt;/strong&gt; (bottom hemisphere) — greek text doesn't go all the way to the right, aramaic doesn't go all the way to the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems this kind of change isn't uncommon, considering that the system from which &lt;strong&gt;Phoenician&lt;/strong&gt; descends, ancient egyptian hieroglyphs, was actually left-to-right. So &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;'s timeline roughly goes as &lt;code&gt;left-to-right (egypt) -&amp;gt; right-to-left (phoenician) -&amp;gt; left-to-right (ancient greek)&lt;/code&gt;, staying as left-to-right until today (modern greek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do some languages just suddenly shift their writing order, and more especifically, how did it happen in &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;'s case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22430" LastEditorDisplayName="user22430" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T01:44:53.097" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T14:20:16.937" Title="Why is Greek alphabet left-to-right?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T05:40:48.267" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/7227/5306&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_compare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_compare.html&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone know why it omits English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ex4CL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ex4CL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;2. Are there websites that can compare more than 3 languages concurrently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T00:38:26.543" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T02:55:51.780" Title="Where online compares phonemes across multiple languages, and exhibits the common and distinct ones?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30781" CreationDate="2019-03-06T05:58:16.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No website reports common or non-shared segments of arbitrary multiple languages, relative to some database. You can get certain multi-language comparisons from the Frankfurt interface by including a Language Class entry, but you couldn't select e.g. just 3 Chadic languages. You also can't get non-shared segments. For that you would have to do the computations yourself on the UPSID database. There are numerous discussed interfaces in journal articles or former / broken interfaces: the Frankfurt one seems to be the only functioning interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The omission of English is a consequence of &quot;the quota rule&quot;. To quote from Maddieson's book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The languages included in UPSID have been chosen to approximate a&#xA;  properly constructed quota sample on a genetic basis of the world's&#xA;  extant languages. The quota rule is that only one language may be&#xA;  included from each small family grouping, for example, among the&#xA;  Germanic languages, one is included from West Germanic and one from&#xA;  North Germanic (East Germanic, being extinct and insufficiently&#xA;  documented for a reliable phonological analysis to be made, is not&#xA;  included).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German was selected, therefore English was not selected. There is no discussion of why specific languages were selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T02:55:51.780" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T02:55:51.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T08:11:30.280" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies trying to quantify the amount of information carried by different frequency ranges in speech in different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T08:11:30.280" Title="Differential information load of frequency ranges" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T08:17:09.240" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to write a text processing script in R. I am interested in finding a word (from a list of words I have selected) only if it is in the same sentence as another word. &#xA;Eventually I would also like to do this for the co-existence of words in the same paragraph and other text lengths.&#xA;I am aware of collocation analysis but this usually relies on words that are actually next to each other. What is the analysis called that I want to perform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T12:52:56.280" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T12:52:56.280" Title="What is the term for a specific type of collocation analysis" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30780" CreationDate="2019-03-06T10:36:05.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue of the direction of writing is more complex than just Left-to-Right or Right-to-Left, but also includes Top-to-Bottom, and rarer Bottom-to-Top or even Spiral.&#xA;Spiral alphabetic writing is attested in Carian. Bottom-to-Top is attested in Lybico-Berber alphabetic inscriptions. Greek is also attested in boustrophedon, that is to say &quot;as the ox plows&quot;, in alternative Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left directions in one line to the next. So the issue is more complex than your initial question. Ugaritic script is a cuneiform-looking archaic alphabet that is mostly L-to-R. So the historical facts are that some alphabets stabilized a Left-to-Right or a Right-to-Left direction, out of an initial state of affairs, where almost everything possible is attested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T10:36:05.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30780" CreationDate="2019-03-06T14:05:20.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd added and asked also &lt;em&gt;why arabic numbers kept their direction&lt;/em&gt; (less significant digit is the last - i.e. number comes from the &lt;em&gt;right-to-left&lt;/em&gt; as arabic text flows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for writing directions, I prefer to see the roots in: physiology (humans right-handedness), sociology (the way we're stickin to traditions) and technology (paper, stone, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is suitable for right-handed man to carve in stone with a mallet in the right hand and chisel in the left and the force vector will be pointing from right to left thus sequential carving in right-to-left direction is very natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for paperwork (or something paintable) it is desirable to not touch the freshly drawn objects and left-to-right sequential moving is very comfortable for populating sheet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Boustrophedon&lt;/em&gt; was very natural too. I think, at first stages the text field populating  was imitation of a field ploughing as well-known and respectful activity of the early societies but later as usual it was simplified for one-directional writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22090" LastEditorUserId="22090" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T14:20:16.937" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T14:20:16.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T14:36:18.457" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two news articles that talk about a similar topic with the previous controlled factors). I'm not entirely sure but I think they're called &lt;em&gt;comparable corpora&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're carrying a set of experiments with Spanish-English bilinguals and I need these texts so the participants can activate their language mode before the start of the experimental tasks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10929" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T22:30:29.723" Title="Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;research&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30788" CreationDate="2019-03-06T15:43:39.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The starting point for a corpus search is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; by the European CLARIN ERIC. Entering the words &lt;code&gt;English Spanish comparable corpus&lt;/code&gt; in the search slit gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/?q=English%20Spanish%20comparable%20corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nine results&lt;/a&gt;, among them &lt;a href=&quot;https://hdl.handle.net/21.11119/0000-0000-D5ED-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EuroParl-UdS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T15:43:39.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T16:15:17.370" Score="3" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nazis considered Slavs as non-Aryans, but did Nazi linguists classified the Slavic languages as &quot;non-Indo-European&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the Nazi theory about historical linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24066" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T04:50:18.143" Title="Nazis considered Slavs as non-Aryans, but did Nazi linguists classified the Slavic languages as &quot;non-Indo-European&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T17:18:00.757" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the theory of transformational generative grammar .what is the difference between complements and modifiers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24064" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T17:18:00.757" Title="Transformational generative grammar" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30790" CreationDate="2019-03-06T18:34:59.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Nazi theory, as summarized &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_race&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, is not about language relations, it is a claim about genetics, and apparently Hitler was inspired by theories of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_F._K._G%C3%BCnther&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hans Günther&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ebooks.bharathuniv.ac.in/gdlc1/gdlc4/Arts_and_Science_Books/arts/english/Linguistics/Books/Linguistics%20and%20the%20Third%20Reich.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This book&lt;/a&gt; studies Nazi linguistics, and chapter 2 may be useful in tracking what was said in Nazi-dominated linguistics. I think that the racial theories are primary and linguistics follows that, which explains why Finns are classified as racial Aryans, and Slavs and Romani are in the &quot;subhuman&quot; class. That is, you can be a &quot;racial outsider&quot; relative to the language that you speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T18:34:59.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30788" CreationDate="2019-03-06T22:13:11.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://learn-spanish-with-bilingual-stories.weebly.com/menu-of-free-parallel-texts-spanish-english.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Menu of free parallel texts Spanish English&lt;/a&gt;. (But these texts would not be as carefully controlled as you asked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T22:30:29.723" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T22:30:29.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-07T04:15:35.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read some articles about this different ways of acquisition, so I can say that simultaneous acquisition differs on the sequential in the way that the children starts to use one language more than the other, in this stage is where is define the dominate one. In the sequential acquisition it is important to ensure the first language at home because if the original or home language is replaced by a second language and all support for the first is withdrawn, some children can lose skills in their first language (this can result in negative consequences for a child both within their family and the community, and in their future language development).&#xA;In conclusion I can say that both ways if are used correctly by the parents will make a great bilingual speaker, but nevertheless in my personal opinion I think that a child who is involved into a simultaneous acquisition will become faster in a better speaker of both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24069" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T04:15:35.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30790" CreationDate="2019-03-07T04:50:18.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nazism is primarily a political ideology. So it's a bit difficult to speak of &quot;Nazi linguists&quot; and historical linguistics is more an alibi than a theory, from a Nazi point of view. You can find more information here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Kossinna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Kossinna&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T04:50:18.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30761" CreationDate="2019-03-07T07:23:36.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ll have a go at answering the question myself, in the hope that others will chime in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; are both connective adverbs, they differ syntactically in that &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; cannot connect to an element which is lower in the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with &lt;em&gt;because he was sick, he therefore stayed at home&lt;/em&gt; is that the only possible referent of &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; is lower in the tree, in the subordinate clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; is not so picky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt; is similar in meaning to &lt;em&gt;nevertheless&lt;/em&gt; but behaves more like &lt;em&gt;therefore&lt;/em&gt; in this respect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;x &lt;em&gt;although he was sick, however he went in to work&lt;/em&gt; / x &lt;em&gt;because he was sick, therefore he stayed at home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;he was sick; however he went in to work&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;he was sick; therefore he stayed at home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;he was sick but, however, went in to work / he was sick and, therefore, went in to work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt; is redundant in the last example, the sentence strikes me as grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems therefore that connective adverbs are characterised, in part, by whether they can take a subordinate clause as their referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T07:23:36.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20859" CreationDate="2019-03-08T01:50:05.503" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3212/what-defines-a-language/3214#3214&quot;&gt;What is a language?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in fact asks &quot;What is a &lt;em&gt;natural&lt;/em&gt; language?&quot;. The accepted answer starts &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/3214/13996&quot;&gt;A language is a complex system of communication...&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which, perhaps coincidentally, is a passable definition for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language whatsoever: A language is a (comparatively) complex system of communication. Clearly, maths isn't a natural language but, even more clearly, it is a language by the latter definition -- in fact, the most complex language we know. A possible &quot;downside&quot; to the definition is that some animal communication systems (e.g. honeybee's dance) are also comparatively complex (and thus, possibly, languages&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20859/is-math-a-language/20877#20877&quot;&gt;lemontree&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mathematics itself, just like biology, philosophy, linguistics, ... is&#xA;  not a language or a communication system at all, but simply a science.&#xA;  /---/ &quot;the study of such things as numbers, structures, and logical&#xA;  reasoning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maths isn't just another science -- in fact, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-mathematics-a-natural-science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;routine&lt;/a&gt;ly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.actforlibraries.org/why-mathematics-is-not-a-science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrasted w/&lt;/a&gt; sciences. Even if we forget about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7494677-mathematics-is-the-language-in-which-god-has-written-the&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galilei&lt;/a&gt;, there's a lot of highly qualified talk about &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6560&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;maths as the language of science&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the language of mathematics&lt;/a&gt;, which are two main ways of construing maths as language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In principle, I don't have a problem w/ honeybee's dance being a language, but it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Dance_language_as_a_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lacks symbols&lt;/a&gt;, so we could strengthen our definition w/ &quot;A language is a (comparatively) complex system of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce#Signs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symbolic&lt;/a&gt; communication&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T21:55:52.723" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T21:55:52.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30820" CreationDate="2019-03-08T09:58:21.537" Score="3" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term in (English) linguistics for a word that belongs to more than one word class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt;, which can be either an adjective, or a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to find a term for this, and the closest I've come up with is &lt;em&gt;conversion&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;zero derivation&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt is that this seems to describe a &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; of word formation in new categories, whereas I'm looking to describe the &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; of belonging to more than one category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that the one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23002" LastEditorUserId="23002" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T10:06:22.857" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T15:22:16.463" Title="Words that can belong to more than one category" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30814" CreationDate="2019-03-08T10:30:22.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, if the category varies according to the syntactic context projected in, i.e. an adjective in X &amp;amp; a noun in Y, there won't be a stable or fixed categoy status that would label it. Other technical words like the one you've mentioned can be used (but again it's a question of context). If the functional projection DP hosts 'fast', it's realizied as its complement NP corresponding to a noun, but if ADJP projection hosts it, it's realized as an adjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T10:30:22.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30814" CreationDate="2019-03-08T15:22:16.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, these are called &lt;strong&gt;homonyms&lt;/strong&gt;, especially in cases like &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; (period of not eating) vs &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; (moving quickly), where neither is derived from the other. In cases like these, they seem to be stored as separate lexemes in the brain, and it's just coincidence that they look the same. This can even happen when the words &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; related, if they've diverged enough: even though &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; (moving quickly) comes from &lt;em&gt;fast&lt;/em&gt; (securely, as in &quot;stuck fast&quot;), modern English-speakers see them as separate words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Zero derivation&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;derivation&lt;/em&gt; in general) usually refers to a different process, where there's only one underlying lexeme in your mental model of the language, and the part of speech is determined by how you use it (or what you attach to it). For example, if I say &quot;the new light bulbs really greenified the whole room&quot;, you don't have a mental lexeme for &quot;greenify&quot; (especially since I just made it up)—instead, you have lexemes for &quot;green&quot; and &quot;-ify&quot; that you stick together to get the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T15:22:16.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30828" CreationDate="2019-03-08T19:47:53.803" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are som examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[t͡sʰ], [t͡s] or [ʣ]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wie al&lt;strong&gt;t s&lt;/strong&gt;in&lt;strong&gt;d S&lt;/strong&gt;ie? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nich&lt;strong&gt;t s&lt;/strong&gt;ehr&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[s] or [z]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wa&lt;strong&gt;s s&lt;/strong&gt;ind Sie von Beruf?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Da&lt;strong&gt;s S&lt;/strong&gt;ofa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[st], [sd] or [zd]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;da&lt;strong&gt;s d&lt;/strong&gt;u weißt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonant clusters marked in bold include a voiceless one and then a voiced one. And as I can hear, the cluster /ts/ is often pronounced a fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T00:56:29.490" Title="Does the voicing of morpheme-initial /z d/ in German transmit to the preceding voiceless consonant in the same consonant cluster?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30823" CreationDate="2019-03-08T21:04:21.420" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, word boundaries are spoken as a short pause, so there can't be any influence of sounds between adjacent words. This also applies to component boundaries within compound words and to a high degree even to syllable boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22933" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T21:04:21.420" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-08T21:16:12.273" Score="-4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like one to me but I'm not sure regarding how it is made. I noticed that when I consciously try to close my glottis the glottal stop is much more soft while when I don't think about closing and instead think about coughing it gets much louder, as you hear in the recording. I don't know what volume we can reach with a true glottal stop but for some reason I think I'd get more noise if tightning each cord agaisnt itself instead of themselves. That by the way is what I think I'm doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vocaroo.com/i/s1dHypk1PrTn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://vocaroo.com/i/s1dHypk1PrTn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T05:34:05.590" Title="Can anyone confirm if this is a true released glottal stop?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30823" CreationDate="2019-03-09T00:51:05.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Haven't you already asked this question on German SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/44907&quot;&gt;Pronunciation of consonants at a word-border&lt;/a&gt;? Please explain why you are re-asking it here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you don't get [dz]. The most commonly described accents of German don't have regressive voicing; instead, &quot;lenis&quot; obstruent consonants tend to be realized as voiceless whenever they are adjacent to a fortis obstruent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound &quot;/z/&quot; is fairly often realized as voiceless [s] in all contexts; even in accents where it can be [z], that would be an unlikely realization after /t/ or /s/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My description here, which is based on what I've read in linguistic sources, agrees with what mach said in the top-voted answer to your German SE question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T00:56:29.490" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T00:56:29.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30827" CreationDate="2019-03-09T01:45:04.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a speech sound, so not a glottal stop or anything like it. It sounds like what happens when you thwack your adams apple with your finger, with your glottis closed and mouth open. If you have &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; a glottal stop, there's no sound at all, so at the minimum you would need something leading into the glottal stop (then slam the vocal folds shut, no release). A &quot;release&quot; would be some very short vowel-like sound (turbulence from the sudden rush of air through the glottis), and would resemble whatever vowel came before it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that such a release feature exists in some languages, because there are reports of &quot;glottally interrupted&quot; vowels of the type [VʔV̆], with a very short echo vowel after the glottal stop. &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/1/article/388?htmlOnce=yes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; on Chuxnabán Mixe discusses this, and provides samples (in this case, the &quot;echo&quot; is relatively long compared to examples that I've heard elsewhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T05:34:05.590" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T05:34:05.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-09T04:16:44.047" Score="3" ViewCount="7198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m wondering how exactly do you make a “w” and “y” sound in English. These two are considered the glides of English, but what exactly makes it a glide? What are the characteristics of a glide sound? For instance, is there a difference in sound between “yi” and “ii.” I know those are not actual words, but someone once told me that a y sound is basically an i sound in the beginning, quickly followed by the main vowel of the word. So for the word “you,” it’s “iu”. Same for w, except it’s an “u” sound instead. So is there a difference between “wu” and “uu”? I never really thought of the y and w as two vowels joined together. Kinda just treated it as one particular kind of sound, though hard to describe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23304" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T22:46:31.100" Title="What are the characteristics of a glide in English?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;glides&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30830" CreationDate="2019-03-09T05:53:22.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The glides &lt;em&gt;y,w&lt;/em&gt; are phonetically very similar to the corresponding vowels &lt;em&gt;i,u&lt;/em&gt; in English, but they are shorter and more constricted. Since &quot;ii&quot; and &quot;uu&quot; don't exist in English, you really can't compare how they differ from &quot;yi&quot; and &quot;wu&quot;. The suppose tense vowels &quot;i&quot; and &quot;u&quot; in English are phonetically lower and more diphthongal compared to [i:], [u:] as encountered in numerous other languages, and a narrower phonetic transcription would be [ɪj, ʊw]. It is not unusual for &lt;em&gt;yi,wu&lt;/em&gt; in other languages to be phonetically indistinguishable from [i,u], especially if [i,u] in the language are closer to the cardinal vowels [i,u]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T05:53:22.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30830" CreationDate="2019-03-09T05:54:59.160" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glides (or &quot;semivowels&quot;) are sounds that are not phonetically dissimilar from vowels but behave like consonants—that is, they cannot constitute the nucleus (peak) of a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a purely articulatory point of view, [j] and [w] are just short occurrences of [i] and [u] (except that in [j, w], the constrictions may be slightly more prominent) and can be alternatively transcribed in IPA as [i̯] and [u̯]. But most linguists consider English [j] and [w] as distinct sounds (phonemes). The reasons are primarily phonological, which include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When at the beginning of utterances, &lt;em&gt;east&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Uber&lt;/em&gt;, etc. are often preceded by a glottal stop. This doesn't happen with &lt;em&gt;yeast&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;womb&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We say &quot;a year&quot;, &quot;a week&quot;, etc., not &quot;an week&quot;, &quot;an year&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They cannot be stressed like vowels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They behave like other approximants, /r/ and /l/, in that they become voiceless when preceded by a word-initial voiceless plosive, as in &lt;em&gt;cue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;queen&lt;/em&gt; (compare &lt;em&gt;crew&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;clean&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can precede almost any vowel, as in &lt;em&gt;Yiddish, wit, yet, wet, yap, wax, yacht, watch, wood, young, one&lt;/em&gt;... Analyzing [j, w] as vowels would entail adding a considerable number of diphthongs and triphthongs into the phonemic inventory of English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to analyze the non-syllabic components [ɪ, ʊ] of the diphthongs /aɪ/, /aʊ/, /ɔɪ/, etc. as /j, w/, but since /j, w/ otherwise do not occur in syllable codas, these diphthongs are usually considered distinct phonemes rather than sequences of two phonemes. (Phonetically, however, there is little to no difference between [j, w] and non-syllabic [ɪ, ʊ] of diphthongs. The non-syllabic components of English diphthongs are often conventionally transcribed with [ɪ, ʊ], but the actual quality of the sounds varies depending on accent and may be closer to [i, u].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T22:46:31.100" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T22:46:31.100" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30830" CreationDate="2019-03-09T14:17:15.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By experiment I find that &quot;i'yi&quot; and &quot;u'wu&quot; are quite different from &quot;i'ii&quot; and &quot;u'uu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emphasis on the second syllable in &quot;i'ii&quot; is produced by a change in pitch accompanied by a glottal stop. The same applies to &quot;u'uu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &quot;u'wu&quot; I can detect a near closure of the lips on &quot;w&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &quot;i'yi&quot; there is a definite lifting of the tongue towards the alveolar ridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases there is a constriction of the airflow, either by the lips or the tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an experiment I tried doing both of these actions at once. It produced a sound that I've never heard in English! It sounded quite a lot like a jaw harp (jews harp) - you can listen to these online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10407" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T14:17:15.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30837" CreationDate="2019-03-09T17:53:41.327" Score="4" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;You see a family in the park and you naturally list the members as &quot;Mom, Dad, son, and daughter&quot;.  But from whose perspective is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mom&quot; and &quot;Dad&quot; are identifiers as seen from the perspective of the children, while &quot;son&quot; and &quot;daughter&quot; are identifiers as seen from the perspective of the parents.  It's as if we shifted perspective midway through the list!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fixed perspective would be, for example, something like &quot;me, my sister, my mom, and my dad&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe the perspective &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; fixed.  Not fixed at any particular person, but rather fixed at the center of gravity of the family, floating somewhere between parents and children.  Like some sort of averaged perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, it gets more complicated when extended family members come along:  &quot;Oh, here comes Grandpa and Auntie!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we've got Mom, Dad, son, daughter, Grandpa, and Auntie.  That's two identifiers from the perspective of the parents, and four identifiers from the perspective of the children.  But why shouldn't it be from the perspective of the mother, since she is now closest to the center of gravity of the family?  She would describe the whole thing as &quot;me, my husband, my father, my sister, and my children&quot;.  That gives a completely different sense from &quot;Mom, Dad, son, daughter, Grandpa, and Auntie&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And don't even think about how Auntie views the whole thing:  &quot;me, my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, my niece, and my nephew&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As our list grows, it becomes more and more a view from nowhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shifting perspective, center of gravity, view from nowhere... &lt;strong&gt;What the heck am I talking about?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24100" LastEditorUserId="24100" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T21:54:36.703" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T21:54:36.703" Title="When an outsider describes family relationships, which point of view are they using?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;kinship-terms&gt;&lt;deixis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-09T18:10:45.717" Score="3" ViewCount="1087" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence would be &quot;Whose dirty underwear is this?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that the base (is that called deep structure sentence?) would be &quot;This is whose dirty underwear&quot; but I'm not sure what transformational rules are applied here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My attempt so far is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TdoUB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TdoUB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I should also note that I'm following &quot;An Introduction to Language by Fromkin and others&quot;, and the notion it seems to be following is a bit simplified version of the X-bar theory, and my knowledge is pretty much limited to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24101" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T16:21:06.973" Title="Phrase structure tree of a Wh question" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30834" CreationDate="2019-03-09T18:24:25.407" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the skills of the person doing the describing. A could say &quot;My mother is the woman who gave birth to me&quot;, B could say &quot;Your mother is the woman who gave birth to you&quot; and C could say &quot;A person's mother is the woman who gave birth to that person&quot;. It also depends on the language they are describing, since some languages have separate words for &quot;my-mother&quot; vs. &quot;your-mother&quot; versus &quot;his-mother&quot;. It also depends on the facts of the relationship. There is a recurring term &quot;cross-sex sibling&quot; which would be in English the relation between female and male siblings, and &quot;same-sex sibling&quot; (male siblings, female siblings). Or, conventionally translated &quot;mother&quot; could be &quot;woman who gave birth to you and all of her siblings&quot;, and &quot;aunt&quot; could be &quot;female siblings of your 'father',&quot; (which is likely to be &quot;biological father plus his male siblings&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T18:24:25.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30834" CreationDate="2019-03-09T19:13:02.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kinship terms are a specialized form of social &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deixis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The things you are pointing out are a consequence of the fact that deictic terms have context-dependent meanings. What you've appropriately called the &quot;center of gravity&quot; is the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://glossary.sil.org/term/deictic-center&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deictic center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - the reference point from which the context is judged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say you see a &quot;Mom, Dad, son, and daughter&quot; you're stating that based on both the social context you find yourself in and the particular people you are referring to. So by &quot;Mom&quot;, you're conveying something like &quot;the person who appears to stand in a motherhood role relative to the other people in the group I'm referring to&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be how you refer to them to a third party you are talking to. But you wouldn't refer to them that way while addressing them directly. You would never say &quot;*Hello, Mom, Dad, son, and daughter!&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T19:13:02.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-09T19:13:56.313" Score="2" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; describes five broad types of sentences, classified by purpose. They are: declarations, questions, commands, instructions, and exclamations. Under this classification scheme, where would a request fall? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, where would a sentence like &quot;please tell me your name&quot; fall? I can see a few possibilities, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A declaration of one's desire to know the other's name; identical to &quot;I wish to know your name&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A very weak command (so much like an exclamation point at the end strengthens a command, like &quot;tell me your name!&quot;, the modifier &quot;please&quot; weakens it); identical to &quot;tell me your name.. if it happens to be convenient for you&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any consensus on the topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22113" LastEditorUserId="22113" LastEditDate="2019-03-10T00:16:51.960" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T01:00:58.550" Title="What sort of sentence is a request?" Tags="&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30860" CreationDate="2019-03-09T23:12:47.857" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that each main verb has (at least) one corresponding noun with the same meaning that is formed from gerund and derivation. For examples, &lt;em&gt;discovery&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;discover&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;addition&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt;; and simply zero derivation like &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The converse is not true, i.e. nouns generally do not have verbs with the same meaning. I'd like this to be verified. Any thought is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastEditorUserId="22765" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T18:14:21.963" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:37:12.030" Title="Does each verb have a corresponding noun with the same meaning" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30835" CreationDate="2019-03-10T00:34:20.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you look at McCawley's discussion of this in his textbook &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;.  He has a Q operator on Ss, which is coindexed with certain constituents of the S in its scope.  I don't take McCawley's treatment as theoretical, but rather descriptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question could also be expressed: &quot;This is someone's dirty laundry -- whose?&quot;  So, we need to give the structure of the corresponding declarative sentence (&quot;This is someone's dirty laundry&quot;) and find a way to express in a tree diagram that the identity of &quot;someone&quot; is being asked about in the corresponding question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In McCawley's description, that fact that it is a question is expressed with an introductory &quot;Q&quot; element, and what specifically is being asked about is expressed in the tree structure by coindexing the Q and some constituent of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2020-04-03T14:42:52.947" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T14:42:52.947" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-10T02:14:39.027" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard from some people (working in computational linguistics) that today the area of formal semantics is on the decline. On the other hand, I can see many new papers from formal semanticists on their webpages. So I was wondering whether this field is &quot;alive enough&quot; today and whether there is a demand in formal semanticists today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T17:15:16.607" Title="How active formal semantics as a research field today?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2019-03-10T14:59:36.017" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to @Mitch's answer, n before dentals, or vice versa, and more (e.g. m before b) is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gemination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gemination&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case of a merger for &lt;em&gt;wr&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;, that @ROBOKiTTY pointed out, would be a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hypercorrection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/a&gt;, if the respective speakers learned often enough that words like &lt;em&gt;dowry&lt;/em&gt; require an r, and figured that must be the case for &lt;em&gt;drawin&lt;/em&gt;. Calling it hypercorrection is not really accurate, if it doesn't stick and due tonawareness of the mistake; Or if it's deemed an accurate transcription, than it would be polemic to denigrate as a mistake. Inhave never seen this one, though. Basically what @acattle said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; can be realized with or without closing of the vocal tract, same as &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;. My favorite example would be &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, among other slang variants rendered &lt;em&gt;suttin&lt;/em&gt;, and thence &lt;em&gt;su'in&lt;/em&gt; with just a glottal stop. This can hardly lead to hypercorrection anymore, if alphabetization is high and the standardized spelling seen often enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;em&gt;rhottic&lt;/em&gt; accent, we also have the internet-famous &lt;em&gt;ermahgerd mershed pertaters&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Oh my god, mashed potatoes&quot;, that's an over-the-top riff on the accent as perceived by outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T14:59:36.017" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-03-10T14:59:36.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30838" CreationDate="2019-03-10T16:56:25.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think requests are a sentence type.  Requests are polite commands, but any sentence type can be used to make a request. Sentence type concerns the grammatical form of a sentence -- like whether its subject is overt, its verb is inflected for second person, whether it has rising intonation.  Things like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to think of a sentence &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt; which cannot be used to make a request by adding &quot;please&quot;.  Clearly you can add &quot;please&quot; to virtually any &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt; of sentence, including questions and imperatives.  It doesn't even have to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; a sentence: &quot;Less noise in here, please!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I find the Wikipedia classification based on purpose to be unhelpful.  It mixes up grammar and content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T16:56:25.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-10T18:18:35.937" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can swear I read an online article that gave a resouding yes to that question but I've lost it and my memory is uhm, not the best so I'd like a confirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T18:18:35.937" Title="Is there any language where stress can be comprised of diminished expiratory force?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30848" CreationDate="2019-03-10T19:43:58.560" Score="6" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does a difference in tense count as a difference in meaning in a minimal pair?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a made up example to illustrate my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we know that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[wuga] means &quot;read&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[wugi] means &quot;reading&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that [wuga] and [wugi] are a minimal pair and that [a] and [i] contrast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24108" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T21:30:20.933" Title="Does a difference of tense count as a difference of meaning in a minimal pair?" Tags="&lt;tense&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30847" CreationDate="2019-03-10T20:07:32.877" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. A minimal pair is meant to differ in one phoneme, to demonstrate that a speaker of the language can distinguish between the two words, and therefore that the contrast is phonemic. Since the difference between the words is on the level of phonology, it doesn't matter whether the difference in meaning is grammatical or lexical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T20:07:32.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30854" CreationDate="2019-03-10T20:51:37.230" Score="5" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguistics student, so my bad if this is actually very obvious/can be found online (I tried. Really.), but what is, exactly, the OE Gloss.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I could find is that it means &lt;em&gt;Old English Glossary&lt;/em&gt;, and even that was just me guessing. I've been guessing that it's a book, and so I tried Googling as though it was. Before that, I just tried the abbreviation (as that's how it was in the OED website), and then I tried the name without any kind of abbreviation, then etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this part is important, but basically, I have a short etymology paper to write and one of the sources of the first attestation of the word is this. The OE Gloss. And I have to write a few sentences about it, so I do have to do some research on it, though I can't find anything at all. At least, I don't think I'm finding the correct information. And to add to that, I'm not even a hundred percent sure if the OE Gloss. is the actual source. Even though I've been told by my professor that it is. Here is the extract from the OED website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OE. Gloss.&lt;/em&gt; in Haupt &lt;em&gt;Zeitschrift&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it sounds that the source is this Zeitschrift book. Or perhaps that's me just hoping it is, because I found information on Zeitschrift, and nothing on &lt;em&gt;OE. Gloss.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please help? And apologies if this isn't the right stack exchange - it's my first time posting anything on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24112" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:06:02.460" Title="What is 'OE Gloss.'?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30847" CreationDate="2019-03-10T21:30:20.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the issue is not as clear as the preceding answer states.&#xA;One issue here is morpheme-boundary.&#xA;It's not good policy to look for minimal pairs that involve morpheme boundaries. For example, drink drank drunk is ok because there is no boundary involved here, but there is the well-known case of Scottish English where vowel length normally does not exist, but some long vowels actually exist in words like Preterite laid &amp;lt; lay+ed. In other words, your pair wugi / wuga is not a fully satisfactory minimal pair. It might involve interferences caused by morpheme boundaries. So I would recommend to look for another minimal pair that does not involve that kind of issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T21:30:20.933" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28343" CreationDate="2019-03-11T06:32:15.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linked Linear A Wikipedia article says “Archaeologist Arthur Evans named the script &quot;Linear&quot; because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay, in contrast to the more pictographic characters in Cretan hieroglyphs that were used during the same period.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citation Wikipedia gives for this statement is Robinson, Andrew (2009). &lt;em&gt;Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction.&lt;/em&gt; Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-9-40-215757-4, p. 54.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T06:32:15.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30855" CreationDate="2019-03-11T13:51:33.920" Score="2" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to segment some connected speech in Praat, and want to get the boundaries between phonemes as accurate as possible. I am finding that in many cases, one sound blends into another and it's hard to say where the dividing line is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat obviously provides a good few clues, but I'm not sure how much weight I should attach to them. Looking at the word /cə/ for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The waveform has a very clear change in shape near the beginning, so the obvious starting point is to treat the first shape as /c/ and the rest as /ə/ - but if I do that the bit that is supposed to be /ə/ sounds like /də/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a slightly later point, I would say that the formants settle (they are a bit wobbly throughout) - but again a boundary there gives me /də/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slightly later still, the first vocal pulse appears. I am not sure how far I can trust the vocal pulses shown in Praat, but in any case I still get the /də/ if I put the boundary here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I move the boundary so that the second segment sounds like /ə/, the end of the bit that is supposed to be /c/ is audibly voiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly there are a number of things going on in this transition and they don't all happen simultaneously (or instantaneously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a principled basis for choosing one of these points - or perhaps another one altogether - as the boundary between consonant and vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T08:28:39.753" Title="Identifying phonemic boundaries in Praat" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30849" CreationDate="2019-03-11T15:06:02.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can confirm the source given by @Gaston Ümlaut in a comment. The &lt;em&gt;Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum&lt;/em&gt; is available in digitised form and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/toc/?PID=PPN345204107_0009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is the relevant table of contents&lt;/a&gt;. Note that the original title is &lt;em&gt;Angelsächsische glossen&lt;/em&gt; and the author is &lt;em&gt;Bouterwek&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:06:02.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30853" CreationDate="2019-03-11T15:50:13.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are enough criteria that the decision is unprincipled, that is, there isn't some unquestionable principle that you can use to deduce where the lines must go, if you are looking for phoneme boundaries. For example, in parsing English [kʰɑɹ], you have to decide whether the velar release burst is the end of the consonant, or do you go for the beginning of voicing (which itself calls for a judgment: do you need one complete semi-sinusoidal period in the waveform to determine that you now have voicing? do you subject the parsing to a stronger criterion of full modal voicing?). This was a topic that was central to phonetic research in the early period (late 50's to early 70's), so reading linguistic phonetic works from those days will be very informative. Two examples are Peterson &amp;amp; Lehiste 'Duration of syllable nuclei in English' and &#xA;Lehiste 'An acoustic-phonetic study of open juncture'. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist205/index_files/Handout%203%20-%20Segmentation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;class handout&lt;/a&gt; gives an overview of main considerations, and would be a good quick first read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best approach is to provide more information, not less, and then &quot;discover&quot; the most stable measures after the fact. However, when it comes to V-C and C-V formant transitions, it is better to let your eyes provide the answer rather than your ears. The consonant closure properties (formants) will be detectable for quite some time after the release of the consonant constriction, because the tongue (e.g.) cannot instantly snap into the target vowel configuration. Yet there will clearly be properties that identify that period as being a vowel, not a stop. This becomes a problem when parsing vocalic sequences, that there's a huge uncertainty in parsing [awa] and the like. I don't know if there is a &quot;majority&quot; approach among phoneticians: I use a &quot;split the difference&quot; approach where the glide boundaries are the midpoint in the stretch that isn't clearly &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; [u] or &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; [a].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T15:50:13.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30838" CreationDate="2019-03-11T16:09:52.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you're asking about the five major 'clause types' that are used to perform different kinds of speech acts. I believe there to be a broad consensus that they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Declarative: &lt;em&gt;You are very tactful&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed Interrogative: &lt;em&gt;Are you very tactful?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Interrogative: &lt;em&gt;How tactful are you?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exclamative: &lt;em&gt;How tactful you are!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imperative: &lt;em&gt;Be very tactful.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polite requests like the one you cited belong in the imperative category. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T16:09:52.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30843" CreationDate="2019-03-11T17:15:16.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are fewer academic jobs now compared to the 70's and 80's (in general), and the wave of &quot;baby boom&quot; retirements is just starting. Formal semantics is a &quot;later&quot; field and scholars in that field are comparatively young (in relationship to e.g. syntax). In one sense, there is little demand because it has already been filled. However, formal semantics is kind of a &quot;niche&quot; field, like phonology has been (there are typically more syntacticians than phonologists in a department), and for example Santa Cruz had multiple syntacticians and no phonologists so the syntacticians taught phonology until they finally hired a phonologist or two. In the really old days, it would be inconceivable that a linguistics department would not have an Indo-Europeanist, but the field changed and now few departments have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A complicating factor is that there it's not obvious what a &quot;formal semanticist&quot; is. The term &quot;formal&quot; is often taken to mean &quot;theoretical&quot;, but IMO &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; semantics means a theory of meaning where you can reduce linguistic utterances and their interpretations to a mathematical equation plus non-linguistic rules of logic. Many theoretical semanticists don't do that, or don't do that as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Demand for academic phonologists and semanticists is comparable, it appears to me. As Jlawler said, if you are a superstar, you might get a job. Otherwise, the odds are that you will need some number of related skills, for example computational linguistics or a language area, or both. This is because the best departments have one or two semantics classes at most, and the teaching load will need to be filled in with other stuff (remember: there are a lot of syntacticians out there). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can browse the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistlist.org/jobs/browse-jobs.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linguistlist job listings&lt;/a&gt; and see what's on offer now (it will be a tedious manual slog). I found one &quot;permanent&quot; academic job in Scotland that is for a semanticist (others are non-academic or 1 year nonrenewable). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T17:15:16.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28343" CreationDate="2019-03-11T19:31:05.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has no source except an undergraduate language history class, but…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned that the scripts were called Linear in opposition to Cuneiform (&quot;wedge-shaped&quot;), the other popular script found on clay tablets. Cuneiform characters are made by pressing a wedge-shaped stylus tip straight down into the clay, while linear characters are made by using a thinner stylus to &quot;draw&quot; in the surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T19:31:05.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30853" CreationDate="2019-03-11T21:23:41.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you base your segmentations on your perceptions, you will never make a good segmentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is normal to hear [de] when you play only [e] because [d] is a stop, so a &quot;silent&quot; sound. As [e] is preceded by a silence, so you get a sound it looks like [de]: [d] + [e] = silent + [e].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only trust the graphic representations of sound (signal, spectrogram, ...). Even with these graphics, it is not easy to find the phonetic units, because of the coarticulation. If you are not interested in the duration, the boundaries of your segment are not so important (few ms' of differences can be judged as negligible), while you embrace the steady part of your phonetic unit (when the articulators reach the place of articulation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T21:23:41.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30839" CreationDate="2019-03-11T22:19:48.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This was revised after some great feedback.)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your assertion is largely true, but not universally true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong candidates: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modal verbs (could, should, ...), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compound verbs (spread-eagle, roll-in-the-hay, ...),  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also tricky ones like 'manhandling' where many dictionaries won't recognize a noun variant, while others will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastEditorUserId="21043" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T14:37:12.030" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:37:12.030" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30838" CreationDate="2019-03-11T23:22:45.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston, Pullum &lt;em&gt;et al&lt;/em&gt;, 2002) describe three broad categories of ɪʟʟᴏᴄᴜᴛɪᴏɴᴀʀʏ ғᴏʀᴄᴇ with which a clause or sentence may be used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Question&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Directive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are meanings derived from the pragmatics of the utterance of a clause  within a given context. These categories of illocutionary force are neither primary, exclusive nor exhaustive. There are utterances which convey other types of illocutionary force, such  as promises, for example. And the three broad categories of illocutionary force may also be further subdivided into more finely grained categories. For example, a directive: &lt;em&gt;Chop the parsley&lt;/em&gt; may be uttered with the force of an instruction, a command, a request, advice and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closely related to the notion of illocutionary force is the syntactic system of  ᴄʟᴀᴜsᴇ ᴛʏᴘᴇs. These are syntactic categories of clause, which are broadly associated with different types of illocutionary force. The five major clause types in English are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;declarative (associated with &lt;em&gt;statements&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closed interrogative (associated with &lt;em&gt;closed questions&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open interrogative (associated with &lt;em&gt;open questions&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclamative (associated with &lt;em&gt;exclamative statements&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;imperative (associated with &lt;em&gt;directives&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we can see, imperatives are associated with directives. However, directives may also take the form of declarative, exclamative or interrogative clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of illocutionary force, a request is normally analysed as being a type of directive. When the Original Poster asks what type of sentence a request is, the answer is that in terms of illocutionary force, it is a type of directive. In terms of clause type it could be a declarative, closed or open interrogative, exlcamative or imperative clause. Notice that these pragmatic and syntactic categories are best applied to clauses, not sentences, because a single sentence may have different clauses belonging to different pragmatic and syntactic categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be great if you lent a hand, or are you busy right now? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence in the utterance above consists of a declarative directive and a closed interrogative question, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It is probably a good idea to consult a vetted grammar source instead of Wikipedia&amp;mdash;especially a Wikipedia entry that takes a definition of &lt;em&gt;sentence&lt;/em&gt; from Dictionary.Com as its  opening description, organising principle and source of linguistic categorization.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T01:00:58.550" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T01:00:58.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30853" CreationDate="2019-03-12T08:28:39.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I treat transitional phenomena, like burst or palatalization, as part of the consonant. Vowels normally have more or less stable formants, so if you want to get the formants, you need a clean period to analyze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T08:28:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30865" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:44:31.253" Score="24" ViewCount="2928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a Wikipedia article about the Slavey (Slave) language in Canada, and it says that Slavey has first, second, third and fourth person. I've never heard about a language having a fourth person, so I was just wondering if someone here knows when is this used and how it works? Or, since it isn't very likely you're familiar with this particular language, just in general, what does a fourth person in a language denote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T23:15:23.457" Title="Fourth person (in Slavey language)" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;american-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30864" CreationDate="2019-03-12T17:13:21.017" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fourth person is a (rare) synonym for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;obviative&lt;/a&gt;. In languages with this feature, when there are two third-person referents and one of them is less salient, the less salient one may be marked as obviative and the more salient one as proximative. According to Rice (1989), the fourth-person pronoun &lt;em&gt;go-&lt;/em&gt; is used for objects when the subject is third person (sorry, the source doesn't provide morpheme boundaries or a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, and I'm not familiar with American languages):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1)  nágoneht'u&#xA;     'S/he is hitting them(human).'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth-person pronoun &lt;em&gt;ye-&lt;/em&gt; is used for third-person direct nonhuman objects when the subject is third person, as a fourth-person possessor (Rice doesn't go into much detail about this use), and used for third-person oblique arguments whose subjects are animate and in the third person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(2) rígodéhtá&#xA;    'S/he is counting them(human).'&#xA;    (The e is nasalised - no idea how to type the Americanist symbol, sorry)&#xA;(3) yeyíe káidhah&#xA;    4.guts&#xA;    (Again, the i is nasalised, and the gloss for the second word is also missing in the main text.)&#xA;(4) yegts'é rádí&#xA;    4.to    3.gives.help&#xA;    'S/he helps him/her.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;Rice, K. (1989). &lt;em&gt;A grammar of Slave&lt;/em&gt;. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T18:19:23.257" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T18:19:23.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30864" CreationDate="2019-03-13T03:07:32.913" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a layman in linguistics I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/spec-tech-wait-who-hit-who/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this explanation&lt;/a&gt; pretty illuminating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, when we have a non-SAP (speech act participants) involved in the discourse, there is the potential for ambiguity. For example, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“John was in a tizzy last night and got into a fight with Bill. He hit him so hard that he broke his jaw.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it isn’t clear that who broke whose jaw.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with what’s called an “obviative” system, however, there is a means of marking two different 3rd persons such that the doer and the doee of an action are clear, even when there are only pronouns in the phrase. These two types are often called 3rd person (or “proximate”) and 4th person (or “obviate”). The details of these systems vary a bit from language to language, but in the broadest strokes, the proximate 3rd person is the topic of the discourse, while the obviative 4th person is used for everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on explaining the concept in more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2998" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T23:15:23.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-13T05:45:03.367" Score="2" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a conundrum here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm attempting to recreate the log-likelihood test example in 'The Cambridge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2015). However when I run the same test on the same data I get a different result in R. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 6 on collocation is by Richard Xiao and on page 111 (the end of section 2.2, table 6.1). He does a log-likelihood measure (LL) on data from the BNC. Specifically he uses a LL on the collocation &quot;sweet smell&quot; and on page 109 gives the following figures: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the BNC, for example, the frequency counts of sweet and smell are&#xA;  3,460 and 3,508 respectively in N (98,313,429) tokens, and the two&#xA;  words co-occur 90 times within the 8-word span&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back on page 111 he gives the following contingency table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/36oXT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/36oXT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I understand correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a = number of co-occurrences (90)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b = instances of the word 'sweet' (3460)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c = instances of the word 'smell' (3508)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d = total words in the corpus (983131429) - instances of 'sweet' and 'smell' so in total: (98306461)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then I run the following formula he gives on that same page in R:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;LL &amp;lt;- 2*(a*log(a)+b*log(b)+c*log(c)+d*log(d)&#xA;         -(a+b)*log(a+b)-(a+c)*log(a+c)-(b+d)*log(b+d)&#xA;         -(c+d)*log(c+d)+(a+b+c+d)*log(a+b+c+d))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LL score I get is ~620, Xiao reports a score of 688. So I wasn't too far off, but why was I off? I checked the syntax of the formula several times, even copied and pasted it out of the e-version of the book and I get the same result. I even tested this against the &lt;code&gt;LL.collostr&lt;/code&gt;function given in Levshina's 2015 book, which gives me an almost identical value of ~620.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my only guess is that I'm not interpreting the contingency table correctly. I fiddled around with it a little bit, setting d to the total number of words in the corpus, and a to the combination of all instances of 'sweet' and 'smell' but I get numbers even farther off by doing that, greater than 1000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's going on here? How am I supposed to interpret that contingency table? Xiao doesn't give a lot of details on that table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# III. Log-likelihood&#xA;&#xA;#a = co-occurrence tokens (sweet smell)&#xA;a &amp;lt;- 90&#xA;#b = word A tokens (sweet)&#xA;b &amp;lt;- 3460&#xA;#word B tokens (smell)&#xA;c &amp;lt;- 3508&#xA;#total words in corpus minus A and B&#xA;d &amp;lt;- 98313429 - (b+c)&#xA;&#xA;LL1 &amp;lt;- 2*(a*log(a)+b*log(b)+c*log(c)+d*log(d)&#xA;         -(a+b)*log(a+b)-(a+c)*log(a+c)-(b+d)*log(b+d)&#xA;         -(c+d)*log(c+d)+(a+b+c+d)*log(a+b+c+d))&#xA;&#xA;library(Rling)&#xA;&#xA;LL2 &amp;lt;- LL.collostr(a, b, c, d)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;REFERENCES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biber, D., &amp;amp; Reppen, R. (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139764377&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do Linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. doi:10.1075/z.195.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14709" LastEditorUserId="14709" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T18:46:15.500" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T18:46:15.500" Title="Collocation: interpreting contingency table for log-likelihood measure" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30872" CreationDate="2019-03-13T18:12:56.880" Score="6" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics differs in studying languages from other fields such as English, French and so on, by concentrating on theoretical parts that are shared by all languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder when was the first time that linguistics departments were established in major universities, i.e. what time linguistics was considered as a separate field from other individual languages. Were (most) linguistics departments set up in 1950s after Chomsky's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastEditorUserId="22765" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T03:23:19.500" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T03:23:19.500" Title="When were linguistics departments first established" Tags="&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30871" CreationDate="2019-03-13T19:15:58.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, before Chomsky. I have a vague recollection that Leonard Bloomfield helped establish an early department with &quot;linguistics&quot; in its name, but I can't find that.  However, note &quot;linguistics&quot; in the titles of some of his professorships, e.g. &quot;Professor of German and Linguistics at the Ohio State University, 1921-1927&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bloomfield#Career&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonard Bloomfield&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it. In 1901 the first department of linguistics was established at the U. of California, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lx.berkeley.edu/about/history-berkeley-linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of Berkeley Linguistics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T19:31:00.573" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T19:31:00.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30871" CreationDate="2019-03-13T21:28:52.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Ferdinand de Saussure started teaching general linguistics in Geneva circa 1892. Before that, he taught Gothic and Old German in Paris starting in 1881.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T21:28:52.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21332" CreationDate="2019-03-13T22:52:39.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Raymond Hickey's &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Irish English&lt;/em&gt; is a good place to start although there is no computer-readable one that I know of. &lt;em&gt;A Sound Atlas of Irish English&lt;/em&gt; by the same author may be the closest thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21137" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T22:52:39.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2019-03-13T23:31:58.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another point, usually overlooked, is that as soon as a language has a literature of some description, a part of it (rhythmic poems/prose, untranslatable wordplays, etc.) is irretrievably lost when the language dies. I'd be more concerned about this than not knowing what some particular word was or meant. Valuable texts are routinely lost in living languages too, but the loss is much starker when there's already in principle no-one who could appreciate them -- losing not only a source but also an entire way for an unknown, possibly sublime influence for good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T21:59:22.030" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T21:59:22.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30871" CreationDate="2019-03-14T01:57:20.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, there were linguistics departments &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; Chomsky all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harvard U: 1941&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;St. Petersburg U (Russia): since 1932 known as the Department of General Linguistics; goes back to 1863, originally known as the Department of Indo-European Comparative Studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T01:57:20.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T10:35:39.710" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in the words tin - can, taxi - cab, autumn - fall, lift - elevator, etc. Would these be considered as absolute synonyms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24139" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T13:21:40.913" Title="Are synonyms belonging to different dialects &quot;absolute synonyms&quot;?" Tags="&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T19:21:39.157" Score="8" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an accepted name for a derivational process applied to a verb which conveys the meaning &amp;quot;feign or pretend to do sth&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a corollary, is anyone aware of any languages (especially non-polysynthetic ones) that possess such a derivational process (e.g. using an affix)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know of one already, Iñupiatun Eskimo, in which the affix &lt;em&gt;-ŋŋuaq-&lt;/em&gt; does this, cf. the full verb stem &lt;em&gt;piŋŋuaq-&lt;/em&gt; (Seiler 2012: &lt;em&gt;s.vv.&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qichaq atu&lt;strong&gt;ŋŋuaq&lt;/strong&gt;tuq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qichaq pretends to sing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Iñupiatun Eskimo has such a huge number of derivational affixes that it is a different kind of animal to less extremely polysynthetic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Seiler, Wolf A. 2012. &lt;em&gt;Iñupiatun Eskimo Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (Language and Culture Documentation and Description 16). SIL International.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T17:32:09.050" Title="Name for a verb form meaning &quot;feign or pretend to do sth&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-14T19:29:25.043" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently discovered extraction of parts of speech and I'd like to see what I can get from patterns once a sentence is POS tagged. I am aware that some sentences will be difficult to categorise but in terms of basic sentence categories there must be ways of saying this is a question or this is an imperative etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone could direct me to what the basic sentence categories are and whether POS tag patterns can help derive this that would be a great reading starting point for me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T20:37:44.510" Title="How to derive that a sentence is a question from parts of speech" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;pos-tagging&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30881" CreationDate="2019-03-14T19:54:11.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The approach to grammar you are interested in seems to me to be  similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagmeme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tagmemics&lt;/a&gt;, so you might be interested in looking that up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T19:54:11.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30881" CreationDate="2019-03-14T20:32:24.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a part of speech perspective, you'll be interested in the the tags that begin with &quot;W&quot; found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the PoS tags won't be enough. Consder a sentence like, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob is the person &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; ate the cake. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence isn't interrogative but the &quot;who&quot; will trigger the PoS logic. Hence, you might use a dependency model to look at how the word is used grammatically. Enter the same sentence into this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://corenlp.run/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://corenlp.run/&lt;/a&gt; and look at the 'enhanced ++ dependencies&quot;. You'll notice that &quot;who&quot; has an arrow back to &quot;person&quot; (these are adjective clauses introduced by relative pronouns; you can skip over these). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other cases like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the cake was gone, I was sad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the PoS logic will trigger, but you can add some code to see if the phrase modifies the verb. If it does, then it's likely an adverbial phrase (and can be skipped).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many question words will follow a preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For what reason did XXX ... &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are the yes/no and tag questions. These use auxiliary/modal verbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is Tom smart?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does Bob eat pizza?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can (could/would/should) Sue go to the beach?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob ate the pizza, didn't he?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(within the clause, no subject precedes the aux verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastEditorUserId="21043" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T20:37:44.510" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T20:37:44.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30880" CreationDate="2019-03-15T12:31:37.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I wrote in a comment, this is one of the functions of the Biblical Hebrew Dt (hitpael) stem, but the two reference grammars I had a look at do not agree on terminology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Waltke and O'Connor (An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, §26.2f):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;estimative-declarative reflexive&lt;/em&gt; is the counterpart to the &lt;em&gt;Piel&lt;/em&gt;'s use to esteem someone as in a state or to declare someone as existing in a state; the &lt;em&gt;Hithpael&lt;/em&gt; may denote esteeming or presenting oneself in a state, sometimes without regard to the question of truthfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Joüon and Muraoka (A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, §53i):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The hitpael] sometimes has the &quot;simulating&quot; nuance of &lt;em&gt;to disguise oneself as&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to show oneself&lt;/em&gt; (truly or falsely) &lt;em&gt;to be such and such&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples (taken from both) include pretending to be ill (2 Samuel 13:5,6), feigning to be a mourner (2 Samuel 14:2); acting like a drunkard (1 Samuel 1:14); pretending to be rich (Proverbs 13:7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have the terms &quot;estimative-declarative reflexive&quot; and &quot;simulating nuance&quot;. Perhaps scholars of this language don't need a widespread term because the meaning is rather transparent (it is a combination of that of the factitive/declarative D stem and the reflexive &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; infix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T12:31:37.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30899" CreationDate="2019-03-15T13:25:36.407" Score="11" ViewCount="4373" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English there's the vowel sound /ɪ/ as in &quot;bin&quot; and /i(ː)/ as in &quot;been&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My girlfriend, who is Greek, cannot perceive the difference, but to me they sound very different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the difference really only the length of the vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I hold the vowel in &quot;bin&quot;, it doesn't sound at all like &quot;been&quot; to me, but is that down to me starting out knowing what word I'm trying to say, and so I'm primed to hear &quot;bin&quot; over &quot;been&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="130" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T15:29:01.877" Title="What's the difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30886" CreationDate="2019-03-15T13:39:37.193" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;They aren't just different in length. In fact, depending on the context, an occurrence of the phoneme /i(ː)/ might be phonetically shorter than an occurrence of the phoneme /ɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, English /ɪ/ is pronounced as IPA [ɪ], and English /i(ː)/ is pronounced somewhere around IPA [i], [ɪi], [ɪj]. The IPA symbols [ɪ] and [i] represent vowels of different &quot;qualities&quot;, not just different lengths. Vowel quality is related to the position of certain parts of the tongue during the pronunciation of the vowel, and it can be thought of as mainly involving two dimensions, &quot;closeness&quot; (also known as &quot;height&quot;) and &quot;frontness/backness&quot;. These can be plotted against each other to get a  visual depiction of a &quot;vowel space&quot;, which is often depicted as a trapezoid or triangle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vowel [ɪ] is opener than [i] (or equivalently, the vowel [i] is closer than [ɪ]). This means that the tongue is supposed to get closer to the top of the mouth when pronouncing [i]. You can express the same idea in different words by saying that the vowel [ɪ] is lower than [i] (or equivalently, that the vowel [i] is higher than [ɪ]).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vowel [ɪ] is also generally said to be less front than /i/, although it's a bit harder for me to define what this means in physiological terms. (The simplified explanation is just that the back of the tongue is more involved in pronouncing [ɪ].)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a transcription like [ɪi] or [ɪj] for /i(ː)/ represents that the vowels /i(ː)/ and /ɪ/ often differ not only by having different qualities (i.e. different positions in the vowel space), but also by having different &quot;trajectories&quot; for their qualities over time: /i(ː)/ tends to become closer towards the end, with an &quot;offglide&quot; that resembles the approximant /j/  (the &quot;y&quot;-sound of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;ellow&lt;/em&gt;). The /ɪ/ sound typically doesn't have this y-like offglide. (In some circumstances, /ɪ/ might actually become more open towards its end, which could be transcribed as something like [ɪə]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can measure the acoustic quality of a vowel by looking at the position of its &quot;formants&quot; on a spectrogram. For example, the closer a vowel is, the lower its first formant will be. You can see pictures and more explanation on this page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#formants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#formants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T00:12:17.787" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T00:12:17.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T13:56:39.837" Score="7" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was talking today with an English co-worker about whether he says &quot;an H-1B visa&quot; or &quot;a H-1B visa&quot;, which hinges on whether one says &quot;aitch&quot; or &quot;haitch&quot; for the letter H.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I noticed that unlike other languages such as German or French or Romanian that change the indefinite article based on things like gender or case, in English we change the indefinite article based on the &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; of the following word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages that change the indefinite or definite article based on what the following word &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24144" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T14:50:19.413" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T20:47:54.830" Title="Are there other languages, besides English, where the indefinite (or definite) article varies based on sound?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-15T14:48:06.883" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A famous example is the Arabic language where the the definite article &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; assimilates to one half of the potential following consonants called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_and_moon_letters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sun letters&lt;/a&gt; in Arabic grammar. So it is &lt;em&gt;an-Nil&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the Nile&quot; or &lt;em&gt;ash-shams&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the sun&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;al-qamar&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the moon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T14:54:28.137" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T14:54:28.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30900" CreationDate="2019-03-15T15:30:28.137" Score="4" ViewCount="845" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dependency Parsing seems to be present in most of the NLP toolkits out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear and what I have trouble finding in Google is what are actual practical, or even research, applications of parsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24145" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-03-16T05:38:29.230" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T05:55:36.387" Title="What are uses of Dependency Parsing in NLP / Computational Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:10:09.913" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italian, both the indefinite and the definite article change in spelling and pronunciation depending on the following sound, in the masculine gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before vowels, the masculine indefinite article is &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt; and the definite article is &lt;em&gt;l'&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elision&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un albero&lt;/em&gt; (a tree), &lt;em&gt;l'albero&lt;/em&gt; (the tree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before single consonants or consonants followed by semivowels or liquids, the masculine indefinite article is &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt; but the definite article is &lt;em&gt;il&lt;/em&gt;, and this includes the affricate consonants /t͡ʃ/ (spelled 'c' before 'i' or 'e') and /d͡ʒ/ (spelled 'g' before 'i' or 'e'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un ramo&lt;/em&gt; (a branch), &lt;em&gt;il ramo&lt;/em&gt; (the branch)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un fiore&lt;/em&gt; (a flower), &lt;em&gt;il fiore&lt;/em&gt; (the flower)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un treno&lt;/em&gt; (a train), &lt;em&gt;il treno&lt;/em&gt; (the train)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un cielo&lt;/em&gt; (a sky), &lt;em&gt;il cielo&lt;/em&gt; (the sky)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un gioco&lt;/em&gt; (a game), &lt;em&gt;il gioco&lt;/em&gt; (the game)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before double consonants (generally 's' followed by a consonant, but other combinations arise in loanwords, especially of Greek origin, including with the double consonant 'x'), and before 'z' which is pronounced as the affricate /t͡s/ or /d͡z/, the masculine indefinite article is &lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt; and the definite article is &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno spazio&lt;/em&gt; (a space), &lt;em&gt;lo spazio&lt;/em&gt; (the space)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno psicologo&lt;/em&gt; (a psychologist), &lt;em&gt;lo psicologo&lt;/em&gt; (the psychologist)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno xilofono&lt;/em&gt; (a xylophone), &lt;em&gt;lo xilofono&lt;/em&gt; (the xylophone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno zaino&lt;/em&gt; (a backpack), &lt;em&gt;lo zaino&lt;/em&gt; (the backpack)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feminine articles are &lt;em&gt;una&lt;/em&gt; (indefinite) and &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; (definite), but they get elided into &lt;em&gt;un'&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;l'&lt;/em&gt; before vowels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;una foglia&lt;/em&gt; (a leaf), &lt;em&gt;la foglia&lt;/em&gt; (the leaf)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un'ombra&lt;/em&gt; (a shadow), &lt;em&gt;l'ombra&lt;/em&gt; (the shadow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These changes are not dependent on the noun the article connects to, but the sound immediately following it, so for example we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;l'albero&lt;/em&gt; (the tree), but &lt;em&gt;il grande albero&lt;/em&gt; (the big tree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un gioco&lt;/em&gt; (a game), but &lt;em&gt;uno speciale gioco&lt;/em&gt; (a special game)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno zaino&lt;/em&gt; (a backpack), but &lt;em&gt;un piccolo zaino&lt;/em&gt; (a small backpack)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;una foglia&lt;/em&gt; (a leaf), but &lt;em&gt;un'altra foglia&lt;/em&gt; (another leaf)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;un'ombra&lt;/em&gt; (a shadow), but &lt;em&gt;una cupa ombra&lt;/em&gt; (a dark shadow)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These behaviors can be at least partly explained by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonotactics&lt;/a&gt; of Italian: whenever &lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt; is used, the phonotactic constraints wouldn't allow for &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt; unless the 'n' were dropped entirely; the same issue gives rise to &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;il&lt;/em&gt;, which look very different on the surface, but both come from different parts of the Latin word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/illum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;illum&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;illud&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a demonstrative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The elided forms with an apostrophe can be explained by a tendency to eschew &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hiatus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T01:23:11.580" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T01:23:11.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:14:26.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Catalan masculine singular definite articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/l/ before a vowel sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;/el/ before anything else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What triggers this allomorphy is clearly the &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt;, as we see &lt;strong&gt;l'interval&lt;/strong&gt; /linteɾval/ but &lt;strong&gt;el iode&lt;/strong&gt; /eljod/, because of the glide /j/. Also &lt;strong&gt;l'hivern&lt;/strong&gt; /liveɾn/ but &lt;strong&gt;el hiat&lt;/strong&gt; /eljat/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is pretty common to &quot;change the indefinite or definite article (&lt;em&gt;that's called allomorphy&lt;/em&gt;) based on what the following word sounds like&quot; in many languages. Italian has three masculine singular definite articles, /el/, /lo/, and /l/, depending on the following sound. In English, the definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced /ðə/ or /ðiː/, sometimes even /ðɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the point of interest for you comes from the arbitrary insertion/dropping of /h/, not from the allomorphy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23880" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T16:14:26.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30894" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:37:44.343" Score="0" ViewCount="1081" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a difficult time drawing the chart for the word &quot;dissatisfaction&quot;. &quot;Action&quot; is not a suffix, so if you would combine satisf(y) + action to get &quot;satisfaction&quot;, you would have two roots. This seems unlikely to me, is it possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I just overthinking this, and the root is just &quot;satisfaction&quot; with &quot;dis-&quot; as a prefix?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24146" LastEditorUserId="24146" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T01:48:34.410" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T11:22:17.557" Title="Dissatisfaction" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30893" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:50:36.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to analyze &quot;satisfaction&quot; as a non-simple form, the etymology-based way of doing it would be &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; + the nominalizing suffix &lt;em&gt;-(t)ion,&lt;/em&gt; with a contextual change of &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; to an allomorph &quot;satisfac-&quot; in this context. (I wrote &lt;em&gt;-(t)ion&lt;/em&gt; because it's not entirely clear whether the &quot;t&quot; should be interpreted as part of the suffix; it also shows up in words with other endings like &lt;em&gt;satisfactory.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin source of &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; had a C in the stem; sound changes caused this to be lost in French (the proximate source of the word &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt;), but it shows up in the related noun. The noun &quot;action&quot; is unrelated. We see a similar phenomenon of English verbs and related &lt;em&gt;-tion&lt;/em&gt; nouns having different &quot;stems&quot; with e.g. &lt;em&gt;destroy, destruction&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;conceive, conception.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like using etymology as a criterion for the present-day morphological structure of English words, you could just analyze &quot;satisfaction&quot; as a &quot;portmanteau morph&quot; for the morpheme &lt;em&gt;satisfy&lt;/em&gt; + whatever nominalizing morpheme is present in abstract nouns that end in &lt;em&gt;-tion.&lt;/em&gt; The concept of a &quot;portmanteau morph&quot; is that you don't have to identify which part of the form corresponds to which morpheme (unit of meaning); rather, you just say that the combination of the two morphemes corresponds to some unitary form (in this case, &quot;satisfaction&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether &lt;em&gt;dis-&lt;/em&gt; should be analyzed as attaching to the verb (forming &lt;em&gt;dissatisfy,&lt;/em&gt; which is then nominalized) or the noun &lt;em&gt;satisfaction&lt;/em&gt; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T16:55:36.893" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T16:55:36.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30893" CreationDate="2019-03-15T18:53:32.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Etymologically, the word &lt;em&gt;dissatisfaction&lt;/em&gt; is formed by these Latin elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;dis-&lt;/em&gt;, a prefix often indicating &quot;undoing&quot; or &quot;lack of&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;satis&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;enough&quot;, &quot;sufficiently&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;fac-&lt;/em&gt;, the root of the verb &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;to do&quot; or &quot;to make&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-tion(em)&lt;/em&gt;, a nominalizing suffix.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;em&gt;satis&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;facio&lt;/em&gt; formed a verb &lt;em&gt;satisfacio&lt;/em&gt; that you could gloss as &quot;to make sufficient&quot;, or simply &quot;to satisfy&quot;; when you add the nominalizing suffix, that becomes &lt;em&gt;satisfaction(em)&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;the state of being satisfied&quot;. When you add the negative prefix, that turns into &quot;the state of being unsatisfied&quot;, so, &quot;dissatisfaction&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T18:53:32.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T19:57:37.457" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/14/soft-foods-helped-humans-form-f-and-v-sounds-research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Guardian&lt;/a&gt;, there is an article on cultural  determinants of phonological feature choice. &lt;a href=&quot;http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6432/eaav3218&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A recent article in Science&lt;/a&gt; supposedly supports the hypothesis that the existence of labiodental fricatives, namely 'f' and 'v', appear in languages of societies that favor cooking over raw food (cultivation vs hunter-gatherer). That is, that there are extant linguistic behaviors that are due to &quot;changes in dietary and behavioral practices since the Neolithic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two articles both refer to an article by Charles Hockett around 1984 that sets forth the hypothesis by using an inventory of languages and noticing that those that have an 'f' were from slightly different anthropological situations than those without.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple question here is not what is the strength of the evidence, if there are other phonological phenomena with similar cultural determinants, etc etc, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where can one find this original article by Charles Hockett?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science is behind a paywall so I can't see the bibliographical reference in the Blasi article in Science. And a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=charles+hockett+publications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;google search&lt;/a&gt; gives only partial list of Hockett's publications. Is there a list of all publications by author in linguistics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T21:47:02.657" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:47:02.657" Title="Charles Hockett - 'F' article?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30896" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:18:28.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the citation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hockett, C. F. (1985). Distinguished lecture: F. &lt;em&gt;American Anthropologist&lt;/em&gt;, 87(2), 263-281.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/678561.pdf?casa_token=T2kZVzHuHoIAAAAA:Cz0tdiMFVrDf6eaYCGVB3ggTHHQuaWzC8QaUInIXhjKjtTUkzhkT17x9bziAIK21rBqE4EPE_YoadBq3wdHYT2yZUdFHDCU4r1jtn5tDnpglfgdJ9RB-&amp;amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but it's also behind a paywall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Scholar profiles, personal webpages and CVs are the most common places where we find publication lists of a certain author, though this doesn't work for Hockett, who passed away in 2000 and presumably didn't put these up on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T20:18:28.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-15T21:22:11.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite similarly to Italian (see @LjL very complete answer) and a few other Romance languages, French does this for indefinite and definite articles, but not really the same way English does, in the sense that what we call &quot;Liaison&quot; is very common, though it rarely changes the writing of the articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indefinite articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Un&lt;/strong&gt; verre /&lt;strong&gt;œ̃&lt;/strong&gt; vɛʁ/ (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; glass)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Un&lt;/strong&gt; arbre /&lt;strong&gt;œ̃.n&lt;/strong&gt;‿aʁbʁ/ (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; tree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both mean &quot;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; but the second one will have its N pronounced as a &quot;transition&quot; letter between the /œ̃/ and the /a/ to avoid hiatus. The writing is unchanged, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar process happens with the definite article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le&lt;/strong&gt; verre /&lt;strong&gt;lə&lt;/strong&gt; vɛʁ/ (&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; glass)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;L&lt;/strong&gt;'arbre /&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;‿aʁbʁ/ (&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; tree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;le&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; becomes &quot;&lt;strong&gt;l'&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, again to avoid hiatus, but this time the writing changes to reflect the absence of the E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only written a few examples, but this process also happens for a plethora of other articles, in a similar fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it happens, but the writing only gets modified if a sound disappears completely because of the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24148" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:22:11.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30886" CreationDate="2019-03-16T01:07:26.323" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5zkEL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5zkEL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the difference is not just&amp;mdash;or even primarily&amp;mdash;one of duration. Although in any given environment /i:/ wil be longer than /ɪ/, their environments radically affect their durations. Because of this, the realisation of /i:/  in some environments will be shorter than that of /ɪ/ in others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The difference between realisations of /i:/ and /ɪ/&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that /i:/ for most speakers will be consistently and reliably  longer than /ɪ/ in the same situation, this is not the most significant difference between  the realisations of these two vowels. They are &lt;em&gt;qualitatively&lt;/em&gt; different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just behind your teeth, you can feel it with your tongue, there is a little shelf that slopes slightly upwards. This is your alveolar ridge. Behind this, your mouth suddenly arches upwards to form the roof of your mouth. Now, if you feel just behind this ridge with your tongue you will be able to feel that this part of your mouth is hard and boney. This part of the roof of your mouth is your ʜᴀʀᴅ ᴘᴀʟᴀᴛᴇ. If you carry on exploring further backwards with the tip of your tongue (it gets a bit ticklish) you will feel that the roof of your mouth becomes soft and tissuey. This tissuey part of the roof of your mouth is your sᴏғᴛ ᴘᴀʟᴀᴛᴇ. This change happens about half way back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When most speakers make an /i:/, that part of their tongue directly below where your hard and soft palate meet rises up very close to the roof of the mouth. If you are an RP (Southern Standard British English) speaker, it will come so close to the roof of your mouth that if it got much closer, it would cause the air passing through to become turbulent and would effectively turn the sound into a consonant. If you speak General American, then the gap between your tongue and the roof of your mouth will be ever so slightly bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most speakers, when they produce an /&amp;NoBreak;ɪ/, the gap between their tongue and the roof of their mouths will be significantly bigger than it would be for /i:/. It will be nowhere near close enough to cause any turbulence. In addition that part of the tongue that will rise up towards the roof of the mouth will be some millimetres further back from that part that would rise up for /i:/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Original Poster's partner&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to realise that what I have described are typical realisations . So a given realisation of /i:/ might be varying degrees lower than IPA [i], and a realisation of /ɪ/ might be higher or lower or more front or more back than IPA [ɪ]. (I haven't talked at all about the diphthongalisation of /i:/, because I'm not sure it is helpful here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that the Original Poster (OP) can hear this difference in vowel quality, but their partner can't, is that in English this difference in vowel quality leads to a difference in meaning. So there are words in English which can be clearly distinguished solely because of this relatively very small difference in the highness and frontness of the vowel produced by a speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for a speaker of Greek, both of the sounds that might be produced by an English speaker aiming for /ɪ/ or /i:/ would be understood to be variations of the same Greek phoneme. It is extraordinarily rare for a language to have two separate high front vowels. Whether a (typical) Greek speaker listens to a pronunciation of /ɪ/ or /i:/, their language brain will map both  sounds onto the Greek I phoneme. So, for example, the words &lt;em&gt;piss&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;peace&lt;/em&gt; will both sound like the word πεις for a Greek speaker, which is the subjunctive of the verb &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if an English speaker wanted to help another non-native speaker hear the difference between the two vowels, there usually is a safe way to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A majority of languages have a high front vowel and a mid front vowel. For a vast majority of speakers these would be thought of as I and E respectively. The I vowel in these languages is typically between English /i:/ and  /ɪ/. Greek happens to be one of these languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to help such a speaker hear the difference, show them that if you give them a triplet of words such as &lt;em&gt;beat, bit, bet&lt;/em&gt; (/bi:t, bɪt, bet/, respectively), they will be able to hear that &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; is closer to &lt;em&gt;bet&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;beat&lt;/em&gt; is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Footnote:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;An interesting fact about the phonology of the word &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; in RP: when it is stressed, or occasionaly when it's the last word in a sentence, it's pronounced /bi:n/&amp;mdash;just like the word &lt;em&gt;bean&lt;/em&gt;. However, it is usually neither stressed nor the last word in a sentence. In these circumstances, it is usually pronounced /bɪn/&amp;mdash;just like the word &lt;em&gt;bin&lt;/em&gt;. English is weird, isn't it?&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-10-01T15:29:01.877" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T15:29:01.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30890" CreationDate="2019-03-16T05:55:36.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parsing is mostly an important building block used for improving the performance of downstream tasks, not as an application per se. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, if we are training NER, it helps to hint to the model what the parser guesses the noun phrases are.  Similar for dialogue systems, translation and so on.  See also: &lt;em&gt;POS language model&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old days (before 2015 or so) parsing was typically an early step in a pipeline.  Nowadays with end-to-end models it could be used to create the representation, either by marking up the text before vectorising, or as an additional vector.  But anecdotally I can say that in the early days of deep learning mania raw text vector input had a lot of appeal, now we are in a phase of adding back a few of the things like parse trees and parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, the point is: a good parsing model has been trained on very large datasets, so your model can effectively incorporate all that knowledge of the world, for an aspect of language that generalises reasonably well across a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T05:55:36.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30903" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:11:17.007" Score="-6" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of a sound shift law under which the German consonant &quot;c&quot; changes to the English &quot;g&quot;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ma&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; mi&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Na&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; ni&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;hter -&gt; dau&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;hter;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;fe&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;hten -&gt; fi&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;re&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; ri&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Li&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; li&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Si&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; si&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Pfli&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; pli&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Fra&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; frei&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Gewi&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; wei&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;di&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; ti&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Flu&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; fli&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht;&lt;br&gt; &#xA;Bu&lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;ht -&gt; bi&lt;strong&gt;g&lt;/strong&gt;ht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23897" LastEditorDisplayName="user23897" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T14:22:57.817" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T17:40:25.373" Title="The German consonant &quot;c&quot; changes to the English &quot;g&quot;" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30905" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:49:54.130" Score="-1" ViewCount="490" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of a sound shift law under which the German vowel &quot;a&quot; changes to the English &quot;i&quot;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;cht -&gt; m&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ght;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;N&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;cht -&gt; n&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ght&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23900" LastEditorDisplayName="user23900" LastEditDate="2019-03-16T17:57:38.677" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T18:48:31.283" Title="The German vowel “a” changes to the English “i”" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30901" CreationDate="2019-03-16T18:30:25.700" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll notice that all of these words include &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; in German and &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt; in English. These originally represented the same sound: a &lt;em&gt;voiceless velar fricative&lt;/em&gt;, written as &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (It's the final sound in &lt;em&gt;lo&lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, if you pronounce that different from &lt;em&gt;lock&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both English and German inherited this consonant from Proto-Germanic, where it's written &lt;code&gt;*h&lt;/code&gt;. (The star is because Proto-Germanic itself was never written down, it's a scholarly reconstruction: &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; is just the letter scholars use when talking about it.) It often came from Proto-Indo-European &lt;code&gt;*k&lt;/code&gt; through Grimm's Law, though there were other sources as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, that sound was written &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;, and has survived pretty much untouched until modern times. In English, however, the sound was written &lt;em&gt;gh&lt;/em&gt;. And somewhere between Chaucer and Shakespeare, it disappeared entirely: this is called &lt;em&gt;H-loss&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;taught-taut merger&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Different dialects did different things with the &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; when it disappeared. Some turned it into &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt; after back vowels, which is how we get &lt;em&gt;laugh&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tough&lt;/em&gt;. Others lengthened a preceding vowel, which is why &lt;em&gt;light&lt;/em&gt; has a &quot;long i&quot; sound. Scots still preserves &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; even to the modern day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T17:40:25.373" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T17:40:25.373" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-16T18:43:54.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the famous examples in Europe and the Mediterranean have been mentioned, but we should add the languages where the definite article is simply a suffix, for example the core languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, like Albanian and Romanian, and Armenian, which works very much like they do in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish does not really have an article but objects are marked for definiteness with a suffix.  In that case the connector varies but also the vowel, because of vowel harmony.  So &lt;em&gt;-u&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-yu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt;... are all realisations of the same morpheme, and it varies according to a vowel that need not even be directly adjacent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T18:43:54.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30902" CreationDate="2019-03-16T18:48:31.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sound changes happen from an ancestor language to a descendant language, not from one modern language to another. However, in this case, German seems to have preserved the vowels from Proto-Germanic pretty faithfully, while English hasn't. So it's still valid to talk about a shift from PGmc &lt;code&gt;*a&lt;/code&gt; to OE &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key here is called &lt;em&gt;Anglo-Frisian brightening&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;code&gt;*a&lt;/code&gt; shifted forward to something like &lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt; in most environments. In Old English, front vowels then got raised before &lt;code&gt;/xt/&lt;/code&gt;. This is why vowels before English &lt;em&gt;ght&lt;/em&gt; are generally higher than before German &lt;em&gt;cht&lt;/em&gt;: see also &lt;em&gt;recht~right&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-OE, the &lt;code&gt;/x/&lt;/code&gt; disappeared and lengthened the vowel in compensation, giving something like &lt;code&gt;/ni:t/&lt;/code&gt;. The Great Vowel Shift then turned this into modern &lt;code&gt;/najt/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T18:48:31.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="552" CreationDate="2019-03-17T01:28:27.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages besides Modern Standard Mandarin that are thought to have apical vowels include &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2483&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuosu&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2578&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lisu&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2533&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ersu&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2539&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shixing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2548&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Achang&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2560&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ahi&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is argued in &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100314000267&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; that the appropriate analysis of Modern Standard Mandarin &quot;apical vowels&quot; is as syllabic approximants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the vowel in pinyin &lt;em&gt;zhi chi shi ri&lt;/em&gt; (traditionally ʅ) is argued to be ɻ̩ (ɻ with syllabic diacritic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the vowel in pinyin &lt;em&gt;zi ci si&lt;/em&gt; (traditionally ʅ) is argued to be be ɹ̪̩ (ɹ with dental and syllabic diacritics)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T01:28:27.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-17T09:06:27.477" Score="-3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the name of a sound shift law under which the Proto-Germanic vowel &quot;e&quot; changes to the English &quot;i&quot;, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*f&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;htaną (f&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;chten) -&gt; f&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ght;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;*r&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;htaz (r&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;cht) -&gt; r&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ght&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24157" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T00:26:30.957" Title="The Proto-Germanic vowel “e” changes to the English “i”" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30913" CreationDate="2019-03-18T00:26:30.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30905/10559&quot;&gt;this other answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Old English, front vowels […] got raised before &lt;code&gt;/xt/&lt;/code&gt;. This is why vowels before English &lt;em&gt;ght&lt;/em&gt; are generally higher than before German &lt;em&gt;cht&lt;/em&gt;: see also &lt;em&gt;recht~right&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T00:26:30.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30922" CreationDate="2019-03-18T15:39:05.380" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages, besides Old Slavonic, with adjectives ending with pronoun, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;добрый /dobryj/ he who is good;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;доброе /dobrojo/ it which is good;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;добрую /dobruju/ she who is good;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;добрыя /dobryja/ they who are good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24163" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T17:21:01.843" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:42:09.033" Title="Are there other languages, besides Old Slavonic, with adjectives ending with pronoun?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30920" CreationDate="2019-03-18T16:53:03.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These adjectives do not end in a pronoun, they end in a case ending. These are nominative case endings, which just so happen to be identical to certain nominative pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T16:53:03.327" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30920" CreationDate="2019-03-18T17:11:59.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian, which is related to but not descended from Slavic languages, is also supposed to have &quot;pronominal adjectives&quot;, according to this web page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://babaev.tripod.com/archive/grammar11.html#4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Historical Grammar of Lithuanian language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That page indicates that pronominal adjectives don't exist in Indo-European languages outside of Baltic and Slavic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the same thing, but a somewhat similar phenomenon that does exist outside of Baltic or Slavic languages is the use of a definite article with an attributive adjective. This shows up in Greek, and I think I remember reading about it occurring in some Germanic language (possibly a type of Yiddish). Outside of Indo-European, you can find definite articles affixed or cliticized to adjectives in Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Obviously, this is different in that the noun also is marked with the definite marker, and the definite marker is not a pronoun. However, definite articles and pronouns often do have some similarities. Another difference is that all of the languages that I mentioned in this paragraph put the definite marker at the start, not at the end of the adjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ung.si/~rzaucer/papers/MarusicZaucer-2007-Adjectival-definite-article-in-Slo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slovenian&lt;/a&gt; uses &quot;ta&quot;, which is apparently the same in form as a demonstrative pronoun, as something often called an &quot;adjectival definite article&quot;. Unlike the examples in the previous paragraph, it apparently can't be used with a bare noun. Slovenian is a Slavic language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germanic languages generally, there is the phenomenon of attributive adjectives having &quot;strong&quot; or &quot;weak&quot; inflection depending on the presence of a definite article. It seems that the &quot;strong&quot; inflectional suffixes are somehow related to demonstrative pronouns. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/61af/0d95fd09b3e47402c2c3a479f329dcfa5d2b.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The adjective in Germanic and Romance Development, Differences and Similarities&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Freek Van de Velde, Petra Sleeman &amp;amp; Harry Perridon, says &quot;The origin of the [Germanic] strong inflection [...] is the endings in the demonstratives, which rubbed off onto other elements, through an intermediate group of semi-pronouns (Kluge 1913: 209; Prokosch 1939:&#xA;261; McFadden 2009)&quot; (p. 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T17:42:09.033" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:42:09.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-18T18:12:33.203" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am exploring the financial-related &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ECPJMxV2wSalXG8ykMmkpa1fq_ur0Rf/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; of Loughran and McDonald. &#xA;I want to calculate the TF-IDF weighting of the words within the dictionary. I use the following formula, based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/ADG_Cons2015_Loughran%20McDonald%20JE%202011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt; &quot;When Is a Liability Not a Liability&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O28zz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O28zz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1:&lt;/strong&gt; Which value should I use for &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; (the total number of 10-Ks in the sample)? If I use the cleaned (50,115) or the raw (121,217) number of 10-Ks, I get negative values for some words. For example, the word “almost” has a value of 126,738 for Doc Count. However, &lt;code&gt;log(121,217 / 126,738)&lt;/code&gt; yields a negative value which is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2:&lt;/strong&gt; What does column E and F of the master dictionary represent? Are these values equal to &lt;em&gt;tfi,j&lt;/em&gt; the raw count of the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;th word in the &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;-th document, and &lt;em&gt;aj&lt;/em&gt; the average word count in the document (page 42 in the paper)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24165" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T18:12:33.203" Title="Calculate TF-IDF of Loughran and Bill McDonald dictionary" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30926" CreationDate="2019-03-18T19:26:22.410" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know which journals in linguistics allow papers without author's information to be reviewed by referees. The only one that can do it to my knowledge is Linguistic Inquiry from the MIT Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T20:22:32.397" Title="Linguistic journal that allows blind referee" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30924" CreationDate="2019-03-18T20:22:32.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The list of double-blind reviewed journals in linguistics is very large. In 4 decades I think I have only reviewed maybe two papers with authors identified, and that includes book chapters. Double blind is the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T20:22:32.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-18T21:06:48.480" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a small pilot study on evidentiality in a language I work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at two evidential markers, -mi that is said to mark the source of knowledge as personal, and -shi that marks knowledge as coming from another source (someone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm exploring how to test these assumptions quantitatively. Specifically by register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some narrative texts, some are narratives are personal experiences others are second hand accounts of personal experience. All are from the same speaker. In other words, some texts are the speaker talking about her own experience, others are her retelling other experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothesis I am testing is that her personal experience texts will have more -mi's and less -shi's, and the secondhand stories will have more -shi's and less -mi's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My corpus is small, but I want to use a sample to do a power analysis to determine how many texts I will eventually need to investigate this more deeply. For now, I have 10 total texts that &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; match up in size:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;firsthand personal experience narratives:&#xA;Text 1a: 344 words&#xA;Text 2a: 568 words&#xA;Text 3a: 1228 words&#xA;Text 4a: 2316 words&#xA;Text 5a: **2389 words**&#xA;&#xA;secondhand personal experience narratives:&#xA;Text 1b: 344 words&#xA;Text 2b: 599 words&#xA;Text 3b: 1165 words&#xA;Text 4b: 1794 words&#xA;Text 5b: **7522 words**&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that 1-3 match up pretty well in terms of word count, 4 shows more disparity, but in 5, 5b is about three times the size of 5a. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any texts in the firsthand register that come close to that size, 5a is the largest. Also all of the texts in the secondhand category are the only the texts I have for that category, so I can't choose another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just omit it all together and use a 4v4 sample? Or compensate by having more texts in the firsthand category to bring the word counts level? I'm hesitant about doing that though. From what I've read in Doug Biber's articles, number of texts is more important than word count, but at the same time apparently word count doesn't matter for certain features? Could I do something like log-transform the data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what to do here, or if there are additional considerations about the situations I haven't thought of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14709" LastEditorUserId="14709" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T21:37:05.207" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T09:03:40.523" Title="register variation: unbalanced corpus sample" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;variation&gt;&lt;register&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30888" CreationDate="2019-03-19T12:41:00.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, before a feminine noun with stressed initial /a/, the usual feminine singular definite article &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; has an alomorph &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; (which is identical to the masculine singular definite article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;la vaca (f)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;el agua (f)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;el libro (m)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/44/why-is-agua-masculine-in-singular-form-and-feminine-in-plural-el-agua-la/25868#25868&quot;&gt;Why is “agua” masculine in singular form and feminine in plural? “El agua” / “Las aguas”&lt;/a&gt; (Spanish SE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T12:41:00.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30934" CreationDate="2019-03-19T22:52:57.610" Score="11" ViewCount="3030" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, please forgive my ignorance, I'm completely new to linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the IPA spelling for word, is it possible to programmatically split it into its sounds?  So, for example, given the word &quot;ingredient&quot; and it's IPA spelling &quot;ɪn'gridiənt&quot;, is it possible to split it into [&quot;ɪn&quot;, &quot;gri&quot;, &quot;di&quot;, &quot;ənt&quot;]?  Is there perhaps a finite list of sounds, at least in the English language, by which an IPA word can be split?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24169" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T00:58:02.113" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:51:38.097" Title="How to split IPA spelling into syllables" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30933" CreationDate="2019-03-19T23:10:58.133" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is, in fact, possible! It's not trivial, but it is straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your goal seems to be to break an English word (written in phonemic IPA) into &lt;em&gt;syllables&lt;/em&gt;. There's a bit of controversy about how useful the concept of a &quot;syllable&quot; is in English, and a few different theories about what exactly a &quot;syllable&quot; is if it does exist, but the following is pretty widely accepted and should be good for your purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the &lt;em&gt;theory of syllable structure&lt;/em&gt;: every syllable looks something like &lt;code&gt;ONC&lt;/code&gt;, where O is the &lt;em&gt;onset&lt;/em&gt;, N is the &lt;em&gt;nucleus&lt;/em&gt;, and C is the &lt;em&gt;coda&lt;/em&gt;. The nucleus is a vowel (*), and always has to be there; the onset and coda are groups of consonants, and aren't required (**).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the &lt;em&gt;maximal onset principle&lt;/em&gt;: we want the onset to be as long as possible. So &quot;tube&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/tub/&lt;/code&gt;, but &quot;tuba&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/tu.ba/&lt;/code&gt;: the &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt; goes with the second syllable, because that makes the onset bigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, the &lt;em&gt;syllable structure constraints&lt;/em&gt;: certain patterns of consonants aren't allowed together. This one varies by language, but in English, the onset can only be three consonants long at most, and you can't have a stop followed by a fricative in the onset, among many others. So &quot;axle&quot; is &lt;code&gt;/ak.səl/&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;*/a.ksəl/&lt;/code&gt;, despite the maximal onset principle. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Syllable_structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a good list of these constrains.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want an algorithm for doing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Locate all the nuclei (vowels)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each nucleus, work backward, adding sounds to the onset&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the onset stops being valid, take a step back, then put all the rest of the sounds in the previous syllable's coda&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Some analyses of English have &lt;em&gt;syllabic resonants&lt;/em&gt;, while others treat them as &lt;code&gt;/ə/&lt;/code&gt; plus resonant. In this answer I'm assuming you're using the version with schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(**) You might also come across the term &quot;rime&quot;, which means the nucleus and coda together. The nucleus and coda seem to be more firmly joined than the nucleus and onset, so it's sometimes useful to have a word for them together: in particular, that's how rhyming works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T15:51:38.097" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:51:38.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T01:20:55.000" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a certain adverbial pattern composed of &amp;quot;[NOUN] and [NOUN]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We work &lt;strong&gt;day and night&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's raining &lt;strong&gt;cats and dogs&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're arguing / going at it &lt;strong&gt;hammer and tongs&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen that &amp;quot;day and night&amp;quot; has a direct translation in many languages, so I assume this sort of adverbial phrase composed of nouns is not uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these phrases composed of nouns end up being used as adverbs? How do you analyse them? Is it a completely idiomatic structure, or is there some way to connect it to more regular grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T21:56:32.237" Title="Analysis of adverbial phrases composed of NOUN and NOUN" Tags="&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;phrases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T01:53:08.257" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking at something like perhaps an inspection of a person's speech organs while reproducing the sound through radiographic means, or comparison of waveform produced. But need more precise/detailed suggestions as I am not well-versed in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23964" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:54:08.330" Title="What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30936" CreationDate="2019-03-20T07:58:12.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First you need a standard of comparison as to how the sound should be produced, and even determining that is difficult. Let us say that the standard is how the average female between 20 and 40 in the village produces the sound. There are 3 main ways of measuring sameness: physiologically, acoustically, or perceptually. Physiology is the least accessible and informative, because there is much lower level variation in how people move muscles to make sounds. Something based on sound itself would be more informative. An acoustic study involves measuring known properties of the waveform, and that is usually how we look at sounds. However it would be better, if possible, to compare how people react to a sound, for example asking &quot;does that sound like a native speaker&quot;. That does introduce subjective factors (irrelevant prejudices of the listener), but it does not require you to know in advance what all of the acoustic properties are that need to be measured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hypothetical ideal strategy would be to collect a sample from the pool used to define the standard and then find the 25% that are most agreed to be &quot;good examples&quot;. Then attempt to find a property in the waveform that distinguishes those tokens. You could then investigate withe your specific individual the extent to which he has that property. However, the notion of accuracy is problematic since it assumes something that probably doesn't exist, namely One Correct Pronunciation. It might make sense when dealing with non-native attempts to produce language sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T07:58:12.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T09:56:46.067" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the structure of supplementary constructions like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Karen, being ill, was unable to go&lt;/em&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;John – her father – was unable to walk her down the aisle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or maybe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a washer-dryer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a paperweight-cum-ashtray&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i.e. compound nouns where the meaning is built up more by addition than modification)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;don’t fit very neatly into either dependency or phrase structure theories, because they are not made up of a head plus dependents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that these constructions basically function as appendages, you might say it's appropriate for the framework that describes them to be a theoretical appendage. Still, I was wondering whether there are other theoretical approaches out there that give more attention to this kind of construction, or integrate it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is it fair to say that the more pragmatic the language, the greater the use of supplementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T08:57:33.127" Title="Where does supplementation fit in?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30878" CreationDate="2019-03-20T13:21:40.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, those are among the first candidates to be called absolute synonyms if we do accept the existence of absolute synonyms, but there are always arguments for the opposite idea. For example, autumn looks a bit different in different places, and that referents of autumn and fall may differ between speakers. Both &lt;em&gt;taxi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cab&lt;/em&gt; are cars carrying people for money, but what you see, imagining cab is not the same to what you see, imagining taxi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every lexeme is a social marker and every speaker's choice is a certain marker. Choosing between more simple and more scientific name, more common for the speaker and more common for the interlocutor. Wilson's question makes a lot of sense: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is an &quot;absolute synonym&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to that is &quot;when there is no context in which changing the word to its synonym would change the sense of the phrase in general&quot;, then yes, &lt;em&gt;autumn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fall&lt;/em&gt; are absolute synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the answer to that is &quot;when changing the word never affects interlocutors perception&quot;, then no, they're not absolute synonyms. And, furthermore, notwo are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24180" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T13:21:40.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30936" CreationDate="2019-03-20T15:54:08.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask a linguist who speaks the language.  Linguists have training in making such normative judgments.  (This is similar to the position taken in SPE on phonological fact.) If you can't find such a linguist, then arrange for a native speaker to be trained as a linguist (I think Ken Hale has done this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:54:08.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T17:40:12.163" Score="-4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24185" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T10:13:45.060" Title="Are there other languages, besides Latin, where a gender of a noun is determined by its genitive case ending?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30943" CreationDate="2019-03-20T18:15:23.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of a &quot;genitive case ending&quot; isn't particularly universal; it shows up mostly in Indo-European languages. And no IE language I know of (including Latin) actually shows gender specifically with the genitive ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you relax your requirements a bit, many Eastern Bantu languages mark gender on the genitive particle. For example, in Swahili:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;mama &lt;strong&gt;w&lt;/strong&gt;a mtoto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the child's mother&quot;, gender #1 (individual people)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;miti &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt;a mtoto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the child's trees&quot;, gender #4 (groups of plants and things that extend)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;kitabu &lt;strong&gt;ch&lt;/strong&gt;a mtoto&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the child's book&quot;, gender #7 (artifacts created by humans and small versions of things)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, unlike in IE languages, the genitive marker agrees with the thing being possessed rather than with the possessor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T18:15:23.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30943" CreationDate="2019-03-20T19:21:47.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For German, it can be said that nouns that have &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive (singular) are not feminine, i.e. they are masculine or neuter. Feminine nouns have no case endings in the singular. Also, neuter nouns have &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive*, whereas masculine nouns have one of &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-(e)n&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-(e)ns&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Mann&lt;strong&gt;es&lt;/strong&gt;, Junge&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;, Name&lt;strong&gt;ns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, names have &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt; even if feminine in those contexts where names have an ending (&lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; Stimme, die Stimme Maria&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;die Stimme unserer lieben Maria&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* One exception: the neuter noun &lt;em&gt;Herz&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;em&gt;-ens&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the following relationships hold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feminine ↔ no case ending&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;neuter → &lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-(e)n&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-(e)ns&lt;/em&gt; → masculine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;-(e)s&lt;/em&gt; → masculine or neuter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases 1 and 3 are those where it can be said that the case ending determines the gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastEditorUserId="23112" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T10:13:45.060" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T10:13:45.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:00:41.947" Score="6" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider myself almost fluent in English, but have trouble understanding when the words are blended together. This includes for example noisy places, song lyrics, or accents. In Czech, I have no such problems. I'm also learning French, where I can't see how native speakers can distinguish between the various contracted forms that make more words sound like one. I wonder if there is some fundamental difference between languages (for example, I'd speculate that languages with big differences between spelling and pronounciation would be less legible). Note that I'm talking about native speakers, not second languages (where the amount of experience is different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24186" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T16:39:11.290" Title="Is audio understanding in bad conditions (e.g. at a noisy market) different between languages?" Tags="&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30927" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:40:33.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number of words is less important than the number of mi and shi present in your text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you should determine how many mi and shi exist in each of your corpus. It is not necessary to differentiate for each text (1a, 2a, ...). What it is relevant is the number found in each of your kind of narrative texts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the number mi and shi should be weighted considering that the size of texts are different. You can use TF-IDF approach. For example for your first narrative text and for mi: (Number_mi/Number_words_text1)*(Number_narrative_texts/Number_mi_all_texts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you can use a histogram to show your results and prove your hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:40:33.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-03-20T22:17:32.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are right in your approach when you say that depending when you acquire the second language you will have different types of bilingual (simultaneous or sequential).  Anyway, in the cases that you raise, we are talking about early bilingualism and in both cases the L2 should be learned before the end of the critical period of acquiring a language. So in both cases the child would achieve the competence of a native speaker in both languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your concern refers to the future, the key will be the time and quality of exposure the child receives in each language. The community and environment of the child will play an important role; keep in mind that if you don’t speak your L1 the language proficiency can considerably decline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can say that becoming a better speaker is not only conditioned by when the languages are acquired, but the exposure time we have in each of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24188" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T22:17:32.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-21T02:28:17.763" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a paragraph from this EFL Magazine article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eflmagazine.com/raising-the-subject/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SUBJECT RAISING: DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (2015):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not long ago, most linguists believed there really was a set of processes in our brains called ‘transformations’, where words moved around inside sentences, to turn simple statements into things like questions, negatives, passives, etc. &lt;strong&gt;This idea seems to have fallen out of favour in modern linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;, which feels like a shame to me – I like the idea of words whizzing around inside our brains. But whether or not it really happens in our brains, I think the image of subjects being raised to different parts of sentences is still a useful way of understanding the structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph seems to suggest that 'raising' is an outdated concept in modern linguistics (although the author still finds it useful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how does 'modern linguistics' explain what is called 'raising' constructions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, doesn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HPSG&lt;/a&gt; do away with the concept of 'raising' altogether?&#xA;I don't know if HPSG is one of the modernest linguistics theories, but it seems fairly new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EDIT&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper on HPSG &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&amp;amp;doi=10.1.1.216.3110&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lingering Challenges to the Raising to Object and Object Control Constructions&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; has this description of HPSG regarding example (45):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HPSG account shares with the overt raising account the assumption that ‘Marcia’ in (1), repeated here as (45), appears in the main clause in the surface string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(45) &lt;em&gt;Cindy believes Marcia to be a genius.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It differs from the movement accounts, though, by assuming a monostratal syntax, which means that though ‘Marcia’ is the object of ‘believes’ in the phrasal syntax, it is associated with the syntactic and semantic features of the embedded predicate (‘to be a genius’) by a kind of complete phrase coindexing called structure-sharing, and not movement. In a sense, the NP ‘Marcia’ is equally associated with the main clause verb and the embedded clause verb; but in the surface string it is in the main clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like HPSG doesn't posit &lt;em&gt;movement&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;raising&lt;/em&gt; for that matter) to analyze (45).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T06:26:48.520" Title="Is 'raising' an outdated concept in modern linguistics?" Tags="&lt;movement&gt;&lt;transformations&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23154" CreationDate="2019-03-21T11:11:45.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an old question, but no one gave an answer that covers Korean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean is written in Hangul, which combines &quot;initial&quot;, &quot;middle&quot;, and (an optional) &quot;final&quot; letters in a single syllable block. For example, a syllable 팔 is composed of initial ㅍ, middle ㅏ, and final ㄹ. 구 is composed of initial ㄱ and middle ㅏ, without a final letter. Initial, middle, and final letters are ordered differently in the two Koreas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In South Korea,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Initial: ㄱㄲㄴㄷㄸㄹㅁㅂㅃㅅㅆㅇㅈㅉㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ&#xA;Middle: ㅏㅐㅑㅒㅓㅔㅕㅖㅗㅘㅙㅚㅛㅜㅝㅞㅟㅠㅡㅢㅣ&#xA;Final: ㄱㄲㄳㄴㄵㄶㄷㄹㄺㄻㄼㄽㄾㄿㅀㅁㅂㅄㅅㅆㅇㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In North Korea,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Initial: ㄱㄴㄷㄹㅁㅂㅅㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎㄲㄸㅃㅆㅉㅇ&#xA;Middle: ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅗㅛㅜㅠㅡㅣㅐㅒㅔㅖㅚㅟㅢㅘㅝㅙㅞ&#xA;Final: ㄱㄳㄴㄵㄶㄷㄹㄺㄻㄼㄽㄾㄿㅀㅁㅂㅄㅅㅇㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎㄲㅆ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syllables are ordered initial-wise first, then middle-wise, and at last final-wise. A syllable without a final letter always comes before a syllable that shares its initial and middle letters but with final letters. For example, 나 comes after 강 but precedes 난, 남, and 낫. (This hold on either side of the DMZ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23880" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T11:11:45.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31780" CreationDate="2019-03-21T14:10:06.137" Score="8" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'impersonal' pronoun in Germanic and Romance languages seems to come from one of two paths:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cognate with the word for 'man'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proto-Germanic: &lt;em&gt;*mann-&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old English: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin: &lt;em&gt;homō&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;om&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;hom&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on#Etymology_9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;use infl. by germanic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catalan: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;hom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sub&gt;(&amp;lt; home) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hom#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;infl. by germanic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cognate with the word for 'one' (number)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PIE: &lt;em&gt;*óynos&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;einer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Latin: &lt;em&gt;ūnus&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Asturian: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ún, unu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the English impersonal pronoun 'one' derived from the English word for the number, or from French &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_(pronoun)#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggested by&lt;/a&gt; the OED)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T16:16:43.607" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T12:25:07.600" Title="Etymology of impersonal pronoun &quot;one&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30950" CreationDate="2019-03-21T20:42:05.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Raising is alive and well, but the conception of Raising as a transformation is moribund, because transformations are no longer accepted.  So, if we believe in Raising, and Raising is a transformation, where does that leave us?  In a word, confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confused, but at least open to the possibility that Raising exists but is not a transformation.  Well, transformational grammar is not the only theory under the sun, after all, so we should look to some other theoretical account of Raising.  My favorite candidate is Relational Grammar, one of whose proponents, Paul Postal, it happens, wrote the book on Raising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HPSG, which you mention, is a revision to GPSG, and GPSG in a certain (rather trivial) sense contains Relational Grammar, since it attributes a &quot;GR&quot; (Grammatical Relation) to every NP, and offers a description of Raising.  However, in my opinion, these extensions of CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) are too artificial to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking of Raising as an upward movement in a tree structure, I myself offered a theory here, which I called &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17271/how-can-psg-describe-the-vertical-dimension-of-sentence-structure&quot;&gt;&quot;2psg&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which describes Raising as a change in grammatical relation, or obliqueness.  (Construing grammatical relations as degrees of obliqueness is also found in HPSG.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T20:42:05.437" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T11:11:48.397" Score="8" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish makes use of two valency markers: (i) the causative marker with 'tur' which increases valency in (1) below, and (ii) the anticausative marker 'il' which decreases valency as in (2) below. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(ben) Hasan -8     kitab -1    oku  -t     -tu   -m&#xA;I     Hasan -lld:. book  -kc.  read -Caus. -Past -l.sg.&#xA;&quot;I made Hasan read the book&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from Kornfilt, 1997, p.331)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Kapį aç-il-di. &amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&#xA;Door open-ANTIC-PAST &amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&#xA;‘The door opened.’ &amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from Haspelmath, 1987, p.2) &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining these two markers renders ungrammaticality in some languages, but I'm not sure whether ungrammaticality follows in Turkish, i.e. when we combine both of these markers. I'm not a native speaker, so I cannot tell. What I want with this is to find an authentic sentence whereby 'tur' is combined with 'il' in the same stem and see whether they render the sentence ungrammatical or not. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I apologize for the previous way in which this question has been asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T12:50:31.613" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T10:16:59.463" Title="Can causative and anticausative co-occur in Turkish verbal morphology?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;valency&gt;&lt;grammatical-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30965" CreationDate="2019-03-23T16:18:27.457" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several phrases in my text such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'The changes are consistent with &lt;em&gt;post&lt;/em&gt; radiotherapy phrases'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to pick these sentences up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way of using parts of speech to determine temporal prepositions specifically eg a tag pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17091" LastEditorUserId="17091" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T16:45:03.743" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T13:01:20.360" Title="How to determine temporal prepositions" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27594" CreationDate="2019-03-23T16:29:57.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideophones are a word class that are understudied by linguists and not well understood. I think I can clarify a few things though. From my understanding, ideophones are a word class especially prevalent in African and indigenous American languages that depict a sensory scene. The sounds of the words somehow depict a visual, audio, smell based, touch based, etc. scene in a listeners mind. For example, dabodabo (this is transliterated without the accents) is a word in an African language that speakers of that language, upon hearing the word, can intimately picture a duck waddling and the sound associated with a duck at the same time. The sounds of the word literally evoke a strong scene in the mind that cannot be described simply as &quot;a waddle&quot;. (The word itself means duck. In one of Dingemanse's papers on ideophones, he describes a language as having two dialectal terms for a duck: one is along the lines of quakquak (I forget the precise word) and the other is dabodabo; both imitate the movement/noise of a duck.) Linguists aren't sure why this is, but is believed to be a cross modal effect in the brain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing we know is that ideophones are overwhelmingly duplicative--pikapika in Japanese means sparkle, and English speakers might associate the sounds in pikapika as being bright; I definitely do. Dabodabo is duplicative, pikapika is, and nurunuru (a Japanese word for slimy) is duplicative. When I see/hear this word nurunuru, I do get a sense of sliminess. Basically, the sounds in the words depict a scene that doesn't have to be audio based. Even though duplication isn't a factor in strictly &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; ideophones, I do think its a good litmus test. Onomatopoetic sounds, a subset of ideophones that strictly represent noises, are duplicative. It is natural for English speakers to say &quot;oink oink&quot; or &quot;quack quack&quot;. In a similar fashion, gobble gobble is a very duplicative word. I'm not sure if it counts as an ideophone, but it definitely evokes a stronger image in my mind than, say, a word like crouch. I would never say crouch crouch because it just comes across as weird; and the word itself doesn't evoke a strong image of someone crouching. The word gobble does; in addition to this, gobble sounds similar to wobble and waddle, which while they aren't inherently duplicative, can be duplicated. They also make great sensory words in poems, and their connection to gobble makes me think they might be at least partially ideophonic. In this way, duplication might be a strong indicator of being ideophonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum: words like neigh neigh cant be duplicated (at least it sounds weird to me personally), but this might be because the word neigh no longer sounds as close to a horses neiiigh as it did before historical sound change occurred. This is just a personal theory, but as it is a less onomatopoetic word, it may be less ideophonic, as seen by the fact it isn't natural to duplicate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24199" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T03:06:32.710" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T03:06:32.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30935" CreationDate="2019-03-23T16:38:15.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding constructions of this sort, you should take a look at Cooper and Ross's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/worldorder.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Order&lt;/a&gt; paper.  There are a range of principles that determine the order of conjuncts in these idioms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24167" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T16:38:15.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30977" CreationDate="2019-03-24T09:16:49.907" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that vocal pitch basically depends on tension in the vocal cords, which I'm visualising in terms of the cords being stretched along their length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the glottal stop is made by pressing the vocal cords together, which makes it sound as if the tension involved is at right angles to the tension that determines vocal pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt the reality is that simple, though. Can anyone tell me how making a glottal stop affects the longitudinal tension within the vocal cords?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastEditorDisplayName="user23078" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T09:26:55.260" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T23:41:51.193" Title="Mechanism of glottal stop - effect on tension in vocal cords" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30971" CreationDate="2019-03-24T16:12:55.967" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since that the F0 i.e. the pitch is the first harmonic and all formants are the i-th harmonics, is it possible that the formants of a vowel in a high tone are higher than those in a lower tone? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, imagin a language which has a L tone and a H tone, and there is a vowel in the L tone satisfies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;F0=100Hz, F1=800Hz, F2=1500Hz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if that vowel in the H tone(assume that F0=200Hz) satisfies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;F0=200Hz, F1=1600Hz, F2=3000Hz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, should I use the value F1/F0, F2/F0 etc. instead of F1, F2 etc. to eliminate such influence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23822" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:09:31.240" Title="Will the pitch of a vowel influence its formant values?" Tags="&lt;tone&gt;&lt;formants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-24T16:36:38.500" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I obtain a list / cross-comparison table of function / closed-class words in the world's languages? (preferably in softcopy, online etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                     English.     Chinese.     Malay.   Thai.   Japanese&#xA;First-person pronoun  I            wo           saya.    ...     ...&#xA;Second-person pronoun ...          ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at perhaps an API, an online database, even the data that translation software like Google Translate use if it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23964" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T16:36:38.500" Title="How can I obtain a list / cross-comparison table of function / closed-class words in the world's languages? (preferably in softcopy, online etc.)" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30958" CreationDate="2019-03-24T22:50:36.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; Part of speech tags can not be used to determine temporal prepositions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long Answer:&lt;/strong&gt; If you &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; want to do this, extract the prepositional phrases, and run those phrases through 'prepositional sense disambiguation' system. They will use a combination of the preposition plus the object of the preposition to determine if the PP was indeed being used to indicate a temporal notion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Also see the book, &quot;Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing&quot; by Yoav Goldberg. Chapter 7.6 walks the reader through the detailed steps of preposition sense disambiguation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastEditorUserId="21043" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T12:16:49.297" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:16:49.297" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-25T07:32:07.703" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;She made Jerry out to be famous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics literature such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=xL33CwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT685&amp;amp;lpg=PT685&amp;amp;dq=%22made%20Jerry%20out%20to%20be%20famous%22%20raising&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2yv2BH-eFl&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2hFGVSR65ANAjHI2084-4s6DtAeA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjY8q-C1pzhAhXtyosBHZH5DHUQ6AEwAXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22made%20Jerry%20out%20to%20be%20famous%22%20raising&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, this sentence was used as an example of 'raising to object' where 'Jerry' raises to object of the matrix clause while semantically it is subject of the VP (&lt;em&gt;to be famous&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; is not really necessary part of the expression 'make someone/something out', for you can omit it as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Jerry was not so famous as she made him out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I wonder why (1) should be analyzed as a 'raising to object' construction, not as a 'object control' construction where &lt;em&gt;Jerry&lt;/em&gt; identifies the implicit subject of the infinitival clause (&lt;em&gt;to be famous&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the verb &lt;em&gt;made&lt;/em&gt; in (1) has to be analyzed as a 'raising to object' verb, should the same verb in (2) or (3) be analyzed as a 'raising to object' verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;She made Jerry out as famous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastEditorUserId="3380" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T09:24:45.133" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T09:24:45.133" Title="She made Jerry out to be famous. ['raising to object' construction?]" Tags="&lt;control&gt;&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="31" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30963" CreationDate="2019-03-25T15:09:31.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;F0 does not affect formant frequency, for a slightly obscure reason. When you look at a spectral cross section, you see the amplitudes of individual harmonics (determined via a Fourier transform). The peaks occur pretty much at multiples of the fundamental. The harmonic with the highest amplitude in the area where you expect a formant is not necessarily at the formant's frequency: the actual formant's peak is usually between two harmonics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A formant frequency is computed using LPC analysis, usually, which gives you a general picture of the resonances in the vocal tract, independent of fundamental frequency. The underlying theory is known as the source-filter theory, where a given glottal source (pitch and voice quality characteristics) is &quot;shaped&quot; by the LPC coefficients to give an actual waveform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the mathematics of formant analysis guarantees that pitch and formant frequency are independent. However: the situation you describe in the formulas does not correspond to a real situation, an you will not find a vowel whose formant's are doubled when pitch is doubled. 3000 Hz is not a realistic F2, nor is 1600 a realistic F1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:09:31.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-26T14:01:27.867" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an &lt;strong&gt;extensive&lt;/strong&gt; list of english words[including American and British... just an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;exhaustive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; list]. This list of english words should contain an exhaustive collection of all forms of all words. And I am looking for just the english words not the sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have checked out a few sources but could find complete list of words.&#xA;I can see the root word but not the derived or forms of that that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have mentioned examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently i have checked out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nltk.corpus.word.words() -------------couldn't find word &quot;vendors&quot;[found &quot;vendor&quot;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gcide : &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcide.gnu.org.ua/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://gcide.gnu.org.ua/&lt;/a&gt; -----couldn't find word &quot;vendors&quot;[found &quot;vendor&quot;] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BNC &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/&lt;/a&gt; ------Its a collection of sentences broked into forms. I'll have to parse and collect words. Still that doesn't guarantees a collection of exhaustive words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;COCA &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/&lt;/a&gt; -----couldn't even understand the data. But it sure wasn't it. I am looking further into it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any sort of help is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I am using...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;s0 = set(corrected_sp_ch_wrd)-set(  list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.words.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.brown.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.gutenberg.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.webtext.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.gazetteers.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.inaugural.words()]) +\&#xA;list([ a.lower() for a in nltk.corpus.abc.words()]) +\&#xA;combined_global_list  )&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;combined_global_list is collection of all external corpora i parsed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not enough. There are words i am missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24215" LastEditorUserId="24215" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T11:30:51.547" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T11:30:51.547" Title="Extensive English word corpora" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30972" CreationDate="2019-03-26T15:14:17.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are interested just in word forms, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leipzig Corpora Collection&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to look for corpora. They have a lot of English corpora separated by geographic origin (not only British and American, but also other regional varieties, e.g., South African).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T15:14:17.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30972" CreationDate="2019-03-26T19:58:18.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're mixing two concepts: words found in dictionaries (like gcide), and words found in a corpus (like COCA). The words in the dictionary will be stored in their base/lemma form, hence, you won't always see words variations (past tense, plural form, etc.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're just looking for words regardless of form, you'll want to read a large corpus and save the tokens. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/LanguageTechnology/comments/a50q9y/open_source_word_lists/ebj3qwz/?context=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/LanguageTechnology/comments/a50q9y/open_source_word_lists/ebj3qwz/?context=3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T19:58:18.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30972" CreationDate="2019-03-26T20:21:36.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To elicit a more comprehensive answer, the question must first define what kinds of words are acceptable, and what are not. For example, most people reading this answer might recognize the word &quot;tokenize&quot;, but you will not find the word in common dictionaries. The other approach is to tokenize a sufficiently  comprehensive corpus (like the Wikipedia dump), but you will also end up extracting nonsensical words (typos, spam, etc.) and foreign words. The other problem with tokenizing a large corpus is that you may end up missing morphological variants of rarely used words. For example &quot;zymurgy's&quot; is accepted by a typical spell-checker, and is understood by anyone who understands what zymurgy means, but has a good chance of not being found in a large corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are only concerned with getting a list of all variants of words found in a typical dictionary, you can generate it on your own using a spellchecker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, hunspell (&lt;code&gt;man 5 hunspell&lt;/code&gt;) tells us that &quot;vendor/MS&quot; allows for &quot;vendor&quot;, &quot;vendor's&quot;, and &quot;vendors&quot;, and that &quot;zoological/Y&quot; allows for &quot;zoological&quot; and &quot;zoologically&quot;. You can figure out the list of root words in hunspell's &lt;code&gt;en_US-large.dic&lt;/code&gt; and derive all their morphological variants with the help of &lt;code&gt;en_US-large.aff&lt;/code&gt;. Repeat the exercise with en_GB. The .dic and .aff files are simple enough to be handled in Python without a lot of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="126" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T20:48:18.397" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T20:48:18.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30962" CreationDate="2019-03-26T23:41:51.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is, no, we cannot tell you. One reason is that there isn't just one thing &quot;glottal stop&quot;. There is a dissertation &lt;a href=&quot;http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~mgarellek/files/Garellek_dissertation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Production and perception of glottal stops&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which covers the literature including the various different types of sounds involving glottal and ventricular adduction. Another reason is that longitudinal tension cannot be measured, it is only assumed based on theoretical modelling, and there is too much uncertainty regarding the factors that would go into computing that force. Some literature on vocal fold vibration&#xA;van den Berg (1958) &quot;Myoelastic aerodynamic theory of voice production&quot;, Ishizaka &amp;amp; Matsudaira (1968) &quot;What makes the vocal folds vibrate&quot;, Stevens (1977) &quot;Physics of laryngeal behavior and larynx modes&quot;,&#xA;Eckert &amp;amp; Laver (1994) &lt;em&gt;Menschen  und  ihre  Stimmen&lt;/em&gt;. These sources would give you a conceptual framework for computing that force, as a physics exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, you correctly state the two forces and the standard right angle assumption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T23:41:51.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30983" CreationDate="2019-03-27T02:03:45.350" Score="1" ViewCount="2238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figure any definition for a word boundary is probably somewhat fuzzy. However, I thought, instead of banging my head against the wall trying to come with an ad-hoc solution, I would throw this out there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Identifying word boundaries in English is, generally speaking, not a big deal: the / big / house / etc. If I were asked to create of a phonological tree (coda, onset, nucleus, word boundary) for any of these words, it would not be that challenging. However, when running into words like &quot;eye-opener&quot; or &quot;bedroom&quot; or &quot;motorcycle&quot;, identifying the word boundary seems somewhat problematic. Would you all recommend claiming there is a word boundary between these words in the compounds or just treat the whole compound as a single word? Perhaps this has to do with the degree in which the word has been lexicalized in the language, but I'll leave that for discussion below.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19727" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T06:31:49.990" Title="Word Boundaries and Compounding" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;word-boundaries&gt;&lt;trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T05:46:33.270" Score="0" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some files. wav in the object window, how can I save them automatically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this script  but I get an error:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;directoryName$ = chooseDirectory$: &quot;Choose a directory to save all the new files in&quot;&#xA;if directoryName$ &amp;lt;&amp;gt; &quot;&quot;&#xA;    for i to numberOfSelectedSounds&#xA;       selectObject: sound [i]&#xA;       Save as WAV file: directoryName$ + &quot;/sound&quot; + string$ (i) + &quot;.wav&quot;&#xA;    endfor&#xA;endif&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24221" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T06:44:30.313" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T01:03:45.370" Title="save all file in window objects praat" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T06:44:18.927" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my Syntax class this semester, we've been asked to look at a language more in depth and try to develop X-Bar compatible rules for it. In doing so, I've come across a reoccurring problem that may ultimately be a result of a lack of understanding. This problem is how to treat the difference between lexical and affixes that seem to be in the same category in the language when trying to create rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the language I'm looking at is Burmese. In terms of adverbs, there seem to be at least two different types, displayed in the examples below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ibGb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ibGb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyXLc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jyXLc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar that I'm referencing classifies both the quickly-quickly adverb and the abruptly suffix as adverbs, so I wasn't sure exactly how to make the X-bar rule as quickly-quickly appears to the left of the verb it's modifying whereas the abruptly suffix appears at the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24222" LastEditorUserId="24222" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T00:57:49.803" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T00:57:49.803" Title="Confusion over Adverbial Adjuncts (X' Bar Theory)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;x-bar-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T14:19:02.770" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example:-&#xA;Kunti-- Kauntey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anjana-- aanjane&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rules &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24224" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T15:44:06.903" Title="Given a name in sanskrit, how to find what to call the son or daughter of that person. What is the grammatical rule for forming such words?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-03-27T15:13:39.403" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30981" CreationDate="2019-03-27T15:12:08.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is called &lt;em&gt;guna&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vṛddhi&lt;/em&gt;. You can learn more here for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%E1%B9%9Bddhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vṛddhi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T15:44:06.903" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T15:44:06.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30978" CreationDate="2019-03-27T16:27:36.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question relies on a number of unidentified assumptions about word boundaries, which are not totally alien but also are not obvious or obviously right. The main problem I see is the premise that there is this one thing, word boundary, that solves myriad problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of there being a single &quot;phonological tree&quot; seems to be historically based on importing notions of structure from syntax (we wanted phonology to be more like syntax), but the properties of tree-like representations as used in syllable and foot structure are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the same as those employed in syntactic representations (prosodic structure is not seriously recursive in the way that syntactic trees are; phonological &quot;trees&quot; flout the single-mother convention). Attempting to align phonological grouping with morphosyntactic grouping just leads to tears, though that is not obvious if you consider just English. The problem is that combining a VC root with a VC prefix and a VC suffix typically leads to phonological V.C+V.C+VC, i.e. syllable boundaries seriously misaligned with morpheme boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English and in contrast to other languages such as Arabic, there is not much evidence for resyllabification between words, so prosodic and syntactic constituency are not generally at odds. At the level of affixation, we do have mismatches involving V-initial suffixes (invite [ɪn.ˈvajʔ], invitee [ɪn.vaj.ˈtʰi]), but not at the phrasal level in e.g. &quot;invite Igor&quot;. In asking about word boundaries in &quot;the big house&quot;, &quot;motorcycle&quot; or &quot;What are you going to do?&quot;, you have to have a theory of entities (are there both word and syllable boundaries? Are there also morpheme boundaries?), and what those entities do for you. Are there necessary or sufficient criteria for diagnosing &quot;.&quot;, &quot;+&quot; or &quot;#&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for positing word boundaries is usually syntactic: &quot;the&quot; is a word, it occupies a certain syntactic position, same with &quot;big&quot;. We might claim that &quot;motorcycle&quot; has an internal word boundary because &quot;motor&quot; and &quot;cycle&quot; are words, and neither can reasonably be called a prefix or suffix. Phonologically speaking, there is nothing about &quot;motorcycle&quot; that demands a word boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain concatenations that can be lumped together under the rubric &quot;contraction&quot;, for example &quot;going to&quot; → &quot;gonna&quot;, &quot;will not&quot; → &quot;won't&quot;, &quot;got you&quot; → &quot;gotcha&quot;, also &quot;Harry's&quot;, behave phonologically more like affixational structures, even though they are syntactically more like word combinations. Just positing a readjustment of boundaries (removing the &quot;#&quot;) does not solve all of the problems, especially in negative inflections (my analytic prejudice is now revealed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final complication in analyzing the aforementioned concatenations is that boundaries are also invoked to account for some facts of speech speech rhythm. The two syllables of &quot;lighthouse&quot; have a fixed rhythmic organization (prominence on the first syllable), but the phrase &quot;light house&quot; has variable rhythm (depends on whether you're shopping for a light house vs a heavy house; or is the discussion about a house that is light vs. a hose that is light). Again, attempting to reduce these speech rhythm properties to nothing more than differences in word boundaries has proven to be futile. Once you introduce some other mechanism for encoding rhythmic distinctions, manipulations of word boundaries becomes unnecessary – we can just posit that word boundaries are there if and only if we syntactically concatenate two words. You still have to have an account of whether &quot;won't&quot; is two syntactic words (as opposed to two syntactically-mandated functions manifested within a single word). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, manipulating word boundaries has not proven to be a useful method of analysis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T16:27:36.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31000" CreationDate="2019-03-27T18:20:56.403" Score="4" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently discovered that Latin &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; at the end of words became the palatal approximant &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; in Italian. I remember reading that this process is also observed in some Occitan dialects,so it cannot be some sort of anomaly. Considering that these sounds are, at least to my ears, phonetically extremely distinct, how is this possible? Is there some explanation involving auditory perception that would clarify the reason behind this change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T15:39:28.513" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T15:39:28.513" Title="Phonetic similarity between *s* and *j*" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30978" CreationDate="2019-03-27T20:18:06.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought recently, that it would be pragmatic to treat words strictly as phrases. A word can appear in a single-word phrase. Theoretically, any word could be the answer to the question for the signet described by any appropriate definition. That test would be a circular definition, if asking &quot;what's the word&quot;. Omitting that meta-level, the range of single-word phrases would be limited. Certainly, &quot;The&quot; and other particles and morphemes that aren't meaningful on their own can never appear alone. Indeed, &quot;the&quot; could be treated as a morpheme, I believe, or any other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea stems from a thought about lexicography on where to draw the line between words and phrases, if trying to be as inclusive as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't give it much thought since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[to be continued]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense &quot;motor boat&quot; would be at least three words, &quot;motor&quot;, &quot;boat&quot; and &quot;motor boat&quot;. This would be recursive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T06:31:49.990" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T06:31:49.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2395" CreationDate="2019-03-27T20:38:55.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand the question correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*g&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is a known change in Celtic. E.g. for Irish &lt;em&gt;bé&lt;/em&gt; &quot;woman&quot; from the same root as Greek &lt;em&gt;gyne&lt;/em&gt;, Gothic &lt;em&gt;quno&lt;/em&gt;, English &lt;em&gt;queen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; occurred so late in Old Irish, that it is actually attested. One might speculate on the nature of this change, whether it's complete coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had noted something similar in a comment somewhen, for Latin or Greek if I remember correctly, but no general rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T22:11:52.107" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T22:11:52.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2395" CreationDate="2019-03-27T22:22:13.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alex B has given a wonderfully detailed answer, but I'd like to sum up some extra information for future readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general consensus, to my understanding, is that &lt;strong&gt;the forms with &lt;code&gt;*kʷ&lt;/code&gt; are the original ones&lt;/strong&gt;. They're found in a wider variety of languages, and &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; is a common sound change, which pretty much never happens the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;, as mentioned, shows up a lot in unrelated places. The two main sub-branches of Celtic are known as &lt;em&gt;P-Celtic&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Q-Celtic&lt;/em&gt; because the former went through this change and the latter didn't; in more modern times, Romanian lost the Latin labiovelars in the same way (Spanish &lt;em&gt;cuatro&lt;/em&gt; ~ Romanian &lt;em&gt;patru&lt;/em&gt;). Most relevantly here, it happened in &lt;s&gt;Attic&lt;/s&gt; all dialects of Greek (Attic &lt;em&gt;hippos&lt;/em&gt; ~ Latin &lt;em&gt;equus&lt;/em&gt;), and in the whole East Italic branch (Oscan, Umbrian, a few others—Latin &lt;em&gt;quattuor&lt;/em&gt; ~ Oscan &lt;em&gt;petora&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to my understanding, &lt;strong&gt;all the alternate forms with &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; are later developments&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, I haven't seen any solid evidence for a PIE root &lt;code&gt;**h₂-p&lt;/code&gt; &quot;water&quot;; forms like Romanian &lt;em&gt;apa&lt;/em&gt; come straightforwardly from Latin &lt;em&gt;aqua&lt;/em&gt;, with the regular loss of labiovelars. Where there's an alternation within the same language, it can usually be explained by borrowing: Latin seems to have borrowed &lt;em&gt;lupus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wolf&quot; from Oscan or another East Italic language, where the change from &lt;code&gt;*kʷ&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; was also regular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T22:00:17.673" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T22:00:17.673" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2019-03-28T01:08:52.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many (most?) sign languages indicate pronouns by indexing, that is, pointing at a region of space which is assigned the meaning of the referent. The referent of an index can be a person, an object, or an abstract concept (i.e., the meanings of &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;). Multiple separate referents can be used, by pointing to different areas, which means that you essentially have available an unlimited number of distinct gender-neutral pronouns. (That is, there's no &lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; limit; in practice, there's a limit to how many you can hold in memory and how many you can make distinct.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sign languages may also adopt vocabulary from the surrounding spoken language, especially if children are taught a signed encoding of the spoken language (Signed Exact English or similar). Irish Sign Language, for example, does have lexical signs for &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;, but they are rarely used, with indexing being by far the most common way to use pronouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="113" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T01:08:52.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30993" CreationDate="2019-03-28T09:51:57.970" Score="5" ViewCount="4048" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that euphemisms are a function of how society views certain aspects of life and feels that they should not be talked about directly. So are there languages with no euphemisms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23638" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T13:53:24.657" Title="Are there languages with no euphemisms?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30990" CreationDate="2019-03-28T10:16:14.927" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to answer a question with a definite negative, since that leaves the possibility open for someone to come along later and say, &quot;I know an example which disproves your position&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think that naturally occurring human languages are all going to have euphemisms, since humans seem to like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only languages I know which do not have euphemisms are ones which are designed to be unambiguous. They include Lojban and SQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T10:16:14.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30996" CreationDate="2019-03-28T10:39:17.250" Score="4" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does ˇ (haček) in &lt;em&gt;*ě&lt;/em&gt; 'yat' mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastEditorUserId="20824" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T12:06:07.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T14:45:31.253" Title="The meaning of /ě/ (ѣ)" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30990" CreationDate="2019-03-28T11:15:53.807" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Their presence across all known world languages constitutes a linguistic universal according to research from Allan and Burridge (1991)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unravellingmag.com/articles/euphemisms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Refer to this article here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270150454_Euphemism_Dysphemism_Language_Used_as_Shield_and_Weapon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And to this paper, here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Wilson interestingly points out, it's not easy to say, &quot;There exists one&quot;, also because, where do you draw a line and say this particular saying is not a Euphemism for something slightly more taboo. Since there is no scale, no definite measure. All languages will mostly have some sort of euphemism construction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless they are artificial languages or very specific sociolect (like in a precision field like surgery), where you have to be totally clear about the point you are making and slight confusion can make a lot of deprecation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="24239" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T05:38:32.363" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T05:38:32.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30990" CreationDate="2019-03-28T14:36:54.783" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is more of a cultural question than a linguistic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Euphemisms do not require the currently spoken language to accommodate them. Euphemisms rely on a person's understanding that A is a less extreme version of B, regardless of the language of the words that are being spoken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way you could have a language where a particular euphemism doesn't work is if that language simply never defines the word that the speaker wishes to use. But that still doesn't mean that the speaker is incapable of using &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; euphemisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in a strict context which doesn't allow for nuance, you can be euphemistic. Imagine a world of mathematics where being a &quot;circle&quot; is considered as offensive language. I could still introduce euphemisms by saying things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tommy is an n-gon with a [particular size of] n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I need to change to nuance my euphemism is change my statement about how big the value of n is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who understands the existence of euphemisms (which is a &lt;em&gt;cultural&lt;/em&gt; thing) will understand that I'm trying to get away with calling Tommy a circle (or close to it) without saying so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24232" LastEditorUserId="24232" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T14:41:57.323" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T14:41:57.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30992" CreationDate="2019-03-28T14:48:45.457" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Nothing specific.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linguists started working with Old Church Slavonic, they weren't sure exactly how the yat was pronounced (since it had shifted in different directions in different daughter languages). But they also needed some way to represent it in their transcriptions. The same happened for the &amp;quot;shortened vowels&amp;quot; that are now known as &amp;quot;hard sign&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;soft sign&amp;quot; in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, phonemic symbols are pretty much arbitrary. There's a convention to use IPA characters for them, but it's not by any means required: see PIE's &lt;code&gt;*h₁ [h]&lt;/code&gt; and Proto-Semitic's &lt;code&gt;*ś [ɬ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for the shortened vowels they just used the Cyrillic characters directly, and for the yat they chose &lt;code&gt;ě&lt;/code&gt;. Why? Because in Russian it's turned into &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;, but it clearly &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; originally the same as &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;, so &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt; with a diacritic seemed appropriate. The haček is also often used for palatalization, which might be why it was chosen specifically (since the yat caused palatalization in some daughter languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As Wilson points out in the comments, there could be a simpler explanation. In Czech, one of the Slavic languages that uses the Latin alphabet, the reflex of yat is sometimes written &lt;code&gt;ě&lt;/code&gt;. So that would have been an easy source to draw from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T14:45:31.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="30998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2019-03-28T18:06:15.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting discussion. I am in the midst of writing a fantasy novel wherein the heroine is transported back in time from present day US to Normandy at the time of the First Crusade. I have her attempting to communicate with the people around her by using the scant vocabulary she remembers from the two semesters of French that she took in college, and a lot of pantomiming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through the excerpt from Chretien de Troyes I had the sense that there was a Germanic influence. I understand that Normandy is so-called because of the numbers of Norwegian Viking settlers in the area. Surely they would have left their imprint on the language in terms of some pronunciation and vocabulary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24236" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T18:06:15.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30984" CreationDate="2019-03-28T23:07:06.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know enough phonetics to give the details, but there seem to be at least some pronunciations of a voiceless sibilant coronal fricative that are phonetically similar to [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS1999/papers/p14_1785.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A gestural solution for some glide epenthesis problems&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Eleonora Cavalcante Albano, says that epenthesis of [j] before coda /s/ in Brazilian Portuguese can be attributed to gestural overlap. It may be relevant that Portuguese /s/ is supposed to have [ʃ] as a coda allophone. On page 1787, there seem to be a suggestion for why the glide would be front: &quot;Articulatorily, the front glide could arise from a passive movement of the tongue body as the tongue tip moves slowly to achieve the critical constriction for [s].&quot; There is also a more technical argument on that page that I don't understand at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another paper that seems relevant: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/flemming/www/paper/coronal%20backness1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The relationship between coronal place and vowel backness&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Edward Flemming, 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some further discussion in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4ZkMbwnKMLgC&amp;amp;pg=PA156&amp;amp;lpg=PA156#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consonant Structure and Prevocalization&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Natalie Operstein, p. 156, but I haven't been able to view all of the relevant section. Operstein says on p. 155 that [ç] has been postulated as a possible intermediate stage between [s] and [j].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T05:36:51.117" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T05:36:51.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19015" CreationDate="2019-03-29T06:58:02.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frequency lists extracted from the WaCky corpora. Lists of words and lemmas are provided, sorted by frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;itWaC (Italian)&#xA;itWaC: a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain and using medium-frequency words from the Repubblica corpus and basic Italian vocabulary lists as seeds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=frequency_lists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=frequency_lists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24245" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T06:58:02.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30990" CreationDate="2019-03-29T13:53:24.657" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I say, &quot;you know best&quot;, I mean you are wrong but I can't be bothered to offend or argue with you. This is a euphemism for the speaker but not necessarily for the listener if they do not realize they have been closed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24249" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T13:53:24.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T14:35:36.597" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;More generally, imagine a corpus which could identify the conversational function of a sentence, such as, &quot;Have a nice day!&quot;, in narrow categories like, &quot;ending a conversation&quot;, or broad ones like &quot;small talk&quot;, and then produce lists of other sentences in the same categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anything remotely resembling this exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interesting categories would be, phrases often used in emails, phrases occuring often in business discourse, different ways to apologize, casual ways to greet people, and so on.&#xA;Even an encyclopedic document of human-curated lists would be valuable, but an oceanic corpus would be far better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15547" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T19:23:58.997" Title="Are there corpora which tag phrases by discourse- or conversational-function?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31012" CreationDate="2019-03-30T09:01:45.223" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested if there's a field of study, or some popular papers, that try to map the thought concepts/constructs that precedes (or succeeds) words, sentences and basically languages. Maybe as a sub-field in semantics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can point me off in the right direction I would be grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22403" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T16:10:23.950" Title="Pre language concepts" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31007" CreationDate="2019-03-30T09:32:26.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can be called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;prehistory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As about the proper science for research it&#xA;can be History or Culturology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia &#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Human prehistory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the period between the use of the first stone tools c. 3.3 million years ago by hominins and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the invention of writing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in 'proto-language' it must  be SEMIOTICS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This science symbols deals with the function of signs in any systems and invludes syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24206" LastEditorUserId="24206" LastEditDate="2019-03-30T09:47:48.207" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T09:47:48.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-30T11:35:17.497" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my text to speech engine (I use Cereproc, William Voice).&#xA;The engine can be used on the website here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cereproc.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cereproc.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and it supports the ssml tags used in this question..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Backstory&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building an acronymn interpreter that will clearly dilineate the acronymn as well as account for nuances like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IEDS -&amp;gt; I, E, Dees&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IEDS -&amp;gt; I, E, Dee, Es&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only mention this, as this is why I can not use Cereproc's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;say-as interpret-as='characters'&amp;gt;IEDS&amp;lt;/say-as&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, with phonemes, I am being tripped up here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;IPA&quot; ph=&quot;ˈaɪ ˈiː dˈiːz &quot;&amp;gt;IEDS&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sounds something like &quot;Iyee'Edees&quot;, giving a stupid sound artifact. I could do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;IPA&quot; ph=&quot;ˈaɪ&quot;&amp;gt;I&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA; &amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;IPA&quot; ph=&quot;ˈiː&quot;&amp;gt;E&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA; &amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;IPA&quot; ph=&quot;dˈiːz&quot;&amp;gt;DS&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now the issue is the pause between each sound is too long. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in the IPA phonetic alphabet, what symbols could I place in between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ˈaɪ&#xA;ˈiː&#xA;dˈiːz &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give the pause I need to adequately space out those sounds so each letter is pronounced in full?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15165" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T11:38:11.940" Title="With SSML phoneme tags using IPA phonetic symbols, how can I insert pauses to slow down pronounciation?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;software&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31009" CreationDate="2019-03-30T11:38:11.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in researching the question, I ended up finding an answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it does not give me full control over the pausing, adding a period after each block of phonetic characters added the perfect amount of spacing, thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;phoneme alphabet=&quot;IPA&quot; ph=&quot;  ˈaɪ. ˈiː. dˈiː.z &quot;&amp;gt;IEDS&amp;lt;/phoneme&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works perfectly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15165" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T11:38:11.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2019-03-30T14:37:38.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A diphthong is a moving vowel, in other words the articulatory apparatus undergoes a significant change of status during the articulation of. The organs of articulation change position; so that you can say a diphthong consists of three constituents, the origin, the destination and the trajectory. Diphthongs are often regarded as being two vowels, di+phthong. They are indicated symbolically by a symbol that indicates the origin, followed directly by a symbol that indicates the target or destination. The diphthong, however, is really the trajectory between these two. There are three basic types of falling diphthong in English: those that target [j], such as &quot;eye&quot;, those that target [w], such as &quot;ow&quot;, and those that fall in towards the centre of the vowel space (the so-called centring diphthongs), such as &quot;air&quot;. A centring diphthong can be analysed as a diphthong of one of the other two types, followed contiguously by an R-sound, though for non-rhotic speakers the actual R merges with the centring diphthong and becomes inaudible. [i:] &amp;amp; [u:] could also be analysed as diphthongs, viz. [ij] &amp;amp; [uw]. If that were the case, we could list some twelve diphthongs in English. There are four which target [j]: [ij], [ej], [aj] &amp;amp; [oj], as in bee, bay, buy boy. There are four which target [w]: [uw], [ew], [aw] &amp;amp; [ow], as in moo, sew, cow &amp;amp; bowl. And the are possibly four centring diphthong, if we can count &quot;ur&quot; as a centring diphthong that begins at the centre and targets itself. There are &quot;ear&quot;, &quot;oor&quot; as in &quot;tour&quot;, &quot;air&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;ur&quot;. How to symbolize these without the I.P.A. characters I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24256" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T14:37:38.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31007" CreationDate="2019-03-30T14:44:37.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that you use the word &quot;precede&quot;, which on first reading suggests that you are looking for some evolutionary story. There is one sub-area of linguistics that speculates about the pre-history of language. My own speculation (the antithesis of Chomsky's) is that the crucial evolutionary spark was developing refined volitional control over articulatory muscles. Then we figured out what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative, you might be asking about domains of study that &quot;logically precede&quot; language, or which language depends on. That would be the areas of epistemology in philosophy, from a cognitivist perspective. It is part of the classical question of the nature of knowledge: what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a concept, and how is it different from a word? What &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a proposition, and how is it different from a sentence? Cognitive psychology becomes important in guiding you towards a specific epistemology, since certain trends (the Fregean stream of thinking) tend towards an abstract mathematical characterization of concepts and propositions. Lakoff and Johnson are examples of cognitively-oriented theorizing about concepts and propositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is unfortunately a widespread tendency for people to think that there is an underlying (universal) &quot;language of thought&quot; and natural language is a translation device from LOT to real language. I have never seen a palatable argument for such a hidden &quot;language&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; gives a good introduction to that idea (advanced by Fodor, most prominently). The main problem that I see with Mentalese is the lack of a plausible set of representational primitives, given the known facts about syntax and semantics across languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-03-30T16:10:23.950" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T16:10:23.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2019-03-30T19:53:04.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers here are excellent and give good evidence. But here's another way of looking at it, from a phonological viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Phonologically, the distinction is really between &amp;quot;syllabic&amp;quot; (acts as a nucleus) and &amp;quot;nonsyllabic&amp;quot; (doesn't act as a nucleus).&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The division into &amp;quot;consonant&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;vowel&amp;quot; is pretty arbitrary, and you can't always draw a nice line between the two. In Chinese, fricatives can be syllabic; in English, nasals and laterals can be. Many languages have pairs of phonemes that are exactly the same except one is syllabic and the other isn't (such as &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;). In PIE, &lt;code&gt;*i&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*j&lt;/code&gt; are reconstructed as allophones: is that phoneme a consonant or a vowel? In the context of this answer, when I say &amp;quot;vowel&amp;quot; I mean &amp;quot;something on the IPA vowel diagram&amp;quot;, and when I say &amp;quot;consonant&amp;quot; I mean &amp;quot;something on the IPA consonant diagram&amp;quot;—but either of those can be either syllabic or non-syllabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, it's pretty clear that you have a vowel + glide sequence, with two separate phonemes. For example, in Japanese, &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; acts just like any other non-syllabic consonant: you can have &lt;code&gt;/aka/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/aja/&lt;/code&gt;, and even &lt;code&gt;/a.ika/&lt;/code&gt;, but not &lt;code&gt;*/ajka/&lt;/code&gt;. So in Japanese, it makes sense to analyze &lt;code&gt;[aj]&lt;/code&gt; as an underlying &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; (syllabic) plus a &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; (non-syllabic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, though, it's pretty clear that you only have a single phoneme. In English, the sequence &lt;code&gt;[aj]&lt;/code&gt; acts just like any other syllabic phoneme. It can come before all sorts of codas, as in &lt;em&gt;geist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt;, where other syllabic+non-syllabic sequences can't. And the &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; never comes &amp;quot;detached&amp;quot;, even to satisfy the Maximal Onset Principle: in my dialect, for example, &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;[jɹ̩]&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;liar&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;code&gt;[laj.ɹ̩]&lt;/code&gt;. So it makes sense to say that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;/aj/&lt;/code&gt; is a single phoneme in English&lt;/strong&gt;, because that analysis is more elegant and explains all the data nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's what a diphthong is: a series of multiple different phones, that &lt;strong&gt;acts as a single phoneme&lt;/strong&gt;. The same can be said for affricates: phonetically, &lt;code&gt;[tʃ]&lt;/code&gt; is a stop followed by a fricative. But if you call it an affricate, you're saying that those two sounds act as a single phonemic consonant. (In Swahili, for example, &lt;code&gt;/tʃ/&lt;/code&gt; patterns with the stops: it acts like a &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; or a &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, not like a sequence of consonant-plus-consonant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Like with anything in phonology, there's no indisputable &amp;quot;proof&amp;quot; of this. Phonemes aren't something we can see or measure directly. Instead, I'm saying that &lt;em&gt;this theory, with diphthongs in it, explains the English evidence in a nice way&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe someday someone will come up with a different theory with no diphthongs involved! But for now, this theory is the most solid one I know of, and that's sort of the general consensus among linguists as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T02:11:54.927" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-31T02:02:54.557" Score="3" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;TG is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transformational grammar&lt;/a&gt;. CFG is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;context free grammar&lt;/a&gt;.  A TG includes a CFG, and if you remove the transformations from a TG, what is left is a CFG, at least in my understanding of classical TG theory.  But I don't mean to imply that transformations don't do anything -- if you remove the transformations from TG, you have to beef up the CFG in order to generate some sentences which transformations originally seemed necessary to describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my own answer in mind for this question, which I will give in a day or two. Boiling it down, my answer will be: Yes, but the extra sentences generated by a TG are all ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T03:00:18.740" Title="Can a TG generate sentences which a CFG cannot generate?" Tags="&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30615" CreationDate="2019-03-31T09:58:27.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The environment in which a phoneme occurs in, can affect the audible realisation of it. An allophone is a variation of a phoneme that has been conditioned by its environment. For example: /s/ is realised as [z] when in comes after a voiced sound. &#xA;Take for example the word {Car}. In its plural form it is pronounced {carz}&#xA;In the word {pits}, there's no [z] sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;S--&gt; [s]/[-voice]__&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    [Z]/[+voice]__&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both allophones do not encroach on the work of the other. /s/ will always be [s] when it comes after a voiceless phoneme and /s/ will always be pronounced as [z] when it comes after voiced phonemes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they occur in mutually exclusive environments, they are in complementary distribution and are therefore, allophones of the same phoneme. &#xA;Much like Jack Spratt and his wife...&#xA;He could eat no fat, and she could eat no lean, but together they lick the platter clean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23102" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T09:58:27.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-31T14:52:25.870" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background : I used to think that employing the word &quot;right&quot; to speak about good thinks was only an arabic culture trait - for instance the Quran describes good people with the expression &quot;people of the right&quot; in opposition with &quot;the people of the left&quot; who are the bad ones and when someone is seeing that something bode well or bring good omens we use &quot;يتيمن&quot; which means literally that &quot;he goes right-handed with it&quot;,indeed the Arabic word for &quot;right&quot; is &quot;يمين&quot;,a word that is also bound to the &quot;south&quot; cardinal direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically,the word &quot;omen&quot; with its latin origins but undefined etymology sounds insanely - almost - the same as &quot;يمين&quot; !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When examining the french word &quot;droit&quot; , my intuition becomes just stronger : &quot;droit&quot; that means &quot;right&quot; and comes from the latin &quot;directus&quot;(&quot;in straight line&quot;) is the same word for &quot;law&quot;,&quot;wright&quot;,&quot;jurisdiction&quot;,&quot;dexterous&quot; and &quot;erect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we go further,to say &quot;left&quot; in french we use these days &quot;gauche&quot; but the original word was &quot;senestre&quot; which bears a profound pejorative connotation (yes,it's the word for &quot;sinister&quot;)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that English is not an exception ; &quot;right&quot; comes from the old word &quot;riht&quot; thus &quot;good&quot; while &quot;left&quot; comes from a whole family of pejorative vocabulary (weak,bad...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other language (except those derived from Latin or semetic ones) that have the same trait ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the result of a psychological phenomenon or just a legacy from one very ancestral common language ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2586" LastEditorUserId="2586" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T09:51:08.737" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T09:51:08.737" Title="what makes the link between the right/left hands,north/south directions and the duality good-bad" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31024" CreationDate="2019-03-31T14:57:35.410" Score="4" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones. But what happened to 3rd declension nouns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like for the majority of them, due to the irregularity of the sg. nom. forms, the sg. nom. was simply remodelled with the sing. accusative. This explains e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Latin noun forms in the order of sg. nom., sg. acc., pl. nom./acc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;voce&lt;/code&gt; &quot;voice&quot; from &lt;code&gt;vōx, vōcem, vōcēs&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;-trice&lt;/code&gt; &quot;-er (f.)&quot; from &lt;code&gt;-trīx, trīcem, trīcēs&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as &lt;code&gt;fiume&lt;/code&gt; &quot;river&quot; from &lt;code&gt;flūmen, flūmen, flūmina&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair processes. Now, what happened to some other Latin 3rd declension patterns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It. &lt;code&gt;-ione&lt;/code&gt; &quot;-(t/s)ion&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;-iō, -iōnem, iōnēs&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the same process happen here as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It. &lt;code&gt;-[d/g]ine&lt;/code&gt;  from Latin &lt;code&gt;-[d/g]ō, -[d/g]inem, -[d/g]inēs&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;incl. It. &lt;code&gt;voragine&lt;/code&gt; &quot;chasm, abyss&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;vorāgō, vorāginem, vorāginēs&lt;/code&gt;, It &lt;code&gt;torpedine&lt;/code&gt; &quot;stingray, torpedo&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;torpēdō, torpēdine, torpēdinēs&lt;/code&gt;, It. &lt;code&gt;-itudine&lt;/code&gt; &quot;-itude&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;-itūdō, -itūdinem, -itūdinēs&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same question as above. In addition, is there any particular reason why the Italian reflex is not &lt;code&gt;-[d/g]ene&lt;/code&gt; given the short &lt;code&gt;-i-&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It. &lt;code&gt;-ità&lt;/code&gt; &quot;-ity&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;-itās, -itātem, -itātēs&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary lists an older reflex of It. &lt;code&gt;-itade&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did this sufix happen, given Italian did not go through the intervocalic voicing of lenis consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Naïvely it appears there was a competition between the two forms and &lt;code&gt;-ità&lt;/code&gt; won out. Is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It. &lt;code&gt;vertù&lt;/code&gt; &quot;virtue&quot; from Latin &lt;code&gt;virtūs, virtūtem, virtūtēs&lt;/code&gt; seems to have undergone a similar process, with an older form &lt;code&gt;vertude&lt;/code&gt;. Then, how did the  &lt;code&gt;-de&lt;/code&gt; drop out in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastEditorUserId="14808" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T13:48:35.473" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T13:52:14.480" Title="Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31003" CreationDate="2019-03-31T16:06:16.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd take a look at 'dialog acts' rather than general purpose discourse functions. This is a good place to start: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dialogbank.uvt.nl/wp-content/uploads/tdb/2015/12/DialogBank-LRE-v8.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dialogbank.uvt.nl/wp-content/uploads/tdb/2015/12/DialogBank-LRE-v8.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It references the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dialogbank.uvt.nl/wp-content/uploads/tdb/2015/11/DiAML-ISO24617-2_data_categories.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO 24617-2&lt;/a&gt; standard which captures intents like &lt;strong&gt;Accept Apology,&#xA;Thanking, Accept Thanking, Init-Goodbye&lt;/strong&gt;, and much more. The following paper identifies several of the corpora that are available: &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.00839.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.00839.pdf&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T16:06:16.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30886" CreationDate="2019-03-31T16:18:51.263" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me try to put it simpler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/ as in bin and bean besides length is that /ɪ/ is 'clear' and the /i(ː)/ sounds a little fricative. You could probably also write bean as /bhɪːn/. It's the same difference as in ton an tone, just more difficult to hear with the i. Bin and pin have pretty much the same difference without the difference in length, if you pronounce pin with an aspirated p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T16:18:51.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31018" CreationDate="2019-03-31T20:26:58.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin word omen (&amp;lt; *Ho:-mn) has clear counterparts in Anatolian languages and it has nothing to do with the word yaman.&#xA;But you are indeed right that rightside is often linked with good or correct, and leftside with bad or clumsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T20:26:58.107" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31019" CreationDate="2019-04-01T04:21:53.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I'd quite agree with that. In the plural, the forms are definitely nominative—but in the singular, I'd say they're usually clearly accusative. See for example &lt;em&gt;notte&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;noctem&lt;/em&gt;, which can't possibly be nominative, but also second-declension examples like &lt;em&gt;figlio&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;filium&lt;/em&gt;: if it had come from &lt;em&gt;filius&lt;/em&gt; it would instead be something like &lt;em&gt;figlie&lt;/em&gt; (because word-final &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;, and the diphthong would simplify). There are a few strange cases like &lt;em&gt;uomo&lt;/em&gt; that do come from the nominative, but they're rare, and usually have competing forms from the accusative (like &lt;em&gt;uomine&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Denis Nardin suggests that the plurals come from the accusative as well; see his answer for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your other questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yep, Latin &lt;em&gt;-iōnem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; Italian &lt;em&gt;-ione&lt;/em&gt; (via loss of final nasals).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Final nasal loss again: &lt;em&gt;vōrāginem&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;voragine&lt;/em&gt;. There's another phonological process here too: in Italian, &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; became &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; in open syllables (compare &lt;em&gt;fenestra&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;finestra&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a native Italian word is stressed on the last syllable (marked with an accent), and it has more than one syllable in it, it's always because a Latin final syllable got deleted. In this case, the dropping happened long after Latin: final &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt; in Old Italian first lenited to &lt;em&gt;-de&lt;/em&gt; and then disappeared.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This didn't happen everywhere: contrast &lt;em&gt;vite&lt;/em&gt; &quot;lives&quot;. Instead, it only seemed to happen in derivational endings, like &lt;em&gt;-tà(tem)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-tù(tem)&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps singular forms like &lt;em&gt;vita&lt;/em&gt; kept the plurals from changing too much? That's why you have &lt;em&gt;amica/amic&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; instead of the expected *&lt;em&gt;amica/amice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. For the first declension there's no solid proof about nominative vs accusative, since both would give the same result (&lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-am&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;-ae&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-as&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, the third plural could be either nominative or accusative, since the forms are always the same. But all else being equal, it's more elegant to say everything came from the accusative singular and nominative plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T13:52:14.480" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T13:52:14.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T06:42:13.107" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked it up in different dictionaries but could not find anything. Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24264" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T09:18:09.297" Title="What is the French equivalent of the English linguistic term &quot;reflex&quot; (the descendant sound of a sound in a proto-language)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31015" CreationDate="2019-04-01T08:06:36.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A transformational grammar &lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt; is a tuple &lt;em&gt;(P,T)&lt;/em&gt; where &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; is some context-sensitive (e.g. context free) grammar (the 'base component' of &lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt; is a finite sequence of transformations over the alphabet of &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; (the 'transformational component' of &lt;em&gt;G&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the following are the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For all CFG &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;, the TG &lt;em&gt;(P, &amp;emptyset;)&lt;/em&gt; describes the same language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For some TG &lt;em&gt;(P, T)&lt;/em&gt; there exists a CFG &lt;em&gt;Q&lt;/em&gt; describing the same language. For some &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt; this CFG can be constructed algorithmically by applying the transformations to the base component directly (what you refer to as 'beefing up' the CFG).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There exist TG whose language cannot be described by a CFG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore TGs are strictly more expressive than CFGs, and transformations are not just 'syntactic sugar' to make the grammar shorter or easier to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/31015/can-a-tg-generate-sentences-which-a-cfg-cannot-generate?noredirect=1#comment67297_31015&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; you write you are interested in deciding which of the two theories is &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; (apparently assuming we are describing a language that can indeed be expressed by a CFG). This depends on what you want to achieve. Using a CFG shows that a language is in a more restricted class; on the other hand, a TG may be much shorter and easy to understand because transformations such as passivization can better be expressed as transformations and would be more obscured in a CFG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T08:06:36.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31025" CreationDate="2019-04-01T09:15:02.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bonne question ! Personnally, I write &quot;reflet&quot; for the noun and &quot;être reflété&quot; (to be reflected) for the verb. This may be an anglicism, but I can't think of something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T09:15:02.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31019" CreationDate="2019-04-01T10:30:49.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it seems that the most common modern point of view is that most Italian plurals come from the &lt;em&gt;accusative plural&lt;/em&gt;, after the regular transformation that turned final &lt;em&gt;/s/&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;/j/&lt;/em&gt;. This explains perfectly also the third declension (so the ending &lt;em&gt;-es&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;-ej&lt;/em&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;). For example, from Martin Maiden's &lt;em&gt;A linguistic history of Italian&lt;/em&gt;, section 2.12&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative [to the derivation of plurals from nominative], and in our view more plausible, approach is to view inflectional -e and -i as phonetic developments of the unstressed vowels, triggered by original final [s]. Inflectional -s survives intact in Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance and Sardinian. Traces of inflectional -s also appear in some northern Italian dialects. After a stressed vowel, [s] has generally become [i] in Italo-Romance: noi ‘we’ &amp;lt; NOS; voi ‘you’ &amp;lt; UOS; poi ‘then’ &amp;lt; POS(T); crai ‘tomorrow’ &amp;lt; CRAS (in southern dialects); stai ‘you stand’ &amp;lt; STAS. This lends weight to the view, proposed, for example, by Reichenkron (1939) and Lausberg (1965: 431–3), that unstressed final [as] and [es] yielded *[ai] and *[ei] (Lausberg actually proposes *[ai] and *[ei]), which subsequently monophthongized, to [e] and [i].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The facts are strongly consistent with the hypothesis that inflectional -e and -i do not directly continue Latin inflections containing front vowels. There is no palatalization whatsoever of velar consonants before the feminine plural inflection (nor before the second person singular indicative inflection -e of the OTuscan first conjugation): e.g., aˈmiːka ‘friend’, aˈmiːke; ˈgrɛːka ‘Greek’, ˈgrɛːke; ˈfiːzika ‘physical’, ˈfiːzike; ˈlarga ‘broad’, ˈlarge; ˈbjaŋka ‘white’, ˈbjaŋke. This absence of alternation in the feminine is repeated throughout the modern Italo-Romance dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your other point, some kind of intervocalic voicing of consonants happened, most notably in Northern Italy, but really across the whole peninsula: for example see &lt;em&gt;strada&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;stratam&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;lago&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;lacum&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;riva&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;ripam&lt;/em&gt;), etc. so &lt;em&gt;cittade&lt;/em&gt; is not really that much of an outlier (but cfr. with &lt;em&gt;virtute&lt;/em&gt;). Maiden, in section 2.7, says about intervocalic voicing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voicing of intervocalic short voiceless consonants is a characteristic of northern Italian dialects. [...] That some instances of intervocalic voicing in Tuscan may be attributable to borrowing from northern Italian dialects of words containing voiced consonants is entirely plausible. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of words showing intervocalic voicing are so rooted, semantically, in the ground of everyday life that an exotic origin is implausible. [...] A further argument against the hypothesis of a northern origin for consonant voicing is the striking absence of words displaying that shortening of long consonants (see section 8) which characterizes all northern dialects, and which some scholars group with northern Italian voicing under the general label of ‘lenition’. [...] So the problem of intervocalic voicing remains unsolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T11:16:02.717" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2019-04-01T12:36:14.850" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Mother tongue is a kind of tongue that we learn with our mother or father at home and it is own tongue of some place. Native tongue is the tongue of the colonization or oficial in any country. And the first tongue is a kind tongue that we learn on the first time. Abel Adriano Bambi from Angola&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24266" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T12:36:14.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T16:55:25.347" Score="8" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something I started wondering while working on formal logic, but I'm having trouble finding any papers that address it. Obviously, the standard way to express negation with a polarity item in languages/dialects with negative concord is as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ain't got nothing in no car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm wondering how such languages/dialects would work with a scenario such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person A has committed a crime in front of B&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; You saw nothing, okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;(defiantly)&lt;/em&gt; I didn't see nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just a matter of emphasizing the negative polarity item in negative concord languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't see &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps people work around it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there some third way that hasn't occurred to me? Input from native speakers of negative concord using languages/dialects would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13554" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:30:28.367" Title="How do languages with negative concord express the actual negation of negative polarity items?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T20:17:09.773" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing some research that to quantify the efficiency of a certain treatment upon various parameters related to production and comprehension of speech and language, in patients with aphasia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, between the various papers that report such measures (refs below), I am at a loss with regard to how to classify the various abilities, tested as they are by various tests, etc. I've had a go in this table, but it just seems those categories are not at all mutually exclusive, but instead overlapping in multiple ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any tips in how I could make those categories more firm, perhaps from someone who deals in aphasia research, would be much appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J1V0S.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J1V0S.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REFERENCES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hurkmans, J.; Bruijn, M. de; Boonstra, A. M.; Jonkers, R.; Bastiaanse, R.; Arendzen, H.; Reinders-Messelink, H. A. Music in the Treatment of Neurological Language and Speech Disorders: A Systematic Review. Aphasiology 2012, 26 (1), 1–19. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2011.602514&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2011.602514&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;van der Meulen, I.; van de Sandt-Koenderman, M. E.; Ribbers, G. M. Melodic Intonation Therapy: Present Controversies and Future Opportunities. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 2012, 93 (1, Supplement), S46–S52. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2011.05.029&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2011.05.029&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zumbansen, A.; Peretz, I.; Hébert, S. Melodic Intonation Therapy: Back to Basics for Future Research. Front. Neurol. 2014, 5. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2014.00007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2014.00007&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zumbansen, A.; Tremblay, P. Music-Based Interventions for Aphasia Could Act through a Motor-Speech Mechanism: A Systematic Review and Case–Control Analysis of Published Individual Participant Data. Aphasiology 2018, 33 (4), 466–497. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2018.1506089&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2018.1506089&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20885" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T00:01:50.623" Title="Categorising parameters of speech&amp;language output&amp;comprehension in aphasia" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;aphasiology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31025" CreationDate="2019-04-01T20:43:31.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the word &quot;réflexe&quot;, but the word &quot;dérivé&quot; is much more used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T20:43:31.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31015" CreationDate="2019-04-01T22:37:07.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer is yes, TG does generate sentences which cannot be generated by a CFG, but these additional sentences are not grammatical.  There are two cases to consider, both involving extraction. (1) TG can generate sentences with extraction from one conjunct of a coordinate construction, while this is not possible to describe in a CFG.  In fact, such sentences are ungrammatical. (This is described by Ross's Coordinate Structure Constraint, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED016965.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) TG can generate sentences with more than one constituent, indeed an arbitrary number of constituents, extracted from a single constituent, while CFG cannot. But sentences with more than one extracted constituent from a single constituent are ungrammatical.  (One instance of this, extraction from relative clauses, is described by Ross's Complex NP Constraint, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15166&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have not actually read Ross's dissertation, you might reasonably guess from the title that the movement constraints he describes are now accounted for by the constraints he gives.  Actually, they aren't, because Ross doesn't give any constraints on variables. The variables in question are those in the structural descriptions of movement transformations, standing for strings of labeled brackets and symbols. It is merely a conjecture that such constraints could be found and formulated, but they never have been (and now, I would say, we know why).  So the Ross movement constraints are unsolved problems for TG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will append to this answer over the next few days an account of why CFG cannot describe extraction from just one conjunct of a coordinate construction and why it cannot describe extraction of an arbitrary number of constituents from a single constituent. This requires some knowledge of Gerald Gazdar's non-transformational theory of extraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gazdar's theory of extraction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first it had been thought by TG grammarians that the existence of unbounded dependencies created by extractions could not be described in a CFG. Around 1980, Gerald Gazdar found a way of describing them, after all, in a CFG.  See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178215?origin=JSTOR-pdf&amp;amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unbounded Dependencies and Coordinate Structure&lt;/a&gt;. Here is a rough outline of how Gazdar's method works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the non-terminal vocabulary of a CFG we append &quot;slash categories&quot;, which are non-terminal symbols whose names have some ordinary category followed by a slash, followed by the ordinary category of a constituent which is missing.  So, for instance, &quot;S/PP&quot; is the category of Ss which are missing a PP.  A CFG must have a finite non-terminal vocabulary, but these new non-terminal symbols do not affect the status of the CFG, since there are at most the square of the number of ordinary non-terminals appended, and the square of a finite number is still finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We must also ensure that there are suitable phrase structure rules to interpret the slash categories. For each phrase structure rule with an ordinary category A on its left hand side (before the arrow), for each category B, there must also be a rule with A/B on the left, and on the right of the ps rule, (1) if B occurs on the right of the original rule, remove it, (2) otherwise for each non-terminal symbol C on the right of the original rule, replace C with C/B and require this ps rule to be in the CFG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sigh.  I suppose that is not terribly clear.  I'll come back to this and try to put it better.  Intuitively, we add a finite number of ps rules to interpret the slash categories, and these additional ps rules either remove whatever is supposed to be missing, or pass down the requirement that it be missing from some daughter constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extraction is described in Gazdar's theory by giving a ps rule which has on its right hand side both the category of the extracted constituent and another slash category which describes the constituent that the extracted constituent came from.  For instance, to describe a topicalized PP as being extracted from an S and Chomsky-adjoined at the left, requires a ps rule S -&gt; PP S/PP.  The construction is an S and has an extracted PP followed by a S which is missing a PP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In adopting Gazdar's theory, we don't give up using movement to describe grammatical constructions, we only give up describing movement with transformations.  Instead of transformations which transpose constituents over variables representing terms of a &quot;proper analysis&quot; that are incoherent strings of labeled brackets and symbols, movement is instead characterized in terms of tree structures, from a beginning state before the movement, to an end state after it, with the trajectory marked off by the slash categories of each constituent out of which the item moves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why only transformations can break Ross's CSC.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coordinate structures have structures with at least 3 instances of the same category: each of the coordinated constituents has the same category, and the entire construction has that same category.  The conjunction of Ss is an S, of two NPs is a NP, of two PPs is a PP, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When something is extracted from a coordinate structure, in Gazdar's theory, the structure has a slash category, meaning something is missing from it, and consequently each of the constituents of the conjoined structure has that same category, which will be a slash category.  So it is not possible to extract anything from just one conjunct -- anything extracted must be extracted from all the conjuncts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why extracting many different constituents from a constituent is not possible in a CFG.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slash categories describe constituents missing one constituent, but there is no way to describe constituents missing more than one constituent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will occur to you that although Gazdar's theory does not allow for the extraction of more than one thing from a constituent, it would be possible to construct CFGs which do extract 2, or even 3 things.  It is possible.  However, following Gazdar's method, it is not possible to extract any arbitrary number of things, because that would require an unbounded number of slash categories, A/B, A/B/B, A/B/B/B, ..., but the number of non-terminal symbols in a CFG must be fixed and finite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T03:00:18.740" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T03:00:18.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31031" CreationDate="2019-04-01T23:21:32.307" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming from a boolean logic perspective, this is a clear case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;I ain't got nothing in no car.&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;I (do not (have something in a car))&amp;quot;, then we can compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;de Morgan's law&lt;/a&gt; (NOT(X) OR NOT(Y)) = NOT(X AND Y) or vice versa (NOT(X) AND NOT(Y)) = NOR(X, Y). Following that, I would parse the example as &amp;quot;I have not and no thing and in no car-desposite&amp;quot;. Indeed, we can omit notation of AND in logic formulas to (XY) instead of (X AND Y), and we can simplify (1 AND X) to just (X).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Coming back to this answer a little bit later, I still can't explain it any better, but I can add the missing conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Do you have something in your car?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I ain't got &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; in no car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a mode of expression, but it might be detected by very analytic investigators. This is also called the overspecific dementi, which is less obvious in the above example, but notable in &amp;quot;Are you in possession of drugs?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No Sir, I don't have nothing &lt;em&gt;in my car&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Or to take your example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: You saw nothing, okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: (defiantly) I didn't see nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(later) O: Did you see anything&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: (nervous) I didn't see a crime, if that's what you're asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguistically, you might get very different answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T15:30:58.633" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8747" CreationDate="2019-04-02T01:57:22.453" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship&#xA;  exists between Indo-European and Semitic and that the&#xA;  Indo-European and the Semitic language families descend from a&#xA;  prehistoric language ancestral to them both. The theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times, but historically it has had a number of supporting advocates and arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Semitic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24066" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T03:08:44.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T03:08:44.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9976" CreationDate="2019-04-02T02:25:03.640" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship&#xA;  exists between Indo-European and Semitic and that the&#xA;  Indo-European and the Semitic language families descend from a&#xA;  prehistoric language ancestral to them both. The theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times, but historically it has had a number of supporting advocates and arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Semitic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24066" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T03:07:04.320" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T03:07:04.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-02T05:54:01.177" Score="3" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in Crystal, D. (2008) that “Some morphemes...are realized by more than one morph according to their position in a word or sentence, such alternative morphs [are] called allomorphs” (p.313), and I thought allomorphs can be recognized by their position and function in the structure of a word. But then when I came across two examples, I found that this criterion might not be enough to judge whether several morphs are allomorphs or different morphemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example A: the morpheme of plurality, usually realized orthographically as -s, -es and phonologically as /s/, /z/, or /iz/; the more irregular cases, like mouse-mice, ox-oxen, though quite different from the -s realization, are still considered as allomorphs of plurality, since they appear at the end of a noun and functions to mark plurality.&#xA;Example B: morphemes (prefixes) that means &quot;not&quot;, un-, in-, a-, though they all share the same sememe, appear in the beginning of an adjective and functions to change the original word to an antonymous meaning, they are not considered allomorphs, but instead different morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this has to do with the morphological processes, A is inflectional and B derivational, the position &amp;amp; function criteria apply only to the former? Or does this have to do with etymological reasons? &#xA;Can't figure it out...please help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24268" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T16:55:38.387" Title="Criteria for judging allomorphs and different morphemes?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31025" CreationDate="2019-04-02T09:18:09.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reflex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; says it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/continuateur#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;continuateur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't really confirm this is actually a technical term after a cursory search. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/reflex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wiktioanry&lt;/a&gt; defines the linguistic sense of English &lt;em&gt;reflex&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;Issue, continuateur ou aboutissement d’un étymon ou d’un phonème étymologique.&quot; There might not be an established counterpart in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T09:18:09.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-02T10:34:38.757" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a sentence that says &quot;He was required &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; work in the kitchen&quot; (actually, another example, doesn't really matter, the question is in principle): what is the function of &quot;to&quot; here? Is it a complementiser? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extra question: does the second VP (work) require an IP? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. in this sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2mT3Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2mT3Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;syntax tree with &amp;quot;to do X&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for tree-formation, I am basically using X-bar but I am not really that verse that I can say I am without fault here... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24271" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T08:17:31.993" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T08:17:31.993" Title="English Syntax Tree: is the &quot;to do X&quot; a CP?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31038" CreationDate="2019-04-02T16:55:38.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of &quot;allomorph&quot; was developed historically in parallel with the concept &quot;allophone&quot;, and was designed to express relations between levels of analysis. In English, [pʰ] and [p] are allophones of the phoneme /p/, following distributional rules governing the bijective relationship between phonemes and allophones (i.e. one allophone appears in one context, the other in another, and the allophones have only a single &quot;source&quot;). The phoneme /p/ can be seen as expressing the unity behind the allophones [pʰ] and [p], and there is a phonetic rule governing that distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phoneme sequences /s/, /z/, /ɨz/ are recognized as being, similarly, variants of a single morpheme marking the plural (also the 3sg present or the possessive). The output of the rule is one or more phonemes (&lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; contrast in English) and the input is a morpheme &quot;the plural&quot;, symbolized often as &quot;{S}&quot;, using Berkeley-style notation. Such rules are known as &quot;morphophonemic&quot; rules, an just as the relation between a phoneme and the phones that realize it are known as &quot;allophones&quot; (of the phoneme), the relation between the morpheme {S} and the phonemes that realize it are known as &quot;allomorphs&quot; (of the morpheme). The concept of &quot;allomorph&quot; is wide-ranging, and would include cases such as &lt;em&gt;s,z,ɨz&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;-ren&lt;/em&gt;, vowel changes as in &lt;em&gt;foot~feet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to know that this was the theoretical standard in pre-generative days in the 40's and 50's. Generative grammar rejected the strict separation of levels of taxonomic analysis, and initially rejected the terms &quot;phoneme, allophone, allomorph&quot; associated with that theory. Inevitably, the words were re-adopted, unfortunately without the original meanings, and therefore there is currently no clear understanding of what an &quot;allophone&quot; or &quot;allomorph&quot; is. The term &quot;allomorph&quot;  these days can be used to refer to the result of applying phonological rules to a morpheme (as in the set &lt;em&gt;s, z, ɨz&lt;/em&gt;) where there is obviously the result of a phonological rule; it can also include cases where the surface form of a morpheme follows a phonological rule specific to a particular morpheme or set of morphemes (for example the phonologically-distributed &lt;em&gt;-si~-i, -ya~-a&lt;/em&gt; alternation in Turkish possessive affixation). It will even extend to the relationship between &lt;em&gt;is, was, were, be&lt;/em&gt;, where there is no phonological conditioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harder question is identifying &quot;the same morpheme&quot;, whereby &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; is not the same morpheme as &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt;. The concept of &quot;sememe&quot; was not available to taxonomic analysis, and appeal to semantic function would not be. Still, the distribution and function of the three prefixes are not exactly the same. One of the meanings of &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;without&quot;, leading to &lt;em&gt;amoral&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;immoral&lt;/em&gt;. The more productive morpheme &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; generally attaches to Germanic roots and &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; attaches to Latinate roots (it's much more complicated than that but that's a first-approximation distinction). There are pairs like &lt;em&gt;unarguable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;inarguable&lt;/em&gt; which both exist, though individuals may abjure one form or the other, but you can't generally replace &lt;em&gt;in-&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;. Those differences (plus the gross differences in form) have been enough to cause linguists to say that &quot;these are different morphemes with similar function&quot;, not &quot;here are some variants of the single negative morpheme&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T16:55:38.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:09:53.477" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example - &lt;em&gt;Uncle John went shopping.&lt;/em&gt; Is &lt;em&gt;Uncle John&lt;/em&gt; an MWE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T20:33:45.783" Title="Are kinship+Name Multi-word expressions?" Tags="&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31043" CreationDate="2019-04-02T20:33:45.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the definition, the words have to belong together and form another meaning to be multi word expressions. But Uncle and John convey two completely separate meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difference to an MWE is that Uncle John can be translated to any language which knows a word or a phrase meaning Uncle and a name close enough to John without any difficulties and in any context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A real MWE like &quot;automatic car&quot; can not so easily be translated to another language. Mostly because we can have different interpretations - does an &quot;automatic car loader&quot; load automatic cars or automatically load (the batteries of) cars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T20:33:45.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31032" CreationDate="2019-04-02T22:47:17.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not knowing much about aphasia, I'll give it a shot from a general perspective: Apparently you want to try some music treatment for patients who are affected in different ways and degrees by aphasia. For that, you collected a number of exercises(?) and tests from literature written by people who had similar ideas, to expand on their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To test efficiency, you need to first measure the different issues, then apply the treatment, then measure again, and so on. You get graphs which hopefully all go up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should first separate into measurement and treatment. Both could be done involving music, some exercises could even be a mixture of both. Where both is done in one step, you should still write the measurements in one column (or row) separate from the notes about the treatment. So you get four columns - treatment/measurement/both, name, notes, results (only for measurements). How you quantify them is up to you - a percentage (of the ideal or healthy/normal results) should be possible to apply to any kind of measurement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, you want to separate into what is being treated and measured - I'd start with the medical classifications of aphasia, and try to break them down into what part of the brain is actually affected - whereby the more severe forms would have more of those parts affected. Articulation. Speech center. Different memory abilities. Different mental abilities (grammar, abstraction, humor...). 'Comprehension' (also with different tests). And so on. However, the brain has many parts and you know better which parts could be affected and separated through methodical tests and treatments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The different exercises/tests you have in your table should be possible to break up to fit into this classification system. However, each part will probably also affect many other parts - so I suggest to not bother too much with a perfect fit and to just choose the classification which fits best from your point of view (logically, most effect, literature...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, you end up with a journal which you can directly use to write a spread sheet with your data and analysis, but also as classification system for your future publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, you might also want to try to track other information - like how much of your results is actual healing or relearning, how much is motivation and other such temporary effects, whether any abilities keep degrading from age or original causes of the aphasia, influence of any personal/environmental (temporary) issues, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal belief about what separates aphasia from other brain issues is that it affects the parts of the brain responsible for connecting the different parts. So things get messed up, even though the individual parts may not be affected. People know sounds, but they come out garbled. They know words but they mix them up. And so on. The main issue in healing or relearning is that learning/relearning/error correction will usually change the parts which are actually fine, as the brain doesn't know that the damage occured elsewhere. Which can cause a lot of issues, for instance when the brain repairs an actually damaged part, but by then other parts have already learned to work with the damage, and now don't work correctly with the repaired part anymore. Which leads to some back and forth. Eventually, the brain will find ways to work correctly with and without the repair in the right place, but it takes a lot of additional wiring until just one part of the brain functions normally again (whereby some parts may never heal completely). And stimulation (through Music) seems to be a good way to get there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T22:47:17.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T00:00:11.813" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Various simple sentences occur in English that I can't explain precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In we went!&quot;&#xA;&quot;Off he goes!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an arcane idiom from an earlier grammar, or is there a general rule that can be abstracted here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: initially I thought &quot;in&quot; was a preposition but I realise now this is a behaviour of particles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Up he looked&quot;&#xA;Although for transitive verbs this seems to not work:&#xA;*&quot;Up he picked&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the particle may move to the immediate left of the subject but no further, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Up, Mary saw John eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally it isn't possible to substitute it for a normal VP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Mary saw up John eat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this been investigated further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21432" LastEditorUserId="21432" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T09:02:22.530" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T09:02:22.530" Title="How is &quot;In we go&quot; syntactically valid?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;idiomaticity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31309" CreationDate="2019-04-03T00:13:45.287" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/31031/how-do-languages-with-negative-concord-express-the-actual-negation-of-negative-p#comment67377_31035&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;, Rethliopuks mentioned something I'd never really connected in my head before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Negative concord] is standard in plenty of languages around the world, incl[uding] most Romance languages, Afrikaans, &lt;strong&gt;Greek (Ancient or Modern)&lt;/strong&gt;, nearly all Baltic and Slavic languages, Indo-Iranian languages iirc, Uralic languages, Turkish, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek is a language that's famously gone through Jespersen's Cycle more than once, with clear evidence of all the different stages. But it hadn't occurred to me that all those stages had negative concord too. Similarly, the famous example of French &lt;em&gt;ne pas&lt;/em&gt; comes from a negative concord language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we ever see Jespersen's Cycle happening in a language without this concord? If so, does the process differ in any significant way? The middle stage of Jespersen's Cycle seems to require multiple negative markers making a net negative, but the Cycle is also talked about as a sort of universal, while negative concord isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm not sure if all of my terminology is standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, in a negative concord language, multiple negatives make each other stronger, and one element of the sentence being marked negative makes the rest be marked negative too, if possible. For example, Yiddish &lt;em&gt;ikh es an epl&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I'm eating an apple&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;ikh es &lt;strong&gt;nit&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ken&lt;/strong&gt; epl&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;I eat not no apple&lt;/code&gt; &quot;I'm not eating an apple&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a positive concord language, either you can only have one negative per phrase with everything else being positive (English &quot;I haven't ever done it&quot;, *&quot;I haven't never done it&quot;). Alternately, multiple negatives can make a positive: Latin &lt;em&gt;non numquam ēgī&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;not never I.have.done.it&lt;/code&gt; = &quot;I've done it at some point&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T03:01:15.457" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T18:32:31.390" Title="Does Jespersen's Cycle apply to languages without negative concord?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;negation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17443" CreationDate="2019-04-03T08:11:08.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a world of data, it should be a trivial matter to find the definition of any word from any dictionary in any given year... that Gutenberg has a centuries old dictionary, well that’s nice I suppose... and we can always look up current definitions... but this describes a gap of well over a century.  This is astounding to me... I can find the chest size of any porn star that has ever lived, but I can’t find out what “racism” meant in 1960. Sakes alive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it would seem that the only answer it to literally canvas used book stores in hopes of collecting maybe one dictionary for each decade. This is crazy to me, given how little data this represents... but I think is the only answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24273" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T08:11:08.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T08:24:30.723" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for some help on strategy to be used for finding out if word is spoken in relation to another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ex: The pool is dirty.&#xA;Here dirty is spoken w.r.t pool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,&#xA;The pool was great but bathroom was dirty.&#xA;Here dirty is spoken w.r.t bathroom and not pool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What linguistic strategies can be used to enable this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24274" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T15:15:57.723" Title="Relationship between two words part of the same sentence" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31018" CreationDate="2019-04-03T10:35:37.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian has this too, as does German. Mongolian and Chinese do not have it, but they use left and right for points of the compass (left is east, right is west)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the explanation why many languages have this conection is because in some cultures, you are supposed to keep you right hand clean(er) and use only the left hand for unhygienic stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23437" LastEditorUserId="23437" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T10:48:37.380" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T10:48:37.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30693" CreationDate="2019-04-03T11:43:48.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I too late to answer this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a native Hebrew speaker interested in phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Hebrew speakers will not hear the difference between /e/ and /ɛ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest will be recognized as a &quot;foreign accent&quot;. /ʊ/ like in GenAm doesn't exist in Hebrew and sounds odd to the native Hebrew speaker, /ɪ/ is another &quot;monster&quot; that might even sound like /e/ to Hebrew speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, pronouncing /i/ as /ɪ/ is a very common feature of American accent in Hebrew. for example, while a speaker of Modern Hebrew reads this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;איש לא התעניין בזה&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;iʃ lo̞ itan'je̞n be̞'ze̞&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Americans tend to pronounce those Hebrew vowels as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ɪʃ lɔ/loʊ ɪtan'jɛn bə'zɛ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, at least for Hebrew, you can't replace vowels by their laxed-equivilaent. Modern Hebrew, having only about 8 million speakers, is extremely sensitive for pronunciation inaccuracies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19889" LastEditorUserId="19889" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T11:51:39.827" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T11:51:39.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30693" CreationDate="2019-04-03T15:04:01.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trick here is the distinction between &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;realizations&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, both Modern Hebrew and Spanish have only five vowel phonemes, conventionally transcribed &lt;code&gt;/i e a o u/&lt;/code&gt;. But the space of possible vowels is continuous: if you throw a dart at the IPA vowel chart while blindfolded, wherever it hits will be a possible sound people can make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when we say they &lt;em&gt;have five vowel phonemes&lt;/em&gt;, what we really mean is that Spanish and Hebrew &lt;em&gt;divide the vowel space into five parts&lt;/em&gt;. Anything in the top left corner (high front) falls under &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, whether that's &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[ɪ]&lt;/code&gt; or anything else in that area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, on the other hand, we have a whole lot more vowel phonemes: at least ten, maybe more, depending on analysis. So for English-speakers, the vowel space is divided into more parts, and what a Spanish-speaker calls &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; we might instead call &lt;code&gt;/ɪ/&lt;/code&gt; (because Spanish's &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; territory is divided up smaller in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as sumelic mentions, IPA isn't great for representing the phonetics of vowels. It's fine for phonemes, and has lots of good symbols for that, but it kind of breaks down when you want to say anything precise about the continuum of actual vowel realizations. Look into &quot;formant frequencies&quot; and &quot;categorical perception&quot; for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T15:04:01.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31056" CreationDate="2019-04-03T15:07:42.320" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the phrase &quot;I went to the shops with a friend&quot;, &quot;a friend&quot; is the accompanier, while I am the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages, such as Finnish (I believe) have a comitative case, which is taken by an accompanier noun. However, in many languages this is not the case. In German, the accompanier would take the dative case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mit einem Freund&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while in Latin it would take the ablative case (which I find rather odd):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Cum amico&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is whether there are any cross-linguistic trends regarding what case accompanier nouns tend to take in the absence of a comitative case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23453" LastEditorUserId="23453" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T08:26:50.750" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T17:26:19.080" Title="What cases are typical for nouns accompanying the subject?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T16:04:23.987" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages combine pro-drop with null or zero morphemes – inflectional morphemes, more particularly. Turkish is an example of this. To illustrate, the verb &lt;em&gt;istemek&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;to want&lt;/em&gt; is inflected as follows (in present continuous):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1Sg: istiyor-um&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2Sg: istiyor-sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3Sg: istiyor__&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1Pl: istiyor-uz&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2Pl: istiyor-sunuz&lt;br&gt;&#xA;3Pl: istiyor-lar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the 3rd person singular, there is no morpheme – or at least not one that’s phonetically realised. So, in that sense, we have a null morpheme. (&lt;em&gt;-yor-&lt;/em&gt; is the morpheme for continuous, but there’s no morpheme for person.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Next, Turkish is a pro-drop language. To say e.g. &lt;em&gt;I want to eat an apple&lt;/em&gt;, one does not have to use the first-person pronoun &lt;em&gt;ben&lt;/em&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;Ben bir elma yemek istiyorum&lt;/em&gt;, but can instead say: &lt;em&gt;Bir elma yemek istiyorum&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, in the third person one need not use the pronoun &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;. To say &lt;em&gt;He wants to eat an apple&lt;/em&gt;, one need not say &lt;em&gt;O bir elma yemek istiyor&lt;/em&gt;, but can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(T) &lt;em&gt;Bir elma yemek istiyor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, (T) is the kind of sentence I am interested in, as it contains &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt; a personal pronoun &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; an inflectional suffix. (More carefully, neither is realised at the surface.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question simply is whether anyone can supply another language that exhibits this – ideally a language where this happens in the first person singular. It’s fine if the language is merely null-subject and not fully pro-drop (i.e. allowing pronoun dropping only for subjects). Of course, I don’t want a language like Japanese or Korean, which lacks inflection in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21085" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T18:05:36.013" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T02:39:27.350" Title="Combining pro-drop with null morphemes" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31054" CreationDate="2019-04-03T16:19:57.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are basically three ways accompaniment can be expressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language has a special &quot;comitative&quot; case, which is used for accompaniment: Finnish &lt;em&gt;ystävineen&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;with some friends&quot;. (Note that in Finnish this case is extremely rare; you'll mostly see it in linguistics textbooks.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language uses an adposition for accompaniment: Latin &lt;em&gt;cum amīcīs&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;mit Freunden&lt;/em&gt;. Here Latin uses the ablative and German uses the dative: not because there's anything inherently ablative or dative about accompaniment, but because that's the standard case for &quot;object of a preposition that's not about movement&quot;. That's why you'll also see &lt;em&gt;prō amīcīs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aus Freunden&lt;/em&gt; &quot;for some friends&quot;, with the same cases but no accompaniment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language used to have a specific comitative case, but it merged together with something else. This is what you find in Hungarian, where the comitative merged into the instrumental: &lt;em&gt;barátokkal&lt;/em&gt; can now mean &quot;along with some friends&quot; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; &quot;by using some friends&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're most interested in the third possibility. The instrumental is the most common case for this, to the extent that Lakoff and Johnson claimed it was a linguistic universal that comitative and instrumental would look exactly the same (which it's not, at all—they focused too much on English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sometimes case mergers are just caused by phonological changes making two forms look the same (like later Latin's nominative-vocative, dative-accusative-ablative mergers), and when this happens, any case might get involved: it comes down to the phonology, not the semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Thanks to amegnunsen in the comments, there's a fourth option too, which I hadn't been familiar with!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The language uses a conjunctive (&quot;and&quot;) to mark accompaniment: Kabyle &lt;em&gt;d kra imeddukal&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and/with some friends&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T15:14:50.360" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T15:14:50.360" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31031" CreationDate="2019-04-03T16:39:35.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, let's take a broader look at multiple negation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ic.nanzan-u.ac.jp/LINGUISTICS/publication/pdf/NLSI3_2-4-fitzgibbons.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Van der Wouden (1994a)&lt;/a&gt; describes four different classes of how multiple negation can be interpreted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;double negation (DN), e.g. Standard English constructions with negation on the verb alongside negation of the pronoun [&lt;code&gt;He did not see no-one.&lt;/code&gt;];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weakening negation, e.g. Standard English constructions with negation on the verb alongside negation on a scalar adjective [&lt;code&gt;She is not unhappy.&lt;/code&gt;];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;negative concord (NC), which is divided into:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;strict NC, e.g. Serbo-Croatian, where negative pronouns necessitate the negative adverb [&lt;code&gt;Ne zove niko&lt;/code&gt;, lit. &lt;code&gt;NEG called no-one&lt;/code&gt; for &amp;quot;Nobody called&amp;quot;];&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-strict NC, e.g. Colloquial French, where negative pronouns eliminate the negative adverb &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt;, [&lt;code&gt;Il a rien vu&lt;/code&gt;, for &amp;quot;He saw nothing&amp;quot;, not &lt;code&gt;*Il a pas rien vu&lt;/code&gt;].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;emphatic negation, e.g. in Dutch, where stacking negative pronouns and adverbs corresponds to a stronger negative than just the usual negative marker for verbs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clear dichotomy is between DN and NC languages, but most show structures that allow the other two interpretations, although the details vary from language to language. But to force the evasive meaning of the DN-language's two negatives, there are some (rather convoluted) strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rephrasing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always a strategy, in any language. But how the logic flows through can vary by convention. Standard English &lt;code&gt;Nobody eats nothing&lt;/code&gt; is equivalent to the more natural &lt;code&gt;Everybody eats something&lt;/code&gt;, and not &lt;code&gt;Somebody eats something&lt;/code&gt;. But that is by convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common way of capturing the evasiveness of the DN-language two negatives in one clause way is to append an extra clause of denial, e.g. &amp;quot;It is not the case that...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-Strict NC: French&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a non-strict NC language (with respect to &lt;em&gt;pas&lt;/em&gt;, at least). By combining both the negative adverb with the other negative words in this &lt;em&gt;non-strict NC language&lt;/em&gt;, a DN reading is forced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Personne   (ne)  mange  pas  rien&#xA; nobody    NEG   eats   NEG nothing&#xA;&amp;quot;Nobody eats nothing.&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, most Romance languages exhibit some level of allowance of the DN reading, although for many (e.g. certain varieties of Catalan, I'm led to believe) there &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be a pre-verbal negative word as a subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strict NC: Russian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, these languages tend to employ a form of rephrasing by adding a sort of indication of denial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Неправда, что  Иван не  знает ничего.&#xA;not true  that Ivan not know  nothing&#xA;&amp;quot;It is not true that Ivan does not know anything.&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very limited circumstances where the ambiguity does exist though, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ic.nanzan-u.ac.jp/LINGUISTICS/publication/pdf/NLSI3_2-4-fitzgibbons.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in &amp;quot;small clauses&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;докладчик не  обращается ни  к   кому&#xA;speaker   not address    not at  who &#xA;&amp;quot;The speaker does not address anybody / The speaker does not address nobody&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T16:30:28.367" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:30:28.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31055" CreationDate="2019-04-03T19:05:46.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, English (and Turkish) imperatives are pro-drop and feature the null morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is arguably really going on here is that the Turkish present-progressive endings are like a compound with copula, and Turkish has null copula for 3rd-person singular.  (The actual Turkish 3rd-person present tense is marked, eg etmek / eder.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This goes back to the etymology of -iyor.  If I recall correctly, it is a relatively recent innovation, and had some literal meaning, which is why it works like a noun or adjective, not a suffix - no vowel harmony.  And of course English present progressive also uses the copula.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, as we're counting a compound tense with the copula, then any pro-drop language with null copula and compound tenses would qualify.  For example, Russian (past tense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T19:14:17.170" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T19:14:17.170" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31031" CreationDate="2019-04-03T19:30:45.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Riffian that is a language with a discontinuous negation (&quot;&lt;em&gt;ur [Verb] ci&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), there is the possibility to get a double negation on the verb instead of having a negation on the verb and the noun/pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ur icci ci / Neg he ate Neg / he didn't eat&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;udji icca (ci) / Neg he ate Neg / he didn't eat&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;udji ur icci ci / Neg Neg he ate Neg / he didn't eat nothing &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*ur udji icca ci / Neg Neg he ate Neg / he didn't eat nothing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T15:39:30.930" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T15:39:30.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31049" CreationDate="2019-04-04T02:22:11.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're asking for a way to link a subject to a predicate. (Informally, an adjective is a &quot;predicate&quot; when it &quot;acts like a verb&quot;: &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;the red book&lt;/em&gt; isn't a predicate, but in &lt;em&gt;the book is red&lt;/em&gt; it is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard way to find relationships like this is &quot;dependency parsing&quot;, which basically means &quot;figuring out the syntactic relationships between words&quot;. In this case, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Stanford CoreNLP dependency parser&lt;/a&gt; will do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a visualization of what the Stanford parser can tell you, which will probably help more than a paragraph of text (made &lt;a href=&quot;http://corenlp.run/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sxiFt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sxiFt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is just a visualization: the parser actually returns everything as a flat data structure, which your program can then use as it likes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go with this parser, you'll want to look for words with the &lt;code&gt;JJ&lt;/code&gt; tag (adjectives), with an &lt;code&gt;nsubj&lt;/code&gt; (noun subject) relationship to an &lt;code&gt;NN&lt;/code&gt; (noun). If you're also interested in &lt;em&gt;attributive&lt;/em&gt; adjectives, look for a &lt;code&gt;NN&lt;/code&gt; with an &lt;code&gt;amod&lt;/code&gt; (adjective modifier) relationship to a &lt;code&gt;JJ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T15:15:57.723" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T15:15:57.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31055" CreationDate="2019-04-04T02:39:27.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen literature that advances the thesis that languages without &quot;pro-drop&quot; tend to have verb that inflect to distinguish some, but not all person/number categories (I think the typical examples used to illustrate this claim are English, French and German), while languages with &quot;pro-drop&quot; tend to either have inflected verbs that (mostly) distinguish between all the person/number categories, or verbs that do not inflect. This generalization is mentioned in the Wikipedia article on &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language#Generalizations_across_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pro-drop languages&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would imply that in a language with &quot;pro-drop&quot;, a null affix would most likely only mark one person/number category, not several.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I've read, marking the third person with a null affix on the verb is not uncommon, although I don't have any numbers to give you. I haven't heard of this being a common strategy for marking the first person singular, although it probably exists in some pro-drop language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar#Pronominal_inflection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navajo&lt;/a&gt; is an example of a language with prefixes to mark subjects and objects where a third-person subject (singular or plural) is marked with a &quot;null&quot; affix. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T02:39:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-04T05:39:21.877" Score="4" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not consider myself a linguist. I just teach English to Japanese audience. So please excuse my ignorance if this is too basic a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the definition of a syllable? What I often see is essentially this: a syllable is a series of sounds with exactly one nucleus, which is a vowel, with optional consonants surrounding it. This works for me because I think the distinction between vowels and consonants are relatively clear (except for glides, IMHO). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets confusing, however, when you factor in syllabic consonants, which they say can also be nuclei of syllables. I think what we have here now are two &lt;em&gt;circular&lt;/em&gt; definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A syllable is a series of sounds with exactly one nucleus, which is either a vowel or a syllabic consonant, with optional consonants surrounding it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A syllabic consonant is a consonant that can be a nucleus of a syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to break this cycle is to define either one differently, without referencing the other. One such definition of a syllable I found is &lt;a href=&quot;https://essentialsoflinguistics.pressbooks.com/chapter/2-6-producing-speech-sounds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;: a syllable is marked by a peak in sonority. Admittedly, this is not a precise definition, but I do think it captures the underlying idea. But some would argue that it just paraphrases the criteria of a phone being able to be a nucleus of a syllable or not, as its sonority level being high or low. More importantly, it does not give a concrete threshold of sonority level for a phone to be able to be a syllable nucleus, so it still does not answer when a consonant is considered syllabic and when it is not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the notion of syllable is innately understood by native speakers of a particular language, but cannot be objectively defined, particularly not by a quantifiable measure. Perhaps what is often presented as the &lt;em&gt;definition&lt;/em&gt; of a syllable is actually a mere &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To wit, I would like to know if there is a definition of a syllable and that of a syllabic consonant that collectively are not circular in nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If I am not responding to your comment or answer immediately, that is probably because it is taking me a lot of time to take in your comment or answer. I am a complete layman, so just reading through your comment or answer can be a big task for me. Please pardon my tardiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24281" LastEditorUserId="24281" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T05:00:53.017" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T05:00:53.017" Title="What exactly is the definition of a syllable?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31063" CreationDate="2019-04-04T06:23:27.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it will be different depending on the theory that you choose to work with, and unfortunately, I've never studied formal linguistic theories, so I can't give you an actual definition. Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this is not a complete answer, I wanted to talk about an area that I think you did not mention in your question: the importance of the &quot;syllable&quot; in the prosodic systems of many languages. &quot;Syllables&quot; are often relevant to rules about accent, stress or pitch. Another area where we might find rule related to syllabification is minimum length requirements. Swahili is supposed to have a bias against monosyllabic words in various contexts, which leads to forms like [ḿ.bwa] &quot;dog&quot; (mentioned in user6726's answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19907/5581&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/11692/5581&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of Japanese, the &quot;syllable&quot; has been argued to be a relevant unit for rules about the placement of pitch accent in certain varieties: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1952/5581&quot;&gt;Mechanical snail's answer here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T06:47:15.250" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T06:47:15.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31067" CreationDate="2019-04-04T10:31:01.453" Score="-2" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use Praat to categorize languages. I am however quite new to the world of linguistics and I have therefore a few questions about pitch and intensity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does the pitch of Praat return? When I look at the pitch it ranges from 80-400hz or more, and human voice ranges between 80-265hz (according to my quick research on google). Is pitch the same thing as tone? Is pitch the same thing as intonation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does the intensity of praat return? Is intensity the same as stress? Or the same as pitch accent? I saw a previous question where a person asked about the difference between pitch and intensity which makes me feel even more lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24282" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T14:43:42.160" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T16:08:11.570" Title="Praat pitch and intensity and what they mean" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31079" CreationDate="2019-04-04T15:11:03.860" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching since last week for annotated informal texts (with a lot of misspelled words, slang, etc.) to test some Named Entity Recognition tools for research purposes. For example, it would be interesting to find informal texts with labels for people's names, mentions of people, names of places, telephone numbers, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am searching mainly for these languages: German and Catalan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found data from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GermEval Task&lt;/a&gt; but it is not exactly what I need because the corpora are from news and Wikipedia. Concerning Catalan, I have found zero data. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am searching also for other languages such as English and Spanish but I have found something that seems interesting enough for me for the moment and I will happily share with you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code-switching.github.io/2018/#shared-task-id&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CS Workshop dataset English-Spanish&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://noisy-text.github.io/2017/emerging-rare-entities.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W-NUT Ner dataset&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13230" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T21:55:44.940" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T21:55:44.940" Title="Are there any corpora of informal and unstructured text labelled for Named Entity Recognition?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;named-entity-recognition&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;&lt;catalan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31065" CreationDate="2019-04-04T16:08:11.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing labeled &quot;pitch&quot; is actually fundamental frequency (F0), so what Praat displays is an approximation of the rate at which the vocal folds vibrate in producing a certain sound. &quot;Pitch&quot; is a psychological (perceptual) construct which is related but different: the most salient difference is that two signals separated by a fixed amount in terms of F0 will appear to be closer together when the frequency range increases (thus signals of 100 Hz and 120 Hz will be clearly distinct  and signals of 10000 and 10020 may not be distinguishable). &quot;Tone&quot; refers to the grammaticalized / lexicalized use of certain larynx-related acoustic properties in some language, such as Yoruba, Japanese, Navaho, Somali, Vietnamese and Chinese: tone is a &quot;package deal&quot;, where duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency (including pattern of rise and fall) and voice quality can all be involved: generally,  syllables are specified for having some tone. Finally, &quot;intonation&quot; is a similar package deal of frequency / amplitude / phonation etc. modifications imposed on longer strings (clauses and utterances, not syllables), and can coexist with a lexico-grammatical tone system or, as in English and Italian, can combine with word stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;intensity&quot; listing in Praat is the RMS amplitude of the signal, which can be related to (but is not the same as) the perceptual construct &quot;loudness&quot;. Intensity does not have a lexico-grammatical correlate, since unlike pitch differences, languages do not employ loudness as a distinctive property of individual sounds. Generally, intensity is a correlate of something else, for example the vowels [a] and [u] differ in intensity because the former has a more open vocal tract and acoustic energy is less suppressed and the latter has a more closed vocal tract and more suppression of acoustic energy. At the level of intonation (over longer spans such as a whole word), you can shout a word and that will increase the intensity of the segments therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Stress&quot; is a package deal similar to &quot;tone&quot;, but with a vastly reduced set of possible distinctions. Whereas languages with tone may have a dozen different tones, a language with stress has at most primary and secondary stress, plus unstressed. Unlike tone systems where you generally have to learn for each syllable what the tone is, in most languages with stress, there are rules that say which syllable has the stress (and most often the distinction is just between stressed and unstresed). English is a bit extreme in that respect, since it is very hard (ultimately, impossible using reasonable rules) to fully predict where stresses are, and which one is more prominent (for example the words &lt;em&gt;tigress&lt;/em&gt;, the verb &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;strong&gt;gress&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and the noun &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/strong&gt;gress&lt;/em&gt; exemplify 1-0, 0-1 and 1-2 stress patterns. Generally speaking, stress translates into &quot;increased pitch, amplitude and duration&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &quot;pitch accent&quot; refers to languages which are somewhere between &quot;tone&quot; and &quot;stress&quot;, and can refer to quite a range of languages (this indeterminacy is why phonologists have generally rejected the concept as a valid category). The main characteristic of a so-called pitch-accent language is that is has limited tonal contrasts within a word, so if there are two &quot;accents&quot; in a language, a 4-syllable word allows fewer than 16 contrasts (which you can get in a two-tone system). A secondary characteristic of pitch accent systems is that there can be phonetic distinctions such as &quot;rising&quot; versus &quot;level&quot; on a syllable, whereas with plain stress systems, if a syllable is stressed, it doesn't then contrast &quot;stressed and rising&quot; versus &quot;stressed and level&quot; (if it does, people tend to call is a pitch accent system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat is about the acoustic properties of the signal, and not about the phonological analysis. It cannot give you a phonological analysis, but it will tell you what the phonetic properties of an utterance are, which you then have to translate into a phonological system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T16:08:11.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31063" CreationDate="2019-04-04T16:52:01.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some unclarity in your question, but that is largely the fault of linguistics as a field, which I regret to say doesn't have a solid grip on what a &quot;definition&quot; is. The problem is that we use definitions to encapsulate all of our knowledge about a thing, and we also use them to formally relate one thing to another thing in a mathematical theory of phonological things. So I could interpret the question as asking &quot;what are the necessary and sufficient criteria for analyzing some substring of speech as a syllable&quot;, and &quot;what are the required and optional properties of a syllable in a formal theory of phonology, and how do they relate to other phonological objects&quot;? To complicate the matter a bit, you could also ask about &quot;phonetic syllables&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a quasi-standard formal theory of prosodic objects stemming from work in the 70's and 80's, which posits a set of prosodic objects – mora, syllable, foot, &quot;phonological word&quot;. Wording from the bottom up, a mora may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of segments. A syllable may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of segments and moras. A foot may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of syllables. A phonological word may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of feet. (Of course people have made claims for other possibilities, this is just the bare bones that is well-supported). There is a further issue regarding how many things of a higher level can immediately dominate a thing of a lower level, for example can a segment be in two syllables at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is a traditional term &quot;syllabic&quot;, as in &quot;syllabic consonant&quot;, which refers to something slightly different. Some languages have &quot;special&quot; versions of consonants known as &quot;syllabic&quot;, for example in Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Ewe and Sanskrit – also English (&lt;em&gt;pervert, button&lt;/em&gt;), there are versions of &lt;em&gt;m,n,l,r&lt;/em&gt; which are phonetically distinct from regular &lt;em&gt;m,n,l,r&lt;/em&gt;, and which phonological behave as though they are the equivalent of vowels within a syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can interpret the expression &quot;syllabic consonant&quot; as meaning &quot;consonant which is the nucleus of a syllable&quot;, since that corresponds to how people generally use(d) the expression. Notice however that our theory does not yet &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a construct &quot;nucleus&quot; – we also have to settle on a theory of what the primes of representation are. I've given you the more sparse theory of syllables above, in which a &quot;syllabic consonant&quot; would be a consonant that is the only thing immediately dominated by a mora (which is then immediately dominated by a syllable). Some people have intermediate objects &quot;onset&quot;, &quot;nucleus&quot; and &quot;coda&quot;, so a &quot;syllabic consonant&quot; is a consonant that is immediately dominated by a nucleus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The circularity that you find is because of a mixing of formal definition and diagnostics. Vocoids &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; generally parsed into a moraic / nuclear position, but that is not part of the definition of syllable, unless you have a metatheory of &quot;definition&quot; where the empirical properties of an object are implicit in (derivable from) the definition of the object. In my opinion, focusing on &quot;definitions&quot; has been an epistemological dead-end in linguistics. The relevant question usually is not &quot;how do you define X&quot;, it is either &quot;what are the properties of X?&quot;, &quot;what is the evidence that X exists?&quot; or related &quot;how do you show that this is an X?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, invoking &quot;sonority&quot; in theorizing about syllables is a problem since there's no independent means of computing sonority. A major defect in sonority-based theories of the syllable is that they tend to assign primacy to sonority, thus you make your decisions about syllabification based on assumptions about sonority. But sonority is determined based in part on syllabicity (a syllabic consonant is apparently high sonority). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T16:52:01.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31071" CreationDate="2019-04-04T16:57:01.550" Score="5" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that the Kyrgyz language has some special words termed &quot;auxilliary nouns&quot; (&lt;em&gt;жардамчы атоочтор&lt;/em&gt; in Kyrgyz), but I wasn't able to find out what those words are and how they work in that language (searching on Google Scholar gave only a few results in languages like Kyrgyz or Russian that I don't read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to see an explanation with some simple glossed examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="23060" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T08:44:28.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T11:45:38.603" Title="What are &quot;Auxilliary nouns&quot; in Kyrgyz?" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;relational-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31063" CreationDate="2019-04-04T17:13:53.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a personal definition of syllable, which assumes that consonants as well as vowels can be stressed or unstressed.  The definition is: a syllable is a syllabic sound together with any preceding stressed consonants and any following unstressed consonants.  This is intended to describe the fact that consonants preceding the syllabic of a syllable are more strongly articulated than consonants in the same syllable that come after the syllabic sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My account is similar to the account of syllables in Saussure's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Course in General Linguistics&lt;/a&gt; (except instead of stress, Saussure appeals to a feature explosive/implosive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T17:13:53.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31069" CreationDate="2019-04-04T20:19:56.963" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, &amp;quot;auxiliary noun&amp;quot; is essentially a synonym for &amp;quot;relational noun&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). These are basically nouns that can be used to fulfil the role of adpositions, postpositions in the case of Kyrgyz (or Turkish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from Kyrgyz would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Үй ич-ин-де мышык уктап жатат.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;house.NOM inside-POSS-LOC cat.NOM sleeping is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'A cat is sleeping inside the house.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T07:32:39.853" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-04T20:35:52.967" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the PIE reconstruction for word-initial alpha with rough breathing? My concern is the tendency (popularly) to mistake initial alpha as privative when it is not (e.g. hamartia): The easiest case, I suppose, is the rough breathing, in which case, am I right to imagine a reconstructed *ha? The question is relevant also, however, with any genuinely alpha-initial root.&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24284" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T22:01:06.790" Title="What is the PIE reconstruction for word-initial alpha with rough breathing?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31072" CreationDate="2019-04-04T22:01:06.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamartía&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sin&quot; is a hard example to use, because to my knowledge, &lt;em&gt;hamartánō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to sin&quot; has no known IE cognates. This means there's no way to check or confirm reconstructions, and it may not come from PIE at all. Instead, I'm going to use &lt;em&gt;háls&lt;/em&gt; &quot;salt&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; in any Indo-European language (except Hittite!) has nothing to do with PIE laryngeals like &lt;code&gt;*h₁&lt;/code&gt;. The laryngeals disappeared very early and are only visible by the effects they had on surrounding sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greek in particular, &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; usually came from an earlier &lt;code&gt;*s&lt;/code&gt; before a vowel. (Later, it disappeared when it wasn't at the start of a word; even later, it disappeared everywhere.) So the reconstructed PIE for &quot;salt&quot; was something like &lt;code&gt;*séh₂l-s&lt;/code&gt;, as seen in Latin &lt;em&gt;sāl&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;salt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also where the prefix &lt;em&gt;ha-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;together&quot; came from: the PIE ancestor is reconstructed as &lt;code&gt;*sṃ&lt;/code&gt;, as seen in Latin forms like &lt;em&gt;simplex&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;semel&lt;/em&gt;. In Greek, &lt;code&gt;*ṃ&lt;/code&gt; turned into &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;code&gt;*s&lt;/code&gt; turned into &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, giving the &lt;em&gt;ha-&lt;/em&gt; found in &lt;em&gt;Hāidēs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;haploûs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hápas&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Sometimes you won't see an &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; where you might expect one, as in &lt;em&gt;adelphós&lt;/em&gt;, which has that same &lt;em&gt;ha-&lt;/em&gt; prefix. This is due to &quot;Grassmann's Law&quot;: if you have two or more aspirated consonants in a word, all but the last one lose their aspiration. This is why you see &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;éksō&lt;/em&gt; alongside &lt;em&gt;ék&lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;ō&lt;/em&gt;: in the future tense, the &lt;em&gt;khs&lt;/em&gt; simplifies into &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;, which allows the original &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning to show through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T22:01:06.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31078" CreationDate="2019-04-05T02:29:57.047" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just come across the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relational nouns&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm curious if Swahili's position-indicating words count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swahili, there's a possessive particle &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; that joins nouns together. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ki-tabu ch-a mw-anafunzi&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;C7-book C7-POSS C1-student&lt;/code&gt; &quot;the student's book&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;m-toto w-a ∅-paka&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;C1-child C1-POSS C9-cat&lt;/code&gt; &quot;kitten&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ch-umba ch-a ku-lala&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;C7-room C7-POSS C15-sleep&lt;/code&gt; &quot;bedroom&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particle is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; used when indicating location:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;∅-paka i-ko n-dani y-a ∅-sanduku&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;C9-cat C9-is.located C9-inside C9-POSS C9-box&lt;/code&gt; &quot;the cat is in the box&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ki-tabu ki-ko ∅-juu y-a ∅-meza&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;C9-book C9-is.located C9-above C9-POSS C9-table&lt;/code&gt; &quot;the book is on the table&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this make words like &lt;em&gt;ndani&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;juu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;relational nouns&quot;? If not, why not? I've traditionally heard them called &quot;adverbs&quot;, and the entire phrase does seem to act as an adverb, but the relation-words have grammatical gender (and trigger agreement) which I would never expect from an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The &lt;code&gt;C#-&lt;/code&gt; in the gloss indicates grammatical gender marking; Swahili has too many genders to make up a new abbreviation for each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. I'm only interested in these relational words; Swahili can indicate location in other ways, such as using genders 16-18, but those aren't important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T18:43:18.593" Title="Does Swahili have relational nouns?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;bantu&gt;&lt;relational-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-05T08:09:01.127" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most common combination of letters that is used for a word... What is that called? And is there a dictionary of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is... Pineapple... If you look at the word pineapple in all the different languages of the world,the most common word used for it is: &lt;em&gt;anano&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what the most commonly spelled word is across all languages where there is a commonality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this been done already? Or am I going to have to go figure it out for every single word all in my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my hope that someone has created a composite language that is comprised of the most commonly used spellings across all of the languages. I was hoping that that was what they did with Esperanto but: no, that is not what they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried searching for this but the idea is so different than the most common questions that are asked on Google that I'm not able to find an answer. Is there a special term that is used for this? What is the most commonly used word for any word across all languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, try to figure out what I'm asking... Because it is more obscure than one would think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24288" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T08:27:38.333" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T08:27:38.333" Title="Is there a dictionary of word commonalities across languages?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;lexicography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31075" CreationDate="2019-04-05T12:00:42.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words like &lt;em&gt;ndani&lt;/em&gt; &quot;inside&quot; and &lt;em&gt;mbele&lt;/em&gt; &quot;front&quot; don't (usually¹) get referred to as &quot;relational nouns&quot;. However, the morpheme &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; you mention in your question (which has many duties in Swahili) is sometimes called a &quot;relational stem&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the reason that, for example, &lt;em&gt;üst(-ün-de)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(on) top (of)&quot; and &lt;em&gt;iç(-in-de)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;inside (of)&quot; in Turkish get referred to as relational nouns and &lt;em&gt;juu&lt;/em&gt; etc. don't is most likely because in Swahili these form phrases whereas in Turkish they are whole words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, this is still somewhat arbitrary because in Japanese (if you consider case markers particles rather than suffixes) the term relational noun gets used even though the noun and case marker (somewhat analogous to Swahili &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; , I suppose) constitute separate words (i.e. noun and particle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, since Swahili doesn't really have a case system to speak of (locative prefixes notwithstanding) but Japanese does, that could be why &quot;relational noun&quot; gets used there (cf. Turkish, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also important to note that just because we might not &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; adverbs to take agreement doesn't necessarily mean that the fact that they do means they're not adverbs. Think of prepositions in Celtic languages, for instance; &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; we don't expect adpositions to agree with their dependent, but in Irish or Welsh they do and are nevertheless still adpositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ I'm not sure they ever do or have been - I can't say for definite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T12:00:42.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31066" CreationDate="2019-04-05T13:25:28.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For German language, there is the corpus &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu/record?q=nosta-d&amp;amp;docId=http_58__47__47_hdl.handle.net_47_11022_47_0000-0000-1D83-C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NoSta-D&lt;/a&gt; containing non standard varieties of German including a chat corpus. It is hosted by the CLARIN-D centre at Tübingen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T13:25:28.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-05T15:21:14.290" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the Latin script with its menagerie of diacritics and modified glyphs, &lt;strong&gt;what other phonetic scripts are extensible to such a degree to accommodate new sounds?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the Greek alphabet and Cyrillic shares many similarities with Latin in that diacritics and digraphs are employed to extend support for other phonologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know Japanese has some limited ability to represent voicing and vowel change (to represent foreign sounds like &lt;em&gt;[fi]&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean has an extensive inventory of basic shapes which can be combined in various ways to cover new sounds (some extinct like &lt;em&gt;⟨ㆅ⟩&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;[χ]&lt;/em&gt;, and some hypothetical like &lt;em&gt;⟨ㅋ⟩&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;⟨ㅋ⟩&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;[gʱ]&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16696" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T19:01:29.073" Title="Other Extensible Scripts Besides Latin" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;graphemics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31080" CreationDate="2019-04-05T15:57:23.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably every alphabetic script is extensible in principle; more interesting is the question what alphabets with extensions are in practical use. To list a few&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cyrillic has been extended in the Soviet Union to accommodate writing of Turkic languages and Caucasian languages. The main means of extension was the creation of new letter shapes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arabic has been extended for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, and a lot more languages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even the Greek alphabet has been extended historically, but the extensions for Coptic and Gothic are considered alphabets of their own right nowadays. On the other hand, the Baktrian letter Sho is still counted as a part of an extended Greek alphabet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Devanagari has been extended with additional vowel signs for European vowels (mainly from English) and also with some additional consonants not present in Sanskrit but in modern languages of India (Both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T15:57:23.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31080" CreationDate="2019-04-05T16:28:48.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Latin is probably the most-extended script out there, &lt;strong&gt;many other writing systems have been extended in the same way&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Greek&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;oldest&amp;quot; form of the Greek alphabet (i.e. the oldest form we consider Greek rather than Phoenician), a number of letters were missing. Phi, chi, psi, and omega (Φ Χ Ψ Ω) were later inventions to better fit Greek phonology. Some dialects invented even more letters, which didn't survive into modern times: the Arcadians used a letter that looked like И to indicate a &lt;em&gt;ts&lt;/em&gt; sound, while the Bactrians used a letter that looked like Þ to indicate a &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Coptic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Coptic alphabet started out as a variant of Greek, but quickly added some Demotic Egyptian letters for the sounds Greek lacked: Ϣ &lt;em&gt;ʃ&lt;/em&gt;, Ϩ &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, Ϫ &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cyrillic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cyrillic alphabet has been extended almost as much as the Latin one, since it's used all across the former Soviet Union and beyond. For just a few examples, the letters Ђ, Њ, Љ, and Ґ weren't in the earliest forms of modern Cyrillic, instead being added by individual languages that needed them. (If you're most familiar with Russian, certain other characters like Ѣ might seem like extensions—but these are actually older characters that Russian, Ukrainian, and other &amp;quot;big-name&amp;quot; Slavic languages have lost.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Japanese kana&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kana have been extended to write many indigenous Japanese languages, such as Ainu. Kana like セ゚ (tse) don't exist in Japanese: in this case, &lt;em&gt;tse&lt;/em&gt; was created by adding a &amp;quot;voiceless plosive&amp;quot; mark to katakana &lt;em&gt;se&lt;/em&gt;. Okinawan has many more &amp;quot;extra&amp;quot; kana, created by adding extra strokes or loops to standard hiragana, but these aren't represented in Unicode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Arabic&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with Latin and Cyrillic, the Arabic writing system has been spread far and wide through conquest and trading. The Arabic language itself has an enormous number of dialects with different pronunciations, so sometimes new letters are created to represent these; other times, the innovations are for use in a non-Arabic language (like Persian or Swahili). For just a couple examples, گ (&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; with an extra stroke) was created for &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;, چ (&lt;em&gt;dʒ&lt;/em&gt; with extra dots) for &lt;em&gt;tʃ&lt;/em&gt;, and ڠ (&lt;em&gt;ɣ&lt;/em&gt; with extra dots) for &lt;em&gt;ŋ&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Devanagari&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Devanagari was originally developed for Sanskrit, but now it's used for over a hundred languages across India. Many of these have sounds Sanskrit didn't, and use extra characters to express them: क़ (&lt;em&gt;ka&lt;/em&gt; with a dot) for &lt;em&gt;qa&lt;/em&gt;, ॻ (&lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; with an underline) for &lt;em&gt;ɠa&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Canadian Syllabics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syllabics were originally developed by James Evans for one particular dialect of Cree, but they caught on and spread like wildfire, with different Aboriginal groups modifying and adapting them for their own languages. New series of symbols were made for new consonants, such as ᕋ &lt;em&gt;ra&lt;/em&gt;, ᕙ &lt;em&gt;fa&lt;/em&gt;, ᖬ &lt;em&gt;ða&lt;/em&gt;, and ᘔ &lt;em&gt;za&lt;/em&gt;. But given the divergent evolution, the same symbol might be used very differently in different languages, or they might have created different new symbols for the same sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;And more!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an exhaustive list, just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. Others should feel free to add to this answer with their own examples!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T19:01:29.073" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31084" CreationDate="2019-04-05T19:36:11.680" Score="9" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many languages, Lingála combines tense, aspect, and mood into a single TAM marking. Three of these TAMs pertain to the past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a-kɛnd-ákí&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he left earlier today&quot; (hodiernal/recent past)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a-kɛnd-áká&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he left a long time ago&quot; (distant past)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a-kɛnd-á&lt;/em&gt; &quot;he left, and he's never coming back&quot; (&quot;irreversible aspect&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This third of these, sometimes called the &quot;irreversible&quot;, &quot;ultimate&quot;, or &quot;dead&quot; TAM, describes an action that's happened and now can never be reversed. According to one native speaker, responding to &lt;em&gt;a-kɛnd-á&lt;/em&gt; with &quot;so when will he be coming back?&quot; is a breach of conversational maxims and will get you a lot of blank stares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never come across this aspect in other languages, and so I'm curious: &lt;em&gt;are there other languages that have a specific grammatical marking for this  meaning?&lt;/em&gt; And if so, is there a standard or commonly accepted name for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S. I'm ignoring vowel harmony in the examples for simplicity. What I'm actually interested in is the meaning.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T14:15:23.193" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T14:15:23.193" Title="Do other languages have an &quot;irreversible aspect&quot;?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;&lt;tense-aspect-mood&gt;&lt;bantu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31083" CreationDate="2019-04-05T20:17:01.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not heard of such a thing, but I have heard of similar things in other Bantu languages. Generally, when you investigate the pragmatics and semantics of a Bantu language's tense system, you will find many subtle conditions of usage, for example &quot;when you say it this way, you are disputing someone else's claim&quot;, or &quot;you say it this way if you want to know where the thing went to&quot;. The things that inflectional categories encode are not at all limited to classical utterance-time etc. Neo-Reichenbachian distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions are common enough that we invent special terms (e.g. &quot;perstitive&quot; or &quot;persistive&quot;, which has only recently spread outside Bantu). I have heard of this being described as &quot;present grounded in distant past&quot; for Lingala, and perhaps Michael Meeuwis (who works on Lingala tense) has an analysis and terminology to go with it. I just located an instance in Nurse's book &lt;em&gt;Tense and Aspect in Bantu&lt;/em&gt; p. 113 where he calls this the &quot;anterior&quot; aspect, P2 tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strategy that I don't entirely disagree with is to assume that the Neo-Reichenbachian approach is somewhat reasonable, and try to figure out what kind of aspect this could be, for example &quot;perfective&quot;, and see if that predicts anything else. I would especially focus on the question of defeasibility in deciding whether a certain property is part of the literal meaning of the form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T21:27:18.050" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T21:27:18.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6181" CreationDate="2019-04-05T22:10:59.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is a little late but maybe someone will still read it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe language started just with sound some higher mammals use - sounds to show pleasure, fear, danger, aggression, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans eventually distinguished loads more such sounds and according emotions, and probably added more types of proto-words - like proto-verbs. Emotions for pleasure got more refined and could mean 'let's eat' or 'let's have fun'. Necessity to replicate such fine nuances to not be considered stupid, miss out on vital clues, or to be able to manipulate others to ones own advantage improved our language learning and vocal abilities, so ever more distinctions could be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, we applied sounds to everything - the noun was born. We also applied them to our fellow humans - probably first with things like emotions noted about another one. 'Let's eat' sounds for someone who likes to eat a lot, aggressive sounds for the alpha male, and so on. Probably also 'run away' sounds for the ones not known for their bravery, or such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next step was to combine the two options humanity evolved - emotions/verbs and names/nouns. As they had the same origins and sounded similar, early humans probably quickly made complicated constructions to distinguish one from the other. And there was some evolutionary pressure to understand those things. Suddenly, it was possible for early human 1 to tell early human 2 and 3 to come along for hunting and tell early human 4 and 5 to stay at home to watch out for danger. Even if the grammar was limited to 2 words and some helper sounds to indicate which was the noun and which was the verb. It is unlikely that there was a specific order in the words (verb-noun or noun-verb) - that requires intellectual discipline, which early humans did not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A running evolution made sure humans understood the pretty quickly pretty complex proto-grammar. Sounds could be added to indicate something was or something will be, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, humans learned to distinguish between subject and object. But still without any special order, and therefore with complicated ways to indicate which is which. Adverb and adjectives followed a few hundred thousand years later. At which time we probably already had recognisable words, recognisable grammar, and so on - complicated through lots of helper sounds to indicate which is which, probably even some hints of what would later turn into cases and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that people's increased linguistic capacity allowed them to add more and more otherwise meaningless helper sounds eventually led to words independent of emotions or things. Which allowed articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and so on, and with that indirect objects and such. Whereby every new addition made the grammar more complex. Here and there, simplifications were made and standards established which made grammar simpler again, yet still effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language increased to the level of universal concrete languages, and then to abstract languages - a process which is still ongoing, with some languages being more useful for abstract and still understandable content (like English), and others not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also the invention of modern grammar, like a fixed verb, subject, object and indirect object position, to avoid complicated cases and other awkward ways to express things. Languages became structured through standardisation and then 'clear' through simplification. Also a process which languages are at a different level in. Chinese is probably among the most advanced in that regard, because their writing system discouraged prefixes, suffixes, sound changes and other more primitive grammar constructions, so that the Chinese were forced to create actual words/signs for every meaning, thus creating an extremely isolating language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T22:10:59.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2019-04-06T03:49:23.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience working in a bilingual school and high school, parents always see as a positive thing that children learn languages giving them an advantage over other children and enriching them culturally and academically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the myths about bilingualism have always existed, fed by professionals without support, feeding these rumors without solid evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when trying to acquire a language it is normal to make mistakes without matter the individual is monolingual or bilingual. It is part of the learning that we all go through until the proficiency in the language will be acquired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in my school, it is normal to see how foreign children adapt quickly to the local culture and how they speak almost perfect Spanish in less than 6 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24296" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T03:49:23.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9016" CreationDate="2019-04-06T06:54:37.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP focused on one peculiarity of Japanese pronouns: they can be qualified. One can note that in English 'me' rather than 'I' would be qualified and if there is any conjugation it will be in the 3rd person, whereas in Japanese the qualification would not thus disrupt the sentence. ('Mini me' and '20-years-old me' refer to another version of me, especially in time, which is truly a 3rd person.) 'I, who am turning 65, will retire.' could be in Japanese 'Turning-65-I will retire.'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are more characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns replace nouns when the antecedent is clear (otherwise use of pronoun would create confusion). But Japanese decides that if the subject or object is clear it can be done away with altogether. In &quot;The man bought an apple. He ate it.&quot;, the second sentence stands for &quot;The man ate the apple.&quot; and since subject and object are clear the Japanese would just say &quot;ate.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns can be long in Japanese: 私供 (&lt;em&gt;watakushidomo&lt;/em&gt;) and 私達 (&lt;em&gt;watakushitachi&lt;/em&gt;) have six syllables. In English, French and German (and certainly many more) they are single-syllable words.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Words which are not pronouns can be used as pronouns. For instance, 自分 (&lt;em&gt;jibun&lt;/em&gt;) which means 'oneself' and &lt;em&gt;uchi&lt;/em&gt; which means 'house'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese pronouns do not change based on case: they take particles as nouns do -- 'I', 'me', 'my' would be 私が, 私を, 私の.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First-person pronouns can be different for men and women. Pronouns also change based on politeness (like &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;vous&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Sie&lt;/em&gt; but for all persons). &lt;em&gt;atakushi&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ore&lt;/em&gt; both mean 'I', but the former is polite and used by a woman and the latter is colloquial and used by a man.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pronouns have variants which become more casual as syllables are dropped: &lt;em&gt;watakushi&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;watashi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;watakushi&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;atakushi&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;atashi&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;atai&lt;/em&gt; (used by women), &lt;em&gt;anata&lt;/em&gt; -&gt; &lt;em&gt;anta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Plural pronouns are based on singular ones with a suffix: &lt;em&gt;watashi&lt;/em&gt; ('I') gives &lt;em&gt;watashitachi&lt;/em&gt; ('we'). There are several such suffixes, with different levels of politeness: &lt;em&gt;domo&lt;/em&gt; (1st person), &lt;em&gt;gata&lt;/em&gt; (2nd), &lt;em&gt;tachi&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ra&lt;/em&gt;. Likewise, 'she' is 彼女 (&lt;em&gt;kanojo&lt;/em&gt;), which comes from 彼 ('he', &lt;em&gt;kare&lt;/em&gt;) and 女 ('woman').&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The class of pronouns is open.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastEditorUserId="24297" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T05:30:13.427" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T05:30:13.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31099" CreationDate="2019-04-06T11:20:39.893" Score="3" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it interesting to learn that Romanian borrowed this word from a Slavic language as well as the verb &quot;a iubi&quot;. I also discovered that the word &quot;amor&quot; is present in Romanian but apparently it was borrowed directly from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When was the Latin word reborrowed into Romanian and in which context is one used instead of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T13:48:42.907" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T11:51:16.077" Title="Etymology of Romanian &quot;amor&quot; (cf. &quot;iubire&quot;)" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;&lt;romanian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T14:19:11.730" Score="0" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;If my mouth is open and my tongue is completely relaxed, do I make an [a] or an [ä]?&#xA;Which one is more common for the TRAP vowel in British English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24300" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T15:42:27.697" Title="The TRAP vowel: a or ä?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T15:18:50.767" Score="0" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title says, are there any linguistic differences between accents acquired from birth/childhood and accents ued by adult language learners who speak the language fluently, but still with a pronounced accent? Can native speakers identify which accents are native and which are developed by adult learners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24301" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T16:08:34.790" Title="Is there a difference between foreign and native accents?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31089" CreationDate="2019-04-06T15:42:27.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I assume you're using those letters according to older dictionary practices, where &quot;a&quot; is [æ] and &quot;ä&quot; is [ɑ] in contemporary IPA-driven usage. Given the physiological conditions you describe, the vowel you would produce is closer to [ɜ], which might most closely match a UK pronunciation of &quot;bird&quot;. Both [æ, ɑ] involve some lowering of the tongue. However, if you open your mouth extremely (all the way), you might coerce a lowered tongue, but it's not clear that you can do that and maintain the presumed &quot;relaxed tongue&quot;. In that case, the vowel would be closer to [ɑ], not [æ] which is the &quot;trap&quot; vowel, as opposed to the &quot;bath&quot; vowel [ɑ]. However, there are two front low vowels, [æ] and [a] in IPA, so &quot;trap&quot; might have [æ] or [a]. There are expert reference pronunciations of the IPA letters out there – the problem is that one has to judge whether a given vowel is closer to ideal [a] or ideal [æ]. John Wells has a list of dialects and judgments on phonetic value &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accentsanddialects/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T15:42:27.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31090" CreationDate="2019-04-06T16:08:34.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &quot;accent&quot;, which is not a technical linguistic concept, generally refers to some deviation from a social norm, and unless you have e.g. the speech of the Queen as your guide, knowing exactly what constitutes that norm can be very difficult. In the context of American speech, &quot;southern accents&quot; are not the standard, nor are northern dialects (Chicago, Minnesota, Buffalo). Given that, I think your question has to come down to asking whether – given a target social standard of pronunciation – do people growing up in that environment acquiring that dialect as their first language pronounce things differently from adults who learn the same dialect as a native speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously in the case of L2 acquisition there is a vast continuum in how well L2 speakers acquire local norms of pronunciation, so you would want to only consider those speakers who have achieved very high phonetic fluency in the target language. I know a guy who migrated to the US from Israel as an adult, and he has an impeccable New York accent, to the point that other New Yorkers (not linguists) have commented on how he sounds just like a native speaker. I also know people who &quot;have foreign accents&quot; (Japanese, Spanish, Norwegian), but these are native-foreign accents, that is, they are the result of a local modification of pronunciation norms, arising from there being very many speakers of the dialect / foreign language and a high degree of bilingualism. Although most if not all second-generation Japanese are native speakers of English, their dialect is/was detectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I conclude that native speakers can make educated guesses as to whether a person is a native speaker vs. L2 speaker, but not always. If you are not familiar with the target dialect, your odds of guessing right are decreased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T16:08:34.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31094" CreationDate="2019-04-06T18:12:06.853" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rephrasing do reborrowings and neologisms help or bedim the communications?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am making the distinction of instantaneous or contemporary communications(especialy for scientific use and social)  and intertemporary communications(especially History). Nonetheless I am interested in both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example systemic did not exist as a word in Greek there was no distinction between what was related to a system and what happened as a system. Systematic encompassed both definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules of word derivation in the Greek language require nouns ending in -μα to give words from the genitive case συστήματος &gt; συστηματικός, εκτρώματος &gt; εκτρωματικός. A(out of more) special case being διάστημα, which gave διαστημικός, directly from the nominative and not διαστηματικός as one would expect probably for euphony. Chaos giving Chao&quot;t&quot;ic and not Chaoic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a language reborrows a word we can't expect the other languages to preserve the rules of the original language σύστημα became system so in English it is perfectly correct to create systemic. We must choose whether to reborrow or not the responsibility is uniquelly ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most dictionaries especially prestigious or older ones do not include the entry in them for neologisms or reborrowings so many people are not familiar with the &#xA;relatively new word and there is no reference to research or scientific(linguistic) consensus what it means. Even reaching consensus is hard because we have problems in the etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neologisms and Reborrowings can make a distinction in the multiple definitions of a word so we need less context to decide how the word was used. A potential economy in text length and thence simpler syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistically/Probabilistically when does the potential distinction help more than the ensuing confusion harms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24303" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T18:35:34.423" Title="Do reborrowings and neologisms statistically help the communicative function of the languages or do the cause more confusion?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31093" CreationDate="2019-04-06T18:35:34.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember that languages are constantly going through an enormous and surprisingly rapid process of natural selection. The whole point of language is to communicate, and if something gets in the way of that, it'll quickly be replaced, worked around, or eliminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a word is borrowed, or reborrowed, or created, it's because &lt;em&gt;the speakers of the language found it useful&lt;/em&gt;. It enhances their communication in some way: or else it'll quickly disappear from the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a concrete example, nothing's stopping me from borrowing Swahili &lt;em&gt;isimu&lt;/em&gt; to replace English &quot;linguistics&quot;. I could start calling myself a &lt;em&gt;mwanaisimu&lt;/em&gt;, search for &lt;em&gt;isimu&lt;/em&gt; at the library, petition to rename this StackExchange site. But if I did, I'm quite confident it wouldn't catch on, and it would just confuse everyone I talked to. If I wanted to communicate with English-speakers in a productive way, I'd have to call it &quot;linguistics&quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a new term &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; catch on, it's because people have found it helpful. Its existence makes communication easier or clearer in some way. Even though &quot;systemic&quot; and &quot;systematic&quot; both derive in some way from Greek &lt;em&gt;συστήμα(τ)&lt;/em&gt; with the suffix &lt;em&gt;-ικός&lt;/em&gt;, they've become separate words in English because English-speakers find that distinction helpful. If Greek-speakers also find it useful enough to justify separate words, we're likely to see &lt;em&gt;συστημικός&lt;/em&gt; or the like alongside &lt;em&gt;συστηματικός&lt;/em&gt;. Only time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. As Colin Fine mentions in the comments, culture can also be a totally valid reason for a word to be useful: the utility of &lt;em&gt;yeet&lt;/em&gt; in English comes from popular/internet/meme culture. But even here, it's enhancing communication in some way: when someone finishes a Tumblr post with &quot;yeet&quot;, they're communicating a meaning you couldn't quite get without that word. In a hundred years, &quot;yeet&quot; might still be around, or it might have died out; it all depends if people keep finding it useful or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T18:35:34.423" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T18:49:08.827" Score="0" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across this post (question attached). But this rule seems to struggle once it comes to the Sanskrit - Indo-Aryan side of the family (PIE) , for example &lt;em&gt;ratri&lt;/em&gt; in Sanskrit and &lt;em&gt;raat&lt;/em&gt; in Hindi. (However Hindi word for eight is &lt;em&gt;aath&lt;/em&gt;) . Then one can look at this(1) , this(2) and this(3) . which all indicate that both, the &lt;em&gt;night&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;raat&lt;/em&gt; . Are they absolute synonyms, or some other explanation can be given? &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11444/is-there-any-link-between-the-word-eight-and-the-word-night&quot;&gt;the night in the Latin-German side of PIE&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BF#Hindi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1st this&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF#Sanskrit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2nd this&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/n%C3%B3k%CA%B7ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3rd this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastEditorUserId="14731" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T05:11:04.263" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T05:11:04.263" Title="Possible absolute synonymy in PIE for 'night'?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31095" CreationDate="2019-04-06T19:23:14.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Almost certainly it's pure coincidence.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem unbelievable that so many languages have the same coincidence, right? But most of these languages are Romance, and we know the Romance languages share an ancestor: Vulgar Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Vulgar Latin, &amp;quot;night&amp;quot; was &lt;em&gt;nocte&lt;/em&gt;, and &amp;quot;eight&amp;quot; was &lt;em&gt;octo&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;-oct-&lt;/em&gt; in the middle then developed the same way in both words. (You'll notice the different final vowels in all except French, by the way, and French just dropped most final vowels without a trace.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two languages are Germanic, and linguists have a pretty solid reconstruction of their last common ancestor too, &amp;quot;Reconstructed Proto-Germanic&amp;quot;. In this language, &amp;quot;night&amp;quot; was *&lt;em&gt;nahts&lt;/em&gt;, and &amp;quot;eight&amp;quot; was *&lt;em&gt;ahtou&lt;/em&gt;: once again, there's the common element *&lt;em&gt;-aht-&lt;/em&gt;, which ends up evolving in the same way. The endings then disappear, so once again the two look the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why do both Vulgar Latin and Reconstructed Proto-Germanic have their stems looking so similar? It's because these share a common ancestor too, Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European! In PIE, &amp;quot;night&amp;quot; was *&lt;em&gt;nókʷts&lt;/em&gt; and &amp;quot;eight&amp;quot; was *&lt;em&gt;oḱtōw&lt;/em&gt;. This is the main coincidence that all the others come from quite regularly. In both the Italic branch and the Germanic branch, *&lt;em&gt;kʷt&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ḱt&lt;/em&gt; merged, so the two differed only in their endings. And as you've seen, all of your example languages either lost these endings, or the endings are still different today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the merger of *&lt;em&gt;kʷt&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;ḱt&lt;/em&gt; happened in both Italic and Germanic, but not in many others. In the Slavic languages, you'll see different consonants in the middle, due to something called &amp;quot;satemization&amp;quot;: Russian &lt;em&gt;noči&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;night&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;vosem'&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;eight&amp;quot;. You should see the same in Sanskrit and its descendants, but I don't speak enough Sanskrit to give a proper example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T19:23:14.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31088" CreationDate="2019-04-07T00:28:11.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be under the misapprehension that the word &lt;em&gt;amor&lt;/em&gt; entered Romanian language from Latin. This is wrong. The word entered Romanian language from French during the Middle Ages, along with other words like: &lt;em&gt;amoros, amorez, a se înamora&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a se amoreza.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even today &lt;em&gt;amor&lt;/em&gt; is used in a way that is less serious than &lt;em&gt;dragoste&lt;/em&gt;. For example, the sentence, &quot;I-au prins făcând amor&quot; would translate into English as &quot;They caught them while they were having sex.&quot; On the other hand, when the word &lt;em&gt;dragoste&lt;/em&gt; is used, it means love in the deepest sense, so, &quot;Făceau dragoste&quot;, translates to, &quot;They were making love.&quot; The word love is actually quite inadequate. For example, in English, you can say, &quot;I love Coca-Cola.&quot;. This cannot be translated into Romanian in any other way than, &quot;I like Coca-Cola&quot;. Some immature girl might say, &quot;Iubesc Coca-Cola&quot;, but this usage of the word can be blamed on her lack on understanding of both Romanian language and love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;dragoste&lt;/em&gt; is used in the most serious way. &lt;em&gt;Iubire&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym, but it can refer to a less serious kind of love, for example, 'iubire de-o vară&quot; (summer love). And &lt;em&gt;amor&lt;/em&gt; is seldom used and usually as an euphemism for sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user22302" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T00:28:11.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-07T11:34:32.080" Score="4" ViewCount="838" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantic types meaning for example a verb being of type (e,t), or an individual/entity being of type e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused in these two sentences, because I believe the semantic type of 'and' is different in each sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) John and Mary run&#xA;(2) Mary runs and jumps&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (1) I have it being of type (et, (et et))&#xA;For (2) I think it is of type (e(e(et,t)))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this I am struggling to provide denotations for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21630" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T18:29:36.270" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T22:01:35.163" Title="The semantic type of and?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;type-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31101" CreationDate="2019-04-07T18:12:16.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will first present a simple solution where &quot;and&quot; conjoins the respective NPs/VPs in such a way that the resulting conjoined elements combine with the VP/subject NP in such as if there was just a single element of the same type as the non-conjoined version. Of course, this is a bit naive for reasons discussed below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic type of &quot;and&quot; is indeed ambiguous between contexts: Since &quot;and&quot; can be used to conjoin NPs, VPs, sentences or pretty much anything else, it will have a different type in each context.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find out the type of an expression, I would always do &lt;strong&gt;&quot;backwards engineering&quot;: See which type you need to get out - this will be the second component of the type - then check what types go in for the arguments - this will be the first comonent of your type - and then simply set (input,output).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;John and Mary run&quot;: &quot;run&quot; is a one-place verb, it referes to a set of individuals and is therefore of type (e,t), so you need to make sure that &quot;John and Mary&quot; are of type &quot;e&quot; because that's the input to &quot;run&quot;. So the second component/the output value of the type of &quot;and&quot; will be (...,e). Now &quot;John&quot; and Mary&quot; are proper names, so they refer to individual elements and thus have the type e. These arguments/inputs are absored by &quot;and&quot; one after the other, so the first component must be (e,(e, ...)). Combined, you have that &lt;strong&gt;the full type of &quot;and&quot; for the first sentence is (e,(e,(e)))&lt;/strong&gt;. You put in an e &quot;John&quot;, then another one (&quot;Mary&quot;), and you get out something of type &quot;e&quot; again (&quot;John and Mary&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; John       and       Mary    run&#xA;| e  |  |(e,(e,e))|  | e  | |(e,t)|&#xA;|       (e,e)     |  | e  | |(e,t)|&#xA;|             e           | |(e,t)|&#xA;|                t                |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;Mary runs and jumps&quot;: &quot;runs and jumps&quot; behaves like a one-place verb that takes an NP of type e and returns a truth value, so the output of &quot;and&quot; should be (...,(e,t)). The input arguments are one-place verbs themselves, so to (e,t)'s go in for the arguments. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;the type of &quot;and&quot; in the second sentenece is ((e,t),((e,t),(e,t)))&lt;/strong&gt;: You put in an (e,t) (&quot;runs&quot;), then another one (&quot;jumps&quot;), and end up with a new something of type (e,t) (&quot;jumps and runs&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Mary     runs            and              jumps&#xA;| e  |  |(e,t)|  |((e,t),((e,t),(e,t)))|  |(e,t)|&#xA;| e  |  |            ((e,t),(e,t))     |  |(e,t)|&#xA;| e  |  |                 (e,t)                 |&#xA;|                        t                      |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the two different types have something in common: In both useage contexts, you have two inputs of the same type and an output of yet the same type. For NPs, the type works with e, for one-place verbs, the type goes with (e,t), and with propositions (for example &quot;John runs and Mary jumps&quot;) you would have the same with type t. &lt;strong&gt;So you could generalize and say that &quot;and&quot; is of type (σ,(σ,σ)) for any type sigma.&lt;/strong&gt; In polymorphic type theory, this can be expressed as ∀σ.(σ,(σ,σ)).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I have to disagree with Draconis' comment in this respect&lt;/strong&gt;: It's not like the entire theory of semantic types breaks down over &quot;and&quot;, it's just that &lt;em&gt;simply typed&lt;/em&gt; expressions are not quite powerful enough to generalize over such observations. But there are of course type theories that can accuont for these kinds of phenomena. Another extension that allows to provide types where simply types fail is intersection types, where one expression can basically have two types simultaneously and you can pick out one of the types depending on which you need in a particular context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to my introductory remark, this analysis is of course a bit naive: You assume that &quot;John and Mary&quot; is of the same type as just &quot;John&quot;, namely of type e. &lt;strong&gt;This is philosophically a bit questionable&lt;/strong&gt;, because e is supposed to denote indivdiual entities, and &quot;John and Mary&quot; arguably are not one individual. This is maybe less severe for the conjunction of NPs, where the predication of singing and dancing indeed behaves like a one-place verb that denotes a set of individuals, but still one could argue that this is not the desired structure.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Under some analyses, but in particular if one were to formalize the two sentences in predicate logic, one would traditionally claim that in both of the sentence we have a so-called &lt;strong&gt;ellipsis&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;John and Mary run&quot; is actually &quot;John runs and Mary runs&quot;, just with the first &quot;run&quot; not visible, and &quot;Mary runs and jumps&quot; is actually just a contraction of &quot;Mary runs and Mary jumps&quot;. Under this analysis, &quot;and&quot; can only conjoin propositions, and is thus of type (t,(t,t)), the remaining sentence then needs to be re-analyzed accordingly.&#xA;This is precisely what you already assumed: &lt;code&gt;λP[λQ[λx[P(x) ∧ Q(x)]]]&lt;/code&gt; would be the proper formalization of (2), and (1) would be &lt;code&gt;λP[λx[λy[P(x) ∧ Q(y)]]]&lt;/code&gt;. In both cases, &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; is of type (t,(t,t)). The respective types of the composed expresions would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   λP [   λQ  [ λx[P(x) ∧ Q(x)]]] &#xA;((e,t), ((e,t), (e,     t     )))&#xA;&#xA;   λP [ λx[ λy[P(x) ∧ Q(y)]]]&#xA;((e,t), (e, (e,    t      )))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T18:57:50.143" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T18:57:50.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31315" CreationDate="2019-04-07T20:56:24.480" Score="7" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern Irish has a suffix &lt;em&gt;-acht&lt;/em&gt; (allomorphs &lt;em&gt;-ocht&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-eacht&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-cht&lt;/em&gt;, probably others) that forms abstract nouns. For example, &lt;em&gt;beo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;alive&quot; → &lt;em&gt;beocht&lt;/em&gt; &quot;life, vital spirit&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we also see Scottish Gaelic &lt;em&gt;-achd&lt;/em&gt; and Manx Gaelic &lt;em&gt;-aght&lt;/em&gt;, this suffix would seem to go back to Old Gaelic at least. But I haven't been able to find anything past that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the full ancestry of &lt;em&gt;-acht&lt;/em&gt; (at least as far as we can reconstruct)? Does it go all the way back to PIE, and if so, do we know what PIE form led to this? It doesn't look much like the Latin or Greek abstract-noun-forming suffixes, like &lt;em&gt;-or&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T21:03:04.113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T03:38:22.683" Title="Where did Irish &quot;-acht&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;affixes&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27896" CreationDate="2019-04-08T13:36:39.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two, three &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;homonyms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;lag&lt;/code&gt; (different meanings, identically written/sounding words), here with two genders for the articles: &lt;code&gt;en/et&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A German example with the same phenomenon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;die Steuer = the tax,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;das Steuer = the steering wheel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a helpful coincidence that the articles differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Languages with several lingual origins/cultures, like English (romance+germanic), or a larger reuse of a word for different contexts (both &lt;em&gt;Steuer&lt;/em&gt;'s have their origin in &lt;em&gt;steer&lt;/em&gt;), may have more homonyms, whereas an artificial language like Esperanto tries to avoid homonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1611" LastEditorUserId="1611" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T13:44:12.830" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T13:44:12.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-08T19:43:19.987" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran into a problem when doing a parse tree recently. It appears to be the word 'both' in the following sentence that is causing the trouble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is evident for both you and the listener&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously 'both you and the listener' is a noun phrase. But, how would it be drawn in a parse tree? At least semantically, 'both' refers to 'you' AND 'the listener'; it would seem, then, that 'both' is a &lt;strong&gt;determiner&lt;/strong&gt; and the rest of the sentence ('you and the listener') is a &lt;strong&gt;nominal&lt;/strong&gt;. I read somewhere that 'both' is usually a &lt;strong&gt;predeterminer&lt;/strong&gt;, but that does not seem to be the case here, or is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if 'you and the listener' is the &lt;strong&gt;nominal&lt;/strong&gt;, how would it be divided further down to word level? I would write my suggestion but I am afraid I am completely lost at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24315" LastEditorUserId="10021" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T21:05:35.453" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T06:08:57.340" Title="Constituency-based parse trees and the word 'both' in noun phrases" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;&lt;noun-phrases&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31108" CreationDate="2019-04-08T21:42:32.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; is not a determiner here. Barring conversion (such as &lt;em&gt;the you I knew&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; cannot be modified by a determiner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; is part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(grammar)#Correlative_conjunctions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;correlative conjunction&lt;/a&gt;. Other examples include &lt;em&gt;neither… nor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;either… or&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not only… but (also)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term comes from traditional grammar. Linguistically, the first part would probably not be analysed as a conjunction (or at least, not in all cases) because of examples such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not only did he pass the exam, (but) he also did very well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the word order indicates, &lt;em&gt;not only&lt;/em&gt; is a constituent of the first sentence and not merely marking a conjunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T21:42:32.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T03:05:43.343" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one time I woke up late and accidentally speak in Japanese &quot;yabai&quot; which means &quot;oh no&quot; or &quot;this is bad&quot;, when I came around after finishing getting ready I then realized I've just spoken in Japanese. And also there is one time something sticks on my foot and in my desperate attempt to shake it off my feet I repeatedly says &quot;bikurista&quot; which means &quot;that surprised me&quot; which then again I realized I've just spoken in Japanese without noticing it..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it means and why does it happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your information I really like Japan and been studying their language by myself through apps, anime, and drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24319" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T08:40:08.937" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T08:40:08.937" Title="Accidentally speak Japanese on reflex" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T09:48:49.623" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, if I wanted to see real-life transcriptions of dialogue in situations like a date, a business meeting, two friends walking in a park, etc, just to be able to generate lists of particular phrases, words or idioms people tend to use in such situations. I can search for words in a corpus, but not contexts. Is there any way this can be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15547" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T13:03:25.730" Title="Is there a way to search for language data by context?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31115" CreationDate="2019-04-09T10:43:38.347" Score="2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are words like /chaj/ and /mej/, but as far as I understand they are not exactly &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24324" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T10:17:49.710" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T10:20:20.687" Title="Why does Thai have no words for &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;?" Tags="&lt;negation&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31113" CreationDate="2019-04-09T11:43:04.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Because Thai language has other tools for expressing &lt;em&gt;polarity&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmation_and_negation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;affirmation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;negation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polarity&lt;/strong&gt; is a grammatical category for expressing the speaker's assertion that a certain clause is true (positive polarity, or &lt;strong&gt;affirmation&lt;/strong&gt;) or false (negative polarity, or &lt;strong&gt;negation&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous &lt;strong&gt;linguistic tools&lt;/strong&gt; to encode both polarities, and each language chooses its own set of these tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has much more than simple &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot;. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_four-form_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;yea&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;nay&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the two forms originally intended for answering questions &quot;is it...?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; were originally used for answering inverted questions &quot;is it &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;...?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English also has an essential difference between &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; (negative), &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; (qualifier), and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, Thai has different tools for expressing polarity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, ไม่ &lt;code&gt;[mâj]&lt;/code&gt; is a negative particle (NEG), quite similar to English &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;. Likewise in English, it is also used with verbs only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ผมเอา &lt;code&gt;[pʰǒm ʔaw]&lt;/code&gt; — I want¹&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ผม&lt;b&gt;ไม่&lt;/b&gt;เอา &lt;code&gt;[pʰǒm mâj ʔaw]&lt;/code&gt; — I don't want¹&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ hereinafter I'm skipping polite particles for brevity; don't omit polite particles in real speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The positive polarity is encoded with verbs; and the negative polarity simply adds the NEG particle mentioned above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repeating the verb:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— คุณเอาไหม &lt;code&gt;[kʰun ʔaw mǎj]&lt;/code&gt; — &quot;do you want…?&quot;, literally &quot;you want…, {INTERROG}&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — เอา &lt;code&gt;[ʔaw]&lt;/code&gt; — {I} want&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — ไม่เอา — &lt;code&gt;[mâj ʔaw]&lt;/code&gt; — {I} don't want&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an indirect &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/8939/1009&quot;&gt;flavor of &quot;to be&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is affirmed with ใช่ &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰâj]&lt;/code&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— ฟ้าใสไหม &lt;code&gt;[fáː sǎj mǎj]&lt;/code&gt; — {the} sky {is} clear, isn't it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — ใช่ &lt;code&gt;[tɕʰâj]&lt;/code&gt; — {it} is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T10:20:20.687" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T10:20:20.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31112" CreationDate="2019-04-09T12:07:25.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are lucky, the corpus metadata have some information about the context. You can search corpus metadata on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt;. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T12:07:25.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T13:04:43.100" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing a semantic derivation of the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cathy and Fred drank three coffees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the types of each individual component but when trying to work towards t, I find a type mismatch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe quantifier raising is the option that I should undertake by raising the DP 'three coffees' to a TP position and leaving a trace behind where the original is. However I am struggling with working out the layout of the rest of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently come across lambda extraction but don't know whether it is necessary to perform this in order to get a complete derivation of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification, I have the D two as being of type ((et),((et),t)) and the whole DP expression ((et),t).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I have made an error with the types of the components, I am unsure how to proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21630" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T13:28:20.737" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T13:28:20.737" Title="Solving type mismatch" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;quantifiers&gt;&lt;type-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31119" CreationDate="2019-04-09T14:11:38.820" Score="4" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heaps' Law&lt;/a&gt; basically is an empirical function that says &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the number of distinct words you'll find in a document grows as a function to the length of the document&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The equation given in the Wikipedia link is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VwWsq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VwWsq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where $V_R$ is the number of distinct words in a document of size $n$, and $K$ and $\beta$ are free parameters that are chosen empirically (usually $0 \le K \le 100$ and $0.4 \le \beta \le 0.6$).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently following a course on Youtube called &lt;em&gt;Deep Learning for NLP&lt;/em&gt; by Oxford University and DeepMind. There is a slide in a lecture that demonstrates Heaps' Law in a rather different way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QnAvH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QnAvH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equation given with the logarithms apparently is also Heaps' Law. The fastest growing curve is a corpus for Twitter data and the slowest is for the Wall Street Journal. Tweets usually have less structure and more spelling errors, etc. compared to the WSJ which would explain the faster-growing curve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main question that I had is how Heaps' Law seems to have taken on the form that the author has given? It's a bit of a reach but the author didn't specify what any of these parameters are and I was wondering if anybody might be familiar with Heaps' Law to give me some advise on how to solve my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24326" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T15:20:34.897" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T21:40:30.520" Title="How to interpret this form of Heaps' Law?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;quantitative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31118" CreationDate="2019-04-09T15:16:45.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A straightforward rewriting of the Wikipedia formula gives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;log V_R(n) = log K*n^beta&#xA;           = log K + log n^beta&#xA;           = log K + beta*log n&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows us to identify &lt;code&gt;K=C&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;beta=-alpha&lt;/code&gt; (probably the WSJ uses a different formulation of Heaps' law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;V_R (n) = \frac{K}{n^\alpha}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;). The remaining b is a strange additional parameter not present in the original formulation of the law (and irrelevant, too, because the law is about large numbers where n-b is approximately equal to n).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T15:27:11.773" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T15:27:11.773" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T16:46:10.160" Score="9" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Apologies if this is off-topic.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chinese character「能」was originally a &lt;a href=&quot;http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?kaiOrder=1854&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;picture of a kind of bear&lt;/a&gt;. The character was once used to represent a word meaning &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt;, but this word doesn't appear to have any modern descendants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;「能」was also used as a borrowed glyph to represent a wide range of other words via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebus principle&lt;/a&gt;. The Old Chinese reconstructions of some of these words are given below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə(ŋ)/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə(ʔ)/&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructions_of_Old_Chinese#Baxter%E2%80%93Sagart_(2014)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baxter-Sagart, 2014&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/*nɯːŋ/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nɯːs/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nɯː/&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructions_of_Old_Chinese#Zhengzhang_(1981%E2%80%931995)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zhengzhang, 2003&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern Chinese word for &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; uses the derivative glyph「熊」, and is reconstructed as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/*C.[ɢ]ʷ(r)əm/&lt;/strong&gt; (Baxter-Sagart)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;/*ɢʷlɯm/&lt;/strong&gt; (Zhengzhang)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Old Chinese, and it is this word that is traced back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan &lt;strong&gt;/*dɣwjəm/&lt;/strong&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/d-wam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there have been no suggestions that「熊」(&lt;strong&gt;/*C.[ɢ]ʷ(r)əm/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*ɢʷlɯm/&lt;/strong&gt;) is cognate to any of the words that「能」represented. There also doesn't appear to have been any attempt to trace the word meaning &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt; for「能」any further back than Old Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; that something that sounded like (&lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə(ŋ)/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nˤə(ʔ)/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nɯːŋ/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/*nɯːs/&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;/*nɯː/&lt;/strong&gt;) was &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; (along with「熊」) descended from Proto-Sino-Tibetan &lt;strong&gt;/*dɣwjəm/&lt;/strong&gt;, or is &lt;strong&gt;/*dɣwjəm/&lt;/strong&gt; incompatible with any of the word reconstructions of「能」?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24327" LastActivityDate="2019-10-07T00:01:40.293" Title="Are any of the Old Chinese reconstructions for「能」plausible descendants of Proto-Sino-Tibetan /*dɣwjəm/?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;&lt;sino-tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31118" CreationDate="2019-04-09T17:48:55.133" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The question is interesting from a (my) novice math perspective.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a basic linguistic perspective, there is little to no difference between either form. All you need is a slowly decreasing count. Both forms describe standard distributions, a concept that's naturally observed in nature. The specific formula of any such distribution depends on an accurate model. It doesn't hold much explanatory power, if the model isn't empiricly grounded, but it's a heuristic--we might speak of so called fudge factors. For the specifics you should check out datascience.se, or whatever it's called where statistics are treated (compression of text is also rather important in signal processing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first formular is akin to the area of a circle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V = k * n ^ beta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A = pi * r ^ 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but inverted, i.e. taking the square root (beta=1/2) instead of the square; also, it has a random factor k instead of pi (=3.14...). This can be pictured various ways, for example as light cone projected onto a surface, or a stream of words onto a lexicon: Where the radious of a light cone increases linearly with distance, it's area increases squarely; if this area illuminated a text, the number of new words would increase linearly with distance from the lamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only explains the inversion of the exponantial function, but the fudge factor is another matter, depending on the model. While the factor pi relates the circumference of a circle to its radius, a different factor implies first of all a different shape, either of the light cone, or alternatively of the surface (left as exercise to the reader to the reader), but it still grows linearly with distance. So it doesn't even make a difference in my simplistical model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if counting text length in number of words n, so the text grows linearly with each word, it should grow squarely if counting each newly introduced word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V ~ n ^ beta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or vice-versa as the formular has it: &lt;strong&gt;The number of new words grows proportional to the square root of the number of total words.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second formular is essentially the same. I too have no idea what the extra variables are. Removing the logarithm and transposing, we see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;f(w) = C * (r(w)-b)^(-alpha)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1/C * (r(w)-b)^a = 1 / f(w).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in principle the same polynomial form as V=K*n^b in either case, with several new parameters. It's not apparent why to choose the transposed form, which works as well, iff it were that V = 1 / f(w), k = 1/C,  n = (r(w) - b), beta = alpha.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few notable differences. What's with those parameters? I'd assume the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; is likely a threshold under which the distribution is useless, because if r(w)&amp;lt;b, then the logarithm of the difference (r(w) - b) is undefined. Perhaps that's the &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;asic vocabulary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that's the major difference in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference would be to focus on the transposed form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; is a constant as usual notation practice has it, then writing &lt;em&gt;log(C)&lt;/em&gt; would be constant as well. This might just be a courtesy to ease solving for (w). It's inversely proportional to k, but that shouldn't trouble us now. I'm keen to assume that it means &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt;orpus, but that gives me troubles. [todo]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That leaves alpha to be explained, which seems to be a variable nudge factor determined per corpus by a specific statistical procedure for error correction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one is crucial. Raising to a negative power of alpha (=reciproke of the power of alpha) is not quite the same as taking the square root (power of 0.5). But it is similar in effect because the ranges of the exponents are also different than in the first formular; here we have b &amp;lt; 1 &amp;lt; alpha. The very important difference is that the number of new words will tend to zero as the number of typed words tends to infinity. In contrast, the old formula would require ever new words to grow the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow I'm trying to see 1/f as a derivative, compared to mechanical accelleration. But I'll rather leave the rest of the exercise to the reader. Please add a link to the video to your question. thx bye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T21:40:30.520" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T21:40:30.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31120" CreationDate="2019-04-09T19:14:22.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know this database: &lt;a href=&quot;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=%5Cdata%5Cchina%5Cbigchina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&amp;amp;morpho=0&amp;amp;basename=\data\china\bigchina&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you search for xiong, it gives you several pieces of information. Chinese is apparently reconstructed *whǝm &quot;bear&quot;, this word has Sino-Tibetan cognates like *(ɣ)wom, some of which have an extra initial dental t- (possibly some kind of prefix).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's unclear to me why a character sounding like *whǝm was used to write something that sounded like *nˤə(ŋ). Possibly the link is more semantic than phonetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T19:14:22.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31117" CreationDate="2019-04-09T22:21:10.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a little intellectual exercise, I looked around a little and found an online PDF using your notation - &quot;Elements of Formal Semantics&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/efs/EFS-ch3-online.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/efs/EFS-ch3-online.pdf&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to page 89, &quot;drank&quot; is of type e(et), not et, as it's transitive. The &quot;and&quot; would be t(tt), not e(ee) according to that page, but that may be an omission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reputation is not yet enough to comment, so I wrote it here, though it's not a complete answer - more an idea how to go forward. Hope it helps anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T22:21:10.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-10T05:41:33.040" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Mathematical Methods in Linguistics&quot; by Partee, Meulen and Wall (1990), it is stated on page 385 that the determiner &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; has been a notorious problem for&#xA;semantic analysis, since it is sometimes equivalent to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt;, but sometimes it &#xA;is not equivalent to it, while in other contexts it is simply unacceptable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any improvement been made on this since then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22765" LastEditorUserId="22765" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T00:15:33.993" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T22:09:08.600" Title="Status of the determiner &quot;any&quot;" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;determiners&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11050" CreationDate="2019-04-10T10:12:24.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Yellow Sky, however I just need to add that some adjectives which are borrowed from Arabic have actually brought the Feminine and Masculine forms which happen to be actually used a lot in legal/formal context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;محترم and محترمه&#xA;(meaning respectful, honourable, respected)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a title referred to a man and woman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24333" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T10:12:24.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15084" CreationDate="2019-04-10T10:18:14.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the area they come from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many Persian phrases which Dari speakers struggle to understand e.g name of fruits or terms which exist in Iranian Persian only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also terms which refer to different things in both languages. For example, Iranians use the word 'madreseh' for school which Afghans use the word 'maktab' when referring to modern schools and madreseh could mean a traditional religious school in Afghanistan while in Iran maktab refers to the old religious schools which are now obsolete. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have many Afghan friends and I can confidently say they more or less understand Persian but the ones whose mother tongue is Pashto struggle a bit especially if they haven't studied Persian at schools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24333" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T10:18:14.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19851" CreationDate="2019-04-10T20:01:20.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the schwa is similar to the Turkish dotless i. A vowel close to no real differentiation, and with that imo a shorter and less pronounced version of ir as in birth. Once a vowel is pronounced in a very 'flat' way and it gets short (as when there is less stress on it), we get the schwa - with the above mentioned exception /ɪ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word custom is actually a good way to show the difference. If we replace the schwa with an /ʌ/, we get something like custum (let's put stress on both syllables for clarity, but with a little bit of trying, one should be able to just stress the first syllable and still get the u-sound, not the schwa, in the unstressed syllable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The u in backup is also a good example. If we pronounce it the same as back up (trying to stress both words, for clarity again), we should hear a difference to the American way of saying backup (trying to stress the up but keep the pronunciation 'flat').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both words, we can try to stretch out the schwa or the /ʌ/, and we will hear a sound similar to ir in birth and a in car, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American English tends to 'flatten' the different vowels, so a lot of vowels could probably be replaced with the schwa. I'd leave it in the current way in IPA, because a lot of people do actually have a hint of the vowel in the pronunciation, with the phoneme chosen according to the usual rules or regional variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it's rare to pronounce the vowel clearly, one might also choose the second most popular pronunciation in the region or in important dialects (British and American English, in the future probably also Indian English), with some indicator that people often 'flatten' it to a schwa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might also consider that pronunciation is often not only affected by the spelling of a word, but also the way dictionaries say they are supposed to pronounce it. Putting a schwa everywhere would probably not help people pronounce things so that an English speaker from another country can understand them. While having a 'real' vowel there would give people a 'standard pronunciation' for when trying to talk especially clear, for instance to a foreigner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T20:01:20.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31125" CreationDate="2019-04-10T20:12:42.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of an improvement.  Sometimes &quot;any&quot; is used in generalizations, like the universal quantifier of predicate logic, and sometimes it is used as a negative polarity word, as in &quot;I want some caviar&quot; versus &quot;I don't want any caviar&quot;. Compare &quot;I don't like any caviar&quot;, which makes a generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was Robin Lakoff who observed that &quot;Do you want any caviar?&quot; expects a negative answer, as compared with &quot;Do you want some caviar?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a suspicion that these two uses are somehow related.  But how?  What do generalization and negation have in common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T20:12:42.463" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17394" CreationDate="2019-04-11T09:55:07.403" Score="-9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a malayalee or an expert linguist but with that much determination self c confidence can say and also prove that malayalam as a language is Aryo-Dravidian rather than  completely dravidian as it is born out of sanskrit like odiya or konkani even marathi but having somewhat tamil influence due to the tamil conquest of kerala lands during early centuries of christ, then to say that malayalam language ìs a dravidian language has no meaning because all languages in the world and also peòples are mixed both culturally and racially, even one can say that english and scottish are celtic languages but one will also find germanic and also roman words despite being far away from roman territory.&#xA;So to say which language is what and which language is what not is entirely stupid idea.&#xA;If I am wrong please correct me, but the truth is all languages peoples cultures are mixed agglutinated and derived from onè languages with other.&#xA;Sanskrit is the mother of all the languages in the world even African, melanèsian and Maori languages are derived from it,even  south indian language, though different morphologically grammatically and phonetically even racially also exhibits a sizeable influence of sanskrit to the advent of aryans up to kerala karnataka and konkan so to say that ANI languages are derived from sanskrit and ASI language derived from tamil is utter foolish to say ,even if tamil is farthest difference from sanskrit also has its some,influence. The truth is that ANI languàge is derived from apabhramsa, which the ASI languages ex tamil and Telugu lacks.&#xA;Thanking yòu&#xA;Yours sincerely&#xA;Pradeep kumar&#xA;8928297807&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24339" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T09:55:07.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31125" CreationDate="2019-04-11T12:15:07.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;they are partly complementary (as &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; can not determine uncountable nouns)  e.g. &lt;em&gt;...any harm will be eliminated...&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;every harm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also in some contexts the use of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; implies choice, e.g. &lt;em&gt;We need to take every one of those things seriously...&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;We need to take any of those things seriously...&lt;/em&gt; (though in this case &lt;em&gt;every one&lt;/em&gt; is a specific phrase)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and sometimes &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; only implies a possibility, e.g. &lt;em&gt;the only viable option for tobacco companies is to fight every damage claim&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;the only viable option for tobacco companies is to fight any damage claim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T12:15:07.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-11T12:42:12.387" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking into different phrases and their semantic derivation.&#xA;For example, the verb sneeze:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Type (e,t)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;λx[SNEEZE]x&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sentence like: Michael and Jamie sneeze, I would like to know how to get to to RUN(m)^RUN(j). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Michale and Jamie are of type (e) and that two DPs conjoined together mean that the type of 'and' in this case is (e,ee)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lambda notation of 'and' I have found to be λP[λx[λy[P(x)^Q(y).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am unsure when applying each lambda how to get the end result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, in the case of quantified DP expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that in a statement like two cookies λx[2x^COOKIE (et,t)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;less than four girls λx[#x&amp;lt;4^GIRL(x)]  (et,t)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that they difficult to combine with other elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Daniel and Nina ate two cookies. Here, a type mismatch occurs quantifier raising and lambda extraction are needed. But it is hard to do these processes if it is hard to combine with the elements. Daniel (e), Nina (e), and (e,ee) λP[λxλy[P(x)^Q(y), ate (e,et) λxλy[EAT(y,x)].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Less than four girls smile and laugh. Smile (et), laugh (et), and (e,t) (e,t) (e,t) λP[λQ[λx[P(x) ∧ Q(x)]]]. I am struggling particularly because 'less than' seems hard to put in lambda notation. I was wondering whether set notation would be better for this semantic derivation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for all three sentences, I have looked over them for a number of days now and I am struggling to find any sort of conclusion for them. Particularly  Dan and Nina ate two cookies, as the examples I have searched for quantifier raising all seem to not have any conjoined NPs in. Most examples are of the type of 'John bought every dog' and not 'Bill and Ben bought two pots' etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21630" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T13:27:27.467" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T11:03:34.603" Title="Converting types into lambda notation and set notation" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;&lt;type-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-11T18:08:08.353" Score="0" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three different ways an English speaker might make the borrowed Polish place name Szczebrzeszynie fit within English phonotactics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24344" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T19:45:27.200" Title="phonotactics borrowed from polish to fit in english" Tags="&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31143" CreationDate="2019-04-11T18:10:09.530" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the subsection &lt;strong&gt;4.3.4.2 The ‘odd number paradox’&lt;/strong&gt; of Cognitive Linguistics by W. Croft &amp;amp; D. A. Cruse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ‘odd number paradox’ has also been put forward as a problem for&#xA;  prototype theory. Armstrong et al. (1983) &lt;strong&gt;found that people will grade ODD NUMBERS for centrality, even though the category ODD NUMBER has a clear definition in terms of necessary and sufficient features.&lt;/strong&gt; Their proposed solution, the so-called ‘dual representation’ hypothesis, combines the prototype approach and the classical approach (Smith et al. 1974). The idea is that concepts have two representations, which have different functions. There is a ‘core’ representation, which has basically the form of a classical definition. This representation will govern the logical properties of the concept. The other representation is some sort of prototype system which prioritizes the most typical features, and whose function is to allow rapid categorization of instances encountered. With this set-up, the odd-number effect ceases to be a puzzle. However, this conjunction of two theories inherits most of the problems of both of them: in particular, it reinstates a major problem of the classical theory that prototype theory was intended to solve, namely, the fact that for a great many everyday concepts there is no available core definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear for me that they speak about conjecture of the two representations of a concept.&#xA;But I is unclear for me what do they mean in this sentence '&lt;strong&gt;people will grade ODD NUMBERS for centrality, even though the category ODD NUMBER has a clear definition in terms of necessary and sufficient features&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24342" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T22:49:34.847" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T22:49:34.847" Title="ODD NUMBER in Cognitive Linguistics of WILLIAM CROFT and D. ALAN CRUSE" Tags="&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;prototype-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31142" CreationDate="2019-04-11T18:35:59.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;people will grade ODD NUMBERS for centrality, even though the category ODD NUMBER has a clear definition in terms of necessary and sufficient features&quot; means that you can ask people things like &quot;which is a better example of an odd number, 19 or 1001&quot; and at least some of them will answer with one or the other (I'd guess most people will go with 19) rather than rejecting the question by saying something like &quot;they're both odd numbers, since neither is divisible by two, so they're equally good examples&quot;. Presumably whatever sources Croft and Cruse cite would have details on the exact nature of the experiments that have been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T18:35:59.500" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31141" CreationDate="2019-04-11T19:02:32.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before you can broach the phonotactics question, you first need to deal with the phonetics. Phonetically, Polish &lt;em&gt;Szczebrzeszynie&lt;/em&gt; (which is the locative case of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szczebrzeszyn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Szczebrzeszyn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) is approximately IPA [ʂtʂɛ.bʐɛˈʂɨ̃.ɲɛ]; English doesn't have [ʂ] [tʂ] [ʐ] [ɨ̃] [ɲ]. Best you can do in English is substitute [ʃ] [ʧ] [ʒ] [ɪ~ij] [nj]. The shibilants won't be far off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonotactically, the main problem is the first onset [ʂtʂ]/[ʃʧ] which is forbidden in English. Maybe just substitute [ʃ]? There is also a problem with [bʐ]/[bʒ], but you can get rid of that by moving the syllable boundary from before the [b] to after it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This results in something like &quot;sheb-zhe-SHIN-yeah&quot; [ʃɛb.ʒɛˈʃɪn.jɛ] which Poles would understand well enough. If you want the nominative case, [ʃɛbˈʒɛ.ʃɪn]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, in Yiddish the city is called Shebreshin (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/poland/szczebrzeszyn.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;שעברעשין&lt;/a&gt;) which fits English phonotactics quite nicely.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: In the original tongue-twister: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preposition &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt; [f] forms part of the onset of the word Szczebrzeszynie, resulting in [fʂtʂɛ.bʐɛˈʂɨ̃.ɲɛ]. This is one of Polish's famous consonant clusters that will not fit neatly into English phonotactics, I fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T19:14:54.190" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T19:14:54.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31141" CreationDate="2019-04-11T19:45:27.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before you deal with the phonetic question, you have to deal with the input question: what stimulus would even &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; an English speaker to respond with such a word? Is the speaker encountering spoken [ʂtʂɛbʐɛˈʂɨ̃ɲɛ] uttered by a native speaker, or are they seeing &quot;Szczebrzeszynie&quot; written down? English speaker strategies for interpreting foreign spelling are quite variable, but are likely to result in [sɛbrəˈzini].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T19:45:27.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31125" CreationDate="2019-04-11T21:40:06.877" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is basically an adverb of &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt;. Compare German &lt;em&gt;eins&lt;/em&gt; &quot;one&quot;, &lt;em&gt;ein-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;a, an*, quantifier &lt;em&gt;einige&lt;/em&gt; &quot;some, a couple, at least one&quot;, adverbial &quot;Ich mache einiges&quot;. The negation of &lt;em&gt;einige&lt;/em&gt; is not in use, doesn't exist, and would be ambiguous (nothing? many?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, &lt;em&gt;not any&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;nothing&quot;. Someone might figure the opposite of &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; were &quot;everything&quot;, which is not necessarily the case, hence the confusion. Logically, the opposite is &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;there exists at least one&quot; (this is very basic in logic). The negation of that is &quot;not any&quot; = &quot;nothing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that explains the semantic difference, but its hard to say when it appeared. I believe that would give a better answer than a strictly synchronic grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting all the different variants together, &quot;anyone can&quot;, &quot;any one man can&quot;, &quot;has anyone seen&quot;, ... would be a start. Comparing German to just these, we have &quot;ein jederman&quot;, alternatively &quot;jederman&quot;, &quot;jeder&quot; in the sense &quot;everybody&quot;; And &quot;irgend-jemand&quot;, &quot;irgendwer&quot; in the sense &quot;someone&quot;. For &quot;je&quot;, which has a complicated history (confer Grimm), I find tempting to see it in the &quot;y&quot; in &quot;anyone&quot; (anyman??), but that's just an unsubstantiated hunch. Further we have &quot;want any?&quot;, which would be &quot;willst du welche&quot;, to which one can answer &quot;ja, einige&quot;, though it would be rather &quot;ja, ein paar&quot; (a couple). Incidentally, &quot;je&quot; also translates to &quot;ever&quot; (&quot;wenn ich je ...&quot; - if I ever) in some context, and akin to &quot;yet&quot; eventually (&quot;hast du je, jemals...&quot; - have you ever, have you yet?) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The really funny one is the case where &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; is seemingly replacing a ~ an. Do you have any idea? At all? Germans would just say &quot;hast du eine Idee?&quot; Since we had this deranged thread today about the correct lambda expression for &quot;Alice and Bob eat two cookies&quot;, that is necessarily ambiguous ... while I have no idea about that it appears intuitive to understand &quot;have any idea&quot; adverbail, not counting the objects, but the verb. This finds a parallel in &quot;hast du mal einen Stift&quot;. &quot;mal&quot; is also hard to explain, even for native speakers, e.g. in du kannst schon mal auspacken. Since &quot;schon&quot; translates most often to &quot;yet&quot; (&quot;hast du schon&quot; - do you have yet?), and &quot;schon mal&quot; is a colocation, it may be reasonable to compare &quot;mal&quot; to &quot;je&quot;, &quot;jemals&quot;, &quot;yet&quot;, &quot;ever&quot;, circling back to the above argument. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a dense cluster of multiple parallel developments. More examples would be required, preferably archaic ones. Preferably about &quot;any&quot; itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &quot;einige&quot; is not to be confused with &quot;einig&quot; (united, in agreement) or even &quot;geeinigt&quot;, &quot;vereint&quot; (united), though &quot;uni&quot; might be interesting to compare. Since the &lt;em&gt;-ig&lt;/em&gt; appeared hard for me to explain for a second, I came to remember &quot;einje&quot;, which is common in northern dialects, at least Berlin and surroundings. That would be much closer to &quot;any&quot;, phonetically. That might be just a common development. Or it might imply that &quot;einige&quot; was a backformation from &quot;einje&quot;, which would be a composition of &quot;ein&quot; and &quot;je&quot;. Just which &quot;je&quot;, of which there were many, I don't know. We also say &quot;einwas&quot; (an what; sounds like &lt;em&gt;an ones&lt;/em&gt; without nasalisation), so make of that what you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T22:09:08.600" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T22:09:08.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31137" CreationDate="2019-04-12T13:22:44.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You got your lambda term for &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; wrong.  Either you mean coordination between subject DPs (&quot;Mary and John sneeze&quot;) then your lambda term is &lt;code&gt;λP[λx[λy[P(x)^P(y)]]]&lt;/code&gt;, with just one predicate P (not Q). Or you mean a coordination between VPs (&quot;Mary sneezes and coughs&quot;), then your lambda term is &lt;code&gt;λPλQ[λx[P(x)^Q(y)]]]&lt;/code&gt; (with an abstraction for a second predicate Q but just one abstraction for an individual variable x). I assume you meant &lt;code&gt;λP[λx[λy[P(x)^P(y)]]]&lt;/code&gt;, which is of type &lt;code&gt;((e,t),(e,(e,t)))&lt;/code&gt;: Put in a one-place predicate, then an individual, then another individual, get out a truth value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you got the sneezing wrong: The term is &lt;code&gt;λx[sneeze(x)]&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;λx[sneeze](x)&lt;/code&gt;; the application to x is part of the scope of the lambda abstraction, not outside of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To avoid confusion with the variable &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;, we can (but don't have to) rename the bound variable &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; to, say, &lt;code&gt;u&lt;/code&gt;, and get &lt;code&gt;λu[sneeze(u)]&lt;/code&gt; with the exact same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for the sentence &quot;John and Mary run&quot;, you simply apply your &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; term to each of the terms you abstract for:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  and                    sneeze         mary john&#xA;≡ (λP[λx[λy[P(x)^P(y)]]])(λu[sneeze(u)])(m)  (j)&#xA;  ((e,t),(e,(e,t)))      (e,t)          (e)  (e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λx[λy[(λu[sneeze(u)])(x)^(λu[sneeze(u)])(y)]])(m)(j)&#xA;  (e,(e,t))                                      (e)(e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λx[λy[sneeze(x)^sneeze(y)]])(m)(j)&#xA;  (e,(e,t))                    (e)(e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λy[sneeze(m)^sneeze(y)])(j)&#xA;  (e,t)                    (e)&#xA;&amp;gt; sneeze(m)^sneeze(j)&#xA;  (t)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I chose to first simplify the two redexes &lt;code&gt;(λu[sneeze(u)])(x)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;(λu[sneeze(u)])(y)&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;sneeze(x)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;sneeze(y)&lt;/code&gt; before continuing with the applications to &lt;code&gt;m&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;j&lt;/code&gt;, but one could do it the other way round as well and get the same result (&lt;strong&gt;In lambda calculus, the order in which you choose to perform your reductions never matters, eventually any two computation paths will yield the same end result&lt;/strong&gt;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  and                    sneeze         mary john&#xA;≡ (λP[λx[λy[P(x)^P(y)]]])(λu[sneeze(u)])(m)  (j)&#xA;  ((e,t),(e,(e,t)))      (e,t)          (e)  (e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λx[λy[(λu[sneeze(u)])(x)^(λu[sneeze(u)])(y)]])(m)(j)&#xA;  (e,(e,t))                                      (e)(e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λy[(λu[sneeze(u)])(m)^(λu[sneeze(u)])(y)])(j)&#xA;  (e,t)                                      (e)&#xA;&amp;gt; (λu[sneeze(u)])(m)^(λu[sneeze(u)])(j)&#xA;  (t)&#xA;&amp;gt; sneeze(m)^sneeze(j)&#xA;  (t)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lambda reduction for &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; between VPs works quite similarly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   and                   sneeze         cough         mary&#xA;≡ (λP[λQ[λx[P(x)^Q(x)]]])(λu[sneeze(u)])(λv[cough(v)])(m)&#xA;  ((e,t),((e,t),(e,t)))  (e,t)          (e,t)         (e)&#xA;&amp;gt; ... (absorb sneeze for P)&#xA;&amp;gt; ... (absorb cough for Q)&#xA;&amp;gt; ... (absorb mary for x)&#xA;&amp;gt; ... (simplify)&#xA;&amp;gt; sneeze(m)^cough(m)&#xA;  (t)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your proposal for the quantified DPs, I don't quite understand your notation &lt;code&gt;λx[2x^COOKIE (et,t)&lt;/code&gt; - how is &lt;code&gt;2x^something&lt;/code&gt; defined? I assume you mean something like &quot;Tgere are two x'es and these x'es are cookies&quot;, but this is not very nice: &#xA;For your individual variable x one individual goes in, and that's what your term will be applied to - one individual. By just prepending a &quot;2&quot; in front of the variable you don't magically duplicate the amount of entities involved - it's still just one individual that goes in, syntacically and semantically.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Furthermore, you missed the application to the variable &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; in your predication: &lt;code&gt;cookie(x)&lt;/code&gt; - not just &lt;code&gt;cookie&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general, quantifiers are always a bit difficult to formalize, so don't worry if you're struggling.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;All&quot;, &quot;some&quot;, &quot;no&quot; etc., can be modeled via ∃ and ∀, but for absolute numbers it gets difficult.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Exactly one&quot; can be formalized as follows:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;exactly one: λP[λQ[∃x[∀y[P(y) &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; y=x] ^ Q(x)]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a quantifier like &quot;at least two&quot;, you can simply do three existential quantifications, have a conjunction of predicates applying to all the elements separately and then making sure that the variables stand for distinct entities:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;at least two: λP[λQ[∃x1∃x2[P(x1)^P(x2)^x1≠x2^Q(x1)^Q(x2)]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You already see that this can get quite annoying if you have higher numbers or something more complex like a combination with a VP.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can then combine the two tricks to get something like &quot;exactly two&quot; - again, the formula blows up even more: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;exactly two: λP[λQ[∃x1∃x2∀y1∀y2[P(y1)&amp;lt;-&amp;gt;x1=y1 ^ P(y2)&amp;lt;-&amp;gt;y2=x2 ^ x1≠x2 ^ Q(x1) ^ Q(x2)]]]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;At most&quot; can be achieved by adding negated existential statements (&quot;there are no 3 distinct entities such that P applies to all of them&quot;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Anything else is even more difficult. &lt;strong&gt;In particular, quantifiers like &lt;em&gt;more than&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; can not be defined with a first-order formula at all.&lt;/strong&gt;  So you'd probably want a different mechanism anyway.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A possibility is to model generalized-quantifiers via comparison between sets: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; is a relation between to sets X and Y such that they have no elements in commen (their intersection is empty). &#xA;&lt;em&gt;at least one&lt;/em&gt; is a relation between to sets X and Y such that they have at least one element in common (their intersection is non-empty, or has cardinality (= size) &gt;=1). &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; is a relation between to sets X and Y such that all elements which are in X are also in Y, i.e., X is a subset of Y (X ⊆ Y). &#xA;&lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; is a relation between two sets X and Y such that their intersection is of size 2. &#xA;So &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; could be defined as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;two: λP[λQ[|P∩Q| = 2]].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's now debatable whether sets (which is what goes in here) is the same as predicates (which is what you'd normally want for VPs and NPs). When taking P for &quot;cookie&quot; and Q for the predication about these cookies, what the quantifier expresses is &quot;The intersection between the things that are cookies and the things that Daniel and Nina ate is two&quot;, i.o.w., &quot;There are exactly two entities which were eaten by Daniel and Nina and are coookies&quot;. (You actually have a semantic ambiguity here - did Daniel and Nina eat two cookies each, or two in total? Each of the two readings would have a different representation.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, a quantifier will be of type &lt;code&gt;((e,t),((e,t),t))&lt;/code&gt;:First a one-place predicates (or sets) go in; this will yield a quantified DP like &quot;two cookies&quot; of type &lt;code&gt;((e,t),t)&lt;/code&gt; as desired, because this is the usual type for quantified DPs. When we then put in another predicate, we get out a sentence with a truth value.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The way this notation of &quot;two&quot; works means that you effecively quantifier-raise, because your topmost operation will be the quantification, which comes from the DP in object position.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other proposal would be to type-shift the verb, which expects two inputs of type &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;, to a different type such that it can absorb a quantified DP of type &lt;code&gt;((e,t),t)&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;eat: (e,(e,t)) --&amp;gt; (((e,t),t),(e,t))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works well from a type-theoretic perspective, and can be represented in set notation, for example as outlined e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sternefeld.info/downloads/Lecture4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sternefeld.info/downloads/Additional-Quantifiers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;However, it is not clear what the resulting lambda term would look like, because you would have to allow the predicate &lt;code&gt;eat&lt;/code&gt; two take an argument which is not an indidual but some complex lambda term that represents a quantified DP, and this would simply be no longer predicate logic.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: Quantifiers are difficult. Representing them as generalized quantifiers by set-theoretic means is the easiest; in this case, they will be relatiions between sets, i.e. lambda terms of the form &lt;code&gt;λP[λQ[some relation between P and Q]]&lt;/code&gt; and type &lt;code&gt;((e,t),((e,t),t))&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T11:03:34.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T11:03:34.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-12T14:27:53.073" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a few languages of Europe (French,German,Italian),these phonemes are in free variation. To my ears they sound quite distinct,but maybe it is because I lack sufficient knowledge about their acoustic properties and their auditory perception.I think the only thing they have in common is the &quot;trill&quot;of course,but I'd like to have a more detailed explanation. I apologize if the question is too vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22572" LastEditorUserId="22572" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T20:13:15.933" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T20:13:15.933" Title="Phonetic similarity between alveolar and uvular trill" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;trills&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2019-04-12T18:00:04.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In greek there is the word ''αντιιικός'' (antiviral) from ''αντι-'' and ''-ιικός'' (viral)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24348" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T18:00:04.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31152" CreationDate="2019-04-12T23:23:43.047" Score="1" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/52097/when-did-f-become-s-why&quot;&gt;History SE question&lt;/a&gt; (with some references), which enquires about when the f (actually an ſ) became an s and why in English specifically, prompted me to wonder if there was any relationship with the Hungarian ssz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, &lt;strong&gt;this question is about the long phonetical sound&lt;/strong&gt;, as in an exaggerated ssssss sound, rather than the grapheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if any, is the relationship between e.g. the English long s (ſ) or the German long s (ß), and the Hungarian long s (ssz, which is actually short for szsz and hyphenated as sz-sz)? Does the Hungarian ssz sound (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vissza&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vissza&lt;/a&gt;, vs the short sz in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/viszl%C3%A1t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;viszlát&lt;/a&gt;) predate the Magyar departure from the Ural region, or is it a loan sound that the Magyars picked up along the way or after settling in Europe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24349" LastEditorUserId="24349" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T13:06:45.957" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T13:06:45.957" Title="Is there any relationship between the Hungarian long s sound and the long s in some European languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31151" CreationDate="2019-04-12T23:53:36.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really any connection between the Hungarian &amp;quot;ssz&amp;quot; sound and the spelling ſ or ß.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about the origin of ssz in Hungarian is interesting. What I have gathered so far is that ssz in Hungarian is fairly infrequent, and may be disproportionately more frequent in loanwords (where it seems to mostly be derived ultimately from &amp;quot;ss&amp;quot; in Latin or in Romance languages), but it was not introduced to the language by loaning. However, I also am not sure if there are any examples of it being inherited intact from some Uralic geminate consonant: I have the impression that in native words, it would originate from simplification of some other sequences. I need to do more research about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly special about ssz as compared to other long consonant sounds like tt, kk, or ccs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To refer to spellings, I'll use the angle-brackets convention, so ⟨s⟩ is a spelling, [s] is a sound, and /s/ is an element of a sound system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The spelling ⟨ſ⟩ is not &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; in the sense of phonetic length&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter-form ⟨ſ⟩, sometimes called &amp;quot;long s&amp;quot;, was as far as I know never used to represent a phonetically lengthened s sound.  The term &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; refers to its shape, not its pronunciation: it is vertically elongated. It was used historically as a non-final variant lowercase form of the letter S in the spelling systems of a number of languages. Because of rules about how to write certain kinds of words, like compounds, it occasionally represented a distinct pronunciation from &amp;quot;short/round s&amp;quot; (e.g. in German, a famous example is &lt;em&gt;Wachſtube&lt;/em&gt; /ˈvaxˌʃtuːbə/ vs. &lt;em&gt;Wachstube&lt;/em&gt; /ˈvaksˌtuːbə/), but you can see from this example that it was not a matter of a phonetic or phonemic length distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German ⟨ß⟩ is supposed to have originated as a ligature, the first element of which was ⟨ſ⟩. Since German spelling historically used both ⟨ß⟩ and ⟨ſ⟩ as contrastive elements, it's confusing to call ⟨ß⟩ a &amp;quot;German long s&amp;quot;. Wikipedia says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ß&lt;/a&gt; is called &lt;em&gt;Eszett&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;scharfes S&lt;/em&gt; in German, and &lt;em&gt;eszett&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sharp s&lt;/em&gt; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Hungarian&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hungarian has a two-way phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants for most obstruents, so /s/ ⟨sz⟩ and /z/ ⟨z⟩ are distinct phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has a distinct phonological contrast between short/basic/single and long/double/geminate consonants, as with [s] ⟨sz⟩ vs. [sː] ⟨ssz⟩. The phonemic analysis of long/geminate consonants in Hungarian seems to be controversial, with some linguists analyzing them as mere sequences (Ham 2001, p. 101). In the rest of this post, I will use the term &amp;quot;geminate&amp;quot; to refer to things like ⟨ssz⟩. Hungarian spelling differentiates geminate ⟨ssz⟩ from doubled ⟨szsz⟩ (the latter is found in compounds) and I read somewhere (sorry, I forget where) that there may be slight differences in pronunciation also between ⟨ssz⟩ and ⟨szsz⟩, but that the realizations overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that just about every consonant in Hungarian can be geminate, although some consonants are more commonly found as geminates than others. (According to Ham 2001, p. 102, all Hungarian consonants are found geminate except for [h] and [ʒ]. It seems that in fact, geminate /h/ exists, but is realized as [xː]. Geminate /ʒ/ seems to exist in inflected forms, at least, such as &lt;em&gt;rozzsal&lt;/em&gt; (the instrumental case of &lt;em&gt;rozs&lt;/em&gt;), even if it doesn't exist in the lemma form of any word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No consonant is found very frequently as a geminate: the table of frequencies in  §2.5.1.1 of Grimes 2009 indicates that in dictionary forms, every consonant phoneme is found more than 92% of the time as a single or basic rather than a geminate consonant. Although [zː] seems to be rare, this frequency table indicates that words with [zː] do exist, so we can say that there is a four-way contrast between [s], [sː], [z], [zː].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;⟨ssz⟩ in native words&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the sound changes that applied between Proto-Uralic and Hungarian. Here are some words with ⟨ssz⟩ from Wiktionary's list of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Hungarian_terms_inherited_from_Proto-Finno-Ugric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hungarian terms inherited from Proto-Finno-Ugric&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, and their etymologies as given by Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vessz%C5%91#Hungarian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vessző&lt;/a&gt; from PFU &amp;quot;*waćɜ&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/messze#Hungarian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;messze&lt;/a&gt; from PFU &amp;quot;*mećä&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rossz#Hungarian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rossz&lt;/a&gt; from PFU &amp;quot;*roćɜ&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Borrowed consonant lengthening&amp;quot; in Hungarian&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a PDF by Bálint Huszthy with some relevant information about the occurence of geminate consonants in Hungarian. Not too surprisingly, geminates have restricted distribution compared to single consonants, and in native vocabulary geminates are rare and have a low contrastive load with singleton consonants. Because of this, geminates may have a role in Hungarian as a characteristic element of &amp;quot;foreign vocabulary&amp;quot;. It seems to be debated to what extent gemination in foreign vocabulary is related to the influence of German dialects specifically. Huszthy says that Nádasdy (1989) suggested borrowing from German dialects with gemination led to analogical extension of gemination to other foreign words. But Huszthy (2016) says that &amp;quot;There must be other motivations of [&amp;quot;borrowed consonant lengthening&amp;quot;] beyond language contact&amp;quot; and suggests that it is related to constraints about prosodic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon in Hungarian reminds me a bit of how Japanese often has geminate consonants in loanwords, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Bahha&lt;/em&gt; from German &lt;em&gt;Bach&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;kyappu&lt;/em&gt; from English &lt;em&gt;cap.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;⟨ssz⟩ doesn't seem to be too special compared to other geminate consonants&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huszthy does not indicate any special status for ⟨ssz⟩ as opposed to other geminate consonants. The PDF includes a number of examples with geminate consonants other than ⟨ssz⟩:  both ones where the doubling might be taken at least in part from the spelling used in the source language (&amp;quot;desszert, gleccser, hobbi, koffer, kollázs&amp;quot;) and ones where the doubling is not present in the spelling of the source language (&amp;quot;dajjer, dopping, maffia, Guttenberg,&#xA;vikkendház&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, voiced fricatives are rarely found geminate, whether in native vocabulary or in loanwords (Magyar 2016, p. 290).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hungarian ⟨ssz⟩ in words from German seems to correspond to ⟨ss⟩, not ⟨ß⟩&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked through Wiktionary's list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Hungarian_terms_derived_from_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hungarian terms derived from German&lt;/a&gt;. All of the words in this category with ⟨ssz⟩ in Hungarian seemed to be derived from German terms spelled with ⟨ss⟩, not ones spelled with ⟨ß⟩. A number of the examples seem to be Latinate (e.g. &lt;em&gt;szecesszió, agresszió, asszisztens, asszociativitás&lt;/em&gt;) so influence from some kind of Latin seems somewhat plausible to me (either from Latin spelling, or from some tradition of Latin pronunciation that maintained distinctly long consonant sounds in this kind of context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;German&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Standard German does not have phonemically &amp;quot;long&amp;quot; consonant sounds&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual linguistic description of Standard German does not include any length contrasts for consonant sounds. Instead, Standard German is described as having a two-way contrast for obstruent consonant sounds where one consonant is &amp;quot;lenis&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;voiced&amp;quot; and the other consonant is &amp;quot;fortis&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;voiceless&amp;quot; (I think it may still be disputed whether voice is a relevant phonemic characteristic in the German consonant system, but I'm not sure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read that &amp;quot;lenis&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;voiced&amp;quot; fricatives tend to be phonetically shorter in duration than &amp;quot;fortis/&amp;quot;voiceless&amp;quot; fricatives, but this difference in phonetic duration is not treated as a phonemic length contrast in standard German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm most familiar with the two-way obstruent distinction being represented in phonemic transcriptions of Standard German by the use of IPA symbols for voiced vs. voiceless consonants: that is, /s/ is used to represent the fortis sibilant fricative, and /z/ is used to represent the lenis sibilant fricative, even though it is not supposed to be uncommon for German /z/ to be phonetically voiceless (at least partially). Standard German is described as having a process of &amp;quot;Auslautverhärtung&amp;quot; that applies to word-final (or syllable-final) obstruents and causes the contrast between lenis and fortis obstruents to be neutralized in perception in favor of fortis obstruents. That means word-final /z/ is supposed to be fortited, causing it to sound like /s/; likewise, word-final /d/ is supposed to be fortited, causing it to sound like /t/. I've read papers that suggest that this kind of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bodowinter.com/papers/winter_rottger_IN_grazer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neutralization may be incomplete in production&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consonant sequences like /s.z/ may occur across syllable boundaries, but such a sequence is not considered to constitute a phonologically long or geminate consonant (compare how in English, /s.s/ can occur across syllable boundaries in compounds like 'housesitting&amp;quot;, but English is not usually described as having geminate consonants in its inventory of consonant sounds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Consonant length in historical and dialectal varieties of German&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are supposed to be dialects of German that do have phonemic length contrasts, but I don't know enough to summarize the situation. As mentioned above, it seems to be thought that dialects like this may have been the source of some Hungarian words with geminate consonants (not just ⟨ssz⟩ specifically, but also other geminates).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a historical perspective, German ⟨ß⟩ mostly represents older /t/, via the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;High German consonant shift&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. In German, the inherited /t/ sound is supposed to have developed in many contexts to a long fricative with an s-like quality; the linked Wikipedia article says that it has been suggested that it was specifically a laminal voiceless sibilant. The resulting sound in modern standard German is standardly transcribed /s/, and spelled ⟨ss⟩ after short vowels, and ⟨ß⟩ after long vowels or diphthongs (in older spelling systems, the grapheme ⟨ß⟩ was used more widely). I haven't actually found any Hungarian word with ⟨ssz⟩ derived from Germanic /t/, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;English&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form  ⟨ſ⟩ was used in English to represent the same sounds as ⟨S⟩ or  ⟨s⟩: mostly /s/ and /z/, in some cases /ʃ/ or /ʒ/ in words with historical palatalization-related sound changes. It's a bit similar to the old use of ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩ as contextual spelling variants (⟨v⟩ at the start of a word, ⟨u⟩ elsewhere). Spellings like ⟨congreſs⟩ don't tell you anything about the pronunciation: the word might have been pronounced differently in the past, but that's not related to how it was spelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English had consonant length a long time ago (consonant length distinctions are uncontroversially reconstructed as being present in Old English, although long consonants had a restricted distribution, and I have the impression that they were fairly infrequent and that the long/short contrast didn't have a very high contrastive load). Long/geminate consonants could be spelled with doubled letters (I don't know how consistent this was), as in &lt;em&gt;cyssan&lt;/em&gt;  [ˈkysːɑn], the Old English cognate of Modern English &lt;em&gt;kiss.&lt;/em&gt; Contrastive consonant length in English is thought to have been lost at some point in the Middle English period, which is before Shakespeare's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grimes, Stephen M. 2009. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pweb.ldc.upenn.edu/%7Esgrimes/papers/diss.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quantitative Investigations in Hungarian Phonotactics and Syllable Structure&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huszthy, Bálint. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/33726860/_Unmotivated_consonant_gemination_in_the_Hungarian_Foreign_Accent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Unmotivated&amp;quot; consonant gemination in the Hungarian Foreign Accent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magyar, Lilla. 2016. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/33/paper3248.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Are Universal Markedness Hierarchies Learnable from the Lexicon? The Case of Gemination in&#xA;Hungarian&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ham, William. 2001. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6u9r7rAvNrwC&amp;amp;pg=PA101#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T12:32:42.837" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31183" CreationDate="2019-04-13T02:43:44.533" Score="-2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning Stanford CS224N: natural language processing with Deep Learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chris said &quot;a little bit broken formal languages&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT5DW2DKqHA&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;amp;t=665&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lecture 1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what does that mean? can any one give a concrete example to illustrate the difference between &quot;formal languages&quot; and &quot;broken formal languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24334" LastEditorUserId="24350" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T23:12:14.943" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T23:12:14.943" Title="what does broken formal languages mean?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T07:59:35.503" Score="0" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lithuanian language has laminal flat postalveolar and Maastrichtian Limburgish has laminal postalveolar. Are they any different, or just the same sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24352" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T15:49:31.633" Title="Is there any difference between laminal postalveolar ʃ and laminal flat postalveolar ʃ˖" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31155" CreationDate="2019-04-13T15:49:31.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone claims that &#xA;Lithuanian has a laminal flat postalveolar and Maastrichtian Limburgish has a laminal postalveolar, I would ask how they made that decision, and what that means (in particular, what does it mean to omit the term &quot;flat&quot; in describing Maastrichian?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gep.ruhosting.nl/carlos/gussenhoven_aarts.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Aarts&lt;/a&gt; describes the phonetics of Maastrichtian, saying this about the post-alveolars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/c,ʃ,ʒ,ɲ/  are  pre-palatal,  articulated  with  the  blade  of  the &#xA;  tongue  against  the  post-alveolar  place  of  articulation,  the &#xA;  tip  being  held  down.  As  is  the  case  in  the  standard&#xA;  language,  /c/   may  be  interpreted   as  /tj/,  since  the &#xA;  sequence  /t/-/j/   occurring   across morpheme  boundaries  will  be&#xA;  /c/,  just  as /n/-/j/  and /s/-/j/  will  be /ɲ/  and  /ʃ/, &#xA;  respectively. Analogously,  /ʒ/ would  be  /zj/  in  this  analysis, &#xA;  even  though  /ʒ/  is  always  morpheme-internal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not say that the sounds are laminal. Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson defines laminal thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Laminal sounds are made with the part of the tongue that has its&#xA;  center, when the tongue is at rest, immediately below the center of&#xA;  the alveolar ridge. The laminal area extends forward to about 2 mm&#xA;  behind the tip of the tongue, and backward to a point about 2 mm&#xA;  behind the point on the tongue below the center of the alveolar ridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either the person who claimed that Maastrichtian has laminals made a leap from what Gussenhoven &amp;amp; Aarts said, or they have some independent evidence (The G&amp;amp;A claim is rather minimal, not implying a detailed articulatory study).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambrazas et al. (1997) in &lt;em&gt;Lithuanian Grammar&lt;/em&gt; provide minimal phonetic detail and zero experimental results. They say that the language has &lt;em&gt;tʃ, dʒ, ʃ, ʒ&lt;/em&gt; and that consonants can be &quot;soft (palatalized) or hard (non-palatalized, velar or velarised)&quot;, saying that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the production of soft consonants the non-front articulatory focus&#xA;  moves towards the middle part of the tongue (in the cases of [[kʲ,&#xA;  gʲ,], , [ŋʲ] – &lt;em&gt;typography modified&lt;/em&gt;) or the front (middle) of&#xA;  the tongue is additionally raised towards the hard palate (in all&#xA;  other cases). The hard (non-palatalized) consonants (especially [ɫ ʃ&#xA;  ʒ]) are characterized not only by the absence of palatalization, but&#xA;  also by velarisation, i.e. by raising of the back part of the tongue&#xA;  towards the soft palate (velum). Besides, the hard [ʃ ʒ] are slightly&#xA;  labialized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, these authors do not make the specific claims cited, so the question is what is the evidence that Lithuanian has specifically laminal consonants, flat or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, as far as I know, no study showing that there are language pairs that distinguish&#xA;&quot;laminal flat postalveolar&quot; versus &quot;laminal postalveolar non-flat&quot; consonants, so I would say that the claim that claim that these two languages exemplify such a difference has not been scientifically established, or even addressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T15:49:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T16:39:37.953" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very angry, sonorant voice may have the vocal lips, wind pipe and whole throat vibrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we may see this as phoneme in e.g. imitation of a wolfs growl, &quot;grrr&quot;, a game show's bad-answer signal (I'm not aware of a transcription) or a propeller airplane and other motors. As the word &quot;growl&quot; shows, this often sounds like &quot;r&quot; and incorporates the palate (in contrast to h-, &quot;howl&quot;). The airplane noise is often realized without the sought sonorant quality, &quot;neeeeeaouu&quot; but a chainsaw is imitated onomatopoeticly as &quot;runn&quot; or &quot;rrrring&quot;, not to be confused with the ring of an old telephone bell. It doesn't appear to be a distinct phone, e.g. in IPA, rather it can modulate any vocal or voiced consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to read about it, so I need a search term. What's it called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_epiglottal_trill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voiced Epiglottal Trill&lt;/a&gt; or a pharyngel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;strong&gt;Sound snippets&lt;/strong&gt; Death Metal Growling &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QnqgDVC6g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at 1:07&lt;/a&gt;, realization of German &quot;R&quot; without trill &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x_g43elUQo&amp;amp;t=24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;around 0:25&lt;/a&gt; (can't understand the word though; with trill at 2:04 &quot;wartes'&quot;), a pirate saying &quot;argh&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7xftyFjKFc&amp;amp;t=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0:20 onwards&lt;/a&gt; (not as approximant), more growling at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpMZVu_DCdg&amp;amp;t=414&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6:55&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T21:02:57.323" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T21:02:57.323" Title="phonetics name of vibration in the wind pipe" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-04-15T18:42:23.750" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T17:04:01.060" Score="-3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;My  research is not linguistics pers se, it is placed in psychiatry, and my problem and question is the French etymology concerning the word psychiatry in French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24357" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T18:52:47.710" Title="Research in psychiatry" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31158" CreationDate="2019-04-13T18:52:47.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English word comes from the French, which comes from a Mediaeval Latin invention: a combination of &lt;em&gt;psych-&lt;/em&gt; (from Greek for &quot;soul&quot;), &lt;em&gt;-iatr-&lt;/em&gt; (from Greek for &quot;doctor&quot;), and &lt;em&gt;-ia&lt;/em&gt; (indicating a general process). Literally, medical treatment for the soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T18:52:47.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30379" CreationDate="2019-04-13T22:27:45.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Realistic datasets are always like that. You'd better focus on proper algorithms to train on such datasets than on fixing the dataset itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With proper algorithm balance is not a problem. It is much more relevant to add more training data than to prepare dataset carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3068" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T22:27:45.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30306" CreationDate="2019-04-13T22:42:10.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robust speech recognition is a huge area with lots of research papers. You can start from a textbook by Microsoft:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://store.elsevier.com/Robust-Automatic-Speech-Recognition/Jinyu-Li/isbn-9780128023983/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robust Automatic Speech Recognition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3068" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T22:42:10.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30306" CreationDate="2019-04-13T22:59:00.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, speech-recognition systems do quite a bit of preprocessing on the signal before trying to interpret it; part of that is getting rid of the noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is, most speech signals are periodic: the vocal folds generate a sawtooth-esque wave, and the vocal tract then applies a filter to it. So all voiced sounds(*) have a very predictable periodicity that can be exploited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noice, on the other hand, is aperiodic by definition. So the noise and the signal tend to be nicely separate in frequency space, and a low-pass filter can purge one while leaving the other intact. (Other approaches include convolution filters, which &quot;smooth out&quot; the waveform, and wavelet filters, which try to preserve sharp peaks and edges in the signal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The key here is &quot;voiced&quot;—voiceless sounds, and voiceless fricatives especially, and voiceless &lt;em&gt;sibilant&lt;/em&gt; fricatives worst of all, are pretty much pure noise. But they're noise that's much louder than the background noise, so they can survive most de-noising filters pretty much intact (if a bit beaten up and scarred).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T23:05:01.020" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T23:05:01.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-14T07:11:46.537" Score="2" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand what is the relationship between &lt;em&gt;sememes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;semantemes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following definitions :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;sememe&lt;/em&gt; is a semantic content of a lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;semanteme&lt;/em&gt; is a unit which together with &lt;em&gt;morph&lt;/em&gt; constitutes a morpheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that a sememe is basically the meaning of a word, and a semanteme is the meaning of a morpheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T07:11:46.537" Title="Sememe and semanteme" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31165" CreationDate="2019-04-14T11:43:12.513" Score="3" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, can you point me to some research, what causes the relative frequency of consonants in various languages?&lt;br/&gt;The fact that vowels are more common than consonants is obviously caused by phonotactics, but I don't see a simple explanation for the fact that some consonants appear to be way more frequent than others. For much of my research, I simply assumed that most of it is caused by syntax, but, evidently, syntax plays only a minor role. As I've explained on this &lt;a href=&quot;http://flatassembler.000webhostapp.com/toponyms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web-page&lt;/a&gt;, it's relatively easy to measure the effect syntax has on relative frequency of consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the relevant part of the web-page, I made a simple computer program in C (source code is available on the web-page) that randomly picks two consonants from a text-file a million times, and counts how many times the two consonants happened to be the same. If you run it on a long English text, it will print that the probability of choosing the same consonant two times in a row is 1/11, and that the most common consonant is &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; (presumably because of the words like &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;). However, if you run it on an English word-list for a spell-checker, it will print that that probability drops to 1/13, and that the most common consonant is &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; (probably because of the common English prefix &lt;em&gt;re-&lt;/em&gt; and the common English suffix &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;). Similarly, if you run it on a long Croatian text, it will print that the probability of choosing two same consonants in a row is 1/13, and, if you run it on a Croatian word-list, the probability will be 1/14 (in both cases, the most common consonant will be &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, probably because &lt;em&gt;ne-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;na-&lt;/em&gt; are very common prefixes forming Croatian words). And, if you run it on a long German text, it will print that the probability of choosing the same consonant two times in a row is 1/12, and that the probability of that happening in a spell-checker word-list is 1/15. In both cases, the most common consonant is &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, and I can't really guess why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you can see from the above data, while syntax indeed plays some role in the relative frequency of consonants, that's not all there is to it. To what extent is the rest of the effect caused by phonology, and to what extent is it caused by morphology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20821" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:53:05.103" Title="What causes relative frequency of consonants?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31164" CreationDate="2019-04-14T12:53:37.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frequency of a thing can be in terms of all languages or a single language; it can be in terms of yes/no existence or in terms of actual use; if the latter it has to be relative to some defined corpus. As an example, [ʕ] is a zero-frequency consonant in English, and a low-frequency consonant in human language. I won't venture a guess about its frequency in Arabic, but it is not the least-frequent consonant of Arabic (Classical, at least). [t] on the other hard is very high frequency in and across languages. There is a vague concept out there of &quot;markedness&quot; that is invoked to encapsulate differing frequency of attestations, whereby it is said that [ʕ] is &quot;marked&quot; relative to [t].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two factors that have the greatest influence on frequency of attestation are (a) intrinsic phonetic properties and (b) historical precedent. Ejectives are extremely low frequency in Indo-European languages because the proto-language lacked ejectives (I ignore the claim to the contrary), and [p] is low frequency in modern Arabic dialects because Classical Arabic didn't have [p]. However, English has [f] while PIE did not, so languages do develop new sounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Factor (a), intrinsic properties, is hard to explain or even establish satisfactorily. A popular idea applied to crosslinguistically low-frequency consonants is that they are &quot;hard to pronounce&quot;; the problem is that this can't be directly measured in an objective way, and seems to reflect the struggle that people have when trying to pronounce a sound that is not in their own language (it's hard). Phonetically based dispreference is the result of aerodynamic, acoustic and articulatory factors. However, it is also hard to separate (a) from (b), that is, I don't find [ʕ] hard in any sense, but it is not part of my native language and I often elide the consonant when pronouncing words of Arabic (names) in an English discourse. It's possible that through massive social change that Arabic could influence English and we would nativize some words containing [ʕ], thus that consonant could be properly a part of the English consonant inventory where it was not one historically. This happened in the case of some Bantu languages of Southern Africa, which adopted click sounds from neighboring Khoisan languages, thus increasing the attestation frequency of clicks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final consideration for you is that spelling and pronunciation are different, so that the letter &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; is both [t] and a spelling component of [θ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of possible influence of syntax, phonology or morphology on consonant frequency depends on what frequency you are speaking of. W.r.t. crosslinguistic frequency, the effect is zero. Token frequency within a language can be influenced by syntax, phonology or morphology, and yes/no frequency can be influenced by phonology (people often say that the lack of [ʕ] in English is a fact encoded in the phonological grammar of English). There is no general way to know in advance what the influence of syntax, phonology or morphology is on token frequency, because you don't know if a language is going to have rules deleting &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; in some context, or turning /k/ into [g] in some context, either of which will influence token frequency. Syntax and morphology can influence token frequency in case e.g. /k/ is figures in widely-used affixes, but again not every language has a ubiquitous affix /s/ or /d/ which increases the token frequency of these sounds in English. Post hoc, you can compute the percentage of tokens that are attributable to some affix or syntagmeme, but there's no predictive power apart from general predictions about samples from a different corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T16:14:38.363" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T16:14:38.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31169" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:16:01.497" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this might sound random at first, I noticed that it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;works in multiple languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Danish: brød (bread) = b + rød&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;German: Brot = b + rot&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;English: bread (spoken language) = b + red&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24362" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T11:58:08.300" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T11:58:08.300" Title="Is there a link between the words red and bread?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31166" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:26:13.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These similarities are because German, English and Danish (also Dutch, Frisian, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese...) are Germanic languages, descended from a common ancestor (we call it &quot;Proto-Germanic&quot;). However, the exact meaning &quot;bread&quot; is somewhat of a coincidence, since the earlier meaning was something like &quot;piece of food&quot;, so the Danish word might have ended up meaning &quot;bit of cheese&quot;. &quot;Red&quot; seems to go back to an Indo-European word meaning &quot;red&quot;. It is also a complete coincidence that &quot;bread&quot; in these languages contains all of the sounds of &quot;red&quot; plus something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:26:13.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31164" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:53:05.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following your argument I guess, the frequency in German is pushed up by indefinite articles &quot;ein-&quot;, case inflections and regular verb inflections on &quot;-(e)n&quot;, and the plural marker &quot;-en&quot;. The common mnemonic for most frequent letters in German is &quot;ERNSTL&quot;, famously in the wheel of fortune game shows, ordered for ease of pronunciation of the mnemonic. One should wonder why words that are favored by the syntax contain those consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the Wikipedia article for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;liquid consonants&lt;/a&gt;, we see claimed that they are very frequent. Down the page we see that the term originally described &quot;the sonorant consonants (/l, r, m, n/) of classical Greek&quot;--three of those matching our &quot;ERNSTL&quot;. Mind that, while German &quot;R&quot; is nominally a trill, it is often produced as a mere approximant, or plainly elided. There's a lot to say about that, and about relations between &quot;d&quot; and &quot;n&quot; (&quot;d&quot; is just a non-nasalized &quot;n&quot;), that escape me at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We discriminate mainly two points of articulation, front and back, respectively the tip of the tongue and whatever your local accent prefers (uvular for me, rhotic for many Americans). &quot;ng&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;velar&lt;/em&gt; nasal on the other hand, so somewhere in the middle, but we still hear most of it like a &lt;em&gt;dental&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;alveolar&lt;/em&gt;; Those in turn are even represented with the same IPA sign; Many other IPA symbols are reminiscent of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heart of the matter that I'm getting at is that &lt;strong&gt;those consonants are prefered, where the least effort is expanded in speech.&lt;/strong&gt; Similarly, written speech optimizes for ease of writing and represents several sounds with the same symbol. Only if trying to be precise--talking clearly, or writing phonetically--will the difference be highlighted. However, we nevertheless hear, or see the difference if we expect it, even if it's hardly even there or only hinted at by context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what that implies for the development of a language. It obviously has not converged to just two different consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that [m], another nasal, is one of the earliest learned sounds of a child (and one researcher figured that was helped by the most basic lip action a baby gets, sucking on the &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;a&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;aries). Note variants like &quot;nana&quot;, &quot;anna&quot;, etc. Whereas [p] is learned rather late. This alone implies levels of difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:53:05.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31166" CreationDate="2019-04-14T21:51:51.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a coincidence, but neither is there a link between the words - except that they consist of similar sequences of sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two words &quot;bread&quot; and &quot;red&quot; derive from Proto-Germanic *braudą and *raudaz. From these forms, the forms in the descendant languages can be derived by applying regular sound changes, and since the basic forms are similar, the resultant forms will be similar as well - because the sound changes treat the sequence *-aud- the same way, no matter if it's preceded by &quot;b&quot; or &quot;br&quot; (and, incidentally, these languages also preserve both &quot;b&quot; and &quot;br&quot; as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same situation can be seen with other pairs of words that were similar in predecessor languages, like &quot;bring&quot; and &quot;ring&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T21:51:51.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31166" CreationDate="2019-04-14T22:18:07.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The party line would be that these words were similar in the common ancestor of those languages, and that the individual languages developed regularly, maintaining the resemblance. However, the etymology of &quot;bread&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.oup.com/2018/11/attacking-loaf-bread/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;isn't straight forward&lt;/a&gt;, whereas &quot;red&quot; is reconstructed for the hypothetic, ancestral proto-form of Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) which includes non-germanic languages like Greek, Celtic, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian and a dozen others, which lack a closely similar word for bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding forms in Proto-Germanic are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/raudaz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*raudaz&lt;/a&gt; (adj. &quot;red&quot;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/braud%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*braudą&lt;/a&gt; (noun &quot;bread; fragment, piece&quot;). The neuter nominative inflection of the adjective is &quot;*rauda, indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The etymology of the noun is given as &quot;Disputed&quot;. They tentatively link PIE &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/b%CA%B0rewh%E2%82%81-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*bʰrewh₁-&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;to boil, to brew&quot;). From the stem they derive &lt;strong&gt;*bʰrowh₁-tó-&lt;/strong&gt; (with vocalism alternation and result-noun forming suffix), that could possibly give Germanic *braudą (&quot;bread&quot;);. They further derive the stem from PIE *bʰer-, there glossed &quot;to boil&quot;, but on the corresponding page it is glossed &quot;to bear, carry&quot;, where they derive also e.g. Sanskr. भर्मन् (bhárman; &quot;support, maintenance, nourishment, care&quot;) and many more words, often diverging wildly in meaning, e.g. &quot;Slavic: *berďa (“pregnant”)&quot;. We already saw, those pages aren't fully congruent, and sadly that somewhat reflects the state of the art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;red&quot; relates PIE *h₁rewdʰ- rather certainly with many very close cognates in the various languages. That does differ a lot from *bʰrowh₁-tó-.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far the party-line. However there is no etymology--at least none accepted--given for *h₁rewdʰ-. So the answer to your question could be: &lt;strong&gt;maybe&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for my open-ended interpretation, I would probably take a weekend. Consider &lt;em&gt;brahman&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;phago-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ferment&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;blood&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;flower&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to raise [a child; dough]&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;Wegzehrung&lt;/em&gt;, the prefix &lt;em&gt;be-&lt;/em&gt;, the roots around &lt;em&gt;rect-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rex&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; etc., German &lt;em&gt;bereiten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;vorbereiten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zubereiten&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;prepare&quot;) &lt;em&gt;Proviant&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;provisions, rations&quot;), &lt;em&gt;etwas gebacken kriegen&lt;/em&gt; (coloquial &quot;to get something done*), En. &lt;em&gt;to back someone&lt;/em&gt; ... Ger. &lt;em&gt;auf die Reihe kriegen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;etwas klappt&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kleben&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zusammen-backen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pappen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;das Becken&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;bacon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bug&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bud&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bow&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Bug&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bauch&lt;/em&gt;, PIE *bhew- (&quot;to swell&quot;; *bu-), Ger. &lt;em&gt;Brett&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bürde&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;burden&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bristle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;brush&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Bursche&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Geburt&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;berry&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Berg&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Brocken&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Brücke&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;überbrücken&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;bridge&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bright&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Bereich&lt;/em&gt;. And that's only Germanic &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and nothing to say of &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; or ... but a little bit of &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;rühren&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Rührteig&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;berühren&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;regen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;rücken&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Rücken&lt;/em&gt;, En. &lt;em&gt;to reach [maturity]&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;to be green behind the ears&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;immature&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, bread turns brown if baked and there is something about color terms having had a wider meaning than today. A root for brown in PIE is reconstructed, but only on the basis of Germanic and geographically close languages, as far as I know. Also note that &lt;em&gt;blood bakes&lt;/em&gt; or rather &lt;em&gt;cakes&lt;/em&gt; in figurative speech, and that traditionally gory crusted blood was labeled differently from vital, flowing blood. Also note that in Japan, the sun is drawn &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt;, as far as &lt;em&gt;rising&lt;/em&gt; (or rather setting [of the dough?]) is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether the difficulty noted at wiktionary lies in irregular sound correspondence or just the semantic shift and lack of cognates (there are likely scholarly papers on the matter to be found for the interested reader). Even in Old English &quot;hlaifan&quot;, German &quot;Laib&quot; [of bread, cheese, the body] were mainly used to denote &lt;em&gt;bread&lt;/em&gt;, but that's probably a different can of worms and that's nothing to say of our &lt;em&gt;daily bread&lt;/em&gt; and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, if only for analogy, note that &quot;bride&quot; is likewise of rather uncertain origin (which Anatoly treated last year in the blog linked above, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Funny enough, if we look at Ger. &quot;Bereich&quot; (realm, area) and compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/area&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;area&lt;/a&gt;, we find the suggestion to look at another root that means &quot;to burn&quot;, *h₂eHs-. I really wonder where the &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; should come from. But I'm done for today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T22:39:14.643" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T22:39:14.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2602" CreationDate="2019-04-14T23:57:06.667" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not quite contrary to your sources I would try to relate this to the root of &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;zeigen&lt;/em&gt;, Lat. &lt;em&gt;digit&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;dict-&lt;/em&gt;. The set ührase is &quot;Zeichen deuten&quot; and &lt;em&gt;deuten&lt;/em&gt; is otherwise synonymous with &lt;em&gt;zeigen&lt;/em&gt;. The semantic derivation--preceding a probably folk etymologic reinterpretation towards &quot;deutsch&quot;--would be *deyḱ-, &lt;em&gt;show&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;teach language&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;interpreter [e.g. of records]&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;explain to the tribe&lt;/em&gt; &gt; ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &lt;em&gt;lector&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;someone [able to, in the profession] to read&quot;; &lt;em&gt;doctor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;?&quot;; &lt;em&gt;ein Deut&lt;/em&gt;, chiefly used in &quot;keinen Deut besser&quot; (not one bit better), imaginably from &quot;kein' Deut verstehen&quot; (&quot;to understand not one &lt;em&gt;Deut&lt;/em&gt;&quot;). Looking at &lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt;, PIE *del- I come to think, the sequence of derivation may well be different, as a comparison Latin &lt;em&gt;debeo, habeo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lego&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;elect&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;delinquo&lt;/em&gt; may suggest, as the latter relates to PIE *leykʷ- (perfective &quot;to leave&quot;) deriving words relating to &quot;remains&quot; and &quot;inheritance&quot; in various languages, and interpretation of cultural heritage through oral tradition and associated cryptic signs is what I'm riffing on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of &lt;em&gt;dict-&lt;/em&gt;, compare &lt;em&gt;pregnant&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pre+gnoss-&quot;, i.e. &lt;em&gt;showing first signs, foreboding, foretelling&lt;/em&gt;, vs idiomatic Ger. &lt;em&gt;dicker Bauch&lt;/em&gt; &quot;big belly&quot;, akin to &lt;em&gt;thick&lt;/em&gt;, but with only Germanic and Celtic derivations at the PIE level. I'm saying &lt;em&gt;dick&lt;/em&gt; stems from a sense &quot;in-&lt;em&gt;dic&lt;/em&gt;-ation&quot;; ironically, &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; is rather uncertain and likely pertains to the root *bhew-, that's often glossed &quot;to swell&quot;, whence also Ger. &lt;em&gt;Bauch&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;belly&quot;. The wonders of life, ey? Venus figurines of big belly girls are among the oldest pieces of art we know, around 30.000 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also see &quot;dick&quot; here, comparing &quot;digitus&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how *tewteH-, &quot;strong, powerfull, mighty&quot; figures into this. Maybe compare &lt;em&gt;to tug&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;ziehen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Zug&lt;/em&gt;, PIE *dewk- &quot;to pull; to lead&quot; (Note the accent on ḱ for *deyḱ- though). For the Anlaut we can compare *(s)teH- &quot;stand, set&quot; on the one hand and *deH- &quot;do, put place&quot; on the other, with various extenstions around *(s)te- (for &lt;em&gt;stiff&lt;/em&gt;, etc. etc.). Arguably, a prefix *(s)- could fortify a coda *deH- to *(s)t- &gt; *t-. I'm betting on the prefix reflecting &quot;ex&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further compare &lt;em&gt;dyke&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;ditch&quot;, *dʰeygʷ- ‘to stick, set up’; The difference should be as small as between Ger. &quot;Zeugs&quot;, &quot;Zeug&quot; and &quot;zeugen&quot;; (saying so because for &lt;em&gt;dyke&lt;/em&gt; we observe &quot;Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;diegti&lt;/em&gt; ‘to prick; plant’, dýgsti ‘to geminate, grow’&quot;; cp. Ger. &lt;em&gt;Erzeugnis&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;produce&quot;; Further, cogante German &lt;em&gt;Teich&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pond&quot;, Latin &lt;em&gt;fīgō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to affix&quot; imply that Ger. &lt;em&gt;angelegt&lt;/em&gt; relates, which pertains to seed beds as well as to ponds, further to clothes and eventually to ships tied in harbor&quot;). Thus, &quot;ditch&quot; does remind of the above mentioned &quot;leave&quot; as well as of Lat. &quot;lego&quot;, or rather Ger. &quot;legen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then some ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that's to say, it--&lt;em&gt;das Deuten&lt;/em&gt;--is yet uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T00:49:57.583" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T00:49:57.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T04:49:08.837" Score="6" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Korean and Vietnamese used to have Chinese characters but no longer do; there has been talk (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3831/why-was-korea-able-to-remove-kanji-but-japan-wasnt-when-both-languages-use-homo&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) of doing the same in Japanese. Has there been an impact on the language? for instance &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;changed pronunciations so pairs of words are no longer homonyms;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;changed spellings so pairs of words are no longer homographs (changing spelling but not pronunciation is not possible in Korean or Japanese, I don't know about Vietnamese);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use of a synonym to remove ambiguity between homonyms;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;insertion of word separators (Japanese books for children, without &lt;em&gt;kanji&lt;/em&gt;, have spaces).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, was there change in speech too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastEditorUserId="24297" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T05:19:45.043" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T16:46:16.730" Title="Did the removal of Chinese characters have an impact on Korean and Vietnamese?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;korean&gt;&lt;vietnamese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T09:14:22.807" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homophones that are not homographs are common in languages like English. This arises because several letters (or diphthongs) can have the same pronunciation. But where do the (less common) homographs that are not homophones come from? 'I shed a tear when I tear my clothes.' 'I read a magazine yesterday, today I read a book.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T17:05:11.777" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:06:45.313" Title="Homographs non-homophones" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;homonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31175" CreationDate="2019-04-15T09:38:18.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similarly to how you put it for homophones, we could say that sometimes, the same letter or digraph can have more than one pronunciation. &amp;quot;Ea&amp;quot; is actually a common example of this in English. The historical reasons for this are fairly complicated. Sometimes words with the same spelling but different pronunciations once had the same pronunciation (at least in some dialect) but developed differently for some reason. Sometimes they were never pronounced the same, but the spelling system doesn't mark the difference. Most spelling systems leave at least some information out: often stress or pitch, but sometimes things like vowel quality or length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;tear,&lt;/em&gt; it seems that the words ought to have developed the same vowel sound in at least some accents of English. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records &amp;quot;/tiːr/ /tɪə(r)/&amp;quot; as a dialectal variant pronunciation of the verb &lt;em&gt;tear.&lt;/em&gt; The vowel in the verb comes from lengthening in Middle English of an originally short *e: this is expected to develop to Late Middle English [ɛː], which usually but not always turned into the &amp;quot;near&amp;quot; vowel when followed by the consonant /r/. The development to the &amp;quot;square&amp;quot; vowel instead is an irregularity that this word shares with some other words. This word is mentioned along with the other like examples &lt;em&gt;bear, pear, swear,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wear&lt;/em&gt; in this handout about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/%7Ekroch/courses/lx310/handouts/handouts-09/ringe/gvs-revised.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ling.upenn.edu/%7Ekroch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony Kroch's website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vowel in the noun &lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt; has a more complicated etymology involving a lost fricative, but it is also supposed to have developed a pronunciation with [ɛː] in at least some dialects of Middle English. Here we see the regular development to the &amp;quot;near&amp;quot; vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kroch suggests that before /r/, the Middle English lengthening process might have resulted in a vowel that was subtly different from the already-long [ɛː] that was found in words like the noun &lt;em&gt;tear.&lt;/em&gt; Another thing that seems relevant to me is that the verbs &lt;em&gt;bear, swear, wear, tear&lt;/em&gt; all conjugate alike in Modern English (&lt;em&gt;bore/born(e), swore/sworn, wore/worn, tore/torn&lt;/em&gt;); the past tense forms certainly show the influence of analogy and not just of regular sound changes, so it seems plausible to me that the vowel of the present tense for at least some of these verbs might also have developed through analogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of the forms of the verb &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; seems to be complicated, but it did have a long vowel in both the past and the present tense at some point. The long vowel ended up being shortened in the past tense, but not in the present tense. The OED suggests that the use of the spelling &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; in the spelling of the past tense in modern English could be due to avoidance of homography with the adjective &lt;em&gt;red.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:06:45.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31166" CreationDate="2019-04-15T11:57:56.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon you just rediscovered is termed &quot;exceptionlessness of sound laws&quot;: Words that have some common sound structure in a proto-language (here Proto-Germanic) tend to keep that commonness while undergoing some sound shifts (here final d -&gt; t in High German, some parallel shifts of the vowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the complete lack of exceptions is kind of a dogma (but a very useful one in historical linguistics), exceptions occur in practice (e.g., because of subtle differences causing different evolution in the daughter languages or cross-borrowing). However, any postulated exception to a sound law needs a sound explanation to be believed by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T11:57:56.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T14:00:04.957" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;read verb&#xA;\ ˈrēd  \&#xA;read\ ˈred  \&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words have the same spelling, but they are pronounced differently, and one of the words is pronounced exactly the same as a color’s name, “red,” yet its definition is different.  How do these words have so many similarities yet can be so different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20011" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T15:10:30.737" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:32:42.527" Title="Why do we write read for both present and past tense, but we pronounce them differently?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-04-15T23:20:32.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31172" CreationDate="2019-04-15T16:46:16.730" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native Korean speaker here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changed pronunciations so pairs of words are no longer homonyms: NO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changed spellings so pairs of words are no longer homographs: NO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spelling of Sino-Korean words are very rigid: with very few exception they are spelled in the way each constituent character (i.e., a Chinese character) is spelled.  In most cases pronunciation also matches spelling, modulo some common yet not entirely predictable process - e.g., 성적 is pronounced 성적(seongjeok) when it means &amp;quot;test score 成績&amp;quot;, but 성쩍(seongjjeok) when it means &amp;quot;sexual 性的&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I don't think change of orthography results in change of pronunciation, at least not directly.  People will just keep talking in the same way they've been talking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;insertion of word separators: YES but not really relevant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korean has been written with spaces between words since early 20th century.  Newspapers and scholarly articles were full of Chinese characters until 1980s.  In Korean, even without word separators it is usually not that hard to tell which part is grammatical suffix, because they frequently have syllables not commonly found in other part of speech.  (E.g., if you see 를, it's 99.9% object marker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the same problem of parsing occurs regardless of whether one uses Chinese characters or not.  A commonly used example is (although a bit nonsensical):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;아버지가 방에 들어가신다 Father enters the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;abeoji(father)-ga(subj) bang(room)-e(into) deureogasinda(enter-honorific-present)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;아버지 가방에 들어가신다 Father enters the bag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;abeoji(father) gabang(bag)-e(into) deureogasinda&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, using Chinese characters might enable one to forego spaces in some cases, but since Korean generally uses spaces anyway, it's a moot point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use of a synonym to remove ambiguity between homonyms: YES (to a degree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the primary mechanism by which Korean orthography gradually moved out of Chinese characters.  But even in this case, the opposition against pure Korean spelling was more political than practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, some old-fashioned people were used to writing Chinese characters, and they wanted to keep it, so they argued that loss of Chinese characters will make Korean sentences ambiguous and degrade communication.  But the effect was often greatly exaggerated, and in many cases it turns out one can simply use alternate expressions to avoid ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did mean many obscure Sino-Korean words that were hardly ever used in everyday speech became even more obscure.  I can't say Korean suffered from that.  On the contrary, I think Korean communication actually benefited from forcing writers to write in words that people actually use, instead of lazily copying some combination of Chinese characters from Chinese or Japanese and claiming that it's a new Korean word everybody has to learn.  (And of course, if you still want to borrow obscure phrases found deep in classical Chinese literary work, nobody stops you.  It's just that people find it less interesting these days.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T16:46:16.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31178" CreationDate="2019-04-15T17:25:13.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is honestly a good question! English spelling used to be very consistent, and while it's fossilized now, words from the same source and time period (like read/read) typically have predictable pronunciations. So what gives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the reason English vowel spelling is so unpredictable goes back to the Great Vowel Shift. Sometime roughly in the vicinity of Shakespeare, English long vowels shifted to new pronunciations—but by an unlucky coincidence, the spelling system had fossilized right before that. So we're stuck with old-style spelling for new-style vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, the correspondence is straightforward (&lt;em&gt;for native English words that went through this shift&lt;/em&gt;): &quot;ou&quot; is IPA &lt;code&gt;/aw/&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;i_e&quot; is IPA &lt;code&gt;/aj/&lt;/code&gt;, &quot;oa&quot; is IPA &lt;code&gt;/ow/&lt;/code&gt;, and so on. But one particular vowel didn't shift in a predictable manner: the long epsilon &lt;code&gt;/ɛː/&lt;/code&gt;, written &quot;ea&quot;, which shifted to &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; in some words but not in others, with no rhyme or reason. That's why &quot;near&quot; and &quot;bear&quot; don't rhyme (they used to) and why &quot;tear&quot; and &quot;tear&quot; are pronounced differently (they used to be the same). Most likely, some dialects shifted it while others didn't, and it was basically random which dialectal form became standard and which died out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it shifted in the present tense, but not in the past tense. Why? Nobody is really sure! One possibility is that the past tense actually had a &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; vowel &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;, which was written &quot;ea&quot; to keep it separate from the homophone &quot;red&quot;. Or this shortening might have happened after the spelling fossilized but before the Great Vowel Shift. There just isn't really enough evidence to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the best answer I can give is: &quot;it's a known irregularity in English&quot;. Unsatisfying, but there it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. As far as why &quot;read&quot; and &quot;red&quot; sound the same, that's a complete coincidence. English has a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of words, and at some point it's inevitable that some of them will sound the same, just by random chance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T17:32:42.527" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:32:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30501" CreationDate="2019-04-15T21:50:11.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Altaic&quot; languages are generally not considered a valid group, not to speak of Ural-Altaic, so the words you mention do not go back to one original source, but rather to two separate sources, one for each family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Uralic words you mention, go back to Proto-Uralic *käle: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Uralic/k%C3%A4le&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Uralic/k%C3%A4le&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mongolian and Turkish words, on the other hand, go back to Proto-Turkic *dɨl. You can find more cognates for that word here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dil#Azerbaijani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dil#Azerbaijani&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T21:50:11.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8444" CreationDate="2019-04-15T23:01:56.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your addendum is about as good of an answer as I can give! But if it helps at all…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second half of &lt;em&gt;ἑκηβόλος&lt;/em&gt; is nice and straightforward: it comes from &lt;em&gt;βάλλω&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;to throw, shoot, attack from a distance&quot;. So the compound as a whole means &quot;someone who shoots &lt;em&gt;hekē&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the first part, I've seen three different hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that it's the preposition &lt;em&gt;ἐκ&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;out of&quot;. In this case it would be an intensifier, or something like that: &quot;someone who shoots away from something&quot;. But this hypothesis has a pretty glaring flaw, namely, the rough breathing in &lt;em&gt;ἑκηβόλος&lt;/em&gt;. I feel confident discarding that as a later folk etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that it's the adverb &lt;em&gt;ἑκάς&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;far away&quot;. This would give the famous &quot;far-shooter&quot; meaning, and the alpha in the prefix makes sense: LSJ reports the Doric form as &lt;em&gt;ἑκ&lt;strong&gt;ᾱ&lt;/strong&gt;βόλος&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that the eta is just an Attic development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is that it's the adjective &lt;em&gt;ἑκών&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;willing&quot;. This is the one LSJ prefers, and could potentially mean &quot;someone who shoots willingly&quot;, or &quot;someone who shoots what he intends to shoot&quot;, or something like that. But to me, this one isn't as convincing as &quot;far-shooter&quot;—and despite Thillaud's argument, I don't see how the extra &lt;em&gt;-ᾱτ-&lt;/em&gt; would get in here, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why LSJ prefer the third interpretation over the second, I really can't say. Historically, those two prefixes would have looked the same all the way up to Koinē times (they both used to have a digamma, which became a rough breathing, then vanished), and ancient sources on etymology tend to be…unreliable at best. (If you want some wonderfully inaccurate folk etymologies, on the other hand, see Plato's &lt;em&gt;Cratylus&lt;/em&gt; for a trove of them.) So I would say, take whichever makes more semantic sense to you; that's one of Thillaud's main criteria in preferring &quot;willing&quot;, and really my main reason for preferring &quot;far&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T23:01:56.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31153" CreationDate="2019-04-15T23:04:46.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;agreed with Mark Beadles's comments.&#xA;Human language is a kind of broken formal languages because Human language doesn't quite follow the rules a formal language is expected to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24350" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T23:04:46.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-15T23:10:09.130" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/31153/24350&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; is discussing human language and formal languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT5DW2DKqHA&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;amp;t=665&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;professor&lt;/a&gt;, human language is a kind of broken formal languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which formal languages rule does human language break?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24350" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T23:10:09.130" Title="which formal languages rule does human language break?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T06:44:34.380" Score="0" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mada&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; まだ refers to a continuing state: 'still (as it was)' or 'not (changed) yet', and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%82%E3%81%86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mou&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; もう is about change: 'already (changed)' or 'no longer (the same)'. Are there other languages using a similar pair of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T15:12:54.930" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T02:04:30.427" Title="Describing continuity and change (like mou and mada in Japanese)" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T07:50:08.687" Score="3" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m using p2fa to do aligning for a sound file. Because the speaker has some heavy breath that was misinterpreted as words, I used praat to denoise it, and it sounds pretty good. However, p2fa almost cannot detect any sound in the denoised file. Anyone knows one? Thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24369" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T07:50:08.687" Title="Forced Aligner doesn’t work on denoised sound file" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T09:04:44.737" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;A drawer is something one draws out of a piece of furniture. Likewise in French with &lt;em&gt;tiroir&lt;/em&gt; coming from the verb &lt;em&gt;tirer&lt;/em&gt; and in Japanese 引き出し from 引く. Is there a word for such a phenomenon: several languages naming the same object (or concept) following the same pattern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T09:04:44.737" Title="Different languages following the same pattern to name the same object" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T18:52:51.250" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;One the one hand, Berlin and Kay found a linguistic hierarchy of colors. On the other hand, some languages have several kinds of colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French, color adjectives are invariable if they come from nouns, e.g. &lt;em&gt;orange&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;marron&lt;/em&gt; (brown). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese there are (in my view) four kinds of colors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;four &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; adjectives (the older and 'purer' class of adjectives): 黒い (&lt;em&gt;kuroi&lt;/em&gt;, black), 白い (&lt;em&gt;shiroi&lt;/em&gt;, white), 赤い (&lt;em&gt;akai&lt;/em&gt;, red), 青い (&lt;em&gt;aoi&lt;/em&gt;, blue/green);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;three &lt;em&gt;kanji&lt;/em&gt; representing colors but not directly &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; adjectives themselves: 黄 (&lt;em&gt;ki&lt;/em&gt;, yellow), 紫 (&lt;em&gt;murasaki&lt;/em&gt;, purple), 緑 (&lt;em&gt;midori&lt;/em&gt;, green);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words meaning explicitly 'the color of X': 茶色 (&lt;em&gt;chairo&lt;/em&gt;, brown, lit. 'color of tea'), 灰色 (&lt;em&gt;haiiro&lt;/em&gt;, grey, lit. 'color of ash'), 銀色 (&lt;em&gt;gin'iro&lt;/em&gt;, 'color of silver'), etc. (possibly an open list); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;words coming from English: &lt;em&gt;pinku&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;orenji&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other languages where there exist different grammatical classes of color adjectives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T19:53:29.490" Title="Different types of color adjectives" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;colour-terms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31189" CreationDate="2019-04-16T19:53:29.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much like Japanese, Swahili/Kiswahili has two classes of adjectives: the closed class of inflecting adjectives, and the open class of non-inflecting adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the closed/inflecting class, there are only three color terms: red, white, and black. These are the three thought to be inherited from Proto-Bantu (and correspond nicely to Berlin and Kay's hierarchy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other color terms go in the open/non-inflecting class. Some of these are loanwords (&lt;em&gt;buluu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;blue&quot;, from English; &lt;em&gt;dhahabu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;golden&quot;, from Arabic), while others are nouns repurposed for their colors (&lt;em&gt;-a kijani&lt;/em&gt; &quot;green&quot;, literally &quot;of the leaf&quot;; &lt;em&gt;-a kijivu&lt;/em&gt; &quot;gray&quot;, literally &quot;of ashes&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T19:53:29.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-16T21:51:01.690" Score="2" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speakers of about any language but English agree that the idea that it may be raining cats and dogs is preposterous. But the same people do understand what an idiom is, and their own language may have fairly similar expressions (in French it rains ropes, or halberds, or as a cow pisses). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there languages where the very concept of idiom (as opposed to a specific idiom) makes no sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-04-17T19:57:06.213" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T20:34:31.550" Title="Are there languages without idioms?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;multiword-expression&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31191" CreationDate="2019-04-16T22:01:34.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;idiom&quot;*, but I don't know of any examples, and if such a language were known to exist, it would be a big deal. So I would guess that nobody has identified any such natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Here's what I mean. Examples like &quot;It's raining cats and dogs&quot; are notably &quot;flashy&quot; or memorable idioms, since they paint a vivid (and in this case, ridiculous) picture when taken literally. You can easily find lists of such idioms in other commonly taught languages. But there are also less striking (or less amusing) examples of idiom in the context of the use of words like &quot;hold&quot; in not only literal senses like &quot;hold a baby&quot; but extended/metaphorical/abstract senses like &quot;hold one's breath&quot; or &quot;hold a position&quot;, or in French, the use of the verb &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; not only in expressions like &lt;em&gt;avoir une maison&lt;/em&gt; &quot;have a house&quot; but also in &lt;em&gt;avoir honte&lt;/em&gt; &quot;be ashamed&quot;. There are many more examples of the less obtrusive kind of idioms (where by &quot;idiom&quot; we mean merely that the meaning of the expression cannot be inferred completely from the meaning of its constituent parts). I don't know whether there are any languages that have idioms like &lt;em&gt;avoir honte&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;hold one's breath&quot; but lack idioms like &quot;raining cats and dogs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-16T22:16:41.797" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T22:16:41.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-17T04:40:58.587" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will specify that people born into bilingual families do not count. It must be someone who started learning the language after childhood (where one's susceptibility to language is virtually cheating).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone who learns Japanese, say, with English as their native language be completely (not nearly) natural in both mannerisms, speech, etc., to be perfectly indistinguishable from a native speaker's POV? Meaning, if a Japanese person were to converse with this person on the phone using all colloquialisms and idioms, one would never get the faintest feeling that something was &quot;off&quot; about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if any major studies have been conducted which examine something like this. It is frequently found that people who have dedicated their life to intensive study and immersion still find themselves occasionally lost in a conversation in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24375" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T12:25:21.463" Title="Is it possible to become truly Native Level in a secondary language?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;bilingualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-17T11:13:56.320" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computational linguist and I need some datasets to evaluate my Simplified to Traditional Chinese converter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone point to datasets which have pairs of Simplified-Traditional Chinese sentence translations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or stuff like translated books so that I curate my own datasets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24376" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-04-17T12:52:58.563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T12:52:58.563" Title="Chinese linguistics: Could anyone give me pointers to the Traditional-Simplified Chinese translated corpora?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31191" CreationDate="2019-04-17T20:34:31.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that any concept of “idiom” could be considered a property of specific languages. Rather, idioms are ways how humans use language to express things, to explain things in a way that's not strictly literal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idioms enrich the language, they make it interesting, they even allow individual people to express themselves in a unique, personal way. Many things that are commonly expressed in idioms are quite difficult to express literally, sometimes the literal words are considered taboo or otherwise carry a negative connotation, or are inappropriate in formal contexts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language without idioms would be limited to literal expressions and sound exceedingly verbose, crude, technical, even robotic, soulless, deprived of human character and originality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T20:34:31.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-18T02:14:43.930" Score="7" ViewCount="563" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;strong&gt;sɪ.ŋɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; does not seem too unreasonable as a syllabification of the word &lt;em&gt;singing&lt;/em&gt;, so I'm a bit puzzled why that option for the syllabification of intervocalic /ŋ/ seems to be dismissed in all of the literature about English syllabification that I have encountered so far. To me, the analogy with &lt;em&gt;sitting&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sɪ.tɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;em&gt;driving&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;draɪ.vɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; seems fairly compelling: I don't feel like the identity of the middle consonant affects how I divide the two syllables of words like this. An alternative position that seems reasonable to me is ambisyllabicity, or Wellsian syllabification based on morphology and coda capture by stressed syllables. (Or more abstractly, there are analyses where [ŋ] in words like &lt;em&gt;sing(ing)&lt;/em&gt; is treated as derived from underlying /ng/, but right now I'm not asking about those.) But many analyses of English syllabification that I have seen do not accept ambisyllabicity or coda capture, but instead use the Maximal Onset Principle to derive syllabifications like &lt;strong&gt;sɪ.tɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;draɪ.vɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't see why ng in words like &lt;em&gt;singing&lt;/em&gt; should be an exception to the MOP.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that /ŋ/ does not occur word-initially, or after other consonants. But the phoneme /ʒ/ is also marginal in word-initial position, and I think that advocates of the syllabifications &lt;em&gt;sitting&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sɪ.tɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;em&gt;driving&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;draɪ.vɪŋ&lt;/strong&gt; would accept the existence of onset /ʒ/ in intervocalic position in words like &lt;em&gt;invasion&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ɪnˈveɪ.ʒən&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I can think of a number of examples from languages other than English that seem to support the idea that restrictions on word-initial consonants may be stricter than restrictions on syllable-initial consonants in intervocalic position. In native vocabulary, German lacks word-initial /s/ and /x~ç/, Korean /l~ɾ/, Hebrew /f/, French /ɲ/. But my understanding is that in intervocalic position, these consonants occur and are analyzed as onsets rather than as codas in these languages. (Well, I've seen a proposal to analyze German intervocalic [s] as a &quot;virtual geminate&quot; that in some way occupies both a coda and onset position, but that seems a similar level of abstraction to analyzing [ŋ] as /ng/, so I'd set it aside for the purposes of this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, some of the &quot;restrictions&quot; I mentioned in the previous paragraph seem to be fairly violable: e.g., in German, word-initial [ç] seems to be well established in a few non-native words, and word-initial /s/ in some loans from English; in Korean, /l~ɾ/ seems to be possible word-initially in loans; and likewise in Hebrew, word-initial /f/ seems to occur in loans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure that the English restriction against word-initial /ŋ/ is actually much stronger: it seems to me that instead, there just isn't a lot of opportunity for English speakers to have pressure to produce word-initial /ŋ/ in loanwords. The sound has no unambiguous spelling in English, and it doesn't occur at the start of words from the languages that English speakers are most likely to have heard spoken aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has my argument here been made before by anyone else? Have I missed some strong argument against /ŋ/ being an onset rather than a coda in intervocalic position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I don't find the Maximal Onset Principle completely compelling as a major principle of English syllabification, but it seems that many linguists do. A modified principle of avoiding empty onsets specifically seems a bit more plausible to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T20:31:20.613" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T01:00:40.400" Title="Why isn't intervocalic /ŋ/ analyzed as an onset in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;phonotactics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-18T03:56:53.927" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the &quot;c&quot; such as in Tortorice and Celente are pronounced as &quot;s&quot; which is not according Italian rules. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24380" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T06:36:35.613" Title="Italian Pronunciation Lost in Translation or regional language difference?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;italian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31197" CreationDate="2019-04-18T06:36:35.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah Italian pronunciation. This is going to be fun!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you have to understand about the evolution of the Italian language is that Italian was for most of its existence an almost exclusively &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; language. It was the language in which the élites communicated with each other via letters and poetry, but it was rarely used in everyday conversation if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence when Italy was unified in 1861, there was no doubt about what should be the national language (although it was understood only by a tiny minority of the inhabitants), but actually very little idea about how the language was pronounced in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most influential intellectuals of the time (notable Alessandro Manzoni) pushed to have a &quot;Florentine&quot; pronunciation, based on contemporary Florentine language. This clashed with some practical problems though. In order to do so, Tuscany should have produced a veritable army of schoolteachers that would go in each primary school of the new nation to teach the new language in the &quot;correct&quot; way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously didn't happen (I don't think there were enough people who spoke Florentine at the time, even if we pressed all of them into service). So what happened was that the written language was standardized, but everyone read it according to their own phonotactics. So for example, the &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;azione&lt;/em&gt; is geminate in Tuscany (its original phonetic value), but often pronounced simple in the North. Or intervocalic &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is always voiced in the North, despite the &quot;official&quot; pronunciation having a few minimal pairs (&lt;em&gt;chiese&lt;/em&gt;= churches/&lt;em&gt;chiese&lt;/em&gt;=she asked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been a few attempts to &quot;uniformize&quot; the pronunciation, most notably the extension of the &lt;em&gt;Dizionario dell'ortografia e della pronunzia&lt;/em&gt; (DOP), which was used by national television to determine what ought to be the &quot;actual&quot; pronunciation of words (this is a completely artificial pronunciation, obtained by removing from Florentine regional pronunciation a few characters, deemed too regional in nature, notably spirantization of intervocalic affricates and the &lt;em&gt;gorgia&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, long story short, while there is an &quot;official&quot; Italian pronunciation, it is not used by basically anyone, except for a few &quot;professionals of the word&quot; (i.e. actors, tv hosts etc.). Italians tend to agree on characteristics that are reflected on the written word, literacy having become almost universal, but beyond that everyone's speech tends to have a fairly distinct regional character, depending on where they grew up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the big division, it seems that currently the Northern regional variants are enjoying the most prestige, and the Southern the least (possibly due to the economic situation, or the location of many TV stations in the North), but those macro areas are far from uniform in themselves, so expect to see a lot of variations nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T06:36:35.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31196" CreationDate="2019-04-18T16:19:57.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first reason for [sɪŋ.ɪŋ] is the premise that [ŋ] only appears in the coda. The main argument for that conclusion is the analogy between word position and syllable position. Steriade has some discussion (reference not available at the moment) questioning syllables (attributing speaker behavioral such as intuitions to analogy to word-positions), and I agree that there are word-position limits on segments that don't reduce to syllable position. The restriction &quot;does not appear after a consonant&quot; is less obvious from an rule-observational perspective (i.e. I don't know of any convincing case of a limit saying &quot;consonant X cannot appear after a consonant&quot; which is not equally or better reduced to a consonant being coda-only). There is no formal problem with stating such a restriction, unless you have a specific theory of restrictions, for example &quot;syllable structure is the only way to state distributional restrictions&quot;. In other words, the theoretical deck is stacked in a way that favors reducing distributional limits to syllable position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The counterargument that [ʒ] is similarly limited is weak because [ʒ] is not sufficiently analogous: [ʒ] as a phoneme is (mostly) even more restricted, but the restrictions are also weaker. Restrictions on [ʒ] are weaker in that word-initial [ʒ] is rare and not non-existent. In contrast, [ŋ] is completely out and mostly un-utterable by English speakers. So we arrive at another theoretical debate: are rules of grammar responsible for statistical patterns, or only absolute patterns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is sufficient auditory input (in certain English-speaking areas) where names like Nguyen, Ngo are not rare, but speakers still adapt initial ŋ. Based on that and assuming (as I don't, necessarily) that absolute gaps have to be encoded in the grammar, I conclude that [ŋ] is in fact absolutely banned as an onset in English.&#xA;Final ʒ (in contrast to final ŋ) is quite rare (barrage, garage, mirage, triage, camouflage, collage – the French [aʒ] words) and a respectable percentage of people utter these with [dʒ]. I think the correct generalization is that [ʒ] is an even more marginal phoneme, statistically peaking in intervocalic foot-medial position. In other words, distribution of [ʒ] is not grammatically restricted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You present an interesting clash between two approaches. I do not see any hope for resolving this clash based on introspection, since coda-enthusiasts intuit just as strongly that ŋ in &quot;singing&quot; is in the coda. The only problem with having both of the two driving principles (&quot;stick ŋ in the coda!&quot; vs. &quot;Gotta have an onset!&quot;) going on is if you insist that one of these has to be absolutely never disobeyed. Only UG-addicted rule-and-constraint theory has a problem with this. OT and regular rule-based phonology use basically the same mechanism (dominance, ordering) to generate the desired outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no fact-based argument of English that argues for [sɪŋ.ɪŋ] vs. [sɪ.nɪŋ], or for [sɪ.ŋɪŋ] and [sɪ.nɪŋ]. I don't believe that there is such a thing as a purely factual argument for deciding between two essentially theoretical analyses. If we accept the existence of &quot;coda-only (onset-only) consonant&quot; and accept MOP, where there is an ordering of these two devices in a grammar, then [sɪŋ.ɪŋ]  [sɪ.nɪŋ] is perfectly possible under one order, and [sɪ.ŋɪŋ] [sɪ.nɪŋ] is perfectly possible under the other order. Within a theory you might develop an analysis where one outcome is simpler to formalize, but in lieu of a high-level stipulation regarding interaction between coda-only vs. MOP (or similar) mechanisms, I conclude that both analyses are possible, and nothing decides between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T16:19:57.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31196" CreationDate="2019-04-18T20:21:26.763" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be asking about what convention about syllable boundary would it make most sense to adopt.  I am very uncomfortable with that approach, since it is more a question about linguists than it is about language.  Can't we find a way of dealing with the truth of the matter rather than what convention is best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write, &quot;To me, the analogy with sitting /sɪ.tɪŋ/ or driving /draɪ.vɪŋ/ seems fairly compelling.&quot;  Analogy?  Why use analogy?  Why do you use slashes for your examples rather than square brackets?  Is this a way of saying the actual facts don't count -- it is a question pitting convention against convention?  What connection does this Maximal Onset Principle have with the facts of pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the pronunciation facts, your syllabification [sɪ.tɪŋ], taken to be phonetic rather than phonemic, is just wrong for familiar dialects of American English.  If that were correct, the [t] would be aspirated (strengthened) rather than flapped (weakened).  Actually, it's [sɪt.ɪŋ].  But if you write slashes, I suppose that I can't make this criticism, because you're not trying to talk about facts.  It's about something else.  I don't know what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T20:21:26.763" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31202" CreationDate="2019-04-18T22:43:06.617" Score="4" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, is the infinitive marker a part of speech? I noticed that Oxford was using it in the PoS lexical entry position for one sense of &quot;to&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bob wants &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; eat pizza.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is it a particle - and the particle is a part of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T12:11:21.627" Title="Infinitive Marker" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;infinitive&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31201" CreationDate="2019-04-18T23:00:31.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out, &quot;parts of speech&quot; are one of those formalisms that's taught in all the schools, but isn't always useful when you start looking closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, &quot;part of speech&quot; is a word's role in the syntax. &quot;Walk&quot; and &quot;run&quot; and &quot;go&quot; and &quot;travel&quot; all act pretty much the same, syntactically, so it makes sense to say &quot;all of these things are Verbs, and this is how Verbs act&quot;. And then you find words like &quot;eat&quot; that act &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; the same, but not quite, so you separate them into &quot;Intransitive Verbs&quot; and &quot;Transitive Verbs&quot;, and write some rules about Intransitive Verbs and some about Transitive Verbs, and some about all Verbs in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this stops being useful when words act, syntactically, like &lt;em&gt;nothing else in the language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;infinitive &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&quot; appears in only one construction. It takes the bare form of a verb, and turns it into either a non-finite verb or a verbal noun, depending who you ask. And there's no other word in English that can do the same thing. It looks just like the &quot;preposition &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but it doesn't act as a preposition: you can't say *&lt;em&gt;he wants for go now&lt;/em&gt;, or *&lt;em&gt;he wants behind go now&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, historically, the solution was to call it a &quot;particle&quot;—where &quot;particle&quot; means &quot;we don't know what category to put this in, but it needs a category&quot;. (In English at least: in a few languages, &quot;particles&quot; are a legitimate category of words that all act the same.) But as far as actually doing syntactic analysis, I'd just keep it in a class all of its own, which is what most POS-taggers will do: the Penn treebank, for example, gives it the special tag &lt;code&gt;TO&lt;/code&gt; shared with no other word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T23:00:31.180" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31201" CreationDate="2019-04-19T12:11:21.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, the infinitive marker &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; has a part of speech (POS) label. What exactly it is depends on your POS tagset. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/pages/mbsp-tags&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Treebank tagset&lt;/a&gt; there is a special tag &lt;code&gt;TO&lt;/code&gt; only for the infinitive marker (sometimes merged with the preposition depending on the corpus and the tagger used), in another tagset is may be just a &lt;code&gt;PART&lt;/code&gt; (particle) togeter with other particles of different rôles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T12:11:21.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31207" CreationDate="2019-04-19T20:28:54.177" Score="1" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which languages should one be familiar with if they wanted to get into historical linguistics? Specifically, Indo-European linguistics, reconstructing Proto-Indo-European etc. Which ones would be most useful and typologically interesting? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T00:04:57.460" Title="Which languages to learn for historical linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31206" CreationDate="2019-04-19T20:59:18.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Knowledge of language families is needed. For a start, it should be very helpful to know one language from the same family as your mother tongue, and at least practical experience with one outside that family, but it's not really required for the theory. Rather, the theory should inform which language you would want to learn. But you cannot feasably learn enough languages, so the choice needs to be economic. That only you can decide in the end. Don't be mistaken, even Greek,e.g. is a language family (thus called Hellenic). You might want to reach a basic level in many, and specialize in few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T20:59:18.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31206" CreationDate="2019-04-19T21:46:41.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depends how much effort you want to put in, and you should also consider what you actually want to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minimum effort, just to pass a course: Check the course material and learn some basics about the languages mentioned there. It'll be more than the others will do, you'll get a good grade and have a good basis for a thesis or such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minimum effort, to satisfy personal curiosity or to work in the area: Study what you are curious about, you will automatically stumble upon languages that might answer some questions, and you aquire as much about them as needed. Depending how much you have to learn, you may want to branch out a little to make the best use of the effort: Translations, research by other people and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medium effort: You know English. As it's a mix of Germanic and Romanic, you may want to study a more Germanic and a more Romanic language to complete your knowledge in the area, and then one language that interests you personally to get a different perspective. Besides your linguistic reasons I suggest also adding practical uses in the choice of languages - opportunity to earn money for your studying and travels, for instance. Not a too crowded field, especially in the low-income area. Other languages you just learn the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High effort: Try to aquire 5 or 6 completely different languages and learn to communicate somewhat in several other languages and regional dialects. As far apart geographically as possible, and with travels to become fluid and find out about actual usage and fine details. In your case, that means a Germanic and a Romanic language, Russian or something related from around Russia, at least 2 languages from India, and also at least to beginners level 2 completely different languages - something African or native American and something east Asian, so you have a comparison. A conlang or two (especially the ones based on research about Indo-European languages) can also help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to bring humanity forward, try to not just delve into the past, but also give speculations about the future a scientific footing. How languages managed to improve clarity over time or compared to others. Or be more concise without loosing in other areas. Easy to learn. Understandable for someone who is not part of the culture (independence from regional context). Useful to express complex ideas (math, physics, complicated machines...) in understandable ways (ideally with tests) even for listeners who have no idea about the subject. Useful to differentiate between fine details without making the listener or reader miss them easily. Easy to understand acoustically, even in noisy conditions (phonetic separation of digits and numbers, for instance). Easy to pronounce for locals or for learners from other regions. Logical. And/or some other things I probably missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T21:46:41.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31206" CreationDate="2019-04-19T22:03:03.093" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;None. Personal competency in languages is not what it means to be a linguist. While you need English as it's the common language of scholarship (though of course much research is published in other languages; if you wanted to do historical research in China, learning Chinese would be essential), in general linguists analyse languages without needing to be fluent in them. Even if you do primary description of minority languages you don't need to know them fluently, though of course it helps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T22:32:43.073" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T22:32:43.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31206" CreationDate="2019-04-20T00:04:57.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason to learn a language is to read relevant literature on the topic. German, French and Russian should suffice except in the case of a sub-specialization in South Slavic, for example. Then there are languages that you need to learn as objects of research, where ideally you would learn all of the old languages from each branch of IE. Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Hittite are the most obvious, then Old Irish, Old Norse, Old Church Slavic... The list goes on. I don't mean that you have to gain mastery of each of the languages. It also depends on why you want to reconstruct Proto Indo European, since that has kind of already been done. Do you have a more nuanced interest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T00:04:57.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31196" CreationDate="2019-04-20T00:52:56.607" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't really an answer, just a post to include some additional information that I find relevant I've come across since asking the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I brought up /ʒ/ in my original post, but the analogy seems to be worse than I initially thought. In fact, /ʒ/ does occur foot-initially for many speakers in word-medial context in the word &lt;em&gt;luxurious&lt;/em&gt;, and potentially in &lt;em&gt;caesura&lt;/em&gt;. So there is clear evidence for syllable-initial /ʒ/ of a kind that we don't have for syllable-initial /ŋ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/ŋ/ never occurs after another consonant in any position; I think it's not clear whether this is solely a matter of syllable structure, but explaining this in terms of a rule excluding /ŋ/ from the onset of any syllable does seem plausible. That said, Cŋ sequences are not only forbidden word-medially and word-initially, but also word-finally, even though English has coda clusters &lt;strong&gt;rm, rn, lm&lt;/strong&gt;, and less commonly &lt;strong&gt;ln&lt;/strong&gt;. This gap would not be explained by a syllable-based rule unless we assume that the final consonants in these sequences are the onset of a degenerate syllable (but that analysis raises the question of how to analyze the syllabification of the final /ŋ/ in words like &lt;em&gt;sing, thing, building&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Evidence that the restricted distribution of /ŋ/ is not accidental&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restricted distribution of /ŋ/ is fairly clearly explained by its diachronic development from assimilation of /n/ to a following /g/ or /k/. This diachronic explanation neither excludes nor supports the possibility that synchronically, the restricted distribution is somewhat accidental. However, there does seem to be some evidence from studies that shows that English speakers are inclined to perceive the n-ŋ contrast better in the context #V_# than in the context #_V#, which indicates that the gap in ŋ-initial words (or ŋ-initial feet) is not just accidental (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03199713.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perception of synthetic nasal consonants in initial and final syllable position&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Larkey, Wald and Strange, 1978).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/tgn4e/any_words_in_english_that_start_with_%C5%8B/c4mmeij?utm_source=share&amp;amp;utm_medium=web2x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comment on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; that says that an unnamed (possibly unpublished) study conducted by the author in 2011 found that monolingual English speakers front &lt;strong&gt;ŋ&lt;/strong&gt; (presumably to /n/) in &amp;quot;foot-initial&amp;quot; position. On the other hand, a comment below that one says that some English speakers from New Zealand may use word-initial [ŋ] in placenames from Maori.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T01:00:40.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T03:04:44.137" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want it back.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is not the direct object of the verb &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; but syntactically &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, is this a raising construction even though it doesn't have any subordinate clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3380" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T03:04:44.137" Title="Is 'I want it back' a raising construction?" Tags="&lt;raising&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23263" CreationDate="2019-04-20T09:54:25.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very interested in this as I am a technical researcher in voice. Mozilla has open sourced DeepSpeech that uses state of the art deep learning to convert speech to text at error levels lower than anything commercially available 5 years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's open source you can customise what it trains on. There's nothing stopping someone train recordings against IPA allophones that, in sufficient volume, should render high quality IPA speech to text. There's even a possibility that some of the existing training may be reusable (&quot;transfer leaning&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's interesting is as other authors mention, there appears to be more subjectivity nvolved in even narrow / allophonic transcriptions than I had personally assumed was acceptable. I'm coming to appreciate that a language independent system of notation does not necessarily mean it's easy to arrive at the same representation! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anyway: anyone interested in working with me on building IPA training data drop me a line &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24388" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T09:54:25.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23263" CreationDate="2019-04-20T18:47:51.403" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most basic problem is that it's not a very interesting problem. Most uses of speech processing would gain nothing from generating IPA and rather use different forms of intermediate representation. If IPA is the end-goal, that would be a niche thing. A broad transcription can't be generated from a single input, anyhow  that would need a broad survey. It doesn't help that speech processing is difficult in general, though the state of the art is impressive and I'd like to think it's a solved problem, but that's a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T18:47:51.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T23:07:41.000" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/adjunct-adverbial-english-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webpage&lt;/a&gt; outlines the &quot;four grammatical forms that can function as the adjunct adverbial&quot;. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/using-relative-pronouns-adjunct-adverbials/:&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree underneath&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;isn't &quot;why&quot; the Head?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is, oughtn`t Adjective Clause be a Pronoun  or Adverb Clause? &quot;why&quot; is a Relative Pronoun or Adverb?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vqwVh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vqwVh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/using-adverbs-adverb-phrases-adjunct-adverbials/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adverb Phrase as Adjunct Adverbial&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;in&quot; is the first word. Thus it looks like the head of a &quot;Prepositional Phrase&quot;, even though the only content word is &quot;opinion&quot; (a noun)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bds5m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bds5m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another [Prepositional Phrase as Adjunct Adverbial]&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/using-prepositional-phrases-adjunct-adverbials/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://parentingpatch.com/using-prepositional-phrases-adjunct-adverbials/&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/goWIA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/goWIA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24396" LastEditorUserId="24396" LastEditDate="2019-04-20T23:12:57.500" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T23:12:57.500" Title="Why isn't &quot;why you are angry&quot; a Pronoun or Adverb Clause?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T23:48:30.537" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/adjunct-adverbial-english-grammar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webpage&lt;/a&gt; outlines the &quot;four grammatical forms that can function as the adjunct adverbial&quot;. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/using-postpositional-phrases-adjunct-adverbials/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree underneath&lt;/a&gt;, I agree that &quot;aside and &quot;ago&quot; are postpositions, but please see the question in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't the red node (not the one underneath) a Verb Phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't this orange node a Noun Phrase or Determiner Phrase? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XWlbK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XWlbK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://parentingpatch.com/using-adverb-clauses-adjunct-adverbials/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adverb Clause as Adjunct Adverbial&lt;/a&gt;, isn't the Clause categorized as Adverb as &quot;unless&quot; is the first word to appear in that Clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZN7T.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BZN7T.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24396" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T23:48:30.537" Title="Why are &quot;joking aside&quot; and &quot;six hours ago&quot; Postpositional Clauses?" Tags="&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23315" CreationDate="2019-04-21T00:43:50.487" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m Japanese American and unless I’m paying attention to every Korean spoken word I get confused. But Japanese I think flows more evenly whereas Korean may take on more of a Chinese or short sounding speech. Ending of sentences seems similar in structure. Apart from that I don’t hear words meaning the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24398" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T00:43:50.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23315" CreationDate="2019-04-21T13:40:51.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides what others mentioned here, there's also the fact that as foreigners, we are more likely to hear the similarities (especially when we know a few words) than the differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, after I met a few people from the south and from the north of China, Cantonese and Mandarin seemed pretty similar. Mostly because my limited vocabulary (of maybe 10 words) would only cover words which have some similarities, and I would ignore the 'minor' differences in intonation, pronunciation, a phoneme here or there and so on. Locals, who know a lot of words where those 'minor' differences decide which word it is, have more difficulties understanding the other version of Chinese if they only know their own one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more vocabulary than sound, but the underlying simplifications our brains make explain why for some (but not all) people, two languages may sound very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T13:40:51.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31227" CreationDate="2019-04-21T17:34:49.810" Score="3" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nahuatl has two sibilant fricatives, now pronounced something like &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt;. The standard orthography was developed by Spanish colonizers, who wrote &lt;code&gt;/ʃ/&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; before a front vowel, &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt; elsewhere. (There's also &lt;code&gt;[t͡ʃ]&lt;/code&gt;, written &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since all stages of Spanish definitely had &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;, it seems clear that the sound the first transcribers heard definitely &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know what this sound was? There unfortunately weren't trained linguists around transcribing Classical Nahuatl, but the Spanish transcription might be enough to make a good guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T02:54:53.293" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T02:54:53.293" Title="What can we say about Classical Nahuatl &lt;z&gt;?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;nahuatl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31225" CreationDate="2019-04-21T20:15:02.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;all stages of Spanish definitely had s for [s], it seems clear that the sound the first transcribers heard definitely wasn't [s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like an oversimplification. Fricatives developed in different ways in different Spanish dialects: some had &lt;em&gt;seseo&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;lt;s&gt; and &amp;lt;c/z&gt; merged as [s]) some had &lt;em&gt;ceceo&lt;/em&gt; (both &amp;lt;s&gt; and &amp;lt;c/z&gt; merged as [θ]) and some had distinction. The use of [θ] for  &amp;lt;c/z&gt; is thought to be a later development from some kind of sibilant distinct from the one used for  &amp;lt;s&gt;. The Iberian (but not Romance) language Basque still uses  &amp;lt;z&gt; for a voiceless sibilant with a quality distinct from &amp;lt;s&gt;. IPA [s] isn't precise enough to notate the difference between the two Basque sounds: it's necessary to resort to diacritics. The IPA symbol [s] seems likely enough as a broad transcription of the Classical Nahuatl sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T20:15:02.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31225" CreationDate="2019-04-21T20:42:44.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason that Spanish linguists transcribed the phoneme /s/ in Nahuatl as &lt;em&gt;z/c(i/e)&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; is because at that time Spanish had two alveolar sibilant phonemes, an apical /s̺/ written &lt;em&gt;s&lt;/em&gt; and a laminal /s̻/ written &lt;em&gt;z/c(i/e)&lt;/em&gt;, and that the dental or alveolar sibilant in the Nahuatl spoken at that time was acoustically closer to the laminal than apical /s/. Since that time, in much of the Spanish spoken in Spain, /s̻/ has developed into /θ/, leaving only one alveolar sibilant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar reason for why post-alveolar /ʃ/ is written &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; in the Classical Nahuatl orthography the Spanish introduced. At the time, in Early Modern Spanish, what is now for the most part written &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; and pronounced /x/ was actually pronounced /ʃ/ and written &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt;. This and /ʒ/, written &lt;em&gt;g(i/e)&lt;/em&gt;, later went on to merge with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T14:18:44.303" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T14:18:44.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-21T23:39:35.153" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read some of Talmy's work particularly that of his semantic analysis of the spatial organization inherent in the meaning of prepositions like &quot;across&quot;,&quot;around&quot; or &quot;over&quot; among others. I've found this pretty interesting and unique research compared to a lot of the other stuff he has been doing but I don't really see him mentioned outside of his papers from the 80s. His force dynamics papers were also quite interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what he's been up to or if any work has been done more recently (last 10 years)in this vain? Seems like such interesting work and it almost feels as if it was just forgotten after the big boom of Cognitive Linguistics in the Late 80s and 90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23014" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T23:39:35.153" Title="Has there been any development or long lasting influence of Leonard Talmy's work?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28668" CreationDate="2019-04-21T23:47:28.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Langacker uses gestalt principles to argue for many structures of conceptualization(and thereby language). I think he would argue that the mental ability(and usual tendency) of reification (conceptualizing separate entities into a whole)allows us to abstract away from specifics into higher order organizational relationships which ultimately could yield what we consider hierarchical relationships. Hierarchical relationships are obviously essential to syntax so in that way I think Langacker's work would be an example of a linguist that would possibly answer &quot;yes&quot; to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, what it tells us is that hierarchical syntax is a reflection of the more fundamental human ability to reify and process ever increasingly higher order relationships out of those simpler component parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23014" LastEditorUserId="23014" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T02:33:56.990" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T02:33:56.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="865" CreationDate="2019-04-22T01:07:16.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sorry if this had yet been answered sufficiently&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt; variants are significantly more common than &lt;em&gt;papa&lt;/em&gt; (so I heared). Indeed, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; is learned far later (else where it's said to be &quot;soon after&quot;) and thus deemed more difficult than &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore let's focus on &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt;. By the way, you'll find a similar distribution of &lt;em&gt;[m]e&lt;/em&gt; in translations of the first person singular pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) You wrote: &quot;This is found in many language families, so they can't be considered cognates&quot; -- that's presupposing that the language families aren't releated, but that is as of yet an open question. This topic and your argument (see &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; below) specifically is argued to deny a common ancestor of the world languages, so you kind of have a circular argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) &quot;This is usually explained by the easiness of babies making this sound early in their babbling, so the parents just use those sounds to refer to themselves&quot; -- I have read the argument (and will find the news article about the prof., ca. from the time this Q was posted)&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;, that it relates to the lip motion of sucking on tiets. I conclude that does at least explain why the phoneme is easy to produce (although it's prerequisite vice versa for eating, that the motion is possible). I'd further inferred from the article that the motion is liable to be produced when hungry (or when satisfied, &lt;em&gt;hmmmmm&lt;/em&gt;). In that sense, &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt; et al might be phonosemantic and especially priviliged to survive. If phonosemantics is not your thing, one could at least argue if the sound is so likely to be primed for &lt;em&gt;mum&lt;/em&gt; that it would be likely to survive if there was a common ancestor and more likely if reinforced by cultural background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while the sound may be easy to learn, it may be not as easy to recognize as an appelation. At least to &quot;just use those sounds to refer to themselves&quot; is a gross simplification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: I didn't find the news article, but the claim can be found by Roman Jakobson, &lt;em&gt;Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T17:32:59.167" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T17:32:59.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17701" CreationDate="2019-04-22T13:47:54.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, a caveat: I'd never heard the terms &quot;wide&quot; and &quot;narrow&quot; applied to diphthongs before this question, and after some searching still haven't seen them anywhere except Wikipedia's &quot;Diphthong&quot; article. So I wouldn't say they're particularly standard or widespread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, using Wikipedia's definition, if you plot the start and end of the diphthong on an F1/F2 vowel chart (like the IPA one), the &quot;width&quot; is the distance between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this definition, &lt;code&gt;/aj/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/aw/&lt;/code&gt; are &quot;wide&quot;, while &lt;code&gt;/ej/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ow/&lt;/code&gt; are &quot;narrow&quot;. The centering diphthongs you get in non-rhotic dialects are somewhere in the middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T13:47:54.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31236" CreationDate="2019-04-22T15:31:49.397" Score="27" ViewCount="3444" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some IPA symbols such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6%9D&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ɲ&lt;/a&gt; lack any name, and when I tried searching for the symbol online, the pages I got only showed &lt;em&gt;palatal nasal&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder what I should call it when I talk with others. Is there any standard conventional name for it? Or what do linguists call it, such as at an international conference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6854" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T12:02:02.120" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T17:43:53.647" Title="What do you call an IPA symbol that lacks a name (e.g. ɲ)?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31232" CreationDate="2019-04-22T16:39:24.330" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost every character that can be input and shown on modern computers is defined in Unicode and has a code point, so of course each IPA symbol has a name. &amp;lt;ɲ&gt; is defined as &quot;LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LEFT HOOK&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode code chart&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=33BSkFV_8PEC&amp;amp;pg=PA166&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handbook of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt; (1999: 166–184)&lt;/a&gt; also has a list of symbols with descriptions, which calls &amp;lt;ɲ&gt; &quot;Left-tail N&quot;. Both these descriptions are based in part on the naming conventions set out in Pullum &amp;amp; Ladusaw's &lt;em&gt;Phonetic Symbol Guide&lt;/em&gt; (1986/&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=editions:VUgA1lSd2cMC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1996&lt;/a&gt;), which calls &amp;lt;ɲ&gt; &quot;Left-Hook N&quot;. SIL International's &lt;a href=&quot;https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&amp;amp;uid=wlbaybzb9e&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ScriptSource&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also have summaries of the IPA symbols and what to call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But AFAIK only a few nicknames like &quot;eng&quot; and &quot;ezh&quot; carry even a modest amount of currency in daily parlance among linguists. In a setting like a conference, simply &quot;the symbol for the palatal nasal&quot; etc. may be the way that is understood by the broadest possible audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T16:57:06.227" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T16:57:06.227" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31232" CreationDate="2019-04-22T16:59:02.013" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question! IPA symbols generally fall into one of three categories, in common use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some symbols have a conventional name: æ is &quot;ash&quot;, θ is &quot;theta&quot;, ŋ is &quot;engma&quot;. Standard Latin letters would also fall into this group, like v being &quot;vee&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some symbols are named based on their shape: ɤ is &quot;rams-horns&quot;, ɔ is &quot;open o&quot;, ħ is &quot;h-bar&quot;. These are the names that are most often used in Unicode.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some symbols are just named after their IPA usage: ɲ is &quot;palatal nasal&quot; (or &quot;palatal n&quot;), ɖ is &quot;voiced retroflex stop&quot; (or &quot;retroflex d&quot;), ʍ is &quot;voiceless labiovelar approximant&quot; (or &quot;voiceless w&quot;). These names are also sometimes used in Unicode, usually for more recent additions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, I've never heard anyone call ɲ anything other than &quot;palatal nasal&quot;. That's the name I'd expect to hear in a conference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T17:43:53.647" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T17:43:53.647" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T21:25:13.697" Score="0" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone claims that the following translation to first order logic is not correct (or maybe lacking consistency how quantifiers are supposed to be translated)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;∀ x: ∃ y: (farmer(x) ∧ donkey(y) ∧ own(x,y) → beat(x,y))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;saying that truth conditions fails &lt;a href=&quot;https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Donkey_sentence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;. Could somebody help me understand how truth condition fails here? I think this is perfect translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="32132" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T15:44:09.770" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T15:44:09.770" Title="Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it - one more time on extending scope" Tags="&lt;logical-form&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-04-22T21:32:56.717" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31237" CreationDate="2019-04-22T21:32:38.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key is, &quot;false implies X&quot; is always true, no matter what X is (the Principle of Explosion, aka Ex Falso Sequitur Quodlibet in Latin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say we have a farmer who owns a donkey and doesn't beat it. Whatever formulation we use, we expect it to return false for this. Set &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; to be this farmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the quantifier on &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; means the statement is true if I can find &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; value of &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; that makes it true. I set &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; to be the Sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the statement is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(farmer(x)=TRUE and donkey(y)=FALSE and own(x,y)=FALSE) → beat(x,y)=FALSE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The left side of this implication is false. And since false implies anything, the whole thing is true. But we don't want it to be true, since this farmer has a donkey and doesn't beat it. So the formulation is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fix it, you need to change the quantifier on y to be universal (&quot;for all&quot;). This is equivalent to &quot;for every man and every donkey, if the man owns the donkey, he beats it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T18:40:13.100" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T18:40:13.100" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T01:45:02.390" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;En&lt;/strong&gt; means lord in Sumerian and &lt;strong&gt;El&lt;/strong&gt; god or deity in Semitic. &#xA;Semitic peoples use the word lord as a synonym of god, it seems that the same happens with Sumerian and its gods like Enlil, Enki, Enzu etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can we say that the Semitic &lt;strong&gt;El&lt;/strong&gt; is the equivalent of &lt;strong&gt;En&lt;/strong&gt; in Sumerian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24066" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T01:45:02.390" Title="Is there a connection between the Sumerian En and the Semite El?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;sumerian&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14780" CreationDate="2019-04-23T05:33:10.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetic transcriptions provide more details on how the actual sounds are pronounced, while phonemic transcriptions represent how people interpret such sounds. We use square brackets to enclose phones or sounds and slashes to enclose phonemes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24408" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T05:33:10.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T07:05:10.030" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know about the syntactic tree of cleft sentences. is the clefted elemnt moved from the original position? or Is it base-generated? &#xA;I would like to knwo some referrences about this.&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24410" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T07:05:10.030" Title="syntax tree about cleft sentences" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31193" CreationDate="2019-04-23T12:25:21.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is of course a very well-studied one, but with a very important caveat that is revealed in the wording of your question: &quot;Native Level&quot; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0855&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poorly defined concept&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you do refer to what is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=uSdE2Sd2niQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critical period hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, which breaks down into several &lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9582.00056#citedby-section&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;maturational constraints&lt;/a&gt;, which limit how well language learning proceeds, some of which are linked to age. However, that 2002 study specifically mentions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...learners who have been identified as indistinguishable from native speakers characteristically exhibit non‐native features that are unperceivable except in detailed and systematic linguistic analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we find a (tacit?) admission that it is very much a judgement call, made by social convention of an already defined group of speakers, as to what variation is deemed &quot;acceptable&quot;. It has been argued that this may be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15434303.2011.570827&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idealisation of a standard language&lt;/a&gt;, and hence there is no &quot;fundamental difference&quot; between the potential of child learners and adult learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course is something that chimes in with the experience of those who do have contact with highly multilingual environments: competent &quot;native-like proficiency&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/026765839601200301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attainable&lt;/a&gt; and sometimes even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14790718.2019.1575831?journalCode=rmjm20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;unremarkable&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, even for those who have passed the various critical periods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T12:25:21.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21556" CreationDate="2019-04-23T13:52:20.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It' s not a sino language (I'm Thai and Chinese mixed,&#xA;I know most of the Chinese dialects that exist and I know Thai and Lao) &#xA;but Thai has MOST of its words from China, while the 2nd most words are from &#xA;India (with the exception that the Thai words versions from India have tonals).&#xA;The Thai script has nothing to do with the language btw. &#xA;Thai and Cantonese for example share a similar pronounciation,&#xA;it sounds similar and also has words who mean the exact same thing.&#xA;There's a dialect spoken in south china that is very similar to Thai, &#xA;even more then Cantonese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24414" LastEditorUserId="20912" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T02:45:08.997" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T02:45:08.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2019-04-23T18:21:23.157" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi (I haven't come across any exceptions in my life, and I'm a native speaker)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hindi is the Official language of India and so is English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Devangari script employed by Hindi contains both vowels (10) and&#xA;consonants (40) and is characterized by bars on top of the symbols.&#xA;Hindi is highly phonetic; i.e. the pronunciation of new words can be&#xA;reliably predicted from their written form. This is in strong contrast&#xA;to English, with the result that Hindi learners may struggle with&#xA;English spelling. Conversely, they may mispronounce words that they&#xA;first encounter in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonetic correctness of Hindi has originally lead to the famous &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Indian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; accent, since Indians try to pronounce every single vowel in a certain specific way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The high number of alphabets used in the script ensure the phonetic correctness of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The famous English word &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mercedes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; if pronounced has three different sounds, denoted by '&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;'. Hindi has three different vowels for these the three sounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not just Hindi but many other Indian languages are very phonetically accurate (also some from the surrounding nations), especially those that use the Devanagari script and its sisters (like Marathi)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can visit the following site to know more about the phonetics : &lt;a href=&quot;https://ielanguages.com/hindi-pronunciation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ielanguages.com/hindi-pronunciation.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24415" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T18:26:48.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T02:01:12.740" Score="-2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know mathematics is a language by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to evoke any constants or any arbitrary values as such to solve anything, prior knowledge of a particular symbol and its usage must be understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, for Pi, we use the well known symbol. But hypothetically, think of a child who did his mathematics with this number as a ratio called 'gobbledegook', he lives his life fine without ever assigning it a symbol, hence avoiding convinience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is rather than assigning an arbitrary symbol without a meaning, and associating a meaning with it, how can one approach designing or linguistically portraying a value that in plain words- represents the idea directly (only speaking for mathematics). Like for Pi, could we say a circle with a line beneath it? (For this, the symbolism of division is a precursor you see, how to avoid stuff like that?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24418" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T16:06:32.563" Title="What natural symbolic representations could be used for Mathematical constants?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;mathematical-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31247" CreationDate="2019-04-24T05:31:28.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The number 4 is represented &quot;naturally&quot; in a number of languages as 四 ٤ Ⰳ ४ ௪ IV Δ ד or 4. They fall into 3 groups: 4 sticks (the most common system), the 4th letter, and the obscure system the Romans used which seems to be derived from a stick-stacking system. As you can see, the actual letters for the same thing have diverged massively over the millenia that they have been used. It is trivial to devise a symbolic written system that &quot;represents the idea directly&quot;, applied to numerals – if you have a theory of what the basic numerals are. It is virtually impossible to force people to write &quot;8&quot; as &quot;||||||||&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_constants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;potload of mathematical consonants&lt;/a&gt;, all of which are given rather modern and arbitrary symbolization. The Ramanujan–Forsyth series is not natural, so you would not expect there to be a natural symbol for it. Indeed, the only natural constants are the numerals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way that constants are symbolized is with words: in that usage, there is absolutely no hope of devising a natural, iconic representation of &quot;4&quot;. the number 4 alone has thousands of pronunciations, depending on what language you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T05:31:28.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31254" CreationDate="2019-04-24T06:46:58.937" Score="6" ViewCount="3288" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which language has the largest number of vowels with minimal pairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T13:40:17.320" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T21:07:37.097" Title="Which language has the most vowel phonemes?" Tags="&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T07:42:46.143" Score="0" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;How semelfactive aspect of a verb that represents a single occasion of an event like knock,hit etc..is perfective and moment defined.&#xA;whereas,iterative aspect is event that is repeated on single occasion.&#xA;Is both the aspects similar?Any Specific examples to understand this aspect of verbs indetail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24423" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T12:16:47.200" Title="How to understand semelfactive aspect of a verb? How is it varied/similar to iterative aspect?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30638" CreationDate="2019-04-24T09:56:15.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a special name for this kind of part of speech, they are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konjunktionaladverb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conjunctional Adverbs or Conjunctive Adverbs¹&lt;/a&gt;. In a broader classification of part of speech, they are subsumed under Adverbs (see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/List_of_symbols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list of symbols from Apertium&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹I deliberately linked the German Wikipedia here, because their account is superior the English one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T09:56:15.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31251" CreationDate="2019-04-24T11:06:28.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are quite similar, and you've isolated the main difference: semelfactive is once, iterative is many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is translated &quot;aspect&quot; here, it may not be a verbal property at all in some languages. It may be clearer to think of it is a form of &lt;em&gt;lexical&lt;/em&gt; aspect, or Aktionsart (&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.mit.edu/rbhatt/www/lsa130/l1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;after Smith 1997&lt;/a&gt;), with the three (Vendlerian) properties: dynamic, atelic, instantaneous/punctual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applied to some actual languages then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I8j4nDrC-nYC&amp;amp;pg=PA30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forsyth (1970)&lt;/a&gt;, iterative and semelfactive used to be considered separate sub-aspects, but then they were set as a perpendicular axis of &quot;grammatical: procedural meaning&quot; to the &quot;true&quot; aspects in Russian of perfective vs imperfective.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;крича́ть is an imperfective verb meaning &quot;to shout&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;кри́кнуть is a perfective verb meaning &quot;to shout&quot; with a &lt;em&gt;semelfactive&lt;/em&gt; Aktionsart, indicating one time when this happened&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;закрича́ть is a perfective verb derived with an &lt;em&gt;inchoative&lt;/em&gt; Aktionsart, &quot;to begin to shout&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;покрича́ть is a perfective verb with a &lt;em&gt;durative&lt;/em&gt; Aktionsart, &quot;to shout for a while&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;кри́кивать is an imperfective verb meaning &quot;to shout&quot; with an &lt;em&gt;iterative&lt;/em&gt; Aktionsart, indicating this happening several times. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a whole group of semelfactive perfectives, the -ну- semelfactives in Russian. There is a whole different group of iterative imperfectives, ending in -вать in Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mandarin Chinese&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sinitic branch has no traditional morphology to speak of, and it's still under intense exploration. But there is a clear difference between a true one-time semelfactive and an iterative, which in Chinese linguistics is seen as a repeated semelfactive (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/9443/Yang_Suying_PhD_1995.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yang 1985&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;在 &lt;em&gt;zài&lt;/em&gt; is a coverb that literally means &quot;to be at/in&quot; but often functions as a &lt;em&gt;progressive&lt;/em&gt; aspect marker in the pre-verbal position. With a semelfactive verb like 咳嗽 késòu, it causes it to be interpreted as a repeated action &quot;He is coughing&quot;, which is then treated as an activity verb with a form of duration (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/20354841/Aspectual_classification_of_mandarin_Chinese_verbs_a_perspective_of_scale_structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peck 2013&lt;/a&gt;). The two lexical aspects are syntactically similar, although semantically &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ldJkwn1BndkC&amp;amp;pg=PA54&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;still distinct&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;著 &lt;em&gt;zhe&lt;/em&gt; the post-verbal durative particle presents an interesting case. Again, this converts semelfactives into activity-like verbs. But there are cases where a difference exists: this &quot;iterative&quot; semelfactive vs a true durative activity/accomplishment is found in example 21 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ldJkwn1BndkC&amp;amp;pg=PA196#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xiao &amp;amp; McEnery (2004)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;他 母親    搖著       頭   對      記者     嘆息。&#xA;Tā mǔqīn  yáozhe    tóu  duì    jìzhě   tànxí.&#xA;He mother shake-DUR head facing reporter sigh&#xA;&#xA;他 母親    低著       頭   對      記者     嘆息。&#xA;Tā mǔqīn  dīzhe     tóu  duì    jìzhě   tànxí.&#xA;He mother lower-DUR head facing reporter sigh&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the semelfactive-derived 搖著頭 (shaking one's head) contrasts with the true activity 低著頭 (lower[ed] one's head); the iterative (semelfactive-derived) aspect means that in the observation period, it has happened several times, whilst the true durative (either activity or accomplishment) means that it has remained constant through the observation period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T12:16:47.200" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T12:16:47.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31250" CreationDate="2019-04-24T14:35:36.143" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of those &quot;it depends&quot; questions. Dinka (Bor dialect) has the vowels [i e ɛ ɔ o u a], as well as long and over-long versions of these (21 vowels), and 4 phonatory contrasts (breathy, hollow, model, creaky) → 84 vowel, which can have 4 different tones (H, F, L, R) giving 336. Unfortunately they do not also have nasal vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could redefine the question to as to eliminate properties like tone or length that can be factored out, but that is rather unprincipled and would lead to the ridiculous conclusion that Turkish has no vowels because you can &quot;factor out&quot; rounding and backness, not to mention vowel height. You could just stipulate a specific list of things, namely those things that are notated in the IPA with a diacritic as opposed to vowel-letter choice, and knock out phonation, length and tone that way (also nasalization). That would still leave you with the ATR problem, since there are atomic letter differences (i/ɪ, u/ʊ), but these can also be spelled [i̘/i u̘/u].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people think that diphthongs are vowels, which raises the question of what you mean by &quot;vowel&quot;. Diphthongs are single phonological units (at some level of analysis) composed of two vocalic articulations – two vowel segments within a nucleus. If you exclude diphthongs, that will knock out a lot of languages. I did not include diphthongs in the Dinka count (Dinka has diphthongs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has, in one theory of transcription, the vowels [i ɪ e ɛ æ ɑ ɔ o ʊ u ʌ] which is sort of a lot of vowels (less than German), but it can also be reduced to [i e æ ɑ o u ʌ] plus an orthogonal length or diphthongization property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a behavioral rationale that people might use to justify ignoring tone, or length, when counting vowels, which is that tone and length have a certain propensity to act &quot;independently&quot;, for example tone can spread from vowel to vowel, or may be preserved under vowel deletion (and gets reassigned to a neighboring vowel). However, the same is true of vowel height, backness and roundness. To stipulate that tone and length should be excluded (and perhaps phonation type as well) based on this autonomous behavior, while &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; doing the same for backness and roundness is unprincipled. There are certain strong-universalist trends in phonological theory which do stipulate that tone and length are not features dominated by the root node (whereas phonation and nasalization are), so if you make those assumptions, then Dinka has fewer vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it depends on your criteria for saying this thing versus that thing are &quot;different vowels&quot;. The probable winner is Dinka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T21:07:37.097" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T21:07:37.097" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31247" CreationDate="2019-04-24T16:06:32.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, a name like &quot;gobbledegook&quot; is a symbol. That's a reasonable systematic, and important to note as a derived grapheme might strive for similarity with the name. Thus it becomes apparent that you are basically asking for how to name &lt;em&gt;things&lt;/em&gt;, equivalent to the question of how does language work. In the same vein we see that maths does have aspects of language. That's true all the more if you are asking for a logical system of naming, if logic is a basic tenant of maths, though one might argue that it's foundational and maths is what's building on top. Naming, eh? The distinction is not very important, actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will just focus on high-school maths for a quick answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name Pi for the ratio of square area to area of a circle where the radius equals the square's side-length--to stay with your example--was an abbreviation of the Greek word &lt;em&gt;perimeter&lt;/em&gt;. We see that the definition doesn't need to rely on the perimeter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of Greek letters might stem chiefly from the need to choose symbols that type foundries and print shops had already in stock, and it might have been traditional already prior to printing, but the decision for a name from natural language is well descriptive. All letters of the various common alphabets are already reserved for common constants and variables, not even uniquely, rather overloaded with meaning depending on subfield, or assigned arbitrarily by any individual author. On the other hand many function names have longer abrevs. That's the important point, in my humble opinion, as the trend in professional programming, probably the biggest field in applied maths, goes to speaking variable names. A multiletter grapheme like &lt;em&gt;gobbledegook&lt;/em&gt; is still a symbol. There are arguments to be made in favor of compact symbols the size of a single character, but that's a matter of fine arts or industrial design more than linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relatedly one could ask for the optimal size of a languages character inventory and compare e.g. the mess that is the Chinese logogram-syllabary potpourri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Corollary: &lt;em&gt;If the name is arbitrary, then the symbol may be, too. Thus there can't be one correct answer to your question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many ways tradition trumps ergonomics; At least one might argue that linguistics is more adapt at describing what-is, not inventing what-could-be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to take a look at APL, the obfuscating programming language, for a heavy use of single-character-width identifiers and operators. It still shows numbers written out. That's the most common depiction of numbers we know. In essence, we describe numbers by the computation that derives them, so any &lt;em&gt;computable number&lt;/em&gt; can be identified by a function that produces the number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lowest decimal numbers are a different matter. The &lt;em&gt;arabic numerals&lt;/em&gt; have been developed over millenniums for optimal legibility. There is no need to reinvent them. The smallest ones are even homologic (or ideographic), 1 is one stroke, 2 is two and so on. And zero was for a long time not written at all. This reminds of the integration of counting into the &lt;em&gt;visual cortex&lt;/em&gt;. Few other things are integrated as deep, that would require mathematical symbolism and could make use of it at the same time. Audible symbolism may rely to a degree on the auditory portions of the brain. Letters that describe the phonetics of the word somewhat marry both ideas. You'd be hard pressed to find other graphemes that imply the sound of &lt;em&gt;pie&lt;/em&gt;. Since maths is for better or worse still taught mainly auditory, or discovered in non-symbolic ways, the need for intricate symbol design is just not there, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T16:06:32.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T20:39:08.993" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentences like &quot;Let such and such be done&quot; or &quot;May this happen&quot;. What is the name of this construct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More examples from Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Que ellos entren ahora (Let them in now).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Que se muerte les satisfagan (May his death satisfy you (pl.))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24427" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T20:57:52.647" Title="What is the name of this syntactic construct: &quot;May [Subject] [Verb]&quot;?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31256" CreationDate="2019-04-24T20:57:52.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optative_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;optative mood&lt;/a&gt; (though Romance languages like Spanish and French use what is morphologically the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#Latin_and_the_Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subjunctive&lt;/a&gt; in this role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T20:57:52.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T23:12:30.640" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am analyzing Latin word order. As in many other languages, most Latin sentences begin with the subject, but I've noticed quite a few that have many complements and adjuncts and then end with the subject immediately following the verb. If Latin still has to satisfy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_projection_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPP&lt;/a&gt; (Extended Projection Principle), does the subject ALWAYS have to raise from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specifier_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spec&lt;/a&gt; (Specifier) of VP (Verb Phrase) to the Spec of TP (Tense Phrase)? Or is there some way of overriding that so it can stay next to the verb like I've observed? I know complements and adjuncts undergo scrambling, but so far I haven't read anything that says the subject does too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples from Pompeiian inscriptions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;normal&quot; sentence according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SOV&lt;/a&gt; (Subject-Object-Verb) order: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lucilla [subj] ex corpore [adjunct] lucrum [complement] faciebat [verb]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sentence where the subject is found right next to the verb: &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Solacio matri tu Mater  [subj] eras [verb]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24428" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T20:57:38.413" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T20:57:38.413" Title="Does a null-subject language always have to satisfy EPP?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;movement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31260" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-25T14:56:01.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T14:56:01.063" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T14:56:01.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31261" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-25T14:56:01.063" Score="0" Body="Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs and several varieties of Nahuatl are still spoken today by around 1.75 million people, mainly in central Mexico, with around two thirds of speakers living in the states of Puebla, Veracruz and Hidalgo." OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T19:10:58.613" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T19:10:58.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9321" CreationDate="2019-04-25T18:17:15.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;German allows a lot of nesting - even has verb-prefixes and the verb bracketing the subject (with the prefix moving to the end of the sentence), 4 cases, genders and other little aids to still make sense of complicated sentences. Whole sentences can be nested easily, and even more than once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such sentences often need to be read a few times to be understandable, make manuals and such difficult to understand for lay-people, can lead to misunderstandings when a writer doesn't know all the suffixes very well, and so on. It's basically a 'feature' only used by people who never tried to speak (or write) in a clear and easy to understand way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, if I see a writer using them a lot (like some German language philosophers), I assume their writings are not a pinnacle of clear thinking...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to like them as they seem to allow to compress a lot of information into very small space. However, with all the little helper-prefixes, -suffixes, prepositions, conjunctions and so on, they don't really make things shorter. Not to mention having to read the same sentence multiple times to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T18:17:15.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-26T01:41:21.510" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some employee must leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that it is actually ambiguous and has two meanings. But I can only see one. What are the two meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24432" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T10:15:07.003" Title="Does this sentence have two meanings?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31263" CreationDate="2019-04-26T04:47:55.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two senses are specific and non-specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific: A certain person, who happens to be an employee, must leave. (&quot;Employee&quot; is not in the scope of &quot;must&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-specific: There is a requirement that the person who leaves be an employee. (&quot;Employee&quot; is in the scope of &quot;must&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul Postal observed that the vowel of &quot;some&quot; can be reduced to schwa only in the specific sense, in such examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T04:55:27.677" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T04:55:27.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31258" CreationDate="2019-04-26T13:05:51.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Not in the Turkish that is spoken in Istanbul. The evidence comes from scope relations when the subject is not dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bütün çocuk-lar gel-me-di. &#xA;all  kid-pl     come-neg-pst&#xA;All the kids did not come.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the sentence is ambiguous. It can be either NOT ALL the students came (NOT &gt; ALL) or No students came (ALL &gt; NOT). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not ambiguous in Istanbul Turkish. It only means some of the students came and some didn't, which means negation has scope over the quantifier and the spec vp does not move to spec tp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Aegean Turkish, however, it is ambiguous. Either meaning can be attested like in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24436" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T01:54:05.890" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T01:54:05.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-26T13:43:34.807" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since consonants tend to be lost next to other consonants, could all of the consonants of a consonant cluster disappear since each consonant is next to a consonant? (This would be a mutual counterbleeding interaction, assuming the progressive part and the regressive part are described with distinct rules.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since sonorants tend to be nasalized when next to nasal segments, could all of the vowels of a vowel cluster be nasalized by one another, since then every vowel would turn out to be next to a nasal? (This would be a mutual feeding interaction, again assuming that the progressive and regressive parts are attributed to distinct rules.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these rule interactions is possible in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;SPE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; theory, which does not allow &quot;mirror image&quot; rules or the simultaneous application of more than one rule.  In addition, in the mutual feeding case, the change is triggered by what is in the output of the rule (rule transparency), which is not permitted in SPE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T19:00:45.163" Title="Are mutually counterbleeding and mutually feeding phonological rules possible? Why not?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31266" CreationDate="2019-04-26T17:31:06.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is very hard to answer. We first have to settle on what &quot;possible&quot; means, and second we have to define feeding etc. in a sufficiently theory-independent way. On the first point, it could mean &quot;does we know of an example, or is it reasonable to think that we could find it in language&quot;, but it also could mean &quot;does the theory have a mechanism for describing it&quot;. On the second point, since feeding etc are constructs of ordered-rule theories, what does it mean for rules to be in a counterbleeding order if you don't have order? To simplify matters, I will assume that you are asking about theories with conventionally ordered rules though not necessarily SPE theory (still, not KSN theory). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the premise that the language has two separate progressive and regressive cluster-simplification rules, such that (a) C→Ø/C_ and (b) C→Ø/_C where there are no other conditions on &quot;C&quot;, and where both rules are obligatory, for any input string /...VblγsnqV.../ where a&gt;b, the input maps to ...VbV... (in standard SPE theory, and in any theory with rule iteration). If there are no other rules in the grammar, (b) can never apply and (b) cannot be learned. However, (b) could apply if there is a third rule (c) which creates new consonant clusters, for example high vowel syncope. Note that given (a), there will always remain one consonant, and you cannot remove all consonants by (a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (a) and (b) are optional, the answer is different. /...VblγsnqV.../ can map to numerous strings, where the output begins with &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; and selects any of the subsequent consonants: for example ...VbsnqV... or ...VbγnV... In that case, (b) becomes potentially applicable and learnable. If the subsequent rule (b) is obligatory, ...VbγnV... maps to ...Vn... and ...VbsnqV... maps to ...VqV... And if (b) is optional, ...VbγnV... maps to &#xA;...VbγnV..., ...VγnV..., ...VbnV... or ...VnV...&#xA;Again, you can never delete the last consonant, but you can end up with any subset of the input consonants in the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is whether the concept &quot;bleeding&quot; applies to the optional rule scenario. Conventionally, (a) bleeds (b) if some string α undergoes (a) and results in β, and β does not satisfy the structural description of (b) but α does. In the present rule pair, (a) bleeds (b) because  α = ...VblγsnqV..., β = ...VbV..., α satisfies the SD of (b) and β does not. That is, by taking away some consonants, application of (a) reduces the number of consonants that (b) can apply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterbleeding is conventionally defined counterfactually, that is, if (b) were to precede (a) the order would be bleeding, but in fact (a) precedes (b). Now we ask if (b) hypothetically preceding (a) is bleeding – it is. If (b) were to precede (a) then α would be ...VblγsnqV..., its output β could be ...VnV..., and rule (a) would not apply at all to that – all of the triggering consonants would have been removed by prior application of (b). Thus (a) and (b) are in a mutual bleeding-counterbleeding order (from which we could conclude that they are also in a mutually bleeding order and a mutually counterbleeding order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPE theory requires that the input to (a) be scanned for all substrings satisfying the SD of (a) and applying those changes simultaneously; and then you move on to rule (b). So my computation above does not depend on simultaneous versus iterative theory. I conclude that SPE theory &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; allow what would be called mutual counterfeeding, under certain circumstances, thus &quot;mutual counterfeeding&quot; is theoretically possible, but complete deletion is not. (SPE does not embrace Kiparsky's feeding etc. functional terminology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now moving to the very first question, &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; there any theory where you can delete all consonants in an input string? If (a) and (b) are separate rules, you will always have at least a single consonant in the output (the case we have just considered). But if (a) and (b) are the same rule e.g. the rule is &quot;C→Ø/C&quot; using Bach's notation – which is not part of the SPE system – and if the SPE simultaneous application convention is followed, you will get complete deletion of the consonant string when the rule is obligatory. That is, the rule says &quot;delete a consonant just in case it is adjacent to a consonant&quot;, and in any cluster of consonants, every consonant is adjacent to some consonant (so will undergo the rule). But a single intervocalic consonant will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be deleted (it is not adjacent to a consonant). However, it is not clear whether this constitutes &quot;mutual counterbleeding&quot;, which is not a technical concept of the theory of ordering. And it is clear that this scenario contravenes your assumption that the two rules are indeed independent rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;does it exist&quot; question, there is no known case where C deleting adjacent to C results in complete erasure of the Cs in an input string. This can happen in case of C deletion adjacent to V so in principle cluster simplification and intervocalic elision could result in total C-deletion, and I would say that it is &quot;possible&quot; (dunno if I can think of an actual example); but that's a different scenario and is feeding, not bleeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also ample discussion in the literature showing that the simultaneous application theory is wrong, and that Howard's directional theory is correct (except I think he erred in including a possibility for simultaneous application, and agree with Jensen &amp;amp; Stong-Jensen that unpredictable directionality is a superior alternative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T17:31:06.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31270" CreationDate="2019-04-26T18:21:59.643" Score="-1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Iranian and here, Arabic script is what is used. many litterateurs believe that this script is not good for the Persian language and many of them think that it should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;one of the reasons that I've heard many times is that &lt;strong&gt;left-to-right&#xA;  scripting is better than right-to-left&lt;/strong&gt;, but I can't see why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so I'm here to ask. thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24439" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T21:09:21.933" Title="Is left-to-right scripting better than right-to-left?" Tags="&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31268" CreationDate="2019-04-26T18:36:48.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is nothing inherently superior about writing a script from left-to-right than right-to-left (or top-to-bottom or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;boustrophedon&lt;/a&gt; for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only potential advantage in the modern world is that, since computers mainly deal with the basic Latin alphabet, adopting the Latin alphabet might make things slightly easier, but that problem is far from insuperable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T18:36:48.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31268" CreationDate="2019-04-26T21:09:21.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you write with your right hand and use an ink that needs to dry, it is a bit better to write left-to-right, to avoid smearing the ink. If you are typing on an older computer or typewriter, it is better to write left-to-write because it is (was) really difficult to write right-to-left, given that the machines were primarily set up for left-to-right scripts. These days, nobody uses squid ink or IBM PCs. Consistent direction is superior to alternating direction (you have to know whether you're on an odd line vs. an even line to know whether the current line is RTL or LTR), so boustrophedon poses an additional complication. Since in Arabic-script based languages numbers are written LTR, that could be a tiny disadvantage (switching direction), but still people cope, and it's only the programmers that would have to write code for systems that are not consistently LTR who suffer. But those problems have been solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see any practical way to write Persian script LTR, so a change in direction would mean a change in alphabet, almost certainly Latin. You should consider the case of Tajik which used to be written in the Persian alphabet, then over the last century there were experiments with Latin and Cyrillic, and purportedly there is a plan to re-introduce Persian. Script changes tend to make old literature inaccessible, which in the case of Persian would be a disadvantage (not fatal, look at Turkish). Even so, older literature tends to get reprinted in contemporary alphabets, so that 150 year old Norwegian books get reprinted in contemporary Latin. I conclude that the LTR / RTL choice is a linguistic red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T21:09:21.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2019-04-27T09:56:51.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware Georgian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts&lt;/a&gt;) is 100% Ideally phonetic language. Being pretty small and neglected countries, people often forget or don't know about the history of one of the oldest civilization on earth with its own unique alphabet and language. Every letter, every word is pronounced as it is written in Georgian. There are no exceptions. What you write is what you say. No different pronunciations of letters. To me as Georgian, it was always very unusual for me to see all these other languages with their very weird sets of rules (from my point of view). While the grammar is very difficult (It is extremely rare for someone who isn't native you speak Georgian correctly, even after years of experience), reading is very easy. What you see, is what you say. I've tried to find other languages like Georgian in this regard, while some languages come close, I found nothing that is 100% phonetic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24444" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T09:56:51.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-27T13:00:30.373" Score="0" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what I get in Caillou &amp;amp; Leite (2009) and the article &quot;Main stress in Italian nonce nouns&quot; by Martin Krämer. The latter brings a case where vowel length is proven to be contrastive (&lt;em&gt;ancóra/áncora, metà/mèta&lt;/em&gt;) but mentions that some authors still refute the idea. Could it be because they are considering vowel length and stress as things apart? They can surely be apart, but stress in Italian is mostly length, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22651" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T18:41:58.473" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T08:01:07.283" Title="Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;italian&gt;&lt;vowel-length&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-27T13:36:30.877" Score="4" ViewCount="582" Body="&lt;p&gt;My qiestion is about the voiceless affricate ch( CHair, maTCH, baTCH, strucTure) as it is used in ENGLISH:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has two affricates: the ch in chair and the j in jar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ch is a voiceless affricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, since this is voiceless, does it follow the same rules of aspiration as voiceless stops in English? That is, like p, t, k?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P,  t and k are usually aspirated when at the beginning of a word(except when preceded by s in the same syllable) and at the onset of a stressed syllable. Does the same hold true for ch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;chair&quot; is aspirated whereas in &quot;catch&quot; the &quot;ch/tch&quot; sound is not? Or is, but a little less in magnitude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24445" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T15:44:37.147" Title="Aspiration of Voiceless Affricate in English" Tags="&lt;aspiration&gt;&lt;affricates&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-27T15:12:08.743" Score="4" ViewCount="734" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Turkic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; we have:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Proto-Turkic language is the linguistic reconstruction of the&#xA;  common ancestor of the Turkic languages that was spoken by the&#xA;  Proto-Turks before their divergence into the various Turkic peoples.&#xA;  Proto-Turkic separated into Oghur (western) and Common Turkic&#xA;  (eastern) branches. One estimate postulates Proto-Turkic to have been&#xA;  spoken &lt;strong&gt;2,500 years ago&lt;/strong&gt; in East Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which language did the ancestors of Proto-Turks speak?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they spoke scythian (an Iranian language) then why did they shift&#xA;to proto-Turkic?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notice that I'm not questioning &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/aeWs9fqLbec?t=123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assimilation done by a nomadic group&#xA;to other groups&lt;/a&gt;, I'm questioning about the very first beginning of a&#xA;new language family. A new language family does not pop up through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spontaneous generation&lt;/a&gt; in vacuum. How do linguists and anthropologists explain it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24448" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T16:04:45.840" Title="What language was spoken in East Asia before Proto-Turkic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31274" CreationDate="2019-04-27T15:25:57.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The affricate /tʃ/ does not behave differently from the stops /p t k/ w.r.t. aspiration. The relevant contexts for aspiration are bit more complicated and are best stated in terms of foot-initial (aspirated) vs. foot-non-initial positions, with some provision for &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;#ˈV contexts where there is no aspiration (&quot;watch &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt;scar; set &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt;scar; stop &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt;scar&quot;). In final position (&quot;stop, hit, watch&quot;) there is often some degree of voiceless turbulence which is usually relegated to the category of release, not aspiration, but the physical substance of that noise is indistinguishable in type from that of aspirates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duration of the noise between the release of the stop is taken be the phonetic correlate of aspiration. That duration depends on contextual factors, for example /t/ versus /k/, being utterance-initial vs. medial, being pre-vocalic vs. pre-consonantal and soon. Given that, there are dozens of &quot;degrees&quot; of aspiration (defined as voice onset time &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; lag to complete silence in case the consonant is not followed by a voiced segment). As a statement of phonetics that's not a problem, but as a phonological generalization, that flies in the face of the premise that English just has a distinction &quot;aspirated&quot; and &quot;unaspirated&quot;, which is furthermore rule-governed. So the ultimate answer depends on establishing what kind of rule governs aspiration. If it is due to a &quot;rule&quot; (equation) of continuous phonetic implementation, the aspirations of &quot;pit&quot; vs. &quot;apex&quot; are not the same – phonetic equations do not yield categories. In that case, asking if they are &quot;the same&quot; is kind of meaningless. If it is a categorial albeit non-neutralizing phonological rule, then all of the evidence says that the rule aspirating /tʃ/ isn't different from the rule aspirating /p,t,k/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T15:25:57.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31277" CreationDate="2019-04-27T16:04:45.840" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As for the title question, the answer would be &quot;many languages, including proto-Chinese&quot;. Focusing on the question in the body, the language spoken by the historical ancestors of proto-Turks, there are two main options. One is that they spoke &quot;pre-proto-Turkic&quot;, that is, an undocumented language whose properties are not presently recoverable. As for the name of that language, just as we don't know what ethnonym the proto-Indo-Europeans had for themselves (or the proto-Turks), we don't know what name the 10-generation before ancestors of the Turks or Indo-Europeans had for themselves. I should point out that there has been a theory that Mongolian, Tungusic and Turkic are themselves derives from an Altaic proto-language, but that hypothesis is now rejected by most linguists working in the area. Still, it could turn out that there actually is some unproven relationship between Turkic and some other language group. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative would be that the individuals who constitute the majority of the speakers of the language reconstructable as &quot;proto-Turkic&quot; descended from people who switched languages from something else to proto-Turkic. For example, perhaps those people were Scythians, but for some political reason switched language to proto-Turkic. This has happened many times in world history, for example the ancestors of current Arabic speakers in a number of countries originally spoke Nilo-Saharan or Berber languages (among others), but for political reasons adopted Arabic. But this is simply an imaginable alternative scenario, lacking in compelling historical support in the present case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer would be &quot;pre-proto-Turkic&quot;, which means &quot;whatever language preceded proto-Turkic&quot;. No new language family was started, instead, &quot;proto-Turkic&quot; refers to the limit of our ability to reconstruct languages. It may be sensible to talk of new families when dealing with daughter languages of a credible proto-language, such as Germanic or Italic in relation to Indo-European where we can say that the properties of PIE changed one way to give Proto-Germanic vs. another way to give proto-Italic. Until we find evidence of some lost sister of proto-Turkic, we have no reason to speak of &quot;developing a new language family&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T16:04:45.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31283" CreationDate="2019-04-27T16:30:13.977" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wiki entry for vocal register lists 5 factors that contribute to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;phonation&#xA;pitch&#xA;timbre&#xA;resonance&#xA;vocal break&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, isn't vocal break the same as resonance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T18:49:52.670" Title="vocal register factors" Tags="&lt;register&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31282" CreationDate="2019-04-27T16:40:46.853" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wiki entry for resonance lists 7 factors that contribute to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;chest&#xA;larynx&#xA;nasal cavity&#xA;oral cavity&#xA;pharynx&#xA;sinuses&#xA;trachea&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given one’s base pitch production, I thought that the oral cavity is the only factor that we can move to affect resonance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, are vocal resonance differences essentially just a matter of your pitch and how widely you open your mouth when talking/singing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T18:16:22.617" Title="resonance factors" Tags="&lt;spoken-language&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31281" CreationDate="2019-04-27T18:16:22.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any cavity that is open to the vocal tract can contribute a resonance. Subglottal resonances are not linguistically controllable, but they exist. Resonances produced in the nasal cavities are widely used contrastively – languages have nasal vs. oral vowels, and they are not part of the oral cavity. The lower pharyngeal cavities are technically not part of the oral cavity, but do have resonance properties. Pharyngeal constrictions are used in some languages (Berber, Arabic) and are often contributors to the linguistic phenomenon of &quot;register&quot; esp. as found in souutheast Asian languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that resonances are not about is pitch: that is determined by the rate at which the focal folds vibrate. That sound source is shaped by the various resonating cavities. There is a singing phenomenon whereby you have to change resonance properties of your vocal tract if you have a very high fundamental frequency, because the acoustic effect of normal articulation with very high pitch can aesthetically be undesirable, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2e9b/56636052d94791155fcf4765bd97e4455a00.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T18:16:22.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31280" CreationDate="2019-04-27T18:49:52.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;vocal register&quot; is not a linguistic one, but there is a linguistic concept of &quot;register&quot; that is somewhat related. You would need to consult with speech &amp;amp; hearing scientists to get proper terminological use outside of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its linguistic use, it primarily refers to local pitch range, i.e. the pitch of the highest and lowest tone at a particular subpart of the utterance. Pitch range can go up or down, for paralinguistic, pragmatic and grammatical purposes. In its grammatical manifestation, change in register refers to upstep, downstep, and downdrift (non-contrastive downstep). However, it can also refer to subdivisions within the tonal space, in languages with 3 or more tone levels. For example, Anlo Ewe has 4 tone levels, R, H, M, L, and they group together phonologically as {R,H} versus {M,L} where R is the higher tone of the upper register and M is the higher tone of the lower register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of Southeast Asian languages such as Burmese and Hmong, the tones of the language are a complex of pitch and phonatory differences (among other things), the latter including creaky vs. breathy voice. Given the inseparability of the phonetic factors defining &quot;tone&quot; in these languages, the package  is often referred to as &quot;register&quot;. In Mon, the distinction is apparently only phonatory (modal vs. breathy), but it is still called &quot;register&quot;. Outside of SE Asian languages, breathy / creaky distinctions are usually referred to as related to phonation type, and are not referred to the term &quot;register&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T18:49:52.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31273" CreationDate="2019-04-27T20:09:45.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason is that it is (given the definition of contrast) not contrastive. The exercise of phonemicization requires that you start with phonetically transcribed data, not removing phonetic facts on the premise that something is predictable, and then look at the distribution of properties. If you find, in the phonetic data, that there are minimal pairs exemplifying a difference in vowel length and nothing else, then vowel length is contrastive. Otherwise it is not contrastive. You have to do further analysis to decide what is predicted on the basis of what else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a connection between stress and vowel length: stressed vowels in open non-final syllables are long, other vowels are short. The question of whether stress is primary or length is primary is a secondary analytic one, so the fact that length isn't contrastive does not mean that length must be underlyingly present – stress and consonant length might be what are underlyingly present, and vowel length is predictable on that basis. Two phonological treatments of this matter are given &lt;a href=&quot;https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/7462&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and D'Imperio &amp;amp; Rosenthall 1999 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231873707_Phonetics_and_phonology_of_main_stress_in_Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (not the published version appearing in Phonology), as well as Saltarelli 1970 &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B0069QUVL2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Phonology of Italian in a Generative Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. There are not particularly strong arguments that vowels have a categorial length distinction, as opposed to a continuous phonetic duration difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T20:09:45.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-28T02:14:17.383" Score="-1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;A German teacher (spoke fluent German and English) stated in high school to our class that “English is opposite every other language.” Is this accurate? What does that even mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24450" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T02:21:00.170" Title="Is English opposite all other languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31285" CreationDate="2019-04-28T02:21:00.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what that would mean. I'd suggest asking the teacher; otherwise, my answer will have to be a simple &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T02:21:00.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-28T13:56:08.887" Score="-2" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Allah ever a common noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or is it always a proper noun? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if so, do they look different in the arabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20333" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T18:31:36.050" Title="Is Allah ever a common noun, or is it always a proper noun? And if so, do they look different?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-04-28T22:35:23.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-28T17:35:00.197" Score="2" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the question clear? Idiomatic scheme is not a term of art, I guess, but it's idiomatic and it follows a schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a weird one, for sure. Some thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Adjective can't be removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* The explosion was [easy] to hear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In idiomatic English, this would probably be &amp;quot;could be heard&amp;quot;. But In German, the direct translations work: &amp;quot;Die Explosion war zu hören&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;was audible&lt;/em&gt;), &amp;quot;Die Explosion ist gut zu hören&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;was easily heared&lt;/em&gt;). In English, &amp;quot;I am to&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I am not not&amp;quot;, have developed different meanings (whereas Ger. &amp;quot;Ich bin nicht zu haben&amp;quot; means &lt;em&gt;I'm taken, not to be had&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This syntax doesn't work with all adjectives, at least not idiomatically. Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The castle is easy to see from here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* The castle is possible to see from here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is good to know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* This is terrible to know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using it rather freely though, and want to find out to what extend that's wrong. I was informed that &amp;quot;It is X to Y&amp;quot; might be the more usual form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my mind the adjective modifies the infinite verb. As such, it should be an infinitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The syntax of the phrase is similar to &amp;quot;good to him&amp;quot;, as if &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; was not the infinitival marker, but a preposition; Which works in German, where nominalized verbs may take the form of the Infinitive (where English has the gerund), and nouns may take prepositions. In effect I'm not sure how to parse this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cases of to-infinitives abound, obviously. There's probably an interesting summary of it's origin somewhere. The phrase in question is probably a tangent in that story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The passive voice usually takes &lt;em&gt;is to be&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;I am not sure how that &lt;em&gt;is to be&lt;/em&gt; explained&amp;quot;. German sees the passive expressed with the finite verb alone &amp;quot;Ich weiß nicht, wie das zu erklären &lt;em&gt;ist&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, although &amp;quot;... wie das zu erklären &lt;em&gt;sein&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;soll&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know a proper term, so I don't know what to search for. Therefore, the title is makeshift. I don't even know what the problem is, so I'm trying to keep it general. What's the grammatical analysis of this phrase in those contexts? Posting here not ell.se for the historic, comparative aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T21:36:02.080" Title="Is English &quot;&lt;adjective&gt; to &lt;verb&gt;&quot; an idiomatic schema, or what do you call &quot;easy to do&quot;?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31288" CreationDate="2019-04-28T18:41:03.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;Allāh&lt;/em&gt; is a contraction of &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the&quot; and &lt;em&gt;ilāh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;god&quot;. However, the contraction is only used as a proper name for the Abrahamic G-d; &quot;the god&quot; in any other context is uncontracted &lt;em&gt;al-'ilāh&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, it's always a proper noun when it's contracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T18:31:36.050" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T18:31:36.050" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-28T23:20:44.133" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The offglide of the English diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/ is represented by the vowel /ʊ/. In other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, they are represented in the same way, but they sound completely different. The offglides in British English are definitely more fronted. Do you think [aʉ̯] and [əʉ̯] could be more accurate representations? In Portuguese (my native language), the tongue slides back towards /ʊ/ (or /u/) in those diphthongs, but it seems that that doesn't happen in English. What are your thoughts about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24300" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T23:53:34.740" Title="British English offglides" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31291" CreationDate="2019-04-28T23:34:57.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the chaotic world of IPA vowels!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, the IPA vowel chart is kind of lacking in the vowel department, which makes answering this question difficult. The space of vowels is completely continuous, unlike e.g. the space of plosives, and the IPA vowel symbols aren't anchored to any particular phonetic feature that we can measure: &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt;, for example, is &quot;the highest, frontest vowel you can make&quot;, but a Bantu &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; is generally significantly higher than an English one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own experience, the English &quot;W-esque&quot; offglide is somewhat more centered than the ones you'll find in Romance, both less back and less high (and often less rounded). But for a proper comparison, you'd want to get recordings of both English and Portuguese diphthongs, then run &lt;em&gt;formant analysis&lt;/em&gt; on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formant analysis is a wonderful technique that revolutionized phonetics when it was discovered. Essentially, it can show us &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; how high and front a vowel is, with objective, reproducible numbers. (It can also tell us sort of how round or nasalized a vowel is…those aspects are harder and less precise, unfortunately.) So by comparing the formants of English and Portuguese off-glides, you can say precisely how high and back they are, then compare those numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Someone may already have done this—but if so, I wasn't able to find the data online. If you know where to find it, please feel free to comment or post a new answer!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T23:34:57.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31291" CreationDate="2019-04-28T23:42:14.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The backness of the final element of /aʊ/ and /əʊ/ in British English varies between different accents/speakers. (For the MOUTH vowel, an alternative realization used in in some dialects is a long monophthongal vowel that lacks any kind of offglide, possibly something like [aː]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transcriptions [aʉ̯] and [əʉ̯] are reasonable, but whether or not they are &quot;more accurate&quot; depends greatly on the specific pronunciation that you are trying to transcribe. The IPA symbol &lt;strong&gt;ʊ&lt;/strong&gt; already implies a quality that is not completely back; a distinction in quality from Spanish &amp;lt;au&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;raudo,&lt;/em&gt; could be marked by transcribing Spanish with [au] or [aw] (and in fact, I think I've seen those transcriptions used more often than [aʊ] in the context of Spanish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about the situation in Portuguese; it may be the case that for this language, the symbol [ʊ] is used instead of [u] only to mark that the vowel is not entirely close. That is, perhaps Portuguese [ʊ] could be more accurately transcribed as [u̞] or [o̝].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-28T23:53:34.740" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T23:53:34.740" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31273" CreationDate="2019-04-29T05:33:54.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Stress in Italian is mostly length, isn't it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean &quot;stress in Italian is mostly realized as phonetic length&quot;, it might or might not be true, but it isn't what linguists tend to mean when they talk about a language having &quot;contrastive vowel length&quot;. English has vowels of different lengths in pairs like &lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;feed,&lt;/em&gt; but that isn't considered to be an example of contrastive vowel length. &quot;Contrastive vowel length&quot; is a theoretical concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I don't think it's even true that stress in Italian can be reduced to phonetic length. I have the impression that stressed final syllables have short vowels, and vowels in closed syllables have short vowels, so I think that the words &lt;em&gt;città&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;villa&lt;/em&gt; both have short vowels in both syllables, but &lt;em&gt;città&lt;/em&gt; is stressed on the second syllable and &lt;em&gt;villa&lt;/em&gt; is stressed on the first syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly incorrect to say that &quot;vowel length is proven to be contrastive&quot; in &lt;em&gt;ancóra/áncora, metà/mèta.&lt;/em&gt; The phonetic transcriptions that Krämer gives for these pairs are [mɛ́ː.ta] [me.tá] and [áŋ.ko.ra] [aŋ.kóː.ra]. Note that for the first pair, [mɛ́ː.ta] [me.tá], there is not only a difference in the length of the vowel in the first syllable, but also in the position of the stress and in the quality of the first vowel. The second pair doesn't have a quality distinction, but does have a stress distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors who say that Italian does not have contrastive vowel length are not &quot;considering vowel length and stress as things apart&quot;; they are considering vowel length as a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of what it means for an Italian syllable to be stressed. Italian stress is related to more than just vowel length; for example, it also is related to vowel quality (many accents of Italian are described as having 7 distinct vowel qualities in stressed syllables, but only 5 distinct vowel qualities in unstressed syllables) and consonant length (in some accents of Italian, we can make the generalization that words that end in a stressed vowel trigger gemination when possible at the start of a following word).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T08:01:07.283" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T08:01:07.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31274" CreationDate="2019-04-29T15:44:37.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental (and contrastive) difference between phonologically aspirated stops and phonological affricates is the nature of the release. Aspiration is turbulent noise whose source is the glottis, thus aspiration has formant structure similar to the following sonorant, and a resulting low COG, and diffuse spectrum. Frication noise has its source in the oral constriction, and thus does not have the lower formants (because of de-coupling of the back constrictions) or diffuse quality, especially for sibilant affricates, which have greater amplitude noise in higher frequencies reflecting the front cavity constriction. &#xA;In English, lexical stress applies, as well as focal stress, and the largest correlates of stress are amplitude, duration, and F0. Stress applies uniformly across the syllable, governed by the expandibility/compressibility of the segments in that syllable, so that vowels experience the largest effects because they can vary more. However, consonants also experience stress-based strengthening or reduction.&#xA;While aspirated stops may have less aspiration in unstressed positions, being reduced in amplitude and duration, phonological affricates do not lose their frication portion in the same unstressed positions, even if their amplitude and duration may also be reduced. &#xA;So, no, affricates do not follow a similar rule as aspirated stops, insofar as their loss of frication would result in a manner change. But they are governed by the same rules of stress reduction, so that in an unstressed syllable, they may have shorter duration and less amplitude, but the phonetic outcomes of a similar rule on different phonological targets are completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19887" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T15:44:37.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31330" CreationDate="2019-04-29T17:36:36.600" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am following this video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLun-LUE1uLNvWi-qV-tRHohfHR90Y_cAk&amp;amp;v=tmmfluHKstw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tutorial&lt;/a&gt;, starting 6th minute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  would like to parse the following sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;square blue or round yellow pillow. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now I am interested in only how &lt;code&gt;square&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt; are combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular with start with the following representation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;square -&amp;gt; ADJ: \lambda x. square(x)&#xA;blue -&amp;gt; ADJ: \lambda x. blue(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next step is we raise types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;square -&amp;gt; N/N: \lambda f. \lambda  x. f(x) /\ square (x)&#xA;blue -&amp;gt;  N/N: \lambda f. \lambda  x. f(x) /\ blue (x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we create representation for &lt;code&gt;square blue&lt;/code&gt;. I indicate substitution by brackets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\lambda x. [ \lambda f. \lambda  x. f(x) /\ blue (x) ] (x) /\ square (x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next I simply substitute &lt;code&gt;z&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; everywhere outside of square brackets, so that we do not confuse different &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\lambda z. [ \lambda f. \lambda  x. f(x) /\ blue (x) ] (z) /\ square (z)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next I push z into square brackets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    \lambda z.  \lambda  x. z(x) /\ blue (x)  /\ square (z)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different from what stated in the lecture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\lambda z.  \lambda  x. z(x) /\   square (x)  /\   blue (x) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did I make a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T19:10:43.583" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T08:16:28.593" Title="Parsing with CCGs - lambda part" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;lambda-calculus&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31298" CreationDate="2019-04-29T19:05:38.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your computation is correct, and the video simply shows the wrong result.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The order &lt;code&gt;square(x) ^ blue(x)&lt;/code&gt; comes from the fact that &lt;code&gt;squared&lt;/code&gt; is applied to &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt; will be substituted for &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; in the term &lt;code&gt;f(x)&lt;/code&gt;, which comes before &lt;code&gt;square(x)&lt;/code&gt; in the conjunction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To change the order in which the terms will appear in the conjunction without changing the order in which the terms are applied to each other (of course you could also do the backward composition &lt;code&gt;blue square&lt;/code&gt; so &lt;code&gt;square&lt;/code&gt; goes in for &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt;, but that wouldn't be in line with the intended forward composition), one could simply change the order of the expressions in the definition of &lt;code&gt;square&lt;/code&gt; to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;square -&amp;gt; N/N: \lambda f. \lambda  x. square (x) ^ f(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which changes the rule for type raising to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\lambda x. g(x) -&amp;gt; \lambda f. \lambda  x. g(x) ^ f(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Actually, the entire computation in the video doesn't work out at all:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;(λf.[λx.[f(x) ^ square(x)]])(λf.[λy.[f(y) ^ blue(y)]])&lt;/code&gt; reduces to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;(λx.[(λf.[λy.[f(y) ^ blue(y)]])(x) ^ square(x)])&lt;/code&gt; which reduces to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;(λx.[(λy.[x(y) ^ blue(y)]) ^ square(x)])&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;not &lt;code&gt;(λf.[λx.[f(x) ^ square (x) ^ blue (x)]])&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how they arrive at this result. This is a definitely a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T21:00:27.933" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T21:00:27.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31289" CreationDate="2019-04-29T19:17:41.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an odd one.&#xA;I'm not sure relating it to modern German is relevant. It is two thousand year since English and High German were one dialect and nearly a thousand years since they were mutually intelligible. That is ample time for each to develop their own syntax.&#xA;I'm not sure it is a restricted form as statements such as: 'The sea was exhilarating to swim in' and 'Apples are wholesome to eat' demonstrate. But then I would also be happy with 'that's terrible to know' as well. The sentence with 'possible' would seem stilted to me but not ungrammatical.&#xA;Basically I would start from 'to see the castle is easy' where 'to see the castle' or 'seeing the castle' is a non-finite subordinate clause as subject of an adjectival sentence. I would call it a non-finite noun clause but some people object to that terminology. The subordinate clause has no subject - that is possible in English for non-finite clauses but not finite clauses.&#xA;There is a standard transformation in English where a subordinate clause as subject is replaced by the word 'it' and the clause is moved to the back-end of the sentence in apposition to 'it': 'it is easy to see the castle'.&#xA;The problem is when the word 'castle' is the known information (topic, theme) and 'easy to see' is the new information (comment, rheme). There is a tendency in languages to make the known information the first element of a statement. Because of this a syntactic form has developed in English which brings the word 'castle' to the front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T19:17:41.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31298" CreationDate="2019-04-29T20:38:28.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll leave the lambdas to you, but you might like to know the syntactic structure.  It is a RNR (right node-raising) construction, with &quot;pillow&quot; the raised node. The intonation I think makes that obvious.  Thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[square blue GAP or round yellow GAP] (pillow), where the noun &quot;pillow&quot; fills the GAP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;square&quot;, &quot;blue&quot;, &quot;round&quot;, &quot;yellow&quot; are adjectives which modify nouns or modified nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T20:38:28.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31289" CreationDate="2019-04-29T21:28:54.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's a mistake to classify something as an adjective just because it looks like one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, the adjective would usually have an e, er or es at the end, depending on the gender of the noun it refers to, and English got rid of such suffixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The castle is easy to see&quot; would be &quot;Das Schloss ist leicht zu sehen&quot;, so no adjective-like ending for the word &quot;leicht&quot;. Instead, it looks like an adverb in German. You could also say &quot;Das Schloss ist leicht ersichtlich&quot;, which would be pretty much the same. And in this case it's obvious that ersichtlich is an adjective to Schloss. I therefore say, zu sehen (to see) is an adjective to Schloss (castle), too, which makes leicht (easy) an adverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;to&quot; has basically the same function as the ending -able, in words like doable or visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads to the question why the castle isn't &quot;easily to see&quot;. If you repeat this a few times, you will probably realise it starts not to sound completely wrong anymore. While &quot;this is an easily task&quot; will always sound wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the reason why English classifies it as an adjective is that it is close to &quot;The castle is an easy thing to see&quot;. So leaving out the suffixes leads to using grammatical constructions suitable to similar sentences, even if they may not be logically correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't even know whether it's historically correct that &quot;easy to see&quot; used to be adverb-adjective in the past in English, or whether the switch was in the German language. But that doesn't really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is that if we add the invisible &quot;thing&quot; or &quot;something&quot; to the example sentences in the question, everything suddenly makes sense. &quot;The castle is [something][easy] to see&quot; lets us leave out the &quot;easy&quot;. &quot;The castle is [something] possible to see&quot; doesn't make a lot of sense (except maybe in an Alice-in-Wonderland world). And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastEditorUserId="24262" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T21:36:02.080" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T21:36:02.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31305" CreationDate="2019-04-29T22:35:33.163" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew and Arabic both mark feminine nouns with a final consonant in writing, which is pronounced &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in certain sandhi-conditioned environments (and is otherwise silent). From what little I know of Punic, it was the same: the name written &lt;em&gt;Elišat&lt;/em&gt; became Latin &lt;em&gt;Elissa&lt;/em&gt;. And even Ancient Egyptian, which may or may not be Semitic (depending on your definition), marked feminine nouns with a glyph that isn't represented in foreign transcriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious—when did this sound change happen? Was the final consonant silent already in Proto-Semitic? Or did it disappear separately in all of the different daughter languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Possibly relevant: Punic and Egyptian use the normal glyph for &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in their writing systems, Arabic uses a mixture of its &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; glyphs, and Hebrew uses the glyph for &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T10:57:30.263" Title="At what point did the feminine ending fall silent in Semitic languages?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-30T03:10:48.493" Score="6" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Arabic word &lt;em&gt;Allāh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;God&quot; is notable for a few different features. For one, it contains the sound [ɫ] not found in any other Arabic word; it's also an irregular contraction of the article &lt;em&gt;al-&lt;/em&gt; and the noun &lt;em&gt;ilāh&lt;/em&gt; &quot;deity&quot; (the expected form would be &lt;em&gt;al-'ilāh&lt;/em&gt;, and this is indeed what's used for &quot;the deity&quot; in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know when, or possibly even why, this change happened? Normally I associate brand-new unique phones with foreign borrowings (like Swahili having [ð] only in Arabic-derived words, or English using [x] only in loans), but &lt;em&gt;Allāh&lt;/em&gt; seems to have a pure Arabic etymology. And I don't know any other words that have contracted with their article in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The article does regularly assimilate before coronal consonants: &lt;em&gt;al-šams&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the sun&quot; &gt; &lt;em&gt;aš-šams&lt;/em&gt;. That's not the phenomenon I'm interested in here: &lt;em&gt;ilah&lt;/em&gt; doesn't start with a coronal consonant, so the assimilation doesn't happen. But it might be related if e.g. the assimilation used to happen before non-coronals too, making &lt;em&gt;Allāh&lt;/em&gt; an archaicism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1032/10559&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is similar, but doesn't explain the contraction. One of the answers implies that the unique pronunciation is to avoid confusion with the name of the deity &lt;em&gt;Allāt&lt;/em&gt;, for example, but also says that the contraction is to glorify the name of God—if &lt;em&gt;Allāt&lt;/em&gt; is also contracted, does that mean this contraction happens in all divine names? The line &quot;almost all Arabian tribes were not monotheistic but they knew that 'Allah' is 'The authentic God'&quot; seems to contradict that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T15:28:40.837" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T19:46:56.223" Title="When did the contraction &quot;Allah&quot; originate?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31303" CreationDate="2019-04-30T10:57:30.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feminine ending /t/ is retained in all forms in Akkadian, Ugaratic, South Arabian and Ethiopic. In Canaanaic (Hebrew) and Aramaic it is retained in the construct state but lost in the absolute state in the singular. In classical (Qur’anic) Arabic the feminine /t/ is retained in all forms except the pausal form occurring at the end of each verse. It is thus clear that the loss of the /t/ is not common Semitic, but an independent innovation in a few branches of Semitic only, and there only in certain contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T10:57:30.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31308" CreationDate="2019-04-30T13:13:28.230" Score="3" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following sentence, the word “for” is commonly postulated as a complementizer which introduces a non-finite clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay for me to put these away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are some other sentences that seem to have the similar structures as the sentence above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's kind of you to say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I rely on you to be punctual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: can we consider these preposition-like particles(of, on) to be complementizers? And are there any research papers on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my English is not too bad to confuse you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24464" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T14:05:51.780" Title="Can “of”, “on”, etc. be regarded as complementizers just as “for” is?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31307" CreationDate="2019-04-30T14:05:51.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the complementizer is usually called &quot;for-to&quot; (not just &quot;for&quot;) to keep it apart from the preposition &quot;for&quot;.  I do not see a case for &quot;on&quot; or &quot;of&quot; as complementizers.  Rather, these are prepositions whose objects can be for-to complements.  The &quot;for&quot; part of the complementizer is deleted when it is immediately after a preposition, but it does show up elsewhere.  For example: &quot;What I can rely on is for you to be punctual.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T14:05:51.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31047" CreationDate="2019-04-30T16:42:29.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are two answers that may be helpful here, but before we get to them let's clear up a few things. Negative Concord is not the same thing as Redundant Negation. Negative Concord is a phenomena where two distinct negative items in a language are used for a single instance of sentential negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ain't never been drunk. &lt;strong&gt;Interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; 'I've never been drunk.' (Alabama English;&#xA;Feagin 1979)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redundant negation refers to the use of multiple morphological agreement features for negation as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je ne veux pas manger. &lt;strong&gt;Translation:&lt;/strong&gt; 'I (NEG) do not want to eat' &lt;strong&gt;Interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; 'I do not want to eat' (Formal Modern French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at negative concord in French we would see something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personne n'a rien fait . &lt;strong&gt;Translation:&lt;/strong&gt; No one has not done nothing  &lt;strong&gt;Interpretation:&lt;/strong&gt; No one did anything (Formal Modern French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Jespersen's cycle addresses redundant negation not negative concord, the short answer to your question is: they're unrelated issues, redundant negation is distinct from negative concord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind we can reframe your question to something similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can Jespersen's Cycle take place without two-part negation at any stage?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two possible answers to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, Jespersen's cycle is a process of grammaticalization and accordingly needs both a lexical form that becomes a grammatical one and a lexical form that comes to support it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammaticalization is a process believed to be constantly at work&#xA;throughout language whereby lexical forms become grammatical forms.&#xA;Jespersen's cycle can be usefully seen as the grammaticalization of&#xA;a negative operator which loses lexical meaning becoming merely a&#xA;grammatical marker of negation. As such negation requires an&#xA;additional word which carries the semantic content of a negative&#xA;operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows then that the process described by Jespersen's cycle -&#xA;like virtually all instances of grammaticalization - necessarily refer to two forms: one&#xA;item being semantically bleached as it becomes a grammatical marker,&#xA;that needs the support of another item with the semantic content the original form lost&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at how this view of Jespersen's cycle would apply to&#xA;negation in Middle English: Initially 'ne' caries a [+NEG]&#xA;specification which is interpreted by the semantics as marking&#xA;negation (Stage I). At some point 'ne' loses this specification and&#xA;becomes an empty morpheme. Since the language has to have a way of&#xA;marking negation not is introduced which now carries [+NEG] (Stage&#xA;II). Even though 'ne' is now semantically empty the morpheme does&#xA;not disappear until later (Stage III) because loss of morphology&#xA;lags behind loss of semantics (essentially 'ne' has to die twice&#xA;once as semantics and once as morphology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kind-of, there doesn't need to be redundant negation if we don't see what's happening in English as redundant negation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of looking at Jespersen's cycle is that it's a single&#xA;syntactic structure for negation with only part of the structure&#xA;being overt at each point in time, this assumes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Each neg-head must have a neg operator in its specifier   b) Each&#xA;neg operator must be in the specifier position of a NegP that has a&#xA;neg-head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this a little clearer let's apply it to Middle English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jlkb9.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jlkb9.png&quot; alt=&quot;Syntax Tree of proposed NegP&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we can see 'ne' as the neg-head and ‘not’ as the neg operator. Under&#xA;this analysis, 'ne' and not are completely distinct and are required&#xA;to be present in the representation of negation independently of one&#xA;another. Initially, the element in [spec, NegP] is null and only the&#xA;head is overt (Stage I). Then the null element in [spec, NegP]&#xA;becomes overt (i.e. ‘not’) (Stage II). Finally, the neg-head becomes&#xA;null, leaving only the specifier overt. So, the occurrence of&#xA;'ne...not' is simply reflects an overlap between the periods of&#xA;[Spec, NegP] becoming overt and neg-head not being yet fully changed&#xA;into a null element across all contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So which is it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with many things in linguistics it's hard to say for sure. However some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024384107001702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interesting work done by Philip Wallage&lt;/a&gt; hints at an answer.  In the first answer proposed here (grammaticalization) there are two distinct forms of 'ne' at stage I and stage II of Jespersen's cycle respectively. Thus we could predict that these two forms should have different distributions. Looking in corpora Wallage finds (among other things) that the distributions of Stage I and Stage II 'ne' are significantly distinct across middle english. This fact is difficult to account for unless we accept the first explanation presented here using grammaticalization which posits that 'ne' is different at each of those stages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is to say that it looks like Jespersen's cycle necessarily requires two distinct forms for negation at Stage II, forming redundant negation, however when both are present one form is a grammatical marker and one contains the semantic content for negation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10770" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T18:32:31.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31304" CreationDate="2019-04-30T19:46:56.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic the behaviour of &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; is distinct from behaviour of other particles and distinctly unlike that of definite articles in romance languages. It is not viewed as a word unto itself and only occurs as a prefix to a noun. As such &lt;em&gt;Allāh&lt;/em&gt; is best viewed not as a contraction but as an inflected form of &lt;em&gt;ilāh&lt;/em&gt; indicating definiteness. With this in mind the question at hand is not so much how this is exceptional from other instances of &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; but a more straight forward question of phonetic change from &lt;em&gt;alilah&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;allah&lt;/em&gt;. This appears to be a relatively standard case of elision, eroding the pronunciation of the &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; over time with the Encyclopedia of Islam attributing the change to frequency of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a further point of clarification: technically speaking &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; does not assimilate with word-initial sun consonants, it geminates with them - meaning the &lt;em&gt;lām&lt;/em&gt; is changed to repeat the sound of the consonant in usage, but not in writing. This is distinct from assimilation as in assimilation the &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt; would merely be pronounced similarly to the consonant rather than be replaced -  which is not the case here. Additionally note that 'moon letters' have never been the subject of gemination with &lt;em&gt;al&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10770" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T19:46:56.223" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-30T20:54:27.717" Score="-1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anybody please explain to me why the Old Slavonic verb рещи (reshchi) &quot;to say, to command&quot; does not reflect PIE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%83re%C7%B5-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;h₃reǵ&lt;/a&gt; (related Terms: нарещи (nareshchi), изрещи (izreshchi), пророк (prorok), прорицати (proritsati), нарицати (naritsati), отърицатисѧ (otritsatisya), отърещисѧ (otreshchisya), предърицати (predritsati))?&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;, where&lt;br&gt;&#xA;на/na, из/iz, про/pro, отъ/ot, предъ/pred are the prefixes in the Old Slavonic;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the letter щ (shch) is always derived from the letters к (k) or г (g) + т (t);&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the letter ц (ts) is always derived from the letter к (k) when it stands between the letters и (i) and а (a);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24216" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T22:09:40.920" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T23:46:18.617" Title="Are Old Slavonic verb рещи (reshchi) &quot;to say, to command&quot; cognates with PIE: [h₃reǵ]?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31312" CreationDate="2019-04-30T23:46:18.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a note: it's often best in etymology to go back to the last form we can be reasonably sure of. As you mention, OCS &lt;em&gt;щ&lt;/em&gt; (often written &lt;code&gt;/ť/&lt;/code&gt; because linguists like the Latin alphabet better than the Cyrillic) basically always comes from Proto-Slavic &lt;code&gt;*kt&lt;/code&gt;, which sometimes comes from earlier &lt;code&gt;*gt&lt;/code&gt; by voicing assimilation. So we can reconstruct the Proto-Slavic form as something like &lt;code&gt;*rekti&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;*regti&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some semantic difficulty in getting from &quot;straight&quot; to &quot;to say&quot;, which isn't totally insurmountable: see Latin &lt;em&gt;rogō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to ask&quot; from the same PIE root. Similarly, there's some difficulty in dealing with the PIE &quot;palatovelar&quot; &lt;code&gt;*ǵ&lt;/code&gt;, but Balto-Slavic never satemized fully, and there's plenty of precedent for &lt;code&gt;*ǵ&lt;/code&gt; not satemizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it seems plausible that it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; come from this root. But there's some other difficulty that's harder to get away from. First of all, there's no evidence of &lt;code&gt;*h₃r-ǵ-&lt;/code&gt; ever acquiring a meaning of &quot;speak&quot; in Balto-Slavic languages. Instead it's acquired a meaning of &quot;see&quot;, like in Latvian &lt;em&gt;redzēt&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;*regt&lt;/em&gt; or Lithuanian &lt;em&gt;regéti&lt;/em&gt;. Second, there are a decent number of IE words looking vaguely like &lt;code&gt;*rekti&lt;/code&gt;, in widely-spread languages which all have widely different descendants of &lt;code&gt;*h₃r-ǵ-&lt;/code&gt;. And absolutely none of them show satemization, which is explainable for Slavic but a bit weird when it happens in all sorts of different satem languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems easier to reconstruct a separate root for these, which doesn't have to deal with satemization. Vasmer suggests something like &lt;code&gt;*r-k-&lt;/code&gt; plus a suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T23:46:18.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26907" CreationDate="2019-05-01T10:15:49.307" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Old English word 'lagu' is retained in English as the word as 'law'. Judgement, and bodies of water are connected in ancient English culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In around 90AD, sacrifices were made to the goddess Nerthus (according to Tacitus) by drowning the chosen in the lagu as they were subject to the lagu. This was happening when the Angles occupied Jutland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the concept word for lake, lagu and law, and perhaps also loch (?) are pre-Latin and pre-Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24470" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T10:15:49.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31104" CreationDate="2019-05-02T03:38:22.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick look at &lt;em&gt;Stair na Gaeilge&lt;/em&gt; yields this (in Kim McCone’s chapter &lt;em&gt;An tSean-Gaeilge agus a réamhstair&lt;/em&gt; — “Old Irish and its prehistory”)…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;21.2&lt;/strong&gt; … It can be seen that use is made of the suffix &lt;em&gt;*-(i)yā&lt;/em&gt; to make abstract nouns in IE itself (e.g., Gr. &lt;em&gt;p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;il-ó-s&lt;/em&gt; ‘beloved’, &lt;em&gt;p&lt;sup&gt;h&lt;/sup&gt;il-ía&lt;/em&gt; ’fondness’). The &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt; (MW &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt;) that descended from it was a common way of forming feminine abstract nouns (13.5) from adjectives in Old Irish, e.g., &lt;em&gt;dílis, díl&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;s-e&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;maith&lt;/em&gt; ‘good’, &lt;em&gt;maithe&lt;/em&gt; ‘goodness’; &lt;em&gt;gor&lt;/em&gt; ‘fervent’ (MW &lt;em&gt;gwar&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;*g&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;ar-os&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;*g&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;r̥-&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;goire&lt;/em&gt; ‘fervour’ (MW &lt;em&gt;gwared&lt;/em&gt;) &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;*g&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;ar-iyā&lt;/em&gt; (7.4). &lt;em&gt;-tūt-&lt;/em&gt; was also available (17.1) and &lt;strong&gt;a couple of other suffixes were developed in (Insular?) Celtic itself to derive abstract nouns from other nouns&lt;/strong&gt;, in particular &lt;em&gt;*-axtā&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;*-yaxtā&lt;/em&gt; (OI &lt;em&gt;-acht&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-echt&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;-(i)aeth&lt;/em&gt;; [&lt;em&gt;*-i-+&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;em&gt;*-ak-&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;*-tā&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;*-assu-s&lt;/em&gt; (OI &lt;em&gt;-as&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;-as&lt;/em&gt;): e.g., OI &lt;em&gt;marcach&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;marchawc&lt;/em&gt; ‘(horse-)rider’ and OI &lt;em&gt;marcaigecht&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;marchogaeth&lt;/em&gt; ’horsemanship’, OI &lt;em&gt;tigern(ae)&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;teyrn&lt;/em&gt; ‘lord’ and OI &lt;em&gt;tigern-as&lt;/em&gt;, MW &lt;em&gt;teyrn-as&lt;/em&gt; ‘lordship’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Kim McCone, Damian McManus, Cathal Ó hÁinle, Nicholas Williams, Liam Breatnach, eds. (1994). &lt;em&gt;Stair na Gaeilge&lt;/em&gt;. II:21.2 “An tSean-Gaeilge agus a réamhstair: Gnéithe de dhíorthú na substainteach”, page 127. &lt;br/&gt;My translation. OI = Old Irish, MW = Middle Welsh.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A connection to &lt;em&gt;aigid&lt;/em&gt; seems unlikely to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;beocht&lt;/em&gt; may be more complicated than it looks. The older form is &lt;em&gt;béodacht&lt;/em&gt; and there was also a form using the &lt;em&gt;*-assu-s&lt;/em&gt; suffix mentioned above — &lt;em&gt;béodas&lt;/em&gt; (the modern &lt;em&gt;beos&lt;/em&gt; probably only exists in the dictionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24475" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T03:38:22.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:19:59.903" Score="-8" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the Latin word &quot;octo&quot; is derived from the serial number of the letter &quot;h&quot; in the alpabet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latin words &quot;veho&quot; and &quot;traho&quot; transform into the latin words &quot;vecto&quot; and &quot;tracto&quot; respectively by analogy with the English word &quot;bear&quot; transforms into the English word &quot;bring&quot;. The latin language also has the word &quot;octo&quot;. I have tried to reconstruate it origin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The origin verb   The perfect passive participle   The derivative verb&#xA;     veho                      vectus                        vecto&#xA;     traho                     tractus                       tracto&#xA;     ?oho?                     ?octus?                       octo&#xA;&#xA;a 1&#xA;b 2&#xA;c 3&#xA;d 4&#xA;e 5&#xA;f 6&#xA;g 7&#xA;h 8&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For better understanding the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The origin verb   The past passive participle       The derivative verb     &#xA;      bear                     born                          bring        &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24216" LastEditorUserId="24216" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T18:09:01.710" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:09:01.710" Title="Are the Latin word “octo” is derived from the serial number of the letter “h” in the alpabet?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-05-04T12:36:40.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31318" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:42:16.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. That would be very strange considering that alphabets are a relatively late linguistic development compared to speech. There is also no other correspondence between a number and a letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even this correspondence is imaginary since the Latin letter &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/733&quot;&gt;wasn't pronounced &lt;em&gt;okto&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;hā&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the root &lt;em&gt;*okto(u)&lt;/em&gt; is definitely older than the Latin alphabet given that it is speculated to exist in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/eight?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;, hence its appearance in Greek, Indic, and Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verbal paradigms are irrelevant since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octo#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is no such verb&lt;/a&gt; either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T17:42:16.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:46:07.807" Score="4" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;h1&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists like to claim that the mapping from sounds to word meanings is mostly arbitrary. Can you point out research that supports this claim? Specificllay I am looking for hard evidience in form of experimental research and not arm chair linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Details&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years I have repeatedly heard the claim, that the meaning of words is not compositionally computed from its constituent phonemes. In other words, the mapping from sounds to meaning is arbitrary. Whenever somebdy made this claim it obviously was always restricted to atomic words such as &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;tree&lt;/em&gt; rather than compounds like &lt;em&gt;treehouse&lt;/em&gt;. Nobody would argue the meaning of compounds is not derived from its constituent words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me state this more formally, so we understand each other correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(no latex support? really? uff...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;atomic&lt;/strong&gt; words (not compounds, not words with productive affixes like &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), there is assumed to be a mapping&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;f : W_p --&gt; W_s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;W_p&lt;/em&gt; denotes the set of phonological representations of the concepts of all words and &lt;em&gt;W_s&lt;/em&gt; denotes the set of semantics of all words. The consensus seems to be that this mapping is just a big lookup table that contains only entire atomic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not assume the alternative function&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;g : P* --&gt; W_s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;P*&lt;/em&gt; denotes the Keleene closure over the set of all phonemes (of a given language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's also require that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;forall w in W_p where w = p_0 .. p_n with p_i in P* . f(w) =~ g(p_0 .. p_n)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where =~ means approximately equal under some metric. For example the L2 norm of the difference vector of the vectors of &lt;em&gt;f(w)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g(p_0 .. p_n)&lt;/em&gt; if &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; map into an n-dimensional vector space.&#xA;(We could define &lt;em&gt;f(a) =~ g(b)&lt;/em&gt; to be true, iff &lt;em&gt;g(b)&lt;/em&gt; is among the &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; closest vectors to &lt;em&gt;f(a)&lt;/em&gt; for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; in contrast to &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; internally performs some computation on the sequence of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; input phonemes &lt;em&gt;p_0 .. p_n&lt;/em&gt;. It does not perform a simple lookup of &lt;em&gt;p_0 .. p_n&lt;/em&gt;. It only looks up either single phonemes or a limited number of phoneme combinations and then computes their composite meaning according to some unknown procedure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; are extensionally equivalent (up to the error allowed for =~) they differ intensionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to this date, nobody claiming that &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is not how sequences of sounds are mapped to meaning, but rather that &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; is how it happens, ever provided any research papers to back this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you point out to me any papers that investigated this and tried to falsify the assumption that a function like &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; exists? i.e. that the meaning of atomic words is computed from some composition of its constituent phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10543" LastEditorUserId="10543" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T15:42:40.717" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T19:10:17.780" Title="Word meaning as function of the composition of its phonemes" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31320" CreationDate="2019-05-02T19:26:46.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably not the kind of answer you are looking for, but I guess the following two points would have to be considered as strong indications that meaning is not computed from phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Polysemy (&lt;em&gt;wood&lt;/em&gt;: the stuff a tree is made of as well as a collection of trees growing together) and homophony (&lt;em&gt;pear, pair&lt;/em&gt;). This implies &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is not a function. Also I don't know how the inverse of &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; works – how do speakers get from meanings to sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would the existence of a function such as &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; predict about language change, and how does it correspond to the kinds of changes we actually observe? Note especially the following two cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes in the phonological structure that are not accompanied by a change in meaning (e.g. metathesis &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; OE &lt;em&gt;þridda&lt;/em&gt;; cf. &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt;) and vice versa (&lt;em&gt;wicked&lt;/em&gt; went from &lt;em&gt;morally bad&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt;). The former is very weird – why would &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; change in such a fashion that &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; retains its meaning while the very closely related phonological form that maps to the meaning of the corresponding ordinal changes (with all other words containing &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; retaining their meaning)? The weirdness of the latter lies in the fact that words that are substrings of a word that changes its meaning (e.g. &lt;em&gt;wick&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;wicked&lt;/em&gt;) do not change along, nor do any other words that stand in a relationship of &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; : &lt;em&gt;Xed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two more armchairy arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chomsky's question: How would a learner infer &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;? Looking at, for instance, &lt;em&gt;but, butt, butter, buttress&lt;/em&gt; – is there any better strategy than memorization? Any other strategy at all?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why do competent native speakers with a vocabulary exceeding ten thousand words still need to look up unfamiliar words? And what happens when they look up a word – is &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; adapted in some manner? Do the meanings of all other words consequently change?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastEditorUserId="23112" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T21:07:09.410" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T21:07:09.410" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31320" CreationDate="2019-05-02T19:37:11.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, it is so self-evident that the arbitrariness claim is true that nobody has experimentally verified the claim. But it would not be hard to do, if you have access to a captive subject pool. There are many procedures that could be followed, but the basic idea is to take recordings of actual words from various languages, present them (one at a time) to speakers of random languages (take note of what they speak), and have them assign a meaning to the words. Alternatively, give them a set of maybe 5 glosses (in their language), one of which is the correct translation and the others are randomly selected. For instance, a subject is presented with [goahti] and told to choose between &quot;he ate; hut; running; lemur; until&quot;. The word is from North Saami and it means &quot;hut&quot;. If there is a non-arbitrary sound-meaning relation, speakers (regardless of native language) should do better than chance in selecting the meaning, but if it is arbitrary, non-Saami speakers should perform at chance and Saami speakers should guess correctly very often. (You have to exclude people like me who know some Saami but don't actually speak it, and maybe exclude many Norwegians since it's one of those widely-known Saami words in Norway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One big problem would be keeping track of crosslinguistically polysemous words. For instance, [moto] apparently means &quot;blades of grass, trunks; falcons&quot; in Japanese, &quot;motorcycle&quot; in various Romance languages, &quot;person&quot; in Lingala, &quot;fire&quot; in various other Bantu languages, &quot;eye&quot; in Tiruray. Also, Mongolian [xɛɮ] &quot;language&quot; counts a lot like &quot;hell&quot; to English speakers; Somali [maðaħ] &quot;head&quot; sounds a lot like &quot;mother&quot; and [naag] &quot;woman&quot; sounds a lot like English &quot;nag&quot;. In scoring or setting up the stimuli, you'd need to filter out or somehow control for words of one language that sound similar-enough to words of a subjects language that they think it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a word of their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is probably why nobody has done the experiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T19:37:11.133" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31320" CreationDate="2019-05-02T19:40:10.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prove for the claim is trivial. Words on the Swadesh list will show little correlation between meaning and phonetics, save for exceptions like &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt;. If there is a hidden correlation, then because the relation is more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: A weaker Argument would be constrained to a single language of a single speaker. I guess that's more or less what you mean. It's not quite clear what you mean, though. &lt;em&gt;phone, word&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;set of semantics&lt;/em&gt; are not well defined as far as I know. That's in essence the same claim as you attack, if, whatever you refered to, was a response to a failed attempt trying to explain meaning from phonetics. Which would be called inductive reasoning, i.e. experience.   The smallest constituent, of speech, the phone, ordered in sequences, is not enough to explain meaning, or to learn language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T19:50:36.077" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T19:50:36.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31320" CreationDate="2019-05-02T22:54:32.460" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you are conflating arbitrariness with other concepts in your question. Phonetic arbitrariness means that in a language, semantics are independent of the choice of phonetics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's talk about what choice of phonetics means. Any particular language has a finite number of phonemes, a discrete subset drawn from the continuous spectrum of articulatable human sounds. There are an infinite number of (for example) vowel sounds a human can possibly make, taking into account continuous features such as height, backness, pitch, length, intonation, stress, phonation, nasalization, rhotacization, etc. Each particular language divides up this continuous multi-dimensional spectrum of sounds into &lt;em&gt;N&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; discrete volumes within this space; a binning process. We would call each volume a vowel (phoneme) and &lt;em&gt;N&lt;sub&gt;V&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;number of vowels&quot; in the language. We can do the similar thing for all the consonants (in reality, at this level the distinction between vowels and consonants sort of vanishes) and arrive at &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt;, the total number of phonemes in the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This set of phonemes constitutes the alphabet Σ of our language. In theoretical terms where a language &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; is a subset of words Σ∗ defined over an alphabet Σ, &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; is just the cardinality of Σ. The alphabet Σ is then some unique discretization &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;[&lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt;] of the infinite set of all possible phones &lt;em&gt;U&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonetic arbitrariness means that the semantics of &lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt; are independent of my choice of discretization function &lt;strong&gt;x&lt;/strong&gt;[ ]. Simply put, it doesn't matter semantically that I have happened to choose {a,e,i,o,u} as my vowels vs. {i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, o, u, ʊ, ʌ, ɚ, ə}. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More editorial: once I have chosen a particular alphabet for my language, then I would say there is a set of heuristics for determining possible semantics based on words in that language. I won't go so far as to say there is a  proper function, mapping, or even deterministic algorithm  to get from words to meanings. Ambiguity, homophony, poor hearing conditions, etc. mean that listeners can be mistaken about a speaker's meaning, which points to this being a heuristic or probabilistic process rather than a deterministic one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T22:54:32.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T11:39:26.543" Score="-5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the German words w&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;who&quot; / w&lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;what&quot; derived from the question word wo &quot;where&quot; + pronouns &lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;he&quot; / &lt;strong&gt;es&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;it&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by analogy with the Old Slavonic [&lt;em&gt;which could inherited this thing (feature) from the Greek, whereas the German languages could inherited this thing (feature) from the Latin, whereas the Latin language could inherited this thing (feature) also from the Greek&lt;/em&gt;], wherein words кои (ko&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;) “who” / что (ch&lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;) “what” are derived from the pronouns и (&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;) &quot;he&quot; / то (&lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;) &quot;it&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The non-slavonic speakers may pass by this part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Old Slavonic has two third-person singular pronouns, the masculine и (i) &quot;he&quot; and the neuter то (to) &quot;it&quot;. The Old Slavonic also has the word къ&lt;strike&gt;де&lt;/strike&gt; (k'&lt;strike&gt;de&lt;/strike&gt;) means &quot;where&quot;, where де (de) is the Old Slavonic suffics да (da), which is used to form a noun/adverb from the short (indefinite) adjective къ(k') by analogy whith the English suffics &quot;th&quot; long/length: правъ (prav') &quot;adj. right&quot; + да (da) = правда (pravda) &quot;truth&quot;, кривъ (kriv') &quot;crooked&quot; + да (da) = кривда (krivda) &quot;falseness&quot;, вьсь (v's') &quot;adj. all&quot; + де (de) = вьсьде (v's'de) &quot;everywhere&quot;, съ (s') + де (de) = съде (s'de) &quot;here&quot; and so on***. The ending alternation is the result of declension (the Old Slavonic has grammatical cases). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transformation of the letter ъ (') to the letter о (o) is caused by its new position in the word. In the old word къде (k'de) the ъ (') letter was not stressed (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5#%D0%A1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B1%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;weak position&lt;/a&gt;) but now it is stressed (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5#%D0%A1%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strong position&lt;/a&gt;). As a result, the Old Slavonic letter ъ (') in our days in some words transformed into the Russian letter &quot;o&quot; and in the other words it is completely disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*** онъ (on') + де (de) = онде (onde), инъ (in') + де (de) = инде (inde), овъ + де (de) = овде (ovde).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by analogy with the Latin words qu&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; “who” / qu&lt;strong&gt;id&lt;/strong&gt; “what” that could be derived from the question word quo “where” + pronouns (demonstratives), the masculine &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; “he” and the neuter &lt;strong&gt;id&lt;/strong&gt; “it”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24216" LastEditorUserId="24216" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T20:12:01.703" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T20:20:03.453" Title="Are the German words wer/was &quot;who/what&quot; derived from the q. word wo &quot;where&quot; + pns. er/es &quot;he/it&quot; by analogy with the Old Slavonic koi/chto &quot;who/what&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31320" CreationDate="2019-05-03T19:10:17.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there's a function from &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; sequences of phonemes to meaning, then it should be possible to ask, e.g., what's the meaning of &quot;kerblaxumenfar&quot;, and English speakers should be able to give a reasonable, consistent answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the best answer will be &quot;I don't know&quot;, and if you keep pressing, the answers you will get will be totally random.  Name of some Amazonian tribe?  A rare disease?  A failed Silicon Valley startup?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your function &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; becomes &quot;a function from &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; subset of phoneme sequences to meanings&quot;, at which point it's becomes unclear how &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is different from &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14734" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T19:10:17.780" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31326" CreationDate="2019-05-03T20:20:03.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for the structural similarities you've noted are not because of any analogy.  The similarities are due to the fact that the forms you provide have descended independently from similar PIE words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ger &lt;em&gt;wer&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;hwaz&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ger &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PGmc &lt;em&gt;hwat&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;od&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rus &lt;em&gt;кой&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PSlav &lt;em&gt;kъjь&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PB-S &lt;em&gt;kas&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;  PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;os&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Rus &lt;em&gt;что&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PSlav &lt;em&gt;čьto&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PB-S &lt;em&gt;ki&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-to&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;id&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;tod&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L &lt;em&gt;quis&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;L &lt;em&gt;quid&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; PIE &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;id&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PIE words themselves are forms of the interrogative root &lt;em&gt;k&lt;sup&gt;w&lt;/sup&gt;-&lt;/em&gt;, combined with a stem vowel &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-i-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-o-&lt;/em&gt; and declined for case, number, and gender/animacy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T20:20:03.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T20:53:42.287" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;h2&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask if anyone knows any decent resources on how native middle easterners, particularly in Judea, might have pronounced greek koine in the first century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;GOAL:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary interest is in Koine spoken in in Judea. I have come across some resources, such as &lt;em&gt;Greek: An History of the Language and its Speakers&lt;/em&gt;, however, this seems more concerned with overall pronunciation of native speakers and not necessarily others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, we can't know everything and many things can only be speculated on, however some things don't necessarily add up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;THEORY:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary languages during the time seem to have been Greek, Hebrew, and maybe Aramaic (that is a hot debate.) Hebrew and Aramaic of course would have the same writing system and similar phonology, most likely the same among people of Hebrew lineage, either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hebrew, at the time, taking great care to distinguish vowels and consonants, I would suspect that in speakers of Greek not of straight-European origin, one might see glottal stops creeping in /ʔ/ perhaps, and bilabial fricatives /ɸ/ and /β/, which fell out of use in Hebrew, being replaced by /f/ and /v/ hundreds of years earlier, would probably be the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect the labio-velar approximant /w/ to be extremely well preserved in ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩, ⟨ηυ⟩. Perhaps even a greater creeping in of the phoneme /ð/ in place of /d/ due to Hebrew's heavy use of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect to prehaps even see a preservation of the distinction between ⟨ο⟩ as /o/ and ⟨ω⟩ as /ɔ/ or /oː/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect to see a shift from /tʰ/ to /θ/ more quickly, if not for mishearing, at least due to its, to my knowledge, seemingly 1:1 correspondence with the the letter tau ⟨τ⟩ being used for the letter taw when making ⟨תּ⟩ making the /t/ sound and ⟨θ⟩ for ⟨ת⟩ when making the /θ/. Granted, this does not mean that speakers did not adopted the aspirated /tʰ/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am struggling to find material that does not focus, per se, on what can be considered the norm. In an illiterate society, it is full-well assumable that a speaker of one particular accent may get someone else to write for them that uses a completely different accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not somebody who has formal linguistic training, so I don't know, I am just trying to think through it logically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15561" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T20:53:42.287" Title="Resources on Middle Eastern Common Greek in the First Century?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31298" CreationDate="2019-05-04T07:59:55.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;square = λf.λx.f(x) ^ square(x)&#xA;blue = λg.λy.g(y) ^ blue(y)&#xA;&#xA;square ° blue&#xA;(1) = λh.square(blue(h))&#xA;(2) = λh.[λf.λx.f(x) ^ square(x)]([λg.λy.g(y) ^ blue(y)](h))&#xA;(3) = λh.[λf.λx.f(x) ^ square(x)](λy.h(y) ^ blue(y))&#xA;(4) = λh.[λx.[λy.h(y) ^ blue(y)](x) ^ square(x)]&#xA;(5) = λh.λx.h(x) ^ blue(x) ^ square(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;f, g, h&lt;/code&gt; are supposed to denote variables of type &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;et&lt;/code&gt;); &lt;code&gt;x, y, z&lt;/code&gt; of type &lt;code&gt;e&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Function composition: &lt;code&gt;φ ° ψ&lt;/code&gt; means that for each &lt;code&gt;α&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;α&lt;/code&gt; is mapped to &lt;code&gt;φ(ψ(α))&lt;/code&gt;. Since &lt;code&gt;φ ° ψ&lt;/code&gt; has the domain of &lt;code&gt;ψ&lt;/code&gt; and the codomain of &lt;code&gt;φ&lt;/code&gt;, we know the lambda expression corresponding to &lt;code&gt;square ° blue&lt;/code&gt; must start with a variable of type &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; and that a term of type &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; must follow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Substitute the definitions of &lt;code&gt;square&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;blue&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3., 4., 5. Function application&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastEditorUserId="23112" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T08:16:28.593" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T08:16:28.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2019-05-04T20:46:22.893" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was searching for phonetic languages and realized most people don’t know Turkish is a phonetic language. If you know how the read the letters correctly, you can write anything you hear and read any written word correctly. It is probably more phonetic than Spanish. (For example in spanish the letter “c” is pronounced differently depending on the next letter, but in Turkish all the letters sound the same no matter which letter comes before or after it.&#xA;Also, French is definitely not phonetic. &#xA;Piquenique (French): Piknik (Turkish) &#xA;while we are trying to learn how some English words are pronounced we just write them phonetically and everyone can read it :D&#xA;for example: How are you? (Hav ar yu?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24494" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T20:46:22.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29009" CreationDate="2019-05-05T08:15:59.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;q=conjunction#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=conjunction&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/a&gt;, McCawley uses Ross's CSC (Coordinate Structure Constraint) and RNR as diagnostics for coordinate conjunctions.  See, e.g., p. 616, where M. investigates contrastive negative &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T08:15:59.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31348" CreationDate="2019-05-05T09:05:54.637" Score="1" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;While browsing this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1960/is-there-a-language-whose-writing-is-100-phonemic&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, two of the answers deal about Lojban and Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1977/1172&quot;&gt;answer related to Lojban&lt;/a&gt;, there's an upvoted comment which states that Artifical Languages are not to be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused and perplex:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, I don't know of any writing system that has not been artificially created.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know of any Artificial Language that do not convey semantic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know of any Artificial Language that does not comply with a grammar etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the reasons Artificial Languages should not be under the scope of Linguistics ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;HR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT ABOUT MY ABOVE STATEMENT ABOUT WRITTEN SYSTEMS&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of these images is ONLY to illustrate my statement (I have been asked about it in comments and answer) that writing systems are artificial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gwpe0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gwpe0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhC9J.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xhC9J.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a1DGS.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/a1DGS.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g8Twt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g8Twt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oDO2x.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oDO2x.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ZzpR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ZzpR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-05-10T07:25:24.873" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T07:25:24.873" Title="What reasons could be given for Artificial Languages not to be considered part of linguistics study field?" Tags="&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31362" CreationDate="2019-05-05T09:43:40.233" Score="1" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;If yes, does any language have this feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 'half-plural' I mean, somewhere between singular and plural, but not dual, trial, or quadral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T22:57:05.513" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T22:57:05.513" Title="Is there such thing as a 'half-plural'?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-05T10:56:26.113" Score="-5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the English word knee and the English word generation cognate because of the Latin word genu &quot;knee&quot; in the Genetive case has the form genus and this is the case birth (the generation of the new case)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not ask my question more clearly because of the English language has not the cases (except the English pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have deleted my previous post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24216" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T21:52:59.063" Title="Are the English word knee and the word generation cognate?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-05-06T09:36:41.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2019-05-05T12:10:26.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A 100% match would be extremely difficult - every language contains exceptions to the usual pronunciation rules (not only from loan words and often used foreign words), so many fine nuances may only appear in a few words (often because it's difficult to pronounce 'correctly' due to surrounding letters and stops).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that a lot of differences in pronunciation are situation based and usually not written down in the words - like raising the pitch in a question, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good phonemic/phonetic writing system would basically have to include all of IPA and then some more for the cases where even linguists aren't sure, which also means a lot of redundant letters and a very difficult to learn writing system. And with all the stresses, pitches, length variations and so on, it would still sound mechanical if we fed it to a speech synthesizer, and there would still be errors when a computer wrote down speech, even with the best possible hardware and under laboratory conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A phonemic writing system which works with the way locals pronounce their words and foreign words would reduce the complexity quite a bit, but at the expense of being unable to pronounce foreign words correctly. Even this reduced set would be quite large (Expressed mathematically: half of infinity is still infinity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simplifications are accordingly in order. Things which would change a word's spelling for a kind of pronunciation which is situational can often be left out. In western languages, we can usually leave out pitch, while a tonal language needs it as there are lots of words where the tone makes the difference quite literally. In other languages, there are probably other things which we can do with punctuation or such or which are usually clear from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, simplifying sounds which natives usually don't distinguish clearly or where there might be slight differences depending on region can make the writing system more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages have often no difference between voiced and unvoiced versions of a sound - German with s, o and a few others, for instance. When the rules of the language make it clear where to use which version, even that should be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For larger differences in pronunciation, I'd prefer different letters personally, but some linguists seem to find it more important to make words spelled the same even across minor region differences. Iirc, there was a letter introduced into cyrillic in some country which would allow for two different pronunciations of the same words where there was a common difference in pronouncing a part and therefore an inconsistent spelling of those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English speakers seem to find it more important to stick to the roots of words and ignore the actual pronunciation in their spelling. Similiar to French, though in slightly different ways. I personally would prefer new words to be added where the difference in pronunciation has become too big. So I'd add &quot;taff&quot;, &quot;nyu&quot;, &quot;teibel&quot; and many more... :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T12:10:26.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31339" CreationDate="2019-05-05T13:20:17.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speculating about how people could better communicate doesn't seem relevant or useful to linguists, who seek to understand how people do actually communicate.  Linguistics is a science, based on evidence collected from observations.  That is a quite different activity from that of artificial language fans, who seem to think they already know how real languages work, but who actually know very little (even less than linguists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you characterize writing systems as artificial?  Alphabetic writing approximates the phoneme systems of real languages, and it has been derived from careful observations of human speech over hundreds of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that artificial languages conform to created grammars.  This does not make artificial languages like natural languages, however.  Natural languages do not conform to any grammars that have yet been devised.  Much like the case with writing systems, grammars of human construction are but halting and incomplete efforts to describe some facts of human languages we have observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T12:25:49.287" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T12:25:49.287" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31341" CreationDate="2019-05-05T13:48:55.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English &lt;em&gt;knee&lt;/em&gt; is related to Latin &lt;em&gt;genu&lt;/em&gt; (knee), as both are believed to originate from Proto-Indo-European *&lt;em&gt;ǵónu&lt;/em&gt; (knee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Latin &lt;em&gt;genu&lt;/em&gt; (knee) and Latin &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; (origin) do not appear to be related, as &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; (origin) is traced back to PIE *&lt;em&gt;ǵénh₁os&lt;/em&gt; (lineage) and not to *&lt;em&gt;ǵónu&lt;/em&gt; (knee); there is no particular reason to believe these two PIE words are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the fact that the genitive case of Latin &lt;em&gt;genu&lt;/em&gt; (knee) looks identical to Latin &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; (origin) appears to be a coincidence. This extends to English &lt;em&gt;generation&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; (origin) through suffixation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T13:48:55.670" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-05T14:06:20.327" Score="13" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, a question was asked about the possibility of the words &lt;em&gt;knee&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;generation&lt;/em&gt; being cognates. Unfortunately, that question is rather unclear, so I'm asking this as a separate post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words in question are commonly derived from the PIE words &lt;em&gt;*ǵónu&lt;/em&gt; 'knee' and &lt;em&gt;*ǵenh₁-&lt;/em&gt; 'to give birth, to beget', respectively. The obvious similarity between these two reconstructed forms would be easy to dismiss as a chance resemblance, especially given the lack of an obvious semantic connection. However, it reminded me of a curious parallel in Basque: &lt;em&gt;belaun&lt;/em&gt; 'knee' and &lt;em&gt;belaunaldi&lt;/em&gt; 'generation' (with &lt;em&gt;-aldi&lt;/em&gt; meaning 'period').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems someone else has also noticed this interesting parallel (though their other blog posts look a bit dubious at first glance):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/11/from-knee-to-knee.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/11/from-knee-to-knee.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;They also point out Finnish &lt;em&gt;sukupolvi&lt;/em&gt; 'generation' from &lt;em&gt;suku&lt;/em&gt; 'kin' + &lt;em&gt;polvi&lt;/em&gt; 'knee'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there seems to be a connection between the concepts 'knee' and 'generation' in at least three unrelated language families. Has this been treated before in the scientific literature? Is there an obvious connection that I'm just missing (maybe via joint/changing directions/changing generations)? Is it based on a specific concept common to the prehistoric cultures of Europe that's since been forgotten? Or is the parallel formation based on calquing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4727" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T23:35:48.897" Title="Relations between 'knee' and 'generation'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-05T15:08:52.653" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to refer to the &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;-semantic-similarity-based counterpart to &lt;em&gt;eggcorn&lt;/em&gt;, which is phonetic similarity-based by definition? Not a hypercorrection, just that thing when you remember something &quot;in your own words&quot; but you mistakenly believe it's the original expression/word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many &lt;em&gt;fixed expressions&lt;/em&gt; can be affected by this phenomenon so one would think it must have a name other than &lt;em&gt;ignorance&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the extreme opposite of being anal-retentive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a related &lt;code&gt;english.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; question I used the example of &quot;&lt;em&gt;false news&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;fake news&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24500" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T00:06:50.213" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T00:06:50.213" Title="Is there a way to refer to the semantic similarity-based counterpart to *eggcorn*?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31339" CreationDate="2019-05-05T15:25:39.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is &quot;What are the reasons Artificial Languages should not be under the scope of Linguistics&quot; (it's not a question about writing systems). As a question about personal opinion it is not suited for SE because it's not a question about fact, but that can be remedied: what reasons can be given that ALs are not within the scope of Linguistics? That is distinct (even if related to) a question about what is on-topic for LSE (such a question belongs on Meta).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer derives from a view of what the subject matter of linguistics is. If you define linguistics maximally broadly as being about any kind of communication and systematic transmission of information, then AL's would certainly be in the scope of Linguistics. Linguistics would encompass many disciplines, such as genetics (the grammar of DNA), bee dancing, bird song, maybe even how viruses work. Historically, the science called &quot;linguistics&quot; (Sprachwissenschaft, nyelvészet and so on) has been associated with a narrower set of questions, about human languages (yes, I know that we have not yet defined &quot;language&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dominant trend in linguistics has been to study those properties of language that occur universally and naturally, without conscious human intervention, and linguistics has been seen as a scientific discipline which asks &quot;what is the nature of that {cognitive faculty/form of behavior}?&quot;. This narrows the scope of linguistics, so that the study of articulatory behavior of world-class opera singers is outside the scope of linguistics (Being Martti Talvela is not universally available and naturally available, it requires massive effort and inherent talent). Or, the study of theories of judicial interpretation w.r.t. what the words of a law are said to &quot;mean&quot; is not a part of linguistics. That does not mean that linguistic tools cannot be used in such studies, it means that the product of such research does not address the presumed central question of the science of linguistics. On those grounds, AL's would not qualify as within the scope of linguistics. You can use the tools of linguistics to construct an AL, but ALs don't inform you about the nature of languages (as defined). Of course the discussion changes once an AL is spoken so prevalently that children actually acquire it as their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can disagree with the initial premise and offer an alternative statement of what you think the science of linguistics is about, and that statement could well include AL's, poetry, pheromone transmission and so on. ALs and writing systems are on the margins (both being artificial). The only argument for a particular definition of a pattern of human activity (&quot;a study&quot;) is historical precedent. You could say, if you want, that &quot;Linguistics&quot; is a very broad discipline that includes DNA studies, and define the study of the universal naturally occurring human code of proposition-articulation as &quot;nyelvészet&quot;. But there is no objective way to establish the &quot;intrinsically correct&quot; name for a specific field of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T20:54:54.327" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T20:54:54.327" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-05T20:51:57.633" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am familiar with indexing and co-indexing NP's but I've come across indexing that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Gregory(i) seems to enjoy (ti) Marvel Films.&quot; Does the (ti) indicate some kind of movement? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24501" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T21:40:25.690" Title="Indexing outside of NP" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31349" CreationDate="2019-05-05T21:22:15.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In transformation-based syntax theories, it is indeed assumed that there is a kind of movement involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;to seem&lt;/em&gt; is a so-called &lt;strong&gt;raising-to-subject&lt;/strong&gt; verb:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, Gregory (which is the subject of the main sentence) is also the subject of the verb phrase &quot;to enjoy Marvel films&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore assumed that the underlying representation of the sentence is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that [Gregory enjoys Marvel films]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the surface form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory_i seems to [t_i enjoy Marvel Films]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has been obtained by moving the NP &lt;em&gt;Gregory&lt;/em&gt; out of the subject position of the embedded clause (&quot;that...&quot;) to the subject position of the matrix clause. Hence, it leaves a trace t_i which we is conindexed with its surface position.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;to seem&lt;/em&gt; allows to &lt;em&gt;raise&lt;/em&gt; the subject NP of the embedded sentence out to matrix sentence's subject position, where it replaces the dummy-subject &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; which is semantically empty and only served to occupy the subject position in the underlying structure (since in English, the subject of a declarative sentence may not be phonetically empty).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;strong&gt;raising-to-object&lt;/strong&gt; verbs:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory believes Henry_i to [t_i enjoy Marvel Films]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the NP &lt;em&gt;Henry&lt;/em&gt; has been moved (&quot;raised&quot;) from the subject position of the embedded clause to the object position of the matrix clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory believes that [Henry enjoys Marvel Films]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are so-called &lt;strong&gt;equi&lt;/strong&gt; verbs, again coming in the two shapes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;subject-oriented&lt;/strong&gt; equi verbs, like &lt;em&gt;to try&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory_i &lt;em&gt;tried to&lt;/em&gt; [t_i watch a Marvel film]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject of the matrix clause is simultaneously the subject of the embedded clause. Reconstructing the deep structure sounds a bit bumpy in that case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory tried that [Gregory watches a Marvel film]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that while this reconstruction may not sound very natural, it's clear that semantically, Gregory is indeeed the subject to the &lt;em&gt;watches as film&lt;/em&gt; verb phrase.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to raising verbs, Gregory is also semantically the subject of &lt;em&gt;to try&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;to try&lt;/em&gt; requires an argument for the one who actively does the trying, while for &lt;em&gt;to seem&lt;/em&gt; it is assumed that it is actually subject-less - there is not really anyone who does the seeming -, and the subject position is only filled syntactically (by a dummy-&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; or a raised subject).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is different from equi verbs, which have in their lexical entry an argument position for a semantic subject (e.g. someone who tries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;strong&gt;object-oriented&lt;/strong&gt; equi verbs, like &lt;em&gt;to persuade&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory &lt;em&gt;persuaded&lt;/em&gt; Henry_i to [t_i watch a Marvel film]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the object of the matrix clause is underlyingly the subject of the embedded clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gregory persuaded Henry that [Henry watches a Marvel film]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all syntactic theories assume that an actual movement operation took place; non-transformation based approaches will nevertheless often account in some way for the semantic coreference between the respective subjects or objects; for example, HPSG would use conindexed variables in the subcategorization information of the verb (for example, &lt;code&gt;SUBCAT&amp;lt;1,VP[inf,SUBCAT&amp;lt;1&amp;gt;]:2&amp;gt; ... [SOA-ARG 2]&lt;/code&gt; in the case of subject-oriented raising verbs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T21:40:25.690" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T21:40:25.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-06T05:56:53.950" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following example sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;For eight weeks, the police say he was tortured by X. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many native speakers would attribute &quot;eight weeks&quot; to &quot;torture&quot;. &#xA;The question is now how do you inform computers about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dependency parse doesn't work here (it connects the temporal mention to &quot;say&quot;): &lt;a href=&quot;https://demo.allennlp.org/dependency-parsing/NzMwNzE3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://demo.allennlp.org/dependency-parsing/NzMwNzE3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar observation with respect to semantic roles: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://demo.allennlp.org/semantic-role-labeling/NzMwNzE5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://demo.allennlp.org/semantic-role-labeling/NzMwNzE5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2748" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T16:36:21.340" Title="Mapping duration mentions to their actual verb event" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-06T18:22:52.757" Score="8" ViewCount="1352" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading Wikipedia, and it maintains that it's unusual for a language to have a voiceless-voiced-breathy distinction (without a voiceless aspirated), but that the Sanskrit 4-way distinction is less weird. I've also heard of the glottalic theory from other sources, which is supposed to make PIE's phonology less weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised that voiceless-voiced-breathy is so weird because it seems like the natural result of a merger in an aspirated-tenuis-voiced-breathy distinction. As I understand it, the difference between aspirated, tenuis, and voiced is mainly voicing onset time with tenuis being between the other two. Isn't it natural that tenuis should merge with one of the other ones? (maybe losing aspiration afterward?) Breathy voiced is so different it makes sense to me that it would stay different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it's just an empirical fact that this distinction is uncommon, but does anyone know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's so uncommon? (It's not just because so many languages are descended Proto-Indic is it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24509" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T09:04:34.517" Title="What's weird about Proto-Indo-European Stops?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31346" CreationDate="2019-05-06T18:34:17.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia mentions &lt;em&gt;mistake&lt;/em&gt; as a linguistic term in the context of language learners, found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Error (linguistics)&lt;/a&gt; (via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malapropism&lt;/a&gt;) citing H. Douglas Brown (1994) for a definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a failure to utilize a known system correctly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason not to apply that to L1 speakers, unless there's a specific term to note the distinction. Linguistics has technical jargon and thus is a language variety, and even L1 speakers learn new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example using &lt;em&gt;false&lt;/em&gt; in stead of &lt;em&gt;fake&lt;/em&gt; shows half-way similar sound and meaning, after all, leaves little doubt that you were trying for &lt;em&gt;fake news&lt;/em&gt;, but with a twist. The precise nature of the twist cannot be infered from the anecdote alone. If it were completely intentional you probably would not question it. Nevertheless you might have been aware of the mismatch, going with it anyway for several reasons, ideally improving the idiom, or at a minimum producing a coherent sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extreme cases of language confusion appear in Aphasia, where speech production can appear dysfunctional in various ways, due to brain damage, temporary or permanent. The respective research probably have jargon for the different varieties of mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T19:22:02.397" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T19:22:02.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31382" CreationDate="2019-05-06T18:46:33.390" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Latin words &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; (hook) and &lt;em&gt;unguis&lt;/em&gt; (claw, fingernail) appear very phonologically similar to me, and semantically I can see why 'hook' and 'claw' could derive from the same source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Wiktionary traces &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; to reconstructed PIE &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82enk-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₂enk-&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unguis&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%83n%E1%B9%93g%CA%B0s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h₃nṓgʰs&lt;/a&gt;, without specifying any connection between these two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a linguist, and I don't know what the definitive sources on PIE reconstruction or Latin etymology are, so I'm wondering if anyone can either connect the two or provide some insight as to why they may not be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24510" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T21:33:20.567" Title="Etymological connection between &quot;uncus&quot; and &quot;unguis&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31356" CreationDate="2019-05-06T19:21:50.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I coudn't say about your argument for naturalness of one particular loss of one member of a four way distinction: voiced non-aspirate/voiceless non-aspirate/voiced aspirate/voiceless aspirate, but the loss of any one of the four would violate a putative principle of phonological systems.  And that is the requirement that features represent independently controllable aspects of articulation, in the language of SPE (&lt;strong&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/strong&gt;).  In &lt;strong&gt;Speech Sounds and Features&lt;/strong&gt;, Gunnar Fant calls this &lt;em&gt;orthogonality&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much earlier, in 1669, the principle was invoked by William Holder in &lt;strong&gt;Elements of Speech&lt;/strong&gt;, when he argued for the existence in English of the velar nasal eng on the grounds that there were velars and nasals already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably important here to distinguish between what is expected in human languages generally, on the one hand, and what is expected in particular language phoneme systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T19:21:50.077" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31356" CreationDate="2019-05-06T19:45:52.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is plausible to claim that the traditional IE system &lt;em&gt;t d dʰ&lt;/em&gt; is rare, but it's not well-established. Very often, we don't actually know what the phonetic properties of the sounds of a language are, either because the author describing the language doesn't say anything specific and leaves it to his transcription system to imply what the phonetic properties are, or the author makes claims that aren't and can't be substantiated phonetically. The letters &lt;em&gt;t, d&lt;/em&gt; might be used conventionally for [tʰ, t'; ɗ, dʱ, d̤]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you state the claim in more general terms and not in terms of &quot;exactly these phonetic values&quot;, you would probably be correct in saying that systems with more phonatory contrasts among the voiced stops than among the voiceless stops are rare (this implies at least three phonatory stop types). The common cases with three stop series is two voiceless and one voiced, or else three voiceless (in which case it is aspirated, unaspirated and ejective). The functional explanation for this asymmetry is that varieties of voiceless stops are easier to differentiate, because they have higher supraglottal pressure during closure which results in a higher-amplitude release burst, and that burst is perceptually more salient compared to the closure (which is just silence), so it's easier to tell what kind of consonant you heard. If a language were to have two kinds of voiced stops, there would be a tendency to eliminate one of the types because it's harder to hear. Sociolinguistic / areal features cannot be disregarded. Indic languages have hung onto their voicing distinctions, and Sindhi has managed to add a series (implosives). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T19:45:52.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31340" CreationDate="2019-05-06T22:53:42.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you may be looking for the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number#Paucal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paucal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; number. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paucal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paucal&lt;/a&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paucus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paucus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;a few&quot;, means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pertaining to a language form referring to a few of something (three to around ten), as a small group of people; contrast singular, dual, trial and plural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T22:53:42.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31353" CreationDate="2019-05-06T23:21:12.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see no remedy short of a human-oriented semantic analysis which can zero in on what would typically be important to a person in various situations.  If I modify your example to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For eight weeks, the police wonder whether he was tortured by X.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now the ordinary interpretation has the duration adverb going with &quot;wonder&quot; rather than with &quot;torture&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T23:21:12.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31356" CreationDate="2019-05-07T12:15:02.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things that are weird about the reconstructed stops. The first feature, the three series unvoiced, voiced, and voiced aspirated, already has been discussed in the other two answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second feature is the strange frequency distribution of the bilabial stops, out of *p, *b, and *bʰ—the voiced bilabial stop *b is the rarest (or even absent). A lack of /p/ would be natural and not surprising, but a lack of /b/ is typologically rare. This leads some researchers to the postulation of a series of ejective stops for Proto-Indogermanic (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalic_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glottalic theory&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia), but this has another difficulty: Not a single descendant of Proto-Indogermanic has preserved the ejectives, their occurrence in Armenian is secondary and due to areal effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T13:33:48.870" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T13:33:48.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31372" CreationDate="2019-05-07T22:10:02.743" Score="4" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't understand how the transition from kappa-digamma to pi-pi happened in the transition from ekwos (same etymology as latin equus) to ippo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean how did the prononciation change ? Because is it a matter of prononciation ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24520" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T07:24:22.987" Title="from ekwos to ippo : transition from kw to p in greek" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31371" CreationDate="2019-05-07T22:57:01.940" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key is, there was never a digamma in &lt;em&gt;hippos&lt;/em&gt; in the first place! (At least, not as far back as we have evidence for: there may have been one earlier than that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early Greek, like Latin, had a set of &lt;em&gt;labiovelar consonants&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, what the Romans wrote as &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; and linguists write as &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; wasn't treated as a combination of &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt; (kappa-digamma): it was a single phoneme in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a note, the tradition among Greek scholars is to write this single phoneme as &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt;, based on how the Romans did it, even though this doesn't line up with the IPA. Confusing, but it's what we're stuck with now, so &lt;em&gt;in this answer &lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt; always means a voiceless labiovelar stop&lt;/em&gt;. Some people even call it &quot;qoppa&quot;, the name of an unrelated Greek letter, which is just outright a bad idea if you want people to understand you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the oldest attested stages of Greek, the Linear B tablets from Crete, we can see that there was indeed a &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;: the word for &quot;horse&quot; is written  &lt;em&gt;i-qo&lt;/em&gt;, which represents &lt;em&gt;hiqqos&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt;, double consonants, and final &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; weren't represented in this writing system). It's not clear where the &lt;em&gt;hi&lt;/em&gt; came from, since we don't see anything similar in Latin or other languages, but that's a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; sound was never completely comfortable in Greek. It's not one of the easier or more common sounds in the world, and requires you to do something with your lips &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; with your soft palate at the same time. So over the years, Greek disposed of it, replacing it with other sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Attic in particular, &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; could turn into either &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; (keeping only the lip part), &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; (keeping only the soft palate part), or &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; (averaging the two).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Next to &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, it became &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; (the &quot;boukolos rule&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, it became &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elsewhere, it became &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why you see &lt;em&gt;tin-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;pay&quot; next to &lt;em&gt;poin-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;fine&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;thein-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;kill (v)&quot; next to &lt;em&gt;phon-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;slaughter (n)&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;bou-kol-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cowherd&quot; next to &lt;em&gt;amphi-pol-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;attendant&quot;, and so on. Note that these rules are only for Attic: this &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; consistent across dialects. Compare Latin &lt;em&gt;quis&lt;/em&gt; &quot;who&quot; and &lt;em&gt;-que&lt;/em&gt; &quot;and&quot;, Mycenaean (Linear B) &lt;em&gt;qis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-qe&lt;/em&gt;, Attic &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-te&lt;/em&gt;, Doric &lt;em&gt;kis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ke&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the word for &quot;horse&quot;, the &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; fell into the &quot;otherwise&quot; clause, so it changed from &lt;em&gt;hiqqos&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;hippos&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. While this sound change may look odd, it's not uncommon in the world. Both Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic split into two branches each, one preserving &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;, the other turning it into &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;. And much later, Romanian did the same to all of Latin's &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T01:22:31.590" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T01:22:31.590" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31356" CreationDate="2019-05-08T01:32:52.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add on to all the excellent information already provided:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PIE had some very particular rules about the shape of roots. Most PIE roots consisted of two consonants or clusters, which an ablaut vowel was inserted in between. For example, the root &lt;code&gt;*p-d-&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;walk&quot;, while &lt;code&gt;*d-ḱs-&lt;/code&gt; means &quot;right&quot; (as in the direction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there was an extra constraint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No root can contain two plain-voiced stops&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No root can contain both a voiceless stop and an aspirated-voiced stop&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;very very weird&lt;/em&gt;. Voiced stops tend to all pattern together, so plain-voiced stops and aspirated-voiced stops acting so different is unexpected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glottalic theory makes this a lot cleaner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No root can contain two ejectives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pulmonic stops must agree in voicing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are very reasonable-looking rules with equivalents in many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T01:32:52.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31371" CreationDate="2019-05-08T07:24:22.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you analyze phonemes into components, /kw/ is velar+stop+labialized. Then if you remove &quot;velar&quot;, then you have stop+labialized = /p/. So basically, the change /kw/ &gt; /p(p)/ amounts to a weakening of velarization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T07:24:22.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T08:12:56.800" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well-known that it is difficult to compete with native speakers when learning a language as an adult. But is there a similar phenomenon with writing systems? Can non-natives (e.g. of Arabic or Chinese) read and write as fast as natives for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T08:12:56.800" Title="Learning a script as an adult" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31356" CreationDate="2019-05-08T09:04:34.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic issue about the traditional system *t *d *dh is that it is extremely odd to have a series like *dh which combines voice and aspiration, when just aspiration would be enough for contrast with *t and *d. That's the core issue. Old Indian had a fourth series *th that was voiceless and aspirated, where the series *dh made sense. When this fourth series was removed from PIE, then the three series *t *d *dh no longer stand on their feet. Besides the glottalic theory is only a partial remedy to the issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T09:04:34.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31381" CreationDate="2019-05-08T11:54:35.773" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize for how this question may be perceived. I am casually learning linguistics with no curriculum. I can understand that this question may have many possible answers, but I am not quite sure how else to ask this question.  I can also understand if all that may be provided to me is some resource on lists of natural ways languages evolve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I've come up with two place names, &quot;Yallet&quot; and &quot;Helverly&quot;. I'm trying to create enough of a naming language that would allow me to create names that seem to occur naturally in the setting.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Yallet and Helverly are locations, and so I was wondering if there was a way for the root &quot;let&quot;, meaning town, to conceivably evolve to &quot;ly&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this evolution happen naturally? If so, I would happily read on such transformations. If not, I would be very appreciative of an explanation as to why it would not be a natural evolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24524" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T20:16:40.490" Title="By what means would the root &quot;let&quot; evolve to &quot;ly&quot; in a naturalistic conlang?" Tags="&lt;evolution&gt;&lt;roots&gt;&lt;conlang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T14:26:15.853" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31376/9781&quot;&gt;this answer by Arnaud Fournet&lt;/a&gt; I have this question: Do Old Indic (Vedic, Sankrit) words beginning with a voiceless aspirated stop (like ph, th, or kh) have cognates in other branches of Indogermanic? What are typical regular sound correspondences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T21:57:12.117" Title="Do Old Indian words with voiceless aspirated stops have cognates in other branches of Indogermanic?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31353" CreationDate="2019-05-08T16:36:21.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a hard problem... many vendors do a poor job of attaching prepositions (including Spacy and Allen AI), but they're all getting better. We use statistics tables to fix the attachment issues (as a post-processor). We've cached the stats of all words in the dictionary for verb-to-pp and noun-to-pp combinations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.amazonaws.com/wordnetparaphrase/verb-prep-stats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://s3.amazonaws.com/wordnetparaphrase/verb-prep-stats.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This simple trick cleans up most of the issue. Unfortunately, in your example &quot;say&quot; and &quot;torture&quot; have attachment rates that are very similar. The result can be further enhanced if you perform PP Disambiguation. There are other clues, such as PP's very rarely attach to the verb that precedes an infinitive marker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an intractable problem, it just requires some work on the part of the vendor/provider. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T16:36:21.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31378" CreationDate="2019-05-08T18:54:12.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you're asking on Linguistics instead of Constructed Languages, here's a real-world example!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at Ancient Greek (Attic/Koine dialect) &lt;em&gt;τείν-ει&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/tiːn-iː/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;she spreads&quot;, next to Latin &lt;em&gt;ten-et&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/tɛn-ɛt/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;she holds&quot; (from the same PIE root).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original vowel in the ending was &lt;code&gt;/eː/&lt;/code&gt;; Latin shortened it to &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; before final &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, and it later became &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;. Greek, on the other hand, dropped all final &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;s, and raised &lt;code&gt;/eː/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt; as part of a chain shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The difference in the first vowel is because they're from different forms of the same PIE root; it's not relevant to the sound change I'm talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T20:16:40.490" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T20:16:40.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31358" CreationDate="2019-05-08T20:55:58.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The two questions you are asking are quite dissimilar.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, very clearly the assumption seems to be that &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; has a silent /k/ and that Latin /k/ reflects PIE *k in this case, and that &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; reflects a voiced consonant as well as most of the other cognates that mean &quot;nail&quot;. The Laryngeals h2 and h3 are informed by other languages, too, Greek &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;nail&lt;/em&gt; implying h3. Overall, &lt;em&gt;unguis&lt;/em&gt; seems quite certain, according to the many references given, though there are dialectal Greek forms (see Beekes), as well as Hittite showing &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; (No &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; is known in Hittite so that shouldn't be surprising). Given the sound laws, that should be mostly a matter of arithmetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;uncus&lt;/em&gt; I am not sure. It is derived via an intermediate full grad form, from *h₂enk-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from From Proto-Indo-European *h₂ónkos (“hook”). Cognates include Ancient Greek ὄγκος (ónkos) and Sanskrit अङ्क (aṅká). [via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uncus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uncus&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantics of all three agree, and then sound laws are sought to match. &lt;em&gt;anka&lt;/em&gt; indicates *h2 (thus dubbed the a-coloring laryngeal, though I'm not sure what it yields in the environment of &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt;, apparently a &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;). Greek &lt;em&gt;ongkos&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand indicates *h3 as far as I can see, and even contains a &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;. (at that point it's notable that ny and gamma can look perceptively similar if the lower stroke of small gamma is not pronounced). We further find at *h₂enk-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;*h₂enk-os or *h₂n̥k-os&quot;, Celtic *ankos &quot;bent&quot;, deriving Celtic *ankotos &quot;hook, paw&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Germanic *angulaz, I think you can see where that is going;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Old Armenian &lt;em&gt;angł&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;ankł&lt;/em&gt; ... &quot;From Proto-Indo-European *h₂enk-u-l-, from *h₂enk- (“to bend”), referring to the bird's curved beak.&quot;, that means &quot;vulture&quot; or &quot;handle of a pot or basket&quot;; &lt;sub&gt;compare that with German &lt;em&gt;Henkel&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;handle of a mug, can, etc.&quot; supposedly from &lt;em&gt;henken&lt;/em&gt;, akin to &lt;em&gt;to hang&lt;/em&gt;, that has its own PIE root, looking similar to &lt;em&gt;Henker&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;hang-man, executor&quot;, cp. &quot;jemanden an den Haken kriegen&quot; (to catch somebody, to hook someone)?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While the reconstructions are imperfect, it's reasonable to assume that the language was diversified.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are copious reconstruction that may be grossly glossed &lt;em&gt;curved, bent&lt;/em&gt;, cp. &lt;em&gt;Ecke&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Angst, Enge&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Knick&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;anchor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;horn&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;thorn&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;corner&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;acute&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nose&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;peak&lt;/em&gt; indeed &lt;em&gt;bent, bow&lt;/em&gt; themselves ... if that's your thing I'm sure there are more the further you want to loosen the semantics,  In the end one has to concede that PIE is meant to reconstruct a full blown language. Connecting the roots below that level is a different task and for the most part very much uncertain. So it's possible that you have stumbled on an coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the saying goes: &lt;em&gt;If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.&lt;/em&gt; Be careful not to hit your finger-nails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's one more observation to make. Ger Unke (a kind of frog?) leads to *h₂éngʷʰis (“snake”). Whereas &lt;em&gt;snake&lt;/em&gt; leads to *sneg- &quot;to crawl; a creeping thing&quot; which has been compared to *(s)neh1- &quot;to sew, ..?&quot; (whence &lt;em&gt;needle&lt;/em&gt;), see e.g. [Kloekhorst 2014:4](*sneg- (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kloekhorst.nl/Publications.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.kloekhorst.nl/Publications.html&lt;/a&gt;). I'd add that snake teeth make good needles; And that needles may be hook shaped. Or a finger nail? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more: The root *h2ek- &quot;sharp&quot; is so general, that it might as well connect both your words. Given &lt;em&gt;ex&lt;/em&gt;, *eghs-~*eks- (and other alternatives), plus idioms like &quot;to peak out&quot; a whole paradigm seems to crop up. Words meaning &lt;em&gt;to cut, break, divide, share&lt;/em&gt; are rather numerous, too, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tangentially: I see no satisfying reason why wood work nails should be akin to finger nails, other than being sharp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid, in the end this the nature of this forum seeking definite answers is not well suited to the question at hand. So, I could go on and on, but without providing a definite answer according to the standard, so let's cut it short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T21:33:20.567" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T21:33:20.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31379" CreationDate="2019-05-08T21:57:12.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a rule, the voiceless aspirates are a dialectal feature. In most languages, they cannot be distinguished from plain voiceless.&#xA;As regards *kh, the typical pattern is Old Indian kh, Armenian x, Greek k(h). For example, in a potentially onomatopeic verb: *kakh- &quot;to laugh&quot;, where probably no laryngeal is involved.&#xA;As regards *th, typically Old Indian th, Armenian t, Greek t(h), very often preceded by initial s- as in *st(h)eH- &quot;to stand&quot;, cf. *pont(H)- &quot;path, way through&quot;, *ost(H)- &quot;bone&quot;.&#xA;As regards *ph, typically Old Indian ph, Armenian ph, Greek p(h), a good example is *(s-)phol- &quot;to fall&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T21:57:12.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31345" CreationDate="2019-05-08T23:35:48.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have anything to say about this particular correlation. However, it is not uncommon to find that there are many PIE &quot;roots&quot; that seem to be sprung themselves from a common &quot;taproot&quot; with semantic coherence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;once ran across this&lt;/a&gt; in the set of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/st.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English simplex words beginning with *st-&lt;/a&gt;, which includes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;stave stab stiff stub stitch stem stand stair step still steep stool&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These (and others) mostly sort out into &lt;code&gt;Leg/Walk&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;One-Dimensional Vertical&lt;/code&gt;, semantically. This suggests that they might come from some PIE root.&#xA;In fact, most do, but they don't come from the same one. &#xA;There turn out to be a &lt;strong&gt;LOT&lt;/strong&gt; of PIE roots with this particular meaning, viz (the example words are English cognates):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*stā- ‘To stand, with derivatives meaning “place or thing that is standing”’ (Pok sta- 1004):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;style, stand, steed, stud, stay, stage, stamen, stem, station, static, stable, stoic, store, steer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*steigh- ‘To stride, step, rise’ (Pok steigh- 1017): &lt;em&gt;stile, stirrup, stickle, distich, acrostic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*steu- ‘To push, stick, knock, beat’ (Pok 2. steu- 1025)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stub, stoop, stutter, stock, stoke, steep&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*stel- ‘To put, stand; with derivatives referring to a standing object or place’ (Pok 3. stel- 1019):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stolon, stalk, stele, stilt, pedestal, stolid, stall, stout&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*ster- ‘Stiff’ (Pok 5. ster- 1029):&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stare, starch, stork, starve, stark, stern, strut, start, stark, startle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*stebh- ‘Post, stem; to support, place firmly on, fasten’ (Pok steb(h)- 1011):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stoop, staff, staple, stump, stamp, stomp, stave&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*steip- ‘To stick, compress’ (Pok steib(h)- 1015)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stubble, stiff, stipple&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*steg- ‘Pole, stick’ (Pok 2. (s)teg- 1014)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stake, stack, stagger&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*stegh- ‘To stick, prick; pointed’ (Pok stegh- 1014)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;stair, stick, sting, stigma, stimulate, stag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this means, of course, is that PIE had predecessors and dialects, which is hardly a surprise. It's just that that's as far back as the comparative method can go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T23:35:48.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-09T03:22:27.513" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ancient Greeks used both words and appeared to have originated both. The first form appears first in 517BC by Hecateus of Milietus. The word is still known in the 12th century AD where it's used in the Alexiad to describe Franks. The word is supposedly from a Celtic word referring to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Galatai though is taken (by modern linguists) to be from a Celtic word 'galos' and was used to describe the Celts who invaded Anatolia. The state of Galatia later named for them. No mention of where the t came from though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greeks used the two terms indiscriminately so my question is whether these words could have come from the same original word? I'm not a linguist and what I've seen so far doesn't address these words together but as separate things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24526" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T03:22:27.513" Title="Relation between keltoi and galatai?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29752" CreationDate="2019-05-09T19:16:56.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scottish has a trill, not a rhotic for R. Since &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; changed to &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt;, it is rather obvious that it was pronounced at the tip of the tongue, not the back. Otherwise I'd have doubts that I'm confusing Scottish with an Irish accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that next to perception (as mentioned in another answer), production might also play a role, especially for children (&lt;em&gt;I wuv you vewy much&lt;/em&gt; and the like). I agree that it is awkward (also compare &lt;em&gt;arkward&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;awkward&lt;/em&gt;, such coincidences). In particular, the sequence of the tongue through the mouth stresses antagonistic muscles repeatedly in succession for those letters. Naturally, the tongue get's cramped only after the succession, but &lt;em&gt;grama&lt;/em&gt; would obviously clash with a word that's reserved? On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;glamour&lt;/em&gt; might be a glorious egg-corn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate I just wanted to note the trill or tap, which was alluded to in prior comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-05-09T19:16:56.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21556" CreationDate="2019-05-10T03:03:17.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see people have talked more on borrowing scripts to write words but less on the origin of words.&#xA;When I look at Thai words(I am not a linguistic expert) I find a lot of words directly from Sanskrit. It looks as if Sanskrit had far great influence in Thailand area at some or most parts of last 1000 years or so which is also evident from Hindu(Sanatan Dharma) cultural influence in Thailand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24536" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T03:03:17.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1642" CreationDate="2019-05-10T05:27:07.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Historical Linguistics: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; by Lyle Campbell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) In Old French livel (from which English borrowed level), the sequence of two l’s dissimilated, giving nivel, which became Modern French niveau ‘level’ through subsequent sound changes which affected the final l.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's a [n] &amp;lt;- [l] case!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T05:27:07.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31399" CreationDate="2019-05-10T09:04:06.567" Score="20" ViewCount="2470" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first syllable in &quot;about&quot; (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the &quot;salad&quot; ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in salad it sounds more like the i in &quot;trick&quot;.&#xA;mountain ('maʊntən) also has a schwa at the end, but to me it doesn't sound like about, much more like the sound in trick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it a consistent sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24538" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-05-11T23:27:39.243" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T17:11:56.870" Title="Is the schwa sound consistent?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31398" CreationDate="2019-05-10T09:28:30.707" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not. The English sound transcribed as &quot;schwa&quot; (ə) is known to be quite variable. There are a number of things that affect how it sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In American accents, it's common for a &quot;schwa&quot; to be more similar to an an [ɪ] sound (the &quot;i&quot; in &quot;trick&quot;) when it's in the middle of a word. For many American English speakers, there is no consistently perceptible contrast between /ə/ and /ɪ/ in unstressed word-internal syllables (this has been called the &quot;weak vowel merger&quot;). Sometimes the merged vowel is transcribed as [ɨ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;schwa&quot; before an /n/ is often realized as a &quot;syllabic nasal consonant&quot;, which can be transcribed as [n̩].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a previous answer post I wrote that has some more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29031/5581&quot;&gt;When should I use /ə/ or /ɪ/ and why does it seem like they're not used correctly?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some additional comments about IPA transcription, since some comments and other answers have brought up that topic. IPA can be used either to represent certain phonetic vowel qualities (in this use, it is an approximation, since vowels differ along a multi-dimensional continuum but IPA letters are discrete), or to represent certain distinctive features of elements of a language's sound system (this is a &quot;phonological&quot; transcription). In generic transcriptions of the kind you find in a dictionary, it doesn't necessarily represent your pronunciation, or the pronunciation that you are used to hearing; it might represent a conventionalized standard or the way that the word used to be pronounced. So there is potentially a lot of space between an IPA transcription and the actual phonetic form of a word's pronunciation. The use of the symbol &quot;schwa&quot;  in a transcription could mean &quot;this word is pronounced with a phonetically mid-central vowel&quot;, or it could mean &quot;this word acts in the phonological system of (some variety of) English like it has a fully unstressed vowel in this position&quot;, or it could mean &quot;in the most influential historical accents of English, this word was pronounced with a phonetically mid-central vowel&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T00:40:47.963" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T00:40:47.963" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-10T15:16:51.917" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's have formalisation of grammaticality judgments in some deduction system. Is it possible to learn/induce grammar from rules that govern grammaticality judgments? Is there theory, that connects grammar rueles as stated in the everyday grammar books and that usually make references to the semantics from the one side and more or less formal grammar (e.g. context free grammar) from the other side. How all that is connected to grammaticality judgments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14372" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:16:51.917" Title="Grammar induction from grammaticality rules" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-10T15:32:02.393" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In software languages, we have a small set of terms to indicate a rule: &lt;em&gt;if, then, else, upon, while, otherwise, case, etc.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In specification writing, we use terms like: &quot;MUST&quot;, &quot;MUST NOT&quot;, &quot;REQUIRED&quot;, &quot;SHALL&quot;, &quot;SHALL NOT&quot;, &quot;SHOULD&quot;, &quot;SHOULD NOT&quot;, &quot;RECOMMENDED&quot;,  &quot;MAY&quot;, and &quot;OPTIONAL&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contract law, you'll see: &lt;em&gt;&quot;have to&quot;, &quot;is mandatory&quot;, &quot;is required&quot;, etc.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question: Has there been any formal analysis on the 'language of rules'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:45:17.010" Title="Terms to Indicate Rules" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31403" CreationDate="2019-05-10T15:45:17.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sentence logic, aka propositional logic, studies sentence connectives And, Or, Implies, Not, and for modal logic, Necessarily, Possibly.  Is that what you mean by &quot;rule&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:45:17.010" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11531" CreationDate="2019-05-10T23:31:54.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without loss of generality, let's consider a bigram model (looking at two words at a time), without a beginning or end marker. Let's also assume our language has at least one sentence of length two, at least one sentence of length three, and at least one sentence of length four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the probability of seeing the sentence &quot;I am&quot;, with nothing before or after it? In our model, it would be $P(&quot;I&quot;) \times P(&quot;am&quot;|&quot;I&quot;)$: the odds of seeing &quot;I&quot;, times the odds of seeing &quot;am&quot; when you've already seen &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what's the probability of seeing &lt;em&gt;any sentence of length two&lt;/em&gt; in this model? We can see it should be $\sum_v \sum_w P(v) \times P(w|v)$: same as above, but summing over all possible words instead of just &quot;I&quot; and &quot;am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is the same as $\sum_v P(v) \sum_w P(w|v) = \sum_v P(v) \times 1$, by laws of probability. And we know that $\sum_v P(v) = 1$. Therefore the probability of having a sentence of length two is 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is a problem. Because we know that there are also sentences that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; length two. You can repeat this proof with length three, and find that the probability of having a sentence of length three is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; 1. And same for four, and so on…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we want the probability of seeing &lt;em&gt;a sentence&lt;/em&gt; to be 1, because that's how probability works, which means the probability of seeing a sentence of length two (and the probability of seeing a sentence with length three, and…) has to be &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; than 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out, adding a sentence-end marker fixes this. Because now when we're taking that sum over $v$ and $w$, we can specify that $w=&quot;&amp;lt;/s&gt;&quot;$, and the sum becomes $\sum_v P(v,&quot;&amp;lt;/s&gt;&quot;)$, which is significantly &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; than 1. I won't prove it here, but you can go through some tedious probability math to show that adding beginning and ending markers makes the probability distribution valid (the probability of seeing a sentence at all is now 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If you find the LaTeX source fragments annoying to read, vote &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/509/10559&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; to get proper rendering support on this site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T23:31:54.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30893" CreationDate="2019-05-11T11:22:17.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dissatisfaction may be analyzed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dis + satis + fact + ion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; comes from the supine, or 4th part of the Latin verb facio, factum. When the Latin suffix is removed, we get the English base &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt;, which is also present in PDE in the words, factor, benefaction, factory and artifact and of course in the free base, fact. Bases in PDE frequently come from the second and fourth principal parts of the Latin verb form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no *&amp;lt;-tion&gt; suffix! (There isn't an *&amp;lt;-sion&gt; suffix either!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T11:22:17.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-11T13:01:38.530" Score="0" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;If *h1 were a glottal stop, and virtually all German word initial vowels have implicit glottal stop then would the claim about regular laryngeal loss have to be revised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a rather recent development from the Hittite camp led by Kloekhorst claiming (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laryngeal_theory&lt;/a&gt;) that *h1 may have been a glottal stop. Assuming that were true, ignoring the other Laryngeals for the moment, and assuming that glottals were never signed in western alphabets, this would mean that we can hardly tell whether Laryngeals were lost. We don't know how precise the Laryngeal theory is, of course. If all Germanic vowel-onsets include a glottal plosive&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, then there's no particular significance to finding words among them that are reconstructed with the laryngeal. At least that fact doesn't negate the claim either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;I need to know what show stoppers to look out for&lt;/strong&gt;, before searching for the coincidence of a PIE-German pair fulfilling this constraint, which shouldn't be hard to find. Any other IE language that is not aspirated, if that's the principal divide, would also work. Primarily, if the glottal plosive vowel onset is evidently an innovation, then the whole idea would be junk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1: Calling an onset a stop is just counter-intuitive. Tangentially to the phonetics, Arabic for example notes &lt;em&gt;hamza&lt;/em&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hamza&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wt:de:Hamza&lt;/a&gt; equates to the sound in German &lt;em&gt;beachte&lt;/em&gt; [bəˈʔaxtə], though I was under the impression that there's a slight difference. My Arabic is certainly weak. &lt;em&gt;ayn&lt;/em&gt; is also a noteworthy tangent, because that's a pharyngeal, though that's a different matter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: One example might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%81er-#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h1er-&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;earth&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare that to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/George&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George&lt;/a&gt;, supposedly from γῆ (gê) &quot;earth&quot; + ἔργον (érgon), PIE *werǵ- &quot;work&quot;. The root of γῆ is uncertain, supposed to be &quot;Pre-Greek&quot; or &quot;Pre-Proto-Indo-European&quot;. So there'd be more at stake than internal reconstruction, if *h1er- and *werǵ- should relate via &lt;em&gt;George&lt;/em&gt;. Note that Personal names are frequently subject to folk etymology. Possibly related, *h₂éǵros gives &lt;em&gt;agros&lt;/em&gt; &quot;field, achre&quot; (&lt;em&gt;agrarian&lt;/em&gt; etc.); Indeed, wiktionary links *h1er- to *h₂erh₃- &quot;to plough&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T17:47:15.430" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T17:47:15.430" Title="If *h1 were a glottal stop, and virtually all German word initial vowels have an implicit glottal stop" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31398" CreationDate="2019-05-11T14:08:19.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sure opinions about this will differ from mine, but in my view, a schwa is always a schwa -- a specific sound articulated in a specific way.  It is that sound articulated when a vowel is pronounced without raising the tongue from its neutral position, or lowering it, or backing it, or fronting it, or rounding the lips, or modifying it with any other secondary articulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't doubt that very often phonologists will transcribe a schwa when they hear a vowel somewhat higher or fronter than a real schwa.  I myself am not above doing this.  But it's a mistake, or at least remarkably sloppy. We want to be studying the actual sounds of a language, not linguists' transcriptional practices. The use of the schwa phonetic symbol as a sort of cover symbol for several different sounds is a fact of linguists, not a fact of language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T14:08:19.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31410" CreationDate="2019-05-11T15:33:01.363" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, a glottal stop is inserted before a vowel-initial morpheme, when that morpheme does not come immediately after a consonant. It never forms minimal pairs, and its distribution is completely predictable. In other words, it's pretty clearly not a phoneme of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to show that laryngeals survived in some language, you'll need to show that the reflex of a word with a laryngeal, looks different from the reflex of a word without one. In German, this isn't the case: a glottal stop appears in all vowel-initial words, regardless of whether the PIE root had a laryngeal or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T21:44:38.773" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T21:44:38.773" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31398" CreationDate="2019-05-11T23:05:22.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Greg Lee's observation is on target. The question posed presupposes without argument that the unstressed vowels of 'salad' and 'about' are [ə]. That is classic question-begging, at least for most American dialects. The standard procedure for phonemic analysis is to analyze the distribution of surface segments of a phonetically-transcribed corpus and determine whether certain segments are contextually-predictable and are in complementary distribution with some other segments. We don't know by divine authority that the unstressed vowels in 'about, abut, upper, salad' etc. are phonemically &quot;schwa&quot;. We do know that in about, abut the first vowel phonetically matches IPA standard for [ə]. It is entirely credible to phonemicize the unstressed vowel of 'salad' as [ɪ], just as one would phonemicize the unstressed vowel of ignore as [ɪ]. It is also well-known that [ə] and [ʌ] are in complementary distribution (the latter is only unstressed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a phonological rule neutralizing unstressed vowels in certain positions, which leads to vowel quality neutralizations associated with stress changes: for example [ˈtɛlVgræf], [tVˈlɛgrVfi]; [ˈdɛmVkrat], [dVˈmakrVsi]; [ˌkætVˈstrafVk], [kVˈtæstrVfi]. The realization of that vowel V varies in American English between [ɪ ɨ ə]. There is no phonological argument that the output of reduction must be treated as [ə], as opposed to [ɨ], [ɪ], or [ʌ]. IMO the prior question is &quot;what vowel is in this token of this word?&quot;, so that we face the individual variability of the initial vowel of [əˈtamɪk] ~ [ɨˈtamɪk] and [tɪˈlɛgrəfi] ~ [tɨˈlɛgrəfi]. But what is the &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; value of the vowel in these words? It's obvious, in these examples: /æ/ versus /ɛ/. In 'solid' we can tell that the unstressed vowel is /ɪ/ because of 'solidity'. Since there hardly ever or never is actual [ə] is 'salad' (it's usually [ɪ]), there's no reason to posit abstract 'schwa' in that word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T23:05:22.523" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31398" CreationDate="2019-05-11T23:18:09.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even phonetically, the schwa has stood for any &quot;obscure&quot; or &quot;neutral&quot; vowel that is not attributable to a particular peripheral (&quot;cardinal&quot;) value for much of the IPA's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Aim and Principles of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt; (1904: 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt; stands for any obscure vowel, like the first of English &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. When it is found useful to distinguish &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; such vowels, the closer one may be written &lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt; and the opener &lt;strong&gt;ɐ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Principles of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt; (1949: 7):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Association also recommends that the letter &lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt; be employed to denote any unrounded vowel situated in the interior triangle (see Fig. 4). If a language contains two unrounded central vowels, it is recommended that &lt;strong&gt;ə&lt;/strong&gt; be used to denote the closer one and &lt;strong&gt;ɐ&lt;/strong&gt; for the opener one. Occasionally the form &lt;strong&gt;ɜ&lt;/strong&gt; may be employed to represent another variety of central vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig. 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nhR2e.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was only in 1993 that [ɘ ɵ ɜ ɞ] came to represent the current values, and they are still little employed as defined in the current IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T17:11:56.870" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T17:11:56.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29989" CreationDate="2019-05-12T15:46:47.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many in Sanskrit    सतासत्    n.  satAsat true and the false   See Monier Williams Sanskrit Dictionary at&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spokensanskrit.org/index.php?mode=3&amp;amp;tran_input=satAsat&amp;amp;direct=se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.spokensanskrit.org/index.php?mode=3&amp;amp;tran_input=satAsat&amp;amp;direct=se&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Other samAsas or joining words examples like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;happiness + sorrow = happiness &amp;amp; sorrow&#xA;सुख | दुक्ख = सुखदुक्ख&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;true+ false = true and false&#xA;सत्य | असत्य = सत्यासत्य&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;strong +weak= strong &amp;amp; weak&#xA;बल | अबल = बलाबल&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24561" LastEditorUserId="24561" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T21:37:25.223" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T21:37:25.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31434" CreationDate="2019-05-12T16:05:52.267" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any sciencific/linguistic/historical theories about reasons of absence of sibilants in some Australian languages? As far as I know, sibilants are common accross world languages. Since sibilants are common, it would be nice to hear/read any theory about lacking of sibilant sounds in Australia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T16:15:59.553" Title="Australia - absence of sibilants" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3717" CreationDate="2019-05-12T18:48:06.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In India almost all children speak more than one language, especially because languages change every hundred or so miles. I spoke Tamil at home and spoke Kannada outside when we moved to Karnataka. I was fluent in both. Most of my friends spoke Kannada at school (and play) but other languages at home, Telugu, Marati etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24561" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T18:48:06.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31428" CreationDate="2019-05-12T19:36:58.097" Score="0" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the depicted letter, in my opinion, is &quot;and&quot;, but what is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.originalbibles.com/wycliffe-bible-new-testament-1400-pdf/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its (page 61)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://old.bibleonline.ru/bible/eng/41/01/#15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mk.1:15&lt;/a&gt; name? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/57Qrt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/57Qrt.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24563" LastEditorDisplayName="user24563" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T19:42:22.283" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T15:45:12.347" Title="What is the name of this Middle English letter?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31427" CreationDate="2019-05-12T20:36:40.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an ampersand, which nowadays looks like &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;/code&gt;. The version in this text is a combination of &lt;code&gt;E&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, because the Latin word for &quot;and&quot; is &lt;em&gt;et&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; ſaide, þat þe tyme is fulfillid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;amp; þe kyngdome of god ſthal come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nyȝ, do ȝe penance; &amp;amp; bileue ȝe to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  þe goſpel, and as he paſſide biſi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  des þe ſee of galile, he ſaye ſym&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern spelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and said, that the time is fulfilled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and the kingdom of God shall come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nigh, do ye penance; and believe ye to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the Gospel, and as he passed besi-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -de the Sea of Galilee, he saw Sim-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; in the second-last word is an outright error; it should be a &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, &lt;em&gt;shall&lt;/em&gt; shouldn't have a &lt;em&gt;t&lt;/em&gt; in it, even in Wycliffe's time: if anything that should be a &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T15:45:12.347" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T15:45:12.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31258" CreationDate="2019-05-13T07:56:07.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;EPP entails that [Spec; TP] must be filled. However, the subject can move out from [Spec; TP] to an adjunct position, leaving a trace at [Spec; TP]. An example of such a movement is topicalization, which is an A'-movement and follows many properties of wh-movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24566" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T07:56:07.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31423" CreationDate="2019-05-13T09:36:47.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that a phenomenon known in biology as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;founder effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is responsible here: When the proto-language lacks fricatives, its descendants probably continue with this particular feature. In addition, on the isolated continent there was no contact with other languages that could give raise to fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T09:36:47.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31423" CreationDate="2019-05-13T10:15:23.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading about a hypothesis that Australian languages may have been influenced by high-frequency hearing loss caused by otitis media. High frequencies are supposed to be more important for accurately perceiving certain kinds of fricatives, perhaps sibilants in particular (as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9678/why-is-f-ambiguous-between-f-and-s-after-saying-the-word-three?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;--I can't give an explanation myself because I don't know phonetics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that idea mentioned by Andrew Butcher on the following web pages: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5068481&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The special nature of Australian phonologies: Why auditory constraints on the sound systems of human languages are not universal&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &#xA;The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 144, 1939 (2018) (abstract).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I haven't been able to read more than the abstract, and I also can't find any other work that has cited this article.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Australian phonologies and Aboriginal hearing&quot;, Seminar by Andy Butcher, Professor at Flinders University, Adelaide and Visiting Fellow of The Cairns Institute, March 5th 2012 (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jcu.edu.au/the-cairns-institute/publications-of-the-cairns-institute/e-lectures/australian-phonologies-and-aboriginal-hearing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About the Seminar&lt;/a&gt;&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T10:29:30.287" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T10:29:30.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31423" CreationDate="2019-05-13T16:15:59.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problems with attributing this fact to &lt;em&gt;otitis media&lt;/em&gt; are (a) that given &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6219068/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this study&lt;/a&gt;, the causes of the condition may be modern environmental and not genetic and (b) it also afflicts populations that don't have the sibilant gap. One could conjecture that OM is a minor contributing factor.&#xA;A founder effect combined with areal diffusion seems the most plausible explanation. The weakness of the founder effect is that there are dozens of language families and isolates in Australia, though again that may be because the original language was spoken so long ago that we can't prove monogenesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Areal diffusion refers to the fact that people in contact who speak different languages tend to adopt features of each other's languages (perhaps asymmetrically depending on social relationships). This is evident in southern Africa, where the &quot;Khoisan&quot; language hypothesis seems to have been based on typological similarity. An example of an areally-connected gap is the lack of otherwise linguisticaly-universal nasals in Twana and Lushootseed (Salishan), Quileute (Chemakuan) and Makah and Ditidaht (Southern Wakasah). It is also reported that one finds lack of [s] but presence of [θ/ð] is Dinka, Lango, Didinga and Kikuyu – the latter is Bantu, the former are Nilo-Saharan. However, these languages are in reasonable proximity and this fact might be attributed to an areal phonetic property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should point out that the factual generalization is a little bit overstated for Australia at least at the phonetic level. I noticed a number of papers in the O'Grady festschrift (&lt;em&gt;Boundary rider&lt;/em&gt;) report fricatives as allophones of stops in a number of Australian languages. Sibilantization of θ,ð is possible albeit not common. I should also point out that sibilants are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; common in the world's languages. Stop are common. It is correct that most languages have a sibilant consonant, and sibilant-free languages are uncommon. It's good practice to state the generalization correctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T16:15:59.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30946" CreationDate="2019-05-13T16:39:11.290" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let's consider noisy environment as barely equal to fast speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is related to several variables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Differences between words – the more different words are, the more likely you are able to correct mishearings. I don't see a simple metric here. Sometimes, there are pairs of two similarly sounding words that are unlikely to be confused, as just ome of them makes sense in such context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Typical speech speed – the slower people are speaking, the more likely you are able to correct mishearings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word length – the longer words, the larger differences between words can be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wanted to make an artificial language we could optimize all those three variables to some point. After reaching the point, you cannot optimize one of them without sacrifying some other of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can increase differences between words, but you need to increase their length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can increase typical speech speed, but you need more significant differences between words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can decrease word length at cost of sacrificing differences between words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, any language with great redundancy is likely to be spoken fast (because they can) and any language with small redundancy is likely to be spoken slowly (because they need to). Imagine you speak your native language as fast as you can, so others still understand it well. It doesn't really matter what you language is; in any case, the ability of correction of mishearings will be about the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might think than dialects of Ostrava (people speek really fast) and Prague (people speak really slow) are counter-examples. This might be the case when people from those two areas meet. But people from both areas have their own ability to handle fast speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is any relation to writing system. A native language is both evolved and learned in the spoken form in the first place. Written form more or less follows the spoken form, and it is usually more or less behind. (English – written form is much behind of the spoken form; Czech – written form is slightly behind, see differences between I and Y or Ú and Ů or transition from W to V.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21478" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T16:39:11.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T11:10:08.610" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;For each of the following sentences I have been asked to: &#xA;1) State which binding principle applies to all relevant elements &#xA;2) Identify the antecedent (If none then state so) &#xA;3) State if the element is bound or free. If it is bound, is it bound locally? &#xA;4) State where there are any controlled PROs and what they are controlled by. (where there are 2 grammatical readings, analyse both using indices to disambiguate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sentences: &#xA;a)I think the student loves herself &#xA;b)Peter claimed that he likes himself c)Lucy tried to promote herself d)John suspected that she misled him&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a) I believe that the reflexive 'herself,' conforms to Binding Principle A because it is bound in its binding domain and the antecedent for this is 'the student'/'student' with it being bound locally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help going through some of the other ones as I am finding binding principles quite confusing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24579" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T12:19:10.620" Title="Binding Principles" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31443" CreationDate="2019-05-14T12:19:10.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(a) The antecedent is 'the student', which 'locally binds' 'herself' conforming to Principle A of BT (Reflexives must be locally bound/governed). &lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) There two binding properties: (i) The anntecedent is 'he', which 'locally binds' 'himself'=Principle A, and (ii) The antecedent is 'Peter' bidning the pronoun 'he', Principle B=pronouns must be bound oustdie their governing domain (CP). &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) There's a PRO element which is 'optional', it can either be controlled by the matrix subject 'Lucy', or be free. It can also bind the reflexive 'herself', Principle A. I vouch for the second option here. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) The antecedent is 'john' binding 'him', principle B of BT, no local binding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T12:19:10.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T12:26:09.370" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a comparative syntactic project on the notion 'causative', either morphologically marked or non-marked. References like Haspelmath (1987) provide some (brief) data on the notion of causative/anticausative in a crosslinguistic manner, still I need more references on causatives in Turkish and Russian to explore this notion in different syntactic environements and see how it interact with the passive. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be grateful if you could refer me to somere references on causatives (&amp;amp; passives) in Russian or Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T12:26:09.370" Title="Data on causatives in Russian and Turkish needed!" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;&lt;russian&gt;&lt;passive&gt;&lt;causative&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-14T15:39:57.693" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a Hungarian (I believe) fairytale about a girl named Ribike. You can find it here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com/2019/04/c-is-for-currant-girl-to-z-challenge.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com/2019/04/c-is-for-currant-girl-to-z-challenge.html?m=1&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It’s said that the heroine’s name was derived from the word “currant”. So I used it as a nickname once and was told that “ribike” actually means something sex-related in Hungarian. Is it true? Is there a word “ribike” in Hungarian at all? I haven’t found anything in the dictionary, but it decided to check if it’s maybe some sort of slang.&#xA;Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24580" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T16:19:28.007" Title="Is there a word “ribike” in Hungarian?" Tags="&lt;hungarian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-05-25T02:23:59.810" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31447" CreationDate="2019-05-14T16:19:28.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia gives Magyar &lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribiszke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ribiszke&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for the members of the currant family &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ribes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T16:19:28.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31450" CreationDate="2019-05-14T17:42:54.877" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Thai speaker (I’m not sure about their fluency or what regional variants they use) told me that 1) the particles ครับ and ค่ะ are essentially only taught to foreigners and have very little usage among native Thai speakers and that 2) the idea that different particles are used by different genders is also false. It’s possible they actually meant that the use of polite particles (and gendered particles) is more like a regional variant, and is rare amongst native Thai speakers rather than nonexistent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Discussion of these particles is so ubiquitous, I find it hard to believe they don’t exist at all, but I could certainly believe their significance is heavily exaggerated. On a continuum from “ค่ะ and  ครับ are myths only taught to and used with tourists” to “the terms are ubiquitous in most Thai speech,” where does the truth lie? If they do exist at all, is there indeed a gendered divide in which particle is used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10833" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T19:55:07.237" Title="How common are the “politeness particles” in Thai?" Tags="&lt;thai&gt;&lt;particles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31449" CreationDate="2019-05-14T19:55:07.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was there in the rural areas and they used the particles among each other as well. A lot of standard phrases wouldn't even sound right without it - like Kop Kun Kaa/Kap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is used intensively in flirting - the women pronouncing the Kaa in an overtly feminine way if they are in a playful mood. While the men, with or without flirt intentions, try to pronounce the particle as masculine as possible, so it sounds more like Xep, if they want to sound impressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In formal or touristy situations they may use it in more situations, and more pronounced. And some people may not be using it a lot, even deliberately avoid it. There might also be some people who avoid it for reasons of egalitarianism, not forcing people of diverse gender to come out to everyone and so on - I can't say much about developments in the last 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24262" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T19:55:07.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26758" CreationDate="2019-05-14T21:29:25.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is a strong 'sort of, not really, but there are some very few examples.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon of sound symbolism](&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&lt;/a&gt;) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ideophones&lt;/a&gt; is attested (within languages). But it's just not that common. All languages have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; small handful of onomatopoeia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The naive, folk-understanding of language is that words mean what they say. A dog is a dog is a dog, that's the way you say it and it means dog. But any study of languages beyond that shows that the sound sequences are arbitrary. After lots of study of these arbitrary sets, some of these sets seem not to be so entirely arbitrary and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; languages seem to have a few more than others. Korea, Japanese, and Swahili have lexical classes of ideophones that have thousands of words. English seems to have mostly just barnyards words and 'gl-' seems like a weak example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross-language ideophones are almost non-existent, and even the 'bilabial nasal for mom and dental stop for dad' universal isn't &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether this is widely known by all linguists and accepted seriously as something beyond folk-linguistics, I don't know. But there do exist &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; articles by &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; serious linguists in &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; respected linguistics journals: Dingemanse, Mark; Schuerman, Will; Reinisch, Eva; Tufvesson, Sylvia; Mitterer, Holger (2016). &quot;What sound symbolism can and cannot do: testing the iconicity of ideophones from five languages&quot;. Language. 92 (2): –117-e133. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0034.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea does have the taint of crackpottery (like trisecting an angle for mathematicians), but there is a reasonably studied phenomenon that is not particularly common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T21:29:25.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30343" CreationDate="2019-05-15T10:34:36.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possible, yes, but I don't know an example. But the following comes pretty close to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Slavonic languages on the Balkans form a somewhat broken ring, almost encircling the Hungarian and Romanian language area: Going counterclockwise from Ukrainian via Ruthenian and Slovak to (first gap in the ring) Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian there is a dialect continuum. Between Bulgarian and Ukrainian is the second gap in the ring, when it were closed along the Black sea coast, Bulgarian and Ukrainian would exhibit a hard language boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T10:34:36.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-15T13:24:27.770" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists claim that subordination is universal across the world languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subordination in English looks can be understood by looking into these examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I know a person who has a dog&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I know a person who has a dog which barks at a cat&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I know a person who has a dog which barks at a cat which lives in a house&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;I know a person who has a dog which barks at a cat which lives in a house which is located in a city which ....&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get the idea...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how could we translate the longest English sentence from the examples into Chinese (with preserving the subordination), that is, leave everything in one sentence.&#xA;like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;我知道一个的人。&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;我知道一个有狗的人。&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no Chinese nor English native speaker, but my intuition is telling me that this sentence, however unnatural, sounds more naturally in English than in Chinese, is that the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even have doubts if subordination really exists in Chinese...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14690" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T17:51:03.060" Title="Subordination. Chinese vs English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;subordination&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30343" CreationDate="2019-05-15T15:36:58.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abarnert laid out quite nicely the reasons why this doesn't really happen. But you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; sometimes get &quot;rings&quot;: they're just a whole lot smaller and form for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In northern Iberia, for example, the local Romance languages form a naturally-evolved dialect continuum from east to west. But in the south, there are hard boundaries between them. This could be seen as a very small ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is politics rather than evolution, though. The southern Romance dialects (like Mozarabic) got displaced by Arabic during the conquest of al-'Andalus, and then Arabic was displaced by Romance again in the Reconquista. But by that point each of the Christian kingdoms had a national language, and the hard political boundaries between them didn't allow the natural dialect continua that formed in the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T15:36:58.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31457" CreationDate="2019-05-15T16:19:29.013" Score="6" ViewCount="1087" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that the internal area of the human mouth is approximately a square, why the vowels pronunciation chart is usually represented by a trapezoid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastEditorUserId="24588" LastEditDate="2019-05-15T19:31:14.047" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T19:31:14.047" Title="Why is vowel phonology represented in a trapezoid instead of a square?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31455" CreationDate="2019-05-15T18:41:36.577" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original reason was, &quot;&lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɑ]&lt;/code&gt; sound less different than &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[u]&lt;/code&gt;&quot;. It seemed &lt;em&gt;intuitively&lt;/em&gt; like there was less &quot;space&quot; between front and back low vowels, so they drew less space on that part of the diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, though, the reasons are acoustic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position of a vowel on the trapezoid is actually an objective, measurable quantity: the &quot;formant frequencies&quot;. There's a longer explanation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/28968/10559&quot;&gt;this other answer&lt;/a&gt;, but the formants are basically a mathematical representation of how our vocal tract is shaping the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modern vowel diagram plots F1 (the first formant) from top to bottom, and F2-F1 (the difference between the first two formants) from right to left. And this ends up giving the nice, distinctive IPA trapezoid shape!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is an objective reason it looks like a trapezoid, it's not just an artifact of early phonetics work. But what is this reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it has to do with the human tongue: when the tongue is raised toward the roof of the mouth (a high vowel), there's a lot of freedom to move it forward and backward (making front and back vowels). When it's lowered (a low vowel), there's not as much freedom. So the space of low vowels is, quite simply, smaller than the space of high vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T18:41:36.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31455" CreationDate="2019-05-15T18:41:44.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The physiological reason is that the tongue has a greater front-back range when the tongue is raised, as compare to when it is lowered, especially in that it can go further forward. Earlier, formants were simply plotted F1 vs F2, but the contemporary calculation is based on a modified relation which mimics the articulatory trapezoid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T18:41:44.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31461" CreationDate="2019-05-15T19:15:40.383" Score="12" ViewCount="1607" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wals.info/feature/142A#2/30.8/145.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paralinguistic clicks&lt;/a&gt; are quite common across world's languages. But paralinguistic clicks usually appears as &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ideophones&lt;/a&gt;. But why is Africa the only continent that uses click consonants? Are there any theories/speculation/hypotheses for why click languages are found only in Africa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Damin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only non-African language known to have clicks is &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Damin&lt;/a&gt;. But to me, Damin appears to be a &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;constructed language&lt;/a&gt;, used as ritual code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastEditorUserId="22150" LastEditDate="2019-05-16T14:31:27.967" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T00:56:40.180" Title="Non-African Click Languages" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31459" CreationDate="2019-05-15T21:41:46.530" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not even African languages in general: clicks seem to have originated only in the Khoisan language &quot;family&quot; (*), and spread from there into neighboring languages. In other words, clicks don't seem to be an African feature so much as a Khoisan feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why they're only a Khoisan feature—it really seems to be pure random luck! Clicks appear paralinguistically, as you mention, and also show up in twin-codes, showing that they're not that difficult to come up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the most part, languages gain new consonants in two different ways: either an existing sound shifts, or bilinguals borrow a sound from one language into another. For example, &lt;code&gt;/ð/&lt;/code&gt; was added to Greek and Germanic when stops lenited, and to Swahili via overlap with Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Click consonants are borrowed fairly easily, which is why they're found all across southern Africa even though the Khoisan languages are rare and dying. (And why they're steadily moving up the east coast now as well!) But there just aren't any common—or even attested—sound changes that can create clicks where no clicks were before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How Khoisan got clicks in the first place is lost to the mists of time, farther back than the comparative method can reconstruct. Maybe &lt;code&gt;t → ǁ&lt;/code&gt; is a sound shift that happened, but it's so rare and unlikely that it only happened once in a surviving language. Or maybe language was invented independently in several places, and the version created by the pre-Khoisan-speakers just happened to include clicks while others didn't. There's unfortunately no way to know for sure now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The Khoisan languages don't seem to be a family in the same way that the Germanic languages or the Romance languages are. Rather, they're a collection of scattered languages grouped together for convenience; they all share some features, but there just isn't enough evidence to say if that's due to a genetic relationship, a sprachbund, areal features, or even just coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T00:56:40.180" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T00:56:40.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31459" CreationDate="2019-05-15T21:41:55.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example of areal phonetics, where certain phonetic properties are relatively widely exploited in one area, but is rare (or nonexistent) elsewhere. Another example is labiovelars such as [kp], which are almost all in the &quot;Central Sudanic belt&quot; of subsaharan Africa. They are universal and numerous in the &quot;Khoisan&quot; languages of southern Africa, also found to a lesser extent in Zulu and Xhosa (in closes proximity to Khoisan), tapering off to rareness in languages like Chopi (still in Southern Africa, southern Mozambique). They also exist in Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania, and exist in a few words of Cushitic Dahalo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are actually somewhat difficult to produce, compared to other sounds. There is a tendency to open the velum during their production (the velum is normally lowered except for speech and lifting heavy stuff), and people who are not native speakers of e.g. Khoekhoe tend not to be able to integrate their articulation with that of surrounding vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excluding the more recent adoption of clicks by neighboring Bantu and Cushitic speakers, the languages with clicks have been spoken fairly undisturbed in situ for tens of thousands of years, not being influenced by other phylla. Relative isolation tends to encourage the development / retention of &quot;exotic&quot; phonetic features, since you don't have to accommodate to the phonetic preferences of neighbors that don't have those exotic sounds. The exact phonetic mechanism that would have encouraged these sounds is not clear, but there are parallels involving velarization in southern and eastern African languages, where phonemic /tw, pw/ are often heavily velarized and partially unrounded. In Shona, this can lead to &quot;token clicks&quot;, where a given token of intended [tˣʷ] may be produced as a kind of click. If, for example, clicks originated as a phonetic variant of standard velarization, they might have been popular enough that they spread to all of the languages down there, and there wasn't ever any reason to get rid of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T21:41:55.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-15T22:53:59.843" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm attempting a word embedding analysis (think underlying meaning and implications, but computational) of certain keywords through time in the English language, but I am having some difficulty finding the right text to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any corpora I can use for this purpose? News articles, newspapers, or anything similar are great. They key here is that I'll need corpora that span at least the majority of the 20th century. If you are aware of any collections that are longer, that would be even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24592" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-05-16T14:31:38.293" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T14:31:38.293" Title="Is there an english news corpus available to download for between 1900 and 201X (free or low cost)" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31474" CreationDate="2019-05-16T07:41:07.003" Score="5" ViewCount="1067" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the old days, phones were defined by the requisite articulation, both consonants and vowels. As time wore on and science and technology advanced, vowels became better defined by their acoustic properties, specifically the relationship between the 1st and 2nd formants, which now defines the ubiquitous vowel trapezoid, and that the 3rd, 4th and 5th formants contribute somewhat inelegantly to things like rounding, rhoticity and nasalization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I haven't heard much of anything of the sort for consonants. I know that fricatives are defined by turbulent airflow, and thus have a &quot;noisy&quot; timbre, and there is a somewhat controversial claim that &quot;rhotics have a lowered 3rd formant&quot; (although that might only apply to vowels), but that's about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do consonants have an acoustic definition analogous to vowels? And if so, what is it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23415" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T18:31:46.003" Title="Formant frequencies of consonants" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31453" CreationDate="2019-05-16T07:41:11.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just keep spamming 的-clauses. To use your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;我认识一个[有狗的]人。&#xA;&#xA;我认识一个[有[向猫吠的]狗的]人。&#xA;&#xA;我认识一个[有[向[在屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。&#xA;&#xA;我认识一个[有[向[在[[...的]城市的]屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own judgement is that the longer sentences don't sound natural in Chinese (because of a well known phenomenon where centre-embedding is difficult to process) whereas the first sentence you provide sounds perfectly fine structurally. (It would be improved by changing 知道 to 认识 and 有 to 养 though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to echo sumelic's comment on the meaning of &lt;em&gt;subordination&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T07:41:11.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2019-05-16T11:16:28.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all about the manner of articulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stop consonant is by definition a sound produced by the complete obstruction of airflow though the mouth, at least for a short time. There are two kinds, oral stops (what you call &quot;stops&quot;), which keep the velum raised, preventing airflow from escaping though the nose, and nasal stops (what you call &quot;nasals&quot;), which lower the velum, allowing air to escape though the nose. Because nasal stops completely obstruct airflow &lt;em&gt;though the mouth&lt;/em&gt;, they are, in fact, &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; stop consonants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because there is air flowing out the nose, a nasal stop can be &quot;continued&quot;, unlike an oral stop, which can only be heard and distinguished upon release. Because a nasal stop can be vocalized indefinitely, it can be argued that nasal stops aren't really stops. This is probably why they are often simply called &quot;nasals&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23415" LastEditorUserId="23415" LastEditDate="2019-05-16T11:31:24.453" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T11:31:24.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2019-05-16T15:54:32.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This being an obligatory answer to a question, we would have to know your instructor's ideology and instructional point – i.e. in the present instance, we can only offer reasonable interpretations of what he/she might have had in mind, based on what is actually said and done in linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phonetic term &quot;plosive&quot; unambiguously refers to [p,t,k] and not [m,n,ŋ]. &quot;Stop&quot; is a more variable term, which can refer to &quot;occlusive&quot; (including nasals) or &quot;plosive&quot;. In addition, in the context of a theory of phonology with distinctive features, &quot;stop&quot;, &quot;fricative&quot; and so on are informal terms describing certain feature specifications. [p t k], which are called stops, would be [-continuant], and [sʃx], called fricatives, are [+continuant]. In that context, the question would be whether [m n ŋ] are [+continuant] or [-continuant].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature continuant is defined in three competing ways. The classical definition of [continuant] in &lt;em&gt;Sound pattern of English&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the production of continuant sounds, the primary constriction in&#xA;  the vowel tract is not narrowed to the point where the air flow past&#xA;  the constriction is blocked; in stops the air flow through the mouth&#xA;  is effectively blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that definition, because flow of air through the mouth is blocked (occluded), nasals would be [-continuant], therefore informally called &quot;stops&quot;. The feature could be redefined in terms of what is blocked, so if [continuant] is defined as continuous air flow through the supraglottal cavities, nasals are [+continuant] but [ptk] are still [-continuant]. You can also define [continuant] in terms of airflow through the midsagittal region (central channel of the oral cavity), which renders [ptkmnŋl] &quot;stops&quot; (i.e. [-contniuant].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;can and cannot&quot; problem, that could refer to competing theories of the definition of the feature [continuant] – if you adopt the supraglottal air flow definition, nasals are not stops, otherwise they are. It has been held in the past that there is a fixed definition for these features, so that we might have different ideas about how to treat nasals and plosives, but there aren't actually two ways to treat nasals. But a different metatheory of features is that they do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; (contrary to the SPE tradition) have narrow phonetic definition, and the features of [ptk] vs [mnŋ] might be language specific. For example, there might be a general definition frame for [continuant], but also a variable term which has to be set for a given language. In that case, it would simply mean &quot;in this language, [m] is treated as a stop&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T15:54:32.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2019-05-16T16:33:46.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer can be &lt;strong&gt;either yes or no&lt;/strong&gt;—it comes down to your definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people define &quot;stop consonants&quot; to be consonants where the airflow is completely stopped (as in, the opposite of continuant consonants). In this case, nasals &lt;strong&gt;are not&lt;/strong&gt; stops: the airflow continues through the nose, which is why you can extend them and keep the sound going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people define &quot;stop consonants&quot; to be consonants where the airflow &lt;em&gt;through the mouth&lt;/em&gt; is completely stopped (as in, the opposite of fricative and approximant consonants). In this case, nasals &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; stops: there's no airflow through the mouth, only through the nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these is more correct than the other: it just depends which definition you (and your instructor and your textbook!) are using. The second definition is more popular, in my experience, but e.g. Ladefoged uses the first, and it's hard to argue that &lt;em&gt;The Sounds of the World's Languages&lt;/em&gt; isn't a solid precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T16:33:46.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31482" CreationDate="2019-05-16T17:53:14.807" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use narrow phonetic transcription in my job. The one symbol I need but can't seem to find is a way to mark stretching of the tongue from side to side. Does this exist? I have made up my own, but I'd rather use a standard symbol if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24600" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T00:05:55.937" Title="Narrow Phonetic Transcription: Stretching?" Tags="&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31469" CreationDate="2019-05-16T17:56:50.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean by &quot;stretching the tongue from side to side&quot;. You can do that with your fingers (if you have a dry tongue), but otherwise it's not possible -- the tongue doesn't stretch that way. There is no symbol to denote this, since the situation you're describing does not exist. Presumably you mean something else -- we'd have to know what you're referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the comments, it appears that the question is about laminal sounds, which are notated with the diacritic ̻ . Although it is usually added to consonants, nothing in principle prevents using it on a vowel. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/phonetic-features-of-a-laminal-vowel-in-taramamiyako-ryukyuan-2471-9455-1000134-96169.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tarama variety of Miyako Ryukyuan&lt;/a&gt; is said to have such vowels, and perhaps some Wu varieties of Chinese have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T19:28:18.060" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T19:28:18.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-16T18:22:26.270" Score="5" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently told by a friend who works in IT that certain neural networks can be trained to predict the age and gender of authors from anonymous texts written by them (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03764&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv:1707.03764&lt;/a&gt;). The linked paper clarifies that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Profiling authors, that is, inferring personal characteristics from text, can reveal many things, such as their age, gender, personality traits, location, even though writers might not consciously choose to put indicators of those characteristics in the text.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from obvious guesses from sentences containing indicators such as &quot;My husband...&quot; or &quot;My girlfriend...&quot; etc., I cannot seem to digest the claim that it is in fact possible to infer the gender of an author from their writing without obvious indicators such as above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no student of linguistics. So, I thought I should ask you guys if there are indeed theoretical mechanisms that permit the possibility of gender-based author profiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24601" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T18:48:18.323" Title="Is author profiling based on gender possible for English?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;neurolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31471" CreationDate="2019-05-16T18:48:18.323" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly! Humans can do this too; computers are just more consistent at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, language usage doesn't just come down to what's grammatical and what's not. A man or a woman can say &quot;I like apples&quot; and have it be equally correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences come in when there are multiple ways to express the same concept. For example, Jespersen(1) conjectured and Mondorf(2) demonstrated that women tend to use significantly more finite adverbial clauses(*) than men, and women tend to put them after the main clause, while men tend to put them before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? Nobody's going around shouting at men &quot;you have to put your adverbial clauses at the beginning of the sentence or you'll sound feminine!&quot;. Rather, it's the same reason so many Americans pronounce the &quot;R&quot; in &quot;bird&quot; and so many Brits don't. That is, it's what they've heard people doing, and so they pick it up from everyone around them, without ever being formally taught. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it comes down to a larger social pressure (adverbial clauses at the beginning tend to show higher commitment to the statement; after, they tend to show lower commitment); sometimes it's just arbitrary (vocal fry is now more associated with women, but in the past it was associated with men). Either way, though, the differences are definitely there, and can be picked up on. Humans tend to get a &quot;gut feeling&quot; or &quot;intuition&quot; about the author's gender, without knowing why, while computers can just say it outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same holds true for any other factor, by the way: nationality, race, social class, and so on. This is one of the reasons why &quot;blind&quot; hiring processes don't work as well as people expect. Even if a job application doesn't mention gender, it'll still include markers that people can subconsciously notice, and subconsciously react to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to look further into this, it generally falls under the umbrellas of &lt;em&gt;pragmatics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/em&gt;. Searching for &quot;gender differences in English&quot; will also bring up some good articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin&lt;/em&gt;, 1922&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Gender Differences in English Syntax&lt;/em&gt; (in the &lt;em&gt;Journal of English Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;), June 2002&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Clauses with a conjunction and a finite verb form, which don't act as a subject or object&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T18:48:18.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-16T19:01:27.643" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in need of a freely available corpus of English language (which may contain text of any genre) but has to be annotated anaphoriacally i-e. Anaphora resolution should have been performed already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my googling I came up with some results such as BASHI and ARRAU but ARRAU is a paid resource. Any relevant help / resources / links would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24603" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T10:10:58.687" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T12:40:21.713" Title="Need an online freely available Anaphorically Annotated Corpus of English Language for Identification of Discourse Units" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31463" CreationDate="2019-05-16T20:22:46.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The space of vowels is continuous: given any two vowels, you can find a midpoint between them, and that's also a perfectly valid vowel that people can pronounce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for consonants, that doesn't work. What would be the average of a bilabial plosive and a labiodental nasal, for example? There's no real point of articulation you can use in between bilabial and labiodental, and it's not clear what a &quot;half-nasal stop&quot; would sound like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; acoustic definitions for certain types of consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plosives, for example, are defined by a period of complete silence, and by how they &quot;bend&quot; the vowels around them. Labials &quot;bend&quot; vowel formants sharply downward, while uvulars &quot;bend&quot; them sharply upwards, and everything else is in between. (I'm sure there's a better word for this but I don't know it.)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the space of plosives between alveolar and velar &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; somewhat continuous, you can define these ones acoustically! But bilabials are still defined as &quot;using both lips&quot; because it's a discrete value: you can't be &quot;a little bit in front of&quot; or &quot;a little bit behind&quot; it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voicing can be represented by &quot;voice onset time&quot;, the time between when the airflow starts and when the voicing starts. This is negative for voiced plosives, near-zero for voiceless, and positive for aspirated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voiceless fricatives don't really have formants per se, since they're made of noise instead of a periodic signal, but they do show spectral &quot;bands&quot; that can be measured. &quot;Sibilant&quot; fricatives are the ones with a bunch of extra noise in the upper frequencies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nasals and approximants do, technically, have formants. But they're &lt;em&gt;complicated&lt;/em&gt; and you have to look for &quot;anti-formants&quot; too. In practice, I don't think there's any reliable way to use these yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these don't really generalize. In other words, we can define &lt;em&gt;coronal plosives&lt;/em&gt; by their acoustic properties, or &lt;em&gt;plosive voicing&lt;/em&gt;, but there's no Grand Unified Theory of Consonants yet. (Or even a Grand Unified Theory of Plosives, for that matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T20:22:46.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31508" CreationDate="2019-05-16T20:38:54.493" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/papers/alnc_lrec14.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/papers/alnc_lrec14.pdf&lt;/a&gt; that has made this epic text corpus of over 1 billion words available somewhere, but I can't find it anywhere online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Version 1.0 is available for research use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a working link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24592" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T16:46:09.533" Title="Does anyone have a link to the American Local News Corpus V1.0?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31463" CreationDate="2019-05-16T21:45:14.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All segments were given an acoustic definition in the feature theories of Jakobson, Fant &amp;amp; Halle (1951) and Jakobson &amp;amp; Halle (1956). Many of the features were passed down to Chomsky &amp;amp; Halle (1968) where the definitions were supplemented with an articulatory definition. &lt;a href=&quot;http://slam.iis.sinica.edu.tw/NGASR/workshop/20051217-Feature-tables.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This table&lt;/a&gt; compares the articulatory and acoustic definitions of the J&amp;amp;H features, for example &quot;consonantal&quot; being &quot;Low total energy&quot; vs &quot;Obstruction in vocal tract&quot;. The surmountable difficulty is figuring out what &quot;compact&quot; refers to. JFH say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compact phonemes are characterized by the relative predominance of one&#xA;  centrally located formant region (or formant). They are opposed to&#xA;  diffuse phonemes in which one or more non-central formants or formant&#xA;  regions predominate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of the vowels this feature manifests itself primarily by&#xA;  the position of the first formant (11): when the latter is higher&#xA;  (i.e. closer to the third and higher formants), the phoneme is more&#xA;  compact. The closer the first formant is to the upper formants, the&#xA;  higher will be the intensity level of the region above the first&#xA;  formant, especially the level between peaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the consonants, compactness is displayed by a predominant formant&#xA;  region, centrally located, as opposed to phonemes in which a&#xA;  non-central region predominates; (cf. Fant's analysis of Swedish stops&#xA;  (3)). The compact nasals have a dominant formant region between the&#xA;  characteristic nasal formants (200 cps and 2500 cps), Delattre's&#xA;  observations on the positions of the first formant in stops and nasal&#xA;  consonants (12) corroborate the parallelism between the compactness&#xA;  feature in vowels and consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formants are the filtering properties of a sound, defined by where the constrictions are. Both consonants and vowels have constrictions, so they have formants (well, &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ʔ&lt;/em&gt; don't have constrictions). However, figuring out where the formants are for a vowel is simple, not so much so for a consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction acute / grave applies to front / back vowels and labial/dental/velar consonants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Acoustically this feature means the predominance of one side of the&#xA;  significant part of the spectrum over the other. When the lower side&#xA;  of the spectrum predominates, the phoneme is labeled grave; when the&#xA;  upper side predominates, we term the phoneme acute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Front vowels are acute, coronal consonants are acute: this matches the more recent equation of coronal &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; V-place feature with &quot;-back&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T21:45:14.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-17T03:05:12.143" Score="4" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;When coming across thoughts on linguistics, concerning some words as having common origins in similar context, how is it evidently clear to know what is so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example: 'Ich' in German, meaning 'I' , having developed from or beside the Hebrew word 'Ish' , meaning 'man'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the way to prove such theories or test them for the laymen in linguistics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23417" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T03:06:42.683" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T04:11:43.270" Title="At what point can a confirmation be established between words of similar meaning in context?" Tags="&lt;cognates&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31477" CreationDate="2019-05-17T04:11:43.270" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;① If there's a good reason to suspect borrowing.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, English and Hebrew aren't etymologically related at all, but English &lt;em&gt;chutzpah&lt;/em&gt; looks very similar to Hebrew חוצפה (&lt;em&gt;ħuzpa&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;audacity&amp;quot;). Could they be connected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we don't see the word &lt;em&gt;chutzpah&lt;/em&gt; in English before the 20th century, it contains a sound that's extremely rare in English (what linguists call &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;), and we don't see cognates in any other Germanic languages. On the other hand, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; see cognates in other &lt;em&gt;Semitic&lt;/em&gt; languages, like Aramaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a convincing argument that &lt;em&gt;chutzpah&lt;/em&gt; is a loan into English (in this case, from Hebrew via Yiddish). If it weren't a loan, we'd expect to see a history within English, and cognates in other Germanic languages, but we just don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;② If there's a consistent, well-attested correspondence.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a long-standing principle in linguistic that &lt;strong&gt;language change is consistent&lt;/strong&gt;. That is, if the &amp;quot;P&amp;quot; sound turns into an &amp;quot;F&amp;quot; sound at the start of words, it'll happen to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; words starting with &amp;quot;P&amp;quot;, not just one or two. This is in fact something that happened in early Germanic, and there are hundreds of words that show the correspondence: compare the English/Latin pairs fish/pisc-, father/patr-, foot/ped-, felt/pell-, fowl/pull-, fee/pec-, fear/per-, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there can be exceptions for various reasons, but the vast majority of the time, &amp;quot;language change is consistent&amp;quot; holds true. So if you want to show a correspondence between German and Hebrew, you need a consistent rule with plenty of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In this case, neither one holds.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, your comparison of &lt;em&gt;ich&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;iš&lt;/em&gt; seems solid. The two words have similar meanings, and similar sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we look at German &lt;em&gt;ich&lt;/em&gt;, we see it has cognates all across the Germanic languages. An older form of English &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; was &lt;em&gt;ic&lt;/em&gt;, for example, while Dutch has &lt;em&gt;ik&lt;/em&gt;, Old Norse has &lt;em&gt;ek&lt;/em&gt;, the extinct and somewhat obscure Gothic language has &lt;em&gt;ik&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. We can hypothesize that Germanic originally had a word like &lt;em&gt;*ik&lt;/em&gt; meaning &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; which evolved into all these descendants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Germanic &lt;em&gt;*ik&lt;/em&gt; is supported further when we look at other Indo-European languages: compare Latin &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt;, along with the rule that Latin &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; tends to correspond to Germanic &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;. So there's decent evidence that this word goes back to Proto-Indo-European, which is as far back as we can reconstruct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could Hebrew איש have been borrowed from some Indo-European language, then? Probably not: it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; has solid cognates in related languages, like Phoenician אש. It seems the two words are thoroughly unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Coincidences are more likely than you'd think.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems crazy that this could just be random chance, doesn't it? After all, the words look remarkably similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the average dictionary for a popular language has somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 words in it. That's &lt;em&gt;a lot of words&lt;/em&gt;. And with such an enormous number of words in each language, you'll statistically end up with an enormous number of seemingly-unlikely coincidences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sheer number of coincidences between any two languages is why consistent, predictable sound changes are so important in linguistics. If one English word starting with F happened to look like one Latin word starting with P, it would be most likely a random coincidence. Same for ten, or twenty. &amp;quot;Grimm's Law&amp;quot; (the sound change that turned initial P's into F's) only holds up to scrutiny because there are several hundred separate examples of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding these sound changes, accordingly, is &lt;em&gt;really hard&lt;/em&gt;. So the best way to check for a connection is to look in a good etymological dictionary; Wiktionary has been getting better and better for this in recent years. It'll show you what linguists have already discovered over the past few centuries, and give you good points to jump off from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The &amp;quot;Grimm&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Grimm's Law&amp;quot; is indeed the same as in &amp;quot;Grimm's fairy tales&amp;quot;: all the different dialects Jakob Grimm documented were what led him to discover Grimm's Law, and that was really the start of modern linguistics. Grimm's Law is traditionally used as the first example of a consistent sound change in intro ling classes, to honor that contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T04:11:43.270" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31473" CreationDate="2019-05-17T12:40:21.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This one was just released a couple months ago and is available for download.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/synapse-developpement/Discovery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/synapse-developpement/Discovery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the anaphoric references are not to your liking, run the Hugging Face Neural CoRef classifier over the dataset. &lt;a href=&quot;https://huggingface.co/coref/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://huggingface.co/coref/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T12:40:21.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31463" CreationDate="2019-05-17T18:31:46.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Provided you understand that consonants are identified in large part by the vowel transitions before and after the articulation of the consonant itself, the very same theory of vowel quality based on cavity resonances in the mouth works also for consonants.  This is called &quot;locus theory&quot; and has been current since forever (well, since I took my first course in acoustic phonetics back in 1966 from Ilse Lehiste).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T18:31:46.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-17T18:40:42.587" Score="1" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for German verbs with a bisyllabic root that have are stressed on their first syllable. But verbs like &lt;em&gt;ändern&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;wechseln&lt;/em&gt; and also &lt;em&gt;eignen&lt;/em&gt; don't count, which would be verb roots that end in &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-el&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;. Compound verb roots and verb roots with a suffix don't count. Stressed separable prefixes clearly don't count either (e.g. &lt;em&gt;anfangen&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the two verbs &lt;em&gt;arbeiten&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;heiraten&lt;/em&gt; seemed odd to me in that they are similar in sharing the above characteristics, but are unlike any other verb I tried to think of. Are there more verbs like those two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13250" LastEditorUserId="13250" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T07:38:05.593" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T15:03:57.343" Title="Bisyllabic German Verb Roots with the Stress Being on the First Syllable" Tags="&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31469" CreationDate="2019-05-17T18:59:52.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge there is no official (or even conventional) symbol to describe that gesture. If I had to pick a symbol to describe &quot;tongue spreading&quot;, I might pick &lt;code&gt;U+20E1&lt;/code&gt;: combining left-right arrow above. Here it is on a schwa: ə⃡&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would choose that because &lt;code&gt;U+034D&lt;/code&gt; (combining left-right arrow below) is used in the IPA extension for disordered speech to describe lip spreading, so there's a natural parallel there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T00:05:55.937" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T00:05:55.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31481" CreationDate="2019-05-18T00:20:20.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/batiken&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;batiken&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that German verb roots are mostly monosyllabic (that is, when we exclude prefixes, particles, and the first elements of compounds, and ignore the presence of second syllables that are merely &quot;reduction syllables&quot; like &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt;). I don't know to what extent this is based on inheritance from Proto-Germanic vs. sound changes like syncope of unstressed vowels. Is it any easier to find examples of bisyllabic German verb roots with stress on the second syllable? I can't think of any right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the examples of verbs with more than one non-schwa vowel in the root seem to be denominal verbs: &lt;em&gt;arbeiten&lt;/em&gt; from the noun &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt; (or from its ancestor) and &lt;em&gt;heiraten&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Heirat&lt;/em&gt; (or from its ancestor). Likewise, &lt;em&gt;batiken&lt;/em&gt; is from &lt;em&gt;Batik&lt;/em&gt;. But I do not expect the class of verbs like this to be very large because I think German noun roots are also mostly monosyllabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in the answer to your &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/31490/german-noun-roots-of-germanic-origin-with-multiple-non-schwa-syllables&quot;&gt;follow-up question about nouns&lt;/a&gt;, there may be around a hundred disyllabic noun roots in German, of which some or most might be &quot;nativized loans&quot;. The noun &lt;em&gt;Käfig&lt;/em&gt; apparently was not inherited from Proto-Germanic, but borrowed from Latin at some point during the history of German. It is clearly an older and more nativized borrowing than my example of &lt;em&gt;Batik,&lt;/em&gt; but neither seems to technically be a native German root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T04:14:01.910" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T04:14:01.910" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31481" CreationDate="2019-05-18T06:55:46.303" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For simplicities sake you can assume &quot;arbeit-en&quot; and &quot;heirat-en&quot; are learned as derivatives from the respective nouns. Thus you can also find ... many verbs on &quot;-ieren&quot;, e.g. &quot;telefonieren&quot;, &quot;persiflieren&quot;, &quot;betonieren&quot;, &quot;kastrieren&quot; or &quot;sortieren&quot; (so much that it's a meme to attach it to any loan, e.g. &quot;ban&quot; &gt; &quot;bannieren&quot;, although &quot;Bann, bannen&quot; already exist and &quot;-ieren&quot; smacks more of French than English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, with &quot;Heirat&quot; the root is &quot;Rat, raten&quot; (advice, council) with the suffix &quot;Heil&quot; (health, prosperity), &lt;em&gt;high&lt;/em&gt; (cp &quot;Hoch-Zeit&quot;). So assuming the same holds for &quot;Arbeit&quot;, the question would be, what's the root? It's obscure, tentativelly and rather grimmly linked to &quot;orphan&quot;. &quot;-eiten&quot; is frequent rhyme for verbs, e.g. &quot;weiten, reiten, schreiten, begleiten&quot;, corresponding to &lt;em&gt;-it-&lt;/em&gt;, cp. respectively *weit, Weite&quot; (far, width), &lt;em&gt;Ritt&lt;/em&gt; (p.p. &quot;rode&quot;), &quot;Schritt&quot; (step, crotch), but &quot;Geleit, leiten&quot; (entourage, to lead), not &quot;gleiten&quot; (glide) and probably neither &quot;leiden&quot;, preterite &quot;litt-&quot; (suffer), nor &quot;lassen&quot; (let), &quot;losen&quot; (lot), &quot;lösen&quot; (solve) [ok, bad example]. But this tells us nothing, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T06:55:46.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T09:55:51.323" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure I remember that in one class, while we were talking about aboriginal languages, the professor said that one language or more languages, classify nouns in the two categories from the question.&#xA;So, for example, &quot;man&quot; would belong in the &quot;upright&quot; category and &quot;woman&quot; in &quot;lying&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need this information just for the &quot;fun-factness&quot; of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23752" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T10:09:13.903" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T03:41:57.400" Title="Which (australian aboriginal?) language classifies nouns in &quot;upright&quot; things and &quot;lying&quot; things?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;&lt;australian-languages&gt;&lt;noun-classes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T10:07:13.957" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can the use of upper case be considered a graphological feature? And therefore be suitable for inclusion in an analysis? A newspaper article has to be analysed. In its first sentence, it presents some words (not all) in upper case. This is unusual and clearly done for effect. But I'd like to be sure that this is classed as a graphological feature. I haven't seen upper case mentioned in any description of linguistic graphology, even though I expected it to be included as a visual/physical feature.(Because in graphology the way a text appears is significant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24611" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T19:50:44.480" Title="The use of upper case" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18958" CreationDate="2019-05-18T11:15:04.953" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can’t really quantitavely measure languages to rank them from the best (i.e. best for conveying our thoughts and emotions to other people as precisely and efficiently as possible) down to the worst, becuase they don’t have a single set of easily measurable attributes (such as length, weight) by which you could rank them. In any case, any such ranking would be pretty subjective and dependent on the individual preferences of the author. One thing you can say pretty much for sure, however, is that English is a pretty poor means of communication compared to other languages because it lacks entire layers of subtlety that most other languages have. So in any kind of such a ranking, English would have to end up very very low on the list. For more details, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://write.as/s7cxgqlpk51wo.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://write.as/s7cxgqlpk51wo.md&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24613" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T11:15:04.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31486" CreationDate="2019-05-18T19:50:44.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. Just like any change in sound can be called phonetic, any change in written form can be called graphemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is whether it's &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to analyze it that way. And that really depends on the rest of your analysis, and on the framework you're building from. Sure, uppercase and lowercase absolutely differ, and there are absolutely reasons people use one instead of the other—so what does that say about the specific corpus you're looking at? Can you draw interesting and meaningful conclusions from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd say yes, you certainly can analyze the use of upper case for emphasis; you could even use eye-tracking equipment to measure concretely how much it draws people's attention, or time people's reading to see if it affects comprehension time. All of this would fall under the umbrella of graphemics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Do people still call this &quot;graphology&quot;? I'm used to it being called &quot;graphemics&quot;, because the word &quot;graphology&quot; got co-opted by the pseudoscientists who say you can psychoanalyze someone from a handwriting sample. I'm assuming you're &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in that, and are instead talking about the linguistic analysis of orthographies and writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T19:50:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T19:57:28.063" Score="3" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;With non-schwa syllables I mean bisyllabic words ending in &lt;em&gt;-e&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-en&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-er&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-el&lt;/em&gt; don't count. But trisyllabic words with similar endings do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples I've found: &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Armut&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Heimat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Heirat&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Wollust&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Habicht&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Kranich&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, I'm not sure whether &lt;em&gt;Wollust&lt;/em&gt; counts as noun stem or a compound noun and Wiktionary tells me &lt;em&gt;Armut&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Heimat&lt;/em&gt; etymologically share the same suffix (with &lt;em&gt;Kleinod&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Einöde&lt;/em&gt;, which are also possible candidates for a list of such words). Looking at the etymologies of &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Heirat&lt;/em&gt;, it's not clear if they are also &quot;explainable&quot; the way the other ones are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of words like that somewhere? Are there any with three syllables? Ones where stress doesn't fall on the first syllable? Can you say all words of this kind can be explained by their etymology and no &quot;true&quot; German noun stem of Germanic origin is polysyllabic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I also found &lt;em&gt;Atem&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jugend&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tugend&lt;/em&gt;, which, although they contain a schwa in their second syllable, do interestingly sorta deviate from regular bisyllabic German noun roots.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13250" LastEditorUserId="13250" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T12:22:45.123" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T12:22:45.123" Title="German Noun Roots of Germanic Origin with Multiple Non-Schwa Syllables" Tags="&lt;german&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31490" CreationDate="2019-05-18T20:40:26.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be a few, but I can't think of any that you haven't already mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons go back to Proto-Germanic. At some unknown point (after Grimm and Verner but before Common Germanic split, so probably within 100BCE - 100CE), the original Proto-Indo-European stress disappeared. Instead, Proto-Germanic stressed all words on the first syllable, and started to reduce unstressed vowels to nothingness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, no matter how long the original Proto-Germanic root had been, it began to collapse into a monosyllable: &lt;em&gt;*ēmaitijǭ&lt;/em&gt; &gt; OE &lt;em&gt;ǣmette&lt;/em&gt; &gt; ME &lt;em&gt;amte&lt;/em&gt; &gt; ModE &quot;ant&quot;. This wasn't complete by the time Proto-Germanic split apart, and didn't go all the way in all the languages—but German, English, and Norse kept running with it, and took it as far as it could go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in these three languages, almost all native Germanic roots are monosyllables, unless this would create an illegal consonant cluster. (This exception is why we see the native word &quot;harvest&quot; with two syllables, because the sequence *rvst isn't valid in English—compare German &lt;em&gt;Herbst&lt;/em&gt;.) German also reduced most vowels in endings to schwa, where English went one step further and deleted them entirely: &lt;em&gt;*xagatusjǭ&lt;/em&gt; with its feminine ending became OHG &lt;em&gt;hagzisse&lt;/em&gt; &gt; German &lt;em&gt;Hexe&lt;/em&gt;, but OE &lt;em&gt;hægtesse&lt;/em&gt; &gt; ME &lt;em&gt;hegge&lt;/em&gt; &gt; English &quot;hag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while there might be a few surviving polysyllabic Germanic roots in German, like &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt;, I wouldn't expect many. There were plenty of such roots in Proto-Germanic, but sound changes have been working tirelessly to destroy them ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I was taught that an Old Norse root was &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; a single syllable, without exception: anything longer was a compound, and consonants were deleted all over the place to keep the syllables pronounceable. But I don't know if this is actually true or not. Knowing how unpredictable language is, I'm cautious about any sort of &quot;always&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T20:40:26.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31490" CreationDate="2019-05-18T21:14:50.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~chrisg/index_files/StructureGermanRoot.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The structure of the German root&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Chris Golston and Richard Wiese (published online on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259081953_The_structure_of_the_German_root&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ResearchGate&lt;/a&gt; in 1998; originally published in the book &lt;em&gt;Phonology and Morphology of the Germanic Languages&lt;/em&gt;). The analysis in this article is based on a database adapted from a list made by Wolf Dieter Ortmann (1993), who created his database based on entries in root dictionaries, mainly Augst (1975).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article has a footnote saying &quot;At a later stage, we plan to make the database available through the internet&quot; (p. 68-Researchgate). I haven't been able to find it, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 75 (Researchgate), the article says that there were 131 roots in the database with two syllables like &lt;em&gt;Arbeit&lt;/em&gt;. This excludes words where the second syllable is schwa or a schwa + resonant/syllabic resonant, but the database includes some items considered &quot;nativized loans&quot; (Golston and Wiese give the examples &quot;&lt;em&gt;Abenteuer&lt;/em&gt; ‘adventure’, add- ‘add’, &lt;em&gt;Akt&lt;/em&gt; ‘act’, &lt;em&gt;Scharlach&lt;/em&gt; ‘scarlet fever’&quot;) (p. 68-ResearchGate). Also, the roots seem to be of all word classes: Golston and Wiese mention &quot;[ʔalaın]&#xA;‘alone’&quot; as a two-syllable root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Golston and Wiese say that there were only five three-syllable roots in the database:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The five roots in our corpus that violate the alignment constraints twice are all loans and felt to be such by most speakers: [ʔaleːgʀo] ‘allegro,’ [baldʀiaːn] (name), [ʔɛnziaːn] (name), [feːbʀuaʀ] ‘February,’ and [januaʀ] ‘January.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(page 75-Researchgate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, I'm fairly certain that three-syllable noun stems would be extremely marginal if not nonexistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a look at the database, it's hard to tell how many of the two-syllable examples are &quot;nativized loans&quot;: Golston and Wiese say that the database includes 792 roots of that type, so they could potentially account for almost all of the 131 two-syllable roots in the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other example I found (taken from p. 88 of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/16583/fischer.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosodic organization in the babbling of German-learning infants between the age of six and twelve months&quot;, by Andreas Fischer&lt;/a&gt;) is &lt;em&gt;Hering&lt;/em&gt; 'herring', which apparently has an unclear etymology, but which looks like a suffixed word of some type. &lt;em&gt;Honig&lt;/em&gt; also looks like it has a suffix, but as far as I can tell it actually wasn't derived that way (at least, not within Germanic at any recent date, since Wiktionary offers a Proto-Indo-European reconstruction for its etymon). &lt;em&gt;König&lt;/em&gt; is technically a suffixed form, but I don't think the base is perceived very much or at all by modern German speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the examples mentioned in the question, &lt;em&gt;Kranich,&lt;/em&gt; seems to have originated as a suffixed form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T07:00:45.453" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T07:00:45.453" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T21:40:00.753" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have in mind examples such as the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheingallizismus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scheingallizismus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (lit. appearance of Gallicism) in German which are words/phrases constructed from French origins but are themselves unknown in French speaking countries. For instance, the German word &lt;em&gt;blamage&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;disgrace&quot; was coined from French &lt;em&gt;blamieren&lt;/em&gt; (to embarrass) and the nominal suffix &lt;em&gt;-age&lt;/em&gt;, and is even pronounced like French. For non-alphabetic writing systems, I have in mind the Japanese &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%92%8C%E8%A3%BD%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kokuji&lt;/a&gt;/wasei kanji&lt;/em&gt; (国字/和製漢字) which are characters coined mainly based on logographical rules of Chinese characters (interestingly, while many of these &lt;em&gt;kokuji&lt;/em&gt; are only seen in Japanese, a few of them did wind up adopted back into simplified Chinese); for instance, the kanji 凪 meaning &quot;calm&quot; was coined from the radical (i.e. component form) ⺇ and the character 止 meaning &quot;to stop&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases, although the constructed words/phrases/characters are mostly unknown in their adopted source languages, native speakers of the adopted languages are often able to recognize some parts of these coined words/characters, but only to a limited extent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;strong&gt;is there a linguistic term specifically accounting for the phenomenon described above?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calques&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loanwords&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_loan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic loans&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;false cognates&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neologisms&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phono-semantic matchings&lt;/a&gt;, and so on; but none of them seems to accurately describe it. I do admit that this is a field that I am relatively ignorant of, and please correct me if I have made any mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: After some further research, it seems to me that the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pseudo-loan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pseudo-loan&lt;/a&gt; would be an appropriate umbrella term for all above-mentioned instances. There is another rather rare term, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/allogenism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allogenism&lt;/a&gt;, which essentially describes the same phenomenon. However, I am not certain as to whether these two are accepted as linguistic terms, or rather just convenient designations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23477" LastEditorUserId="23477" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T22:10:28.283" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T22:21:18.043" Title="Is there a specific linguistic term for the following practice of constructing new words/characters?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T09:52:51.467" Score="4" ViewCount="953" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any resources that can show IPA pronounciation for each PIE word? Either with laryngeals or without laryngeals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikitionary gives me only small list &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Proto-Indo-European_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Category:Proto-Indo-European terms with IPA pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*bʰréh₂tēr&lt;/strong&gt; is [b̤ráx.tɛːr], &lt;strong&gt;*h₂éwis&lt;/strong&gt; is [xáwis], &lt;strong&gt;*méh₂tēr&lt;/strong&gt; is [máx.tɛːr], &lt;strong&gt;*nisdós&lt;/strong&gt; is [niz.dós], and&#xA; &lt;strong&gt;*pénkʷe&lt;/strong&gt; is pronounced [péŋ⁽ʷ⁾.kʷe].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, since Wikitionary can give me only six words with IPA, are there any resources that can give me larger word lists with IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T17:04:36.910" Title="Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words with IPA" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31496" CreationDate="2019-05-19T16:52:11.987" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is, nobody is quite sure how PIE was pronounced!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk about PIE phonemes like &lt;code&gt;/*d/&lt;/code&gt;, we don't mean it was actually IPA &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;. We mean that &quot;there seems to have been a phoneme, which is pronounced &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt; in a lot of descendant languages&quot;. But there are also many languages which &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; pronounce it &lt;code&gt;[d]&lt;/code&gt;: Germanic, Anatolian (an extremely conservative branch), Armenian, and Tocharian all have &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt; there. So there's a theory that &lt;code&gt;/*d/&lt;/code&gt; was actually &lt;code&gt;[t']&lt;/code&gt;, an ejective, which makes certain weirdnesses in PIE a whole lot less weird. (Look into the &quot;glottalic theory&quot; for more details; there's some info in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/31356/10559&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;'s answers too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, PIE has two &quot;velar&quot; series, the ones marked with accents (&lt;code&gt;/*ḱ/&lt;/code&gt;) and the ones without (&lt;code&gt;/*k/&lt;/code&gt;). It's clear that there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a difference between these series, because they act differently in the satem languages, but there's very little agreement on what the difference actually &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;. Personally, I like the theory that &lt;code&gt;/*ḱ/&lt;/code&gt; was velar (&lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;) and &lt;code&gt;/*k/&lt;/code&gt; was uvular (&lt;code&gt;[q]&lt;/code&gt;), but you can find a great number of linguists who would vehemently disagree with me. In particular, if you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; accept the glottalic theory, the uvular theory makes the weird consonant system even weirder, requiring sounds that aren't attested in any language in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the plus side, there are only two (maybe three) phonetic rules reconstructed for PIE that aren't represented in written-out reconstructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*e/&lt;/code&gt; next to &lt;code&gt;/*h₂/&lt;/code&gt; becomes &lt;code&gt;[a]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*e/&lt;/code&gt; next to &lt;code&gt;/*h₃/&lt;/code&gt; becomes &lt;code&gt;[o]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes (depending on reconstruction):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consonant clusters assimilate in voicing, and nasals assimilate in place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That change definitely happened at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; point, there's solid evidence for that, but it's unclear if it should be called a part of PIE or a later change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to turn a PIE word into IPA, the process is straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decide which pronunciation you want for each reconstructed phoneme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Map each phoneme onto its chosen pronunciation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apply the two (or three) sound changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you're done! But note that this pronunciation is &lt;strong&gt;very definitely not accurate&lt;/strong&gt; to what the actual early Indo-Europeans would have used: that's the problem with using reconstructions. There's just too much detail that's been lost over the millennia. (In particular, there were certainly more phonetic changes than the three I listed—we just don't have enough evidence to reconstruct others with any certainty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my personal guess as to pronunciations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdKnf.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdKnf.png&quot; alt=&quot;chart of phonemes&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it must be emphasized that &lt;strong&gt;this is only a guess&lt;/strong&gt;: an educated guess, sure, but there's just not enough evidence to call it a &quot;theory&quot;, and given the lack of evidence, it's not really falsifiable. Other linguists here can probably give you a dozen other reconstructions that differ from mine. That said—while this guess isn't &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than any other, it's also not really &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; than any other. So depending on your purposes, that might be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T17:04:36.910" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T17:04:36.910" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T20:41:02.443" Score="3" ViewCount="3130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take this syntax tree as an example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5WDss.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5WDss.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is a prepositional phrase (PP) sometimes a post-modifier and sometimes a complement? What is the difference in general? I need to be able to spot them and label them as one or the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have researched this extensively but I can't find a satisfactory answer that makes this clear for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take my sentence for example: The rat at the corner of the room. I understand from the wikipedia page that arguments are necessary for the sentence to make sense, adjuncts are extra info not necessary to have the sentence make sense. According to the syntax tree I provided the adjunct is [at the corner] the argument is [of the room]. How is [at the corner] necessary but not [of the room]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24623" LastEditorUserId="24623" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T21:23:22.317" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T13:19:53.020" Title="What's the difference between a modifier and a complement?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31500" CreationDate="2019-05-19T21:48:29.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important for you to notice that notions such as modifier, complement, specifier, head are &lt;strong&gt;relative&lt;/strong&gt; concepts. A phrase is not just a modifier, it is a modifier of &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, namely a modifier of the phrase it modifies. Likewise, a complement is not just a complement, but a complement &lt;em&gt;of some head&lt;/em&gt;, and a head is not just a head, but a head of a phrase, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your sentence, &lt;code&gt;at the corner of the room&lt;/code&gt; is a PP modifier &lt;em&gt;to the NP&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;the rat&lt;/code&gt;. You can easily say just &quot;the rat&quot; without specifying its location and the phrase would still make perfectly sense; the NP without the PP would not be semantically incomplete or ungrammatical. The specification &lt;code&gt;at the corner of the room&lt;/code&gt; just adds some extra information that is not part of the core predicate &lt;code&gt;rat&lt;/code&gt;; one would assume that in the lexical entry of the word &lt;code&gt;rat&lt;/code&gt;, there is no dedicated argument slot that specifies the location as part of the core meaning of the word &lt;code&gt;rat&lt;/code&gt;, this information is completely optional. Therefore, it is assumed that the PP &lt;code&gt;at the corner of the room&lt;/code&gt; acts as a modifier rather than a complement to the NP &lt;code&gt;the rat&lt;/code&gt;. This is usually the case for such phrases which specify circumstances like time or place.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, &lt;code&gt;of the room&lt;/code&gt; is a PP complement &lt;em&gt;to the NP&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;the corner&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not to the full NP&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;the rat at the corner&lt;/code&gt;. So the question is whether or not this PP is necessary for the NP &lt;code&gt;the corner&lt;/code&gt; to make sense, not the whole sentence. In this case one would argue that the nominal head &lt;code&gt;corner&lt;/code&gt; indeed requires a complement: While it is not ungrammatical to say just &lt;code&gt;at the corner&lt;/code&gt;, it is in a way semantically incomplete, or put the other way round, the fact that a corner is always a corner of &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; (like  the room) is part of the core meaning of the word &lt;code&gt;corner&lt;/code&gt;, and you would expect that in the lexical entry of the word &lt;code&gt;corner&lt;/code&gt;, there is a slot specifying what the corner belongs to. So the &lt;code&gt;of the room&lt;/code&gt; doesn't just add extra information about time and room without which the sentence could be interpreted just as fine, but instead contributes to the core meaning of the NP &lt;code&gt;the corner&lt;/code&gt;, which is what qualifies the PP &lt;code&gt;of the room&lt;/code&gt; is as a complement rather than merely an adjunct to the nP &lt;code&gt;the corner&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other test is whether it is possible to multiply the phrase in question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for modifiers, these can easily be stacked: &lt;code&gt;the rat + in the corner of the room + with fuzzy gray fur + that likes to eat cheese + ...&lt;/code&gt; As you see, you can always add more modifies to the NP &lt;code&gt;the rat&lt;/code&gt; specifying extra information about the NP, just as well as you could omit them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is not possible for complements: &lt;code&gt;* the corner + of the room + of the cupboard&lt;/code&gt; is both ungrammatical and semantically consensual. Of course, you could add modifiers or complements to the complement itself, like &lt;code&gt;the (corner + of (the room + in the house))&lt;/code&gt;, but then these extra modifiers/complements are modifiers/complements to &lt;code&gt;the room&lt;/code&gt;, not to the original NP &lt;code&gt;the corner&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;corner&lt;/code&gt; can only have one argument specifying the object that the corner is a corner of, and this one argument slot is here filled by &lt;code&gt;of the room&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this clarify your remaining uncertainties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-05-19T21:53:54.877" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T21:53:54.877" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31507" CreationDate="2019-05-20T03:21:29.597" Score="9" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;All languages I know of discretize qualities when trying to describe them. For example, languages generally sample a few words for describing a range of continous things like feelings ('terrible', 'bad', 'neutral', 'good', 'wonderful') or colors ('red', 'blue', 'yellow', etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feature, however, does not seem to be a direct limitation from speech, as we could modulate aspects like pitch, lenght of vowels or volume of words to be able communicate such things in a continous way. Are there examples of languages that do so, or anybody has explanations for why those aren't observed in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24624" LastEditorUserId="24624" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T03:46:42.650" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T13:29:14.733" Title="Are there languages that can speak of continous things without discretizing them?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25640" CreationDate="2019-05-20T03:39:42.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went to school with an Eva Szakal in Lethbridge, (Central School) Alberta, Canada. We both played on the basketball team, along with a girl called Toth Marika. The name Szakal does mean, if taken literally, beard, but it could have come about because of some misidentification. I have thought about Eva off and on throuogh the years, and lately. My first name is the same as hers, and we both came from Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. I note that your first name is Vladimir, which is not Hungarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;szekely&quot; people of Transylvania were Hungarian origin and speak Hungarian. But I don't see the name derived from there. Did you try going to Hungary and looking for the name? There are quite a lot of websites for various families or names. The acute accent mark is correct on your name, if it is of Hungarian origin, but Vladimir is not a Hungarian given name, but who knows about marriages and so on. I really would try Hungary, just type in the name and see if there is a response. There should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably you know more than I do about searches, but I found that there are sites that are ready to interpret your name, find it or a variant that is usually some noble person originating in some country complete with estate and title and even crest. I do think most of these are a kind of business, from my experience. I wish you luck, and in case you have anything to do with the Eva Szakal I mentioned, it would be good to know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slovakia and Czechia, quite a lot of territories which also had Hungarians, could be a good name to look for birth records. Hungarians I found related to a name I looked for were at Liptovsky Jan, and Mihalovce. (The latter was Nagyszentmihaly at one time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24625" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T04:08:45.757" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T04:08:45.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31500" CreationDate="2019-05-20T08:32:52.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's all about something called &lt;strong&gt;licensing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthews in &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; defines 'complement' as 'A syntactic element seen as completing the construction of another element’, though I would add that the syntactic concept construction is preferable to the semantic concept meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to say, more specifically, that it applies to elements (other than the subject – though some modern grammar extends it to include the subject as well) which are within the valency of a verb or other lexical unit. And his entry for 'valency’ is: 'The range of syntactic elements either required or specifically permitted by a verb or other lexical unit' – which is equivalent to licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of NPs most items are modifiers, not complements. However, dependents with the form of PPs are common and qualify as complements when they are licensed by the particular noun. The clearest cases have one or more of the following properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) They correspond to object or subject NPs in clause structure, e.g. &quot;The warriors returned&quot; (subject + verb) ~ &quot;the return of the warriors&quot; (noun + PP complement). This type of PP complement can combine with one corresponding to the object in a clause, as in &quot;The secretary removed the files&quot; ~ &quot;the removal of the files by the secretary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The choice of preposition is specified by the head noun. Many nouns take complements headed by a particular preposition: &quot;their belief in God, &quot;its effect on the audience&quot;, &quot;a request for more staff&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) The PP is obligatory because the noun makes little sense without it, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the advent of the steam engine&quot;, &quot;the feasibility of the proposal&quot;, &quot;a dearth of new ideas&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nouns in those three examples almost always occur with a PP headed by &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular example, the PP &quot;at the corner of the room&quot; is not syntactically licensed by the head like those in the examples above -- nor is it syntactically obligatory -- and hence must be a modifier, a locative PP to be precise. By contrast, the PP &quot;of the room&quot; fits into category (2) since the preposition &quot;of&quot; is specified by the noun “corner”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13403" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T08:32:52.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31493" CreationDate="2019-05-20T10:06:06.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, there is the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoentlehnung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pseudoentlehnung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Scheinentlehnung&lt;/em&gt; for such kind of words, abstracting from the alledged original language. I think, you can use this term untranslated in a scholarly publication, I am not aware of an English translation of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T10:06:06.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31500" CreationDate="2019-05-20T13:19:47.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an extract from another post of mine on another SE site, slightly modified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.0 Complements versus Modifiers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.1 Complements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, so let´s have a look at what Modifiers and Complements actually are. Well, roughly speaking, a Complement is a phrase which fills a special slot set up by another word or phrase in the sentence. So for example, the verb &lt;em&gt;TEACH&lt;/em&gt; sets up a slot for the thing being taught, the Direct Object, and the people being taught, the so-called Indirect Object. These terms such as Direct Object, Indirect Object, Locative Complement and so forth are just more specific names for Complements of a verb. Prepositions take Complements too, often noun phrases which we can also sometimes describe as Predicative Complements or Objects. Adverbs can often take Complements either directly or indirectly as well. So for example, the infinitival clause &lt;em&gt;to eat in one go&lt;/em&gt; fills a special slot set up by the adverb &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;It was too big to eat in one go&lt;/em&gt;. Adjectives can take their own various sorts of Complements too; consider &lt;em&gt;on chess&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;keen on chess&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to leave&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;keen to leave&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, all sort of words and phrases can set up these slots, and all sorts of words and phrases can fill them too. Sometimes Complements are obligatory and sometimes they aren't. Of course, it's nice and handy when Complements are obligatory, because it's easy to identify them. It is also, in such cases, easy to demonstrate how that word or phrase has a special relationship with the Head of the phrase. So, unfortunately, Complements are often construed as obligatory essential accompaniments to other words or phrases when we first start to learn about them. This isn't always the case. Let's revisit the verb &lt;em&gt;TEACH&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I teach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I teach English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I teach students.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I teach students English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I teach English to students.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see this verb taking no Complements, taking one Object, taking two Objects and taking an Object and  a preposition phrase Complement. These different Complements are Complements because this verb sets up a special slot for them, not because they are obligatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complements, of course, have other features. For example, they are usually selected by the word they are the Complements of. These Heads will allow certain types of Complements but not others. So for example, the adjective &lt;em&gt;keen&lt;/em&gt; will select preposition phrases headed by the preposition &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;, but not ones headed by the preposition &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keen on spiders&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*keen of spiders (ungrammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;em&gt;inquire&lt;/em&gt; can take interrogative clauses as Complements, but not declarative ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I inquired whether the elephants had left.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*I inquired that the elephants had left. (ungrammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complements are thought of as being more tightly integrated into the phrases they occur in than Modifiers are. Whereas Complements are often required to be adjacent to the words that license them, Modifiers can often be moved further away from the phrases they modify or appear on either side of them. So if we see both Complements and Modifiers in the same phrase, as a rule of thumb, all other things being equal, we expect the Complements to be closer to the Head word than the Modifiers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it on the shop floor on Thursday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*Put it on Thursday on the shop floor. (awkward if not ungrammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sentence or phrase will often sound marked, awkward or ungrammatical if this does not occur. In the sentence above the Complement &lt;em&gt;on the shop floor&lt;/em&gt; will ideally come closer to the verb &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt; than the Modifier &lt;em&gt;on Thursday&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Complements are more tightly integrated into the phrases they occur in than Modifiers, they are often obligatorily replaced when we use a proform, whereas Modifiers may be repeated or addended to such phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*I put my beer in the fridge and Bob did so in the cupboard. (ungrammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I drank my beer in the kitchen but Bob did so in the living room.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*I am counting on their help, but I don't want you to do so on their help. (ungrammatical)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am counting on their help, but I don't want you to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first sentence &lt;em&gt;in the fridge&lt;/em&gt; is a Locative Complement. As the anaphoric proform &lt;em&gt;do so&lt;/em&gt; includes the Locative Complement in the second clause in that example, we cannot then add a second Locative Complement, &lt;em&gt;in the cupboard&lt;/em&gt;. In the second sentence, where &lt;em&gt;in the kitchen&lt;/em&gt; is a Locative Adjunct (a Modifier), we can freely add another Locative Adjunct in the second clause, &lt;em&gt;in the living room&lt;/em&gt;. In the last pair we see that the sentence is grammatical if we omit the Complement &lt;em&gt;on their help&lt;/em&gt; after &lt;em&gt;do so&lt;/em&gt;, and ungrammatical if we repeat it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, semantically, Complements usually have a close relationship with the words that license them. Words inherently describe semantic relations between different things. So the verb &lt;em&gt;PUT&lt;/em&gt; brings to mind a putter, a thing being put, and a location. It doesn't inherently involve any idea of time. So in &lt;em&gt;Put it in the fridge tonight&lt;/em&gt;, we would not expect &lt;em&gt;tonight&lt;/em&gt; to be a Complement of the verb &lt;em&gt;put&lt;/em&gt;, but we would expect both &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in the fridge&lt;/em&gt; to be Complements, which as we have seen above, they are. The thing being put and the destination of that thing are suggested by the very use of the verb &lt;em&gt;PUT&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly the noun &lt;em&gt;collector&lt;/em&gt; also inherently implies that there are things which are collected and someone who collects them. The noun &lt;em&gt;resignation&lt;/em&gt; implies a resigner. So in &lt;em&gt;a collector of antique books&lt;/em&gt;, we would expect &lt;em&gt;of antique books&lt;/em&gt; to be a Complement, and we would expect &lt;em&gt;of the President&lt;/em&gt; to be a Complement in &lt;em&gt;the resignation of the President&lt;/em&gt;. But we would not expect &lt;em&gt;in the corner&lt;/em&gt; to be a Complement in &lt;em&gt;the collector in the corner&lt;/em&gt;, because the noun &lt;em&gt;collector&lt;/em&gt; does not inherently imply a location. (However, see the linked-to paper at the end of this post, where it is argued that there is no meaningful syntactic distinction between the Modifiers and Complements of nouns.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of semantic factors above we also expect Heads to impose semantic, as well as syntactic, selectional restrictions on their Complements. We can annoy elephants but not tables, unless we ascribe some sort of animacy to our tables for some reason. We don't expect such tight restrictions with Modifiers. One can do almost anything &lt;em&gt;on Wednesday&lt;/em&gt; and almost anything &lt;em&gt;pointlessly&lt;/em&gt;. And whereas the number of possible Complements is specified by the Head both semantically and syntactically, the number of Modifiers is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.2 Modifiers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modifiers are never obligatory. We can characterise them as syntactically extra elements. They are usually semantically extra too, in the sense that they are not automatically implied by the words or phrases that they modify. Unlike Complements, Modifiers are usually only loosely integrated into the larger phrases they occur in. Their position is often only loosely determined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I play foot ball [in the park][on Fridays][with my friends]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I play football [with my friends][on Fridays][in the park]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I play football [on Fridays][in the park][with my friends]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[On Fridays] I play football [with my friends] [in the park]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As shown further above unlike Complements, Modifiers are not obligatorily relaced when we use proforms to refer back to a larger phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use various forms of cycle as an analogy for phrases here: unicycles, bicycles, tricycles, tandems and so forth. If we regard the frame of the cycle as the Head of a phrase or clause, then the Complements are all the things that fit into the different slots in the frame. So the frame dictates the size and number of wheels, saddles, handlebars and so forth (some of which may be optional, for example in the case of tandems) that the frame can take. These things are all Complements. You can't put the wrong Complements on the wrong frames. For example, a unicycle frame won't usually allow handlebars in the same way that an intransitive verb won't allow a Direct Object. Also you can't fit the wrong size parts into the wrong slots. So the stem of your handlebars must fit into the frame, for example. It cannot be too big or too small. So the frame puts restrictions on what can be slotted into it. In contrast, any lights, bells, mudguards, panniers, stickers and so forth are always optional extras. They are, to extend the metaphor, Modifiers. You can't ride your unicycle without a wheel, but a light is definitely an optional extra. Notice as well, that the bicylce frame puts very few selectional restrictions on the Modifiers available. You can stick lights, bells or horns on any cycle you want to, and any number of each as well&amp;mdash;although admittedly things might get awkward if you do decide to use very many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.0 &lt;em&gt;The rat at the corner of the room&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, most would agree that the noun phrase &lt;em&gt;the rat&lt;/em&gt; is fully formed as it is. The noun &lt;em&gt;rat&lt;/em&gt; certainly does not suggest a location, and the locative preposition phrase &lt;em&gt;at the corner of the room&lt;/em&gt; is not filling any special slot set up by the noun &lt;em&gt;rat&lt;/em&gt;, and must therefore be considered a Modifier. Some might argue that, in contrast, the noun &lt;em&gt;corner&lt;/em&gt; does set up a slot for a following preposition phrase. A &lt;em&gt;corner&lt;/em&gt;, it might be argued, inherently implies the existence of something that it is the corner of. We might be minded in this case to do some syntactic tests to see whether &lt;em&gt;of the room&lt;/em&gt; was a Complement here. However, recent work by linguists, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Anaphoric_One.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Payne, Pullum,  Scholz &amp;amp; Berlage 2013, §3.5&lt;/a&gt;, have cast doubt on whether nouns ever actually take PP complements, in part by showing that the tests commonly used for establishing the Complementhood of nouns are flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T13:19:53.020" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T13:19:53.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31502" CreationDate="2019-05-20T13:29:14.733" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English for example, we have the words &quot;wide&quot; and &quot;narrow&quot;. We can say &quot;a narrow belt&quot; or &quot;a wide belt&quot;, but these are &quot;discretizations&quot;, aren't they? In BSL, the distance between your index finger and your thumb show exactly how wide the belt is, as you trace them round your waist. This holds even if that belt varies in width somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T13:29:14.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31475" CreationDate="2019-05-20T16:52:28.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I contacted a couple of the authors and got some links!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary author said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can download the raw corpus here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/ALNC/030314corpus.cleaned.tgz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/ALNC/030314corpus.cleaned.tgz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the preprocessed corpus here:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/ALNC/030314corpus.splittoklc.tgz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/ALNC/030314corpus.splittoklc.tgz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that these files contain version 1.1 of sorts; slightly more data&#xA;  than reported in the LREC paper. Each file is about 8GB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will update when I have the complete uncompressed sizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24592" LastEditorUserId="24592" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T16:46:09.533" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T16:46:09.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31516" CreationDate="2019-05-21T09:25:29.397" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am puzzled by the Dutch &quot;Ik ben het beu&quot; phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main question: what is the syntactic structure of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this indeed a direct object with a copula?&#xA;Or is it an ellipsis of a larger, more usual structure?&#xA;If yes, which one?&#xA;If not, how did they come up naturally with such a saying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD: &#xA;A relevant detail is that are there any other sayings (productive or not anymore) that use the same approach?&#xA;Ik/jij/etc ben/bent het XXX &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24631" LastEditorUserId="24631" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T00:41:03.923" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T11:18:56.430" Title="Syntax of Ik ben het beu" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;copula&gt;&lt;dutch&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31510" CreationDate="2019-05-21T11:13:43.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nl.taal/qhprx4v-tdY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; can be of help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In het Middelnederlands bestond er al een uitdrukking 'Het heeft mi boy'. Waarschijnlijk was 'boy' een uitroep à la bah.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle Dutch had an expression 'het heeft mi boy'. Probably 'boy' was an interjection like 'bah'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In Gent zegt men nog altijd de constructie 't ès mij bui'. Dus 'het is mij beu', niet 'ik ben het beu'.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ghent one still uses the construction 't ès mij bui'. So 'het is mij beu', not 'ik ben het beu'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these are indeed related to &amp;quot;ik ben het beu&amp;quot; one needs to explain how the subject switch occurred. I'm no expert and couldn't find information about this, but it could perhaps have been on analogy of similar expressions like &amp;quot;ik ben er klaar mee&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T11:13:43.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31515" CreationDate="2019-05-21T12:06:31.693" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is a verb that takes an object called &lt;strong&gt;transitive&lt;/strong&gt;? Why does that term make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it is that it extends its action to an object rather than limits it within the subject. I take this notion from the Arabic terms of intransitive (لازِم) meaning &lt;em&gt;contained&lt;/em&gt; and (مُتَعَدّي) meaning &lt;em&gt;transceding&lt;/em&gt; (I might have just made up that word). However, this notion has no sense of transition. Hence the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24427" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T14:03:56.923" Title="What is the intuition behind the term Transitive for verbs?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T12:25:28.313" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to localize phrases like &quot;Places in {country name}&quot; where the (already localized) country name is dynamically obtained according to the ISO country code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that for some country names, an article must be prepended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Places in &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; United States (&lt;code&gt;en&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes in plural form, male or female, capitalized or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lugares en &lt;strong&gt;los&lt;/strong&gt; estados unidos (&lt;code&gt;es&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lugares en &lt;strong&gt;las&lt;/strong&gt; Maldivas (&lt;code&gt;es&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article might even have to be declined according to the case (nominative, dative etc) of the country name in the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orte in &lt;strong&gt;der&lt;/strong&gt; Schweiz (&lt;code&gt;de&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wir fahren in &lt;strong&gt;die&lt;/strong&gt; Schweiz (&lt;code&gt;de&lt;/code&gt; for &quot;we go to Switzerland&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or we even might might a different preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orte &lt;strong&gt;auf den&lt;/strong&gt; Malediven (&lt;code&gt;de&lt;/code&gt;, using &quot;auf&quot; instead of &quot;in&quot; because the Maldives are an island)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there either a library or a good set of rules (e.g. regular expression based) that one could use to accomplish this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24632" LastEditorUserId="24632" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T12:40:35.113" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T12:40:35.113" Title="How to localize country names in phrases?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31513" CreationDate="2019-05-21T14:03:56.923" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The grammatical sense of the word &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transitive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transitive&lt;/a&gt;&quot; comes from the Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transitivus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transitivus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which as you imply the idea of going (&lt;em&gt;itus&lt;/em&gt;) across (&lt;em&gt;trans&lt;/em&gt;). This is calqued from Hellenistic Greek μεταβατικός.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most well known early use comes from the late Roman grammarian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Priscian&lt;/a&gt;, who wrote the &quot;Institutes of Grammar&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Institutiones Grammaticae&lt;/em&gt;) in the 6th century CE. Therein he writes that in transitive verbs the sense crossed over from one person to another, and explained that such verbs usually occurred with oblique cases (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia802606.us.archive.org/29/items/PriscianiInstitutionumGrammaticarumLibri/PriscianiInstitutionumGrammaticarumLibriI-xiihertz.1855_text.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 552 of the edition, PDF page 602&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nam μεταβατικά dicuntur, id est transitiva, quae ab alia ad alia transeunt personam, in quibus solent || obliqui casus adiungi verbis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T14:03:56.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31510" CreationDate="2019-05-21T14:49:43.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This construction is reminiscent of a Dutch &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_verb#Perfect_ergative_innocence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verb of innocence&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, such as &lt;em&gt;Ik ben het vergeten&lt;/em&gt; (lit. I&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt; am&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; it&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt; forgotten&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;, &quot;I forgot (it).&quot; ), where the grammatical subject is specifically marked as not being the actor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beu&lt;/em&gt; isn't a past participle, of course, but the construction with an adjective seems quite similar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T14:54:48.593" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T14:54:48.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28082" CreationDate="2019-05-21T16:02:53.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All pronouns common in European languages (save Basque, Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and Lapp) date back to Proto-Indo-European, e.g. &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; **egho* 'I', &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; **me* 'me', &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; **tu* 'thou', &lt;em&gt;thee&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; **te* 'thee', etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These pronouns have been preserved in more descendant languages than any other word. For pronoun root *m- '1st person non-subject', I have found it in 480 out of the 482 IE languages and dialects for which I obtained data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pronoun roots *m- '1st person' and *t- '2nd person' are found in a cluster of language families covering northern Eurasia (Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Gilyak, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut, as well as, somewhat faintly, in Nippo-Korean). Mostly preserved in all descendants as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their massive preservation in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years makes them very unlikely independent innovations in these families. Most likely they are the traces of a more ancient language, Proto-Eurasiatic. Greenberg wrote two splendid books about this linguistic phylum (Stanford University Press, 2000 and 2002).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested I wrote an essay about the ultimate origin of personal pronouns, which are very special words (changing referent with each speaker), when syntax first evolved and it began to be &quot;unwieldy,&quot; as the first answer rightly says, to use personal names to indicate who's doing what to whom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24635" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T22:26:52.527" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T22:26:52.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28082" CreationDate="2019-05-21T16:42:34.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question. The shape of pronouns goes further back in time than the methods of historical linguistics reach. There are two major groupings of languages that are not demonstrably related, but sharing striking similarities in their pronouns: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;languages with M-T-pronouns&lt;/a&gt; distributed over Europe and Northern Asia, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/137&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;languages with N-M-pronouns&lt;/a&gt; in the Americas. Note that English is not in the M-T-group because it has lost its original t-pronoun &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's another intresting map: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/combinations/137B_136B#2/24.9/153.7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;M-pronouns in the first and second person singular&lt;/a&gt; all four possible cases occur, and they show some geographical clustering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T16:42:34.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T18:55:32.347" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a way to know, a tool that tells me, that, for example, the verb &lt;em&gt;to show&lt;/em&gt; is the ditransitive semantic extension of the verb &lt;em&gt;to see&lt;/em&gt;, simply because &lt;em&gt;to show X Y&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;to let X see Y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us call this semantic relation the &lt;strong&gt;transitivity extension&lt;/strong&gt;. &#xA;In the same way as the previous example, this relation binds &lt;em&gt;to know&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;to inform&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to say&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;to tell&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to die&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;to kill&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&#xA;It gives the transitive version of an intransitive verb, and gives the ditransitive version of a transitive verb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other such semantic relations on pairs of different parts of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I find such information when I need it? Any accessible and usable semantic ontology that provides that kind of information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: OK I made a mistake in explaining what I want. I meant that you give as input two things: the verb &lt;em&gt;to see&lt;/em&gt; and the semantic relation, and the tool outputs &lt;em&gt;to show&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24427" LastEditorUserId="24427" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T18:34:54.590" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T18:34:54.590" Title="How to find which verbs are semantically-related to a given verb or noun?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;ontologies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31523" CreationDate="2019-05-21T19:29:13.483" Score="0" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following excerpt is from &lt;em&gt;Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid&lt;/em&gt; by Douglas Hofstadter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Divide the adjectives in English into two categories: those which are self-descriptive, such as &quot;pentasyllabic&quot;, &quot;awkwardnessful&quot;, and &quot;recherché&quot;, and those which are not, such as &quot;edible&quot;, &quot;incomplete&quot;, and &quot;bisyllabic&quot;. Now if we admit &quot;non-self-descriptive&quot; as an adjective, to which class does it belong? If it seems questionable to include hyphenated words, we can use two terms invented specially for this paradox: &lt;em&gt;autological&lt;/em&gt; (= &quot;self-descriptive&quot;), and &lt;em&gt;heterological&lt;/em&gt; (= &quot;non-self-descriptive&quot;). The question then becomes: &quot;Is 'heterological' heterological?&quot; Try it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Hofstadter is describing is a famous variation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Russell's Paradox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Grelling-Nelson Paradox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Both Hofstadter and Grelling seem to be concerned with how one should classify &quot;heterological&quot;, and makes no mention of which of the two categories &quot;autological&quot; falls into. So my question then, is &quot;autological&quot; an autological adjective, or a heterological adjective? Or is the answer to this question yet another paradox implied by Grelling's original question about &quot;heterological&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24638" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T21:10:17.057" Title="The Grelling-Nelson Paradox" Tags="&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;word-classes&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;&lt;ontologies&gt;&lt;complement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31520" CreationDate="2019-05-21T20:42:17.860" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No instance of an adjective is self-descriptive, it always describes other instances of words. This is the classical sign/meaning confusion. Word-forms are not descriptive, they are collections of instances and always follow the instance (hence dictionaries need citations). Problem solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few words, like &quot;I&quot; said by myself for example, are self descriptive, and then not bijective, that is, I am not just the sound that I omit and the sound is not my own posession, but then what is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T20:42:17.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31520" CreationDate="2019-05-21T21:10:17.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as you can view the question of the self-descriptiveness of &quot;non-self-descriptive&quot; as a form of the liar's paradox (&quot;this statement is false&quot;) you can similarly view the question of whether &quot;autological&quot; is autological along the lines of &quot;this statement is true.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional analysis is that such statements can be taken as either true or false, without contradiction either way.  Thus it's valid to say that &quot;autological&quot; is autological, or that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; autological, and no contradiction will arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I once read that due to esoteric reasons in formal logic, such statements were (either by convention or deeper reasons) taken to be true &amp;mdash; but I cannot currently find a reference for this.  (I believe Tarski or Smullyan may have claimed as such?)  In that case, one should take &quot;autological&quot; to, in fact, be autological.  I will look some more to see if I can find a reference for this (and the reasons) but perhaps somebody else will beat me to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24641" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T21:10:17.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31481" CreationDate="2019-05-22T02:19:47.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the CELEX database, you can find some verbs that match your criteria. There aren't many, and as others have already said, these are mostly deadjectival or denominal verbs on &lt;em&gt;-ig&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;ängstigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bändigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;billigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;einigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fertigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;festigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;huldigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kräftigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kreuzigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kündigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mäßigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nächtigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nötigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;peinigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;predigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;reinigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sänftigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sättigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;schädigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;steinigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sündigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;tätigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;willigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;würdigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;zeitigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;züchtigen&lt;/em&gt; ...) and denominal verbs like &lt;em&gt;antworten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;arbeiten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;argwöhnen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;frühstücken&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;heiraten&lt;/em&gt; (no connection to &lt;em&gt;heil&lt;/em&gt;, by the way -- there's an old Germanic word for 'household', 'family' in there), &lt;em&gt;kennzeichnen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;kiebitzen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;langweilen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mutmaßen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ohrfeigen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;urteilen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;weihnachten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wirtschaften&lt;/em&gt; and some more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's also &lt;em&gt;ehelichen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;dolmetschen&lt;/em&gt; (borrowed from a Slavic language that got it from Turkish &lt;em&gt;tilmaç&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24643" LastEditorUserId="24643" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T12:18:31.343" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T12:18:31.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-22T02:49:54.180" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all know that &quot;but&quot; is used to replace &quot;except&quot; or indicate that the first clause is contrastive to the second in a way, or the logic these two sentences bear is somewhat contradictory. But, I see that there is also a redundant use of &quot;but&quot;. I want to confirm whether it is a form of redundancy, or it is just me. Please consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not a teacher, BUT I am a student.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not a gun, BUT it is a curtain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is not a president, BUT he is a clown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24328" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T10:23:58.587" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T21:15:01.383" Title="&quot;but&quot; usage (redundancy of &quot;but&quot;)" Tags="&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;clauses&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31525" CreationDate="2019-05-22T03:15:58.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you answered your own question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;but&quot; is used to […] indicate that the first clause is contrastive to the second in a way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your first example, &quot;I am not a teacher&quot; contrasts with &quot;I am a student&quot;. In context, I'd imagine something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice, in a school: Excuse me, are you a teacher? I have some questions about the organization here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob: I'm not a teacher… &lt;em&gt;[and thus might not be able to answer]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob: …but I am a student. &lt;em&gt;[and thus &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; answer]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the &quot;but&quot; is because the implication of the first part is the opposite of the implication of the second part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your other two examples, I wouldn't use &quot;but&quot; in most cases: only in a context where the two clauses had different implicatures (like above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T03:15:58.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-22T13:02:59.430" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to break down and analyse different sentence structures in English. Each group contains one present, past, and future sentence, but otherwise should be the same within a group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He gives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He gave&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will give&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has given&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He had given&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will have given&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is giving&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He was giving&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will be giving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;4&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has been giving&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He had been giving&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will have been giving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they're all indicative&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2 is perfective&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 &amp;amp; 4 are progressive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that I'm not mistaken so far, I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the inverse of progressive called, i.e. 1 &amp;amp; 2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do 1 &amp;amp; 3 have in common that 2 &amp;amp; 4 don't, and what are their respective names?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:30:58.893" Title="How to break down sentences into known grammatical categories" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;tense-aspect-mood&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31519" CreationDate="2019-05-22T13:32:11.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For verbs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/luIndex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FrameNet&lt;/a&gt; might be what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you search for &quot;show&quot; there, you'll find several entries for different frames, including lexical entries and annotated sentences. In this case, you're probably looking for the frame &quot;cause to perceive&quot;, but there are also some others (mostly metaphorical extensions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web interface&lt;/a&gt;) doesn't go into as much detail regarding (possible) frame elements, but does offer different word senses, sentence frames and relations to other words.&#xA;In the case of your example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S: (v) show (make visible or noticeable) &lt;em&gt;&quot;She showed her talent for cooking&quot;; &quot;Show me your etchings, please&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;S: (v) see (perceive by sight or have the power to perceive by sight) &lt;em&gt;&quot;You have to be a good observer to see all the details&quot;; &quot;Can you see the bird in that tree?&quot;; &quot;He is blind--he cannot see&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, if you search for &quot;kill&quot;, you'll find this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;S: (v) kill (cause to die; put to death, usually intentionally or knowingly) &lt;em&gt;&quot;This man killed several people when he tried to rob a bank&quot;; &quot;The farmer killed a pig for the holidays&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;S: (v) die, decease, perish, go, exit, pass away, expire, pass, kick the bucket, cash in one's chips, buy the farm, conk, give-up the ghost, drop dead, pop off, choke, croak, snuff it (pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life) &lt;em&gt;&quot;She died from cancer&quot;; &quot;The children perished in the fire&quot;; &quot;The patient went peacefully&quot;; &quot;The old guy kicked the bucket at the age of 102&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24643" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T13:32:11.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31527" CreationDate="2019-05-22T14:00:56.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There you go: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding aspect, 1 is &quot;simple&quot;, 2 is &quot;perfect&quot;, 3 is &quot;continous&quot; (or &quot;progressive&quot;), 4 is &quot;perfect continuous&quot; (or &quot;perfect progressive&quot;). (I'm not aware of a special umbrella term for non-continuous forms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 &amp;amp; 4 share &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_(grammar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;perfect aspect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24643" LastEditorUserId="24643" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T21:11:11.787" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T21:11:11.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31481" CreationDate="2019-05-22T15:03:57.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few more examples in addition to Cyreth's great answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;malochen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;roboten&lt;/em&gt; (another two words semantically close to &lt;em&gt;arbeiten&lt;/em&gt;, both loans, the former from Yiddish and the latter from Czech or another Slavic language), &lt;em&gt;haushalten&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;urlauben&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T15:03:57.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31485" CreationDate="2019-05-22T15:53:18.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language you're thinking of could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuchi_language#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yuchi&lt;/a&gt;. It has a complex gender system, involving animacy, biological sex, and uprightedness of inanimate objects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But it does not coalesce biological sex and uprightedness. And it is not spoken anywhere near Australia.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T15:53:18.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28530" CreationDate="2019-05-22T17:12:30.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;to my knowledge, it doesn't exist in English or French for example&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, my father, born in a Francoprovençal village, often called me &quot;mon petit père&quot; or &quot;mon gros père&quot; (I used to be a chubby baby) until I was 5 or 6, and he was not alone in doing so with his sons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father-in-law, a Picard farmer with a lot of dialectal phrases in his French, always called his grandsons &quot;mon tcho père&quot; (tcho = petiot), and so do his sons today with both their sons and nephews (and maybe other kids).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that neither me nor any other French people I know ever called their father &quot;mon gros père,&quot; however chubby. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Children may call their father &quot;mon petit papa&quot; (typically with an overtender tone, to introduce a sensitive request), though not &quot;mon petit père&quot;, while French fathers will not call them &quot;mon petit papa&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that &quot;mon petit père&quot; may have a derogatory use between male adults, like a euphemistic version of &quot;dirtball&quot; or &quot;scumbag&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Dis donc, mon petit père, tu croyais me rouler?&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing for mothers, brothers or any other kinship term, to the best of my experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24648" LastEditorUserId="24648" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T18:31:18.923" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T18:31:18.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28530" CreationDate="2019-05-22T19:41:14.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondered about this and &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/a/51916/35111&quot;&gt;answered my own question&lt;/a&gt; on the German StackExchange. The phenomenon exists in German dialects, but not Standard German (with the possible exception of &lt;em&gt;Pate&lt;/em&gt;; see below). I found one article by Germanist Wilhelm Schoof, &quot;Die deutschen Verwandtschaftsnamen&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Zeitschrift für hochdeutsche Mundarten&lt;/em&gt;, 1900, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_T5FkCYw9U10C/page/n209&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link&lt;/a&gt;), where he coins the term &lt;em&gt;Rückgabe der Anrede&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;giving back the address&quot;). As far as I can tell, this term has not caught on. Since the article is in German, it might not be useful to you, but I have still included some page references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pate&lt;/em&gt; &quot;godfather&quot; can refer to the godchild. This meaning is still listed in modern dictionaries. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/wdg/Pate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WDG&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Swiss German &lt;em&gt;Äni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;grandfather&quot; can refer to the grandchild (p. 263 f.). (&lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.idiotikon.ch/idtkn/id1.htm#!page/10247/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Idiotikon&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases where the child reverses a term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Middle Rhenish dialects, &lt;em&gt;Nichte&lt;/em&gt; &quot;niece&quot; can refer to the aunt (p. 267). (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemma=nichte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DWB&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;em&gt;nyecht&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Mutterschwester&quot;, i.e. aunt)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Middle High German &lt;em&gt;Neffe&lt;/em&gt; &quot;nephew&quot; can refer to the uncle (p. 260). (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemma=neffe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DWB&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastEditorUserId="23112" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T20:02:14.813" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T20:02:14.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31527" CreationDate="2019-05-22T21:26:19.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(One thing to note first, these terms aren't universally accepted. Linguists like to come up with new terms, and some people might use &quot;imperfective&quot; or &quot;continuous&quot; where I use &quot;progressive&quot;, or &quot;preterite&quot; or &quot;aoristic&quot; where I use &quot;simple&quot;, and so on.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tense-wise, English has only two morphological tenses: &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-past&lt;/em&gt;. These can be determined by looking at the first verb word in the phrase. &quot;Will&quot; + non-past, as a special augmentation, makes &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt;. (But people often use the non-past for future events without &quot;will&quot;: would you really say *&quot;after you &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; arrive in Berlin&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's no other auxiliary (extra verb word), you have &lt;em&gt;simple aspect&lt;/em&gt;. This is a sort of default form without anything special added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you replace the verb with &quot;have&quot; + past participle, you have &lt;em&gt;perfective aspect&lt;/em&gt;. This indicates that the action was already completed, and you're talking about the effects that resulted. For example, compare &quot;I ate&quot; (simple action in the past) against &quot;I have [already] eaten&quot; (the action's finished, but we're talking about its effects in the present, so &quot;have&quot; is marked non-past).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you replace the verb with &quot;be&quot; + present participle, you have &lt;em&gt;progressive aspect&lt;/em&gt;. This indicates that it's an ongoing action, or an action that's extended over a duration. Again, compare &quot;I ate&quot; against &quot;I was eating&quot; (…over a span of time, during which something else happened).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you replace the verb with &quot;be&quot; + past participle, you have &lt;em&gt;passive voice&lt;/em&gt;. The direct object becomes the subject, and the subject is pushed off somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any number of these can be applied, in the order I listed them. For example, you can say &quot;he will have been being fired&quot;: from beginning to end, this marks future tense, perfective aspect, progressive aspect, and passive voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opposites of these don't really have well-agreed-upon names. So the easiest way to refer to 1 and 2 is &quot;non-progressive&quot;, and the easiest way to refer to 1 and 3 is &quot;non-perfective&quot;. None of these appear only in English, but in many languages the perfective and progressive are mutually exclusive, so the non-progressive non-perfective can be given a name (&quot;aoristic&quot;). But that's not the case in English, where you can mix and match them freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T16:30:58.893" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:30:58.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T05:47:25.667" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are typical vocabulary growth rates (say, in words / day) for children and adults in their native languages? Has there been enough research to plot vocabulary growth rate vs age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially interested in how many new words adults learn per year, on average, simply due to new words entering the language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess adults probably still learn words at a surprising rate due to the evolving language, but also that kids still beat them out of the water. But it would be nice to quantify this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23282" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T05:47:25.667" Title="What are typical child and adult vocabulary growth rates?" Tags="&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;vocabulary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31485" CreationDate="2019-05-23T06:00:28.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language you're thinking of could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enga_language#Nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enga&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's got all these existential verbs, depending on the referent!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kata- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are judged to be tall, large, strong, powerful, standing or supporting, e.g. ‘men’, ‘house’, ‘tree’, ‘sun’, and ‘leg’ (lexical meaning ‘to stand’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pita- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are judged to be small, squat, horizontal, or weak, e.g. ‘woman’, ‘possum’, ‘insects’, and ‘pond’ (lexical meaning ‘to sit’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;sa- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are orifices, locations, or crawling or aquatic beings; e.g. ‘eel’, ‘door’, ‘ground’, ‘shovel’, and ‘mouth’ (lexical meaning ‘to lie’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pala- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are internal or subterranean, e.g. ‘worm’, ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘sweet potato’ (lexical meaning ‘to lie inside’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lya- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are hanging or protruding&#xA;  objects, e.g., ‘wasp’, ‘bee’, ‘moss’, ‘mushroom’, ‘fruit’, ‘seed’, ‘flower’ (lexical meaning ‘to hang’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ipa- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are judged to be intermittent, capable of growth, liquid or gas; e.g., ‘river’, ‘rain’, ‘hair’, ‘blood’, and vine used for rope (lexical meaning ‘to come’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;manda- occurs with subject NPs whose typical referents are reproductive, e.g., ‘penis’, ‘vagina’, and ‘testicles’ (lexical meaning ‘to carry’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see &lt;em&gt;The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying&lt;/em&gt;, p. 180)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Enga you'd say things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Koné akáli dóko andá-ka   ká-ly-a-pe&#xA;red  man   the  house-loc be-prs-3sg-q&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Is the European man at home?’ or ‘Is the European man standing in the house?’ (Lang 1975:ƒ42)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Koné énda  dóko andá-ka   pí-ly-a-pe&#xA;red  woman the  house-loc be-prs-3sg-q&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Is the European woman at home?’ or ‘Is the European woman sitting in the house?’ (Lang 1975:ƒ43)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you use the &quot;wrong&quot; existential verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Koné akáli dóko andá-ka   pí-ly-a-pe&#xA;red  man   the  house-loc be-prs-3sg-q&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Is the European man sitting in the house?’ (Lang 1975:ƒ42) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence cannot mean ‘Is the European man at home?’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T09:40:12.677" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T09:40:12.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2124" CreationDate="2019-05-23T06:24:04.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2125/24651&quot;&gt;Otavio Macedo's answer&lt;/a&gt;, if you just want plain txt files containing English words sorted by frequency without having to analyze Google Ngram Viewer's dataset yourself, &lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/ngrams/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Natural Language Corpus Data&lt;/a&gt; provides two useful files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a file containing 1/3 million (333,333) of the most common English words ordered by frequency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a file containing 1/4 million (250,000) of the most common two-word bigrams ordered by frequency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data from these lists are also from Google Ngram Viewer's dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24651" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T06:24:04.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31546" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-23T11:45:02.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T11:45:02.913" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T11:45:02.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31547" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-23T11:45:02.913" Score="0" Body="For questions about names of geographical places (countries, cities, etc.), which are the subject of toponymy." OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T20:18:49.677" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T20:18:49.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31551" CreationDate="2019-05-23T14:19:50.093" Score="12" ViewCount="4246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/52741/which-european-languages-are-not-indo-european&quot;&gt;Which European Languages are not Indo-European?&lt;/a&gt; on History.SE got this peculiar comment from user mathreadler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;None of them are. Indo-European is completely made-up language family by Britons who wanted India to have excuse to be part of Europe in some sense so they could use the massive population as power of social influence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it really so? Or if not, is there an account available online where a linguistic layman may rear about how this notion came about and how it was refuted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24654" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T15:53:27.687" Title="Is the Indo-European language family made up?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;language-families&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31548" CreationDate="2019-05-23T14:33:44.943" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European family is completely made up, yes. But not for the reason cited in that comment. And the fact it's made up doesn't mean it's not &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sciences often posit the existence of things we can't actually directly observe, just because these things explain what we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; observe. In Ancient Greece, some simple thought experiments showed that atoms must exist, even though you can't see an atom. (Later, we invented microscopes and other proofs, which allow us to observe them directly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Proto-Indoeuropean has been posited as an ancient language, not because any of us have ever heard or spoken it, but because it explains some of our observations of the languages of Europe and parts of Asia. (Later, perhaps someone will invent a time-machine of some sort that will allow us to observe Proto-Indoeuropean more directly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Indo-European family is just the group of languages that we suppose have derived from Proto-Indoeuropean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T14:43:13.617" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T14:43:13.617" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31548" CreationDate="2019-05-23T15:45:20.450" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim cited in the quote is definitely wrong. The existence of language families is inferred from the data on extant and ancient languages, and there is a rigorous methodology used in this inferential process. So, it does not matter who looks at the data, experts from all over the world should come to an agreement on the existence and membership of a language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some fringe cases (e.g., very large and deep language families like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nostratic&lt;/a&gt;, or single languages with disputed family affiliations) but Indogermanic is a clear and fully accepted grouping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a layman should be able to see the impressive correspondences layed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this wikipedia article on Indo-European vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;. Contrast this with data from a non-Indogermanic language like Turkish, Japanese, or Tamil for an unrelated language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T15:53:27.687" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T15:53:27.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27437" CreationDate="2019-05-23T16:01:19.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The account that comes to mind that is most &lt;em&gt;à l'époque&lt;/em&gt; (early modern Western linguistics being around the time of the Enlightenment and European colonialism, as a rule of thumb, in the 18th century) is the following work from &lt;em&gt;fauteuil 31 de l’Académie française&lt;/em&gt; and Abbot of Mureau, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5QIwAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA435&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/condillac_etienne_bonnot_de/essai_origine_des_connaissances/condillac_origine_des_connaissances.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Condillac 1746&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Si le génie des langues commence à se former d’après celui&#xA;  des peuples, il n’achève de se développer que par le secours des&#xA;  grands écrivains. Pour en découvrir les progrès, il faut résoudre deux&#xA;  questions qui ont été souvent discutées et jamais, ce me semble, bien&#xA;  éclaircies : c’est de savoir pourquoi les arts et les sciences ne sont pas&#xA;  également de tous les pays et de tous les siècles ; et pourquoi les&#xA;  grands hommes dans tous les genres sont presque contemporains.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rp_go5DhQqQC&amp;amp;pg=PA286&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas Nugent from 1756:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though the character of languages is originally formed from that of the people, yet it is not perfected without the assistance of eminent writers. But to trace its progress, we should resolve two questions, which have been often discussed, and never, I think, rightly decided. It is to know the reason why the arts and sciences do not flourish alike in all ages and in all countries; and why men of eminence in every kind are generally contemporaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does have this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le français a été, pendant longtemps, si peu favorable aux progrès de l’esprit, que si l’on pouvait se représenter Corneille successivement dans les différents âges de la monarchie, on lui trouverait moins de génie, à proportion qu’on s’éloignerait davantage de celui où il a vécu, et l’on arriverait enfin à un Corneille qui ne pourrait donner aucune preuve de talent.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The French tongue was for a long time so unfavourable to the progress of the mind, that if we could frame an idea of Corneille successively in the different ages of our monarchy, we should find him to have been possessed of less genius in proportion to his greater distance from the age in which he lived, till at length we should reach a Corneille, who could not give the least mark of abilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that the language of the nation has an effect of the progress of the nation, and language 'progress', scientific progress, and hence strengthening the nation, appears (to me at least) to be a fairly mainstream intellectual idea of the time. Almost a kind of weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but on the national scale as opposed to the individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BSuoDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT94&amp;amp;lpg=PT94&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern analysis&lt;/a&gt; does have this to say though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Condillac's treatise the tone of linguistic chauvinism [...] is absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This text is worth a read for its overview of historical attitudes to language over this period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assessment is in line with the comment under the question above, that the intuitions of intellectuals arose from popular stereotypes, and evidence was gathered to &quot;rationalise&quot; and &quot;scientise&quot; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:01:19.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21160" CreationDate="2019-05-23T17:46:52.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one example that might be a richer source of &quot;the origins of interrogatives&quot; is Chinese, from Old Chinese (Classical texts) to Middle Chinese (Literary Chinese texts) to modern topolects of Mandarin, Cantonese etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is because the interrogatives are &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; less stable than in Indo-European languages, and have changed many times. There is also a very large synchronic diversity across Sinitic topolects, with the e.g. Cantonese interrogative system very different from modern standard Mandarin or from colloquial northern Mandarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Across the history of Chinese, the &quot;what/which + &quot; is the most common interrogative used for time, place, manner as well as non-personal nominal phrases, and has been generalised to personal nominal phrases in many topolects. In Classical Chinese, these would have been the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pM8QiZGImRgC&amp;amp;pg=PA91&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;velar series&lt;/a&gt; in Middle Chinese phonology (according to Pulleyblank, with */ɣ/). This was most commonly written with 何, but variants abound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;who&quot; for personal nominal phrases was separate in the Classical language, starting with a palatal affricate in Middle Chinese (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pM8QiZGImRgC&amp;amp;pg=PA91&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pulleyblank uses */dʑ/&lt;/a&gt;), and most commonly written 誰. Its reflex remains for Mandarin, but many southern topolects now use the &quot;which&quot; equivalent + personal nominal phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third family in Classical Chinese starting with a glottal stop in Middle Chinese, typified by 安, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pM8QiZGImRgC&amp;amp;pg=PA91&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypothesised&lt;/a&gt; to be mergers of the prepostional coverb 於 (&lt;em&gt;is, at&lt;/em&gt;) with various elements. I'm only aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%8C%89%E6%80%8E#Min_Nan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Min&lt;/a&gt; group preserving this reflex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the history of Middle Chinese, one of the transitions from Early to Late Middle Chinese (through the Tang dynasty) is the dual layer of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uNSBDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA223&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical vs more vernacular interrogatives&lt;/a&gt; in text from this time. The Classical 何 structure for the &quot;what/which + &quot; had in competition the more vernacular 什摩 (note the characters!), which caused a few changes in syntax for the interrogative adverb of manner (the &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;). The origin of this new &quot;sh-&quot; family &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems to be&lt;/a&gt; 是物, literally &lt;em&gt;this thing&lt;/em&gt; in Classical Chinese, but [apparently] taking on interrogative force in late Middle Chinese. This of course led straight to Mandarin 什麼, Min Dong 什乇, Min Nan 啥物 etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots more issues to go through, but I'll just list a few different things for the reader's own research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the which/what distinction across (most?) modern topolects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the emergence of the t- class in Min&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the emergence of the m- class in Cantonese/Yue, Hakka, and Mandarin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wh-in situ vs wh-movement across the topolects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the emergence of interrogative numerals (幾何 in Classical Chinese, 多少 vs 幾 in Mandarin)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the origin of the families of Classical Chinese interrogatives and their relation to the Sino-Tibetan family at large (for example, Tibetan uses as one of its interrogative pronouns ག་རེ, Wylie transliteration: ga-re. What evidence is there that this is connected to 何? Can we reconstruct a proto-Sino-Tibetan form?). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What trends are there for the use of different characters along different periods or maybe different areas for each of the Classical families?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T09:43:13.810" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T09:43:13.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T18:02:31.437" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, writing was done in 漢字 (English spelling may vary), going down and stopping and switching to the next line on the left and repeating the process again. Now, all of them write in the same orientation as English - going horizontally to the right and stopping and switching to the next line below the previous line and repeating the process again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are exceptions. Chinese-language novels published in Taiwan or in Hong Kong may be printed in the traditional orientation. In Mainland China, books may also be printed in the traditional orientation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there are Arabic and Hebrew. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conjecture is that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are all arranged in syllabic blocks. So, it would be relatively easy to change orientation. However, the same cannot be said for Arabic and Hebrew. Those are abjads, and the letters must be arranged in a specific order. And there is the Mongolian script, which is a vertical alphabet, again a specific order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be as if English letters were arranged vertically like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;n&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;m&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So difficult to read!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question above can be expressed alternatively. Is it possible to write Arabic or Hebrew or Mongolian in the same orientation as English? Is the inability to change writing orientation purely linguistic, or are there social/historical/cultural factors involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23690" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T18:02:31.437" Title="What made some languages change normal writing orientation?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;history&gt;&lt;writing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T19:23:03.960" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language employs some kind of alphabet for writing. One could naïvely expect that each letter bears the same amount of entropy. But in reality that is not the case. For example in English each letter has it own frequency and they are far from equal. Same is for many other languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that some letters are more frequent than others? I have found &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/31164/24657&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that is asking seemingly for a similar information, but the answers are concerning phonetics only, and not the actual written alphabet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any language or an alphabet, that treats each letter equally? Or nearly equally? Natural or constructed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24657" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T19:23:03.960" Title="Does an alphabet with the uniform letter frequency distribution exist?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T21:27:43.467" Score="5" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens sometimes that rather useful words disappear.  A word like&#xA;&lt;em&gt;thence,&lt;/em&gt; for example, is very useful, and has to be replaced if it is&#xA;taken out of the language by something less concise (and less elegant),&#xA;namely &lt;em&gt;from there.&lt;/em&gt; It's rather mysterious to me that this should&#xA;happen.  Why do such words ever fall out of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12706" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T04:47:56.220" Title="Why do words like thence fall out of use?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T01:07:30.130" Score="1" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can we say that ungrammatical strings are still part of the English language? Like for example Joe sleep not last night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24661" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T02:33:45.467" Title="morphology and ill-formed sentences" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31558" CreationDate="2019-05-24T02:33:45.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe, maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're familiar with the computer science definition of a &quot;language&quot; as a set of strings (where a &quot;string&quot; is an ordered sequence of characters, and a &quot;character&quot; is an element of an arbitrary but pre-defined set called the &quot;alphabet&quot;). But in linguistics, it's never quite that clear-cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the sentence &quot;I ain't got nothing&quot;. Would you consider this sentence part of the English language, or not? Many native speakers would say yes, but many other native speakers would say no. There are dialects of English where this sentence would be immediately accepted as grammatical, and other dialects where it would be immediately rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sort of like &quot;word&quot;, &quot;language&quot; is one of those terms that comes up all the time in linguistics, even though it doesn't have any widely-accepted rigorous definition. The whole idea of discrete &quot;languages&quot; breaks down the moment you look at dialect continua—compare the languages spoken all across Italy and you won't be able to draw hard lines anywhere. But we still use it anyway, just because it's an extremely useful model in most circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, no native English speaker I know would produce that sentence. However, every native English speaker I know would understand the meaning perfectly. Does that make it a part of the English language? Well, that's up to you and the definitions you decide to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The main error in your sentence is syntactic, not morphological. For a pure morphology error, try something like *&quot;Alex sleep&quot; (instead of &quot;Alex sleep&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T02:33:45.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31557" CreationDate="2019-05-24T03:53:16.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @jlawler pointed out in the comments, there was a whole paradigm of words like &lt;strong&gt;thence,&lt;/strong&gt; and therein lies the problem with such non-transparent terms, however elegant they are: they usually come in pairs, and it's hard to remember which is which. What's more, they often sound similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not many people will mix up &lt;strong&gt;horizontal&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;vertical&lt;/strong&gt; because at least one of these terms is completely transparent. We all know which way the horizon goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's something like &lt;strong&gt;starboard&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;port,&lt;/strong&gt; which is actually &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; transparent than &lt;strong&gt;left/right,&lt;/strong&gt; but only for seafarers. The rest of us struggle to remember them correctly, but at least they sound very different, giving our memory something to latch on to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's the nightmare-difficulty level, neither transparent nor dissimilar: &lt;strong&gt;convex&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;concave,&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;longitude&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;latitude.&lt;/strong&gt; And this is where I think pairs like &lt;strong&gt;thence&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;thither&lt;/strong&gt; belong. So I'd guess eventually people just gave up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T03:53:16.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31557" CreationDate="2019-05-24T04:47:56.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To elaborate on the others' comments about paradigms: although misfortune can befall individual words, you do have to look at the whole system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &quot;thence&quot; we lost &quot;whence&quot; and the non-figurative sense of &quot;hence&quot; (&quot;Get thee hence&quot;). We lost &quot;henceforth&quot; and &quot;thenceforth&quot;. We lost &quot;thither&quot;, &quot;whither&quot;, and &quot;hither&quot;. We lost &quot;wherefore&quot; and &quot;therefore&quot; became elevated. &quot;Hereafter&quot; and &quot;thereafter&quot; were relegated to fixed meanings and poetic diction. &quot;Wherein&quot;, &quot;therein&quot;, &quot;herein&quot; went the way of &quot;whereupon&quot;, &quot;thereupon&quot;, &quot;hereupon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, our prepositions became more atomic. This is arguably a minor typological shift from synthetic to analytic. Individual pieces combine to yield the meaning. Less concise, but less space in memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broaden your search further and you find verbal endings being neutralized in favour of explicit subjects, separate from the verb. A future tense grows out of the repurposed particle &quot;will&quot;. Particles abound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T04:47:56.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17624" CreationDate="2019-05-24T07:30:18.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, states the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Middle English &lt;em&gt;gendre&lt;/em&gt;, from Old French, kind, gender, from Latin &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gener-&lt;/em&gt;. See &lt;strong&gt;genə&lt;/strong&gt; in Appendix I.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Appendix I is PIE roots.)&#xA;This website: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender&lt;/a&gt;, says that even in Latin &quot;genus&quot; could mean sexual gender, as well as things like &quot;family&quot;, &quot;rank&quot;, or &quot;species&quot; It's grammatical usage, however, seems to stem from the fact that it was used to translate the Greek word &quot;genos&quot; which Aristotle (and others) used as a grammatical term, and which derived from the same PIE root according to Wiktionary (which says its *ǵenh₁- +‎ *-os = &quot;race, lineage&quot;) (Keep in mind that h₁ on Wiktionary is ə₁ in my dictionary because its a reconstructed &quot;laryngeal&quot;; also remember Latin, Greek, and probably PIE all had several inflected forms for nouns.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dictionary (Amer. Herit. Dict., 4th Ed.) also implies that the terminology may not have caused as much confusion &lt;em&gt;in English, at least,&lt;/em&gt; until &quot;recently.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usage Note&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Traditionally, &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of &quot;masculine,&quot; &quot;feminine&quot;, and &quot;neuter,&quot; but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to  refer to to sex-based categories, ... This usage is supported by  the the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve &lt;em&gt;sex&lt;/em&gt; for reference to biological categories, while using &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; to refer to social or cultural categories. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does leave me wondering when the terms &quot;masculine&quot;, &quot;feminine&quot;, and &quot;neuter&quot; entered the picture. It is not the result of the Latin term, because Aristotle used it in Rhetoric, Book III, Chapter 5 (Bekker # 1407b)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0059%3Abekker%20page%3D1407b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0059%3Abekker%20page%3D1407b&lt;/a&gt;, yields this original&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[5] τέταρτον, ὡς Πρωταγόρας τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων διῄρει, ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ σκεύη: δεῖ γὰρ ἀποδιδόναι καὶ ταῦτα ὀρθῶς: [6] “ἡ δ᾽ ἐλθοῦσα καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα ᾤχετο”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to go with this translation I have by W. Rhys Roberts in Brittanica's &quot;Great Books of the Western World&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) A fourth rule is to observe Protagoras' classification of nouns into male, female, and inanimate; for these distinctions also must be correctly given. 'Upon her arrival she said her say and departed (ἡ δ᾽ ἐλθοῦσα καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα ᾤχετο).'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note the differing section numbers because they're from 2 different sources. Аlso note that the word &quot;genos&quot; is in the plural form &quot;geni&quot; (γένη) and is translated as &quot;classification&quot; by WRR., ie. &quot;τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων&quot; means &quot;the classification [of] the nouns&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aristotle's example involves an actual female person, but Ancient Greek's gender system applied to other nouns as well. (eg. &lt;em&gt;House&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; are feminine; &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; is masculine.) At this point it may be prudent to consider that gender systems in many languages, including most European languages actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; somewhat related to sexual gender, both because of the usual alignment of animate (esp. human) examples, and because of &lt;em&gt;metaphor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;association&lt;/em&gt;. Although Indo-European's feminine gender may have originally come from some grammatical inflexion (Anim.=masc vs Inam.=neut. is prob. older), there is a tendency in many languages to put objects associated with women and with men, or with female and male stereotypes/roles, into different noun classes. There is also research indicating that modern speakers of IE languages (even young children) associate objects that have a certain grammatical gender with the associated sexual gender. &lt;a href=&quot;https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/31865/1/31865_Alvanoudi_Pavlidou_2013.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/31865/1/31865_Alvanoudi_Pavlidou_2013.pdf&lt;/a&gt; It strikes me that this might still have something to do with education, but I don't know if that makes it any less important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many languages have noun-class systems that relate to real semantic (and grammatical) properties of nouns, such as the complex system of Bantu languages with classes for humans, animals, plants, fluids, actions, etc., or the animate-inanimate (or similar) distinctions of some languages, so it's not surprising to me that gender systems would have some (often very vague) semantic content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: According to the world atlas if language structures, most languages with grammatical gender systems have distictions associated with sex, and most of the languages that don't are Niger-Congo languages. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/chapter/31&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/feature/31A#2/-20.6/48.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wals.info/feature/31A#2/-20.6/48.4&lt;/a&gt;) The following text was written before I knew that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most languages with an actually &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt;-related noun class system (outside pronouns) are either Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic (like Arabic and Hausa), although it does play an important role in some more complex noun class systems, such as the 4-way noun-class system of Dyirbal (in Australia) which is the inspiration for George Lakoff's book &lt;em&gt;Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things&lt;/em&gt;. These previous are the reason why the term &lt;em&gt;noun-class&lt;/em&gt; is preferred over &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt; nowadays, though apparently some linguists distinguish between the two concepts. Here's a link for exploring some of the various types of &quot;genders&quot; in the world: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24509" LastEditorUserId="24509" LastEditDate="2019-07-29T11:22:14.330" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T11:22:14.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T08:36:23.410" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I gave Tom an apple&quot; and &quot;I gave an apple to Tom&quot; have the same meaning. The meaning of Tom receiving the apple comes form the position of the word in the former example and from the preposition in the latter. Would the two be analysed in the same fashion ? dative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question (in and about French): &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/34858/un-verbe-peut-il-avoir-deux-cod&quot;&gt;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/34858/un-verbe-peut-il-avoir-deux-cod&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T20:31:47.093" Title="&quot;I gave Tom an apple&quot; and &quot;I gave an apple to Tom&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31185" CreationDate="2019-05-24T13:58:06.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, for example English as you pointed out in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Norwegian: &quot;ennå&quot; and &quot;allerede&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Dutch: &quot;nog&quot;, and &quot;al&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Czech: &quot;ještě&quot; and &quot;již&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Mandarin:  還 and  已經&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically it seems like all languages have ways to express these concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T13:58:06.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31525" CreationDate="2019-05-24T16:48:41.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples you are given are not natural, although maybe formally correct. Colloquially, you'll rather find&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not a teacher, but a student&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; is adverbially linking &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt; to the verb of the matrix clause We can readily see that &lt;em&gt;I am not a student, [and] a teacher&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous; different bracketing yields different ways to parse the negation; If anything, the intended negation is ungrammatical because the number of the singular subject disagrees with the two-headed object. Redundancy is thus required to disambiguate, e.g: &lt;em&gt;I am not a student, not a teacher&lt;/em&gt;, which however is equally unlikely, and rather said using &lt;em&gt;neither, nor&lt;/em&gt;. The base case &lt;em&gt;I am a student, [and] a teacher [and a unicorn]&lt;/em&gt; is still ambiguous due to the semantics, where teacher and student are usually in opposition, so &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; might be used as the conjunction of choice to mark simultanity. Copula are regularly required between two indefinite nouns, except for adpositions (&lt;em&gt;a teacher, a smart one&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that's redundant in your example is the repeated verb. If &lt;em&gt;amn't&lt;/em&gt; is parsed as a lexeme, then &lt;em&gt;I am not X, I am Y&lt;/em&gt; is anaphoric without redundancy. However, that's rarely the case, as shown in the frequent reversal &lt;em&gt;I am a Y, not an X&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another reason to use the conjunction: *It is not the show it ...&quot; rather expects &quot;... used to be&quot;, a syntax that can be explicitly disambiguited with the conjunction &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;. It seems reasonable to assume the indefinite article would follow the same pattern of the definite article, for simplicity of the paradigm, even if a definite pronoun &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; cannot be in adposition to an indefinite noun (rather it needs &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, which then functions as a determiner: &lt;em&gt;It is not a show that is shown on TV&lt;/em&gt;). Moving out on a limb I guess we may still see &lt;em&gt;It will not rain, it won't&lt;/em&gt;, which is prefectly redundant, that is seen all too frequently in reversed order in anaphoric questions, &lt;em&gt;isn't it&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T16:48:41.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31563" CreationDate="2019-05-24T19:14:37.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Relational Grammar, the &quot;to Tom&quot; is a 3 (or indirect object), but when that is moved up next to the verb, it has been advanced to a 2 (or direct object).  This advancement forces the original 2 to lose its grammatical relation and become a chômeur, which is moved to the right, because of the Stratal Uniqueness Law, which does not permit more than one instance of a term relation on one Stratum.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B4meur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chômeur&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm a believer in the Stratal Uniquess Law.  Don't know about the rest of this analysis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T19:14:37.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T19:23:49.067" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;When person asks a question, &quot;which language is the most similar to Modern English?&quot;, the most common answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frisian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most people that answer this question as it is, are unaware, which Frisian language/dialect. As far as I know, there are couple of Frisian languages/dialects, such as North Frisian, West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, Sölring, Öömrang, Fering, Halunder,  Halligen, Wiringhiirder, Frasch, Karhiirder, Hoolmer and Hoorninger. Also, I think that is no such thing as Standard Frisian. (Or even Standard North Frisian, Standard Saterland Frisian or Standard West Frisian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T19:23:49.067" Title="Which Frisian language/dialect is the most similar to Modern English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T19:28:01.173" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a dataset of airline customer complaints. Since it is &quot;complaints&quot; the general consensus is all the sentence are &quot;negative&quot; sentiment. So I am think of an approach to quantize the negativity score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less Negative review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &quot;the cabin did not have enough leg space but the food was decent&quot; - Score: 0.3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High Negative Review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;complete service was horrible, I will not recommend them ever&quot; - Score: 0.8&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions on existing approaches? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S I am not looking for an exact answer, any suggestions on the direction or approaches would be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24671" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T23:48:38.980" Title="Negativity score for sentences" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;sentiment-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2019-05-24T20:33:08.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Macedonian and Serbian are completely phonetic languages. I am Macedonian, therefore will give examples from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Macedonian language has 31 letters, and each of them is a represented with a well defined and distinguishing sound. The official alphabet is Cyrillic, and today, 24th of May is the day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who wrote the first Glagolitic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| English   | Macedonian  | Cyrillic|&#xA;|-----------+-------------+---------|&#xA;| letter    | bukva       | буква   |&#xA;| alphabet  | azbuka      | азбука  |&#xA;| Cyril     | Kiril       | Кирил   |&#xA;| Methodius | Metodij     | Методиј |&#xA;| George    | Gjorgji     | Ѓорѓи   |&#xA;| love      | ljubov      | љубов   |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first 4 examples are quite simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 4th one, George in Macedonian is &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=%D0%83%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%93%D0%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gjorgji&lt;/a&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;Gj&lt;/code&gt; is one letter in Cyrilic &lt;code&gt;ѓ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 5th one, love in Macedonian is &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=%D1%99%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ljubov&lt;/a&gt;, where lj in Cyrillic is one letter &lt;code&gt;љ&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bulgarian is also close to 100% phonetic, but it has a couple of letters that are pronounced like two sounds, i.e. &lt;code&gt;я&lt;/code&gt; (/ja/, /jɐ/, /a/ or /ɐ/), &lt;code&gt;щ&lt;/code&gt;(/ʃt/), &lt;code&gt;ю&lt;/code&gt;(/ju/, /jo/, /u/ or /o/), and also in order to make the sound J, like in John, you need 2 letters (Дж), so &lt;code&gt;John = Джон&lt;/code&gt;, while in Macedonian and Serbian is &lt;code&gt;Џон&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some Romanesque language that are close to 100% phonetic, like Spanish and Italian, but they have some rules where one letter may sound different depending of its position in the word, and sibling letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&#xA;The &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; letter has different pronunciation in Jorge /ˈxoɾxe/ and Gato /ˈɡa.tu/ in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; letter has different pronunciation in both its occurrences in Calcio /ˈkaltʃo/ in Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24672" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T20:33:08.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31571" CreationDate="2019-05-24T20:44:42.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a large literature on negation.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically on quantization, it might be interesting to classify various forms of negation with regard to how grammatically oblique they are.  I use numbers corresponding to the 1,2,3 of Relational Grammar, supplemented by a 0 relation for least oblique.  Higher numbers are more oblique, appearing lower down in a grammatical tree structure.  From more to less oblique: &quot;I saw no one ever./I didn't ever see anyone./I never did see anyone./Never did I see anyone.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T20:51:12.273" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T20:51:12.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31525" CreationDate="2019-05-24T21:15:01.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples that you picked are where &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt; is simply being a conjunction joining 2 sentences/clauses. The usage of &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt; there seems redundant for that reason but (note the meta usage of the very word here) without it you'll have 2 separate sentences. So you'd have to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not a teacher. I am a student&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or with the conjunction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not a teacher but a student&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is still a possibility for a different question. Perhaps a parent looking for some employee of the school for some help with directions could ask, &quot;Are you a teacher?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not a teacher but I could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, the second part is not even contrasting the first. Again, without the &lt;code&gt;but&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am not a teacher. I could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is still not redundancy much like other conjunctions aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24662" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T21:15:01.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31571" CreationDate="2019-05-24T23:48:38.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, this is called &lt;strong&gt;sentiment analysis&lt;/strong&gt; aka &lt;strong&gt;opinion mining&lt;/strong&gt;; putting either of those into Google will give dozens of different possible starting points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One model I've used before is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VADER&lt;/a&gt;, which is specifically tuned to online reviews and social media posts; if you're using Python, it's available through the NLTK (natural language toolkit) library, or on its own through Pypi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get started, you can use something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from nltk.sentiment.vader import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer&#xA;&#xA;analyzer = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()&#xA;scores = analyzer.polarity_scores(my_sentence)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's all there is to it! Now &lt;code&gt;scores&lt;/code&gt; is a dictionary with four keys, giving the probability that the sentence is positive (&lt;code&gt;pos&lt;/code&gt;), negative (&lt;code&gt;neg&lt;/code&gt;), or neutral (&lt;code&gt;neu&lt;/code&gt;), along with an estimate of how intense the feeling is (&lt;code&gt;compound&lt;/code&gt;: negative values mean negative sentiment, positive values mean the opposite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a longer demo &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/howto/sentiment.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you scroll down to the second heading, showing how you might use it inside a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T23:48:38.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-25T12:48:09.153" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of literature on contemporaneous analyses of languages that pre-date or are not influenced by Aristotle's &quot;Categories&quot; and the grammatici? For example, did the Chinese analyze Chinese on its own terms? Re. Sanskrit I've found only: Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language. Oxford University Press, 2001. Many thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24675" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T06:26:17.823" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T06:26:17.823" Title="Literature on contemporaneous analyses of languages that pre-date or are not influenced by Aristotle's &quot;Categories&quot; and the grammatici" Tags="&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31576" CreationDate="2019-05-25T15:15:13.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first full linguistic analysis I can think of is Pāṇini's description of Sanskrit, written somewhere in the early fourth century BCE. Pāṇini is sometimes considered the first linguist, because parts of his &lt;em&gt;Aṣṭādhyāyī&lt;/em&gt; weren't surpassed until the 20th century: he goes into great detail on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and more, with surprisingly modern insights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps surprisingly, Pāṇini mentions in his work that he wasn't the first person to analyze Sanskrit grammar: he cites earlier work which unfortunately hasn't survived. But early proto-linguistics seems to have flourished on the Indian subcontinent well before Aristotle's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T00:49:25.907" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T00:49:25.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31589" CreationDate="2019-05-25T21:19:05.467" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an elementary course on philosophy of language ( at the highschool level) , I try to explain to students the distinction betweeen semantics, syntax and pragmatics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring myself to Carnap/Morris , I say : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Semantics deals with meaning ( sense and reference), with the relation linguistic signs have with the world or with thought ( considered objectively). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Syntax deals with the relations linguistic signs have with one another in a sentence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pragmatics deals with the relations holding between signs and the person that uses them. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;nolens volens&lt;/em&gt; , when I want to explain the interest of each branch, I inevitably arrive at : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;syntax gives the necessary conditions ( though not sufficient) for a sentence to mean anything&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pragamtics shows that one can produce a meaning that is different from the litteral meaning of a sentence by using this sentence in a particular way in a particular context. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the question : can it be suspected that, in fact, syntax and pragmatics belong to semantics? or are sub-field of semantics? Are not semantic considerations omnipresent in lingusitics?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24680" LastEditorDisplayName="user24680" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T10:55:51.430" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T16:35:00.827" Title="Can one avoid using the notion of meaning when defining syntax and pragmatics?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;soft-question&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31598" CreationDate="2019-05-25T22:01:08.897" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only have a rudimentary ( or even less than rudimentary) knowledge of generative grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what strikes me is that the sentence formation rules are coinded using parts of speech. For example ( the most basic one ) : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                 Sentence  --&amp;gt; Noun Phrase + verb Phrase &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the motivation for this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there behind this a hypothesis as to cognitive processes involved in speaking. I mean is there a hypothesis such as &quot; subject, object, complement are artificial categories invented by linguists; the real syntactic categories mentally present in the mind of every speaker, the real natural syntactic categories are parts of speech: noun phrase, verb, adverb, preposition, etc. &quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does generative grammar reject traditional syntactic categories such as subject, object, circumstantial complement, agent complement, etc. ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does generative grammar use parts of speech to formulate syntactic formation rules?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS : I am french, maybe the labels I use are not traditional in english grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24680" LastEditorDisplayName="user24680" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T18:19:05.827" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T22:12:13.103" Title="( New formulation) Are parts of speech syntactic categories? ( A question on generative grammer)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;generative-grammar&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9369" CreationDate="2019-05-25T22:14:46.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is Joseph Greenberg who first used this notion (borrowed from biogeography/taxonomy) in his controversy with Malcolm Guthrie, a leading Bantuist in the 1960s, about the Bantu homeland. Guthrie believed it to have been in the center (somewhere in what is today the DR of Congo) of the huge Bantu area (roughly all Africa south of Equator save the Khoisan area in South Africa-Namibia-Botswana) because it was the &lt;em&gt;lesser&lt;/em&gt; diversity area, erroneously taken as the original zone having best preserved the original language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenberg convincingly demonstrated that, to the contrary, the original Bantu homeland ought to be somewhere around the Cameroon-Nigeria border, where Bantu languages are most divergent, because it is the place where they had the longest time to accumulate divergences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This notion of maximal diversity area (not &quot;center of gravity&quot;) may be corroborated by finding the location of the closest outgroup of the family. The closest outgroup of Bantu languages actually is in southwestern Nigeria, just besides the maximal internal diversity area, implying that their common ancestor also originated around there. (Guthrie believed these languages were not really related to the Bantu family but were instead &quot;Bantuized&quot; languages. Actually, they are all rather closely related members of a 5th- or 6th-order subbranch of the Niger-Congo family.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course neither the &quot;maximal diversity area&quot; nor the &quot;closest outgroup location&quot; are absolute rules for a linguistic group's homeland. In exceptional cases, people may travel quite a long way from their original group (think of Apaches walking 3,000 miles south from the Na-Dené territory). However, each works well as a rule of thumb, and when the two coincide, as in the Bantu case, certitude is close to absolute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For references you may look at: Joseph H. Greenberg, Linguistic Evidence Regarding Bantu Origins, The Journal of African History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1972), pp. 189-216, and references therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24648" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T22:14:46.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31580" CreationDate="2019-05-25T23:48:10.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your first question, yes, meaning can be avoided when defining syntax (or doing it), and, presumably, also for pragmatics.  Without dealing with meaning, following Carnap and Morris, we have a &quot;logical syntax&quot;, which is a theory of implication.  That is, we study what follows from what.  There is plenty to do, there, and this is one popular way of introducing symbolic logic to students -- there is no reference to truth tables (which would make the account semantic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T23:48:10.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31563" CreationDate="2019-05-26T12:49:20.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example of &quot;ditransitive construction&quot;. From a typological perspective, English belongs to languages that show a mixture of constructions: the verb (‘give’ in your example) can occur both in an indirect-object construction and in a double-object construction (Cfr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS dedicated chapter for further info&lt;/a&gt;). So to answer your question, they are not both dative. The first occurence of 'Tom' is coded as a direct object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21628" LastEditorUserId="21628" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T20:31:47.093" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T20:31:47.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31580" CreationDate="2019-05-26T16:35:00.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In generative grammars, as far as possible the syntax is designed to be automatic and meaning-free. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/McCawley-Lg.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jim McCawley&lt;/a&gt; used to distinguish syntax from the cluster of topics involving &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; that he called semantics/logic/pragmatics, viz (from the list of research topics on &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20061101005024/http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/linguistics/faculty/mccawley.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his home page&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syntax&lt;/strong&gt; (of English, and when native speakers are available to be exploited, also Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi), within the revisionist version of transformational grammar that I operate in (and to which I refuse to give a name - if you feel you need a name for it, go and make one up), which exploits what I regard as the fruitful ideas of transformational grammar (constituency, multiple syntactic strata, the cyclic principle) and chucks out what I regard as counterproductive ideas (the metaphor of a &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; structure, the idea of categories and structures as remaining constant throughout derivations, the fetish for keeping syntax and semantics separate). For detailed exemplification of this approach to syntax, see my &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3613599.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/a&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1988; 2nd edition 1998).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semantics/logic/pragmatics&lt;/strong&gt; (it's impossible to talk in any detail about any of these three fields without getting into the other two, so I don't even try to keep them separate). I teach courses on logic from a linguist's point of view, taking a broad view of the subject matter of logic (logic has suffered from 23 centuries of myopia, which I try to make up for) and giving full weight to linguistic considerations in revising (or replacing) existing systems of logic to maximize their contact with natural language syntax and linguistic semantics. (See my book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0226556115&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Everything that Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know About Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask)&lt;/a&gt; , University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 1993). I also from time to time teach courses in lexical semantics, tense and aspect, and speech acts (with Erving Goffman sharing top billing with J. L. Austin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However automatic syntax may be, its functions can be discerned in many cases, and these have to do with processing, which is to say, communication -- and therefore &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; (an undefined term to avoid if possible in philosophy, as Wittgenstein pointed out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, English has dozens of syntactic phenomena like &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/57519/15299&quot;&gt;Extraposition&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/143530/fun-to-make-and-fun-to-eat/143566#143566&quot;&gt;Raising&lt;/a&gt; that all operate on different words, with different constraints, and in different constructions, but all have the same effect, of leaving large and complex constituents at the end of the sentence, where they are easier to process in a right-branching language like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect you might find McCawley's books good reading for a situation like yours. He's clear and complete and considers all the alternatives. And he deals nicely with philosophical matters, particularly in his logic book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T16:35:00.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29989" CreationDate="2019-05-26T18:07:00.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like you're referring to words such as &quot;length&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that what you mean, or are you looking for words that explicitly morphologically consists of a pair of antonyms for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the latter is the case, then Mandarin Chinese. The concept of &quot;the degree of which&quot; is commonly formed by pairing up the pair of antonyms. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Magnitude&quot; 大小 &lt;code&gt;dàxiǎo&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;big small&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Warmth&quot; 冷暖 &lt;code&gt;lěngnuǎn&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;cold warm&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Coldness&quot; 冷热 &lt;code&gt;lěngrè&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;cold hot&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Length&quot; 长短 &lt;code&gt;chángduǎn&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;long short&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Depth&quot; 深浅 &lt;code&gt;shēnqiǎn&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;deep shallow&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Height (elevation)&quot; 高低 &lt;code&gt;gāodī&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;high low&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Height (bodily)&quot; 高矮 &lt;code&gt;gāo'ǎi&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;tall short&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Overweightness/slimness&quot; 胖瘦 &lt;code&gt;pàngshòu&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;overweight slim&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Amount&quot; 多少 &lt;code&gt;duōshǎo&lt;/code&gt; or (&lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt;) 多寡 &lt;code&gt;duōguǎ&lt;/code&gt;, lit. &quot;many few&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Correctness&quot; 对错 &lt;code&gt;duìcuò&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;right wrong&quot; or (in the factual sense) 正误 &lt;code&gt;zhèngwù&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;correct mistaken&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Position in an ordered sequence (e.g. a queue)&quot; 先后 &lt;code&gt;xiānhòu&lt;/code&gt; lit. &quot;prior anterior&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from these, besides lexically specific formations, an alternative generic formation also exists that uses 度 &lt;code&gt;dù&lt;/code&gt; &quot;degree&quot; attached to the more semantically unmarked one, like English does with &lt;code&gt;length&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;depth&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;magnitude&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;magn-&lt;/code&gt; &quot;big; great&quot; + &lt;code&gt;-itude&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and &quot;the dichotomy of truth an falsehood&quot; would really literally be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;真假 &lt;code&gt;zhēnjiǎ&lt;/code&gt; &quot;truthfulness&quot;, lit. &quot;true false&quot;, or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;真伪 &lt;code&gt;zhēnwěi&lt;/code&gt; &quot;authenticity&quot; lit. &quot;true fake&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;虚实 &lt;code&gt;xūshí&lt;/code&gt; &quot;realness&quot; lit. &quot;phantom real&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, this formation probably expresses &quot;(the quality of falling in) the semantic space spanned by the constituent morphemes&quot;, as Mandarin also has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;兄弟姐妹 &lt;code&gt;xiōngdìjiěmèi&lt;/code&gt; &quot;sibling(s)&quot; lit. &quot;elder-brother younger-brother elder-sister younger-sister&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;兄弟 &lt;code&gt;xiōngdi&lt;/code&gt; &quot;brother(s)&quot; lit. &quot;elder-brother younger-brother&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;姐妹 &lt;code&gt;jiěmei&lt;/code&gt; &quot;sister(s)&quot; lit. &quot;elder-sister younger-sister&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;弟(弟)妹(妹) &lt;code&gt;dì(di)mèi(mei)&lt;/code&gt; &quot;younger member(s) of the sibling(s)&quot; lit. &quot;younger-brother younger-sister&quot;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;天地 &lt;code&gt;tiāndì&lt;/code&gt; &quot;this whole world&quot; lit. &quot;sky earth&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;前后左右 &lt;code&gt;qiánhòuzuǒyòu&lt;/code&gt; &quot;all sides (of you)&quot; lit. &quot;front back left right&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;东南西北/东西南北 &lt;code&gt;dōngnánxīběi&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;dōngxīnánběi&lt;/code&gt; &quot;all (geographic) directions&quot; lit. &quot;east south west north&quot;/&quot;east west south north&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastEditorUserId="14808" LastEditDate="2019-05-26T18:52:41.430" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T18:52:41.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-26T18:12:17.617" Score="5" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that English was in front of Mandarin in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia list of languages by total number of speakers&lt;/a&gt;, so I wondered when it became first. I didn't find any convenient statistics on the historical evolution of the number of speakers of languages, but I was able to use the internet archive's wayback machine on the website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ethnologue.com&lt;/a&gt; (wikipedia's source). This is what I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1kRfW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1kRfW.png&quot; alt=&quot;Table and graph of the number of speakers of languages of English and Mandarin according to the website ethnologue.com between the 13 of February 2018 and the 17 of May 2019&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a huge jump in the total number of speakers on ethnologue.com between the 13th of February and the 28th of February 2018 (from 983 million to 1,121 billion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened? Was there a change in the way this number is computed? Are the results from before 2018 still valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your answers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24684" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:09:32.017" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T12:09:32.017" Title="What happened to the number of english speakers in february 2018?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;&lt;mandarin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27649" CreationDate="2019-05-26T18:52:57.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking, each character in Chinese is counted as a 字. It is most practical that way, because there is no limit to a 词. A 词 can be composed of two, three, four, or even more 字. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at your example: 你好嗎？&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;你 = word, meaning &quot;you&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;好 = word, meaning &quot;good&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;嗎 = word, used as a yes/no question marker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally, there are 3 字. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;我今天去了你家。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally, there are 7 字 and 6 词. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;我 = word, meaning first-person pronoun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;今天 = word, made up of an adjective/static verb and a noun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;去 = word, verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;了 = word, past-action marker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;你 = word, second-person pronoun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;家 = word, noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;我/今天/去了/你/家 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an incorrect analysis, or at least not really a Chinese analysis. In elementary school, young children learn how to use characters to make words (用字组词). The main problem with your example is 去了. Some characters, such as 了, cannot be used with other characters to form words. In other words, 去了 would never be recognized as one word. It's actually recognized as two words -- 去 and 了. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;飯盒 is a word. 飯 is a word. 盒 is a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;高速公路 is a word. 高 is a word. 速 is a word. 公 is a word. 路 is a word. 高速 is a word, involving one adjective and one noun. 公路 is a word, involving one adjective and one noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;地下鐡路 is a word. 地 is a word. 下 is a word. 鐡 is a word. 路 is a word. 地下 is a word. 鐡路 is a word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further note:&lt;/strong&gt; It should be kept in mind that a &quot;word&quot; is a feature associated strongly with more synthetic languages. Written Chinese is highly analytic. The concept of a word in an English sense does not exist in Chinese. In Chinese, there are 字 (often translated as &quot;characters&quot; or &quot;writing&quot;) and 词 (often translated as &quot;words&quot; or &quot;expressions&quot;). 词语 is a chain of Chinese characters that would be interpreted as a &quot;word&quot; in an English sense. 单词 is a term used specifically for English words and other foreign words; 单词, such as &quot;detriment&quot;, is what English speakers would recognize as a &quot;word&quot;. 单词 does not exist in Chinese. Therefore, when I used the term &quot;word&quot; above, I really meant to say 词, but seeing that 词 as a concept really doesn't exist in English, I have to say &quot;word&quot;. I don't mean &quot;word&quot; in an English sense, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23690" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T18:52:57.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31493" CreationDate="2019-05-27T01:50:23.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;em&gt;occasionally&lt;/em&gt; seen this term, &lt;strong&gt;pseudo-loans&lt;/strong&gt;, for instance in Louviot, Élise, and Catherine Delesse. 2017. Studies in language variation and change 2: Shifts and turns in the history of English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EVRyU.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EVRyU.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T01:50:23.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31594" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31595" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" Score="0" Body="For questions asking for datasets for a specific linguistic purpose and for questions on details of public or frequently used linguistic datasets." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T12:10:40.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-27T14:55:47.330" Score="8" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;Celtic, Italic, Greek and several other IE languages have a P- and a Q-variety (from kw &gt; p and gw &gt; b). The P-variety usually also has h for ancient s.&#xA;What would be the best linguistic term for describing this combined phenomenon? Labialization? Develarization? Lenition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24687" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T15:01:25.413" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T07:09:55.077" Title="What is the best linguistic term for describing the kw &gt; p / gw &gt; b change, and its usual companion s &gt; h" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31581" CreationDate="2019-05-27T19:07:37.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, it's the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to generativists, syntactic categories are a fundamental part of the mental grammar of a language. When you learn a new lemma, like &quot;purple&quot;, you also have to learn how it acts syntactically: in this case, it basically combines with an NP to make a new NP. (In practice it's a bit more complicated, but that's not important here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient grammarians noticed that a lot of words tended to pattern in the same way, and gave these patterns arbitrary names. The terms &quot;noun&quot; and &quot;verb&quot;, for instance, come from the Latin words for &quot;name&quot; and &quot;word&quot; (and are cognate with those two English words, actually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But parts of speech describe syntactic categories, not the other way around. In many languages (Japanese, Swahili, Lingála, etc) there are two or more syntactic categories that English-speakers would group together as &quot;adjectives&quot;. In other languages &quot;adjectives&quot; don't have a syntactic category at all, they're the same as stative verbs. So in these instances, the word &quot;adjective&quot; isn't useful, and we make up new terms and symbols instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The symbols like &quot;NP&quot; and &quot;VP&quot; are arbitrary and made up by syntacticians, representing mental structures we can't observe directly. In the distant past, ancient grammarians made up words to describe these same mental structures, so it's traditional for modern syntacticians to use these same words. But the names are less important than the structures they describe: you could replace &quot;NP&quot; with &quot;Ξ&quot; and &quot;VP&quot; with &quot;Ш&quot; and the model would still work just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T19:07:37.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31597" CreationDate="2019-05-27T19:16:46.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The change from &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; is called &lt;strong&gt;debuccalization&lt;/strong&gt;, from Latin &lt;em&gt;bucca&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;mouth&quot;. The name is generally applied to any change that turns a non-glottal sound glottal, since it's moving the articulation &quot;out of the mouth&quot;; another example is English &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[ʔ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change from &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; doesn't have a universally-accepted name in my experience; I've seen it called both &lt;strong&gt;labialization&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;develarization&lt;/strong&gt; (since the labiovelar consonant is losing its velar closure and becoming purely labial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any real correlation between the two sound changes; I know they both happened in some varieties of Greek, but initial &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; was universal in Hellenic, and &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; was less consistent; &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt; didn't happen word-internally or finally, either. Similarly, Romanian had develarization, but not &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt;: consider Latin &lt;em&gt;socium&lt;/em&gt; → Romanian &lt;em&gt;soț&lt;/em&gt;, with the original &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T19:54:04.750" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T19:54:04.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29989" CreationDate="2019-05-27T20:13:59.013" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is a thing, as the other answers imply, then German &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sprechen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sprechen&lt;/a&gt; &quot;speak&quot;, from *spreg- could be seen as composed of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*pr-, *per (whence &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;*eks- (whence &quot;ex&quot;; reconstructed variously) either suffixed or prefixed,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and containing an s-mobile (thus compare *prey-, *preg, especially *prek- &quot;to ask&quot;), that by estimate might reflect *eks, in which case the coda would still need an explanation (how about &lt;em&gt;co-, con-&lt;/em&gt;, see below!?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the meaning would be similar to &quot;back and forth&quot;, &quot;pro and contra&quot;, Ger. &quot;hin und her&quot;, &quot;für und wieder&quot; in the sense &lt;strong&gt;exchange&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Also compare &lt;em&gt;express&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T20:22:29.117" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T20:22:29.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31581" CreationDate="2019-05-27T21:29:46.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generative grammar emerged most directly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(philosophy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formalism&lt;/a&gt; (and see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(philosophy_of_mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formalism in mathematics&lt;/a&gt;).  I'm not saying that Noam Chomsky is a formalist, but in his early work from the 50s, it is clear that in establishing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chomsky hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;, he uses formal methods.  In a formal system, what identifies a system and its parts is its form alone.  That's what makes it a formal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may wish. for your own purposes, to supply histories and interpretations for the terms of the system.  You're free to do that, but the system itself doesn't depend on any such specific&#xA;interpretation, and the various users of the system need not agree about the interpretations of the symbols used in the system.  Typically, actually, they don't agree.  This can give formal systems great generality, because the parts are not tethered to specific interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example rules given in the question resemble the productions (rules) of type-2 grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy, so let's assume that is what they are.  I'll use CFG, standing for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Context Free Grammar&lt;/a&gt;, as a synonym of type-2 grammar.  You want to know about the history and interpretation of the non-terminal symbols that are typical in applications of CFG to the description of natural language and other similar systems (like computer language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a natural question, but it really isn't possible to answer it, because those who have used CFG have had various ideas in mind when they used the symbols, and sometimes, presumably, haven't had anything in mind at all.  Perhaps the symbols are derived from traditional antecedents, or perhaps they are not.  In one offshoot of CFG, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, the symbols are interpreted in accordance with their names, which are finite sets of features and attributes of various sorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T22:12:13.103" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T22:12:13.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31410" CreationDate="2019-05-27T22:30:28.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there's no particular significance to finding words among them that are reconstructed with the laryngeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly the case. The presence of a glottal stop at the start of German words is not at all confined to inherited words that are reconstructed as starting with a laryngeal in PIE. It also appears at the start of borrowed words: my understanding is that &lt;em&gt;Anus, Echo, Omen, ordnen, Urne, Usus&lt;/em&gt; are equally likely as inherited Germanic words to be pronounced with an initial glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, inherited German words that start with a vowel/glottal stop don't all come from PIE words that started with a laryngeal consonant. German has &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt; from *n̥-; my understanding is that words like &lt;em&gt;Unfall, Undank, Unrast, Ungnade&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced with a glottal stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T22:30:28.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31597" CreationDate="2019-05-28T07:09:55.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am totally aware of all that has been replied, but my question was one of terminology, as there doesn't seem to be a generally agreed term. So, I was asking around. Until now, I have been using the term 'labialization', but that seems ambiguous because it is also used to describe adding a labial feature to velars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transition s &gt; is not limited to Hellenic: it also happens in P-Celtic (sal &gt; hal) and P-Italic. It is a frequent companion of the labialization/develarization (or whatever would be a better term). I just don't know why because they seem unrelated at first sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both phenomena happened almost simultaneously in the three branches of IE  in the period 1,200-800 BCE. My guess is that it happened in a presumed northern Balkan Sprachbund stretching from Hallstatt to Epirus or thereabout. Note that P-Italic clearly 'invaded' Italy from Dalmatia, leaving only a small area around Rome/Italian west coast with the older Q-Italic.(BTW. there is a present-day trans-branch Balkan Sprachbund, with Bulgarian/Macedonian (Slavic), Romanian (Italic)and Greek (Hellenic), so it is not unthinkable something similar existed in Antiquity).Research paper: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/9796216/Celtic_and_the_Adriatic_-_A_completely_reconsidered_view_of_Celtic_linguistic_prehistory_-_Updated_18.12.2018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.academia.edu/9796216/Celtic_and_the_Adriatic_-_A_completely_reconsidered_view_of_Celtic_linguistic_prehistory_-_Updated_18.12.2018&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24689" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T07:09:55.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T05:09:38.947" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the key tenets of contemporary linguistic theory, at least so far as I understand it, is that linguistic units can be categorized into categories at different levels of description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a phrase is comprised of words (which in turn can be categorized into nouns, verbs, for ex), and words are comprised of syllables, and syllables are comprised of phonemes, and phonemes are comprised of distinctive features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the above claim is true (and please correct me if it is not! Perhaps it is simplistic), where does that leave us with respect to suprasegmental phenomena like tone, word-stress, sentence-stress, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T21:21:05.063" Title="Understanding Linguistic Categories" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;suprasegmentals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31613" CreationDate="2019-05-29T08:47:58.540" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the vowel in a word like &quot;know&quot;. The way I pronounce it sounds maybe like /nøʉ/ to me. But other Brits oftentimes think I have a foreign accent, so I don't know about that. And I am sure I've heard people say /no:/ as well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But what I'm interested in knowing about is the pronunciation /nuɔ/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to appear in Jamaica (I say so because of Lee Perry's pronunciations in an old recording of the song &quot;I Man Free&quot;). And the Wikipedia page on Jamaican Patois gives this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/if kau no did nuo au im tɹuotuol tan im udn tʃaans pieɹsiid/ &#xA;('If the cow knew that his throat wasn't capable of swallowing a pear seed, he wouldn't have swallowed it')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And by the way I thought it notable that &lt;code&gt;know&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;no&lt;/code&gt; are not homophonous in this variety of English). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will make another assertion, but this one is not backed up by the Wikipedia page on Mackem or Geordie: The same sound change has happened in the North East of England, and appears to be accompanied by a similar process that's /eɪ/ → /iə̯/ here and in Jamaica alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By my intuition, the &quot;semivowel half&quot; of a diphthong is usually a high vowel, like /ɪ̯/ or /ʊ̯/. By my intuition, diphthongs that involve a glidey thing that's qualitatively like /ɔ/ or /ə/ are cross-linguistically very rare. So has there been some kind of analysis on how and why this has turned up around twice, and in at least two varieties of English separately? Or have I misunderstood something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T15:42:34.717" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T09:42:56.233" Title="Diphthongisation in varieties of English" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;diphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31612" CreationDate="2019-05-29T10:57:50.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This pathway of falling diphthong &gt; (long) monophthong &gt; rising diphthong has happened several times in linguistic history. Cf. Classical Latin &lt;em&gt;caelum&lt;/em&gt; /ˈkae̯.lum/ with falling diphthong, Vulgar Latin */ˈkɛ.lum/ with monophthong, Castilian Spanish &lt;em&gt;cielo&lt;/em&gt; /ˈθjelo/ with glide or rising diphthong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rising diphthongs [uo] and [ie] are a relatively conspicuous part of the phonology of basilectal Jamaican Creole. In Standard Jamaican English, these &lt;a href=&quot;https://is.muni.cz/th/kleri/Z_Nyvlt_27.4.2012__MA.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tend to be long monophthongs&lt;/a&gt; [o:] and [e:], corresponding to the Wells lexical sets &lt;code&gt;GOAT&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;FACE&lt;/code&gt; respectively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your intuition about Geordie is borne out by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/12886314/Diphthongisation_of_High_and_Close-Mid_Vowels_in_Geordie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;presentation&lt;/a&gt;, given at a conference in 2015. There is apparently a split based on whether the syllable is closed or not. Although /ə/ as the nucleus of the diphthong might be rare, it's not unheard of; old-school (pre-1970s) Received Pronunciation has an abundance of &quot;centering&quot; diphthongs, albeit falling rather than rising, e.g. &lt;code&gt;CURE&lt;/code&gt; /kjʊə̯/ (analyses as a triphthong aside). An example of a rising diphthong onto /ə/ is in Central Catalan (e.g. of Barcelona) - &lt;em&gt;qüestió&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced /kwəs.tiˈo/, with a glide onto /ə/ in the initial syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T09:42:56.233" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T09:42:56.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31745" CreationDate="2019-05-29T13:33:03.187" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm referring here to the distinction Frege made in his paper called &quot; Sense and denotation&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classical example is &quot; the morning star&quot; and &quot; the evening star&quot; : different senses but same denotation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am correct, Frege intended, in drawing this distinction, to explain the cognitive value of identity statements, more precisely to explain how they could be both  informative and analytic ( in the kantian sense of the term). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction also explains &quot;opaque contexts&quot; in which the principle of substitution of co-referential terms does not work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These purposes are mostly &lt;em&gt;epistemological&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case linguists make use of this distinction, how do they use it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this distinction useful to study ordinary language and the way it functions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ordinary language phenomenon does this distinction between &quot;sense&quot; and &quot;denotation&quot; enlighten? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24680" LastEditorDisplayName="user24680" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T14:10:05.077" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T13:27:43.087" Title="In case the fregean distinction between &quot;sense&quot; and &quot; denotation&quot; is used in linguistics, what purpose does it serve in this discipline?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31631" CreationDate="2019-05-29T16:08:10.170" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would this process of gathering the meaning of a sentence be called? What would the segments derived from the sentence be called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;John and Derrek both love cake&quot;&#xA;    -&amp;gt; John loves cake&#xA;    -&amp;gt; Derrek loves cake&#xA;&#xA;&quot;John was mad that the weather was rainy today&quot;&#xA;     -&amp;gt; John was mad&#xA;     -&amp;gt; weather was rainy today&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24701" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T15:23:36.117" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T15:23:36.117" Title="What is it called to derive all the implied meanings from a sentence?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31610" CreationDate="2019-05-29T16:09:08.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is, more precisely, a key tenet of science that the world is only comprehensible when things are grouped into categories, and categories have orthogonal hierarchical relations to each other. There is no clear highest-level entity for language: people talk about paragraphs as linguistic units, and speech processing needs to have some kind of thing resembling an &quot;utterance&quot; that has more than one sentence, or less than a full sentence. Then you can break those things into sub-parts that are uncontroversially linguistic in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phenomena (palatalization, syncope) can be treated as &quot;things&quot; and analyzed in a hierarchical manner, if you want. So &quot;nasalization&quot; might be used to refer to the process of making one thing become nasalized, or it could be used to refer to the thing that assimilates (the property of nasalization). In like manner, stress and tone can refer to the property itself, or the process of assigning / modifying that property. Seen as the thing being assigned, there are at least two category-related questions that arise – what is the category of thing that &quot;tone&quot; or &quot;stress&quot; refers to (is tone a feature, is stress a feature?), and what categories of things have tone, or stress. You can ask the same kinds of questions about nasal(ization) or palatalization. That's where we are, at least at the level of generality that you asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a lot of technical details of tone that we know, but they don't necessarily have much to do with &quot;categories&quot; except that everything ultimately involves some kind of categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T16:09:08.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31614" CreationDate="2019-05-29T17:12:30.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Lakoff pointed out that definite anaphora  requires identity of reference between antecedent and proform, while indefinite anaphora requires identity of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T17:12:30.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13153" CreationDate="2019-05-29T19:38:47.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, but I receive linguistics classes at university. I can try to explain a couple things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, here is what H.A did. He analyzed simple sentences such as those:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Stop singing!&quot; or &quot;I hate singing!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He noticed that in order for someone to say &quot;stop doing something&quot;, the &quot;doing&quot; in question has to have started, in other words, it has to be taken for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, He said that for someone to like or hate something, they need to have done it in the past and tried it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He concluded that '-ing' is a marker which indicates that the utterer takes for granted the action or event involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: &quot;I leave tomorrow&quot; &lt;strong&gt;announces&lt;/strong&gt; that the utterer will leave the day before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am leaving tomorrow&quot; on the contrary &lt;strong&gt;takes it for granted&lt;/strong&gt;, the utterer is giving a reminder or shows that he already thought about leaving before, it is not new to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H.A uses the terms &quot;rhematic&quot; (new information) and &quot;thematic&quot; (old information).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He moved on to use his theory in other cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He starts to sing&quot; announces what the person starts to do while &quot;he starts singing&quot; involves an already envisaged action, the &quot;singing&quot; per se is not surprising and was to be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We will land soon&quot; would be used to announce that the landing will happen soon while &quot;We will be landing soon&quot; would simply be a reminder or in any case, would show the event as normal and &quot;given&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I heard a dog bark&quot; and &quot;I heard a dog&quot; barking would not differ according to whether or not you heard the whole action, like traditional grammar would hold, but instead &quot;I heard a dog bark&quot; would announce that the dog was barking while &quot; I heard a dog barking&quot; gives the barking of the dog an already pre-established dimension thanks to the marker 'ing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His theory holds merits and can help in cases where it is hard to choose between a simple or a progressive form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is hard to argue against the fact that there is an aspectual difference between &quot;I wrote a letter&quot; in which the writing is complete and &quot;I was writing a letter&quot; which does not indicate that the writing was complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, his theory is regarded as intellectually enriching but does have some faults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I gave an extremely simplified interpretation of this theory so that you can understand the basic idea behind it. If you wish to understand it more in detail, please tell me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24702" LastEditorUserId="24702" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T19:46:49.147" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T19:46:49.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13004" CreationDate="2019-05-29T19:57:00.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;What the form BE+V-ing really does is to indicate that the action or state refered to by the verb in question is presented by the person speaking as actualized (that's the mental operation marked by the suffix -ing) &quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other linguists in France, such as Henri Adamczewski also agree that the marker '-ing'actualizes (makes real) the event in question and in fact it presupposes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case:&#xA;'I eat an apple' would be used in a story-telling context for instance.&#xA;-I am eating an apple&quot; would be used in a conversation, in which the goal is not to say that you are eating an apple or rather not to assert it but simply to use it as a way to apologize for not doing something else for instance. The fact that you are eating an apple is seen as &quot;presupposed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &quot;We are getting married next year&quot;, the -ing marker shows that the decision has been made before the moment of speaking or that the information is not presented as new in absolute terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to:&quot; We get married next year&quot; which would sound like a dry statement such as the reading of an official schedule in which the goal is simply to inform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24702" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T19:57:00.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31610" CreationDate="2019-05-29T21:21:05.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;... where does that leave us with respect to suprasegmental phenomena like tone, word-stress, sentence-stress, etc.?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It leaves us in the same place, so far as I know.  Tones may be sequences of pitches, word-stress may be a sequence of syllable stresses or segment stresses, sentence stress may be a sequence of word or phrase stresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I don't see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T21:21:05.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22816" CreationDate="2019-05-30T05:06:43.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to forget, we have this way in English too, using contextual cues to decipher whether the word acts as a verb or as a noun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grab a hammer... hammer a nail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;catch a ball... nice catch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24704" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T01:50:03.953" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T01:50:03.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T13:18:46.623" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a language w/out dependent clauses, i.e. one in which you couldn't say e.g. &quot;&lt;em&gt;I know &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; x is here&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; w/ a &lt;em&gt;clause&lt;/em&gt;, where the main clause is in italic and dependent in bold (and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; overlaps, because you may analyze it as belonging to this or that). I suppose the lack of dependent clauses might be possible &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a language would exclusively use a different constituent (i.e. not a sentence or clause) to convey the same meaning. Or maybe you lack so complex syntax in some pidgins (which would be unlikely to generalize to full-blown natural languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: The original question was about &quot;relative clauses&quot;, which seems to be a proper subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31624/13996&quot;&gt;dependent clauses&lt;/a&gt; that I intended it to be about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T16:08:32.707" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T16:08:32.707" Title="Languages w/out dependent clauses" Tags="&lt;linguistic-universals&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31622" CreationDate="2019-05-30T14:35:55.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4774923/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pirahã may qualify&lt;/a&gt; (my stress):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;we do not find unambiguous relative clauses in the corpus&lt;/em&gt;, we&#xA;  cannot use them to conclude that Pirahã has recursive embedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Pirahã isn't a pidgin, this could be taken as a tentative evidence that such full-blown languages may exist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the lack of relative clauses might be possible if a language would&#xA;  exclusively use a different constituent (i.e. not a sentence or&#xA;  clause) to convey the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be also possible if you were always compelled to use a separate sentence, e.g. &quot;&lt;em&gt;I know something. It is that x is here.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Maybe this is the case in Pirahã&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: If &quot;relative clause&quot; is not the same as &quot;dependent clause&quot;, as suggested by @amegnusen, my answer explodes (assuming the authors of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4774923/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; make the distinction, which is not clear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastEditorUserId="13996" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T15:30:46.903" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T15:30:46.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31622" CreationDate="2019-05-30T14:52:11.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many kinds of dependent clause. The example you provided is a content clause and not a relative clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Riffian, depending on the dependent clause used, this one can be introduced by a subordinator or not. There is a subordinator &quot;i&quot; for the relative clauses. But nothing is used for the content clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T14:52:11.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31675" CreationDate="2019-05-30T16:02:18.460" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a tendency  to &quot; masstermize&quot; nouns in contemporary informal French, I mean to use nouns as mass terms ( uncountable), though they cannot be strictly used in this way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I call &quot; masstermize&quot; a noun is to use a countable noun in the following way : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;verb + partitive article ( &lt;em&gt;du&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;em&gt;de la&lt;/em&gt; )  + noun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe one could call this phenomenon &quot; stuffization&quot; : treating a whole set of discrete entities as a stuff. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;attention, il y a &lt;em&gt;du niveau&lt;/em&gt;!&quot; ( in order to express the fact that the persons performing a certain activity have an amazingly good level) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot; il faut remettre &lt;em&gt;du lien social&lt;/em&gt;&quot; ( it is necessary to strengthen social links that are getting looser and looser) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vivrelyonne.fr/nos-actions/creer-du-lien-social-avec-des-ateliers-des-rencontres-des-chantiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.vivrelyonne.fr/nos-actions/creer-du-lien-social-avec-des-ateliers-des-rencontres-des-chantiers&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot; là on va être sur &lt;em&gt;de la chaussure de sport&lt;/em&gt;&quot; ( a formulation used by selling agents to express the fact that the products they are talking about no longer belong to kind A , but now belong to a new kind B) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://unespecedeblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/on-est-sur/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unespecedeblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/on-est-sur/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot; il y a &lt;em&gt;de la jolie nana&lt;/em&gt; par ici &quot; ( there are many nice girls in this place) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct sentences would be : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot; attention, il y a des personnes de bon niveau&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot; il faut resserrer les liens sociaux&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot; là on va arriver dans le domaine des chaussures de sport&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot; il y a de(s) jolies nana ici&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the examples I provide actually be analyzed in terms of &quot; masstermization&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this phenomenon also known in other languages than French? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has it been studied in linguistics of French language? In case it has, which name has it received and how has it been explained? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24680" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T11:48:44.563" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:58:56.667" Title="On an apparent &quot; masstermization&quot; phenomenon in contemporary informal French: &quot; il y a de la jolie nana par ici&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;articles&gt;&lt;countability&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T16:54:08.093" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect not, and I'm being dumb, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Usain ran quickest.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is parsed (&lt;a href=&quot;https://corenlp.run&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://corenlp.run&lt;/a&gt;) as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;NNP VBZ JJS. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why JJS (Adjective, superlative) and not RBS (Adverb, superlative)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using extended dependencies I get&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;dep: advmod, &#xA;dependentGloss: quickest, &#xA;governorGloss: ran&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yet the manual (&lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/dependencies_manual.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/dependencies_manual.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An adverb modifier of a word is a (non-clausal) adverb or adverb-headed phrase that serves to modify the meaning of the word&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be very grateful for an explanation of where I'm going wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17226" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T16:54:08.093" Title="Does StanfordNLP have a problem with adverbs?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;adjectives&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31615" CreationDate="2019-05-30T17:28:23.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is it called to derive all the implied meanings from a sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples do not derive all implied meanings of the sentences (e.g. &lt;em&gt;John loves cake&lt;/em&gt; implies the existence of &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;cake&lt;/em&gt;, a certain binary relation, etc., all separately)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that what you have in mind is called &lt;em&gt;reducing a semantically complex sentence into elementary ones that constitute it&lt;/em&gt;. The qualification &lt;em&gt;semantically&lt;/em&gt; is important, as &quot;John and Derrek both love cake&quot; is, differently from the other one, not a complex sentence syntactically. I'm pretty sure there's no single word for this kind of reduction, other than maybe in some obscure branch of formal semantics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T17:28:23.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T20:35:12.573" Score="0" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrases &quot;the fire, the firefighters extinguished&quot; and &quot;the firefighters, the fire extinguished&quot; both follow the same pattern, switching the place of the words, but without switching the arguments of the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both mean &quot;the firefighters extinguished the fire,&quot; because that's just what firefighters do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that the subject and the object are being chosen pragmatically from the topic and focus? As opposed to syntactically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22646" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T11:27:27.980" Title="Is interpreting a topic as subject pragmatics?" Tags="&lt;pragmatics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20669" CreationDate="2019-05-30T22:55:40.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lltacademia.com/courses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLT Academia&lt;/a&gt; free platform which provides several courses in linguistics. You can study, take graded exams, submit assignments and earn a certificate of completion. All courses are offered free of cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24708" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T22:55:40.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31615" CreationDate="2019-05-31T14:13:42.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like what you have in mind is components of the sentence. (In semantics, &quot;implications&quot; refers to a broader range of things: all the propositions that must be true if a given sentence is true.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phenomenon you're describing is known as &quot;compositionality&quot;: that the syntax and the meaning of the parts combine to yield the meaning of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that process is called &quot;composition&quot;, we might call the reverse process &quot;decomposition&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in modern syntax and semantics, there's no guarantee that all the elements that appear to transparently combine actually do. The underlying structures might not match the surface ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John and Derek love cake.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; ⇒ John loves cake.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; ⇒ Derek loves cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John and Derek met.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; ⇏ * John met.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; ⇏ * Derek met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T14:13:42.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31633" CreationDate="2019-05-31T14:19:22.727" Score="11" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was speaking to a college-educated American woman in her 80s, born and raised in the metropolitan east coast of the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were on a new topic, and without any preceding context, she said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her accountant told Janet that she really ought to diversify her portfolio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very efficient construction, but I have never heard a native English speaker introduce a pronoun prior to its antecedent.  For the first few words of her sentence, I was in some suspense, wondering what she was referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that some other languages can introduce placeholders which get filled in later in the sentence, but I'm not aware of anything equivalent in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a known construction among any segment of the English-speaking population?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24100" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T14:32:18.890" Title="Pronoun introduced before its antecedent" Tags="&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;references&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31632" CreationDate="2019-05-31T16:05:53.797" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's been extensively studied; perhaps the first paper was Ron Langacker's 1966 &quot;On Pronominalization and the Chain of Command&quot;. The major generalization seems to be statable as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A pronoun may not both precede and command its antecedent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following examples &lt;strong&gt;Marilyn('s)&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;her&lt;/strong&gt; are meant to be co-referential:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I talked to Marilyn before her operation.&lt;/em&gt; (Pronoun does not command or precede antecedent)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before her operation I talked to Marilyn&lt;/em&gt;. (Pronoun precedes but does not command)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Before Marilyn's operation I talked to her&lt;/em&gt;. (Pronoun commands but does not precede)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;*&lt;em&gt;I talked to her before Marilyn's operation.&lt;/em&gt; (Pronoun precedes and commands - ungrammatical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Command&quot; (sometimes called &quot;C-Command&quot;) is a technical relation between constituents in syntax; &quot;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; commands &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;&quot; essentially means &quot;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; is in a higher clause than &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;&quot;. The reason (4) is ungrammatical is that the antecedent is in a subordinate clause while the pronoun is in the main clause, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the pronoun comes before the antecedent. You can do one or the other -- or neither -- but not both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T14:32:18.890" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T14:32:18.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31628" CreationDate="2019-06-01T11:22:08.740" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pragmatic to say &lt;em&gt;my Dog is&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;The dog of me is&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;I have a dog that is&lt;/em&gt;, because it avoids competing syntactic positions, e.g. the two finite verbs in &quot;The dog I &lt;em&gt;own is&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or the disagreement between the person of pronoun and verb &quot;[The dog of] &lt;em&gt;me is&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The topic can become the subject, e.g. &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt;, which even shows noun morphology in German &lt;em&gt;mein Hund&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;meiner&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also see &quot;Good luck with [...]&quot; omitting the subject and verb, &lt;em&gt;You have&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the firefighters it's readily obvious that &lt;em&gt;the fire fighters extinguished&lt;/em&gt; is ambiguous to &lt;em&gt;the firefighters extinguished _&lt;/em&gt;. In effect, your variant shows an unusual elision of the fully qualified sentence &quot;The fire, that the firefighters fought, was extinguished, when the firefighters extinguished it&quot;. In German subordinate clauses word order is regularly inverted, ending with the verb, &quot;... als die Feuerwehr das Feuer löschte&quot;. While this order also takes possesive pronouns &lt;em&gt;als die Feuerwehr Ihr Feuer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;their fire&quot;, it is proscribed vehemently to say &lt;em&gt;der/dem Hund sein Herrchen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;&lt;code&gt;NOM/DAT&lt;/code&gt; the dog &lt;code&gt;Gen.&lt;/code&gt; its owner&quot;. Instead &lt;em&gt;des Hundes Herrchen&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Hundebesitzer&lt;/em&gt; for short, is preferred, &quot;&lt;code&gt;GEN&lt;/code&gt; the dog's &lt;code&gt;NOM&lt;/code&gt; owner&quot; or &lt;em&gt;dog owner&lt;/em&gt;. The genitive &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; is rare in German (frequently replaced with a dativ construction &lt;em&gt;der Besitzer von dem Hund&lt;/em&gt;), and in English easily confused with the plural; The German plural feminine genitive is likewise ambiguous over nominative, &lt;em&gt;die Frauen, der Frauen&lt;/em&gt;, thus constructions like &lt;em&gt;Der Katzenbesitzer&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the cat owner, the cats owner, the cat's owner, the cats' owner&quot; are opaque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently it seems informative to assume that &lt;em&gt;firefighter&lt;/em&gt; is a backformation, from a possessive marker &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; that was interpreted as plural and dropped by analogy to singular inflection. Hence, &lt;em&gt;the firefighters extinguished&lt;/em&gt; shows topicallization, and your &lt;em&gt;the fire, the fire, fighters extinguished&lt;/em&gt; shows a proscribed redundancy. Since German likewise shows no binding morpheme in &lt;em&gt;Feuerwehrmänner&lt;/em&gt;, this phenomenon in compound nouns may go back at least to Proto-Germanic, if it is not a latter parallel development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is focused on a very specific example, because  topicallization is usually constrained to the subject, in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T11:27:27.980" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T11:27:27.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3492" CreationDate="2019-06-01T18:03:30.883" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I married my husband, from Cuba, I was SHOCKED to find out that the dogs there spoke Spanish! They didn't say, &quot;woof-woof&quot; or &quot;bow-wow,&quot; but &quot;jao-jao&quot; (translated: how-how!) That's actually closer than bow-wow! I don't know what other animals say. I just laughed so hard at that realization, that I never went any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24720" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T18:03:30.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-02T05:32:04.350" Score="1" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, 私立 means 'private' and 市立 means 'public, city-owned', both are pronounced &lt;em&gt;shiritsu&lt;/em&gt;. Is such a troublesome phenomenon common? Does it have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T05:40:27.647" Title="Antonyms yet homophones" Tags="&lt;homophony&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31649" CreationDate="2019-06-02T05:40:27.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autoantonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autoantonym&lt;/a&gt;. They might have a category for those, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T05:40:27.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29764" CreationDate="2019-06-02T16:32:11.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sinhala has borrowed lot of words and terms from Tamil,which is a member of Dravidian language division.That peculiarity you observed is mainly due to the above reason.&#xA;But Sinhala still maintains a rich vocabulary full of Sanskrit and Magadhi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24731" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T16:32:11.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31661" CreationDate="2019-06-02T23:46:35.347" Score="2" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned basic Tibetan alphabet prior to visiting Tibet, just to realize I know only some of the characters used in practice (because of a lot of Sanskrit transcriptions that go beyond basic Tibetan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a translation table between Devanagari, Uchen and Lantsa scripts, but I am not a linguist. Could someone check what I am doing and maybe point me towards resources that would let me complete this work without major blunders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused by the different forms of &quot;am&quot;. Some have just a dot, some have a little &quot;bowl&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am missing a Devanagari equivalent to a bunch of Tibetan characters (tsa, tsha, ...) and I suspect it may not even exist in Sanskrit (??)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, does anyone know what does ༔ mean? I am utterly confused by the difference between this character and the ཿ symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dbq37.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dbq37.png&quot; alt=&quot;My work so far&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24733" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T09:25:16.750" Title="Mapping between Uchen, Devanagari and Lantsa help" Tags="&lt;devanagari&gt;&lt;tibetan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T00:24:14.867" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there online sources for Norwegian transcription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://naob.no&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NAOB&lt;/a&gt; gives an orthographic one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ordbok.uib.no&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UiB Ordbokene&lt;/a&gt; do not have transcription at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24734" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T01:27:15.927" Title="IPA transcriptions for Norwegian" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T01:00:07.233" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying linguistics and I want to know if there's an option for having several translations at once?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, I enter &quot;word&quot; as an English entry and I get the below output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: word1 word2 word3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: word1 word2 word3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Russian: word1 word2 word3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Persian: word1 word2 word3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/MEibCyjPMh4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/MEibCyjPMh4&lt;/a&gt; but I need the pronunciation as I can't read the pertaining writing system it uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone can introduce good online sources I would much appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23535" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T13:36:21.187" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T13:36:21.187" Title="Finding roots and cognates online" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31656" CreationDate="2019-06-03T01:27:15.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason why there are not is that pronunciation is a bit dialect-idiosyncratic (&lt;em&gt;sverd&lt;/em&gt; is [sʋæɖ] or [sʋæɾd], depending on dialect). Bokmål and Nynorsk are really written standards, and the 1sg pronoun has at least 3 pronunciations that I know (jæɪ, eɪ, æ). Kristoffersen's &lt;em&gt;The phonology of Norwegian&lt;/em&gt; contains IPA for his dialect. Wiktionary does often include IPA, but they are more guided transliterations from spelling rather than actual transcriptions of pronunciation. Comparing Kristoffersen's practice with what you see in Wiktionary, you also see another factor, that they decided that Bokmål is /jæɪ̯/, not /jæɪ/ as I opted for (and then looked up their choice) – there are many ways to render the same pronunciation in IPA. They also list [kʋɪnə] for &lt;em&gt;kvinne&lt;/em&gt; altough i  is clearly a geminate &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;, both /mɑn/ and /manː/ for &lt;em&gt;mann&lt;/em&gt; (vs. /ɡrøːn/ for &lt;em&gt;grøn&lt;/em&gt;), indicating a certain unsystematicity in their decisions regarding how to render long consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NAOB type transcriptions can be converted to IPA, as long as you accept that it isn't necessarily an actual pronunciation from a location. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T01:27:15.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T04:11:33.403" Score="2" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;what enjoy the most is to trace back the words right to their origin.&#xA;i had little study on Mazandarani(tabari\tapuri) dialect spoken is Mazandaran province of Iran. traced back some words to their protp-indo-europian roots (i hope i did it right). one of them for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;val /væl  / (adjective) wry [neo-persian: χol=stupid     middle&#xA;  persian: χɔhɜl=wry, mad    pal: χvæhl=wry  peo: *hrɑχrɑ from root&#xA;  *hvɑk    san: vɑkrɑˈ  PIE root: *suek-=to bend, to arch it, also forms old german: wanga    deu: wange  both mean &quot;cheek&quot;. san:&#xA;  vɑkræŋɑ=goose; vakra(awry organs) + aŋɑ(creature). this PIE root is&#xA;  correlate with PIE: klo-dhro which forms  lat: coluber  forming fra:&#xA;  cobra forming fas: kɔbrɑ.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;now i want to progress further and do some more but i need some help on finding rich references especially on extinct Indo-European languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23535" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T07:08:52.847" Title="good references for old indo-European languages" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31659" CreationDate="2019-06-03T05:15:54.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest Fritz's &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;. It touches on every branch of Indo-European in several different aspects, with a not-excessive-but-generally-sufficient level of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buying a hard copy will unfortunately set you back several hundred dollars: check your local library first (or, better yet, a university or research library). It's a classic in the field and copies shouldn't be too hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T05:15:54.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31655" CreationDate="2019-06-03T09:25:16.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.virtualvinodh.com/wp/tag/tibetan-unicode/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; may be of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The first one in your table (just the dot) is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anusvara&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anusvara&lt;/a&gt;, and is usually transliterated with aṃ (a + &lt;em&gt;m with underdot&lt;/em&gt;) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAST standard&lt;/a&gt;. The second one (bowl and dot) is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrabindu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chandrabindu&lt;/a&gt;, and is translated in the IAST standard with a◌̐ (a + Latin script version of the chandrabindu!). But because the &lt;em&gt;phonetic&lt;/em&gt; differences from Vedic and Classical Sanskrit are rather &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/25997/anunasikachandrabindu-in-vowels-sanskrit&quot;&gt;poorly understood&lt;/a&gt;, they are often conflated in transliteration. They do have a distinct role though, and modern Hindi has fairly well established rules for their use in Devanagari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a) Correct; Devanagari never had dental affricates as separate letters. I suppose you could use the conjuncts त्स (tsa), थ्स (thsa), ध्स (dhsa). Apparently, द + स dsa is not attested. You can clearly see that Tibetan derived its dental affricate series from the palatal series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b) Devanagari also never had voiced sibilants notated in the script, so the ཞ zha and ཟ za were created in Tibetan. Their origin is not particularly clear, although they bear a strong resemblance (at least in the standard script) to ན and ཇ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) The &lt;a href=&quot;http://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/gter_tsheg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gter tsheg&lt;/a&gt; is not a vowel, nor a diacritic, but a form of punctuation mark found at the beginning of certain sentences and paragraphs in religious text, specifically for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terma_(religion)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terma&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T09:25:16.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T10:22:57.803" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24736" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T10:22:57.803" Title="Sociolinguistics/Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T14:23:58.157" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some content words signal that future content will likely follow. The words seem to act as a typing system for instances of the content. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have an &lt;strong&gt;idea&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; --&gt; one expects the idea to soon follow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have an &lt;strong&gt;example&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; --&gt; (what is the example?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There are &lt;strong&gt;two things&lt;/strong&gt; I need to say.&quot; --&gt; (what are the two things?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for these kinds of words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T15:49:11.903" Title="Words that signal future content" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31664" CreationDate="2019-06-03T14:50:13.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These words are nouns. The effect you're referring to doesn't come from those words. For example &quot;That's why I rejected that idea&quot;, &quot;I accepted his example&quot;, &quot;As you know, Dr. Seuss wrote about two things&quot;. You can create an expectation of &quot;more to come&quot; by not saying enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T14:50:13.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31664" CreationDate="2019-06-03T15:49:11.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;User6726 is absolutely correct, but to expand a little bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;more to follow&quot; idea comes from &lt;em&gt;Gricean implicature&lt;/em&gt;, not from the words themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grice's Maxims are four rules that people &quot;expect&quot; everyone in a conversation to follow. One is the &lt;em&gt;maxim of relevance&lt;/em&gt;: if you're saying something, you're saying it for a reason, so it should be relevant to the context. Another is the &lt;em&gt;maxim of quantity&lt;/em&gt;: you'll say as much as you need to get the point across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have an idea&quot; on its own generally seems to violate either relevance or quantity: in most contexts, that doesn't really add anything or give any useful information (bad relevance), and if the idea &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; relevant, you haven't said enough about it (bad quantity). But if you followed it up with &quot;…we could foo the bar&quot;, that would fulfill both relevance and quantity. So people will be expecting that followup—it's the only way the first part makes pragmatic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T15:49:11.903" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31657" CreationDate="2019-06-03T18:03:02.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;? It offers multilingual translations, frequently with alternatives, and a lot of additional information. The format may be clumsy for automatic harvesting, but for human readers it is very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there is an etymology section to many entries where you can trace ancestors and roots. The roots can be used to find cognates, for a more detailed description see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29027/9781&quot;&gt;this answer to another question here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T18:12:10.617" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T18:12:10.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T21:05:51.757" Score="4" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;TV Stereotypes about exaggerated Canadian accents not withstanding, to me  Canadian English sounds identical to standard U.S English. I can't tell English speaking Canadians from Americans with neutral accents unless the former actually identify themselves as such. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the Canadian accent remain so close to the standard U.S accent, given how many very distinctive regional accents (Southern, Texas, Midwestern, Boston, NY/NJ, etc...) developed in the U.S that are very different from the neutral accent? Shouldn't have English speakers' accent in Canada diverged in a similar way as those regional examples I mentioned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:38:05.570" Title="Why did Canadian English remain so close to standard U.S English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;accent&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31668" CreationDate="2019-06-03T23:05:34.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have three possible reasons why you can't tell a &quot;neutral&quot; Canadian accent from a &quot;neutral&quot; American accent, which probably synergize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that urban centers speed up language evolution. So many people interacting, making and breaking social classes and other cliques, &quot;necessitating&quot; the need for new shibboleths every other month. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is dialect continuum. New York shares borders with Ontario, so it makes sense that an Ontarian would sound similar to an upstate New Yorker. The same could be said for British Columbians and Washingtonians or other state-province neighbors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is dialect experience. If you have spent your formative years steeped in a dialect, you know all or most of it's shibboleths, at least subconsciously, which translates to being able to &quot;just tell&quot; where someone's from. If you can't, they all sound the same, unless there is a deliberate stereotype. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why (most) Britons don't sound like (most) Americans and where the South vs. North split comes from - both sides found stereotypes they use and abuse to purposefully distinguish themselves from each other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23415" LastEditorUserId="23415" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T00:07:42.587" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T00:07:42.587" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31671" CreationDate="2019-06-03T23:56:28.550" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is 'word order' the correct term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of other examples from the literary canon?  I can think of merely one in English from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Faulkner#As_I_Lay_Dying_(1930)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As I Lay Dying&lt;/em&gt; (1930)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. &lt;strong&gt;The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning&lt;/strong&gt;; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not disapproving Faulkner's mismatch! I quote him merely to exhibit how the bolded phrase can be rewritten to match time and word order, and to forestall the necessity to reorder the sequence of events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The fundamentalists say it is the beginning; the nihilists, the end;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T00:45:20.013" Title="Is there a term for mismatch between time and word order?" Tags="&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31670" CreationDate="2019-06-04T00:45:20.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In literature and rhetoric, this is called &lt;strong&gt;hysteron proteron&lt;/strong&gt; (Ancient Greek for &quot;later earlier&quot;). Probably the most famous example is Vergil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; II.353:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mori-ā-mur et in medi-a arm-a ru-ā-mus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  die-HORT-1PL and into middle-ACC.PL weapon-ACC.PL charge-HORT-1PL&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Let us die, and charge into the middle of the fight!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more general term is &lt;strong&gt;hyperbaton&lt;/strong&gt;, which is any sort of &quot;rearrangement&quot; from the way you'd expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T00:45:20.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31676" CreationDate="2019-06-04T15:44:25.560" Score="1" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case, on the other hand, doesn't show the syntactic function but rather the semantic one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't have any examples for this, I find it hard to understand. Could this for example mean that even though a certain nominal syntagm is grammaticaly in accusative (so there are affixes for accusative) it actually has attributive meaning (so semantically it's genitive)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T19:41:16.697" Title="Grammatical case vs semantic case" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;morphological-typology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31625" CreationDate="2019-06-04T18:48:09.513" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, as a native speaker of the language, I tend to disagree with your approach. &#xA;To begin with, this distinction countable/uncountable is a feature of English, not French. In French, the relevant distinctions are animate/inanimate and definite/indefinite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;il y a du niveau&quot; it's idiomatic and in my opinion often ironic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;on va être sur de la chaussure de sport&quot;, this can be compared with &quot;on parle de chaussure de sport&quot;, in the first sentence, you need &quot;de la&quot; (relevant feature is indefinite)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;il y a de la jolie nana par ici&quot;, it reifies &quot;girls&quot; (relevant feature is shifting animate into inanimate). It somehow translates as &quot;there's nice chick meat here&quot;. I expect females to disapprove this kind of sentences...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T18:48:09.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31625" CreationDate="2019-06-04T19:28:29.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen reference to this sort of construction being called &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;massification&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and also &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;transformateur qualitatif&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/massification&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Massification (en)&lt;/a&gt;: (grammar) Conversion of a count noun to a mass noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/massifier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Massifier (fr)&lt;/a&gt;: Faire devenir un phénomène de masse, donner un effet de masse à (quelque chose). [en: &lt;em&gt;To cause to become a mass phenomenon, to give a mass effect to (something)&lt;/em&gt;.] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-the-wild example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fr.lettres.langue.francaise/2TqTAawoznk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, discussing mass nouns (noms indénombrables/massiques) vs. count nouns (noms dénombrables/comptables), emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Les noms indénombrables (ou &quot;massiques&quot;) peuvent s'employer avec un &#xA;  partitif au singulier :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Je bois du vin.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Je mange du pain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Il y a du vent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  J'ai besoin d'oxygène.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ce qui n'est pas possible pour les noms dénombrables :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *Je bois du bock -&gt; je bois un bock.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *Il y a de l'accident sur la route -&gt; il y a un accident.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Même si on peut toujours trouver des expressions où l'on &quot;massifie&quot; le&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nom en question&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  une rumba -&gt; il y a de la rumba dans l'air&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  un accident -&gt; avec ce verglas, il y a de l'accident dans l'air&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  un tibia -&gt; avec ce verglas, il y a du tibia cassé dans l'air).    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more scholarly source which fully discusses the noun categories can be found in Georges Kleiber, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cairn.info/revue-langue-francaise-2014-3-page-3.htm#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Massif/comptable : d'une problématique à l'autre&lt;/a&gt;, Langue française 2014/3 (n° 183), pages 3 - 24. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kleiber uses both the terms &lt;strong&gt;massification&lt;/strong&gt; as well as &lt;strong&gt;transformateur qualitatif&lt;/strong&gt; for this usage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;8: LA QUESTION DES CONVERSIONS OU TRANSFERTS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comme nous l’avons signalé supra, le fait de postuler que les noms possèdent eux-mêmes le trait comptable ou massif conduit aussi à postuler un phénomène de transfert ou de conversion (ou encore coercition) lorsqu’ils apparaissent dans un emploi qui répond au trait opposé à celui qui est leur trait inhérent : un nom intrinsèquement comptable peut apparaître en emploi massif et, inversement, un nom intrinsèquement massif, peut apparaître en livrée comptable. L’affaire est plutôt bien connue. Les travaux d’avant 2000 ont en effet mis en relief cinq principaux types de changements, en recourant à un machinisme métaphorique pour les expliciter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pour le passage du comptable au massif, trois modes de conversion ont été relevés, deux modes sur le plan quantitatif (1 et 2), un sur le plan qualitatif (3) :   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;celui de l’écrasement de l’entité comptable qui, à l’issue de l’opération, n’est plus qu’une substance sans formes (une « bouillie » pour reprendre le mot de Galmiche, 1989 : 67). Ce modèle de conversion correspond au « broyeur universel » de F. J. Pelletier (1975) et se trouve illustré par un exemple comme : Ne marche pas dedans. Il y a de l’œuf par terre !   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;celui de la pluralisation indéfinie (Kleiber 1990), qui présente des occurrences d’entités comptables (non broyées !) comme non discernables. Pour représenter ce modèle, M. Galmiche (1989 : 70) a proposé la fiction d’une autre machine, celle du multiplicateur, que l’on trouve à l’œuvre dans des emplois tels que : Il y a du sanglier dans la forêt, Il y avait de la voiture à perte de vue.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;celui de la &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;massification qualificative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (qui fait écho à la &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;massification quantitative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; à l’œuvre dans 1- et 2-) (Kleiber 1992, 1994 : 106-107), qui réduit l’occurrence ou les occurrences d’une entité comptable à une substance qualitative homogène, c’est-à-dire qui en fait une sorte de propriété, équivalant sur le plan qualitatif, à ce qu’est la matière sur le plan quantitatif, comme le montrent des énoncés tels que : Ça, c’est de la bagnole !, Cette statue, c’est du Rodin.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Si l’on entendait lui faire correspondre une machine fictive, c’est celle du «&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;transformateur qualitatif&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;» que nous proposerions aujourd’hui.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T23:11:02.520" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T23:11:02.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31673" CreationDate="2019-06-04T19:41:16.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much it. Languages do some idiosyncratic stuff with their grammatical cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember you &lt;em&gt;(obj)&lt;/em&gt;. (English)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Meminī tuī &lt;em&gt;(gen)&lt;/em&gt;. (Latin)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ich errinere an dich &lt;em&gt;(acc)&lt;/em&gt;. (Northern German)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, sentences with the same semantic meaning even use different grammatical cases, like in Ancient Greek (transliterated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mnēmoneúō sé&lt;/em&gt; (with accusative)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Mémnēmai soû&lt;/em&gt; (with genitive)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in all of these examples, the last word is, semantically, the thing being remembered (the &quot;theme&quot;). The syntax doesn't change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T19:41:16.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T00:13:11.323" Score="1" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA purpose seems straightforward to me: map all the known ways to produce sounds using the mouth to symbols and, for a specific language standard/dialect, map the possible sounds of it to these symbols. Now it is possible to describe the pronunciation of any word of the language/dialect in written form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, teachers, dictionaries and phonetic descriptions often uses phonemic transcriptions. As each phonem may be rendered by different allophones, the whole original purpose of IPA is broken IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: why use /paɪ/ instead of [pʰaɪ] to describe the pronunciation of the word &quot;pie&quot;? How would a Spanish native know that the initial &quot;p&quot; should be aspirated (Spanish has no aspirated &quot;p&quot;)? The same applies for the flap T / D in GA English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: GA American phonology Wikipedia shows /ɑ/ (open &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; unrounded vowel) as a &lt;em&gt;central&lt;/em&gt; vowel in its vowel trapezoid diagram. Why not use the allophone [ä] instead, making clearer which is the standard sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between phonems and allophones may be useful in linguistics discussions, but I really do not understand its usefulness in language learning. It seems to me it only adds an extra layer of complexity and ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastEditorUserId="24588" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T11:13:43.770" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T17:22:48.883" Title="Is the distinction between phoneme and allophone useful in language learning?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31677" CreationDate="2019-06-05T01:44:26.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distinction between allophone and phoneme is useful, because allophonic rules are ones that can actually be taught as general rules, whereas morphophonemic rules (neutralizing rules) generally are taught as &quot;you just have to memorize it&quot;. However, actually teaching the technical terminology and giving phonemicization exercises is pretty useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you present data in phonetic transcriptions, rather than phonemic transcriptions along side practice with contextual variants, you make it so much harder to learn the morphology and orthography of the language. The extent to which that actually matters depends on the language: aspiration alternations in English are not ubiquitous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't teach something like a rule of aspiration, then you will have to give phonetically transcribed data, which will confuse students into thinking that English is like Hindi; and you &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have to explain why you get aspiration variation between appʰly vs. application. As for the symbol for the low back vowel, I suppose you do have to deal with Wikipedia which is likely to be a popular source of misinformation. There is no reason to transcribe that vowel as anything other than [a]. Most linguists don't truly understand the IPA, much less general language learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T01:44:26.733" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31677" CreationDate="2019-06-05T01:46:54.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say the original purpose is lost. I ask, what is the original purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence indicates that native speakers remember phonemes, not phones. That is, an English-speaker's mental representation of &quot;pie&quot; is something like &lt;code&gt;/paj/&lt;/code&gt;; the aspiration isn't &quot;stored&quot; as part of the word. Instead, English-speakers just know (subconsciously) to aspirate voiceless stops in stressed onsets, as long as they don't come after &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt;. (This varies by dialect: I aspirate even after &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt;, for example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most language-learning programs are based on the same principle. There's an enormous amount of phonetic information in any word, so it's far easier to learn by &quot;compressing&quot; it: remembering a set of phonemes for each word, and a set of rules to turn those into a phonetic realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T01:46:54.380" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31681" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T03:57:57.593" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently labelling some singing data, which contains very slow transitions between vowels. The data often have prenuclear glides and diphthongs together. The picture below is an instance (the correct IPA should be [ti̯ɑʊ̯]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YCaTu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YCaTu.png&quot; alt=&quot;[ti̯ɑʊ̯]&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, from the /i/ sound to /a/ has a transition with the shape of a &quot;&gt;&quot;, since /i/ has lower F1 and higher F2 than /a/; from /a/ to /u/, the shape is the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the descending or ascending slopes are just the transition periods. How do you decide where to put the boundaries? Are there textbooks or articles discussing such issues? Should I put the boundaries in the middle of the transitions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of a similar question here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30853/identifying-phonemic-boundaries-in-praat&quot;&gt;Identifying phonemic boundaries in Praat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answers in that question did not answer my questions; and I'm adding a practical example to see what other linguists would do under similar circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13438" LastEditorUserId="13438" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T06:39:00.270" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:33:57.310" Title="Marking phoneme boundaries - how to decide on the transitions?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;annotation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31677" CreationDate="2019-06-05T17:04:07.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broad transcription is meant to capture the difference between e.g. &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;deed&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; &quot;plumbum&quot; and &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; &quot;guide, head&quot; or whether &lt;em&gt;ghoti&lt;/em&gt; is to be read as &quot;fish&quot;. That can help a beginner, but no kind of transcription can help learning a perfect pronounciation. Have you taken a look at narrow transcription? It's a mess, and only useful for advanced linguists beginning to learn something new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;native English listeners hardly even perceive the difference&lt;/strong&gt; betwen e.g. /pʰɪt/ and /spɪn/, and if they do, they won't care much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, even if they noticed a foreign accent, the foreigner would need an introduction to phonetics, and a trainer to get rid of it. That would be too extensive to belong in a dictionary, or in an elementary class room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different dialect is noted differently in the respective dicts, which take a choice to note the allophone specifically, to present only one still mighty broad dialect--consider e.g. &lt;em&gt;dance&lt;/em&gt; as the prime example for the difference between UK or US. You might ask why they don't note the aspirated labial plosive, too, but you'd have to make a case why they should. They have to limit the detail at some point. The prior answeres have already tried to point out that it is a reasonable decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether dictionaries noting narrow transcription of certain dialects exist and who should use them is a related, but different question. It rather seems that native &lt;em&gt;speaker&lt;/em&gt; experience is required. Otherwise rule based descriptions are applied to broad description to yield a narrow dialect description, and the rules are inferred from example sets. The rules may differ depending on what is used as basis. So e.g. Spanish speakers necessarily build on Spanish. In principle, any learner tries to infer these rules, and only the important ones are noted in introductory classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T17:22:48.883" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T17:22:48.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31685" CreationDate="2019-06-05T17:47:50.297" Score="4" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;zero experience with linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. Some friends told me that my question is one in linguistic, so I decided to give a shot here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While designing a dictionary, people collect words into it. Naively, each word will occupy an entry, but that is not an efficient way. Instead, we should combine words like 'book' and 'books' into an entry, and probably should name that entry 'book' because the word 'book' is more &quot;reduced&quot; than the work 'books'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I would like to say that the 'canonical form' of the word 'books' is 'book'. &lt;strong&gt;What is the terminology in linguistics (if any) that is similar to my 'canonical form'?&lt;/strong&gt; And how do people deal with this dictionary-designing problem? Any related terms will also be appreciated. Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24748" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T15:34:32.903" Title="Jargon request: &quot;Canonical Form&quot; of a word" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31683" CreationDate="2019-06-05T18:55:44.273" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term you are looking for is &lt;strong&gt;lemma&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And yes, indeed most linguists will treat &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt; as the same &quot;word&quot; (in the sense of word=lemma) in a dictionary, which is why the term &quot;lemma&quot; is sometimes also referred to as the &lt;strong&gt;dictionary form&lt;/strong&gt; of a word. This applies not only when writing a literal dictionary, but is also the common understanding of the term &quot;word&quot; in theoretical linguistics: &quot;books&quot; and &quot;book&quot; are generally regarded as belonging to the same lexicon entry, where &quot;lexicon&quot; here means not a physical lexicon you keep in your bookshelf, but an abstract idea of a language's word inventory that speakers have intuitions about.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't know exactly what you'd like to know more about how this problem is dealt with; basically, forms of a word which are mere &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; variants (such as singular vs. plural in the case of nouns, present vs. past tense in the case of verbs, ...) but carry the same core meaning will be treated as the same &quot;word&quot; (in the sense of lemma), while two words of the same form but with a different &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; (such as the word(s) &quot;bow&quot;: to bend down vs. something to shoot an arrow with - both words happen to have the same form, but it makes sense to treat them as different words) are treated as belonging to different lemmas. More difficult cases include phenomena like &quot;parliament&quot; (this could have the sense of building or an institution - is this still in some way the same meaning or should these two senses of &quot;parliament&quot; be treated as different entries in a lexicon?), but this is then more a question of where to draw the line between different &quot;meanings&quot;, while &quot;lemma&quot; in the sense of &quot;an abstraction over all grammatical variants of a word&quot; is relatively clear-cut. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: The process of computing the lemma form for a given word (e.g. books -&gt; book), often used in the context of computational linguistics, is called &lt;strong&gt;lemmatization&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another distinction you may find useful in this context is that of &lt;strong&gt;types&lt;/strong&gt; vs. &lt;strong&gt;tokens&lt;/strong&gt;: The sentence &quot;Mary eats a banana and Peter ate a pizza.&quot; contains 10 tokens (~= occurrences of strings of characters separated by white space, treating punctuation as separate tokens), but only 9 different types (= distinct word forms abstracted away from different occurrences in the text), since the token &quot;a&quot; occurs twice. Still, &quot;eats&quot; and the past-tense form as &quot;ate&quot; would be treated as different types, although belonging to the same lemma. So including punctuation symbols (which is useful for computational purposes), the sentence contains 10 tokens, 9 types and 8 lemmata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re. your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The problem with &quot;parliament&quot; is not what is the lemma, but what is the underlying word we want to compute the lemma for at all: if one includes meaning as part of what distinguishes one word from another, where to draw the line between different meanings? But once we decided which words we want to take as words on their own, the question of which is the corresponding lemma is rather clear-cut.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since a lemma is an abstraction over all &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt; variants of a word and not of a vague concept such as &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;, it is clear which categories are available, and one can simply choose one grammatical value as the default for the lemma form: For nouns, we will usually take nominative singular, for verbs, we will take the infinitive, etc. As soon as we have such a default value, the lemma is clearly decidable. Of course one has to settle these default values themselves; one could try to question why the nominative singular form &quot;book&quot; is more qualified to be the lemma than is the plural form &quot;books&quot;, or why we'd choose to use the infinitive to list a verb in a dictionary rather than the present perfect progressive. But speakers have rather consistent intuitions about what is &quot;basic&quot; (for example, imagine if you ask someone &quot;I'm looking for a verb... It's a term for when I investigate or examine something, and I recall it starts with an ''a'&quot;, then the other will most likely reply with &quot;You mean 'to analyze'&quot; - and not with  &quot;You mean 'analyzed'&quot; or 'analyzes', because they will take the infinitive form as basic: What they're replying with is precisely the lemma), and there are heuristics like complexity (which is the shortest form) or semantic markedness (which is the most unspecialized, generalized form) which help making that decision a lot easier. Since the inflectional &lt;strong&gt;paradigm&lt;/strong&gt; (the set of all grammatical variants of a word) is finite - there is only a finite number of parameters such as case, number etc., and hence only a finite number of combinations of them - the problem of &quot;how do we argue that there's no word more reduced than 'book' in its lemma&quot; can be solved by simply taking a look at all the full paradigm and picking the &quot;most reduced&quot; form among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If words belong to different parts of speech such as noun (&quot;analysis&quot;), verb (&quot;analyse&quot;) and adjective (&quot;analytic&quot;), it is rather universally assumed that they are different words and hence have different lemmata on their own. (Otherwise, if we were to mix words of different categories together, the process of picking the lemma by the pre-set default grammatical value wouldn't work, because there is no nominative singular to &quot;analyse&quot; and no infinitive to &quot;anylsis&quot; etc. - the definition of a lemma entails that it is relative to one part of speech). So the problem of deciding which lemma would be common to all of them doesn't arise in the first place. You will find &quot;analysis&quot;, &quot;analyses&quot; and &quot;analytic&quot; listed as individual entries in a dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- second update --&#xA;3) I think the closest to what you want are the following two concepts: On the morphological (= form) side, there is the concept of a &lt;strong&gt;root&lt;/strong&gt; (= the indecomposable core part of a word), as you say. On the semantic (= meaning) side, there is the concept of a &lt;strong&gt;semanteme&lt;/strong&gt; (= an indivisible unit of meaning). All three words &quot;analyze&quot;, &quot;analysis&quot; and &quot;analytic&quot; will have the same root (&quot;anal&quot; or &quot;analy&quot; or &quot;analyz/analys&quot; - sometimes phonology makes it difficult to settle down to one precise morphological root) and the same semanteme (the abstract meaning that underlines the words in all three categories). While the concept of &quot;lemma&quot; combines form and meaning in its definition, &quot;root&quot; is a purely morphological and &quot;semanteme&quot; a purely semantic concept.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And then there is a whole bunch more concepts like &quot;morpheme&quot; (= an indecomposable, meaning-bearing form unit of a word; this concept subsumes also more functional units like the affixes &quot;-ic&quot; or &quot;un-&quot;), &quot;base&quot; (= the form which affixes attach to, similar to root but doesn't have to be the core part but may already be built up of more than one morpheme), &quot;seme&quot; (= smallest part of a sememe), &quot;sememe&quot; (= a unit of meaning built up from one or more semes, soemewhat the semantic analogon to morpheme) and much more which would exceed the scope of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are further interested, I would suggest you to try an introductory book on morphology or lexical semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="24748" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T15:34:32.903" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T15:34:32.903" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31625" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:58:56.667" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm hardly speaking french, so my suggestion may seem unusual, but take &lt;em&gt;jolie&lt;/em&gt; as the headword and &lt;em&gt;nana&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective, morpheme or ... Thus you would have to write &lt;em&gt;jolie-nana&lt;/em&gt; with a hyphen, except that french adjectives regularly appear in post position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German equally has recently gotten such a feature in slang, so perhaps the development is not unique to french. There is e.g. &lt;em&gt;Er ist [ein] Hurensohn&lt;/em&gt;. I'm sorry that &quot;&lt;em&gt;He is son-bitch&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is the first example I can think of, but at least I'm sure it's idiomatic, and it shows the register. You could also say &lt;em&gt;Er ist Boss&lt;/em&gt;. Omiting the indefinite article &lt;em&gt;ein&lt;/em&gt; is irregular, and lets the object appear like an adjective or an uncount/plural noun. It's still clearly a noun, but the adjective/noun distinction is blured. For terms of occupation or other proper names, the omission is regular, so &lt;em&gt;boss&lt;/em&gt; is in a grey area. Usually it would be &lt;em&gt;der Boss&lt;/em&gt;, because &lt;em&gt;there can be only one&lt;/em&gt;. However, in that case further qualification via articles should not be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:58:56.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31659" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:39:50.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A very good book dealing with all branches of Indo-European is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0199296685&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that you will find thousands of PIE roots and their development in different branches like e.g. Iranian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, as already suggested, you should start collecting etymological material on different branches of IE. Brill/Leiden has a whole series of those &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/view/serial/IEED&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series&lt;/a&gt;, but they gonna hurt your pocket. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some free resources that I personally like for tracing roots are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etymonline.com/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.palaeolexicon.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.palaeolexicon.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:39:50.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31777" CreationDate="2019-06-06T10:08:42.200" Score="-1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not linguist, but I am looking for reference on the following matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Social function of language and relation of the function with other functions of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Variability of language on the basis of its sociality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; Social models of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone here suggest some papers or may be some book chapters on the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22692" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T00:54:08.157" Title="Reference request on sociolinguistical matters" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-06-29T18:28:48.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-07T03:24:05.560" Score="2" ViewCount="1713" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Talmud frequently calls an individual a &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot;. Two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been reported: If one has learned Tanach and Mishnah but not Talmud, Rabbi Eleazar says he is an ignoramus [am ha-aretz]; Rabbi Shmuel ben Nahmani says he is a boor; Rabbi Yannai says he is a Samaritan [rejects sources beyond Torah]; Rabbi Aha ben Yaakov says he is a magician [who misleads others with illusions]. [Sotah 22a]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one who recites the blessing on any of the mitzvot mentioned in the Torah may not answer 'amen' after himself; and if he does answer 'amen' he is a boor. [Berachot Y 58b]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew for 'boor'is also 'boor' --  &lt;strong&gt;בור&lt;/strong&gt;, bet-vav-resh, vocalized BOOR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet this is not the origin of the English word &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot;. The dictionary says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boor: noun: 1-a churlish, rude, or unmannerly person; 2-a country bumpkin; rustic; yokel; 3-peasant; 4-Boer; Origin: 1545-55; Dutch boer; or Low German bur; (cognate with German Bauer -- farmer), derivative of Germanic to dwell, build, cultivate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic word for &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot;is also &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot; -- &lt;strong&gt;بور&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Are the facts that the English &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot;, the Hebrew &lt;strong&gt;בור&lt;/strong&gt; and the Arabic &lt;strong&gt;بور&lt;/strong&gt; sound identical and mean the same thing just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T14:55:35.110" Title="Origin of &quot;boor&quot;" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31692" CreationDate="2019-06-07T04:20:57.427" Score="18" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's just a coincidence.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew and Arabic words come from a root B-W-R &amp;quot;to lie fallow&amp;quot;; compare the Arabic verbs بَوَّرَ (&lt;em&gt;bawwara&lt;/em&gt;) and بَارَ (&lt;em&gt;baara&lt;/em&gt;). The metaphor of &amp;quot;thoughts = crops&amp;quot; isn't an uncommon one, so if someone isn't having any thoughts, their mind is metaphorically lying fallow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word is borrowed from Dutch (compare &amp;quot;Boer&amp;quot;, as in a descendant of Dutch colonists in South Africa, from the same source). The Dutch word means &amp;quot;farmer&amp;quot; and is cognate with German &lt;em&gt;Bauer&lt;/em&gt;, archaic English &amp;quot;bower&amp;quot; (both meaning &amp;quot;farmer&amp;quot;). The older meaning of the root, reconstructed for Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, is something like &amp;quot;to dwell&amp;quot;, which is how we get English &amp;quot;neighbor&amp;quot; (the first half is equivalent to archaic English &amp;quot;nigh&amp;quot;, meaning &amp;quot;near, close at hand&amp;quot;: so a neighbor is someone who dwells nearby). In this case, the metaphor was &amp;quot;stupid people are like farmers (and not like us, the wealthy, cultured elite)&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the majority of the forms from these roots have nothing in common. It's pure coincidence that Hebrew/Arabic &lt;em&gt;buur&lt;/em&gt; and English &amp;quot;boor&amp;quot; have drifted close to each other, and their meanings still aren't quite the same—if I understand right, the Semitic words are about lack of intelligence, while the English word is about lack of refinement or schooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T15:08:04.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31681" CreationDate="2019-06-07T08:38:21.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only a proposal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem seems to be: having a clear definite point to determine whether you are in one vocal or another for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said you could define transition zones. &#xA;And then take a temporal &quot;barycenter&quot; of those zones as the discrete transition points so to base your calculation of durations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is: You can get some inspiration from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fuzzy Logic&lt;/a&gt;, which helps a lot with the need to describe a quality / a feature that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a discrete value. I think it is exactly the case for phonems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you highlighted with your varying frequency curves, and when looking at the IPA diagram, it is clear that the space between vocals is totally continuous, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; discrete:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wSCjQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wSCjQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same for consonants, I don't have a diagram at hand, but when playing didjeridoo/yidaki, I spend my time exploring the nuances between all sorts of d from the back of the palate, to the d on the front of the palate, then approaching the different t and d we can do on the back of teeth, either at the base of the tooth/gengiva or at the top of the teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same for k and g. You have all the palette of tongue position, and strenght in the breath, that makes them sound slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for ch, f, v, and h, the palette is continous also.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you have asked, the difficulty is determining the spectral/frequency features to define one phonem. You are asking for reference about that, I don't have any. Neither have I used Praat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; you can start &lt;strong&gt;arbitrarily&lt;/strong&gt; fixing them. And &lt;strong&gt;decide yourself&lt;/strong&gt;: when this or that parameter has gone to far away from this value, we are no longer in this phoneme. When this parameter and this parameter is there: we are totally in this phonem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the core of Fuzzy logic: only defining the points &quot;We are full in it&quot;, &quot;We are no longer in it&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking an ultra simplisitc example from the desciption of Fuzzy Logic with only one dimension / degree of liberty, (here it's temperature) you happen to have something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0 : Quality is false&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 : Quality is true, fully present&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uq8b3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uq8b3.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works really well for multi-dimension continous space: that's namely the strength of this technique indeed.&#xA;And I tend to think you could apply that to several parameters for defining phonems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said, it's only a proposal. I had worked on a &lt;strong&gt;simplistic&lt;/strong&gt; system which was determining at which moment the sound was a vocal or a consonant. And it was mostly based only on these two qualities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;noisy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pseudo-periodic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not using formant frequencies like you seem to do (that's what I interpreted from the graph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if the description of each phonem you are interested in is too tedious, you could think about using Machine Learning.&#xA;You would have to provide examples of frequency analysis (not the sheer impulse amplitude data which is too precise, detailing too much, too much local) and the corresponding phonem. That could be a good candidate for what is called &quot;Classification&quot; in machine learning. But you would have to invest in learning &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some ML classification techniques&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:33:57.310" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:33:57.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31668" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:38:05.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a large amount of movement of people back and forth across the international border while the US and Canada were being settled. Such movement tends to homogenize the dialects. Evidence for this movement is this list I compiled of US places named for Canadian cities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._places_named_for_non-U.S._places#Canada&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._places_named_for_non-U.S._places#Canada&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'd compiled the same list for Canada, but it got deleted for reasons I still don't understand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there's very few places in the list that are not in northern US states west of New England. The same states also dominate the Canadian list. Since the &quot;neutral&quot; US accent is found in those states, there was obviously a lot of interaction across the border which helped keep the two areas from developing radically different dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23266" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:38:05.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27681" CreationDate="2019-06-07T15:55:03.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I stumbled on a similar question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/9rfig8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/asklinguistics&lt;/a&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/user/TwilitMe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TwilitMe&lt;/a&gt;. 22 points 7 months ago&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In short H1 &amp;amp; H2 etc are believed to be different phonemes, but we are unsure of their precise values, so the numbers are used to distinguish them whilst staying impartial to what their specific values are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/9rfig8/what_do_the_numbers_in_reconstructed_pie_words/e8hjxm9/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avatar339&lt;/a&gt;. 11 points 7 months ago &#xA;  This is exactly it, the most important part is how they evolved &#xA;  H1e-&gt;e&#xA;  H2e-&gt;a&#xA;  H3-&gt;o &#xA;  This explained much of the inconsistency that surrounded certain vowel qualities between daughter languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T15:55:03.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11816" CreationDate="2019-06-07T17:59:51.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proper names. E.g. &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; should be &lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; in most languages, and I'm pretty sure that &lt;em&gt;Percival&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gwendolyn&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hugh&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Sandra Bullock&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Howland&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;Howland Island&lt;/em&gt; are the same in all languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13996" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T17:59:51.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31702" CreationDate="2019-06-07T18:49:17.927" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;My English teacher grew up in Texas and unsurprisingly her native dialect is Texan English. I noticed that when intervocalic /l/ is followed by /i/, the /l/ is elided and /y/ takes its place. For example, &quot;million&quot; is pronounced &quot;miyyon&quot; and &quot;bill you&quot; is pronounced &quot;biyyou&quot;. I wanted to see if this feature was also present in SAE, as it could explain the origin. Texan English seems to derive a lot of features from SAE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, l-vocalization is any case where /l/ becomes a vowel or semivowel. However, most examples that come up when I try to find information on &quot;English l-vocalization&quot; are cases where dark l is elided or replace with /w/. So, either the feature in my teacher's dialect is not actually an example of l-vocalization, or I'm just terrible at using google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is this: Is the /l/ to /y/ feature derived from SAE? If it is, where could I find more information on this sort of topic in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24769" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T21:45:14.103" Title="Where does Texan English derive its l-vocalization?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31700" CreationDate="2019-06-07T21:45:14.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be &lt;strong&gt;Mexican Spanish&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my close-to-GAE dialect, the word &quot;million&quot; has only two syllables—that is, it has &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;, not &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, in the middle. Phonetically, this &lt;code&gt;/lj/&lt;/code&gt; is often realized as &lt;code&gt;[ʎ]&lt;/code&gt;, blending the lateral-ness of &lt;code&gt;/l/&lt;/code&gt; with the palatal-ness of &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish classically had a phonemic distinction between &lt;code&gt;/ʎ/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt;. But a famous and distinctive feature of Mexican Spanish (which is now pretty much universal in other dialects too) has always been &lt;em&gt;yeísmo&lt;/em&gt;: merging them both into &lt;code&gt;[j~ʝ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would attribute the Texan shift, &lt;code&gt;/lj/ [ʎ]&lt;/code&gt; → &lt;code&gt;[j~ʝ]&lt;/code&gt;, to the influence of Mexican &lt;em&gt;yeísmo&lt;/em&gt;. Midwestern English (a bit to the north) and Southern American English (a bit to the east) are both farther from Mexico and thus don't show the same shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T21:45:14.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11816" CreationDate="2019-06-07T23:25:20.670" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words or 'mother' and 'father' are quite similar across languages. The word of 'mother' is most probably /mama/, and 'father' is most probably /papa/. Quote rom Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean &quot;mother&quot; and &quot;father&quot;, usually but not always in that order. This is thought to be a coincidence resulting from the process of early language acquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are nearly universal. Exception is, atleast Georgian, where 'mama' is 'father', and' mother' is 'deda.' Something similar is also attested in Old Japanese, where 'papa' means 'mother'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24422" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T23:25:20.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-07T23:27:11.423" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Principles And Parameters syntax posited that along with some principles, there were parametric settings for certain properties, which are either &quot;on&quot; or &quot;off&quot; in a language. Examples are the &quot;head-directionality parameter&quot;, the pro-drop parameter, the polysynthesis parameter, and the ergativity parameter, which are assumed to be provided by UG. Was it (ever/generally) claimed that UG supplies a default setting for one or more parameters? My goal is to see how the low frequency of less-common systems (ergative or polysynthetic languages, for instance) was accounted for in that framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T23:27:11.423" Title="Does UG supply default values for parameters (in P&amp;P syntax)?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2019-06-08T00:19:13.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt; outlines this on pp. 18-22  of &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;.  I  post only pp. 18-19:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LvZzT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LvZzT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;The Five Faces of Language Change&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;1. Sound Change: Defining Deviance Downward&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Much of the difference between the Latin and the French sentences is due to the fact that in all languages, there is a strong tendency for sounds to erode and disappear over time, especially when the accent does not fall upon them. This is part of what transformed &lt;em&gt;femina&lt;/em&gt; &quot;woman&quot; in the Latin sentence into &lt;em&gt;femme&lt;/em&gt; in the French one, which is pronounced simply &quot;FAHM.&quot; The first syllable of &lt;em&gt;femina&lt;/em&gt; was accented -- &quot;FEH-mee-nah&quot;; the other two were not, and over time they weakened and dropped off completely. In real time, we process this kind of erosion as sloppy: to us, &lt;em&gt;Jeet yet?&lt;/em&gt; is a barefoot version of &lt;em&gt;Did you eat yet?&lt;/em&gt;, as inevitable but formally unsavory as an unmade bed. But this very process was part of what turned Latin into French, and not &quot;sloppy&quot; French but the toniest &lt;em&gt;formal&lt;/em&gt; French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sounds do not vanish in a heartbeat; at first, there is just a tendency to pronounce the sound less distinctly in casual, running speech. What follows is a kind of analogue of &quot;defining deviance downward,&quot; a societal trend in which the gradual acceptance of behaviors once considered taboo has the effect of rendering behaviors of the next level of extremity easier to contemplate and fall into (&quot;If smoking pot is no big deal, then why not...?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A generation that grows up hearing the sound produced less distinctly most of the time gradually comes to take this lesser rendition of the sound as the &quot;default.&quot; Meanwhile, however, they, too, follow the general and eternal tendency to pronounce unaccented sounds less distinctly and thus pronounce their &quot;default&quot; version of the sound, already less distinct than the last generation's, even &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; distinctly. The next generation takes &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; muffled sound as &quot;default&quot;; but when they in turn follow the natural tendency to pronounce this sound even &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; distinctly much of the time, this time there is so little left of the sound that to muffle it is to eliminate it completely. Thus, for them, the choice is between making the sound at all and leaving it off completely. Finally comes a generation for whom the &quot;default&quot; is no sound in that position at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This erosion has a particularly dramatic effect in that, whereas some sounds in a word serve no particular purpose (the &lt;em&gt;-ina&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;fem-ina&lt;/em&gt;), other sounds are part of suffixes or prefixes that perform important grammatical functions. For example, think of the &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; that marks past in English; without this suffix, one does not know from the word whether &lt;em&gt;walked&lt;/em&gt; is present or past at all. The erosion of prefixes and suffixes like these was particularly central in turning the Latin sentence into the French one. There is a certain tendency for sound change to &quot;go easy on&quot; these prefixes and suffixes to preserve important aspects of the language's machinery. But this is only a tendency, and just as often sound change wreaks its termite-like destruction even on the support beams of a grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T00:19:13.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-08T00:25:28.437" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/9dks66&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this on r/asklinguistics&lt;/a&gt; that, being 9 months old, has time-barred comments. I've a shade rectified some mistakes and rewritten it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky, in some interview, said that scholars in the 19th or even 18th century decided that French would be the language of science and English the language of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where did Chomsky contend this? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did these scholars reckon that French befits science, rather than English? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And why English for literature, and not e.g.German or Italian?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24396" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T00:25:28.437" Title="Why would French fit science, and English fit literature?" Tags="&lt;chomsky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31710" CreationDate="2019-06-08T21:16:40.430" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there exist a language (the natural or the constructed one) with a completely standardized and ambiguity-free rules, and which is suitable for the modern use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering for a language which should be strict, logical, and ambiguity-free as the programming one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the word &quot;rules&quot; I mean grammar, word order, punctuation, and so on. Everything except pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages with which I'm familiar (I'm native Russian with some practice in English) doesn't look as something what I'm searching for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a lot of weird things which doesn't have any sane logic behind them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are some things that doesn't really solved. One example is the Oxford comma. Sometimes we need to use it to remove ambiguity, sometimes preserve it, and sometimes we will have ambiguity whatever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some things are so complicated that even linguists have holy wars about them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some things have too loose rules. One thing which is very different between Russian and English is that in Russian you can mix word order in a very free way. You may think it is cool, but actually it leads for a lot of problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In English, we have compound nouns like &quot;water tank capacity&quot; which aren't ambiguity-free (this is successfully resolved in Russian).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I started to learn Esperanto. It is cool in some aspects, but it doesn't have standardized punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One man on the internet said that Sanskrit is the only language with a completely standardized rules, but he is Sanskrit teacher and can be biased. Also, I'm not sure that Sanskrit have words for the modern life, like &quot;electricity&quot; or &quot;software&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May be German, Icelandic, Chinese, Latin? Something different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24776" LastEditorUserId="24776" LastEditDate="2019-06-09T01:15:21.303" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T01:15:21.303" Title="Standardized and ambiguity-free language" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;esperanto&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31712" CreationDate="2019-06-08T21:17:10.677" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to predict that a language is about to die out  just by looking at its structure? So without taking into account the number of native speakers it has and other external factors? If so, how? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T00:31:38.297" Title="Can we predict language death just by looking at grammar?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31708" CreationDate="2019-06-08T21:50:33.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what you were perhaps looking for: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lojban&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;ложбан&lt;/em&gt;) is a conlang which is a syntactically unambiguous human language with logical and unambiguous structure and greater means of expression aimed at eliminating ambiguity in language. The name &quot;Lojban&quot; is a compound formed from loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lojban is designed to express complex logical constructs precisely, it has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling and grammar (although word derivation relies on arbitrary variant forms). This gives rise to high intelligibility for computer parsing. It is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible and allows highly systematic learning and use, compared to most natural languages. Also, it possesses an intricate system of indicators which effectively communicate contextual attitude or emotions. As for punctuation, it is actually not needed, since all the syntactic structure is expressed within the words, even question marks and exclamation points are not needed, although they still can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2019-06-08T22:05:53.810" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T22:05:53.810" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31709" CreationDate="2019-06-09T00:04:08.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A language dies when nobody learns it as their first language. The factors leading to this are generally social and cultural ones: maybe it becomes more prestigious to speak Spanish than Q'anjob'al, so Q'anjob'al is used less and less, or perhaps the government makes it illegal to speak Dyirbal so it never gets passed on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could a language die out just because its structure was no longer useful? It's possible for &lt;em&gt;parts&lt;/em&gt; to die out: all of Latin's ablative inflections are dead and gone, for example. But the language as a whole lives on; there's an unbroken line of transmission between Cicero's Latin and modern Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages are constantly changing under a strong evolutionary pressure, adapting to be as useful as possible for communication. If part of a language's structure is making communication harder instead of easier, that part will quickly wither and die. &lt;strong&gt;But a community won't go from speaking one language to zero&lt;/strong&gt;: having &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language is better than none. Language death only happens when social factors bring in competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T00:04:08.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31709" CreationDate="2019-06-09T00:31:38.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can somewhat predict language death from current available data on the language, but not from the structure itself. A factor that accompanies language death is that speakers have significant uncertainty as to what the facts are. The reason is that the speakers hardly use the language anymore: so, if you have a really incoherent corpus of data, this suggests that the language is falling out of use. Abrupt social upheaval, where most of the speakers are killed and dispersed, could lead to isolated pockets of individual fluent speakers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T00:31:38.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T11:42:37.650" Score="0" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a list of minimal pairs for pronunciation, preferably with audio files?&#xA;So far the best I have found &lt;a href=&quot;https://european-portuguese.info/minimalpairs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://european-portuguese.info/minimalpairs&lt;/a&gt; but this is specific to European. Most searches return ESL resources for Portuguese speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21137" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-06-10T18:41:06.750" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T18:41:06.750" Title="minimal pairs for Portuguese" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;&lt;minimal-pairs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20933" CreationDate="2019-06-09T11:52:26.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not certain what the question is, but if it helps, most Irish people start learning the language from the age of 4 or 5 so everyone is familiar with basic phrases, even though few of us speak it fluently.&#xA;When we watch TG4 there are usually subtitles in English on the Irish-language programmes.&#xA;Many English-speakers will choose to educate their children in Irish-language schools around the country so it is not necessarily true to say the West is the only place Irish is spoken. There are also Gaeltacht areas in counties such as Waterford. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21137" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T11:52:26.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T13:52:09.483" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying Discourse Analysis and I need to analyze a text regarding its verbal processes. Everything was going well until I saw this sentence that is burning my head completely!! :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am grateful to Yad Vahem and all of those responsible for this&#xA;  remarkable institution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which is the process of &quot;am grateful&quot; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and what is the rest ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of that being a mental process, but then the rest being phenomenon sounds a little bit weird to me. However, I am a starter, maybe it is not that weird. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24779" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T00:53:01.473" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T00:53:01.473" Title="Verb processess" Tags="&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31493" CreationDate="2019-06-09T22:21:18.043" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also called false loans, pseudo-borrowings and pseudo-formations &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24782" LastActivityDate="2019-06-09T22:21:18.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31720" CreationDate="2019-06-09T23:56:33.630" Score="4" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The man paints the wall red&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb to paint can take three arguments, the object, the subject and the colour of the paint. What kind of verb is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The man colours the paper blue&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's because this stands in for the (infinite) set of verbs &quot;colours-blue&quot; &quot;colours-red&quot; &quot;colours-green&quot; etc. e.g. &quot;The man colours-red the paper&quot;. As colours exist in more than one axis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas for things like size we have verbs like &quot;enlarges the balloon&quot; instead of &quot;sizes the balloon large&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it could exist for emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The clown makes the children happy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Makes&quot; can stand in for a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other verbs like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T07:22:16.220" Title="What kind of verbs take three arguments?" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31719" CreationDate="2019-06-10T00:43:26.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, verbs with two objects are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditransitive_verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ditransitive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is just a fancy word for &quot;takes three arguments&quot;. In English, one of these arguments goes before the verb and takes the subjective case, while the other two go after the verb and take the objective case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, the third argument here is the &lt;em&gt;manner&lt;/em&gt; of the action: it's semantically similar to &quot;the man paints the wall vigorously&quot;, but syntactically different (compare &quot;the man vigorously paints the wall&quot; against *&quot;the man blue paints the wall&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many verbs that indicate an imposed state, without inherently indicating what that state is, can mark a manner in this way: &quot;make&quot; is a good generic one, as you noted, but also &quot;turn&quot;, &quot;set&quot;, &quot;call&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2019-06-10T07:22:16.220" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T07:22:16.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26238" CreationDate="2019-06-10T10:45:08.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might help:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_variants_of_IPA_letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_variants_of_IPA_letters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There've been cases (no pun intended) where I find myself in need of IPA in upper case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24784" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T10:45:08.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-10T11:07:43.733" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;French uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lalanguefrancaise.com/general/formule-de-politesse-email-lettre-de-motivation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complex word arrangements&lt;/a&gt; to say &quot;best regards&quot; and &quot;yours sincerely&quot; to finish well written letters, i.e.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments respectueux et dévoués.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We beseech you to agree, Sir, the expression of our respectful and dedicated sentiments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you please give examples of other languages that use complex phrases as standard? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you explain why a language type would shy from brevity? (I am bilingual so I understand from daily use, although you can surprise me!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21979" LastEditorUserId="21979" LastEditDate="2019-06-10T11:13:16.590" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T11:13:16.590" Title="Examples of languages with complex &quot;formules de politesse&quot;" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12353" CreationDate="2019-06-10T17:48:15.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, the distinction between clitics and affixes is not accepted by all linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for people who do find it meaningful, I have the impression that postposed definite articles are often called clitics, but have been argued to actually be suffixes instead. See &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/26473436/Romanian_definite_articles_are_not_clitics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanian definite articles are not clitics&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Albert Ortmann &amp;amp; Alexandra Popescu, and the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/574/why-is-the-definite-article-in-balkan-languages-always-called-a-suffix-when-it-r_&quot;&gt;Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The status of articles in North Germanic languages seem to be similarly dubious or arguable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T17:48:15.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-11T15:31:13.807" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;When does a thing become a person, in any language. When is it correct grammar to refer to a thing as a person? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24790" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:04:28.183" Title="When is a thing correctly called a person?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-06-16T03:18:04.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31728" CreationDate="2019-06-11T17:19:52.460" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the language, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages have a distinction between &quot;animate&quot; and &quot;inanimate&quot; baked into the grammar, but they don't all draw the distinction in the same place. For a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In older Swahili, gender #1 (&lt;em&gt;m-&lt;/em&gt;) is used for most people. Animals use gender #9 (&lt;em&gt;N-&lt;/em&gt;), and &quot;irregular&quot; people (defined by a specific characteristic, including disabilities like blindness, but also height) use gender #7 (&lt;em&gt;ki-&lt;/em&gt;).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In modern Swahili, this distinction is vanishing, with all humans and animals shifting into gender #1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Ancient Greek, all words for adult humans are grammatically animate, but small children are grammatically inanimate.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact, the word for &quot;living being&quot; in general (&lt;em&gt;ζῷον&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;zôion&lt;/em&gt;) is grammatically inanimate, and includes not just humans and animals but also paintings and sculptures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Classical Latin, all words for humans and animals are grammatically animate, but so are the majority of all other nouns. The neuter gender (descended from the PIE inanimate) died out completely in later Latin, which is why the Romance languages don't have it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the lines aren't necessarily sharp and strict, either: look at English, where it's valid to call an animal or infant &quot;it&quot;, but equally valid to call it &quot;he&quot; (or &quot;she&quot;), and there's a convention of using &quot;she&quot; for ships and other large vehicles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T17:19:52.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31716" CreationDate="2019-06-11T19:50:12.540" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about SFL, but I'd naively say that you are looking at a formulaic expression of politeness, covering the act &lt;em&gt;to thank&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passive act--&lt;em&gt;being taken care of&lt;/em&gt;--is animated through agents, and the passivity is reflected in an act of acceptance in the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatically, there is an &lt;em&gt;appellative&lt;/em&gt;, cp. &lt;em&gt;&quot;The meeting is closed!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;,--and a participle, &lt;em&gt;responsible&lt;/em&gt;, that binds adverbially in the predicate. If contrasting just the verbs, then the participle is a subclause in the place of the obligatory argument from &lt;em&gt;thankful \ \&lt;/em&gt;; Cp. &lt;em&gt;pleasently surprised&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;em&gt;surprised by the pleasure&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;by the people pleasing _ [me]&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;by the pleasing people&lt;/em&gt;: Thus the participle-adverb gives &lt;em&gt;&quot;responsibly being thankful&quot;&lt;/em&gt; which is a bit weird, but works out if the bespoke responsibility were a bi-transitive and bi-jective relation; Then it would be trivially isomorphic to &lt;em&gt;thankful for responsible people&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically, if the act of thanking is a self-fulfilling prophecy, then it might work on multiple levels (&lt;em&gt;phenomenal, mental&lt;/em&gt;, whatever), with different semantic connotations on each level. So on level the sentence expresses acceptance of the chance to speak, the reason might be acceptance of an award (we can tell so much from the context), for work in which she had to ask for--and accept a lot of--help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To unfamiliar listeners, there's the by-clause, that is vital information to them, but would not need to be given to a familiar speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T19:50:12.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31728" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:04:28.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Draconis' nice answer, there are things considered animate in Latin, trees have the &lt;em&gt;natural gender&lt;/em&gt; feminine, even when the word form suggests masculine, e.g. &lt;em&gt;populus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;poplar&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:04:28.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-12T22:24:28.627" Score="1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the concept of &lt;em&gt;clitics&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the paper, &quot;Feature  Analysis  of  Danish Pronominal  Paradigms  with a View  to  a Danish Application  of the Pronominal  Approach&quot;, it is stated &quot;In  Danish, only one pronoun (&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;) is clitic by nature, whereas most pronouns are clitic under specific  syntactic conditions&quot;. In the article, &quot;clitic&quot; is also regarded as &quot;verb-bound&quot; (for the French pronominal system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the examples on the English Wikipedia show 's, I'm and je t'aime. &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand is a separate word which can move far from a verb, e.g., in Europarl I see the example &quot;... og at man i 1999 kun har budgetteret ...&quot; where &quot;har&quot; is the verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there separate concepts at play here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T10:32:07.373" Title="Concept of clitic" Tags="&lt;clitics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31734" CreationDate="2019-06-12T23:21:44.487" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, a note: not everyone believes in clitics! Some theories don't include them as a separate concept at all. But for those that do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The defining feature of a clitic, in most theories, is that it's &lt;em&gt;tightly bound to the word next to it&lt;/em&gt;. Phonologically, it's treated as part of the same word, rather than a separate word in and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, crucially, clitics can move around to different places in the sentence—they're not &lt;em&gt;morphologically&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;syntactically&lt;/em&gt; part of the same word. Compare the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice and Bob &lt;strong&gt;'s&lt;/strong&gt; house&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Domus Alici&lt;strong&gt;ae&lt;/strong&gt; et Robert&lt;strong&gt;ī&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; attaches to the entire phrase &quot;Alice and Bob&quot;; in Latin, the genitive (possessive) marker is put onto every word in the phrase instead. So &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; is called a clitic and &lt;em&gt;-ae&lt;/em&gt; is called an affix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional guideline, clitics are &quot;promiscuous&quot;: they can attach to anything and everything that's in the right syntactic position. Affixes generally aren't: the English plural &lt;em&gt;-s&lt;/em&gt; can't attach to nouns like &lt;em&gt;ox&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;, for example, while &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt; can attach to the end of any English noun—or any phrase that acts like a noun, which is why we see &lt;em&gt;surgeon&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; general&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;surgeon general &lt;strong&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. (It's not always written as &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;, but that's just orthography: &lt;em&gt;Jesus'&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced just like &lt;em&gt;Jesus&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;'s&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I don't speak Danish, I wouldn't say that sort of movement disqualifies something from being a clitic: it's actually a point in favor of the clitic analysis, as opposed to analyzing it as an affix. Whether it's a clitic or a separate word then comes down to phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T23:21:44.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31734" CreationDate="2019-06-13T00:25:45.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exposition in Schøsler's paper is a bit difficult to relate to general theoretical linguistic concepts (it's a different theoretical perspective from most work on Scandinavian), but with a light reading of the paper, it looks as though (a) her claim isn't incomprehensible from a non-hi-tech theoretical perspective and (b) your example seems to be a problem. It is true that in some languages clitics are positioned relative to the verb phrase, but that's not a defining property of clitic. For example, the definite in Norwegian and Swedish are credible examples of clitics. There may be cliticization in certain dialects of Norwegian between monosyllabic WH-word plus monosyllabic pronoun which interacts with the V2 generalization (&lt;em&gt;ka du sa?&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;hva sa du?&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that immediate pre-verbal position is the diagnostic for clitic (especially the impossibility of intervening parentheticals), your example seems to be problematic. If V2 behavior is the diagnostic, V2 is a main clause phenomenon, and your example is from a subordinate clause, then you would not expect &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; to attach to the verb. Dunno if that what she is claiming, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T00:25:45.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15744" CreationDate="2019-06-13T07:17:07.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that it is being used like an indefinite article, so you could call it the &quot;indefinite this&quot;. Unlike &quot;a&quot;, &quot;this&quot; in such a context seems to indicate that you are about to elaborate on the noun phrase governed by that &quot;this&quot;. I suppose you can call this usage &quot;cataphoric&quot; (adjective) or &quot;cataphora&quot; (noun), since &quot;this&quot; is not pointing back to a previously mentioned noun phrase (anaphora). Cataphora is usually used to speak of pronouns which are used before the full noun phrase is revealed (ex. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;He&lt;/strong&gt; may be approaching 37, but &lt;strong&gt;Jeff&lt;/strong&gt; has no plans to retire from the sport yet.&quot;) But I guess you could stretch the term to fit your example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example usage would be &quot;I have this strange feeling...&quot; If you don't then attempt to describe the feeling, or demonstrate that you are unable to describe it, people will look at you funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T07:17:07.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31742" CreationDate="2019-06-13T07:26:46.663" Score="3" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of the example in the question in the title is that, to my knowledge, there are no minimal pairs that contrast [ð] and [θ] in English, yet, if someone pronounced a word with those sounds correctly we would think it sounds wrong or at least think they must be using a different dialect than us. It is not free variation, and it is not phonologically conditioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe 'x' and 'ng' also behave this way in English, although in these cases we are dealing with two segments, always with 'x', and sometimes with 'ng'. Actually it is not about the orthography, so I should probably talk about [ks]/[gz] and [ŋ]/[ŋg]. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I don't know of any words that contrast only on these sounds. In this case there my be some phonological motivation for [ks] vs [gz]. I haven't thought it through. I know in the case of 'ng' there is some morphological motivation, but I think that would still qualify for the phenomena I am asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am studying a language which has prenasalized many words that begin with voiced consonants, but some words do not get prenasalized. I don't believe there are any minimal pairs to be found where one the only difference is prenasalization at the beginning of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2373" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:20:26.063" Title="Is there a term for the way that 'th' is pronounced differently in 'thin' and 'this'?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31734" CreationDate="2019-06-13T10:32:07.373" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While not an expert on the issue, I'd point out that the example you give from Europarl is a subordinate clause, and that main clauses and subordinate clauses have different constraints and rules governing them in Danish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schøsler writes &quot;The form &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; (you, one), preposed or postposed, is always clitic and thus permits no insertion at all between man and the verb&quot; (2.2.1, p. 121). It seems to me, she's dealing solely with main clauses here, even if she only says so explicitly further on (under 2.2.4.1, p. 124).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T10:32:07.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31738" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:16:05.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, there are no terms that everyone agrees with. The thing you are talking about is phonemes, but where there are no minimal pairs that utterly prove phonemic status. Two sounds are &quot;phonemes&quot; if their distribution is not rule-governed. If we get rid of the few minimal pairs, the two fricatives still contrast. Some people might maintain that you need minimal pairs to utterly prove contrast, but lack of MPs has never been sufficient to prove contrast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no standard term for contrast without minimal pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:16:05.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31738" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:41:36.793" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick note, there are two minimal pairs for &lt;code&gt;[θ]&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; in English: &lt;em&gt;ether&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;thigh&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;thy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if there aren't minimal pairs, a distinction can be phonemic &lt;strong&gt;if it is unpredictable&lt;/strong&gt;. The distribution of &lt;code&gt;[ŋ]&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;[ŋg]&lt;/code&gt; can be predicted quite reliably:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ŋ]&lt;/code&gt; is used at the end of a morpheme (sing, sing-er)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[ŋg]&lt;/code&gt; is used in the middle of a morpheme (finger, anger)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the distribution of &lt;code&gt;[θ]&lt;/code&gt; versus &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; can't be. The best you can do is list all of the words with &lt;code&gt;[ð]&lt;/code&gt; in them, and say &quot;everything else has &lt;code&gt;[θ]&lt;/code&gt;&quot;. Which is strong evidence that the two are separate phonemes, even if the words &lt;em&gt;ether&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;thy&lt;/em&gt; drop out of the language entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Colin Fine has pointed out a few more minimal pairs: &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt; (n) ~ &lt;em&gt;mouth&lt;/em&gt; (v), &lt;em&gt;sooth&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;soothe&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;wreath&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;wreathe&lt;/em&gt;. Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T19:20:26.063" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:20:26.063" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2526" CreationDate="2019-06-13T19:36:27.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Proto-Indo-European form behind &lt;em&gt;Zeus&lt;/em&gt; is reconstructed as *&lt;em&gt;dyēw-s&lt;/em&gt;, with the oblique stem *&lt;em&gt;diw-&lt;/em&gt; used for all forms except nominative, accusative, and vocative. This sort of alternation between *&lt;em&gt;yē&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; is common in PIE: look up &quot;ablaut&quot; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Proto-Greek, the last common ancestor of the Greek dialects, this turned into something like *&lt;em&gt;dzéus&lt;/em&gt;: dentals before &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; palatalized into affricates. It's not entirely clear what the affricate sounded like, but Mycenaean (the oldest attested Greek dialect) uses the sign  for earlier *&lt;em&gt;dye&lt;/em&gt; and the sign  for earlier *&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;, so there was definitely a difference there. The oblique stem was still *&lt;em&gt;diw-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in Ancient Greek, the *&lt;em&gt;dz&lt;/em&gt; was written with the letter zeta; different dialects pronounced it differently, but the Romans just borrowed the letter zeta to represent it, and modern transcriptions do the same: &quot;Z&quot;. This is how we get the forms &lt;em&gt;Zeus, Zēn, Zeu&lt;/em&gt; alongside the oblique forms &lt;em&gt;Diós, Día&lt;/em&gt; (previously &lt;em&gt;Diwós, Díwa&lt;/em&gt; before most dialects lost &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Latin &lt;em&gt;Juppiter&lt;/em&gt; comes from a vocative form combined with the word for &quot;father&quot;; compare the Christian formula &quot;Heavenly Father&quot;. The PIE vocative form is reconstructed as *&lt;em&gt;dyew&lt;/em&gt;, which became Proto-Italic *&lt;em&gt;djou&lt;/em&gt; (aka *&lt;em&gt;dyow&lt;/em&gt;, different ways of writing the same thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike in Ancient Greek, the *&lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/em&gt; didn't survive as a special palatalized consonant: it simplified into &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; by Latin times. Then *&lt;em&gt;Jou-patēr&lt;/em&gt; became &lt;em&gt;Jū-piter&lt;/em&gt; by sound change, and then sometimes became &lt;em&gt;Juppiter&lt;/em&gt; due to something called the &quot;littera rule&quot;; the two forms were in free variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oblique forms on *&lt;em&gt;diw-&lt;/em&gt; also survived into Latin, creating the noun *&lt;em&gt;djow-&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;Jov-is&lt;/em&gt; (where Classical Latin &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; represents &lt;code&gt;/w/&lt;/code&gt;). This had normal third-declension (consonant-stem) forms: &lt;em&gt;Jov-is&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jov-ī&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jov-em&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. Through suppletion, the special form &lt;em&gt;Juppiter&lt;/em&gt; with &quot;father&quot; glommed on took over the nominative and vocative, while the regular &lt;em&gt;Jov-&lt;/em&gt; was used for all other cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;accusative&lt;/em&gt; form of the root, *&lt;em&gt;dyēm&lt;/em&gt; (cf AGrk &lt;em&gt;Zēn&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; survived in Latin, in the form *&lt;em&gt;diēm&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;diem&lt;/em&gt;. Uniquely, the &lt;em&gt;dy&lt;/em&gt; here didn't become *&lt;em&gt;dj&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt;; some scholars suggest that it evolved in a different Italic language/dialect, which didn't have the palatalization rules, then got borrowed back into Latin. When it did come back to Latin, though, it was with a new meaning of &quot;day&quot; (instead of &quot;sky/sky god&quot;), and it was extrapolated into a whole paradigm on the stem &lt;em&gt;di-&lt;/em&gt;, and forced into the fifth declension where it didn't really fit (&lt;em&gt;di-ēs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;di-ēī&lt;/em&gt;, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T19:48:19.863" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:48:19.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31614" CreationDate="2019-06-14T13:27:43.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very fascinating question, which, to my knowledge, has never received an exhaustive answer. I can share some ideas on this concern, not the definitive solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general problem is that Fregean philosophic system and (post-)Saussurean Linguistics speak about two different topics. Moreover, these two sciences have different objects of analysis. What Frege had in mind was not the ordinary language — despite the fact that he made some examples from it — but, rather, the ideal language of science. The ideal language has the following properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both referents (numbers, sets, truth values) and senses (mathematical and logical expressions) are &lt;strong&gt;abstract&lt;/strong&gt;, in nature;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is &lt;strong&gt;no ambiguity or subjectivity&lt;/strong&gt; (Frege explicitly states his lack of interest in the individual &lt;em&gt;Vorstellungen&lt;/em&gt; 'mental representations'); all the reference links between singular terms and entities are always &lt;strong&gt;determinate&lt;/strong&gt; (if not even &lt;strong&gt;rigid&lt;/strong&gt; in Kripke's sense): e.g. the referent of the description &quot;the positive square root of 9&quot; will be necessarily &quot;3&quot;, always, doubtlessly and indisputably (i.e. in all possible worlds);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ideal language is not a system of communication; in a certain way, logic and mathematics &lt;strong&gt;consists of&lt;/strong&gt; the language that they are described in, but they do not &lt;strong&gt;communicate&lt;/strong&gt; it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many post-Fregean philosophers of language attempted to apply this approach to the ordinary language of the everyday communication, but these efforts have a major limit in the fact that the ordinary language is on the opposite of the ideal language for many reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linguistic expressions are still general and abstract, but referents are of a totally different nature, surely not abstract; thus, the word &lt;em&gt;apple&lt;/em&gt; can refer to a well defined apple that I am pointing to at a certain moment, and that is totally different — in color, shape and taste — from all the other apples existing on earth;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ordinary communication through natural language is necessarily &lt;strong&gt;subjective&lt;/strong&gt;: when we want to refer to the things around us, the most effective means is to link them to our own person; thus, &lt;em&gt;my bag&lt;/em&gt; is far more determinate and evident to my hearers than simply &lt;em&gt;bag&lt;/em&gt;; this also means that the content that I have in mind while using words, e.g. &quot;beautiful&quot;, &quot;happiness&quot; or &quot;crime&quot;, is totally individual and can differ from someone else's understanding;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;natural language has the &lt;strong&gt;communication&lt;/strong&gt; as its main aim (contra Chomsky); the grammar of a sentence is as it is mainly in order to facilitate the understanding; e.g. the topic comes first — because the hearers are supposed to know it already — while the comment comes last.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, Fregean ideal languages lives in the &quot;third realm&quot; of the objective knowledge, where the reference link is determinate, while the ordinary language lives in the &quot;first realm&quot; of subjectivity.  Therefore, Frege's notions of sense and denotation are hardly applicable to the words and expressions of the ordinary languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that Frege made such examples as the Venus as morning/evening star paradox, but what he was doing, at that moment, was an attempt to ground the arithmetics on logic. Therefore, both senses and referents are mathematical abstractions. The phenomenon of reference, here, is a &quot;function&quot; from third realm to third realm. On the contrary, in the real life, the reference goes from first realm (subjectivity) to second realm (physical objects), or sometimes to third realm (when we speak about abstractions). As a consequence, the ideal language judgements are &lt;strong&gt;proved theorems&lt;/strong&gt;, while ordinary language sentences are, in the best cases, only &lt;strong&gt;conjectures&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, the ideal reference is a mathematical fact, while the ordinary reference is a matter of practical agreement. E.g., we do not know really how to define such notion as &quot;happiness&quot; or even &quot;horse&quot; or &quot;table&quot;, but then, in an individual conversation, we try to reach an agreement with our discussants on how to indent these words in the present circumstances (but such an understanding is not established forever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some post-Fregean philosophers (first of all, the late Wittgenstein) have faced the indeterminacy of the ordinary language without even knowing that Saussure's idea of arbitrariness had addressed it long before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wittgenstein imagines the following paradox. The speaker A asks the speaker B what is sum of 5 and 8. They both agree that is is 13. Can be the speaker A certain that s/he will agree with B on every other sum? The answer seems to be negative. The private languages cannot be shared interpersonally, by definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saussure was aware of this arbitrariness, and even quite unhappy because of it. But it was the Danish linguist Hjelmslev, Saussure's ideal follower, who described the ultimate consequences of the arbitrariness. Not only are words arbitrary per se (the phonological form is arbitrary with respect to the semantic content); not only the semantic boundaries among words are not universal, not given in advance, but, on the contrary, arbitrary established for each individual language; but, also the link between words and objects (i.e. referents) is arbitrary. In theory, I could use whatever word for referring whatever thing. In practice, it happens fairly often that someone uses an unexpected linguistic expression in order to refer to some real object that is not usually called that way. Still, the communication works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I think that only with these premises one can seriously consider the influence and the relevance of Frege's approach to language in contemporary linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;REFERENCES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frege's idea of an independent realm of objective ideas (see 1918a &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/catalog.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) has been stolen by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Popper who popularized is as the &quot;third world&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Private_Language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; on Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hjelmslev's theory of arbitrariness is surveyed in his &lt;em&gt;Prolegomena to a Theory of Language&lt;/em&gt;, cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.signosemio.com/hjelmslev/index-en.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T13:27:43.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-15T13:21:16.093" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do compositional semantics without possible worlds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially in the case of semantics of fictional objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to think of fictional objects as 'grammatical object' so they don't demand a referent the way objects tend to do.&#xA;So I guess, one would have to do semantics without referents. what kind of extensions would one take in this case? Or better yet, how can this problem be solved without resorting to extensions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24813" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T13:21:16.093" Title="Compositional semantics without possible" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34507" CreationDate="2019-06-15T22:32:27.577" Score="0" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;amp;search=unless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unless (conj.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mid-15c., earlier &lt;em&gt;onlesse&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;(not) on lesse (than)&lt;/em&gt; &quot;(not) on a less compelling condition (than);&quot; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=less&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;less&lt;/a&gt;. The first syllable originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=on&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on&lt;/a&gt;, but the negative connotation and the lack of stress changed it to &lt;em&gt;un-&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0_moins_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;à moins que&lt;/a&gt; = sauf si.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spanish, Portuguese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_menos_que&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a menos que&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Italian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_meno_che&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a meno che&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above substantiates the same semantic shift to mean &quot;if not&quot; in at least 4 languages,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;from  the  prepositional phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sp, Pt, It &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, Fr &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt;, En *un ← &quot;on&quot; (preposition) +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (adverb) +&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;than&lt;/em&gt; (comparative preposition)   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does 'un ← on' in 'unless' mean the same as &lt;em&gt;à&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in 2 and 3?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-12-10T07:16:28.013" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T08:02:35.330" Title="Does 'on' mean the same as 'a' or 'à'?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19047" CreationDate="2019-06-16T04:17:04.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Dravidian is reconstructed with three coronal stops - laminal dental, apical alveolar and retroflex. This alveolar stop phoneme is one of the most unstable in the family. Old Tamil did preserve all three of the coronal consonants, but most dialects of Modern Indian Tamil have lost the alveolar stop, having merged it with the alveolar tap when it appears singularly, and with the dental stop when it occurs geminated. However, certain Indian dialects of Tamil, Sri Lankan Tamil, and Malayalam retain the alveolar stop in post-nasal and geminated position. Further several Dravidian languages of the tribes living in the Nilgiri hills of southern India (Toda, Kota, and Irula included among them) do retain the three-fold coronal consonant contrast that they've inherited from Proto-Dravidian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24817" LastEditorUserId="24820" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T07:28:58.390" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T07:28:58.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6335" CreationDate="2019-06-16T04:21:45.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you are hearing is the retroflex lateral approximant being flapped. There are four retroflex consonants in Modern Standard Tamil - three of them (retro stop, retro nasal and retro lateral approx) are flapped when they occur intervocalically (between vowels). So the /ɭ/ between vowels becomes a retroflex lateral flap. I believe you're confusing this flapped realisation of the phoneme as a click.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24817" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T04:21:45.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31756" CreationDate="2019-06-16T08:07:04.357" Score="1" ViewCount="1347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a document that clearly explains how to apply Hebrew vowels (and what all the combining characters are for Hebrew vowels), but I haven't been able to find anything after a few hours of searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best I was able to find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_Two/Vowel_List/vowel_list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O8cfT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O8cfT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's still unclear to me how to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two parts to my question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What all the symbols are related to vowels. Related to this is if all vowel symbols are &quot;combining characters&quot;, or if some of them are full on standalone characters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What the rules are for applying the symbols to consonants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (2) I am wondering if simply you can apply any vowel symbol to any consonant symbol. So any of the vowel combining characters (from the unknown complete set of vowel combining characters) can be combined with any of the consonants (clearly laid out on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (1), my complete list is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a   ä   חַ  ַ   Patakh&#xA;a   ä   חָ  ָ   Kamatz&#xA;a   ä   חֲ  ֲ   Reduced Patakh&#xA;e   e̞  חֵ  ֵ   Tzeire&#xA;e   e̞  חֱ  ֱ   Reduced Segol&#xA;e   e̞  חֶ  ֶ   Segol&#xA;i   i   חִ  ִ   Hiriq&#xA;o   o̞  חֹ  ֹ   Holam&#xA;o   o̞  חֳ  ֳ   Reduced Kamatz&#xA;u   u   חּ  ּ   Shuruk&#xA;'   -   חְ  ְ   Sh'va&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third column is an example consonant it is applied to, and the fourth column is the combining character by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I get confused is stuff like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holam Haser and Holam Male defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_diacritics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; both have the same unicode character, but the image of each is different. I don't understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am wondering if my table above is &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt;, or if there are any other vowels I am missing. And then if my assumption that you can apply the vowels to &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; consonant is correct, or if not, which ones each can be applied to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24818" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T20:33:43.250" Title="How Hebrew Vowels Work" Tags="&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;&lt;diacritics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-06-17T19:32:07.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31755" CreationDate="2019-06-16T11:21:57.403" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is helpful to understand some of the history behind this mixed system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, Hebrew was never written with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;niqudot&lt;/a&gt; (diacritics added above, below, or within consonantal signs; singular niqud). Although there is a high theoretical ambiguity in such a writing system (e.g. שמר for &lt;em&gt;šāmar&lt;/em&gt; 'he guarded', &lt;em&gt;šəmor&lt;/em&gt; 'guard!', &lt;em&gt;šomēr&lt;/em&gt; '(a) guard') this works quite fine in practice, because when a form is ambiguous usually context helps to clarify which vocalization is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, at some point, scribes decided to add niqud to disambiguate the texts and preserve the 'correct' vocalization for future generations. There were various vocalization systems. The most well-known, which is also used in the Codex Leningradensis (the most-used manuscript of the Hebrew Bible), is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_vocalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiberian vocalization system&lt;/a&gt; which you are using. This system indeed uses patakh (/a/), segol (/e/), tsere (/ē/), hireq (/i/), qamets (/ā/), holem (/o/), qibuts (/u/) and shureq (/u/) as vowel signs. The schwa sign indicates an ultrashort /ă/ or is voiceless in syllable-final positions; it can be combined with patakh, segol and qamets to shoten their respective sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system also has some diacritics which do not indicate vowels: the dagesh sign (a dot in the center) marks gemination of consonants, and /š/ and /ś/, both written with ש, are distinguished by dots above them: שׁ vs. שׂ, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interwoven with this is the system of vowel letters, where aleph, he, waw, and yod are used to indicate vowels. Hence we may find שמור for &lt;em&gt;šəmor&lt;/em&gt; but not for &lt;em&gt;šāmar&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;šomēr&lt;/em&gt;. Unlike the Tiberian system, which was clearly invented, vowel letters have a more natural origin, namely a stress movement around 1000BCE where stress moved to the penultimate syllable. This caused the loss word-final short vowels. The written פנמו &lt;em&gt;Panammuwa&lt;/em&gt; then becomes &lt;em&gt;Panammuw&lt;/em&gt; &gt; &lt;em&gt;Panammū&lt;/em&gt;. Because of this the waw can be understood to represent the /ū/ vowel. Vowel letters gradually gained traction throughout the first millennium BCE, and you can also see this in the Hebrew Bible (a well-known example is the spelling of &lt;em&gt;David&lt;/em&gt;, usually דוד in older texts but דויד in later texts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two systems are separate but not unrelated; hence e.g. yod cannot serve as a vowel letter for /ā/ but for /ē/, because original /āy/ would have contracted to /ē/. When the two systems are combined, the system is actually redundant, since there is no difference in pronunciation between דָוִד and דָוִיד. You only need to make sure to remember that the four vowel letters should not be pronounced as a consonant when used as a vowel letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The waw is special in that it combines with the dagesh to denote /u/, and that when a holem is placed above it this does not indicate /wo/ but simply /o/ (the holem really is the holem of the previous letter). Holem male is simply a waw with a holem diacritic, this is why the same unicode point can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T20:33:43.250" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T20:33:43.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-16T14:38:08.407" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm starting a project that examines the phonetics of palatal approximant fortition (with a variety of outcomes) in several dialects of Spanish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a great deal of existing Spanish linguistics literature on this, but I'd like to branch out and see what's going on cross-linguistically, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any recommendations of phonologists/phoneticians doing work like this and/or possible references?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24821" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T19:52:26.107" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T19:52:26.107" Title="Source on approximant fortition" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31757" CreationDate="2019-06-17T01:22:13.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The feature theory of palatalization in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_Pattern_of_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/a&gt; is meant to cover historical developments in Slavic.  Another reference that occurs to me is a paper by Bhat on palatalization from a Stanford project on universals of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own observation is that the articulations of English syllable onset and syllable offset jod are quite different, the first being a palato-alveolar rather than a palatal.  As in &quot;yam&quot; vs. &quot;pay&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T01:22:13.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31763" CreationDate="2019-06-17T04:30:58.027" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to put together a worksheet to understand how the Thai script works. I am looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/writing/thai.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; page seems to suggest that there are two types of symbols: combining characters and standalone characters, whereas omniglot says every vowel is a combining character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if one could explain briefly how to apply the vowel symbols, and what all the vowel symbols are in practice. My question is basically, if they are all combining characters, and if every vowel symbol can combine with every consonant. Also, it sounds like it might be more complex than that, where a combining character combines with a whole &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt; of consonants, not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially though, I would like to know this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What all the vowel characters are (and if they are both standalone and combining).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the combining ones, if they can be combined with every consonant, or generally what the rules are for combining them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24818" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T14:12:40.500" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T17:38:05.810" Title="How Thai Vowels Work" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26729" CreationDate="2019-06-17T05:41:32.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't say it's pseudoscience, no. I have great confidence that it's &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, but wrong science is still science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Indo-Austronesian Hypothesis is exactly what it says on the tin: a hypothesis. The author has proposed the idea that the Indo-European and Austronesian languages are related, which isn't inherently absurd: weirder connections have happened before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the author's gone through and compiled a parallel word list of maybe-cognates, and come up with a set of regular sound changes that would connect them. This is definitely the right next step for someone who wants to show that language families are related: it's the basis of the Comparative Method, basically the gold standard in linguistic reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then…that's where the author leaves off. They do some sketchy probability calculations but don't claim those calculations are undeniable proof or anything. And math mistakes don't inherently make something pseudoscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say that it's perfectly valid science—it's just not finished (and has some math mistakes). It's a hypothesis without enough evidence behind it to make it a theory. To become an actual theory, it would have to be developed further, with more cognates found, grammatical comparisons, and so on. And the author admits that on the first page: &quot;Maybe some expert will read this and pursue my ideas.&quot; So far, as far as I know, no expert has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; It's a perfectly valid (scientific, falsifiable) hypothesis, with a small amount of evidence behind it. It's just not complete. I also believe that it's downright wrong, given my own experience with Indo-European and Austronesian languages, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that if the author comes up with a stronger argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T05:41:32.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31760" CreationDate="2019-06-17T14:11:33.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that this question comes from misunderstanding between the &lt;em&gt;orthography&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;typography&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;strong&gt;typography&lt;/strong&gt; point of view, you don't care how characters &quot;encode&quot; sounds. Your only concern is symbols and glyphs and how they combine &lt;strong&gt;on print&lt;/strong&gt;. These characters can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;standalone&lt;/em&gt; characters — that take horizontal space, like the Latin &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;zero-width combination&lt;/em&gt; characters, like Extended Latin &lt;code&gt;̈&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;COMBINING DIAERESIS&quot; U+0308) which combines with the preceding character, forming a combined character &lt;code&gt;Ä&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;strong&gt;orthography&lt;/strong&gt; point, in complex scripts like Thai, you always look at the entire syllable, so one may argue that &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; vowel character is a combination character that &quot;stick&quot; around the consonant, just like the Umlaut &quot;sticks&quot; to the &quot;A&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Thai vowels can stay on the left, right, top, or bottom of the consonant.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Consider these examples¹:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + ◌า = กา &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /aa/ = /kaa/&lt;/code&gt; (²)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + เ◌ = เก &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /ee/ = /kee/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + แ◌ = แก &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /aee/ = /kaee/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + ◌ิ = กิ  &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /i/ = /ki/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + เ◌า = เกา  &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /au/ = /kau/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…a combining character combines with a whole &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt; of consonants…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct. Many vowels (including diphthongs and triphthongs) are combinations of several &quot;simpler&quot; ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note example #5. From the &lt;strong&gt;typography&lt;/strong&gt; view, there are &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; combination characters: &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;aa&lt;/code&gt; (you may have noticed them in previous examples ##1 and 2). However, from the &lt;strong&gt;orthography&lt;/strong&gt; point, being used together, these two characters denote &lt;strong&gt;a single&lt;/strong&gt; vowel (diphthong) &lt;code&gt;au&lt;/code&gt; and never &lt;code&gt;ee&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;aa&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ก + เ◌ีย = เกีย  &lt;code&gt;/k/ + /ia/ = /kiia/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here again, typographically three combination characters (which alone stand for &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/ii/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt;, correspondingly) denote a diphthong &lt;code&gt;/iia/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹) the dotted circle represents a placeholder which is substituted with a single consonant character.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;²) double vowel in a transliteration stands for a long vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T17:38:05.810" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T17:38:05.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31757" CreationDate="2019-06-17T14:45:50.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vulgar Latin to modern Romance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very likely well known to you. The emergence of the phoneme /ʒ/ written &quot;j&quot;, from /j/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical Latin &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt; /ˈe.ɡo/, probably elided the middle /g/ to form Vulgar Latin &lt;em&gt;*eo&lt;/em&gt;, which must have been pronouced something like /jo/, yielding modern Sardinian &lt;em&gt;eo&lt;/em&gt; /ˈɛo/, Spanish &lt;em&gt;yo&lt;/em&gt; /jo/, Italian &lt;em&gt;io&lt;/em&gt; /ˈi.o/, but Central Catalan and some instances of Old French &lt;em&gt;jo&lt;/em&gt; /ʒɔ/, modern French &lt;em&gt;je&lt;/em&gt; /ʒə/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect is much stronger with the /j/ at the beginning of Latin words. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iocus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;iocus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which underwent fortition in most varieties of Romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Middle Chinese loans in (Northern) Vietnamese&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/13182/how-was-the-j-initial-in-middle-chinese-borrowed-into-vietnamese/23195&quot;&gt;this StackExchange answer&lt;/a&gt; about certain Middle Chinese lexemes in /j/ (preserved in modern Mandarin and Cantonese), which surface as voiced fricatives /z/ in northern Vietnamese, written as &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; (not to be confused with &lt;em&gt;đ&lt;/em&gt;) in modern Vietnamese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Holtzmann's Law / Verschärfung in Proto-Germanic to Old Norse &amp;amp; Gothic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Proto-Germanic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/Frijj%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Frijjō&lt;/a&gt; resulting in Old Norse &lt;em&gt;Frigg&lt;/em&gt;, with a /g/ that is retained in modern Scandinavian varieties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Index Diachronica&lt;/a&gt; has a list of phonemic changes. For a lot of them I haven't been able to access the original source, but the list is quite long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:24:33.390" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T15:24:33.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31768" CreationDate="2019-06-17T14:49:14.657" Score="1" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding exercise 1, chapter 4, &lt;em&gt;Introductory Phonology&lt;/em&gt; by Bruce Hayes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have the features &lt;strong&gt;high&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;low&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;round&lt;/strong&gt;. We are given the table below, representing the vowels of a hypothetical language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vowels:           Front                       Back&#xA;        Unrounded     Rounded         Unrounded    Rounded&#xA;high        i           y                ɯ            u&#xA;mid         e           ø                ˠ            o&#xA;low         æ           Œ                ɑ            ɒ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is about this question:&#xA;Find as many natural classes as you can that have five members. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For natural classes that have four members, for example, I could think of the class [+high] or [+low]. But how about a five-member class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20961" LastEditorUserId="20961" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T07:15:29.773" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T07:15:29.773" Title="Finding Natural Classes" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31766" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:08:43.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't find natural classes unless you have a theory of them. Usually the theory is based on a set of features and a theory of expressions. For example, [+hi,-rd] is a possible expression referring to two vowels in your set. With the labels you have, there is no way to refer to non-low ([-lo]) if these are privative features, or unless you have disjunctive expressions available for defining classes. So first you have to know what the features are, do they have plus and minus values, and can you tack together classes with braces (&quot;or&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I advise against interpreting the instructions as meaning &quot;at least&quot;, without instructor approval. When we say &quot;3&quot; we mean &quot;3, no more and no less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:08:43.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31766" CreationDate="2019-06-17T17:54:39.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now when I have found the book and read the complete task of the exercise, I would say the answer is &quot;&lt;em&gt;In that hypothetical language, there are no natural classes that have five members&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at all the tasks of the exercise, not only at the one (&lt;strong&gt;d.&lt;/strong&gt;) you quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a. Find as many natural classes as you can&#xA;that have FOUR members.&#xA;List them, and define the natural class using features.&#xA;&#xA;b. Find as many natural classes as you can&#xA;that have SIX members.&#xA;List them, and define the natural class using features.&#xA;&#xA;c. Find as many natural classes as you can&#xA;that have EIGHT members.&#xA;List them, and define the natural class using features.&#xA;&#xA;d. Find as many natural classes as you can&#xA;that have FIVE members.&#xA;&#xA;e. Explain why [y, e] is not a natural class.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not too difficult to answer questions &lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;c.&lt;/strong&gt;, since natural classes with 4, 6, and 8 members respectfully are easy to find in the given chart, unlike classes with 5 members in our question &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;. Also note that questions &lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;c.&lt;/strong&gt; have the task &quot;&lt;em&gt;List them, and define the natural class using features&lt;/em&gt;&quot; which is not found in question &lt;strong&gt;d.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of question &lt;strong&gt;d.&lt;/strong&gt; and the difference of its structure suggest the negative answer to &lt;strong&gt;d.&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;In that hypothetical language, there are no natural classes that have five members&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T17:54:39.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T09:09:17.373" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to use the Montreal Force Aligner in order to try and train a model for a language I've been working with for alignment of future data. However, I keep throwing a ton of errors, and after messing with the source code I realize that it doesn't even pass its own tests, so I'm hesitant to keep trying to use it. Does anyone know another trainer for some force aligner model?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I want to find a trainer and aligner that can do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trainer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Input: Audio files (preferably wav) and phonetically transcribed TextGrids&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Output: Some representation of model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aligner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Input: Precomputed Model, audio files (preferably wav), and word or sentence-level transcribed TextGrids (transcribed phonetically but no boundaries yet between phones, just between words or sentences)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Output: TextGrids with boundaries marking the phone boundaries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone knows a good way of approaching this without starting from the ground up, that would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22171" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T09:09:17.373" Title="Force Aligner Trainers" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3181" CreationDate="2019-06-18T22:49:40.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Glib answer: nothing, since those letters were removed from the Montenegrin alphabet in 2017; they've been replaced with &lt;em&gt;sj&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;zj&lt;/em&gt;, same as in Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual answer: phonemically, they represent &lt;code&gt;/sj zj/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ɕ ʑ/&lt;/code&gt;, depending on your analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most native speakers of Serbo-Croatian pronounce these phonemes (or clusters) as something like &lt;code&gt;[ɕj ʑj]&lt;/code&gt;: that is, the &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; is clearly heard. And the sequences &lt;code&gt;[sj zj]&lt;/code&gt; don't appear. So the standard orthography writes these sounds as &lt;em&gt;sj zj&lt;/em&gt;, taking the palatalization as allophonic before the palatal &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Montenegro, though, these phonemes/clusters are realized more like &lt;code&gt;[ɕ ʑ]&lt;/code&gt;, with the off-glide disappearing. So analyzing them as phonemic, and using the special letters &lt;em&gt;ś ź&lt;/em&gt;, is  way of distinguishing the Montenegrin identity from wider Serbo-Croatian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters never really caught on, though, nor did their companion &lt;em&gt;з&lt;/em&gt; (for &lt;code&gt;[dz]&lt;/code&gt;). And their Cyrillic equivalents have no precombined codepoints in Unicode, which makes them difficult to use electronically. On top of that, it's been pointed out that many people in Montenegro still pronounce the off-glide, while people in e.g. Herzogovina don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the government eventually made the decision to drop their custom letters entirely, and stick with the more traditional &lt;em&gt;sj zj&lt;/em&gt; for all official purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T22:49:40.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T05:41:01.327" Score="-1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the original meaning of &lt;code&gt;krap&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;ka&lt;/code&gt; politeness particles and what are their equivalents in Indo-European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24324" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T08:52:27.103" Title="Politeness particles `krap`/`ka`" Tags="&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-06-19T13:12:02.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31772" CreationDate="2019-06-19T08:52:27.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://th.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%9A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Thai wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; ขอรับ &lt;em&gt;kráp&lt;/em&gt; is a shortening of ขอรับ &lt;em&gt;kɔ̌ɔ-ráp&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ask to serve&quot; = &quot;may I serve you?&quot;.  &lt;em&gt;Ká&lt;/em&gt;, however, is uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a single equivalent to these politeness markers in IE languages, where politeness and gender are marked by different mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T08:52:27.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T16:09:50.663" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m teaching a seminar crash course in linguistics to first year undergrads next term.  It’s just 3 one hour lectures, and should be fun and engaging. I want it to be hands-on, and give students a chance to become familiar with some techniques, even if they lack the theoretical background still. These are diverse students, not just would-be linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, what are some instructional preferably group) activities we could do with Praat which would give students some insight into the complexity and intrigue related to Phonetics/Phonology ? I’m looking for activities we can start in class together but the students can complete as homework for the next lecture ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your creative ideas and experiences are appreciated! I’ve never taught a course of total novices before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T04:52:24.240" Title="Interactive class exercises with Praat" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T17:11:31.270" Score="4" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide a good formal definition of the notion of &lt;em&gt;grammatical category&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am primarily referring to morphological categories, such as case, tense, gender etc., rather than to syntactical categories (subject, direct/indirect object), or phrasal categories (NPs, VPs, etc.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another formulation of this question would be: what is grammatical, in a language? (as opposed to lexical, semantic, or the like). How can we define &lt;em&gt;grammaticality&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries are useless. The 10 thousand pages &quot;Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Language_and_Linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brown 2015&lt;/a&gt;) contains separate entries for such fundamental notions as &quot;French Southern Antarctic Lands: language situation&quot;, it differentiates the entry for &quot;Frisian lexicography&quot; from the one for &quot;Frisian etymology&quot;; yet, it has &lt;strong&gt;no entry&lt;/strong&gt; for &quot;Grammatical category&quot;. Which is absurd, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14934" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T06:05:32.827" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T06:05:32.827" Title="Grammatical category definition" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammatical-category&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31689" CreationDate="2019-06-20T00:54:08.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be impossible to sum up the research on your questions with several articles since you're questions are the central questions of an entire field of study that has been developing for over 100 years. What I can suggest, instead, is a rather good textbook:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bell, A. (2013). The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics. Chichester, UK: Wiley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15062" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T00:54:08.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31775" CreationDate="2019-06-20T03:08:30.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;grammatical category&lt;/em&gt; of a language is a non-terminal symbol of a context free grammar of the language. A &lt;em&gt;morphological category&lt;/em&gt; is a non-terminal which appears on the left of a phrase structure rule of the grammar which does not have any non-terminals on its right hand side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T03:08:30.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31775" CreationDate="2019-06-20T05:56:40.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The various linguistic frameworks all talk about this in different ways, but I think the essence of the question comes down to the observation that in all languages there's a difference between what are commonly called &quot;function words&quot; and &quot;content words&quot; (though they may be affixes, clitics, etc instead of full words.) In any language there will be a set of things you say which have regular, non-figurative, and largely unambiguous meanings, and there will be another larger set of things you say with widespread polysemy and which are more freely used in creative extensions of meaning, and which are easily and frequently coined or borrowed from other languaged. Furthermore, the content words are often analysable as being based off of function words. For example, all verbs can be defined as subkinds of the archetypal verbs BE, DO, and HAPPEN, and all nouns are subkinds of THING. Many linguistic frameworks would analyse every lexical item as either a functional/grammatical lexeme standing by itself, or a functional/grammatical bit of meaning merged with some unique content to form a root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages have grammatical/function words, and new grammatical words can develop over time from content words, a process called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammaticalisation&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia gives a good summary of four processes of grammaticalisation: semantic bleaching, phonetic erosion, morphological reduction and obligatorification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As linguistic typology compares languages we have come to identify there are many things which humans talk about in every language. In every language you can talk about how many things there are. In every language you can talk about time. So we can talk about the semantic categories of number and temporality. Furthermore, typology has identified that many of these semantic categories are grammaticalised in lots of languages. While in theory any kind of meaning could become grammaticalised, in practice certain things are grammaticalised far more often. For example, probably every language has grammaticalised at least one of tense, aspect, mood, or evidentiality, and often more than one. So, of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/feature/65A#2/21.6/134.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;222 languages in WALS&lt;/a&gt;, 45% of them have grammaticalised the perfective/imperfective aspect, and 55% have not, in a very diverse distribution across the world's languages. Languages can grammaticalise very unusual things. In the Australian language Jingulu, every verb marks whether it has an associated motion of going, coming, or remaining in place. We could design conlangs which grammaticalised things which occur in no natural languages, such as whether or not an action is done with a sense of existential millenial dread or irrational baby-boomer optimism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But despite the possibility of very rare grammaticalised concepts, there are lots of ones which typology has shown are very common. These are what the grammatical categories are, the fruit of typology. Grammatical categories are what working linguists need to know in order to study, make sense of, and document previously undocumented languages. The table below comes from Wikipedia. Linguists familiar with all these grammatical categories will likely be able to account for 90% of grammatical morphemes in any arbitrary language from anywhere in the world. Though language description is never routine, and they're sure to find something unique enough to write a PhD about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lEViU.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wikipedia&amp;#39;s list of grammatical features.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T06:03:07.810" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T06:03:07.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30954" CreationDate="2019-06-20T10:28:14.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For posterity, I am copying the content of Mark Beadles' comment to an answer. It seems there is no consensus among etymologists as to whether there was French influence in its development:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use as an indefinite generic pronoun (sense C. 17), which replaced &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; pron.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; pron. in late Middle English, may have been influenced by Anglo-Norman &lt;em&gt;hom, on, un,&lt;/em&gt; Old French, Middle French &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; (12th cent.; mid 9th cent. in form &lt;em&gt;om&lt;/em&gt;; French &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;; ultimately &amp;lt; classical Latin &lt;em&gt;homō&lt;/em&gt;: see &lt;em&gt;homo&lt;/em&gt; n.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;), &lt;strong&gt;though this is not regarded as a necessary influence by some scholars.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, second edition (1989)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T12:25:07.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-20T22:53:05.833" Score="-2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Weird question, granted, but I was just looking around on Google Translate and I noticed that the word &quot;idiot&quot; is basically the same across quite a few languages, here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian: idiota (very similar in French, Spanish, Polish, Romanian...);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian: идиот (idiot; same for Czech, Serbian, Albanian, Danish...);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afrikaans: idioot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the first ones I found. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24841" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T18:08:34.423" Title="Why is the word &quot;idiot&quot; so similar between multiple languages?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31782" CreationDate="2019-06-20T23:11:43.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're all ‘borrowed’ from Greek. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13200" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T23:11:43.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31774" CreationDate="2019-06-21T04:52:24.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about this:&#xA;1. In class, ask them to record themselves, and segment all phonemes, so you can teach them how to do that.&#xA;2. As homework, they can record someone else or themselves, then they can come back with a few spectrograms of some sounds, and then ask other students to guess what the sounds are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After these two activities, they will know how to record in Praat, how to make a TextGrid, how to segment, what the spectrogram/waveform represent. Of course, you can add other features in to make it even richer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13438" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T04:52:24.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31782" CreationDate="2019-06-21T10:54:55.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When searching for the etymology &quot;idiot&quot; I get: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For French:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For English:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;from Latin idiota, from Ancient Greek ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs, “a private&#xA;  citizen, one who has no professional knowledge, layman”), from ἴδιος&#xA;  (ídios, “one's own, pertaining to oneself, private”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it comes from Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it was both in Latin and Greek may have help the term to be used on the west and east sides of Europe. Just a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T10:54:55.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31789" CreationDate="2019-06-21T12:42:48.247" Score="2" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of years ago, I was working with some friends on conlanging for a fictional society. At the time, we didn&amp;rsquo;t know about IPA or formalized sound descriptions like &amp;ldquo;voiceless bilabial plosive&amp;rdquo;, so we just described our sounds in terms of sounds that we were familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such sound was written &amp;lsquo;R&amp;rsquo;, and described as &amp;ldquo;the sound of &amp;lsquo;r&amp;rsquo; in certain British dialects, where &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; sounds like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;veddy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;rdquo;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one describe that sound formally, and what is the IPA symbol for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21746" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T16:56:15.150" Title="IPA Sound used for grapheme 'R' in some English dialects?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31788" CreationDate="2019-06-21T12:55:04.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_/r/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation of English /r/&lt;/a&gt; is notoriously variable. &quot;Certain British dialects&quot; doesn't narrow it down much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the description, this &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_and_alveolar_flaps#Alveolar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar tap&lt;/a&gt; [ɾ]&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the same sound used in some American dialects for the 'tt' in &quot;butter&quot; or the 'd'  in &quot;header&quot; (or alternatively, the Spanish 'r' as pronounced between two vowels). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description also might mean an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveolar_trills#Alveolar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alveolar trill&lt;/a&gt; [r]&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a &quot;rolled&quot; or &quot;trilled&quot; r sound like is found in Spanish for 'r' at the beginning of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T16:56:15.150" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T16:56:15.150" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-21T14:30:01.987" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really can't understand why this verb changes to &quot;am&quot;, &quot;is&quot;, etc. The common answer is &quot;just became as historical legacy&quot;, but how actually it happend? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24844" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:22:33.540" Title="Why a verb &quot;to be&quot; has a lot forms" Tags="&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-06-25T13:27:06.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31790" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:22:33.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basic intuition here is that the most common verbs are on average the most irregular.  It is very hard for people to remember irregular forms of uncommon verbs, we tend to regularise them over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; is the most common verb of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:22:33.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31802" CreationDate="2019-06-22T21:34:02.747" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in Spanish.StackExchange there was a question about the use of the word &lt;em&gt;plata&lt;/em&gt; (literally &quot;silver&quot;) in American dialects of Spanish instead of the proper word, &lt;em&gt;dinero&lt;/em&gt;. European Spanish also avoids &lt;em&gt;dinero&lt;/em&gt;, preferring the term &lt;em&gt;pasta&lt;/em&gt; (lit. &quot;paste&quot;). There are a lot of other, more localized terms like those. Nobody uses &lt;em&gt;dinero&lt;/em&gt; except in formal contexts. I was intrigued by this because it looked like some widespread phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a tendency in Spanish, and even more so in English, to name certain banknotes and multiples of currency units with special terms, but this is not it. There's also a taboo, in certain cultures, against speaking of money, but that doesn't mean money cannot be mentioned, only that asking someone about their income, for example, is viewed as impolite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there &lt;strong&gt;a recognized tendency to name money after other things&lt;/strong&gt; (such as precious metals) to the point of almost replacing, in most conversations, the proper term for &quot;money&quot;? Has it been studied cross-linguistically? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14883" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T13:48:16.150" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T15:57:42.593" Title="Is there a tendency to name money after other things?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-23T19:24:00.287" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposedly being a high-context culture, do modern Japanese text genres also sport a higher prevalence of ellipsis? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Japanese texts, by and large, sport more &lt;em&gt;kinds&lt;/em&gt; of high-context manifestations in the grammar they represent, or a higher prevalence of high-context, at the sentence or word level, than what many other languages do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2547" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T19:24:00.287" Title="Does high-context manifest in Japanese grammar and syntax?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;&lt;multilingualism&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;&lt;ellipsis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="29367" CreationDate="2019-06-23T21:05:02.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it may be not a definitive answer for your question, but I hope it will clarify and explain a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, until the XV century, &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; (from latin &lt;em&gt;TV&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;vós&lt;/em&gt; (from latin &lt;em&gt;VOS&lt;/em&gt;) were regularly used as second person singular and second person plural respectively and conjugated as such. I'm going to be using &quot;thou&quot; and &quot;you&quot; to make it clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Tu és bela&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Thou art fair)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Vós sois belas&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (You are fair)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronoun &lt;em&gt;vós&lt;/em&gt; was also used, like in many other languages (such as Italian), as a more formal way to address people (e.g.: modern Italian &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;voi&lt;/em&gt;); this use was also inherited from Latin, which started using the form &lt;em&gt;VOS&lt;/em&gt; as a way to evoke the greatness of the emperor in the fourth century AD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Vós sois bela, minha rainha&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (You are fair, my queen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in this case the adjective is not in its plural form, for it refers to the queen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the XV century, the pronoun vós was losing its formal tone, since it was being used as a form of treatment even between people who just didn't know each other and/or had a big difference in age (like in modern French and Italian). From this need to express formality with nobility, bishops etc., came forms like &lt;em&gt;vossa majestade&lt;/em&gt; (your majesty), &lt;em&gt;vossa alteza&lt;/em&gt; (your highness) and so on. It was a way of not speaking directly with the person, and they were used with third person singular forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Vossa alteza é bela&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Your highness is fair)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word você comes from a corruption of &lt;em&gt;vossa mercê&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;your grace&quot;) — exactly like Castillian &lt;em&gt;usted&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from &lt;em&gt;vuestra merced&lt;/em&gt; ­— and was used as a formal treatment that started to overcome the form &lt;em&gt;vós&lt;/em&gt;. In the end of the XIX century, this form started to be more relevant in Brazil as interchangeable with &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt;. This lead to the emergence of &lt;em&gt;o senhor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a senhora&lt;/em&gt; as more formal alternatives. In Portugal using the definite article to address people formally is also common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;A professora é bela&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (You [referring to the teacher] is fair) (lit. The teacher is fair)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Brazilian dialects from Paraná, São Paulo, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Espirito Santo e Minas Gerais use &lt;em&gt;você&lt;/em&gt; as the standard second person singular pronoun, however some dialects in states like Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro, &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;você&lt;/em&gt; seem to be in free variation (with a little difference in use between them).&#xA;Cities like Belém and São Luís do Maranhão have strong Lusitan influence, there people conjugate second person singular and the third person conjugation has not become the standard way of addressing someone (probably a process of assimilation happened in the other dialects and that's why &lt;em&gt;tu&lt;/em&gt; is often conjugated with third person singular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Tu é bela&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Thou are fair) instead of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Tu és bela&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Thou art fair).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22198" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2020-01-23T19:08:54.953" LastActivityDate="2020-01-23T19:08:54.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-23T22:22:29.840" Score="6" ViewCount="1876" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard it said that accents of towns drift over time. I find this hard to comprehend as how could an accent of a whole town change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is established that we mainly pick up our accent from our peers at school. But this is also odd, since if we are separated by age, peers in an age group should not really interact that much from other age groups, so where do their accents come from in the first place? Perhaps, maybe this is the answer, that because in schools we are separated from older children to a large degree, the accent can drift as it has no correction from older children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this still seems unlikely to me as universal schooling is a quite recent thing, and before then we had mainly apprenticeships which children would learn from adults and presumably pick up their accents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another (to me) unlikely idea is that a town's accent (e.g. Liverpudlian) has changed due to people talking over machinery in factories or mills so it gets higher pitched. Can an accent of a town really change that quickly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I do see is that immigration affects accents a lot, for example the Jamaican accent changing the London cockney accent. Or the Geordie accent with lots of Scandinavian words also from immigration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in essence, is accent drift a real thing (has it been observed) and what is the main cause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T23:12:57.600" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T16:01:15.693" Title="How do accents of a whole town drift?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;accent&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31798" CreationDate="2019-06-24T01:24:17.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This does indeed happen! It tends to follow the same processes that make whole languages change over time. Just on a smaller scale: smaller area, smaller changes, smaller timespans. (Intuitive example: surely the first American colonists spoke &quot;British English&quot;, since what would be the alternative? And look at what that's led to now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to think of it is, language is a tool for communication, and if it's not serving its purpose, it'll evolve with ruthless efficiency until it is. For a dramatic example, look at how quickly people stopped using capital letters in text messages: they were getting in the way of fast and efficient communication, so they were pruned away. Then, within five years, they were brought back, with a new purpose: SHOUTING, Distinctly Emphatic Tone, SaRcAsTiC MoCkErY, and so on. This helped communication, so it's stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might start with a &quot;random mutation&quot;, just by chance. One man in the town pronounces his &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; a little more like &lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt;. He teaches this pronunciation to his children, who might influence their peers, until everyone pronounces that vowel &lt;em&gt;slightly&lt;/em&gt; more to the front. This starts crowding &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt;, so over time that starts to shift upward in order to remain distinct. And so on, and so on…a small initial shift like that can lead to a complete restructuring of the vowel system, given enough time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T01:24:17.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31798" CreationDate="2019-06-24T09:50:35.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every community has &quot;influencers&quot;. This isn't a social media invention. An influencer is someone who has an above average impact on their surroundings. Think of this like how Genghis Khan has more genetical ancestors today than some random farmer. While it may not always be visible, some people simply impact the world more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they're a well known and respected person and their mannerisms therefore rub off on others who copy them, subconsciously or not. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they're infamous and their mannerisms turn into a comical impersonation/stereotype, which becomes so well known that people start using things unironically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they simply raised many children (or taught them) who then go on to spread the things they've learned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to become such an influencer. Not all cases are a matter of intentionally wanting to create this influence. Some cases are just luck of the draw or random selection.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At any point, anyone could become an influencer in the future. We simply don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we've established that the spreading behavior exists but cannot always be pinned down or predicted. All that's left to consider is &lt;strong&gt;random variation&lt;/strong&gt;. Like in nature, mutations always exist. Given a large group of people, you're likely to find that some people have different linguistical ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they pronounce things differently because of a physical reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they apply a word in a novel way because to them it's similar to another thing (which the word comes from)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maybe they misunderstand the meaning/context of a saying and therefore alter it to make more sense to them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the reason, you will over time encounter people who deviate from the regionally normal language. Random selection ensures that it's possible that these people happen to end up being an influencer (possibly for completely unrelated reasons), and thus end up making a regional impact, causing a shift in linguistics for e.g. their entire town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24232" LastEditorUserId="24232" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T11:23:42.303" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:23:42.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31798" CreationDate="2019-06-24T11:37:27.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very many causes. There are many phenomena which exhibit fashion, trends, or shifts over time, and accents are one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, an individual's accent can change over time. Possibly the best example is when going through puberty, boys undergo rapid changes in their anatomy which directly changes their accent as well as indirectly requiring them to re-learn to speak. Not to mention they wish to sound more mature and distinctive, to show they will push boundaries and break rules. Of course they generally imitate each other to be part of the club.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, an individual's accent changes in different company. When addressing friends one speaks a little differently to when one is, say, addressing customers. Or parents. Or in-laws. We don't have fixed accents within a single &lt;em&gt;day&lt;/em&gt;, and this creates a degree of pliability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That pliability is limited—it is hard for someone to shift from British to American English. However, this is partly because of how incompatible they are. The way all the muscles are configured needs to make a big shift. But when a town's accent shifts, the change has much higher &quot;compatibility&quot;. Things change that are not a difficult change for most people there. (Even if some do not end up making that change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk to people we take subconscious cues about the degree of effort they are putting into understanding you and adjust our own behaviour. Subconsciously. Usually to make it easier for them, but certain people have an urge to make others uncomfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to trends and fashions. Some trends seem to morph into being, while others are catalysed by trendsetters. There is a human desire to chase &quot;the new thing&quot;. We are impressioned by our friends. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what might actually cause changes, it can be everything from wanting to sound more posh to wanting to sound more vulgar. Sometimes families with a particular accent are more successful than other families and grow in size or are simply more influential. Often it's just a kind of laziness of speech. Sometimes accent changes would lead to an inability to distinguish words (e.g. cot/caught merger). This might affect some places more than others, potentially based on their local economy, local place names—basically how often people go to the effort of making that distinction. By the same token, if accent changes have absolutely no effect on identifying words, then those changes may quite easily occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is no simple answer. Language is a sum of billions of small decisions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13585" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T11:37:27.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31793" CreationDate="2019-06-24T15:22:53.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although anecdotally the answer to the question is a confident &quot;yes&quot;, there is a big complication: the many concepts of &lt;em&gt;economic value&lt;/em&gt; that are bundled into the Western European concept of &quot;money&quot;. This of course is a question for historical economics and anthropology, more than linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://elaineou.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Grierson-The-Origins-of-Money.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/5qczk3/the_origins_of_the_word_money_in_various_european/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the origins of the words for money&lt;/a&gt;. This often relates to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The physical manifestation of the currency system, whether that's &quot;silver&quot; (as in French &lt;em&gt;argent&lt;/em&gt;, Thai เงิน &lt;em&gt;ngoen&lt;/em&gt;, Irish &lt;em&gt;airgead&lt;/em&gt;, Tibetan དངུལ &lt;em&gt;dngul&lt;/em&gt;), &quot;metal&quot; (as in Japanese &lt;em&gt;かね, kane&lt;/em&gt;), &quot;cattle&quot; (as in Classical Latin &lt;em&gt;pecunia&lt;/em&gt;, Old English &lt;em&gt;feoh&lt;/em&gt; [modern English &lt;em&gt;fee&lt;/em&gt;]) or &quot;squirrel pelts&quot; (Finnish &lt;em&gt;raha&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The location or characteristics of a specific currency (for example the temple of Juno Moneta in Rome, giving rise to English &lt;em&gt;money&lt;/em&gt;; or the one-tenth nature of the denarius, producing Spanish &lt;em&gt;dinero&lt;/em&gt;; or the &quot;solid&quot; nature of the solidus gold coin, producing Italian &lt;em&gt;soldi&lt;/em&gt;; a northern European ancestor of &quot;penny&quot;, giving rise to Swedish &lt;em&gt;pengar&lt;/em&gt; as well as Czech &lt;em&gt;peníze&lt;/em&gt;; Swahili &lt;em&gt;shilingi&lt;/em&gt; from the pre-decimal British currency and &lt;em&gt;pesa&lt;/em&gt; from the Indian currency). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verbs to do with nature of currency, including giving (whence German &lt;em&gt;Geld&lt;/em&gt;) or desiring (giving rise to Modern Greek &lt;em&gt;χρήμα, khríma&lt;/em&gt;) or taking (such as Latvian &lt;em&gt;nauda&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A generic word for &quot;thing&quot;, often leading to &quot;value&quot; and thence to &quot;money&quot; (e.g. Bengali অর্থ &lt;em&gt;ôrthô&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many origins which are still very much under debate, where we can only reconstruct ancient forms and then tentatively attach them to possible roots (e.g. Chinese 錢 [Mandarin &lt;em&gt;qián&lt;/em&gt;, Cantonese &lt;em&gt;cin4*2&lt;/em&gt;], possibly related to spades/knives or the Classical Chinese word for thin; Korean 돈 &lt;em&gt;don&lt;/em&gt;, possibly related to the verb for &quot;to turn&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the question can be rephrased slightly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the semantic field of &quot;money&quot; more susceptible to change than average?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the evident answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slang_terms_for_money&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is &quot;yes&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, because of its &lt;a href=&quot;https://repozytorium.ur.edu.pl/handle/item/2735&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ubiquity in daily life&lt;/a&gt; but also its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248968346_Meanings_of_money_national_identity_and_the_semantics_of_currency_in_Zambia_and_Tanzania&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;large power&lt;/a&gt;. Although top-down changes like the Zambia / Tanzania example are rare, the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.online-spellcheck.com/english/95-slang-words-money-meanings/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;emotionally charged nature&lt;/a&gt;&quot; means &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00754240022004947&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the semantic field of money is often taken to be one of the most fertile areas of word formation in slang[.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I've not (yet?) seen any denigration of a formal word for &quot;money&quot; due to taboo (although in modern Japanese the rise of お金 &lt;em&gt;o-kane&lt;/em&gt; as a polite form for 金 &lt;em&gt;kane&lt;/em&gt; may attest to this), there are plenty of &lt;a href=&quot;https://digilib.k.utb.cz/bitstream/handle/10563/12722/ja%C4%8Dkov%C3%A1_2010_bp.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;euphemisms&lt;/a&gt; for types of &lt;em&gt;debt&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=xbouDwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;other adverse economic situations&lt;/a&gt;. More commonly for &quot;money&quot; itself, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=MZYgAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA61&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;expressivity&lt;/a&gt; that is desired, and hence metaphor and metonymy add greater colour to a piece of daily life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T15:57:42.593" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T15:57:42.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31804" CreationDate="2019-06-24T16:20:29.990" Score="3" ViewCount="8573" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was exploring some various aspects of corpus linguistics and studying different approaches to corpus research on the internet when I came across these phinomena of paradigmatic&#xA;and syntagmatic relations. Can I get a satisfactory elucidation of both the concepts as well as how do the two technically and practically differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23624" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T17:43:44.187" Title="Paradigmatic vs syntagmatic relationship" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31803" CreationDate="2019-06-24T17:43:44.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Paradigmatics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paradigmatic relations are relations of opposition and functional identity of linguistic elements (“OR - OR”), i.e. the paradigm combines sets of linguistic units that are similar according to one, and opposed according to some other criterion(s). Paradigmatics determines to which level of grammatical categoric hierarchy this or that language unit belongs, by analogy with units similar to it. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonemes &lt;em&gt;b, ɪ, g, s, t&lt;/em&gt; are the building blocks of morphemes &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-est&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morphemes &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-est&lt;/em&gt; can combine to form the lexeme &lt;em&gt;biggest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The lexeme &lt;em&gt;biggest&lt;/em&gt; is a part of the sentence &lt;em&gt;That's the biggest fish I've ever seen!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Syntagmatics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntagmatic relations can be defined as relations of compatibility of elements of the level in a sequence of speech events, i.e. combination of phonemes with phonemes, morphemes with morphemes, etc. Syntagmatics combines language units by their direct combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logical formula of syntagmatic relations is the formula &quot;AND - AND&quot;, i.e. both one element and another element together, side by side, one after another, forming a chain of the same-order elements of a certain length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of syntagmatic relationships:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;b=ɪ=g=ɪ=s=t, bɪg=ɪst&lt;/em&gt; (phonetico-phonological level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;big=est&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;water=s&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;walk=ing&lt;/em&gt; (morphological level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;teach=er&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;re=name&lt;/em&gt; (word-building sub-level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tall man, tall tree&lt;/em&gt; (lexical level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The tree is tall.&lt;/em&gt; (syntactical level)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T17:43:44.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31782" CreationDate="2019-06-24T18:08:34.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, the term originated in Ancient Greek; it's cognate with &quot;idiom&quot; (originally meaning something like &quot;individual peculiarity&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek &lt;em&gt;idiōtēs&lt;/em&gt; was borrowed into Latin as &lt;em&gt;idiōta&lt;/em&gt;; there wasn't a good Latin equivalent for the term, so the Romans just used the Greek one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, etc) inherited it directly from Latin. They spread the term all across Europe, and from them it was borrowed into Germanic and Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T18:08:34.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31810" CreationDate="2019-06-25T00:08:26.410" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;AHD-IER (Watkins, 2011) P97 gives PIE *man-e- for L. maneō:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Variant suffixed (stative) form&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;*man-e-.&lt;/strong&gt;  MANOR, MANSE, MANSION, MENAGE; IMMANENT, PERMANENT, REMAIN, from Latin manere, to remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while EDLIL (Michiel de Vaan, 2008) P374:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PIE *mn-eh₁- 'to remain'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;at a stage preceding the Latin&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;unrounding&lt;/strong&gt; of *mo- &gt; *ma- in open syllables. In particular, initial m- could have played a &lt;strong&gt;rounding role&lt;/strong&gt; in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In P21, only find this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7.1 *o &gt; a /b, l, m, w, kʷ_CV (Lat. badius, canem, lacus, lanius, manus, mare)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the vowel a in maneō reflect from PIE *men- &quot;to stay, stand still&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt;: this topic is related to this 2019 paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24098/1/Leppaenen_Ville.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ablaut and the Latin Verb Aspects of Morphophonological Change&lt;/a&gt;, and the author has the same conclusion that none of the proposed PIE form can be safely accepted without problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1306" LastEditorUserId="1306" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T15:02:31.103" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T15:02:31.103" Title="How did vowel a in L. maneō “to remain” come from PIE *mn-eh₁- “to remain” &lt; PIE *men- “to stay, stand still”?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31659" CreationDate="2019-06-25T07:08:52.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern entry literature exists fourfold from Ringe, Fortson, Meyer-Brügger, Mallory, as far as I know. Ringe gives a good notion about statistical chance in another report, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionaries exist a few, Pokorny first of all and then Rix et al's Lexicon of the Indo-european Verb (LIV). But most reconstructions are distributed over shelves full of etymological dictionaries for the daughter languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more confusing is the journal publication scene. A wide array of special interest groups publish linguistic essays, proceedings and other material in a wide array of topics. Dictionaries cite papers, and papers cite each other, so accessability is pretty good, at least if you have access to a university library with licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just looking up &quot;proto indo european filetype:pdf&quot; in scholar.google.com for example finds many accessible papers that can take a while to read , naturally with mainstreram topics leading the cite-count. Maybe &quot;substrate language&quot; would refine the search to your interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T07:08:52.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-25T15:04:06.363" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the John Doe or John Smith of language names for when a linguist is making an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’ve all seen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose that in &lt;strong&gt;language &lt;/strong&gt; . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine &lt;strong&gt;a language&lt;/strong&gt; . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in another post, I saw&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/26312&quot;&gt;a &lt;strong&gt;language Gwambomambo&lt;/strong&gt; which lacks the word . . .&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more common way to refer to a dummy language without using a plausible-sounding name as the last example does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="489" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T15:04:06.363" Title="Is there a standard way to refer to an example language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-25T16:55:24.167" Score="8" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well-known that Classical Hebrew had phonemic length distinctions in the stops, since geminated stops didn't turn into fricatives: compare רַב &lt;em&gt;raβ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rabbi&quot; against רַבִּי &lt;em&gt;rabbī&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my rabbi&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/10998/406&quot;&gt;I've noticed a curious pattern&lt;/a&gt; with Hebrew and Aramaic names transcribed in Greek (in the LXX and New Testament): the letter ש (&lt;em&gt;šin&lt;/em&gt;) is transcribed with a single sigma after a long vowel, but a double sigma after a short one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;מְשִׁיחַ‎ &lt;em&gt;məšīaħ&lt;/em&gt; → μεσσίας &lt;em&gt;messias&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;יֵשׁוּעַ &lt;em&gt;jēšūaʕ&lt;/em&gt; → ἰησοῦς &lt;em&gt;iēsūs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;אַבְשָׁלוֹם &lt;em&gt;'aβəšālōm&lt;/em&gt; → ἀβεσσαλωμ &lt;em&gt;abessalōm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;הוֹשֵׁעַ &lt;em&gt;hōšēaʕ&lt;/em&gt; → ὡσηέ &lt;em&gt;hōsēe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/11000/406&quot;&gt;isn't a phonological rule of Koine Greek&lt;/a&gt;, which makes me wonder: is it just a transcription convention? Or did Classical Hebrew and Aramaic actually lengthen their continuants after short vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. Ancient Greek did have phonemic length distinctions on &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/y/&lt;/code&gt;, but didn't mark them orthographically. In other words, the final &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Abessalōm&lt;/em&gt; was presumably long, but there's no way to know from the written form. Koine eventually lost these distinctions, but not by the time of the LXX.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-06-25T22:56:55.973" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T23:47:04.783" Title="Did Classical Hebrew and/or Aramaic have allophonic continuant length?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;gemination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31806" CreationDate="2019-06-25T23:31:39.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR: Nobody's sure, and none of the proposals are universally accepted.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty clear that &lt;em&gt;maneō&lt;/em&gt; came from the PIE root *&lt;em&gt;m-n-&lt;/em&gt;, which has plenty of cognates across the IE world. But if I understand right, that's not what you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consonants come straight from PIE, and the &lt;em&gt;-e-&lt;/em&gt; of the second conjugation is well-understood. The real mystery is the &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; in the middle. Most often, &lt;em&gt;-a-&lt;/em&gt; comes from the laryngeal *&lt;em&gt;h₂&lt;/em&gt; (or *&lt;em&gt;h₁&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;h₃&lt;/em&gt; in Italic), but there's no sign of a laryngeal in this root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper you've linked gives a number of different ways this might have developed, from big names like Sihler, De Vaan, and others. You've already read what they have to say on the matter; I'll add my own slightly more far-fetched theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;man-&lt;/em&gt; may perhaps have come from the zero-grade stem, *&lt;em&gt;mṇ-&lt;/em&gt;. In Latin, this would have regularly developed into *&lt;em&gt;men-&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;min-&lt;/em&gt;, via (according to Meiser, in Klein's &lt;em&gt;Handbook&lt;/em&gt;) some sort of intermediate *&lt;em&gt;mẽ-&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in the closely-related Sabellic languages, Meiser's *&lt;em&gt;ẽ&lt;/em&gt; instead becomes &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; in stressed (i.e. initial) syllables: compare Oscan &lt;em&gt;fanguam&lt;/em&gt; &quot;tongue (acc)&quot; against Latin &lt;em&gt;linguam&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt;*&lt;em&gt;dẽgwām&lt;/em&gt;), or Oscan &lt;em&gt;anter&lt;/em&gt; &quot;between&quot; against Latin &lt;em&gt;inter&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;lt;*&lt;em&gt;ẽter&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So it's entirely possible that the Latin *&lt;em&gt;men-&lt;/em&gt; was affected, or possibly even replaced, by the Sabellic *&lt;em&gt;man-&lt;/em&gt;. This is attested with other words, such as &lt;em&gt;lupus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wolf&quot; (instead of the expected *&lt;em&gt;lucus&lt;/em&gt;), which shows the Sabellic shift of *&lt;em&gt;kʷ&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; instead of the Latin *&lt;em&gt;kʷ&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;_.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlikely? Perhaps—I can't find any actual attestation of a Sabellic verb *&lt;em&gt;man-&lt;/em&gt;, though the sound changes involved would be regular. But I've never seen a more regular explanation than this: they all require some sort of irregularity (in this case, the Sabellic influences). So I have to agree with Leppänen: &quot;the current scholarship is not conclusive enough to show which ablaut grade Lat[in] &lt;em&gt;manē-&lt;/em&gt; actually continues, and which changes it has undergone.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T02:33:47.807" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T02:33:47.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31812" CreationDate="2019-06-26T17:56:12.520" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to hear some ideas that can explain Greek *&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CE%AD%CF%80%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B9#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;σκέπτομαι&lt;/a&gt;, σκοπός &amp;quot;watcher, look-out, spy, mark, goal&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from Proto-Indo-European *skep-ye-, from a metathesis of *speḱ-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cognate to Latin speciō (“I see”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... especially the methatesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German &lt;em&gt;schauen&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to watch&amp;quot;, En. &amp;quot;to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/show&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;show&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; are PGmc *skawwōną (“to look, see”), IE *(s)kewh₁-(“to heed, look, feel, take note of”). *(s)kewh₁- could conceivably relate to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82ew-#Proto-Indo-European&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*h2ew-&lt;/a&gt; (Def. 2 &amp;quot;to perceive&amp;quot;). Could these have, for example, influenced the metathesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T21:32:36.597" Title="The Methatesis in &quot;scope&quot; vs &quot;to show&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31811" CreationDate="2019-06-26T21:32:36.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite possibly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was definitely a Proto-Greek form *&lt;em&gt;skow-os&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;em&gt;sk-o-wh₁-os&lt;/em&gt; meaning something like &quot;watching&quot; or &quot;overseeing&quot;; it didn't survive on its own, but is attested in compounds like &lt;em&gt;thyo-sko(w)ós&lt;/em&gt; &quot;haruspex&quot; (+ &lt;em&gt;thy-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sacrifice&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have *&lt;em&gt;skow-os&lt;/em&gt; &quot;watching&quot; next to *&lt;em&gt;spok-os&lt;/em&gt; &quot;watcher&quot;, a transformation into &lt;em&gt;skop-os&lt;/em&gt; isn't at all implausible. This then spread to other forms of the same root, giving &lt;em&gt;skep-sis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;skop-éō&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T21:32:36.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-27T03:32:58.883" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, if you take the sentence &lt;em&gt;behind the house was untidy&lt;/em&gt;, what is untidy is really an area behind the house – so assuming for now that &lt;em&gt;behind the house&lt;/em&gt; can be regarded as the subject of the sentence (more below), that PP stands for an area which can be said to be &lt;em&gt;behind the house&lt;/em&gt;, or in other words an NP to which it would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Thai, unless I have misunderstood, if you want to say &lt;em&gt;he is angry because of you&lt;/em&gt;, you say &lt;em&gt;because (of) you made him angry&lt;/em&gt;, where the PP is the subject and stands for &lt;em&gt;a situation caused by you&lt;/em&gt; - so again, an NP to which the PP would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a recognised phenomenon, and does it have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the subject of the English sentence, I posted something on EL&amp;amp;U that was intended to explore this, but chose a bad example (&lt;em&gt;behind the house was a culvert&lt;/em&gt;) and got nowhere – it was immediately pointed out that the subject of that sentence is &lt;em&gt;a culvert&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That analysis doesn’t work for &lt;em&gt;behind the house was untidy&lt;/em&gt;, though. I suppose this could be seen as a transformation of &lt;em&gt;it was untidy behind the house&lt;/em&gt;, but I’m not sure that would explain or simplify anything. Then there is the sentence &lt;em&gt;behind the house was laid out to lawn&lt;/em&gt;. I’d be interested to know whether this strikes people as correct (intuitively, I mean). If it is correct, isn’t &lt;em&gt;behind the house&lt;/em&gt; the subject, and doesn’t it stand for &lt;em&gt;the area behind the house&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23078" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T03:32:58.883" Title="Substituting prepositional phrases" Tags="&lt;prepositions&gt;&lt;grammatical-subject&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-27T04:48:15.880" Score="2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt; (0:00am, June 27th, JST): After reading Draconis' answer, I did a little more research and added my findings below the horizontal line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be easily distinguished? Here is an excerpt from p. 84 from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/teacher-training-development-and-research/teaching-pronunciation-2nd-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marianne Celce-Murcia, et. al., &quot;&lt;em&gt;Teaching Pronunciation&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2010&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... a consonant sound often anticipates some following sound. Both /t/ (in words like &lt;em&gt;but͟t͟on&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;kit͟t͟en&lt;/em&gt;) and /d/ (in words like &lt;em&gt;sud͟d͟en&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;had͟n't&lt;/em&gt;) exhibit unusual medial variants before syllabic [n̩]. The /t/ is either glottalized (articulated with a momentary blockage of the airstream in the vocal cords) or it is replaced by a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;glottal stop&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [ʔ], which is a sound formed when the vocal cords close tightly so that air cannot pass between them. When the consonant /t/ and /d/ is produced before syllabic [n̩], the air used to produce the stop is released through the nose rather than the mouth. Because of these articulatory differences, words with medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic [n̩] are clearly distinguishable, for example, &lt;em&gt;sud͟d͟en&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;Sut͟t͟on&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bid͟d͟en&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;bit͟t͟en&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not clear on &quot;these articulatory differences.&quot; I guess one interpretation would be that while the medial /t/ before [n̩] has either glottal reinforcement (pre-glottalization) or glottal replacement (borrowing terms from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-glottalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;'s entry on &quot;&lt;em&gt;T-Glottalization&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;em&gt;the /d/ counterpart does not&lt;/em&gt;, and that is the difference. The part about the /d/ is only implied, not explicitly stated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct, though? No glottalization occurs to the medial /d/ before [n̩]? When I look up &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/bitten/en_usa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;bitten&lt;/em&gt; in American English on Forvo&lt;/a&gt; and compare that with &lt;a href=&quot;https://forvo.com/search/bidden/en_usa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that of &lt;em&gt;bidden&lt;/em&gt; there&lt;/a&gt;, they sound quite similar and the only noticeable difference, at least to me, is the length of the preceding vowel. And even that may be a meaningless observation because these two were clearly spoken by different people. (I know &lt;a href=&quot;http://forvo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forvo&lt;/a&gt; is not the most reliable resource, but it is the only readily available one for me at this time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also speak of post-nasalization (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant#Nasalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;'s entry on &quot;&lt;em&gt;Stop Consonant&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), but that is supposed to be a common phenomenon to both /t/ and /d/, so it cannot be a differentiating feature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate it if you could shed some light on this matter. I am not a linguist, still less a phonologist or a phonetician. I teach English (American English, to be specific) and I am trying to educate myself with English phonology/phonetics just so I can be certain of what I teach to my students. One big problem for me is that I do not have innate knowledge of correct pronunciation because I am not a native speaker. Your help would be much appreciated because I honestly do not know whom else to turn to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even after reading Draconis' answer, I was not convinced that &lt;em&gt;bidden&lt;/em&gt; is read [bɪɾn̩] --- I was fairly sure at least it is not always. &lt;a href=&quot;https://pronuncian.com/podcasts/episode66&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pronuncian.com's podcast episode &quot;&lt;em&gt;66: Syllabic n's and nasal plosions (as in the words 'sudden' and 'couldn't')&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt; deals with this issue head on, and the author says &lt;em&gt;bidden&lt;/em&gt; many times in this episode, and she realizes the /d/ as [ɾ] only once, at about 2'30&quot; mark. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the time, she realizes it as [d̚] (no audible release). You could say it is actually [dⁿ] (nasal plosion/release), but I personally do not think adding yet another allophone is helpful, as far as American English is concerned. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_release&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt; states to the same effect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in General American, &lt;em&gt;bitten&lt;/em&gt; is read either [bɪʔn̩] or [bɪʔt̚n̩] while &lt;em&gt;bidden&lt;/em&gt;, [bɪd̚n̩]. Since [t̚] = [d̚], I would say they sound quite similar; to my ears, they definitely do. Wouldn't you agree? I guess whether you can differentiate them or not depends on if you can tell [ʔ] from [d̚] (plus possibly the sensitivity to the duration of the preceding vowel). I have zero confidence in my ability to do that, but how about you? Please let me know, because I would really like to know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24281" LastEditorUserId="24281" LastEditDate="2019-06-28T08:59:40.423" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T08:59:40.423" Title="Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be distinguished easily?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;glottal-stop&gt;&lt;syllabic-consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31814" CreationDate="2019-06-27T05:11:05.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most dialects of American English, medial &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt; are indistinguishable in most environments: both are realized as &lt;code&gt;[ɾ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before a syllabic &lt;code&gt;/n̩/&lt;/code&gt;, however, they remain distinct: &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; becomes glottalized to some extent, while &lt;code&gt;/d/&lt;/code&gt; never does. For me, the glottalization is complete, and I realize &quot;bitten&quot; as &lt;code&gt;[bɪʔn̩]&lt;/code&gt; (versus &quot;bidden&quot; &lt;code&gt;[bɪɾn̩]&lt;/code&gt;). For others, it's more like &lt;code&gt;[tˀ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this doesn't happen before any other vowel, including other syllabic resonants: &quot;bottom&quot; and &quot;bottle&quot; both have &lt;code&gt;[ɾ]&lt;/code&gt;. Only before &lt;code&gt;/n̩/&lt;/code&gt;—which shares &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;'s place of articulation, prompting a sort of dissimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T05:11:05.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31814" CreationDate="2019-06-27T15:15:41.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your additional question, it is when /ən/ is realized as [ən] as opposed to [n̩] that /d/ in &lt;em&gt;bidden&lt;/em&gt; etc. can be flapped (i.e. realized as [ɾ]). Which isn't common as far as North American English is concerned but it does happen. [d̚n̩] is certainly the predominant pronunciation of /Vdən/ words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T15:15:41.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-27T16:10:23.327" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In South Australia there is a region called the Barossa Valley. At some point [after WW2? not sure] it was settled by a lot of German farmers who bought land and started dairy farms. They applied Rudolf Steiner's methods of organic farming. Places got names like Germantown and Hahndorf. From then on they formed their own region of German language that didn't change. So when German people who speak current German went there they could barely understand each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this and other examples is there a name for this &quot;diverging language pocket&quot; outcome? Is it rare? I can't think of a similar example offhand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24875" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-06-27T16:53:52.493" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T16:53:52.493" Title="Is there a name for this type of language divergence and isolation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;german&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-27T17:08:33.640" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if the average adult knows more words in their language (excluding proper nouns), or more proper nouns? At first I'm inclined to think the former, but then I think of all the names I know: names of people, places/streets, institutions/companies, brands, titles of books/movies, etc. I know this is a difficult question but I'm curious how to estimate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24877" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T20:14:17.207" Title="Do people know more words or proper nouns?" Tags="&lt;vocabulary&gt;&lt;proper-nouns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31818" CreationDate="2019-06-27T20:14:17.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Words, definitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/08/16/Most-US-adults-have-vocabulary-of-more-than-42000-words/2801471361934/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A 2016 study&lt;/a&gt; suggests that your average 20-year-old knows over 42,000 lemmata (&quot;basic&quot; words, like &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;runs&lt;/em&gt;). Multiply that by three if you want to include &quot;non-basic&quot; words: as a rule of thumb, English nouns have two forms, verbs four, adjectives three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are a lot of proper nouns out there in the world, it's unlikely any individual will know more than 126,000 of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T20:14:17.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15059" CreationDate="2019-06-28T02:34:29.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems in English, numbers can be adjectives, determiners, and nouns.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Though I feel the nouns are really just adjectives that have an implied noun.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Types of numbers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ordinals: first, second...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cardinals: one, two...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adjectives:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ordinals seem comparable to superlatives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I am the very first Uber driver.&quot; is similar to &quot;I am the very best Uber driver.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;For my third trick...&quot; is similar to &quot;For my next trick.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;In my sixth year&quot; is similar to &quot;In my final year...&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determiners:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cardinals seem to work here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Six years ago...&quot; is similar to &quot;Many years ago...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Here, have six dollars.&quot; is similar to &quot;Here, have some dollars.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;One week had passed.&quot; is similar to  &quot;A week had passed.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;He is my second.&quot; ... I feel a noun is implied via context &quot;He is my second son.&quot; just like &quot;He is my favourite.&quot; implies in context something like &quot;He is my favourite character.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You are the chosen four&quot;...implies &quot;You are the chosen four winners,&quot; similar to &quot;You are the chosen few.&quot; &quot;You are the few winners that we have chosen.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You are the one [person in the world] for me.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I'll take those two [things], thanks.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;except for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;I am the very one you seek.&quot;  similar to &quot;I am the very man you seek.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24879" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T02:34:29.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31809" CreationDate="2019-06-28T05:59:31.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having confirmed with a Hebraist, this is indeed a phonological rule of Hebrew (and Aramaic). In his words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in certain positions, consonants geminate after historically short vowels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these geminations didn't survive into the modern day, especially with the loss of contrastive vowel length; those that are still relevant are marked with a &lt;em&gt;dageš ħazaq&lt;/em&gt; (a dot in the middle) in pointed texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lengthening process applied consistently to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; consonants, not just sonorants, except for &lt;em&gt;aleph&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ħeth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ʕayin&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;reš&lt;/em&gt;: these four could not be geminated, so they lengthened the vowel instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In fact, this phonological rule is the reason why &lt;em&gt;raβ&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;-i&lt;/em&gt; gives &lt;em&gt;rabbi&lt;/em&gt; &quot;my rabbi&quot; rather than *&lt;em&gt;raβi&lt;/em&gt;, as mentioned in the question: the &lt;em&gt;beth&lt;/em&gt; comes after a short vowel and is before another vowel, so it gets geminated and remains a stop. Alternately, &lt;em&gt;raβ&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;rabb&lt;/em&gt; due to the short vowel, but the &lt;em&gt;bb&lt;/em&gt; degeminates at the end of a word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-06-28T15:31:48.610" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T15:31:48.610" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-28T15:08:08.063" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: (1) The officer believed [NP Mary and &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the distribution of ACC pronouns in English doesn't really map onto ACC in overt morphological case languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24880" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T15:08:08.063" Title="Are there languages in which overt morphological accusative case is obligatory on the second conjunct of a conjunction?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-28T15:44:14.237" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a comprehensive list of corpora of all the languages of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching on wikipedia eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Corpus&lt;/a&gt;. If I scroll to the bottom, I do see a list of corpora. However, the list is heavily biased towards English corpora. Need something more representative of other languages, if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across Sketch Engine. The scope's pretty good. Are there rival products or better products?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23964" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T16:53:02.897" Title="Is there a comprehensive list of corpora of all the languages (maybe even dialects) of the world?" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31827" CreationDate="2019-06-28T16:53:02.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plain answer to this question is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A somewhat more lengthy answer is: There are some metadata harvesters around the world collecting data about corpora provided by repositories, one of the is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://vlo.clarin.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory&lt;/a&gt; that provides a search over the complete corpus metadata and a facetted search for some specific metadata fields. Another one is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://search.language-archives.org/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OLAC Language Resource Catalog&lt;/a&gt;. A third one is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.meta-share.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;META-SHARE inventory&lt;/a&gt;. The content covered by those portals is overlapping, but also disjoint, and there are corpora out in the world that aren't findable by either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T16:53:02.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31809" CreationDate="2019-06-28T23:35:39.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything significant about Ancient Hebrew. Since there were different varieties of Hebrew and Aramaic in ancient times, I can't be sure whether information that I find in documents online applies to all varieties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that caveat, the title and first sentence of this question seem a bit strange to me, because my understanding is that Ancient Hebrew had &lt;strong&gt;phonemic&lt;/strong&gt; (not allophonic) length distinctions for most consonants, not just the stop series. As you say in your answer, certain consonants were supposed to be non-geminatable in Biblical Hebrew: the Wikipedia article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Hebrew#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblical Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;&quot; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Geminate consonants are phonemically contrastive in Biblical Hebrew. In the Secunda /w j z/ are never geminate. In the Tiberian tradition /ħ ʕ h ʔ r/ cannot be geminate; historically first /r ʔ/ degeminated, followed by /ʕ/, /h/, and finally /ħ/, as evidenced by changes in the quality of the preceding vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I haven't found any source that lists /s/ as a consonant that cannot appear as a phonological geminate in Biblical Hebrew. So the implication of the sources that I've read seems to be that singleton /s/ was phonologically contrastive with geminate /ss/ in Ancient Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologically contrastive consonant length was not written in the Hebrew alphabet. There are later traditions of marking length (or for plosives, the absence of spirantization) with diacritics, but these don't necessarily correspond to the distribution of length in earlier time periods. I'm not sure what evidence experts use to establish the existence of geminate consonants in particular words in Ancient Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of possible conditioning factors for a process of consonant lengthening, stress seems to be important. I found a web page that refers to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_tequ.htm#pretonic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pretonic Vowel Lengthening or Equivalent Consonant Gemination&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and says that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adath-shalom.ca/history_of_hebrew2.htm#trad_v_c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretonic gemination at times substitutes for pretonic lengthening&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&quot;Phonemic Structure of Pre-Exilic, Tiberian and Israeli Hebrew Contrasted&quot;, &lt;em&gt;History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language&lt;/em&gt;, by David Steinberg). &quot;Pretonic&quot; in this context seems to refer specifically to the syllable immediately before the stressed syllable. Also, I don't know how schwa relates to the process described there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the original position of the stress in the words that you mention, but I would recommend studying that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-06-28T23:47:04.783" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T23:47:04.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31798" CreationDate="2019-06-29T16:01:15.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I live in an exceptionally remote village in the West of England (UK).  The local dialect/accent among the older generation took a long time for us to understand when we moved here 7 years ago.  My wife is a reading mentor at the local primary school.  She has noticed that since the introduction of Phonics as a (highly effective) technique for teaching the children to read, much of the local accent is disappearing from the children's speech.  Phonics provides a standard, and they are all eager to read.  Phonics is widely used in UK schools, and must be standardising speech sounds in many places, changing the accents of towns and regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22043" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T16:01:15.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31854" CreationDate="2019-06-29T20:56:51.030" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the following linguistics (and some non-linguistic) constructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entailment_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entailment&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implicature&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downward_entailing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strawson entailment&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underspecification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semantic underspecification&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_representation_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourse representation theory&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_structure_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhetorical structure theory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_logic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;description logic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there a system trying to integrate all the above cited constructions and designing a powerful Machine Comprehesion algorithm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've googled for a kind of linguistic &quot;theory of everything&quot; enabling a machine to read like a man but I haven't find an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24884" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T17:16:36.627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T10:21:27.423" Title="Is there a Machine Comprehension system integrating several different linguistic constructions?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31835" CreationDate="2019-06-30T01:10:06.830" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had never heard anyone use &quot;oftentimes&quot; as a word until I watched an American in a youtube video about 5 years ago. I am confident that where I am in Australia and in the UK that it wouldn't be standard English; if you wrote it in a school essay you would gte a red mark. So from the wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;inherited from the Middle English oftentymes; equivalent to oftentime +‎ -s. Compare oftentime. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if it had an origin of Middle English as above, rather than an American origin, then why did oftentimes not become standard English in the UK, Australia or other parts of the Anglosphere? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24875" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T02:54:09.380" Title="Why did Oftentimes not become standard English outside of the US" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31834" CreationDate="2019-06-30T02:54:09.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the OED puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now chiefly North American; otherwise archaic or literary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It used to be a standard English word, attested from the late 1300s (well before any sort of &quot;American English&quot; existed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But somewhere in the 1800s, it fell out of fashion in England, and stopped being actively used. This happens to a variety of words without any real rhyme or reason to it; now people will understand what it means, but it's seen as somewhat archaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In America, that fall from grace never happened; it remains a fairly common word up to the present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T02:54:09.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30768" CreationDate="2019-06-30T04:36:38.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greek arguably has a dual indefinite article &lt;em&gt;tiné&lt;/em&gt;. Literally it means &quot;some [two things]&quot;, and is unrelated to the numeral &quot;two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate a bit more: Ancient Greek didn't have mandatory indefinite articles during the Classical period, but the indefinite correlative &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt; was in the process of grammaticalizing into that niche. The dual wasn't particularly productive (or common) by this point, mostly showing up in fixed expressions like &quot;two eyes&quot;, but &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt; still had a full declension pattern, including dual forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt; is specifically the Attic dialect form; other dialects had &lt;em&gt;kis&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sis&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the singular forms of &lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt;-as-indefinite-article were displaced by forms of &lt;em&gt;hen-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;one&quot;; the plural was unaffected, and the dual had died out completely by that point. But if the dual had survived into Modern Greek, it would presumably have an article based on &lt;em&gt;tiné&lt;/em&gt; or on &lt;em&gt;dyo&lt;/em&gt; &quot;two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T04:36:38.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31833" CreationDate="2019-06-30T04:45:10.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically no, full AI doesn't exist, and there is not much work on representing language at the discourse level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bleeding edge would be the Winograd schema challenge and anaphora / co-reference resolution, where the scope is nearby phrases or sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other tasks that may interest you are summarisation and question answering, eg SQuAD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T10:21:27.423" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T10:21:27.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-01T02:26:02.373" Score="5" ViewCount="1195" Body="&lt;p&gt;The preposition expressions like &quot;on top of the table&quot;, &quot;under the tree&quot;, &quot;above the building&quot; are very well understood. Comparing these with the Germany noun cases &quot;auf dem Tisch&quot;, &quot;unter dem Baum&quot;, &quot;die Farbe der Kleidung&quot;, &quot;Ich sehe den Wagen&quot;. Also with Finnish noun case &quot;Poydaallaa&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really feel that essentially there are no difference between preposition/postposition with the noun case. I mean (roughly) if the preposition is separated from its noun then we will call it as preposition, but if the preposition is 'attached' to the noun then we will call it 'noun case'. So, what is the biggest difference between preposition / postposition and noun case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="long pencil" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T03:35:56.053" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T13:46:49.097" Title="What is the difference between case and adpositions?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;prepositions&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31839" CreationDate="2019-07-01T04:54:25.313" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semantically (in terms of meaning)? There's no real difference. Some languages might use an adposition for a certain meaning, while other languages use noun case. The underlying meaning can be exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically, though—in terms of putting words together into sentences—there's one major difference. The case is part of a noun, and can't be separated from it. Adpositions can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to Bob&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; the blond &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where's the &lt;strong&gt;person&lt;/strong&gt; I gave the book &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preposition and the associated noun can have all sorts of things inserted in between them, and one can move without the other following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare to Latin, which uses a noun case for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dedī librum &lt;strong&gt;Robertō&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dedī librum flaviō &lt;strong&gt;virō&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ubi est homō &lt;strong&gt;cuī&lt;/strong&gt; dedī librum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The word order in these is somewhat stilted and unnatural, in order to line up with the English, but the point stands.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dative case marking can never be separated from the noun, by any means: it's a part of the word, and no syntactic movement will ever pull it off. The case is also applied to all words in the phrase: &quot;blond&quot; is &lt;em&gt;flaviō&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;flavius&lt;/em&gt;, because it's taken on the case marking too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T16:11:50.997" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T16:11:50.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31839" CreationDate="2019-07-01T06:45:12.357" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a matter of meaning, and especially a question of syntactic functions. In some languages what marks an argument derives from adpositions like in English. So there are related diachronically, but not synchronically, even though they are pronounced identically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case markers indicate which is the object, the indirect object and/or the subject of a predicate. But adpositions indicate where a referent is situated in relation to another referent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="13420" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T12:19:30.573" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T12:19:30.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31839" CreationDate="2019-07-01T08:36:12.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biggest difference is that case is a &lt;strong&gt;grammatical category&lt;/strong&gt; whereas adpositions are a &lt;strong&gt;syntactic category&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. cases are properties across (certain kinds of) words, and adpositions are one type of words. The case of a noun/pronoun/noun phrase/determiner phrase (hereafter just &quot;noun&quot;) is a property of that noun; different languages mark cases differently, some languages don't even mark case. Adpositions are a category of words that typically express temporal/spatial relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the English sentence &lt;em&gt;I won the argument with her&lt;/em&gt;, the pronoun &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; is in the nominative/subjective case, and the pronoun &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; is in the oblique case. In English, the rule is that subjects have nominative case and complements of prepositions have oblique case. The noun phrase/determiner phrase &lt;em&gt;the argument&lt;/em&gt; could have accusative/objective case or not, depending on your view of English syntax. You may say that all English nouns have case, but case is only realized in pronouns, or you may say that in English only pronouns have case, not nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in English, case marking is part of the noun but adpositions are separate from their complements, in some languages it is difficult to tell case marking and adpositions apart. For example, here are some Japanese sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1.  Taro-ga  pan-o     tabeta.&#xA;    Taro-NOM bread-ACC ate&#xA;    'Taro ate the bread'.&#xA;&#xA;2.  Taro-kara Hanako-e  hanataba-ga  okurareta.&#xA;    Taro-FROM Hanako-TO bouquets-NOM were.sent&#xA;    'Bouquets were sent by Taro to Hanako.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, case is marked by the so-called particles (&lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;o&lt;/em&gt; in (1-2)), which have the same distribution as the adpositions (&lt;em&gt;kara&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; in (2)). Some people consider both of them as case markers, and distinguish the two as syntactic vs. semantic case markers (Kishimoto 2018, 448). However, adpositional phrases may be case-marked in Japanese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;3.  Taro-kara-no  Hanako-e-no   tegami&#xA;    Taro-FROM-GEN Hanako-TO-GEN letters&#xA;    'letters from Taro to Hanako'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the particle &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; marks the genitive case on the adpositional phrases &lt;em&gt;taro-kara&lt;/em&gt; 'from Taro' and &lt;em&gt;hanako-e&lt;/em&gt; 'to Hanako', making it difficult to distinguish between case-marking particles and adpositional particles on distributional grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kishimoto, Hideki. &quot;Case Marking.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Japanese Syntax.&lt;/em&gt; De Gruyter Mouton, 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24566" LastEditorUserId="24566" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T06:25:11.700" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T06:25:11.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27470" CreationDate="2019-07-01T11:07:23.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to influence of other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been influenced strongly by Arabic and Persian and more recently by Russian and Mandarin Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as a Persian, even I can't Understand what they say ... :) so the answer No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the best&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24891" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T11:07:23.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31839" CreationDate="2019-07-01T14:36:00.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this isn't a universal distinction, since other answers do not mention it, and I apologize if it's too Indo-European centric, but I understand a major difference between cases and adpositions (even though postpositions can look a lot like cases) is that &lt;strong&gt;the forms of adpositions can be predicted from the phrase they are attached to&lt;/strong&gt;; they behave as words, or maybe especially with postpositions in cases such as Japanese, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clitics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;different cases change words in ways that are not uniform nor necessarily predictable&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, the Latin noun &lt;em&gt;rosa&lt;/em&gt; in the nominative case becomes &lt;em&gt;rosae&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive case, while the noun &lt;em&gt;lupus&lt;/em&gt; in the nominative becomes &lt;em&gt;lupī&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive. You cannot single out a &quot;genitive postposition&quot;, because it would be &lt;em&gt;ae&lt;/em&gt; in one case and &lt;em&gt;ī&lt;/em&gt; in the other. At this point, one might be tempted to say, okay, they are different, but I can predict that a word in &lt;em&gt;-us&lt;/em&gt; will get &lt;em&gt;-ī&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive; but this is not true, because &lt;em&gt;currus&lt;/em&gt; becomes &lt;em&gt;currūs&lt;/em&gt; in the genitive, not *&lt;em&gt;curri&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another major difference is that &lt;strong&gt;adpositions only need to occur once&lt;/strong&gt; in the phrase they are attached to: before it in the case of preposition, and after it in the case of postpositions; furthermore, they occur before or after the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; phrase, including function words like articles. &lt;strong&gt;Cases modify individual words&lt;/strong&gt;, and generally, a noun phrase that needs to be marked by a given case &lt;strong&gt;will exhibit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agreement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, whereby if the noun in the noun phrase is in the genitive case, any adjectives or other words that are subject to declension (articles in German or Greek are also declinable, for instance) will need to replicate the same case as the noun. This means that whereas &quot;the good wolf&quot; will be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bonus lupus&lt;/em&gt; in Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;der guter Wolf&lt;/em&gt; in German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;ὁ ἀγαθός λύκος&lt;/em&gt; in Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hyvä susi&lt;/em&gt; in Finnish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;of the good wolf&quot; will become&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;bonī lupī&lt;/em&gt; in Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;des guten Wolfes&lt;/em&gt; in German&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ λύκου&lt;/em&gt; in Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hyvän suden&lt;/em&gt; in Finnish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where every declinable word (every word, in these examples) is modified by case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T23:42:42.430" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T23:42:42.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31846" CreationDate="2019-07-01T16:25:16.160" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;A vowel is a sound generated by an open vocal tract, with vibration of the vocal cords and without friction. A consonant is every sound that is not a vowel. These two concepts are very simple and clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the whole concept of a semivowel seems to me a consequence of the false statement that the beginning sound and the final sound of a syllable (respectively, an onset and a coda) must be consonants. In several words of several languages, a diphthong (eg. &quot;pay&quot;, &quot;fly&quot; and &quot;yes&quot; in English) or a triphthong (eg &quot;Paraguay&quot; and &quot;why&quot; in English) may begin/end a syllable. As far as I can hear, there isn't any difference in pronunciation of these vowels when are in the beginning or end of a syllable and when they are in the middle of it (nucleus).  AFAIK, for instance, &#xA;[flaɪ̯] and [flaj] are pronounced identically. Therefore, why are there different IPA symbols for semivowels (eg [w] and [j]) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T18:03:14.587" Title="Are semivowels pronounced differently than vowels?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;semivowels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31845" CreationDate="2019-07-01T17:00:19.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few different and mutually incompatible definitions of &quot;consonant&quot; and &quot;vowel&quot;. One is, like you said, that vowels have no friction. But what about approximants like &lt;code&gt;[l]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[ɹ]&lt;/code&gt;—or, for that matter, &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt;? Those sounds have no friction and no complete closure, so wouldn't they be vowels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another definition is that vowels form syllable nuclei, while consonants don't. (More often this is called &quot;syllabic&quot; versus &quot;non-syllabic&quot; for clarity.) This notably requires defining what a &quot;syllable&quot; is; like phonemes, syllables aren't anything that can be quantitatively measured on a spectrogram, they're theoretical constructs that make phonological theories more elegant. And not all theories use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many theories of phonology &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; use syllables, and in practice this syllabic/non-syllabic distinction turns out to be extremely useful for those theories. &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[j]&lt;/code&gt; in theory have exactly the same formants, it's just that the former is a syllable nucleus, and the latter isn't. Same with &lt;code&gt;[u]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[w]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[y]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɥ]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;[ɑ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ʕ]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why there are different symbols? Historical artifacts, really. The IPA vowel chart and consonant chart are completely separate and mutually exclusive, so when the same phonetic sound can be both a &quot;consonant&quot; and a &quot;vowel&quot;, they had to make separate symbols for them. More recently, diacritics have caught on to switch one to the other, which is why we talk about English &lt;code&gt;/n̩/&lt;/code&gt; and Latin &lt;code&gt;/e̯/&lt;/code&gt; instead of making up entirely new symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It's worth noting that, in practice, semivowels do also tend to be a bit closer than actual vowels. This is usually considered a phonetic detail and ignored by phonologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T18:03:14.587" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T18:03:14.587" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31861" CreationDate="2019-07-01T20:51:33.567" Score="18" ViewCount="3944" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%94&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, שלמה (pronounced /ʃloˈmo/ in Modern Hebrew) is the Hebrew version of Solomon. The pronunciation seems to follow reasonably well from the spelling, and as far as I can tell, it was spelled the same way in Biblical Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descendants look quite a bit different from the Hebrew pronunciation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Ancient Greek: Σολομών (Solomṓn), Σαλομών (Salomṓn), Σαλωμών (Salōmṓn), Σολομῶν (Solomôn), Σολωμών (Solōmṓn)&#xA;    → Gothic:  (saulaumōn)&#xA;    Greek: Σολομών (Solomón)&#xA;    → Latin: Solomon&#xA;        → English: Solomon&#xA;Classical Syriac: ܫܠܝܡܘܢ‎ (šlemūn)&#xA;    Arabic: سليمان‎ (Sulaymān)&#xA;        → English: Suleiman&#xA;        → Turkish: Süleyman&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems reasonable to me that the /ʃ/ shifted to a /s/, and most of the languages added a vowel between the /s/ and the /l/, and that Syriac and Arabic changed the vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't understand where the /n/ at the end came from. I'm not aware of any other Biblical names that ended in an open vowel in Hebrew and shifted toward having an n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9425" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T10:42:50.543" Title="How did שְׁלֹמֹה (shlomo) become Solomon?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;hebrew&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31847" CreationDate="2019-07-01T21:22:14.793" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the vowels, pay close attention to the nəquddoth (vowel dots)! Between the shin and the lamedh is a &lt;em&gt;shəwa&lt;/em&gt; mark; sometimes this indicates an extra-short vowel, sometimes no vowel at all. But historically, shəwa was always pronounced (&lt;em&gt;shəwa na&lt;/em&gt;) if it came after the first consonant in the word. So at the time of the Septuagint, the name was pronounced something like &lt;em&gt;Shəlōmō&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Greek-speakers tried to transcribe this word for the LXX, they ran into some difficulties. Ancient Greek didn't have &lt;code&gt;[ʃ]&lt;/code&gt;, only &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;. So they wrote the first letter as a plain sigma (&quot;s&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, Ancient Greek didn't have any extra-short vowels corresponding to &lt;em&gt;shəwa na&lt;/em&gt;, so they made do with the letters they had: in this case, it was sometimes transcribed with a short alpha (&quot;a&quot;), sometimes with an omicron (&quot;o&quot;). You'll also sometimes see &lt;em&gt;shəwa&lt;/em&gt; transcribed with epsilon (&quot;e&quot;), depending on the word; this is closer to the modern pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in Ancient Greek, it was extremely rare for names to end in &lt;em&gt;-ō&lt;/em&gt;. It was much more common for them to end in &lt;em&gt;-ōn&lt;/em&gt; (Glaucōn, Cleōn, Zēnōn). So the translators stuck a nu (&quot;n&quot;) on the end to make the name look more like a name. This is also why English &quot;Moses&quot; ends in &quot;s&quot; when the Hebrew &lt;em&gt;Mōshe&lt;/em&gt; (מֹשֶׁה) doesn't: &lt;em&gt;-ē&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;feminine&lt;/em&gt; ending in Greek, not a masculine one, so the translators changed it to the very common and masculine &lt;em&gt;-ēs&lt;/em&gt; (Achillēs, Sōcratēs, Diogēnēs), and this version persisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might expect the Latin of the Vulgate to then remove this &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt; again, since the same &quot;type&quot; of name in Latin ended in plain &lt;em&gt;-o&lt;/em&gt; (Cicero, Scipio, Piso). That's why we now talk about &quot;Zeno's Paradox&quot; instead of &quot;Zenon's&quot;, even though he was Greek and spelled his own name with an &lt;em&gt;-n&lt;/em&gt;. But the Vulgate tends to follow the Greek with extreme precision where names are concerned, so &quot;Solomon&quot; (and &quot;Moses&quot;) persisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Chromium fails beautifully when it tries to render the question title…&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DGdZA.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DGdZA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T18:12:24.843" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T18:12:24.843" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31852" CreationDate="2019-07-02T21:26:56.820" Score="4" ViewCount="850" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Russian language and my own language have something in common - they are very rich and nuanced lexically, but not rich phonetically at all. There are even numerous parodies making fun of the Russian phonology because of that (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/MEmAGJac7Is?t=541&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious as to whether the Russian language has always been that poor phonetically or got phonetically simplified over time. Languages indeed can get phonetically simplified: for example, the Turkish language had the voiced counterpart of the 'h' sound and has the corresponding letter, ğ, which nowadays has no own sound, and the English language is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/28/th-sound-to-vanish-from-english-language-by-2066-because-of-mult/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;predicted&lt;/a&gt; to lose the 'th' sound by 2066. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is this: Are there any extinct Russian phonetic sounds? If so, what are some examples?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will now make a few remarks to make my question more specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I am interested in sounds that ceased to exist rather than changed over time to survive as modified variants. For example, if people stopped pronouncing a certain sound in all words containing it, as happened with the Turkish ğ, then it is an extinct sound. Also, a sound is extinct if it got replaced in all words containing it by a different sound that had already been existing in the language as a separate sound. But if a sound just evolved, always staying as a separate sound and not becoming indistinguishable from any other sound of the language, then what it was in the past is not an extinct sound for the purposes of my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, please consider sounds as evolutionists consider animal species. If an animal species evolved into something existing today, it is not extinct, even if it now looks very differently from how it looked before. But if it truly ceased to exist at a certain point of time, then it is extinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I feel I need to define the Russian language, because there have been various Slavic ethnic groups living in what is now Russia. For the purposes of my question, let us define the Russian language as the language spoken by people who formed a linguistically uniform group living in the past thousand years in and around what is now Moscow, as well as by their ancestors, wherever they migrated to what is now Moscow from. In other words, just consider the Muscovite version of the language and trace back its history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, I feel I should specify the history time frame, but instead I would like to ask you to just trace things back to the point at which you can find extinct sounds. My question is thus not a broad request for all extinct sounds; I just want some examples. The later the sound disappeared the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, to illustrate what I am looking for, I would like to give a few examples of sounds absent in the Russian language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;th in English as well as dh and th in Albanian, i.e., voiced and voiceless interdental consonants,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ğ in Old Turkish, i.e., the voiced counterpart of h (звонкая аналогия русского звука х), &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;c in Turkish, i.e., the voiced counterpart of the Russian sound ч.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want something like this, that is, something absent in modern Russian (albeit not necessarily sounding like any of the sounds listed above), but with evidence of previous existence in Russian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24901" OwnerDisplayName="Mitsuko" LastEditorUserId="24901" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T14:16:45.460" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T14:16:45.460" Title="Are there any extinct phonemes in Russian?" Tags="&lt;history&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="26" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31851" CreationDate="2019-07-02T21:51:41.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two phonological changes that reduced the phoneme inventory in Russian were the loss of yers (ultra-short vowels) and yuses (nasal vowels). None of these sounds occur in the modern language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;yer&lt;/a&gt;s were ъ = *[ŭ] and ь = *[ĭ]. The symbols are still used today but no longer indicate a vowel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;yus&lt;/a&gt;es were ѧ = *[ɛ̃], ѫ = *[ɔ̃], ѩ = *[jɛ̃], ѭ = *[jɔ̃]. These symbols are no longer used, and nasal vowels no longer are found in Russian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there was a vowel ѣ = *[e] which was higher than е = *[ɛ], but those vowels have merged into modern е.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the consonants, ц may have had a palatalized form [t͡sʲ] (still a marginal phoneme), and double consonants have generally degeminated: [t] &amp;lt; *[tt], [f] &amp;lt; *[ff]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="537" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T22:28:26.570" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T22:28:26.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31851" CreationDate="2019-07-02T23:28:54.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of phonemes in the historical antecedent languages, such as Proto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European, which are not found in modern Russian. Establishing a more recent loss of phoneme which is specifically within Russian is much harder to do. For example, there was an East Slavic ʒ/dʒ contrast, and while dʒ is missing in Russian, I don't know of any evidence that it existed in earlier Russian – it may be assumed that it was lost before Russian emerged as a distinct language. The case of *[æ] (&quot;yat&quot;) is also unclear, that is, was there still a vowel pronounced something like [æ ~ ɛ] in earlier Russian, distinct from [e]? Is [æ] really extinct (the vowel in пять is pretty much [æ])? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other problem is that there are dialects of Russian. Southern Russian has [γ] for [g], so [g] is &quot;extinct&quot;, but that's not a feature of Russian in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T23:28:54.847" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31833" CreationDate="2019-07-02T23:34:56.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adam is correct, however, there are several companies who are working on large scale NLU / machine comprehension systems. Most companies have not yet released their offerings, or they've only released portions. Companies include: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plasticity.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.plasticity.ai/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://primer.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://primer.ai/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.elementalcognition.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.elementalcognition.com/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.forge.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.forge.ai/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dm.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dm.ai/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cortical.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cortical.io/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://legendary.ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://legendary.ai/&lt;/a&gt; (my company)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each solution will vary with the focus of their offering and the specific features. However, the GLUE benchmark serves as an interesting set of requirements that most find necessary: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gluebenchmark.com/diagnostics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gluebenchmark.com/diagnostics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also note that at least half of the companies are attempting to do deep NLU without applying linguistic techniques. Instead, they use deep learning routines that are fine tuned for a final application such as question &amp;amp; answering. Others are embracing the  concepts you mention. This is an exciting space, and with Bill Gates mentioning just last week that if he were to do a startup, it would be to &quot;teach a computer to read&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T23:34:56.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31851" CreationDate="2019-07-02T23:45:03.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most Russian phonemes as well the most Russian phonemic oppositions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ш /ʂ/ vs. щ /ɕː/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ж /ʐ/ vs. жж /ʑː/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ɕː] and [ʑː] are correspndingly a voiceless and voiced &lt;em&gt;long (geminated)&lt;/em&gt; alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative. It seems like no other Slavic language has such phonemes, neither do other European languages. Well, the Italian /ʃ/ is geminated word-internally, but it does not have a non-geminated contrasting phoneme. In Russian, the pairs are really contrasted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;чаша [ˈtɕäʂə] 'cup' vs. чаща [ˈtɕäɕːə] 'dense forest'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;дрожи [ˈdroʐɨ] 'of shivering' (Gen. case) vs. дрожжи [ˈdroʑːi] 'yeast'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phoneme /ʑː/ is rarely pronounced as alveolo-palatal nowadays, most Russian speakers pronounced it as retroflex [ʐː], but it's still geminated, and it's still a distinct and unique Russian phoneme hardly found in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T23:45:03.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-03T04:58:46.137" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some hypothetical language, could ten grains of rice be paucal but ten people be plural because ten grains of rice are only a few, whereas ten people are a lot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is paucal grammatically stricter than that and applies to an exact range per language? e.g. always three to six items in one language and always three to ten items in another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T11:24:27.650" Title="Does paucal always represent the same number range per language?" Tags="&lt;paucal&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-03T05:18:56.607" Score="-8" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;English seems to create normal/not normal divisions. For instance:&#xA;Paranormal&#xA;Supernatural&#xA;Extraterrestrial &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll call these compound comparisons. To me this seems to be very problematic in may ways. One is that there are many unusual things that are never described as paranormal, supernatural etc. Take human pregnancy for instance. I'd be very hard pressed to argue with someone who said that pregnancy is paranormal or supernatural. Yet that use never occurs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my point is that the English language has not found a good way of creating and applying such compound comparisons. In fact the English language applies them in ways that are seriously flawed. That makes me think: do other languages use compound comparisons in a better way? For instance they could say that pregnancy is supernatural or whatever word they use for it? Is English the odd language out that uses compound comparisons to be so limited? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24875" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T21:32:32.570" Title="Is English unusual for using compound comparisons for describing unusual things?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2019-07-03T11:28:19.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31858" CreationDate="2019-07-03T05:59:42.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to have to frame-challenge this one. (This would be a comment, but it's too long for the character limit.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English seems to create normal/not normal divisions. For instance: Paranormal Supernatural Extraterrestrial&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Para-&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;super-&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;extra-&lt;/em&gt; are all Greek/Latin prefixes; out of the three, &lt;em&gt;super-&lt;/em&gt; is the only one that's stayed productive in English with its original Latin meaning intact. It comes from the Latin word for &quot;above&quot;, and when applied to an English word it means something like &quot;above and beyond&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Superhuman strength&lt;/em&gt; is above and beyond &lt;em&gt;human strength&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;supersonic speed&lt;/em&gt; is above and beyond &lt;em&gt;sonic speed&lt;/em&gt; (the speed of sound), and a &lt;em&gt;supercomputer&lt;/em&gt; is above and beyond a normal &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit to add: it can also mean literally &quot;above&quot; sometimes, which is the literal meaning in Latin: a &lt;em&gt;superscript&lt;/em&gt; is above the normal &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;, for instance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this reasoning, something is &lt;em&gt;supernatural&lt;/em&gt; if it's above and beyond what's natural. Werewolves, for example, defy our understanding of nature (biology in particular), so they're &lt;em&gt;supernatural&lt;/em&gt; creatures. Pregnancy certainly doesn't defy our understanding of nature: it's well-understood biologically, and happens in mammal species all across the world as well as in humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;em&gt;extra-&lt;/em&gt; in Latin means &quot;outside&quot;; in English it means &quot;extremely&quot;, back-derived from &lt;em&gt;extraordinary&lt;/em&gt; (beyond what is ordinary). &lt;em&gt;Extraterrestrial&lt;/em&gt; uses the Latin meaning: something that is outside (&lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt;) the earth (&lt;em&gt;terra&lt;/em&gt;). So life on Mars would be extraterrestrial, but human pregnancy wouldn't be, unless it e.g. happened during one of the Apollo missions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paranormal&lt;/em&gt;, finally, uses a Greek prefix that didn't catch on in English quite as much as &lt;em&gt;super-&lt;/em&gt; did; it means &quot;beside&quot; or &quot;apart from&quot;. So something &lt;em&gt;paranormal&lt;/em&gt; is separate from what is normal. In English, it's shifted to mean specifically &quot;separate from &lt;em&gt;our usual understanding&lt;/em&gt; of what is normal&quot;, so similar to &lt;em&gt;supernatural&lt;/em&gt;. Since pregnancy is a well-understood part of biology, it's not &lt;em&gt;paranormal&lt;/em&gt; in that sense either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the only one of those words that explicitly separates &quot;normal&quot; from &quot;not normal&quot; is &lt;em&gt;paranormal&lt;/em&gt;, which…is derived specifically from the word &quot;normal&quot;, and in modern usage is closer to &lt;em&gt;follows our understanding of nature&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;doesn't follow our understanding of nature&lt;/em&gt;. It's not a flaw in English: it's words meaning pretty much exactly what you'd expect from their constituent parts. The words for &quot;not following the laws of nature as we understand them&quot; in other languages, like French &lt;em&gt;innaturel&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;unnäturlich&lt;/em&gt;, have basically the same meaning and similarly wouldn't apply to pregnancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T21:32:32.570" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T21:32:32.570" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31847" CreationDate="2019-07-03T10:42:50.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our friend Draconis has given a very good answer, especially for the final /n/. I have only a few words about the Aramaic and Arabic forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Syriac form šlīmōn seems to be a re-Semitisation of the Greek Σαλωμων (Σολωμων etc.), apparently attached by folk etymology with Aramaic šallīm “complete, perfect”. Arabic Sulaymān is borrowed from Syriac or another Aramaic language, but revocalised to more closely resemble typical Arabic patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T10:42:50.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28279" CreationDate="2019-07-03T14:36:10.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several promising new developments where JSON is being used to provide improved modern data formats for computational linguistics, NLP, and corpus research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an extensive project under way to create a JSON framework for linguistic fieldwork resources, including lexicon, texts, etc:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Hieber, Daniel W. (2018). Data Format for Digital Linguistics.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Check it out at &lt;a href=&quot;https://format.digitallinguistics.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://format.digitallinguistics.io/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or see the project on GitHub: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/digitallinguistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/digitallinguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another useful source for JSON for syntax and semantics representations is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Forbes, Angus G., Lee, Kristine, Hahn-Powell, Gus, Valenzuela-Escárcega, Marco A. &amp;amp; Surdeanu, Mihai (2018). Text Annotation Graphs: Annotating complex natural language phenomena. In Goggi, S. &amp;amp; Mazo, H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Miyazaki, Japan: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1169&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information about this JSON approach is available from Angus Forbes' Creative Coding Lab on GitHub:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CreativeCodingLab/TextAnnotationGraphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/CreativeCodingLab/TextAnnotationGraphs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ines Montani of Spacy makes an interesting proposal for a new approach to JSON formatting for linguistic data/NLP:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/2928&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/2928&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basic documentation for Spacy's (existing) JSON NLP format is here:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Spacy (2018). JSON input format for training.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spacy.io/api/annotation#json-input&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spacy.io/api/annotation#json-input&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanford NLP describes a JSON formatter:    &lt;a href=&quot;https://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/pipeline/JSONOutputter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/pipeline/JSONOutputter.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, at the Rezonator project (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/johnwdubois/rezonator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/johnwdubois/rezonator&lt;/a&gt;) we are working to create a JSON format for the 2nd edition of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE). This is work in progress; stay tuned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24910" LastEditorUserId="24910" LastEditDate="2019-07-04T02:18:36.523" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T02:18:36.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2019-07-04T01:15:36.733" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Japanese student who learns both English and Russian, so I can compare both languages as a &quot;neutral&quot; person, and I think the root cause of your problem is that the mechanics of English speech is very different from that of Russian speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English speech is a continuous flow with a varying intonation, like a song. Here is a random example from a movie: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/OKTeMvhoNBs?t=1080&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scene&lt;/a&gt;. Listen how the guy says, &quot;Now they are whispering we got a secret investigation going on.&quot; It is a continuous flow of vowels, which transform to each other; consonants are &quot;superimposed&quot; on that flow. English speech is like а long continuous meowing by a cat. To talk like a native English speaker, I do this: (1) Before saying a sentence, I first decide exactly what sentence I am going to say, (2) I breathe in a lot of air, (3) then I start breathing out and making a continuous &quot;meowing,&quot; like a cat, superimposing consonants on the continuous flow of vowels. I say a sentence as a long single word, without any interruption of the flow, and I vary the intonation just as the guy in the video does. It is only after I stop saying the sentence that I make a short pause, during which I breathe in again. To talk like this, you need a focused and determined state of mind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mechanics of Russian speech is very different. It is based on consonants and is like a relaxed walk. You can say consonants with any pace, stop for a while, think a bit, then continue the sentence. You can breathe in and out when saying a sentence. You can make pauses between words. When I talk in Russian, I build my speech on consonants. In Russian speech, vowels are just ultra-short links connecting neighboring consonants. It is critical to pronounce all consonants distinctly and correctly, whilst you can be pretty careless with vowels because they are just very short links. You can say 'а' instead of 'o,' you can say 'э' instead of 'о,' and so on - no big deal. Let us consider this sentence: &quot;На дворе трава, на траве дрова, не руби дрова на траве двора.&quot; When you say this, you pronounce all consonants accurately and distinctly and make pauses between words. Or let's consider this: &quot;Устранить препятствия, затрудняющие усовершенствование процедуры освидетельствования.&quot; No English speaker would be able to pronounce this by using the English mechanics of speech. The key is to accurately and correctly say all consonants, not messing them up, and make all vowels very short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the English mechanics of speech is very different from the Russian one, it is no wonder that English speech sounds &quot;extraterrestrial&quot; to you. If an English speaker says, &quot;How are you, all right?&quot;  - this will sound to you like meowing of a cat, because it will be like a continuous flow, &quot;howareyouallright.&quot; You are just not used to hearing such speech. You cannot easily break it into individual sounds. It is a flow. You have to learn to recognize flow patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand English speech, you need a lot of experience in order to recognize flow patterns. There is no way around it. And you also need to mentally &quot;tune your receiver&quot; to the English mode of speech perception, that is, to temporarily forget all other languages you speak, in order not to use irrelevant habits of speech recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I humbly hope that I as a &quot;neutral&quot; person was able to give a helpful insight and that my humble view will be useful for Russian speakers learning English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24901" LastEditorUserId="24901" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T00:10:26.790" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T00:10:26.790" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31857" CreationDate="2019-07-04T11:24:27.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paucal is frequently not very strict, and in a number of languages with a paucal form, many different absolute quantities may be referred to sometimes with the paucal, sometimes with the plural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greville G. Corbett in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.dk/books?id=7jc-pgAFcE0C&amp;amp;lpg=PA23&amp;amp;vq=paucal&amp;amp;pg=PA24#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Number&lt;/a&gt;, a volume in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, writes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Schütz (1985: 251) also discusses the paucal in Fijian, and says that&#xA;  it can be used for three and for twelve. Some consultants put the&#xA;  limit at fifteen, others put it higher. He points out that contrast is&#xA;  more important than the specific number, and mentions a text in which&#xA;  approximately thirty people are referred to sometimes with the paucal&#xA;  and sometimes with the plural. Andrew Pawley (personal communication)&#xA;  also says that its range varies considerably according to the&#xA;  situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if this quote does not specifically answer your question, it strongly implies that there may well be a language, where ten grains of rice may be referred to in the paucal and ten people in the plural. But by the same logic, it may well be that the same language in other contexts will use the plural for ten grains of rice and in still other contexts use the paucal for ten people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19744" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T11:24:27.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31868" CreationDate="2019-07-05T04:45:00.173" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm working with a language that doesn't have much data available; the largest corpus around is a translation of the Bible, which is free to read online, but is presumably still copyrighted by the translator. Or suppose I've found a corpus of books to scan in, but those books were recently published and thus still under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do with that corpus, by law and by academic convention? For example, if it's freely available for reading (or if I've purchased a copy), does that also mean &quot;freely available for running a statistical analysis on&quot;? Can the results of that statistical analysis be redistributed, even if the original text can't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there's much legal precedent in this area, but I'm sure there's quite a lot of academic precedent in linguistics—corpora have to come from somewhere, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I'm asking this question from America, but information from anywhere would be useful!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T15:54:41.067" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T15:54:41.067" Title="What are the conventions for corpus usage?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36332" CreationDate="2019-07-05T10:13:25.630" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to synthesize the French vowels [o] and [ɔ] for running a perception experiment. I have been using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.praatvocaltoolkit.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praat Vocal Toolkit&lt;/a&gt; and got pretty nice results with the following formant values: F1(o)=430, F2(o)=800 Hz, F1(ɔ)=490, F2(ɔ)=1000 (I kept the other parameters at their default values). However, the F2 values that I used do not correspond to the typical F2 values one finds in the literature for those vowels. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/archive_papers/interspeech_2005/i05_2453.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gendrot and Adda-Decker (2005)&lt;/a&gt; found F2 values of about 1000 Hz and 1200 Hz for [o] and [ɔ], respectively. But, with these values, the vowels sound too central to my ear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea of why that might be so? And also, does anyone know of another (free) software that I could use to synthesize French vowels with realistic formant values?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24919" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-07-07T10:40:55.700" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T19:50:37.407" Title="How to synthesize French vowels" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;french&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31866" CreationDate="2019-07-05T13:15:36.080" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only speak for Germany, and IANAL (I am not a lawyer). The situation is basically as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can collect material from accessible sources (from the web, from radio broadcasts, from TV) and do analyses on that material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can do so within a closed collaboration with some collaborators including students and guests visiting your institution (they just have to sign that they don't take the corpus with them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot legally redistribute the collected material without permission of the copyright holders (sigh)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can redistribute some materials that do not allow the reconstruction of the original (e.g., word frequency lists)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some legally largely un-tested tricks I have encountered to circumgo the restrictions on redistribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tear the material in parts short enough to be not copyrightable and scramble the order of these parts (typical unit of the parts: sentences). You loose some research questions (e.g., cohesion) but you can do still a lot with this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thin the material by creating voids in the material (typical: Alternating chunks of 100 words visible and deleted)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parallel and coordinated crawling: Communicate with your partners at other places which websites to crawl and make sure that you crawl the same content by exchanging checksums of the crawled texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information you can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://irights.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Forschen-in-der-digitalen-Welt-Juristische-Handreichung-Geisteswissenschaften-dwp-2015-12.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Juristische Handreichung für die Geisteswissenschaften (DARIAH-DE Working Papers 12, 2015)&lt;/a&gt; (in German)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T13:15:36.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31872" CreationDate="2019-07-05T22:41:58.840" Score="73" ViewCount="9015" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that Old English had two letters, thorn and eth, which were used interchangeably to represent the sound &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;thin&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively, one might think that one of these letters would 'win', and replace the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we lost &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; of these letters and use the digraph &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did this happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23791" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T03:07:52.327" Title="Why did Old English lose both thorn and eth?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31870" CreationDate="2019-07-05T22:49:43.623" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The explanation I remember seeing for the rise of the digraph “th” and fall of the letters thorn and eth in English spelling is influence from French spelling habits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see more details if you do a search for &quot;digraph&quot; in the paper &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/11002/1/Jekiel%20%E2%80%93%202012%20%E2%80%93%20The%20evolution%20of%20English%20dental%20fricatives%20%E2%80%93%20variation%20and%20change.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The evolution of English dental fricatives:&#xA;variation and change&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Mateusz Jekiel (2012). Note that the history of the spelling of non-sibilant dental fricatives in English is fairly complicated and includes a lot of variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The digraph &quot;th&quot; had actually been used early on in the Old English period (alongside the letter &quot;d&quot; in medial or final positions). Jekiel says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to&#xA;  Hogg (1992b: 76-77), the &amp;lt;th&gt; digraph appeared first by the end of the 8th c. in early OE&#xA;  manuscripts, as it was borrowed from the Irish and spread by monks who taught Latin. Furthermore, &amp;lt;th&gt; also appeared in the 9th c. Old Saxon, where the grapheme represented only&#xA;  the voiceless dental fricative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 52)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the letter thorn lasted substantially past the Old English period, and even into Early Modern English in certain specific contexts: many function words starting with the th sound had abbreviations starting with thorn, which came to be written in a way that looked like the letter y. This is the source of “ye” as a spelling for the word “the”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T20:11:57.230" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T20:11:57.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31870" CreationDate="2019-07-05T23:04:51.247" Score="151" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My understanding is that Old English had two letters, thorn and eth, which were used interchangeably to represent the sound &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;thin&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;father&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much. In some languages they were distinct, but in English, either letter could be used for voiced or voiceless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Intuitively, one might think that one of these letters would 'win', and replace the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed: thorn &lt;em&gt;(þ)&lt;/em&gt; won, and eth &lt;em&gt;(ð)&lt;/em&gt; died out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead, we lost &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; of these letters and use the digraph &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eth was lost early, within Old English; thorn survived all the way into Early Modern English, and is found in the first printing of the King James Bible. (Norman) French influences brought about some use of &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;þ&lt;/em&gt; was still widely popular and universally understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But German, French, Italian, and other prominent languages of the time didn't use thorn, and thus typefaces imported from Europe didn't include it. So in printed books, thorn generally had to be replaced either with &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, or with the closest available character, &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;; the latter was readable, but somewhat annoying and unintuitive (since &lt;em&gt;þ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced nothing alike).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the convention of using &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; took over, and &lt;em&gt;þ&lt;/em&gt; vanished entirely. The use of &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; survives only in archaicisms like &quot;ye olde shoppe&quot;, where it's now pronounced &lt;code&gt;/j/&lt;/code&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And English-speakers, understanding that revenge was a dish best served cold, went on to impose ASCII on the world and destroy dozens and dozens of other languages' unique letters in the same way. All of which could have been avoided if Johannes Gutenberg had stuck to Unicode from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-07T06:41:04.800" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T06:41:04.800" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31839" CreationDate="2019-07-06T04:30:36.730" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best answer is: Adposition yields a more specific meaning/semantic, while 'case' yields a broader/deeper meanings/semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24922" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T05:44:15.850" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T05:44:15.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19976" CreationDate="2019-07-06T19:55:28.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It makes total sense to signal the start/end of a word in a ScriptThatDoesNotUseWhitespace. The ancient scripts that I have seen do not use whitespace. Having individual initial forms like capitals next to terminal forms as in Arabic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a script that does have whitespace, terminal forms may come pretty natural if writing &lt;em&gt;cursive&lt;/em&gt;, that is a handscript which does preferably not lift the pen until the end of the word--in contrast to American hand lettering, which mimics print letters. I totally agree with Draconis on that part, although that might look as simple as simple curl or drawn out stroke, as a matter of caligraphy. The economics of handwriting do have to be taken into account. There is a big difference between imprints, scratches, or brush strokes. This explains miniscule &quot;e&quot; as a capital &quot;E&quot; starting with the middle stroke but connecting to the above stroke. Whereas a stonemason can work more effectively if avoiding curves and extraneous strokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to consider is that terminal phonemes do possibly have a different sound. It's possible to see a kind of graph-symbolism in letters that imitates sound-qualities. I am not sure what to call this, since sound-symbolism means the exact opposite. Just for example: &quot;I&quot; is thin, &quot;O&quot; is wide and round like the rounded lips, &quot;U&quot; is open, &quot;A&quot; like &quot;K&quot; shows an increasing envelope, what with the glottal plosive that it often is, while &quot;E&quot; or rather Greek &quot;H&quot; (Eta) is very centric with it's central stroke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The display of the letters depends on the font you are using, but I have no time to take pictures or draw animations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i do not know enough about Arabic or Hebrew caligraphy for example, so I cannot speak to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24943" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T19:55:28.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-07T07:47:00.267" Score="2" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists have some methods to measure the complexities of the grammar of a language. Some linguists may refer to how many grammar rules that language has.    some may also refer to how many morphemes a single word has in that language , while other linguists may also refer to how many grammatical cases a language possesses . Okay let's go straight to the point, Polish is hard to learn because it possesses so many grammar rules and word changing, same for czech and Lithuanian . American indigenous and some caucasian languages are hard to learn because they possess so many morphemes in their single word (Abkhaz and Adyghe verbs are perfect examples). While Hungarian, and northeast caucasian languages like Tabassaran, and Tsez are hard to learn because they possess so many grammatical cases, with Tsez being the most extreme with 126 cases ( depending on one's analysis). My question is, What are the best methods to measure the complexity of the grammar of a language ? . What is the hardest language on earth to learn in terms of grammar complexities based on that method ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24952" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-07-11T11:29:25.850" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T14:54:14.930" Title="How to 'correctly' measure the complexity of the grammar of a language?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;complex-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31878" CreationDate="2019-07-07T11:09:11.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;a) What you exemplify is an &lt;em&gt;inductive argument&lt;/em&gt;, you have seen or heard of people who have a hard time learning the grammar, and you assume it were the grammars fault. Native speakers might think quite differently, though. What you are looking for is either a &lt;em&gt;reductive&lt;/em&gt; (rule based) argument, which would lead to a kind of Universal Grammar base line type system common to all the languages in comparison; Or a &lt;em&gt;deductive&lt;/em&gt; argument based around typology. I hope I did not mix-up the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) In physics there is a duality between &lt;em&gt;Measurement&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Control&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Regulation&lt;/em&gt;. Your question for measurement suffers from a loose definition of the system that you want to measure. In other words, you meant to ask for a definition of grammar-complexity. Since grammar is multi-facetted, there is very likely--in my humble opinion--no lossless projection onto a single dimensional measure. Only Euclidean spaces have the &lt;em&gt;unique &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;norm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. However, since there is no concensus on whether language grammar were, in some dark corners, a context-free grammar in the sense of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chomsky's hierarchy&lt;/a&gt;, thus NP-complete, and since NP-complete problems cannot be modeled in Euclidean spaces, though they can be approximated e.g. via schema of induction, I would not be too sure that your question has an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the rant, I am just trying to show the scope of the problem. Put another way, a language with only two words and a really simple construction rule can have a hell of a run-time complexity, but it's rules are really simple to describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24956" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T11:09:11.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31870" CreationDate="2019-07-07T16:57:38.840" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are my &lt;em&gt;notes&lt;/em&gt; on the question, a summary of most important linguistic research with relevant quotes; perhaps someone, who is more into linguistic theory, might find them useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-the-english-language/phonology-and-morphology/A8D95BCB691F2F39E767D11F8ED93441&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hogg 1992 (2005)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Orthographic usage was reasonably stable during the Old English period”;&#xA;“Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Latin normally kept to the Latin spelling conventions and alphabet, and in the earliest vernacular manuscripts the spelling system remained close to that of Latin texts, usually of Irish origin.”; thus, he continues, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“at first, we do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; find spellings with &amp;lt;æ&gt;, &amp;lt;w&gt;, &amp;lt;þ&gt; or &amp;lt;ð&gt;” (p. 71; emphasis mine - Alex B.), Hoggs calls the use of &amp;lt;þ&gt; or &amp;lt;ð&gt;” &lt;strong&gt;the Anglo-Saxon innovations&lt;/strong&gt; (p. 77) because in the very earliest manuscripts, especially from the north, we find the digraph &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; or the simple graph &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444341355.ch2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hogg 1992/2011&lt;/a&gt; mentions Bede(M), EpGl and the later LVD (p. 33);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;þ&gt; and &amp;lt;ð&gt; “were in principle interchangeable with one another, whatever the generality of their usage or the habits of individual scribes” (p. 76), for instance, he quotes the following spelling variants from Beowulf, syððan (line 6), syðþan (line 132), syþðan (line 283), and syþþan (line 604).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;þ&gt; and &amp;lt;ð&gt; “must have been used by the last quarter of the seventh century”;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Differences in usage: at first, &amp;lt;ð&gt; was the most frequent choice (up to about the time of Alfred); later, &amp;lt;þ&gt; was more and more used, mainly restricted to initial position (with some occasional instances in medial position and rare in final position).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ð eth (or edh):&lt;/strong&gt; “the native English term appears to have been ðæt” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2854443&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robinson 1973:&lt;/a&gt; 451); Hogg 1992: 75 adds that since the nineteenth century it has been known under its current name (Robinson 1973: 451 mentions its current name was borrowed from Modern Icelandic but Hoggs claims that “this is uncertain”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;digraph th:&lt;/strong&gt; “appears to have been borrowed from Irish” (Hogg, p. 77);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Middle English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lass 1992 writes that “&amp;lt;ð&gt; began to yield to &amp;lt;þ&gt; in the thirteenth century, though it remains sporadically through the fourteenth” (p. 36) - against an incorrect assertion in one of the other answers posted here. He adds that in Early Middle English &amp;lt;þ&gt; was the most common graphical representation for /θ, ð/, although the digraph th ‘reappears’ in the twelfth century and gradually ousts &amp;lt;þ&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444342994&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Upward and Davidson 2011:&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;“Through the ME period this TH was increasingly adopted in place of the OE symbols Þ and Ð to represent the native Eng voiced and voiceless sounds /ð, θ/” (p. 160). They list it under &lt;strong&gt;“Spelling changes introduced by Anglo-Norman scribes”&lt;/strong&gt; (p. 176, emphasis mine - Alex B.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Upward and Davidson 2011 mention that this &lt;em&gt;gradual&lt;/em&gt; change was completed by about the end of the 15th century” (p. 176).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In passim, they make an accurate observation, almost a truism I'd say, about TH &quot;being &lt;strong&gt;more economical&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;not susceptible to misreading&lt;/strong&gt; as T+H&quot; (p. 199, emphasis mine - Alex B.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They add that “the digraph TH is not normally found in Eng words of pure Lat (as opposed to Graeco-Lat) or Fr derivation” (with some exceptions: faith, author, authority, anthem, and thyme) – see p. 199-200 for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/13280/445&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, drawing on Blake 2012, after the Norman Conquest, English monasteries started receiving a lot of monks trained in France who started copying OE texts applying spelling practices found in the languages they were familiar with (Old French and Latin?). Those practices were further spread by the other monks whose native language was English but who got trained primarily in Old French and a bit of Latin - Cecily Clark (Clark 1992) calls them the Gallicizing scribes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Printing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Scragg 1974 we can read that William Caxton, the first English printer, usually used the digraph th and only occasionally used a modified form of &amp;lt;þ&gt;, the latter survived in private documents and in some printed books until the seventeenth century, esp. in the contracted forms of the definite article y&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; and demonstrative y&lt;sup&gt;t&lt;/sup&gt; (p. 2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by that time th had already practically ousted &amp;lt;þ&gt;, which had happened &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; printing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here's a passage from Raoul Lefèvre (translated by William Caxton), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126577.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;cf. the following quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/10/jensen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jensen 2012&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The gradual loss of &amp;lt;þ&gt; in favour of &amp;lt;th&gt; in the English spelling system has traditionally been explained by the introduction of print. However, &lt;strong&gt;Stenroos (2006: 10) argues that the replacement of &amp;lt;þ&gt; was a gradual process that had begun long before the advent of printing.&lt;/strong&gt; She bases her argument on the following three points. Firstly, the use of &amp;lt;th&gt; appears in the southern part of England already as early as ca 1300 and grows steadily more common through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Secondly, Scragg (1974: 67) suggests that printing and scribal traditions may have been relatively isolated from each other until well into the sixteenth century. Thirdly, it is not completely obvious that the carrying over of thorn into printing would have posed an insurmountable problem: some types used in England did include thorn, and the letter ‘y’ was always available.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Re: father&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Old English, this word was always spelled with the simple graph d. The PDE spelling with the digraph th is a Middle English innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T03:07:52.327" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T03:07:52.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31878" CreationDate="2019-07-08T06:59:06.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't the slightest idea what the answer to you question might be.  I think you're wasting your time with such speculations.  Basically, I guess, you think the difficulty of a language must be somehow proportional to the length of a grammar book written for that language.  I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details of vocabulary are a great labor for dictionary makers and grammar writers, but humans don't learn languages by reading dictionaries and grammars, though those may be helpful.  Instead, humans have a fantastic ability to remember such details about words -- it's not hard for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T06:59:06.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31888" CreationDate="2019-07-08T14:39:30.067" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;A cat is an animal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Is a cat an animal?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a theory that the word order here is important. One must first put the image of a &quot;cat&quot; in your brain BEFORE recognising if it is an &quot;animal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &quot;Is an example of an animal, a cat?&quot; is much more unnatural. Or perhaps &quot;Are there animals called cats?&quot; But these are not the usual way of asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages in which these common phrases are reversed? Which would disprove my theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T18:01:24.297" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T18:17:44.423" Title="Are there languages where this &quot;is&quot; phrase is reversed?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;word-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31884" CreationDate="2019-07-08T17:40:35.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. In the most common order for equative or defining sentences in Welsh, the complement comes first, then the verb, then the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (from Wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_syntax#Noun_and_adjective_complements&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welsh syntax&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diffoddwr tân ydy Gwyn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Gwyn is a fireman.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see this in use, look at the first sentence of most articles in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welsh Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. The usual syntax is &amp;quot;[definition, sometimes quite long] yw [subject of article]&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Yw&amp;quot; is one of the words for &amp;quot;is&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T17:40:35.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-08T17:41:11.177" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a computational linguist's point of view, is there a lower limit on the number of hours of speech needed to train a neural net to translate speech to text? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-many-voice-data-is-needed-for-the-training-of-commercial-DNN-HMM-ASR-system-with-accuracy-of-90&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An estimate from CMU&lt;/a&gt; is 3000-5000 hours for 90% accuracy&#xA;commercial quality speech recognition. Is there is a minimum amount of information needed to reproduce the complexity of the actual language.  I.e., if you had 5000 hours and compress it down with a neural net, there is some minimum size neural net needed to do a good job at speech recognition.   You can call that the &quot;bit complexity of a natural language&quot;.  Does inverting the compression ratio tell you how many hours of speech, at a minimum, you would need to train a commercial quality speech recognition system?  For context, the classic paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prediction and Entropy of Printed English&lt;/a&gt; seems relevant.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also relevant is the work of &lt;a href=&quot;http://mltheory.cs.princeton.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanjeev Arora&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.ias.edu/theoretical_machine_learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theoretical machine learning&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question comes out of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openclir-evaluation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NIST OpenCLIR19 evaluation&lt;/a&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/opensat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSAT19&lt;/a&gt;.  OpenSAT is having an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2019/08/opensat19-workshop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open meeting in August&lt;/a&gt;.  In both programs there is a focus on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Who-is-doing-interesting-NLP-research-for-low-resource-languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Low Resource Languages&lt;/a&gt;. OpenCLIR had 80 hours of Swahili and OpenSAT has Pashto. In OpenCLIR, no solver team was able to do speech recognition on Swahili training from 80 hours of speech. Hence the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23445" LastEditorUserId="23445" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T11:16:57.230" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T11:16:57.230" Title="Computational linguist's estimate of minimum hours of speech needed to train a neural net to recognize speech" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;machine-translation&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;&lt;entropy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31884" CreationDate="2019-07-08T18:17:44.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word order in a copular construction can be flexible according to the languages of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have for a canonical sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject + Copula + Predicate (e.g English)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copula + Subject + Predicate (e.g Welsh)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Predicate + Subject + Copula (e.g Basques)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copula + Predicate + Subject (e.g Irish)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, this order can vary according to the tense, the modality and so on. So your theory cannot be endorsed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T18:17:44.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-08T22:56:10.097" Score="14" ViewCount="6571" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, there are the &quot;vosotros&quot; (only used in Spain) and &quot;ustedes&quot; (formal in Spain) forms for use when talking to a group of people. These also use specific conjugations different different from the regular single &quot;tú&quot; or &quot;usted&quot; (formal) forms. I don't speak it, but I've heard French also has this. However, these are both Romance languages, so it makes sense that they'd be similar in such a fundamental thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In standard English, we have no such thing; &quot;you&quot; can be used when talking to one person or to multiple people, with no distinction necessary. &lt;strong&gt;Is English unusual? Do more languages have a second person plural form or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24394" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T09:53:12.350" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T21:45:03.900" Title="Is English unusual in having no second person plural form?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;pronouns&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31889" CreationDate="2019-07-08T23:24:31.380" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;English marks plurality in first and third person pronouns (&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;he/she/it&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;), but not in the second person (you). (The singular &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; did exist in English in the past, but is now considered obsolete.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/35&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS chapter 35&lt;/a&gt; (paragraph 5.1), about 20% of languages distinguish plurality in either first person or second person but not both. So the partial lack of plurality marking in English is present in a minority of languages, but it isn't incredibly rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among Indo-European languages, I think the lack of plurality marking on pronouns is less common, but I don't have any statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T23:24:31.380" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31889" CreationDate="2019-07-09T08:30:59.487" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although largely archaic, in &lt;em&gt;some locations&lt;/em&gt; (some parts of Northern England/Cornwall/Ireland, among others) the word &quot;ye&quot; is still used as second-person-plural.  It can also be found in some older works, such as the King James Bible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15%3A16&amp;amp;version=KJV&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 15:16&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that here both &quot;ye&quot; and &quot;you&quot; are &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; being used as plural second person, with &quot;ye&quot; as the Subjective form - vs &quot;thou&quot; as the singular second person Subjective - and &quot;you&quot; as the Objective form - vs &quot;thee&quot; as the singular second person Objective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be confused with &quot;ye&quot; as a typographical approximation of &quot;þe&quot; (i.e. &quot;the&quot;) as in &quot;þe olde shoppe&quot;/&quot;ye olde shoppe&quot;, which arose from the similarities between the cursive gothic letter &quot;y&quot; and &quot;þ&quot; (pronounced &quot;thorn&quot;) which was not widely available in movable type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Alternatively - for those of you living in the Southern States of America, there's always &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;y'all&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;strong&gt;&amp;#42;shudder&amp;#42;&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23599" LastEditorUserId="23599" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T08:36:44.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T08:36:44.680" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30113" CreationDate="2019-07-09T19:25:08.527" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to think that when it was found that in battle an armored horseman was worth 100 soldiers on foot, a nobleman considered himself worth 100 farmers, and hence a farmer had to address a nobleman in the plural, whereas the nobleman would speak to the farmer in the singular. Among their like, people in high ranks would then use the plural, those in low ranks the singular. That is what we have in Shakepare's pieces. Nowadays all English speakers always use the plural, and they are not even aware &quot;you&quot;  is not the singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@JeffZeitlin regarding German: historically, there were various ways of polite address:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the second person plural, as in English and French: &quot;Seid willkommen, edler Herr, was ist Euer Begehr?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the third person singular, to keep the distance: &quot;Lass Er sich sagen, Er ist ein Lump!&quot;. Since no 3rd person imperative exists, the subjunctive is used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the combination of both, the third person plural. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is the polite address in today's German. The verb forms of the 3rd person plural need to be used (&quot;sie sind&quot; = they are, &quot;Sie sind&quot; = you (polite address) are), and the subjunctive replaces the imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25020" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T19:25:08.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31917" CreationDate="2019-07-10T04:41:06.523" Score="4" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it easier for speakers of SOV languages to learn SOV/VSO syntax or vice versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading about constructed languages recently, specifically the ones intended to be easy to learn such as Esperanto and Ido or trivial to learn but not very expressive such as Toki Pona. These languages or vaguely-language-like-things are basically head initial and have SVO as their dominant word order. I'm curious as to whether this is the &quot;best&quot; choice if the goal is to be as friendly as possible to L2 learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OV and VO languages are &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/feature/83A#2/18.0/152.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approximately equally common&lt;/a&gt;, although things might be different if we counted languages by number of speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm curious which order is easier to learn for native speakers of languages using the other order... or if perhaps word order is totally insignificant when it comes to L2 acquisition and ease or difficulty is dominated by other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've seen a couple of works about L2 acquisition of specific features in specific languages by English speakers and some theoretical things such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~lupyan/LandC-cogsci2002.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; that seek to explain the presence of case-marking in SOV languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T15:28:00.063" Title="Ease of L2 acquisition of SOV and SVO/VSO word order" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31897" CreationDate="2019-07-10T06:08:14.177" Score="6" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norwegian &lt;em&gt;gøy&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;fun&quot; in both Bokmål and Nynorsk. Does this word have anything to do with English &lt;em&gt;gay&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary says &lt;em&gt;gay&lt;/em&gt; comes ultimately from Proto-Germanic &lt;em&gt;ganhuz&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sudden&quot; via Old French &lt;em&gt;gai&lt;/em&gt; &quot;joyful, laughing,  merry&quot;, but under &lt;em&gt;ganhuz&lt;/em&gt;, Wiktionary lists no North Germanic descendants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14808" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T14:08:51.543" Title="Are English 'gay' and Norwegian 'gøy' cognates?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;&lt;norwegian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31896" CreationDate="2019-07-10T12:38:48.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.naob.no/ordbok/g%C3%B8y_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;to the Norske Akademis Ordbok&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gøy&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;from&lt;/strong&gt; English “gay”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T12:38:48.830" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-10T14:38:47.220" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an audio file database with any audio format which will contain the 44 English phonemes spoken by different speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25032" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T16:20:59.337" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T16:20:59.337" Title="English phonemes audio database" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31878" CreationDate="2019-07-11T03:04:44.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linguists have some methods to measure the complexities of the grammar of a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Methods to measure the complexities of &lt;strong&gt;different aspects&lt;/strong&gt;, absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the best methods to measure the complexity of the grammar of a language ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the problem: there is no best method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like asking &quot;which cultures on earth are the most complex?&quot; Different cultures, like different languages, are complex in different ways. Some languages have extremely complicated systems of derivational morphology, others have tables and tables full of inflections, and still others have syntax full of movement rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most importantly—complexity in one of these areas tends to lead to simplicity in others. Languages with complicated inflection systems tend to have a freer syntax, for example, while languages with complicated syntax don't need as many inflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to find a language that's &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; in all of these respects: look into the early stages of trade languages and pidgins as they begin their evolution into creoles. They tend to start with very straightforward syntax, and almost no morphology at all. But as time goes on, they tend to start gathering complexity, since deeper syntax and morphology make it easier to communicate complicated ideas. Eventually, they reach the level of other natural languages, and tend to rest comfortably there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If someone were to actually make a metric of &quot;language complexity&quot; or &quot;language learnability&quot;, specifically excluding orthography (since that tends to come later), I would expect all well-established natural languages to be hovering around the same level. The process of language learning puts strong selection pressures on languages, keeping them complicated enough to express elaborate concepts, but simple enough to be learned by speakers. As a pidgin develops into a proper living language, these pressures are what push it to take on more and more intricacies until it reaches that same vague level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T03:04:44.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-11T15:12:11.267" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanna ask a question about semantics. It's on page 20 in the paper &quot;Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese&quot; (Kratzer &amp;amp; Shimoyama, 2002).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is the part Computing the total meaning of (17). Why is N(A)↔N(B) (N stands for necessity, I guess) equal to P(A) &amp;amp; P(B)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And doesn't N(A)↔N(B) mean &quot;must borrow A iff must borrow B and vice versa&quot;? In this case, isn't it the case that the person has to borrow both (which is not the intended meaning of the sentence)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Necessity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(17) Du musst dir irgendeins von diesen beiden Büchern leihen.&#xA;You must you(dat.) irgend-one of those two books borrow. ‘You must borrow one of those two books, it doesn’t matter which.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative set chosen: Must {A, B}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T(ruth-conditional) content: N(A∨B)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figuring out the implicature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She picked the widest set of alternatives, {A,B}. Why didn’t she pick {A}, which would have led to a stronger claim? It might be that N(A) is false. Or else, it might be that N(A) is true, but its exhaustivity inference ¬N(B) is false. We infer N(A)→N(B). The same kind of reasoning can be given for why she didn’t pick {B}, and we infer N(B)→N(A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computing the total meaning of (17)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N(A∨B) T-content of claim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N(A)↔N(B) Implicature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N (A∨B) &amp;amp; (N(A)↔N(B)) Total meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;N (A∨B) &amp;amp; P(A) &amp;amp; P(B) Implication of total meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25042" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T15:12:11.267" Title="Necessity and Possibility, Domain Widen, Indeterminate Phrase" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;logic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31905" CreationDate="2019-07-11T23:00:52.823" Score="3" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inscribed on a bronze sword in the British Museum is a statement of ownership, which the museum attributes to &quot;Marduk-nadin-ahhe&quot;. However, the inscription does not directly say this, but gives the name as &quot;d.amar.utu-sum-šeš.meš&quot;. When I look up the Marduk name in Thallquist's Assyrian Names, it lists 3 explanations for this name as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;AMAR.UD-na-din-SES&#xA;AMAR.UD-SE-PAP&#xA;AMAR.UD-SE-SES&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these match the inscription &quot;amar.utu-sum-ses.mes&quot;. How should I interpret Thallquist's dictionary? Is the Marduk name Assyrian and then the definitions various variants of the same name in Babylonian, or vice versa? And how is that the British museum is equating amar.utu.sum-ses.mes with Marduk-nadin-ahhe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T05:06:48.703" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T05:06:48.703" Title="Why is amar.utu.sum-ses.mes equivalent to Marduk-nadin-ahhe?" Tags="&lt;assyrian&gt;&lt;babylonian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31904" CreationDate="2019-07-12T01:52:27.490" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name &quot;Marduk&quot;, as in the deity, was originally written . This spells out something like &lt;em&gt;amar utu&lt;/em&gt;, with the first sign being silent (&lt;code&gt;[DIŊIR]&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;[D]&lt;/code&gt; for short—basically meaning &quot;what follows is a divine name&quot;, for disambiguation). All together, it means something like &quot;solar calf&quot;, in Sumerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Akkadians and others borrowed the writing system, though, they didn't always use it phonetically. When they wanted to write about Marduk, they used these same signs for Marduk—even though the Akkadians pronounced their deity's name &lt;em&gt;Marduk&lt;/em&gt;, and the signs phonetically spell out &lt;em&gt;Amar Utu&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is called a Sumerogram, and in Latin transcriptions, it's written with capital letters to show that &lt;strong&gt;those letters have no relationship to the actual pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt;. When an Akkadian-speaker writes , we transcribe it as &lt;code&gt;[D]AMAR.UTU&lt;/code&gt;, and it phonetically spells out &lt;em&gt;amar utu&lt;/em&gt;, but the actual intended pronunciation was more like &lt;em&gt;marduk&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the capitalization in the British Museum's transcription is important: Marduk-nadin-ahhe's name, as written on the blade, is &lt;code&gt;[D]AMAR.UTU-SUM-ŠEŠ.MEŠ&lt;/code&gt;. In other words, there are three different Sumerograms, which represent Sumerian words pronounced &lt;em&gt;amar utu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sum&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;šeš meš&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the name, as actually spoken, used &lt;em&gt;translations&lt;/em&gt; of those three words: &lt;em&gt;Marduk&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nādin&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;aḫḫē&lt;/em&gt;. That is, his name was &lt;em&gt;pronounced&lt;/em&gt; something like &lt;em&gt;Marduk-nādin-aḫḫē&lt;/em&gt; by his subjects, despite the spelling—&lt;em&gt;amar utu sum šeš meš&lt;/em&gt; is just what you get when you read the characters as if they were Sumerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(His name is also sometimes written as &lt;code&gt;[M][D]AMAR.UTU-na-din-MU&lt;/code&gt;, using a mixture of Sumerograms and actual phonetic characters. Here, the characters in the middle actually represent the pronunciations &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;din&lt;/em&gt;, not any meaning in Sumerian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T02:07:58.817" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T02:07:58.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31906" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31907" CreationDate="2019-07-12T11:37:33.167" Score="5" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for the following phenomenon or the words that are used in this way: One starts to utter a swear word, but continues to form an innocent sounding word. Examples from German are &lt;em&gt;Sack Zement&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Sakrament&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Scheibenkleister&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Scheibenhonig&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Scheiße&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T12:41:39.803" Title="Replacements for swear words" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;profanity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31906" CreationDate="2019-07-12T12:20:38.587" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're talking about are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;minced oaths&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some contemporary examples from English are &lt;em&gt;sugar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fudge&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;shit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt; or even the longer phrase &lt;em&gt;shut the f...ront door&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;shut the fuck up&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13303" LastEditorUserId="13303" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T12:41:39.803" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T12:41:39.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31910" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-13T04:49:35.470" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the sound changes that occur from Proto Bengali to Bengali? In which order did they  occur historically? &#xA;Ex.&#xA;PB Būdhā became B Buro&#xA;PB Karisi became B koriš &#xA;PB dahī became B doi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21930" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T10:18:01.750" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T10:18:01.750" Title="Sound Changes From Proto Bengali to Bengali" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indian-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1922" CreationDate="2019-07-13T05:31:09.337" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perfect example of &lt;em&gt;verbal gender&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;verb classes&lt;/em&gt; would be a language that assigns every verb to one of a small number of classes and has morphology elsewhere in the sentence that agrees with the verb, e.g. declining adverbs to agree with the verb. I don't know of any slam dunk examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French itself, though, has an example of something similar. The selection of &lt;em&gt;avoir&lt;/em&gt; (to have) or &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; (to be) for forming compound tenses is partly lexical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closed class of intransitive verbs use &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;aller&lt;/em&gt; (to go), &lt;em&gt;devenir&lt;/em&gt; (to become), &lt;em&gt;naître&lt;/em&gt; (to be born)) and every reflexive verb uses &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Je             suis     allé(e).&#xA;1sg.NOM be.1sg.PRES   go.PP.M/F&#xA;I went / I have gone.&#xA;&#xA;J'                 ai     dormi&#xA;1sg.NOM have.1sg.PRES  sleep.PP&#xA;I slept / I have slept&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Selection of &lt;em&gt;être&lt;/em&gt; is highly correlated with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaccusative_verb#Tests_for_unaccusativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unaccusativity&lt;/a&gt;, but in French the choice of auxiliary cannot be predicted &lt;em&gt;perfectly&lt;/em&gt; from semantic criteria alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://krieger.jhu.edu/cogsci/wp-content/uploads/sites/70/2017/02/LegendreSorace2010Englishversioncompressed.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; goes into some detail about the verbs that form compound tenses with &lt;em&gt;to have&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt; in French and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastEditorUserId="13573" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T16:57:12.333" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T16:57:12.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-13T21:35:11.850" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen several mentions of &quot;sonority&quot; in different works, most of which define it as something like &quot;how loud a particular sound is in relation to other speech sounds&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like something that can be measured quantitatively: take the average amplitude of the phone in question, divide it by the average amplitude of the entire utterance, and you have a nice clean measured value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I also see sonority brought up in &lt;em&gt;phonological&lt;/em&gt; contexts. For instance, English syllable structure follows a &quot;sonority sequencing constraint&quot; where a less sonorous phone cannot be closer to the nucleus than a more sonorous one. This is violated only by the clusters &lt;code&gt;/sp/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/st/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/sk/&lt;/code&gt;, which some theories explain by calling those three individual phonemes rather than clusters (&quot;presigmatized stops&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the sonority hierarchy applies to &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't that undermine its phonetic nature? The amplitude of a waveform doesn't change if we decide that &lt;code&gt;/st/&lt;/code&gt; is one phoneme or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;strong&gt;is &lt;em&gt;sonority&lt;/em&gt; conventionally a phonetic or a phonological property?&lt;/strong&gt; Or are there two separate definitions of the word, one used in phonetics, and one used in phonology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T22:55:13.763" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T21:12:43.717" Title="Is sonority phonological or phonetic?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;sonority&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31912" CreationDate="2019-07-13T22:38:45.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term is a phonological one rather than a phonetic one, though given common assumptions about phonological properties, that implies (falsely IMO, but that's another matter) that it is a phonetic property, because phonological properties are widely thought to be really phonetic in nature. I don't think I have ever seen a phonetic paper (i.e. something published in &lt;em&gt;JASA, JoP, Phonetica&lt;/em&gt;) ever claim to quantify &quot;sonority&quot;, but it is possible that some phonetic paper has referred casually to the phonological account (e.g. &quot;we would need to look at segments of high sonority&quot;). There are phonological accounts which attempt to relate &quot;sonority&quot; to a physical property, namely properties of the vocal tract which result in minimal signal damping. See Hume &amp;amp; Odden (&quot;Reconsidering [consonantal]&quot;) for an account in terms of &quot;impedance&quot;, i.e. those factors in the vocal tract configuration that increase resistance to airflow. This relates to amplitude of the signal, but factors out differences in the source which make amplitude an unsatisfactory measure of whatever &quot;sonority&quot; is about. This is, however, a speculative account of the concept &quot;sonority&quot; (the inverse of &quot;impedance&quot;), posited simply to show that the feature [consonantal] is not necessary in order to compute that relation where V &gt; y &gt; l &gt; m &gt; p.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that phonological theorists posit phonological devices that derive the scale V &gt; y &gt; l &gt; m &gt; p, you can say that it is a phonological concept. There is a substantial debate over whether sonority is a legitimate concept, as opposed to being epiphenomenal. The latter account says that grammatical machinery doesn't need &quot;sonority&quot;, instead the observed patterns ([.prV] but not *[.rpV]; [Vrp.] but not *[Vpr.]) are explained perceptually – the &quot;marked&quot; sequences are harder to perceive than the &quot;unmarked&quot; ones. &#xA;So in that account, the response is simply &quot;Sonority? What's that?&quot;. Among theorists who believe that sonority is a primitive property of segments, it seems that the prevailing oipnion is that &quot;sonority&quot; is a scalar phonological property, which can have some number of values, around 6 or 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question about phones and phonemes is based on a premise that was rejected decades ago, namely that the (allo)phone / phoneme distinction entails different grammatical mechanisms. On the other hand, the attempt to say that the phonetic causal mechanism is part of the phonological computation results in a causality paradox (you have to access the actual physical outcome so that you can compute what the phonological output is, which then results in the actual physical outcome). Hale &amp;amp; Reiss &lt;em&gt;The phonological enterprise&lt;/em&gt; discuss the phonological substance abuse problem at length. Most often, phonologists who believe in sonority consider sonority to be a grammatically arbitrary property whose existence can be rationalized by reference to a phonetic explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not clear whether sonority is a &quot;feature&quot; of any sort. &quot;Feature&quot; has a specific meaning in phonology (&quot;syllable&quot; is not a feature), and sonority isn't generally treated as a feature. I don't think many phoneticians believe in &quot;phonetic features&quot;. However, you might have intended &quot;property&quot;, a fairly non-commital term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T22:38:45.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-14T02:46:16.613" Score="0" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the paper below, and because of my lack of knowledge on the linguistic terms, I have been stuck half way through. If you would be kind enough to enlighten me, I would be very much obliged. My take is 'existential force' points to, as it says, the phenomenon where the referent is in existence whereas 'universal force' points to the force that a free choice item has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, if you would also paraphrase the 'when it gets bound by an &lt;strong&gt;unselective operator&lt;/strong&gt;' into lay person's terms I would also appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[E]xamples like (10) indicate that weak definites have the force of&#xA;  the complement indefinite not only when the indefinite has&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;existential force&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but also &lt;strong&gt;when it gets bound by an unselective operator&lt;/strong&gt; and acquires &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;universal force&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(10) If the student of a linguist owns a donkey, he beats it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A different solution comes to mind, namely, that the reason why weak&#xA;  definites have the interpretation we are interested in is because&#xA;  their interpretation gets 'anchored' to that of the NP that serves as&#xA;  complement of of, so that if that NP gets bound by an operator, these&#xA;  definites get bound by that operator as well.[[Weak Definites][1] by&#xA;  Massimo Poesio]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[1]:&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiqsJenzbPjAhUvyYsBHXRIDmwQFjABegQIABAC&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fjournals.linguisticsociety.org%2Fproceedings%2Findex.php%2FSALT%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F2465%2F2213&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0WebL6SH8Hw7Ba-J5hSa0O&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiqsJenzbPjAhUvyYsBHXRIDmwQFjABegQIABAC&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fjournals.linguisticsociety.org%2Fproceedings%2Findex.php%2FSALT%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F2465%2F2213&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0WebL6SH8Hw7Ba-J5hSa0O&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastEditorUserId="10826" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T04:51:42.913" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T18:04:34.930" Title="existential force and universal force" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-14T12:05:04.520" Score="6" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take kazakh language as an example. In every source I've read there are 7 cases in kazakh language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nominative &lt;strong&gt;üi&lt;/strong&gt; - a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa&lt;/strong&gt; - garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;genitive &lt;strong&gt;üi-diŋ&lt;/strong&gt; - of a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-niŋ&lt;/strong&gt; - of a garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dative &lt;strong&gt;üi-ge&lt;/strong&gt; - (in)to a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-ğa&lt;/strong&gt; - to a garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accusative &lt;strong&gt;üi-di&lt;/strong&gt; - a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-ni&lt;/strong&gt; - a garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;locative &lt;strong&gt;üi-de&lt;/strong&gt; - in a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-da&lt;/strong&gt; - in a garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ablative &lt;strong&gt;üi-den&lt;/strong&gt; - from a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-dan&lt;/strong&gt; - from a garden;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instrumental &lt;strong&gt;üi-men&lt;/strong&gt; - with a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-men&lt;/strong&gt; - with a garden.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could distinguish at least 3 more cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abessive &lt;strong&gt;üi-siz&lt;/strong&gt; - without a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-siz&lt;/strong&gt; - without a garden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;essive &lt;strong&gt;üi-she&lt;/strong&gt; - as a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-sha&lt;/strong&gt; - as a garden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comparative &lt;strong&gt;üi-dei&lt;/strong&gt; - like a house, &lt;strong&gt;baqşa-dai&lt;/strong&gt; - like a garden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these 3 more can be considered as grammatical cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are similar cases in turkish language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;İlgisizlik Hali&lt;/em&gt; (abessive) &lt;strong&gt;bahçe-siz&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;without garden&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eşitlik Hali&lt;/em&gt; (essive) &lt;strong&gt;bahçe-ce&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;as a garden&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25054" LastEditorUserId="25054" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T09:16:00.097" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T09:16:00.097" Title="What is considered a grammatical case in the framework of turkic languages?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;turkic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-14T13:48:43.983" Score="5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious as to whether anyone has attempted to come up with a quantitative measure of information conveyed by written words, symbols or graphs, and particularly curious if anyone has studied Japanese kanji or Chinese hanzi in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's often said that Chinese and Japanese are more &quot;information dense&quot; in their written languages, which seems intuitively true given that &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/1088290/in-japanese-chinese-and-korean-140-characters-for-twitter-twtr-is-plenty-thank-you/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tweets in Japanese, Chinese and Korean average out as much shorter&lt;/a&gt; than other Western languages. But I don't know of any attempt to put actual numbers to the amount of information that can be conveyed by logographs in Japanese and Chinese (I'm not discussing Korean as I have no knowledge of the language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively this seems like a near impossible task, given the amount of ambiguity in, for example, the character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;上&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which in Japanese can mean &quot;above&quot;, &quot;up&quot;, &quot;elder&quot;, &quot;before&quot;, &quot;previous&quot;, &quot;based on&quot;, &quot;since&quot; and so on, depending on the context. Some of these meanings are shared with Chinese, where it can also mean &quot;to attend a class&quot;, &quot;to climb up&quot; or &quot;to go up&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, I wonder if anyone has ever attempted such a quantification for Chinese/Japanese, or indeed in any written language. I haven't managed to find any studies through Google Scholar or through quick googling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3340" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-15T12:29:54.907" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T12:29:54.907" Title="Are there studies which attempt to quantify the information conveyed by written languages - especially Japanese/Chinese?" Tags="&lt;written-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31895" CreationDate="2019-07-14T15:28:00.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many SOV languages are head final. Korean and Japanese are famous examples. In head final languages, sentences that begin with a subordinate clause are temporarily ambiguous. In other words, the listener or reader cannot be certain if the words encountered belong to the main clause or the subordinate clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The book that we bought yesterday in town fell on the floor.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At no point in the sentence is there any ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same sentence in a head final SOV language would be,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We town in yesterday bought that the book the floor on fell.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there is initial ambiguity about whether constituents such as &quot;we&quot;, &quot;town in&quot;, and &quot;yesterday&quot; belong to the main clause or to the relative clause. In fact, even when one gets to &quot;the book&quot; there is nothing that assures the decoder that he or she is now in the main clause. One could be at the beginning of another embedded relative clause. The ambiguity is not resolved until the main verb at the end of the sentence is reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively it can be assumed that this structural ambiguity causes significant cognitive load. Eye tracking experiments have shown that indeed this is the case, suggesting that SOV languages are harder for SVO language speakers to learn than SVO languages are for speakers of an SOV language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &quot;COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC FACTORS AFFECTING SUBJECT/OBJECT ASYMMETRY: AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY OF PRENOMINAL RELATIVE CLAUSES IN KOREAN&quot; Language Vol. 86, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 2010), pp. 546-582 (37 pages) Published by: Linguistic Society of America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25056" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T15:28:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31914" CreationDate="2019-07-14T17:35:49.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This refers to the &lt;em&gt;existential quantifier&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;exists X&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;universal quantifier&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;for all x&quot;, respectively in first order logic, which quantifies formulas over the elements of a set, not to be confused with higher order logic, that quantifies formulas over classes of formulas. The donkey-beating sentences are the canonical example in this context in linguistics. Whether &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; has special meaning in this context I do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In priniple, there exists an isomorphism between &lt;em&gt;existential&lt;/em&gt; terms and &lt;em&gt;universal&lt;/em&gt; terms. That means, there is an equivalence between &quot;for all donkeys owned by x it is true that they get beat by x&quot; is equivalent to &quot;for all students who each own a donkey, it is true that they beat it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T18:04:34.930" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T18:04:34.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30113" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:30:02.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Concerning the continental european situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing an officer in the polite plural can be understood as addressing the office, implying that the actions of the officer are expected to be in accord with &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; responsibilities, and mostly free of personal value judgement. Consequently, there is--in German or French at least--the same honorific used for actual plural addressees, and the honorific appears impersonal and thus potentially impolite in personally intimate conduct, and offering the 2nd p. sg. between e.g. collegues is honorific in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That describes only a subset of the usage, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary distinction is made only after kindergarden, in primary school, where teachers are addressed in the plural 3rd p., but the individual pupil is addressed regularly in the singular 2nd p. and the whole of the class is addressed regularly in the 2nd p. pl. It is thinkable that this stems from teacher positions in grammar schools being taken by officers, but this does not matter in a synchronic analysis. Especially children still learning the language may simply take the contrast for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diachronic analysis might have a long historic tail and vary by language, culture and domain. In many domains the direct address to an authority is taboo-ized, arguably so if &lt;em&gt;imperative&lt;/em&gt; forms would start with the nominal. In this sense, the idea of &lt;em&gt;distance&lt;/em&gt; as mentioned by @MarkBeadles is often a very real physical distance, that is so ingrained that it prevails after approaching closer. To conclude, note that even the 3rd p. sg. has been used as form of respect (and consequently in sarcastic disrespect). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:30:02.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31912" CreationDate="2019-07-14T21:12:43.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;loudness&quot; is usually taken to be a perceptual measure (whose acoustic correlate is amplitude).  That is, to find out whether one sound is louder than another, you ask someone which is louder.  I think the definition of sonority you gave in the first paragraph of your question works fine.  That makes sonority a perceptual measure. And, of course, perception can be measured and studied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't distinguish between phonetic and phonological, so my answer to your headline question is &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T21:12:43.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12402" CreationDate="2019-07-14T21:26:17.837" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is thought &lt;sup&gt;[by whom?]&lt;/sup&gt; that *eghom was a late-PIE variant of *egh-. Therefore the tag &lt;em&gt;proto-world&lt;/em&gt; and its implication of a common ancestor to PIE and PA seems dubious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim for a &lt;em&gt;closest relative&lt;/em&gt; does seem to be too strong for what its worth, and does not even make sense in a wave model (at least not unambiguously), nor in a topological sense if the IE-homeland and dispersal question is still open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your reasoning is sound and convincing, as far as I can tell, but incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are giving the official answer in your own question, so this answer should be an easy reputation grab: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Austronesian is usually regarded as a separate family, not related to any other.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implied question for a closer look is to remain implicit for the time being, as arm-chair arguments (e.g. Buddhist missionaries teaching grammar, reading and math to a native population that soon flees the imposing forces) are discouraged here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;, I stumbled over a statistical Swadesh list analysis treating &lt;em&gt;separately&lt;/em&gt; both families, though I would not vouche for it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.de/scholar?cluster=10573960271790350724&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;as_sdt=2005&amp;amp;sciodt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&amp;amp;u=%23p%3DhCEoDdhAvpIJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Networking phylogeny for indo-european and austronesian languages&lt;/a&gt; (2009) by Blanchard, Petroni, Serva, and Volchenkov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, we support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin and the ‘express train’model of Austronesian expansion from South-East Asia, with an essential role for the Batanes islands located between the Philippines and Taiwan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Anatolian Urheimat theory is less popular than the Steppes', but I would give them leeway because Urheimat is a weak definition with error margings covering at least one millenium, so I wouldn't draw systematic inferences from this result to the other, pertinant half of the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; I stumbled upon a 2009 comparison of PA and PIE. I can't access it, didn't read the preview; Dumped here for later reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound-correspondence laws of word-initial consonants between proto-Indo-European and Austronesian languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ohnishi, K. Artif Life Robotics (2009) 14: 567. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-009-0747-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-009-0747-1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion subscribes to &amp;quot;Austronesian origin of Indo-European language family&amp;quot;; Feel free to ignore that part. The paper should be valuable instead for its application of methods from statistical biology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; the question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/48418/whats-the-explanation-for-the-similarities-seen-between-the-rapa-nui-script-and&quot;&gt;Similarities seen between the Rapa Nui and Indus Valley Script&lt;/a&gt; might be informative, though nothing certain so far. That's Easter Island vs ancient, unidentified kingdoms in south-south-east-central Asia. The comments there are, of course, destructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T09:53:57.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-15T06:25:48.837" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want a clarification on terminology. A language is written in a particular script . but there are various styles for writing a script. For e.g. arabic is written in arabic script, and it can be written in Kufic style or Naskh or Dewani or Nastaleeq etc. &#xA;Are these writing styles called fonts or these are writing styles and fonts are different interpretations of these writing styles?&#xA; Kindly clarify the standard terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25060" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T10:10:59.763" Title="relationship between writing systems, scripts, and font. Terminology clarification required" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31923" CreationDate="2019-07-15T10:10:59.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These variants have different and inconsistent names in English across the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Style&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;style&quot; seems to be preferred for the variants of the Arabic script; people refer to styles of the Arabic script very &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-explain-the-difference-between-Nastaliq-style-and-Shikaste-style-of-Persian-and-Arabic-calligraphy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;often&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Script&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also often used for Arabic script variants, even though it is ambiguous with the script system (e.g. Arabic, Roman, Cyrillic, Chinese). It is also the standard way to refer to different historical forms of Chinese characters (e.g. oracle bone &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;, clerical &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;, cursive &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;) and for calligraphic variants of the Roman alphabet (e.g. Uncial &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;, Gothic &lt;em&gt;script&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slightly literary word, one that is more frequently used in the artistic calligraphic world than the linguistic world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;typeface&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;font&lt;/em&gt; are not appropriate for this level; they refer to more things in printing and computing, below the level that you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T10:10:59.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31953" CreationDate="2019-07-16T05:58:55.510" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;In languages with limited syllable structures (CV and CVC), how can I get data on the respective percentages of words in the known vocabulary that have 1 syllable, 2 syllables, 3 syllables, and 4 syllables?    e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In nonce language X, 20% of the words have one syllable, 40% have two syllables, 30% have three syllables, and 10% have four syllables?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approximations will suffice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="790" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T12:38:35.063" Title="Need data on # of syllables per word in languages with CV &amp; CVC syllables only" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;lexicon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31932" CreationDate="2019-07-16T14:35:34.633" Score="1" ViewCount="839" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Malay/Indonesian word for salt &lt;a href=&quot;https://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;garam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is surprisingly similar to the Latin word for the Roman fish sauce &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;garum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;garum&lt;/em&gt; was made from fermented salted fish, is there an etymological connection between the two words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TiHRmvfCqy4C&amp;amp;pg=PA86&amp;amp;lpg=PA86&amp;amp;dq=malay+roman+garam+garum&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=-plhk_0-HD&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2itb401gdXNECK2QoSzswifvTW6w&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj75syH07njAhVaWs0KHSAWB18Q6AEwB3oECAgQAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fisheries of the Oriental Region&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; claims this to be a &quot;strange coincidence&quot; without providing any further information, and I am unable to find any other sources pertaining to this matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T21:54:00.370" Title="Is the Malay &quot;garam&quot; (salt) related to the Latin &quot;garum&quot; (fish sauce)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;malay&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31928" CreationDate="2019-07-16T15:49:42.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What more is there to say? It's a coincidence, to the best of our knowledge, and statistically not an unlikely one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Garum&lt;/em&gt; comes from Greek &lt;em&gt;γάρος&lt;/em&gt;; its etymology is unknown, but the Greek word in the nominative already looks quite different from &lt;em&gt;garam&lt;/em&gt; just by virtue of its inflection. The chances of being able to find two unrelated languages where the syllable &quot;gar&quot; happens to be part of words with loosely relatable meanings, but without an etymological connection, seem high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T15:49:42.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31928" CreationDate="2019-07-16T20:02:45.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is really a bad question - food terms can be the sort of words that can travel readily between languages (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wanderwörter&lt;/a&gt;). Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ketchup&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sugar#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sugar&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ginger#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ginger&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tea#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, though, the relation between L &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;garum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and May &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;garam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; does seem to be a coincidence. Or at least, there is no recognized etymology which connects them that I can find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I will note that there is another word which is nearly homonymous with the others, and which also refers to a type of seasoning: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%AE#Hindi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi गरम&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;garam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which means &quot;hot&quot; and is often used in the sense of &quot;spicy&quot; (e.g. the popular spice blend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garam_masala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;garam masala&lt;/a&gt;). But this &lt;em&gt;garam&lt;/em&gt; is said to derive &amp;lt; PIE *gʷʰer-, so it's likely yet another coincidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T20:02:45.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31928" CreationDate="2019-07-16T21:54:00.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://abvd.shh.mpg.de/austronesian/word.php?v=125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database&lt;/a&gt; indicates that the Malay term was originally &lt;em&gt;garam sira&lt;/em&gt; 'grain of salt', and &lt;em&gt;sira&lt;/em&gt; and similar forms are widely attested for 'salt' at proto-levels in various subgroups (Blust reconstructs *&lt;em&gt;qasiʀa&lt;/em&gt; for Proto-Austronesian). I think this makes a Latin origin more than unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T21:54:00.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31940" CreationDate="2019-07-17T00:14:29.913" Score="0" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the etymology of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amadouer#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;amadouer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; when I lighted on these attested morphemes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Etymology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Middle French&quot;&gt;Middle French&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amadouer#Middle_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;amadouer&quot;&gt;amadouer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“to coax, lure”), from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a-#Middle_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;a-&quot;&gt;a-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;*madouer&lt;/em&gt; (“to lure, give food to”), from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Old Norse&quot;&gt;Old Norse&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mata#Old_Norse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;mata&quot;&gt;mata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“to lure, feed”), from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Proto-Germanic language&quot;&gt;Proto-Germanic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/mat%C5%8Dn%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/matōną&quot;&gt;*matōną&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/matjan%C4%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/matjaną&quot;&gt;*matjaną&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“to feed, eat”), from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Proto-Indo-European language&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/meh%E2%82%82d-#Proto-Indo-European-wet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/meh₂d-&quot;&gt;*meh₂d-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“wet”). Cognate with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Icelandic language&quot;&gt;Icelandic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mata#Icelandic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;mata&quot;&gt;mata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“to bait, allure”), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Danish language&quot;&gt;Danish&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/made#Danish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;made&quot;&gt;made&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“to feed”), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Gothic language&quot;&gt;Gothic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8C%BC%F0%90%8C%B0%F0%90%8D%84%F0%90%8C%BE%F0%90%8C%B0%F0%90%8C%BD#Gothic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/matjan#Gothic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;matjan&quot;&gt;matjan&lt;/a&gt;, “to eat, have a meal”), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Old English&quot;&gt;Old English&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mete#Old_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;mete&quot;&gt;mete&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“food”). More at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;meat&quot;&gt;meat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please see the titled question. How did &lt;em&gt;*meh₂d-&lt;/em&gt;  semantically shift to mean &lt;em&gt;*matōną&lt;/em&gt;? What does eating or feeding have to do with wetness? I know that people drink while eating, but I'd reckon that PIE and Proto-Germanic had verbs for drinking?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change#Typology_by_Blank_(1999)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;type of semantic shift&lt;/a&gt; is this? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T22:01:30.167" Title="What semantic notions underlie PIE *meh₂d- ('wet') and Proto-Germanic *matōną, *matjaną (“to feed, eat”)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31938" CreationDate="2019-07-17T04:16:07.510" Score="4" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many (all?) languages have possession of some kind. Whether the language is possessor-possessum or possessum-possesor, the possessum is the head of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether the numeral or the noun is an expression like &lt;em&gt;three chickens&lt;/em&gt; is the head and whether it varies from language to language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, is there a language without numeral classifiers where the numeral is clearly the head and a language where the noun is clearly the head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the WALS chapter on the order of numeral and noun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In such languages [like Nusu, a Tibeto-Burman language with numeral&#xA;  classifiers], the numeral is not really modifying the noun, at least&#xA;  not directly, but rather is modifying the classifier. For such&#xA;  languages, the map shows the order of the noun relative to this phrase&#xA;  consisting of numeral and classifier. Whether this phrase actually&#xA;  modifies the noun is itself something that is often unclear. It has&#xA;  been proposed for some languages that the classifier is the real head&#xA;  of the noun phrase and the numeral and noun are both dependents of the&#xA;  classifier. See Map 55A on numeral classifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The issue of what element is the head also sometimes arises sometimes&#xA;  in languages without numeral classifiers. It has been proposed that&#xA;  some numerals in Russian serve as heads (Babby 1987). Similarly, in&#xA;  Rif Berber (Morocco), most modifiers follow the noun, while numerals&#xA;  precede; but the construction they occur in is the same as the&#xA;  genitive construction, as illustrated in (12), suggesting that the&#xA;  numeral is the head, not a modifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T07:01:05.377" Title="Is the numeral or the noun the head? Does it vary depending on the language?" Tags="&lt;numerals&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-17T04:29:26.667" Score="0" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Screenshot's from &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/YON1pOcEhrA?t=363&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube&lt;/a&gt;. I don't speak Chinese and don't understand the relevance of these ideograms. I emailed him twice, but after 5 months, got no reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4RXW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4RXW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T05:55:06.730" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T05:55:06.730" Title="Why did Moti Lieberman associate 子 with onset, and 了 with coda?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31936" CreationDate="2019-07-17T05:13:09.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think that it not only varies between languages, but it can vary within a language for different numerals. I think large numerals have a greater tendency to function as heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the numeral is usually taken to be the head in English constructions like &amp;quot;hundreds/thousands/millions of beans&amp;quot;, where the noun &amp;quot;beans&amp;quot; occurs inside of a prepositional phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, there may be constructions where the noun takes a case that seems to function similarly to an &amp;quot;of&amp;quot; prepositional phrase in English. In Russian, I think the genitive case is involved, but it's a complicated topic that I don't know enough about to summarize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English expressions like &amp;quot;three chickens&amp;quot; are tricky. In some ways, English numerals function similarly to articles. The indefinite article &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt; developed diachronically from &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;, and I've even seen some papers where it is argued that &lt;em&gt;a(n)&lt;/em&gt; should be analyzed synchronically as a reduced form of the numeral &lt;em&gt;one.&lt;/em&gt;* The definite article &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is not derived from a numeral, but both numerals and articles can be categorized as taking a &amp;quot;determiner&amp;quot; function in a noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether determiners or their associated nouns are heads (if determiners are the heads, it would technically be of a &amp;quot;determiner phrase&amp;quot; rather than of a &amp;quot;noun phrase&amp;quot;) is a disputed topic, according to the Wikipedia article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Determiner phrase&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The section &amp;quot;Morphological dependencies&amp;quot; in that Wikipedia article mentions (although it doesn't provide any citations) that agreement with a noun can be taken to support an NP analysis over a DP analysis. English numerals don't show any agreement (although the determiners &lt;em&gt;that/those&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;this/these&lt;/em&gt; do). But in other languages, a numeral may be a target for agreement in features like gender or case (or even, oddly enough, number: in Latin, the word for one, &lt;em&gt;unus,&lt;/em&gt; has plural forms used with plural-only nouns). I think in such languages, it is usually assumed that the noun, which has the role of the controller, is the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another complication in English: numerals can occur after determiners, which is a context where they typically could not be analyzed as having a determiner function. We can say &amp;quot;the three chickens&amp;quot;, even though we can't say *&amp;quot;the my chickens&amp;quot;; one way of explaining that is to say that before a noun, &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; always functions as a determiner, but &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; doesn't always function as a determiner. But as with the NP vs. DP issue, I believe there are different approaches to analyzing the structure of expressions like &amp;quot;the three chickens&amp;quot;. Some related posts: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/22713&quot;&gt;How to analyze an NP with two determiners?&lt;/a&gt; (Linguistics SE), &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/442233&quot;&gt;One noun but two determiners?&lt;/a&gt; (ELU). According to Araucaria's answer to the second question, &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; in a phrase like &amp;quot;the three chickens&amp;quot; would function as a modifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Here is a relevant passage from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7mBbDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA246&amp;amp;lpg=PA246&amp;amp;dq=linguistics%20definition%20indefinite%20article&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=h9uTjpUXDc&amp;amp;sig=jDh2ICcSmB3mkKq_-nIfuBQTPrA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj0kun1_pPYAhWL5oMKHcFqBkw4ChDoAQg_MAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=linguistics%20definition%20indefinite%20article&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Article in English&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by David M. Perlmutter (1970):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct, the relationship between the definite article and the indefinite article in English is quite different from what has been generally supposed. Grammarians have worked on the assumption that NP's may bear either a definite or an indefinite article, and that the two constitute some sort of opposition. If the analysis given here is correct, however, the indefinite article is simply a numeral like all other numerals, and the occurrence or non-occurrence of the definite article is a completely independent phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: here are some articles related to this question that I found after writing this post, but that I haven't finished reading yet. If anyone gets around to reading them before me and finds more relevant information to put into an answer, please go ahead and make a post of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://faculty.biu.ac.il/%7Edanong1/papers/Danon2012lingua.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two structures for numeral-noun&#xA;constructions&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, Gabi Danon, 12 September 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://faculty.biu.ac.il/%7Edanong1/conferences/2009-04_Gabi_Danon_CGG-19_handout.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatical number in numeral-noun constructions&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by Gabi Danon, 2009&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/62fe/49bd782fb008eb6429ff9fc5eadeb8eae1a0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The interaction between numerals and nouns&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, James R. Hurford&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T07:01:05.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31934" CreationDate="2019-07-17T19:50:00.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kroonen's dictionary says, following [Lubotsky (1981)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*matjan- w.v. 'to lap' -- [...] In spite of Torp 1909: 305 &#xA;  and Pokorny IEW: 694-5, unrelated to *mati- 'food' (q.v.).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Germanic reflex given is an old Norse term &quot;to suckle, nurse&quot;, agreeing with Albanian evidence and agreeing not so much with the semantics in Sanskrit &quot;to rejoice&quot; in relation to intoxication,&quot; and Greek &quot;to drip, melt, ...&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They reconstruct respectively PIE *mh2-d- and tentatively *med-; The later is found in wiktionary under &quot;measure&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*mati- has more explanation. I am not going to quote the whole thing, if I only understand half of it. Follow the sources (Lubotsky 2012 also has some on water):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lubotsky, A.M. 1981 [Lubotsky 1981] &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Gr. πήγνῡμι: Skt. pajra- and loss of laryngeals before mediae in Indo-Iranian&lt;/em&gt;. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 40, 133-138&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pokorny, J. 1959 [Pokorny IEW] &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Indogermanisches etymologisches Worterbuch&lt;/em&gt;. Bern.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Torp, A. 1909 [Torp 1909) &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Wortschatz der germanischen Spracheinheit&lt;/em&gt;. Vierte Auflage. Göttingen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T20:26:37.257" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T20:26:37.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-18T19:06:51.847" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in building a toy text-to-speech system, where at the very least I want to decide when to include dynamic emphasis, slight pitch shift, and the duration and boundary between words.  It would be amazing if this could be done on the basis of simple rules, but it looks like most people use data-driven approaches.  However, I haven't found a dataset which maps words in a text to any prosodic features (f0 frequency/duration, for example).  Does either such a set of rules or such a dataset exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T16:48:12.547" Title="Is there a dataset/list of rules mapping words in sentences to prosodic features?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;&lt;intonation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12964" CreationDate="2019-07-19T00:32:17.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &quot;be-&quot; prefix (originally &lt;em&gt;bi-&lt;/em&gt;) was originally used to create prepositions—compare &lt;em&gt;fore&lt;/em&gt; against &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hind&lt;/em&gt; against &lt;em&gt;behind&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;twain&lt;/em&gt; against &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; against &lt;em&gt;below&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, the prefix isn't adding any new semantic meaning: it's just changing the part of speech and attaching a reference point to the description. &quot;Hind&quot; is an adjective describing anything at the back (as in &quot;hindmost&quot;), but &quot;behind&quot; attaches that back-ness to a fixed reference point: you can be hindmost, but you can't be *hindmost the house; you can only be &lt;em&gt;behind&lt;/em&gt; the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T00:32:17.447" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-19T13:12:05.253" Score="0" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where does the spelling  as the short e sound (such as bread) come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25086" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T13:36:55.013" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T18:17:21.650" Title="Where does the spelling &lt;ea&gt; as a short e sound (such as bread) come from?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-07-20T04:08:02.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31944" CreationDate="2019-07-19T15:28:11.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This goes back to Middle English, which seems to have had a vowel system something like this in the standard (London) dialect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;iː i     u uː&#xA; eː e   o oː&#xA;   ɛː    ɔː&#xA;      a&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, these vowels were spelled pretty much like you'd expect from the IPA, with the &quot;silent E&quot; convention indicating length: &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; had a short &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, while &lt;em&gt;bite&lt;/em&gt; had a long &lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the English alphabet had no letters for the open-mid vowels! Since those were always long, in the Later Middle English/Early Modern English period, they started being written with digraphs &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;oa&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;em&gt;e_e&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ee&lt;/em&gt; meant &lt;code&gt;/eː/&lt;/code&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;breed&lt;/em&gt; (sometimes written &lt;em&gt;brede&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;ea&lt;/em&gt; meant &lt;code&gt;/ɛː/&lt;/code&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;bread&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then the Great Vowel Shift happened, and &lt;code&gt;/ɛː/&lt;/code&gt; was affected irregularly, due to dialectal differences. While &lt;code&gt;/eː/&lt;/code&gt; pretty much always became &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, &lt;code&gt;/ɛː/&lt;/code&gt; sometimes became &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt;, sometimes &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;, sometimes &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt;. There are some general rules for predicting this, but they're full of exceptions: it's usually only &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; next to &lt;code&gt;/r/&lt;/code&gt;, for example, as in &lt;em&gt;bear&lt;/em&gt;, but not in &lt;em&gt;fear&lt;/em&gt;, and it's usually only &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; next to alveolar consonants, as in &lt;em&gt;bread&lt;/em&gt;, but not in &lt;em&gt;bean&lt;/em&gt;. Sometimes former homonyms are only distinguished by this, as in &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; (present) versus &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; (past), or &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; (verb) versus &lt;em&gt;lead&lt;/em&gt; (metal), and sometimes spelling has been intentionally changed to show the pronunciation change, as in &lt;em&gt;red&lt;/em&gt; (color)…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, it's a mess. But the short version is, it's spelled with two letters because it used to be a long vowel, once upon a time. The choice of the letters is, presumably, because it was halfway between &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;, but that's just speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. With other vowels, the GVS was generally more regular: that's why &lt;em&gt;oa&lt;/em&gt; is quite consistently &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt;, as in &lt;em&gt;boat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boar&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boast&lt;/em&gt;, etc. &lt;code&gt;/ɛː/&lt;/code&gt; just had terrible luck. (And yet, &lt;em&gt;broad&lt;/em&gt;…English orthography will always have exceptions somewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T18:17:21.650" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T18:17:21.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31941" CreationDate="2019-07-19T16:48:12.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prosodic contours of a word will vary greatly, depending on how it is used. This might be because of neighboring words in the sentence, or the information content of the word (new vs. given information). This will also vary greatly depending on dialect. People are actively researching this, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this doctoral thesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258357313_Prosody_modelling_using_machine_learning_techniques_for_neutral_and_emotional_speech_synthesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosody modelling using machine learning techniques for neutral and emotional speech synthesis&lt;/a&gt; seems relevant. Google has also done some recent research on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-synthesis-with.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expressive Speech Synthesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A dataset seems close to impossible, since it would need to contain every word in every single context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T16:48:12.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-21T13:07:52.157" Score="7" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether linguistics board is the right place to ask this question, but since I couldn't find any better place here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most (all?) of the writing systems are using the vector-like/linear alignment of text. It may be left to right, right to left, top to bottom, etc. &#xA;But are there any writing systems that use multi-dimensional e.g. matrix-like alignment? Were there any real historical examples or how would, in theory, such a system look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25093" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T11:59:51.537" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T15:44:22.987" Title="Do multi-dimensional writing systems exist?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;alphabets&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T10:22:48.587" Score="1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is quite clear and understandable as in the title. Are there traces of Old Turkish in ancient Germanic languages? Or traces of Germanic in Old Turkish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21667" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T11:51:58.837" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:17:39.737" Title="Are there traces of Old Turkish in ancient Germanic languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;turkish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31926" CreationDate="2019-07-22T12:38:35.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could simply count the vowels per word, as with those syllable structures the number of vowels is equal to the number of syllables: each CV or CVC pattern has exactly one vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only problematic if you process written text and some letters can be both vowels or consonants, such as /y/ in English. But that might be resolvable through context, eg if /y/ is followed by a vowel, it would itself be a consonant, as in &lt;em&gt;yell&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yawn&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25095" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T12:38:35.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-22T12:56:21.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a bit of an edge case, and much depends on what you mean by &quot;dimension&quot;, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana#Punning_and_double_meaning&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;hidden meaning&quot; usage of furigana above kanji&lt;/a&gt; in Japanese may qualify as one extra dimension. The use of the extra dimension varies. It is certainly not part of the usual Japanese writing system, but rather an extension of it into a separate dimension, and it is only really used for its entertainment value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SignWriting&lt;/a&gt; would certainly count, when/if it becomes more widely adopted. With the nature of most signemes requiring at least 2D space as well as time (and I'm sure many sign language users employ 3D space too), the notation tries to encompass all of it on a 2D page. Unicode has encoded &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_SignWriting_(Unicode_block)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some of its characters&lt;/a&gt;, but being able to render it correctly is another matter entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T13:41:12.450" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:41:12.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31952" CreationDate="2019-07-22T13:17:39.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old Turkish was spoken in what is now Mongolia and Xinjiang. These are very far from the areas where Old Germanic languages were spoken. There are no &quot;traces&quot; of Old Turkish in ancient Germanic, nor of Germanic in Old Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:17:39.737" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26429" CreationDate="2019-07-22T13:28:56.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you seem to be interested in syntax and word order parallels, this paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/papers/wang+eisner.tacl16.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wang and Eisner: The Galactic Dependencies Treebank&lt;/a&gt; may be of interest to you. They measure &quot;dissimilarity&quot; of two languages by training a syntax parser on language A and applying it to language B and look how many labels come out wrong; and for symmetrisation they also do it the other way round. With this kind of metric they can relate laguages according to their syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:28:56.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T13:33:44.817" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m describing the phonology of an Asian language. I put all the phonemes in a clear table. Since I use a local (Roman letter-based) orthography in my transcribed examples, I think it’d be handy to include the orthographic conventions in the same table, next to the phonemes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s the standard way to do this? Use curly brackets for the orthography or is there some other practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastEditorUserId="4838" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T20:12:47.580" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T03:27:49.037" Title="What’s the standard way of showing phonemic inventory and orthography in the same table?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14373" CreationDate="2019-07-22T13:56:58.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haspelmath (see here for a reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20919/subtypes-of-standard-average-european/20939#20939&quot;&gt;Subtypes of Standard Average European&lt;/a&gt;) calls this &lt;em&gt;Nominative experiencer&lt;/em&gt; for your English example and &lt;em&gt;Dative experiencer&lt;/em&gt; for your Spanish example. There are studies of the frequency of the types of experiencer, including the study on Standard Average European by Haspelmath. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T13:56:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T14:18:45.170" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m working with a language which differentiates between aspirated and ejective stops. Is there a linguistic convention that I can use in writing descriptive rules  for processes which both aspirated and ejective segments undergo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean just as that little circle under a “C” indicates a voiceless stop, is there a similar convention for ejectives/aspirates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:38:03.690" Title="What is the standard representation of a stop which could be either ejective or aspirated?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31959" CreationDate="2019-07-22T14:34:21.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard diacritic for aspiration is [ʰ], thus [pʰ], and the standard diacritic for ejectives is [’], e.g. [p’]. FYI, the lowered circle is not generally used represent voicelessness and [t̥] is a conceptual anomaly, but you may encounter [b̥ d̥] vs. [p t] if in the former case /b d/ become mostly devoiced in a context though not neutralized with /p t/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In writing rules referring to classes of segments, it is conventional to use the feature that the segments have in common. If you don't want to follow that convention and have to use transcriptional symbols rather than features but you still want to capture the class &quot;aspirated or ejective&quot; with one letter (rather than listing each segment in a disjunction), you could write &quot;C̥&quot; and probably be understood, as long as you don't mean &quot;aspirated or ejective, but not plain voiceless&quot;. If that is the intent, you have no alternative but to use an expression like &quot;aspirated or ejective&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T14:34:21.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31965" CreationDate="2019-07-22T15:53:01.473" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am self-studying morphology and came across this paragraph in Martin Haspelmath book &quot;Understanding Morphology&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although we must assign names to lexemes to be able to talk about them, lexemes are abstract entities that have no phonological form of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone explain the meaning of 'abstract entities that have no phonological form of their own' ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25096" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:19:17.543" Title="Lexeme phonological form" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31964" CreationDate="2019-07-22T16:22:41.440" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a single term for words that help maintain cohesion in a dialogue, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A : How was the Lion King remake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B : It was good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A : And the Aladdin remake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B : It was &lt;strong&gt;equally&lt;/strong&gt; good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A : And Toy Story 4?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B : That, &lt;strong&gt;however&lt;/strong&gt;, was not so good...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess traditional grammar would class &quot;equally&quot; as &lt;em&gt;adverb&lt;/em&gt;, and &quot;however&quot; as a &lt;em&gt;conjunction&lt;/em&gt;, but their discourse function (to me) seems to be the same: To allow separate dialogue turns to remain cohesive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you heard of a single term to label both in terms of dialogue/textual cohesion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11474" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T17:07:55.593" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:09:05.783" Title="Single term for words that maintain dialogue cohesion" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T16:28:15.293" Score="7" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tutankhamun's throne name in the sacred writing is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASLP8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASLP8.png&quot; alt=&quot;tut throne name&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, from the bottom, represent ideograms conventionally pronounced as Neb-U-Kheper-Ra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the name is transliterated (for example on the Wikipedia) it is given as Nebkheperure, with the U coming between kheper and Ra/Re, instead of between neb and kheper (yielding 'Nibukhepera' instead as I would expect). Why is the order of U and Kheper transposed in the standard transliteration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T12:55:06.663" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T12:55:06.663" Title="Why are the phonemes of Tutankhamun's throne name transliterated out of order?" Tags="&lt;names&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31962" CreationDate="2019-07-22T17:09:05.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words keeping up cohesion are called &lt;em&gt;cohesive devices&lt;/em&gt;. Note that this term leaves their part-of-speech assignment untouched, a cohesive device can be a word of any kind of speech or even a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:09:05.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31961" CreationDate="2019-07-22T17:19:17.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of a lexeme as an equivalence class of word forms belonging together, e.g., the class of word forms &lt;em&gt;go, goes, went, going, gone&lt;/em&gt;. Now, for the English language we pick by convention &lt;strong&gt;go&lt;/strong&gt;, identical to the infinitive form, as the name of this lexeme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Latin, the conventions are different: A verb is usually quoted in the first person singular present tense (active, when available), so the class &lt;em&gt;ire, eo, is, it, ... , ii, ..., itum&lt;/em&gt; is represented by &lt;strong&gt;eo&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this illustrates very well the point of not having a phonological form &lt;em&gt;of its own&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:19:17.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31963" CreationDate="2019-07-22T17:35:40.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The throne name (praenomen) has the following four hieroglyphs, listed by Gardiner number as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nb#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;V30&lt;/a&gt; (basket)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Z2 (three strokes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%86%A3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L1&lt;/a&gt; (dung beetle)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%87%B3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;N5&lt;/a&gt; (sun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the issue you are having is with Z2, the plural strokes for the plural. However, Z2 is classified as a &lt;em&gt;determinative&lt;/em&gt;, indicating plurality. Because it was often paired with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%85%B1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hieroglyph G43&lt;/a&gt; (quail chick), which does have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-w#Egyptian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonetic value -w&lt;/a&gt;, the Z2 is often transcribed as &lt;code&gt;(w)&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ehBExYpasIC&amp;amp;pg=PA8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;within brackets&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it looks like Z2 (three strokes) is &quot;before&quot; L1 (dung beetle), as a determinative it simply adds to what is &lt;em&gt;physically above it&lt;/em&gt;, not what comes before it in phonetic order. Hence the plural determinative Z2 is &quot;attached&quot; to L1, and so we should parse it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;V30 (basket)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L1 (dung beetle) - Z2 (three strokes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;N5 (sun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence we have &lt;code&gt;nb-ḫpr(w)-rꜥ&lt;/code&gt;. Adding conventional changes, we get &lt;code&gt;Neb-kheperu-re&lt;/code&gt;, which becomes &quot;Nebkheperure&quot; in modern standard Egyptological writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the fact that many (most?) of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.egyptology.nl/KinglistNK.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;other pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty&lt;/a&gt; had a throne name ending in the same thing. So we have Aakheperure (Amenhotep II) all the way down to Djeserkheperure (Horemheb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T17:53:24.593" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:53:24.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31959" CreationDate="2019-07-22T17:38:03.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bad news is, I don't know of any convention for this, and have never seen such a symbol used in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is, phoneme names are arbitrary, and archiphoneme/cover symbol names even more so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your position, I would come up with a new notation, and explain it clearly in the text before using it. Since aspirated and ejective stops are both written with a mark above and to the right (the superscript &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; for aspirated and apostrophe for ejective), perhaps &lt;em&gt;C°&lt;/em&gt; as their cover?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, if you only need this notation once or twice, you can use a disjunction, &lt;em&gt;(Cʰ | Cʼ)&lt;/em&gt;. This would require less explanation beforehand, but would also be harder to read if it came up over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:38:03.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T18:10:08.090" Score="4" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking up a Middle Egyptian word, it's usually not too hard to find the consonants: for example, if I look up &lt;code&gt;U2 Aa11 D36 X1 C10&lt;/code&gt; in Dickson's or Gardiner's dictionary, they tell me it means &quot;rightness&quot;, and the consonant phonemes are &lt;em&gt;m-ꜣ-ꜥ-t&lt;/em&gt; (that is, something like &lt;code&gt;/mʔʕt/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no dictionary I've found lists the vowels, even in cases when we can be fairly certain of them. In this case, the word is transcribed into Akkadian as &lt;em&gt;mu-a&lt;/em&gt; (in names like &lt;em&gt;Nimmuaria&lt;/em&gt;), which seems like good evidence that the vowels were &lt;code&gt;/u/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard reference work for cases like this, where I can look up &lt;code&gt;U2 Aa11 D36 X1 C10&lt;/code&gt; and see the reconstructed vocalization alongside the consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm most interested in Middle Egyptian, but if such a work exists for a different stage of the language, that's also good to know about!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T18:16:34.920" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T08:42:57.677" Title="Where can one find reconstructed vocalizations for (any stage of) Egyptian?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31968" CreationDate="2019-07-22T19:27:36.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attempts at reconstructing the actual vowels of Egyptian can be found in Loprieno's and also in Vycichl's books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T19:27:36.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-22T19:30:35.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possibly case of 2-D writing is Amerindian (Mexican) codices.&#xA;They look like elaborate drawings but they actually also encode language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T19:30:35.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T20:21:32.890" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do we have ablaut in the Bengali verb system?Is it why we have vowel alternation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21930" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T14:35:15.500" Title="Do we have ablaut in the Bengali verb system?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-23T01:00:08.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Dongba script of Naxi comes to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Im5Rn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Im5Rn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Example of the script&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you may have guessed from the picture, the Dongba script is generally left-to-right. But you can also have glyphs stacked together, and this gives it an extra vertical dimension. In addition, it's not always read in the same order. The ensuing discussion is from Fu (1981/2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/swlMe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/swlMe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Two vertical sequences of characters&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two phrases above are read as &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;su &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;xe and &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;su 'khu respectively. The &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;su glyph appears on top in the first phrase, but on the bottom in the second; in other words, the phrase is read from top to bottom in the first case and bottom to top in the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/amrx6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/amrx6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three characters, from top to bottom, are &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;khu, &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;mɯ, &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;thu. Together they are read as  &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;mɯ &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;khu &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;thu. So in this case you start from the middle character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit C:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ndoYb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ndoYb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The house is a female buddha's temple. (The context is that the protagonist of the story, a white bat, is looking for the buddha.) There are three characters inside the house, which when put together mean 'unclean'. The bat was saying that the road leading to the front door of the temple was unclean, and refused to enter from that path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit D:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ip1dB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ip1dB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character for 'spear' is on the top left. The character for village is &lt;em&gt;broken up&lt;/em&gt; by the spear. The whole character is pronounced &lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;phu and means to break into the village with force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these examples I think the script is pretty unambiguously multidimensional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fu, M. (1981/2012). &lt;em&gt;Naxi Zu Tuhua Wenzi 'Bai Bianfu Qujing Ji' Yanjiu [A study of the Naxi pictogram text 'The Tale of the White Bat Obtaining the Scripture'， 纳西族图画文字《 白蝙蝠取经记》 研究].&lt;/em&gt; Beijing: The Commerical Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10021" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T01:00:08.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32017" CreationDate="2019-07-23T02:04:48.650" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;What semantic notions underlie 'sit' and 'properness'? The following words for propriety hail from the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Proto-Indo-European language&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sed-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sed-&quot;&gt;*sed-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spanish &amp;amp; Portugese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sentar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/seoir#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seoir&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English 'sit well'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Italian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sedere#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sedere&lt;/a&gt; or Romanian`s equivalent shifted semantically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T02:24:51.137" Title="How did 'sitting' semantically shift to mean 'properness'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-23T05:27:04.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Korean &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Morpho-syllabic_blocks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hangul&lt;/a&gt;, each character represents a syllable, which is made of several elements arranged vertically or horizontally. A bit like writing successive syllables from left to right but with each syllable written (in part) vertically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24297" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T05:27:04.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-23T09:34:12.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31973/17305&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;, you could argue that comic books are an example of multidimensional writing, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The reading direction goes left, right, up and down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tb2BD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tb2BD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When there is a clear reading direction, words may still be intended to be read simultaneously, so to speak. In this example, all text except the top left box should be considered simultaneous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J6yTu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J6yTu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples were taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000117/000117.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walsh, 2012. 'Comic Book Markup Language: An Introduction and Rationale', &lt;em&gt;Digital Humanities Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 6 (1)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T09:34:12.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15748" CreationDate="2019-07-23T10:08:14.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I am a native speaker of both Silesian and Polish and a profesional linquist living in Central Poland (Warsaw) and taking conclusions from some research which was carried out at my university and from conversations with people speaking only Polish I can say that the distance between Silesian and Polish is like between Polish and Slovakian. Of course there are many similarities - both these ethnolects have common roots (they belong to the lechitic languages' group) but there are also many varieties of Silesian - some of them are more understandable to the Poles and the others less (for example the varieties of Silesian in Czechia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25105" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T10:08:14.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-23T10:26:20.637" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that I wanted to compare Siri and Google Voice in terms of naturalness or similarity to human speech. Obviously I could give a bunch of people a survey and collate their opinions — but I wonder if there is some industry standard used to objectively compare and contrast different voices in terms of how they sound, the ease with which they recognize fluid speech, and the quality of their chat functions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4838" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T10:26:20.637" Title="Are there standards to compare naturalness of synthetic voices?" Tags="&lt;speech-synthesis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-23T16:01:42.297" Score="5" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sacred writing of Egyptian king Tutankhamun's throne name is shown belong aside the same name as it appears in a letter written in cuneiform to his majesty from the king of the Hittites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XfHb5m.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XfHb5m.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EfHsB.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EfHsB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four signs in the Egyptian form (reading from the bottom) can be transliterated as Nb-U-Kheper-Ra. Therefore, we might expect the name to be pronounced &quot;Nibukhepera.&quot; (Note that Nb should be Nib, not Neb, because Neb meaning gold is a different sign. Nib means 'everything'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cuneiform beside it is transliterated by Guterbock as Ni-ip-khu-ru-ri-ia-as, which seems to be somewhat different than the Egyptian. For example, if we take the Hittite to be Nip-Khuru-Ria-as, the -as being a personal suffix, then Kheper becomes Khuru and Ra becomes Ria and U is silent. This is strange because the P in kheper has become an R in Hittite, which seems unlikely because a rhotic consonant is being transmuted to a plosive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if we take the Hittite to be Nip-Khu-Ruri-Ia-as, then Khu and Ra/Ya closely match, but Kheper is Ruri, where once again we have a severe change of sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line here seems to be that the Hittites are not pronouncing the scarab as Kheper, but are pronouncing some other way. So, does this point to the traditional pronounciation of the scarab being either incorrect, or incorrect in the New Kingdom period of time, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="4998" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T17:30:33.647" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T02:54:03.830" Title="Why are the Egyptian and Hittite versions of Tutankhamun's name different?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;&lt;hittite&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31983" CreationDate="2019-07-23T17:33:50.567" Score="1" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me say this questions is asking only about fairly recent loanwords (as in, the word (or something similar to it) exists in both languages). I'm not asking about very old loanwords that may have shifted in meaning in either/both languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of what kind of loanwords I'm looking for, let me present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;das Handy&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;der Smoking&lt;/code&gt; in German (borrowed from English; try to guess the meaning before looking at the spoiler below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;code&gt;cellphone&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;tuxedo&lt;/code&gt;, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though both are &quot;borrowed&quot; from English, the meaning probably isn't clear to an English speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; referring just to loanwords where the meaning is slightly adjusted from the meaning in the borrowing language, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;sombrero&lt;/code&gt; (&quot;hat&quot; in Spanish, but a specific style of hat when borrowed into English).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;baguette&lt;/code&gt; (I guess &quot;rod&quot; or &quot;wand&quot; would be the best translation? Also refers to the bread, because it has that shape. In English, refers exclusively to the bread.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for loanwords with a completely different meaning in the borrowing language (to the point that native speakers of the original language wouldn't understand)? Can anyone think of examples where English borrowed a word and did this? (I have trouble with this as an English speaker.) I do realise this might be fairly subjective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've screwed up any terms, please let me know and I can edit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25106" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T09:06:32.660" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T02:07:19.360" Title="Loanwords with different meanings from original language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;borrowing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-23T17:33:57.950" Score="3" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found out that the English letter 'W', as in the word &quot;weep&quot;, is classified as a voiced labiovelar approximant. To quote Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its place of articulation is labialized velar, which means it is articulated with the back part of the tongue raised toward the soft palate (the velum) while rounding the lips.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labio-velar_approximant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voiced labiovelar approximant - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised to find out that this sound relies on the back part of the tongue being raised towards the soft palate. The reason I find this strange is because, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a doctor tells me to open my mouth and say &quot;ahhh&quot; I will most likely say something like [ɑ], [ɐ] or [ʌ], all open vowels (which is good for the doctor because my tongue is as low as possible).&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I then round my lips as if I'm whistling without doing anything else I get a sound sounding like [ʊ] or [u]. These two sounds are described as being close or near-close back vowels, and according to the IPA vowel chart if you say [ɑ], and then round your lips, you get the vowel [ɒ], which is said to be the vowel sound in General American &quot;thought&quot;. However, as I explained, if I open my mouth and make an open vowel sound and then close my lips as if whistling I get a sound much like [ʊ] or [u], which sounds nothing like the General American &quot;thought&quot; vowel sound. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA vowel chart&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I then go from this rounded lips position back to the original position my doctor told me to be in I get back to the open-mouth position with the same open vowel I started off with, let's say [ɑ], [ɐ] or [ʌ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell in this case I've essentially said the &quot;wah&quot;, as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/wah-wah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;wah&quot; (or &quot;wah-wah&quot;)&lt;/a&gt; pedal for an electric guitar, or something close to it. My point is that I've pronounced the 'W' letter in English without my tongue being anywhere near the top of my mouth, or specifically soft palate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain this to me? Essentially I can (and actually might, as far as I know) pronounce the English 'W' letter without any part of it being a velar approximant which Wikipedia and the IPA information I've checked insists it is. That is, the information I've found is that English speakers pronounce it with the tongue high, close to the soft palate. However that's not particularly the case, is it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21640" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T20:34:10.183" Title="Can someone explain the English 'W' sound?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31979" CreationDate="2019-07-23T17:59:00.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's important to remember that hieroglyphic Egyptian usually makes the consonants clear, but not the vowels. Tutankhamun's &lt;em&gt;praenomen&lt;/em&gt; is thus transcribed &lt;em&gt;nb-ḫpr-(w)-rꜥ&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;nb-xpr-(w)-rꜥ&lt;/em&gt;, depending on the author; &lt;em&gt;ḫ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; mean the same thing). But the form &quot;Neb-Kheper-U-Ra&quot; is purely a modern invention to make it more pronounceable, replacing consonants with vowels and adding &lt;code&gt;/ɛ/&lt;/code&gt; wherever desired to turn it into something an English-speaker can say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better guide to the pronunciation can be found in the Amarna Letters. &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdli.ucla.edu/search/search_results.php?SearchMode=Text&amp;amp;ObjectID=P270888&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter EA 9&lt;/a&gt; starts out with the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a-na ni-ip-xu-ur-ri-ri-ya LUGAL KUR mi#&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;H&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;x&lt;/em&gt; is just a transcription convention in Akkadian and Hittite, so I'm changing things to look closer to the Egyptian. Similarly, &lt;em&gt;ia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ya&lt;/em&gt; are just two different transcriptions for the same sign, and &lt;em&gt;re&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ri&lt;/em&gt; were phonologically distinct but written the same in cuneiform.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end of the line is damaged, but it can be filled in with decent confidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To Nipxurreria, King of Egy[pt]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lining the two versions up with each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;n b-x pr -(w)-r  ꜥ&#xA;nip xurre     ria&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that the first vowel is &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, the second vowel is &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pr&lt;/em&gt; assimilated completely to &lt;em&gt;rr&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;(w)&lt;/em&gt; may have been weak or silent, and the final vowel is &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; (with an epenthetic &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; before the pharyngeal). Alternately, the final vowel might just have been &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;-ya&lt;/em&gt; meaning &quot;mine&quot; (so &quot;my king Nipxurreri&quot;); I've seen both versions proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we can put our approximation of the vowels back into the word, giving &lt;em&gt;nib-xurre-(w)-riaꜥ&lt;/em&gt;. Let's compare that against the Hittite, which I transcribed slightly differently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ni  b-xu rre-(w)-ri  aꜥ&#xA;[M]-ni-ib-xu-r    u -ri-ya -aš&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to line up very nicely! The final &lt;em&gt;-š&lt;/em&gt; is a Hittite nominative ending, so it can be disregarded, and the initial &lt;em&gt;[M]&lt;/em&gt; is a silent determinative, saying that what follows is a male name. Remember also that it wasn't uncommon to transcribe a vowel twice in cuneiform, using the pattern &lt;em&gt;CV-VC&lt;/em&gt; for a &lt;em&gt;CVC&lt;/em&gt; syllable—this was just due to the constraints of the writing system, and doesn't necessarily indicate anything about the underlying phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T02:54:03.830" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T02:54:03.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31980" CreationDate="2019-07-23T19:23:49.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German a word like &lt;em&gt;Handy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Oldtimer&lt;/em&gt; can be called a &lt;em&gt;Scheinanglizismus&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;pseudo-Anglicism&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that is specific to this one source language, and there are others for other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally it can be called a &lt;em&gt;Scheinentlehnung&lt;/em&gt; (pseudo-loan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Smoking&lt;/em&gt; is a bit different because it is similar in many languages, so it's not clear that German speakers invented it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another word &lt;em&gt;false friend&lt;/em&gt; (or similar in other languages) which is for a broader category, like &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all possible sets have a shorthand label with currency in every language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T15:29:43.613" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T15:29:43.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31981" CreationDate="2019-07-23T20:34:10.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is fairly difficult to accurately introspect about what your oral cavity anatomy is doing when you speak, and even harder when you're trying to follow abstract articulatory instructions. To verify what you are doing, you need specialized articulatory gadgetry, to rule out the possibility that you are actually backing and raising your tongue when you think you are only protruding your lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably easiest to convince yourself that the tongue is backed, by comparing [wi] and [ɥi] where [ɥ] is the tongue-fronted version of [w] (compare French &lt;em&gt;oui&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;huit&lt;/em&gt;). The height of the tongue is less important, perceptually, and probably in actual speech, the tongue &quot;aims for&quot; the soft palate (a close position is the ideal target), but may not make it all the way. However, if the tongue were not raised in producing [w], you would not expect there to be any tongue-lowering when you say &quot;woe&quot;. Comparing &quot;wooed&quot; (past tense of &quot;woo&quot;), &quot;wood&quot;, &quot;wode&quot; and &quot;wad&quot;, you should notice tongue lowering in the case of &quot;wad&quot; and not in &quot;wooed&quot;. Tongue lowering is generally implemented by jaw-lowering, so put your thumb under your chin and say these words, and notice how your jaw pushed your thumb when you say &quot;wad&quot; but not &quot;wooed&quot;. If that doesn't work for you, maybe you are, um, unusual in how you articulate vowels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T20:34:10.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31957" CreationDate="2019-07-23T20:42:06.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard convention for indicating orthography is with angled brackets, thus [ jɛs ] / iɛs / &amp;lt; yes &gt; (meaning respectively phonetically, phonemically or underlyingly, and orthographically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T20:42:06.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32286" CreationDate="2019-07-23T23:47:18.670" Score="-3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Swedish language, I am presently trying to discern the proper translation of &quot;&lt;em&gt;No, they're not&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as it is spoken and written in English. I determine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nej, det är de inte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nej, det är dem inte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the differences between written and spoken Swedish while trying to conjugate for the pronoun '&lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;', being '&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;' and '&lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9332" LastEditorUserId="9332" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T04:26:38.907" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T14:11:22.157" Title="Swedish conjugation, spoken vs written" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-08-30T08:53:47.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="31996" CreationDate="2019-07-24T00:49:01.560" Score="2" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf2fM79TsCc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this insightful and touching video&lt;/a&gt; by John Green where he makes the connection between 'to gather' and 'together'. One could say &quot;let's gather at the bus stop&quot; for instance, causing the together-ness. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf2fM79TsCc&amp;amp;lc=UgwFasMZ0IA1YCjLQjR4AaABAg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the comments&lt;/a&gt;, people started going into this and found that this is similar in their language as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;German: &quot;zu sammeln&quot; and &quot;zusammen&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polish: &quot;zbierać&quot; and &quot;zebranie/zbieranina&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch: &quot;verzamelen&quot; and &quot;(te)samen&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Greek: &quot;Μαζί (mazi)&quot; together, &quot;μαζεύω (mazevo)&quot; to gather&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French: 'to gather' = '(se) rassembler', 'together' = 'ensemble' &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is there actually a connection between the words on a semantic level? Like the causation relation I propose above? Or is this simply an evolution of two different Indo-european stems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T12:30:36.383" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T00:20:12.153" Title="Common root 'to gather' and 'together'" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;derivation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31957" CreationDate="2019-07-24T03:27:49.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would use angle-brackets ⟨like this⟩, next to the phonemes in the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taken from Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jclgb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jclgb.png&quot; alt=&quot;chart of Akkadian consonants&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T03:27:49.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31979" CreationDate="2019-07-24T05:37:11.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by other people, Egyptian transliterates as nb-ḫpr-w-rꜥ, while cuneiform reads ni-ib-hu-ur-ri-ri-ia or ni-ib-hu-ru-ri-ia. The name contains three basic morphemes. The first is *nib (or *neb), the last is *Riꜥa (God Râ). So far, so clear. Now, the issue is the second morpheme: obviously neither hurri nor huru can equate ḫpr. So the conclusion is that cuneiform Nib-Hur(r)u-Ria reflects another name, something like nb-ḫ(w)r-rꜥ. This pharaoh has an ordinary name that was not the official nb-ḫpr-w-rꜥ written on the walls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T05:37:11.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31968" CreationDate="2019-07-24T08:42:57.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say 'if such a work exists for a different stage of the language, that's also good to know about!'. Well Coptic (the last stage of Egyptian) is plentifully written with vowels,  because the Egyptians migrated from the hieroglyph-based writing system to an alphabetical one around the turn of the christian era. A google search for 'coptic dictionary' should find you one.&#xA;As far as Middle Egyptian goes and as far as I know there is no such book. It is waiting to be written. Takacs has begun an etymological dictionary which by its nature considers vowels, however he has not got through the alphabet (yet?).&#xA;As well as the work by Takacs, Loprieno and Vycichi (which I didn't know - thank you Arnaud), Peust is worth reading on Middle Egyptian phonology (although he does write in German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8118" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T08:42:57.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31980" CreationDate="2019-07-24T11:46:06.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most loanwords develop different meanings, so the term &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a loanword/borrowing. You should just assume that the loan could have a different meaning from the source language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T11:46:06.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31972" CreationDate="2019-07-24T12:47:07.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we take &lt;em&gt;ablaut&lt;/em&gt; to mean the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indo-European ablaut&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=e1HyCQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;we do not see it&lt;/a&gt; in the Bengali verb system. Instead, they can be seen in derivational patterns in loanwords from Sanskrit, e.g. বিজ্ঞান &lt;code&gt;/biggæn/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;science&quot;, but বৈজ্ঞানিক &lt;code&gt;/boiggænik/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;scientific&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; has become the diphthong &lt;em&gt;oi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Bengali does have &lt;em&gt;vowel alternations&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. the infinitive কেনা &lt;code&gt;/kena/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;to buy&quot; becomes in the simple present tense for the 1st person singular কিনি /&lt;code&gt;kini/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;I buy&quot;]. The &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; of the infinitive has become &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; before the final &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; of the verbal suffix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is replicated across the conjugation: before &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; in the suffix, the vowel of the root is raised if it is a mid vowel: &lt;code&gt;/e æ o ɔ/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/i e u o/&lt;/code&gt; respectively. This is interpreted as a case of &lt;em&gt;vowel harmony&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;vowel assimilation&lt;/em&gt; rather than the Indo-European ablaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a few verb suffixes are low vowels e.g. the second person familiar (তুমি &lt;em&gt;tumi&lt;/em&gt;) in the present continuous is ছো &lt;code&gt;/tʃʰo/&lt;/code&gt;, the first person in the future tense is বো &lt;code&gt;/bo/&lt;/code&gt;, the first person in the simple past tense is লাম &lt;code&gt;/lam/&lt;/code&gt; and the third person familiar in the simple past tense is লো &lt;code&gt;/lo/&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These still trigger vowel raising, because of a diachronic change: all these had an &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; before it, as can be seen from the সাধু ভাষার &lt;em&gt;shadhu bhasha&lt;/em&gt; forms. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.banglatangla.com/conjugate.php?verb=%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;For কেনা &lt;code&gt;/kena/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;to buy&quot;&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SIMPLE PAST &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[সাধু ভাষা &lt;em&gt;shadhu bhasha&lt;/em&gt; &gt; চলিত ভাষা &lt;em&gt;cholit bhasha&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(আমি) কিনিলাম (&lt;em&gt;kinilam&lt;/em&gt;) &gt; কিনলাম (&lt;em&gt;kinlam&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(সে) কিনিল (&lt;em&gt;kinilo&lt;/em&gt;) &gt; কিনলো (&lt;em&gt;kinlo&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the vowel raising in the stem is a trace of the &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt; that was previously present across all the forms of the simple past. A similar process occurred for the future tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a related &lt;code&gt;/a/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/e/&lt;/code&gt; alternation, which occurs only for certain verbs and certain verb forms, and forms the basis of certain conjugation classes. Compare জানা &lt;code&gt;/dʒana/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;to know&quot; with খাওয়া &lt;code&gt;/kʰauwa/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;to eat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T14:35:15.500" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T14:35:15.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31987" CreationDate="2019-07-24T14:43:14.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, of course there is a semantic connection. When things have been gathered, they are together, aren't they. So &quot;together&quot; is the result of having been gathered. So it's not surprising that they should share an etymology is many languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T14:43:14.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31987" CreationDate="2019-07-24T15:24:16.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Etymonline, the English word goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English togædere &quot;so as to be present in one place, in a group, in an  accumulated mass,&quot; from to (see to) + gædere &quot;together&quot; (adv.), apparently a  variant of the adverb geador &quot;together,&quot; from Proto-Germanic *gaduri- &quot;in a body,&quot; from PIE *ghedh- &quot;to unite, join, fit&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not surprising that PIE-derived languages would have a related verb and adjective.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting how little relationship the languages' words seem to have to each other. But maybe I just don't know how to pronounce Polish? Or I'm not seeing the way the sounds mutate between languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25113" LastEditorUserId="13636" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T10:29:03.423" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T10:29:03.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-24T17:22:35.510" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have attached an example of this structure for the word 'dream', from Blevins' chapter in the Handbook of Phonological Theory, 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8rcjk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8rcjk.png&quot; alt=&quot;A branching syllable tree for the word &amp;#39;dream&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25115" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T17:41:13.520" Title="Who are the first theorists to represent syllable structure as a hierarchical branching structure?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31997" CreationDate="2019-07-24T18:34:30.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends on what you mean by &quot;hierarchical branching structure&quot;. The particular expression &quot;hierarchical branching structure&quot; was, AFAIK, first introduced in the late 70's in metrical studies, but the equivalent concepts are ancient. Candidates are &quot;Ancient Chinese Grammarians&quot;, &quot;Indic Grammarians&quot; and possibly &quot;Ancient Greek Grammarians&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T18:34:30.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="31999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32001" CreationDate="2019-07-24T21:20:57.370" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a time when distinct Germanic dialects already existet in geographically diffenrent areas, the usual verbs to signal a following direct speech seem to be descendant of PrG „*kweþana“ in any dialect (e.g. Go: Wulfila, OS: Heliand, OHG: Monsee Fragments).&#xA;However in todays‘ use of Germanic languages (both oral and written) forms like G „sagen“, EN „to say“ Du „zeggen“, IS „segja“, Sw „säga“, Nw „seie“, Da „sige“ dominate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why and how did this often used verb nearly completely diappear form all Germanic languages? Why and how could it consequently be replaced be the „same“ word in distinct dialects over geographically diffenrent areas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25117" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T01:28:22.810" Title="What happened to *kweþana?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;frequency&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31999" CreationDate="2019-07-25T01:28:22.810" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, just to note, *&lt;em&gt;kweþaną&lt;/em&gt; didn't completely die out: English &quot;quoth&quot; is archaic but still recognizable, and Icelandic &lt;em&gt;kveða&lt;/em&gt; is still in active use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you're absolutely right about the general trend that killed off most descendants of *&lt;em&gt;kweþaną&lt;/em&gt;. It's now quite rare across the Germanic languages, when it used to be widespread. It's hard to say &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; something like this happens in linguistics, at least in a falsifiable way, but it's certainly possible to speculate and make some educated guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Colin Fine points out in the comments, there's a very nice parallel here with Latin &lt;em&gt;inquam&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Inquam&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;I say&quot;) was a common Classical word with very restricted usage: it was always connected to a specific quotation or phrase of some sort, and almost always occurs in the present tense singular—it doesn't even have a single attestation of its infinitive, anywhere, in any stage of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So despite its Classical popularity, &lt;em&gt;inquam&lt;/em&gt; left no impression at all on modern Romance languages. It was simply too heavily restricted; more general words like &lt;em&gt;dicō&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to speak&quot; took its place, giving French &lt;em&gt;dire&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;decir&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible that the same thing happened with *&lt;em&gt;kweþaną&lt;/em&gt; in Germanic: the use of this verb became restricted to certain contexts, and eventually more general synonyms caught on and took its place. In the languages where the root survives, like Icelandic, it has no such restrictions (either having lost them or never developed them), and so it sticks around as a general-purpose verb for speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T01:28:22.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2019-07-25T05:13:29.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasons for which a language may have eight different words for ‘lion’ do not vary in essence from the reasons the Inuits have fifty words for ‘snow’, and ‘functionality’ at vast can answer the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vis-à-vis the various cases PIE languages used for the inflection of nouns, it is worth emphasizing that there are still very much alive languages, which much like their precursors, haven’t dropped any of those markers throughout their existence: Russian (Именительный, Родительный, Дательный, Винительный and Предложный Падеж), Greek, Albanian (albeit, the latter had dropped its Vocative Case — one out of six Cases — some four or five decades ago: Rasa Emërore, Gjinore, Dhanore, Kallëzore and Rrjedhore). The various cases merely offer a particular suffix to the noun (singular masculine/feminine/neutral ; plural masculine/feminine/neutral). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a linguistic perspective I could not possibly think of languages in terms of ‘complexity’. Each language has its own peculiarities, whether morphologically or syntactically speaking; it rises, evolves (in accordance with its existential circumstances), and in the best case scenario is preserved for a considerably long time. While Romance languages have little to no traces of noun inflection in the various cases, they make up for it with verb conjugations in Eight (!!) different modes (i.e., Italian: Modo Indicativo, Congiuntivo, Condizionale, Imperativo, Gerundio, Infinito Presente, Participio Presente, and Participio Passato) — not to mention the Tempi Semplici and Tempi Composti for each mode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, while they share none of the above characteristics, they have other peculiarities. The verbs in Hebrew, although superficially seem to have only three simple tenses, are conjugated in both singular masculine/feminine and plural masculine/feminine according to the verb root structures called בנין Binyan — Structure: Binyan Po’el; Pi’el; HitPa’el; Hif’il; Pu’al. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, it is safe to say that when a language is not established in written, there’s more flexibility and room for it to evolve (for instance, add/drop markers), as opposed to a well established, written language, and English is a perfect example of the latter. When Dante Alighieri wanted the lady of his interest to be able to read his poem, he chose to write it especially for her in the language of the peasants of his time, rather than in the official Latin. And by doing so, he gave birth and legitimized... Italian(!!). The poem was no other than La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that explains a bit the circumstances under which languages evolve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25119" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T05:13:29.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32007" CreationDate="2019-07-25T18:11:33.783" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for tools that can &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;format parse trees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.  I want to be able to collapse and expand them.  I understand that collapsing them is rather simple with regex or even simple search and replace, but I am doing some testing which requires me to work with a large amount of trees for testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say expand, I mean pretty print them in a way that represents the tree &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following parse tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S (VP (DT He) (VBP ran)))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expands out to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(S&#xA;    (VP&#xA;        (DT He) &#xA;        (VBP ran)&#xA;    )&#xA;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I understand collapsing them back is rather simple, but I have a lot of trees to test.. AND these trees can be quite large.  I tried googling variations on &quot;parse syntax tree tools formatter&quot; and wasn't finding anything.  This would be something similar to a programming language beautifier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any links for online syntax tools would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25126" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T08:40:23.887" Title="Parse Tree Formatter Tools?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;&lt;parsing&gt;&lt;tools&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32006" CreationDate="2019-07-25T21:32:25.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a script I quickly assembled from pieces of code I had lying around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://trinket.io/python3/a33a025467?toggleCode=true&amp;amp;showInstructions=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://trinket.io/python3/a33a025467?toggleCode=true&amp;amp;showInstructions=true&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware that this script parses your tree very naively; it just processes the input symbol by symbol and does some formatting when it encounters opening or closing brackets; it will not warn you if you have any syntax errors in your tree structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I included the option to set a mode (plain or fancy), indentation depth and permitted opening/closing brackets - to change the settings, click the pen button, change the code and hit the play button to re-run the script; the usage of the settings is hopefully self-explanatory enough even if you don't know Python. This could of course be made more user-friendly if one had time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (plain mode, indentation depth 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Place your flat tree here:&#xA;&#xA;(S (VP (DT He) (VBP ran)))&#xA;&#xA;Here is your inflated tree:&#xA;&#xA;(S &#xA;    (VP &#xA;        (DT He)&#xA;        (VBP ran)&#xA;    )&#xA;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example (fancy mode, indentation depth 3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Place your flat tree here:&#xA;&#xA;(S (VP (DT He) (VBP ran)))&#xA;&#xA;Here is your inflated tree:&#xA;&#xA;|-- S &#xA;|   |-- VP &#xA;|   |   |-- DT He&#xA;|   |   |-- VBP ran&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably if someone messes up the script in the edit mode with this online tool, it will be lost for good, so here is the source code for restoration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;This is a simple script for formatting tree structures.&#xA;Author: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/13238/lemontree&#xA;&#xA;You can customize&#xA;- whether to use plain and fancy printout (default: plain),&#xA;- the depth of indentation (default: 4),&#xA;- the permitted opening and closing brackets (default: &quot;[&quot;, &quot;(&quot;),&#xA;by editing the settings in the source code.&#xA;&#xA;Exmple input:&#xA;[S [NP [PRN This]] [VP [V is] [NP [D a] [N tree]]]]&#xA;&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&#xA;# print the documentation&#xA;print(__doc__)&#xA;&#xA;# settings -- make your changes here&#xA;mode = &quot;plain&quot;        # set the printout mode (one out of &quot;plain&quot; or &quot;fancy&quot;)&#xA;ind_depth = 4         # set the amount of spaces by which you want each nesting level to be indented&#xA;opening = [&quot;(&quot;, &quot;[&quot;]  # set the symbol sequences which signal the start of a subtree&#xA;closing = [&quot;)&quot;, &quot;]&quot;]  # set the symbol sequences which signal the end   of a subtree&#xA;&#xA;# ask for tree input&#xA;tree_in = input(&quot;Place your flat tree here:\n&quot;)&#xA;&#xA;# generate formatted tree&#xA;tree_out = &quot;&quot;&#xA;ind_level = -1&#xA;for char in tree_in:  # parse each character&#xA;&#xA;    # opening bracket found - new nesting level; increase ind. level, add newline and indentation&#xA;    if char in opening:&#xA;        ind_level += 1&#xA;        if mode == &quot;plain&quot;:&#xA;            tree_out += &quot;\n&quot; + \&#xA;                        (ind_level * ind_depth) * &quot; &quot;&#xA;        elif mode == &quot;fancy&quot;:&#xA;            tree_out += &quot;\n&quot; + \&#xA;                        (ind_level * (&quot;|&quot; + ind_depth * &quot; &quot;) if ind_level &amp;gt; 0 else &quot;&quot;) + \&#xA;                        &quot;|&quot; + (ind_depth-1) * &quot;-&quot; + &quot; &quot;&#xA;&#xA;    # append current symbol&#xA;    if mode == &quot;plain&quot;:&#xA;        tree_out += char&#xA;    elif mode == &quot;fancy&quot;:&#xA;        if char not in opening and char not in closing:&#xA;            tree_out += char&#xA;&#xA;    # closing bracket found - end of nesting level; decrease ind. level and add newline&#xA;    if char in closing:&#xA;        ind_level -= 1&#xA;        if mode == &quot;plain&quot;:&#xA;            tree_out += &quot;\n&quot; + \&#xA;                        (ind_level * ind_depth) * &quot; &quot;&#xA;        elif mode == &quot;fancy&quot;:&#xA;            tree_out += &quot;\n&quot; + \&#xA;                        (ind_level * ind_depth + 1) * &quot; &quot; + \&#xA;                        &quot;\n&quot;&#xA;&#xA;tree_out = &quot;\n&quot;.join([line for line in tree_out.splitlines() if line.split()])  # remove blank lines&#xA;&#xA;# output formatted tree&#xA;print(&quot;\nHere is your inflated tree:\n&quot;)&#xA;print(tree_out)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has recommendations on possibly better online Python interpreters which permit running code with user input, I'm happy to learn about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T08:40:23.887" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T08:40:23.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-25T22:04:26.277" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking data set for reasoning. Basically, more examples like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1. I like food.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2. Cake is food.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Conclusion: I like cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15327" LastEditorUserId="15327" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T19:47:06.600" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T19:47:06.600" Title="Data set for reasoning?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;annotated-data&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31987" CreationDate="2019-07-26T09:48:47.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it has been pointed out, it’s interesting that this works although the words don’t seem to be related between (some of) the languages.&#xA;At least I cannot come up with a common root for engl. “gather” and German “sammeln”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German and Dutch versions are obviously related. What surprises me though, is that French “ensemble” and German “zusammen” do seem to be related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s a connection I never would have made! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: In the comments on YouTube, someone pointed out that in Indonesian you have “bersama” for ‘together,’ deriving from “sama” meaning ‘equal’ or ‘same.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This close similarity really surprises me, as you also have “beisammen” as an alternative to “zusammen” in German. Plus, this makes me think that “zusammen/sammeln” are related with engl. ‘same,’ meaning that when you come together, the different individuals become ‘same’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25130" LastEditorUserId="25131" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T00:20:12.153" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T00:20:12.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32011" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32012" CreationDate="2019-07-26T16:06:07.060" Score="0" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it accurate to say that the Spanish language has no connection whatsoever with the Greek language? If not, and if possible, about how much can we safely say there is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25132" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T16:14:14.310" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T17:48:44.627" Title="Is it accurate to say that the Spanish language has no connection whatsoever with the Greek language?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;spanish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32011" CreationDate="2019-07-26T16:13:10.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish and Greek are both part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indogermanic language family&lt;/a&gt; and therefore historically connected. However, this historic connection is rather old, the split between proto-Greek and proto-Italic dates back at least 4000 years. The split is that old that there is no mutual intelligibility between Spanish and Greek left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Modern Spanish has absorbed a lot of learned loans coined from Ancient Greek mostly for medical and technical vocabulary. This gives another connection to the Greek language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T17:48:44.627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T17:48:44.627" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31997" CreationDate="2019-07-26T17:41:13.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The structure is pretty clearly based off Chomskyan tree structures, so I can hardly imagine it being much earlier than that. &lt;em&gt;Syntactic Structures&lt;/em&gt; is from 1957, so while the 60s would have been my guess, the 70s suggested in @user6726 's answer can't too far either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T17:41:13.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28530" CreationDate="2019-07-26T22:07:26.487" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several in fact, but there doesn't seem to be a single unified term, which is quite a problem because it makes looking it up a real pain in the neck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amazingly of languages that have this feature I have yet to see one have a specific native name for it. I myself as a Turkish speaker describe this to people around me as &amp;quot;when your mother calls you 'my mother'&amp;quot;, but that's about it. The very demand to name it seems to have arisen from those who study it, who often don't seem to have such a common occurrence of the concept in their own languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anthropologists (especially Americans) often call it &lt;strong&gt;self-reciprocal kinship&lt;/strong&gt;, although that term can be extended to given names and honorifics depending on the author's perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] What may be termed &lt;strong&gt;conceptual reciprocity&lt;/strong&gt; is an exact accord in range&#xA;of inverted meaning of the terms for two relationships. [...]&#xA;The generic terms talakyi and ulani are each &lt;strong&gt;self-reciprocal&lt;/strong&gt;; but they are&#xA;hardly terms of relationship in the strict sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anthropological18amer/page/78&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Kroeber, A. L. (1919). Zuñi Kin and Clan. &lt;em&gt;Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Volume XVIII&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 79-80)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychologists don't seem to have a specific name for the term, but I have encountered (at least the quotations of) a few who describe this action as &amp;quot;a method to teach children how to address their older relatives by anticipating them to repeat&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally linguists seem to use a number of different words depending on the focus of their study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Affectionate kin terms&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Affectionate kin&lt;/strong&gt; vocatives are social honorifics that are employed to en- hance intimacy among relatives and acquaintances. Jordanian Arabic features several  of these,  e.g., yammah 'mother', yābah 'father' [...] these &lt;strong&gt;affectionate kin terms&lt;/strong&gt; are used in two distinct ways. First, parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts may use their own designated  absolute  honorifics in addressing  their  respective  descendants,  thus reversing the denotational signification for the purpose of showing affection. For instance, Jordanian mothers usually address their sons and daughters as yammah 'mother' instead of yabni 'my son' or yabinti 'my daughter' for various purposes in interaction  (e.g., summons, requests,  questions, etc.),  as in the utterances in (9) below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(9a)  'a tf-ni  may  yammah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(mother-child) give-me  water  mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Give me water, son/daughter!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285592947_Kin_Terms_and_Titles_of_Address_as_Relational_Social_Honorifics_in_Jordanian_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Farghal, M. &amp;amp; Shakir A. (1994), Kin Terms and Titles of Address as Relational Social Honorifics in Jordanian Arabic. &lt;em&gt;Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 36, No. 2&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 246-247)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reverse Adressing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reverse addressing&lt;/strong&gt; is the possibility of addressing a recipient with the addressor‟s kinship term and try has been made to investigate almost all its aspects based on harvested and self-reported data. Since this feature is not a universal feature of all the natural languages, representative examples are used with the English equivalents to provide all the readers with an in-depth understanding of this phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ijscl.net/article_3359_9482fce532417a96ab66acde9e8fdb13.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Tavakol M., Allami H. (2013). Reverse Addressing in Modern Persian. &lt;em&gt;International Journal of Society, Culture &amp;amp; Language, Vol. 2, Issue 1&lt;/em&gt;, p. 37)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a bit tricky. Depending on the language, country or region this phenomenon can have several connotations. While a primary way to address relatives regardless of age in some cultures, in others it's exclusively used for children and in yet others as a form of belittling. As a result, this itself is a sociological question in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to consider are the many variants which can even differ for speakers of the same dialect of a language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As briefly alluded to above, the &amp;quot;relatives&amp;quot; this can be applied to don't only depend on which relatives have a word designated for them.&#xA;(ex. A Bulgarian uncle might not call their niece an &lt;em&gt;вуйчо (vuycho)&lt;/em&gt; ~uncle, but their grandfather might call his granddaughter &lt;em&gt;дядо (dyado)&lt;/em&gt; ~grandfather )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the gender of the addressee can be the reference rather than the addressor (ex. a Mexican mother might call her son &lt;em&gt;papá&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;mamá&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Vertical&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Horizontal&amp;quot; generational extensions are possible.&#xA;(ex. A Vietnamese mother calling her daughter &lt;em&gt;cô&lt;/em&gt; is calling her an aunt, rather than mother)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it confined to a geographical region?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you're talking! This is actually a pretty interesting question that I don't think has been covered in-depth before, so I've spent the past few months surveying people across the internet to make this map:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWwMJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OWwMJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The darker the green the more common, used yellow if I was uncertain with my data from a certain country, last updated: July 23rd See https://www.reddit.com/r/LinguisticMaps/comments/chsnub/wip_update_july_25th_geographic_distribution_of/ &quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell: It's common throughout Latin America, A good chunk of Africa, The Balkans, The Middle East; more region specific for Italy and South Asia; and appearing in pockets throughout Western Europe, Central Asia, The US and Oceania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the above link (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/LinguisticMaps/comments/chsnub/wip_update_july_25th_geographic_distribution_of/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;or click here if it's invisible for some reason&lt;/a&gt;) for a more in-depth analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, how can I find more information about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welp,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if any of the above citations were an indicator, anthropologists might be of more help to you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I myself personally recommend &lt;em&gt;The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies&lt;/em&gt; by German Valentinovich Dziebel. It's a pretty good source covering many disciplines but best of all it proved to be a very good starting point for my own research on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any and all of the above citations, and references found therein. You might need to be a bit archive-savvy to find those American Anthropology Journal articles but the later ones should be a bit more accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are particularly interested in my map, you could try making an acquaintance from a particular country and asking them first hand about it, amazingly this is a lot more effective in distinguishing nuances between how different cultures implement their kinship reversals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that somewhat clarifies things for you. Feel free to comment for any further clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17465" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T12:51:20.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32031" CreationDate="2019-07-27T02:02:21.207" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a Wikipedia article a while ago about semantics. It explained that each meaning of a word fits into one of five categories. For example, the word &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; has a literal meaning as a piece of anatomy. However, you can also have the &lt;em&gt;head of a line&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;em&gt;head&lt;/em&gt; has a figurative meaning as the first person in a queue. The article had more distinctions than just literal and figurative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to argue whether or not five is the correct number of categories, I just want to find the name of this concept. What is it called? Bonus points if you can find the Wikipedia article!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T00:06:53.990" Title="What is the classification of semantics into literal and figurative meanings called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31974" CreationDate="2019-07-27T02:24:51.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's actually an easy one. Rulers sit, subjects stand. Those who are allowed to sit are noble, and their behavior defines propriety. A judge who is in office is said to be a sitting judge. A monarch is said to be on the throne. The pope issues encyclicals &lt;em&gt;ex cathedra&lt;/em&gt; 'from the chair'. – &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/482/jlawler&quot; title=&quot;8,329 reputation&quot;&gt;jlawler&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/31974/how-did-sitting-semantically-shift-to-mean-properness#comment70008_31974&quot;&gt;Jul 23 at 20:45&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T02:24:51.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-27T03:30:38.150" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does it make any sense or rather is it scientific to take random languages that have no prior evidence of kinship and apply the historical comparative method? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25133" LastEditorUserId="4" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T19:35:02.263" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T23:20:50.783" Title="Is it scientific to throw all previous work on language families and instead take two random languages and apply the historical comparative method?" Tags="&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13024" CreationDate="2019-07-27T05:41:31.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you see a link between &quot;twisting&quot; and &quot;turning&quot;? I do. When something turns, it often twists its path. Does that make sense to you? – &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/5581/sumelic&quot; title=&quot;10,985 reputation&quot;&gt;sumelic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/13024/why-was-thwart-assigned-to-pie-terkw-to-twist#comment34602_13024&quot;&gt;Aug 7 '15 at 4:48&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T05:41:31.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30956" CreationDate="2019-07-27T10:16:59.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely, it's especially common for certain verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7jkyV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7jkyV.png&quot; alt=&quot;Bir ev tahliye **ettirildi**&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bir ev &lt;strong&gt;tahliye ettirildi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A house was &lt;strong&gt;evacuated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Istanbul, following the past earthquake many houses cracked (sic.). Among these, opposite of the Süreyyapaşa factory in Balat, was a new four-story stone house whose cracks were deemed so dangerous that yesterday security officers (sic.) escorted the renters outside while their belongings were transported to another location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cumhuriyetarsivi.com/sign/buy_page.xhtml?clip=13805630&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Cumhuriyet Gazetesi. 4 May 1935, p. 2.)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here &lt;em&gt;tahliye&lt;/em&gt; is a word which means an evacuation. (I'll spare you the ultimate derivation to keep things as simple as possible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To make it into a verb we use the word &lt;em&gt;etmek&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&quot;tahliye etmek&quot;&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;to evacuate&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's make it causative, &lt;em&gt;&quot;tahliye et&lt;strong&gt;tir&lt;/strong&gt;mek&quot;&lt;/em&gt; would be to order an evacuation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally what would be the fate of one who has had an evacuation ordered for them? Pop in the anti-causative &lt;strong&gt;-il&lt;/strong&gt; and you get &lt;em&gt;&quot;tahliye ettir&lt;strong&gt;il&lt;/strong&gt;mek&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because this is from a newspaper and we're reporting it, you can conjugate it in the third person plural* and past tense yielding: &lt;em&gt;&quot;tahliye ettirildi&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(* The third person plural is equivalent to the singular in a lot of cases, such as when the subjects are humans)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the gist of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that there are a few other forms of the causative as well so you might also come across piş&lt;strong&gt;ir&lt;/strong&gt;ilmek (to get cooked) or kapa&lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ıldı (to be/get shut down). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Akşam için muhteşem bir yemek pişirilmiş.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A wonderful meal has been cooked for the evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eski ofisimiz kapatıldı ama yenisi şu adreste açıldı.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our old office was closed but the new one opened at this address here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17465" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T10:16:59.463" CommentCount="27" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32036" CreationDate="2019-07-27T16:10:51.753" Score="7" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today the Cyrillic script is used by the East Slavs, such as the Russians and the Bulgarians, but the West Slavs (e.g. the Czechs, the Poles) and some South Slavs (e.g. the Croats, the Slovenes) use the Latin script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the Croats, for example, used to use the Cyrillic script, but I'm wondering whether &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the Slavic people used the Cyrillic script at some point in their history? Is the reason why some of them displaced the Cyrillic script the fact that the it was connected to Orthodox Christianity while they were/are mostly Catholics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13248" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T09:52:47.973" Title="The Cyrillic script among the Slavic people" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;slavic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-27T22:12:10.873" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering for how long the voicing persists into closure here, if at all. At about 50% into the closure I would say it's noise only from there on, nevermind F1. But what about the oscillations before that point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKKQg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKKQg.png&quot; alt=&quot;waveform and spectrogram of /p/ in &amp;quot;type of&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25136" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-07-28T00:22:16.170" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T11:58:08.600" Title="Voicing Into Closure? [segmentation, waveform and spectrogram form Praat]" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32018" CreationDate="2019-07-27T23:20:50.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scientific? Absolutely! At least, if you're going by one common definition of &quot;scientific&quot;, meaning &quot;making falsifiable hypotheses, doing experiments to gather data, rinse and repeat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comparative method is so useful specifically because it fits into this cycle. The way it's conventionally used, it assumes that language change is for the most part uniform and regular. So if we hypothesize a relationship between Latin initial &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; and German initial &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt;, the comparative method suggests that there should be quite a lot of similar-looking, similar-meaning words in Latin and German, where the Latin word starts with &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; and the German word starts with &lt;code&gt;/f/&lt;/code&gt;. If we look at the data, that's exactly what we find (and exactly what Jakob Grimm found).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to do this? Well, that depends on your use case. If nothing else, rediscovering something like Grimm's Law can be a great way to introduce students to the comparative method and teach them how to apply it in practice. And especially outside the Indo-European family, there are a whole lot of languages whose categorization is far from certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, after all, there is the chance (however remote) that you'll discover some new connection that's been overlooked in the past. But the odds are slim; remember that the null hypothesis is always that two random languages have no relationship to each other, and it takes quite a lot of evidence to reject that. Learn from the mistakes of Nostratic and Proto-World analyses, and be ready for a whole lot of failures before finding an actual connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T23:20:50.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32022" CreationDate="2019-07-28T05:49:18.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably background noise. To check this, compare a section with no speech. For example, during closure of /p/ you can get very strong apparent &quot;coarticulation&quot; from preceding /a/ where the formants of /a/ are identifiable -- if there is an echo. You can't analyse noise with just a tiny snippet of a spectrogram, you need an actual acoustic wave sample of a full utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T05:49:18.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-28T09:26:11.390" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;One property of dreams, which you have when you sleep, is that they are not real but imaginary, and thus may give you unlikely experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many languages throughout the world, not limited to English, you express your wishes you think are perfect (“ideal”), &lt;em&gt;your ultimate desires&lt;/em&gt;, with the word “dream,” which means “an (&lt;em&gt;unrealistic, unlikely, and impossible&lt;/em&gt;) imagination you get when you sleep.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that, despite those negative connotations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21779" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T09:26:11.390" Title="Why do you call ideal wishes “dreams?”" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-07-28T16:34:50.493" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-28T10:27:36.470" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Davidsonian and Neo-davidsonian formal semantics is full of templates containing something labelled as &lt;strong&gt;Event Argument&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, In Kratzer (1996, p.1), discussing severing the external argument from its predicate, this sentence is provided: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1) We bought your slippers in Marrakesh.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Davidsonian semantics analyze this sentence as: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1') Ǝe [buy (your slippers) (we) (e) &amp;amp; in(Marrakesh) (e)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in Neo-davidsonian semantics, it's taken as: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1'') Ǝe [buying(e) &amp;amp; Agent(we)(e) &amp;amp; Theme(your slippers)(e) &amp;amp; in(Marrakesh)(e)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why there must be an &lt;strong&gt;Event Argument&lt;/strong&gt; realized with &lt;strong&gt;(e)&lt;/strong&gt; in both (1') and (1'')? &#xA;Who argued for it in the first place? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20155" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T10:27:36.470" Title="What's an Event Argument?" Tags="&lt;formal-semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32022" CreationDate="2019-07-28T11:58:08.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your spectrogram is not clear. You should use a narrow-band spectrogram to see formants efficiently. So change your settings. To obtain this visualisation, you should use a small window length as it is indicated here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_2__Configuring_the_spectrogram.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_2__Configuring_the_spectrogram.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, if it appears harmonics with a high energy, so this segment is voiced. Like in these examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.krisyu.org/blog/supp-material-cantonese-creak-perception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.krisyu.org/blog/supp-material-cantonese-creak-perception.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T11:58:08.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32029" CreationDate="2019-07-28T19:12:33.533" Score="2" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/449/is-the-ll-in-albanian-like-the-sounds-in-other-languages/13092#13092&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; here is my question: How can I write a &lt;em&gt;interdental lateral&lt;/em&gt; in phonetic transcription (IPA preferred, but not a necessary requirement, other wide spread phonetic notation systems are also welcome)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-29T08:56:56.823" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T12:12:49.090" Title="How can I write an interdental lateral in phonetic transcription?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;&lt;laterals&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32028" CreationDate="2019-07-28T20:22:46.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/extIPA_2016.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extIPA&lt;/a&gt; gives you these options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voiceless interdental lateral fricative: ɬ̪͆&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voiced interdental lateral fricative: ɮ̪͆&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voiced interdental lateral approximant: l̪͆&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I find these diacritics a bit of overkill, especially given American English /θ, ð/ are also usually interdental but never transcribed with these diacritics anyway. I bet just [ɬ̪, ɮ̪, l̪] (or even [ɬ, ɮ, l], unless the language contrasts interdental with (post)alveolar) would suffice in most occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-07-28T20:30:17.047" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T20:30:17.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32016" CreationDate="2019-07-29T00:06:53.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the article! It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sememe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sememe&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are five types of sememes: two denotational and three connotational, the latter occurring only in phrase units (they do not reflect the denotation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Denotational 1: Primary denotation, for example &amp;quot;head&amp;quot; (body);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Denotational 2: Secondary denotation by resemblance with other denotation: &amp;quot;head&amp;quot; (ship);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connotational 1: Analogous in function or nature as the original denotation, for example, &amp;quot;head&amp;quot; used as managing or leading positions, which is similar to the role or function of &amp;quot;head&amp;quot; in the operation of the human body;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connotational 2: Emotive, e.g. meaning in &amp;quot;honey&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connotational 3: Evaluative, e.g. meaning in &amp;quot;sneak&amp;quot; – move silently and secretly for a bad purpose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the classification is into denotational and connotational sememes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T00:06:53.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32035" CreationDate="2019-07-29T02:48:06.390" Score="4" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;Studying the book &lt;em&gt;Understanding Morphology&lt;/em&gt; by Martin Haspelmath, I arrived at this fragment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The importance of the latter part of the definition is seen in paradigms like insula. Although there are only seven different sequences of sounds in (2.3), we can still say that the paradigm of insula has ten word-forms, because ten different sets of grammatical functions are expressed (e.g. genitive singular and nominative plural are distinct, despite having the same form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought a grammatical function was a relationship between constituents in a clause. So, my question is: why does the author gives genitive singular as an example? Is it supposed to be an inflection of the lexeme &lt;em&gt;insula&lt;/em&gt;; a specific &lt;em&gt;word-form&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25096" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T22:31:59.113" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T22:31:59.113" Title="Is the concept of grammatical function related to inflexion?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32032" CreationDate="2019-07-29T03:58:00.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terminology is just a bit unclear here. The real distinction is between different levels of the grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the phonological level and lower, the word &lt;em&gt;insula&lt;/em&gt; has seven different forms (&lt;em&gt;insula&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ae&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ā&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-am&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ās&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-īs&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;-ārum&lt;/em&gt;, in no particular order). These are the &quot;underlying forms&quot; that phonologists are concerned about, which get processed through some sort of mental machinery (rules, constraints, whatever analysis you use) to produce the actual sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the syntactic level and higher, the word &lt;em&gt;insula&lt;/em&gt; has fourteen different forms (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative, and locative; each of those can be singular or plural). The syntax doesn't care about the difference between Classical &lt;em&gt;insulae&lt;/em&gt; and archaic &lt;em&gt;insulās&lt;/em&gt;; all that matters is that it's the genitive singular form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The morphological layer is right in the middle of these two groups, and it's what maps between abstractions like &quot;&lt;em&gt;insula&lt;/em&gt; genitive singular&quot; and underlying forms like &quot;&lt;em&gt;insulae&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. When the author uses &quot;grammatical function&quot; here, what they mean is the abstract form of a word, the sort you see in glosses: something like &lt;code&gt;insula-GEN.SG&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. The author considers only five cases, but there are technically seven; two of them were just in decline by Classical times, so they're sometimes ignored for simplicity. You can find grammars which list five, six, or seven, depending on how much they're willing to simplify.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T03:58:00.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32021" CreationDate="2019-07-29T09:07:59.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I'm wondering whether all the Slavic people used the Cyrillic script at some point in their history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we include the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which according to Wikipedia was commissioned in the 9th century AD, then the Slavic language family predates the alphabet by around two thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that many languages/dialects/etc would have been spoken without ever having been written down in the Cyrillic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example Czech: It's earliest records are from around the 12th century. The earliest forms are written in a Latin orthography (though very different from today's). The Latin alphabet also took hold in neighbouring Poland, having been brought there by Christians, or by them that translated early Latin texts, as the first way to record the Polish language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to your question is no, not all Slavic people used the Cyrillic alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the reason why some of them displaced the Cyrillic script the fact that the it was connected to Orthodox Christianity while they were/are mostly Catholics? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not (quite) so. At least in the Lechitic, Bohemian, Moravian areas, Catholicism did not displace Orthodoxy, it displaced some kind of Paganism. Catholicism, having Latin as a liturgical language, of course brought with it the Latin alphabet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T09:07:59.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32032" CreationDate="2019-07-29T09:41:50.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not having read the book, I find the terminology misleading in the same way you did. &lt;strong&gt;Nominative plural&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;genitive singular&lt;/strong&gt; are commonly called &lt;em&gt;grammatical features&lt;/em&gt;. For a constituent to have a specific grammatical function, it must have the proper grammatical features, e.g. for &lt;em&gt;insulae&lt;/em&gt; to be the subject of the following sentence, we know it must be &lt;strong&gt;nominative plural&lt;/strong&gt; and not &lt;strong&gt;genitive singular&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insulae magnae sunt.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The islands are large.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, the other way around, if &lt;em&gt;insulae&lt;/em&gt; is to be interpreted as a postmodifier of &lt;em&gt;incolae&lt;/em&gt; in the following example, we know it must be &lt;strong&gt;genitive singular&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;incolae insulae&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;the inhabitants of the island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first &lt;em&gt;insulae&lt;/em&gt; could be replaced by &lt;em&gt;urbes&lt;/em&gt;, the second by &lt;em&gt;urbis&lt;/em&gt;, the nominative plural and genitive singular respectively of &lt;em&gt;urbs&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;city&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to collapse the distinction between &lt;em&gt;grammatical features&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;grammatical functions&lt;/em&gt;. If &lt;strong&gt;nominative singular&lt;/strong&gt; is a grammatical function, what do we call &lt;em&gt;subject&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23112" LastEditorUserId="23112" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T13:42:06.243" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T13:42:06.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32021" CreationDate="2019-07-29T09:52:47.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting, that before the Cyrillic script there was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glagolitic script&lt;/a&gt; used to write Old Church Slavonic. This is the script devised by Cyrill and Method, the Cyrillic script is a reform of the Glagolitic script. The Glagolitic script survived longest in Croatia where it was used for liturgical purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there was a pre-Christian writing system for some Slavic languages or not, and how it might have worked is unclear and left to further research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first wide-spread writing system for Old Church Slavonic was Glagolitic. In the orthodox parts, it was replaced by Cyrillic, in Croatia it continued until it was rather lately replaced by Latin writing. Other Slavic speaking areas were converted to Christianity by catholic missionaries and had Latin writing from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T09:52:47.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32028" CreationDate="2019-07-29T12:12:49.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a different idea, interpreting the interdental lateral as a lateralized th sound and using the IPA character ˡ (raised l) for lateral release: /ðˡˤ/. This sound is attested according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_consonant#Lateralized_consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for some Modern South Arabic language or some Southern Arabic dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T12:12:49.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32040" CreationDate="2019-07-29T20:35:41.897" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not able to find an etymology of ON &quot;miskunn&quot; within PrG.&#xA;Is the first syllable a prefix &quot;mis-&quot; indicating any &quot;wrong kunn, lack of kunn&quot; or a deformed &quot;midi-&quot; as in E &quot;com-passion&quot;, G &quot;Mit-leid&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which root does the word go back? &#xA;Or did the whole Concept of mercy/Erbarmen first come into Germanic languages with Christianisation?&#xA;Wulfila translates Gr &quot;οἰκτίρμων&quot; with &quot;bleiþs&quot; (e.g. Lk 6,36) going back on PrG *bliþiz, which seems less pathetic and weaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25117" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T10:29:24.920" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T15:48:48.020" Title="Was there a Proto-Germannic root of &quot;miskunn&quot;" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-29T23:38:17.323" Score="6" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_syllabics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cree syllabics&lt;/a&gt; from a comment on another SE. According to the wiki (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are unique among abugida scripts in that the orientation of a symbol, rather than modifications of its shape or diacritic marks, determines the vowel of a syllable. Each basic shape corresponds to a specific consonant sound; this is &lt;strong&gt;flipped or rotated&lt;/strong&gt; to denote the accompanying vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the glyphs ᑕ, ᑌ, ᑎ, and ᑐ represent the syllables &lt;em&gt;ta&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;te&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ti&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has palindromes and words that look the same upside down when written in a certain case and font, e.g., &quot;pod&quot;. But the typography of Cree syllabics opens up whole new possibilities for palindrome-like constructs. For example, you could potentially have text in a 2D grid that reads intelligibly but differently depending on the orientation of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do such texts exist? Are there any well-known examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24738" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T23:38:17.323" Title="Are there palindrome-like constructs in written Cree?" Tags="&lt;language-games&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32038" CreationDate="2019-07-30T15:48:48.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://ordbok.uib.no/perl/ordbok.cgi?OPP=miskunn&amp;amp;ant_bokmaal=5&amp;amp;ant_nynorsk=5&amp;amp;begge=%20&amp;amp;ordbok=begge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bokmålsordboka&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;miskunn m1 (norrøntmisskunn, egentlig 'det å ikke skylde en for noe', -kunn beslektet med kunne med eldre betydning 'skylde') særlig i religiøst språk: (Guds) nåde&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A translation into English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;miskunn &lt;em&gt;masc&lt;/em&gt; (norse: misskunn, actually &quot;the state of not owing anyone anything&quot;, -kunn being related to kunne, having the older meaning &quot;to owe&quot;) especially in religious language: (God's) mercy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would make it related to Proto-Germanic *kunnaną and PIE *ǵneh₃ or *ǵn̥néh₃ti. I am not sure of the semantic connection between knowing and owing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T15:48:48.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-30T19:57:48.920" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to measure vowel length in 'beat&quot;, utterance-final. Should I place the marker where it is now or further to the right, as there is some activity there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gS1xn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gS1xn.png&quot; alt=&quot;spectrogram and oscillogram of the word &amp;#39;beat&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25136" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T08:47:48.537" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T08:47:48.537" Title="Should I include this piece in the vowel? [spectrogram]" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;praat&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;sociophonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32041" CreationDate="2019-07-30T21:29:01.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems good. The vocal folds continue to vibrate a little bit after your boundary, even though the tongue and the lips were already articulating a stop, but it is just a coarticulation phenomenon. Yet, your burst seems very long and energetic for a [b].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T21:29:01.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T01:29:23.437" Score="4" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;given that:&#xA;Hawaiian (H)&#xA;Maori (M)&#xA;Samoan (S)&#xA;Tongan (T)&#xA;/l/ in H S T = /r/ in M&#xA;/t/ in M S T = /k/ in H&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why do we find words with /l/ /r/ /n/ alternations instead of the common attested /l/ /r/ alternation, such as:&#xA;H lima&#xA;M rima&#xA;S lima&#xA;T nima - why /n/ instead of /l/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a similar case can be found in the alternation between /t/ /k/ /s/ instead of common attestes /t/ /k/ alternation, such as:&#xA;H kila&#xA;M tira&#xA;S tila&#xA;T sila - why /s/ instead of /t/?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21930" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T10:05:27.643" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T10:05:27.643" Title="Proto-Polynesian reconstruction and ambiguities in Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan and Tongan" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32053" CreationDate="2019-07-31T04:08:48.623" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example can a voiced pharyngeal fricative  [ʕ] develop into the Voiceless bilabial fricative ⟨ɸ⟩? Are there places of articulation that don't directly develop into different places of articulation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25133" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T18:30:45.903" Title="Unfounded sound changes" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32045" CreationDate="2019-07-31T06:38:23.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tongan /s/ seems to be the regular reflex of *t before /i/. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_language#Related_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tongan has retained the original proto-Polynesian *h, but has merged it with the original *s as /h/. (The /s/ found in modern Tongan derives from *t before high front vowels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That article also says that as a general rule, Tongan retained a Proto-Polynesian phoneme reconstructed as *l but lost a different Proto-Polynesian phoneme reconstructed as *r. In fact, Tongan /l/ vs. ∅ is apparently the main criterion for reconstructing PP *l vs. *r, as they have merged reflexes in other Polynesian languages. So Tongan &lt;em&gt;nima&lt;/em&gt; seems to be a real outlier, which is in agreement with the note on the Wiktionary page &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Polynesian/rima&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reconstruction:Proto-Polynesian/rima&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it were *rima, Tongan would be expected to have *ima, and if it were *lima, Tongan would be expected also to have *lima. No other Polynesian language fully distinguishes /ɾ/ and /l/. [The reconstruction *rima] assumes that nima evolved out of *ima, which may have been modified to avoid confusion with a common homophone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternation between /n/ and /l/ or /n/ and /r/ (either sporadic, or as part of regular sound changes) is not that uncommon. There was a previous question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/19263/n-vs-l-in-south-asian-languages?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;/n/~/l/ alternation in Asian languages&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T06:57:51.163" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T06:57:51.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T12:53:27.397" Score="-1" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was not able to understand the grammar rules explain in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nltk/nltk_teach/blob/master/examples/grammars/book_grammars/discourse.fcfg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourse.fcfg&lt;/a&gt; file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any one help me understanding &lt;code&gt;SEM&lt;/code&gt; means in &lt;code&gt;S[SEM = &amp;lt;app(?subj,?vp)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; NP[NUM=?n,SEM=?subj] VP[NUM=?n,SEM=?vp]&lt;/code&gt; an other keywords in the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to decode all the lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appreciate your time.&#xA;Thanks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;S[SEM = &amp;lt;app(?subj,?vp)&amp;gt;] -&amp;gt; NP[NUM=?n,SEM=?subj] VP[NUM=?n,SEM=?vp]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain the meaning and the properties of each keyword. What does app, subj, ? NUM, means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25150" LastEditorUserId="25150" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T13:43:56.707" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T14:19:02.597" Title="Can anyone explain me the structure of the FCFG grammar" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;grammar-formalism&gt;&lt;nltk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T15:18:02.870" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a praat script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#!/usr/bin/praat --run&#xA;&#xA;form Add VOT&#xA;     sentence Filename_of_textgrid /mount/arbeitsdaten31/studenten1/vernonhn/Thesis/MASTER_code/autovot-master/experiments/data/ALC/train/0422047037_h_00.TextGrid&#xA;endform&#xA;&#xA;# check if absolute path&#xA;if startsWith (filename_of_textgrid$, &quot;/&quot;) &#xA;   # absolute, so just copy the value into the shortened variable&#xA;   filename$ = filename_of_textgrid$&#xA;else&#xA;   # relative, concatenate with shellDirectory&#xA;   filename$ = shellDirectory$ + &quot;/&quot; + filename_of_textgrid$&#xA;endif&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;textgrid = Read from file: filename$&#xA;&#xA;Insert interval tier: 2, &quot;VOT&quot;&#xA;numberOfIntervals = Get number of intervals: 1&#xA;for intervalNumber from 1 to numberOfIntervals&#xA;    label$ = Get label of interval: 1, intervalNumber&#xA;    if ( label$ = &quot;k&quot; ) or ( label$ = &quot;p&quot; ) or ( label$ = &quot;t&quot; )&#xA;        start = Get start time of interval: 1, intervalNumber&#xA;        end = Get end time of interval: 1, intervalNumber&#xA;                Insert boundary: 2, start&#xA;                Insert boundary: 2, end&#xA;                intervalNumberNewTier = Get interval at time: 2, start&#xA;                Set interval text: 2, intervalNumberNewTier, label$&#xA;   endif&#xA;endfor&#xA;&#xA;Save as text file: filename$ + &quot;.for.autoVOT&quot;&#xA;&#xA;removeObject: textgrid&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me why the line &lt;code&gt;textgrid = Read from file: filename$&lt;/code&gt; gives an error when i try to iterate over files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17042" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T15:18:02.870" Title="praat script errors" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31950" CreationDate="2019-07-31T15:44:22.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hypertext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hypertext&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(uncountable) Digital text in which the reader may navigate related information through embedded hyperlinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/layout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Layout&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A structured arrangement of items within certain limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, language is hyper. There is not one intended order of reading in a shelf of books. Discurse is not hierarchically structured, except when it is. Take three books of one author next to each other, and finding the relations between them will require someone to write a fourth book, repeat ad infinitum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caligraphy is a good example when it comes to the spatial dimensions, but painting in general counts as speech in some sense, too. For example, the German term &lt;em&gt;Schrift&lt;/em&gt; (cp. &quot;script&quot;) covers film et cetera, in legalese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(uncountable) Graphism of symbols such as letters that express some meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the choice of a font gives a typeset document certain notes of accentuation. Not to mention the depth of expressivity that a good hand script has. Effectively, it depends entirely on what you mean by &lt;em&gt;dimension&lt;/em&gt;. Surely a letter is a grapheme. Only morse code is somewhat one-dimensional, and not even really, because the meaning of the symbols has to be confered through a side-channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T15:44:22.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32046" CreationDate="2019-07-31T18:30:45.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the subculture of constructed-language enthusiasts, there's an acronym ANADEW: &quot;whatever you proposed for your conlang, A Natlang Already Did it Except Weirder&quot;. In other words, pretty much any bizarre sound change you propose has a precedent &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your specific case, a series of shifts like &lt;code&gt;ʕ → ʔ → h → ɸ&lt;/code&gt; in certain environments is absolutely possible; while I don't think any language has actually gone through this exact pattern, each of the individual stages is well-attested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T18:30:45.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19046" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:31:15.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, what is the proof the pIE didn't have retroflex stops? Or that it lacked affricates? In general, can we be sure that there are no major gaps in the pIE phonological system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out, there is none! And no, we can't be sure. We know nothing at all about PIE phonetics except for a few informed guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reconstructions you're talking about are &lt;em&gt;phonological&lt;/em&gt; models, not phonetic ones. And the trick with phonology is, it doesn't study anything we can actually measure in the real world. Instead, phonology is a field of models—and any given model is &quot;good&quot; only insofar as it explains the data in a clear and insightful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the &quot;standard model&quot; of PIE currently includes laryngeals like &lt;code&gt;*h₁&lt;/code&gt;. Saussure realized that he could explain the existing data more clearly and succinctly if he added a few special phonemes, which had no direct reflexes in any language known at the time. Since then, no theory &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; laryngeals has ever given us as clear or as complete of an explanation. So the laryngeals have stayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could PIE have had retroflex stops? Absolutely! Could you come up with a theory that incorporates them, perhaps saying that they merged into the dental/alveolar stops in all environments? Sure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is—&lt;strong&gt;does this addition actually add anything to the model?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it make anything clearer, or explain the data in a better way, or make better predictions? Because if not, Occam's razor suggests that we should stick with the simpler model—and the simpler model here is the one with fewer phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As TKR put it in his answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the PIE sound system as currently reconstructed works pretty well -- i.e., in combination with posited rules of sound change, it predicts the attested reflexes with high accuracy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the existing model makes very good predictions. So unless there's some clear and visible improvement that can be made by adding a new stop series, it's unlikely to catch on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:31:15.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32057" CreationDate="2019-07-31T20:17:53.210" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an obvious similarity between the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed roots *leg- and *les-, both &quot;to collect, gather&quot;, reflected in &lt;em&gt;logos&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;lego&lt;/em&gt; and German &lt;em&gt;lesen&lt;/em&gt; respectively. I have not yet seen a comparison of the roots, and did not research explicitly, other than looking up Wiktionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am hoping someone knows a reference from the top of their head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a common root to the two reconstructions and a grammatical explanation for the dissimalirity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a) &lt;em&gt;lesen&lt;/em&gt; did not have the connotation of &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt;. The sense is a phono-semantic loan from a christian incurser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.b) &quot;lesen&quot; had the connotation &lt;em&gt;to pick up hints&lt;/em&gt; for long.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both roots were the same but at different stages; Which would imply sound change not shared by both branches as early as in a PIE dialect scenario or at the latest in a scenario in which noble savage learns to read from forreigners--similar to 1.a)--and borrows the whole word mutating it slightly (Galician &lt;em&gt;lesen&lt;/em&gt;, 3rd p. pl. subjunctive participle of &lt;em&gt;ler&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to read&quot; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;legere&lt;/em&gt;, reminds of Ger &lt;em&gt;belesen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;learned&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that there is no main-stream hypothesis, otherwise I'd expect Wiktionary to note that. I'm pretty sure there are at best non-comittal opinions or unacceptable fringe theories at worst about questions concerning the timeline of PIE and unproven sound-changes. I think it is impossible to give an acceptable negative answer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be surprised if a tentative synchronic explanation has been given on the example of exactly these two roots. A general grammatic theory to synthesize an answer would probably be beyond me; I expect I will not find the answer in introductory text-books (if that constitutes lack of prior research, the question should be closed, or put on hold for a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; while).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So i guess I'm asking: Have I missed another principle possibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This could be deemed to broad and unlikely to result in a high quality answer and more likely to result in a low effort answer about the uncertainties of etymology, which would be yet too much effort to ask, for what it's worth, on the basis of the question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I really want to know is actually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a theory for a root *le-?-&lt;/strong&gt;? Ideally, that should explain a few other *l- initial roots as well, perhaps even &lt;em&gt;glossa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T23:51:42.587" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T13:50:34.933" Title="Reference Request: connection between PIE \*leg- and \*les" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32056" CreationDate="2019-08-01T10:25:53.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the time when Proto-Indogermanic was spoken, there wasn't any written form of it. It is therefore quite clear, that it also hadn't a word with the modern meaning of &quot;to read&quot;. German usage like &lt;em&gt;Kartoffeln lesen&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Trauben lesen&lt;/em&gt; still preserve the old meaning &quot;to collect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The root form of Latin &lt;em&gt;lego&lt;/em&gt; and many other words is &lt;em&gt;*leǵ&lt;/em&gt; with a ǵ that becomes palatalized in the Satem languages as shown by an Iranian cognate. The synonymity between &lt;em&gt;*les&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*leǵ&lt;/em&gt; is indeed strange, but I am not aware of a deeper explanation. My first guess would be that in Germanic we have for some reason applied a partial satemization to that root or borrowed it from a Satem language at an early stage in its history, but the existence of a Hittite (&lt;em&gt;li-iš-ša-an-zi&lt;/em&gt;) cognate to &lt;em&gt;lesen&lt;/em&gt; makes this hypothesis less plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that you can deduct anything from one single instance, where &lt;em&gt;*-ǵ&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;*-s&lt;/em&gt; are synonym forming endings; especially not even the fact that they are suffixes to a shorter root &lt;em&gt;*le&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another note: The Galician form &lt;em&gt;lesen&lt;/em&gt; is a pure coincidence, the /s/ there does not come from the /g/ in leger, but from the ending, compare Catalan &lt;em&gt;lleguessin&lt;/em&gt; with preserved /g/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The r in the Galician infinitve &lt;em&gt;ler&lt;/em&gt; is also not part of the root, it goes back to the Latin infinitive ending &lt;em&gt;-re&lt;/em&gt;. So no connection to German &lt;em&gt;lernen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to learn&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. For Some alternations in Protoindogermanic that occur with a greater frequency, see this question and its answers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27634/can-these-new-etymological-pairs-of-pie-roots-be-true&quot;&gt;Can these new etymological pairs of PIE roots be true?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T13:50:34.933" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T13:50:34.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-01T14:47:48.230" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's often whimsical to substitute a single letter for a group of letters phonetically identical to the letter's name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such as rewriting &quot;barbecue&quot; as &quot;bar-b-q&quot;, or the entirety of William Steig's classic children's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDB!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;CDB!&lt;/em&gt; (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDB!)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25153" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T15:45:43.150" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T15:45:43.150" Title="What's the name for using a letter to represent its name's sound?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32060" CreationDate="2019-08-01T15:07:41.183" Score="1" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new in speech-processing and there are some notions confused me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through Fourier Transform, we can get spectra of specific sound signals, the harmonic frequencies can be shown as the peaks in the spectrum. So are those harmonic frequencis i.e. the peak frequencies equivalent to the formant frequencies? Or what's the relationship between harmonic frequencies and formant frequencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, I have anothor question, that is, why the harmonic frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency? What if I synthesize a sound with a 440Hz wave and a 441Hz wave? Will the fundamental frequency of that sound be 1Hz!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23822" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T16:57:00.150" Title="What's the relationship between harmonics and formants?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;speech-recognition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32059" CreationDate="2019-08-01T15:51:27.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why the harmonic frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physics!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much all of the physical processes that create vibrations at a base frequency, also create vibrations at integer multiples of that base frequency. This includes the way the human vocal chords work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can artificially synthesize a sound with any frequencies you like, but you'll find it sounds somewhat &quot;unnatural&quot; unless you add some extra frequencies at integer multiples of the fundamental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or what's the relationship between harmonic frequencies and formant frequencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine for a moment that the human vocal tract didn't exist. In other words, you just had a voice box, and nothing above that to alter the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the physics of the vocal chords, this would produce a &quot;sawtooth wave&quot;, very much like the sound of a bowed string. If you Fourier-transform such a wave, the &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;th harmonic's amplitude is roughly proportional to &lt;code&gt;1/n&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with the vocal tract in place, that's not what we see. The geometry of the vocal tract imposes an &quot;envelope&quot; on the wave, damping some parts and amplifying others. The peaks &lt;em&gt;of the envelope&lt;/em&gt; are what we call the formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUVrt.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUVrt.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram of envelope superimposed on harmonics&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this diagram, the blue line is a Fourier-transformed speech sample, with each peak being a harmonic. The red line is a reconstruction of the envelope, a polynomial that transforms a sawtooth wave into this particular speech sound—where the red line is high, it's amplifying the harmonics, and where it's low, it's damping them. And the green bars on top/blue bars on the bottom mark the formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The diagram is from my own work, released under CC-BY; the units on the horizontal axis are Hz, and the units on the vertical axis don't really have any physical meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T16:57:00.150" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T16:57:00.150" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-02T07:17:28.200" Score="5" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are dozens of etymological dictionaries for Persian, has somebody compared them, and if yes could you recommend me a good one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25137" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-08-02T08:22:44.350" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T13:07:28.483" Title="What is a good etymological dictionary for the Persian language?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;persian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32062" CreationDate="2019-08-02T10:41:30.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johnny Cheung: Etymological dictionary of the Iranian verb. You need to look up the New Persian words in the index, which will then refer you to the appropriate entry in the main section. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul Horn: Neupersische Etymologie, is old, but still usable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything else is worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T10:41:30.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32032" CreationDate="2019-08-02T11:46:17.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read and used this book when I was a grad student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure how you could have missed their definition of “grammatical function” or “grammatical meaning” they give on the same page. The authors of the book - Martin Haspelmath and Andrea Sims - use these terms &lt;strong&gt;synonymously&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t find their terminology misleading at all. Grammar could mean so many different things, depending on your theory of language (Universal Grammar, morphosyntax, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, arguments such as Subject, Predicate etc. are known under different names, depending on your theory of language: grammatical relations, grammatical functions (in LFG), or syntactic functions etc. - see any intro syntax textbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2019-08-02T12:51:14.407" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T12:51:14.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32049" CreationDate="2019-08-02T14:59:29.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/book/ch10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The NLTK book, chapter 10&lt;/a&gt;, which provides some theoretical background to the implementation, references &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nltk.org/book/ch09.html#chap-featgram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK ch. 9&lt;/a&gt;, where the feature grammar is introduced. Have you read these articles?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ch. 9 explains all the the features you were asking about including the &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; notation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ch. 10 introduces the lambda calculus. The special function &lt;code&gt;app&lt;/code&gt; in the implementation is used to express function application and is not introduced like this in the book, but plays the same role as &lt;code&gt;ApplicationExpression&lt;/code&gt;: Where &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; is a functor and &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt; an argument, &lt;code&gt;appl(M,N)&lt;/code&gt; stands for the application of &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;N&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;M(N)&lt;/code&gt;. So &lt;code&gt;app(?subj,?vp)&lt;/code&gt; is just a different way of notaiton for &lt;code&gt;?subj(?vp)&lt;/code&gt;, if I understand correctly. It seems that they're using &lt;code&gt;M(N)&lt;/code&gt; notation inside pure lambda expressions, such as &lt;code&gt;P(John)&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;\P.P(John)&lt;/code&gt;, and the &lt;code&gt;app(M,N)&lt;/code&gt; construction when dealing with meta-variables which stand for expressions later to be filled with lambda terms, such as &lt;code&gt;?subj&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;?vp&lt;/code&gt;, which are not lambda terms yet but placeholders for two expressions that will be applied to each other once concrete lambda terms have been inserted for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T14:19:02.597" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T14:19:02.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-02T19:21:45.720" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is regarding the phenomenon of spontaneous nasalisation (emergence of nasalisation out of nowhere) in New-Indo-Aryan as it evolved from Middle-Indo-Aryan. This is a well-documented phenomenon: MIA &lt;em&gt;assu&lt;/em&gt; 'teardrop' &gt; Hindustani &lt;em&gt;ā̃sū&lt;/em&gt; 'teardrop'; MIA &lt;em&gt;akkhi&lt;/em&gt; 'eye' &gt; Hindustani &lt;em&gt;ā̃kh&lt;/em&gt; 'eye'; MIA &lt;em&gt;niddā&lt;/em&gt; 'sleep' &gt; Hindustani &lt;em&gt;nīnd&lt;/em&gt; 'sleep'; MIA &lt;em&gt;has-&lt;/em&gt; 'laugh' &gt; Hindustani &lt;em&gt;hãs-&lt;/em&gt; 'laugh'; and many other such examples. This is found in other Indo-Aryan languages as well. Many of these instances of spontaneous nasalisation occur in words which have undergone the extremely common phenomenon of geminate consonants simplifying to single, and the preceding vowel lengthening due to compensatory lengthening (as in the first three examples that I've provided here). My question is, why does the vowel undergo nasalisation as well? Is there some articulatory explanation that explains why the nasalisation seemingly emerges out of nowhere? I ask this question because as far as I know, there is no research on the articulatory aspects of spontaneous nasalisation, or at least I haven't been able to find any study on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24820" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T05:25:17.040" Title="Is there an articulatory explanation to spontaneous nasalisation in New Indo-Aryan?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-02T19:35:55.573" Score="1" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;While studying &lt;em&gt;An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy&lt;/em&gt;, came across this fragment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Section 2.1 pointed out that we tend to think of words as possessing two characteristics: 1. they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed in dictionaries, and 2. they are the building-blocks for words and phrases. In Sections 2.3 and 2.4 I have argued that, although this may be broadly true, the two characteristics do not always go together. For this reason, it will be helpful to have distinct terms for items with each of the two characteristics. Let us use lexical item for items with characteristic 1., and reserve word for items with characteristic 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what's the difference between those terms? It seems to me &lt;strong&gt;lexeme&lt;/strong&gt; is an abstract entity sometimes called ‘dictionary word’, but &lt;strong&gt;lexical item&lt;/strong&gt; appears to be that same concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25096" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T03:05:35.183" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T03:05:35.183" Title="What's the difference between lexeme and lexical item?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;lexemes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-02T21:23:13.410" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any explicit examples of poor methodology or application of the historical comparative method that most, if not all, can agree on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25133" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T16:12:23.617" Title="What are the &quot;cardinal sins&quot; in historical linguistics?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-08-14T20:50:59.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28252" CreationDate="2019-08-03T05:00:45.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an example from Dravidian. The reconstructed Proto-Dravidian word is *&lt;i&gt;caracu&lt;/i&gt; 'cobra, snake'. In the South-Dravidian subfamily, word-initial c- is very commonly elided: first to s-, then h-, and then finally it disappears. Elision of intervocalic -c- is also well-attested in South-Dravidian (and especially in Pre-Tamil). Hence *&lt;i&gt;caracu&lt;/i&gt; becomes &lt;i&gt;aravu&lt;/i&gt; or &lt;i&gt;aravam&lt;/i&gt; with the -am noun class marker added, in Tamil and Malayalam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the South-Central Dravidian subfamily, this word underwent another major phenomenon, apical displacement. Apical consonants that occurred in the second syllable of a word metathesized to the first syllable, forming word-initial consonant clusters and word-initial apical consonants, neither of which occurred in Proto-Dravidian. Thus Proto-Dravidian *&lt;i&gt;caracu&lt;/i&gt; &gt; Proto-South-Central-Dravidian *&lt;i&gt;crācu&lt;/i&gt; &gt; Old Telugu &lt;i&gt;trācu&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;i&gt;cr&lt;/i&gt;- &gt; &lt;i&gt;tr&lt;/i&gt;-) &gt; Modern Telugu &lt;i&gt;tācu&lt;/i&gt; (with simplification of word-initial consonant clusters in Modern Telugu).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, Tamil &lt;em&gt;aravam&lt;/em&gt;, meaning 'snake' and Telugu &lt;em&gt;tācu&lt;/em&gt;, meaning 'cobra' or less commonly 'snake', are cognates, both descending from Proto-Dravidian &lt;em&gt;caracu&lt;/em&gt;. They share no consonants with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24820" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T05:00:45.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32069" CreationDate="2019-08-03T05:25:17.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you're answering your own question. The sound change is not &quot;spontaneous&quot;. What you describe is a chain: geminated aCCa &gt; prenasalized anCa &gt; nasalized long vowel ã:Ca. Exchanges of geminated vs prenasalized consonants also occur in Semitic: manṣaru = maṣṣaru &quot;guard, keeper&quot;, but there it does not lead to nasalized vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T05:25:17.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17733" CreationDate="2019-08-03T06:03:20.113" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Blanda” is the term for non-indigenous white people in the Language of the Yolngu aboriginal people of the Northern Territory of Australia. Whether they got it from the Dutch the Portuguese or from the aboriginal people of Borneo and the Malay Archipelago is anyone’s guess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25161" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T06:03:20.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-03T08:39:29.550" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for etymology of the word شوهر in Persian language, I looked in wiktionary and two other dictionaries but found nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;šowhar means &quot;husband&quot; in modern persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%87%D8%B1?oldid=49026403&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%87%D8%B1?oldid=49026403&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25137" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T14:14:17.640" Title="Etymology of the word &quot;šowhar&quot; in Persian" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-03T12:45:16.907" Score="1" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Talaz is a word that means &quot;wave, tornado&quot; in Turkish dialects.  dalga means &quot;wave&quot; in Turkish. You can use the following two links to look up the word's attestations throughout history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etimolojiturkce.com/kelime/dalga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etimolojiturkce.com/kelime/dalga&lt;/a&gt; to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=dalga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=dalga&lt;/a&gt; to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw the word  &quot;thalassa&quot;  which was defined as Pre-Greek and was not given its etymology, I did not have much foreignness. Because it continues to be used in Turkish dialects. And I think this word, defined as Pre-Greek, is one of the oldest traces of Pre- Turkic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE : talaz may be loanword from Greek, in Turkish ? I am not sure.&#xA;       I am not a Turkish   propagandist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;( sorry for English )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21667" LastEditorUserId="21667" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T15:54:42.407" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T19:19:45.103" Title="Pre-Greek θάλασσα &quot;thalassa&quot; and Turkish talaz" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;&lt;greek&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32071" CreationDate="2019-08-03T14:15:58.473" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In other words, you are asking for the fundamentals of the comparative method. There are books written on the matter. You ask for an example of somebody not following them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;long range etymology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most public opinions agree that the Altaic language family was highly suspect. &lt;em&gt;Altaic&lt;/em&gt; remains in use as the label for a group of Languages with obvious similarities, but the comparisons to Korean and Japanese for example are disregarded. The critique centers on missing hypothesis of a system of total sound correspondances, often spourious semantic comparisons, that remain the authors' secret, and preference for competing theories. It's a convolute I wouldn't touch with a nine-foot pole, so I cannot judge its merrit. But the inflamatory tone of the most vocal critiques has given them a bad rep, too. It's hard to tell who's the sinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nostratic, Proto-Human and other long-range studies hit a similar vein. Few neutral bystanders in the literature offer encouragement. Sergei Starostin and, earlier, Vladislav Illich-Svitych have died at a relatively young age, and it is not clear to me whether that was just a euphemism for abandoning their carreers admitting defeat (no disrespect; take incredulity as a stage of grief, if you will), or really just unfortunate accidents (a heart attack in Starostin's case; Svytich ws involved in a car accident), or the consequence of manic, self destructive behaviour. At any rate, I try to bear the common warning in mind, that superficial similarities can be random chance at an overwhelming rate, that cannot be sorted out trivially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, statistical methods are supposed to counter this problem. Those that I'd seen criticized focus on the very limited input of 200 item swadesh lists (perhaps as a test). Ruhlen et al have produced a very convincing shortlist and, drawing on the StarLing database, amassed a seizable list of what might be thousands of cognates, despite the perhaps erroneous reconstructions. That is, they show consistent semantics, relaxing the constraints on the Phonology instead. The mistake then is to jump to conclusions about genetic relations, without cross-references from the other Anthropological fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, many etymological dictionaries, mostly older works, have been called the product of &quot;insanity&quot;, &quot;worthless&quot; and &quot;nonsense&quot;, whether Hebrew, English or Turkish, either because they do not offer a sound methodology (Whom Anatoli Liberman dubbed &quot;Monomaniacs&quot;; Comparing a single language with itself, or only one other that's supposedly the gospel of truth), or because they show disregard for the prior research, if not ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-08-11T16:12:23.617" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T16:12:23.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13024" CreationDate="2019-08-03T14:25:15.593" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The derivation quoted from etymonline--who are known to copy from published material without referencing the source--seems to be from Kroonen's dictionary (see fig. 2). This headword, &lt;strong&gt;*thwerha&lt;/strong&gt;, is listed after several words related to washing and swiveling (fig. 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I connect those two meanings first of all on grounds of Ger. &lt;em&gt;wischen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to scrub, mop, swipe&quot;, or &lt;em&gt;scheuern&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to chaff; swipe&quot;, which in my experience involves twerking motions. Secondly, I connect washing to cleansing rituals as observed in many cultures. Indeed, &lt;em&gt;pendulum&lt;/em&gt; (a thing that swings) for example has been connected to PIE *(s)pend-, glossed &quot;libation&quot;, which again reminds of Lat. &lt;em&gt;lavo&lt;/em&gt; etc. &quot;to wash&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point I would usually dive deep into unknown territory reading up on &lt;em&gt;sabbath&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;salat&lt;/em&gt;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Urlaub&lt;/em&gt; &quot;holiday, vacation&quot;, &lt;em&gt;easter&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;spring&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pass over&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pessach&lt;/em&gt;, Turkish &quot;sunday&quot;, Ru &quot;easter&quot;, Ger. &lt;em&gt;Samstag&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;salvation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;september&lt;/em&gt; etc. ... and I would never see the end of it. I want to connect &lt;em&gt;thwart&lt;/em&gt; &quot;cross&quot; to &lt;em&gt;christening&lt;/em&gt;, but have no basis to connect a ostensibly Germanic root to christian traditions, and not much insight into the comparative mythology, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QAjpz.png&quot; alt=&quot;figure 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2VoRV.png&quot; alt=&quot;figure 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T14:25:15.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32076" CreationDate="2019-08-03T14:41:50.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with the word 'θάλασσα' is explaining the source of the geminate -σσ-. Native Greek words and PIE words don't have geminated consonants. Further, In various Greek dialects the word appears as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B1#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;θάλασσα&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1%CF%84%CF%84%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;θάλαττα&lt;/a&gt; (Attic), &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B8%CE%B8%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;θάλαθθα&lt;/a&gt; (Cretan), possibly even &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=mW3jn8dOrVMC&amp;amp;lpg=RA7-PA165&amp;amp;ots=2kDhN-GTLa&amp;amp;dq=%CE%B4%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B3%CF%87%CE%B1&amp;amp;pg=RA7-PA165#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%CE%B4%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B3%CF%87%CE%B1&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;δαλαγχα&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Macedonian&quot;? according to the source). So the original source needs to have been something that could reasonably diverge into the forms /ss/, /tt/, and /ttʰ/, (and /gkʰ~ŋkʰ~nkʰ/ for that Macedonian form). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7502/what-was-the-sibilant-in-%CE%B8%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B1&quot;&gt;this question on Latin Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; for a thorough discussion of the nature of this sound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Any etymology for the word needs to explain not merely the first syllable θαλ- but the whole word. There is no evidence that a Turkic origin can explain the word's phonology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastEditorUserId="2652" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T19:19:45.103" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T19:19:45.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32087" CreationDate="2019-08-04T01:56:08.983" Score="6" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying Japanese and recently I came across the term &quot;double nominatives&quot;. The idea is that &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; marks the nominative case, so a phrase with two &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; has two phrases in the nominative case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;boku ga  eiga   ga  suki da&#xA;I    NOM movies NOM like COP&#xA;I like movies&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the copula &lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to connect the subject to the complement. Since there's only one copula, it makes sense to think that there's only one subject. However, two phrases are marked as nominative. So one of them is nominative AND subject, and the other is ONLY nominative and NOT the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: if the nominative case isn't necessarily the subject, then what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the nominative case, if not the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I also understand that in the phrase above, we can attribute other functions to the first phrase, like experiencer, or focus. I think I've seen some studies claim &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt; marks either the subject or the focus. But now I'm seeing studies saying it marks the nominative case in both instances. I'm trying to understand how double-nominatives are supposed to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22646" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T23:07:21.110" Title="What is the difference between the nominative case and the subject?" Tags="&lt;cases&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32075" CreationDate="2019-08-04T10:34:48.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Persian šōhar (šawhar) seems to imply Iranian *xšawdar-, and the parallel form šōy would be from the nominative *xšawdā, presumably an actor noun from the verbal stem *xšawd- “to wash, to become liquid”, as in Persian šustan, šōy- “to wash”, or Avestan xšudra- “fluid, semen”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T10:34:48.337" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-04T10:37:24.703" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In recognising the language of a text, spoken or written, have current algorithms or implementations incorporated ISO 639 codes and/or other standards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'd like to decide the language of a text, but map the text directly to an ISO 639 code. Is it currently possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, how is this implemented? I can guess that this would require that either ISO 639 specify ways on how to decide whether a text belongs to a language code, or the registrars of ISO 639 keep adequate samples of each language code. However, from my current understanding (I may be wrong because I have no direct access to the standard), these aren’t true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are there others ISO or other organisations' standards that deal with this issue directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23964" LastEditorUserId="23964" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T10:49:47.933" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T02:09:09.857" Title="In NLP, is it possible to do language recognition of a text whereby the text is mapped directly to an ISO 639 code?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32081" CreationDate="2019-08-04T19:52:22.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Y03-1006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese and Their Theoretical Implications&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Masahiro AKIYAMA, indicates that in at least some Japanese sentences with multiple noun phrases marked by &lt;em&gt;ga,&lt;/em&gt; both are subjects (p. 51). There is a syntactic analysis, but I don't know syntactic theory or notation, so I can't explain it. The second &lt;em&gt;ga&lt;/em&gt;-marked noun phrase is supposed to be &quot;predicate-internal&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, Akiyama identifies two categories for such sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Multiple-nominative sentences in Japanese are classified into (at least) two types: those that involve a relation of inalienable possession between the nominative DPs ((1), MNC1), and those that do not ((2), MNC2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure whether your example fits into one of these categories, but I think it might be the second type. It looks a little similar to Akiyama's example 2a: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Haru-ga tai-ga uma-i&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;spring-NOM sea breams-NOM tasty-PRES&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;`Sea breams are tasty in spring.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments mentioned the use of nominative NPs as predicative complements; e.g. in European languages such as German, but based on what I've read, I don't think that is related to your Japanese example. There is no apparent equation in your sentence between &quot;boku ga&quot; and &quot;eiga ga&quot;: &quot;I like movies&quot; does not mean &quot;I am movies&quot;. Also, I remember reading somewhere that Japanese &quot;da&quot; doesn't really work like the English copular verb &lt;em&gt;be,&lt;/em&gt; so I'm not sure whether it's even considered accurate to call &lt;em&gt;da&lt;/em&gt; a copula, rather than something else. At least, the matter seems to be sufficiently uncertain that there's an article titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/30197998?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Japanese Copula Revisited: Is da a Copula?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Michio Tsutsui (which I haven't read). &lt;em&gt;Da&lt;/em&gt; seems to be used with 好き (&lt;em&gt;suki&lt;/em&gt;) because &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/42493/is-suki-an-adjective-and-a-verb&quot;&gt;好き is a &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt;-adjective&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there are some other ways that particles can be used in sentences with 好き. Here is a Japanese SE post about it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/44409/difference-between-particles-wa-ga-and-o-with-sukidesu&quot;&gt;Difference between particles wa, ga and o with sukidesu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T23:07:21.110" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T23:07:21.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-04T23:32:04.397" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages with a construction similar in meaning to an associative plural or elliptical construction that's used frequently within the language? I'm particularly interested in a construction that's productive, can be used with animate or inanimate objects, and doesn't mandate a particular role for the representative (e.g. the head of a family or the leader of a group).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious whether there are any languages where it is relatively common to describe an ad hoc collection of things or people by picking a representative and combining it with some kind of grammaticalized particle or affix to refer to the whole thing. For exmaple, if it were unremarkable to refer to some silverware on a table as &lt;code&gt;the fork &amp;amp;c&lt;/code&gt;, that would qualify. Or if it were acceptable to refer to a collection of blue and red pencils as &lt;code&gt;the blue pencils &amp;amp;c&lt;/code&gt;, that would also count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WALS article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Associative Plurals&lt;/a&gt; describes a construction that's generally similar to the additive plural called an associative plural. WALS gives the example &lt;code&gt;Tanaka-tachi (田中達)&lt;/code&gt; meaning &lt;code&gt;Tanaka and her/his associates&lt;/code&gt;. A construction meaning &lt;code&gt;a group of people related to person X&lt;/code&gt; seems to be common cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the WALS article goes on to make an interesting claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is only sporadic evidence for inanimate heterogeneous plurals&#xA;  designating sets of objects closely related to each other, and this&#xA;  pattern is never productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how narrowly they are defining what qualifies as an associative plural, that would suggest that a hypothetical &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;c&lt;/code&gt;-like construction is unattested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29893/how-common-is-the-elliptical-dual-or-plural-cross-linguistically&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; is similar, but seems to be asking mainly about the prototypical associative plural used for groups of people, which seems to be extremely common cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T23:32:04.397" Title="Languages with a common, productive construction for marking heterogeneous groups" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;plurality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T03:42:08.803" Score="7" ViewCount="978" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us suppose that we have a text that in its majority follows the orthographic or grammatical rules of a language X, but 10% of the words have orthographic mistakes, and 10% of the sentences have grammatical mistakes. Is this text still a text in the language X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not talking about popular mistakes or new trends and fashions, nor of &quot;varieties&quot; nor &quot;dialects&quot; with communities endorsing or practising that way of writing; I am talking about mistakes that are happening only in that text, and that probably none else will adopt later, and 99% would easy recognise those details as mistakes. However, the reader can still understand the text and infer easy what it is being tried to say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a paper in linguistics in which this issue is very relevant and I have not found any academic text (maybe because I am not sure about how to phrase this problem) that talk about this. What is the view of linguistics on this issue? At what point is a text not longer in language X? Could you recommend me some linguistic (or philosophy of language) theories or discussions that talk about this (the identification of a text as pertaining to certain language)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23640" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T08:53:56.013" Title="Is a text with orthographic or grammatic mistakes in a language X still a text in that language X?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;philosophy-of-language&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32089" CreationDate="2019-08-05T05:08:27.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A useful philosophical framework for discussion is the classic dichotomy between competence and performance, promulgated by the theory of generative grammar, and the difference by I-language and E-language – see Chomsky 1986 &lt;em&gt;Knowledge of language&lt;/em&gt;. Questions of text are in the domain of performance and E-language domain, whereas by definition there are no errors in competence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Errors of speling and grammar change not a text from being &quot;In X&quot; to &quot;Not being in X&quot;. Instead, they make the text be &quot;In X, with errors&quot;. Massive errors of a specific type could change a text in Norwegian to Swedish in which case you would say that the text is &quot;In Swedish&quot;. Such a shift cannot arise from true error, it would arise from an I-language matter such as that the author does not actually speak Norwegian or didn't learn either of the literary standard dialects of Norwegian, but did learn Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The errors might be so numerous that the text is utterly incomprehensible as being in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; language, but such errors would not be due to the writer's performance, instead they would come from external scrambling -- not impossible with electronic transmission. The most common form of that is the conversion of a text into gibberish Chinese, by misparsing the Unicode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T05:08:27.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T08:20:17.353" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between these three terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Agentivity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intentionality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Volitionality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have different definitions, could you provide examples where their values do not match? (For example, a situation where [+agentive] but [-intentional])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25179" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T09:39:46.107" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T09:39:46.107" Title="Agentive vs Intentional vs Volitional" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32089" CreationDate="2019-08-05T09:38:59.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In corpus linguistics we often have to deal with texts digitised using OCR and containing some amount of OCR errors. We are completely aware that we cannot get rid of the OCR errors completely with reasonable effort, but we treat them as texts in the language they are supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T08:53:56.013" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T08:53:56.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32084" CreationDate="2019-08-05T09:54:45.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so, because of lack of training data for many languages with an ISO 639 code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While language recognition in general is really good and while it can do really fine grained distinctions as well, it is still a machine learning process that depends on training data. It can only recognize what it has seen before and will react unpredictable on languages missing from the training set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with sufficient training data I am not sure whether a classification into several thousand categories is still working (though several dozen languages at once work pretty well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T09:54:45.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32089" CreationDate="2019-08-05T12:33:04.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence is &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to be in that language, then I'd say that it is in that language. Intent matters a lot in communication - for example, the utterance &quot;Hallo!&quot; would be a valid sentence in multiple different languages, but any particular usage of it &quot;is&quot; in the language which the speaker intended, inferred from the surrounding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that in the domain of formal languages e.g. Chomsky type-3 regular languages with formal grammar, it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; literally be the case that a sentence is clearly &quot;in language X&quot; or &quot;not in language X&quot; if it has some mistake; it's just that this definition and these rules aren't directly applicable to general linguistics and natural language processing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3285" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T12:33:04.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T15:54:34.617" Score="12" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;For pretty much any grammatical category, I can think of a language in which it's a closed class. Japanese has closed classes of verbs and (verb-like) adjectives, for example, while Swahili has a closed class of (noun-like) adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't think of any instance of the class of nouns being closed. It makes intuitive sense for this to be a universal, since giving names to objects is a pretty fundamental part of human language use. But it's equally possible that I just haven't looked at enough languages to find a counterexample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;is there any natural, attested language in which nouns are a closed class?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. By &quot;closed class&quot; I mean a class that resists adding new members, like English pronouns—compare the backlash against singular &quot;they&quot;, which has been used since before Shakespeare, to the immediate acceptance of the new verb &quot;to google&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T21:55:34.090" Title="Are nouns ever a closed class?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32084" CreationDate="2019-08-05T20:18:40.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/cld3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLD3&lt;/a&gt;, which is the model used in the Google Chrome browser. The training data and code is not available, but the inference code and a pre-trained model is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Elizafox/cld3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python bindings&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/akihikodaki/cld3-ruby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ruby bindings&lt;/a&gt; for the original C++ code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; cld3.get_language(&quot;This is a test&quot;)&#xA;LanguagePrediction(language='en', probability=0.99, is_reliable=True, proportion=1.0)&#xA;&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; cld3.get_frequent_languages(&quot;This piece of text is in English. Този текст е на Български.&quot;, 5)&#xA;[LanguagePrediction(language='bg', probability=0.92, is_reliable=True, proportion=0.58),&#xA; LanguagePrediction(language='en', probability=0.99, is_reliable=True, proportion=0.41)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like it &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/cld3/blob/06f695f1c8ee530104416aab5dcf2d6a1414a56a/src/nnet_lang_id_test.cc#L38-L127&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;usually outputs ISO-639-1&lt;/a&gt; (2 letter) codes, but can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/cld3/blob/06f695f1c8ee530104416aab5dcf2d6a1414a56a/src/nnet_lang_id_test.cc#L59&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;output 3 letter codes&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/cld3/blob/06f695f1c8ee530104416aab5dcf2d6a1414a56a/src/nnet_lang_id_test.cc#L31-L32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;unknown&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24988" LastEditorUserId="24988" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T02:09:09.857" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T02:09:09.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32089" CreationDate="2019-08-06T06:09:01.880" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drawing from math I want to say, it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, a text is not generally &lt;em&gt;in that language&lt;/em&gt;, but evidence that may allow reconstructing that language. The syllogism calling evidence the fact, the text a language should only be allowable if the language can be reconstructed from the text completely. Of course most texts are too short for that. It may be compared with text that is believed to be in the same language. This biases the comparison; For the worse, I guess, if it can obscure severe mistakes. That is, there is a difference between systematic and spontaneous effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, mutual understanding &lt;em&gt;defines language&lt;/em&gt;, so your question seems tautologic in the binary sense. In a gradual sense, your &quot;10%&quot; are arbitrary when not derived from a reasonable, quantifiable measure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had just been reading on point-set topology and find that the imagary of a limit of a set and a neighborhood of a limit are a fitting metaphor. One step in the wrong direction, one small mistake too much, can render the message incomprehensible; but there is a known sequence of inferences (the reconstruction) that approach the intended meaning. This is pseudo &quot;abstract non-sense&quot; and my abstract algebra is weak; Started with &lt;em&gt;Closed-form expression&lt;/em&gt; and read up-to &lt;em&gt;Open Set&lt;/em&gt;. The imagery is Fig 1. Extended with Fig 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighbourhood_(mathematics)&quot; alt=&quot;Fig 1: Imagine the point *p* is a text, *V* is a language; *V* is not a *neighborhood* of *p*, but *p* is an element of *V*, [ref&quot;&gt;](&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neighborhood_illust2.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neighborhood_illust2.svg&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_(topology)&quot; alt=&quot;Fig 2: *p* is not the interior, but the boundary of *V*, [ref&quot;&gt;](&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Runge_theorem.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Runge_theorem.svg&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem is that your &lt;em&gt;99%&lt;/em&gt; are supposed to be &lt;em&gt;competent&lt;/em&gt; speakers, but this property cannot be established without the sought metric. It leads to a slippery slope well known in the categorization of e.g. the development from Latin to Italian, if Dante is the proto-type for &lt;em&gt;not-Latin&lt;/em&gt;. And it leads to arguments about how you can be sure that you understand the devious text correctly (which is a general problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a German English speaker, it sounds as if you described Dutch, though the error rate is closer to 100% percent and my understanding thus rather limited unless I know what's being said. You might need to weigh the defective features for an accurate percentage, in which case the idioms, grammar morphology and verbal base should appear much closer to 10% defective (the numbers arw figurative, orders of magnitude). I know you said no &lt;em&gt;varieties&lt;/em&gt; but I like to think of Dutch as Rudi Karell's accent when speaking German, and any real written Dutch, read with my own intonation just appears as an immense speech impediment. (No offence intended, I love it). The whole &quot;dialect with an army&quot; idea applies. But note that boundaries by definition can be approached from both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T06:14:09.307" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T06:14:09.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32106" CreationDate="2019-08-06T08:55:51.217" Score="17" ViewCount="4550" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many languages we usually say &quot;between min and max&quot; (e.g., grades &quot;between 1 and 10&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages where the reverse construction (&quot;between max and min&quot;, e.g. grades &quot;between 10 and 1&quot;) is used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25187" LastEditorUserId="17197" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T05:43:09.780" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T21:20:06.860" Title="Do any languages mention the top limit of a range first?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;numbers&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32101" CreationDate="2019-08-06T09:33:44.503" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are, presumably in all languages, situations where the top limit is mentioned first. For example, we may talk about &quot;between 10 and 20 metres below sea level&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this seems to be primarily a matter of which limit is felt 'closer' to the speaker (and that would be the limit that is mentioned first). Because we normally count up, the lower limit is more likely to be the first to be mentioned and would also be the default if not one of the limits is felt 'closer'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in the example of grades &quot;between 1 and 10&quot;, you could argue that 1 is the easiest to obtain and therefore 'closer' to the speaker (I would be interested to know whether Americans say &quot;grades from F to A&quot; or &quot;from A to F&quot;, because that could falsify this claim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17305" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T09:33:44.503" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-06T15:21:36.980" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I don't know who to turn to. I'm trying to publish a paper on Gapping in a small national journal - they publish anything related to language and literature. I sent the paper and they said that they need me to write the metadata for the paper. Among other things they want me to describe the research sample characteristics (e.g. linguistic corpus). Obviously, most of my examples are invented (or adapted from other authors) for that specific circumstance, just like most papers in the generative framework. What should I write? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that they don't publish many papers in generative grammar. They also want me to write Geo-spatial coverage and chronological coverage, which I feel I should just write n./a. to. Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22627" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T09:56:22.637" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T09:56:22.637" Title="Metadata for a paper in the generative framework?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;standards&gt;&lt;metadata&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-06T18:00:08.077" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;hi I'm new to phrase/dependency structure. &#xA;For a project of mine I want to extract from any sentence a meaningful structure with 3 items i.e. triple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general case the Subject-Verb-Object is ideal.&#xA;The problem is for many sentences some of the items from the triple is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what other element/s of POS/DEP  is suitable to fill in, so I can always have triple (except in the case of 2 word sentences :))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about sentences which do not have a VERB ?&#xA;Is there are part of Linguistics that research those ? Links ?&#xA;Can I still generate triplets based on some other structural information ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25189" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T02:05:25.473" Title="SVO triple in case of missing S or V or O?" Tags="&lt;phrase-structure&gt;&lt;dependency-grammar&gt;&lt;svo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32101" CreationDate="2019-08-06T21:28:41.467" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, I am aware of two instances where the &quot;reverse&quot; order is used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The weather forecast of the newscast &quot;Tagesschau&quot; (and quite possibly many other weather forecasts, but not all) always states the range of lowest expected temperatures with the higest number first. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/V2jB49t6M34?t=870&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;today's 8pm broadcast&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In der Nacht 19 bis 12 Grad; am Tag 18 Grad im südwestlichen Bergland, 27 in der Niederlausitz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At night, 19 to 12 degrees [celsius]; during the day, 18 degrees in the southwestern uplands, 27 degrees in Lower Lusatia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I is used very consistently. Here are the archived broadcasts of the last few days.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/kADSW8lqb60?t=882&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/kADSW8lqb60?t=882&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/4kRKGXeYigg?t=972&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/4kRKGXeYigg?t=972&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/t8JOLMGEMSw?t=903&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/t8JOLMGEMSw?t=903&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/yBssC2K_LmY?t=886&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/yBssC2K_LmY?t=886&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/6oZLJJC2hts?t=952&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/6oZLJJC2hts?t=952&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you understand a little bit of German, you can listen out for the numbers and for the word &quot;Grad&quot; (degrees).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage of this ordering goes back a long way. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/nMyyaK3Ad2w?t=808&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 1983 recording&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tiefsttemperaturen 5 bis 1, Tageshöchsttemperaturen 7[!] bis 12 Grad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;yes, he says 7, even though the thermometer graphic displays 9&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these even older recordings use &quot;standard ordering&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/yu5naTZ9B18?t=855&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;December 30, 1973&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Im Norden Tiefsttemperaturen 1 bis 5 Grad, Tageshöchsttemperaturen 4 bis 7 [cut off]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/_8Z8djBzy1Q?t=848&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;July 30, 1979&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tiefsttemperaturen in der Nacht 11 bis 15 Grad, Tageshöchsttemperaturen 20 bis 25 Grad, nur im Norden etwas weniger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Some cities (particularly those with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering#Germany&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inconsistent numbering schemes&lt;/a&gt;) add house number range information to all or some of their street name signs. The house number that is closest to the location of the sign is stated first, followed by the last house number before the next (major) intersection, which often results in the larger number coming first. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.schilder-versand.com/verkehrsschilder/strassenschilder/18643/Berliner-Hausnummerneinschuebe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Berlin-style sign&lt;/a&gt; shows for example &quot;56 – 48&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25195" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T21:28:41.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-06T21:49:31.110" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very interested in the idea of systemic functional linguistics as an alternative to the simplistic production grammars advanced by the minimalist program.  What I don't understand is how SFL proposes we produce language instead.  It makes great sense to me as a computer scientist without a background in linguistics that it might require some complicated constraint solving, but I haven't seen anyone describe a detailed account of such a constraint solving process.  When it comes down to it, how do we turn the network of associations we have with different words into a string of words, according to SFL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19696" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T21:49:31.110" Title="By what algorithmic process do systemic functional linguistics think surface language is generated?" Tags="&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;production&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32104" CreationDate="2019-08-06T23:14:49.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use DOOM, which in a cfg is a non-terminal symbol that does not occur on the left-hand side of any phrase structure rule.  Since a cfg does not generate any string containing a non-terminal symbol, once DOOM gets into a phrase structure derivation, it poisons the derivation, which can never lead to generating a grammatical sentence. (A DOOM marking convention was suggested by Paul Postal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T23:14:49.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32103" CreationDate="2019-08-07T09:56:00.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The names for the metadata fields that you drop sound like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dublin Core&lt;/a&gt; and the linked Wikipedia article has some explanation and further links. Note that Dublin Core metatada fields can occur in any multiplicity in your description, including 0—every metadata field is optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fill as many metadata fields as you can, and don't hesitate to use some of them (e.g., subject) more than once. The metdata make your paper findable for later users using, e.g., facetted search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the concrete question about coverage: I don't know your paper, but it is probably about present day English where you have a geographical coverage of the main anglophone countries unless you are specific about British or American English and a temporal coverage of say 1949/2019 (last 70 years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T09:56:00.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32111" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32112" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" Score="0" Body="For questions about metadata relevant for linguistics, e.g., metadata for language resources or research articles." OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T09:57:12.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32101" CreationDate="2019-08-07T14:23:48.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese, you often have this construct as well. An example is &quot;100分の１is&quot; one of 100 parts (lit: 100 parts and 1) for fractions.  You tend to bound problem as well when you are speaking in regard to mathematics.  I generally give the limits of equations before I discuss the points; however, that could just specific to the discipline of mathematics in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25202" LastEditorUserId="25202" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T15:02:58.453" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T15:02:58.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32101" CreationDate="2019-08-07T21:20:06.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether this should be an answer, since it's not about numerical ranges, but there are definitely certain idioms in English that seem to put the &quot;greater&quot; extreme first, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;high and low (e.g., I've been searching high and low&amp;hellip;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;top to bottom (although, for some things, like written text in English, top to bottom could still be &quot;lower&quot; to &quot;higher&quot;, just as &quot;from the top&quot; means &quot;from the beginning&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;head to toe &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10516" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T21:20:06.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34835" CreationDate="2019-08-07T23:05:14.137" Score="6" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to determine the appropriate &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(BCP 47) language tag&lt;/a&gt; for Flemish as spoken in Belgium. It seems that Flemish is Dutch as spoken in Belgium (i.e. &lt;code&gt;nl-BE&lt;/code&gt;), but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish&lt;/a&gt; also seems to imply that Flemish is &quot;Vlaams&quot;, so perhaps I should use &lt;code&gt;vls&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are Vlaams and Flemish synonymous? If not, is Flemish more like Dutch than Vlaams?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25210" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T09:24:24.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T18:51:56.733" Title="Is there a difference between Belgian Dutch (i.e. Flemish) and Vlaams?" Tags="&lt;dutch&gt;&lt;standards&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T03:53:22.153" Score="0" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm attempting a functional analysis of the text of the Catholic Mass, primarily in English but with reference to the Latin. The use of grammatical moods is quite rich, with plenty of subjunctives ('God bless you'), imperatives ('Go in peace') and cohortatives ('Let us pray'; imperative in English, subjunctive in Latin). The interpersonal metafunction is my first stop here: taking as boulomaic modality the English subjunctives, and as deontic the imperatives and cohortatives. I'm having trouble, though, examining the transitivity of these sentences. Do they &lt;em&gt;translate&lt;/em&gt; them into the indicative mood, so that the transitivity of 'God bless you' is identical to 'God blesses you', 'Go in peace' as 'You go in peace', or 'Let us pray' as 'We pray' or even 'We let ourselves pray'? This last thought is where I felt I needed some advice. Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25213" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T03:53:22.153" Title="Transitivity analysis of subjunctives and imperatives" Tags="&lt;modality&gt;&lt;transitivity&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;&lt;systemic-functional&gt;&lt;subjunctive&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32121" CreationDate="2019-08-08T09:14:35.250" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vlaams is Flemish. Vlaams is the Flemish word for &quot;Flemish&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether to regard this as a separate language (that's &lt;code&gt;vls&lt;/code&gt;) or as a variant/dialect/whatever of Dutch (&lt;code&gt;nl-BE&lt;/code&gt;), seems to be a matter of opinion or political stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T09:14:35.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T22:43:24.067" Score="0" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;My #1 passion in life is linguistics, and I’ve been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember, but a lot of the basic linguistics jobs such as translators and the such make low wages per year. I want a high paying job that has to do with my linguistics skill, so naturally, seeing as programming seems to be the way to go, computational linguistics seemed like a good idea. However, browsing through Quora answers, it seems that the field is bleak and unpromising. I am not sure how credible Quora is, but it doesn’t seem UNcredible either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I get a job in just programming without language, I know I’ll be miserable, even if I make a lot of money. Is computational linguistics a good path to follow? If it is, how would I go about learning it? Is there another job that doesn’t involve CS at all that involves linguistics, that pays well? (50k-100k a year, or more). What needs need to be filled by advanced linguistic knowledge in our world today? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate this because I know I want to do something with linguistics, but I want to be able to make decent money as well. Currently I am working on a language course/program based on years and years of research, including stuff like understanding syllables instead of words, comprehensible input, learning whole phrases as opposed to individual words, viscerally learning words based on motivations, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T23:07:05.767" Title="Is computational linguistics a good field to go into?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-08-09T09:26:20.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32124" CreationDate="2019-08-08T23:07:05.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists tend to be most interested in figuring out why language works the way it does. You seem to be more interested in how language works, which is closer to applied linguistics than to linguistics proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a good way to make top dollar as a linguist, alas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T23:07:05.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32135" CreationDate="2019-08-09T16:18:06.507" Score="8" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a computer science grad who has been fascinated by Chomsky's theory of language. I have been following his work and the others in his field. But I also want to try something on my own. &#xA;The problem, I don't know where to start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, I would like to work and contribute on NLP, but in the Chomsky's way and not the statistical one. I am aware of the the contribution of Statistical NLP and know the theory, tools and software around it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am completely blank about is the research (in computer science) that is done on the line of Chomksy Linguistic theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: In case you want a refresher on what Chomsky's theory of Language is and how it differs from the Statistical one, below article are great starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chomsky.info/20121101&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://chomsky.info/20121101&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/chomsky.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://norvig.com/chomsky.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions are appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2408" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T16:12:14.257" Title="Where to start if you want to do Chomsky style NLP?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;chomsky-hierarchy&gt;&lt;natural-language-understanding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32134" CreationDate="2019-08-10T02:15:49.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hadn't heard the term &quot;statistical theory (of language)&quot;, but it seems to be a misnomer.  I gather from your references that you take some data and use it to estimate the parameters of some statistical model.  Model, not theory.  We inherit our ideas about what empirical theories are like from the physical sciences, and a key property of those theories is that they are vulnerable to counterevidence.  They can turn out to be wrong.  Can a statistical theory of language turn out to be wrong?  There don't seem to be any underlying ideas there that could fail. I think &quot;model&quot; is a better term than &quot;theory&quot; for such a framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, transformational grammar, the theory that Chomsky proposed in, e.g., &lt;em&gt;Aspects of the Theory of Syntax&lt;/em&gt; was evidently an empirical theory, since it did turn out to be wrong.  I'll refer you to John Ross's dissertation, &lt;em&gt;Constraints on Variables in Syntax&lt;/em&gt;, where the &quot;constraints&quot; are hypothetical, unformulated limits on the crucial variables in Chomsky's formalization of transformational theory.  No one has proposed such constraints, explicitly, and it is probably impossible to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no agreement in linguistics about how to describe the phenomena described by the Ross constraints, but my favorite candidate is the theory (based on Chomsky's context free grammar) described in &lt;em&gt;Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, &amp;amp; Sag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of the three books that I've mentioned would be good things for you to look at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T02:15:49.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-10T03:31:09.793" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any &quot;modern scholars&quot; that support the onomatopoeia origin of language hypothesis? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25133" LastEditorUserId="25133" LastEditDate="2019-08-11T13:17:44.317" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T13:17:44.317" Title="Onomatopoeia origin of language?" Tags="&lt;evolutionary-linguistics&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32140" CreationDate="2019-08-11T09:26:25.590" Score="3" ViewCount="1570" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there a site or a tool, which can go through a big text and replace every word with an antonym of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are none, then a tool, which translates into a hand-made language would help. I.e translator, which takes a custom dictionary as an input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25234" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T09:47:02.183" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T11:39:42.883" Title="A tool to replace all words with antonyms" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;tools&gt;&lt;antonymy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32139" CreationDate="2019-08-11T13:17:34.450" Score="19" Body="&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from nltk.corpus import wordnet&#xA;&#xA;try:&#xA;    wordnet.synsets('test')&#xA;except LookupError:&#xA;    import nltk&#xA;    nltk.download('wordnet')&#xA;    # For more information see: https://www.nltk.org/data.html&#xA;&#xA;def anti(word, fallback=None):&#xA;    for i in wordnet.synsets(word):&#xA;        for j in i.lemmas():&#xA;            for k in j.antonyms():&#xA;                return k.name()&#xA;    return fallback or word&#xA;&#xA;def wordmap(text, morph=anti):&#xA;    out = []&#xA;    bits = [i.isalpha() for i in text]&#xA;    diff = [0] + [j-i for i, j in zip(bits[:-1], bits[1:])]&#xA;    pos = 0&#xA;    while True:&#xA;        end = diff.index(-1, pos)&#xA;        word = text[pos:end]&#xA;        out.append(morph(word))&#xA;        try:&#xA;            pos = diff.index(1, end)&#xA;        except ValueError:&#xA;            break&#xA;        out.append(text[end:pos])&#xA;    out.append(text[end:])&#xA;    return ''.join(out)&#xA;&#xA;if __name__ == '__main__':&#xA;    import sys&#xA;    assert len(sys.argv) == 2, &quot;Provide a text to be translated.&quot;&#xA;    print(wordmap(sys.argv[1]))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;% python main.py 'At length it was so enormous that by itself it filled a whole cart, and two oxen were required to draw it, and the farmer had not the least idea what he was to do with the turnip, or whether it would be a fortune to him or a misfortune. At last he thought, &quot;If thou sellest it, what wilt thou get for it that is of any importance, and if thou eatest it thyself, why the small turnips would do thee just as much good; it would be better to take it to the King, and make him a present of it.' &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At length it was so enormous that by itself it filled a whole cart, and two oxen were required to draw it, and the farmer had not the least idea what he was to do with the turnip, or whether it would be a fortune to him or a misfortune. At last he thought, &quot;If thou sellest it, what wilt thou get for it that is of any importance, and if thou eatest it thyself, why the small turnips would do thee just as much good; it would be better to take it to the King, and make him a present of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At length it differ so enormous that by itself it empty a fractional cart, and two oxen differ obviate to push it, and the farmer lack not the most idea what he differ to unmake with the turnip, or whether it would differ a fortune to him or a good_fortune. At first he forget, &quot;If thou sellest it, what wilt thou leave for it that differ of any unimportance, and if thou eatest it thyself, why the large turnips would unmake thee unjust as little evil; it would differ worsen to give it to the queen, and unmake him a future of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25235" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T11:39:42.883" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T11:39:42.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-11T14:32:48.377" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;How call words expressing same thing but varying degree?&#xA;&lt;code&gt;hot - warm - cold - frozen&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25237" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T01:32:48.537" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T01:32:48.537" Title="Word for synonyms with different degree" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;synonymy&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16933" CreationDate="2019-08-11T21:00:55.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I was just looking for information about this and I could't found any example of a tree diagrama that explain coordinated sentences. &#xA;I thought something similar (the same) to what shows the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SC: o1 + C'&#xA;C':C + o2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think this is possible because the words that regulate case take the same position than C. These words are the verbs and the preposition, which are -N. By far I havent read any classification that takes care of conjuntions, but I'm sure that conjuntions must share that characteristic: to be -N.&#xA;Then, each o (o1 and o2) could be explained independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25243" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T21:00:55.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16933" CreationDate="2019-08-11T22:59:55.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                VP_aux: 0&#xA;          /                   \&#xA;         Created               Copied&#xA;       /                     /&#xA; Alice                  Bob&#xA;       \               /&#xA;             And&#xA;                \  __________________  The file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T22:59:55.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2019-08-11T23:10:46.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When syllables are assembled to form, especially, 2-syllable words, it's not sounds that are being concatenated, but ideas that are being combined. If you lose the ideograms, you lose track of lexical formation and word families. You'd be losing an essential part of the language's logic.&#xA;Even if romanization became the mainstream written medium, you would still have to refer to ideograms to create neologisms and to teach or study lexical semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25225" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T23:10:46.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32148" CreationDate="2019-08-12T06:51:50.753" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am pretty new to this site. I have a question about setting up a morphological condition. eg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a language, we see a pattern that consonant-ending as well as ə-ending words are pluralized with a replacive morpheme {-i}. Can I formulate this condition as this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ə, ∅ → i / _#&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can't, what is the correct way of formulating this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please suggest some references from where I can learn the conventions of formulating such conditions which are useful in morphology as well as in historical linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25245" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T13:10:23.113" Title="Can I form a morphological condition like this?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32147" CreationDate="2019-08-12T13:46:49.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is a bug in your rule, as you write it, any word can form a plural adding an &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt;, even when the word ends in a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My corrected version of the rule is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ə → i / _#&#xA;∅ → i / C _ #&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using a capital C as a metacharacter for any consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the notation is known as &lt;em&gt;SPE style rules&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;SPE type rules&lt;/em&gt; and goes back to Xerox Finite State Tools (xsft). Some tutorial on the Web are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/linguisticglossary/PDF-HO/SPE-type%20rule.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/linguisticglossary/PDF-HO/SPE-type%20rule.pdf&lt;/a&gt; very basic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://staff.um.edu.mt/mros1/hlt/PDF/xfst.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://staff.um.edu.mt/mros1/hlt/PDF/xfst.pdf&lt;/a&gt; xsft explained, with demonstration and exercises&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hfst/hfst/wiki/Regular-Expression-Operators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/hfst/hfst/wiki/Regular-Expression-Operators&lt;/a&gt; Helsinki Finite State Tool&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/all#Abbreviations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/all#Abbreviations&lt;/a&gt; Explains conventionally used metacharacters, note the caveat &lt;em&gt;unless otherwise noted&lt;/em&gt; in the description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T13:10:23.113" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T13:10:23.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32151" CreationDate="2019-08-12T14:07:29.510" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going through Catford's &lt;em&gt;Practical Introduction to Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, experiments 31-32. After explaining how to produce voiced stops [b], [d], [g] by superimposing a closure upon the voiced air-stream, the author asks the reader to try producing their lengthened variants — [b b], [d d], [g g] by prolonging &quot;the period of closure while keeping the voice going throughout&quot; (p. 44). Catford then remarks that it may be difficult keep the voicing going long enough for lengthened voiced stops and offers a method of doing so by starting to lower the larynx at the moment when the closure is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My two questions are&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think I am struggling to do this correctly. Most of the times when I try to pronounce lengthened voiced stops as described above, I feel that &lt;strong&gt;the air goes through my nose as well&lt;/strong&gt;, so the produced lengthened [b], for example, inevitably involves the humming sound of [m]. Are there any tricks to prevent the air from going to the nose, or is it impossible in this case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the languages which have geminated voiced stops, are they pronounced by passing the air only through the oral cavity, without any voicing going through the nose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16677" LastEditorUserId="16677" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T14:52:34.840" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T21:48:55.397" Title="Lengthened voiced stops and the airstream through the nose" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;gemination&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32149" CreationDate="2019-08-12T15:34:16.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible that you do lower the velum when you do this, and velum lowering is one of the methods that is used to alleviate the pressure buildup of voiced stops, but it is also possible that your feelings about what you are doing is wrong. You could be reacting to pressure against your velum and/or the acoustic consequences of acoustic transduction of glottal pulses beating on the thinned-out soft palate, leading to vibrations in the nasopharynx. If you put your thumb on your nose-holes, you should be able to feel whether there is actual air escaping though the nasal passages, and you can more clearly detect the vocal fold vibrations causing tour nose to vibrate a tiny amount (if there is nasal air flow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voiced geminate stops are rare enough in the world's languages, and nasal airflow studies are rare enough, that it is risky trying to make any generalizations about nasalization as a compensatory articulatory process for coping with pressure buildup. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323465644_Airflow_patterns_of_voiced_geminate_stops_in_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fujimoto and Funatsu&lt;/a&gt; find that there is not any nasal airflow in the production of Japanese geminate voiced stops (instead, there is devoicing). I know of no airflow study that shows nasalization of geminate voiced stops, but nobody has does an airflow study of Luganda, for example. &lt;a href=&quot;http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/230/1/uk_bl_ethos_350202.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghalib&lt;/a&gt; apparently gathered data on nasal airflow during geminate vs. singleton stop production in Iraqi Arabic, but doesn't report a general pattern for nasal airflow (it was apparently collected but not analyzed). There is no increase in nasal airflow in the provided mingogram trace in appendix 4, but that is just a single token. I would say that we just don't know if phonetic nasalization of voiced geminates occurs. There are no reported instances of phonological nasalization (/bb/ → [mm], neutralizing with /mm/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:34:16.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32147" CreationDate="2019-08-12T15:52:55.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Correct&quot; formulation of rules is relative to some context, for example in the context of a specific theory like Distributed Morphology, or Two Level Morphology. If you are just attempting to describe a fact pattern, a plain English statement would suffice, and in fact is superior to a &quot;formalization&quot;, since using a set of symbols the way you did suggests that you are operating in some formal theoretical framework, which doesn't seem to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way of treating the pattern that you describe is to affix -i in the morphology (no further conditions), and have a separate phonological rule of schwa-deletion (before a vowel, possibly just /i/). That is, &quot;affix -i&quot; regardless of context, then ə→Ø/__V. You don't say what happens with vowel-final words, and that makes a difference. In certain versions of Distributed Morphology, there could not be a rule that simply changes final schwa to i, there has to be a specific triggering context, which would probably lead to positing a general affix /i/ with a peculiar phonological property (in case there are other invariant affixes of the shape /i/ in the language). Work by Shanti Ulfsbjörninn has pushed this particular line of reasoning. In other words, correctness depends on your theoretical assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:52:55.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32149" CreationDate="2019-08-12T21:23:57.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're producing nasals then you must be allowing your velum to drop.  No fair.  You have to find some way to enlarge the closed air cavity above your larynx.  There are several ways to do this.  One is to lower your larynx, as Catford suggests.  Watch your throat in a mirror and you may be able to see your larynx bobbing downward, if you're doing this successfully. Exaggerate this a little and you'll be making implosives (and the attempt to keep voiced stops from being devoiced by back-pressure above the larynx has been suggested as an origin for the implosive series' in some languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you can relax your cheek muscles enough that they bulge out to make more room in your mouth.  For labials, you can let your lips bulge. I call this the Bing Crosby maneuver, since I think he did this in his singing.  It gave the impression that he was very relaxed in his performances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you can drop your jaw.  That might affect vowel quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T21:48:55.397" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T21:48:55.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32170" CreationDate="2019-08-13T00:26:07.583" Score="-3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several European languages have (false?) cognate adverbs with the meaning of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/nevertheless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'nevertheless'&lt;/a&gt; (and 'nonetheless') built from words meaning &amp;quot;nothing/not/none/no&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;less&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;despite something that you have just mentioned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What semantic notions underlie their original (&amp;quot;nothing/never the less&amp;quot;) and contemporary (similar to that of English 'nevertheless' above)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A9anmoins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'néanmoins'&lt;/a&gt; and had (now obsolete) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neantmoins#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neantmoins&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymology: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n%C3%A9ant#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;néant&quot;&gt;néant&lt;/a&gt; (“nothing”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moins#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;moins&quot;&gt;moins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“less”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italian has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nondimeno#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'nondimeno'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/non#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;non&quot;&gt;non&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; +‎ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/di#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;di&quot;&gt;di&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; +‎ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meno#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;meno&quot;&gt;meno&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dutch's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niettemin#Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;niettemin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and German's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nichtsdestoweniger#German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'nichtsdestoweniger'&lt;/a&gt; are calques from  Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niet#Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;niet&quot;&gt;niet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“not”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/te#Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;te&quot;&gt;te&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“too”) +‎ &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/min#Dutch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;min&quot;&gt;min&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (“insignificant, less(er), small(er)”), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Appendix:Glossary&quot;&gt;calque&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Latin&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nihilominus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;nihilominus&quot;&gt;nihilōminus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loan translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;w:Latin&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nihilominus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;nihilominus&quot;&gt;nihilōminus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T20:10:27.820" Title="How did the cross-linguistic univerbation 'nothing/not/none/no + less' semantically shift to signify 'despite'?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-13T00:54:12.530" Score="20" ViewCount="3273" Body="&lt;p&gt;The IPA's current tone system can show five different tone levels, and any contours formed from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any language for which this is insufficient? In other words, is there any (known, natural, attested) language which uses six or more phonemically-distinct tone levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T08:46:38.793" Title="Can the IPA represent all languages' tones?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32155" CreationDate="2019-08-13T05:06:36.090" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there are any attested languages that require more than five (5) phonemic levels of pitch to describe. However, there is one language Cori with six (6) &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; pitch realizations, although it can be analyzed with a tone inventory of three level tones. I'm looking for some more non-Wikipedia sources and a better explanation of the situation in Cori, but here's what I have so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bench_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bench&lt;/a&gt; has five level tones and one rising tone 23. &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20110719053906/http://www.kwedekind.de///Eingang1///PdfFiles/1983_ASixToneLanguage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; a source that Wikipedia cites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cori_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cori&lt;/a&gt; can be described as having six phonemic levels of pitch, apparently. However, 2 is an allotone of 4 and 3 and 5 are surface realization of sequences of tones. So, a minimal analysis only needs a three tone inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastEditorUserId="13573" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T12:02:06.020" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T12:02:06.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-13T13:29:34.243" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;*Apologies for any ill terminology I may use, I'm pretty new to the field&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been working on the transition of dialectology surveys from the traditional methods to the modern ones, now that we not only have better technology to collect and analyze data but also have realized some ways in which we might have overlooked certain features either consciously or simply due to the way the questionnaires are framed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been following &quot;Introducing Sociolinguistics - Rajend Mesthrie&quot; up till now.&#xA;I'd love to get more insight into this. I've done some digging on the net to get old survey questionnaires, but so far no luck. So it'd be a huge help if I could get hands on a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;link to the above mentioned book- &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.lu.lv/~pva/Sociolingvistika/0710892_68436_mesthrie_rajend_et_al_introducing_sociolinguistics.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://home.lu.lv/~pva/Sociolingvistika/0710892_68436_mesthrie_rajend_et_al_introducing_sociolinguistics.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25257" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T13:29:34.243" Title="How have dialectology surveys changed over the years?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;dialect-mapping&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32155" CreationDate="2019-08-13T15:26:05.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation in Chori exemplifies a widespread problem with discussions of allophony, that &quot;allophone&quot; has different meanings. The classic definition of allophone is that two phonemes (or, tonemes) are allophones iff the variants appear in surface-complementary environments. This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the case in Chori: all 6 tones are surface-contrastive. The alternative definition is &quot;you could remove some of the tones from underlying forms by applying some set of rules&quot;. The data-source, Dihoff, pursues a toneme-minimizing analysis where 1→3/_6, 4→2/_1 and 2→5/_6. The particular rules are well-enough motivated since they apply in phrasal contexts, but the underlying representations are not always motivated. Dihoff notes that these rules may be limited to certain grammatical constructions, for example in the present tense, /1/ becomes [6] after a 3s subject and /4,6/ become [3] after a 1s subject. This analysis may be technically tenable &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you decompose any [3] into an abstract sequence /1+6/, but this is entirely contrary to the spirit of the traditional concept &quot;allophone&quot; which is based on distribution in surface forms, not underlying forms. Dihoff's analysis only assumes that you can remove tones /2,3,5/ from lexical entries, it does not assume that you can remove those tones from derived representations, including the surface form. In fact, his discussion starts with a tone-minimizing analysis with just /1,4,6/ but morphs into a full 6-level analysis once he gets to talking about tense-inflection and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IPA allows concatenation of level markers, using either accents or bar-markers, so that contours are irrelevant – you can have rising, falling, high-rising and so on as contours. The only thing that would pose a problem for IPA is a 6th level. As it happens, IPA sort of failed in its remit to specify standard letter-shapes for contours. Given 5 levels, there are very many contour tones than can be created (and that are attested) such as extra-high-to-extra-low vs. extra-high-to-mid vs high-to-extra low etc. But they only provide 5 letters for tone contours, and they leave it to the author to come up with a clever way to indicate more subtle contours. This means that authors dealing with language that have many levels and many contours formed from those levels have to operate outside the IPA system, and use one of the two (mutually incompatible) non-IPA numeric-superscript notational systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T15:26:05.907" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2019-08-13T19:33:39.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Anixx said, a shift from &lt;code&gt;/kʷ/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/kw/&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt; isn't at all unprecedented. To add a few more examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;P-Celtic&quot; languages: Welsh &lt;em&gt;pen&lt;/em&gt; ~ Irish &lt;em&gt;ceann&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; *&lt;code&gt;/kʷenn/&lt;/code&gt; &quot;head&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;P-Italic&quot; languages: Sabellic &lt;em&gt;lupus&lt;/em&gt; ~ Latin *&lt;em&gt;lucus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; **&lt;em&gt;luqvus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wolf&quot; (*)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some dialects of Ancient Greek: Attic &lt;em&gt;hippos&lt;/em&gt; ~ Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/4929/406&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ecus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;eqvus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &quot;horse&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romanian: Romanian &lt;em&gt;patru&lt;/em&gt; ~ Vulgar Latin *&lt;em&gt;qvattro&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;qvattuor&lt;/em&gt; &quot;four&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) This example is especially famous because the Oscan word ended up displacing the native Latin one—hence Spanish &lt;em&gt;lobo&lt;/em&gt;, Italian &lt;em&gt;lupo&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while this wasn't a &lt;em&gt;regular&lt;/em&gt; development from PIE to Proto-Germanic, it's easy to imagine it happening in some scattered Germanic dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pure coincidence, then, that the form of *&lt;em&gt;wulfaz&lt;/em&gt; that caught on throughout Germanic was the one with &lt;code&gt;/p/&lt;/code&gt;—like how Latin coincidentally ended up with labial &lt;em&gt;lupus&lt;/em&gt; next to velar &lt;em&gt;ecus&lt;/em&gt;. The only difference is that, in Italic, we have records of the Sabellic languages that show where the develarizing influence came from. In Germanic, no such records exist, so all we can do is speculate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T19:39:09.990" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T19:39:09.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4664" CreationDate="2019-08-13T21:34:42.667" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My research into prehistoric comparative etymologies allows a different approach. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I propose that ‘fox’, ‘bocca’ (mouth) and ‘voice’ use a similar root in the context of the mouth related to the /p/ and /f/ (the opening itself) and that the /Kw/ root is found in the same context of the mouth found in words like ‘chew’, ‘kauw’, ‘cook’, ‘cake’, ‘canine’ with a sound change /k/ to /j/ in ‘jaw’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is interpreted as a sound change here might actually be different compounds using either the ‘kw’ root or the ‘p/f’ root (originally words for the opening of the mouth and the chewing/jaw/teeth/biting function. Hence the differences in the use of /Kw/ and /p/ or /f/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wlkw’ variants could be compounds of a simple Prehistoric phrase saying ‘The mouth it bites’. &#xA;W=The mouth&#xA;L=He/It&#xA;Kw=Teeth/Jaw/To bite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolf&#xA;W=The mouth&#xA;L=He/It&#xA;F=Voice (howls)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fox&#xA;Fo=The mouth &#xA;X=/Kwos=teeth/bites/jaws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice/Beak/Bocca&#xA;The opening with the teeth (through which the voice is heard)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list from the earlier answer above:&#xA;“The &quot;P-Celtic&quot; languages: Welsh pen ~ Irish ceann &amp;lt; */kʷenn/ &quot;head&quot;&#xA;The &quot;P-Italic&quot; languages: Sabellic lupus ~ Latin *lucus &amp;lt; **luqvus &quot;wolf&quot; (*)&#xA;Some dialects of Ancient Greek: Attic hippos ~ Latin ecus &amp;lt; eqvus &quot;horse&quot;&#xA;Romanian: Romanian patru ~ Vulgar Latin *qvattro &amp;lt; qvattuor &quot;four&quot;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shows mouth and head related words. Horse is cavallo/cheval and is cognate to words that mean  ‘head’ too. ‘Four’ is really interesting because it shows the compound fir the 4 ‘heads of the earth’ ‘pa-try’: ‘pa’ (head/mouth) and ‘try’ (terra/earth). Qvattuor has qva (the jaws/teeth) and tuor (terra/earth). In Ancient religion we can see this symbolism in the Hindu god Brahma who has four heads and from whom they believe humanity came from just like Adam (Adam is made of clay and means earth. These are identical ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is overlap in contexts:&#xA;Terra (earth)&#xA;Tree (plant in the earth)&#xA;Tier (German: animal on the earth)&#xA;Tor (German: opening/goal)&#xA;Tür (German: door)&#xA;We see the opening context from the mouth/head in the earth. The connection with ‘head’ is dimentional. North (pole star), east and west (sunrise and sunset) and South (opposite north and an invisible pole from the northern Hemisphere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have ‘voice’ and ‘face’. Actually they both have both /f/ and /Kw/. This shows that the voice and face were described with determinatives as ‘the opening for chewing’. The voice is the sound that comes from the opening for chewing and the face is the side of the head where the opening fir chewing is situated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T20:39:50.567" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T20:39:50.567" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32461" CreationDate="2019-08-14T02:37:54.163" Score="2" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;You know when Forrest Gump yells Jenny's name and it sounds like &amp;quot;Jenneay&amp;quot;. I'm wondering if there actually is a triphthong at the end there, or of it is a figment of my imagination. I believe the phonetic transcription would be: /dʒɛnæɛɪ/ Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps the southern pronunciation ends on a much simpler diphthong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMuiK1832a0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reference video&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25265" LastEditorUserId="25265" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T19:18:17.703" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T19:18:17.703" Title="Does the southern pronunciation of Jenny have a triphthong in it?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;names&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-14T17:58:52.710" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say that I am in a library alone and I have a text that I think that is in X language, for example, this fragment of the 9th chapter of the 2nd part of the novel 1984 by George Orwell, that I think that is in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It  was  curious  to  think  that  the  sky  was  the  same  for &#xA;  everybody,  in Eurasia  or  Eastasia  as  well  as  here.  And  the &#xA;  people  under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all&#xA;  over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like &#xA;  this,  people  ignorant  of  one  another’s  existence,  held apart by&#xA;  walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who&#xA;  had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and&#xA;  bellies and muscles the power that  would  one  day  overturn  the &#xA;  world.  If  there  was  hope, it lay in the proles! Without having&#xA;  read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s&#xA;  final message. The future belonged to the proles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in the book or the library that say explicitly that it is in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no English speakers, and all I have at my disposal is a lot of books that are said to be written in English, plenty of dictionaries of English, and manuals of English grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What argument can I provide to justify that this text is in English?&#xA;My idea is that I can say that this text is in English because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The words appear in the dictionary of English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can find examples of those words in other books that are said to be in English, with similar usages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text follows the syntax and the morphology that the manuals advice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I translate the words into my language, according to the English dictionary, they seem to present some coherent message.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am dealing with something like that right now, but in Latin. I have tested each word and they seem to be properly declined, the meaning makes sense, and I have found examples of the oddly written words in other Latin texts. However there are other texts that criticise this text for being in &quot;defective&quot; Latin, or not being in actual Latin at all. Yet I tested the way I said and it passes the proof, so I think that the criticism is just more from a capricious point of view, calling it &quot;defective&quot; because it is not stylistically laudable, but not because it is missing anything linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am looking for concise tests, or theories that talk specifically about how to know that something is in X language. As I said, there is no community to consult, and no native speakers, just texts, so there has to be a way to know that with only texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I think that my proposed method is correct, however I have not found any book or article explicitly proposing a test to know if some text is in X language. Can you recommend some theory or some text about this or about the limits of language (when is a language still a language?)? Do you think that my argument is valid and solid and that it wouldn't need references to others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I used the fragment of 1984 because the novel itself insists in saying that they are being forced to speak in &quot;Newspeak&quot;, and that they are being conditioned to stop being able to distinguish well meaning and logic; so in my imaginary circumstance, I think that it might be probable to the reader of the book to wonder if it is actually written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23640" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T20:08:08.370" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T20:08:08.370" Title="What are the reasons to justify that some text is in X language?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;lexical-semantics&gt;&lt;language-identification&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20709" CreationDate="2019-08-14T18:08:16.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;She was kissed by his lips&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syntactically the subject is &quot;she&quot;. This concerns the order of the words in relation to the verb: she is the subject because it is positioned in the place of the subject. Also you have many other reasons to argue that this is the subject, like the morphological one: you can see that the verb &quot;was&quot; is conjugated in singular to correspond with &quot;she&quot;, and not with &quot;his lips&quot;, which is in plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantically -concerning the meaning of the words- you can say that the agent (not the subject, but the agent), which is the thing that is performing the action, is his lips, as they are, in the meaning, the things that are performing the action onto her. However, I insist, this is not what is called &quot;subject&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;His lips kissed her&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject (which is evaluated syntactically [concerning the order of the words] and morphologically) is &quot;his lips&quot;, and the agent (which is evaluated semantically [concerning the meaning]) is also &quot;his lips&quot;, they coincide in this case, but that is not always what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23640" LastEditorUserId="23640" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T18:15:34.003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T18:15:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32154" CreationDate="2019-08-14T20:10:27.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I'd suggest looking at &quot;nonetheless&quot; rather than &quot;nevertheless&quot;: &quot;never&quot; in this case is being used as an intense negative (it's a somewhat archaic/regional thing nowadays, but survives in &quot;well I never!&quot;) instead of as &quot;not ever&quot;. Something something Jespersen's cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the oldest attested construction like this seems to be Latin &lt;em&gt;nihilō minus&lt;/em&gt;: literally &quot;less&quot; (&lt;em&gt;minus&lt;/em&gt;) + &quot;by nothing&quot; (&lt;em&gt;nihilō&lt;/em&gt;). The original meaning is something like &quot;not decreased/lessened at all&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This literal meaning is found in Cicero (&lt;em&gt;Pro Milone&lt;/em&gt; 19), for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;minus dolendum fuit rē non perfectā, sed puniendum certe nihilō minus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There should certainly be less grieving, since the action wasn't actually completed—but it deserves to be punished &lt;strong&gt;not any less [severely]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the punishment should not be lesser, just because the crime wasn't actually committed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only a small leap from this to the modern idiom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But [an incomplete crime] deserves to be punished &lt;strong&gt;nonetheless&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the English, French, and so on all line up so well with the Latin, I postulate that they're all calques from the Latin. The written record doesn't give much evidence one way or another, but the fact that they all follow the Latin word order is telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T20:10:27.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32168" CreationDate="2019-08-14T20:35:38.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no objective absolute criteria for language-identification. There may, however, be subjective criteria, and there may be comparative criteria. Subjective criteria depends on one or more individuals declaring that some property of a language is, definitionally, either in or out. The criteria could be stipulated by an individual author (of a normative grammar or similar work), by a quasi-official board (The National Language Academy; The Swahili Council), or by some guy on the street who declares 'There is no word &quot;ain't&quot; in English'. There is no basis for accepting some such criteria, but if you do, it might allow you to filter texts for being English vs. non-English. Linguists typically consider this to be a pointless and unscientific enterprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparative criteria are somewhat more useful (still, not all the way to useful). Asking &quot;Is this English&quot; as an absolute will probably give a useless subjective answer, but asking &quot;Is this English, or is it Dutch&quot; ought to give a fact-based answer. Similar comparative questions would be &quot;Is this Modern English, or Middle English?&quot;, or &quot;Is this US English, or British / Indian / Australian English?&quot;. Or, you can ask &quot;Is this English as written by a native speaker of some dialect of English; or is this English as written by a second-language speaker?&quot;. You might also ask &quot;Is this English as written by an under-schooled or careless author who is a native speaker; or is this English as written by a careful, well-educated native speaker?&quot;. But that question should lead you to ask &quot;Is this person posing as low-register native speaker, or does this represent how they actually talk&quot;. I am not suggesting that you can be certain about anything pertaining to a writer's performance, I am saying that the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; you can hope to to accomplish is say something about social facts surrounding an author, based on their writing. Asking &quot;Is this English?&quot; is scientifically meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T20:35:38.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32168" CreationDate="2019-08-14T21:21:40.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are making the erroneous assumption that &quot;X is in language Y&quot; is a claim that can be verified as true or false. For many combinations of text and language, of course it can be verified, but for many others it cannot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am not just restating your question: I am not talking about whether there is a test for verification (your question) but whether verification is meaningful. If a an otherwise English text contains one foreign word, is it English? What about if it contains an English word that has not been recorded since the 17th century? If it contains a word invented by the author of a science fiction novel? What if it uses a grammatical structure used in only a small number of dialects of English? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your description, I think you have just such a case as this: it is not a matter of whether you have a technique to identify the language: it is a disagreement about what counts as Latin and what doesn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="718" LastEditDate="2019-08-14T21:26:58.257" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T21:26:58.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32168" CreationDate="2019-08-14T22:49:20.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like in most cases of categorisation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prototype Theory&lt;/a&gt; helps. There are exemplar texts of a language. I'm not actually an expert of Latin, but perhaps Cicero, Seneca, the Vulgate, and Aquinas could be considered to be exemplars of Latin, showing how the language has changed. Close to each exemplar text are the texts written in very similar style, by native speaker contemporaries. Texts by second language speakers are further out, as is Church Latin, and then those halfway to becoming Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian etc. Way out on the distant periphery is English, whose grammar is thoroughly non-Latin, but which shares a lot of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Prototype Theory, the task is not to establish rigid defining borders, but to find the most helpful exemplars, and then to organise the data around them. If your text seems to be declined perfectly, that suggests it's quite central. But there could still be semantic, or stylistic issues which mark it out as non-native Latin, late Latin, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastActivityDate="2019-08-14T22:49:20.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-14T23:22:19.473" Score="6" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;arbitrariness of the sign&quot; is a fundamental principle of modern linguistics: that is, that there's nothing intrinsic about the sound sequence &lt;code&gt;[kʰæt̚]&lt;/code&gt; or the phoneme sequence &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; that links it to a small furry animal. English-speaking humans have just decided arbitrarily that the animal should be a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;, and parents teach it to their children, and thus a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; it remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this principle isn't necessarily obvious. Plato, among others, wrote long philosophical tracts on why specific sounds are linked to specific meanings. And every so often a new theory pops up (sometimes aiming to be scientific, sometimes not) proposing the same thing. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/7048/10559&quot;&gt;&quot;Edenics&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is the first one that comes to mind, but there are many, many others out there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So—&lt;strong&gt;what is the current evidence for the arbitrariness of the sign?&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, if someone comes to me asking how I know that &lt;code&gt;[kʰæt̚]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; intrinsically linked to , what should I point them toward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The most obvious answer is &quot;because some people call  &lt;code&gt;/neko/&lt;/code&gt;, and others call it &lt;code&gt;/paka/&lt;/code&gt;, and neither of those people would necessarily understand what &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; means&quot;—but it's very easy to find coincidental resemblances between languages when your data set is large enough, and these theories usually have dozens and dozens of them. I'm looking for an argument that doesn't depend on specific examples, since they can always come up with more coincidences in response.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T14:46:00.400" Title="What is the evidence for the arbitrariness of the sign?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32174" CreationDate="2019-08-15T00:51:27.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before you point someone to evidence, I suggest pointing them to the problem of saying exactly what the &quot;principle&quot; or at least empirical claim is. It is about the relationship between meaning and pronunciation, &lt;em&gt;across languages&lt;/em&gt;. In English, the relationship between form and meaning is not arbitrary, it is &quot;natural&quot; – it is in the nature of contemporary English that the word for &quot;cat&quot; is indeed approximately /kæt/, and it is not /dɔg/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were a natural relationship between form and meaning across languages, we would expect there to be significant correlations between form and meaning, e.g. words for &quot;dog&quot; would tend to look like [dɔg], or perhaps [mbwa]. Hmmmmm, bad example, the latter is kind of true (hundreds of languages have [mbwa] as the word for &quot;dog&quot;, nearly a thousand languages have a word like [masa] as the word for &quot;eye&quot;, virtually &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; languages have the same word for &quot;computer&quot; – for known reasons). We'd expect there to be a correlation between the meaning &quot;small&quot; and [titi] (rats, I gotta get a better example). As you know, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; arbitrary that the modern English word for &quot;cat&quot; is /kæt/. It's pronounced that way because our ancestors pronounced it that way. [mbwa] is one of those Ur-onomatopoetic words, idem [titi]. If you don't define the claim clearly enough, you can never escape the problem that there are lots of non-random sound-meaning relations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might profitably point to the more random nature of the relationship between meaning and form with grammatical morphemes. For example, collect all of the noun plural morphemes of languages, the nominative singular markers, the past tense markers... then see if anyone can correctly reassign function based on form (even if you tell them what the possibilities are). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T00:51:27.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32174" CreationDate="2019-08-15T18:15:53.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following Max Müller in his &lt;em&gt;Lectures on the Science of Language&lt;/em&gt;, one may study the etymologies of supposed onomatopoetic words to see whether they obey the sound laws that have governed the evolution of the bulk of vocabulary, or whether words that sound like their referents are exceptions to the sound laws. Mostly, they are not exceptions, though there are a few cases in which they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Müller also gives cases where words heralded as due to the &quot;onomatopoetic force&quot; have come to this apparent status only through the action of the sound laws, which obviously in their application to most vocabulary have nothing to do with onomatopoeia. So etymology shows that the onomatopoeia was coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T18:15:53.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2019-08-15T20:05:03.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Synonymy is a spectrum&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two words can be regarded as synonymous just due to a relation in meaning. Though usually, words referred to as &quot;synonyms&quot; are those who &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; the same thing. Thing is, semantics isn't just definitions. There's another side to it. &lt;strong&gt;Connotations&lt;/strong&gt;. This is were objectivity starts to fade and you see many different opinions based on race, geography, gender, age demographic, etc. Heck, even individually the connotations had can differ, though you'll still see patterns within the common denominators mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something close to absolute synonyms. &lt;strong&gt;Cognitive synonyms&lt;/strong&gt;, which is one of the &quot;extreme&quot; ends of the spectrum, where the definition is &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; the same. Thing is, these cognitive synonyms still aren't absolute synonyms, due to human nature making associations and connotations inevitable. I guess the closest you can find to absolute synonyms are obscure cognitive synonyms. Due to their obscurity, or better yet, if they're obsolete, there is no preconceived societal connotations with the words. BUT STILL, different connotations will be had, due to the different look, roots, construction and potential etymological origins of the respective words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put, the human mind doesn't allow absolute synonyms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25265" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T20:05:03.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-16T12:50:18.030" Score="6" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the minimum population required to keep a language alive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23896" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T04:23:14.153" Title="Minimum population for language survival" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;creoles&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32185" CreationDate="2019-08-16T14:03:46.563" Score="-2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, for song titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that in English all words are capitalized, except for short function words like “of”, “for” etc. and in Russian only the first word is capitalized, plus proper names, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about French, Breton and Irish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, “Tri Martolod” vs “Tri martolod”; “Cad É Sin Don Té Sin” vs “Cad é sin don té sin”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25284" LastEditorUserId="25284" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T14:10:06.207" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T13:57:26.217" Title="What are the title capitalization rules in some languages?" Tags="&lt;french&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32181" CreationDate="2019-08-16T14:14:01.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, there isn't a minimum population for a language to survive, because a speech community can theoretically be of any size. Even if the speech community dwindles to one person, that last person isn't going to stop transmitting his language if he isn't exposed to any other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this isn't a practical case, because the last speakers of a language &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; going to be exposed to other languages. Speakers of any language, no matter what number of people speak it, will tend to gravitate towards more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prestigious&lt;/a&gt; languages. This can happen to a language with any number of speakers; for example, speakers of Chinese who immigrate to the United States will tend to learn English, and eventually may stop transmitting Chinese to the next generation, because English has more prestige than Chinese in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for a language to become extinct, all speakers would have to give up the language. This would usually happen in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minority languages&lt;/a&gt; whose speakers are all exposed to a more prestigious language (e.g. aboriginal languages spoken in a country with a different predominant language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the actual number of speakers necessary in practice for a language to survive, I don't know what, if any, empirical data there is. But since you are looking specifically for the minimum, in optimal conditions there is none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T15:08:32.763" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T15:08:32.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32182" CreationDate="2019-08-16T16:24:59.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is more of a language usage question, but since I can't think of another SE site where this question would fit, here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is the only language I know of that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Case_styles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title case as opposed to sentence case&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific examples for the languages you asked about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/songs/gaelic/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaelic&lt;/a&gt;: Ceud soiridh soiridh bhuam (A Hundred Greetings from Me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://per.kentel.pagesperso-orange.fr/index_saozneg.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breton&lt;/a&gt;: Amañ pell diouzh an trouz (Here Away from the Noise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starmania_(musical)#Notable_songs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt;: Quand on n'a plus rien à perdre (When You Have Nothing Left to Lose)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it would be ideal to have some resource where languages were listed with their capitalization style. Failing such an easy list after some quick Googling, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/72813/101120&quot;&gt;another SE answer&lt;/a&gt; that links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/language/styleguides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft's style guides per language&lt;/a&gt; where you could check the &amp;quot;Capitalization&amp;quot; heading for any that you're interested in. For example, I just checked Dutch and Basque and they're also sentence case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think European languages all use sentence case, though I'm open to a counterexample. You might also find it interesting that some languages have no case, such as Arabic and Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As jlliagre notes, French has &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/q/12835/1109&quot;&gt;more specific conventions&lt;/a&gt; that sometimes override sentence case (and even the question of what the first word is can be ambiguous when you begin with &lt;em&gt;d'&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;l'&lt;/em&gt;). I suspect other languages do too — a well-known one is that German always capitalizes nouns — but all are likely set against the backdrop of one of the major case conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T13:57:26.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32181" CreationDate="2019-08-16T20:33:39.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Language transmission can occur in different ways. Generally, a language is learned inside a group social. So, theoretically, without considering external considerations (peer pressure, motivation, ...), it can be two persons at least a learner and a teacher without having necessarily a familial relationship; or two genitors who give birth to children and transmit their language. If this condition is met at each generation, so it can survive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T20:33:39.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32181" CreationDate="2019-08-16T21:13:18.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The answer is zero.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt; became extinct after around 200 and 400 CE and got revived in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also are fluent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klingon&lt;/a&gt; speakers (the imaginary language spoken by the Klingons in Star Trek). Including some documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/nursery-worker-stunned-learn-boy-13304918&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fluent&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.huffpost.com/entry/darmond-speers-dad-spoke_n_363477&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klingon&lt;/a&gt; kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24349" LastEditorUserId="24349" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T04:23:14.153" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T04:23:14.153" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32174" CreationDate="2019-08-16T22:53:08.143" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading my answer to the question is best preceded by reading these texts first because I will reference to them with examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pratclif.com/language/nol1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://pratclif.com/language/nol1.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://seminalthought.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-arbitrariness-of-signs.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://seminalthought.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-arbitrariness-of-signs.html?m=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am excluding onomatopoeia in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have read all the views on arbitrary language (the pratclif link), eventually the author writes: “Some signs are absolutely arbitrary; in others we note not its complete absence but the presence of degrees of arbitrariness: the sign may be relatively motivated, for example, 'vingt' is relatively less motivated than 'dix-neuf' (which by its form refers to other forms) ... but even in the most favourable cases motivation is never absolute ...”&#xA;So if we don’t know or can not find a motivation, the word must be arbitrary? That is like saying I am blind so light can not exist. What if all words have a motivation? Sure we may have lost the motivations of most of the words in languages, but that does not mean they don’t exist. Here is where people ‘believe’ my methods are based on coincidence, nonsense, twaddle and whatever terminology can be used to keep up the misconception that words are arbitrary. If we don’t see words as combined phonetic elements with descriptive meaning we can not analyse if there is a natural origin or motivation for each sound/syllable within the word connected to meanings. I write ‘meanings’because I suspect multiple basic meanings for each sound. So stating that most words are arbitrary is at least premature. And I must confess that the evidence for my motivations is empirical. We are humans and language is a skill in which we stand out. We give meaning to signs. And if we intend meaning we intend motivation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the challenge we have?&#xA;What if there are absolute motivations for each word?&#xA;What if people just lack the ability to identify them all? This inability to identify them puts the mass of valuable data and possible outcomes in the bin, because it is not understood as the seminal thought author points out. However his example ‘vingt’ (20) can similarly be motivated as dix-neuf (19 literally ten-nine) referring to two other forms. Vingt is a corrupted compound of Latin ‘quinque quattuor’ which forms show the initial speaker’s intention of conveying a multiplication: 5 x 4 to be 20. This is common in French counting because 80 is expressed as quatrevingt which literally says fourtwenty (4x20=80 so not a sum but another motivated multiplication). An English speaker not knowing this difference in counting can easily claim ‘vingt’ to be a more or less arbitrary word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we leave out the culture in the analyses, we are again blind for what use the word has in a language. If we include culture we can motivate why ‘dog’ is based on observing the behaviour of the animal ‘digging’ holes, while ‘hound’ can be motivated by the animal’s use in ‘hunting’ and ‘perro’ is the guardian of the ‘house’ just like ‘Canis’ can be motivated by the animal’s use in protection by its ‘teeth’, while ‘kalba’ is motivated by observing the animal produce ‘saliva’: drewl. The treatment of dogs within the cultures using these languages coincides with the level of usefulness to humans. In northern Europe the dog was used in hunting and thus providing important food especially in the winter. The dog culturally became a friend of humans. In Arabic countries living a dog’s life is not easy and this can be understood by its name; his drewling not being a useful function for humans. It was not used as extensively in hunting as in the north. And in Southern Europe the animal was used less in hunting but more in protection of the house and land. Hence a motivated connection with teeth and house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A noun is a descriptive name often based on a quality of the context it signifies. And from&#xA;that description it is possible to analyse older meanings for the single phonemes by comparing their use across languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that in husbandry (motivated by compounding the descriptive location of the animals: house &amp;amp; boundary) naming of animals follows certain specific rules. The word for a  being ‘cat’ in English is not arbitrary, neither natural. It is cultural. There is no direct link between the form and the meaning of cat. There is a direct link though between the name of the animal and its use for humans. A cat/Katze catches mice. The motivation of the word ‘cat’ is found in the cultural context of the usefulness of the cat catching mice. Cat is than cognate to ‘chase’, French ‘chasse’ (hunt) and Spanish ‘caza’ (hunting/chase) and even ‘casa’ (house), which in extension encloses the sleeping place (instead of rodents). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked about one example where a sound carries a specific meaning. This essentially is the biggest question of all. How did the first sounds link to the first meanings? If we consider the development of language as a string of DNA, we have to analyse each word to its origin until there are only single sounds to designate meaning to. That is painstaking work. Something that should be done by computers but as it is a hobby of mine I have done a bit myself. I am not ready but can claim a handful. There are 2 that I suspect are the sounds copied from our environment and they fortunately share a context which makes the case a bit stronger. This does not mean that it is the only natural meaning to the sound, because there are many linguistic developments that give more possibilities. These sounds are /v/ (sometimes /f/) and the /n/. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The /v/ dominate words that have to do with flying in Germanic languages. In Semitic it is found in the context of heaven in Hawwah (Biblical Eve) which means ‘snake’ and ‘sky’. Two meanings related by the sound of air if directed by blowing through the mouth. French ‘vent’ and English ‘wind’ (sound change). So whistling and blowing air most probably became the natural origin for the sound /v/ in parole and language. And if used in descriptions that compounded to names and verbs, this would explain the relation between a phoneme in a word and similar meanings within different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/n/ is the nasal sound. Based on the evidence above one would expect the /n/ to dominate the nouns meaning ‘nose’ in different languages which it still does. It is found in the Arabic word for breath (a function of the nose) and English ‘sneeze’. The verbs ‘to smell’ and ‘to smoke’ use different phonemes that can be found in the Hebrew word for sky (Shamash). The letter Samek is said to derive from a support, thus lifting something. The skyward context can be noted again. It is very hard to motivate all words with an /n/, but the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ (nicht in German) are based on ‘night’. Yes is harder to motivate because the connection with ‘day’ is harder to see at first sight. But that is the context where we have to look. The ‘eyes’ and ‘yes’ are cognate. Compare:&#xA;French: oui and ouil&#xA;Greek: μάτι versus French matin&#xA;Greek: όχι versus oog (eye in Dutch)&#xA;But in Greek the sounds for these meanings seem switched. Greek όχι (no) seems cognate with ‘oké’ which is in itself strange because they are antonyms and we could associate Yes with the presence of light and no with the absence of light (night). Greek Yes is Ναί. A choice that amazes me. But it shows how cultures invent or invert or substitute meanings, contexts, forms and everything out of unknown reasons (word play, political, religious or other). It is just one of many underlying ways words and sounds are related to meaning. So like I said painstaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the evidence for the arbitrairiness of a sign? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer must be, the lack of or inability to find motivations for words through qualities of the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to that unwillingness (people calling my research outcomes coincidence, nonsense, twaddle and whatever terminology that does not support rational, logical and argumented reasoning and evades dialogue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note:&#xA;Draconis, I Thank you for your attitude which has always been informative, critical and investigative. You have been an island of tolerance here. And your question motivated me to determine where I stand in the realm of linguistic research by comparing my ideas to others. Thanks also to anyone editing this as I am not a native speaker of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T14:46:00.400" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T14:46:00.400" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-17T05:59:39.713" Score="4" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chomsky&lt;/a&gt; makes the following argument for Universal Grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and&#xA;  finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first&#xA;  language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic&#xA;  ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences,&#xA;  including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we know that modern Machine Learning &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language models&lt;/a&gt; can be trained on a finite number of sentences and then generate an &quot;infinite&quot; number of sentences. These models are however initialized randomly without any intrinsic knowledge of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good current example of such a model is OpenAI's GPT2. It generates samples such as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PROMPT&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;  In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living&#xA;  in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains.&#xA;  Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns&#xA;  spoke perfect English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MODEL COMPLETION (MACHINE-WRITTEN, 10 TRIES)&lt;/strong&gt; The scientist named the&#xA;  population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These&#xA;  four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd&#xA;  phenomenon is finally solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La&#xA;  Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when&#xA;  they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez&#xA;  noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain,&#xA;  surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pérez and the others then ventured further into the valley. “By the&#xA;  time we reached the top of one peak, the water looked blue, with some&#xA;  crystals on top,” said Pérez.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pérez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd. These&#xA;  creatures could be seen from the air without having to move too much&#xA;  to see them – they were so close they could touch their horns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While examining these bizarre creatures the scientists discovered that&#xA;  the creatures also spoke some fairly regular English. Pérez stated,&#xA;  “We can see, for example, that they have a common ‘language,’&#xA;  something like a dialect or dialectic.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dr. Pérez believes that the unicorns may have originated in Argentina,&#xA;  where the animals were believed to be descendants of a lost race of&#xA;  people who lived there before the arrival of humans in those parts of&#xA;  South America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While their origins are still unclear, some believe that perhaps the&#xA;  creatures were created when a human and a unicorn met each other in a&#xA;  time before human civilization. According to Pérez, “In South America,&#xA;  such incidents seem to be quite common.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, Pérez also pointed out that it is likely that the only way of&#xA;  knowing for sure if unicorns are indeed the descendants of a lost&#xA;  alien race is through DNA. “But they seem to be able to communicate in&#xA;  English quite well, which I believe is a sign of evolution, or at&#xA;  least a change in social organization,” said the scientist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These samples tend to be grammatical, even if somewhat lacking in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it's possible to start with no knowledge about the language and learn its &quot;grammar&quot; from a finite number of samples. Therefore, the fact that children learn their native language's grammar from a finite number of samples can not be used as evidence of the existence of &quot;universal grammar&quot; (whether or not it actually exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, is Wikipedia's argument one that Chomsky himself made?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T01:02:03.377" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T01:02:03.377" Title="Is Wikipedia's argument for Universal Grammar completely fallacious?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;&lt;chomsky&gt;&lt;universal-grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30666" CreationDate="2019-08-17T10:25:17.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turkish &lt;em&gt;çünki&lt;/em&gt; comes from Persian &lt;em&gt;čūn&lt;/em&gt; &quot;because&quot; and Persian &lt;em&gt;ke&lt;/em&gt; &quot;of&quot;. The literal meaning is &quot;because of&quot; and can be compared to French &lt;em&gt;parce-que&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkish &lt;em&gt;için&lt;/em&gt;, Azeri &lt;em&gt;üçün&lt;/em&gt; and Uzbek &lt;em&gt;uchun&lt;/em&gt; all come from Old Turkic &lt;em&gt;uç&lt;/em&gt; &quot;end, tip, boundary&quot; + old Turkic suffix &lt;em&gt;+(I)n&lt;/em&gt;. In modern turkish it means &quot;for&quot; and nothing else. &lt;em&gt;Ne için?&lt;/em&gt; &quot;for what?&quot;, &lt;em&gt;senin için&lt;/em&gt; &quot;for you&quot;. It &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; means &quot;because of&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your statement saying that there's no -un suffix in Turkish is completely false. &#xA;+(I)n suffix produces time and place adverbs from nouns and adjectives in Old Turkic.  Most of the time + In, sometimes + An form is used.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of words suffixed by +(I)n :&#xA;Yarın &quot;tomorrow&quot;&#xA;Erken &quot;early&quot;&#xA;Uzun &quot;long&quot;&#xA;Zorunlu &quot;by force, obligated&quot;&#xA;Ect. Ect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of için, the etymological meaning is &quot;in the (location of the) limit, boundary, end of&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25137" LastEditorUserId="25137" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T05:01:05.060" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T05:01:05.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-17T14:55:58.570" Score="-6" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/32174/what-is-the-evidence-for-the-arbitrariness-of-the-sign/32188#32188&quot;&gt;What is the evidence for the arbitrariness of the sign?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing this question, what English words can not be motivated and should be considered arbitrary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think only the natural meanings would remain and that all words that are compounds of those natural sounds. But what does the linguistic community think? Which words are 100% arbitrary and please say why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T19:13:14.593" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T19:13:14.593" Title="What English words can not be motivated and are arbitrary?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2019-08-22T23:37:56.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32191" CreationDate="2019-08-17T19:02:38.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which words are 100% arbitrary and please say why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways, none of them. In other ways, all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the question you linked, I used  = &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; as an example of an arbitrary word. But in many ways, it's not arbitrary at all. I call  a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; because my parents called it a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;, and my teachers called it a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;, and their parents called it a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;, and so on. Go far enough back and they called it a &lt;code&gt;/katte/&lt;/code&gt;, and even farther back a &lt;code&gt;*/kattuz/&lt;/code&gt;, and so on, and we can track the specific sound changes that eventually led to this becoming the modern English word that we all know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I didn't just one day decide on a whim that this small furry animal would be a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;. I call it a &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt; based on centuries upon centuries of oral transmission from generation to generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, why did my distant Proto-Germanic ancestors (I'm sure I had some somewhere in the family tree…) decide to call  a &lt;code&gt;*/kattuz/&lt;/code&gt;? Unknown. Some linguists think it was borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic language, or a Uralic language, or some unknown substrate that's long since died out, or that it goes back to an obscure PIE root. There must have been &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; reason, but &lt;strong&gt;there's just not enough surviving evidence to say&lt;/strong&gt;. This is the same reason we can't reliably talk about anything older than Proto-Indo-European: we can hypothesize and speculate, but there's not enough evidence to make &lt;strong&gt;falsifiable theories&lt;/strong&gt;. And that's the standard that all modern science is weighed against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard assumption is that there's nothing inherently -like about &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;, which is why  has different names all over the world (in Kenya it's a &lt;code&gt;/paka/&lt;/code&gt;, in Japan it's a &lt;code&gt;/neko/&lt;/code&gt;, and so on). That's what people mean when they talk about &quot;the arbitrariness of the sign&quot;. But there's no origin of language we can point to to say &quot;this, this is where the arbitrariness comes in&quot;. We can just say &quot;if language weren't arbitrary, we'd expect to see all languages across the world having similar words for similar things, and we don't see that&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like what you're interested in is—&lt;em&gt;is there a built-in mechanism in our brain that somehow associates  with &lt;code&gt;/kæt/&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/em&gt; In other words, is there an intrinsic meaning to the phonemes &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/æ/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; that connects them to ? And as you can see from the answers to my other question, the answer is pretty solidly no. This can be tested and falsified: take a large sample of people who don't know anything about language X (or its relatives), then show them the language-X words for  and , and see if they can identify which is which. It's been found that people with no outside knowledge of language X or its relatives usually &lt;strong&gt;do no better than random guessing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For an example you can try yourself: &lt;code&gt;/toːtoːtɬ/&lt;/code&gt; is an attested word for a certain type of animal that I'm sure you're familiar with. Can you tell me what animal that is? How about &lt;code&gt;/tokatɬ/&lt;/code&gt;? Or &lt;code&gt;/mit͡ʃin/&lt;/code&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However…&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While people can't reliably tell  and  apart, there &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; some interesting results showing that &lt;strong&gt;humans, regardless of language, do associate certain sounds with certain qualities&lt;/strong&gt;. Several different experiments have shown that people tend to associate words like &lt;em&gt;kiki&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;takete&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Kate&lt;/em&gt; with sharp, pointy shapes, and words like &lt;em&gt;bouba&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;maluma&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Molly&lt;/em&gt; with soft, rounded shapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that there is some sort of intrinsic association between sound and quality embedded in the human brain. It's not anywhere near as strong as you've suggested (which is why people can't reliably distinguish  and  in an unknown language), but it does exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could such an association have been involved in the origins of human language itself, millennia and millennia ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure! Absolutely! That's entirely possible. &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;—and this is an important &quot;but&quot;—that's so far in the past that no current linguistic models can make any sort of falsifiable claims about it. And as long as the claims aren't falsifiable, they're not considered science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to seriously pursue this idea, and take it in a more scientific direction, I'd recommend changing your approach. If you think that a certain phoneme is associated with a certain meaning, turn that into a falsifiable hypothesis: &quot;humans, regardless of language, will instinctively associate phoneme X with meaning Y&quot;. Then set up an experiment that could falsify that hypothesis: gather a bunch of test subjects who speak English and a bunch who speak Mandarin, have them categorize pictures based on nonsense-word labels, and see if the accuracy is the same regardless of native language. This might support your theory, or might disprove it, but either way, &lt;strong&gt;you'll have a falsifiable theory, and hard evidence one way or another&lt;/strong&gt;. And that's what modern science demands—nothing more, nothing less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T19:02:38.343" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32189" CreationDate="2019-08-17T19:21:38.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beginning with your very last parenthesized question, does &quot;this&quot; refer to the argument you quote from Wikipedia or the argument you yourself make that begins with &quot;however&quot;?  And why does that argument begin with &quot;however&quot;, anyhow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to make out your question, once one realizes that the machine models you refer to are essentially due to Chomsky himself, proposed by him precisely because they all meet his criterion of finite models which generate infinite languages.  Now, it appears, you're ready to go the next step and, with Chomsky, try to answer the next question, which is: since there are substantially different models which meet the general criterion of finite models generating infinite languages, which is the one that most resembles human language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T19:21:38.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-17T21:26:16.227" Score="3" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;IPA is international standard for transcribing phonetic of any language (AFAIK, I am not a linguist), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://translate.google.com/&lt;/a&gt; is excellent tool for translating between languages. But when I use for translating to Thai, it uses some weird transcription. Is there a way to switch to standard IPA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Thanks, wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11940-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO_11940-2&lt;/a&gt; says: &lt;strong&gt;&quot;(ISO 11940-1) bears no resemblance to Thai pronunciation&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; , while ISO 11940-2 seems to be focused more on pronunciation (&quot;All information on vowel length and syllable tone is dropped&quot; and &quot;Transcription is according to pronunciation, not Thai orthography&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even getting ISO 11940-2 would not get me pronunciation with tones, and it is not Google's goal to provide it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there other website which converts a text in Thai to (preferably) IPA with tones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5687" LastEditorUserId="5687" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T20:57:45.903" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T20:57:45.903" Title="Google Translate Thai with IPA transcription?" Tags="&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32194" CreationDate="2019-08-17T22:04:32.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, because they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; provide a transcription, they provide a transliteration. Note that if the language uses the Latin alphabet, you get no help. It is also not always the &quot;best&quot; transliteration, for example in Arabic it does not retain the plain / emphatic distinction in dentals and its rendering of ʕ (as &quot;e&quot;) is, uh, odd. The contrast between transcription and transliteration in Mongolian is fairly stark: you (they) would have to do a fair amount of fieldwork to determine how written text is actually pronounced. The case of Thai is spelled out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11940&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_General_System_of_Transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Royal Thai General System of Transcription&lt;/a&gt; which is more about pronunciation is explained here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T22:04:32.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32202" CreationDate="2019-08-17T22:38:11.767" Score="5" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the active voice is predominant in the English language the ‘ideal’ proportion of recommended passive sentences is still regarded as between 5% and 10%(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ego4u.com/en/business-english/grammar/passive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source1&lt;/a&gt;) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://resources.marshalladulteducation.org/techtips/techtip96.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt; source2&lt;/a&gt;). Which is substantially more than in languages like Spanish and, though I couldn't find numerical data to compare the percentage use of the passive voice, experience of writing in Spanish and memories of Spanish teachers accustomed to bilingual students warning about overusing the passive voice &quot;like in English&quot;, &#xA;as well as these language learning sites expressing that the passive is not as common in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/avoiding-the-passive-voice-spanish-3079429&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.italianlanguageguide.com/grammar/passive-voice.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/the-passive-voice-in-german-4068771&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; as it is in English, provide me with some confirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, what intrinsic difference does English have that would allow more sentences  to make sense in the passive voice than the languages mentioned above? Sources would be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It's still gramatically correct in all the languages mentioned above to use the pasive voice to whatever degree, but many more sentences in this voice would be discouraged as they'd simply not make much sense or be very hard to understand (particullarly in conversations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: Perhaps other European languages use the passive more often, but even so, why is this the case, I'm particularly interested in comparing English to Spanish or Italian or German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25289" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T03:47:15.417" Title="Why is the passive voice more prevalent in English than in other Indo-European languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;passive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T08:19:02.783" Score="2" ViewCount="501" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any definable difference between collocations and compound nouns? Or is it just frequency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer does not seem to be transparency vs idiomaticity - looking at the text I'm presenting to my students tomorrow, &lt;em&gt;sunlight&lt;/em&gt; looks like a compound noun but its meaning is completely predictable, whereas my intuition and textbook say &lt;em&gt;primary consumers&lt;/em&gt; (in a food chain) is a collocation, but it's a technical term so the meaning is not predictable in isolation. And how about &lt;em&gt;carbon dioxide&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: this is helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Compounds include word pairs that occur consecutively in language and typically are immutable in function. Noun-noun pairs are one such example, which not only occur consecutively but also function as a constituent. Cowie [8] notes that compounds form a bridge between collocations and idioms,&#xA;since, like collocations, they are quite invariable, but they are not necessarily semantically opaque.&quot; McKeown, K.R. and Radev, D.R., 2000. Collocations. Handbook of Natural Language Processing. Marcel Dekker, pp.1-23.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this: Bauer, L. (1998). When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics, 2(1), 65-86. doi:10.1017/S1360674300000691 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastEditorUserId="25291" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T10:17:38.930" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T10:17:38.930" Title="Collocations vs compound nouns" Tags="&lt;compounds&gt;&lt;collocations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32155" CreationDate="2019-08-18T08:46:38.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see Vietnamese nặng (low glottalised) or ngã (rising broken) among the IPA symbols. Vietnamese tone pitches and contours cannot be separated from phonation type or manner of articulation of final consonants, so classification based on pitch is not adequate. See &lt;em&gt;Vietnamese Tone: A New Analysis&lt;/em&gt; (Pham, 2004).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T08:46:38.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20459" CreationDate="2019-08-18T09:43:10.460" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While as a foreigner I am grateful for the Latin alphabet in Vietnam, I would be concerned about the loss of cultural information that would be involved in moving from Chinese characters to pinyin in China. Don't the characters contain etymological information that contributes to the meaning of the words? When I studied traditional Chinese medicine, understanding the names of acupuncture points included explicit knowledge of the structure of the characters. That would all be lost in pinyin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T09:43:10.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9976" CreationDate="2019-08-18T17:26:23.973" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know maybe in the letters. Alef= Alph(a) (ph and f make same the sound)    bet= bet(a)  Gimmel= Gamm(a) Dalef= Delt(a) Heh= Epsilon ? Vav= Upsilon? Zayin= Zeta ? Chet= Et(A) Tet= Thet(a) yod= iot(a) (d to t to d iod(a)) Yoda :). Kaf= Kapp(a) ( f and ph f and p make the same sounds) Lamed= Lambd(a) Mem= Mu Nun= Nu Samech =Xi? Ayin= Omicron? Peh= Pi or Phi Rho= Resh (no sh sound in Greek also so Reh) Sigma= Shin Tau= Tav Psi= Tsadeh? Chi and Omega?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So also transliteration. If you notice this letter are identical I put the (a) so to show how to Bet and just add an &quot;a&quot; Beta. I put questions because some are not as similar, but shin is transliterated sigma in Greek. Well, maybe the alphabet or alef-bet see it is similar. So I know of people who teach Biblical Hebrew and Greek, well on Facebook one Izzy Avraham and one of his lessons showed how Greek was familiar with Hebrew in letters. Then How even the Latin alphabet was familiar with Hebrew. I mean you can see it on Youtube.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then another thing notice how in Hebrew Chet is also Het but in Frankish the name Childeric so it is really Hildr then how Charles is Karl it seems to be similar to Chet. Then how I and J in Old Norse are pronounced like y like Jorvic is Yorvic or York. Sorry of the topic I don't know but anyone can see there are similarities in the names of these letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25293" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T21:42:24.163" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T21:42:24.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T17:45:21.067" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read an exam question given in a class on Semantics, that was asking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is language necessarily underspecified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find much about this at the time, which is surprising because it intuitively strikes me as an important concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class was using J. I. Saeed, &amp;quot;Semantics&amp;quot;, which albeit does not index the term. The notion must have been given separately in class. The student couldn't guide me any further either. What I found is too formal, e.g. there's the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underspecification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Underspecification&lt;/a&gt; focused mainly on phonetic and morphologic underspecification. A random .pdf jumped right inwith syntax trees. Now I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt; in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn may be too broad (I should read it eventually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, I hope the instructor was not asking the students to synthesize an answer. Rather, I suppose they referred the idea about &amp;quot;necessity&amp;quot; to a certain line of thought, a scholar, or seminal work, in the sense that e.g. &amp;quot;one cannot not communicate&amp;quot; is attributed to Paul Watzlawick, or &amp;quot;I know that I know nothing&amp;quot; to Plato's Sokrates, even if this isn't always completely accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, looking for an authoritative answer, this is basically a reference request. A discussion, or rather a summary of the  context is welcome, but I'm affraid it would have to be necessarily underspecified and thus may be kept brief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: A search for &amp;quot;semantics underspecified&amp;quot; yields many results. The reference request still stands, as long as I can't answer it myself, while I postpone flipping through the results (18 months later I am none the wiser; who developed the idea?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastEditorUserId="22504" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T08:57:04.080" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T08:57:04.080" Title="Is language &quot;necessarily underspecified&quot;?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;formal-semantics&gt;&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32196" CreationDate="2019-08-19T10:57:52.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether your initial assumption is statistically correct, but let us take it as a working hypothesis. French and German (to mention only these) very commonly use &quot;on&quot; and &quot;man&quot; with an active verb where English prefers a passive construction. Thus: &quot;on dit&quot; = &quot;man sagt&quot; = &quot;it is said&quot;. Of course you can also say &quot;one says&quot;, but this is less common, or in any case less colloquial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T11:13:46.600" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T11:13:46.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T11:03:57.800" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading a chapter about dialect that distinguish dialects according to the alignment that is used in the dialect (alignment such as nominative-accusative, tripartite. etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused with this sentence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this pattern, S/A/P are left unmarked in the Sentence-Focus environment while overt marking for S/A (but not P) is obligatory when the subject (S/A) is focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of Sentence-Focus environment? thank you :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25296" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T11:36:44.443" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T11:36:44.443" Title="What is sentence focus environment?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;focus&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T12:57:02.177" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time understanding the etymology of the Persian verb &lt;em&gt;farâmuš kardan&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;to forget&lt;/em&gt; in Persian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The infnitive kardan is often used to make verbs from nouns and&#xA;adjectives, so for this part there's no problem.  the adjective here&#xA;is &lt;em&gt;farâmuš&lt;/em&gt;, and it translates as &lt;em&gt;forgotten&lt;/em&gt;.  In the book of Horn,&#xA;It is written  : &lt;em&gt;farâmuš, farâmušt, farâmušidan&lt;/em&gt;, since the&#xA;infinitive is formed with -idan in Persian, it made me think that a&#xA;verb &lt;em&gt;farâmušidan&lt;/em&gt; meant &lt;em&gt;to forget&lt;/em&gt;. I didn't find any translation for&#xA;neither mušidan and farâmušidan.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Horn then states that the root of the word is formed with &lt;em&gt;pra&lt;/em&gt; + marš-, mršyatē. It seems similar to me to English 'forget' since it shares the same prefix &lt;em&gt;pra-&lt;/em&gt; with it. In English the pra- means &quot;out, away&quot; and get is considered as &quot;having a hold on smth&quot;, so forget etymologically means &quot; to lose hold on smth in someone's mind&quot; whence to &lt;em&gt;forget&lt;/em&gt;. However in Farsi the fra- prefix generally connotes frontwards direction/movement. I don't know if they are in the same context with english forget.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no clue on the meaning of marš-, I looked on the internet and I found on PIE lexicon that marš- means &quot;to falsify&quot; in Proto Indo European, but I doubt that they are talking about the same marš- or if my source is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody has the time to explain me these etymological meanings and the semantics of this compound, it would be super&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25137" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T12:57:02.177" Title="Understanding the etymology of Persian &quot;farāmoş&quot;, to forget" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32206" CreationDate="2019-08-19T19:09:34.340" Score="13" ViewCount="1226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/30046/click-consonant-development#comment64246_30050&quot;&gt;an old comment&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/30046/10559&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, jlawler mentions in passing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Much the same can be said about ejective consonants -- other languages can pick them up, but nobody knows where they come from. Clicks and ejectives are common in the phonologies of Sprachbunds, and nobody knows where &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; come from, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This took me by surprise, since I would have expected ejectives to arise naturally from e.g. clusters of stops plus &lt;code&gt;[ʔ]&lt;/code&gt;, or pharyngealized consonants becoming glottalized, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I certainly can't think of any instance of ejectives arising in this way in a language that didn't previously have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So—is this comment correct? Are there really no known instances of ejectives developing naturally from non-ejective consonants, rather than spreading in from an adjacent language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T20:45:03.297" Title="Have ejective consonants ever arisen on their own?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;phoneme-inventories&gt;&lt;ejectives&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32205" CreationDate="2019-08-19T20:45:03.297" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is almost true, in the sense that there are nearly no cases of ejectives unambiguously developing and clearly without external influence. There are two good candidates, though: Yapese and Waimoa.  Ethiopian Semitic development of ejectives can be attributed to contact with Cushitic, and Nguni ejectives to contact with Khoisan. However, it is also possible that proto-Semitic originally had ejectives and pharyngealization is a later development. A further however is that South Arabian languages also have ejectives which would seem to be inconsistent with a Cushitic contact hypothesis, but it is also conjectured that Cushitic languages &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; originally spoken in South Arabia. In other words, the possibility of contact can't be clearly ruled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three and two fractions candidates for &lt;em&gt;sua sponte&lt;/em&gt; ejectives. The first fractional candidate is Korean: but it is generally agreed that the glottalized consonants of Korean are not ejective, they just have some amount of laryngealization. The second fractional candidate in Tonkawa, which either has [tʔ] clusters or ejectives. Phonologically they behave like Cʔ clusters, and Hoijer's description of their pronunciation doesn't make them sound like Salishan ejectives (but Salishan ejectives are perhaps &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; architypical). There are no prospects for phonetically investigating Tonkawa since there are no sound recordings and the language is extinct (but also no related languages so even if there are ejectives, they did not demonstrably develop from something else). These languages represent a further complicating factor, where &quot;glottalized&quot; non-voiced consonants may not be phonetically ejective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yapese, Waimoa and Itelmen are reported to have ejectives. The problem with Itelmen is that it's not clear what the historical predecessor was, so this could just be a retention (Chukotkan languages don't have ejectives – but they might not be related, or they might have lost original ejectives). The other two cases are Yapese and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3623333.pdf?casa_token=A2qdYb2sIK8AAAAA:euCliXxcAQGGEWuw3y81OYNC2vdtx_i-n3AvMt8lz6oySEFzMeeEgoqfpPXv8SHtQk3n4zYc-ZqanY63GEdFcmKkVWQSWUsOx_hcw5VZVzno4-nkz4Hb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Waimoa&lt;/a&gt;, both Austronesian languages, where there is no suggestion that proto-Austronesian had ejectives – and these languages are not in contact with any language with ejectives. Blust (&quot;More on the origins of glottalic consonants&quot;) doesn't have much to say about their source in Yapese, except a few cases where they may have developed from C+ʔ sequences. &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/view/1249/1033&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maddieson reports&lt;/a&gt; phonetic results for Yapese ejectives, which indicate that the putative ejective stops (but not the fricatives) are indeed ejective, not just C+ʔ sequences like in Tonkawa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T20:45:03.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2019-08-20T08:14:59.723" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic and/or Afro-Semite language, whereas Proto-Germanic is an Indo-European language. Both super ethnic and cultural groups (Afro-Asiatics and Indo-Europeans) were connected through the history of trade, migrations, and the written alphabet. Afro-Asiatic cultures had trade routes throughout the Middle East, Orient, and Asia; and Indo-European cultures had both migratory and trade routes throughout the Orient, the Middle East and Europe; both groups shared these routes for thousands of years. The first written alphabet was Phoenician (Afro-Asiatic), and it was used as a model for the development of the Indo-European alphabets. Therefore, we could assume that any written Afro-Asiatic language modality precedes any written Indo-European modality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25303" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T08:14:59.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27217" CreationDate="2019-08-20T10:43:04.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will only speak of the part that the words themselves reveal. Antiphrasis, is a phrase that does exactly what you describe above. Antonymy, is something different that the term you gave up there, but maybe I'm reading the word wrong. So, Auto-antonymy, would mean what antiphrasis is, but for words. When there is a word that spoken in a certain way would mean the exact opposite. Like when somebody makes a statement and the someone's response is &quot;Clever&quot; while they clearly insinuate the exact opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25307" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T10:43:04.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28003" CreationDate="2019-08-20T14:14:47.170" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, a hyperphrase is a convergence of speech, gesture, and gaze, and perhaps other signaling factors. So, my utterance + how I was gesturing at the time + where I was looking and when combine to convey a hyperphrastic message greater than just the words uttered. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=edAGCAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA2&amp;amp;lpg=PA2&amp;amp;dq=what+is+a+hyperphrase&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=dv0yrIM3jX&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3oH2Yu6_c6MWCUtiqQsOviw1LJsw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjf68D3zpHkAhUzVBUIHWJ3CAQQ6AEwA3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=what%20is%20a%20hyperphrase&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=edAGCAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA2&amp;amp;lpg=PA2&amp;amp;dq=what+is+a+hyperphrase&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=dv0yrIM3jX&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3oH2Yu6_c6MWCUtiqQsOviw1LJsw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjf68D3zpHkAhUzVBUIHWJ3CAQQ6AEwA3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=what%20is%20a%20hyperphrase&amp;amp;f=false&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25309" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T14:14:47.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30935" CreationDate="2019-08-20T21:56:32.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it a completely idiomatic structure, or is there some way to connect it to more regular grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these individual examples are idioms, the basic principle is completely regular. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We work nights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We work long hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We work weekends.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's raining bucketloads.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's raining ash.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's raining men.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last one is the only one where we can't just swap in another noun phrase without changing the syntax: this is a hint that &quot;going at it hammer and tongs&quot; is short for something like &quot;going at it &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; hammer and tongs&quot;. In other words, it's shortened from a prepositional phrase used adverbially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do you analyse them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, a NP is used adverbially to give a duration of time: same as &quot;I slept all day&quot; or &quot;I was in Canada last week&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, an NP is the direct object of the verb &quot;rain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third case, a PP is being used adverbially to give the manner of the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do these phrases composed of nouns end up being used as adverbs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different ways for different phrases, in the end!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T21:56:32.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-21T06:15:34.743" Score="6" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the northern part of Iran, in Mazandaran, we negate like this (this is the only verb being used like this as far as I'm aware of):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bɜtʊ̈ndɜ: he/she can&#xA;bætʊ̈ndɜ: he/she can't&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there anything like it in other Indo-European languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit:&#xA;another example can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bænʃɜnɜ --&amp;gt; Persian: nɜmɪʃævæd   meaning &quot;it is not possible (to happen)&quot;&#xA;bɜnʃɜnɜ --&amp;gt; Persian:   mɪʃævæd   meaning &quot;it is possible (to happen)&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23535" LastEditorUserId="23535" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T10:11:32.687" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T10:11:32.687" Title="Is there any similar verb negation in other Indo-European languages?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;negation&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32213" CreationDate="2019-08-21T09:02:12.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically what you are saying is that for this one verb the negative form changes the vowel of the prefix from /ɜ/ to /æ/. Is that right? These correspond to classical Persian bi-tawānad     بتواند and na-bi-tawānad نبتواند respectively. I am not familiar with this construction in any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T09:02:12.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32218" CreationDate="2019-08-21T18:42:51.920" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the physiological production of uvular and dorsal consonants. what are the physiological aspect of both consonants articulation? As uvular consonants articulated with the back of the tongue near the uvula and the dorsal is articulated with the back of the tongue is it a problem to distinguish between dorsal and uvular consonants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22911" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T00:43:38.533" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T00:43:38.533" Title="Relationship between Uvular and Dorsal Consonants articulation" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32217" CreationDate="2019-08-21T19:49:47.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Uvular consonants are a subtype of dorsal consonants (which are tongues produced with the tongue dorsum – palatals, velars and uvulars). Being pulmonic is an orthogonal property: [k,q] are pulmonic, [k',q'] are ejective and [ɠ,ʛ] are implosive (the latter two are non-pulmonic). If you are trying to &quot;distinguish&quot; velar and uvular consonants, there are different ways to distinguish sounds. One is transcriptionally – I've given you examples of that transcriptional distinction. You can also distinguish them in terms of some theory of representation. It is not hard to distinguish them in terms of features, but what the exact features are that you would invoke depends on the theory (e.g. in SPE it is [+hi] vs. [-hi] but in Unified Features Theory it is usually by adding [radical] to the [dorsal] node, where velars are bare dorsals). It might be hard to distinguish them perceptually, depending either on the language that has them, or the person trying to distinguish them. Speakers of English may have problems distinguishing velars and dorsals since we don't have a contrast in English. There is a phonetic velar / uvular distinction in some languages that relates to adjacent vowels (Turkic languages and also Kenyang), which I find a bit more subtle and potentially harder to perceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T19:49:47.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32221" CreationDate="2019-08-21T22:14:48.580" Score="20" ViewCount="4200" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is on purpose not a very concrete question, I simply want to know some interesting properties other languages have that English doesn't, or features you even think English ought to have, this can be with respect to all linguistic fields you can imagine (grammar, phonetics etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the correct answer I'll choose the most voted property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25289" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T20:42:31.233" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T20:59:09.947" Title="What are some interesting features that are common cross-linguistically but don't exist in English?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-21T22:28:41.430" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give the glib answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A straightforward/predictable orthography.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of all the languages which have established writing systems, the vast majority are to some extent phonemic; not all have a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but it's generally possible to figure out how a word is pronounced, given nothing but its written form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only a few languages lack this property; English is one of them. (Others include Mandarin and Japanese—so when I say &amp;quot;only a few&amp;quot;, I'm going by number of languages, not number of speakers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T22:28:41.430" CommentCount="25" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-22T05:52:10.527" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some features that are common to many languages, but absent in English. It's worth taking WALS entries with a grain of salt, but the chapters are great at calling out potential issues and borderline cases and identifying areal patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no particular order, here are some common features that English does not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not have &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an associative plural construction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not have &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/54&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;distributive numerals&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English does not have &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/27&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;productive full or partial reduplication&lt;/a&gt;, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/refdb/record/Erickson-2001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source cited by WALS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastEditorUserId="13573" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T05:00:12.907" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T05:00:12.907" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-22T10:29:05.407" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;English lacks a simple vowel system: Cross-linguistically, three (/a/, /i/, /u/) or five (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) vowel systems are very common, having a lot of different vowel qualities like English is uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T10:29:05.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32227" CreationDate="2019-08-22T15:50:45.143" Score="37" ViewCount="6116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone asked me the question, &quot;Have you completed the project?&quot;. A standard response would be &quot;I have&quot;. Why does the equivalent &quot;I've&quot; sound so strange and never used as a replacement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also trying to think of other responses where contractions are used as a complete sentence, but I can't think of something concrete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if this even works, but for example, if I were to ask &quot;I am going to pick you up after work&quot;, an accepted response could be &quot;Don't. I'm already on my way home&quot;. Even if it isn't a complete sentence, it still &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; a lot cleaner than the &quot;I've&quot; response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a linguistical reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25323" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T17:35:55.987" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T16:24:50.323" Title="Why isn't &quot;I've&quot; a proper response?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;stress&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32225" CreationDate="2019-08-22T17:01:17.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple technical explanations, depending on theoretical framework, but one non-technical way to look at it is that you have to include an &quot;actual verb&quot; in the response, where the verb is &quot;stressed&quot; (emphasized, put in focus). You can't say &quot;*I'll&quot;, but you can say &quot;I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; you can also say &quot;I'll &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;I &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt;, so it's not that you can't do contractions in such responses. One popular analysis is that contraction involves a morphosyntactic process of cliticization, where an apparent full word can also be realized as a phrasal affix on some preceding word. Despite appearances, &quot;*I'd; *I'll&quot; doesn't have a verb. But &quot;I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;&quot; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more to it than that, since you can't say &quot;*I'd &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (as in &quot;I would have gone&quot;). This has to do with the stress requirement (which is about semantics – what you are focusing on). Notice that there is a subtle difference between (1) &quot;I &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have sold it&quot; and (2) &quot;I would have &lt;em&gt;sold&lt;/em&gt; it&quot;, and that (3) &quot;I would &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; sold it&quot; is kind of bizarre. (1) focuses on the fact that you did not actually sell it and suggests there are other reasons for not selling it; (2) focuses on the choice of selling versus some other action. I cannot conjure up any sensible thing that you'd be contrasting in emphasizing &quot;have&quot; in 3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T17:01:17.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32225" CreationDate="2019-08-22T17:45:09.980" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;English syntax makes a distinction between &lt;em&gt;auxiliary verbs&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;full verbs&lt;/em&gt;. (Note that this answer is only talking about English; other languages do things differently. And as people have pointed out in the comments, specifically my Midwestern American dialect: British and Irish readers will probably disagree with several of my grammaticality judgements, since those dialects allow contractions in some places where AmE forbids them. See the comments for some examples!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Auxiliary&quot; verbs have a few special properties in English; the most famous one is that they swap places with the subject when asking a direct question. For example, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; is an auxiliary verb in the sentence &lt;em&gt;he can swim&lt;/em&gt;, so if you turn it into a question, it moves to the front: &lt;em&gt;can he swim?&lt;/em&gt; The verb &lt;em&gt;likes&lt;/em&gt; seems similar on the surface, but is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an auxiliary: &lt;em&gt;he likes to swim&lt;/em&gt;, but not *&lt;em&gt;likes he to swim?&lt;/em&gt; Instead, an extra auxiliary is added for the question: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; he like to swim?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things get trickier when using verbs like &quot;have&quot;, which can be either auxiliaries or full verbs, depending on their meaning. Compare &lt;em&gt;you have finished&lt;/em&gt; ~ &lt;em&gt;have you finished?&lt;/em&gt; against &lt;em&gt;you have a cat&lt;/em&gt; ~ *&lt;em&gt;have you a cat?&lt;/em&gt; In the first case, it's an auxiliary marking what linguists call &quot;perfective aspect&quot;; in the second case, it's a full verb indicating ownership. This is why &lt;em&gt;do you have a cat? *I've&lt;/em&gt; is ungrammatical: &lt;strong&gt;only auxiliary verbs can contract&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on top of that, there's an additional rule. Auxiliary verbs usually come attached to the full verb, but sometimes that full verb disappears if it's clear from context. This is called &lt;em&gt;verbal ellipsis&lt;/em&gt;, and is extremely common: &lt;em&gt;Have you finished? I have. Do you take this woman to be your wife? I do.&lt;/em&gt; But, crucially, &lt;strong&gt;auxiliary verbs cannot contract when there is verbal ellipsis&lt;/strong&gt;. This is why your first example (&lt;em&gt;have you completed the project? *I've&lt;/em&gt;) is ungrammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules together can be summed up as: &lt;strong&gt;certain verbs in English can contract together with the preceding word, but only when acting as auxiliaries, and not if the following full verb is elided&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. An extra point was added while I was writing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not sure if this even works, but for example, if I were to ask &quot;I am going to pick you up after work&quot;, an accepted response could be &quot;Don't. I'm already on my way home&quot;. Even if it isn't a complete sentence, it still sounds a lot cleaner than the &quot;I've&quot; response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;a different type of contraction&lt;/strong&gt;. Another feature of auxiliaries in English is that they can be negated by putting &quot;not&quot; directly after them; full verbs can't do that without sounding extremely archaic (*&lt;em&gt;he completed not the task!&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens, the &quot;not&quot; can sometimes contract to &quot;n't&quot;, losing its vowel. But this is separate from &lt;em&gt;the auxiliary itself&lt;/em&gt; getting contracted, which is what was happening up above. &quot;Not&quot;-contraction isn't subject to the same restrictions, which is why &lt;em&gt;I didn't&lt;/em&gt; is a valid sentence, but *&lt;em&gt;I'dn't&lt;/em&gt; isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. If you look into this further on your own, be aware that there are two competing definitions of &quot;auxiliary&quot; in English! One definition, the one I'm using, is: &lt;em&gt;auxiliary verbs are the ones that can swap places with the subject in negation&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;syntactic auxiliaries&quot;). Another definition is: &lt;em&gt;auxiliary verbs are the ones that have no semantic meaning, only grammatical meaning&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;semantic auxiliaries&quot;). Some people use the term &quot;modal verbs&quot; for the second meaning, but that term can &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; have different definitions…welcome to the wonderful world of linguistics terminology!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly relevant because of the verb &quot;to be&quot;: syntactically, it's an auxiliary (&quot;is this a pigeon?&quot; &quot;this is not a pigeon&quot;), but semantically, it's not (&quot;I think, therefore I am&quot;). For the purposes of this answer, I'm only using the syntactic definition, not the semantic one. But don't be surprised if you see other people do it the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T16:24:50.323" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T16:24:50.323" CommentCount="21" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-22T18:07:03.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;English does not double its negations. The correct interpretation of a sentence with two negatives really should cancel them out. You may have heard &quot;I ain't got no satisfaction.&quot; It's deliberately incorrect for effect. While the author may well insist on a simple meaning, formal English demands the opposite of what the author intended, &lt;em&gt;and this is very important to formal language&lt;/em&gt; that it behave this way. Complex electrical controls and option contracts would be very difficult to describe without this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spanish on the other hand stacks its negatives. It doesn't take too long to get used to in general conversation and literacy but I can't imagine using it for technical work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kinda source: &lt;A HREF=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/double-negatives-spanish-3079432&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Double Negatives in Spanish&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13512" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T18:07:03.100" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32225" CreationDate="2019-08-22T19:13:18.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't delete a vowel and also stress it.  That's obvious. So deleting a vowel prevents stressing it, and stressing a vowel prevents deleting it.  A principle of English stress is that the last stressed vowel in the last word of a phrase bears the main stress in that phrase -- this is the Nuclear Stress Rule, or NSR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting these two things together, we can predict that you can't delete the last stressed vowel in the last word of a phrase.  In your example, answering the question &quot;Have you completed the project?&quot; with &quot;I have completed the project&quot; leaves the vowel of &quot;have&quot; in a vulnerable position for contraction, since &quot;have&quot; is not at the end of a phrase, and the NSR is inapplicable to its vowel.  In the shortened answer &quot;I have&quot;, however, the NSR requires stress on the vowel of &quot;have&quot;, since it is at the end of its phrase (the sentence), thus preventing contraction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T19:13:18.840" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-22T20:29:32.527" Score="6" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 3rd person pronouns of Russian – &lt;code&gt;ego&lt;/code&gt; him/it.ACC, &lt;code&gt;eё&lt;/code&gt; her.ACC, &lt;code&gt;ix&lt;/code&gt; them.ACC – gain an initial &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt; when they are governed by most prepositions: &lt;code&gt;nego&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;neё&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;nix&lt;/code&gt;. There are, of course, historical reasons for this, but in a synchronic analysis of the modern language, this is a morphologically or syntactically conditioned change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to call this an &quot;epenthetic &lt;code&gt;n&lt;/code&gt;&quot;, but for some reason it seems wrong to call it epenthesis when it is not conditioned phonologically. Is there a better term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6908" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T21:42:41.470" Title="Is the `n` in Russian 3rd person pronouns &quot;epenthetic&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sandhi&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-23T01:08:41.243" Score="3" ViewCount="776" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English, it's widely held that imperative verbs have &quot;invisible&quot; subjects, on the syntactic level. For example, we see &lt;em&gt;look at &lt;strong&gt;yourself&lt;/strong&gt; in the mirror&lt;/em&gt;, rather than *&lt;em&gt;look at &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; in the mirror&lt;/em&gt;, which implies that there's some invisible &quot;you&quot;-like entity in the subject position, which just doesn't appear on the surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a universal? Or are there languages in which imperatives have no syntactic subject at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. For some languages, there may be no way to know whether there's an &quot;invisible&quot; subject or not, since it wouldn't affect other words the way English pronouns can. I'm not as interested in these cases: I'm specifically curious if there are languages that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; show evidence of an invisible subject, but &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, I'm looking for evidence of absence, not just absence of evidence.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T03:21:03.393" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T14:48:45.420" Title="Is &quot;imperatives have invisible subjects&quot; a universal?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;imperative&gt;&lt;reflexive&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-23T02:32:59.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English doesn't have gendered adjectives, adverbs, or verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a debate in comments about gendered nouns, but in no case does English have to match the adjective, adverb, or verb to the gender of the noun. The only time the gender of a noun matters is when you're replacing it with a pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of gendered adjective: the &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;la torre&lt;/em&gt; (I think this is Italian; correct me if I'm wrong). In Spanish, the adjective one &lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt; is also gendered and appears as &lt;em&gt;una&lt;/em&gt; if the noun is feminine. But use of &lt;em&gt;uno&lt;/em&gt; as an adjective is rare as opposed to the adjective &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt; which also becomes &lt;em&gt;una&lt;/em&gt; when pared with a feminine noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13512" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T02:32:59.643" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32239" CreationDate="2019-08-23T05:22:06.257" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of languages where a dedicated future tense is always required when referring to events that take place in the future and using a non-future, present, or past tense is always ungrammatical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably at least one such language, but I'm wondering if there's a standard or elegant example of a language that strictly distinguishes future and non-future reference with its verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English has a tense frequently referred to as the future tense, used in sentences like &lt;code&gt;I will go&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is possible to use the present (or perhaps nonpast) tense in English to refer to events in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;My flight leaves tomorrow.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Events that took place in the past seem to require a past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*My flight leaves yesterday.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French has an inflectional future tense, but allows the present tense to be used to refer to events taking place in the future. I'm taking my example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2593/what-is-the-present-tense-expressing-future&quot;&gt;another question on this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Je déménage demain.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T17:20:17.863" Title="Example of a language with a future tense that's always required for future time reference" Tags="&lt;future&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32231" CreationDate="2019-08-23T05:27:52.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problems associated with defining &quot;imperative&quot; non-circularly are sufficiently large that they preclude answering the question. It is presumably clear that meaning and usage can't distinguish imperatives from other constructions such as subjunctives. Imperatives are not definable morphologically (there are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; always bare verbs -- see for instance Sanskrit with imperatives inflected for all persons, Finnish with imperatives for all persons besides 1s). They are also not definable as &quot;the verb forms that you get just in case there is no overt subject&quot; -- there are plenty of pro-drop languages which don't require overt subjects (pronouns or NPs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We often take the reflexivization facts to be sufficient evidence that the subject of an imperative must be 2nd person in English. This argument is weakened a bit by famous Dong 1967 examples like &quot;Fuck/screw/forget/damn you&quot; (where you can dispose of the problem by saying they aren't imperatives), and by &quot;Everyone make yourself a sandwich&quot; where we have an overt subject of an imperative that doesn't control reflexivization. Since subjects generally control verb agreement in English, Spanish, Greek, Sanskrit, Finnish and so on, we ought to conclude that if there is any subject agreement at all, we have proof that there is a covert subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an imaginary scenario that could detect a subjectless imperative. Gwambomambo has a single bare-verb form &quot;imperative&quot; that doesn't indicate subject. It has obligatory person-and-number agreeing reflexive object pronouns. But in Gwambomambo, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; reflexive can be the object of an imperative, instead there is also a special imperative object reflexive pronoun -- a form that doesn't agree with anything, which is selected because there isn't anything to agree with (no subject). If you could find this language, it could establish that the claim about there being covert subjects of imperatives is not universally true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T05:27:52.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32231" CreationDate="2019-08-23T12:07:34.270" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting, non-exotic, case is German. In the familiar register you can say “geh nach Hause”, “geht nach Hause”, with implicit subject, but you can also say “geh du nach Hause” and “geht Ihr nach Hause” with explicit subject and a slightly more insistent tone. On the other hand, in the polite register you need to say “gehen Sie nach Hause”; the explicit pronoun cannot be omitted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T12:48:00.443" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T12:48:00.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-23T14:27:31.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tonality. It may seem exotic to English speakers but Yip (2002) says up to 70% of the world's languages may be tonal. I know English has things like record (v) vs record (n) but they are in complementary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T14:27:31.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32231" CreationDate="2019-08-23T14:40:06.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several exceptions to this rule (etc. Icelandic, Tagalog), see Nikolaeva 2007 for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Icelandic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HLxi2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HLxi2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tagalog and Newari&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CLgLA.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CLgLA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ndyuka&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UG9vb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UG9vb.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why Jerry and Kissine write that such strong universal claims about imperatives are “perhaps ill-advised” (p. 102).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/imperatives?format=HB&amp;amp;isbn=9781107012349&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/imperatives?format=HB&amp;amp;isbn=9781107012349&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(writing from a phone, sorry about poor formatting abs not giving you examples)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="445" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T20:43:13.840" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T20:43:13.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32234" CreationDate="2019-08-23T16:31:33.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A candidate language is Logoori. IMO the reason why it is a candidate is that it doesn't seem to have a bare present tense. There is a habitual tense and an immediate past tense, which do the heavy lifting of conveying English presents. Neither of these tenses can be used to refer to a future event, and do not combine with an adverb that implies some future time. Logoori contrasts with Kerewe, which has a &quot;simple present&quot; tense that is distinct from the habitual, which is generally used for e.g. &quot;I like fish&quot;, &quot;I want a beer&quot;, and which can be used for near futures (and combines with future-referring adverbials as well as &quot;now&quot;). The only detailed analysis of tense semantics in a Bantu language that I know of is Seth Cable's work on Kikuyu, which you might consult. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T16:31:33.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32234" CreationDate="2019-08-23T17:20:17.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Riffian always uses a particle &quot;ad&quot; in combination with a particular inflectional verbal morphology (unmarked form) to express future events. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad ccex&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FUT eat.1P.FUT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will eat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ccix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eat.1P.PAST&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some verbs have the same form (unmarked form) to express the future and the past. It is the particle &quot;ad&quot; that bears the future feature and distinguishes between these word-forms. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad ssnex&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FUT know.1P.FUT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will know &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ssnex&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;know.1P.PAST&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, future events cannot be expressed with other inflectional verbal morphologies. An event that didn't start can only be encoded with the particle &quot;ad&quot; and the unmarked form, called in the Berber grammatical tradition &quot;aorist&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T17:20:17.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:13:59.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;English doesn’t use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;infixes&lt;/a&gt; (except for a few colloquialisms where an infix is created for comic emphasis, like fan-bloody-tastic or abso-fragging-lutely). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25355" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T19:13:59.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32244" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:34:52.577" Score="6" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;Triggered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/32220/what-are-some-interesting-features-that-are-common-cross-linguistically-but-don/32232#32232&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, I am curious: Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender or noun class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have consulted the following two questions but the given inflections of adverbs in their answers are comparative/superlative and agreement in voice (passive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8515/does-any-language-conjugate-adverbs&quot;&gt;Does any language conjugate adverbs?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26800/are-there-languages-in-which-adverbs-inflect&quot;&gt;Are there languages in which adverbs inflect?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T19:04:39.717" Title="Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;inflection&gt;&lt;gender&gt;&lt;adverbs&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32242" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:46:19.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Bantu languages, adverbs are often inflected for noun cl. 8, for example Shona &lt;em&gt;ndakáryá zvi-díkí&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I ate a bit&quot; with the cl 8 form of &quot;small&quot; (-díkí), Swahili &lt;em&gt;unaongea kiswahili vi-zuri&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you speak Swahili well&quot;, cl. 8 form of &quot;good&quot; (-&lt;em&gt;zuri&lt;/em&gt;). I do not know of any evidence that agreement propagates from adverbs (&quot;very&quot; is non-agreeing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T22:26:27.237" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T22:26:27.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32242" CreationDate="2019-08-23T20:20:42.637" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although adverb agreement in gender/noun class is far from ubiquitous, there seem to be (apparent) examples of this kind of agreement in a fair number of languages. I am most familiar with examples of gender-agreeing adverbs from Indo-European, since that is a large and well-studied family containing many languages with gender systems. But there do seem to be examples from other language families as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Indo-European examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Indo-European languages have words that despite being analyzed as adverbs show gender agreement in certain contexts. All of the examples that I have seen so far seem to be limited either to particular words or particular contexts: I don't know of any Indo-European language that always shows gender agreement for all adverbs. Also, all of the examples of gender-agreeing adverbs that I've seen so far seem to share their forms with non-adverbs. By this I mean the forms used for gender agreement are not exclusively used as adverbs, but are also used in other contexts as e.g. quantifiers or adjectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gender agreement on adverbs can be found in some Romance languages for specific types of adverbs. In some Romance languages (e.g. French and Spanish), many deadjectival adverbs are formed with a suffix &lt;em&gt;-ment-&lt;/em&gt;: as far as I know, &lt;em&gt;-ment-&lt;/em&gt; adverbs never show agreement. But some other kinds of adverbs may show agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Interestingly, Hummel (2017) suggests that prescriptive traditions may have increased the frequency of invariant &lt;em&gt;-ment-&lt;/em&gt; adverbs in the Romance languages that have them (p. 27). In traditional grammatical descriptions of Latin, adverbs are treated as a category that is distinct from adjectives and characterized by a lack of inflection. Even though Latin didn't use the &lt;em&gt;-ment-&lt;/em&gt; ending to form adverbs, &lt;em&gt;-ment-&lt;/em&gt; adverbs have a similar morphological structure to Latin  &lt;em&gt;-ē&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ter&lt;/em&gt; adverbs and can be described using the same grammatical concepts. This may have helped them to become established in the standardized forms of some Romance languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is a long history in Romance languages of using adjective forms (which generally means forms with the same ending as nouns of a certain class, since Romance adjective terminations tend to be a subset of noun terminations) adverbially—often without agreement, but sometimes with agreement with another word in the phrase/clause. Even in Latin, one significant method of forming adverbs was with the singular neuter accusative of an adjective; this construction seems to have contributed to the form of certain adverbs in some Romance languages, whereas Latin's adverb-specific suffixes like &lt;em&gt;-ē&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-ter&lt;/em&gt; left no visible traces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romance constructions with gender-agreeing adverbs seem to have fairly recently been the topic of some study and attention from linguists interested in determining what exactly is going on there. I'm not on top of the literature (I haven't even finished reading all the works cited in this post), so this answer is just a small sample of the information that is out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adverbs modifying adjectives&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One situation where gender agreement may show up in Romance languages is with adverbs modifying adjectives: there are some adverbs that show gender agreement with the adjectives that they modify or with the nouns that the adjectives modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example I am most familiar with is French [tu] (masculine form) 'all': the feminine form [tut] is found in phrases like &quot;une galerie toute petite&quot; and &quot;des galeries toutes petites&quot;, where it shares its gender with the feminine adjective &lt;em&gt;petite&lt;/em&gt; 'small' and feminine noun &lt;em&gt;galerie&lt;/em&gt; 'gallery' (examples taken from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/4PPFS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counterexamples in French&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Miller, Pullum and Zwicky, 1996). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I referred to the pronounced forms rather than the spelling of the French adverb because the standard spelling of this word is rather complicated and perhaps artificial: Miller, Pullum and Zwicky argue that the number agreement that is present in the standard spelling of &quot;des galeries toute&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; petites&quot; does not actually exist as part of the grammar of non-written French. Such number agreement is not found when the adverb is in a position where liaison (morphologically conditioned pronunciation before a vowel-initial word of a word-final consonant that is not pronounced in most contexts) occurs; instead, the word is spelled &lt;em&gt;tout&lt;/em&gt; and pronounced [tut] in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, in Spanish &lt;em&gt;mucho&lt;/em&gt; can show gender agreement (taking the form &lt;em&gt;mucha&lt;/em&gt;) as an adverbial modifier of an adjective that is followed by a feminine singular noun, but &lt;em&gt;mucho&lt;/em&gt; does not show agreement in either gender or number before a plural adjective and noun (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304212782_Gender_agreement_on_adverbs_in_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gender agreement on adverbs in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Antonio Fábregas &amp;amp; Isabel Pérez). Fábregas and Pérez give the example &lt;em&gt;mucha mejor intención&lt;/em&gt; 'much-fem better intention-fem' (p. 27), and report that this agreement pattern only occurs with abstract nouns, not with animate nouns or count nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This next part is not directly relevant to your question (because it doesn't involve gender agreement), but the French and Spanish examples remind me of the use in English of &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; as an adverb in the expressions &quot;many more&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/371353/77227&quot;&gt;&quot;many fewer&quot; (&quot;much fewer&quot; is also used)&lt;/a&gt;, despite the usual use of &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; as an adverb. French &lt;em&gt;tout/toute,&lt;/em&gt; Spanish &lt;em&gt;mucho/mucha,&lt;/em&gt; and English &lt;em&gt;much/many&lt;/em&gt; are all quantifiers that have common pronominal and adnominal uses in addition to their uses as adverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adverbs modifying verbs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/HeadLex16/handouts/butt_etal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adverb Agreement in Urdu and Sindhi&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Miriam Butt, Sebastian Sulger,&#xA;Mutee U Rahman, and Tafseer Ahmed, discusses another construction where a manner adverb based on an adjective may show gender agreement with a noun while modifying a verb. In addition to the two languages mentioned in the title of the paper, Butt et al. cite Punjabi and Southern Italian dialects as languages that have gender-agreeing adverbs of this type (as well as non-agreeing adverbs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Daghestanian examples&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Butt et al. briefly mention the existence of adverbs that show agreement in gender/noun class in Daghestanian languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Daghestanian, adverbs agree with either the agent (e.g., in Archi) or the patient (e.g., in Avar) (Evans 2000, Kibrik 1979).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the Archi example in (5) the adverb &lt;em&gt;dītaru&lt;/em&gt; ‘early’ agrees in (feminine) class ii&#xA;  and singular number with &lt;em&gt;buwa&lt;/em&gt; ‘mother’, the agent of the overall predicate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(It cannot agree with &lt;em&gt;dez&lt;/em&gt; ‘me’ since dative NPs are generally not available for&#xA;  agreement).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  (5) buwa             dez         dītaru      x̄ₒalli           &#xA;      mother:ii:sg:nom 1:ii:sg:dat early:ii:sg bread:iii:sg:nom &#xA;&#xA;   barʃi           erdi&#xA;   bake:ger:iii:sg aux:ii:sg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Mother was baking me the bread early.’ (Kibrik 1979, p. 70)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In the Avar example in (6) the adverb &lt;em&gt;xar&lt;/em&gt; ‘here’ agrees in (non-human) class iii and plural number with &lt;em&gt;‘icalgi&lt;/em&gt; ‘apples’, the patient of the overall predicate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(6) ṛex         xar         dedebe            ‘icalgi&#xA;    3:ii:sg:erg here:iii:pl father:iii:pl:dat apple:iii:pl:nom &#xA;&#xA;roʃun      ro‘a&#xA;buy:iii:pl aux:iii:pl&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘She was buying father the apples here.’ (Kibrik 1979, p. 76)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pp. 2-3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Works cited&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Butt, Miriam; Sebastian Sulger,&#xA;Mutee U Rahman, and Tafseer Ahmed. 2016. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/HeadLex16/handouts/butt_etal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adverb Agreement in Urdu and Sindhi&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fábregas, Antonio and Isabel Pérez. 2008. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304212782_Gender_agreement_on_adverbs_in_Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gender agreement on adverbs in Spanish&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hummel, Martin. 2017. &quot;Adjectives with adverbial functions&#xA;in Romance&quot;, in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/catalog/la.242/fulltext/la.242.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; edited by Martin Hummel and Salvador Valera, &lt;em&gt;Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today (LA)&lt;/em&gt; Volume 242.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Miller, Philip H.; Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold M. Zwicky. 1996. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/4PPFS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counterexamples in French&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T19:04:39.717" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T19:04:39.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32220" CreationDate="2019-08-23T20:59:09.947" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am always surprised that there is no English word that is equivalent to French neuf (new to you or revised but not brand new (newly made)). For example in English someone can buy a &quot;new used&quot; car.  I assume that other romance languages have a neuf word.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25359" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T20:59:09.947" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1967" CreationDate="2019-08-24T08:57:09.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consensus among my fellow MA Applied Linguistics graduates and EAP colleagues is not a lot. Some mentioned that their tolerance for persistent errors from students has improved as a result of their awareness of developmental processes in language acquisition. After reading up on task-based language teaching (relentlessly pushed by tenured teacher-bashers like Mike Long) for an assignment, I concluded that realistically it can only be implemented at the institutional level; I don't see that happening very much except with Kris Van den Branden and his students, with limited success in the Vietnamese case. I've noticed recent CELTA trainees have started using the word 'task' for 'activity', but that's about it. There still seems to be a huge gap between SLA researchers and the transmission of classroom craft to teachers from academic managers and peers, and little reason for teachers to want to bridge it until SLA offers them some practical help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T08:57:09.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28370" CreationDate="2019-08-24T09:01:42.560" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my MA instructors, Alex Ho-Cheung Leung, has researched this question with regard to phonology. He says that speakers of 'heritage languages' (e.g. spoken within the family but in the wider enviornment of a different language) may develop less robust phonology because they only hear a limited number of variants of each sound. That makes them less flexible when exposed to other variants. Seems similar to your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Leung, A. 'Input Multiplicity and the Robustness of Phonological Categories in Child L2 Phonology Acquisition'. &lt;a href=&quot;http://doe.concordia.ca/copal/documents/28_Leung_Vol5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://doe.concordia.ca/copal/documents/28_Leung_Vol5.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastEditorUserId="25291" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T07:35:48.803" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T07:35:48.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28031" CreationDate="2019-08-24T16:18:34.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Indo-Aryan languages (including Hindi) and most Middle and New Iranian languages (but not modern Persian) have two cases: Nominative and Oblique, the latter the result of the merger of all the non-nominative cases in Old Indo-Iranian. However, pre- or postpositons typically govern the oblique, not the nominative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T16:18:34.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="36267" CreationDate="2019-08-24T17:03:48.310" Score="0" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this Google Translate pronunciation of 1991 (which it appears to be interpreting as the year rather than the cardinal or ordinal); click the thumbnail for the video on YouTube:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0HLAO8HxQM&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i3.ytimg.com/vi/e0HLAO8HxQM/maxresdefault.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;YouTube video&quot; title=&quot;Google Translate video on YouTube&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if this pronunciation is accurate for an L1 Danish speaker, but it’s &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; hard for me to even get my head around, even slowing down the audio and listening over and over. Danish number construction is a bit complex, so I’m not sure &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;what words it’s saying (I’m pretty sure it’s &lt;em&gt;nitten hundrede og enoghalvfems,&lt;/em&gt; though I really think I hear an extra syllable in there somewhere between &lt;em&gt;hundrede&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;enoghalvfems&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;/s&gt; &lt;em&gt;[See below the line at the bottom of this question for the answer to this; it appears to be&lt;/em&gt; nitten hundrede og en-og-halvfems &lt;em&gt;or something close to that.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how you’d transcribe those words into IPA, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether those words are even correct for the year 1991.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, by giving &lt;code&gt;1991&lt;/code&gt; context I was able to hear different pronunciations for counting 1,991 things vs. the 1,991st thing vs. the year 1991, and the last is the only one I find completely puzzling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know that speakers of other mutually-intelligible languages with Danish like Swedish frequently make fun of Danish numbers, so I imagine something strange is going on here; I just don’t know what.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;p.s. I have added &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/TA8BRDg44YM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another video&lt;/a&gt; using the input “nitten hundrede og en-og-halvfems, 1991”. Except for intonation, these two seem to be the same? So I think that mystery’s been solved. But how to transcribe it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25370" LastEditorUserId="2253" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T19:59:05.200" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T07:35:30.387" Title="Transcription of this computer-generated pronunciation of 1991 in Danish" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;germanic-languages&gt;&lt;danish&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32249" CreationDate="2019-08-24T18:24:18.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not Danish, but it seems that it says ”nitten hundrede halvfems”, which is wrong. It means 1990 not 1991. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, you get a better response from Google Translate if you write numerals with words. Then you can read the Danish words as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update&lt;/em&gt;. Actually, your record says &lt;em&gt;”nitten hundrede og en og halvfems”&lt;/em&gt; which is a correct but probably old-fashioned wording for 1991.&#xA;However, there is something strange going on with Google Translate, it is translating the phrase &quot;nineteen hundred ninenty one&quot; as 1990 both in Danish and in Swedish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5696" LastEditorUserId="5696" LastEditDate="2019-08-24T20:43:53.790" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T20:43:53.790" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T06:27:51.420" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find what have been done in research about conceptual metaphor. I've looked into some database, e.g. ERIC, Sciencedirect, WileyOnlineLibrary, JSTOR, Cambridgecore, Taylor&amp;amp;Francis, etc. But I can find just a few research about conceptual metaphor. Does anyone have other resources or tips for searching?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25380" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T11:05:29.303" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T11:05:29.303" Title="What are the recommended sources for research about conceptual metaphor?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;datasets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32251" CreationDate="2019-08-25T08:02:53.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's &lt;em&gt;Metaphors we live by&lt;/em&gt; as a starter. This tiny book is widely available in libraries. It's going to give you an idea what to look for later. Additionally, there is a bibliography there as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25382" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T08:02:53.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18943" CreationDate="2019-08-25T08:47:53.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vietnamese comes pretty close. Pronouns in conversation are almost all words for family members. The pronoun used depends on relative age. Speaking to a slightly older woman, for example, I would call myself &lt;em&gt;em&lt;/em&gt; (little brother) and she would also call me &lt;em&gt;em&lt;/em&gt;; she would call herself &lt;em&gt;chị&lt;/em&gt; (big sister) and I would call her &lt;em&gt;chị&lt;/em&gt;. So in a typical conversation there is no surface representation of person at all. There is no inflection so no question of verb agreement. I have even been in the situation of me and a Vietnamese speaker both calling each other and ourselves &lt;em&gt;anh&lt;/em&gt; (big brother) when the age difference was not yet established. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English translators of the highly amusing novel &lt;em&gt;Dumb Luck&lt;/em&gt; by Vũ Trọng Phụng try to get the effect of this across by having characters speak to their family members using third person kinship terms instead of personal pronouns. I'm not sure whether it seems like that to Vietnamese speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception in ordinary circumstances is &lt;em&gt;tôi&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;bạn&lt;/em&gt;. These are usually translated as I / you, but it's not quite as simple as that. &lt;em&gt;Bạn&lt;/em&gt; means 'friend' and it is still used as a noun, so its second person meaning is derived from its primary meaning. I think someone told me that &lt;em&gt;tôi&lt;/em&gt; originally meant 'servant' but I can't find any reference to that. Anyway, at a practical level, &lt;em&gt;tôi / bạn&lt;/em&gt; do mean first and second person, but in my experience they are rarely used (I haven't been in many extremely formal situations). In most situations there is no need to use &lt;em&gt;tôi / bạn&lt;/em&gt; for politeness as the age-relative pronouns express adequate respect. I have used &lt;em&gt;tôi&lt;/em&gt; to address a mixed-age group; on the other hand, I can also speak as if addressing the oldest person by using the pronoun that expresses my age relative to that person's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some more obscure pronouns or pronoun-like terms which are used in certain friendship and family situations and do have first- and second-person meanings (whether primary or derived I don't know). My wife has explained them to me but they are quite opaque to foreigners, who are at any rate unlikely to hear or use them. Wikipedia lists &lt;em&gt;mình&lt;/em&gt; as a true first person pronoun but I can't agree. I think it's a reflexive with a derived first person meaning -- as in 'me, (my)self and I' -- and I have definitely heard it used as a second person reflexive, for example in an instruction in a meditation lesson: &lt;em&gt;cơ thể của mình&lt;/em&gt; 'body belonging to self', i.e. 'your (own) body'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the OP was about first person, but there is further evidence of the minimal appearance of person in Vietnamese in that the third person is represented only by the demonstrative &lt;em&gt;ấy&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;anh ấy&lt;/em&gt; 'he', literally 'that big brother'. On the other hand, there are words for 'it' and 'they'. Make of that what you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25291" LastEditorUserId="25291" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T08:54:58.727" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T08:54:58.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32257" CreationDate="2019-08-25T15:18:05.053" Score="0" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within&#xA;  that of another word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be said that &quot;parents&quot; is not just a plural form of &quot;parent&quot;, it is lexicalized, since expresses such as &quot;two parents&quot;, &quot;some parents&quot; are not normally used, and &quot;parents&quot; refers always to the mother and the father of someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question becomes thus: Is &quot;parent&quot; a type of or a part of &quot;parents&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T01:39:58.587" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T01:39:58.587" Title="Is &quot;parent&quot; a hyponym or a meronym of &quot;parents&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;lexical-relations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32254" CreationDate="2019-08-25T17:28:11.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say a meronym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule of thumb for a hyponym is, &quot;is every X a Y? is not every Y an X?&quot; For example, every cat is an animal, but not every animal is a cat, so cat is a hyponym of animal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, is every parent a parents? Is not every parents a parent? The answer, if we overlook the strange syntax, would have to be no. So it's probably not a hyponym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Depending on the semantic theory you're using, it's usually a bit more complicated than this. But this rule of thumb works reasonably well in most of the theories I'm aware of, so it's still valuable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, every &quot;parents&quot; includes at least one &quot;parent&quot;. A &quot;parent&quot; is a part of every &quot;parents&quot; (again overlooking the weird syntax). So it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, according to the rule of thumb, a meronym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T17:28:11.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32254" CreationDate="2019-08-25T18:33:23.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of them, nor meronym nor hyperonym. Because they are the same word, they share the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signified of parent is : idea of parent + idea of singular (zero form)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signified of parents is : idea of parent + idea of plural&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this kind of classification cannot be applied to things that denominate the same thing. That goes also for plurals realised by suppletion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-08-25T18:53:07.553" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T18:53:07.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T20:52:42.243" Score="1" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindi उल्लू &lt;code&gt;/ʊl.luː/&lt;/code&gt; (derived from Sanskrit उलूक &lt;code&gt;/uluːka/&lt;/code&gt;) appears superficially very similar to Latin &lt;em&gt;ulula&lt;/em&gt; (both meaning &quot;owl&quot;). Are these words cognate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T22:56:30.860" Title="Is Latin &quot;ulula&quot; cognate with hindi उल्लू (&quot;ullu&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32260" CreationDate="2019-08-25T22:05:13.187" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Skt ulūka-, Latin ulula, Gothic ūla, English owl, and others, are Indo-European cognates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T22:05:13.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32260" CreationDate="2019-08-25T22:56:30.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One hypothesis is that these words are cognates, going back to an Indo-European word for &quot;owl&quot; (see also English &quot;owl&quot;, German &lt;em&gt;Eule&lt;/em&gt;, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another hypothesis is that they're all onomatopoetic, imitating the sound of some species of owl, and weren't actually inherited from PIE. In this case it's &quot;coincidence&quot; rather than genetic relationship, in the same way that English &quot;hoot&quot; and Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;huhuzō&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;to hoot&quot;) are a &quot;coincidence&quot;: they're imitating the same sound in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, in my opinion, it's a combination of the two: a word arose in PIE through onomatopoeia, and this onomatopoeia kept the form relatively consistent despite various sound changes (since the sound of an actual owl call would keep reinforcing the original form). If this is true, then yes, they are cognate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T22:56:30.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-26T08:49:46.517" Score="-7" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to download this paper but I don't have access to it. Does anyone can access it? Thank you in advance. &lt;a href=&quot;https://benjamins.com/catalog/cogls.2.2.04kar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://benjamins.com/catalog/cogls.2.2.04kar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25380" LastEditorUserId="25380" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:48:04.060" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T10:22:27.197" Title="Can anyone download this paper?" Tags="&lt;research&gt;&lt;metadata&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-08-26T11:12:22.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32225" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:53:16.680" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give a minority opinion to be subsumed under the other so far uncontestable answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your premisses is flawed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Overwhelmingly, the shortest response to &quot;have you&quot; would be &quot;Yes!&quot;, and who knows, maybe that's a contraction?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;gese&lt;/em&gt; (with &lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt; pronounced as &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;) has existed since the days of Old English. [...] The s-part remains in limbo. It may be the stump of &lt;em&gt;swa&lt;/em&gt; “so” or of &lt;em&gt;sie&lt;/em&gt;, the present subjunctive of the Old English verb &lt;em&gt;to be&lt;/em&gt;. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/etymology-affirmations-yes-yea-yeah-yep-aye/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anatoli Liberman, Etymology of affirmations: yes, yea, yeah, yep, aye&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Have you?&quot; is subjunctive mood. English doesn't inflect for subjunctive and &lt;em&gt;Have your homework done by tomorrow!&lt;/em&gt; is rather analyzed as imperative. &quot;Have done&quot; shows the present-perfect aspect in &quot;have&quot; and the past tense in &quot;done&quot;.  Effectively, I suggest &quot;Have you completeded?&quot; is often met with &quot;I did&quot;, analoguous to &quot;Have you done it?&quot;, &quot;I did&quot;. &quot;I have&quot; would seem a little stilted in contrast, like a father addressed &quot;sir&quot;, which is nevertheless a thing, but in a context that is perhaps less amenable to contractions. &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; does not contract well because &lt;em&gt;I'd&lt;/em&gt; say it'd be morphemically and phonologically underspecified. In the same sense &lt;em&gt;I've&lt;/em&gt; would be underspecified,perhaps, in the sense @user explained. I'd say &quot;I did [it, and if you want me to I'll explain in meticulous detail how &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; went]!&quot;. You don't say &quot;I have [it]&quot;, but rather suggest &quot;I have [done]&quot;, the short form (simple past, preterite, call it what you will).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a L2 speaker the difference between &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; perfectives is not quite obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:53:16.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32263" CreationDate="2019-08-26T10:22:27.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This paper is copyrighted and when your local university library does not hold it, you can buy it (at a price that may be prohibitive for you, or due to some sanctions the paper may not be delivered to the country you are living in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germany, there is a system called &lt;em&gt;Fernleihe&lt;/em&gt;: When the local library does not hold a paper, you can get it from another university library that holds it (use a catalogue to find one) paying some fee that is usually cheaper compared to buying it from the publisher. Ask your librarian for possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is to write to the author of the paper and ask for a reprint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't expect advice on circumventing copyright by using illegal methods here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T10:22:27.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-26T13:46:42.533" Score="10" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;What criteria do linguists use to tell if something is a copula?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say there's this group of undocumented languages and a linguist is studying nonverbal predication in those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary bla-yi   gul&#xA;Mary COP-PRES teacher&#xA;'Mary is a teacher'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary sho  gul&#xA;Mary 3.SG teacher&#xA;'Mary (she) is a teacher.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language C:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary sh=gul&#xA;Mary 3.SG=teacher&#xA;'Mary (she) is a teacher.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language D:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary nun  gul&#xA;Mary DIST teacher&#xA;'Mary (that) is a teacher.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language E:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Mary ha  gul&#xA;Mary FOC teacher&#xA;'Mary is a teacher.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a variety of items which can pass as copulas because they all seem to be linking the subject with the predicate. Language A has an actual verb (or auxiliary), Language B a pronoun, Language C a proclitic, Language D a distal demonstrative and Language E a focus particle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/120&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stassen (2013)&lt;/a&gt; states that there exist copulas that come in the form of verbal copulas, pronominal copulas, and particle copulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a checklist that linguists use to tell if something is a copula?&#xA;Do linguists identify copulas based on their linking function regardless of their form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2581" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T15:23:26.147" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T20:01:55.180" Title="How to Identify Copulas in the Wild" Tags="&lt;copula&gt;&lt;descriptive-linguistics&gt;&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-26T14:00:46.210" Score="5" ViewCount="2441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned that the word &quot;dyadic&quot;, a word opposed to monadic, is written with a &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My etymology sources indicates it comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dyad&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which means &quot;pair&quot;, &quot;couple&quot;, &quot;double&quot;. However, every other word I know with a &quot;di-&quot; prefix meaning &quot;two&quot; is written with an &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Dioxyde&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dipterous&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dioptre&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;digram&lt;/em&gt;, ... The &quot;&lt;em&gt;bi-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; prefix is now much more prevalent but every other case of &quot;&lt;em&gt;di-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; I know uses an &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in ancient Greek, there's a difference between the &quot;&lt;em&gt;δι-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; prefix and the word &quot;&lt;em&gt;δυάς&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, they don't use the same letter, although they both come from the Greek word for &quot;two&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is there a difference in spelling between the Greek word for two and the &quot;di-&quot; prefix?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does &quot;dyadic&quot; seem to be the only word that kept the &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that this seems to date from ancient Greek, so as far as I know it also happens in every language that got these words from Greek, not just English.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note2: I should have specified it, but of course I'm talking about words where the &quot;&lt;em&gt;dy-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; prefix means &quot;two&quot;, so this is not about words like &quot;dynamic&quot; or &quot;dyssentry&quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16835" LastEditorUserId="16835" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T08:39:59.287" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:32:01.573" Title="Why is &quot;dyadic&quot; the only word with the prefix &quot;dy-&quot; for &quot;two&quot;?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;prefixes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2019-08-26T14:22:20.320" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A language is influenced by use, and use comes in two forms, oral and written. I can agree that oral exchange is more extensive than written; since written exchange requires other set of tools and also specific skills. However, it is traditional that members of the ruling and military classes in most cultures, dedicated time to using linguistic codes (alphabets) to communicate and govern, and that through those processes there was also creation of new sounds and symbols, and other mimetic representations. There are even cases, like the one of King Ferdinand of Spain, who had a lisp, and therefore imposed a form of speech on the Castilians that had to incorporate the phono-mechanics of a lisp in their common pronunciation and oral expression. Languages borrow forms and words from other languages both via oral and via written, and sometimes even tangentially through oral forms that become written, or viceversa. There is no isolationism in language. Therefore, I do believe that modeling an alphabet will necessarily involve the exchange of phonemic elements that will also translate into phonetic elements at some evolutionary stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25303" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T14:22:20.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32268" CreationDate="2019-08-26T14:23:56.313" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prefix δυ- is from δύω “two” &amp;lt; IE *duō. The prefix δι- is from δίς “twice” &amp;lt; IE *dwi- (the /w/ is lost in Greek). Both are common in Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way: “division” is from Latin, not Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of English words beginning with dyo- and dy-. I suggest you flick through any English dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T16:50:04.803" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T16:50:04.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32230" CreationDate="2019-08-26T16:47:51.833" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaimek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pronoun Comparison&lt;/a&gt;. The 'n' consonant is always present in the basic pronoun form: &lt;code&gt;она, он, оно&lt;/code&gt; and likewise across Slavic languages. If I understand 'epenthetic' notion correctly it is rather contrary to what we have got here. It is the omission of the 'n' consonant which makes it easier to prononuce the pharse when the preposition is not required to be present. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25382" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T16:47:51.833" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32230" CreationDate="2019-08-26T18:06:23.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/j%D1%8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; it is prothesis, which is to my understanding epenthesis at the beginning of the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Following a preposition, a prothetic n- is attached to the pronoun in many Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic. This probably arose through resegmentation of prepositions that originally ended in -n; through the law of open syllables, it became preferable to consider the final consonant as part of the next syllable, so it was shifted onto the pronoun.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not able to locate the original source from the list of references, but it sounds quite natural. I was able to find a similar description of this written in Czech by Miroslav Vepřek - Komparativní tvarosloví staroslověnštiny who specifies the prepositions to be sъ a vъ (and not kъ as claimed by older sources).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastEditorUserId="9466" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T18:25:04.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T18:25:04.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32230" CreationDate="2019-08-26T21:42:41.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether or not there is a &quot;better&quot; term depends on your audience, and how annoyed they will be if you use the &quot;wrong&quot; term, according to their beliefs. You have apparently decided that this is to be analyzed as insertion (as opposed to deletion, or suppletion): where do you think this consonant is inserted? In the morphological component? In the phonological component? Or are you not concerned with synchronic analysis, under some particular theory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Epenthesis&quot; is the broadest term for insertion (&quot;insertion&quot; is another obvious term for &quot;insertion&quot;, perhaps also &quot;intrusive&quot; or &quot;linking&quot; as adjectives). You could use the term &quot;prothesis&quot; which specifically limits it to beginnings of words, but few people actually use that term. Wikipedia claims that &quot;excrescence&quot; is consonant insertion, but that doesn't match actual usage in the literature (that term is used neutrally w.r.t. what kind of segment is inserted, instead it's more about the phoneticness of the process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phonological literature, it is not considered an impediment to using the term &quot;epenthesis&quot; if the conditions on insertion are partially morphological or syntactic. Obviously, though, if the process takes place in the syntax then it's not in the phonology, so any such case would not be dealt with in the phonological literature (and it would be distinctly strange to call anything in the syntax &quot;epenthesis&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T21:42:41.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32285" CreationDate="2019-08-27T01:47:55.413" Score="2" ViewCount="855" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any attempt to make phonetic alphabet (like IPA) based on Cyrillic script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the Russian phonology covers enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17445" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T09:34:57.310" Title="Cyrillic phonetic alphabet?" Tags="&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32276" CreationDate="2019-08-27T02:42:34.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, most major publications use IPA, and among those that don't, it's usually for historical reasons. Creating new phonetic alphabets isn't a particularly active area of research when there are already multiple standards that work well enough. (Some people do come up with &lt;em&gt;extensions&lt;/em&gt; to the IPA, and some of those extensions eventually end up standardized, like the tone-bar letters—but they're still using the existing standard as a base, not starting from scratch.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some of the non-IPA standards do include some Cyrillic characters, such as the Uralic &lt;code&gt;ᴫ&lt;/code&gt; for a postvelar lateral. The usual trend across different systems seems to be to use Latin characters first and foremost, then Greek, then Cyrillic, as need be. So if you find yourself needing a letter for something the IPA (or Americanist or Uralic or whatever) doesn't support, Cyrillic isn't a bad source to draw from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T02:42:34.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-27T11:46:30.860" Score="4" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word Talo in Finnish means house. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/talo#Finnish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, it might be etymologically related to talas (boat-shelter). &#xA;I was wondering if the word might have a common etymology with Greek Thalassa (&quot;sea&quot;) or Thalamos (&quot;bedroom&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it might be a long shot, and I know that there is not a known common ancestor of Proto Uralic and Proto Indo-European, but there is a small set of convergent vocabulary (for instance, in the personal pronouns), and I was wondering if this could be the case with this word.  Could Talo and Thalamus actually be cognates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22467" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T13:05:53.443" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T19:08:56.333" Title="Etymology of &quot;Talo&quot; (Finnish for &quot;house&quot;). Can it be a cognate of Thalamus?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;&lt;greek&gt;&lt;cognates&gt;&lt;finnish&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-27T12:54:43.743" Score="8" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I've read that machine learning has been used to apply the Comparative Method (example with references &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2018189&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Also, there are other mathematical approaches that have been applied to the problem of reconstructing proto-languages. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3600463/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is a very interesting work where the researchers employ a probabilistic model of sound change to reconstruct parts of the proto-austronesian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, aimed at professional linguistics working on these fields, is: How relevant do you think are the computational/mathematical techniques in the fields of historical linguistics/language reconstruction?  Are there interesting unsolved problems that could be (potentially) solved with these methods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking because I've also read some critics say that these methods have not brought anything new, only already known stuff, and all I know about the subjetc comes from mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists, but I have not heard much about it from linguists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22467" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T00:49:30.123" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T09:50:21.123" Title="Can computational techniques solve historical problems that couldn't otherwise be solved?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;reconstruction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32279" CreationDate="2019-08-27T13:00:56.353" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is that both Greek words are probably not of Indogermanic origin. The case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B1#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;θάλασσα&lt;/a&gt; is pretty clear-cut, the -σσ- cannot be inherited directly from Proto-Indogermanic and must be inherited from a pre-Greek substrate. The case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CF%8C%CE%BB%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;θάλαμος&lt;/a&gt; is less clear, but again a substrate origin is suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of the pre-Greek substrate remains unknown, but a connection to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurro-Urartian_languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurro-Urartian&lt;/a&gt; has been proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Finnish side it seems that &lt;em&gt;talo&lt;/em&gt; lacks cognates in the Uralic languages (the Sami cognates are classified as loans from Finnish), and it is not an obvious loan word. This makes it difficult to track it back in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; With our current knowledge, the null hypothesis (the word forms are just chance coincidences) cannot be disproved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T13:00:56.353" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32280" CreationDate="2019-08-28T02:14:18.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say &quot;... some critics say that these methods have not brought anything new ...&quot;  From my recollection of some old results (well outside my areas of expertise), I would say the problem is rather that automatic methods have not brought anything old.  To have confidence in such a method, linguists would need to compare the classifications it comes up with known results to decide whether the method is sound.  Early results in this area were extremely disappointing.  I'm sorry that I can't be very specific about some work that was done back in the 70s.  I recall a persuasive paper by Eric Hamp, a renowned Indo-Europeanist, but now I can't find it on the Web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recall an LSA paper claiming to have detected a close family relationship between English and Icelandic.  That was amusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had my own brief adventure in lexicostatistics trying to construct a genetic tree for the Je/Ge languages of NE Brasil, and in particular the two languages Cherente and Chavante (or Xerente/Xavante), whose peoples separated recently enough, around 1900, that the parent tongue was actually partially documented.  So I could compare what a reconstruction method gave me starting from the modern pronunciations and reconstructing back, and the actual earlier pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glottochronology gave me a separation time for the two languages of over 600 years, which was wrong.  It should have been less than 200.  The reconstructions didn't look much like the earlier forms from the parent dialect.  It was just nonsense.  Maybe I did it wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my suggestion is that you look first for any work done to validate the methods used in such studies as you referred us to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="13386" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T09:50:21.123" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T09:50:21.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32280" CreationDate="2019-08-28T05:15:17.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that computational technology might in principle be useful for is managing huge amounts of data. This could be useful if all of the sudden we discovered word lists for a thousand Austronesian languages and didn't know that there was an Austronesian phylum. But we've know about Austronesian for many years, and automated reconstruction is not an advance on already-existing manual reconstruction. Reconstruction is a problem that can be solved with just pencil and paper (and data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elementary lexicostatistics can in principle be done with pencil and paper, but there are modern methods that are sufficiently compute-intensive that they can't be done manually. As Greg Lee pointed out, though, there is a real question as to the validity of the method, as a technique for arriving at subgroupings. The two main problems with lexicon-based sub-grouping is that it does not distinguish shared retention from shared borrowing; and it fails to weight shared innovation above mere shared retention. These are not permanent problems of computational approaches, and in principle some good metric of relatedness could be developed using computational technology. But these results have to be calibrated using the gold standard for historical linguistics, shared grammatical innovations. If the two methods give different results, well, we already have an explanation for why vocabulary is historically very fluid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T05:15:17.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32276" CreationDate="2019-08-28T09:17:23.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few authors that use the Russian Linguistic Alphabet (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%84%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Русский лингвистический алфавит&lt;/a&gt;) or a variation of it. For example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hi-edu.ru/e-books2/xbook107/01/index.html?part-020.htm#i1481&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balgina 2002&lt;/a&gt; (see sections 56, 57, 58).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25425" LastEditorUserId="25425" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T09:34:57.310" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T09:34:57.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31986" CreationDate="2019-08-28T14:11:22.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this and i am a native speaker of Swedish and i had to answer. I have no specific grammar training more than any other Swede and i speak what is referred to as &quot;common&quot; Swedish with no specific dialect (i am from the Stockholm region).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When speaking casually with friends i would respond&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Nej det är dom inte&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and when we say it fast it actually is more pronounced &quot;&lt;em&gt;Nä deärom inte&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &quot;&lt;em&gt;Deärom&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is not a correct word, but to speak faster we drop som letters and that is more of how we pronounce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swedish people in general have a hard time differentiating between &quot;de&quot; and &quot;dem&quot; thats why we commonly just use &quot;dom&quot; to safeguard us against both in spoken language. A lot of people write &quot;spoken languge&quot; thats when &quot;dom&quot; sneaks in, in written language, but this is considered bad practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was taught the following in school when i was young:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know when to use &quot;&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;dem&lt;/em&gt;&quot; try replacing it with &quot;&lt;em&gt;jag&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;mig&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;save a piece of cake for them&quot; called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Spara en tårtbit åt de?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &#xA;or &#xA;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Spara en tårtbit åt dem?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i want to save a pice of cake for myself i say &quot;&lt;em&gt;Spara en tårtbit åt mig&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;mig&quot; is the same form as &quot;dem&quot;. So it is &quot;&lt;em&gt;Spara en tårtbit åt dem?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; that is the correct version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Placing this context in your example it will become:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Nej det är jag inte&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;jag&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is the same as &quot;&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;&quot; so correct Swedish grammar would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Nej det är de inte&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this was what i was taught in school as a 10 year old kid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25427" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T14:11:22.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-28T15:31:47.343" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Carnie's &quot;Syntax: A Generative Introduction&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/87M1L.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/87M1L.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This notation is not explicitly explained. What does it mean? (I'll write my conjecture below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that T is defined as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Bf7r.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Bf7r.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess the first row in 17) means  that the subcategory of T consisting of auxiliaries includes only non-modal and non-nonfinite verbs. The second row should mean that the subcategory of T consisting of modals includes only modal and non-nonfinite verbs. Is this a correct interpretation? It sort of makes sense to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the third row is a little bit confusing. Is &quot;to&quot; a modal (since there is +modal mark)? Why isn't it included in &quot;Modals&quot; in 16) then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:31:47.343" Title="A question about Carnie's subcategories and features" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;parts-of-speech&gt;&lt;auxiliary-verbs&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32268" CreationDate="2019-08-28T15:32:01.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dyad is a commonly-used musicological term for a two note chords. Pedal steel guitars use this harmonic structure primarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25428" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:32:01.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32290" CreationDate="2019-08-28T19:30:20.847" Score="0" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;And are there any examples in world's languages of the one mechanism developed into the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which&#xA;  the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another&#xA;  aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or&#xA;  verbs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are three main ways [...] by grouping them with other nouns that&#xA;  have similar form (morphological) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatical gender&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Agreement or concord happens when a word changes&#xA;  form depending on the other words to which it relates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agreement (linguistics)&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The a/an-distinction in English meets the conditions: the nouns can be classified into two groups, one with &quot;a&quot; as the article and the other with &quot;an&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nouns with &quot;an&quot; share all morphological similarity: start in a vowel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21742" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T20:23:40.317" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T22:13:37.090" Title="What is the boundary of morphologically decided gender assignment and the phenomenon like a/an-distinction in English from a synchronic perspective?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;agreement&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32289" CreationDate="2019-08-28T20:08:54.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gender is, as mentioned in your first quote, a system of agreement based on noun classes. Gender systems always have a semantic component (or in other words, there is a &amp;quot;semantic core&amp;quot; to at least one of the noun classes/genders): there are languages where gender corresponds to phonological or morphological criteria for most words--or for most non-human words specifically--but there are no languages with a gender system that is always arbitrary from a semantic point of view and based purely on phonology (Kibort &amp;amp; Corbett).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trigger of gender agreement is expected to be the noun itself, not the phonological form of the first word after the article in the noun phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English use of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; does not qualify as a gender system. It is not based on noun classes (as shown by my examples below, the same nouns, &lt;em&gt;contribution&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; can be used with either &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; depending on what word comes after the article), and there is no &amp;quot;semantic core&amp;quot; to the phrases that take &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or the phrases that take &lt;em&gt;an.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;a/an&lt;/em&gt; distinction is phonologically (not morphologically) conditioned: as you said, &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; is used before vowel-initial words (not nouns--the only thing that's relevant is the pronunciation of the directly following word, which is not a noun in phrases like &lt;em&gt;an important contribution&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a good idea&lt;/em&gt;). From a historical perspective, this phonological conditioning comes from earlier differences in the rate of dropping the sound /n/ before vowels vs. before consonants: the /n/ was originally present in the article in all contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't heard of a language where a gender system originated from a phonologically conditioned sound change like this. However, in languages that have preexisting gender systems, phonologically conditioned sound changes can influence the gender category of nouns with a certain phonological form. For example, many Romance languages have articles that take different forms conditioned both on the gender of the associated noun and the phonological form of the following word. I know of some evidence that a form that was originally conditioned phonologically may be reinterpreted as indicating gender information instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Spanish nouns like &lt;em&gt;agua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specific example: in Spanish, the noun &lt;em&gt;agua,&lt;/em&gt; which has the typically feminine ending &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; and which consistently triggers feminine agreement on postposed adjectives, takes the definite article &lt;em&gt;el,&lt;/em&gt; which is identical in form to the article used for masculine singular nouns, and different from the article used for consonant-initial feminine singular nouns (&lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt;). This use of &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; seems to have originated as a morpho-phonologically conditioned variant form of the article (&lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; is used before nouns starting with a stressed /a/, whether masculine or feminine), and for the standardized form of Spanish, the rule is often described that way. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asa#Spanish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; specifies that unlike the English &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; rule, the standard &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; rule is conditioned by both phonology and morphology, not purely by phonology, as it seems that &lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt; is used before feminine adjectives starting with stressed /a/.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://spanish.stackexchange.com/a/25868/17930&quot;&gt;ukemi wrote an interesting answer to this question on Spanish SE&lt;/a&gt; that indicates that for some speakers, gender may be involved, as apparently there are examples with such nouns of &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; being used even when a preposed adjective intervenes between article and the noun, and of preposed adjectives being used in the masculine form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that, since the morphophonological condition for using &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; before a feminine noun is so restricted (when I first wrote this post, I misremembered it as applying to all feminine words starting with a stressed vowel, but it seems that it only applies to feminine nouns starting with the stressed vowel /a/ specifically, and there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://onetoonespanish.com/blog/el-agua-o-la-agua.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exceptions even for the small number of words in that category&lt;/a&gt;), the phonological basis for the use of &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;agua&lt;/em&gt; is not very salient to Spanish speakers, so the form &lt;em&gt;el&lt;/em&gt; is prone to being reinterpreted as an example of masculine agreement for words preceding this noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One thing I'm not sure about is to what extent the confusion/variability in agreement for adjectives and other preposed words before nouns like this is a matter of spelling vs. pronunciation. One of the examples in ukemi's post is &lt;em&gt;que el abundante agua caída;&lt;/em&gt; my understanding is that because Spanish speakers blend vowels together between words, this would when spoken sound very similar or maybe even identical to the standard form &lt;em&gt;que la abundante agua caída.&lt;/em&gt; But the example &lt;em&gt;por aquel&lt;sup&gt;m&lt;/sup&gt; asa y no por ésta&lt;sup&gt;f&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is clearly distinct in pronunciation from the form with feminine agreement (which would be &lt;em&gt;por aquella&lt;sup&gt;f&lt;/sup&gt; asa y no por ésta&lt;sup&gt;f&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) as &lt;em&gt;l&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ll&lt;/em&gt; represent different consonant sounds in Spanish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Works cited&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kibort, Anna &amp;amp; Greville G. Corbett. &amp;quot;Gender.&amp;quot; Grammatical Features. 7 January 2008. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/gender.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/gender.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T20:54:17.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32289" CreationDate="2019-08-28T22:13:37.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sumelic's answer is entirely correct, and goes into quite a lot of detail. But there's also a much simpler answer to this specific question: &lt;strong&gt;the article doesn't specifically depend on any feature of the noun&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; good &lt;strong&gt;dog&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;An&lt;/strong&gt; excellent &lt;strong&gt;dog&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; very excellent &lt;strong&gt;dog&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;An&lt;/strong&gt; extremely good &lt;strong&gt;dog&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly there's no property of the word &quot;dog&quot; that's affecting the article here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammatical gender is usually thought of as a &lt;em&gt;morphosyntactic&lt;/em&gt; property: it takes effect at the morphological and syntactic level, when the sentence is still in the form of an abstract tree made of abstract morphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here, the article doesn't depend on the structure of the tree, or the head of a phrase. It depends on &lt;em&gt;the phoneme that comes immediately after it, in the final, linear sentence&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, this effect happens at the &lt;em&gt;morphophonological&lt;/em&gt; level, after the syntax tree has been flattened down into a linear sequence, and the morphemes are made up of phonemes instead of just being abstract units. So it happens &quot;too late&quot; in the production process to be considered a form of gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm simplifying things a lot in this explanation, and speech production is a bit more complicated than a linear &quot;processing pipeline&quot;. But the different &quot;stages&quot; of processing are still useful in all sorts of linguistic models, even if they don't correspond perfectly to specific regions of the brain or whatever, so I have no qualms about using them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T22:13:37.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2019-08-29T06:47:18.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this in Cape Breton.there was no pause between the exhale and inhale as the sentence continued. Fascinating little pocket of linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25432" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T06:47:18.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2019-08-29T07:44:36.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add to the list of special cases, in French, when someone has made a big mistake, or if something really risky is ongoing, one can do an ingressive sound to signify the high probably that things go bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same sound when by empathy you imagine the hurt someone may feel, about an injury for example. And I would also use it myself to express my own pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a sound close to &lt;code&gt;f&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ʃ&lt;/code&gt;, but done while breathing in air strongly.&#xA;It remotely resemble the english 'phew', but with more intensity, no voicing at all, (and of course ingressive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would list it as an onomatopoeia. Not as a dedicated word, but it conveys meaning. I would say it can mean pain or danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T07:44:36.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-29T21:00:11.090" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to define the concept of ownership or &quot;having&quot; with basic more primitive concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first try is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I own X == Only I can take X&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does the word take imply taking ownership of? So perhaps this definition is circular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second try is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I own X == I can pick up or use X&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other tries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I own X == I can use X or you can use X if I allow you to use X&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I own X == I can put X inside the place in which I live. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm starting to think that I don't understand what the word &quot;own&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps (as in &quot;it's mine I can do what I want with it&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I own X == Only I can say who can do something to X&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T02:55:09.357" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T02:55:09.357" Title="Define &quot;own&quot; with more primitive linguistic concepts?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32296" CreationDate="2019-08-29T21:46:21.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to me to be a pretty good example of the futility of trying to reduce meaning to definitions. You might paraphrase the verb as &quot;having the right to dispose of property&quot;, but then an infinite regress of questions may follow. In this sense, defining &quot;own&quot; is as easy as defining &quot;dog&quot; – not at all easy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given your final version &quot;Only I can say who can do something to X&quot;, I need to point out a few problems. First, &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt; can say, utter or pronounce something: you presumably are using &quot;can say&quot; to refer to the concept of &quot;right&quot;. Second, we would judge a definition to be wrong if it fails to include cases that would be recognized as being an instance of the concept. When two people co-own (&quot;joint tenants&quot;) a thing, &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; has the right to dispose of the thing (legal details omitted): so it is wrong to make exclusivity part of the definition of owning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Objections might be raised to using the word &quot;dispose&quot;, which in common usage means &quot;get rid of&quot; (I've borrowed this from a more specialized philosophical context). I mean &quot;do whatever you want&quot;. That might suggest that, if I own a brick, then by my definition I can rightfully bash you on the head with the brick, which is clearly false. The reason, though, has to do with the concept of &quot;right&quot;, not the concept of &quot;owning&quot; (I also cannot bash you with a borrowed or rented brick).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a speaker of English, I bet you do know what the word means, the problem is that you probably haven't thought about every allied concept and proposition that relates to owning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T21:46:21.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-30T01:39:52.283" Score="3" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a natural instance of both the alveolar approximant and the alveolar tap existing in a natural language's phonology.  Could this naturally happen or do languages converge to one of them and the other dies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't quite know how to search for this information on google, so I apologize in advance if this is something one could find with some choice queries.  Presently, I'm just checking individual languages one by one and I figured asking experts would be more enlightening.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24524" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T04:22:43.140" Title="Can languages have both the alveolar approximant and the alveolar tap?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32298" CreationDate="2019-08-30T02:00:34.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hawrami, a dialect of Kurdish, has both: &lt;em&gt;aða&lt;/em&gt; &quot;mother&quot; vs. &lt;em&gt;hæræ&lt;/em&gt; &quot;donkey&quot;, where &lt;em&gt;ð&lt;/em&gt; represents the alveolar approximant which is phonetically identical to Danish lenited &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; (that is, it is not a fricative, but it is also not a rhotic so we wouldn't write it with &lt;em&gt;ɹ&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T02:00:34.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32267" CreationDate="2019-08-30T04:11:38.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may not be a satisfying answer (is this becoming a trend with my answers?), but here's the best advice I can give:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A word is a copula if &lt;em&gt;and only if&lt;/em&gt; calling it a copula makes your theory more complete, accurate, or elegant.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you noted in the comments, there's no universal definition of &amp;quot;copula&amp;quot;. But even if there were, definitions like this are always difficult to apply cross-linguistically. (Or even within a language! Is &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; an adjective, or a form of a verb, or an adjective derived from a verb? Different theories give different answers to that question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the definition of &amp;quot;copula&amp;quot; tends to be part of a particular theory, often tied to the particular language you're analyzing. In English, you might define a &amp;quot;copula&amp;quot; as something like &amp;quot;a verbal 'bridge' that connects a subject to its predicate, with no semantic meaning of its own&amp;quot;. But this falls apart in various Romance languages, which have two or three &amp;quot;copulae&amp;quot;, each with its own semantics. So in Romance, the definition is usually a syntactic one instead: &amp;quot;copulae&amp;quot; are defined by how they act in the syntax, rather than by their lack of semantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, copulae are &lt;em&gt;entirely theoretical constructs&lt;/em&gt;. There's no sensor we can hook up to a word to determine if it's a copula or not. (Hell, we don't even have a sensor that can tell us whether or not something is a &amp;quot;word&amp;quot;!) So we have to apply the classic rules for testing theories. How well does it explain the data? How elegant is it? How complicated is it? Are there things it can't account for? Because in the end, these questions are more important than any formal definition you come across. If adding copulae doesn't improve the theory, you should always feel free to apply Occam's razor—and excise them completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T04:11:38.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32298" CreationDate="2019-08-30T04:22:43.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, absolutely. My particular variety of American English does, for example: &lt;em&gt;batter&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;[bæɾɹ̩]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonologically, also absolutely; it just depends how you name your phonemes. An Italian linguist freshly discovering and documenting my English might decide that &lt;em&gt;batter&lt;/em&gt; has an &lt;code&gt;/ɾ/&lt;/code&gt; in the middle, for instance. That phoneme is traditionally called &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in analyses of English, but there's no quantitative reason why that has to be the case (it's just traditional).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T04:22:43.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32303" CreationDate="2019-08-30T09:33:01.197" Score="4" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;So dialect levelling is,  in which the speech of a group of people converges towards a common norm, with extreme differences being ironed out. While pidgin is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if language and dialect are both just 'varieties' and not actually majorly different, then what's the difference between the two terms above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14731" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T15:21:10.147" Title="Difference between dialect levelling and pidgin formation?" Tags="&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;&lt;pidgins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32302" CreationDate="2019-08-30T10:43:55.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the process of dialect levelling, the grammatical system of the dialects (tense, nominal case systems, other complex features) usually stays intact. The dialects undergoing dialect levelling are full-fledged languages at each time of the process. The dialects just converge to each other or to a &lt;em&gt;dachsprache&lt;/em&gt; dominating them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a pidgin discards all the original complex grammatical features. A pidgin is not considered a full-fledged language. When native speakers emerge in a group of pidgin-speaking peers, they develop a &lt;em&gt;creole&lt;/em&gt; with typical grammatical features different from the original languages from which the pidgin was formed. The creole is a full-fledged language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To complicate matters: When the creole is influenced by one of the original languages, a process called &lt;em&gt;decreolisation&lt;/em&gt; can start which can be described as dialect levelling between the creole and the original language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in any case, dialect levelling is rarely equal to all dialects involved. Usually, there is one dominant and prestigious dialect (e.g., the dialect of the capital city, or a formal &lt;em&gt;hochsprache&lt;/em&gt; like High German or Standard Dutch) that gravitates the dialects to itself and absorbes only a few features from the dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T15:21:10.147" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T15:21:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2019-08-30T12:25:21.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the Scandinavian inhaled &quot;ja&quot; - this is at least in Norwegian pretty non-standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intended (usually comic) effect when uttered by an adult is maudling, whingeing or  extremely insulted, mimicking a child trying to speak on both in- and outbreath whilst crying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25442" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T12:25:21.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-30T13:26:19.813" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just now, I had a slip of the tongue which resulted in a silly grammatical error. I said &quot;if I had, I would not commented on it&quot;. I added &quot;have&quot; afterwards. My question is &quot;do natives make such mistakes because of slips of the tongue?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24328" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T13:26:19.813" Title="Slip of the tongue" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;american-english&gt;&lt;grammaticality&gt;&lt;errors&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32308" CreationDate="2019-08-30T15:51:01.277" Score="2" ViewCount="888" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance&quot;&gt;Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance&lt;/a&gt; here when looking for a way to know if Portuguese is the most similar language to Spanish. Unfortunately neither of these languages are in the marked answer. Is it know through this mean or another, which language is the most similar to Spanish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13957" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T14:32:41.273" Title="Which language is the closest lexically to Spanish?" Tags="&lt;spanish&gt;&lt;portuguese&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32306" CreationDate="2019-08-30T17:41:31.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;NB: The problem with the other answer by guifa is: it claims that there is no methodology behind the lexical distances used in the map in question, and &lt;strong&gt;that those numbers are meaningless&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm ill at ease: Reading entirely the two original answers and their links shows otherwise (though unfortunately I can't read Russian to comment Konstantin Tishchenko's work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eadW8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;map&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/19484/1172&quot;&gt;marked answer&lt;/a&gt;: Catalan language is displayed as the closest to Spanish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Galician and Portuguese, both are more distant than Catalan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oCZAo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original map in Russian&lt;/a&gt; by Prof. Konstantin Tishchenko in  &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/17401/1172&quot;&gt;the other answer&lt;/a&gt;, Galician AND Occitan/Provencal are closer to spanish than Portugese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the validity and the methods used for the two maps: the answers mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Levenstein distance&lt;/a&gt;, as a systematic method for computing the distance between two sentences. Check those answers for more detailled informations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers suggest that the author Konstantin Tishchenko used only a limited set of very usual words to calculate the Levenstein distance, or a similar metric. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. if you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swadesh list&lt;/a&gt; that could have been used, then you notice it is really short a list! Only a hundred of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may be insufficient for saying that two languages are close. Maybe. But it is another matter to state that those distances are meaningless, and I don't subscribe to that point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T14:32:41.273" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T14:32:41.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32306" CreationDate="2019-08-30T18:55:56.173" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The map you have doesn't pass the sniff test for me.  I don't imagine anyone realistically saying Catalonian being closer to Spanish than Galician.  I can't speak for other Romance groups, but for Iberian languages, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Romance_languages#/media/File:Romance-lg-classification-en.svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chart on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is in line with my experience (I speak Asturian, Castilian, and Portuguese, and regularly consume media in Galician and Aragonese).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, however, when doing a lexical analysis is how you handle words that exist in both languages but have different frequencies of use, or with pronunciations that line up closer in one than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;cerrar&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;to close&lt;/em&gt;) exists in Portuguese, but &lt;em&gt;fechar&lt;/em&gt; is used infinitely more.  On the other hand, in both Asturian and Aragonese, the verb is &lt;em&gt;zarrar&lt;/em&gt;.  Which is closer?  You can argue for Portuguese because &lt;em&gt;cerrar&lt;/em&gt; is identical — but should the comparison really be with &lt;em&gt;fechar&lt;/em&gt; which is more used and thus you could argue for Asturian or Aragonese with &lt;em&gt;zarrar&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or looking at Spanish’s &lt;em&gt;despertar&lt;/em&gt; to Asturian's &lt;em&gt;espertar&lt;/em&gt;, Portuguese and Catalan's &lt;em&gt;despertar&lt;/em&gt; and Mirandese’s &lt;em&gt;spertar&lt;/em&gt; which one is closer?  Do we count them all the same since it's a direct etymological link and the only difference is the morphological form of *des ?  How do we factor in Asturian's &lt;em&gt;esconsoñar&lt;/em&gt; and Portuguese and Mirandese’s &lt;em&gt;acordar&lt;/em&gt;?  Do we link Asturian more closely because the two are about equally common in it but &lt;em&gt;(de)spertar&lt;/em&gt; is rare in PT/MWL?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we let pronounciation factor in because some languages like Mirandese indicate vowels that would be spoken (but not written) in others like Portuguese?  If you do, how do you decide which spoken variant to use?  &lt;em&gt;Gato&lt;/em&gt; in Portuguese/Mirandese is &lt;em&gt;gato&lt;/em&gt; which might make them &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; closer to Spanish, but oftentimes the pronunciation will trend closer towards /u/ (Mirandese) or even silent (Portuguese) in which case … are they really closer to Spanish than Asturian’s &lt;em&gt;gatu&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't establish a clear methodology for how you're comparing things, then the numbers are meaningless.  Most likely I would say that &lt;strong&gt;Ladino&lt;/strong&gt; would be the language closest, but it has a modern writing system that probably obscures that closeness and I'm not familiar enough with it to say definitely.  Otherwise, any of the West Iberian languages would be good candidates and I'm not sure you can say confidentally which one is lexically closer than the others for the reasons above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5202" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T18:55:56.173" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-31T19:13:49.387" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose, e.g., that there are two brothers, Bob and Bill, that must do two things but it doesn't much matter which brother does which task. I am interested in constructions like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One brother should do TASK 1 and &lt;em&gt;the other one&lt;/em&gt; should complete TASK 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;One brother&quot; is indifferent between Bob and Bill, but once one of the brothers is selected &quot;...the other one...&quot; must refer to the other brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a special term for descriptions like this? It seems like maybe it is a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(linguistics)#Complement_anaphora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complement anaphora&lt;/a&gt;? What is a good place to read more about phenomena like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T20:32:54.793" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T20:32:54.793" Title="Terminology/resources for descriptions like &quot;...the other one...&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;anaphora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32314" CreationDate="2019-08-31T18:19:15.387" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been several romanization schemes for the Chinese languages over the years, and in recent decades we seem to have settled in Pinyin as the system of choice. There doesn't seem to be a comparable standard system for Arabic. Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25456" OwnerDisplayName="crmdgn" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T19:37:26.943" Title="Why is there no standard romanization scheme for Arabic?" Tags="&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32313" CreationDate="2019-08-31T22:21:05.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem isn't no standard—the problem is &lt;em&gt;too many&lt;/em&gt; standards!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least a dozen competing systems for romanization of Arabic, all mutually incompatible, all used for different purposes. For example, ISO 233 (specifically ISO 233-2 now) is backed by the International Standards Organization, which is about the best endorsement you can get, but it requires various diacritics that aren't on most keyboards. ArabTeX is standard for typesetting and uses pure ASCII, but gets unwieldy to read on its own. And so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinyin has three things that none of these Arabic standards have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't require any &quot;exotic&quot; letters (*), making it easy to adapt for ASCII &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; appropriate for publication at the same time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It has the endorsement of the Chinese government, and the majority of all Chinese-language writings are written/published in China&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It fills a niche where the native writing system is severely lacking (unambiguously showing the pronunciation of rare or unusual words)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, there is no central government that the majority of Arabic-speakers in the world listen to, the native Arabic alphabet shows pronunciations already, and I've never seen a system that avoids &quot;exotic&quot; letters, looks good in print, and represents the whole phonology unambiguously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) &quot;Exotic&quot; in the world of Unicode tends to mean &quot;what Western Europeans are unfamiliar with&quot;. So &lt;em&gt;ħ&lt;/em&gt; is significantly more &quot;exotic&quot; than &lt;em&gt;ü&lt;/em&gt;, and significantly less likely to be supported by keyboards, typesetting systems, text processing systems, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T22:21:05.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32267" CreationDate="2019-09-01T00:32:10.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most sensical cross-linguistic definition of &quot;copula&quot; is an element that is &lt;strong&gt;required for non-verbal predication&lt;/strong&gt;. The elements in your examples could all qualify as copulas depending on what verbal predication looked like in those languages. That the copula has multiple functions (focus marker, pronominal, etc.) shouldn't affect its categorization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25451" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T00:32:10.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2019-09-01T09:59:17.297" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a Unicode phonetic alphabet that I personally think is even better&#xA;than the IPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the result of many hours of work on my behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the documentation on how to use it here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SalviaSage/Translingual-Phonetic-Alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/SalviaSage/Translingual-Phonetic-Alphabet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I update this page as I develop the alphabet further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25454" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T09:59:17.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32320" CreationDate="2019-09-01T13:26:38.373" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an example from a book I'm reading, they talk about a loss of a conditioning environment creating a new phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Irish &quot;man&quot;: w&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt;ir&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt;i &gt; w&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt;ir&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning is that the word final front vowel &quot;i&quot; which triggered the palatalization was lost, but the palatalization of r (r&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt;) remained. They claim that this makes r&lt;sup&gt;y&lt;/sup&gt; a new phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? I thought you needed a minimal or near-minimal pair to support the existence of a phoneme in a language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25450" LastEditorUserId="25450" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T20:52:50.677" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T21:26:08.287" Title="Does loss of conditioning envt automatically create new phonemes?" Tags="&lt;palatalization&gt;&lt;irish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32318" CreationDate="2019-09-01T14:24:46.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this sound appears only at this position and/or with this word, so it seems difficult to agree with their conclusion. A minimal pair is not enough, the distribution is much more crucial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T14:24:46.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32318" CreationDate="2019-09-01T15:00:32.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends on which definition of &quot;phoneme&quot; you use. Under the classical taxonomic definition, where you analyze actual sounds into a more abstract system, two sounds are allophones if their surface distribution is complementary, and if their surface distribution is contrastive, they are distinct phonemes. The concept of &quot;conditioning environment&quot; is a secondary concept, related to the &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; which relate surface sounds to a system of phonemes. Under the classical view, if the conditioning factor is later changed (especially deleted), then the relationship is no longer allophonic, because the surface distribution becomes contrastive. In OIr, not every word-final rhotic after [i] is palatal, therefore plain and palatal &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; are separate phonemes (although the palatal has a restricted distribution). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generative reinterpretation of &quot;phoneme&quot; is &quot;any feature matrix that can be present in the underlying representation&quot;. Under that view, if every instance of a sound X can be derived from some other sound by a rule, then X is not a phoneme. So if the underlying form of &quot;man&quot; is /wiri/ and there are appropriate rules to derive palatalized &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, then palatalized &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is not a phoneme. Surface loss of the conditioning environment does not change the phoneme status of the sound. What does change its status is whether the rules and underlying forms required to &lt;em&gt;deny&lt;/em&gt;  a sound phonemic status are still learnable. For instance, when the final vowel of &quot;clothe&quot; was actually entirely lost from the grammar, the rule allophonically deriving [ð] from /θ/ became untenable, and /ð/ became a phoneme (there were other factors converging on that result, it was not just about vowel loss).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T15:00:32.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20909" CreationDate="2019-09-01T20:19:53.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK Pausanias (Paus. 8.17.1) gives it to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After the grave of Aepytus you come to the highest mountain in Arcadia, Cyllene, on the top of which is a dilapidated temple of Cyllenian Hermes. It is clear that Cyllen, the son of Elatus, gave the mountain its name and the god his surname. ( δῆλα δέ ἐστιν ἀπὸ Κυλλῆνος τοῦ Ἐλάτου τῷ τε ὄρει τὸ ὄνομα καὶ ἡ ἐπίκλησις γεγενημένη τῷ θεῷ.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know little about this gentleman (Κυλλήν, the above being apparently his only claim to fame), but Beekes  gives &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;κυλλός [adj.] 'deformed, crippled, crooked', of hands, feet, etc. (lA).  ... .ETYM Probably connected with κελλόν:  στρεβλόν, πλάγιον  'twisted, athwart' (H.)...  In view of its semantics and problematic lE etymology, the word may as well be Pre-Greek (cf. Fur.: 35455).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CF%85%CE%BB%CE%BB%CF%8C%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Α Pre-Greek placename is plausible, given their plethora in the area, but if you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/3842065784&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seen&lt;/a&gt; the crooked mountain, you cannot escape the evident inference. (Where Graves' queen came from one should not have a clue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25191" LastEditorUserId="25191" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T21:08:32.217" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T21:08:32.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32318" CreationDate="2019-09-01T21:26:08.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the form you quote is the Genitive singular of wir- &quot;man&quot;. So indeed it created a new phoneme: palatal -ry in contrast with the Nominative: plain -r.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T21:26:08.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8612" CreationDate="2019-09-01T22:33:19.447" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An integration of a 'formalized' subset of natural languages and programming languages should be possible. Don't start with a full natural language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the programming language Python 'everything is an object', whereas there are a few standard objects. I think there are good reasons to extent programming languages, such as Python, with formalized natural languages by adding more standard objects. It would improve interoperability and save time when standard objects would be added that represents the concepts. As a first proposal for example: person, organization, and ISO standardized concepts such as countries, currencies, unit of measure, etc. For each formalized natural language a dictionary could be added with the name(s) and synonym names in that language that refer to the identifier of the object in the programming language. For each name a given language community could be added to enable and distinguish homonyms. Also standard kinds of binary relation could be added, such 'is a kind of' and 'is classified as a' (to represent instantiations). The Gellish family of formalized languages might be used to provide ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25459" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T22:33:19.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32326" CreationDate="2019-09-02T00:26:25.613" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question when reading the paper Kisseberth(1970). It’s about when rules can be collapsed. My question is about &quot;adjacent rules&quot;. I don't quite understand what &quot;ordered before&quot; and &quot;ordered after&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author says that for rules to be collapsed, not only the structure environment should be similar, the rules also need to be adjacently ordered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘That is, if two rules such as (4) and (5) are to be collapsed by standard notational conventions, there must not be some other rule which is ordered after (4) but before (5), or after (5) but before (4). According to the standard theory, the existence of such a rule blocks the collapsing of (4) and (5) into (6) - whatever the degree of structural similarity may be.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4)V -&gt; ∅/__ V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5)V -&gt; ∅/VC[-long]CV&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6)V -&gt; ∅/{    __V&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;       VC[-long]CV}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for help in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25042" LastEditorUserId="25042" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T00:33:44.230" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T00:42:16.400" Title="Phonology: adjacent ordered rules (Kisseberth, 1970)" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32325" CreationDate="2019-09-02T00:42:16.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the basic ideas in SPE-style phonology (which is the theory that's being used here) is that there's a long list of rules, which are applied in a &quot;chain&quot;. The first rule in the chain takes the underlying form as input and produces an intermediate form as output, the second one takes that intermediate form as its input, and so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rule X is &quot;ordered before&quot; rule Y if X comes before Y in the chain. Similarly, Y is &quot;ordered after&quot; X if Y comes after X in the chain. This is especially important for cases of &quot;rule feeding&quot;. For example, imagine a rule that turns &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt;, and another rule that turns &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;. In one order, &lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt; turns into &lt;em&gt;le&lt;/em&gt;; in the opposite order, &lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt; turns into &lt;em&gt;li&lt;/em&gt;. (Can you see why?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, two rules are &quot;adjacent&quot; if they come next to each other in the chain. This is really only important for the purpose of &lt;em&gt;collapsing&lt;/em&gt; rules: taking two similar rules and turning them into a single, more comprehensive rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T00:42:16.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8685" CreationDate="2019-09-02T03:54:15.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Craytilus Socrates explains the etymology as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Socrates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, for Agamemnon (admirable for remaining) is one who would resolve to toil to the end and to endure, putting the finish upon his resolution by virtue. And a proof of this is his long retention of the host at Troy and his endurance. So the name Agamemnon denotes that this man is admirable for remaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25460" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T07:05:06.240" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T07:05:06.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32330" CreationDate="2019-09-02T11:20:59.300" Score="7" ViewCount="5925" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear Latin and Sanskrit are called dead languages. Sanskrit is used in rituals and at the temples.&#xA;I think this is also true of Latin.&#xA; What is the cause of their degradation when they have enriched so many languages like English and Telugu which are expanding on a large scale, especially English across the globe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="22150" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T18:08:01.320" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T09:01:04.697" Title="Why are Latin and Sanskrit called dead languages?" Tags="&lt;latin&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32329" CreationDate="2019-09-02T11:42:01.410" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;By definition, a dead language is a language that does not have any native speakers anymore but that had native speakers earlier (the last clause is needed to delineate dead languages from constructed languages that never ever had any native speakers). Looking at the definition, Latin is definitely a dead language, and Sanskrit is a dead language, too, despite some revival experiments (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/369/is-the-sanskrit-spoken-natively-in-pockets-in-india-changing&quot;&gt;Is the Sanskrit spoken natively in pockets in India changing?&lt;/a&gt; for more info on Sanskrit revival).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of a dead language does not preclude its use in religion, science, or even administration, it does not diminish its prestige, and it does not make a language unsuitable as a donor of borrowed words in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It is also possible that L2 learners of a dead language use it for communication or for composing literary works (There is a Latin translation of Asterix, after all)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T14:26:50.390" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:26:50.390" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-02T14:21:46.473" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, P&amp;amp;P and Minimalism are &quot;programs&quot;, which are like different ways of thinking about syntax. G&amp;amp;B is the generative grammar that is based on P&amp;amp;P. (I think that's all correct.) However, it seems like Minimalism is getting rid of some of the G&amp;amp;B rules and structures, so wouldn't this make it a new theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25118" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:21:46.473" Title="What is the relationship between 'Government and Binding Theory', 'Principles and Parameters', and 'Minimalism?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;minimalism&gt;&lt;principles-and-parameters&gt;&lt;government-and-binding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-02T19:37:56.577" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what sense do non-restrictive phrases limit meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's well known that non-restrictive phrases are inessential to the meaning of the sentence because they&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;do not limit the reference of a word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam Webster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this example, the non-restrictive word 'Susan' (between parenthetical commas) seems to add information that limits meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;My sister, Susan, likes to shop&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Susan' is an appositive that renames &quot;my sister&quot; as &quot;Susan&quot;, and says I only have one sister (Susan). It adds information that limits &quot;my sister&quot; to 'Susan': surely that means that it limits meaning, as well as not limiting the referent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the &quot;reference&quot; that isn't limited and the meaning that is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20416" LastEditorUserId="20416" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T23:12:35.037" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T01:51:09.923" Title="In what sense do non-restrictive phrases limit meaning?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32333" CreationDate="2019-09-02T21:19:00.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A limitation is information that narrows the range of possible referents. For example, in the case of a restrictive relative clause as in &quot;My sister Susan likes to shop (but my sister Sally hates to shop)&quot;, the RC narrows the referent of &quot;my sister&quot; to Susan. &#xA;Non-restrictive relative clauses, as in &quot;My sister, Susan, likes to shop&quot; (paraphrasing &quot;My sister, whose name is Susan...&quot;), do not narrow the range of referents, they just tell you something more about that referent (namely, what her name is). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you mean by limiting meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T22:52:16.087" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T22:52:16.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32333" CreationDate="2019-09-02T23:29:57.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple answer: I was confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appositive 'Susan' does not limit meaning per se. All it does is rename &quot;my sister&quot; as Susan. In doing so it says &quot;my sister&quot; that likes to shop is called &quot;Susan&quot;. But the referent is already fixed. The appositive -- rather than vice versa (as I thought) -- has &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; referent limited, due to that referent already being fixed by the rest of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Susan&quot; is what is referred to by 'My sister', so she is the only thing that is &quot;my sister&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20416" LastEditorUserId="20416" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T01:51:09.923" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T01:51:09.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6397" CreationDate="2019-09-02T23:51:40.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguists have abstracted &quot;Protoindogermanic&quot; roots from various ancient languages of the language family.  There is no direct evidence for such forms, but even the documented history of languages like ancient Greek shows significant amount of changes of its use, with  many changes occuring when Greek was a world language used for communication outside of its native speaker circle (it is actually already a simplification to talk of &quot;Greek&quot; since it is a comparatively diverse collection of island dialects, pronunciations, forms and spellings in ancient times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence we have of older forms of various Indogermanic languages in ancient times very much suggest that the kind of fixed sentence structure built from an aggregation of clauses is a newer development, with the focus of older language use being on nominal phrasings.  Prepositions tended to be optional and/or proper prefixes, with the actual meaning expressed by a much larger case system than the systems used in antique times (antique Latin used ablative and vocative cases regularly, antique Greek had vocative and remains of a locative), typically expressed by suffixes.  The case system made it convenient to express meaning not through a verb structure but nominal phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When verbs gained increasing mind share, they got their own share of suffixes for tenses, modes, numeri, times, person.  Something like &quot;you two should have started to be a little bit ashamed of yourself&quot; could be expressed in a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating utterances as a collection of heavily flected words with little requirement as to order and structure later became more rigid and sentence order and particles like prepositions became much more a part of speech that was considered correct than it were at some point of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As opposed to more &quot;archaic&quot; living language like German, English relies very little on flectation and on rather few word suffixes while depending much more on sentence order which is much more flexible in German than in English since English uses it as the main factor conveying the relation of items in a sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically the &quot;complex&quot; grammar of ancient languages evolved from a state where single words were extensively modified and aggregated in order to convey complex meanings instead of synthesizing sentences with prescribed structure.  The common unit of an utterance became a sentence rather than a noun or nominal phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the languages you consider complex compared to English started out simple in a different way and evolved into more complexity by adding verbs, sentence structure, prepositions and other stuff.  Making much of that mandatory provided redundancy that English took opportunity of to simplify the language again eventually, throwing out the case system and other details (with the exception of their ingrained impact on some core stuff like some verb forms and pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25468" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T23:51:40.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32333" CreationDate="2019-09-03T01:42:40.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you consider the meaning of &quot;My sister likes to shop&quot; to be the set of possible worlds in which this sentence is true, then the meaning of &quot;My sister, Susan, likes to shop&quot; is more limited, since it is true only in the subset of those worlds in which my sister is also named Susan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T01:42:40.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T05:52:55.613" Score="9" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, Modern Standard Arabic is different from Classical Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of North African Arabic, I don't see the difference between the two, except for some inevitable changes in vocabulary (due to technology, science, influence of other languages, etc...). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They seem to me to be much closer to each other for example than Early Modern English and contemporary English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is MSA then classified as a separate language from CA ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is indeed a separate language, what is its status? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't currently have any native speakers, so it isn't a living language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it never had any to start with, so it's not a dead language either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is it a constructed or reconstructed language, since it evolved organically from CA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is its status? Are there any other languages that have a similar status? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastEditorUserId="17465" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T22:40:18.793" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T20:36:08.717" Title="What is the status of Modern Standard Arabic?" Tags="&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32329" CreationDate="2019-09-03T07:49:28.137" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say anything about Latin but I can definitely tell you something about Sanskrit. Sanskrit is a less spoken language not a dead language. There are 7 villages in India where all the people including small children, women,elder people, literate and illiterate speak fluently in Sanskrit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mattur (Karnataka)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jhiri (MP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sasana (Orrisa)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baghuwar(MP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ganoda (Rajasthan)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mohad (MP)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hosahalika (Karnataka)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one more village in Bihar where Sanskrit is a primary language but I don't recall its name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is a very scientific language. The next generation super computers are planned to be made in Sanskrit language as NASA believes it is the most easily understandable language by computer. But in India, the government didn't promote this wonderful language; that's the reason why it comes to end in most of the states. Maybe in the next few decades it will become a dead language but presently it's not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25474" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T09:01:04.697" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T09:01:04.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32329" CreationDate="2019-09-03T08:19:50.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, &lt;a href=&quot;https://everything2.com/title/English+is+a+living+language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;living languages&lt;/a&gt; grow and change as people use and &lt;a href=&quot;https://journeypathinstitute.com/what-is-living-language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;experience&lt;/a&gt; them.  There's technical terms formed as new techniques are discovered, slang created as people, kids, want to be cliquish and edgy and not-quite-understood, shifting words and phrases and meanings as people want to speak about something without outright saying it, right?  Some definitions say a living language needs native speakers, I think it has more to do with casual speakers - I think it matters more if they use the language for daily conversation rather than at what age they learned it.  Languages in constant use change as the people using them change, with loan words and technical terms, with phrases and terms used by stories or anecdotes, with terms becoming popular or falling out of use, with cultural shifts over what to say and how, or what &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to say and how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dead languages don't have that, they are static, unchanging.  They can be used, even used often, (this distinguishes them from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extinct&lt;/a&gt; languages), but because they aren't used casually and for day-to-day stuff, they don't change, not really.  You mention rituals and temples, well, this is an example - you don't usually get people making up new words or phrases in the middle of things, or changing meanings or shifting things around just because - religious rites and rituals are &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to be constant and unchanging, the words and meanings should be the same every time to invoke continuity and honor the strength of the past.  The same is true of other uses of dead languages, academic uses like medical latin, translation of literature from that language, use of quotes or set phrases (phrases whose meaning is independent of the actual words being used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are languages that have moved back across that border, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_revival&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revived&lt;/a&gt; languages, jknappen mentions attempts at reviving Sanskrit, and I believe Hebrew and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language_revival&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cornish&lt;/a&gt; both revived to living languages as people both learned them and made an effort to use them communally.  There are also languages that are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;endangered&lt;/a&gt;, which furthers the metaphor for the line between languages in common use and those whose usage has declined to formal contexts alone - languages we fear might go the same path and lose vitality as the population that was using these languages, and the culture that shaped it, diminish and become assimilated to other cultures.  Because there is a difference between the languages whose meanings are found in people's conversations, and the ones whose meanings are found in books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling a language dead isn't meant to deny its history or all the things it has inspired or shaped, or minimalize its current use, the term is used to note that the uses are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; when a language is not being used in day-to-day life, that it is no longer used casually or flexibly, but remains constant and formal, that it remains preserved for certain uses instead of growing and changing on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25475" LastEditorUserId="25475" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T08:39:05.517" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T08:39:05.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32347" CreationDate="2019-09-03T12:40:15.337" Score="18" ViewCount="6017" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know whether language and thought are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think language enriches  one's  thought and  thought  helps  one to use language  better. Without language how could man think? Did they have inner language which helped them to think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the invention of language helped man to think progressively and helped them to learn not only  language but also many other things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether  language and thought are the  same or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how are they different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T15:05:13.117" Title="Are language and thought the same?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17232" CreationDate="2019-09-03T14:14:57.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Also except for some variations in North Africa Arabs&quot; - this isn't just &quot;some variations&quot; - Moroccan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic are significantly different from Lebanese or Saudi (and from each other as well - with Algerian being a sort of middle between the two), far more so than British and American, more like the difference between Portuguese and Spanish or Spanish and Italian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to people being able to understand each other, especially across the Middle Eastern variants of Arabic, that has a lot more to do with TV and Pop Music than with linguistic unity. Everybody understands Egyptian for example, because of exposure to Egyptian movies, but if you examine Egyptian Arabic, it is actually very different from other forms of Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Arabic myself (Maghrebi Arabic), I would argue that Arabic as a single language with the different regional variations being mere dialects or slang has a lot more to do with Arab nationalism than it does with proper linguistic classification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14667" LastEditorUserId="14667" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T02:33:03.520" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T02:33:03.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:22:56.857" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea that language and thought are one and the same, that thoughts cannot exist without language, is sometimes called &lt;em&gt;strong linguistic determinism&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&lt;/em&gt; (*). It's extremely popular among non-linguists, and shows up a lot in fiction: see George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; for one of the ur-examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, it doesn't really line up with the data we can observe. Have you ever had a word &quot;on the tip of your tongue&quot;, where you know exactly what you want to say, but can't think of the words for it? Or had difficulty getting your thoughts down in writing, even though they're clear in your head? If we actually thought in English (or Arabic or Chinese or whatever), this wouldn't be expected to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, depending how you define &quot;thought&quot;, it seems clear that infants can think before they can speak. My three-year-old nephew still hasn't mastered English syntax, but he clearly makes plans and follows through with them all the same—even plans he can't explain particularly well in words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more popular hypothesis nowadays is called &lt;em&gt;linguistic relativism&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis&lt;/em&gt;, and is something like &quot;language and thought influence each other&quot;. Which is much more plausible, but also much less exciting, and much fuzzier in its boundaries (&lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; influence is there?). The specific details are still an active area of research: the classic experiments that always comes up are Kay and Berlin's color studies, which might be a good place to start from if you want to look into this further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Sapir really doesn't deserve to have his name associated with this; Whorf just attached his mentor's name to the work to make it look more prestigious. So I've mostly heard linguists call this sort of thing &quot;Whorfianism&quot; in an informal context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T15:22:56.857" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32339" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:39:06.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I understand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classical Arabic is what was used in the Koran, and the writings of that era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Standard Arabic is what is used today in formal writing, on television and so on which should appeal to or at least be understood by the entire Arabophone market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not &lt;em&gt;mutual&lt;/em&gt; intelligibility because a person time-travelling from the 8th century would have severe difficulty understanding the Modern Standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a difficulty in defining where along a continuum the break happened, but that doesn't mean that one end of the spectrum is the same as the other, just like Italian isn't Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The labels for Arabic seem comparable to Early, Middle and Modern versions of other major languages, although of course you are right that some languages evolve more than others over an equivalent time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not the best comparison, its evolution was too different from Arabic's.  English is the Maltese of Germanic languages - a spoken dialect that got stranded on an island under intense Romance influence, before the orthography was settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slavic, Latin, Persian, Armenian, Greek or Hebrew which were written or used as liturgical languages over the same centuries are more comparable to Arabic.  And indeed, for those languages, we distinguish between ancient, early mediaeval and modern standard forms, as distinct from dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using labels for these stages should not be interpreted as a judgement on the status or intelligibility, it's just convenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastEditorUserId="6793" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T08:38:06.070" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T08:38:06.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T17:11:13.543" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;so here's the set-up:  In a sentence like &quot;Bill went to the store,&quot; several accepted constituency tests can produce &quot;Bill went&quot; as a constituent.  These tests include the question test (What happened? Bill went.) and the ellipsis test (Bill went to the store, and to the docks, and to the playground, ... etc.).  We also know that complete sentences are in themselves constituents, and &quot;Bill went&quot; is, technically, a complete sentence.  It happens, in this case, to be contained within a larger sentence, but it is its own sentence nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;Bill went&quot; also fails certain constituency test, notably the clefting test (*It was &lt;em&gt;Bill went&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;to the store&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: in this example, is &quot;Bill went&quot; a constituent or not?  And, almost more importantly, if it is not a constituent, precisely why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25486" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T19:12:03.360" Title="SV Constituent Structure (Syntax)" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;constituents&gt;&lt;constituency&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32349" CreationDate="2019-09-03T18:11:51.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bill went&quot; is not a constituent in &quot;Bill went to the store&quot;. Your tests purporting to show that it is are incorrect.  The example &quot;Bill went to the store, and to the docks, and to the playground&quot; does not result as an ellipsis of &quot;Bill went&quot;, but rather by Conjunction Reduction which forms the coordination of three prepositional phrases: &quot;to the store&quot;, &quot;to the docks&quot; and &quot;to the playground&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T18:11:51.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32349" CreationDate="2019-09-03T19:12:03.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, I have finally found an answer after quite a search!  Many thanks to Washington State University's webpage, &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.wsu.edu/~gordonl/S04/256/Constituents.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://public.wsu.edu/~gordonl/S04/256/Constituents.htm&lt;/a&gt;, for giving me this lovely and very specific answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A sequence of words cannot be a constituent if its parts are part of other constituents which are not subunits of the same constituent.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many, many thanks, Washington State University!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25486" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T19:12:03.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-03T19:43:44.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It certainly does seem like thought and language are the same; that's been the presumption in human society for as long as we know about. But it's not really true, any more than it's true that your emotions reside in your heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly it must be true that one's thoughts -- whatever &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; might mean -- have to be related to one's speech in some way. It's just that specifying what way is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for that is that people are different from one another in unpredictable ways, because everybody -- even identical twins -- has a different life with different experiences, and draws different lessons from it. In particular, everybody &lt;strong&gt;thinks&lt;/strong&gt; differently; and that means there can be no universal definition of &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; that can encompass all humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for language, people also vary widely. There are people who learn their native language and never are able to learn another; but there are also people who soak up languages like sponges and can converse within a few days of arriving in a strange place. Some people display great creativity in their use of language, others don't. Clearly everybody has their own relation to their language, which may or may not be the same as -- or even resemble -- someone else's relation to their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, for some people, the Whorf hypothesis is true -- they &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; think in language and they can't detect any differences, except that thinking is easier, clearer, and less noisy than talking. At the other end of the cline, there are people for whom language is a skill like walking or driving that they use when they need it, but which has little to do with their thought, in use or apparently in structure. And then there are most people, who are in between these poles, or situated on some other branch of this multidimensional spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this question for even one person, one would have to know everything about that person's thought, and everything about that person's language use, and everything about how they were connected. Obviously there is only one person in a position to do that research, and it will only apply to that one person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generalizations are dubious, but you can often tell by someone's attitude toward the Whorf hypothesis how they think their thought works, and how they think it's related to their language use. People sort themselves out on this spectrum by how they react to the possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="482" LastEditorUserId="482" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T20:19:15.097" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T20:19:15.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-03T23:28:09.490" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;These examples show that in some way thought continues even if you temporarily lose language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[neuroanatomist .. was struck with a left hemisphere haemorrage.]&#xA;  Over the course of 3-4 hours, she lost her inner speech, became&#xA;  hemiparetic, and soon realized that her utterances did not make sense,&#xA;  nor did those of others. In her retrospective recall of that time, she&#xA;  experienced the loss of function of a good part of the left&#xA;  hemisphere, language included, and remained fully conscious, though&#xA;  things felt differently from a 'right hemisphere perspective.' Her&#xA;  account not only confirms that &lt;strong&gt;consciousness continues in the&#xA;  absence of language&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;ndash; or at least left hemisphere&#xA;  specializations having to do with comprehension and production, but&#xA;  that &lt;strong&gt;thought and self-reflection continue too&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another extraordinary report is from a patient who underwent an anesthetic&#xA;  injection into the lower division of the left middle anterior artery. The &#xA;  anesthetic ... caused as expected a deep Wernicke aphasia indistinguishable &#xA;  from that due to strokes, except it was temporary (a few minutes) and fully &#xA;  reversible. From the patient's recollections of the experience, it is clear &#xA;  not only that he was conscious and thinking, but that he also had a much &#xA;  better understanding of the situation than appeared from the language tests &#xA;  being administered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=PeacBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;ots=B7tsmjDBZ1&amp;amp;dq=The%20Neurology%20of%20Consciousness%3A%20Cognitive%20Neuroscience%20and%20Neuropathology&amp;amp;lr&amp;amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=The%20Neurology%20of%20Consciousness:%20Cognitive%20Neuroscience%20and%20Neuropathology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 377&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology&lt;/em&gt;, ed. by Steven Laureys, Giulip Tononi&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/McANH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/McANH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Thought without language&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25488" LastEditorUserId="25488" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T05:35:03.670" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T05:35:03.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:35:40.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a web page that might interest you: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ask A Linguist FAQ: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.&quot; -Whorf (1940:213-14) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is a lot more on this web page. Go look)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the focus on &quot;categories and types&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A important part of thought is categorization:  &quot;Muffy is a cat. Cats are animals. Therefore the things I know about animals apply to cats and to Muffy.&quot;  It is natural to assume that if I didn't know a word for &quot;animal&quot;, I wouldn't be able to make this generalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think this is partially true, at least for me and my thoughts.  Having a word for a category makes it easier to think about.  However, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to have informal categories without names.  Typically these will be &quot;people/things who remind me of each other&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the categories just corresponds to single words.  Language also has sentences and complex grammar.  Very few thoughts get that complex.   In my mind, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, I think it would be better to talk about &lt;em&gt;cultures&lt;/em&gt; rather than languages.  I learned most of my categories from my culture.  Both my language and my thoughts reflect these categories, but the origin is the culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22658" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:35:40.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30002" CreationDate="2019-09-04T12:25:02.353" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Breathing and movement have always been characteristics of a living human. In some languages the word for movement (animation) resembles the word for spirit/breath (Latin anima) in another language. Greek Zoi from which Zoo shows a similar relation (life vs the animals). The Biblical story of Adam and Eve is a rewriting to suit monotheïsm but it shows earth (Adam) and heaven (Eve) to have been considered our original ‘ancestors’ in the Israelites’ worldview. This originates from a world view where the body falls to the earth after death and the spirit/breath goes to heaven. The spirit became personified later on as a seperate entity while it is in essence the breath of life. The word life is abstract and comes from an older concrete word for feet as can still be seen in the resemblance between English ‘life’ and German ‘laufen’ (to walk) and the ‘soles of the feet’ is that which gives you movement which is cognate to anima and that is why these words look so similar to words with a meaning of living and breathing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarities that are no coincidence:&#xA;Spirit: breath, bird, bread, birth&#xA;Anime: animal, name, animate&#xA;Life: laufen, love, elevate&#xA;Leg: ciel, soul, keel (Dutch)&#xA;Foot: pt (sky in hieroglyphs, tepe (hill), top, body&#xA;Bein (German leg): nebo (Russian sky), oben (above in German), nebula, to be, B hieroglyph is a leg&#xA;Zoi: Chi (Hebrew life), zoo, qi (life energy in Chinese), Ka (the double (spirit) in Egyptian texts), to go (which refers to motion)&#xA;Adam: atmen (to breath in German) Important to note is that the dead bodies fall back to the earth as they die so the invertion of Adam/Atmen in consonant phonemes is ‘mt’ which is the consonantal foundation of Semitic words having to do with tomb and death. This is why ‘mute and deaf’ are euphemisms for death:&#xA;-mute: mut (death)&#xA;-deaf: death&#xA;Without breath there is no Word. This resulted in the spirit of god being the word in the beginning. Spirit is breath and the creative ability of breath is words, so the word God had to be uttered for the spirit to animate itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The soles of my feet go up into the air that I breathe and animate my body.” &#xA;This sentence can be understood as a description of life, and the individual meanings have differentiated into the different languages. It should be possible to reconstruct which meaning originally belonged to what phonemes by identifying the meanings of the individual phonemes within the words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breath: B-R-Th is descriptive for sky/up-air/sun/-body. A bird has the ability to bring its body into the air. At birth is the first moment where the body inhales air; the breath meaning the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go: this sound is not the original as the original underwent many sound changes. To chew is one of those changes where the motion refers to the jaw. Chew can be decompounded to (and I simplify here) ‘go-jaw’ which describes the ‘motion of the jaw’ literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B as a hieroglyph for leg shows how words like beth (Hebrew house), bath and bed are described as B-T (legs on the earth) thus lying down. That is what you do in your habitat, bath and bed. It describes that you are not standing on the legs or moving them but they are on the ground, resting. &#xA;B=legs&#xA;Th/T=earth&#xA;An example of how phonemes describe the meaning of the words bath, bed and beth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically many of what we now know as nouns used to be short descriptive phrases with phonemes that each had a couple of rudimentary meanings that could be used to express a characteristic of what the noun stands for. And words for life and breath belong to the oldest category and are therefor easier to decompound to their rudimentary descriptions as later words. With a world view that saw the body as the earth and the breath as the sky returning to both when dying, these became our cosmic parents in the most Ancient world views. That is why many languages have such similarities. A shared origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T04:34:09.450" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T04:34:09.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32362" CreationDate="2019-09-04T15:40:44.120" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the NP &quot;the Middle East&quot; contain only the determiner &quot;the&quot; and the proper name (noun) Middle East? Or does it contain the AdjP which is the adjective &quot;Middle&quot;? Or is &quot;the Middle East&quot; a noun (a proper name) on its own? (Since people only say &quot;the Middle East&quot;, not &quot;Middle East&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T16:02:49.320" Title="Syntax tree for &quot;the Middle East&quot;" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32361" CreationDate="2019-09-04T16:02:49.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Middle East&quot; is generally considered a single lexeme. While it started out as an ordinary adjective + noun combination (along with &quot;Near East&quot; and &quot;Far East&quot;), it's &quot;fossilized&quot; now: you can't swap in the *Central East or the *Close East, for example. So syntactically, it's reasonable to treat &quot;Middle East&quot; as a single, unbreakable unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The&quot; is then an ordinary determiner; &quot;the Middle East&quot; is syntactically the same as &quot;the apple&quot; or &quot;the book&quot; (which might be an NP or might be a DP depending on the particular theory you're using). It is indeed a proper noun, but certain proper nouns require definite articles in English: compare &quot;he looked at the sun&quot; against *&quot;he looked at sun&quot;, or &quot;she's swimming in the Pacific&quot; against *&quot;she's swimming in Pacific&quot;. This is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T16:02:49.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-04T17:01:21.310" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only have anecdotal evidence that they are not the same, but I hope it might give an explanation or at least a starting point where to research it deeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know someone who had a car accident and lost the ability to speak due to a head injury. She didn't lose the physical ability, but the part of her brain responsible for language was damaged. She had to learn to speak again just like a baby does, completely from the beginning. She is doing well now, but there are still some words she doesn't remember, but only the words, not the concepts (she is intelligent and can fluently insert a description for anything she doesn't remember the word for). What is very interesting is that her cognitive ability and intelligence didn't suffer in any observable way. In the early stages of her recovery she couldn't even use conjugation or any pronouns, she used a grammar even worse than the Hulk from the comic books. Yes, for a long time she referred to herself in third person, and had to study the grammar of her own mother tongue a lot before she could start speaking fluently again. However, no matter how hard it was for her to express her thoughts, it was evident that her cognitive ability was normal for her age of approximately 30 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows that language is not necessarily the same as thinking ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2354" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T17:01:21.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32367" CreationDate="2019-09-04T17:05:45.477" Score="24" ViewCount="14993" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hindus believe that &quot;Sanskrit is the mother of all Languages&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu, as Latin enriched some languages like English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Hinduism is  believed by some people to be the oldest recorded religion in the world and  Sanskrit  was the language of the people those days, do linguists  agree that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, or do they consider it a myth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors who might have spoken a language though it might not have been Sanskrit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="13357" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T09:34:04.160" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T00:23:00.293" Title="Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;sanskrit&gt;&lt;origin-of-language&gt;&lt;indo-aryan&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="18" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-04T18:51:53.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that they are not the same, from personal experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than once, when writing a mathematical proof, I developed the core part of the proof visually in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one case I remember, I did translate the mathematical language (which wasn't a verbal language, but a symbolic one that could be read) into visuals, worked out what the visuals would &quot;look like&quot; if the proof was invalid, then took the visuals and generated a mathematical description of what I was visualizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of manipulating that visualization was &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt;.  At one point it was converted &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; a (non-verbal) language, it was manipulated as visualization, then it was then converted &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; to that non-verbal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to explain the visualization steps -- the way I worked out how to do the proof -- to someone in order to explain how I generated the proof.  I couldn't explain the visualization steps sufficiently in English, nor in Mathematics, despite the fact both her and I where fluent in both languages.  When describing it, I used various and sundry terms to describe the things I was thinking about, but nothing fit; I suspect that is why communication failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proof &lt;em&gt;generated&lt;/em&gt; was clear, the problem statement was clear (both written in Mathematics), but the process used to generate the proof was not in any &quot;language&quot; either of us spoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I guess you could stretch the definition of language to include visualizing things and motion of said things.  If you define language to be &quot;that which you use to think&quot;, that would make your proposal true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the curious, the case I'm thinking about had to do with the existence of certain categories of continuous inverses of a particular kind of function.  The visualization was imagining coloring things with a continuously changing tint and examining what it meant to the colors of the inverse.  The proof had to do with how the category of functions limited the properties of the inverse, and hence how the inverse would paint the domain.  Nothing really deep.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odds are you can experience this yourself.  Think about doing something physical with your body, how it will move, etc.  Try not to &quot;narrate&quot; it.  Are you using language to describe how you imagine your body moving?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25500" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T18:51:53.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32365" CreationDate="2019-09-04T19:16:03.330" Score="69" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, it is not.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, there are many languages recorded long before the advent of Sanskrit, and many religions recorded long before the advent of Hinduism. The oldest surviving texts in Ancient Egyptian are from c. 3000 BCE, while the majority of the Rigveda (the oldest known Sanskrit text) was probably composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE. So that's a difference of a millennium and a half—and that's just between the oldest &lt;em&gt;surviving written documents&lt;/em&gt; in Egyptian and the oldest &lt;em&gt;oral traditions that were, much later, written down&lt;/em&gt; in Sanskrit! (While scholars think the Rigveda was composed sometime in the second millennium BCE, it wasn't written down until centuries later, and we don't have any actual artifacts with Sanskrit written on them from this period.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is an &lt;em&gt;Indo-European&lt;/em&gt; (sometimes called &lt;em&gt;Indogermanic&lt;/em&gt;) language, which makes it a relative of English, Spanish, Russian, and many others. But Sanskrit isn't the &lt;em&gt;ancestor&lt;/em&gt; of those languages, any more than the composers of the Vedas were the ancestors of all modern Europeans. Rather, Sanskrit and those other languages all share a common ancestor, called &amp;quot;Proto-Indo-European&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;Proto-Indogermanic&amp;quot;), which was spoken somewhere between 4500 and 2500 BCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no surviving records of Proto-Indo-European (PIE for short), but scholars have been able to reconstruct it by comparing the languages that are attested, and working backward from there. There are some striking similarities, which make it clear that the languages are related. But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sanskrit preserves some features that disappeared in other branches: for example, the injunctive is well-attested in Vedic Sanskrit, but is uncommon in Homer's Greek, and disappears entirely by Plato's time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And other branches preserve some features which have disappeared in Sanskrit: Hittite retains a phoneme that disappeared entirely in Sanskrit (but left plenty of traces showing that it must once have existed).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are dozens and dozens more correspondences like these, where features disappeared in one branch but survived in another, or were innovated in one branch but not in another, and so on. So while it's clear that Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and so on are &lt;em&gt;related&lt;/em&gt;, it's also clear that none is &amp;quot;mother&amp;quot; to the others: they're more like &amp;quot;siblings&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;cousins&amp;quot;, with a common ancestor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors[?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this question is harder to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The techniques I mentioned above, called the &amp;quot;comparative method&amp;quot;, are really useful for reconstructing languages that must once have existed but aren't directly attested. But this method can only go back so far. Past a certain point, the comparative method just can't say anything particularly meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while we know that there was an ancestor to all Indo-European languages, and an ancestor to all Afro-Asiatic languages (&amp;quot;Proto-Afro-Asiatic&amp;quot;), and an ancestor to all Sino-Tibetan languages (&amp;quot;Proto-Sino-Tibetan&amp;quot;)…we can't really say anything definite about what came before those. They might all descend from an ancient sort of &amp;quot;Proto-World&amp;quot;, or they might have all come about independently. There's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T14:14:33.220" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32365" CreationDate="2019-09-04T21:25:33.487" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is not the mother of all languages. &lt;strong&gt;Sanskrit is not even the mother of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of the Northern India&lt;/strong&gt;. Neither it is their father or grandfather. &lt;strong&gt;In fact, no language is a direct descendant of Sanskrit.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages is the same as Latin to the modern Romance languages is &lt;strong&gt;absolutely wrong&lt;/strong&gt;. The Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin, but &lt;strong&gt;the modern Indo-Aryan languages are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; direct descendants of Sanskrit.&lt;/strong&gt; The best European analogy is the role Ancient Greek played for the modern European languages: Ancient Greek affected them all, filled them with lots of words and syntactic structures, but none of those languages is a direct descendant of Ancient Greek, naturally with the exception of modern Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To continue the family analogy, to the modern Indo-Aryan languages Sanskrit is a cousin grandfather who was their teacher, their guru. The Indo-Aryan languages descend from grandfather's siblings, but grandfather himself had no children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking more linguistically, there are actually two languages called &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/em&gt;: the Vedic Sanskrit aka the Vedic language (ca. 1500 to 500 BCE), and Sanskrit proper aka Classical Sanskrit (ca. 200 CE to 1300 CE), the latter being a refined and artistic, highly elaborate version of the former. The Vedic language was once a vernacular, but since the texts in it were holy and highly revered, the language was later standardized and it underwent polishing by Indian sages and philosophers giving rise to &lt;em&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/em&gt; whose name can be translated as &quot;well prepared, pure and perfect, polished&quot;. But apart from Sanskrit proper, the Vedic language gave rise to its sister languages, not so refined, not so polished, but which were really vernacular languages in the times when Sanskrit became the language of educated philosophers, brahmins, and poets. Those sister languages are called Prakrits, &quot;natural, original, unpolished&quot;, the main ones being Maharashtri, Gandhari, Shauraseni, and Magadhi. Pali can also be considered a Prakrit, although later they did polish it very much. The Prakrits are the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, it is from them that the Modern Indo-Aryan languages developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T00:23:00.293" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T00:23:00.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-04T21:41:59.173" Score="5" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the second chapter of &lt;em&gt;Three Areas of Experimental Phonetics&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Ladefoged (1967), in which he summarizes the studies he conducted in the 1950s and 1960s which demonstrated practical limitations of Daniel Jones's Cardinal Vowel system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, I was struck by the fact that Ladefoged couldn't ascertain the frequency values of the first and second formants of high and back vowels because for high vowels &amp;quot;the first formant has a very low frequency&amp;quot; and for back vowels &amp;quot;the first and second formants are too close together&amp;quot; (p. 101). He then goes on to say this difficulty may have bearing on our perception of vowel quality, one effect of which being that the distance between the cardinal [i] and [e] is smaller than those of some other combinations (p. 103).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eq41o.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eq41o.png&quot; alt=&quot;Figures 40 and 41 from pages 101-2&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chapter concludes, albeit tentatively, that (pp. 132-3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The acoustic quality of most vowel sounds can be conveniently specified by stating the frequencies of their first two or three formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) This is not true of vowels which are called in traditional terms close vowels, nor of so-called back vowels. It is not at all easy to analyse these vowels in terms of their formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) The perceptual quality of a vowel usually depends on the relationship between the pitches of the formants of that vowel and the pitches of the formants of other vowels pronounced by the same speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) The listener to speech uses his past experience to form an adaptation level, the immediate past experience of a particular voice being the most important factor in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Neither of points 3 and 4 above has been shown to be true for the vowels mentioned in 2 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as I know, linguists of today have no problem getting the F1 and F2 of high and back vowels. Is point 2 above still true? If not, why was it so difficult? And what made it easy (e.g. some kind of technological advancement)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about point 5? It is still true that the acoustic distances between the cardinal [i] and [e] and between [u] and [o] are greater than those between [e] and [ɛ] and between [o] and [ɔ]. Is this just a random coincidence on the part of Daniel Jones or perhaps the phonology of French or German, or are these values indeed perceptually (more or less) equidistant? AFAIK the latter is true, but if so, was Ladefoged's assumption (in 1967) that the incongruity between acoustics and perception stems from certain formant frequencies being too close to one another correct? (EDIT: I'll ask this point separately &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/33574&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T09:49:32.777" Title="Why were the formants of high and back vowels difficult to obtain? And why not anymore?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;formants&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32371" CreationDate="2019-09-04T22:51:04.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is point 2 above still true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not any more, thankfully!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, why was it so difficult?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back when this paper was written, spectrograms of sound were right on the cutting edge of technology. They generally involved hooking a microphone up to a huge bank of band-pass filters, each of which was receptive to a certain frequency range, and making ink marks proportional to the amount of energy in each range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you might imagine, this wasn't a trivial process. If you wanted ten frequency bands on your spectrogram, you'd need ten different tuned filters; if you wanted a hundred frequency bands (which would be considered ridiculously &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; nowadays!), you'd need a hundred of them. It didn't scale particularly well. And linguists, who generally didn't (and still don't) get enormous equipment budgets, had to make do with whatever they could afford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why back vowels were so hard to measure. The difference between F₁ and F₂ is small, so on a low-resolution spectrogram, they tend to get smeared together into a big, imprecise blob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the lower-frequency parts of the spectrogram tend to be louder and noisier. Even with modern spectrograms, there tends to be a lot of unhelpful noise down there, making formants harder to pick out. Back then, when the resolution was lower, F₁ for close/high vowels would tend to get drowned out by all the noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what made it easy (e.g. some kind of technological advancement)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digital signal processing (DSP)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fourier transform has been known since the early 1800s, but it was always a mathematical process, not something that could be applied to experimental data. But with the advent of DSP, and the &quot;Fast Fourier Transform&quot; (FFT) algorithm in particular, it turned into something that computers can do near-effortlessly. Now the frequency-domain resolution only depends on how much processing power you can devote to it, and even a low-end smartphone can make something orders of magnitude more precise than a tuned filter bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, linear predictive coding (LPC)—this is the modern way to find formants, rather than examining spectrograms by hand. Now the entire process can be automated: put a recording in, get precise formant values out, in a way that would have been utterly inconceivable back in the 60s!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T22:51:04.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32375" CreationDate="2019-09-05T01:20:20.363" Score="2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Indian languages have three consonant clusters.I think that English has got three consonant clusters.Example, strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know which language has got the most consonant clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how many consonant clusters can a human being utter in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T02:16:08.070" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T02:32:49.490" Title="How many consonant clusters can a human being utter?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;consonants&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32374" CreationDate="2019-09-05T02:32:49.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to know how many consonant clusters can a human being utter in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unknown, possibly unlimited!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with a &quot;classical&quot; consonant-vowel distinction, the longest clusters I know of are eight consonants long, such as Georgian &lt;em&gt;gvprtskvni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you are peeling us&quot;. Whether this is truly a consonant cluster or not is debatable, and depends on your definition of &quot;consonant&quot;—it's not as straightforward as you might think! But you'll often find this particular word cited as an example of the longest possible clusters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Salishan languages (spoken in the Pacific Northwest) go even farther, forming words, phrases, even sentences with no &quot;vowels&quot; at all. At this point the idea of a &quot;syllable&quot; starts to break down; the classic example is Nuxalk &lt;em&gt;clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts'&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;code&gt;/xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ/&lt;/code&gt; in IPA), &quot;he had previously had, in his possession, a bunchberry plant&quot;. Since this word has no &quot;vowels&quot; at all in it, you could presumably have a Nuxalk speaker repeat the word over and over to get as long of a consonant cluster as you wanted (again depending on your definition of &quot;consonant&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T02:32:49.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T04:02:17.323" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages use an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicative_voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;applicative voice&lt;/a&gt; construction exclusively for certain meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Applicatives may also be the only way of expressing such roles, as in&#xA;  the Bantu Chaga languages, where instrumental, benefactive,&#xA;  malefactive, and locative are formed solely by applicatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some strategies that such languages employ for sentences like the one below with multiple arguments that can only use an applicative construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I baked a cake for you in the castle.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T04:02:17.323" Title="How do languages express multiple simultaneous applicatives?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32365" CreationDate="2019-09-05T10:23:07.857" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit, Latin and a few other languages had a common ancestor called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;, which was prevalent around 2500 BC on the southern steppes of Russia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu as Latin enriched some languages like English &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think that there must be a common language for our&#xA;  ancestors who might have spoken a language though it might not be Sanskrit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is probably true but than common language existed at least 50,000 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone is at all interested in this field, I highly recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-language.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24981" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T10:23:07.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="20350" CreationDate="2019-09-05T12:06:32.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally came across a paper where the authors state a speech rate in bit/s. The paper is &lt;a href=&quot;https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche&lt;/a&gt; and they give a value of &lt;code&gt;39 ± 5 bit/s&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T12:06:32.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32386" CreationDate="2019-09-05T14:23:50.503" Score="30" ViewCount="8037" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does English really have two tenses - present and past? Some linguists argue that it is a Latinate fallacy to think that English has three tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some English professors and even some native speakers do not accept the proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is true, why are the standard grammar books published by Cambridge and Oxford Publications still mentioning the term future tense? Is it not misleading the learners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we call the two sentences given below present continuous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I am working here today.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I will be working here tomorrow.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have doubts regarding others forms too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Does English really have only two tenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope the answer will be comprehensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="23172" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T08:43:13.220" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T03:07:35.620" Title="Is future tense in English really a myth?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;tense&gt;&lt;tense-aspect-mood&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32382" CreationDate="2019-09-05T14:48:10.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an argument for distinguishing morphological tenses from periphrastic tenses. The English verb “to be” has five morphological tenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present: I am&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;past: I was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present subjunctive: (if) I be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;past subjunctive: (if) I were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;imperative: be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Periphrastic tenses combine a form of the verb with a battery of auxiliaries, giving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;present continuous: I am working&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;past continuous: I was working&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;future: I shall/will work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;future continuous: I shall/will be working&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a lot more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is basically whether “tense” is a morphological category or a syntactic category. Both positions have their supporters, but the former is neater. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastEditorUserId="2556" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T14:55:27.520" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T14:55:27.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32382" CreationDate="2019-09-05T14:54:02.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &quot;tense&quot;. One thing that goes into making a &quot;tense&quot; is time reference, so the English future qualifies on that basis. The other thing, though, is &quot;grammaticalization&quot;, such as affixing a certain morpheme to verbs to form the particular verb form. Compare how past, present and future are constructed in Swahili, Assamese, or Lushootseed where you add certain affixes. If your understanding of &quot;tense&quot; is that it's about verb form, then English doesn't have a future tense. But we can still convey future time reference by adding something in the neighborhood of the verb (an auxiliary like &quot;shall&quot;, &quot;will&quot;, &quot;may&quot;, subordination like &quot;going to&quot; or &quot;intend to&quot;, or &quot;about to&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T16:35:57.637" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T16:35:57.637" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32345" CreationDate="2019-09-05T15:05:13.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you want to articulate the difference (or the quasi-identity, depending on your viewpoint) between language and thought without language ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are certainly valid arguments to claim that thought is not, statically speaking, a language, thought -- the act of thinking -- is, dynamically speaking, a language. Think of it: if you want to think something, you're speaking a language. Now you can claim that this language is personal or is impaired, flawed, unspoken, whatever, language of your body, or even that no one else on earth understands it. Still it is a language. Even if the hypothesis of strong solipsism is true, precisely because then, it does not matter. Just like we can not refute the hypothesis of solipsism, but learn to live with others whom we seem both to understand and not to understand, we have the ability to think by learning the language of others. Thinking implies to deploy words, not just to imagine or visualize. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: if you make thought, or language, into a category, then they are distinct (because no one will &quot;contain&quot; the other). But each time you truly think, you create a language of yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25514" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T15:05:13.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32382" CreationDate="2019-09-05T16:38:19.490" Score="40" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does English really have only two tenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends how you define &quot;tense&quot;, but to most linguists, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All languages can mark the time when an event occurs, to any degree of specificity you want. You can say &quot;I played a game&quot;, or &quot;I played a game yesterday&quot;, or &quot;I played a game at 11:35am on September 4th&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists generally only call it &quot;tense&quot; (sometimes &quot;morphological tense&quot;, though that's not quite the same thing) when this marking is &lt;strong&gt;mandatory&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, if I played a game at 11:35am on September 4th, then &quot;I played a game yesterday&quot; is perfectly correct (as of the time of writing), and &quot;I played a game&quot; is also fine. But that &lt;em&gt;-ed&lt;/em&gt; is mandatory for past-tense verbs in English: that part can't be left off. As soon as I switch to &quot;I &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt; a game&quot;, the meaning has changed significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in English, the only mandatory morphological distinction is between past and non-past. It's &lt;em&gt;conventional&lt;/em&gt; to use &quot;will&quot; to mark events happening in the future, but you can also have future meanings without it: how about &quot;I'm going to play a game&quot;? Or &quot;after I play this game [I'm going to go get pizza]&quot;? In both cases, the game-playing will happen in the future, but no &quot;will&quot; is required. The only thing that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required is using a non-past form, since the event is non-past: we can't say *&quot;after I &lt;strong&gt;played&lt;/strong&gt; this game [I'm going to go get pizza]&quot;. (The star before it is linguistics shorthand for &quot;this isn't valid&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why some languages, like Mandarin, are said to be tenseless. Mandarin is certainly capable of expressing whether an event happens in the past, present, or future. But this marking is not &lt;em&gt;mandatory&lt;/em&gt;: it's entirely optional, like whether to include &quot;…yesterday&quot; or &quot;…tomorrow&quot; in English. So linguists say Mandarin has no (morphological) tenses at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T16:38:19.490" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T17:55:02.747" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the implementing of the Praat script  where formants was  measured automatically,  I found an small differences  between   manual and automatically measured formants. Who knows, why this differences are existing? See more information below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Praat Script: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;start = 0.445&#xA;end = 0.49949542580791223&#xA;vowel_duration = end - start&#xA;vowel_mid_time = end - (vowel_duration/2)&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;### formants for  mid time&#xA;Move cursor to: vowel_mid_time&#xA;f1_vowel_mid_time$ = Get first formant&#xA;f2_vowel_mid_time$ = Get second formant&#xA;f3_vowel_mid_time$ = Get third formant&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;### formants for  end time&#xA;Move cursor to: end&#xA;f1_vowel_end_time$ = Get first formant&#xA;f2_vowel_end_time$ = Get second formant&#xA;f3_vowel_end_time$ = Get third formant&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Time point: &lt;/b&gt; &lt;br&gt; &#xA;start time of the vowel: 0.445&lt;br&gt;&#xA;mid_time of the vowel: 0.4722477129039561&lt;br&gt;&#xA;end_time of the vowel: 0.49949542580791223&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; &#xA;&lt;b&gt;Automatic measurament:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f1_mid = 611.2670572939114 Hz (nearest F1 to CURSOR)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;f1_end = 347.9625660876839 Hz (nearest F1 to CURSOR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f2_mid = 1456.6771398810374 Hz (nearest F2 to CURSOR)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;f2_end = 1386.7518424074453 Hz (nearest F2 to CURSOR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f3_mid = 2466.7302196075952 Hz (nearest F3 to CURSOR)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;f3_end  = 2512.137349760532 Hz (nearest F3 to CURSOR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Manual Measurament: &lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f1_mid = 610.4667330034513 Hz (nearest F1 to CURSOR) &lt;br&gt; &#xA;f1_end = 298.4994941061535 Hz (nearest F1 to CURSOR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f2_mid = 1456.512849969646 Hz (nearest F2 to CURSOR)&lt;br&gt; &#xA;f2_end = 1394.1468860327666 Hz (nearest F2 to CURSOR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f3_mid = 2467.4351107904986 Hz (nearest F3 to CURSOR)&lt;br&gt; &#xA;f3_end = 2536.6386804839294 Hz (nearest F3 to CURSOR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9eBI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9eBI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Praat-Editor Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25521" LastEditorUserId="25521" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T18:12:59.770" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T18:12:59.770" Title="Small differences between manual and automatic formants measurements" Tags="&lt;praat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T20:57:55.670" Score="1" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the NP &quot;the book that lies on the table&quot;, there is a CP (&quot;that lies on the table&quot;). Carnie has the following rule for CP:s: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CP-&gt; (C) TP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the following rule for TP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TP -&gt; {NP/CP} (T) VP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in my example the CP &quot;that lies on the table&quot; should consist of the C &quot;that&quot; and the TP &quot;lies on the table&quot;. But how come that &quot;lies on the table&quot; is a TP? It doesn't have any NP or CP in it. Or does it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T16:01:45.220" Title="Confusion about the CP and TP rule in Carnie" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T21:44:44.390" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to draw the syntax tree for the TP &quot;Kim wants John to stop&quot; (in the setting of Carnie's first three chapters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it contains the NP &quot;Kim&quot; and the VP &quot;wants John to stop&quot;. The VP consists of the V &quot;wants&quot;, NP &quot;John&quot;, and [something else] &quot;to stop&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that [something else]? This piece &quot;to stop&quot; cannot be a PP because the only rule for PP is PP -&gt; P (NP) and &quot;stop&quot; is not a NP, it's a VP (or am I wrong)? And the fact that &quot;to stop&quot; is a VP contained inside another VP (&quot;wants John to stop&quot;) ruins the whole theory because there cannot be a VP inside a VP. Am I wrong in saying that &quot;wants John to stop&quot; is a VP then? If so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T21:44:44.390" Title="&quot;Kim wants John to stop&quot; -- does a VP in this example contain another VP?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T22:33:55.223" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically curious about passive voice and how it's often said to be a weak writing style. Since linguists ostensibly might view scorning passive voice as maybe a meaningless rule, would it be more acceptable to use passive voice in academic writing in linguistics than in other fields?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25525" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T23:55:12.893" Title="Do linguistics academics adhere to arbitrary rules of English prescriptive grammar in their writing?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32394" CreationDate="2019-09-05T23:55:12.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like what is being argued here is whether a different register should be applied by texts that are written by linguists, compared to those written by the general populace, by virtue of the fact that a particular construction is accepted by linguists more readily than it is by the average individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not outraged by the notion: it is nothing out of the ordinary for different styles to be applied depending on what type of audience or readers a work is meant to be enjoyed by; however, I won't be quoted as saying that a discretely different register is being used, like it's considered its own named style, as opposed to simply being regarded as one of many variations that can be employed. It can be seen as a matter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clustering&lt;/a&gt;, if you will: is this small detail worthy of being leveraged to having a new cluster in the set of registers being created, or should it simply be taken to belong somewhere in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main sequence&lt;/a&gt;&quot; of unmarked registers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T23:55:12.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32382" CreationDate="2019-09-06T09:47:34.827" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The argument that the English &quot;will + infinitive&quot; construction should not be considered a future tense is fairly complex. It is not an obvious matter, and I think the rejection of this classification is usually based on several criteria, not just one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe a tense is usually defined as something like a grammaticalized construction used for time reference. I know that there is a lot of linguistic literature about the exact meaning of &quot;tense&quot; and how it works, but I haven't read any of it, so I can't give an explanation of whether the semantics of the English &quot;will&quot; construction qualify as future tense or not from a semantic point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to what has been said in other posts and comments, I don't think there is any general consensus that tense can only be expressed by synthetic, and not by analytic constructions. French, German and Latin all have analytic constructions for some tense/aspect/voice combinations, but these constructions are still generally understood to be marked for tense (e.g. French &quot;il est allé&quot; is typically classified as a past tense construction despite the fact that the finite verb, the auxiliary &quot;est&quot;, does not bear past-tense inflection).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not sure whether it is supportable to say that some other languages have analytically expressed tenses, but English specifically does not. If I remember correctly, the CGEL analysis of the English tense system categorizes the perfect as a secondary axis of tense (rather than as a primarily aspectual construction), even though the perfect is formed analytically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Optionality and frequency (I think as proxies for grammaticalization) are criteria that can be applied even to languages with a synthetic &quot;future&quot; construction&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Draconis's answer, in bringing up the topic of &quot;optional&quot; vs &quot;mandatory&quot; constructions, gets at a more important point. Tense is supposed to be &quot;grammaticalized&quot;, and in general, more grammaticalized categories in a language are expected to be more obligatory and to have fewer competing alternatives for their expression than less grammaticalized categories. I'm not sure I put this very clearly, so here is an example of what I mean: English &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; is considered to be a highly grammaticalized word, of a type that has been given a special name (&quot;definite article&quot;) and that is often viewed as distinct from the less frequent demonstratives &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;that.&lt;/em&gt; In some languages, demonstratives can be used in certain contexts to express a similar idea to that of the English definite article. But if it is not obligatory to mark definite noun phrases with a demonstrative, the language is less likely to be categorized as &quot;having definite articles&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even languages with synthetic constructions that refer to the future are not invariably classified as having future tenses. In the comments section of the &lt;em&gt;World Atlas of Language Structures&lt;/em&gt; chapter 67, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.wals.info/the-future-tense/comment-page-1/#comment-137123&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Future Tense&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Östen Dahl and Viveka Velupillai, Dahl mentions an argument for not classifying Portuguese's inflectional future construction as a future tense because the verb form is &quot;not [...] used generally enough to be treated as a grammaticalized future tense (it is in competition both with the present and with the periphrastic ‘go’ construction).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dahl and Velupillai also restrict their chapter to synthetic/inflectional constructions, but I feel like this criterion may have been chosen in part for convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a paper by Martin Haspelmath about the issue of classifying certain analytic constructions as &quot;periphrastic&quot; (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/22872072/Periphrasis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Periphrasis&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Article 68 of &lt;em&gt;Morphology: A Handbook of Inflection and Word-Formation,&lt;/em&gt; HSK, de Gruyter) which may have some relevance. Haspelmath brings up the connection of the concept of &quot;periphrasis&quot; and grammaticalization, and also draws a distinction between &quot;suppletive periphrasis&quot; of the kind found in the Latin tense paradigm (where some kinds of futures are expressed analytically, but others are expressed synthetically) and &quot;categorical periphrasis&quot; like the English &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt;-perfect, which is always expressed analytically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;To understand the contrast between what English has and what a &quot;real&quot; future tense would be, it might be best to look at some of the following languages&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some comments have noted, many other European languages can be viewed as having the same kind of problematic aspects to their &quot;future tenses&quot;: not only Germanic languages, but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/2428/is-there-a-future-tense-in-russian&quot;&gt;Slavic languages&lt;/a&gt; and even, as I mentioned above, some Romance languages, despite the development of a synthetic future construction in Romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of better understanding the range of future constructions in languages, and how tenselike they can be, it may be helpful to study the following languages mentioned in another paper by Dahl:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As noted in Bybee and Dahl (1989), the future grams in an expanded version of the sample used in Dahl's earlier investigation (Dahl 1985) which were systematically used in both temporal and conditional clauses were all bound. In the expanded sample, the languages in question were the following: Alawa, Bandjalang (Australian), Oneida, Seneca (Algonquian), Hebrew (Semitic), Hindi/Urdu, Kurdish, Latvian (Indo-European), Georgian (Kartvelian). The futures in these languages are also characterized by a number of other indicators of high degree of grammaticalization: close adherence to the generalized cross-linguistic profile of the gramtype, high frequency of use and tendency to obligatory use in central cases (to the extent that&#xA;  all these things can be judged about from the questionnaire data).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the absence of any languages from Western or Southern Europe, two areas that are rather over-represented in the sample, should be noted. The conclusion is that full grammaticalization of futures is not common in&#xA;  large parts of Europe. This is a point that we shall return to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0cad/8b44417b50767289dd1bf24aecbdb35e439e.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The grammar of future time reference in European languages&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Östen Dahl, p. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-07T03:07:35.620" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T03:07:35.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32382" CreationDate="2019-09-06T11:21:44.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is only now when the future tense deteriorated to the mere one auxiliary &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; that it lost its look as a true tense, but quite recently, like 50 years ago, it used to have the 1st.p. vs. non-1st.p. distinction, &lt;em&gt;shall&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; suppletive auxiliaries, and this feature distinguished it from both &lt;em&gt;shall&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; as modal verbs, each of them has just one single form for all the persons and numbers. We can speak about the on-going restructuring of the future tense, but definitely not about its absence as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastEditorUserId="2689" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T13:23:29.047" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T13:23:29.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-06T12:44:15.790" Score="0" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is convenient/ce pronounced with a long e? (Sounds like veen to me)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect the &lt;strong&gt;ven&lt;/strong&gt; in con&lt;strong&gt;ven&lt;/strong&gt;ient to be pronounced as it is in oven , seven, venn diagram, vendor, venison, convent, ventricle, adventure...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-containing-ven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of words containing &quot;ven&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and the only pattern I recognized where &quot;ven&quot; was not pronounced as &quot;ven&quot;, is when the &quot;ven&quot; spans between the base word (usually adjectives) and it's suffix (as in attenti&lt;strong&gt;ven&lt;/strong&gt;ess)... but maybe that actually has to do with syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is convenience pronounced differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there is some rule I learned as a kid that I've since forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23368" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T05:32:49.593" Title="Why is &quot;convenient&quot; pronounced with a long e?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32402" CreationDate="2019-09-06T13:00:25.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of the first E in &lt;em&gt;convenient&lt;/em&gt; follows a spelling/sound pattern that arose from a sound change that apparently occurred in Middle English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for this word is from &amp;quot;c1374&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. Chaucer tr. Boethius &lt;em&gt;De Consol. Philos.&lt;/em&gt; iii. xi. 97   Nature yeueth to euery thing þat þat is conuenient to hym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its etymology is given as a borrowing from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The sound change&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the Middle English period, it seems that when an &amp;quot;a&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;o&amp;quot; sound was followed by a single consonant, and then an unstressed &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; sound, and then another vowel (this is a type of sequence that did not occur in native English words, but that did occur in many borrowed words), it was regular for the &amp;quot;a/e/o&amp;quot; to be lengthened. Lengthening also applied to &amp;quot;a/e/o&amp;quot; when they were followed by a single consonant and then a schwa. The word-final schwas of Middle English ended up being lost, while an &amp;quot;e/i&amp;quot; before another vowel ended up mostly loosing its syllabicity and turning into a palatal glide (/j/). So both of these sound changes can be analyzed as involving a type of &amp;quot;compensatory lengthening&amp;quot;: when one syllable is lost, another is lengthened. For some reason, the high front unrounded vowel &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; was in general not subject to compensatory lengthening in either of these contexts. (In words borrowed from French or Latin, the vowel spelled &amp;quot;u&amp;quot;, which had already been fronted in French to something like [y], ended up developing in English to the &amp;quot;long u&amp;quot; sound [ju] whenever it came before a single consonant followed by a vowel, regardless of what followed that vowel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the first place I saw the compensatory lengthening analysis of this sound change was in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/740a/f56a74c2c8b1dfe27dc044ac8f4e742609f5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Architecture of the English Lexicon&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by&#xA;Jonathan B. Alcántara, May 1998, section 5.2.2 &amp;quot;Compensatory lengthening within the stem&amp;quot; (p. 5-176). The sound change is mentioned in Otto Jespersen's &lt;em&gt;Modern English Grammar&lt;/em&gt; (1954).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the other &amp;quot;ven&amp;quot; words that you list have this kind of &amp;quot;veni + &lt;em&gt;a vowel&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; structure. &amp;quot;Venial&amp;quot; and  &amp;quot;Slovenia&amp;quot; are pronounced with a long E. In fact, the preceding &lt;em&gt;v&lt;/em&gt; is irrelevant, so you could just as well compare &lt;em&gt;convenient&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;genius, selenium, senior, lenient, menial&lt;/em&gt; or to words with another consonant after the E like &lt;em&gt;medium, premium, tedious, expedient.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a post with more details about this sound change (and the corresponding modern English spelling pattern) here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/346984/77227&quot;&gt;Why is “salient” pronounced with a “long a” sound?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T17:55:19.707" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32390" CreationDate="2019-09-06T13:27:36.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be that at the point in the book where you encountered this rule the theory is not yet far enough developed to cover this phenomenon -- if you have not yet heard of stuff like movement and gaps and traces, it might be best to just be patient and wait until it is introduced later. If by the Carnie book you mean the one addressed in my comment, from what I can tell it is not dealt with in the book at all; in the third edition of the book, it will be covered in ch. 12.2 &quot;Relative clauses&quot; -- though interestingly, that chapter only cites examples of relative clauses where it's the object that is turned into a relative pronoun and not, like in your example, the subject, but the general principle works the same for both NP positions. So let me adapt the idea to the theory as presented in the 2006 version of the book: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;that&quot; in the relative clause &quot;that lies in the table&quot; is not is not the same &quot;that&quot; you have in e.g. &quot;I believe &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; the book lies on the table&quot;. In the context of &quot;the book that lies on the table&quot;, &quot;that&quot; is not a complementizer which serves to introduce a subclause, but a relative pronoun that stands for an NP. This is maybe more convincing once you realize that &quot;that&quot; can be replaced by a wh-pronoun &quot;which&quot; or &quot;who&quot;: &quot;the book &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; lies on the table&quot; is semantically and syntactically the same, and it's clear(er) that the wh-pronoun &quot;which&quot; refers to and acts like an NP.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, that NP is &quot;the book&quot;: &quot;that&quot; takes the place of the subject &quot;the book&quot; that complements the VP &quot;lies on the table&quot;. Hence, &lt;strong&gt;it is assumed that &quot;that&quot; starts out as an NP in SpecT position, and then is moved to into SpecC, leaving a gap with a trace (t) at its original position&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[NP the book [CP [NP that_i] [TP [NP t_i] [VP lies on the table]]]&#xA;                        ^------------´&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this analysis, &quot;that&quot; serves both as a subject NP to make &quot;lies on the table&quot; a TP and as a specifier to the CP, &lt;strong&gt;while the C head is empty&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works the same if the relative clause is about the object, that is, instead of the subject, &quot;that&quot; takes the role and starting position of the object of the embedded sentence, where the subject is some different NP that remains present in its original position, and instead the object is moved out of the complement of the verb to, again, the specifier of C:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[NP the book [CP [NP that_i] [TP [NP you] [VP [V read] [NP t_i]]]&#xA;                        ^-----------------------------------´&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the relative pronoun &quot;that&quot; is an NP which starts out in the position of the object so we get an intact TP, and is then, in order to form a relative clause, moved out to the SpecC position, while the C head is again empty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relative clauses where the relative pronoun is about the object also make it more obvious why the movement is at all necessary: In the first sentence, we would get just the same word order if we assumed that &quot;that&quot; just remained in subject position, so we might wonder why we want to make the complicated assumption of moving it away to somewhere different that leaves us with the same word order as before. But in object relative clauses, we do have to move the &quot;that&quot; away from its sentence-final position in order to get it in front of the subject &quot;you&quot;, and it makes sense to treat the two very similar cases of object vs. subject relative clauses uniformly and say for the sake of generalizability that relative pronouns are always moved into SpeC, no matter if they refer to the object or the subject of the sentence -- which gets us exactly the structure outlined in the first gray box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastEditorUserId="13238" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T14:49:02.770" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T14:49:02.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32410" CreationDate="2019-09-06T15:14:02.523" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistics is the systematic study of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people say &quot;What chemistry is to medicine, linguistics is to language.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a fact that linguistics helps one to study languages systematically. Some people learn many languages without knowing about linguistics or studying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: whether the study of linguistics helps only to describe the languages or makes one a fluent speaker and a good writer of all the languages one has studied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T18:05:21.007" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T18:05:21.007" Title="Does the study of linguistics help one to be a good speaker and good writer of languages?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32409" CreationDate="2019-09-06T15:50:51.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that studying linguistics has a particularly positive effect on writing and speech, either in L1 or L2. Let us just take the question of effect on L1 writing: and first, you have to be clear about what you mean by &quot;being a good writer&quot;. If your goal is to write like James Joyce, J.K. Rowling or Larry Niven, studying linguistics will not help you one iota. Suppose then that you want to write scientific prose, in the field of chemistry or economics. Studying linguistics will not help you, whereas studying chemistry and economics will. But if you plan to write in the area of linguistics, studying linguistics will help. &#xA;Merely &lt;em&gt;studying&lt;/em&gt; linguistics will not help you much in the domain of writing, but in case your plan of study involves writing, then practice at writing (in linguistics) can aid your writing abilities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some limited potential for knowledge of linguistics (primarily syntax) to contribute to writing skills. An example is the problem of verb agreement, which people might mess up when the subject NP contains another NP and the two NPs differ in number. The normative rule is that the verb agrees with the entire NP, whose number is (usually) transparent on the highest N, leaving aside conjunctions. After a year of syntax, you can probably mechanically figure out whether the NP is singular or plural.  Other areas of linguistic study (Indo-European comparative) could help you figure out the normative agreement pattern for &lt;em&gt;bacterium&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;bacteria&lt;/em&gt;, useful in case you ever have to use &lt;em&gt;bacterium&lt;/em&gt; as the subject of a sentence (I don't think I ever have).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should point out that there is a distinct disadvantage to learning linguistics w.r.t. writing skills: you need to limit your reading to only good writers, which will shorten your career in linguistics. Writing style in certain venues (CLS, BLS, IULC papers) in the 60's and 70's tended to be, ahem, a bit casual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T15:50:51.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-06T18:53:38.277" Score="8" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fashionable theory of PIE laryngeals offers plausible explanations for many phenomena, but plausibility is not proof.  Are any implications of the postulated laryngeals amenable to statistical test?  This would be the standard of proof in hard disciplines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have in mind is this:  One could try to compare cognates from two branches of the IE family to find a statistically significant correlation between some contrasting features allegedly determined by an ancient laryngeal.  I would call this the method of &lt;em&gt;parallel watersheds&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to apply this strategy to distinctive reflexes of “heavy” CṚ:/CḶ:(C) roots.  These are expected to give rise to ŪR and ĪR in Sanskrit, as in &lt;em&gt;pūrņa, stīrņa, tīrņa, gīrņa, jīrņa, ūrņā, dīrgha, bhūrja&lt;/em&gt;; ΡΗ/ΡΩ and vowel-liquid-vowel (VLV) sequences in Greek, as in &lt;em&gt;πληθος, βρωτος, γηραω, ληνος, στρωτος/ στορε-, δολιχος&lt;/em&gt;; and RĀ and (arguably) RACC sequences in Latin, as in &lt;em&gt;plēnus, strātus, trātus, vorātus, lāna, longus, fraxinus&lt;/em&gt;.  “Light” CṚ/CḶ(C) roots, by contrast, are expected to give rise to LV/VL sequences with a short vowel to one side only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key step in the correlation analysis is to pigeonhole paired cognates into heavy/heavy, heavy/light, light/heavy, and light/light boxes.  Loosely speaking, matches should preponderate over mismatches, but the technical definition of correlation is a bit more complicated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying a χ² test to limited data, I found correlations “significant at the 5% level”.  This bit of jargon means that the odds against finding a spurious correlation due to sampling error, when none would actually be present in abundant data, are better than 20:1.  This would be considered adequate in most disciplines, and allowances might be made for the limited nature of the fossil record, because they don’t make more classical languages while you sleep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The degree of concordance is not as impressive.  There are a fair number of heavy/light mismatches without obvious explanation, e.g., &lt;em&gt;sūrkšati/στεργεται, pṛthus/πλατυς/plānus&lt;/em&gt;.   (I tried not to cherry-pick the data, but I may have applied unconscious bias.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave you two questions:  Has a statistical strategy been tried, and what did it conclude?  Are there any other implications of laryngeal theory that can be so tested?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that some, maybe even most, supposed implications of laryngeals defy testing by this method.  For example: The leading vowels on Greek words such as &lt;em&gt;ακουω, ανηρ, αστηρ, ελευθερος, ελαχυς, εννεϝα, ερεβος, ερυθρος, ομιχω, οριγω, οφρυς&lt;/em&gt; are commonly attributed to laryngeal prefixes, but no other IE branch (Hittite aside) displays them.  The number of possible exceptions is too small to support a statistical test, and &lt;em&gt;ονομα, ομφαλος, ονυξ&lt;/em&gt; are easily explained in terms of syllabic nasals.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  The point of such tests is not to prove the existence of PIE laryngeals, but rather to assess the strength of evidence (in a mathematically rigorous fashion) for their supposed manifestations in daughter languages by ruling out the possibility of random transformations.  The evidence for some phenomena is stronger than for others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25550" LastEditorUserId="25550" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T13:07:38.893" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:47:26.140" Title="Statistical tests of PIE laryngeal theory" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31120" CreationDate="2019-09-06T23:22:47.417" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider comparing the ‘bear’ meaning of the Chinese character with the sound of the sign that forms the word ‘oxen’ 牛.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that Arctic Ursa’s epithet Septentrio may have the clue you are looking for. Then the “/*nˤə/, /*nˤə(ŋ)/, /*nˤə(ʔ)/, /*nɯːŋ/, /*nɯːs/, or /*nɯː/” sounds of the Chinese bear character can be understood as a Chinese sign used for the Western constellation carrying the phonetic association of the Chinese word for oxen instead of the Chinese meaning ‘ability’ together referring to the Western Bear/Plough constellation in symbol meaning bear 能 and in sound meaning oxen 牛. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/*ɢʷlɯm/ may be related to голема, Macedonian ‘great’ and ‘large’ which in relation to the northern sky constellations is significant for Ursa Major.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the text in which the bear context is found provides more context for the astrological interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;+1 for this good question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T23:55:37.170" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T23:55:37.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-07T13:23:45.290" Score="7" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Hindi 3rd person singular proximal and distal pronouns यह and वह are commonly pronounced [jeː] and [ʋoː], in contrast to the [hyper-correct?] pronunciations [jəɦ(ə)] and [ʋəɦ(ə)] one might expect from their spellings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are these words spelled this way given their pronunciation?&lt;/strong&gt; Apart from word-internal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_languages#Hindi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;schwa syncope&lt;/a&gt;, Modern Standard Hindi pronunciation is generally predictable from spelling, so this seems an odd departure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I tried to research this but found little credible information. Some possible reasons that jump to mind:&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; They used to be pronounced as spelled, but have since evolved (possibly influenced by the plural forms). &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; A specific dialect pronounces them this way (that influenced the standard spelling). &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; A phenomenon similar to how [ɛ] occurs as an allophone of /ə/ in /əɦə/ environments (e.g. बहन /bəɦən/ &gt; [bɛɦ(ɛ)n]), or how [ɔ] occurs as an allophone of /ə/ and rounded vowels in /əɦ&lt;sub&gt;V[+round]&lt;/sub&gt;/ or /&lt;sub&gt;V[+round]&lt;/sub&gt;ɦə/ environments&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; (e.g. बहुत /bəhʊt̪/ &gt; [bɔhɔt̪])?&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. /əɦʊ, əɦuː, əɦoː, əɦɔː/&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;   /ʊɦə, uːɦə, oːɦə, ɔːɦə/ &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20700" LastEditorUserId="20700" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T12:13:12.130" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T12:13:12.130" Title="Historical pronunciation of Hindi यह and वह" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;sound-change&gt;&lt;allophones&gt;&lt;hindustani&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32411" CreationDate="2019-09-07T17:45:44.183" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your proposed statistical test would not actually provide evidence (much less proof) for the laryngeal theory. You might use statistical methods to compute the significance of certain correlations, for example is there a significant correlation between patterns in Sanskrit like &lt;em&gt;pūrṇa&lt;/em&gt; and patterns in Latin like &lt;em&gt;plēnus&lt;/em&gt;? At the level of individual letters, the test would not establish significance (single-word comparisons are not significant), but if you code the data for broader categories, you could ask &quot;Does Sanskrit CV:rC correlate significantly with Latin CrV:C&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a statistical test does not support the laryngeal theory, but it is &lt;em&gt;consistent&lt;/em&gt; with the theory. Well before the laryngeal theory was set forth, there was a hypothesis that there were long syllabic sonorants, just as the correlation &lt;em&gt;bh-f-b&lt;/em&gt; vs &lt;em&gt;b-b-p&lt;/em&gt; was firmly established. The statistical test is also consistent with the traditional reconstruction – it does not at all distinguish the theories. The phonetic interpretation of the comparative relations is what is at issue, and there is no statistical test that can resolve those controversies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proving statistical significance is unnecessarily complicated low-hanging fruit. In well-established historical reconstructions, the correlations should in principle be perfect – zero variation, once you've discerned all of the correct categories. Verner's Law was discovered because an earlier coarser-grained theory of the categories was wrong, and new categories simply needed to be added. When people slap together random n-tuples of words into a comparative series that has no consistent phonological correlation, we can tell that without calling on statistical methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some common ad hoc re-categorizations that historical linguists apply to data, in order to deal with known types of imperfect correlations. For example, the word &quot;podiatrist&quot; in English ought to have &lt;em&gt;fVt&lt;/em&gt;, like &quot;foot&quot;: but we know that it's a loan word, so it is categorized separately and doesn't count against Grimm's law as a valid law of Germanic historical phonology. It takes considerable specific knowledge of history, culture and contact languages to be able to make a valid claim about loan-word status, and this is not something that an automated or statistical procedure can do. Onomatopoeic words likewise mess up regular sound correlations, and we deal with them manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, one could use statistical tests to decide that there isn't enough data to declare that a certain correlation is valid, for example if you have a hypothesized category that has exactly one member, that isn't statistically significant. But we already knew that. Where I think it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be useful to apply some informed statistical thinking is deciding how big N has to be, i.e. do I abandon all hope if there are only 4 examples of hypothesized proto-phoneme X – do I really need 8 examples? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a separate intellectual exercise, you could take large-enough comparative series that are not pre-classified in terms of loan or onomatopoetic words, and see if statistical methods could find the loan words. I think this will fail, because e.g. in English we have so many loan words that Grimm's Law is overwhelmed by the &quot;other&quot; correlations (English &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; to Latin &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T17:45:44.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="439" CreationDate="2019-09-07T18:40:30.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the Universal Phonetic Alphabet. I tried to post this some time ago, but couldn't find the link. Here it is;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://omniglot.com/conscripts/upa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://omniglot.com/conscripts/upa.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21513" LastEditorUserId="21513" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T16:15:46.830" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T16:15:46.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-07T19:11:51.267" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching urgent for a software that I can use to analyse corpora. In short, I would like to have a look at collocations, ellipsis, frequencies, concordances etc. I also want to search for themes and then accordingly to be able to assign the data different categories, so that I am able to work further on these. For overview of the data I tried to upload it in AntConc, but it is not working (though that the data is less than 400MB). I read about QDAMiner, didn’t understand however if WordStat is part of it or it can run separately (or what I need in general). Do you have any comments or suggestions about a program I can use? I am grateful for every information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I would like to carry out mostly qualitative analysis, so the program doesn't have to do all analysis automatically, but to offer tools/features which can help me analyze the data.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25569" LastEditorUserId="25569" LastEditDate="2019-09-07T21:13:37.623" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T19:35:06.290" Title="Suggestion for software to analyze data from social media- please advise" Tags="&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;software&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32417" CreationDate="2019-09-07T21:00:25.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking for a software that can do quite a lot. Many of the tasks you are asking for can be done with Python NLTK, for pointers to some tutorial see &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/kwsearch/NLTK/0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeLeMaCo&lt;/a&gt; hosted by the CLARIN-D centra at Saarland University. For themes, a topic model can be of help, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/kwsearch/topic%20model/0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here for tutorials on topic modelling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any software that can annotate ellipsis automatically (in any language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: In response to the comment, there is another relevant software, namely the Corpus Query Processor and its web fontend &lt;a href=&quot;http://cwb.sourceforge.net/cqpweb.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CQPweb&lt;/a&gt;. Again, there are some tutorials linked from &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedora.clarin-d.uni-saarland.de/hub/kwsearch/CQPweb/0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeLeMaCo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-08T19:35:06.290" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T19:35:06.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-08T07:25:19.763" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an Italian native speaker but I speak English everyday for work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I'm with English native speakers I often hear them asking to repeat words, especially if there's a lot of noise around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized this kind of situation happens very rarely when I speak with other iltalians. We usually never misunderstand a word, at worst we ask to repeat the whole sentence because we got distracted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something I think &quot;backs&quot; my hypothesis is the fact the English language makes heavy use of the &quot;spelling&quot; to help the other understand specific words, names, etc... While in other languages such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and probably most of the Latin derived languages, this isn't common at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, are there any evidences that some languages are more suitable to talk in loud environments than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25570" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T07:25:19.763" Title="Are there languages more suitable for loud or crowded situations than others?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-09-08T11:26:51.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32426" CreationDate="2019-09-08T08:32:52.207" Score="7" ViewCount="1014" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often we are hearing that such-and-such spelling, phraseology, etc is incorrect. Person X made a grammar error, pronunciation error, orthography error, styling error, other sorts of language error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I understand this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Superficially, it would seem to me that linguists are there to &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; a language and not to &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt; it. The language was created a long time ago by our forefathers; and is constantly being re-created and modified by those who speak it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linguists may decide and announce that such-and-such spelling is correct while such-and-such spelling is a &lt;em&gt;common error&lt;/em&gt;; but the very phrase '&lt;em&gt;common error&lt;/em&gt;' seems to me to be self-refuting. If it's common then it means people speak and write in this way; and if this is how people speak and write then this is how the language is being spoken so &lt;em&gt;this is the language&lt;/em&gt;. The linguists may resort to arguments from the language's history (eg &quot;such-and-such form has never been used for this purpose&quot;), but the language is an evolving structure rather than a static one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it would seem to me, if people decide to speak or write in any given way (that is if an error is common), the linguists may declare such use of the language incorrect but this will only lead to the typical map vs territory issue. Worst case, the linguists are ignored; best case, the language diverges into its &quot;as the linguists see fit&quot; variation, spoken by very few people, and its &quot;as people actually speak&quot; variation. Typically, however, the linguists will have to back off eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I would exclude non-native speakers from the body of all people speaking any given language and collectively deciding about its features (although it's kind of interesting to watch how non-native English speakers mangle English - do we already observe the birth of a yet another English variation - Broken English - natively spoken by non-native speakers?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And still I must be incorrect because it is commonly accepted to correct native speakers' common errors regarding their use of their language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25571" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T17:38:47.563" Title="Why can linguists decide which use of language is correct and which is not?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;applied-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32430" CreationDate="2019-09-08T11:08:50.927" Score="2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know some professors of phonetics teach phonetics(in a country like India) in a laboratory almost similar to that of the native speakers.But when they come out of the class their pronunciation does not sound like native English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to speak like a native speaker learning the phonology without living with the native speakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-08T14:01:59.597" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T16:40:53.840" Title="Is it possible to speak like a native speaker of English by mastering the phonology?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;second-lang-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-07T03:58:41.363" Score="5" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lojban&lt;/a&gt; was created to be syntactically unambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder though if there are natural languages that have the same property, or at least come much closer to having it than English does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone attempted to quantify the relative ambiguity of languages and to rank them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3677" OwnerDisplayName="MaxB" LastEditorUserId="3677" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T16:46:51.760" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T16:46:51.760" Title="Are some human languages significantly less ambiguous than others?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;&lt;lojban&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32423" CreationDate="2019-09-08T12:05:04.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages per se are not ambiguous or not ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, instances of language - sentences, phrases, words... - are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All natural languages evolved to allow varying degrees of ambiguity/specificity, which speakers then choose for the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consistently forced disambiguation would be a highly undesirable property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity can be syntactic but that is hardly the only type, there are semantic ambiguities because of homophones and co-references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an experiment like lojban has any success in the real world it will also end up like that, if it's not already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T12:05:04.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32421" CreationDate="2019-09-08T17:38:47.563" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Often we are hearing that such-and-such spelling, phraseology, etc is incorrect. Person X made a grammar error, pronunciation error, orthography error, styling error, other sorts of language error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, indeed! Linguists do spend a lot of time figuring out what things are correct and what things are incorrect. But how exactly do we figure that out? There are two fundamental approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Superficially, it would seem to me that linguists are there to &lt;em&gt;study&lt;/em&gt; a language and not to &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt; it. The language was created a long time ago by our forefathers; and is constantly being re-created and modified by those who speak it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is called the &lt;em&gt;descriptivist&lt;/em&gt; view: that linguists study what already exists, but don't (and shouldn't, and usually can't) change it in the process. I'd say probably about 90% of modern linguists fall into this camp. (I, personally, do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Descriptivists say that something is &quot;correct&quot; (more often &lt;em&gt;grammatical&lt;/em&gt;) if and only if a consensus of competent native speakers accepts it as grammatical. In other words, language is defined by the consensus of the speakers of that language, rather than by any central authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opposite is called the &lt;em&gt;prescriptivist&lt;/em&gt; view: that linguists can change the territory to make their maps prettier. There are many, many prescriptivists out there in the world—think of the people who call themselves &quot;grammar nazis&quot;, or the people who claim using &quot;literally&quot; as an intensifier is literally like 1984, or the people making a fuss about singular &quot;they&quot;. But most of them aren't actually &lt;em&gt;linguists&lt;/em&gt; (in the sense of scientifically researching and studying language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…the linguists may declare such use of the language incorrect but this will only lead to the typical map vs territory issue. Worst case, the linguists are ignored; best case, the language diverges into its &quot;as the linguists see fit&quot; variation, spoken by very few people, and its &quot;as people actually speak&quot; variation. Typically, however, the linguists will have to back off eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed; historically, this is what usually happens to prescriptivists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few very notable counterexamples: look into &quot;language planning&quot;, for example, where linguists promote prescriptive rules in order to preserve or revive an endangered language (that would otherwise get amalgamated and absorbed by a different language). Modern Hebrew, for example, wouldn't exist if not for language planners inventing hundreds of new words and dozens of new constructions to bring it back from the grave. But once the language can stand on its own again, as you put it, &quot;the linguists will have to back off eventually&quot;—Modern Hebrew now has a thriving speech community that has more influence than any central authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(although it's kind of interesting to watch how non-native English speakers mangle English - do we already observe the birth of a yet another English variation - Broken English - natively spoken by non-native speakers?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, one of three things happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The learners pick up &quot;standard&quot; English and become part of the surrounding English-speaking community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The learners pick up &quot;standard&quot; English but fuse it with influences from their native language, creating a new dialect or a new speech community (e.g. Indian English, the version of English widely-spoken in India, which has diverged quite heavily from British and American English).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The learners combine broken English with a broken version of their native language, creating a rudimentary &quot;pidgin&quot; in order to communicate with English-speakers. If children then grow up speaking this pidgin, they tend to smooth down the rough edges, fill out any places where the grammar is lacking, and turn it into a fully-fledged language called a &quot;creole&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of these is the most common, but the last is the most linguistically interesting, and tends to be heavily studied whenever it happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T17:38:47.563" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32423" CreationDate="2019-09-08T18:15:17.907" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has anyone attempted to quantify the relative ambiguity of languages and to rank them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your timing is excellent! The most comprehensive study I've seen on this topic was published less than a week ago (at the time of writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is, &lt;em&gt;what is ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;? Pretty much every sentence has some sort of ambiguity in it: if I say &quot;I like cats&quot;, does &quot;like&quot; mean &lt;em&gt;similar to&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;feel affection toward&lt;/em&gt; (a lexical ambiguity)? The syntax here disambiguates, makes it clear that the answer is &lt;em&gt;feel affection toward&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do English-speakers consider this ambiguity acceptable? Why isn't it a problem to have one word that means both &lt;em&gt;similar to&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;feel affection toward&lt;/em&gt;? Because the two words are generally used in such different syntactic contexts that it isn't an issue. There are only so many strings of phonemes to use, and reusing some makes the average word length shorter, so it takes fewer phonemes to convey a meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a cross-linguistic example, Swahili has no separate words for &quot;he&quot;, &quot;she&quot;, &quot;him&quot;, or &quot;her&quot;: &lt;em&gt;yeye&lt;/em&gt; is used regardless of case and gender. Ancient Greek has thirty (it just uses the demonstratives), allowing it to distinguish &quot;the first man I mentioned&quot; from &quot;the second man I mentioned&quot; from &quot;a man newly introduced to the dialogue&quot;, along with five different grammatical cases (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor, addressee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that Swahili is significantly more ambiguous, right? It would need more words than Ancient Greek to convey the same amount of information: one Swahili word could correspond to any of thirty different Ancient Greek words, and only context can make it clear which is intended. Textbook ambiguity right there. That seems like something that can be objectively measured and ranked, using information theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coupé, Oh, Dediu, and Pellegrino did exactly that&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Less formal summary of their work here.&lt;/a&gt;) They calculated how many bits of information are contained in each word (and in each syllable) in seventeen different languages. Vietnamese, for example, conveys about eight bits per syllable, significantly more than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when multiplied by the rate of speech—how many words/syllables are spoken per second—&lt;em&gt;all the results were almost identical&lt;/em&gt;. Every single language they studied conveyed about 39.15 bits per second. Languages with a lower information density per word are spoken faster to compensate, getting in more words per second, while languages with a higher information density per word are spoken slower (since losing any individual word in transmission would be a bigger problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that the answer to your question…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are some human languages significantly less ambiguous than others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. Some languages may have more lexical ambiguities or more syntactic ambiguities, conveying less information per word. But they compensate by just &lt;em&gt;using more words&lt;/em&gt;, putting in more context until the ambiguity is gone, in the same amount of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T18:15:17.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12402" CreationDate="2019-09-08T18:45:32.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usually the most close relative to PIE among other Eurasiatic languages is considered Chukchi-Kamchadal family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably know this already, but the idea of a &quot;Eurasiatic&quot; language family isn't widely accepted. Nor is the idea of Indo-European being related to Austronesian, or Afro-Asiatic, or really anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, the comparative method's predictions get weaker and weaker the farther back in time you go. Were there languages spoken before Proto-Indo-European, with relatives and families and heritages of their own? Undoubtedly. But Proto-Indo-European is right up against the limits of the comparative method. Anything before that is lost to the mists of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question of a &quot;closest relative&quot; to PIE—or any relatives at all, for that matter—simply &lt;em&gt;can't be answered&lt;/em&gt; with any confidence using current methods. Until we discover some startling new evidence, or come up with a brilliant new method that can extrapolate farther back with confidence, I'm afraid that's the best answer modern linguistics can give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T18:45:32.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32422" CreationDate="2019-09-08T19:35:56.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Learning the rules of phonology in a language might make the lowest levels of acquisition easier in some languages that have complicated phonologies (such as first-year Arabic or Klamath), perhaps 10% easier. It could help to reduce the chaotic appearance of the inflectional system, all of that complicated stuff about vowel changes and glides coming and going (in Arabic). You will still not sound like a native speaker even a little bit. For English, no amount of studying the putative phonology behind word pairs like &quot;cone, conic&quot;, &quot;obscene, obscenity&quot; will make you sound like a native speaker. I have (or had) a reasonably good understanding of Klamath phonology, and not the slightest idea what the language actually sounded like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also intellectually master knowledge of the acoustic and articulatory phonetics of a language, that is, read all of the phonetic literature on the language – read myriad articles that measure amplitude, pitch, formants, duration in some language. That will &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; not tell you what the language actually sounds like. The only thing that will help you sound more like a native speaker of the language is being exposed to native speakers of the language: you have to speak the language, with native speakers. You don't have to live with / among them, but you have to intensively interact with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;India presents the additional complication that the national standard for pronunciation isn't the same as that of the US, UK, Australia, that is, Indian English is a separate language. I don't know of any research into the phonetic and phonological properties of Indian English monolinguals or at least first-language speakers. I would take differences in in-class vs. out-of-class performance to be evidence that the person has not natively mastered English phonetics – unless the instructor is actually trying to teach American English pronunciation, and is a fluent Indian English speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T19:35:56.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T00:06:27.033" Score="1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an NP like &quot;stronger but smaller storm&quot;, when drawing a tree, how do I know if I should conjoin two AdjP or two Adj inside one AdjP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working in the framework of Carnie's book (3rd edition). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has in particular these rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XP -&gt; XP conj XP&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X -&gt; X conj X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(where X is a category). So it's not clear which one to use in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are all rules he gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wNOZK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wNOZK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also gives this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZYTh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZYTh.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but hastens to point out the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xBhfr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xBhfr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand what he means by &quot;the category of red and blue is ambiguous between a head word and a phrase&quot; and whether similar reasoning applies to &quot;stronger but smaller&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22577" LastEditorUserId="22577" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T01:12:40.623" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T04:51:57.380" Title="Should I conjoin two AdjP or two Adj inside one AdjP?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;syntax-trees&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32431" CreationDate="2019-09-09T00:50:41.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I don't know Carnie's book (so this could be a comment, but it's too long).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my suggestion is: look at all the syntactic rules, and see what distinguishes an &lt;code&gt;AP&lt;/code&gt; from an &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;. If the only rule involving them is &lt;code&gt;AP → A&lt;/code&gt;, for example, then it doesn't matter which one you choose: the tree will be effectively the same either way. But there's probably more to it than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, look at how his theory treats adverbs. If the phrase were &quot;(very small) and (very strong)&quot;, how would that change the tree? What if it were &quot;incredibly (small and strong)&quot;? Does either of those require one construction over the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T00:50:41.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32438" CreationDate="2019-09-09T01:05:05.600" Score="42" ViewCount="10496" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard the difference between tone and intonation described in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tone&lt;/strong&gt; is when the pitch of a word determines its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intonation&lt;/strong&gt; is when the pitch of a word conveys its importance within a sentence, or conveys other possible aspects of the speaker's attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not considered a tonal language, but sometimes pitch &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; distinguish different meanings of otherwise identical-sounding words. For example, &quot;perMIT&quot; vs &quot;PERmit.&quot; One of these is a noun and the other is a verb, and their meanings are related but distinct. I'm sure there are several similar examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would it be fair to say English is &quot;sometimes&quot; tonal, or that &quot;some words in English are tonal words&quot;? In other words, how are situations like this reconciled with the statement that English is not tonal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23282" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T04:37:59.633" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T14:02:43.010" Title="Is English tonal for some words, like &quot;permit&quot;?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;tone&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="19" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32433" CreationDate="2019-09-09T01:38:52.500" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual account of the difference is that the location of &quot;stress&quot; differs between perMIT and PERmit. You cannot tell the difference between tone ans stress just based on phonetics (that is, &quot;higher F0&quot; does not mean &quot;H tone&quot;, because the primary phonetic correlate of stress is higher pitch). There is a misguided tendency to use Chinese as the standard of comparison for tone system, but actually Chinese is the best known but one of the least-representative types of tone systems, if we're counting numbers of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually very difficult to come up with any one absolute criterion, phonetic or phonological, that establishes that such-and-such is tone versus stress. Instead, people tend to resort to multiple criteria and see which property gets the most votes. &quot;Vowel reduction&quot;, for example, is usually associated with stress, and we do find in English phonology that unstressed vowels become &quot;reduced&quot; (shorter, qualities neutralized often to just schwa). Also, while in English and in the normal case higher pitch correlates with stress and lower pitch correlates with unstressed, the opposite correlation is actually possible under certain intonational patterns – the main stress can have an extra-&lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; pitch (e.g. &quot;It's not permìtted?&quot;, the incredulity contour). As far as has been reported, intonational system in tone languages do not actually reverse pitch correlates, making H toned vowels have lower F0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think things are clearer if you talk about phonological analysis (tone, or stress – you could have both in on language), and phonetic correlates (relative pitch, duration, amplitude). Stress is a fairly abstract construct which usually has some pitch consequence, but the system of rules for assigning stress are completely different from the system of rules for assigning tone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the level of &quot;some words&quot;, English is clearly not tonal, it simply has contrastive stress. However, there is a proposal on the market (starting with Liberman's dissertation) that intonation &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; tones, so since English has intonation, you could conclude that English has tones. At the same time, &quot;tone&quot; in the sense of intonation is a phonologically and phonetically different thing from tone in the lexico-grammatical sense (as found in tone languages like Chinese, Navaho, Punjabi, Igbo). Intonation co-exists with phonological tones – developing a coherent model of phonological tone vs. intonational overlay is a current research desideratum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T16:21:50.290" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T16:21:50.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32422" CreationDate="2019-09-09T03:00:00.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your answer is comprehensive.We can not speak like a native speaker despite our mastery over phonetics and phonology. I would like to give a classic example for this.once a professor of Linguistics from The English and Foreign Languages University, the best university for teaching English  in the country, was choosen by The British council as The best English teacher of the year.When he was talking to the members of the British council he mispronounced the word &lt;em&gt;Child&lt;/em&gt;. A British councl member immediately questioned the professor about the correctness of his pronunciaion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The professor himself revealed this while he was interviewed by a TV channel in India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I listen to the cricket commentary too often and observe the pronunciation of Indian commentators like Sunil Gavaskar and the native speakers.Though Gavaskar is an excellent speaker of English , his pronunciation has got some Indian flavour.He has been associated with native speakers for many years but he has lived in India since he was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that one can not speak like a native speaker unless one lives with the native speakers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="25462" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T16:40:53.840" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T16:40:53.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32439" CreationDate="2019-09-09T04:07:25.690" Score="1" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;some teachers say if you want to speak English ,  think in English.Since language and thought are different as is evident from the answers to the question* Are language and thought the same?*how can we say that we think in different languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am bilingual and speak the two languages well-English and my mother-tongue.A polyglot speaks many languages.Is it possible for a polyglot to think in every language he speaks. What is the criterion to say that one thinks or not thinks in the language he speaks? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a polyglot think in every language he/she speaks or does he think only in his mother-tongue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T12:13:59.320" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T12:13:59.320" Title="Does a polyglot think in every language he speaks or only in the mother-tongue?" Tags="&lt;language-change&gt;&lt;language-acquisition&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32433" CreationDate="2019-09-09T04:58:51.863" Score="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tonal&quot; is one of those words that everyone vaguely understands, but is &lt;em&gt;annoyingly hard&lt;/em&gt; to actually define. Most people agree that English isn't &quot;tonal&quot;. But there's not a clear dividing line between &quot;tonal&quot; and &quot;not tonal&quot;; it's more of a spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one end are the &lt;em&gt;truly tonal languages&lt;/em&gt;. In these languages, every syllable/vowel/tone-bearing-unit gets one of however many tones—it's an inherent property of the phoneme, just like how every vowel in English has a height and a frontness and a roundness. For example, in Lingála, the word &lt;em&gt;mòtò&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;human&quot;, while the word &lt;em&gt;mòtó&lt;/em&gt; means &quot;head&quot;; the tones are an inherent property of the vowels. Mandarin is the most famous example of this, but it can be found throughout much of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Usually it's not quite as simple as &quot;tone is an inherent property of the phoneme&quot;—this is one of the reasons why &lt;em&gt;autosegmental phonology&lt;/em&gt; was invented, to deal with some fascinatingly weird tone effects that couldn't be explained by older models. But that's worth a question, or several questions, of its own!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One step farther down the spectrum are the &lt;em&gt;pitch-accent languages&lt;/em&gt;, which distinguish between different tones, but the tone of a whole word is entirely determined by the placement of a single &quot;ictus&quot; or &quot;accent&quot; within it. This is what Ancient Greek and Japanese have. For example, in Ancient Greek, &lt;em&gt;állà&lt;/em&gt; &quot;other things&quot; and &lt;em&gt;àllá&lt;/em&gt; &quot;but&quot; are valid words, but *&lt;em&gt;állá&lt;/em&gt; and *&lt;em&gt;àllà&lt;/em&gt; are not. With only a few exceptions, every word has exactly one high tone (the &quot;ictus&quot;), and everything else is low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One step past &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; are the &lt;em&gt;stress-accent languages&lt;/em&gt;. This is what English is generally considered to be. Like pitch-accent languages, stress-accent languages have a single &quot;ictus&quot; in each word which determines the accentuation. But unlike in pitch-accent languages, the ictus is shown by &quot;stress&quot;—a vague combination of a dozen different phonetic features, &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; pitch. The line between pitch and stress is a blurry one, and often has more to do with convention than any phonetic measurement you can quantify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, you get the &lt;em&gt;fixed-stress languages&lt;/em&gt;. These languages, like Hungarian, Classical Arabic, and Classical Latin, don't use tone, pitch, or stress in any phonemic way. Some syllables are still &quot;stressed&quot; more than others, but this is entirely predictable from the structure of the word. These languages can be said with certainty to be entirely non-tonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, all these categories are blurry at best. How do you draw a line between pitch accent and stress accent, for example, when &quot;stress&quot; includes a change in pitch (like in English)? How do you draw a line between true tone and pitch accent when it's possible for a word to have multiple ictus (*), or when over half the words have no ictus at all? The best answer I can give is, these terms are useful only insofar as they elucidate or clarify explanations, and no further. Every language uses tone somewhat differently, and there's usually much, much more to tone than these categories can show. (For example, Lingála generally has phonemic tone, where every phoneme has a tone associated with it. But it also has &lt;em&gt;purely tonal circumfixes&lt;/em&gt;: morphemes which attach on either side of a verb root and add no phonemes, only &quot;floating&quot; tones, which clamp themselves onto the nearest &quot;unclaimed&quot; vowels! Which is the coolest point in favor of autosegmental phonology I've ever seen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The plural of ictus is also ictus. Or &quot;ictūs&quot; if you're especially pretentious. Blame the Romans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T05:16:59.277" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T05:16:59.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32437" CreationDate="2019-09-09T05:56:52.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being bilingual yourself, you should be able to answer this question yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's my answer: people don't usually think in a language. At least I don't. I think in a language when I am thinking about conversations (then I think in whatever language I'd use for that conversation), or when I am trying to figure something out by remembering what a teacher or someone has said to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, my thoughts are pictures, maps, videos, lambda calculus, assembly, or in some other way not linguistically formed. Whatever fits the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some teachers say if you want to speak English , think in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's okay advice. You could train yourself in a language by narrating something in that language. You could be deliberate about using English in your brain. Feel free to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13420" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T05:56:52.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32437" CreationDate="2019-09-09T06:19:24.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have asked a native speaker of English the same question.She said that if you dream in the language, it means you think in the language.Infact, I speak sentences in English while I sleep.Sometimes I make speeches in English.I remember them and my wife or my children say that I spoke in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think while learning a language the learner first thinks in his mother tongue and try to translate into the target language.It is very clear from the sentences such as &lt;em&gt;rain is coming&lt;/em&gt;.and &lt;em&gt;I car saw&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;I have asked this question many linguists but I could not get a satisfactory answer.I think it is possible to think in the language one speaks unless his thought and language becomes the same.(It is my opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a person spoke to me in nearly ten Indian languages and asked me whether I could identify his mother-tongue but I could not.I wondered then whether he was thinking in his mothertongue or in every language he was speaking. There are many people in India who are multilinguals.&#xA;I think unless the thought and the language are not the same while speaking one can not be so fluent and natural&#xA;When we are not speaking there might be thoughts as in our dreams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope an expert linguist answers better than me.I am expecting some more answers for my  question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="25462" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T12:54:23.463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T12:54:23.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32446" CreationDate="2019-09-09T13:17:50.120" Score="1" ViewCount="2244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know about External and Internal language.&#xA;Suppose I was talking about a person who was not either good or great. I was praising him in my speech as he was my superior though I felt that he did not deserve the praise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the differences in my thought and the speech called Internal language and External language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: What is Internal and External language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T12:17:10.360" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T12:17:10.360" Title="What are External and Internal language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T13:21:37.900" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Animals have legs, and so it seems do terms for animals.  Bulls in particular:  Hebrew &lt;em&gt;šūr&lt;/em&gt; (שור), Arabic &lt;em&gt;θaur&lt;/em&gt; (ثور), Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;sthūra&lt;/em&gt;, Greek &lt;em&gt;ταυρος&lt;/em&gt;, Latin &lt;em&gt;taurus&lt;/em&gt;, Russian &lt;em&gt;туръ&lt;/em&gt;, Gothic &lt;em&gt;stiur&lt;/em&gt;.  Is there any way to know who took what from whom, and when?  The odds against mere coincidence are long.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it even possible that Hebrew &lt;em&gt;baqar&lt;/em&gt; (בקר), Arabic &lt;em&gt;baqar&lt;/em&gt; (بقر) derive from Latin &lt;em&gt;pecus/pecora&lt;/em&gt;, meaning either cattle or property in general?  (In this case, Sanskrit, Baltic, and Germanic cognates based on *PEK’U rather than *PEK’OS seem to rule out the reverse direction.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25550" LastEditorUserId="25550" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T13:35:12.503" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T22:38:43.590" Title="Wanderwörter between IE and Semitic" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32443" CreationDate="2019-09-09T14:08:47.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an answer but I couldn't share the image in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From:&#xA;Menges, Karl H. “Etymological Notes on Some Non-Altaic Oriental Words in the Old-Russian Igoŕ-Song.” Oriens, vol. 9, no. 1, 1956, pp. 86–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1579602.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D4v3u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D4v3u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastEditorUserId="13386" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T14:22:01.710" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T14:22:01.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32442" CreationDate="2019-09-09T15:34:21.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably referring to the I-language vs. E-language distinction, terminology promulgated by Chomsky in 1986 &lt;em&gt;Knowledge of language&lt;/em&gt;. I-language refers to the internal psychological state of an individual (w.r.t. language), and E-language is, he argues, not a coherent concept but would cover external realizations of that individual, internal state (a particular utterance), or Platonic abstractions such as &quot;our collective grammar of English&quot;. &quot;I&quot; also stands for &quot;intension&quot; as contrasted with &quot;E&quot; for &quot;extension&quot; (the intension of my English is in my grammar, the extension of my English would be the sentences that I could produce or accept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction doesn't include the distinction between deep-seated feelings vs. what you actually express, though there could be an analogous concept &quot;I-feelings&quot; vs &quot;E-feelings&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T15:34:21.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32431" CreationDate="2019-09-09T15:46:25.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I know, English has no meaningful distinction between categories that depends on whether an expression has a single word or has several words.  Of course, the English language has a distinction between the words &quot;phrase&quot; and &quot;word&quot;, but that's English, not English grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you do very often see linguists distinguishing a grammatical type with name ending in &quot;P&quot; from one not ending in &quot;P&quot; depending on how many words an expression has. But this is always wrong and results from confusion between English grammar and the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An NP can have a Determiner, though it needn't, but a N cannot -- it has nothing to do with how many words there are, per se, though of course if there is both an explicit N and an explicit Det, an expression has multiple words and is a NP rather than an N, but this is because there is a Det, not because there are two or more words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good rule about coordinating conjunctions is that the grammatical categories coordinated are always the same, but it will take you only a few seconds of experimentation to discover that a single word and a multiword expression can perfectly well be coordinated with &quot;and&quot;.  The number of words is not what matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good general rule, in my opinion, is that modification does not change category.  I derive this from my reading of McCawley's &lt;em&gt;The Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/em&gt;, though I don't know that M. actually states this as a general principle.  This is in direct conflict with the (incorrect) notion that category is connected with the number of words in an expression.  Following this principle, &quot;very warm&quot; must be an A (not AP), since &quot;warm&quot; is an A and &quot;very&quot; modifies &quot;warm&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a categorial difference between A (adjective) and AP (adjective phrase) that is connected with whether a modifier comes before or after a N that it modifies, AP tending to come after.  But this is a difference in complexity, not number of words. Compare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a bought chicken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a ready to eat chicken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a chicken bought ready to eat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *a bought ready to eat chicken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; find a stylistic difference that seems to depend on number of words -- compare &quot;a forest dark and dank&quot; with ?&quot;a forest dank&quot; or ?&quot;a forest very dark&quot;, where a postnominal modifer is used for poetic effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T04:51:57.380" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T04:51:57.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32437" CreationDate="2019-09-09T17:19:56.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will provide some thorough personal reflections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it seems like spoken languages are a layer on top of thought, in the same way that musical notes as formal symbols C D E etc are a layer on top of the momentary musical experience. The connection between the two layers can be stronger with people who have perfect pitch or who compose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mother tongue is Swedish. This means that Swedish is an interface to my thoughts. But I usually don't use Swedish at all when I do my work (which is math). The reason for this is that English provides both an alternative interface to my thoughts, and an interface to the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, it is common for kids internationally to use English phrases from video games. The use of domain specific words translated to their mother tongue would feel unnatural to them because it would be a detour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extrapolating from this, a polyglot could have different uses for different languages. If I am to be careful, I wouldn't say that he &quot;thinks in those languages&quot; (or in his mother tongue for that matter), because this insinuates that all thought takes place in a spoken language. I would rather say that he habitually uses an appropriate language as a medium between his innate, strong, intuitive thinking abilities and the task currently at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to avoid belittling the value of language in thinking, I should acknowledge that language can play a great role in structuring, guiding, focusing and spurring one's intuitive thoughts even when not speaking. It is then relevant to note, that different languages could in principle (and probably do) play this role differently for an individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next question is whether a polyglot who &quot;thinks in several languages&quot;, can use all those languages at once. According to the principle that we cannot keep many things in mind at the same time, it seems that the answer should be &quot;no&quot;. It would simply cause too much interference. It may even typically be too much to use two languages at once. Running somewhat counter to this hypothesis is the fact (citation needed) that some excellent composers can imagine multiple voices of music in parallel. By analogy some exceptional people should be able to use several languages at once. But I think it is not controversial to claim that this ability would be something out of the ordinary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other specific questions are whether a polyglot would use different languages to think about the same topic on different occasions, and whether he would even switch between languages repeatedly while refocusing his thoughts on a particular subject. As for the first question, I think the language he last used externally, as in speech, is more likely to be used, than if he hadn't used it recently. As for the second question, I see two relevant trails for investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, multilingual people can frequently switch back and forth between languages when talking to each other. It is not clear to me that the reasons for this should carry over to internal thinking, but maybe they do. Secondly, you could think of a mathematician or a modern physicist as a technical polyglot, for the mathematician uses geometric diagrams at one moment, only to write algebraic equations one minute later, and (although my knowledge of this is limited) a physicist may think of a situation with the vocabulary of particles in one instant, while switching to waves in the next. (I won't mention the practices of computer science and biology, which are more about layers of abstraction.) These people systematically use different languages on the same problem, in order to extract (or store) as much knowledge as possible, but their languages are technical and their practice is disciplined, so this does not account for the generality of the question as one about natural, common language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25235" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:19:56.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T17:53:05.553" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;As user6726 put it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/32434/10559&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a misguided tendency to use Chinese as the standard of comparison for tone system, but actually Chinese is the best known but one of the least-representative types of tone systems, if we're counting numbers of languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; representative type of tone system, if we're counting numbers of languages? Is there a particular language whose tone system is seen as a good model to compare everything else against? (Bonus: if we're counting numbers of &lt;em&gt;speakers&lt;/em&gt; rather than numbers of languages, does Mandarin take the lead again?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested specifically in &quot;phonemic tone&quot; systems here, as opposed to pitch accent, phrase contours, etc. I know the lines are blurry, but an &quot;archetypal&quot; phonemic tone system is presumably clear enough not to get close to those lines in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:38:36.837" Title="What is the most archetypal phonemic-tone system?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;tone&gt;&lt;examples&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32402" CreationDate="2019-09-09T19:03:17.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A stressed vowel is tensed (or lengthened) before consonant, unstressed /i/ and a vowel, and the stressed vowel is vowel-shifted, as a consequence.  SPE gives a special rule for this. Besides the /e:/ of &lt;em&gt;convenient&lt;/em&gt;, we also get long /e:/ in &lt;em&gt;ethereal&lt;/em&gt;, long /o:/ in &lt;em&gt;arboreal&lt;/em&gt;, long /u:/ in &lt;em&gt;mercurial&lt;/em&gt;.  I don't know why it happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This SPE rule is apparently the same change as discussed by sumelic in his answer above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T05:32:49.593" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T05:32:49.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32449" CreationDate="2019-09-09T19:14:59.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The notion of “most typical tone lnguage” can be understood in terms of specific properties that are most typically encountered in tone systems (not counting the number of speakers of each language, as a way to get Chinese languages to be “most typical”). This does include so-called pitch-accent languages because very many tone systems have been labeled pitch-accent languages, for example Luganda has been said to have such a system, based on the property of restricted distribution. The Ibukijima dialect of Japanese looks on the surface like as contour-dense West African language, yet it is &lt;em&gt;analyzed&lt;/em&gt; as a pitch accent language. The matter of Norwegian and Swedish tone is a bit more complex, since it sort of seems to be completely predictable, just not &lt;em&gt;surface&lt;/em&gt; predictable, so I will exclude Scandinavian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One question is what is the typical number of levels: either 2 or 3, I’d wait for a major statistical survey to decide that. Chinese languages seem to be amenable to description in such terms, though traditionally tones are actually treated as having 5 different levels, hence the analysis in terms of 45, 31 etc. which is over-phonologization of perceived differences (generative practicioners like Yip have been countering that tendency).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is what the density and structure of contours is. Most typically, the contours in a tone language are a proper subset of the two-level combinations of contrastive levels. So in a 2-level system, there may be two contours, rise and fall (theoretically, you could have 5 kinds of rise and fall but only two level tones – and I think you do in some Chinese languages, for example only 1 level tone in Mandarin and 3 contours). Two-level systems that exploit the maximum of two-endpoint contours (2) are not as common as ones that only allow fall as an underlying contour (and the typical single contour is fall, not rise). Looking at three-level systems, the pattern is more noticeable, that it is hard to find a language with 3 levels and 6 underlying contours. It is not clear to me whether completely contour-free languages are the most common type, but this brings us to more general restrictions on contours. A final point about contours is that they typically only involve two endpoints, and three-point complex tones (rise-fall) are quite rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, there is a substantial distributional asymmetry between level tones and contours: any syllable can be H or L (or M), but contours are often restricted either to final position, or to certain syllable types (heavy ~ long vowel). Even factoring out the limited distribution of contours, full exploitation of all possible tone patterns (T^n – number of tones &lt;em&gt;T&lt;/em&gt; raised to the power of the number of syllables &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;) is uncommon, once &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; goes over 2. The theme that I’m pointing to here is that tones are typically not distributed very densely, given the theoretical potential of specifying each and every syllable with a distinctive tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-density of underlying tonal contrast is what is mostly behind the scandalous notion of “pitch accent”. This concept is based on an analogy to typical stress systems. Typically (English being atypical), stress is on some &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; syllable of the word. (Secondary stress complicates the matter a bit more, so you have a single &lt;em&gt;primary&lt;/em&gt; stress and then some system of alternating secondary stresses, in the typical case). A tone system with a single tone specification per word / morpheme thus has some similarity to stress systems, except that typical stress systems do not arbitrarily specify location of stress in the lexicon (again, English is not typical), instead there is some system of rules determing where that stress is. Whereas in restricted tone systems (such as Luganda or Japanese), you still have to lexically specify where the prosodic contrast is in the lexicon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chinese languages have two striking properies that are rare in other tone systems. One is the “unit contour” property. The standard autosegmental deconstruction of contours as combinations of L, H on a single vowel is challenged by some examples in Chinese languages where contour tones seems to spread as units (the Danyang case). The second is the arbitrary-sandhi property where tone changes are most efficiently described by numbering the tones (1, 2, 3, 5) then giving a table of replacements (1→3, 2→7…), rather than decomposing tonal alternations into phonological simple phonetically-based operations like “spread H to the left”, “delete L before H”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, I would say that the &lt;em&gt;typical&lt;/em&gt; tone system is not “dense” in the way that Chinese or Vietnamese are. Instead, they are sparse, as Korean, Japanese, Bantu, tonal Indic, Tibeto-Burman, Cheyenne, New Guinean or Western Amazonian languages. Discerning what constitutes “typical” is a very difficult research project, which has been hampered by lack of descriptive material (a lacuna being slowly filled over the years). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose that the best way to look at these questions is not in terms of Chinese vs. the rest of the world, instead it is in terms of fundamental monosyllabism vs. longer words. The characteristics of Chinese are also found in Grassfields Bantu, Vietnamese, Taa (Khoisan), Kru, and in general are not so rare when words are typically monosyllabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will think about whether there is some one language that strikes me as most typical, but a first-impression candidate is Igbo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T19:14:59.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32458" CreationDate="2019-09-09T19:24:26.873" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;The placename 'bugarth' or 'bugardie' in Shetland has be confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally for Shetland placenames I turn to Jakobsen who gives: &lt;strong&gt;bu&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;stock of cattle on a farm&lt;/em&gt; from [Old Norse] &lt;strong&gt;bú&lt;/strong&gt;; and &lt;strong&gt;gart&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;an enclosed, uncultivated patch of land&lt;/em&gt; from [Old Norse] &lt;strong&gt;garðr&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;an enclosure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, James &lt;a href=&quot;https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2019_Edition.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brittonic Language in the Old North&lt;/a&gt; suggests this could come from the [Early Celtic] &lt;strong&gt;*bou-cc-ā-garto-&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;A cattle-yard, an enclosure, pen or fold for livestock&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could these two words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stem from the same PIE root, and survived relatively unskathed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have been borrowed one from the other, making one or both of the etymologies dubious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have been borrowed from a non-IE language (perhaps in Shetland or other point of contact) into both Early Celtic and Old Norse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there another explanation of how these two similar sounding words can have such similar meanings with apparently vastly different origins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25438" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T18:11:22.230" Title="Bugarth - Celtic, Old Norse, both or neither?" Tags="&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;celtic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32452" CreationDate="2019-09-09T21:11:04.013" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Celts and the Norwegians were not the first peoples to have ox gardens so both are cognates and the name is a compound of the phonemes that appear in both languages. The phonemes in the name represent two words meaning ‘bovine garden’ and this gives two etymologies to pursue. &#xA;You could investigate the oldest maps of Shetland and see what spelling is used. I assume the spelling that is closest to either gives you the people who named it Bugarth. Probably Old Norse. There is a Dutch surname called Boogerd. The two phoneme groups Bu and Garth are quite universal in Europe for bovine garden as French ‘bouef cour’ shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T21:11:04.013" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="32457" CreationDate="2019-09-09T22:47:36.980" Score="-3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making up an imaginary word to be used as a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I seem to have it ending in &quot;tata&quot;, but want it to be clear it is pronounced as &quot;tay-tah&quot; not &quot;tah-tah&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit that I do not know my accented characters very well, but I think the right answer is likely one of the below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) tæta&#xA;2) tāta&#xA;3) táta&#xA;4) tåta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I recognize that this is language specific, and also that accented 'e' is likely a better choice in many languages. While trying to keep close to the &quot;tata&quot; spelling (with a, not e), is there a method to force the pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not universally, is one solution &quot;generally better&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25590" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T03:10:54.987" Title="What is the most universally understood way to represent the &quot;ay&quot; sound of &quot;CAKE&quot; substituting the standard a for a single character?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;ipa&gt;&lt;phonetic-symbols&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32454" CreationDate="2019-09-09T23:23:55.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, you want a single letter (possibly with a diacritic), and it should be &quot;most widely&quot; understood to refer to the &quot;cake&quot; vowel. The bad news is, unless you narrow down your audience, there is no answer. If you are addressing linguists, &lt;em&gt;kek&lt;/em&gt; is the way to go. If you are addressing a non-English audience and it is clear to them that this isn't English, &lt;em&gt;kek&lt;/em&gt; will give you the best results, although there's a high change that it will be interpreted as &quot;keck&quot; (i.e. IPA [kɛk] since in many languages the vowel nominally transcribed as [e] is really [ɛ]. &lt;em&gt;kæk&lt;/em&gt; would be a bad choice – it would most likely be interpreted as &lt;em&gt;kack&lt;/em&gt; (rhymes with &lt;em&gt;gack&lt;/em&gt;). If your audience is English speakers, &lt;em&gt;kāk&lt;/em&gt; is probably the best bet. English speakers have no idea what &lt;em&gt;å&lt;/em&gt; is, and at best they will interpret &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; as IPA [æ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer potentially changes a bit if you want phonetic [tetə], at least for an English-speaking audience, because the conventions for orthographic interpretation work differently for VC versus V syllables. &quot;Tate&quot; gets you the correct vowel with no puzzlement by speakers, but unfortunately the final vowel is not going to be interpreted (&quot;silent e&quot;). Resorting to an acute or macron might get people to select the correct vowel (so, &lt;em&gt;tāta&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;táta&lt;/em&gt;) but it's likely than many English speakers will just ignore the diacritics, just as they do with Mötley Crüe, Māori, résumé.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T23:23:55.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32454" CreationDate="2019-09-10T01:58:37.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest that your best bet is &lt;strong&gt;Téta&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, especially with the acute accent &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt;, makes the sound you want (when pronounced by an English speaker) in all the European languages of which the average English speaker is aware and is likely to know a few words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It even makes that sound in some loan words used by monolingual speakers: touché, cliché, jalapeño, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks a little foreign, but as long as you're in accent territory anyway, that shouldn't bother you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using an &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; or some variation thereof will not consistently get you there in one letter for enough readers. Note that &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; usually rhymes with &quot;be&quot; (dæmon, encyclopædia) or &quot;meh&quot; (æsthetic), and to linguists it's the vowel in &quot;pan&quot;. But see below for my concession. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T02:13:23.577" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T02:13:23.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32454" CreationDate="2019-09-10T02:15:56.917" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linguistically, the sound in the English word &quot;cake&quot; is a diphthong &lt;code&gt;[ej]&lt;/code&gt;. In most languages which use the Latin alphabet (including Latin itself), it would be written as &lt;em&gt;ej&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ei&lt;/em&gt;, more often the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very similar sound is written as &lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt; in the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is a &lt;em&gt;monophthong&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to a &lt;em&gt;diphthong&lt;/em&gt;, but in English the distinction doesn't really matter (as opposed to in, say, Hawai'ian). Most Latin-orthography-using languages write this sound as &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, or as &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt; if they need to distinguish it from other front mid vowels; &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt; is probably as close as you can get with a single letter (and may be familiar to English-speakers from French loans like &lt;em&gt;né&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;fiancé&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;café&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;résumé&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any language except English that would use any variant on the letter &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; for this sound. &lt;code&gt;[ej]&lt;/code&gt; is a high-mid front vowel at heart, while &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; almost always indicates low vowels of some sort, and usually back ones at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) tæta 2) tāta 3) táta 4) tåta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To linguists and speakers of Old English, &lt;em&gt;æ&lt;/em&gt; is the vowel in &quot;cat&quot;. &lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt; generally indicates either a mid tone or a long vowel, while &lt;em&gt;á&lt;/em&gt; generally indicates either a high tone or a long vowel, but neither would sound like &lt;code&gt;[ej]&lt;/code&gt;. And &lt;em&gt;å&lt;/em&gt; is usually somewhere between the vowels in &quot;awe&quot; and &quot;phone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've got your heart set on using some variant of &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;, you should probably go with &lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt;. The idiosyncratic transcription system used by the American Heritage Dictionary uses &lt;em&gt;ā&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;code&gt;[ej]&lt;/code&gt;, so some monolingual English-speakers may be familiar with it. But expect most readers, especially those who know any non-English languages, to pronounce it like the first vowel in &quot;father&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T02:15:56.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32452" CreationDate="2019-09-10T02:51:06.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could these two words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;stem from the same PIE root, and survived relatively unskathed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;have been borrowed one from the other, making one or both of the etymologies dubious&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;have been borrowed from a non-IE language (perhaps in Shetland or other point of contact) into both Early Celtic and Old Norse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes indeed! All three are plausible on the surface (as in, all three of these things happened for various words in various languages); in this specific instance, I think it's a mixture of the second plus a healthy dose of coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PIE root for &quot;cow&quot; is reconstructed as *&lt;em&gt;gʷṓws&lt;/em&gt;; in various languages, including P-Celtic, P-Italic, and some varieties of Greek, &lt;code&gt;*gʷ&lt;/code&gt; becomes &lt;code&gt;/b/&lt;/code&gt;. This is why we see Latin &lt;em&gt;bōs&lt;/em&gt; (*), Old Irish &lt;em&gt;bó&lt;/em&gt;, Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;boûs&lt;/em&gt;, and so on. This is the first part of the proposed Celtic origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this shift (the &quot;Q-to-P shift&quot;) did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; happen in Germanic, which is why we see the English word &quot;cow&quot; from the same root, with a &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt;. Instead, Germanic had a presumably unrelated root *&lt;em&gt;būą&lt;/em&gt; &quot;building&quot;, which gives Old Norse &lt;em&gt;bú&lt;/em&gt; and all its descendants. This is the first part of the proposed Germanic origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Germanic also had a root *&lt;em&gt;gardô&lt;/em&gt; (and/or *&lt;em&gt;gardaz&lt;/em&gt;), &quot;fence, enclosure, yard&quot;. This is the origin of English &quot;yard&quot; and &quot;garden&quot;, via two different paths, and became enormously popular in Romance, completely displacing native Latin words like &lt;em&gt;hortus&lt;/em&gt;. So it was clearly a popular word in Germanic, and it's not much of a stretch to imagine it being borrowed into Celtic languages too. This seems to be the last part of both reconstructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for which one is correct—I'm afraid I don't know enough to say. It's not inconceivable that both the Celtic root for &quot;cow&quot; and the Germanic root for &quot;building&quot; influenced the name of the location, but it would require someone more familiar with the history of Britain to say for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Latin is not in fact a P-Italic language, but it has lots of loans from Oscan and Umbrian, which were. The word for &quot;cow&quot; seems to be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T18:11:22.230" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T18:11:22.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T15:12:47.153" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in need of English 100,000 frequency word list.&#xA;I hope you tell me about a free option (if available) or an inexpensive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25595" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T15:55:08.027" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T15:55:08.027" Title="big english word frequency list" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;words&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-09-20T10:49:33.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="30308" CreationDate="2019-09-10T18:03:03.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unicode Consortium has spent some time documenting some of the most common plural rules for over 200 languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information on how rules are defined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-numbers.html#Language_Plural_Rules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-numbers.html#Language_Plural_Rules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this does not cover all cases but it gives a good idea of most common plural rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25602" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T18:03:03.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32165" CreationDate="2019-09-10T19:36:54.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, I would say &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a plot of this final vowel (taken from about 12.75 seconds into the linked video). It's not a great plot, since the recording quality I'm using isn't great, but it'll work for our purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6c0Gt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6c0Gt.png&quot; alt=&quot;plot exported from praat&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acoustically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/28968/10559&quot;&gt;vowels are determined by values called &lt;em&gt;formants&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which appear as horizontal black bars in the spectrum. The red dots also represent the formants, just calculated in a different way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the positions of these formants are continuous: they can show up at any frequency (within a certain range), not only certain specific values. Which means that the space of vowels is also continuous! When someone pronounces a diphthong, they glide seamlessly from one vowel to another—so a diphthong like &lt;code&gt;[æi]&lt;/code&gt; starts at &lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;and passes seamlessly through &lt;code&gt;[e]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; before arriving at &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt;. In fact, since frequency space is continuous, it passes through an infinite number of different intermediate vowels!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, calling all vowel sequences &quot;infinity-phthongs&quot; isn't very useful, even though there are indeed an infinite number of intermediate points. So instead, phoneticists generally ignore everything in the middle, and &lt;em&gt;only pay attention to the critical points&lt;/em&gt;—the start, the end, and anywhere the trajectory changes direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a sequence like &lt;code&gt;[æɛeɪi]&lt;/code&gt; would still be called a &quot;diphthong&quot;, since it never changes direction: it moves in a &quot;straight line&quot; from &lt;code&gt;[æ]&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt;, and we don't really care about the intermediate stuff. If you connect the dots on an IPA vowel chart, you'll get basically a straight line. So we only care about two phthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a sequence like &lt;code&gt;[ɑɔoʊuʉy]&lt;/code&gt; would be called a &quot;triphthong&quot;, because it changes direction once (try connecting the dots on an IPA vowel chart again and you'll see). So we care about the two endpoints, plus the one direction change in the middle, giving us &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; phthongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there's no real change in direction—the formants are basically straight lines, without any bends or kinks in them. The sound starts somewhere around &lt;code&gt;[ɛ]&lt;/code&gt; and moves straight to &lt;code&gt;[i]&lt;/code&gt;. It definitely passes through other vowels on the way, but phonetically, that's just how diphthongs tend to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Phonemically, the question is totally different—but I'd also say no. There's no evidence that there are three separate phonemes at the end there; instead, it seems to be an allophone of plain old &lt;code&gt;/i/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. This plot was generated with a program called Praat, which is free to download and play around with if you want to do some phonetic experimentation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.P.S. &quot;Phthong&quot; is not actually a technical term in linguistics. It's just more fun to say than &quot;critical point in the vowel trajectory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T19:36:54.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T19:39:06.373" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for the perhaps weirdly worded question, but here's my attempt to explain better what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, if I say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;We went to lunch with Bob&quot; means that the people involved are me, Bob, and at least one unnamed third party, which is included in the &quot;we&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian, on the other hand, you could say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Мы с Бобом пошли на обед&quot;, literally &quot;We with &#xA;Bob went to lunch&quot;, and mean only yourself and Bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other language I'm fluent in, German, has the same structure as English, &quot;Wir sind mit Bob zum Mittagessen gegangen&quot; would imply at least three people attending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is: Is this a trait that is linked to language relationships? Are other Slavic languages like Russian in this regard? And has there been any research on this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25603" LastEditorUserId="15419" LastEditDate="2020-02-08T13:23:50.920" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T03:28:11.653" Title="In which languages could a phrase like &quot;We went to lunch with Bob&quot; signify an event in which exactly two people took part?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;comparative-linguistics&gt;&lt;indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T21:09:44.150" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lojban.org claims that “Lojban has [...] unambiguous resolution of sounds into words”&lt;a href=&quot;https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban_Introductory_Brochure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;¹&lt;/a&gt; and that “Lojban [...] sounds can be divided into words in only one way.”&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;²&lt;/a&gt; What is the evidence for this? Is there a list of rules, algorithm, or program that one could use to segment any Lojban sentence with no spaces into words? Can this be done based purely on Lojban phonotactics, or does it require some knowledge of Lojban vocabulary? Does this require the sentence to be grammatically correct, or can it be a random mishmash of Lojban words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9425" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T02:09:58.507" Title="Does Lojban really have “unambiguous resolution of sounds into words”?" Tags="&lt;words&gt;&lt;constructed-language&gt;&lt;lojban&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28300" CreationDate="2019-09-10T21:45:29.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been informed by my students that &quot;yeet&quot; (past tense: yeeted) means to throw back behind you.  To throw in front of you is to &quot;fleet.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25606" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T21:45:29.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32463" CreationDate="2019-09-10T22:03:43.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was an important consideration in the design of Lojban, so while I haven't gone through the process of verifying it myself, I'm fairly confident that it is true for most of the language. (Since just one mistake would make it false overall, it's hard to be certain that it's true for all parts of the language: there are a few difficult parts.) It's not extremely difficult to design a system like this for a constructed language, and Lojban has been around long enough that I imagine someone would have spotted any obvious errors in the original design of the phonotactics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in practice, the rules are only fully unambiguous as a mapping from a phonological/phonemic transcription to the sequence of words, not as a mapping from physical sounds (phones) to the sequence of words. Spoken Lojban, like any spoken language, is not immune to having auditory signals obscured by noise, or to having a certain phone being perceived as one phoneme by one speaker but as another phoneme by another (e.g. an English speaker listening to a Spanish speaker of Lojban might mishear as /b/ an unaspirated [p] phone that was intended as /p/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know exactly where the rules are laid out. My understanding is that no part of the rules requires knowledge of Lojban vocabulary: the rules work from the information included in the normal Latin spelling of Lojban, including the characters &lt;code&gt;’&lt;/code&gt; and  &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; (which represent contrastive elements of Lojban pronunciation), plus stress. I'm not sure about whether there are any ungrammatical sequences of valid words that could break the rules, but I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Lojban texts written with spaces, stress is not typically written, but stress has to be provided for proper word division of unspaced spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrastive element &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; (the period), which is necessary for unambiguous parsing, is supposed to be pronounced as a &amp;quot;pause&amp;quot; (it looks like a lot of people interpret this as a glottal stop).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Proper nouns and borrowed words are subject to special restrictions for the purpose of avoiding ambiguity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some &amp;quot;hacks&amp;quot; (my characterization) to get around certain possible ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opoudjis.net/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less1names.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proper names&lt;/a&gt;, which might otherwise introduce ambiguous sequences of sounds, are required to end with a consonant followed by a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; (the character representing a &amp;quot;pause&amp;quot;), and &lt;strike&gt;cannot&lt;/strike&gt; used to not be allowed to contain the sequences &lt;code&gt;la&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;lai&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;doi&lt;/code&gt;. In 2015, the la/lai/doi rule was officially abandoned in favor of a simpler rule stating that all names have to start as well as end with a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;pause&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Decisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the new rule is called &amp;quot;dotside&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://lojban.github.io/cll/4/7/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complicated rules about what forms borrowed words can take&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some rules about Lojban phonotactics can either be implemented multiple ways, or have changed over time. Here is a link to a discussion from 2015 with some more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/lojban-beginners/f-u86pPQ-TQ/BVFmXWTSgSQJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/lojban-beginners/f-u86pPQ-TQ/BVFmXWTSgSQJ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another link with discussion of some difficult points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Talk:BPFK_Section:_PEG_Morphology_Algorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Talk:BPFK_Section:_PEG_Morphology_Algorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T02:09:58.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32462" CreationDate="2019-09-10T22:45:48.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not exactly what you are asking, but a similar construction was used in Old Norse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A noun (usually a proper name) was often put in apposition, or partial apposition, to a dual pronoun of the first or second person, or a plural pronoun of the third person, as &lt;em&gt;vit Hǫttr&lt;/em&gt; 'Hǫtt and I'; &lt;em&gt;þit móðir mín&lt;/em&gt; 'you (sg. or pl.) and my mother'. In the third person it is not always clear whether the apposition is partial or complete; thus &lt;em&gt;þeir Grímr ok Helgi&lt;/em&gt; might mean 'Grím and Helgi' or 'Grím and Helgi and their men'.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Gordon, &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Old Norse&lt;/em&gt;, para. 164.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T22:45:48.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="32467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32462" CreationDate="2019-09-11T01:05:14.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Logoori (and I think the facts are parallel in most Bantu languages), &lt;em&gt;ndáágéénda na Marova&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I walked with Marova&quot; says that exactly 2 people walked and &lt;em&gt;kwáágéénda na Marova&lt;/em&gt; &quot;we walked with Marova&quot; implies that at least 3 people walked, that is, it can't be used felicitously for &quot;Me and Marova walked&quot;. The conjunction &lt;em&gt;inzí na Marova&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Me and marova&quot; induces 1st plural agreement, and &lt;em&gt;inzí na Marova kwáágéénda&lt;/em&gt; means only &quot;Me and Marova walked&quot; – there isn't some third person. If you want to unambiguously say, with the un-shifted &quot;and/with Marova&quot; in subject position &quot;Me (and someone else) and Marova walked&quot;, you have to use the equivalent of &quot;we&quot; namely &lt;em&gt;kʊnyi&lt;/em&gt;, thus &lt;em&gt;kʊnyi na Marova kwáágéénda&lt;/em&gt; &quot;We and Marova walked&quot;. In this way, I think Bantu languages are parallel to English, in that &quot;we&quot; is only used when you mean &quot;I and someone else&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the Russian pattern – are all of these possible, unambiguous, and equivalent? That is, how &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; you say &quot;Me, someone else, and Bob/Igor went/are going to lunch&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Я и Игорь собираемся на обед / Я с Игорем собираемся на обед&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Мы и Игорь собираемся на обед / Мы с Игорем собираемся на обед&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T01:05:14.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-11T01:28:12.340" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today I heard “regex,” short for “regular expression,” out loud for the first time with a /dʒ/ instead of a /g/ as I had always guessed. I felt the same experience when I first heard the abbreviation for character as identical to “char” rather than as /ker/. Is there any research on the patterns by which people choose to pronounce newly coined abbreviations?&#xA;Does an abbreviation being technical (and therefore more likely to be a word that one might only ever encounter in writing [I’ve heard “regex” once until today, and have never heard “eval” or “cin”]). This is going off the deep end (consider it the “bonus portion”), but for more obscure subjects, is there any evidence of “genealogies” of certain universities producing certain pronunciations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21763" LastEditorDisplayName="user21763" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T02:06:55.860" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T02:06:55.860" Title="How do people pick an abbreviation for a technical term?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-11T05:49:54.623" Score="0" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find a single resource online that has (unicode encoded) Runic inscriptions like a full text of ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, or even a dictionary. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesauruslex.com/sprak/engrune.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; site lists some resources, most of which are dead. One that seemed promising was &lt;a href=&quot;http://runic-dictionary.nottingham.ac.uk/search.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't work and/or it only gives you words like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;biærtr (OWN: bjartr), adv. 'bright, shining, illustrious'.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  bræiðr (OWN: breiðr), adj. 'broad, wide'.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  bæria (OWN: berja), v. 'to beat, strike, fight'.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  bærias (OWN: berjask), v. 'to fight, battle'.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  bætr (OWN: betr), adv. comp. 'better'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?if=runic&amp;amp;table=database&amp;amp;view=runic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; dictionary also seemed promising, but doesn't seem to work. However, it produces this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;aldr (noun m.) ‘life, age’ - 3&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  alfr (noun m.) ‘elf’ - 1&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  allgóðr (adj.) ‘very good’ - 5&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  allmikill (adj.) ‘very great, very large’ - 2&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  allr (adj.) ‘all’ - 34&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  almáttigr (adj.) ‘almighty’ - 2&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  andi (noun m.) ‘spirit, soul’ - 12&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Andrés (noun m.) ‘[Andres]’ - 1&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  1. annarr (pron.) ‘(an)other, second’ - 8&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  arfi (noun m.) ‘heir, heiress’ - 17&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  arfr (noun m.) ‘inheritance’ - 6&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one that seemed potentially helpful was this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm/?languageId=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scandinavian Runic Text Database&lt;/a&gt;. I downloaded the &lt;code&gt;.zip&lt;/code&gt; and the text folder, which contained a few strange text files and an excel spreadsheet containing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Signum  Plats   Socken  Härad   Kommun  Placering   Koordinater Urspr. plats?   Nuv. koord. Sockenkod/Fornlämningsnr. Runtyper  Korsform    Period/Datering Stilgruppering  Ristare Materialtyp Material    Föremål Övrigt  Alternativt signum  Referens    Bildlänk&#xA;Öl 1 $  Karlevi Vickleby sn Algutsrums hd   Mörbylånga      6275755.1538971 ja      0879 (Vickleby), 10 [objektid=10087900100001]           V s 900-t   RAK     sten    smålandsporfyr  runsten västnordisk inskrift    B 1071; L 1323; DR 411  $=ATA Dnr 323-3515-2002; $=Gustavson 2002; Strid 1991:44; Svenska landsmål 1995 (321) s. 436 med n. 3; BN 1 http://kmb.raa.se/cocoon/bild/object_list_simple?query=Öl1&amp;amp;showthumbnails=true&#xA;Öl 2 †$     Algutsrums kyrka    Algutsrums sn   Algutsrums hd   Mörbylånga      6283750.1544290         0785 (Algutsrum)            V   Pr3     sten        runsten     B 1076; L 1324  $=Plansch IV fig. 2, 145ff.; BN 2    &#xA;Öl 3 †$     Resmo kyrka Resmo sn    Algutsrums hd   Mörbylånga      6268390.1539280         0858 (Resmo)            V efter 1050    Pr3 - Pr4? sten     fragment av runsten Parsten till Öl 4. Runföljden -unilu har av Bruce Nilsson lästs sueinu och tolkats Svæinu, Söderberg tolkar slutet som moður sina, Randvi. L 1588, L 1589   $=SRI 1 plansch IV fig. 3; BN 5  &#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anywhere in these two places anything that looks like ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how does the academic transcriptions of the actual Runes carved on rocks (which do look like ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ) map to unicode runes like ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ. Is there a direct mapping of old-english-like letters to the runes? Or is it something simpler, or more complicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how to take a runic transcription such as one of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christerhamp.se/runor/gamla/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; and convert it to ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ. Do those dictionary entries above somehow encode the runic inscriptions so they could be translated into runes ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ? I would like to know how to convert it. That last link has stuff like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;raþ| |þu : runaR : ret : lit : rista : toliR : bry[t]i : i roþ : kunuki : toliR : a(u)k : gyla : litu : ris... ...- : þaun : hion : eftiR ...k : merki srni... haku(n) * (b)aþ : rista&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Råd du runorna rätt! Tolir bryte i Rod lät rista [dem] åt konungen. Tolir och Gyla lät rista [runorna], makarna båda som minnesmärke efter sig[?] Håkon bjöd rista.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would love to know how to recover the unicode runes from these transcriptions somehow if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://greenforestwitch-main.tumblr.com/post/164997099104/%E1%9A%A0%E1%9A%A2%E1%9A%A6%E1%9A%A8%E1%9A%B1%E1%9A%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tumblr&lt;/a&gt; we have this reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ᚠ - F&#xA;    ᚢ - U&#xA;    ᚦ - þ  (TH)&#xA;    ᚨ - A&#xA;    ᚱ - R&#xA;    ᚲ - K&#xA;    ᚷ - G&#xA;    ᚹ - W&#xA;    ᚺ - H&#xA;    ᚾ - N&#xA;    ᛁ - I&#xA;    ᛃ - J&#xA;    ᛇ - Æ (AE)&#xA;    ᛈ - P&#xA;    ᛉ - Z&#xA;    ᛋ - S&#xA;    ᛏ - T&#xA;    ᛒ - B&#xA;    ᛖ - E&#xA;    ᛗ - M&#xA;    ᛚ - L&#xA;    ᛝ -  ŋ (NJ)&#xA;    ᛟ - O&#xA;    ᛞ - D&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using that on the last sentence from that website with a bunch of inscriptions yields:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ᚱᚨᚦ| |ᚦᚢ : ᚱᚢᚾᚨᚱ : ᚱᛖᛏ : ᛚᛁᛏ : ᚱᛁᛋᛏᚨ : ᛏᛟᛚᛁᚱ : ᛒᚱy[ᛏ]ᛁ : ᛁ ᚱᛟᚦ : ᚲᚢᚾᚢᚲᛁ : ᛏᛟᛚᛁᚱ : ᚨ(ᚢ)ᚲ : ᚷyᛚᚨ : ᛚᛁᛏᚢ : ᚱᛁᛋ... ...- : ᚦᚨᚢᚾ : ᚺᛁᛟᚾ : ᛖᚠᛏᛁᚱ ...ᚲ : ᛗᛖᚱᚲᛁ ᛋᚱᚾᛁ... ᚺᚨᚲᚢ(ᚾ) * (ᛒ)ᚨᚦ : ᚱᛁᛋᛏᚨ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's (a) still a bunch of latin punctuation remaining, and (b), I just find/replaced every letter individually, is it that simple? Or are there context-specific things that need to be taken into account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes#Runic_alphabets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;know&lt;/a&gt; is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We started with actual jaggedly shaped runes on rocks. We then transcribed them into &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; sort of alphabet that is not at all like them. I am guessing we do this by following our guesstimated knowledge such as &quot;the [f] sound is ᚠ&quot;. How we know that I don't know. But so we go from runes on rocks, to the sound in our head, then we write the sound down in latin-ish script. As long as there is a 1-to-1 mapping between rune to english latin sound and glyph, then we can move backwards back to the runes. But I am not sure that they always represent each rune the same way. That's sort of what I'd like to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm, after reading about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_transliteration_and_transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rune transcription&lt;/a&gt; it looks like they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; use the sound. Hmm..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The runes are transcribed into normalized spellings of the languages the runes were written in, and normalizations are rendered with italics. Since a single rune may represent several different phonemes, normalizations can differ greatly from transliterations. The þ rune can represent both the Old Norse letter ð (as in English the) or þ (as in English thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christerhamp.se/runor/gamla/sm/sm22.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; we go, the first actual Runic sentence I've seen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ᛆᚠᛂ ᛘᛆᚱᛁᛆ ᛬ ᚵᚱᛆᛍᛁᛆ ᛒᚱᚮᚦᛁᚱ ᛋᛁᛒᛒᛁ ᛬ ᚵᛂᛋᚢᛋ ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛐᚢᛋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;afe maria : gracia broþir sbbi : gesus kristus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ave Maria gratia. Broder Sibbe. Jesus Kristus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, translating it with the tumblr thing gives a different result. Hence my concern of not having an exact map from the latin-ish script back to the runes. I got this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ᚨᚠᛖ ᛗᚨᚱᛁᚨ : ᚷᚱᚨcᛁᚨ ᛒᚱᛟᚦᛁᚱ ᛋᛒᛒᛁ : ᚷᛖᛋᚢᛋ ᚲᚱᛁᛋᛏᚢᛋ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;mine   ᚨᚠᛖ ᛗᚨᚱᛁᚨ : ᚷᚱᚨcᛁᚨ ᛒᚱᛟᚦᛁᚱ ᛋᛒᛒᛁ : ᚷᛖᛋᚢᛋ ᚲᚱᛁᛋᛏᚢᛋ&#xA;theirs ᛆᚠᛂ ᛘᛆᚱᛁᛆ ᛬ ᚵᚱᛆᛍᛁᛆ ᛒᚱᚮᚦᛁᚱ ᛋᛁᛒᛒᛁ ᛬ ᚵᛂᛋᚢᛋ ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛐᚢᛋ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a strange one from &quot;froglands&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ᚾᚨᛏ ᛬ ᚷᚨᚱᚨᚹᚨᚢᚩᛏᚨ ᛬ ᛞᛁ&#xA;&#xA;...næt : gæræw-uotæ : di&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The middle doesn't match up to my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or how about this from &quot;lindisfarne2.html&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ᚩᛁᛀᚨ&#xA;-oina&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found 4 translations of the letter &quot;a&quot; in that guys work: &lt;code&gt;ᛆ ᚪ ᚨ ᚫ&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with others, like &quot;i&quot; and &quot;h&quot; of which there's at least 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  i: ᛁ ᛇ&#xA;  h: ᚼ ᚺ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How/why is this decided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T07:41:04.690" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T18:08:31.337" Title="How do you translate academic runic encodings to runes (ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ)?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;old-norse&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;&lt;old-english&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32449" CreationDate="2019-09-11T16:38:36.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some confusion on what &quot;tone&quot; means. IMO two types need to be distinguished: languages with true tones and languages with contrastive prosodic patterns. Chinese, Vietnamese, Serb have true tones, Swedish has contrastive prosodic patterns. In the first group, isolated words of one syllable have their own recognizable tones. The second group needs at least two syllables to convey a High-Low contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:38:36.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32411" CreationDate="2019-09-11T16:47:26.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The different effects of laryngeals are: vowel coloring (a e o), vowel lengthening, tones (in Balto-Slavic), word-initial vowel prothesis (in Greek and Armenian), aspiration of consonants (typically stH- in Old Indian), lengthening of rhotics (r: vs r in Old Indian). Anatolian languages explicitly keep traces of one laryngeal (namely *H2). We don't need statistical &quot;tests&quot;. The case in favor of Laryngeals is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:47:26.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17175" CreationDate="2019-09-11T17:39:40.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about:  &quot;I am going to an interesting reading this evening.&quot;  Clearly, the word &quot;reading&quot; here is a noun. It is preceded by an article; it could also be pluralized.  My guess is that the morphological process that created &quot;reading&quot; still would be 1) read + inflectional -ing (verb).  Syntactic demands necessitate nominalization (gerund) in sentences such as &quot;Reading makes me happy.&quot;  (It's the act of reading.)  And then we give this gerund form a secondary meaning and life as a noun (reading as an event.)  Thoughts?&#xA;Or are there instances where -ing is a derivational suffix, creating a noun from a verb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26616" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T17:39:40.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33470" CreationDate="2019-09-11T18:08:31.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Runes&quot; aren't a single writing system: there are several variants, used in different places at different times to transcribe different languages. It's like asking &quot;how do I convert text written in the Latin alphabet to IPA?&quot;—first, you have to know what language and orthography is being used. They're not interchangeable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you know what particular runic writing system is being used, there are standardized transliteration systems from each one into the Latin alphabet. When you're looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christerhamp.se/runor/gamla/u1/u1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual inscriptions&lt;/a&gt;, especially in academic publications, the romanizations will tend to follow these standards. Any decent book on the relevant languages and writing systems should include tables showing this, but failing that, I'd at least recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; over Tumblr.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T18:08:31.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32463" CreationDate="2019-09-11T19:53:28.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a potential area of ambiguity in Lojban phonetics with regard to something called a &quot;buffer vowel&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lojban.github.io/cll/3/8/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;buffer vowel&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is an optional epenthetic vowel used to break up consonant clusters. It is intended for use by speakers of languages that have phonotactic limitations on consonant clusters (emphasis mine): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many languages do not have consonant clusters at all, and even those languages that do have them often allow only a subset of the full Lojban set. As a result, the Lojban design allows the use of a buffer sound between consonant combinations which a speaker finds unpronounceable. &lt;strong&gt;This sound may be any non-Lojbanic vowel which is clearly separable by the listener from the Lojban vowels. Some possibilities are IPA [ɪ], [ɨ], [ʊ], or even [ʏ], but there probably is no universally acceptable buffer sound.&lt;/strong&gt; When using a consonant buffer, the sound should be made as short as possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The buffer vowels appears to tend to be a high mid vowel, since that's an open space in the Lojban vowel system. But this appears to be a place where some ambiguity can arise: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɪ] (buffer) is close to [i] (Lojban '&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;')  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʏ] (buffer) is close to [y] (acceptable variant of Lojban '&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;')*  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ʊ] (buffer) is close to [u] (Lojban '&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;')  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ɨ] (buffer) is close to [ə] (Lojban '&lt;strong&gt;y&lt;/strong&gt;') &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lojban.github.io/cll/3/8/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lojban Reference Grammar&lt;/a&gt;&quot; puts it (emphasis again mine): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since buffering is done for the benefit of the speaker in order to aid pronounceability, &lt;strong&gt;there is no guarantee that the listener will not mistake a buffer vowel for one of the six regular Lojban vowels&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard guidance seems to be to pronounce a buffer vowel short, and regular vowels long. I'm not a Lojban speaker, so I don't know well how this works in practice. Since the grammar does call out the potential ambiguity, I thought it made sense to mention in response to this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;em&gt;roundness does not matter in &lt;a href=&quot;https://lojban.github.io/cll/3/2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation of Lojban vowels&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="537" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T19:53:28.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-12T02:24:26.707" Score="0" ViewCount="454" Body="&lt;p&gt;Languages are classified according to tones, stress, pitch etc. What type is Tamil language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26615" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T02:28:57.733" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T04:34:47.460" Title="What type of language ( tonal, pitch- stressed etc.) is Tamil?" Tags="&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;tamil&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-09-17T19:09:08.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33482" CreationDate="2019-09-12T02:34:48.143" Score="2" ViewCount="1431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to transcribe some images of illustrations of hieroglyphics into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_block)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unicode&lt;/a&gt;. I am having a hard time and right off the bat there seem to be slight variations in the structure of the hieroglyph. For example, in the illustration attached, the first ellipse has a line off to the side, while the one on Unicode has either 2 lines or no line . Then the bird, how do you pick a bird?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                    &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                              &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are about 50 birds that don't vary too much for the most part. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; tells us this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = alef&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = tyu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = Horus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... many don't have a meaning on wikipedia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = eternity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = divine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = Thoth, god of scribes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = To find or discover&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = to be good / beautiful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = small or bad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = son of / daughter of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt; = pluralizes words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then you see a bird like in the image on the attachment, and then go like &quot;How do I decide which bird is the right one?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, how would you take the image below and make it into Unicode? How do you know you're picking the right one, even though there are such slight variations in the Unicode hieroglyphs like the birds, and also in the drawings like the attachment shows (comparing its glyphs with Unicode).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MH2lS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MH2lS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is all of the Unicode characters which are possible for transcribing glyphs into Unicode. It seems like a lot are missing, I don't know, what do you think? What are your thoughts? How are you supposed to accurately translate an image into Unicode (or some more extensive code perhaps). Unicode is based on the Gardiner numberings from what I've seen, but maybe that doesn't cover all of the possible glyphs. So what are you supposed to do? Anyway, here are the glyphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                  &#xA;                                &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T22:43:25.227" Title="A Lesson in Transcribing Egyptian Hieroglyphics" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32454" CreationDate="2019-09-12T03:05:41.583" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could use tAta.  This Uses the nOtAtion for thE english &quot;long&quot; vowels employed in the intrOductory section of &lt;em&gt;The Sound Pattern of English&lt;/em&gt;, a standard handbook.  Capitalized letters are used for the sounds of the letter names A E I O U. Thus, Age, mE, mI, gO, Use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastEditorUserId="8022" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T03:10:54.987" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T03:10:54.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33477" CreationDate="2019-09-12T04:34:47.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tamil falls in the &quot;none of the above&quot; category, that is, it does not have stress, and it also does not have predictable or lexical stress (Arabic has predictable stress, English has lexical stress). Krishnamurti 2003 (The Dravidian Languages) holds that none of the Dravidian languages have stress (and none have been reputed to have tone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T04:34:47.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33478" CreationDate="2019-09-12T06:15:34.987" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Gardiner's classification system. It's what Unicode (and every major dictionary I know of) uses, and is quite comprehensive; pretty much anything you come across in everyday Egyptology will be listed in there somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gardiner also includes a list of notable variants for each sign: distinct graphical forms that should be considered to represent the same underlying symbol. (&quot;Allographs&quot;?) For example, here's the very beginning of his list, showing A1 through A3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IY6vE.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IY6vE.png&quot; alt=&quot;beginning of gardiner&amp;#39;s list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While A1 and A1B looks very different, they're stylistic variants on the same theme, and should be read the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to convert a hieroglyphic inscription to Unicode, the first step is looking up each symbol in a good copy of Gardiner's list, then converting from Gardiner number to Unicode codepoint. (The second step, thankfully, is easy to automate, and I've got a Python script somewhere that does it for me.) I'm pretty sure Gardiner's work is in the public domain, so it shouldn't be hard to find a good electronic copy—Wikimedia Commons has one somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, this inscription starts out &lt;code&gt;D21 Z1 N35 O1 D21 X1 G17 N5 Z1&lt;/code&gt;. In conventional transliteration, this is &lt;em&gt;r n prt m hrw&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;chapter of coming forth during the day&quot;—do you recognize that phrase? It shows up at the beginning of several chapters of the Book of the Dead, though it usually has a determinitive &lt;code&gt;D54&lt;/code&gt; in the middle, and spells out &lt;em&gt;hrw&lt;/em&gt; a bit more phonetically. (&lt;em&gt;Prt&lt;/em&gt; &quot;proceeding&quot; is usually written &lt;code&gt;O1 D21 X1 D54&lt;/code&gt; to distinguish it from &lt;em&gt;prt&lt;/em&gt; &quot;the month of Prt&quot;, written &lt;code&gt;O1 D21 X1 N5&lt;/code&gt;, and other similar words. In actual spoken Egyptian the vowels probably distinguished these, but those vowels weren't included in writing, so determinitives took their place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T22:43:25.227" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T22:43:25.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33478" CreationDate="2019-09-12T06:23:22.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Meta; to be removed once the question edited) This post has a seed of a good question, but it is a bit wordy, meaning it contains useless information (all letterforms), subjective/open-ended parts (like &quot;what do you think?&quot;), plus asking several questions in one. I suggest you to edit it to make it more succinct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interesting question I see here is, &lt;strong&gt;How to tell letterforms apart?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring to Doug Cooper's of the Center for Research in Computational Linguistics paper, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How do Thais Tell Letters Apart?&lt;/a&gt;. Although it is about another language (Thai), there are several key points that help you understand the principle of deciphering an arbitrary font and figure out what letter you're looking at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each letter has its &lt;strong&gt;distinct feature&lt;/strong&gt; that makes it different from other letters. Otherwise, the alphabet would be useless at all.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In case of Egyptian, each &quot;bird&quot; letter is somehow distinct; either by kind (falcon, owl, flamingo, etc.) or by pose (on a boat, in a nest, flying, etc.) or number (two of species) or whatever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In whatever script or written variation, the letterforms &lt;strong&gt;retain their distinction&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To tell the letterforms apart, you are not supposed to analyze the entire character; &lt;strong&gt;compare these distinct features&lt;/strong&gt; instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you should keep the entire alphabet in your memory for that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In some languages, &lt;strong&gt;the stroke order&lt;/strong&gt; is essential. Keep your eye open in what order the writer draws the strokes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/3068&quot;&gt;Deciphering a handwritten script&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1009" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T06:23:22.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33493" CreationDate="2019-09-12T09:29:46.240" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English and many European languages the instrumental is expressed with a preposition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I eat noodles &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; chopsticks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But &quot;with&quot; is not dedicated to this function and has other uses such as the comitative &quot;I eat dinner &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; my parents.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another construction for the instrumental in English would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use chopsticks to eat noodles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with a case system, there is sometimes a specific instrumental case. In others, another case my do double duty for the instrumental, or one of those cases in combination with specific prepositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chinese, the construction I know is like the second English one, using 用 for &quot;use&quot; in a serial verb construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Thai use? I'm in Thailand but haven't found a way to ask my local friends that they get what I'm asking (-: I've been unable to successfully Google for it so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it may use เอา and maybe in a serial verb construction, so maybe a bit like Chinese? But maybe it's like English and has more than one way to express it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="51" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T12:15:27.723" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T12:36:35.467" Title="How does the Thai language express the instrumental?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cases&gt;&lt;thai&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2019-09-12T10:25:15.597" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my own terms, syntax is the relation between semantics. If the relation gives new semantics, then syntax is semantics by syllogism. The reverse also holds: Semantics describes the syntax of objects. Which is first is undecidable if not meaningless, unless grounded in a thorough understanding of the speech aparatus and its interrelation with the workings of the mind in general. Category theorists observe syntax-semantics-duality (e.g. Stone-Duality), with the empty set or the void-type as initial elements. I wonder for the initial and terminal elements of thought: &lt;em&gt;Ex nihilo quodlibet.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T10:25:15.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9044" CreationDate="2019-09-12T20:45:49.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Jakobsen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jakob Jakobsen&lt;/a&gt; might be of interest to you.  Not strictly &lt;code&gt;Old Norse&lt;/code&gt; but the vast majority of the words in the following publications are of &lt;code&gt;Old West Norse&lt;/code&gt; origins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland [Two Volumes]. First printed in Copenhagen 1928.  Reprinted in Lerwick 1985&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dialect and place names of Shetland.  Lerwick 1897. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924026356406/page/n10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Version&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Place-Names of Shetland.  First printed Copenhagen &amp;amp; London 1936.  Reprinted Kirkwall 1993.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be able to help source these if that was helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25438" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T20:45:49.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32443" CreationDate="2019-09-12T22:38:43.590" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bert, your question requires a complete study to get a chronology for the words mentioned. As a loan word grazing through time and nations it seems almost impossible to point to an origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BQR may relate to ‘butcher’ as בשר (bsr) means ‘meat’. Latin macello (butcher) may relate to muscle and מהכוחַיִל (mhcuchjl) meaning ‘from the force’ in Hebrew and beef is mostly muscles and muscles are parts of the body that give strength. The letter ‘m’ in the Hebrew word I would in this&#xA;case call an aglutinative prefix which in itself means ‘from’. We could pose that muscle has Semitic roots. BQR is harder to pinpoint but if the B is replaced by an S we get words like Turkish sığır besides words like boğa and bacağı (bull and leg). Egyptian wsr (F12-S29-D21) meaning powerful shows a description of the bull. All in all some conclusions can be made. I apply one of the rules I found in animal naming that a name of an animal is based on a description of a characteristic of the animal or its use for humans (or sometimes geographical reasons). In this case descriptive: its powerful muscles. And beef (use as meat). Osm (the Osman example) shows an invertion of musc(le). עם הכוח חיל a Hebrew phrase that is possibly cognate to muscle oruscle is its corrupted compound. Os-m/Osm/Ox-m (from power). Another indicator is the letter Alef which is /a/ but means ‘strength’ and is a bull’s head’. We know that cattle was domesticated long before all these languages arose. So we have to look for clues in culture and function, characteristics and usefulness of these animals in their names. These names still contain that knowledge if we dare to look for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T22:38:43.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33499" CreationDate="2019-09-13T08:46:25.287" Score="4" ViewCount="1941" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a word list for Phoenician but &lt;a href=&quot;http://ancientroadpublications.com/Studies/AncientLanguage/Phoenician.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is all I've found online (a short list, who knows how accurate it is). The only books (without previews unfortunately) I could find were these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0891301267&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Phoenician_Punic_dictionary.html?id=bh_jdzIT9GQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phoenician-Punic dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (OUT OF PRINT)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Phoenician-Punic Dictionary is the most comprehensive word thesaurus of the Phoenician language yet collected and published, and a unique informational sourcebook for the Phoenician literature and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last one sounds promising but I can't see any demo. It looks like it's at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/search/o247963897&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berkeley library&lt;/a&gt; (yay), so maybe that's the only option. Does anyone have any experience with this, are there any resources online? I am specifically looking for glyph-sequences and their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google is not showing me anything otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also looking for Etruscan dictionaries, but there is even less. Didn't find any books to reference, perhaps maybe &lt;a href=&quot;http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b15126939~S1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; though. Has a nice review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the barest of bones when it comes to resources on the Etruscan language, printed and published in the cheapest way possible. The information it presents is scant at best, reading like it was a plagiarized Wikipedia article. I recommend The Etruscan Language: an Introduction by Bonfante instead. You'll actually get something out of that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not used to there not being at least 5 or 10 online references :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T05:43:44.867" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T01:31:28.440" Title="Do there exist any Phoenician or Etruscan dictionaries online?" Tags="&lt;resource-request&gt;&lt;phoenician&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33489" CreationDate="2019-09-13T10:34:51.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Etruscan, I suggest this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://diachronica.pagesperso-orange.fr/TMCJ_vol_3.2_Fournet_Etruscan.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://diachronica.pagesperso-orange.fr/TMCJ_vol_3.2_Fournet_Etruscan.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It's based on Bonfante and it's free :):)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T10:34:51.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33489" CreationDate="2019-09-13T10:57:32.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there are no online dictionaries for Phoenician. To those two that you have already found &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions&lt;/em&gt; by Hoftijzer and Jongeling can be added. But in it are data on other languages beside Phoenician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16677" LastEditorUserId="16677" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T11:37:49.070" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T11:37:49.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33484" CreationDate="2019-09-13T12:36:35.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The serial verb construction is the most common and least marked way of expressing the instrumental meaning. Among the verbs used in the first verb position include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;เอา (&lt;em&gt;ao&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;ใช้ (&lt;em&gt;chái&lt;/em&gt;) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;นำ (&lt;em&gt;nam&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Su7xu4FXfEcC&amp;amp;pg=PA177&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quoted here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;เขาใช้มีดตัดเนื้อ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kăo chái mêet dtàt néua&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;he take knife cut meat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a version with ด้วย (&lt;em&gt;dûai&lt;/em&gt;), which literally means &quot;together with&quot;, but it is highly marked, and believed to be related to / calqued from Khmer. The word order parallels the English one &lt;code&gt;(VERB + DIRECT OBJECT + ด้วย / with + INSTRUMENT)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T12:36:35.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-13T14:09:11.403" Score="2" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read in the wikipedia about aspiration that &quot;voiced consonants are seldom actually aspirated&quot;, unlike their unvoiced counterparts. It does not seem so to me. Assuming that aspiration is the puff of air that comes out of my mouth when I pronounce a plosive consonant, I feel the same puff of air with my hand when speaking &quot;big&quot; or &quot;pit&quot;. I don't know if it is relevant, but I am not a native English speaker (I'm Brazilian). What have I misunderstood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T15:12:18.937" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T17:15:26.953" Title="Aspiration of voiced consonants" Tags="&lt;consonants&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;stops&gt;&lt;aspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-13T15:40:24.083" Score="2" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly there is a difference between the gerund form of the verb &quot;read&quot; and  the noun &quot;reading.&quot;  Is the word-formation process of the latter different in that its -ing suffix is derivational?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26616" LastEditorUserId="1270" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T10:50:26.007" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T10:50:26.007" Title="Is _ing a derivational suffix in the noun &quot;reading&quot; (as in the event--e.g. a poetry reading)?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;morphological-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33494" CreationDate="2019-09-13T15:48:05.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Aspiration&quot; is used in multiple ways, phonetically and phonologically, which can lead to some confusion, and Wiki reflects that confusion. Given that you're appealing to physical production and not phonology, I assume you don't care about aspiration as a phonological property, you just are about production (Wiki articles have many authors so there is no consistent perspective). Phonetically, &#xA;there literally are no voiced aspirates. Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson proffer a phonetic definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Having a greater rate of airflow than occurs in modal voice before or&#xA;  after a stricture; arytenoid cartilages may be further apart than for&#xA;  voiceless sounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also distinguish aspiration from breathy voice = murmur, which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vocal folds vibrating but without appreciable contact; arytenoid&#xA;  cartilages further apart than in modal voice; higher rate of airflow&#xA;  than in modal voice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that &quot;breathy voice&quot; combines the properties of aspiration (increased airflow) with the properties of voicing (vocal fold vibration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ladefoged and Maddieson definition defines a basically phonetic distinction contrast to a different type of phonation, namely modal voice. &#xA;A voiceless aspirated stop has a greater rate of airflow after its stricture, compared to a (modal) unaspirated voiceless stop. This does not mean that there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; airflow after release of a stricture – there always is airflow. What it means is that there is a high rate of airflow after the release of stricture, but all stops have some increased airflow after the stricture is released. Instead, we talk of the &lt;em&gt;release burst&lt;/em&gt; of [t], vs [tʰ]. A voiced stop may also have a release burst, so you may detect a &quot;puff of air&quot;, but it's not a big puff of air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tactile percept of a &quot;puff of air&quot; is not a particularly reliable means of measuring airflow - you need an airflow mask to measure airflow. The increased airflow associated with release of stricture is very high, very briefly, as the intraoral pressure is relieved and the vocal folds can move back into position for voicing. Aspiration is more than just that release, it is the entire pattern of increased airflow. Phoneticians usually speak of voice onset time as the measure of &quot;aspiration&quot;, so aspiration is not a fundamental phonetic term, it's a phonological terms that phoneticians employ because of phonological contrasts, and they want to say something about the phonetics of [pʰ] vs [p] in Thai, English or Navaho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that people thought of &quot;aspiration&quot; in terms of a puff of air is historical (from old ideas about phonetics). The term &quot;aspiration&quot; was invented in the context of knowledge of Indo-European languages, and given the similarity between Sanskrit &quot;bh&quot; versus Greek &quot;ph&quot;, it's not inappropriate to extract the unifying property, the &quot;puff of air&quot;, but that's not how we define laryngeal states now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the phonological unity of breathy voiced stops and voiceless stops with long VOT lag, there is an Indic-specific phonetic feature that encourages the use of the expression &quot;voiced aspirate&quot; (thus the Wiki article). &#xA;There is a difference in the production of the breathy stops in Indic versus breathy voiced stops found in a number of African language such as Shona. The difference resides in part in the type of breathy voicing (turbulent versus nonturbulent, respectively) and, apparently, the timing of the wide-glottis configuration (late, in Indic). One would not think of the typical non-Indic breathy voiced stops as having a &quot;puff of air&quot;, but that is a typical and appropriate percept of how Indic [bʰ] et al. are produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T17:15:26.953" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T17:15:26.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33495" CreationDate="2019-09-13T17:14:38.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no derivation or inflection. It is a conversion or also called zero derivation. A verb becomes a noun without affixation. Sometimes, the nominalisation is based on the bare form (e.g change), the past form (e.g chosen) or the imperfective form (e.g reading). So, there are many ways to transform a verb into a noun, depending on whether the referent is an action or not, (in/)animate, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22688" LastEditorUserId="22688" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T18:52:09.130" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T18:52:09.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-13T17:54:15.703" Score="5" ViewCount="808" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read some time ago that [z] is the voiced counterpart of [s], as [d]-[t], [g]-[k], [b]-[p] and [v]-[f]. For all pairs except the first, I was able to consciously perceive it by starting to pronounce the unvoiced consonant, adding voice and realizing that I am now doing a voiced consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I start to produce a S (AFAIK a hissing sound) and add voice, I don't get a Z, but rather a hissed Z. AFAIK Z is the same sound a flying insect (eg bee) does and has no hiss on it. Or is that another phone? Am I the only one who perceives this difference between a voiced S and Z? I don't know if I'm mispronouncing [s] or [z], somehow affected by my native language (Brazilian Portuguese) or by some regionalism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T00:11:13.200" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T17:20:43.983" Title="Is voice really the only difference between [s] and [z]?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33489" CreationDate="2019-09-13T17:55:51.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Krahmalkov's &lt;em&gt;Phoenician-Punic Grammar&lt;/em&gt; contains a high-quality (but unfortunately short) dictionary, focusing mostly on functional words and affixes rather than content words. It seems like it's meant to be used alongside a database of triconsonantal roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT: Krahmalkov also has a&lt;/em&gt; Phoenician-Punic Dictionary &lt;em&gt;alongside the grammar, and I finally managed to get my hands on a digital copy. So I can say now, they're much more useful combined than separately.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glen Gordon (an amateur Etruscanist) used to maintain a &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/paleoglot/Home/09417289.xml?attredirects=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database&lt;/a&gt; of all attested Etruscan word-forms with tentative translations. His translations don't always agree with the mainstream consensus, to put it lightly, and I'm not sure the database is still updated, but it's a great way to check if a particular form is attested or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, since you're &amp;quot;looking for glyph-sequences and their meaning&amp;quot;—I would highly recommend reading a grammar of the language, if possible, instead of just looking words up in a list. There's much more to a language than the meaning of each individual word; to translate coherently, you also need to understand the morphology, the syntax, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T01:21:08.813" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T01:21:08.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33498" CreationDate="2019-09-13T18:06:41.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phonetically, the only distinction between a pure, unaltered IPA &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; and a pure, unaltered IPA &lt;code&gt;[z]&lt;/code&gt; is voicing. However, most languages don't use pure, unaltered IPA &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[z]&lt;/code&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One phoneticist I know, for example, tends to pronounce English &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;[s͎]&lt;/code&gt;: a &quot;whistled&quot; sibilant with a very distinctive, high-pitched &quot;overtone&quot;. This makes his &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; very different from his &lt;code&gt;/z/&lt;/code&gt;, in more ways than simple voicing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say for sure without a recording, but your &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; may be similar, or have some other feature setting it apart from &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;. If you want to make sure, I'd suggest finding some good phonetic recordings (the ones made by Ladefoged are especially famous) and comparing your &lt;code&gt;/s/&lt;/code&gt; against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T18:06:41.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33498" CreationDate="2019-09-13T19:30:46.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, voice is not the only difference between /s/ and /z/.  /s/ is fortis (forcefully articulated), while /z/ is lenis (weakly articulated).  When I do your experiment, saying /s/ and adding voicing, without making other adjustments, I get exactly the result you report -- the /s/ made voiced doesn't sound anything like /z/ -- instead, it's an angry hornet sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-13T19:30:46.277" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33498" CreationDate="2019-09-13T19:38:02.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the symbols [s] and [z] typically refer to consonants with the same place of articulation, in terms of tongue and lip position (that exact place is different in different languages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are also both fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Differences in voicing often go with differences in pitch contours&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also supposed to be common for there to be difference in the pitch transitions betwen voiced and voiceless consonants and the following vowels (as mentioned in this Language Log article by Mark Liberman: &lt;a href=&quot;https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12799&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels&lt;/a&gt;, although it doesn't look at fricatives). I'm not sure how much of that (if any) is an automatic consequence of the difference in voice, but it seems that in some languages different pitches can become phonologized in syllables that originally had voiced or voiceless consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Differences in voicing often go with differences in duration&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read that in many languages, [s] and [z] tend to have a difference of duration, with [s] being longer than [z]. If I remember correctly, this is the case for the /s/ and /z/ of English, German, and Navajo (in the latter two languages, the phonetic voicing of /z/ may be weak or even absent). But either sound can be prolonged, so I don't think that a difference in duration is generally essential for the contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Araucaria mentions, in certain contexts, the duration of the preceding vowel is related to the /s/ vs. /z/ contrast in English, and I think I've read that this is also detectable in German, but I don't think this is a universal phenomenon, and I'm not sure how common it is outside of Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;fortis&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;lenis&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fortis&amp;quot; is a somewhat common term in literature, but I don't know what it means when talking about the phonetic qualities of sounds.* Unlike Greg Lee, I can't directly hear or feel a difference in the amount of force when I pronounce [s] and [z]--the idea of &amp;quot;forceful articulation&amp;quot; feels more like a metaphor to me, like calling palatalized consonants &amp;quot;soft&amp;quot; or velarized consonants &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it's come up in both Greg Lee's and Araucaria's answers, I thought I'd do more research on what &amp;quot;fortis&amp;quot; means. The preceding paragraph, which is what I wrote originally in this answer, is based on my inability to perceive this quality through personal introspection, as well as some statements in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortis_and_lenis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; that suggest that it is difficult or controversial to identify which measurable correlates of articulatory force (aside from voicing) are connected to phonological contrasts between consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found paper with some discussion that helped me a bit. &amp;quot;The Phonetics of Fortis and Lenis Consonants in Itunyoso Trique&amp;quot;, by Christian T. DiCanio, has a section titled &amp;quot;Defining 'strength'&amp;quot; (1.2, p. 244-245). DiCanio says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malécot (1966) attempted to provide some phonetic grounding for differences in articulatory energy between consonants. He concluded that the “intra-buccal air pressure impulse” was the primary correlate of force of articulation, where stops [p] and [t] were produced with greater intra-buccal air pressure than stops [b] and [d]. [Footnote 3: Yet Malécot did not consider that differences in voicing would have significantly contributed to the lower oral pressure and amplitude values that he observed.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 244)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three phonetic correlates which unambiguously reflect a stronger&#xA;primary articulation. First, one expects stronger articulations to involve greater constriction between two articulators (Fougeron and Keating 1997, Keating et al. 2000, and Lavoie 2001). The only articulation that can be responsible for this is greater muscular tension between the articulators. Second, one expects stops to have louder bursts if they are produced with greater muscular tension. Articulators with more muscular tension will close and release more quickly, causing burst intensity to increase (Debrock 1977 and Kohler 1984). Related to this is the fact that increased stiffness among articulators will result in more abrupt formant transitions into and out of a consonant and faster falling and rising intensity contours (Debrock 1977). Thus, one usually expects consonants with increased articulatory strength to be abruptly timed relative to the surrounding segments. While differences in the constriction degree of consonants are usually measured using articulatory measures (e.g., electropalatography [Lavoie 2001]), both burst amplitude and formant and intensity transitions can be measured acoustically&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 245)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether differences in any of these articulatory qualities have been found for a [s]/[z] pair in some language. DiCanio says burst intensity is relevant specifically for plosives, but [s] and [z] are fricatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think lower constriction is a fairly common characteristic of the voiced counterparts to non-sibilant voiceless fricatives. E.g., in many languages, voiced &amp;quot;fricatives&amp;quot; like  [β], [v], [ð], [ʝ], [ɣ], [ʁ] fairly often can be realized more like approximants than their voiceless counterparts [ɸ], [f], [θ], [ç], [x], [χ], and few languages have a contrast between voiced approximants and voiced fricatives at the same place of articulation: e.g. [v] and [ʋ] or [ɣ] and [ɰ]. But I'm not sure whether this is true of sibilant fricatives: I can't tell whether a less constricted, more approximant-y realization of [z] is possible. Diachronically, [z] can be subject to change into a rhotic approximant (a sound change called rhotacism), but the result of that change is no longer a sibilant consonant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T17:20:43.983" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-13T23:05:34.920" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about how the mind works, and how the mind dreams or simulates events. This seems to be an important part of how the brain works so it seems like we should have special words to describe these thoughts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could (imagined different available possibilities)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would (imagined most likely possibility given a situation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should (imagined a better possibility for some criteria)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &quot;I could've gone to the park today.&quot;, &quot;I would've won the race if my legs were longer.&quot;, &quot;I should've chosen the strawberry icecream.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if there are any more words like this? Which would give us an insight into how imagination works. For example, we might imagine a chess computer thinking of possible moves it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; do, imagining what an oponent &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; do, and then if it lost thinking about what it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of one more. That is &quot;might&quot;. But I'm not sure how this fits in. For example, &quot;If I annoy a kangaroo it might punch me.&quot; But then again, a kangaroo &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; punch me even if I don't annoy it. It seems like it's the same as &quot;could&quot; but just with a higher probability. Then again this might be to do with truth. As in &quot;It might've happened&quot; seems different to &quot;It could've happened&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might've (imagined a possible past event that is consistent with current knowledge of the present)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might (same as &quot;could?&quot; for future events?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T23:24:34.230" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T11:40:41.993" Title="What words relate to thinking about possible events? (Could've Should've Would've)" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;modality&gt;&lt;modal-verbs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-10-03T09:43:54.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33498" CreationDate="2019-09-14T01:46:14.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;the voiced [z] requires a harmonic vibration to create a low frequency oscilation to modulate the voice and is, in my case, liable to fricate with as much of the tongue as possible. The voiceless [s] is just a noisy turbulence; any added voice is not necessarily harmonically modulated and the place of articulation may differ slightly, if only the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge from below, or the dents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact forming of the tongue can differ for channelling the air stream(s) differently in either case and not necessarily in the same manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;To my surprise, closed teeth aren't needed to produce the sounds, although the vibration between the teeth is needed for me to satisfy the feeling that I fully formed the phoneme. There is a strong prejudice against lisping in German, which might somehow explain that (I think I recall being called to order exactly once), quite different from thSpanish. German also lost &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, which Proto-Germanic presumably had.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T01:46:14.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T03:22:28.313" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about what the space of attested V2 languages looks like, particularly what happens to the part of the VP besides the finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially curious whether moving the non-finite part of the VP into the first position is allowed and what the distribution of languages that allow or prohibit it looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Non-finite_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V2 Word Order&lt;/a&gt; shows that some languages ordinarily put the rest of the VP after the finite verb and others ordinarily put the rest of the VP at the end of the clause, but doesn't explicitly mention what constituent orders are mandatory or prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The V2 principle regulates the position of finite verbs only; its&#xA;  influence on non-finite verbs (infinitives, participles, etc.) is&#xA;  indirect. Non-finite verbs in V2 languages appear in varying positions&#xA;  depending on the language. In German and Dutch, for instance,&#xA;  non-finite verbs appear after the object (if one is present) in clause&#xA;  final position in main clauses (OV order). Swedish and Icelandic, in&#xA;  contrast, position non-finite verbs after the finite verb but before&#xA;  the object (if one is present) (VO order). That is, V2 operates on&#xA;  only the finite verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of what I'm talking about taken from German. I don't speak German and can't make grammaticality judgments, so I'll use a prepended &lt;code&gt;?&lt;/code&gt; to mark sentences that I'm &lt;em&gt;presuming are unacceptable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ordinary, unmarked word order is given below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Ich habe                        das         Buch gelesen.&#xA;1sg.nom have.1sg.PRES  DEF.MASC.nom/acc book.nom/acc  read.PP&#xA;      I have read the book.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what I've read, I'm guessing the non-finite portion of the VP must appear in the final position. I'm pretty sure the following sentence is not acceptable even though the finite verb &lt;code&gt;habe&lt;/code&gt; appears in the second position in the clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;?Ich habe gelesen das Buch.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other orders are possible so long as the finite verb second, rest of VP last constraint is respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Das Buch habe ich gelesen.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence I'm curious about, and have no idea about is this one ... where the non-finite part of the verb phrase is yanked from its normal position and put in the first position. If I had guess, I'd say it probably isn't grammatical because &lt;em&gt;gelesen&lt;/em&gt; is non-final.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;?Gelesen habe ich das Buch.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious whether German and other V2 languages allow that order in particular, and more generally how flexible V2 languages are about where the rest of the VP goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T03:22:28.313" Title="Are there any V2 languages that allow/prohibit movement of the non-finite part of the VP to the first position?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;v2&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T04:42:01.707" Score="0" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's Grammatical Moods page&lt;/a&gt; they list a bunch of different moods, but not all of them. I have yet to find a list of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; moods across languages (if you know of one please comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this post is I am trying to wrap my head around moods because they are not intuitive the way they are described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main thought/wondering/question is why the different moods are typically made as variations of a word root. It doesn't seem to be this way in English (we have chains of words to express modality, like &quot;I probably will have something like that in the future&quot;. But in some other language you might have the verb &quot;to have&quot; be &quot;foo&quot; and that whole sentence be &quot;inamanafoobaratimani&quot;. Whereas when you are having a sentence about &lt;em&gt;objects&lt;/em&gt; like &quot;The cat climbed up the big tree to eat its catch&quot;, the objects are typically separate, though the adjective/noun pairs might be one word like &quot;arborissimo&quot; or something for &quot;big tree&quot;. But you don't have &quot;cattreecatch&quot; as one word in some language, at least I don't think. (I am brand new to this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyways, another thing that factors into this is that it makes a lot of sense to have the &lt;em&gt;count&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt; be a modification of the word base. Like &quot;cloths&quot; pluralizing with the &quot;-s&quot;, or &quot;clicked&quot; with the &quot;-ed&quot;, it is short and to the point and shorter than &quot;click-in-the-past&quot; or something like that. Or &quot;click-more-than-one&quot; for plural. From what I've learned so far, Chinese does keep separate words for making things plural or tensed, which is cool, but many instead modify the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is how exactly, or why exactly, &lt;em&gt;mood&lt;/em&gt; is made as a modification of the word. I was just looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_verbs#Aorist_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit verbs&lt;/a&gt; and at the bottom they say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Taking into account the fact that the participial forms each decline in seven cases in three numbers across three genders, and the fact that the verbs each conjugate in three persons in three numbers, the primary, causative, and desiderative stems for this root when counted together have &lt;strong&gt;over a thousand forms&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do they do this? It seems so much more complicated and more to learn than having discrete words like &quot;probably, maybe, might, possible, hope, etc.&quot;, rather than varying the word prefixes/suffixes to include these features. My question is WHY. Why do they do it like this? In any language? How does it evolve? Is there something inherent in the way we think particularly about commands/probabilities/emotions/etc. (but not objects, actions, or other &quot;things&quot;) that causes us to make them modifications on bases, instead of just separate words? I'm thinking maybe by saying it in one word somehow &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; better, which is why it's (so much more?) common. I don't know. I want to know some reasons why languages make these word modifications, rather than separate words, because &lt;em&gt;it seems so much less efficient&lt;/em&gt; from a computer-science standpoint, but there must be some benefit if it's such a widespread phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T20:17:46.290" Title="Why do languages modify their words for different moods?" Tags="&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;mood&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T09:58:56.063" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to find a copy of the Avesta in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avestan Script&lt;/a&gt;, but the closest I could find was from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.avesta.org/avesta.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.avesta.org/avesta.html&lt;/a&gt;, which is written in some sort of romanized script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ashem vohû...(1 u 3). fravarâne mazdayasnô zarathushtrish vîdaêvô ahura-tkaêshô, hâvanêe ashaone ashahe rathwe ýasnâica vahmâica xshnaothrâica frasastayaêca, sâvanghêe vîsyâica ashaone ashahe rathwe ýasnâica vahmâica xshnaothrâica frasastayaêca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;âthrô ahurahe mazdå puthrahe tava âtarsh puthra ahurahe mazdå xshnaothra ýasnâica vahmâica xshnaothrâica frasastayaêca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't completely scoured the site yet, but doing a brief look around I couldn't find what this &quot;encoding&quot; was, what the rules were. I would like to know (short of if you know of a link to a unicode Avesta document in Avestan Script) how to convert this romanized encoding back to Avestan Script, and if it would be exactly as original. I don't think it would be because there seems to be flexibility in whether or not you choose a ligature or not, etc, so there's probably no way to recreate the original Avestan Script version from this text. But who knows (hence my question). Wondering if you could clarify that, and otherwise point me to the rules for converting this to Avestan Script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/languages/#oral&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The earliest known written text of the Avesta that has survived is a fragment of a 10th century CE Sogdian manuscript discovered in the 'Caves of a Thousand Buddhas' - a cliff wall near the city of Dunhuang, a town on the Silk Road in northwest China. The manuscript was written in the Sogdian using the Avestan script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T12:03:43.597" Title="If either there exists an Avesta book online in Avestan Script, or if you can transfer back romanized Avestan to Avestan Script reliably" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33508" CreationDate="2019-09-14T12:03:43.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the complete text of the Avesta look here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217560/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217560/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avestan script is not yet available on unicode, but they are working on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T12:03:43.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33507" CreationDate="2019-09-14T15:48:13.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time a language &quot;decides&quot; that it should be simpler to have discrete words to express ideas, somebody (the speakers) comes along and messes up the system, by creating idiosyncratic meanings (&quot;kick the bucket&quot;, &quot;look &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; the answer&quot;, &quot;give X a break&quot;), and by smashing stuff together into one word (who says &quot;will not&quot; anymore?). Languages are very short-sighted: they can't see the future, and they can't compute the consequences of lexicalization. Those speakers proto-Bantu could not foresee that turning their multi-word constructions with &quot;go&quot; into paradigmatic inflectional differences would eventually result is a somewhat arbitrary set of verb forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not any more complicated and it isn't more to learn if you have to learn a string of morphemes and rules for combining them, as opposed to having to learn the same number of words and rules for combining them. The word/morpheme distinction is vastly overrated. What &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; more useful is semantic compositionality and formal transparency. However, transparency and compositionality are at cross-purposes with compactness (information-richness). So you have a choice between a single brief span of sound where you have to look up the meaning and you get a lot of information, or you have to parse a longer sequence of sounds and compute the interpretation. While you have more expressive freedom if each piece of information has a unique form, you rarely need that freedom. A politeness marker has greatest utility in getting people to do things, and perhaps least utility when talking about things expected but non-realized in the past. Rather than having 6 dozen words that you have to independently string together to convey all of the things that &quot;mood&quot; conveys, you can just conventionally convey some of them simultaneously, forgoing the demand (which people do not have, except as an academic desideratum) for infinite informational precision. Conventionalizing useful packages of information into brief tags isn't that big of a cognitive deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbs &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; special, in the enterprise of constructing a proposition. Verbs have requirements that other things be specified, e.g. they need subjects, they may demand objects, or a specification about the proposition in terms of time. By gluing the parts together within the verb, you are guaranteed that the elements required for interpreting the non-argument parts of a predicate are &quot;local&quot;, that is you don't have to go hunting through the sentence to find out whether the speaker is saying that the proposition is true or is saying that it &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; true, or that he wishes that it were true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem of &quot;mood&quot; is that it is not a particularly coherent category in the set of things which are &quot;not about the arguments&quot;. The terms &quot;tense&quot; and &quot;aspect&quot; have been assigned particular definitions in terms of what they convey; for those languages with negative inflections, we have &quot;polarity&quot;. IMO the Wiki listing of &quot;moods&quot; is a fraction of the bits of information that is actually conventionalized into inflectional differences in verbs (though their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grammatical_moods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;category list&lt;/a&gt; is more informative). You don't find people talking about &quot;focus moods&quot;, yet focus is often one of those things that is conventionally signalled by inflectional form (and it isn't tense, aspect or polarity). There is no grammatical term in the set of &quot;moods&quot; that refers to &quot;denial of presupposition/assertion&quot;, but that's one of those things that can be signaled by inflectional choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T15:48:13.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33507" CreationDate="2019-09-14T19:45:00.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;First things first:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &amp;quot;grammatical mood&amp;quot;, like the concept of &amp;quot;word&amp;quot;, is one of those things that works great &lt;em&gt;within a language&lt;/em&gt; (as a tool to make a particular theory/explanation more elegant) but kind of breaks down when applied cross-linguistically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, some languages have tense, aspect, and mood being orthogonal axes, where any given verb can choose one of each. In Latin, you can mix and match however you like between [present|past|future] [imperfective|perfective|aoristic] [indicative|subjunctive] (*).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other languages, tense, aspect, and mood are combined into a single marking, and you can only choose one. In Lingála, &amp;quot;present&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;recent past&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;gnomic&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;habitual&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;subjunctive&amp;quot; (†) all take up the same slot: every verb gets one and only one of them. Sometimes this combination is called a &amp;quot;TAM&amp;quot;, short for &amp;quot;tense-aspect-mood&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;tense-aspect marking&amp;quot; if mood isn't included).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; break down the Lingála TAMs into tenses, aspects, and moods: recent past is a tense, habitual is an aspect, subjunctive is a mood. But it just isn't particularly &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; to do so, since they're all mutually exclusive. You can't create a subjunctive habitual, for example, even though semantically &amp;quot;if I did this over and over&amp;quot; isn't nonsensical or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In still other languages it's a mix: Ancient Greek mixes mood with tense (indicative can co-exist with any tense, but imperative, subjunctive, and optative are mutually exclusive with tense marking), but can mix and match moods with aspects to your heart's content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Now, to get to your actual question…&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas when you are having a sentence about objects like &amp;quot;The cat climbed up the big tree to eat its catch&amp;quot;, the objects are typically separate…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Define &amp;quot;typically&amp;quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many languages incorporate the subject into the verb: Latin &lt;em&gt;tē amō&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I love you&amp;quot; versus &lt;em&gt;tē amat&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;she loves you&amp;quot;, for example, has descendants all across the Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many others incorporate the object into the verb as well: Swahili &lt;em&gt;nakupenda&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I love you&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;unapenda&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;you love me&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages take this to extremes: Rwanda &lt;em&gt;aranahakizibakun-someesheesherereza&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;she is also making them read the book, using the glasses, to you, for me, in the house&amp;quot; (‡).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other languages have &lt;em&gt;agglutinative morphology&lt;/em&gt;, where a huge number of morphemes can be combined into a single word, with morphology taking over the job of syntax in other languages: Inuktitut &lt;em&gt;Parimunngauniralauqsimanngittunga&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I never said I wanted to go to Paris!&amp;quot; (§).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But anyways, another thing that factors into this is that it makes a lot of sense to have the &lt;em&gt;count&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;tense&lt;/em&gt; be a modification of the word base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why those things in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the count but not the gender (Latin &lt;em&gt;amīcus&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;friend (m)&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;amīca&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;friend (f)&amp;quot;), the size (Swahili &lt;em&gt;nyumba&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;house&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;chumba&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;room&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;jumba&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;mansion&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;ka-umba&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;apartment (dialectal)&amp;quot;), the general type of object (Swahili &lt;em&gt;Mswahili&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;Swahili person&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Kiswahili&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;Swahili language&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Uswahili&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;Swahili-ness&amp;quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the tense but not the aspect (Ancient Greek &lt;em&gt;epaídeusa&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I taught (in the past)&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;epaídeuon&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I taught (in the past, repeatedly or for a long time, what's important happened during the duration)&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;epepaideúkē&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I taught (in the past, it was completed, what's important are the aftereffects)&amp;quot;), or the evidentiality (Turkish &lt;em&gt;geldi&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;he arrived&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;gelmiş&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;I heard that he arrived&amp;quot;), or the polarity (Japanese &lt;em&gt;amegafutteiru&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;it's raining&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;amegafutteinai&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;it's not raining&amp;quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of what to incorporate into the morphology, and what to give to the syntax instead, is &lt;strong&gt;pretty much arbitrary&lt;/strong&gt;. Mandarin has basically no verbal morphology at all, relying on syntax and additional words for all of these. Inuktitut uses morphology for all of them, requiring syntax and extra words for basically nothing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern English is somewhere in the middle of the road, but closer to the Mandarin side: we use verbal morphology to indicate past vs non-past, and third person singular versus everything else, and that's it. But that's just English; other languages do it differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know some reasons why languages make these word modifications, rather than separate words, because &lt;em&gt;it seems so much less efficient&lt;/em&gt; from a computer-science standpoint…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an information-theory standpoint, all that matters in the end are the bits. Some languages use fewer words, but more bits of information per word (since there are more possible words). Other languages use more words, but fewer bits of information per word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, as a recent study showed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/32427/10559&quot;&gt;it all evens out&lt;/a&gt;. Some languages have more bits per word, some languages have more bits per syllable, but in the end, the fundamental rate of information transfer is always right around 39.15 bits per second. It seems like this is a sort of fundamental limitation of human biology, and languages will evolve to reach it, by whatever means necessary—there's &lt;em&gt;tremendous&lt;/em&gt; selection pressure being applied every second of every day, after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, languages evolve in different directions. Romance dropped a whole lot of Classical Latin's morphology, using extra words instead. Then it incorporated some of those extra words into the verb, turning them into affixes. Modern Romance languages use a mixture of both. The exact details seem to come down to the vicissitudes of fate—which indicates that the different options are about equally useful for communication, and the choice of one or the other comes down to historical accident more than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Morphologically, not all of these forms are completely distinct: the future subjunctive looks like the present subjunctive, the present perfective looks like the past aoristic, etc. But you can still mix and match freely, and Vulgar Latin took steps to separate out the ones that got too ambiguous (such as the present perfective ~ past aoristic combination).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(†) And more! Different authors list different numbers, but in my own work I've separated out thirteen morphologically distinct TAMs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(‡) Example taken from Kimenyi (2002).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(§) Example taken from Mallon (2000).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from those, all examples are my own. If there are errors in them, blame me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T20:17:46.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T21:18:16.847" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to the field of linguistics so please forgive any ignorance or naivety, but there is something I have been thinking about recently and cannot find anything about it online. I suppose there are two parts to my question. The first part is simply asking for the name of a phenomena so I can read up on it more and the second is asking if my assumption on the phenomena is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the name of the effect when an individual makes a mistake in the fact of a sentence but doesn't realise until they say something which contradicts that fact. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. someone meant to say &quot;I went to the shop bought 3 apples, then bought 2 later in the day forgetting the previous purchase, now I have 5 apples.&quot; When they actually say &quot;I went to the shop bought 5 apples, then bought 2 later in the day forgetting the previous purchase, now I have 5 apples.&quot; and don't realise the mistake on the first number of apples until the final mention of the total. I see this happen quite often and also see it happen when a contradiction doens't take place, i.e. no contradiction is made and the person doesn't realise they made a mistake until later on or when questioned about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this imply that as we speak a sentence, the &quot;state&quot; of the sentence is somehow held in the brain and not checked for veracity but only consistency? I don't want to make any claims which are too far reaching but could this be part of misunderstanding people? We are not as concerned with making sure what we say is correct (or the meaning we intend to convey) but more so that it is self-consistent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks in advance for any responses :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26635" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T21:18:16.847" Title="Carrying a mistake in a sentence until contradiction" Tags="&lt;psycholinguistics&gt;&lt;sentences&gt;&lt;logic&gt;&lt;natural-language-understanding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T22:05:49.580" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sentence might be split into subject+verb+object order. But there are two ways of doing this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) S = subject+(verb+object)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) S = (subject+verb)+object&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say the first one is more natural because the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The cat (killed the chicken and ate the frog).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems more natural than the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(The girl stroked and the boy fed) the cat.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It would probably be said &quot;The girl stroked the cat and the boy fed it.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this may just be because usually one object can do several things, whilst it is rarer to talk about several things doing something to one object. (In fact it's hard to think of any examples!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But although awkward we can still understand what the second sentence means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it is the same in all lanugages? Or maybe this says something about how sentences are ordered in our brains? I'm not sure quite how the rules of conjunctions work in other languages other than English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24783" LastEditorUserId="24783" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T22:18:14.717" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T17:41:58.153" Title="Unusual sentence grouping with conjunctions" Tags="&lt;conjunctions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T22:36:34.770" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen articles covering semantics-related topics that present a formalism where every finite verb receives an event argument. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11578/how-to-represent-a-dative-verb-in-first-order-logic#comment29388_11578&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; on a question on this site &lt;em&gt;briefly&lt;/em&gt; describes what an event argument is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you might be able to use this event machinery to explain why finite verbs in various sentences receive perfective or imperfective aspect. The idea being that the &lt;em&gt;perfective&lt;/em&gt; introduces a new event and the &lt;em&gt;imperfective&lt;/em&gt; does not. This isn't my idea. I'm cobbling together some half-remembered ideas presented in a few papers I read a long time ago, I'll try to find a source. I suspect the real distinction is more complicated ... and the choice of aspectual marking depends on more than whether the event in question is a new discourse participant or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I wonder if there's a language with an aspect distinction that's close-to-ideal from the perspective of events and could be used to support a theory of events as verb arguments in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there are any languages with a 2-way aspectual distinction that aligns particularly well with the &quot;am I introducing a new event?&quot; test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13573" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T03:32:39.237" Title="Languages with an aspectual split indicating whether a new &quot;event&quot; is introduced" Tags="&lt;aspect&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-15T15:45:23.660" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Yamato period (300 - 710) had an organized ruler, civilozation, etc. However, only in Nara period (710 - 794), which existed along with the Tang dynasty of China, a Japanese script and language were defined by 万葉仮名 (Manyogana). These where phonetic Chinese characters, forming an &quot;alphabet&quot; and a proto-script for Hiragana and Katakana. &#xA;So my question is, what script or language did they use during the Yamato period? I can not imagine Chinese, but maby an early Japanese using Chinese characters? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26636" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T15:45:23.660" Title="What language/script did Japan during the Yamato period and earlier have?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;chinese&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33498" CreationDate="2019-09-16T17:15:27.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The presence or absence of vocal fold vibration is the most widely used distinction to notionally differentiate so-called fortis and lenis consonants. However, it is not the only one, and for this reason, the following transcriptions do not indicate the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b̥e̞d̥&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pe̞t&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortis (notionally unvoiced) consonants generally differ from lenis ones in the following ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They require greater exertion of the lungs, resulting in higher intra-oral pressure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are generally of longer duration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When occurring in the coda of a syllable, they may have the effect&amp;mdash;where a contrast between fortis and lenis pairs is avaliable&amp;mdash;of clipping the vocalic elements of the syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may cause devoicing of a following vowel (known as aspiration).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T03:41:23.687" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T03:41:23.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-16T19:02:01.717" Score="0" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;in Arabic calāl جلال [#cll msd.] means :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;great and majestic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;greatness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this word derives from Arabic calla &quot; great&quot;- Aramean gēl, galā &quot; mound&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw this Arabic word, I compared it to the word &quot;excellent&quot; in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etymology of the word excellent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex &quot;out from&quot; (see ex-) + -cellere &quot;rise high, tower,&quot; related to celsus &quot;high, lofty, great,&quot; from PIE root *kel- (2) &quot;to be prominent; hill.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From ex- +‎ *cellō (“to rise”), one lost verb whose participle is celsus, from Proto-Indo-European *kelH- (“to rise”) (whence collis, columen etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the English and Arabic forms related? Is it evidence for Indo-Semitic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26641" LastEditorUserId="26641" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T20:05:34.000" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T20:39:40.613" Title="is english excellent and arabic galaal related?" Tags="&lt;indo-european&gt;&lt;semitic-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33524" CreationDate="2019-09-16T19:40:54.883" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they are not related, or even similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;جلال is /ʤalaal/ or /galaal/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T19:40:54.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33524" CreationDate="2019-09-16T20:39:40.613" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arabic جلال (&lt;em&gt;jalāl&lt;/em&gt;) is a well-established part of the triconsonantal root system, built from the root JLL &quot;greatness, magnitude, height&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Excellent&quot; meanwhile has cognates all across the Indo-European world (in Italic, Germanic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, and possibly others), which all trace back very nicely to a reconstructed root *&lt;em&gt;k-lH&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to be tall&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if there was a borrowing or relationship, it happened long, long ago, back before Arabic and English existed, in the distant era of Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European. (Otherwise we wouldn't see it so well-integrated into the descendant languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European influenced each other, or one borrowed the word from another, or they both got it from the same source, or they both descend from a common ancestor? Sure! Could this word be evidence for a relationship? Absolutely! Especially since, if I remember right, Arabic &lt;em&gt;j&lt;/em&gt; descends from Proto-Semitic *&lt;em&gt;g&lt;/em&gt;, a velar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;, and this is an important &quot;but&quot;, it takes a whole lot more than one word to establish a relationship between two languages. Languages have &lt;em&gt;a lot of words&lt;/em&gt; in them, so the law of large numbers says you're practically guaranteed to find some similar-looking words between any two languages if you look hard enough. And that applies to Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than it applies to modern languages, due to the inherent uncertainties in the reconstructions. It's not hard to come up with a dozen coincidental similarities between Swahili and Japanese, or Basque and Nahuatl, or any two languages you pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this could be evidence for &quot;Indo-Semitic&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; it could be a complete coincidence. And until you have a whole lot more evidence, hundreds of words &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; with clear phonological (and ideally morphological) correspondences between PIE and PS, the null hypothesis is that the two are unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T20:39:40.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T03:36:54.237" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I teach partner dancing.  I want to use language that makes sense to both Leads and Follows.  When partners are facing each other, moving together, &quot;Side!&quot; is usefully ambiguous, meaning (depending on context) &quot;right&quot; to the Leads and &quot;left&quot; to Follows.  In the same way, I want a word which can mean either &quot;Forward&quot; or &quot;Backward&quot;.  I can't find a word in English.  Is there such a word in any language? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, the ambiguity of &quot;Side!&quot; could be confusing, but if it's clear that one foot is free and the other is not, without doing extra-fancy manoeuvres &quot;Side!&quot; can only mean one direction to each dancer, and when partners are facing each other, one will move left and the other right, and that will be the same direction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: If not from another language, is there a useful term from science or some other discipline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26642" LastEditorUserId="26642" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T12:36:37.020" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T01:14:51.520" Title="&quot;Side!&quot; can mean &quot;Right!&quot; or &quot;Left!&quot;. Does any language have a word that can mean &quot;Forward&quot; or &quot;Backward&quot;?" Tags="&lt;ambiguity&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33527" CreationDate="2019-09-17T04:41:56.320" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Side is even more ambiguous with front side and back side too. Some words in English that you could agree on using in dance to express moving to the front and back are to hammock, to swing. to commute or to saw. With these metaphores you can express going back and forth. You could use lateral and longitudinal but Maybe the word you are looking for is ‘medial’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://flexikon-mobile.doccheck.com/de/Medial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://flexikon-mobile.doccheck.com/de/Medial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T04:41:56.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T07:15:39.503" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested to do a cross-cultural study of a conceptual metaphor 'Love is food' between English and Thai. I would like to compare the use of this metaphor in the two languages to find similarities and differences and see what they can reflect about the two cultures. I've seen some previous works done in this fashion. But my professor want me to focus more and identify what aspects I am going to compare. I'm really confused about what aspects there are. Anyone knows the answer or have any advice? Please help. Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26634" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T07:15:39.503" Title="What aspects of a conceptual metaphor can be compared cross-culturally?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;pragmatics&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-10-03T09:49:27.760" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T08:05:31.447" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;· &lt;strong&gt;endophora&lt;/strong&gt; is a general term that refers to either &lt;strong&gt;anaphora&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;cataphora&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;? does a general term exist that refers to either &lt;strong&gt;antecedents&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;postcedents&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20901" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T08:05:31.447" Title="does a general term exist for antecedents or postcedents?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33534" CreationDate="2019-09-17T15:37:07.987" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jamaliah Mohd. Ali, in her research paper, says, &quot;the use of indirectness in communication is an important aspect of Malay community life because one of its main intentions is conflict avoidance&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jml.um.edu.my/article/view/3564&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1995&lt;/a&gt;:19).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harnisch and David also say that if someone says &quot;you are like the moon&quot;, most young Malaysians will get offended instead of taking it as a praise (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=SZCQCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA434&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2015:434&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a fact that some communities like Malaysians prefer indirect discourses to direct discourses? Which other communities prefer to be unassuming?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T16:52:04.633" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T16:52:04.633" Title="Do some communities prefer indirect discourses to direct discourses?" Tags="&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;discourse-analysis&gt;&lt;discourse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32134" CreationDate="2019-09-17T15:56:45.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you familiar with any of the HPSG or lexicalist approaches to NLP that came about in the 90s or anything? This is strictly non-chomsky, non-transformational but it at least would give you some kind of starting point with how NLP is done from more of a linguistics perspective. I'd suggest looking at ALE grammars, LinGo or anything like this. I am by no means an expert on Transformational grammar and was taught in a very anti-Chomsky environment but from what I gather there is good reason no successful attempts have been made at creating a computational model of transformational grammar. As alluded to by Greg Lee, essentially there arent hard rules to be coded and trying to come up with them might not even be possible. The HPSG stuff I brought up is a direct response to this. The &quot;rules&quot; in HPSG are easily represented in a computer and there have been large grammars written for quite a few languages. If you want to look at this seriously, I would suggest looking at the GPSG book suggested by Greg Lee and then also look at Bob Carpenters &lt;em&gt;The Logic of Typed-Feature Structures&lt;/em&gt;. Carpenter's book is exactly what the title says and Typed-Feature structures are essentially how words/phrases get represented. I actually used all of this to write a mini-Mandarin grammar for a class in grad school. &lt;strong&gt;A little disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; Im sure you are aware, but this territory starts to become a little murky in that a lot of this stuff has been abandoned to a large extent in favor of the statistical methods you mentioned. It definitely is still used but it is frankly hard to find resources for it. My personal theory is that a majority of serious efforts are done in the private industry and essentially amount to large-scale knowledge representation as a backend for other tasks.  Also, in order to do this well you need to have an extremely strong grasp of the language you are working on. Syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology all can play a role in your grammar and if you haven't spent a significant amount of time working on that language you could easily be creating a grammar that is totally misinformed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26644" LastEditorUserId="26644" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T16:12:14.257" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T16:12:14.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33532" CreationDate="2019-09-17T16:36:56.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're referring to what is known in social sciences as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;high-context culture&lt;/a&gt;, a concept put forth by Edward Hall in the 1970s. Hall considered some cultures to be &quot;lower-context&quot;, i.e. requiring more explicit information in communication, than others, but this model has been criticized as lacking empirical evidence (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240709593&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cardon 2008&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model of high-context vs. low-context may certainly be applied to the speech communities of languages, but not to languages themselves, because it is generally found that languages do not differ in their capabilities to express the same ideas; they just do it in different ways. The very fact you were able to word your question in English is one such piece of evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T16:36:56.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T19:22:42.437" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;My team and I have been working on a project that involves classifying different strings in a text, or more specifically, Wikipedia Infoboxes. For example, &lt;em&gt;Barack Obama&lt;/em&gt; would be classified as a &lt;strong&gt;Personal Name&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;California&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;strong&gt;Toponym&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;1914-1916&lt;/em&gt; would be classified as a &lt;strong&gt;Time Interval&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Wikipedia data is not only vast, but it's also very messy and hard to work with, making our task very difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue that we have come across is being able to classify compound strings or lists that contain more than one type of information. We don't want to classify each individual part of the string, but the string as a whole. For example, we have the following strings that we don't know how to classify as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;2006, 2007, 2012&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wouldn't classify this as date, date, date.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possibly classify as a &lt;strong&gt;list&lt;/strong&gt; since this has the same type of information in a row.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rangana Herath (23)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We wouldn't classify this as Personal Name, Age.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Turkish (3.55%) (2002)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kazakhs reduced from 60% to 38% of the republic's population&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to know if there are terms that we could use that would help us classify these compound strings that contain more than one type of information. If so, what are these terms or names that we could use to classify these compound strings? How should we classify the examples provided above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26645" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T19:22:42.437" Title="How to classify Compound Strings?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;onomastics&gt;&lt;text-classification&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28233" CreationDate="2019-09-18T02:35:35.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let's distinguish between double letters that function as digraphs indicating a single sound (like English &quot;oo&quot; in &quot;flood&quot;, which corresponds to the single vowel phoneme /ʌ/, or &quot;dd&quot; in &quot;middle&quot;, which corresponds to the single consonant phoneme /d/), and double letters that arise from the incidental repetition of the same sound without any intervening sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many languages with writing systems that don't make use of double consonant letters as digraphs. And as Draconis pointed out, many languages don't allow consonants at the ends of syllables, which would prevent double consonant letters from arising incidentally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's harder to figure out whether a language can never have consecutive vowel letters. Double vowel letter digraphs are fairly common as symbols for long vowels. And aside from that, many languages allow vowel-initial syllables, which brings up the possibility of double vowel letters arising incidentally from a sequence of the same vowel in adjacent syllables. (Languages that forbid that kind of situation often resolve the illegal vowel sequence by turning it into a long vowel, which as mentioned might be written with a double vowel digraph.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include sequences of letters separated by a space, that would cause further difficulties, because languages often either don't have or don't write sound changes that eliminate vowel-vowel sequences across word-space boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't include sequences of letters separated by a space, I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/vietnamese-word-space-spacing.3067954/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/a&gt; might qualify, because of the general practice of writing a space between all of the syllables in a Vietnamese sentence, regardless of word grouping. In the linked Wordreference thread, the original poster asked if mặttrời would be an acceptable spelling of mặt trời, and was told to use the spaced spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can make out from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Vietnamese spelling&lt;/a&gt;, a doubled letter shouldn't be possible in a single written syllable of Vietnamese. Vietnamese does have a diphthong written &quot;ưu&quot;, which might look like a double letter to an English speaker, but ư and u are considered to be separate letters of the Vietnamese alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T02:41:11.493" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T02:41:11.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33539" CreationDate="2019-09-18T13:26:12.677" Score="0" ViewCount="646" Body="&lt;p&gt;I here with attach a link which shows that  &lt;strong&gt;Panini is the father of  Linguistics&lt;/strong&gt;. Even professors of English from the English And Foreign languages, Hyderabad say that he is the father of linguistics  and even English grammar is codified based on his treatise  Astadhyani. They say that it is the first grammar book in the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Panini  really the father of  Linguistics and  Astadhyani is the first grammar book  in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T13:39:45.923" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T21:03:44.760" Title="Is Panini really the father of Linguistics?" Tags="&lt;history-of-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33537" CreationDate="2019-09-18T15:39:53.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that Pāṇini is one of the most ancient named linguists in the world (preceded by Yāska, Śākaṭāyana and Śākalya), and is the best-known of that set. It is also true that the Aṣṭādhyāyī is the oldest surviving work that could be called a &quot;whole grammar&quot;. Pāṇini is not the &quot;father&quot; of all linguistics, unless you define &quot;father of all linguistics&quot; as &quot;oldest linguist&quot; (a fallacy that would lead to the conclusion that Sumerian, as the oldest know written language is the father of all languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of influence on linguistics &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; science over the past 2500 years, outside of Indian Pāṇini had relatively little influence in linguistics because his works were unknown, until more recently they had some influence. His work was known to Sanskrit scholars like Whitney. There is some question regarding the influence of ancient Indic linguistics in the domain of phonetics (it is generally felt that modern phonetics &quot;owes a debt&quot; to knowledge of sound classification via knowledge of Sanskrit). However, the Prātiśākhya's, the &quot;source&quot; of ancient phonetic wisdom, were not the product of Pāṇini. Outside of phonetics, it is dubious to claim that the Aṣṭādhyāyī was the most influential work in linguistics. You can read up on other influences &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, as far as I know, no grammar of English that can be said to be &quot;Pāṇinian&quot;. It is likely that the Tolkāppiyam was substantially influenced by Aṣṭādhyāyī. We can argue about whether Chomsky was the father of formally codifying English grammar: it was not Pāṇini.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T15:39:53.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33537" CreationDate="2019-09-18T17:12:41.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends what you mean by &quot;father of linguistics&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pāṇini's &lt;em&gt;Aṣṭādhyāyī&lt;/em&gt; is the oldest surviving work that could be called a complete linguistic grammar. But Pāṇini wasn't writing in a vacuum: his work references earlier works that haven't survived, by other authors. It's mostly a historical accident that his grammar survived when none of his predecessors' did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Ferdinand de Saussure is often called one of the fathers of linguistics (i.e. one of the people who turned European/Western linguistics from a pastime into a science). Sanskrit was one of his specialties, and he specifically cited Pāṇini's work as an influence on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noam Chomsky, who's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; sometimes called the father of linguistics, was then deeply influenced by Saussure—many of Chomsky's more influential ideas came about from either defending or refuting Saussure's theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And nowadays, it's hard to find any area of linguistics that hasn't been affected (for better or for worse) by Chomsky's work. So on the one hand, yes, pretty much all of modern linguistics has been influenced indirectly by Pāṇini, and some ideas introduced(?) by Pāṇini are now so standard we don't even think about them (such as formal systems and auxiliary symbols). On the other hand, we don't know how much of that is due to Pāṇini and how much is due to his predecessors whose complete works haven't survived, and linguistics as a science in and of itself didn't really exist until the late nineteenth century, long after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how much of that you want to attribute to Pāṇini himself is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T17:12:41.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33537" CreationDate="2019-09-18T21:03:44.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Father of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; is not an official title that &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; belongs to anyone. Panini is very important person in history of linguistics but there is no official body to grant this title to him or to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24787" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T21:03:44.760" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2019-09-19T05:26:34.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of &quot;An etymological dictionary of the French language&quot; is available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/etymologicaldict00bracrich/etymologicaldict00bracrich_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/stream/etymologicaldict00bracrich/etymologicaldict00bracrich_djvu.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26649" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T05:26:34.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-19T15:27:47.687" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to undestand how PRAAT works and to recognize consonants through spectrograms. I Know that it's possible to distinguish fricative consonants from nasal ones (for example) but is it possible to distinguish their place of articulation? ie. /ħ/ and /h/ (Voiceless pharyngeal fricative and Voiceless glottal fricative)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26653" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T13:35:13.533" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T13:35:13.533" Title="Is it possible to recognize place of articulation of consonants through spectrograms?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33546" CreationDate="2019-09-19T16:22:54.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible, in principle, to distinguish consonant place of articulation with spectrograms, within certain limits of precision, but only given certain prior knowledge. It used to be a standard exercise that students would be given a spectrogram and they had to transcribe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technique involves figuring out the formants of the consonant, usually via transitions with vowels. Any good introductory phonetics text that deals with acoustics will give you the main cues for distinguishing labial, alveolar and velar consonants in English. However, if you really want [ħ] versus [h], you have a bit of an uphill climb because most intro textbooks don't deal with exotica. It's not impossible: what you'd need to do is find acoustic studies of such consonants in the professional literature. Very roughly speaking, you'll find that you can best identify [ħ] from lowered F3. However, the letter [ħ] is not articulatorily or acoustically uniform across languages, this comparing Arabic and certain dialects of Somali is inappropriate because the two consonants are quite different, despite the transcriptional standards usually applied to the languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good transitional source for going beyond basic English consonants is Ladefoged &amp;amp; Maddieson &lt;em&gt;The sounds of the world's languages&lt;/em&gt;. The really best way to fill in the required knowledge is to obtain good illustrative recordings of the sounds in a specific language, and then try to see what measurable differences in formant frequencies there are between [t] and [ʈ], or [k] and [q]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, if you have a really great catalog of zillouns of sounds of the world's languages, you might develop a program to assign one or more plausible descriptive labels such as &quot;laminal alveolar&quot;, given just the acoustics. Nobody has done it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T16:22:54.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33527" CreationDate="2019-09-20T01:03:27.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging from the posts on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/247258/a-word-for-forward-backward-movement&quot;&gt;English StackExchange&lt;/a&gt;, there are not many verbs of movement along the sagittal axis (the front-back axis) in English, and I'm struggling to think of verbs that do so the other languages that I'm familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neologisms are tricky, although can work in certain contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English StackExchange has the following suggestions that fit the criterion of a single syllable verb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;surge&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;rock&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surge is also a technical term, from mechanics (originally naval, as I take it), but it is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; verb for motion in the z-axis, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(mechanics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the six degrees of freedom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also add, as further possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;drive&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;go (in the absence of any other use!?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, the Japanese 前後 &lt;em&gt;zengo&lt;/em&gt; was mentioned, but its use as a verb has a very specific idiomatic meaning that is not what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of dance is very limited, but of course the pattern of &quot;forward - side - close; back - side - close&quot; seems to be standard in the community. [The German equivalent being &quot;Vor - Seit - Schluss - Rück - Seit - Schluss&quot;, well known enough to be the title of a 2015 film]. Renaming may start off a war! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastEditorUserId="1278" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T01:14:51.520" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T01:14:51.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33554" CreationDate="2019-09-20T03:49:43.037" Score="-1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most languages I know  there are only two numbers.&#xA;Singular and plural.In most Indian languages too there are only two numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Sanskrit there are three numbers.Singular  number(yeka vachana) double number (dwivachana) and plural number(Bahu Vachana).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any advantage of  having three numbers linguistically and which other languages have more than two numbers like Sanskrtit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not seen the previous question.Besides I have asked the advantages  of having more than two numbers&#xA;So it is not a duplicate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="25462" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T06:33:41.483" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T16:14:18.420" Title="What languages have more than two numbers regarding things and persons?" Tags="&lt;list-of-languages&gt;&lt;grammatical-number&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-09-20T09:30:28.720" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33553" CreationDate="2019-09-20T04:58:31.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto-Indo-European seems to have had a dual number (for two things), so many Indo-European languages show remnants of it: it's attested in Ancient Greek, though not quite as abundantly as in Sanskrit, and left various traces across Latin. It's still used today in some Celtic languages. Over in the Semitic world, Biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic also had a dual, though like in Indo-European it's atrophied a bit over time; it still shows up in day-to-day Arabic, but in Modern Hebrew it's restricted to a limited set of nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some languages go one step further and mark a &lt;em&gt;trial&lt;/em&gt; number (pronounced &quot;TREE-al&quot; rather than &quot;TRY-al&quot;), used for exactly three objects; this shows up mostly in Austronesian languages, most famously in Tok Pisin (but only for pronouns) (*). Others have a &lt;em&gt;paucal&lt;/em&gt;, used for small groups of things, where the definition of &quot;small&quot; depends on the language; this shows up to some extent in modern Russian and some other Slavic languages, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for advantages…I don't think anyone's shown objective benefits or detriments to having a dual number. It makes it easier to specify &quot;two people&quot; without using an extra word, like how English can easily distinguish &quot;another person&quot; from &quot;other people&quot;, but other languages (Mandarin, Japanese) get by perfectly fine without any grammatical number marking at all. Different languages do it differently, and the details just come down to their particular history, not to any universal benefits or drawbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Tok Pisin is a creole combining English, various Austronesian languages, and a smattering of others; its trial number definitely comes from Austronesian, but it's not quite an Austronesian language in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T16:14:18.420" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T16:14:18.420" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33553" CreationDate="2019-09-20T07:12:31.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic_grammar#Number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Church Slavonic&lt;/a&gt; has dual - not just remnants of, but the real thing. That language is a &quot;snapshot&quot; of a mixture of 9th century south Slavic dialects and is still in use, unchanged, as a liturgical language in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having more than two number categories is neither an advantage, nor a disadvantage. It's just a grammatical feature that could appear, disappear, or reappear naturally as a language evolves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20019" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T07:12:31.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33503" CreationDate="2019-09-20T11:40:41.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are all different ways of expressing mood in English. Wikipedia has an article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English modal verbs&lt;/a&gt;. It lists modal verbs such as those you mention in your question. English also has other ways of expressing mood without auxiliary verbs (e.g. &lt;em&gt;if it be done&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;do this!&lt;/em&gt; both imply something that isn't currently the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're interested in how the mind thinks about possible events beyond English usage in particular, you might want to look at how moods work cross-linguistically. Particularly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;irrealis moods&lt;/a&gt; seem to be what you're interested in (&quot;thinking about possible events&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cases of &lt;em&gt;should've&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;would've&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; is a combination of mood with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aspect&lt;/a&gt;: When you say &lt;em&gt;I should...&lt;/em&gt; you're talking about a possible event right now; when you say &lt;em&gt;I should've...&lt;/em&gt; you're talking about what was the case at a point in time that ended before now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T11:40:41.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="32075" CreationDate="2019-09-20T14:14:17.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Persian word has cognates in many IE languages, most meaning father-in-law or brother-in-law: German Schwager, Gothic swaihra, Latin socer, Greek `εκυρός, Sanskrit śvaśura-s, Russian свёкор, Lithuanian šešuras, Welsh chwegr, Albanian vjehërr, Armenian skesrayr&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Pokorny’s entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://indo-european.info/pokorny-etymological-dictionary/whnjs.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;su̯ekrū́-&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25550" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T14:14:17.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22670" CreationDate="2019-09-20T17:51:56.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, there's a reason linguists use the IPA (or a variant such as X-SAMPA or Americanist) instead of English spelling—if English spelling could clearly indicate pronunciation, you wouldn't be needing this tool in the first place! (Apart from that, &lt;em&gt;ē-thē-ˈō-pē-ə&lt;/em&gt; isn't IPA; it looks a bit like the system the American Heritage Dictionary uses? So any existing tools for translating IPA aren't going to help you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you just need to decide on a transcription for each of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set#Wells_Standard_Lexical_Sets_for_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;27 or so English vowels and diphthongs&lt;/a&gt;, as well as the 25 or so consonants, then do a find-and-replace for each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However…this is just creating another new transcription system that your users need to memorize. There are a lot of contrasts that exist in some dialects but not others: a friend of mine in England pronounces &quot;bath&quot; and &quot;palm&quot; with the same vowel, separate from both &quot;trap&quot; and &quot;cloth&quot;, but I (in America) pronounce &quot;bath&quot; like &quot;trap&quot; and &quot;palm&quot; like &quot;cloth&quot;. This means, for your program to be useful to both me and my friend, you'll need separate symbols for all four—and if those symbols aren't intuitively understandable, we'll just be memorizing them, exactly like we'd do for the IPA. Except that, unlike the IPA, this specific transcription system is only useful on your website and nowhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I'd recommend using the IPA (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can represent all these categories in a standardized way&lt;/a&gt;), and using something like the HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;abbr&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag to make looking it up easy: if I hover my cursor over the symbol &lt;code&gt;æ&lt;/code&gt;, a tooltip shows up telling me it's the vowel in &quot;bath&quot;. If I need to check the pronunciation for a specific word, I can do that without learning the IPA, and if I need to use the tool over and over, I'll eventually have learned some IPA symbols that could be useful later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T17:51:56.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33567" CreationDate="2019-09-21T02:51:40.487" Score="-1" ViewCount="3165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please ELI5? I read the websites beneath but I still feel befuddled. Are there simple real-life analogies? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/4mfsu9/can_someone_explain_to_me_the_difference_between/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can someone explain to me the difference between a phone, phoneme, and allophone? (reposted from r/linguistics : asklinguistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; is a single sound that comes out of your mouth. The glottal stop is a phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt; is the group of sounds that distinguish meanings within a language. The glottal stop is not a phoneme in standard dialects of English because they don't use it to distinguish between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an &lt;em&gt;allophone&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of phones that shows up as the form of a phoneme either some of the time or under certain circumstances. In some dialects of English, the glottal stop is an allophone of the phoneme /t/ when it occurs between vowels or before liquids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/phoneme-sound-allophone-phone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phoneme – sound – allophone – phone | BLOG|ON|LINGUISTICS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phoneme&lt;/strong&gt; (Gr. &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; “sound, voice”) is the smallest contrastive unit of language that may change the meaning of a morpheme and, as a pursuant, a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sound&lt;/strong&gt; (=&lt;strong&gt;phone&lt;/strong&gt;) is a vibration or wave caused by an object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Allophone&lt;/strong&gt; (Gr. &lt;em&gt;allos&lt;/em&gt; “other” and &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; “sound, voice”) is a variant of a phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://specialties.bayt.com/en/specialties/q/23493/what-is-the-difference-between-phoneme-phone-and-allophone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is the difference between phoneme, phone and allophone? - Bayt.com Specialties&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;- A phoneme is the smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning. For example 'mat' and 'bat'. Phonemes are based on spoken language and recorded by IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). They are written between slashes e.g. /p/.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;- Allophones are variations of phonemes. So, they are set of possible spoken sounds used to pronounce one single phoneme. e.g. [pʰ] (as in &lt;em&gt;pin&lt;/em&gt;) and [p] (as in &lt;em&gt;spin&lt;/em&gt;) are allophones of the phoneme /p/. They are written in brackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;- A phone is a unit of speech sound. It may refer to any speech sound or gesture without regard of its place in phonology of a language. A phoneme is a set of phones or a set of sound features that are thought of as the same element within the phonology of a particular language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://notendur.hi.is/peturk/KENNSLA/02/TOP/phonemes.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phonemes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phones&lt;/strong&gt; are speech-sounds;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phonemes&lt;/strong&gt; are groups of sounds which speakers usually think of as &quot;one sound&quot;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;allophones&lt;/strong&gt; are the variations within each group.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tehreemali176.blogspot.com/2017/01/difference-between-phones-allophones.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Language and Literature: Difference between Phones, Allophones and Phonemes.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PHONES&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Minimum unit of sound is called phone. OR The speech sounds considered as units of phonetic analysis are called phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phones are any sound of language that can be consistently and individually produced and recognised by the speaker of language. Phones are represented by enclosing the appropriate alphabet/symbol in square bracket. Thus, [p] will refer to p sound (which is described more technically as a voiceless, bilabial sound)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PHONEME&lt;/strong&gt; Each one of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language is described as a phoneme. Slash marks are conventionally used to indicate a phoneme, e.g. /t/, an abstract segment, as opposed to the square brackets, as in [t], used for each phonetic or physically produced segment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ALLOPHONE&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  When we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we add the prefix “allo-” (= one of a closely related set) and refer to them as allophones of that phoneme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="5306" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T06:49:22.477" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T06:49:22.477" Title="ELI5 — phone v. phoneme v. allophone" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33570" CreationDate="2019-09-21T03:11:05.963" Score="4" ViewCount="5662" Body="&lt;p&gt;What words are the most common across languages? Is there a list of 100 or 1000?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T14:20:55.083" Title="List of 1000 most common words across all languages" Tags="&lt;swadesh-list&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-09-23T13:25:51.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33568" CreationDate="2019-09-21T04:04:21.123" Score="-1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to come up with a guide to transcribe hieroglyphs in books into Unicode. How do I do that? First is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_sign_list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gardiner's list&lt;/a&gt;. But I would assume you simply read the hieroglyphs left to right, but it doesn't seem so in an example such as the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jXGuS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jXGuS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that you read &lt;em&gt;recursively&lt;/em&gt;, from left to right, top to bottom. So it would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;first square: Z1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;second square: D21 Z1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;third square: N35 (ignoring the brackets for some reason)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fourth square: O1, D21, X1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fifth square: G4/G17&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sixth square: ? Z1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;seventh square: G4/G17&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;eighth square? how to translate this one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically wondering where I learn how to do this properly, or how to do this properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T04:16:02.223" Title="How to transcribe Egyptian Hieroglyphs" Tags="&lt;transcription&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33564" CreationDate="2019-09-21T04:08:08.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt; is just a sound. That's it. In linguistics, we usually only care about sounds humans are making in order to convey information, but this is still a pretty broad category. Phones are typically written between square brackets, to show that we're talking about a sound and not a letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a &lt;em&gt;spectrogram&lt;/em&gt;, it's possible to record a phone, then put it under a microscope and pick it apart to determine its properties. This is called &lt;em&gt;acoustic phonetics&lt;/em&gt;. Alternately, you can measure exactly what someone is doing with their body in order to create a sound, and determine its properties that way. This is called &lt;em&gt;articulatory phonetics&lt;/em&gt;. Both are valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is…when we're conversing, we hear words as being made up of these nice clean units. We can pick apart &quot;cat&quot; into a &quot;kuh&quot;, an &quot;aa&quot;, and a &quot;tuh&quot; sound. And once we start taking actual measurements, either dissecting spectrograms or measuring people's tongues moving around, this distinction disappears. If you look on a spectrogram, there's no nice, clear division between the &quot;kuh&quot;, and the &quot;aa&quot;, and the &quot;tuh&quot;. Even worse, there are all sorts of different versions of the English &quot;tuh&quot; sound, which look totally different on a spectrogram, and are made with totally different movements—yet we still hear them all as &quot;tuh&quot;! What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, what do scientists do when they come across something that doesn't make sense? They make models to explain it! And the most popular model, in this case, says that we have a mental representation, an &quot;underlying form&quot;, of the word &quot;cat&quot;. This underlying form is made up of three units, a mental &quot;kuh&quot; and a mental &quot;aa&quot; and a mental &quot;tuh&quot;, even if the actual sound we produce doesn't have those nice clean divisions. These mental units are called &lt;em&gt;phonemes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allophones&lt;/em&gt; are then all the different phones that correspond to a single phoneme. Remember how there are all those different sounds, that look totally different on a spectrogram, but which English-speakers all hear as a &quot;tuh&quot; (which linguists would call &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;)? Those are called &lt;em&gt;allophones&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, notably, phonemes and allophones are language-dependent! The sounds &lt;code&gt;[tʰ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ʔ]&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;[ɾ]&lt;/code&gt; are all allophones of &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt; in English, but all belong to different phonemes in Czech. The study of phonemes, these mental models which are specific to a given language, is called &lt;em&gt;phonology&lt;/em&gt;; the study of phones, the actual sounds that we can measure and examine, is called &lt;em&gt;phonetics&lt;/em&gt;. As you might imagine, the two have a lot of overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T04:08:08.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33566" CreationDate="2019-09-21T04:16:02.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a non-trivial process!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, break the text into units. In this case, the units are the rows, with nice gaps between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you have to determine the overall direction of each unit. This is usually left-to-right or right-to-left; humans and animals in the text will look toward the starting point. In this case, the birds are all looking to the left, so you start at the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've done that, break the text into blocks, from the appropriate starting point. When one glyph is above another, they go in the same block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, read the blocks one at a time, in the same order. Within each block, read from top to bottom. When you get to the end of your unit, go to the next unit, and repeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot more nuance than this, but this should be a good enough rule of thumb to get you started. If you actually want to learn to read hieroglyphs, I recommend James Peter Allen's &lt;em&gt;Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs&lt;/em&gt;. The book is unreasonably expensive, but it can be found pretty easily in libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T04:16:02.223" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33949" CreationDate="2019-09-21T04:44:17.670" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a layout system for the Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example, here are some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OK5ki.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OK5ki.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Cord.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Cord.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wFJXN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wFJXN.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/399Iq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/399Iq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they lay it out pretty much exactly like it appears in the stone? And do they have a &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; or are they laying it out like you layout on PowerPoint and just manually place each piece?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one looks like this to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;aacc  rr&#xA;aaccee&#xA;xxcc  ss&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third one like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;aaccmm&#xA;aaee&#xA;xxrrrr&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a pattern to it or is it all over the place? Has anyone come up with a Unicode layout system for the Gardiner hieroglyphs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="746" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T04:14:15.237" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T04:14:15.237" Title="How do Egyptologists layout hieroglyphs in print?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33565" CreationDate="2019-09-21T05:09:58.007" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such list, but you could build one. &#xA;You can find (multiple) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequency lists for many languages&lt;/a&gt;, and you could come up with a way to decide which frequency list to use (there are very many for English). I suppose you are thinking you might construct a list with entries like {day, Tag, jour, день, gün, siku, päivi, 日} where all of the words seem to mean the same thing and the words all end up on the top-1000 list in their respective languages (I don't know if they do, this is just a hypothetical example). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the most frequent words in English (and many other languages) are things like &quot;a, the, all, but, she&quot;, and these are not going to have correspondents in all languages. Plus, the various forms of the verb &quot;be&quot; or &quot;do&quot; and &quot;don't&quot; are each treated as separate words in some frequency lists. It would be more productive to define a subset of concrete nouns and &quot;verbs&quot; like &quot;cat, dog, big, small, eat, walk&quot; and get the N most frequent equivalents across languages. You must abandon the search for data in every language, but you could go for &quot;as many as you can get&quot;. As a precursor to this exercise, you might try to come up with the N most frequent concrete nouns and verbs of English, filtering out proper names (unless you really want proper names to be included). Then do the same thing for Khmer. Then you have to decide whether &quot;good&quot; and ល្អ are &quot;the same&quot; in meaning (the Khmer word also translates &quot;attractive&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T05:09:58.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T05:46:05.157" Score="1" ViewCount="761" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know Japanese, but I notice they have a mixture of Hiragana, Katakana, and Chinese characters. Instead of a mixture, could you write a whole article in just one of them? Does this ever occur? Are there any examples if so? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T12:48:20.907" Title="Can you write Japanese in only Hiragana, or only Katakana, or only Chinese characters?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;japanese&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T06:40:45.900" Score="4" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Followup to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/32371&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, also related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29181&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=33BSkFV_8PEC&amp;amp;pg=PA11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handbook of the International Phonetic Association&lt;/em&gt; (1999: 11–2)&lt;/a&gt; defines the values of cardinal vowels as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]wo fully front vowels [e] and [ɛ] are defined between [i] and [a] so that the differences between each vowel and the next in the series are auditorily equal; and similarly, two fully back vowels [ɔ] and [o] are defined to give equidistant steps between [ɑ] and [u]. The use of auditory spacing in the definition of these vowels means vowel description is not based purely on articulation, and is one reason why the vowel quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction and not a direct mapping of tongue position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this begs the question as to how those supposed auditory equidistances are, or can be, determined. We know they do not correlate exactly to the formant frequencies: the acoustic distances between [i u] and [e o] are smaller than those between [e o] and [ɛ ɔ] or between [ɛ ɔ] and [a ɑ].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sail.usc.edu/%7Elgoldste/General_Phonetics/Vowels/Vowel_Theories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BFzwT.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Formants of cardinal vowels in a group of phoneticians trained by Daniel Jones&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/103/Charts/VChart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zUWX6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;IPA vowels as pronounced by Bruce Hayes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to measure auditory distances of vowels? Is it possible to (re)define the values of the close-mid and open-mid cardinal vowels based on any acoustic or auditory measures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his 1967 &lt;em&gt;Three Areas of Experimental Phonetics&lt;/em&gt;, Peter Ladefoged speculated that, since the technology available back then was unable to determine the formants of high and back vowels, humans also lacked the ability to determine them, hence the discrepancy between acoustics and perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From pp. 132-3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The acoustic quality of most vowel sounds can be conveniently specified by stating the frequencies of their first two or three formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) This is not true of vowels which are called in traditional terms close vowels, nor of so-called back vowels. It is not at all easy to analyse these vowels in terms of their formants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) The perceptual quality of a vowel usually depends on the relationship between the pitches of the formants of that vowel and the pitches of the formants of other vowels pronounced by the same speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) The listener to speech uses his past experience to form an adaptation level, the immediate past experience of a particular voice being the most important factor in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) Neither of points 3 and 4 above has been shown to be true for the vowels mentioned in 2 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now computers can extract the formants of high and back vowels just as easily as any other vowels, and I've never seen Ladefoged's speculation (in 1967) repeated in more recent literature, including his. Has this speculation turned out to be true, false, or just less likely? Can one devise a means to confirm or deny it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T16:03:44.623" Title="How to measure auditory distances between vowels" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;acoustic-analysis&gt;&lt;perception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T06:42:47.367" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to find a list of borrowings illustrating the reflexes in (proto-)Germanic of Latin long and short vowels. In particular I would like to find substantiation to the standard claim that it reflects long and short vowels differently. This statement would be correct in relation to qualitatively distinct pairs such as &lt;em&gt;v&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;det&lt;/em&gt; != &lt;em&gt;v&lt;strong&gt;ī&lt;/strong&gt;dit&lt;/em&gt; that in most of Romance likewise remain distinct, but the pairs that in North-Western Late Latin/proto-Romance must be described as contrasting primarily in terms of length are the vowels of &lt;em&gt;v&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;v&lt;strong&gt;ē&lt;/strong&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;, and these ultimately merge with the rise of Open Syllable Lengthening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of the kind of evidence I'm looking for, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/4645/1/DS_Proto.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stifter 2009&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In words that were borrowed into Germanic or its dialects from Latin&#xA;  in the imperial period, Lat. ā is not reflected by *ō but by the new *ā&#xA;  by default, e.g. OHG phāl 'stake' &amp;lt;- pālus, OHG strāzza 'street' &amp;lt;- strāta, OHG kāsi 'cheese' &amp;lt;- cāseus, the OHG agentive suffix -āri &amp;lt;- ārius. Cases where Lat. ā seems to be reflected by Gmc. *ӑ are actually borrowings from Vulgar Latin with pretonic shortening, e.g. OHG ratih, retih 'radish' &amp;lt;- VLat. rӑdīc- &amp;lt; Lat. rādīx 'root'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like some sort of a reference - if not a dedicated discussion then at least a list of borrowings - showing in which environments and at what periods of borrowing the Late Latin vowel length contrast between &lt;strong&gt;/a/&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;/ā/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/į/&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;/ē/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/ę/&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;/ae/&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;/ų/&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;/ō/&lt;/strong&gt;, and perhaps &lt;strong&gt;/ǫ/&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;/au/&lt;/strong&gt; is reflected in Germanic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24673" LastEditorUserId="24673" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T07:54:02.333" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T07:54:02.333" Title="(proto-)Germanic evidence for Late Latin vowel length" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;latin&gt;&lt;romance-languages&gt;&lt;proto-germanic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T06:52:29.757" Score="0" ViewCount="526" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/phoneme-sound-allophone-phone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diagram on left&lt;/a&gt; contradict &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/linguistics/lectures/05lect06.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diagram on right&lt;/a&gt;? Which is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's a contradiction because  the right diagram answers an unequivocal no, but the left diagram answers Yes and No, to the right same question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yi8Gb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yi8Gb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T06:52:29.757" Title="Do these diagrams on Complementary Distribution contradict each other?" Tags="&lt;compl-distribution&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33786" CreationDate="2019-09-21T06:53:37.250" Score="2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;My native language is Korean. I'm not learning Arabic, but I'm curious anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refer to the following link for the letter names I recorded myself: &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/dannyu-ndos/sets/arabic-pharyngeal-consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic pharyngeal consonants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can pronounce plain /ħ/ and /ʕ/ properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the pharyngealized fricatives /sˤ/ and /zˤ/, I understand them as coarticulated [s͜ħ] and [z͜ʕ]. Is this a correct analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For /dˤ/, I tend to realize it as implosive [ɗ]. Is this an acceptable allophone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For /tˤ/, I'm not even sure what I'm realizing it as. Is it a pharyngeal-released affricate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Did I pronounce them properly?&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the comments say, I pronounce them properly. So I have a remaining question. Did I phonetically analyze them correctly? (Essentially, the questions above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17445" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-10-08T13:21:33.860" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T15:10:32.800" Title="Phonetic characters of Arabic emphatic consonants" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;articulation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33579" CreationDate="2019-09-21T09:43:23.220" Score="0" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol_master_gloss/aveol/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionaries of the avesta and old persian&lt;/a&gt; of which there isn't much, and would like to collect words in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old persian cuneiform&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;avestan script&lt;/a&gt;. First part of the question is, how different are the Avestan Language, Old Persian/Iranian, and Farsi? Second part is, would it be acceptable to take a Farsi word and render it using Old Persian Cuneiform? Or render it in Avestan script? I ask because I would like to write in these languages and there isn't much in terms of dictionary, so wondering if I could use Farsi words to write in it. Or is it like Old-English to Modern English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T10:37:02.590" Title="How different is Old Persian / Avestan / Farsi from each other?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;persian&gt;&lt;ancient&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33578" CreationDate="2019-09-21T10:37:02.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first question: Avestan and Old Persian are the two attested Old Iranian languages. Both are very close to the reconstructed Old Iranian, and thus to one another. New Persian (Fārsī) is (mainly) descended from Old Persian, but it has moved very far from Old Iranian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question: The Zoroastrians in Iran and India do sometimes write New Persian texts in Avestan script, though not very often. It seems that no one has tried to write New Persian in Old Persian cuneiform script, but in principle you could do so if you really want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T10:37:02.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T12:38:55.987" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computer science, there is a theorem that says any machine able to perform six basic primitives can compute any computable problem. Is there a similar theorem in linguistics that specifies certain qualities a language requires to be able to express any conceivable idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26666" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T12:38:55.987" Title="Is there a theorem for the completeness of a language?" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;theoretical-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-09-22T14:05:30.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33565" CreationDate="2019-09-21T14:20:55.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are looking for the &quot;Swadesh list&quot;, a list of the 100 most common concepts across languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2556" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T14:20:55.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-21T20:01:36.717" Score="4" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a fluent english speaker. While speaking this language, we usually prefer the implicit objective subordinate clauses (with subject in the accusative case, if it exists) to the corresponding explicit ones, precisely as in classic latin. &lt;em&gt;(I do not know if the word &quot;objective&quot; is correct: I say that a subordinate clause is objective when it functions as object of the verb of the principal clause.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, we prefer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) they want [me to do this]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) they want [that I do this]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe that in (a) the subject &quot;me&quot; of the subordinate is in the accusative case, while in (b) the subject &quot;I&quot; of the subordinate is in the nominative case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is this &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; syntactically correct? Can we &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; substitute an explicit objective subordinate clause with an implicit one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me present another (trickier and maybe incorrect) example. Can we use the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) they showed [the hypothesis to be correct]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) they showed [that the hypothesis is/was correct]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe that the subject &quot;the hypothesis&quot; of the subordinate does not change his form between (c) and (d), as it does not have the nominative/accusative cases. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, in the english language, the only english words still having a difference between their nominative and accusative forms are the personal pronouns. Maybe, because of this, it is the case that the implicit objective subordinate clause is eligible just when the subject of the subordinate is a pronoun. Is this true? Was it different in the so-called Old English? I expect that this syntactical construction was more frequent in Old English (or &quot;to be more frequent in Old English&quot;, lol), as this was the case in Latin and probably in Proto-Indoeuropean as well. Again, if I'm not mistaken: I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26667" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T20:01:36.717" Title="Usage of the implicit objective subordinate clause in English" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;english&gt;&lt;latin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33588" CreationDate="2019-09-21T21:26:41.037" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to compare different sentence structures and would like to look up sentence glosses quickly. Are there any databases out there, either for all languages or for individual languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular I am looking for Tibetan, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, and Cree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In searching google all I am finding are &lt;a href=&quot;https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/26668/1/Graf_Tibetan%20Grammar_PhD.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grammars&lt;/a&gt; which are hundreds of pages with few glosses. Is that it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but it's not very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T21:34:15.567" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T10:35:24.657" Title="Is there a database of literal linguistic glosses across languages or per language?" Tags="&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;&lt;interlinear-gloss&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33584" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33586" CreationDate="2019-09-21T21:45:58.113" Score="2" ViewCount="1895" Body="&lt;p&gt;So after looking at a a few glosses across languages it looks like words can be in any order. Is it just based off convention then for each language or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because of what it means to &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; a statement. If the words can be in any order, then theoretically any sequence of words could encode a desired statement. But in each language we have a preference for a specific sequence or set of sequences. Is this just a convention for each language, or is there some in-built brain structures that govern how we perceive the &quot;morphemes&quot; or what you call it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T15:35:57.523" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T15:35:57.523" Title="Is the order of words purely based on convention?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33571" CreationDate="2019-09-21T22:12:15.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kanji: You would not write entirely with Kanji (Chinese characters). As stated in the comments &quot;it would feel archaic or outdated, like using Middle English spellings or something&quot;. Nowadays Kanjis do not cover all the words / grammatical functions. A simple example is の for possessive, the corresponding Kanjis are archaic. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you were to write only with Katakana that would be you only using words from foreign origin. Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;fried potatoes&quot; フライドポテト&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;mineral water&quot; ミネラルウォーター&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;spaghetti&quot; スパゲッティー&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hiragana: If you were to write only with Hiragana that would be for pedagogical purpose. When learning Kanji, they have the Hiragana syllabic version of the Kanji written in tiny Hiragana letters. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a sentence with indication of pronunciation of Kanjis in Hiragana : &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KpNZf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KpNZf.png&quot; alt=&quot;Kanji + Hiragana&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have heard that they can choose to write a word in another alphabet so as to convey a special connotation to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beginner in learning Japanese, I'd be happily corrected or given more information about my statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1172" LastEditorUserId="1172" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T13:55:49.717" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T13:55:49.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33584" CreationDate="2019-09-21T23:29:37.987" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The order of words is based off convention, in the same way that the meanings of words are based off convention. In other words, there's no law of nature that says &quot;cat&quot; means , and there's no law of nature that says that verbs have to come before their direct objects. Instead, there's an enormous collection of &quot;conventions&quot; that English-speakers use to communicate, and we call those conventions &quot;the English language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the ordering of words (whatever you consider &quot;words&quot; to be for a given language) is called &quot;syntax&quot;, and is a whole discipline of its own. It's why, in English, &quot;is the order of words arbitrary&quot; and &quot;the order of words is arbitrary&quot; have different meanings, and &quot;order the is arbitrary words of&quot; is nonsense. Some languages have extremely loose syntax, and you can rearrange words pretty much however you like without changing the meaning. Some languages have extremely strict syntax, and this sort of rearrangement is forbidden. English is (like most languages) somewhere in the middle, but generally on the stricter side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is worth noting, though, that &quot;convention&quot; doesn't mean &quot;easily changed&quot; or &quot;easily explained&quot;! English syntax is the focus of a tremendous amount of research, and still has never been fully explained. And prescriptivists throughout history have tried to rewrite it without success. Instead, it's a &quot;convention&quot; in the sense that there's no universal truth behind it; it's created by a consensus of English-speakers in order to communicate, nothing more, nothing less.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T21:50:47.793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T21:50:47.793" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33571" CreationDate="2019-09-21T23:53:12.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can, but it's considered unusual at best and incorrect at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using solely kanji means leaving off all functional morphemes and non-content words, so it's like speak### English ####### ### ## ### function## word#, use### #### ### content word#—#### ##, most## noun# ### verb# ### adjective#. Understandable, with effort, but not at all natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using solely kana conveys pretty much all of the same information as spoken Japanese (with the exception of tone). Since people can understand spoken Japanese, they can also understand pure kana; this is how computer interfaces worked for a long time, since the number of kana is relatively small compared to the number of kanji (so they're easier to implement). However, it's extremely &quot;marked&quot;, in linguistic terms—it goes against standard Japanese orthography (writing conventions), and iz ə bit laik raiting Inglish mor fonetiklee. Peepl wil stil əndrstand yoo, bət its not hau reel Inglish-speekrz akchlee rait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pure kana are often used in books for children and second-language learners, who might not know all the kanji yet. Pure kanji are not used in any context I know of (at least within Japanese).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T03:03:55.727" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T03:03:55.727" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33583" CreationDate="2019-09-22T00:00:40.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be able to use the ODIN site for this. The links to the XML data are all broken, but you can access the link to download the XML data directly from this URL, but replace the &quot;xxx&quot; with the 2- or 3-letter language code for the language you want (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=xxx&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The languages you mentioned as your interests (choosing one variety from each when there are more than one) can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=bod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tibetan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=san&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=heb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=cmn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese (Mandarin)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=arb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic (Standard)&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://odin.linguistlist.org/download/xml.php?lang=crk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cree (Plains)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1270" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T00:00:40.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33583" CreationDate="2019-09-22T00:47:54.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you are looking for (alternatively, your expectation is unrealistic). Drawing on the Cree example, you can locate the gloss &quot;2-like-DIR?-N                      thus:CNJ-speak.Cree-3&quot; or &quot;1-see-INV-3&quot; in that database. I assume you did not know that you have to enter those particular glosses (why not &quot;see-1-3-INV&quot;? – because the gloss reflects the morphemes of Cree, their order, and their conventional abbreviation in some cases like INV). It seems really unlikely that you would ever want to look up a gloss like &quot;1-see-INV-3&quot;, unless you are doing a comparative study of Algonkian. You can't compare sentence structures across languages in any meaningful way, if you are searching by gloss. But if you were searching using English translations, you might have somewhat better odds of learning something. For example, you might get the equivalent of &quot;You see me&quot; from Cree and some other language (if it's in the database). It is not in the Tibetan data, nor the Arabic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might contact &lt;a href=&quot;http://giellatekno.uit.no/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Giellatekno&lt;/a&gt;. There's a reasonable chance that they have large amounts of text, much of which may be already parsed, and a gloss plus translation is in principle available, at least for the Saami languages. You would probably have to build the database yourself, but they have good computational tools for parsing, and the main problem would be associating lexical items with something that you might use (presumably you don't want &quot;goahti&quot; in your gloss, you want the English equivalent). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T00:47:54.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-22T07:33:01.123" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language&lt;/a&gt; lists some controlled languages, of which Attempto Controlled English seems to be the most recent. However, are there any Attempto extensions, or completely separate approaches, which extend it even more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9807" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T07:33:01.123" Title="State of the art in controlled english languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33593" CreationDate="2019-09-22T09:09:17.513" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea&lt;/a&gt; gives the definition of the idea as &lt;code&gt;&quot;archetype, concept of a thing in the mind of God,&quot;&lt;/code&gt; I was wondering if they come from the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26671" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T09:42:25.877" Title="Do words Deus and idea share the root?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-09-23T18:51:29.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33592" CreationDate="2019-09-22T09:42:25.877" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;god&quot; is believed to come from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) &lt;em&gt;*deywós&lt;/em&gt;, a derivative of &lt;em&gt;*dyew-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;sky, bright&quot; (from which we get words like Latin &lt;em&gt;dīes&lt;/em&gt; &quot;day&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Idea&quot; comes from Greek &lt;em&gt;idéia&lt;/em&gt;, from PIE &lt;em&gt;*weyd-&lt;/em&gt; &quot;to see&quot; (which also gives us &lt;em&gt;video&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vedas&lt;/em&gt;, among others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two are not related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T09:42:25.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33584" CreationDate="2019-09-22T13:16:10.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Word order is not based purely on convention.  A sentence expressing a complicated idea has a relatively more complicated constituent structure, and constituent structure places limits on word order.  Words in the same constituent tend to be ordered near each other.  The details differ greatly from language to language, but searching on &quot;scrambling&quot; will get you many discussions on the web.  Here is one from here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6352/scrambling-in-languages-like-latin&quot;&gt;Scrambling in languages like Latin&lt;/a&gt;.  Scrambling was proposed by Robin Lakoff to describe Latin word order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T13:16:10.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-22T18:00:01.947" Score="-6" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is sort of the old question that you'd see whispered about a lot in Western academia, and shouted out by linguists of the past, who had their own circumstances, own canons, own less-connected (?) cultures to influence their reasoning and prejudices: Which language is the best one...? Which languages are better...? Which ones are inferior? What circumstances lead to this...? Why those circumstances? Does this justify our conquests, empire and spreading our religion/language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am a native 'British-ish' English speaker, 'upper-class', never really learned another language properly&lt;/strong&gt; though I understand bits of some other languages when I hear them spoken by the speakers I'm exposed to. &lt;strong&gt;So at least some of my biases are on display - I would appreciate answers that discuss and/or challenge these and maybe reframe the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I hope that it doesn't just scream&lt;/strong&gt; 'racist, unpleasant to answer' but I don't mind answers talking about these. Very incomplete answers are fine - &lt;strong&gt;uncovering a small part of the puzzle is OK if it doesn't obscure the big picture or become a big red herring&lt;/strong&gt;/distraction...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metrics could include, but are not limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Syntax, and how you'd 'rank' this.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Character density under 'common' and more 'specialised' conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Grammatical consistency&quot; and &quot;variation&quot; of this between speakers, and how this is understood by different speakers. Differences between spoken, written?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Legibility under different/damaging conditions when written and spoken (ie. variance between writers and speakers of the language, how easy is it to read when scrawled on a sign, in a book that gets damaged by water).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the syntax impart meaning and concepts and thought and abstract imagery and emotion into a speaker, and how would this vary by language? (results of brain scans of different language speakers when the 'same' concepts are being talked about in their languages could maybe offer insight, or the pictures/symbolism they might draw or invoke when asked about the 'same' things).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Speed' at which they're picked up, and the conditions this varies by, reasons why it varies and the distribution of what is picked up and by who.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Popularity as 1st language, demographics, geography of... why/how this is...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Understandings and interpretations of time, spirituality, kinship, death, bonding, sexuality, societal organisation and hierarchy... and how this crosses or doesn't cross between different cultures and places that speak the same language. (ie. for English you could compare its use in Britain, US, Canada, South Africa and by the places/demographics in those countries).&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hierachies and social/economic inequality, enshrined in the language/its use. If you're ranking this, how to rank and why and under what conditions to rank? Is it inherent to the language, chicken-and-the-egg, does this vary?&#xA;(ie. Western-style debates done in English are usually adversarial and pit one person against another. Does the language end up structured around this kind of aggressive stand-off... other languages less so, different way, not adversarial in most debates?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Correspondence between what one speaker says and how another replicates the concepts in their mind?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Connections with mathematics, why this is, teaching of mathematical and physical concepts in the language and who this trickles down to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Weird quirks' (to me as an English speaker???) (type, distribution, 'severity', demographics) that might be caused by the way the language is taught that manifest in most of the population that uses it as a 1st, 2nd, etc language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How easy it is to pick up as a 2nd, 3rd... language, and how this varies by what 1st, 2nd... language the person learning it speaks.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How easy it is for someone unfamiliar to 'understand'...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematical models that weight these metrics, account for their uncertainties, the stats distributions of, etc...(does not have to be a constant weighting regardless of conditions or context) would be welcomed in answers too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mean to scare anyone off who doesn't feel up to doing all that in their answer though or isn't answering the entirety of the big-picture question - if I have, what to do? I understand this is probably one of the most difficult questions to really answer well and I am a newcomer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26678" LastEditorUserId="26678" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T18:12:44.290" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T20:23:53.360" Title="What is the 'best' language, and by what metrics, why those metrics...?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cognitive-linguistics&gt;&lt;interdisciplinary&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-09-23T10:24:16.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33595" CreationDate="2019-09-22T18:49:18.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any relationship between the various measures and the notion of some language being &quot;best&quot;, a notion that is similar to the question &quot;what is the best car?&quot;. However, you might be able to try measuring some of these specific properties. For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Grammatical consistency&quot; and &quot;variation&quot; of this between speakers,&#xA;  and how this is understood by different speakers. Differences between&#xA;  spoken, written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what you mean by &quot;grammatical consistency&quot; – all languages are internally consistent (by definition). However, especially from the E-language perspective, there can be a lot of variation between individual speakers, or not much variation. A classic example is Chinese which has massive variation, to the point that linguists don't even say that Chinese is one language, it's a family of languages with the same name. English is not quite as diverse as Chinese, but it is pretty diverse. In comparison, Finnish is much less diverse. I should also point out there are 500 times more speakers of English than Finnish. The differences between written and spoken English are fairly minimal, compared to the differences between written and spoken Arabic: so one can certainly try to quantify the differences that exist in a language. Because of the huge number of speakers of English, I distrust claims about variation in English that go beyond saying &quot;We encountered these forms from that person&quot;. Individual variation is generally discounted, in favor of broad social trends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the syntax impart meaning and concepts and thought and&#xA;  abstract imagery and emotion into a speaker, and how would this vary&#xA;  by language? (results of brain scans of different language speakers&#xA;  when the 'same' concepts are being talked about in their languages&#xA;  could maybe offer insight, or the pictures/symbolism they might draw&#xA;  or invoke when asked about the 'same' things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no brain imagery that results in different head-shots from people hearing &quot;I saw a cat&quot;, &quot;I saw a rat&quot;, &quot;I saw a vat&quot; or &quot;I bought a cat&quot;. You can't identify a specific lexical item in one speaker of one language from brain imagery. We don't know how sentences map into mental states – we can't mechanically describe the mental states. So we can't compare languages on the basis of brain states resulting from utterances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Speed' at which they're picked up, and the conditions this varies by,&#xA;  reasons why it varies and the distribution of what is picked up and by&#xA;  who.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All we can say is that children learn language pretty quickly. We cannot say for example that children learn Zulu quicker than they learn English, mainly because there is no definite endpoint where you're done learning a language. Plus, we don't have much data on children learning Zulu. It does seem that properties that require a child to understand complex social rules in the society are learned late, so when a language has numerous grammatically-encoded social registers (for example, Javanese), a child learning one of those languages will not acquire the whole system as early as children that don't also have to learn obscure social conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Popularity as 1st language, demographics, geography of... why/how this&#xA;  is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as a first language, the Logoori language is mainly learned by children in Logoori-speaking families, most of which are in Kenya. That's different from the Haya-learning children, who live in Haya-speaking families, most of which are in Tanzania. Sure, you can try to gather all sorts of social statistics about individual languages, and put them in a table. The reason why the Haya-speaking comunity lives in Tanzania and the Logoori-speaking community lives in Kenya has to do with where their respective ancestors migrated to and from, and that is far enough in the past that we don't know (e.g. did the Wataka family chase an antelope to the west and did the Limbonde family chase a zebra to the south? We don't know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And none of this tells you whether a language is good or bad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T18:49:18.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33595" CreationDate="2019-09-22T19:08:01.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing you nor anyone else knows what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; consider to be &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; in a language, or what a language should be good for as opposed to be &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be good for, nobody can tell you what is &lt;em&gt;the best&lt;/em&gt; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can tell you that when you are doing your French A-level in the UK, the best language to use for your essay is French. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I personally find that Georgian script has exceedingly beautiful design capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given a sincere context and a sincere question an answer &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be possible, but this isn't the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; tell the Original Poster that this question here will be as well received as one on Physics SE asking &lt;em&gt;Which is the best speed?&lt;/em&gt;, one on Chemistry SE asking &lt;em&gt;Which is the best element?&lt;/em&gt;, or one on Psychology SE asking &lt;em&gt;What is the most inane question one can ask?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T20:12:53.587" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T20:12:53.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33595" CreationDate="2019-09-22T20:23:53.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To extend Araucaria's analogy, this is a bit like going to Physics.SE and asking &quot;what is the best unit?&quot;. Well, it depends on your use case. If you want to measure time, then the best unit might be the second, or the microsecond, or the hour, or the year. If you want to measure distance, the best unit might be the meter, or the kilometer, or the light-year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the &quot;best&quot; language depends on your use-case—and this is in fact a very relevant question in &lt;em&gt;sociolinguistics&lt;/em&gt;, the intersection between linguistics and sociology. In certain national beauty pageants in Kenya, for example, contestants can choose to give an interview in English or Swahili. On the one hand, English is seen as a language of the elite, the language of government and commerce. On the other hand, Swahili is seen as a &lt;em&gt;Kenyan&lt;/em&gt; language, a language of the Kenyan people, not of the colonialists. Most people in Kenya speak both, so the choice of which to use comes down to complicated social factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is inextricable from the specific set of circumstances. Some fascinating papers have been written on the relationship of English and Swahili in Kenya. But if you're applying to Oxford or Cambridge, it's almost always going to be better to write your essays in English than in Swahili. Not because English is a &quot;superior&quot; language, but because it's the appropriate language for those circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And trying to determine a single &quot;best&quot; language, overall, is like trying to determine a single &quot;best&quot; unit in physics. It's pointless. How can you decide if a meter is better or worse than a second? Does the kilogram outrank the coulomb? It's not just unanswerable—the question doesn't even make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; choose one particular metric to go by, and rank languages that way. You could rank by average number of phonemes per word, in which case Inuktitut is near the top and Mandarin Chinese near the bottom. Or you could rank by number of first-language speakers, in which case Mandarin (and English) are at the top. Or you could rank by geographic length of the longest dialect continuum, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29960/10559&quot;&gt;Slavic&lt;/a&gt; would win. But &lt;em&gt;all these measurements are arbitrary&lt;/em&gt;; they just depend on what factors you care about. One objective measurement might be &quot;how much information does each language convey per second, on average?&quot;—and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/32427/10559&quot;&gt;a recent study&lt;/a&gt; (which I keep linking people to because it's &lt;em&gt;really cool&lt;/em&gt;) showed that &lt;em&gt;every language they examined&lt;/em&gt; ranks about the same! In other words, all languages convey about the same amount of information per second, no matter what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T20:23:53.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33584" CreationDate="2019-09-23T08:11:44.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Finnish, the word order is almost entirely irrelevant. Even the most mangled up sentence (vs. convention) can be understood, as long as the word declension is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example the English sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The dog is in the hot black car with the window open&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to change it to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The window with black open dog in hot is the car the&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make no sense whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter Finnish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Koira on kuumassa mustassa autossa, jossa on ikkuna auki&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is the same English phrase in conventional Finnish. Now, if you were to mangle it up and change the order to uhh... unconventional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ikkuna jossa on koira kuumassa on autossa mustassa auki&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still get the meaning, even though all the word order rules were thrown out the window (eh). The exact translation of the above would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The window where the dog is in the heat, is open in the car black&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which still sort of makes sense. I'm not saying you should just ignore all rules, but some languages do allow for massive deviations from the convention and grammar, and still be understood. The key in Finnish is in the declension. But even ignoring that will still be understood, but it will take a moment to parse :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;auki koira auto on joka kuuma ikkuna musta&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gets far more challenging, with all declensions removed, but can still kind of be understood without context. Anyway, the only reason it is harder to understand is because there is a conventional word order that most people follow subconsciously, learned from other natives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In daily life, it happens all the time that you start a phrase, change your thoughts mid-phrase and modify the rest without missing a beat. The phrase will come out a bit odd, but will still be fully understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26682" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T08:11:44.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-23T09:10:38.237" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, English uses &quot;...&quot;, but French uses «...».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, which of these is more common? What did the first written languages use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24981" LastEditorUserId="1009" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T10:04:36.407" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T10:04:36.407" Title="How and why do languages evolve to use different types of quotation marks?" Tags="&lt;historical-linguistics&gt;&lt;written-language&gt;&lt;punctuation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33571" CreationDate="2019-09-23T09:40:19.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;could you write a whole article in just one of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you could, but it would be considered troublesome for both the reader and the writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this ever occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Almost never.&lt;/strong&gt; Well, it could be done in a book meant for someone who is learning the language, because students learn (or rather, cram) Kanji over several years of studying Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Japanese does not use spaces to separate words&lt;/strong&gt;. So, using different scripts makes it easier to understand where a new word starts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some words would be easier to write&lt;/strong&gt; using Kanji alone because a Kanji is essentially a pictograph. For example, a phonetically long word could be represented as a single Kanji character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Historically&lt;/strong&gt;, Kanji were borrowed from the Chinese language, which is a tonal language whereas Japanese is not. So, the structure of the language itself was a bit different and Kanji alone could not be used to express everything in the language. For example, Japanese has many word endings, changing which cannot be done using Kanji. The word root taberu can be transformed to tabemasu, tabemasen etc, which requires the usage of hiragana.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24981" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T09:40:19.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33584" CreationDate="2019-09-23T10:24:32.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick look on the distribution of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;basic word order&lt;/a&gt; tells us that it is not entirely conventional. Out of the six possibilities SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS the latter three are suspicously underrepresented in the languages of the world (it was once believed that these word orders didn't exist at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is some element in word order that makes it not completely conventional, but conventional enough to allow for different word orders in different languages, and even the more deprecated ones occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T10:24:32.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33583" CreationDate="2019-09-23T10:35:24.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not linguistics glosses, but a lot of sentences in a lot of languages can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tatoeba.org/eng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tatoeba&lt;/a&gt;. The sentences are typically of the phrase-book type, but there are also some more complicated sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T10:35:24.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33584" CreationDate="2019-09-23T11:23:42.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any language is a system of conventions. Word order is certainly part of that, but it depends on the specific language how rigid rules are. In many Indo-European languages it seems that the preferred order of subject, object and verb is &quot;SVO&quot; (see jknappen's answer). In Latin it is not really rigid. Also German is an example with more flexibility. Although the standard is definitely SVO, all six arrangements of S, O, V can occur, but some would probaby be used only in poetic language. The order can also put special emphasis on the object (OVS) or produce a question (VSO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26686" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T11:23:42.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="31889" CreationDate="2019-09-23T15:39:26.353" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking by Michael Cysouw, the absence of the 2PL form in English pronoun despite having 3PL form is extremely unusual. The only language that has the exact five-way system of 1SG 1PL 2 3SG 3PL paradigm is the Xokleng language in the Amazonian basin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is Berik paradigm (1SG 1PL 2 3) and Sierra Populuca paradigm (1EXC 1INC 2 3) that is much more common. Both have only 1 second-person pronoun, but both also have only 1 third-person pronoun. The language that has Berik paradigm includes Berik and Kuman, while the language that has Sierra Populuca paradigm includes Jaqaru and Campa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24485" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T21:45:03.900" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T21:45:03.900" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2019-09-23T16:00:32.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wals.info/chapter/99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WALS&lt;/a&gt;, Wichita and Wari' lacks any personal pronoun. Since they're polysynthetic languages, they probably used personal affixes to convey the same meaning instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And this is not just pro-dropping. There is really no personal pronoun, to the point that that article decides to give the case alignment of the pronoun as &quot;None&quot; rather than &quot;Neutral&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24485" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T16:00:32.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="210" CreationDate="2019-09-23T17:25:58.930" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's notable that the inclusive &quot;we&quot; is symmetric, and a that an inclusive sense of &quot;I&quot; and &quot;you&quot; is not completely unthinkable (that is, one can differentiate that the appelative sense of an assertive &quot;I am hungry&quot; is inclusive, and that &quot;we will go now&quot; is nevertheless egoistic; nevermind &quot;feed me&quot;, which I'd deem an absurdity for a young child to say :D).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm kind of answering to the sign-language related answers. Nevertheless, if reading the question's word &quot;language&quot; as &quot;logic system&quot; (synonymously called &quot;theory&quot; in maths circles), then I might even post this as an answer, deeming an inclusive logic a sub-language. It's not surprising that single valued logic develops before a two valued logic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;me, mi&lt;/em&gt; etc means &quot;we&quot; in some languages. Also compare Ger &quot;man&quot;, French &quot;on&quot;, Eng &quot;one&quot; for an indefinite pronoun, and Proto-Indo-European *sem- &quot;one; together&quot;, *se- or *sel- &quot;self, sole&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22504" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T17:25:58.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33614" CreationDate="2019-09-24T13:01:04.313" Score="7" ViewCount="2748" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When languages borrow words from other languages, they sometimes deliberately distort words to make them phonetically easier to pronounce.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when Japanese speakers are taught the word &quot;circle&quot;, it is taught as sa-ku-ru. Similarly, &quot;beer&quot; is taught as bee-ru and &quot;bottle&quot; is taught as bo-te-ru.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Japanese probably has hundreds of such examples. Chinese also does this when it borrows words from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific linguistic term for this that I can read more about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How common is this? Is there a specific reason why this happens? Does this have something to do with how accents are developed? Do we lose the ability to pronounce some sounds as we age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24981" LastEditorUserId="24981" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T16:11:55.760" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T05:09:34.603" Title="Phonetic distortion when words are borrowed among languages" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;linguistic-typology&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33612" CreationDate="2019-09-24T13:44:35.390" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not &quot;deliberate&quot; – it's the automatic, nigh-inevitable result of fitting a set of sounds from one language's inventory into a different inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like changing a photo from RGB to CMYK or changing the encoding of text that includes special characters. Most values will transfer but some will just be approximated. Sometimes the change is obvious, but even values that appear very similar may be represented or realized slightly differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for frequency, it's a universal phenomenon. Because no language has an inventory of sounds and combination rules that is a superset of all other languages' inventories, every language will need to approximate some sounds and sequences when borrowing words. The greater the overlap between a given pair, the less approximation needed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T13:44:35.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33612" CreationDate="2019-09-24T15:14:36.473" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term is &lt;em&gt;loanword adaptation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens every time someone tries to use a word from a different language when speaking another. It's because every language has a different set of sounds that can be recognized as part of that language.  A tongue click can be part of ordinary words in some languages in southern and eastern Africa just like any other consonant but not in others. A difference in the length of a vowel can create a difference in meaning in some languages but not in others. The presence or absence of a puff of air following a sound like &lt;em&gt;p&lt;/em&gt; can create a difference in meaning in some languages but not in others. Native speakers of languages with such sounds and features perceive and produce them with incredible precision without ever even thinking about them, while others find it difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of these differences, two competing goals come into play when a language borrows a word from another. One is to preserve the original form as faithfully as possible. The other is to conform to the rules of the sound system of the target language as much as possible. So when a sound used in the original word is unavailable in the target language, the closest possible sound is chosen. What you often end up is a compromise between these two forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Languages also differ in conditions under which each sound is allowed to occur (known as &lt;em&gt;phonotactics&lt;/em&gt;). Languages like Japanese allow few consonant clusters. So a word like &lt;em&gt;strengths&lt;/em&gt; is often an impossible sequence of sounds in those languages. There are two overall strategies a language can take when borrowing such a word: It can delete existing sounds or insert extra sounds. Japanese usually takes the latter approach (known as &lt;em&gt;epenthesis&lt;/em&gt;), so e.g. &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; [strɔŋ] becomes &lt;em&gt;sutorongu&lt;/em&gt;. At the other end of the spectrum, there are languages that allow longer consonant clusters than English does. In Polish, &lt;em&gt;wszczniesz&lt;/em&gt; [fʂt͡ʂɲɛʂ], which may be approximated by &lt;em&gt;fshchnyesh&lt;/em&gt; in English spelling, is a totally possible word that native speakers of Polish don't find difficult to pronounce. But if you had to say &lt;em&gt;fshchnyesh&lt;/em&gt; in the middle of an English sentence, do you think you would find it easy or the listener would easily understand what you said? I hope that gives you an idea of where the &quot;distortion&quot; may come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we lose the ability to pronounce some sounds as we age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we start losing the ability to recognize fine shades of sounds when we're a few months old, and we complete this process before puberty. This is natural and essential as part of first language acquisition. If you think about it, the fact we can recognize the same word as the same word when uttered by different people, male or female, hoarse or high-pitched, in a loud room or not, having cold or not, etc., is an incredible ability that computers are still trying to catch up with. But as we start recognizing a group of similar sounds as the same sound, we also lose the potential to develop the ability to produce them distinctly in exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T05:09:34.603" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T05:09:34.603" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-24T15:20:41.300" Score="4" ViewCount="883" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is known to have a phenomenon of &quot;pre-fortis clipping&quot;: in certain contexts, vowel and sonorant phonemes before a fortis/voiceless consonant are realized with shorter duration than the same phonemes before a lenis/voiced consonant (or before no consonant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/04/pre-fortis-clipping.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Wells's blog entry&lt;/a&gt; about the topic quotes his article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syllabification and allophony&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, where he describes the rule as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English vowels are subject to pre-fortis clipping, then, when they are followed by a fortis consonant within the same syllable. The /f/’s in &lt;em&gt;self, selfish&lt;/em&gt; /ˈself.ɪʃ/, and &lt;em&gt;dolphin&lt;/em&gt; /ˈdɒlf.ɪn/ trigger clipping, but not those in &lt;em&gt;shellfish&lt;/em&gt; /ˈʃel.fɪʃ/ or &lt;em&gt;funfair&lt;/em&gt; /ˈfʌn.feə/. So do the /t/ in &lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt; and the /ʧ/ in &lt;em&gt;feature,&lt;/em&gt; but not the /p/ in &lt;em&gt;fee-paying&lt;/em&gt; or the /k/ in &lt;em&gt;tea-kettle&lt;/em&gt;. The vowel /æ/ undergoes pre-fortis clipping in &lt;em&gt;lap, lamp, happy&lt;/em&gt; /ˈhæp.ɪ/, and &lt;em&gt;hamper&lt;/em&gt; /ˈhæmp.ə/, but not in &lt;em&gt;slab&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;clamber&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Susan Ramsaran (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Studies in the pronunciation of English,&lt;/em&gt; A commemorative volume in honour of A.C. Gimson (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pages 76-86.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This data is consistent with Wells's method of syllabification, where intervocalic consonants are assigned to the coda of a preceding syllable when it has greater stress than the following syllable. However, I don't believe that a consensus has yet formed in favor of Wells's system of syllabification. I've seen various post-1990 literature, such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bermudez-otero.com/amphichronic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An amphichronic approach to English syllabification&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (2013), that instead syllabifies such consonants into the onset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onset-favoring theories of English syllabification need to have a way to deal with the facts of pre-fortis clipping, and as far as I can see, a syllable-based account won't do the trick for those analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non-syllable-based formulations that I've found so far&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/harris.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The foot as a segmental domain&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, by John Harris, 2000, suggests that the clipping rule is foot-based: &quot;English pre-fortis clipping/pre-lenis drawling: duration of V is conditioned by co-pedal C&quot; (p. 14). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This foot-based formulation accounts for all of the examples mentioned so far, but not for a &quot;latex&quot; example mentioned in Bermúdez-Otero 2013. Bermúdez-Otero says that in certain American English accents that have [ɾ] in words like &quot;better&quot;, the word &quot;latex&quot; can be produced with a clipped vowel before a voiceless plosive [t] (not lenited [ɾ]). This poses a problem for certain analyses. Specifically, it excludes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a) any analysis that both restricts clipping to tautosyllabic sequences and predicts lenition for all coda /t/&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;b) any analysis that that both restricts clipping to foot-internal sequences and predicts lenition for all non-foot-initial /t/.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bermúdez-Otero 2013 cites Bermúdez-Otero 2007, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bermudez-otero.com/OCP4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Word-final prevocalic consonants in English: representation vs derivation&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Here, the possible presence of clipping of the first vowel in &lt;em&gt;latex&lt;/em&gt; without lenition of the /t/ is explained by the following formulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;§24 A prosodic solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The environment of stop lenition is defined by the foot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The environment of prefortis clip is defined by the prosodic word: a &#xA;  vowel undergoes clipping if followed within the same prosodic word by a &#xA;  fortis consonant that does not belong to a stronger syllable. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this description a little complex, but satisfactory for the most part (I'm not sure whether the &quot;that does not belong to a stronger syllable&quot; exception is necessary: do words like &quot;tattoo&quot; not show clipping?). Does anyone know of problems with this rule, or further refinements that have been made to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T17:14:07.513" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T17:14:07.513" Title="Does pre-fortis clipping only operate within a syllable? If not, what is its actual scope?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;vowels&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;&lt;prosody&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33574" CreationDate="2019-09-24T16:03:44.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although auditory equidistance is foundational in the cardinal vowel system, it is widely known that this is a problematically unvalidated concept. Peter Ladefoged made this point a few times. Here is a proposal for empirically testing the concept, based on a higher-tech version of Jones' method. The input stimulus is a pair of vowel-like synthetic stimuli, for example cardinal vowels 1 and 5, and the task is to select two points on an auditory continuum that are (subjectively felt to be) equally-spaced from the endpoints and from each other. Subjects can be trained on a pitch-based and amplitude-based analog (this would also provide a useful metric of whether subjects understood and could perform the task). A third kind of &quot;training&quot; task would be to construct a continuous model of some kind of non-speech complex wave (e.g. varying amplitudes in a 5-component series with component frequencies 100, 200...500 Hz). The main equidistance test would then involve subjects doing the same thing for (plausible) vowel stimuli which vary F1 and F2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part, IMO, is setting up the task so that the program does not just give you the answer automatically, but you also don't have to randomly search an inventory of thousands of possible F1,F2 values. As a first pass at this experiment, you could reduce formant pairs to a single point on a linear equation, and impose a certain granularity on those points (for example, 10 possible points spaced apart physically-equally on that line). I suggest putting the candidate points in a physically random position, not a straight line.&#xA;A variant of this approach presents pairs of sequences like &quot;i e ɛ a&quot; where &quot;i&quot; and &quot;a&quot; are identical, and the nature of the intermediate points varies between Candidate 1 and Candidate 2 (the question for the subject is of the type &quot;which of these two is closer to equal spacing?&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not be at all surprised to discover that the native language of subjects strongly affects responses, so that if your vowel system has [i ɪ a] you will get different result than if your vowel system has [ɪ e æ]. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T16:03:44.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33618" CreationDate="2019-09-24T17:09:56.013" Score="4" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most universities in India are teaching  only  pure vowels (monophthongs), and  diphthongs. Now  we find  triphthongs. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is  the study  of triphthongs a must to  master the phonology  of   English? Does the study  of  triphthongs  help  a long way in the advanced stages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the study  of triphthongs not  necessary for  those who are not  very advanced  in phonetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T15:33:55.583" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T15:33:55.583" Title="Is the study of triphthongs a must to master English phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;phonemes&gt;&lt;triphthongs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33617" CreationDate="2019-09-24T17:58:16.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;triphthongs&quot; I assume you're referring to /eɪə, əʊə, aɪə, aʊə, ɔɪə/ found (or posited) in words like in &lt;em&gt;layer, lower, fire, hour, lawyer&lt;/em&gt; for Standard Southern British English (or Received Pronunciation or BBC English or whatever you want to call it). And by &quot;to master the phonology of English&quot; I assume you're referring to acquisition of the phonology of English as a second/foreign language, not the study of it. And I'm also going to assume the accent model as a target for acquisition being talked about here is one based on what has traditionally been referred to by the names I mentioned above (SSB/RP/BBC), because if your model is based on American English triphthongs are most likely irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these assumptions are true, the answer I'd say is no. First of all, not all accounts of the English vowel system accept that it has triphthongs. Out of the three major pronouncing dictionaries, two (&lt;em&gt;Longman Pronunciation Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English&lt;/em&gt;) do not posit triphthongs, transcribing &lt;em&gt;layer, fire&lt;/em&gt;, etc. as (prototypically) disyllabic and thus as rhymes with &lt;em&gt;player, liar&lt;/em&gt;, etc. This is because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether /eɪə/ etc. in certain words are one syllable or two. Some who support the triphthong analysis point to the fact these sequences of vowels often undergo a process called &lt;em&gt;smoothing&lt;/em&gt;—whereby the vowel in the middle is dropped, resulting in a diphthong or even a monophthong, so that &lt;em&gt;fire&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced as [faə] or [faː] (similar or identical to &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt;)—or argue that monomorphemic words like &lt;em&gt;layer/hour/fire&lt;/em&gt; are pronounced more quickly and undergo smoothing more often than words like &lt;em&gt;player/lower/liar&lt;/em&gt;, but the problem is that smoothing does occur in the latter words too and even across word boundaries. I see no reason to try to pronounce &lt;em&gt;layer, hour, fire&lt;/em&gt;, etc. any differently from &lt;em&gt;player, lower, liar&lt;/em&gt;, etc. If one wants to sound more like native speakers of SSB/RP/BBC, one should master smoothing (in both groups of words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T17:58:16.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-24T18:33:03.623" Score="-6" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proto indo european (aka PIE) is an unrecorded (as far as we know) language that was possibly spoken in southern Russia or Ukraine. Let’s suppose that there was a building underground sealed with rocks that holds the bodies of dead people who spoke PIE. And, let’s say that the cave was extensive, similar to what was seen in Ancient Egypt but smaller in size. There were skulls (presumably of important and in this case possibly literate people) of the dead and, most importantly, writing, probably about religion and a little history. Let’s say these writings were written in a way that was similar to cuneiform and there were about 200 writings, written on rocks similar to adobe in Native American settlements. (This adobe like material was, of course, preserved.) Some explorational linguists explore the area, which was flat land as the PIE homeland was described as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of PIE, why do we call a language a language and not a danguage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26693" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T20:11:03.600" Title="What if Proto-Indo-European documents written in a cuneiform like script were found?" Tags="&lt;proto-indo-european&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-09-25T03:45:44.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33619" CreationDate="2019-09-24T19:22:55.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds somewhat like a worldbuilding question—you're working on a story of some sort, and are looking for some linguistic details to include. So I'm going to approach it from that angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Proto-Indo-European&quot;, as it's commonly used, doesn't refer to a specific, actual recorded language. Instead, it refers to a sort of hypothetical reconstruction. We know that various languages are related, and probably descend from a common ancestor; PIE is our attempt to reconstruct that common ancestor. To use a biological analogy, we know that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor at some point in the past, and there must have been, at some point, a &lt;em&gt;last&lt;/em&gt; common ancestor. We can even try to reconstruct what that last common ancestor might have looked like. But finding fossils of that single specific ancestor is vanishingly unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more likely is that we'd find documents written in a previously-unknown Indo-European language, either written down much earlier than anything we already have, or having branched off from the others much earlier than anything else we currently know about. Or even both! And, in fact, &lt;em&gt;this has happened in the past&lt;/em&gt;—when Bedřich Hrozný managed to decipher some cuneiform tablets in 1917, and showed that the language on those tablets was Indo-European. The &quot;Anatolian&quot; languages, as they're now known, were written down a millennium before any other other Indo-European languages, and also split off earlier than any other IE branch. And, even more startlingly, they showed evidence of phonemes that until then had been purely hypothetical, Saussure's &lt;em&gt;coefficients sonantiques&lt;/em&gt; (now called &quot;laryngeals&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could something like that happen again? Absolutely! It's not &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt;, but it's plausible enough to build a story out of it. There are even several as-yet-undeciphered scripts out there in the world that might turn out to encode Indo-European languages. And evidence like that might completely rewrite the textbooks on Proto-Indo-European. It might not be PIE itself, but for story purposes the effect would be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T19:22:55.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33619" CreationDate="2019-09-24T20:11:03.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;RE: Speaking of PIE, why do we call a language a language and not a danguage? =&gt; I'm not sure if I understand this question, but, PIE for &quot;tongue&quot; was probably *dnghu(a). This word has often interfered with verbs meaning &quot;to lick&quot;, with l-, hence the initial of Latin lingua, whence French langage and English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T20:11:03.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17082" CreationDate="2019-09-25T11:57:16.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free morphemes: Lexical &amp;amp; Functional&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexical morphemes:ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Functional morphemes:Functional words (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Articles are free morphemes belong to functional morphemes  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26700" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T11:57:16.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="26818" CreationDate="2019-09-26T01:47:31.593" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English belongs to the West Germanic family tree. There are a lot of different options about which language is the closet to English. However, Semantically Scots is the closest to English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, English originated from Fris which is a language spoken in the northern province of the Netherlands called &quot;Friesland&quot;. Fris is still being spoken in the Netherlands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, English had large influence on Latin words due to the occupation of the French in England during the middle ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to say which language is closest as it is a mix of Germanic, Latin, French, and even greek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26705" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T01:47:31.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33629" CreationDate="2019-09-26T02:18:04.360" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most consonants in Hittite appear in two variants, conventionally called &quot;voiced&quot; and &quot;voiceless&quot;: &quot;voiceless&quot; consonants are written twice in a row, while &quot;voiced&quot; consonants are written only once. For example, the word &lt;em&gt;appa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;later&quot; is variously written &lt;em&gt;a-ap-pa&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ap-pa&lt;/em&gt;, but never *&lt;em&gt;ap-a&lt;/em&gt; or *&lt;em&gt;a-pa&lt;/em&gt;, while the word &lt;em&gt;apa&lt;/em&gt; &quot;that&quot; is always &lt;em&gt;ap-a&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;a-pa&lt;/em&gt;, not *&lt;em&gt;ap-pa&lt;/em&gt;. So it's thought that the former was something like &lt;code&gt;/apa/&lt;/code&gt;, and the latter &lt;code&gt;/aba/&lt;/code&gt;. (Or maybe fortis-lenis, or short-long, or…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this distinction usually only shows up intervocalically: initially, finally, or in clusters, the writing system has no consistent way to express it (as there are no glyphs for lone consonants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So—&lt;strong&gt;is anything known about this contrast in other environments?&lt;/strong&gt; Do we know if it was actually neutralized in other contexts, or if it just didn't show up in writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(We might know this based on, for example, the spelling of clusters: if a form like &lt;em&gt;nahh-teni&lt;/em&gt; &quot;you all are afraid&quot; is consistently written *&lt;em&gt;na-ha-te-ni&lt;/em&gt;, for example, that's decent evidence that the &lt;em&gt;hh&lt;/em&gt; ended up getting voiced; if it's consistently written *&lt;em&gt;na-ah-ha-te-ni&lt;/em&gt;, that's decent evidence that it remained voiceless. But I don't know if either of these writings actually happens.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As fdb pointed out, voiceless consonants aren't quite &quot;written twice in a row&quot;, since there are no signs for individual consonants in Hittite cuneiform. Rather, two adjacent signs both indicate the same consonant: &lt;em&gt;ap-pa&lt;/em&gt; is written with a sign for &lt;code&gt;/ap/&lt;/code&gt; followed a sign for &lt;code&gt;/pa/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T16:02:06.177" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T22:21:34.950" Title="What is known about the voicing of Hittite consonants?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;voicing&gt;&lt;dead-languages&gt;&lt;hittite&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33628" CreationDate="2019-09-26T03:36:56.000" Score="-3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;So when you learn a new language from English like Spanish in school, they make it seem like &quot;hey there's these clear patterns and rules once learned you'll master spanish&quot;. So you learn the verb conjugations for some simple verbs that all fit the same pattern. But then second year comes around and you learn that there are all kinds of edge cases and slight divergences from teh &quot;main&quot; patterns which you just learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I've been looking around at every language I can find. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, Thai, Telugu, Tamil, Nahuatl, Zapotec, Piraha, Ancient Egyptian, Yoruba, Igbo, Xhosa, Armenian, Arabic, Inuktitut, Basque, Georgian, Sumerian, Norwegian, Old English, Navajo, Cherokee, Tibetan, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't looked too closely at the grammars yet, but I have seen them and tried scanning them to see if they have a highly &quot;normal&quot; structure. By that I mean like a set of rules that everything follows, with no edge cases. Or if there are edge cases, there are clear rules to them (like changing the following letter based on the previous letter in verb conjugations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what it seems, especially in the &quot;main&quot; ones like Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Chinese, is that there is &lt;strong&gt;no standard set of patterns&lt;/strong&gt;. These books are all saying &quot;Sanskrit has 3 genders and 9 x and 12 y for every noun, and 4 this and 5 that for every verb, etc.&quot; Or for Tibetan, &quot;there are 3 verb forms and they come in these flavors: a, b, c. etc.&quot;. But then my experience is something like this....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE FIRST VERB I PICK OUT OF THE HAT DOESN'T FIT THE PATTERN&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one doesn't either. These turn out to be edge cases. The third one doesn't either, that belongs to this &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; class we don't learn until Graduate school. Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is if these &quot;patterns&quot; (so to speak, they are not &lt;em&gt;computationally rigorous&lt;/em&gt; patterns in my opinion) are more just this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VAGUE CLASSIFICATION OF SPEECH/WRITING DONE AFTER THE FACT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, these &quot;rules&quot; are more just like &quot;Hey, it &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like these verbs all have the same pattern&quot; or &quot;It &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; like this is a group of related words&quot;. But in reality, it is just something human minds have classified into patterns....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IT'S NOT BUILT INTO THE LANGUAGE ITSELF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, it's the result of evolution or something, and &lt;em&gt;after the fact&lt;/em&gt; we &quot;find&quot; these patterns. More accurately, we try to come up with patterns in the language, even though it wasn't &lt;strong&gt;designed&lt;/strong&gt; that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that more or less an accurate reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the people who write these grammars are trying to make sense of languages that &lt;em&gt;don't have an inbuilt set of rules predefined for them&lt;/em&gt;. In doing so, they come up with these &quot;rules&quot; and &quot;patterns&quot; so it is &quot;easier&quot; to teach (I would say it makes it harder). Every language listed above, and every language other than perhaps modern constructed languages, don't have predefined rules. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about Sanskrit, or a few others? I've heard about how there were ancient grammar books written. Does this mean it was constructed with rules? Or no, they are just like modern grammarians and analyzed their language &lt;em&gt;after the fact&lt;/em&gt; that it was already in existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are languages which have predefined patterns (before their existence), what are they and are there any edge cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to go through a grammar and learn the patterns, but then I am finding really it's a bunch of fluff and almost it would be better to just figure out the patterns on your own and be provided with a very large word list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then generally I guess part of the question could be, &lt;strong&gt;what is the purpose of grammars&lt;/strong&gt;? The stated purpose is &quot;to define the rules of the language&quot;. But these aren't &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt;, give me a break. These are more like &quot;shared traits&quot; of word forms rather than &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt;. With shared traits you can't use them as &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt;. Rules don't have edge-cases. Unless that is part of the rule too! With shared traits, you can only use them as a hint to the analysis of new word forms. And maybe &quot;hey, this uses the same pattern in 2 of the 120 cases I've seen, that makes it Class A!&quot;. But that is definitely not making it a rule, more like a &lt;em&gt;coincidence&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;borrowing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say, it would be way better to see the full notes of every word recorded by the linguist than to have the grammar as the final source of truth. The word list is the final source of truth, and the collected sentences! But they usually are few in the grammar books in comparison to the length of the grammar book. 10,000 sentences and 100,000 words might be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T04:34:44.990" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T04:56:35.703" Title="How definitive are &quot;patterns&quot; in grammar across languages?" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;&lt;morphology&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33643" CreationDate="2019-09-26T04:24:41.277" Score="0" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-do-linguists-learn-a-new-language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; doesn't come close to a good answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a linguist goes out into the middle of the Amazon where no one has ever been and no one knows the language other than let's say a remote tribe, how does the linguist learn the language enough to create a grammar for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long do they have to spend (rough range/scale of time)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many words do they collect (rough range/scale of words)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many sentences do they collect (rough range/scale of sentences)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many stories/texts do they collect (rough range/scale of stores)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are they writing all of this down during a conversation or do they record conversations and then transcribe later? I'm wondering this part because how do they figure out the meaning of the words if they are only recording right now and not transcribing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a rough back of the napkin description to paint the picture, not a complete book on how to be a linguist :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My imagination says that they would at first point to things and get the names. This gives you some nouns. They would then compare some things and eventually arrive at adjectives (bigger, smaller, etc.). Then they could move onto actions/verbs somehow. But how do they then get to a grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T19:25:13.843" Title="How does a linguist learn a brand new language?" Tags="&lt;field-linguistics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-09-26T22:13:27.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33626" CreationDate="2019-09-26T04:43:48.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More accurately, we try to come up with patterns in the language, even though it wasn't &lt;strong&gt;designed&lt;/strong&gt; that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much all of modern linguistics is &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;prescriptive&lt;/em&gt;. In other words, it's not about making up rules that people have to follow—it's about inventing rules that explain the data we observe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it like physics. Isaac Newton &quot;invented&quot; gravity—he came up with some very famous rules that explained how it worked. But before Newton, objects didn't just hover in midair; Newton didn't change the way the world worked, he only documented what already existed. Linguistics is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Newton's law of gravitation, like pretty much anything in linguistics, is a &lt;em&gt;model&lt;/em&gt;. It may miss some nuance, or fall apart on certain edge cases, but that's okay—the point is to come up with an explanation that covers as much of the data as possible, as elegantly and simply as possible. We know nowadays that Newton's law of gravitation isn't perfect, and has some pretty serious flaws in it, but despite those flaws it got humanity to the moon and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically, the people who write these grammars are trying to make sense of languages that &lt;em&gt;don't have an inbuilt set of rules predefined for them&lt;/em&gt;. In doing so, they come up with these &quot;rules&quot; and &quot;patterns&quot; so it is &quot;easier&quot; to teach (I would say it makes it harder). Every language listed above, and every language other than perhaps modern constructed languages, don't have predefined rules. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends what you mean by predefined. Languages tend to follow patterns, not because some ancient language-planner laid out those patterns for them, but because it makes things easier for the learners and speakers. In English, there's a general rule that you make nouns plural by adding a special morpheme to the end, and that morpheme can take four different forms, depending on the final sound in the word. This rule doesn't work 100% of the time (child~children, goose~geese), but it's &quot;real&quot; in the sense that children learn it, internalize it, and can apply it in situations they've never encountered before (look up &quot;the wug test&quot; for details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And languages do evolve over time—they evolve &lt;em&gt;really quickly&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, compared to biological evolution, and there's &lt;em&gt;enormous&lt;/em&gt; selection pressure on them every minute of every day. Sometimes this evolution makes them more regular: you mention Spanish's &lt;em&gt;-ar -er -ir&lt;/em&gt; conjugation patterns, which evolved out of Latin's system of &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; conjugations (the &quot;consonant conjugation&quot;, the least regular/predictable one, got broken up and absorbed into the others), which evolved out of Proto-Indo-European's whole mess of different paradigms and derivations. Sometimes it makes them less regular, when sound changes obscure something that used to be regular and make it &quot;opaque&quot;. It's always a compromise between regularity (regular, easy-to-learn patterns) and efficiency (conveying information as quickly and reliably as possible), and trade-offs always have to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So then generally I guess part of the question could be, &lt;strong&gt;what is the purpose of grammars&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To document the structure and usage of a language, as completely and succinctly as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually this involves giving broad generalities (&quot;Latin nouns ending in &lt;em&gt;-a&lt;/em&gt; are feminine&quot;), which work 90% of the time, and then later filling in the edge cases (&quot;…except for Greek borrowings and a handful of fossilized forms&quot;). It's the same reason physics students learn Newton's law of gravitation before Einstein's: 90% of the time, F=GMm/r² will get you the answer you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have to say, it would be way better to see the full notes of every word recorded by the linguist than to have the grammar as the final source of truth. The word list is the final source of truth, and the collected sentences! But they usually are few in the grammar books in comparison to the length of the grammar book. 10,000 sentences and 100,000 words might be a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right, the raw data collected by a field linguist is usually more complete and more authoritative than a grammar. But you're severely underestimating how much data is needed to fully learn a language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of how long it takes children to learn their first languages. That's years and years of time spent hearing the language used just about every hour of every day. Evidence shows, that's how much data it takes to truly learn (i.e. have an accurate mental model of) a language. Because you need to not only learn every pattern and rule and law in the grammar, but also all the exceptions, all the variations, all the possible changes and slips and idiosyncracies and styles and accents that make up what we call &quot;English&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while no grammar is complete, they tend to be an acceptable compromise: if I want to know something about Swahili, it'll be much, much easier for me to find a good grammar and look up the appropriate chapter than to move to Kenya and spend a decade listening to people speak! Just like in physics, people around the world are constantly working on building newer and better models for language. But we're not at the point where every detail of a language can fit into a single book, or even a set of books, and it's unclear if we ever will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, crucially—&lt;strong&gt;learning a language is fundamentally about learning patterns&lt;/strong&gt;. Take a random sentence from this answer. Odds are you've never seen that exact sentence before in your life. Odds are that sentence has never been written down before by anyone in the universe! Yet you can read it no problem. Why? &lt;em&gt;Because of the mental rules that form your knowledge of English.&lt;/em&gt; Those are the rules that linguists try to document. It's been proven that you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; memorize the plural for every word individually—instead, you remember a few special cases and exceptions, and learn a rule for all the rest. (Again, look up &quot;the wug test&quot;.) This is why grammars are pretty much universally regarded as A Good Thing, even if they always have to rely on generalizations that don't work in every instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T04:56:35.703" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T04:56:35.703" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33625" CreationDate="2019-09-26T06:15:54.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This topic is not easy to answer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To begin with, as a rule, PIE voiceless *t k p are normally written double intervocalically, while PIE voiced *d(h) *g(h) *b(h) are normally written simple in the same position. So we have good reasons to think that Hittite had two series of consonants. The controversy is the nature of the distinction.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same issue exists in Hurrian.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are few exceptions to the above rule. One is mekki &quot;much&quot; related to *meg- &quot;big&quot;. Hittite has an odd kk in that word.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now, the cuneiform system does not give the means to write the distinction word-initially or word-finally nor in clusters of consonants. So here, we're in the dark.&#xA;I think the number of Hittite words attested in Ugaritic script is too small to provide sufficient light. Some Armenian words seem to be of Hittite origin, but I don't know if they are numerous enough to be helpful.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, the conclusion is that we don't have satisfactory information about Hittite consonants in word-final or word-initial position. It seems probable that the distinction existed but we can't tell for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23769" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T06:15:54.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-26T06:45:44.417" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Option 1: &quot;Cambridge English Grammar Language&quot; by Geoffrey Pullum &#xA;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2: a site which, i think, is based on government and binding theory: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if there are better options, please reccommend. thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24159" LastEditorUserId="13977" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T18:38:45.387" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T18:38:45.387" Title="Which option should I use if I want to learn theories that will account for as much English sentence's structure as possible" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;resource-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-26T07:24:37.523" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I'm not a linguist, and I only have a cursory grasp on any of this terminology, so sorry in advance for butchering it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if any languages exist where one can recursively generate an infinite amount of tenses. I got thinking recently when learning french about how past perfect kind of does this in one dimension (past tense from the past tense, so to speak, albeit accomplished without recursive mechanisms, at least in the languages I know), but was wondering if some form of recursion could do so. Have any languages along these lines been discovered? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26706" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T12:22:20.450" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T03:00:32.487" Title="Do recursively generated tenses exist?" Tags="&lt;universal-grammar&gt;&lt;recursion&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6670" CreationDate="2019-09-26T09:16:41.517" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mother tongue is tribe language of your parents.&#xA;First language is a language that you learn first in your life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26708" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T09:16:41.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33637" CreationDate="2019-09-26T11:05:41.663" Score="4" ViewCount="1594" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be up front: this question arises from trying to crack a Lingala song. There is this polyphonic Lingala religious hymn, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWwwtNS4bhM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salelaka Mokonzi&lt;/a&gt;, which is very well-known among members of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_and_Liberation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catholic religious movement&lt;/a&gt; I belong to. Recently, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Can-someone-help-me-complete-the-word-by-word-analysis-and-translation-of-the-Lingala-song-in-the-source-that-Im-doing-in-the-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tried cracking it&lt;/a&gt;, that is, armed myself with several versions of the lyrics, a couple of translations, a couple of dictionaries, and a lot of patience, and tried to analyse the lyrics word by word to figure out what they meant (I usually distrust ready-made translations, especially when they and the lyrics oscillate between different sources as in this case). I had some successes and some problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem I had was subject prefixes, and it arises from the following cognitive dissonance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On one side, I know Zulu and Swahili, both Bantu like Lingala, use a system of subject prefixes which mandates agreement with the class of the subject noun, plus prefixes for first and second person; a couple of passages in the song suggest this could be the case in Lingala as well, that is, there seem to be a couple verb forms that use noun class prefixes as subject prefixes, and one isn't analyzable otherwise and the other seems to mean something apparently extraneous to the sentence of the song it's found in;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikis.swarthmore.edu/ling073/Lingala/Grammar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this grammar&lt;/a&gt; seems to give full conjugations, and only has three third person prefixes: a (s)he, an it, and a they; also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dic.lingala.be/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this dictionary&lt;/a&gt; analyses forms like &lt;em&gt;aye&lt;/em&gt; ((s)he came), but &lt;em&gt;loye&lt;/em&gt; isn't analysed, whereas I'd see it as similar to aye but with the lo- prefix.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there Bantu languages where, unlike Zulu and Swahili, the subject prefix system has only three third person pronouns, two singular and one plural, or anyway far fewer prefixes than noun classes? In particular, did this system collapse happen in Lingala, or does Lingala use noun class prefixes as subject prefixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally I strongly encourage any Lingala speaker who sees this to either answer the Quora question about the song or open a chat room to discuss it. Lingala seems to be rather unpopular on Quora, with only 12 people having answered questions in it, exactly one each, at the time of posting my question, and then a couple more answers were posted to questions of mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two things: one, I'll clarify that «exactly one each» in the P.S. meant each user had posted one answer, not that each user had answered a distinct question; there are at least 12 questions though, excluding mine; two, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/99190/analyzing-and-reconstructing-the-correct-text-of-and-translating-a-lingala-song&quot;&gt;created the chat room&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17268" LastEditorUserId="17268" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T14:31:23.643" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T14:31:23.643" Title="Subject prefixes in Bantu languages" Tags="&lt;african-languages&gt;&lt;bantu&gt;&lt;lingala&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33631" CreationDate="2019-09-26T11:34:52.160" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tense&lt;/strong&gt; is the grammaticalisation of temporal reference. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_and_absolute_tense#Absolute_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Absolute tense&lt;/a&gt; relates a moment to the time of utterance or writing. So for a tense-prominent language like English, we have two morphological tenses: the past, indicating that a moment occurred before now, and the non-past tense, indicating it moment is now or in the future. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/32382/2555&quot;&gt;It is debated whether the English auxiliary verb &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; should really be considered a future tense&lt;/a&gt; but from a functional perspective it fulfils the role of marking a moment after the time of utterance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_and_absolute_tense#Relative_tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;relative tense&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which shifts the reference point away from the time of utterance. This is what the perfect in English does: it indicates that the moment happened prior to the primary tense. You can combine the perfect with all three tense options: the past (had), the present (have), the future (will have). In other words, it sets up a second level of relative time referencing. But it can also be used recursively. So with just one construction you can have recursive relative referencing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the time you read this I will have left by train, because I have never loved you, and I had lied when I said that I had fallen in love with you when I saw you the first time, but actually I had been spying on you for months because I had been sent after you because I had been recruited as a Soviet spy because I had a gambling debt because ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note that we wouldn't normally say that we have recursively &lt;em&gt;generated&lt;/em&gt; tenses, each language still has a finite number of tenses which can be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; recursively. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T12:02:40.133" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T12:02:40.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33631" CreationDate="2019-09-26T12:34:10.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not exactly recursive because the recursion stops after one level, but it comes close to recursion: There is a formation termed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Perfekt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doppeltes Perfekt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in German. Similar formations are also known from French and from Northern Italian dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it extends the usual formation of the perfect tense auxilliary + past participle into auxilliary + past participle of the auxilliary + past particple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T13:11:24.717" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T13:11:24.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33633" CreationDate="2019-09-26T15:24:02.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Lingala grammars, you might want to read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/42/paper2778.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, which contains references to grammars (not well-meaninged class projects labeled &quot;grammar&quot;) and some discussion of the dialect problem. Lingala does have a full noun class system with agreement, your online source just didn't give all the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some variation in the class system in &quot;ordinary&quot; Bantu (most of the languages, except for parts of zone A), where not all languages have cl. 20 &lt;em&gt;gʊ&lt;/em&gt; and most don't have cl. 19 &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt; or the classes above 20. The classes 1-11 plus 14 are the most resilient, and even then there are minor reducing tendencies such as merger of cl. 11 &lt;em&gt;lʊ&lt;/em&gt; and cl. 14 &lt;em&gt;vʊ&lt;/em&gt;. There is also a dialectal merger of cl, 9, 10 in Swahili because you can't tell from the noun for what class &lt;em&gt;ratili&lt;/em&gt; is in (again, phonological merger of the distinctive prefixes). Kituba is a good example of a reduced class system, but it still has most of the original class distinctions.&#xA;There are frequent additional reduction patterns where semantic properties override formal agreement (all humans inducing agreement in cl. 1-2 even when such nouns can appear in other classes). I don't know of any Bantu language that reduces noun classes or agreement patterns to just two or three 3rd persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T15:24:02.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33633" CreationDate="2019-09-26T15:57:35.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excellent question! It just so happens that this is exactly what my group is researching at the moment!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there Bantu languages where, unlike Zulu and Swahili, the subject prefix system has only three third person pronouns, two singular and one plural, or anyway far fewer prefixes than noun classes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;pronouns&quot; you mean &quot;subject agreement markers&quot;, there are indeed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, did this system collapse happen in Lingala, or does Lingala use noun class prefixes as subject prefixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the dialect! And this is probably the source of your confusion. It's not something that's documented nearly as well as it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version: some dialects show this system collapse down to three classes, while others don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;Literary&quot; or &quot;High&quot; or &quot;Catholic&quot; Lingála&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most classes, the subject marking on the verb resembles the noun class prefix. But there are a few where the two diverge. The same happens in Swahili sometimes: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;dege &lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;naenda&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;dege &lt;strong&gt;zi&lt;/strong&gt;naenda&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Cl N   VS  VO&#xA; 0  ∅-  a- mo-&#xA; R         mi-&#xA;1S     na-  N-&#xA;2S      o- ko-&#xA; 1 mo-  a- mo-&#xA;1P     to- lo-&#xA;2P     lo- bo-&#xA; 2 ba- ba- ba-&#xA; 3 mo- mo- mo-&#xA; 4 mi- mi- mi-&#xA; 5 li- li- li-&#xA; 6 ma- ma- ma-&#xA; 7  e-  e-  e-&#xA; 8 bi- bi- bi-&#xA; 9  N-  e-  e-&#xA;10  N-  i-  i-&#xA;11 lo- lo- lo-&#xA;14 bo- bo- bo-&#xA;15 ko- ko- ko-&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the prestige dialect used for works of literature and such. You can recognize it by the wide variety of class prefixes and by the use of &quot;agreeing attributives&quot; (&lt;em&gt;moto wa&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bato ba&lt;/em&gt;, etc, like you see in Swahili).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Kinshasa Lingála&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Cl N   VS&#xA; 0  ∅-  a-&#xA;1S     na-&#xA;2S      o-&#xA; 1 mo-  a-&#xA;1P     to-&#xA;2P     lo-&#xA; 2 ba- ba-&#xA; 3 mo-  e-&#xA; 4 mi- ba-&#xA; 5 li-  e-&#xA; 6 ma- ba-&#xA; 7  e-  e-&#xA; 8 bi- ba-&#xA; 9  N-  e-&#xA;10  N- ba-&#xA;11 lo-  e-&#xA;14 bo-  e-&#xA;15 ko-  e-&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, this dialect has reduced the noun class system drastically! Nouns still tend to show their class prefixes, but third-person agreement has been reduced to three classes: &quot;animate singular&quot; (originally class 1), &quot;inanimate singular&quot; (originally class 7), and &quot;plural&quot; (originally class 2). In some places the distinction is still eroding further, with &lt;em&gt;e-&lt;/em&gt; taking over some of the inanimate plurals, but this doesn't seem to be universal yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably the most famous dialect, and it's generally associated with the military. A lot of popular music is written in this dialect, and as you might expect, it's the main dialect spoken in Kinshasa. The easiest way to recognize it is the simplified verb prefixes, the use of &lt;em&gt;na&lt;/em&gt; for the attributive regardless of class (&lt;em&gt;moto na&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;bato na&lt;/em&gt;, etc), and the loss of prenasalized voiceless consonants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;Spoken&quot; or &quot;Low&quot; or &quot;Protestant&quot; Lingála&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sometimes called &quot;the third dialect&quot; (separate from Literary and Kinshasa), but it's not so much a single dialect as it is a pretty huge continuum. It tends to fall somewhere in between the two extremes, with some classes getting simplified and some remaining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big part of our current work involves examining and categorizing all the different types of &quot;Spoken Lingála&quot; out there in the world, and I'll probably update this with a link once we publish. But suffice to say, there's a whole lot of variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of this answer is based on Bokamba, Eyamba G. 2012. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/42/paper2778.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Polylectal Grammar of Lingála and Its Theoretical Implications&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Selected Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Michael R. Marlo et al., 291-307. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #2778.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of it is based on a corpus collected by the same author, as yet unpublished. The corpus analysis is my own work, as yet unpublished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;N&quot; is nouns, &quot;VS&quot; is verb subjects, &quot;VO&quot; is verb objects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Class 0&quot; is also known as &quot;class 1A&quot; or &quot;class 25&quot;; it's used mostly for kinship terms and (according to some analyses) personal names, and acts just like class 1 except with a zero prefix in the nouns. You'll also recognize this one from Swahili: &lt;em&gt;mama&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;baba&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;R&quot; is a special object marker that indicates that the object is the same as the subject; it can be used with single subjects, unlike the reciprocal &lt;em&gt;-an-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;1S, 2S, 1P, 2P&quot; are first and second person singular and plural&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The prefix &quot;N-&quot; means &quot;a nasal without a defined place of articulation&quot; (same as Swahili &lt;em&gt;m-bwa&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n-dege&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ny-oko&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classes 12 and 13 no longer exist in any dialect I know of, nor do any of the locative classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T22:07:28.673" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T22:07:28.673" CommentCount="30" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33642" CreationDate="2019-09-26T16:02:51.380" Score="1" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;If  a  Telugu  speaking   woman  married   an  English man   and  the children  speak  the  two  languages  equally well and  that  is possible in the  global  context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What  will be the  mother-tongue  of  the  children.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a  word  like  father-tongue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25462" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T00:01:36.513" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T00:01:36.513" Title="Is there a word like father-tongue?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;native-language&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33631" CreationDate="2019-09-26T16:35:37.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;McCawley argues that recursively generated past tenses do exist in English.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k6-C5AWWqjQC&amp;amp;q=have%20deletion#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=have%20deletion&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion beginning about page 221 in Syntactic Phenomena of English&lt;/a&gt;. Past is a predicate of a sentence which may itself predicate Past of some sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8022" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T16:35:37.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33630" CreationDate="2019-09-26T16:42:32.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;By invoking &quot;theory&quot;, you made the question very difficult to answer, because not only does the work have to account for English, it also has to be a theory. Which aspect is more important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See p. 18 ff of the Cambridge grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary goal of this grammar is to describe the grammatical&#xA;  principles of Present day English rather than to defend or illustrate a&#xA;  theory of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare that to Santorini &amp;amp; Kroch ch. 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This book is an introduction to generative grammar from a Chomskyan&#xA;  perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cambridge grammar is more a description of English with some assumed theoretical subcurrents, whereas Santorini &amp;amp; Kroch (or, Koeneman &amp;amp; Zeijlstra &lt;em&gt;Introducing syntax&lt;/em&gt;) is an introduction to a syntactic theory, exemplified via English. If you are most interested in theory, Santorini &amp;amp; Kroch or, Koeneman &amp;amp; Zeijlstra would be better because that's what those books are about; whereas as a description of Modern English, the Cambridge grammar would be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T16:42:32.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33638" CreationDate="2019-09-26T17:16:12.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of mother tongue can &lt;a href=&quot;https://expatsincebirth.com/2019/02/19/mothertongue-first-language-native-language-or-dominant-language/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;break down&lt;/a&gt; when you have more than one language learned by the child. Multilingual families are often the ones who see this the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various labels for all the different functions of each language, e.g. &quot;dominant language&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/how-many-mother-tongue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;first language&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but I think &quot;mother tongue&quot; and &quot;native language&quot; are the only ones that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mother%20tongue%2Cnative%20language%2Cfather%20tongue%2Cdominant%20language&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=4&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmother%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bmother%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMother%20Tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMother%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cnative%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bnative%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BNative%20Language%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BNative%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cfather%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bfather%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFather%20tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFather%20Tongue%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cdominant%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdominant%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDominant%20language%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDominant%20Language%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common enough&lt;/a&gt; to be recognised by most English-speaking people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Tongue_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One specific use of the term &quot;father tongue&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was coined to explain how the Y-chromosome (only passed from fathers to sons) links to language acquisition, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://phys.org/news/2018-08-mother-tongue-father-tonguea.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one proposed reconciliation&lt;/a&gt; of mother tongue vs father tongue is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thewordling.com/blog/fathertonguehypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypothesis&lt;/a&gt; that children learn &lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwy083/5076917&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phonemes from the mother but lexicon from the father&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1278" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T17:16:12.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33638" CreationDate="2019-09-26T17:52:34.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A distinction is sometimes made by some speakers (who are not usually fluent English speakers), who treat &quot;mother tongue&quot; compositionally rather than as a technical term meaning (well, that in itself is a problem) &quot;native language&quot; or &quot;first language&quot;, often labeled &quot;mother tongue&quot;. For example, &quot;My mother tongue is Pare and my father tongue is Gogo&quot;. Linguists usually approach the problem more conversationally by asking a person about the languages that they speak, and which ones they use for what purpose. In that context, if you were to have started by asking &quot;What is your mother tongue?&quot;, you could get an answer to the question &quot;which of your two 'dominant' languages does your mother speak?&quot;, and you might need to probe deeper to find out about their &quot;father tongue&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Native English speaking linguists generally do not talk of languages being &quot;tongues&quot;, so as a technical term, &quot;father tongue&quot; is unusual. You may encounter it in non-technical contexts as in the Gogo / Pare example, or as a somewhat quirky term for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/wkwsci-fyp-collection/2016/05/23/%EF%BB%BFmy-father-tongue-a-campaign-to-revitalise-the-use-of-chinese-dialects-among-youth-in-singapore/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language revitalization&lt;/a&gt; effort (read about the project name &lt;a href=&quot;https://fionaseah.com/tag/my-father-tongue/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). There is, though, a journal called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aslip.org/mt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mother Tongue&lt;/a&gt;, which is about language prehistory, and this inspired the construction &lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36272178/ShompenMTXIII.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_Shompen_of_Great_Nicobar_Island_New.pdf&amp;amp;X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&amp;amp;X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20190926%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&amp;amp;X-Amz-Date=20190926T174611Z&amp;amp;X-Amz-Expires=3600&amp;amp;X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&amp;amp;X-Amz-Signature=822fe6e1e84321b15f6b489e4d30225d7a49e19d53409326cc762dffab47d720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Father Tongue hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;, which has nothing to do with what languages you or your parents speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if speakers of Indian English would find it unusual for a person to say &quot;My mother tongue is Telugu and my father tongue is English&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T17:52:34.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33627" CreationDate="2019-09-26T19:25:13.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The post constituting the OP is really broad and touches on a lot of stuff, suggesting that the question is about monolingual elicitation, or how do you start eliciting, or is there a formula that everybody uses. What I think is the intended question is something like &quot;What does it take to create a grammar based on elicited data?&quot;. That's the matter that I will address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most difficult problem (also the last problem) is deciding what constitutes &quot;good enough&quot;. I commend Cowell's grammar of Syrian Arabic, because the author decided to go the extra mile or so. I have seen plenty of lousy grammars (name will be withheld). I assume that the goal is to create a Cowell-quality (or, Whitney Sanskrit quality) grammar. The related problematic point is determining whether your goal is to say what the language is like, or to show what the language is like. Whitney is based on excellent knowledge of the language, but not a corresponding level of exemplification. Cowell is chock full of examples. So you have to decide what kind of a grammar you plan to produce. Newman's encyclopedic grammar of Hausa is kind of unique, and clearly can only be done for a language that is already well-described (contra the &quot;undescribed&quot; assumption).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for some numbers. I have approximately 400 hrs of elicited data on Logoori, covering about 120,000 items (not just sentences... basically, &quot;lines&quot; including words, semantic datoids, NPs and full sentences (or two). I have an extracted collection of 983 noun stems and 707 verb stems (probably another 200 items lurking in the database).&#xA;This was carried out over about 7 working years, and the data-elicitation part which covers phonology and morphology and rather elementary syntax is maybe 80% finished. This includes zero texts, though I have some published words (stories and bibles) that I've consulted. In light of the highly variable nature of the language, it would be preposterous to get &quot;the complete picture&quot; for &quot;all speakers&quot;. The current grammar fragment is about 700 pages, and does not try to cover systematically syntax (extraction, complementation, conjunction, syntax of agreement, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data is starkly divided into the written part of about 25,000 items, not recorded just directly transcribed into notebooks, from the first speaker, and the recorded and post-hoc transcribed part from everybody else (10 speakers). The reason for this is that technology improved over the years: the first chunk was conducted from 2005, and the latter chunk started in 2014. Recording technology has improved orders of magnitude, and I find it easier, &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; but not then, to record sessions and not waste face-time with transcribing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to know the meaning of a word in the &quot;record then transcribe&quot; regime is to ask &quot;How do say 'chicken'?&quot; and transcribe what the guy says. This works &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; your voice is also picked up on the recordings: you are in trouble if your stimulus is not included (this does happen). Or, if the guy also gives the English translation, that gives you some evidence what the word means. You have to treat &quot;meaning&quot; as a hypothesis that you are continuously trying to refine. I am pretty happy with my understanding of the completive variants of verb-forms which I spent a lot of time on. This is one of those YMMV matters. These facts are both because of the nature of this particular language, and because of my goal and standards in writing a phonology-and-morphology of this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of grammars that are less Cowell-like and more Whitney-like (or even shorter). Whether one calls the word a grammar, a sketch, an introduction, essentials or some other expression is up to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T19:25:13.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33644" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-26T21:01:32.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T21:01:32.517" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T21:01:32.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33645" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-26T21:01:32.517" Score="0" Body="For linguistic questions about the Lingala or Ngala language, a Bantu language spoken in parts of Congo and neighbouring countries." OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T00:53:01.120" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T00:53:01.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33646" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-26T21:03:50.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T21:03:50.073" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T21:03:50.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33647" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-26T21:03:50.073" Score="0" Body="For linguistic questions about the Bantu languages, a family of languages (with Swahili and Zulu as its most prominent members) spoken in the central and southern parts of Africa." OwnerUserId="9716" LastEditorUserId="9716" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T00:52:56.617" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T00:52:56.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-27T01:41:53.733" Score="9" ViewCount="4604" Body="&lt;p&gt;In every spoken language I'm aware of, if you read a word you are unfamiliar with, you can generally work out how to pronounce the word from how it's written.  You can sound it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this kind of thing possible with American Sign Language?  If no, is it possible in any sign language?  Is it possible to figure out how to sign a new word by &quot;signing it out&quot; analogous to how a speaker would &quot;sound it out&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26715" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T04:18:47.063" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T02:28:45.140" Title="Is American Sign Language phonetic?" Tags="&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;sign-languages&gt;&lt;asl&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T04:28:42.797" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you mean can you know how to sign a word in American Sign Language by reading it in English? Well no, because the two languages are not really that similar. Sign languages are not transformations of the local spoken language, they are independent fully formed languages with their own vocabularies and grammars. ASL is actually part of the French Sign Language family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a thing called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_coded_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manually Coded English&lt;/a&gt; which is a way of signing the English language. This can involve borrowing some signs from sign languages, making up new signs, and finger spelling. But even Signed English has different incompatible forms, based on the sign language of the area: ASL and BANZSL (the sign language of the UK/Australia/New Zealand) are not related, and only share about 40% of signs (and they only have that much in common because of borrowings, not because they descend from one language like English and French from Indo-European) and have different finger spelling systems. So not only could deaf people from the US and the UK not understand each without first learning the other's sign language, they also could not communicate through Signed English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who speak ASL as their first language often learn to read English as a second language, with all the difficulties faced by other second language learners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T04:33:48.703" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T04:33:48.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T05:22:32.850" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears you are (implicitly) asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sutton Sign Writing&lt;/a&gt;. If you don't know the system, obviously you can't learn a new sign. It's not clear how many signers know the system, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.signwriting.org/archive/docs1/sw0032-Stokoe-Sutton.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it appears&lt;/a&gt; that, in principle, the system is capable of symbolising any sign in any manual language, so that a monolingual ASL dictionary could be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T05:22:32.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-27T11:33:35.563" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this term in a paper talking about the first wave and second wave studies. Anyone know what it means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26634" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T12:23:43.257" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T12:23:43.257" Title="What is 'Category Affiliation' in sociolinguistics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;sociolinguistics&gt;&lt;variation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T15:28:10.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think part of the issue here is that you’re comparing ASL - which has several non-concatenative (I.e. simultaneous) elements - to spoken languages, which have more limitations as far as that’s concerned and are typically concatenative (I.e. linear). Phonologically, a sign has 4 elements: handshape (the configuration your fingers and hand make), movement, palm orientation, location (and in practice, non-manual markers, but that’s a whole conversation in its own right), and due to the physical nature of them, they all happen at the same time (save for dynamic signs, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll ignore that here). That is to say, I couldn’t do a handshape, then the movement, then the location, then the palm orientation - that’s not how bodily mechanics work. Theoretically, someone learning a sign could go “okay, it has an A handshape, palm orientation is facing across the body, moving up and down, located in neutral space making contact with the other palm which is facing upwards with a B handshape.” In practice, doing that much examination is more complicated than seeing a sign and copying what they do, though some element of that could be included in making adjustments during learning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As previous respondents mentioned, ASL and other sign languages don’t have a standard writing system - there have been a few systems created with that intent, but never really took off save for small groups of people here and there, and those are often teachers or linguists. The vast majority of signers don’t know those systems, and many have never even heard of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26720" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T15:28:10.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T17:59:30.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phonemes in English are distinct, unique sounds which sometimes-to-often correspond with letters or combinations of letters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, elements of signed language include: hand shape, location, movement, pauses, palm orientation, facial expression, and body movement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot determine how to produce a sign by reading an English word. You learn new signs by seeing someone sign them and copying the sign for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26722" LastEditorUserId="26727" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T02:28:45.140" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T02:28:45.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19952" CreationDate="2019-09-27T18:36:28.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. – However these communities are quite small. There seem to be active groups on Facebook for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/groups/ASLwrite/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;ASLWrite group on Facebook&quot;&gt;ASLWrite&lt;/a&gt; (315 members) and another for Sutton &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/groups/SuttonSignWriting/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Sutton SignWriting Group on Facebook&quot;&gt;SignWriting&lt;/a&gt; (442 members). Sutton SignWriting is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;used for teaching sign language in Brazil&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made &lt;a href=&quot;https://zrajm.github.io/teckenskrift/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Web article (in Swedish, by me) with an adaptation of ASLWrite for Swedish Sign Language&quot;&gt;an attempt at adapting the ASLWrite system for use with Swedish Sign Language&lt;/a&gt; (linked page in Swedish). Hopefully one day I'll manage to drum up some interest for it. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bisN3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bisN3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Comparison of handshape glyphs between different sign language writing systems&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The above image was taken from an article called “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.handspeak.com/write/index.php?id=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Article: History of sign language writing&quot;&gt;History of sign language writing&lt;/a&gt;” on handspeak.com. The table compares the symbols for five different handshapes in different sign language writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also exists numerous systems for transcribing sign language for research or dictionary work, but as far as I know none of these systems are used by a wider community. (These would include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228963927_HamNoSys-Representing_sign_language_data_in_language_resources_and_language_processing_contexts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Scientific article on HamNoSys phonetic writing for sign languages&quot;&gt;HamNoSys&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia page on Stokoe notation for sign languages&quot;&gt;Stokoe notation&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://zrajm.github.io/teckentranskription/intro.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Web article (in Swedish, by me) on how the transcription system used for Swedish Sign Language works&quot;&gt;Swedish Sign Language Transcription&lt;/a&gt; and several others. – NOTE: The linked article on Swedish Sign Language transcription is in Swedish and was written by me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22825" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T18:47:35.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T22:33:07.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well are y are you asking if you can guess a sign this meaning based on what it looks like, because there are certain things called classifiers, that can help you, as a beginner signer, understand the nature of what's being talked about. For example for water dripping, you would sign water first and then Shake Your Hand with the Palm inward(ring finger is the bottom finger) in a rotated w shape mimicking the dripping of a water faucet. You could not know that the second sign means dripping but you could figure it out based on the context, and the nature of the classifier (along with NMMs). But signs arent inherently &quot;intuitive&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26728" LastEditorUserId="26728" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T22:40:28.070" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T22:40:28.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-27T23:11:42.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This version of written ask is pretty phonetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gUQ6n.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot from a video&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.handspeak.com/word/search/index.php?id=11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.handspeak.com/word/search/index.php?id=11&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26730" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T23:17:26.977" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T23:17:26.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33649" CreationDate="2019-09-28T01:07:03.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sign language communicates concepts not sounds.  Sounds do not have any meaning in language of Deaf. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it is possible to communicate word equivalents through language components- for example stringing English alphabet letters together to literally Express an English word - this is called fingerspelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP seems to have the mistaken idea that sign language is an alternate system to Express and receive English...its not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26732" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T01:07:03.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33665" CreationDate="2019-09-28T04:26:02.137" Score="-3" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some written languages, there are multiple &lt;strong&gt;symbols&lt;/strong&gt; to stand for one &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt;. Here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    tibetan&#xA;    ཨ       [a] ⟨ꞏa⟩&#xA;    འ       [a] ⟨ʼa⟩&#xA;&#xA;    hebrew&#xA;    ך   [χ]         כ       [χ]&#xA;    ח   [χ]&#xA;    ח׳  [χ]&#xA;&#xA;    ס   [s]&#xA;    שׂ  [s]&#xA;&#xA;    arabic&#xA;    ى   [aː]&#xA;    ا       [aː]&#xA;    آ       [ʔaː]&#xA;    س   [s]&#xA;    ص   [sˤ]&#xA;&#xA;    sanskrit&#xA;    अ, प    a&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit has a lot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ɐ   अ, प    a   comma&#xA;    aː  आ, पा   ā   bra&#xA;    ɪ   इ, पि   i   sit&#xA;    iː  ई, पी   ī   feet&#xA;    ʊ   उ, पु   u   look&#xA;    uː  ऊ, पू   ū   loot&#xA;    ɽɪ  ऋ, पृ   ṛ   as rri&#xA;    ɽiː ॠ, पॄ   ṝ   as rrī&#xA;    lɪ  ऌ, पॢ   ḷ   as lli&#xA;    liː ॡ, पॣ   ḹ   as llī&#xA;    eː  ए, पे   e   wait&#xA;    ai  ऐ, पै   ai  hi&#xA;    oː  ओ, पो   o   old&#xA;    au  औ, पौ   au  h'ow&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of the arabic ones, they are slightly different sounds. Is there any good examples showing words and how to distinguish these, because they seem pretty much the same to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For languages like Hindi or Sanskrit, there are long and short versions of the same vowel. Those make sense, even though they can be hard to distinguish. But why do these languages have multiple symbols for the same sound? I guess it could be like english where &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;k&lt;/code&gt; are the same, and &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt; are the same in different contexts. But why is this? It means there can't be a direct phonetic mapping of letter to sound, you have to also include information about the original symbol used to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; that sound in the transcription (or otherwise find some way to distinguish them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sure in other languages that have their own writing systems have some of this as well. But languages like the Native American ones which never had alphabets, when we transcribe them these days, we seem like we try to make sure every sound is uniquely represented by a single symbol (I'm thinking like Navajo). So why didn't this happen in the languages exampled above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T04:56:07.847" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T11:56:47.210" Title="Why do some written languages have multiple symbols for a single sound?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-28T04:32:52.927" Score="2" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for attested examples of similects in action. The term is relatively new for me. Could someone point me in the right direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Etymology&#xA;&#xA;Coined by Anna Mauranen in a 2012 paper, from similar +‎ -lect, modelled&#xA;on dialect, etc. &#xA;&#xA;Noun&#xA;&#xA;similect (plural similects) (linguistics) A variety of a language &#xA;spoken by people who have a different first language, with features&#xA;transferred from the first language in parallel by individual speakers&#xA;rather than by a cohesive group.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/similect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/similect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26735" LastEditorUserId="9781" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T17:48:11.243" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T18:09:06.083" Title="What is a similect?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;dialects&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33667" CreationDate="2019-09-28T04:52:54.057" Score="-4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ɟɲ  ज्ञ jñ  roughly like argue&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those 3 writings all conflict with one another, so what is the correct pronunciation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:14:54.060" Title="What is the sound for ज्ञ in Sanskrit?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-09-28T17:34:48.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33662" CreationDate="2019-09-28T04:57:08.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But languages like the Native American ones which never had alphabets, when we transcribe them these days, we seem like we try to make sure every sound is uniquely represented by a single symbol (I'm thinking like Navajo). So why didn't this happen in the languages exampled above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; happen—and then things changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hebrew, for example, the letters kaph (ך), qoph (ק), and ħeth (ח) used to be pronounced completely differently in all environments. They're traditionally transcribed &lt;em&gt;k q ħ&lt;/em&gt; respectively, and conveniently enough, their IPA values were at one point something like &lt;code&gt;/k q ħ/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then sound changes happened, and &lt;code&gt;/k/&lt;/code&gt; gained the fricative allophone &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/q/&lt;/code&gt; fronted to &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/ħ/&lt;/code&gt; merged with &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;, and eventually you end up with the modern state of things: kaph is pronounced either &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;, qoph is always pronounced &lt;code&gt;[k]&lt;/code&gt;, ħeth is always pronounced &lt;code&gt;[x]&lt;/code&gt;. (I know these are pretty broad/loose transcriptions, but they're good enough for this purpose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also how we ended up with a mess of different pronunciations for the letter &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; in English. Back in Classical Latin times, &lt;em&gt;C&lt;/em&gt; represented a single phoneme. But over the following two millennia it shifted in all sorts of ways in all sorts of different daughter languages, and English inherited a lot of these different ways, and now we've ended up here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes, once a writing system is in place, it fossilizes and stops changing to keep up with the spoken language. This is what happened most famously (but not only) in English. The way we write &quot;native&quot; English words tends to represent how they were pronounced about five hundred years ago, when &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rite&lt;/em&gt; were all pronounced differently. Now they're all the same, but there's a huge amount of cultural inertia that resists changing things now. So we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T04:57:08.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33662" CreationDate="2019-09-28T05:00:20.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For each language and each letter the story is different, but usually it's like this: when the script just appeared, those letters meant different sounds, but with the course of time those sounds converged, came to sound the same way, but the different letters remained retaining the old, traditional spelling. It is the case with the Hebrew letters in your chart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Arabic letters, you've got to know that in the Arabic alphabet there are &lt;em&gt;absolutely no vowel letters&lt;/em&gt;, the letter &amp;lt;ا&gt; 'alif' has &lt;em&gt;no reading&lt;/em&gt; of its own at all, it's used as a helping letter for different purposes, for example it is written in the beginning of the word if the word begins with [ʔ] + vowel, any vowel, not just [a] as you have it in your chart. &amp;lt;آ&gt; is actually &quot;double alif&quot;, two alifs, one written vertically and the other one horizontally above the first one. As for &amp;lt;س&gt; and &amp;lt;ص&gt;, they stand for two quite distinct sounds, [s] and [sˤ]. As for the Sanskrit characters, don't tell us there are Sanskrit letters that are read the same. Sanskrit alphabet is a fine phonetic transcription system for the Sanskrit language, each letter stands for a particular distinct sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:00:20.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33664" CreationDate="2019-09-28T05:14:54.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the [gj] pronunciation of ज्ञ is a modern regional pronunciation associated with Hindi-speaking areas, and doesn't have a classical pedigree (e.g. Panini). ɟɲ vs. jñ are not different pronunciations, they are transliterations (the former being IPA, the latter being traditional Sanskrit transliteration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:14:54.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33685" CreationDate="2019-09-28T05:35:59.387" Score="-4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've already asked about &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/33566/how-to-transcribe-egyptian-hieroglyphs&quot;&gt;how to rewrite the hieroglyphs using Unicode&lt;/a&gt;, which requires using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_sign_list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gardiner's List&lt;/a&gt; (over 1000 hieroglyphs). However, if you look at Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transliterating Ancient Egyptian&lt;/a&gt;, there is only a short table of say 30 hieroglyphs (compared to the 1000 in Gardiner's). How do you romanize the remaining 1000+ glyphs? Are ancient Egyptian glyph sequences mostly sequences of Word-Glyphs, or of Sound-Glyphs? Or a mixture? Or how does that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without going to the books yet, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest that most of the glyphs are for &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;phrases&lt;/em&gt;, such as &lt;code&gt;&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;wrdj&lt;/code&gt; meaning &quot;to be tired or weak&quot;. But how do they know it sounds like that? (That's a tangent question). The main question is how do you take any arbitrary sequence of hieroglyphs and convert it to a (however rough) romanization? I get that there are &quot;as many systems for romanizing ancient Egyptian as there are egyptologists&quot;, but picking some decent system, how do they do it for &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the Gardiner's list. I don't need to have an answer outlining every transliteration, just where to look or how it works is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T22:07:05.847" Title="How to transliterate/transcribe/romanize Ancient Egyptian" Tags="&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;egyptian&gt;&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33678" CreationDate="2019-09-28T05:58:25.680" Score="-4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;While romanization often is a lossy transformation, it helps with pronunciation. I have looked at the romanizations for a few written languages and they are all easily romanizable. (Hebrew, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pinyin, Vietnamese, Armenian, Arabic, Gothic, Old English, Danish, Norwegian, Japanese). I tried to pick languages that were different and had their own scripts. Some of the languages I haven't tried that have their own scripts are English (this would be hard because you have to know the spelling of each word individually it seems), French, Finnish, German, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, (a lot of languages, like African, Latin American, and Native American, are written in Latin script, so I could list many here), Telugu, Tamil, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Georgian, Ancient Egyptian, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any languages that are particularly hard to romanize, or have particularly bad romanizations currently? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something, because the romanizations out there all so far seem pretty good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am mainly talking about written languages, because capturing all the IPA stuff requires much more than your typical romanization scheme can handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:40:58.480" Title="What are the most complex languages to romanize (other than IPA)" Tags="&lt;romanization&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33689" CreationDate="2019-09-28T08:05:33.657" Score="-1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In English (I haven't really thought too much about English yet), there are tons of what-seem-like one-off patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(the &quot;oo&quot; sound)&#xA;tool /tul/&#xA;two /tu/&#xA;to /tu/&#xA;through /θɹu/&#xA;blue /blu/&#xA;queue /ku/&#xA;(highly variable)&#xA;&#xA;(the &quot;uu&quot; sound)&#xA;book /bʊk/&#xA;look&#xA;(pretty consistent)&#xA;&#xA;(the &quot;eh&quot; sound)&#xA;bed /bɛd/&#xA;spread /sprɛd/&#xA;said&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you things like (i, ai, ae) being the same sounds, or (ie, ee). Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reasonably small number of these combinations in English? Like, are there rules for all of them, or are there a bunch of exceptions? Like &lt;code&gt;aardvark&lt;/code&gt;. (hour, our) (own, hone, moan), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I'm looking at different languages and (at least as I am first starting) I am seeing that the sounds and vowel &lt;em&gt;symbols&lt;/em&gt; have 1 or perhaps 2 sounds depending on a small amount of context. Either it's a different dialect, or the position of the letter relative to something else (like sound &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; for letter &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; after a consonant, sound &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; after another vowel) (or sound A at the end of a word, sound B everywhere else). It's appearing that no language is as complex as english in the number of sounds per letter sequence, and number of patterns and variations like I started to list above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which languages are similar to English in having a largish number of &lt;em&gt;rules&lt;/em&gt; for letter sequences and what sound they produce? Are all/any/some/many languages strict with the number of combinations, limiting it to a 1-to-1 mapping? Does it just &lt;em&gt;depend&lt;/em&gt;, and there's not a finite set of rules you can map out? Does English have a large number of combinations (in the 1000's +) or is it relatively small (100 or so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Japanese and Tibetan and Sanskrit all seem regular in that there is a 1-to-1 mapping from sound(s) to letter(s). I haven't learned too much about each yet though so I'm sure there's edge cases (and it would be interesting to know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T18:30:24.967" Title="How many sound-to-letter sequence mapping rules does English have compared to other languages?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;grammar&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33681" CreationDate="2019-09-28T08:29:03.057" Score="1" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wylie_transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wylie Tibetan Transliteration&lt;/a&gt; page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2718544&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original paper&lt;/a&gt;), it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie transliteration was designed to precisely transcribe Tibetan script as written, which led to its acceptance in academic and historical studies. It is not intended to represent the pronunciation of Tibetan words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A google search for &quot;what is the purpose of transliteration&quot; reveals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Transliteration is the process of transferring a word from the alphabet of one language to another. Transliteration helps people pronounce words and names in foreign languages. ... It changes the letters from the word's original alphabet to similar-sounding letters in a different one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two answers are in conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me -- after looking at a few different &lt;em&gt;transliterations&lt;/em&gt; -- it seems that transliterations exist because before there was computers it was hard to write and read the characters of the native language efficiently, so they used familiar symbols (latin letters) to &quot;transliterate&quot;. But it seems that a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; transliterator &lt;strong&gt;doesn't focus on pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt;, but instead, &lt;strong&gt;does focus on perfect writing transcription&lt;/strong&gt; or perfect copying of the letters so they can be recovered (because of the transliterators 1-to-1 mapping).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case -- that a good transliterator is one that doesn't focus on pronunciation but instead on writing transcription -- then why don't you just use a numeric code to represent every possible glyph in the native language? That is, why don't you just use some existing numeric code like Unicode! Which gives you the benefit that you can recover the original glyphs, but nowadays you can actually see the original writing on your laptop or phone because the fonts all now include it pretty much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, is this correct? Were transliteration schemes created to solve the problem of manipulating a target language in easier to write and read (familiar) symbols, with the goal of perfect transcription of characters rather than sounds, because computers weren't present? Or was/were there some other reason(s)? Would it be advisable to use a transliteration scheme today, like the Wiley one? Or just go with Unicode? What is the benefit of one over the other? Are transliterations obsolete because of Unicode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a subset of the ISO 15919 standard, used for the transliteration of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pāḷi into Roman script with diacritics. IAST is a widely used standard. It uses diacritics to disambiguate phonetically similar but not identical Sanskrit glyphs. For example, dental and retroflex consonants are disambiguated with an underdot: dental द=d and retroflex ड=ḍ. &lt;strong&gt;An important feature of IAST is that it is losslessly reversible&lt;/strong&gt;,[citation needed] i.e., IAST transliteration may be converted to Devanāgarī or other South Asian scripts without ambiguity and with correct Devanāgarī spelling. Many Unicode fonts fully support IAST display and printing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a bonus question, what popular languages &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have a losslessly reversible transliteration scheme? It seems that Korean does not. Chinese seems too complicated I don't know. &lt;em&gt;(Japanese, Mongolian, Russian, Telugu, Tamil, Thai, Cree, Georgian, Armenian, Amharic, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Avestan, Ancient Egyptian, Aramaic, Coptic, Gothic, Old English)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written form: exact replication of letters (unicode is best for this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phonetic form: exact replication of sounds (IPA is best for this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is why to get the best of both worlds, you can't have 1 language, you must have two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T08:41:42.387" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T17:37:04.767" Title="What is the purpose of transliteration?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;unicode&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33671" CreationDate="2019-09-28T10:27:44.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can actually read a transliterated text. Hardly possible with a sequence of Unicode numeric codes. If you want the most exact replication of the text, then even Unicode might not be &quot;best&quot; (your wording). You might need a photograph or an accurate drawing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often you do not need the details of the graphics, you need to reproduce the sequence of letters in a way that is easier to work with, that you and you readers can read easily. Slavists will customarily transliterate &lt;a href=&quot;http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/slav/aksl/kievfol/kievf.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glagolitic texts to Cyrillic&lt;/a&gt; or Latin so that you can fluently read the text and work with the meaning of those words as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In certain conventions one might loose the information like the rare presence of a spidery CH or the multiple Is present in glagolitic (vs. eg. Cyrillic single и and single х) and then the process is not strictly reversible and may be instead called &lt;em&gt;transcription&lt;/em&gt;. It allows much easier work with those texts. Also getting rid of those redundancies will actually make searching of words contaning those words much easier. Or you can choose strict transliteration to preserve the distinction with the use of і,и and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation problem is secondary. With a faithful transliteration the pronunciation rules for the sequences of the original script graphemes will remain the same for the transliterated graphemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9466" LastEditorUserId="9466" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T14:00:18.187" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T14:00:18.187" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33676" CreationDate="2019-09-28T10:44:04.703" Score="-1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finding stuff like this in every language, but it's all written in sentence form scattered all over the place. Is there a central database of this sort of stuff for each language, or a book of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In most Russian dialects, о is pronounced as in hello only when it is stressed. If it comes immediately before the stressed syllable, it is pronounced 'ah', as in father. Otherwise, it is pronounced 'uh', as in money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the variations in pronunciations of the written letters based on the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_orthography#Consonants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; EVERYTHING for Gaelic, or is there a lot more (type of thing). I would like to see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;the a in {x}gh{v:vowel} pronounced [ɤ]&#xA;the a in {x}gh$ pronounced [ɤ]&#xA;the a in {x}gh$ pronounced [ɤ]&#xA;The a in {x}ll{c:consonant} is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}nn{c:consonant} is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}m{c:consonant} is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}ll$ is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}nn$ is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}m$ is [au]&#xA;The a in {x}rr$ is [aː]&#xA;The a in {x}rr{c:consonant} is [aː]&#xA;The a elsewhere is [a]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T14:04:46.767" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:05:00.397" Title="Where can I find a list of pronunciation rules for different languages?" Tags="&lt;orthography&gt;&lt;pronunciation&gt;&lt;morphosyntax&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33683" CreationDate="2019-09-28T11:03:40.043" Score="5" ViewCount="1033" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wylie_transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; it says it's lossless (Wylie Transliteration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ག   ga&#xA;ང   nga&#xA;ཉ   nya&#xA;ན   na&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if you had sequences like ནག (ng, or is it naga)? Is it lossless because we can guarantee that every consonant (or consonant bundle as in some of the letters) is separated by a vowel? (I don't really know Tibetan yet, so please excuse my ignorance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt; for Sanskrit is another lossless one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;त   t&#xA;ह   h&#xA;थ   th&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's many more that have this (seemingly) same problem. &lt;em&gt;You can write the same thing multiple ways&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;तह      th&#xA;थ       th&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you had this in the original Sanskrit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;थथथथथथथथ&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would maybe &lt;em&gt;transliterate&lt;/em&gt; it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;thththththththth&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you might do this to go back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;तहतहतहतहतहतहतहतह&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or any of these combos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;थतहतहतहतहतहतहथ&#xA;थतहतहतहतहतहथथ&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you end up with is not necessarily what you started with. How do they say this is lossless? Does it have the same property that every consonant/letter is separated by a vowel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there never a &quot;t + h&quot; sound (t followed by standalone &quot;h&quot;) in sanskrit, as opposed to a &quot;th&quot; sound (aspirated t)? What if we &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; there isn't, but then later we discover one? This is where I'm lost, it seems that such systems aren't really lossless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one explain how these are actually lossless? How can you prove that it's lossless, maybe not so far as a mathematical proof, but a thought experiment or something perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be nice to know which languages have lossless transliterations out there available, I would like to check them out :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T13:52:24.150" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T03:52:37.750" Title="How do we know for sure a transliteration is lossless?" Tags="&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33673" CreationDate="2019-09-28T14:22:28.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia articles titled &quot;[language name] orthography&quot; or &quot;[language name] alphabet&quot; typically have a list of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A site called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Omniglot&lt;/a&gt; also has summaries of writing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13977" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T14:22:28.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33673" CreationDate="2019-09-28T14:53:40.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://espeak.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eSpeak&lt;/a&gt;, or its more current fork &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eSpeakNG&lt;/a&gt;, are formant-based speech synthesizers that cover a decently large number of languages, although not all with the same quality. Their grapheme-to-phoneme conversion is rule-based (or dictionary-based when rules fail, as is often the case for English), which means the distribution contains a number of rule files of the type you seem to want, although, of course, they are expressed using the language of eSpeak's own rule engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/dictsource/en_rules&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the rules files for English&lt;/a&gt; for example, or for something less complicated and closer to your example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/dictsource/ga_rules&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the one for Irish&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the rules files aren't natively written using IPA, they do contain a lookup table between their internal format and IPA, as eSpeak can be made to output IPA with a command line like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;espeak --IPA &quot;Text goes here&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If eSpeak is not satisfactory for you, I believe you can be on the right track if you search for &quot;graphemes-to-phoneme&quot; systems, although such systems may not necessarily include language files, if they are merely an engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13636" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T14:53:40.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33673" CreationDate="2019-09-28T14:57:46.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean literally all &quot;rules of pronunciation&quot;, you are extremely out of luck. That's a call for &quot;knowledge of all phonological and phonetic systems of all languages&quot;, which we don't have, not even close. If you mean &quot;rules for orthographic interpretation such that I can pronounce any word in that standardized written language&quot; (e.g. what does &quot;ł&quot; stand for), you're also out of luck. First, not every language has an ideal phonemic orthography (e.g. English, Russian – stress isn't marked, stress affects pronunciation; Arabic – I have no idea what vowel to use in that word in that dialect). Second, there isn't necessarily &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; pronunciation for a word, for example &lt;em&gt;tomato&lt;/em&gt;. Or, in North Saami, spelling isn't chaotic but is abstracts away from dialect differences, so you need to learn specific rules to map spelling to phonetic output in a given dialect. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sami_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki article&lt;/a&gt; does not tell you that &quot;Dan áiggi Jesus lei oktii vázzimin gordnebealdduid čađa sábbáhin&quot; is pronounced (one dialect, broad transcription) [dan aajkki jesus lej okti vaaddzimin goreʔnebealttuih tʃɑðaa saabbaahin] (I think: I haven't verified that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no central database for languages w.r.t. any linguistic fact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T14:57:46.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33669" CreationDate="2019-09-28T15:48:50.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pinyin, Vietnamese, Danish and Norwegian are already romanized (written in a Latin-based script), the first example by definition (it's the now-standard romanization of Mandarin). You didn't mention French in your first list, which uses more diacritics that Norwegian, so are you really asking &quot;how hard would it be to get rid of all of the diacritics as well&quot;. Norwegian is a snap: å=aa, æ=ae, ø=oe; nobody really needs é.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are widely-adopted romanization schemes for writing a number of non-Latin based national languages, for example Ethiopic Semitic in general, (Standard) Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin. A well-known problem with pinyin is the lack of tone marks, but this is a problem with the practice of pinyin and not the system itself, which does provide tone marks. Otherwise, it is a good representation of how words are pronounced in Mandarin (there is, of course, no possible representation of &quot;the letters&quot;). However, it is not at all a representation of how e.g. Nantongese is pronounced. Japanese seems to pose a problem in how to romanize some Chinese characters, because they may have multiple pronunciations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving to alphabets, abjads and so on, I don't think there are any romanization schemes which are significantly bad, as a method of transliterating. Romanized Khalkha Mongolian is misleading in terms of pronunciation, but so is the underlying Cyrillic spelling (too many people have made wrong phonological claims because they didn't understand the archaic nature of the Cyrillic spelling system). SE Asian languages seem to suffer somewhat from standardization problems so perhaps that is where you'll find the best candidate for &quot;problem&quot;. Because there are reasonably well worked out conventions for Cyrillic romanization, that covers quite a number of languages. Perhaps there are problematic languages written with Perso-Arabic script, where this representation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talysh_language#Phonology_and_scripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talyshi romanization&lt;/a&gt; is less ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T15:48:50.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33673" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:05:00.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically, the variations in pronunciations of the written letters based on the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two separate steps here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is going from the orthography (written language) to the underlying form (list of phonemes). In some languages, this is pretty easy: the Russian letter &lt;em&gt;о&lt;/em&gt; (according to most analyses) represents a single phoneme &lt;code&gt;/o/&lt;/code&gt;. In some languages, it's horrendously complex: for English and Mandarin, there's no way to avoid a long list of hardcoded special cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is going from the underlying form (list of phonemes) to the surface form (list of phones). This is one of the main things phonologists study, and any good grammar should include the most important points of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this second step, there are various different theories for how this process works, which can be somewhat cleanly divided into &lt;em&gt;rule-based&lt;/em&gt; theories (apply a series of transformation rules one by one to the underlying form, eventually you end up with the surface form) and &lt;em&gt;constraint-based&lt;/em&gt; theories (various candidate forms are generated, then compared against a ranked set of constraints, which eliminates the worst offenders until only one remains). In real-world grammars you're going to find mostly rule-based explanations, since constraint-based theories are significantly newer and less widely accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:05:00.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33674" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:06:24.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit is lossless. तह is romanized &lt;em&gt;taha&lt;/em&gt;, and there is no cluster &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; distinct from the aspirated consonant &lt;em&gt;tʰ&lt;/em&gt; romanized as &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt;, spelled थ. You omitted virama in your spelling of bare &quot;t&quot;, i.e. त्.&#xA;You can't later discover that there is &quot;t+h&quot; in Sanskrit because there isn't, though you could wonder, how would the Sanskrit grammarians doing fieldwork on Arabic render the cluster &quot;th&quot;. Maybe they would write त्ह. It is possible that problems arise in transcribing grammarian metalanguage, which massively violates the rules of Sanskrit. Since I guess you didn't know that there is no t+h cluster in Sanskrit, that relates to how you'd know if a system is lossless – you have to know the target language, and compare the facts of the language to what you know about spelling. I conjecture that North Saami is lossless w.r.t. pronunciation of written words, up to the point of social indeterminacy (are Norwegian &lt;em&gt;u&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt; adopted into the language with the same vowel or different vowels?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:06:24.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33671" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:28:34.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;transliteration&quot; and &quot;transcription&quot; are often used interchangeably. If you want to draw a distinction between them, the distinction is usually that &quot;transliteration&quot; tries to encode the original &lt;em&gt;grapheme sequence&lt;/em&gt; as losslessly and efficiently as possible, while &quot;transcription&quot; tries to encode the original &lt;em&gt;phoneme sequence&lt;/em&gt; as losslessly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes people call the latter &quot;bound transcription&quot; for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the age of Unicode, why do we need transliteration? Well, most people can't read raw Unicode codepoints. If you want to find a particular poem in a library's collection, is it easier for you to identify &lt;code&gt;631 62b 627 621 20 627 644 623 646 62F 644 633&lt;/code&gt; by &lt;code&gt;627 644 631 646 62F 64A&lt;/code&gt;, or رثاء الأندلس by الرندي, or the &lt;em&gt;Rithā' ul-'Āndalus&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Al-Rundī&lt;/em&gt;? Most English-speaking librarians would find the latter significantly easier to catalog, sort, file, reshelve, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the pre-Unicode days, it was also often impossible to typeset or print various exotic writing systems. Nobody was really putting in the time and effort to make movable type for Hittite cuneiform, and many Indo-Europeanists weren't fluent at reading it anyway. So instead of writing the word  in their papers, they would use the transliteration &lt;em&gt;na-aḫ-te-e-ni&lt;/em&gt; (representing each sign unambiguously), or the bound transcription &lt;em&gt;naḫtēni&lt;/em&gt; (representing the phoneme sequence rather than the signs). Even nowadays, if you've never had to deal with cuneiform before, it'll be much, much easier to learn to read &lt;em&gt;naḫtēni&lt;/em&gt; than .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note: even now, Unicode hasn't solved all the problems! &lt;em&gt;I can't actually read the word  in my own answer&lt;/em&gt;—because the default font on StackExchange has &lt;em&gt;classical Sumerian&lt;/em&gt; cuneiform glyphs, which look very different from the &lt;em&gt;modified Old Assyrian&lt;/em&gt; glyphs used for Hittite! Without some way to change the font, I have to copy-paste into a text editor and switch to a Hittite font in order to get something I can read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X04vd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X04vd.png&quot; alt=&quot;picture of actual Hittite form&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Naḫtēni&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;na-aḫ-te-e-ni&lt;/em&gt; meanwhile are as readable as ever.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T17:37:04.767" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T17:37:04.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33669" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:40:58.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generalising, the good Romanisations are 1:1 ie reversible, and the bad Romanisations are lossy or require not just a language model but a calibration to the transliterator's style, assuming it is even consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Serbo-Croatian Latin version is a well-known example of a good Romanisation that is also used and understood by laypeople.  It's still not fully 1:1 and not fully reversible.  It's also just a fundamentally easier conversion than some others, where 1:1ness between the two scripts is even less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we count the informal Romanisations - which exist for all major languages written in other alphabets like Russian, Chinese and Arabic and are actually the largest by volume - bad Romanisations are potentially infinite, so it's hard to list the bad ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One type that is relatively official and especially bad are double transliterations, for example Georgian or Armenian which was first transliterated to Russian Cyrillic and then to Latin.  It gets even worse if the Latin style chosen is inspired by, say, French.  For example &lt;code&gt;Խաչատուր Համբարձումյան - Хачатур Амбарцумян - Khatchatour Ambartsoumian&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are even triple transliterations, but no example occurs to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:40:58.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33674" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:53:28.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A transliteration system is usually either &lt;em&gt;designed&lt;/em&gt; to be lossless, or not. To know whether it is or not, you have to know the target language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lossless transliteration systems generally have to use one of four methods to stay unambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't use digraphs at all. Write every phoneme with a single character: &lt;code&gt;ŋ&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;ng&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;kh&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;þ&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a letter for digraphs that never appears elsewhere. Some transliteration systems for Russian reserve &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; for digraph use, so that &lt;code&gt;kh&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ch&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sh&lt;/code&gt; are unambiguous: there's no such thing as an &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt; on its own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use digraphs that are illegal consonant clusters in the language. Ancient Greek (Attic dialect at least) had all of &lt;code&gt;/t/&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/h/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;/tʰ/&lt;/code&gt;—but transcribing them &lt;code&gt;t&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;h&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt; is unambiguous, since &lt;code&gt;/th/&lt;/code&gt; can never occur (depending on your analysis of words like &lt;em&gt;μέθοδος&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a special way to disambiguate between the two. Swahili has both &lt;code&gt;/ⁿg/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/ŋ/&lt;/code&gt;; the former is written &lt;code&gt;ng&lt;/code&gt;, the latter &lt;code&gt;ng'&lt;/code&gt;. The &quot;library transliteration&quot; of Arabic uses &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;/θ/&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;t'h&lt;/code&gt; for &lt;code&gt;/th/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is sometimes considered cleanest, but tends to very quickly exceed the limits of ASCII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second works well for certain digraphs, less well for others: a language with &lt;code&gt;/ŋ/&lt;/code&gt; probably also has &lt;code&gt;/n/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/g/&lt;/code&gt; already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third works great until you discover that your assumptions about what's illegal were wrong! This happened famously in Inuktitut: the orthography was designed with the assumption that the sequence &lt;code&gt;/nŋ/&lt;/code&gt; was illegal, so they use the equivalent of &lt;code&gt;nng&lt;/code&gt; for a geminate &lt;code&gt;/ŋŋ/&lt;/code&gt;. Except then some lesser-known dialects &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have &lt;code&gt;/nŋ/&lt;/code&gt;, and they had to retrofit in an awkward solution. Oops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth is the easiest to retrofit onto an existing system, and is fairly widespread. If you aren't already using the apostrophe for something, it's an easy way to fix pretty much any ambiguities that come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T17:47:36.613" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T17:47:36.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33691" CreationDate="2019-09-28T17:19:40.570" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am playing with the idea of building a language parser/transformer and getting into the structure of pronunciations. This leads me to try and come up with rules for the parser for understanding how to transcribe a language from letters in the source language to romanized output. From what it sounds like, rule-based systems are what have been around for a while, but there is new research on constraint-based processing of the pronunciations. Wondering what are some good resources to get up to speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T18:24:12.677" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T02:36:35.717" Title="What's a good introduction to constraint-based phonology?" Tags="&lt;phonology&gt;&lt;optimality-theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33668" CreationDate="2019-09-28T17:23:46.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Foreword: if you want to be pedantic, this will be a &lt;em&gt;transcription&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;bound transcription&lt;/em&gt;, representing the phonemes as best we can, but not necessarily representing the orthography.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list you've found on Wikipedia are the &lt;em&gt;uniliteral&lt;/em&gt; signs. Each of these originally represented a single consonant phoneme in the standard dialect (though this changed over time). They don't quite represent the whole phonemic inventory (see Loprieno for details), but they're reasonably close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then in addition to those are &lt;em&gt;biliteral&lt;/em&gt; signs, which represent pairs of consonant phonemes. For example, Gardiner H6 represents the pair &lt;code&gt;šw&lt;/code&gt;. And &lt;em&gt;triliteral&lt;/em&gt; signs, which represent triplets of consonant phonemes, like Gardiner L1 &lt;code&gt;xpr&lt;/code&gt;. And &lt;em&gt;logograms&lt;/em&gt;, which represent specific words, like Gardiner N14 &quot;star&quot; (&lt;code&gt;sbꜣ&lt;/code&gt;). And &lt;em&gt;determinatives&lt;/em&gt;, which aren't pronounced but disambiguate between words with the same consonants. There are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;—being a scribe wasn't easy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main question is how do you take any arbitrary sequence of hieroglyphs and convert it to a (however rough) romanization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is going to be a disappointing answer, but: look it up. Good dictionaries will let you look up words and phrases by Gardiner number and tell you the relevant consonant sequences. I've found Dickson's dictionary especially good for this, since it's available as a PDF that you can Ctrl-F through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But how do they know it sounds like that? (That's a tangent question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is the interesting bit! It's a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: the first steps involved figuring out the uniliterals using translated names. We know &quot;Ptolemy&quot; was written like &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; sign must be &lt;code&gt;p&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; sign must be &lt;code&gt;l&lt;/code&gt;…and then we sometimes find names written with biliterals and triliterals, and can piece together what those must mean…and eventually use those to figure out the meanings of logograms, since the word for &quot;star&quot; is sometimes spelled with the single sign N14 and sometimes with a series of uniliterals and biliterals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an enormously complicated undertaking! One of the reasons the Rosetta Stone is so famous is because it's what made the first steps possible, and everything built up from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T22:07:05.847" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T22:07:05.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33684" CreationDate="2019-09-28T18:34:44.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some confusion in the question owing to the use of the word &quot;pronunciation&quot;. There is a constraint-based theory of phonological computation, Optimality Theory, which is the dominant theory in phonology. However, it is not about &quot;pronunciation&quot;, it is about phonemic outputs &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; sequences of letters (in IPA or some other transcriptional system). If you can go from [tadˁaʕu] to a pronunciation and don't care about the particular details of the language (it's Classical Arabic), then OT could be relevant. An OT account might tell you how to describe the mapping from /tawadˁiʕu/ to [tadˁaʕu].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Boersma&lt;/a&gt;, however, is into the physical output stuff and he seems to do constraints. From a phonetic perspective, I'd recommend starting there. If you want to learn OT as a phonological theory, you could read R. Kager &lt;em&gt;Optimality theory&lt;/em&gt; and J. McCarthy &lt;em&gt;Doing Optimality Theory: Applying theory to data&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T18:34:44.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33863" CreationDate="2019-09-28T22:40:00.190" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I'm looking at a Hittite text, occasionally I'll come across a glyph that has no phonetic meaning. This generally means one of two things: either it's a logogram, or it's a determinative. Either way, I'll go look it up in an appropriate list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But—how do I know which is which? If I see the sign LUGAL, does it mean that the following word is the name of a king, or does it mean the word &quot;king&quot; itself? Is there a reliable way to tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T00:06:36.587" Title="How do I know if a cuneiform character is a logogram or determinative?" Tags="&lt;writing-systems&gt;&lt;hittite&gt;&lt;cuneiform&gt;&lt;determinatives&gt;&lt;logograms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33670" CreationDate="2019-09-28T22:57:35.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To rephrase the question, it is possibly hardest to go from pronunciation to letter sequences in English, compared to other written languages. I might propose Chinese as being worse (even less predictable) except I assume you only mean alphabetic-like systems. Lhasa Tibetan and Mongolian in Uighur script might be close runners-up. English uses a combination of rules and strategies, for example [f] is most likely spelled &lt;em&gt;ph&lt;/em&gt; in words of Greek origin, [i] → &lt;em&gt;ae&lt;/em&gt; in Latinate words but &lt;em&gt;ee, ea&lt;/em&gt; in Old English words. To the extent that you might guess the source of a word, that helps you predict the spelling (also any related words such as &quot;paradigm; paradigmatic&quot;). I have never seen anything that resembles an exhaustive &quot;set of rules&quot; for pronunciation-to-spelling mapping in English. There may be some core that they teach in schools, and the rest is left to memorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most languages have writing systems of more recent provenance or had an orthographic reform, most languages are not as challenging in the pronunciation-to-writing mapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T22:57:35.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="34179" CreationDate="2019-09-29T02:22:52.970" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a Corpus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have searched for good practices on how to build it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I've downloaded some Corpus to check their internal structure and the extension file, but I didn't find many.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, I am lost and confused, because I don't know how to chose the good structure, for instance: Should I chose a grid, a CSV, or a JSON structure, or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, some articles about &quot;How to make it&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/corpus/Intro/Unit2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus building and investigation for the Humanities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1145032.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Steps for Creating a Specialized Corpus and Developing an Annotated Frequency-BasedVocabulary List&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot for your advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24871" LastEditorUserId="9871" LastEditDate="2019-11-11T22:26:04.753" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T10:09:04.323" Title="How to make a Corpus? (selecting a good structure)" Tags="&lt;computational-linguistics&gt;&lt;corpora&gt;&lt;python&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33684" CreationDate="2019-09-29T02:36:35.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best entry-level introduction I've found is Matt Gurevitch's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/magurevitch/OT-Machine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OT Machine&lt;/a&gt;, a tool for conlangers to build and test out Optimality Theory-based models. It includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magurevitch/OT-Machine/master/about_OT.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an overview&lt;/a&gt; of how OT works in general which is significantly more accessible than most published papers on OT. (Optimality theory has problems with opacity, in more ways than one!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original paper which spawned the whole theory is &lt;a href=&quot;http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prince and Smolensky 1993&lt;/a&gt;, but I would absolutely not recommend that for someone starting out unless they already have years of background in computational linguistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T02:36:35.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33674" CreationDate="2019-09-29T03:52:37.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding Wylie, the problem you describe is part of the issue noted in the Wikipedia article you linked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wylie's original scheme is not capable of transliterating all Tibetan-script texts. In particular, it has no correspondences for most Tibetan punctuation symbols, and lacks the ability to represent non-Tibetan words written in Tibetan script...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the EWTS variant addresses most of the ambiguities, but transliterating to/from Wylie inherently requires knowledge of Tibetan orthographic rules for identification of root letter and which stacks, prefixes, and first- and second-suffixes are valid. For at least a few three-letter words with no vowel mark, the rule is essentially just a special-case for the particular word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So indeed, this kind of transliteration system is very limited and suffers from the problems you expected. Other transliteration systems like Romaji (at least as I understand it) don't; the difference is ability to preserve character boundaries unambiguously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, such transliteration systems are obsolete in the age of Unicode anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22450" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T03:52:37.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33693" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-29T19:19:54.080" Score="47" ViewCount="13333" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember when the Muslim holy book was the Koran when I was in middle school, but now it's the Quran. But it's always been Qatar and Iraq (but still Kuwait.)&#xA;Who decided that 'Q' was going to be represent that sound instead of 'K', and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26745" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:13:10.490" Title="Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?" Tags="&lt;english&gt;&lt;arabic&gt;&lt;transliteration&gt;&lt;velar&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33693" CreationDate="2019-09-29T19:35:02.340" Score="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arabic, in fact, they've always been separate sounds! The sound we write &quot;K&quot; is spelled with the letter ك in Arabic, and is pronounced a little bit further forward in the mouth; the sound we write &quot;Q&quot; is spelled with the letter ق and pronounced a little bit farther back. In phonetic terms, &quot;K&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;velar&lt;/em&gt; sound, and &quot;Q&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;uvular&lt;/em&gt; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English doesn't distinguish between these two different sounds. But since we've got a spare letter lying around—the English letter &quot;Q&quot; is actually related to the Arabic letter ق, if you go back far enough!—it's become conventional to separate them in writing. &quot;Kuwait&quot; is spelled with a ك, so it gets a &quot;K&quot;; &quot;Qatar&quot; is spelled with a ق, so it gets a &quot;Q&quot;. The &quot;Qur'an&quot;, similarly, has a ق in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, by the way, the letter &quot;Q&quot; has started to be associated with Arabic in particular, since it shows up significantly more there than in English. So in pop culture, you'll sometimes see names like &quot;Hakeem&quot; respelled to &quot;Haqim&quot;—even though the original Arabic has a ك in it! Linguistically, this is called &lt;em&gt;hypercorrection&lt;/em&gt;, and it's the same reason you'll see words like &quot;forté&quot; with an &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt;: English-speakers associate the acute accent with Romance loans (café, fiancé, résumé), but it has no special meaning in English, so it sometimes gets inserted where it doesn't actually belong (the original Italian word is simply &lt;em&gt;forte&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="10559" LastEditDate="2019-10-01T20:13:10.490" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:13:10.490" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33693" CreationDate="2019-09-29T20:37:55.217" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to propose Julius Klaproth, in his 1823 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia800700.us.archive.org/12/items/asiapolyglotta01klapgoog/asiapolyglotta01klapgoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asia Polyglotta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. He notates the difference between ك and ق as &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt;. In earlier works such as Hamer 1806 &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ancientalphabet00conggoog/page/n6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ancient alphabets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;both were represented as &quot;k&quot; with a note that [q] ق is &quot;hard&quot;.&#xA;However, I see that &#xA;Christian Ravis 1649 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://cbj.jhi.pl/documents/119483/54/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A discourse of the orientall tongues : viz. Ebrew, Samaritan, Calde, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic together with a generall grammer for the said tongues&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; p. 96 or 97 (in the &quot;General grammar&quot; part) notates the kaf / qaf distinction with &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; versus &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; as well. &#xA;Subsequently, it emerged that Otho Gualtperius 1590 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ZjY8AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=GBS.PP30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grammatica linguae sanctae&lt;/a&gt; described the analogous Hebrew kaph / qoph distinction as kaph &lt;em&gt;c,ch&lt;/em&gt; (=[k,x]) versus  qoph &quot;q or k&quot;. It is worth noting that the letter &quot;q&quot; itself &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;derives historically&lt;/a&gt; from and still resembles the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qoph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semitic letter qoph&lt;/a&gt;, which represented a Semitic sound that was either [q] or [k'] and is [q] in Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this point I would say that it is unknown who first devised that convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastEditorUserId="6726" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T18:22:53.280" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T18:22:53.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33671" CreationDate="2019-09-30T13:05:07.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transliteration is useful because linguistic research is meant to be accessible to linguists generally and not just people with some prior experience with the language in question. Transliteration allows people to read and understand articles without needing to become proficient in a new script or language. We shouldn't assume that everyone will be familiar with a language or script before they read our research; this is especially the case with typology where you might be searching for papers by keywords and reading research on a dozen new languages every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give one concrete example, in the Hebrew alphabet there are three pairs of letters which can be easy to mistake for each other: a: ב and כ, b: ד and ר, and c: ה and ח. In some fonts, particular classical serif ones, they will look much more similar than they do here on this web site. Even if you know the language you will probably still occasionally confuse them, especially if you're reading small text or a poor photocopy. (Even the Hebrew Bible has mistakes from these characters being confused!) If you misread these characters you could completely misunderstand an article about Hebrew phonology, or considering that two of the three Hebrew prepositions are ב and כ, you could be entirely bewildered if you didn't realise they were completely different characters!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now readers do have a responsibility to do their own work to understand what they're reading. But providing transliterations is a relatively small thing to do which could have a massive impact on your research's accessibility, and thereby on its use and impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2555" LastEditorUserId="2555" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T13:10:23.353" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T13:10:23.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33693" CreationDate="2019-09-30T17:52:09.883" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question has multiple layers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/33694&quot;&gt;Draconis&lt;/a&gt; has already noted that the two sounds are distinct (phonemic) in Arabic and &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/33695&quot;&gt;user6726&lt;/a&gt; has added that the convention of writing one using &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; and the other using &lt;em&gt;q&lt;/em&gt; dates back quite a number of centuries. But why does the Latin alphabet even have this ‘spare letter’ (Draconis) q that turns out to be nigh perfect to write a different, k-like sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of my answer is sourced from a German video on the history of Q in the German &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.belleslettres.eu/content/schrift/buchstabe-q-kentum-satem.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belles Lettres blog&lt;/a&gt;. Sadly, I don’t know of a translation of the entire video. But the author explores the history of why the letter Q exists in current German, why it existed in Old German and where it came from. The trivial answer to why do we have Q is that we inherited it from Latin, but why does Latin have it? Latin in turn borrowed the letter from Etruscan and initially used it somewhat unsystematically until the current convention of orthographic distinction emerged in which certain words are written with qu and most other /k/ sounds were written with c (cu contrasting with qu). Etruscan had a similar convention whereby certain vowels (u) were preceded by Q (their letter name being &lt;em&gt;Koppa&lt;/em&gt;), others by K and others again by what the Romans would take over as C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why did Etruscan have three symbols for one sound? Well, all three were borrowed from one of the Ancient Greek alphabets with C actually being Greek gamma (Etruscans did not have voiced stops) and two Greek letters for the /k/ sound. However, shortly after the Etruscans borrowed the alphabet, Greek stopped using the kappa/koppa distinction altogether, most likely because there was no significant gain. The video I mentioned states that a number of /k/ sounds in Greek – that were typically spelt with koppa – migrated to /t/ sounds and others but for all intents and purposes we might just assume intelligent design and removal of clutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the Greeks had a letter Koppa that was nothing but clutter, why did they have it? Well, the Greek alphabet itself had been copied from the Phoenician alphabet. While Latin, Greek and German (and English) are Indo-European languages (and Etruscan, while not being Indo-European, has a debated origin as far as I’m aware), Phoenician is actually a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and less closely to – you guessed it – Arabic. All these Semitic languages already had a k/q distinction (as in they had two phonemic consonants) and so it only made sense that alphabet systems (or abjad systems) designed to write these languages came up with two different letters for the two different sounds. The Phoenician alphabet is indeed among the oldest alphabets. So even if there had been some other convention to distinguish between the two Arabic &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; sounds in writing, it would make much more sense ‘etymologically’ to completely discard whatever else exists and use the k/q convention instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why does ‘a lot of Q’ look Arabic when Hebrew has the same sound distinction? (Phoenician and most other Semitic languages are extinct and the ones that aren’t are minor, but in the western world one has a non-neglegible chance to come in contact with Hebrew names.) At some point before Hebrew as a language was revived, the k/q distinction was lost. As Hebrew became a purely liturgical language and Jews started using the native languages of the diaspora countries they were in, a lot of them no longer lived in a place that distinguished k and q phonemically so nowadays both Hebrew letters have the same pronunciation which is typically transliterated as &lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; (Note: the Hebrew letter corresponding to K can also be pronounced as &lt;em&gt;kh&lt;/em&gt;, which in itself is a separate orthographic and transliteration issue). This leaves Arabic as the last significant Semitic language to distinguish a k and a q sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T17:52:09.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-30T19:14:50.233" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a class of indefinites sometimes called &quot;specific indefinites&quot; that refer to one individual. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A man walked into a bar followed by two others. He ordered a drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this example, it seems as though there is a specific man of the three who is being referred to, even though there is nothing in the common ground to single out a unique one of the three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm curious about is whether there is discussion of an &quot;indifferently referring&quot; variety of specific indefinites. I know that Ockham discussed &quot;indifferent reference (supposition)&quot;, but I don't know of any examples in the contemporary literature. What I have in mind is something like the following. Suppose there are two brothers and some task that one of them needs to accomplish, but it doesn't matter which one does it. Then in a discourse like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One brother must complete the task. He should complete it by Wednesday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;one brother&quot; seems to refer &quot;indifferently&quot; to one of the two brothers and despite the lack of specificity it seems to (unproblematically) serve as the antecedent to &quot;he&quot; in the second sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this sort of indefinite called and where might I find some discussion of it? Is there a broader discussion of the phenomenon I'm calling &quot;indifferent reference&quot; beyond its occurrence in indefinites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="17305" LastEditDate="2019-10-01T06:42:07.923" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T13:35:13.577" Title="&quot;Indifferent&quot; reference of specific indefinites?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;semantics&gt;&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;indefinite-article&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-30T19:21:28.590" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does etymology have any role in everyday speech? For example, do common language practices preserve semantic connotations that are influenced by etymology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple example from Oxford Dictionary of English for &quot;build&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English byldan, from bold, botl ‘dwelling’, of Germanic origin;&#xA;  related to bower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say &quot;build&quot;, in what way, &lt;em&gt;if at all&lt;/em&gt;, am I drawing on the idea of &quot;dwelling&quot; due to its origin in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of poets that spend a career with roots, though I pass on examples of their poetics. I'm interested in whether everyday speech has its etymon available in it, without recourse to the ideal of poets being the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.observerbd.com/details.php?id=97413&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guardian of language&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20416" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T21:54:43.647" Title="Does etymology have any role in everyday speech?" Tags="&lt;etymology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33700" CreationDate="2019-09-30T21:54:43.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite the reverse. People sometimes argue that a word &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; a particular meaning &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of its etymology: this argument is always bogus, and even has a name: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymological fallacy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes knowledge of etymology may allow people to guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word, especially if it is from classical (Latin or Greek) roots; but their guesses will not be reliable, and sometimes far from accurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="718" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T21:54:43.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-01T02:36:16.457" Score="2" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to compare the syllable diversity and length distributiin of different languages. En-Fr to start with, phonetically even more than in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to check the theory that short word short phrase languages have a higher phonic diversity. Longer syllables which are more varied require smaller phrases to convey the same information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can i find comparative phonic studies to enumerate syllable range and variability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21979" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T21:21:47.587" Title="Source of syllable statistics of languages?" Tags="&lt;phonetics&gt;&lt;syllables&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33703" CreationDate="2019-10-01T09:03:42.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, I remember an article (&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.916.6277&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf#page=79&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oh &lt;em&gt;et al.&lt;/em&gt; 2013&lt;/a&gt;) showing that shorter syllables languages (shorter phonetic debit for syllables) needed more syllables to form words (Japanese) ans longer syllables debit languages needed less syllables per word. But eventually, the ratio between these two factors was about the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26758" LastEditorUserId="26758" LastEditDate="2019-10-05T21:21:47.587" LastActivityDate="2019-10-05T21:21:47.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33662" CreationDate="2019-10-01T11:56:47.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first problem with your question is that ‘sound’ in languages can mean at least two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;phoneme&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. something that if changed will change the meaning of the word. English example: /b/ and /p/ are phonemes because &lt;em&gt;bear/pear&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;beer/peer&lt;/em&gt; are different words that you can understand without context. Phonemes are always distinguished as different ‘sounds’ by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a &lt;em&gt;phone&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. a sound that may be heard distinctly from other similar sounds by a speaker but does not serve to distinguish different words (either both sounds give the same words but differ e.g. in accent, dialect, social status or a given environment enforces a certain sound with the other being a mispronunciation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the different ways to pronounce vowels across the different varieties of English (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand) can be considered phones. German has a nicer example: the digraph &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt; can be either [x] or [ç] depending on whether it is preceded by a back or front vowel—however, some dialects tend to strongly prefer [x] over [ç]. Phones may be recognised as different sounds but don’t have to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often, but not always the case that different phonemes will be represented by different symbols. However, consider English &lt;em&gt;th&lt;/em&gt; which can either be voiced as in &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; or unvoiced as in &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; (I believe a more accurate description is &lt;em&gt;fortis/lenis&lt;/em&gt; nowadays) and the difference can be considered phonemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes the case that different phones will be represented by different symbols. However, that is far less common: Korean uses the same symbol for the [s] and [ʃ] sounds (which are allophones as far as I’m aware) and I have already given the example above with German’s &lt;em&gt;ch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your Arabic examples actually represent different phonemes as far as I can tell (the two s variants certainly do) and thus aren’t ‘the same sound’ by any possible definition except in the eyes of someone coming from a language that happens to not distinguish between those phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this can be a two-way problem. English differentiates between /s/ and /ʃ/ for example, while in Japanese they are allophones (the sound is pronounced [ʃ] if /i/ follows; while there is a difference between /sa/ and /ʃa/ that is actually one between /a/ and /ja/); Finnish traditionally doesn’t have any approximation of a /ʃ/ sound at all. So a Finn might ask ‘Why does English have random orthographic &lt;em&gt;h&lt;/em&gt; after some s?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is within &lt;em&gt;writing system&lt;/em&gt;: Many languages do not have their own writing system. In Europe, the majority uses either the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabets which can be said to be the original writing systems of Latin and Church Slavonic meaning that it can be said that no modern European language except Greek uses its own writing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional Latin alphabet offers 26 letters. For some languages, that is technically sufficient: Finnish, for example, has only eight vowel phonemes and thirteen consonant phonemes meaning it could make do with 21 letters. This disregards vowel and consonant length, which is phonemic for all vowels and most consonants but can easily be written as a doubled letter (and is done so, no exceptions). Eight vowel sounds are sadly more than Latin distinguished, but Finnish makes use of ä and ö to overcome the two unbridgable gaps rather than misappropriating letters. I hear Hawaiian and a couple of other languages have a similarly small repertoire of phonemes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French, being a direct descendant from Latin, could be assumed to be another good candidate but it isn’t. Off the top of my head I count ten vowel phonemes, three semivowels and sixteen consonant phonemes (total: up to 29 distinct letters) but I likely missed a bunch. I don’t even want to get started counting English but rest assured you’re well outside the 26-character limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most of Europe, Latin was highly regarded as a language for the educated since the fall of the Roman Empire. It was also the language of the western church, so the Latin alphabet rapidly superceded any other remaining writing systems (like Norse runes) that were around before it. However, not all languages in Europe are Romance and they did a varying job of coming up with a way to represent the needed sounds with the 26 Latin letters. Elsewhere, other writing systems enjoyed a similar status: most of the Islamic world wrote in variants of the Arabic writing system (the language of the prophets) while the status of Chinese in East Asia led to the Chinese writing system being adopted in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. In many a case, the prestigeous writing system didn’t actually fit the target language well and various remedies were devised. The most radical one was probably Turkey switching to the Latin alphabet in the early 20th century—while Arabic’s inability to adequately represent Turkish out of the box may have played a role the prestige of Europe at the time probably played a greater one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third problem I want to point out is that languages aren’t static: their spoken forms tend to evolve. In German, the way the letter &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced has changed significantly during the last century with a new variant almost entirely surpassing the previous variant. (All variants of pronouncing /r/ are still valid, but one speaker will stick almost entirely to one single variant.) In a similar manner, English underwent something called the Great Vowel Shift and Japanese had a number of shifts involving the /h/ and /w/ sound, effectively merging a number of different syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing systems tend to be much more static than spoken languages, however. While the German /r/ cannot really be expressed in writing (as it merely represented a change from one allophone to the next), the vowel shifts of English is why English pronunciation maps with spelling so extremely poorly: take the word extremely where each &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is pronounced differently—one is even pronounced almost like the final &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;, at least in my variety of English!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing systems aren’t acquired naturally like spoken language; they have to be taught, meaning that there is a teacher who at some point defines what the student learns as ‘correct’ and ‘wrong’. In Japanese, the culture of taking for granted everything the teacher said led to very antiquated spellings due to numerous sound changes having been ignored until a couple of reforms in the early 20th century ‘put it right’ again and (almost) aligned spelling and pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how flexible your writing system is, how much emphasis is put on spelling as you speak rather than as you learnt, a writing system may adapt quickly to new pronunciations or not adapt at all. I would expect Finnish with its very phonemic spelling to mirror any cross-phoneme pronunciation changes almost immediately and English to ignore them completely within all reasonable timeframes to give just two rather extreme examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this very long rambling, I finally turn to answer your actual question. In principle, when a writing system is newly invented by a language you will end up with a very good to perfect &lt;em&gt;phonemic&lt;/em&gt; mapping of that language’s sounds and symbols in the writing system &lt;em&gt;at that time when it was devised.&lt;/em&gt; A good example for this is the Korean writing system which was consciously invented around 500 years ago and includes one symbol for each phoneme (disregarding vowel length) in use at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is generally true if a language adopts another language’s writing system. Ideally, a symbol exists for approximately every sound and these can be used in that way. Potentially, a number of symbols have to be invented (be it using diacritics, as is the standard for most Latin-based scripts, or by inventing a wholly new character, as was often done in Cyrillic scripts) for sounds the language you copied from doesn’t have. Also, a number of sounds may be similar to the same phoneme in your language (but different phonemes in the alphabet’s origin language) so you can choose to keep them both and assign by any arbitrary rule or discard one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this essentially happened, when Greek copied the Phoenician alphabet. The original Phoenician O was split into two Greek symbols—&lt;em&gt;omicron&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;omega&lt;/em&gt; or small and large &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt;—because of Greek phonetic needs. The Phoenician Q (Koppa) gave rise to three Greek symbols: koppa, psi and phi. Greek needed to distinguish between aspirated and nonaspirated stops and so made sure that these were present. At the same time, it did not distinguish between K and Q so Q quickly fell into disuse (not before the Romans copied it, though). The result was a writing system that worked well for Ancient Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast forward almost three millennia and the Greek spoken language had changed—but spelling was still somewhat consistent with the Ancient Greek predecessor, kept ‘alive’ as a classical language of the educated. If you now look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_orthography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek orthography&lt;/a&gt;—and if you like things organised like me—you may sense immediate frustration at so many spellings giving the same sound. The point is, they were all distinct at a time long ago but have since merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One paragraph above, I have mentioned that the Romans copied the Greek alphabet (with the Etruscans acting as an intermediary). They did so before the Greek variant they copied from eliminated Q, and because of the phonemics of Etruscan—which did not, for example, know a [g] sound—they were suddenly left with three ways to write /k/: C, Q and K. In classical Latin, these were eventually regularised so that C is used normally, QV is used to represent /kw/ to not confuse it with CV (/cu/) and K practically falling out of use except in words from Greek. Back then, that was great, but centuries down the line in modern Italian the /k/ sound changed to /tʃ/ before front vowels. Suddenly, one letter represented two different phonemes—not allophones, compare the minimal pair &lt;em&gt;che&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;c’è&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These considerations—sound change since adoption of the writing system coupled with rigid spelling conventions or inflexible source that wasn’t expanded—explain the perceived anomalies of Hebrew and English while your Arabic examples seem to stem from incomplete understanding of Arabic phonology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ‘explain’ the Sanskrit case: well, it turns out that your definition of a ‘letter’  or ‘character’ is not directly transferable. Not all writing systems follow the general Latin/Greek/Cyrillic idea that a specific, separable ‘letter’ or a group of these represents a single sound (consonant or vowel). Most writing systems can be grouped into one of the following classifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;alphabet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abjad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abugida&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;syllabary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logophonetic system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alphabet is what you know from the Latin alphabet: there are distinct consonant and vowel letters which can be arranged to give syllables (like twup) or unpronouncable gibberish (like xptk although you can pronounce that if you really try).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arabic and Hebrew writing systems are more or less abjads: most symbols represent consonants and the vowels connecting them are often not written. Only select vowels (e.g. only long ones) get their own symbol. Other vowels can be indicated by diacritics but don’t have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A syllabary is when a single symbol always or usually corresponds to an entire syllable (and there are no individual parts of a symbol that hint at the sound). So in Japanese, く represents /ku/ but there is nothing connecting it to any of the other /k-/ syllables (かきけこ) or any of the /-u/ syllables (うすつぬふむゆる).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example for a logophonetic system is Chinese. While a symbol represents a pronunciation it also comes with an intrinsic meaning and different symbols with different meanings are used to represent words that sound the same. Japanese copied that somewhat so it also has a logophonetic component to it, allowing to distinguish the homophones 海鳥 (seabird) and 会長 (chairperson/president; both /kaitʃo:/) or 切る (to cut) and 着る (to wear; both /kiru/) in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, abugidas—and as you may have guessed because I left it out, Sanskrit falls into this category. In an abugida, the smallest possible symbol represents a consonant with an inherent vowel, but adding a specific part to it will result in a symbol with the same consonant but a different vowel. Thus, looking at a symbol representing a syllable, you can identify a consonant part and usually a vowel part (but the vowel part can be absent if the inherent vowel is used). Of course, sometimes vowels turn up at the beginning of a word without a preceding consonant. While abjads would traditionally write a null consonant here, Sanskrit has individual symbols for the vowels. Your first column of Sanskrit ‘doublings’ represent the lone vowel while in the second column it is attached to a (consonant) syllable symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sincerely apologise to everyone who worked their way through this wall of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T11:56:47.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33571" CreationDate="2019-10-01T12:48:20.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In modern times, you would not (with exceptions), as the other answers have pointed out.  Historically: yes definitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Chinese characters were first imported, they were used only to write (old; then contemporary) Chinese. Before today’s kana were derived from a certain set of these with the desired pronunciation, this certain set (the Manyogana) had to be defined. But even thereafter, it was possible to write in a Kanbun style, employing only kanji with the word ending markers omitted and particles represented by specific kanji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably more common and more understandable was the opposite: writing entirely in kana. The most famous example is probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It was written by a woman and at the time only hiragana characters were considered suitable for women. Thus, it was originally written entirely in hiragana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10467" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T12:48:20.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33703" CreationDate="2019-10-01T15:43:48.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are interested in the number of possible syllables in a given language, and how that might relate to word length. This is not a property that is generally studied and there isn't a definite answer for English, though there is an estimate on the order of 16,000 syllables &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/HarshTrivedi/syllabification/blob/master/English/list_of_all_syllables_web.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this paper&lt;/a&gt;. This would be because of the number of segments that we have in English (more than Hawaiian, fewer than Ubykh) and the number of syllable types (more than Hawaiian, fewer than Polish). Length per se is probably irrelevant, since a language where every syllable is of the kind CCVCC is longer than one with (C)(C)V(C)(C) as its template, but the latter has more &quot;syllable diversity&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shona has about 642 possible syllables (or, twice that many) – it has much simpler syllable structure, limited to (N)C(w)V. Also, Shona words are on average longer than English words (actually, there are no single-syllable words in the standard dialect). The figure 642 comes from knowing the consonants of the language, which ones can be preceded by &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;, then doubling that for consonant-plus-w. I should knock off one from that count because expected [βw] becomes [ɦw]. Then multiply by the number of vowels. This is a theoretical limit, but I don't know whether [vwu] is actually attested anywhere in the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know how you can really test &quot;conveying the same information&quot;. Texts in Lushootseed seem to be kind of long given their information content, but that's because of style, not the language per se. You might take Bible translations as a standard text, since there was been a concerted effort to convey the same information in all translations. Unfortunately for your interest, you will not get versions transcribed into a uniform and phonologically justified manner, instead you will get spelling with tri- and quadrigraphs for single segments (rather than use fancy IPA letters). So you would have to read up on spelling conventions for the language to know that Hmoob doesn't have a consonant cluster at the beginning and a [b] at the end. It will be difficult to create the kind of data that you are looking for, and much harder to find it already published. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other factors that will affect the validity of such a study. Although [vw] is a possible syllable in Shona and 5 syllable long words are hard to avoid on ordinary conversation (nobody has studied corpus frequency to the best of my knowledge), [vw] has a very low frequency of occurrence and probably never appears in a syllable more than 3 from the end. There is really just a C(w)V(N)C core which exploits the full range of segment possibilities, then many prefixes and suffixes of the type (C)V- and -VC- drawing on a dramatically decreased set of consonants and vowels. You might expect there to be about 1.0906242e+14 possible 5-syllable words (20 syllable words are not a problem in this language), but I suspect that you would find that the actually attested or acceptable number of syllable-permutations is many orders of magnitude less that that figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6726" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T15:43:48.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-01T18:35:58.923" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a student of linguistics, I'd want to know that what a concept of thematic structures of a clause actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23624" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T18:35:58.923" Title="Thematic structures of a clause" Tags="&lt;syntax&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="33714" CreationDate="2019-10-02T00:57:56.477" Score="-4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only languages for which I have found a book (not even a webpage) is for &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/9653760106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/095603571X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic&lt;/a&gt;. Are there books or webpages that contain all the noun declensions and verb &quot;conjugations&quot; (or noun and verb forms generally) for different languages? In particular I am looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tibetan (Found a book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1559394838&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tibetan verbs&lt;/a&gt;, but not the conjugations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sanskrit (Found &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.yoga-vidya.de/Sanskrit_Verbal_Roots_List_with_English_Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verb roots&lt;/a&gt; on a Wiki, but not sure how thorough, and no conjugations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cree&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancient Egyptian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coptic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gothic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chinese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Korean&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Japanese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vietnamese&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thai&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Khmer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georgian (the only halfway book is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B01ETX9BD0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1200 verb list&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't seem to have conjugations at all)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armenian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sumerian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Akkadian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phoenician&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navajo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nahuatl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zapotec&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quechuan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancient Greek&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Classical Latin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I am looking for the conjugation/declension/&quot;form&quot; &lt;em&gt;tables&lt;/em&gt; for these languages, essentially the data so that I know that I am morphing a verb or noun correctly. Because, like in Gothic, while you may find an &quot;a-stem noun&quot; (or even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Gothic_a-stem_nouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list&lt;/a&gt;), I suspect that there are slight variations in the form of the modified noun in a case-specific manner. So having a list of all the forms of each verb and noun would confirm whether or not applying a general pattern to a new verb or noun is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked for verb and noun books for all of the above languages and didn't find anything worthwhile. Wondering if this just doesn't exist, or the types of places I should be looking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't have to be exactly compiled into &lt;em&gt;tables&lt;/em&gt;. It can be in any form but basically I would like to find all the forms of the words mapped out in some way, so I can know if a &quot;generic pattern&quot; can be accurately applied to new forms following the same pattern (like -er verbs), or if it is an outlier/irregular pattern like &lt;code&gt;tener&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;tengo&lt;/code&gt; in Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the best site so far has been Wiktionary, like for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Greek_verbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek Verbs&lt;/a&gt;. However, they just list the possible verbs, no conjugations or anything. I have heard Ancient Greek verbs are highly irregular, and many students have a hard time learning the edge cases. So I would (in this case) like to find a list of all Greek verbs in conjugated form, so I could see the conjugations. But same applies to any language (cross-linguistics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0715617729&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is the best I've found for Ancient Greek, which isn't saying much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no such reliable, respected (i.e. not &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.verbix.com/languages/sanskrit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spam&lt;/a&gt;), aggregated resource exists, what do I have to do to put together a list myself? Scan each book for the few pieces they contain? Or what would be effective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3142" LastEditorUserId="3142" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T01:15:00.657" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T04:46:03.267" Title="Where can you find a list of all nouns and verbs &quot;forms&quot; in each language?" Tags="&lt;reference-request&gt;&lt;verbs&gt;&lt;cross-linguistic&gt;&lt;nouns&gt;&lt;conjugation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-10-11T16:22:43.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33712" CreationDate="2019-10-02T04:21:05.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Such a thing generally doesn't exist, since it wouldn't be useful.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For languages with complicated verbal morphology, such a list would take up several volumes without really communicating much. In Lingála, for example, a back-of-the-envelope calculation says there are over &lt;em&gt;72,000&lt;/em&gt; morphologically distinct finite forms for each verb! (*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, this is almost the length of the first Harry Potter book—for a &lt;em&gt;single verb stem&lt;/em&gt;. A quick search through a dictionary shows 200-some verbs, which is a bit on the low end (it's a small dictionary). So listing every form for every verb would be &lt;em&gt;over fourteen million words&lt;/em&gt;. That's twenty-some copies of &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; filled with nothing but lists of verb forms. And that's with &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt; estimates for every factor, and not even getting to nouns…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these fourteen million verb forms are created using a relatively small set of relatively simple rules. Experiments have shown that humans learn a language by internalizing these rules, not by memorizing every form they see (once again, the wug test is the classic example). And it takes significantly less space to list out these rules than to show all fourteen million forms. This is what any decent grammar will do, listing out the morphological rules, along with any relevant exceptions that have to be memorized specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it differently: those fourteen million forms have a very low Kolmogorov complexity, and can be very easily compressed down into a couple of pages of code. Since there's no real reason to deal with the uncompressed version, nobody ever wastes the time and energy and resources to print it all out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; find, if you really want them, are automatic paradigm generators, such as the one you linked for Sanskrit. This is basically what Wiktionary does to fill in its inflection charts automatically. If you search for &lt;code&gt;[language name] morphological analyzer&lt;/code&gt; you can sometimes find very good open-source tools for this sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) The actual number of forms per verb is significantly higher. For this estimate I left off infinitives, imperatives, all possible homophones (where the meaning is different but the surface form is the same), and didn't allow stacking the same extension more than once. In theory, extension stacking means a verb can grow infinitely long, though in practice this would never happen. So the number of possible forms, in theory, is unbounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10559" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T09:49:29.203" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T04:46:03.267" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="33715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33712" CreationDate="2019-10-02T04:23:01.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Saami languages, you can get paradigms &lt;a href=&quot;http://giellatekno.uit.no/smilang.eng.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. E.g. select North Saami, All tools, Paradig